Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back with part two of our series on the paragraph. Yes,
Speaker 1: the writing convention the paragraph as used in prose. In
Speaker 1: the last episode, of course, if you haven't heard that yet,
Speaker 1: you should go check that out first. But in the
Speaker 1: last episode we especially focused on the history of the paragraph,
Speaker 1: talking about the old Greek and Latin manuscript style of
Speaker 1: script EO continue ah, which is just a big old
Speaker 1: mess of letters with no case differences, no punctuation between sentences,
Speaker 1: and no spaces between words. It sounds like an absolute nightmare.
Speaker 1: And how over time that morphed into a tradition that
Speaker 1: put a greater emphasis on legibility, introducing things like spaces
Speaker 1: between war words and punctuation case differences and so forth, um,
Speaker 1: but eventually also having this tradition of transition markers such
Speaker 1: as the pill crow, which are you know that that's
Speaker 1: the paragraph symbol. You've probably seen it before, especially in
Speaker 1: medieval manuscripts, often being a little red symbol. But then
Speaker 1: of course that over time just giving way to blank space,
Speaker 1: giving rise to the paragraph breaks that we know today
Speaker 1: now concerning the era of medieval manuscripts, where you had
Speaker 1: these red pill crows and they would be filled in
Speaker 1: by special manuscript artists known as rubric caters. Again that's
Speaker 1: uh actually from the Latin word meaning red. So these
Speaker 1: are the red text people, uh that they um there.
Speaker 1: There was a quote from a Middle English poem that
Speaker 1: I wanted to share because it struck me as so weird.
Speaker 1: This poem was cited in an essay that I'm going
Speaker 1: to refer to in this episode, and I did in
Speaker 1: the last called Past Lives of the Paragraph by Richard
Speaker 1: Hughes Gibson published in The Hedgehog Review. But the poem
Speaker 1: goes like this, Okay, so it's in Middle English, I'll
Speaker 1: try it. It's like route is on the book without
Speaker 1: v pariff's great and stout bullet in rose red. And
Speaker 1: what's going on here is that the poet is using
Speaker 1: pair off symbols as a metaphor for the five wounds
Speaker 1: on the body of Christ. And in modern English this
Speaker 1: would these lines would say something like wrought on the
Speaker 1: book without five paraffs, great and stout standing out in
Speaker 1: rose red so there you go. That's your typography and
Speaker 1: crucifixion narrative coming together in in one great glorious stew this.
Speaker 1: This is fascinating when it comes to red text. I
Speaker 1: guess the main place one sees it now is that
Speaker 1: many bibles, uh, Christian Bibles will contain um passages that
Speaker 1: are the attributed words of Christ in red and uh
Speaker 1: and that's a hold over from these days. Another case
Speaker 1: that stands out in my memory is the book The
Speaker 1: House of Leaves, in which I believe the word minotaur
Speaker 1: is is featured in red. And that book as a whole,
Speaker 1: I think is interesting to think of in terms of
Speaker 1: something that I keep thinking of discussing the paragraph, and
Speaker 1: that is the format being part of the message, part
Speaker 1: of the communication. Um that if you if you strip
Speaker 1: away paragraph breaks yet disrupts the communication that is that
Speaker 1: is taking place between between author and reader. And and
Speaker 1: if you strip away other aspects of formatting, if you
Speaker 1: tinker with things like fonts in a in a negative fashion, uh,
Speaker 1: it can also have such an effect. And that is
Speaker 1: a book for example, that if you were to alter
Speaker 1: too much about the format at all, you end up
Speaker 1: decaying the message and the intended communication of the piece.
Speaker 1: This ties into something we talked about in the last episode,
Speaker 1: which is the somewhat arbitrary designations of like which formatting
Speaker 1: decisions are considered integral to the text and which you're not. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the the big example would be e books in
Speaker 1: the way that they break text across different pages. So
Speaker 1: you change the font size on your e book that
Speaker 1: you know different text will appear together with different page groupings. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course this was true before the books. I mean,
Speaker 1: different printings of the same text in book form would
Speaker 1: usually not have the exact same words each page, so
Speaker 1: page layout is not considered integral usually in a printed book,
Speaker 1: though of course it would be in a book like
Speaker 1: House of Leaves, where it's very much a work of
Speaker 1: art as well as a book. Uh. And yet paragraph
Speaker 1: breaks are considered an integral part of the text, and
Speaker 1: if you change those around, people I think would mostly
Speaker 1: have the sense that you are really altering the author's
Speaker 1: work there, even though some teachers do it and uh
Speaker 1: apparently it has good effects, especially when teaching a piece
Speaker 1: of writing that has really long paragraphs. I totally forgot
Speaker 1: to mention a book that I'm I'm currently reading that.
Speaker 1: I'm that I have that our head that has errors
Speaker 1: in it. I'm reading an old e book that I
Speaker 1: have of Rank Herbert's Heretics of Dune, and I hadn't
Speaker 1: I hadn't picked up this e book in a very
Speaker 1: long time, and the formatting was weird in it, uh,
Speaker 1: not consistently, not enough to where I was like, should
Speaker 1: I just buy a new e book of this? Or
Speaker 1: should I press on? But occasionally, uh, paragraph breaks would
Speaker 1: be missing, and it would often occur with dialogue. So um,
Speaker 1: if I'm just reading along, I might miss that one
Speaker 1: character has stopped talking and another character has started talking,
Speaker 1: or that there's been some shift in a thought and
Speaker 1: it is it was disruptive to reach those points, and
Speaker 1: I would have to stop and go back and sort
Speaker 1: of pick apart with my my eyes where the actual
Speaker 1: paragraph breaks should have occurred. And then I would momentarily
Speaker 1: think about buying a new e book, and then I
Speaker 1: would keep going instead. Wait, I'm perplexed by the idea
Speaker 1: of an e book with fixed errors in it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you buy a video game and it's gotten bugs.
