FRANCIS BACON

The strength of the arguments for Shakespeare, and the weakness of the arguments against him have done little to discourage anti-Stratfordians from putting forward droves of different candidates for the title of True Author. The main ones at this writing are Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley.

The most venerable authorship campaign has been the one carried out on behalf of Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon was a born aristocrat, successful politician, and widely-admired philosopher and man of letters—the only man of the times who was capable of producing such great works as Shakespeare’s. Or so his backers imagine. The first argument in support of Bacon is based on a looneation, the fact that we have no report of Shakespeare’s ever meeting Bacon, nor any mention of him together with Bacon in the same text. For the perceptive, this oddity can only be explained by Bacon’s being Shakespeare. (No chance that no one would any more think of putting an entertainer like Shakespeare with a government man like Bacon back then than anybody would today couple singer Eminem and one-time US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.)

In January 1592 Bacon wrote his uncle, Lord Burghley, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” His life’s work was a project he called “the Great Instauration,” the regeneration of learning, based on scientific reasoning. Psychology was to be one of his topics. Its lessons, he wrote, should be taught through “visible representations” and through “actual types and models, by which the entire process of the mind should be set as it were before the eyes.” To Baconians, this could mean only one thing: that he planned to employ plays to set forth his psychology. Practically proving that is the fact that, except for discussions of various historical figures and comments on human behavior in his essays and other writings, we have no work of psychology from him—in his name.

Considering the horror of an important aristocrat’s being caught writing for the public stage, and how incapable any secret True Author would be of thinking to write novels or closet plays or plays for the court only instead, he must therefore have used Shakespeare as a front, or used his name as a pseudonym not realizing it belonged to someone else in the theatre.

The anti-Stratfordian, John Michell, admits that there are flaws in the supposition that Bacon wrote The Oeuvre. (Michell is very even-handed, always pointing out an equal number of flaws in each candidate’s case, including Shakespeare’s; he never points out, however, that in doing this, he covers all the “flaws” in Shakespeare’s case, but less than ten percent of the genuine flaws in any other candidate’s.) “There are some items in the list of Shakespeare’s alleged attributes that cannot easily be explained by the hypothesis of Bacon’s authorship,” says he. “Francis Bacon was no professional mariner, nor was he a soldier, and Shakespeare’s apparently first-hand descriptions of hunting and the sports and pastimes of the nobility seem rather too robust for someone with Bacon’s delicate health and studious habits. There is nothing to show that Bacon had the experience of Denmark which some have attributed to the author of Hamlet, nor is he known to have traveled in Italy. These are among the weak points in the case for Bacon as the sole author of Shakespeare. Despite their similarities, the two writers are still not perfectly matched.”

On the other hand: “Bacon and the author of Shakespeare both had the same classically learned, legally attuned cast of mind. Both were conservative traditionalists, supporters of lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm. Both writers were linguistically inventive, commanding a wide vocabulary and coining new words and expressions. They each quoted from the same literary sources, often in paraphrase or with slight inaccuracies, as if drawing from learned mnemones rather than looking up references. They had an equal tendency towards secretiveness and were interested in subterfuges, disguises and hidden communications. There are many examples of these in Shakespeare’s plays, while Bacon’s addiction to ciphers and coded messages is only too well known to those who have lost themselves in the quest for a cipher in Shakespeare. Finally, both Bacon and, on the evidence of his Sonnets, Shakespeare were lovers of young men.”

Even if all this were true, so what? That such similarities should be enough to overcome all all the hard evidence for Shakespeare is absurd. But it’s moot, because:

(1) Shakespeare the author was not classically learned, nor his mind any more legally attuned than the minds of the others writing plays at the time.

(2) The majority of those in the middle and upper classes supported lawful authority and a hierarchically ordered realm, so Bacon’s resembling Shakespeare in this means nothing.

(3) Many writers of the time (Nashe, for instance, and Harvey) were linguistically inventive, so both Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s being so is another so what.

(4) There is no evidence that Shakespeare had any “tendency towards secretiveness and (was) interested in subterfuges, disguises (including the cross-dressing practically obligatory with all-male casts, one would think) and hidden communications” outside the plot-energizing fun he had with them in his comedies, as have the majority of writers of comedies before and since, so he cannot be considered necessarily similar to Bacon in this respect.

(5) As for both Bacon and Shakespeare’s sexual preferences, there seems to be good evidence that Bacon was homosexual, but little or none that Shakespeare was. The only direct testimony about the latter that we have is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20,” in which Shakespeare explicitly denies any homosexual interest in the young man so many of his sonnets were addressed to.

Of course, all the orthodox authorities on either Bacon or Shakespeare have denied their identity on stylistic grounds alone. Baconians argue, with some plausibility, that if Bacon wrote poetry, its style would have differed from the style of his prose, and might well have sounded Shakespearean. They have no direct concrete evidence that he did write poetry, other than some nondescript verse translations of the Psalms he wrote toward the end of his life. Aubrey, however, speculated that he was “a good Poet, but conceal’d”–apparently because Bacon spoke of himself in a letter as a concealed poet. But he wrote it to a known poet, in such a way as to indicate that he was merely an unpublished poet since he took it for granted that his correspondent knew of his “concealed poetry.” Moreover, in a work about the Essex affair, Bacon later said he’d written a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth in hopes it’d reconcile her to Essex–adding, “Although I profess not to be a poet.” To authorship cranks, “I profess not,” would mean “I pretend not”; to the rest of us, it would mean, “poetry is a minor sideline for me.”

Proof that the diligent overturner-of-received-wisdom can always find evidence to support his delusions is the discovery by other Baconians of a hint of Bacon’s literary pseudonymity in a letter from the continent
that Bacon’s friend, Sir Tobie Matthew, wrote him. In a postscript to the letter, Matthew said, “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” Sidney Lee surmised that Thomas Southwell, living in Liege at the time, and a son of a man named Bacon, was meant, which makes sense. What does not make sense is the way the Baconians have taken Matthew, which is that he was referring to Francis or his brother (another authorship candidate)–revealing to him as a fact that might interest him that, hey, someone with your name (yourself—or your brother Roger) although he goes by another, is the brightest Englishman on this side of the sea. Preposterous, even if either of the Bacons was a resident on the continent.

Then there’s Durning-Lawrence. He managed to turn a 1645 anonymous work, The Great Assises holden in Parnassus by Apollo and his Assessours, into evidence that Bacon was a poet because it names him (in a spoof trial) as “Chancellor of Parnassus,” which would make him a leading poet. Unfortunately, in the same text, Shakespeare is mentioned, as well, which suggests that even if Bacon was a secret poet, he was not Shakespeare.

There’s also Jonson, who in his The Poetaster includes a character, Ovid, Jr., who is supposed by Baconians to be based on Bacon-as-Shakespeare (Jonson, of course, being privy to The Truth but not above telling everyone about it through a satire). Ovid, Jr., is depicted translating a passage from Ovid that contains a couplet that Shakespeare put on the title-page of his Venus and Adonis. Ovid, Sr., finding Ovid, Jr., doing this, accuses him of writing a tragedy, Medea, for the common players, which Ovid, Jr., denies. Odd that Jonson would openly refer to Venus and Adonis’s title-page but then not find a play-title more like something actually written by Shakespeare for his satirical purposes. Once again, unbelievably flimsy speculation is all Bacon’s supporters can come up with in support of his candidacy.

