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Posts Tagged ‘language’

Thaw-time Tweets

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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Literacy Atrophies

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on March 13, 2023| 4 Comments »

When I was in library school in the early ’90s, one of the topics of discussion of interest to students training to be children’s librarians was the problem of classic children’s literature becoming inaccessible to modern readers.  There are two factors in determining the proper age range for a children’s book: the first is of course its level of difficulty, and the second its subject matter.  If a book is too difficult for most children of the age it’s intended for, few will be able to enjoy it, and if the subject matter is too mature or too childish for the kids who can read it, it will languish unread.  Children of the period in which children’s literature first flourished, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, read at a level well above that of their average modern peers, with the result that by the time modern children are able to read a book, its subject matter and/or tone is too juvenile to hold their interest.  As a result, many books regarded as classics are now mostly read by nostalgic adults.  And as I recently discovered, the problem has only worsened in the past 30 years:

The Scarlet Letter is not remotely difficult to read for people who have a normal high-school level of literacy; Hawthorne’s style is pretty clear and direct by the standards of Gothic literature.  But I suppose it’s difficult for people who think “your” and “you’re” are both spelled “ur”, capitalization is optional, and punctuation is “rude”.  If it’s been years since you read Hawthorne, judge the clarity of his style for yourself with this example, my favorite of his stories.  And then consider that if Harvard students can’t read something so simple, we’d better hope politicians start making immigration easier so people from countries with functional educational systems can come here to do the brain work.

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Midwinter Tweets

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2023| Leave a Comment »

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Tweets from the Darkside

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 23, 2023| 2 Comments »

 

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The Road to Hell

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , on January 12, 2023| Leave a Comment »

Reporters: could y’all please stop making claims about what politicians and bureaucrats “intended” some awful civil liberties violation to do?  One:  You are not fucking psychic and do not actually know what they intended; you just know what they claim, which for politicians means less than nothing.  Two: Nobody outside of a philosophy class should give a damn what was “intended”; if people’s lives are being ruined by extensive criminal records, sometimes before fucking puberty, the “intent” of those who inflict the police violence is of absolutely no consequence.  This “good intentions” shit is nothing but an excuse for evil, and anyone with the even the most basic education should be able to grasp this.  It’s not like we don’t all know the saying about the Road to Hell.

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Links #653

Posted in Current Events, History, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 9, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I wanted him to have a positive view of police…we ended up going to [the] emergency room.  –  Shelia Jackson

I hadn’t realized that classical Greece had an early form of pipe organ, the hydraulis; thanks to Genya for drawing my attention to this recording of a reconstructed example of the instrument.  The links above the video were provided by Mike Siegel, Amy Alkon, Cop Crisis (x3), Dan Savage, and Lenore Skenazy, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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I Couldn’t Do It Without You

Posted in Perception, tagged , , , on January 7, 2023| Leave a Comment »

People often use the titular expression as a generic expression of gratitude, but when I use it I mean it literally.  And by “you” I mean my loyal subscribers and readers who, even if they don’t actually subscribe, have always been generous when I ask for help with a specific expense, such as travel for speaking or a budgetary shortfall like the one I faced in the autumn.  Every month I see notice of incoming subscriptions from my stalwarts, some of whom have supported me in this way for the better part of a decade.  And when I ask for help with a specific goal, it rarely takes more than a few weeks to hit it.  I don’t know if that’s normal for blogs, but I do know that without that unflagging support this one would’ve folded years ago.  It’s not the hosting expenses; those are relatively small and I have no problem justifying them to myself.  No, it’s the sheer amount of work involved.  When I first started writing The Honest Courtesan, 40 was still visible in the rear-view mirror and I had years of pent-up anger and creative passion with which to drive my effort; now 60 is perceptible on the horizon and, as is the way of the world, my internal fires no longer  blaze as brightly as they once did.  If I thought nobody was reading this and few cared about my work, I would’ve closed up shop long ago.  But if there’s one thing being a whore has taught me, it’s that people value the things they pay for.  Whenever I receive a subscription notice or a contribution to one of my fundraisers, it sends me a message loudly and clearly: this reader cares about you and thinks what you’re doing is important.  And when I’m tired or feeling down, such gifts and their implied message give me a lift and keep me going.  There’s something beautiful, magical and a bit awe-inspiring about this kind of generosity; as I pointed out a couple of months ago, I haven’t paywalled this blog and I’m not going to even threaten to paywall it, because it doesn’t feel ethically right to me.  And yet, y’all give me what I need to be able to treat this as a part-time job without any kind of direct exchange or PBS-station-style-bribery on my part.  I can’t even begin to tell y’all how much that means to me; I’m not often at a loss for words, but my powers fail me when I sit down to try to express my gratitude.  In fact, I sometimes worry that y’all may feel I’m ungrateful or take all this for granted, and I cast about for some more concrete way to express it…only to realize that nothing I could come up with would express it any better than demonstrating my commitment to our implied pact by making sure that there’s a new post every day, and by reminding y’all that I’m only an email away if you need more direct (and, needless to say, discreet) advice or professional expertise.  But now my words are failing again; I feel the ones I’ve written here are woefully inadequate to express my feelings.  And yet, they’re the only ones I have, so I can only hope that y’all can sense the depth of emotion behind these all-too-limited sentences.

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Links #652

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 3, 2023| 3 Comments »

Stop, please.  –  Ryan Marzi

I wanted to commemorate the passing of the co-creator of the Moog synthesizer with a selection from 1968’s Switched-On Bach, but apparently the copyright holder must be aggressively censorious because no videos are to be found on YouTube or Vimeo. So here’s one from Daily Motion which has a stupid function that continues to play videos whether you like it or not; I don’t know HTML well enough to know which code to remove to stop it, so you’ll need to close it entirely.  The links above the video were provided by Scott Greenfield, Cop Crisis (x2), Jesse Walker, Stephen Lemons, and Cop Crisis (x2 again), in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Yuletweets

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 23, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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Imaginary Dualities

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 15, 2022| 1 Comment »

I don’t think it’s controversial (it certainly shouldn’t be) to say that street workers suffer far more violence than sex workers with higher screening barriers.  It’s not like every damned study ever done on the subject hasn’t said the same thing.  If this is in any way controversial to some people, I’d say it derives from the modern infatuation with Manicheanism.  Far too many moderns want to believe that all of society can be neatly divided into sheep and goats, “workers” and “capitalists”, renters and landlords, oppressors and oppressed, white and POC, old and young, straight and queer, etc, etc, ad nauseam.  So when people laboring under that grievous cognitive error see a statement like “x is safer than y”, they read it as “X is completely safe and Y unrelentingly dangerous”.  But of course, that’s no more true than any of the others; we don’t live in a Hollywood black hat/white hat world.  The first time I was ever raped on the job, it was by a businessman in a 5-star hotel, but that doesn’t change the fact that on average, I was safer from violence by clients, cops, and criminals than my sisters on the streets.  The chance of a suburban kid being killed by cops firing wildly into her parents’ house is dramatically less than that of an inner-city kid suffering that fate, but it still isn’t zero.  And of course the same can be said for all those other imaginary dualities.  Sex workers who should certainly understand the wrongness of Madonna vs whore will nonetheless subscribe to the equally absurd renters vs landlords or labor vs management dichotomies if they find it politically convenient to do so, even while simultaneously condemning the state’s pretense that sex workers can be cleanly divided by a bright, clear line from “pimps” (despite the fact that this notion is a littermate of the Marxist labor vs management divide).

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