Tag: Writing

Infernal Inflammation of Logorrhea a la Influenza

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Human flu is a term used to refer to influenza cases caused by Orthomyxoviridae that are endemic to human populations (as opposed to infection relying upon zoonosis). It is an arbitrary categorization scheme, and is not associated with phylogenetics-based taxonomy. Human flu-causing viruses can belong to any of three major influenza-causing Orthomyxoviruses — Influenza A virus, Influenza B virus and Influenza C virus.

The annually updated trivalent influenza vaccine contains two hemagglutinin (HA) surface glycoprotein components from Influenza A virus strains and one from B influenza.

Most human flu is a non-pandemic flu that is slightly different from the main human flus that existed in last year’s flu season period. This type of flu is also called “common flu” or “seasonal flu” or “annual flu”. It causes yearly flu epidemics that are generally not deadly except to the very old or very young.

Human flu symptoms usually include fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches, conjunctivitis and, in severe cases, severe breathing problems and pneumonia that may be fatal. The severity of the infection will depend to a large part on the state of the infected person’s immune system and if the victim has been exposed to the strain before, and is therefore partially immune.

All of these symptoms are characteristic of numerous infectious agents, so many that most diagnoses of human influenza technically are diagnoses of influenza-like illness (ILI) and most cases of ILI are not due to influenza.

 Wikipedia, 2012

Influenza Virus

[peeling paint off a pencil used for teething]

in a fluey oblivion – that weakness and stingy tingly skin surface of hurt while the bones diseasing ache and organs rot following torrential attack of the virus.  Just that sort of glaucous gaze, while wishing I could be contributing meaningful language into the world of humans, duly rearranged toward some import, feeling the passage of a bright cold day filled with wealthy hours bulging with productive possibilities, eyes stung unable to tighten to focus or move without sand, arrow along anywhere, body bereft of batteries soughing along, draped, crumpled, wrenched, deflated here and there throughout the house, asking again and again like a cyclone of pencil marks – sentencing – within a gluey glaze of cranium bathed repletely in symptom-smattering chemicals scrambling and defracting synaptic sparks – “what do we think we’re doing when we want to – write/paint/draw/dialog – express/describe/inscribe/communicate?”  “When we want to?”  Why do the hours pain so when they disappear in illness or hurt, confusion or despair, inability?”  “What have we proposed to ourselves or one another that we might be offering were we not undone?”  Whirling conflation of such creamy viscous thoughts like mumbling mush, crossed inquiries, towers of babbling echoes just seeping stains, unable to vomit or defecate, trapped between intestinally sluicing back and forth as if clarity or some stint of reason could make sensible hope and power, as if, on a normal day with faculties and physiology aligned I might dialogically inscribe some arrangement/re-arrangement of terms and rhythms, sounds and sense that would change, remake, foster, enable or disable to some extent deemed important – but would I?  Have I?  When?  How?  In the ocean of stories, atomically-termed universe, paltry chicken feed of the barnyard of my pen on paper – what difference outside of me has any word meant lined up just so next to this on or that how it pieces my own world together like a context the two tiniest slits of my perspective, shaping and giving shape to all the data or input, experience or information swilled together like steel shavings to an electromagnet brushing a factory floor – what difference though – really – to spouse or children, you or universe, god or war?  Absent depression or dismay because virus + medication is muffled even beyond apathy adding discomfort not soured in the brain but citrus mixed with dairy curdled without complaint what is it I think would have been made if sick days didn’t intervene, interfere, intrude, interrupt, would it have been better than this – this nothing but record of viral mania reformed by terminal translation : linguistics, semiotics, indices and signs available in repressed unhinged layerings of smoke across the pages?

Oscillating

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, WritingLeave a comment

Like margins, thresholds, beginnings.

Species of relation.

I am drawn to synthesizing agents, it seems.  I find myself attuned to, and triggered by, generalizations, and yet curiously constantly in search of them.

Fitting things where they converge, borders of meetings and passings.

.

Oscillation is one such theory.  Neurologically cognizable perceptively, passaging to and from hemispheres and lobes, neurons and systems, and productive.  From which we get “fire together – wire (conspire) together.”  Symphonic circuitry.  Fluctuate congruity.  A jazz band improvising.

Extended to bodies in spaces and times, collective moods, or space and time themselves, if you will.  Constructive theory of observation.  Oscillation.

As if a structural template for an expression of personal creative process.

As if an introduction toward a story, that story that’s been brewing, surging, throbbing and stewing throughout my physiological corpus for days, since an opening of light, of breath – a semester’s impending conclusion – aptly (I hope) nominated “break.”

