jrmilazzo

[jrmilazzo]

Jean Xcéron, "Pink." 1952

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Today's necessary noise.

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Under the microscope, metamorphic rocks are like exquisite illuminated manuscripts, with interlacing minerals chronicling their hidden, subterranean experiences. Crystals that grew in distinct episodes over time will develop concentric bands like tree rings, and early formed minerals may be engulfed or rimmed by later ones. On the way to becoming schist, a mudstone might first have been a slate, and garnets that overgrew the slate’s aligned minerals can preserve a record of that stage even when the slaty texture has been erased in the rest of the rock – like a tree that grew around the wires of an old fence that has long since been removed.

Microscopic observations, together with laboratory experiments, have also shown that fluids in the crust – mainly water, but also carbon dioxide, and various elements dissolved in these phases – are as important as temperature and pressure in governing metamorphic reactions. Water’s presence dictates the temperatures and rates at which reactions occur, and on a watery planet this is the rule rather than the exception. Indeed, the one important scientific result of the absurd and expensive Cold War race to drill the deepest hole was the discovery that water (in a supercritical form, neither liquid nor gas) occurred even at the greatest depths reached.

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Cornelis Anthonisz, "Sinte Aelwaer." ca. 1546.

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Today's necessary noise.

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While orthography can clearly play a role in the bouba/kiki phenomenon, evidence from studies with different populations suggests that there is also some genuinely vocal basis for the effect. For example, early blind individuals who have no experience with the Roman alphabet show the effect when feeling round and pointy shapes, although earlier investigations failed to establish this. While a few studies have failed to find the bouba/kiki effect with pre-literate children, several others have shown the effect in children, including pre-literate ones. However, given that sound-symbolic phenomena such as bouba/kiki generally become stronger with age, more convincing evidence for the idea that orthography is not the locus of bouba/kiki comes from cross-cultural studies with speakers of non-literate societies. For example, speakers of Himba (a Bantu language spoken in Namibia) showed the bouba/kiki effect even though they were non-literate and had minimal exposure to Western culture. Another study found that Taiwanese participants showed similar bouba/kiki performance to United States participants, despite the fact that their languages are written in different scripts [83]. More generally, a meta-analysis of 13 different bouba/kiki experiments with speakers of six different languages (English, French, Italian, Himba, Syuba and Hunjara) showed that across languages, 89% of all responses were congruent with the phenomenon. However, some exceptions have also been found: Syuba speakers from the Himalayas in Nepal did not show the effect, and neither did Hunjara speakers in Papua New Guinea. Styles & Gawne suggested that the lack of effect for these two groups may be because the nonce words have some phonemes that do not occur in the respective language or that some sounds are phonotactically/tonotactically illegal in the corresponding languages.

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Odilon Redon, "La Grappe" or "Le Marchand de ballons." 1906.

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Today's necessary noise.

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For me, a book like Criticism and Politics leaves lingering in its wake the summary question of why institutional support for the systematic study of literature ultimately failed so utterly to maintain itself. Certainly it showed itself to be vulnerable to shifts in critical fashion. It was arguably New Criticism that solidified the establishment of literary study as part of the curriculum of American universities (although other methods also developed in parallel with New Criticism), but when challenges to the purportedly "disinterested" qualities of these methods began to be heard (presumably from the post-60s insurgents [Bruce] Robbins examines), soon enough a seemingly perpetual series of methods competing for the role of acceptable substitutes ensued, each more determined than the last to avoid the stigma of appearing to be "merely literary" in their assumptions, leading to the current situation in which the literary has finally and emphatically been eliminated altogether. Perhaps academic literary study was always destined to evolve in this way, given the expectations of scholarly "progress" implicit in the academic system, but the ritual scapegoating of New Criticism for its methodological sins has persisted now for so long that it seems to suggest a true antipathy for literature except insofar as it can be enlisted for the scholar's own more "serious" agenda--politics, of course, being the most serious subject of all in our present dispensation.

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Don Daglow, [Screenshot from] Utopia. 1981.

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Today's necessary noise.

Hala Strana, Hala Strana. (Emperor Jones, 2003.)

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For the internet to be the truly global service that it is, many of these wires—most of them no thicker than a garden hose—are sunk full fathom five across the bottom of the ocean, where they lay alarmingly vulnerable to fishing nets, ship anchors, currents, shark bites, scuba divers with saws, earthquakes, and, of course, volcanoes. These slender strands of mega-charged fiberoptic cables moving terabits per second account for 95 percent of all international data and voice transfers—volumes that blow satellites out of the sky.

What is more shocking than having the vast bulk of non-physical human interaction carried by something that looks like it comes from the lawn care section of a hardware store, is how comparatively rare disconnection calamities like the one that befell Tonga really are. According to the folks who lay them and fix them, the 870,000 miles of submarine cables invisibly meshing the world together under each of our planet’s oceans demand only about 100 repairs per year—far fewer than their wind- and rain-swept terrestrial cousins.

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Gonzalo Fonseca, "House of the Painted Shadows." 1982.

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Today's necessary noise.

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Trap adj. 1. Descriptor applied to objects in the dual, lesser world conceived in some religions. Maya, shadows on the cave wall. If you thread a fine enough path, past all the trap things, you’ve won. Sometimes you start at zero and can go negative, or get a point for each trap evasion. In this version, you start with all the points and keep losing them, Leaky Bucket. 2. Sentiment’s motility is hallmarked by a certain sludgy quality. 3. To a superficial archaeologist, “1”s could be “I”s. Then the whole house of cards pulls off a ziggurat illusion. “Poof”s could be “boob”s. 4. Trick, or to be tricked.

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František Kupka, "One Vision (Une Vision)." 1946.

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Today's necessary noise.