Got a couple weekend reads for you.

First, an article in the LA Review of Books that compels me to admit that maybe—just maybe—the French are right about something:

English speakers think of their language as “open,” “flexible,” and “accommodating.” The French story is exactly the opposite. In French minds, their language is a particularly complex and nuanced tongue with no gray zones and little, if any, à peu près (approximation). Words are right or words are wrong. Every word has a precise meaning distinguishing it from other words.

Second, the Washington Post has a story about Jerry and Rita Alter, who “may have been hiding a decades-old secret, pieces of which are now just emerging”:

After the couple died, a stolen Willem de Kooning painting with an estimated worth of $160 million was discovered in their bedroom.

More than 30 years ago, that same painting disappeared the day after Thanksgiving from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.

And Wednesday, the Arizona Republic reported that a family photo had surfaced, showing that the day before the painting vanished, the couple was, in fact, in Tucson.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

This brilliant article over at The Outline is chock full of aphorisms that ought to be cross-stitched on pillows in homes across America.

Here are a couple of good ones:

“Publishing is a retail industry, not a meritocracy.”

“Just because you are fluent doesn’t mean you can write.”

My favorite, though? “Writing is hard. Writing artfully so that someone enjoys what you’re writing is even harder.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

All this straw-banning nonsense is, well…just that: nonsense. Given that 60 percent of the plastic in the oceans comes from only five Asian countries, these new laws are nothing more than virtue-signaling by career politicians. I mean, take a look at this chart.

That aside, my favorite part of this Newsweek story is the quote from Chris Milne, director of packaging sourcing for Starbucks: “Starbucks is finally drawing a line in the sand and creating a mold for other large brands to follow. We are raising the water line for what’s acceptable and inspiring our peers to follow suit.”

I don’t know about you, but I count four metaphors in those two sentences. Four:

“Starbucks is finally drawing a line in the sand and creating a mold for other large brands to follow. We are raising the water line for what’s acceptable and inspiring our peers to follow suit.”

Then there’s the clichéd language like “what’s acceptable” and “inspiring our peers,” not to mention all the questions I have about how a large brand—or anyone, really—is supposed to follow a mold. And that’s not just a PR lackey speaking off the cuff, either. It came right out of the “Starbucks Newsroom.” Which means a bunch of middle-management types signed off on it. Heck, they’re probably incorporating it into a slide deck even as I write this.

When this stuff passes for good writing or clear thinking, forget about the plastic choking our oceans and killing the fish. We’re all doomed.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts the writing life  |  make a comment

Yesterday I found myself at the Spalding Site of Nez Perce National Historic Park, where I read the following from Chief Joseph:

Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

For some reason, I thought of something Thelonious Monk once said:

When I was a kid, some of the guys would try to get me to hate white people for what they’ve been doing to Negroes, and for a while I tried real hard. But every time I got to hating them, some white guy would come along and mess the whole thing up.

Which, inexplicably, reminded me of this, from Mahatma Gandhi:

Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time.

So what’s the connection? Beats me. Could be something about how we all just need to shut the hell up. Quit telling people what to do, what to think, how to act. Try listening for a change. And maybe—just maybe—we might be able to get along a little better.

Or it could be that my synapses are just misfiring in my old age.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Tim Berners-Lee has regrets. From the very beginning, it turns out, the inventor of the World Wide Web “understood how the epic power of the Web would radically transform governments, businesses, societies. He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation.”

Vanity Fair‘s Katrina Brooker has more:

His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.

So what can we mortals do about it? I mean, that ship has sailed, right? The cat’s out of the bag. You can’t unring that bell.

Not according to Berners-Lee: “You don’t have to have any coding skills. You just have to have a heart to decide enough is enough. Get out your Magic Marker and your signboard and your broomstick. And go out on the streets.”

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Ethan Iverson interviews one of my favorite musicians; the New York Times features one of my favorite authors; the New Atlantis explores one of my favorite TV shows.

It’s a good day.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Your bloodcurdling, horrific, spine-tingling news of the day: “Spiders can physically detect electrostatic changes in their surroundings.” They “prepare for flight [emphasis mine] by raising their front legs into the wind, presumably to test how strong it is,” and use Earth’s electric field to launch themselves into the air.

How far? you ask. Oh, you know, only as far as two-and-a-half miles into the troposphere and 1,000 miles out to sea.

So, basically, this is a documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou7WQPN2dbU

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

In the following dispatch to the New York Times, Samuel Wilkeson gives an account of the “Confederate bombardment” at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863—probably the largest artillery bombardment of the entire Civil War. He wrote it beside the body of his son, killed in battle the previous day:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly [sic] absorbing interest—the dead body of an oldest born, crushed by a shell in a position where a battery should never have been sent, and abandoned to death in a building where surgeons dared not to stay?…

For such details as I have the heart for. The battle commenced at daylight, on the side of the horseshoe position, exactly opposite to that which Ewell had sworn to crush through. Musketry preceded the rising of the sun. A thick wood veiled this fight, but out of the leafy darkness arose the smoke and the surging and swelling of the fire.…

Suddenly, and about ten in the forenoon, the firing on the east side and everywhere about our lines ceased. A silence of deep sleep fell upon the field of battle. Our army cooked, ate and slumbered. The rebel army moved 120 guns to the west, and massed there Longstreet’s corps and Hill’s corps to hurl them upon the really weakest point of our entire position.

Eleven o’clock—twelve o’clock—one o’clock. In the shadow cast by the tiny farmhouse, sixteen by twenty, where General Meade had made his headquarters, lay wearied staff officers and tired reporters. There was not wanting to the peacefulness of the scene the singing of a bird, which had a nest in a peach tree within the tiny yard of the whitewashed cottage. In the midst of its warbling a shell screamed over the house, instantly followed by another and another, and in a moment the air was full of the most complete artillery prelude to an infantry battle that was ever exhibited. Every size and form of shell known to British and to American gunnery shrieked, moaned, whirled, whistled, and wrathfully fluttered over our ground.…Through the midst of the storm of screaming and exploding shells an ambulance, driven by its frenzied conductor at full speed, presented to all of us the marvellous [sic] spectacle of a horse going rapidly on three legs. A hinder one had been shot off at the hock.…During this fire the houses at twenty and thirty feet distant were receiving their death, and soldiers in Federal blue were torn to pieces in the road and died with the peculiar yells that blend the extorted cry of pain with horror and despair. Not an orderly, not an ambulance, not a straggler was to be seen upon the plain swept by this tempest of orchestral death thirty minutes after it commenced.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment