I was sitting in my favourite Mile End café pretending to study for my final tomorrow (to keep up appearances), cuddling with the local cat, and listening to some musicians set up for a set. As often with foreign languages I caught mostly only the conversational fluff, the fillers that frame communication - we need to, we have to, where is, I'm glad that... A pleasant lilting melodic background until I realized something. The musicians weren't speaking the usual background Québecois French. They were speaking Spanish. Because I have a familiarity with but not a fluency in both languages, the framework seemed natural even when I couldn't perfectly understand it. My preoccupied mind just harmonized with the flow of the language, got into its rhythm, prepared to maximize understanding, without even bothering to register what it was trying to understand.
Odd.
19.12.10
14.12.10
Viral
Julian Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, founded and controls Wikileaks. Assange has white hair, grew up on a place called Magnetic Island, never attended school regularly, spent ages 11 to 16 in hiding from his mother's abusive cult-member ex-boyfriend, and adopted the online moniker "Mendax" as a teen when he began hacking into servers at the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other sensitive targets. He was arrested by the Australian National Police in 1991 and charged with 31 counts related to his hacking; he pleaded guilty to 24 of them and avoided jail time. Prior to founding Wikileaks, he spent time as a programmer, blogger, security consultant, and physics student at the University of Queensland. He is essentially homeless, spending the vast majority of his time couch-surfing around the U.S., Iceland, and Europe. In his OKCupid profile, he described himself circa 2006 as engaged in changing the world through "passion, inspiration, and trickery," and his CouchSurfing.com profile promises that he will regale hosts with tales of "attempted assassinations in Africa, telephone taps in Australia...election rigging, the Russian mafia...and politicians' wives." He has a 20-year-old son, Daniel Assange, in Melbourne.
-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange
Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]
Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.
One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable:
-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange
Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]
Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.
One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable:
13.12.10
Saudade
I just came from the company of friends. In the face of exams we talked at length about the concept of view opinion and even experience being intimately tied to language - how the means of expression you have at your disposal almost predetermine how anything presents itself to you. Your mind packages things simultaneously with their occurrence, as they come up rather than after the fact, subconsciously categorizing and organizing, choosing what information to take and which to ignore, where to go from here. Language is intimately linked to that process of mental sorting - you can only communicate your experience through the limitations of the language you employ. Orwell's newspeak simplistically illustrates the causality of this perfectly - control language and you control thought.
The fact that there is so much to know means I know nothing about anything, I feel. There are seminal works in every field that I don't even know I don't know - I learned who Hegel was a year ago (and haven't gotten past "philosopher" in the time since), I learned the very extreme Magic Schoolbus-style basics of how a neuron fires around that time, how a bottom bracket works is still a mystery to me. I am accepting of, and perhaps almost detrimentally comfortable in, this ignorance. Often I don't read the news.
Being through no merit of my own fully bilingual brings a more unsettling, profoundly divisive ignorance to light. I am culturally Czech and American. I can function in both systems and think in both cultures, and this brings something up - each language, with its accompanying modes of cultural expression, attains sentiments and ideas that are inaccessible to the other. That cannot be translated, that cannot be explained. Not small things, either - fundamental ways of looking at the world, keystone ideas.
These are, mind you, two modern western countries sharing many of the same mores and conventions. What then must it be like to be Mongolian? To speak Creole or Urdu or Icelandic or any of the thousands of tiny dying tribal languages that dot the globe. I am unaware not just of facts and ideas, then. There myriad entire frames of thought absolutely inaccessible to me. To borrow a phrase, entire doors of perception infinitely shut.
A lifelong fascination with this wall of perception, in a nutshell, is why I translate, or attempt to. A bit like an irate American tourist storming the Bastille with a toothpick, admittedly, but we stand only to gain.
I came home from that conversation (with two friends who between them speak English French Russian Spanish and Urdu, no big deal) to another friend's one-word facebook status - Saudade. She is part Iranian, part Portuguese. I looked up Saudade. It is again fundamental and untranslateable. I know what it means, now, I identify with the feeling it describes very strongly, but I will never know what it means. I will never be culturally Portuguese. I know this and accept it - I also, despite my (American) second grade teacher's proclamations to the contrary, will never be an astronaut - but it makes me wish, just for a second, that saudade triggered for me what it does for Maryam.
