created, $=dv.current().file.ctime & modified, =this.modified
tags: Language
Driving
When driving you see numerous types of symbols, some aren’t obvious.
- Turn signals - require you to press them.
- Brake lights - communication directly tied to action, you brake and they light.
- lights might be accompanied with sound in larger vehicles
- Hands - physical communication, variable.
- Horn - Auditory, warning.
- Stop signs - voluntary, fixed.
- Variable Message Signs - text, variable
- radar speed signs
- Car - variable
- car can communicate with color or design (wealth)
- car can communicate with wear (an old car, or beware a car that appears to have been in accidents)
- any driver knows intent can be read by the positioning of a car, often a lane change by a car in front of you is felt before it begins.
- Traffic lights - fixed, variable.
- Drive silhouettes - operator.
- Tire skid marks - record of action, warning
- Medians/fences - barriers, boundary enforcement.
The one that I am interested in pointing out is the brake light. Because the brake light communicates directly with an action. If your car is functioning correctly, you cannot brake without turning red. This is distinctly different than a blinker, which is voluntary intent of an action. (I stop, I speak red.)
A book that flings itself
How to make a word an action? How to make reading something, perform and action? (like the appeal of an incantation, like the brake light speaking red.)
I was reading a passage in a book, and it describes commanding the book to fling itself.
I’m wondering how you could construct a “gimmicky” book that would actually fling the book from the reader at that point in time. What tools exist to do this?
Obviously words in this context are divorced from actions, which is why the impossibility of it is an attractive thought, like an incantation.
Reading “the book flung itself” doesn’t seem connected to the book actually flinging itself (though of all the word combinations, it might be one of the closest links to the action - at least closer than “the bird had a suit”. What I mean in all the utterances of “There’s a fire in the chicken coop” it’s likely there was a fire in the coop.)
Off the top of my head I guess you could
- a book that is a play that a single person acts out while reading
- have a programmatic book (eye contact trips logic), but this is somewhat less special that just reading a paperback and the phenomenon of it being pulled from your hands
- some kind of priming of the reader, making them fling the book at that point
- Maybe a book of “fling the book” written over and over again
- coincidental flinging of the book that actually happens to universally align with reading (too small of a case, but definitely powerful, i.e. you read about a police siren in a book as a police chase happens to pass outside)
- have over eons evolved the mouth as part of book reading, so that mouthing “fling the book” actually flings the book like flinging the tongue is instinctual
All of these seem to just be hacks though. I want the book to literally become an active subject and fling itself when it is read
Control Characters
Maybe there’s some conceptual overlap with control characters.
ASCII has definition for 33 control characters. One of them will ring a terminal bell.
These are in-band signals (sending control information in the same channel that media information is) that are meant to cause “effects other than the addition of a symbol to the text.”
Excerpt from A Lover’s Discourse - Roland Barthes
Whence a new view of /-love-you. Not as a symptom but as an action. I speak so that you may answer, and the scrupulous form (the letter) of the answer will assume an eflective value, in the manner of a formula. Hence it is not enough that the other should answer me with a mere signified, however positive (“So do I”): the addressed subject must take the responsibility of formulating, of proffering the I-love-you which extend: I love you, Pelléas says. —/ love you, too, Mélisande says.
What I want, deliriously, is to obtain the word. Magical, mythical? The Beast—held enchanted in his ugliness— loves Beauty; Beauty, obviously, does not love the Beast, but at the end, vanquished (unimportant by what; let us say by the conversations she has with the Beast), she, too, says the magic word: “Je vous aime, la Béte”; and immediately, through the sumptuous arpeggio of a harp, a new subject appears. Is this story an archaic one? Then here is another: a man suffers because his wife has left him; he wants her to come back, he wants—specifically— her to say I love you to him, and he, too, runs after the words; finally she says it to him: whereupon he faints dead away: a film made in 1975. And then, once again, the myth: the Flying Dutchman wanders the earth in search of the word; if he obtains it (by an oath of fidelity), he will cease wandering (what matters to the myth is not the rule of fidelity but its proflering, its song).
Dance by Christopher Knowles
A typing.
And Dance (2011) looks like writer’s block: the word “dance,” typed 14 times.
I can’t help but imagine Knowles typing DANCE repeatedly, his hands dancing on the typewriter, as he also produced a text that is a score, instructing us to dance. Not so much a structure, it seems to me, but an exhortation and a trace of its making. And, of course, a text that can be read in the sonnet tradition, asking us to consider how dance, repeated, insistent, filling the width of the page completely, relates to love.