I do understand the allure of social media. My social media consists of substack and YouTube. Twitter scared me. I didn’t last a month. I quit Facebook in February 2021. You think you’re choosing a product or service. You are actually choosing where you (the actual product) will be sold.
I quit Facebook several years ago and never came to grips with Twitter. Loved Instagram as a way to share photos, but since Zuckerberg bought it it’s become unbearable. I’ve almost stopped posting, and when I do go on it’s become a time dump where I almost never see the people I actually follow. So have fun on Threads, but I’ll stick to the Substacks accounts I subscribe to.
I loved Twitter until Elon totally ruined it. It was my media du jour before that. Someone said that they wished Dolly Parton had bought Twitter and I have to say, I agree. I am still on it but don't use it other than seeing what is being sold and trolled there.
That's the advertisers' collective belief, anyway. We are all psychically passive, inert objects oh so easily reconfigured as a consumer of their...well, "administered desires," whatever it is; and not only that, but we CARE about their inane bourgeois rat race values, why?
Given the choice between a $250,000 car and a $25,000 rare guitar, I say "let's rock!"
Yeah yeah I know, "You could take the $250,000 vehicle and sell it and end up with ten count 'em, TEN rare guitars, it's a no brainer!"...
Come on, that completely misses the point.
"The best things in life are not things."
Mastering the skill of blocking their nonsense is not as difficult as they seem to think, either.
"Dark Theme," set whenever possible as fast as possible & saved to a PDF file via Opera Snapshot (Goggle Chrome is noticeably more awkward to do but that's possible as well, same idea) and K'BOOM!! there went all their inane ads - for example some tripe with Katy Couric as a "pop-up" on Salon.com, after doing that split-second evasion so many times I have lost count, I still have NO IDEA what she is even selling, saying, nada. Plus "Aha, but you remembered Katy Couric! And that proves something, right?" is a fail.
It proves I have to work on my hand-eye coordination even more than I already do through 3 minute blitz chess at playchess.com, and guitar, keyboard, Variax hand grip tools, etc., because I already LOATHED Katy Couric before that relentless pop-up, that's what it proves!
I remember entire small gangs of kids in my neighborhood YOUNGER THAN TEN YEARS OLD, mocking television ads. True, we "paid attention," though! But there has always been a deep distrust of the blatantly stupid advertising ploys the Madison Avenue firms have churned out, it runs very deep in our culture, along with the easily entranced people fascinated by small shiny objects - both things can be true.
And if the "pop-up" ads are for keyboards, amps, microphones, headphones, 24-Track Portable Studios, guitars, electric-acoustic guitars, 7-string guitars, resonator guitars, used guitars, multi-effects processors, single effect overdrive pedals, etc. etc. (that's a very short list of what would encompass about forty or fifty musically related categories I MIGHT pay heed to) or new books in too many categories to list, including dumbazz trendy b.s. propaganda purveyed via "religious" fiction or alleged non-fiction, I might scan a review just to keep track of their latest atrocities against all sound human values - plus too many other such interests of mine to bore you with, I can deal with those ads I find dim-witted, loathsome, inane, repulsive, just as those featuring something of interest to me.
Chacun a son gout.
Let them make the most of it, couldn't care less what they "sell" off of my time spent online. Or fail to sell, or sort of sell, or alienate the FORK out of me so I vow to never, ever spend one thin dime on it, something they also seem completely clueless about...
End of rant, I need to save this one for future reflection because sometimes "you don't know what you really think until you have to (sketchily) try to put it into words."
Thanks for the `like,' Babette, I should maybe clarify that it isn't so much even a matter of "loathing" Katy Couric, which is hyperbole I threw in there in the rush of propounding a few ways to (try to) evade the advertiser's sinister, diabolical, apocalyptic plans to ruin my life and...oh there I go again! OK, seriously I can hardly even associate Couric with anything distinctive enough to merit "loathing," more just the damn smiling face pop-up that recurs again and again and again on salon.com.
Same with some tv show advert that seems to inevitably pop-up when I first power up the TCL Roku TV I use as a monitor, right at the stage where I am selecting "HDMI 2," and since I IMMEDIATELY perceive it as "useless information/ trying to stulti-FYE my imagination" (have to rework the lyric & rhythmic emphasis from the Stones song) I do not know what show.
Thing of it is I am more of a
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.[3]"*
student of life than what they are apparently aiming to influence, despite also enjoying stuff like this, preposterously overdone purple prose as a "bad example," from the astounding Amanda McKittrick Ros, or maybe there's no contradiction?!
