Language Scraps

God, the Afterlife, and the Scientific Method

2011-08-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

I would like to know whether the traditional religious convictions which hold that “God exists!” and that “there is an afterlife!” are created using the scientific method to interpret subjective data. As I understand the situation of knowledge in relationship to the scientific method, the certainty generated by using the scientific method to reliably predict future events is only reliably possible when using objective data. If that is so, religious convictions which hold that “God exists!” and that “there is an afterlife!” must embrace a greater degree of faith because they seem to be based on using the scientific method with subjective data. But, as a starting point for this journey, is it necessary that the scientific method only be used with objective data for the purpose of reliably predicting future events? Who’s perspective on this matter is trustable and why? Moreover, which method do religious people consciously think they are using to produce convictions that “God exists!” and “there is an afterlife!”? Is there any credible way to see such convictions based on a method other than the scientific method? And again, who’s perspective on this matter is trustable and why?

Lexicon Valley

2011-08-03T12:46:00.000-07:00

So, I was listening to NPR's show "On the Media" and this segment came up unexpectedly...it was great!

Back by popular demand, here's another installment of Mike Vuolo's "Lexicon Valley." In February 2010, the last living speaker of Boa died, and with her, the logic, culture, and history of the ancient people. Mike and Bob discuss the death of languages and why their passing matters. http://www.onthemedia.org/2011/jul/29/lexicon-valley-episode-2/

Our 'Love Affair' With Euphemisms - All Things Considered

2011-02-07T17:01:00.000-08:00

Our 'Love Affair' With Euphemisms

Listen to the Story

All Things Considered

[6 min 31 sec]

text size A A A

February 7, 2011

In Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, author Ralph Keyes explores the power of words and our power over them. Keyes tells host Robert Siegel he's always been interested in the intersection of language and culture, and how the way people talk reflects changes in society. Nothing, he says, does that more than euphemisms.

Science Friday: Jonathon Keats and "Virtual Words"

2010-12-24T15:24:00.000-08:00

via sciencefriday.com

"Do you ever 'tweet?' Does your texting vocabulary include the ultra-brief, but oh-so-useful, 'k?' In this segment, we'll talk with Jonathon Keats, author of the book 'Virtual Words.' Keats, a conceptual artist, also pens Wired's 'Jargon Watch' column. We'll talk about how the rapid pace of technology is creating new words and how new ideas drive new language."

Guests:
Jonathon Keats
Author, Wired magazine's "Jargon Watch"
Virtual Words (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Conceptual Artist
San Francisco, California

download mp3: http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/totn/2010/12/20101224_totn_01.mp3

On Language and Living

2010-12-20T09:50:00.001-08:00

A scene from Godard's "Vivre Sa Vie."

NY Times: John Cage's Piece 4' 33"

2010-12-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

December 14, 2010, 12:06 PM

Just in Time for the Holidays: Cage Against the Machine

By BEN SISARIO

The musicians crowded into a London studio, dozens of them, to record a song for charity. Waiting for their cue, they held guitars and drumsticks, and stood at attention by the microphones. Then the producer gave the count: “Quiet in the studio: one, two …”

And then silence. Exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds of it.

The musicians, including British pop stars like Billy Bragg, the electronic act Orbital and the band Enter Shikari, were there to perform John Cage’s famous tribute to nothingness, “4’ 33”,” as part of a project cheekily called Cage Against the Machine whose goal is to send an unlikely song to the top of the British pop chart at Christmas.

Last year a Facebook campaign helped the anarchist American rock band Rage Against the Machine reach No. 1 with “Killing in the Name,” and now another Web effort is behind Cage Against the Machine. A single is available on iTunes (you can even buy an EP with seven “remixes” of studio chatter and other random sounds), with proceeds going to five British charities.

“Music is made up of more than just formal notes and arrangements,” Julie Hilliard, one of the organizers, told the musicians as they prepared for their silent take. “Here today we are doing something special. We are stopping and appreciating the space between things, the unintentional sounds that make up our world.”

A video of the recording sessions can be seen above or here on YouTube.

Poetry and Philosophy at the Crossroads

2010-12-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

http://www.nhinet.org/ricci20-1.pdf

Perfect Language

2010-12-12T16:23:00.001-08:00

I just remembered there was a quote I read that reminded me of our class. I don't remember who said the quote or exactly how it went, I think it was Peter Benchly - author of Jaws. Anyway whoever it was, they were talking about language and they said something to the effect of the following:

I have terrific understanding of language and its power and so I say nothing...

Alex's Dream

2010-12-09T20:21:00.001-08:00

This is something that I made a while ago. It's an interpretation of what he said about his dream.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK2Ms_U3PqY

Discovering one's own language: another throught

2010-12-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

From "The Clouds Should Know Me by Now" (the Buddhist poet monks of China from the past 700 years)

...Maybe we're in a position now to see that this is what's so compelling in 1500 years of Ch'an poetry. The best poems push no doctrine or dogma, there's no jingo, no proselytizing. The Buddhism is carefully hidden away in tight five- and seven-syllable lines. (This metric pattern, according to Yunte Huang, "is intimately related to the translations from the Sanskrit Buddhist texts. It was the encounter with an alphabetical language--Sanskrit--that made the Chines realize for the first time that a Chinese character was pronounced by a combination of vowel and consonant.")

This came back to me from having recently read it, after Alex told of finding Sicilian to be a written language--his own language, complete.

Ch'i chi (864-937 C.E.)

Don't dye it, don't pull it out,

let it grow all over your head.

No medicine can stop the whiteness,

the blackness won't last out the fall.

Lay your head on a quiet pillow, hear the cicadas,

idly incline it to watch the waters flow--

The reason we can't rise to this broader view of life

is because, white hair, you grieve us so!

So much of the poetry takes me to a deeper tranquil and very awake place. But this one shows the abiding sense of humor that surfaces in many of the poets' work. Wanted to share.

Def Poetry Jam - Alicia Keys - POW

2010-12-04T19:53:00.000-08:00

I have been a fan of Def Jam poetry for awhile. I can't help but think of what Alex did on Wednesday and it ties into what Alicia Keys says in this session of Def Jam Poetry. Here is Alex, trying to go above and beyond language just as our earlier readings have suggested. Here is Alicia, speaking of the prisoner she is to words as well. But as Alex, at least, makes the effort to rise above the convention and restrictions we are flooded with, Alicia speaks of a character that finds defeat through the standard and norms of society. This character does not want to offend, does not want to turn anyone away, but in doing so she builds the bars that make her a prisoner. Alex, though some of us may not understand how it all works, does not build any bars or forge any chains. Alex is a guerrilla in the revolution...

Productive Questions/Assignments

2010-12-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

Part 1: Essay

Due by noon on December 13

Write about at least 3 specific works by Alex Caldiero (at least one each from the performance, the film, and the book) in the context of at least 3 specific works we read and discussed in the sections called "the shape of the shapeless: undermining the limits of language" and “the first casualty of war is language” – at least one work from each section. About 6-7 pages.

Draw on notes you have taken during discussions of the texts in class, read the authors’ works closely and carefully, and think rigorously and creatively about the questions you are answering. Don’t write personally about the questions. Don’t simply associate other things with what you read. Instead, use passages from the texts to establish patterns of ideas. What is the author saying in these passages and how do they relate to passages from other texts and authors? That’s your most basic task, to lay out what the text means. Do not stop with paraphrase. If you do, you’re just repeating. Your job is to analyze what you find/what you read, to make sense of the ideas, to find patterns in the texts that you can show to have meaning related to the meanings of other texts.

Part 2: Prepare your Notes and Scraps for evaluation.

On the same day, December 13, hand in your notes/scraps. Include:

1. All the notes you have taken in the second half of the class, notes you have made about (on) each of the texts we have read and discussed, notes you have written to others about this material, all other notes taken or written or drawn for or about this class.

2. All the scraps you have collected, references to the various topics, complementary materials, essays, articles, etchings, clippings and so on related to language in general and specifically, in short: the rich collection of materials you have made in response to our readings and discussions. If you have posted to the Languagescraps blog, note what you have posted.

Helen Keller and Language...

2010-12-01T20:51:00.000-08:00

One of Alex's performances tonight, the one where Alex was feeling his face and making sounds, actually reminded me of Helen Keller - and I mean this as no disrespect to Alex or Helen Keller.

I am really shocked that I haven't ever made the connection between Helen Keller and our class yet... She is one of the most extreme and perfect examples of language. She became blind and deaf while she was a baby and from that point on was at odds with language in all forms. Imagine what an incredible breakthrough it must have been for her to finally be able to communicate - "water" was the word that unlocked language for Helen Keller. At that moment she was on the verge of discovering the entire realm that is language.

Being at that moment when she was on the verge of communication is what struck me about Alex's performance. It seemed, to me at least, that that specific piece was about being on the verge of language - it was something that was working its way from within, trying to make its way out. It is a pivotal place and so frequently we teeter on that pinnacle waiting to fall to one side or the other and I think Alex's piece was trying to demonstrate that.

Now if you'll excuse me, it is time for the raffle now...

The Dream

2010-12-01T11:24:00.000-08:00

I wanted to share an experience I had when I was younger. I've never really been able to talk about it because, well, I've never understood it. Regardless, I was reminded of this while watching Alex play with sound in the film.

All my life I have been an extremely light sleeper. When I say light, I mean if someone so much as touched the doorknob to my room I would wake. It's so bad that I've developed the habit of sleeping with a fan so as to drown out minor sounds that would otherwise wake me during the night.

When I was about thirteen years old I had a recurring nightmare. It was just me, in a dark room, where there was complete and utter silence except for the very quiet and static sound of what I can only describe as a leaky faucet. I would try and run away, scream and talk but I would run and go nowhere; I would try and speak but no sound would come out. I was enveloped in silence and the single static sound. This dream instilled a fear in me that I have never felt before. I would wake up screaming and drenched in sweat. Specifically, there was one night that was unlike any other. That night I was literally so scared I slept walked as an attempt to escape my horrific nightmare. Not a very common action for someone who wakes up at the drop of a pin. However, I didn't just sleep walk around my house no, I literally slept walked down the street, around three in the morning, to my grandma's house. I woke up on her doorstep.

How is it that a mere sound petrified me to such an extent that I slept walked? It could only be the shapeless.

Healthy Decadence: With a drawing by Alex as the Prime Example

2010-12-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

Published by the Salt Lake Art Center as an insert to Catalyst Magazine

Healthy Decadence? Utah Art Through a German Lens

25 May 1998

A century-old barge rides at permanent anchor at the edge of the Danube just outside Belgrade. My friend Zarko Radakovic and I find a table in the sun. Most of the guests on the barge are drinking Jelen Pivo, “Stag Beer,” brewed in Yugoslavia since 1756. The shoulders of the brown bottles are rubbed white with hundreds of recyclings.

A middle-aged man docks a motorboat next to the barge and joins us at our table. His name is Vuk and he and Zarko have known each other since grade school.

“Two years ago,” Vuk tells us at one point in the desultory conversation, “short of money, I agreed to make a campaign film for Mira Markovic’s political party. She’s Slobodan Miloševic’s wife. It was kitsch, pure kitsch, and very effective. I had a whole sequence with neon lights that shot the word PROGRESS across the screen: PROGRESS . . . PROGRESS . . . PROGRESS.

