recombi(nation)

12 - Poem for a Fresh Page

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:24:55 GMT

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

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:26:59 GMT

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."

Twilight

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:54:09 GMT

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

If you haven't read Twilight, all you need to know to understand this post is: Boy (Edward) meets girl (Bella).

"[Stephenie Meyer] said that she doesn’t know why boys read her books, but that it should be good for them! If more guys were like Edward, the world would be a better place! [...] She hopes that girls learn from these books, too. " -- here; some symposium transcript

"Since the release of the Twilight series, the "dashing" character of Edward has developed somewhat of a cult following, with millions of devoted, mostly female, fans worldwide. [...] The character has been overwhelmingly well-received by readers and has been called the "obsession of teen girls." -- wikipedia

BUT

"Gina R. Dalfonzo of the National Review Online described Edward's character as mentally unstable and a "predator", using behavioural examples such as spying on Bella while she sleeps, eavesdropping on her conversations, dictating her choice of friends, and encouraging her to deceive her father as reasons why she believes he is "one of modern fiction's best candidates for a restraining order." -- wikipedia

"How many signs does Edward show that fit so well to the warnings in a few paragraphs?
Resents her hanging out with friends who are not him or his sister? Check.
Fucking up her car so she can't go see Jacob? Check.
Being around her ALL THE TIME, even at night when she sleeps? Check.
Locking her up in his house and lying to her father so she can't see or talk to Jacob? Check.
[...]
Constantly trying to pressure her into the decisions he thinks she should make regarding money? Check.
Bella being unable to function once he is gone? Check.
Manipulating and controlling the most trivial things (like who drives) even against her will? Check." -- here

"Kellan Rice of Blast Magazine criticized the relationship between Bella and Edward, saying that it "romanticizes and idealizes...an obviously unhealthy – even abusive – relationship." -- wikipedia

(this website is actually the most informative; if you scroll down it has quotations from Mayo clinic lit on abuse with quotations from Twilight as examples.)

Science and Linguistics

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:46:21 GMT

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).

I've been reviewing reproductive endocrinology for 7 hours now

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:41:04 GMT

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:16:09 GMT

ABC please.

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:09:19 GMT

"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

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:46:19 GMT

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

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:12:54 GMT

And so begins year the third.

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:21:14 GMT

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'll never learn to play an instrument

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:38:07 GMT

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.

July

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:05:44 GMT

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.

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
->James Watson
I was preoccupied with sex, but not the kind in need of encouragement.
(on his boredom with studying bacterial reproduction)

the Witching Hour: Book One in the Mayfair Chronicles
->Anne Rice
"Why are you being so foolish!" said Mary Beth with a bored, matter-of-fact air. "My God, everything has been fulfilled. And there is no limit to how many times the transmutation can be effected, and you can imagine, can't you, the superior quality of the mutated flesh and the mutated genes. This is actually a scientific advance of stunning brilliance."

Great Mambo Chicken & the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge
->Ed Regis
The hope of the surgical team was that at some point in the distant future a fresh, new body could be cloned for Dora Kent from one of her old cells. Her old brain would then be placed inside the head of the new body [...] Once she was reanimated, in the cryonics jargon, Dora Kent would enter her "second life cycle" (also part of the jargon), and go on to lead a long and prosperous new life. A very long life, perhaps: she might live for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. She might even become immortal.

Postcards from the Brain Museum: The Improbable Search for Meaning in the Matter of Famous Minds
->Brian Burrell
Not the smell of death as you might expect, or even the reassuring whiff of decay (which at least promises an eventual end to things), but a smell that reneges any hope of oblivion. It is formaldehyde, a fixative so powerful that it does to living cells what the pause button on the remote control does to pixels. And it does not discriminate. It will do the same thing to the skin of the careless anatomist as it does to the specimen he is preparing. And when you first walk into a closet full of preserved human brains, it will smell as though it wants to do the same thing to you.

I Know this Much is True (a novel)
-> Wally Lamb
"I think if I wash with the water from the river, it might help to heal my infection. Purify me. I'm unclean."
"Unclean?" I said. "What do you mean?" In the silence that followed, I forced my eyes down to his self mutilation. The scar tissue was pink and shiny, as soft looking as a newborn's. [...] "It looks pretty good now," I said.
"What?"
"Your ... your wrist."
"I meant my brain," he said. "I think the water might help heal my brain."
[...] I probably could have counted on one hand the number of times over the years when Thomas had acknowledged his sickness like that--when he hadn't taken the attitude that he was the reasonable one and the rest of us were crazy

the Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
-> Simon Winchester
Every morning her would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before, trying to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated in poison, into his mouth.

Dreams Underfoot (a collection of short stories)
-> Charles de Lint
" They're like . . ." His hands moved as he spoke, trying to convey what he didn't feel words alone could say-- a whole other language, she often thought, watching those long slender fingers weave through the air between them. '"They're just too much..."
"You've really seen them?" she asked.
'"Oh, yeah. Except not on the streets. They're floating up in the air, y'know, like fat little kites."
It was such a relief to know that they were real.

