Archive for 2024
Long, long ago, on a hushed and snowy Monday night in December of 2019, a friend at my bar told me, apropos of nothing but my handwriting, that the hashtags #handwriting and #allthedifference were currently trending on something he called TikTok, which I’d never heard of. Three hours later, however, I’d downloaded the app. Some […]
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What is prosody? Prosody studies the music of language. Prosody studies sounds moving through time. Prosody is separate from semantics. It’s distinct from the meaning of the words that the sounds compose. Prosody isn’t the sound of language organized in lines, as is now sometimes supposed. The reason this definitional fallacy is important to […]
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You were a pure shooter, a long shot. You were a star. Just another nobody boy, half-black, half-white, raised in a nowhere town, in a fractured home in middle America: a drunk father who worked twenty-five years for Clayton County, and a mother who loved you but was always too passive, it seemed, to truly […]
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The sonnet as a poetic form is surprisingly slippery to define. Any human unlucky enough to have witnessed my interminable sonnet-definition revisions can, I think at bare minimum, attest to this. Normally, of course, the sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in some alternating fashion. This is all well — right up […]
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Somebody just told me about this recent episode of America’s Got Talent, which I don’t watch. I do, however, have very good reason to think that Dusty May, my character from Gap-Toothed Girl, who inspires me so much, also inspired Ms. Ashlee Montague, as I also have very good reason to think that Dusty May […]
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“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject matter isn’t the only component of art, nor is it the most complicated, but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the artist presents. It […]
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Fundamentally, all art consist of two and only two components, and those two components are subject matter and style. Subject matter is The What. Style is The How. Style is the way in which an artist presents her or his subject. It is execution. The following, for example, is Matthew James Taylor’s depiction of the […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011