It was a brilliant piece of propaganda. Since then I’ve called myself Vuk Riefenstahl. I learned everything from Leni Riefenstahl’s films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. She was a genius at making the people so small and the great leader so large. I don’t worry about having done the job. I needed the money and the country is absolute chaos anyway. It doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do, it doesn’t change anything anyway. Absolute chaos, and so I just made the film and now can keep my boat running.”

26 March, 1999

While bombs are falling today in Serbia, I remember last year’s discussion with the cynical film maker and ask myself several questions: What kinds of art please the powers that be? What kinds of art do rulers fear? What kinds of rhetoric do governing bodies use to suppress art that makes them uncomfortable? What is propaganda? And what kinds of art serve us best as citizens of a diverse, precarious, and changing world? [the rest of the article here]

The Sonosopher: Some Thoughts

2010-11-29T12:44:00.000-08:00

For the DVD that will be out next week, I wrote an essay called "Fixing the Sonosopher." Here a couple of the thoughts that came to me again after seeing the film today:

Fixing the Sonosopher

by Scott Abbott

About three years ago I was bathing with a young man whose development at that time had a wonderful grace about it. . . . As it happened we had just seen, in Paris, the youth pulling a thorn out of his foot. . . . Resting his foot on a stool, to dry it, and glancing at himself as he did so in a large mirror, he was reminded of the statue; he smiled and told me what he had seen. . . . He raised his foot a second time, to show me; but the attempt, very predictably, failed. In confusion he raised his foot a third time, a fourth, again and again, a dozen times: in vain. He was incapable of reproducing the movement. . . . From that day, or from that very moment, forth the young man underwent an unbelievable transformation. He began spending days in front of the mirror; and one after the other all his charms deserted him. (From Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Puppet Theatre,” translation by David Constantine)

About three weeks ago I had lunch with a man of my age whose performances as a “Sonosopher” have a wonderful, if sometimes terrible, grace about them. We spoke about a film he had recently collaborated on. After seeing himself through the camera’s eye, Alex said, he has been unable to reproduce the movements, the gestures, the sounds the camera recorded. At least he can no longer do so naturally. His charms, he fears, have deserted him.

I mentioned the young man in Kleist’s essay.

Exactly, he said. I’ve been robbed of the grace of un-self-conscious movement. I’ve been pinned to a specimen board for observation.

You feel like you’ve been fixed? I asked.

Yes, he answered. The film has fixed me, neutered me. How do I continue? My work is process, my media are temporal, sonorous, fleeting.

To what extent is that true? I wondered later. Has this film, in fact, fixed the Sonosopher?

As with all works of art, from one version to the next there’s a sense of panic brought on by the knowledge that the composer or writer or painter or filmmaker will have to settle on the final, fixed version, knowing all the time that it is just one of an infinite number of versions. Documentary films of a certain kind work to make their audiences forget that fact, constructing a seamless and supposedly truthful narrative. This, I take it, is what Alex most feared.

Do The Right Thing

2010-11-21T13:18:00.000-08:00

I was in the Post Office the other day and saw this pamphlet. The current tactic for getting our young men to register for war..."Do The Right Thing", "It's The Law". They have no choice!

I realize this is the database used if there was ever another draft.

When I saw the pamphlet, I immediately thought of Scott's question "How do you get someone to fight in war?"

Blood Memory...

2010-11-19T02:27:00.000-08:00

I was revisiting some of my notes from class and this article came to mind. It is an interview with the "native American" author, Sherman Alexie in which some very interesting points are raised. Here is a section I found useful. Especially pertinent are the ideas of collective trauma, blood memory, and the Holocaust connection.

AN: I find the concept of "collective trauma" particularly useful concerning the suffering that many of your characters are experiencing. Many of them suffer from not only personal losses and grievances--absent fathers, poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, etc.--but also from a cultural loss and a collective trauma, which include experiences of racism and stereotyping. Their losses and grievances affect their behavior and their lives on many levels. In my view, your fiction explores how such trauma both damages and creates community and identity alike. Both identity and community are, of course, condemned to ongoing dysfunction. Do you think that suffering is part of what constitutes Indianness? Perhaps in a somewhat comparable way by which we have come to associate African American identity with slavery, or Jewish identity with the Holocaust? If so, how does this relation differ from, e.g., the relation between African Americans and suffering, or Jews and suffering?

SA: Yes! The phrase I've also used is "blood memory." I think the strongest parallel in my mind has always been the Jewish people and the Holocaust. Certainly, their oppression has been constant for 1900 years longer, but the fact is that you cannot separate our identity from our pain. At some point it becomes primarily our identity. The whole idea of authenticity--"How Indian are you?"--is the most direct result of the fact that we don't know what an American Indian identity is. There is no measure anymore. There is no way of knowing, except perhaps through our pain. And so, we're lost. We're always wandering.

AN: Like the lost tribes of Israel?

SA: Yes. It's so amazing that the indigenous people of the United States have become the most immigrant group. The process is slowly changing. My generation and the next generation--we are immigrants! I am an immigrant into the United States, and now my children are fully assimilated.

AN: A scholar by the name of Kai Erikson has put a social dimension into the term "trauma." He talks about "traumatized communities" in the sense of damages to the tissues that hold human groups together as well as to the dominant spirit of a group, which is a fitting concept when we talk about "collective trauma" or "blood memory."

SA: Yes it is. Some day they're going to find it, but I feel that it is true that pain is carried in the DNA. And because it is carried in the DNA, pain can mutate through generations. One of the most obvious proofs for that is child abuse. Kids who get abused so often grow up and become abusers.

AN: Many of your characters--Victor and Junior in The Lone Ranger and Reservation Blues, John Smith in Indian Killer, Harlan in Ten Little Indians, to mention a few--are struggling with their experiences of what it means to be an Indian, and what they are told it means to be an Indian. At times, they seem at a loss as to what Indian identity really IS. Is their struggle linked with the fact that Indian identity has often been reduced to stereotype? In other words, do you think that the long-term reduction of the Indian to stereotype in American culture has resulted in a collective crisis of identity for many Indians today?

A world of story-smoke: a conversation with Sherman Alexie.

...

2010-11-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

Wednesday's lecture has been running across my mind, like a broken record, for the past day and a half. I could not get Theo Bleckmann's rendition of "Lili Marleen" out of my head. It was so hauntingly beautiful that it made me want to cry for joy as well as fall into a million pieces. Wednesday night I went home and played "Lili Marleen" again, and then listened to some of his other musical pieces that he has done. As a result, my brain started to click and my thoughts went from one connection to another. I started to remember things from as early as my childhood to things as recent as this summer. I began to see things that I have surrounded myself in, in a new light. So here are 3 of my thoughts stemmed from Theo Bleckmann.

1) Sigur Ros, through there volenska (english translation: Hopelandic-meaning ' unintelligible lyrics') has, in my opinion, broken the language barrier. They have produced music that is able to be swallowed by, (as Professor Caldiero says) the mouths of our souls. Here is their song "Von" which is a part of the volenska music (as far as I understand).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WThvUZ0pSIA

2) My second thought had to do more with remake of songs. Just as Theo Bleckmann added his own twist to the already popular "Lili Marleen" WWI song, Billy Bell and Allstar Ade, performing a Stacey Tookey contemporary routine, added a new twist to Tears for Fears "Mad World" song. Though the song "Mad World" already does a phenomenal job painting a picture of how the world is hectic, Stacey Tookey is able to zoom into one moment where the world is effecting two people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jykFBUHZqfA

3) Lastly, I couldn't help myself but think of Homer Simpson.

http://www.istosovideo.com/videos/4767/the-simpsons-intro-universe.html

2010-11-17T13:41:00.000-08:00

I found this reading interesting. I would like to know what others think of this.

Teaching toTransgress

Education as the Practice of Freedom

I I

Language

Teaching New Worlds/New Words

bell hooks

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body. It was in my first year of college thai I read Adrienne Rich's poem, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children." That poem, speaking against domination, against racism and class oppression, attempts to illustrate graphically that stopping the political persecution and torture of living beings is a more vital issue than censorship, than burning books. One line of this poem that moved and disturbed something within me: "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you." I've never forgotten it. Perhaps I could not have forgotten it even if I tried to erase it from memory. Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will. The words of this poem begat a life in my memory that I could not abort or change.

When I find myself thinking about language now, these words are there, as if they were always waiting to challenge and assist me. 1 find myself silently speaking them over and over again with the intensity of a chant. They startle me, shaking me into an awareness of the link between languages and domination. Initially, I resist the idea of the "oppressor's language," certain that litis construct has the potential to disempower those of us who are just learning to speak, who are just learning to claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject. "This is the oppressor's languages yet I need it to talk to you. " Adrienne Rich's words. Then, when I first read these words, and now, they make me think of standard English, of learning to speak against black vernacular, against the ruptured and broken speech of a dispossessed and displaced people. Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear, the speech of the Gullah, Yiddish, and so many other unremembered tongues.

Reflecting on Adrienne Rich's words, I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory diat limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize. Gloria Anzakliia reminds us of this pain in Borderlands/La Froniera when she asserts, "So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language." We have so little knowledge of how displaced, enslaved, or free Africans who came or were brought against their will to the United States felt about the loss of language, about learning English. Only as a woman did I begin to think about these black people in relation to language, to think about their trauma as they were compelled to witness their language rendered meaningless with a colonizing European culture, where voices deemed foreign could not be spoken, were outlawed tongues, renegade speech.

When I realize how long it has taken for white Americans to acknowledge diverse languages of.Native Americans, to accept that the speech their ancestral colonizers declared was merely grunts or gibberish was indeed language, it is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest. I think now of the grief of displaced "homeless" Africans, forced to inhabit a world where they saw folks like themselves, inhabiting the same skin, the same condition, but who had no shared language to talk with one another, who needed "the oppressor's language." "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you." When I imagine the terror of Africans on board slave ships, on auction blocks, inhabiting the unfamiliar architecture of plantations, I consider that this terror extended beyond fear of punishment, that it resided also in the anguish of hearing a language they could not comprehend. The very sound of English had to terrify. I think of black people meeting one another in a space away from the diverse cultures and languages that distinguished them from one another, compelled by circumstance to find ways to speak with one another in a "new world" where blackness or the darkness ol" one's skin and not language would become the space of bonding. How to remember, to reinvoke this terror. How to describe what it must have been like for Africans whose deepest bonds were historically forged in the place of shared speech to be transported abruptly to a world where the very sound of one's mother tongue had no meaning.

I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor's language, yet I imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor's language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous. For in that recognition was the understanding that intimacy could be restored, that a culture of resistance could be formed that would make recovery from the trauma of enslavement possible. I imagine, then, Africans first hearing English as "the oppressor's language" and then re-hearing it as a potential site of resistance. Learning English, learning to speak the alien tongue, was one way enslaved Africans began to reclaim their personal power within a context of domination. Possessing a shared language, black folks could find again a way to make community, and a means to create the political solidarity necessary to resist.

