in memoriam: David Foster Wallace

in David Foster Wallace a great part of the american landscape of literature and language was lost. As an addendum to Scott's last post, i wanted to point out the ways DFW touched invented usage.

better than Dave Eggers
when we decided to book club on invented usage, our first (and so far, only) attempt was Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. i was still reeling from my first encounter with Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and those discussions showed it. in both part 1 and part 3, i really revealed how much he influenced all the reading i did afterward. if you'll permit me to quote myself...

and the thing that sets the gimmickry of ahwosg apart from that of, say, david foster wallace, is that eggers never turns the lens around. he never makes the reader speak to him, never comes out with 'the only access you have to these tragedies is what i'm choosing to tell you about it, and you can't trust me!'. (part 1)

i think that witty, po-mo, self-referentiality was, at one time, a very new idea. but now we've read david foster wallace and the whole new generation of writers that he and Eggers spawned, so i feel like the style has lost some freshness. (part 3)

for a certain genre of writing, DFW has informed, if not outright spoiled, innumerable readers of our generation.

death of a SNOOT
in the summer of 2006, i came across an article by DFW, Harper's Magazine: Tense Present, that i felt compelled, as a usage liberal, to engage with. the resulting post, the SNOOT fallacy, generated a lot more comments than average, and in turn compelled me to write one of my favorite posts, the deconstruction of a stradivarius.

it's an understatement to say i was surprised to find out that DFW was a SNOOT. really, it shook the core liberal values that have inspired this blog from the beginning. if a writer like DFW, who so clearly knows and respects the value of language, calls himself a SNOOT, maybe SNOOThood isn't as bad as i'd previously thought?

i stood my ground, obviously, and those posts explain why, but DFW was the most worthy SNOOT adversary i can imagine. that confrontation is a moment worth pointing out in the blog's history.

suicide the internet
DFW is called a postmodern writer for several reasons. not the least of these, i think, is his engagement with media in a lot of different forms. what little of his writing i've actually read involves characters who realize that their whole lives are built by text and so on. for me, he really brought home the ways in which we are surrounded (in some cases trapped) by the texts that surround us (writing and speech about us, by us, for us).

i'm not sure whether it's ironic or appropriate, then, that he's now the subject of an extensive online obituary. gawker's compilation points out the fact that DFW will now continue to reach out, via the internet -- from beyond the grave -- to new readers. mcsweeney's probably has THE example of this postmodern obit. their 'memories' page collects the eulogies of anyone and everyone who ever met DFW -- especially those who got kind notes from him -- so that seemingly every word he wrote is collected and instantly accessible.

but this new DFW is surrounded by his suicide. if his work was somewhat disquieting before, it will now be a road map into depression or an extended suicide note.

suicide presents all kinds of questions, and writings like DFW's provide lots of possible answers. i predict, the commentary (see all the comments on the links above) from readers will no longer be about our modern times or about technology, but about the man himself. and who knows whether he would have wanted that?

Christ on a jet-ski, Hallie!

David Foster Wallace left us this past weekend, and the world is a much sadder place for it. I'd first heard his name when in high school, when my most beloved teacher, Ms. Wilson, recommended his magnum opus "Infinite Jest" to me. She knew that I might find the 1,100 page novel a bit daunting, and suggested--if I didn't have the nerve--that I might as well just pick up "Girl With Curious Hair."

It wasn't until after college, during the summer of '07, that I finally got up the nerve to tackle IJ with my girlfriend who would be reading it also. It took over our lives in a way only few things can, and we became both a source of irritation and envy for our friends. During that time, reading about Don Gately, Hal Incandenza, O.N.A.N., Eschaton, Wheelchair Assasins, Madame Psychosis, The Entertainment, the concavexity, etc etc, I kept thinking to myself that I wish I'd read it sooner. In it's pages I found a sensitivity to the modern condition that was at once critical and empowering, at once heartbreaking and hopeful.

In the days since DFW "eliminated his own map" (to borrow terminology from IJ), I've read tributes written by everyone from Patton Oswalt to Dave Eggers to Gawker commenters. It's surprising and heartening to see just how many people are affected by his loss. His genius was one of those rare types, so total and self assured as to take the form of a sheer force of nature. In no small sense, his gift was taken for granted, and, now that it is gone, his lack will leave a gaping hole in the literary consciousness that it is incumbent upon us to fill.

