Links

Obituary for a Quiet Life

bittersoutherner.com

All around us are these lives — heads down and arms open — that ignore the siren call of flashy American individualism, of bright lights and center stage. I’m fine right here is the response from the edge of the room, and that contentment is downright subversive. How could you want only that? the world demands. There’s more to have, always more.

Death is a Feature

doc.searls.com

To explain why life needs death, answer this: what do plastic, wood, limestone, paint, travertine, marble, asphalt, oil, coal, stalactites, peat, stalagmites, cotton, wool, chert, cement, nearly all food, all gas, and most electric services have in common?

They are all products of death. They are remains of living things or made from them.

How Actors Remember Their Lines

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text.

Witches and wizards: A delightful new book will tell you something new about medieval magic.

slate.com

In another test, the suspects would be placed in a dark room with a sooty cooking pot, told to touch it, and assured that God would miraculously keep the hands of the innocent clean. “It seems the expectation here,” Stanmore writes, “was that all those who were confident of their own innocence would touch the pot and leave with dirty hands. The one person whose hands were clean would be the guilty party, as they had not dared to touch the pot in the first place.” Cunning indeed.

‘The Way of the Hermit,’ by Ken Smith, reviewed

washingtonpost.com

I’ll tell you what I think is weird, and it ain’t the hermit. It’s how entire generations of people have been conned into believing that there is only one way to live, and that’s on-grid, in deepening debt, working on products you’ll probably never use, to line the pockets of people you’ll never meet, just so you might be able to get enough money together to buy a load of crap you don’t need, or, if you’re lucky, have a holiday that takes you to a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day.”