What is it about seaside resort towns and their universal hankering--from Cape Cod down to Florida's Gulf Coast--to sell us (and we buy 'em!) the gamut of products with our first names on them?
It is as if, all of a sudden (is it the sea air? that jellyfish sting? heat exhaustion? or all that damn rain?), vacationing at the seashore makes a person desire to have the personalized-MADE-IN-CHINA toothbrush. Perhaps "PETE" stumbles bleary-eyed (or drunk) in to the bathroom and repeatedly fails to recall his bristles' color designation? But, today--no offense meant--PETE is a pedestrian moniker in a sea of Paiges, Taylors, Madisons, Tads, and Brittanys that clutters the license plate trees. Ahhh, a newer generation of richer, soap-star sounding names...
Then, there is the perennial coffee mug--should you forget your name before the morning's coffee. (My friend Tracy actually has mugs with names on them, but names that are neither hers nor her husband's. Ha.)
And, in my roving, I always find a variation of the personalized pad and/or note cards. In fact, one year, Santa proved that truly he knew our names when he put some note cards of a seashell motif in my stocking. Dang! was I impressed! And I recently came across a garish orange and yellow pad (très 70s) with the first three letters of my full name--I recall being ecstatic at 8 or 9 years old that they had something with my name on it. (Hell, I'm sure I would have bought the toothbrush if they carried it!)
Finally, don't we all need a zipper pull with our first name embedded in the dolphin's wave? Could be handy when your fingers are nearly frostbitten on Mount Everest? And who does not associate bedroom doorplate "[your name here]'s room" with childhood and seaside sojourns? The ubiquitous mini-license plate with the simulated state motifs, and the pens...Well, names aside, things have not changed all that much at those resort towns.
27 December 2006
14 December 2006
Metablog (Y)
How many blogs on blogging are out there? (Any of you have a rough figure, a stat for me?) Well, here's another metablog for the count.
To think our borrowed words can travel through all these chutes and alleys in cyberspace unbeknownst to us, their foster parents. Like some spaceship, they may land on an unknown, foreign planetary monitor.
But see, blogging requires reading, yes, reading. And it would stand to reason that those who write must be reading as well. Chances are though, cyber reading is akin to scanning… A quick perusal, or a practice of—what I called—reading diagonally—a grad school survival tactic of mine (I mean who had time to read 1,000 pages a week?!) And when I read from the Internet, I do a bit of skimming, making an informational cappuccino of sorts, gleaning from the foam of perspectives. Back here, on the other side of this screen, in this bibliophilic Eden of mine, I do read differently, voraciously.
But when I scan and seek, I find that there is indeed a hunger to tell, and a quiet desire to be read… We're all writers, we're all photographers, we're all aspiring to be something. Something else. We all aspire to be visible, to make our selves visibly distinct in the morass of personas: we are all special.
There is an array of blog phylums—the political, the special interest, and the personal-journal, to list but a few. Specifically, with the diary-like blog—we create an illusion of sorts. We put our words, our thoughts out there—as a way of saying, "I exist." (The millennia's mantra? I blog, therefore, I am.) We do not shout, grab the mike, or ring a phone off the hook—no, instead, we quietly, patiently post. And perhaps, a friend, or even a fellow parvenu on the blogging scene will read these wee-hour thoughts, and post an obsequious comment in affirmation (or a bitter, hubristic pot shot at our humanity?).
We also create an illusion of communication. An ersatz dialogue—for it is masked as a monologic text, but akin to a letter or email, it needs—it begs for!—an audience. Neither the blog nor letter can be self-defining. It exists in relation to its readers, perhaps an old case of mauvaise-foi.
From the French essayer, to try out (to try out ideas), I suppose the blog has become, in a way, for this neophyte, the new essay. A literal site for putting ideas down, seeing one's thoughts through the other side of the rabbit hole, without interruption (because I —not my persona—do not like to compete for air time in real time conversations) and without the fear of boring one's company. S/he clicks on another window, and quietly slips away from this one…
To think our borrowed words can travel through all these chutes and alleys in cyberspace unbeknownst to us, their foster parents. Like some spaceship, they may land on an unknown, foreign planetary monitor.
