language
Texts
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Pantography
Pantography tweets a message every hour. Each one is consecutive: the first was ‘0’ and the last will consist of 140 zeds. Between these two extremes, every possible message will have been tweeted: a description of every feeling you’ve ever had, anything you’ve ever overheard or will overhear, any headline that has ever caught, or could ever catch, your... -
The Peculiar Melancholy of Nations
The Portuguese are very jealous of their saudade and you will frequently be told that the word is untranslatable. Similar claims are made for Czech litost, Turkish hüzün, Ethiopian tezeta, German sensucht, Bosnian sevdah, and, for that matter, the blues. They all express some sort of melancholy at the heart of the national character. It is unsurprising that no satisfactory equivalent can be... -
Jean Paul: Sculmeisterlein Wutz
What stories hide within your letters, what adventures within your words, mysterious Schoolmaster Wutz! Pompous and mocked you make your entrance: a rustic pedant with eyes on the greater world, re-imagining the wisdom of ages at the kitchen table. The volumes in your library bind fancied epics, elaborated rumours of ideas and histories—a matchstick model of the soul!
Citations
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I’m not interested in my emotions insomuch as their being mine, belonging only, uniquely, to me. I’m not interested in their individual aspects, only in how they are traversed by what isn’t mine. In what emanates from our...
Preciado 2013 pp 11-12 -
Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world’s thousands of languages are...
“Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? by John McWhorter — Aeon Essays” at aeon.co -
It’s out there with Finnegans Wake (although two years earlier), and but for the fact it hadn’t been synthesised yet, you’d be wondering if Dr Destouches hadn’t scored a tab of LSD.
“Céline’s journey to the cutting edge of literature” at www.theguardian.com -
[L]anguage is doomed to enter the service of new codes and to become background noise—as we know it from sound film, in music, and still more in speaking as an auxiliary function, so that it can be said of silent film...
Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future? p. 69
Links
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Lacan, eroticism, & some thoughts on how it pertains to BDSM
On the suggestion of my primary supervisor, I have been taking a look at Jacques Lacan and Lacanian theory as it pertains to critical theory and literary criticism.
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The Lord’s Prayer: the Maltese Semitic version and its historical origins—The Malta Independent
Some weeks ago, the Malta Independent carried an article about Pope Francis wishing to change certain words currently used in the Lord’s Prayer.
- www.independent.com.mt
- Simon Mercieca
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Sheila Fitzpatrick
Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by Alexei Yurchak Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95, December 2005, ISBN 0 691 12117 If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written an interesting and provocative book about the way young Soviet Russians talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. For Yurchak, discourse is everything: there is no “real world” outside the world we construct via language. He argues that socialism really existed in the Soviet Union because people not only talked the talk (as they had to do) but at some level actually believed it.
- www.lrb.co.uk
- Everything Was For Ever Until It Was No More The Last Soviet Generation