But Michell brings in something better, he thinks: “a contemporary painting of a well-known Shakespearian scene” in an old inn, “the fourteenth-century White Hart Hotel on Holywell Hill (which) was in Bacon’s time the nearest inn to his mansion at Gorhambury, two miles away.” So, a painting about a subject Shakespeare used in a narrative poem, which was popular (“a common renaissance theme,” as one scholar put it) before he used it, and more popular after he used it, in an inn near where Bacon lived, is supposed to be more than a trivial coincidence. I don’t buy it. Even though, according to Michell, St. Albans, where Bacon lived, is named fifteen times in The Oeuvre, Stratford-upon-Avon, not once. Of course, St. Albans was somewhat more relevant to the military history of England than Stratford, but that means nothing to Baconians. I will say that I’ve written more than ten plays, myself, and not one of them mentions my hometown.

Next on the list of “evidence” for Bacon is Joseph Hall’s Satires (1599), which criticizes a writer Hall calls Labeo, a name with—steady, now—b, a and o, just like “Bacon!” What’s more, Labeo is a lawyer, like Bacon. Strained interpretation of Hall’s work can make it suggest that there are people pretending to be poets about, and that Shakespeare may be involved (due to a possible reference to the same Ovid poem the epigraph on the title-page of Venus and Adonis is from). A year later, in a continuation of his Satires, Hall writes of “the craftie cuttle (who) lieth sure/ In the black Cloud of his thick vomiture,” going on to ask, “Who list complaine of wronged faith or fame/ When he may shift it to anothers name?” To me, Hall is speaking of shifting blame to another; to a Baconian, he is speaking of shifting the writings others complain of (as beneath the dignity of a courtier, I imagine) to another author.

One Major Clue in the poem is a mention of a helmet, which is “a reference to the ‘Honourable Order of the Knights of the Helmet’ described in Bacon’s Gesta Greyorum, produced at Gray’s Inn in 1594, and thus pointing to him as the author of Venus and Adonis”–at least in the mind of Baconian Bertram Theobald, writing in 1932.

To follow up on this, we have to go first to the appendix of John Marston’s poem, Pigmalions Image (1598), which says, “So Labeo did complain his love was stone,/ Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none;/ Yet Lynceus knows that in the end of this/ He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.” Michell points out the parallel of the first two lines of this to lines spoken in Venus and Adonis by Venus to Adonis, “Art thou obdurate, flinty hard as steel/ Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth?” The other two lines refer to Adonis’s being transformed into a flower. To a sane person, all this shows is that Marston was (perhaps) influenced by a popular poem of the time, and/or using conventional language current in poetry then. To Baconians, he is practically screaming that he is using Venus and Adonis to alert us to the identity of The True Author as Labeo/Bacon.

To “prove” this, Michell brings in one of Marston’s Satires, number 4, entitled “Redactio.” There “Labeo is specifically identified in a line which Marston addresses to Hall: ‘What, not mediocria firma from thy spite?’ Mediocria firma (implying, ‘Hold fast to the middle course!’) was Francis Bacon’s family motto, belonging only to himself and his brother Anthony. So this is the conclusion: Francis Bacon was Labeo, Labeo was the author of Venus and Adonis, and Bacon was therefore responsible for at least some of the writings attributed to Shakespeare.”

Michell has found H. N. Gibson, a befuddled Shakespearean scholar who goes along with this crap, but comes to the rescue of the Bard by pointing out that Marston and Hall, thought Bacon the author of Venus and Adonis by mistake. I can’t see that, since the name of its author was on Venus and Adonis. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Marston and Hall thought Labeo the author of Venus and Adonis, and that one use of a conventional Latin phrase that was the Bacon family motto is a long way from plausibly demonstrating that Labeo was Bacon.  Even if Labeo was intended to satirize Bacon, there’s no reasonable connection from that to the authorship of Venus and Adonis.  I suppose I have to go along with Gibson, though, in considering the Labeo matter the best evidence extant for Bacon. Which is saying nearly nothing at all.

One last bit of “hard” evidence for Bacon is the Northumberland Manuscript, a damaged and now-incomplete collection of writings discovered in 1867 that Michell says “seems to have come from the office of Francis Bacon.” It has a contents page that mentions both Bacon and Shakespeare—and Thomas Nashe—that obviously means that work by these three was initially in the manuscript. Baconians, however, find the sequence, “By mr ffrauncis Bacon/ Essaies by the same author/ William Shakespeare” followed by the names of two of Shakespeare’s histories, evidence that Bacon was Shakespeare, and that whoever wrote the sequence made a point of distinguishing the stuff in the collection that Bacon wrote under his own name from that which he wrote under Shakespeare’s—and, in case he forgot, I suppose, made sure to indicate that Shakespeare was the same author as Bacon. Even Michell doesn’t seem to take this too seriously.

The most notorious “evidence” for Bacon is cryptographic. For decades, fanatics have scoured Shakespeare’s and related works (including paintings, engravings, and the like) for secret messages, most of them finding nothing anyone but a few of their craziest followers also see. None of these escape William F. and Elizebeth S. Friedman’s demolition of all such ciphers and word-games past, present and to-be in their The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. The thoroughness of the Friedmans’ work makes my bothering with the message-finders here unnecessary—though I will in due course critique a secret message found by one believing that Marlowe was the True Author, or something close to it. The reader will have to take my word that this secret message is the best of the crop, and that I could similarly dispose of any others, assuming the Friedmans hadn’t already done so. I might add that most recent anti-Stratfordians do their best to keep distance between themselves and the message-finders, for even they tend to agree with Orthodoxy about their nuttiness. Michell, as sympathetic to idiocy as any of them, is compelled to admit that while he thinks there are good reasons to believe in Baconianism, “the Baconian symbolists and cryptologists have done little to help it.”

Baconians, of course, like all anti-Stratfordians, can find references of every possible description to their man and events in his life in The Oeuvre. One such reference is Mistress Quickly, a servant-girl, inserting the following joke into a Latin lesson being given to the boy William in The Merry Wives of Windsor: “Hang-hog is latten for Bacon, I warrant you.” Here’s what Michell says about this: “This comic exchange echoes a Bacon family joke, included with other anecdotes in the 1671 edition of Francis Bacon’s Resuscitutio. It was about his father, Sir Nicholas. At the end of a trial in which he was judge, Sir Nicholas Bacon was about to pass sentence of death when the prisoner asked for his mercy on the grounds that they were related:

‘Prithee,’ said my lord judge, ‘how came that in?’

‘Why, if it please you, my lord, your name is Bacon and mine is Hog, and in all ages Hog and Bacon have been so near kindred that they are not to be separated.’ ‘Ay; but’, replied Judge Bacon, ‘you and I cannot be kindred except you be hanged; for Hog is not Bacon until it be well hanged.’

‘Hang-hog is Latin for Bacon’ is surely a reference to this joke. Its occurrence in The Merry Wives of Windsor is a mystery, typifying much of the Baconian evidence. It is suggestive and provocative, but leads to no particular conclusion.” To which I say, “Nonsense.” There’s no reason some version of the Latin joke couldn’t have been in wide circulation before the lives of both Lord Bacon and Shakespeare and/or that it couldn’t have occurred to some schoolboy who knew nothing of Bacon’s family. Or Shakespeare could have heard the Bacon joke and used (part of) it. For people like Michell, however, trivial coincidences don’t exist, only mysteries.

