I make so many mistakes when I play—it’s just that people don’t pick up on them. There are any number of ways to get from one place to another on the neck of the guitar that I don’t know about.
Posted 1997 days ago.
The ancient poetries of Europe—Greek, Saxon, Welsh, Irish, Norse, and German—have lately been studied together as common examples of heroic poetry, and certainly no reader can help being struck by the fact that all these poetries have chiefly to do with the prowesses of men of strength and courage, whom the poets believed to have lived in a more or less distant past when human powers were greater, and whom they called by a special term which we translate as “hero.” It is wrong, however, to go on and suppose that heroic poetry (in this sense of the term) is due to any law in the growth of literature. The poetry is heroic only because it is created by people who are living in a certain way and so have a certain outlook on life, and our understanding of the heroic will come only as we learn what that way of living is, and grasp that outlook. We find, for example, that cattle-lifting is a common theme in the ancient European poetries, but it is found there because of no law of poetry, but because these peoples happened to live in a way which led them to the stealing of cattle on the one hand and to the practice of poetry on the other. It may seem far-fetched to say that any one has gone so far as to suppose a law of poetry which makes cattle-lifting a common theme at a certain stage in the growth of poetry, and which results in reaving, but still that is implied by those who study the heroic element in early poetry as primarily a literary problem. Its proper study is even more anthropological and historical, and what Doughty tells us about cattle-lifting among the Bedouins is more enlightening, if we are reading Nestor’s tale of a cattle raid into Elis, than is the mere knowledge that the theme occurs elsewhere in ancient poetry.
Posted 2013 days ago.
One can thus see the many formidable challenges facing a coercer. Precision of thought and language can matter greatly in compellence, while a degree of vagueness occasionally can be useful for deterrence. A nuanced understanding of the needs, fears, capabilities, interests, and will of the target state is essential. But the coercer must possess self-knowledge as well, including an understanding of the importance of the stake involved, and the likely commitment to it—by policymakers and by the domestic population—over time. And the coercer must be able to articulate the demand in ways the target state can comprehend and comply with. To understand all this is to understand the deeper meaning of Carl von Clausewitz’s insistence on the linkage between war and politics, and the need to recognize the relationship between the stake and the scale of effort required to achieve it. It is also to understand, beyond a superficial level, the meaning of Sun Tzu’s insistence on knowing one’s self, and knowing one’s enemy.
One should note here, too, that democracies engaging in coercion will face a challenge inherent in the structure of their system of governance: Communication is complicated by multiple power centers—built by design to check one another—and myriad interest groups. Indeed, bureaucratic (and organizational) models of decision-making are at the center of many scholars’ critiques of US foreign policy, and deterrence in general.
Posted 2027 days ago.
Now that we know what happen(s)ed in March and April in the City of Roses, it might maybe be time to start figuring out what will having been happened in May and June?
Contents may settle during shipping; void where prohibited by law; also available in Spanish. —There’s work yet to do: the ebook’s out, sure, but the paperback’s got a ways yet to go—paperbacks, actually, since I’ve got to final the final edits and reflow and redo the lot, and I’m still dithering over whether to stay with 5.06 × 7.81, or goose it up to 6 × 9. But that’s all background, busywork, gears to grind while the rest of the cognition engine’s whirring away at what happens next. —I have a structure (see above), but that just tells me where to look, and when. I’m not yet sure just what we’ll see. (Meanwhile.)
Posted 2037 days ago.
The particular form I’m talking about is probably clearest in the Foundation tales, though you can trace it out in almost all the others. Put simply, the first story poses a problem and finally offers some solution. But in the next story, what was the solution of the first story is now the problem. In general, the solution for story N becomes the problem for story N+1. This allows the writer to go back and critique his or her own ideas as they develop over time. Often, of course, the progression isn’t all that linear. Sometimes a whole new problem will assert itself in the writer’s concern—another kind of critique of past concerns. Sometimes you’ll rethink things in stories more than one back. But the basic factor is the idea of a continuous, open ended, self-critical dialogue with yourself.
Posted 2052 days ago.
In brief, the story we might have written had things been only a little different would have told of bravery, wonder, fun, laughter, love, anger, fear, tears, reconciliation, a certain wisdom, a turn of chance, and a certain resignation—the stuff of many fine tales over the ages. But in those weeks Pryn did not once think of dragons.
Thus, we review them briefly.
Posted 2060 days ago.
There’re so many levels to enchantment in reading these texts. A lot of it has to do with sublime experiences, and this feeling of being connected to something bigger than yourself, but also being special within that framework. But often that specialness is a form of privilege, and that privilege comes at the expense of other people, and if you pause and think about it, it’s really uncomfortable really quickly—or if you don’t come from that background and you’re reading these kinds of texts, maybe you figure it out with a shock at a certain point, or you detect it early on and are not interested in these texts at all.
Posted 2068 days ago.
Speaking of Little Women I said:
“The story is so natural and lifelike that it shows your true style of writing,— the pure and gentle type…”
“Not exactly that,” she replied. “I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public.”
Posted 2076 days ago.
The first draft of no. 33, “ – carnival was ringing – ”, the final installment of vol. 3—is done! (He said, just about four weeks ago. Pause for applause.)
It weighed in at 19,299 words, a respectable number for a first draft. The cuts will no doubt—are proving to have been—wioll haven be daunting, but not, I should hope to have thought, impossible.
But! Considering that Adobe has raised the prices of their monthly subscriptions—for software that really, at this point, one should have been owning outright—but to levels nosebleedingly high above outrageous and into you’ve-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me territory, which means the family operation has switched wholesale from the Adobe family of products to Affinity, bless their scrappy little hearts—but! What that means is I’ve got to be taking this entire end of the workflow and having reconfigured it completely, build templates up from nothing to be exactly like what I would have had before, in software that’s almost but not entirely annoyingly just enough like what I wished I’d had before to trip up all my reflexes. —The below is a shot of what happened when I tried to open one of the postscript files that used to have been spat out as a byproduct of ’zine production; I was hoping that maybe Affinity could parse it just enough to make making new templates a bit easier, but: Affinity (scrappily!) took all 18 spreads of a 36-page booklet and printed them one atop another on a single two-page spread [ fig. 1 ].
Fig. 1.
Quite powerful, in an Austin Osman Spare sense, but otherwise? I will have got to have had a bit of work to’ve been done as of yet. On top of the redrafting.
So.
Posted 2146 days ago.
(Originally posted on the Patreon.)
“She was not my wife. She was too fine to be my wife,” Michael said of Bridget after her death. It might sound like bitterness, a man venting his insecurity at a woman who made him feel small. But Michael was being literal. He also claimed the woman he’d killed was “two inches taller than my wife.” By the time he was on trial for murder, Michael was not framing the problem in terms of some flaw in Bridget. He claimed that the woman he’d killed was not Bridget at all.
Posted 2181 days ago.
