My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:
![100_0085[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00851.jpg)
What the heck, here’s another wall:
![100_0087[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00871.jpg)
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Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
What follows is from the column I’m working on for the January/February issue of Small Press Review. I knocked it out a little while ago.
Guy Beining, a frequent contributor to ZYX is represented by an intriguing poem called, “Spheres of Clouds and Skulls,” which alone puts the zine at the forefront of experioddica. A passage to give the flavor of his “Sphere of Clouds and Skulls: “Prior to heat there is worship.//barely audible one hears- who is the guest of/ the dead bird? Who holds a hanger as grail/ upside down in water?/ the corpse in all of us moves out/ a bit & on spigot we watch a form rotate/ spawn clouds between legs and along tongue.// Direction is a hazard that makes us move.// beyond cloud cover there is the public dance.” What is most wondrous-fine to me about the poem, though, is what Beining does in it with clouds (particularly “cloud cover”), constantly, weirdfully renewingly riffing off them, under-deepening the poem with their presence even when unmentioned, and ending the poem with a moon’s view of them.
I was all set to put off work on the column until this afternoon. (It is now around ten a.m.) To pretend I was serious about working on it, though, I put what I’d so far written up on my computer screen. Then, uncharacteristically for me–at least now–I thought I’d put in a line about the importance of clouds in the poem. Once I’d done that, I kept going and got the whole paragraph done in two minutes or less. Not a great accomplishment, as I had previously typed the extract from Guy’s poem. I’d already come up with my slant on the clouds and been mulling it over, too. What was new was that I saw a way to organize my take on the whole poem around it–after staying away from the column for a week or more because I couldn’t think how to deal with the poem. I knew I didn’t have room to say much about it but wanted to at least be interestingly informative about it.
The paragraph made me Very Happy for several reasons. It got me finally back into the essay. It took care of the only part I thought it’d be difficult, so am confident I’ll finish a near-final draft of it today. It gave me something write about here. Most of all, it made me feel good about my writing skill–I’d had fun and said a few good things about something important. Two things tend to make me feel that way about something I’ve written about a poem : a solution to the poem that has been giving me trouble that I believe in, and chances to play with the language with stuff like “weirdfully renewingly” and “underdeepening.” The latter is self-indulgent, but what’s the point of doing anything if you can’t indulge yourself, at least a little? Aside from that, there have to be people around for whom such words are fun, too.
* * * * *
It’s now four in the afternoon. I was hoping to have heard back from Poets House so I could pass it on, but I haven’t, so I’m posting this now.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Note: I just now made most of my columns for Small Press Review available in the Pages section to the right under “Bob Grumman’s Small Press Review Columns.” They go back to my first, published sometime in 1994, and continue up to my second-to-last for 2009. I hope before too long to get them completely up-to-date. Much thanks to the people at Reocities.com for making this possible.
I’m okay. Took me a long time to get access to a computer, and from it to the Internet. Am now trying to delete items in my server’s inbox so as not to go over my limit and I apparently don’t know how to do it because I’m doing it one e.mail at a time. I know I’ve at other times deleted many more at one time but can’t now. When done, almost certainly not until tomorrow, will say more about my current situation.
marton koppany says: Great news, Bob!
I wish you quick recovery,
Marton
Geof Huth says: Bob,
Welcome back to the world of communication. Good lick recuperating.
Geof
karl kempton says: B O L & Healing ! ! !
Thanks, all. Dunno how back to communicating I am–not up to saying much yet. But I do think I’m getting better.
Bob
Jake says: Bob,
Sorry you had to go through this, but glad you’re on the other side of it now and recuperating. Like where the new mathmaku was going at latest posting. Get well. You’re due on the track.
Jake
now
when you go through an
airporte
check-point
will all of the alarms go off
and they’ll pull u out of the line
and make you dropyourpants
to show your scar ?
well be
just crwl under a bush
lich your wound
cat-like
and re:cover
Gee, thanks for giving me something to look forward to when I next travel by plane, Ed!
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
What follows is something I compiled from a mixture of writings I wrote about The World of Zines. Some of it may be repetitions of passages in published materials, and some may be material I deleted from articles that were too long for publication. I may have published some of it, too, who knows. In any case, it adds to my picture of the history of Factsheet Five.
Comments on The World of Zines
Mike Gunderloy had been active in the micro-press for some ten years when I joined his team, having then–at the age of 22 or so–founded Factsheet Five as a sort of “zine zine” specializing in reviewing other zines (a zine being a kind of periodical that is to small press magazines what the latter are to, well, Cosmopolitan or NewsWeek). Factsheet Five was purely a hobby for Gunderloy at first. Working out of his garage (or the equivalent), he gradually turned it into something resembling a real business, eventually having it printed by offset and getting it commercially distributed. His last issue had a press run of over 10,000 copies. That in itself wasn’t enough to bring him financial success. What it did, though, was establish him as an authority on zines, which were the subject of the book Penguin signed him up for, The World of Zines. And now he’s getting national press coverage–and making at least a little money.
According to one newspaper article on Gunderloy, at least one other editor has recently been directly absorbed from a zine into the BigTime: a fellow named Christian Gore. Seven years ago, at the age of 19, Gore started a six-page zine on movies called Film Threat that is now a slickzine with a circulation of 125,000. So, while the only sane reason to begin a zine is to say things, however privately, that the mainstream isn’t, dreaming of one day reaching a public of some size is not entirely irrational.
In any event, if you’re at all interested in zines–as a publisher or would-be publisher of one, or as just a reader–I highly recommend The World of Zines to you. It provides excellent, if brief, reviews, such as the one that follows concerning Raleigh Clayton’s Fugitive Pope (available for $1 in cash or stamps from Raleigh Clayton Muns, 7351-A Burrwood Dr., St. Louis MO 63121), which I chose at random from the 300-plus that are discussed in The World of Zines, seems to me typical of the genre. Here’s what Gunderloy and his co-editor Cari Goldberg Janice have to say about it:
“Life as a librarian need not be terminally dull, as Raleigh proves over and over again in these pages. He recounts strange questions encountered at the reference desk, gives us glimpses of what it’s really like in librarian school and suggests ways to discourage masturbation in the stacks. Along the way, bits and pieces of obscure writing are dropped in–almost as much fun as finding them serendipitously among the stacks.”
Note Fugitive Pope’s resemblance to an ongoing letter. Such is generally what most zines resemble, though a letter usually confined to some central subject–a librarian’s life here, flying saucers (UFO) or old Norse religions (Asynjur) elsewhere. Comics, sports, sci fi, hobbies and collecting, “hip whatnot,” travel, and–this a single category– splatter, death & other good news are just some of the other general topics the zines reviewed get into.
