This list is motley great. Unable to sleep I get up at 4 am to find some boring book to induce somnia, but just for the heck of it I checked my emails. Bad mistake. First, there's Donal's legal advice, David's cooking and politics, John's linguistics, Lawrence's podhoretzing around the Middle East, and Andreas's despair over Lawrence. Of course I just absolutely have to weigh in on it all.
In regard to Donal's excellent advice, I strongly endorse his caveat that you find out how much the bastards are going to charge you. I was once in negotiations with a production company for a script I'd written and called my uncle, the lawyer, he gave me the name of THE intellectual properties lawyer in Memphis -- a good buddy of his, oh yeah. I went to see him just to ask him how much he'd charge me to negotiate a contract. $250 an hour he said (this was 20 years ago). We chatted briefly and breezily about the nature of the "property". I said I needed to think about my options. The next month I got a bill for $250 for a consultation fee. It cost me $250 just to find out how much the asshole charges.
Yes, David, I do listen to the Splendid Table if I'm in the truck when it's on. It's always tuned to the NPR station. It must play at a different time here, because I always seem to hear it before noon and on weekends. I listen as intently as I can while dodging Memphis madmen in their various vicious vehicles. I know that I enjoy listening to the program, but can't remember one damn thing about it specifically. Maybe I just like Lynne Rosseto Kasper's voice on the way to a job. Gives me courage maybe? Anyway, I do listen on occasion and apparently I like it for some reason.
John wants to know whether pre-literate peoples believed in word-magic. I recently came across a book written by a pre-literate (he could write, he just couldn't read), and according to him -- Ugg was his name, Winston Lathermore Ugg, "Word Magic For Dummies" is the title of his book, I think -- his contemporaries did indeed believe in word magic, just as much as they believed in amulets and that blood drinking and the eating of organs appeased and pleased the Spirits that inhabited everything you touched and even those yucky things you wouldn't touch. There were thousands of sacred magical words, but he couldn't write any of them down because they were sacred. On a less serious note, I find it surprising that you, John, failed to mention the still reigning major world wide belief in word magic: the consecration of the host and the wine at Mass. Talk about your magic -- wow! This isn't appeasement of the gods, this is making God answer to you're beck and call -- whoa, that's impressive! And yes, I believed it for 20 something years, and yes, many believe I'm a pre-literate having seen my spelling.
I wonder, could I convince Lawrence he's wrong by quoting Chomsky at him? But I love you, Lawrence. Keep up the good fight. Or the fight anyway.
Red Rover, Red Rover, send Andreas right over. (tee hee, what Andreas doesn't know is that or minds are set in concrete -- but he keeps coming over, slamming into a concrete wall of arms -- tee hee!)
OK, back to bed. Mike Geary----- Original Message ----- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "Anthro-L" <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2007 11:39 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Must the Word be Literate?
Linguistics gives priority to the spoken over the written word. Linguistic philosophy tends to reverse this order and seek precisely the right words to express a truth about the world. As a philosophical exercise, the search for a perfect language extends is characteristic of modern philosophy from Leibniz to the early Wittgenstein (the one who wrote the Tractatus). But the search for the One True Language is, of course, much more older and more widespread. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition it begins with the Tower of Babel and the confusion of human languages after the Tower's fall. The hope of its resurrection is implicit in the opening words of the Gospel According to John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." In Judaism, it may only be a single word, the unsayable true name of Jehovah. In Islam the text of the Koran is sacred and the classical Arabic in which it is written sacrosanct by association. The belief in primordial and, thus, powerful words survives as a theme in, for example, the Earthsea novels by Ursula Laguin. It is, however, also found at the other end of Asia, in the popular (religious) Taoist belief that the primordial words embodied in charms have a uniquely valid relationship to reality that accounts for their magical force. I find myself wondering, then, if this belief--in intrinsically powerful primordial words--occurs outside a literate context. Is the written word, the word of scribes with the esoteric ability to read and write, the source of this model of and for? Anybody know? -- John McCreery The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN Tel. +81-45-314-9324 http://www.wordworks.jp/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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