Christ on a jet-ski, Davie! We'll miss you.

a rhetorical flourish

as i mentioned in my last post, i've put in an application to UC Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric. gah, it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? a bit about why i'm so ga-ga for this particular ivory tower, and what i'd do if they let me scale the walls:

first, the description on the website:

The Department of Rhetoric is a leading center for interdisciplinary research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences. Linked by a common interest in the functions of discourse in all its forms, faculty and students engage the theoretical, historical, and cultural dimensions of interpretation and criticism, in fields as diverse as political theory, gender, law, media studies, philosophy, and literature.

neat, huh?

the department is sort of inside out--they're not unified by a particular subject matter, but by a particular approach. people there do philosophy, history, film studies, english, etc. but they do them from this discourse-studying post-structurally-informed standpoint that sees all those disciplines as part of the same cultural moments and movements.

so, i love linguistics as a discipline, but i want to come at it from that direction. i think it's too entrenched to really be shaken up from the inside the way i want to.

how do i want to? i'm glad you asked. first of all, linguistics, for all its science-y rhetoric, relies on certain metaphors and assumptions that define how it conceives its objects: a person is the genesis of language, a person exists independent of language and then gains it, the purpose of language is to communicate information, and so on. an approach that examined these assumptions as metaphors and rhetorical figures would be ultra revealing.

second, disciplines like rhetoric (and brown's MCM department, notably), are doing a neat thing called 'media-specific analysis.' here is a ucla website on the topic. the first listed author, btw, is one of my recommenders! she taught a great course my last semester at brown for which i did some of my favorite work. including a 20-mile-wide webpage. which i should post.

anyway, MSA is being done on genre and poetry and so on, but not everyday language itself. why not? where are the people talking about how typing is changing language? what are the differences between print and speech, from a linguistic, not poetic, standpoint? these things aren't being talked about in linguistics, as far as i know.

i had a really nice meeting with a rhetoric prof, michael mascuch, just about the day after i submitted my application. he's done some interesting thinking about the authority of various media and how that relative authority has shifted over time. so he's examining novels and history, but maybe the techniques used in these disciplines provide a way into looking at the effects of media on language itself. (language conceived as an entity apart from any particular speaker? yeah... maybe...)

aside from that, the department has some major heavy hitters like judith butler and kaja silverman. AND, it's berkeley. come on. it's beautiful, it's in the bay area, and it's got people like john searle and george lakoff, who are SO important, even if i don't agree with them and submitted my writing sample on just how much i don't agree with them. it's a move i'm second-guessing.

the ulterior motives for this post: 1. maybe admissions committees do google searches? they should, in this day and age, shouldn't they? not that this slap-dashery will impress anyone, but maybe my enthusiasm is more apparent than in my overly-reworked statements of purpose. 2. i need to not think about this now. i'll know in just over a week if i didn't get in, and i'm hoping that getting this post out of my system will help alleviate the stress. fat chance: 200 applicants, 10 spots.

oh well, there's always next year.

post kia eyan kia feni!

i've only recently discovered the world of constructed languages (or 'conlangs' if you're in the know). a constructed language differs from a natural language (natlang) because it is designed by a person or people, rather than evolving as natlangs do.

esperanto is perhaps the most famous conlang. it was developed for international communication in the hopes of fostering peace. wikipedia estimates that there are 100,000 to 2 million fluent speakers of esperanto and 1,000 native speakers.

other well-known conlangs are those created by j.r.r. tolkien for his fantasy characters to speak. while these fictitious languages can't be said to have evolved 'as natural languages do,' tolkien famously evolved them himself, creating a world full of languages that were realistically related and distributed according to the movements of populations. some langs, though fictional, are constructed to be as realistic as possible.

people also create conlangs for philosophical reasons, especially to test the sapir-whorf hypothesis, which, at its strongest, states that the range of thought is limited by the range of language. Loglan is philosophical a language meant to limit or eliminate ambiguitity. for instance, one cannot express a finite verb without also expressing a tense eliminating ambiguities such as the english "i am going to the store" (later? right now?). Láadan is another fascinating philosophical language. It was made by Suzette Haden Elgin as part of a fictional work and also to determine whether western natlangs are systematically male-oriented. each sentence in Láadan ends with a tonal (one of the few tonal conlangs!) particle that expresses the mood of the sentence: fact, hearsay believed to be true, hearsay believed to be false, etc. just check out wikipedia's list of conlangs and be amazed at the number of people who have constructed whole languages and the diversity of their reasons for doing so!

now, journey with me to a small corner of the internet where one much-maligned little conlang lives. Kalusa is not listed on wikipedia. and i might be wrong, but i think it's the first unplanned conlang. the kalusa corpus is created one entry at a time by any user. each entry must have an english translation. then other users can vote on the acceptability of the entry. if an entry's score falls too low, it is removed from the corpus. users can search the corpus by english or kalusan keywords. it began with four simple sentences posted in may.

not exactly how a natlang develops, but closer than most conlangs get. it's hard to classify kalusa according to the typical taxonomy of conlangs. it's not exactly an artlang since it's not used in fiction; not really an engineered language since it has no philosophical purpose and isn't really engineered at all. i guess it's kind of an auxillary language, but most of those are created for some political purpose (like esperanto). at its heart, i think it should be called a language game.