It is refreshing to note that Gunderloy and Janice include on their pages almost as many graphics, rants, poems and other matter culled from the zines under review as they do commentary. Hence, we’re not just told about zines, we’re meaningfully exposed to parts of them.
Contact and ordering information for every zine mentioned is included, too. Moreover, a number of pages at the book’s end deal in detail with the nitty-grit of starting, running and circulating one’s own zine. This should make The World of Zines highly useful, particularly for people outside the knownstream who have incorrect interests, or lack credentials, but who nonetheless want to have some kind of voice in their culture, however small.
Of course, it can’t be said that The World of Zines is perfect: every connoisseur of the field will find dozens of terrible omissions (where, for example, is my favorite zine, the subtle journal of raw coinage?!?). Considering that there are something like 20,000 zines extant (according to the authors’ estimate, which seems sound to me), this is inevitable. It is not important, for the object of the book is to introduce the scene it covers, not exhaustively memorialize it, and this The World of Zines does with efficiency and flair.
Here endeth the history of my involvement in Factsheet Five. Later I’ll be quoting from columns I wrote for it.
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Here’s what I got published in Small Press Review about me and Factsheet Five as a guest editorial:
Into the BigTime
By Bob Grumman
Among those of us who compose our masterpieces of prose or verse deep in the hinterlands of the hinterlands, I doubt that there are many who have not dreamed, however pure of heart we are, that there will come a day when something will go wrong, and a beserk minute projection of the BigTime will shoot out in our direction and beyond, then halt, permanently–with us inside it. That the Bigtime will have accommodated us rather than the other way around, will, of course, allow us to accept the situation. Insane this dream, without question, but . . . well, I’m here to tell you, my friends, that it has happened to me!
Here’s what’s happened: Penguin Books has published a large-format paperback survey of “the independent magazine revolution” by Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice called The World of Zines and a poem of mine is quoted in full in it. What’s more, one page later I am cited as an important critic of the scene! Okay, maybe all that doesn’t quite put me up there with Norman (Mailer) and Danielle (Steele), but I’m certainly not far from them.
How did this happen is not (entirely) to brag about myself but to make a few observations on “success”–mainly for those in the small press world who might want to follow me. One is that, yes, who you know is probably what counts the most in the success game: Gunderloy is the former editor of Factsheet Five, and I was one of his columnists for five years. I never met him in person but we did exchange a fair number of friendly letters. Of course, it could be argued that Gunderloy’s knowing me was an advantage I had earned since I wouldn’t have been able to latch on as a columnist for Factsheet Five without some kind of writing talent.
Well, I started at Factsheet Five because I knew Miekal And, a crazy multi-media wizard who, with his wife Liz Was, ran a publishing operation called Xerox Sutra (which has since become Xexoxial Endarchy, to avoid trademark infringement). I knew And because I had bought $90 worth of books through the mail from his firm, and had written, and sent him, some criticism of it, some of it quite favorable to work he himself had done. At this time (1987) And was peppering Gunderloy with letters reproaching him for not paying enough attention to experimental art publications in his magazine, which was billed as a complete guide to the micro-press. Gunderloy agreed that he wasn’t and, feeling unqualified himself to treat such material, invited And to. That was my door in, for And had too many commitments elsewhere. He suggested I write Gunderloy, offering my services. I did so, then at his request sent him a few sample reviews–which he thought good enough to use.
This all makes me sound much more self-serving and systematic than I actually was. I originally bought the books from And because I was genuinely interested in what his press was doing, not to butter him up. The essay on those books that I subsequently wrote was more a means of investigation than an attempt to further (more exactly at that point, begin) my writing career–although it was partially, and consciously, the latter as well. The real upshot here is that I made my people-connections only after making my interest-connections. That is, I first got involved with experimental art because I was genuinely interested in it, and that involvement led to my involvements with And and Gunderloy.
So here’s my advice for making it into the BigTime: develop your interests.
Note: the above was written 15 or 20 years ago. My stint at Factsheet Five remains to this day the highest in the BigTime I ever got. As I keep saying, I can’t begin to understand it.
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
Here’s something about Factsheet Five I got published somewhere, probably in Small Press Review:
Micro-Zine Compendium
Factsheet Five
#47, Spring, 1993, 112pp.;
Box 170099, San Francisco
CA 94117. 6 issues/$20.
For almost two years the bible of the micro-zine world, Factsheet Five, has been an on again, off again, proposition. It seemed not to have much chance of survival when founder Mike Gunderloy abruptly abandoned it in the summer of ’91 (due mainly, I gather, to overload, and too much generosity with free subscriptions). Some five months later a personage with the intriguing name of Hudson Luce, who had talked Gunderloy into the rights to F5, managed to publish one fairly decent issue of it. He then became only intermittently available, though vowing to continue the magazine for at least five or six more issues. Eventually he sold his rights for a dollar to someone in San Francisco who started an electronic version. I’m not sure how the present editor of the regular version, Seth Friedman, got in on the act, but early this year, when almost no one thought F5 would ever see print again, he got another issue out. And now, against all odds, he’s published his second.
This is cause for celebration for anyone interested in what’s going on in the off-off-Broadway of the publishing world, for Factsheet Five has been covering that world with almost insane thoroughness since 1982. During that time, it has been pretty much the sole general source of information in the U.S. on underground comicbooks, punk rock zines, sci fi fanzines, queerzines (as their own editors call them), conspiracy theory pamphlets, experioddica, animals’ rights magazines, and scores of other equally special-interest publications–including, most estimably, political and religious hate magazines (because, under Gunderloy, F5 was always a courageous champion of freedom of speech, even for those with whom Gunderloy was in violent disagree- ment).
The latest issue is as thorough as any of Gunderloy’s, for it contains over 1300 reviews. It is also indexed, a welcome improvement. Its paragraph-sized reviews tend to summarize contents, not discuss them, but they are informative and well-written. Since Friedman has taken charge, F5 has not printed anything but reviews, aside from Friedman’s editorials, and one short article he wrote on food. Consequently, it can be rather monotonous at times for a non-fanatic. But it includes drawings, cartoons and wacked-out ads, and I’m sure that with time it will bring back at least some of the kinds of columns and features that made Gunderloy’s F5 so sparklingly more than a data-bank. In the meantime, it’s reassuring to those of us who publish or write for micro-zines to know that it will continue to be there to chronicle our doings on a relatively visible, national basis.
Friday, February 5th, 2010
8:30 P.M. Friday 28 August 1992 I got quite a bit of semi-interesting mail, including a form letter from Jim Knipfel announcing that Hudson Luce sold Factsheet Five to Jerod Pore. Then this evening Bill Paulaskis gave me a call and we chatted about the latest F5 developments, and Taproot Review, which he’s going to be participating in as well, and other matters. My mail also included a note from John Byrum, who didn’t have anything to say about his newsletter but did invite me to do a reading in Cleveland.
