A Million Words for Love

I was fascinated by Bertan's article on the study of the evolution of language and the signifier/signified debate. I especially liked his paragraph about how perhaps, if we had no word for pony, all horses would look the same to us because we had no designation for the smaller horses.

And that got me thinking about something I had read the other day about how in Arabic, and several other languages, there is more than one word for what we in English call "love." there's a word for general love, a word for love between lovers, a word for love that's distracting, a word for love that causes us pain because it's so powerful. We don't have anything close to that last word. we just have...love.

There's been a debate going on (maybe this is just at my house) about how we throw words around too freely now and how the phrase "LOVE" has lost its meaning. does a word become less powerful when we affix too many meanings to it? Can the signified overwhelm the signifier?

written after reading http://archive.eteraz.org/story/2006/12/4/8052/97546
and another article i can't seem to find now...

NOT A CLASS POST- How to do Email alerts for new blog posts

okay, so this is going to sound really nerdy, but I know it's been really hard for me to keep track of all the blogs in my group and i decided i wanted to set up email alerts for all of them so that when something new gets posted, i get a message saying "read me!"

Well, technically speaking, it's not an email, it's a post into my Google Reader feed, which shows up on my igoogle homepage. you can have it show up on your MyYahoo page if you like, too.

to get the RSS feed (that's what it's called) on your IGoogle page, simply scroll down to the bottom of the Blogger page (I'll get to wordpress in a minute) and click the link titled " Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"

A page will pop up in a new tab or window asking how you'd like to subscribe to the feed, via google (igoogle page) yahoo (myyahoo page) or a few other options I'm not familiar with. you choose one and click subscribe now.

depending on which you pick, your yahoo or Google Reader page will come up ( I have both, so I tried both). On Yahoo, you'll get a message asking if you'd like to add this feed to your My Yahoo page. click yes and it'll add it in the center column at the bottom. With Google, it'll ask you if you'd like to add it to google reader, which manages the feeds and puts them in a nice little box on your i google page.

I haven't tried word press with the yahoo yet, but for google, once you're inside that Google reader page, there's an option on the lefthand sidebar called "Add Subscription." If you click that, a menu will appear asking for a search term or a feed url (the website address of the wordpress blog works fine) Paste the URL in and click ok- if it's the right URL, the blog should be added to your subscription list and the widget on your igoogle page will show when you have new posts to read. NOTE: you might have to add the widget to your Igoogle page for it to do any good.

But nifty, yes?

Just thought I should share this valuable information.

Sounds of Silence- Ideology in Simon and Garfunkel

If none of you have actually heard this song before, here's YouTube graciously stepping in to play the music for you while you read this post- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdGkZ6Fngw

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

I started randomly singing this song when I was walking back to my room last night and kind of had this epiphany- the sounds of silence are like ideology. They're the unspoken rules and creeds that govern our daily lives, things that we can't necessarily explain because they've always been like that.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
A neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

But then, when I got to this part of the song, the people talking without speaking and hearing without listening, I started thinking about Naomi Klein's corporate advertising culture and how americans seem to be really confused now about what their culture really is; is it what the advertisements tell them to buy or is it what they are buying or are the two the same or is really the fact that they are being advertised to. That's an ideology, that advertising culture, and a really good one, too; we can't say where it starts or where it ends. But that's what a culture is, isn't it?

The people writing songs that voices never shared, it's almost like the big record companies controlling the music we listen to; the music is stuff that the artist doesn't write, and sometimes I don't think it's stuff the artist even likes! Real human voices don't share some of the music before we listen to now, it's just the recordings that spread whatever message the company wants them to spread. Music is culture, is an expression of ideology, so the fact that this music is being engineered means that our culture, too, is engineered.

This also made me think about Foucault and that lingering "What about all those writers who never get published?" (I know, this song covered a lot of bases for me last night, but that's because Paul Simon's music is made out of awesome)

Fools said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence

It's that corporate culture (I think it's a culture, anyway) that keeps the silence in place, that doesn't let the voices like the narrator's speak. And, the narrator is arguing, that censorship is only going to get stronger if you let it.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon God they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the signs said, the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls,
And whispered in the sounds of silence.

A Neon God? You don't need to get any more advertising-oriented than that! But even the sign knows that there are more outlets for the unpublished, the subway walls and tenement halls that are covered in graffiti, and of course, the sounds of silence themselves, the unspoken rules that govern our interactions. Obviously Foucault and Paul Simon were thinking about this in terms of the pre-internet world, but nowadays you can self-publish on the Internet, you can have your own book bound at a Kinko's, you can stream your music through MySpace and have everyone who visits your site listen to your music. And even if only ten people read that book, it still influences the sounds of silence, the Ideology behind when and why you wrote your book.

Author's note: This post was kind of a decompressing of information to see if I understood it. I don't know if I made a point or not. I'm sure that's not the way Simon wants us to read the song, but I'm not publishing this in a nationally circulated news column, so I think I'll be okay.

A Poem for you

I wrote this poem after hearing the poet Larry Schug speak to my English 133 class the other day. We were talking about one way to interpret his poem and he said "That's not what I meant it to mean, but that's cool!" The guy who brought it up said "Oh," in this really disappointed voice because what he'd gotten out of the poem had been really cool, something about capitalizing letters, and Larry said, by way of an explanation, "That's not wrong. Once I publish a poem, once you read it, it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's your poem- you can do whatever you want with it." Anyway, I thought what he had to say had a lot to do with Barthes and the death of the author and I wanted to do something with that.

So I wrote this. Have fun with it.

This poem does not belong to me any more.
a poem by mg written january 23rd

This poem does not belong to me any more.
This poem stopped belonging to me
when it stepped out of my pen
eyes flashing
fists up
teeth barred
ready to take on the world.
This poem stopped fighting my cause
when it met you-
it gave up,
went home,
switched sides!
You powerful person, you,
you reader!
You made it do that!
This poem does not belong to me any more-
This poem belongs to you.