Wallace Edwards
Mixed Beasts
There is an appendix that gives a key made up of line drawings of some to the beasts to be found in the preceding colour illustrations. Here are a few drawn from the abecedarius order.
I have been trawling through the literature on overlapping hierarchies and have repeatedly come across puns and other forms of humour. One of the outstanding examples comes from Steve deRose.
This model, originally named HORSE (Hierarchy-Obfuscating Really Spiffy Encoding) may seem wooden at first, but soon it comes to look quite natural. With its spartan syntax it should be attractive; but its name seems less so, and clearly a Muse meant us to rename this modelThe acronym in itself is funny but even more humorous given that it is part of an extended conceit playing with a name: "This approach, which after Troy [Griffiths] is called 'Trojan milestones'". And is redoubled by the allusive heading to this section: "Catching Hell'n Tagging".
CLIX
because of its heavy use of point events scattered throughout the text or data stream: click, clicks, clix.
Cleverly designed ephemera.
And the double play with the puns in both French and English (announcing a German book fair): "Nose out a good story", " Ve-nez donc voir".
"3,000 books and magazines from 500 publishing houses" — in case you read the back before opening… now ya knowz.
Steno pads sometimes get buried in the book shelf which results in an asynchronous dialogue between entries distanced in time. For example, this entry from 2001 is revisited in 2002.
13/03/01And the very page of the steno pad gives us a string — a red line down the page.
Rumi has a line about being the moisture in an oyster that helps form a pearl. Interesting how so much of the creation of a pearl is credited to the speck of irritant that launches the process.
Very happy with the play on words: nautilus, not a list. And the spiral image it conveys out of two columns.
hippo camp set round rumination moisture string in the oyster
of speechspeckless
beadingthe string break broke sea bulls
horsed in to playnot a list
chambersrumination round 29/03/02
In the age of cat videos, one comes across an apt little bit of verse from John S. Crosbie in Crosbie's Book of Punned Haiku. (New York: Workman Publishing, 1979).
There is nothing worseIf you think this is bad, I've seen worse — from Crosby himself — a haiku that ends limerick-like with "caramel knowledge."
Than poems about cute cats
It is all perverse.
The image is from a greeting card copyright 1981 with the following credits: created by Scott Alyn and artist June Wood. The card came with seeds.
Lettuce SeedsOf course the entire crop could bolt in warm weather. Planting early leads to good head — at least in the domain of iceberg lettuce.
Plant me 1/4 inch deep in early spring and every few weeks as long as weather is cool. Rows should be 15 inches apart. And remember.... "Eat more lettuce. Get Ahead!"
It begins to rain and Timothy Findley at the end of the title story in The Ark in the Garden (edited by Alberto Manguel) turns the reader's mind to the moral of the story with a twist on the popular saying ("No news is good news") and given that the fictional protagonist is Noah it is fitting that the pun takes an animal nature.
No gnus is bad gnus. In other words, if you want to survive today — you had best get on the right list.Like the gnus, Noah and the Mrs. didn't in this story make it on the right list and are barred from boarding.
Anthony Burgess on the semantic and sonorous creativity of James Joyce (Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce) and its limitations (as poetry)
A mark of Joyce's genius was to recognise the smallness of his poetic talent and to see how a fine ear and a weak lyrical impulse could revolutionise the prose of a whole era.We will resist here the attraction of search grinding to find mentions of "lyrical impulse" and will instead offer this description from the introduction to Post-structuralist Readings of English Poetry edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris.
Just as we can never write exactly what we intend, so we can never write and intend nothing at all. Language has its own inbuilt intention to mean, which we can at best only attempt to harness in a way that seems to suit our present needs.Neither glak nor gluk nor gleek appear in Finnegans Wake. Check the online concordance and find the instances of "intend" which in one occurence the glossers relate to the Italian "intendere" to undertand which I fail to understand because the form "intend" matches none of the conjugated forms of the Italian verb. It takes a very fine ear... or a fine again eye.
