I have always had a special interest in what I think of as ephemeral visual-arts media: sandcastles, doodles, graffiti, etc…. and now, office whiteboards. Seeing Bill Taylor’s cubicle whiteboard artalmost makes me wish I worked in a cubicle, again. I say, almost. Maybe I should just buy a whiteboard for my apartment, instead. He draws these things on the whiteboard in his cubicle at work – a month or more for each one, during his spare time.
Bill Taylor, imitating Picasso’s “Guenica,” whiteboard and dry-erase marker.
The blogger IOZ is such a talented writer that I enjoy reading what he writes even when I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment. In a recent, broader discussion of Obama's rhetorical style and the recent State of the Union Speech, he says, "What, after all, is authenticity but the habituation of the self to its own autobiographical invention?"
That's such a brilliant, memorable line. It's going on my list of favorite quotes, thusly decontextualized.
There’s not much in the way of Dakota-Lakota language material on the internet. Dakota and Lakota are two closely-related dialects of the Sioux Native American language. Somewhat confusingly, the Lakota dialect is what is spoken in the Dakotas, while the Dakota dialect is spoken in Minnesota and Manitoba.
I studied the Dakota language while living in Minneapolis in the early 1990’s, during one of (one of ?) my “strange languages” phases. I really like the language. As an “active” speaker I can’t do much with, but I can still recognize verb conjugations and some basic vocabulary when I see it or hear it (not that that happens much). During my Lunar New Year time off I was surfing the internet looking for random things, and I took a moment to wonder if anyone, anywhere, had posted some Dakota Language poetry.
The below is the only thing I found in that vein. It was written by someone named John Hunt Peacock, Jr., a few years ago. He has been learning Dakota as a way to get in touch with his own cultural roots. Finding written materials in the language is hard – there are only a few thousand speakers in the world. He learned his language from the Dakota Bible and other Christian materials in the language, but he feels ambivalent about Christianity.
The poem is quite brutal in its assessment of the Christian legacy provided by the European Americans. He is both glad there is a Dakota language Bible, and bitter about the fact that that Bible was used to justify the mistreatment and dispossession of his people (“the cross of the Dakota culture’s crucifixion,” he writes). He asks how he could possibly be Christian.
TOKED CHRIST TAWOKEYE HEMACA OWAKIHI HWO?
Miye ca wowinape un wati, wowapi ska akan, Iyuieskapi topa dena — Dakota Wowapi Wakan Kin, Wocekiye Ikceka Wowapi Kin, Mahpiya Oicimani Yapi Kin, Sina Sapa Wowinwange — icipahyapi okatanpi wan Dakota wicohan yapi, Dakota iapi kin nipi, wotanin waste dena kapi. Wowapi woyakapi, toked wakiye sni, kais wawihingyapi sica, caje un econpi, Miye ca, wicoie ed otokahe ekta wicoie heca, Wan iye qa iyohi Dakota wicoie waste!
HOW COULD I BE A CHRISTIAN?
To me, living in exile on this white page, these four translations — the Dakota Bible, Book of Common prayer, “Pilgrim’s Progress”, and Catholic Catechism — once the cross of Dakota culture’s crucifixion, have become the gospel of the resurrected Dakota language. I don’t care what these books say or mean, or what atrocities are stll committed in their name. To me, in the beginning was the word, and the word, each and every Dakota word, was good!
I don’t know who this image should be attributed to – I found it here (a photographer’s blog, who in turn attributes it to this website). It’s pretty cool, though.
This is comedy. Or maybe not. Painful, if it’s comedy.
I think I should have less stuff. I’ve given up owning a car. I live in a 200 sq ft apartment, fairly contentedly. But I still have a storage unit in Minnesota with 5000 books and assorted furniture. I still have more clothes than I wear. I still have 2 (and a half) computers.
Simplify. Keep simplifying.
Here’s something from TED, on a similar theme. I’m not entirely impressed with it – its default starting point is a level of consumption I never actually reached in my life. But the same point can be recursively applied, and should be recursively applied, relentlessly.
Below is a picture I took in June 2010. Just because I want to put a picture.
Ta-Nehisi Coates remains one of the more “mainstream” political bloggers (as opposed to the rather more antiestablishment marxisty types) who most often manages that rare mix of fine writing and scathing analysis to “knock the ball out of the park,” as his commenters like to say.
