⚡ October 25, 2017
A Preview of Sorts 💇
I am trying to catch up. To keep up. To provide a daily bit of lagniappe, a literal amuse bouche. Today is also a bit of a ruse, since I’m writing it now, which is tomorrow, which is Hillary’s 70th birthday. Behold the glory and the demise of words, plain words.
Since I know what I will be writing tomorrow (which is today for me), I bring you a bit of an appetizer to tide you over until we meet again. New Yorker covers are always works of art, and today’s cover from 2015 is undeniably artful, yet not so great. It’s hard to get back into whatever mindset that moment in 2015 was meant to portray, but I will try. There is a playful but obvious ambivalence regarding all things Hillary, for example. She was in a sort of sweet spot between serving as Secretary of State and declaring her run for president. Significantly, the Russian wave of hate had not yet hit our shores.
In addition, the popularity of emoticons in place of words had recently taken hold of the zeitgeist, never to let go. A book called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain gives a compelling argument that dominant world culture is leaving the realm of the patriarchal and entering the sphere of the female. Inevitable, Shlain says, once photography was invented and pictures became ubiquitous. And so, we are moving toward the right-brain feminine concept of images speaking their individual volumes of 1,000 words each. The straight linear-thinking requirements of words-on-a-line, shot like arrows at their target, is giving way to the sketchy inclusiveness of our cave ancestors’ drawings. When you’re working with stone, you have to be concise. Ditto wax and clay.
In other words: 😀. 🐔