Lately (well, perhaps not that lately) (OK, maybe it was a couple months ago) (but still, there was a time) there have been more warnings than I ever intended. My apologies to one and all. And my apologies to the rest of you as well. And to anyone else in need of some apologies.
Now perhaps, due to this new emerging trend, or possible tendency, there will be (or at least might be) more apologies than warnings, especially given the present post, and I hasten to add that that, too, for heaven’s sake, was certainly never intended. Not at all. One can always (or usually, if not exactly ‘always’ in the infinite sense) have too much of a good thing. If apologies are indeed, intrinsically at least, a Good Thing.
These things get tricky when you try to manage them in public. In my secret subterranean den, all set about with fever trees, I can post stupid remarks and unbalanced rants wherever and whenever I want, and nobody ever sees them. If they (anybody) do (see them), I just snatch them (the posts) from the wall and nonchalantly toss them into the 55-gallon drum by my desk, smiling sheepishly and emitting the usual list of disclaimers.
But here, out in the World, which we (so often) hear so much about, each post becomes an obelisk to my own lunacy.
Sneaky play on words in that last sentence, eh?
Plot vs Story
[Updated Jan. 25, 2016.]
Somehow the word ‘plot’ has become elevated above the word ‘story.’ Perhaps E. M. Forster is to blame, for his canonical, “the queen died, the king died” as a model ‘story,’ based on the assertion that a story is intrinsically chronological, while a ‘plot’ is intrinsically causative (“the queen died, the king died of grief”).
Story = “The queen died. The king died.”
Plot = “The queen died. The king died of grief.”
[See this on Amazon for Forster’s entire brilliant and priceless 1927 lecture series. Note that I have reversed the characters’ roles to make it more poignant and perhaps more modern.]
To my way of thinking, story-telling is quintessentially human, and serves as the basis of virtually all forms of learning beyond the mirror-neurons, and probably involves plenty of those as well. Thus ‘story’ is a crucially powerful concept, while ‘plot’ is a notion arising from the study of literature and story-telling.
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