9 September 1992 Joe Lane just called me. He just wanted to know what was going on with me; he said that apparently the new Factsheet Five has two editors, one of them in charge of the printed version. His name is Seth Friedman, and Joe thinks he’ll be getting in touch with me soon. I certainly hope the magazine gets going again, with my column as part of it.
11 December 1992. A form letter from Len Fulton announcing to past contributors to Small Press Review that he was planning to start a new similar magazine devoted to reviewing small press magazines and inviting comment, and submissions. I wrote him a postcard note in support of the new magazine and told him he could count on help from me. Next I hope to send him three 500-word reviews and volunteer for a position as regular columnist on “experioddica.” It would be a huge step forward if he agreed to that!
Saturday 16 January 1993 I got a form advertisement for subscrip- tions to Factsheet Five from Seth Friedman–no mention of my column. I subscribed to F5 anyway.
Tuesday 19 January 1993 Among a largish number of minor letters was one that came in an envelope with no return address. I tore it open thinking it and and ready to toss it. Then I saw that it was from Small Press Review . . . For a few seconds I thought it was some kind of form letter, particularly when I noticed that the second of its two sheets was a style sheet. But I then realized that the first sheet was not from Small Press Review after all, but from Small Magazine Review. It was, in fact, Len Fulton’s reply to my offer to write a column for his new magazine: he accepted! Naturally, I was delighted–even though he only wants to run my column every other issue for a while, and is hesitant about using the samples I sent him on the grounds that the magazines reviewed in them won’t be current by the time they appear. He did say that he should be able eventually to do it more often, and he encouraged me to write regular reviews and features, etc. In short, he was very positive. And so am I. I have now become sufficiently established to become an important part of world culture–if I deserve to. I will now have to be attended to–if I deserve to be, for I will now be regularly visible. If I deserve a significant place in world culture, I will now not be denied it because I couldn’t gain access to a
large enough public. From now on all should be automatic, assuming I keep working hard. Of course, if the New Yorker comes through for me, things will be even better, but it doesn’t matter that much any more. And that’s it for this entry.
(Note: The was the high point of my bigWorld achievements, I still can’t understand why.)
Thursday 21 January 1993 Around eleven a letter and some copies of the long-awaited first issue of Taproot Reviews arrived from Luigi-Bob Drake. The magazine looked very nice and did a pretty good job of covering the micro-press scene. I had a bunch of reviews in it, possibly all the ones I sent him, but he didn’t run my column. He ran four others’ columns, though. Oh, well, I’m more than willing to keep on as reviewer, as I told him in the reply I wrote to his letter.
27 January 1993: Mike Gunderloy’s Penguin book about the underground press is now out. I ordered a copy, eager to see it. I should be able to do an interesting review of it for Small Press Review. I’m curious if I’ll be mentioned in it. Probably not. Geof, I’m sure, will be, however.
Thursday, February 4th, 2010
Friday 3 January 1992 I spent over an hour on the phone with David Roberts, who called. We continued our metaphysical discussion somewhat, coming to a better and more amiable understanding of each other. The main thing he wanted to tell me, though, was that he called the guy who bought Factsheet Five and although Hudson wasn’t there, the guy answering the phone described a copy of the newest issue, which he had on hand, and it sounded good, for I was in it. I should soon be getting my copy. David says he intends to write a letter to Factsheet Five in praise of my column, which would be nice.
Monday 13 January 1992 Jim Knipfel, my Factsheet Five features editor, called. He wanted to know if I knew anything about the current issue, or Hudson, our chief. He hadn’t gotten his copy of the January issue and said he was hearing unsettling rumors about the magazine. I told him what David had found out, which seemed to reassure him. We then chatted a little about my column. He seemed to think it fine but felt I had a mathematical point wrong. I don’t think I did but afterwards changed my text a little for him. He seemed an okay guy. I think I ought to get along fine with him.
Wednesday 29 January 1992 Hudson Luce’s first Factsheet Five arrived. I was relieved to see it but a little disappointed with my column, which appeared sans illustrations, and with a dumb but minor typo that wasn’t mine but which I had a chance to catch when Gordon sent me a copy to proof but missed. The magazine looked okay. Marc Bloch, I was a bit peeved to see, ruled over seven or eight pages. He did a pretty good job, though. He reviewed David T. Roberts’s last Streetfighting Aesthete, but with a brief summary only that listed the zine’s contributors, including me. I got mentioned several times throughout the issue, as a matter of fact–and the new Poetry Reviewer favorably but unpenetratingly discussed My SpringPoem No. 3,719,242 as well as Geof’s Ghostlight and Karl’s Charged Particles. Hudson wrote an informative editorial that said he’d taken over rather than bought Factsheet Five–Mike had simply decided to stop publishing it. I get the distinct impression that he’s going to have trouble keeping it going–he said he needed to triple (to 5000) the number of paying subscribers in the next few months. Uhn.
Meanwhile I’m musing over the possibility of trying to get a twice-weekly column into the local paper again, this time because Barbara Whitcomb, one of my buddies in the writers’ club just recently gotten taken as a twice-weekly columnist for the Englewood edition of said paper. I feel what I’d have to do is get 50 columns done in advance, and submit ten or so. That’s probably much too much work, but if Factsheet Five were to fold, I should seriously consider it. Once I got into the swing of it, I could probably do two columns in a day without much trouble. I’d aim for 500 words or so on a variety of cultural topics, including reviewing local art exhibits, stage performances, etc.
Friday 31 January 1992 Later note: Geof called and we chatted for about an hour. He said he thought (the second edition of) Of Manywhere-at-Once improved. He filled me in on his ongoing projects. Told me Ben Gordon and Hudson Lane had had a fight over a partly negative article on the new Factsheet Five set-up that Gordon got from some Maine editor. Hudson is very thin-skinned.
2 March: One letter I got today was from Joe Lane, fellow Factsheet Five columnist. It seems he’s interested in starting a magazine that be a side publication to F5–but it’s a secret from Hudson Luce. Lane is afraid, as are we all, that F5 is about to take the full count. I replied after cards with Mother this afternoon. Basically, I’m interested but want to hold back till we know more. It’s a delicate situation, to be sure. Unfortunate to find out I’m not the only one connected with F5 who is in the dark about what’s going on.
