Mood Indigo

How could this be true of a 64-year-old recording? Well, old is not always bad. Magnetic tape, invented by the Germans, was brought back to the United States after World War II, just a few years before this session. (Before then, records were cut straight to wax or disc.) And the early brands of tape were capable of absorbing wide dynamic range and the full spectrum of frequencies.

- Ce cub perfect...

opportunism

'L'amour absolu n'existe pas plus que le parfait gouvernement, et l'opportunisme du coeur est la seule sagesse sentimentale (Maurois,Climats, 1928, p.268)'

fíldeș

'Când cântă parcă moare o taină dintr-un grec'

Couleurs du spectre

'.Ils regardaient la vaste plaine
En parlant entre eux du passé
Et ne se retournaient qu’à peine
Quand un obus avait toussé

Tous quatre de la classe seize
Parlaient d’antan non d’avenir
Ainsi se prolongeait l’ascèse..'

elocutionary

“To be or not to be: that is the bare bodkin.”

comeuppance

'Millions

for automation but not one cent

for elegy. Eight elephants dancing

deliriously to the wail of the   

bumble bees. So long, sailor /

goodbye failure. Or let the pail

wear the head of the lotion. Here

is smoldering continuation. The

smell of green tea on Greene Street.

Bottled reticence.'...

diffract

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives" ~Abba Eban, 1970

empathetic

'....You have to endure about 45 seconds of self-aggrandising musical and graphic intro before the news reader even enunciates the headlines – which are then underscored by a soundtrack and punctuated with drumbeats. It’s like watching a musical. The whole panoply of melodramatic music, techno-wizardry and zooming shots serves only to impress the viewer with the over-riding importance of the messenger rather than the message. News readers no longer sit there in front of us and read the news out. Nowadays they have to get up and and pose at various times in front of the equivalent of sophisticated Powerpoint presentations...'

symbols evolve

...'Evolution favours animals that can read and react to those signs, and it favours animals that can manipulate those signs to influence whoever is watching. We have stumbled on the defining ambiguity of human emotional life: we are always caught between authenticity and fakery, always floating in the grey area between involuntary outburst and expedient pretence.'

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

...the revival and universal teaching of the art of rhetoric to the point where it attains something akin to the kind of status it enjoyed in Ancient Rome. While it is not part of a code of conduct, rhetoric is closely related in that, in contrast to the likewise valuable art of written composition, rhetoric concerns how we present ourselves and engage others in public and, hence, encourages us to pay attention to our speech and body language and the way our words affect others. As with etiquette, I think we can all agree public speaking is in dire need of improvement, and for that reason, as well as its obvious practical benefits, I believe this would be a feasible measure people could easily get behind.

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant 
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

semblent grises sous la lune

Conceptual Structures

http://iccs2014.info.uaic.ro/committees.php

Sap and sawdust

Still, she couldn't feel nervous with it, after they had been talking together so long.

` -- then you don't like all insects?' the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened. 

• `I like them when they can talk,' Alice said. `None of them ever talk, where I come from.'

`What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?' the Gnat inquired.

• `I don't rejoice in insects at all,' Alice explained, `because I'm rather afraid of them -- at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them."

`Of course they answer to their names?' the Gnat remarked carelessly.

• `I never knew them do it.'

`What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, `if they won't answer to them?'

• `No use to them,' said Alice; `but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?'

`I can't say,' the Gnat replied. `Further on, in the wood down there, they've got no names -- however, go on with your list of insects: you're wasting time.'

Compte-pas

Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d’une rivière accrue,
Et que, décor semblable à l’âme de l’acteur,

Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l’espace,
Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un héros
Et discutant avec mon âme déjà lasse,
Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux.

charge d'âme

La solitude est l’aphrodisiaque de l’esprit, comme la conversation celui de l’intelligence. (Le crépuscule des pensées)

ℇ- en effigie

'We found first that the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science.  We then considered the nature of scientific laws, and found that, instead of stating that one event A is always followed by another event B, they stated functional relations between certain events at certain times, which we called determinants, and other events at earlier or later times or at the same time.  We were unable to find any a priori category involved:  the existence of scientific laws appeared as a purely empirical fact, not necessarily universal, except in a trivial and scientifically useless form.  We found that a system with one set of determinants may very likely have other sets of a quite different kind, that, for example, a mechanically determined system may also be teleologically or volitionally determined. '

knowingness

'...when it comes to risk, you have to think for yourself. That’s the only way to cut through the noise. Society, in fact, needs to make a shift toward prioritizing understanding risk so that we don’t let the experts drive us crazy. “In the good old times people learned how to read and to write.  That’s no longer sufficient in the high tech twenty-first century,”'

superficies

 
..'une page, dans son système, doit, s'adressant au coup d'oeil qui précède et enveloppe la lecture, "intimer" le mouvement de la composition; faire pressentir, par une sorte d'intuition matérielle, par une harmonie préétablie entre nos divers modes de perception, ou entre les différences de marche de nos sens,- ce qui va se produire à l'intelligence.'

• 'The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing, of regular sonorous lines or verse – rather prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes.' 

