The rhythms of speech, chance encounters, and The Luminaries
The rhythms of speech. Too much setup would probably lessen your experience with it. In the below YouTube video that you should click to watch, a great drummer accompanies a scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, and in so doing illustrates the rhythms that are hiding all the time in our everyday speech.
For me, watching this was just pure joy. A gigglefest.
Chance encounters. The link here is to an amazing conversation that unfolded between two strangers on a subway in Singapore. It’s worth reading the whole thread. It starts like this:
This dude’s niece also makes an appearance in the twitter thread linked there.
More broadly, I want to speak in praise of the chance encounters public transportation creates. For the last couple of months, I’ve been taking the city bus to and from an office a couple of times each week. I hadn’t taken public transportation regularly for a good long while before that.
One of the things I quickly realized I’d been missing is sharing space with people who aren’t in the same behavioral targeting advertising profiles as me, and that aren’t (nor am I) in a moment motivated by a purchase or consumption. You tend to share the bus stop with a generally random sampling of people, especially when you get on the bus somewhere away from your home. It’s not a store, it’s not a restaurant, it’s not a bar, it’s not a sporting event. It’s a link in a journey. We’re all using the bus to get different things done and our lives look completely different from each other - they haven’t been invisibly selected like they have so often now at all of the destinations we end up at.
Today at the bus stop a man introduced himself to me and explained that he was on the way back from the clinic and has been getting kidney dialysis for the last 14 years. In the brief time we had we chatted about his experiences. Another time I sat in on a conversation between a laborer, a resident of a nearby senior center, and a former professional drummer all talking about unemployment and how anyone who wants a job should be able to find one right now. Another time I talked to a woman who is semi-retired but works part time on a hospital janitorial staff, who wanted to know about an upcoming music festival taking place near her apartment.
No other form of transportation gets you in front of such a wide swath of people like this. You can’t get it from driving, or walking, or cycling. Something about it feels like an essential thing to share in at least every now and then. Sometimes people are annoying, or troublesome, or not in a state in which they can offer or receive much interaction. But often people are just doing their thing, and it’s nice to be on the same journey for a brief moment.
Open the window. Fantasy and Sci-Fi author Susan Dennard is weaving a story on Twitter called #TheLuminaries, using Twitter polls to allow the audience to shape what happens. A piece of this crossed my timeline via retweet and I had no idea what it was, and had to hunt for a while to see that it was more than just a one day thing. On her Facebook page, she explains:
“The Luminaries was a project I tried to sell six years ago, but alas, wrong market, wrong time. Then, while bored at LaGuardia, I ended up turning the first part of it into an interactive story on Twitter. So far, we have #TeamPractical, #TeamPetty, and a lot of people who love #UghJay.”
What an ingenious way to tell a story. I’m not sure if this is the first installment, but it’s the first tweet I saw:
Because of the limitations of embedded tweets in emails like this one, you can’t see it but there’s a completed poll in there. Click in to see it and follow the story all the way through.
Those are the bananas I found for you this week. You can hit “reply” and your email will go only to me. Thank you.