Imperfection

Before too long, this blog and the whole website are going to have a different look, and I’m going to ramp up my posting frequency in a bid to gain eyeballs and attention before Babel No More comes out.

I’d really love to be asked someday what threads run through Um… and Babel, because part of my reply would be: there are a lot of themes that are woven through the two books, but one of them is the hope and faith we hold in language’s sufficiency. Its aesthetic sufficiency. Its personal sufficiency. That using it we can mean what we mean, arise to occasions. And that also, from time to time, it will mean more than we can mean. Also, it’s social sufficiency. That language is what binds us as collective groups, that through it we can undertake collective action, come to shared understandings, live and thrive together. But of course language is insufficient for any of those things; or, its capabilities can’t match the hope and faith we have in it. Both Um… and Babel are written from the middle of that space between, on one hand, the hope and the faith, and the other, the disgust at its failure.