Speaker 1: The developers should eventually release a patch like an update
Speaker 1: that will download. It'll it'll fix your game, and now
Speaker 1: it won't have the bugs anymore. But you download an
Speaker 1: e book and it's got bugs in it, and what
Speaker 1: they don't do that? No, Well nowadays they can. Nowadays
Speaker 1: the books can you can essentially have a patch that
Speaker 1: goes out through like Amazon and whatnot. So I don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess this is just a super old e book
Speaker 1: that I have of this particular UH text. So, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I should have. I should have broken and bought
Speaker 1: a new e book of it. I actually have a
Speaker 1: physical copy of it as well, and I toyed with
Speaker 1: just switching over to the physical copy, but I can't
Speaker 1: control the size of the text on that, so I
Speaker 1: kind of kind of spoiled by my kindle. So this
Speaker 1: old one, You're like, it would be like waiting on
Speaker 1: the developers to release a patch for the et game
Speaker 1: for the Atari. Yeah, well, like this is clearly not
Speaker 1: the supported copy anymore, so, or maybe I have something
Speaker 1: wrong in my settings. I'm not sure. Okay. Well, one
Speaker 1: thing that I guess ties more into the history that
Speaker 1: we were talking about in the last episode, UH is
Speaker 1: the question of when did the idea of a paraph
Speaker 1: for a paragraph come to symbolize more the chunk of
Speaker 1: text itself between the breaks rather than the breaks, because
Speaker 1: you know the the Originally, the idea is that the
Speaker 1: marker known as the paragraph as in Greek manuscripts, was
Speaker 1: like a marginal notation that signaled some kind of transition
Speaker 1: within the text. It was it was written out beside uh.
Speaker 1: And then over time this morphs through many stages to
Speaker 1: become line breaks and indentation. Uh So when did we
Speaker 1: start talking about paragraphs as the text between those breaks?
Speaker 1: Well in that article I mentioned by Richard Teughs Gibson,
Speaker 1: Gibson points to examples in texts in UH in French
Speaker 1: and English around the thirteenth through fourteenth century that seemed
Speaker 1: to start making reference to paragraphs as subsections of text,
Speaker 1: saying things like you know, you can skip this paragraph,
Speaker 1: or talking about a text and saying, you know, refer
Speaker 1: to this paragraph. But it seems to be roughly around
Speaker 1: the late seventeen early eighteenth century that the more modern
Speaker 1: definition of a paragraph as the passage of text between
Speaker 1: the line breaks and indentation emerges as dominant. UH. And
Speaker 1: Gibson points to a seventeen oh six new edition of
Speaker 1: the New World of English words, which defines a paragraph
Speaker 1: as quote a portion of matter of discourse or treatise
Speaker 1: contained between two breaks, i e. Which begins with a
Speaker 1: new line and ends where the line breaks off. So
Speaker 1: by around that time you've got people talking about paragraphs,
Speaker 1: and they are the paragraphs that we have today. It's
Speaker 1: a chunk of text between line breaks. But this leads
Speaker 1: to another question, which is the question of paragraph theory.
Speaker 1: What actually makes a paragraph? Surely people who study language
Speaker 1: and writing must have come up with ideas of Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, you go out and look at paragraphs and books.
Speaker 1: What are the things that paragraphs have in common? How
Speaker 1: do authors decide where to break the line? And this
Speaker 1: question is not nearly as easy to answer as you
Speaker 1: might assume, especially because, uh, you know, this is not
Speaker 1: the only thing like this in the world. But it's
Speaker 1: one case where there's sort of a formal definition that
Speaker 1: you will find taught in school and that you will
Speaker 1: find in a lot of textbooks that does not at
Speaker 1: all seem to describe what happens just out in the world. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and the difference here is that you've got all
Speaker 1: kinds of prescriptive definitions of the paragraph, often saying that
Speaker 1: a paragraph sort of explores a central idea or a topic.
Speaker 1: And we'll get to one major proponent of this idea
Speaker 1: in just a bit. But one person that Gibson points
Speaker 1: to in his essay is a poet and art critic
Speaker 1: named Herbert Reid, who wrote a nineteen book on English
Speaker 1: prose style, and Gibson writes about read quote taking up
Speaker 1: his nearly century old book one recognizes a peculiar tradition
Speaker 1: in which one textbook after another, one generation after another,
Speaker 1: has promoted a blueprint for paragraph construction conspicuously at odds
Speaker 1: with the prose of the most highly acclaimed stylists of
Speaker 1: the English language. So, in other words, there's a conflict
Speaker 1: between how paragraphs are theorized in textbooks and taught in
Speaker 1: schools and how they're actually used by writers, especially the
Speaker 1: most popular writers in a culture. Good writers do not
Speaker 1: usually write comp one oh one style essays with clear
Speaker 1: topic sentences and one central idea per paragraph. How often
Speaker 1: do you come across that in a book you actually
Speaker 1: like to read? Yeah? Not often, you know. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was for the last episode, and for this episode,
Speaker 1: I did a lot of looking around, thinking, well that
Speaker 1: I should be able to find some perfect paragraphs out
Speaker 1: there in books that I that I love and books
Speaker 1: that I admire, and it's it's it's really hard because
Speaker 1: if you go into it thinking about paragraphs and perhaps
Speaker 1: having at least this shadow of the of this school book,
Speaker 1: this textbook paragraph in your mind, you find all sorts
Speaker 1: of things that don't really fit that form. Absolutely. So
Speaker 1: you look at your favorite books, you are probably just
Speaker 1: not going to find too many paragraphs that have a
Speaker 1: topic sentence and then supporting sentences developing that topic idea,
Speaker 1: and then a line break when you're done with that topic,
Speaker 1: moving on to the next thing. There are some reasons
Speaker 1: we can talk about where I think it might make
Speaker 1: sense for composition classes to teach it that way, But yeah,
Speaker 1: this is just not usually what you're gonna find out
Speaker 1: in the wild and in the books you like. And
Speaker 1: so we're back to the question again, like what actually
Speaker 1: causes those paragraph breaks to happen where they do. They're
Speaker 1: not random. If you were to just rearrange them at random,
Speaker 1: it would probably produce a less good and less cohesive text.
Speaker 1: And yet it's very hard to actually come up with
Speaker 1: rules to explain why they come in the places they do.
