Seeled

Developing Genius: Or, Plans for the Present

2010-08-26T11:15:00.000-05:00

Well, she's here. Yesterday was Gabriella's one month birthday and she celebrated by crapping herself in the most explosive manner. Also, she recited the first 3 lines of sonnet 141:

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise.

Most people would not have been able to understand her, but that is only because of their relative lack of brainpower. My kid's a genius.

So what about that list?

I suppose to require her to adhere directly to the list would imply that I had the intellectual and physical capacity to plan the path of success and world domination (logically--I put the list together, so I had to have been able to think up the process by which she could become the first great American author/take over the world/become a hermit/etc). However, this can't be the case as I have not fulfilled the list myself. Therefore, there must be some room for improvement.

I know I just compromised my life's declaration, viz. I am smarter and better than everyone else, but she is my progeny, and with my immense genetic development, I am sure to evolve more rapidly than most mammals. In other words, she's going to be smarter, better, and faster than me.

So what does the present hold? She is currently singing Mussorgsky's The Nursery progression. Perhaps her life does not hold a literary or spiritual bent. She may have some musical talent.

Who am I kidding, My genetic pool has NO musical talent whatsoever. But the fact that she is singing in Russian certainly cheers me up!

Women

2010-07-23T07:27:00.000-05:00

Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to. They're crap.... They inevitably wimp out and go suckle something.

- Neil French

Vuvuzelas in Golf?

2010-06-19T21:03:00.001-05:00

I think golf would be the perfect game to introduce the Vuvuzela--lots of men with grimaces and focused looks playing with long sticks and wrinkly balls, occasionally grunting or vocalizing deep-throatedly as others stand around staring at their postures, the length of their "drive" and their ability to put the balls in the holes--definitely makes me want to toot a phallic horn...

Also, the nature of my last two posts somewhat worries me.

Literary Joke of the Day

2010-05-30T19:21:00.001-05:00

A Pathetic Fallacy is when a naturally lifeless object is treated as having human traits; a Phallic Patheticy is when a human object is naturally lifeless and not straight.

Satan's Child Revealed

2010-04-27T21:51:00.000-05:00

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

Now if only our professors and business executives could figure this one out, the world might be a smarter place.

With Boldness and Italicization

2010-04-13T09:51:00.001-05:00

I am no longer involved in extensive academic writing nor reading others' essays, however I was writing something this morning and was horrified at my lack of linguistic integrity. I seem to have forgotten my freshman rhetoric course which emphasized the fact that words, if used correctly, speak for themselves.

Basically, I was writing something and felt like I needed to put a particular phrase in bold or italics. WTF. If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top.

Take for example my last sentence, "If your main emphasis in a paragraph, sentence, or 20 page essay is placed correctly and properly surrounded by appropriate language, the words will rise to the top." This sentence ends in a major letdown. I begin by highlighting the subject of the sentence, the "main emphasis". I follow it by examples and secondary premises, leading to a crescendo after the final comma. Then I end with a lack of precision in the word choice. It would be more effective to end with a concise conclusion, reiterating the knowledge that the audience has already discerned. Instead, I use a semi-metaphorical cliche that leads the reader's mind in another direction. I could have used any number of conclusions, like "the meaning will become apparent."

However, my lack of experience in writing and continued inability to express myself concisely sometimes leads me to write like I speak. I try to slip in commas and semi-colons, hyphens and periods when they are not needed. I bold or italicize words and phrases that I want the audience to remember. Of course, I refuse to fall into the horrid trap of using three exclamation points or all CAPS when making a point, but what I do is almost worse.

So how should I solve it? First, I should use less words whenever possible. Why expound on something without a rhetorical purpose? Yes, sometimes it is necessary to repeat in a different form what you say in order to re-emphasize your point. At the same time, a simple 7 word sentence in the midst of 4-line monsters can stand out perfectly.

Second, every word should be considered in all its purposes. Does the word rise or fall phonetically? Is it a stop, plosive, or fricative? Do the following words complement the focus?

Third, consider all points of grammatical structure, punctuation in particular. Is the main purpose of the sentence separated by a comma, led into by a run-on phrase, broken by hyphens, followed by a period, ended with a question mark? How do I want the phrase to be read?

There are many other ways to emphasize a point or word, but the reality is that the audience will be ultimate receptor. They will discern by means of their experience and faculty of logic. How much grammatical hand-holding do they need? Many times what I think is the "purpose" of the paper/essay/sentence will be entirely moot to the audience, but I can influence their decision.

Naiveté and Greatness

2010-03-30T15:51:00.002-05:00

Yes, another post about myself. Remember, "to be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself."

I am exceedingly naive. Especially when it comes to reading and understanding books--whether philosophy, literary theory, or pure fiction. I often love or hate a book, phrase, thought, or image without any knowledge whatsoever about the author. Sometimes this gets me into trouble.

For example: I am an unabashed fan of Martin Heidegger. I decided to bring in a comment about Heidegger and "Being" during a conversation (admittedly sophomoric) about sub-strains of generic existentialism in modern Christianity. I was consequently shunned from the rest of the conversation for sympathizing with a Nazi.

Please remember that I qualified the discussion as sophomoric, so you can't really give much credit to the crowd or the conversation that ensued, but it is an example of my common way of thinking. Another time, in a Graduate class on Shakespeare's Tragedies, while discussing the "Rape of Lucrece", I brought up something about the Neo-Platonic imagery in the poem and was immediately shot down, as that seems to be an observation that has been made about 30 trillion times in the great land of Academia.

Well, I don't care. I would prefer to be somewhat naive about the things I read (not knowing that Emerson was a Transcendentalist, Marquez and Rushdie Magical Realists, etc.) than know about it going into the story. I don't like carrying prejudices into my reading. If I do, I will judge the material based on what I know going in and not on its own merit. I guess this goes against more mainstream literary criticism, but even if I were to critique a work of literature or poem, I would rather not know the history. I don't want to know that Ginsberg was a homosexual before I read "Howl". Not because I will judge it more positively or negatively on that basis, but because I will begin to read things into it even in the first line. It is extremely difficult to break myself of knowledge if I do have it.

People of Refinement and an Old-School Blonde Joke.

2010-02-04T12:29:00.001-06:00

People of refinement have a disinclination to colours. This may be owing partly to a weakness of sight, partly to the uncertainty of taste, which readily takes refuge in absolute negation. Women now appear almost universally in white and men in black.

The female sex in youth is attached to rose-colour and sea-green, in age to violet and dark-green. The fair-haired prefer violet, as opposed to light yellow, the brunettes, blue, as opposed to yellow-red, and all on good grounds.

Theory of Colours - Goethe, #841 & 840

Satire's Bleak Outlook

2010-02-04T12:10:00.001-06:00

At first blush, it may seem that Bleak House is a satire. Let us see. If a satire is of little aesthetic value, it does not attain its object, however worthy that object may be. On the other hand, if a satire is permeated by artistic genius, then its object is of little importance and vanishes with its times while the dazzling satire remains, for all time, as a work of art. So why speak of satire at all?

The study of the sociological or political impact of literature has to be devised mainly for those who are by temperament or education immune to the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature.

--Vladimir Nabokov on Bleak House

Of Course Not and Other Conundrums

2010-01-22T11:39:00.000-06:00

Fundamental to this view of the relation between text and culture, then, is a refusal to allow any rigid distinction between the inside and the outside of a work. To study literature is to study culture, but, conversely, to understand literature, we have to understand a culture. Literary study is of value in this account because it leads to a fuller cultural understanding but, equally, it is this understanding that informs the reading of the literary text. There may appear to be a certain circularity to this explanation, but it is better to think of it as another version of the chiasmus that I quoted from Louis Montrose in the 'Why Greenblatt?' chapter. Greenblatt's thinking here may be rendered as: culture produces literature and literature produces culture. Thinking of literature in terms of culture allows the critic to see the ways in which culture may be seen as both inside and outside literature.

-From Stephen Greenblatt by Mark Robson...and of course there is no "circularity to the explanation", rather, it is the explanation that encircles the thing explained. Conversely, it is Greenblatt's very understanding of culture that helps us to understand Robson's explanation of the understanding.

New Subtitle and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #14

2009-12-18T12:48:00.000-06:00

Scratch that last note, my new subtitle will be "How To Pretend To Be A Genius". What do you think?

TURN OFF THE NEWS

anxiety gallops through chatter
fading century’s martial insanities
brain struggles to sum up “shut up”
articulation fails
walking shadow slides across faces

dusk over epitaphs
ash hair rusty litanies

dead friends and rain
paradise is an idiot
bones vines cold day
old vulture in airlock

scorpion dust
sneeze

-Anselm Hollo (Poet Anti-Laureate of the U.S.)

More Erudite Ramblings

2009-12-10T22:10:00.004-06:00

I am thinking of changing the subtitle of my blog to match that of my friend, bjorniavelli, who is "Less Humble Than Others", with a slight change. It would then read, "So Vastly and Supremely More Humble than You, You Just Wouldn't Believe It."

Since I am so well learned in the ways of becoming and maintaining the status of household Genus, I will enlighten you with some of my hard-earned and always humble wisdom:

To be, or to be believed to be, a Genus, you must adopt an objective viewpoint of the world...and a rather subjective viewpoint of yourself. Take for example a young man, say in his mid-or-early-twenties, who works in a rather affluent suburb. He often sees middle-aged women in Cadillac or Lexus SUVs in the drive-thru of his local Starbucks and thinks to himself, "Why are all these women so obnoxiously self-absorbed and stupid to be buying coffee from this company every day? I mean, their coffee is so notoriously bad and their atmosphere is so blatantly anti-rational (I mean for crying out loud, they sell Sufjan Stevens, The Beatles, and A Charlie Brown Christmas all on the same counter!) and so unbelievably corporate, yet hypocritically "socially-concious", and faux-artsy, and--" then he interrupts his thoughts to pay for the coffee.

See, it is the innner conundrums of the Genus' mind that make him what he is. He is not a hypocrite; a hypocrite is one who uses the same rules to mean different things in different situations. He is a realist--he understands he can't expect everyone to live by the necessarily objective rules of life, rises above the despair of the nihilist, simultaneously denounces the Absurdist absenteeism, and becomes what can only be known by one who is also a Genus: that Other, which other than which cannot be thought not to exist (take that Anselm the blunderer!).

Plans for the Future

2009-12-03T10:36:00.000-06:00

When one's significant other adopts the status of impregnation, one tends to reflect in ways that are not necessarily common to his nature. In some cases this takes the form of planning for the future. I have compiled a list of things to be accomplished by my offspring in chronological order. Assuming I do not perish in childbirth or the assistance thereof, I will provide this list to the little growth upon its ingression. I may return to the subject after further reflection, but as my mood stands, the chemical depository must:

Speak in full sentences before it can walk
Swim at least 2 legal strokes before it is weaned
Sleep 8 hours a night or learn to cry "mama", not "aaah"
Recognize the difference between a trope and a theme before it recognizes the difference between milk and juice
Learn to read before it learns to change the channel
Potty train itself by age 1
Know how to mix a good drink or to open a beer
Select an appropriate mate
Select an appropriate pre-school with fast-track liberal arts focus and college choices posted on the wall
Learn to fail in appropriate circumstances so as to undermine and disguise its inherent genius
Learn to cheat only when it already knows the answers, but has more important things to do in life than simple mathematics or scientific equations
Learn to appreciate the plight of the lunch-lady, yet despise her insolent ungratefulness
Stay out of petty arguments by means of erudite sarcasm cleverly disguised as "pussying out"
Know the appropriate moment in which to establish dominance in social situations
Graduate Kindergarten in the middle of the class
Read every book in the house before getting a new one from the Library
Be able to adequately explain in concise detail the central purpose of any book or be forced to read it again
Spend all of second grade in silence and learn the distinction between false humility and vain conceit
Successfully accomplish the requirements for the USA Junior National Team
Describe in detail the intricate relationship between Farmer and Samurai in Kurosawa's films
Build a little empire out of some crazy garbage called the blood of the exploited working class.
Skip fourth grade
Learn not to ask why everyone else is so slow to realize that it is indeed the rightful ruler of the world out loud
Spend the next twelve years in college studying and appreciating the minute pleasures of life.

By this time, the brood will be of age and wisdom enough to return to its mate and determine its path of success. At this point it will have many options:

Become the first great American author
Write an exposition of the modern English language that reveals how inferior it is in comparison to modern Russian
Win 9 Gold medals at the Olympic games
Become a hermit
Birth a child
Take over the world
Destroy the world

Any final realization, or all of them, is acceptable.

Bauerlein's Irony

2009-11-27T07:07:00.001-06:00

Maybe he was serious. Maybe he was up late downing pots of coffee because he felt obligated to squeak out some form of intellectual commentary on the state of higher education. Maybe he knew what he was doing and knew it was flippin' hilarious. Whatever the case, Mark Bauerlein of the Chronicle of Higher Education made me chuckle this morning. In an article about the apparent lack of aesthetics in the ever-increasing vocational age and college students' inability to write palatable sentences, he writes this:

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things. That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .). And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

(emphasis mine). I find this last sentence utterly hilarious in its own right, but the entire article is like this--short, pointless sentences with no imagery, flair, metaphor, or balance...

As Predicted

2009-11-20T08:43:00.001-06:00

Remember back when I wrote about the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind. People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

Well, now it's been released, and every publisher and reviewer out there is following my predictions to the letter, viz.:

Before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and now Nabokov's son, Dmitri, is releasing them to the world, though after reading the book, readers will wonder if the Lolita author is laughing or turning over in his grave.

Every review I have read concerns the nature of the release more than the actual content of the book. I am dismayed, but not surprised.

Dystopia in Kentucky

2009-10-16T22:00:00.000-05:00

A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

More here.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #13

2009-10-16T21:45:00.000-05:00

Prologue to the Adagios Quartet

One narrow world that might be anywhere; but, for you,
it's here and it's now, now. Palest full moon in the window,
muted blue-grey shadows, smoke coiling within
variegated scintillae of light.

Just lie there.

Don't move.

That's good. Nothing like a man who can follow
the figures of beauty, fathom the fingers, the splaying
of light. Your hands are beautiful, smooth
and worn, firm and supple, a hint of moisture
glancing off the wet plucked eye suspended in the balance,
in the frame, and yes, I'm calling your name, seeking, seeking, speaking
from experience, from what I know you crave; so, come,
here, now. I know what you need and you know how good
it can feel, giving yourself over to the abandoning emptying
and to keep breathing, hot, like that, on the back of my neck. Man . . .

Did a dame ever have it so good, so easy, a place to worship,
a temple in which to slide moist lips and eloquent tongue narrating
a wordless world turning upsy-turvy placing these jewels
ever so gently between teeth, and time, and breathe,
hallelujah, breathe, breathe, breathe. Wild and wondrous
before this fragility of need and it's heavenly to kneel,
desire flickering defiantly among stilled shiftings of forever,
lovely so opened, awake in my mouth. And, you know,

it's the rhythm,
it's the glide and sway, it's you moving with me and I with you
tasting the sweet explosions spectacularly cascading
across the moon drifting slowly
out of this poem, this frame, this time, air porous
with inevitability, menace and caress held at bay, thighs tangling
in strands of the futureless future guttering
among shafts of light and yes, that's it and that's all.

- Judith Fitzgerald gives an interesting assemblage of notes to her poem on her website.

The Pangrammatic News Continues!

2009-10-15T13:35:00.001-05:00

Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJ IQ

General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, Jr. found out on Wednesday morning that his knowledge of his home state was shabby to say the least. When taking the online NJ IQ challenge, the retired General was amazed to discover that the most mall-per-capita city in the US was not indeed Hackensack as he thought. This came as a major disappointment to him, though he soon recovered when he found something to be proud of, viz., that Ben Stiller was definitely NOT born in NJ. Of course the military leader was quick to punt the criticism onto someone else when reporters began quizzing him about his failure.

"You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself," he said with a glare.

Having been the top Army representative during the Gulf war, reporters asked him what he thought about the state of the current struggle. After pausing thoughtfully, he quipped, "Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion."

Tempestuous Procedures

2009-10-09T10:18:00.006-05:00

Sometime around 1610, Shakespeare penned The Tempest, one of his most famous and interesting works. Except he didn't really write it. At least not the whole thing. On his own. I dislike as much as anyone bickering and arguing about whether Mr. Shaxpere or Sir Bacon, or whomever the hell else might be involved actually wrote one play, sonnet, line, or word, but evidence in The Tempest is overwhelming. Yet this work remains, without the Author's explicit signature, one of the great literary masterpieces of all time. The work, whether we like it or not, is a great work, with or without Shakespeare's involvement. If it was completed by a court jester or a plebeian patch worker, or a bourgeois land-owner, our Marxist critics will have a bit of a time reading it, but they cannot deny its beauty (actually, the New World allusions, the dis-Utopian and power-play tendencies of the play make it quite a Marxist mayhem!).

I assume that I do not need to argue the point that The Tempest is a great work. Nor should I need to argue that it stands apart from its author(s). But consider this:

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

How can I logically read a Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov novel I know has been tampered with? Do I want to read it? I have become familiar with the authors based on the books I have read previously, and now it is quite difficult to overcome my desire to reject these posthumous offerings.

My reasons for not wanting to read these books are different than you may think. It is not because I want to preserve an aura of health and holiness around the author's oeuvre. I have come to terms with the fact that someone I have never heard of, who was chosen at random by Knopf's low-ranking no-name publisher, will finish Vlad's book. Nor do I really care whether he or Twain or Kafka requested that their stuff be burned (they should have burned it themselves, a fact which reduces their intelligence in my mind) after death. I don't want to read the books for the same reason I have never liked Michael Jordan--it's all a publicity stunt.

The Original of Laura, will cause more debate over its construction and publication than over its literary content. That pisses me off. The publisher is going to put the 138 index cards that the novel was penned on in perforated sheets so you can reconstruct the novel yourself. WTF. Lolita was written the same way. Can you imagine putting Humbert Humbert's reflections on innocence after his final encounter with Lola? Didn't think so. This is the most ridiculous marketing ploy in the history of mankind. People will do what I am doing now--they will berate the publishers, tear apart the novel before they have read it, then read it and pine for the last wishes of a great and dead white man--and the publishers will use it to make more fatuous and puerile productions to draw in those who have never before thought about reading a 500 page novel.

As Prospero says in the Epilogue to his play,

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I hope to God that the writings of average authors will stand above their stories and give good credit to the only name that will appear on the dust jacket (besides Alfred A. Knopf pub., or HarperCollins). That they may say, "What strength I have's mine own."

Beard-Off Conclusion

2009-10-06T10:57:00.002-05:00

The anticipation was overwhelming, I know. Due to a massive influx of visitors (I think 3 people visited the site over the past month, and only one was my mother!), the poll was successfully decisive. The best Literary Beard of all time is Henrik Ibsen!

The Humble and Defecatory Posture (and Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #12)

2009-10-06T10:51:00.002-05:00

Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious. Luther's shoes on the floor beneath the chamber pot, placid, possibly made of wood, Luther's 16th century shoes, awaiting epiphany. The mute quiescent suffering of generations of salesmen in the stalls of train-station johns, heads down, fingers laced, shined shoes inert, awaiting the acid gush. Women's slippers, centurion's dusty sandals, dock-worker's hobnailed boots, Pope's slippers. All waiting, pointing straight ahead, slightly tapping. Huge shaggy-browed men in skins hunched just past the firelight's circle with wadded leaves in one hand, waiting.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Shittard
Squitard
Crackard
     Turdous.
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
      on us.
Filthard
Cackard
Stinkard:
   St. Antonie's fire seize on
           thy toane,
If thy
Dirty
Dounby
     Thou do not wipe ere
            thou be gone.

Will you have any more of it? Yes, yes (answered Grangousier.) Then said Gargantua,

A ROUNDLAY
In shiting yesday I did know
The sesse I to my arse did owe:
The smell was such came from that slunk,
That I was with it all bestunk:
O had but then some brave Signor
Brought her to me I waited for,
in shiting:
I would have cleft her watergap,
And joyn'd it close to my flip-flap,
Whilest she had with her fingers guarded
My foule Nackandrow, all bemerded
in shiting.

Gargantua and Pantagruel - Francois Rabelais

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #11

2009-09-29T09:00:00.006-05:00

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time 
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, 
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time 
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

-Archibald MacLeish

Cure for the Swine Flu!

2009-09-26T22:11:00.001-05:00

I am going to a TMBG concert on the 10th of October (do what you will with their lyrics, I just like them), and this was on their website recently. At this concert, they will be playing the entirety of their album "Flood". I have never heard this album, and, though tempted, will not be purchasing it on iTunes before the show. Why? I like the idea of going to a concert and being interested, not singing along and bobbing my head. Do you think Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov had his audience listen to a pre-recorded portion of his music:

(By the way, this, along with part 5, is my favorite song of ALL TIME!!! Take the time to listen. I don't care what you are doing, this will improve your life more.)

Slavophilism Only Goes So Fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ar

2009-09-15T12:00:00.001-05:00

I am a self-proclaimed part-time Slavophile. I can't help it. If you offered me an American Cheeseburger or Russian Borscht, I'd take the Borscht--not because I like borscht (I've never actually tasted good borscht), but because its Russian. I would rather say "dos vidanya" than "goodbye". I didn't live through the Cold War and don't really care about Gorbachev (except that he was Russian). But I think I've reached my limit here.

Last Saturday I went with my wife to see Russian immigrant, Regina Spektor, in concert. Before then I was only passively in disdain of her songwriting style. I think, over the past few days, as I have heard the concert replayed on our iTunes account over 15 times, that disdain has grown into an active hatred. Let's check out her most popular song, one that has gotten over 12 million views on YouTube:

Really.

Let's follow the lyrics and ask logical questions of them. "I never loved nobody fully..." Hmmm... My ability to analyze lyrical writing just decreased dramatically by way of deficient brain function. What poetic ploy was she trying to pull by inserting the double negative? I am not very well versed in my Russian, but I think even an immigrant would resist the urge to bludgeon the listener with the first line.

"And by protecting my heart truly,/I got lost in the sounds." I am going to start protecting my heart falsely from now on, how about you? I also think if I were to write a song that garnered 12 million hits on YouTube I would avoid blinding cliches like getting lost in the music (or is it merely the random beating of your psychotic heart that you get lost in?).

We are intentionally skipping over the whole part about schizophrenia (by the way, one time Alex and I (and Liz) were trying to figure out which one of us was the true person and the others just parts of their personality, this after watching Identity). Although, I think she may just be coming out about her Idiot-Savant tendencies...

Then we come to the greatest lyrical moment of the song: "And it breaks my hea-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-art/When it breaks my heart." I think one of her personalities is a broken record. Or maybe she is just giving them each a chance to vent. Whatever the case, I think she is very correct in saying that this "it" (by which I am going to assume she means either the music (very fitting) or the lack of love?), breaks her heart when it breaks her heart. I think. The last time something broke my heart, it didn't break my heart. Maybe I didn't experience the right "it".

So, did anybody else think of the line in The Mummy Returns, where the guy says, "This is cursed, that is cursed! What is it with you and curses?" Suppose this, suppose that, what is it with Regina and suppositions? Well, I suppose I should never ever try to analyze a Regina Spektor song.

"All my friends say that of course/It's gonna get better" betta betta betta! Ah yes, those voices in her head give very good advice, don't they! If the voices in my head were all a bunch of yes-men, I would get some new imaginary friends to play with, but that's just me.

Well, after that we get to hear more of the beautiful ar-ar-ar-ar-ar-arting (coincidentally, I sing along to this part in a harmonic "and I break my fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-art". I am such a hypocrite!). There is a theme in Regina's songs where she likes to echo herself in random-m-m-m-m locations.

So maybe we are supposed to ignore the lyrics and just go for the nursery-style bouncing rhythm and childish tune. I dunno. Honestly, my Slavophilic tendencies led me to expect more out of an internationally trained daughter of Russian musicians. I am convinced she was a genius before they forced her to move to New York.

While I love Russia, I have a secret (and not uncommon) vendetta against Canada. Yet recently I've been replaying the history of Spain's expatriate king, who apparently has chosen to reside in the unfortunate Great White North. Maybe the stick-in-your-head kind of tune (reminiscent of my dad's 80s A Capella records) helps keep Regina's bleating out.

Maybe I like it just because I have always wanted to joke around with the OPEC leaders, or drive a Zamboni.

On a side note, Regina's music seems to be somewhat "anti-folk" indie-pop, a style that almost recalls Keane, yet she cannot legally be clad in indie armor, as she has signed with both WB and Disney (she had a song in the Prince Caspian disaster last year). Definitely defines "sold out".

Nativity of the Theotokos (also Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #10)

2009-09-08T10:38:00.002-05:00

"The Mother of God"

The threefold terror of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terror of all terrors that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's blood stop
Or strikes a Sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

-W.B. Yeats

"Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell"

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food--fish and a honeycomb.

-Denise Levertov

Subjective Halos

2009-09-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

Halos may be divided into subjective and objective. The latter will be considered under physical colours; the first belong here. These are distinguished from the objective halos by the circumstance of their vanishing when the point of light which produces them on the retina is covered.

Theory of Colours - Goethe, #89

Sundry Thoughts

2009-08-31T20:43:00.003-05:00

Form, of course, does not exist in a vacuum. It is not an abstraction. In thinking of form we should keep in mind the following matters that relate to its context:
Poems are written by human beings and the form of a poem is an individual's attempt to deal with a specific problem, poetic and personal.
Poems come out of a historical moment, and since they are written in language, the form is tied to the whole cultural context.
Poems are read by human beings, which means that the reader, unlike a robot must be able to recognize the dramatic implications of the form.

From the preface of Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, 3rd ed.

I found the above book, which I have wanted for many, many years (5 to be exact) in the 50 cent section of the Evanston Public Library. I love pillaging.

Similarly, I was reading an article on David Jones' The Anathemata and thinking about the nature of poetry and poetic criticism. The Symbolists of the early 20th Century would have us believe that poetry brings to life the dualism inherent in all things; the physical and the spiritual; the natural and the transcendental; the utile and the artistic. This school of thought is often known by its catch phrase, "Art for Art's sake." In After the New Criticism, Frank Lentricchia relegates to the New Critics a role of similar dualism. This common misconception is merely an age-old failure to understand the concept of incarnation. Rather than a gnostic separation of the material and the divine, the New Criticism would seek to show how the primary experience is deified in the poem by a re-structuring or re-making of the experience, in a sort of reverse incarnational activity. I may be entirely wrong, but my understanding of what little reading in Understanding Poetry I have done leads me to believe that the Formal approach to a poem leads to an understanding of the poem that does not directly relate back to primary reality--not because it ignores primary reality, but because, in the case of the poem, what actually existed at the time of the poem has been transfigured and immortalized to such an extent that to read it in (or read into it) a static setting (temporally and otherwise) would eliminate its incarnational status in the same way as trying to define the very instant in which the sacrament of the Eucharist is complete is also self-defeating.

I do not know enough about these things to continue, so I will end with a quotation from Gregory Dix, an Anglican theologian:

The whole pre-Nicene church was obviously not just denying the evidence of its senses about the bread and wine in pursuit of a phrase when it spoke of the Eucharist as being in very fact that Body and Blood of Christ which was born and crucified for us. The explanation of its almost crudely "realistic" language lies, it seems to me, in two things. First, we have to take account of the clear understanding then general in a largely Greek-speaking church of the word anamnesis as meaning a "re-calling" or "re-presenting" of a thing in such a way that it is not so much regarded as being "absent," as itself presently operative by its effects.... Secondly, and perhaps chiefly, the explanation lies in the universal concentration of pre-Nicene ideas about the eucharist upon the whole rite of the eucharist as a single action, rather than upon the matter of the sacrament in itself, as modern Westerns tend to do.

The Shape of the Liturgy, Gregory Nix, 2nd ed., found in "Incarnation Reconsidered: The Poem as Sacramental Act in "The Anathemata" of David Jones", Kathleen Henderson Staudt, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 26, No.1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 1-25

Reporting Folly

2009-08-08T17:28:00.004-05:00

I generally avoid reading newspapers and current events stories, but a few days ago I unintentionally clicked on a link on my wife's homepage and was taken to an article about the recent helicopter tragedy. This piece of reporting, if it can be called that, is horrific in its pure absurdity. The first sentence of the article, where the poor New Jerseyans were forced "to scamper for cover" evokes frightened mice in a Godzilla-style mishap. The need to report the Mayor's prognosis that "the collision...was 'not survivable'" almost seems like a line from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, especially for the poor "thousands of people enjoying a crystal clear summer day." Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, the reporter insists that "this time, there was no miracle," and the Mayor chimes in with, "This is not going to have a happy ending." I am truly appalled.

NEW YORK – A small plane collided with a sightseeing helicopter carrying Italian tourists over the Hudson River on Saturday, scattering debris in the water and forcing people on the New Jersey waterfront to scamper for cover. Authorities believe all nine people aboard the two aircraft were killed.
...
The collision, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg said was "not survivable," happened just after noon and was seen by thousands of people enjoying a crystal-clear summer day from the New York and New Jersey sides of the river.
...
But this time, there was no miracle.
"This is not going to have a happy ending," Bloomberg said. Hours after the collision, he said he thought it fair to say "this has changed from a rescue to a recovery mission."

Going into The Gloom

2009-08-03T20:30:00.005-05:00

In Timur Bekmambetov's (Nightwatch, Daywatch, Wanted, and interestingly enough, a Tim Burton children's film this summer!) Nightwatch, only spiritually gifted "others" can enter into what is called "The Gloom", wherein spiritually light or dark actions carry significant clout and affect the state of the world.

In Met. Jonah's recent speech to an ACNA (Anglican Church in North America) convention concerning unity, he quippingly described Orthodoxy as "a bunch of people who like to gather for colorful quaint rituals in the sacred gloom."

Funny, but it seems as though I remember overhearing many of the visitors to my parish describe it that way as they were leaving...

Beard-Off

2009-08-02T22:19:00.005-05:00

In Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine keeps pictures of Literary figures with beards up on his wall to inspire him. Being among the most juvenile humans alive, I propose a Beard-Off. Check out the beards in the Picasa web album, then vote in the poll. Who has the best beard?

When voting, keep in mind that amazing handlebar mustaches, beautiful sideburns, and roaring goatees are on a competitive level. Feel free to proffer your own missed author of literary significance. The first two are Homer and Doestoevsky.

Do you think Phelps is Sexy?

2009-07-28T11:03:00.002-05:00

Admit it, you've looked at the body of a swimmer at the Olympics and either said to yourself "I want to be that" or "I want that." No one can argue that swimmers have the best, most natural bodies in the world. Runners tend to be more legs than arms, weightlifters are grotesquely over-featured, baseball players and football players eventually get fat, but swimmers are the main course. So what about the last Olympics? Was everyone disappointed that the swimmers all wore big body suits that covered everything?

I noticed that all the major highlights all involved Phelps with his suit rolled down to his hips...

The World Championships are going on right now and Swimming's international governing body (FINA) has decided to (yes in the middle of the most important competition outside the Olympics!) eliminate all full body suits from international competition FOREVER. So get your TVs adjusted, the guys will be rolling out the six packs (or eight packs) again. The males will now be limited to a Jammer, or tight shorts.

Unfortunately, Fina will still allow women to wear "knees to shoulder" coverage, sorry no Bikinis, guys.

The Spawn of Frogs!!!

2009-07-28T10:51:00.003-05:00

Hypochondriacs frequently see dark objects, such as threads, hair, spiders, flies, wasps. These appearences also exhibit themselves in the incipient hard cataract. Many see semi-transparent small tubes, forms like wings of insects, bubbles of water of various size, which fall slowly down, if the eye is raised: sometimes these congregate together so as to resemble the spawn of frogs; sometimes they appear as complete spheres, sometimes in the form of lenses.

Theory of Colours - Goethe, #119

Merton on Desire for Directed Religion

2009-07-11T20:28:00.004-05:00

From the high, gray, expensive tower of the Rockefeller Church, huge bells began to boom. It served very well for the 11:00 mass of the little brick church of Corpus Christi. What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in one place together, more conscious of God than of one another; not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

From The Seven Storey Mountain-Thomas Merton

Drew's Back!!!

2009-06-22T20:37:00.004-05:00

Drew has finally revived his blog, and there are some rumors that other former Ante-Occidents may return in force!! Here is an excerpt from the Paradoxicon. An inescapably intelligent man, Drew lends a heavy weight of honor to any conversation.

In particular, I am curious about Luther's view of the Doctrine of Justification, and how it relates to Predestination on one side, and Sacramental Grace on the other. In a word, the question is, What does "Justification by Faith Alone" mean in Lutheranism?

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #9

2009-06-19T21:29:00.001-05:00

"Daddy"
by: Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Another Pangramatic World News Update!!!

2009-06-15T20:26:00.003-05:00

While Suez sailors wax parquet decks, Afghan Jews vomit jauntily abaft.

The Somali Pirates really had a jolt when they ran across a ship packed with a random conglomeration of Egyptians and recent Jewish converts. Puzzled, they sailed on, leaving the bunch to their own wiles. Convincing the captain of the "Akiiki Benjamin" to sit down for an interview was impossible, but a few of the sailors and passengers offered words that explained unequivocally their experiment.

"We began this voyage as an attempt at brotherly union, a sort of imposed peace," said Joseph Abrahamas, "I think it has worked out quite--excuse me!" His rush to the stern was cut short by a torrent of violent hurls that left the recently waxed decks covered with last night's lamb stew.

Shenti Wakashem rolled his eyes and exclaimed, "These Jews won't stop vomiting! We wax on, we wax off, and they uncontrollably find the one clean spot to puke on!"

Raw Feeling

2009-06-14T16:50:00.002-05:00

Well, it's the end of spring and the "meteorologist's summer" (measured June-August), but it doesn't quite feel like it here in Chicago. I was outside three days straight for a little over 2.5 hours each time (both early morning and early evening) and each day the temperature was hovering between 49 and 53. Utterly awful. Yet today as I drove home from a meet, there were literally thousands of people along the shoreline on a beautiful 75 degree sunny day. I hate the fact that when I have to be outside it is just brutal, and so idyllic on the days I am inside. Oh well, I guess I can blame Murphy for that one.

While at the meet, I had an opportunity to brag on myself when a volunteer asked me if I was still in high school. I found myself describing my life in terms of my academic success instead of merely stating my age. I told her, "No, I actually am part-way through my masters", to which her surprised response was, "In what?" This job I have now is a significant change in my entire lifestyle. I find myself more and more realizing just how different it is to be an Age Group swim coach than a Teaching Assistant and student of English. I find that each of the two disparate sides of my existence often come into conflict--the academic me, loving literature for what it is and being able to debate it on a semi-intellectual level with those on the same wavelength as I am, and the newly-formed mostly-practical coaching side.

Obviously I am well-suited to either pursuit--I grew up with kids, know how to see things outside their respective parameters, and have a constant energy that I can learn to use in motivating young children; and I read an immense amount from before I can remember, always interested in the opposite sides of arguments, beginning and ending debates, and reading some more.

I guess my dilemna is common and at this point I guess I could say I am lucky to have my life before me, but still I fear I must raise the question as to how compatible these two lifestyles are. I fully intend to return to school ASAP, yet I wish to continue full-time coaching. Should I fully dedicate myself to one or the other in neglect of the other? Or should I continue my current plan of doing both in the best way I can?

This is definitely my most personal post yet, and I will certainly follow it up with some irregular poetry (or is it the timing that is irregular? or the exposure?).

Pangramatic World News Update!!!

2009-06-07T17:11:00.006-05:00

Forsaking monastic tradition, twelve jovial friars gave up their vocation for a questionable existence on the flying trapeze.

Two Tibetan monks represented the far east.

I caught up with one of 6 Franciscans who seemed to have found his true calling. "Really," he told me, "I felt like a stone on the ground, but now I feel light as air. Wheee!"

Here is a sketch of a Lay Brother from the Prayer Foundation, as he was moving too fast for a photo.

And this Orthodox monk seemed to have finally reached Theosis.

Etherealization

2009-06-07T16:48:00.005-05:00

In college, a friend of mine wrote a paper on how society seeks to etherealize every aspect of life--communication, hardware, even human interaction reduced, reduced, and reduced again, with the end goal being what software is, a mere "specter", or imaginary thing. In a response to Derrida's Specters of Marx, Antonio Negri began to analyze from the perspective of the "Marxist-Deconstructionist" divide:

When the analysis passes from the hermeneutic and ontological viewpoint to the experience of the political, the picture given is terrible. The conspiracy against Marxism and the world evangilization of the free market, the construction of the global power 'without place' and 'without time', the structuring of the 'end of history', the media's colonization of consciousness and the impoverishment in the quality of work, the emptying out of meaning from the word 'democracy'--within individual countries and in international relations--these represent only a few of the hegemonic orders of capitalism in one phase of the spectral reconstruction of the real. How does one circulate within this new determination of being? .... It's at this crucial point that a discourse on ethical resisitance unravels, one that reflects on the experience of the gift and of friendship, that feels a certain affinity with the messianic spirit and reaffirms the undeconstructability of the idea of justice.

"The Specter's Smile" - Antonio Negri, in Ghostly Demarcations - Derrida, Eagleton, Jameson, Negri et al

While I don't agree with all of Negri's commentary (particularly his insistence upon the exploitaion and suffering of the Marxist agenda, though there is a certain worldwide sense of fear towards the extreme leftist end of things), one can empathize with a certain spirit of hesitancy to do away with that which is tangible. For me this was a semi-nostalgic desire to retain my cd collection and resist the wave of ipodification that swept the world in the past 5 years.

And the Fastest Way Between Two Points is...

2009-06-01T22:20:00.002-05:00

Chapter 1, dimension two, is very elementary. Secondary school students should be able to appreciate it, but we think that, even if you know already what meridians and parallels are, you will enjoy the spectacle of the Earth rolling like a ball !
...
Mathematician Heinz Hopf explains his "fibration". Using complex numbers he constructs pretty patterns of circles in space.

My friend the Teddy Bear pointed me to this site on his Facebook account (god I hate that site!)

Comments on Location in Lear

2009-06-01T21:45:00.003-05:00

While one can pull many quotes out of Lear to discuss and, by use of synecdoche, claim that each exemplifies the whole play, it is not as simple to do nor as defensible as in many of Shakespeare’s other plays. As in the others, the first thing to be taken into account must be the statement; second the speaker; and finally the context (an inversion of this order might be suggested, but it would not be as simple to explain, nor would it make sense until the conclusion).

However, in Lear, the latter consideration must be almost the greatest focus. For the complex situations in which the characters find themselves often lends to a confusion of context. For example, any of the statements of the Fool could be taken as such and regarded as reversals of tradition merely because of his role as the fool. However, when the situation has already been reversed (as when Lear bears “thine ass upon thy back” or makes “thy daughters thy mothers”), the role of the fool is not only to point out the situation at hand, but to create a reversal of the inverted situation.

In other words, when the fool speaks in the context of Lear’s madness, he is not merely speaking the truth in riddles, but speaking it from the midst of a riddle. Thus the role of place, context, and plot act in this play as figures of greater import than in Macbeth or Othello. In fact, location itself must be the key determinate in interpreting the statements of any character in this play.

For example, the short scene V.ii takes place in a “field between the two camps.” The exchange between Gloucester and Edgar here becomes not only representative of the “ill thoughts” (V.ii.9) in the play, but also the lack of established relationship; Edgar says, “Give me thy hand”, but Gloucester says that “a man may rot even here.” Thus, the location takes an integral role in showing the lack of safety in conventionally accepted places of truth.

By the way, my favorite Shakespeare quote of all time is in this play. I just love the last line of Edmund's soliloquy, read loudly and viciously:

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #8

2009-05-26T22:32:00.002-05:00

"Skunk Hour"
For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

-Robert Lowell

"The Armadillo"
For Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars --
planets, that is -- the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft! -- a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

-Elizabeth Bishop

Whatever happened to Zoot Suits?

2009-05-22T14:03:00.005-05:00

I have avoided posting things about swimming, mainly because my target audience has little background on the subject, but not much background is needed to appreciate the vicious verbal attacks of some of swimming's most famous and (in some cases) respected people. A little background doesn't hurt though:

For the past year or so things have been escalating in the swimming world concerning the legality of the new suits, which are in some ways performance-enhancing. There is merit to both sides of the argument and far too many voices out there for me to have much to say on the subject.

Fred Bousquet is the fastest human in the water of all time, since he shattered the world record in France while wearing a suit that has since been deemed illegal by FINA (the international body that governs swimming).

Brett Hawke is the head swim coach at Auburn who coaches Bousquet and 4 of the top 16 fastest swimmers ever.

Craig Lord is an experienced and respected member of the swimming community who writes for SwimNews.com.

The Screaming Viking is just a strange observer of all things swimming.

This is an article posted on the Viking's blog.

Honestly? Twitter takes on Dickens. And Christ.

2009-05-18T22:15:00.002-05:00

Classics by Charles Dickens, JD Sallinger and Jane Austen are among the novels to have been boiled down to a sentence by bookish readers of the micro-blogging site.
...
"What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets."

Read the rest of the article.

The Foreknown

2009-05-12T11:55:00.003-05:00

When you approach a work of literature, is it necessary to know everything about the topic that the author discusses? Do you have to have an intimate knowledge of the political background in order to experience the true depth of Richard II or Henry V? I don't think so. Yet if you follow the link on the right hand side of this page to the David Jones Society website you will find that those who run the society are more concerned with the atmosphere, life, and place of Jones' content than about the literature itself. They even offer a tour of David Jones' birthplace and places of interest in his literature. These founders and administrators of the society are considered the foremost scholars on the literature of David Jones (William Blisset, Thomas Dilworth, etc.), yet they seem very concerned with discovering the background and life of the works. This is quite bothersome.

I had hoped that Randy Malamud in this article would make a strong argument against "Literary Tourism", but it seemed as if he was afraid to confront the issue head-on and caved in to the whimperings of the masses who romanticize the places of an author's birth or his culture. Fuck culture. The true literary artist does not evoke culture, but the beauty and truth that are inherent in the subject. The place, the culture, the history is a medium of truth, not the truth itself. That's not all though: the artist portrays what he sees, not what is there. So even if you were to stand on the exact same spot, reenact the exact same scene, and set the exact same tone, would you experience the same truth as you would by reading the literature itself.

Okay, so literary tourism is overkill, but is it acceptable or even necessary to discover the history of a piece or understand the political background? Yes, in a sense. If you know the story of King Henry V, then you will more fully understand Henry V, why certain characters are significant, and the setting will be easier to grasp. But you cannot go back in time and find Falstaff, you can't return to the globe and see Prince Hal, and you certainly cannot recreate the experience of 1415 in such a way as to "truly feel and see" what Shakespeare depicts in the character of Pistol.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #7

2009-05-10T16:32:00.006-05:00

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted. They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.

-Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings

Unbelievable...

Property Relations in Mickey Mouse Cartoons

2009-05-04T21:41:00.004-05:00

Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.
The route taken by a file in an office is more like that taken by Mickey Mouse than by a marathon runner.
In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilisation.
Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.
These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.
Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatomospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them and Maeterlick or Mary Wigman. All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.
So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.

-from Walter Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse", 1931

Nostalgia

2009-04-27T21:10:00.002-05:00

The Japan post brought back some more fond memories:

The little prince sat down on a stone and looked up at the sky.
"I wonder," he said, "if the stars are lit up so that each one of us can find his own star again. Look at my planet. It is right above us...But how far away it is!"
"It is beautiful," said the snake; "why have you come here?"
"I am having some difficulties with a flower," the little prince replied.
"Oh!" said the snake.
And they remained silent.
"Where are the men?" said the little prince, at last resuming the conversation. "One feels rather lonely in the desert."
"It is just as lonely among men," said the snake.
The little prince gazed at him for a long time.
"You're a strange animal," he said at last. "You are as thin as a finger..."
"But I am more powerful than a king's finger," said the snake.
The little prince smiled. "You do not look very powerful...you don't even have paws...you cannot even travel."
"I can carry you farther than a ship," said the snake.
He twined himself around the little prince's ankle, like a golden bracelet.
"Whomever I touch I send back to the earth from which they came," he added. "But you are pure and innocent and come from a star."
The little prince said nothing.
"I feel sorry for you, so weak on this earth of granite. I may be able to help you one day, if you become too homesick for your own planet. I can..."
"Oh! I understand you perfectly," said the little prince. "But why do you talk in riddles all the time?"
"I solve them all," said the snake.
And they both fell silent.

This from the beautiful book by Atoine de Saint-Exupery.

Randosel

2009-04-27T12:08:00.004-05:00

Besides walking in lines while holding hands, wearing matching colored hats, or raising their arms as high as possible while crossing the street, Japanese school children also all have the same backpack: the Randoseru (or Randosel).

A commercial for the Randoseru:

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #6

2009-04-24T15:07:00.002-05:00

"Ode to the Confederate Dead"

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!--
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel's stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision--
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick and fast
You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,
What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl's tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing:
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall:
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush--
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!

-Allen Tate

Read his commentary on the poem here.

New Sites

2009-04-22T10:23:00.002-05:00

I have added two sites to my blogroll, BookNinja and 3QuarksDaily. Both of these are interesting in their daily engagement with current culture while not neglecting the classics of Great Literature. Mostly, both of the sites just link you around the web, something that can help with web exposure. Just this morning, 3Quarks posted an article concerning GMH, mostly good because it contains "Carrion Comfort", a great poem. Edward Thomas is there too, along with a poem about Smokey The Bear. Check them out.

A Perfect Circle with 3 Points

2009-04-21T07:27:00.006-05:00

In my one semester of grad school, I began researching a paper on a Southern New Critic of the Vanderbilt era. I was writing about the origins of the Southern Ballad and the responsibility of the ballad collectors, especially in the heyday of ballad collecting in the 1920s, to maintain the tradition of cultural authorship. I investigated theories of authorship and attribution as well as copyright law for this paper. When I went to look up information on this guy (whose relation to the ballad and authorship comes in the form of his novel, The Big Ballad Jamboree), I merely typed in his name, Donald Davidson, and checked out the books that sounded interesting. Unfortunately I ended up with a slew of books by and about a more contemporary linguistic theorist. I read through them a bit and found them extremely interesting as related to the paper I had in mind. Then of course I realized my naivete. However, there were a few things I retained from that brief reading of the linguist Donald Davidson that remain intriguing.

Davidson described the formation of language as "triangulation." When two individuals communicate, they form a certain understanding of one another and the others' starting point to the conversation. They each contribute to the other and create a direct link of communication in a very intimate way. Imagine a person's relationship to his or her best friend; they speak together and understand each other in a way that almost makes for its own language, one that others either don't understand or don't find of interest. What forces their communication to adapt, to change, is the interruption of a third party. Neither of the original two can connect with the newcomer on an individual basis without disrupting their own relative distance in the newly formed communication triangle.Another way of thinking about this, and this is the approach I was planning on taking with my paper, is to imagine an insular culture where everyone within the culture can communicate and interact with everyone else on the common basis of being involved with the culture. Yet when someone new arrives in the area, it disrupts the active connection between the participants in the culture and forces them to adapt in their communicative efforts. This, Davidson argued, forms the basis for all linguistic development.

On a similar note, three members of the former Ante-Occidents once raised their legs together, resting one leg on top of another, and began to spin in a circle, thus forming a perfect circle with three points.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #5

2009-04-20T21:39:00.004-05:00

Two poems this time, one a translation, the other...well, you'll figure it out.

New Translation of Polina Barskova
by Ilya Kaminsky

A Still Life

Saturday morning. Schubert. Frosya torments the slipper.
White hydrangea. (Remember, as in Sapunov?)
I lie on the floor between dolls, small hats, t-shirts.
I stare at you, and close my eyes.

Music for performance over water? Over waters?
The German rhythm stops
like a member of the National-Socialist party in a frightened mouth.
You sit by the computer, covered with light ice
covered with your porcelain beauty.

And waters of Schubert like thousands of tiny mice boil in your mouth.
I’ve been looking at you for three years, like a maniac at the
corpse’s cameo
waiting—the policemen will arrive—they’ll begin to yell
beat me with a shoe, and I will lay quietly on the floor.
Know nothing. Hear nothing. Nothing.
The white hydrangea, a fistful of fireworks
in the sky, as if
some celestial mole labors in the sky.
—Mishenka, it is too bright?
—It is not too bright.
Bubbles of Schubert. Tears bubbling in my mouth.

(From Guernica, May 2007)

I Love Me, Vol. I

Pete Lee

Frustrate Lee? Let art surf:
Regard a mad rager,
dessert-stressed
flesh self,
radar,
drab bard
(anal was I ere I saw Lana),

flee to me, remote elf!
Raft far!
O, desire, rise, do!
Dog sit in a lap, pal, an' it is God!
(Dog doo! Good God!)
Bosses sob,
nudists I dun,
sex at noon taxes --

risen or prone, sir?
Egad! No bondage!
Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic...
But sad Eva saved a stub.
God, to have Eva. Hot dog!
Madam, I'm Adam!

(From Marginalia Vol.3, Issue 1)

Symbiotics

2009-04-20T21:13:00.002-05:00

All truth is organic. That is to say, truth does not exist in a stagnant form, rather it is active and living. According to Adorno's theory, language is merely our attempt to communicate that which is, to make the not quite cognizable into sense. For him, language is the process by which we become "disenchanted" with the unknowable, the way of de-mystifying that which is beyond our ken.

2009-04-19T13:52:00.002-05:00

Christ Is Risen!

A Little Late

2009-04-16T21:08:00.006-05:00

I was listening to the radio today, as I do on the way to work usually, and I had the station turned to NPR, where I heard this interview. I was instantly reminded of an old professor of mine, Bill Jenkins, a man whom I would describe as an Anglophile. He often spoke to the class in reference to the poor state of Britain's morality and religious decay. Also today, I read on the online Guardian of the changing face of the British novel.

Those of you who like Neil Postman, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, or any other British writer of the past century or who are interested in the demographic change that has become virtually global might begin to feel a bit of alarm at noticing the rapid rate of decline in people associating with any form of Christianity in Britain. The BBC did a piece on this back in 2000 called "The UK is 'Losing' its Religion".

In 2007, Vexen Crabtree wrote an article citing multiple statistical sources in which these statistics appear:

"66% of the UK population have no connection with any religion or church3.
18% of the British public say they are a practicing member of an organized religion4. "

Read the entire article here.

A bit selfishly, while being quite depressed by the situation as a whole, I was happy to note the thriving Orthodox community in Britain. The problem with that is the same as in America: while the Orthodox Church is growing in America, England, Australia, and other countries where it was relatively late in appearing, it is rapidly dissapearing in such "home countries" as Russia, Ukraine, and Greece.

While noting the worldwide rise of Islam, also pay very close attention to the terrifying numbers of Jedi Knights in Europe (390,000 in the UK alone!), with even the Pope partaking in this growing sect.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #4

2009-04-09T13:50:00.003-05:00

I know these are predictably frequent, but some poetry should be read every day.

LA HORA

Cada minuto de este oro
¿no es toda la eternidad?

El aire puro lo mece
sin prisa, como si ya
fuera todo el oro que
tuviera que acompasar.

(¡Ramas últimas, divinas,
inmateriales, en paz;
ondas del mar infinito
de una tarde sin pasar!)

Cada minuto de este oro
¿no es un latido inmortal
de mi corazón radiante
por toda la eternidad?

-Juan Ramon Jimenez

I will not attempt to translate, as my Spanish is by no means poetic, but you should be able to get the drift with all these cognates. "Oro" means gold, "prisa" means to hasten, "ondas" are waves. This should help.

Cultural Views of Work and Vocation

2009-04-08T21:36:00.003-05:00

My perspective on my occupational status is rather uncommon in this country. Without addressing any like or dislike of one's profession, it is quite rare to find someone who sees what they do as something other than "work" or a "job". Perhaps it is my propensity towards laziness and procrastination, but those particular words don't jive with my personal philosophy.

When being introduced to someone, one is often asked the question, "What do you do for a living?" or, "Where do you work?" Personally, I prefer to answer, "I am a swim coach" or "I am a student" as opposed to "I coach an age group swim team" or "I study English literature".

When I lived in Japan, I was struck by the way the Japanese lived from day to day. If you were to follow the average middle-aged man from 6:30am-7:30pm, you would probably find him at an office for much of the time. Yet the attitude towards the work he does at the office (from my perspective) seems rather apathetic. He does not seem to dislike his occupation nor would he probably complain about it if you asked him. He works seemingly incessantly to improve the company, the corporation, to meet the goals within his sight. Yet the apathy stretches to this aspect of his life as well. It almost seems as though he typifies a paradox: he does not merely do his job, he makes it his life, yet at the same time he is as disinterested in the job as someone who hates his job--he does not derive any personal pleasure from it. This kind of worker is one that I would describe as vocationally masochistic.

The American Ideal, of course, is to achieve your own personal pleasure in life. The average view of one's line of work is that it is a means to an end--it allows the person to have the house, the car, the funds for mountain climbing or traveling. He or she may actually spend as much or more time at the office as the Japanese person, but the attitude towards the job is filled with passion, usually negative. He is equally masochistic, as he seems to derive pleasure from a source of pain.

I looked at the OED for some background on the words "job", "work", and "vocation", but I really don't think I need to go into the etymological implications of them. Rather, I think it is sufficient to say that each of these scenarios lacks a sense of attachment that used to exist in one's vocation or profession. The Japanese have it right in that they make the job a part of their life; the Americans have the sense of desire down pat. Yet they both separate their idea of "the good life" from their work.

Regardless of what position I hold in life, that position will become for me, not a part of my life, but integral to my life. I do not necessarily look for deriving pleasure from what I do, nor do I see it as something to complain about any more than I would complain about another aspect of who I am.

While I have thought about this subject before, my recent reading around about "dispassion" and "disinterestedness" and the difference between these things and apathy has made me think about the need to incorporate these things into every aspect of my life. This thought process has also made me realize that this is much different than merely being "content", because there is a sense of drive in each of these ideas. Rather than seeing my position in life as "fact", I prefer to see it as "condition", a state of being, and one which is dynamic.

New Book

2009-04-06T22:30:00.003-05:00

This is a relatively new book about my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was, as far as I know, the first decisively Modern poet and the first of three English-Welsh poets whom I absolutely love, followed by David Jones and Dylan Thomas. A pretty decent review, I must say, though I don't know how I feel about the idea of writing a biography in the present tense.

Undpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #3

2009-04-05T17:05:00.004-05:00

Though you may know him for this poem, I better enjoyed William Carlos Williams' "Perpetuum Mobile: The City", whose first few stanzas read thus:

"—a dream
we dreamed
each
separately
we two

of love
and of
desire—

that fused
in the night—

in the distance
over
the meadows
by day
impossible—
The city
disappeared
when
we arrived—

A dream
a little false
toward which
now
we stand
and stare
transfixed—

All at once
in the east
rising!

All white!
small
as a flower—

a locust cluster
a shad bush
blossoming

Over the swamps
a wild
magnolia bud—
greenish
white
a northern flower—

And so
we live
looking—"

And which can be heard in its entirety here.

Funny

2009-04-04T23:00:00.001-05:00

I usually don't do this, but holy crap this is funny!

Addendum

2009-04-03T09:48:00.002-05:00

I think I need to add an addendum to the last post. Perhaps it was somewhat unclear what my idea of aesthetic appreciation includes. I am not entirely sure myself, but I do know that, unlike the impression I probably gave in the last post, desire does not play THE central role. Desire is one of the many steps that one must take in learning to appreciate art, but it is merely a step. Ultimately, according to Kant, etc. one should reach a state of disinterest. I will not go so far as to suggest that aesthetic disinterest is the same as the Orthodox ideal of dispassion or apatheia, but there are some similarities, just as there are similarities to the Stoic idea of the same. Really it means to be able to be fully immersed in contemplation, yet not affected.

An Arduous Perigrination

2009-03-30T21:17:00.006-05:00

On Friday, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago and spent the entire two and a half hours in one room--not one gallery or wing, but one room (and it was not the bathroom). This was new for me, as I usually browse casually, moving from room to room within 10 minutes on average, some rooms holding me for about 20 minutes if I am truly interested in the art or artist.

While there, I had a few thoughts I had never had before, some that I probably should have thought but which never occurred to me for one reason or another. I thought about them for the past few days and decided to share them briefly here, not because they have particular merit, but because to me they were unique.

1) Art museums are jarring. You jump from one worldview to another to another in the turn of the head. Blink once and you experience the Shang Dynasty in a wine vessel; twice you see Crivelli's Crucifixion; three times you are blindsided by Max Ernst's surrealist works. It's like going to the library for the purpose of looking through the dust jackets. If the works are good enough to deserve being placed in an art museum, they merit contemplation of some sort. Perhaps I am merely weak-minded, but I start getting a headache when I try to think about too much at once. Granted, some works are not meant to be contemplated, such as the wine vessel, but there is still an element of depth to the piece that ought to be considered for a brief period at least. I am not suggesting that you search for the meaning of a piece, or try to "get the feeling" that it gives. All I am suggesting is something that Aesthetic theorists since Plato have posited--the good or great aesthetic experience that defines a well-wrought thing is not a passing thing, but something that pervades you and impels you to continue the contemplation.

2) Art actualizes the desires of the culture. Walter Benjamin suggests (and I am not by any means fully in agreement with his theory!) that art is essentially cultic. Take for an easy example the first two pieces above: the wine jar for funeral purposes and the painting of the crucifixion for purposes of prayer. These things arose out of the need for religious action. Traditionally the artwork has arisen from the desire to create a symbolic representation of the divine ends. The art becomes more and more elaborate as the deities become so. Yet with the advent of a distant deity, or a deity stripped bare of niceties, what replaces him in the human urge for aesthetic beauty is naturally whatever else actualizes the desires of the culture. More recently (say mid-19th through the 20th century) the art has come to reflect the desire of the culture to reinvent the individual as the deified creator of his or her own particular idiom. Even more recently there has been a trend of "rediscovery" of the human inter-connectedness, but this trend is still heavily weighted down by the individualistic purposes that preceded it. In the Ernst example, desire itself is what is actualized.

3) My last point is really just a reiteration of the above points: if art actualizes the desires of the culture, then the effect that it has on the viewer is to evoke the same desire. In some cases this desire is confrontational, in others soothing, in others merely passive. However, and this is one of the main reasons I spent 2 1/2 hours in one room and would gladly spend it again in the same room, the most important thing in contemplating art is to process the experience. I am not good with rationalizing things into logical formations internally, but that is the beauty of art--it is not philosophy and therefore does not have to be fully processed to be understood.

I am not so good at explaining the visual aspect of experience, but I definitely feel that these new realizations have helped me to seize the penetrating aspects of art in a new fashion.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #2

2009-03-26T11:37:00.005-05:00

O Florida, Venereal Soil

A few things for themselves,
Convolvulus and coral,
Buzzards and live-moss,
Tiestas from the keys,
A few things for themselves,
Florida, venereal soil,
Disclose to the lover.

The dreadful sundry of this world,
The Cuban, Polodowsky,
The Mexican women,
The negro undertaker
Killing the time between corpses
Fishing for crayfish...
Virgin of boorish births,

Swiftly in the nights,
In the porches of Key West,
Behind the bougainvilleas,
After the guitar is asleep,
Lasciviously as the wind,
You come tormenting,
Insatiable,

When you might sit,
A scholar of darkness,
Sequestered over the sea,
Wearing a clear tiara
Of red and blue and red,
Sparkling, solitary, still,
In the high sea-shadow.

Donna, donna, dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover ---
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.

-Wallace Stevens

(I thought it fitting considering my recent vacation!)

Signs and Metaculture, explained

2009-03-24T16:17:00.007-05:00

The series "Signs and Metaculture" ended up being a bit too dry to appeal to any readers whatsoever, or at least to those who might be reading blogs like mine. And let's face it, no one is going to stumble on my blog unless they are googling "metaculture". Originally, the series was meant to explore differing aspects of representation through literary devices and terminology. For example, the word "Sign" was the first and I discussed how there were differing opinions on how "Sign" could be interpreted.

The second word I wanted to discuss was the word "Mimesis", a word that obviously lends toward the same meaning as "mime", that is, to imitate. Many philosophers and theorists (from Plato to Erich Auerbach, to Michael Taussig) have come to the conclusion that reality is formed by the imitating of other things.

However, the word Mimesis does not only mean "to imitate" in the sense of a re-telling, rather, it means to actualize and participate in the thingness of the object or idea being represented. In this sense, all cultures, all images, all words, essentially everything, participates together in reinterpreting and taking part in those things which came before.

I hope to delve more into this idea of representation in the future with more or less boring content, but it will be interspersed with other random things. If you have anything to contribute to the site (my wife said she can't read white on black, but I like it), let me know. While you have time on your hands, check out this odd fella.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #1

2009-03-13T21:05:00.003-05:00

This thing, that hath a code and not a core,
Hath set acquaintance where might be affections,
And nothing now,
Disturbeth his reflections.
-Ezra Pound

Welcome

2009-03-12T12:50:00.002-05:00

This is a continuation of my participation in the effort of the former Ante-Occidents. Many posts found here are from that site. I hope to begin posting with more regularity. If the color scheme or content is bothersome, let me know soon. This blog I hope to make more "personal" than the last and less overtly intellectual. Most of this is due to my being out of school for the time being, but it also has to do with the lack of time. I don't have as much time to read or think now that I am quite busy with this job. Feel free to peruse the old posts until I come up with new ones.

The Active in the Making

2009-03-12T12:48:00.003-05:00

Schopenhauer says in his first part of "The World as Will and Representation" that to consider the object as separate and prior to the subject is a false assumption. Indeed, the object comes simultaneously with the subject yet "presupposes" it.

So what the hell is he talking about? Basically this, the object is the representation of the subject, and yet exists as the very subject itself in its entirety. That is to say, the representation of a thing contains the thing in its fullness. Why? Because, according to the Schop, objects exist because of the active will of the subject; subjects exist as continuous emanations and participations in ACTIVE will.

In a painting (or some of my friends here might think of an icon), the image is said to represent something. Yet, Schopenhauer claims that that representation contains the fullness of the thing represented. Why? Because both the original subject and the representation of it both exist because of the same emanation of will. Because neither the subject nor object can exist without being active separately and active in their participation with each other (object drawing from the will of the subject and vice versa), the subject is pure action exertive and the object is pure action receptive.

Here is the problem: understanding. I have not yet read enough of the Schop to know what he thinks of when he says "understanding", but I do know that the knowledge of the existence of the subject fully within the object representing it presupposes an understanding of the subject itself. The issue here is that Schopenhauer clearly points out that all subjects are pure energia and no essence. Those in the Eastern side of the world would say that this cannot be, as one can never understand God outside of his energies, his actions. In other words, his fullness, his "being" as Schopenhauer calls it, cannot be known by man. While Schopenhauer gets a lot of points very close to the mark, I believe here is one where he goes a bit to the far side of his point. Yet, my problem is that I have not yet come up with a philosophical argument, though I know someone else already has and I just haven't read it, to counterpoint the argument for pure energy as being!

If I can figure out a simple way of explaining it, maybe I will apply it to my gradually forming definition of the "making" of words. What I have so far is this: in creation, everything is always in motion; the motion defined here is constant movement of the active will in supporting objects (or representations); words themselves are nothing but representations of the subjects (thoughts, physical things, images, etc.); language is made up of words; thus language is constantly subjected to the active supporting will of the subject. Conundrum: two opposing subjects actively projecting their individual wills upon the same phrase, thus creating opposing representations out of identical objects. The solution is not always that there is a faulty premise in one speaker's projection.

Well, I will leave it at that for today.

Aesthetics and Associated Mental Humbug

2008-10-02T15:52:00.002-05:00

Recently I have been quite busy with the move, new job, and strangely uncharacteristic attempts to become slightly more organized. Because of this, I have tried to lay off much of my self-applied pressure to continue regular posting. However, each night as I lay down to sleep, certain thoughts persist in preventing me from doing so, no matter how tired I may be. As these thoughts, though they are in no way formalized, pertain to the general strain of thought displayed in my postings (sans the Olympics babble), I will do my best to hash them out in a semi-understandable format.

Point one of my basic ponderings is the idea of instability in human nature. Perhaps it is an effect of my naiveté, but I have rarely thought of human nature as being transient at best. Yet Gregory of Nyssa writes, “Existence itself originates in change” and, “The created nature cannot exist without change.” This, of course, is because “nothing comes from nothing” and things came to be as a result of change (a point upon which all people agree, whether ex nihilo or from preexisting matter, all things begin as change, hence “begin”, not just “be”). And, according to Newtonian Laws (Chase correct me if I’m wrong), things in motion tend to stay in motion (though these laws do not necessarily apply to metaphysics, accept the allegory). Thus, to approach a study of human nature, or the nature of anything created or deriving from a created thing, one must approach it with the concept of constant motion. Though I already had thought that language was constantly changing (though not evolving), my thoughts have been much involved with how much different things (language in particular) change in reaction to things or in action towards them, or a combination, or whatever (very Hegelian I know).

As you can tell, my thoughts are very scattered and incomplete, but my next point is along the same lines: all of my “Signs and Metaculture” series was supposed to pertain to the representation of things (examining words like Metaphor, Mimesis, Ekphrasis, maybe Reification, etc.) yet I have also recently discovered Theodor Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” and can’t help but look for everything to have an inherent contradiction, vis-à-vis, “Art can only be understood by its laws of movement, not according to any invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not.” Of course, I know next to nothing about aesthetic theory (having read little of Kant, less of Hegel, and maybe 30 pages of Nietzsche, without tapping much into the 20th century at all), but Adorno’s desire to describe the relation of Art to society, determining in the process that Art is neither the sublimation of society alone nor the mere representation of it, convinces me that Language and signs, in their act of representation, may perhaps participate in the same particular fluidity to which human nature is subject. Though none of this plays out empirically, I am trying to process the relation between the necessarily human act of “making” that I promised to discuss, and the reflection of the transient nature of the “maker”.

Lastly, I put forth a call to anyone who can suggest further reading on “Ekphrasis”, as I can find very little on it and don’t have access to university thinkers right now.

Until I can figure out a regular schedule, I remain yours, my 2 ½ faithful readers!

My First Time

2008-08-19T10:35:00.001-05:00

I recently read part of my first issue of Touchstone Magazine (as a result of a confession--non-sacramental--to Father Patrick Henry Reardon that I had never read the publication) and read for the first time a writing sample of Peter J. Leithart. Many people have respect for this man as an intellectual contemporary theologian, though I only read a very brief comment in the beginning of the magazine. The comment that he made is somewhat pertinent to my stalled-out series on the depth of language and literary theory, so I will quote it in full:

Consensual Silence

Meaning in language depends upon consensus. The sound "cat" denotes a feline to English speakers because English speakers agree that it does. French speakers can make no sense of the sound, but say "chat" (without the "t") and everything becomes clear.

Augustine gives a near twist to this common notion. Not only do we know what words mean because a group agrees, but learning what words mean involves coming to agreement with those who use the word. Learning that "katze" means "cat" unites me, in a small way, with all the German-speakers.

This is the heart of Augustine's analysis of the dangers of superstition. If an astrologer says, "If Venus is in the fifth house, you'll fall in love," and I agree, even if I agree simply by failing to disagree, I have formed a pact with falsehood. Worse, by agreeing with the astrologer, I've entered into a league with the demons who inspired his false signs in the first place.

Confronted with a false word, there is no way to remain neutral, to let it slide. I must either enter into fellowship with falsehood or break the consensus by disagreeing and telling the truth. "No," I must say to the astrologer, "Venus doesn't mean that."

Such disagreement is a liberation. But Augustine's analysis also raises disturbing questions about our culture's mania for politeness. What kind of villainy do we tolerate when we smile and smile and refuse to disagree?

Focus on Leithart's phrase, "his false signs." Note the importance, as I stressed in the first major installment of the S&M series, of the use of the correct signs. Naturally, I would expect all readers to agree, yet be at a loss as to where they define false from true signs. If by our mere disagreement we can falsify the signs of another, fine. But if the truth or falsehood of the statement and the sign created by the string of words in the statement (note that each word is a sign in itself and put together they form a new sign...) is intrinsic to the sign and cannot be changed, then we are at a quandary--we must first know whether the sign is true or false before agreeing or disagreeing! Please wait with extreme anticipation for my follow-up on how we create meaning through the "making" of signs which should be forthcoming as soon as I get settled in my new home (though who knows how long that will be.)

What is Environment?

2008-07-17T15:09:00.001-05:00

This is a subject upon which Chase, Brandon, and Josh have much more well-formed opinions than I, but since Pen and Palette author Susan Cushman asked for responses to her article "The So-Called Environmental Crisis", and it is a fairly popular subject, I'll throw in my ambiguous two-cents.

Recently, on a trip between Tennessee and Florida on I-55, I passed what I call Nissan City, a mile-long Nissan car factory and I said to the people in the car with me, "That's beautiful," and I meant it, though I don't entirely know why. One of the reasons that I had for saying that probably has to do with my having lived in cities for almost my entire life, yet my appreciation of nature has not diminished.

To get right to the point, I believe in life. Living in the vicinity of Tokyo for a period of time, I did not look up at the sky and say, "My, what dreary smog" or at the massive amounts of skyscrapers and say, "Oh dear, how dare they impose upon the beauty of nature in such a way." That is not to say I did not appreciate nature, but my experiences in forests, semi-tropical jungles, beaches, fields, and whatever other "natural" places my life has taken me seem to have been very secondary to the experiences that I have had in densely populated areas. The experiences that I remember the most and appreciate the most are always when in communion with others.

Even while climbing mountain Mount Fuji, it was so much more enjoyable for me to have someone standing next to me as I watched the sun rise through the mist (though I must admit, that person was holding me up to keep me from vomiting due to altitude sickness).

As an English Major and Graduate student, I have learned to appreciate life in all senses, whether it be watching the grass grow around Tintern Abbey on a page or feeling the tingling sensation of a jellyfish wrapping itself around my arm, I have come to realize that these minute experiences are immensely more important than worrying about the overshadowing of the abbey by a new skyscraper bank or worrying that the jellyfish's natural habitat is being decimated by oil spills in the Pacific Northwest.

That is not to say that we need not be concerned about these things, for how can we appreciate them when they are no longer there? Yet I believe that the proper mindset that needs to be instilled in all people is not that we need to be on the constant search for ways to preserve the environment, but that we need to develop a gradual appreciation for every experience we have. This appreciation will necessarily birth a desire to preserve the origin of that experience and thereby lead to what many specifically environmentally minded people are pushing for. An acknowledgement of our place as partakers rather than mere recievers will also assist in this mindset.

I don't want to get to intellectual with this post, but I would like to add that many sacramentally minded people attempt to push the idea of "making" as an act by which we participate in the grand scheme of life. All that we touch, see, do, or experience is in some way affecting other; we are "making" a new world every time we blink our eyes, every time we think a thought, every time we mow the grass. The correct mindset for someone concerned about the environment begins with a knowledge of interconnectedness in experience (beware Westerners).

(PLEASE do not think of that last statement as in any way Chardinian (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)! I do not here propose that all life is interconnected in every sense, as though we could affect the actions of God, or as though each thing was God and that by destroying it we were destroying part of God. Just that, if we are to consider our very life as equally important both physically and spiritually (viz. "sacramental"), then our mental, spiritual, and physical actions are all equally as influential.)

Wall-E

2008-07-01T10:10:00.001-05:00

(This whole posting may be taken as a spoiler, but read on anyway)

When I first saw the preview for this movie, I became very excited and thought it was going to be a great Disney/Pixar film, on par with Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. After watching the movie, I came out depressed, feeling let down, and more than a little disappointed. I thought about why this might be the case, and I here put my thoughts on paper:

I plan to look at three different components of the film: (1) Character, (2) Mission, and (3) Aesthetics.

(1) Wall-E himself I believe to be the single greatest character achievement of any Disney film. Never before has an entertainment company been able to produce a character so pure, so innocent, so perfectly genuine, and so unconditional in love. No matter what is done to him by anyone, he shows no sign of vengeance, of anger, or even of processing their negative reactions at all. When Eve, his love and nemesis, rejects him for something he has not done, he is so utterly naive as to not even notice her indifference to him. The interactions that he has with the humans aboard the BNL liner are perfectly selfless. Without any concern or personal reservation, he greets them, "Wall-E," extending his hand and entirely expecting them to return his affections. Usually, if a character is portrayed as naive, the other characters end up taking advantage of him, but this is not the case with Wall-E. He cannot be described as forgiving in any sense, he does not even notice the wrongs done to him. He is the perfect example of utter humility and ought to be emulated in every sense. He is not beyond giving orders, however--he orders his pet cockroach to sit down when he may be in danger and he orders Eve to continue her "directive" when she seems to be faltering.

Eve (or "EEEVA", as Wall-E calls her), on the other hand, is a typical character in a Disney movie, she starts out interested, turns vengeful, but learns to love when she is confronted with the sacrifices that Wall-E has made for her (though he would never consider them sacrifices). She adds much to the film and is somewhat of an integral part of the story, i.e., she assists in continuing the plot with Wall-E's necessarily stagnant character. I will come back to her character when addressing Mission.

Humans are another story altogether. All comedies, by nature of genre, must have "something appealing, something appalling." Well, the humans are the appalling part. They are grotesque, revolting, and entirely incapable. One "heroic" scene in the movie depicts the normally lethargic and boneless (almost literally) captain struggling to walk across a room. I know that the intentions of the creators were to make humans appear dumb, helpless, and as a bane to the universe, but they were worse than that. Their inability to cognisize and mobilize was connected to their inability to dispose of waste. The depiction of humanity was utterly ridiculous. I am not saying that the humans ought to have been depicted differently, but that they should have been removed from the film entirely. The interactions between Eve, the other robots, and Wall-E were sufficient to produce a "G-rated" movie that would be perfectly acceptable to a "G-rated" audience. Unfortunately, people often take the opportunity in children's movies to speak to the parents.

(2) Okay, I'll stop ranting about the humans for now and turn to the idea of "Mission." I am not going to talk about the mission of the movie, as that was blatantly obvious and, in my opinion, rather preachy and overwrought, but I would like to address the them of "directive" in the movie. Wall-E has a directive--to clean up the waste on earth. He follows it implicitly and with great enjoyment, but he is not mindlessly dedicated to the job. Rather, he takes pleasure in finding every opportunity to discover unique things about his mission every day. He lives his directive, but it does not live him.

Eve suddenly appears on the scene and vocalizes what Wall-E has been living this whole time, "directive." She knows nothing but her mission, that is, to find life somewhere on earth. She is, in the beginning, quite literally a machine, but also figuratively a programmed worker who knows nothing but her mission. She shows some interest in the things Wall-E shows her, but is instantly snapped back to "directive" when he shows her a plant he found. Most of the movie, she follows her mission to the letter, leaving Wall-E behind, sending him away, and entirely neglecting him in her desire to place the plant in its proper location. As mentioned above, however, she falters when she realizes the futility of her situation and (huge spoiler!!!!) Wall-E's impending death, but he sets her aright in the always present Disney over-theme of sacrificial love, repeating "directive" to her and bleeping inanely. Of course, once her directive is accomplished, she turns to bringing Wall-E back to life and starts loving him as a partner. But, again, it is only after she accomplishes her mission that she can truly love, so is this really love? I don't know, you be the judge.

Okay, humanity.... It's very simple, really, they have a directive from BNL to have fun, relax, and "EAT NOW". They follow it to the letter (except for the fun part maybe). The captain has a mission to fly around, give morning announcements, and return to earth when signs of life are found. He does this pretty well, and nothing else really, until he learns about earth, dancing, water, and pizza trees from his computer. Then all he really does is follow his directive some more. While there may be a bit of confusion as to whether his or the co-pilot's directive is more important, he asserts his captain-ness and does what he is supposed to do.

The robots from the rejects ward play a key role in resolving the final dilemma, and it is very important to note that they centralize the theme of "mission". Because they are incapable of completing their assigned tasks (due to random malfunctions like painting yellow lines and opening umbrellas incessantly), they are the perfect assistants to the anti-mission endeavor. Basically, the moral here is that nothing ever really gets accomplished when you just follow your "directive."

(3) Finally we come to Aesthetics. I am not qualified to, nor do I desire to discuss the CGI effects or the cool-looking things that they do in the movie, though I do want to say that I didn't like the Mary Poppins-esque appearance of a live-action figure in the film (the demi-god-long-dead president of BNL). Not for any particular reason, just didn't like it. Anyway, I do want to discuss the theme of aesthetic pleasure in the movie. Again, Wall-E is perfect in my eyes, so his sublimation of a lighter, light-bulb, or Rubik's Cube is beautiful to me. His child-like love of everything, regardless of its practicality or purpose (directive), is amazingly unpragmatic.

Eve, of course, has to be the opposite of everything Wall-E is, so she likes things for their purpose--she solves the Rubik's Cube, lights the light-bulb, flicks the lighter on, and tries to figure out what usefulness the video tape has.

Here I think the humans do a good job--they present the idea that aesthetic pleasure is not stagnant, but active. They think that poking a button to hit a golf ball or sitting by a pool is pleasure, but don't truly understand aesthetics until they learn to interact with each other and with the objects. This, I believe is the best and usually most neglected aspect of pleasure that the movie addresses--that things can be pleasurable without having a use and that pleasure is active not morbidly immobile.

Overall, the movie had some phenomenal points--notably, Wall-E and the addressing of aesthetic pleasure--but was exceedingly preachy, obnoxious, and grotesque. I cannot repeat enough how amazed I am at how Disney/Pixar could turn such great potential (it could have been the best child's movie of all time) into an abysmal flop. Imagine it this way, The executives at Disney sat there thinking, "We have this astounding character that kids will love, a great interaction with another character, and phenomenal appeal to people of all ages. Now how can we use that to further our plan to corrupt humanity?"

When Wall-E sat peering into the vaste waste-land of earth, desiring someone to take pleasure in all of it with him (scene 1), I wanted to climb through the screen and slap a bra on my eyes as well. After Eve appeared, I held out hope that the little guy could show everyone how to be human (scene 2). But when they arrived aboard the liner (scenes 3 and following), I wanted to pull Wall-E off the screen and take him out of the theater before they could corrupt him. Fortunately, this was not The Idiot, it was a kids movie, so he remained impermeable to the atrocities of Disney, but my mind did not. I was highly disappointed.

Signs and Metaculture: "Sign" and the "Transcendental Signified" 1.2

2008-06-28T15:03:00.002-05:00

I’ve been thinking more about the previous post, and I’d like here to add a small musing to “Signs and Metaculture: ‘Sign’ and the ‘Transcendental Signifier’”.

When we speak to each other, we are participating in the use of signs. But to what extent do we create the meaning of the sign and to what extent does the meaning derive from the references it make to the other signs with which it interacts?

I believe I was a little unclear on what the exact nature of our participation in creating meaning was. See, if we hold that the word has meaning entirely external to what we say, then we do not participate in any sort of “making” process whatsoever, but merely use what has been passed down to us. Yet, as we can see in the ever-changing nature of language, there must be an alteration at some point in the communication process. At the same time, however, we cannot assert that the words we speak are entirely made to mean whatever we want them to mean. So the question becomes, what role do we play in the equation?

Well, there are three main claims about this argument, all of which were just mentioned, but I’ll make them clearer:
1. Words have meaning; we don’t change the meaning of the words, and if we think we do, we are confused and are twisting the way language ought to work.
2. Words gradually change meaning due to changes in culture and philosophical understandings of the world. That’s the nature of the beast and we just float along with it, affecting it, but not intentionally.
3. Words have no fixed meaning, nor is the meaning tied to culture; the only way we can understand a word is by being in agreement with the person we are speaking with. You know what I mean when I say a word, so we give the word its meaning together.