Needing the oppressor's language to speak with one another they nevertheless also reinvented, remade that language so lhat it would speak beyond the boundaries of conquest and domination. In the mouths of black Africans in the so-called "New World," English was altered, transformed, and became a different speech. Enslaved black people took broken bits of English and made of them a counter-language. They put together their words in such a way that the colonizer had to rethink the meaning of English language. Though it has become common in contemporary culture to talk about the messages of resistance that emerged in the music created by slaves, particularly spirituals, less is said about'the grammatical construction of sentences in these songs. Often, the English used in the song reflected the broken, ruptured world of the slave. When the slaves sang "nobody knows de trouble I see—" their use of the word "nobody" adds a richer meaning than if they had used the phrase "no one," for it was the slave's body that was the concrete site of suffering. And even as emancipated black people sang spirituals, they did not change the language, the sentence structure, of our ancestors. For in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance. Using English in a way that ruptured standard usage and meaning, so that white folks could often not understand black speech, made English into more than the oppressor's language.

An unbroken connection exists between the broken English of the displaced, enslaved African and the diverse black vernacular speech black folks use today. In both cases, the rupture of standard English enabled and enables rebellion and resistance. By transforming the oppressor's language, making a culture of resistance, black people created an intimate speech that could say far more than was permissible within the boundaries of standard English. The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epis-temologies—different ways of thinking and knowing that were crucial to creating a counter-hegemonic worldview. It is absolutely essential that the revolutionary power of black vernacular speech not be lost in contemporary culture. That power resides in the capacity of black vernacular to intervene on the boundaries and limitations of standard English.

In contemporary black popular culture, rap music has become one of the spaces where black vernacular speech is used in a manner that invites dominant mainstream culture to listen—to hear—and, to some extent, be transformed. However, one of the risks of this attempt at cultural translation is that it will trivialize black vernacular speech. When young white kids imitate this speech in ways that suggest it is the speech of those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny, then the subversive power of this speech is undermined. In academic circles, both in the sphere of teaching and that of writing, there has been little effort made to utilize black vernacular—or, for that matter, any language other than standard English. When I asked an ethnically diverse group of students in a course I was teaching on black women writers why we only heard standard English spoken in the classroom, they were momentarily rendered speechless. Though many of them were individuals for whom standard English was a second or third language, it had simply never occurred to them that it was possible to say something in another language, in another way. No wonder, then, that we continue to think, "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you."

I have realized that I was in danger of losing my relationship to black vernacular speech because I too rarely use it in the predominantly white settings that I am most often in, both professionally and socially. And so I have begun to work at integrating into a variety of settings the particular Southern black vernacular speech 1 grew up hearing and speaking. It has been hardest to integrate black vernacular in writing, particularly for academic journals. When I first began to incorporate black vernacular in critical essays, editors would send the work back to me in standard English. Using the vernacular means that translation into standard English may be needed if one wishes to reach a more inclusive audience. In the classroom setting, I encourage students to use their first language and translate it so they do not feel that seeking higher education will necessarily estrange them from that language and culture they know most intimately. Not surprisingly, when students in my Black Women Writers class began to speak using diverse language and speech, white students often complained. This seemed to be particularly the case with black vernacular. It was particularly disturbing to the white students because they could hear the words that were said but could not comprehend their meaning. Pedagogically, I encouraged them to think of the moment of not understanding what someone says as a space to learn. Such a space provides not only the opportunity to listen without "mastery," without owning or possessing speech through interpretation, but also the experience of hearing non-English words. These lessons seem particularly crucial in a multicultural society that remains white supremacist, that uses standard English as a weapon to silence and censor. June Jordan reminds us of this in On Call when she declares:

I am talking about majority problems of language in a democratic state, problems of.a currency that someone has stolen and hidden away and then homogenized into an official "English" language that can only express non-events involving nobody responsible, or lies. If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative participating voices of everybody here. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language conform to .the truth of our many selves and we would make our language lead us into the equality of power that a democratic state must represent.

That the students in the course on black women writers were repressing all longing to speak in tongues other than standard English widiout seeing this repression as political was an indication of die way we act unconsciously, in complicity with a culture of domination.

Recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism tend to downplay or ignore the question of language. Critical feminist writings focused on issues of difference and voice have made important theoretical interventions, calling for a recognition of the primacy of voices that are often silenced, censored, or marginalized. This call for the acknowledgment and celebration of diverse voices, and consequently of diverse language and speech, necessarily disrupts the primacy of standard English. When advocates of feminism first spoke about the desire for diverse participation in women's movement, there was no discussion of language. It was simply assumed that standard English would remain the primary vehicle for the transmission of feminist thought. Now that die audience for feminist writing and speaking has become more diverse, it is evident that we must change conventional ways of thinking about language, creating spaces where diverse voices can speak in words other than English or in broken, vernacular speech. This means that at a lecture or even in a written work there will be fragments of speech that may or may not be accessible to every individual. Shifting how we think about language and how we use it necessarily alters how we know what we know. At a lecture where I might use Southern black vernacular, the particular patois of my region, or where I might use very abstract thought in conjunction with plain speech, responding to a diverse audience, I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to "master" or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I stiggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English. Adrienne Rich concludes her poem with this statement:

I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick- Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. oan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Cantonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to bum. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.

To recognize that we touch one another in language seems particularly difficult in a society that would have us believe that

there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that to feel deeply is to be inferior, for within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language. To heal the splitting of mind and body, we marginalized and oppressed people attempt to recover ourselves and our experiences in language. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular. When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor's language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.

Now that you have read this go to this link:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/99/jrieffel/poetry/rich/children.html

Across the Universe - Helter Skelter

2010-11-17T12:14:00.000-08:00

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

2010-11-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

November 14, 2010, 4:32 PM

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

By ROBERT SAPOLSKY

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

TAGS:

NEUROSCIENCE,PHILOSOPHY

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

We study hard to get admitted to a top college to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.

But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

Erin Schell

Neuroscientists understand the structural bases of some of these qualities. Take language, that uniquely human behavior. Underlining it are structures unique to the human brain — regions like “Broca’s area,” which specializes in language production. Then there’s the brain’s “extrapyramidal system,” which is involved in fine motor control. The complexity of the human version allows us to do something that, say, a polar bear, could never accomplish — sufficiently independent movement of digits to play a trill on the piano, for instance. Particularly striking is the human frontal cortex. While occurring in all mammals, the human version is proportionately bigger and denser in its wiring. And what is the frontal cortex good for? Emotional regulation, gratification postponement, executive decision-making, long-term planning. We study hard in high school to get admitted to a top college to get into grad school to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.

[click HERE for the rest of the article]

Triumph of the Will

2010-11-12T00:22:00.001-08:00

After class on Wednesday I was thinking about Triumph of the Will...

Throughout the entire film I was thinking about how much it reminded me of Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. I realize this is an interesting contrast - the two films are essentially two sides of the exact same coin. Triumph of the Will represents the power and polish of a totalitarian government. Like any piece of brilliant propaganda, it shows the public what it is supposed to think. Hitler himself called the film, an "incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement." The same holds true with Battleship Potemkin - it too is propaganda that feeds the public an image. This image is, however, the opposite image that Triumph of the Will portrays; it shows a crippling, murderous government. Reifenstahl's film uses a more sophisticated visual language - it is more refined, eloquent , and poised. While Eisenstein's film is more rough, crude, and vulgar. Both, however, are using the same tools to tell their story. One has the poor helpless people who are oppressed by their government and the other has a triumphant and admirable government leading its people to their rightful place in the world - or so the propaganda would suggest. I just thought that although the film language used in these two films are very different, they reminded me of each other...

Consequently I read that it took 6 months to edit Triumph of the Will, and that the actual running time of the film only represents around 3% of the footage that Riefenstahl actually shot (imdb.com). I also thought it was interesting to note that Steven Spielberg used a nearly identical shot from another one of Reifenstahl's Nazi films called Tag der Freiheit - Unsere Wehrmacht. Spielberg opened and closed his film, Saving Private Ryan, with a shot of an American Flag blowing in the wind backlit by the sun - giving the flag a translucent quality. This was done by Reifenstahl with the Nazi flag in her 1935 film - how ironic. Consequently Reifenstahl died in 2003 at the age of 101. She was quoted as saying, "I filmed the truth as it was then. Nothing more..."

The "truth" she filmed was heavily edited to make it seem like absolute truth which was then fed to the German people - it was a beautifully shot trap. A trap which nearly all of Germany bought and then fell into; it really was a deadly type of language...

Propaganda and Film

2010-11-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

The Twisted Art of Documentary

NOVEMBER 25, 2010

Ian Buruma

E-MAIL PRINT SHARE MORE BY IAN BURUMA

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948)
a film directed by Stuart Schulberg and restored by Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky

A Film Unfinished (2010)
a film directed by Yael Hersonski

AP Images

Hermann Göring, front right, during a recess at the Nuremberg trials, November 24, 1945. At front left is the American intelligence officer G. M. Gilbert, who served as prison psychologist and interpreter for the Nazi war criminals.

The function of propaganda is…not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

All governments make propaganda. The difference between totalitarian government propaganda and the democratic kind is that the former has a monopoly on truth; its version of reality cannot be challenged. Past, present, and future are what the rulers say they are. Which is why, from the official point of view, there is no stigma attached to the word “propaganda” in totalitarian societies. Nazi Germany had a Ministry of Volk Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the Soviet Union a Department for Agitation and Propaganda.

The idea that rulers should impose their own realities exists, at least as an aspiration, in democracies too. It was nicely summed up by a US government official not so long ago who stated that “we [the Bush administration] create our own reality.”¹ But democratic governments and parties are not supposed to dictate the truth. We expect partisanship from our politicians; they can try to make their case. But the word “propaganda” has a negative connotation. It smacks of coercion, or official lying. And so propaganda cannot be called that, but must be disguised as “news,” or “information,” or “entertainment” (Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver). The propaganda department of the US government during World War IIwas called the Office of War Information, and on several occasions during the last Iraq war heroic myths were presented as news stories.

[the rest of the review HERE]

Degenerate Art

2010-11-09T04:01:00.000-08:00

(posted by Ryan) -- I thought this went along great with Mondays class:

9 November 2010 Last updated at 03:47 ET

Sculptures confiscated by Nazis to be displayed

In pictures: 'Degenerate' art

A sculpture collection which was condemned by Hitler's Nazis is set to go on display later at Berlin's Neues Museum.

The 11 pieces of art, which date back from the early 20th Century, were discovered on a building site in the city centre last year.

They belonged to a collection of 15,000 works which Hitler's regime dubbed "degenerate art".

The statues were found during a dig to lay down a new underground train line.

The terracotta and bronze statues were criticised by Hitler's regime for containing "deviant" sexual elements and anti-nationalistic themes.

Berlin's Mayor Klaus Wowereit said that finding the sculptures is a "small miracle" that "shows a lot about the dark times of the city".

click HERE for additional links

The Shape of Braille

2010-11-08T10:38:00.001-08:00

The Shape of the Shapeless, The Shapelessness of Shape

2010-11-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

I think I've always been fascinated by numbers. Not in the ways mathematicians are fascinated by numbers, but by the shapes of numbers.

This week, the odometer in my car approached and then passed 100,000. As it did so, as numbers lined up in striking patterns, there were several almost magical moments for me:

099990
099999
100000
100001
100100

Why magical? Because of the shapes, I think. Because out of the visually unremarkable sequences that lead to 097392 or earlier to 0769124, suddenly there are repetitions of such order and weight that they seem noteworthy.

Perhaps they even seem meaningful.

Not, of course, when I ponder what they mean: they don't mean anything. They won't reveal the philosopher's stone. They won't help me with my cooking. They don't tell me anything more than do the numbers 100152 or 098563, which are both indications of how many miles the car has put behind it since I drove it off the lot.