If “break” belongs with “dance” and poetic feet fall into step, or sentences seek their stride.  She hopes so, as does he, now ungendered in a unison of copulatory oscillation, my hope for the tremoring bits that vibrate me toward a Nathan : writing.

…to be continued…

Reasons for Thanks – inspiration

On By NW FilbertIn Uncategorized, Writing11 Comments

in·spire/inˈspī(ə)r/

Verb:
  1. Fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, esp. to do something creative
  2. Create (a feeling, esp. a positive one) in a person

Many thanks to Music & Meaning / The Rag Tree for awarding me the “Very Inspiring Blogger” award.  The work there is genuinely inspiring, in fact, just this week I was speaking with my spouse, artist & blogger Holly Suzanne, about RT’s work, particularly in translations and all that brings with it regarding languages and cultures and purposes of art.  Thank you Rag Tree!  I am honored and, indeed, inspired, by your work.  In fact, I would hazard to guess that the decision to begin a personal blog or website, followed by the clunky and quirky process of finding or constructing a steady community of readers or viewers might be characterized by inspiration.  As we watch one another follow their urges to “do or feel something…creative” it does “create a feeling, esp. a positive one” in us to continue doing/working/creating our own.  I am thankful to the blogosphere for providing such a cheap and relatively easy format for those of us who will to expose our work far beyond our limited personal spheres, and especially to receive comments and criticism, and gather multitudes of inputs from others works all throughout the world, that we, most likely, would never have otherwise been exposed to.  It gladdens me deeply if my work inspires others to work or think or be, and all of you that I follow have done the same for me.

I relish in giving awards to other bloggers, as there are so many out there, but we’d live in social media were we not forced continually to edit and select the number we can truly “follow,” and actually attend to.  By that point, a blogger has gone through (for me) the same sort of criteria any music I listen to, literature I read, or conversation or activity I participate in does – engaging it involves an enhancement of meaning for my life.  How can one not want to award or acknowledge, thank or praise those whose work and words enhance and expand your daily living?!  So I find no difficulty in finding bloggers to pass the gratitude on to, the hardest thing is choosing!  This blog comes with a few “rules”, as follows:

  1. Display the Nomination logo on your blog
  2. Link back to the person who nominated you
  3. State 7 things about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 others and link to them
  5. Notify those bloggers of the nominations & award requirement

Seven Things About Myself

1.  Writing joins me to the world.

2.  I love theory – as a way of thinking about thinking about the world and anything in it.

3.  I am particularly fascinated by the way humans learn and change.

4.  My wife and children amaze me and expose and explode un-countable aspects of the world into me.

5.  Rain is my favorite weather – especially the thick drizzly kind, the all-day kind (or all-week or -month) – optimum temperatures 40s     or 50s.

6.  I read 4-6 hours a day.

7.  I like cabins and caves.

Now for those I recommend.  For the selections for this, I have spent a good deal of time thinking “which blogs do I truly go to for inspiration?”  Not only interest or admiration, information or curiosity, but that I seek out and miss if I don’t see, and that genuinely create in me the urge to “do or feel something creative…” perhaps even the “ability” to do so.  Here they are:

Life In Relation to Art – see also www.hollysuzanne.net: yes, this is my wife and co-creator in everything I do.  It’s true she always makes my lists for blogger awards, and it is also true that no other’s life or work inspires me remotely as much as living life side-by-side with her.  I can attest to the effort and deep work that goes into each of her creations, and how her creating fuses into every aspect of our lives and activities.  Thank you, love, for inspiring me every moment of my life.

Objects – see also www.spoondeep.wordpress.com – contributions by author “severnspoon.”  This author also occurs with each of my kudos and thanks because he, too, constructs the courage to be alive in me.  His work in graphics, poetry and mixed media ALWAYS inspirit me to do and make and think.  Thanks, compadre.

Draw and Shoot – see also www.karenmcrae.photoshelter.com – when I first spied Karen’s work I was impressed by the mood and quality of each shot.  Now, over months, I must say that I anticipate each shot, and have truly come to be amazed by the “capturing” her eye, technique and production do in relation to the world.  These are photos I go back over again and again, almost as a meditation, guaranteed to evoke feelings, thoughts and the urge to create in me.

Christian Mihai – how can one NOT be inspired by the quality, content and sheer verve of Christian Mihai – he is instructive, productive and full of ideas and insights, as well as fine and evocative creative writing.  Press “random post” again and again – let me know how many times it took before you stumbled across something “not interesting.”!  Thanks CM – for all your work – and work FOR all of us!

