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Three Good Links

@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle
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Paul Krassner … in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

Kurt Vonnegut quoted in a post by Jason Schafer in Dangerous Minds. Cagnitive Dissonance: Paul Krassner's 'Fuck Communism' Banner, 1963.

The last few weeks at work I've done little else at work other than load bags of mulch into people's vehicles. An awful lot of guys my age are dicks. Some of them have 'Fuck Biden" bumper stickers on their Yank tanks. I've known for a long time sayiing that I'm an old hippie doesn't mean what I think it means. A whole lot of people really hate hippies. And the Biden bumper sticker and Krassner's banner gets to a part of what people think they don't tlike about hippies.

"Fuck Biden' isn't funny today because the F-word simply doesn't have the same "bad magic." I do suspect that people sporting the sticker sense of specter of humor, Lenny Bruce or George Carlin's 'Seven Words'. But nobody finds 'Fuck Biden' funny, it's merely mean and crass. It's the cruelty that titilates.

I do sometimes visit The Realist Archive. I don't know what people today will make of it.

#paul krassner#john francis putnam#the realist#satire#words#yippies
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creativecommons.org

Karen Blaha - Flickr: Daffodils and serpentine wall

A friend online posted the question about crinkle crankle walls: How could it be that these walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall? I'm pretty sure he knew the answer when he posted, and probably figured folks would enjoy finding out more about sinusoidal walls.

I enjoyed this short article at My Modern Met, These Wavy Brick Walls Found Across England Use Fewer Bricks Than Straight Walls. There's a great link to a post by John Cook about the calculus of these walls. The article also mentions the walls were often constructed in order to grow fruit against them. Here's an article by Kurt Kohlstedt, Fruit Walls: Before Greenhouses, Walled Gardens Created Urban Micro-Climates.

#walls#words#food#geography
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“You’re working on a poem or story, when you’re hitting a dead end, when it’s not going, take it with you. Get away from the desk.” It means something is not happening. It doesn’t mean you’re blocked. I don’t think writer’s block is real. I think it’s the mythos of capitalism — that you’re always supposed to be producing; this anxiety of being productive and quantifying your self-worth through page counts and word counts. So I said, “You’re working, but you have to work differently now. Now you have to work with your body. Maybe there’s questions you’re not asking. Maybe you have to recite this poem and walk with it.” And so, to me, this is actually more available to us as a species — this is what we’ve always been doing. We’ve been telling stories as we walked. We’ve been telling stories as we work, side by side. Ocean Vuongresponding to a audience member's question at On Being with Krista Tippett. Ocean Vuong: A Life Worthy of Our Breath Also: https://desperadophilosophy.net/2020/07/31/words-into-being/
Source: onbeing.org
#words#language#walking#embodied
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Derived from nostalgia, Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar. The term is specifically referencing change caused by chronic change agents like climate change or mining. Used primarily to describe the negative psychological effect of chronic environmental destruction on an individuals homeland, or the place they call home. The condition is often “exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.*”

Buerau of Linquistical Reality. Solastalgia

* Albrecht, Sartore, Connor, Higginbotham, Freeman, Kelly, Stain, Tonna, Pollard (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australas Psychiatry. PubMed Commons

#words#psychiatry
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To both ways of thinking, whether we can reach it or not, there is something out there: the way things are, which language is meant to designate. But ‘the great difficulty here’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘is not to represent the matter as if there were something that one couldn’t do.’ For him, it is the divide itself, which places language on one side and the world on the other, that needs to be questioned, not whether the divide can be bridged. This is not to say that the divide should be regarded as a fiction. It is, rather, an achievement, but one with certain limits that are easily forgotten. Wittgenstein’s later writing takes on the aspect of therapy because it tries to draw attention to the moments, in philosophy especially, where removing language from the contexts in which it has a use, lends that language a kind of magical power and leads to confusion. We begin to puzzle about what the word refers to out there in the world, instead of attending to what it actually does in particular linguistic practices – what it tells us.

Alexander Stern at Aeon. The way words mean

Words stand for things in the world, and they stand apart from it. Perhaps meaning is more sunken into words than we realise?

