“meaty posts”

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

1. A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
2. A form is a linguistic pattern.
3. A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
4. Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
5. It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
6. Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
7. Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
8. Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
9. Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
   Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.

   I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
10. Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
11. Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
12. Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
13. Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.

14. We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.

    [...]

    A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.

    The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
15. Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.

    What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?

    “Make me one with everything.”

    * * *
    
    When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”

    Formists just want to have fun.

16. A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
17. Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
18. Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
19. Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
20. Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
21. A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugar^WP .”
22. It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
23. This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
24. All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.

    Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!

    Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]

    Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
25. Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.

A few months ago my family got a new van, a Windstar. It’s a pretty good car and, being a luxe edition, has many interesting gizmos. My favorite one is a sensor that starts screeching when you get too close to something in the back.

It is not its human-augmentation side what fascinates me the most, but the possibilities that such a sensor suggests. Why not go crazy and make this a gizmo that truly represents space, in all its subtleties, through sound?

I envision a somewhat thick, solid, black band that you would close around your head, completely covering your eyes and your ears; somewhat like a headband worn too low.

This gadget, the soundscape (scape for short), will simply translate space into sound. Let’s imagine the simplest case. A soundscaper standing in the center of a medium-sized, empty, white, circular room. What would that sound like? Well, as the soundscaper turns, it’d probably be a soft hum in all directions; medium-volumed to represent a medium distance; high-pitched to represent the whiteness of the walls; equal in all directions to parallel the physical reality.

If we increase the diameter of this circular room, the walls move farther away, and thus the (sound) volume will decrease; if we decrease the diameter, the walls come closer and the volume increases. If this room now had a door and it were open, the soundscaper would notice it as it turns around to “hear” the room: it would be a sudden sharp decrease in the volume.

If we now put a black square somewhere in the room close to the soundscaper, it’d sound like a squared speaker the size of the black square, emitting a somewhat loud, low-pitched noise.

Can you imagine it? Yeah, who knows if it would have a practical use (assist the blind?) and it’d probably never be advanced enough to allow you to, say, “read” a book through pure sound, but it sure’d be interesting to use it.

Of course, there’s no reason to stop at sound, maybe space can be represented through smell too (and maybe, just maybe, through taste). We always think of space as something fundamentally visual but that’s only because we’re all so visually biased. There are other possibilities.

And yet, sight is probably the best way to represent space. It’s by far the sense with the biggest bandwith. So much, in fact, that I think at least two other senses (hearing and smelling) can be merged into it. Thanks to sci-fi movies we’re all familiar now with some sort of thermal vision—in which red represents hotness, blue coldness. Hearing and smelling could be added in a similar fashion. Sound could be represented as an overlay of 3d waves expanding rapidly through space. The sound of birds chirping outside would look like a pond under a light rain, only in 3d. And smell could be represented as an overlay of little colored dots. A nubile girl passing by would leave a rainbow cloud of dots behind her.

But the soundscape still sounds the most daring, maybe because the possibility of replacing sight is as frightening as it is exciting. Just imagine, sound as light!

Update August 24, 2006: ABC News’ Humans With Amazing Senses: Blind People Who Interact With the World Like Dolphins and Bats

Update April 24, 2007: Wired’s Mixed Feelings: See with your tongue. Navigate with your skin. Fly by the seat of your pants (literally). I blogged about it here.

If you’ve decided to browse with Firefox,^[1] why not learn to do it gracefully? It’ll make you happier and more efficient.

Before we begin, be sure to have the latest Firefox. As of 28/Feb/2006, the current version is 1.5.0.1 and what follows will assume you have that version or a higher one. You get Firefox from GetFirefox.com.

With that you’re ready. Here is my guide (for non-techies) to using Firefox with flair: