Speak Coffee to Me‘s most recent “ad of the week” is this glittering little diamond, a brief film (directed by Azazel Jacobs) “about looking at art.” A nice little fable for those who just don’t get the point of so-called non-representational art, it’s from the Web site of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Wild
[Image above, “Where the Wild Things Are,” a tribute to Maurice Sendak
by elmicro of the deviantArt site. Click the image to see the original.]
Today marks Maurice Sendak’s 81st birthday.
This year also marks the 45th anniversary of the publication of Where the Wild Things Are. From 100 Best Books for Children:
After creating art for almost fifty books by other authors, Sendak took up a project of his own begun in November 1955, a saga called “Where the Wild Horses Are.” But since he couldn’t draw horses very well, he tried to think of another character he might use — eventually focusing on “Wild Things.” That idea brought back childhood memories of his Brooklyn relatives — aunts, uncles, cousins — who would come visiting and eat his family food. They pinched his cheeks and cooed over him, saying, “You’re so cute, I could eat you up.” Sendak brought these relatives and the movie King Kong together in his story caldron. As Sendak drew and redrew the Wild Things — at first quite skinny and under-nourished — they gained weight and density.
…
The writer’s favorite fan letter reads: “How much does it cost to get to where the Wild Things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”
The book’s grip on the popular imagination — at least in the US, among the generations which have grown up since 1964 — boggles the mind. And among artists and illustrators? Pfft: words don’t suffice.
(For example, just check out, the deviantArt site where thousands of indie/professional artists display their work online. Do a search on “wild things” and you get over 12,000 hits, among them the illustration which tops this post: Max giving a Wild Thing as good as he gets. Not all of those hits refer to the book, but a lot — I mean, a lot — of them do.)
Here’s a video of Sendak talking about “his work, childhood, [and] inspirations”:
Finally, if you follow such things you probably already know about the forthcoming film version of Where the Wild Things Are, from director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers. Here’s the trailer for it:
Crossing the Line
First, there’s May 29. As you may have put together by your own clever self, that’s The Missus’s and my anniversary. This has always been an easy date for me to remember, because it was also my Dad’s birthday. Somewhere around here was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. And finally, because I have many happy childhood memories of Memorial Day — which used to fall every year on May 31 — the very end of the month always seems to carry with it an assertive whiff of celebration and commemoration.
But then we come to the small matter of June 4, 1988…
There Are Some Cures for Pre-Summertime Blues
Wanted to draw your attention to a couple of recent donations to the “life is complex and frustrating, so let’s go have some fun!” cause.
First, you can generally look to the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog for a pick-me-up. (And before breakfast, say researchers, is when 99% of the populace most needs picking up. (The other 1% need it most while they’re sitting on barstools and fantasizing about Mr. or Ms. Right, as the case may be.))
But today’s post, “Some Cartoons for You,” just made me grin from ear to ear. (It might even have made the grin wrap around to the back of my neck — an alarming sight, no doubt, for the people behind me in the elevator this morning.) As is usually the case at 7-Imp, the focus is on children’s books and illustrators — specifically, in this case, illustrators who favor a cartoon-like style of art.
It’s pretty darned hard for me to look at this without smiling, and it’s not even the whole image (from “Mr.” [Tom] Warburton’s 1000 Times No — see a reproduction of the entire page at the 7-Imp site):
Airborne
From whiskey river:
As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.
(Native American Indian saying)
Not from whiskey river:
Don Juan and don Genaro stood up and stretched their arms and arched their backs, as if sitting had made their bodies stiff. My heart began to pound fast. They made Pablito and me stand up.
“The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” don Juan said. “It is the door to the unknown.”
He pointed with a sweeping movement of his hand to the mesa where we were standing.
“This is the plateau in front of that door.”
He pointed then to the northern edge of the mesa.
“There is the door. Beyond, there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”
Don Juan and don Genaro then turned to Pablito and said good-by to him. Pablito’s eyes were dilated and fixed; tears were rolling down his cheeks.
I heard don Genaro’s voice saying good-by to me, but I did not hear don Juan’s.
Don Juan and don Genaro moved towards Pablito and whispered briefly in his ears. Then they came to me. But before they had whispered anything I already had that peculiar feeling of being split.
“We will now be like dust on the road,” don Genaro said. “Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday.”
