Who's and whose. It's and its. Bear and bare. See grammar. See grammar rollover and play dead...it happens, especially in the train of thought sometimes with the best and busiest of writers. Don't sweat it. That's why professional editors fit into the communication community quite nicely (and of course, being human they occasionally miss errors; more frequently these days it seems, as Paige attests). Self-editing is important in the case of casual writing for those who can bear it, but the attempt at frank thought by others less diligent is often more important, unless of course one runs smack up against a GRAMMAR NAZI. But be careful as you don that suit. You might be surprised to find that homophones are just the beginning of what a true grammar nazi is keen to enforce. I recall an assignment in junior high was given to look for errors in the local newspaper and other media of the time. I was hooked. Still delight when I find the errors. Of course, I never take personal offense anymore, and you'll get over it. Mere trifles. I did, and I was smug if not frosty about this and so much other sheet music when I was young—but I do congratulate those of you who still care about how you present your thoughts, and am not suggesting you change any of your linguistic insights. Just thought I'd trot out my own grammar nazi among familiar minds for old times' sake—please forgive any errors that remain in this text, even as I attempted to perfect my script.
Archive for the ‘Critique’ Category
Grammar Nazi
Language Theory, Deluxe Brown Shoe Cynics & Other Wet Blanket Ratios
Word Wakers
The following excerpts are from an essay cast by poet Marjorie Perloff as excerpted in Nothing to Say & Saying It, the online blog by John Gallaher.
Language poetry, together with its related ‘experimental’ or ‘innovative’ or ‘oppositional’ or ‘alternative’ poetries in the U.S. and other Anglophone nations, has often been linked to the two Steins—Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein (as I myself have argued in Wittgenstein’s Ladder), to Guillaume Apollinaire and William Carlos Williams, the Objectivists and New York poets, Samuel Beckett, the Frankfurt School, and French poststructuralist theory. Those who denigrate Language poetry and related avant-garde practices invariably claim that these are aberrations from the true lyric impulse as it has come down from the Romantics to such figures as the most recent Poet Laureates—Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky and Stanley Kunitz. But laureate poetry—intimate, anecdotal, and broadly accessible as it must be in order to attract what is posited by its proponents as a potential reading audience—has evidently failed to kindle any real excitement on the part of the public and so decline-and-fall stories have set in with a vengeance. Great poets, we read again and again, are a thing of the past: a ‘post-humanist’ era has no room for their elitist and difficult practices. Accordingly, the main reviewing media from the Times Literary Supplement to the New York Times Book Review now give ‘poetry’ (of whatever stripe) extremely short shrift.
‘To imagine a language,’ said Wittgenstein, ‘is to imagine a form of life.’ This book studies such key poetic ‘imaginings’ both at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the millennium, so as to discover how their respective ‘forms of life’ both converge and cross.
- The Perloff Manifesto : Marjorie Perloff via John Gallaher in Nothing to Say & Saying It
- After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents by Marjorie Perloff
- Language Poets Wiki : The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Language poetry emphasizes the reader's role in bringing meaning out of a work.
- Textual Politics and the Language Poets : "Let us undermine the bourgeoisie." So Ron Silliman ends his contribution to "The Politics of Poetry" symposium in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 9/10 (October 1979). Writes Gabriel Thy in response to Silliman: "Better as discard than trump. It's no accident the truck feeds millions, ignoring the silly man crammed with errors."
A Few Choice Words On The Climate Change Hoax
As solar activity drops to high risk century low,
puzzling buzzing scientists—who've for past few decades
or so—insisted planet barely missed flaming new ice age,
all the rage in the Eighties, now had dutifully traded crazy moon
white snow boots for trendy new blue swamp goloshes
as they prepped the weak and the weary for pernicious
man-made global warming trends, projected
death of civilization, unprotected
men of calculation, sober cool thinkers
fighting like cats in the Captain's Tower,
having replaced Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
competitively, at least two generations ago
with bursting advent of the whimpering class...
unless we stopped all modern activity,
removed it to a more needy neighborhood,
redistributed the wealth, heavy environmental taxation,
daring energy industry transfers nation to nation,
dumping energy back into the glittering soil,
boasting certain good intentions whipped
unintended consequences every time,
so peace could again perfect its reign
upon contemporary balance.