Speaker 1: I'll also say that I think that a very effective
Speaker 1: but standard, you know, sort of textbook paragraph is kind
Speaker 1: of like a brick and a cathedral. Um. The bricks
Speaker 1: are important, and there may be a lot of bricks,
Speaker 1: and they're holding things together, but they're not the part
Speaker 1: you remember. You remember the flying buttresses, you remember the gargoyles,
Speaker 1: and the and the stained glass windows and the uh
Speaker 1: and and things of that nature. And so the parts
Speaker 1: of a text, and in fact, the paragraphs of a text,
Speaker 1: they probably stand out the most to us are the
Speaker 1: ones that are weird, that are you know, big run
Speaker 1: roll on sentences, are short, little fragments that have a
Speaker 1: lot of weird things going on in them, Like those
Speaker 1: are those are the things that catch our eye. Those
Speaker 1: are the ones we remember. Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: And uh. And I think even by looking at some
Speaker 1: of the more prescriptive paragraph theorists, even if their prescriptive
Speaker 1: definitions of paragraphs don't really describe what you see in
Speaker 1: the world, um, they do make some observations that are useful.
Speaker 1: And one thing that's stuck with me here is that
Speaker 1: in Gibson's article, he cites an American lawyer and grammarian
Speaker 1: named Lindley Murray, who in seventeen wrote a book on
Speaker 1: English grammar called English Grammar, which makes some recommendations on
Speaker 1: how a composition should be divided into paragraphs, and literally
Speaker 1: writes that ideally a paragraph is about a single subject.
Speaker 1: Each subject should get its own paragraph, unless subjects are
Speaker 1: very short. Uh. Subjects that are very long should be
Speaker 1: divided into multiple paragraphs or getting into some some vagueness
Speaker 1: about exactly what is very short or very long here,
Speaker 1: And who knows. People in seventeen might have had more
Speaker 1: tolerance for very long paragraphs. I'm not not not sure
Speaker 1: about that, but that seems possible based on the text
Speaker 1: sive surveyed. But one thing Linley Murray says that I
Speaker 1: do think is still true is that you should often
Speaker 1: try to place the paragraph breaks quote at sentiments of
Speaker 1: the most weight or that call for particular attention. So
Speaker 1: when you have to divide subjects across multiple paragraphs, you
Speaker 1: are looking for places to to place the paragraph breaks
Speaker 1: that will call attention to the sentences directly before or after. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so it's interesting that Murray senses what what Gibson
Speaker 1: in his essay describes as these quote hot spots places
Speaker 1: in the text, typically occurring near paragraph breaks, where the
Speaker 1: power of the words increases or is emphasized. Paragraph breaks
Speaker 1: tend to draw attention to the words right before and
Speaker 1: after them. This is a great idea, of course, because
Speaker 1: as a as a writer, you want the reader to
Speaker 1: keep reading and and this this kind of works like
Speaker 1: like an arrow pointing from one chunk of text to
Speaker 1: the next, almost like uh, connecting one tile in a
Speaker 1: board game to the following tile. You know where to go,
Speaker 1: and you want to go there, yes, And I think
Speaker 1: at this time it's also already recognized that paragraph length
Speaker 1: plays an important role, not just in organizing the contents
Speaker 1: of a piece of writing, but also in sort of
Speaker 1: managing energy and attention of the reader. Because again, if
Speaker 1: paragraphs are too short, the text starts to feel frivolous
Speaker 1: or insubstantial, and if paragraphs are too long, the text
Speaker 1: starts to feel tedious and over taxing, and so balancing
Speaker 1: paragraph length serves the function of not losing the reader
Speaker 1: than But okay, it's time to talk about Alexander Bain,
Speaker 1: because when you get into paragraph theory, this is a
Speaker 1: name that is cited and essentially every piece of writing
Speaker 1: on this subject. Alexander Bain is the king of paragraph theory.
Speaker 1: So he was. He was a professor in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century in Scotland. He was the He was the chair
Speaker 1: of Logic and the chair of English Literature at the
Speaker 1: University of Aberdeen. I think he was given those posts
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty one, and uh he was. He had
Speaker 1: a He was one of those people at the time
Speaker 1: who just had like a poker and a number of
Speaker 1: different fire So I think he was also influential in
Speaker 1: the early development of psychology. Uh yeah, but also logic
Speaker 1: and also English literature. So um. He became a teacher
Speaker 1: of composition at Aberdeen and ended up writing his own
Speaker 1: text book for his classes that was called English Composition
Speaker 1: and Rhetoric, a manual. This was published in the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It contained what a scholar called Paul Rogers called the
Speaker 1: first systematic formulation of paragraph theory. And if you you
Speaker 1: ever took a comp one oh one class, you will
Speaker 1: probably recognize Bain's idea. Bain's primary concern with paragraphs was unity,
Speaker 1: that each paragraph should have what's called unity of purpose.
Speaker 1: It's doing one main thing. And he had like six
Speaker 1: rules about paragraphs. They are things like first rule, the
Speaker 1: bearing of each sentence upon what proceeds shall be explicit
Speaker 1: and unmistakable. Too, when several consecutive sentences iterate or illustrate
Speaker 1: the same idea, they go, so far as possible be
Speaker 1: formed alike. And then three, here's the big one. The
Speaker 1: opening sentence, unless so constructed as to be obviously preparatory,
Speaker 1: is expected to indicate with prominence the subject of the paragraph.
Speaker 1: And here it is, this is your topic sentence rule
Speaker 1: number three. So, for Alexander Bain, each paragraph in a
Speaker 1: composition should exhaust a single subject, and the paragraph should
Speaker 1: begin with a succinct statement of that subject, which is
Speaker 1: then to be developed in the following sentences. Don't you
Speaker 1: just thrill with the love of the English language. But
Speaker 1: Bain's ideas did prove very influential, and, according to Gibson,
Speaker 1: at least one half of the modern discourse on paragraph
Speaker 1: theory still basically derives from Bain. Gibson writes, citing another
Speaker 1: rhetorician named Mike Duncan, that there are two major schools
Speaker 1: of thought in paragraph theory. You've got prescriptivists and descriptivists.