All kinds of wasted energy has been devoted by Baconians to parallelisms—thoughts, phrases and expressions which occur in the writings of both Shakespeare and Bacon. Ignatius Donnelly devoted nearly two hundred pages of “Identical Expressions, Metaphors, Opinions, Quotations, Studies, Errors, Unusual Words, Characters and Styles” of a Baconian book of his of 1888. John Michell is fair enough to present the orthodox response, which is that “there was no special relationship between the two great authors (or, I might insert, between Shakespeare and any other writer someone thinks was really Shakespeare–BG) other than the bond that linked all literary men of their time. This was clearly demonstrated by Harold Bayley in The Shakespeure Symphony, 1906. With scholarly dedication he read through the literature of Bacon’s time, finding the same phrases and metaphors in the works of many different authors.”

Ironically, Bayley used his findings not to vindicate Shakespeare but to show that Bacon was behind the creation of all the great literature of the time by schooling all the competent writers of the time in philosophy, teaching them new words and expressions, and overseeing the writings which he allowed them to publish under their own names. Among the problems with this is that there is no direct or even anecdotal evidence for it. It is also ridiculous.

There is little to be said against the Baconian case as a whole except that the best evidence is all against it, and there is no direct evidence, nor any convincing lesser sort of evidence, for it.

Specific problems with it are that Bacon died in 1626, three years after Heminges and Condell said Shakespeare was dead, which is direct evidence that he was not Shakespeare. There is also the evidence making Shakespeare an actor, which I don’t think even the wackiest advocates for Bacon think Bacon was. That a gigantic, complex, ungainly, preposterously implausible conspiracy would have been required to allow Bacon to secretly be Shakespeare is another grave problem with Bacon’s being Shakespeare. I will be saying more about that later, since it applies to all the contestants in the Who Is Shakespeare Contest—except Will Shakespeare.

Next Chapter here.
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The Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive

BACKGROUND

As part of my attempt during the past 47 years to construct a total theory of psychology, I’ve posited all sorts of brain-mechanisms and cerebral operations. It is only now that I’ve begun to think in terms of the drives that most psychologists believe in, some of which most certainly exist—the reproductive and hunger-satisfaction drives, for instance. Drives have always been part of my theory, but I’ve been mostly interested in details of their functioning rather than with what they are as wholes—for instance, in what poems are, and how the brain makes them, rather than in some drive behind them (a communicative drive, say, or some sort of creativity drive—actually almost certainly a mixture of various drives).

It was in trying (very recently) to write about the attraction of human beings to beauty, that got me involved with drives, for I eventually attributed it to what I called “the sensory-satisfaction drive.” At length I found that to be a sub-drive of what I am temporarily calling the “cerebral-satisfaction drive. Since I have long thought in terms of taxonomies, I connected that to what may be a final drive for human beings and, possibly, all living organisms, “the pleasure-maximization drive.” While I had always been a sort of Benthamite (as I not very deeply understand the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham), and thus believed all of life comes down to a being’s attempt to maximize its pleasure (which, of course, includes minimizing its pain), I had never proposed a drive to carry out the process of maximization.

The best part about thinking of human thought and behavior in terms of drives is how helpfully it simplifies exposition of one’s ideas about said thought and behavior into a followable orderliness. Or so I found it to be. (And if the rest of this essay doesn’t convince you it is, that will only be due to your not having read the essay I wrote before this one, without bringing in drives till the very end.)

In any case, the drive I like the best is the cerebral-satisfaction drive, which I’m making the subject of this essay. Before getting to it, though, I need to tell you about the evaluceptual awareness. And before getting to that, I need to introduce you to my theory of multiple awarenesses.

Much of my theorizing about the brain goes far from the borders of certified science, but not my multiple awarenesses theory, which has much in common with Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences,” and he’s a prize-winning certified Harvard scientist. It may well have been from him that I got my idea for my awarenesses. Be that as it may, I long ago proposed that the brain consists of a number of separate (but complexly inter-related) divisions of brain function, each concerned with constructing a different major understanding of existence. I distinguished them from Gardner’s intelligences by name because of they seem more different than similar to his.

So far, I posit ten awarenesses. I’m not sure whether I have too many or too few. In any case, “the evaluceptual awareness,” is one of them. Perhaps the first awareness (or proto-awareness) that evolved after what I call “the fundaceptual awareness,” it has to do with pleasure—and its opposite, pain. The evaluceptual awareness is at the core of what this essay is about, but I need first to give you an idea of the fundaceptual awareness to be able to describe its workings.

THE FUNDACEPTUAL AWARENESS

My idea of the fundaceptual awareness is boringly uncontroversial: it’s the awareness that has to do with the perception of self and other—with fundamental glandular and sensual perceptual data of the entire material world. It employs a huge number of sensory-receptors to gather “percepts.” I believe I use that term much as most others involved with neurophysiology (or whatever my subject is) do, but to avoid confusion, I need to emphasize that I define it simply as the kind of neurocept that is transmitted (in one guise or another) by a fundaceptual sensory-receptor to the fundaceptual awareness when the receptor is activated by the presence of a given stimulus in a person’s outer or inner environment—a particular photon in a particular locus in the person’s field of vision, say.

A neurocept is my coinage for “smallest unit of data the brain deals with.” There are many of these in my theory besides the percept, several of which I will be introducing you to.

The fundaceptual awareness has a second function which is close to as important as its first: the storage and retrieval of memories—which brings us to the essential organ of the fundaceptual awareness—and of the cerebrum as a whole: a mechanism I call the mnemoduct.

The mnemoduct consists of a tube of units called mnemo-dots, or m-dots, for short. One such cell, or organelle (I have no idea what they really are but feel confident something like them must exist), becomes active during every instacon (i.e., instant of consciousness) of a person’s lifetime, remaining active only until that instacon ends, never to become active again. During its period of activity, it records all the percepts then delivered to the fundaceptual awareness. When the instacon ends, the m-dot right after it on the mnemoduct becomes active and records another group of percepts. Ergo, the mnemoduct records a person’s interaction with his inverionments in chronological order.

Pretty simple, right? Actually, I’ve already ridiculously over-simplified my theory: I hypothesize many mnemoducts, for instance, one of many complications I will ignore on the grounds that my theory, while possibly simplistic to an extreme, is also impossible to describe in any kind of accessible way in less than an essay ten times the length of this one—at least by me.
So, we will go with one mnemoduct instead of many, and ignore all kinds of associated cells.

Now, then, while a given m-dot is active, the m-dot active during the prior instacon will attempt to activate previously stored percepts as units of memory which I term retrocepts. Let’s call this m-dot, the “remembering-dot.” The m-dot active just after it I will term the “outcome-dot.” Any retrocept that the remembering-dot succeeds in activating will be recorded in the outcome-dot along with the percepts it is simultaneously recording. So each m-dot will end its period of activation with a clump of percepts indicating what it is going on in the person’s inner and outer environments, and a clump of contextually-appropriate retrocepts.

To be contextually-appropriate, a retrocept must have followed one or more neurocepts in the remembering-dot a significant number of times—and other neurocepts in most or all of a number of the m-dots strung out behind the remembering-dot. A simple example should clarify this. Let remembering-dot X contain neurocept I (which could have come to it as either a percept or a retrocept). Let the eight m-dots just before X contain, in order, neurocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H.

