Matthew Simmons—
“Published in the future.” (“A screaming comes across the sky,” translated 56 times. Here.) Also, hey. I’m reading Against the Day.
23
Linguistic Darwinism: Can a brand name kill the thing it was named after?
Before Facebook, there were facebooks. When I was in college, “the facebook” was one name for the (ink and paper) Pomona student handbook’s most-perused section, the photo directory of incoming freshman. Other designations were the lookbook and, more crudely but most aptly, the menu. Plenty of schools had them and many also called them the facebook. Facebook corporate mythology has it that founder Mark Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook from the facebook issued by his high school alma mater, Phillips-Exeter. In any case, this kind of directory is surely what the company was named after.
Presumably, college students don’t need facebooks anymore because they have Facebook. I doubt they’ve been totally phased out, but I do wonder if they are still colloquially referred to as facebooks. Wouldn’t that be too confusing?
There are plenty of cases when a brand name became the de-facto generic name for something, like Kleenex or Coke (at least here in Atlanta) or Oreo. But this is a different phenomenon, wherein the brand name takes a generic thing’s name and applies it to a new form of that thing, thereby making the generic name and thing obsolete.
My father frequently uses the construction “all a-twitter.” Twitter is, after all, a verb meaning to make successive chirping noises (hence the Twitter bird icon) or to tremble with excitement (my dad’s usage is somewhat of an amalgam). Surely, much as people don’t say “gay” to mean “happy” anymore, uses of the generic verb twitter–when not in reference to micro-blogging–will diminish to nothing. But this still isn’t as extreme as the Facebook example, in that people are no less happy for not being called gay, and birds cheep no less for not being described as twittering, whereas colleges really might stop printing their own facebooks now that there is one big Facebook.
I’d love to hear if anyone can think of any other examples of this phenomenon, especially older examples–or was Facebook the first to murder its forebears?
HOW MUCH DO YOU CARE?
just hanging out in here. admire me. or not, i don't care.
How important to you is it to get your writing published? We’re probably all familiar to some degree with the feeling of “flow”, that creative euphoria you experience when immersed in creation, and we’re also probably acquainted with the intense (and rare) sense of personal satisfaction that comes from having created something that resembles (or even exceeds) something we conceptualized before we sat down to create it. And then, of course, there’s that very different experience: the clotted/congested sensation of ushering it into the understandably indifferent world that reacts with form rejections or silence. So do you care? Or to phrase it differently: Would you still write if there were no chance of getting your work published?
Some Sentences Recently Written In My Moleskine
“I saw the flag, and the sun slanting on the broad grass.” — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“Thank you for not walking your dog in this area.” — Sign at an RV park in Estes Park, Colorado
“Summer or winter, the shade of trees or their hard shadow, I never seem to get into my Rice Krispies until noon.” — Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
“Talk to LaRhonda: SEX” — From a notebook found on Southwest Flight 620, San Francisco to Denver
“When Haley Joel Osment thought about Dakota Fanning’s father he saw a normal-looking man sitting on the edge of a bed in the morning, standing in an office with a neutral facial expression, walking to his apartment at night, walking into his bedroom, quietly closing the door, screaming in agony, brushing his teeth, sleeping.” — Tao Lin, Richard Yates
“But then, why would I want a chick no one gives a shit about?” — Some guy walking near 16th and Dolores
“The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured Kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.” — Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America
Wheel of Fortune
The answer isn’t “Asshole,” as the letter “s” would have lighted up in the primary round of letters — yet that is what we see, what we hear. Language lives in the eye and ear before it enters the brain, except for Vanna White’s, who stares ahead with a straight botoxed face wondering why all the snickers? I don’t know what the correct answer is, keep on seeing A S S H O L E, like think about anything but elephants and what do you think? The elephant in the room is at once both erroneous and implicit, its verity beyond its actuality. The contestant (let’s call her Cphog) no doubt is thinking what we’re thinking, the expletive that doesn’t exist but might as well. Say goodbye to that 25K or SUV honey, you’re linguistically fuckd, missing vowels or not.
Composition With JavaScript
Composition With JavaScript: create your own Mondrian.
(via @Powell_DA)
Deconstruct This
It’s Saturday morning. I have missed capoeira practice because of last night’s asinine behavior. I’m sitting in front of the tv watching the VH1 Top 20 Countdown. Adam Lambert is doing his Mad Hatter / Mad Max / wood nymph thing.
My friend says to me, “Is this the video that makes us suspect that music itself might have dementia?” Then he says something about the structuralist utterance out of the void. Fuck, this music really is bad. It’s not just that I’m getting old, is it?
This same house guest, I just discovered, was responsible for this bathroom poetics when it originally read “SUCK IT.”
Mustache mediation
Some say Leo D’s “Mona Lisa” was him in drag, that he was gay. Some say gay is the last chapter of evolution, that we reach a point where ppl. get to make love without the threat of babies, which leads to child support, etc. An effeminate man is often deemed sophisticated, at least in our liberal-progressive artsy business. What used to get you beat up in the playground is now considered “interesting,” a word used in place of a compliment. Testosterone is boring. Toblerone is fattening, so much for semantics. So Duchamp turns Mona back into Leonardo, or at least signifies his convoluted wants quicker, while turning himself into Rrose Sélavy. Look at the poetry of Rrose, how it looks like Prose.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Civilization ends at the waterline
Floating horror of a 35 mph red-light
Your pelvis aches in your hands, too?
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it’s waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye
Get drunk. Get naked. Fall
Despite your refusal
Who can control themselves around so much “rough trade”?
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge
It was embarrassing
When black-dog down, get your tires changed. It will make you glow 2 hours
Gobble
Sloppy drunk and starting to sink into the winged chair
Electric monkey
Fly