Speaker 1: Paragraph prescriptivists usually say something like, the paragraph is an
Speaker 1: ideal structure with an ideal form. It's based on unity
Speaker 1: of purpose. Like Bain said, it should be about one
Speaker 1: thing and it should cover that one thing and then uh,
Speaker 1: and that form, that ideal form can be emulated by
Speaker 1: students to practice their writing. Meanwhile, paragraph descriptivists would have
Speaker 1: what Gibson calls quote a looser inductive approach to instruction,
Speaker 1: with Bain style rules limited to suggesting a structural ideal
Speaker 1: that is only rarely seen and thinking about it. I
Speaker 1: can see how there are advantages to teaching writing with
Speaker 1: with each of these approaches. Uh. So the descriptive school,
Speaker 1: to my mind, saying yeah, paragraphs don't usually work that
Speaker 1: way is more honest. It is more honest about how
Speaker 1: paragraphs are actually formed in popular writing, but it's also
Speaker 1: a lot harder to teach. I mean, if the truth
Speaker 1: is that a paragraph can be anything you want it
Speaker 1: to be as long as it works, as long as
Speaker 1: it makes sense and feels good to the reader, that
Speaker 1: is a true statement. But a student probably doesn't know
Speaker 1: how to create a paragraph that works unless they're just
Speaker 1: naturally talented, So this is just not very helpful advice.
Speaker 1: So incomes the prescriptive model. It doesn't usually describe most
Speaker 1: of the paragraphs you'll find in books you like, and
Speaker 1: and and articles you like, but it is actually something
Speaker 1: that can be taught and has the utility in creating
Speaker 1: a structure that students can use to organize their thoughts
Speaker 1: and make them clear. So it is better than nothing.
Speaker 1: It is better than not being able to write anything
Speaker 1: coherent at all. But then again, if you learn composition
Speaker 1: on the basis of the prescriptivist thought, and you're you're
Speaker 1: writing Alexander Bain style paragraphs with topic sentences, the classic
Speaker 1: five paragraph essay for for a school class, I wonder
Speaker 1: does that constrict the development of your writing skill in
Speaker 1: the domain of organic paragraphs. Yeah, I don't know, And
Speaker 1: it certainly makes me think of of the old standard
Speaker 1: that you need to learn the rules before you break
Speaker 1: the rules that you need to It's better to start
Speaker 1: with this rule based system and then move out from that.
Speaker 1: Uh So you'll have, you know, somewhere to go and
Speaker 1: somewhere to sort of look back to. Um. So I
Speaker 1: can see the I certainly see the appeal of of
Speaker 1: of valuing both approaches to the paragraph. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I can agree with that, and I guess I was
Speaker 1: sort of already getting at this, But to make it
Speaker 1: more clear, I wonder if this is just one of
Speaker 1: those things that is a product of necessity stemming from
Speaker 1: the realities of teaching, Like there's no systematic way to
Speaker 1: teach a student to be a great prose stylist, to just,
Speaker 1: you know, to write great organic paragraphs that people love
Speaker 1: to read. Like, what would you tell them to do
Speaker 1: is like, no, use this word here, And you know,
Speaker 1: like you probably just can't really teach that unless you're
Speaker 1: gonna stick with them their entire life and just be
Speaker 1: really intensive. But you probably can, in the course of
Speaker 1: a semester help teach a student to better organize their
Speaker 1: thoughts more clearly with a structure like the five paragraph
Speaker 1: essay that has paragraphs with topic sentences that are each
Speaker 1: about a single subject. So I think taking a student
Speaker 1: from incoherent in writing to reasonably clear five paragraph essay
Speaker 1: with Baines style conventions, that's doable. Teaching someone to write
Speaker 1: wonderful organic paragraphs is much more challenging. Yeah, And this
Speaker 1: is something that's gonna be a no brainer to any
Speaker 1: teachers out there, and certainly to any parents of children
Speaker 1: who are still learning how to write. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: my sons are doing pretty well, but um but, I
Speaker 1: mean I've seen some real dogs of paragraphs when it
Speaker 1: comes to, uh, to putting things together, because you know,
Speaker 1: he I have to remind myself. I've had to remind
Speaker 1: myself in the in these times it's like, yeah, he
Speaker 1: he may he he reads a lot and he's he
Speaker 1: gets to see a lot of of well constructed paragraphs
Speaker 1: and para apps that are definitely doing their job within
Speaker 1: narrative works and so forth. But you've got to start somewhere.
Speaker 1: You've got to have like some sort of basic form
Speaker 1: in mind, especially when you're doing these very um, you know,
Speaker 1: wrote sort of assignments where it's all about constructing, uh,
Speaker 1: stracting the sentences, forming those sentences into paragraphs, and having
Speaker 1: you know, X number of paragraphs to illustrate a basic concept. Yes,
Speaker 1: and in the defense of the five paragraph essay and
Speaker 1: and the Alexander Baines style paragraph, uh, I would say
Speaker 1: that's useful for more than just producing a piece of
Speaker 1: writing somebody would actually want to read. It is useful
Speaker 1: for practicing organizing your own thoughts. I know, I've said
Speaker 1: on the podcast before that I often feel like I
Speaker 1: don't really understand what I think about an issue, often
Speaker 1: until I try to write about it. Writing is the
Speaker 1: process by which I realize which of my intuitions I
Speaker 1: do think are true and make sense, and which ones
Speaker 1: are not and I should just abandon It's a Writing
Speaker 1: for me is very much a process of figuring out
Speaker 1: what I really think and organizing those thoughts into a
Speaker 1: structure that makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely, I I certainly agree
Speaker 1: with that. Oftentimes, oftentimes find myself in a situation where
Speaker 1: I have to write about a topic, my thoughts on
Speaker 1: the topic or just the general knowledge about that topic.
Speaker 1: It's kind of all over the place. But you've got
Speaker 1: to start somewhere. And uh, and so that just that
Speaker 1: first sentence, that first paragraph, that opening paragraph of of
Speaker 1: a work, even if it's not the lead paragraph, you
Speaker 1: end up sticking with Like that is often for me,
Speaker 1: Like that's kind of like staking a place in the ground.