Pidgins and Creoles
-> Loreto Todd
A creole arises when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of a speech community. The simple structure that characterized the pidgin is carried over into the creole but since the creole, as a mother tongue, must be capable of expressing the whole range of human experience, the lexicon is expanded and frequently a more elaborate syntactic system evolves.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:53:31 GMT

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

Saturday

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:07:43 GMT

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.

hiking

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:10:25 GMT

Our words.

Fri, 23 May 2008 19:07:04 GMT

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).

From Saturday's Globe

Sun, 04 May 2008 16:39:51 GMT

Unfortunately they don't look like viruses to me ... viruses have protein coats (capsids). But I suppose rigid protein coats aren't very expressive. Or recognizable to the average Globe reader.

the origin of "quark"

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:06:11 GMT

"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.

enclosis

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:24:59 GMT

Remember how I kept muttering about endocytose being a back-formation from endocytosis? Well, dictionary.com has confirmed my suspicion.

I'm going to be honest, I'm pretty ecstatic about having spotted this one. I have a soft spot for back-formation -- it's such an interesting process.

You see, we use this verb often; and everytime I've heard it, I've thought to myself "that is one beautiful back-formation" and I've felt myself deriving it each time I've said it -- it's breathtaking.

en·do·cy·tose /ˌɛndoʊsaɪˈtoʊs, -ˈtoʊz/ [en-doh-sahy-tohs, -tohz]

–verb (used without object), -tosed, -tos·ing.
Physiology. (of a cell) to take within by the process of endocytosis.
[Origin: 1970–75; back formation from endocytosis]

Note, this derivation first took place before I was born, so I likely didn't produce it de novo but, as I said, I feel myself taking 'endocytosis' and clipping it whenever I use the verb, and that was what first made me suspect that it was a back-formation.

highschool vernacular

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:04:25 GMT

When I was in grade ten, I was taking a beginner dance class as one of my credits (art school, right). The strange thing about this class was that it included many girls I had never met before -- this turned out to be a result of their tendency to take applied level classes (while I took academic). Possibly they planned to attend college, but I was given the impression that it was a strategy for avoiding difficult homework. (Not that they were lazier than I was -- I wasn't really into homework either ... I just wasn't willing to base on laziness decisions that would affect my future quite so drastically).

Anyway. These girls spoke differently from how I spoke. They had slang words and phrases that I was unfamiliar with (and not terribly fond of). One such word was custy, an adjective meaning 'gross, unlikeable' -- often used when they were talking about women they had distaste for. When it was used as a noun, it would undergo zero derivation: custy, (pl. custies) -- here it was used slightly differently, between friends ("Let's get going, custies.")

My friend Hendrik hypothesized its origin -- disgust. Often, notice, pronounced /dɪˈskʌst/ (di-skuhst): they were clipping the word and endowing it with a different derivation pattern.

lex. category	standard eng.	vernacular
v.	disgust	---
adj.	disgusting	custy
noun.	---	custy

They were also keeping the devoiced velar stop /k/, not reverting to the original /g/ which had become devoiced as a condition of its environment (after the /s/).

Which brings me to my next observation -- I didn't think about it much at the time, but the gust part of disgust is associated with taste, enjoyment, gusto. Strange that it should have come so far from that meaning.

/ˈkjukʌmbər/

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:18:30 GMT

what's with this cucumber thing ... you know: "cool as a cucumber", "one tough cucumber" ... why are we so concerned with cucumbers?

April Foolery

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:01:16 GMT

My sister was the victim of two April Fools Day jokes.

Her boyfriend sent her a text:
"Just got a call from [my co-worker]. He's in jail -- arrested for murdering his wife. his kids are fine, staying with their grandmother."

At 7:45 I walked into the kitchen, to witness her exclaim over her toast, "This isn't honey!"
It was, in fact, concentrated grapefruit juice I had been storing in a honey jar in the fridge -- since February! It would be April first that she mistook it for what the label advertised.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:35:02 GMT

Have set up a new & improved NaPoWriMo blog over here: http://alltheaprilpo.blogspot.com/

Perfect Weekend in Buffalo

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:19:05 GMT

For the second year in a row, a very memorable trip to Buffalo for the small press fair. The pace and atmosphere of the weekend, for me, felt very different this year from last, in a way that is well suited to where I am in my life right now -- if that makes sense.

Photo above by Jessica Smith, below by Chris Fritton.

Sisters

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:40:45 GMT

1995

Natalie (5yrs): Hurry up.
Anna (18mos): I'm doing my best, Natalie, I'm doing my best.

2008

Natalie (17yrs): I'm thinking, I'm thinking.
Anna (13yrs): It hurts me when you think.