Communicaton Skulls

Dear Fictioners:

Capstone of the last two classes in Linguistics
& TransRomantics, so feel free to ignore or
reply or reply-to-all: my Courses Without
Boundary Series presumptuously aims
to ruin the lines and distinctions we sustain
between discrete academic enterprise and
make it all ONE: hap-ily ever after. You
got a problem with that? Don Quixote.

Have a good break. As Dr. Bradshaw would
insist: Be CAREFUL.

Dear Language-ers et al.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate,”
–a famous line from Cool Hand Luke :the warden
speaks it to Paul Newman, prisoner.

I would make it the Theme for All my Courses if only it
could be cast and framed as Hell yes, of course: failure
to communicate we have always with us: that’s the
nature of Communication-going-on-state-of the-art:
that it fails; why do you suppose God crashed the
Tower of Babel?—so as to sustain the failure
sustainably and Oh! Evolve!

I doubt I could scrub-off the notion sufficiently to make it
descriptively attractive as in thank-god-someone’s-telling-
IT-like-IT-is, to make it workable, appealing.

IT = failure to communicate as the ongoing evolutionary
sustainability success of COMMUNICATION.

Today was a good example of DIVERGENT
rather than Convergent process .



Convergent would have worked its way to branch, limb,
trunk and ROOT (radix). A HA! we would have said
and marched out of class with solution in hand.

Divergent: just the opposite. Start with the image of the
hitch-hiker with enormous thumbs and constelllate all
over the place. Hops, skips, jumps. Holy Smokes and
Mirrors—virtual and actual realities, dreams & waking life,
library research & laptop dancing, vis-a-vis communication
and rat-a-tat keyboard tattoos, going to hell in a globalilzed
unification handy basket, plastic surgery all over the world,
post-literate, neo-oralcy metaphors, media and message
dynamics and the stress of cultural laggards.., just some
of the things we touched on.

Rich! A magnificent failure of communication! Generative.
Inventive. Notions galore. Diversity uber alles R us!

xxxooo, Noam Chumsky

Dear Transromantics et al.

What about the notion: “Hell is other people.” asks Will,
quoting Sartre’s No Exit.. And what I heard was “The hell
with other people.” and went on to elaborate how any one
might feel that, if not say it—from time to time.

I, on the one hand.

OTHER
ELSE
EL (“god”)
ALIEN
ULTRA
FAR OUT
STRANGE

on the other hand.

Turn up the “incommensurate” and radically opposed nature
and values of any “I” and any “other”

Consider the lead-me-not-unto-Temptation to collapse the difference.

( I/Other: “It’s all one, Sam: all relative, all related!”)

And for the sake of argument, school mode and what I call
Being Academic, resist IT (the temptation).

NO! Man IS an Island!
“I” and OTHER are totally “opposed”
descriptively: positioned-in-opposition:
juxtaposed:
you there; I, here.) :

What happens when the opposition is denied, covered-up,
sent to the cellar so to speak?

“What? Me? Hate full?
Say that again and I’ll have to wall you up,
bury you alive, and all the other ways to
skin a category."

Now: put IT in play.
IT = the opposition.
IT = the relationship.

What it is LIKE to be a ONE (a whole)?
What it is LIKE to be a PART (partial) ?

& do they Just Get Along ? (my wholeness, my partiality) ?

This is the question of the course. of course.
Consider or ignore, Be considerate. Be ignore-ant.
Always: your efficient/deficient attention ichoice.

xxxooo, Edgar Allen.