J.K. Rowling outed Dumbledore to an audience of fans who cheered with such enthusiasm that she responded "If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!". When Darren Hayes called himself a 'gaylord' on stage, here, at the Mod Club, we cheered too, and he said "Thank you -- I didn't have that much to do with it, but thank you."

Tell us that you're gay! It makes us so happy.

Made on a page of my notebook by marking where the previous poem (on the previous page) had made the deepest impressions in it.
( See it ... )

Today my mother found a blue glass bead not unlike one of these. She thought to herself "I will give this to my eldest daughter when I get home."

I'm not going to discuss Twilight. I just want to juxtapose a few quotations here, with two very different perspectives.

( Read more... )

According to my Language Acquisition textbook (Language Development 4th Edit, by Erika Hoff), the humans larynx is relatively low  -- relative to other animals that is. As a result, food can "fall into the trachea" (p. 44), causing choking, plus we are unable to drink and breath at the same time, the way that animals with high larynges can. Wow. That doesn't seem very healthy.

The advantage to a low larynx is ... speech. The way we do it. The book isn't very specific about this. It probably turns out to be pretty technical, beyond the scope of a basic psych/ling course: a combination of physics, physiology and phonetics (I know -- *swoon*),
The most common airstream used for speech is the pulmonic airstream. Air is exhaled from the lungs and pushed through the larynx -- through the vocal chords, which vibrate -- to produce the basic pitch used for speech. This 'basic pitch' really a range of frequencies, or wavelengths. The altered airstream travels through the mouth. The mouth acts as a resonating chamber. Depending what "closures" are  made with the tongue (that is, the shape of the resonating chamber) different ranges of wavelength are reinforced*. When we hear these patterns of reinforcement, we recognize discrete speech sounds.
You can see it's a very complicated -- and so likely precise -- process. Perhaps it's the distance from lungs to larynx, or the distance from larynx to resonating chamber, but the difference between high and low larynx is important to speech production.

Back up. "No hominid before the Cro-Magnon was capable of producing the range of sounds in modern language" (p. 45). This is partially due to the height of the larynx, and partially to do with properties of the resonating chamber -- the jaw and teeth (there's a trade-off there too: dental problems like overcrowding and impacted wisdoms, which can lead to difficulty eating and infection). So let's add evolution to our list of fields. According to Darwin, an animal's "fitness" is its ability to survive and reproduce. Fit animals pass on their genetic sets, and the associated traits, to their progeny, shaping the future of their species.

This suggests that, even in its early days, speech granted great advantage to its possessors. Great enough that the disadvantages of choking hazards and dental problems -- both of which impact survival in direct ways -- were outweighed.





* this is a "spectrogram", a picture of someone speaking. The large dark spans are vowels, and the reinforced frequencies are easy to see: the dark horizontal bands (called formants).

ABC please.

"Thick collagen fibres (5-10 μm) often aggregate into bundles (up to 100 μm thick). The fibres form an interlacing network, although their predominant direction is parallel to the surface of the skin. A preferred orientation of the collagen fibres is not visible in the sections, but the main orientation of the fibres differs in skin from different parts of the body. Usually, their main orientation will follow the "lines of greatest tension" in the skin (Kraissl lines). This is of some surgical importance since incisions parallel to these lines will heal faster and with less formation of scar tissue." -- http://www.lab.anhb.uwa.edu.au/mb140/CorePages/Integumentary/Integum.htm

"Icelandic is a very exoskeletal language -- you can see everything in Icelandic." 
-- Prof. Elizabeth Cowper, Syntactic Theory Lecture

And so begins year the third.

Thanks to a.raw for pointing out to me this blog entry, which contains a brief and flattering mention of my reading at the lexiconjury revival, while simultaneously directing me to the blog of brilliant sound poet and charming fellow, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl.

I'm working now. Full time (until school starts). I'm also elbow deep in a graphic novel. There's also the Novel, but that's always been slow going. There's a certain someone in my life to whom I like to devote much spare time. A couple of paintings have been commissioned, are half way done. I'm out of town every weekend -- family reunions, weddings. My courses for next semester are all selected, and I can see them looming on the horizon. I've promised to do some editing work -- the pages are on the table next to me.

I say this not in the spirit of complaint; I'm enjoying everything. I just wish there was enough time.

I spent these past 12 days at my family's cottage in the Kawarthas. Much of my time was devoted to diligent work on the painting visible above. Other activities included daily swimming; writing; games of Trivial Pursuit, Slang Teasers (aka Balderdash), and Monopoly; a 1000 piece puzzle assembled by half a dozen collaborators; heated conversations about physics, grammatical mood, and the photocarcinogenic components of sunblock.

And, of course, reading.

I didn't devote myself to reading a single text, and so regrettably finished nothing -- rather, I dipped in and out of a multitude of novels and non-fictions, frequently reading passages aloud to my companions (a behavior they tolerated gracefully). I'd like to share with you a series of  excerpts, many of which I did blurt out aloud or mark with a little dogear at the corner of the page.

I like to think that it betrays something of my thinking patterns that, when they are ordered carefully, each of the separately selected quotations shows thematic linkage to the quotation following it.

I've been scarce because I am working diligently on a graphic novel. Stay tuned.

This coming Saturday, Kevin Fortnum and I will be sharing a table at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair. He'll be selling his book, Defamation of a Scoundrel, and I'll have the latest issue of Knives Out along with all of my other little goodies. It's always a great event, so come on out. 

homosexual - homeosexual - bisexual - heteroflexible - heterosexual

There was no word, that I knew of, which described those of you interested most often in your own gender, but not exclusively -- the extremely gay end of the bi spectrum. So I've coined one -- homeosexual.

As you can see, all other general regions of the continuum were named. I understand there to be something jesting in the term 'heteroflexible', and this is a shame, but I'm sure it can be overcome.

Perhaps we don't all need labels, but it is easier to explain oneself when there is a word for it.
Not that I like the word 'homosexual' particularly. Or 'gay', or 'queer'. 'Lesbian' isn't so bad these days, but I've heard it upsets the actual Lesbians of Lesvos. 'Vagitarian' is funny, but too funny. No one uses 'homophilic', but I like it's association with proteins ('homophile' pleases me less).

 

"In 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork". Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with "Mark," as well as "bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as "kwork". But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the "portmanteau" words in "Through the Looking Glass". From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature."

-- from The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann, though I found it in the Wikipedia entry for quarks.

Two notes:

-> I've always pronounced to rhyme with bark etc.; true to the origin in the way that double negatives are true to old english, I suppose. 
-> I have not read Finnegans Wake. I gave it a shot on St. Patrick's day, but found it unreadable. If you've read it, drop me a line ... I'm not researching it for no reason.