In yesterday’s post on This Space, Steve commented in passing that Time’s Flow Stemmed recently celebrated (25th January to be precise) its tenth anniversary. While I did mention the milestone on Twitter I forgot to mark the occasion here, so in observance of this blog’s first decade, over five-hundred years after Martin Luther apparently nailed his treatise to the door of Wittenberg’s church, I offer my own 33 theses, random reflections and treasured quotes:

1. “The work of art may have an ideology (in other words, those ideas, images, and values which are generally accepted, dominant) as its material, but it works that material; it gives it a new form and at certain times that new form is in itself a subversion of ideology.” – T. J. Clarke
2. Prose fiction is the art of excess. It is better when large, loose and baggy
3. Poetry, on the other hand, is the place for concentrated lyrical expression
4. “Consciousness is only attainable after decades of being honest with yourself followed by more decades of honest observation of the world. Even then, consciousness is mostly illusion.” – John Rember
5. Attention to form is the greatest force for literature
6. “This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world and a confessor predict the progress of the passions.” – Samuel Johnson
7. Literary interpretation is inherently unstable
8. Free indirect style is the novel’s most useful contribution to literary endeavour
9. “If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay late and drink all the whiskey.” – William Gass
10. There are good and bad books, artistically and possibly ethically
11. There are also good and bad readers
12. “I’ve described my experience of reading as immersion in a peculiar kind of fictional space. Above all, what fascinates me about that space is the idea that it might be infinite; that the world opened up by a book might exceed that outside it.” – David Winters
13. Reading is selfish, but an essential aspect of enlarging life and the self (or illusion of self)
14. Reading should be social; conversing about what you’ve read augments the pleasure of reading
15. “Writing and reading are not separate, reading is a part of writing. A real reader is a writer. A real reader is already on the way to writing.” – Cixous
16. The Death of the Author is a delusion
17. “In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” – Nietzsche
18. We will never know the people in our lives as profoundly as we can know the characters in a novel
19. “As for those people who will not welcome this kind of writing, which they call obscure because it is beyond their understanding, I leave them with those who, after the invention of wheat, still want to live on acorns.” – Joachim du Bellay
20. Difficulty in fiction is normally pleasurable
21. Form shapes critical thinking and enhances perception
22. Rereading is richer than first time reading as it eliminates the distraction of suspense
23. Most literary criticism discerns in its subjects the evidence its theories predict
24. The problem for writers of fiction in Britain in the 20th and, so far, in the 21st century: how to write and publish brilliant, sublime prose in a country and culture that shrinks with horror from intellectualism
25. Coetzee’s Disgrace is a rare example of a great book adapted into a great film
26. Virginia Woolf is Britain’s last great and important novelist
27. More than well-structured narrative, it is the texts on the fringes I keep coming back to, notebooks, diaries, letters, fragments, what Genette called pre-texts
28. All the roots of Western literature may be found in Aeschylus
29. Greatness and perfection are not necessarily the same thing
30. “My writing wasn’t entirely about the books ‘under review’ so much as my internal ‘reading experience’.” – David Winters
31. “How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel?… Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumour of the soul.” – George Steiner, Paris Review interview
32. I find it hard to endure writing in the third person
33. ” . . . deepening what there was in her of sweetness and listening – for this was her nature.” – Lispector

To those that read Time’s Flow Stemmed, whether for a decade, or as a recent discovery, I offer my profound thanks. I used to explain that I wrote here for myself, but that is the worst kind of deceit, a self-deceit. I am thrilled that this blog has readers and offer an apology that I am even further from understanding literature than I was at the beginning.