156 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. The battalion commander claimed that he protestedbut was merely told by the operations officer and division�mmander that the German police could provide the cordonand leave the shooting to the Lithuanians.

      after-the fact testimony, war crime trial and memory guilt?

    2. instructed continuously aboutthe political necessity of the measures.
  2. Feb 2024
    1. Unit commanders subsequentlydistributed instructions on “The Art of Writing a Letter,” urgingsoldiers to write “manly, hard and clear letters.” Many impressionswere “best locked deep in the heart because they concern only sol-diers at the front . . . Anyone who complains and bellyaches is notrue soldier.
    2. “Actuallythe impact of letters from the front, which had been regarded as ex-traordinarily important, has to be considered more than harmfultoday,” he noted: “soldiers are pretty blunt when they describe thegreat problems they are fighting under, the lack of winter gear . . .insufficient food and ammunition.”
    3. From the perspective of the regime, lettersfrom the front served to justify the war and to bind together the na-tion in a common purpose. Military officials underscored the im-portance of writing home; letters from the battle front supplied “akind of spiritual vitamin” for the home front and reinforced its “at-titude and nerves.
    4. Lettersand photographs, and the effort to archive them, indicated the ex-tent to which soldiers deliberately placed themselves in world his-tory and adopted for themselves the heroicizing vantage of theThird Reich
    5. the simple act of writing or mailing a letter distin-guished Germans from Jews. The distinction affected the abilityof people in the war to bear witness, to send news, and to makesense of extraordinary events. It indicated the destruction of onecommunity of remembrance and the survival of another.
    6. In time ofwar, families frequently established archives in order to documenttheir role in national history
    7. In time of war and separation, the letters to andfrom soldiers serving on the front lines were precious signs of life.They were avowals of love and longings for home. They describedthe battlefield and conditions of military occupation and eventuallyprovided historians with crucial documents about popular attitudestoward the war and knowledge about the Holocaust.
    8. With smuggled letters, private diaries,and secret archives, Jewish victims made enormous efforts to leavebehind accounts of the atrocities the Nazis were committing.
    9. Emigration meant the dispersion of the archive of Jewishlife in Germany, scattering the traces of ancestors and the signs ofcollective history. While German “Aryans” were driving their an-cestries deep into Germany’s past, German Jews were cutting loosefrom their heritage.Racial Grooming • 141
    10. apoliceman’s “perp book”: “a small selection” of photographs fea-tured photographs of the imprisoned physicians, lawyers, and otherprofessionals whose newly shaven heads created the “eternal sem-blances” by which Jews dissolved into criminals.1
    11. Well-appointed homes were ransacked and formerly prominent cit-izens tormented because Jews were regarded as profiteers whosewealth and social standing mocked the probity of the Volksgemein-schaft; children and the elderly were terrorized because they were“the Jew” whose very existence threatened Germany’s moral, polit-ical, and economic revival
    12. The vernacular tag, at least in Berlin, of Reichskristallnacht, or“night of shattered glass,” to designate what should be considered anationwide pogrom against more than 300,000 Germans Jews inNovember 1938, was inflected with sardonic humor, which mockedthe pretentiousness of Nazi vocabulary in which Reich-this andReich-that puffed up the historical moment of the regime
    13. In the context of the Spanish CivilWar, which broke out in July 1936, the Moscow “show trials”against old Bolsheviks in August 1936, and the November 1936anti-Comintern pact between Germany and Japan, the Nazis persis-tently linked Germany’s Jews to the Communist threat.
    14. The acknowledgment that there was a fundamental differencebetween Germans and Jews revived much older superstitions hold-ing that physical contact with Jews was harmful or that Jewish mendefiled German women.
    15. The fact is that it is totally possible,” he carefully noted,“that the National Socialist state would use such a law to make it aduty for those without means and who are dependent on handoutsfrom the state to more or less ‘voluntarily’ take their lives.
    16. . The Nazis carried out involuntary euthanasia in order“to purge the handicapped from the national gene pool,” but war-time conditions gave the program legitimacy and cover.
    17. German legal com-mentators reassured the German public by citing U.S. programs asprecedents and quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1927 opinion,“three generations of imbeciles are enough”
    18. Run largely alongside the state justice and penal system, concen-tration camps became a dumping ground for Gemeinschaftsfremde,“enemies of the community,” who were to spend the rest of theirlives thrown away.

      gemeinschaftsfremde - enemies of the community

    19. The consciousness of generation, and the assumption thatold needed to be replaced with new, undoubtedly opened youngminds to the tenets of racial hygiene, which were repeatedly parsedin workshops and lectures.
    20. Filled with photographs, graphs, and tables, thepropaganda of the Office for Racial Politics made the crucial dis-tinction between quantity and quality—Zahl und Güte—easy tounderstand. Unlike Streicher’s vulgar antisemitic newspaper, DerStürmer, the Neues Volk appeared to be objective, a sobering state-ment of the difficult facts of life

      hiding behind objectivity. ppl saying things and being like well its just fact w/o the ability to double check

    21. new visual regime repeatedly in-troduced the German body, most often in portraits of sunnyathletes, large families, and marching soldiers, and sometimes bycontrast in juxtaposed close-up shots of misshapen, degenerate
    22. In November in Weimar, he promised that “if to-day there are still people in Germany who say: ‘We are not goingjoin your community, but stay just as we always have been,’ then Isay: ‘You will die off, but after you there will a young generationthat doesn’t know anything else!’”

      brah

    23. It was the modern, scientificworld of “ethnocrats” and biomedical professionals, not the anti-communist Freikorps veterans of the SA, who devised Ahnenpässeand certificates of genetic health and evaluated the genetic worth ofindividuals.

      not exactly a bait and switch but somewhere along those lines, hitler gained loyalty by kicking out communism and then harnessed the goodwill to be like "you know what else we need to do"

    24. As parents, educators, volunteers, and soldiers, millions of Ger-mans played new parts in cultivating Aryan identities and segregat-ing out unworthy lives. They did not always do so willingly, andthey certainly did not anticipate the final outcomes of total war andmass murder.
    25. most Germans had little reason tothink of the Third Reich as particularly sinister. “It was possible tolive in Germany throughout the whole period of the dictatorship,”
    26. During the war Klemperer, like so manyother Jews, was forced to move into the drastically smaller quartersof a “Jew house,” which meant that he had to dispose of books andpapers. “[I] am virtually ravaging my past,” he wrote in his di-ary on 21 May 1941. “The principal activity” of the next daywas “burning, burning, burning for hours on end: heaps of letters,manuscripts.

      nazis enforced the creation of aryan archives and forced the destruction of jewish ones, creating an imbalance in how much material there was in order to control the historical narrative

  3. Nov 2023
    1. the official fantasy of the 20th century after the war but now also the 21st century is this that of course they will 00:53:15 all become like us and after the war we called it development and they were then third world countries would become first world some second world countries as well and the interesting thing is is 00:53:30 that fundamentally that really hasn't changed if you scratch under the paint of the UN's sustainable development goals what you find is they want to take the very best fruits of modernity and 00:53:42 make them in a fair way distribute them more evenly across the planet so that everybody has the advantages of a modern life and as billa suggested that's a 00:53:56 fantasy that isn't going to happen there isn't enough planet for that to happen but nevertheless this is the official fantasy it drives the OECD and the folks at Davos and the UN and most 00:54:08 universities
      • for: key insight - modernity framework is the major narrative, quote - modernity framework is the major narrative

      • key insight: modernity framework is the major narrative

      • quote: modernity framework is the major narrative
        • the official fantasy of the 20th century after the war but now also the 21st century is this that
          • of course they will all become like us
            • after the war we called it development
            • they were then third world countries would become first world
            • some second world countries as well
          • and the interesting thing is is that fundamentally that really hasn't changed
          • if you scratch under the paint of the UN's sustainable development goals what you find is they want to take the very best fruits of modernity and make them in a fair way distribute them more evenly across the planet so that everybody has the advantages of a modern life and
          • as Bill (Reese) suggested, that's a fantasy that isn't going to happen
          • there isn't enough planet for that to happen but
          • nevertheless this is the official fantasy that drives
            • the OECD and
            • the folks at Davos and
            • the UN and
            • most universities
    1. The historian David Hackett Fischer identifies presentism as a fallacy also known as the "fallacy of nunc pro tunc". He has written that the "classic example" of presentism was the so-called "Whig history", in which certain 18th- and 19th-century British historians wrote history in a way that used the past to validate their own political beliefs. This interpretation was presentist because it did not depict the past in objective historical context but instead viewed history only through the lens of contemporary Whig beliefs. In this kind of approach, which emphasizes the relevance of history to the present, things that do not seem relevant receive little attention, which results in a misleading portrayal of the past. "Whig history" or "whiggishness" are often used as synonyms for presentism particularly when the historical depiction in question is teleological or triumphalist.[2]

      This sort of Whig History example seems to be cropping up again in the early 21st century as Republicans are basing large pieces of their beliefs/identity/doctrine on portions of The Federalist Papers which were marginally read at the time they were written, but because those historical documents appear to make their current positions look "right" today, they're touting them over the more influential Federalist tracts at the time of the founding of America.

