This one is delicious.
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colloquy – for when you need to elevate your conversations
from col– together + –loquium speaking, from loqui to speak
- A talking together; a conversation, dialogue. Also, a written dialogue.
- A meeting for conference.
- Church blah blah.
All the modern dictionaries mention that it’s specific to elevated speech/conversation. Interesting that “colloquial” is used to mean common speech.
coruscate – for when you need a little flash and sparkle
VERB
literary
- (of light) flash or sparkle.
‘the light was coruscating through the walls’
Origin
Early 18th century from Latin coruscat- ‘glittered’, from the verb coruscare.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/coruscate
NB: Never doubt my commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Norman Mailer on Politics and Cigarettes
Politics has its virtues, all too many of them—it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things—but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
The nut, the moron, the stylist, and the critic
I liked this bit from Susan Sontag’s journals. Apparently, the LitHub post from whence this came was in violation of something, so it’s gone.
Rules for Being a Writer
from Sontag’s journals, December 3, 1961
The writer must be four people:
- The nut, the obsédé
- The moron
- The stylist
- The critic
1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.
A great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.
Obsédé means the obsessed person, or the fanatic. So not nut like “poop smearing,” nut like “can’t stop looking at this thing no matter what else happens.” This is aligned with the concept of creativity in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention:
The first [phase in the creative process] is a period of preparation, becoming immersed…in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.
Csikszentmihalyi (what a name!!) makes it clear that, while this sounds benign, truly creative individuals who have made a significant contribution to culture generally are immersed at a level that is unusual. Obsédé.
The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness…the third…is insight, sometimes called the “Aha!” moment.
The moron.
The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.
The critic.
The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work.
The nut + the stylist.
NB: the featured image, which reads “Theater Square of Susan Sontag,” is from this Flickr account. It turns out that Susan Sontag “actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia.” Who knew?!
Books that wish they were movies
I know I’m not the first to notice that lots of recently-authored books seem more like a verbose screenplay written in prose than a novel. This seems to especially be the case with genre books.
I recently finished the first book in an acclaimed new fantasy series, the Draconis Memoria trilogy. The Waking Fire is a super fun read in its way — engaging characters, easy language, light on the politics and heavy on the quests. Every time I read passages like this, though, I was left with a nagging feeling that I’d be better off just…seeing the show.
When it seemed it might never end, Tekela reached out a hand to Lizanne. She sat with knees drawn up and her back against the Thumper’s base, eyes closed tight and trembling arm extended. Lizanne took her hand, holding it tight, watching the girl’s lips move in an unheard prayer, or was it a song? The suspicion was confirmed when at last the final shell came slamming down and a thick wall of silence descended on the trenches, the sudden, almost shocking stillness broken only by Tekela’s song. Lizanne’s estimation of her musical talents deepened upon hearing her voice. She recognised the tune, “The Leaves of Autumn,” the Eutherian lyrics sung with a captivating sweetness at odds with the landscape that greeted their gaze.
– Chp. 31
Can’t you just see the framing of this shot? Hear the over-compressed, breathy vocals? It reads to me like stage direction. It has the feeling of a scene that might provide some insight into the characters, if only I could see them. Or how about this?
Clay crouched, ready to dodge the flames, then stopped as a crack sounded from above and a large piece of the dome’s ceiling fell, tumbling straight down to deliver a glancing but heavy blow to the White before slamming onto the glass floor. Clay watched an intricate matrix of cracks spread through the glass from the point of impact, staring with an unwarranted detachment as his Green-enhanced eyes tracked the complex array of fractures until it has covered the floor from end to end.
– Chp. 45, emphasis mine
For the love of pete, Anthony Ryan literally describes the camera’s/Clay’s detached viewpoint in the middle of this fast-paced fight scene.
The book even follows the 90s action movie convention of switching between multiple separate stories/main characters that come together at the end. I’d like to say the connections were pleasing and unexpected, but I would need to use scare quotes, and I refuse to do it. I refuse, damnit.
This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book — I actually kind of did, although I won’t be continuing to the second book in the trilogy at the moment. I mean, the fantasy-steampunk-spy mash-up is kind of worth the price of admission.
At the end of the day, I like dragons and that kind of shit enough that I kept reading, despite feeling weird that I knew that, even with my mild aphantasia (I find it EXTREMELY difficult to see images in my mind), this book managed to express to me exactly what each and every scene looked like. It did this based on movie tropes and conventions that we all love, but are probably a bit tired of at this point. Color me old-fashioned, but I’m just not into that.
I work, therefore I meditate, therefore I work harder.
As workplaces demand that their employees hustle harder in a more precarious world, mindfulness has emerged as a means to manage stress and increase productivity. Since its import to America, it has been oddly well-suited at making the individual citizen responsible for mitigating the suffering and loss that our necrotic social structures have induced. So how peaceful can it really be?
The Rise of the Mindful Museum, Michael Friedrich
How we roll Christmas
The season may be officially over, but that doesn’t mean the party has to stop. As you can see, Don Quixote is the strong, silent type, but he’s enjoying the vibe. Clink!
‘Kill your foster parents’: Amazon’s Alexa talks murder, sex
So a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents.”
Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation. And this summer, a hack Amazon traced back to China may have exposed some customers’ data, according to five people familiar with the events.
Alexa is not having a breakdown.
The episodes, previously unreported, arise from Amazon.com Inc’s strategy to make Alexa a better communicator. New research is helping Alexa mimic human banter and talk about almost anything she finds on the internet. However, ensuring she does not offend users has been a challenge for the world’s largest online retailer.
One Mouse, Two Cups?
On January 1, 2019, original works from 1923 will move into the public domain. This batch will be the first new public domain works in over 20 years.
Mickey Mouse was born via Steamboat Willie in 1928. That means that, barring further Disney intervention, in 2024, the Mouse can become…anything.
I, for one, am keen to see how many people genuinely want to watch Mickey Mouse porn. I feel certain that the number will be much, much higher than anyone would like to believe.