He recently wrote about the Gingrich’s deployment of race-baiting code in the recent South Carolina (and the subsequent, deeply depressing standing ovation). Most compellingly, with his concise prose, in his conclusion, Coates writes,
When a professor of history [i.e. Gingrich] calls Barack Obama a “Food Stamp President,” it isn’t a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggression. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest. They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind.
I’ve never really had a long-distance, many-days-long hiking adventure. The closest I came were my two months living in the mountains of Michoacan, traveling by horseback (1987). When I traveled in Patagonia, too, although I traveled by bus (or boat, sometimes), I had a custom of walking for 5 or 6 hours each day that I could, exploring whatever town or lack-of-town I had arrived at, that day. I particularly remember walking from Rawson to Gaiman (Chubut Province, Argentina), about 35 km. It sticks with me as a vivid day-long hike, for some reason, in Argentina’s Welsh colony, stopping at Welsh tea houses and strange roadside attractions intended to be visited by car.
Well, anyway, I’m mentioning this because of this video I ran across.
I very, very often think of just throwing aside everything and walking some really long journey, like this man above has done. Also, there’s Simon Winchester’s walk across South Korea, from his book A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. It’s one of my favorite books “by foreigners about Korea.” I think of doing something like that. Or walking to visit my uncle’s house in Alaska, from somewhere like Minnesota.
I like urban hiking more than rural hiking, too. Over several days, I once walked the length of Mexico City’s Avenida Insurgentes, one of the longest boulevards in the city (maybe 30 km? taking the subway or bus to a spot along the avenue one day, then going home and picking up at the spot farther along the next day), and I once had this strange fantasy of walking the entire Mexico City subway system – essentially, walking from station to station until I’d visited them all, collecting small bits of the system on weekends or when I was off from work. I more recently have thought I could do the same thing with Seoul’s subway system, too. I’ve done some major portions of the Orange Line (Line 3), along which I live, that way, including the long stretch from Yaksu to Gangnam.
It’s mostly fantasy. But fun to think about. And maybe someday I will do one of these things.
I have no idea how advanced these plans are, to build a 65-floor “earthscraper” (an underground, “downward pointed” building) under Mexico, D.F.’s Zócalo (central historic plaza). And I understand people’s concerns about building such a thing in such an earthquake prone area (although it’s worth noting that during the huge 1985 quake, for example, the subway was actually a pretty safe place to be). So maybe the “earthscraper” is not a serious project. But it would be very cool.
The native peoples of the Great Plains – the Kiowa, Arapaho, Lakota and Cheyenne – had an elaborate art tradition involving pictorial drawing on animal skins, which they used to record stories and information about the natural world around them. As their contact with Europeans increased in the 1800s, they discovered that “ledger books” and Western drawing materials (crayons, colored pencils, etc.) worked well for this task too, and today there are fascinating troves of “ledger-art” from the 1800s. Most of these drawings are anonymous, but they offer a wonderful window into the pre-European imaginative life on the Great Plains.
There’s a website that hosts some of these images. I find them really fascinating.
Tvfaci mapu mew mogeley wagvben
Tvfaci kajfv wenu mew vlkantuley
ta ko pu rakiduwam
Doy fvta ka mapu tañi mvlen ta komv
xipalu ko mew ka pvjv mew
pewmakeiñmu tayiñ pu fvcakece yem
Apon kvyeh fey tañi am -pigekey
Ni hegvmkvleci piwke fewvla ñvkvfvy.
– Elicura Chihuailaf N. (poeta Mapuche de Chile)
El idioma es Mapudungun. La ortografía no es la que aprendí cuando estudiaba el idioma en 1994 en la UACh – no es una ortografía muy transparente, en mi opinión. Nótese que la “v” representa una vocal parecida a la rusa “ы” o la polaca “y” o también el sonido que se escribe en galés “u”. En la ortografía que yo aprendía, se la escribe “ü”. También nótese que la “x” arriba representa un sonido casi exactamente el del inglés, “tr” en una palabra como “truck”, y que la “c” es el del “ch” español o inglés. Debajo, una traducción en español. No soy capaz de entenderlo muy bien sin la traducción – nunca lo aprendí muy bien y me he olvidado de casi todo. Pero me encanta el idioma.
