Wednesday, February 5th, 2014
For today, a haiku review first appearing in Modern Haiku, then reprinted in my From Haiku to Lyriku. It’s here because I needed something to post and pages 86 and 88 happened to be the pages I turned to when I opened that to grab something. But I like my haiku reviews, even though they never made me famous.
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I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician. Well, no–Havel was an artist. He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:
An early visiopunctuational poet. The first such? Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know. Wait–of course not. My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964. I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though. Terrific poem, in any case. It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.” That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry. I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.
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Today I have another new word: “davinciation.” I came up with it after reading an essay about mathematicians before around 1900 who were also poets. Only two seemed to me major poets: Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, but a few in other languages than English that I’d never heard of may have been, too. As for Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, Khayam was definitely both a major poet and major mathematician: the poems of his Rubaiyat are still widely read, and his Demonstration of Problems of Algebra presents the first definition of algebra in the history of mathematics. I believe he was the first to find a method for solving third-degree equations, a geometric method that anticipated Descartes’s analytical geometry. I consider Carroll a major poet although he wrote only “light” verse because I see no reason to consider light verse inferior to “serious” verse, although only at its rare very best. But Carroll was merely a highly talented mathematician so far as I can tell.
Thinking about major poets who were also major mathematicians like Khayam, I wondered how many major poets were geniuses in some other significantly different field (unlike T. S. Eliot, for instance, who was a genius in both poetry and literary criticism). Leonardo immediately jumped to mind. But I had problems with him that I doubt many others, if any, have. I tend toward denying visimagists preceding the advent of non-representational painting genius. To me they seem just skilled craftsmen, basically repeating reality rather than significantly adding to it. I suppose some of them have to be consider geniuses as a sort of engineer: the first to use perspective (Brunelleschi, the architect), and Leonardo’s invention of sfumato (or is it only something he used very well?)
While thinking about Leonardo, I wondered what his second field of genius might be. It didn’t seem to me quite science, and not too close to philosophy. That’s when “davinciation” occurred to me: a field of versosophy that covers a great deal of varied subjects without unifying around any central organizing principal for any of its major subjects—as the pre-occupations of da Vinci seem to me to have been—and to have included his sculpture and painting. Francis Galton seems a similar sort of genius although possibly not at da Vinci’s level. Another might be Charles Sanders Pierce, but I haven’t been able to connect to his work well enough to know. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are best thought of, it seems to me, a lesser geniuses in the field of davinciation. Goethe, too—but he differed from Franklin and Jefferson in being a definitely major genius in literature. Liebniz? Possibly. Descartes? Anyone care to add a name or two?
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Thursday, October 9th, 2014
Directly below is the cover featuring the design Craig Kaplan and I came up with for the latest issue of The Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. Beneath it, from the bottom up, are my initial rough draft for the cover, then two drafts of mine (from several) combining ideas of Craig’s and mine. The poem is my “Mathemaku No. 10.”
From down&dirty to fairly high-grade commercial art, it seems to me. Two equal but different expressions of aesthetic taste. If we had gone with my initial version, I would have wanted to boost its resolution and possibly made the heart-sequence more like the sequence in the one just above it–i.e., made the upward movement less predictable. I hadn’t realized when I made my first version that the lay-out of the cover was rigidly the way it is in the top image: image in square to top right, name of publication, image in square to bottom right. I’d have a single image take up the entire page with the publication data on top of it around two thirds of the way up. Different strolks for different fokes. Also a good demonstration of why I’ve never made any money from what I’ve done in the arts.
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Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013
I’ve always said that many commercial artists do work as good as “real artists.” The difference is simply their central goal, which is to persuade someone to buy something, however much they may at times also want to create a thing of beauty. So they are not making art, they are making advocature. I find the label below a wonderful specimen of advocary visiotextual art, but not of advocary visual poetry. A main reason I’m posting is to again make a point about what visual poetry is and is not. This is just an ornamented word. Excuse please, I should say that this is a beautifully-ornamented word, and one should be grateful for it, but that a visual poem, even an advocary visual poem, will do much more. Now if my creative brain hadn’t blown all sixteen of its fuses last year, with no new shipments of fuses due from Uranus until my next life, I’d show you what the melloyello logo would look like as a genuine advocary visual poem. That not being possible, I’ll just say it’d do something to make its visual appearance a metaphor for its text.
On the other hand, the lemon and orange slices seem pretty close to o’s–citrically mellowing beyond the o’s ending the text’s two words . . . Note: I think I couldda made a lot of money in advertising.
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I did so much work on the revision of my article for the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts that I forgot all about posting this day’s entry. The article is now a little over 4,000 words in length, and finished except for one final run-through that will primarily be a copy edit.
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Friday, August 30th, 2013
I got a post from Irving Weiss that sent me here where I found to my surprise some excellent concrete poems by a politician. Well, no–Havel was an artist. He was a politician pretty much inadvertently, or so it seems to me, one what don’t know too much about him.
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slav ˈɦavɛl]; 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first presdent of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Here are two of his concrete poems from 1964:
An early visiopunctuational poet. The first such? Probably not, but I don’t know enough about the history of the variety to know. Wait–of course not. My boy E. E. was doing visiopunctuational poetry long before 1964. I’m not sure who was the first to make a poem of nothing but punctuation marks, though. Terrific poem, in any case. It reminds me of Leroy Gorman’s brilliant “Birth of Tragedy.” That’s on exhibit at my latest Scientific American blog entry. I’ll probably use Havel’s autobiography above in my next SciAm entry.
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Saturday, May 31st, 2014
The Following is from my diary entry for today. Have my blog entries now sunk to the level of tweets?
I took my now-standard zoom-dose (a caffeine pill and a hydrocodone pill) a little while ago and am now (11 A.M.) feeling pretty good. My Civilization game is going well, I finally won two straight games of Hearts when playing it around seven, and just got a string of 11 straight FreeCell wins going. What more could a boy want? I’m going to go through my essay on Beauty methodically now. I need a unifying principle. I also need something to write about in my blog entry for the day. Something will come. “Off to the races!” I think, then recall my father, who—in similar circumstances, albeit quotidian, like starting off on a car trip, not of High Importance like mine—would have said the same thing. Maybe for my blog I’ll talk about how nice it was of God to make cats for us, but how vile of him to leave so many of us with no parents to show off in front of when we finally make it—or even, as now, happily think we may. I truly believe I’ll be able to sell this essay to someone if I can just get it right. That means smooth, right now. Okay, now—really—off to the races. (Hey, I think I just wrote my blog entry.)
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Saturday, April 5th, 2014
Prologue, from my diary entry for 4 April 2014: “In five minutes it will be 2 o’clock. I, as usual, don’t feel like writing anything. I can’t think of anything to write. So, I’m going to give the small zoom-dose a big test. I haven’t taken one for five or more days. I will take it at two and see what it makes me write. I will start with my blog entry for the day, and just write any old thing if nothing else occurs to me.”
My small zoom-dose consists of half of one of my hydrocodone-acetaminophen 10-660 tablets and a caffeine pill supposed to be the equivalent of a cup of coffee (but I can’t remember a cup of coffee doing much for me–probably because the few I’ve had, have been more than half cream [I never developed a taste for it]). If I’m addicted to it, I must be a weird addict be cause I avoid taking one as much as I can–just the way I avoid all forms of work!
It seems to be working. The brilliant title of this entry was the first indication of that. But I’ll consider it a failure if it doesn’t get me writing something of importance to me, like one of the many reviews I need to get done for Small Press Review. Or my July/August SPR column. Maybe that. It should be easy, for it’s just a continuation of my previous one, a review of a Seattle zine from 25 years ago called Skyviews that I barely got begun, thanks to my introductory remarks. (Note: it’s 2:22 and I’m already zinging along happily. But haven’t whirred very close to anything I can use my mood to spout megalomaniacal huzzahs about. Unless it’s that sentence. [Note-within-a-note: when I’m in my pharmaceutically-aided zone, I constantly remember friends high on mary j. in my younger days who thought themselves aflow with creativity that I saw no sign of, and wonder if that’s where I am; but I later like what I’ve done. Biggest symptom is gushfulness–as soon as I finish a sentence, another suggests itself–or several do. I veer into what I think are either clever or witty asides. I feel confident, though, that that is what I am at my best, and that dues to old age, I need pills {most of the time} to get there.] There–proof that I have not gone excessively linguoblivious: I just closed every one of my parenthesized parenthetical expressions. And now closet this one>)! Stagoo!
