Sometimes I watch people arguing over definitions of things and I wonder
where the arguments come from. This just in...Consider reading Cory
Doctorow's novel _Eastern Standard Tribe_ online at
http://www.craphound.com/est/download.php
Longish quote (sorry)
> I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese
>and Western medicine thus: “Western medicine is based on corpses, things that
>you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese
>medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans.”
>
> The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not
>particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in
>your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a
>hallucinatory hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on
>the roof of a sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the
>perpetual construction of Boston that it’s merely a cloud of dust like a herd
>of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil
>up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn’t it be nice if I
>gave myself one.
>
> Deep breath.
>
> The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the
>dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference
>between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living
>the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.
>
> School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I’d escaped
>into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals
>with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what
>the story was about, but never what the story was. Stories are propaganda,
>virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves
>directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they’re as naked
>as a nightclub in daylight.
>
> The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: “What is
>the theme of this story?”
> Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and
>understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you rather be smart or
>happy?”
> This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing smarts over
>happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then it’s a story about
>choosing happiness over smarts. It’s a morality play, and the first character
>is about to take the stage. He’s a foil for the theme, so he’s drawn in simple
>lines. (01)
Jack (02)
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