Judy Wells « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Judy Wells’ Category

Entry 385 — My Most-Used Coinage

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

From My Verosophy Workshop « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘From My Verosophy Workshop’ Category

Entry 1674 — The Sun & My First House

Saturday, December 27th, 2014

For the past two days or so I have been feeling like I am on the verge of really getting started on a Major Work beginning with an in-depth survey of my theory of awarenesses.  I couldn’t figure out why until I thought of the transitting sun.  That’s what the sun is called when one is considering its location in one horoscope: right now the Sun is at 6 degrees Capricorn in the sky, which puts it just in my horoscope’s first house, which begins at around 3 degrees Capricorn.  This house, as you might guess, has to do with beginnings!

It’s all rot, but fun.  And I have to admit, when my life is suddenly doing something good that my horoscope says it should be doing, it encourages me, however many more times I’ve compared what my horoscope said my life should be doing with what my life was doing and found no similarity at all between the two.  I think it’s because nothing in my life is ever encouraging.  Okay, exaggeration.  What’s more true is that the few things in my life that have been encouraging resulted in nothing but disappointment: get the gig at the Scientific American website, for instance.  To be maximally accurate, I should say that the stars are no worse at predicting good things for me than real life is, and not as depressing when their predictions are full of hooey, because I don’t really believe in them.

On the other hand, anything encouraging is good for me, if I can even half believe in it for a few minutes because I think people like me may have an urceptual optimist in us that is sensitive to any sign of encouragement, and able to minimize all that our internal pessimist tries to warn us about.

Note: you have just had a front eye on the birth of the urceptual optimist and urceptual pessimist: neither existed until I began writing the paragraph above.  They make sense to me, particularly the urceptual optimist.  How else explain the insanity that keeps people like me going no matter how unarguably quickly the unreachability of our goals is increasing?

Hey, I also have three new terms for you: “magni-cerebrevalu-ceptual,”  “practi-cerebrevaluceptual,” and “reflexevaluaceptual.” I’ll save my discussion of these till tomorrow.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1668 — Additions & Blither

Sunday, December 21st, 2014

First an addition to my taxonomy of awarenesses: I’ve decided to give what I was temporarily calling the “X-ceptual Awareness” one of the names I previously considered, then junked, “the Magniceptual Awareness.”  My problem with it was that it was too similar to “the Supraceptual Awareness,” the name I had given to my system’s over-all awareness.  I made that problem go away by simply changing “Supraceptual Awareness” to “Cerebral Awareness.”  Pretty clever, wot?  It makes sense since both the Practiceptual Awareness and the Magniceptual Awareness are in, or mostly in, the cerebrum.  And I’m comfortable with the idea of a Sub-Cerebral Awareness located in the cerebellum and other parts of the brain, as well as various places in the secondary nervous system.

Next, a Noun cement that I hope will will cause those of you feeling guilty about getting all this blog’s incredible brilliance for free to express your gratitude with money–to someone on food stamps (due to his actual economic situation, not lies about it, although I did not report the $200 I made as a writer last year in my 2013 request to continue on the dole, nor will I report the $350! I made as a writer this year on my upcoming request).  You can do this by sending me $5 or more for an autographed numbered copy of a limited edition of 4 More Poem Poems.  It just came off the press.  Only 8 copies printed, each with a different cover from the others–in fact, I have just decided to paste a unique original visual image on each cover.  (Note: I really think $20 would be reasonable for anyone who is paying that or more for a subscription to any poetry-related magazine whatever.)  I claim that no one who likes Joycean foolery with the language and surrealism will find at least one of the poems delightful.  And there iz not one (1) but two (2) dreadfully wicked attacks in the collection on our country’s poetry gate-keepers–but only in passing!  Remember, Posterity will really be angry with you for not sending me any money!

To take advantage of this Fabulous Offer, send check & your name&address to:

Bob Grumman
1708 Hayworth Road
Port Charlotte FL 33952

Sorry for the begging, folks.  I’m really not badly off: I still have credit cards that will allow me to borrow over ten thousand dollar before I max them.  I just used on of the cards for $1500, in fact–to have some company try to get the data in an external drive of mine that went bad about a year ago, and has the only copies of a few of my poems, and a lot of my only copies of others’ poems including four or five of Guy Beining’s the originals of which are lost.  But I thought it’d be fun to play marketeer for a little while.  And at least I didn’t bold-face the above.

* * *

Okay, now to what seems to me an interesting question I just wondered into (note: it’s near impossible now for me not to qualify every opinion of mine in some way like this) while discussing Karl Kempton’s current central project, an exhaustively researched history of visual poetry from pre-history on: what poem should be considered the world’s first major full-scale visual poem?  Very subjective, I fear, because of the difficulty in defining both a full-scale poem (for me, to put it simply, it would be a poem that’d be mediocre or worse if not for what it does visually) and a major poem.

I have no idea what poem is but don’t think any of Mallarme’s was because not depending on the visual for anything truly central to them.  Nor Apollinaire’s, which seem primitive to me, although I’d have to look at them again to be sure.  Such a poem would have to have a highly significant and original visual metaphor at its core to get the prize, in my opinion.  Nothing before the twentieth century that I know about does.  I think I’d aware the prize to something by Cummings (although I’m not sure what, and he may not have composed what I’d call a full-scale visual poem); if not Cummings, then Grominger’s “silence,” but not with confidence because I don’t know what other superior visual poems came before it.

Here’s a related question I didn’t send Karl: what poet could be said to have been the world’s first serious, dedicated, lyrovisual poets, by which I mean poet who concentrated a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poetry–as opposed to Lewis Carroll who (1) was not a lyrical visual poet and (2) wrote light visual poems (which were nonetheless an important contribution to poetry, or Mallarme or Herbert, neither of whom composed more than a few poems that could be called visual–or, from my standpoint, made primary visual poems, or poems whose visual content was at least as important aesthetically as its verbal content.

I’m not even sure Cummings would qualify for consideration since he did not compose all that many poems I’d call primary visual poems.  I’d have to go through my volume of his complete poetry to be sure of this, though.  So, we have a preliminary question: what poets devoted a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poems.  My impression is that Kenneth Patchen was one of them.  I think Apollinaire probably was, too.  Most of the concrete poets seem to have been. I know I’ll annoy a number of you with my next pronouncement: it is that fewer and fewer people calling themselves visual poets devote much, or any, time to the composition of visual poems, preferring to make textual designs (and mostly doing extremely well at it).

Now another addition, this to my thoughts about urceptual personae:

It occurred to me that I made no attempt in yesterday’s entry to indicate the biological advantage of having . . . ursonae, so I’ll try to do that now.  I’ll need to go into some detail about the way an urceptual persona is created.  For an example, I’ll use the urnemy (no, I’m just foolin’ around: I won’t make that my new name for “the urceptual enemy”).  When a baby first sees its father, it will automatically be thrust into its socioceptual awareness[1] where its urceptual persona recognition mechanism is.  This mechanism will activate the baby’s urceptual other—due to such stimuli as the father’s face and arms.  The father will be unfamiliar to it (probably, although he may have experienced enough of him while in the womb for him to be familiar; or perhaps any face will be familiar enough not to cause the baby pain, or even to cause it pleasure; assume here, though, that the father is unfamiliar to the baby, maybe because he has a beard and is first encountered while he is sneezing or farting).  Since the unfamiliar causes pain according to my theory, and pain caused by another person has to be one of the stimuli causing the activation of a person’s urceptual enemy, the baby’s urceptual enemy will become active.

The baby will withdraw as much as possible from its enemy, the father, because urceptual personae automatically activate appropriate certain reflexive behavior.  This is value #1 of an urceptual persona.

At this point, I am going to drop the urceptual enemy for not being as good a choice as an example as I first thought.  I’ll go instead to the urceptual father.  In the scenario I began, the father will almost certainly not continue to activate the baby’s urceptual enemy for long, if he even does so when the baby first encounters him.  The baby’s mother will probably be with the father and say something like, “Here’s your daddy, Flugwick (or whatever the kid’s name is),” in a momvoice, accompanied by a mom smile, and many another mo0mfeature, so neutralize the father’s unfamiliarity.  And the father will smile and say something in a gentle voice and perhaps, tickle the kid under the chin—certainly something likely to seem pleasant to the kid.  In short, little Flugwick’s urceptual persona recognition mechanism will soon activate its urceptual father (I now think a baby will recognize the first male it encounters as its father—but be able to correct the error before long—rather than as a friend; if my hypothesis turns out valid, it will be easy to determine exactly what happens.

Be that as it may, eventually the baby will (in normal circumstance) automatically perceive its father as both a certain shape with a certain voice and smell—and as its urceptual father.  The activation of the latter will help it more quickly react to the father appropriately.  It will learn from its social environment—mainly its family—the details of appropriate reactions not instinctive like its smile will be until it learns enough to control it.

That an urceptual persona will double the ability of the real person it is attached to cause reactions is it second extremely important biological value.  For one thing, this will make people more important than almost anything else to a person, which would obviously help a species survive.

What might be as important to a person as people?  Here’s where my superspeculative nature takes over from my speculative nature.  The goals a person shoots for may become as important to a person as others, or even himself  Beauty, for an artist.  As I’ve already tried to demonstrate, an artist will almost surely be motivated to some small or large degree to create an object of beauty to gain others’ approval.  But simply to create something of beauty for its own sake can very well be his main motive, or even his only motive.  I’m back to the magniceptual awareness where one might go to concentrate on beauty free of interpersonal concerns.  Where I increase my speculativeness is in thinking puberty may open a person’s magniceptual awareness—give him doors into it, or significantly increase his doors into it.  I strongly suspect a male’s magniceptual awareness is significantly large than a female’s.  Just as a female’s anthroceptual awareness is much larger than a male’s. Of course, feminists will take this to be an insult to women, but I don’t see it as that.  Well, as a male, I have to think of what I am as superior to females, but nonetheless trying to be objective about it, there’s no reason to say that interpersonal matters require less talent than impersonal matters.

The joke is that all this will be moot when asexual computers take over the world, reproducing like protocytes—with ecstasy.  But who knows, they may be us.
.
* * *
.
[1] According to Me, among everyone’s ten major awarenesses[2] (so far) is an anthroceptual awareness, which consists of two sub-awarenesses, the egoceptual awareness which is where a person experiences himself as an individual, and the socioceptual awareness, where he experiences himself as a member of his society.  Each of these is one of the “intelligences,” in Howard Gardner’s writings on the subject.

[2] A major awareness is an awareness just under one of the primary awarenesses on my taxonomical chart of the awarenesses.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1665 — Additions to Yesterday’s Entry

Thursday, December 18th, 2014

Note: in yesterday’s entry, I opposed entities that are “real,” because capable of being sensorily perceived, to “imaginary” ones that cannot be perceived.  I should have used “communicatively perceived” in place of just “perceived,” or whatever term I used for that.  That’s because some believers in Eastern x-ceptualities, believe themselves actually perceiving gods and the like whom others cannot.  I say that if I see a tree, and say the tree is real and get almost any sane person to look at it and agree with me that it is, I have identified a communicably perceivable entity whereas if an Eastern mystic says he went somewhere in his mind, or some like place, and talked with his god, his god is only perceptible to him, if he cannot take me where I can also meet him; the god is not communicably perceivable.

This goes back to the two realities idea of mine.  I’m not sure what nutto names I gave them, but they are the personal reality and the collective reality, and–for me–the only one the means anything is the collective reality: reality is what I and others agree it is.  I think my personal reality is almost the collective’s.  The important differences are no questions not yet genuinely decided by the collective: for instance, the value of my cultural contributions.  I suspect there will never be a fair way to determine that but the collective’s current answer would have to be”who knows.”

As I think more on it, it seems to me there might be two collective realities: the one with a city called New York separated by an ocean called the Atlantic from a city called London, and we go into our x-ceptual awareness to consider.  There most questions are a good deal less than 95% decided by the collective, and I think it fair not to consider something to be part of the collective reality (“objective reality” is or should be my name for this unless 95% of the clearly sane say it is.  It is insane, though, to reject something proposed as real because it hasn’t gotten enough votes; one must accept it as not sufficiently demonstrated only.

Maybe I’m saying objective reality is what we deal with in a practiceptual awareness, while insufficiently-demonstrated reality makes up most of what we deal with in our higher awareness.  From another slant, objective reality consists of entities; non-practiceptual possible reality consists of the inter-relationships of entities.

I’ve thought more about what to call x-ceptuality.  “Sapienceptuality” may be my best attempt, but it’s not right.  “Aristoceptuality” gets it almost exactly, but only if we put aside the fact that most aristocrats are not very bright.  And Aristotle, my favorite philosopher, had little to do with the arts.  Another miss: “Magnaceptual,” out because too similar to “Supraceptual,” which I want to keep for my ruling awareness.

I thought of following Siggy in using the names of gods which would have given me “Apolloceptual.”  But what god’s name could I use for “practiceptual,” assuming I could give up that name, which seems near ideal for what I want it to mean.  Also, Apollo seems to me to represent only part of where goes on in the “second” awareness.

