#Walter Ong

[rbolick]

Bookmarking Book Art -- A to Z in Bas Relief

Oratorical Type A by Nerhol (Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka) Oratorical Type Z by Nerhol (Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka) The Japanese artists and partners Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka are known as NERHOL.  Interviewed by Rebecca Fulleylove in the online magazine It’s Nice That, they explain the name: We met at one of Iida’s exhibition and realised we had so much in common in regards to…

[mrsllyziy]

i want to make a short comic ab teen Sam so bad 😭😭😭 its ab him + walter dealing with calvin's death and how they "moved on" spoiler: they didnt

[a-chilleus]

"To speak, I have to be somehow already in communication with the mind I am to address before I start speaking. I can be in touch perhaps through past relationships, by an exchange of glances, by an understanding with a third person who has brought me and my interlocutor together, or in any of countless other ways. (Words are modifications of a more-than-verbal situation.) I have to sense something in the other’s mind to which my own utterance can relate. Human communication is never one-way. Always, it not only calls for response but is shaped in its very form and content by anticipated response."

Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (Florence: Taylor & Francis Group, 1982), p. 173

[raymadrigal]

Ghastly Elegance

2023

Documentation by Lillian Heredia

[zermbie-dergon]

Little things I learned about the members of Constellation:

- Andreja feels like an outcast to the rest of the group and doesn’t feel like she’s included in their group activities.

- On the flip side, Barrett will try to invite Andreja to join him and the others in said activities and she always declines (this includes things like movie night, dancing, cooking, listening to music, board games and having drinks together)

- The members all get together to have movie night and take turns picking out the movies

- Andreja tries so hard to make jokes with Barrett but he always knows what she’s gonna say. She gets discouraged but keeps trying

- Barrett and Vlad once spent 5k of Constellation’s credits to throw a party on The Eye

- Sarah is completely against Sam bringing Cora along with him. She suggests leaving Cora with Matteo to ensure her safety. Sam becomes irritated and defensive and says Cora goes with him.

- Sam and Barrett are sports bros and love watching games together. If one of them isn’t around to watch the game, the other will record it so they can watch it together later

- Sam has terrible spelling

- Barrett is actually his last name. His first name starts with A but (as far as I know) we don’t know what the A stands for

- Sarah seems to fill a kind of motherly role of the group, checking in with Barrett after being held hostage by pirates, keeping Sam on track, watching out for Cora, reassuring Andreja, etc

- Sam and Barrett seem to cause the most trouble or make the most mistakes in the group. Barrett will try to joke and laugh it off until Sarah threatens punishment. Sam however can get grumpy and irritated when “Sarah Perfect Morgan” calls him out on it.

- Andreja has some knowledge in cooking

- Barrett does as well and will cook large meals for the group

- Cora will occasionally take some of Barrett’s stuff, usually books, without asking leading to Barrett going to Sam to get them back

- Sam seems to get easily distracted while on missions. “Sam, did you check out that thing I asked you to?” “Well I was going to but then I got caught in a goose chase-” “So did you or not?” “I was going to but then there was this thing-” “Should I just assign someone else?” “Uh that would probably be best”

- Andreja really wants to teach Cora self defense and how to fight and use a weapon. Sam is uncomfortable with it and tries to brush Andreja off. She doesn’t get the hint though

- Sam keeps an open tab at the bookstore in Akila City for Cora. She's supposed to be cut off at 100 credits but tends to overspend

- The stress Sarah is under must be obvious to the other members as multiple members of Constellation will ask if she is doing ok

- Barrett tries to get Noel to join them in space but she declines and reveals how much she is overworking herself. She then admits that she had nothing but her smarts to get her ahead in life

- Sarah is Cora’s favorite member of Constellation. Sam is her second favorite

- Not knowing where Andreja is from and her backstory drives Matteo crazy. He will vent to Sam about it who tells him to let it go and everyone is allowed their secrets

- Aja recruited Barrett into Constellation

- Sarah and Vlad recruited Andreja into Constellation

- At one point in his life, some people called Sam “Sammy”, he now detests the name and “goes by just Sam now”

- While Barrett was grieving, Aja sat with him in his room. He doesn't remember what she said but her presence was comforting and that’s what he remembers most

- Despite not having many credits himself, Sam is willing to help out those in need whether it's loaning credits to Barrett, keeping an open book tab for Cora or donating to those in need.

- Sarah is not afraid to ask Walter for money. They have some banter back and forth but Walter always signs the check

- Nadia at SSNN tries to get Sam to dig up dirt on Jacob. Despite the estranged relationship with his dad, Sam refuses

- Barrett and Sam have both been to jail at least once

- Sam and Sarah have an ongoing debate over which is the superior beer. Sarah suggests they go bar hopping one day to test their theory.

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how "oral" vs " written" culture should perhaps be referred to as "embodied" vs "recorded" culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We've created a new and Highly Scientific™ 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you're not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

The 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling' by Ted Chiang

'The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang — Subterranean Press' blog post by Devon Zeugel

'Orality and Literacy' by Walter J. Ong

Wikipedia entry for Grimms' Fairytales

Wikipedia entry for Milman Parry

Wikipedia entry for Homeric Question

Wikipedia entry for Mwindo Epic

Encyclopedia.com entry for Mwindo

Crash Course episode 'The Mwindo Epic'

'The world’s oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about ‘seven sisters’ stars may reach back 100,000 years' by Ray Norris on The Conversation

'The Pleiades – or 7 Sisters – known around the world' by Bruce McClure on EarthSky

Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Semiotics

99% Invisible episode 'Ten Thousand Years'

Wikipedia entry for Aesops Fables

'How Inuit Parents Teach Their Kinds to Control Their Anger' by Michaeleen Doucleff and Jane Greenhalgh for NPR

Deafness and Orality: An Electronic Conversation

Wikipedia entry for The Tale of Genji

Bea Wolf, a middle-grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf, by Zach Weinersmith

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

'Writing is a technology'

'Arrival of the linguists'

How translators approach a text'

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

[your-ne1ghbor]

Art dump

don't know how many of these I'll show but like I have so much art stuff from last year to this year that I never showed because either their stupid, cringe, or me practically on 0% of sleep but I guess I'll sacrifice my sanity since I'm kinda on a block rn lol

Btw this is like:

6-7 sketch books

Alot of them are filled with Wish content so yeah. Anyways here you guys go:

We'll start with this one:

°•○☆○☆○☆○☆○☆○☆○☆○☆○☆○•°

Oh shit this ain't even all of it wtf 😭😭

ANYWAYS

I wanted to show you guys this one first cause this one had a lot of scrap book sessions and me practicing with water colors! Btw I haven't used it in a while but I probably should pic it up again.

Also the Ceilo water colors was one I messed up on and I was too sad on uploading it but hey guess it's here now.

Also I was going to do Hedous in Water Colors but I didn't know his color pallet. I was going to show it here but it got cut off 🫡🫡🫡

And ong you guys see my characters going through...an Era 😭😭😭

Thank God I landed on smth consistent.

THE WALTER WHITE ONE AND HARRY POTTER ONE WAS A IMAGE I SAW ON PINTEREST AND IT WAS SO FUNNY I WAS INSPIRED TO EXPAND UPON IT

AND THE BOB THE BUILDER ONE WAS A JOKE. AGAIN I SAW SMTH LIKE IT ON PINTEREST AND HAD TO DRAW IT YKYK 😭😭😭🥰🥰🥰👅👅👅

Anyways

@signed-sapphire @sewerpalette @spectator-zee @pennysucks @oh-shtars @rascalentertainments @tumblingdownthefoxden @uva124 @chillwildwave

[vintagegeekculture]

How 60s Zines and Fandom Led to a Novel Series

One of the biggest parts of organized fandom in the 1940s-1970s were fanzines centered on adventure and scifi writer Edgar Rice Burroughs. Xeroxed and passed around in manilla envelopes in the mail, the organized fandom included fan art, articles, fan fiction, and essays passed from person to person. The big fanzines were the Gridley Wave, ERB Dom, the Oparian, and Burroughsania (fantasy writer A. Merritt and the Weird Tales writers had fanzines even at this late date as well, like Amra).

I heard a great description of Edgar Rice Burroughs fans and the fandom around him: they’re like the rest of us, except even more so. This could apply to the extremely right-brained, detective novel approach they took to the source material. All fandoms have people in them that do this, of course, I would never say otherwise...but I’m telling you, nobody did it quite like they did. As an example, ERB fandom in the 50s very precisely calculated where Tarzan grew up, based on the flimsy clues of the text, that his family’s steamer was out several weeks from Libreville. Based on calculating the average 1889 steamer’s range in two weeks, along with overlaying existing maps of the Central African Republic (today’s Gabon), they were able to figure out where he grew up very precisely. This was typical of the kinds of things they did. It reminds me less of the usual activities of fandom, and more like Heinrich Schliemann using a copy of the Iliad to discover the supposed site of the city of Troy. 

It’s incredible how ahead of its time that all was, because the culture has only now caught up to what they were doing in the fifties in ERB fanzines. Today, the appeal of a lot of conspiracy theories floating around is that they are participatory, almost like some kind of ARG, like Ong’s Hat and the John Titorverse. Which pop music videos have clues put in them by the Illuminati? Can you guess which of the Hollywood Sickos was secretly replaced by a clone after being executed in a secret trial? It’s fun because you can play along at home! A lot of true crime podcasts and the communities around them also have this “figure out the mystery yourself” appeal, which is why the families of unsolved murder victims absolutely dread being covered by a popular mystery podcast. The future is in the back and forth model carried out by Edgar Rice Burroughs fans in the 50s. 

It’s no surprise Edgar Rice Burroughs has fans like this. He had an absolute domination over the pop culture of the early to mid 20th Century. He, not Fitzgerald, not Hemingway, was the best selling novelist of the 1920s. ERB was, in particular, a favorite of two audiences that no longer are reliable customers of the book and publishing world: working class men and young boys. This makes sense, since his works were adventure Walter Mitty daydreams, the male equivalent of romance novels. The fact that young boys are no longer reading is, incidentally, one of the most disastrous and under-researched social phenomena of the present time. I am who I am today because I dreamed and imagined.

The biggest of the Fanzine writers had to be Philip Jose Farmer, who later became a professional writer, a name you’ve probably heard if you’ve been following this blog. Farmer, when he was a full on writer, wrote biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage that treated them as living people. For example, Farmer’s Tarzan biography was so intensively researched that he calculated that one incident in Jungle Tales of Tarzan could not have happened, as there were no lunar eclipses visible over the Central African Republic between 1908-1909. 

What I think is forgotten, however, is that Farmer’s incredible borderline fanwork was merely standing on the shoulders of giants when it came to the right-brained ERB fandom of the 1940s-1970s in Burroughs Bulletin and Gridley Wave. Many of the ideas in Farmer’s biography of Tarzan were long-standing theories in the fandom, so often repeated they gain a strange secondary canonicity, for example, the theory that Tarzan had two different sons, and the John Clayton Jr. captured as a baby in Beasts of Tarzan was different from the one who became Korak the Killer in Son of Tarzan. None of this was new to Farmer, he was a latecomer. 

In particular, Farmer wrote an entire novel series was written based on an essay written in 1966 in the fanzines. This essay was “Heritage of the Flaming God: An Essay on the History of Opar and Its Relationship to Other Ancient Cultures” by Frank J. Brueckel and Michael Winger, and used to be referred to as “fanwank” but today would be called “Meta.” 

The essay was about one of the most awe inspiring locations in the Tarzan series, one no film version as yet has done justice to: the Lost City of Opar. No film version has yet got across the grandiosity of this incredible ruin in the heart of the African jungle, a colony of Ancient Atlantis abandoned in Central Africa, a city of colossal masonry that almost seemed made by gods. It was a city of peacocks, and apes, gold and diamonds....but also the degenerated inhabitants, the women of which were beautiful, the men were feral, bestial Neanderthals. In an ancient ruin made by their ancestors, the Oparians run like children playing murderous games in a haunted house.

The queen of the city was La, a high priestess of the flaming god, a beautiful, seductive, uncanny sorceress who might be the only true rival to Jane in Tarzan’s affections (and who some fans prefer), who’s icy queenly exterior hid vulnerability and isolation. She was sympathetic and lonely one moment, cold, pitiless, and murderous the next. She was far more than just the evil seductress, but possibly the most complex character of the series, and she got a huge fan response. After all, It isn’t just women who like sexy sympathetic villains, you know. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs always preferred Tarzan to get with La of Opar (a sentiment I’ve found to be almost universal among ERB dom), and even had the Germans kill Jane off in Tarzan the Terrible to make it possible. Reader outcry was so harsh at Jane’s death, however, he had to bring her back the very next novel. Tarzan found out her “death” at the hands of the German Army was faked and she was merely a prisoner of the Kaiser’s high command in East Africa. It is easy to see why La would have this towering, monumental stature in the Tarzan novels that she returned three times and almost literally replaced Jane as Tarzan’s wife. In an adventure series that flirted at the borderline edge of fantasy, La was the most “out there” element, a sorceress who was implied to be immortal and ageless, with the blood of Ancient Atlantis in her veins, and to disobey her was to die. 

