There's a biggish manuscript that I wrote not too long ago. On the advice of a professional, I'm making some revisions to it now. She says that I didn't make as many mistakes as she expected, but there are still a bunch of little things to take care of. Some other suggestions, as well.
Overall, it's something I'm glad to be doing. It feels like a good step.
A number of years ago―by which I mean the year almost certainly started with "19"―I was reading a library copy of Writer's Digest. For some reason. And there was an article about company names. Some companies had been named after their founders, of course. Other times the founders had been going for a certain image or certain sound. There may have been mention of George Eastman getting the name "Kodak" from an Anagrams kit.
But what the author really wanted to get across was that if you were starting a business now, you couldn't use any of these principles or your own intuition to name it. You needed to go to a professional business name consultant. And hey, guess what his profession was?
Somehow this seems symbolic of a lot of things now.
Bear with me here...
Leighton Woodhouse has some interesting things to say about the class war brewing between two elements of America's elite class.
Politics today is the struggle for supremacy between these two segments of the elite. The economically rich seek to convert their monetary riches into political power by bankrolling their favored candidates (or themselves) in elections and by extending the rules of the free market—the arena in which they are hegemonic—into every facet of human activity. The culturally affluent aim to consolidate political power by constraining the influence of the market to purely economic activity, thereby limiting their rivals’ domain of activities, while proselytizing a vision of government led by professional technocrats. Thus, the rich tend to gravitate toward economically libertarian political ideologies, while the credentialed embrace progressive politics that favor the power of government institutions run by experts.
The thing is that neither of these groups is what they used to be. Both have changed in ways that aren't for the better. The culturally affluent aren't for the most part fluent in Latin and Ancient Greek in the way you once could have assumed they were. Nor do they have a deep understanding of the history of art. Cultural elites have come to specialize in politicized forms of knowledge, and contentious presentation of same.
On the other hand the economically rich are no longer really in the business of physically producing products. Not in the vast majority of cases. They invest in stuff that is made elsewhere, or has no physical reality to begin with.
Steve Bannon is a likable guy, or at least one who grows on you. And when he says, "Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant,. He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values," he may be onto something. But that's a problem if he really wants to campaign for a third Trump term. Assuming that Trump is able to run for the presidency again and to serve, he's not going to become less vulnerable to being manipulated by scheming eunuchs. Someone will have to say up hered.
Labyrinths are a very old theme, and there must be a reason for that. Educated guess? Our unconscious minds stylize the space we move through, emphasize things through repetition. The result is that we create mazes in our dreams, and respond to them when we find them elsewhere.
Meeting Slides looks to be a fun labyrinth. Swedish artist Carsten Holler codesigned it with American architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and it was built in Kemi, Finland. It's made of snow, and also outfitted with windowlike apertures. For cluing me into this one I have to thank Francesca Tatarella's book Labyrinths & Mazes: A Journey Through Art, Architecture, and Landscape.
"The Christian Life" is one of the highlights of The Byrds' 1968 album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But it was probably inevitable that it would be misunderstood. No, Gram Parsons wasn't trying to convert his listeners to Christianity. He had much eager sinning left to do in his short lifetime. On the other hand the song has nothing to do with peak-2020 "everything is about race" cultural politics. I don't know where you'd even get something like that.
No, the simple truth is that Parsons heard the Louvin Brothers' original and was moved by it. Therefore he covered it with the Byrds, and opted to treat the sentiment behind it respectfully, whether he shared it or not.
I only just found out that February is named after Februus. And who is Februus, you ask? The Roman god of purifications. Associated with Hades/Pluto and the Underworld.
Tomorrow is the Ides of February, Ides being another idea that comes down to us from the Romans. To them ritual was very important, and is woven into the very fabric of time. And in some senses theirs wasn't that long ago.
