What a tumblog. Lots of great modern design and art. Compare to Will it Float.

DFW on language.

The New Critics had the same basic problem as Gove's Methodological Descriptivists: They believed that scientific meant the same thing as neutral or unbiased.

And

it's now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter's particular ideology. And the consequence of (a) and (b) is that there's no way around it — decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer's ideology.

And:

It isn't scientific phenomena they're tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are — to be blunt — moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an "authoritative" ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.

Humility is prerequisite.

I think part of what we’re trying to do with the Books is to break the back of language, to bend it until it snaps and then examine the pieces to see what of it’s essence remains. Poets and songwriters have been in business so long, trying to say things in just the perfect way that they’ve crowded out the front door to meaning which is all tightly locked up by cliches. Essentially we’re looking for the back way around. So it’s really heartening to find a site like freetranslation.com that so egolessly shreds language like it’s making a vat of sauerkraut out of your precious word cabbages.

The Books are essentially the spirit of the age in song.

Inspiring work. Very post-modern.

Beautiful deconstructionist facets.