I strongly suspect that the ability to produce yelps of triumph is one of our innate mechanisms. And with that my zoom seems to have ended. I have nothing more to say! 453 words only to this point. But my zoom has not entirely ended: I don’t care! However many words I’ve done is enough! Stagoo!
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Tuesday, March 4th, 2014
Yeah, another coinage, this one finishing off my full definition of the “G-factor” (or, in my psychology, general cerebreffectiveness component–or full-scale intelligence as opposed to what most credentialed psychologists consider it) as a combination of four cerebral mechanisms: charactration, accommodance, accelerance and–now–cerebrogovernance. Mechanism in charge of basal cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of reducing cerebral energy level; mechanism in charge of increasing cerebral energy; and supervisory mechanism in charge of directing cerebral energy (which is effectually the same as directing attention) to and from various awarenesses (or areas of the cerebrum such as the auditory or verbal awarenesses–e.g., the cerebrogovernance might turn off all the awarenesses of a person silently reading except his verbal awaresness and verbal/visual and verbal auditory association areas, then switch him out of all three to his auditory awareness if someone suddenly screams his name).
I think of cerebrogovernance as “little g” and all four cerebreffective mechanisms “big G.” All the major awarenesses are “big S’s” (for big specific “intelligences”), and their many sub-awarenesses (e.g., the reducticeptual awareness’s matheceptual and linguaceptual sub-awarenesses) are “little s’s.”
I’m gearing up for a Major little essay on my theory of cerebreffective- ness. But, first I have to finish the first blog entry to the continuation of my Scientific American blog. I’ve almost finished it, honest, but I keep finding spots to repair, delete or expand, and seem to be avoid what I believe is the thing’s final section (where I went off on a tangent about tragedy, then realized what I had to say about it was too confuse to try to add to my entry).
Meanwhile, I had my cystoscopy. It went very well, but my problem turned out to be due to a bladder stone the doctor couldn’t removed for some reason so I’ll have to go back next Monday for, I guess, a similar procedure to remove it. Will find out more Thursday. Meanwhile, I’ll have to endure another week of sometimes painful difficulty urinating. Right now I’m in a good mood, though–even though I’m not on hydrocodone.
Speaking of that, I just read in the paper that I’m a hydrocodone-abuser because I sometimes take “just to feel better”–instead, apparently, for a headache back-ache or the like that other pain remedies don’t do much for, which is what my hydrocodone was prescribed for. It’s so stupid. A person semi-incapacitated because of a headache should be given a pill but a person unable to do anything that will give his life meaning because he’s in the kind of null zone I get into at times should not be given a pill–unless, I gather, worse off than I am.
My doctor can no longer prescribe the dosage of Hydrocodone he used to, so my latest prescription from him is for half the dosage. A little silly, since it only means I have to take two pills instead of one to get the effect one was giving me. I’m going to see how the half-dosage works, though. I suspect I don’t really need any dosage; I think I only need the caffeine pills. But who knows, I may end up seeing a shrink to get genuine anti-depressive pills, legitimately.
Of course, the thing that most disgusts me is that I’m not allowed to buy the pills from anyone who wants to sell them to me without a prescription, and take them as I see fit, on the grounds that I should make all final decisions about my body. Which, of course, could include my decision to put one of my doctors in charge of my thyroid gland, for instance, as I’ve done.
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Sunday, October 7th, 2012
I’ve now had two caffeine-boosted days in a row. Once again, I’m into what looks to be a null day. I can’t think of anything it’d be worth taking a caffeine pill, with or without a part-opium pain pill, to work on. I’d very much prefer not taking anything, but I have so much to do. So, drug-dependent Bobby has just taken both pills at 11:19 A.M. e.s.t. this 7 October 2012.
It seems, according to an Internet site, that caffeine is an Once in the brain, the principal mode of action is “a nonselective antagonist of adenosine receptors”–it connects to these receptors, in the process blocking adensonie from them. Since it has no affect on the receptors, they keep doing what you do, which seems to be keeping us awake, and boosting our apparent and actual energy, so we feel good and work hard. Adenosine clamps down on wakefulness and energy. It seems to me a life-extender inasmuch as it slows you down, keeping you from over-doing anything. I’m sure my adenosine got too influential, I’m not sure why. I may be that I got to drinking too much Mountain Dew, the caffeine content of which shut down so many adenosine receptors that my body manusfactured a huge number too many of them in compensation. This is why drugs generally end increasing whatever problem they at first helped one with. I hope old age is the culprit, screwing me up by intentionally slowing me down, and went too far. In any case, I may well be headed toward a state in which now amount of caffeine can help me. My dosage at the moment is pretty low, though–the quivalent of two cups of mosts kinds of coffee. I don’t see that I have any alternative.
Well, maybe I do: maybe there some way to poison my adenosine receptors and whatever mechanism builds new ones. The probable problem with that is that creativity requires wakefulness followed by null zones during which one accumulates necessary new data. . . .
Hey, here’s something else asemic by Nancy Brush-Burr so you’ll get something out of this entry:
While waiting for this image to upload, I thought to myself what a wonderful good deed I was doing for nbb (with whom I’ve exchanged a few letters and/or e.mails but don’t know well–and am wondering if we are distant cousins, the Burr family being prominent in my genealogy [but Aaron is off to the side!]) by giving her work space here and making my everlastingly insightful comments on. Up there on my peak, I credited her with deserving this favor. From there my mind went to amusement on the way my drugs bring out my megalomania. At once, I smiled at myself, observing that I was a megalmonai even without drugs, the difference being that with drugs I am a happy megalomaniac, without them an unhappy one. A weird kind of manic-depressive, or so I’ve long believed. Never darkening enough to overcome my instinct to stay alive, nor glistening Sol-levelly enough to go confront Obama in person for not shoveling a few billion of his pay-offs to the 47% to me.
Enough of me (if only for 2.3 minutes): this visimage of Nancy Brush-Burr’s is an absolutely zowwy picture of –hey, maybe my very own communicative excitement at times! Not a poem, just a terrific representation of language thunder-storming into something glorious.
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Sunday, March 11th, 2012
I think six people have now seen and commented on my Sequences. 17 in all have seen it, if the counter involved is only counting each person’s first visit. The only slightly negative comment about it came from the one of the very few who made any meaningful comment on it, Endwar, who said he wasn’t all that taken with long division. Which, I (Moon in Aries!) instantly responded to with a phooey directed at him followed by a description of (some of) my feelings about long division poems: “I don’t think of any of my long divisions as division, but one multiplication and one addition. I love the idea of objects or images multiplying each other. Also the complication of the metaphor resulting: the metaphor having three parts: the multiplier, the multiplicand and the process of multiplication. My long division poems also bring me back to how wonderful I thought the process of long division was when I was first exposed to it.”
I also commented that my long divisions are much more poetic than conceptual, and Endwar leans more to the poeticoceptual than to the conceptipoetic. As I’m sure I’ve mused before, I feel many people in science (like Endwar although this may not apply to him), are too conceptual to be able to break out of their analytical minds enough to flow into the weirdwhere my long divisions bobble into.
Ha, they may need the mix of APCs and opiated pain pills I sometimes take. I say that because I took such a mix just twenty minutes ago after being dead-headedly uncreative for a week or more–and look how “creative” my weiords bobbled at the end of the previous sentence. The lilt up into poeticonceptuality. Actually, with me, it is an ascent into an energy level sufficient to express whatever poeticonceptuality I have–but others not naturally in the zone may well be helped by such a mix into it. So, require visitors to my exhibts and readers of my books to take a dose prior to engaging my work?