But see, blogging requires reading, yes, reading. And it would stand to reason that those who write must be reading as well. Chances are though, cyber reading is akin to scanning… A quick perusal, or a practice of—what I called—reading diagonally—a grad school survival tactic of mine (I mean who had time to read 1,000 pages a week?!) And when I read from the Internet, I do a bit of skimming, making an informational cappuccino of sorts, gleaning from the foam of perspectives. Back here, on the other side of this screen, in this bibliophilic Eden of mine, I do read differently, voraciously.
But when I scan and seek, I find that there is indeed a hunger to tell, and a quiet desire to be read… We're all writers, we're all photographers, we're all aspiring to be something. Something else. We all aspire to be visible, to make our selves visibly distinct in the morass of personas: we are all special.
There is an array of blog phylums—the political, the special interest, and the personal-journal, to list but a few. Specifically, with the diary-like blog—we create an illusion of sorts. We put our words, our thoughts out there—as a way of saying, "I exist." (The millennia's mantra? I blog, therefore, I am.) We do not shout, grab the mike, or ring a phone off the hook—no, instead, we quietly, patiently post. And perhaps, a friend, or even a fellow parvenu on the blogging scene will read these wee-hour thoughts, and post an obsequious comment in affirmation (or a bitter, hubristic pot shot at our humanity?).
We also create an illusion of communication. An ersatz dialogue—for it is masked as a monologic text, but akin to a letter or email, it needs—it begs for!—an audience. Neither the blog nor letter can be self-defining. It exists in relation to its readers, perhaps an old case of mauvaise-foi.
From the French essayer, to try out (to try out ideas), I suppose the blog has become, in a way, for this neophyte, the new essay. A literal site for putting ideas down, seeing one's thoughts through the other side of the rabbit hole, without interruption (because I —not my persona—do not like to compete for air time in real time conversations) and without the fear of boring one's company. S/he clicks on another window, and quietly slips away from this one…
12 December 2006
An Ode to "X"
"Keep the X in Xmas" anyone?
Understandably, at the zenith of humanity's materialist obsessions, a sub set of citizenry want to keep Christ in Christmas. Their crèche and lawn billboards tell me so. Who am I to deny them that right? I have no intention of quashing their cause. But I do wonder, if I agree to let them keep their Christ in Christmas, would they scoff at my suggestion to keep the X in Xmas? It's not a cause or a psuedo-cause, it's just a 4 minute linguistic antic, reflex…Thoughts from a drive:
So, back to the non-cause of Xmas. Some of you may see X and think: a cross. True, and yet it is not just a uniquely Christian symbol, but a rather mutable symbol in the scheme of human history—the intersection of two lines need not necessarily incite religious connotations, but maybe an axis? Or, in my best posh voice, "anyone for a round of noughts and crosses?" Tic Tac Toe. For the Romans, X denoted the number 10, a known quantity… And if memory serves me correctly, X is a now-obsolete marker for December.
The letter X, as the Greek chi, has been around quite some time—before fraternities. You-know-who is in chi: X, paired with p, together they are Xp, with the proper diacritics, or the Greek abbreviation for, Khristos, dating back to the 12th century.
And much later on (or more recently?), the Frenchman Descartes introduced XYZ into the 17th century algebraic equations. (Math as language!) Of course, if you were an illiterate peasant, chances are you could have signed away your wife, life or land with an inked X, indicated by a bejeweled digit… And if you were penning letters to loved ones, after the 176Os, you might have closed with a finite chain of xxxxxx.
In the mid-19th century and in good humor, Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair, that a slaughtered pig "weighed x stone." The appropriated, algebraic, adjectival x serves as a flippant, unknown quantity.
