Kevin Kelly « POETICKS-

Kevin Kelly « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Kevin Kelly’ Category

Entry 995 — A Gem by Kevin Kelly

Saturday, January 26th, 2013

The following is a pwoermd Kevin Kelly posted to Spidertangle the other day:

hearthththrob

I like the way it makes me, at any rate, close to simultaneously strongly, sympathetically identify with the one whose heart throb is involved, and laugh at the poor jerk. The lisp of the heartbeats is any excellent touch, too. Not to mention the stuttering attempt to say, “the,” but not be able to. Never has “heart throb” been so fully writ.

Blockbuster DVD

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Entry 120 — Responding to Narratives of Misery « POETICKS

Entry 120 — Responding to Narratives of Misery

Topic: why some people like narratives about miserable people. A variation on why people like tragedy–as, on the surface, they should not, if my claim that the object of art is to give pleasure is true.

1. The standard answer: one experiencing the narrative experiences the beauty of the ugly material’s aesthetic expression. The artist provides a taming order to horror, and pleasurable details, for instance, as with Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury.”

2. A simple psychological answer: it results in an “Ah, I’m not alone!” for someone empathetic who is exposed to it.

3. Another obvious one: it produces in the person experiencing it the kind of happiness one gets from looking through a window of a snug, secure house at a blizzard.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Dylan Thomas « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Dylan Thomas’ Category

Entry 1314 — Just-Spring

Sunday, December 29th, 2013

It crossed my mind earlier today that a flair for the use of fresh language might be the most important attribute of a superior poet. Certainly E. E. Cummings had it, which is why he rates so high with me. In particular, I think the invention of new words or phrases, or the use of a word in a way it was never before used, like Cummings’s melding of “just” and “spring” in his famous poem about the balloonman, is about the most important thing a superior poet can do. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas are two others I quickly think of who did this. If I were fading out, I’d try to find examples, and mention more poets of fresh language. I might even come up with a Grummaniacal name for them.

For now, I just say that one way of recognizing mediocrity in a poet is his total conventionality of word-choice and use. You can recognize the subj-mediocrity by his used of dead poeticisms.

Digital Cameras

Posted in Aesthetics, Dylan Thomas, E E Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 584 — An & & My Full Triptych « POETICKS

Entry 584 — An & & My Full Triptych

It seems that almost every time I seem to be getting productive, something knocks me down. This time it’s only a lost entry–this one, that I was trying to correct some detail of and lost in the process–without realizing it, so was not able to try to find the lost material by backing up until it was too late. So now I have to spend an hour or so, restoring what I can recall of what was here two days ago.

One item was this by Moribund Face:

And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:

About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.” I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever. I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white. The original frames are each eleven by seventeen. Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.

* * *

Sunday, 4 October 2011. Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is. I played tennis early in the morning–badly. I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.

Engagement Rings

This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Bob Grumman, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Moribund Facekvetch, Visual Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Henry James « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Henry James’ Category

Entry 833 — Plot Versus Character

Friday, August 17th, 2012

Yesterday I finished reading Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. It’s a mere “genre” novel, but I doubt any of the “art” novels of our time are better. I think critics have too long been under the influence of Henry James, whose forte was characterization, not plot, as Clancy’s is. I much prefer The Hunt for Red October to the one James novel I know I read, The Ambassadors–a penetrating psychological study of an absolute nincompoop as far as I’m concerned. The inability to be explicit does not seem the brilliant virtue to me it does to Jamesians.

I think taste in these matters boils down to which of a person’s awarenesses is stronger, his sagaceptual awareness or his anthroceptual awareness. I’ve discussed all this before, but haven’t anything else to post today, so here it is again. (I also want to make public my notion of sagaceptuality as much as possible so maybe I’ll get some credit for it when some certified theoretical psychologist discovers it.) It’s the awareness which tends to organize thinking in goal directed modes–i.e., to put a person on a quest. It could be a child hunting for pirate treasure on a beach, a girl pursuing a boy, me working up a decent definition of . . . “sagaceptuality.” It could also be a vicarious quest, as was the one I went on with the hero of The Hunt for Red October. With several of the heroes of that book, actually.