Meanwhile, the mix continues working on me. It’s got me into my semi-megalomaniacal zone. “Semi,” because I’m aware that I’m in it, or at least enough aware of my readers to pretend to think I’m in it when IT IS NOT ANY KIND OF MANIA FOR ME TO RECOGNIZE THAT I AM TO JEHOVAH WHAT HE IS TO KOOL-AID JONES. I do get hilarious when in the zone, don’t I! Anyway, as I was about to say, I once again wonder why hardly anyone bothers with writings of mine like this one. So many others have large audiences for similar reflections whose plod is way lower than the deft snipper of mine. Okay, I’m not quite a Thoreau or Emerson (the first two I can think of whom I hope have contributed to what I try for with my poetic prose–Robert Frost another), but surely, I keep believing (even when not in my possibly megalomaniacal zone, the difference being that I keep my belief to myself then), I’m close enough to them often enough to attract the attention of people who like that kind of writing more than I do.
Two possibilities: I’m more wildly out-of-phase with the zeitgeist than I feel I am–or I’m too boring repeating a long-dead zeitgeist. I can’t tell, which is why I so much wish I could get feedback from my few readers. But they are all as creatively other-occupied as I, who rarely am able to critique them! What I need are academics, and academics are academics because they are innately behind and want to stay there–who can’t not stay there.
I just made up a new category for entries like this one: “Autobiosophy.” Words about my, uh, wisdom, rather than words about me. I feel I write a lot more about my thoughts than I do about me, a good reason for my claim that I ain’t no narcissiphist. Another argument of mine against the latter tag, which has been applied to me, is that I don’t worship myself, I am aware of and point out flaws of mine all the time. I am balancedly ego-postive and ego-negative. Or so it seems to me.
I could go on forever but will try to do it taking care of the reviewing I’m behind on. Wish me luck. You needn’t wish me contentedness: the pills have me ridiculously content with the whole universe.
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
I betcha this entry draw thousands of visitors! What a compelling title! What a fascinating topic!
So, what’s going on? What’s going on is I’m going to have an in&out urethra procedure carried out this coming Friday. My surgeon will be using a laser to remove a calcium build-up that’s been giving me urinary problems. He believes the radiactive seeds I was implanted with twelve or so years ago for prostate cancer caused the build-up.
Why am I telling you this? To explain why I’ve been so listless of late, and will be for a while. I’ve been told not to take any aspirins until I’ve had and recovered from the procedure–to prevent excessive bleeding. APCs, apparently my only source of zip, is part aspirin, so I can’t take them.
In spite of my listlessness, I have the book for Marton half done. Two days ago I felt I needed a break from it, so pulled out the chapters I want to add to my book on the Shakespeare authorship question to work on. It took me a full day to remember what I intended to do, and find the files I had done. What I want to do is important: it’s to make my explanation of the anti-Shakespeare conspiracy theory thebasis of a general explanation of all conspiracy theories. I’m hoping that will increase the salability of the book–although I think it important to do, anyway. I may have all the ideas I need but organizing them is a bear. And I’s so weary.
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Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
If I count 31 August as part of September, I’ve come up with 9 new mathemaku in September. Nine poems in a month isn’t much of an output for most poets, but it’s very good for me. Actually I only have final copies of four or five, but the others are essentially finished. I also have essentially have all the terms I jotted down in May for another that have to be written out the way I want them (many in cursive) and backgrounded, and notes for one or two others that are fairly complete.
I wrote the above last night. It’s now around ten in the morning of the twenty-first of September and once again I’m high on drugs–2 APCs and one tablet of the pain pill with opium that I use on occasion. As always, I find it unbelievable that a little bit of some chemical or chemicals could make such a difference in me. I took them because I’m so far behind in my struggle to keep up with the things in my life I consider important, like my next column for Small Press Review, I feel I can’t come close to catching up without chemical help. (The column, by the way, is now two columns–I did manage to pump far more than enough words into it over the past weeks, but at way too slow a rate, even with the occasional help of my pills.)
I’ll talk over what I’m doing to my body with my gp next time I see him, which should be in three months. I fear I’ll reach a point at which time the chemicals no longer help me. I’m concerned, but not as concerned, that I’ll have a heart attack or go crazy–although my usage is not at all high. Bottom line: I’d rather have three or four more years high than twenty without the pills, or something else that can get me where they get me or close to it. I can’t say it enough: they astonish me every time. Without them, I’m almost a car with no gas in its tank; with them, I can operate.
So, it’s Grumman with his APCs and opium, Leary with his LSD, Freud with his cocaine and tobacco, Coleridge with his opium (Keats used it a bit, too, I believe, even before his tuberculosis), just about all the prominent American authors of the first half of the twentieth century and their alcohol, Balzac and his coffee . . . Many others. There are negative examples, too, such as Shaw (one of my greatest heroes) and his abstinence . . . and failure to ascend beyond wonderfully crisp and logical prose to poetry. The only drug-free artist of the first order I can think of was Shelley–if he indeed was.
It bothers me that I seem to need drugs no matter how many others in my field did, and regardless of the fact that human beings owe their place in the scheme of things to their being able to improve themselves significantly with external aids (why should we go along with the use of spiked shoes for athletes, say, but not steroids?) My output is probably no more increased by the drugs I take than by the computer I use. Still . . .
I am aware of certain negatives in the pill-popping life–lack of focus. It is hard for me to leave this entry, for example. Once I’ve managed it, I’ll have trouble choosing the right project to tackle next. I believe, too, that my critical sense suffers. No matter. I will now go to the SPR column-become-columns and finish them. (Tarzan yell I’m not sure how to spell here, nor can I execute decently, although I do attempt to.)
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
I’ve often mammered here about the effect of pain pills on me. Recently I’ve taken the one with an opium derivative in it and two APC’s. The caffeine in the latter may help me. The two drugs together allow me to act. I have always found this extremely weird. The most interesting thing about it (for me), though, is how always it reveals two of my many ways of knowing things to me. Various portions of what I call my reducticeptual awareness tell me that all these pills do is give me a little extra stimulator-chemicals, or precursors to those–more dopamine, perhaps. Or less whatever chemical in my brain is inhibiting me. Simple neurophysiology.
The rest of my awarenesses will never understand this. How can my brain be so helpless? How can it sit in my head or do whatever it does wherever it is in me or near me and perceive me at my keyboard unable to type a single simple word that will get me going into a blog entry like this–until, ZING, Mr. Happy Pill and his wife come aboard and say, “Let the dolt type.”
Don’t tell me about placebos. I don’t seem suggestible. Marijuana never worked on me, for instance. Nor chiropractry. I wanted both to. Ditto valium that a doctor once gave me for the dead-headedness I’ve experienced on and off for forty years. Certain remedies for allergies failed while others worked, at least for a time.
Ah, but I have been suggestible. A few days after I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, my arms started to ache and became weak; I couldn’t lift them above my head. My gp at the time, Dr. Hollinger, checked me out and told me he though I was experiencing an anxiety attack. My symptoms almost immediately disappeared. I didn’t bother getting the tranquilizer he prescribed for me.
Still, it was ultimately neurophysiological. My brain-cells were frantically trying to make new connections to deal with the extreme blow to my self-esteem getting cancer had given me, not to mention the fear of death it got started in me. It broke down. I haven’t studied medicine enough to know the details of what happened, but I don’t think my layman’s guess that the brain shifted too much attention from the normal working of my body, particularly in this case my arms, to dealing with the cancer crisis. So my fundaceptual awareness wasn’t getting enough data to run my arms right. More important, my execuceptual awareness didn’t have the energy to make my arms move properly–lift when necessary, for example.
All kinds of distress would occur when they didn’t lift when they normally would, automatically. Ergo, anxiety and further breakdowns. Whereupon, my analytical intelligence multiplied the bad effect hugely by telling me I was going to drop dead. After all, prostate cancer plus the beginnings of paraplegia.
The simple reassurance my doctor gave me cancelled the anxiety. I suspect that the relief I felt to hear the cancer hadn’t spread to my armpits, or whatever I feared, upped my endorphins as much as the pills I’m now taking do. And the good effect held long enough form my brain to work out an effective way to deal with my changed circumstances.
