Quando la poesia ha iniziato a fruire nel carteggio….

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What is the ethical power of literature? Can it diminish acts of injuring, and if it can, what aspects of literature deserve the credit?

All these questions, at first, hinge on another: can anything diminish injury? In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that, over 50 centuries, many forms of violence have subsided.1 Among the epochs he singles out for special scrutiny is a hundred-year period bridging the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during which an array of brutal acts—executing accused witches, imprisoning debtors, torturing animals, torturing humans, inflicting the death penalty, enslaving fellow human beings—suddenly abated, even if they did not disappear.

Attempting to account for “the sweeping change in everyday sensibilities” toward “the suffering in other living things” and for the protective laws that emerged during the Humanitarian Revolution, Pinker argues that the legal reforms were in some degree a product of increasing…

Two parts of my childhood–Reading Rainbow and the Doors–come together care of Jimmy Fallon:

It sounds so perfect, it’s kind of eerie.

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Signal to Noise is a fascinating installation for Luminato 2012, an arts festival that begins in Toronto on June 8.  This work transforms random letters into legible words with a satisfying flapping sound emitted by its moving parts.

Created by the Belgian artists LAb[au], it’s made of discarded technology and salvaged components from the information displays that predated LED monitors in public spaces like airports and train stations. The flaps rotate randomly until the system identifies a word.  (I’ve watched this video a number of times now. It’s kind of hypnotic.)

UPDATE: JUNE 10 I have just come back from the Toronto airport, where this work is installed. The noise is actually much softer than on the video, and anngrafics is right. It does indeed sound most like rain – or perhaps the sound of distant typing by a great many people, in a far away typing pool. You…

Continuando a scrivere parole, vorrei ricordare Ferdinand De Saussure che nella raccolta delle sue lezioni tenute a Ginevra tra il 1906 e il 1909, pubblicata postuma e intitolata Corso di linguistica generale, distingue nettamente tra “lingua” e “parola”: dove lingua rappresenta il momento sociale del linguaggio ed è costituita dal codice di strutture e regole che ciascun individuo assimila dalla comunità di cui fa parte, senza poterle inventare o modificare e dove parola è invece il momento individuale, cangiante e creativo del linguaggio,

Questa danza degli spettri, in due versioni (a colori e in bianco e nero) è stata diretta da Samuel Beckett nel 1981 per la televisione tedesca. Come vedete, c’è una zona proibita al centro del quadrato, zona impercorribile, che i danzatori debbono assolutamente evitare…

a.c.