#indoctrinating and further enabling myself in the process

[ducktracy]

INSANE that this is the first porky movie since the groovy goolies one. which i assume is porky focused because he’s in the title. Sure bugs replaced him as The mascot but still yknow???? Yknow??????

Anyways im SO excited for this movie i PRAY it comes out

I KNOWWWWWWWWWW HE DESERVES IT!! GOD all of what i’m about to say is nothing you lovely people haven’t heard before because i have terminal I Love To Repeat Myself disease, but it is legitimately soooooooooo so so heartbreaking how slept on and under discussed of a character he is. have said it a million times but despite Daffy barely squeaking by as my #1 favorite i talk about Porky SO MUCH because the gospel of the pig needs to get out there! i truly think he’s one of the funniest and most sincere and most versatile characters the studio has to offer and very enigmatic and it’s really really sad that he barely gets any recognition outside of “the guy who stutters” or “the that’s all folks guy” or “the boring pig” (NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

the Duck Dodgers TV series was originally intended to be a movie if i recall but they scrapped that and turned it into an actual series (and for the better i’d say), likewise deleted footage of Back in Action showed him having slightly more significance (but not by much.) i sincerely hope that with this upcoming movie—and LTC as a whole—that it inspires people to look into both his cartoons and the Porky and Daffy dynamic more as a whole because i think it too is a dynamic that is incredibly slept on

part of why i’m so crazy about Porky and/or Porky/Daffy cartoons is the NOVELTY of it all—again, have said this all before but growing up in an era dominated by the Jones and Freleng interpretations of the characters i never knew that LT shorts used to be in black and white or that Porky used to be so popular or that Porky and Daffy were THE duo that represented the studio for a good number of years. and i’m definitely a person who flocks to novelty more than something that’s more polished, so discovering this whole branch of cartoons that have Porky and Daffy killing each other or being besties or whatever else have you just felt like an entire treasure trove! because all i had known were typical pair ups like Bugs and Daffy or Bugs and Elmer or Bugs and Yosemite Sam and all that. and it helps that the Porky and Daffy shorts are so unique through their versatility too, there’s an overlying theme with them all but they are both characters who aren’t nearly as bound to formula as the others and there’s more room for experimentation which is something that really interests me more personally as well.

BUT BACK TO PORKY. YES. he is done so dirty and not given the time of day and it’s just absolutely absurd!!! i truly think he’s one of the funniest characters the studio has to offer and he has way more personality outside of just stuttering or looking cute or reacting to characters funnier than him (to paraphrase Tiny Toons), and i really hope that this movie allows people to see him in a new light and get more curious about him. likewise with the Porky and Daffy dynamic, with it being a feature i’m hoping that it’ll be able to explore and hit some nuances that maybe the regular series doesn’t hit all the time (as i do think there is a more strong sense of formula to a bit of an inhibition in the LTC Porky and Daffys rather than what their classic counterparts offered) or don’t have the time/opportunity TO hit

and even if none of this Worldwide Porky Enlightenment that i’m fantasizing about happens i’ll still be happy. LTC’s Porky and Daffy dynamic isn’t perfect by any means and has a lot of vices it can get itself into, but regardless i am so fortunate and excited for this movie and seriously hope it sees the light of day; to appease crazed pig and duck fanatics such as myself, but to also showcase everyone’s hard work and talent. there’s a lot of incredible talent on this film and i truly hope they get the credit and satisfaction and fulfillment that they deserve to the fullest extent

#and i think i’ve said this before too but i’ll be very honest in that even when i first started doing my reviews in Dec 2019 one of my goals #was to help get more people on board with realizing Porky is a funny/great character. NOT MY ONLY GOAL but A goal and i think i’ve ended up #indoctrinating and further enabling myself in the process #i am so horribly picky with LT characterizations and everyone knows this. it’s another reason why i don’t talk about Daffy as much #comparatively because my ideal of him is so horribly incredibly picky that like. i don’t even know how to explain it. i’m protective over #things i like BUT HVE CALMED DOWN A LOT it used to be bad but i’m much more #open than i used to be #but anyway. Porky is a very rare exception in that i am just literally happy to see him whenever and wherever i’m very picky with what i #prefer but i am always very happy to see him #anonymous #asks #*cartoon WHEW sound effect* too much typing

[language576-blog]

Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

New Post has been published on https://languageguideto.com/trending/toward-changing-the-language-of-creative-writing-classrooms/

Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

I open the creative writing courses I teach with this vow: “I’ve seen far too many workshops become an indoctrination into an instructor’s taste—a semester-long exhortation to love what the instructor loves and to hate what he does too—and I am going to do my best to avoid that.” The statement is meant to protect students from the shame I felt when, in the first semester of an MFA program in fiction, I listened as the director mocked a writer whose books my parents, sister, and I all loved.