Brueckel and Winger’s 1966 essay on Opar’s origins argued that the mother culture of Opar, Atlantis, was actually an island inside an interior continental African sea, an extension of Lake Tchad, and they used ancient flood data to support their idea about the continental interior. They further argued that Opar’s genders have such different appearances because of the introduction of Neanderthal DNA on the Y chromesome alone. Further, in their lengthy fan speculations, they connected the ancient interior African Atlantean civilization to the other great lost cities encountered by Tarzan, including Athne and Cathne, Tuen-Baka, Kuvuru, and Xuja, all of which had similar traits: cyclopean abandoned cities of great antiquity, worship of a flaming god, human sacrifice, absence of the bow and arrow, and matriarchal rule. Atlantis was the source of the Flaming God religion. They further argued, fannishly interconnecting everything, that the Kuvuru immortality elixir was in the possession of that mother culture, and was the explanation for the beautiful La’s immortality. They  also argued that the reason all these cultures did not have the bow and arrow was a religious taboo. 

All of this was very impressive stuff, especially for 1966, even for fanwank, though I confess a lot of the geological proofs went over my head.

This essay about the origins of Opar and the Flaming God was so well remembered that fan turned real deal writer, Philip Jose Farmer, wrote a series based on their speculations. Set in the ancient prehistory of Africa, he wrote of Opar at its height, when it was a minor mining colony of a forgotten African civilization on an internal sea in 10,000 BC, just like in Bruekel and Winger’s description. His novel series was Hadon of Ancient Opar, published in 1975, and PJF acknowledged Brueckel and Winger’s fan essay as the primary source of inspiration, which he turned into a book series. 

If you need convincing this meta was an inspiration for PJF’s book series, take a look at his map used in the series for their ancient civilization, which was a matriarchy with a sun worship religion with still surviving Neanderthals as a lower class. He even had a woman named La there, who may have been the ancestor of the La of Opar...or perhaps, the actual immortal La herself (the book leaves this open to interpretation). Always keen to have series cross over, PJF also mentioned the lost African cities of H. Rider Haggard and connected them with Burrough’s, which is a surprisingly good fit, since Haggard’s lost races also were matriarchies with a religion of sun worship. 

When I heard the connection between this fan essay and PJF’s book series, I had to track down a copy of Brueckel and Harwood’s essay for myself. I was able to find one for sale by the Historical Society of Oak Park and River Forest on the outskirts of Chicago, Illinois. They have a lot of pride in Edgar Rice Burroughs, who was born there, and they have many rare and old things for sale related to ancient fandom of the 60s. To my surprise, when my order arrived, I got a copy of the Historical Society of Oak Park, IL newsletter, and a personal addressed letter from the historical society librarian. I was so surprised by this that I actually called the Oak Park Society up to thank them, and had a pleasant chat with the kindly librarian about their collections of ERB memorabilia and fandom. All in all, a pleasant ending of an investigation into one of the oldest fandoms, one that, like Opar and the beautiful, immortal La herself, still lives in a hidden corner of the world. 

[gothhabiba]

Literacy is a contested term that both shapes and is shaped by our understandings of divisions among individuals, social groups and institutions. Many earlier approaches to literacy treated it as a neutral technology or skill: the simple ability to read and write. Indeed, there have been trends in both academia and development discourse to represent literacy as a problem of technology in which literacy learning is viewed as a straightforward and unproblematic process of an individual’s acquiring and applying decoding skills to matching a string of sounds to their graphic symbols and vice versa (Schieffelin and Charlier Doucet 1998; Wagner 1993). The technical skills needed to read and write are imagined as neutral and universally applicable regardless of the particularities of the cultural or social environment in which they are being deployed. This trend, commonly referred to as the “autonomous model” of literacy acquisition, has been repeatedly shown to inform literacy projects developed by international organizations (Street 1984; Street 1995).

