rat tibia

(via mrtsk on tumblr)

Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.

A language in which there is no word for "I"--this scifi-esque meme, which does actually correspond a little bit to English experience with the pronoun usages of Japanese, occurs in Robert Silverberg's A Time of Changes (1971); & he claims not to have read Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) at the time (& why would he?); she, in turn, would very likely have been familiar with Zamyatin, in whose We (1924), something similar (but not exactly) obtains. We can also jet forward to the Sapir-Whorfly landscapes of Delany's Babel-17 (1966) & Mieville's Embassytown (2011)--with a side nod to Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao (1958)--to complete our survey of linguistic scifi, if we want (since the pickings are so few!)... But it is not, in fact, the word which creates egotism, nor enables self-consciousness, nor even places oneself at the head of a chain of causality; & though it may be true that we interpret our own actions no less than we interpret the actions of another, we could describe it as well another way, as we can recognize various images (good camera, bad camera, drawn sketch, oil painting) of the same place we know.

At a loss for other words. (Including the theological Rapture, Russian 'privacy', &...camel spit.)

"...his own alphabet, both word and sign (for a previous publications, Clattinger: an alphabet of signs from nature, 2008, but reproduced here) – a lexicon all of his own to articulate the particular (in words such as dootitsi, thinedata, uzactyl, and zipzygo)..."

"According to Everett in 1986, Pirahã has words for 'one' (hói) and 'two' (hoí), distinguished only by tone. In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett said that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean 'small quantity' and 'larger quantity'." --Wikipedia

Chewbacca Mom action figure.

an old blank book
has come to me
across many dry decades
hitch existent toxin
lyke fyerd pitche skorching
magnolia corner always a car coming
W-shaped turn signal
gray inversion here on the blurred horizon
Klingon Lincoln kiln
still burning after all these years

" In the face of chaos, why not try to create some beautiful maps?"