I have always had a special place in my heart for Vladimir Nabokov. The man was smarter than anyone had the right to be: he grew up speaking Russian, French, and English (though he grew up in St. Petersburg, Russian was the last language he learned to speak), he had nearly perfect recall and whats more, he was synaesthetic, a condition in which otherwise normal people experience the blending of two or more senses. Other notable synaesthetes include: Duke Ellington (who blended timbre and color), Thom Yorke (music, color), Richard Feynman (colored alphabet), and well, John Mayer. Nabokov’s synaesthesia is not unique, as it is not uncommon for a synaesthete to see letters in color. What makes his gift unique is its coupling with his incredible command of the English language (a command that he has actually called “second-rate”). He calls his gift the gift of “colored hearing”. In describing his alphabet, he states that:
“Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k.” (From his autobiography Speak, Memory)
The picture above is taken from the book Alphabet in Color put out by Gingko press and illustrated by Jean Holabird. (more…)
Filed under: hypertext
An introduction.
This blog is only a holdover until I can move on to bigger and better things. I am currently in the process of learning how to use tinderbox to create fully customized blog. I am also in the process of attempting to teach myself some web programming skills.
Tinderbox, for those of you who do not know, is arguably one of the best things that has ever happened to a computer.
Essentially, it connects notes the same way the internetz do. You create notes, which act as individual web pages. Now you can link them to one another. Have an idea about a film related to a book you’ve read? Create a note for the book and one for the movie, link them together, allowing you to navigate through either one to the other. This means one day while looking through ideas you had while reading that book, it can remind you of the idea you had for the film. As your ideas become more complex, as you have more of them, the tighter the thought weave becomes and the more useful the thought web. The software works as much through the writing of notes as it does through the linking of ideas. Relational note-taking. A hypertextual mind-map.
What makes the software really crack is the visual representations of both the notes themselves and the links. My personal favorite view is the map view, as shown above. With the software, instead of outlining your ideas and then sorting them into the outline as you progress, you can create as many notes as you need to and then divide them into piles as if they were pieces of paper. Hypertextual pieces of paper. This way, the outline rises out of the natural folds and nuances of the ideas. Bottom up thinking with a fully hypertextual interface.
Congratulations, you can now become the internet, your notebook is reborn in the 21st century.
This is essentially the sort of thing my blog will be about. Hypertext. Cyborgs. Books. The odd music post. Arts. Architecture. New Media. Pluralizing things with the letter z.
