Return of the ("Sigh") Grammar Nazi

Alas, it is time once again to mount the anti-tank guns and prepare to take a few pot-shots at the proliferating weird, bland, dumb, lazy, ungrammatical coinages which are appearing just over the horizon of our fair English language.

Just the other day, listening to the radio, I was nauseated to hear an announcer use the phrase "bein' as how..." as an informal conjunction. Other similar constructions--"being that" or "being as"--constitute the same kind of error. What speakers mean by these phrases is either "because" or "since" but they seem unable to avoid using the word being. (Another variation of the same error is "seein' that" or "seein' as how.") These are regarded as "country speech"--especially in the American South--and are unworthy of anyone pretending to practice civilized conversation.

A related problem is the use of "be it that" or, as in a string of options "be they one, or be they another, or be they..." etc. "Be it that" like "being as" or "being that" or (horrors) "being as how" are all yahoo grammar mistakes. And yet you hear these phrases used constantly in the media, usually in situations where the speaker is either uneducated, or wants to sound, or to seem to be, familiar. "Aw shucks, Pee Wee, bein' as how you and me is such great friends,..." etc.

Never use "being that" or "being as" to introduce dependent clauses! Never use "be they" or "be that" in the same way, or to elaborate choice-lists. Instead, use "whether" as in "whether they are" or "whether you have" etc.

The other gripe I have is with the spreading use of clipped participles, i.e., bein', seein', livin' etc. Somehow, these kinds of mock abbreviations have come to be accepted as familiar, politically correct, friendly, easy-going, inoffensive gestures, or as polite, homespun, intimate, humble overtures. In actuality, they are a form of condescension, particularly when used by educated people. When someone wants to put you at ease by "puttin' ya' at-eazze" they probably want something from you, or are saying (in effect) "you're just dumb enough to think that when I used clipped participles in speaking to you, you'll be more likely to believe what I'm tellin' ya, than ya would be if I used grammatically correct language." Don't drop the g (or "ing") sound from participles. It's stupid. Imitating bad speech patterns in an attempt to achieve familiarity is dishonest, or naive, or both.

Out, out!, I say!

Vasarely - Post-Modernist Abstraction For the Future

Victor Vasarely occupies a unique place in the history of 20th Century painting. Beginning as a kind of late-comer to the Surrealist camp, his works of the 1930's suggest Miro, Ernst, De Chirico, Gris. But his work showed tantalizing qualities which would later blossom into a full-blown preoccupation. In the 1940's, he continued to work with familiar shapes and arrangements, rather in the manner of a soft Surrealist. His work had always shown a tendency toward geometric linear plaiting or layering. By the early 1950's, he had begun to experiment with pure linear abstraction, rather in the manner of Esher--even employing nested mirror imagery and trick perspective. This tendency towards illusionary space eventually came to dominate his work, and in his mature period, during the 1960's, he became identified with the Op Art movement. During this period his glowing, shimmering grids, distorted into bulging or twisting convexities and concavities, became familiar images to a growing public.

An early work from the mid-1930's

Vasarely's work hovers uncertainly between playful, geometric abstraction and eerie, psychedelic transport. In the 1960's his work, like Esher's, was often associated with hypnotic or hallucinatory states of mind, or with far-out dazzling scientific fantasy. These associations were purely gratuitous, but Vasarely benefited from the publicity. There's something very satisfying about Vasarely's imagery. It demands very little of the viewer in terms of understanding or context, and can be appreciated by people of all ages, especially children. But when I first looked at it, I thought it meretricious and bland.

Like Esher's work, I thought it rather "game-like" or trivial. But the more you see it, the more you realize that Vasarely's concentration upon geometry and illusion is genuine and not mere trickery. It isn't merely a "light show" or an innocent flowery indulgence (like a Peter Max design).

The work displays a classical balance and symmetry which may suggest calmness and serenity, or frenetic, percolating activity. Obtruding, flowing forms roll forwards or intersect across space like kaleidoscopic Chinese checker-boards, or immense spinning disks of colored polka-dotted mechanisms.

