cody frank

tomorrow, mañana, I go to Mexico City. in preparation, I’m studying mi español, because I’m a language pervert and would really love it if I knew more than just stodgy-ass English. no espero entenderlo todo, pero queiro practicar y aprender. as much as possible. tanto como sea posible.

in order to really learn a language, one must develop the ability to think in the language. this means submitting to what the language makes possible: affectively, intellectually, practically. it is perhaps difficult to accept if one wants to be an egalitarian humanist, but different languages create different possibilities. this doesn’t have any bearing on intelligence or intellectual ability, of course. in my experience, with trying to embody Spanish, not merely “know” it, I have found that, in leaving English, one must accommodate themselves to a more direct expression of emotion and desire that the Latin-derived languages require. it is for this reason that the Romantic movement is so named, with stuffy Northern European Anglos striving for the passion they thought the classics of the Romans (Latin speakers) expressed. this is also the source of the stereotypically fiery Latin character.

I find it fascinating to compare English and Spanish as two extremely successful colonial languages. they are languages of power and authority, as all dominant languages are, to varying extents. but the colonial, imperial projects of both the English and the Spanish are ideologically tied up in what is made possible by their respective languages. Spanish, arising out of the imperial language par excellence, Latin, is adapted for use in commerce and trade: it is a market language. this is because Spain geographically sits at the crossroads of several trade routes, where traders from Africa to the South, Rome to the East, and the Norman Celts to the North, meet and do business. Spanish is well-designed for quick learning and even quicker speaking; one can perform many transactions in rapid succession without raising one’s voice above a murmur. with these trade routes crossing through the language’s homeland, those wishing to make money had to adapt to its dictates. which made it easy to export the language in the final direction, al oeste, to el Mundo Nuevo.

English is slightly different. it is also a language of commerce, but of commerce at a distance. English, being a mutt born from the Germanic languages, the weird Celtic dialects on the British Isles themselves, and the Vulgar Latin popular in Normandy which eventually became French. as such, English is exceptionally good at absorbing things, whereas Spanish is less malleable phonetically and grammatically, but more easily adapted to because of it. there’s probably some kind of analogy to be made here with Protestantism vs Catholicism

tengo que escribir en español todos los dias cuando estoy en México.

no sé cómo terminar este post, so I’m just gonna stop writing.

perhaps the feeling that it’s so hard to communicate nowadays, that there’s been some fateful line crossed technolinguistic-sociopolitickepistemologically, that all is decadence and alienation, perhaps this is merely the nature of being human. we seem to be on the forefront of whatever realm is dictated by the gods of language, ie Thoth/Hermes/Mercury, whose caduceus also symbolizes commercial trade and the ambivalences that endeavor requires. it is a struggle. whence the opportunity to use language, as it uses: to shape the possible, to broaden the scope of the possible. to create. “creation” and “formation” are translations of the Hebrew יְצִירָה (remember, read it right to left), yetzirah, as in Sefer Yetzirah, or the Book of Creation, which outlines a sophisticated linguistic theory for how the universe is created, out of nothingness, from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. it is also an important work in the development of Jewish mysticism, specifically the Qabbalah (KAH-baluh, not kuh-BALL-uh). scholars generally date Sefer Yetzirah to the Talmudic pediod, though some suggest a more recent, early Medieval authorship. “early” and “recent” of course relative to the ordering of events demanded by the reign of commerce.

as much as commerce (1. social interchange broadly speaking 2. market activity 3. sex) governs the conditions of existence, the principle that gives broad shape is Time, which is felt as growth, loss, pain, transformation and death. something is changing (he says less meaningfully than those words could mean), and decisions must be made. on a long weekend desert bender, I hoped to gain clarity/distance/perspective on how to reapply myself to the task at hand, and all I thought the first day back at my job was “I need more time for Work”. there’s a job interview in two weeks. if it goes well, I will not have more time. resting from Work for six days made Work on the seventh day kind of a drag. it is likely that soon I will need to move out of my apartment. J’s roommate will be moving out of their house in two months.

too much worry, too conservative, too egotistical—all I need is space to act out ideologies, jokes, stories. combinations of words, made up of letters. also need the allowance to be a little bit, or maybe a lot bit, crazy. need to throw a short story I workshopped with friends through another edit at least. also nurturing an idea for some ~cyberliterature~.

do, for there is nothing to “be”. be, a verb? yes. here now, even. there’s no where else, is there?

when photography developed, there was a tectonic shift in the visual arts. painting’s role as documenter of vision had been displaced, leading to a crisis over what job painting could still do. this is standard art history summarizing, the advent of impressionism neatly coinciding with the rise of photography, the need for mimetic resemblance having been met thanks to new chemical processes and technology. it is a topic still discussed today, whether painting is obsolete, with the latest wave of technological innovation generally contributing to an overabundance of images, most of them digital, the rest digitally reproduced. yet painting continues.

anxiety over the supposed “death of the novel” is hardly new, nor is it new to procrastinate on novel writing by considering this anxiety. a “job” I have seen ascribed to the novel is in collecting and organizing, via aesthetic principles, information. writing novels in the 19th century and earlier involved amassing sociocultural data descriptive of whatever milieu constitutes the subject of the work. but thanks to the advent of the internet, wikipedia, mass data collection, so on, the idea that the novel is in someway responsible for organizing information might be questioned. I have also seen it said, somewhat bizarrely, that conceptual art broadly speaking took over this job from the novel in the late 20th century.

the function of language is not to communicate, since “communication,” as conceived as the expression or conveyance of privately held thoughts to another’s mind, is impossible, for reasons far to complicated to get into here. sartre, never one to skip a chance to be extremely French, has it that speaking is fundamentally a seduction. he puts it more generally by saying language causes to be experienced. if this is the case, then a writer is someone who deliberately anticipates what experiences their language is likely to elicit, as a chess player anticipates how their moves will be answered. skill or talent then lies in how many moves ahead are considered, in employing tactics that catch off guard. I’m also fond of D&G’s metaphor that language is a synthesizer—in which case a writer in the 21st century must approach their task as lee scratch perry would approach a crate of vinyl, the recording tape, the sampler, and the mixing deck.

Abstract beatz, math rock, intelligent Techno, proper Drum’n’Bass, these clever genres for stupid people resurrect the premodern opposition in which the mind is bizarrely superior to the body. By frustrating the funk and impeding the groove, clever music amputates the distributed mind, locks you back in the prisonhouse of your head. Far from being futuristic, cerebral music therefore retards you by reimposing a preindustrial sensory hierarchy that shut up your senses in a Cartesian prison.

More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction