And so the Prince obscured his contemplation
Under the veil of wildness, which, no doubt,
Grew like the summer grass, fastest by night,
Unseen yet crescive in his faculty.Ely’s speech, Henry V, Act 1, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare
For as long as I can remember, I have been attracted to hobbies which set actions to beat and meter. I started playing rock and jazz drums when I was fairly young, which means I can move each of my four limbs with independence and with some command over tempo, complex and compound meter, styles, and multiple swing patterns. I was a multi-year drum major in high school and a reasonably accomplished conductor. I have composed electronic music, written pop songs, performed in bands, and played in orchestras, but never at anything approaching a professional level. Let us say that I am an advanced hobbyist - one who feels most at home at the intersection of improvisational feel styles and technical progressive styles. I should have rhythm. I do have rhythm, dammit.
An elegant, eloquent, and powerful start! Gonna be a great read.
It makes me consider the overwhelming power of AI taking over social networks.
And binge drinking, which likely hasn’t reached a pinnace yet.
At what point does binge become baseline, and powerful cannabinoids, ketamine, and (perhaps) other soon-to-be-available psychotropics dull the wider population even more than their smartphones already have?
Smartphone sports gambling probably gets there first.
When it goes Orwellian and is referred to as “Victory Bingeing”.
I got a small shudder when your autocorrect killed some humor when you simply copied and replied to part of my comments. That was not expected at all. Did you make a manual change?
“Pinnace” was intentional on my part, being part of the semantic meaning wordplay like Rusty and Shakespeare were having fun with in the article.
Spooky
I did make the change, thoughtlessly assuming that your autocorrect left intact a marine reference. I’m sorry - went right over my head. Hardly spooky, anything that goes on in there.
Rusty, do you think what you’re describing is a new field of study?
I don’t think so. It’s a multidisciplinary application, to be sure, but I think as we progress you’ll see that many of the underlying topics have pretty robust fields of scholarship to call upon.
May it bring scholars from around the world to a major university in Nashvegas.
Jim
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Stepping down from the empyrean heights of the Gospel of John: humans have not done well when new media - new ways to tell the stories - have become widespread. Whether it was the printing press and the subsequent Reformation and Wars of Religion, to the newspaper and the revolutions in America and France, to broadcast media and the rise of both communism and fascism, to apparently social media today, it seems the less savory actors tend to harness the system first, only to unleash havoc that eventually settles into some sort of new, purportedly wiser order. That is, until the next form of media comes along.
Reminded me of this:
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
David Comberg 1.34K subscribers
2,050,888 views | Oct 30, 2010
Short lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the ‘simple shapes of stories.’