If, say, there is a string of three m-dots somewhere, the first of which contains P; the second, I; and the third Q, I in m-dot X would send some energy to Q, because it once followed it, but very little because of how little appropriate Q is contextually. It would send much more energy to an m-dot holding J that immediately follows a string of m-dots containing, in order, retrocepts A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J—probably enough to activate J, with substantial contextual appropriateness. In short, remembering-dot X will be using memory-string A through I to activate J.

THE EVALUCEPTUAL AWARENESS

We are now ready, finally, to consider the evaluceptual awareness. To provide a little direct, scientifically-responsible background on it, here’s a few small smears of information from Wikipedia concerning certified neurophysiology’s equivalent of the evaluceptual awareness: “the perception of pain starts with the nociceptors . . . commonly found in the skin, membranes, deep fascias, mucosa, connective tissues of visceral organs, ligaments and articular capsules, muscles, tendons, periosteum, and arterial vessels . . . (which send) signal(s) to the brain when activated.”

Note: I don’t like “nociceptors,” so my name for pain-receptors is . . . “owceptors.”
Elsewhere in the Wikipedia entry I’m citing, all kinds of things are done with pain “in the spinal cord; midbrain; brainstem sites such as the parabrachial nucleus, the dorsal raphe (where facilitation or inhibition of neuron-activity takes place), locus coeruleus, and the medullary reticular formation involving . . . noradrenaline, serotonin, dopamine, histamine, and acetylcholine”—neurotransmitters many of which my theory is concerned with, acting pretty much as the experts say—but under different, made-up names, because of my use of them with almost no biochemical vocabulary, at all.

Wikipedia is curiously sparse about pleasure: “Pleasure can be considered from many different perspectives, from physiological (such as the hedonic hotspots that are activated during the experience) to psychological (such as the study of behavioral responses towards reward). Pleasure has also often been compared to, or even defined by many neuroscientists as, a form of alleviation of pain.”
The Wikipedia article goes on to indicate areas in the brain having to do with pleasure, but says nothing more about them. One of these areas (I guess it’s an area rather than a mechanism) is the “dorsal raphe.” I’m wrong. I just looked it up in Wikipedia and found that it’s part of a group of nuclei called the “raphe nuclei” whose main function is the release of serotonin to the rest of the brain—that is, according to my theory, it is (or acts with) the evaluceptual awareness to carry out the functions of a mechanism I call “the evaluplex,” and will soon be telling you about.

Actually, the Wikipedia article has very little connection to my theory except for its list of a few neurotransmitters undoubtedly important (by other names) in my theory, and for vaguely mentioning mechanisms I hypothesize but misname, or their likely loci in the brain. Whether any of my mechanisms, or mechanisms like them, actually exist, is unknown (so far as I know). I don’t believe they are known not to exist . . . ‘cause I can always say they are just too teeny weeny to be seen using the instruments available now! In truth, I think one or more of them could be found if looked for. One thing is sure, I claim they are material entities that do exist and carry out operations that break no known laws of nature, so my theory is definitely falsifiable.

Little in my theory of evaluceptuality seems to me particularly revolutionary. Like, I’m sure, almost all other accounts of pleasure and pain, it deals with a wide variety of specific kinds of them such as the auditory pleasure of a theme in a musical composition or the tactile pain of a bee-sting. Where it becomes unconventional is in its division of pain and pleasure into two importantly different general kinds: physical, like the pain of the bee-sting mentioned, and cerebral, like the pleasure of the musical theme. The two kinds could also be termed “reflexive” and “learned,” or, even, “direct” and “indirect,” but I prefer “physical” and “cerebral.”

The evaluceptual awareness’s frontline mechanism is the reptiliplex, so-named because we share it with reptiles. Its concern is physical pleasure and pain. Just to the rear of the awareness’s frontlines, the predictiplex, so-named for reasons which will become clear in due course, deals with cerebral pleasure and pain. The only other major evaluceptual mechanism is the afore-mentioned evaluplex—so named because it is where the brain’s final “evaluation” is made of how good or bad each moment in our lives feels, and various reactions to that evaluation are initiated.

At this point, I need to introduce two more terms: “owcept” for what neurophysiologists mean by “nociocept” (or pain percept) but I think inferior to my term for obvious reasons, and “ahcept” for “pleasure percept,” for which orthodox neurophysiologists have no term I’m aware of. Note: each owcept and ahcept indicates not only pain or pleasure but the unique site of the pain or pleasure—e.g., “cold at locus 16 on the left index finger.”

The Reptiliplex

Our vocabulary should now be sufficient for what’s to come, so I can say a little more about the reptiliplex. By far the simplest of the evaluceptual awareness’s three major mechanisms, it is entirely concerned with the input of evaluceptual sensory receptors sensitive to various stimuli in the inner and outer environments that the receptors automatically take as either physical pleasure or pain: the scent of lilacs, for instance, or a warm fire on a cold day; a twisted ankle or the smell of excrement.

All the reptiliplex does is act as a port of entry for all the ahcepts and owcepts (or evalucepts) it is notified of by the evaluceptual sensory receptors during each instacon, which it passes on to the outcome-dot to be enter the consciousness of the person involved with all the other neurocepts there, and stored.

The Predictiplex

The mnemoduct is to the predictiplex what the inner and outer environments are to the reptiliplex: the source of signals from sensory receptors that the predictiplex is responsible for dealing with. At bottom, what the predictiplex does is simple:

(1) it learns which of the memories the m-dot becoming the outcome-dot during a given instacon tries to activate it succeeds in activating, and which of them it fails to activate;

(2) then, based on this information, it formulates the value of a number of evaluceptual ratios, each such ratio indicating some group of inter-related neurocepts’ pleasure to pain ratio;

(3) each such value will be somewhere from negative 1.0 up to positive one. The predictiplex converts whatever it is to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is low up to a value of . . . negative 0.5, say.

It performs no conversion of any value between negative 0.5 and . . . positive 0.5, say, to either owcepts or ahcepts (although it may convert it to “nullcepts” but I consider that possibility too unimportant to get into here).

Any value higher than positive 0.5 it converts to a number of cerebral ahcepts to the degree that the value is high. Unless the value goes beyond . . . positive 0.7, say, whereupon it gradually reduces the number of ahcepts it converts the value to until it reaches positive 0.8, say. Values between that number and 0.9 it either ignores or converts to nullcepts.

Here I bring in something most psychologists, in my view, seriously neglect: boredom. According to my psychology, the more the ratio rises above positive 0.9, the more it indicates not pleasure, but boredom—painful boredom, possibly comparable to the pain of a kidney stone, or the like. Ergo, an evaluceptual ratio above positive 0.8 will be converted to a number of cerebral owcepts to the degree that the value is high.

Note: the only original ideas I’m presenting in this essay are what cerebral evaluceptuality is and the evaluceptual importance of boredom;

(4) The predictiplex will then multiply each ratio by the number of evalucepts that were involved in its determination, and transmit them to the outcome-dot, which will now be in the process of activation.

(5) There the physical evalucepts the m-dot has just gotten will be experienced as a mixture of specific pleasures and pains, such as a kiss or painful ankle (but most likely not many because of the generally focused nature of the flow of instacons through the conscious mind, and the cerebral evalucepts will be experienced as a mixture of cerebral pleasure or pain, such as the pleasure of a fraction of a song, or the annoyance of having to cough.