The fact that there is so much to know means I know nothing about anything, I feel. There are seminal works in every field that I don't even know I don't know - I learned who Hegel was a year ago (and haven't gotten past "philosopher" in the time since), I learned the very extreme Magic Schoolbus-style basics of how a neuron fires around that time, how a bottom bracket works is still a mystery to me. I am accepting of, and perhaps almost detrimentally comfortable in, this ignorance. Often I don't read the news.
Being through no merit of my own fully bilingual brings a more unsettling, profoundly divisive ignorance to light. I am culturally Czech and American. I can function in both systems and think in both cultures, and this brings something up - each language, with its accompanying modes of cultural expression, attains sentiments and ideas that are inaccessible to the other. That cannot be translated, that cannot be explained. Not small things, either - fundamental ways of looking at the world, keystone ideas.
These are, mind you, two modern western countries sharing many of the same mores and conventions. What then must it be like to be Mongolian? To speak Creole or Urdu or Icelandic or any of the thousands of tiny dying tribal languages that dot the globe. I am unaware not just of facts and ideas, then. There myriad entire frames of thought absolutely inaccessible to me. To borrow a phrase, entire doors of perception infinitely shut.
A lifelong fascination with this wall of perception, in a nutshell, is why I translate, or attempt to. A bit like an irate American tourist storming the Bastille with a toothpick, admittedly, but we stand only to gain.
I came home from that conversation (with two friends who between them speak English French Russian Spanish and Urdu, no big deal) to another friend's one-word facebook status - Saudade. She is part Iranian, part Portuguese. I looked up Saudade. It is again fundamental and untranslateable. I know what it means, now, I identify with the feeling it describes very strongly, but I will never know what it means. I will never be culturally Portuguese. I know this and accept it - I also, despite my (American) second grade teacher's proclamations to the contrary, will never be an astronaut - but it makes me wish, just for a second, that saudade triggered for me what it does for Maryam.
11.12.10
I'm trying to read your portrait, but I'm helpless like a rich man's child
How could I answer that question if you've got the nerve to ask me?
10.12.10
As mental doors finally clang shut and the balance between a levelheaded vision for the construction of something worthwhile and the youthful bloodrush to the head that is not yet in its dying throes (I hope, for it's a sweet siren song indeed) is sought with clarity that increases every day, I'm torn between expansion and self-control, whimsy and rigor.
Screaming "Kick out the jams!" is the antithesis of saying "Save a small part of the world through math and sense and sensibility.", and I want both.
And allthewhile avoiding being derivative is almost impossible. Perhaps that's not remotely undesirable, though.
Screaming "Kick out the jams!" is the antithesis of saying "Save a small part of the world through math and sense and sensibility.", and I want both.
And allthewhile avoiding being derivative is almost impossible. Perhaps that's not remotely undesirable, though.
8.12.10
There Are Those Who Love To Get Dirty
There are those who love to get dirty
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.
-Gary Snyder
Oh, Americana! One of my favourite wanderers suggests that I am doing just fine indeed. Alas my fixing has been less than my breaking of late. Blizzards aren't good for bikes, and theoretical math isn't good for getting dirty. Or fixing things.
Them's the rules, though:
1. Everything will be alright always.
2. No decaf anything ever.
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,
And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.
There are those who do both,
they drink tea.
-Gary Snyder
Oh, Americana! One of my favourite wanderers suggests that I am doing just fine indeed. Alas my fixing has been less than my breaking of late. Blizzards aren't good for bikes, and theoretical math isn't good for getting dirty. Or fixing things.
Them's the rules, though:
1. Everything will be alright always.
2. No decaf anything ever.
6.12.10
On a pair of socks
A year ago at a party I was party to an effusive hug which ended in a fall, a stocking ripped at the toe, and a badly twisted ankle. Yesterday in the library wandering around without shoes I noticed a subconscious twinge in my ankle, a ghost-sprain, as it were, the slightest feeling of unease, the smallest worry fighting to escape the back of my mind. I looked down and saw the hole in the toe of my sock.
A strange sensation to be sure, but my young malleable consciousness has learned the lesson. Today I am wearing sturdy wool socks and my feet and mind are calm and warm and dry.
A strange sensation to be sure, but my young malleable consciousness has learned the lesson. Today I am wearing sturdy wool socks and my feet and mind are calm and warm and dry.
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