 'Il introduit une lecture superficielle, qu'il enchaîne à la lecture linéaire; c'était enrichir le domaine littéraire d'une deuxième dimension.(Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard)' 

réalisme magique

'...Poètes et mendiants, musiciens et prophètes, guerriers et racaille, tous créatures de cette réalité effrénée, n’avons eu que peu de choses à demander de notre imagination, car le défi principal pour nous a été de rendre notre vie crédible sans avoir assez de ressources conventionnelles pour y arriver ..'. 

•  The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.  These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales.

Transcendence

'...but even now we barely begin to understand the most rudimentary facts about human personality. Is the self unitary, or is it a shifting collection of fragments, turning inward upon themselves in a recursive illusion? Do our personalities persist through time, or are we a sandpile of our own unreliable memories? It is trite to say that one is not the same person now as twenty years ago. How about five minutes ago?'

des éclairs

Les époques travaillées par l’interrogation métaphysique demeurent les moments culminants, les vrais sommets du passé. (Écartèlement)

understandingly

 

When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.

Bertrand Russell, "Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?", 1947

bronze, iron, and digital

'..Great city-destroying quarrels begin with what turn out, to be, in retrospect, absurdly flimsy reasons. Modern historians will doubtless try to attach deeper causes to the quarrels—just as Hammurabi may have returned his shoes in a symbolic gesture of refusal, perhaps the braying hippo was a conventional cultural code for some other, economic quarrel. But our own experience suggests the reverse: people with money and power are annoyed when their shoes don’t quite fit; great powers come to grief over the noise a hippo makes, or is thought to make, even when the moat is nowhere near the palace.'

persuasion

'...Orwell and Kafka may be cliches, argues Hitchens, because the Soviet Union and other totalitarian states are cliches. It's as though they used 1984 as an instruction manual.'

...d'abord une cage

Peindre d'abord une cage
avec une porte ouverte
peindre ensuite
quelque chose de joli
quelque chose de simple
quelque chose de beau
quelque chose d'utile
pour l'oiseau
placer ensuite la toile contre un arbre
dans un jardin
dans un bois
ou dans une forêt
se cacher derrière l'arbre
sans rien dire...
.

amasseur

Et il monte sans bruit les escaliers du palais. Il

pousse du mufle les portes... Le voilà... Le voilà...

come of age

'...often i go to the town’s terraced frontier

where streets meet trees / locals stare up

through canopies of ancestry

listening to unprogrammed voices of birdlife /

a michelangelo sketches the muscles of children'

it’s a trick

'...It’s tempting to dismiss Zeno’s argument as sophistry, but that reaction is based on either laziness or fear. Laziness, because thinking about the paradox gives the feeling that you’re perpetually on the verge of solving it without ever doing so—the same feeling that Achilles would have about catching the tortoise. Fear, because being outwitted by a man who died before humans conceived of the number zero delivers a significant blow to one’s self-image.'

tenuous resurrection

tiresome names

'The 1st of May was approaching, and there was talk of a monster demonstration in which both the C.N.T. and the U.G.T. were to take part. The C.N.T. leaders, more moderate than many of their followers, had long been working for a reconciliation with the U.G.T.; indeed the keynote of their policy was to try and form the two blocks of unions into one huge coalition. The idea was that the C.N.T. and U.G.T. should march together and display their solidarity. But at the last moment the demonstration was called off. It was perfectly clear that it would only lead to rioting. So nothing happened on 1 May. It was a queer state of affairs. Barcelona, the so-called revolutionary city, was probably the only city in non-Fascist Europe that had no celebrations that day. But I admit I was rather relieved. The I.L.P. contingent was expected to march in the P.O.U.M. section of the procession, and everyone expected trouble...'

comma problems

"Cineva, un nebun, îndragostit de o viziune de arta, a schimbat într-o noapte poarta teatrului si a pus o poarta noua"

aesthetic consistency

'...nearly 100-year-old publication instructs sentence drafters to “enclose parenthetic expressions between commas” and to “place a comma before and or but introducing an independent clause.” It says writers should use a semicolon or a period instead of a comma in that case if there’s no and or but.'

changement phonétique

'...la Sarre tente de redorer son blason en tirant parti de sa proximité géographique avec la France, voulant devenir «un pont avec l'Allemagne et une porte vers la France». Une initiative unique outre-Rhin. La Sarre est d'ailleurs le Land allemand qui compte la plus grande proportion de professeurs de français dans son système scolaire, et entretient des relations étroites avec la Lorraine.'

There’s a cat on the mat

 
'Our approach to thinking, from the early days of the computer era, focused on the question of how to represent the knowledge about which thoughts are thought, and the rules that operate on that knowledge. So when advances in technology made artificial intelligence a viable field in the 1940s and 1950s, researchers turned to formal symbolic processes'....'While the successes behind subsymbolic artificial intelligence are impressive, there is a catch that is very nearly Faustian: The terms of success may prohibit any insight into how thinking “works,” but instead will confirm that there is no secret to be had—at least not in the way that we’ve historically conceived of it. It is increasingly clear that the Cartesian model is nothing more than a convenient abstraction, a shorthand for irreducibly complex operations that somehow (we don’t know how) give the appearance, both to ourselves and to others, of thinking. New models for artificial intelligence ask us to, in the words of philosopher Thomas Metzinger, rid ourselves of an “Ego Tunnel,” and understand that, while our sense of self dominates our thoughts, it does not dominate our brains.'