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Take the wheel and drive by
I would strongly prefer to have started the year without respiratory crud. I travel tomorrow nonetheless. Have some things from the internet.
1. I love the idea of a ship's biscuit love token.
2. I had never heard the story of Lee Sallows and the self-enumerating pangram.
3. This poem sticks with me: Martín Espada, "Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913."
4. Worth reading in full, especially the parentheses: Matthew Cheney, "The Narrative of Dead Narrative."
5. I can't remember which recent news item provoked me to leave myself the note "FUCK THE GHOST OF JOSEPH BREEN AND ALL HIS NECROMANCERS," but I'm sure it's still relevant.
I understand the concept of statistical outliers, but I still have a very hard time believing in the Boomer-Millennial culture wars when my father calls me up to discuss in detail the fourth-season finale of Lucifer (2016–).
1. I love the idea of a ship's biscuit love token.
2. I had never heard the story of Lee Sallows and the self-enumerating pangram.
3. This poem sticks with me: Martín Espada, "Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: The Paterson Silk Strike, 1913."
4. Worth reading in full, especially the parentheses: Matthew Cheney, "The Narrative of Dead Narrative."
5. I can't remember which recent news item provoked me to leave myself the note "FUCK THE GHOST OF JOSEPH BREEN AND ALL HIS NECROMANCERS," but I'm sure it's still relevant.
I understand the concept of statistical outliers, but I still have a very hard time believing in the Boomer-Millennial culture wars when my father calls me up to discuss in detail the fourth-season finale of Lucifer (2016–).
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Thank you!
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I can't remember which recent news item provoked me to leave myself the note "FUCK THE GHOST OF JOSEPH BREEN AND ALL HIS NECROMANCERS," but I'm sure it's still relevant.
The Ford Government taking over the movie-ratings system in Ontario?
I understand the concept of statistical outliers, but I still have a very hard time believing in the Boomer-Millennial culture wars when my father calls me up to discuss in detail the fourth-season finale of Lucifer (2016–).
I’ve had a hard time believing in generations ever since I concluded that I was too young, and simultaneously at least one of my parents was too old, for me to belong to Gen X (at least as it was being defined in the mid-nineties.)
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I was just catching up on Wondermark recently! It's one of the comics I forget exists for months at a time. I enjoyed this one.
The Ford Government taking over the movie-ratings system in Ontario?
That looks right.
I’ve had a hard time believing in generations ever since I concluded that I was too young, and simultaneously at least one of my parents was too old, for me to belong to Gen X (at least as it was being defined in the mid-nineties.)
I believe I am classifiable by birth year as either late Gen X or early Millennial and just about everything that has ever been said about either group, including by members of either group, has made me feel like I came in sideways from some other timeline. I don't expect to feel seen by media—I don't think I use the phrase except facetiously—but I feel especially un-seen when I run into things like this sincere appreciation of It Chapter Two:
"Andy Muschietti's 'It Chapter Two' is going to wind up a foundational text when we're trying to signify the generational split by which everyone's currently transfixed. This is a movie about the ceiling of Gen X responsibility, about the people who, by now, were supposed to be adults, but when asked to take responsibility for their emotions and livelihood, could at best manage one . . .
"Gen X and Millennials are the last group of children raised before the Internet. We didn't know about global climate change until it was too late. We became addicted to social media, some of us already married with kids by then. We were born sarcastic but could afford it because it seemed like there would be adults to take things more seriously. Now? There is no adult in the room anymore. For better or worse, that's us now and if we don't fix everything we're doomed.
"That’s what 'It Chapter Two' is about. Look at your friends now and remember the friends you used to have. Those drunks who you used to make dick jokes with, who've seen you in your underwear, who know what your weaknesses are but don't care really because theirs are worse? . . . I'd bet money that most Millennials know that feeling only too well. That if they could just force their old friend group back together, they could get something back that was taken along with the time they've lost."
The looming horror of extinction, fine. The rest is so far from describing my relationship to either my friend groups or my responsibilities that all it does is tell me that, if its assessment of generational cultures is correct, I am likely to be incomprehensible to most people when I try to talk about the things that actually hurt me, and I feel like that most of the time already.
[edit] The problem is that by now I know to avoid articles with Millennial anything in the title, but I thought I was going to read a film review, and I feel bitten.
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I'm more solidly on the Gen X side of the line (1976) but otherwise ... hard same. I guess it's easier for me to ignore in Millennial thinkpieces because I really have never thought of myself that way, but I don't really relate to most of the Gen X generalizations either, and loathe the generation-war/generation-is-destiny mentality that seems to have become common on both ends of the generational divide, as if birth year is the new zodiac.
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+1.
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Writers think narrative is important because, unlike normal people, they spend a lot of time thinking about it and trying to manipulate it. And since it feels important to them, they think it must somehow be related to other important things. But that's just the bias of attention. If Scranton were a photographer, he'd be out here declaring that imagery is killing us and we need to make abstract photos. If he were a plumber, he'd be trying to figure out how to make a sewer empty in to a house rather than out of it.
And I like the story he tells about the playwright instructing the young man to go out and live his politics and then write, just because I do think sometimes people **do** need to live the thing that's preoccupying them. Usual caveats apply...
(We need to give your respiratory crud a notice of eviction...)
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That's a very anti-narrative way to read it!
(We need to give your respiratory crud a notice of eviction...)
I was doing all right on the respiratory front until this month! And now I have no energy and I need a lot.
