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In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. [...]
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. [...]
[...] What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then,
if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to
seeing in print. - Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
[...] The main reason I liked it was that it increasingly struck me as a very generative thing to do: to push through the embarrassment, to change your feelings about doing something by exposure, to wilfully enter into conversational territory where both parties felt vulnerable and to allow yourselves to be in a space of experimentation. I felt for myself how freeing it was to talk about this stuff, and I liked watching my conversational partners having the same realization.
This is more of a general observation that extends wider than just porn, but I feel that in the queer community – or maybe I should say among millennials and gen Z, because it’s just as much of a generational thing – the backlash against sex being taboo, and against unhealthy beauty standards and all that, has been to make it this friendly, approachable thing, and I don’t really like that either. The thing that I have an absolute loathing of is sex workshops. People go to fisting workshops! I honestly think that’s unhinged. Sex is not a group activity! It’s not recreational, you can’t learn fisting the way you learn to play volleyball, you know what I mean? I just think it’s crazy. But yes, I feel like there’s this push for that to be the new normal. You know: let’s not make anything taboo anymore, let’s not make anything private anymore. It’s now this social thing, and that doesn’t sit right with me either because sex is still something intimate.
lol
[...] A friend of mine, my cousin, stopped drinking alcohol, but he didn’t tell me that. We went out to a bar in Soho and he ordered a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know he was in AA at that time. He made me drink a bottle of vodka in front of him so that he could get a kind of thrill from it.
[...] I asked him why he was doing it and he said, I want to tell my sponsor at AA that I watched my cousin drink a bottle of vodka and I didn’t do it. I said, So what do you do now that you don’t drink or smoke? How do you get your kicks? To which he replied, I have my white noise. For three hours before I go to bed, I watch the most violent pornography I can find. I don’t masturbate. I don’t even feel anything. I just watch it, and I don’t think about anything. Hearing that, I thought: My God, man. Have a vodka. Which is all to say, there’s something numbing about it. It numbs relations. That’s what got me about those young women or old women that I slept with in America. I know I sound ridiculous when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway: I felt like I was not a person – I was a function. They weren’t relating to me as a person. They had their set of tricks that they want performed and then that’s it, and it just felt totally anonymous. I’ve never seen non-anonymous pornography. That’s my basic objection. Maybe there is some amazing feminist pornography somewhere.
lmao
The issue has to be: what lies beyond the current relationship our society has with it, and how does one get there? Can pornography be singular – can it escape cliché and script? One of the terrible things about pornography is that it’s so anonymous. It’s my cousin watching three hours of white noise – as he calls it – of people being tortured. What is that? But take it seriously, he literally doesn’t remember shit: pornography becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening… I’m used to telling stories and they’re about human beings who have experiences, and they change, and the same is true of you and what you write. Yet so much of porn for me feels like it’s about – it’s not necessarily what it needs to focus on – nullity and boredom and forgetfulness and tiredness. How do you tell a story about that? How does one get at that? It’s not even the worst part of human beings. It is evil, but it’s not the evil of death or murder or something Dostoyevsky would write about. It’s the forgetfulness of someone who can’t even get a hard-on masturbating. How do you write about their boredom looking at the scene they used to masturbate to three weeks ago, their compulsive desire for new content, and their nagging realization that they have to go to the office tomorrow? That’s a strange scene to write.
The first time for me was maybe watching Boogie Nights? And like you with Rachel Ryan RR, the standout memory from that was seeing someone with an erection. Full-frontal images of women were incredibly common, and I’d seen people fucking in TV series, but seeing a man with an erection I thought: Oh wow, this is the real shit. I think I found it – again, like you – really arousing, but also a dangerous feeling and somehow unpleasant at the same time. I remember I had this tiny little TV with an integral VHS player, and for some reason I had the Boogie Nights video, and I remember watching it on that, and feeling this real sense of darkness and seediness. Being turned on by it and not really wanting to be turned on by it, the way that complemented the whole experience of watching that film.
[...] In a post from February 2017 with the heading "Building Global Community," Mark Zuckerberg was ostensibly reacting to the trauma caused by Donald Trump's presidency. [...] "Are we all building the world we all want?" The sentence's rhetorical test lies not in its content but rather inits form, which subtly extends the reach of its pronoun. Though the speaker of the sentence's first "we all" seems to refer only to Facebook (the previous sentence is about the company's tireless work on products and updates), the second "we all" consolidates the business and its customers indiscriminately in a single group. The merger complete, the users are suddenly shifted into an active mode: global businesses and users build the world side by side, united beyond all questions of power. And isn't it true that "we" are actively involved? We all maintain our profiles and press our like buttons, don't we?
love this
The emergence of modern management theory coincides with the birth of business consulting, an indication of their shared genesis in the new culture of efficiency. [...] Harrington Emerson (1906), Gilbreth Inc. (1912), and Booz Allen HAmilton (1914), were founded. The nearly parallel development of management theory and consulting can be convincingly explained by the fact that the latter was presented as a special form of expertise with which the newcomers promised to provide orientation to executives bewildered by social and technological upheavals. [...]