Misc.

Ah, Fall back! The human law of time zones and daylight saving time. Like money and the economy, human law must be a fiction. Uh oh, better go live in the woods. Have fun.

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There is not much point in featuring a "hop series" from your brewery with four different beers claiming various kinds of hops in the brewing process when you filter the entire brewing process out of your beers at the end.

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Speaking more about pastiche, here is a quote from Georges Rouault, one of the great masters of the 20th. century, along with Max Beckmann and Marc Chagall (all three of whom were solidly rooted in tradition and all three of whom happened to be, oh that's right, "modernists". The three masters of 20th. century right after Paul Cezanne):

The old masters are perfect and admirable examples, on condition that we remember that the spirit gives life and the letter kills, and that even the best pastiche is inferior to the harmonious stammering or incoherence of a child trying to speak.

Amen and A-freaking-men. Here's another:

A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them.

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Speaking more about pastiche, here is John Keats, from Sleep and Poetry:

The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of, — were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it, — no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark'd with most flimsy mottos, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

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A thousand handicraftsmen. LOL. Learn at the poetry forum (which means becoming cynical like us and destroying your subject). Take writing corse. Our bestsellers write the same professional petri dishes of delicious prose - the only catch being that part about the microscope. Write just like them you too. LOL. You think you're learning to write better when in fact a clamping set of ideological teeth are being set into you (that was what the microscope indicated in a previous sentence). And one of the greatest indicators of the wholesale takeover of the thousand handicraftsmen is the apparent inability to write about any other thing than some near or far future dystopia. Or if it's something else, the subject is sucked dry all the same, becoming a blackboard to feature the author's writing, descriptive or what have you.

It's basically the dystopia of writing, really. The handy escape hatch out of the million complexities of experience. Wipe that slate clean. Throw in some zombies. Or other gruesome reality. Get some critics to hail it is as the razor's edge and atmospheric (the Alaskan tundra is the real character! LOL!) and chilling and gut-wrenching and unflinching and some people will even throw in some Flannery O'Connor references to dignify it.

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And always remember, Adolf Hitler championed Classical Realism as überlegen and held those exhibitions of Degenerate Art (in which Max Beckmann's work was included) to catalog the "inferior".

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Interestingly, the degree to which J.R.R. Tolkien loathed Disney seems be about the same degree that Adolf Hitler loved Disney.

Hitler drew/copied Disney cartoons and Hitler thought Snow White was one of the greatest films ever made.

Did you know there's a conspiracy theory running around that has it that Walt Disney and Adolf Hitler were the same person?

Anyways, Tolkien made it expressly clear his admiration for the Jews, while with Disney the question is rather open about whether he was anti-Semitic or not.

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There's this interesting quandary about how one can read/view some writer's/artist's work who had major personal problems and be at a safe distance like the writing/art didn't come from that person and one can also read/view problematic content and say it's okay because it doesn't mean that the author/artist agrees with it. You know, it's just a literary device. Handy. LOL.

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What

is

money?