I took aspirins fairly regularly for headaches, some awfully bad, I thought, between the ages of eight and twelve. The stress of dealing with people, I’m sure, was at the bottom of it. Going to school, going to choir practice, things like that. I don’t remember getting headaches during summer vacations when there was no school or choir practice.
As I’ve written before, I spontaneously gave up headaches one day in the seventh grade when I vividly remember going down the stairs in the school and knowing that I was over my need for aspirins. I remember nothing else. Perhaps I had a headache and I’d suddenly told it to go away and it did. Or maybe I just realized I hadn’t had a headache for quite a while. Maybe I’d just experienced something that ordinarily would have given me a headache and it didn’t (although I had no cognitive theory as to why I had them, so could only have guessed I’d had an experience that should have given me one intuitively). Anyway, I only had headaches a few times a year from then on–except when hung-over, as I occassionally was during my early thirties, when I occasionally went bar-hopping.
I forgot something in my pill-propelled paragraphs above: my bad eyes. Too much reading, especially without enough light, and perhaps without exactly the right prescription lenses, probably contributed some to my susceptibility to headaches.
Final musing: that I’ve run out of natural endorphins, or a proper supply of them, due to how much I did use them over the years, often going close to genuine mania as a creative artist and thinker. I keep thinking I shouldn’t use them now, I should let my endocrine system rebuild itself, without pharmaceutical interference. But it might take too much time. There’s also the fact that my thyroid gland doesn’t work the way it should anymore (which may well be due to my having been hyperthyroidal most of my life, which was responsible for what I like to think of as my genius, until the overwork the poor gland was doing finally caused it to have a breakdown).
Okay. It’s six in the evening at this point. I more or less did my duty as a physical therapy patient. A forty-minute session at the center I go to. The bike ride to and from. A third of my home exercises–but I need only do half of them when I go to the center. I should have done more but I was too worn out to. I didn’t take the pills till a couple of hours ago.
I took care of one email this morning. I got one or two more Small Press Review columns posted in the Pages section here. (I have to boast, by the way, that I now have 82 columns there. Four years more of them to go. I feel proud of them–and did so even pilllessly. They’re nothing compared with what I might have done–and have occasionally done here and elsewhere–but I continue not to understand, acognitively since my intellect understands, in what way they are inferior to the literary commentary of those getting national attention).
New subject, because of the remarks I’ve made above concerning my True Value to World-Culture. As I may have said, now that I’m seventy, I’ve decided to be fully honest. I believe one of the things that has me on the margins is lack of social aggressiveness. I believe it’s what kept me from playing varsity basketball in high school, too.
Long story. Maybe I should save it till tomorrow. I have more pills.
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Many times in the past, I’ve spoken of the pain pills I’ve taken, or the Mountain Dew I’ve drunk, often noting how one of the other, or both, have helped me out of the Null Zone. For at least four weeks I almost entirely avoided either. Once or twice taking a four-hour pain pill before trying to play tennis on my painfully bad left leg. I think in that time I was never fully out of the null zone, and probably half the time close to fully in it.
Well, I finally decided that I’m a hopeless addict. Proof is that I took two APCs, which have caffeine, a bit over two hours ago, then a pain pill with an opium-derivative in it a half-hour or so ago, and have done better work since the APCs on the important essay I’ve been slogging through for over a month than I have since beginning it. And I feel like I can do a full day’s work on it. Maybe more!
Once back home after the hip replacement operation I’ll be having (in a week), I plan to find some expert on my kind of drug addiction, and find out if I can somehow stay out of the null zone (a reasonable amount of the time) without drugs. If not, no big deal so long as I can keep having them prescribed for me, and I’m pretty sure I can. If it costs me a few years of life, so what? To continue to live as I’ve been living the past month of so would be ridiculous. In any case, it looks like I’ll have my essay done before I go into the hospital.
I’m feeling very good about it (and was even while in the null zone). It’s really coming together nicely. As usual when I’m knocking out material I have a good opinion of, I sing my way into fantasies of finally gaining recognition. One thing for sure, this time I’m going to keep on the attack with this essay until it is, or I am, done.
Meanwhile, what have I learned from my life that I can pass on to others? Nothing. I truly don’t know whether to advise the young to avoid caffeine and pain pills, or to consider them seriously if their energy levels are not as high as they feel they need to be for a satisfying life. Maybe some people are born with a need for pharmaceutical help, or with a flawed endocrine system that will eventually require it as I eventually required synthroid for my thyroid deficiency. Or was that caused by a use of caffeine that caused my thyroid to overwork and wear out? All I can say is that I hope genetic research will finally tell people enough about what they’ve been born with for them to make intelligent decisions about questions like these. If their genes have given them the capacity to make intelligent decisions. I don’t think mine did, I don’t think mine would have allowed me to choose suicide at the age of 15 or 24, the two ages at which it would have been best for me to do that.
I’ve been thinking about how to say why I very much like Aram Saroyan’s addition example, ocean plus forest equals horses. (1) It forces me to try to wonder some sense into it. (2) I see a fence between the never-motionless huge ocean to the left of a quiet forest and . . . horses. Visual equalities. (3) To put it most mechanistically, the poem is saying that if we take all the connotations of the word, “ocean,” and mix them with all the connotations of the word, “forest,” we’ll get all the connotations of the word, “horses.” That takes us back to (1): and I get flow of ocean continually going somewhere but never getting there, flow of horses (and living creature), forever also going nowhere . . . the forest much more slowly flowing there, too. The gallop of horses, the slower gallop of the ocean toward land, the climb and spread of a forest. This suggests (4) the haiku’s clash of two strong images to produce a third. There’s a poem somewhere in the depths of my messy mind that has the image of the ocean’s surf consisting of numberless horses galloping ashore. I find it intuitively easy to link ocean and horses, but the forest? Perhaps needed because the horses would otherwise be all flow?
the “orse” of “horses” and the “ores” of “forest” intrigue me, too, but I have found a way to make them a meaningful part of what the poem is doing–i.e., they are coincidental.
I don’t feel I’ve done more than have fun in the poem–i.e., no definitive interpretation here, for sure.
* * *
For anyone interested in my Great Adventure, I have a sad announcement: after eighteen days of valiantly working on some project I consider important, I worked only a couple of minutes on one two days ago, then did not work at all on any of them yesterday. But it’s not over! I’m just toning down my vows. My latest is that I will do significant work on one or my of my Life’s Works daily for the next 21 days, or more!
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Wednesday, June 18th, 2014
Anny Ballardini recently posted a haiku at NowPoetry about red cherries by Richard Wright with a second haiku about cherries under it that I took to be by Wright when I wrote about it there, and then posted that here, but which was actually by Anny. Fortunately, I said nice things about it:
stole two red cherries expensive in plastic baskets under the electric light me
Might as well say a little more about it. I claim a haiku should try for a haiku moment, and a haiku moment should have archetypal resonance. That brings us into subjectivity, I’m afraid. But a critic should be able to show how a haiku he rates as effective as I consider this one to achieve a haiku moment of archetypal resonance. Then the critic’s readers can decide for themselves whether he’s right or not.
(1) (to go through it again because Sound Practice can never be illustrated to many times!) I consider this haiku’s two images to be . . . well, it’s not that easy to sort it out; one image is a store’s expensive cherries bright lit; a second is the haiku’s speaker’s stealing two of them; but there is a third, the shoplifter all by herself, under an electric light (for me, “electric” in this crime scene, connotes the chair). I would combine the first two–in tension with “me” because: (1) a physical act versus (suddenly) a psychological state; (2) a scene versus the tiny focal point of the scene (which I see as tinily inside the scene, the perpetrator seeing herself stealing).
(2) The tension is resolved almost instantly with the reader’s empathetic realization of an archetypal fear: the fear of being found out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about instinctive human drives lately, and one of them I’m still trying to work out an effective description of is the need for the world’s approval. Or the need, as here, to avoid sustaining the world’s disapproval. I consider all major human drives to be archetypal, and this one is. It’s what makes us such conformists, even the most eccentric of us behaving like everyone else at least 97% of the time.
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Monday, March 24th, 2014
Note: hold down your control button and punch + to be able to read the following more easily.
