Had fun back in ’98 in creating seamless access to HTML that contained image elements.
[image] Green Eggs [image] Hold the Ham
became in a text browser
[Have] Green Eggs [and] Hold the Ham
Silly and a wonderful expanse of possibilities …
And so for day 570
05.07.2008
I’ve come across a bibliography of works published by the French Department at the University of Toronto. I am interested in the following item: Patte, Daniel. Organisation sémantique et narrativité. 1978-7[9?].
No sign of it in the university’s library catalogue. No mention showing up on the World Wide Web.
My interest was piqued by a little misreading. I read “semiotic” for “semantic”. I was wondering if the work by Daniel Patte would be an early theorizing of how a narrative drive influences human encounters with the stuff of perception. Just curious.
And so for day 568
03.07.2008
Addendum: There is a section in Carré sémiotique et syntaxe narrative. (Documents de recherches du groupe de recherches sémio-linguistiques de l’institut de la langue française, 1981) that has the following two headings “Organisation sémantique et narrativité dans un récit simple; Organisation sémantique et narrativité dans un texte complexe”. In that book, Patte acknowledges colleagues in Montréal: “L’élaboration de ce travail doit beaucoup à de nombreuses discussions […] mais aussi pour son ultime révision, aux questions soulevées et aux suggestions faites par le Groupe de Recherches Sémiotiques de l’Université de Montréal (sous la direction de M. Hammad) lors d’un séminaire (septembre 1980)” Might he also have visited the University of Toronto during that period. All speculation since I have yet to recover the document with the bibliographic reference to verify the transcription which at this remove looks erroneous. But there is still the University Archives to consult — there may be some clue in the documents relating to the activities of the French Department.
The Toronto Semiotic Circle Bulletin Volume 2, Number 1, 1994 (ISSN-1197-1231) “Commonplaces and Situation: The ‘Subjective’ Nature of Discourse Revisited” by Paul Perron, Jan Gordon and Marcel Danesi
How does SF [situational focusing] work? In a certain sense, SF is a deictic process, for the reason that it involves abstract thinking that refers to spatial location.
My gloss:
Why do they privilege visual mode? Perhaps they have opted for focus vs attention.
It may very well be that abstract thinking arises from attention to temporal factors (e.g. before and after) and thus is more relational than spatial.
More from the article:
The experientialist approach sees abstract meaning structures as end-products rather than points-of-departure. […] The progression from sensory to conceptual thought that an experientialist approach to meaning would posit makes it clear that there is a link between ego-states, perception and conception.
My marginal inscription:
Yes but not a depth method. [and at the bottom of the page] end products vs points of departure. abstraction is here pitted against physical embodiment of emotion & sensation. but emotion belongs with abstraction not sensation. because both emotion & abst. [flip to bottom of next page] depend upon memory and its testing in predicative situations. Emotion is a configuration.
And so for day 567
02.07.2008
A tiny slip of paper with tiny script upon which is a sort of list headed by “time space + mind” and in slightly larger letters
semiotic migration &
fractal osmosis
=========
a mindfully global
village
and swirling around this core text are more small letters that need to be squinted at “mind body universe / intelligence + sound / global village / –> / history / past (arche) / future (telos)” Parts are circled and parts are underlined.
Something is struggling here, caught in between. Almost as if the writing was being done at a chalkboard, ready to be erased and moved.
And so for day 566
01.07.2008
As a person deeply interested in narrative sequences and multi-modal sensory translation, I recorded this in a little notebook back on September 8, 1997.
Mihailo Markovic Dialectical Theory of Meaning D. Reidel Publishing 1984. Preface to the English Edition xxviii n. 18
“According to Lotze, a universal concept is a rule that articulates sensory impressions into a series (Rudolf Lotze Logik Leipzig 1880, pp. 14, 29).”
I have never followed up but I have found a slip of paper within the same notebook with the following written around its edge “the ontology of mind –> global village <– plural?" and it strikes me here and now that a series can be read along its two directions, i.e. there is some reversibility built in. This may tie the consideration of logic with those of narratology.
And so for day 565
30.06.2008
A note book entry dated July 30, 1997, produced under the rubric of DICE INCISIONS
In trying to explain […] to […] I’ve come across an interesting if not highly intriguing formulation: the producting [sic] of randomness in a literary (machine) text is a safeguard against entropy. In one sense this is a homeopathic theory of semiotics. A certain degree of nonsense is incorporated in a text to make it travel… self incorporated enigmas power the vehicle…. Also the invitation to play a game of chance functions as an attraction. I almost want to say that REGs [Random Event Generators] capture audiences.
Producting? A type of multiplication at play, perhaps.
And so for day 564
29.06.2008
On a Dusty Shelf in the Library at LambdaMOO I took and read
A glimmering of sunlight, a candle in the rain,
Just enjoy my company, I don’t want to give you pain.
Like alfvar or faerie, I have no heart to give.
I cannot truly love you, for I do not truly live.
from “Mirage” a piece attributed to StarDancer
And so for day 563
28.06.2008
Allen S. Weiss Phantasmic Radio has in the preface this fine set of enumerations:
There is no single entity that constitutes “radio”; rather, there exits a multitude of radios. Radiophony is a heterogeneous domain, on the levels of its apparatus, its practice, its forms, and its utopias. A brief, and necessarily incomplete, sketch of some possibilities of non-mainstream concepts of radio will give an idea of this diversity: F.T. Marinetti: “wireless imagination” and futurist radio; Velmir Khlebnikov: revolutionary utopia and the fusion of mankind; Leon Trotsky: revolutionary radio; Dziga Vertoz: agitprop and the “Radio-Eye”; Bertolt Brecht: interactive radio and public communication; Rudolf Arnheim: radiophonic specificity and the critique of visual imagination; Upton Sinclair: telepathy and mental radio; Glenn Gould: studio perfectionism and “contrapuntal radio”; William Burroughs: cut-ups and the destruction of communication; Marshall McLuhan: the primitive extension of the central nervous system; and the labyrinthine radio narratives of Hörspiel; the diversity of community radios; free radio; guerilla radio; pirate radio; radical radio.
It is this passage that makes me wish for a comparative study of Khlebnikov and McLuhan. Just imagine what that might sound like
And so for day 562
27.06.2008
Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life Chapter 5 “How to Express Your Emotions” on clichés
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.
Somewhere some when someone has put forth the by now cliché defense of surfaces.
Note de Botton is not against the use of cliché per se but opposed to over use.
And so for day 561
26.06.2008
