Welcome to the PenOpticon Miscellany and Blog!

The PenOpticon is mostly a play on the Panopticon -- Jeremy Bentham's famous 1791 prison design.  In a pseudo-academic fashion, maybe the PenOpticon is also a variation of one of Foucault's hierarchical structures. The writer can not see her gaoler/reader, but she is perpetually doomed to imagine him.  Or, as Offred puts it in The Handmaid Tale: "Because I'm telling you this story, I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are." Such a line works well for Margaret Atwood, but for me, the most confining Panoptic structure is often language itself (or at least my use of it!). What if our language is no longer capable of speaking truth to power -- or truth to anything?  Never mind Global Warming, what if we are doomed to drown in a rising ocean of linguistic truthiness? So that's why this place is what it is -- at least in theory. In practice, this is just a place to type stuff and share photographs. I hope some of it is interesting.

Rod Potter
Richmond Hill, Ontario