Literacy has been widely assumed to cause cognitive differences between individuals and has been argued to be the basis of a “great divide” between cultures — so called “oral cultures” and “literate cultures” — and as such has frequently been used to mark the difference between the "civilized" and "uncivilized." [...] [Walter] Ong, in his article “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” describes literacy as an “imperious” force that establishes itself as the cognitive foundation of human expression and thought (Ong 1986). He argues that “functional literate human beings… are beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing” (24). The view of literacy held by international organizations and development projects has emerged from these earlier positions. They tend to discuss literacy as a material that can be measured, bought or sold as part of a market economy and posit that a certain level of literacy is necessary in order for a nation’s economy to develop and compete in the global market.

Over the past two decades, numerous scholars have argued for a historical approach to understanding literacy that pays explicit attention to how literacy practices shape and are shaped by discourses of power, identity and subject formation. New Literacy Studies theorists, and most particularly Brian Street, are the most commonly cited critics of autonomous models of literacy. Street claims that all models about literacy, particularly those that posit literacy as a universal, individual skill, are embedded in particular power relations. In the context of the developing world moreover, these are power relations that often favor Western models of orality, literacy, rationality, and logical thought. Indeed, even the claim that literacy is a neutral technology reveals particular ideologies about language and its relationship to power (Blommaert 2005; Blommaert, et al. 2006; Collins and Blot 2003; Street 1995).

— Jennifer Lee Hall, Debating Darija: Language Ideology and the Written Representation of Moroccan Arabic in Morocco (PhD dissertation), 2015, pp. 36-8.

Blommaert, Jan 2005 Creativity within Constraints: Hetero-Graphy. In Discourse. Pp. 107-123 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, Jan, Lies Creve, and Evita Willaert 2006 On Being Declared Illiterate: Language-Ideological Disqualification in Dutch Classes for Immigrants in Belgium. Language & Communication 26(1):34-54.

Collins, James, and Richard K Blot 2003 Literacy and Literacies: Texts Power and Identity. Volume 22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ong, Walter J. 1986 Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought. In The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. G. Baumann, ed. Pp. 23-50. New York: Clerendon Press.

Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Rachelle Charlier Doucet 1998 The "Real" Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice. In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard, and P.V. Kroskrity, eds. Pp. 285-316. New York: Oxford University Press.

Street, Brian V. 1995 Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography, and Education. London; New York: Longman.

Wagner, Daniel A. 1993 Literacy, Culture, and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco. Cambridge [England]; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

[yum-zlurplie]

yall be walter white w/ how much yall are cookin' ong frfr 🔥🔥🗣🗣

[whencyclopedia]

Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community

European rhetoric and language usage have experienced many changes and modifications ever since ancient Greece and Roman orator Cicero's famous diction. Language, in history, has been used not just for functional communication but also as an icon to establish social identities or for regimes to instate their power. In Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community, Daniel Ellis studies how members of the gentry in Norfolk, England, during the Elizabethan era used rhetorics and writing techniques in their everyday letter-writing to establish a communal gentry identity. This identity gave them a common tone in conversations or negotiations with each other over topics of land, law, and family. Ellis brings in both a variety of primary sources and the theories by modern linguists and historians, such as Walter Ong and Benedict Anderson. In the end, Ellis shows that the gentry class was tightly bonded by their shared language norms through sharing a common focus on literacy, property, and land, and this ideological bond gave them a sense of unity amid the English Civil War and other chaotic events in the 17th and 18th centuries. Rhetoric was, Ellis argues, not just flowery writing but something that could result in real-life actions taken by a community as a whole.

Rhetoric was, Ellis argues, not just flowery writing but something that could result in real-life actions taken by a community as a whole.

Chapter One sets the book's theoretical foundation by showing that, in the 16th century, English rhetoric became a writing style rather than something with functional purposes. For instance, in a letter by Anne Boleyn (c. 1501-1536), who grew up in a gentry family in Norfolk and became Henry VIII of England's second wife, the polite opening took up almost three times as much space as the letter's actual message. Chapter Two looks at two Norfolk writers and their language usages in showing a tone of pride in their social status. These two chapters, One and Two, could act as great stand-alone essays to read in a college classroom.

Continue reading...