She wrote under the pen-name Amanda McKittrick Ros, possibly in an attempt to suggest a connection to the noble de Ros family of County Down.[4] Ros was strongly influenced by the novelist Marie Corelli. She wrote: "My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after."[5] She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years."[6]
Her "admirers" included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain.[7] Her novel Irene Iddesleigh was published in 1897.[8] Twain considered Irene "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time". A reader sent a copy of Irene to humorist Barry Pain, who in an 1898 review called it "a thing that happens once in a million years", and sarcastically termed it "the book of the century". He reported that he was initially entertained, but soon "shrank before it in tears and terror". Ros retorted by branding Pain a "clay crab of corruption"[citation needed] and wrote a twenty-page preface to her second novel, Delina Delaney, in which she disparaged Pain at length and suggested that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her.[9] But Ros claimed to have made enough money from Delina Delaney to build a house, which she named Iddesleigh.[10]
In Ros' last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote: "she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals..."[6]
Jeeeeeeeezussss, I don't even comprehend what state of mind you'd have to access to write like that; sure, there may be a tinge of "successful male authors enjoying example of lousy woman writer" wrapped up in this, but just a tinge, the built-in sexism always around, but damn! I have never seen anything quite as horrific, and that's just one example! I downloaded the projectgutenberg full text of Irene Iddlesleigh last night, had to stop after the first page. Afraid of nightmares, call me a coward, no problem, this is just beyond words!
Ros believed that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, and was convinced that they conspired against her for revealing the corruption of society's ruling classes, thereby disturbing "the bowels of millions".[6]
I don't know which rant I like better, but suffice it to say, I am smiling one huge smile at the moment...just short of letting loose with a guffaw. Thank you. And by chance would Ros be a distant ancestor of the current braggadocio to beat all braggadocios? Maybe I am just assuming that narcissism is passed along in one's DNA. Or that crazy is.
That DNA connection would really make sense if there was an ancestral lineage, who knows?!
"When I get time" next few days, I will track down a much more professional executed, fairly brief critical view on Ros, far more astute than my few rather predictable laughs and expressions of amazed horror, found it very interesting and of much wider application than to only stunningly overdone purple prose found in any number of 19th - early 20th century writers, including of course Amanda McKittrick Ros.
I've never been able to understand buying into the bullshit thing about "luxury" cars.
I've also never bought a car...my whole driving life was based on hand-me-downs from other family members. two of them actually lacked air conditioning, which is pretty good dharma practice in a NYC summer. I inherited a Volvo which unfortunately had that famously horrible 240 Turbo engine. EVERY repair (and there so many...I had to replace three water pumps) ALWAYS cost $350.00 (in the early '90s...friends who've driven more recent Volvos say it's up to nearly $700). that car had a tangibly demonic presence. I'm not kidding.
thing is, while the ads were idiotic (and fun to talk about...remember those beakers of stomach acid that'd turn colors when you dumped in some Rolaids?). but some of those jingles were pretty good. last week, my three-day earworm was the old Rheingold jingle ("My beer is Rheingold the dry beer/Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer" etc.). it was completely maddening.
I just bookmarked your threads account, Michael. I've spent the better part of yesterday and today lurking as the writers I've followed for years migrate from twitter. I haven't seen any nyt or New Yorker writers switch yet—assume corporate policy isn't ready. I've never had a FB or twitter account, will join threads as soon as it satisfies EU privacy demands. If never, so be it as long as meta lets nonmembers lurk. Musk just shut that down on twitter.
A few writers I like who've made the move are (in this form for the benefit of other nonmembers who'd rather explore than prejudge):
https://www.threads.net/@joshtpm/ Near the bottom of Josh's feed are his interesting first impressions. Your feelings about Musk are of course universal, and others have noted remarkable engagement, especially @profgalloway
(Typo in Felix's link fixed. Sorry if it tripped anyone!)
Dammit! They put up a firewall Friday for a few hours to force lurkers to join, and it's up again Saturday night. Hope it vanishes soon.
I don't know how many of the 70 million who joined threads at once were twitter evacuees, but I assume that most evacuees are progressive. The irony is that that won't help musk lure back trump or MAGAts who left with him. To them, the whole point of social media is to own the libs, and threads has pledged to squelch such action.
rofl, IF and I do mean IF! anyone can select a specific liberal "shibboleth," meaning what amounts to some kind of dogma misapplied or misunderstood and then misapplied or....... (etc. etc. etc.), OF COURSE we should listen, take any hypothetical cogent, non-hysterical criticism on board, but of course that rarely happens since, as you just summarized: their game is to simply assert liberal-progressive-left "imminent danger to our sacred freedom to do x y and z NO MATTER THE CONSEQUENCES, no matter the laws," you name it.
Everyone makes mistakes, liberals, everyone, that's not the issue.
Sunday morning ET: threads firewall did vanish. I'm guessing they''ll enable it a few hours every evening. Annoying, but (data) freeloaders can't be choosers.
Never followed anyone on Twitter. Twitter always gave me the creeps. The very idea of a delusional, moral ignoramus, spewing spurious bilge would ordinarily motivate me to call the sewer guy.