[Copy this image to your desk-top and expand it to full scale for best effect]

No one had ever mined the possibilities of geometry in quite this way, before Vasarely began to explore them. He wasn't making arithmetical statements, but the equations that could express his works numerically were undoubtedly elegant indeed. On an intuitive level, these kinds of imaginative spaces and designs might be accompaniments to visionary propositions about the behavior of matter in space, or the ways in which we might visualize concepts too abstruse to get a handle on.

Vasarely's elaborations included sculpture, architecture, commercial furnishing design. He even went so far as to develop permutations of specific shapes and colors, whose proliferating variations undermined the meaning of the unique created object, much as Duchamp had done with his Rotoreliefs:

There is much more to be said about Vasarely than this momentary glimpse. His work seems to point to a future in which the very large scale and the very minute scale, are commonly available and can be perceived. In my mind, these two worlds are different versions of each other, and intersect or co-exist simultaneously. Like the balletic movements of the space stations in 2001: A Space Odyssey, conducted to the oompah-pah, oompah-pah of Strauss Waltzes, Vasarely's work may seem like the perfect accompaniment to Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata, or Steve Reich's Six Pianos--or even like the dancing white spheres in Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. These are all apt comparisons for further study.

Minimalism XI: Who is William Minor

Some months back I received a copy of a small limited edition book ["tree on the outside"] by one William Minor [Coracle: Ballybeg, Grange, Clonmel, Tipperary, Ireland, 2010*]. The book is a perfect bound paperback, about 4 1/2 x 6 inches, in dark green folding self-wrappers. It has no "title page" and all the copyright and printing information is on the last leaf of text. The "editorial design" is by Simon Cutts (a name I recognize from the backlist of Jargon Press some years back). The work is minimalist, and originally so, to my eye and ear--since I can't think of any antecedents that would fit. This is always a good sign, since the best fresh work usually best hides its influences, particularly if the writer is young. I've always had a fondness for work like Minor's, because it suggests a care and precision that is admirable, especially when it feels mysterious or sharp in its contrasts or wit. Traditional (Quietist) wit usually shows itself as overbrimming polymathic demonstration (a surfeit of invention), but I've always been drawn to clarity of reserve and insistent specificity. It's usually an indication, I like to think, of a sharp mind showing itself early. Actually, Minor may not even be a young man, and he might have been writing for 30 years. This is a problem, because I have no context to fall back on. Maybe that's alright.

Quotation is the shortest cut to explanation, so I'll drop a few breadcrumbs here--

I cut

the carrots

as I cut

the carrots

.

girl

girl in mirror

.

talking and liking talking and liking

.

back

front

door

front

.

night

at night

.

one night

in three windows

.

photograph bathing.

.

Anna

the front the back the

sides

.

French towns

seem natural

to the people

who live in them.

.

I am a woman and

the window is open and

the sun is shining and my

shadow is on the bed and I am

lost.

.

I ask you

to remain who you are

until morning.

.

woman in

the shape of

a woman in the

night in the shape

of a night.

.

look

how ugly

the inside of

a man is

.

St. Tropez

the woman

emerging from the sea

also reappears in language.

.

two figures

we sat down

next to each other

and ran out of stuff

to say

.

I blame spectacle.

.

someone else

smokes in my place

.

Outside on the tree.

The level of statement is specific, and clear. The less the speaker tries to reveal, the more he is revealed. This is one of the paradoxes of minimalism. You think that the less you say, the less elaboration you permit yourself, the more discrete (and conceptual) you make it, the less is relinquished. But it isn't. No one who writes a poem--no one who writes anything--can help but express exactly who they are. The emotional feeling of revelation is an illusion-- The more we want to say something, the harder we try to get the exact words in the correct places, the more elusive an objective reality becomes. Giving and receiving, accepting and attempting, running and standing perfectly still. The heart, meanwhile, keeps on beating automatically.

I quote you. You quote me. We quote each other. I'm getting to become familiar with William Minor's poetry, as each poem adds to my knowledge of how he thinks. Does he think such and such a poem "works" or does he simply stop when something happens. How he sees things is reflected in how he thinks to describe them. Description is a kind of failure. The degree of this failure is an aspect of language which appears to interest him. Or the degree to which we can control how we think about the world by altering the usual ways we think to say something about the world. Moving the pieces on the board, in different arrangements. Then comparing this to the model. Descriptive poetry is like modeling. A replica, a copy, a version, a specific use. Each use defines its limit. Each mind is limited by its capacity. All eyes see the same thing. What is it.

