Glossolalia

UbuWeb is an indie resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts: www.ubu.com.

I can nerd out on this site for hours - Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Lacan... see you in a few weeks.

I'm digging the ethnopoetic section. Nice to see a little hommage to 'ole Gertie. I've been a fan of her for years. Her punctuation-less rumination on writing is amazing.

Wondering what the image is all about? Well, it's a Shaker drawing. They documented their "visions" in this manner. I like pictographs - sometimes our alphabet limits, expecially when you're trying to capture something as ephemeral as a "vision".

Shakers, I'm just finding out, are a fascinating offshoot of the Quaker movement. But unlike the Oat Heads, Shakers aren't about marriage and kids, and their rituals consist of trembling, shouting, dancing, shaking, singing, and glossolalia (this is one of my favourite words along with word salad.) And they invented all these nifty items: the screw propeller, Babbitt metal, the circular saw, the clothespin, the flat broom and the wheel-driven washing machine. What a great Christian cult.