diction friction

‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. ‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? ‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.’I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. -- T. S. Eliot "The Waste Land" II. A Game of Chess (lines 111-115) more shit: things visual : anal retina // things audible : commercial suicide // things i'd rather not discuss : fuck yeah, ennui

[depsidase]

[wack-ashimself]

[reading-writing-revolution]

Banned books tell the truth about humanity. That's why certain people don't want you to read them.

[molly-bloom]

It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, 1935.

[mudwerks]

note for note

the MAGA story

[langoaurelian]

" America a Prophecy" - Plate 8 (Detail) WILLIAM BLAKE Relief etching, with extensive white-line etching and rich hand coloring on wove paper, 1793.

[ganymedesrocks]

William Blake (1757 - 1827).

William Blake's Universe, America, A Prophecy, plate12, 'Thus wept the Angel voice', 1793-1821.

William Blake (1757 - 1827), 'The Morning Comes', ca 1793-1821, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (Detail).

[vintagegeekculture]

oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.

Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?

As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.

The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked. 

My friend and fellow Rod Serling fan Brian McDonald wrote an article about this where he explains everything beautifully. Check it out. His articles are all worth reading and he’s one of the most intelligent guys I’ve run into if you want to know how to be a better writer.

According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion. 

The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story. 

One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised. 

[airyairyquitecontrary-deactivat]

IIRC “Judgment Day” was part of the inspiration for the excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”

[may-shepard]

This whole post is liquid gold for writers.

[spudnuto]

[sugary-sweet-grits-deactivated2]

“The Edge - there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson • self portrait, On the Road to Tijuana, (1960)

[feral-ballad]

Ama Codjoe, from Bluest Nude: Poems; “Bluest Nude”

[Text ID: “I crave. I want to be seen clearly or not at all.”]

[70sscifiart]

Josh Kirby’s 1967 cover art for “Untouched by Human Hands,” by Robert Sheckley

[you-are-another-me]

[rogerclarkaudiobooks]

"Eliot After The Waste Land"

Author: Robert Crawford Narrator: Roger Clark Audiobook Release Date: February 13, 2024 Length: 29 hours, 5 minutes

Care to listen to a sample of this audiobook? Click on the media player below 👇

Visit Original Link

Publisher's Summary:

After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After "The Waste Land" tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life. Chronicling Eliot's time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford shows us the public and personal experiences that helped inspire Eliot's later masterpieces. Crawford describes the poet's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his Nobel Prize, his great work Four Quartets, and his adventures in the theater. Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters. ©2022 Robert Crawford (P)2024 Tantor

Eliot After the Waste Land is available from: Audible ✰ Audiobooks.com ✰ AudiobooksNow.com ✰ AudiobookStore.com ✰ Barnes & Noble ✰ Binge Books ✰ Chirp Books ✰ Everand ✰ Downpour ✰ Google Play ✰ Hoopla ✰ Libro.fm ✰ Overdrive + Libby ✰ Rakuten Kobo ✰

TIP: If you want to find more audiobooks from Roger, you can click on the "Roger's Audiobooks" tag, or you can also check out my pinned post 😉 Happy Listening!

[barbariankingdom]

[nuckgirl16]

Sooo was Heir Miller making a jab orrrr did he just not pay attention in Lit??

Odysseus was a narcissist, compulsive liar, adulterer and thief who caused the destruction of everyone who followed him.

Damn, I really hate it but I have to agree with Heir Miller here, but I'm still getting he never read the poem

[branchflowercuriosa]

[soberscientistlife]

[passareltemps]

[passareltemps]

"Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”

Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others."

Timothy Leary