"I've sat with others and watched while a speaker or an average Jamal, with awe in their voices has said, "just as a diamond is wrapped in a protective cloth, women are precious enough that they too must be thus wrapped. Not everyone can see this diamond." Sometimes some of the women watching with me raise their eyebrows with pride and high-five glances at each other. But trust me when I say that there are a lot of us watching and listening who don't feel like we've been mined from Africa illegally." (via *t*raz)

"Of course, Planet Earth would have exploded if a U.S president had said that on live national television."

"I have also done research in braid theory and knot theory and strongly believe that the corn rowing technique is a way of encoding information and indeed braiding is a way of encoding information."


Another way to make polyvalent logic part ofyour life is to practice finding the "tertium quid" or third alternative, for those reflexive pairs which so bedevil our discourse. There is always one to be found.


"Forn Siðr has been since the 6th November 2003 officially approved as a religious community in Denmark, by the Danish minister of religious affairs."


"Cold wind of misfortune, blowing away a civilization. Blowing away the principalities and the powers, the unkept promises, blowing away the riches and the lies. In times like these you do what you can to save what you can,make what new beginnings you can, for a recovery you'll never see." --North Wind


   "Osiris"

pallid dust
cold irks with orb vorago blinking
tumultuously

font thick butoh matutinal chicory
turn back its hand Osiris
craisin out of youth's shadows

" "They are a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion who wish to return to the monstrous dark delusions of the past," said Father Efstathios Kollas, the President of Greek Clergymen." :-)


"If you never come again, never blow through these steaming regions
like cooling drifts of the upper air, even that absence is an encounter."

--Binoy Majumdar


Drinking: Jasmin*-Lav*nd*r T*a.

Though logic per se seldom appears in our regular considerations, there is an implicit logical element in our choosing and in our experiencing new things (perhaps in others as well?). To act as if only two alternatives are possible; to be compelled by imperative feeling to make a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down judgment at every novel stimulus--these are dualistic sorts of blunder. And it would be a not negligible improvement simply to insert a conscious else also (Lojban: ji'a drata) into these automatic processes. --Thus does cthia start to reshape the world.


Tux*domoon.


Ryng's book from Lulu now. Plus. D*ath Songs of Carcosa.


   "Tomahawk-11"

radint sarcophagi add tinkling
only ptarmigan
isthmus walking graybody act zodiac
aptly you watch ago night


New 7 Wond*rs.


"It was strange to think that this world, the day-to-day mess that Sid took for granted, was to Buonarotti a dreadful, unplumbed abyss." --Gwyn*th Jon*s, North Wind (1994)


Romani links.

(via) (Plus)



"Of course, it could be that this avoidance of homosocial bonding is itself an intense form of male-on-male passion. "You're a secret macho," Hisae told me when I explained the concept of the homosocial to her yesterday. "You can't deal with men because they bring out your aggressive, competitive side." "


"Is the meaning of a word like a ghost that walks beside? Is it coordinates on a map? Is it the rules for how a game-piece can move? Is it the amount of reality a word can be redeemed for? Is it a fantasy we share? Is it a trick, a snare, a fraud? Is it a postman for the secret-part of our being here? Or is it the person which that word is a name for?"

   "Vitalic Functor"

injurious inch ajar
dust from nil inhabitants
dust asking winch and scaffold
striving sandstorm fjord habit

to irrational acquaint
idiot dust as stairway
officious gray Godzilla
Amontillado only


High Noon.


Quadrupolar logic: aliens of planet Ummo (Wolf 424).

Truth values: so, not-so, possibly-so. (Truthful, untruthful, chatoyant.)
In Aymara: jisa, jani, ina.
In Lojban: jetnu, jitfa, norje'u.


On my victrola: Gitan* D*mon*- Lov* for Sal*

Markovp*dia.


Now this is art. (via B*st Links of 2006)


Stalin's Wif*. (By Slava Tsuk*rman, of Liquid Sky.)

Without sound, without pain, twisting my form. Gray days full of cars. Will it fall soon? Not now. Soon.

   "Bad Dragoon"

abattoir abacus fast
stony storying logic
with gray caracul its pang



...3-logic is [topologically] equivalent to subtractive color theory, more than binary logic with a middle term added. A model: the "Scissors, Paper, Rock" game. Philosophically, 'true' can be considered {as-if (not (as-if))}; as-if is basic. But it is convenient to have a name for the world inferred by the realm of discourse: paratrue. ("False" can be made from T and T + F.) then, considering the two kinds of (Lojban) NOT: Polar opposite & Contrary (or: other than), we have a "scissors, paper, rock" circle: [a circle divided into thirds by the points A, B, C is pictured]. Let S = a proposition. Values: S, As-If S; other-than-S-that's-not As-If (call them A, B, C). A (Not As-if/ paratrue) is the contrary of C (Neither-True-Nor-False/ nonsense) and the polar opposite of B (As-If, or Both-True-and-False), which is the contrary of C.

A ∪ B → B    A ∪ C → A    B ∪ C → C

  Contrariwise:
A ∩ B → A    A ∩ C → C    B ∩ C → B

  Finally, if as-if = T ∪ F :

  F = (T ∪ F) ∩ (~T)

A novel which purports to be an exchange of letters between Teddy Roosevelt & Sherlock Holmes. Suggests that any combination of fiction & nonfiction has the truth value of fiction.


On my victrola- Piaf at th* Olympia


Big Cotton.


Prior to its icing up, this was cold.


IBM and th* Holocaust.

(via //hom* dot scarl*t dot b*)


Arrows flying, you rush up to put both hands across my sight.


Doublethink, rationalization, denial, NOT-AS-IF...

As-If & Not-As-If are contraries, not opposites. The latter is a restriction (sort of--) of the former... All language is first As-If. Nonsense might be construed as the part of As-If [~ As-If] that is not True. For, one arrives at this latter distinction only through empirical testing. Strictly speaking, False shades into Nonsense only by degree of unfamiliarity. "Pigs fly" is a conventional kind of paradox, not more so than "Colorless Green Ideas." But [computer-generated] "it's the it bathed played" contains within it a tug toward metaphor unlike the others.

Rationalism might be called the fallacy of believing language to be a category of description, rather than that description is a special use of language.

Description is As-If-(some) World, just as Ego is As-If-(some) Self.


   "Formation"

rubrics furnish abattoir frogurt
with acts as if burn frost into vitriol
Usk shadow
half oblivious zarfs
strung with folio
birdtalk bringing uffish fragrant wood


"At the collapse of a great Pax, crisis and insecurity ensue, different civilizations clash, and slowly the image of a new man is outlined. --Umb*rto 3co


Brutal Journ*y.


Book 5.

"In 2000 I started experimenting with sewing human hair into paper by hand."


Top 10 Links of 2006. (via Tom Moody)

"Just as once upon a time there used to raids by bad poets on Sonnet form of poetry, today raids are conducted on haiku, geet and ghazal forms, and especially
more so on ghazal form. Those who do not understand the poetic element but read for entertainment, love-crazed idiots, fame-hungry rich men and immature adolescents as a weird group have gang-raped the lady, ghazal, and a true ghazal-poet faces the uphill task of returning her chastity to her. This duty of the poet is extremely difficult, and only a handful of ghazal-writers on a pan-Indian basis have done, amongst whom we see the name of Mareez."


Playing a Chenoboskian (look at third). Also (#232).


"TOP TEN Ways Deep Blue is Celebrating its Victory against Gary Kasparov

#10. Nailed R2-D2."

Rock Swings.


"When they gave her no help, she went to the publishing house itself, but the editors could not fathom a poet who did not want her poems published."


Compassion: another person as-if myself.
To listen as-if the other person might be saying something true, that you need to know.
To act & judge as if you could be wrong.


rust furls as this uffish small
frost glows asking wasp ashtray at thwart pidgin

is rust of uffish
silk ash ghost

town impair cardboard glory slogging
uffish associating googols


"The intense purity with which geometry, mathematics, science and logistics fill the bone-marrow of his poetry, marks his rare genre. Despite being a fine and talented engineer, a brilliant, innovative mathematician and an even more brilliant poet, Binoy led a rather distraught and disoriented life of extreme poverty."

(via Goblin M*rcantil* 3xchang*)


M*tacritic. (via Ozarqu*'s Journal)

"...javanais is a form of French slang which sticks "av" between a word’s consonants and vowels."


Life on Bzoa...developed from primitive forms that had tri-lateral symmetry... There are 3 sexes, any two of which can mate... Associated with these genders (though not necessarily) are the qualities of Yang, Balance, & Yin. The Balance gender, or Harmonizers, correspond somewhat to artists. All the records of the Guelphs...: 'Description-Memory-Files,' 'Interpretation-Memory-Files,' & 'Expression-Memory-Files,' which correspond to History/Science, Philosophy/Religion, & Literature. Guelphs have 3 worldviews: Bolor, mystical Gnosticism, & Geometric Rationalism, whose attitudes are to accept, transcend, or alter the way things are. Guelphs name 3 colors: Scarlet (Yang)... Chartreuse (Balance)... & Amethyst (Yin)...(They try to structure their world into threes & nines whenever possible....) DORD: the null Third of a complete twosome of anything. ...Besides Harmony, one could consider Dissonance [as] divided into Humorous & Serious...

Putting any two [things] together would not cancel them out, but seem to automatically call for the missing third, either by creating it with the juxtaposition, or making the lack obvious, or when two are complete, the creation of a Dord.

Sulphur, salt, mercury. Tamas, rajas, sattva. Waste (Shiva) = loss of meaning; saving (Vishnu) = conservation of meaning; making (Brahma) = creation of meaning.

"Progress" vs "Ancestor Worship". The Third = selective eclecticism. Triadicities (F Peirce). The Picturesque: between the Sublime & the Beautiful. Needs: fellowship, solitude, intimacy.



"Gacela of Distracted Love

You put on a crown of verbena
solely to hear
the watch-bell.
Granada was a moon
drowned among the ivy.

You stole into my garden in Cartagena
solely to hear
the watch-bell.
Grenada was a rose
among the streamers and pennants.

You silenced me passionately
without knowing who I was
solely to hear
the watch-bell."

by F*d*rico Garcia Lorca
(translation by Gilb*rt W*sl*y Purdy)