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Hah! You're right. I love a good narrative, but when it comes to things that are designed to inform and that don't rely on (or give me the impression of not relying on) linear reading, I create my own mental pastiche of the thing by reading here and there. Eventually I may read the whole thing and then go back to get the author's intended flow--or it may be evident anyway, even with my scattershot way of reading.
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Is it alright if I post the link to this?
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You can link to anything of mine that is posted publicly, but I think this comment may have been intended for another post.
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Also, I should have asked how your crud is doing. I hope you've recovered.
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No worries. *hugs* Please link! It is a powerful poem.
Also, I should have asked how your crud is doing. I hope you've recovered.
The crud is persistent, but I am traveling anyway, or at least I will once this train decides it actually wants to go somewhere.
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It goes directly through my brain - leaving important messages there - to my heart, which it sticks pins into.
I've spent much of my adult life (say, since 1976-77) involved in the union movement, and sure that it was right before I even read or experienced it. That means, by extension, that I've spent much of my life explaining what I thought about the union movement to people, usually younger ones but not always, most of who were afraid to be in unions, or talk about them, or even think about them, even when they were in jobs protected, at least to some extent by a union.
"But they could fire me!" "But they're the boss - they have the right to [treat us like shit]!" "What could happen to me?"
And sometimes I tell them that unions gained the tiny foothold they have in the U.S. because people braved Pinkerton and his bullet-spraying thugs, because people lost their jobs, because people were killed by the bullets, and that what they are facing is not all that frightening by comparison. Mostly I don't, because I know everyone's fear is big to them. Worse, I sometimes find myself that afraid, and not taking my own advice.
So yes, reading about this brought tears.
(Also, on a completely superficial note, I couldn't help thinking about Adam Driver when I first saw the title, before I remembered the events.)
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I have not spent my life in the union movement, but I grew up knowing that history and it frightens me that it is forgotten. I am glad that you tell people the stories when they can hear them and even when they can't, tell them the importance of unions and believe it yourself.
*hugs*
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I read the Cheney and was reminded that I am not an academic. Why on earth would anyone argue against narrative? We are narrative and all that we touch becomes part of that, and why should we not both celebrate narrative as, you know, a thing, and make use of it as a tool?
Middlebrow me does not understand.
Many, many thanks for the hugs. Please have one right back if and when you need it.
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Thank you!
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I rather liked the song they ended on. It did, actually, make me think of you for some reason.
(I suppose some of that generation-whatever stuff must have some basis in something, because times change and society with it, but, honestly, most of it seems to be the eternal cry of youth vs age expressed as per the experiences (usually alien to the rest of the population) of whatever particular writer is trying to sell an alarmist/head-shaking article this time.)
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He loved it! He enjoyed the first three seasons, but thought the show really came into its own with the cancellation and the move to Netflix. (He had hated the season-three finale.) He made a sufficient case for it that I am trying to figure out if I can somehow watch four seasons of TV, even though the answer is usually no.
I rather liked the song they ended on. It did, actually, make me think of you for some reason.
"My heart, my heart, my drowning heart . . ."
Thank you! It's very folkloric.
but, honestly, most of it seems to be the eternal cry of youth vs age expressed as per the experiences (usually alien to the rest of the population) of whatever particular writer is trying to sell an alarmist/head-shaking article this time.
I think you are right. I will do my best not to feel alienated.
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Aw, cool! I have to say I got S1 for my b'day, devoured it, S2 & 3 and then was obliged to pirate S4, which I think was v interesting, maybe more so than the others (although I liked the 2 random 'lost' AU S4 episodes, too), but they were longer eps and I was watching online so it was v tiring, too much so for me to have fair comment. It's a sort of guilty pleasure show that's a lot of fun and then sometimes actually really excellent in multiple ways, I think? (If you do try it, I found the first few eps a bit off, but there's an episode around 4-5 in that involves Lucifer's wings and that's where it steps up. So if you do give it a whirl it's worth holding on that far before coming to a decision.)
Thank you! It's very folkloric.
I think that was what made me think of you. I don't know why I didn't mention it in the end - I suppose I got overtired as usual and then it seemed like an uncool source or something, idk.
I think you are right. I will do my best not to feel alienated.
I liked
ETA: In other important news, in my attempts to gif all the Draculas I have now achieved Peter Cushing:
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No worries. (In general, do not worry about uncool sources with me. I do not tend to fret about cool.)
t I watched an astrology-based old TV show once and the Scorpios were invariably not to be trusted and usually murderous, because scorpios.
Whoa, what?
ETA: In other important news, in my attempts to gif all the Draculas I have now achieved Peter Cushing
Hooray!
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Ha, at some point around 1974 someone apparently asked Roger Marshall to make the most 1970s thing he possibly could and so we got six episodes of Zodiac starring Anoushka Hempel and Anton Rodgers about a newspaper astrologist who is always right teaming up to solve crime with a detective who's only still in the police force because if he leaves he'll lose the money someone left them in their will. But it's pretty charming and, like I said, the most 1970s thing ever.
I think Scorpios are extra ambitious or something, according to the show, hence the tendency to murder more than other star signs, but anyway, Esther is down on them and Esther is never wrong about these things, much to Grad's annoyance. :-D
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You're welcome!
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""Vivas to Those Who Have Failed" is an excellent poem; thank you very much for sharing.
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I am sure there will be others! Have a lovely time at dinner with your friend.
""Vivas to Those Who Have Failed" is an excellent poem; thank you very much for sharing.
You're welcome! You see why it stuck with me.