usage of the week-ing it up

cristi here, blogging it up in connecticut, and tracking invented usages to keep you, the reader, up to date and talking it up real cool-like.

today we'll be talking about 'blanking it up.' as with most new usages, the form of this one isn't new, but the application is.

eat it up
take it up
snap it up
mess it up

have been around for years, but new usages like

tent it up (usually refering to camping)
blogging it up
talking it up
laugh it up
smoke it up (usually refering to marijuana)

seem emergent. a google search returned 334 hits for "tenting it up," and 1050 hits for "blogging it up," many of them in phrases like "blogging it up motown style," "blogging it up here," or "blogging it up in [location]"

in the more traditional usages i've mentioned, 'it' usually stands for an object, so that one can say 'eat up all the turkey' or 'took his bag up.' in the newer usage, this is impossible - 'it' is not an object at all.

this usage - the addition of 'it up' to an existing verb - is hard to describe. it doesn't seem metaphorical in any way. it doesn't seem logical to say that these actions go 'up' in any sense of the word. it's my guess that a few uses came into favor in a cool community (maybe the ones having to do with gang life? who knows.), and the status of those usages lapped over into the phrasing itself.

the interesting thing is that the phrase is productive even though it isn't 'meaningful' in the strict sense. '-ing it up' doesn't add meaning - it just seems to add attitude and mark a certain speaking style. i'm just thinking it up out loud.

get your language now, 'cause we're using it up here at invented usage.

vagueness part deux

Timothy Williamson, clearly the most exciting guy in the world, wrote a whole book called 'Vagueness' about some of the topics in my last post. His opening chapter is about the classical history of sorities problems - logical puzzles like the baldness problem i presented last post.

the general format of sorities problems is a series of questions, in which one begins with a clear case: "is this pile of 10,000 grains of corn a heap?" to which anyone would answer "yes." Then the questioner slowly works down: "if i remove one grain, is it still a heap?"; "yes". "If I remove one grain at a time, and no one grain should make a difference to the status of the object, is one grain a heap?" based on the logic of premises and conclusions, the answerer (usually a stoic) is left in the absurd position of having to answer that one or even zero grains are, in fact, a heap. The question has always been: is there a sharp cut off determining when something is no longer a heap? is there a certain number of grains required to make a heap?

I, possibly a skeptic, tried this line of questioning on a computer science major (dave, i think you know who you are). at first i thought i had failed utterly, because no matter how low the numbers got, he still considered it a heap. "alright, dave, what if there are no grains? is it still a heap?" dave: "yes, [laughter] it's just an empty heap."

but i found it hard to argue that he was wrong to hypothesize an empty heap. it was certainly an elegant way to buck a sorites problem. and it reminded us here at I.U. of a post scott wrote over the summer.

even with a c.s. major, pointing to an empty place on the ground and asking "is this a heap?" is unlikely to elicit a 'yes' response. but it's NOT hard to say that yes, after i've removed grain after grain, the empty spot left is a type of heap - namely, an empty one.

so, what's the difference? why are 5 grains sometimes a heap and sometimes not? as with most topics on this blog, we return to context. we are only inclined to call something a heap when salient that it is a heap - as opposed to anything else.

the same contextual issues are important in other circumstances - suppose i have 10,000 grains but they are spread out, for instance. suppose a heap is naturally formed by wind piling grains against a wall? is it a heap?

the neat thing about language is that we can match it effectively to these vaguenesses. i hesitate to say 'vaguenesses in the world', because vagueness isn't in the world - it's in the application of totalized terms like 'heap' to a world that isn't built out of totalized concepts. but language allows us to work around these gaps when we need to and say "it used to be a heap", "it's an empty heap"; "it's a group of grains, but not a heap".

on vagueness

it's that time of year again, when all philosophy of language students' minds must turn to fanciful musings about their final papers. Will we write anything original? Will we write anything original the night of december 5, when we stay up at the sci-li all night in a panic?

to ensure that this doesn't happen, i'm going to attempt some pre-write blogging on my chosen topic, one near and dear to all our hearts: vagueness.

Gareth Evans' now famous essay "can there be vague objects?" begins,

It is sometimes said that the world might itself be vague. Rather than vagueness being a deficiency in our mode of describing the world, it would then be a necessary feature of any true description of it.

