BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)
By:
August 25, 2022
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, delivering brief remarks on mottos, mantras, speeches, slogans, and other words to live by. Series edited by Adam McGovern.
Illuminate or Dissipate?
Boiling down a complex and nuanced observation into its basic elements is a fine art. One which has recently been tarnished by New-Age sentiment and marketing culture. Though, even sloganeering in its crudest form has still birthed double-edged wonders like “Everything Must Go,” which could easily be elevated to metaphysical, Zen-like proportions. Gone are the days of Wilde, where a simple one-liner dropped at a London dinner table could become the epitaph for an entire social career. Though, power audiences have changed with time — power itself being diluted, in order to be shared. Quality following suit. Now, aphoristic epitaphs have to be chiselled on mile-high politicised banners, flown at the mastheads of every major social media site to gather sufficient momentum to topple careers. Often, to survive these blandishments, phrases must reduce to their crudest form, rather than mull down subtly into a ratio of harmonies. Wordplay has long since become a functional apparatus. So much so, that any subtle usage is often lost to the hot winds of social discourse. For a witty sentiment is only as good as its audience reaction. Pearls to swine, no less.
To illustrate, I will provide a small taster of one-liners rooked from my own writing, which shall hopefully serve to illuminate (or dissipate). Enjoy:
Imitation is the sincerest form of battery / Beauty rears its ugly head / Socialism is inherently capitalist / Be your own muse / Abduct your inner child / Turn the voices in your head into backup singers / The pearl is my cloister / Funny spelled backwards is “enough” / Home is where the art is / Great mines sink alike / Normalise nothing — nothing is normal / I took the node less ravelled / The basis of equality is a paradox, in that we are all individuals — we are all equal in our individual inequality / Third eyes don’t blink, they wink / Nothing kills a conspiracy faster than its entertainment value / False positivity is negative / The eye of the storm just winked at me
BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Ran Xia on BLACK CROW BELIEFS | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on LEFT-CORNER BRICK | Andrea Diaz on JOY IS RESISTANCE | Lynn Peril on TO THINE OWN SELF | Miranda Mellis on THE FUTURE IS PASSÉ | Bishakh Som on LET THE WEIRDNESS IN | Lucy Sante on FLAUBERT’S PERFECT WORD | Stefene Russell on CRYSTAL SETS | Crystal Durant on LIFE IS A BANQUET | Adam McGovern on EVERY MINUTE AN OCEAN | Josh Glenn on LUPUS LUPUM NON MORDET | Heather Quinlan on SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED | Adrienne Crew on WATCH YOUR PENNIES | Art Wallace on COME ON AND GIVE A CHEER | Julia Lee Barclay-Morton on WILLIAM JAMES, UNADAPTED | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on TO EACH HIS OWN | Nikhil Singh on ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | Mimi Lipson on CHEAP FOOD TASTES BETTER | Kahle Alford on NOT GONNA CRACK | Michele Carlo on YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT | Marguerite Dabaie on WALKING ON WATER | Raymond Nat Turner on TRYIN’ AND TRANEIN’ | Bob Laine on WHEN YOU GROW UP | Fran Pado on THE SMILEY EMOJI | Deborah Wassertzug on PLACING YOUR BETS. PLUS: BLURB SERIES CODA by Lisa Levy.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!