Archive for September, 2010

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Entry 238 — The Evaluceptual Awareness

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

The following is a very rough, very brief account of cerebral pain and pleasure.  There are also pre-cerebral pain and pleasure.  Although they have a small role to play in over-all aesthetic pleasure and pain, it is too small to be worth (probably confusing) discussion here.  I plan to make my account part of my book concerning the taxonomy of poetry.

The Evaluceptual Awareness

The evaluceptual awareness is where a brain evaluates its experience.  In my theory there are two evaluceptual responses possible (in the cerebrum, at any rate, which is nearly all this book is concerned with): knowlecular frustration and knowlecular resolution, which I will hereafter be referring to as, simply, frustration and resolution. The former results whenever a knowlecule receiving k-units (cerebral energy) fails to become immediately active as a memory.

Resolution, on the other hand, results from any knowlecule’s getting k-units to a knowlecule that becomes immediately active, even if its k-units weren’t responsible for its activation (as would be the case if it sent too few k-units to a knowlecule to activate it immediately but k-units from elsewhere, or perceptual stimulation, were enough to do that). An evaluception-cell is associated with every m-cell. It is sensitive to how many k-units any k-route transmitts to the m-cell it isassociated with during a given instacon, and whether or not the m-cell becomes immediately active.

If the m-cell does become active, the evaluceptual-cell causes the enhancement of each k-route that sent it k-units to in proportion to the number of k-unitseach route sent. If the m-cell does not become active, the  evaluceptual-cell causes the inhibition of each k-route that sent it k-units in proportion to the number of k-units each route sent. That is, if resolution occurs at the site of one m-cell, the k-routes contributing to it are rewarded with enhancement; if frustration comes about there, the contributing k-routes are penalized with inhibition. An enhanced k-route will thereafter multiply whatever k-units it transmits to the degee that it is enhanced; the reverse is true for an inhibited k-route, which will divide any k-units given it to transmit.  It’s quite simple, as shown below.

M-cell X, activated, transmits k-units of cerebral energy to m-cells A and B via route X87, which will diverge into two routes, X87A and X87B.  The broken lines ending in little rectangles from the Evaluceptual Center read the amount of energy A and B receive and report the amount the the Center.  Let’s say A then becomes active.  The line from the Center to A ending in an inverted v will tell the Center that, whereupon the Center will use its Stimulator to enhance route X87A.  That will mean that the next time X is activated, it will favor its X87B route.

If at the same time B fails to become active, the reverse will happen.  X87B will be inhibited, and X, when next active, will reduce the amount of energy it transmits to B.

Meanwhile, all evaluceptual-cells active during a given instacon (smallest chronological unit of consciousness) will transmit the strength of the frustration or resolution at their m-cells to the Evaluceptual Center.  The latter will give the instacon its evaluceptual rating, or final evaluceptual coloring. A surplus of frustration will cause a feeling of pain, a surplus of resolution pleasure. If a moment’s frustration and resolution are equal (or nearly so), then the moment will be evaluceptually neutral, and cause neither pain nor pleasure.

The way frustration and resolution work makes biological sense, for it means that events (or thoughts) that are unexpected, events (or thoughts) not forecast, will cause pain, and those that are expected will cause pleasure. The predicted should be pleasurable because one has dealt with it before and, apparently, found it to be safe–or, at any rate, survived it. The unpredicted, however, may be dangerous, so ought to seem painful. The neurophysiological results (according to my theory) of frustration and resolution build on this logic.  They are, to put it simply, avoidance of anything that causes pain to the degree that it is painful (until it becomes familiar enough not to cause pain), wariness of anything that causes neither pain nor pleasure, and attraction to anything that causes pleasure to the degree that is does that.

Posted in Aesthetics, Awarenesses, Knowlecular Psychology | No Comments »

Entry 237 — Celebratory and Illyrical Art

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

I’ve been reworking my thoughts concerning what I’m now calling “illyrical art”–art, that on the surface, seems mainly to produce pain.   I’m planning a short booklet laying out my taxonomy of poetry, which I feel needs a preliminary definition of art, among other things.  That is what the following sketch partially addresses.