“Significeptual?”  I like it but fear it’s too much of a slur on the practical.   I thought of “culturaceptual” because the practiceptual awareness has to do with survival and comfort, the other awareness with what I think of as culture.  But “culture” is a contaminated word.

“Abracaceptual?”  A good one, but no.

Fie on it.  I’m quitting for now.
.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1447 — Day 14

Thursday, May 8th, 2014

My second week working on what I thought would be a simply essay will end today.  I may have another week to go before finishing it.  It’s close to 7,000 words in length now–which means I’ve done 500 words for it daily.  But most of them were already written before I began.  And the piece should be substantially shorter when done.

So just what have I been up to?  Basically thinking, I guess, and re-thinking–and re-arranging blocks of text.  A few days just enough more than nothing to claim I worked on the thing.  And it’s only one small portion of only one of my life’s projects!  Yesterday, though, I wrote A Pivotal Sentence: “More exactly, however, it is what we feel when a pleasure-cell in the brain’s ‘evaluceptual awareness’ is activated,” “it” being pleasure.  This sentence was wonderfully important, at least to me, because it give me a transition into what I was instantly intuitively certain would be the Grand Core of Mine Essay.

Finding a good transition makes me happier than coming up with what seems to me an original, important idea.  Anyway, this one led to “And here we leave certified science completely for my Knowlecular Psychology.”  See?  Now I can yak about my whole theory, then about its evaluceptual awareness, and finally what I have to say about beauty, ending with its biological importance.  I’m already 200 words into that.  You will be able to judge whether my transition worked or not when the essay is done and published somewhere.

 .

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 384 — A Poetic Coinage « POETICKS

Entry 384 — A Poetic Coinage

Faereality.
.                                      f
.                                     ae
.                                      r
.                                     ea
.                                     lit
.                                     y

As Cummings might have had it.  I coined it for use in the mathemaku I made last night for the one-mathemaku-a-day-no-matter-how-bad project I start five days ago to force myself to think mathemakuically–in hopes that that would eventually perk me up.   It’s the dividend.  I haven’t gotten the quotient quite the way I want it.  At this stage, it’s “clouds softening/ out of a long-lost haiku/ toward a full-hued day.”  I need it positive because the poem’s divisor is a raging storm.  Which now makes me think a better quotient would be something like “17th-century haiku about a butterfly”–i.e., something not so obviously the opposite of a storm.  The poem needs work, but it’s the first I’ve thought good enough to tinker with.  The first four don’t come close to making sense nor do anything interesting. No matter as long as I end with 365 things that qualify as mathemaku 360 days from today.

Leave a Reply

theoretical psychology « POETICKS

Posts Tagged ‘theoretical psychology’

Entry 115 — The Knowleplex

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.

Entry 89 — IQ, EQ and CQ

Friday, January 29th, 2010

I’m taking a break from Of Manywhere-at-Once to reveal my latest coinages, PQ and CQ, or psycheffectiveness quotient and creativity quotient.  I’ve long held that IQ is a ridiculously pseudo pseudo synonym for intelligence.  “Pychefficiency” is an old term of mine for “genuine intelligence.”  A slightly new thought of mine is that PQ equals IQ times CQ divided by 100.  So an average person’s PQ would be 100 times 100 divided by 100, or 100.  The most common Mensa member’s PQ would be 150 times 50 divided by 100, or 75.

Okay, mean-spirited hyperbole.  But there definitely are a lot of stupid high IQ persons, and it is the stupid high IQ persons that gravitate toward Mensa membership.  (Right, I’m not in Mensa–but I could be, assuming my IQ hasn’t shrunk much more over the years than my height, which is down a little over half an inch.)

My formula wouldn’t come too close to determining a person’s true PQ because IQ is so badly figured, but it would come at least twice as close to doing so as IQ by itself.  A main change necessary to make the formula a reasonable measure of mental effectiveness would be to divide it into short-term IQ and long-term IQ.   The former is what IQ currently (poorly) is–i.e., something that can be measured in a day or less.  The latter would be IQ it would take a year (or, really, a lifetime, to measure).  Quickness at accurately solving easy problems versus ability to solve hard problems.

Really to get IQ right one would have to measure the many kinds of intelligence there are such as social intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, athletic intelligence, self intelligence and so forth, then add them together, find the mean score thus obtained for human beings.  Divide that by a hundred and use the answer to divide a given intelligence sum to find true IQ.

Maybe not “true IQ,” but “roundedness quotient.”  For me, true IQ would be all the intelligences multiplied together divided by the product of one less than the number of intelligences and 100.  That, on second thought, wouldn’t do it, I don’t think.  What I want is a reflection of the strength of all one’s cerebral aptitudes without penalty for absent talents since it doesn’t seem to be that they’d be too much of a handicap.  I’m in an area now I need to think more about.  So here will I close.

Entry 78 — Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume Two

Monday, January 18th, 2010

For three months or so I have been critiquing a book by an imbecile who doesn’t know who wrote the works of Shakespeare, only that Shakespeare did not.   Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography. Each day (but one) I’ve attacked a section of it at HLAS, where the authorship debate can be carried on without restrictions.  I started the critique for many reasons, the main one being that the book is too full of crap to ignore.  Nor did I ignore it when it was first published.  I read it through, making copious annoyed and sarcastic annotations in it.  I wrote up an overview of its main thesis for use in my own authorship book.  And I fully intended to write a thorough critique of it–which I never got around to.  Until now.

2009 was a terrible year for me, especially the second half of it.  I did almost no writing during that second half.  So my second reason for my critique was simply to force myself into a writing routine.  I have to admit I also wanted something to express anger about, being pretty unhappy at the time with just about everything in my life.  In other words, take out my misery on poor Diana Price.  Not a worthy victim but published hardbound by a more respectable company than I ever was, and asked to lecture on her book at universities, as I never have been asked to lecture on my Shakespeare book.  Oh, what I’d really call my main purpose is to present a full-scale portrait of a propagandist–that is, reveal what the main propagandistic devices are and how they work.  A handbook on propaganda for the uninitiated, or–more exactly–the incompletely initiated–which would include me, out to learn in the process.

My venture  has so far been successful.  My critique is now almost 40,000 words long, and I’m almost halfway through Price’s books, which I’m covering page by page.   For some reason today I thought of a similar project I could start here: constructing day by day another book I have notes for and long ago seriously hoped to write but didn’t, my Of Manywhere-at-Once, Volume Two. (I’ve had a third volume in mind to do, as well.)

So: tomorrow I’ll begin it.  I figure I’ve pretty much taken care of this entry already–and want to add something to it that has nothing to do with my manywhere book, but want to record in case I forget about it.  It has to do with my knowlecualr psychology, specifically with my theory of temperaments.  Until an hour or so ago, I posited four temperaments (or personality-types): the rigidnik, the milyoop, the ord, and the freewender for, respectively, high-charactration/low accommodance persons, high-accommodance/low charactration persons, medium charactration/medium accommodance (ordinary) persons, and high charactration/high accommodance persons.   My types were based on two of my three mechanisms of intelligence, charactration and accommodance.  I suddenly saw earlier today that a fifth temperament based on the third mechanisms of intelligence, accelerance, might be in order.  A person high in accelerance bu not high in either of the other two mechanisms.   An eruptor?  Not sure how good a name that is, but it will do for now.

Entry 42 — A Knowlecular Analysis of the Visiophor

Monday, December 14th, 2009

#682 through #688 contain pieces of an attempt at an analysis of how, according to my knowlecular theory of psychology, we experience visual poetry.  It’s a jumble I hope at some time to make a coherent essay out of but for right now I’ve made it a page you can access by clicking on “How the Brain Process Visual Poetry” in the Pages section to the right.

Entry 17 — Knowlecular Poetics, Part 1

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Today, #621 in its entirety because I’m too tapped out to do anything more:

14 October 2005: Eventually, neurophysiology will be the basis of all theories of poetics. My own central (unoriginal) belief that metaphor is at the center of (almost) all the best poetry is neurophysiological, finally, for it assumes that the best poems happen in two (or more) separate brain areas, one activated by an equaphor (or metaphor or metaphor-like text), the other (or others) by the equaphor’s referents. Manywhere-at-Once. Neurophysi-ologists may even now be able to test this idea–although not with much finesse. Their instruments are too crude to determine anything definitively, but could certainly determine enough to be suggestively for or against my idea.

I believe, by the way, that the few good non-equa-phorical poems get most of their punch due to their evasion of metaphor. That is, those experiencing them get pleasure from the unexpected absence of metaphor or nything approximating mataphor. It may even be that such poems cause those experiencing to experience anywhere-at-Once by activating two separate brain areas–one of them empty! (A kind of “praecisio” for Geof Huth to consider.) The pay-off would be a feeling of image-as-sufficient-in-itself.Be that as it may, I brought this subject up–well, I brought it up because I couldn’t think of anything else to discuss today. But I wanted to begin considering visual poetry neurophysiologically, something I haven’t before, that I know of. Recently, I’ve been trying, in particular, to distinguish visual poetry from illustrated poetry in terms of my knowlecular psychology, which is entirely neurophysiological (although the neuorophysiology is hypothetical). I’ve been having trouble. I believe I have a beginning, though. It is that an illustrated poem, like some of William Blake’s, put a person experiencing them in a verbal area of his mind first, and then into a visual area of his mind. The text activates his verbal area, the illustration his visual area–at about the same time that his verbal area activates some of the cells in the portion of his visual area activated by the illustration. This results in a satisfying completion that enhances the pleasurable effect of the poem.

A classical visual poem–a poem, that is, that everyone would consider a visual poem–will put a person experiencing it in a verbal area of his mind and a visual area of his mind at the same time. Because the text and the illustration will be the same thing.

The activated visual area will cause (minor) pain, because not expected–that is, it will be due to textual elements used in unfamiliar ways, or graphic elements jammed into texts in unfamiliar ways. If successful, the poem’s verbal content will secondarily activate some of the cells in the portion of the subject’s visual area the visual elements did–to result in the same kind of saisfaction the illustrated poem resulted in, except faster (the precipitating experiences not being consecutive but simultaneous), and with more unfamiliarity resolved, a plus in my theory of aesthetics.

Apologies if all this seems dense. I’m feeling my way–and writing for myself more than for anyone else. I hope to find my way to clearer expression, eventually.

Apologies for the misplacement of the above text: I can’t figure out how to indent at this site.–Bob

Entry 4 — The Nature of Visual Poetry, Part 2

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Note to anyone dedicatedly trying to understand my essay, you probably should reread yesterday’s segment, for I’ve revised it.  Okay, now back to:

The Nature of Visual Poetry

As a visual poem, Biloid’s “Parrots” is eventually processed in two significantly different major awarenesses, the protoceptual and the reducticeptual.   In the protoceptual awareness, the processing occurs in the Visioceptual Awareness, to which it directly proceeds.  In the reducticeptual awareness, it first goes to  the Linguiceptual Awareness, which is divided into five lesser sub-awarenesses, the Lexiceptual, Texticeptual, Dicticeptual, Vocaceptual, Rhythmiceptual and Metriceptual.  The first is in charge of the written word, the second of the spoken word, the third of vocalization, the fourth of the rhythm of speech and the fifth of the meter of speech.  Of these, the linguiceptual awareness passes “Parrots” on only to the first, the lexiceptual  awareness, because “Parrots” is written, not spoken.  Since the single word that comprises its text will be recognized as a word there, it will reach its final cerebral destination, the Verbiceptual Awareness.

The engagent of “Parrots” will thus experience it as both a visioceptual and a verbiceptual knowlecule, or unit of knowledge–at about the same time.  Visually and verbally, the first because it is visual, the second because it is a poem and thus necessarily verbal.  Clearly, it is substantially more than a conventional poem, which would be processed entirely by its engagent’s verboceptual awareness.

Okay, this essay, only about a thousand words in length so far, is already a mess.  Yes, way too many terms.  And I keep needing to revise it for clarity.  Or, at least, to reduce its obscurity.  I have trouble following it myself.  My compositional purpose right now, though, is to get everything down.  Later, I’ll simplify, if I can.

Entry 3 — The Nature of Visual Poetry, Part 1

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

bgfavorites2

The image above is from the catalogue of a show I co-curated in Cleveland that Michael Rothenberg was kind enough to give space to in Big Bridge #12–with two special short gatherings of pieces from the show, with commentary by me.  I have it here to provide relief from my verosophizing (note: “verosophy” is my word for serious truth-seeking–mainly in science, philosophy, and history).  It’s also a filler, for I’ve had too tough a day (doctor visits, marketing, phoning people about bills) to do much of an entry.

It’s not a digression, though–I will come back to it, as a near-perfect example of a pure visual poem.

Now, briefly, to avoid Total Vocational Irresponsibility, back to:

the Nature of Visual Poetry

The pre-awareness is a sort of confederacy of primary pre-aware- nesses, one for each of the senses.  Each primary pre-awareness is in turn a confederacy of specialized secondary pre-awarenesses such as the visiolinguistic pre-awareness in the visual pre-awareness and the audiolinguistic pre-awareness in the auditory pre-awareness.  Each incoming perceptual cluster (or “pre-knowlecule,” or “knowlecule-in-progress,” by which I mean cluster of percepts, or “atoms of perception,” which have the potential to form full-scale pieces of knowledge such as the visual appearance of a robin, that I call “knowlecules”) enters one of the primary pre-awarenesses, from which it is sent to all the many secondary pre-awarenesses within that primary pre-awareness.