But they seem, they feel profound, profoundly different from the less well ordered numbers.

Slot machines have a similar fascination for me, doubled up by the fact that when the three red sevens appear in a row along the line the machine makes sounds and flashes and quarters or nickels come cascading out of the machine.

Along with casino owners who take advantage of my need for shapely sets of numbers, poets, novelists, and musicians all capture my imagination with orderly and repetitive sequences.

[the rest of the post is HERE]

Zoom in and zoom out

2010-11-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the shape appears shapeless if we are approaching it from a different point of view.

Anyways......

Today's class reminded me of a piece of art I once saw in a museum. The room was empty except for about 5 strings linking the ceiling to the floor. The piece was interactive because you could walk in between the strings and look at them from different angles. I asked about the piece and was told that when the piece arrived it was in a small envelope with the a small card. The card had a formula on it explaining how the strings should be arranged. The size could be large or small depending on the space. John Cage's 4:33 appears to be similar to me because if you are going to play it there is a "formula" to follow. Alex slightly mentioned a constellation during class. Does anyone have a clue as to what he meant? Could it be the constellation's points are like a formula?

I've been listening to the music all day. A new awareness.

Hgiyiyi, by jjjj

2010-11-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

My friend Steve directed me to this link, and I found it enjoyable. Apparently, a test page for Amazon was found and toyed around with. Click the link, then read the customer reviews.

(click below)
Hgiyiyi, by jjjj

Radiolab - "Wild Talk"

2010-11-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

This episode blew my mind...discovering animal language, remarkable levels of communication, deeper syntaxes, different species understanding each other, etc.

EPISODE SUMMARY:

In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie. Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about Klaus Zuberbuhler's work in the Tai Forest of West Africa. When Klaus first came to the forest, he hit a wall of sound. But he slowly started making sense of that sonic chaos by scaring a particular monkey called the Diana Monkey. Turns out, the Diana Monkey is making more than just noise. Then we jump from the jungle to the prairie, where Con Slobodchikoff has discovered what he calls a grammar of color, shapes, and sizes embedded in prairie dog chirps. His discovery leaves Jad and Robert wondering whether we could ever understand the language of a different species. Back in the jungle, Klaus is wondering the same thing, and tells us about one day when the cacophony of monkey calls distilled into a life-saving warning.

2010-11-01T23:54:00.001-07:00

"Language, that most human invention, can enable what in principle should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes."

--Oliver Sacks (from his book "The Mind's Eye")

The Shape and the Shapeless

2010-11-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who works in the interior design industry in Orange County. While I was perusing her design blog I came across this interesting post. These paintings really seem to be good illustrations of the Shape of the Shapeless idea we've talked about in class. The blogger, Brittany, tries to explain what intrigues her about these paintings and is at a loss for words. I think the way things are left slightly unclear leaves us wanting more and wanting answers as to why it was done that way. Enjoy!!

http://brittanystiles.blogspot.com/2010/11/mari-eastman.html

Alex Reading "Poetry Is Wanted Here"

2010-11-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

For a video of Alex reading the poem at Ken Sanders Rare Books on the day the new book was released, click HERE

Defining "Christian"

2010-10-28T15:19:00.001-07:00

The sandbox world.

2010-10-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

This came to mind today when I was reading over some Rimbaud. Poet/Songwriter extraordinaire, Bob Dylan was deeply influenced by his work. Dylan also was on a journey to transcend the limitations of expression and defy convention. In the recent documentary on Dylan, No Direction Home, the late great Allen Ginsberg recounts the story of how he wept the first time he heard Dylan play the song Hard Rain, realizing that the torch had been passed to the great poet/seer of the next generation. I tried to find the clip, but to no avail. If you have the time to listen to Hard Rain, I would highly encourage it.
The link that I am including will lead you to Dylan reciting the prose-poem, Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie. To say much in preface would be to diminish its power, but I would be interested in any observations or feelings about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVbr0y8zp68

Flattened Layers

2010-10-25T08:44:00.000-07:00

This is the corrected version

2010-10-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

Without

In twilight, I saw your shadows
manifold and manifest
apart as all robust aching, mine
and began
to light so that nothing could see
as I felt around the edges of my being
not the shape my eyes know but
harrowed
literal and innocent
a strangeness of relevance protruding
as if
and still, trepidatious fingers molding
every sidelong glance as though
having just met
I
were prior to every arrival.

chc 10.24.10

Mallarme in Crisis

2010-10-24T23:19:00.000-07:00

I was reading in a book and I came across an amazing quote by Mallarme from his Crisis in Verse. The quote is a really good description of the problem of language:

"Languages are imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing. Inasmuch as thought consists of writing without pen and paper, without whispering even, without the sound of the immortal World, the diversity of languages on earth means that no one can utter words which would bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate... But esthetically, I am disappointed when I consider how impossible it is for language to express things by means of certain keys which would reproduce their brilliance and aura...We dream of words brilliant at once in meaning and sound, or darkening in meaning and so in sound, luminously and elementally self-succeeding. But let us remember that if our dream were fulfilled, verse would not exist - verse which, in all its wisdom, atones for the sins of languages, comes nobly to their aid."

I thought Mallarme did a beautiful job of illustrating the double edged sword that is language. Everyone we have read about has drawn attention to this problem - we need a language that gets beyond language itself. However if we arrive at that place we have also lost something. Werther arrived at that place only by death and Bloch arrived at that place by killing someone else. The works of art we have studied, or anything we have studied for that matter, are all desperate attempts to arrive at somewhere real without leaving our own reality. The problem is we cannot arrive at the real without the aid/hinderance of our actual reality - language.

"Blumf!"

2010-10-24T15:05:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought you knew Dr. Suess...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_newsroom/20101022/en_yblog_newsroom/unpublished-dr-seuss-manuscript-reveals-authors-doubts-new-word

Coffee and Cigarettes: Jim Jarmusch

2010-10-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379217/

What poetic term describes living your life while accepting that it is filled with uncertainty?

2010-10-23T15:42:00.001-07:00

The thoughts in the link below about John Keats stand out to me in light of our class conversations. I am imagining Mallarme's ability within himself to walk through the extreme misery of his up-endedness, his unknown, that place without meaning where even the ego cannot comfort us. Rather than create meaning, it seems at least from the author's perspective below that Keats received into being, what was. The Taoists see receptivity as the complement to creativity--that when heaven moves into the earth, when creative force meets receptive devotion, the 10,000 things come into being. "To let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thought" causes me to think of Alex's shaking invisible dice on Friday and winding up in Virgil, then Walser, then Seurat, then Goethe... Arriving unintendedly (yes I meant that word) where one means to be.

"In recent years critical attention has focused on Keats's

philosophy,which involves not abstract thought

but rather absolute receptivity to experience.

This attitude is indicated in his celebrated term

"negative capability"—"to let the mind be a

thoroughfare for all thought.""

http://hotword.dictionary.com/what-poetic-term-describes-living-your-life-while-accepting-that-it-is-filled-with-uncertainty/?__utma=1.1702717677.1270776355.1286514982.1286771665.7&__utmb=1.1.10.1287873360&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1286771665.7.3.utmcsr=dictionary.reference.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/browse/figurative&__utmv=-&__utmk=255882507

Mallarme's "A Throw of the Dice

2010-10-22T11:12:00.000-07:00

[click on each page for a larger version]

infrathin gap between light and dark, http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/photoblog/2010/10/20_minutes_of_light.html

2010-10-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

I know I missed class today but I thought these pictures in this article were a great example of what we talked about Monday and I wanted to share them.

click HERE

How Google understands language like a 10-year-old

2010-10-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

by James Temple, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, October 18, 2010

Language has long been one of the most difficult challenges in artificial intelligence research, mainly because programs are based on rules, while native tongues cobbled together over hundreds of years tend to flout them.

Researchers only began to make major strides in the last 15 years or so, once they began supplementing rules with a so-called statistical approach.

Put very simply: By analyzing huge quantities of human text, initially labeled and dissected in much the manner of English class sentence diagramming, machines eventually begin to detect the patterns that define the use of language. After a certain stage of development, the algorithms can be unleashed onto raw or unstructured data, and continue to refine their understanding.

The same process has led to similarly momentous advances in language translation tools, and machine perception technologies like facial and voice recognition.

The success of this approach has been further propelled by two key developments: The sudden availability of massive amounts of digital text in the way of the Internet, and the enormous computing power available to researchers through server farms strung together across the planet.

Now when Google's computers confront a word with multiple meanings, they can rely on the same clues that humans use to understand the meaning.

Take the word "can." It might be a noun (a metal container), a verb (to put something into such a container) or a modal verb (to be able to do so). You can can something in a can.

Based on the billions of examples its algorithm has analyzed, Google knows it's highly likely that if "can" is preceded by a pronoun ("you") it's most likely the modal verb. If it's followed by an object ("something") it's most likely a verb. If it comes after an article ("a") it's most likely a metal container. (And in just about every case other than the one in the preceding paragraph, two cans in a row would probably denote a dance.)

The search engine has also begun to understand which words are synonyms for others. That's why today Google knows that a user typing the query "change memory in my laptop" would probably be interested in a string of text online that reads "install laptop RAM," even though only one word is the same. Google was incapable of a match like that as recently as three years ago.

These improvements have allowed users to increasingly express their queries using natural language, instead of breaking down their wants into three-word Boolean expressions. As consumers have caught on to this, the length of average queries has steadily grown.

Artificial intelligence isn't a silver bullet to online search, however. Google is continually tweaking its algorithms to address shortcomings, but some problems can be quite difficult to solve.

For instance, "pain killers that don't upset stomach," a fairly common query, trips up the engine because it's not great at negation. Typically, the words in a query represent things people do - not "don't" - want to find.

And sometimes probability works against the search engine: Google tends to think that Dell and Lenovo are the same thing because so many similar words show up around the names of the two computer manufacturers.

The algorithm's understanding of language "has moved from a 2-year-old infant to something close to an 8 or 10-year-old child," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, an honorific reserved for the company's top engineers. "They're still not approaching the conversations you'd have as a teenager."

the language of love

2010-10-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

From Jonathan Raban's review of Lydia Davis' new translation of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary":

"The cracked-kettle paragraph follows a speech by Emma to Rodolphe in which she declares her feelings for him in a string of amorous cliches: 'I'm your servant and your concubine! You're my king, my idol! You're good! You're handsome! You're intelligent! You're strong!' Here's how Davis renders what follows:

He had heard these things said to him so often that for him there was nothing original about them. Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion, which always assumes the same forms and uses the same language. He could not perceive -- this man of such broad experience -- the difference in feelings that might underlie similarities of expression. Because licentious or venal lips had murmured the same words to him, he had little faith in their truthfulness; one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.

