A Lithuanian Writer's Livelihood—Gone: Rūta Vanagaitė was a best-selling author in Lithuania. Then she contradicted the story her country tells about itself
What Happened To Julian Assange’s Twitter Account? Social Media Confused International Business Times
Blind mystic who 'predicted' 9/11, Brexit and the rise of ISIS has two major predictions for 2018
2017 WAS A BRUTAL YEAR FOR THE ENVIRONMENT WhoWhatWhy.org
There are many families in which nobody writes poems,but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.
My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacationswhose text is only the same promise every year:when she gets back, she'll haveso much
much
much to tell.
Barack Obama has warned that social media can leave people “cocooned” in alternate realities and urged world leaders to promote responsible use of the technology.
Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’? National Review vs. In Which Former NatSec Prosecutor Andrew McCarthy Embraces Russian Disinformation emptywheel
Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life these days makes it difficult to take seriously religion and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so much so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. So it comes as no surprise that someone would point to 'burnout' as the explanation of Aquinas' failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:
Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.
Jonathan Malesic, from whose Commonweal article the above quotation is taken, finds the traditional explanation "suspiciously pious." (My inclination is to say that his rejection of the traditional explanation is suspiciously post-modern.) What Malesic sees in the final days of the doctor angelicus is "burnout." Malesic builds on a suggestion of Joseph Weishepl:
The most down-to-earth account of Aquinas’s final winter that I have come across is by someone you might expect to play up Aquinas’s sanctity: Joseph Weisheipl, a Dominican writing to commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of his confrere’s death. But Weisheipl is interested less in hagiography than in empathy. Sensitive to the rigors of Aquinas’s schedule as a professor and member of a religious order, he argues not for a theological or mystical explanation for Aquinas’s silence, but a physiological one. In his view, “the physical basis for the experience of December 6 was a breakdown of his constitution after so many years of driving himself ceaselessly in the work he loved.”
Burnout or visio mystica? An 'immanent' explanation in terms of physiology, or a 'transcendent' explanation in terms of supernatural insight?
‘Oh, you know, you write it and deconstruct it at the same time.’‘Well, said Eleanor, who had no idea what he was talking about, ‘that could be tricky – like trying to have a bath while you let the water out.’‘Hey, that’s a neat image.’‘What’s it about, your self-imploding novel?’‘It’s kind of a spy story, but of course it’s not about anything. I’m just playing intertextual games with the Cold War’s favourite genre and its grand narratives. I play with labyrinths of unstable meanings, the unravelling of meanings, aporia, the mass hallucination that is the Cold War. So as not to appear completely anti-humanist, I dangle a kind of resolution before the reader and then snatch it away at the last moment…’Eleanor stopped listening, as a he was clearly not going to indulge her with a story. She felt weak and emptied of feeling. Occasional words penetrated the blear like fragments torn from a nightmare: linguistic predicaments, logocentrism – or was itlogorrhoea? – chiasmus, Dasein, effraction, glissement… Glissement: now there was a word with a certain slippery allure ...
After telling us good writing has little or nothing to do with “brainpower,” and probably cannot be taught, one notably excellent writer says this:
“. . . there is no reason to believe that Mozart was a genius in the ordinary sense of being brainy. He was a musical genius. I think there is writing genius as well—which constitutes primarily, I think, of the ability to place oneself in the shoes of one’s audience; to assume only what they assume; to anticipate what they anticipate; to explain what they need explained; to think what they must be thinking; to feel what they must be feeling.”
When it comes to writing advice, that’s not bad, probably better than most and doesn’t presume to impose a list of how-to rules. Forget the “genius” part. Knowing your audience and your intent is essential, even among workaday tyros. Often I work with engineering faculty and students who are stymied when writing for non-engineers. They take for granted the transparency of equations and technical jargon. Some are hobbled when denied the crutches that come naturally when they write for peers. I suggest they picture their non-specialist reader sitting across the room from them. Tell a story. Don’t frame an argument. The advice given above is nicely adaptable. A chemical engineer could learn from it, and so could an eighth-grader writing a book report.
The author is the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in “Writing Well,” collected in Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law Faith, and Life Well Lived (Crown Forum, 2017). The book of speeches is edited by his son, Christopher J. Scalia, and former law clerk, Edward Whelan. Scalia was the public servant who, during my lifetime, I have most admired and respected. Granted, the pickings have been slim, but Scalia’s “brainpower,” to use his word, and love of the Constitution were memorable. His voice was so distinct, I looked forward to reading his dissents. It helped that he liked citing Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.
Scalia delivered “Writing Well” when accepting a lifetime achievement award in 2008 from Scribes, a national organization of legal writers. He dismisses the notion that legal writing is a discrete discipline apart from “that large, undifferentiated, unglamorous category of writing known as nonfiction prose.” A good legal writer, he says, “but for the need to master a different substantive subject,” could become a good writer of history or economics. Scalia taught legal writing at the University of Virginia Law School, where he formulated two “prerequisites for self-improvement in writing” 1. “There is an immense difference between writing and good writing.” 2. “It takes time and sweat to convert the former into the latter.” Scalia concludes his speech winningly with a pithy statement of truth: “It is my experience that a careless, sloppy writer has a careless, sloppy mind.”
Speaking of truth, I recently read a poem by Gavin Ewart, “The Premature Coronation” (Penultimate Poems, 1989), about Edward Gibbon. Ewart describes the great historian as “most fit to be loved for his long-term attachment to truth, and the style that’s so clear and Olympian. / “Rien n’est beau que le vrai. Rhetoricians avaunt! (he implied).” The French is Boileau’s old saw: “Nothing is beautiful but truth.”
The drinking person’s guide to world citiesDON’T OVERDO IT: Vigorous Exercise Tied to Macular Degeneration in Men. “They found that exercising vigorously five or more days a week was associated with a 54 percent increased risk of macular degeneration in men. They did not find the association in women. The study, in JAMA Ophthalmology, controlled for more than 40 variables, including age, medical history, body mass index, prescription drug use and others.”
Read Widely? That’s Really Bad Advice
“At its most obnoxious, the command to “read widely” reflects the more-is-more ethos that courses, like an energy drink, through our literary culture. My Twitter feed is full of writers and critics who relentlessly strive to be up on their field, logging every literary debut like librarians, returning from writing conferences with shareable jpegs of their book-engorged tote bags, or lighting out for yet another reading, the stacks on the book table like some mountain range, the promise of a horizon. Some real talk: most writing isn’t worth consuming. That includes cereal boxes and New York Times wedding announcements. More real talk: most people urging you to read widely probably have a hard time ranging outside their comfort zones.”
John Menadue: Parliamentary reform and democratic renewal
Kellogg’s “junk science” and Australia’s health policy
“It’s just madness and lazy politics to allow a cereal company to fund a health study ...
Midnight At The Democracy Dies In Darkness Café.
Midnight At The Democracy Dies In Darkness Café.
