Notorious/ Changes

[Cometman]

From: Ian Livingston Subject: Re: JMW follow upDate: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 05:52:18 -0700

Is there a good way to become notorious?


Notorious possession of real estate if you are the good guy (-;   Pacifist vegan squat? Robin Hood seeking deed to Sherwood Forest?

Notorious B.I.G. to some extent - the self chosen monicker aiding his career

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Lots of things have changed since 1966.

They took the choral amens off the ends of all the hymns - why?! Who thought that was a good idea?

All-rea'dy became al'reddy (accent change reflects a hurried tendency, metric foot changing from the humorous, leisurely amphibrach to insistent dactyl)

Cigarette' became Cig'arette (accent change deemphasizes the French “cultured” connotation, the metric foot changing from the rolling anapest to the hurried, road-to-ruin dactyl)


Yeah', it is' became yeah'it is - (First heard this in like 1991, the elimination of the little pause for reflection and the second emphasis makes it sound, again, a little rushed and slightly transgressive/peevish, the darn front-loaded dactyl rears its headlong head yet again)

These all have aesthetic and cultural implications (IMHO symptoms of a decky-dance, but I also bemoan the systemic sans-ing of lovely eye-guiding serifs, so I'm probably just stuck in patterns I learned to like long ago)

That doesn’t excuse me for reading JMW several times and not getting the significance of “she’s having a baby” 

It didn’t click that the guy meant “right then.” It kept on not clicking until I looked up the incident in Wikipedia.

But rather than dwell on my obvious inadequacy as an attentive and perceptive reader, I wonder, would I have made the same mistake in medias res?

I’ve seen enough movies and TV to be familiar with the scenario where upon hearing those or similar words, the aggravated police officer becomes solicitous and assists with an escort, or even in some cases with the delivery.

Senisitivity training wasn’t a thing yet in 1966, afaik...I think my uncle who worked for a big chemical company had to go to it in like 1970 for some reason and it spurred him to start smoking again after having quit (which was probably not part of the mission statement or business case, which again probably weren’t things then.) But police assistance (and the occasional taxicab driver) in emergency labor situations was if anything even more prevalent in media back then, I seem to recall.


Extrapolating from that cognitive dissonance is a, or maybe even the, central theme of JMW: Things that a person ought to be able to expect  contrasted with the actual experience of the inhabitants of Watts.

He doesn’t dwell at all on what the police officer might have been thinking or expecting - or whether it was reasonable to approach a traffic stop with a pistol out (sometimes it might be) beyond suggesting (through a juxtaposition rather than argument) that the top-down approach of “overwhelming force” mandated by Mayor Yorty - given the axiomatic respect for chain-of-command that is probably a necessity in that line of work - fostered this and other misdeeds as seen in LA and elsewhere.

This is something that really ought to change. Bring back my anapests and amphibrachs and amens, but unsympathetic policing would not be missed!

I mean, they took Dylann Roof to Burger King, and white collar criminals whose collars usually aren’t the only things white about them get prisons with golf courses. It’s only human to desire some of that toughness be applied to financial criminals in particular and white criminals in general - but it’s wiser IMHO to prefer applying more of the opposite, kinder, gentler approach to groups not currently preferred in that manner. Spread the love around some. And while we’re at it - Bring back rehabilitation (and the amens!)