But this slick idea was modified when numbers
secretly fudged melted into gosh darn goo of scandal
from burning lights of world-wide media exposure,
and strange humiliating coincidences,
major players like Al Gore and The Hague
sensing jubilant masses lampooning laughter
even as Big Al the Grand Wizard slinked away
from his own imperial carbon footprint,
only to pop up again in news to sell his failing network
to Al-Jazeera. By that time powers had changed the name
of green movement from Man-made Global warming
to Man-Assisted Global Climate Change.
Yep. Cosmological scientists fooled again. Who
do you believe now, a gaggle of government-funded white coats
with pocket calculators fighting over grant money
and other tax subsidies or your own self-serving
senses when you step out the front door
every morning? Certainty is nothing
unless nothing is certainty.
In this age of Internet,
gonzo TV and one's own dilly
dallying daily devotions, everything
he needs to consider his puny effect
in challenging the cosmos, the gifted wing,
more than a few paltry molecules at a time,
man pockets like a broken rhyme.
Isn't that why a few cozy Parisians
rounded up decades of thought,
added some of their own,
codifying existentialism
the 1940s, until a few others
shuttered Sartre's approach for chaos theory,
hamming up for the 1970s, brokering game theory
to police chance, pushing the unified field lovers
back onto existentialism's pearly-gated scientist
hunkered down among his graphs and chunks
of ice, the Yukon Valley Dolls, analyzing
a bucket of balls, which then burst off-camera
his pus-filled cyst, stunning a moth
with some butterfly cough.
I'm merely a journeyman, mind you, but I can smell
ink, the rank differences in accumulative error
between humanity's penchant for gross
speculation and visceral control
while also being limited
by his obvious lack
of precision in husbanding
dormant or active volcanoes,
residual tsunamis, bitter storms,
topical flooding, global wind patterns,
colliding rocks aimed at a rotting nuclear plant
near you and various unsavory activities of our sun,
that ultimate troublemaker, all circulating
about this planet long before we began
questioning its wobble.
Bawer On Günter Grass
Gunter Grass
The only surprising thing about the anti-Semitic poem that Günter Grass published last week, and that has created an international firestorm, is that he waited so long to write such a thing. Anti-Semitism, after all, is all the rage these days among left-wing European literary intellectuals (excuse the multiple redundancy), and Grass has always prided himself on being in the forefront of these trends, not being a Johann-come-lately.
Who is Günter Grass, you ask? For decades after the 1959 publication of his first and most famous (and highly overrated) novel, The Tin Drum, he was described by admirers as the conscience of postwar Germany. His detractors had other words for him: smug, arrogant, obnoxious. Even Richard Gilman, a writer for the left-wing The Nation whom one might have expected to celebrate the guy, complained in 1982 about his lofty, hectoring tone, stating:
Today there is no writer more swollen with self-importance than Günter Grass, who has begun to think of himself as identical with the fates of German literature, German politics, and German mores. John Updike, for his part, saw Grass as a cautionary case for politically engaged writers: he can't be bothered to write a novel; he just sends dispatches from the front lines of his engagement.
Read it all...
Article by Bruce Bawer.
Reflexions On The Reflecting Floor
Rename a thing to the best advantage of the opinion programmer's interest.
HERE ARE A FEW ACTUALITY PRISMS that make a Fictive Reality possible:
Hurdling - When the facts of an event come under dispute, the viewer is forced to spend time finding and verifying the facts for himself. This is almost never done by viewers, so they settle on a triangulation around the opinion programmer claims based on the presentation made by each side. In other words, they guess. The more the guesswork goes up, the more malleable the reality becomes.
Fuzzing - Framing reports with the set of facts best suited to the opinion programmer's interests, and ignoring other salient facts. It is frequently asserted in public by opinion programmers that the science is settled on carbon dioxide and anthropogenic global warming, when this would any objective viewer with the time and energy to find out would demand to know why if that's true why does the geologic record show evidence that contradicts the theory on its face.
Naming - Rename a thing to the best advantage of the opinion programmer's interest. The MSM's use of undocumented workers instead of illegal aliens is an example of this. Per McLuhan, names can take on cold resonation to the viewer, in this example making the event of an illegal alien seem less illegal, even though everybody acknowledges the law is violated, but that's a matter of paperwork, so it's cool, not hot. There are also insurgent vs Jihadi, conservative vs lawful, and of course that venerated classic racist vs constitutional.
Urging - A technique increasingly popular among opinion programmers is the old short deadline trick. The closer the deadline, the less the facts can be established, the higher the risk of stupid national behaviors and decisions. Properly executed, a deadline decision will be very hot, which can send the body politic into a steamy sauna, where figures are fuzzy and unclear in the fog.
