He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed," and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never win an argument.
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
I'm interested in the relationship between Asemic Writing/Logograms and Sound Poetry. Sound Poetry is to spoken language what Logograms is to written language: it succeeds by sounding superficially like language but without conveying meaning (at least, in the way that language traditionally conveys meaning). I'm interested in finding more examples of Sound Poetry; all I really have on tap currently are Altazor and this piece by Hugo Ball:
Olamina olasica lalilá
Isonauta
Olandera uruaro
Ia ia campanuso compasedo
Tralalá
Aí ai mareciente y eternauta
Redontella tallerendo lucenario
Ia ia
Laribamba
Larimbambamplanerella
Laribambamositerella
Leiramombaririlanla
lirilam
Ai i a
Temporía
Ai ai aia
Ululayu
lulayu
layu yu
Ululayu
ulayu
ayu yu
Lunatando
Sensorida e infimento
Ululayo ululamento
Plegasuena
Cantasorio ululaciente
Oraneva yu yu yo
Tempovío
Infilero e infinauta zurrosía
Jaurinario ururayó
Montañfendo oraranía
Arorasía ululacente
Semperiva
A delightful bit of asemia that we saw at the NC museum of art: Tom Phillips*, the calligrapher replies Ⅰ.
According to the NC Museum of Art Handbook of the Collections,
"The painting is a tease. It invites and resists interpretation. Viewers can pick out a word here, a phrase there, but the artist has intentionally entrapped the content within the written maze."
*And lo and behold! I did not recognize his name -- it turns out Mr. Phillips is the author of A Humument, now available in its 5th edition and in app form for iPad.
posted evening of December 31st, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Wallpaper
Ryan of Rock and Wry* is in a band called Borrowed Beams of Light; they are soliciting donations to help produce their first full-length record. And that's not all! The tunes on this record will be "loosely based on a 500 year old, vellum manuscript known as The Voynich Manuscript." Far out, I can't wait to hear! Go pledge. $10 gets you a record when it's ready, $25 gets you a record when it's ready plus their previous short-format CD.
* (Which I am happy and puzzled to discover is a 2-drummer blog)
Via a post of LanguageHat's I discover a new work that is utterly sui generis -- author Tom Phillips' ongoing project A Humument -- potentially infinite (or Babelianly astronomically finite) stories extracted selectively from W.H. Mallock's novel A Human Document, by altering the book:
This reminds me in certain ways of asemic writing -- though clearly the words have meaning, are to be read as pieces of language and not only as a visual arrangement of forms, I react to them as I would to the shapes and scribbles of Roberto Altmann or Mindy Fisher or Serafini, where the semantic element of the language is "all in my head".
posted evening of November 19th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Language