I departed Twitter with the feeling I'd been able to kick an addiction to crack. Everything I read or thought ran through some kind of evaluation filter: What can I make of this for a Tweet? By me, no social media is freedom. My outlet, I guess, for what I used to say publicly is now a few Substack comment spaces -- mostly Mr. T.'s.
On Twitter I found myself posting a few snarky but hopefully also relatively lucid rejoinders to "the usual suspects" from the right-wing, or to ultra-dogmatic leftists, expressing my own disdain, but yeah, what you said, Margo. Too limiting as well, just in terms of sheer length of the posts. I mean, if I post some extend quasi-rant, and people mostly skim it or completely ignore it, why should I care deeply, as if it's some huge tragedy, oh woe is me! It's worse than the hurricanes and floods destroying people's homes! - how DARE they!
How would that make any sense at all, it's laughable.
I try not to take any of this "too seriously," but also not simply treat it as a kind of useless venting, or just egocentric opinions that don't much matter. I think it's definitely possible to learn from all kinds of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. And we tend to be older on here, which is nothing to sneer at in terms of sheer life experience, that's for sure.
I haven't looked at my Instagram account for years. Facebook is my outlet for Political outrage and nothing else. Twitter is only for the notifications they send me - I never post and rarely retweet (unless I'm really outraged about something I see). Tried Post but lost interest. I'm not the "ideal" social media customer!
Probably make a case that any new social media platform is bound to attract "the kids," and some will remain for years, some for only a few months or weeks.
Hey I have been wanting to post a link to something in that vein (bands, concerts, in this case added is dance) for the last week and who knows, you might enjoy it...
_-This presumes I can even locate it, I am thinking of a you tube segment I must have seen a good six or more years ago, the energy level alone is worth a few minutes, that's for sure....
Final - Boogie-Woogie World Championship 2012 - Fauske Norway
As Steve Allen explained to Johnny Carson after a concert tour of China in the
1970s, as to why they could set up just a piano in some fairly remote area, gather a crowd, and the Chinese kids would immediately start rockin' to his boogie-woogie standards, "Rhythm swings everywhere!"
Glad you liked it, I also found myself wondering how to even separate the "Top Three" - watching closely and listening thru headphones, all ten of the pairs really put it out there on the dance floor, some of those split-second leaps and synchronized moves are clearly not for novices - but they did all seem to realize it's more or less just part of the game, "winners and losers," cheering the results regardless. And judges in this kind of contest, like in gymnastics, ice dancing, freestyle skating, and the much more brutal sport of boxing as well, will always be second-guessed, unless some individual or team just "crushes it" - in this boogie-woogie/ jitterbug competition, I could see how almost any one of the pairs competing could have been judged the winners, and it would make sense.
Phew. No kidding on the energy scale - and a lot of fun to watch. Yes Allen always struck me as wise. Dance will do that and the music that gets through to the same part of the brain irregardless of language. I remember getting kids up dancing with me when I was a teenager in a Greek village in the 60s - to the loco motion which had somehow made its way there.
Instagram, not surprisingly, us something my teen granddaughter signed me up for and is filled with her playlists, no doubt in an effort to educate me that other music exists other than warren zevon or dire straits. The thing is if there’s a link to Threads I don’t want a thread leading back to her photos, track meets, etc through my participation there.
Aha, that is a serious consideration, their damn "tracking" and possible creeps.
Glad you liked it, once in awhile something like is just pure fun, doesn't need any other excuse.
Of course being enthralled with philosophy starting roughly with those Greeks, very influential people, those Greeks! Thales of Miletus and Anaximander, for starters, and I also couldn't help being reminded of this passage:
“I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall.”
LOL, the fact is there must be millions of us, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions when you take international online users into account, who share that "profile"!
I guess there are severely driven workaholic ad mavens who really despise us, "How DARE they be so recalcitrant and obtuse, really, it defies common sense!" blah blah blah.
Hey look, it's that justly renowned ancestor of LKTIV himself, at it again with this same sentiment, see below excerpts! ****
"The pen is mightier than the sword" is a metonymic adage, indicating that the written word is more effective than violence as a means of social or political change. This sentiment has been expressed with metaphorical contrasts of writing implements and weapons for thousands of years. The specific wording that "the pen is mightier than the sword" was first used by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.
Under some interpretations, written communication can refer to administrative power or an independent news media.
Origin
The exact sentence was coined by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy.[1][2] The play was about Cardinal Richelieu, though in the author's words "license with dates and details ... has been, though not unsparingly, indulged".[1] The Cardinal's line in Act II, scene II, was more fully:[3]
True,—This!