—Alarmed Pig Farmer
Thanks for this solid piece of writing, APF, now destined to be seen by a few additional interpretive minds than are found at our usual play pen.
We can certainly attest to the fact that all aggressive ideologies seek to command the language, the manner of communication, the information circuitry. We saw this throughout the 20th century, and the preceding imperial eras, each dynasty or cultural strain eager to deploy the tactics of domination.
So yes, we see it despicably advanced in fundamental Islam; we can still see the last gasps of it in Christianity fundamentalism.
Peerlessly, the ragin' Left and to a lesser degree the conservative Right tongue wrestle for every monkey wrench in the toolbox in an embarrassing effort to control the terms in describing life as they each insist it is, must be, and always shall remain the better path, no matter what fluctuating human or other jurisdictional energies support. We might call this reflexology. Every strike for a better way of temporal living falls short and is shortlived, dying out due to either lawlessness or the failures of impure government, that is to say, government failure through tactics of domination and its supporting structures. Doesn't the posted image prove our point...
[2011, Washington DC ]
The Critique
Experience
THAT'S A KEEN INSIGHT into the poetics of good metaphor, Paige, by insisting the "tree" is neither happy" or "unhappy", but rather merely exists within the framework of its own inanimate kind.
However, as if I were Ezra Pound dancing with a pronoun and you were Thomas Sterns Eliot sipping a cup of Earl Grey, might I suggest, without airs but in an uncompetitive spirit of respect, changing the rather inactive choice of "Withstanding" which is repetitive of the earlier uses of "standing" to the deeper, richer word "weathering the elements" if the poet's style insists upon a common vernacular. And in that sense, one might also write:
-
Yet there it still stands
Rain or shine, sheet or snow,
an ornament to the elements.
Or better yet, a rebuke to the elements:
-
Yet there it still stands
Rain or shine, sheet, or snow
a rebuke to the elements.
Thus avoiding a third usage of "stand" in so few syllables. And adds a function to the existence of the tree.
But it's a wonderful poem, Paige. Just take my comments as a persnickety old poet who himself is constantly seeking a more compelling poetics from which to put matters that strike a chord in himself, or better yet, in others, as well.
The tree, a noun, of course, is a living thing, unlike a firelog, so a better choice of words than "inanimate" would have served the argument better, but sense the difference between using an adjective like "happy" or "unhappy" and the device of the active verb "rebuke" to better reflect the context of the "thing" in its apparently subdued and hampered existence.
Gabriel
Everyone Needs To Think, So Why Snip Off
Body of Workers
On 27 May 2010, at 09:33, Billy Asperger wrote:
I follow you regarding the craps hinted in the previous message. It's true that "you can lead todays lefties around by their dreadlock hair-extensions with the smallest tug". But at the same time we easily can admit that most of the people (doesn't matter whether they are lefties or whatever) really don't give a damn about the revolution a bunch of US had been theorizing (here or there).
I think what disconcerts me about the statement above is that it seems to take for granted a division between those who can "theorize" and the working class. If you are feeling a gap it isn't an intelligence gap it's a class gap; it's not about support for radical change it's over trust and sincerity in those who claim to know better what is good and bad and their good intentions to realize it. It's not because ordinary people do not or can not understand the workings and evils of the system it's because they know them much better: "intellectuals" more than often lack real knowledge of just what it is like to be born into trapped, exploited, cheated and abused neighbourhoods.
I'm working class and all the people I work with are working class (in fact at the moment every last one of them is black working class) and I can tell you a clear and certain fact—that I have heard more genuine insight, shrewdness and sincerity from the mouths of common people than from the pens of middle class and academic "vanguards of the working class", or from the white-people-with-dreadlocks brigade who are rooted nowhere and ultimately committed to nothing as a result.
But there is nothing wrong or pointless about "theorizing", though it's a word I do not find helpful. Discussion ought to take place to try and deepen understanding of how everything works. Those who can do it should do it—and take a clearer perception of conditions back to the communities in which they live and work. Everyone needs to think, so why snip off the activity of thinking, call it theorizing and divorce it ideologically and socially from its application in daily life?
I need to add though that not a lot of what takes place on lists like this, or seminars in colleges or in all the other supposedly intellectual theatres where this "theorization" is supposedly taking place...is anything of the kind. On the contrary it seems to be a battleground where people hone and refine the very things they claim to be against; find new excuses to obscure the truth and divert others from coalescing around it. It is class war over the spectacle. It would be nice to have genuine discussion once in a while but in the absence of true common roots or listserv mediation it isn't very common.