Who is William Minor.

____________

Check out Coracle Press here.

The Meaning of Silliman's Links

Ron Silliman does not, as far as I know, play golf, or follow the professional circuit. In fact, I never was aware that he had any kind of physical recreation. Ron was always the avid reader, and watcher, and thinker about culture--the whole range of it, from the meanest manifestation, to the most exalted example.

Since Ron began his blog way back in the early oughts, one of his favorite, regular installments has been the "link list" of other internet sites, featuring stories, newsbreaks, videos, essays, commentary and the like. For those of us who maintain our own blog sites, a "link" mention on Silliman's Blog is worth at least three dozen hits, almost as if you'd been mentioned on an evening news segment. Having been the beneficiary of a number of these free adverts, I'm grateful to have been included in his eclectic panoply of worthy honorable mentions over the years [I started my own blog, The Compass Rose, in January 2009].

But this essay isn't a celebration of Silliman's Blog. It's an analysis of the meaning of Silliman's links, how they relate to, and express, are indeed a crucial component of his poetics.

The links function of blogs is a feature seemingly created for Silliman's mind. As I've said before, the chief aspect, the common thread which runs throughout Silliman's work from his beginnings as the Author of short, snappy lyric fragments [Crow, New York: Ithaca House, 1971], is his non-stop notational instinct to observe, absorb, record, and deconstruct "everything that's happening" at the moment or in his consciousness. The "stream of consciousness" form, which was developed mostly by prose writers during the Modernist Era (Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner) was designed to mimic the passage of mental data flowing through an individual conscious persona. In fiction, this may take the form of an interior monologue in which language is the medium, in which experience (and thought) are transported along a stream of words. Twisting and altering syntax and sense might be employed to reflect the passage of an individual persona, and the development of the inner life as it passed through the matter of experience. What Silliman discovered was that you could use this same technique to record "reality"--the very events and observations and feelings that one might experience in a given sequence (space) of time, say, during a bus ride or an afternoon spent sitting in the kitchen. Barrett Watten, I believe, had used this metaphor to describe Ron's poem Tjanting: "This poem is as good as a bus ride." But if this were only what he had been doing, it would only have constituted a kind of verité documentary. What Silliman recognized was that at any given moment, any mind is conducting itself on multiple levels (call them contexts), simultaneously. Any writer's approach to form is a mediation between how one may see the world, and how that particular consciousness may express that unique vision. Nearly all of his work, since he abandoned "poetry" in favor of his long prose constructions, has consisted of long sequences of prose meditation, which are also kinds of journeys through mental space/time. We ordinarily think of the duration of a poem as consisting of the time of its reading. A lyric or narrative poem consists of the time of its reading, which has a beginning, middle and end. But this duration in traditional poetry refers only to the occasion of its consummation--the time of its being used-up as nothing more than its use as a literary experience. What Silliman saw was that a literary work might include multiple segments of time--filled with relevant/irrelevant data and interior conscious/unconscious phenomena--and occasion, whose intervals would be syntax itself--language performing autonomous functions, and placed in a certain order to achieve a total effect more nearly like the way his mind worked, than as an external formal artifact to which his habitual way of seeing and thinking about the world would have to be adapted.

As a thinker about culture, Ron's nervous, eclectic, voraciously curious mentality was expressed in his percolating conversation, as a wide range of interests--a catholicity of inquiry which has always seemed to me the main thrust of his aesthetic. This attempt to witness, and to account for, to incorporate, process, organize, and in some way justify, the whole sweep and variety of "what's happening" within the compass of a particular consciousness parallels the technique of his writing. As a computer industry contractor, Silliman was intimately involved in the development and progress of software applications, the birth and flowering of the internet--in the ways in which that technology could be applied in the marketplace, and as a medium of/for the dissemination of information and cultural exchange. As the World Wide Web unfolded and expanded, it was almost as if it had been designed to accommodate the kind of aesthetic of consciousness which had been at the heart of Silliman's approach to form from the earliest part of his career. Marshaling vast banks of reference, spinning the slide carousel of contexts with increasing rapidity, were the ideal applications for a mind with such a preoccupation.

