e-commentary e-ssay e-poem

. . .

S          “Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity. Guidance from the handbook for ham operators.”

J          “Abstruse, Bloviated and Cryptic.  . . .  On occasion?”

S          “Hamming it up.  On more than one occasion.”

. . .

S          “One week a law review, the next an economic journal, followed by a foreign policy tract and then a social discourse.  And every week, ‘e-commentary’ aspired to be a weekly literary adventure.”

. . .

S          “Tom Clancy observed that most military and defense secrets are publicly available in ‘Aviation Week & Space Technology’ magazine and other sources.  He stirred plot and characterization into the mix to cook a potboiler with insight.”

J          “An international thriller every few weeks this year?  That should be thrilling.”

S          “Every week is a thriller.  First understand the ‘Box.’  Assemble all the available and inscrutable and obscure and arcane information in a pile.  Connect two dots cautiously and carefully pencil in to craft the first line.  Proceed with caution and care to connect a third dot and proffer a plane.  Pen the right lines, erase connections between the wrong dots, and then distill, titrate and edit to craft a convincing and compelling production.”

. . .

S          “If I could see the bar, I raised it.  And then raised it again for good measure until it was out of sight.  And measured twelve times, wrote once.  The final product may be . . . measured and out of sight?”

. . .

S          “After ten years of careful observation, ‘blue’ and ‘red’ not only cannot see eye-to-eye, they cannot see each other and cannot stand each other and cannot sit down together.”

J          “They just do not play well with others.”

. . .

J          “Forget it.  ‘Conservatism-cum-a-four-digit-I-Q’ as a political, economic and social movement will never catch on.  You only get one word.”

S          “That gets one back to the fundamental challenge.  Why even try?  They say there is nothing that one can do.  They are right.  Yet I write.  Is that absurd or insane?”

. . .

S          “And a lot of fun.”

. . .

[See the discussion at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/arts/writers-say-they-feel-censored-by-surveillance.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.%5D

[See the e-commentary at Writin’ (February 17, 2014) and So Many Words, So Few Ideas (Sept. 21, 2009).]

Bumper stickers of the week:

investigate, interpolate, extrapolate; titrate, distill, edit

Measure twelve times, write once

Peg it, and peg the fun meter.

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