Just had some disappointing news about wedge heels. In light of it, I’m off to wear black, read, and sulk for a while, a la Audrey.
I think people like to post this picture and pretend it enhances Hepburn’s aura of perfection –– “she reads! she’s smart!” –– but if you look closely, you’ll see she’s just perusing a script.
So I know I’ve been doing a lot of bullshit reblogging recently, but I’m on vacation, so give me a break! Anyway, here are some excerpts from an amazing New Yorker article about a man named John Quijada, who came up with his own language named Ithkuil, which attracted attention from linguists, fellow “conlangers,” and freaks the world over.
1. “The first entirely artificial language of which any records survives, Lingua Ignota, was created by the twelfth-century German nun and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, who is better known for having composed what may be the earliest surviving morality play. She seems to have used Lingua Ignota for some form of mystical communion. All that remains of her language is a short passage and a dictionary of a thousand and twelve words listed in hierarchical order, from the most important (Aigonz, God) to the least (Cauiz, cricket.)”
2. “By the nineteenth century, the dream of constructing a philosophical language capable of expressing universal truths had given way to the equally ambitious desire to unite the world through a single, easy-to-learn, politically neutral, auxiliary language. Solresol, the creation of a French musician named Jean-Francois Sudre, was among the first of these universal languages to gain popular attention. It had only seven syllables: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Si. Words could be sung, or performed on a violin. Or, since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.”
3. “And yet, by some estimates, Esperanto still has more speakers than six thousand of the languages spoken around the world today, including approximately a thousand native speakers (among them George Soros) who learned it as their first language.”**
4. “… David Peterson, the president of the Language Creation Society and the inventor of Dothraki, the language spoken by a race of pseudo-Mongol nomadic warriors in the HBO series Game of Thrones. (Dothraki is now heard by more people each week than Yiddish, Navajo, Inuit, Basque and Welsh combined.)”
5. “Laadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radiidin, defined as a ‘non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.'”
6. “Kalmykia [where Quijada was asked to deliver a lecture] is notable for two things: for being the only majority-Buddhist state west of the Ural Mountains, and for having an eccentric former President, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, an oligarch-turned-politician, spend millions of dollars of his own fortune turning a dusty, forgotten corner of the Russian steppe into the chess capital of the world. Ilyumzhinov claims to have been abducted from his Moscow apartment in 1997, by extraterrestrials, who gave him a tour of the galaxy and taught him that chess came from outer space.”
7. “One of the conferees, a graduate of the University of Effective Development named Gennadiy Overchenko, explained that he had used psychonetics [a philosophy that sounds suspiciously like Dianetics, followers of which became devotees of Quijada] to develop skills in a variety of disciplines where he previously had no expertise, from chess to cooking to gouache painting. He later told me that, after half an hour of meditations, he was able to sight-read Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ despite being a novice pianist. ‘In the past two years, I have never fallen (including on ice), and have not dropped or broken anything,’ he continued.”
Searching now for: the “self-published… definitive, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-page description of [Ithkuil]” by Quijada.
… the vintage LP Radha Krishna Temple album (Apple Records) BUT ONLY if it has this cover:
Hare fucking Krishna.
If I can’t find one with this cover, I’ll just buy the audio for $4.95. Ain’t no thang.
From George Harrison:
“Everybody is looking for KRISHNA.
Some don’t realize that they are, but they are.
KRISHNA is GOD, the Source of all that exists, the Cause of all that is, was, or ever will be.
As GOD is unlimited HE has many Names.
Allah-Buddha-Jehova-Rama: All are KRISHNA, all are ONE.
God is not abstract; He has both the impersonal and the personal aspects to His personality which is SUPREME, ETERNAL, BLISSFUL, and full of KNOWLEDGE. As a single drop of water has the same qualities as an ocean of water, so has our consciousness the qualities of GOD’S consciousness… but through our identification and attachment with material energy (physical body, sense pleasures, material possessions, ego, etc.) our true TRANSCENDENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS has been polluted, and like a dirty mirror it is unable to reflet a pure image.
With many lives our association with the TEMPORARY has grown. This impermanent body, a bag of bones and flesh, is mistaken for our true self, and we have accepted this temporary condition to be final.
Through all ages, great SAINTS have remained as living proof that this non-temporary, permanent state of GOD CONSCIOUSNESS can be revived in all living Souls. Each soul is potentially divine. Krsna says in Bhagavad Gita: “Steady in the Self, being freed from all material contamination, the yogi achieves the highest perfetional stage of happiness in touch with the Supreme Consciousness.” (VI,28)
YOGA (a scientific method for GOD (SELF) realization) is the process by which we puirify our consciousness, stop further pollution, and arrive at the state of Perfection, full KNOWLEDGE, full BLISS.
If there’s a God, I want to see Him. It’s pointless to believe in something without proof, and Krishna Consciousness and meditation are methods where you can actually obtain GOD preception. You can actually see God, and Hear Him, play with Him. It might sound crazy, but He is actually there, actually with you.
There are many yogic Paths–Raja, Jnana, Hatha, Kriya, Karma, Bhakti–which are all acclaimed by the MASTERS of each method.
