Appreciate for a moment the extravagant detail, or what we could call the involvement, of this description of a character in Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas.” This is Braggioni, who waits every evening for Laura, to sing for her with his guitar: Braggioni catches her glance solidly as if he had been waiting …
Author Archives: rultimo
What Literature Might Do For Us
Actors will talk about breaking the fourth wall, by which they mean disregarding the imaginative belief that their character is living and moving within its own world, and that we the audience are watching it all from a point outside that dramatic stage world. It’s an odd notion to think about, needing the sophisticated agreements …
Plain Language
Writers and writing teachers will often refer to something called plain language, by which they mean to point to the incontestable virtue of saying clearly and plainly what one means to say. To be described as a plainspoken person is still, even now, a compliment most of us would be pleased to own. Such a …
Omniscient AI?
What are we to do about this? A friend of mine who tutors high school students recently consulted AI (an acronym we now seem to be accepting as a proper noun) about the correct use of pronouns in a sentence like this: He calls her more often than me. The word than, he was told, …
What Are You Talking About?
If you have an idea and I have an idea and we don’t agree, we can find ourselves in an impossible situation if we ignore the one idea everyone has in common: truth. Pursuing truth in a conversation is distinctly different from having the truth beforehand. Seeking the truth between us is an act of …