cockaigne/cocaine.
Meaning: 1. Paradise, utopia, an imaginary land of luxury. 2 (Facetiously) The land of the Cockneys, which is to say, the East End of London.
Notes: Today’s Good Word has nothing to do with cocaine, despite the resemblance in spelling and meaning. Cocaine originates in the Quechua word for the coca plant, kúka. The first syllable of today’s word is [kah], not [ko].
In Play: In Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco wrote, “Everyone was seeking renewal, a golden century, a Cockaigne of the spirit.” Aren’t you glad the translator didn’t use the English slang equivalent, la-la-land? The second sense of today’s word refers (humorously) to the land of Eliza Doolittle, in whose Cockney accent Henry Higgins becomes ‘Enry ‘Iggins. This leads to the possibility of saying, in the right company, “Reliable carpenters in this area are as rare as Hs in Cockaigne.”
Word History: Today’s Good Word is capitalized since it is supposed to be a proper geographical name referring to a country. It is based on the Old French phrase pais de cokaigne “land of cakes” (Modern French pays de cocagne), referring to a country where good fortune abounds. The word takes on its current meaning in the Old French phrase trouver cocaigne “find a land where good things drop from the sky”. The word for “cake” at the root of cocaigne was probably borrowed from German Kuchen “cake”, a word sharing a source with English cook and kitchen.
Must re-read Foucault’s Pendulum at some point.
Apparently the word ‘cockaigne’ is not related at all to ‘cocaine’. that was my reason for looking it up in the first place. disappointing, really, though i am glad anaesthetics have moved on since the 1870s…
1874, from Fr. cocaine (1856), coined by Albert Niemann of Gottingen University from coca (from Quechua cuca) + -ine, arbitrary use of L. -inus, -ina for noun ending. A medical coinage, the drug was used 1870s as a local anaesthetic for eye surgery, etc.
antonio negri.
Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities. The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor. Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.
read the whole essay here.
everybody’s bloggin about da wall.
as usual, i will follow suit. historic footage here for you youngsters. are we still working out the consequences of this day?
[insert exclamations of how time passes. boring.]
i also give you this ‘testbild’, something that has been irrecoverably lost on TV, methinks.
walls/membranes.
Faith pours from your walls, drowning your calls
I’ve tried to hear, you’re not near
Remembering when I saw your face
Shining my way, pure timing
Now I’ve fallen in deep, slow silent sleep
It’s killing me, I’m dying
To put a little bit of sunshine in your life
Soleil all over you, warm sun pours over me
Soleil all over you
Warm sun
Now this slick fallen rift came like a gift
Your body moves ever nearer
And you will dry this tear
Now that we’re here, and grieve for me, not history
But now I’m dry of thoughts, wait for the rain
Then it’s replaced, sun setting
And suddenly you’re in love with everything
Soleil all over you, warm sun pours over me
Soleil all over you
Warm sun
(by badly drawn boy, listen to it here)
natural form.
“Orchardists have never tried growing fruit trees in their natural form. To begin with, most have never even given any thought as to what the natural form is. Of course pomologists will deny this, saying that they are working with the natural form of fruit trees and looking for ways to improve on this. But it is clear that they have not really looked in earnest at the natural form. Not a single book or report has been published which discusses pruning based on such basic factors as the phyllotaxy of a citrus tree, or which explains that a divergence of so much gives such-and -such a natural form with primary and secondary scaffold branches of X degrees.
“Many have a vague idea of the natural form as something akin to the shape of a neglected tree. But there is a world of difference between the two..” (pg. 209)
this is from fukuoka. made me wonder about ‘natural form’.
Porcellio scaber. most amazing little critter.
Woodlice need moisture because they breathe through gills, called pseudotrachea, and so are usually found in damp, dark places, such as under rocks and logs. They are usually nocturnal and are detritivores, feeding mostly on dead plant matter, although they have been known to feed on cultivated plants, such as ripening strawberries and tender seedlings. Woodlice then recycle the nutrients back into the soil. In artificial environments such as greenhouses where it can be very moist, woodlice may become abundant and damage young plants [1].