Once again I needed something to post here and grabbed this from 25 years or so ago. It didn’t get me into the BigTime. Note: “vizlation” was my word then for “visimagery,” which is my word now for “visual art.
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Friday, April 19th, 2013
A few people have told me (I don’t know how seriously) that they have not been able to figure out all the pieces I have in my latest entry in my Scientific American blog, and a few of mine colleagues even claim I can’t multiply. Ergo, I have an excuse to blither about one of my poems. I’ve chosen one I think the easiest to defend. First, though, here’s Monet’s The Regatta at Argenteuil. It’s important for one trying to understand my poem to know of it because it is central to the poem (as the third poem in my triptych makes clear with a full reproduction of it).
Okay, to begin with the simplicities of the poem below, a person encountering it must be aware that it is a long division example. That is indicated by two symbols: the one with the word, “poem,” inside it, and the line under the sailboat. The first, so far as I’m aware, has no formal name, so I call it a dividend shed. The line is a remainder line. The two together, along with the placement of the other elements of the poem, one where a long division’s quotient would be, one where its divisor would be, one where the product of the two would be, and one under the remainder line where a remainder would be, clinch the poem’s definition as long division.
Now, then, anyone remembering his long division from grade school, should understand that the poem is claiming five things:
(1) that the text the painter who is unsleeping a day long ago multiplied times the scribbled sketch, or whatever it is to the left of the dividend shed equals the sailboat shown;
(2) that the sailboat is larger in value that either the painter or the sketch;
(3) that the addition of the letter fragments under the remainder line to the sailboat image makes the sailboat equal the poem referred to above it;
(4) that the the sailboat should be considered almost equal to the poem;
(5) that the letter fragments, or whatever it is that they represent must be less in value than any of the other elements of the poem with the possible exception of the quotient.
(2) and (5) are decidedly less important than the other three, but can still be important.
I could easily claim that the poem is wholly accurate mathematically by giving the painter a value of 2, the sketch a value of 7, the sailboat a value of 14, the fragmented letters a value of 3 and the poem a value of 17. Arbitrary? Sure–but by definition as Grummanomical values of the elements mathematically correct however silly. (And I would contend that if I had time, I could given them Grummanomical poetic values most people would find acceptable, and–in fact–I believe one of the virtues of such a poem is that it will compel some to consider such things–at least to the extent of wondering how much value to give a painter’s activity, how much to a sketch, and whether a poem is genuinely better than either, or the like.)
I am including the above in my entry to help those a little fuzzy about long division (and I was definitely not unfuzzy about it when I began making long division poems, and still sometimes have to stop and think for more than a few minutes at times to figure out just what one of my creations is doing). My poem imitates it in every respect except that it does what it does with non-numerical terms rather than with numbers. I hope, however, that someone encountering it without knowing much or anything about such poems will at least find things to like in it such as the little poem about the painter, or the idea of the childish sketch as perhaps the basis of what would become a Grand Painting. Some, I believe, would enjoy recognizing the sailboat as the one in Monet’s masterpiece, too. But what is most important aesthetically about the work is what it does as a mathematical operation. That operation must make poetic sense if the work is to be effective. Needles to say, I claim it does.
To consider the question, we must break down the long division operation the poem depicts into its components. First of all, there is the multiplication of the sketch by what the painter is doing to get the sailboat–the painting of the sailboat, that is, sketch times something done by a painter almost having to yield a picture of some sort. Does this make sense? Clearly, a painter must carry out an operation on some initial sketch or idea or equivalent thereof to get into a painting, so I don’t see how one can wholly reject painter operating on sketch yields portion of painting as analogous to . . . 2 operating on 7 to yield 14. But there is more to it than that, if only to those of us who think of multiplication as magic, and are still in touch with the way we felt when the idea that 2 times 7 could make 14 was new to us. That is, just after we had internalized the remarkable mechanism for carrying out multiplication. For us, the poem’s painter is using his painting mechanism to hugely enlarge a sketch the way the operation of multiplication (usually) hugely enlarges a number. Doing so in a kind of concealed magical way unlike mere addition does. A three-dimensional way.
At this point, the question arises as to whether the sailboat nearly equal to a poem. That’s obviously a subjective matter. Those who like sailboats (and poems) will tend to say yes. Note, by the way, that “poem” here does not mean what I say it mean verosophically, but as what one of my dictionaries has it: “something suggesting a poem.” Here the context–a work of art–makes it impossible to take the word literally,–and moreover, of taking it to mean not just something suggesting a poem, but something suggestion a master-poem.
Well, not quite here: the penciled informality of the word, “poem,” counters the idea that a super-poem is being referred to, and the sailboat is only a black and white portion of a great painting, not a great painting by itself. We know it’s on its way to being that, but the multiplication is only telling us of it as a pleasant step, not anywhere close to being a realized goal.
The remainder, fragmented words, add very little to it, but we will later see that they are fragments of the phrase, “the faint sound of the unarrestable steps of Time.” Again, it’s a subjective matter as to whether these words could deepen anything sufficiently to enable it to suggest a poem. I say it does. But even if not, I think it would be hard to claim that the addition of such words to a visual image could not be called a plausible attempt to mathematically increase the image’s value.
In conclusion, I claim that the poem carries out the operation of long division in two steps, one multiplicative, the other additive, to valuable aesthetic effect. Elsewhere I have shown how, according to my thinking, it will put someone one appreciative of it into a Manywhere-at-Once partly in the verbal section of his brain and partly in the mathematical section of it. The next poem in the triptych goes somewhat further; the sequence’s final poem brings everything to a climax–I hope.
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Sunday, March 31st, 2013
I had a slush-brained day yesterday, so only did a little work on my discussion of Manywhere-at-Once. Then, while doing a little putting of mine house in order, I came across this. It wasn’t till I got to the word “aesthcipient,” which no one uses but me that I recognition the piece as mine. At that point I was wondering who else had written so insightfully about Basho’s old pond haiku, which it clearly concerned. I’m not sure where it’s from, but I’m sure it was written more than twenty years ago. Nice to know I could sometimes write so well even way back then!
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Friday, February 8th, 2013
I was described at Wikipedia, by someone defending me as worthy of an entry, as a minor poet. That got me thinking, once again, how best to sort contemporary poets into okay; good; excellent; enough better than excellent o be considered minor poets, or poets specialists will or should be interested in a hundred years or more from now; and enough better than minor poets for all lovers of poetry to be aware of them. Can it be done? Most anti-evaluatory people say, oh, never. But it seems to me that at least half of those poets born in earlier eras that their times canonized have remained canonized until now. The problem is to find what makes them different from the ones their times canonized who are now forgotten.
Those not canonized by the world at large until after they were dead are another story. Some were just poor at self-publicity. My impression is that all of them were canonized by a few in their field not related to them, and regardless of whether or not they were friends with them.
To me, it should be easy enough for an intelligent person, knowledgeable of the field to quickly recognize the okay and good poets. They are the ones doing absolutely nothing different from what the poets who were active when they were born were doing, down to the cliches used. I’m speaking of veteran poets, poets who have had time to get beyond the received forms, techniques, subject matter, point of view and language. The cliches of language, subject matter and outlook will give them away. I think not even the poetry establishment will will give them high marks. Unless they are members of a certified victim group.
The excellent but ultimately not superior poets will be the hardest to pick out. I tend to believe that you can identify them by the recognition the establishment gives them, but history suggests the establishment isn’t wrong all the time. It’s best at identifying poets like Frost and Yeats who veer only slightly from the ways of the poets before them but equal, or even surpass, the best of them (as I believe the best critics can show in detail although it’s difficult, and fewer know enough about poetry to have any chance of recognizing valid criticism objectively than know enough, and have enough good albeit subjective intuition to recognize superior poetry). I would consider the poets of a time that the establishment rates as certain to be considered major by posterity to be probably at least minor and having a reasonable chance to be major. With the poets the establishment and most poetry-lovers would consider excellent, this is as far as one can go.
Then there are my kind of poets, otherstream poets, the best quick definition of is poets making kinds of poems ignored by the establishment of their time–unless it annoys them enough to say something negative but unhelpful about them. Such poets can be identified by (1) lack of recognition or (2) their composing non-Wilshberian poems as Merwin’s, say, or Jorie Graham’s, or someone in-between–from the Iowa Workshop school, for instance. (Wilshberian poets, by the way, can be different in many respects, just as automobiles can, but they are as different from otherstream poets as every automobile is from helicopters as a mode of transportation. Not that they and their admirers are capable of understanding this.
It seems to me that identifying otherstream poets should be easy, selecting the most important ones, not so easy. In fact, it is not possible for the huge majority of academics, and the journalists, publishers, awards-betowers and the like to do it. That’s because you must first know enough about what they are doing as poets to know which of them are doings things no other, or almost no other, otherstream poet, is doing. In many cases this is objectively possible. Take me as an example: if it’s true that I am the first one ever to compose a serious long division poem (a kind of poem easy to identify), and am still the only one who has made more than a handful of them, then I am such a poet.
Now, then, I suppose whether or not the use of long division in poetry is a significant new technique is a subjective matter. As a critic, I have presented arguments at length that it is. It remains for others to decide how good my arguments are. If they’re persuasive, then I would claim that I (and others who have broken beyond anything previously done like John M. Bennett, Karl Kempton, Scott Helmes, Kathy Ernst and others, should be considered probably at least minor and having a reasonable chance to be major–assuming, as I guess I too automatically do–that my poetry is reasonably free of the various cliches I’ve spoken of, and not hermetic, something else that’s a factor although I didn’t think to mention it till now.
Since I don’t believe innovativeness the only attribute of superior otherstream poetry, or even necessary for it, I would deem otherstream poets who at are the cutting edge of whatever specific kind of poetry they’re involved with but without significant innovations to their credit whom their otherstream peers and knowledgeable critics or fans of otherstream poetry rate as high as the establishment rates poets like Ashbery also to be probably at least minor, etc.
It seems to me that I’ve described what does happen informally every generation, and that we do have a fair idea of who will be consider the minor and major poets of our time by posterity. I think it unlikely that in 2100 anyone will revere some poet of today who has not gotten even the contemporary recognition that Emily Dickinson did from the very few knowledgeable poetry people who knew of her work.
Note: after reading what I’ve written, I see that I made no attempt to distinguish the probably minor from the possibly major. I’ll leave that to some other time–if I have get to it. I think it will be extremely difficult to work out.
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Monday, December 10th, 2012
Would any of you who have been contributed to this thread (or only read portions of it) be willing (be brave enough) to carry out the following experiment:.(1) Select two poems, one you consider significantly better than the other;.(2) Support your view with references to what is explicitly in each poem, bad and good (in your opinion)?.Second challenge to those unwilling to do this because it would be meaninglessly subjective: be honest enough to go on record with the view that all poems are equally good..I’ve already half-done this with a very flawed quick reaction to the Sondheim poem indicating why I consider it at least not bad. (I now consider it a superior poem, having found more virtues in it by thinking of it more focusedly as a conceptual poem.) I will now say why—objectively, because supported by what’s objectively in or not in each of the two poems as opposed to anything that may be subjectively in them like sincerity.) I will now compare it with the other poem posted:PHOTOSYNTHESISby Banana JonesYou have a head,mountain goats eat fudge,I spread toe jelly on my wrist,Concrete angel,You ain’t got nothing on me,Oh right…Babies come from vagina’s..Sondheim inserts (_) into his poem, as I’m now sure it is, in accordance with a logical plan—i.e., after every word or phrase in order that a person doing the task of reading it will be able to check off each read bit of the poem. This slows the read (a virtue in the opinion of most I’m fairly sure) and also almost forces a reader to pay more than normal attention to each bit, and think about the task of reading. The poem explicitly tells the reader to take extra pains while he’s reading, so the claim that pressure to pay more than normal attention to one’s journey through the text seems to me objectively true. I feel I could support most of my reactions to the poem similarly, but am not up to doing that right now. My aim now is simply to compare this one thing the Sondheim text objectively does I believe any reasonable person would agree to what seems to me an absence of any thing like it..The Jones poem does nothing according to any logic I can see. It jump-cuts from one clause-length narrative to another entirely unconnected to it in any meaningful sense (I say with a fair confidence that I am here being objective in the reasonable sense that (verbal) meaninglessness can be objectively defined as words arranged in such a way as to confuse a large majority of readers or listeners, and no defense of their meaningfulness will change any but a very few minds about that)..The Sondheim contains one fresh element, or perhaps can be said to carry out a fresh design; and every poem needs something fresh–objectively. If we start with the dogma that a poem needs to move one, and know objectively from a study of the effects of poetry on human beings that a poem that does absolutely nothing new will rarely move anyone, even those who claim to like some such poem..The Jones poem is not fresh—because although its particular images are wildly different from the images in conventional poems—they lack all coherence and therefore result in chaos—objectively result in it, I say, using the same argument I previously used—and chaos is never fresh however different its elements, one chaos being perceived by the sane as just about entirely the same as any other chaos. I think this observation important (and especially like it because it just occurred to me as I was writing this): the Sondheim is not chaos (although possibly not cohering here and there..I think I could find some virtues in the Jones poem if I tried, but I’m sure they wouldn’t equal the virtues in the Sondheim I’ve already written about in this thread, and I’ve found more since then. I claim they are objectively superior to any virtues in the Jones I’m now intuitively aware of, but that’s admittedly just an assertion, but one made because I’m not up to a full dissertation on the two poems—here..Frankly, I think that I’ve shown beyond reasonable doubt that the Sondheim is the better of the two poems. Which makes me think maybe my challenge would have been that someone show why they are equal. Or of what value any discussion of the merits of any poem is if we agree in advance than nobody’s opinion means anything..
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
Here’s my bad artwork again. I’m dead in the head, again, and have had a busy day–5 hours helping set up a local Arts & Humanities council show–a bunch of tables for craftspeople and painters, etc., to display and try to sell wares, and organizations trying to sell tickets and/or memberships like our local theatre group. A way of circulating, and fun, but tiring. Anyway, I’m just going to say a few things about the work–which I’ll call “mp” for the time being.
First off, let me say that it’s as hard, and important, to show why an artwork is a failure as it is to show why it is a success. Against some views, I hold that one way to show that a work is bad is to point out what it does not have. This one, for me, does not have what I consider the most important thing any work must have, a unifying principle. Many artists sneer at the need for one, but their best works always have one, and I believe they recognize that intuitively. “MP” has no design focus that I can see. No conceptual center, either. If it had both, would they be in the same place? I don’t know.
This thing makes me think of golf, and I don’t like gold. What do the red lines say? Nothing, to me. I do like the 9 repeating in the nearby g but it’s momentarily interesting without connecting to the rest of the piece. I like the climb of the m’s, but–again–where are they going and why? I’m seeing random graphics, nothing more.
Pointing out what’s bad helps us better experience the absence of those thing in good art; having what a bad work lacks pointed out helps us better expreience what is in a good work that makes it good. Now, I am not contending that some bad in a work would be bad in any other work. Although some bads, like lack of a unifying princile, I consider universally bad. Tone is part of any good work’s unifying principle, and some elements of the work which seem bad in some respects may, if necessary for tone, prove good. A clumsy syntactical step in a formal poem becomes more good than bad if it is required by the meter.
Gad, I’m sleepy.
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Sunday, September 16th, 2012
More Thoughts on What a Literary Critic Is.
Needless to say, a literary critic’s function is not only to analyze individual poems. He should also consider (albeit in less detail) a poet’s entire oeuvre, or some distinct portion of it—and take on larger groups of poets—up to as many of all the poets whose poetry is extant as he is able to.
Another single attribute any critic of value has to have is the ability to recognize superior new poets and bring them to the attention of his readers before anyone else does—and/or present the first good case for singling them out . A critic of the first-rank will go one step further: he will recognize superior new kinds of poetry, and describe its virtues before anyone else—and probably two to five decades before any academic critic does.
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Saturday, September 15th, 2012
There’s a discussion at leafepress.com the title of which is, “What is Literary Criticism? What is a Literary Critic?” It’s mainly between Conrad DiDiodato and John Bloomberg-Rissman, but Ed Baker takes a few potshots at the others, basically reiterating the standard belief of the romantic poet that criticism is irrelevant to poets.
The discussion annoyed me because it made no references to my criticism. Of course, I didn’t really expect it to, although Conrad knows a little of my work, but I have trouble listening to people taking tenth-rate critics seriously when my work is available. Yes, I am that arrogantly convinced of the value of my criticism. Not that I’m all that sure it’s any good, but that I am positive that it’s many orders of magnitude better than Derrida’s, say, or DeMan’s, or that moron Foucault, which these guys seem to admire (although they do seem to be familiar with a wide range of critics, some of whom I don’t take as tenth-rate, like Cleanth Brooks.
The discussion annoyed me more because, like so many such discussions, it starts nowhere, really, and splathers inconclusively severalwhere. Its central defect is absence of defined axiom-setting terms—due to the standard belief of its participants that “artworks . . . can NEVER be fully unpacked.” The truth is that any artwork can be unpacked sufficiently to satisfy any sane person. Just as the distance from my house to yours can be measured sufficiently to satisfy any sane person although it can never be measure perfectly.
This absence of defined terms allows them to say sometimes interesting things, and not worry about contradiction. And it satisfies the political need of the naïve to feel certain all beliefs are equally true/false, just as all persons are equally good/bad. The only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. This is a problem, because false beliefs are much more likely to lead to grief than true beliefs—as every knows intuitively but intellectuals keep out of their verbal awarenesses. For example, an intellectual won’t make a fifty-foot swan dive into a pool whose water he knows is frozen because his reptile brain will give him nausea at the thought of doing so. But the nausea will never work its way up into his verbal awareness and bother him with the possibility that a belief that a fifty-foot dive into a pool of solid ice is harmful is true whereas a belief that it is not harmful is false.
I know. Simplistic. But in the final analysis, true.
I began this expecting simply to answer the questions in the title of the leafepress.com discussion. No, not answer them, just scatter a few thoughts concerning them. I’ve elsewhere answered the questions pretty well, I believe, although I’m not sure when or where. Right now, however, I have one new thought (for me) about the subject: that there is an important difference between a literary critic and a literary appreciator. A literary critic tells you—make that, “tries to tell you”—everything important to know about a particular literary work based on its expressive elements alone. Which will include what is denoted, what connoted and what is explicitly alluded to. It will, I believe, also include what is implicitly alluded strongly enough for most knowledgeable engagents of the work under analysis to connect to. “Fourscore and ten years ago,” for instance, with “Lincoln’s “fourscore and ten years ago” being an explicit reference.
Hmm, I see that I’ve defined a literary critic, except that I left “literary work” undefined. So be it, for now, although it’s easy to define; it’d take too many words for me to bother doing that here (and I’ve done it elsewhere). Oh, one other minor omission: I didn’t say what it is important to know about a literary work. I’ve defined that, too. It wouldn’t take all that many words, but too many for me to bother with here.
Let me turn to what a literary appreciator is. I decided I needed the term because it seems to me my definition of the literary critic is almost identical to any new critic’s. But new critics opposed going beyond the artifact on the page or pages in analyzing it. I believe them correct to dos, but only strictly speaking. I want someone telling me about a poem, say, to tell me things about its maker, including things having little or nothing to do with the poem. Like, Wow, a guy like Ezra Pound could believe in a totally loony economics theory yet write “In a Station of the Metro!” A literary appreciator is a literary critic who also is willing to discuss all kinds of things about a poem beyond what it is as literature. He is not someone who slights literary analysis to do this. He must also avoid finding implicit allusions that aren’t there for any normal person and building wacky psychiatric interpretations out of them the way Freud did and has followers have. As basically all the French critics and their allies have in diverse ways.
Not that there isn’t a place for, say, someone who focuses on what forces in society may have influenced the final form of a poem. Such a person is neither a literary critic nor a literary appreciator; he is a sociological critic of literature.
Before I end I want to mention that I would divide literary critics into two kinds: the practical literary critic and the theoretical literary critic (unless I think of a better name). The first deals with works of literature, each mostly by itself, although he may (and usually should) connect a work to other works of its author, and to like works by others; the second does this also, but presents some kind of theory for the nature and value of a literary work—not just that rhyme is pleasurable, for instance, but why it is. Along the way he will provide a taxonomy of the kinds of literary works he deals with, and a continuing list of the techniques used in them with detailed descriptions of them, and why they are effective.
Above the two kinds of literary critics is the literary philosopher. Such a person is a serious seeker of significant final truths about literature. He will probably also be a philosopher of aesthetics, one seriously seeking significant final truths about all the arts, not just literature. My taxonomy continues upward, finally arriving at the neurophysiological theorist—who is one step below the Total Verospher, who seriously seeks significant final truths about everything!
Urp.
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Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
Here’s my sonnet, again, back for further dissection
Much have I ranged the lolli-skied deep art
that Stevens somehow miracled around
his meditations into seem and are,
and each time burned eventually to found
a like domain. I’ve often ventured, too,
to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,
and earthlife synapsed in the underhue
of Roethke’s thought and felt no less an urge
to master his techniques, as well. And I’ve
explored the fading fragments of the past
that Pound re-morninged windily alive,
sure I would one day follow on his path.How vain they’ve been, how vain my fantasies:
their only yield so far just lines like these.
The first question of the day is whether or not the “mis-used” words are virtues or defects. They are “miracled” and “synapsed,” two nouns used as verbs. The noun-to-verb change happens all the time in English, yet there seem still to be people peopling the outskirts of provincialism whom it dismays. Of course, when one comes on a noun that’s been used as a verb for the first time in the one’s experience, it is bound to seem slightly wrong. In a poem, though, no one should object to this practice if the object is freshness. Which it almost always is in my poems. Still, one can over-do it. Whether I have with these two, and with the later “re-morninged,” which is both a noun used as a verb and a word given an unexpected prefix. “Re-morninged” may be strained, but I like it (and used it in all my versions of this poem) because it is also a metaphor for the particular way Pound brought the past “to life again.”
Then there are my coinages, “lolli-skied,” which I’ve already discussed, and “underhue,” which may well not be a coinage. If a coinage, it uses “under” as a prefix the same way Wordsworth did, so I consider it a plus. (If I were an academic, I’d quote the passages where Wordsworth used it, but I’m not–’cause I got more important things to do.) Again, whether these are plusses or minuses is a to each his own proposition.
I’m not sure what “seem” and “are” are the way they are used here. Verbs as nouns, I guess–“seem” meaning “things as they seem,” “are,” “things as they are.” So, verbs as noun preceded by ellipses? In any case, they are appropriate here for indicating one constant theme of Stevens’s poetry, usually specifically with the difference between reality and our metaphors for it. On the other hand, “are” is inserted for the rhyme. It should be evident by the fourth line that I could have used fewer words, and sometimes shorter words, to say what I have, but didn’t because I had to have so many syllables per line, and get the meter right. The fourth line should be just “burned to found.” And “found” seems a bit of a strained effort to make a rhyme. Poets don’t “found” poetic worlds so much as “fashion,” “create,” or “form” them. Sometimes such a not-quite right word works beautifully, though–I’m thinking of Blake when he asked “who could frame” the “fearful symmetry of the tyger.
I remember, too, never liking the way “to” followed “too,” but I couldn’t think how elsewise to write that part. Lines 6 and 7 are downright bad due to the padding I’m speaking of “to where the weather’s smallest pieces, earth,/ and earthlife synapsed in the underhue . . .” This ultimately became, “to where the small dirt’s awkward first grey steps/ toward high-hued sensibility begin . . .” which is superior (I believe) though not perfect because all four of the adjectives in first of the two lines adds something to the picture the dirt in spring using seeds to ascend to color (and “sensibility,” which I won’t defend here). Does such padding kill a poem? Not unless overdone, in formal verse, where I believe padding nearly always happens–but pays off in the best poems with in a smooth rhythm and rhyme (and rhyme is a wonderful thing, so what if great poems can eschew it). Does padding kill this poem? I frankly don’t know. Certainly “the fading fragments of the past,” wounds it, not only as padding but as cliche–i.e., fragments of the past are pretty sure to be “fading.”