I absorbed the verdict as truth even though the disdain felt like snobbery: I would never tell someone they were wrong to love what they loved. It wasn’t that I wanted to please my professor—I’d already voiced my dissatisfactions with his course. What I wanted was to master the social mores of a culture that, in some unconscious and unexamined sense, I’d entered the MFA program to join: the culture of the tastemaking class.

It wasn’t despite but because of the shame I experienced that the first creative writing courses I taught reproduced the canon of that program almost exactly. I wanted to shield my students from the embarrassing ignorance I’d discovered in myself; I thought they should know what “good taste” entailed. A pedagogy course had introduced me to the problem of education as acculturation—a means of assimilating students into the dominant culture of a powerful class—but I discussed acculturation only with students in my composition courses, not in my creative writing workshops. I wasn’t yet paying attention to the connection between the problematic constructs of “bad grammar” and “bad taste.” I was still a student of “good taste” myself.

We should grab readers by the collar and never let go, I learned. Write stories so transporting our prose becomes invisible. Use as few words as possible to move the story forward as fast as we can. Never be sentimental, and avoid “purple prose.” Great emotion manifests only indirectly, we were told. When a frustrated classmate in my MFA program declared himself a maximalist, I chose to pity him. Poor guy: everybody knew restraint was superior, but he’d missed the boat.

Conventions of artistic apprenticeship demand that students be schooled to recognize, imitate, and aspire toward inherited ideals of greatness. So maybe it’s not so shocking that a writer might publish two acclaimed books before looking down at her own work and realizing that all along, she’d been pandering to old white men. This is what Claire Vaye Watkins unpacks in “On Pandering”: the troubling discovery that her “hard, unflinching, unsentimental prose,” and the details she wrote—like a “nubile young girl left for dead in the desert”—reflected her teachers’ ideals, not her own. As Tajja Isen describes in “Tiny White People Took Over My Brain,” such men had become the “imagined judge and jury”—if not also Watkins’s actual judge and jury, writing her first glowing reviews. This is one way conventional workshops ensure structures of power are reproduced.

Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.

As a student in 2008, I participated in the workshop of a story about a Black man’s murder by white plainclothes police. The writer was the only Black person in what poets Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have called the creative writing industry’s “mainly white room.” Per convention, he was silent as we debated whether the story was “too familiar” or “unbelievable,” the obviousness of the racism it portrayed resulting in a kind of cliché. When we were finished, the writer blurted, “But it actually happened!” He’d been rewriting the 2006 murder of Sean Bell.

It’s difficult to capture in fiction the impact of a real event. But when I remember that workshop, I can’t help but feel that I joined in an effort, by a group of white readers, to muffle and ignore a story of anti-Black violence. Back then, I still believed race-blindness might be a virtue, and what my criticism boiled down to was this: The racism in that story was too overt. I didn’t want to believe it—that’s what “unbelievable” meant.

Aesthetic values don’t only include “hard” syntax and imagery of “nubile girls,” but also the varied shapes of narratives that readers welcome and pursue—from the fairy tale’s arc toward happy ending, to stories like my classmate’s that progress toward an uncomfortable truth. The one story that never gets called “too familiar” may be that of white upper-class domestic ennui. And if academia’s entrenchment of certain literary-aesthetic values needs further proof, consider the case of students like a quiet junior I met while teaching at the University of Iowa. He had come to Iowa especially to study writing, but had yet to meet a professor who seemed to respect the science fiction and fantasy he loved. He’d been silent in writing courses, he confessed, ever since a first-year instructor had told him she was tired of hearing his voice. University workshops, especially prestigious ones, are notoriously unkind to writers of so-called genre, like him—but you have to be on the inside, or close to it, to know this before entering the system yourself.