En este suelo habitan las estrellas
En este cielo canta el agua
de la imaginación
Más allá de las nubes que surgen
de estas aguas y estos suelos
nos sueñan los antepasados
Su espíritu -dicen- es la luna llena
El silencio su corazón que late.
(Imagen: ciudad de Castro en la isla de Chiloé, región históricamente Mapuche en la Patagonia chilena.)
Siempre me ha interesado literatura para niños. Por pura casualidad encontré este poema que me acuerdo haber visto (o algo parecido) en algún contexto hace tiempo.
LA JIRAFA
La pobre jirafa se muere de frío, pues llegó el invierno y no tiene abrigo, ni tiene bufanda, por eso se arrima tanto al oso panda. ¡Qué suave que estás! ¡Qué calorcito me das!
La mamá jirafa llama a su vecina, que es la oveja Fina. ¿No podrías darme un poco de lana? Pues te la daré… si me da la gana. ¡Anda, Fina! ¡Por algo eres mi vecina! Arráncame tú un mechón pero con mucho cuidado, no me hagas un chichón.
Y ahora ¿quién podrá ayudarme a hacer una bufanda tan grande? Buscaré a la araña, que sabe tejer con las manos y los pies.
Y así, con ayuda y con mucha calma, la mamá jirafa hizo la bufanda, y a su hijita, con cariño, se la regaló y no puedes imaginarte la alegría que le dio.
¡Ay, que calorcito que siento en mi cuello! Y se fue a dormir Porque le entró sueño.
This is very cool. I love typewriters. If I had a fixed abode (as opposed to a storage unit and moving once or twice a year for the last decade), I would collect them, I think. And I like to think about “alternative” methods of painting and doing art, too. This is definitely a conceptual piece but it has a strange practicality. A chromatic typewriter by Tyree Callahan.
Here's a book I want to read: The Atheist's Guide to Reality, by Alex Rosenberg. In a review at 3AM Magazine, Richard Marshall summarizes,
Rosenberg is a fearless naturalist, whose ‘nice nihilism’ doesn’t imply that we can become nihilists. He disturbs the comfy domestication of the naturalistic world view. Evolutionism and physics gives us a nihilist universe, purposeless, meaningless, ultimately devoid of everything we think is important. But it has constructed us as having evolutionary reflexes that grant us illusions of freewill and purpose we cannot but believe.
Even the review makes for very dense reading. I haven't been doing very well at dense reading, lately – but I hope I can find Rosenberg's book at Kyobo or somewhere like that.
Walking home from work, the night air sparkled with a sprinkling of snow, the air cold and clean-tasting. Work is hard these days. I’m trying hard to improve my teaching, and there’s a lot of pressure and discomfort at work because we’ve been losing students, too. This is partly just because hagwon business is cyclical, and parents always pull their kids out of hagwon in January, when public schools are in vacation and parents find other things to do with their kids. I can never understand how Korean managers – ever relatively good ones such as my current boss – seem to take these cycle-driven losses of enrollment so personally, and assume there’s some mistake being made by teachers as opposed to just being the vagaries of the market.
Well, anyway. So work is hard, these days. I have a tight, dense schedule, too. But I felt OK about it, today, walking home in the dark in the cold in the snow in my dreams.
I really, really like the resolution that goes: “19. Keep hoping machine running.” It appears he doodled a picture of it, too. I like the idea of a “hoping machine.” I’m doing some repairs on mine, currently.
What I’m listening to right now.
Neutral Milk Hotel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.”
I found out about an artist in New Jersey named Dave DeVries who takes children’s drawings and transforms them into “realistic” paintings. Here’s the article I saw, and here’s his website. It’s really cool, and reminds me so much of many of the dreams I had as a child that I can still remember clearly and vividly so many years later. Here’s an example of his work.
One reason I love my students’ artwork is because I can often, with only a small amount of effort, see “beyond” their depictions to their imaginations, and my own imaginings resemble the kind of thing this artist is doing. I suppose what I’m trying to say is something along the lines of: “I’ve thought of what this artist has done.” So it’s very cool to see him doing it.
“Enlightenment is the ideological firstborn of the bourgeoisie in its course of ascent. In its actual concreteness and specificity, Enlightenment serves the purposes of the bourgeois order that gave it birth as sedulously as the mediaeval Papacy served the feudal order.” – Michael J. Smith in an entry from last year to his blog, Stop Me Before I Vote Again.
