bugshaw: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] bugshaw at 08:21am on 20/05/2006
I had been reading an introductory linguistics book, and for light relief picked up Pixel Juice, a Jeff Noon short story collection, and found Metaphorazine.

Johnny takes Metaphorazine. Every clockwork day. Says it burns his house down, with a haircut made of wings. You could say he eats a problem. You could say he stokes his thrill. Every clingfilm evening, climb inside a little pill. Intoxicate the feelings. Play those skull-piano blues. Johnny takes Metaphorazine.

He’s a dog.


Noon goes on to describe the experiences as Lucy takes Simileum, Josie takes Hyperbolehyde, and Alanis takes Alliterene.

I'm thinking about computational processing, I'm thinking about language, I'm thinking up a worthwhile project to occupy myself intellectually, I'm thinking of doing a fanzine - Words or Numbers? or Words and Numbers? I enjoy punning (or had you already noticed that?)

I read[1] Metaphorazine and ideas multiply exponentially in my mind - each fresh take can combine with every other to spawn new paths of thought. So much for light relief! I want to not read anything else now, until I have mined the seam of ideas, or at least noted the locations of interesting digressions so I can return to them later. [Darn my immensely long list of Things To Do By May. Will my bank balance get along okay without me for another month, d'you think?]

It feels profound - though I felt this way at age 11 when introduced to the tool of algebra. I fear at some level my verbal/linguistic development is retarded, that the things which enlighten me today should have been second nature for the last 20 years.

Googling for the text offered me
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~grant/Research/Semiotics/whiteheads.pdf
Algebraic Semiotics, Ontologies,and Visualisation of Data in Animations or: Signs, Things, and Stuff Inbetween. Grant Malcolm links the linguistic processing of metaphor and semiotics to web navigation interfaces. I note this here so I can come back to it (a superficial glance suggested it would be interesting) later - but now we're off to visit [livejournal.com profile] major_clanger's Mum. Will bring lots of paper and a biro for the long car journey and attempt to find out from MC just how retarded I am ;-)

[1] Present tense - "reed", rather than "red". I want to spell it incorrectly to make this clear, but that would be wrong.

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