I don’t remember if the version of this sonnet I consider the final one still “has “windily” in it. I wanted to refer to the brisk weather I thought rule many of Pound’s best poems, but “windily,” alas, also suggests the windy speaker that he too often was.
Finally, there’s the repetition of “How vain they’ve been,” which I confess was due to the need to fill out the line–although one can argue that it helps emphasize the strong feeling of the couplet it’s in. As I’ve said before, however, when I read this poem after not having read it for probably more than ten years, I did like it, not noticing the problems I’ve now found in it. I’m convinced it’s not a mjor poem, but it may not be a bad one.
Incidentally, I’ve not yet mentioned the poem’s subject. It is a simple, conventional one: the desire of a poet to write great poetry–with explicit praise to the side of three poets, and implicit praise of a fourth (Keats). I claim that no poem’s subject is important, unless it’s unclear or ridiculously stupid (e.g, raw toads taste better spread with peanut butter). It’s how the subject is treated that counts. What kind of monument to it does the poem’s words create? Most import for me has always been how well it gets an engagent to Manywhere-at-Once (which is where an effective metaphor takes you, but not only metaphors), how often, how deeply, and how richly. Oh, and archetypal depth is crucial for the best poems. This one has to do with its speaker’s needs for greatness, and that’s are archetypally significant as any subject can be.
I never bothered to mention my poems “melodation,” either. That’s what I call the many ways poems can give auditory pleasure: rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, even cacophony in the right place; and meter. I claim that even poor poems usually have effective melodation. There’s always the danger of too much of one kind–alliteration, most commonly; and of cliche–in choice of rhymenants (which is what I call words that rhyme), for example, “love/above.” My sonnet avoids cliched rhyming through the use of my bow-rhymes, and I don’t think any of my melodations is overdone. Most of them, by the way, came naturally. I think few people who have composed enough poems think about melodation while making a poem: it just comes. Every once in a while, you may have to think about it when not sure which of two or more words is right for a line–usually one will make the best sense but not sound as well as a second.
Did anyone notice how I ran out of gas toward the end of the above. For a while yesterday I really thought this would turn into a Terrific Example of New Criticism at its Best. Oh, well, I don’t yet think it’s wretched.
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Saturday, March 7th, 2015
An “argument” far too often used in debates between the impassioned (I among them) is the assertion that one’s opponent is in denial. “Denial,” I suddenly am aware, belongs on my list of words killed by nullinguists. It has come to mean opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose. When used in what I’ll a “sweeper epithet” (for want of knowing what the common term for it is, and I’m sure there is one) like “Holocaust-Denial” (a name given to some group of people believing in something), it has become a synonym for opposition to something it is impossible rationally to oppose–or morally to express opposition to! Thus, when I describe those who reject Shakespeare as the author of the works attributed to him as “Shakespeare-Deniers,” I am (insanely) taken to mean that those I’m describing are evil as well as necessarily wrong. Now, I do think them wrong, and even think they are mostly authoritarians, albeit benign ones, but I use the term to mean, simply, “those who deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare.”
Or I would if not having the grain of fellow-feeling that I have, and therefore recognizing that small compromises with my love of maximally-accurate use of words due to the feelings of those not as able to become disinterested as I am may sometimes be wise. Hence, I nearly always call Shakespeare-Deniers the term they seem to prefer: “Anti-Stratfordians.” But I have now taken to call those that Anti-Stratfordians call “Stratfordians,” “Shakespeare-Affirmers.
(Note: now I have to add “disinterested” to be list of killed words, for I just checked the Internet to be sure it was the word I wanted here, and found that the Merriam Webster dictionary online did have that definition for it, but second to its definition as “uninterested!” Completely disgusting. Although, for all I know, my definition for it may be later than the stupid one; if so, it just means to me that it was improved, and I’m not against changing the language if the improvement is clearly for the better as here–since “disinterested” as “not interested” doesn’t do the job any better than “uninterested,” and can be used for something else that needs a word like it, and will work in that usage more sharply without contamination by vestiges of a second, inferior meaning.)
Of course, to get back to the word my main topic, “denial,” means the act of denial, and indicates only opposition, not anything about the intellectual validity or moral correctness of it. Except in the pre-science of psychology where it means, “An unconscious defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge painful realities, thoughts, or feelings.” I accept such a mechanism, but would prefer a better term be used for it. For me it is a probably invariable component of a rigidniplex. Hey, I already have a name for it: “uncontradictability.”
No, not quite. It seems to me it is a mechanism automatically called into action against certain kinds of contradiction: facts that contradict the core-axiom of a rigidniplex, directly or, more likely, eventually. Maybe “rigdenial,” (RIHJ deh ny ul)? For now, at any rate. Meaning; rigidnikal denial of something (usually a fact or the validity of an argument) due entirely to its threatening, or being perceived as a threat to) one’s rigidniplex, not its validity (although it could be true!).
When I began this entry, I planned just to list some of the kinds of what I’m now calling “rigdenial” there are, preparatory to (much later, and somewhere else) describing how it works according to knowlecular psychology. I seem to have gotten carried away, and not due to one of the opium or caffeine pills I sometimes take. I’ve gotten to my list now, though. It is inspired by my bounce&flump with Paul Crowley, who sometimes seems nothing but a rigdenier.
Kinds of Rigdenial
1. The denied matter is a lie.
2. The denied matter is the result of the brainwashing the person attacking the rigidnik with it was exposed to in his home or school
3. The denied matter is insincere–that is, the person attacking the rigidnik with it is only pretending to believe it because the cultural establishment he is a part of would take his job away from him, or do something dire to him like call him names, if he revealed his true beliefs.
4. The denied matter lacks evidentiary support (and will, no matter how many attempts are made to demonstrate such support: e.g., Shakespeare’s name is on a title-page? Not good enough, his place of residence or birth must be there, too. If it were, then some evidence that that person who put it there actually knew Shakespeare personally is required. If evidence of that were available, then court documents verifying it signed by a certain number of witnesses would be required. Eventually evidence that it could not all be part of some incredible conspiracy may be required.
5. The denied matter has been provided by people with a vested interest in the rigidnik’s beliefs being invalidated.
6. The denied matter is obvious lunacy, like a belief in Santa Claus.
7. The rigidnik has already disproved the denied matter.
8. The person advancing the denied matter lacks the qualifications to do so.
9. The rigidnik, as an authority in the relevant field finds the denied matter irrelevant.
10. The rigidnik interprets the meaning of the words in a denied text in such a way as to reverse their apparent meaning. (a form of wishlexia, or taking a text to mean what you want it to rather than which it says)
11. One form of rignial (as I now want to call it) is simple change-of-subject, or evasion.
12. Others.
I got tired. Some of the above are repetitious, some don’t belong, others have other defects. Almost all of them are also examples of illogic. But the list is just a start. I’ll add more items to it when next facing Paul–who has a long rejoinder to the post I just had here.
Omar Khayyám
Ghiyāth ad-Dīn Abu’l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām Nīshāpūrī (/ˈoʊmɑr kaɪˈjɑːm, -ˈjæm, ˈoʊmər/; Persian: غیاث الدین ابوالفتح عمر ابراهیم خیام نیشابورﻯ, pronounced [xæjˈjɒːm]; 18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131), commonly known as Omar Khayyám, was a sufi mystic, Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet. He also wrote treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy, music, and Islamic theology.[3]
Born in Nishapur in North Eastern Iran, at a young age he moved to Samarkand and obtained his education there. Afterwards he moved to Bukhara and became established as one of the major mathematicians and astronomers of the medieval period. He is the author of one of the most important treatises on algebra written before modern times, the Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, which includes a geometric method for solving cubic equations by intersecting a hyperbola with a circle.[4] He contributed to a calendar reform.
Born: May 18, 1048, Nishapur, Iran
Died: December 4, 1131, Greater Khorasan
yogananda has a wonderful rendering and unraveling of his major opus, his Rubáiyát.
Thanks for the additional info on a Major Davinciator, Karl.