One of the great strengths of the English language is the number of ways it provides to describe people who annoy us. True, German has the word “Backpfeifengesicht” – “a face in need of a punch” – but English overwhelms us with options, thanks partly to its abundance of vulgarisms. If I call you a “wanker” I mean something subtly different from a “dickhead”. (It can be hard to pinpoint these nuances without resort to further swearing, as demonstrated by users of urbandictionary.com, as they struggle to define a “prick”: “An all around fucktard, dickweed, assrat bastard.”) These differences aren’t just a matter of intensity. We can presumably all agree that Simon Cowell is a bit of a tosser. But his success makes it hard to dismiss him as a fuckwit, while it’s not clear he’s guilty of the malice that would condemn him as a shit.
I think an awful lot of what passes for political discourse in this country these days works off that principle: There’s money in making stupid people mad.
Pedagogy
When Julia was in 2nd grade, I taught poetry to her class, using Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?. The kids wrote really great poems for me. I would come in every other day for two weeks. That was actually one of my triumphs of teaching. Kids would come up to me years later and say, “Mr. Mayhew, how about a poem?”
FRANK SANTORO CORRESPONDENCE COURSE for COMIC BOOK MAKERS. NEW COURSE STARTS JANUARY 1st 2013 - Email me capneasyATgmail for application guidelines. I WILL SEND YOU A LINK TO THE LAST COURSE so you can check it out. Ten students per course. 8 week course. 500 bux. Payment plans available. I will work with you. This is the 6th course I have done and I have it down to a science. Great way to study comics for those who can never find the time to make them. Correspondence method works with your schedule. I will show you. You can do it! Applications due by Xmas - unless we all die on Dec 22… http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/riff-raff/page/10/
5 Open Supersecrets About Bloggers
The “five open supersecrets” about bloggers, as Lee Siegel says in Against the Machine (quoted in Benjamin Kunkel’s review at N1BR), are:
- Not everyone has something valuable to say.
- Few people have anything original to say.
- Only a handful of people know how to write well.
- Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
- “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.
I am not sure how these five secrets distinguish bloggers from anyone else, including those who write books. They are worth remembering, though.
The search for meaning is not man’s search. The real question is how to do any good, or as Etty Hillesum put it just days after learning for a certainty that the Germans “are after our total destruction,” the problem is one of “offering what little assistance I can wherever it has pleased God to place me.”
Or, as some wag once said, “in the most carefully constructed experiment under the most carefully controlled conditions, the organism will do whatever it damn well pleases.”
Yoga is not about doing…it is about being. The most important thing to remember is that you have everything you need right in you. Enter every practice without expectation or judgement. Enter every pose as if it were the very first time. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. Don’t worry if you are stronger on the right than on the left. Don’t worry if you could do a pose yesterday that you can’t do today. You are exactly where you are meant to be…right here in this moment. Take the first step, and let yoga do the rest.
Everything you need to know about the connections between humans and demi-gods is down there in the subconscious – this is my cut-price Jungian theory. And writing is the sort of process that brings out those connections. With the conscious application of craft, things just pop up. It is like solving a cryptic-crossword clue.