A few years after completing my MFA in fiction, I enrolled in an MFA program in nonfiction. There I learned new codes for “good” work. Previously I’d internalized the ideal of a reading experience so effortless you forgot you were reading, but in the nonfiction MFA I met readers for whom the effort of an effortful read was a pleasure in itself. In the fiction MFA, Do Not Bore Me had been law, but my new professors praised meandering prose. Before, my professors talked book deals in terms of advances; now, my program director exhorted us never to sacrifice a book’s integrity by selling it for more than $10K. These differences were a product of genre, yes, but they were also the result of different communities and their values. In the fiction MFA, we read through a consumer’s lens and aspired toward commercial success. In the nonfiction MFA, earning money from writing, or aiming to please an impatient readership, was viewed with ambivalence.

I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise.

A friend introduced me to during a conversation about how difficult it was not to internalize the aesthetic values of instructors with the power to grant degrees, fellowships, recommendations, and blurbs. Lerman, a dancer, offers a value-neutral approach to “getting useful feedback on anything you make, from dance to dessert.” The method, she says, “enables a group of people to uncover their various aesthetic and performance values,” making them “aware of the numerous ways people see art, and the array of value systems underlying their differing visions.”

Lerman’s four-step, capital-P “Process” begins with what she calls “statements of meaning.” These are responses to the question “What was stimulating, surprising, evocative, memorable, touching, meaningful for you” about the work? This is followed by questions from the artist to responders; neutral questions from responders to artist (not “Why’s the cake so dry?” but “What kind of texture were you going for?”); and opinions the artists may choose to hear or not. (“I have an opinion about the texture. Do you want to hear it?”)

I wanted to follow Lerman’s example of making individual students’ values more transparent. But I knew that many undergraduates are determined to experience the creative writing workshop they’ve imagined: a silent writer taking in the readers’ chorus. I also wanted a paradigm that would apply equally to discussions of published and in-progress work. The solution I came up with is an adaptation of a stubbornly entrenched model, not an overhaul. It’s a strategy for addressing craft, giving feedback, and conducting workshops, when I’m not sure that addressing craft and conducting workshops should be all, or even most, of what a writing course does. I call the practice “value-transparent,” since neutrality is a problematic goal, and because I hope the exercise might help students recognize and trust their own values.

I’m not convinced that my way of teaching is ideal. But I am convinced that we can teach creative writing without the language of failure or success, criticism or praise, and that doing so will help us avoid reproducing systemic oppressions, damaging students psychologically, and stunting creative work.

The experiment begins with two questions: What happens if we take value language out of the classroom, avoiding words like good, working, strengths, better, improve? Can we abolish our faith in writing that is “good” or “bad”? The result, I hope, is that our conversations about craft can be reinvented and reinvigorated as conversations that remind us what art is for.

*

“Write the story (or essay, or poem) you want to read in the world.” My courses begin with this invitation for students to create their own goals: for the student who loves being entertained to figure out how to entertain; for the student who loves difficult prose to examine how such work engages him. As they share examples of writing they love, students begin to articulate their aesthetic values, which they’ll return to in discussions of published and in-progress texts, and later use as touchstones when they revise their work.

Our workshops begin as our conversations about published work do, with Lerman’s statements of meaning. “Meaning,” in this case, doesn’t refer to interpretation: The approach treats interpretation as part, but not all, of the experience a piece of writing exerts. Students are pleased to learn that the work they’ve produced resonates in some way, and reorienting the conversation around meaning, rather than praise or criticism, also reorients students around socially motivated reasons to write and share work—to create an experience for someone else.

Conversations conducted in the language of positives and negatives make the writer’s feelings the conversational subtext; the writer becomes the conversation’s implicit subject. Worse, such conversations habituate students to writing for extrinsic rather than intrinsic reward: for pats on the back. And copious pedagogical research demonstrates that a focus on extrinsic reward reduces risk-taking and hamstrings the quality of creative work. “When people do things in order to earn rewards, they become less creative; and when they do things that they think will be evaluated in some way, they become less creative; and when they do things to please someone else, they become less creative,” write two scholars about this widely observed effect.

This is why workshops oriented around praise and criticism don’t only attract narcissists—a word I use in the sense of one who is unsure of his own worth, and so seeks external esteem—but also create narcissists. They unsettle a writer’s inherent sense of worth, and divert attention away from intrinsic reasons for making art. Even praise, like any other drug, will eventually poison art. Like criticism, it makes us forget what art is for.

When I remember that workshop, I can’t help but feel that I joined in an effort, by a group of white readers, to muffle and ignore a story of anti-Black violence.