Now, with the further refinements and sophistication (portability) of phones, various hand-held devices and so forth--allowing people to be constantly "in touch" anywhere in the actual and virtual environments--we're becoming consumers and participants in a continuous flow of information, exchange and recordation which seems the ultimate realization of the "Silliman" consciousness. Re-reading Ketjak [1978] recently, I was struck by the multiple implications it had for the computer revolution, the portable autonomous consciousness of the cell phone era.

Silliman's early poems--Ketjak, Tjanting, and eventually The Alphabet--are all quintessential computer age poems. If I didn't know otherwise, and was coming upon these works today without any knowledge about the date or occasion of their composition, I might suppose that they had been written in the present century. When Silliman began his blog, the reach of his mind, across the whole panorama of media and cultural exchange, suddenly was subsumed into the tapestry of the new age of information. Silliman's blog itself, of course, became another forum in the proliferating platforms of opinion and information. The links function, in which separate sites may be joined in a vast network of interconnectivity, became another expression of Silliman's mining of source, entertainment and significance. Each link thus gathered and presented, together, became like a kind of daily edition of one man's world view (consciousness). Using the web as a platform, Silliman utilized his blog site in much the same way that he wrote and organized bodies of data in his poems, choosing and discriminating information and presenting it in linear form, as a series of links to widely separated contexts and sources. To be "included" as a link in Silliman's blog was like being mentioned (as I was, at least once) in one of Ron's meta-epic extended prose poems. Of course, the ephemerality and fragility of the blog-verse meant/means that, without a saving of some kind, all this blog content will eventually either be erased or transmuted into some newer "database" or media system. The internet, in this respect, has clearly mimicked the restless throw-away quality of our product/artifact driven capitalist economy, as a highway of information whose immediate value and use seem commodity-driven, but whose underlying implications are potentially much greater, not just for art, but for the society at large.

Silliman's links, then, may be seen as another example of his aesthetic of a constant, ineluctable procession--the "caravan of fellaheen" "migrating to the right" towards overwhelming mountains of data. Though no one mind may be capable of consuming it all, or with "keeping up" with it, sampling this data with intelligence and shrewd selectivity, might be one way to interpret what it all means. I often feel, reading Silliman's poetry, as if I were on a fast motorcycle, speeding through cities, the countryside, or perhaps through some virtual parallel universe of structure, event, and display, with the wind blowing by, my mind unable to take it all in, in some kind of high state of propulsive consciousness. Silliman seems to be saying "don't worry about trying to make sense of all of it, just stay tuned, be alert, and think clearly about what you're actually seeing, so you don't misinterpret or exaggerate or distort the reality." And the second implication, at least for me, would be an injunction not to resist the flow, but at least to some degree, "to go with it," to go with the flow, embrace its richness and variety and potential for growth.

Will Ron now graduate to the next platform of interconnectivity? Will the new phone-verse which is just now overtaking us, be the platform of a new poetry aesthetic? Will poets of the future create multiple "Ketjaks"--travelogues of millions of autonomous journeys along the super-virtual highways of Tomorrowland? I always think of Coolidge's work as the culmination of the advances and discoveries of science and psychology, of cybernetics and physics and cognitive research, in the 20th Century. But Silliman's works--Ketjak and Tjanting and The Alphabet--are the first important literary works of the Computer Age. Ironically, Silliman himself couldn't have known it at the time--because it hadn't happened yet. His thinking process, and the writings he did, beginning in the 1970's, anticipated our present technological environment in the Age of Information.

Go figure.

Eigner and Painting - Installment #1

If we can speak of poetry and painting in the same breath, perhaps it's possible to compare the techniques of each medium as being complementary. This is not a new idea, but one which hasn't often been explored. Since the birth of Modernism at the turn of the last century, degrees of abstraction have been taken to various limits in all kinds of art. Representation has been abandoned and rediscovered, and fragmentation and dimensional obscurities of all kinds have been rendered in predictable and unpredictable ways now for over a a hundred years.

