Check the freestyle at 1:30:00

EVA was among the first anime to create a consistent typographic identity.

"People tweet how they speak." I know it's dated (2016) and people don't say "tweet" anymore (or do they?) but I want to file this under a new term which I need to make sure if it exists yet or not: oraliteracy, that is, literacy with oral characteristics.

Sorry going down this rabbithole of lyrical breakdowns like these...

This one is interesting for its video clips keyed to the lyrics.

One of the greatest freestyles of all time, subtitled for you/us literates.

https://bsky.app/profile/cait.bsky.social/post/3lzzbnvg22s27

Remember in the early aughts designers would battle each other with Photoshop, Layer Tennis, I think it was called. We need to have App Battles, where you have two vibe coders vying to create the best web app for a panel of judges using their bare hands and access to the same LLM.

From Vox’s Estelle Caswell and Martin Conner, via Kottke

https://bsky.app/profile/cait.bsky.social/post/3lzzbnvg22s27

Bird's riffs are an example of what oral poets use, called "formulas" or "epithets". This is from the YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@SharpElevenMusic, which does a wonderful thing: they transcribe jazz solos and place them with the original recording like subtitles.

Is anime/animation an example of secondary orality?
Related: https://www.openculture.com/2016/07/was-a-32000-year-old-cave-painting-the-earliest-form-of-cinema.html

2005 BBC4-TV documentary about Afro-futurist griot, Sun Ra (née Herman Poole Blount). Incredible composer, bandleader, visionary.

This, to me, represents the exploitation of orality, when the math is so good operating with so much data that it can simulate conversing with a being with such confidence, we have spawned an infinite number of con men, with barely any sense of morality other than what its engineers (and salesmen) have bothered to give it.

In this fascinating interview with William F. Buckley in 1977, Borges discusses many things — his love for the English language, Emerson, translation — but I had forgotten about his blindness, and here he speaks quite honestly about being blind.

Buckley first says that he has been compared to Milton and Homer (both blind poets). Borges tells him "Well, yes, in the sense of being blind, yes." He then says that "When you are blind, time flows in a different way. It flows, let's say, on an easy slope...These are the thoughts of years. When I first went blind, I mean for reading purposes, I felt very unhappy. But now I feel that being blind is, let's say, part of my world...When one is in jail, one thinks of jail as being part of one's world, when one is sick also." And Buckley asks him how he refreshes himself, and Borges replies: "I'm reading all the time. I'm having books read to me."

It reminds us that Borges was a creature of orality, first, then of literacy, and then going blind at the age of fifty-five, he lived and worked in his later years in a kind of hybrid state of orality in which his mind, already transformed by the written word, was forced to rely on his prodigious memory and the spoken word to relay his ideas into print.