Our conversations about craft might remind us what art is for by shifting away from what “works” toward what actually happens when we read. Does your heart race? Do you cry? Think? Forget that you’re reading? Pick up the dictionary to look up a word? More important: Which elements of the text, and of the world the text inhabits, determine your response? When a student is asked to move away from value-laden language in conversations about creative work, she is being asked to resist a set of nebulous, arbitrary, class- and culturally-coded aesthetic values, to study the reading process, and to define her values for herself.

“Should we have no standards?” is one response I’ve heard when I explain that I never say, “Great job,” never put checkmarks in the margins of student work. “No,” I reply, “we should not.” As teachers, we might have standards for how students approach their work, for how they read, observe the reading process, define their aesthetic values, and revise in pursuit of those goals—and we might use these standards to evaluate student performance, when we must. But “standards” inevitably narrow the scope of what writers envision as consequential elements of their work.

“But I want to know if people liked what I wrote,” students might plead. I’ll ask what they mean by “like.” “If they wanted to keep reading,” one says. “If they feel moved,” says another. These are qualities we can discuss without risking that the writer’s objectives are obscured. “You don’t believe that Faulkner is good and Danielle Steele bad?” is another question I’ve heard. I point out that different people—or the same person, on different days—might choose to read one author instead of the next. Their bodies of literature fulfill different needs.

After statements of meaning, students and I spend most of our time pointing to details of a text—authorial choices, conscious or not—and examining their effects. This differs from convention only in that avoiding the language of explicit value pushes us to examine the reading experience with a mindful attention that results in the discovery of our own values. It’s not easy to avoid saying, “This is great” or “This works.” We slip up all the time. The learning happens when students are asked, and I ask myself, “What do you mean?”

*

Teaching this way has helped me identify my own (ever-shifting) aesthetic values. But the more interesting discovery has been how obviously tied these are to my political and social values. When I long to convince students to “unpack” or “complicate” the tidy happy endings of their personal narratives, for instance, it’s because I want them to reject dominant cultural narratives that obscure what I see as important truths. But to what degree should I not only teach in a way that reflects my values—as this approach reflects a desire to foster inclusivity, mutual trust, and students’ self-worth—but in a way that encourages students to adopt my values? The solution I’ve found is not to hide these values, but to frame them as such—personally and politically informed—and to be clear that I won’t be using my position as instructor to privilege my views, that students will have the space to identify, explain, and find authority in their own values.

That a class might arrive at a shared value system isn’t surprising: Aesthetics—like grammar, fashion, and politics—serve as markers of belonging.

Even in a course where aesthetic values are relentlessly questioned, I’ve observed that a collective value system nevertheless tends to emerge. In one class, students spoke of their “engagement” with each other’s texts in laudatory tones; to keep the conversation in line with my goals, I needed to ask what “engaging” meant, and how a text worked toward that end. Was “engagement” always desirable? Did “engagement” ever happen at the expense of something else? Maybe “engagement” meant distraction, escapism, a turn away from the contemplative and toward commercialism’s empty thrill, we thought—but then again, maybe “engagement” could also refer to the surprises of poetry and the challenges of conceptually thorny prose.

That a class might arrive at a shared value system isn’t surprising: Aesthetics—like grammar, fashion, and politics—serve as markers of belonging. And the values we identify as our own aren’t fixed. I doubt I’d love the author my professor once derided if I read his books today, and that’s not only because my aesthetics have changed, but also because I have changed, and my ethics have changed—partly as a result of the conversations I joined when I started my MFAs. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that author’s work doesn’t hold value; its value to certain readers, including readers I love, is plain. Instead, this is evidence of how unfixed our aesthetic values are, dependent far more on a reader and her context than on the text itself.

Which brings me back to the question of what art is for. I won’t attempt a universalizing response. But I suspect that there is an ethical dimension, conscious or not, to most artists’ work. If you ask a beginning writer why they write, there’s a good chance they’ll respond along these lines: to voice what is unheard, to comfort or move a stranger, as a form of protest, a crying-out against or in accord. Even art created solely in pursuit of pleasure arises from the imperative that pleasure, too, deserves space—like outrage or grief, pleasure is something artists can make.

