RaceFail '09

It seems to me that an increasingly important, or at least prominent, part of the ongoing discussion, at this stage, is for those of us so inclined to locate and name and try to improve upon our own pieces of Fail in all of this.

One of mine--surely far from the most important or egregious, but one--is the failure to synthesize well, if at all. I haven't followed the discussion closely, being located at a safe and comfortable distance from its epicenter; when it erupts over the horizon of my attention, I poke around reading and feeling horrified and/or enlightened. I think "I must never do that" or "I must really try to do this" and then wander off again, without coming to any systematic conclusions or even beginning to understand the entirety of the thing.

synecdochic, in my humble and obviously limited opinion, synthesizes very well. Her post today is the sort of thing I wish to read over and over, both to try to get the hang of all that it says, and to try to learn how to get to the place of saying those things myself, rather than simply pointing enthusiastically toward them when I find them.

But for now I read, and I point.


NB: comments at that post are being strictly moderated, in accord with the principles laid out in the post itself.