23 March 1992 phone call from Jim Knipfel. He wanted to know if I’d heard anything about Factsheet Five lately. No. But he himself had spoken a few times with Hudson over the past month or so and is confident that there will be at least one more issue. According to Jim, Hudson’s goal is to make another Utne Reader of the magazine. Ugh, but if it keeps going, and I am allowed to keep writing for it, I don’t really care that much. Another thing Jim said is that Factsheet Five is now going to be a quarterly. He liked my latest column, apparently. He said he had gotten it and found nothing to change. The deadline for it won’t be till 1 July, so I’m way ahead of schedule. The next deadline I need to make, assuming the magazine lasts, will be the first of October. One piece of gossip from Jim particularly interested me: Hudson was much taken with Mark Bloch, talked a lot about him, gave him a good deal of space in the last issue, and sent him twenty copies of it–but Mark, whom Jim has recently talked to (they both live in New York), is now as cut off from Hudson as the rest of us. Hudson, by the way, had to go to Kansas for a while to take care of the estate of an aunt who had died. He’s living there now but is expected to return to Atlanta. There was more to the conversation, which was a good one, but I can’t remember more than a few bits and pieces. I feel better about the situation but it still doesn’t appear that Factsheet Five will keep going too much longer.
6 May: two phone calls, one from Jim Knipfel and one from Bill Paulusakis. Jim said that the next issue of Factsheet Five wouldn’t be out until June at the earliest, and that Hudson is continuing to make changes. I’m still in it, though. Screw magazine has done a bad review of the last issue but Jim knew nothing more about it than that Hudson said it was bad, and that the writer had accused Hudson of using an assumed name. Two issues hence Factsheet Five will have a new name. All this doesn’t sound good to me. And poetry, comic books and something else will be dropped. Bill, when he got hold of me, said he himself would continue (he’s been the poetry editor), but would be concentrating on experimental poetry, which is okay, I guess– why, I don’t know. Bill and I gabbed for almost an hour. Mostly bullshit but entertaining enough. He’s unhappy with the way Factsheet Five is going but intends to hang on. I think he might have been feeling me out for starting a mutiny or something, but I’m not sure. We certainly came to no agreements as to future actions, except to stay in touch. And that was the day.
2 June 1992: a letter from Jim Knipfel saying that Hudson Luce will not be publishing one last issue of Factsheet Five, but will switch immediately to V. Later: I called Jim Knipfel and this time got him. Not much new data. Apparently Hudson doesn’t yet know about this “final issue of Factsheet Five that Joe Lane wants to publish, and which I’d contribute to if it had Hudson’s blessing. And Hudson definitely has junked Factsheet Five, in part possibly because of postal suits against him for not fulfilling subscription agreements. It irks me that people would sic the authorities on him for that. Hudson is now living in Lawrence, Kansas, and Jim has his doubts that he’ll publish any issues of V. One other tidbit: the Village Voice ran a favorable review of
the last issue of Factsheet Five, but the news of this didn’t sway Hudson. Jim’s going to send me a copy of the review, as well as a piece on the magazine that he himself did for, I take it, a newspaper. It doesn’t look like I’ll be contributing to Joe Lane’s spin-off but maybe I should put together some kind of miscellany of reviews. It couldn’t hurt since I could use them elsewhere if they don’t go to Lane. In the meantime, I have to start thinking about where to get the two columns I did for if V doesn’t appear.
Saturday 22 August 1992 Geof wrote that Hudson Luce had turned Factsheet Five over to some guy in San Francisco. Luce had called Geof about it and asked him to tell me and Mark Bloch, which makes me suspect I’ve been dumped and Luce didn’t want to be the one to tell me.
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Thought of 12 September: that to become a Great Writer one needs to do five things: master one’s craft; achieve a reasonably full under- standing of existence as a whole; become an expert in at least one significant field of knowledge; fashion a reasonably large body of work (whether published or not) and, last, get a position in the world where one can be heard by a reasonable number of people. If one was born with sufficient gifts, recognition must eventually follow.
This thought occurred to me because, after Hudson Luce’s call I’ve been feeling like I’ve finally gotten to where I must become successful as a writer if I have the goods, which I of course believe I do. If I haven’t yet mastered my craft, I never will. I certainly have as full an under-standing of existence as anyone in the world, unless there’s a hugely greater gap between such an understanding and the deeds resulting from it than than I believe. I am also, I believe, an expert in the field of literature (which is different from being able to write)–and one in esthetics and psychology as well. There are many other fields I would count myself a near- expert in, too, including even economics, though my expertise there only amounts to common sense and the ability to think about goods and services without being muddled by some political bias.
My body of work is objectively large, consisting as it does of the equivalent of ten unpublished, full-length plays, a published book, published essays and poems, and scattered other pieces that haven’t been published. Lots of letters, too. And, with my position at Factsheet Five secure, and other avenues to visibility opening up such as the space won at Modern Haiku and Small Press Review, I feel I have a position in the world from which I can be heard by a reasonable number of people, too. So it’s just a matter of time before I’ll be recognized. Urp.
Saturday 12 October 1991 The big excitement of the day was getting a letter from my new Factsheet Five editor, Ben Gordon. It arrived with an edited version of my column. At first I didn’t like what he’d done to the column at all, but I gradually changed my mind. He made some good deletions, and few so-so changes, and one or two slight blunders, but did a good job. Of course, he missed some nuances I intended, but the hell with ‘em. He also seems more concerned with punch than full responsibility–for instance, he changed a line I had about Kaldron and Lost & Found Times‘s being the only magazines doing otherstream material that were older than Mallife–“that I know about.” He, in Time/Life fashion, chucked “that I know about.” He doesn’t like my interjections of self-descriptions for comic effect, either. Oh, well, I can live with that. As for the irresponsibility of some of the things the column will now be saying, I can blame it on my editor. I called said editor (Ben Gordon) about my changes to his changes and ended talking to him for about a half an hour. He seems bright and enthusiastic. Also young. I enjoyed the talk, though, and think we should get along fine.
(2) The only magazine I’ve been doing a regular column for changed hands, and the new editor kept only two of the old columnists, out of ten or so: me and another guy. A minor triumph, for sure, but reassuring. The magazine is Factsheet Five and is actually sold in record shops and bookstores. It’s not too certain how much longer it will last. The first issue to be published by the new owner has not yet appeared and it was due out last month.
Tuesday 17 December 1991 One other item in the mail was a form letter to “all columnists” from a guy named Jim Knipfel who is abruptly my new editor at Factsheet Five. Ben Gordon “flew the coop,” according to Knipfel. No word as to whether the latest Factsheet Five has hit the streets yet or not, but I found out that my next deadline is 20 January, which is a relief. All in all, I wasn’t happy to hear Gordon had severed ties with F5, for I felt I would have gotten on well with him. I have no idea how I’ll get along with the new guy. He sounds like he wants to leave the columnists alone to do their thing–but he also said something about not trying to find new columnists to write about things nobody understands as, Knipfel says, Gordon was doing. This suggests he might not be as keen on my far-out intellectualism as Gordon was, or appeared to be. What a world. I just hope the magazine keeps going, and that my last column will be in the forthcoming issue as scheduled.