The conventional workshop tends to distract students from these motives, graduating writers who wonder whether publishing a book will change their lives, instead of whether publishing a book might change the lives of others; writers who wonder whether their work is any good, instead of whether it does any good. I’ve heard debut writers say that they can’t wait for the first year of a book’s life to be over, that the barrage of award cycles and best-of lists, the sense of constant assessment, feels torturous. They struggle to follow the advice of writer and Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang, whose plea that writers protect their “inner lives” rather than fall prey to the career-driven concerns so “toxic to creativity” is difficult to follow not least because the institutional structures that ostensibly support emerging writers do so little to protect their inner lives.

Maybe, though, writing programs and workshops could train writers to focus their energy somewhere other than assessment, prizes, and reviews. Maybe, in refusing to take aesthetic values for granted, in uncovering and starting conversations about the ethics these aesthetics manifest, creative writing classrooms could become spaces for considering the role of writers and the work they create as actors in a public space, agents of the sort of social change that begins when a reader is changed.

The final question my students and I address in our conversations is “How else could this be?” This is an invitation to imagine a variety of paths toward the next version of the work, and the experiences these alternatives might produce. The question has its origins in the traditional workshop, but I encourage students to imagine alternatives outside of what conventions of “improvement” would suggest. Our job as reading writers is to remember that the story can always be told differently. I spell it out on the blackboard: our job is to practice imagining change.

A version of this essay originally appeared in the fall 2018 edition of Poets & Writers.

