Strictly speaking, this wasn't a second hand book shop, but more of a stall, at a village fete. Regardless, I was able to nab Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and, curiously, Experimental Design and Statistics by one Steve Miller. All paperback, all for fifty pence each. Two pounds for four books. A couple of them are a little tattered, but for 50p I can hardly complain!
I first read Lord of the Rings when I was 11, and I've been a big fan of the series ever since. Despite that, I've never owned my own copy (for shame!), and I'm glad to finally get it. It's a one-volume copy, with the all-important appendices and index. I was just flicking through it this morning, and I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it again.
I've never read Gulliver's Travels, but I'm familiar with the story and many of the satirical themes in it. As such, I'll allude to it in conversations when I want to sound intelligent and educated. Which is a little hypocritical. So maybe I should read it. Which is why I got it. And it's a damn good book, or so I hear.
I'm even more unfamiliar with Conrad's Heart of Darkness, although I've seen Apocalypse Now. Which is the same thing, right?
Experimental Design and Statistics may seem like an odd choice, but that's almost exactly the name of a course I'm enrolled in at uni, so I figured it could be useful. Looks like it's mainly from a psychological perspective, which is alright - methodologically, experimental linguistics has a fair bit of overlap with psychology.
Four books for two pounds. Not bad, not bad at all.
So, Canada apologises for forcibly separating hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their families and sending them to abusive boarding schools (see also). About time, I say. It's about time that the state recognises historical human rights abuses for what they are. Yet I'm still left with a sour taste in my mouth. It strikes me as too little, too late. An apology is a great step forward, but it's just words. "Let deeds, not words, be your adorning," wrote Baha'u'llah (Hidden Words #5 from the Persian). So where are the compensation payments to the affected families? How is the Canadian state today trying to tackle institutional racism? What is being done to address the segregation and wealth gap between whites and natives? Where, in short, is the justice?
Events like this remind me of Australia's apology over a similar policy towards the indigenous people there (see also), and Norway's apology for their sterilisation of their Roma (Gypsy) population, which was ongoing from 1934 to 1977 (sorry, no links). No reparations were paid in these cases either.
And as far as I know, there has never been any apology for Russia's long-running abuse of indigenous Siberian peoples, which dates as far back as the 17th Century and as recently as the Soviet Era. The world is a tough place.
Barney Leith has just written a quick update on the arrested Iranian Baha'is I mentioned in my previous post. Check it out, it's full of goodies. Also new since my last post are these blog posts about the arrests: Where Being Baha'i is A Crime; As if Natural Disasters were not Enough!; and Earth, Wind and Fire: The Road to Hell.
Also, it seems that my comments have been playing up, and anonymous comments, instead of being forwarded for moderation, have just been deleted. So apologies to anyone who's tried to comment only to have their comment disappear into the ether. I'm looking into it - for now, commenting has returned to normal.
On January 16th 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, fled his country for Egypt, in the face of increasing domestic turmoil. On February 11th, Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in the Iranian Revolution. The new Islamic Republic of Iran was made official on April 1st, ousting the Shah from power and setting in motion probably the world's largest theocratic state.
The monarchy had not been sympathetic towards the Baha'is. For instance, the Shah and his aides encouraged radical clerics to preach against the Baha'is, resulting in mob attacks on Baha'is and destruction of property. However, this new government was different. The eradication of the Baha'i Faith is one of its guiding principles.
On the 21st of August 1980, all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Iran - the democratically elected national governing body for Iran's Baha'is - went missing. Their bodies have never been found. The Iranian Baha'is, not to be trifled with, simply elected a new Assembly. This new assembly saw all but one of its members executed on 27th December 1981. The Iranian government was going for the nerve centre of the Baha'i community. Kill the leaders, and the masses are in disarray. Following more executions of various Baha'is around the country, the Iranian government outlawed all formal Baha'i organisations and institutions in 1983. The Baha'i community responded dutifully by disbanding its National Spritual Assembly, and around 400 local assemblies at localities throughout the country.
Since then, there has been no formal organisation of Baha'is in Iran. The persecution of Baha'is has continued, although in a more subtle manner (after international pressure in the 1980s the executions slowed). See, for example, 54 Baha'is sentenced to jail in Iran and Baha'i cemetery destroyed in Iran.
To see to the minimum needs of Iran's Baha'is, a group was formed called Friends in Iran, consisting of seven people. One of these people, Mrs Mahvash Sabet, was arrested on 5th March this year, and has been held incommunicado - forbidden from speaking to anyone. The other six members of this group were arrested just yesterday, the 14th of March. This sounds very similar to the disappearances and executions of the 80s, and the Baha'i World is very worried.
- Baha'i News World Service story
- Barney Leith's first and second reports on the story.
- Barney's post on the response to this by a human rights group.