2010-10-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

how come if someone can post a perfect post as "blankness" (since it was not meant to be named i only describe it) and we can't turn in a blank unnamed paper.

after all, john cage wrote music that was made up entirely of rests.

i should be able to write a paper made up entirely of spaces. i will actually hit the spacebar however many times it takes to occupy the entire length of it.

expect to be amazed by what you read :)

Falling Out

2010-10-12T17:52:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article I found the other day- I had no idea that almost every two weeks one of the 7,000 recorded languages goes extinct. Also pay careful attention to the language, within the first couple of lines he says, "many of them unwritten and in danger of falling out of use." The term 'falling out of use' especially caught my attention because we have seen this time and time again in our readings especially in Werther and Lord Chandos were they phrase it "falling out of language." Even in our discussions in class, I have never heard of anyone falling out of language before and I thought that it was just something Scott would say, meh, who knew it's not. Although I am still not sure exactly what it means to fall out of language and I feel that I have never experienced it to same degree as Bloch, Werther or others but I am starting to understand that even having that feeling of being at a loss of words is a minimal example of 'falling out of language.'
-Tess

Advertise on NYTimes.com

Hunting One Language, Stumbling Upon Another

Chris Rainier

DOCUMENTING AND PRESERVING Gregory Anderson interviewed Kachim, a Koro-speaking woman, for a National Geographic project.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: October 11, 2010

Two years ago, a team of linguists plunged into the remote hill country of northeastern India to study little-known languages, many of them unwritten and in danger of falling out of use.

Chris Rainier

A Koro-speaking woman and her baby in Kichang village in Arunachal Pradesh, India.

On average, every two weeks one of the world’s recorded 7,000 languages becomes extinct, and the expedition was seeking to document and help preserve the endangered ones in these isolated villages.

At a rushing mountain river, the linguists crossed on a bamboo raft and entered the tiny village of Kichang. They expected to hear the people speaking Aka, a fairly common tongue in that district. Instead, they heard a language, the linguists said, that sounded as different from Aka as English does from Japanese.

After further investigation, leaders of the research announced last week the discovery of a “hidden” language, known locally as Koro, completely new to the world outside these rural communities. While the number of spoken languages continues to decline, at least one new one has been added to the inventory, though Koro too is on the brink of extinction.

“We noticed it instantly” as a distinct and unfamiliar language, said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Ore.

Dr. Anderson and K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, were leaders of the expedition, part of the Enduring Voices Project of the National Geographic Society. Another member of the group was Ganash Murmu, a linguist at Ranchi University in India. A scientific paper will be published by the journal Indian Linguistics.

When the three researchers reached Kichang, they went door to door asking people to speak their native tongue — not a strenuous undertaking in a village of only four bamboo houses set on stilts. The people live by raising pigs and growing oranges, rice and barley. They share a subsistence economy and a culture with others in the region who speak Aka, or Miji, another somewhat common language.

On the veranda at one house, the linguists heard a young woman named Kachim telling her life story in Koro. She was sold as a child bride, was unhappy in her adopted village and had to overcome hardships before eventually making peace with her new life.

Listening, the researchers at first suspected Koro to be a dialect of Aka, but its words, syntax and sounds were entirely different. Few words in Koro were the same as in Aka: mountain in Aka is “phu,” but “nggo” in Koro; pig in Aka is “vo,” but in Koro “lele.” The two languages share only 9 percent of their vocabulary.

The linguists recorded Kachim’s narrative in Koro, and an Indian television crew had her repeat it in Hindi. This not only enabled the researchers to understand her story and her language, but called attention to the cultural pressures threatening the survival of such languages, up against national languages dominant in schools, commerce and mass media.

In “The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages,” published last month by National Geographic Books, Dr. Harrison noted that Koro speakers “are thoroughly mixed in with other local peoples and number perhaps no more than 800.”

Moreover, linguists are not sure how Koro has survived this long as a viable language. Dr. Harrison wrote: “The Koro do not dominate a single village or even an extended family. This leads to curious speech patterns not commonly found in a stable state elsewhere.”

By contrast, the Aka people number about 10,000 living in close relations with Koro speakers in a district of the state of Arunachal Pradesh, where at least 120 languages are spoken. Dr. Anderson said the coexistence of separate languages between two integrated groups that do not acknowledge an ethnic difference between them is highly unusual.

As Dr. Harrison and Dr. Anderson expanded their research, comparing Koro with several hundred languages, they determined that it belonged to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes 400 tongues related to widely used Tibetan and Burmese. But Koro had never been recognized in any surveys of the approximately 150 languages spoken in India.

The effort to identify “hot spots of threatened languages,” the linguists said, is critical in making decisions to preserve and enlarge the use of such tongues, which are repositories of a people’s history and culture.

In the case of Koro speakers, Dr. Harrison wrote in his book, “even though they seem to be gradually giving up their language, it remains the most powerful trait that identifies them as a distinct people.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page D3 of the New York edition.

Crisis in Language...

2010-10-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

This midterm has caused me to have my own crisis of language - I mean that as a positive as well as a negative thing... Hopefully the crisis can be averted by Wednesday. It just seems that everything I am writing is trash, and after each revision I just end up with more trash, only that the trash has now been polished. And when I do have a good idea I can't seem to do it justice once I write about it. However, the ideas are there and I just have to find a way of expressing them correctly. I usually have no problem writing papers but for some odd reason this assignment has been much more difficult than I had anticipated. Just wanted to let everyone know that I am paying the price for my own procrastination and current general lack of well, everything - I suppose I am experiencing my own anxiety at the penalty kick...

I also wanted to thank Andrew for his remarks in class on Friday about guilt. It was a real springboard for my ideas and has helped me salvage a dying paper. Thanks.

Lost With Language

2010-10-10T23:37:00.000-07:00

All Creative Work is Derivative: It all builds on what has come before

2010-10-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

Foreign Accent Syndrome

2010-10-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

Just as we have been reviewing old texts for the essays it reminded me of this as a unique recognized medical condition. -Jonathan Barrett

The Origin of Language

2010-10-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

I was looking back through my notes and scraps and got hung up on some of the things we talked about regarding Rousseau and some of his views and arguments for language. In particular the origin of language and how it has been produced naturally rather than given by God. This article from Cambridge discusses the different "sources" of language and how it could have possibly come about. I personally think it's a combination of the sources in the article. What do you think?

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521749220&ss=exc

Photographic Experiment 7: Language (NOW UP)!

2010-10-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

Click HERE! to see all 10 submitted photos.

Late submissions are welcome.

Pictured below: a submission, which presents a nice example of 'body-language'.

"Found in Translation"

2010-10-03T19:32:00.001-07:00

Here is a pretty simple editorial from the New York Times about how every written text is essentially a translation. The author finds particular satisfaction in focusing on readers of his works. I couldn't help but think about the basics of reader response theory as well as many of the discussions we have had in class while reading this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03cunningham.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

photos of language: deadline extended

2010-10-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

Jorgen has extended the deadline for photos of language until this Sunday night.

Could be a wonderful collection, but only if we're creative and actually do it.

Check out the original invitation in an earlier post on this blog.

"f" word

2010-10-01T20:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26UA578yQ5g

A Language Barrier: thoughts on "The Goalie's Anxiety..."

2010-09-30T22:05:00.001-07:00

I had a conversation with one of my clients on Wednesday (after the beginning discussion of Handke and "Goalie." I had previously told her about The Sorrows of Young Werther, however, in this conversation I found myself taking an enormous amount of time to say absolutely nothing. I could NOT find a way to convey to her the feeling and tone of Handke's writing that told the story. I tried to tell her of the depersonalization of the reader herself (me) in reading the depersonalization of Bloch himself. I tried to convey the structure of the sentences. I tried to explain how Handke narrates the mundanity of each action, observation or thought in a way that leaves you feeling empty and upended inside. I attempted to describe the slow emergence of Bloch's awareness with the present leading up to the conclusion...

She is very well-read, my client, and so she continued to give me back words and phrases in the effort to grasp what I was trying to tell her. All of them MISSED! MISSED! The longer this went on, the more I became aware of just how brilliant this work of Handke's is; how skillfully he writes about language so that we cannot describe it but only experience what it is for ourselves.

And that was the conclusion we both reached. I wrote the title for her on a sticky note at the end of our appointment.

Psycho and Language

2010-09-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Alex's remarks about Psycho in class I had to re-watch it with the parallels of language in the back of my mind. However trite it may be I couldn't help but relate language to the murders in the film. How many times do we butcher or slaughter what we feel and think by trying to say it. Bad writing/poor speech is the equivalent of "the shower scene." Or could it be the other way around? Spectacular writing is "the shower scene?" You decide.

In one particular scene in the movie Norman is talking to Marion about his mother. Norman speaks about the illness his mother has and how much he hates it. Marion suggests that it might be better to put her "someplace..." referring to an asylum. Norman perks up and says, "You mean an institution? A madhouse?" This got me thinking about the concept of the institution/madhouse of language. In class we refer to language as a prison, however I think a madhouse would be a better term - especially in the light of The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. We must either live in the madhouse of language or go mad trying to get beyond language.

Language strives to explain the madness but only adds to it. Already I have done no justice to the ideas and thoughts I wanted to communicate. Ultimately all we've done is brutally murder truth. (Cue shrieking violins...)

Interesting

2010-09-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

This is a very interesting idea and seems to be effective on some level. I wonder if the kids understand and know the meaning behind the language or they just sing the songs to the tune that they have memorized.

Language Moving Picture

2010-09-30T15:26:00.000-07:00

LOL

2010-09-30T00:15:00.001-07:00

Peter Handke

2010-09-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

"The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" was Austrian Peter Handke's first widely read novel. It was translated by Michael Roloff, who has a fantastic web site devoted to Handke and his work. You can access it HERE.

The photo above was taken by my friend Zarko Radakovic at a soccer game in what is now Serbia. Peter Handke is on the left, his friend Zlatko Bokokic on the right.

photos of language

2010-09-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

In response to Jorgen's call for photos of language, I've been thinking about possibilities. I haven't settled on the single photo I'll send him before the end of September, but two are currently my favorites, one I took on campus a few months ago, and another a photo I took today of a fine wood carving by Bob Moss that includes a transcription guide from the Deseret Alphabet he often uses to the alphabet we usually use.

The campus photo can be found
HERE

Kafka and Hofmannsthal

2010-09-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

Today's NYTimes Magazine has an article about Kafka's papers that contains this paragraph:

Kafka's life passed almost entirely within the space of a few city blocks in Prague, where he was born in 1883, attended school and university and, as an adult, lived with his parents and worked in an insurance agency. Kafka and Brod met in 1902, at Charles University, where both were studying law. Brod was 18 — one year younger than Kafka — but already a literary sensation. According to Brod’s biography of Kafka, the two met at a lecture Brod gave on Schopenhauer, during which Kafka objected to Brod’s characterization of Nietzsche as a fraud. Walking home together afterward, they discussed their favorite writers. Brod praised a passage from the story “Purple Death” in which Gustav Meyrink “compared butterflies to great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka, who took no stock in magic butterflies, countered with a phrase from Hugo von Hoffmansthal: “the smell of damp flags in a hall.” Having uttered these words, he fell into a profound silence that left a great impression on Brod.

[the rest of the article is HERE]

What had been on my mind lately.

2010-09-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

It is a serious business, I think, to Create. We do it constantly without thought or forethought or introspection. We begin, entitled to Create, and continue from that vantage point. We see Creation as an innately righteous endeavor in which outcomes with negative consequences are the result of other influences and not a result of a tacitly naive indulgence at the beginning.

But creating is dangerous. In the midst of a culture which seduces us to believe that we can control our futures, not just influence them, we embark upon our Frankensteinian missions with what seems the guilelessness of a child. But in fact, perspective is hard-bought. And when we say hindsight is 20/20, and allow ourselves license to continue irresponsible rampant creating, we have still failed to purchase it. Our noble intrepidness leads as often to happy outcomes as it does to folly and tragedy.