Source

Toward Changing the Language of Creative Writing Classrooms

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Humankind, being an inherently tool-making species, has always been in a relationship with technology. Our tools, weapons, machines, and appliances are crucial to forging the cultural criteria of human life. At present, amid the technology created phantom-scape of mass media’s lurid — yet somehow sterile — imagery, one can feel as if one’s mind is in danger of being churned to spittle. On a personal note, an informal consensus has formed among my friends who share a passion for reading: We read far fewer books since the time we became enmeshed with the internet. Worse, we find the feelings of isolation that we have attempted to mitigate by an immersion in online activity, at best, provides only a palliative effect. Yet, in the manner of addiction — or a hopeless love affair —  we are prone to trudge deeper into the psychical morass by further immersion into the very source that is exacerbating our feelings of unease and ennui. Yet we insist on remaining mentally epoxied to electronic appliances, as the oceans of our technology besieged planet die, as the atmosphere is choked with heat-holding greenhouse gas emissions, and, as a result, exquisite, living things disappear forever. Therefore, it is crucial to explore why we are so isolated from each other but so connected to our devices, and are married to the belief system that misinforms us, technology can and will lift us from our increasingly perilous predicament. When reality dictates, if the past remains prologue, a fetishising of technology will further enslave us in a de facto techno-dystopia. A reassessment, for numerous reasons, of the relationship between humankind and technology must come to pass. Moreover, the reevaluation must include machines, at present and in the future, we have created in our own image. For example, those such as IA technologies, that on an increasing basis, will cause a significant number of the workforce to be rendered idle. Of course, it is a given, bottom line obsessives that they are, capitalists crave to replace workers with an automated labor force. The parasitic breed has always viewed workers as flesh machines, of whom, they were inconvenienced by having to pay wages. Capitalism is, by its very nature, dehumanising. From the advent of the industrial/capitalist epoch, the system has inflicted mass alienation, societal atomisation, and anomie. Moreover, the vast wealth inequity inherent to the system allows the capitalist elite to own the political class — a mindless clutch of flunkies who might as well be robots programmed by the capitalist order to serve their agendas. The question is, what effect will the nature of being rendered superfluous to the prevailing order have on the powerless masses — who have, up until now, been kept in line by economic coercion, by meretricious, debt-incurring consumer bribes, and by mass media indoctrination and pop culture anaesthesia? Will consumers continue to insist that their mental chains are the very wings of freedom? Yet the Age Of Mass Mechanisation carries the potential to bestow an era of liberty, artistic exploration, scientific inquiry, intellectual fervour, the pursuit of soul-making, and inspired leisure. Or the polar shift in cultural raison d’etre might inflict a crisis of identity so harrowing that demagogues rise and despots promise to seed a new order but harvest the corpses of dissidents and outsiders. A couple of weeks back, during a visit to a neighbourhood playground with my four year old, I had a conversation with an executive on voluntary leave from her management position at BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke). She was grousing about a infestation of seaweed choking the beaches of the Florida Keys she had encountered on a recent excursion to the US. When I averred the phenomenon of the warming oceans of the planet, the progenitor of the exponential growth of the sea flora she had been troubled by, was caused, in large measure, by the very socio-economic-cultural dynamic that financed her trip to Florida in the first place…well, it put a crimp in the conversation. It can be unsettling to be confronted with one’s complicity in the ills of a system that, by its very nature, provides camouflage to its perpetrators — the big bosses, down to its functionaries, and foot soldiers. Soon, she, by a series of subtle moves, extricated herself from the conversation — and I cannot say I blame her. I myself experienced discomfort by the thought of the discomfort I inflicted on her. Therefore, as a general rule, under the tyranny of amiability, which is the rule of the day of the present order, one is tempted to avoid trespassing into the comfort zones that aid in enabling the status quo. Yet we are faced with the following imperative: The system and its machines must begin to serve humanity, as opposed to what has been the case since the advent of the industrial/technological age: the mass of humanity serving the machine. Therefore, there must arrive a paradigmatic shift in metaphors and the ethos of the era; e.g., a renunciation of the soul-decimating concept of human beings as flesh machines — who must, for the sake of monomaniacal profiteering, divorce themselves from human feeling as well as must forgo exploration, enthusiasm, and craft in the pursuit of expediency. We do have a choice in the matter, all indications to the contrary. Yet, in the prevailing confusion regarding what ethos should guide our relationship to technology, we are confronted with phenomenon such as the situation chronicled in a recent article in The Guardian. Headlined: “The Sex Robots Are Coming: seedy, sordid – but mainly just sad“. Regarding the supercilious nature of the headline, wouldn’t it be more propitious for all concerned to ask and explore why, under the present order, men are so alienated, socially awkward and lonely, as opposed to lapsing into all the predictable moral panic, wit-deficient snark, and supercilious value judgments these sorts of stories evoke? Isn’t being attracted to consumer goods what it is all about, identity-wise, under the present order? Don’t customers demand that the de facto slaves of the service industry evince the demeanour of compliant androids? Isn’t it a given that the underclass workforce, holders of service industry jobs, will soon be replaced by robots? Do we not worship and are ruled by the gospel of the cult of efficiency? Withal, for the present order to be maintained, it is crucial for the general public to remain both alienated thus using consumerism as a palliative, and that includes the production and retailing of sexualised, simulacrum appliances that mimic sex partners and the psychical release valve of finger-wagging, easy virtue and shallow vitriol aimed at the poor sods who seek comfort from them. Addendum: I’m much more mortified by robotics designed for surveillance and war than for ones designed for simulacrumatic sex. I’m simply beastly that way. Robots can be programmed to simulate copulation but it is doubtful that machines can be tuned and tweaked to experience the manifold, complex states of being that define human consciousness and its innate ability for self expression; for example, the ability to express themselves by means of spontaneous generated metaphors. While it is true, AI technologies can mimic forms of poetic and artistic expression but, in any honest account of the processes they utilise, machines engage in the activity sans a depth of feeling, the facility to evince empathy and the ability to access imagination; i.e., the phenomenon we human beings term soulfulness. Sans the ineffable quality of soul, AI entities, as is the case with our present information technology, will contribute the palliative, yet inherently alienating, effects inherent to our hyper-commodified era. In contrast, writers/artists/activists must proceed to dangerous places. It is imperative that they descend into the danger zone known as the soul. The soul is not a realm inhabited by weightless beings radiating beatific light. Rather, it is a landscape of broken, wounded wanderers; inchoate longing; searing lamentation; the confabulations of imperfect memory; of rutting and rage; transgression; depression; fragmented language; and devouring darkness. The reductionist metaphors inherent to the age of mechanisation — which limn human beings in mechanised, commodified terms — as opposed to the organic, unfolding pantheon composed of needs, longings and desires we are — inflicts not only alienation from our fellow human beings but from our essential natures. In our misery and confusion, we have bloated our bodies, maimed and poisoned the earth, and scoured the hours of our lives of meaning by the compulsive commodification of all things. Therefore it should not come as a surprise when alienated, lonely men become enamoured of glambots. We have delivered insult after insult to the soul of the world, and yet it loves us with an abiding and bitter grace. The question remains: do we love it in turn, and deeply enough, to mount a resistance to the present order thus turn the tide against the love-bereft forces responsible for the wholesale destruction of both landscape and soulscape. http://clubof.info/