Just to have my Odysseus Suite fully and correctly documented here (and get another entry posted although still barely able to function), here’s what I hope is the final version of its first frame:
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Entry 715 — “The Odysseus Suite, Frame 1″
April 21st, 2012Entry 714 — Yet Another Revision
April 19th, 2012I decided on this revision before my kidney stone attack, so don’t blame it on that. The change is to the second frame of The Odysseus Suite. I now want it dividend to be “c. 1200 B.B.” The ear dominated by Mycenae rather than Mycenae itself. It makes more seense to me that way, but I’ll have to wait until my infection has receded to have the energy to make a good case that that.
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Entry 713 — Kidney Stone
April 18th, 20128 days of hospitaliztion for it. No access to computer, bu no energy to use computer, either. Stone gone and I’m at home with infection issues. The outlook, however is good. I’m too tired to type more.
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Entry 712 — The Value of Blurbs
April 11th, 2012One of the new topics of discussion at New-Poetry is blurbs. I may have been the only one to defend them–because I do not define them as empty commercial hype for a product but as potentially useful, albeit favorable, data about a product. Jim Finnegan, for instance, disdainfully writes them off as wholly worthless: a prospective buyer of a collection of poetry should not bother with what’s written on its back-cover, but crack the book and read a few poems in it. Sounds sensible, but it only works for Wilshberian poetry–poetry, that is, that does nothing the normal reader of poetry won’t have been long familiar with. A glance at such poetry is all he should need to decide whether he likes it or not. But what about adventurous poetry? Poetry the normal reader will most likely be instantly confounded by, and give up on quickly, unless he is an unusually responsible investigator of poetry with enough time to delve into the poetry involved much more deeply than most others would. A good blurb can give such a reader helpful hints–tell him, for instance, that the poems in my largest collection carry out mathematical operations of serious metaphorical significance rather than indiscriminantly play around with mathematical symbols who knows why. What’s wrong with a blurb’s also imparting enthusiasm for poetry not-easy quickly to like? For letting a reader know that someone likes it well enough to have spent time blurbing it. The identity of a blurber can be useful information, too–the fact that John Ashbery blurbed a collection of Amy King’s quirkily jump-cut poetry will tell someone finding her book in a bookstore that it is probably in a vein similar to Ashbery’s, as well as letting the person know that someone considered particularly knowledgeable about poetry likes it. I can’t remember what Ashbery said, but if he quoted some passage of it and said why he liked it, it could have made the difference between a thoughtful perusal of a few poems in the book, and a quick rejection of them. It all comes down into whether or not commentary on poetry is a good thing. I say it is–regardless of how many stupid blurbs are written.
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Entry 711 — A Visit With Paul Crowley
April 10th, 2012For anyone coming here who doesn’t realize I’m a lunatic, I thought I’d give you a look at my latest post to HLAS. In it I argue about what intelligence is with Paul Crowley. No, what I’m now trying to do is get him to agree that such a thing exists. I believe you will find him unbelievably out of it. I often believe him to be a computer program designed to see how rational people interact with the completely irrational. Or perhaps just for the fun of seeing me make a fool of myself trying to refute someone too dense to be refuted. In any case, I believe my participation in discussions with Paul Crowley (which have been going on for around fifteen years) are near-proof that I am a lunatic. But there is method in my madness, heheheheheh. I am the foremost explorer of irrationality in the world, you see! I’m not out to defeat this boob, but to spark manifestations of every conceivable insanity out of him so that I may list them as a lepidopterist collects butterflies for display!
On Apr 9, 11:48 am, Paul Crowley wrote:
> n 07/04/2012 00:09, Bob Grumman wrote:
> > And if you really think no one discusses intelligence,
> > and who is intelligent, who not, and what precisely it
> > is, and so forth, you’re–why, you’re Paul Crowley.> The world is much more than the acquaintances
> of Bob Grumman. No one, outside of those born
> in the 20th century in a modern western scientistic
> culture discusses ‘intelligence’ in a manner that
> is remotely similar. To all other societies and
> cultures, the concept is either quite alien or
> utterly strange.> >>> Is there a necessity to postulate an entity that allows
> >>> us to see–which I would call “sight?”
> >> Certainly not. People and other creatures see.
> >> That is enough.> > Where did the word, “sight,” come from? (Truly,
> > you’re at your finest here, Paul–I’m sure I’ve never
> > tried to answer such incredibly stupid opinions
> > before.)> It is convenient, in the English language (and
> in some other languages), to sometimes use
> abstract nouns. I’d advise you not to let that
> fact fool you into believing that such things
> have a real existence — but you are already
> hopelessly lost in a world of fantasy.> > Ophthamologists should not be concerned with
> > some entity that allows people to see?> There is no such entity.
