The manuscripts aren't definitive, because definitiveness, for better or worse, is the product of deadlines and editors and publishers: things Kafka either went out of his way not to have or ended up not having because of bad luck, tuberculosis and the First World War.
The resulting movies, individually and as a group, make no pretense to definitiveness — blues fanatics, and even normal music fans, will notice omissions.
| Updated | Sandra Steingraber has sent a long response to my question about the definitiveness of the language she used in the letter to Gov. Cuomo to describe breast cancer trends in the Barnett Shale region of Texas.
"This is not a good drink," Mr. Frizell said with unhesitating definitiveness.
I'm interested in the idea that definitiveness or specificity can be painful for people; they're more a function for the people those lines serve".
But Lethem and Dettmar wisely eschew any attempt at definitiveness, and they are quick to acknowledge that their book offers "neither a history of rock and pop nor of rock and pop writing" but, rather, "a feast".
Reading the piece, I kept thinking, These bytes are simply crying out to be mashed and wikied by the hive, endlessly worked over in the name of increasing the correctness or definitiveness of a master list (yes, I've been reading and enjoying Lanier, despite certain overexuberances).
At the same time, there was, in the fashion press, something of a thrill at the definitiveness of it all: she believed in fashion, and she was committed.
A comic, contemplative dynamism, a gratuity, a movement from play to play, a definitiveness that responds to some deep need, a religious need, a sense of meaning that is at once final and provisional: a substratum of dependable regularity, continuity, and an ever renewed variety, openness to new possibilities, new chances.
It quickly ricocheted — via art blogs, design blogs, tech blogs, personal blogs — to BoingBoing.net, which is about as close as the fragmented culture of the Web gets to Walter Cronkite-level definitiveness.
This month, three NASA scientists and several officials at NASA headquarters and at two agency research centers described how news releases on new global warming studies had been revised by administrators to play down definitiveness or risks.
