josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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22 Aug '06 07:47:53 AM

'Fuck, I'm wasting valuable time - I could be reading Julio Cortazar.'

22 Aug '06 04:44:36 AM

'kinda sour cause my favorite group ain't comin with it'

17 Aug '06 01:27:36 PM

Bravo, Jess: 'There's also some wooshy stuff in the background, as was the style at the time.'

15 Aug '06 07:52:51 AM

I imagine that I would be happy with only the hi-hat part on 'Shhh/Peaceful', but I'm content not to have to test my imagination.

15 Aug '06 05:59:31 AM

'it seems that you have given me a beating'

11 Aug '06 08:40:04 AM

'don't talk about your business / keep your thoughts in your head'

9 Aug '06 06:42:42 AM

'Years ago I was struck by the fact that some of my young philosophical friends, in arguing a question, persistently referred to what they were doing as "moves." When one put forward an assertion, he called it "a move," and he tended to anticipate - often correctly - a philosopher's response as a "counter-move." It dawned on me that these philosophers had been "dragged on," as Wittgenstein put it, by his carefully delimited analogy between using language and playing chess, to the degree that their own philosophizing followed the model of the game of chess, with its rules that strictly define all possible moves and its single purpose - which, in their instance, was to win the game by checkmating an opponent's philosophical king. These philosophers were not following Wittgenstein's flexible and resourceful example, but instead were playing a new philosophical game - a Wittgenspiel.'

- M.H. Abrams, 1974

8 Aug '06 05:47:58 AM

'I believe that the characteristic feature of primitive man is that he does not act from opinions (contrary to Frazer).

I read, among many similar examples, of a Rain-King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is "a parched and arid desert". For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this office of Rain-King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless certainly clear that they had previously experienced that the rains begin in March, and then they would have had the Rain-King function for the other part of the year. Or again: toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated by the people, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps.'

7 Aug '06 04:37:04 AM

'In the middle of the previous paragraph. Please pay attention.'

- a footnote of Hugh Kenner