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Tag Archives: Analogies
Rehearsing Analogies
Sometime ago I used to have the following reflection as part of my signature block for email messages. Wondering if… mnemonic is to analytic as mimetic is to synthetic Of course the underlying premise is that the discrete blocks of … Continue reading
Qualities
In the translation by M. K. Fisher, Brillat-Savarin gives this enumeration of the qualities of a great chef By a natural consequence, those who presided over the preparations for these great feasts became men of note, which was reasonable enough, … Continue reading
Broken Circles, Scattered Pearls
A passage from Edmund Gosse on Swinburne’s compositional technique offers some alternative vocabulary to the nodes and webs of hypertext. From Aspects and Impressions It may be observed that Dolores is a rosary of stanza-beads on an invisible string; in … Continue reading
Sub-mundane
There is on the spine of Brick (Winter 2005) a quotation from Jim Harrison’s “Food, Fitness, and Death” in the same issue of Brick. This is the quotation: How feebly the arts compete with the idea of what we are … Continue reading
Cultivation
Brent Ledger in a column about collecting culture (a review of an anthology of Canadian gay poetry) in Xtra! May 10, 2007, invites us to meditate on the means of self-creation: As much as history creates us, we create history. … Continue reading
Vector Sector
There is something of boyhood memories of an advertising campaign that crossed cereals with gasoline (“Put a Tiger in Your Tank”) in this line full of internal rhyme: There’s a Vector in your Sector. A sector has a circumference and … Continue reading
Shaping pace
Like garden work there are moments to cling to, to be taken up by, one such is from a 1909 winter: I too write in haste, just before dressing to go out. I will only add here I have blind … Continue reading
Almost Alpha
An encyclopedia wolf entry pacified with passives: In spring and summer wolves are solitary or in pairs, in the autumn in families, and in the winter in packs When it sees itself captured its courage and ferocity are forsaken A … Continue reading
Central Processing Units as Peripheral Devices
Sometimes analogies break down. Computable is to potable as hardwidth is to bandwidth. Water may flow from the tap but without a host of cups or glasses there is more of a communion trail than joyous toasting. Further: to taste … Continue reading