The secondary pre-awarenesses, in turn, screen the pre-knowlecules entering them, accepting for further processing those they are designed to, rejecting all others.  The visiolinguistic pre-awareness thus accepts percepts that pass its tests for textuality, and reject all others; the audiolinguistic pre-awareness tests for speech; and so on.  More on this tomorrow, I hope.

Entry 2 — The Ten Knowlecular Awarenesses

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Okay, today the first installment of my discussion of the nature of vispo, which begins with a summary of my theory of “awarenesses”:

A Semi-Super-Definitive Analysis of the Nature of Visual Poetry

It begins with the Protoceptual Awareness. It begins there for two reasons: (1) to get rid of the halfwits who can’t tolerate neologies and/or big words, and to ground it in Knowlecular Psychology, my neurophysiological theory of psychology (and/or epistemology).  The protoceptual awareness is one of the ten awarenesses I (so far) posit the human mind to have.  It is the primary (“proto”) awareness–the ancestor of the other nine awarenesses, and the one all forms of life have in some form.  As, I believe, “real” theoretical psychologists would agree.  Some but far from all would also agree with my belief in multiple awarenesses, although probably not with my specific choice of them.  It has much in common with and was no doubt influenced by Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.

The protoceptual awareness deals with reality in the raw: directly with what’s out there, in other words–visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory stimuli.  It also deals directly with what’s inside its possessor, muscular and hormonal states.  Hence, I divide it into three sub-awarenesses, the Sensoriceptual, Viscraceptual and Musclaceptual Awarenesses.  The other nine awarenesses are (2) the Behavraceptual Awareness, (3) the Evaluceptual Awareness, (4) the Cartoceptual Awareness, (5) the Anthroceptual Awareness, (6) the Sagaceptual Awareness, (7) the Objecticeptual Awareness, (8) the Reducticeptual Awareness, (9) the Scienceptual Awareness, and (10) the Compreceptual Awareness.

The Behavraceptual Awareness is concerned with telling one of one’s behavior, which this awareness (the only active awareness), causes.  For instance, if someone says, “Hello,” to you, your behavraceptual awareness will likely respond by causing you to say, “Hello,” back, in the process signaling you that that is what is has done.  You, no doubt, will think of the brain as yourself, but (not in my psychology but in my metaphysics) you have nothing to do with it, you merely observe what your brain chooses to do and does.  But if you feel more comfortable believing that you initiate your behavior, no problem: in that case, according to my theory, your behavraceptual awareness is concerned with telling you what you’ve decided to do and done.

The Evaluceptual Awareness measures the ratio of pain to pleasure one experiences during an instacon (or “instant of consciousness) and causes one to feel one or the other, or neither, depending on the value of that ratio.  In other words, it is in charge of our emotional state.

The Cartoceptual Awareness tells one where one is in space and time.

The Anthroceptual Awareness has to do with our experience of ourselves as individuals and as social beings (so is divided into two sub-awareness, the egoceptual awareness and the socioceptual awareness).

The Sagaceptual Awareness is one’s awareness of oneself as the protagonist of  some narrative in which one has a goal one tries to achieve.

The Objecticeptual Awareness is the opposite of the anthroceptual awareness in that it is sensitive to objects, or the non-human.

The Reducticeptual Awareness is basically our conceptual intelligence.  It reduces protoceptual data to abstract symbols like words and numbers and deals with them (and has many sub-awarenesses).

The Scienceptual Awareness deals with cause and effect, and may be the latest of our awarenesses to have evolved.

Finally, there is the Compreceptual Awareness,which is our awareness of our entire personal reality. I’m still vague about it, but tend to believe it did not precede the protoceptual awareness but later formed when some ancient life-form’s number of separate awarenesses required some general intelligence to co:ordinate their doings.

I have a busy day ahead of me, so will stop there.

Literary News « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Literary News’ Category

Entry 902 — the “Pleruser”

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

Do I have a good word, finally, after forty years, for “one who does more than read a poem” in “pleruser?”  I like it now, but I’ve liked probably thirty or more previous of my attempts to get a better word than my “aesthcipient” for engage a work of art fully, in general, and for not just reading but viewing a visual poem, in particular.  pluhr ROO zuhr.  From “peruser” and “PLuRal.”  Sibling: “plerusal.”

Another new coinage, but probably just an ad hoc term is “poelectricrity,” which is what a poem has to have to be major.  It comes from my latest idea about a poem that it has three contents, one of them its elecrical content.  More on that when (and if) I get the essay I’m writing about it–one paragraph done so far–finished.

I’m learning of interesting behind-the-scenes quiet differences of opinion about the Fantagraphic anthology, by the way.  Two friends having mixed views of it, or worse; an unnamed acquaintance of one of them sounding as if he thinks very little of it.   I consider it excellent–which doesn’t mean there aren’t specimens in it I’m not too fond of, although I’ve seen nothing in it that I think doesn’t deserve to be in it.   I’m not sure which would be better for the field–a no-holds-barred between those for it and those against it, or a solidity of all involved in the field it covers against the Establishment, it the latter comes out in opposition to it, as I hope it will.  Probably the best thing for now is to await further developments in the BigWorld.

.

Entry 788 — Poets & Writers Questionnaire

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Here it is:

1. Yes, I am interested in participating in either a phone interview (30 minutes) or focus group (90 minutes) or both
2. Please tell us what you write. Poetry, Fiction
3. Do you write genre fiction? Yes
4. If you write genre fiction, please indicate which type.  Science Fiction
5. Are you a translator? No
6. Do you write books for children?
7. Do you write books for young adults? Not yet
8. Have you published a book? Yes
9. If you’ve published one or more books, how were they published?
Both Published by a publisher and Self-published
10. Would you be willing to participate in a focus group in Manhattan? Could not afford to
11. Would you be willing to participate in a focus group in downtown Los Angeles.? Could not afford to
12. Do you use Google+ Hangouts? No (Don’t know what these are.)
13. Would you be willing to participate in a virtual focus group using Google+ Hangouts? Don’t know what it is.
14. On weekdays, what time of day would be best for you to participate in a focus group? Any time
15. Do you subscribe to Poets & Writers Magazine? No
16. Do you subscribe to our e-newsletter? No
17. Have you received payment from Poets & Writers for a reading you’ve given or a workshop you’ve conducted? That’s a laugh.
18. Are you listed in our Directory of Poets & Writers? Yes
19. Do you participate in our online Speakeasy? No
20. Your age? Over 65
21. Your ethnic background? White, not Hispanic
22. Your gender? Male
23. Please provide your name, email address and information on where you live. Provided

I find nothing in it to indicate Poets & Writers has a genuine interest in finding out what it can do to help poets and writers. They should, at the very least, have someone answering their questionnaire tell how he rates their magazine from 1 for I think it very bad to 5 for I think it very good, to be sure of getting a few people who could actually help them do what they say they want to do. They should ask for comments, too. Such as a yes/no question about whether the answerer has ever published any kind of opinion piece on the state of literature in America, with a follow-up determining how often he has, if he has. More specific question on the kind of poetry done would help–a list of the Wilshberian poetries and “other.”  If I had time, I’m sure I could think of other good questions.  The results of P&W’s effort to improve should be amusing.

.

Entry 524 — The Latest Nobel Laureate

Friday, October 7th, 2011

 
Yesterday I made a sarcastic remark at New-Poetry about the blurb at the Nobel site for the latest mediocrity getting money from Stockholm in the literature department.  John Jeffrey replied, “Bob, if you go to the Noble Prize for Lit web site, there’s a list of all the laureates.  For the recent winners, those little blurbs (such as Tranströmer’s ‘condensed, translucent images’ you commented on) have been so overblown that they crack me up.  Here are some for various winners.  (See if you can guess who based on the blurb.)

 
“‘…for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat’.
 
“‘…author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization’.
 
“‘…that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’.
 
“‘…for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’.
 
“But it seems these incomprehensible burbs are a recent phenomenon.  It wasn’t always this way.  Back in ’23, they wrote that Yeats was awarded the prize,“for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”  That’s probably too clearly phrased for today’s fancy-pants Nobel writers.”
  
Said I: “I’m a sucker for ‘cartography,’ John, so I love the blurb with that in it.  As for the Yeats blurb, well, my problem with it is the same as my real problem with all the blurbs: they treat poetry as a sociopolitical instrument; what it does for ‘the spirit of a whole nation’ is what counts, not what it does as works of art—not for a whole nation but only for its best few (although I believe in the trickle-down effect that will allow lesser talents to use the innovations of geniuses to make art most of the rest of a nation will enjoy—the Bob Dylans, for instance).  The over-blown gush the Nobel people use for their blurbs is just their way of saying they haven’t the slightest idea for what poetry is at its best—though a few times I accept that they’ve rewarded it at its best, as with Yeats.  Maybe with Tranströmer, too, who knows.  I don’t and won’t have time to, but my intuition is that, at best, he’s another Yeats—which is to say, as Brahms was to Beethoven—when Wagner had become the next Beethoven.  Not that I’d shoot someone for preferring Brahms’s music to Wagner’s, but I would shoot someone for claiming Brahms was anywhere near as important a composer as Wagner, and importance ought to be of . . . importance.”
 
I mentioned Dylan because some people are advancing him as an appropriate Nobel Laureate.  If writers like Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck were, then I guess he is. 
 
.

Entry 476 — Bad News

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Just last night I heard of Len Fulton’s death from Karl Kempton.  A huge loss to me personally, and to the larger world.  What small visibility I have as a critic is due almost entirely to him.  What small visibility our country’s best writers have is due in large part to him, too–due to his support of the small press and micro-press for so long.  (His American Odyssey, a Bookselling Travelogue, which is about his beginnings in his vocation, is still entertainingly and informativelyl worth reading.)

I never met him personally–or even talked to him on the phone.  But we exchanged a lot of notes over the twenty years or so that I knew him.  He was always upbeat and supportive.  In his last note to me (this June), he wished me luck with my hip, which I’d just written him I was going to have replaced.

I was amused to hear that he’d been a life-long fan of the baseball Giants–and saddened that I hadn’t shared his happiness for them when they won the world series last year.  I’d rooted for them when they were the New York Giants, then for a while after they abandoned their New Jersey, New York and Connecticut fans, but only because of my emotional investment in their players.  I eventually dropped them for the Mets.  I disliked them (and the Dodgers) for many years but last year they were my team–I liked their players and felt the organization had been punished long enough for having skipped out.  Now that I find they won one for Len, I’m even more for them!

I hope he can be replaced enough to allow Dustbooks to continue.  He certainly won’t be replaced enough to satisfy any of the many who will miss him.

Entry 350 — Re: the Value of Taxonomy « POETICKS

Entry 350 — Re: the Value of Taxonomy

My good friend Geof Huth has challenged me to demonstrate why taxonomization is of value.  At first, I was somewhat dumbfounded by his belief that it was, if not useless, not of major importance.  Able occasionally to illuminate but not able to do so well enough for one to make a life-long project of, as I have.   I have always taken it as a given that an effective taxonomy is of value–of crucial value–in all fields.  Linnaeus’s Taxonomy, Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table of Elements, Euclid’s Geometry . . .   I termed it “the basis of the conceptual appreciation of art” (in a slightly different arrangement of those words), in the introductory defense of it in my A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry.  I also mentioned “the clarification of discussion that an effective taxonomy can accomplish.”  Later, I may have gone off the lyrico-mystical deep end when I said, “At their best, taxonomies (and analysis in general) reveal ever-smaller mysteries, and ever-vaster interconnections to discover down or up to–while allowing us a vocabulary greater than ‘oooh’ and ‘ahhh’ with which to share our pleasure with others.”  Granted, the idea that without taxonomy’s help, our vocabulary would be limited to ooohs and ahhhs is absurdly exaggerated.  Still, as I hope to show, only a taxonomy-based vocabulary is of maximal usefulness in the search for significant truths.

I soon admitted that I had not done much more than assert the worth of taxonomy, although it still seems to me that anyone who has done serious work in any kind of verosophy (i.e., field of significant material knowledge) would find plenty of support in his experiences for those assertions.  Ergo, I now must present a detailed case for taxonomy.  Not easy, for that requires a discussion of knowledge,  a main contention of mine being that taxonomies are either necessary or hard to do without in all attempts significantly to understand a discipline.  Here I ought to stop, for the possibility that I could convince anyone that my understanding of what knowledge is, and how we acquire and use it is valid is less than point oh one percent.  Nevertheless, I’ll try.  If I can figure out how to.

Warning: I’m now going to think out loud.  I will be hard to follow as I will probably jump around.  My logic will at times be very lax, and I’ll use coinages of mine unfamiliar to all but me.  Don’t expect too much in the way of articulateness, either.