Speaker 1: That's like where you begin to to actually trace out
Speaker 1: where you're going to build the rest of the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you remember, a long time ago, we did an episode
Speaker 1: that I think back on fairly often about the illusion
Speaker 1: of explanatory depth, the psychology concept where you can think
Speaker 1: you understand how something works, but you actually don't until
Speaker 1: you are forced to try to explain it. Uh. Easy
Speaker 1: example for this is, uh, do you know how to
Speaker 1: draw a bicycle with all the parts? And everybody thinks
Speaker 1: they do, but you actually try to draw one, and like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the percentage of people has, but
Speaker 1: a huge percentage of people actually they draw a bicycle
Speaker 1: that could not work, like they don't actually know what
Speaker 1: parts connect to what and and everything. Um. And the
Speaker 1: same is true for like a toilet tank or other
Speaker 1: things that we just think we understand how they work
Speaker 1: until we have to get explicit and into the details
Speaker 1: about it. And writing can be an exercise like that,
Speaker 1: Like trying to draw the bicycle, It helps you realize
Speaker 1: what you thought you understood or new, but you don't.
Speaker 1: You don't actually, so now you've got to go back
Speaker 1: and figure things out now. I was thinking about another
Speaker 1: difference between the you know, the lovely organic paragraph that
Speaker 1: sort of moves on its own terms and and you
Speaker 1: can't really say what exactly the rules for its structure are,
Speaker 1: versus the Alexander Bain style prescriptive topic, sentence, paragraph, and
Speaker 1: and I think one difference is simply that these are
Speaker 1: achieving different goals. One is style and the other is clarity.
Speaker 1: And if if like a fiction book, we're full of
Speaker 1: Bain style paragraphs, I think that would obviously become very
Speaker 1: tedious and unpleasant to read. So of course there's the
Speaker 1: idea that good prose stylists don't usually follow this format.
Speaker 1: And yet I can think of documents where I would
Speaker 1: much rather have the document read in and Alexander Bain
Speaker 1: style instead of having you know, uh, sort of more
Speaker 1: loosey goosey organic paragraphs. And examples would be things like
Speaker 1: an article in a science journal or a medical article,
Speaker 1: or a legal document, or a list of instructions for
Speaker 1: building something, basically anywhere that clarity and logical organization are
Speaker 1: more important than uh, style and energy and pleasure of reading.
Speaker 1: I think that the Bain style structure is a good approach. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting point, and it made me think
Speaker 1: of how I use a lot of texts for work
Speaker 1: and for research, because I think an interesting aspect of
Speaker 1: the text to think about here is skimmability for texts
Speaker 1: that are not expressly for pleasure. Uh, you know, certainly
Speaker 1: if it's something I'm using for research purposes. Some In
Speaker 1: some cases I read the entire book, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: cover to cover. Other times I'm in there to get
Speaker 1: specific things from that author. I know they're specific topics
Speaker 1: or it's a specific part of a study that I'm
Speaker 1: interested in. And for that, Yeah, paragraphs are breaks and
Speaker 1: paragraph structure are pretty important because I need to be
Speaker 1: able to move around in that text. I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna eat at all. I need to be able
Speaker 1: to pick out the things I want, and so it
Speaker 1: helps if those morsels are separated from each other on
Speaker 1: the platter. I think they're Also these are the kind
Speaker 1: of documents that in many cases would benefit from being
Speaker 1: removed from the flowing prose style altogether and just become
Speaker 1: lists of bullet points. Yeah, yeah, I mean you see
Speaker 1: this and instructions right, Uh, Similarly, guidelines and whatnot. They're
Speaker 1: generally not going to be arranged in um in multi
Speaker 1: paragraph form. It's going to be bullet points and numbers
Speaker 1: and also illustrations and so forth. But you do find
Speaker 1: this with recipes, I guess. But even then you'll have
Speaker 1: numbers or bullet points in there as well. So you
Speaker 1: can easily skip from this paragraph to this paragraph. So
Speaker 1: it's you're very clear on which step am I on totally.
Speaker 1: I mean, I love organic flowing pros, but I don't
Speaker 1: want it in a recipe. But you will get it
Speaker 1: in your recipe on every recipe blog out there. And
Speaker 1: I think you often hear people gribe about this, and
Speaker 1: I think it's because of that, that collision of two things.
Speaker 1: You'll often have a an organic organic paragraphs forming this um,
Speaker 1: this conversational blog post about a particular recipe about a
Speaker 1: particular drink or or food culture, whatever it happens to be.
Speaker 1: But then this article also contains the recipe a thing
Speaker 1: that that is very much uh, you know, a situation
Speaker 1: where you want to go in what you need, jump
Speaker 1: in at the right step, and get out again. And
Speaker 1: if you're hit with both styles, I mean that can
Speaker 1: be a little bit jarring, Yeah, especially if it's not
Speaker 1: so I was gonna qualify what I said with like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I can understand, you know, sort of a thing that's
Speaker 1: two parts. It's like the recipe as a list of
Speaker 1: instruct clear instructions with bullet points, and then above that,
Speaker 1: like an article that explains in more detail, but uh,
Speaker 1: it does get frustrating, like if it's not clear at
Speaker 1: first glance whether you need to read the article or
Speaker 1: not in order to make the recipe, you're like, am
Speaker 1: I gonna be missing something if I don't read all
Speaker 1: this text right? And And one of the problems I
Speaker 1: think with with blog posts is it comes down to formatting.
Speaker 1: Because if you have a really good book, like I
Speaker 1: have a few different books on on cocktails and and
Speaker 1: those are often nice because they're very well formatted and
Speaker 1: you can easily see where is the cocktail recipe and
Speaker 1: where where is the you know, the article, where's the
Speaker 1: pros about this cocktail or the history of the cocktail, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But if you're dealing with a blog format, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's some great blog templates out there, but you don't
Speaker 1: always have that much freedom, and you're often left doing
Speaker 1: something that is a little more alike blog post at
Speaker 1: the top, recipe at the bottom, or worse, I guess,
Speaker 1: is something where there is no distinction, where the recipe
Speaker 1: is just immersed within the more pros based blog post. So,
Speaker 1: in thinking about paragraphs and and organization of pieces of writing,
Speaker 1: I was looking at an interesting article called The Music
Speaker 1: of Form, Rethinking, Organization and Writing by Peter Elbow, which
Speaker 1: was published in College Composition and Communication in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, and um, the main thing I wanted to
Speaker 1: mention from this Most of this essay is about Elbow
Speaker 1: talking about possibly thinking of writing as an alogous to
Speaker 1: music and having music style organizational techniques. But but I
Speaker 1: want to start with this metaphor. So Elbow describes a painting.
