Satire: literary or dramatic form in which human or individual vices, follies or abuses are examined, using burlesque, irony, parody, humour and caricature, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform. Stories, verses, dialogues for the Satirocene Age from Vancouver Island, Canada. (Posted by F. Jardine or guests)
Sunday 28 November 2021
"Surviving" Christmas
A Concrete Discussion
Wednesday 24 November 2021
The Pandemic of Logo-phobia
Monday 22 November 2021
Where's the Statute for the Protection of the Status of Statues?
Saturday 20 November 2021
Miniature Worlds and Imagining Mind -- a mental health response to pandemic restrictions
On the table in the sitting room squashed up against the bedroom of my box, I have built a miniature world. There's a castle, and a farm, a farmhouse and some trees made of twigs gleaned from the municipal park across town. A family – dream characters – lives in the farmhouse. A queen lives in the castle, as do her ladies-in-waiting, and lots of knights, her visitors of the night. In my night-visiting dreams I imagine their dramas unfolding, and the farm animals stirring, the owls watching, the earth of the miniature-landscape seething with microscopic life.
Wednesday 17 November 2021
Is Literacy "Cultural Genocide"? How Do We Reconcile With Censorship?
Tuesday 9 November 2021
The Hidden Violence Around You -- Who Knew?
Saturday 6 November 2021
Passive-Aggressive Punctuation Is Out To Make You Anxious
"The period can feel so emphatic as to sound sarcastic. It can easily come across as passive-aggressive." Exclamation marks, however, "convey warmth and sincerity; failing to use them runs the risk of making the person you are messaging feel uncertain and anxious."
What. Nonsense. The kind of nonsense that makes one feel uncertain and anxious.
To some writers punctuation is king; it rules the pauses between the tumble of words, providing shape, enriching meaning. It's not about pandering to either warm or anxious "feelings" of readers. Martialing meaning is the whole point of the period (note the Latin for point: punctus).
In British grammar the period is called a "full stop" because "to stop" comes from the Old English verb meaning "to stuff up or block". Drains for instance, and road traffic, get stopped at punctuated points of blockage. In prose these pauses are no bad thing. (It's handy in speaking too if you wish to stop for breath -- and don't you hate those people who talk in breathless! exclamation! marks!?) Only in a weather report is that okay (Warning! Snowstorm on highway!) Although maybe we also need a Bad Grammar signal: Warning! Illiteracy Ahead!
The comma too is essential, this word has Greek ancestry: "komma". Commas close off a clause with the "least degree of separation" (compared to the period or semi-colon which separate more decisively). With "clause" we're back to Latin and closing off: claudere is "to shut".
So at the risk of making ourselves "feel uncertain and anxious" let's champion the full use of punctuation by everyone punctilious about the points they're making when they write. Of course, "texting" is something else, neither speech nor writing, and nothing to do with actual texts. "Text" also derives from Latin, textura meaning "relating to arrangement of threads, as in fabric, skin, rock, and literary work".
So if you're saying anything beyond "me grunt, you snort" you need to arrange your threads of meaning, points, clauses, sentences and paragraphs according to punctuation. And if that idea makes you passive-aggressively anxious, just wait 'til we examine the role of the hyphen …
Friday 5 November 2021
What Can You Do When Your City Hates Your Country?
Recorded council meetings indicate that Victoria Council plans to create a Welcoming City Committee to accomplish Civic Inclusion Day. They will replace fireworks, music, celebration and the red and white T-Shirts cheerfully worn for the occasion by all ages, ethnicities and occupational groups, with something they consider “modest, family-friendly, multi-cultural and anti-racist” (which is code for anti-white-settler).
There will be, in this form of celebration, a moment of silence for “reflection”. (That'll be fun.) And it will be another chance to ideologically lower the flag. Is there any other country in the world as addicted as Canada to lowering their flag? Half-mast is Canada's favourite position -- as if afraid to stand upright and be counted, as a flag-pole. Does being serially half-mast suggest half-full or half-empty? The heads of some of our decision makers seem fully empty.
There will of course be no fireworks allowed in this anti-celebration (too bright, too festive) – except the verbal fireworks in the opinion columns of course, among independently thinking patriotic types.
So what can citizens do when their city hates their country? They can hold their own Canada Day parties -- real parties -- picnics in the parks, beaches and gardens with flags flying, such as the group of friends shown below did in Victoria BC in 2021.
Monday 1 November 2021
Senior Thoughts From Dr. Seuss
Shakespeare For the Modern Audience
We open the curtain on King Lear who is getting lost in a storm, raging against his disloyal daughters, and expressing the feelings of his Inner Child:
“Oh let me not be mad, sweet heaven” -- by which his Inner Child means “Let me not be neuro-variant, sweet safe place”
Adding that “Old fools are babes again”, he stresses that “older differently-abled adults are just as good as newborns”
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Hamlet upon seeing the ghost of his murdered father, is wondering:
“Whether to suffer the slings and arrows of this escalatory shit-storm, or whether 'tis woker in the mind to leverage against a sea of its positionality, and by un-friending, de-platform it.”
King Richard by contrast has no doubt about how to win a battle. He on his own battlefield would give up what Hamlet's uncle wouldn't, confirming that he'd prefer a horse to a crown. “My kingdom for a horse,” he assures us, meaning “my traditional territory for an electric all-terrain-vehicle in which to roar across the landscape”
From here our medley switches to a scene in Italy where the Capulet and Montague families are having an ancestral feud. “A plague on both your high-rise low-carbon urban appropriately eco-dense condos”, responds one onlooker. Meanwhile a member of one of the families, Juliet, is trying to contact a member of the other:
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though Romeo?” she texts, while muttering under her breath “why are you being such an elitist privileged misogynist?”
Miranda, after witnessing a Tempest that struck her island homeland, is having better luck with a new immigrant, Prince Ferdinand. After a life spent with only one manic-depressive father for company and one distant neighbour who was … alternative, she fell in love with this first new guy to come along. Finding he had relatives in tow plus a bunch of alcoholic mariners, she expressed wonder: "oh brave new international order," she exclaimed, "that has such multicultural intersectional identity groups in't!"
And as our play comes to an end, three omnivorous old foodies appear and stir a pot in a cooking demonstration for the benefit of Lord Macbeth who, feeling victimized by their harassment, insults them in very sexist ageist terms, even alleging they smell like filthy old people-experiencing-poverty.
Then, clearly himself a person experiencing depression (due partly to his wife tasking him with a too-actionable ask) Macbeth announces that it's time to “out out” all kinds of societal bad actors, plus the brief green-battery low-energy flashlight that lights his way to death. In an obvious fit of post traumatic stress disorder he concludes that “on the coming event-horizon (in fact, three of them) our brief green-battery flashlight will go out-out, and every poor click-baiting content-providing social media influencer too will strut but an hour of performativity upon the platform, and then be blocked".
At this the curtain falls, upon sincere pre-emptive apologies from the cast to whomever might have been offended by their speech.
This story is reproduced from LITERARY YARD, www.literaryyard.com, 2024/02/10 It's a common fairy-tale theme -- imprisonment in a tower ...
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"Lionized" by the literary establishment during his/her own time, many a once-popular author is now denounced for racism, sexism, ...
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'Twas the night before Christmas … In each bedroom and hall the seniors were stirring, insomniacs all, support hose was hung by the chim...
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Handicaps are not failures, and we all have some -- physical, social, educational, circumstantial. They may even signal prowess (the...