Post About Parodies Constructed Entirely of Self-Referential Utterances


Question to blog readers inquiring about similar examples for other media.

Obligatory credit to Metafilter.


doubting if other media, like the written word, are amenable to self-referential utterance fun.

realizing this post and comment disprove last statement.

resigning to submit comment anyway.


Comment expressing appreciation for post.


I heard this once on TV, no idea who it was singing it though:

When you’re singing a blues song, you always sing the first line twice.
Oh, when you’re singing a blues song, you always sing the first line twice.
And along about the second line, anything that rhymes will suffice.

Richard


Oh, here’s another one for your collection: Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Richard


Richard, isn’t that the same link I started with?

But here’s another example: The Song that Goes Like This.


Richard, isn’t that the same link I started with?

Hah, yes, so it is! For some reason, I began reading at “apology for posting twice” and missed it; I guess I must have thought that this first line was the first one you were posting twice about (sigh).

Oh well, life wouldn’t be life without embarrassment.

The idea of using abstractions instead of content is an old one, of course, but they’re surprisingly hard to track down. I wonder if there are any examples where the lines are the polar opposite of what they describe? That might be quite interesting.

Richard


a standard art school exercise was : draw something without drawing it. Remember being set a pineapple, one of the smarties drew a can (of pineapple).

Steven J Gould years ago made the point that in modern Greek a meta-phor is… a removal truck.


The ultimate self-referential utterance may perhaps be Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1509), a parody of a formal encomium in which Folly personified delivers a speech in praise of herself, the content of which is by definition folly, and at the same time full of recognizable truths about human folly.


Interesting interview in New Scientist with Kees van Deemter on Vaugeness

Will the web need Vagueness?

As we move toward a semantic web where the formal representations are symbolic, the challenge is to figure out how to represent vague or gradable things, such as “affordable” housing or “ancient” monuments.

In all of Cézanne’s most perfect representations of the experience of reality, there are blank ‘unfinished’ patches, without these unfinished patches the picture would not be complete.