I am only asserting that I think we are too quick to move and too slow to think. That good ideas do not necessarily make good realities and the difference between can often be apprehended at least in part from caution and hesitancy at the outset. Instead, we spend much of our time analyzing our creations and rationalizing, demonizing, deifying, or regretting them. Which amounts to our still not learning to reverence the gravity of the creative moment and look as far inside of it as we are able before the first step is taken.

This seems to necessitate an ethics of some kind in order to clarify to ourselves what our true motives are in beginning a Creation. Are we not so led by our egos? This can be either an emotional or a logical process of rationalization. And I don't know if people are truly able to not rationalize in any decision, to be honest. But perhaps we can curb the ego somewhat by considering the effects our creating can or will have on others. Beauvoir thought one's freedom could only be truly ethical when it required that one also esteem and work toward the freedom of the Other. The Tao Te Ching teaches that to understand one's life, one must look to the effects her actions have produced.

Seems a good beginning to mindful creating. And Frankenstein wasn't bad, just misunderstood and isolated. But that eventuality would have been obvious before forcing him into life.

Seeing inside her journey, a little

2010-09-24T22:07:00.000-07:00

Lord Chandos "Letter": A Personal Response

2010-09-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Just finished rereading Hofmannsthal's description of his language crisis, and realize I've got a similar problem.

HERE it is, if you're interested.

Hofmannsthal: Review of a New Book of Translations

2010-09-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

From The Times Literary Supplement

November 4, 2009

The precious Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The precocious, outstanding, gifted poet and frustrated conservative who sought to escape his Jewish roots

Paul Reitter

Can a bad economy make for great poetry? Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought so. Indeed, he saw his own gift for lyrical writing and reflection as being, in a way, a consequence of the stock market crash of 1873. This self-understanding starts with the fact that Hofmannsthal was conceived at the very moment of the bust. His father, a banker, got word of it soon after arriving in Naples for his honeymoon. Cutting his trip short, he hurried back to Vienna, where he was able to confirm that the family fortune, which stemmed from his silk-trading, noble “von”-earning, devoutly Jewish grandfather, had evaporated. But even harder hit, Hofmannsthal believed, was his mother. She already suffered from weak nerves; according to him, the cause was the tumultuous context of her own birth: the revolutions of 1848. When financial worries came, she dealt with them poorly. In Hofmannsthal’s view his mother’s stress imprinted itself on him in the womb. Its mark was the special sensitivity of the poet.

Clearly, Hofmannsthal liked to spin myths about himself. Yet in treating his talent as a phenomenon that demanded a back story, he was merely acknowledging what was plain to see. Even Karl Kraus, who loathed Hofmannsthal and seized every opportunity to debunk him, acknowledged that Hofmannsthal was a great writer. In a fin-de-siècle Viennese literary scene famously well stocked with brilliant poets and thinkers Hofmannsthal stood out. It helped that he entered the scene so young. He was still in high school when, under the pseudonym “Loris”, he began placing essays and poems in literary journals. His precociousness as well as his virtuosity and the refinement of his observations were unrivalled. Here is Arthur Schnitzler evoking his impression of a reading Hofmannsthal gave in 1892, at the age of eighteen:

"After a few minutes we riveted our attention on him, and exchanged astonished, almost frightened glances. We had never heard such verses of perfection, such faultless plasticity, such musical feeling, from any living being, nor had we thought them possible after Goethe. But more wondrous than this unique mastery of form (which has never since been achieved in the German language) was his knowledge of the world, which could only have come from a magical intuition in a youth whose days were spent sitting on the school bench."

[read the rest of the review HERE]

2010-09-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

I got a picture from my 4 1/2 year-old daughter that she drew recently. I asked her what she called it and she gave it a name, but I won't post it.
Below it is a picture I drew well before she was born, which does not have a name.
Both pictures were drawn with black pen.
Note the particular use of lines in each.

2010-09-20T13:43:00.001-07:00

Words are Living Beings: A Deleted Scene from "The Sonosopher."

2010-09-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

A deleted scene from "The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life...in Sound." Alex explains his belief that words are living beings and then begins a spontaneous performance linked to his artwork.

Foam and Sand

2010-09-18T13:33:00.001-07:00

A short clip of Alex Caldiero performing his poem "Foam and Sand" in the film "The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life...in Sound." For more information on the film please visit thesonosopher.com.

THE SONOSOPHER - ALEX CALDIERO PERFORMS FOAM AND SAND from Torben Bernhard on Vimeo.

Alex and Metaphors

2010-09-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

Shot from a camera phone in Italy while filming "The Sonosopher: Alex Caldiero in Life...in Sound." Alex explains his belief (or lack thereof) of metaphors.

An Experiment in Photography

2010-09-16T22:40:00.001-07:00

Hey Language Scrapians... In the past I have, with many others, run a set of 'experiments' in photography, where we take pictures regarding a certain theme, and then publish them on a blog for all to see. The most recent of these experiments happens to have the theme: LANGUAGE. So Scott and I thought it would be of interest to people in this current class (as well as to interest of those from previous classes - and other readers of this blog). So, if you are interested in participating, see the following:

***DESCRIPTION OF EXPERIMENT (please read carefully and completely)***

1. With as creative an eye as possible, take a photograph of anything that fits the theme of 'LANGUAGE'. Language is an expansive albeit vague topic, which can encompass words, speech, bodies, and more... "think outside the box" as the saying goes, and... be as creative as possible when capturing 'language' on film.

2. Submit ONE picture to the email address (photoexperiments@hotmail.com) with the subject line reading something like "Photo Experiment: LANGUAGE" - be sure to specify that it is for THIS event. Be sure to submit by 11:59 pm on Thursday, September 30, 2010 (i.e. by the end of this month). **[Early submissions encouraged]**

3. Then, check the blog: http://theubiquitousnessofbeauty.blogspot.com/ on Friday, October 1 to see the pictures.

Feel free too check the blog (at the link right above) to see other previous experiments.

LINK to the facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=155448924483952

2010-09-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

I am reminded of a quote from a favorite movie, Playing By Heart. "Talking about Love is like dancing about architecture." The thing in itself. Can we only know what we experience, and allow what seem like authentic understandings to exist between ourselves and others?

But I think there is more to us than language. It is only the tool. Something seems to exist that wants language in order to express itself. (not a new thought, I know.) How can we be language or not be language? I thought I had a solid footing here, but I think not, now.

Inner (mystical) Experience

2010-09-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of a fine book by a French writer in which he gets at some of the questions we raised in the first section of our course.

2010-09-15T11:36:00.000-07:00

After class I was thinking about the discussion of natural language and the conventional language. Conventional language and those that are furthest away from natural language seem to involve the "mind" a lot more. Language can be a tool and the mind can also be a tool to get things figured out and understood. People who are run by the mind can not stop using language which is the tool of the mind. This also connects with the idea of trying to name the unnameable. The mind and language can only go so far on thier own. When they are used as tools one can better comprehend the concept of the Tao. Using your mind and using language are traits of someone who is more centered on "Being". I believe that being is coinsides with the natural language. I'm finding this very hard to express.

2010-09-14T21:43:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia had a quote by Rousseau that I think relates to what we are studying:

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him... Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

This reminded me of the concept a lot of the people we have studied believe - the notion that to say it is to not say it. This relates to anything, particularly I was thinking about religious texts - by writing it down we instantly discredit it and have made it into nothing. Whenever anyone writes about God or tries to tell what God is, we must mistrust them by virtue of the fact that they have defined God. What they have done is define what God is to them, not necessarily what or who God actually is.

By defining God we have nullified God. I am speaking about all the various religions who profess to know God and claim they have/know the only true God(s). Let me, however sacrilegious it may be, rewrite Rousseau's quote to read - Beware of listening to this impostor [i.e. any religious text claiming to know the only true God(s)]; you are undone if you once forget that God belongs to us all, and God itself is nobody. Meaning that "God" varies from person to person and is so undefinable/illusive that claiming to know God instantly destroys God by putting a fence around God. Oddly enough it reminds me of a song from The Sound of Music, "how do you catch a cloud and pin it down?"

I would also like to bring up the fence that Rousseau mentioned: language is the fence we use to try and contain God, who cannot even be contained. This links back to a class Scott taught this summer about barbed wire; now everywhere I go, all I see are fences and I just realized language is yet another fence. We try to contain what we think and feel inside the realm of language and often times this leaves us speechless and unable to purely define what we feel and think. I don't know - I think I am just contradicting myself now. What do you guys think about language as a fence and God being destroyed by that fence?

Hegel on the Absolute

2010-09-13T07:47:00.001-07:00

Scott,

More interesting philosophy ties! :)

"Though it may seem contradictory that the Absolute should be conceived
essentially as a result, it needs little pondering to set this show of
contradiction in its true light. The beginning, the principle, or the
Absolute, as at first immediately enunciated, is only the universal. Just
as when I say 'all animals', this expression cannot pass for a zoology, so
it is equally plain that the words, 'the Divine', 'the Absolute', 'the
Eternal', etc., do not express what is contained in them; and only such
words, in fact, do express the intuition as something immediate. Whatever
is more than such a word, even the transition to a mere
proposition, contains a becoming‑other that has to be taken back, or is a
mediation. But it is just this that is rejected with horror, as if absolute
cognition were being surrendered when more is made of mediation than in
simply saying that it is nothing absolute, and is completely absent in the
Absolute." ‑ Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Colten Strickland

Have you heard the joke about Adolf Eichmann, the strip-tease dancer and the eminent linguist?...

2010-09-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[and yet...]

Language--human language-- after all, is little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature--sometimes not so adequate. -Nathaniel Hawthorne (American Notebooks)

Hannah Arendt, from her work "Responsibility and Judgment," wrote:

"Some years ago, reporting the trial of [Adolph] Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of "the banality of evil" and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.

He functioned in the role of prominent war criminal as well as he had under the Nazi regime; he had not the slightest difficulty in accepting an entirely different set of rules. He knew that what he had once considered his duty was now called a crime, and he accepted this new code of judgment as though it were nothing but another language rule [my emphasis added]. To his rather limited supply of stock phrases he had added a few new ones, and he was utterly helpless only when he was confronted with a situation to which none of them would apply, as in the most grotesque instance when he had to make a speech under the gallows and was forced to rely on cliches used in funeral oratory which were inapplicable in his case because he was not the survivor. Considering what his last words should be in case of a death sentence, which he had expected all along, this simple fact had not occurred to him, just as inconsistencies and flagrant contradictions in examination and cross examinations during the trial had not bothered him. Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence. If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon be exhausted; the difference in Eichmann was only that he clearly knew of no such claim at all." (end quote)

Arendt's experience with Eichmann illustrates to me the disagreement in belief between Coleridge's and Hawthorne's views. Where Eichmann clearly used language as a means to wield power to the ends of torture and genocide in a war against the Jews and Others, Coleridge's assertion is born out. But upon deeper inspection, Hawthorne's insistence that language is brutish senselessness seems utterly apparent in Eichmann's vacuous adaptivity without any shift in consciousness--even facing the moment of his own death.

Where Coleridge sees language as the means for identifying what we want and then waging war to acquire it--the occupation of our own worlds [read: words], Hawthorne sees language as oftentimes a waste. Though what it is a waste of, I'm uncertain from the quote. And it is interesting that Hawthorne is using language to denigrate language.