What happens is that we all have an instinctive recognition of certain goals–for instance, the capture of a mate. We usually have some instinctive goal pursuit drive that the object we recognize as a proper goal makes available to us. What it does, basically, is lock us onto the object it is our goal to capture (or escape from) and energize us when we are effectively closing in on it (or escaping it), and de-energize us to take us out of single-minded ineffective pursuit and expose us to other possible better kinds, until one of them is judged to improve out pursuit. In other words, just a homing device, with many different possible targets, like a possible mate, or food, or beauty, or fame. Nothing much to it.

Anthroceptuality is simply interest in oneself and others. When it is dominant, other instincts rule us, such as the need for social approval. Needless to say, both anthroceptuality and sagaceptuality will usually be in some kind of partnership–with other awarenesses. But some, as I’ve said, will be stronger in sagaceptuality than anthroceptuality, and some the reverse. The former will prefer plot in the stories he reads or movies he watches to characterization; the latter will consider plot trivial compared to characterization. I’m convinced that normal men are sagaceptuals, normal women anthroceptuals. But not necessarily all the time.

professional laptop

Posted in Aesthetics, Henry James, Literary Opinion | No Comments »

Entry 554 — Maurice Golubov « POETICKS

Entry 554 — Maurice Golubov

I’m posting this because (1) I need an easy entry because I’ve been away from the computer all day; (2) I came across this image in the latest issue of ARTnews and liked it; and (3) I’d never heard of Golubov, and thought I was pretty familiar with American non-representational painters of value (and he is American).

Priceline Hotels

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Maurice Golubov. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

B. H. Fairchild « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘B. H. Fairchild’ Category

Entry 650 — Some Anti-Philogushy

Thursday, February 9th, 2012

Me Versus B. H. Fairchild and Others He quotes

Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry. You can’t rescue any hidden life, whatever that is, with prose? Or some other art? Or science? Why wouldn’t using language to drown certain aspects of unhidden life be equally or more valuable?

Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet. It sure isn’t everything to me. It and serenity are only two of many pleasures it is the function of art to provide. Its manner of providing them is what sets it apart from verosophy and other endeavors which can, and try, to lead to wonder and serenity, and other pleasures.

Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.” Nice thought–but unattainable heavens to dream toward are a high good, too.

Seven propositions:

1. By way of Wittgenstein and Heidegger: A poem is a verbal construction which, through an array of rhetorical and prosodic devices of embodiment, achieves an order of being, an ontological status, radically different from that of other forms of discourse (with the exception of certain kinds of descriptive and fictional prose). I agree: a poem is a verbal construction different from almost all other verbal constructions.

2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego. As does almost anything else I can think of, when it isn’t nothing but ego.

3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning. Which the infinity of possible verbal meaning can express.

4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam. All the arts, like all the sciences, have become vastly superior to what they were hundreds or thousands of years ago, but anti-progressives mistake the sentimentality that becomes more and more attached to the old because of their age for aesthetic rather than nostalgiacal value. Compare the clumsy “novel” in the Bible about David with almost any competent commercial novel of today, for instance. Consider how much more of existence the best art of today is about compared with earlier art. For just one thing, today’s art has a vastly larger tradition to make allusions to than previous art had. There have been artists in the past as great as our best, but what our best have produced is significantly better than what they did in part because of the what the artists of the past did. (Note, this is a subject requiring a book.)

5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique–and, obviously, to learn it–is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.) I more or less agree with all this, but I wonder how one can avoid using some technique.

6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief. Every work of art requires a container; I call that container form; one calling it “an extension of subject matter,” if I understand him, needs to tell me what, then, is containing it and the subject matter it is an extension of. I don’t know what ideology and religious belief have to do with it; how would they be not subject matter?

7. Meter is not the reins to keep the horse of the poem in check; it’s the heartbeat of the horse. Drop the reins. (Clearly this is an argument for meter rather than against it.) It is almost impossible to convince poets who never bothered to learn prosody that meter is something that emerges from within the language rather than something that is imposed externally upon the language. Even conversational English is very loosely iambic. I think meter is both natural and imposed–necessarily imposed to add predictability to balance the difficult-to-accept unpredictability of horses going beyond prose that poetry at its best is.

A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings. Just to be argumentative, I would say that a poet’s having to write for others (and he needn’t) greatly increases his field of play. (Note that our Wilshberian’s poet writes rather than composes. It never occurs to any Wilshberian that a poem might be more than words.)

Blockbuster DVD

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Entry 649 — Some Philogushy from B.H. Fairchild

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

“Philogushy” is my term for “love of gush.” It’s practiced a good deal by poets. Once again I could think of nothing to post here, so I stole the excerpt below from 25 pages of journal entries by poet B.H. Fairchild that are in the latest issue of New Letters, a magazine I’m reviewing for Small Press Review. I knew nothing about Fairchild but apparently he’s very well-known, and a grant-winner.

Language can be a way of rescuing the hidden life, and that way is poetry.

Glenn Gould: “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” And wonder is everything to a poet.

Mandelstam: “We will remember in Lethe’s cold waters / That earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.”

Seven propositions:

2. Poetry occurs at a considerable distance from the ego.

3. There exists an infinity of nonverbal meaning.

4. Science is progressive, but Art is not. It doesn’t get better; it just gets different. (The relevance and utility of all poetic forms.) See Mandestam.

5. Rules are made to be broken; techniques are made to be used. (They were never rules anyway; they were techniques. The freedom of the artist, like that of the lathe machinist, is the freedom to choose those techniques, those tools, that he deems necessary for the task at hand. The refusal to use technique-and, obviously, to learn it-is the refusal to be an artist, or at least a free one.)

6. Form is an extension of subject matter rather than of ideology or religious belief.

A poet is always limited by the fact that he has to write for other human beings.

* * * * *

Most of the other entries are at this level. some stupid, some interesting, none what I’d call a serious attempt to understand what poetry is, rather than what the effect of poetry the definer admires is. Subjective philogushy rather than objective verosophy. I’m not going to discuss any individual entries now so as to leave myself something to write about tomorrow.

Health Discounts

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Entry 123 — Kinds of Words « POETICKS

Entry 123 — Kinds of Words

In a shift in my way of describing varieties of visio-textual artworks, I’m trying out a taxonomy of words and wordlike, uh, expressitons. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll change the latter to something better. I threw it onto the screen within a second or two of reaching where it put it in my sentence. What I’m talking about are things that act in an artwork the way words act in standard poems. It would include a brush-stroke in a painting, say, or a dot of paint, or maybe an entire shape. I got the idea of calling such a thing a kind of word, by the way, when I thought I might send Geof a pwoermd consisting of a scribble of paint, using the logic that since a visual poem, for him, need not have words, a visual pwoermd need not, either.

Here are the kinds of words I thought of:

1. word — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically rational context; e.g., “gulp” in “I gulp water just before playing tennis.”

2. nullword — a standard word (or fragment of such a word that contains enough of what it was whole to be read as a word) in a semantically incoherent context; e.g., “gulp” in “water I just tennis before gulp playing.”

3. unword — a nonsense word; e.g., ” gspp”

4. fragword — a fragment of a word incapable of easily being read as a word, and in a context in which it would be incoherent even if read as some word; usually intended to represent language, never to be language.

5. preword — something in a photograph or work of visual art that a word exists for–for instance, a tree.

6. visword — an element in a visual artwork like some of Scott Helmes’s visual haiku that is wholly atextual but intended, it would seem, to represent a word. Helmes’s visual haiku generally consist of three shapes, each suggesting a line in the classical three-line haiku; hence, each shape must contain a set of words adding up to five or seven syllables.

The use of these terms: I can now call poetry that is significantly visual visual word art; I can call visual art with semantically meaningless words in it, visual nullword art; visual art with nonsense words visual unword art; and three other kinds of visual n-word art. Then I will be able to communicate with the five or six people in the world who would are capable of telling the difference between these forms of art effectively.

Tags: Aesthetics

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 123 — Kinds of Words”

mIEKAL says:

13 April 10 at 11:38 AM

numwords
Bob Grumman says:

29 May 10 at 12:25 AM

Good one, mIEKAL.

