purgatorial whispers

(Keep Portland Weird via Robert H Price on facebook)

A soviet artist's response to just criticism.

"Now for the Pharisees, they say that some actions, but not all, are the work of fate, and some of them are in our own power, and that they are liable to fate, but are not caused by fate. But the sect of the Essen[e]s affirm, that fate governs all things, and that nothing befalls men but what is according to its determination. And for the Sadducees, they take away fate, and say there is no such thing, and that the events of human affairs are not at its disposal; but they suppose that all our actions are in our own power, so that we are ourselves the causes of what is good, and receive what is evil from our own folly." --F. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XIII., Ch. 5, sect 9.

The big data of death.

"Zoopoetics is a new movement in literary theory and practice that treats nonhumans as individuals with agency, as conscious world-having individuals worthy of moral consideration." --Gabriel Gudding

Weep for Day.

"Alexander Ellis, the British philologist, mentions that a girl in Chicago was being raised to speak Volapük. Her name was Corinne Cohn; she was the daughter of Henry Cohn, a professor of Volapük, and in 1888 she was six years old.

There's no record of what became of Corinne. I imagine her speaking Volapük with her father at the kitchen table, after dinner. She chews on the end of her braid, and tells him, tears in her eyes, how no one understands her, no one but him! Only the problem is that even he doesn't understand everything she says. Corinne has invented new Volapük expressions, new idioms to describe what it's like to be a 12-year-old girl in Chicago, an experience for which old Father Schleyer had absolutely no words. For a few years, until she gives it up for boys and boat rides on Lake Michigan, Volapük is a living language." --Paul LaFarge

Techriture.

"In the end, a lot of this stuff made its way into The Grasshopper King, which in some sense is about the question: 'What if a real language worked the way people who invent languages want languages to work, and what would happen to you if you tried to speak that language?' " --Jordan Ellenberg on his blog

"Don’t try using this 'all the blood in the world' business in a poem, I’ve already done it."