Celebratory Art & Illyrical Art

Most art–just about all the art I like–celebrates the beauty of
existence.  The final claim of such art, however, is not that
existence is beautiful, but that it is beautiful enough to celebrate, or
significantly more beautiful than ugly.  Some art, which I call
“illyrical art,” seems obsessed with the ugliness of existence,
though.  It is prized by the cognescenti more than celebratory art is,
in fact, tragedy being its most common variety.  It seems to
contradict my notion that human beings are wired to seek that
which gives them pleasure, and reject as much as possible that
which gives them pain.  And I define art as that which give
aesthetic pleasure.  How can I reconcile these views of mine with
the unarguable preference of so many people for art that seems to
give little or nothing but pain?

I’ve pondered this question a good deal, concluding finally that
even illyrical art ultimately provides people with more pleasure
than pain.  It does so by providing one of five values, or (more
commonly) some mixture of one or more of these values):

The Pleasurable Details Value

1. A work of illyrical art–an effective tragedy, say–will contain
details that give aesthetic pleasure,” I need only specify that I mean
such details as the metaphors in Shakespearean tragedy, or the
melodic effects of certain sad poems–or vivid scenes or characters.
Their contrast with the painful elements in the art will increase the
pleasure they give.  These pleasurable details will rarely if ever
compensate for twork’s pain–unless one of them is a
compensatingly redeeming ending: each of Shakespeare’s
tragedies, for instance, has an ending that nullifies its tragic
message to some degree.   Life is shown restored to The Way
Things Should Be.  A good king assumes the throne.  The bad guys
are buried.  Civilization has gotten through another time of horror
bloodied but alive.

The Artistic Conquering of Evil Value

2. A work of illyrical art will cause a person the pleasure of seeing
something conquered, at least to a degree, by art–that is, by an
artist’s organization  and expression of it.  This is just another way
of saying that finding the exactly right words eloquently to evoke
elements dangerous or ugly, and arranging them in some kind of
pattern (which will “explain” the painful elements, in a manner of
speaking, or make them more coherent, more logical, than they are
in the chaos of reality)  is, of course, a way of giving the antithesis
of the beautiful a kind of beauty.  That, in turn, will give an
engagent aesthetic pleasure, although probably not enough to offset
the aesthetic pain of the work.  But with the other positive
components of the work added to it, it will–as it must to be a
successful work of art.

The Sentimental Value

3. Illyrical art may provide an engagent with a friend with whom
one shares a reaction to the pain the art concerns–a character in a
tragic play, a persona in a melancholy poem, or a reader’s
impression of the author of such a poem.  For example, an
engagent might experience Macbeth as a friend by sympathizing
with his misery over the death of his wife and his final
dissatisfaction with life (even despite the evil acts he has
performed).  The feeling that Macbeth is an ally of the engagent
against the vileness of life will then cause a pleasure possibly
superior to the pain of Macbeth’s bad end, and the pain caused by
his crimes. In other words:  tragedy causes one to experience the
anthroceptual pleasure of learning one is not alone.

The Simple Relief Value

4. Tragedy, or any artwork (or art adventure like a ride on a roller
coaster)  dealing with ugly, fearsome, horrifying or similar painful
material, can, when the artwork is escaped, result in the pleasure of
gaining safety.  I consider this the primary reason people “enjoy”
illyrical art.

The Masonchistic Pleasure

5. illyrical art acts to make the evil of life easier to take simply by
exposing us to it, in packaging that reduces its lethalness, thereby
allowing us to learn it into bearableness.  Or: “illyrical art, as
Aristotle has it, arouses pity and fear, the purgation of which
through catharsis, makes one feel better (anthroceptually).”  One
feels more fit to withstand evil after effective art.

Posted in Aesthetics, Grumman coinage | No Comments »

Entry 236 — A Day Worthless But Happy Enough

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

I had what seemed to me a lot of errands to do today.  It was also one of my three tennis days a week.  So I never expected to get anything much done.   I have so far, and probably wont.  (It’s a little after four in the afternoon.)  I feeling lethargic, as I seem always to.  But happy enough because I was able to run close to all out on the tennis court for the second time in a row.  I’m not quite up to what I consider full speed, and I still have trouble when I have to push off on my left leg.  But I feel reasonably able to play near my standard, which I would rate at slightly above average for my age.  This is the main reason for my good mood.