I’m going to start with the knowleplex.  That’s what I call the complex of knowlecules (bits of knowledge) that a person’s brain forms when learning his way around a portion of reality containing interrelated matter–one’s neighborhood, for instance, or marine biology, or the study of the photon.  There are many kinds of knowleplexes.  The most effective, for verosophers, is the verosoplex.  That’s because it is systematically organized.  Not perfectly, but always aiming for maximal systemization.

I would claim that one reason many plenty dislike taxonomy (and reductive thinking and everything else having to do with science and related fields) is that they are incapable of forming verosoplexes.  Some whom I call “milyoops, tend because of their innate temperaments, mainly to form sloppy clumps of knowlecules some of which interrelate with some of the others in the knowleplex  but few of which interrelate to all or even a majority of the others in it.  The milyooplexes, as I call these, lack a unifying principle, something that makes a big picture possible.  An effective taxonomy is the ultimate such unifying principle.

It’s just like a city: an ideal system of streets will get you with maximal efficiency wherever you want to go; streets designed merely to connect one building to one or two others, will be worthless outside a give neighborhood.  Similarly, a city with an effective system of streets will tend to fill up with building at eay to find and get-to locations.  A really well-organized city (impossible because Nature must make it so) would have a center from which the whole of the center would be in view.

Another kind of knowleplex is the rigidniplex.  It’s formed by people I term rigidniks whose innate temperament compels them to create unsound unifying principles–conceptual skeletons, so to speak–that are too inflexible to form a unifying basis for sufficient knowledge to provide a rational understanding of a field.  They over-unify too little data.

Milyoops are satisfied by their milyooplexes because they allow pleasurable short-term connections–the pleasure of vaudeville versus the pleasure of a well-written full-length play.  Or pop songs versus classical symph0nies.  They can’t experience long-term pleasure or be other than bored by anything aimed to provide that, so they oppose it.  They love to learn small facts, but avoid systematic knowledge.  Another way of putting it is that a milyoop lacks much of an attention span–a pop song’s immediate variation on its initial theme will give them pleasure, but forget a second movement of a symphony’s providing a (probably more complicated) variation on a (probably more complicated) theme played ten minutes previously.  They can’t use a taxonomy, which does, basically, what a fine symphony does, so they reject it.

The whole idea is that a small understanding of some small portion of a knowleplex will give pleasure, but if one also can connect it to some other portion of the knowleplex, one can enjoy the second portion at the same time, and if one can also–do to one or more such connections, intuite something of the way everything in the knowleplex interrelate, one can enjoy a truly superior pleasure.  Indeed, such an understanding can suggest the sense of the oneness of all things that religions hype as the ultimate happiness–and which I believe all verosophers experience in their best moments, and have spoken of.  Artists, too–although not by means of a verosoplex, but by means of (this is a new idea of mine) an intuiplex–a knowleplex whose unifying principle is protoceptual rather than reducticeptual.  Or sensual rather than conceptual.

This is a good moment for me.  Due to the taxonomical thinking I always do when working with my theory of psychology.  I classify artistic temperaments as different from scientific temperaments on the basis of their brain make-up, which I won’t go into here.  And suddenly perceived how I could be nice to artists with this intuiplex, which I genuinely see can be a route to large truths equal to the verosoplex.  But also what causes the two cultures C. P. Snow wrote about, and which I fully accept.

The intuiplex much more than the verosoplex aids the pursuit of beauty, which I hold to be as important as the search for truth, but probably hinders the latter–except when used by someone who also is capable of verosoplexes.  Similarly, verosoplexes tend to get in the way of the pursuit and appreciation of beauty.

Again, I yield to the temptation of using my present reasoning to support the value of taxonomy.  Only because of taxonomy have I been able on the spur of the moment to hypothesize an intuiplex–because it is based on the knowleplex, which is only a taxonomical level one step above it, and the verosoplex, which it is recognizably identical to (to me) except for one thing, its being an arrangement of primarily protoceptual knowlecules (think of the somatic knowledge that some highly unintellectual highly effective athletes have) instead of reducticeptual knowlecules–which, by the way, is taxonomically very similar, and in the same taxon as protoceptual knowlecules, differing from them only in that their ultimate source is the data conveyed to the brain more or less directly from the senses rather than extracted from the senses pre-cerebralling and converted to reducticepts (or conceptual knowledge, like words, numbers or geometrical shapes).

An important point to recognize is that the validity of my theory of psychology is irrelevant so far as the value of its taxonomy is concerned: its taxonomy greatly facilitates my navigation of it, and ability to understand it–and find gaps worth trying to fill I’d never find without it,

I really think I know what I’m talking about, however little it may seem so.  I hope someone somewhere in time and space gets something out of this installment of my adventure in Advanced Thought.  More, I hope, tomorrow.

Leave a Reply

Andrew Joron « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Andrew Joron’ Category

Entry 385 — My Most-Used Coinage

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

Jonah Goldberg « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Jonah Goldberg’ Category

Entry 1639 — Choice of Ethotactic, Part 4

Saturday, November 22nd, 2014

What I’ve said so far suggests a question to me: can something a person does with no ethical intentions be ethotactical?  For instance, say I am with a friend I know to be much more poor than I and we  come upon an apple tree in a public forest with one apple on it, and I pick it and eat it, not thinking of my friend.  Or, for a more colorful example, say I have been taught that Irishmen are subhuman creatures without the ability to feel pain, and that hunting them will be good practice in the use of firearms that one may one day need to fight off aliens from outer space.  So I shoot a few Irishmen between the eyes, inflicting pain on them without realizing it, and even perhaps killing one or two of them.  Have I behaved immorally?

According to my theory of knowlecular psychology, no.  That’s because an ethotactic, or the choice of a moral or immoral action, can only be the result of some anthroceptual decision based on living in harmony with a known social code.

I think I would go so far as to say that my killing an Irishmen or two in such a case is not immoral even according to most people’s standards.  Many would protest, but because it would seem that I would be excusing a Nazi taught to consider Jews sub-human for gassing them.  I would excuse the Nazi, but only morally.  For me, he would be not immoral, but homicidally stupid—and therefore deserving to be reprimanded!  Sorry.  I have a weakness for black humor.  What I believe is that such a person should be prevented from continuing to gas Jews by being executed—unless one truly believes some kind of re-education can make him accept Jews as human, and he is compelled to repay society for his social stupidity by spending the rest of his life shining the shoes of Jews for free or something.

Ultimately, I believe all reprehensible acts are acts of stupidity, and that what kind of stupidity is involved—moral stupidity or some other kind of stupidity—is irrelevant.  Society should be maximally protected from the person acting reprehensibly (and protected from his genes, for I believe criminals [real criminals], and that’s who I’m talking about, should not be allowed to breed).  Of course, I realize I’m making a complex subject seem much more cut&dry than it is.  Just ideas to counteract simple-minded bad/good anti-continuumism and the insensitivity of certain sentimentalists to Evil.

About evil I will say that all definitions of it are necessarily subjective, but that it does exist, and can be defined sociobjectively.  Sociobjectivity is a view of an idea that is held by such a large majority of the members of a society and which has an objective neurophysiological basis as to be close enough to true objectivity as to be taken as such.  Take the evil of killing an innocent child.  Almost everyone would disapprove of that, and (I believe) almost all of us are instinctively repelled by the deed, and—in fact—would instinctively try to prevent a child, innocent or not, from being killed.

Not that our instinct to use reason would necessarily not be involved.  If effective, it might tell us that our standing in society will go up if we stop someone from murdering a child.  Although our instinct to advance statoosnikally would be part of that.  Actually, I think in most cases, protecting the child would be reflexive whereas our explanation would be taken care of mostly by our reasoning.

To be honest, if I were dominated by reason, I would never risk my life, even as the old man I now am, for some child, because what I believe I may contribute to World Culture is almost sure to be more than what the child will, however long he lives.  The problem with that, of course, is that my ability to reason may be defective, in which case, my not saving a child at the risk of losing my own life would be stupid integrity–that is, acting according to my code that I should protect my own life at all costs because of its great value to the world.  I claim that following that code would be absolutely valid if I were another . . . Nietzsche, without his breakdown.

Needless to say, the idea that Evil is what some deity has said it to be is absurd; various deities have universally defined certain acts as evil because the men who invented them were instinctively against those acts.  Other non-universal acts, like saying something contemptuous about some deity, have also been said to have been ordained Evil by a deity invented by men not because their inventors were instinctively against such acts but because the definition of Evil helped them gain power or destroy other tribes, or simply because of some personal dislike—of a priest once clawed by a cat that made him claim his main god had defined cats as evil, for example.

I do think that reasoning should dominate every moral choice one makes, but it can’t overcome one’s instincts, all of which are ultimately moral, for a given person.  We can only argue about whose individual morals would work best for the society we want to live in, and perhaps use reason to show that giving in to a society’s chosen code will be better for each individual in the long run, the long run excluding some never-seen Heaven or anything like it.

Which brings to mind the question of whether or not it is moral to lie to the masses and tell them some God will do horrible things to them if they don’t accept a society’s code.  I realize that there are those who don’t believe that our species naturally, due to our genes, divides into different social classes–three of them, roughly speaking:  masters, slaves, and . . . cerebreans.  They’re nuts.

I divide ethics into the study of socioethotactics and the study of egoethotactics . . . I think.  There are two major problems: formulation of a maximally fair and biologically advantageous set of socioethotactics by a society, and an individuals’ reconciling his inevitably conflicting set of egoethotactics with his society’s socioethotactics.

More on this eventually, if I think I can say anything at all interesting about it.

* * *

Note: on the day I made my first entry here about ethotactics, 36 people checked up on me at my Wikipedia entry; rarely do more than 4 people visit it on a day, and none since the first month it was up have anywhere near that many done so.  Were they fans of Jonah Goldberg, whose article I was commenting on?  The visits after that have been few, for or five in a day at most.

Last, and definitely least, here’s this SURVEY again:

Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)

YES

NO

Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1636 — Back to Goldberg

Wednesday, November 19th, 2014

Okay, back to my response to an essay by Jonah Goldberg.  I was writing about the effect of ethotactical intelligence on ethotactical duration but also the width of said duration.  An “ethotactic” is a person’s moral choice of action in a given situation.  I ended my writing for that day with the following:

“Obviously, the situation will have a lot to do with the length of a person’s ethotactical durations, there seldom being little point in trying for a long one regarding what to do morally about a piece of candy one has been offered.  Short-term moral behavior will not depend much on ethotactical intelligence.  That means day-to-day behavior will generally be intelligent enough (and considered acceptable enough) although not based on long ethotactical durations or particularly high ethotactical intelligence.

“Now for a scattering of points, because I don’t see right off how to present a better organized response to Goldberg’s essay.  First is his suggestion that too many people, especially young people, believe that “if it feels right, do it!’ by which he means all they think is necessary to make an ethotactical decision is passion.  Goldberg amplifies this when he quotes a character in the movie, Legally Blonde, as follows: “On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise professor quoted Aristotle; ‘The law is reason free from passion.’  Well, no offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard, I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law—and of life.’”

“Well, I would agree with Goldberg that the character is an airhead  . . .” I stopped there, cutting the paragraphs above from the text because I thought it had come to a good stopping point before them.  When I came back to them just now, three days later, and wrote the paragraph beginning this entry, to set the scene, I was immediately unsure what I was talking about.    There’s a person’s plain choice of action.  How is it different from his moral choice of action?

Okay, a person’s choice of action depends on a vote from each of his active awarenesses at the time.  These votes will probably never be equal.  How much weight the vote of a given awareness will have will depend on the person and on the situation.  And now I suspect I’m constructing a different theory or set of ideas than I was describing in part one of this cluster-dementia of an intellectual exploration.

I should probably re-start but I’m too lazy too.  It is also possible that I’ve got an idea begun that may lead somewhere worthwhile.  Question: what awareness provides the ethical portion of a person’s choice of action?  Immediate answer: the evaluceptual awareness, because it is the awareness that determines on the basis of past experience what path is most likely to maximize the pleasure-to-pain ratio.  This answer is wrong.

The moral content of the evaluceptual awareness’s choice will be determined all or mostly in the anthroceptual awareness, because it will try to make one act properly in order to satisfy one or more social instincts like the need to conform, the empathic need not to cause pain . . . there must be others but I can’t think of them now.  The instinct not to cause pain probably has many sub-instincts under it: like the need not to boast (because it may make others feel smaller) . . .

I wonder if there’s an egoceptual instinct to be honest in appraising oneself.  No one else need see that you dishonestly rate yourself a better poet than some Nobel Prize Winner, so it’s not a socioceptual instinct, if it exists.  I think it may exist because it would be advantageous for preventing unrealistic behavior.  But would it be moral?  And what about the embarrassment of missing five lay-ups in a row in your backyard where no one can see you.  You have immorally failed to live up to your own expectations just as missing one layup in a game would be immorally failing to live up to your group’s expectations.  If doing what you’re supposed to in a team effort hasn’t to do with morality, what does it have to do with?