Asperger: "People are enchanted and mesmerized by "the apparent" of the spectacle and that fucking pseudo(?) "objectivity" is good and is enough from their point of view. They feel comfortable being trapped inside the great show of appealing-consuming-producing-exploiting and so on. The spectacular society is reassuring for their simple and mechanical minds."
I can't begin to tell you just how condescending and spectacular a cliché that is. Instead I'll say something potentially more interesting. Human existence is existential: there must be something to fill the void and to structure everyday life, and there must be an ideological framework, a worldview, only within which all words, phenomena, values and beliefs acquire a place and a meaning and a value. Worldview, and all the habits that stream forth from it, is as fundamental and material a necessity as food water and air. It's the way we are made.
Therefore ultimately there is no complete distinction possible between what is spectacle and what is situation; or what is recuperation and what is detournement and so on. There are only inherited models from which to construct models. Very little truth, if any, is ahistorical; all ideas, appearances, meanings and values must exist in a perpetual war over ideas, appearances, meanings and values.
What is eternal is the wisdom of good conduct—of seeing and revealing the truth in all its partiality, of understanding the common interest of fairness and distributing needs and opportunities with equity. What is eternal also seems to be that which I call "original sin" -- the tendency to imitate and repeat evils and errors, to reiterate imperfect worlds from imperfect worlds; bad habits of mind and behaviour that not having been perceived for what they are cannot be rooted out: "karma". Thus life is not really composed of true and false images nor even right and wrong values so much as right and wrong choices. From the existential point of view, to be free means to be condemned to choose between the good and the evil within alternative possible actions—endlessly. No wonder they fall back into the provided routines, spectacles and social clichés: it is so much easier to have something that tells you what to do than to have to face each and every moment in a cosmic abyss of uncertainty.
And these "theorizations" you're referring to are simultaneously an attempt to defend an Ideology of distorted self-serving de/perceptions at war with the attempt to add and revise it with new understandings of the truth. The fact is, the "Left" (whose name itself is as spectacular a piece of nonsense as you could ever hope for) has been struggling with the contradiction between its moral outrage for the world's underdogs and the fact that the underdogs will not meekly back them up in return ever since it robbed the working class of its politics, at about the same time it started robbing rastafarians of their hair-dos, the genuinely homeless of their squatters movements and so on. All the class rhetoric and fashionware and shrunken heads by which today's radicals identify themselves have been stolen from somebody else—as if by possessing their tattoos and music, hairstyles and footwear you could somehow take power over their souls and legitimize yourselves.
But white men can't sing the blues.
k
A Taste Of Trench Madness
Gabriel Thy's Sleepy Eye
Thanks for keeping up the resistance, Morales. Just know that the busy silence of we who are marked to fall always proceeds the clashing of the cymbals, while those of us who warned the others (now laughing and mocking, hissing and despising our herald) will have witnessed the fullness of truth, not they—and by inertia or grace will be prepared to shield others from the amplified atrocities as they arrive. That's the extent of whatever hope I have remaining because I have learned that minds are not changed by the politeness of social stability but by the harsh tongues of upheaval and crisis. This country will probably awaken when Europe implodes, but I believe that America is also marked for crisis, a result of having become sadly corrupted and from our national potential far have we strayed.
Don't fear the Marxist-Islamofascism creep, however. Resist it wherever we can, but don't expect any sudden miracles quite yet. People still treasure their fool's gold, reflecting among the dueling mirrors of social consciousness that they've done the math, not quite realizing they've only been using imaginary numbers while letting the real digits slip away...
And allow me this opportunity to insist that I am not naive, no matter what I choose to paint or wrestle into inconsequential line. It's rather obvious by now that I frittered away that excuse six senses and a million miles ago in a taste of trench madness. I may be a fool, but I'm nobody's fool.
A Few Sky Gray Thoughts On Politics As A Brittle Literary Device
War On Wars
A fine man and dedicated patriot named Christopher Logan honored me recently when he sent me a message inquiring, "Do you think I was being too rough with her?"
Damned if I know. She doesn't seem to be backing down, and is remarkably patronizing in her own right. Let's face it. Some people just don't get it, won't get it, can't possibly get it until IT affects them in some very personal way, very detrimental way. Perhaps a few quotes from Thomas Jefferson, J. Quincy Adams, John Wesley, Bishop Sheen, Winston Churchill, and Mohammed himself will get her attention, but probably not. Because she's of the mindset right now that it is better that 100 guilty terrorists go undetected than one innocent Muslim be given a second glance in an airport line. There's no defeating that logic in these sad, post-modernist, politically incorrect, globalist times since it parallels the romanticism that our own US legal system is grounded in, and pumps out through the state media. For better or for worse, smiley-faced Pollyannas will always be with us. You and me? We just keep plugging. In due time, we might be prepared to be of even greater service to those who criticize us now...