The work of Larry Eigner presents an instance in which the visual dimension of words on a page was explored in considerable detail, to exploit the possibilities of both syntactic relationships, and purely proximal ones--frequently presenting both kinds of relationships at the same time. In Western languages, reading occurs from left to right, and down, and it is these inertias which Eigner employed to define his sensibility (both visual [descriptive] and cognitive [meditative]). There is, in addition, a kind of immediate visual arrangement--usually at a smaller scale, since the eye isn't able to comprehend more than about a half a dozen spatial word groupings at one instant--which may be apprehensible in much the same way a work of art (painting or sculpture or photograph) is, initially, all at once. Writing doesn't have texture, or color, or surface quality range, or scaled dimension, the way painting does, though typographical and graphic qualities may be (in fact, always are) a part of the formal presentation of every text. Still, we think of writing as having a certain transparent quality which should be apprehensible throughout various applications, in a way that visual imagery can't--at least to the naked, unimpeded eye.

It would go without saying that Eigner was familiar with the range of Modernist art, and derived a good deal of his literary methodology from it. The work of Cezanne presents the most vivid example of the historic "break" with the tradition of representation, and is itself a classic example and satisfying demonstration of the possibilities of employing abstract techniques to the portrayal of familiar forms and perspectives. Out of Cezanne came Pointillism, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism. Cezanne's work is in many respects the window through which the possible interpretations of visual data were first conceived and realized: He's a key figure, a bridge between Impressionist and Modernist painting.

But I'm not interested in rehashing art history here. I'm more interested in how poetry such as Eigner's responds to, imitates and transforms the discoveries of Modernist painting into language. From his earliest experiments with broken sequences of speech and visual description, Eigner was interested in how seemingly disconnected fragments of syntax, of naked nouns and floating verbs, could be set in such a way as both to mimic cognitive leaps or turns, and to portray fixed proximal relationships among visual arrangements of words, either as "things in themselves" or as stepped movements of the eye or ear through space/time. For anyone familiar with Eigner's work, these are common themes and techniques. And in the context of Modernist and especially post-Modernist poetry, they're almost clichés. But Eigner was among the first to refine these techniques, and his practice of them became, if anything, more astute over time--quicker, lighter.

If we can speak of an Author's palette, Eigner's not particularly "primary." Movements, and shapes, and feelings--along the vector of the poem's progress--are almost always more important than secondary spectral qualities, such as color. Objects, and situations, are usually generic, and two-dimensional, rather than detailed, and unique. This approach conforms to a vision of the literary art which coincides with the flatness of applied surfaces. Eigner usually intended to evoke, and invoke, familiar relationships which were then manipulated or examined from various angles or positions (in space, or abstractly, through conceptual language). This is roughly analogous, for instance, to the way Cezanne sometimes sought to evoke shape, mass, density, and position with just a few discrete touches of color, as here--

This is really nothing more than a charcoal or pencil sketch, "touched" in certain areas, to "suggest" the material qualities of the fruit, bowl and surface upon which it in turn rests. Without the colored patches, the lines are "flat" or translucent. The objects are not simply "clothed" in their color, but are made whole by it. The pleasure we feel in this partial in-fill of discrete objects in space, is inhanced by the witty reserve implied by their incompleteness. Just enough, Cezanne seems to be implying, and no more, to make you feel and see them. Their representative quality hovers between weight and weightlessness, meaty solidity and empty transparence. They're unfinished, but finished. The mind flexes delicately to resolve them into the shapes of actual things (fruit, bowl), seeing that the generic forms are being offered in shorthand, rather than completely syntactical visual realizations, which we take as touchstones for ideal (universal) things. The fruit of the gods. An analogous evocation, in words, is this rather atypical poem of Eigner's (atypical, in that it uses a "hard" left-hand margin)--

