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

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.

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.

"... on the basis of this information, we can actually figure out how genes are organized in the genome, and we can do this simply by letting organisms do what they like to do, which is to mate ... And then what we like to do, which is to use simple genetic knowledge -- we can actually map a genome, and create a road map for constructing an organism."

--- the brilliant Malcolm Campbell in lecture.

"In 1905, Starling introduced the term hormone, derived from the Greek for 'I arouse'..."
-Eckert, Animal Physiology

in second year zoology:

"What is that [you're drawing]?"
"Sort of a flower." (I often find myself drawing sort - of - flowers.)
"It looks like a fish."
"Oh yeah, I can see it. There're its gills."
"And the eye is there."
"Well, that's more appropriate for the class."
"Is a fish an animal?" Pause. "Oh, god...forget I asked."

Cozumel, Mexico; circa 2003


Jry: Do you have a boyfriend?

Me: No.

Jry: Do you want a boyfriend?

Me: No.

Jry: Are you gay?

Me: Yes.

Jry: (laughes) I knew that wasn't you. I was just throwing it out there to get your attention.

Me: (bemused)

Jry: You're a neat kid.


----


The man who was responsible for making this marvelously ironic conversation possible passed away recently. A respectful moment of silence please.

~
(x-posted on mapleleaf_poem)
~

In this week's New Yorker there is an article about Michael Ondaatje. It's what I would call a mixed review. The reviewer pays close attention to Ondaatje's process, and to the form that the novels take. He seems to approve of Ondaatje's aesthetic. When the reviewer moves into the reader's point of view however, the tone of the article becomes more negative.

I'm not entirely sure how I myself feel about Ondaatje's novels. I respect the man. I love his poetry. When reading his novels, I feel as if I am listening to someone singing, but I'm worried that he's not going to hit the next high note - it sounds like he won't hit it, but then he does. The song goes well, but the anxiety is there.

The last few lines of the review are as follows:

"The novel has been quite slow in picking up what the other arts are doing," Ondaatje has said. "For years they have been doing things that are much more suggestive, much freer of chronological sequence." The impulse to experiment is worthy; one wants it to yield more than suggestion.

I had to read it over again to figure out what exactly happened there. Ondaatje used the word "suggestive" - a succulent word, full of passion and mystique. The reviewer took this word and turned it around, using it to implicate an inadequacy. What a nasty and delightful trick.

(Notice that where I used 'implicate' a synonym might be 'suggest'. It's getting hot in here.)



One unconscious habit I have when I read an article is to neglect to read the name of the article's author. I then, when reading, formulate a hypothesis regarding the gender of the author. I don't do it intentionally or carefully. It just happens.
For this article, my guess was female.

---

"who wouldn`t be exited if they were hit by a high energy electron?"

---

semantics questions how a person can understand the meaning of a sentence which he or she has never heard before. this is much different from how one understands words, as you must memorize their meanings (though the process divining their meanings from context is worth a look, I think).
"Human beings constantly mistake the symbol for the thing with the thing itself," professor hallman explained to us. "whatever the word squirrel means, it is not that meaning." since in semantics we study this relationship between symbol and thing, it is important that we do not make this mistake.
one exception to this is "word". "word" is exactly what it says it is. or, in the notation we were taught, [[word]]=word - as opposed to word as in [[lick]]=lick. professor hallman used a word in bold to symbolize the actual object or event, lick for example. which is amusing, because he is still using a word to symbolize the thing. [[lick]] means "the denotation of lick". (he actually used lick as an example, which wasn't so interesting until he seemed slightly embarrassed about his choice and said "I don't know why I wrote that." makes you wonder.)
I found further amusment in statements like "we use the word denotation to mean 'means'." This is the way it goes, though, when one uses language to describe language. It feels silly. I feel like we should be drawing pictures or doing EEG scans, not muddling ourselves up by using what we study as we study it.
negative sentences were also a point of interest. hallman often gets caught up in the finer details of negative sentences (as he did with "that particular absence of cat wore a hat" for "no cat wore a hat") Yesterday it was "there is a relationship between moritz and the sandwich, but is it not an eating relationship" for "moritz did not eat the sandwich". these elaboration seem to compose a great portion of the  lecture.

I at some point hope to develop poetry which is "informed" by linguistics, but I'm still gathering knowledge.

~

"mass is defined as the amount of matter in an object. [...] matter is anything that has mass."
-- McMurry & Fay, Chemistry, p.12

beautiful.
a good start to CHM139H1Y




~

last night I had my first linguistics lecture of the new year. this unit we will study syntax - "the science of grammar".

syntacticians are primarily concerned with what makes one sequence of words grammatical and another sequence of words simply gibberish. hallman explained that it is not meaninglessness that indicates non-grammaticality, but non-grammaticality which causes a sentence to be uninterpretable. in some cases a sentence can me meaningful yet non grammatical (eg. "which book did she criticize the person who wrote?"). the opposite can also be true, in the case of noam chomsky's 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously'. I had to bite my tongue when hallman stated that it was impossible to be both green and colourless. interestingly enough, wikipedia has a small discussion on this, giving three alternated phrasings of this sentence:

"nondescript, immature ideas have violent nightmares"
"Newly formed, bland ideas are unexpressible in an infuriating way"
"unimaginative environmentalist ideas are unpopular"

we also encountered "three travelers from syria wore a hat", which is perfectly grammatical but slightly funny. hallman also became sidetracked discussing the sentence "no cat wore a hat" & whether or not "no cat" is a noun phrase. ("that particular absence of cat wore a hat" & "that particular emptiness which is catlike wore a hat"). there was a lot of hat wearing (or not wearing) going on.


during this class, poetry was brought up for the first time (unless you count the first lecture when hallman included "a course in poetics" in a list of things which lin100 is not). the question concerned poetic license, and the answer wasn't all that interesting; I simply enjoyed the mention of poetry because I do spend most of the two hours in lecture thinking about poetic possibility.

"If you are in lecture section L0101, you will take the test in room 'Benson North'. If you are in lecture section L5101, you will take the test in room 'Benson South'. My understanding is that the room in question is a gymnasium that will be partitioned into 'North' and 'South' with some kind of divider, or maybe even not partitioned at all, in which case you might want to bring a compass."

-- Prof. Peter Hallman.

That is my linguistics professor. He's very funny. I hope to take class from him again next year.

I thought, since my blog is 'the idea of north' it would be good to mention a compass. Maybe I will take a compass. I want a nice compass. a good, solid & beautiful compass. I should shop around for antiques. and maybe get a job. to pay for this compass. compass compass compass

"... nothing in this definition says that the number of p orbitals and the number of pi electrons must be the same. In fact, they can be different."

Thank you McMurry. You are one truly eloquent textbook.

 It makes me sad that I didn't know about this course when I selected my courses.
The question is, can I justify taking it next year,aquiring an 8th 100 level course? (that count includes those which I hope to aquire this year). Is it worth that? Is it good? It could have been my elective, had I known.
Oh, the mistakes we make in ignorance.

EDIT: though the physics website presented it as a running course, it seems the professor who ran it has retired  - I don't know what that means. Apparently the 'manuscript' is available here. I suppose he wrote the text for the course? (At any rate, I am clearly supposed to be doing actual physics right now  instead of researching a course which may or may not be interesting & in existence.)