Alan Jacobs

None of this offers even a start to the question of why people keep buying and presumably reading an interminably long, frequently repetitive and intermittently gruesome Iron Age rendition of Bronze Age combat. One reason, obviously, is that had Homer existed (in spite of his deconstruction by Wolf, and in spite of his substitution by Parry/Lord), he would have been the star pupil of any creative writing course. They teach a variety of tricks and techniques for different kinds of writing, but Homer uses absolutely all of them: the Iliad begins in media res with the action underway, and instead of a tiresome summary of the first nine years of the war, necessary context is supplied by scattered flashbacks; it starts, moreover, with a quarrel on the Achaean side that is a fast way of introducing its two principal protagonists, Agamemnon and Achilles, each acting out at maximum volume to reveal his character immediately; the indispensable enlistment of emotions to make us care for the characters’ fates is fully accomplished, on both sides, most strongly perhaps for Hector as he parts from his infant son and desolate wife for a day of combat, but also for the teenage fighter who grasps Achilles’ leg in a futile plea for mercy in Book 22, and many others; the build-up of tension leading to a great climax is relentless, and achieved not once but twice, first in the long delayed return of Achilles to combat, preceded by dramatic renditions of the bloody losses his absence had caused, and then in the duel between Achilles and Hector, all the more dramatic because of the final loss of nerve of Priam’s most valiant son. On top of that, there are the production values, as Hollywood calls them: lots of special effects ranging from the habitual falling-star incandescence of the gods to the extraordinary revolt of the river god Scamander against Achilles, who had fouled the river with bleeding dead bodies (he would have drowned in a thunderous flood had not the gods intervened); the gorgeous Cecil B. DeMille battle scenes written as if seen from above, sex scenes all the more erotically charged because they are inserted between dramatic peaks and, throughout, the reciprocal balancing of the inevitable human tragedy of mortality with the tragicomedies of the cavorting gods.

For Vedantam and Inskeep, the local nature of Twitter is not only notable, but somehow fails to be “democratic,” an analysis that seems unhinged from any useful political theory. But beyond this, there’s a whole social-media news-analysis paradigm reflected in Inskeep’s framing. Twitter here is supposed to exist in another world: a nebulous cyberspace of unbounded freedoms. But most of us already know that the Internet is at best a broken utopia (the only kind we’re ever likely to get).

“Wellman is finding that Twitter isn’t flat,” Vidantam says—as if Tom Friedman’s chimerical “flatness” (the analytic value of which has proven to be nil) is the only possible quality of transformative political agency. In last year’s revolutions, it wasn’t flatness that gave social media its power. It was its hyperlocality, its novel blending of intimate communities and witness at a distance.

Jesus’s decision in the desert led him into several years of working with and speaking out for the people his society – and ours – thought unimportant: sick people, foreigners, poor people, women, children. The people in power didn’t like to be challenged in Jesus’s day, any more than they do now, and so Jesus faced scorn, derision and, ultimately, death, for his choice to live by different rules.

That’s a far cry from giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, but there is really no point at all in a Lenten discipline that isn’t about reimagining the world so that it revolves less about our own desires and more about the good of all. When Lent ends, that vision of the world doesn’t. It’s a world that is less about what I want, and more about what we all need, in which the good life for me is unimaginable unless it is also the good life for you.

Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.

Though my heart leaps up when I hear the gorgeous music of 17th-century prose (Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor), such organ-concert grandeur is simply beyond me. If only I had a flair for striking similes and metaphors! Alas, nothing ever reminds me of anything else. Equally elusive are the twists and turns of intricately layered, Ciceronian syntax: I have enough trouble holding a thought in my head for more than a couple of lines, let alone carrying it through serpentine clause after clause. I do sometimes console myself by remembering Isaac Babel’s famous dictum: “There is no iron that can pierce the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment.”

Because of journalism’s paramount need for clarity and objectivity, working at The Washington Post only reinforced the natural austerity of my prose. An old copy editor I knew used to say, when striking out a needless epithet or intensifier, “No vivid writing, please.” Beauty, I learned, grows out of nouns and verbs, and personal style derives from close attention to diction and sentence rhythm. When Yeats decided that his poems had become too ornamented and flowery, he took to sleeping on a board. Before long, he’d put the Celtic Twilight far behind and was producing such shockingly blunt lines as “Nymphs and satyrs copulate in the foam.”

Making reading social?

yugodrom:

Nikolai Lutohin - Dijalektički materijalizam

The startled glutton glared gruesomely,
grinned like a greyhound with grisly fangs
then groaned and glowered with a menacing grimace,
growling at the good King who greeted him angrily.
His mane and his fringe were filthily matted
and his face was framed in half a foot of foam.
His face and forehead were flecked all over
like the features of a frog, so freckled he seemed.
He was hook-beaked like a hawk, with a hoary beard,
and his eyes were overhung with hairy brows.
To whomever looked hard, as harsh as a hound-fish
was the hide of that hulk, from head to heel.
His ears were huge and a hideous sight,
His eyes were horrid, abhorrent and aflame,
His smile was all sneer, like a flat-mouthed flounder,
and like a bear his fore-teeth were fouled with rank flesh,
and his black, bushy beard grew down to his breast.
He was bulky as a sea-pig with a brawny body,
and each quivering lump of those loathsome lips
writhed and rolled with the wrath of a wolf’s head.
He was broad across the back, with the neck of a bull,
badger-breasted with the bristles of a boar,
had arms like oak boughs, wrinkled by age,
and the ugliest loins and limbs, believe me.
He shuffled his shanks, being shovel-footed,
and his knock-kneed legs were abnormally knuckled.
He was thick in the thigh and like an ogre at the hips,
and as gross as a grease-fed pig, a gruesome sight.
He who mindfully measured that monster’s dimension
from face to foot would have found it five fathoms.

thingsmagazine:

Soviet-era postage stamps, a collection

Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political activism by creating a society of computer users, forget trying to be the ‘people’s university’ and create a body of well informed citizens. Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards by pretending to have a farm on Facebook (well, that is if they had any of their 2 hours left when they were done). What were we doing during the nineties? What were we doing during the boom that we’ve been left so ill served during the bust? No one seems to know. They come in to our classes and ask us if we have any ideas, and I do, but those ideas take money, and political will, and guts, and the closer I get to graduation the less and less I suspect that any of those things exist.