cartel of defiance (noun): 1. In medieval combat, a formal declaration, delivered by herald, of a combatant's intention to fight and refusal to submit. 2. An electronic assemblage of engaged and enraged citizens. 3. An intertextual mode of reading, writing, and thinking that puts the current political, cultural, and personal moment in dialogue with text/art from the past in counterargument to the ahistorical Memory Hole into which America seems to have slipped.
1560 Sir T. Chaloner Let. 15 Jan. in Froude Hist. Eng. VI. 313 "Our professed enemies... instead of cartels of defiance, will send us solemn letters of congratulation."
posted by awol | 6:48 PM
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"The chief difficulty of writing a book nowadays is that pots of paste are usually sold without brushes. But if you can get hold of a brush (sometimes procurable at Woolworth's), and a pair of scissors and a good-sized blank book, you have everything you need. It is not necessay to do any actual writing. Any collection of scraps-reprinted newspaper aricles, private letters, fragments of diaries, even "radio discussions" ground out by wretched hacks to be broadcast by celebrities-can be sold to the amusement-starved public."
George Orwell, Review of '42 to '44
21 May 1944
"All the subjects dealt with by the orators, however, were doubtful and uncertain, since the speakers understood none of them accurately, and the listeners were not to be given real knowledge, but merely an opinion for the moment, false, or at best unclear."
Cicero, on the Ideal Orator
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