By Birds
There's a Borges story, I think, involving an unintentionally poetic murder and the observation that history repeats literature.
Makes sense. Literature, if it's good, is true.Apparently some birds don't lie either.Thank you PSFK.
There's a Borges story, I think, involving an unintentionally poetic murder and the observation that history repeats literature.
Makes sense. Literature, if it's good, is true.Apparently some birds don't lie either.Thank you PSFK.
I'm reading Philip Pullman, loving it, thinking about it in relation to (comparison with) the JRR Tolkien Middle Earth Project, and wondering about value.
I think Tolkien's work is immensely impressive in its imaginative scale and as a demonstration of accessible but ambitious storytelling, and I think it's educationally valuable in that it turns people into readers, writers, and explorers of the originally weird thoughts we all have. In my opinion, however, Tolkien's orcs are a very big worry. I think it's fundamentally unethical to tell war stories in which the bad guys don't have families. So. How do we teach Tolkien? (If we teach Tolkien. Which I'm pretty sure we do and I'm pretty sure we should. Because of the imagination, the fact that his work can be a gateway to literature and learning and love of stories, words, and communication.) Maybe we teach the man with the work? Explain his personal weirdness and how it contributed to his (in my opinion problematically simplified) vision of good and evil and the virtue in violence? Worth some thought I think. And then there's Pullman. I'm halfway through the second book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, and, so far, I love it. So far, it feels questioning and complicated and real. So.So far, I say teach it. For imagination. For storytelling. And for truth.Yikes. Bold statement from someone that still has 500 pages to read.Comments [4]
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Not sure if I actually believe Ween folklore, but there's plenty of truth in plenty of fiction, and I don't think there's anything wrong with a little embellishment, so I feel perfectly comfortable spreading this around...
Apparently a journalist once asked Ween what they were trying to accomplish with an album they'd just released. Gene and Dean took a moment to think, and then Gene took a stab. Our goal when putting this thing together, he said, was to create a certain sensation for people that walked in on the music. We imagined a room full of friends listening, maybe with focus on the music, maybe with it playing in the background. And we imagined a friend (one that has never before listened to Ween) coming into the room. If this album achieves its desired effect, no matter which moment of which song on the album is playing, the entering friend will feel compelled to say, immediately upon noticing the sounds from the speakers:
What the fuck are we listening to?
Friday night's show definitely had an element of that, and, as a long time fan, I continue to appreciate Ween's uncompromised committment to silliness.
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I feel like sometimes (quite often, in fact) it's hard to resist changing a story. A little embellishment here. To accentuate the very real intensity of something that happened. A little order switching there. A character role change maybe. Putting thoughts in another character's head.
I do it ALL the time.
And I'm a fanatical truth addict.
I can't imagine what pathological liars do.
Unless I'm secretly (secretly from myself) a pathological liar. Yikes.
Anyway, if I change the history of my life every day by telling embellished stories, don't you think it's likely that storytelling historians change things all the time?
Not manipulatively. But for effect. For a better story.
I would if I were an historian.
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