But Arendt's assessment of the simple change in "language rule" identifies the deeper issue of all three quotes: individual perception(s) and one's subsequent intention(s). Language can create victory and destruction simultaneously. It can create meaning while at the same time negating something else. In this sense, Coleridge and Hawthorne are two sides of the same coin. Eichmann was the negative of his own positive.

Another perspective on this follows:

"There is a perfectly true story of the strip-tease dancer who wrote to an eminent American linguist asking him to supply a word to replace 'strip-tease' because of its 'strong connotations.' "I hope," she added, "that the science of semantics can help the verbally unprivileged members of my profession." The eminent linguist, knowing his classical languages, suggested 'ecdysiast.'" -Frank Palmer (1981)

ecdysis n. the shedding or casting off of an outer coat or integument by snakes, crustaceans, etc.

[from The Study of Language by George Yule, 1985]

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (Shakespeare), how do we account for our sexist reinterpretations of something like waitress changing to wait person changing to server? Arendt seems to be saying that in Eichmann's case at least, intention was so impersonal to Eichmann, that even his own death was a thing entirely apart from himself. And yet in the case of the strip-tease dancer and the eminent linguist (the juxtaposition of which, I simply LOVE), the linguist is extremely personal in his intellectually-veiled attack. He does exactly with language what Coleridge argues for. However, I think the sum total of what he accomplishes fits more closely with Hawthorne. And why?

For myself, Arendt's observations pinpoint the dangers of context from which we can never free ourselves. Eichmann could BE the staunch leader for true Germany as easily as he could Be the hated war criminal. Language will always at some level, speak the morality of the person and the culture from which it is executed (no pun intended). If I were to simply say "turn right," my language relies upon the history of each word that holds countless meanings built upon each other through all their various reincarnations and then delivered with my own tacit and explicit intentions. The linguist not only wished to humiliate the dancer, he wished to show his own brilliance and superiority to others in the act of it. And yet without using the words 'eminent' or 'strip-tease,' the story would mean something else entirely. Would the persons themselves each be someone else entirely too?

Computer Viruses and Language

2010-09-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

I can't help but think about Scott's challenge a few classes ago to answer how it is that we consider language, and specifically naming, as being able to create something. Naming as creation. I don't know if I have an answer to that, but I do think there are now many clear cases of language creating something, like self-replicating, independently operating objects purely out of language, namely computer viruses and similar things like worms, Trojan horses and wabbits. These are programs, ultimately just strings of bits, on or off commands, arranged in ways such that the language itself multiplies itself, albeit using a physical structure already provided by logic circuits. The program is pure language, and in replicating itself it only creates more pure language, but it still functions and operates with a certain degree of autonomy, able to not only work, but move, travel, locomote, from place to place, computer to computer. Language that not only moves physically (any book can do that) but moves itself from place to place without a human needing to wield it. In an interesting kind of way, these objects of computer language are almost alive, if that doesn't sound too cliche. That an artificial, purely logical language can give birth to something so solid, real, and locatable in space and time is fascinating, and almost unexpected given the abstractness of artificial logical languages.

If you take the idea seriously, it also means that the creators of the first artificial life, the gods of new life, if you will, are Loki-like, mischievous computer hackers who mostly just wanted to mess around and experiment, and even make jokes. Consider - the first serious virus in the wild, as they say, was the Elk Cloner, which displayed a simple rhyme merely touting it's ability to clone itself and infect files. The earliest artificial life was literally a joke. Kind of a geeky, bad one.

Here are a few links to some interesting material on computer viruses as artificial life or not, which means in my mind, artificial life created purely from language.
Paper from Purdue University
Introduction to computer viruses
Scientist "infects" himself, via RFID chip, with a computer virus
Conficker: One of the world's largest worms.
Early discussion of "Self-Reproducing Automata"

The Vehicle of Language

2010-09-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about something Alex said in class today; he stated that language is a vehicle. He said this vehicle can drive on land. Once we run out of land it can sail on water, and when we run out of water it can fly. However silly and trite it may be, but my mind instantly jumped to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, is a vehicle that is unlike no other, it can drive, sail and fly. Bare with me...

I soon began singing the song in my head (it has consequently stayed there all day today) and I then began comparing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to language. In the song from the film, [Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Finale] the owners of this flying car try to describe Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and do so by using a variety of amazing words; they call it "uncatagorical," an "oracle," and "phantasmagorical." Toward the end of the song they state, "It's more than spectacular to use the vernacular." I quickly saw that these words also describe language.

Language is "uncatagorical," it can't be categorized very easily as it is so all encompassing and yet so limiting. Language, especially in the context of what we have been discussing in class, is also an "oracle." Meaning that language is something prophetic/godlike. The dictionary I used said an "oracle" is something that is "typically ambiguous or obscure." Language being "phantasmagorical" fits perfectly too - as it describes defining and traumatic moments in our lives. When something is phantasmagorical it is surreal and unreal - like our classmates out of body experience whilst giving birth or Scott's nightmare he had. But language still seems to fall short when we try to describe one of these experiences - hence language being uncatagorical, an oracle, and phantasmagorical.

I particularly liked the end of the song when it stated, "it's more than spectacular to use the vernacular." Meaning Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (language) cannot be put into words. Using the "vernacular" to describe it still does not do Chitty Chitty Bang Bang justice - it defies the ordinary and common.

This amazing ability to communicate is "spectacular." It is fun and useful to use the vernacular to communicate what we think and feel which is why language is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; it is the perfect vehicle.

Just an interesting excerpt I came across

2010-09-10T00:13:00.000-07:00

From Francis Bacon
"New Method"
..."There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Marketplace, on account of the commerce and consort of men there.For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar.And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies."
(Sort of like the idea of putting your foot in your mouth or searching for the "right" word)

Joseph Smith; http://www.eldenwatson.net/harmony.htm#23

2010-09-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

Now I am not going to say whether I am LDS or not because I think that might change what people think about what I think about what I read. Maybe I am not familiar even with the Mormon culture, maybe I am. Maybe I am the most devout Mormon ever. Either way, I am not from Utah and I have spent alot of time in other countries, Yes plural, countrieS, I am not talking about an LDS mission.... Anyways,...I also do not completely understand the Mormon culture here.

I dunno about you but when I was fourteen I was much different then I am now and I think if I went into a forest to pray and heard some noises while I wanted so desperately to communicate with God, I would have been scared and frozen if I had heard noises too. Maybe it was an animal, a boogie man, something else my "unlearned" mind could come up with. Maybe he (Joseph) had gone into a place in the forest that was full of black mold or pot, or something and he hallucinated (I mean no disrespect, I am only trying to look at this like I never have before, and maybe I haven't and I know nothing other than what I am reading about Joseph Smith)..He says "not to an imaginary ruin but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being." Kids can make things up and make things so real to them that they create their own (false and unreal) memories. I am not calling Joseph Smith a lair by any means, but he was only 14. Fourteen. I don't even think if something such as that happened to me at 14 I could even comprehend it. However, maybe that is why he could comprehend it because he had not yet been tainted by everything the world throws at you with age, maybe because he was 14 he was able to have such powerful faith. Maybe what happened to Joseph he could only describe in the words he used, do to the confines of language, and it was actually something completely different then the representation that the Mormon religion follows.

Just some thoughts from another unlearned boy

-Ryan

And on another note, I love what Roger Keller said, in that in all other religions that have 5% of truth, in the Mormon religion he found 6%.

I guess what I am trying to say, is that in the bible there is a description of something as a chariot of fire. I believe this description is used because it was the best way to describe what was seen with the knowledge and language at the time, but who knows, maybe that description was a F-16, but "F-16" was not known then, the word, nor the name which describes it.

Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

2010-09-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

Words Cannot Express

By DEREK BICKERTON

Published: September 3, 2010

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Serge Bloch

THROUGH THE LANGUAGE GLASS

Why The World Looks Different in Other Languages

By Guy Deutscher

304 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $28

Times Topic: Grammar and Usage

Deutscher starts with the puzzling fact that many languages lack words for what (to English speakers) seem to be basic colors. For anyone interested in the development of ideas, Deutscher’s first four chapters make fascinating reading. Did you know that the British statesman William Gladstone was also an accomplished Greek scholar who, noting among other things the surprising absence of any term for “blue” in classical Greek texts, theorized that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans when those texts were composed? Or that a little-known 19th-century philologist named Lazarus Geiger made profound and surprising discoveries about how languages in general divide up the color spectrum, only to have his discoveries ignored and forgotten and then rediscovered a century later? Did you know that Siegfried Sassoon’s World War I psychiatrist, William Rivers, carried out the earliest psychological experiments to test the precise relationship between the colors people could name and the colors they actually saw?

Deutscher does not merely weave little-known facts into an absorbing story. He also takes account of the vast changes in our perceptions of other races and cultures over the past two centuries. Although the strange sequence in which color terms appear in the world’s languages over time — first black and white, then red, then either green or yellow, with blue appearing only after the first five are in place — still has no full explanation, Deutscher’s suggestion that the development of dyes and other forms of artificial coloring may be involved is as convincing as any other, making color terms the likeliest candidate for a culture-induced linguistic phenomenon.

[the rest of the article HERE]

Vinegar Tasters

2010-09-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

We see three men standing around a vat of vinegar. Each has dipped his finger into the vinegar and has tasted it. The expression on each man's face shows his individual reaction. Since the painting is allegorical, we are to understand that these are no ordinary vinegar tasters, but are instead representatives of the "Three Teachings" of China, and that the vinegar they are sampling represents the Essence of Life. The three masters are K'ung Fu-tse (Confucius), Buddha, and Lao-tse, author of the oldest existing book of Taoism. The first has a sour look on his face, the second wears a bitter expression, but the third man is smiling.

To Kung Fu-tse (kung FOOdsuh), life seemed rather sour. He believed that the present was out step with the past, and that the government of man on earth was out of harmony with the Way of Heaven, the government of, the universe. Therefore, he emphasized reverence for the Ancestors, as well as for the ancient rituals and ceremonies in which the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, acted as intermediary between limitless heaven and limited earth. Under Confucianism, the use of precisely measured court music, prescribed steps, actions, and phrases all added up to an extremely complex system of rituals, each used for a particular purpose at a particular time. A saying was recorded about K'ung Fu-tse: "If the mat was not straight, the Master would not sit." This ought to give an indication of the extent to which things were carried out under Confucianism.

To Buddha, the second figure in the painting, life on earth was bitter, filled with attachments and desires that led to suffering. The world was seen as a setter of traps, a generator of illusions, a revolving wheel of pain for all creatures. In order to find peace, the Buddhist considered it necessary to transcend "the world of dust" and reach Nirvana, literally a state of "no wind." Although the essentially optimistic attitude of the Chinese altered Buddhism considerably after it was brought in from its native India, the devout Buddhist often saw the way to Nirvana interrupted all the same by the bitter wind of everyday existence.

To Lao-tse (LAOdsuh), the harmony that naturally existed between heaven and earth from the very beginning could be found by anyone at any time, but not by following the rules of the Confucianists. As he stated in his Tao To Ching (DAO DEH JEENG), the "Tao Virtue Book," earth was in essence a reflection of heaven, run by the same laws - not by the laws of men. These laws affected not only the spinning of distant planets, but the activities of the birds in the forest and the fish in the sea. According to Lao-tse, the more man interfered with the natural balance produced and governed by the universal laws, the further away the harmony retreated into the distance. The more forcing, the more trouble. Whether heavy or fight, wet or dry, fast or slow, everything had its own nature already within it, which could not be violated without causing difficulties. When abstract and arbitrary rules were imposed from the outside, struggle was inevitable. Only then did life become sour.