Important Note: Almost every physical evaluceptual experience will include some portion of cerebral evaluceptuality and vice versa. For instance, a tasty meal will be mostly physically pleasant, but have elements of cerebral pleasure mixed in, such as the unfamiliarity of a special meat sauce; and a delightful piece of music will mostly convey cerebral pleasure, but may add the pleasure of various physical pleasure, as well, such as the innately physical pleasure of a certain chord, and other elements pleasurable for other reasons than their being neither too familiar nor too unfamiliar. In this introductory text, however, I tend to suggest any evaluceptual experience is either all physical or all cerebral to, again, make my ideas easier to follow.

EVALUCEPTUAL ENHANCEMENT AND INHIBITION

It is at this point that the evaluceptual cycle begun by the activation of the remembering-dot and continued by the outcome-dot’s activation ends with the evaluplex’s activities:

(1) Like both the reptiliplex and the predictiplex, the evaluplex is connected to sensory receptors; its will tell it how many more ahcepts than owcepts the outcome-dot ends with, if it has more ahcepts than owcepts, or how many more owcepts than ahcepts it has if the contrary is the case.

Note: I suspect the situation is more complex than that, perhaps much more complex, but what I’m describing is possible, too, and close enough to what I’m sure actually occurs if my theory is anywhere near correct, at all, so I feel free to consider it here as I’ve just described it.

(2) It will facilitate the ability of all the neurocepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories (to go from J to K, after getting to J from I, for instance) in proportion to how many ahcepts it is reacting to, or inhibit the ability of all the evalucepts in the outcome-dot to activate memories in proportion to how many owcepts it is reacting to:

(3) Ergo, the evaluplex will make us repeat whatever we do or think in a given situation that leads to pleasure and avoid repetition of whatever we do that leads to pain. Simple. Freudian repression. And the opposite. (I don’t recall if Freud hypothesized a mirror image of repression; if not, he should have.) The over-all goal is the satisfaction of the pleasure-maximization drive.
(4) My theory also assumes the evaluplex will activate various reactions to increase the pleasure of anything that leads to pleasure, and decrease the pain of anything that leads to pain. Note: these will be relatively slow, cerebrum-based responses. The cerebellum and pre-cerebellar reflexes will already have caused animal responses like fight or flight, and carried out appropriate facilitation or inhibition of future physical responses. Among the cerebral reactions I’m speaking of will be heightened attention where appropriate, increased ability to think of effective responses, appropriate anger or happiness . . .

I think the neurophysiological establishment already agrees with me at least loosely with the effects of physical pleasure and pain since all I’m positing is that a person will be less likely to repeat actions that lead to physical pain, many of them biological harmful, and more likely to repeat actions that led to physical pleasure, many of them biologically beneficial.

Since I first came up with my theory of cerebral evaluceptuality almost fifty years ago, inspired by a paperback called Precious Rubbish by someone named Shaw (Theodore L., not George Bernard), which made me realize how important avoidance of boredom is in art—and everything else, and the central importance of familiarity, I’ve been bemused by how little familiarity and boredom seem to have been discussed by the experts in the relevant fields. Perhaps because taken for granted? Or because so many vested interests rely on other value determinants in art and life as a whole? In any event, I am now ready to discuss the main subject of my essay:

THE CEREBRAL-SATISFACTION DRIVE

Among the many drives various levels beneath The Pleasure-Maximization Drive are the Cerebral-Satisfaction Drive and the Reptilian-Satisfaction Drive. Each of these has numerous sub-sub-drives like the auditory-satisfaction drive, the reproduction-drive and the warm bath drive. Needless to say, there are sundry lower-level drives, like the mathematics drive, and—under it, the algebra drive—or the dessert drive down to the green-gumdrop drive. The nature of each depends on what awareness or sub-awareness its home is.

First, I want to review what most exactly happens during any instance of cerebral evaluceptual . . . analysis, let’s call it. A person experiences a mental event, then his brain predicts what it will experience next based on the supposition that what he has experienced in similar circumstances before will be repeated. If its prediction is wrong, the person will experience pain due to unfamiliarity (in context). If the prediction is right, but not too right, he will experience the pleasure of the expected, or familiarity. If the prediction is too right, he will experience pain due to boredom, or excessive familiarity. With fairly large expanses of neutral, or blah, evaluceptual experience, which I’ll ignore here on out, as not relevant. Very simple.

The cerebral-satisfaction drive I’ve chosen as my primary illustrating specimen of all cerebral-satisfaction drives is auditory-satisfaction. One reason for this is that I agree with Nietzsche that without music, life would be a mistake (although most of the time I would say that without music, life would be more of a mistake). A better is that it’s the drive that most readily reveals how cerebral evaluceptuality works to provide maximal cerebral satisfaction and how important this is biologically in spite of the fact that music is the purest of the arts, since it has minimal (or possibly no) utility. It is just about only capable, horror of horrors, of giving us pleasure.

Take a simple song. If it’s original at all, it will strike a hearer as unfamiliar. Mental pain will be the result. But once one hears it enough times, it will start seeming at least somewhat predictable, and one will become neutral about it. Soon one will have heard it enough for it to be just familiar enough for it to seem nice. The melody and the orchestration are friends now, but not yet old friends. We are now ever-so-slightly surprised when they appear, but instantly find them welcomely familiar.

Eventually, though, most of us will become so well-acquainted with the piece that, rather than recognize what it does as we hear it, we will know what it does as it does it. We will then lose interest in it. If we keep hearing it, however, we will come to know in advance everything it will do so absolutely, it will irk us, perhaps even anger us. But . . .

A gifted jazzman who can provide us with variations on the piece will be able to give it again the ability to surprise us. Those previously annoyed with it will like it again, unless they find it at first too defamiliarized and have to learn their way back to enjoyment of it; those not out of enjoyment of it in its original form may find the jazzed-up version of it a crime. Sensitivity to music, you see, varies from individual to individual. Some can be too slow ever to appreciate a song, or ever to appreciate a variation on a song. Others may be faster but not fast enough on the uptake ever to tire of a song, once able to appreciate it.

It should be said that rewriting a song, or the equivalent—performing it with a band instead of a single singer, or with a symphonic orchestra, etc.—isn’t the only way to revive a song. A listener may learn things about its composer or about music in general, that changes him and not the song, and in that way makes the combination of what the song brings to him and he brings to the song new enough to make it or keep it enjoyable for him.

One more point: when a jazzman or the equivalent re-renders a song, it will make parts of the original unexpected enough to give pleasure. The listener will not be sure which of the two versions will be next, although he will recognize each when he hears it. Which reminds me that (1) simply hiding from the song once it becomes too familiar will give one time to lose his memory’s grip on it sufficiently to make it seem fresh again and (2) listening to other music, particularly music much different from it, may well do the same thing—the listener will hear a short sequence of notes that he’s later heard in a different piece of music, and thus be momentarily uncertain what comes next, with enjoyment.