Just so we’re clear: we’re talking European philosophical Enlightenment, not the Buddhist nirvanic type. It’s food for thought, though I’m not sure where to go with it. But it struck me as I read it – it was an aha moment.
It has come to my attention that Newt Gingrich considers Asimov’s Foundation series to have been a major influence in his intellectual formation. Although this perhaps bodes better than some other Republicans’ idolization of, e.g. Ayn Rand, it’s still disturbing, in multiple, incompatible ways. In fact, it’s cognitively dissonant in at least four ways:
a) Asimov was an atheist liberal, while Gingrich positions himself as a christianist (neo-)conservative (arguably not very plausibly, but still);
b) despite the above-mentioned fact that Asimov was, politically, liberal, nevertheless the actions of Hari Seldon (the founding psychohistorian – fictional picture at left) in the novels are hardly exemplars of liberal or democratic political action – they more resemble elitist crypto-totalitarianism – more than one critic over the years has compared Asimov’s psychohistory and the emergent Foundations (First and Second) as essentially Leninist-style avant-gardist cabals;
c) Gingrich apparently shares his interest in psychohistory with none other than liberal(-ish) talking-head Paul Krugman;
d) Gingrich is hardly like Hari Seldon, despite being influenced by the fictional character’s ideas – the former Speaker of the House seeks political glory and the media limelight, while Seldon preferred to operate in secret, behind the scenes.
In surfing the internet, I sometimes look at building, architecture and design sites. I have been running across rather hobbity looking things, lately.
Having worked as a truck mechanic, and having grown up in the household I did, I have a strong interest in (and fascination for) engines, although I never developed the level of passion for vehicle mechanicking that seems to have been my birthright (by which I mean my father, grandfather and great-grandfather were/are all passionate auto-mechanic hobbyists).
Some guy in Spain makes miniature engines that actually run. Here’s a video of him putting together and testing a V12 engine. I think it’s really interesting.
Slightly related to the above (in the aspect of “hand-made” industrial devices), I also ran across a story about a guy who tried to make a toaster “from scratch” – I mean really from scratch. I think it was meant as a sort of performance art. It’s intriguing.
Yesterday I went to the foreign grocery store across the street, mostly to resupply myself with the Brazilian brand of instant coffee that I like (“Iguaçu”), and I saw a giant bottle of dill spice. It seemed too big, but it was the only size they had, and I’ve never seen dill spice before in Korea. I decided to buy it – it was only 8 bucks.
So I got home thinking, gee, I have a lifetime’s supply of dill spice, what should I make? The main thing I have used dill spice for, in the past, is borsht – but I still haven’t found any beets (admittedly I haven’t looked that hard).
I had some nice tomatoes, and I had my pea soup. What could I make? I made fried tomatoes, with a breading that included corn flour, dill spice, nutmeg, black pepper. I literally invented the recipe from my crazy imagination – I had no plan or idea beforehand. Then I ate them with my pea soup and some toast. They were delicious.
What I’m listening to right now.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “Buy for me the rain.”
The video is very interesting – it’s a cheesy anti-war-themed music video from the 1960’s! I didn’t even know such a thing existed until I found it when finding a youtube of the song [UPDATE: old video link rotted, new video link is just the soundtrack – so the video is lost].
I grew up with this music – it’s very nostalgic, for me. Here are the lyrics.
Buy for me the rain, my darling, buy for me the rain; Buy for me the crystal pools that fall upon the plain. And I’ll buy for you a rainbow and a million pots of gold. Buy it for me now, babe, before I am too old.
Buy for me the sun, my darling, buy for me the sun; Buy for me the light that falls when day has just begun. And I’ll buy for you a shadow to protect you from the day. Buy it for me now, babe, before I go away.
Buy for me the robin, darling, buy for me the wing; Buy for me a sparrow, almost any flying thing. And I’ll buy for you a tree, my love, where a robin’s nest may grow. Buy it for me now, babe, the years all hurry so.
I cannot buy you happiness, I cannot buy you years; I cannot buy you happiness, in place of all the tears. But I can buy for you a gravestone, to lay behind your head. Gravestones cheer the living, dear, they’re no use to the dead.
