barbarians

Via JWZ which is so much more than an excellent resource for quiz nights once bars get to re-open, we learn that there’s of course equivalent phrases in other languages that convey the same sense as the scribal gloss and line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for encountering something incomprehensible—dismissively or otherwise—completely with a directional graphic showing where each language might attribute the impenetrable sounds. When a Hebrew-speaker is pinned in a corner, for them “it sounds Chinese” and conversely for someone whose mother tongue is Korean, something that seems like gibberish smacks of Hebrew, reportedly. For Germans, it’s Kauderwelsch, a trade patois. Ich verstehen nur Bahnhof. Chinese itself defers to the celestial language of the gods.  What’s all Greek to you? Especially appealing is the etymology of the term Gringo coming from the similar expression “hablar en griego” and how in Esperanto, one sighs, “tio estas volapukaĵo”—that’s a Volapük thing, a contemporary rival constructed language invented by a priest in Baden.

classic of changes

Via friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, we are shown some snow oracles that artists and flâneuse Jan Baracz began noticing on the storm grates around New York City as the warmth and gas seeped through to form patterns. I’ve found myself also transfixed by the same uniformity or unevenness on display during these periods of respite and thaw between the flurries but had not made the leap from melting redaction to actual divinatory hexagrams like those encountered in the I Ching. I’ll need to consult the sidewalk for a reading next time I walk through town.  For instance, the one in the bottom right corner (though there's only five lines) would be 坤, kūn or Field, and signifies the receptive, acquiesing Earth.

the love of freedom brought us here

With the organisation and the planned settlement of the commonwealth of Liberia established four years prior, the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Colour of America constituted to encourage the migration, repatriation of African Americans to the continent sponsored its first voyage of eighty-eight individuals on this day in 1820, departing from New York harbour to the colony of Mississippi-in-Africa on the Pepper Coast, southwest of the Sierra Leone Province of Freedom (previously) established in 1786 by the London-based Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor.

Though some abolitionist and Quakers who supported the society thought that the emancipated and formerly enslaved individuals might fare better outside of the systemic prejudice of the United States, the society’s motives were pure racism, uncomfortable with the growth of non-white population since the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and mounting pressure from slave-holders to do something about the free population lest they stoke rebellion—hopeful that the concession could avoid a civil war, whose tensions were already primed.

Apparently under considerable duress (at gun point), Zolu Duma, the Gola ruler who also ostensibly was positioned to profit from Triangular Trade, was persuaded to sell the land that would become the capital Monrovia (named after the fifth US president and plantation-owner) and surrounding territory. Of the four thousand that immigrated there, unwelcome by the indigenous population that they were displacing and the harsh environment, less than half survived in the coming decades and were forced to grow cash-crops for export to repay their passage. Finding the situation untenable and suffering privations on par with what they had experienced on the other side of the Atlantic, Liberia revolted and declared its independence from the US in 1847, the first colonial-holding in Africa to do so. Its status as a republic was not recognised by reunited America until after the Civil War in 1862.

7x7

high dive: Casa Zicatela in the Oaxaca coastal region references Le Corbusier and the retro look of municipal swimming pools 

rip: legendary actor Christopher Plummer (*1929) has passed away 

polar flare: visualising the true size of terrestrial landmasses through cartographic distortion plus mapping countries as offworld colonies  

gulf stream: lack of circulation during ice ages past may have meant the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans had fresh water 

dataviz: sleek, informative infographics by the Great Grundini  

réseau pneumatique: an exploration of the pneumatic postal system of Paris—see also  

hq2: a preview of the new Amazon headquarters (previously) building in Arlington, Virginia

zardoz

The 1974 Irish post-apocalyptic fantasy film starring Sean Connery (*1930 - †2020), Charlotte Rampling and Sara Kestelman premiering on this day in Los Angeles and New York takes its title, the eponymous stone talisman and cornucopia, from a damaged copy of the L. Frank Baum book Wizard of Oz that survived the end of the world and the bibliocaust and supplant older gospels and introduces us to a highly gentrified and segregated society that consists of a ruling class of ageless Eternals and mortal, enslaved Brutals who eke out a subsistence in the nuclear wilderness after satisfying the needs of the aristocrats—with a clan of assassins charged with keeping the exploited under subjugation by following orders issued by Zardoz in exchange for weapons.
It is revealed that Zardoz is an extension of the omnipotent artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle that maintains the precarity of this social order by boundless insight that no human, immortal or otherwise, can comprehend. John Boorman, the writer, director and producer had hoped to create an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (see also) for a film studio at the time but Boorman’s offer was turned down, fearing it was too ambitious and would run-over budget, instead turned his sights to creating this world, which was philosophically challenging with good elements of storytelling and very much ahead of its time but had not played well to audiences by dint of that same complexity, costuming and lack of special effects.

guillemets

Used in a number of orthographies around the world instead of or in combination with quotation marks, the term is a diminutive of Guillaume (William) after the pioneering sixteenth century French printer and font-founder Guillaume Le Bé—France being the primary place where they are employed, though the nested quotes are used elsewhere and in other ways, including in Japan and China where « » sets off the title of a book or album, in Portuguese and Swiss German (called Möwchen, little Sea Gulls) to indicated a reported quotation within a quotation, and inwardly pointing » « to bracket off direct speech. In Quebec, a singular right pointing guillemet itératif is used as a ditto mark.

don’t @ me

While the earliest known attested use is to be found in a fourteenth century translation of a Greek chronicle with the at symbol substituted for the α of amen for unknown reasons and in commerce as a glyph representing the unit of volume and mass the arroba on the Iberian Peninsula—about two stone or twelve kilograms before signifying a going rate, despite its inclusion on most Western keyboards, it remained something of a mystery until the widespread use of the internet and social media. Traditions outside of English general ledger accounting (and in reality everyone prior to email) perceived the rather useless upper carriage key as something twee mentioned in a typo—as in Afrikaans, Dutch, Finnish, German, Macedonian and Polish where it’s a tail of a pig, puppy, cat or monkey. Astutely in Norwegian, Welsh, Korean, Esperanto, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Belarusian it is the word for snail, whereas in Catalan, Hebrew, Swedish and Slovak it is the word for a pastry roll. Though informal stylings probably prevail, in the Kazakh language, @ is officially called айқұлақ—that is, the Moon’s Ear.

liquid television

Via the venerable Cardhouse, we are invited to indulge in a bit of forgotten nostalgia in the complete mini-series—the arc of narrative with cliffhangers clocking in at just over six minutes—of The Esperanto Family airing on MTV, with other cartoon friends including Æon Flux, Beavis and Butthead who unjustly received more attention thanks to the network’s doting, in 1990 from the brilliant Joe Horne, creator of The Specialists and Stevie & Zoya. The narrator is John Joseph Lydon—also known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.