While on the subject, I might as well add that performing the song oneself, as singer or instrumentalist, adds a great deal to one’s appreciation of it because one then accompanies the song with a muscular accompaniment of it—one that can be quite varied. For instance, a singer can change the way he sings a song once it starts turning dull for him. Ditto dancing to the song. Or giving it dancers on a stage for one to watch as it is performed. The simple act of following a piece in score will do the same thing—double it into two expressive modalities, conceptual symbols as well as heard sounds.

Here’s another way of putting all this: each new song begins as an addition to reality, and is difficult to accept. Eventually it is accepted. It is now just short of being full-scale quotidian reality—that with which we are totally familiar—which it soon becomes. Boredom. So an artist must replace it with another addition to reality, or make it new.

Actually, every new song is a variation on reality that acts as an intruder on reality; it is a distortion of some portion of familiar reality that takes time to undistort into the happily known-but-not-entirely-known. An original song (by which I mean sufficiently different from every other song to seem new to almost all who hear it) is a variation, to a greater or lesser extent, on all the music prior to it; a representational painting is a variation on the visually real that differs from it in being immobile, probably slightly different in color, arrangement, etc., and context; a misrepresentational painting—impressionistic paintings are a good example—shows us reality as it isn’t, but becomes in art (children almost automatically like representational paintings but take time to appreciate impressionism—I was 17 or 18 when I finally connected to it); then there is nonrepresentational painting that has little to do with the real world, all to do with painting (the way music even at its simplest has little to do with the real world, all to do with music).

Normal prose is the equivalent of representational painting: it is not part of the material world but as close to it as symbols can be: it denotes it so well at its clearest, it disappears. The result would be narrative art if it told a story, but not linguistic art. The words would be utilitarian—just devices used to create the story.

High rhetoric uses words just “unrepresentationally” enough to give linguistic pleasure, and thus an artistic accompaniment to a text that, as a whole, is not art—a political speech, for instance. Poetry is the form of linguistic expression in which linguistic misrepresentationality is a central element, the intention of its words being to not be prose due to its many artificialities, even when seeming cut-up prose (when it evades prose through the use of lineation, which—to those most sensitive to what poetry can do—can be potently misrepresentatively enjoyable.

What I’m saying, if I’ve lost you, is that poetry’s words distort reality by ever-so-slightly misnaming or misrepresenting parts of it. Consider a simple metaphor, for example: Romeo calling Juliet the morning sun. Meter is another way of misrepresenting reality—by giving it a regular beat, which neither it nor prose generally has. Even free verse distorts the reality that is its subject by breaking it into irregular pieces by making its lines end in unexpected places instead of more or less at the same place every time unlike prose (except in the special case of paragraph ends).

I think I’ve digressed enough. I hope that my idea of the goldilocksian way the cerebral-satisfaction drive works is clear, makes sense, and has brought you cerebral satisfaction of the highest order.

EXPERIODDICA                                      November/December 2014

Aftermaths
LeRoy Gorman
Puddle of Sky Press
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
www.puddlesofskypress.com

Truck
Publisher: Halvard Johnson, Guest Editor: Jerry McGuire
www.halvard-johnson.blogspot.com/2014­_08_­01_archive.html

* * *

If the world were as I wish it were, I’d just have to quote this, the only thing on the back cover of LeRoy Gorman’s recent chapbook, Aftermaths:

And by the end of 2015, ten million copies of it would have been sold (and LeRoy would have sent me and Small Press Review a hundred grand each).  Or at least one visible critic of poetry in America would have informed his readers of the book.  Of course, I’m ridiculously biased toward it because it consists entirely of mathematical poems, as I define the term, and they are my specialty as a poet; because LeRoy has been a friend of mine through the mail (and cyberspace) for around a quarter of a century; because he is also a leading figure in North American haiku, one of the kinds of poetry I think the poetry establishment has for too long treated unfairly (outright stupidly, in fact); and because he has the same first name as my maternal grandfather and one of his sons.

Hey, if you doesn’t agree with my assessment of the equation above, get losted (to the power of five zillion)!  Seriously, dear readers, the equation is a wonderful poem—I’d call it a haiku although aficionados of that variety of poetry would consider it too thought-requiring to qualify as that (traditionally, the proportion of feeling to thinking a haiku should induce should be near infinity).  It’s wonderful because (1) “puddle of sky” is a charming expression of a pleasant image of nature beautifully “mis-expressed”—i.e., rendered in an interestingly “wrong” way (as two few mainstream poems are); (2) because the poem as a whole carries out two mathematical operations: simple addition and doing whatever it’s called (and I can’t recall or never knew) to increase a term’s value by multiplying it by itself a certain number of times (in this case, a “Sky” number of times); (3) ) because of the poem’s appropriate but entirely unexpected visual maneuver at its end; and, finally, (4) because the poem conveys something arrestingly true, if you think about it long enough.

Since more than a few of you may not immediately see why its unexpected upside-down exclamation mark is so cleverly, blessedly right, I guess I should say a bit more about it.  It is right because puddles that are exponentially expanded–ha, I remembered how to describe that operation, after all!  Now, as I was saying, exponentially expanded puddles will vividly reflect whatever sky they’re under . . . upside-down.  Am I right or am I not?!

I suppose I should explain why what the poem conveys is “arrestingly true,” too.  Actually it’s not that obvious.  I certainly took a while to get it.  What I find it to say is that by taking poetry, as represented by the quantity “puddles of” multiplied by itself a “Sky” number of times, which should produce a vast number of puddles with all kinds of different hues of sky, and cloud formations, and birds and other forms of sky-life, and earthlife fringing a sky, and adding it to a press, thus making it available to the public, you will get something Very Happy, like an upside-down exclamation point.

If you include what’s on its front and back covers, and I do, Aftermaths contains 19 poems.  They range widely in subject matter: one, for instance, is in homage to Basho, the famous composer of haiku; another has to do with Wile E. Coyote.  Then there’s the one that defines life as the quantity, “if”—squared.  It’s hard to pick out a favorite from so many good specimens, but mine might be the one whose title is “to die in one’s sleep”; it consists of just the letter z—to the power of z.  I’m certain I won’t encounter a poetry collection as good as  Aftermaths for a long, long time.

Meanwhile, mathematical poetry was recently making news elsewhere: at the cyberzine, Truck, where my latest specimen of it appeared on 15 August.  If the world were as I wish it were, you’d already know this because every newspaper in America would have mentioned it, and the best columnists would be arguing about whether or not it was my best mathematical poem ever or not.  But there would be those condemning it as rubbish, too, since I’d be bored if everybody agreed with everything I did or thought.  I gotta have knuckleheads to argue with!

Truck has been doing an excellent job making all kinds of poetries public since it occurred to Halvard Johnson, its publisher, to set it up in the spring of 2011.  His commendable idea was to ask various poets to guest edit an issue for a month.  Since he is sympathetic to just about every possible kind of poetry, the editors he has chosen have included Wendy Battin, Skip Fox, Lewis LaCook, Larissa Shmailo, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, David Graham, Mark Weiss, John M. Bennett (Mr. HyperNonWilshberian, himself, for Pete’s sake!) and Chris Lott, to give you an idea of the mix—what’s more, he has allowed them to drive Truck any which way they want to (which accounts for my getting into it).

