R. Kelly has revealed to the press that he “suffers from illiteracy.”

Here is his quote: “When I was trying to make it out here, I already knew, and I was stubborn about it,” he says. “I don’t even read really and I’m not afraid to say that. My cousins and brothers used to tease me ‘you can’t even read right. How you think you’re going to come up?’ The only reason I graduated from grammar school is because I had a great jump shot. I went to high school and [my teacher] told me ‘you will one of the greatest writers of all time.’ I believed. You [have to] believe it. You can’t believe [anything] if you’re hating. You can’t achieve [anything] if you’re hating.”

I bet, given R. Kelly’s schedule, there really isn’t time to practice reading. It’s probably way harder to learn how to read as an adult than as a kid. I guess he probably has people in his life who can read stuff for him, but still.

What I don’t understand, and maybe someone can explain, is what the difference is between suffering from illiteracy and being illiterate. Like, if you suffer from illiteracy, does that mean that learning to read is exceptionally hard?

i’m having a hard time staying awake.

oh well, here’s your daily ed ruscha

and a special monday morning bonus yves klein fire painting:

man, art is so creative and awesome! i just can’t stop showing it to you, really, i’m serious, i can’t stop. here’s george brecht:

once in awhile, anthony lane still hits it. on johnny depp in sweeny todd:

“His singing gives off the Cockney yowl of someone who has listened to too much early Bowie, and his ivory-pale face is crowned by a stiff black mane with a white blaze in it. If you had sat Susan Sontag down and broken the news that not everyone in New York reads Hegel, you would have got the same effect.”

mike huckabee on grand funk railroad:

‘‘That’s a groundbreaking group,’’ he said earnestly. ‘‘The bass player, Mel Schacher, is very underrated. ’’

evelyn waugh on his second wife (from a letter written to his father upon his engagement):

“She is very young, very thin, rather poor, dead silent, long nosed, laudably devoid of literary, artistic or social ambition, lazy, affectionate, timid, ignorant. I will bring her to see you at the first opportunity.”

from “play it again, sam”, written by and starring young Woody Allen:

Allan: That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?

Woman: Yes it is.

Allan: What does it say to you?

Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe.  The hideous lonely emptiness of existence.  Nothingness.  The predicament of Man forced to live in a barren, Godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

Allan: What are you doing Saturday night?

Woman: Committing suicide.

Allan: What about Friday night?

“Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the “Neighborhood” at hours when some children cannot use it … I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the “Neighborhood” off-the-air, and I’m speaking for the “Neighborhood” because that’s what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been “You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.” Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”
-Fred Rogers testifying before the Supreme Court in the 80s during the court’s decision on the legality of betamax VCR recorders

also this (watch his speech at the end):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaJQLgiXKO0

here’s his commencement address to dartmouth graduates in 2001:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2002/june/060902c.html

Hemingway Translated

It may turn out Hemingway was often secretly writing in Spanish. He got so he hated English. Language, really, but English especially. He was with young Beckett there. Beckett said he liked Finnegans Wake because it didn’t use words as “mere polite symbols.” He said “form is content and content is form,” the writing “not about something; it is that something itself.” Beckett swears in Finnegans Wake the language gets drunk. The words go to sleep. Usually, words know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t touch a drop, or wear themselves out too much. They don’t ever come too near this mess at all. They breeze along meaning the same old things according to the same damn polite codes we’ve stuck them in by talking about the world in the same old ways over and over. Especially the English ones. “The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything,” thinks Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Beckett thought it was “worth while remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death.” Hemingway’s bone with language gets personal. (more…)

Tess is working on some “thrilled illuminations on great pages, in the styles of their authors” Here is commentary on:
Borges’s “The South” (“El Sur”) as the Thousand and Second Night

[‘Gauchesca’ in broad strokes: The dominant literary genre of early twentieth-century Argentina, self-consciously derived from the region’s traditional rural ballads (payadas) and built around the life of the gaucho – that solitary, horse-straddling, knife-wielding, poncho-wrapped and lasso-whirling character of the South American pampas. The paradigm would be José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872 & 1879), hailed again in 1913 by leading nationalist poet Leopoldo Lugones as the country’s foundational epic and most binding literary inheritance – an opinion from which, in times of Peronist censorship, dissension could get one “promoted” from state-employed librarian to official inspector of chickens and rabbits, as Borges was in 1946]. (more…)

Somewhat related to Kathryn’s post: it turns out my father is actually quite a literary man, it’s just that he grew up with a different canon. When I get all pretentious, and try to out-literary him with lines from TS Eliot, he retorts with entire poems from the Song dynasty.
.
Anyway, kind of accidentally, this resulted in us beginning to translate a Song dynasty poem by a poetess/lyricist called Li Ching Chao. He says it’s one of the classics of all time. Basically, while we eat humus and lentil soup at the restaurant downstairs, my dad tells me the poem in Chinese, and I suggest English words, and he explains why they don’t have quite the right connotation, and then suggests better English words. (So basically it is his translation.) And we do this over and over until he thinks it’s something close. Here’s what it is so far (after lunch today):

(more…)

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conflate

http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861599516

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/conflate?view=uk

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=16123&dict=CALD

http://www.bartleby.com/61/28/C0562800.html