Monday, August 22, 2011

back to work


posted by tom @ 9:21 AM 0 comments

Monday, August 08, 2011


posted by tom @ 12:39 PM 0 comments

Saturday, August 06, 2011

vacation report

OK OK so I didn't do much over vacation, and did even less upon my return; this place, I recognize, has become somewhat of a ghost blog. I am retooling internally for a linguistics project, but really, I have no excuse. I just needed a vacation. We went way up north, to the north shore of Lake Superior; I had a sore shoulder, so could barely skip a rock (even though there were thousands, all colors) but by the end of the vacation I was able to skip as many as I wanted.

Then, upon my return, I was given a stack of old New York Times which I read in reverse order, most recent first, until just yesterday when I got to Betty Ford's obituary. I kind of got stuck on this article:

Loos, T. (2011, June 22). Squeezing essence from a stone. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/design/lee-ufan-squeezes-essence-from-a-stone.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 8-11.

which describes a guy who basically sees a lot in various rocks; he sees what they do to the space around them. I loved this article and was unable to throw it away. I don't know if I would call myself a devotee of the "Mono-ha" movement but I'm glad I know more about it today than I did before I left.

Break is about the emptiness of stones on the beach, and the fact that, if you pick up a stone and throw it into the water, you may change the arc of its life for what, 300 years? Whereas, if you pick it up and take it to a museum, or bring it home, you change its arc even more. But hey, in the end, a rock is a rock, and this blog is about language. So I'll get back to work, I promise!

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posted by tom @ 10:24 AM 0 comments