Something Different For The Super Tuesday Overloads

I'll be keeping up with the Super Tuesday voting and results like every other politically aware American. I won't be blogging about it(unless something monumental happens) because I don't have the time and resources of many other bloggers, especially the A-listers. For updates and realtime feedback of results as they happen, here's a good place to start, and here, here, and of course here. As for me I'll throw up something completely different. William S. Burroughs on that wonderful human attribute the written word:















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"..In the beginning of WRIT- TEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh ... human flesh ... In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey informa- tion but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future gener- ations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING. Korzybski, who developed the concept of General Semantics, the meaning of meaning, has pointed out this human distinction and described man as ‘the time binding animal’. He can make information to other men over a length of time through writing. Animals talk. They don’t write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for the Reader’s Digest with tactics for ganging up on digs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes. It is doubtful if the spoke word would have ever evolved beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written word ist inferential in HUMAN speech. It would not occur to our wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge along in an aural tradition BECAUSE THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TIME BINDING COULD NOT OCCUR WITHOUT THE WRITTEN WORD. The written word is of course a symbol for something and in the case of hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbol for itself that is a picture of what it represents. This is not true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no pictorial resemblance to a leg. It refers to the SPOKEN word leg. so we may forget that a written word IS AN IMAGE and that written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING PICTURES."
-William S. Burroughs

Link. William S. Burroughs sound files.
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