To Lao-tse, the world was not a setter of traps but a teacher of valuable lessons. Its lessons needed to be learned, just as its laws needed to be followed; then all would go well. Rather than turn away from "the world of dust," Lao-tse advised others to "join the dust of the world." What he saw operating behind everything in heaven and earth he called Tao (DAO), "the Way."

Success through failure

2010-09-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

I was reminded of some words from a song in Chitty Chitty bang bang as we discussed what makes success possible and kept thinking of the lines " up from the ashes, up from the ashes, grow the roses of success"

The Roses Of Success Lyrics
Every Bursted Bubble Has A Glory!each Abysmal Failure Makes A Point!every Glowing Path That Goes Astray,shows You How To Find A Better Way.so Every Time You Stumble Never Grumble.next Time You'll Bumble Even Less!for Up From The Ashes, Up From The Ashes, Grow The Roses Of Success!grow The Roses!grow The Roses!grow The Roses Of Success!oh Yes!grow The Roses!those Rosy Roses!from The Ashes Of Disaster Grow The Roses Of Success! (Spoken)yes I Know But He Wants It To Float. It Will!for Every Big Mistake You Make Be Grateful!here, Here!that Mistake You'll Never Make Again!no Sir!every Shiny Dream That Fades And Dies,generates The Steam For Two More Tries!(Oh) There's Magic In The Wake Of A Fiasco!correct!it Gives You That Chance To Second Guess!oh Yes!then Up From The Ashes, Up From The Ashes Grow The Roses Of Success!grow The Roses!grow The Roses!grow The Roses Of Success!grow The Roses!those Rosy Roses!from The Ashes Of Disaster Grow The Roses Of Success!disaster Didn't Stymie Louis Pasteur!no Sir!edison Took Years To See The Light!right!alexander Graham Knew Failure Well; He Took A Lot Of Knocks To Ring Thatbell!so When It Gets Distressing It's A Blessing!onward And Upward You Must Press!yes, Yes!till Up From The Ashes, Up From The Ashes Grow The Roses Of Success.grow The Rogrow The Rogrow The Roses!grow The Rogrow The Rogrow The Roses!grow The Roses Of Success!grow The Rogrow The Rogrow The Roses!those Rosy Rothose Rosy Rothose Rosy Roses!from The Ashes Of Disaster, Grow The Roses Of Success!start The Engines!success!batten The Hatches!success!man The Shrouds!lift The Anchor!success!

Another idea that isn't new is the image of the phoenix that dies and then rises from the ashes

Words: A Bonus Video from RadioLabs

2010-09-02T10:05:00.001-07:00

2010-08-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

Why do i always feel a deep need to read more than one translation of any given text? more than one translation? four, five, six translations of the same text, of the same book...i dont recommend this...i m ever dissatisfied and never feel that i ve understood enuff of whatever i happen to be reading. so here is another translation of that poem from Holderlin that we recently read in class. this one is by Richard Sieburth from his versions of Holderlin called "Hymns and Fragments."

In the Forest

Noble deer.

But man lives in huts, wrapped in the garments of his shame, and is the more inward, the more alert for it, and that he tend his spirit as the priestess tends the heavenly flame, this is his understanding. Which is why recklessness and the higher power to fail and achieve are given him, godlike creature, and language, most dangerous of possessions, is given man so that creating, destroying, perishing and returning back to her, eternal mistress and mother, so that he might bear witness to what he is, having inherited and learned from her the godliest of her attributes, all-preserving love.

Reading this version it is clear, at last, who "her" refers to in the phrase back to her, eternal mistress and mother. It is none other than language "herself" most dangerous of possessions, is given man so that creating, destroying, perishing and returning back to her, eternal mistress and mother... And she endows the human being with godlike powers to create and destroy, to perish and return to her... indeed it is language that allows us humans to bear witness to what we are, and to inherit and learn from her the godliest of her attributes, all-preserving love. Yes. The most Divine attribute of language is Love. And it is Love that language teaches us, ultimately. Is that right? what a thing to say! If Holderlin is indeed saying it. His language, that is, his German is uniquely HIS. Each word and syntax flow directly from his peculiar tongue... I mean the one in his mouth...the link between his body and soul.

Below is yet another translation. This one was made at my request by my side-kick, Scott Abbott. I wanted a translation of the poem as literal and raw and direct as is possible from someone who knows German and English. Here is the result.

you noble deer

but in huts lives man and wraps himself in the shamed garment for more inward is more attentive to and so that he tends the spirit as does the priestess the heavenly flame this is his understanding. And that is why choice and higher power to err and to bring about is given to him to the one who is like god the most dangerous of possessions language so that he creating destroying and perishing and returning back to the eternal to the mistress and mother so that he begets what he is has inherited learned from her, her most Divine the all preserving love.

Read the two above translations and then read the one from class (by Michael Hamburger). Read the German (if you can)-- I almost said "the German original" but i stopped in my tracks...Over time and many readings, i ve come to understand that the original, if ever there was or is one, is alive only in Holderlin himself...and he, Holderlin, was the first translator of the poem.

A Zen quote.

2010-08-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago, before I began the study of Zen, I said, 'Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.' After I got insight into the truth of Zen through the instructions of a good master, I said, 'Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters.' But now, having attained the abode of final rest, (that is, Enlightenment) I say, 'Mountains are really mountains, waters are really waters.'

I was reminded about this quote durring our discussion today. It is as if we are trying to understand and study a higher form of language than most of us have previously done. However it seems that the level of understanding which we are seeking is higher than we will be able to reach unless a knowing along with a being happens. We are looking at these ideas and concepts in ways that we can describe which is limiting, because many of them ARE without words. (Our words at least.) Would a high form of language include connecting with, understanding, feeling, being, seeing, and knowing, everything that exists? How would we go about getting there? Is it possible that we already are THERE but are just unaware of it?

Language and Technology

2010-08-30T12:38:00.001-07:00

As we become a more and more advanced civilization, relying more heavily on computers can be both an aid and a detriment. In some cases they can do things much faster and better than we can, but when does the line occur where intuition takes over? How can we convey that idea of experimentation?

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630.html

In this link provided a computer was able to decipher an ancient language called Ugaritic in a significantly shorter period of time than it was translated by a human, but only because it has a base line to model. What are your thoughts?

Tao Te Ching

2010-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1 -What is the Tao?

The "Tao" is too great to be described by the name "Tao".
If it could be named so simply, it would not be the eternal Tao.
Heaven and Earth began from the nameless (Tao),
but the multitudes of things around us were created by names.
We desire to understand the world by giving names to the things we see,
but these things are only the effects of something subtle.

When we see beyond the desire to use names,
we can sense the nameless cause of these effects.

The cause and the effects are aspects of the same, one thing.
They are both mysterious and profound.
At their most mysterious and profound point lies the "Gate of the Great Truth".

[this translation from this site]

1

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

2

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

3

If you overesteem great men,
people become powerless.
If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.

Practice not-doing,
and everything will fall into place.

4

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

5

The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the center.

6

The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.

7

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

8

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.

9

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

10

Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child's?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from you own mind
and thus understand all things?

Giving birth and nourishing,
having without possessing,
acting with no expectations,
leading and not trying to control:
this is the supreme virtue.

[this translation from this site]

Language Transcending Time

2010-08-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

After class on Friday I was thinking about language and its relation to time. I concluded that language, either spoken or written, has the power to transcend time. It is only upon the death of a language that time overpowers language.

A good example of this was the Rosetta Stone discovered in 1799. Before its discovery Egyptian Hieroglyphics were a complete mystery and without ability to read the hieroglyphics the entire ancient civilization was also a mystery for thousands of years. It wasn't until this stone was discovered that we could read Egyptian. Once we were able to read ancient Egyptian the entire history and civilization of ancient Egypt was alive once again and all because of language.

Language can bring us to any place in time solely through communication of ideas, emotions, and concepts. Think of all the times we read or say something and it makes and impact on us. We can all remember something mean or hurtful someone said to us and we can relive the hurt just by remembering what was said; it may have been years prior but we still remember as if it were yesterday. Written/recorded communication is one of the most immortal forms of language. It could have been something written hundreds, even thousands of years ago and yet it still carries an enormous impact. Religious texts are prime examples, The Bible, The Qur'an, The Torah, and many others are all ancient writings but still manage to impact human life thousands and thousands of years later - all because of language.

Whorf's Theory

2010-08-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

By GUY DEUTSCHER

Published: August 26, 2010

At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

Enlarge This Image

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

[for the rest of the article, click HERE]

Ode to be thought in the context of Hölderlin's poem

2010-08-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

THE “ODE TO MAN” FROM SOPHOCLES’ ANTIGONE

by Anne CarsonAUGUST 16, 2010

Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more

terribly quiet than Man:

his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea

in marble winter,

up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday

down he grinds the unastonishable earth

with horse and shatter.

Shatters too the cheeks of birds and traps them in his forest headlights,

salty silvers roll into his net, he weaves it just for that,

this terribly quiet customer.

He dooms

animals and mountains technically,

by yoke he makes the bull bend, the horse to its knees.

And utterance and thought as clear as complicated air and

moods that make a city moral, these he taught himself.

The snowy cold he knows to flee

and every human exigency crackles as he plugs it in:

every outlet works but

one.

Death stays dark.

Death he cannot doom.

Fabrications notwithstanding.

Evil,

good,

laws,

gods,

honest oath taking notwithstanding.

Hilarious in his high city

you see him cantering just as he please,

the lava up to here.

Originally published in "The New Yorker": HERE

Language of Angels

2010-08-26T12:18:00.000-07:00

1 Corinthians 13 (King James Version)

1Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

3And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

4Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

5Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

6Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

7Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

8Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

9For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

10But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

11When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

Joseph Smith and Language

2010-08-25T12:17:00.000-07:00

For thoughts on truth and revelation, including Joseph Smith's desire to know things beyond the prisonhouse of language, see this essay, especially pages 18-20.

For a "harmony" of the several accounts of the first vision, click HERE

Lavater Longing to Be Beyond Language, Longing for a "Natural" Language

2010-08-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

Lavater on a possible language in heaven: click here

Read pages 177-178.

Also, click here for more, reading pages 91-93.

WORDS -- by Radiolab

2010-08-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

NEW EPISODE -- "WORDS"

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke. Plus: a group of children invent an entirely new language in Nicaragua in the 1970s.

http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2010/08/09/words/

So I've been listening to this great radio show/podcast for about six months now and I've obsessively listened to their whole back catalogue of shows now. Now I have to be content listening to the new episodes as they come out, which is more slowly than I'd like. It is that good. Anyway, everyone should check the show out (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/), or download the podcast on iTunes... To the point: the newest episode is called "WORDS" and it really blew my mind. Many of their episodes are appropriate for this forum. The show essentially takes a seemingly very simple question, concept, or idea, and tries to explore it in depth in a number of ways (through the sciences, math, philosophy, art, etc.). It hasn't failed to fascinate me yet. So go check out the latest episode and then I think you'll be hooked.

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