george lakoff

I just finished "Metaphors We Live By" on tour, very evocative reading. I finished an email this morning with, "I'm sure our paths will cross again", thereby playing into Lakoff's "Life is a Journey" paradigm.
I am fascinated with the rather acrimonious dialectic that arose in regards to Chomsky's generative grammar vs Lakoff and the school of "generative semantics", an issue close to my heart. I see the rich exploration of metaphor by Lakoff, Johnson and others as closer in spiritual kinship to the pre-Chomsky structuralism of Sapir, Whorf and the early modern linguists. The different metaphors we use vary from culture to culture and when employed, especially as they are countless times each day, they do shape our worldviews in sometimes radically disparate fashions. Maybe Lakoff wouldn't welcome the company of Whorf, but I see in Lakoff's work an attempt to regain some humanity and perspective from the rather cut and dry objectivist approach of Chomsky and his acolytes. To be honest I don't think the syntactic science favored by Chomsky, Pinker, Mark Baker, and the overwhelming majority of academic linguists need be in opposition to the richer interpretation of Lakoff. It's different layers of the same onion, to employ a much abused metaphorical turn.
The video above is from a lecture Lakoff gave on the subject of political rhetoric and how the framing of the debate, the metaphorical parameters perhaps, are often the key factors in "winning" the argument. ( I know, I am getting carried away with self analyzing my own metaphors here)

happy birthday Phil Niblock

San Zhi

A futuristic tourist resort built in Taiwan in the eighties, the strange pod like buildings of this town, long abandoned, are a testament to stunted progress.