The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning

#language#meaning#words#walter benjamin#ludwig wittgenstein
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Fuck 2005 Trailer

PAVELDANTON

F U C K The Film That Dare Not Speak Its Name

FUCK is an entertaining, yet socially-conscious film that explores the infamous f-word and its impact on popular culture, politics, censorship, and the First Amendment. 

#words#fuck
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Consider what would happen if we literally gave no fucks about the current situation and let the whole mess speak for itself in plain language. Consider what would happen if we could no longer wrap ourselves in the warm linguistic blanket of fuck and had to face the world in boring, G-rated terms.

Meghan Daum in Words That Matter 2018 at Medium. Fuck

#words#fuck
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The Oxford English Dictionary clarifies the word's commonest contexts as the two-fold "female external genital organs" and "term of vulgar abuse" (RW Burchfield, 1972). At the heart of this incongruity is our culture's negative attitude towards femininity. 'Cunt' is a primary example of the multitude of tabooed words and phrases relating to female sexuality, and of the misogyny inherent in sexual discourse. Kate Millett sums up the word's uniquely despised status: "Somehow every indignity the female suffers ultimately comes to be symbolized in a sexuality that is held to be her responsibility, her shame [...] It can be summarized in one four-letter word. And the word is not fuck, it's cunt. Our self-contempt originates in this: in knowing we are cunt" (1973).

Matthew Hunt at MatthewHunt. Cunt: A Cultural History of the C-Word

#words#sexuality#sex#patriarchy#cunt
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[W]hile the word vagina implies a singular orifice for organ, cunt speaks of the textured nature of female genitals and includes the vulva, clitoris, labia and canal. Cunt speaks of the multidimensionality of women’s sexual pleasure–not just the sheath in which a man can thrust his erection. It denotes a sexuality that is rooted in pleasure and orgasm, not one denied orgasm by patriarchal doctrine.

Gillian Schutte in Ms.blog. C is for Cunt

#words#complexity#patriarchy#sex#pleasure
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“I would say there were two languages that were created by African Americans,” he explained in one of his seminars. “One that is being created so that African people could communicate with European people and another language for African people to communicate with other African people. I imagine that at that point, English was the common language that we were using. So, OK, we would use English words, but we use them in an African way. That process takes a long time,” he thought, “Yiddish is a language that can be considered a Creole language. It was a combination of Hebrew and German, and it was spoken by Jews in Europe. It’s a question that African Americans will have to answer. Do we let it die out and learn standard English, or do we keep them both and develop a language and literature in both?”

William Kelley quoted in an article by Eli Rosenblatt at Public Books. IF YOU’RE WOKE YOU DIG IT: WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY

#william melvin kelley#RIP#words#literature#aave
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People say silly things in the presence of chubby, beautiful little babies all the time. Some even joke about eating them up, and no one would really take that seriously. Then again, there isn’t a history of baby eating in this country, backed by institutions centred on supporting this practice. When it comes to the theft and removal of Indigenous children, though, people need to recognize that this is no laughing matter.

Chelsea Vowel at Today's Parent. Joking about stealing my baby isn’t funny

#cultural sensitivity#words
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We do not currently have a clear public vocabulary of civic freedom in the US or a cultural penumbra that surrounds support for the same. We didn’t need them before. Now we do.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. Toward an Identity and Vocabulary of Civic Freedom for The Trump Era

#illiberalism#politics#words
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In politics too words matter, and in politics too language evolves. In the last 50 years we have witnessed a politically motivated sea change in the meaning of old words and the introduction of new words, all intended to undermine our sense of compassion.

David Morris at AlterNet. Words Matter: What the Language We Use Tells Us About Our Current Political Landscape.

In politics, definitions change.

#language#politics#words#liberal#welfare#systemic racism#entitlement#equity#neoliberalism
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I want a word for the earth’s shadow in the sky on a summer sunset evening, that terminator between pink and indigo, and the knowledge in the gathering chill that tomorrow’s sun will be every bit as hot.

Chris Clarke at Coyote Crossing. Desert words I want

#nature#words#noticing#chris clarke
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