How to Pronounce Stieg Larsson
And other pronunciation guides from Pronunciation Manual.
(thanks, Dave)
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
tweet of the day
“Diarrhea” is one of those words that really looks like what it means.
— Garrett Miller (@heyitsgarrett) December 16, 2011
from the comments
The 15-20 seconds starting at 2:20 are my favorite, that’s where he rises above language altogether to some sort of celestial machine code.
Damar, Mon Amour (out of context)
In context: Starlingo ii.
Damar torn from the flock.
What is Damar? Who is Damar? What is Damar?
The Titanic Taxonomy of Wrestler Names
From Pop Chart Lab: A celebration of 382 noms de guerre from the world of professional wrestling.
headline of the day, IV
Microsoft to revive ‘squirting’ on Windows 8, Windows Phone
dear clusterflock, serious edition
How do you move through your grudges? Is it a process of letting go? Giving in? If you focus on forgiveness, do you feel that you’ve metabolized your anger?
from the comments
The seeds that fell off are the footnotes.
from the comments
I said hoary rime and it felt good.
coming out of sleep
I like my sentences like my women: with colons.
from the comments
Uppity. Adj. Applied to those presumed inferior by those who presume themselves superior. Application of the adjective uppity implies a defensive judgment on the part of the speaker that the individual thus characterized exhibits presumption by virtue of some act or acts presumed to demonstrate the individual’s presumed sense of equality with or even superiority to the speaker. Traditionally applied by pig-ignorant Caucasian-American supremacists to African-Americans deemed insufficiently humble and deferential. (“That uppity Nigra don’t know his place.”) Appropriated self-consciously by American feminists in the 1970s (see slogan: “Uppity Women Unite!”) to uncertain effect.
Gordon Lish and dictionary.com
I’m afraid this link will not be what I’m wanting past midnight today. The word of the day for November 19 is “knavery” and they use a quote from Gordon Lish to show usage! (Thanks to my friend Susan for letting me know about this.)
Update:
Yes, I took the brunt of it but not because there was a ballot on it but because I know knavery when I see knavery. Plus underhandedness and mischief.
– Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions
EDIT: The link has been edited to point to the relevant day forever.
“The results suggest that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may have had the capability to perceive speech-like sounds before the evolution of speech, and that early humans were taking advantage of this latent ability when speech did eventually emerge”
Well-educated Panzee understands more than 130 English language words and even recognizes words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones. This shows that she isn’t just responding to a particular person’s voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do.
A chimp that understands language! Next you’ll be telling me we “descended” from apes.
Telephones — The Ur-Supercut
Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995) showed famous actors answering ringing telephones in a string of surreal, disjointed conversations throughout Hollywood history. Edited together, the cadence and rhythm of nonstop clips feels very reminiscent of modern supercuts. Apple tried to license Marclay’s film for the launch of the iPhone in 2007, but he refused. Instead, they made their own, borrowing the idea wholesale. (Marclay decided not to sue.)
Andy Baio, in his new column for Wired’s Epicenter blog, discusses supercuts, those videos that mash-up dozens or hundres of short clips of a type. His article traces the evolution of the form from proto examples like Telephones to their use as tools of political critique. More examples at his supercuts site and more analysis at his Wired article.
How It Came to Pass
“Why,” I asked, “is there an Essex, a Wessex, and a Sussex, but no Nessex or Nussex?”
“Well,” he replied, “there’s an interesting story behind that. Edward I was king at the time the regions were all laid out, and he gave them their names. But he suffered from a terrible neurological condition that prevented him from turning to the north. And because he was the king, nobody wanted to say, ‘King, you’re forgetting one of the cardinal directions’.”
offre tree free for the taking
Posted to the Dubuque Freecycle group:
a tree fell in my yard could use for fire wood
the stars in starlings
(yep, they’re here)
Shit That Siri Says
In case you’ve not seen these everywhere you look. The Shit That Siri Says tumblr.
tweet of the day
dear clusterflock
Words that sound like they have meaning but don’t.
Elmore Leonard
has a sharp ear for dialogue and no mistake, but one of my favorite Leonard characters never utters a word.
The alligator, a ten-foot female weighing about five hundred pounds, opened her eyes and, after several minutes, moved her head from side to side, drowsy, disoriented, not knowing where she was, not catching the scent of anything familiar other than grass and dry soil. No water close by. She raised her head and hissed in the night, in the sound of insects. The wind rose and with it came a scent she recognized as something she liked that she had smelled before sometime in her life and had eaten. After several more minutes she began to move in a sluggish sort of way as though half asleep, not entirely upright on her legs, brushing the grass with her tail. The scent she liked became stronger as she moved and kept moving until her snout touched something she had never smelled before. She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked. Now she pushed and whatever it was in front of her bent against her weight until it gave way and the alligator walked through it and felt the ground cold now, smooth and hard. The scent she liked was here, though not enough in one place that it would become the thing itself she could fasten her jaws on and tear or take into her mouth whole. She settled on the cool ground, feeling it become warm beneath her as she went to sleep.
Elmore Leonard. Maximum Bob. 1991.
Sign Language
From a photo-graphic of various hand signals the maitre d’ at New York’s Eleven Madison Park uses to signal the waiters.
last night, tumbling sleepward
Let the little lost lamb lead the way.
The ancient burden of language.
I can still see the three perfect self-contained sentences if I look into the blue depths of the sky, into oceanic currents of air. Once, they rode dromedaries or Bactrian camels of syntax, bearing dangling modifiers in boxes, vases, jars. At all the stoplights and Shell stations in Los Altos and Encino, the inhabitants of night would talk about the Crab Nebula and how they saw it erupt in the frigid velvet darkness like the first strobe light in a Whitesnake concert, the first flash of the first camera in picture day at school, and what this meant. The three perfect self-contained sentences lived on the top of a mountain overlooking Menlo Park, and they had fiberglass radio dishes and astrographs and big Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes on tripods, and they had had studied the theory of peace on earth.
So peace would be established in parking lots and the office blocks on Wiltshire, and bags of Reese’s Pieces would be handed out for free. A waitress with frosted hair had seen the Macho Man Randy Savage asking for directions to the banquet of the resurrected at the Getty. Two aspiring hip-hop producers produced an iphone with photographs showing Frank Zappa eating an oven-roasted chicken sandwich on Ventura Boulevard, and they needed a tank of silver-grade unleaded and two bags of Doritos, because this meant that 2Pac was out there somewhere, clothed in white and riding a Ducati through the night. Everybody embraced, and two young Java developers burst into tears at the sudden beauty of the world.
Everyone knew that the three perfect sentences were on the move, through the deserts, because we could hear the sounds of tiny bells. But there were some that doubted that they were self-contained. “..es un Tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego” said a line cook from El Cerrito, and we all knew that he was right. Serpents made of language that have a period preceding the initial capital letter, they were the recursive CatDog of perfection: if somebody tried to use a chalkboard to make a sentence tree from them, the tree would flower, and burst into leaves. Birds would gather on the branches made of chalk. They were like something out of that dream that Samuel Johnson had, which he was incapable of telling Boswell, because the weight of the words on paper, the shape of the words in his mouth, destroyed the purity of the absolute sentence, the single sustained example of perfect prose.
So where are the three perfect self-contained sentences now, Mr. Neece? What happened to their journey? And what will they find at the center of the world?
