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Feb. 8th, 2019 08:50 amThey were talking in the lunchroom when I breezed on through or tried to. They were talking on the matter of books & reading 'em. They asked after my habits which isn't weird as I'm regarded as weird & smart & I had to confess that I'd only gotten to about ten last year. Pretty good ones but just ten. They seemed to think this was laudable though. Ten.
I'm past that place of vanity that compelled me to have only & all books so that I could read & read & put on the face of the readerly scholar. I liked that way, just enough, just okay. It's not as fun as dancing nor as amusing as video games. True stories about reading.
But what it lacks in compelling addictive properties, reading makes up for in a few ways. Portability, variety & consistency. You can have a book on the bus - no need to obsessively stare at angering news! You can get all kinds of books, hundreds of kinds. Hundreds! And you know, no real waiting around & hoping that the developer doesn't fuck the license up so bad that the cherished title becomes utter trash. You can always get a book when you need one.
So I figure I aught to get on this & read more. Be less antagonized by the antic current events, less euthanized by the march of pixels on the screen. Read-it-up. So I thought I'd try & get those books in. Despite...
Here's that thing - you know, at the dentist last night they really hurt me good. I found a dentist after a drought of dentists for a while - I found one & have been going steady & getting done what aught have been done before. So they had to drill a couple of my bones up plenty & I knew - that they'd use the gutta percha points because I backhandedly found out about Gutta Percha and then I went looking for some of these washed up blocks of it that are being found nowadays from a 19th century japanese shipwreck. Sometimes bricks of it roll upon shores. I found out about that and got acquisitive- you know, hard to have treasures- the only kind I like. So I went a-looking for to get an antique block of honest-to-goodness raw materials of ancient industry. Can't be had, it seems but you wouldn't know it owing to the breadth of search results for dental artifice. So, laying there under the television tonguing the crisp new holes in my fangs I know what's to come.
Which is to say I'm pretty well served by literacy as a competency & do get a lot - mainly from encyclopedia entries & bulleted lists. And for all the books I've made over the years, I've fallen into these patterns of exposition - leaving aside the art of it all to convey information. Technique matters though, more than one might hope. One might hope that ideas and their clear exposition would be sufficient - but here it is: No. Things can't just be done adequately, they must be delivered correctly. And correctly in the context of the times which I inhabit means sufficiently distracting & engrossing. You must engage.
Which terminology I'm suspicious of & piqued by. That's one of those everywhere notions that drops meaning as it gains ubiquity. Sales-tactics. You, like me, probably read all those books on how to sell well growing up because they & the bible were the only things at home. Right? Right. Sales guides are like self-help but with the added piece of other-harm. Zero Sum, it is & always is. Preaching & selling are of a kind, you've got to make them believe - first in you & then in what you're telling them. The culture will soften their will, the setting will put them at ease, the message must then draw their focus & then their commitment. The performance is in teaching too. Set-Induction, engagement & Close. The Close.
The close is the fiction that the salesman believes, it's the idea that there's an end. It's just the end of the one, that one, specific bullet point on the easy to digest list. It's not the culmination of efforts, but the punctuation of an activity that does not cease. A musical rest, noted. In all the things you do there's this requirement - for artifice.
So you needn't just tell a story - you've got to have a bit of style a bit of flair & elan. Without it? And so I've got to go back to the book & read the words & get better acquainted with that artifice.
I'm past that place of vanity that compelled me to have only & all books so that I could read & read & put on the face of the readerly scholar. I liked that way, just enough, just okay. It's not as fun as dancing nor as amusing as video games. True stories about reading.
But what it lacks in compelling addictive properties, reading makes up for in a few ways. Portability, variety & consistency. You can have a book on the bus - no need to obsessively stare at angering news! You can get all kinds of books, hundreds of kinds. Hundreds! And you know, no real waiting around & hoping that the developer doesn't fuck the license up so bad that the cherished title becomes utter trash. You can always get a book when you need one.
So I figure I aught to get on this & read more. Be less antagonized by the antic current events, less euthanized by the march of pixels on the screen. Read-it-up. So I thought I'd try & get those books in. Despite...
Here's that thing - you know, at the dentist last night they really hurt me good. I found a dentist after a drought of dentists for a while - I found one & have been going steady & getting done what aught have been done before. So they had to drill a couple of my bones up plenty & I knew - that they'd use the gutta percha points because I backhandedly found out about Gutta Percha and then I went looking for some of these washed up blocks of it that are being found nowadays from a 19th century japanese shipwreck. Sometimes bricks of it roll upon shores. I found out about that and got acquisitive- you know, hard to have treasures- the only kind I like. So I went a-looking for to get an antique block of honest-to-goodness raw materials of ancient industry. Can't be had, it seems but you wouldn't know it owing to the breadth of search results for dental artifice. So, laying there under the television tonguing the crisp new holes in my fangs I know what's to come.
Which is to say I'm pretty well served by literacy as a competency & do get a lot - mainly from encyclopedia entries & bulleted lists. And for all the books I've made over the years, I've fallen into these patterns of exposition - leaving aside the art of it all to convey information. Technique matters though, more than one might hope. One might hope that ideas and their clear exposition would be sufficient - but here it is: No. Things can't just be done adequately, they must be delivered correctly. And correctly in the context of the times which I inhabit means sufficiently distracting & engrossing. You must engage.
Which terminology I'm suspicious of & piqued by. That's one of those everywhere notions that drops meaning as it gains ubiquity. Sales-tactics. You, like me, probably read all those books on how to sell well growing up because they & the bible were the only things at home. Right? Right. Sales guides are like self-help but with the added piece of other-harm. Zero Sum, it is & always is. Preaching & selling are of a kind, you've got to make them believe - first in you & then in what you're telling them. The culture will soften their will, the setting will put them at ease, the message must then draw their focus & then their commitment. The performance is in teaching too. Set-Induction, engagement & Close. The Close.
The close is the fiction that the salesman believes, it's the idea that there's an end. It's just the end of the one, that one, specific bullet point on the easy to digest list. It's not the culmination of efforts, but the punctuation of an activity that does not cease. A musical rest, noted. In all the things you do there's this requirement - for artifice.
So you needn't just tell a story - you've got to have a bit of style a bit of flair & elan. Without it? And so I've got to go back to the book & read the words & get better acquainted with that artifice.