My errands were getting milk and bananas (I eat one banana every morning), depositing a credit card cash advance for $500 in my bank account, dropping buy to pay my dentist my monthly bill, and stopping at my general practitioner’s to get a lab appointment and an office appointment, having missed two schedule for earlier this month, how, I don’t know, but–yikes–I’m getting absent-minded of late.  Once home, I managed to write the times of the appointments down on a wall calendar I have for the very purpose but two often forget to use it.

My dentist has ordered my two recent collections of plurexpressive poetry, but I don’t want to turn them over to her until I written some notes to help her understand them, which is my next minor writing chore.  I’ve been avoiding doing it these past two days, for some reason.  I should be able to start on it tomorrow.

I had some thoughts on how much more important than subject matter in a poem techniques are, inspired by another me-in-the-minority discussion at New-Poetry.  Can’t remember much of what I had to say now, but I do remember discovering that techniques are invisible; it’s their effects that we are aware of in poems.  Ditto form.  I contended that subject matter is too often the only concern of poets, poetry readers, poetry editors and poetry critics.  Certainly almost nobody in the field considers technique more important in a poem than it, the way I do.

I also discovered that actually technique is everything in poetry, for the simple choice of subject matter is a technique.   Subject matter is also everything in a poem.

One thing I said was that it is technique that gives the subject matter of a poem its meaning.  I also opined that viewpoint is a kind of subject matter.  I guess I’d divide subject matter into primary subject matter like the summer day of “Sonnet 18,” and secondary subject matter like Shakespeare’s view of the summer day in that poem as something fine but flawed.

Posted in Autobiographica, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 235 — JoAnne Growney’s Selected

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Beyond Reason Reasonable

I ended a previous review of JoAnne Growney’s poetry with the
observation that she “clearly sees red strikingly well, and a lot
more.”  I was referring to her fine “Can A Mathematician See
Red?” which is also in her latest collection, Red Has No Reason,
for it is a 79-page selected poems (available at Amazon), with most
of the best poems from previous collections (many of them
revised) as well as new ones.  Red, and other colors, are important
for Growney again, as in her “April,” in which a “woodpecker
drums indigo into the poet’s blue days,” but she moves (with green
steps) through the colors, finally to “yield to the rainbow’s red
ending.”

Growney’s poems celebrate many such “red endings,” as when, in
“Exercise,” her persona jogs around a warm-up track for harness
racers, then into city streets where, oblivious of bystanders’ stares,
and cars honking at her, she loses herself in regions “where words
draft/ themselves into swinging, ringing bells.”  Most important to
her, though, is not the beauty of colors, however important that
indeed is, but that they are beyond reason. Her forte, that is, may be
the unreasonablenesses truer than truth she surprises her readers
with–like the setting of her protagonist’s stroll in “Like a Cat,”
whose sky is “a creature as alive as rocks/ but not so warm.”  Or
like the whole of “Stress Remedy”:

From the barn
bring the cow
to your living room rug.
Sleep
when the cow sleeps.

On your porch
watch the ant
do a task seven times.
Quit
before the ant quits.

Walk out
to the field
where wild mustard waves.
Spend
that gold right away.

Only when I read her “Running,” which she describes as a response
to Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking,” ” did I realize that Roethke
is a key influence on her, albeit fully absorbed and re-created.  A
villanelle, like Roethke’s poem, “Running,” builds its self-portrait
with “My sleep is brief.  I rise to run again” and “I live by going
faster than I can,” Roethke’s builds its with “I wake to sleep, and
take my waking slow,” and “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Two beautifully executed formal poems, the later one with the
added richness of its connection to a portion of poetry’s best past.

Less direct but still potent is the connection of such poems of
Growney’s as “Stress Remedy” to the inspired babble of such
poems of Roethke’s as “Where Knock is Open Wide,” which
begins, “A kitten can/ Bite with his feet;/ Papa and Mama/ Have
more teeth.// Sit and play/ under the rocker/ Until the cows/ All
have puppies.”

I thought at times, too, of Emily Dickinson while reading this
collection: the wry sudden twists of thought or wording.  As in the
strangely deep wisdom of:

14 Syllables

A hen lays eggs,
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.

Growney has Dickinson’s interest in religion, too–but is much
more relaxed about it. Take, for instance:

I Don’t Know Much about Gods

but they don’t live in houses brightly painted
on narrow streets in small towns and don’t
celebrate the ordinary as I do and my friends.

I doubt Paradise.  I see mostly what is small
and not too far away, dislike to start
new things, will build on old foundations.

No river runs in me, no sea surrounds.
My corner is a tidy garden plot.
I plant and nourish, pick the crop–

with care I cook, enjoy my fare, wash up,
and sleep to rise another day.  Gods should
introduce themselves to girls like me.

What could be more Dickinsonian than the flat, “I doubt Paradise.”
I find Growney’s last sentence funnier than anything I remember of
Dickinson’s, though.  Such a mordant “polite” turn on almost every
skeptic’s wonder about why God, if He exists, refuses to show
himself.

Canny observations are one of Growney’s strengths, and self-
revelation–concerning situations most of us find ourselves in, but
also in mathematical ones rare in poetry, and therefore especially
appreciated, too.  This passage from her “A Taste of Mathematics”
particularly appeals to me: “Hot peppers/ are like mathematics–/
with strong flavor/ that takes over/ what they enter,.”  A wonderful
simile out of ordinary sensual life to capture the hold mathematics
can have on those in love with it–as well the magically (beyond-
reason) number-infused Universe, itself.

I don’t feel I’ve come close to doing full justice to this collection.  I
hope my comments have been at least preliminarily useful.

Posted in JoAnne Growney, Linguexpressive Poetry | No Comments »

Entry 234 — Thoughts on Anthologizing

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

Another year’s anthology of “the best American Poetry” is about to hit the market.   A brief discussion at New-Poetry about it got me thinking once again about the proper way to edit such a book.  The groundwork, which should have been laid long ago, would be to list all the schools of contemporary American Poetry (and Canadian, since I consider American and Canadian culture one), as I’ve been trying to do for years–without great success because just about no one in poetry is willing to help me.  Hence, if I were asked to oversee such an anthology, I would turn down the job unless I were chosen two years in advance.   And given a good deal of money to hire researchers, as well as to support me for two years (which would only cost a few thousand a year).

I’d hire a few young researchers (with no background in poetry to confuse them), spend a week with them telling them how to recognize poetry and what characteristics to look for in distinguishing one kind from another.  Then I’d set them loose.  Their specific job would be first to list the poetry magazines published during the previous twelve months.  The anthology would consist of poems from periodicals only, as I forgot to mention–and as, I believe, the current “best” anthologies do.  Including those published on the Internet.

Job number two would be to sort the magazines into the eleven main categories of poetry my taxonomy presently recognizes (and which should not be controversial–conventional free verse, visual poetry, surrealistic poetry, etc.).  Magazines with more than one kind of poetry would go into more than one slot.  Magazines containing poetry whose classification my researchers were not able with confidence to determine would go into a twelfth category.  These I would examine, and discuss with my work crew.

Meanwhile I would issue announcements everywhere I could think of but principally the Internet calling for the names and descriptions of schools of poetry, offering a monetary award for any new one I was unaware of.  I would be generous, and pay for any obviously good attempt whether I accepted the group of poets involved a school of poetry or not.   I’d try to generate discussions, writing provocative posts about the project under many names.

I feel 99.99% sure I could, within a year, have a list of every school of contemporary North American poetry, which I would define as any group of two or more poets doing similar work that I judged significantly unlike poetry outside the group.   Some schools I’d have to divide into sub-schools.  I’m thinking of the language poetry school, which consists, it seems to me, of three or more such sub-schools, each considerably different from the others.  Ditto the visual poetry school.  I’d rather have too many schools on my list than miss one.

My guess would be that I and my helpers would find about fifty schools.    I would place them in my taxonomy.  (Just the thought of doing that excites me, as I suspect it would excite almost on one else in poetry.)  Then I’d try to combine similar schools, my goal being to work with just twenty or fewer poetry groups.

All the research done would enable me readily to find one or two editors who were expert in the school or schools of poetry their magazines preferred.  I’d hire them to supply me with every poem in a magazine from the year the anthology would cover that they thought as good as any poems being published.  With an asterisk next to any they thought genuinely belonged in the anthology.   I would hope to be able to skim all the magazine, myself.  In any case, I would add all the poems that jumped out at me.  The only egalitarian rule I’d follow would be to make sure to have at least one poem from each of my twenty or fewer groups.   Finally, I would cut my selections down to a hundred or so, perhaps asking for the opinion or others on the few I wasn’t sure of.

That would be it except for an introduction explaining and defending my procedure, and making the usually declaimer about the choices being, in the final analysis, subjective–but meaning it.

Posted in Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 232 — New Knowlecular Terminology!!!

Saturday, September 25th, 2010

After so many near-worthless entries, at last a really really exciting one!  A very lame school marm type at HLAS, one of my Shakespeare Authorship “Question” sites, got me thinking about rigidniplexes.  They are fixational systems rigidniks form that are the basis of the authorship theories of the most dedicated and rigidly doctrinaire anti-Stratfordians.  One of their main functions is defending the rigidnik against non-conformity.   I had always thought of them as necessarily irrational.

But it seemed to me  the school marm, Mark Houlsby (which may be a pseudonym), has one,   because of  the way he constantly gets after people for rude remarks, going off-topic, and disregard of what he thinks is grammatical correctness, as well as any view he disagrees with, which are mostly non-conformist views.   Yet Houlsby is not an anti-Stratfordian nor does he  seem any more irrational than every normal person is, just set in his narrow ways.  So, I decided there are two basic kinds of rigidniplexes, “hyperrigidniplexes” and “hyporigidniplexes,” the first being highly irrational, the second not particularly irrational.

Actually, I’ve always believed in more than one kind of rigidniplex, but I hadn’t come up with names for them I liked, and my definitions of them were vague.    Now I think I’ll call the most rigidnikal of rigidniplexes, the ones suffered by genuine psychotics, “ultrarigidniplexes.”  Such rigidniplexes are either not “sensibly” irrational, the way hyperrigidniplexes are, or are based on unreality rather than the irrational, although they are no doubt irrational as well.  For instance, an ultrarigidnik may believe unreal aliens from another dimension are after him whereas a mere hyperrigidnik will only believe, say, that no one whose parents are illiterate can become a great writer, which is idiotic but but is merely a misinterpretation of reality, wholly irrational, but not drawing on pure fantasy.

There are probably two levels of hyporigidniks–no, make that three.  Managerial hyporigidniks are the most successful rigidniks, common in the officer corps of the military, and on corporation boards, and, of course, running federal bureaucracies, or universities.  Rigidnikal enough to dominate third-raters, and hold unimaginatively to a course that has proved effective in the past, and rally others at their level, along with the masses, against non-conformity, which will include a country’s culturateurs.  Such hyporigidniks are the great defenders of mediocrity.  And here’s where this entry becomes on-topic for a blog called “Poeticks,” for among the great defenders of mediocrity are the people selecting prize- and grants-winners in poetry, and which contemporaries’ poetry should be taught, published and made the subject of widely-circulated critical essays or books.

A level below the managerial hyporigidniks are the marmly hyporiginiks.  Only slightly above-average in charactration, or basal mental energy, below average in accommodance, the engine of flexibility, imagination, creativity, but with possiblely slightly above average accelerance, or the ability to raise their mental energy when appropriate.  So, not in managerial hyporigidniks’ league, but able to construct rigidniplexeses about trivialities like table manners, spelling, etc., and lord it over milyoops.  And, in poetry, repeat the opinions of the Establishment.

Managerial hyporigidniks, I should have said, are higher in charactration than lesser hyporigidniks.  Indeed, each level of rigidniks has more charactration, and less accommodance–and smaller but more life-consuming rigidniplexes.  The lowest-level hyporigidniks have average charactration and accommodance, and variable but never inordinately high accelerance.   Peasant hyporigidniks, I call them: they form rigidniplexes that are little more than habits sensible for their position in life, and aren’t so much locked into them as too unimaginative to try anything else.

In the past, I’ve often hypothesized a kind of “pararigidniplex”–a rigidniplex formed by freewenders, who are the sanest, most intelligent people.   I now have a new name for it: “wendrijniplex.”  It’s like any other rigidniplex except for its origin, which is not caused by a person’s chronically having too much charactration and too little accommodance, but by a freewender’s having in a single instance, too much charactration and too little accommodance, his enthusiasm for a discovery of his over-riding his critical sense, and his continued pleasure in the rigidniplex it brings into being, being too great for him to break ties with it.  So it blights his intellectual existence every bit as unfortunately as a rigidnik’s rigidniplex blights his.

To be thorough, I will remind my readers (including myself) that everyone forms knowleplexes, which are mental constructs each of which provides an inter-related understanding of some fairly large subject like biology, for a layman, or the biology of mammals, or of one species of mammals, for a biologist.  A rational (although not necessarily valid) knowleplex is a “verosoplex.”  Offhand, I would say there are two kinds of irrational knowleplexes: rigidniplexes and–another new term coming up–”ignosoplex,” or a knowleplex which is basically too inchoerent to be classified as either rational or irrational.  It’s the result of ignorance.  We all have many of them, each concerning a field we are “ignosophers” about–not completely ignorant of, but not sufficiently knowledgeable about to be able to form a verosoplex–or any kind of working rigidniplex.

I’m well aware that most readers will find the above the product of an ignosopher.  It isn’t.  It’s just a pop-psychology–level very rough draft of one small knowleplex the among many making up my knowleplex of temperament, which in turn is a small knowleplex among the many making up my theory of intelligence, which is just a small portion of my theory of epistemology, which is a not-small portion of my theory of the human psychology.  Or so I keep telling myself.

Posted in Grumman coinage, Knowlecular Psychology, theoretical psychology | No Comments »

Entry 231 — “Poem, More Nowhere Than Ever”

Friday, September 24th, 2010

.       Poem, More Nowhere Than Ever

.       For a long time Poem
.       had blithely gone along with his
.       role as an alter ego, even after Criticism
.       had bothered him about it, somewhere
.       off-page. He was not by nature
.       particularly self-analytical. Aside
.       from that, his surroundings generally
.       were interesting enough to keep
.       him out of his self. Lately,
.       though, the texts he found himself
.       part of, like the present
.       one forced him to ask him what he
.       was doing with his life–which in term
.       caused him to wonder what his life
.       was.

.       Criticism loaned him the two chapbooks
.       he’d so far been in. They reminded him
.       of his supposed ancestors but they
.       seemed to have too little in common
.       with even his best self-image to help
.       him sort out things.

.       For the hell of it, he decided to write
.       a poem himself. “For a long time,
.       Bob Grumman had blithely gone along
.       with his role as source ego for
.       a being vastly his superior
.       whom he tortured by confining him
.       to the stupidest, dullest texts in
.       ever conceived.” Alas, he didn’t enjoy
.       his game for long. Too many others
.       had played it before he had, and
.       played it better.

.

Posted in Nothing Much, Of Poem | No Comments »

Entry 230 — “Poem’s Worst Where”

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

 

.          Poem’s Worst Where

.          Poem didn’t know where he was.
.          He barely knew who he was.
.          Whatever text he was in, and
.          he was never anywhere
.          but in a text, said his
.          author was desperate to
.          fill a blog entry, so
.          here he was. The
.          hope was
.          that
.          something would happen
.          to him that
.          would make the text
.          he was in worthwhile.

.          “What is poetry?” he asked.
.          He was made to ask.
.          Poetry is words.
.          Poetry is words but needn’t be
.          only words.
.          Poetry is not prose.
.          The object of poetry is to evoke
.          in as sensually rich a form
.          as possible an image.
.          Prose is only concerned with describing.

.          Poetry wants to capture you, prose to move
.          you to what’s next. Hence,
.          lineation. A poem is
.          an expanding stasis, prose
.          a motion.

.          “Can I go back to bed now?”
.          Poem asked. He was allowed to.

.

.

Posted in Nothing Much, Of Poem | No Comments »

Entry 229 — Reactions to my Cryptographiku

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

It turns out I was wrong when I claimed no one had ever discussed my cryptographiku in print: Geof Huth had.  I found that out in his response to the two new ones I’ve posted here a week or so and two weeks ago or so.  What he insightfully said on each occasion is now archived in this blog’s “Pages” under “Discussions of Bob Grumman’s Poetry.”

I’m still bumbling, although yesterday I did finish the book review I had to do.  I’m letting it sit today.  Tomorrow, I’ll give it a once-over and release it.   I’m not up to writing anything worthwhile here, so am posting the reactions at Geof’s blog to what he said about my latest cryptographiku, and my response to those comments:

Blogger Conrad DiDiodato said…
Geof,

your reading of Grumman’s ‘cryptographiku’ reminds me of something Derek Attridge once said about reading a work:

“We must not allow the resonances of the term “work” to echo too strongly, however; although we may admire the time and effort that has gone into an invention, what we respond to when we respond creatively and responsibly is the enduring event of invention that the labor made possible, not to the labor as such—to the work as working rather than as worked.” (“The Singularity of Literature”)

9:15 PM, September 18, 2010

Blogger John B-R said…
If – if – I consider what you’ve done, Geof, to be translation, then other translations are also possible. Here’s one:

.#####

eagle

epic

eagle

epic

gl

pic

uh

all around the world

color of flags, color of shit

failing fuckedup empire

1:31 PM, September 19, 2010

Anonymous Anonymous said…
‘good’ quote Conrad

I like-wise “pin it on”
the/an event

however: need that event
(irregardless of the/any punctuation or absence of any other
‘signification’) be an “enduring event” which we can reduce to mere mathematics and mathematical symols?

-K.

1:37 PM, September 19, 2010

Blogger VizPo-Central said…
Thanks, Geof, for your second discussion of my cyrptographiku. About the name, when coining terms for use in criticism or like fields, the aim should be clarity, not elegance, though maximizes elegance should be the second aim. When I coined my word, I couldn’t think of any better ones. But at one of my discussion groups, one who interpreted my poems used the word, “cipher.” So I now find “ciphku,” probably a better name for these kinds of poems. So, thanks for sensitizing me to the poor name enough to make me notice a word leading to what I think is a better one.

Thanks for the good comment, Conrad. I think speaking of a poem as a work can have on good side: it reminds the poem’s engagent that it wasn’t just thrown together (although these were!), so he should try not to dismiss it too easily.

Thanks for your thoughts, too, B-R–but your second interpretation is, I’m afraid, wrong. There is, so far as I can see, only one main “solution” for either poem that fits. For instance, in the first, each line should consist of one one-letter word followed by a four-letter word.

One idea I hope to follow up on is some coded text that spells one thing according to one code and another, legitimately, according to another.

Finally, K. I think you’ve hit on a central idea of each of the poems. While I don’t see anything “mere” about mathematics, in these poems, I was trying to show events not enduring–I’d rather say, enduring for only a moment–but dying from letters through numerals to nothingness.

Anyway, I’m happy that thoughts like yours occur to someone encountering my gadgets.

–Bob

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Entry 228 — Nowhere, Again

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

I’m avoiding the book review I need to finish.  I don’t know why.  I only have to do another 400 words or so on it, and I plan just to list and comment on a few poems, to support the general impression of the collection I’ve already expressed.  (The book is a collection of poems by Joseph Bathanti called Restoring Sacred Art.)  I have another review to do after that.  Then I need to get to work on something with a chance to make some money for me.

I haven’t gotten back to the mathemaku I was working on.

My health remains about the same.  I played tennis this morning: four sets of doubles.  I was terrible, but seem to be able to chase balls better than I was before my surgery.  I still hopalong, though–I can’t genuinely run.

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