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand!— itself a nothing!—
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars—and to strike
The loud earth breathless!—Take away the sword—
States can be saved without it![4]
The play opened at London's Covent Garden Theatre on 7 March 1839 with William Charles Macready in the lead role.[5] Macready believed its opening night success was "unequivocal"; Queen Victoria attended a performance on 14 March.[5]
In 1870, literary critic Edward Sherman Gould wrote that Bulwer "had the good fortune to do, what few men can hope to do: he wrote a line that is likely to live for ages".[2] By 1888 another author, Charles Sharp, feared that repeating the phrase "might sound trite and commonplace".[6] The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, which opened in 1897, has the adage decorating an interior wall.[7][8] Although Bulwer's phrasing was novel, the idea of communication surpassing violence in efficacy had numerous predecessors.
The saying quickly gained currency, says Susan Ratcliffe, associate editor of the Oxford Quotations Dictionaries. "By the 1840s it was a commonplace."[9]
Earliest sources
Assyrian sage Ahiqar, who reputedly lived during the early 7th century BCE, coined the first known version of this phrase. One copy of the Teachings of Ahiqar, dating to about 500 BCE, states, "The word is mightier than the sword."[10] *****
Early pre-enlightenment sources
In 1529, Antonio de Guevara, in Reloj de príncipes, compared a pen to a lance, books to arms, and a life of studying to a life of war.[20][21] Thomas North, in 1557, translated Reloj de príncipes into English as Diall of Princes.[21] The analogy would appear in again in 1582, in George Whetstone's An Heptameron of Civil Discourses: "The dashe of a Pen, is more greeuous than the counterbuse of a Launce."[22][b]
Netizens have suggested that a 1571 edition of Erasmus' Institution of a Christian Prince contains the words "There is no sworde to bee feared more than the Learned pen",[23][24] but this is not evident from modern translations[25] and this could be merely a spurious quotation.
William Shakespeare in 1600, in his play Hamlet Act 2, scene II, wrote: "... many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills."[12][26]
Robert Burton, in 1621, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, stated: "It is an old saying, 'A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword': and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrilous and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-play or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever."[27] After listing several historical examples he concludes: "Hinc quam sit calamus saevior ense patet",[27] which translates as "From this it is clear how much more cruel the pen may be than the sword."[12]
Early modern sources
The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known to history for his military conquests, also left this oft-quoted remark: "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." He also said: "There are only two powers in the world, saber and mind; at the end, saber is always defeated by mind." ("Il n'y a que deux puissances au monde, le sabre et l'esprit : à la longue, le sabre est toujours vaincu par l'esprit.").
Thomas Jefferson, on 19 June 1792, ended a letter to Thomas Paine with: "Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword: shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man, and be assured that it has not a more sincere votary nor you a more ardent well-wisher than Y[ou]rs. &c. Thomas Jefferson"[12][28]
Published in 1830, by Joseph Smith, an account in the Book of Mormon related, "the word had a greater tendency to lead the people to do that which was just; yea, it had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword".[29]
***** And for arguably the most bizarre example of widely published writing considered by many
"the worst of the worst," there's this, but first, WARNING! TO IMBIBE BEVERAGES NEAR SCREEN WHILE INNOCENTLY STARTING TO READ SAMPLES OF AMANDA MCKITTRICK ROS IS A BAD IDEA!
Irene Iddesleighnote is a romantic drama novel written by Amanda McKittrick Ros. Its publication in 1897 was financed by Ros's husband as a gift on their tenth wedding anniversary.[1] The plot centers around an adopted Canterbury noblewoman named Irene's affair with her tutor. It has been widely considered one of the worst books of all time since its publication, and has been panned by critics for its excessive purple prose and poorly-constructed plot. *****
You young people are adorbs.
I do understand the allure of social media. My social media consists of substack and YouTube. Twitter scared me. I didn’t last a month. I quit Facebook in February 2021. You think you’re choosing a product or service. You are actually choosing where you (the actual product) will be sold.
The "allure" of social media for me is spreading my Substack column around and getting new subscribers. I don't post anything other than my columns.
I quit Facebook several years ago and never came to grips with Twitter. Loved Instagram as a way to share photos, but since Zuckerberg bought it it’s become unbearable. I’ve almost stopped posting, and when I do go on it’s become a time dump where I almost never see the people I actually follow. So have fun on Threads, but I’ll stick to the Substacks accounts I subscribe to.
I loved Twitter until Elon totally ruined it. It was my media du jour before that. Someone said that they wished Dolly Parton had bought Twitter and I have to say, I agree. I am still on it but don't use it other than seeing what is being sold and trolled there.
…And what you will be buying and how you will be spending your precious time.
That's the advertisers' collective belief, anyway. We are all psychically passive, inert objects oh so easily reconfigured as a consumer of their...well, "administered desires," whatever it is; and not only that, but we CARE about their inane bourgeois rat race values, why?
Given the choice between a $250,000 car and a $25,000 rare guitar, I say "let's rock!"
