4 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. The art of the biblical narrative, Alter hypothesized, was finalized in a late editorial stage by some unifying creative mind — a figure who, like a film editor, introduced narrative coherence through the art of montage. Alter called this method “composite artistry,” and he would also come to use the term “the Arranger” — a concept borrowed from scholarship on James Joyce — to describe the editor (or editors) who gave the text a final artistic overlay. It was a secular and literary method of reading the Hebrew Bible but, in its reverent insistence on the coherence and complex artistry of the central texts, it has appealed to some religious readers.
  2. Jan 2023
    1. I've seen a bunch of people sharing this and repeating the conclusion: that the success is because the CEO loves books t/f you need passionate leaders and... while I think that's true, I don't think that's the conclusion to draw here. The winning strategy wasn't love, it was delegation and local, on the ground, knowledge.

      This win comes from a leader who acknowledges people in the stores know their communities and can see and react faster to sales trends in store... <br /> —Aram Zucker-Scharff (@Chronotope@indieweb.social) https://indieweb.social/@Chronotope/109597430733908319 Dec 29, 2022, 06:27 · Mastodon for Android

      Also heavily at play here in their decentralization of control is regression toward the mean (Galton, 1886) by spreading out buying decisions over a more diverse group which is more likely to reflect the buying population than one or two corporate buyers whose individual bad decisions can destroy a company.

      How is one to balance these sorts of decisions at the center of a company? What role do examples of tastemakers and creatives have in spaces like fashion for this? How about the control exerted by Steve Jobs at Apple in shaping the purchasing decisions of the users vis-a-vis auteur theory? (Or more broadly, how does one retain the idea of a central vision or voice with the creative or business inputs of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others?)

      How can you balance the regression to the mean with potentially cutting edge internal ideas which may give the company a more competitive edge versus the mean?

  3. Oct 2022
    1. "Do not take out of a secondarywork a paragraph or its substance and incorporate it in your work. . . . Use it if youmust, but restate it in your own terms, and make its form entirely yours. Give thefootnote of course but remember that you must be the author."

      Paxson advised that one should completely know, understand, and own one's sources and materials so that they would be able to act as auteur when relaying those ideas in their own theses.

    2. "There is no reason why a writer should not useopenly . . . the contributions of a corps of helpers," he said ofJames Ford Rhodes ; "but the result of such historical method isunlikely to be volumes that reveal unity of historical constructionor the ripe judgment and point of view that come only to the writerwho has done his own selecting and discarding among the sources."

      Review of James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States From Hayes to McKinley, 1877-1896 (New York, 1919), American Historical Review (New York), XXV (April, 1920), 525. Paxson sometimes filed notes handed in by students in the course of routine checks on their work (to about 1913), and he regularly took notes on students' oral seminar reports, but he apparently did not depend on such notes. On the other hand, he often went out of his way, in his own writings, to refer to related works by his students.

      This almost sounds like he's proposing an auteur theory for historical studies rather than film studies.