January 25, 1882: Virginia Woolf is born.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
And is strewn still…
(Source: unhistorical)
Posts tagged words
Posted 3 months ago
Posted 3 months ago
![fucktheory:
Speaking In Tongues
The first and most important requirement in my new school will be that every participant in our experiment must either speak at least 2 languages or begin studying a second one immediately on entering the school. Because that’s how they separate us, that’s how they keep us from understanding each other, and that’s how we can access new modes of thought an action. And that’s why I’m learning Arabic right now. Because until I can read Arabic, I’m not going to weigh in on crap like “Islamophobia.” See how that works? First learn. Then talk. Preferably in a new language, using words you can explain, on your own conceptual plane of immanence.
This is wonderfully true: it is amazing to use words in languages beyond your mother tongue that are difficult to translate ‘back’ without entire sentences of culture and context explanation… But which just ‘work’ in the language you are thinking in.
We know we know the purpose of our news media is to reinforce our own mythologies, rather than inform us of the views others hold. Direct communication is key to understanding.
[Stories of my mother failing to teach me to swear in Polish, and of my father studying Korean or coming to the aid of German travelers who didn’t expect fluent German from an African-American omitted in the interests of remembering to go to sleep tonight.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c90a05bfee987d91098f871431681d8b/tumblr_mgsdpmThoW1qasntco1_500.jpg)
Speaking In Tongues
The first and most important requirement in my new school will be that every participant in our experiment must either speak at least 2 languages or begin studying a second one immediately on entering the school. Because that’s how they separate us, that’s how they keep us from understanding each other, and that’s how we can access new modes of thought an action. And that’s why I’m learning Arabic right now. Because until I can read Arabic, I’m not going to weigh in on crap like “Islamophobia.” See how that works? First learn. Then talk. Preferably in a new language, using words you can explain, on your own conceptual plane of immanence.
This is wonderfully true: it is amazing to use words in languages beyond your mother tongue that are difficult to translate ‘back’ without entire sentences of culture and context explanation… But which just ‘work’ in the language you are thinking in.
We know we know the purpose of our news media is to reinforce our own mythologies, rather than inform us of the views others hold. Direct communication is key to understanding.
[Stories of my mother failing to teach me to swear in Polish, and of my father studying Korean or coming to the aid of German travelers who didn’t expect fluent German from an African-American omitted in the interests of remembering to go to sleep tonight.]
Posted 4 months ago
Posted 4 months ago
Posted 4 months ago
Nowhere in Farago’s pro-censorship argument does he address, or even fleetingly consider, the possibility that the ideas that the state will forcibly suppress will be ideas that he likes, rather than ideas that he dislikes. People who want the state to punish the expression of certain ideas are so convinced of their core goodness, the unchallengeable rightness of their views, that they cannot even conceive that the ideas they like will, at some point, end up on the Prohibited List.
France’s censorship demands to Twitter are more dangerous than ‘hate speech’ | Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald points out that government censorship only sounds like a good idea when people who agree with you are in power. And that never lasts.
Posted 4 months ago
The good news, young writers, is that your life does not have to be extraordinarily interesting, because there are billions of people in the world who do have interesting lives, and you have the privilege of telling their stories. Even the most productive journalist could not write 1% of humanity’s freely available interesting stories in the course of an entire career. Your friends, and neighbors, and community members, and people across town, and across your country, and across the world far and wide are all brimming with stories to tell. Stories of love, and war, and crime, and peril, and redemption. The average inmate at your local jail probably has a far more interesting life story than Susan Shapiro or you or I do, no matter how many of our ex-boyfriends and girlfriends we call for comment. All of the compelling stories you could ever hope to be offered are already freely available. All you have to do is to look outside of yourself, and listen, and write them down.
Journalism Is Not Narcissism - Gawker (via goldman)
Can you imagine a world in which people don’t merely talk about themselves? (It’s tough in the current ‘omg I just ate a grape and am posting this to inform you’ era, isn’t it?)
Posted 4 months ago
SUBMISSION:
“PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB” Art Print by WORDS BRAND™ at Society6. T-shirt in the US Store and EU Store.
Posted 6 months ago
The reason is that bookstores are human places—they are extensions of the personalities of the men and women who operate them. This is the point of Krauss’s essay that still very much obtains: bookstores are, in her word, “thoughtful.” Thoughtful may mean wise, but it doesn’t have to; it doesn’t even have to mean rational (everyone has been in bookstores that were clearly run by crazy people—often they’re the best ones). It simply means organized by individual minds. And to the extent that we believe we can learn from other people—a belief fundamental to the very practice of reading—bookstores will have something to give us.
The Bookstore Brain: How Bookstores Choose Their Books : The New Yorker.
This makes perfect sense: it’s why real bookstores have tangible “personalities.”
Posted 7 months ago
How to Talk to a Writer
No one piece does justice to the whole: just go read it.
5. Don’t tell me how bad your grammar is or that you have always been terrible in English. I know you think it is a compliment, but really it makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel like you are trying to give value to what I do because it isn’t really that valuable. People are expected to be able to say a sentence with correct grammar. Does that equate to being able to write a book? It does not. I can cut up a chicken, but I cannot operate on someone’s brain. When you tell me you are a brain surgeon, I do not say, “Hey, I am TERRIBLE at cutting into people’s brains!” You would assume that to be true. Cutting up a chicken is to brain surgery as saying a correct sentence is to writing a book. Both are a start.
Posted 9 months ago
In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and for the language which we alone created…did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult. It’s a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things… George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can’t read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write, ‘the giraffe speaks!’ in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?
Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey, from the essay “Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World”. (via greenapplebooks) I *LOVE* this. Thank you, Green Apple!
Delightful web discoveries, with the occasional link to my own projects and sites.All images and content are © their respective creators, including mine.
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