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Not only wasn’t Of Manywhere-at-Once helping me up to whatever the next level of literary visibility in the BigWorld was, my literary career started downhill in 1991. As readers of volume one of Manywhere-at-once will know, I began, in may 1987, to write a regular column about otherstream literature, mainly visual poetry, for Factsheet Five, a nationally distributed periodical whose goal was to review the micro-press in its entirety. I actually got paid. In my diary entry of Thursday, 14 February 1991, I reported, “I got a check, my biggest yet ($54.64!!), from Mike Gunderloy. A note accompanying it said it was definitely not the right time just now for my column to become an every-issue feature. It turns out that Mike is so strapped for space that he is considering having all his columnists appear only every other issue. Phooey. But I understand. F5’s reviews of the micro-press encourage the foundation of new micro-presses which F5 then reviews, which encourages the foundation of new micro-presses which F5 then reviews, which . . . ” That probably was the last payment I got from Mike. Abruptly, in August of 1991, his magazine began to fold. Other excerpts from my diary tell the story:
Saturday 24 August 1991 A rather disconcerting form letter arrived in the mail from Mike Gunderloy: he’s sold Factsheet Five–and dumped his columnists, or so it sounds. We columnists are to submit “samples” of our columns to the new editors. Since I got no personal letter from either Gunderloy or the new editors, it doesn’t look good for my column. I’m sad about it–it looked like Factsheet Five would be y only potential avenue into knownness. I plan to go ahead and write my next column as planned and send it in. If it is accepted, fine; if not, I no longer have any deadlines to worry about (and I have a good piece to try elsewhere); and I have interesting material for volume two of Manywhere-at-Once. I’m disappointed with Gunderloy, though; up to this point, he’d seemed the most considerate of bosses. I feel he ought to have sold the magazine with the proviso that all his employees are kept on. Why not? Surely the columnists aren’t holding the magazine back.
3 September 1991 A letter from Len Fulton turning down my offer to do columns for his magazine, Small Press Review, but saying he’d like to run an slightly extended version of the sample column I’d sent him as a guest editorial. Sounds okay to me. I also got a short form letter from some editor wanting a response to Mike Gunderloy’s getting rid of Factsheet Five.
Tuesday 10 September 1991 I had a Very Important Phone Call: Hudson Luce, the new proprietor of Factsheet Five called at around five, just as I was finishing a nap of about a half an hour. He said that he’d been reading my columns, was very interested in mail art, and wanted to continue the column. I liked that, needless to say. I made sure he understood that the column wasn’t just about mail art, though, and he said he was also interested in experimental art, and thought it was important that Factsheet Five continue covering it. Somewhere along the line, fairly early in the conversation, I mentioned that I’d been doing the column in every other issue; how often would he like it in–every issue he said without hesitation. And he wants it the same length it has been.
So, onward and upward. We talked about several other things, too, and I voiced a few opinions, even disagreeing with him mildly here and there. I hope I didn’t go too far. Looks like I and Joe Lane, who will be writing on the technical aspects of publishing fanzines, are the only columnists he’ll keep on the staff, so it’s a fair-sized compliment. I was pleased that I’ll stay and Mark Bloch won’t but was a little disappointed that Annie Ackner will be dropped–though, as I told Hudson, I don’t think her column really is appropriate for F5. (He had asked, “I suppose you’ll be disappointed that I won’t be keeping Annie Ackner’s column,” or something close to that. I said I liked her writing and felt a kind of solidarity with my fellow columnists but that . . . Felt a bit of a schmuck about that.) He plans more interior color but isn’t too eager to cover poetry, and is against comic books entirely. (Turns out he has a Ph.D. in chemistry, of all things.) Interesting situation. The analogy to corporate changes, and anxiety among department heads, and reactions to firings and non-firings struck me. I felt pretty good about it, though–and hope to get cranking on my upcoming column tomorrow.
Just a note to say I got back from the rehab center yesterday, and after putting the stuff I brought home with me away, walked a mile–at a blazing 3 miles and hour. But I’m not allowed to go much faster. Running will be forbidden for another week. Not allowed to twist, either. I’m supposedly ahead of schedule. I feel good about my progress. I feel good about most everything, in fact.
Had a therapist make a house call yesterday. He gave me some exercises that seem good ones. Gotta do two of them once an hour, though, so I’ve been busy. Also walked another mile and did some writing.
More tomorrow, I hope.
I’ve done it again: lost track of something important to me, this time four or more copies of my April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now. As usual in such cases I can’t imagine what I did with them. I feel I’ve looked everywhere they could possibly be at least twice. This time, though, I have no deadlines hanging over me, so am going to try to do something about it: I’m going to put my house in order. So don’t expect much here for a while.
.
Saturday, November 6th, 2010
Another day in the null zone for me, perhaps because I’m going without the pain pills I’ve been on for my bad hip as an experiment. I played tennis this morning without any more of the slight hip pain I’ve been having with the pain pills. That was nice but since I got home from that and a little marketing (for socks and new sneakers), I I’ve been feeling blah. A nap didn’t help.
Meanwhile, I’m been feeling bitter about my reputation as a defender of Shakespeare. SHAKSPER, an Internet discussion group I’m in, has for several days been discussing the proper reaction to a movie coming out called Anonymous, in which the Earl of Oxford is depicted as Shakespeare–and as Queen Elizabeth’s son–and Southampton is depicted as Oxford and Elizabeth’s son. I think it may destroy Oxfordianism the way the preposterous codes found in Shakespeare’s plays “proving” Bacon wrote them pretty much destroyed Baconism.
What irks me is that several who comment at SHAKSPER mentioned James Shapiro’s recent book on the authorship question, and books and articles on it by others, but not my book. No doubt I’m biased, but I consider my book the best refutation of anti-Stratfordianism in print, and the only one that presents a serious theory of what makes people become anti-Stratfordianism–whether valid or not. Yet the Shakespeare establishment, and their little followers at the two authorship sites I participate in don’t mention me, or respond to my posts to SHAKSPER. Maybe they don’t want it known that our side has a crank like me on it. A crank, morover, who calls anti-Stratfordians “psitchotics.”
Nonetheless, my attempt to understand what causes reasonably intelligent people to become psitchotics where Shakespeare is concerned, and–more important–find a way to express my finding entertainingly and coherently, continues, with a minor development today, the new term “irratioplex.” This I pronounce ehr RAH shuh plehks. Do I misspell it? Possibly, but “irratiplex” doesn’t do it for me.
