Strong Verbs Are Just Better

When he tried to look for materials on their catalog for Vietnamese or South Vietnamese, he couldn't find anything. When he asked the librarian what's going on, he was told that he has to use the term "gooks." 2/

— Jade Alburo (@JadeLibrarian) January 31, 2019

Can loneliness be taught? Can it become a habit? Can it be unlearned? I’m not sure — but for me, it has always been a safety blanket.

I grew up an only child: the sole daughter of a fiercely independent single immigrant mother. From a young age, I learned to keep myself entertained, to take care of things without asking for help. I learned how to be alone — and to enjoy it.

As I got older, the habit stuck.

In many ways, I’m Solo’s target audience: I eat most of my meals alone, and I can’t afford to eat out for every meal. Unlike Chopped, Top Chef Masters, and Iron Chef America veteran Anita Lo, however, I hate cooking for myself.

Dancer and choreographer Joel Bray nervously greets 20 of us at the door of his Sydney city hotel suite and ushers us inside. His underwear is strewn about the room and he asks us to put on a hotel-issue black dressing gown over our clothes and take a seat wherever we can find one. His lithe, nude body is sheathed in an identical robe.

Bray meets our apprehension with studied anxiety, nervously pouring us drinks before crumpling at all angles on the floor, his face frozen in a rictus. He bounces up and dashes onto the bed in the adjoining room, holding up a Holy Bible as though it is a haloed digest of forbidden hunks, which, depending on your taste, it may well be.

Once, I read a piece in workshop where the protagonist with the same “sandy blonde hair and erudite glasses” as the author was also a Christ figure with an exceptionally large penis. (No one told him, “Good luck with your dad,” or suggested the story had come from his diary.) Still, that personal myopia is different from the myopia an author constructs when writing from the perspective of a single character. Take Lolita — Humbert Humbert convinces himself that his child abuse was justifiable, but Nabokov gives us the tools to unpack the horror of his narrator’s crimes.

But the line dividing the narrator’s thoughts and the author’s ideas isn’t always so obvious, especially for newer writers who haven’t been studied for many years. The Pulitzer Prize committee likely believed Junot Diaz was depicting sexism, while the women Diaz harassed likely believed he was espousing it.

“Unlike replicants,” Terada argues, “zombies don’t experience themselves as though they were someone else” (Terada 2001: 157). There is something noble about the zombie’s undivided desires, the clarity of it, that I would like to replicate but I know that I can’t maintain it. I can’t feel without division. The best I can do is to recognize that the expression of intense emotion — let’s call it crying in a meeting for now — is a deeply alienating moment where I am experiencing myself as though I were someone else. It is not fun to feel this way but it is a discomfort that I have to hang on to because I want to be alive to the difficulties and the deeply divided desires at the heart of all the good fights that I want to keep fighting.

While ‘The Second Coming’ arises out of the unique creative partnership between Yeats and Georgie, there is another aspect which makes it universal and timeless and which is not private and abstruse at all but universal and indeed may seem obvious once it is pointed out.

Quite simply, what gives lyric poetry of the kind revived and mastered by Yeats so much of its power is the mere fact that it is written in the present tense.

Just as the gyre operates in history in perpetual, if not always harmonious motion, so too is the poem always happening, the prophecy it discloses endlessly experienced with redemption expected but yet to arrive. Things are always falling apart; the centre never quite holds. In troubled times like ours when we must contemplate the potentially devastating consequences of having a leader like Trump in the White House, we see more vividly what Yeats views as the underlying entropy in human affairs.

KR: I tend to think that “universality” is in the mind of the reader rather than the writer; it takes practice to learn how to read across these divisions, and whether people are willing to do that for you depends on their own motivations and values, as well as the way that the book is marketed and sold. There’s probably not much I can do to market myself to a crotchety old guy who sniffs at stories about women, or “genre” stories or YA (I didn’t realize until just now that I’d hit that trifecta!) but once it’s in his hands, the methods I use to captivate and engage him are the same as the ones I use on anyone else. I think growing up with free range in the library and with the license to steal from my parents’ bookshelves made me skeptical of those divisions: if I read and loved Stephen King when I was an eleven year old girl who’d never seen a monster, why shouldn’t some theoretical crotchety old man be able to enjoy a book about monstrous teenage girls?

Jack Ashby: The shape is great: the head sags glumly downwards, the back and bum are round, the legs are barely discernible from the body. I love it. They mixed the lighter ears of (some) common wombats with the lighter eye-rings of (some) hairy-nosed wombats, and the toe-count is wrong again, but its overall wombattiness is excellent.4.5

This is one of the regular issues with surveillance systems. It's potentially bad for you if someone amasses a dossier of data about you, sure. But it's potentially even worse if that dossier represents itself to be complete but is not.

Then you wind up in situation like this one, where people discriminate against you in business dealings, due to absence of positive data - or simply absence of data.

One of the problems with surveillance systems is that they can, as they become normalized, perversely drive people to "opt in" to those systems, to make sure the surveillance system has enough data, as well as the right data.

This is one of those two-level attitude things, where you might hate the idea of this information about you being tracked and traded, but if it is going to be tracked and traded, you want to make sure its as favorable as possible.
Unfortunately, this situation drives people to maximize their exposure to data collection.

muccamukk

• What happens if whoever runs that instance flounces? Does the pictures go bye? If not, where does it go, and who pays for hosting?
• How does the "We'll spread the server cost!" thing fit into this?
• I post a picture of an eagle, where is that picture hosted, who is paying for it, and who has the ability to remove it?

impertinence