My problem is to intelligently describe a person’s choice of action, which I now see is a matter of describing the many choices it is a combination of—basically the votes of various awarenesses (and sub-awarenesses) I’ve already mentioned.  Too much work for me now, so I’m outta here.  I hope I return to this matter, for my own sake.  (It would be immoral for me to deprive the world of my further thoughts about it.)  Not sure I will.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1633 — Moral Integrity

Sunday, November 16th, 2014

Jonah Goldberg is one of my favorite writers.  I consider him funny enough to steal material from, and agree with (most of) his political outlook.  Often, though, I find myself partially disagreeing with some position of his.  At the moment, I’m disagreeing with portions of his latest essay in National Review, “Empty Integrity.”  Goldberg believes the world is opting for a kind of “integrity” that Irish philosopher David Thunder categorizes as “purely formal accounts of integrity (which) essentially demand internal consistency within the form or structure of an agent’s desires, actions, beliefs, and evaluations.”  Opposed to this is a kind of integrity, Thunder describes as “fully substantive accounts.”  The difference between the two is that a person with the first kind acts in accordance with ethical principles designed to maximize his pleasure-to-pain ratio whereas a person with the second kind “desires to do what is morally good in all of his decisions,” according, again, to Thunder.

Goldberg implies that the first kind of integrity, which—because he associates it with the philosophy of Nietzsche, one of my idols—I will hereafter term Nietzschean Integrity, is “empty.”  It isn’t.  What he is really bothered by, first, is that a person possessing it does not “apply reason to nature and our consciences in order to discover what is moral” but simply does what “feels right.”  This is wrong for Goldberg because it ultimately means understanding integrity “only as a firm commitment to one’s own principles—because one’s own principles are the only legitimate principles. The god of a person’s morality is thus not Jehovah but the person.”

Nietzschean Integrity is “empty” only inasmuch as there is no imaginary being running it.  It seems to me that a truly empty integrity would be one that was devoid of rules to follow.  That is not the case with Nietzschean Integrity.  What makes it empty for Goldberg is merely his dislike of its rules . . .  No, what is wrong with it for him is not its rules but the rules he believes it will be based on if some entity outside it is not their source.  Actually there is no reason a person with Nietzschean Integrity might not “apply reason to nature and (his) conscience in order to discover what is moral” and, as a result become firmly committed to absolutely standard good old George Washington principles—because they lead him to rules of morality that “feel right” to him.

Ultimately, we all must follow the internal moral rules that feel right regardless of where they come from.  Everything we do, we do because it feels right.  Reason may tell someone that if he sticks his hand in a fire, he will experience pain, but he will accept what it tells him because it feels right.  To give just one example of why you should accept my generality that should suffice to clinch my case—which, I suppose, reduces the question to one of simple semantics.

In any case, the real problem for Goldberg (and me) is what I have some up with the brilliant name for of “Stupid Integrity.”   And here I bumble into boilerplate I feel bad about repeating but, I fear, is all I have to say about the topic.  I claim that one necessarily tries always to maximize his P2P (i.e., his “pleasure-to-pain ratio”), as he at the time believes—I should say, “guesses”—it to be for a length of time dependent on his . . . anthreffec- tiveness, or effectiveness as a human being, which includes but is quite a bit more than his “cerebreffectiveness,” which includes what those less picky about such matters than I would call “intelligence” but is significantly more than.  To make it easier to plow through what I will go on to say, though, I will replace “anthreffectiveness” with “intelligence.”

The stupider a person is, the shorter the period of time I’m speaking of will be.  Since my greatest defect as a thinker is a need to name just about everything I discuss, I am now going to call this period of time the “ethotactical duration.”  It’s a term I’ve come up with on the spot, so probably won’t last long.  It’s how long ahead a person plans (in effect, since usually the “planning” will be nothing like formal planning, and won’t even involve what most people think of as thought)—or, to put it more simply, it’s how long a person will take to decide, based on his (conscious or unconscious) moral code, what he will next do.  (A “behavratactical duration” is how far ahead a person plans before initiating any behavior.)

Note to Goldberg: please tell your couch that I am not purposely trying to distract my readers from my essentially empty ideas by overloading them with terminology, and that—while I do feel he’s almost as good an influence on my as he is on you, I’d prefer that he not bother me until I’ve finished saying what I want to say here.  I should add that if he wants me to continue referring to him in the future, thus improving his chances of immortality by at least 0.62%, he needs to try harder to be my friend.)

To be fastidious to a nauseating extreme, I must say that by “how long ahead a person thinks before making an ethotactical decision about what he will do next,” I actually mean “how long ahead the wide variety of facts, feelings, and who-knows-what-else a person will (in effect) consult before making an ethotactical decision regarding what he will next do.

Now then, while the length of a person’s ethotactical duration has a great deal to do with the intelligence of his moral acts, the width and depth of his moral decisions (i.e., their intelligence) will have significantly more to do with it.  Does he just consider the taste of a piece of candy he has been offered, or also its effect on his health and/or its effect on his reputation, and/or its effect on a child with him if you don’t offer it to him and the effect of that on you, and/or its effect on his mood and the effect of that on the poem he is composing . . . and the effect of that on what the world thinks of him in the year 2222?

As you can see, ethotactical intelligence will effect ethotactical duration but also the width of said duration.  In the case just described, if the person is concerned only with the taste of the candy bar and the immediate effect of his giving it versus not giving it to the child, he will only be concerned with a duration approximately equal to the time it takes him to eat the candy, or the same length of time (let’s assume) that he will enjoy the child’s enjoyment of the candy if he gives it to the child, or feel guilty about not giving it the child if he eats it but the width of the duration will be greater than it would have been had he only considered how the candy would taste.

(My thanks to Goldberg’s couch for not telling me how clumsily I just expressed myself.)

TO BE CONTINUED (alas)

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 309 — Necropetry « POETICKS

Entry 309 — Necropetry

Reading a post about some scholarly literary project, I came up with “necropetry” (neh CRAH peh tree) as the poetry that academia spends ninety percent of the time it devotes to poetry.  Poetry by the dead.  It spends nine point nine percent of that time on “Neonecropetry” (poetry by clones of the dead) and point one percent of it on contemporary columbetry.  I do think academia should spend more time of necropetry than on contemporary columbetry.  I merely think the gap between the two should be less.  And I see no point in its devoting more than one percent of its time, if that, on neonecropetry.  (NEE oh neh CRAH peh tree–nice word, actually, in spite of how bad it looks on the page.)

Leave a Reply

Grumman coinage « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Grumman coinage’ Category

Entry 1697 — SAQ Wack-Classification, Cont.

Monday, January 19th, 2015

As I was saying:

The fallaciplex a rigidnik crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex.  Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowleplexes in his magniscipience (where he is involved with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) are rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things).  Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance.  (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.)  The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.

That is a memory-complex that comes to over-ride any new information contradicting the understanding it generates.  Call it a fixation, or a permanent outlook.  The result is extreme inner-directedness based not on the interaction of continuing data but on what data was around at the birth of the rigidniplex.

Hence, if Shakespeare becomes important in his life, he must form a Shakespeare rigidniplex.  For reasons I’ll soon get into, this will become a delusional system based on some kind of insane conspiracy theory that someone other than Will Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to Will.

Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.

The second kind of authorship wack, the milyoop, is a kind of pseudo-rigidnik.  His fallaciplex is named after him, too: the milyooplex.  It is the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops suffer from a too low level of basal cerebral energy.  This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.

The sanest kind of wack is the eurekan.  Usually he is the third type of the three my theory of temperaments hypothesizes, the freewender, but he can also be a strong milyoop or weak rigidnik (in real life, just about everyone is a mixture of the three types).  He will have a healthy mentality, perhaps even a superior mentality, but been done in by a Eureka moment.  A Eurekan moment can occur in almost any intelligent, creative person’s life.  What happens is he meets an apparent problem without the background knowledge properly to deal with it, then finds a brilliant solution—which is incomplete but which excites him too much for him to notice that.

His cerebral energy is not naturally too high, but can be driven high by the pleasure of suddenly finding an apparent solution to a difficult problem.  In the case of the eurekan, his burst of energy will allow him to build a fairly strong knowleplex, or understanding of the problem he believes he has solved.  Moreover, if society considers the subject his solution deals with, and Shakespeare is one of the largest cultural subjects there is for most people in the West with any culture at all, he will be filled with energizing anticipation of fame and fortune.

From then on, he will work on it, each time with the energy of a rigidnik because of the pleasure his brilliant solution is giving him.  As a result, he will make the knowleplex he began with into an artificial rigidniplex every bit as immune to reason as a natural rigidniplex.
.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1696 — Some New Coinages

Sunday, January 18th, 2015

I’m hoping to do Important Work elsewhere today, so this entry will be short (unless I get inspired).  Currently one of the essays I’m working on concerns the kinds of people who become Shakespeare cranks–i.e., people who are pretty much permanently certain that someone other than the rube from Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works of Shakespeare.  So far there are three major kinds of Shakespeare cranks on my list: the rigidnikal, milyoopian and eurekan cranks. According to my wholly uncertified “knowlecular” theory of psychology, each of these cranks is the victim of a closely related but not quite identical group of inter-connected brain-cells in his cerebrum called a fallaciplex (fuh LAY shih plehks).

A fallaciplex is one of the brain’s two kinds of “knowleplexes,” or sets of brain-cell’s involved with a person’s understanding of some fairly large portion of reality (astronomy, say, rather than the moon as simply a bright object in the sky).  If the understanding of a given knowleplex is obviously wrong (i.e., demonstrated to be invalid by rigorous logic applied to nothing by the known relevant facts of the subject of the knowleplex under analysis–in the view of an overwhelming majority of people with knowledge of the subject involved), it is a fallaciplex.  The opposite of this is the validiplex.  This, as should be obvious, is a knowleplex that logic and all the facts have shown–for an overwhelming majority of those with relevant knowledge–to be valid beyond reasonable doubt.  All other knowleplexes can be considered validiplexes-in-progress until are shown to be maxilutely (i.e. as close to absolute certainty as any understanding can come) valid or invalid.

The crank’s fallaciplex is activated whenever he encounters the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ (more than briefly).  It then fills his mind with a delusional system concerning the SAQ that he is almost completely unable to free himself from–although he’s unlikely to want to.

The fallaciplex a rigidnikal crank is victimized by is a rigidniplex.  Almost all of a rigidnik’s knowlexplexes in his magniscipience (where his involvement with questions outside the everyday like the SAQ) rigidniplexes due to his innately excessively high basal cerebral energy (while in or mostly in his magniscipience and defective accommodance (i.e., ability to lower the level of his cerebral energy, which is the basis of creativity, among other things).  Nonetheless, some of his rigidniplexes are valid: Newton’s understanding of physics may have been rigidnikal, for instance.  (I have this suspicion that all the best theoretical mathematicians and physicists are rigidniks.)  The SAQ one is not, as I will later demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt.

Soundbite definition of a rigidniplex: a mental structure that results in an understanding of some relatively large subject (that is much more often invalid than valid) that one possessing it can’t change his mind about.

The fallaciplex a milyoopan crank is victimized by is  the opposite of a rigidniplex, for milyoops, as I classify those who tend to form milyooplexes, suffer from a too low level of cerebral energy.  This causes them to form knowleplexes they are too weak of mind to defend.

To be continued tomorrow, I hope.  Right now, I suddenly need a nap–or a shot of cocaine, and I don’t know where to get any.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1686 — Some Thoughts on ?enius

Friday, January 9th, 2015

None of my three or four faithful readers will be surprised that I have a rather large need to believe I am a genius–a genuine one, not an IQ or MacArthur genius.  The only thing perhaps unusual, for a serious, meta-professional artist or verosopher like me, is that I admit my need.  By “meta-professional artist or verosopher,” I mean someone whose main reason for his activities as either is to produce something of significant cultural value.  Unlike Samuel Johnson, at least if we go by his famous saying about only fools writing for anything but money.  Sam is one of my cultural heroes however much I disagree with him about possibly more things than I agree with him about.  Of course, one reason for that is that money is much less meaningful in our incredibly affluent country than it was in his.  True poverty was hard for a great many people to avoid in his, near-impossible to suffer in ours.

I think false modesty is so battered into people like me that, for most of us, it is no longer false.  There is also the (innate) need to fit in in spite of being different.  Like many ?eniuses, I do downplay my aptitudes (like the one that made schoolwork mostly easy for me).  I also somewhat exaggerate my many ineptitudes such as the way it grab hold of conclusions prematurely, or my slowness to understand (which, most of the time, I contend, is a virtue due to realizing how much more there is to be understood than most others).  What helps me most is that I’m actually pretty normal in most respects, and that’s genuine.  I tend to think of myself as a television that has one channel no other television has that picks up telecasts from some weird planet in another galaxy . .  but only once or twice a year.  (Other ?eniuses are the same kind of television, each of which picks up telecasts from a different weird planet.)

I’ve now used my newest coinage, “?enius,” enough to indicate it’s not a typo.  That’s because, as is the case, I suspect, with many blessed/cursed with the kind of brain I have, I have enough self-confidence to be sure I’m either a genius or not far off from being one, but not to declare myself one.  In fact, I truly don’t know whether I am one or not.  What I am, therefore, is a ?enius.