And irratioplex is an irrational knowleplex. There are several. Two of them are the rigidniplex and the enthusiaplex. I now maintain that all anti-Stratfordians are afflicted with one or the other of these two irratioplexes. The new term allows me to couple them as victims of irratioplexes, then show how they differ from one another by virtue of their (slightly) different irratioplexes. The rigidniks’ irratioplex is forced on them by their innate psychology; the enthusiasts’ (who are frrewenders) acquire their irratioplexes during fits of enthiuiasm, making them quickly too strong thereafter to resist. Both irratioplexes act the same once active. both nearly impossible for their victims’ to resist.
My new strategy for the description of wacks is to concentrate on irratioplexes in general, proceed to rigidniplexes and enthusiaplexes in general, then to how the latter two specifically enslave their victims to anti-Stratfordianism.
Friday, October 22nd, 2010
“Magnipetry” and “magnipoet.” maahg NIH peh tree and MAAH nih POH eht. I know probably no one at all but I will now use them, but I’ve been needing them for years. As I hope will be clear, they mean “superior poetry,” and “superior poet.”
My many critics will tell me that “superior poetry” and “superior poet” or like adjective/noun combinations, have been available for years, and proven satisfactory for everyone but me. So why cram two new words for what they mean into the lexicon? Well, for one thing, I believe important things should have names, not just descriptions, which “superior poetry” is. (Am I really the only person in the world who believes this? Sometimes I think so.)
I hope “magnipetry” suggests “magnificence.” I feel it ought quite clearly to say, “large poetry,” and its derivative say “large poet.” Where I’ve often found myself wanting such words is in discussions of what makes a poet, when we’re talking about what makes a poet worth reading or listening to. One always has to stick an adjective in.
Than there’s my problem with those who denounce poetry they don’t like as “not poetry,” when they have to mean they’re speaking of bad poetry. If they aren’t, then they need a name for what the texts they are referring to are. “Doggerel” is a good one for some but not all of it. They can say, “This is not good poetry,” but that sounds weak to me. They mean more than that, so we need a single name for it.
“Poetaster” is a good word for inferior poet, but it seems awkward to me, and “poetastry” isn’t (yet) a word. Even with “poetaster,” which I’m not even sure how to pronounce, we still need a name for “good poet,” since a poetaster is a kind of poet, not a non-poet.
The real reason I suddenly made my coinages, having woken up with a headache in the middle of last night for a few minutes. I was thinking about a long division poem I’ve made a sketch of in which I divide something (I forget what, right now) into “poetry.” I times that by Shakespeare’s signature, and I get a graphic that’s about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I think is Shakespeare’s most poetic comedy, and a favorite of mine. But there’s a remainder. My problem is that the graphic is a poem, in my view–since it has words. Moreover, some of the words play poetic word-games. So there should not be a remainder.
But I really want to be divided into is “poetry of the highest order.” I thought of various phrases for that, including, “poetry of the highest order,” but didn’t like them. They sounded somewhat pretentious to me. And I found nothing with more than one word in it to have the sock I wanted, the sock that “poetry,” would have if I could use it. Hence, “magnipetry.” It will keep most people from liking the poem as much as I’d like them to, but “poetry,” just isn’t right.
The same word will damage my long series of various long divisions of “poetry,” which I’ve always thought had the same problem this new piece has. On the other hand, if my math poetry ever catches on, and people like my series, it’s possible the word might catch on.
While people have little trouble with new names for new things, they seem wired to reject new names for old things, even important old things that have never had a name, like visual art (which I now call “visimagery,” after auditioning more than a dozen names). But I won’t give up trying to get the names I come up with into general usage.
It’s be nice to have a name for okay poetry that isn’t magnipetry, but I’m willing to let adjective take care of such poetry, and those who compose it. “He’s a pretty good poet, but not a magnipoet,” for instance. I think “magnipetry” is a good word. I don’t think “magnipoet” is. Dunno what to do about that, however. I may well drop it. The sneer, “he calls himself a poet,” for someone who writes bad poetry, “could be corrected to him think him write magnipetry.” Hmmm, I will drop it.
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
Because the names of my aesthetic appreciation types, “apollonian” and “dionysian,” may connect too confusingly to Nietzsche’s similarly-named personality types, I am now calling apollonians, dionysians and hermesians “verosolysts,” ” instinctilysts” and “expressilysts.”
Because the verosolyst evaluates poetry primarily on the basis of its truth (according to its freedom from or contamination by contradictions), I made his name out of “veroso” of my term for “true wisdom”, or “the rational seeking of significant truths about material reality”, so a general term for philosophy, science, history, literary criticism, economics . . . and the “lyst” of “analyst.”
The instinctilyst’s name derives from the fact that he evaluates an artwork primarily on the basis of the instinctive pleasure it affords by means of its attention to stimuli normal human beings are automatically attracted to like a 3-month-year-old happy baby.
The expressilyst is primarily concerned with how a poem presents its content, or its manner os expression, rather than with its content. So we have the old what versus how again, this time as instinctilystic appreciation versus expressilystic appreciation.
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.
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.
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:
Conrad DiDiodato said… 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
John B-R said… .#####
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 said… 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
VizPo-Central said… 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
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Random thoughts today because I want to get this entry out of the way and work on my dissertation on the evolution of intelligence, or try to do so, since I’m still not out of my null zone, unless I’m slightly out but having trouble keeping from falling back into it.
First, two new Grummanisms: “utilinguist” and “alphasemanticry.” The first is my antonym for a previous coinage of mine, “nullinguist,” for linguist out to make language useless; ergo, a utilinguist is a linguist out to make language useful. By trying to prevent “poetry” from meaning no more than “anything somebody thinks suggests language concerns” instead meaning, to begin with, “something constructed of words,” before getting much more detailed, for example.
“Alphasemanticry” is my word for what”poetry” should mean if the nullinguists win: “highest use of language.” From whence, “Visual Alphasemanticry” for a combination of graphics and words yielding significant aesthetic pleasure that is simultaneously verbal and visual.”
I popped off today against one of Frost’s “dark” poems, or maybe it is a passage from one of them: “. . . A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead”–the kind academics bring up to show Frost was Important, after all. “Wow,” I said, “Wow, he confronts death! He must be major! “ I then added, “Frost is in my top ten all-time best poets in English that I’ve read but not for his Learic Poems.”
James Finnegan then corrected me, stating (I believe) that the poem didn’t confront death but showed its effects. I replied, “Okay, a poem about the effect of death on two people. What I would call a wisdom poem. I’m biased against them. I like poems that enlarge my world, not ones that repeat sentiment about what’s wrong with it, or difficult about it. Frost knew a lot about reg’lar folks, but I never learned anything from him about them that I didn’t already know. In other words, I’m also somewhat biased against people-centered poems. But mostly, I don’t go to poems to learn, I go to them for pleasure.”
I would add that I’m an elitist, believing with Aristotle that the hero of a tragedy needs to be of great consequence, although I disagree with him that political leaders are that, and I would add that narrative literature of any kind requires either a hero or an anti-hero (like Falstaff) of great consequence.
I’m not big on poems of consolation, either.
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino has been blogging about mathematics and poetry at his Eratio blog. When he told me about it on the phone yesterday, I said I’d check it out, which I’ve now done. I left my first comment on it. Fortunately, for once I cut what I said before hitting the button telling his blog to accept it, for my post got rejected. I’ll try in a little while to post it again. Meanwhile I want to post it here, to make sure it’s somewhere, and because maybe one of my two regular visitors doesn’t also read Gregory, or misses posts to it because it’s irregular, which is my excuse.
Hi, Gregory. I’ve decided to tear into your commentary on mathematics and poetry Very Slowly, one idea at a time, to facilitate coherence.
I’ll begin with your statement that “Already (‘mathematical sentence’) (you’re) thinking analogically.”
This is where you and I first disagree, for (as revealed in our long & interesting phone conversation of yesterday) I believe numerals and mathematical symbols are part of our verbal language, just as, in my opinion, typographical symbols for punctuation or to abbreviate are. The mathematical symbol, “+,” for instance, is just a different way of writing, “plus,” or “&.” It therefore follows that for me, a mathematical equation is a literal sentence differing from unmathematical sentences only in the words in it. “a – b = c,” for instance, is a very simple sentence and not significantly different from, “Mary cried when she lost her lamb.”
Obviously, it’s just a case of your opinion versus mine, but I think acceptance of my opinion makes more sense, because it keeps thing more simple than your does. I would say that what most people mean by “words” are “general words,” while words like “sineA” or “=” are “specialized words” or mathematical words–like punctuation marks.
I think in my linguistics, these “words” are all called “textemes,” But it’s been a while since I read Grumman on the matter, so I’m not sure.
Hey, I found a glossary in which I define many terms like “texteme.” It’s not a word but a typographical symbol: “any textual symbol, or unified combination of textual symbols–letters, punctuation marks, spaces, etc.–that is smaller than a syllable of two or more letters: e.g., ‘g,’ ‘&h(7:kk,’ ‘GH,’ ‘jd.’” I coined the term for discussion of various odd kinds of symbols and symbol-combinations like some of those among my examples that not infrequently occur in visual or infraverbal poems.
So, I don’t have a special term for word, as I define it. Yet.
To continue my argument in favor of my take on mathematical expression as an extension of verbal expression, not something different in kind, I would saimply ask what is special about mathematical symbols that should require us to think of them as elements of a special kind of expression? They do nothing that ordinary verbalization can’t do, although they do it more clearly, compactly and elegantly.
Graphs would be mathematical expression–a form of visio-conceptual expression, as is written music. Chemical diagrams but not chemical notation. . . .
I don’t see that there’s any difference between the syntax of mathematical expression (other than graphs and probably other similar things I’m not into Math enough to think of right now) and normal verbal expression. There’s no inflection, I don’t think, in mathematical expression. Which is a triviality.
Conclusion: we need a carefully formed taxonomy of human modes of expression.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
The knowleplex is simply a chain of related memories–A.B.C.D.E., say–or a knowledge-chain. It is what we remember whenever we are taught anything, either formally at school (when our teacher tells us Washington is the capital of the United States, for instance) or informally during day-to-day experience (when we see our friend Sam has a pet cat).
There are three kinds: rigiplexes, flexiplexes and feebliplexes, the name depending on the strength of the knowleplex. One is too strong, one too weak, and the other just right. If we let A.B.C.D.E. stand for “one plus two is three,” then a person with a rigiplex “inscribed” with that, asked what one plus two is, will quickly answer, “three.” But if asked what one plus four is, he will give the same answer, because his rigiplex will be so strong it will become wholly active due only to “one plus.”
On the other hand, a person with a feebliplex “inscribed” with “one plus two is three,” asked what one plus two is, will answer “I dunno,” because his feebliplex will be so weak, even “one plus two is” won’t be enough for his knowlplex to become active. Ditto when asked what one plus four is. But the person whose knowleplex is just right–whose knowleplex is a flexiplex, that is–will answer the first question, “three,” and the second, “I dunno.”
Needless to say, this overview is extremely simplified. Even “one plus two is three” will form a vastly more complicated knowleplex than A.B.C.D.E. The strength of a given knowleplex will vary, too, sometimes a lot, depending on the circumstances when it is activated. And each kind of knowleplex will vary in strength, some feebliplexes being almost as strong as a flexiplex, for example. In fact, a feebliplex can, in time, become a rigiplex. For the purposes of this introduction to knowleplexes, however, all this can be ignored.
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
I’ve come up with new terms for two of the three kinds of rhyme in my poetics. One is Chyme-Rhyme for standard rhyme (e.g., “bat/cat”). The other is Rhyle-Rhyme for the kind of rhyme I’ve called various names, “Backward Rhyme,” being the most frequent (e.g. “bat/badge”). My name for the third kind of rhyme in my poetics is Rim-Rhyme, the perfect name coined many years ago for it (e.g. “bat/bet”).
The new names follow the logic of “Rim-Rhyme” by demonstrating the sound of the kind of rhyme they name, but not the construction, as “Rim-Rhyme” does. The “Chyme” of regular rhyme seems fitting, too. As for “Rhyle,” well, it’s a kind of rhyme that riles traditionalists, and I couldn’t come up with a better “rhy-consonant” word to use.
I should haven’t to explain why I consider all three of my kinds of rhyme valid rhymes, but while some accept rim-rhyme because of Wilfred Owen, I think no one has accepted rhyle-rhyme. But it seems sensible to call such a combination a rhyme rather than an alliteration/assonance. And it seems sensible to call any pair or great number of unidentical syllables sharing two sounds to be rhymes.
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
I’ve been in and out of my Null Zone quite a bit of late, and for the past few days have been extremely in it. No zip, at all. I want to sleep but am barely able to–it takes me four or five hours to get to sleep at night, and I can’t sleep past six or seven. Even with a sleeping pill–or two. Ambiens? Something like that. The lowest dosage.
Maybe my trouble sleeping is why I liked the visual poem below of mine so much when I came across it earlier today while looking for a sonnet-related visual poem of mine for use in a presentation on sonnets I’m scheduled to give at the local writers’ center in a little over a week and can’t seem to work on for more than ten or fifteen minutes a day.
I may need my dosage of synthroid, the medicine I take for hypothyroidism, increased. I’m sure I’m suffering depression, too: one of my two brothers recently died. Visiting him for a week, then returning for three or four days for his funeral was one of the reasons for so few recent entries here.
Apologies for this doleful entry, but I wanted you few who come here upon occasion to know what’s going on, especially you few I’ve told I expected to write about an artwork of yours here by now.