Speaker 1: He uses the example of Edward Hopper's Night Hawks and says,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, we're we're humans were able to stand
Speaker 1: several feet back from this painting and see it as
Speaker 1: a whole right, you can just look at it. You
Speaker 1: can see the whole thing, and you can understand it
Speaker 1: as a composition of different parts that it that emerges
Speaker 1: from how they all come together at once. But then
Speaker 1: he says, okay, now take the same painting and imagine
Speaker 1: instead that you are an aunt and you can only
Speaker 1: look at the painting a little bit at a time
Speaker 1: by crawling over the surface of it, and thus your
Speaker 1: idea of the whole painting has to come together a
Speaker 1: little bit at a time and involves your use of
Speaker 1: memory of what parts you previously looked at, and probably
Speaker 1: also some imagination of what parts you haven't looked at yet,
Speaker 1: and then elbow writes quote. When we read a text,
Speaker 1: we are like the ant. The text is laid out
Speaker 1: in space across multiple pages, but we can only read
Speaker 1: one small part at a time. We may jump around
Speaker 1: the text grasshopper like, especially with long texts, looking at
Speaker 1: chapter titles and other headings, browsing the openings and closings
Speaker 1: of chapters, looking for quote perspective. Some texts to lead
Speaker 1: off with an abstract, as this journal now asks. Books
Speaker 1: have tables of contents, but still we can take in
Speaker 1: relatively few words at a time. So here's my question.
Speaker 1: If texts are spatial phenomena, and yet our experience of
Speaker 1: them is necessarily tim poral, how can we best organized
Speaker 1: texts for readers? How could we organize paintings for ants?
Speaker 1: This is this is great. I love this way of
Speaker 1: thinking about it, the ant crawling over the painting, trying
Speaker 1: to form this idea of what the painting looks like.
Speaker 1: And I think that gets down to one of the
Speaker 1: problems of thinking, Oh, I'm going to find that great
Speaker 1: paragraph in that book. I love, because no paragraph, for
Speaker 1: the most part there may be some exceptions, and and
Speaker 1: maybe I can think of one or two, but they're
Speaker 1: so rare. For the most part, the paragraph, any given
Speaker 1: paragraph is not a miniaturization of the larger work and
Speaker 1: cannot properly convey the idea of the larger work. Right.
Speaker 1: I thought this metaphor was so interesting because it's true,
Speaker 1: and that, like a lot of the stuff people do,
Speaker 1: like conventions of writing, like the Alexander Bain style paragraph
Speaker 1: or the five paragraph essay and a composition class are
Speaker 1: designed to give you a structure that would help an
Speaker 1: ant understand what the whole painting is even after they're
Speaker 1: even while they're only you know, crawling over a bit
Speaker 1: of it at a time, because it's so familiar. You
Speaker 1: know what the structure is, you know where you are
Speaker 1: within it at any given time, you know roughly what
Speaker 1: the whole thing is going to look like, and that
Speaker 1: that type of mapping or sign posting does provide some
Speaker 1: some perspective to you know, the aunt crawling over the painting,
Speaker 1: or the human being reading a text. And yet they
Speaker 1: come with disadvantages, and and Elbow identifies a number of them.
Speaker 1: But when he talks about is um, the idea of
Speaker 1: energy like that. Uh. Text with good organic paragraphs that
Speaker 1: are not organized in such a you know, mapped out
Speaker 1: in signposted way, they tend to have more more power
Speaker 1: to pull you along and make you want to keep
Speaker 1: reading and feel more like music, have those kind of
Speaker 1: interesting little melodies and themes that recur. Uh. He calls
Speaker 1: this other style, you know, the non signposted style, dynamic organization.
Speaker 1: And one interesting comparison that he makes is that he
Speaker 1: has dynamic organization can have not just style advantages. It's
Speaker 1: not just you know, more interesting and pleasant to read
Speaker 1: kind of organic paragraphs that uh that that are not
Speaker 1: so signposted. It can have a revelatory power of its own.
Speaker 1: It can actually show you things that a well mapped
Speaker 1: signposted paragraph for essay cannot. And the example he uses
Speaker 1: is um is a comparison to Platonic dialogues that This
Speaker 1: comes from an author named Burke writing about Plato's dialogue
Speaker 1: The Padress, and Burke writes the following quote for a
Speaker 1: Platonic dialogue is not formed simply by breaking an idea
Speaker 1: into its component parts and taking them up in a
Speaker 1: one two three order. The purely scholastic aspect in Aristotle's
Speaker 1: method of exposition. A platonic dialogue is rather a process
Speaker 1: of transformation, whereby the position at the end transcends the
Speaker 1: position at the start, so that the position at the
Speaker 1: start can eventually be seen in terms of the new
Speaker 1: motivation encountered en route. And I think that that's a
Speaker 1: great point of comparison, because a lot of good writing
Speaker 1: has the quality of following the author's thoughts. So we're
Speaker 1: not just seeing like a presentation of of pre approved
Speaker 1: informational tidbits, you know, arranged into paragraph form, but we
Speaker 1: are actually discovered the the author is showing us something
Speaker 1: about how they come to an idea, they get from
Speaker 1: here to there, They're taking us along the way with them,
Speaker 1: and that can be just as enlightening as a clearly
Speaker 1: organized list of conclusions. Yeah, and and of course the
Speaker 1: style is going to inform so much of how you
Speaker 1: understand the the the inner workings of an author's mind
Speaker 1: and how you connect with it. Like you know, for instance,
Speaker 1: uh Borhes is going to have a totally different feel
Speaker 1: for his paragraphs compared to Hunter S. Thompson One. With
Speaker 1: Thompson's paragraphs, there's more this sort of crackling live wire
Speaker 1: intensity to them. Directing one thought to the next, whereas
Speaker 1: Borhes is gonna he's gonna take his time, and he's
Speaker 1: it's more like a like like a like a vapor
Speaker 1: drifting through a wing of a library. Uh and uh
Speaker 1: and and so they're they're totally different experiences, and they're
Speaker 1: giving you a snapshot into the way connections are forming
Speaker 1: in the author's minds. Oh yeah, sure, I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess I've mainly now been thinking about nonfiction writing. But
Speaker 1: when you get into fiction, yeah, that's a totally different
Speaker 1: ball game also. But anyway, a lot of this essay
Speaker 1: seems to play on this metaphor of music and how
Speaker 1: you could think about uh writing as as analogous to
Speaker 1: music in various ways, and how that also helps you
Speaker 1: think about compromises between the the highly organized, signposted structure
Speaker 1: of like the five paragraph essay versus the dynamic organization
Speaker 1: of the organic paragraph uh, and how you can you
Speaker 1: can blend them together to to to have maximum effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's this great that from from elbow and a read
Speaker 1: here quote. Whole text need larger global pieces of energy.