i was immensely excited when i first found kalusa because it's all invented usage! what could be better than a totally open-minded community of language inventors trying only to encourage each other to understand and play by certain rules of a language game? isn't that a perfect little utopia of how language could work?

as it turns out though, where there's language there's always controversy. the forum on the kalusa site is often filled with interesting and open exchanges of information and curiosity; but it also reveals that everyone thinks they know what kalusa should be. gary, aka gregor samsa posts:

The earliest utterances of the language should deal with the most basic daily needs of the people who speak the language, and not with "existentialism" and "hyperinfracaniphilia". Therefore, rather than allowing contributors to add random (and often "goofy") sentences and words, a large collection of simple sentences dealing with the daily concerns of the people would be provided in English; sentences such as "It is time to plant the corn." and "Father has gone to the marketplace."

but the shared basic needs of kalusa users are NOT corn and marketplaces. in fact, the most shared things among kalusans are probably philosophy, linguistics and the internet. but if you believe, as gary does, that kalusa should be naturalistic (a common goal among conlangers), then for some reason we have to make believe that it started in the days of one syllable words. additionally, he proposes some sort of central control to keep people focused on such basic vocabulary before allowing departures. unfortunately for gary, the development of a language like kalusa would be fundamentally influenced by the technology surrounding it (not to mention that all its creators speak english). it will never begin with one-syllable words for corn because words for 'internet' and 'existentialism' are more interesting and more useful to its speakers.

dedalvs, another disatisfied kalusan, writes: (to an unkown poster)

If one were just to look at your entries, the obvious conclusion is that you have no idea how /s/-reduplication works (one need only look at /fortusortu/, to figure that out). But that isn't quite the truth. You've been against it, and everything else that didn't quite make sense to you, from the beginning, and so you just coined a bunch of obviously ungrammatical, nonsensical, or just plain ugly words to make the whole process seem ridiculous. Well, no need to bother any more. Just use your trick to continue getting as many votes as you want, delete all the sentences you don't like, and start coining away until you're satisfied. If you decide you're interested in an interactive language, though, let us all know, so we can come back. Until then, enjoy.

careful what you wish for! as i've said before, a language (any language) can't truly be interactive, because it's not an object that exists outside of people. because it belongs to many people all at once (those with certain types of power -- in this case, the ability to win votes), it is subject to wild 'ungrammatical' 'nonsensical' or 'ugly' changes. even if the person to whom dedalvs refers is dumb (doesn't know how s-reduplication works!) or mean (uses tricks! hijacks the language for irony's sake!), he/she is still a participant in the language. that is, to someone who approaches the language as a new user, the trick/nonsense/sarcastic words are just as good as the 'real' ones. what's real in a lang anyway?

i'll post again soon about the actual grammar of kalusan and my own adventures with coinage. but, of course, politics come first!

i don't know what they're teaching you kids these days

The other day I found myself in William and Mary's bookstore which is basically a Barnes and Noble with a textbook section in the basement. Being a college graduate now, I was curious about what books they are making the poor children read in English classes at the prestigious Virgina college. It wasn't but two years ago that I did the same thing and found a copy of Charles Simic's "The World Doesn't End"--a book I'd been looking for--sitting on one of the shelves.

Sadly, I made no similar discoveries. In fact, there were probably enough poetry books on the nearly 20 feet of shelf space occupied by the English textbooks to count on two hands. Half of those books were anthologies. Of the books that were individual collections of poetry most were of the ethnic-American sort. Not that there is anything wrong with that on its face, but it was clear based on the books in proximity to those collection that the poetry filled a genre void in a class otherwise devoted to race and not primarily poetry. One got the impression upon viewing the shelves that poetry is more and more becoming an exotic bowl in a china shop. Interesting to look at, but not something you want your neighbors finding on your living room table. "Who would buy a bowl that looks like that?"

There really is a place for poetry in the college English program. I just suspect the professors are getting more and more daunted by the prospect of teaching it. They avoid having to really come to terms with the 'tradition' by padding poetry courses with period poets (Dickinson, Whitman, Hughes etc). These poets are about as safe as they come. They've already been well canonized and most literate adults have at least encountered them once before. For example, they were the sole focus of the only poetry unit I had in highschool. At the conclusion of that unit we all wrote "Songs of Ourselves". Yawn. At Brown University there is a contemporary American poets course that doesn't even touch Creeley, Ashbery, Ginsberg, O'Hara, Baraka etc. Now, I realize I'm being a little bitchy here, but I think professors in English departments need to grow some backbone and start teaching this stuff. There is an absolutely rich tradition of writing in America that most people are barely aware of! At the very least, an education in it would provide a great counter to foreign attacks on our lack of 'culture'. Additionally, a lot of contemporary poetry would act as a great background upon which to teach a lot of the concepts introduced in literary theory courses.

I digress, but would recommend "Hell's Angels" by Hunter Thompson. It's been providing some entertaining reading while my parents and I have been shuttling around the south.