What are the eyes?
> >> There is nothing to define. There is nothing
> >> that can be defined. It’s classic case of the
> >> Emperor’s new clothes.> > Right. There is no such thing as intelligence
> > because there is no such thing as intelligence.> Sorry, but pointing at the nakedness of the
> Emperor is enough to demonstrate that he
> has no clothes. It’s up to those claiming that
> he really has clothes to demonstrate that fact.
> For example, they could put him on a
> weighing scales and show that he weighed
> more with them on than with some off.
> You can’t off course. The clothing (i.e. here
> ‘intelligence’) exists because you want it to
> exist, so it must exist. You can’t imagine a
> world without it, but you have no conception
> as to how you’d prove or disprove its
> existence.[note: amazing how much cranks love the dead metaphor of the emperor's new clothes.]
> >>> And now I’m to what I thought I’d write about just
> >>> now: how we should tackle what I want to tackle,
> >>> which is to determine if each of us possesses a
> >>> mechanism I would call “intelligence” that allows
> >>> us effectively to interact with the environment–
> >>> biologically, I mean: i.e., in such a way as to
> >>> keep us alive and comfortable.> >> No one in the real world asks such a question.
> >> It’s entirely fake.[note: one of the most comic of Paul's traits is his inability to avoid using "no one" and "entirely" and the like every chance he gets. If really pushed on the practice, he will call me too literal-minded to accept that he "really" means "the probability against anyone's acting in such a way is astronomical," of the like. But it's clear he truly means what he says. As a rigidnik, he can't accept not being 100% on the right side of any significant question.]
> > Yet I have reference books that define the term, and
> > books about it.> If you had any historical perspective you would
> know that throughout history nearly all libraries
> consisted of books that were nearly all
> worthless junk. Those of the 20th century
> must be by far the worst in this respect, with
> Pssyycholistic and other pseudo-scientific
> ‘works’ being manifestly mindless junk from
> the moment they were published.“Nearly all worthless junk.” Absolutely incredibly obtuse statement. Since I have something called intelligence, I know that to the contrary no book ever created was worthless junk. Many books about intelligence seem to me not to have very effectively advanced the search for truth regarding it, but the possibility that any of them was discussing something non-existent is ludicrous. But I’ll keep playing this insane game you have me in, the goal of which is to nail you in a contradiction no sane person can deny–although you will.
Here’s a starting question: What did Shake-speare have that I do not have that was responsible for his creation of plays vastly superior to the ones I’ve written?
> >> You are talking about a nothing.
> > I am speaking of a physical mechanism humans
> > have that allow for problem solving.> Nope. You are missing every point that can
> be missed. As an analogy, let’s say you
> are explaining to some young person how
> important the New York Times was in the
> 20th century, and what it was like. But, at best
> — and you are even a long way from that — you
> would be saying what kind of ink was used for
> its printing, and where they got the paper.> >> There is no entity which “allows us to solve
> >> problems”. We either solve them or we don’t.
> >> We either walk or we don’t.> > Ah, so my legs have nothing to do with my ability to
> > walk?> How do you come to this conclusion?
> You need a lot of things to be able to walk,
> and working legs are one of them. Being
> able to balance is another. Having a fair
> amount of practice around the ages of one
> or two is another. Having nerve connections
> in the lower spine is another. And so on
> and onSo anything that’s complicated does not exist? What happens to allow a car to move is complicated: does it therefore not have the ability to move?
> Possessing an entity called ‘walking ability’
> does not figure in mind (or the books) of any
> physiotherapist or doctor or other specialist
> in the field. It would only be imagined by some
> specialist in Pssyychologostical bull-shit.Wouldn’t a physiotherapist investigate certain physical mechanisms and not others? Would he give a person having trouble walking a color discrimination test?
> >> We either eat or
> >> we don’t. You can talk about whole ranges
> >> of pre-conditions that “allow us” to eat, or
> >> walk, or solve problems; for example, being
> >> fit and healthy helps. But none of these pre-
> >> conditions have some over-riding power.
> >> [..]> > All you’re saying is that intelligence is a mechanism
> > has many constituents.> NO, I am not. I am saying it is far less useful
> an idea than ‘walking ability’ would be to a
> paediatrician or a doctor in a hospital for foot
> or leg amputees.I had a bad hip, Paul. It was operated on last June. After the operation I could walk, but not well. All the doctors and nurses and therapists I was involved in were concerned with my ABILITY TO WALK, not with whether it was there or not there as a lunatic like you apparently would, but whether or not I had an EFFECTIVE ABILITY TO WALK. Certain muscles needed exercise for me to fully to recover THE ABILITY TO WALK. I soon had that ability again, but not a reasonably good ABILITY TO RUN, which they next worked on, and that is nearly back, as well.
> >> There is NO ability. Giving a name to a nothing
> >> and then defining it is (I fully agree) the raison> >> d’etre of Pssyychologism.
> > Can a normal person solve some problems? If so,
> > what does he possess that allows him to do that?
> > Nothing?> Take a relatively simple concept like ‘walking’
I can walk because I have legs and a brain that directs those legs.
> or ‘left-handedness’, and ask the same kind
> of question. You will (hopefully) then see that
> such a question is absurd or close to absurd,
> and that it has no reasonable answer. THEN
> you might realise that to imagine you have a
> meaningful question as regards ‘intelligence’
> is only to fool yourself.As far as I can make out, you are claiming that there is no such thing as an ability. Or that abilities exist but nothing physical causes them to be manifested.
> >> Not the supernatural. We are what we see we
> >> are. There is no point in trying to pretend that
> >> we are explicable in terms of electrical signals
> >> or whatever. You could say that today’s New
> >> York Times is just a combination of paper and
> >> ink. But to reduce it to ‘paper and ink’ misses
> >> its entire nature, and to respond in the wrong
> >> dimension. You are (somehow) thinking you can
> >> do something similar with human beings and
> >> their brains — reduce them all to bio-electrical
> >> bits and signals. You are simply missing the
> >> point.Block the bio-electrical bits and signals to the cerebrum and the person involved will have no ability to solve problems. Doesn’t that tell you something, Paul?
> > If it is not bio-electrical bits and signals, and not
> > supernatural, what is it?> It’s the hopeless inapplicability of your
> reductionist approach to anything human.Seriously, Paul, have you had a relapse? You seem at least one order
of magnitude more insane than ever before.–Bob
Few people visit HLAS nowadays, for Paul and I dominate it and there are few who are willing to wade through our exchanges. I think they are very funny, some of my inept attempts against Paul being close to as funny as his almost-always bizarre irrationalities. The very few who have commented on Paul or I lump us together. No one yet has ventured to take sides in this particular thread (or the two or three other threads the discussion has also been going on in). So I would appreciate it if someone would be good enough to reassure me that it is not absurd to believe that human beings possess a mechanism it makes sense to call intelligence that, among other things, allows them to solve problems (or try to). I’m curious, too, if anyone finds Paul as hilarious as I do. Sometimes I think there may be less that a thousand people in the whole world who love the ravings of nuts as much as I. And, as I’ve said more than once, I empathize with nuts, knowing full well that I may be one myself. Although I am convinced I am am leagues less a nut than Paul Crowley is. (I’ve tried to find out who he is in the real world and gotten nowhere, by the way; he refuses to disclose anything at all about himself–amusingly, I find it hard not to disclose everything about myself.)
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Entry 710 — Late Emptry
April 9th, 2012I 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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Entry 709 — Of Dichotophobia and the Cosmic Randomizer
April 8th, 2012Here’s a word I believe not a new coinage of mine that I put here just in case it is: “dichotophobia,” hatred of dichotomies. Politically, it’s a form of excessive egalitarianism, the insane wish that everyone be the same, so no one can suffer from being inferior. Fortunately, there’s no way such sameness could come about, because the world would be intolerable if it did. But totalitarians have too many believing it’s possible.
I also have a new term for today: “cosmic randomizer.” I’ve always thought the universe entirely predictable, although too complex for human beings fully to predict. But what if there’s such a thing as a cosmic randomizer that every ten years shuddered, jarring the matter near it out of predictability for an instant, thus rendering all sequences of cause and effect they were participating in null, which would mean, ultimately, a small surge of randomness throughout all the universe. It would be hardly noticeable to human beings but could in a few cases have, from our point of view, huge consequences–like a weird bounce in a championship tennis match, or a philosopher’s suddenly, for no reason, coming up with the idea of . . . a cosmic randomizer.
Another weak pwoermd for Poetry Month.
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Entry 708 — Long Division Poetry I, Lesson 1
April 7th, 2012
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My pwoermd for the day–remember that I’m doing a sequence of months; this one is where “June” would be expected. Pitiful, but maybe if I made the S look like a J, it’d work better? Nah.
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Entry 707 — Grey Thoughts about Creativity
April 6th, 2012I often feel I’m a magnificently creative artist–until I consider how few ideas, devices, images or other poetry materials I use. How many, I wonder, are there? And how many of the original ones can I claim are mine? Take my pwoermd for today:
It’s just one more of my dozens of exploitations of the silent gh I stole from Aram Saroyan, slightly modified (for the better, I hope) by its emptiness (a trick I’ve also used more than once before). Then there’s to enlarged O that’s central in more ways than one in my Odysseus sequence. That I got, I think, from Johanna Drucker, a poet I have a very low opinion of. I first used it long ago in “The Word.” Of course, I did more with it there and this time than she could have thought to do, by using it as a window on another text. Not that big a deal, and probably not a trick new to me. I have been first to insert many mathematical operations significantly into poems, but is that many tricks or just one, the use of a mathematical operation in a poem? In any case, someone else preceded me with that. (Dunno who.) So, are there more than maybe ten or fifteen sorta original devices in my poems? As many as a hundred significant devices of any kind? That’s not many–not that any other poet is likely to have had more. Pound, maybe. Cummings? My friend Richard Kostelanetz may well have the record for being the first or tied for being the first with a great many infraverbal maneuvers, but most of them seem to me to be too little different from one another to count as full inventions–which isn’t to belittle them: many are extremely effective, and far beyond the capacity of any visible poets of our time. I’ve elsewhere claimed Cummings for the most inventive, significantly inventive, poet of all time–by a lot.
Someday a grad student will list and describe mine, I’m sure–probably a year or two before the hundredth anniversay of my death when the professor in charge of him realizes, possibly after reading this, that it’d be a good subject on a Certified Poet not that many have researched yet. I hope it will turn out that I’ve been first with a handful of good new devices. Originality is far from everything in any art, but it’s essential for the advance of an art, even when at first ineffective. Which mine NEVER is.
Jus’ gabbin’ another entry together. It’s not yet ten in the a.m. I may actually do some writing of at least minor importance before I go to bed. I’m opiated for the second time this week. I’m coming to the view that the stress of poetry for someone as serious as I about doing it well and creatively (craft = repeating existence, art = enlarging existence) finally was too much for my terribly sensitive ahtist’s nervous system five or ten years ago, and that I require my pain pills to get anything of any value done. I do think my performance as an opiated neurological cripple is as good as it was before I needed help. Certainly I relaxes me enough to strewdle along indefinitely like I’m doing now. Gotta stop and try to get a final draft of my latest Small Press Review column done.
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Entry 706 — Penelope
April 5th, 2012These two, again, to finish off what I hope is my final version of this sequence. I haven’t changed the third frame, but did touch up the last frame slightly. Now for a few notes to help those without the background for anything close to full appreciation without help. This, I admit, is a flaw in the poems–well, not really a flaw but a disadvantage; I’d like almost everyone to be able to figure out what’s going on in my third frame, for instance, but those who never had, or never understood, algebra won’t be able to, and the poem is nothing without its algebra. I think everyone will know that my 2 is an exponent that increases the value of “gh.” I hope they will be familiar enough with my work to know that I make a big deal out of the silence in Aram Saroyan’s “lighght” of the silence of his gh’s, so here I’m mathepoetically emphasizing the romantic quietude of moonlight.
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Do try to guess the rest of my intent without looking here if you can. That is, don’t give up too fast. If you do need help, then you should know, or be reminded, that since the “heart root” of Penelope equals moonlight at what it must be its quietest, then Penelope equals that moonlight, raised to the power of the heart–or love, courage, passion, health . . . Penelope, it should be easier to see, contains lilacs. She is, in other words, very desirable, assuming you like lilacs as much as I do.
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The final frame may sum up all that is good about existence for me. Music times light equals life. That seems to me a wonderful simple Final Truth. But note that the life involved is especially potent–it is to ordinary life as a capital E with four horizontals is to one with just three. In addition, the extra “limb” is supposed to suggest the fecundity of nature in spring–extra growths. The remainder, which must be added to the “super-life” to equal the lilacs at the core of Odysseus’s Penelope, is a puzzle because I think puzzles are fun, but also because puzzles are part of all the best things, poems, flowers, wives. It’s basically 3 words and an x, for the unknown, mixed together.
The word above is my fifth word of the month as part of my participation is Geof Huth’s DUMB pwoermd-a-day celebration of Poetry Month. I doubt if I can keep making pwoermds up for 26 more days but thought it might be fun to try–after stumbling on the idea of making part of it a sequence. This is the first of my specimens that’s even half-good, but I’m getting some ideas for rescuing one or two of the others. It may be that revision after more than a day has elapsed is against Geof’s rules. No matter: I’ll play on, anyway.
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