- Baha'i Views's coverage
- Another blogger's response
A few people have asked what happened to my blogging. Well, it slowed down, due to several things. Mainly exams, assignments, and other annoying real-life constraints. I'm back on things now, at least mostly. I have a number of things I'd like to complain about:
- The fact that it cost me £24 to get a train from Edinburgh to Lockerbie via Stirling, when a train from Edinburgh to Lockerbie via Glasgow would be only just over half of that.
- The inability of anywhere in Edinburgh to sell cheap USB memory sticks. £15 for 2 gigs? No thanks. I got 4 gigs (plus a 2 gig SD card) for £16 from the interwebs.
- Spam. Sneaking through my spam detector. As such, I've set it so that all anonymous comments to my blog have to be moderated before appearing on the site.
- The fact that my "misc" category is the largest one on this blog... Oh, and my crappy style sheet. I'll have to rectify both of those sometime.
- The fact that Chainmail Bikini, one of my favourite webcomics, has ceased to be. Not gone on indefinite hiatus, like A Lesson Is Learned, but actually stopped. Damn.
Anyway, I'll finish up this rather moany post with a couple of comics. This one is sorta how I feel at the moment, and this one just made me chuckle.
Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King's Men, via boingboing. Two scenes from Pulp fiction modified into Shakespearean language, replete with iambic pentameter!
You can see the original scenes in question here, between 1:02 and 1:29 (it's a little quiet so turn up your speakers), and here, between 4:19 and 5:38 (this one is louder, so remember to turn your volume down again). Warning, if you're not fond of strong language and gunshots, don't watch these videos.
Part of me likes this more than the original. Roll on the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing Tarantino's Tales of Travail: A Tragic Comedie in Three Parts. (I wanted to call it Commoners' Tales but a little googling revealed that that was the name of a slash fanfiction series...)
Also, I realise that a) this isn't purely Early Modern English in the Shakespearean sense - as the first commenter on the boingboing post notes, the hachis parmentier is named after Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, who wasn't born until at least 100 years after Shakespeare had died; and b) it isn't 100% iambic pentameter, it breaks occasionally (but so did Shakespeare!). Does that matter? It's a fine piece of translation, with an excellent rhyme at the end to signal the end of the scene.
I went into a second-hand bookshop on the way home from uni yesterday. (Pickerings Books, 30 Buccleuch Street (just on the corner with Buccleuch Place). It's closing down, unfortunately.) I usually look for books on Philosophy, Religion, and Language, although I'm open to all really. Sometimes you can get real gems.
Of course, everyone's definition of a gem differs. While my interest in language are mainly theoretical and phonological, I do have a penchant for language descriptions and obscure languages, and the idea of descriptive fieldwork seems very romantic and adventurous to me. (You'd be like Indiana Jones, but a linguist instead of an archaeologist!) So I stumble upon David Watters' A Grammar of Kham, a language spoken by roughly 45,000 people in western Nepal. How much? £5! You can't say no for that price. Especially when it's in such a good condition - hardback, no notable scuffs, paper practically as-new. I get home, and find out that Cambridge University Press, the publishers, expect £96 for the book, and that amazon.co.uk are charging £91.20.
Slightly less impressive, but still a good saving, I got Geoffrey Kimball's Koasati Dictionary (also known as Coushatta, a language spoken by around 400 people in Louisiana) for £4, when amazon.co.uk want £64, and the publishers $85.
Do I need these books? No. Do I want them? Yes. Will I use them, and find them useful? Probably. As I was explaining to my flatmate yesterday, I'm not buying them for any pragmatic value. I doubt I'll be stuck in western Nepal any time soon, or be asked to translate some Koasati myths. I got them because I find this stuff interesting. And because they were bargains!
Kimball, Geoffrey D. Koasati Dictionary. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Watters, David E. A Grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
I spent a good two hours last night playing around with Praat, with some rather odd results. Praat is a phonetic analysis program, packed full of features, that I've been using for over two years now. So far, I've mainly been using it for spectrograms, annotation of files, and making measurements. However, I needed to actually manipulate some sound files, so I started playing around with the settings to see what there is on offer. There's a lot, most of it over my head - multidimensional scaling and combine to ParamCurve, anyone?
I ended up making this WAV file (right click, "save target as" to download), mostly accidentally. It was originally a recording of me saying brewed, but has been manipulated in several ways. A few of the sounds (particularly the distorted time parts) remind me of noises in a lot of breakcore music I listen to (for instance, at around 1:45 this video of Venetian Snare's Szamár Madár (yes, it's meant to sound like that)).
The particular manipulation I wanted to do, was to take a sound file, and take a particular section of that file (from, say, 25ms to 150ms), and change the duration of that section (from, say, 125ms to 100ms). Reading the manual it seemed that this was indeed possible, but to do it with any great precision would require a script. So I figured, let's write this script, and since I'm going to the trouble of writing a script I might as well make it automate most of the process for me. As such, the script will manipulate the duration between the specified time points of the selected sound file, and, optionally, write the output to a .WAV file.
This is the first Praat script I've written from scratch (I've done a few others, mainly edits of other people's work to better suit whatever I'm working on), and if you want to see it, it's here. Hopefully the comments in the code make it fairly transparent, and I think its operation is relatively simple.
Okay, technical stuff now. Look away now! Don't say I didn't warn you! Beware! ... Now that I've scared away the non-geeks, let me talk a little about the extension possibilities of this script. Currently it's fairly limited - it only outputs to WAV, for example. It should be fairly easy to change what it outputs to (or even make a range of options appear on the form). In its current form, the user has to specify the start and the end of the area to be manipulated, by entering numbers. Another (probably easier) way to do this would be to take the information from a textgrid file associated with the sound file. Then all the user has to do is to make a textgrid file, add some points where they want the duration to be changed, and run the script. Coupled with a modification that allows for batch processing of files - modifying several files in one go - this would allow for fairly extensive modification at the click of a button.
I don't like Garfield. It's a boring comic with no depth, no emotion, and most of the time it isn't even funny. However, I fell in love with Garfield after seeing some edits with all of Garfield's speech removed.
Since Garfield is a cat, he never technically speaks, he only thinks (with a thought bubble, à la Snoopy). Removing this from the strips make the comic's interactions appear as they would to a disconnected observer. Garfield becomes a real cat, rather than a smart-assed anthropomorphic feline. In the words of MvCRage, "It adds yet another depressing layer to the pathetic existence that is Jon" (Garfield's owner).
That's not all, however. About a month ago the blog garfield minus garfield started making the rounds. This version removes Garfield entirely. In the words of the site itself,
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let's laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
Along the same lines, and much older, is the Garfield randomiser, which doesn't modify the panels themselves, but rather the ordering of panels themselves. Think of it as a Garfield collage. There were some copyright issues with it, so google it to find some links and information. One of the best comics ever created (in my opinion) with the randomiser is the death of garfield.
This modification of existing art (or whatever you want to call comics) reminds me a lot of Marmaduke Explained and Dysfunctional Family Circus, and even those artists a few years ago who bought classic paintings and modified them with paint all over the shop, I can't remember their names. It's the visual equivalent of a remix, almost. And I really like the transposition of Garfield (the character) from a smug lasagna-loving cultural icon, into an ordinary housecat, and then into... nothing at all.
[Edit: Looks like The Comic Strip Doctor has written something about this, and mentions all the stuff I mentioned, and more! It's a great read, especially with the Garfield analysis towards the end.]
I recently read Words Words Words, by David Crystal. It's a popular science book (or should that be "popular lingustics"?) inviting readers of all backgrounds to discover the magic of words, and lexical investigation in general. The book is split into six parts: the universe of words; the origins of words; the diversity of words; the evolution of words; the enjoyment of words; and becoming a word detective, with between four and seven chapters per part.
Crystal writes in an easy-going informal style, which makes it very easy to follow and read through. Crystal's deep passion for words, and the English langyage in particular, is evident in his prose, with the enthusiasm leaping out the page at you, in the form of diverse quotations from literature both classical and contemporary, pictures from around the world, and amusing anecdotes about words and word-usage. Crystal's passion is infectious. Although I study linguistics, I can't say I find the lexicon to be the most fascinating area of study, and I get quite annoyed when people think that I "study words". Yet this book has really opened my eyes to the vast panorama of lexical beauty available to us - to all of us. And with chapter headings like Wordsmithery, Wordmelodies, Worddeaths, and Wordworlds, who can say no?
Along the way, Crystal addresses the language critics, naysayers, and doom-mongers who "reflect gloomily on the present state of the language, make dire prophecies about its future, and wish things were like the earlier golden age they remember so well" (p156), noting that such comments are as old as the language itself. He notes the perfectly natural stages of semantic shift and of word death, while also pointing out that new coinages or borrowings can greatly enhance English's expressiveness.
If you're interested in words, and in the English language in particular, but don't want to have to deal with preachy, badly-researched books, nor wade through a dense academic text, this book is ideal. Crystal is filling a sorely-felt gap in the popular linguistics genre - books written by actual linguists! As influential as Melvyn Bragg or Lynn Truss may be, they have no formal linguistics training, and often serve only to give linguists a bad name.
One, very minor, criticism I have of this book is that the references are scattered throughout the text, and not collated at the end. Having said that, Crystal is very methodical in his reporting of sources, and encourages us to be likewise. You can read his blog here.
Crystal, David. Words Words Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. (UK Paperback edition.)
