Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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December 15, 2009
when snl ='d wtf 30 yrs exactly since this live television broadcast performed some serious rewiring of certain brains November 26, 2009
is runed Experience has taught TiR that if we closely investigate the "ruined," then we are sure to find at least a little "i" somewhere, usually near the heart of it. But what if TiR could get rid of the "I"? Then we'd have: "runed." If we correctly interpret the guidance on various webpages about runes, like this one and this one, then the word T H A N K S G I V I N G would seem to be transcribable phonetically into the following runic alphabetical marks: TH → Thurisaz If we then attempt some amateur divination via the purported rough meanings of each of the above symbols, we find that the phenomenon called "thanksgiving" presents to us, in sequence, the following experiences: (destruction)↓ Astonishing! The above findings uncannily comport with the results of related investigations that TiR has conducted for a number of years now on this exact day. November 09, 2009
"Es ist eine Falle!!" Exactly twenty years on, the fresh reminders of context & background that Andrew Curry presents in his new "Before the Fall" piece are terrific. TiR especially liked: For the dissidents who had been filled with hope at the sight of East Germans rallying to their cause, the fall of the wall was initially seen as a huge setback. "We were disappointed," [Uwe] Schwabe admits. "We thought everyone who would help us change the country would leave, and there would be no reason to come out on the street." Curry's piece (in The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2009) is here. Not that Thatcher & Mitterrand would have been displeased at such a trick, as we've since learned. However, a loony or perverse practitioner of the skeptical arts might ask: How much time (/evidence) must needs pass (/be amassed) before Eppelmann's friend is necessarily proved wrong? ------------------------------------------------------------- Meanwhile, every once in a while, the Ž-man pulls his tongue out of his čheek and lapses into straightforward language. He hardly could have picked a better day to do so. November 08, 2009
every comma counts Behind the glass doors that seal the shelves along the walls in the most perfect space of this room, in this museum, among the colorful spines of the items in the children's book section, stands a slim volume by one "Leinstein" with the curious title, Punctuation in Verse. What on earth is it? One guy found out. George Burnham Ives [b. 1856, Salem, MA; Harvard man, lawyer, then author, translator and, proofreader, and father of lawyer Frederick Manley Ives] [Why, in 1890, did G.B. Ives leave the law, & rather abruptly at that? once got a peek at the publication. He wrote about it in 1921: In connection with the "formal periodic arrangement" of sentences . . . this is, perhaps, a convenient place to refer to a rare little volume, called "Punctuation in Verse: or the Good Child's Book of Stops," by one Madame de Leinstein, of which there is a copy in the Children's Department of the New York Public Library; this copy, through the courtesy of Miss Annie Carroll Moore of that department, the writer was allowed to examine. It was printed in London, presumably a great many years ago, -- it bears no date, -- consists of only thirty-odd pages, of which one half are blanks, and is "Embellished with Twelve handsomely colored Engravings." The two couplets following (put in the mouth of "Cook Comma"), --At the Comma, each reader should stay, and count one; See Ives' Text, Type and Style: Compendium of Atlantic Usage, p. 59, herein. One can read information about the wonderful Ms. Moore, Ives' courteous benefactress, here and here. Last year, a writer for The Oxford Times provided additional clues about the contents of Leinstein's volume & its apparent agenda, here: The earliest book entirely about English punctuation -- A Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses (1680) -- recommended that, when reading, you should count one when you reach a comma, two at a semi-colon, and four at a colon. Madame Leinstein's Punctuation in Verse; or, The Good Child's Book of Stops, published about 1825, disagreed: For the Colon count three -- for the Period, four; As, "The robin is dead: he now is no more." ------------------------------------------------------------- What do we know about Madame Leinstein? Basically nothing. We do know that Punctuation in Verse was not her only children's book. Her 1826 Mamma's Tales; or Pleasing Stories of Childhood, Adapted to the Infant Mind, is on-line here. The book includes stories that begin like this: Tom was a good boy, and he could not bear to see dumb animals ill used; but Sam was a bad boy, and he was fond of ill-treating every thing. Can you guess, in general terms at least, how things end up for Sam? On the other hand, she could also write sentences like the following, for non-children: Comalvin is scarcely equal to the furious strokes of the monster; his strength, subdued by long suffering, gives way; he sinks upon his knee; the dreadful arm of Fin-Dallan is uplifted; his blade gleams wrathful above his head; "die!" he exclaims; Ilvena knows the voice, her hand graps the dagger rusted in Cuth-Ionor's blood; she makes suddenly between the combatants, and buries the weapon in Fin-Dallan's heart. The foregoing is from her story, "The Fatal Scarf: A Legend of Cuth-Ionor," included in the 1840 collection, The Evening Museum: A Collection of Deeply Interesting Tales and Legends, Together with Several Affecting Narratives and Surprising Adventures, here. How many (beats? seconds?) does she tell us to "count" at a comma? One. And for a semicolon? Two. The above passage from "Fatal Scarf" contains 4 commas and 7 semicolons. Thus, we should "count" at least to 18, as we read the above passage? ------------------------------------------------------------- Madame Leinstein seems to have been one of those who would have advocated a function for punctuation in written English much like that of the rest in musical notation. Why did written English never incorporate certain useful elements of musicial notation, such as the rest? Or did it? Rare books curator Paul Saenger (interviewed here), in his Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, conjures up a time when punctuation and notation were not so far apart, with common roots in the opening up of intratextual space: The compatibility of punctuation and musical signs is evidence of the advantages for ocular movement and text perception that intratextual space afforded the oral reader who in the new medium could more readily decode not only the text's meaning but also indications for pitch, intonation, and tempo. Intratextual space was a prerequisite for maintaining an eye-voice span sufficiently broad to enable the fluent matching of syllable to pitch necessary for the performance of medieval chant. (p. 36-37) A historically blurred line between "words" and "musical notes" is easiest to consider in liturgical performance: Early musical notation also consisted of interlinear letters and tironian word notes to indicate both pitch and tempo. As signs, they were at times identical to the letters used for the notation of syntax, and experienced scholars have more than once mistaken the one for the other. The same neurophysiological processes that necessitated space for the effective reception of signs for word sequence were required for the perception of these notae, which provided encoded information for the oral performance of liturgical texts. (Saenger, p. 74) Hebrew cantillation marks come to mind as a regularly observable example today of "musical" annotation in texts. For written English in verse form, Julia Parker Dabney in her Musical Basis of Verse: A Scientific Study of the Principles of Poetic Composition (1901, here) proposed use of musical notation to "cut the Gordian knot of scansion fairly in two." Dabney "notates" some Tennyson like this: | ♪ [quaver rest] [quaver rest] | ♪ [quaver rest] [quaver rest] | ♪ [quaver rest] [quaver rest] | Several years later, Raymond Macdonald Alden commented on some of the obvious flaws in this method, in his Introduction to Poetry (1909). Other ideas come along in Mallarmé, and Olson and "field poetics," about how to textually represent silence or a pause for breath, usually indeed through manipulation of intratextual blank space or layout/array on the page. ------------------------------------------------------------- Leading away from Leinstein's Punctuation in a different direction could be the notion of a mathematical substratum to the reading experience. Do we "count" as we read? Ought we to? Does each reader have a silent metronome that ticks away underneath the reading mind? Should our reading of punctuation conform to it, if so? Is reading-time elastic? Alden suggests it is. Even if so, does the phenomenlogy of reading involve a steady click track beneath the elasticity, as the ground against which the latter is measureable, perceptible? TiR imagines one end result of this line of thought to be a world in which every page of text is recast to resemble a page of the Principia Mathematica -- or, to bring it back to music, certain scores by Elliott Carter, a former math teacher. As Masumi Rostad of the Pacifica Quartet put it several years back: I like to joke that because of [Elliott's] rhythmic complexity, every bar ends up looking like I’m in school again taking a math quiz I didn’t study for. In other words, this post may be a roundabout pointless way to ask: How does Elliott Carter read commas? October 30, 2009
Die Expropriateurs werden expropriiert. What was TiR wondering about, a year ago today? TiR's pointless internal records reflect that among the numerous links saved that day were a few that suggest our asking, "Is theft from thieves not theft?" The abovementioned alleged "wondering" (in fact monkeyesque websurfing, as usual) seems to have ricocheted from Proudhon ("le propriété, c'est le vol", etc.) to Rothbard to Nozick. What in the world might have been going on, a year ago, to make TiR wonder about this? We can't imagine. October 02, 2009
obituary hidden within an obituary From an appreciation of the late Irving Kristol, by Joseph Dorman, the person behind the most excellent "Arguing the World": One day, I walked around the corner from the building in which I worked and picked up a copy of Kristol's "Reflections of a Neoconservative" at the old Coliseum Books. To pile digression atop digression, obituaries for the former site of the "old" establishment are here and here. September 18, 2009
so wrong, so badly, so often Searle, recently: It is much easier to refute a bad argument than to refute a truly dreadful argument. A bad argument has enough structure that you can point out its badness. But with a truly dreadful argument, you have to try to reconstruct it so that it is clear enough that you can state a refutation. Yes. Where even to begin? September 10, 2009
great moments in heckler response For a moment, we imagined BHO channeling Zimmy in Manchester in 1966, turning to face Biden & Pelosi and stage whispering (sic): "Play healthcare reform f--king loud!" =========================================================== Meanwhile, David Kurtz flags an analysis that situates the (more recent) heckle within the decisional calculus of what we think of as a sort of Tribunal of Absurdity, in which an increased quantum of evidence in favor of innocence makes more imperative a verdict of guilt. TiR has been fascinated by this almost-beautiful [but only "almost-", because of its gratuitous & scary destructiveness]dynamic for years. We'd sometimes like to imagine that its definition of individuality and person/selfhood is planted in a dream logic that demands autonomy to the last, even against the coercive dictates of linear rationality. However, underneath it instead here seems to be a cynicism all too linear and economic. [lordy what noodly gibberish] September 08, 2009
Steely the ability of the nyt to get thru the whole obit & discussion of the context of s&c's contribution w/out appearance of the phrase "sleng teng" appears a bit astounding . . . . . . otoh, the bdp connection is astute, & the story itself tho sad is a reminder that contra stereotype not every post-marley figure in ja music dies of gunshot . . . September 03, 2009
monosyllabism Rick Perlstein now has reiterated, here, a point that perhaps cannot not not not not not not not be reiterated enough: Much of what passes for analytical discussion about politics on American TV resembles celebrity gossip -- the celebrities just happen to be politicians. TiR idly wondered about the American overlap between the realms of entertainment & political media coverage two summers ago when, for a day or two, we entertained the pet theory that in the USA:
Related, we imagined, were: the phenomena of commentators who aspire to wear hats in both the film & politics worlds (e.g., Steve Sailer); Anyway, as per usual, TiR got bored [someone will say: understandably] with the material and shelved it before we could be bothered to develop it into a blog post. [Note: Many readers should automatically say in response to whatever Perlstein has to say & to anything that anyone (esp. us) could possibly have to say about it:"Duh! Yawn. What a trite and therefore stupid observation. Tell us something we don't already know! Please try to come up with something new to say. Lame. Superficial. Shopworn. Highly unoriginal. Next! Booooring." ============================================ We remembered all this because of a new dispatch from the fault zone between celebrity entertainment gossip and political analysis, here. TiR's favorite response so far to the piece is here: Still, there was something rather troubling about the article: Almost none of the words within it were more than two syllables long. . . . A "translation" into single syllable words of LJ's account is then provided. TiR encourages the author of the piece, Mr. Johnston or anyone else to take up and complete our monosyallabic translation of Kant's first critique, the CPR, here. We never made it past the first paragraph. Or wanted to. Monosyllabomaniacs can find efforts in a similar spirit, so we now discover, in the "Words of One Beat" poetry sites, here and with numerous translations here. The translated sonnet "Shall I say how thou'rt like a mid-year's day?" by one "Will the Bard" is especially brilliant. (A link to the text of the original sonnet, with its words of up to three syllables, is here.) |