Mark Newbrook « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Mark Newbrook’ Category

Entry 1382 — The Prescriptive Approach to Language

Tuesday, February 25th, 2014

I stealed a whole entry to Mark Newbrook’s excellent blog for this entry–in order to publicize the writings of a highly intelligent, entertaining linguist I agree with 93.7% of the time, but more to argue a bit with him (politically-incorrectly).

New post on Skeptical Humanities

Linguistics ‘Hall of Shame’ 39

by marknewbrook

39: MARK HALPERN

Hi again, everybody! ‘Hall Of Shame’ resumes (again not sure at what intervals).

Some critics of mainstream linguistics explicitly reject the non-prescriptive approach to language adopted by linguists (see the Introduction). One such writer is the Australian journalist Mark Halpern.

Halpern’s views are partly grounded in a belief which he knows is shared by very few indeed, at least among those who think seriously about language, but which he nevertheless regards as clearly correct: namely, the belief that most linguistic change is deliberate and a matter of choice, because linguistic features (he believes) depend on the conscious minds of speakers or writers, especially when they are actually changing. He contrasts this view with a diametrically opposed ‘straw man’ view which he mistakenly attributes to mainstream linguists, the idea that grammatical and other structures ‘have a life of their own’ and do not depend at all upon the minds of language users. Halpern apparently fails to discern the actual viewpoint (intermediate between these two extremes) adopted by (most) mainstream linguists, according to which linguistic features are indeed epiphenomena of human minds rather than independent entities but are mostly not accessed by the conscious minds of native speakers of the language in question in the absence of explicit study – and which are liable to systematic change without conscious decisions being made and indeed without there necessarily being any awareness of a given change while it is in progress. This mainstream viewpoint, of course, is well supported from evidence and argumentation.

Halpern exemplifies mainly with vocabulary changes, the study of which requires much less understanding of linguistic theory or descriptive techniques than that of changes at more heavily structured linguistic levels such as grammar. It is true that some vocabulary changes are deliberate or semi-deliberate, or at least readily accessible to the conscious minds of language users without study. In these respects, linguists will disagree with Halpern less than he suggests they would. But he is mistaken in extending this observation (albeit implicitly and without exemplification) to grammatical and other structural changes.

Furthermore, Halpern regards many of the vocabulary changes which he cites as very unwelcome and as constituting degradation of the language in question (in this case English). He berates linguists for refusing to accept this prescriptivist folk-linguistic stance (which of course is very widely shared).

More next time (when pos)!

Mark

For my book Strange Linguistics, see:

http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=64212

As those of you who have come here more than a few times before know, I wholly believe in the responsibility of linguists to do their best to counter imbecilic misuse of the language, usually for propagan- distically political, and/or purely sentimental, but always for anti-verosophical reasons, by the leaders of the masses and their air-headed serfs. Yes, most language changes are unconscious. Most are innocuous, some make sense. But more than a few do not, and should be consciously, loudly resisted by the linguistically responsible. However unlikely of success. No one that I know of has ever agreed with my general definition of “marriage” as the union of two opposites and therefore inapplicable to a union of two men or two women. I specifically define it in the traditional manner, so what if fundamentalist Christians agree with me.

Note: one of my opponents who did argue with me on the subject claims that two males are not opposites–because both are human beings. Right. And up and down are not opposites because both are directions.

I have given up doing more than lashing out at the use of “marriage” once in a while nowadays. Smilingly imagining the beauty of a marriage of H2O and water. And coining “mirrorge” for kind of marriage homosexuals are being joined in. When they mirry (meery) each other. I haven’t yet come up with a coinage for “marriage of a man and a woman.” One will definitely be needed.

To repeat, I’m no more homophobic than I’m Anglophobic (as–mostly–a descendent of English settlers whom I–mostly–very much admire). Their lifelong unions should be equal in law to marriages. Only the unmarried should be discriminated against. That’s a joke.

Posted in Aesthetics, Linguistics, Mark Newbrook | No Comments »

Entry 238 — The Evaluceptual Awareness « POETICKS

Entry 238 — The Evaluceptual Awareness

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 30th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Aesthetics, Awarenesses, Knowlecular Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

POETICKS

Category: Aesthetics