Speaker 1: It's not enough if paragraphs are sections hold together and
Speaker 1: pull us through from one to another. We also need
Speaker 1: a sense of the whole as whole, a matter that
Speaker 1: Williams treats, but very briefly. This energy comes from the
Speaker 1: same forces that hold music together, sequences of expectation and
Speaker 1: eventual satisfaction, larger melodic or harmonic rhythms, or examples of
Speaker 1: what I am calling the music of form. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this this interests me because the author here mentions the
Speaker 1: use of story thinking at times, and this brought to
Speaker 1: mind the formulaic nature of most storytelling and fiction weaving endeavors.
Speaker 1: You know certain structures are going to be followed, certain
Speaker 1: tropes you're going to be invoked, and this does present
Speaker 1: a kind of form that pulls us along. For instance,
Speaker 1: many of the movies we discussed on Weird How Cinema
Speaker 1: follow very expected structures and invoke expected elements. And while
Speaker 1: this certainly can make a movie viewing experience feel to formulaic,
Speaker 1: in some cases, it can also provide the necessary pull.
Speaker 1: The genre trappings can often serve as a kind of
Speaker 1: airport conveyor belt that makes it easier to move through
Speaker 1: the work. You put up with the humdrum human interactions
Speaker 1: because you know that genre it demands that some of
Speaker 1: these humans are about to be eaten by a monster
Speaker 1: or knife in the back, by slash or whatever the
Speaker 1: case may be. Uh, And and that may be the
Speaker 1: aspect you're far more interested in. Also playing into the
Speaker 1: the the idea of expectation in music. I mean this
Speaker 1: brings me back to some of our past discussions of music,
Speaker 1: that it's not only about expectations being met, but expectations
Speaker 1: being subverted. So you think that the next note is
Speaker 1: going to do this, but then it does that, and
Speaker 1: that's what makes it fabulous. And that too is one
Speaker 1: of the great things in in film, but also in writing,
Speaker 1: like it's the beat that you think is coming, the
Speaker 1: rhyme that you think is coming, or whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be, it ends up being something else instead. And
Speaker 1: if you if you tease it apart and tear it apart,
Speaker 1: that that may seem more mundane, but in the actual
Speaker 1: experience of the thing it can be it can just
Speaker 1: give you chills. Yeah, And I think, uh that that
Speaker 1: is one way in which reading and music are very similar.
Speaker 1: I mean elbows correct that you know, you can only
Speaker 1: sort of experience them in a linear way, like one
Speaker 1: moment at a time. You can't hear a whole piece
Speaker 1: of music at once, or read a whole piece of
Speaker 1: writing at once. And so it's that process of having
Speaker 1: to go through one bit at a time in a
Speaker 1: linear way that makes these prediction subversion patterns so important.
Speaker 1: It's something about creating a great piece of music or
Speaker 1: a great piece of writing has to do with finding
Speaker 1: the right balance of meeting expectations and then subverting expectations,
Speaker 1: like just to just to come back to to to
Speaker 1: to to be movies for a second, like, sometimes the
Speaker 1: subversion that works is accidental, Like sometimes it's the fact
Speaker 1: that the monster jumps out and doesn't look right, and
Speaker 1: that looks like the effect doesn't work like that is
Speaker 1: not the subversion that the filmmakers were going for. Uh,
Speaker 1: if the left of their own devices and being if
Speaker 1: they were able to achieve everything I wanted to achieve,
Speaker 1: it may have not. The finished work may not have
Speaker 1: been that different from the works that inspired it. But
Speaker 1: sometimes just um an error in style or or a
Speaker 1: weirdness of effect can subvert expectations in a way that
Speaker 1: makes it memorable, Like Jason takes Manhattan when when the
Speaker 1: mask finally comes off and he looks a little little
Speaker 1: weird a little cutely. Yeah, like that. That's memorable, because
Speaker 1: that's not really what you were expecting based on previous
Speaker 1: experiences with the form, with the with the Jason movie
Speaker 1: and what an unmasking has previously been. I don't think
Speaker 1: they made him cute on purpose. I think that was
Speaker 1: a that was a felicitous accident. Yeah, the rob did
Speaker 1: you tell me before we started recording that you found
Speaker 1: a book with no paragraph breaks in it? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: this morning, in fact, I was, I was looking around
Speaker 1: on my bookshelf and I was I was asking myself, Okay,
Speaker 1: which of these has some great paragraphs? And there's gotta
Speaker 1: be another great paragraph, another great intro paragraph. And I
Speaker 1: did find a nice intro paragraph in another um Alan
Speaker 1: Roque rule a book. But I also realized, oh, I
Speaker 1: do own a book that has I think no paragraph
Speaker 1: breaks in the text itself, and it achieves this, uh
Speaker 1: through It's kind of cheating, I guess. But it is
Speaker 1: a book you might be familiar with, Joe. It's titled
Speaker 1: four Stories by Thomas Bernard. Uh the voice Imitator. So
Speaker 1: Thomas Bernard in this book is writing short shorts. These
Speaker 1: are very short stories. Uh. They are all as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell and remember, one paragraph long. The
Speaker 1: paragraphs range and size. Some of them are rather lengthy paragraphs,
Speaker 1: some of them are very short. But in every case
Speaker 1: I believe the paragraph is the complete story. Therefore, there
Speaker 1: are not really paragraph breaks within each work. Now they're
Speaker 1: certainly paragraph breaks between works, but each story itself has
Speaker 1: no paragraph breaks. Okay, so you can look at this
Speaker 1: as a work uh with with no paragraph breaks, or
Speaker 1: work with extreme paragraph breaks where every break is the
Speaker 1: end of the text. I guess. Yeah, Like, just given
Speaker 1: exact this is certainly a book worth picking up if
Speaker 1: anyone out there is interested in short shorts as a form,
Speaker 1: which I do find quite fascinating because at times, I,
Speaker 1: especially when I'm getting into bores, I keep thinking, well,
Speaker 1: it's the shorter works that are really the ones that
Speaker 1: resonate with me the most. You know, some sort of
Speaker 1: like Philip K. Dick's story that just is about a
Speaker 1: little idea, and so this is kind of the extreme
Speaker 1: form of it. But for example, there's a there is
Speaker 1: a story in here titled Hotel vald House, and this
Speaker 1: is the complete story one paragraph. We had no luck
Speaker 1: with the weather, and the guests at our table were
Speaker 1: repellent in every respect. They even spoiled Nietzsche for us.