      Link this to example of this (which I can't seem to find right now.)

  4. Oct 2023
    1. The art of the biblical narrative, Alter hypothesized, was finalized in a late editorial stage by some unifying creative mind — a figure who, like a film editor, introduced narrative coherence through the art of montage. Alter called this method “composite artistry,” and he would also come to use the term “the Arranger” — a concept borrowed from scholarship on James Joyce — to describe the editor (or editors) who gave the text a final artistic overlay. It was a secular and literary method of reading the Hebrew Bible but, in its reverent insistence on the coherence and complex artistry of the central texts, it has appealed to some religious readers.
  5. Jul 2023
    1. In the West, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: "stream of consciousness as a narrative mode" means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[184]

      Using stream of consciousness for writing, as a narrative form (for me, this portrays more authenticity, maybe even a way to communicate inspirations as it first strook the person, without filter).

  6. Jun 2023
    1. Ulisse

      Ulysses can be considered as an alter ego of Levi in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ and other passages of the writer’s works. By considering the nature of the link between the author and the classical hero, we can also clarify the reasons behind Levi’s choice of presenting to Pikolo the core episode of canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. Levi himself connects his experience to that of Ulysses in a 1973 interview, where he states: ‘[M]i ero reso conto che proprio il canto di Ulisse era abbastanza importante, perché è un’evasione anche quella: cioè ero evaso raccontando di un’altra evasione. Questo Ulisse che si strappa dalla vita quotidiana per fare un viaggio che non ha ritorno: mi sembrava che avesse una vaga analogia con la [mia realtà]’ (OC III, 988).

      First, Levi underlines the parallel between his condition of deportee and that of Ulysses, driven by his nature and fate (‘fortuna’?) to embark on a journey without return. On a smaller scale, in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ we also find one of the few physical movements in SQ – Primo and Jean’s trip to collect the soup. The chapter also represents a textual journey, where, while reading about Primo translating and interpreting Dante’s canto for Jean, we follow the path towards knowledge of the two characters. Finally, we can read it as a sentimental journey: the chapter is a nostos, a (temporary) memorial homecoming of the two protagonists to their homes and pre-Auschwitz lives. In the chapter, there is a constant superimposition of the experience and memory of Dante’s Ulysses with those of Levi (and Pikolo). Far from his home and family, Dante’s character sees Mount Purgatory in the distance before the shipwreck; this episode triggers in Levi the memory of the Piedmontese Alps he used to see on the horizon while going back home by train: ‘E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano…le montagne…oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’

      When we consider the presence of Ulysses in Levi’s works, we should not only think of the Commedia. We must consider Homer’s Ulysses too, a character appreciated by Levi since his high-school years and often remembered in his writings and interviews. If we analyse Levi’s quotes from the Odyssey, we can find further points of contact emerging between Levi and his alter ego. We can start with the episode of Ulysses’ deception of Polyphemus, quoted explicitly in the chapter ‘L’ultimo’ in SQ. Here Levi narrates that as he was leaving the shower, ‘un fiduciario del Block si installa sulla porta, e tasta come Polifemo chi esce per sentire se è bagnato’. Primo and Alberto manage to trick the guard and even gain a generous amount of bread from their kombinacja. The common ground between the Greek hero and Levi are versatility and resourcefulness, the most famous traits of Homer’s Ulysses.

      Levi considered this episode of the Odyssey crucial and included it also in his auto-anthology La ricerca delle radici with the title ‘Un uomo da nulla’. First of all, the physical description of Ulysses in the passage quoted in La ricerca delle radici – the hero is described as ‘un uomo da nulla, slombato, piccino’ – recalls Levi’s aspect in SQ. More importantly, the whole passage quoted by Levi revolves around the double name and identity of Ulysses. Introducing the excerpt, the writer notices that, while talking to Polyphemus, Ulysses ‘è fiero del suo nome, che finora aveva taciuto’. The name Nobody, chosen by Ulysses to fool the cyclops, recalls the loss of individual identity and the attribution of a new name (the number tattooed on the forearm) to Auschwitz prisoners.

      In this sense, Ulysses can be seen not only as an alter ego of Levi, but also as an allegory of the Jews detained in Lagers. This is true also for some aspects of Dante’s Ulysses, as we can read in Levi’s comment to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in the notes to the school edition of SQ: ‘In quell’istante, all’autore pare di intravvedere una conturbante analogia fra il naufragio di Ulisse e il destino dei prigionieri: l’uno e gli altri sono stati paradossalmente “puniti”’. In his narration of Ulysses’ shipwreck, Dante tells us that everyone on the boat is punished and dies. If we go back to consider the story of Homer’s Ulysses instead, the character could instead be an example of being ‘saved’. Having wandered for ten years, he was finally able to return to Ithaca, just as Levi managed to go back to Turin. Ulysses’ fellows represent instead the ‘drowned’, just like the majority of the prisoners detained in Levi’s barrack.

      A final, crucial shared aspect linking Levi to Homer’s Ulysses is the narrative ability and the urge to relate his misadventures to others. The ethical need to share with others the trauma of Auschwitz is strong in Levi already during his detention and impelled him to write SQ. In the 1976 Appendix to the book, he remembers that ‘era talmente forte in noi il bisogno di raccontare, che il libro avevo incominciato a scriverlo là’ (OC I, 281). Levi will reconsider his previous accounts of the Lager from a new perspective in the 1970s. On several occasions, he compares the urge to communicate his experience of the concentration camp to Ulysses’ narration of his decade-long wanderings at the court of Alcinous. In I sommersi e i salvati, Levi adopts this comparison as the opening of the chapter ‘Stereotipi’, writing: ‘[È] bello sedere al caldo, davanti al cibo ed al vino, e ricordare a sé ed agli altri la fatica, il freddo e la fame: così subito cede all’urgenza del raccontare, davanti alla mensa imbandita, Ulisse alla corte del re dei Feaci’. Ulysses is seen here as a prototypical model of the oral narrator and the founder of the genre of the memorial accounts of the survivor (‘reduce’) of traumatic events. Thus, an alter ego not only of Levi as a character but also of Levi as writer.

      MM

    2. Jean è attentissimo

      As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

      A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

      In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. He also reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

      In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

      In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi also shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

      For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

      FG

    3. dolci cose ferocemente lontane

      Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative – Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

      EL

    4. dolci cose ferocemente lontane

      Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

      EL

    5. qui

      This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

      LI

    1. persecution complex
      • Persecution complex
        • One of the most widely and deeply spread memes, and corresponding behavior within Evangelical Christians is a persecution complex
        • This is a attitude of righteousness and feeling attacked for holding their righteous views
        • This meme and accompanying behavior appeals to base emotion of fear to shut down intelligent conversation
        • It makes them impervious to constructive criticism
    1. persecution complex
      • Persecution complex
        • One of the most widely and deeply spread memes, and corresponding behavior within Evangelical Christians is a persecution complex
        • This is a attitude of righteousness and feeling attacked for holding their righteous views
        • This meme and accompanying behavior appeals to base emotion of fear to shut down intelligent conversation
        • It makes them impervious to constructive criticism
    1. qui

      This “qui” is a fulcrum around which the temporal and spatial dimensions of Levi’s narrative turn. After Levi’s initial passato remoto (‘Passò una SS’) shifts to present-tense narration (‘È Rudi’) in paragraph 15, Primo and Pikolo’s itinerant conversation unfolds in the now. Levi then develops an analogous spatial proximity with his insistence on the demonstrative “questo”, culminating in paragraph 28 (beginning ‘Pikolo mi prega…’), where he twice uses the word “qui”: in the first instance indicating the “hereness” of yet another gap in his memory; in the second, in ‘... come si dice qui’, effectively erasing any distance between the episode and its narration.