Yeah yeah I know, "You could take the $250,000 vehicle and sell it and end up with ten count 'em, TEN rare guitars, it's a no brainer!"...
Come on, that completely misses the point.
"The best things in life are not things."
Mastering the skill of blocking their nonsense is not as difficult as they seem to think, either.
"Dark Theme," set whenever possible as fast as possible & saved to a PDF file via Opera Snapshot (Goggle Chrome is noticeably more awkward to do but that's possible as well, same idea) and K'BOOM!! there went all their inane ads - for example some tripe with Katy Couric as a "pop-up" on Salon.com, after doing that split-second evasion so many times I have lost count, I still have NO IDEA what she is even selling, saying, nada. Plus "Aha, but you remembered Katy Couric! And that proves something, right?" is a fail.
It proves I have to work on my hand-eye coordination even more than I already do through 3 minute blitz chess at playchess.com, and guitar, keyboard, Variax hand grip tools, etc., because I already LOATHED Katy Couric before that relentless pop-up, that's what it proves!
I remember entire small gangs of kids in my neighborhood YOUNGER THAN TEN YEARS OLD, mocking television ads. True, we "paid attention," though! But there has always been a deep distrust of the blatantly stupid advertising ploys the Madison Avenue firms have churned out, it runs very deep in our culture, along with the easily entranced people fascinated by small shiny objects - both things can be true.
And if the "pop-up" ads are for keyboards, amps, microphones, headphones, 24-Track Portable Studios, guitars, electric-acoustic guitars, 7-string guitars, resonator guitars, used guitars, multi-effects processors, single effect overdrive pedals, etc. etc. (that's a very short list of what would encompass about forty or fifty musically related categories I MIGHT pay heed to) or new books in too many categories to list, including dumbazz trendy b.s. propaganda purveyed via "religious" fiction or alleged non-fiction, I might scan a review just to keep track of their latest atrocities against all sound human values - plus too many other such interests of mine to bore you with, I can deal with those ads I find dim-witted, loathsome, inane, repulsive, just as those featuring something of interest to me.
Chacun a son gout.
Let them make the most of it, couldn't care less what they "sell" off of my time spent online. Or fail to sell, or sort of sell, or alienate the FORK out of me so I vow to never, ever spend one thin dime on it, something they also seem completely clueless about...
End of rant, I need to save this one for future reflection because sometimes "you don't know what you really think until you have to (sketchily) try to put it into words."
Thanks for the `like,' Babette, I should maybe clarify that it isn't so much even a matter of "loathing" Katy Couric, which is hyperbole I threw in there in the rush of propounding a few ways to (try to) evade the advertiser's sinister, diabolical, apocalyptic plans to ruin my life and...oh there I go again! OK, seriously I can hardly even associate Couric with anything distinctive enough to merit "loathing," more just the damn smiling face pop-up that recurs again and again and again on salon.com.
Same with some tv show advert that seems to inevitably pop-up when I first power up the TCL Roku TV I use as a monitor, right at the stage where I am selecting "HDMI 2," and since I IMMEDIATELY perceive it as "useless information/ trying to stulti-FYE my imagination" (have to rework the lyric & rhythmic emphasis from the Stones song) I do not know what show.
Thing of it is I am more of a
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.[3]"*
student of life than what they are apparently aiming to influence, despite also enjoying stuff like this, preposterously overdone purple prose as a "bad example," from the astounding Amanda McKittrick Ros, or maybe there's no contradiction?!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_McKittrick_Ros
***** Excerpt -
Writing
She wrote under the pen-name Amanda McKittrick Ros, possibly in an attempt to suggest a connection to the noble de Ros family of County Down.[4] Ros was strongly influenced by the novelist Marie Corelli. She wrote: "My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after."[5] She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years."[6]
Her "admirers" included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, C. S. Lewis and Mark Twain.[7] Her novel Irene Iddesleigh was published in 1897.[8] Twain considered Irene "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time". A reader sent a copy of Irene to humorist Barry Pain, who in an 1898 review called it "a thing that happens once in a million years", and sarcastically termed it "the book of the century". He reported that he was initially entertained, but soon "shrank before it in tears and terror". Ros retorted by branding Pain a "clay crab of corruption"[citation needed] and wrote a twenty-page preface to her second novel, Delina Delaney, in which she disparaged Pain at length and suggested that he was so hostile only because he was secretly in love with her.[9] But Ros claimed to have made enough money from Delina Delaney to build a house, which she named Iddesleigh.[10]
In Ros' last novel, Helen Huddleson, all the characters are named after various fruits: Lord Raspberry, Cherry Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, the Earl of Grape, Madame Pear. Of Pear, Ros wrote: "she had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals..."[6]
Jeeeeeeeezussss, I don't even comprehend what state of mind you'd have to access to write like that; sure, there may be a tinge of "successful male authors enjoying example of lousy woman writer" wrapped up in this, but just a tinge, the built-in sexism always around, but damn! I have never seen anything quite as horrific, and that's just one example! I downloaded the projectgutenberg full text of Irene Iddlesleigh last night, had to stop after the first page. Afraid of nightmares, call me a coward, no problem, this is just beyond words!
