Read My Body -- Writer's Poke #96

For Writers:

KISS recorded a song called "Read My Body," and you can find it on their 1989 album Hot in the Shade. In what are arguably the most inspired song lyrics of all time, the chorus goes:

Read my body
Are the letters big enough?
Read my body
Do you like the book of my love?
Read my body
Turn the page, get to the good stuff

Okay, so while the Beatles have somehow managed to find inclusion in poetry anthologies, you will probably never find KISS in a Norton any time soon; but it's a fun song, and I think it asks playful questions.

Reading someone's body doesn't have to be a sexual act as suggested above. Body language, otherwise known as nonverbal communication, actually accounts for 55% of the message we convey to others, whereas the actual words we use to communicate, if you can believe it, only convey 7%. The remaining 38% of message conveyed, by the way, occurs through voice tone and quality.

So don't ignore the body. Read it. Start listening more with your eyes.

What does your messages does your body communicate to others?

"I'm not into working out. My philosophy: no pain, no pain." -- George Mead

Comments

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it. Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years. Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him. Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog. https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...

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