Ironwoodwind and Photography Of Nia – Doug and Nia are two of the most humane, attentive, genuine, interested and interesting blogger-people I’ve come across.  Both obviously care about the world around them and the people and organisms in it, and express themselves warmly and carefully into it.  I notice from many that their efforts at commenting and encouraging others goes a LONG way in inspiring ongoing work in the community of WordPress.  Thank you both for your kindness and creativity and communal encouragement.

Settle + Chase – in line with Draw & Shoot, S+C’s work indeed settles deep into the subject and chases what is ephemeral, mysterious, or not objectifiable in it.  This leads consistently to photography that we are able to “enter in” instead of just observe and admire.  I enjoy work like this that asks to be questioned over time…and continually provides new responses.  Thank you S&C!

Boy With a Hat – I can’t remember how I came across this blog, but have not missed a post since I did.  Here is some ingenious, fresh and alive writing and thinking.  His 50-word stories are little explosions of insight, and his particular way of involving the reader in whatever it is he is considering in language is admirable and unique.  Thank you Vincent Mars!

atelierscheune2012 – see also Ute Schatzmuller – here you’ll find visual art and collaborative work that I promise will evoke new ideas in you, inspire new collaborative desires, and set your mind or hands or eyes off on new explorations internally and externally.  Ute’s work is suggestive and entire in a spiraling manner – each piece feels complete and yet also as if it’s the beginning of a journey. Thank you Ute!

The Disorder of Things – I promote this blog because I admire blogs that take on big issues and are willing to dig deep and explore options and ideas.  I appreciate this because whether or not I agree with any position or concept under inquiry – it invites and enervates more thinking – which is inspiring.

Ooggetuige – primarily portraiture of some sort, the settings and background textures combined with perspective on subject consistently intrigue me.  These photos start stories.  Thank you!

The Hour of Soft Light – the writings, images, poems, quotations and reflections here nearly always brush some deep human place of longing, nostalgia, wonder or gratitude.  Important things to keep alive in us.  I appreciate the breadth and depth of the entries – the range of our human experiences.

Quirk’n It – inspiring in subject, expression and real-lifeness of it.  The energy, interest and genuineness of her intention and attention to subjects, meanings, and scene are delightful to follow.  (Also, there’s collaboration in the works – being considered for it is inspiring in itself).  Thanks!

It Started With a Quote – likewise – so much of my life is inspired or rises out of what I read and then winds in and out of my lived relational experience, testing, proving, questioning the language of it.  Here you encounter all sorts of worthy inspirations and get a chance to watch them thread through, effect and alter an able mind into the world of experience.  

The Artsy Forager – I am SO thankful for the work of the Artsy Forager – bringing all manner of creative, enlivening, interesting works and activities into our days.  Our family has a funny attribution to “feeling artsy” – for when we have that curious, active want-to…the Forager satisfies and often increases this want-to.

barbaraelka.com and Dark Pines Photos  – two sites that do things with photographs that make me want to do things with words – change the finish, crack the background, tear the edges, skew the subjects…MAKE IT NEW!  Very thankful for their work and steady spontaneous creativity.

There it is – longer than usual, but fortunately for me – it’s Thanksgiving Week in the USA, so seems appropriate.  Hope you visit and enjoy each of these!  And follow the tags onward to new brilliant blogs!

Sincerely, mano’theword

in·spire  (n-spr)

v. in·spired, in·spir·ing, in·spires
v.tr.

1. To affect, guide, or arouse by  influence.
2. To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion: hymns that inspire the congregation; an artist who was inspired by Impressionism.
3.

a. To stimulate to action; motivate: a sales force that was inspired by the prospect of a bonus.
b. To affect or touch: The falling leaves inspired her with sadness.
4. To draw forth; elicit or arouse: a teacher who inspired admiration and respect.
5. To be the cause or source of; bring about: an invention that inspired many imitations.
6. To draw in (air) by inhaling.
7. Archaic

a. To breathe on.
b. To breathe life into.
v.intr.

1. To stimulate energies, ideals, or reverence: a leader who inspires by example.
2. To inhale.

Spilling the Marbles

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes4 Comments

Spilling the Marbles

Which got me thinking (a process I’d describe as internal), about how we find things out when we act.

My wife was talking (a process I’d call external), about what occurs for her when she journals (with a physical pen or pencil on physical paper).  Which she described as “internal processing,” (an activity I’d designate externalizing), whereby she mysteriously splits herself into observer and subject at once, providing case-notes or records of the interaction.  (Did I listen well?).  The arm a kind of thread-of-self arcing out to the needle of a writing instrument, jittering and inscribing its EKG-like “reading” onto the blank pages and looping back in for more.  The self as inkwell?

My body hitched at this.  Read: torso clinched and weather vane set spinning in grey matter.  Like I might if someone told me “god told me to…”, or that they were “inspired by the Muse,” or “carried away by the spirit” and whatnot.  A reaction remote from wife’s account – so what was happening for me?  In other words, am I re-enacting her activity presently?

There’s the thinking part, surely.  And then there’s the intention to find something out – observation, attention, inquiry – “why did I cinch up at that depiction?”, “what felt ‘off’ to me in that account (as related to my own experience)?”, “what was I ‘feeling’”?

I felt uncomfortable, that’s what.  Squirmy, antsy, bothered.  Was that chemically induced, like overall mood-disorder stuff, or related to her message?  I thought about this, and now I’m writing about thinking about it – what’s the difference?

It leaves traces?  It does.  And so?

I’m making something of it?  I suppose.  Why?  How?  And – ?

Why?  Hmmmm.  It comforts me to write.  Like organizing marbles on a tabletop.  It diverts my attention.

To the marbles.

Ah, yes.  That’s it, exactly.

That is to say (in this case silently with tangible markings), the reason I am unable to identify with my wife’s remarks about writing about thinking about her “self,” is that I get distracted.  In my head, it’s a swirl of sounds and concepts, images and sensation-symbols or impulses infiltrating and becoming one another like smoke strands in an overturned glass.  But transforming to paper it becomes language, marbles, metaphors.

            Some whispering gap of translation.  I wouldn’t have thought marbles on a tabletop or envisioned smoke swirling in an upside-down glass – what would be the point?  Do I need to describe myself to myself?  Could I even?  Deceive myself so?  But through a medium – a thick, loamy, granular medium like language – that’s cause for intention, apparatus of selection and choice, opportunities outside the body, drawn from the big wide world.  That’s external, that’s INTERACTION with a history, a culture, and a society of humans that gave rise to its agreements and standards, components and flavors and rules.

Jolting out through the arm via muscle controllers and a mechanical tool, I’m participant far outside my finite organism – in contents and structures, systems and meanings way beyond my doing or the thinks I might think.  The threads that I sew, the fabric I stitch in, the stylus, ink and letters I write are not mine – the pen, paper, leaves, spark, or smoke emitted into the clear crystal container all already exist, given or available, as it were, to me.

It’s hard to find the part I play in the process, or how the words relate to me – more like the words relate me – render me relatable – if I’m able to finagle myself to their categories and nuances.

So it is (for me) as if the movement to write is spilling the marbles – turning me out of myself into a world where language matters – discursive, discussive, dialogically or to some expressive purpose – catching at these rolling targets and corralling them toward some organizational assemblage (that, I suppose, being my part in the meaningful game).  I pick the red one and set it there, not there.  Or prefer the one with the chip in it next to the tiger’s eye, and so forth.  (There’s no accounting for taste – is that “style”?  (Really!?)).

So “what have I written?” I think, and I’m sure I don’t know, but thanks for the language and time, it’s a process – and now you have the bagful of marbles…

Happy Thanksgiving!!

“Bless Babel.”

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Traces5 Comments

Below I am going to share with you an essay that I promise is worth every hour or two you lend your attention to each paragraph.

It is written by this person:

(Donald Barthelme)

and it is called: “Not Knowing“

from his collection of the same name.

it contains statements like the following:

“Any work of art depends upon a complex series of interdependences”

“tear a mystery to tatters and you have tatters, not mystery”

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation.  Its artistic worth is measurable by the degree to which it remains, after interpretation, vital – no interpretation or cardiopulminary push-pull can exhaust or empty it”

“The combinatory agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they’re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven’t yet encountered.”

“Art is a true account of the activity of mind”

“The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world”

and so forth.

Please understand me, if you maintain a blog, take photos, love your children, think about your self or the world you live in, dialogue with books or pictures or animals or people or movements…

take a little time to read this

Thank you.

  Not Knowing

                            

Enough about Writing…

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, TracesLeave a comment

 

Came across this article…seems to jibe with many blog discussions/posts floating about out there just now…thought I’d like to share it.  It’s a bit dated in places, but the overall concept seems worth your ruminations….

