category: mashups

Raoul Dufy + Jackson Pollock mashup

Here mashed together are two details from paintings I saw last week at the small exhibition at

Stanford’s art museum, Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art:

Raoul Dufy Jackson Pollock painting details

Raoul Dufy (France, 1877–1953), Window at Nice, 1923, detail
Right: Jackson Pollock (U.S.A., 1912–1956), Composition (White, Black, Blue and Red on White), 1948, detail

Zabriskie explosions

An Antonioni mashup on Youtube: ‘Blow-up’ sequences from Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” (1970) cut-up + layed-down to the original soundtrack:

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern mashup

Sucked from the Wikiquote page for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and re-bejumbled:

Guildenstern: Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word – “wife” – or “house” – because when you write it down, you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before …?

Rosencrantz: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.

Guildenstern: The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. Demolish.

Rosencrantz: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?

The Player: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds – if it was a bet, you wouldn’t take it.

Guildenstern: Words. Words. They’re all we have to go on.

The Player: I congratulate you on the unambiguity of your situation.

Guildenstern: There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it.

An apparent typological anomaly

Thinking more about the work of linguist Simon Kirby, featured in the New York Times book review that I wrote about a couple days ago, so I Googled him. That led me to the rich vein of glorious word ore that is Linguistic Typology, an academic journal about, well, linguistic typology, stupid.

The LT website features an index of all the articles and book reviews published in the journal’s ten-year history. Here is a mashup list of titles from this page — beginning with good old Simon Kirby, who leads off this list with a jaw-dropping title from 1997:

  • Competing motivations and emergence: Explaining implicational hierarchies
  • Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information
  • The Implications Register
  • A grammar of Supyire
  • Ergativity
  • Tone systems in New Guinea
  • On nominal and verbal person marking
  • An apparent typological anomaly
  • The co-variation of phonology with morphology and syntax: A hopeful history
  • The Ergative in Proto-Australian
  • Language sampling
  • Regularity in irregularity
  • A parsing view on inconsistent word order
  • The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony
  • Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other?
  • Intransitive Predication
  • The colours of Tsakhur
  • Split morphology: How agglutination and flexion mix
  • The Decay of Ergativity in Kurmanci
  • Tense Systems in European Languages
  • Verbal Periphrases in Romance: Aspect, Actionality, and Grammaticalization
  • The Navajo Verb
  • A dynamic approach to the verification of distributional universals
  • Counting genera
  • Stochastic models in typology: obstacle or prerequisite?
  • The indefinite-interrogative puzzle
  • La négation
  • Lexico-semantic universals
  • Activation levels in Lavukaleve demonstratives: oia versus foia
  • The complexities of arguing about complexity
  • The case of Sinitic
  • Historical baggage and directionality
  • Complexification, erosion, and baroqueness
  • Rejoinder to the replies
  • Motivation for copula in equational clauses
  • Accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?
  • The Prominence of Tense, Aspect and Mood
  • Evidentials
  • Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope
  • The parameter of actionality
  • Against implicational universals
  • A case for implicational universals
  • Significant and non-significant implicational universals
  • Crosslinguistic insights on the labial flap
  • The Structure of Tone
  • Animacy and Reference
  • Mental state postpositions in Tiriyó
  • Hand, head, and face: Negative constructions
  • Depictive secondary predicates
  • The Origin of Agent Markers
  • Testing Trudgill’s hypotheses
  • On the complexity of simplification
  • A typological overview of Mwotlap
  • Anaphors
  • Suppletion in personal pronouns
  • Theory versus practice
  • The place of reproducibility
  • The Universals Register
  • Motion, Direction and Location
  • Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects
  • Listening to the Pacific
  • The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking
  • Recipient-prominence vs. beneficiary-prominence
  • A Pan-Dialectal Grammar
  • The myth of a language
  • Does sampling matter?
  • The robust bell curve
  • Multifunctional agreement
  • The possibility of genderless nouns
  • A typology of intensifiers
  • Constituent order
  • THE UNIVERSALS ARCHIVE
  • Wider and deeper
  • Explaining recurrent sound patterns
  • Methodology and the empirical base
  • Where’s phonology in typology?

This is like three Thanksgiving feasts worth of lingoism, causing me to experience multiple wordgasm. Time to get back into the studio. My apologies in advance to all of these undoubtedly brilliant linguists whose work I am mangling and will no doubt be plagiarizing in the months to come.

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