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16 posts tagged letters
“I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”
for wunderkammer: ancient greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt engraved on one side and the inscription “take that” (δεξαι) on the other.
other sling slogans include “ouch” and “for pompey’s backside!”
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photo source: wikipedia. more ancient greek fun with slogan embossery can be found here.
The Tragos weapons of choice. (Always good to combine pens and swords for the double the power.)
An Ape’s Letter to the Academy (by Kafka)
“I’m worried that people do not understand precisely what I mean by a way out. I use the word in its most common and fullest sense. I am deliberately not saying freedom. I do not mean this great feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, I perhaps recognized it, and I have met human beings who yearn for it. But as far as I am concerned, I did not demand freedom either then or today. Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime. In the variety shows, before my entrance, I have often watched a pair of artists busy on trapezes high up in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked back and forth, they jumped, they hung in each other’s arms, one held the other by clenching the hair with his teeth. “That, too, is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What a mockery of sacred nature! At such a sight, no structure would stand up to the laughter of the apes.
No, I didn’t want freedom. Only a way out—to the right or left or anywhere at all. I made no other demands, even if the way out should also be only an illusion. The demand was small; the disappointment would not be any greater—to move on further, to move on further! Only not to stand still with arms raised, pressed again a crate wall.”
[From Franz Kafka’s “Report for an Academy”, which you can read in its entirety here. Translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College.]
The letter Y can be regarded as both a vowel and a consonant. In terms of sound, a vowel is ‘a speech sound which is produced by comparatively open configuration of the vocal tract, with vibration of the vocal cords but without audible friction…’, while a consonant is ‘a basic speech sound in which the breath is at least partly obstructed’. The letter Y can be used to represent different sounds in different words, and can therefore fit either definition. In myth or hymn it’s clearly a vowel, and also in words such as my, where it stands for a diphthong (a combination of two vowel sounds). On the other hand, in a word like beyond there is an obstacle to the breath which can be heard between two vowels, and the same sound begins words like young and yes. (This consonant sound, like that of the letter W, is sometimes called a ‘semivowel’ because it is made in a similar way to a vowel, but functions in contrast to vowels when used in words.) Whether the letter Y is a vowel or a consonant is therefore rather an arbitrary decision. The letter is probably more often used as a vowel, but in this role it’s often interchangeable with the letter I. However, the consonant sound is not consistently represented in English spelling by any other letter, and perhaps for this reason Y tends traditionally to be counted among the consonants.
There, in case you were wondering about that.
“Y” is such a difficult letter. You just have to be patient.
I apologize for ‘M’. He’s never known how to behave himself. Never. (I think ‘W’ has always been a bad influence.)
“What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive, or Edmund Wilson, who spent his most productive years sitting in his big stone house in upstate New York and writing about what he damned well pleased. Samuel Pepys, who wrote the greatest diary in the language, was a high officials in the British Admiralty. Many people can write well and yearn to, but they are not content, like Pepys, for their work to go unread. A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young women in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.”