The woodlouse has a shell-like exoskeleton, which it must progressively shed as it grows. The moult takes place in two stages; the back half is lost first, followed two or three days later by the front. This method of moulting is different from that of most arthropods, who shed their cuticle in a single process.
A female woodlouse will keep fertilised eggs in a marsupium on the underside of her body until they hatch into small, white offspring. The mother then appears to “give birth” to her offspring.
Some species of woodlice are able to roll into a ball-like form when threatened by predators, leaving only their armoured back exposed. This ability, or dominant behavior, explains many of the woodlouse’s common names.
Metabolic rate is temperature dependent in woodlice. In contrast to mammals and birds, invertebrates are not “self heating”: the external environmental temperature relates directly to their rate of respiration. They are not generally regarded as a serious household pest as they do not spread disease and do not damage wood or structures; however, their presence can indicate dampness problems.
Woodlice are eaten by a wide range of insectivores, but the only animals known to prey exclusively on woodlice are spiders of the genus Dysdera, such as the woodlouse spider Dysdera crocata [2].
yeah!
play.
Pete (to whom I wish all the best and whose departure leaves me sad but hopeful that our paths cross again soon) sent me the link to this article a while ago. Just now getting around to reading it. Wonderful stuff. I wonder why I do not have a tag in my cloud for ‘play’. With a reminder that we all need some play. So go out and get some. Today. Now is the time. 
Let us go directly to his definition of play. It is characterized, he says, by the addition of a meta-communicative act, one that stands outside the current level of communication and comments upon it, certainly a “binocular” structure: “These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by these actions which these actions denote. The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (Bateson, 1976: 121).
Bateson immediately draws attention to the fact that play is paradoxical, indicated in his very definition since the word “denote” is used at two levels of abstraction: with two monkeys at play, the action of a nip indicates aggressive attack, but the grin which preceded it denotes that that lower-level denotation does not apply in this instance. This results in two peculiarities of play: “(a) that the messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue or not meant; and (b) that that which is denoted by these signals is non-existent” (Bateson, 1976: 123). A denotation before accepted within an existing communication scheme is subverted by an act of meta-communication which (temporarily) cancels that original scheme.
Bateson notes that play can sometimes fail because the clue to the meta-communication (in the above case, the playful grin) is not observed, or, for some other reason, is disregarded or deliberately ignored. He mentions a ritual common in the Andaman Islands in which leaders of warring tribes meeting in a peace parley were ceremonially allowed “to go through the motions,” as we say, of striking each other: there were occasions on which the meta-communicative aspect failed and the blow was responded to on the lower level, so that actual fighting broke out (ibid.: 122). One recalls the white man in America’s South who, during a performance of Shakespeare’s Othello, rushed up out of the audience onto the stage to stop the black actor suffocating the white actress taking the part of Desdemona. There are occasions when student “initiation ceremonies” take a sadistic turn. There are many people who, for unconscious reasons, are quite unable to act a part upon the stage, or even to adopt a change of voice to improve a joke. While watching a 3-D film, we might not be able to resist ducking as a spear is thrown at the camera. The gap between the two levels of communication and meta-communication is fraught with tension, and there is a reason for this, to which we shall return.
borges: happiness.
Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time. I saw something white in the sky. They tell me it is the moon, but what can I do with a word and a mythology. Trees frighten me a little. They are so beautiful. The calm animals come closer so that I may tell them their names. The books in the library have no letters. They spring forth when I open them. Leafing through the atlas I project the shape of Sumatra. Whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire. Inside the mirror an Other waits in ambush. Whoever looks at the ocean sees England. Whoever utters a line of Liliencron has entered into battle. I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that destroyed Carthage. I have dreamed the sword and the scale. Praised be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed, but both surrender. Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we have the power to create hell. Whoever goes down to a river goes down to the Ganges. Whoever looks at an hourglass sees the dissolution of an empire. Whoever plays with a dagger foretells the death of Caesar. Whoever dreams is every human being. In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted. There is nothing else so ancient under the sun. Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal. Whoever reads my words is inventing them.
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