Visions of "Cathy"

1. Rkellybouros.
(Via Andrew)

2. Jacket Copy reports on the end of Cathy...though longtime Cathy-followers saw it coming years ago:



(I miss scanning stuff.)

3. Happy birthday, Mom!!

The mystery of language

I.
Just as there are real human languages (French, Chinook, Burushaski, etc., just to name the best known) and imaginary human languages (the most famous of which is Psalmanazar's Formosan), there exist real animal language, (the language of crows, for instance) and imaginary animal languages (among which one can cite the language of Swift's Houyhnhnm and that of Edouard Chanal's sea lions). To these, we must add the dog language found in Chapter 13 of Sylvie and Bruno.

Lewis Carroll provides a corpus of nine sentences that allows us to identify eighteen different words, whose meaning one can discover thanks to the translations he provides. (It is somewhat curious to note that Swift also reveals only seventeen words of Houyhnhnm to us--but leaves the meaning of five of them uncertain.)

—Raymond Queneau, from “On Some Imaginary Animal Languages & On the Dog Language in Sylvie and Bruno in Particular”

(From L.G. Thos.)


II. Sine-wave speech

(From Dzyd Sarah)


III.

zsl.ΩΩΩ t gb 1k `
M a111q61
yhNNNNNNNNNNN ,.,XZ.,
Z788877

—Infant at keyboard, 12/3/08


IV.
“The Mystery of Language,” as I understood it, 11/30/90

Waterworld

The obscure local daily that I read has a story today about aquariums, pegged to the death of the whale shark (Ralph) at Atlanta's Georgia Aquarium. It mentions Ginger Strand's Believer piece. Here's a taste:

In an essay published in The Believer in 2005 before the Georgia Aquarium opened, Ginger Strand catalogs the relationship between aquariums and ruined ecosystems: the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California is on the old Cannery Row, made obsolete by the depletion of sardine stocks; the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward was paid for largely by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Settlement Fund; in the Ocean Voyager exhibit in Atlanta, there are scant and inconsistent facts about whale sharks — they reach 45, 60 or 65 feet depending on which sign is consulted — but copious details on how they were airlifted from Taiwan (“via UPS!”).

* * *

Here's an illustration from dreams of yore.

* * *

Also in the Times—Dizzyhead Dennis on Twin Peaks. How about this lede, eh? The kid can write!

LIKE the homecoming queen who was its resident ghost, “Twin Peaks” died young and left a ravaged but still beautiful corpse. Both demises are now inextricably linked: When David Lynch’s hit series revealed who killed Laura Palmer in the fall of 1990, it also committed a kind of symbolic suicide.

Whan that Aprille

National Poetry Month continues here at The Dizzies. Today's poem is "Dream Job," from Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon).

The poet reads about an experiment in which scientists carefully nab migrating birds and inject them with "double-/labeled water ampules."

and it occurs
to me in my snow globe
surrounded with rain
on Water Street by the sea,
it's possible all this
capturing daily
was for some other purpose.

Very nice...snow, rain, water, sea. (The shoores are certainly sooteing today in New York, eh?) And I dig the end, which took me by surprise.

Go, Jerry. Soon you will be
in Canada where
Neil Young was born.

Then I remembered the title, and remembered this—another dream job.