Python owns us

Another life-changing book: Keith Johnstone's Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre.

Don't be afraid of the title. It's a book about life in general more than anything else.

Opening with a statement after months of silence, entangles my thoughts so thoroughly that it's almost painful. I discard every thought as irrelevant and so I have to begin with a meta-thought. Better than nothing, I guess.

It should be obvious that most of the blog authors play low-status in their blog. And if a writer playing high-status, say a real journalist, comes critisizing the whole blogging phenomenon, then the most natural way to defend is to either to try lower the attacker's status (by insulting in a subtle way, for example) or by lowering one's own status even more.

Status transactions are also evident even in simple sentences, like this one. My natural inclination was to start the previous sentence with "I think" which would have been an obvious move to lower status as a defence. Guides like Strunk & White teach, in some sense, how to write in high status, at the word and sentence level.

Funniest example of a paradoxical status transaction is Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular. Think of the essay itself as a status transaction and reflect this viewpoint to the content of the essay and you'll see what I mean.

Successful (that is, popular) writers are good at manipulating status. Playing low and high status at just the right moments, making us feel good without even knowing why. The greatest pleasure comes when a person's status lowers in a way that we don't have to feel sympathy for him. It's cruel, in a sense. But it comes so natural to us that we don't mind.