gutenberg.org/files/34181/34181-h/34181-h.htm
***** back to the Wiki entry -
Ros believed that her critics lacked sufficient intellect to appreciate her talent, and was convinced that they conspired against her for revealing the corruption of society's ruling classes, thereby disturbing "the bowels of millions".[6]
Legacy *****
*en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors_of_Perception
I don't know which rant I like better, but suffice it to say, I am smiling one huge smile at the moment...just short of letting loose with a guffaw. Thank you. And by chance would Ros be a distant ancestor of the current braggadocio to beat all braggadocios? Maybe I am just assuming that narcissism is passed along in one's DNA. Or that crazy is.
That DNA connection would really make sense if there was an ancestral lineage, who knows?!
"When I get time" next few days, I will track down a much more professional executed, fairly brief critical view on Ros, far more astute than my few rather predictable laughs and expressions of amazed horror, found it very interesting and of much wider application than to only stunningly overdone purple prose found in any number of 19th - early 20th century writers, including of course Amanda McKittrick Ros.
I've never been able to understand buying into the bullshit thing about "luxury" cars.
I've also never bought a car...my whole driving life was based on hand-me-downs from other family members. two of them actually lacked air conditioning, which is pretty good dharma practice in a NYC summer. I inherited a Volvo which unfortunately had that famously horrible 240 Turbo engine. EVERY repair (and there so many...I had to replace three water pumps) ALWAYS cost $350.00 (in the early '90s...friends who've driven more recent Volvos say it's up to nearly $700). that car had a tangibly demonic presence. I'm not kidding.
thing is, while the ads were idiotic (and fun to talk about...remember those beakers of stomach acid that'd turn colors when you dumped in some Rolaids?). but some of those jingles were pretty good. last week, my three-day earworm was the old Rheingold jingle ("My beer is Rheingold the dry beer/Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer" etc.). it was completely maddening.
….right on.
Let us know how it feels. I doubt I would go back. Zuck is no better than Musk.
I really like Threads. First, I can stick it to Musk and secondly I'm getting much more engagement than I ever got on Twitter. @michaelmartel
I just bookmarked your threads account, Michael. I've spent the better part of yesterday and today lurking as the writers I've followed for years migrate from twitter. I haven't seen any nyt or New Yorker writers switch yet—assume corporate policy isn't ready. I've never had a FB or twitter account, will join threads as soon as it satisfies EU privacy demands. If never, so be it as long as meta lets nonmembers lurk. Musk just shut that down on twitter.
A few writers I like who've made the move are (in this form for the benefit of other nonmembers who'd rather explore than prejudge):
https://www.threads.net/@felixsalmon/
https://www.threads.net/@ezraklein/
https://www.threads.net/@joshtpm/ Near the bottom of Josh's feed are his interesting first impressions. Your feelings about Musk are of course universal, and others have noted remarkable engagement, especially @profgalloway
(Typo in Felix's link fixed. Sorry if it tripped anyone!)
Dammit! They put up a firewall Friday for a few hours to force lurkers to join, and it's up again Saturday night. Hope it vanishes soon.
It's kind of surprising just how quickly Elon Musk managed to (nearly completely) tank this supposedly "genius power takeover move" of Twitter!
I don't know how many of the 70 million who joined threads at once were twitter evacuees, but I assume that most evacuees are progressive. The irony is that that won't help musk lure back trump or MAGAts who left with him. To them, the whole point of social media is to own the libs, and threads has pledged to squelch such action.
rofl, IF and I do mean IF! anyone can select a specific liberal "shibboleth," meaning what amounts to some kind of dogma misapplied or misunderstood and then misapplied or....... (etc. etc. etc.), OF COURSE we should listen, take any hypothetical cogent, non-hysterical criticism on board, but of course that rarely happens since, as you just summarized: their game is to simply assert liberal-progressive-left "imminent danger to our sacred freedom to do x y and z NO MATTER THE CONSEQUENCES, no matter the laws," you name it.
Everyone makes mistakes, liberals, everyone, that's not the issue.
Sunday morning ET: threads firewall did vanish. I'm guessing they''ll enable it a few hours every evening. Annoying, but (data) freeloaders can't be choosers.
Never followed anyone on Twitter. Twitter always gave me the creeps. The very idea of a delusional, moral ignoramus, spewing spurious bilge would ordinarily motivate me to call the sewer guy.
I haven’t succumbed to getting on there yet. Don’t you feel it’s like going from one fire to another, Lucian?
I joined Threads yesterday even though I can't do witty responses. *sigh*
Intelligence IS wit. Go for it
I departed Twitter with the feeling I'd been able to kick an addiction to crack. Everything I read or thought ran through some kind of evaluation filter: What can I make of this for a Tweet? By me, no social media is freedom. My outlet, I guess, for what I used to say publicly is now a few Substack comment spaces -- mostly Mr. T.'s.
On Twitter I found myself posting a few snarky but hopefully also relatively lucid rejoinders to "the usual suspects" from the right-wing, or to ultra-dogmatic leftists, expressing my own disdain, but yeah, what you said, Margo. Too limiting as well, just in terms of sheer length of the posts. I mean, if I post some extend quasi-rant, and people mostly skim it or completely ignore it, why should I care deeply, as if it's some huge tragedy, oh woe is me! It's worse than the hurricanes and floods destroying people's homes! - how DARE they!
How would that make any sense at all, it's laughable.
I try not to take any of this "too seriously," but also not simply treat it as a kind of useless venting, or just egocentric opinions that don't much matter. I think it's definitely possible to learn from all kinds of people from all kinds of different backgrounds. And we tend to be older on here, which is nothing to sneer at in terms of sheer life experience, that's for sure.
I haven't looked at my Instagram account for years. Facebook is my outlet for Political outrage and nothing else. Twitter is only for the notifications they send me - I never post and rarely retweet (unless I'm really outraged about something I see). Tried Post but lost interest. I'm not the "ideal" social media customer!
Teenagers seem to love it - pictures, bands, concert stuff.
Probably make a case that any new social media platform is bound to attract "the kids," and some will remain for years, some for only a few months or weeks.
Hey I have been wanting to post a link to something in that vein (bands, concerts, in this case added is dance) for the last week and who knows, you might enjoy it...
_-This presumes I can even locate it, I am thinking of a you tube segment I must have seen a good six or more years ago, the energy level alone is worth a few minutes, that's for sure....
youtube.com/watch?v=Tr-77vZ4_SU&t=34s&ab_channel=TheWRRC
Final - Boogie-Woogie World Championship 2012 - Fauske Norway
As Steve Allen explained to Johnny Carson after a concert tour of China in the
1970s, as to why they could set up just a piano in some fairly remote area, gather a crowd, and the Chinese kids would immediately start rockin' to his boogie-woogie standards, "Rhythm swings everywhere!"
Thanks. That was fun.
Glad you liked it, I also found myself wondering how to even separate the "Top Three" - watching closely and listening thru headphones, all ten of the pairs really put it out there on the dance floor, some of those split-second leaps and synchronized moves are clearly not for novices - but they did all seem to realize it's more or less just part of the game, "winners and losers," cheering the results regardless. And judges in this kind of contest, like in gymnastics, ice dancing, freestyle skating, and the much more brutal sport of boxing as well, will always be second-guessed, unless some individual or team just "crushes it" - in this boogie-woogie/ jitterbug competition, I could see how almost any one of the pairs competing could have been judged the winners, and it would make sense.
Phew. No kidding on the energy scale - and a lot of fun to watch. Yes Allen always struck me as wise. Dance will do that and the music that gets through to the same part of the brain irregardless of language. I remember getting kids up dancing with me when I was a teenager in a Greek village in the 60s - to the loco motion which had somehow made its way there.
Instagram, not surprisingly, us something my teen granddaughter signed me up for and is filled with her playlists, no doubt in an effort to educate me that other music exists other than warren zevon or dire straits. The thing is if there’s a link to Threads I don’t want a thread leading back to her photos, track meets, etc through my participation there.
Aha, that is a serious consideration, their damn "tracking" and possible creeps.
Glad you liked it, once in awhile something like is just pure fun, doesn't need any other excuse.
Of course being enthralled with philosophy starting roughly with those Greeks, very influential people, those Greeks! Thales of Miletus and Anaximander, for starters, and I also couldn't help being reminded of this passage:
“I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
LOL, the fact is there must be millions of us, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions when you take international online users into account, who share that "profile"!
I guess there are severely driven workaholic ad mavens who really despise us, "How DARE they be so recalcitrant and obtuse, really, it defies common sense!" blah blah blah.
Disinclined. I understand you must access through instagram. Or they are connected in some indelible way.
Well, that lets me out too if it really connects like that, good to know.
Got it. Now all I have to do is figure out what Threads is and how to use it.
Do I have to join threads to continue reading you?
No. Threads has no connection to Substack. I just post my columns there to promote them and get some more readers.
Good to hear!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pen_is_mightier_than_the_sword
Hey look, it's that justly renowned ancestor of LKTIV himself, at it again with this same sentiment, see below excerpts! ****
"The pen is mightier than the sword" is a metonymic adage, indicating that the written word is more effective than violence as a means of social or political change. This sentiment has been expressed with metaphorical contrasts of writing implements and weapons for thousands of years. The specific wording that "the pen is mightier than the sword" was first used by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839.
Under some interpretations, written communication can refer to administrative power or an independent news media.
Origin
The exact sentence was coined by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 for his play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy.[1][2] The play was about Cardinal Richelieu, though in the author's words "license with dates and details ... has been, though not unsparingly, indulged".[1] The Cardinal's line in Act II, scene II, was more fully:[3]
True,—This!
Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanters wand!— itself a nothing!—
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyse the Cæsars—and to strike
The loud earth breathless!—Take away the sword—
States can be saved without it![4]
The play opened at London's Covent Garden Theatre on 7 March 1839 with William Charles Macready in the lead role.[5] Macready believed its opening night success was "unequivocal"; Queen Victoria attended a performance on 14 March.[5]
In 1870, literary critic Edward Sherman Gould wrote that Bulwer "had the good fortune to do, what few men can hope to do: he wrote a line that is likely to live for ages".[2] By 1888 another author, Charles Sharp, feared that repeating the phrase "might sound trite and commonplace".[6] The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, which opened in 1897, has the adage decorating an interior wall.[7][8] Although Bulwer's phrasing was novel, the idea of communication surpassing violence in efficacy had numerous predecessors.
The saying quickly gained currency, says Susan Ratcliffe, associate editor of the Oxford Quotations Dictionaries. "By the 1840s it was a commonplace."[9]
Earliest sources
Assyrian sage Ahiqar, who reputedly lived during the early 7th century BCE, coined the first known version of this phrase. One copy of the Teachings of Ahiqar, dating to about 500 BCE, states, "The word is mightier than the sword."[10] *****
Early pre-enlightenment sources
In 1529, Antonio de Guevara, in Reloj de príncipes, compared a pen to a lance, books to arms, and a life of studying to a life of war.[20][21] Thomas North, in 1557, translated Reloj de príncipes into English as Diall of Princes.[21] The analogy would appear in again in 1582, in George Whetstone's An Heptameron of Civil Discourses: "The dashe of a Pen, is more greeuous than the counterbuse of a Launce."[22][b]
Netizens have suggested that a 1571 edition of Erasmus' Institution of a Christian Prince contains the words "There is no sworde to bee feared more than the Learned pen",[23][24] but this is not evident from modern translations[25] and this could be merely a spurious quotation.
William Shakespeare in 1600, in his play Hamlet Act 2, scene II, wrote: "... many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills."[12][26]
Robert Burton, in 1621, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, stated: "It is an old saying, 'A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword': and many men are as much galled with a calumny, a scurrilous and bitter jest, a libel, a pasquil, satire, apologue, epigram, stage-play or the like, as with any misfortune whatsoever."[27] After listing several historical examples he concludes: "Hinc quam sit calamus saevior ense patet",[27] which translates as "From this it is clear how much more cruel the pen may be than the sword."[12]
Early modern sources
The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known to history for his military conquests, also left this oft-quoted remark: "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." He also said: "There are only two powers in the world, saber and mind; at the end, saber is always defeated by mind." ("Il n'y a que deux puissances au monde, le sabre et l'esprit : à la longue, le sabre est toujours vaincu par l'esprit.").
Thomas Jefferson, on 19 June 1792, ended a letter to Thomas Paine with: "Go on then in doing with your pen what in other times was done with the sword: shew that reformation is more practicable by operating on the mind than on the body of man, and be assured that it has not a more sincere votary nor you a more ardent well-wisher than Y[ou]rs. &c. Thomas Jefferson"[12][28]
Published in 1830, by Joseph Smith, an account in the Book of Mormon related, "the word had a greater tendency to lead the people to do that which was just; yea, it had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword".[29]
***** And for arguably the most bizarre example of widely published writing considered by many
"the worst of the worst," there's this, but first, WARNING! TO IMBIBE BEVERAGES NEAR SCREEN WHILE INNOCENTLY STARTING TO READ SAMPLES OF AMANDA MCKITTRICK ROS IS A BAD IDEA!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Iddesleigh
Irene Iddesleighnote is a romantic drama novel written by Amanda McKittrick Ros. Its publication in 1897 was financed by Ros's husband as a gift on their tenth wedding anniversary.[1] The plot centers around an adopted Canterbury noblewoman named Irene's affair with her tutor. It has been widely considered one of the worst books of all time since its publication, and has been panned by critics for its excessive purple prose and poorly-constructed plot. *****
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Me too. I got kicked off Twitter permanently. It was for a good cause.
Check out Post News also. None of the usual social media, um, drama.
https://terikanefield.com/socialmedia/
"Twitter Alternatives: Mastodon, Post.news, Threads, Bluesky, and others" is thorough.
As I recall, Laurence Tribe @tribelaw fled early to post.news, but I can find no evidence he's anywhere but twitter now.
I pull on threads, but usually I lose a perfectly go pair of underpants