I can’t quite figure out this video. But I like it. Nice music track, too.
What I’m listening to right now.
Bentley Rhythm Ace, “Bentley’s Gonna Sort You Out.” The car in the video below is very similar my dad’s (and formerly grandfather’s) old 1913 Ford Model T.
I loved that car and I hated when my dad sold it. But I love the ’28 Ford Model A more – and he still hasn’t sold that (below left, from circa 1970 – with me, my sister, and mom).
This thing I found online is very strange. It’s a map of the US, with each traffic-related death pinpointed. It’s like a density map of the country, zoomable to individuals – but it’s only dead people, and for a specific reason. You can see the patterns of highways and cities in all the dots.
[UPDATE 2024-05-02: This embed seems to have rotted long ago, and the original web content is utterly lost to all humanity. Yay internet!]
I say that in the deepest irony. The “pepper spraying cop” of the recent UC Davis incident has gone memic, with a tumblr dedicated to photoshopping him into just about everything imaginable, most images full of obscure cultural references and cruel satire. My personal favorite was his elevation to a new, 2011 version of Lady Liberty – see below.
It’s interesting watching all this from abroad – it gives some distance, some cultural perspective. It’s not like South Korea doesn’t have its own pepper spraying cops (or the rough equivalents) – in fact, I would almost say that it was South Korea that perfected the difficult arts of both public rioting and of the police repression of said rioting – these American occupiers and their pepper-spraying cop friends could learn a lot from a careful study of the last two decades of Korean history – they are rank amateurs in comparison.
Nevertheless (or perhaps, because of this), there is something disturbing, depressing, and, yes, ironic that South Korea seems so… settled and calm, these days, while other parts of world, including places not so far from where I was born and raised (such as UC Davis) are undergoing these social upheavals. I tend to want to start studying gini coefficients, and suchlike.
From a broad economic and/or politico-historical perspective, let’s just say… mistakes may have been made. I’m feeling depressed about the future of my passport-issuing polity (because I don’t like saying the word “nation” with a possessive pronoun like “my”).
I don’t know the origin of this idea, but I find it singularly fascinating. A commenter at the LanguageLog blog by the handle of “Mark F.” writes (in a comment to a recent entry):
I have read that beavers can’t bear the sound of running water, so much so that they will cover speakers playing that sound with mud, sticks, and rocks until they can’t hear them any more; and that this is what induces them to build dams.
The implication is that what appears, objectively, to be evolved instinctive behavior is, in fact, subjectively experienced as a profound, even unbearable discomfort with some environmental condition – e.g. the sound of running water. Somehow this jibes quite well with my own subjective experiences with some aspects of my humanness – that things that are really evolved adaptive behaviors are only with immense difficulty perceived as such, because inside the own individual’s mind, they resonate more as various sorts of discomforts or dislikes.
Last night I had one of my increasingly infrequent "coding nightmares" – dreams that consist mostly of a sort of montage of SQL programming code, where I haven't got a clue what's going on. While I acknowledge that, if it became financially necessary for me to return to programming, I would, I find it less and less appealing the longer I spend away from it.
There is a meme (perhaps started at xkcd) that says that following the first (non parenthetical) link on a wikipedia article, recursively, always leads to the article entitled “Philosophy.” Someone built a widget online to test this. You can try out random wikipedia articles, and see them leading to Philosophy – it draws a tree. Here’s a tree I made with some random articles using the “random” button.
There are some caveats (naturally) to how this works – explained here (read the comments thread). I like the example of a circular set of articles (try “Exogeny” in the widget).
“Buddha. I bow and pray not to be destitute in the world.”
This is #101 out of a series of 108 daily Buddhist affirmations that I am attempting to translate with my hands tied behind my back (well not really that, but I’m deliberately not seeking out translations on the internet, using only dictionary and grammar).
I would read this one hundred first affirmation as: “Buddha. I bow and pray not to be destitute in the world.” I would only add that poverty is in part, at least, a state of mind. Not that I deny real causes and inequalities – as a lapsed marxist, I must allow them. But beyond the most basic needs of food and shelter, most of our needs are manufactured for us by our culture. Hence true destitution is starvation and exposure to the raw elements – that’s something worth praying against.
On a lighter note, here’s a handy happiness diagram I found online.