I would not be surprised if even the most ratified culturateur–Murray Gell-Mann, for instance–

Hey, I just did a quick search of the Internet for Murray to check for about the twentieth time whether or not he spelled his last name with a hyphen and found an entry at this Roman Catholic Blog that is one of the best blog entries I’ve ever come across–in spite of its having been written by someone who considers those not accepting the existence of God as a given to be intellectually vacuous, and their arguments on par with those of holocaust-deniers (which, he implies, are wholly worthless although some I’ve found to be pretty good, just not good enough to unconvince me that it is beyond reasonable doubt that a great many Jews were deliberately killed by the Nazis[1]).

Back to what I was saying: I would not be surprised if even Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann sometimes fears he’s not very smart, after all.  Maybe not.  More likely he is like Newton feeling like a small boy at the beach finding interesting pebbles or shells . . . but still aware at some level that only he was noticing them.

The situation is different for ?eniuses like me who, even in old age, are near-completely unrecognized.  One would have to be close to insane to be sure the whole world, just about, was wrong about you.  Nonetheless, I keep thinking and writing about genius and related topics, my own underlying aim always being, to some degree or other, to find a way to get around the evidence against me.

Not today, unless in just having revealed my invention (so far as I know) of the world’s first English word for day-to-day use that includes a typographical mark as one of its letters (Cummings and others have made words like it, but not for use outside the poems they are in) is my subtle argument for my being a genius.  I guess I am never not trying to prove  I’m a genius whenever I create a serious work of art or write a serious text.  In this entry I’m mainly considering what someone you might reasonably characterize as “brilliant” of “gifted,” but not accept as a genius.

My latest thought is minor but taxonomically valuable: it is that a genuine genius has two characteristics: the temperament of a genius and the mentality of a genius.  This thought occurred to me when (as so often) thinking about myself–in particular about what I could claim for myself as one striving to achieve genius.  I feel certain that I do have the temperament of a genius; what is unknown is if I also have the mentality of a genius.

All I can say about the latter is it’s very much higher than even a superior human mentality, and that it’s far more than ability to score high on IQ tests or get high grades in school.  I lean toward believing it is probably high-superiority in only one kind of art or verosophy, maybe two, not some kind of all-around superiority.  In any case, I don’t feel capable of pinning it down objectively.

I do feel the temperament of a genius can be objectively defined.  I contend it consists of some high proportion of the following characteristics, each overt and easy to identify:

1. Gross tendency to emotional ups and downs, sometimes psychotically extreme as with Theodore Roethke.  (Note: most of the characteristics on this list have been pointed out by many others, and I doubt it any is original.  While in this parenthesis, let me add that this is my first list so with surely be incomplete, perhaps severely so.)

2. A need for Great Achievements–like Keats’s declared hope of being among the English poets when he died.

3. A disregard for the opinions of others–i.e., non-conformity.

4. Reasonably high output as an artist and/or verosopher–due to determination and persistance.  (Needless to say, I’m assuming in advance that I have the temperament of a genius, so basically listing my own characteristics–but I’ll leave out bald-headedness.  And unbelievable potent wittiness.)

5. Extreme self-reliance–a variation on #3 because it importantly includes going one’s own way regardless of what others say.

Yikes, I see I don’t need to make a list–the National Enquirer beat me to it by some 35 years:

    1. DRIVE. Geniuses have a strong desire to work hard and long. They’re willing to give all they’ve got to a project. Develop your drive by focusing on your future success, and keep going.  Sure: my #4 is the necessary result and provides objective evidence of this.
    2. COURAGE. It takes courage to do things others consider impossible. Stop worrying about what people will think if you’re different.  See my #5.
    3. DEVOTION TO GOALS. Geniuses know what they want and go after it. Get control of your life and schedule. Have something specific to accomplish each day.  Only sometimes true.  My #4 again will be the result for someone with the temperament of genius.
    4. KNOWLEDGE. Geniuses continually accumulate information. Never go to sleep at night without having learned at least one new thing each day. Read. And question people who know.  Everybody continually accumulates knowledge.  A ?enius becomes a genius in part by applying what he accumulates better than others due to his genius mentality.
    5. HONESTY. Geniuses are frank, forthright and honest. Take the responsibility for things that go wrong. Be willing to admit, ‘I goofed’, and learn from your mistakes.  That’s me, but I have no idea whether other ?eniuses tend to be frank, etc.
    6. OPTIMISM. Geniuses never doubt they will succeed. Deliberately focus your mind on something good coming up.  Again, see my #4.
    7. ABILITY TO JUDGE. Try to understand the facts of a situation before you judge. Evaluate things on an opened minded, unprejudiced basis and be willing to change your mind.  My mentality of genius would include this; it’s just the truism, be intelligent.
    8. ENTHUSIASM. Geniuses are so excited about what they are doing, it encourages others to cooperate with them. Really believe that things will turn out well. Don’t hold back.  Maybe, but I tend to see being a loner in your field as more likely a characteristic of a genius temperament.
    9. WILLINGNESS TO TAKE CHANCES. Overcome your fear of failure. You won’t be afraid to take chances once you realize you can learn from your mistakes.  #4.
    10. DYNAMIC ENERGY. Don’t sit on your butt waiting for something good to happen. Be determined to make it happen.  #4.
    11. ENTERPRISE. Geniuses are opportunity seekers. Be willing to take on jobs others won’t touch. Never be afraid to try the unknown.  #4 and #5.
    12. PERSUASION. Geniuses know how to motivate people to help them get ahead. You’ll find it easy to be persuasive if you believe in what you’re doing.  I suspect ?eniuses are too advanced to be persuasive, and not involved in collective enterprises.
    13. OUTGOINGNESS. I’ve found geniuses able to make friends easily and be easy on their friends. Be a ‘booster’ not somebody who puts others down. That attitude will win you many valuable friends.  No.  Although this fits me more than it doesn’t.  Many ?eniuses are ingoing.  All ?eniuses must be ingoing at times, extremely ingoing, I would say. 
    14. ABILITY TO COMMUNICATE. Geniuses are able to effectively get their ideas across to others. Take every opportunity to explain your ideas to others.  This would be one of the characteristics of a genius mentality, I would guess.  I tend to think it must be the hardest thing for a ?enius to achieve.  A subject worth an essay.  The geniuses most easily getting appropriate recognition before they are dead are those specializing in something where colleagues are in some sense clustered and on the same page–physicists, for example.  Their VOCATION needs to have been recognized as significantly a superior one, as physics is, poetry not. 
    15. PATIENCE. Be patient with others most of the time, but always be impatient with your self. Expect far more of yourself than others. #2
    16. PERCEPTION. Geniuses have their mental radar working full time. Think more of others’ needs and wants than you do of your own.  BS.
    17. PERFECTIONISM. Geniuses cannot tolerate mediocrity, particularly in themselves. Never be easily satisfied with your self. Always strive to do better.  I think I would put having high standards for oneself on my list although that would follow from #2, having a need to be great.
    18. SENSE OF HUMOR. Be willing to laugh at your own expense. Don’t take offense when the joke is on you.  I feel I pretty decidedly have this, but don’t see what it has to do with genius.
    19. VERSATILITY. The more things you learn to accomplish, the more confidence you will develop. Don’t shy away from new endeavors.  I’ll have to think about this.  My initial thought is how one should balance improved understanding of one thing versus having many understandings.  But having a genius mentality will automatically cause you to absorb a great many things not obviously related and use many of them (as well as know which ones to scrap).
    20. ADAPTABILITY. Being flexible enables you to adapt to changing circumstances readily. Resist doing things the same old way. Be willing to consider new options.  Have superior accommodance, the most important characteristic of a genius mentality.
    21. CURIOSITY. An inquisitive, curious mind will help you seek out new information. Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know it all. Always ask questions about things you don’t understand.  I’m sure extreme curiosity, inability to be satisfied with one-step answers, or even ten-step answers, is an important part of the genius mentality.
    22. INDIVIDUALISM. Do things the way you think they should be done, without fearing somebody’s disapproval.  This is on my list.
    23. IDEALISM. Keep your feet on the ground – but have your head in the clouds. Strive to achieve great things, not just for yourself, but for the better of mankind.  Do great things, by your definition.
    24. IMAGINATION. Geniuses know how to think in new combinations, see things from a different perspective, than anyone else. Unclutter your mental environment to develop this type of imagination. Give yourself time each day to daydream, to fantasize, to drift into a dreamy inner life the way you did as a child.  Again, be born with a superior accommodance.

L. Ron Hubbard thought this worthy of re-circulation.  It’s not bad for The National Enquirer, but basically a guide for socio-economic go-getters, not my kind of geniuses.

The list is here, by the way. It’s followed by a lot of interesting comments.

I now need a break from this topic. I hope tomorrow to be able to have an updated list here.

  * * *
[1] No matter how often I notice the need of those advocating some point of view to denounce all opposing views as wholly invalid (or is it a–possibly innate–defect that makes it difficult for them to avoid binary thinking?), it almost always makes me shake me head.  I can’t claim I’m never guilty of it, but . . .

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1683 — Certain Kinds of Facts

Monday, January 5th, 2015

A brand-new dogma of mine: certain kinds of ideas are perceived by our senses as facts.  An obvious one, and one I discussed long ago when beginning to work out my theory of urceptual data, is the circle.  I say that just as we have a sensor the is activated by the color red in a specific area of our visual grid, and eventually results in the activation of a brain-cell which the person involved experiences as a dot of red, we have a group of sensors that are activated by circles like the circumference of a full moon and eventually result in the activation of a brain-cell that we experience as a circle–although without experiencing it long enough or with sufficiently focused attention for us to be more than micraware of it.  Rather than . . . ephemraware of it, or mildly, dully aware of it; or macraware of it.

Certified psychologists have found evidence for what I say about the circle, by the way.

One such ideational fact is dichotomy: a person’s innate recognition of opposites.  Including something versus nothing (which would, and I say does, require senses activated by nothingness.

* * *

Nothing more today,  I had a bad day: I learned I’ll be out $1200 for the repair  of a crown that came off one of my teeth last night.  I had a lot of errands, too.  Nonetheless, I was able to churn out the bs above.
.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1676 — Mars Rules My Moon

Monday, December 29th, 2014

The planet Mars is interfering with my normal reticence, pushing me to throw away the last shred of my pretense of being a Nice Person by finally revealing that I believe men and women are significantly different from one another.  The transiting moon is contributing to the problem because it has entered the house where my natal moon, and that house is ruled by Aries, the sign of Mars!  Meanwhile, Uranus is currently in Aries, too, and (energizingly) trine to my natal sun.  Uranus is my ruling planet, and basically in charge of craziness, which is what it’s mainly energizing in the present case.  So add it to the mix.  As for Mars, it is conjunct to (with?) my natal sun, which is why it’s having such a great effect on me.  Nothing, I fear can now save me.  I must now continue with my follow-up to what I mentioned toward the end of my letter to William Voegeli.

What I believe was standard educated thought for at least a century before I was born and possibly until 1960.  Somewhere along the way the feminist movement ordained that it was invalid, and that was it.  I’m sure many males, and perhaps a few females, still believed it, but we kept our mouths shut.  Let me be as honest as I can (an Aquarian defect): as an unfortunately close-to-100% male (tall, thin, bald-headed, heterosexual and much else I won’t get into): I not only consider men to be vastly superior to women but consider that a healthy point-of-view (and expect healthy women to believe women to be vastly superior to men).  But I’m intelligent enough to see that men and women have to put up with each other.  Needless to say, my innate sex drive makes that unavoidable for me personally, although not nearly as much now as it did earlier.

I believe men and women are innately psychologically different from one another in a way that increases both their need for each other and the friction between them.  Men give life meaning; women make it livable.  To lunge beyond the minor infamies of popular men-as-Martians, women-as-Venusians books.  Back to what I said about a focus on aspiration and a focus on compassion.

Also: men are oaks in winter, needing the foliage that women are more or less as much as women need the structuring mean can provide them.

Men lead, women follow. Margaret Thatcher was a rare exception, an effective leader, there being about as many effective female leaders as there are superior male leaders, but only a hundredth as many effective female leaders as effective male leaders.  Another effective female leader was anthropologist Margaret Mead.  I don’t think much of her standard anthropological views (what makes effective leaders is their ability to think standardly better than most others, and avoid thinking unstandardly, and sometimes standard views make sense), but I think her right when she concluded that while male and female roles varied from one society to another, males always took the roles that society considered its most important ones (as I’m pretty sure it was her, but I’ve never called myself an effective scholar [believe my ideas, not my data]).  I therefore more than half-think political positions are rapidly losing status in our society now that women are taking them over, and that college degrees have almost most entirely lost status with superior males now that females are proving much better at getting them than all but a few males.

As you may have noticed, I’m into my note-scattering mode now, writing thoughts as they occur without trying (much) for any kind of logical presentation.  I’ll try to make connections between notes when I can, though.  Like the connection of what I’m about to get into back to my honesty about myself.  I said I healthily consider my sex superior to . . . my sister’s.  I bring her into this because something she said to me as a little girl (around ten when I was eleven and the two of us were on the wonderful roof of our wonderful childhood house where no one could see us because of the M-shape of the roof we’d climbed down into where its two sides came to a point).  I don’t remember how we got into it but we were arguing about who was better, boys or girls.  I was winning because my sister couldn’t deny that men were physically superior to women, and in our family even my mother (who graduated from high school at the age of 15) agreed men were smarter than women (although, oddly, I thought my mother much smarter than my father until puberty when I realized that he, though slower by quite a bit than she, was deeper).

