Take the wheel and drive by

[sovay]

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–).

Comments

[asakiyume]

I've dipped into the Matthew Cheney in the way I do often with links--read here, scan, read a little more, jump back, jump forward. I really like the parentheses, but I also really like this:

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...)

[sovay]

I've dipped into the Matthew Cheney in the way I do often with links--read here, scan, read a little more, jump back, jump forward.

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.

[asakiyume]

That's a very anti-narrative way to read it!

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.