Like all blanks, associative leaps through space need to be created. We must understand what makes electricity arc through the air. A conscientious reader confronted with a string of unrelated passages separated by blanks will, for a while, dutifully attempt to form bridges from one passage to the next, to discover the writer’s logic or pattern, the work’s intended accumulation. If no such thing is discernible, however, the reader will eventually, understandably, move on to something else. Such is the risk of communicating through silence. The rewards include the powerful bolt of understanding a leap can create, an understanding that reaches the reader beyond words, beyond rational explanation, and so is more intensely felt.Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer, p. 55
Notes & Links
on
art, design, creativity and technology
on
writing
Contact Me
Wordnik, the dictionary that I really should be using*, just launched a side-by-side word comparison feature to help you distinguish between similar words while browsing their thesaurus. It takes the window arranging, tab switching, or (god forbid) page flipping out of the equation.
* I typically just use Apple’s built in Cmd+Ctrl+D shortcut, which changed my life.
It happens that I have strong feelings about the use of [sic]. Hackish writers deploy this routinely to make whoever they are quoting look stupid. It’s a very cheap move, and a sure sign, in my view, of third-tier writing. It’s acceptable to use [sic] if there’s no way around it, and it’s sometimes excusable to use it if you’re trying to underscore the sloppiness, or stupidity, or whatever, of some powerful figure — if the president of an Ivy League school made a glaring mistake in some official context, maybe that would get a pass. But in general, [sic] is a cheap move — we all make mistakes, typos, little glitches, that mean nothing. This web site is full of such errors — for all I know this post will contain such errors, because I’m writing it quickly, and I don’t have a proofreader, etc. In other words, I’m no different than the person I quoted making some workaday, meaningless error.
Rob Walker, My [sic] mistake
(via jenbee)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Words by Radiolab
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.
Don’t miss the companion film, either.
I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks.
(via austinkleon, meaghano)
I cannot combine certain letters as dhcmrlchtdj, which the divine Library has not already foreseen in combination, and which in one of its secret languages does not encompass some terrible meaning…
To speak is to fall into tautologies.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
(via jennyeagleton)
Aug 5, 2010 | ∞ 0 comments | 1 note
What looked like an impossible problem wasn’t a problem after all; we’d just gotten twisted up in the way we talked about it.Tim Carmody, on how a change of grammar can be a change of perspective.
Max Fenton writes poems in MindNode. The coolest thing about this is that entire branches of writing can be hidden or shown with a single click. I am decidedly less organized.
Sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (p. 175)
Modern Day Ideograms
A post on Core77 half-jokingly posits that in 5000 years, archaeologists will dig up tacky shower curtains decorated with emoticons and interpret them as modern day hieroglyphics.
It had never occurred to me how these two languages, separated by an unimaginably vast expanse of time, seem not-so-far removed from each other.
Also, An Xiao observes a few charts and graphs on an office whiteboard that resemble the Chinese characters for “field” and “life.” Citing a link on how drastically Chinese characters have changed over the years, she writes, “What would modern pictographs look like? Something like the [below], I suspect - inspired by PowerPoint and graphs, rather than images from nature.”