      LI

    2. Jean è attentissimo

      As Levi writes in the preface to the theatrical adaptation of SQ - produced in collaboration with Pietro Alberto Marché - all those imprisoned in the Lager hoped to find an attentive audience: ‘speravamo non di vivere e raccontare, ma di vivere per raccontare. È il sogno dei reduci di tutti i tempi, e del forte e del vile, del poeta e del semplice, di Ulisse e del Ruzante’ (OC I, 1195). In this chapter, therefore, Ulysses’s canto does not simply identify the monologue of Dante’s Ulysses, which Levi painfully pieces together from memory and translates for Pikolo; it also signifies the song of the hero who has survived his ordeal and is eager to tell his story to anyone who is willing to listen. Levi drew inspiration for his radio and theatre adaptations of SQ from an earlier, independent radio program on Canadian national radio. Levi praises this experiment for its ability to capture the lack of communication, aggravated by the confusion of languages, that had been a central device in the Lager’s machine of dehumanisation and annihilation. As Levi reports, the Canadian authors explained their decision not to translate the bits of dialogues in different languages to convey the author’s experience, ‘perché questo isolamento è la parte fondamentale della sua sofferenza, e la sofferenza, sua e di tutti i prigionieri, scaturiva dal proposito deliberato di espellerli dalla comunità umana, di cancellare la loro identità, di ridurli da uomini a cose’ (OC I, 1196). Tellingly, the moment of catharsis between Levi and Pikolo is made possible by the act of translation, the only instrument capable of redeeming the Babelic confusion of languages.

      A willingness to listen, however, is the key precondition for successful communication and a veritable ‘flaw of form’ in the universe of the Lager, especially when this attitude is displayed by someone (like Pikolo) who enjoys a superior position in the camp’s hierarchy. Levi’s gratuitous election to be Pikolo’s travelling companion in the journey to the kitchen, and Pikolo’s openness to listen, may be fittingly celebrated through a subversive reinterpretation of Ulysses’s last words, ‘come altrui piacque’. Could this be part of the unspoken realisation that is capable of reshaping, albeit only contingently, Levi’s own understanding of their condition in the Lager?

      In two contiguous short stories from Lilít e altri racconti, Levi further elaborates on the ethical imperative to listen that is at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. In these stories, I argue, Levi reworks the same narrative situation and Dantean subtext from ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, but inverts the characters’ roles and their symbolic movement outside the ‘infernal’ hole (see also the story ‘Capaneo’).

      In ‘Lilít’, a heavy downpour of rain makes it impossible for prisoners to work and compels them to find shelter and temporary rest. Levi slides into a large pipe. From the other side of the pipe, another inmate known as Tischler enters. Tischler spends this recreational time sharing with Levi the story of Lilít. According to some Kabbalistic interpretations of the Bible, Lilít was Adam’s first wife. For rebelling against both Adam and God, she was turned into a devil and eventually became God’s mistress. Their union continues today and is the cause of evil and suffering in the world. Tischler teases Levi for not knowing this story and jokes about Levi being an Epicurean like all other Westerner Jews. The use of the label ‘Epicurean’ to define the ‘miscredenti’, I suggest, gestures to the subtext of Dante’s Inferno 10, where the sin of heresy is named precisely as Epicurus’s sin. Those punished for this sin are condemned to burn in a sarcophagus. Each sarcophagus houses several souls who, like Levi and Tischler, must share the same narrow space, but, crucially, are uninterested in communicating with each other. (Indeed some of Tischler’s phrasing echoes Dante: e.g. verrà un potente… farà morire Lilít’, and cf. Inf. 1.101-02.) This Dantean reminiscence is not the only element that links ‘Lilít’ to ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Both stories recount a successful act of communication and storytelling in the Lager. But there are two significant inversions: this time, the protagonists move inside a hollow space and Levi is the one who plays the part of the attentive listener. This shift, I believe, is signalled in the text by Tischler’s injunction: ‘perché oggi la mia parte è di raccontare e di credere: l’incredulo oggi sei tu’ (OC II, 252; emphasis added). Tischler’s words seem to echo Levi’s thoughts in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ that ‘Se Jean è intelligente capirà. Capirà: oggi mi sento da tanto’. That Tischler plays the part that had been Levi’s in his dialogue with Pikolo is further confirmed by the former’s gesture of sharing an apple with Levi, before telling his story, as a way to celebrate their common birthday. This act amounted to blasphemy in the Lager, where everyone used every means to survive, even stealing food from other inmates. In ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, Levi tells us that, like Tischler, he would be willing to give up his daily ration of food in exchange for being able to remember Dante’s text correctly and share it with Pikolo: ‘Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare “non ne avevo alcuna” col finale’. Like Pikolo, and unlike Dante’s Epicureans, Levi pays attention to Tischler’s story and, by retelling it, saves it from annihilation.

      In ‘Un discepolo’, Levi is back in the underground tank and, as with Pikolo, he is trying to translate to another Häftling, Bandi, the text of a letter from his family that had been smuggled into the camp by an Italian worker. The episode is almost identical to the one narrated in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’. Once again, moreover, Levi emphasises his listener’s attention: ‘Bandi mi ascoltava con attenzione: non poteva certo capire molto, perché il tedesco non era la mia lingua né la sua, e poi perché il messaggio era scarno e reticente. Ma capì quello che era essenziale’ (OC II, 258; emphasis added). Bandi too shares food with Levi. Hence, the act of sharing/giving up food becomes a physical marker of their desire to share their lives through human communication and let themselves be nurtured by it.

      For Levi, the real protagonists of these exceptional acts of communication in the Lager are not the messengers but the listeners. Those, in other words, who were able to resist the continuous and exhausting process of reification enforced by the camp and could muster enough human empathy and curiosity to listen con attenzione.

      FG

    3. dolci cose ferocemente lontane

      Similarly in the story ‘Lilít’, Levi describes as ‘sweet’ and ‘ferocious’ his chance encounter in the Lager with a woman: ‘A quel tempo capitava di rado di vedere una donna da vicino, ed era un’esperienza dolce e feroce, da cui si usciva affranti’ (OC II, 251). Tellingly, the story also recounts a rare moment of human warmth and respite from work during which Levi bonded with a fellow prisoner, Tischler, thanks to the power of narrative - Tischler told him the story of Lilìt.

      EL

  7. May 2023
    1. Hyper-zettelkastenStudents stick all of their zettels on the walls with sticky tack or tape (be sure students initial or mark their zettels before doing this).Then, students walk around the room and search for connections and create original ideas using those connections.Students physically attach those zettels with string (like a conspiracy theorist would) and stick a zettel on the string explaining the connection.
  8. Apr 2023
    1. The specialist modelling groups (referred to as Integrated Assessment Modelling, or IAMs) have successfully crowded out competing voices, reducing the task of mitigation to price-induced shifts in technology – some of the most important of which, like so-called “negative emissions technologies”, are barely out of the laboratory.

      Question - Who is controlling and advocating - the dominant techno-based NET narrative? - This narrative creates many scenarios that carry strong colonialist assumptions that perserve existing inequalities - Whilst IAM scientists strive to work with integrity, the fundamental framing narrative constrains their work to support ethically questionable recommendations - reference the work of Kanitkar et al.https://theprint.in/environment/why-indian-scientists-are-critiquing-ipcc-report-unfair-burden-on-developing-countries/1298871/

    1. My experiment illustrated how the vast majority of any medical encounter is figuring out the correct patient narrative. If someone comes into my ER saying their wrist hurts, but not due to any recent accident, it could be a psychosomatic reaction after the patient’s grandson fell down, or it could be due to a sexually transmitted disease, or something else entirely. The art of medicine is extracting all the necessary information required to create the right narrative.

      This is where complexity comes in, teasing out narratives and recombine them into probes, probing actions that may changes the weights of narratives and mental models held about a situation. Not diagnostics, but building the path towards diagnostics. Vgl [[Probe proberend handelen 20201111162752]] [[Vertelpunt 20201111170556]]

  9. Jan 2023
    1. According to the conventional public narrative, colonial patterns of extraction ended with the withdrawal of colonial troops, flags and bureaucrats from the territories of the global South. Today, we are told, the world economy functions as a meritocracy: countries that have strong institutions, good markets, and a steadfast work ethic become rich and successful, while countries that lack these things, or which are hobbled by corruption and bad governance, remain poor. This assumption underpins dominant perspectives in the field of international development

      !- comment : dominant narrative of international development - using the tool of EORA I/O tables, the authors refute this argument and transparently show what is happening - the continuation of colonialism extractionism through the vehicle of unequal exchange structurally built into trade inequality unilaterally imposed upon the Global South

  10. Oct 2022
    1. Goutor only mentions two potential organizational patterns for creating output with one's card index: either by chronological order or topical order. (p34) This might be typical for a historian who is likely to be more interested in chronologies and who would have likely noted down dates within their notes.

  11. Sep 2022
    1. Art

      Tracy and I would've been more interested in seeing more depictions of the negative aspects of religion which weren't addressed enough. A good example of this would've been possibly the Salem Witch Trials and the Last Judgement.

  12. Jul 2022
    1. From Friday 2022-07-29 evening:

      Narrative String Theory<br /> Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner Bros., 2011) has background NST boards at approx 17:22 and 1:18:46.

      Currently available on Netflix. If you're careful with timing you can get some fun facial expressions out of Holmes and Watson on one of them.

      https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/

    1. https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/06/spring-83/

      I've been thinking about this sort of thing off and on myself.

      I too almost immediately thought of Fraidyc.at and its nudge at shifting the importance of content based on time and recency. I'd love to have a social reader with additional affordances for both this time shifting and Ton's idea of reading based on social distance.

      I'm struck by the seemingly related idea of @peterhagen's LindyLearn platform and annotations: https://annotations.lindylearn.io/new/ which focuses on taking some of the longer term interesting ideas as the basis for browsing and chewing on. Though even here, one needs some of the odd, the cutting edge, and the avant garde in their balanced internet diet. Would Spring '83 provide some of this?

      I'm also struck by some similarities this has with the idea of Derek Siver's /now page movement. I see some updating regularly while others have let it slip by the wayside. Still the "board" of users exists, though one must click through a sea of mostly smiling and welcoming faces to get to it the individual pieces of content. (The smiling faces are more inviting and personal than the cacophony of yelling and chaos I see in models for Spring '83.) This reminds me of Stanley Meyers' frequent assertion that he attempted to design a certain "sense of quiet" into the early television show Dragnet to balance the seeming loudness of the everyday as well as the noise of other contemporaneous television programming.

      The form reminds me a bit of the signature pages of one's high school year book. But here, instead of the goal being timeless scribbles, one has the opportunity to change the message over time. Does the potential commercialization of the form (you know it will happen in a VC world crazed with surveillance capitalism) follow the same trajectory of the old college paper facebook? Next up, Yearbook.com!

      Beyond the thing as a standard, I wondered what the actual form of Spring '83 adds to a broader conversation? What does it add to the diversity of voices that we don't already see in other spaces. How might it be abused? Would people come back to it regularly? What might be its emergent properties?

      It definitely seems quirky and fun in and old school web sort of way, but it also stresses me out looking at the zany busyness of some of the examples of magazine stands. The general form reminds me of the bargain bins at book stores which have the promise of finding valuable hidden gems and at an excellent price, but often the ideas and quality of what I find usually isn't worth the discounted price and the return on investment is rarely worth the effort. How might this get beyond these forms?

      It also brings up the idea of what other online forms we may have had with this same sort of raw experimentation? How might the internet have looked if there had been a bigger rise of the wiki before that of the blog? What would the world be like if Webmention had existed before social media rose to prominence? Did we somehow miss some interesting digital animals because the web rose so quickly to prominence without more early experimentation before its "Cambrian explosion"?

      I've been thinking about distilled note taking forms recently and what a network of atomic ideas on index cards look like and what emerges from them. What if the standard were digital index cards that linked and cross linked to each other, particularly in a world without adherence to time based orders and streams? What does a new story look like if I can pull out a card either at random or based on a single topic and only see it or perhaps some short linked chain of ideas (mine or others) which come along with it? Does the choice of a random "Markov monkey" change my thinking or perspective? What comes out of this jar of Pandora? Is it just a new form of cadavre exquis?

      This standard has been out for a bit and presumably folks are experimenting with it. What do the early results look like? How are they using it? Do they like it? Does it need more scale? What do small changes make to the overall form?


      For more on these related ideas, see: https://hypothes.is/search?q=tag%3A%22spring+%2783%22

  13. Jun 2022
    1. Writers diverge by collecting raw material for the story they wantto tell, sketching out potential characters, and researching historicalfacts.

      Missing here is the creative divergence of creating plot points which could be later connected. This part of the process is incredibly difficult for many as seen in the poor second act development in most of narrative history. Beginnings and endings are usually incredibly easy, but the middle portions for connecting the two is incredibly hard.

      Is this because creating connections between the ends when there no intervening ideas to connect is nearly impossible? How can one brainstorm middle plot points so that they might be more easily connected?

  14. May 2022
    1. Consequently, we cannot understand the history of science if we take a narrow (that is, modern) viewof its content, goals, and practitioners.5. Such a narrow view is sometimes called “Whiggism” (an interest only in historical developments thatlead directly to current scientific beliefs) and the implementation of modern definitions andevaluations on the past.

      Historians need to be cautious not to take a whiggist and teleological view of historical events. They should be careful to place events into their appropriate context to be able to evaluate them accurately.

      The West, in particular, has a tendency to discount cultural contexts and view human history as always bending toward improvement when this is not the case.

      link to Dawn of Everything notes

  15. Apr 2022
    1. Dr. Syra Madad. (2021, February 7). What we hear most often “talk to your health care provider if you have any questions/concerns on COVID19 vaccines” Vs Where many are actually turning to for COVID19 vaccine info ⬇️ This is also why it’s so important for the media to report responsibly based on science/evidence [Tweet]. @syramadad. https://twitter.com/syramadad/status/1358509900398272517

  16. Mar 2022
    1. A Narrative Framework for Understanding Experiences of People With Severe Mental Illnesses - https://is.gd/5pC1pA - urn:x-pdf:1e3bc85eda04e09f205615c0874637bb

    Tags

    Annotators

  17. Jan 2022
  18. Dec 2021
    1. In a nutshell, then, there was never a time when humans uniformly lived in small, simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, and a time when they started to switch to agriculture- thus inevitably switching to a  sedentary, hierarchical, and more complex life style. This is not because the correct trajectory is a different one, but because there was never a linear trajectory to begin with.

      Is there a reason or cognitive bias we've got that would tend to make us think that there's a teleological outcome in these cases?

      Why should it seem like there would be a foregone conclusion to all of human life or history? Why couldn't/shouldn't it just keep evolving from its current context to the next

  19. Nov 2021
    1. Critical to historical and ongoing carbon lock-in has been the pervasive failure in industrial, modern societies to imagine desirable ways of living that are neither wedded to the carbon economy nor dependent on narratives of progress reliant on perpetual economic growth (see Section 4.1). This scarcity of plausible imaginaries underpins many of the factors discussed in this article and persists for a number of interconnected reasons.

      It is critical to create stories and narratives of what an ecologically regenerative society living within planetary boundaries looks like at a local level that we are familiar with. We need enliven and enact futures studies and backcast to our current reality.

      Imaginative storytelling by the artists is critical at this time so that we can imagine and not be so afraid of what a transformed future looks like. Indeed, if we do it right, it can be FAR BETTER than our current unbalanced civilization.

    1. It may seem unreasonable to distinguish the Great Wanderings (Troy toKalypso's island) from the Homecoming (Kalypso's island to Ithaka). The reasonfor the distinction is Homer's way of recounting these two stages. The GreatWanderings are told by Odysseus in the first person; the Homecoming by thepoet in his own person. This makes a great difference. For instance, whenOdysseus is made to report divine intervention unseen by him, he has to find aplausible explanation (xii.389-390); when the poet tells the story in his ownperson, he can do as he pleases. Thus the change of technique, if nothing else,puts the two stages of wandering on different levels.

      Interesting to note this shift in narrative style. How can one interpret this from the perspective of orality versus literacy?

  20. Oct 2021
  21. Aug 2021
  22. Jun 2021
    1. "Dear Jenny: What am I working on? How is it going?

      I love that after the break, he brings it back around to something from the beginning to close things out nicely. Something done by the best writers and usually the best comedians).

      Create some context, then use that context to your advantage.

  23. May 2021
  24. Apr 2021
  25. Mar 2021
    1. The urgent argument for turning any company into a software company is the growing availability of data, both inside and outside the enterprise. Specifically, the implications of so-called “big data”—the aggregation and analysis of massive data sets, especially mobile

      Every company is described by a set of data, financial and other operational metrics, next to message exchange and paper documents. What else we find that contributes to the simulacrum of an economic narrative will undeniably be constrained by the constitutive forces of its source data.

  26. Feb 2021
    1. The intellectual cesspool of the inflation truthers

      Powerful Headline (words) from a Washington Post article under Economic Policy. WORDS.....! Words..... When you study Legal Theory you learn that "words" play a significant role in all aspects of social order.

      Controlling the rhetoric with consistent narrative

      This statement simply implies the use of consistent narrative (story) to allow control of the rhetoric. Narrative can be viewed as believable while Rhetoric is a general pejorative. When the rhetoric is mis or dis-information the narrative must be credible.

      Main stream media (MSM) has held a long-term standing across the world as being credible. This standing is eroding. It has eroded considerably over the last 25 years among critical thinkers and the general population has started to take notice.

      I question everything from MSM especially when narrative is duplicated with identical rhetoric across known government media assets. History is a wonderful thing when searching for Truth. Events in historical time periods can be researched, parsed and studied for patterns based on future evidence and outcomes.

      Information "Spin" is real and happens for one purpose, that purpose is to benefit a position, agenda, person, plan, etc., by manipulating (advertising, PR, propaganda) information. Spin is difficult to refute without hard facts. Spin has a short-term shelf life, but that is all it needs to chart a new course, set the "ball" in motion so to say.

      History allows Truth to overcome Spin.

  27. Jan 2021
  28. Dec 2020
    1. I think what the narrative of Incendies is trying to do is to first distinguish the mother's side of Oedipal desire from the male desire and then integrate them. Female characters are femininized as personified obstacles in traditional Oedipus story. The feminist narrative of Incendies seeks to contrast this idea by complicating the reality of Nawal in order to give her personalities, so her desire would not be subdued by the patriarchal desire. Therefore, the film has to focus on the desire of Nawal and her daughter first. The film also tries to challenge the traditional Oedipal narrative by integrating the double- identity of Simon/Nahid into that of Jeanne/Nawal through the blood tie they share, and suggests that they are all persecuted by the conflicts between two existing orders: Muslim and Christian. What the film is trying to do is to separate Nawal's reality from the patriarchal discourse, and to portray her as a misfit (in contrast to the feminized characters in Oedipus' story, where they all serve the Oedipal desire), so Nawal could not only have her own voice, but her desire can be fulfilled and outlive the patriarchal framework through the reunion of her children.

    1. In the COVID debate, there is a mainstream, “popular” narrative, and a competing, “unpopular” narrative — a “fringe.” The former exploits the common, mediocre desire to be “popular.”

      Is it simply a desire to be popular?

  29. Jun 2020
  30. May 2020
    1. “As I enter the office floor, I see my colleagues, wave to them, and find myself a desk. I overhear some guys talking about an old client of mine. I give them some tips on how I used to handle this client, but I really don’t have time to chitchat. My new client will arrive in an hour; a key account and we cannot afford to lose him. I’m damn nervous and I need to prepare. So, I pick up my laptop and move into one of the available quiet rooms. I close the door and start working.” This straightforward story explains the advantages of the open office, as well as the users’ fears of not being able to concentrate, and the potential business implications of distracted workers. And the story provides a possible design solution (creating ‘quiet rooms’), which proved to be valuable input in the design process (they got their quiet rooms).

      Example of an effective and authentic narrative.

  31. Apr 2020
  32. Dec 2019
    1. Policymakers in Guinea

      Given that the Case studies were broken down by country, I would have expected at least the first paragraph of this section to bind the Case studies together from a policy diffusion/ policy learning perspective (e.g. in terms of more or less strenuous conditions during outbreaks or 'peacetime'), before zooming back in to highlight certain aspects from the Case studies.

    2. In three of these countries (i.e. Guinea, Argentina and India), the CIOMS Guidelines have had direct influence over their domestic governance policies on the subject. Its impact was greatest for Guinea and Argentina, whose governance policies had to be adapted in response to the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa and the Zika virus epidemic in Latin America. In both countries, sharing of biological materials and related data with international organisations increased significantly to meet therapeutic and research needs during the outbreaks. International organisations have had a comparatively greater role in bringing about policy change in Guinea when compared with Argentina, mainly due to the fragility of the health system in Guinea in 2014. In contrast, policy in India and in Malawi occurred under less strenuous conditions. This may account for the relatively greater emphasis on control and limits to cross-border transferability in their policies when compared with those of Guinea and Argentina.

      I would have expected the Background section to set the stage for the case studies, not to sum up their results.

  33. Aug 2019
    1. I think that if we had this tool in Blackboard we might reach a tipping point among faculty users so that Hypothes.is would bleed back out into folk’s everyday browser use and from there back into the classroom. And from there into the communities we live and share within.

      You've probably hit on our most secret desire here. That we could have this kind of cross-cutting impact.

  34. Jun 2019
  35. May 2019
    1. Procedural Rhetoric. Bogost, I. In Persuasive games: the expressive power of videogames, pages 1–64. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2007.

      "...the rhetoric of failure. Tragedy in games tends to find its procedural representation in this trope." (85)

      "Political video games in the sense I have articulated above are characterized by procedural rhetorics that expose the logic of a political order, thereby opening a possibility for its support, interrogation, or disruption. Procedural rhetorics articulate the way political structures organize their daily practice; they describe the way a system “thinks” before it thinks about anything in particular." (90)

      In thinking through This War of Mine, I'm interested in the notion that the game is designed to thwart winning, and indeed every choice the player makes bring them closer to survival or to morally bankrupt behavior or both. In many moments of the game's narrative, there are no good choices. In some play-throughs I have felt better allowing my characters to die than I have with exercising the power at my disposal, e.g. killing and robbing the old couple. And in a strange way, my characters seem to feel more comfortable with that choice, too. TWoM seems to fall somewhere in between Kabul Kaboom and traditional winnable games.

  36. Oct 2018
    1. Sie zielt nicht darauf, die Beziehungen über Rechte und Pflichten zu organisieren, sondern über Bedürfnisse, Abhängigkeiten und Autorität

      moralische Narrative der feministischen Ethik

  37. Aug 2018
    1. Plotline 3: Making life sensible is as much about who we are as about narrating events and experiences

      Later in this section, Cunliffe and Coupland write:

      "In summary, ‘making life sensible’ is a complex interweaving of self-other, of retrospective and prospective, discursive and embodied, routine and creative, explicit and intuitive sensemaking."

      The narrating process is a "a complex interweaving of self-other, of retrospective and prospective, discursive and embodied, routine and creative, explicit and intuitive sensemaking."

      Identity construction (who am I?, who are you?, who do I want to be in the future?) is an important factor here as the foundation by which socially constructed sensemaking is generated and justifications (narrative rationality) are staked out.

      It's also incredibly messy, social, and contradictory -- all simultaneously.

    2. Plotline 2: Making our life sensible enough to go on is an embodied process

      The embodied process involves how we our bodies (everything except cognitive function) to make sense of our surroundings/situations. This embodied process includes emotions, physical self, language, gestures, actions, and lived experiences.

    3. Plotline 1: Making life sensible occurs in polyphonic, responsive and ongoing moments of embodied narrative performance

      Polyphonic is described as multiple voices and multiple interpretations of the story element which, in turn, can produce competing narratives. There is also a subtle temporal nature to "making life sensible" as people attempt to apply narrative logic in the moment, to use retrospection to make sense of past events or to peer into the future.

      Uses a more emotional, experiential, and embodied perspective for sensemaking through narrative is counter to the org studies POV that sensemaking is frequently a "deliberate, collaborative and unemotional process"

    4. We offer an alternative to sensemaking as a representational, cognitive, information-processing, or communicative process, and contest the idea that sensemaking is a purely retrospective and linear activity. We build on narrative theory to propose that sensemaking is a temporal process of making our life and ourselves sensible through embedded and embodied narrative performances. It is an interpretive process in which we judge our expe-rience, actions and sense of identity in relationship to specific and generalized others.

      Cunliffe and Coupland's framework that contests Weick's perspective on sensemaking and proposes a new interpretative process that is temporal, embodied and performative.

      See: Goffman (1978) The presentation of self in everyday life

    5. Narrative rationality is therefore fundamental to narrative sensemaking, because it connect us with our social surroundings through an ongoing process of interpreting, assessing and critiquing our experience: a form of ‘criti-cal self-awareness’ (Fisher, 1985: 349)

      While there are different theories to describe how narratives are constructed in organizations, Cunliffe and Coupland argue that "... narratives are the means by which we organize and make sense of our experience and evaluate our actions and intentions."

      Narrative rationality takes sensemaking a step further and theorizes how people judge the merits of a narrative from discordant story elements.

      Cunliffe and Coupland mention that people use probability, fidelity, plausibility, reliability, trustworthiness and wisdom of the constructed narrative and the narrator as ways to judge its rationality.

    6. Our theorization of embodied sensemaking differs from, and extends, current work in three main ways. First, we define embodiment more broadly than emotion – as bodily sensations, felt experiences, emotions and sen-sory knowing; second, we situate embodiment in lived experience not as abstracted from, and able to be generalized across, experience; and third, we argue that embodiment is an integral part of sensemaking.

      Description of embodied narrative sensemaking. Cunliffe and Coupland refer to these as plotlines:

      "Plotline 1: Making life sensible occurs in polyphonic, responsive and ongoing moments of embodied narrative performance"

      "Plotline 2: Making our life sensible enough to go on is an embodied process"

      "Plotline 3: Making life sensible is as much about who we are as about narrating events and experiences"

    7. Ricoeur (e.g. 1988) because he sees narrative theory as a form of making sense in and across time that involves personal and community identit

      Ricoeur claims there are temporal elements to sensemaking

      Get this paper

    8. Merleau-Ponty (2004 [1962], 2004 [1948]) because of his theorization of the relationship between perception and embodi-ment.

      Unsure about whether Merleau-Ponty's work also includes a temporal element. Get the paper.

    9. Specifically, we argue that making life sensible:• occurs in embedded narrative performances – in the lived experience of everyday, ordinary interactions and conversations with others and ourselves;• is temporal, taking place moment-to-moment within and across time and space;• encompasses polyphony as we attempt to interweave multiple, alternative and contested narratives and stories;• is an ongoing embodied process of interpretation of self and experience in which we cannot separate ourselves, our senses, our body and emotions

      Four features of everyday sensemaking:

      • lived experience

      • temporal

      • polyphonic

      • embodied

    10. Our contribution lies in extending the work on sensemaking theory to include the notion of embodied narrative sensemaking, which posits that whether we are aware of it or not, we make our lives and ourselves ‘sensible’ through embodied (bodily) interpreta-tions in our ongoing everyday interactions.

      Extension of sensemaking theory

    1. Justification, understood as discourse that introduces legitimacy and stability into social action, is a source of linkage that recurs in several articles. Cunliffe and Coupland, for example, argue that we create sense ‘if we can find justifications (narrative rationality) for our and others’ actions’ (p. 69)

      Justification definition.

      Justification is used as a linkage in storytelling to connect the what/with/for elements.

      See: Cunliffe and Coupland http://wendynorris.com/cunliffe-and-coupland-2011-from-hero-to-villain-to-hero-making-experience-sensible-through-embodied-narrative-sensemaking/

  38. course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
    1. A light fringe of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.

      Here we find yet another personification of air, which enwraps the story with subtle layers of movement and circulation. We could trace this pattern, and its effects on narrative time and narrative progress, through concordances and dispersion plots of "air" and any wind-related words.

    1. “the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, situations, and phases that comprise those relationships” (2000, p. 27), the dynamic weaving of events, interactions, and situations being very similar to narrative.

      Temporal context definition.

      Furthers the notion of narrative and how relationships between events/things is transformed into a cohesive whole which is necessary for sensemaking.

    2. A narrative consists of three essential elements: past events, story elements, and a temporal ordering (Maines 1993, p. 21).

      Narrative definition.

      Developing the plot around the story elements is the most important element for sensemaking. It transforms a chronology/sequence of events into something more meaningful, more memorable,and more relatable.

  39. Jul 2018
  40. course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
    1. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me. It began to confess to me in a murmuring voice and I wondered why it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle.

      There are quite a few religious references throughout the text, and not only in direct reference to the priest . I would be interesting to run they words using a narrative time analysis to see ho they are used through out the entire piece. I would also be interested in running a collocation analysis to see if they appear together frequently.

    2. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.

      The narrator's description of the commercial ships, and his fantasy of sailing away from Dublin, briefly suspend the narrative, creating a temporal and spatial expansiveness that pressures the story's geographic containment. It would be interesting to track and investigate the language of imagination and fantasy throughout Dubliners with a concordance and collocations.

  41. course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
    1. And what of that?–you may reply–the thing is done every day. Granted, my dear sir. But would you think of it quite as lightly as you do, if the thing was done (let us say) with your own sister?

      Mathew Bruff carefully anticipates the reader's objections, and tries to persuade him ("my dear sir") to reconsider his assessment of Godfrey Ablewhite. To better understand how and why The Moonstone's various narrators directly address readers, we could run a word collocation analysis and/or a sentiment analysis on each moment that features a narrator addressing a reader. Then, we would be informed enough to speculate about the extent to which such addresses prove effective.

  42. Mar 2018
    1. the effect of the color caste system on the North American Negro has been both good and bad, its effect on white America has been disastrous.

      This is an interesting inversion of the usual narrative about segregation (which would say that segregation hurt black Americans, and would rarely discuss its impacts on white Americans). It feels both like it grants agency-- in that black Americans are not being presented as a continually downtrodden group-- and that it is an attempt to legitimize the struggle against segregation, because if segregation is disastrous for white America then it is truly bad for America.

  43. Oct 2017
    1. Like the tools in a toolbox, though, modes can sometimes be used in ways that weren't intended but that get the job done just as well (like a screwdriver being used lo pry open a can of paint).

      An example of a mode being used in an unintentionally effective way would be the aural mode of Flannery O’Connor’s voice as she reads her short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” Before reading the linguistic content of her story, my high school professor played an audio recording of O’Connor reading this story in a ballroom theater.

      O’Connor is a Southern author from Savannah, Georgia, so one of the first characteristics I noticed of her voice was its accent. Next, I noticed the bluntness with which she spoke. Her voice sounded rather dry and sarcastic at times, which perfectly illustrated, even softened the uncomfortable humor present in the story. I became so engrossed with the aural mode of O’Connor’s short story that once the linguistic mode caught up to me, I felt shocked by the grotesqueness of the events unfolding.

      The aural mode of O’Connor’s reading deceived me and lured me into a state of selective-attentiveness, however, this deception worked well to demonstrate the content of her story. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is, itself, an illusory and misleading narrative that culminates in a dreadful tragedy which appears quite suddenly and viciously. Until one rereads the story and recognizes the points of foreshadowing present all along, O’Connor’s voice served an unintentional purpose of misleading the (in this case) listener.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQT7y4L5aKU

    2. word choice

      The decision of Welker, Lee, Clark, Van Buskirk, and Gill to name their dance company Terminus was intentional and purposive. The name Terminus comprises multiple elements of symbolism through which meaning can be derived. Terminus was one of Atlanta’s original names, and it describes the former setting of the Southern city. Terminus means “end of the line,” which indicates the spirited growth of Atlanta around the railroad’s stopping point between Georgia and the Midwest. Not only is the name Terminus historically significant to the company’s homebase city, but it is also metaphorically significant.

      Photo of Tara Lee by Joseph Guay; Lee is a dancer for TMBT

      To the dancers of Terminus, the “end of the line” simultaneously serves as the origin point of a new journey. Their inception as a dance company flourished from their conclusion with Atlanta Ballet, a significant chapter in all of these dancers’ careers. Tara Lee describes a terminus as an “intersection and meeting point of ideas” in which “people [come] together to create something new” (Freeman). She believes that this definition describes the Terminus Modern Ballet Theater dancers well. The name Terminus is multimodal because it evokes specific imagery related to the railroad as well as a symbolic interpretation critical to understanding the motivations and origin story of this ballet company. As the text demonstrates, understanding the full message of even a single word requires a multimodal analysis.

      Questions one might ask:

      Are there images associated with the word?

      What is the word’s historical context?

      How is the word presented?

      Does it belong at the fore of the conversation?

      Does it compete with and/or complement another mode?

    3. We can u-;e this mode to communicate representations of how something look~ or how someone is feeling, to instruct, to persuade, and to entertain, among other things.

      As page 9 notes, "audio can also have visual impacts." This quote demonstrates the multi-modality of singular objects and subjects, a fact that exhibits the importance of multidimensional analysis. One of the panels on the AIDS Quilt contains a patch of leather, which has both a visual connotation and a distinct aural context. Leather evokes the Danny Zuko stereotype by conjuring images of enigmatic characters and inviting the sounds of rumbling motorcycles.

      Cardiac monitoring, similarly, is a common image in popular media that also contains multiple influences and connotations. Cardiac monitoring is typically executed with electrocardiography, a machine that monitors a person’s cardiac rhythm. At its core, though, the sound of a heartbeat monitor relies on the heartbeat itself. Our pulse of life.

      Image result for heartbeat monitor

      The human heartbeat is primal and intrinsic to our humanity. It betrays our fear and reveals our desires. Its visual and aural modes are ingrained within us all, for it is both a familiar sight, and a calming sound. The following short film presents the significance of our heartbeat in finding our truths, facing our fears, and embracing love. Relying heavily on visual and aural modes to encapsulate a story of heartache and romance, "In a Heartbeat" communicates a tale of love by personifying a famed motif, the heart itself.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2REkk9SCRn0

    4. Although most of us arc used to hearing sound all around us every day, we don't often pay attention to how il signals information, including feelings, responses, or needed actions.

      One of the activities in our class textbook, Guide to First-Year Writing (6th Edition), asks us to “consider a song as an argument” (70). This activity (activity 2.12, found in chapter two) requires the participant to locate a song that appears to make an argument and answer the activity’s given questions. For this exercise, I chose the song “Love Is Dead” by Estonian musician Kerli.

      The title alone presents Kerli’s argument: love is dead. Answering the activity’s given questions, however, caused me to contemplate Kerli’s song as a complex communicative device; I soon realized that Kerli’s message is not as simplistic as the title implies. In my response, I hypothesize that Kerli is a mistress who has made the difficult decision to leave a secret relationship. By referencing lyrics that support my interpretation of the song’s argument, I was able to appreciate the narrative present in the song, and analyze its method of storytelling.

      Previously, I felt most drawn to the aural mode of “Love Is Dead,” however, this activity prompted my explicit admiration of the song’s linguistic mode as well. Through the following questions, I discuss how and why the linguistic mode of the song’s argument is supported by its aural mode:

      How would you describe the musical style of the song? In what ways does the style of singing and instrumentation help convey the rhetorical argument?

      Here is a snippet of my response:

      *The composition of the piece seems to describe the navigation of a dangerous path. It’s as if one has to look over one’s shoulder while listening to this song. By employing a sense of danger, the ballad mimics the traitorous and deceptive nature of Kerli’s secret relationship.

      In the song, Kerli’s vocals are slightly distorted. She sounds as if she is singing from behind a glass wall, showing that she is both unsure of the words she is singing to herself, and afraid of being honest about her doubt of the worthiness of her relationship. The instrumentation is forceful and almost overpowers Kerli’s voice at times. One is never unaware of the thematic orchestra scoring Kerli’s ascent through perilous territory. As the song advances, however, Kerli’s angelic voice increases in power. She continuously repeats and chants variations of “love is dead, love is gone, love don’t live here anymore,” alternating between singing these words, chanting them, and crying them to the audience.*

      As this article’s authors point out, the aural mode of media “signals information” even when we are not consciously aware of those signals.

      At first, I only appreciated the superficiality of the composition of “Love Is Dead,” and simply recognized that it sounded good to me. I now realize, however, that the aural mode of the song also performs the deeper, more complex function of storytelling. The sound of Kerli’s song influences the emotions that I feel upon listening, and the imagery I conjure in accordance with the music.

      Read the full response on my website, Postscript Reverie: My Analysis of "Love Is Dead"

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBDiHFS1TjY

  44. Sep 2017
    1. The keen feeling of hazard and loss that attends Elizabeth’s point of view—the caution Jane gives her that Elizabeth’s habit of interpretation will “ruin [her] happiness”—is lost in a critical interpretation that celebrates her character as a representative of either social progress, cultural conservation or aesthetic consolidation.

      Moe excellently addresses how narrative and Elizabeth's ideas interferes (and mislabels) the possibilities of progressive and modern actions. Elizabeth ends her friendship with Charlotte (essentially) because of their difference of interpretation (of the "modern" action)

    2. By portraying Charlotte as a superior helpmeet who is more than Mr. Collins deserves, Austen hints that the distinction Elizabeth makes between full, scripted banality and empty, untrammelled elegance is a false one

      Something a reader should question, however, is the context of Darcy's comment. Does he say this because it's truly how he feels, or because he wants a wife in Elizabeth, as well? Also interesting how because Darcy makes opinion of Charlotte as a wife, it becomes assumed as "correct"

    3. Are these scenes meant to be savored or overcome? They might be evidence of Austen’s “zest for the small concerns,

      Moe engages her reader by posing a question. Further, Austen's consideration of the "small concerns" seems relevant to Burrows' argument that the small words largely matter to Austen's writing.

    4. She severs the moral and conceptual bonds linking marriage to progress, conjugal harmony to personal growth, and future happiness to the judgment of character, all of which Elizabeth teaches herself throughout the novel to see as natural and necessary.

      I think this is a very interesting insight. However, I think Moe does herself a disservice by briefly mentioning this finding without further description. Since part of her argument relies on narrative/text, a further exploration of this idea and Charlotte's particular language would have enhanced her many points.

    5. The recognition of mediocrity exchanged by two characters, whom nineteenth-century readers recognized as “of superior order” to common novel characters, transfigures their self-consciously lacking public performances—his bad manners, her mediocre piano playing—into performances of intimacy, rather than class allegiance or simple dilettantism

      Great point. Moe's description of Elizabeth and Darcy's connection through their "modern" misbehavior, as presented through narrative, addresses the points of her argument. However, this is quoted/paraphrased from a text (The Critical Review/Annals of Literature) from 1813, which I do not think is necessarily appropriate or relevant for such a modern (pardon the pun) article.

    6. Understanding social forms as the moral fabric created by so many individual participants helps explain how Elizabeth can imagine herself personally affected by actions not directed at her.29 Actions must be sincerely felt so that social norms, like marriage, can be naturalized as self-expression. She would like Charlotte to feel secretly repulsed by her marriage or to discover that her friend’s equanimity disguised feeling oppressed by the circumstances that cornered her into marrying without love. It is Charlotte’s equanimity in the face of marrying Mr. Collins that most disturbs Elizabeth and helps her clarify her own expectation that a woman’s internal well-being should be either jeop-ardized or affirmed by marriage

      At first, this concept seems a bit unrelated to the article, as Moe begins to discuss Elizabeth Bennet's sensitivity and the impact of other characters' choices on her. However, this is Moe's method of bringing up narrative, again, as she describes Austen's methods of using narrative to expose this emotional, affected side to Elizabeth. She also bridges this back to the discussion of marriage and why Charlotte's marriage feels so personally offensive to Elizabeth.

    7. Identifying her own suffering with Jane’s, she tells Mrs. Gardiner, “We do not suffer by accident,” by which she expresses how Bingley’s abandon-ment and Charlotte’s betrayal painfully revealed to her that persons whom she had thought were “independent” were in fact “slave[s]” to material comfort, the opinions of friends, or the easiest social path.

      Moe here argues that Austen manipulates Elizabeth's narrative to compare her own pain/conflict with Charlotte to that of Jane's with Bingley. Her analysis of Elizabeth's character strengthens her argument's credibility.

    8. interpreting action as intention involves quite a bit of circumstantial squinting, but that making claims about injury also involves taking responsibility for one’s own interpretive position—a mandate, as we shall see, it is not clear Elizabeth fulfills when she judges Charlotte (P, 167). (That Elizabeth’s intentionalist thinking has irreparable consequences for her regard for Charlotte is anomalous in a narrative about misjudgment and repentance.

      "Narrative about misjudgment and repentance" is essentially caused, in the case of Elizabeth and Charlotte, by conflicting modernities

    9. styles of judgment, with the often surprising suggestion that a critical reading of others’ behavior is not necessarily more incisive—especially because detachment is difficult to maintain with regard to marriage.

      How narrative informs the reader

    10. Jane’s willingness to construe everyone’s actions so as to think well of them is a narrative resource that Austen wields adeptly; who better to narrate with absolute surprise Lydia’s elopement and the revelation of Wickham’s character (“‘A gamester!’ she cried. ‘This is wholly unexpected. I had not an idea of it’”) (P, 305). Yet, Jane’s will-fully generous interpretive habits are more than comic; they contrast with the tendencies of other more sharp-tongued, detached critics whose predictive accuracy, it turns out, is not more reliable.

      This points to the discussion of narration. Moe reiterates her several theses by acknowledging the many aspects of her larger argument, as here she brings the reader back towards the narrative part of her discussion.

      Austen uses narrative to exercise Jane's kindness and willingness to see the best in others.

    11. Narratives have limited resources—formal development, narrative attention, and thematic social goods—that are unequally distributed between protagonists and minor characters. In the process of being “minored,” the many clarify the one; in Pride and Prejudice, minor characters “contribut[e] to the development of Elizabeth’s consciousness.”5 As Elizabeth’s close friend and, in many ways, catalyst for her development, Charlotte is both a minor character par excel-lence and a register of the costs of such a system of individuation

      It is important to relate the concept of cultural modernity and Charlotte's choices to narrative, as that is the main point of the argument (though Moe's thesis is not clearly stated just yet). Also fascinating to label all the minor characters are developmental aspects to Elizabeth; this is quite dehumanizing, but is quite arguable. Austen, therefore, purposefully has Charlotte marry Collins as part of further promoting Elizabeth's vehement feelings about marriage.

  45. May 2017
  46. Mar 2017
    1. sets of conflicting argument

      In the way he is stating this it seems like if we ever came across opposing narratives the argument would go on forever and cause a blip in the story. Learning to live with people who don't think like you do is pretty necessary.

    1. I realized that what sold was not the script but the connection of excitement, the acceleration of a heart beat, the comic tone, the sudden absurd eruption in the life of another.

      Facts count for nothing.

      Excitement. - Career? Power? Attachment? Identification? Meaning? Numbers?

    1. Who do children identify with? Superman? Spiderman? Ironman? Barbie? Gandhi?

      International.

    2. I identified immediately with their show. I reckon that this must be like Mr Benn. We need characters who somehow capture our imagination.

      Identification Narrative culture

    3. Yesterday, I started the day with a blog post entitled 'In the Tribble Valley' inspired by a series of tweets between people who I had never met

      Imaginary space. What shape does it have?

    4. during the week we had students reading my blog, seeing their snow hat from last winter being commented on by people all around the world and retweeted by Rihanna (a robot - I kept that quiet not to spoil the effect) on Twitter.

      Modeling reflective practice.

      Narrative connected

    5. I have indeed succeeded in my ambition, I even referred to Mr Benn in a conference I did in Plymouth in 2011 entitled "In Search of Nomad's Land".

      vulnerability storytelling child/adult Historical Body Discourses

    6. a writer...(now, I come to think of it, I could say that now, I had never assumed that costume before)

      Writer.

      Blogger at least.

    1. whose story are we telling 'objectively'?

      KEY "Whose story are we telling?"

    2. Another star discovered with my brother's telescope might have made a blemish in their cultural landscape...

      innnovation outlier culture belonging belief

    1. I ~hould have preferred to be enveloped by speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather than have to begin it myself. I should have preferred to be-come aware that a nameless voice was already speaking long before me, so that I should only have needed to join in

      This narrative voice is interesting, considering the way he considers the problems of the author/narrator in the previous pages.

    1. " I want there to be a continuum, a narrative, that tracks the history of people disseminating, collecting, sharing data.

      A "static" image / mural that reflects a continuum and a continuum. Paradoxically beautiful.

    1. The tiger had held a reign of terror for nearly five years, in the villages that girt Mempi Forest.

      Why do you think Narayan ends this introductory paragraph with a picture of the tiger which contrasts with the characterisation which precedes it?

    2. In a mood of optimism they named him ‘Attila’. What they wanted of a dog was strength, formidableness and fight, and hence he was named after the ‘Scourge of Europe’.The puppy was only a couple of months old; he had square jaws, red eyes, a pug nose and a massive head, and there was every reason to hope that he would do credit to his name. The immediate reason for buying him was a series of house-breakings and thefts in the neighbourhood, and our householders decided to put more trust in a dog than in the police. They searched far and wide and met a dog fancier. He held up a month-old black-and-white puppy and said, ‘Come and fetch him a month hence. In six months he will be something to be feared and respected.’ He spread out before them a pedigree sheet which was stunning. The puppy had running in his veins the choicest and the most ferocious blood.

      Consider here how fate plays with human expectations. Here, the name Attila symbolises the roles which the family hopes the dog to live up to. Then, there is hereditary genetics, which should bolster the family's hope.

      Also, notice the time shift in the second paragraph. Why does Narayan begin with the naming of the dog and then go back in time?

      See Narrative Techniques.

  47. Jan 2017
    1. In this sense it has a role very close to that of confession to the director, about which John Cassian will say, in keeping with Evagrian spirituality, that it must reveal, without exception, all the impulses of the soul (omnes cogitationes)

      To me, this idea of writing that speaks and reveals information to a "director" is the very basic idea for what first person narratives are.

      Furthermore, this idea of confessing to an audience through an interactive narrative translates to various media, as well. However, even though these confessions are seemingly necessary in textual renditions of narratives, they can often be misconstrued as more intrusive fourth wall breaks due to this change in media. This creates a very thin line between these confessions being additive to the narrative or if they take away from the overall intent of the author.

      To keep this idea going still, upon researching the definition of "cogitationes," the definitions were either of self-reflection, thoughts, or the act of thinking; something clearly represented through Foucault's writing, but a connection I found interesting, nonetheless.

  48. Sep 2016
    1. They knew that the story mattered; that people in the real world looked up to Superman, even though he was fictional, and could thus be persuaded to use him as a moral compass
  49. Feb 2016
    1. How did animals help create the world? • How were the earth, sun, and moon formed? • Who created human beings? 0 How did Coyote influence the world?

      1) The animals were there for humans when they needed help. 2) They were created by the mother and father. 3) Human beings were created by the mother and father.

    2. How were human beings created? • Where did they obtain their knowledge, and how did they provide for themselves?

      1) Human beings were created by birth from mother and father.

      2) The father passed on his offspring and that his how they gained knowledge.

    3. What was the source of life? • What were the differences between Earth-mother and Sky-father? • Where did the moon and stars come from?

      1) The animals were taking care of humans that were in need of help.

      2) The difference was day and night. The mother and father both created the light and darkness in the day. Bringing the moon, sun and earth.

      3) The sky-father created the moon and stars for the night time.

  50. Jan 2016
    1. Now like all the surpassing beings the Earth-mother and the Sky-father were changeable, even as smoke in the wind; transmutable at thought, manifesting themselves in any form at will, like as dancers may by mask-making.

      It is amazing how descriptive the world was made. The way things are being described in this document make me think of how peaceful this world was made to be. How come it could not be like this anymore?

    1. “We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. ” ― Hayao Miyazaki
    2. “I’ve become skeptical of the unwritten rule that just because a boy and girl appear in the same feature, a romance must ensue. Rather, I want to portray a slightly different relationship, one where the two mutually inspire each other to live - if I’m able to, then perhaps I’ll be closer to portraying a true expression of love.” ― Hayao Miyazaki
    3. “The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.” ― Hayao Miyazaki
  51. Dec 2015
    1. Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull has warned that virtual reality technology may not be the revolution in storytelling that some of its evangelists have claimed. “It’s not storytelling. People have been trying to do [virtual reality] storytelling for 40 years. They haven’t succeeded. Why is that? Because we know that if they succeed then people would jump on it.”

      What? Who says VR has to be "just wandering around in a world"? You don't have to give the viewer full mobility, or any mobility. You can put their point of view where you want, and disallow interaction with the scenery -- which makes the experience precisely a 3D immersive motion picture. And I'm sure scripted stories can be told while giving the viewer some interaction with characters, and much freedom to move around -- that's just trickier. You'd plan for all the characters in various locations to push the story in a particular direction, or one of several directions, regardless of what the viewer does. The more you let the viewer affect events, the more it becomes a game, rather than a story.

  52. Nov 2015
    1. I recall that Martin Seligman also mentions this buffering effect in a slightly more rich context, but the essential message is the same.

    2. narratingdifficulties, frustration, stresses in the simple writing expressive paradigm leads toincreased happiness, reduced stress, reduced visits to health centers, reduced depression,even sort of better profiles of your immune system as you're handling disease.
    1. Research suggests that the more sort of nuanced and detailed and richour narratives are, the more resilient we are to stress, the faster we are to recover,and what we hope end up will end up being the case, is the happier we can be.

      This makes sense; you need different aspects of life to buffer against downturns in other areas.

  53. May 2015
    1. the banks of the great_____ river

      Might this be the Niger?

      see The Encyclopedia of Geography: Comprising a Complete Description of the ... By Hugh Murray, William Wallace, Robert Jameson, Sir William Jackson Hooker, William Swainson (Book III, p.1269, note: 5420-1Link to reference

  54. Jun 2014
    1. Anna von Veh

      Other articles on fanfiction and publishing by Anna von Veh


      von Veh, Anna. 12 June 2012. What Can Trade Publishers Learn from Fanfiction?. Publishing Perspectives. von Veh, Anna. 12 October 2012. Why Fanfics are Like Startups. Publishing Perspectives. von Veh, Anna. 25 June 2013. Kindle Worlds: Bringing Fanfiction Into Line But Not Online?.

      Interviews


      Lenz, Daniel. 31 May 2013. Anna von Veh über Perspektiven der „Kindle Worlds“. buchreport. Molinari, E, Draghi E. 11 February 2014. Anna von Veh: «Ecco perchè le fanfiction sono il prossimo business model per l'editoria»Giornale della Libreria. Frossard, Flavia. 29 January 2014. Digital Publishing Market and FanFiction – An Interview with Anna Von Veh. Widbook blog. Webb, Jen. 3 October 2011. The agile upside of XML. Interview with Anna von Veh and Mike McNamara. O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing.

      Articles and posts on tech/art in publishing


      von Veh, Anna. 10 May 2012. Let’s Improvise! Jazz as a Metaphor for Publishing Progress. Publishing Perspectives. von Veh, Anna. Musings on Digital: a collection of blog posts

  55. Feb 2014
    1. the Phoenicians do not tell the same story about Io as the Persians

      1.5. Herodotus claims that the Phoenicians have an alternate version of the story of Io, in which she eloped willingly with the ship's captain because she was pregnant. This is an example of one type of account that Fehling thinks Herodotus invented (the story according to national bias). It is also example of what Dewald describes as Herodotus' "narrative surface", where Herodotus highlights his own process of data collection.

  56. Nov 2013
    1. Is this also a narrative system? Narrative can be a powerful rhetorical tool and deterrence rhetoric (particularly through film) projected a certain narrative about the world. It almost seems to exist as stories that create filters or lenses through which the actors see the world; the system exists because they allow it to color their perceptions.

  57. Oct 2013
    1. If any statement you make is hard to believe, you must guarantee its truth, and at once offer an explanation, and then furnish it with such particulars as will be expected.
    2. Again, you must make use of the emotions.