Introduction:
Why Books?
LIBRARIES 2000
Libraries 2000, a seminar to re-examine the function and future
development of libraries in Alberta, was held in 1983. A committee
consisting of representatives of Alberta Culture, the Alberta Library
Board, the Alberta Library Trustees Association, the Library Association
of Alberta and the Learning Resources Council of the Alberta
Teachers Association was set up to look into ways of following
up on the suggestions arising out of the seminar. This is the second
booklet commissioned as a result of these discussions.
Public libraries have long attempted to fulfil many functions and
roles in our society. As financial and human resources have become
harder to obtain, librarians and library trustees have had to give
more attention to examining these roles and assessing their relative
worth. In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of the
public library as an information provider, but less discussion of the
more traditional view of library service.
Sam Neill is a professor at the School of Library and Information
Science at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario.
This booklet is based on a speech delivered at the Ontario Library
Association Conference, Ottawa, 1984, entitled “The Role of a
Traditional Library in an Age Bludgeoned by Information.” The
opinions and ideas expressed are those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the view of Albe11a Culture, or the Alberta
Library Board. The assistance of the Alberta Library Board in editing
and printing this booklet is gratefully acknowledged .

Why Books? by Sam Neill

(click for full article, please)

dove-tailing ever-so-nicely with another book I stumbled across in the library (which also contains a fine consideration of David Foster Wallace in one of the chapters), and considers, I think, the same sorts of issues of humaneness and being alive meaninfully:

Some Reasons…for Some of Us

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing12 Comments

“I am someone who tries to write, who right now more and more seems to need to write, daily; and who hopes less that the products of that need are lucrative or even liked than simply received, read, seen…why I’m starting to think most people who somehow must write must write.  The need to indite, inscribe – be its fulfillment exhilerating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither – springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads.  On one side – the side a philosopher’d call ‘radically skeptical’ or ‘solipsistic’ – there’s the feeling that one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world, when the imagination becomes not just a more congenial but a realer environment than the big Exterior of life on earth…The need to get words & voices not only out – outside the sixteen-inch diameter of bone that both births & imprisons them – but also down, trusting them neither to the insusbstantial country of the mind nor to the transient venue of cords & air & ear – a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit…the textual urge, the emotional urgency of text as both sign and thing.  The other side of the prenominate 2-bind – … – is why people who write need to do so as a mode of communication.  It’s what an abstractor like Laing calls ‘ontological insecurity’ – why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed.  “I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing – & all good writing…

what must the world be like if language is even to be possible?”

got it, David.  Thank you.

Among the Leaves

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography1 Comment

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Suddenly I found myself among the leaves, diffuse as light, but darker.  Almost a shadow, if I’d found myself at all.

For it came of a simple moment in-between.  Between responding to this or fetching that.  Perhaps waiting for coffee to brew, or just breathing.  In cold sunlight.  In kitchen.  It had something to do with my daughter.  Or she was the first one I told.

“I’ve found myself,” I burst upstairs and explained, holding out my phone which had captured the image like communication.  “I’ve found myself, see?”

But no one quite did.  I was thereby forced to point it out.  Which is a lot more like making something up rather than discovering.  More like envisioning than recognition or taking notice.

Yet I can tell you I saw right through it in that gap.  Made out my identity in that fluster of sunrays and blockage.

An insubstantial sort of silhouette designated by a drove of other things – that “it” – that ephemeral, vacuous “me.”

In fact, the way I remember it, I was harried by flickering thoughts, responsibilities, and a mantled dose of tired, and it was only morning.  I’d backed up against the steely sink and weighted my palms, hoping my neck might loosen by letting it drop.  The floor there.

Something alerted me – a “honey?” or a child’s announcement from some other room – and so I swung and hoisted toward action.  My roving eyes sniffed at calendar and began steadying toward a list comprising my future, but instead.

Instead, a patterning of leaves translating immediately to a scatter-shot messaging of light, exposing some presence in its midst that was absorbing or otherwise deflecting.  Signifying, nonetheless.  A kind of tracing of a head, a photo-graph I guess, a contour drawing by our prominent star.  And if light could trace it, could scribble a quick sketch out of me, well then,

I’d guess I’d found myself among the leaves,

which went something like these pages.

N Filbert 2012

David Foster Wallace – “both a quantum of information AND a vector of meaning”

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing3 Comments

ah how I relish in his mind and language…

Deciderization 2007 – A Special Report

from

Masterful Hejinian on Language

On By NW FilbertIn Traces, Writing6 Comments

“Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say.  

We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children.  Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects – balls and rivers.  Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes.  

They discover the words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them – a displacement producing a gap.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.

Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions.

Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it – 

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.

It makes us restless.

As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.’

Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

Language itself is never in a state of rest.

Its syntax can be as complex as thought.  And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active – both intellectually and emotionally.

The ‘rage to know’ is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.  ‘As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,’ as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust…”

–Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry–