I simply forgot about my blog all day yesterday, so here is merely an acknowledgement of its lateness, with the last of my attempted pwoermds for Poetry Month. I was unable to click even once in my nine tries.
Augussssssssssss. . . . I was going to make each s slightly smaller than the one before it but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
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I feel okay. It’s just that I can’t think of anything to put here except the announcement that I have nothing to put here, which I put here so I can say, for some reason, that I’ve done a daily blog for at least the past, what, three months? I’m so out of it I’m not upset about being so out of it.
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The past few days I’ve been backing up my blog entries. A little while ago I came across something extremely discouraging: a list from July 26th, 2010, of my 15 life-works-in-progress. What was discouraging was observing that I have done no work on any of them since listing them. Oddly, I left out my Shakespeare authorship book. That I have done work on–quite a bit, in fact. But I had expected to finish with that a year or more ago. I certainly hope that I’ll at least get to work on a few of these life works this year!
My excuse for not doing anything on them today is that I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. Of late, that’s all I need to do nothing of consequence all day. But it does look like I’ll get this entry posted. I very much need to put the final touches on my response to Jake’s essay, too. That’s been sitting for three or four days, and the deadline is now less than a week away. I have a review of a novel I read to do for Small Press Review, too. Shouldn’t take long, but so difficult simply to start.
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There’s been a discussion of “prose poetry” at New-Poetry the past day or two. I posted a few sarcastic remarks against what I consider the nullinguistic idiocy of calling prose “poetry,” and this, which I wouldn’t have bothered posting here except that I was desperate for something to post:
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Diary Entry
Friday, 6 January 2012, 4 P.M. I took one of my special pain pills a little while ago. My day seemed shot, even though I’d written what may be a semi-okay Poem poem for my blog entry. The pill may have helped. I feel a little better, and I got going on my response to Jake again. While working on it, I saw a paragraph I could cut; I always enjoy cutting. Once I’d done that, I realized the paragraph would work much better in a different spot, so I moved it. Suddenly, I thought a C essay might be a B or B+. The pill? No matter: what counts is that the essay is done–more than a week before the deadline!
An hour later. I have to assume the pill has had a good effect on me. In the past hour I revised a recent mathemaku and submitted it to Amanda Earl for her Poetry Month site; finished editing a text from a friend who is making a book of the letters she and her husband exchanged during a Phillipines/USA courtship for her family; and wrote a letter to a friend in California. I made a few Civilization moves, too.
Good news: I won’t be cluttering my entries with these doubly-null diary entries, anymore. When I began posting them, I thought my life had a chance of becoming interesting, but I’m now certain it never will.
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I’m pretty much out of it. Can’t think of anything to write about but my wonder at how much our our lives are truly ours. For instance, how much of live other people’s lives do we live? I’m talking about vicariously experiencing part of the life of someone in a book or film–or even in someone’s conversation. Not that one doesn’t remain at least partly in his own life, observing as well as living inside the take-over character. Not that it’s a bad thing, either, unless done to excess–good for a change of pace, exposure to new slants and data, escape from personal stress into someone else’s. . . . Then there’s all the time one spends repeating previous thoughts and actions. For instance: the thousands of times I’ve ridden home on my bike from the same part of town. Never a precise repetition, but am I really more than ten percent of my present self rather than the person I used to be? Sure, in a technical sense, I’m living my own life, but I end with a life equal to 11,078X + 342Y + 9846Z instead of X + Y + Z + a . . . . . + z, etc. A deck with 31 threes of clubs, 15 fours of spades and aces of spades rather than a regular deck.
Diary Entry
Tuesday, 3 January 2012, 1 P.M. I now have 18 pieces on display at the local Chamber of Commerce building. I thought I was prepared for an anti-climax, but things went worse than I was prepared for. The holders wouldn’t hold all my pieces. Twice one of my pieces they did hold fell down because the little nails holding its hook, or whatever, came out. No damage, but . . . It wasn’t possible to hang my pieces level or untitled. Meanwhile, there was a fair amount of traffic–without even once anyone’s taking notice of my things. Once, when I was bent over trying to hang a piece, I was aware of three or four people behind me, two or three of them exclaiming at the beauty of something; then they went in through door to a nearby office, still excited–about a co-worker’s new shoes.
I had to get everything taken care of in two trips because I needed to take one piece home to renail its hook. I also didn’t want to hold up Linda, waiting in her car for me to finish, too much, and all I needed from her was transportation of my pieces, which had been taken care of.
Now that I’ve been home a half-hour or so, I feel a little better, a little more sane. My pieces look okay. I don’t think anyone finding them interesting will be bothered by their less than ideal installation. Best of all, I don’t have to think about the exhibition, anymore.
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I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that most of us, including me, should be thankful to have been born. Unfortunately, we’re designed never to be satisfied with our level of happiness–if we were, we’d not work to improve our lot, and we’d have by now been replaced by another species of animal incapable of being satisfied with its lot. I still wouldn’t want to have to repeat my life, though.
Maybe some lucky people are happy with their lot. The species survives anyway because of the many more unsatisfied ones in it.
That’s it for this entry (except for the diary entry from yesterday). I played tennis in the morning and will have a real thanksgiving dinner at my friend, Linda’s this afternoon. I think I may treat the day as a holiday and not do any genuine work.
Diary entry for Wednesday, 23 November 2011, 10 A.M.: I feel a little sleepy but not as sleepy as I usually do. I’ve already done two more exhibition hand-outs, although each is rather short. I continue to feel enthusiastic about the show. My blog entry for today, which I did yesterday, has been posted, so the only project left for me to work on is my book. I do believe I’ll be getting to it.
9 P.M. I got to it and did some good work on it, but it’s all revision now (of this particular section) and it is hard-going trying to figure out what I was talking about.
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My computer made things hard for me all day. I must have lost three hours at least waiting for an upload or the like to occur, rebooting when the computer hung up, etc. I got a little work done on the book I’m doing for MartonKoppany, and started a page for the class that took an interest in math poetry. When I got to this, I couldn’t think of anything to put in it. Ergo:
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These are from who-who-knows-when and not officially part of mine Oeuvre! There here because I’m determined to post a daily blog. But I do think the lower image pretty. I think I probably posted it once before. I don’t believe I ever posted the other–can’t imagine why I would have. On the other hand, I’m posting it now. . . .
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Small comment about Jaynes: when speaking of consciousness, he meant self-consciousness, so wasn’t entirely silly. As I believe I wrote in yesterday’s entry, I believe living things have almost always had a feeling of self. That early talking selves were not aware of their deepers selves may be possible but I doubt it. Whatever I mean by that.
I played two sets of doubles this morning and got very tired. The humidity, I hope. Since then, I’ve done very little. Yesterday I took notes on most of the works at Scriptjr.nl 2.2 (on the Internet) for the Small Press Review column I’ll be writing about it. Visiotextual art curated by Andrew Topel. I just had three artists left to cover today but haven’t felt up to going to the site. Really had to push myself to get this little entry done.
As my day began and through most of it, I was my usual sleepy self. Had a busy doctor-day, too. But I took a couple of APCs three hours or so ago for a headache, and feel quite good. I’m not up to writing a really good entry here, but wrote a pretty funny e.mail to New-Poetry an hour or so after taking the APCs and think it’ll work reasonably well for today’s entry. Here it is as written except that I deleted one word that I’d replaced with a second word but forgot to take out:
>> On 5/4/2011 2:35 PM, Halvard Johnson wrote:
>> Truth-seeking and mindless nihilism are false alternatives, Bob.
>> See what I mean?Get me in a formal debate, Hal, and I’ll plead guilty to any false dichotomies I commit. This one is what I’d call a colloquial one, or maybe an ellipsis–meaning, “truth seeking and sufficient mindless nihilism to prevent truth from being found,” to a verosopher but not to one trying to win an argument. It’s like the statement, “a person is either black or white.” Everyone knows what it means although everyone is also aware that in a small minority of cases it’ll be very hard to decide which a person is. “A person is either black or white” really means “A person either has dark enough skin to be considered by most people to be black or he doesn’t, in which case he is deemed to be white.” Everyone is also aware that “everyone” really means “almost everyone” and that “black” and “white” don’t mean “black” and “white.”
I just realized that what I’ve been writing, slightly changed, would make a good Arthur Vogelsang poem. What a name he has for a poet! If I have the German right. I would be amazed if he is not a favorite of yours, Hal. I was unfamiliar with his work until I got a copy of his Expedition to review for Small Press Review. Very funny. He would take what I said and change the order, and add non sequiturs. Into it surrealize a smoking chimney some woman leans against with her tenses awry and nothing to do with Santa Claus except eye-color, although the latter has to do with chimneys (Santa Clause, not eye-color), if not compulsively since what’s once every 365 or 366 nights a year? Am I what I am because I’m trying to desatirize his work or is he what he is because he is satirizing my verosophy. Which he would agree would be simple to do although he doesn’t know me any more than he knows Santa Claus. Who has nothing to do with sentence structure. Which is nonetheless considered important in some circles. By everyone, which is not to say “everyone.” In most circles. Repetition is important.
Back to Me:
It’s simple. I asked Anny whose side Freddy would be on, mine or Amy’s. The extremely strong implication of that is that Freddy could be expected to be on one side or the other–if we ignore, as we do colloquially (see my preceding paragraph), the possibility that he will be neutral, and my Freddy would never be neutral. Hence, your saying Freddy Laker was the Freddy I meant indicates that you thought Freddy Laker could be expected to be on one side or the other. But you won’t say what it was about him that would cause him to side with either Amy or me.
Sure, you could be having fun with the idea of Freddy Laker’s being on Amy’s side because they are both high fliers, or deliver the goods, etc. Or a knight would be on the side of a King. But I think that after you realized where I was (seeking a truth, remember, although a small one), you would out of considerateness have told me that you were a lot less than as serious about your Freddy as I about mine. True, I was using my Freddy in an attempt at a joke, but a joke in which what my Freddy was, had to be taken seriously for it to work.
Right, I’m going on and on. I am crazy, for I really think there are some out there who will enjoy reading this as much as I’m enjoying writing it (due primarily to the two APC’s I took a while ago for a headache, no doubt). But I’m also writing for myself. I’m going to use this as my blog entry for today. I thought for a moment I’d spare New-Poetry participants from having to see it, and just provide a link to my blog here. Then I thought, why? All someone this offends need do to get me to stop making such posts is to go public with a legitimate case against its value. That means more than denouncing it and/or monster-me. Defeated by a rational case, I would retire from the field. I would hope. Dumped on for being out of tune with Proper Understanding of What’s Right, I fear, won’t have much of an effect on me.
Since few here will take the time for that, maybe Finnegan can add a like and a don’t like button to every post–or be even more insipid and just add a like button as Facebook does.
Why is “egocentricity” a good word and “anthrocentricity” comically stupid a word?
Whee.
–Bob
“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Louise Armstrong.
“If you can’t define something, either you are lacking in analytical ability or it doesn’t exist.” Bob Grumman.
By “define” I mean describing something not perfectly but intelligently enough for others to use your definition to find and use what you’ve defined. For instance: to say that Bob Grumman’s residence is “the house with green walls at the southeast corner of Midway Boulevard and Hayworth Road in Port Charlotte, Florida, USA,” is to define it more than sufficiently for most purposes. Ways can be found, in my view, for you to define it (or anything else) in any greater details required for whatever your purpose is. Eventually. To not yet have sufficient data to define something well does not make it undefinable.
I’m writing all this because of another stupid passage in Nordlinger’s New Criterion music review: “. . . a Carnegie Hall booklet featured an interview with James Taylor, the folk-rock-pop legend. He said, ‘A trick that I seem to have used over and over again is to juxtapose a cheerful musical style with a grave or heavy lyrical content. These things are so beyond description and analysis.’” Sure, for someone not blessed with a good reducticeptual awareness (and most people in the arts are not, although Taylor seems to me to have given a helpful, partial description of his art). I don’t fault Taylor for his off-hand remark about description and analysis, but Nordlinger for using it to support his belief in things that are beyond analysis, in this case a piece of unconventional music Nordlinger quoted a terrible attempt at an analysis of–in his mind to show, I gather, the futility of analysis, not that analysis, like anything else, can be poorly done.
Only initial premises are beyond analysis, and they are very few, one of mine being “The Universe is an eternal collection of matter and at least one urwareness occupying infinite space.” (An “urwareness” is a person’s final eternal conscious-of-existence self; I know I have one and have no way of knowing whether anyone else does or not.) My final definition of matter, if I had one, would be my only other unanalyzable premise, I believe. My definition of space is simply “everywhere that matter isn’t.” I recognize that this definition is considered obsolete by certified scientists, but hold to it, anyway. Indeed, I recognize that I’m not saying anything certain philosophers now considered hopelessly out of it weren’t saying 200 or more years ago.