The editor of the issue under discussion here, Jerry McGuire, has used his editorial freedom to greatly increase the value of his trip, in my view, by stuffing it (see below) with commentaries on each poet that jitter fascinatingly every which way out of his interest in mediation—which, he tells us, is “how the various stuff of our lives (a ten-year-old Romanian girl once told me that ‘stuff’ was her favorite English word) affects how we produce and consume things, especially works of art.”  Hence, his decision this month “to use Truck to present a variety of visual and verbal (sometimes both) works that address questions of mediation.”

One such work particularly took my seeing and reading eyes (and the two are different!), Chantel Langlinais Carlson’s “Aperture.”  This opens with rough drafts in charmingly individual cursive using a quill pen and two shades of blue ink.  Out of one medium and into standard black print the drafts flow and splash to form the following final draft:

Past thyme and rain on the window’s
stillness, a woman’s gaze
turns to blue. Quilled in blue seeped through
to vein the blood with ink
now gone dry.  A woman’s gaze turns
to her skin, Rorschach forms
islands and daggers and ships sail
across life lines once held
in a gypsy’s palm. The bourbon
moon never tasted so good.
A woman’s gaze turns to shut
ticks and stocks of time-crossed memory.
Drawn feathered. Drawn blue.

Or: a view of a woman, a view of her gaze through a window, a view of her memories coalescing as poetry, a view of the other views in “quilled” blue, a view of forever ongoing time . .

This is a list of contributors to a mail art show of SASEs Crag Hill gathered items for, then sent to me. I immediately kicked an attempted field goal with it that went fifty yards wide and seven miles long: just another of the many projects I overloaded myself into back when my Runaway Spoon Press was publishing a new book monthly and I was actually making poems and writing reviews of my own and never followed through on, or didn’t follow through enough on. It now strikes me that a Then&Now publication of the pieces now in my possession and new pieces Crag and I can get from the ones we have old pieces from with news of what’s been happening with them since they sent Crag their SASEs. I think it would be a great art history snapshot of the past quarter-century or so.

I’m posting the list of participants in hopes many of them will see it and send new SASEs to me at [email protected]–with an update on their lives. I’m also hoping non-participants in touch with anyone on the list will let that person know about it. Otherwise, the list will at least let people know whose mail art will eventually be appearing on my blog (poeticks.com).

And, hey, if anyone has a few extra bucks to mail me for postage and other expenses that are sure to hit me, don’t be shy about doing so. I’m plunging way too rapidly into credit debt the way I did as a publisher. A friend bailed me out but I’m not sure he can again. Apologies for bringing this up, but . . .

(Ellipsis compliment of Marton Koppany: it may look normal, but . . .)

(Previous ellipsis is mine–although greatly influenced by Marton’s.)

.

.

.

.

.

Finishing Off 2007

Small Press Review,
Volume 40 Numbers 1-2, January-February Year

      Concrete! Producer/Director: Sara Sackner.
      DVD 2003, running time 72 minutes;
      Padded Cell Pictures, 1105 North Signal Street,
      Ojai CA 93023. $35 ppd.
      http//:www.paddedcellpictures.com

      Mark Sonnenfield, Writer. November 2007.
      Marymark Press, 45-08 Old Millstone Drive,
      East Windsor NJ 08520. np.

Thanksgiving is here, so I have five days off from substitute teaching, and have vowed to get this column done during it. I am beset with problems. A major one is that I’m no longer getting many zines in the mail, anymore. I attribute that to (1) the dominance in innovative literature circles of the Internet (witness my last half dozen or so columns) and (2) the shitting down of almost all the zines I used to write about (and for), such as Lost & Found Times. There’s also (3): the fact that when I do get a zine or other item worth writing about, I lose it for two or three years in the chaos of books, rough drafts, stacks of paper with print on one side I plan to use a second time, videos, dvds, cat hair, dust, dirt, clothes being aired, garbage (in proper containers, I want to assure everyone), cords, dried-up lizard remains, pencils & pens, bills, receipts, ets and ceteras, that I haven’t gotten into my twenty filing cabinets or fifteen bookcases or various closets and cabinets.

In short, it’s hard to find something to write about. So, I’ll start with the biggest news of 2007 from here: I bought a new toilet. I had two but only one worked. I won’t bother describing its layers of biota and calcification, but will just say that I had a bucket in my bathtub for flushing it (because everything in the tank was broken, including the flush- handle, which was also gunked immovably in place). No big deal: I was used to it, until the shut-off valve to it had gone on the blink, so water kept going into it, and I was afraid it might flood the house. So I got a plumber in, and we decided the most rational thing to do was put in a new toilet. He put in a new shut-off valve for nothing to seal the deal. I did not compose a poem about it, but did write it up at my blog.

Next is something that actually has to do with experriodica, which is supposed to be this column’s subject. It’s Concrete!, a pleasant documentary on a DVD of a visit to the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, starring the extremely personable Ruth and Marvin Sackner themselves, with guests appearances by Tom Phillips, the author of A Humament, one of the most important works of visual poetry ever, and the central artist in their collection, and Johanna Drucker and Albert Dupont. I saw it several years ago when it first came out, but didn’t get around to ordering a copy until just a few months ago. Its coverage of visio-textual art can not be complete, given there were over sixty-thousand items in the archive at the time the film was made, and its emphases are different from what mine would be, but it’s good on the early contribution to visual poetry of such artists as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kasimir Malevich, and the generation in England and America that included Bob Cobbing, John Furnival, Emmett Williams. One flaw in it, for me, is its making too much of big names like Gertrude Stein and Roy Lichtenstein, who are marginally important to visual poetry, at the expense of just about everyone active in the field in this country after 1970. It’s a wonderful survey of the field, though, and something anyone seriously interested in the field should have.

Something I can always find is my monthly envelope of poetry and who-knows-what from Mark Sonnenfeld. That’s because I have a folder in one of my filing cabinets for what he sends me. Make that, several folders. He sends me (and others he’s in artistic sympathy with) little broadsides, sheets of paper that look mimeographed, and saddle stitched chapbooks and other publications with enough different poets and illumagists in them to qualify, I think, as zines. His November batch contains three items (less than his envelopes usually contain). One (which I almost lost while just sitting here at my keyboard) is just a sheet of white paper with two short reviews by Andy Ford. One is of the first issue of a zine called Stronger Than Dirt. This, according to Ford, seems to be produced by “a high-school age dude,” but is nonetheless first-rate–“with tons of flyers, interviews with WHEN LIBERTY DIES and FLOWER VIOLENCE, and interesting art.”

The other concerns two chapbooks by Mark Sonnenfeld, 14th St. Sta. Found Items and An Anonymous Artist. About the first Ford concludes with “A modern survey in trashsites, 14th St. Sta. Found Items proves once again that art is not limited to the canvas, the reel-to-reel tape, or the museums.” The other chap Ford describes as “one of the more narrative and comprehensible chapbooks of (Sonnenfeld’s) that (Ford) has read.” Pages from the reviewed publications share the page with the texts of the reviews but are too small to be of much use, I fear.

