Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Cost of Information, Good and Bad
Is there something about the decreasing price of information that makes it harder to sift the chaff from the wheat? I have investigated this phenomenon before with respect to poetry. The barriers to entry for writing and publishing poetry have come down significantly over the centuries, and especially over the last few decades. There is much more poetry, but not necessarily any more good poetry. Thus, it becomes more of a chore to find good new poems. (Trust me, I once published and edited a poetry magazine.) The same seems to be happening with “news” and other information sources. There seem to be more outlets serving fewer real facts. Finding these facts becomes more and more difficult.
What are you seeing out there, Ricochet?
Published in Journalism
That is an excellent thought.
EWTN is available for streaming both live and on demand. No need to subsidize CNN, ESPN, et. al. to enjoy their programming. And they accept donations so you can kick them whatever you would have been wasting to subsidize all of that hate speech.
Poetry, like sculpture and painting, it seems to me has lost much of its footing in the underlying use of language. One has to wonder whether many modern poets could manage a single coherent line of prose, and yet, they are said to put down poems. On the other hand, treacle allowing a rhyme at the end of each or every other phrase regardless of meter, is offered as poetry, which I guess it is just as stick men might be art if offered by the pen of Picasso. And even the most revered of poets often wrote dismal stuff wallowing in hidden sentiments and overwrought metaphors. Poetry, even in the best of times, doesn’t account for much, to say nothing of taste. It is maddening. And that is coming from a poet himself! But we write on, compelled to it when an idea peaks under the mind’s tent and reveals itself. We just hope that a reader, any reader, gets the idea when he reads. That is the best we can hope for.
You might be right. I’m judging not from the history but from what I know of human nature. In every man’s soul there’s a longing for the transcendent, for the sublime. Also in every man’s soul is the impulse to call each other gay if they admit to it.
It only takes a few.
For all that it looks like it was done with permanent marker in five minutes it’s actually a pretty good representation of the subject matter.
(Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso, if you haven’t already guessed.)
Argr.
Well played, my dear ‘hant. Well played.
An impulse to which I yield with some regularity, usually on a phone call with my younger brother:
You had to know that I would know how to call someone a girly-boy on Old Norse.
Hmm…
I don’t suppose you know when the next General assembly will be called?
It’s been replaced. No longer exists.
I just assumed that at some point you’ve been called a girly-boy in Old Norse.
I’ve been using Picasso for a while now as a test case for where the line is drawn between art and crap. I think so was he.
What I’m hearing is that the right no longer expires.
Not by anyone who survived doing so.
Looks like it was restored in 1844.
Uh, poetry is just a fancy word for limericks, right?
It was good if you could, but splitting someone in half with a single blow has an eloquence all its own.
Bragging was a major thing. The god of bards was Braga. All honor to the biggest, most energetic braggart. Not like today.
Variations on the theme, Boss.
The chick that wouldn’t put out without a poem.
Mondrian, before he became a noted linoleum pattern designer.
Ain’t no gainsaying that. When the man is right he’s right.
Print by Miyamoto Musashi, allegedly the greatest samurai swordsman ever.
Slash, thrust, cut and die
No speed gained by thinking why
Feet on sand or loam or in the rill
Make the cut and get the kill
Make the cut without a thought
Or on the blade you will be caught.
(PS, that’s not Musashi, that’s me. Got motivated for a minute, there. Got to watch that.)
While we’re on the subject of poetry, do you like Kipling?
I’ve been told he has a following in the special forces community, and would like to verify that.
I love Kipling with a love that no straight man should ever have for another man. I’ve never read any poesy by him that didn’t have been there, done that verisimilitude.
I like him.
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.
I’m caught between calling you gayer than Liberace’s pool boy as the regulations require, and wanting to live out the rest of my days with all my vital organs where the Good Lord originally put them.
Kipling though, that guy was every bit as good as he was supposed to be and then some.