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Honest Opacity

Honesty is a rule about what you say. Transparency is a rule about what you hide. They are different instruments, and the confusion between them is how power keeps its secrets in the open. Two words get treated as synonyms by people who ought to know the difference, and the people who exploit the confusion understand it best of all. A company under investigation announces that it has been fully transparent and expects the phrase to function as an alibi. A politician says he has nothing to hide and trusts you to hear it as proof of innocence. Each one is trading on a slippage between two ideas that are not the same and do not even point the same way.

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The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

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Rise of the Typeface as Image: Moving from the Static Mind to the Empty Eye

When Twitter was text-only, I confess to finding it a dry and wanting experience.  I realize that sort of goes against my living mantra that The Word Rules — but I do think what sort of word rules us is important.

Now that Twitter are publishing inline images with Twitter streams, I actually appreciate the “worth a thousand words” addition to the brittle 140 character limit of a Tweet.  Now the word reflects the image and the image reflexes the 140 construction.

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Bob Dylan is Not a Man of Arts and Letters

When I passively heard news reports Bob Dylan had been voted into the “prestigious and elite” Academy of Arts and Letters, I was surprised, and immediately recalled famous Groucho Marx quote, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”  Bob Dylan is no hoity-toity academic — he’s a measured man of depth and magnitude.  What was going on?

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Thoughts on the Power of Words

Words are an incredibly potent and powerful thing. I don’t just mean in the sense that you can have a poem that seems to be made out of the same word over and over — shi shi or repeating buffalo and meaning an entire sentence from it. Here I refer to the power of words that might seem simple and yet have a powerful effect on those that hear them.

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Burning Words on New York School Exams

There are a lot of things going wrong in New York Public schools — there is overcrowding and a lack of funding, teachers that get shipped off to rubber rooms and too many children that find a lack of reason to pay attention in class. Now on top of all that, teachers have to be careful how they write their tests because they now have to avoid using certain words that are deemed to be unpleasant to students.

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Panopticonic Orgasm in CounterPunch

We confess to getting a little thrill whenever we see a mainstream media outlet use the made up title of this Panopticonic blog in print on their pages.  The latest media monster to invoke our “Panopticonic” is CounterPunch in a fine article — A Bloody Awful Question of Liquidity — written by Stephen Martin.

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