SWAMI BHAKTIVEDANTA is as his title says, a BHAKTI Yogi following the path of DEVOTION. By serving GOD through each thought, word, and DEED, and by chanting HIS Holy Names, the devotee quickly develops God-consciousness. By chanting:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
I request that you take advantage of this book KRSNA, and enter into its understanding. I also request that you make an appointment to meet your God now, through the self liberating process of YOGA (UNION) and GIVE PEACE A CHANCE.”
There is a “process” called GIVE PEACE A CHANCE? What, exactly, is the process?
Dear A and J. W.,
So you might be wondering why I send you a card that had only a URL written on it, but that’s because frankly, writing by hand is damn hard. Am I right or am I right? But still, I wanted to explain my gift to you, so here goes:
This year, I’ve been kind of at a loss as to what to get people, particularly people who have recently gotten married, because you bitches got a lot of shit this year. Am I right or am… okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, I decided to get things based on what I actually want. This is helpful not only because you get it, but now you know what I want the next time a holiday that calls for gift-giving comes around (don’t forget the Feast of St. Genevieve is January 3rd.) Even though I don’t like to fall for those cheesy gift lists made by twee design bloggers, sometimes they find good stuff, and I just can’t help myself, so here, for you, courtesy of me, are these ball things that make really cool looking ice cubes!
Different model but same idea.
So now when I come to visit you in Vermont you can make plain old scotch look like a glass o’ fancy.
I’m telling you, this is way classier than drinking scotch out of a soda can.
I think we’re done here? Merry Christmas and all that jazz. Love!
… called “How Many People Will Have Gchat Statuses Linking to YouTube Clips that Reference the End of the World?”
Here’s my personal fave: an eerily poised Lena Zavaroni –– the United Kingdom’s answer to Karen Carpenter –– singing the Skeeters’ “End of the World” on the Johnny Carson Show.
Seriously: how does one JOIN Anonymous? Is there a sign-up sheet or something? BTW, I’m spending my afternoon signing up various members of the Westboro Baptist Church for Grindr newsletters and Metropolitan Opera emails (that doesn’t sound so bad, but that shit comes EVERY. SINGLE. HOUR.)
So WordPress, as some of you may know, provides little aphorisms of hope to silly bloggers like myself, but sometimes even WordPress makes mistakes, and this time, I had to call them out on it:
Dear ID,
Thank you for your support request. Your public message is posted to the forums so you and other users can see it.
WordPress.com has a fantastic community of users who enjoy helping and they may be able to provide an answer to your question. We have automatically subscribed you to email updates on the forum thread.
For reference the request you submitted was:
Dear WordPress,
I believe you’re misquoting this in one of your inspirational sidebars:
“I do not like to write – I like to have written.”
Gloria Steinem
I think it should be attributed to Dorothy Parker.
Happy holidays!
ID
“[Jack Palladino] returns to his laptop. ‘There were very few people who survived that day in Jonestown,’ he remarks. ‘One of them had a wonderful name, and I’m gonna see if I can pull it back,’ he pauses as he scrolls through the files. ‘We interviewed her in Los Angeles. She’s an elderly black woman in her eighties, probably looked in her nineties, with that kind of leathery skin.
‘Hyacinth,’ he recalls, ‘it was Hyacinth. they had the old people in Jonestown stacked up like cordwood basically. They would collect all their Social Security checks, and Jones would use it for his own purposes. They were terribly malnourished –– except for Jones, who of course had a freezer run by propane that had meat in it –– but the rest of the people were just warehoused basically. Hyacinth was in Jonestown in a bunk bed when she hears the announcement over the PA system to report to the pavilion. She gets very frightened. She’s been trained, you know, White Nights and the GDF, the Guyanese Defense Force, is going to attack and all that, so she hides under the bunk bed. And she falls asleep. So whoever came in to poison people in her cottage –– they poisoned a batch of people, especially some of the older folks, in their bunks –– they see her lying there and she looks dead. They just didn’t bother to poison her, because they’d thought she’d already been done. Didn’t squirt her with anything or inject anything.
‘So she wakes up in the middle of the night, walks out into the middle of Jonestown, and everybody’s dead. She’s convinced she’s the only survivor. She is the only survivor who lived through the whole thing and walked out the next day alive. There are people who escaped, we have several of them, but she’s the only one that was right there and walked out. Her story is a great little vignette of what she saw, what she believed. It thrust you right into the mind of the elderly, highly religious, and unfortunately very controlled people. Hyacinth is a wonderful story.'”
— Leigh Fondakowski, Stories from Jonestown
I have been wanting to write about the novels of Ingmar Bergman for many years now –– I think the idea came at the time of this death, in 2007 –– but I have never been able to discover the right outlet, and now I have it! Pre-Christmas, then, a little dive into the oeuvre of the master of existential despair, including but not limited to a screening of Fanny and Alexander, which I have shamefully never seen.
No, not Bergman –– this is my xmas card.
A snippet from his obit:
“In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film, Fanny and Alexander, a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the 19th century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.
‘Making Fanny and Alexander was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,’ he told Ms. Kakutani. ‘I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.’
Fanny and Alexander won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.”
God Jul!
Sharks!
That is all.
Under the water off South Africa.
Itinerantdaughter's Blog 