[swartzmark]

“How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts." --Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

[art-of-manliness]

Odds & Ends: May 26, 2023

“The Purple Testament” episode of The Twilight Zone. Wednesday’s episode of the podcast about the 11th Airborne Division during WWII led me into reading this interesting article about the combat experience of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, which then led me to watching an episode of the classic television show I hadn’t watched before. Serling was a member of the 11th Airborne Division’s 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which lost a third of its ranks during its fighting in the Pacific. Serling, who earned the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, was haunted by his harrowing experiences after the war, and these ghosts served as indirect and direct inspiration for episodes of The Twilight Zone. As an example of the latter, the article referenced “The Purple Testament” (Season 1, Episode 19), which depicts an officer fighting in the Philippines who has gained the ability to predict soldiers’ deaths by looking into their faces. It’s a pretty good episode — especially once you know about Serling’s personal connection to the story’s backdrop. Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness by Walter J. Ong. Walter J. Ong was a Jesuit priest who spent his career as an academic studying and writing about how humanity’s transition from an oral to written culture changed human consciousness. In Fighting for Life, he looks at how competition — particularly male competition — shaped that process. He focuses on how the male drive for competition influenced philosophers and academics from ancient Greece through the Enlightenment to create a learning environment that was agonistic. Ong argues that after the Romantic Era, education became more feminized, and an emphasis on cooperation rather than competition began to pervade classrooms. “Experiences Won’t Make You Happier Than Possessions.” You’ve probably heard that research has found that spending your money on experiences rather than things will lead to greater happiness. We like this kind of scientific finding; it seems “right.” But as the author of this piece convincingly explains, that finding is based on the particular (and potentially misleading) way studies on the subject have been framed, and when you look at the question from other angles, it’s not so clear that experiences are superior to possessions in the happiness-generating department. Some people may get more enjoyment from the former than the latter, and vice versa. So the conclusion is to not make your spending decisions based on pop psychology, but what you personally enjoy.  Nutricost Creatine Monohydrate Powder. We’ve written about the benefits of creatine. Besides aiding in muscle and strength building, it can also boost cognition. It’s one of the most research-vetted supplements out there and has been shown to be effective and safe. It’s also pretty dang cheap. You don’t need any of those proprietary blend creatine powders; plain old, straight-up creatine monohydrate is perfectly effective. I’ve been using this creatine monohydrate powder from Nutricost for awhile now. It’s a good price and gets the job done. Quote of the Week The dead are living all around us, watching with eager anticipation how we will handle the opportunities they left in our hands when they died. —Theodore C. Speers The post Odds & Ends: May 26, 2023 appeared first on The Art of Manliness. http://dlvr.it/SpghpN

[waterarks]

accumulated book list; (unowned) 𓇢𓆸

- [ ] the body where I was born by Guadalupe Nettel

- [ ] a personal matter by Kenzaburo Oe

- [ ] shame in the blood by Tetsuo Miura

- [ ] nw by Zadie Smith

- [ ] tender by Ariana Harwicz

- [ ] shantarm by Gregory David Roberts

- [ ] second place by Rachel Cus

- [ ] bluets by Maggie Nelson

- [ ] devotions by Mary Oliver

- [ ] black swans by Eve Babitz

- [ ] perfume by Patrick Suskind

- [ ] a certain hunger by Chelsea G. Summers

- [ l ] time is a mother by Ocean Vuong

- [ ] assembly by Natasha Brown

- [ ] butter by Asako Yuzuki

- [ ] carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

- [ ] boulder by Eva Baltasar

- [ ] permafrost by Eva Baltasar

- [ ] discipline and punishment by Michel Foucault

- [ ] black reconstruction by W.E.B Dubiou

- [ ] a poets notebook by Paul Valery

- [ ] die my love by Ariana Harwicz

- [ ] swimming in the dark by Tomasz Jedrowski

- [ ] timecode of a face by Ruth Ozeki

- [ ] into the wild by Jon Krakauer

- [ ] the wind up bird chronicle by Murakami

- [ ] theory of the lyric by Jonathan Culler

- [ ] orality and literacy by Walter J. Ong

- [ ] the soundscape by Murray Schafer

- [ ] listening and voice by Don Idhe

- [ ] the poetics of french verse by Clive Scott

- [ ] the poetics of space by Gaston Bacherlard

- [ ] housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson

- [ ] the white book by Han Kang

- [ ] americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

- [ ] poor deer by Claire Oshetsky

- [ ] pushout by Monique W. Morris

- [ ] agua viva by Clarice Lispector

- [ ] foggy mountain breakdown by Sharyn Mccrumb

- [ list two ] ☼

bought = b | loaned = l , read = x | reading = …