Land Hard on “And.”
First of all, welcome to Thank You Campaign to those who have just signed up, or found your way here by virtue of being in my bandcamp community, which I recently merged with this Weekly Letter community. Speaking of bandcamp, soon there shall be a grand announcement pertaining to The Great Simplification of Online Matters of 2021, by which I mean I am launching a new site, and also making my bandcamp a score store and One More Revolution’s Bandcamp the place where you can find all of the recorded things. Those links are active right now but soon, whenst you click them, they will be all new and different and lovely, and Wonderful Places To Spend Money. In the meantime, if you are a bandcamper, do follow us (andrea/OMR)! Then you will get 54785454571 emails as I publish every score and recording I have ever made during the aforementioned Great Simplification, which in this telling sure does not sound simple.
And now, this week’s official weekly:
There is A Thing happening in the circles in which I run: in the course of speaking off-the-cuff, someone will approach the conjunction “but”—which maybe should be called a disjunction—and deliberately replace it with “AND.” Typically they hit it pretty hard in terms of emphasis, landing hard on it, encouraging themselves to do it, reminding themselves mid-sentence. I really like this. It is such a subtle little signal that one is trying to live in a world that is less binary and more fluid, to celebrate complexity and possibility. As an example, I could take the sentence about my bandcamp links (andrea/OMR) in the last paragraph and fashion it thus: “those links are active right now AND soon, whenst you click them, they will be all new and different and lovely, and Wonderful Places To Spend Money!” So instead of saying “yeah, you could go there now and see version 1.0, but soon there will be a version 2.0, so come back later,” I could say “yeah, you could go there now and see version 1.0, AND soon there will be a version 2.0! Visit early and often!” It is like the exclamation point is implied when we go from disjunct to conjunct, like there is an actual offering being made, a “you won’t believe this, but both things can be true.” Wait, no: “you won’t believe this, AND both things can be true!” (Perhaps I have just found the linguistic limit of this conversion.)
In practice:
“There was a possum in our kitchen, but we found a guy to help us get them out from under the deck and have trapped and released SEVEN so far” becomes “There was a possum in our kitchen AND we found a guy to help us get them out from under the deck and have trapped and released SEVEN so far!”
“It is sometimes hard to catch up with my brother but he sent out some yucca palm cuttings for us to plant” becomes “It is sometimes hard to catch up with my brother AND he sent out some yucca palm cuttings for us to plant!”
“I don’t really have much more to say this week but I am sending The Weekly anyway” becomes “I don’t really have much more to say this week AND I am sending The Weekly anyway!”
Implied exclamation. Richness. Complexity and awe and wonder. Where once was disjunct is now conjunct, the vessel grows to accommodate a larger reality.
Yours sincerely,
Butdrea (no, ANDrea!)