Andre the Giant may have a posse, but George Lakoff has a blog. Sort of.
And check out his interview with Mother Jones: “How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must).”
[Via Scrivenings.]
lakoff blog
Category Archives: language-and-literature
cfp re: jd in pmc
Postmodern Culture is soliciting full-length essays reading the work of Jacques Derrida for volume 15, number 3 (May 2005), a special issue celebrating the work of Derrida edited by Eyal Amiran, Paula Geyh, and Arkady Plotnitsky. Please send submissions and queries to amiran {at} msu {dot} edu by March 1.
[You might also note, by the way, that the current issue of PMC features an essay entitled “The Time of Interpretation: Psychoanalysis and the Past,” by Wordherder Jason Jones.]
“Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones”
A fascinating article in today’s New York Times by Marc Lacey:
Across the continent, linguists are working with experts in information technology to make computers more accessible to Africans who happen not to know English, French or the other major languages that have been programmed into the world’s desktops.
There are hundreds of languages in Africa – some spoken only by a few dozen elders – and they are dying out at an alarming rate. The continent’s linguists see the computer as one important way of saving them. Unesco estimates that 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages are not represented on the Internet, and that one language is disappearing somewhere around the world every two weeks.
“Technology can overrun these languages and entrench Anglophone imperialism,” said Tunde Adegbola, a Nigerian computer scientist and linguist who is working to preserve Yoruba, a West African language spoken by millions of people in western Nigeria as well as in Cameroon and Niger. “But if we act, we can use technology to preserve these so-called minority languages.”
Language geeks, and computer geeks, and progressives unite!
turning each page is like making a bed
In the bits of time available to me, I’ve been reading Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s really quite lovely, and it features as one of the main characters Henry, a librarian for the Newberry who (involuntarily) finds himself temporarily transported backwards and forwards in his own life. What’s not to like? In one scene, an older Henry encounters his younger self after hours in a museum. Taking himself to the rare books collection, he pulls down a copy of “Audobon’s Birds of America, the deluxe, wonderful double-elephant folio that’s almost as tall as my young self. This copy is the finest in existence” They sit and look at the gorgeous plates together while waiting to be returned to their respective times and places:
Turning each page is like making a bed, an enormous expanse of paper slowly rises up and over. henry stands attentively, waits each time for the new wonder, emits small noises of pleasure for each Sandhill Crane, American Coot, Great Auk, Pileated Woodpecker. When we come to the last plate, Snow Bunting, he leans down and touches the page, delicately stroking the engraving. I look at him, look at the book, remember, this book, this moment, the first book I loved, remember wanting to crawl into it and sleep. (35)
What dedicated reader would not recognize her- or himself in this passage? I like the suggestion here of reading as a kind of time travelling, taking us out of the present and sometimes taking us back to contact a previous version of ourselves.
Niffenegger, by the way, is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Book Arts Program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.
“reading at risk” forum
Three hundred people came to a forum on the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report. There were four speakers:
- Mark Bauerlein, Director, Office of Research and Analysis, NEA
- John Mark Eberhart, Books Editor, Kansas City Star
- Helma Hawkins, Director of Youth Services, Kansas City Public Library
- Robert Stewart, UMKC Professor of Creative Writing and Editor of New Letters
I took rough notes (PDF, 78K) on their talks and on the question-and-answer period.