The thing about Rakim
Aug 112008
May 262008
Spam throws up some nice Joycean moments. ‘Maria’ recently tried to sell us OEM software:
And there is their store http://kvmandapam.org/softoeman.html where you can find soft.
Buy, Marialove
It
Mar 222008
The street/cool/text msg world is producing some savoury demotic: going hawkshit on Iran for example. But you have to be certifiably young to use it straight.
I admire contemporary American prose for its inclusiveness. Slang, obscenity,whimsy, riff mix down with the educated stuff. Nicholson Baker would find a way to use ‘hawkshit’.
Feb 092008
It makes no sense complaining about the decline of the printed word. As it becomes just another medium, we are moving to a kind of multimedia literacy, where capability with print becomes no more important, or useful, than capability with image.
Graeme Philipson in The Age this week.
Philipson has three main arguments, all familiar:
1. New media don’t supplant old media – the ‘people still go to the movies’ argument.
2. People are busily writing emails and reading text online so it’s only a shift of delivery: literacy is if anything enhanced.
3. as above
1 and 2 are boilerplate. What’s interesting though is 3. which just pops up as it routinely does in these pieces. All evidence from neurology and evolutionary psychology, the careful arguments of people like Walter Ong – all the evidence, that is, which shows that for rational beings, language is both unique and essential is lost on these people. Maybe because the serious discussion takes place in books.
Jan 202008
With the row over the second cricket Test against India just over, you may like to know that in gridiron, according to a bloke on the ABC’s ‘Grandstand’, there’s a rule against getting stuck into the opposition with word and gesture. ‘Taunting’ is banned, and not only direct attack but also celebrating your own achievements in a way that implicitly insults the other team. No taunting in other words, and no flaunting. Who knew gridiron was such a gentlemanly pastime?
Time to mobilise ‘fleer’ and ‘jeer’. To fleer, according to SOED is to gibe, jeer, sneer at, laugh at mockingly or scornfully. Sounds like the slips cordon to me. ‘Sledging’ may be a fine, robust word but it tends to suggest a practice exempted from civility. So how about a sign on the dressing-room wall? ‘Players will refrain from taunts, flaunts, fleers and jeers.’
Well something’s gotta shut the bludgers up.