Q: Thank you for not attacking me but providing me with the information. But your quick turn to the passive-aggressive has not provided much in the form of education. I'll investigate anyway.
Pamela, I'm not here to educate you. One liners on Facebook will never get that done. There is a wealth of information out there just for the picking. You are correct. You must do the investigations, yourself. Take no single source as truth, or at least not until you have determined the source as reputable over a string period of time. That's the best any of us can hope to do. But what seems to be at issue here on this thread is whether or not this question of a global jihad in its myriad of forms is a matter of personal opinion, anecdotal evidence, or mere genuflection, but rather of determinable fact by a tough, keen look at all the evidence available. Propaganda is very tough nut to parse with mere cursory efforts...
And I suggest to you that Mr. Logan has the right beat on the issue, Laurie. News that screams forth everyday from all corners of the planet where Islam is actively pursing more territory, more corpses, more power under the guise of sharia, is not a mere blip on the screen. The signage of Islam on the march is everywhere. Signs, signs, everywhere are signs. Perhaps you know the song, perhaps not. But the point is, there's a whole lot more to this Islamic muffin than just some flour and a handful of blueberries.
Gabriel: Information is not knowledge.
Kirsten: This is an often misconstrued concept! But, to quote: Knowledge is Good.
Gabriel: Prudence is better. And all things being equal, innocence is best...
Bruce: Well I didn't want to say anything but I am glad you know this.
Gabriel: Well dear public, feel free to expose me to what else you and yours might speculate I need to know. The nasty truth is not as mysterious as we've been led to believe. GATHER OR DIVIDE. The whole point of my imaginary punk rock band is to suggest that each one of us must make the play. Bystanders be damned. Ignorance is bliss, twice the fun, bur perilous in spoilage. Our retaliation?
Inherit a role. Allow it to count. Face the music. And realize that this is the only rule by which we know ourselves as intricately as our detractors do.
Josh: Correlation does not imply causation!
Karl Popper
Gabriel: Obviously correlation is a more pertinent state of affairs, since to put matters in terms Karl Popper might appreciate, scientists can explain First Cause, but we are stuck with all pending correlations.
Maybe that was Wittgenstein, not Popper, but since they exchanged thoughts with fabulous animosity, the pending correlations in this case are probably nothing more than the dollars and cents of an ego economy - commonly called hubris - rather than the clarity that some uncertainty principle might avail us when the necessary light we might require to accept a generality at the sufferance of a specific is corrupted by political motivations.
In other words, all politics is tainted, and plagued with guesswork, but I am a survivor of my own knowledge, not yours. Might I bother this page with a correction? scientists CANNOT explain...well, that unintended typo effectively puts the skid into this thread. After fielding a few snarky remarks from leftist associates and reading some of the neck-snapping snorts of some rightie cohorts, I feel compelled to state:
Faith is central to each creature as we struggle with imperfection in the teleological realm, and faithlessness is punished in one form or another at every turn. There is no certainty but uncertainty, and there is no uncertainty like certainty. We thrash about with words to form ideas that deceive us with words no matter where we spend our coins. No realm is satisfied, and logic is quickly sold to the highest bidder. Some might even say there is no rational distinction between politics and religion, but are merely similar thorns on the same blighted rose bush...
Like Ezra Pound, I cherish the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time.
GT
Money For The Poets
Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy
DECADES OF PUBLIC and private funding have created a large frumpy professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Poets? Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward, but I guess it's been this way for a long time. Me? Think I'll pull, push, exhort, pry, torque, haul ass my own weight outside the grinding gears of establishment bureauocracy poesy. Hence this website and its demands on atomic clearance, where animated bias is the pungent cream of festivities. Click. Click. 404 error. File not found on this server. Click. Click. Damn, this is what I hate about linking to outside tiddly winkers. Link expirations. Here today, gone tomorrow. I had linked to a page touting a national poetry month special called Show Me The Money. It was a good read, but now the link is dead, and I should remove it to keep my SEO score respectable. This is the primary reason I link to Wikipedia pages. They may not be the most thorough or even the most factual presentations of a given subject, but one can link to them and count on their continued existence. At least until their self-funding dries up. Money, money, money...
Read it all.
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