April 25-8 72 # 6 7 5

room

for flowers

shaft

the air

winds

move

dimensions

distances

directions

If we compare this verbal "equivalent" of Eigner's evident still-life description of a pot of flowers near a window or on a porch, available or adjacent to ambient "winds," we can see how both the discrete separation of the flowers, the "air / shaft" and the winds, and the clearly paralleled dimensions, distances and directions function in much the same fashion that Cezanne's sketched-in physical shapes do. Cezanne's apples and grapes don't ask us to take them literally, though we're in no doubt about their meaning, and in the same way, we're not at liberty to assign any ulterior name or meaning to Eigner's flowers, which have a purely generic and generalized quality, which is employed for their potential use in the dialectic the poem sets up. The "descriptive" vectors "dimensions//distances//directions" are like dramatic brushstrokes intersecting at the focal point of the flowers, not unlike the archly faux-cubistic diagonals in a Demuth or O'Keeffe flower painting. The simplicity of the structure of the description has an architectural forthrightness and declamatory force which is not intended to explain or metaphorize, but to indicate and evoke senses of perception. The poem has a Platonic simplicity which is deliberately naive and basic, much as Cezanne's still-life. What does either work tell us about life? They seem to exist in a shadow world of mental distraction, cool cocktails of elevated surmise, from which the superfluous connectives of explanatory "content" have been removed. They're astonishingly clear and brilliant.

Café Paradox

The life I wanted to live

Went on without me

Following a course

I had imagined

At the time of my decision

Not to live it

The life I chose to live instead

Allowed me a certain liberty

To see what I might have become

Deprived of the opportunity

Of being someone other than

Who I actually am

Giants Begin 2011 Season - World Series Defenders !

This evening, the Giants kick off the 2011 season against the Dodgers in their park. In the past two years, this has resulted in a disastrous beginning, with the Giants either taking an 0'fer, or maybe winning once.

The Giants starting line-up this year is as follows:

Andres Torres

Freddy Sanchez

Aubrey Huff

Buster Posey

Pat Burrell

Miguel Tejada

Brandon Belt

Pablo Sandoval

Tim Lincecum

Torres, Sanchez, Huff, Burrell, Sandoval and Posey are all familiar faces. Belt and Tejada are new to the team this year, Tejada coming in as a free agent, and Belt arriving as the fresh-faced young phenom slugger, after a single year in the minors. Over the off-season, we lost Uribe to the Dodgers, and Ishikawa (just yesterday) to waivers. Guillen is gone, and a handful of other temps were let go as well. The team's pitching squad looks identical to last year, except that Bumgarner replaces Wellemeyer, pushing Zito down into the fifth position. On paper, with Wilson and our set-ups, we have the strongest staff in the majors. And they're all young, with Zito the senior at age 33. Wilson and Ross begin the season on the DL, but neither is expected to be gone for long. The only consideration would be whether Wilson would lose a couple of opportunities, jeopardizing his saves total for the year.

I have a couple of questions. How come Ishikawa goes and DeRosa stays? DeRose at 35 is basically washed up; last season it was predicted that his wrist condition would be chronic, and end his career, but here he is again, right back in business. Rowand's contract is still a problem (like Zito's), and there's always the possibility that he'll rediscover his swing and become once again the power hitter he was born to be (if he could just stand up straight at the plate instead of leaning over backwards in the batter's box!). Sandoval dropped thirty pounds, and appears ready for a resurgence after last season's fall-off. It's doubtful that Tejada will be able to replace Uribe's hitting at shortstop, but if he could hit 16 homers and drive in 70, that might well be enough to supply the missing piece. If Ross comes through, too, that might furnish just the right amount of power.

But, as with last year, this is a team based on pitching, not power. Philadelphia understood this, and signed Cliff Lee, after losing Jayson Werth to free agency (Washington Nationals)--which makes them just as competitive (or more so) than they were last year, when they were the only legitimate challengers to the Giants in the post-season.

I don't expect the Giants to go all the way this year, but I'd be surprised if they don't win 90 games, which would almost certainly be enough to take their division. As for the playoffs, there's still the Phillies in the way. A repeat, as always, is very very difficult to bring off.

But it'll be exciting!

______________

Somewhat characteristically, this evening, the Giants performed as expected, with excellent pitching, and weak hitting. Kershaw, the Dodgers young talented starter, outpitched Lincecum, but not by much. Lincecum was victimized by a few bloop hits, and two key errors (by Tejada, and--believe it or not--Posey). Players trying to do too much. What is the difference between "pressing" and playing hard? It's a thin line. Anyway, the Giants seemed to be pressing this evening, and it cost them. Pablo is still swinging at balls out of the strike-zone. Que sera.