Now that I’ve gotten going, I might as well make an announcement: the issue of The Pedestal with the gallery of artworks John M. Bennett and I edited for The Pedestal will be published tomorrow (at www.thepedestalmagazine.com), according to our editor, John Amen. We expect the usual flak about it. I just want to say all the wrong choices were John’s. And that I prefaced it with a ringing undorsement of calling textual designs visual poetry. Which John’s preface countered, but we’re still pals.
Isn’t it amazing? No matter how null I get, I retain my acerbic wit.
Another announcement: if I ever get even slightly energetic, I’m going to post a few of the works submitted to the gallery that didn’t make it into the gallery but that I liked; John says he might like to post a few of his favorites that didn’t make it, too. We also plan to have a gallery containing just about all the works submitted. It will go up at Spidertangle.net 1 August. I thought it’d be extremely informative for people to see what was submitted. We won’t post anything without the submitters’ permission, and have been turned down by three, so far. The same number so far have granted permission.
More, eventually, I very much hope.
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
I have to apologize to those of you who have sent me comments about this blog. For some reason, I was not getting e.mail notification of them. I also wasn’t aware of where I had to click to, to approve them (and apparently I have to approve them at this site for them to be posted). So I didn’t know I was actually getting comments.
I hope they will now show up. I hope, too, to get to them and reply. I just glanced at them when I finally discovered them, unapproved, but noticed several very interesting ones. Be patient with me, though. I’m pretty bushed at the moment, and out of it because of unhappy family matters. I’ll recover, though–always have.
–Bob
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
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.
Monday, February 21st, 2011
On 2/21/2011 3:21 AM, Jake Berry wrote:
Bob, Hope this finds you well. I'm working on an essay and I'd like to use your term 'otherstream', but I want to quote your definition of the word directly. I haven't been able to find it on the internet and I have no idea where it might be among all my books and papers. So how would you define it? Best, Jake
Terrific hearing from you, Jake–although it makes me feel guilty by reminding me of what a horrible correspondent I’ve been for going on ten years or more. So many people I haven’t kept in touch with but should have! Although I do keep up with you on the Internet.
Ah, the old days when I was one of the Kings of the . . . Otherstream because I owned my own Xerox! I’ve had some ungood years since then. 2010 was possibly the worst year I’ve had in thirty years. But this year, so far, is going pretty well, although right now I’m in my null zone again.
Maybe not–your e.mail has me at least partway out of it. Great to know someone still likes my coinage, and it was fun doing my own search for it on the Internet. I found an article about Dale Jensen and his wife, Judy Wells, in which the term was used, followed by a comment by Jack Foley (good ol’ Jack) declaring that Andrew Joron had not coined “otherstream,” Bob Grumman had!
Somewhere else some guy took credit for coining it in 1996. My guess is that I first used it around 1985, so it has just has its 25th anniversary. If I, indeed, was the first to use it. Who knows if I did or not. I don’t care. I mean, it’d be nice to know for sure some word that more than a few people use was my word, but I’m really not that big about getting credit. I want money, not credit!
Oh, I also found out there are various businesses calling themselves “otherstream” this or that, including, I think, a broadcast network.
So, a definition. I’ve defined it in different although similar ways. I think I would say that “otherstream” is my adjective for kinds works of art the great majority of arts academics, well-known critics, commercial publishers and commercial magazine editors know little more than the names of, if that. A brief definition: art that’s now taught in college classes. For me, it means approximately but only approximately the opposite of “mainstream.” What it’s the exact opposite of is “knownstream.” That’s because some art is knownstream, like certain kinds of very formal verse–the sestina, say, is well-known to most literature professors but is not what you’d call a kind of mainstream poetry. I don’t think cowboy poems are considered mainstream, either, or though fairly popular. I used it mainly for visual poetry, sound poetry and language poetry when I began using it, but some language poetry has become mainstream.
Hope this helps. Thanks for wanting to use the word, which I think is a useful one. And for inspiring me to write what I have here, which I can now use for today’s entry in my blog! Make sure to link me to your essay when it’s online, or send it to me if it’s printed–with the hundred dollar royalty fee I charge for the use of any of my coinages. (You can use “knownstream,” also mine, for half-price.)
all best, Bob
It’s not really important: I can ask Arnold for another copy. But that I lost it drives me almost mad with rage at my continuing stupidity. I feel like there’s just no sense in going on. Once again, you see, I’ve lost something. This time it was a copy of a long piece of . . . surrealistic mathematics, I guess. By someone French. Arnold Skemer was kind enough to send it to me, with the french text translated. I have the envelope it came in and the letter that came in that envelope with it. They are right where they should be, on the table to my right as I type this. Why the surrealistic mathematics isn’t with it, I JUST CAN’T understand.
But I do something like this at least monthly. More times than not, I find what was missing, sometimes in less than a couple of hours. I won’t find this. My house is less disorganized than it’s been in years, mainly because of the filing cabinet I freed up for current items–like this, or it should be. I recently did make a folder for just-answered snail mail, but not one for items like this. And I have several now–a letter from my Oakland poet friend Jody Offer; some great stuff just in from Marshall Hryciuk; Marton’s little booklet The Reader which I’ve had for two months and haven’t lost, who knows why; Arnold’s letter; a little packet of great stuff by himself Andrew Topel left with me during his visit a little while ago as well as wonderful full-color things his press published that he sent me a couple of months ago.
These are what are in plain view. Stored who knows where are many items like them previously in plain view. As I keep telling myself, I have to getmy house in better order. I’m sure I can, for I’m now able to chuck dead magazines–old copies of Discover or National Geographic, for instance. I proved that last year sometime when I threw out . . . I forget what, but it was a magazine I liked but hadn’t read all my issues of, which went back twenty years or more. I’m also ready to pack away old correspondence and zines and the like that I now have handy but never refer to. I may finally toss old paint brushes, broken crayons, and all kinds of painting supplies I once thought I could use to make masterpieces but never did.
Wish me luck. Before I started putting the house in order, I have to get my next column for Small Press Review done. Yesterday I finally finished a full draft of the two-chapter essay that will close my book on the Shakespeare authorship question that I wanted to finish before going to the hospital, so I can devote myself to the column during the next five days. Not today. Today I spend six killing hours at (1) my dentist’s spending $140 having another chipped tooth fixed (my teeth are crumbling at an alarming rate), (2) at the hospital where I’ll be getting operated on for a class in what to expect and pre-op filling out of forms and getting blood and an chest x-ray taken, and (3) at the supermarket getting bananas, milk and six bottles of Propel, the drink I’m trying to replace Mountain Dew with. It was too much for me.
Whee.
They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.
All the best,
Márton
Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!
Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.