At the top of this year, I corresponded via email with someone whose work and style I’ve admired since I was 13 years old (Assterman’s finest, once the Chazebralope, he who drawls in perpetuity). This myth appeared to me the way that myths do — that is, out of thin air, to give encouragement you didn’t know you needed and approval only they’re qualified to give...all between conquering worlds entirely unknown to you.

Anyway something he took notice of about this here corner of the Internet as compared to many others is the complete absence of imagery. I was excited by that, cuz it’s a deliberate choice that I always hoped readers would pick up on. Here go a couple of the reasons for that choice:

1. It’s my subtle form of protest against the millisecond consumption cycle that Big Media provokes via constant imagery on socials (except this one, read all about it).

2. I’ve loved words since I was a kid. I’m talking bout how they sound, how they’re spelled, where they come from, what they mean, new ones, old ones, slang, technical jargon, don’t matter the language.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love visuals too, but these days pixels and letters are like a flood and a drought (I know letters are made up of pixels too sometimes but you get the analogy, don’t be so pedantic, don’t be so punctilious, don’t be so joe damn!!! lol). And there’s nothing like finding the exact right word to convey what you think or feel, or forgetting a word that was on the tip of your tongue and having it return to you spontaneously hours or days later.

And I find that as a logophile, I’m in excellent company.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

I discovered Kameelah Janan Rasheed and her work through Art21 and instantly felt a jolt, an electric connection.

I find it impressive the way she manages to combine her thorough and lucid ideas about the world (her lived experience specifically, and art-making generally) with a very sharp aesthetic sensibility. She’s as careful about the letterforms and typefaces themselves as she is about dialing in how abstract or face-value the work ends up.

I also just think it’s cool whenever anybody uses letters and/or words in visual art, cuz I imagine it’s somehow less alienating for people who don’t think they “get art”. I make that assumption based on the fact that many of us learn our ABC’s early in life — it’s a formative experience — ergo when someone who might feel aggravated by a Jackson Pollock splatter painting encounters a piece that centers letters or words instead, they might find that a useful anchor, or “an invitation to go slow, instead of trying to rush to understanding” as the artist herself puts it. Letters can be for more than communication, they can be an on-ramp to the often-wacky and sometimes-very-cool world of art.

I won’t flatter myself by making any artistic comparison between myself and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, but I do aspire to work with her precision and at the scale that she does. Where I will compare us is in the religious practice that we both inherited, which aptly began centuries ago with the word “READ”.

Rich Hickey

This guy invented a useful programming language that I’m learning called Clojure.

The story goes, in his own words: “I started working on Clojure in 2005, during a sabbatical I funded out of retirement savings. The purpose of the sabbatical was to give myself the opportunity to work on whatever I found interesting, without regard to outcome, commercial viability or the opinions of others.” That’s.......simply flames lmao I’ve always dreamt of taking a sabbatical with that exact purpose (although I somehow doubt mine would yield such a beloved piece of technology).

This may surprise some folks, but you don’t necessarily have to give a fuck about words at all to create a programming language. But, as you may have guessed, Rich Hickey absolutely does. In fact, he loves words, so much so that he can’t give a single one of his (very enlightening) talks without carefully analyzing the definition and uses of at least one. He’s as great a communicator as he is a technologist, so it tracks that words mean a lot to him. I think there’s a strong argument that without his logophilia to help him proselytize the language, Clojure would have had a harder time picking up steam, despite its sheer technical brilliance.

He’s also just a cool character, at this point my brain files him under “legendary old white dudes” along with Bill Murray and Rick Rubin.

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These two make for such an interesting duo — seemingly worlds apart, but bound together by a love for the symbols that we cram meanings into and exchange in all kinds of ways. I repeat, excellent company! If either of y’all are reading this, you’re always welcome to Mt. Shoya.

Thanks for reading, I hope you liked some of the words I used :)