The noun ‘drift’ is so much more interesting when understood as anything that is ‘driven’. The drift of conversation, a drift of rain or snow or dust. I never thought about the core of the word before.

something driven, propelled, or urged along or drawn together in a clump by or as if by a natural agency: as
a : wind-driven snow, rain, cloud, dust, or smoke usually at or near the ground surface
b (1) : a mass of matter (as sand) deposited together by or as if by wind or water (2) : a helter-skelter accumulation
c : drove, flock
d : something (as driftwood) washed ashore
e : rock debris deposited by natural agents; specifically : a deposit of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders transported by a glacier or by running water from a glacier

merriam webster

George Orwell wrote a short essay on his favourite pub…

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of “regulars” who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.”

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

Read further here. There’s an interesting note at the end.

I discovered the pictured device — a note-taking machine invented by one Vincentius Placcius — via a nice opinion piece on the BBC website about how we have dealt with information overload up until today.

In 1689 a professor at the University of Hamburg with a passion for new technologies, unveiled a device for managing information overload – a purpose-built mahogany cabinet designed to hold and organise several thousand hand-written notes taken by an individual reader from the books they were reading.

Along the back of the cabinet were narrow vertical posts, each headed by a letter of the alphabet. Running the length of each post was a sequence of brass plates engraved with alphabetised headings designed to capture topics of particular interest to the reader, each heading furnished with a metal hook, to which slips of paper containing information extracted from the owner’s reading were to be attached, ready to be retrieved for re-use at a moment’s notice.

It is not clear whether this rather cumbersome piece of equipment caught on (though apparently the philosopher Leibniz owned one) but the impetus behind it is obvious.

Sounds like a glorious object, no matter how impractical… I want one.

The danger today is rather that we are reluctant to let go of any information garnered from however recondite a source. Every historian knows that no narrative will be intelligible to a reader if it includes all the detail the author amassed in the course of their research. A clear thread has to be teased from the mass of available evidence, to focus, direct and ultimately give meaning to what has been assembled for analysis. Daring to discard is as crucial as safe-guarding, for effective knowledge management and transmission today.

There is all too little danger of the knowledge currently accumulating in floods – multiply-owned, stored and captured – being lost. Rather, if we are going to make sense for posterity of today’s information-saturated present, one of the things we will have to learn to do is decide how to prune the evidence, and ultimately, what to forget.

Beeb

Addendum: Here’s an interesting article about the Belgian intellectual of the early 20th century Paul Otlet, and his approach to the same problem. Thanks Arnaudt!

There’s a name for this rudder’s type of hinge. Part 2 is a pintle and part 3 is a gudgeon. Gee thanks, wikipedia.

From a talk by Alan Watts. Shame about the strings added in the background.

I saw a distasteful facebook page and thought “bigot, bigot, bigot”, which evolved into “spigots spigots spigots”. A happy learning opportunity:

Water spigot; also known as a valve, hose hydrant, hose bibb, or sillcock.

A tap (also called spigot and faucet in the U.S.) is a valve controlling release of liquids or gas. In the British Isles and most of the Commonwealth, the word is used for any everyday type of valve, particularly the fittings that control water supply to bathtubs and sinks. In the U.S., the term “tap” is more often used for beer taps, cut-in connections, or wiretapping. “Spigot” or “faucet” are more often used to refer to water valves, although this sense of “tap” is not uncommon, and the term “tap water” is the standard name for water from the faucet.

And the joy of tap mechanics:

Ecstasy courtesy of wikipedia.

Another artist from the experimental atelier made a drawing to represent the sound environment of a particular area (unknown to me) and I interpreted it in sound. The result is bellow.

I have since been told that the original space, upon which the auditory sketch was based, was an abandoned building near a power station and near train tracks. Unfortunately I don’t have a scan of the sketch at the moment but hopefully I can update this post later.

