a response to prayerless hopes

I knew you were high when I read your writing diminish, diminish us. I still thought what we had was chaos, chaotic, but it birthed our new world coherent. I read your destruction when you contacted me again, writing me high so it could be compartmented, so, ignored. But I resumed living the drudgery and feeling the defeated stench of black saltwater lapping our necks. I didn't care what you felt now, and I had nothing to say to you, so I could not write back.

 

about listening, sometimes, and a lack of perspective

Some people are desperate for someone to listen to them. Others, you feel special because they chose you to talk to this time.

about how I probably won't see you anymore

Just like that, our friendship is over. I let it grow—forced it to grow, maybe—to ridiculous proportions in my mind. Rationalizing what I now know were disparities in how we felt about each other, I told myself our friendship was so great that I could only glimpse small parts of it at a time. But it was just never that big to begin with. I was getting all of it, and I just assumed there was more. But it was out of sight, out of mind for you.

bloody roots

Some people talk a lot about their humble beginnings so that when you see how they act now, you won't despise them; you'll admire them.

an email: Going Away Forever

From: Kumar
To: All
Subject: Jeremy - Going Away Forever Lunch
When: Thursday

Where: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Our beloved Jeremy is fortunately leaving us. As one of the Leads, he has been a great source of inspiration and guided most of us in all our difficulties.

We all have learned a lot of skills from him. The two most important things that anyone would have learnt is his sense of humor and using Lambda expressions in your code.  Though they seem to be highly efficient, yet they are so much annoying, for you have to rebuild the whole solution for any small changes to the code snippet containing those lambda expressions.

He has helped us immensely, inspite of the busy board he hangs on his chair. To put it in right words he had been a very good mentor like other Leads.

His leaving is a big loss for all of us as we would miss his knowledge, humor and expertise. It’s a big loss to the girls. Hopefully he will not take them with him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Let us group together and give him a great unforgettable favorite lunch, to extend our best wishes for his new career.

This would be the best time to bring sacks of Oranges.

Date : 07/26 ( Thursday) 11:30am to 12:30pm

Venue: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Communication breakdown

It is well known that a whole train of thought can pass through one's mind in a flash in the form of some kind of feeling, without being translated into human language, let alone into writing ... Because many of our feelings, put into ordinary words, would appear quite implausible, would they not? That is why they are never revealed, but remain locked up within us.

  -from "A Disgraceful Affair" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Billy Corgan on Billy Corgan and music today

Billy Corgan has caught a little hell for talking shit about Radiohead. But now, having read what he said in this interview, I think folks have misunderstood him. Here is the controversial part (parentheses mine):

From ’89 on I’ve had people tell me who I am. And they pick my personality as if it’s a one or two-dimensional thing, and I’m more like a tetrahedron. I can’t think of any people outside of Weird Al Yankovic who have both embraced and pissed on Rock more than I have. Obviously there’s a level of reverence, but there’s also a level of intelligence to even know what to piss on. ‘Cause I’m not pissing on Rainbow. I’m not pissing on Deep Purple. But I’ll piss on fuckin’ Radiohead, because of all this pomposity. This value system that says Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) is more valuable than Ritchie Blackmore (Deep Purple). Not in the world I grew up in, buddy. Not in the world I grew up in. 

So I find myself defending things. Is Ritchie Blackmore a better guitar player than me and Jonny Greenwood? Yes. Have we all made contributions? Yes. I’m not attacking that. I’m attacking the pomposity that says this is more valuable than that. I’m sick of that.

I don't think Corgan is attacking Radiohead. He's using them as an example of a popular band that critics deify while trashing other artists, himself in particular. The "pomposity" is the pompousness of critics who fawn over select bands and citicize those whom its safe to criticize. Corgan's predictably irreverent response would be to "piss on fuckin’ Radiohead" because no one else will--not because Radiohead deserves to be pissed on.

In answering a different question, Corgan expands on this:

Look, we’re all insecure in our own ways, most of us. You’ve got a Facebook with a few hundred friends. If you do something truly radical, are you ready to withstand the forty negative comments? Most people aren’t. So they’re getting peer pressured at levels they don’t even realize. It’s what you don’t say. 

It’s like the government spying on us. Right? Now it becomes about what we don’t say. The same thing with culture. I’m just willing to say it, and deal with the forty negative comments.

To the extent that anything can be interesting, Corgan sort of can be because he's a bit of a paradox. He's trying to be a rock star but he thinks we have none, can have none, and that it's pointless and vain. As he did during the 90's early alt-rock scene, he's the champion of zeroes and outcasts because he is not accepted as cool (anymore); but he's also the antithesis of that guy because he makes a spectacle of himself by dating porn whores, shaving his head, saying inflammatory crap and whatnot. This paradox is him now.

He approaches all this later in this same interview:

And the funny thing is that I’ve been playing with conceptual identities all along. And I’ve watched each turn, as I’ve adapted to each cultural identity, how I’m attacked for not being this or that, or too much of this or too little of that. Meanwhile the real me is standing behind it all noting where the deflector shield works and where it doesn’t. And what gets through. Now I’m actually strong enough where I don’t need a mask. I’m just myself.

And then he brings this back to the original point--that he gets criticized unfairly (unfair because the playing field isn't even):

Well what I’m saying is rather than be celebrated as a radical who’s continually subverted the system and turned his back on much greater commercial realities than I’ve embraced, I’m celebrated as this fucking weirdo who just won’t go away!

Is he an ass? Oh yeah. And maybe he's wrong, too, but he might as well be understood before he gets shit on for being so.

How it was

I was never closer to him than during those few weeks, weeks that exploded like moments, when the language he had heard since birth promised to realize from his lips into our world as humidity will from stirred up air some dark April nights in North Texas. Those days he'd watch how my mouth formed words, inch his fat little hand to my lips, (so close right then), him believing it was just a matter of getting the mechanics right, making the jaw and teeth and tongue do their work. But communicating was more difficult than that, obviously, and he would learn that lesson most sincerely for having known me.

In summary

In the dialog/play "The Critic as Artist" by Oscar Wilde, a witty provocateur named Gilbert spins off art-related value positions with his foil, a human sounding board named Ernest. In reply to one of Gilbert's most eloquent expositions--a take on Robert Browning as process--Ernest says, "There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say." So true.


Applicable if you've:

• tried summing it up
• taken stock
• thought something was important
• felt something needed to be said

Notes:

"Porphyria's Lover"
      -by Robert Browning

The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me — she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

Facilitating the man who facilitates change

In the recent New Yorker magazine article titled "The Obama Memos", a journalist tells the story of Obama's first few years in office by interpreting released White House memos. Two things stand out.

First, the journalist's description of the President's communication method with advisers:

President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting ...

If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not.

Depending on the circumstances and personalities involved, a team of advisers can be understood to inform their leader and/or steer their leader towards a course of action. I find it interesting that the President's advisers are steering him in the formatting of their memos, which discourage response and nuanced discussion in favor of decisive decision making.

Second point of interest is this claim forwarded by the journalist:

A President’s ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, “Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion.”

Nope, not buying it. Are you telling me that Roosevelt's fireside chats didn't make his audience more amendable to the unprecedented policies of his administration? That all Kennedy's talk of the "New Frontier" didn't help the success of the space program? That Reagan's pronouncements about "Morning In America" didn't inspire support? The argument and content around this passage feels as if it was inserted haphazardly. Whether (and how) Obama used rhetoric effectively once he was in office is a question that would require more research.

The substance of style

The New York Times article "Sleeveless and V-Necked, Santorum’s Sweaters Are Turning Heads" notes a recent meme from the Republican campaign: Rick Santorum's sweaters. Here, the candidate's fashion is playfully called the "sensible, traditional choice of grandfathers and college football coaches". I think this as astute an observation as any made about the campaign so far.

The larger discussion here is about image--Santorum's self-image, the image he has of his perspective supporter, and the self-image of that supporter. The Santorum staff's enthusiasm for the sweater is not entirely in jest; the sweater vest is indicative of their message and target audience.

As the last standing hardline social conservative in the field, Santorum appeals to swaths of mature voters ("grandfathers") and strict disciplinarians ("football coaches")--disciplinarians in the sense that these people emphasize self-discipline as key to one's ability to support oneself and manage life's affairs. This is the person who most heartily nods in agreement while reading the Forbes article "If I Were A Poor Black Kid"; his appreciation for discipline shows in his brand of faith, his military support, his politics, and many of his habits and much of his work. The "football coach" conjures many other qualities and values attributable to Santorum's perspective supporter.

But what about the other candidates' images?:

Mr. Santorum’s rivals are biased toward sleeves. Mitt Romney likes his crisply pressed oxford shirts, often under a blazer. Ron Paul is partial to suits, albeit ill-fitting ones. And Michele Bachmann, who has said her fashion icons are Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Audrey Hepburn, is almost always carefully turned out ...

Romney messages about the economy, and he appeals to fiscal conservatives. Members in this crowd see themselves primarily as responsible, business-minded people ready for wealth and status. With his style, Romney communicates this economy of success, but opts for business casual over suits so as to appear accessible, his elbows ready to rub.

Besides being one of the few options left to a man his age, Ron Paul's suits reflect his own desire to be taken seriously. Afterall, what else is a suit but a man hoping to be taken seriously? Ditto for Michele Bachmann, more or less, although I vaguely recall reading she wore only dresses or skirts at public appearances which, if so, would communicate a traditional brand of femininity, a servile sort as opposed to the "bossy" pant suits of Hillary Clinton.

Thinking back to Barack Obama's campaign, seems like he adopted several looks, even allowing/releasing photos of his basketball practice. Perhaps he welcomed being seen in a variety of ways, sending the message that he is a dynamic (young) candidate.