rebeccation

Collections of poetry, technology, literature, visual arts, history and language

[fluttering-slips]

The Nights are Long Now        

The spider took me and she spun me in her web, tent pegs through the heart, a bite on the thigh numbing my foot. I fell from the bed,

feet tangled in my winding sheet of silk, mouth papered over with moth wings. I forgot to listen when the owl called my name. Jane Robinson

[gacougnol]

Marie Claude Strausz Rives Obscures 8

[scandinaviancollectors]

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, Orchid, 1982. Image copyright by Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. / Independent

[rebeccation]

To places unexplored

Hiatus? ¿Cambio profundo? Fermeture définitive ? Not yet sure, but I’ll likely be quieter from now on.

Thanks for all the inspiration and support over the past several years.

[thewoodbetween]

Cat Tails and Moon - Shibata Zeshin (Japanese, 1807–1891) Period: Edo period (1615–1868). lacquer on silver paper

[probablyasocialecologist]

Myth of pristine Amazon rainforest busted as old cities reappear - New Scientist

Amazonian wilderness buzzed with human activity until 500 years ago, when Europeans turned up with weapons and diseases, says radical rethink of rainforest history

The first Europeans to penetrate the Amazon rainforests reported cities, roads and fertile fields along the banks of its major rivers. “There was one town that stretched for 15 miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvellous thing to behold,” wrote Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicler of explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana in 1542. “The land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.”

Such tales were long dismissed as fantasies, not least because teeming cities were never seen or talked about again. But it now seems the chroniclers were right all along. It is our modern vision of a pristine rainforest wilderness that turns out to be the dream.

What is today one of the largest tracts of rainforest in the world was, until little more than 500 years ago, a landscape dominated by human activity, according to a review of the evidence by Charles Clement of Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, and his colleagues.

After Europeans showed up, the inhabitants were decimated by disease and superior weaponry, and retreated into the bush, while the jungle reclaimed their fields and plazas. But, thanks to a combination of deforestation and remote sensing, what’s left of their civilisation is now re-emerging.

They reveal an anthropogenically modified Amazonia before the European conquest. “Few if any pristine landscapes remained in 1492,” says Clement. “Many present Amazon forests, while seemingly natural, are domesticated.”

[rebeccation]

Tierras silúricas / Las perdices

1931

Benjamín Palencia b. July 7, 1894

[rebeccation]

Que salga el indio entre las piedras (Mario Menéndez)

Que salga el Guayasamín que cada uno tenemos que salga el indio entre las piedras, médula a médula el gran precipicio que somos, la gran llaga ecuatoriana y lo que cae del ojo al cielo, y lo que arruga el aire y lo que sale de nosotros mismos como una rosa deforme y lo que araña más adentro que salga que salga el trueno, la bocanada, el relámpago la hebra furiosa y tuerta que mira sangrar el alma y aquí, en esta jaula ardiente que es América de luto están pendiente los nombres de aquellas manos clavadas de aquellos pies desahuciados, de aquellos huesos de humo de aquel sueño arrojado al gran ataúd del miedo o simplemente del árbol con sus ramas infinitamente secas Porque no estamos muertos, no estamos y hay uno que ahora brinca por encima de los sables y hay uno que bebe fuego y lleva alas de ceniza y hay uno que agrieta el río con su cráneo universal y hay uno que dice yo, yo soy el indio entre las piedras y todo el horror humano se me apaga en el cuerpo y tengo lágrimas y penas y el corazón como una luna borracha y el esqueleto dormido, y la mandíbula tiesa y a mi oído brama el perro de las noches podridas y a mi boca rueda el beso de la angustia que mata Y yo pinto, yo pinto con mi voz y con mis uñas repletas yo pinto con mi oxígeno la cicatriz del viento raspo la puñalada maldita de los siglos me sumerjo en el ácido mortal de las pupilas andinas desnudo el recuerdo de la calavera sombría y en mí sobreviven las tripas cortadas de cuajo y cada grito soy yo, cada mejilla nacida del grito cada suspiro fatal y su patria de aguja cada mujer, cada hombre cada animal volteado en la vértebra dramática todos y cada uno de ellos y en todas partes la vida como un sol amargo y yo, hinchado de colores cierro las alas y duermo sobre la tristeza

[rebeccation]

Bernard Buffet

[rebeccation]

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge on the same grammar in spite of the fact that they are exposed to different input), and poverty of the stimulus (children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them). I argue that these arguments are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. Languages differ from each other in profound ways, and there are very few true universals, so the fundamental crosslinguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not universality. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the existence of considerable differences in adult native speakers’ knowledge of the grammar of their language, including aspects of inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and a variety of more complex constructions, so learners do not in fact converge on the same grammar. Finally, the poverty of the stimulus argument presupposes that children acquire linguistic representations of the kind postulated by generative grammarians; constructionist grammars such as those proposed by Tomasello, Goldberg and others can be learned from the input. We are the only species that has language, so there must be something unique about humans that makes language learning possible. The extent of crosslinguistic diversity and the considerable individual differences in the rate, style and outcome of acquisition suggest that it is more promising to think in terms of a language-making capacity, i.e., a set of domain-general abilities, rather than an innate body of knowledge about the structural properties of the target system.

[anshelinasholie]

[arsvitaest-deactivated20260111]

Santiago Calatrava, Untitled (no.00023), 2005

via oeus and blushingcheekymonkey

[thewoodbetween]

Diana Sudyka - Image of The Migration

[fluttering-slips]

Stammering translated sonnet in which the poet sends the rains of Havana to her love in New York

Got your message, here in the letter you didn’t write: burned, with a forbidden seal, marking the burial site of what has neither voice nor definition, what has no face, no peace, no place to sleep, a whisper in which I can’t [inaudible] —what the sea doesn’t say, whispering, every night, and when the rain comes to erase the streets tomorrow, & all the dusks that follow that, and runs around making up street dances from what you once said, I’ll have this map, without details, made of what I’ve missed, telling me that that which isn’t is.

Soneto Balbuciendo En Que La Poeta Manda A Su Amor En Nueva York La Lluvia de La Habana

He leído el mensaje que mandaste, aquí, en la carta no me has escrito: quemada, y con sello prohibido, diciéndome dónde enterraste lo que no tiene voz ni luz ni cara, ni paz, ni un lugar para dormir, susurro donde yo puedo oír cada noche lo que no dice el mar, y cuando la lluvia borrará las calles mañana, y los crepúsculos después, y correrá haciendo bailes de lo que me dijiste una vez, yo tendré este mapa, sin detalles, que me dice que lo que no es, es. Suzanne Gardinier

[harrietleemerrion]

www.harrietleemerrion.com

[popthirdworld]

“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

[polyglotinprogress]

GUYS LOOK AT THIS BOOK I FOUND TODAY

[rebeccation]

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking