Archive for July, 2010

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Entry 175 — Another New Term

Saturday, July 31st, 2010

This one is “enthusnik,” from which comes “enthusnikry” and “enthusniplex.”   They are part of my taxonomy of temperaments.   An enthusnik is a freewender who, due to his excessive enthusiasm for some set of irrational (but not necessarily invalid) beliefs, forms them into a rigidniplex, acting himself with regard to that like a rigidnik, although not otherwise mentally dysfunctional.  Enthusniks, then, are members of a subclass of “freewenders.”

I have long needed a term for people who come to believe someone other than Shakespeare wrote the Shakespearean oeuvre who are saner than the riginiks who are the principal anti-Stratfordians.  I didn’t like “pseudo-rigidnik.”  This one, I hope, will do.

So much for today’s entry.  My back still aches, and I am still taking a lot of naps.  My mood is pretty low.  It was difficult to write even this minor, short entry.  If I could start feeling even one percent better, I think I would snap out of it.  Oh, well, I’m in no great pain, and things are not getting worse.

Posted in theoretical psychology | No Comments »

Entry 174 — Extending the School Year

Friday, July 30th, 2010

While at my dentist’s, I happened to skim a recent issue of Time.  In it was an article favoring the extension of the school year.   The author only wanted summer vacations cut by a month, though, which is ridiculous.  Kids should get no vacations, at all.  Give them any time off and they’ll find out what not being a slave is like and many of them, especially the males, will want to re-experience the feeling as adults. This could lead to their trying to do what they want to do with their lives rather than what the government wants them to.

The author was also foolish in highlighting the fact that many kids become bored at times when they’re on vacation.  Bringing that up may remind those of them with IQ’s above 72 that nothing could possibly be more boring than school.  The fact that the boringness of school is compulsory tends to make kids dislike it more than than they dislike the sometime non-compulsory boringness of vacationtime, too.   The real flaw in this approach is that it involves kids’ preferences, not parents.  Obviously, the top argument for abolishing vacations is that full-time schooling equals full-time vacation from kids for parents.  And they’re the ones who will make the final decision.

On the other hand, the author does a good job with the argument that the more formal education kids are blessed with, the better off the country will be.  No good American will ever fall for the notion that non-robots are of more value to a country than robots, or that there is knowledge of consequence not available in the classroom that a kid can pick up while on holiday that will more than make up for his falling slightly behind Swiss kids in speed of multiplying two-digit numbers.

To sum up, I’m happy that Time published this article, but many more articles like it need to see print.  You can’t have too little freedom, and the place where its limitation begins is the school.

Posted in Social Criticism | No Comments »

Entry 173 — Taxonomical Update, Continued

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

A mathematical poem is a poem some or all of whose verbal elements undergo a mathematical operation centrally important to the poem that is simultaneously both significantly mathematical and significantly verbal–in the opinion of those capable of appreciating the poem.

This is close to Kaz Maslanka’s definition of an “equational poem” (I believe) but, unlike that, allows the poem to be more than an equation (as my “Mathemaku No. 2″ is).  This makes sense to me on the grounds that otherwise one must have separate classes for “pure mathematical poems,” and “impure mathematical poems,” and subclasses under the latter.  I don’t feel that most “impure mathematical poems” are different enough from pure ones to require separate classification.

I continue to believe that a poem whose subject is mathematics or which discusses rather than carries out a mathematical operation should be called a mathematical poem since otherwise one’s taxonomy, as I’ve stated often, will be burdened with an endless number of different classes at its highest levels, one for a poem about every conceivable kind of subject.

The same revised template gives me my definition of visual poetry:

A visual poem is a poem in which some or all of its verbal elements combine with visual elements to result in a formation centrally important to the poem that is simultaneously both significantly visual and significantly verbal–in the opinion of those capable of appreciating the poem.

Note: for the purposes of this definition, words as words are not “significantly visual.”

I desperately hope my definitions will hold up, but nevertheless welcome comments and suggestions.


Posted in Poetics, Taxonomy | 3 Comments »

Entry 172 — Taxonomical Clarifications

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Today may be a taxonomical breakthrough day for me.  Those reading this should be aware, however, that I’m pretty doped up due to the back surgery I had two days ago.  In any case, I have been driven by some excellent comments to this blog or back-channel from Kaz Maslanka, Gregory St. Thomasino, Connie Tettenborn and Karl Kempton to massively rethink certain of my poetics terms and definitions, some of them going back centuries.

The mainest term involved is “textual.”  From certain completely logical things that Connie said I realized that I have been suffering from a linguistic dissonance for thirty years or more without realizing it: I have been using “textual” to mean both “everything involved in the written language” and “just those elements of language whose denotation is of no significance in whatever it is they are a part of.”  Basically, I was distinguishing linguistic matter of no consequential verbal meaning from linguistic matter of consequential verbal meaning.  Why?  Chiefly so I could distinguish visual artworks containing linguistic matter of no consequential verbal meaning from visual artworks containing linguistic matter of consequential verbal meaning–what I’ve most recently been calling “textual designage” from “visual poetry.”

I have always considered such a differentiation one of the most importance functions of any rational taxonomy of art since I believe the difference between what words do and what visual images do to be huge.

At the same time, though, I unthinkingly often referred to a critical essay or a poem or the like as a “text,” and thus “textual.”  I now ordain that henceforth what I’ve been calling “textual designage” shalt be known formally as “infraverbal visimagery” and informally as “infraverbal visual art.”  “Text” shalt be known as anything containing textual elements of any kind, in any combination, and–verily–know ye that all textual elements shalt be divided into two groupings:

(1) textemes

and

(2) words.

The first shalt be defined as any textual symbol–letter, punctuation mark, space, mathematical symbol, etc.–or unified combination of more than one such symbol that is smaller than a syllable.

The second shalt be defined as any texteme or combination of textemes that is used to represent an object in the material universe or an idea about existence.

My intention is to define words as most people take them to be.

Important note: in some contexts, a texteme can also be a word, in other contexts not.  For instance, “a” is a word in the previous sentence but not in the sentence, “x, p, a and c” were scrawled on the front wall of Joe’s house.”  I deem it taxonomically necessary for me to further ordain (arbitrarily) that punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, chemical symbols, etc. are textemes but not words when they are averbally specialized. I am doing this simply because I don’t feel the mathematical treatment of visual elements in the absence of any “verbal words” should qualify as mathematical poetry–because only the mathematical and visual portions of the brain (in my view) are significantly involved in their appreciation.  I believe, however, that mathematical symbols can sometimes act as “verbal words.”  For example, in the (silly) expression “-/+ = divided by/times. ”   The minus and addition signs don’t tell a reader to subtract or add, they say “minus” and “plus,” which I maintain is different.

Punctuation marks similarly can be “verbal words” rather than specialized texteme, as the periods and colons in my “Mathemaku No. 2″ are, in my opinion, since they don’t tell an engagent what specialized act to perform but say what they are: full stops and pauses indicating something to follow.

I hope what I’m saying makes sense, but it’s tricky to express coherently–and, I’m sure, to get anyone to agree with.

This has led me to change my definition of poetry to literary texts containing words or textemes acting as words whose specific meanings are essential to the over-all aesthetic meaning of the text, and which is distinguished from prose by the significant presence of flow-breaks.  Flow-breaks being essentially line-breaks but also other devices that break prose flow such as a cluster of asterisks at various points in an unlineated text, or the halting of every line in a text after some pre-determined number of spaces, even if it meets breaking off in the middle of a word.  I have defined flow-breaks in my detail in my taxonomy.

Tomorrow I plan to present what I hope is my final definition of mathematical poetry.

Posted in Poetics, Taxonomy | 1 Comment »

Entry 171 — Another Medical Update

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

My surgery yesterday went well.  I came home with pain in my back at the site of the incision, but no pain in my leg at all.  However, I was extremely doped up.  So I waited until today to make a more probably accurate report.  I feel the same now, early in the morning.  I am walking with no limp, and don’t feel much pain except when I lean the wrong way.  The doctor prescribed enough pain pils for a week or two,  so probably expects me to have some pain for a while.  The pain pills are strong but I haven’t taken any yet.

I have big literary news, too.  For one thing, I remember two more life works for my list: Finish my taxonomy of literature and Update my list of Contemporary Schools of Poetry.

Kaz, Connie and Karl K. have given me quite a lot to think about regarding my definitions of mathematical poetry, and some of my other poetics terms.   I got to thinking about “linguexpressive poetry.”  Since all poetry is linguexpressive (i.e., linguistically expressive), I changed it to “linguexclusive poetry.”  I hope those devoted to it won’t consider this a derogatory term.  I certainly don’t.

More on my new thinking tomorrow when I should be feeling better.  I’m still mildly post-operative, I think.  Worse by quite a bit, I have a two-hour dental appointment coming up.

Posted in Autobiographica, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 170 — LifeWorks

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Here’s a list of the Life Works I hope to get done (in the order I think I should get them done) before I croak.  Letter indicate how important I believe each other is compared to the others, “A” being most important.  It’s mostly for myself although I would certainly be interested in anybody else’s similar list.

1. Revision of A StrayngeBook

I have ideas for five to ten new pages; then I have to add color, which shouldn’t take too long.

It’s number one because it’s the only life work of mine that might actually make money as I have an actual commercial publisher who is willing seriously to consider it (after seeing the original).  It’s also tops because it should be a lot of fun and shouldn’t take long.  A

2. Final Revision of The Atlantreality Box

I have a full draft of this, my sci-fi novel, half revised, and the rest of the revision should not be difficult.  I discouraged about it, though, for I don’t have any idea qhat I could do with it once it was done.  Number two because it shouldn’t take long to do, and I consider it about as worth getting done as any of my life works.  I’m absolutely sure it would be a commercial success if I could find a way to get it to people’s attention. A (tie)

3. Publication of Writing To Be Seen, Volume 2

This needs an introduction and a little work, then getting a publisher and I think I know of one

I owe the people whose work is in this book to get it published as soon as possible.  C

4. Completion of A Summer Day Anatomized

I have perhaps twenty percent of this done but know what I want to say in the rest of it, for the most part. 

High on the list because I will enjoy working on it and it would make my mainstream critical reputation if I could get market it properly, and there’s a built in audience for it, Shakespeare being very popularand if I sent free copies to the many Shakespeare scholars I know, I think there’s a fair chance one of them would read it and like it enough to publicize it.  B

5. Critique of Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, An Investigation of Propagandistical Techniques

I have a rough draft of this but it’s not well-organized so will need a lot of work.

In some ways not even worth doing, but I think I can say valuable things about propagandistical techniques, and it will be satisfying to demolish so wretched a book.  A good outlet for the venom I have too much in me.  E

6. Construction and Testing of Zingkrieg

Zingkrieg is a board game I have pretty completely worked out in my head.  It is based on a previous strategy game I created forty years ago.  It  requires a number of decks of cards, a board, tokens, a booklet of rule of play and someone to play it with to find and correct the flaws it’s sure to have.  I consider it a superior game and, if I pull it off, will be as great an achievement as anything else I have done. A (tie)

7. Completion of Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volumes 2 and 3

I have lots of already-written material to draw on for these but probably a third of each book will require new writing.

This should be easy and it’s a project I’ve wanted to get out of the way for twenty years.

This would be a good change from my other projects, which are mostly writing projects.  B (tie)

8. Completion of The Importance of the Poetry of E. E. Cummings

I have an essay about the influence of Cummings done, but it would take a lot of addition words to make it book-length.

There might be a little scholarly interest in the book and I have a slight in with Cummings scholars.  B (tie)

9.  Complete Knowlecular Psychology

I’m sure I have enough already completed material for a book on my knowlecular psychology

but would like to produce a complete description of it, which would mean a lot of new wordage.  A lot of organization will be required, too.  A (tie)

Gotta get this done but shold wait becasue once into, I could too easily get bogged down and not only get nowhere with it, but nowhere with anything else.

10. Revision of Plays

I have eight to twelve full-length plays (and a few one-acts) I hope to make a collection of.  Three or four are finished, or just about finished; another three or four need quite a bit of work although I have finished drafts of them.  Two or three are in-progress first drafts.

The problem with doing this, perhaps more so than most of my other life works is what do I do with the result?  Also, Most of the better plays are finished, and the others are close enough to finished to allow others to finish them if the finished plays ever caught on, and that wouldn’t bother me.  C (tie)

11. Completion of America’s State Religion: Formal Education

This I’m more hazy about than any other of my life’s work but it will be based on my theory of temperaments to a large extent, and be polemical.

Last of the life works I should do because it would take a long time and isn’t that important.  D

12. Completion of Harbor View

Tis was to be my great epic poem of some hundred full-page visual poems but I now doubt I can get anywhere with it.  I have a few ideas for it and have made a few poems that will work for it.  I would need a much better computer and printer to get it done–and at least a year without medical or financial problems.

This is the work I’d most like to get done, but the one I have the least confidence of even half-finishing, so should leave it to last, or nearly last. A (tie)

13. Complete various Power Point Presentations.

I have two or three pretty good Power Point presentations that are from 30 to 60 minutes in length that shouldn’t need much work to finish.  F

The least important of my life works and okay as is, so there’s no sense in working on them–unless I suddenly get tremendously in the mood to, as I might if asked to present one somewhere.

Meanwhile, I need to continue writing my once-every-two-month column for Small Press Review and continue composing mathemaku and Poem poems.





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Entry 169 — Yet More about Definitions

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

Upon reflection, I’ve made a few small changes in my definition of mathematical poetry.  I know say that:

A mathematical poem is a poem some or all of whose textual elements undergo a mathematical operation that causes an engagent of the poem to experience aesthetic pleasure that is simultaneously both significantly mathematical and significantly verbal.

It’s not quite fully objective since different people will have different ideas as to what “significant” mathematical or verbal aesthetic pleasure is, but most will agree on that most of the time.

The same template gives me my definition of visual poetry:

A visual poem is a poem some or all of whose textual elements are combined with purely visual elements to cause an engagent of the poem simultaneously to experience aesthetic pleasure that is both significantly visual and significantly verbal.

I would claim that ordinary calligraphy will not cause “significant visual aesthetic pleasure”  I would also claim that letters, punctuation marks, mathematical symbols and the like, are not purely visual but are primarily textual–athough they can be sufficiently altered visually to purely visual elements as well as textual elements.

The “simultaneously” in my definition of visual poetry is crucial for disqualifying illustrated poems, visual art with a captions or embedded titles, and many collages containing both text and visual images as visual poetry.  I’m emphasizing that in visual poems textual and visual elements do their thing together.

While on this fascinating subject, I want to repeat that I see my function as a taxonomist of literature to be separating various kinds of literature into tight little boxes that nevertheless contain many members to facilitate discussion.  So I am strongly opposed to calling certain texts “prose poetry.”  If you accept such texts are neither prose nor poetry, a poetics taxonomist must give them a separate category.  Such a category will contain too few members in comparison to the other categories at its taxonomical level, prose and poetry, to make sense.  So I unconfuse the situation by calling such texts “evocature,” which I define as prose texts that contain poetic elements to such an extent as to seem poetry, but, unlike poetry (by my definition) do not contain flow-breaks).  Ergo, they are a sub-category of prose.

Similarly, since “asemic poetry” lacks meaningful words, I refuse to call it “poetry,” instead terming it “textual designage,” a sub-class of visimagery (i.e., visual art).  Why have three classes, one with many varied members called “poetry,” one with many varied members called “prose,” and one with a small number of members all doing similar things when you can easily make the latter a sub-category of one of the other two.  I pick visimagery as the category it is under because all its elements are visual except its textual elements, and they act primarily as visual elements, only–at most–connotatively as verbal elements.

Fairly soon I hope to revise my taxonomy of literature and self-publish a booklet containing and discussing it.  I’ll announce that–it I ever get to it.

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Entry 168 — About “Mathemaku No. 2″

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Here’s the work from yesterday again.  It may be the first work I did that I called a mathemaku.  I’m not sure because I was working on the one I ended giving the name “Mathemaku No. 1″ to at the same time that I was working on this one, and I’m not sure which I finished first.

Once it was fully formed, I was delighted with it, and still am.  I would love to find out from its detractors what might make it not worth taking seriously.

The big question about it I’m concerned with here, however, is whether it is a mathematical poem or not.  According to Gregory St. Thomasino’s definition, it is, for he says that a “‘mathematical poem,’ if it is to be, or to contain, poetry, must have some poetic elements, as well as some formal symbols and operations of math.”  At least I think it is: I claim it has poetic elements but have no idea whether he would agree since his definition fails to say what a poetic element is (nor indicate how they make a text poetry considering that there are no poetic elements that prose doesn’t also have).  Words must be one, unless he’s changed his view that poetry has to have words.  Words denoting a visual image should be another, metaphors a third.  Both of these my poem has, “meadows” denoting a visual image, and its period acting as a metaphor for the effect of winter on the meadow.

Since my poem also has mathematical symbols (the equals sign and the parentheses and slanted line indicating a fraction) and “contains” the mathematical operation of multiplication (“meadow.” times :/.) , it has everything St. Thomasina would require it to have to be a mathematical poem.

That being the case, it is odd that he disputes its being that, claiming that it, and all the poems I call “mathemaku” that I’ve composed, are visual poems.  Geof Huth would agree with me that it is a mathematical poem, but would agree with St. Thomasino that it is a visual poem.  It is, of course, true that it is visually represented on the page.  It can, however, be orally conveyed as easily as any other written work.  Even if that were not the case, however, I would say that a poem must be visioaesthetically significant to qualify as a visual poem.  Otherwise any printed poem must be considered a visual poem.  Even if one were to argue that conventional textemes like letters and punctuation marks are verbal, not visual elements, it would surely make poems penned by cartographers visual poetry although the cartography would only be decorative, not poetically meaningful, and any conventional avisual poem could be calligraphically enhanced. I oppose that because it would make the class, “visual poem,” taxonomically too large to be useful.

It would mean that “1 + 1 = 2″ is a visual rather than symbolic (I would say, “verbal”) representation of a mathematical expression, too.  Why not, instead, consider mathematical symbols, which are widely held to be semiotic, to be verbal symbol since a “+” is really just an ampersand, which is really just “and, ” and no mathematical symbol not readily acting as a word or phrase?

At this point, I think I’ve established that my poem is mathematical.  For St. Thomasino and others, however, my further contention, that it does mathematics, is questionable–although it does for Kaz Maslanka (whose definition of “equational poetry,” one of several kinds of poetry he considers to be mathematical, it satisfies).  To tackle this question, we must define what “doing mathematics” is.  I would say it is “carrying out a mathematical operation on mathematical terms,” the operations and terms being what everyone would agree they are: e.g., in my poem, addition, finding a root, equating for the first, numbers and things having numerical values for the second.

My poem clearly carries out the mathematical operations of equating one term or terms with another term or set of terms, and of dividing one term by another.  If these are not mathematical operations, I’m very curious as to what they are.  They are not analogous to mathematical operations as far as I can see, they are identical in all respects to equating and division.

They terms they are operations on, however, are not mathematical.  They can reasonably be called analogous to mathematical terms rather than identical to them.  (Although if push comes to shove, they can  be made identical to them, as I will show in due course.)  So, we have in this poem two mathematical operations being carried out on (apparently) non-mathematical terms.  Is that enough to allow that mathematics is being done.  That is, can an event which is partially but not wholly mathematical be considered mathematical.  I say yes, although I think it’s a subjective matter.

It makes sense to say yes, because by agreeing that my poem, and others like it, “do mathematics,” we distinguish them from all the poems that do not in any way do mathematics, and this is a significant difference between poems like mine and those others– significant enough to deserve them their own category in a taxonomy of poetry.

If we say they aren’t doing math because they do things other than math, we have to say chemistry, for instance, is not mathematical, because only some of the many things involved in chemistry are mathematical.  I can bear it’s being said that my poem doesn’t do math, but I think it insane to say it is not mathematical.

To really pin down the point, let me make “March” = 100, “meadows” = 20, “:” = 5, and “.” = -10.  Plugging in those values, the equation that my poem is acts 100% like any mathematical equation.  And like the physics equation “energy equals mas times the speed of light squared.”  Nor is there anything stopping me from giving aestho-numerical values to everything on earth.

A final debate remains: whether only poems satisfying my narrow definition of “mathematical poetry” qualify as such.  My definition is “poem whose engagent must carry out a mathematical operation in order fully to appreciate the poem aesthetically.”  Another definition would be “poem some or all of whose textual elements undergo a mathematical operation the result of which is central to the poem’s aesthetic value.”  I say it is on the grounds that is is the only kind of poem in which mathematics takes place rather than generates a text or is discussed.  I’ve already said why subject matter is a worthless significant element on which to base a taxonomy of poetry since it will start such a taxonomy out with thousands or millions of categories.

I think I may have said most of what I have to say on the subject.  But there’s always more to say, so I’m sure I’ll return to it.  Tomorrow, probably.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 167 — Example of a Mathematical Poem

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Question: how could any rational person say this is not mathematical?

Posted in Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | 7 Comments »

Entry 166 — Some Background on My Definition of Mathematical Poetry

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

It doesn’t look like my latest attempt to discuss the definition of mathematical poetry with Gregory St. Thomasino is going to get anywhere.  In any case, I thought I’d say a few words about why I want mathematical poetry to be defined as a combination of mathematics and poetry.   It’s pretty simple.  As a taxonomist of poetry, I want to start with as few kinds of poetry at the top of my taxonomy as possible.  Ergo, I split poetry into two kinds: linguexpressive and plurexpressive.  Not great names but the best I could do to suggest with my names what I meant and not seem derogatory about either category.  Linguexpressive poetry is poetry whose mode of expression is language.  This category became necessary only with the advent of visual poetry, whose mode of expression is language and visual imagery.  Make that averbal visual imagery.

Now, I could have one major category for each kind of poetry that uses a different mode of expression besides the verbalm which all poems use in my poetics, but I preferred to adhere to my rule of having as few categories at each level as possible.  Hence, the split into linguexpressive poetry, or poetry of words only, and plurexpressive poetry, or poetry using more than one expressive modality.

Subcategories of plurexpressive poetry would then be the various kinds of poetry using more than just words–such as “mathematical poetry,” which expresses itself mathematically as well as verbally.

A suggested definition of mathematical poetry as any kind of poetry that has anything whatever to do with mathematics seems to me taxonomically unwieldy.   It would require the taxonomy it was in to have categories based on subject matter; that is, if you classify a poem about mathematics as mathematical poetry, then you have to classify all poems on the basis of what they are about–Hollywood poems, ocean liner poems, kitchen utensil poems.

Of course, people do refer to poems by what they’re about, but they are, I claim, only describing them, not classifying them, or not classifying them formally.  I contend that a rational taxonomy of poetry must be based on what they are as mechanisms, not on what they are about.  At least at and near the top of a poetry taxonomy.  Let classification by subject matter occur at the very bottom of the taxonomy, if at all.

A simple question should show the logic of what I propose: is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet about Euclid more like one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or like one of my long division poems?

(Note: Gregory St. Thomasino agrees with me that Millay’s poem is only about mathematics so should not be considered a mathematical poem.)

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