Also in Sonnenfeld’s November envelope are two chaps, one on yellow paper I only have space to give the title of, Jerk off Guitar Players, by Sonnenfeld and Tom Hays, the other on green, by Sonnenfeld alone: I am a (u r b a n) cassette ‘sound’ collagist. First poem (or stanza of a poem, I can’t tell which):

or  I       didn't  care if I fit  a       shirt  POCKET  twopart-  look down  a     simple  path

A later poem asks one to “imagine a piano hammer crashed in flowers.” Get on Mark’s mailing list. I don’t know what he charges strangers, probably nothing. But even if he charges postage, or a few bucks more, he’s worth the investment.

col100

Small Press Review,
Volume 42, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2010

      Comprepoetica
      Blogmaster: Bob Grumman
      http://www.reocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1492/spr-stuff

      “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry”
      By Bob Grumman
      /bob-grummans-first-piece-in-spr

Congratulations to Me, for this (“col100,” as my computer calls it is the one hundredth column I’ve done for Small Press Review–for a department of SPR, Small Magazine Review, if you want to get technical. To be even more technical, I must state that SMR began as a separate magazine, so my first four columns, which were in every other issue of SMR during its brief solo flight, were definitely not in Small Press Review. I’m counting them as being in it, anyway.

Getting started as a columnist was about the only break I’ve ever gotten as a writer. It all began when Editor/Publisher Len accepted a guest editorial of mine, “Some Notes on a Relatively New Form of Poetry,” for the April 1992 issue of SPR. Concerned with two “infraverbal” poems by Karl Kempton, one by Jonathan Brannen, and George Swede’s one-word poem, “graveyarduskilldeer,” it remains one of my best pieces of criticism–so much so that I’ve published at least five different versions of it since. I no longer remember I came to get it into SPR, but I vaguely recall it had to do with Len’s openness to visual and related forms of poetry, due–I believe–to his admiration for d. a. levy, and acquaintance with Karl Kempton.

In any case, I’m grateful to Len for accepting my piece. Despite the fact that it didn’t do nearly as much for me as I thought it would. Which was get me read by someone connected with an upscale magazine like The Atlantic, who–charmed by my style, and the subject of my essay–would persuade a bigWorld editor to solicit me for a similar piece. And I’d go on to fame as a bigWorld writer. What a laugh.

But it did help me when, not too long after, I tried for a position as a columnist for SMR when Len began that. I’ve been a contributing editor to SMR ever since.

In my first column I reviewed Meat Epoch, Dada Tennis, CWM, and O!!Zone, all now defunct, although the editors of two of them, Geof Huth and Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, are still active in the otherstream. I can’t say the column was brilliant, but I did quote a nice passage from a poem in Meat Epoch by Spencer Selby, referring to meaning as something “which gathers in emptiness/ and waits for all things,” and discuss one of my other favorite contemporaries, the ridiculously under-recognized Guy Beining, who had a number of pieces in O!!Zone.

My next column was devoted to Gustave Morin’s stained paper archive and Larry Tomoyasu’s Found Street. Both of these I considered state-of-the-art specimens of adventurous poetry. Neither is around anymore. Morin is still active in his native Canada, but I hear little from him. Tomoyasu seems no longer on the scene although I got a friendly note for him sometime during the past year.

Two issues later I did a column on John M. Bennett’s Lost & found Times, a durable otherstream zine that continued in print until just a few years ago, and for which I eventually wrote a regular column. And so it went, this reviewing of zines and sometimes books that I considered superior by far to anything in the mainstream but which rarely lasted more than a few years, and never gained any kind of bigWorld acclaim, something I still don’t understand.

SPR hasn’t changed too much over the years, it doesn’t seem to me. The reviewers’ names have changed. And I’m the only columnist, although “Michael Andre” still makes occasional (always interesting) visits, and Len writes an occasional editorial. Laurel Speer was dominant when my very first piece appeared. I’d read her years before that with admiration, although she was never interested in my kind of stuff. Ditto Robert Peters.

I modeled myself to some extent on Speer’s way of incisively dealing with review material while at the same time injecting her own life in literature and outside it into what she wrote. I loved Peters’s caustic commentary, too–as well as his positive insights. She burned out, it would appear; he aged off the scene. A shame in both cases.

Amusingly, I didn’t think much of Speer’s column in the issue of SPR I made my rookie appearance in. It was on the page opposite the beginning of my editorial. She picked on a quotation of Roger Sessions’s, “The only alternative an artist has to being himself is being nobody,” which I quite enjoyed. I interpreted to mean that if, as an artist, you try to live up to others’ expectations instead of being true to yourself, you’ll end being a nobody. I don’t think she got it. Her point seemed to be that all the counts is what an artist produces, which has nothing to do with his self.

What is really amusing is that a one-paragraph review of one of John M. Bennett’s four-pagers, Tempid, by A. J. Wright shared the page Speer’s column was on. After quoting a few out-of-context lines, from Bennett, Wright averred, “I guess this stuff is supposed to be deep, but ersatz surrealism just sticks to my boots.” A little over a year later, I had a review in SPR (September 1994) in which I said of Bennett, “He makes ‘nets wider than sense,’ to quote (one) of his poems, by using words the way Jackson Pollock used paint: to tell of the urgency and violence they’ve been flung out of as much as to ‘mean’ in more conventional ways. Thus, they splatter, jerk back, go off-course, repeat, offend and baffle–as they build a world as major as that of any other current poet’s.” Something I still believe.

Hey, I had fun in them days, and hope to continue having fun here for a few more years. A big thanks to you, my few readers, some of whom have been with me since ’92. Even though you never helped me onto the pages of The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or even The Hudson Review.

Several anthologies of visual poetry were published around 1970 in this country, Anthology of Concrete Poetry, 1967, edited by Emmett Williams; anthology of concretism in Chicago Review, 1967, then as a separate book, 1968, edited by Eugene Wildman; Concrete Poetry, A World View, 1968, edited by Mary Ellen Solt; Once Again, 1968, edited by Jean-Francois Bory; This Book is a Movie, 1971, edited by Jerry G. Bowles and Tony Russell; and Open Poetry, 1973, edited by Ronald Gross & George Quasha with a visual poetry anthology of around 150 pages within edited by Emmett Williams (and A found Poetry section with some works that might pass for visual poetry edited by John Robert Colombo.   Then no more appeared for quite a while.  Visual poems kept being composed, though—enough of them toward the end of the eighties to make it clear that we were ready for another visual poetry anthology.  Lots of visual poets, particularly those in the post-70s-anthologies generation, jabbered about having one done, but nothing happened until around the autumn of 1999 when Crag Hill and I up and decided to get one done.  It was hard work but Writing To Be Seen, Volume One was the result.  More volumes were planned, one of them completed except for conversion to a form readable by computer-driven printers, but none published.

This essay is an attempt to present a rough idea of what is in Writing To Be Seen via samples of each contributor’s work, with my comments on them.  I welcome feedback. I’ll start with the cover illustration by K.S. Ernst, which I consider alone worth the $24 price of the anthology.  Next is the sample of the works within on the back cover, though not reproduced quite as nicely as I would have liked (because of my own limited technical means at the time).  They indicate the collection’s breadth and excellence.

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The Connotation/Denotation Ratio The greater this is for a poem, the more likely the poem is a good one.

The Security/Freedom Ratio  The value of this pretty much defines a person’s politics.

The Familiarity/Unfamiliarity Ratio   I take this to be the sole determinant of aesthetic pleasure, which is limited not to one end of the range of the ratio’s possible values, but to a short length somewhere between 100 and 200, my wild guess is

The Pleasure/Pain Ratio  The maximization of this I consider the sole motive of human behavior.

The Credentials/Achievements Ratio  A ratio, inversely proportionate to a given society’s cultural value, and directly proportionate to a person’s rewards from that society.