With fifty thousand Twitter followers and a similar number of Tumblr readers, Shire, more than most today, demonstrates the writing life of a young, prolific poet whose poetry or poem-like offhand thoughts will surface in one of your social media feeds and often be exactly what you needed to read, or what you didn't know that you needed to read, at that moment.
Sometimes an offhand remark, a shared thought, a look, or an opinion can alter another's life.
"It was an offhand remark made without thought for the hurt it could cause to those around me". Potgieter was fined $20,000 – with $10,000 suspended – by the Australian Rugby Union for using the homophobic slurs.
Vandalism was replaced by constructive thoughts, and offhand sexism was replaced by explicit respect for women.
When some Londoners expressed their surprise and admiration at the quasi-vigilantism of "Turksec" in Dalston and Hackney, the north London Turkish community who fought off looters with a mixture of togetherness and baseball bats, most grime fans' first thought was Wiley's offhand lyric: "I had this Turkish bredrin from school, all his family were gangsters".
It's in that offhand "by the way," in the sudden thought or the afterthought that Buress seemed most himself, and funniest, as when, returning from a commercial, he said, "Welcome back, or just welcome -- who am I to assume you started watching the show at the beginning?
And yet: there is a ferociously good essay – at once thoughtful and really funny and offhand – on the technical challenges to the novelist of rendering your characters' thoughts.
A proud Jew, and a champion of writers like Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he opposed the Zionist program in the 1940s and could speak with offhand contempt of Judaism, whose sole contribution to human thought, he wrote toward the end of his life, is "a summons to prayer, ritual and obedience".
The same thought recurred to me in a rereading of his offhand Talk of the Town report, written for The New Yorker after he watched the collapse of the twin towers from across the river in Brooklyn Heights: "War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction — that turns a planeful of peaceful passengers, children included, into a missile the faceless enemy deserves.
Allen's songs are simultaneously offhand and precisely calibrated her lyrics sound like they could be the thoughts of any young woman anywhere in the world, yet they are carefully composed and matched to music with a deftness that few of her peers have.