I had no reply to what she next said: “Only girls can have babies.”  Later I learned of something called “division of labor,” than feminists seem not to believe in.  But it caused me as the asexual objective being that I am to about an equal degree that I am a male to come to understand that sexes as equal but different–however much the male in me scoffs at the idea.

That reproduction is maximally complex in human beings is central to the division of labor between the sexes.  Women have a womb, and it is not some minor organ they have and men don’t.  For one thing, it must require energy for maintenance that must reduce a female’s energy for other things like boxing and writing symphonies.  It more substantially affects the amount of energy a pregnant female has for various activities.

Meanwhile, the male has no womb holding him back.  One major, rarely-mentioned side-effect of his womblessness, however, is how biologically-expendable it makes him, something I immediately recognized when at the age of 32 I learned about copulation.  (Slight exaggeration in hopes that the wittiness of it will keep any female or girly-boy friend of mine who is reading this from being too mad at me.)  Males are close to biologically irrelevant when it comes to reproduction, because one male can keep a village of a hundred nubile females and no males but him doubling in population yearly, and in eleven or twelve years, more than doubling whereas one nubile female in a village of a hundred healthy young men and no females but him will need help from daughters to ever double the population of her village.

This being the case, why wouldn’t Mother Nature make males courageous, sometimes excessively so, and females timid?  Why shouldn’t they hunt and fight other tribes while females gathered vegetables and fruit, and fled from another tribe’s warriors?  In short, why shouldn’t reproductively barely-relevant males be risk-takers–intellectually, eventually, as much as physically–like me, now, I try to convince myself, never having been much of a physical risk-taker, although I believe I would have been had I needed to because of a confrontation between a scared me and a German Shepherd who bit me (actually, just nipped me in the heel), which turned me instantly into a beserker whose scream of rage as I whirled around to face the dog made the it run away.

Of course, women can take on maleness when necessary, Mother Nature realizing there will be times when males are too scarce to fill all the male roles needing filling; but they won’t be as good males as natural males, nor able to keep it up for very long (generally).  Men can make adequate mommies, too, but not usually for a long time.

Women are much better verbally than men . . . practiceptually, which is all that the the verbal portion of IQ tests test (incompletely).  Orally, particularly, due to the female vocal cords–and superior flexibility of mind (which is also a female defect that makes them more suggestible than men–in the long term).

Culturally, women’s main value is their female point-of-view; that is, they can add much to any art or verosophy that no male can, even a maximally feminine one–just as males can supply much that no female can.

After skimming what I’ve so far written, I see that I’ve left out how Mother Nature has used common sense to make those who bear children have a much stronger mothering-instinct than those who may not be present at a child’s birth.  Indeed, it seems obvious to me that women are the timid sex not only to protect themselves, but to protect the children they bear.  And a good reason they are more empathetic than men is to be able to forge closer bonds than men to their children and be able to react faster to their needs, which they feel within to a greater degree than man.

At the same time, this gives men a freedom from domestic responsibilities, to be emotionally as well as physically better able to put aside their families (especially when young and thus more male than they will be) that allows them to go on quests.

I just remembered one other big difference between men and women.  I discovered its importance thirty or forty years ago but this will be the first time in print I’ve mentioned it.  I can’t believe geneticists are not aware of it, but can’t recall ever reading a discussion of it.  It’s the fact that the y-chromosome, which only men have, is so much smaller than the x-chromosome it joins to form the genotype of the potential human being.[1]  Unless I’m mistaken, the difference in size between the two means that many genes in the x-chromosome have no gene from the y-chromosome to fuse with; therefore variation is substantially increased: there’s no gene from the y-chromosome to neutralize or modify a freak gene from the x-chromosome as there would be in a fertilized ovum destined to become a female.

One of my speculations, by the way, is that our species and probably others have a mutation mechanism that intentionally causes genetic mutations, and that its target is the an individual’s sex chromosome–perhaps, in fact, an ovum’s sex chromosome.  Hence, such a mechanism would increase the possibility of genetic variation.

Be that as it may, this greater male genetic variation would explain why more IQ geniuses as well as more of those of severely reduced mental-capacity are male than female, an empirical fact, I believe.  It seems also a fact that males are much more susceptible to genetic defects and to a lesser degree since they are rarer, genetic blessings.

All this would go along with my theory of the biological expendability of males: mother Nature doesn’t mind if a bunch of males are born severely defective, so she can risk them to test new genes on.  I further speculate that she keeps a woman’s mutation mechanism dormant until a woman is in her thirties, thus seeing to it that a woman’s first children are “normal” and only taking a chance of failed experiments on late-born children, children, in other words probably “extra.”  I particularly like the idea as one such late-born who in his own view must have all kinds of genetic mutations in his XY chromosome.  But my impression is that a fair number of superior culturateurs had older mothers.  And it is a fact that the late-born are more likely to be defective than those to young mothers.

* * *

[1] Sorry, right-to-lifers, but fetuses are not human beings for me, although I’d prefer they live as much as I prefer tadpoles to live (which I do) though much less than I want living cats to stay alive.

* * *

My intention today was to get all my evil thoughts about the differences between men and women down, to get them out of the way.  But there are quite a few more, and details to be recorded, and I’m tiring.  To bring this entry past the 2,000-word mark, though,  I’ll mention where differences between the sexes get most interesting.   Those of temperament are the most obvious: men lean toward being rigidniks, women milyoops (though most are a healthy balance between them.

Otherwise, the main ones are in . . . I can’t remember my name for it: the “cerebrawareness?”  All the awarenesses in the cerebrum taken together I mean.  That would be a good term for it.  Anyway, I contend that the cerebrawarelity of females is substantially different from the males.  Females have a more developed anthroceptual awareness than men, for instance.  I’ll get back to this sometime, but I think it less important than other things I want to discuss (although right now I can’t think what they might be).

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1674 — The Sun & My First House

Saturday, December 27th, 2014

For the past two days or so I have been feeling like I am on the verge of really getting started on a Major Work beginning with an in-depth survey of my theory of awarenesses.  I couldn’t figure out why until I thought of the transitting sun.  That’s what the sun is called when one is considering its location in one horoscope: right now the Sun is at 6 degrees Capricorn in the sky, which puts it just in my horoscope’s first house, which begins at around 3 degrees Capricorn.  This house, as you might guess, has to do with beginnings!

It’s all rot, but fun.  And I have to admit, when my life is suddenly doing something good that my horoscope says it should be doing, it encourages me, however many more times I’ve compared what my horoscope said my life should be doing with what my life was doing and found no similarity at all between the two.  I think it’s because nothing in my life is ever encouraging.  Okay, exaggeration.  What’s more true is that the few things in my life that have been encouraging resulted in nothing but disappointment: get the gig at the Scientific American website, for instance.  To be maximally accurate, I should say that the stars are no worse at predicting good things for me than real life is, and not as depressing when their predictions are full of hooey, because I don’t really believe in them.

On the other hand, anything encouraging is good for me, if I can even half believe in it for a few minutes because I think people like me may have an urceptual optimist in us that is sensitive to any sign of encouragement, and able to minimize all that our internal pessimist tries to warn us about.

Note: you have just had a front eye on the birth of the urceptual optimist and urceptual pessimist: neither existed until I began writing the paragraph above.  They make sense to me, particularly the urceptual optimist.  How else explain the insanity that keeps people like me going no matter how unarguably quickly the unreachability of our goals is increasing?

Hey, I also have three new terms for you: “magni-cerebrevalu-ceptual,”  “practi-cerebrevaluceptual,” and “reflexevaluaceptual.” I’ll save my discussion of these till tomorrow.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1668 — Additions & Blither

Sunday, December 21st, 2014

First an addition to my taxonomy of awarenesses: I’ve decided to give what I was temporarily calling the “X-ceptual Awareness” one of the names I previously considered, then junked, “the Magniceptual Awareness.”  My problem with it was that it was too similar to “the Supraceptual Awareness,” the name I had given to my system’s over-all awareness.  I made that problem go away by simply changing “Supraceptual Awareness” to “Cerebral Awareness.”  Pretty clever, wot?  It makes sense since both the Practiceptual Awareness and the Magniceptual Awareness are in, or mostly in, the cerebrum.  And I’m comfortable with the idea of a Sub-Cerebral Awareness located in the cerebellum and other parts of the brain, as well as various places in the secondary nervous system.

Next, a Noun cement that I hope will will cause those of you feeling guilty about getting all this blog’s incredible brilliance for free to express your gratitude with money–to someone on food stamps (due to his actual economic situation, not lies about it, although I did not report the $200 I made as a writer last year in my 2013 request to continue on the dole, nor will I report the $350! I made as a writer this year on my upcoming request).  You can do this by sending me $5 or more for an autographed numbered copy of a limited edition of 4 More Poem Poems.  It just came off the press.  Only 8 copies printed, each with a different cover from the others–in fact, I have just decided to paste a unique original visual image on each cover.  (Note: I really think $20 would be reasonable for anyone who is paying that or more for a subscription to any poetry-related magazine whatever.)  I claim that no one who likes Joycean foolery with the language and surrealism will find at least one of the poems delightful.  And there iz not one (1) but two (2) dreadfully wicked attacks in the collection on our country’s poetry gate-keepers–but only in passing!  Remember, Posterity will really be angry with you for not sending me any money!

To take advantage of this Fabulous Offer, send check & your name&address to:

Bob Grumman
1708 Hayworth Road
Port Charlotte FL 33952

Sorry for the begging, folks.  I’m really not badly off: I still have credit cards that will allow me to borrow over ten thousand dollar before I max them.  I just used on of the cards for $1500, in fact–to have some company try to get the data in an external drive of mine that went bad about a year ago, and has the only copies of a few of my poems, and a lot of my only copies of others’ poems including four or five of Guy Beining’s the originals of which are lost.  But I thought it’d be fun to play marketeer for a little while.  And at least I didn’t bold-face the above.

* * *

Okay, now to what seems to me an interesting question I just wondered into (note: it’s near impossible now for me not to qualify every opinion of mine in some way like this) while discussing Karl Kempton’s current central project, an exhaustively researched history of visual poetry from pre-history on: what poem should be considered the world’s first major full-scale visual poem?  Very subjective, I fear, because of the difficulty in defining both a full-scale poem (for me, to put it simply, it would be a poem that’d be mediocre or worse if not for what it does visually) and a major poem.

I have no idea what poem is but don’t think any of Mallarme’s was because not depending on the visual for anything truly central to them.  Nor Apollinaire’s, which seem primitive to me, although I’d have to look at them again to be sure.  Such a poem would have to have a highly significant and original visual metaphor at its core to get the prize, in my opinion.  Nothing before the twentieth century that I know about does.  I think I’d aware the prize to something by Cummings (although I’m not sure what, and he may not have composed what I’d call a full-scale visual poem); if not Cummings, then Grominger’s “silence,” but not with confidence because I don’t know what other superior visual poems came before it.

Here’s a related question I didn’t send Karl: what poet could be said to have been the world’s first serious, dedicated, lyrovisual poets, by which I mean poet who concentrated a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poetry–as opposed to Lewis Carroll who (1) was not a lyrical visual poet and (2) wrote light visual poems (which were nonetheless an important contribution to poetry, or Mallarme or Herbert, neither of whom composed more than a few poems that could be called visual–or, from my standpoint, made primary visual poems, or poems whose visual content was at least as important aesthetically as its verbal content.

I’m not even sure Cummings would qualify for consideration since he did not compose all that many poems I’d call primary visual poems.  I’d have to go through my volume of his complete poetry to be sure of this, though.  So, we have a preliminary question: what poets devoted a fairly substantial portion of his thoughts and energy to lyrovisual poems.  My impression is that Kenneth Patchen was one of them.  I think Apollinaire probably was, too.  Most of the concrete poets seem to have been. I know I’ll annoy a number of you with my next pronouncement: it is that fewer and fewer people calling themselves visual poets devote much, or any, time to the composition of visual poems, preferring to make textual designs (and mostly doing extremely well at it).

Now another addition, this to my thoughts about urceptual personae:

It occurred to me that I made no attempt in yesterday’s entry to indicate the biological advantage of having . . . ursonae, so I’ll try to do that now.  I’ll need to go into some detail about the way an urceptual persona is created.  For an example, I’ll use the urnemy (no, I’m just foolin’ around: I won’t make that my new name for “the urceptual enemy”).  When a baby first sees its father, it will automatically be thrust into its socioceptual awareness[1] where its urceptual persona recognition mechanism is.  This mechanism will activate the baby’s urceptual other—due to such stimuli as the father’s face and arms.  The father will be unfamiliar to it (probably, although he may have experienced enough of him while in the womb for him to be familiar; or perhaps any face will be familiar enough not to cause the baby pain, or even to cause it pleasure; assume here, though, that the father is unfamiliar to the baby, maybe because he has a beard and is first encountered while he is sneezing or farting).  Since the unfamiliar causes pain according to my theory, and pain caused by another person has to be one of the stimuli causing the activation of a person’s urceptual enemy, the baby’s urceptual enemy will become active.

