“readings”
85 posts under this tag.
Today is World Book Day and to celebrate it there was a public reading of
The Aleph, a wonderful book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (“the information fetishist”), in my city. Let’s not miss the opportunity, here’s a great short-story of his to read today: Funes, the Memorious (in English and in Spanish).
“He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.”
The story is slow, filled with all sorts of mundane, meticulous details (apocryphal, of course) and full of seemingly irrelevant roundabouts—Borges hallmarks. How else can you talk about such profoundly magical things?
Unlike most people these days, I happened to chance upon Rails through Ruby, not the other way round. But wait, today’s reading is a tad geeky but I’m putting it up here for non-geeks to read it —particularly those, you know who you are, that don’t yet speak any computer language— so here’s some context: Rails is a tool (a web framework they call it) to make web-apps (that’s right, a meta-tool: a tool to make tools) and Ruby is the computer language in which Rails is written.
Anyway, I can’t remember how I found Ruby but I can tell you when I was certain it was something truly special: when I found Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide and, shortly thereafter, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. The first one is a most delightful, witty, unique manual of the language made out of of an acute bout of ruby-rapture and given away for free by its freakishly talented authors; the second is the exact same thing.
So, after much ado, here’s today’s reading: the first chapter of Why The Lucky Stiff’s poignant guide, Kon’nichi wa, Ruby . Technophobists worry not, this chapter doesn’t contain a line of computer code nor does it force you to install a thing, it’s just good ole prose. It is my Trojan horse to try to get you to learn Ruby (you gotta learn a computer language someday). In fact, I’m so confident in my wooden stallion that let’s do this: you only need to read the very first section (1. Opening This Book) of the chapter. If it doesn’t mesmerize you, if you don’t have the weirdest crooked grin on your face by it’s end, feel under no obligation to read any further.
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
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 don’t know what made me cry when I read this brief account by Heberto Castillo some years ago. Perhaps I saw in him—a young, talented, penniless, just-married, idealistic civil engineer—my father, perhaps I saw myself in his unabashed naiveté.
Here’s my hand-typed transcription of the story, which appeared in his 1988 book Si Te Agarran Te Van a Matar:
This shall be the first of a series of daily (or almost daily) short readings: Joe Haldeman’s None So Blind. It’s a tiny, funny, fascinating sci-fi story from 1995 that won both the Hugo and the Locus award. So tiny it is (just over 4k words) that I’ll say no more. Go read it.
Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languagesWP written by Eward SapirWP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:
There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four
- The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
- “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
- His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
- ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.
* * *
Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).
Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.
I’ve been walking a lot lately, walking and driving, and I’ve seen more people in the last 2 weeks than in the past 2 months. What never fails to surprise me every time I pay attention is the multiplicity of their circumstances. What troubles that sad woman in the car behind me? That man right there is obviously cheating her wife. The father on the coffetable at my side talks to his daughter and son about graduation trips, money, leisure, the future, whatnot. That well-off lady over there, the one sipping her coffee and chatting with her friends, doesn’t know her two tweens are being stabbed to death right now by the ex-boyfriend of her eldest daughter.
I read somewhere, Savater I guess, about a dying old lady who, confined to bed, comforted herself thinking that, somewhere, someone was making love at that very moment. I couldn’t find that particular quote (there go 3 hours), but my quest wasn’t entirely fruitless. I chanced upon the same thought carried to the extreme: a (looong) list of right-now happenings. It’s often quite tacky (cursi)—Andrea’d love it—but surprisingly original at times (specially at its many gay moments).
Have you ever chanced upon someone’s blog only to suddenly fall in love and realize here was someone so similar to yourself (only dazzingly more brilliant) with whom you’re bound to cross paths sooner or later? I have. Today. Twice. Here and here.
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