I translated the sketch into audio by reading into a microphone my impressions of the drawing. I then took samples of my own voice and altered them digitally until they seemed to me to be close enough to the sounds and sensations I was trying to get at with my verbal descriptions. For example, I took a recording of me saying “four bells, four bells, four bells, four bells” and boosted certain frequencies, limited others, and further manipulated it until it began to sound like four bells. Other instances were less literal.

My Fancy by Lewis Caroll.

I painted her a gushing thing,
With years about a score;
I little thought to find they were
A least a dozen more;
My fancy gave her eyes of blue,
A curly auburn head:
I came to find the blue a green,
The auburn turned to red.

She boxed my ears this morning,
They tingled very much;
I own that I could wish her
A somewhat lighter touch;
And if you ask me how
Her charms might be improved,
I would not have them added to,
But just a few removed!

She has the bear’s ethereal grace,
The bland hyaena’s laugh,
The footstep of the elephant,
The neck of a giraffe;
I love her still, believe me,
Though my heart its passion hides;
“She’s all my fancy painted her,”
But oh! how much besides.

But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world’s best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.

With a University of Chicago computer scientist, Dr. Knight this year published a detailed analysis of the manuscript that falls short of answering the hoax question, but does find some evidence that it contains patterns that match the structure of natural language.

“It’s been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world,” he said. “It’s super full of patterns, and so for somebody to have created something like that would have been a lot of work. So I feel that it’s probably a code.”

From NYtimes article about the Copiale cypher and its decryption.

From wikipedia:

The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six “sections”, with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration.

The image above is fro the “biological” section of the book (“A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.”). The other presumed topics are herbal, astronomical, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes.

The manuscript has a nice wikipedia page devoted to it.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this-through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs or medication-we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness. For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: Without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane.

But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: It helps to shut out the terror and awfulness while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality. When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to re-create hope and to restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather.

An excerpt from a beautiful text written by K. R. Jamison. It’s an extract from her book The Unquiet Mind (which I haven’t read).

And here’s a link to the T.S. Eliot poem referenced in Jamison’s text and in the title of this post.

Continuous partial attention is that state most of us enter when we’re in front of a computer screen, or trying to check out at the grocery store with a cellphone pressed to an ear — or blogging the proceedings of a conference while it’s underway. We’re aware of several things at once, shifting our attention to whatever’s most urgent — perhaps the chime of incoming e-mail, or the beep that indicates the cellphone is low on juice. It’s not a reflective state.
—Scott Kirsner, “Are your feeds turning into too many long tails? Filter!.” The Boston Globe, June 27, 2005

Or we may cultivate a skill John Cage calls “polyattentiveness” — the simultaneous apprehension of two or more unrelated phenomena.
—Marshall Cohen, “What is dance?,” Oxford University Press, April 7, 1983

…Attentional blink. This is temporary amnesia caused by the fact that human beings are not good at looking out for two things at once. So if you ask the viewer to watch for a “target” number in a row of figures going past on a screen, they’ll spot it, but fail to notice what comes afterwards.

The amnesiac effect works with words too -unless you put someone’s name after their target word. They’ll spot it every time, report Calgary University scientists in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and Human Perceptual Performance.
—John Naish, “Narcissus: the name for us all,” The Times (London), January 13, 2007

from wordspy

And a nice quote from John Cage:

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain.

John Cage: The Future of Music: Credo (1937)

From here.

D.H. Lawrence trying for the world’s driest poem:

The English are so nice
so awfully nice
they are the nicest people in the world.

And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on
they’re all very well
but they’re not really nice, you know.
They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That’s why one doesn’t have to take them seriously.
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally—
But it doesn’t really matter what you say to them,
they don’t really understand—
you can just say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just be nice
but you must never take them seriously,
they wouldn’t understand.

Just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage—
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they’re not quite
as nice as they might be.

Via the reading by spokenverse on youtube.

A translation (by whom?) of Pablo Neruda’s “If You Forget Me”.

If you forget me
I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.