The baby will withdraw as much as possible from its enemy, the father, because urceptual personae automatically activate appropriate certain reflexive behavior.  This is value #1 of an urceptual persona.

At this point, I am going to drop the urceptual enemy for not being as good a choice as an example as I first thought.  I’ll go instead to the urceptual father.  In the scenario I began, the father will almost certainly not continue to activate the baby’s urceptual enemy for long, if he even does so when the baby first encounters him.  The baby’s mother will probably be with the father and say something like, “Here’s your daddy, Flugwick (or whatever the kid’s name is),” in a momvoice, accompanied by a mom smile, and many another mo0mfeature, so neutralize the father’s unfamiliarity.  And the father will smile and say something in a gentle voice and perhaps, tickle the kid under the chin—certainly something likely to seem pleasant to the kid.  In short, little Flugwick’s urceptual persona recognition mechanism will soon activate its urceptual father (I now think a baby will recognize the first male it encounters as its father—but be able to correct the error before long—rather than as a friend; if my hypothesis turns out valid, it will be easy to determine exactly what happens.

Be that as it may, eventually the baby will (in normal circumstance) automatically perceive its father as both a certain shape with a certain voice and smell—and as its urceptual father.  The activation of the latter will help it more quickly react to the father appropriately.  It will learn from its social environment—mainly its family—the details of appropriate reactions not instinctive like its smile will be until it learns enough to control it.

That an urceptual persona will double the ability of the real person it is attached to cause reactions is it second extremely important biological value.  For one thing, this will make people more important than almost anything else to a person, which would obviously help a species survive.

What might be as important to a person as people?  Here’s where my superspeculative nature takes over from my speculative nature.  The goals a person shoots for may become as important to a person as others, or even himself  Beauty, for an artist.  As I’ve already tried to demonstrate, an artist will almost surely be motivated to some small or large degree to create an object of beauty to gain others’ approval.  But simply to create something of beauty for its own sake can very well be his main motive, or even his only motive.  I’m back to the magniceptual awareness where one might go to concentrate on beauty free of interpersonal concerns.  Where I increase my speculativeness is in thinking puberty may open a person’s magniceptual awareness—give him doors into it, or significantly increase his doors into it.  I strongly suspect a male’s magniceptual awareness is significantly large than a female’s.  Just as a female’s anthroceptual awareness is much larger than a male’s. Of course, feminists will take this to be an insult to women, but I don’t see it as that.  Well, as a male, I have to think of what I am as superior to females, but nonetheless trying to be objective about it, there’s no reason to say that interpersonal matters require less talent than impersonal matters.

The joke is that all this will be moot when asexual computers take over the world, reproducing like protocytes—with ecstasy.  But who knows, they may be us.
.
* * *
.
[1] According to Me, among everyone’s ten major awarenesses[2] (so far) is an anthroceptual awareness, which consists of two sub-awarenesses, the egoceptual awareness which is where a person experiences himself as an individual, and the socioceptual awareness, where he experiences himself as a member of his society.  Each of these is one of the “intelligences,” in Howard Gardner’s writings on the subject.

[2] A major awareness is an awareness just under one of the primary awarenesses on my taxonomical chart of the awarenesses.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1665 — Additions to Yesterday’s Entry

Thursday, December 18th, 2014

Note: in yesterday’s entry, I opposed entities that are “real,” because capable of being sensorily perceived, to “imaginary” ones that cannot be perceived.  I should have used “communicatively perceived” in place of just “perceived,” or whatever term I used for that.  That’s because some believers in Eastern x-ceptualities, believe themselves actually perceiving gods and the like whom others cannot.  I say that if I see a tree, and say the tree is real and get almost any sane person to look at it and agree with me that it is, I have identified a communicably perceivable entity whereas if an Eastern mystic says he went somewhere in his mind, or some like place, and talked with his god, his god is only perceptible to him, if he cannot take me where I can also meet him; the god is not communicably perceivable.

This goes back to the two realities idea of mine.  I’m not sure what nutto names I gave them, but they are the personal reality and the collective reality, and–for me–the only one the means anything is the collective reality: reality is what I and others agree it is.  I think my personal reality is almost the collective’s.  The important differences are no questions not yet genuinely decided by the collective: for instance, the value of my cultural contributions.  I suspect there will never be a fair way to determine that but the collective’s current answer would have to be”who knows.”

As I think more on it, it seems to me there might be two collective realities: the one with a city called New York separated by an ocean called the Atlantic from a city called London, and we go into our x-ceptual awareness to consider.  There most questions are a good deal less than 95% decided by the collective, and I think it fair not to consider something to be part of the collective reality (“objective reality” is or should be my name for this unless 95% of the clearly sane say it is.  It is insane, though, to reject something proposed as real because it hasn’t gotten enough votes; one must accept it as not sufficiently demonstrated only.

Maybe I’m saying objective reality is what we deal with in a practiceptual awareness, while insufficiently-demonstrated reality makes up most of what we deal with in our higher awareness.  From another slant, objective reality consists of entities; non-practiceptual possible reality consists of the inter-relationships of entities.

I’ve thought more about what to call x-ceptuality.  “Sapienceptuality” may be my best attempt, but it’s not right.  “Aristoceptuality” gets it almost exactly, but only if we put aside the fact that most aristocrats are not very bright.  And Aristotle, my favorite philosopher, had little to do with the arts.  Another miss: “Magnaceptual,” out because too similar to “Supraceptual,” which I want to keep for my ruling awareness.

I thought of following Siggy in using the names of gods which would have given me “Apolloceptual.”  But what god’s name could I use for “practiceptual,” assuming I could give up that name, which seems near ideal for what I want it to mean.  Also, Apollo seems to me to represent only part of where goes on in the “second” awareness.

“Significeptual?”  I like it but fear it’s too much of a slur on the practical.   I thought of “culturaceptual” because the practiceptual awareness has to do with survival and comfort, the other awareness with what I think of as culture.  But “culture” is a contaminated word.

“Abracaceptual?”  A good one, but no.

Fie on it.  I’m quitting for now.
.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1649 — More Blither about Words

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014

Another of my too tired to do anything days.  I suppose I should begin calling them my “Elderly Codger Days.”  So the main item for you today is an excerpt from an email I wrote to Sabrina Feldman protesting the way she and other adherents to the proposition that Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him too frequently refer to questions concerning his life and related matters call them “mysteries” rather than questions not yet satisfactorily answered:

For me, a mystery is a question for which there seems no even semi-plausible possible answer not employing in the equivalent of a deus ex machina whereas a problem is a question for which there is at least one plausible possible answer employing no deus ex machina, and there are many plausible possible answers to the Two-Shrew Problem including yours.  Sorry, but I have this need to force The World to accept My Definition of certain words (like “poetry,” when some of my friends claim a poem need not have any words, or “marriage,” when so many are able to take it to mean a union of mirror-images rather than of opposites ) and “mystery” became one of them after my encounter of so many authorship-skeptics telling us that things like what my Willie was doing for three or four of his younger years is a mystery instead of just unknown (without the slightest reason for that to seem strange to any sane person knowing anything of the times).

But, wait!!! That’s not all I have for you!  From my unstifleable  coinage factory I have received three new coinages: cerebritecture,  triflitecture  and reptilitecture, for high-brow, middle-brow and low-brow culture, respectively (and only roughly, because actual high-brow culture is crap whereas I want cerebritecture to mean the culture of genuinely high cultural taste).  I expect to say more about these when not held back by my codgerality.

.

AmazingCounters.com

Entry 1639 — Choice of Ethotactic, Part 4

Saturday, November 22nd, 2014

What I’ve said so far suggests a question to me: can something a person does with no ethical intentions be ethotactical?  For instance, say I am with a friend I know to be much more poor than I and we  come upon an apple tree in a public forest with one apple on it, and I pick it and eat it, not thinking of my friend.  Or, for a more colorful example, say I have been taught that Irishmen are subhuman creatures without the ability to feel pain, and that hunting them will be good practice in the use of firearms that one may one day need to fight off aliens from outer space.  So I shoot a few Irishmen between the eyes, inflicting pain on them without realizing it, and even perhaps killing one or two of them.  Have I behaved immorally?

According to my theory of knowlecular psychology, no.  That’s because an ethotactic, or the choice of a moral or immoral action, can only be the result of some anthroceptual decision based on living in harmony with a known social code.

I think I would go so far as to say that my killing an Irishmen or two in such a case is not immoral even according to most people’s standards.  Many would protest, but because it would seem that I would be excusing a Nazi taught to consider Jews sub-human for gassing them.  I would excuse the Nazi, but only morally.  For me, he would be not immoral, but homicidally stupid—and therefore deserving to be reprimanded!  Sorry.  I have a weakness for black humor.  What I believe is that such a person should be prevented from continuing to gas Jews by being executed—unless one truly believes some kind of re-education can make him accept Jews as human, and he is compelled to repay society for his social stupidity by spending the rest of his life shining the shoes of Jews for free or something.

Ultimately, I believe all reprehensible acts are acts of stupidity, and that what kind of stupidity is involved—moral stupidity or some other kind of stupidity—is irrelevant.  Society should be maximally protected from the person acting reprehensibly (and protected from his genes, for I believe criminals [real criminals], and that’s who I’m talking about, should not be allowed to breed).  Of course, I realize I’m making a complex subject seem much more cut&dry than it is.  Just ideas to counteract simple-minded bad/good anti-continuumism and the insensitivity of certain sentimentalists to Evil.

About evil I will say that all definitions of it are necessarily subjective, but that it does exist, and can be defined sociobjectively.  Sociobjectivity is a view of an idea that is held by such a large majority of the members of a society and which has an objective neurophysiological basis as to be close enough to true objectivity as to be taken as such.  Take the evil of killing an innocent child.  Almost everyone would disapprove of that, and (I believe) almost all of us are instinctively repelled by the deed, and—in fact—would instinctively try to prevent a child, innocent or not, from being killed.

Not that our instinct to use reason would necessarily not be involved.  If effective, it might tell us that our standing in society will go up if we stop someone from murdering a child.  Although our instinct to advance statoosnikally would be part of that.  Actually, I think in most cases, protecting the child would be reflexive whereas our explanation would be taken care of mostly by our reasoning.

To be honest, if I were dominated by reason, I would never risk my life, even as the old man I now am, for some child, because what I believe I may contribute to World Culture is almost sure to be more than what the child will, however long he lives.  The problem with that, of course, is that my ability to reason may be defective, in which case, my not saving a child at the risk of losing my own life would be stupid integrity–that is, acting according to my code that I should protect my own life at all costs because of its great value to the world.  I claim that following that code would be absolutely valid if I were another . . . Nietzsche, without his breakdown.

Needless to say, the idea that Evil is what some deity has said it to be is absurd; various deities have universally defined certain acts as evil because the men who invented them were instinctively against those acts.  Other non-universal acts, like saying something contemptuous about some deity, have also been said to have been ordained Evil by a deity invented by men not because their inventors were instinctively against such acts but because the definition of Evil helped them gain power or destroy other tribes, or simply because of some personal dislike—of a priest once clawed by a cat that made him claim his main god had defined cats as evil, for example.

I do think that reasoning should dominate every moral choice one makes, but it can’t overcome one’s instincts, all of which are ultimately moral, for a given person.  We can only argue about whose individual morals would work best for the society we want to live in, and perhaps use reason to show that giving in to a society’s chosen code will be better for each individual in the long run, the long run excluding some never-seen Heaven or anything like it.

Which brings to mind the question of whether or not it is moral to lie to the masses and tell them some God will do horrible things to them if they don’t accept a society’s code.  I realize that there are those who don’t believe that our species naturally, due to our genes, divides into different social classes–three of them, roughly speaking:  masters, slaves, and . . . cerebreans.  They’re nuts.

I divide ethics into the study of socioethotactics and the study of egoethotactics . . . I think.  There are two major problems: formulation of a maximally fair and biologically advantageous set of socioethotactics by a society, and an individuals’ reconciling his inevitably conflicting set of egoethotactics with his society’s socioethotactics.

More on this eventually, if I think I can say anything at all interesting about it.

* * *

Note: on the day I made my first entry here about ethotactics, 36 people checked up on me at my Wikipedia entry; rarely do more than 4 people visit it on a day, and none since the first month it was up have anywhere near that many done so.  Were they fans of Jonah Goldberg, whose article I was commenting on?  The visits after that have been few, for or five in a day at most.

Last, and definitely least, here’s this SURVEY again:

Please, Dear Reader, I implore thee: when you have read as much of this entry as you feel like reading, let me know whether you have found it worth reading in full or not by clicking “YES” or “NO” below. You would help me a great deal, and might even get me to make my entries more reader-friendly. (And for the love of Jayzuz, please don’t try to spare my feelings by politely declining to click the NO although you think the entry Vile Beyond Imagination. Oh, some of you may need to know that I am not asking you whether you agree with me or not!)

YES

NO

Note: I will be repeating this request in some of my entries to come. Feel free to click one of my buttons each time I do, but please don’t click either more than once a day.

.

AmazingCounters.com