Most people who agree with (1) tend to be moralistic and priggish about ought-ness and ethics. It would be great if language were like that, but the fact is, meanings do change, whether we like it or not. Sure, most people with a traditional moral background would love for there to be stability in our understanding of things, but most things, like language, ethics, and morality, are somewhat mobile in practical existence. These people would have an exceedingly difficult time putting together a dictionary since they would be constantly searching for the True meaning of a word (which, by the way, doesn’t exist, shh… it’s our secret).

Those who side with (2) are generally staunchly democratic—they believe that the society determines existence. Of course, then you get caught up in discussions over whether the changing contexts of language affect the specific meaning of a word, then you end up needing a new dictionary for every cultural situation. Here we play some role in changing things, but not as individuals, as class and cultural groups.

Our friends in (3) would never be able to put together a dictionary at all, for obvious reasons--they don't need one! Each person determines his or her own perception of meaning and reality. If I think masochism is a good thing, you can't convince me any differently, because that's what brings me pleasure. If I think "burger" means a portabella mushroom and tomato on a hamburger bun with Swiss cheese, that's my prerogative.

So, most of you reading this will probably fit into one of these categories (with a little mixing a matching, of course). I'll leave it at that for now, and see if any of you have any comments. I'll tell you what I think when I have a bit more time.

(Here's a spoiler - it has something to do with my previous post, a little to do with the act of "making", and a lot to do with not really agreeing entirely with (1), (2), or (3). I'll be a bit presumptuous and say, enjoy the wait!)

Signs and Metaculture: "Sign" and the "Transcendental Signified"

2008-06-01T15:55:00.003-05:00

First, “Sign”, perhaps the most common and complex term tossed about by modern literati. So commonly debated and utilized has the term been that even upon hearing “si-”, many professors merely roll their eyes, as if to say, “Oh no, not again!” Yet, while they may be sick and tired of opening that particular box of fury (and I am not learned enough to give a full-on discussion of its history), it is important to briefly address the nature of the sign and its implications for everyday communication and human interaction.

Very concisely, here is a simple description of the sign, as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure[1]:

1. The sign is the holistic representation of two parts—the signifier and the signified.
2. The signifier could be said to be the form of the sign, and the signified the concept.
3. To give an analogy, a sign is a painting; the signifiers are black, white, grey, and red watercolors; and the signified is a woman riding a horse.

There are many instances in which we interact with signs in daily life—traffic signs, advertisements, giving someone the thumbs-up. Each sign has its own meaning: a traffic sign is a directive, ordering you to stop, go, turn, etc; an advertisement (let’s take a KFC billboard as representative) is another form of directive—“eat my chicken”; the thumbs-up is a form of acknowledgement of past obligation: “you did a good job.”

More often than not, however, the experience we have with signs is in the form of verbal communication. In speech, the spoken word is the sign, the form of the word is the signifier, and the meaning of the word is the signified. Saussure gives the example of the sign: “arbor”, where the letters “a-r-b-o-r” comprise the signifier and the idea of ‘tree’ is the concept, or thing signified. Thus, in the phrase, “an arboreal recluse”, we understand it means “a hidden place with trees” only because we know that the sign “arbor” implies the meaning of ‘tree’.

All right, here are some problems associated with theories of signs:

1. If the spoken word, “arbor” brings to mind ‘tree’, the next question we have to ask is, what kind of tree? When you say arbor, am I thinking of a dead oak while you are thinking of a cluster of beautiful palm trees? The next step is that we must be more and more specific with our words—defining each and every word. Of course, the only way to define what we say is with other words, so we are caught in an everlasting circle of definition in order to understand each other.

2. Jacques Derrida discusses the problem of representation. The way that we have described the sign above involves representation: the signified is represented by the signifier. Representation, he says, has two ways of being understood: representation as describing/defining a thing or re-presentation as one thing standing in the place of/reproducing another. He shows the nature of signs to be representational, and as such to be contingent upon there being something to re-present. This he follows to the source of an object which represents itself and which “is present before the act of repetition” (“Speech and Phenomena” 13), that is, it exists before signs and is that which all other things are representations of. If all signs represent something else, then there must be something at the origin that cannot represent anything other than itself. As the primary thing which all others represent, it is the “transcendental signified”, that which takes no part in the other signifiers because of its transcendence. However, by asserting itself in the act of being, or in its presence (by being “re-presented”), it negates its own existence, since it, by nature, can never be represented (in the sense of definition) in the first place. Because it is transcendent and nothing can represent it but itself, then when the “transcendental signified” represents itself it is brought into the realm of things represented, which means that it is made present (which it cannot be by nature).

While there are more discussions, let us only address these two, as they are complicated enough. Problem (1) is based on the theory of signs being a social construct, centered on interaction between human beings. Essentially then, the difficulties become psychological incongruencies (psychological because the problem is associated with the concept of the signified in a person’s mind, whether the person who vocalizes the sign or one who hears it). Thus, if the sign is a social construct, then the most important part of the sign is the signifier and how the signifier is used. If the problem lies in the signifier, and not the signified, then it is with the signifier that human communication finds its meaning. For, we cannot (unlike some Sci-Fi characters) comprehend the unspoken psychological existences. And if the meaning of the sign lies in the proper communication of it within society (because a concept has no meaning if you can’t structure it in a particular form, even in your own mind, and it is meaningless without communication between beings) then primacy of the signifier rather than the signified in the human psyche becomes apparent.[2]

The main issue that I want to point out with Problem (1) is that, if the sign is a social construct, then it becomes entirely relative to the communicative abilities of those in the society. Take, for example, a child who says, “Ba!”, and the parents understand that to mean, “I want my bottle.” Naturally, if the child continues to grow, his social surroundings will inevitably change, and he cannot be allowed to continue the use of “ba” to mean “bottle.” Now let us look at another way of viewing signs and see if it helps any with combating the sign as an entirely social construct.

Briefly, Tolkien the philologist (following Barfield) taught that modern languages evolved from a common root language, a teaching that is very common in anthropological studies but at the time, the two were not considered different spheres in philology[3]. In tracing the common root language, Tolkien believed that one might find the origin of human communication. And, if “in the beginning was the Word”, and the Word is the apex of communication without verbal effort, then the beginning language must be a social manifestation (though tainted) of the transcendental Word beyond. It was Tolkien’s philological desire to romanticize the languages of human races and find the traces of their common origin in their ancient communication. We might call this theory of language, centered upon the Logos, “Logos-centric”. Each word and phrase, since it is directly derived from its predecessor (and the primary antecedent is the Logos), is contingent upon the immediate presence of the Logos.

In hearing our dilemma of the child presented above, Tolkien might say that the word “bottle” has meaning outside of the child’s concept of what the word means. The child cannot just invent a word (“ba”) and say that it is substitutable for “bottle”. He merely does not know what word to use, so uses another in its stead. Just as we use the word “arbor” to represent ‘tree’, we use it in place of knowing the expression that might have been used in the original, or divine language. So, in this concept, the sign is not a social construct, but a way of participating in the divine eternality of the Word. Indeed, the more fully we understand languages and the construct of signs, the more we come to participate in the Word. For example, if the only image and concept that comes to mind when we hear the word “arbor” is a palm tree or dead oak, then we do not fully understand the sign. The sign ought to re-present in our minds not only a dead oak, but also “gopher wood”, “olive branch”, and “Cross”, not to mention all the other implied socially constructed, but poetically and divinely useful, representations of the sign. When we hear “arbor”, the more we know, the more we experience. Hence, the study of language, for Tolkien and others, was important to an experience of that from which all things originated.

Here is where we come to Problem (2), the seemingly more complicated of the two. Derrida claimed that the statement, “I am”, was inherently a representation, an act of making the “I” reflexive and present. And if the “I” was supposed to be the “transcendental signified”, it would follow that it was that which could not have a signifier. And the “I am” statement is an attempt by the “I” to signify itself, since it has no adjective defining what state of being the “I” is in. Basically, Derrida wanted to “de-construct” the structures that had been built—structures which all had a single locus as their fixed object. Whether this locus was God in theology, the sun in the solar system, reason in Western philosophy, or the “transcendental sign” in language, his assertion was that these things themselves are not stable, they are constantly in motion. Thus, the binding laws of connection (that which binds all things in a structure to a center) could not apply, but must be themselves in motion. And if they are in motion, then the signs cannot have their meaning based upon the centralized concept, or “logos.” So upon what does the meaning of language signs rest? Upon the differences in the signs themselves—how they relate to one another, how they are used, and to what end their usages permit. A sort of inter-connectedness of meanings arises, rather than a centralized presence or “logos.” In other words, “arbor” would not represent ‘tree’ because it centered around a certain fixed state, but rather because the words surrounding it allowed it to take on the meaning of ‘tree’.

Of course, this assertion is in direct conflict with the beliefs of “Logos-centrism” described in the teachings of Tolkien. The sign is not entirely socially constructed, however. Indeed, the sign, for Derrida, constructs society. Society participates in the grand “play” of signs in that it constantly references signs, and by proxy their interplay of meaning, but the signs themselves still dwell outside of physical existence. It is in the constant reference of the signs to one another that we find the connection between the three philosophies here present. As we pointed out above, in the “Logos-centric” understanding of language, the more references we understand in the meaning of the sign, the closer we get to an experience of what lies beneath, thus we participate in the eternal self- and inter-referential nature of the signs.

This does not negate the fixed center around which the signs and our understanding of those signs circulate, as the center itself need not be separated from the interplay of signs and may actually assist in the constant change of reference. For, if the Word of “Logos-centrism” cannot be fully re-presented in the signs we make (as we are inherently tainted), then we must constantly be representing our experience in various and incomprehensive ways. This also addresses Problem (1), as it points out that each word has its meaning inherently intertwined with the use of other words in society while at the same time being maintained by the ever-present Logos. What does this mean for practical life? For starters, it means that the words we use are by their use a reference to and re-presentation of the original Word and that the inter-referential nature of signs inherently contains divinity and is not limited to a social construct.

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. “Speech and Phenomena.” In A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Flieger, Verlyn Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. Kent State University Press, 2002.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Chicago: Open Court, 2004.

[1] While I reference Sassure here, I do not intend to go over the entire Course in General Linguistics nor debate the failures of Sassurean philosophy (for a somewhat entertainingly harsh and un-learned reaction to post-Saussurean theory, see Not Saussure by “Dr.” Raymond Tallis). I do not wish to go into a lengthy discussion of post-structuralist thought nor alternative theories of defining signs (viz. Donald Davidson’s “triangulation” theory, etc.). This is not because they are not interesting, indeed I find them more intriguing than Saussure’s model, but for the purposes of this essay, I will mostly allow Saussure’s model to stand (for now), so as not to bore you.
[2] See Lacan for a psycho-analytical defense of the SIGNIFIER/signified split.
[3] Indeed, it is important to understand that Saussure’s teaching was almost in direct reaction to the assumption that anthropology and linguistic studies must go hand-in-hand, as he taught that, while they can contribute to one another, the two fields are entirely separate.

Signs and Metaculture: Introduction

2008-06-01T15:14:00.001-05:00

In the upcoming series of essays titled "Signs and Metaculture", I intend to provide an understandable explanation of certain common terms used by literary critics and scholars. I will show how, in its respective definition, each term carries the vast importance of constructing perspectives on everyday experience. I will explain certain theories of each word or phrase in history and how each theory can drastically alter one's concept and experience of reality.

I do not purport to be an expert in any sense on historical literary criticism and will not give a detailed analysis of competing schools of literary thought. However, I will reference particular schools and a few critics during the essays, so a brief explanation will be necessary. Because I lack expertise, I welcome all feedback on the series.

Lastly, I hope to provide at least six essays in installments of two month intervals, but this is subject to change. Enjoy!