Dell Adams: Tolkien claims (in "A Secret Vice") that he wasn't the only soldier he knew who spent his time in the trenches constructing new languages.

TIL that the New Wave band DEVO was formed in response to the Kent State shootings. In 1970, co-founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis got serious about their idea of the "de-evolution" of the human race after Casale's friends Jeffrey Miller & Allison Krause were killed by OH national guards.

Reminds me of how almost all the French dadaists and surrealists were WWI veterans of the trenches seriously exploring alternatives to conventional thought and language.

Tolkien claims (in "A Secret Vice") that he wasn't the only soldier he knew who spent his time in the trenches constructing new languages.

You see it with the Post-Structuralists after WWII too - the idea that root of the madness lies between the world and how we process it through language.

Oh so that's what they were on about?

Yeah. “How did fascism happen?” is a very important part of that intellectual movement, but it’s the background of a whole lot of Western art of the era.

www.max-ernst.com/the-triumph-....

The Triumph of Surrealism, 1973 - by Max Ernstwww.max-ernst.com

Oh neat! This was a minor plot point in Fargo S2. [spoilers below] I didn't know that there was historical precedent. ... .. . [spoilers] There's a scene where a WWII vet reveals he is trying to create a universal human language to help avert future conflict and tragedy

The Bronner Soap guy too. He’s more esoteric religion, but it springs from being the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust: www.drbronner.com

Dr. Bronner's: The Original All-One Magic Soap and More!www.drbronner.com Vegan & cruelty-free products for your home, body & hair using the highest quality organic & fair trade, environmentally responsible ingredients.

And I suspect Esperanto would fit into this, too.

Speaking of Today I Learned. Wow.

Oh yeah. That final letter from his father has haunted me ever since I first read it.

Me too.

I met a Japanese artist trying to do something similar in response to Hiroshima.

It's also a major plot in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Though Skull Face's plans are the opposite. Using a virus that will kill anyone who speaks English, he plans to eliminate its strangehold on the world. Also the virus gives you super powers and he wants everyone to have nukes.

Which wraps back to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities - where the printing press and the act of reading your local and national “values” every day is how we created the modern nation state. In our heads every day, we make it real.

Maybe that's why Dada and Neo-Dada was so popular during the Usenet and BBS days?

Was it? I just thought everyone was having fun being weird.

I mean, them having fun being weird was also probably what drew them to Dada and Neo-Dada, but there was some thought that went into how Dada could be used on new communication technologies.

The Church of Euthanasia distributed self-consciously Dada literature over Usenet, and there was a ton of optimism about what the future of communication tech could hold. There was a lot of overlap between early hackers and the phone phreaker community.

textfiles.com/magazines/EU... If any of this interests anyone, I recommend checking out textfiles.com. They've got a really cool 80's E-Zine section at textfiles.com/magazines/, lot of neat stuff in there.

textfiles.com

archives.textfiles.com/magazines.zip Here's the download link for the whole Zine section. It's only about 100Mb, plain text is tiny and compresses really easily.

archives.textfiles.com

Thanks, looking forward to checking it out.

Thanks!