6 thoughts on “Discussion Suggestions Please

  1. In a digital age, when social media and electronic communications trump face-to-face interactions, the presence of the glowing screen looms large in our lives. Here we are right now, in our separate worlds, interacting with physical others in virtual isolation. The forms and strictures and restrictions, not to forget the freedoms and possibilities of this digital existence, heavily influence how we read and what we read. This, of course, presumes its influence on how we write and what we write. Good or bad, it is. Amen. I can glean data points about the medium from the medium, but what about the analogue reality that’s represented there? For instance, is an ebook the same book as (the) one printed on paper? Is the linguistic representation of the world that I receive through emitted light identical to the one I get from light reflected?

    When was the last time you made a meaningful mark on a stone surface in a dark cave?

  2. Any mark in a dark cave can only be meaningful to the maker. To the audience it is steadily meaning less and less. In the dark anything is as good as nothing. Nothing said, nothing gained. Thus, the satisfaction of the maker to the maker, nothing more.
    Enough. What about a round about the sad and disheveled state of song lyrics as we hear them today. Is it the content that lacks or is it the lackluster delivery. Such monotony we face. Now there is a mark in the dark. We are witness to the latest in the dark age of music. Lacking consonance and assonance but loads of melodiousonance.
    Popular music over the air today is a bore. Is there just one song promoter with an ear on the outside of an open mind?
    I’ll be in bed by 9.

  3. Lascaux. And every non-transitory communication that follows.

    Including the last five minutes of civilization when mass distribution and consumption of a communication form lead you to opine that what you perceive as popular you also find to be boring.

    Works for me.

  4. To quote Chrissie Hynde, “A half-wit in a leotard stands on my stage”. I was watching a Jimi Hendrix documentary and the director is interviewing Paul McCartney and asking him about the first time he saw Hendrix. To paraphrase Paul, “he said it was amazing. This guy from the States, unknown to the world was doing things with his guitar they had never heard or thought of before. All anyone in the club could do was sit and watch and listen.”
    But that was a time of impressions and cave paintings before we forgot how to see past demographic statistics and money.

  5. Thank you for your suggestions. I’ll get these posted soon. I’m sorry it took so long. Your fearless editor was sick for a week. I’m trying to get back to it now. Soon. Thank you!

  6. They have their place in history, don’t they all? The ancient art in the caves of Lascaux, the immortals of our youth who are still fascinating us in these later years, and stand as vivid memorials across the timetable of history.
    Will she, though, have a place at her table for our present day? What can we present as the focus of our energies other than the popular view that all idols are created equal?
    I hail the creative spirit, the originals, but those with a purpose
    other than economic self-service. We would all welcome back the rebel even though he would inevitably at some point be labelled a plagiarist, he would be our own.
    It’s hard to find the words
    That no one’s said before,
    It’s easier to be a repeater
    And risk being a bore.
    I have so many favorites
    To treasure, I suppose,
    I love William Sonnets shakespeare an Edgar Allen’s prose…

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