In the early 1900s? Ah, the ever-slippery X has learned to work both sides of the unknown and known fence called Quantity. We have the apparition of the X chromosome, yes, identifying the winsome feminine in the world of chromosomes. (And genes, are they not the helix of life? Who dares to belittle the birthing power of the X here?) And what if you want to make the quality of an ale or porter known? Well, you label it with the duplicate, uppercased, intimidating XX. To make the substance of a film known? By 1950, I believe, and by Parliament's hand, Britons began using the X to designate movies for those 16 and over—16 and over, you say?—and we thought the world was more puritanical then?
So, really, this is just a digression that reeled through a brain on a homeward drive, which, like the drive, must draw to a close… Even odder to think it was inspired by someone's version of lawn-bumperstickering, professing his or her faith… Lawn kitch so rarely arouses (that's not true, Travelocity is still reaping the benefits of Amélie's gnome…), rarer still are lone campaigns found on brown December lawns, seeking to stir…
In a fickle allegiance to the secular, I say, let's keep the slippery, polymorphous X, in Xmas or wherever it decides to rear, no, stretch its paradoxically crossed arms….
Understandably, at the zenith of humanity's materialist obsessions, a sub set of citizenry want to keep Christ in Christmas. Their crèche and lawn billboards tell me so. Who am I to deny them that right? I have no intention of quashing their cause. But I do wonder, if I agree to let them keep their Christ in Christmas, would they scoff at my suggestion to keep the X in Xmas? It's not a cause or a psuedo-cause, it's just a 4 minute linguistic antic, reflex…Thoughts from a drive:
So, back to the non-cause of Xmas. Some of you may see X and think: a cross. True, and yet it is not just a uniquely Christian symbol, but a rather mutable symbol in the scheme of human history—the intersection of two lines need not necessarily incite religious connotations, but maybe an axis? Or, in my best posh voice, "anyone for a round of noughts and crosses?" Tic Tac Toe. For the Romans, X denoted the number 10, a known quantity… And if memory serves me correctly, X is a now-obsolete marker for December.
The letter X, as the Greek chi, has been around quite some time—before fraternities. You-know-who is in chi: X, paired with p, together they are Xp, with the proper diacritics, or the Greek abbreviation for, Khristos, dating back to the 12th century.
And much later on (or more recently?), the Frenchman Descartes introduced XYZ into the 17th century algebraic equations. (Math as language!) Of course, if you were an illiterate peasant, chances are you could have signed away your wife, life or land with an inked X, indicated by a bejeweled digit… And if you were penning letters to loved ones, after the 176Os, you might have closed with a finite chain of xxxxxx.
In the mid-19th century and in good humor, Thackeray wrote in Vanity Fair, that a slaughtered pig "weighed x stone." The appropriated, algebraic, adjectival x serves as a flippant, unknown quantity.
In the early 1900s? Ah, the ever-slippery X has learned to work both sides of the unknown and known fence called Quantity. We have the apparition of the X chromosome, yes, identifying the winsome feminine in the world of chromosomes. (And genes, are they not the helix of life? Who dares to belittle the birthing power of the X here?) And what if you want to make the quality of an ale or porter known? Well, you label it with the duplicate, uppercased, intimidating XX. To make the substance of a film known? By 1950, I believe, and by Parliament's hand, Britons began using the X to designate movies for those 16 and over—16 and over, you say?—and we thought the world was more puritanical then?
So, really, this is just a digression that reeled through a brain on a homeward drive, which, like the drive, must draw to a close… Even odder to think it was inspired by someone's version of lawn-bumperstickering, professing his or her faith… Lawn kitch so rarely arouses (that's not true, Travelocity is still reaping the benefits of Amélie's gnome…), rarer still are lone campaigns found on brown December lawns, seeking to stir…
In a fickle allegiance to the secular, I say, let's keep the slippery, polymorphous X, in Xmas or wherever it decides to rear, no, stretch its paradoxically crossed arms….
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