Speaker 1: Even after they had had a fatal car accident and
Speaker 1: had been laid out in the church in Sills, we
Speaker 1: still hated them. Complete story. So there's another author I've
Speaker 1: been reading recently who I love, who also has some
Speaker 1: very short short stories named Lydia Davis. Do you know
Speaker 1: Lydia Davis? I don't think I know that one though. Oh.
Speaker 1: She writes a lot of like really gray, excruciatingly observed
Speaker 1: relationship stories, um, that are just full of like horrible,
Speaker 1: grown inducing details and dynamics. But they're they're wonderful. Is
Speaker 1: She's a great writer, and she has a lot of
Speaker 1: single paragraph stories that are really good nice. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess it comes down to ye, depending on how
Speaker 1: you shake it and depending on how you discuss the paragraphs.
Speaker 1: There are works out there that have no paragraph breaks.
Speaker 1: But um, but yeah, the the extreme interpretation of that
Speaker 1: would just be works I guess that are just big
Speaker 1: vomit of of just a big bolus of of of words,
Speaker 1: of words and symbols, right, I mean it just you
Speaker 1: when you lose the form, you you lose the message.
Speaker 1: Like the format is part of the communication. It's just
Speaker 1: something I keep coming back to and thinking about this topic. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if somebody was teaching something you wrote in a classroom,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't know, you would not want them to go
Speaker 1: in and insert paragraph breaks where you did not have them.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know, I don't, I don't. I
Speaker 1: would guess throw them in if you need to write. Okay, no,
Speaker 1: I I see what you're saying. Then it is part
Speaker 1: of the message. But you're not gonna be so precious
Speaker 1: that you couldn't add a few extra right. Well, I
Speaker 1: think part of this, this exploration in the paragraph says,
Speaker 1: made me question that the use of paragraph breaks in
Speaker 1: other works, especially older works, like I really kind of
Speaker 1: took it for granted. You know, some some paragraphs are long,
Speaker 1: summer short. I didn't really think that about the the
Speaker 1: idea of even breaking them up. And now I'm looking back,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, well, you know, Borhes is going a
Speaker 1: little long in this opening paragraph to this story. Uh
Speaker 1: And and indeed he does go pretty His paragraphs tend
Speaker 1: to be kind of chunky, especially some of the opening paragraphs.
Speaker 1: But um, I'm not saying I would break up his
Speaker 1: text it's not my place, but I guess if someone
Speaker 1: came around and broke some of my text up, I
Speaker 1: would be like, okay, yeah, it's it's probably better. You
Speaker 1: probably probably improved it. Hey. So we got to end
Speaker 1: with the call to the listeners here because there was
Speaker 1: something we were curious about that we couldn't really find
Speaker 1: good answers to. UM, which is, are there languages where
Speaker 1: paragraph organization is significantly different than it is like in
Speaker 1: English that we're familiar with. Uh, Bilingual listeners who read
Speaker 1: and write in in other non English languages? Uh, any
Speaker 1: any interesting differences in how paragraphs are used in those
Speaker 1: languages or or is there a language without paragraphs at
Speaker 1: all that you can tell us about. Yeah. I wasn't
Speaker 1: able to find any good answers on this myself looking
Speaker 1: around there weren't There weren't any discussions about it, and
Speaker 1: certainly I didn't see it addressed in any in any papers.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I would love to hear from anyone out
Speaker 1: there who can can speak to this. It seems like
Speaker 1: it seems like the answer is yes, there are things
Speaker 1: like paragraphs or paragraphs and in in other languages. And
Speaker 1: I didn't see anything about there being particular language traditions
Speaker 1: today where there are no paragraphs, but maybe there are.
Speaker 1: Maybe I missed something, so definitely right in and let
Speaker 1: us know, tell us and certainly the call remains open
Speaker 1: paragraphs that you love in particular works, especially again, I'm
Speaker 1: fascinated by opening aerographs. Uh. And and part of that
Speaker 1: is like thinking, like newspapery about things that this is
Speaker 1: the hook, This is the thing that you are presenting
Speaker 1: the reader with to get them to keep going. So
Speaker 1: what is the what is the opening dish? What is
Speaker 1: the appetizer that will uh make us remain seated for
Speaker 1: the remainder of the meal? Uh? If you have great
Speaker 1: examples of that right in, let us know. Or perhaps
Speaker 1: there are some other works out there you can think
Speaker 1: of in which there are no paragraph breaks. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you would like to check out other episodes of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you will find them in
Speaker 1: the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Core episodes
Speaker 1: come out on Tuesdays and Thursday's Short Form Artifact or
Speaker 1: Monster Fact episodes come out on Wednesdays on Monday's We
Speaker 1: Do Listener Mail on Friday's We Do Weird How Cinema
Speaker 1: That's our Time to set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hello, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart radio,
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