long days

Went to an amazing event in TARARTRAT's apartment last night. Vattenfall has cut off the electricity so it was lit with 200 candles. Arrived too late to catch Susanna Berivan but was in time for a great set by Laura Bean (playing with Charles Booth of the Cowboy Killers) and another in which a guy called Mike (whose surname I have on a piece of paper somewhere) read poetry with and without banjo accompaniment by another guy whose name I don't even have on a piece of paper. Tod Wodicka's two-year-old son Louis threw his plastic turtle. [According to Paul this was a plastic ninja turtle; I never got close enough to the actual object to make that kind of identification.] Tod: When he starts throwing the turtle it's all over.

TARARTRAT is the blogger responsible for my starting a blog, which in turn was responsible for my discovering just how many people are WRONG on the INTERNET. (Fatal. Fatal.) I have moved into an apartment with no phone and no Internet connection for 5 months so I can get some work done. I told Tod and he said he too had moved into a place with no Internet connection.

intercostal clavicle

My mother is visiting Berlin. I've been preparing my apartment to sublet. Much running about. The second day of my mother's visit I was putting coal in the stove when the doorbell rang. It was the Post. A Pakett. I sign for it, tear it open - it's my intercostal clavicle! Well, OK, not really. It's Deepayan Sarkar's Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization with R! I did not have the nerve to try to blag a review copy off Springer, given my bad habit of putting reviews in the drafts folder, so I ordered one online and now it is here. Have been getting my mother up to speed with e-mail and downloading new packages for R. Was reading Andrew Gelman's splendid Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do before I went to Oxford and then got caught up in preparations to sublet / see mother and suddenly realised I was unlikely to write about it before the election, which is appalling but can't be helped, so I point readers shamefacedly to AG's blog...

when is a hand-out not a hand-out

Currently waging a war against administration as the University have decided to ban students from accessing online resources until their fees are paid. One of my current courses has 120 students and is run entirely via 'e-learning' (whatever the hell that is). Basically, we can't use paper hand-outs, and all resources are on the intranet. Mmmm, lovely. However, given that a fair proportion of students are unable to pay their fees because their local authority has a backlog of loan payments, this means large sections of the class can't access the materials, or the exercises they are supposed to complete each week. It's as if the 'old-fashioned' lecturer with photocopies were to have intimate financial knowledge of their students and, on this basis, refuse to give copies to people in their class. It's immoral, and stupid, and cataclysmically time-consuming as I seek to find a way to get the oh-so-supposedly-bleeding-edge-of-technology materials to oh-so-old-skool-boringly-anxious students who are being punished for something that isn't their fault.

Infinite Thought

silence

Before calling Luc, Pierre and I had talked about the place of silence, and more generally the question of time, in interviews and in their transcriptions. I told Pierre about my meeting with Hans Georg Gadamer a few years earlier. He was 101 years old, and he dozed off during the interview. For a few minutes I watched him sleep, without turnng the tape off. Later, Gadamer talked to me about the importance of silence in conversation, and about the impossibility of recording silence in a transcription.

The Tale of the One Thousand Signs, Hans Ulrich Obrist : Pierre Huyghe (Parkett 66 2002)

Lachmann Research Fellowship at LSE

Came across this Research Fellowship at the LSE website - I'm posting it in case it's relevant to any readers who for one reason or another haven't come across it elsewhere:

Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method

The Ludwig Lachmann Research Fellowship

Salary: £39,167 to £42,780 pa incl

This is a fixed term appointment for three years

Reference: 01/08/RES

Application deadline: 7 November 2008

The Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific is seeking to fill the Ludwig M Lachmann Research Fellowship, a research post in commemoration of the late Professor Lachmann.

The successful candidate will have a PhD and a record of excellence in research in economics and/or philosophy. Particular consideration will be given to candidates with a research interest in the philosophical aspects of economics or the Austrian School of Economics.

The Research Fellow will be expected to complete a piece of work forming the basis of a publication during his or her period of tenure.

Its is expected that the successful candidate will be appointed from September 2009 for a period of up to three years, though it is possible for the appointment to commence earlier in the year. The appointment may be made on a flexible working arrangement.

Informal enquiries can be addressed to Prof. Richard Bradley at r.bradley@lse.ac.uk.

To apply, please see the instructions of how to apply, notes for applicants, the job description, the person specification and the personal details form.

If you cannot download the pack, email HR.Recruit.Res@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 6183 quoting reference 01/08/RES.

Closing date for receipt of applications is 7 November 2008.

Caderno de Saramago

Mithridates has just sent me an e-mail. Saramago has a blog. (It's available in Spanish as well as Portuguese; hope that means most readers can read some.)

trilingualism

David Crystal on trilingualism in children.

Three is an age where monolingual children first display serious 'normal non-fluency' (as the speech pathology world calls it). This is a phenomenon which sometimes causes parents anxiety, because with its pauses and repeated attempts at words it sounds like stammering, but in fact it's nothing like stammering at all. In particular, it lacks the tension one associates with that condition. What the child is doing is processing more complex language (notably, coordinate and subordinate clauses), and needing extra time to do it. So we hear such narratives as 'Daddy went in the garden and he - and he - and he - and he did kick the big ball'. There might be a dozen or more repetitions before the child sorts out what is needed to make a successful coordinate clause.

I've talked about all this before, in several clinical linguistic books and articles, but one thing I'd never thought of was the way normal non-fluency would be a sign of code-switching at this age. Mateo is at the stage now where he is realizing he speaks different languages. He has learnt the names 'English', 'Spanish', and 'Dutch', and is using them appropriately. Evidence? When watching Handy Manny on Play Disney - a repairman who switches between Spanish and English - Mateo shouts out 'Spanish' whenever he hears some Spanish words. And on the way back from the beach one day, as we passed a boy with a big bike, he looked at it, then at me, and said 'bicycle'. I didn't know he knew that word, so I must have appeared to be taken aback, because he then said - as if I hadn't understood - 'bicicleta' (the vocative 'prat' was in his intonation). He then added, for my benefit, 'Spanish'. 'I don't suppose you know it in Dutch as well?', I said, in a sceptical tone. He made a noise which sounded like a rude dismissal, so I queried it, and he said 'bike'. His mother told me later that he had probably said fiets, and that bike was common as a loan word in everyday Dutch. All this in a kid who's been on this earth for only just over a thousand days.