Don Juan and don Genaro stepped back and seemed to merge with the darkness. Pablito held my forearm and we said good-by to each other. Then a strange urge, a force, made me run with him to the northern edge of the mesa. I felt his arm holding me as we jumped and then I was alone.
(Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power — the last words of the book. I always thought Castaneda’s entire “Don Juan” series would have ended perfectly at this point, but no: he went on to write numerous further books, none of which attained the convincing — and impeccable — power of the early ones.)
What We Miss When We Shutter Our Senses
[Above image, “Magic Eye” by Jennifer Love, first appeared on TrekEarth.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking dear, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. The wing scars the sky, making a path inevitably as the deer in snow, and the winds all know it and tell it though we hear it not.
(John Muir, John of the Mountains [source])
Not from whiskey river:
When your eyes are functioning well you don’t see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren’t working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don’t hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there’s something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes — it means something’s wrong with your functioning.
(Alan Watts, Ego)
…and:
Night Plus Light Makes Right
From the toxel.com design blog:
Light writing is a form of stop motion animation wherein still images captured using the technique known as light painting are put in sequence thereby creating the optical illusion of movement for the viewer.
Two examples:
Impacto Criativo (Creative Impact)
Created by Propague and MidiaEffects with 2 cameras, 1700 clicks, 18 people, 20 nights, 35 flash lights, and 234 batteries.
…and:
Light Paint Piano Player
Created by Ryan Cashman with a small green LED keychain light. The frames were photographed with a Canon Rebel using 20-30 second exposure time.
See them all. (Warning: visiting the toxel.com home page can be hazardous to one’s productivity.)
Haunted by What’s Inside
From whiskey river:
People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.
(Alberto Giacometti)
Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:
…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.
(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)
Surprising the Audience
[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]
My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.
Knowing Only the Present
Since history is on my mind anyway…
From Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days blog recently, by guest blogger Tero Ykspetäjä: the top five reasons “Why Finnish Is Cooler Than English.” Reason #5 (with slightly tongue-in-cheek coda):
There’s no future tense in the Finnish language. The present tense is used instead. “No future,” as the Tähtivaeltaja slogan says. This makes it easy to seize the day, to live in the moment and not worry about tomorrow. At least in theory. There are some who insist on trying to introduce a sort-of future tense by artificial constructs like “you will come to know this,” but they are clearly in the wrong and should stop immediately.
I jogged over to Wikipedia and found this example:
The future tense is not needed due to context and the telic contrast. For example, luen kirjan “I read a book (completely)” indicates a future, [while] luen kirjaa “I read a book (not yet complete)” indicates present.
(If you’re a native English speaker — perhaps especially so — contemplating following the link to Wikipedia’s article on telicity, and you are not a linguist, prepare yourself to learn more about the language than you ever picked up in Mrs. Grundy’s fifth-period class. Let alone on the playground.)
All of which got me wondering: are there any languages with no past tense?
Duh, what a question. I should have known this (emphasis mine):
All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages, in that they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure) rather than morphology — i.e., changes in form of a word — to indicate the word’s function in a sentence. In other words, Chinese has few grammatical inflections — it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers, for example for personal pronouns), only a few articles (i.e., equivalents to “the, a, an” in English), and no gender.
It’s a topic for a *cough* future post, maybe. But I’ve always been interested in the idea that knowing one language from birth, as opposed to another, might (does?) shape the way one thinks throughout life.
For instance, if you have no grammatical form to express the future tense, can you even think in terms of a time containing events which have not yet happened? If you can’t express the past, what goes through your mind the first time you see a timeline? If your language has no tenses at all, do you have clocks and calendars? What does “time” itself mean to you? If you forget something you mean to pick up on the way home from work, what is the context in which you fail to pick it up, vs. the context in which you formed your intention to remember it in the first place — is there a “when”? (And what on Earth do you make of bizarre concepts like “daylight savings time”?)
Surely it can’t be that you think of “time” only as what English speakers call the present, a sort of neverending concurrency. Surely you don’t think you may walk out your front door and eventually come within (say) a mile of where the Emperor Gaozu is currently taking a bath.
Er… can you?
I think I’m experiencing some sort of linguo-philosophical vertigo here. (Almost said “at the moment” but, well…)
[P.S. For the link to the post on Finnish-vs.-English which started this avalanche of paradox, thanks to the “Instant Distractions” sidebar at Colleen Lindsay’s blog.]