He's right, and it's a promising idea, but I'd like to point out that what is never said is that language is what allows us to talk about objects as though they were not vague.

he then introduces logical operators meaning 'definitely' and 'indefinently' and concludes that they always lead to contradiction. and then the essay ends. very abruptly. it's only a page! turning the page over, we find an essay by David Lewis in which he defends Evans and uses the word 'precisifications' many times. well done, Lewis.

but Lewis, too, addresses a simple dichotomy in the way philosophers think of vaguness: there are those who believe that objects are vague, and there are those who believe that descriptions are vague. in either case, vagueness is a fault which, if we are to be logical, we must remedy by precisifying our concepts before using them in formulas.

over my next few posts (and maybe that paper?) i'd like to argue that vagueness is not a weakness of language or the world, but a necessary, interesting, and productive part of the connection between the two. and arguments about vagueness might provide a way to bootstrap up into a debate about the nature of properties of objects and whether or not logic bows to language.

until next time, consider this classic(al) sorites problem, which led to original formulations of vaguness:
is a man with one hair on his head bald? (yes?)
is a man with two hairs on his head bald? (yes?)
can we reasonably make a distinction between his being bald or not bald on the basis of the addition of any single hair? (no.)
then by this reasoning, we can continue adding one hair at a time until you must admit that a man is not bald even if he has 20,000 hairs on his head. (doh!)

hypothesis confirmed!

i don't know how i feel about empiricism, but this is pretty interesting anyway:

think back to my last post, bodily function poems. Last night, not two days after that post was written, I went to the restroom in New Dorm, and lo and behold, underneath the "if you sprinkle when you tinkle..." sign (which is printed in a childish, light-blue font), was a very serious looking black and white sign that read:

Please be considerate and keep the bathroom, shower, sink area clean.

Clean up messes that you are responsible for - whether it be toilet paper or bodily fluids.

I can't tell you how proud i was.

In this sign, we are addressed as responsible adults, and as such, we no longer "tinkle," but instead, "cause messes," which may or may not involve "bodily fluids."

There is fine print on the sign directing "you" to contact "facilities management" or "C.A.s" "if the toilets are clogged" or "for further complaints or information."

Perhaps it has become clear to the writers of the signs that we are no longer hapless children who inadvertently "tinkle" and forget to clean up after ourselves. Maybe we are finally to be held responsible for repeated infractions.

and the sign is much more authoritorian in another way: there is a threat of being inconsiderate if we don't follow the sign. in an anonymous situation, these methods: gentle, humorous suggestion, and appeals to responsibility and consideration might be the only course of action. at least, i can't see a middle ground. we would never rhyme about "bodily fluids" or write prose about "poo".

scott tells me the new sign also hangs in the men's restroom, where it will likely be peed on.

more on those god damn poetry readings

Was taking a look over at the Contemporary Poetry Review in an article about John Ashbery:

One problem presented by the semi-professional need for poets to deliver recitations of their poems is that it must be assumed that they are the best interpreters, if not necessarily the most gifted performers, of their own works. One might delight in the thought of James Earl Jones intoning oneÂ’s poem from the podium to awed audiences, but it is usually a whinier, less assured voice that the audience finally encounters. It is unfortunate that the aural revelation of a poem is often one of foggy meandering and droning rather than the warm illumination that should be expected. One finds in scratchy old recordings of Pound reading from the Cantos a tidier (or at the least quite amusing) understanding of some of the last centuryÂ’s most imposing and sometimes nearly incomprehensible poems. Even an otherwise undemanding poem by a poet today will be muddled up in the reading. The poet very often recites with a slight trailing up at the end of the otherwise randomly broken line, in a pompous, breathy seriousness that hardly befits the slightness of the poetry itself.

Hell yes. Well put says I. Seriously what is with the monotone poet voice? One even encounters it in College workshops, where poets (some of them even talented) deliver their poems like they were reciting from the phone book. I guess it's an image thing. Emo, maybe?

They come to witness greatness, fame, and finally, the clarification, elucidation of the poems, the revelation from the oracle.

This is what I've been telling people for awhile now. The mark of a good reader is the ability to elucidate what's being read. To have the voice ride across the piece of literature, highlighting with ARTICULATION and INTONATION the gradients of meanincontaineded within the work.

Michael Harper, a well known poet and professor here at Brown is the best reader I've heard yet. When he reads one has the feeling of "getting it" a feeling not to often felt at your average poetry reading. If you haven't had the chance to listen to him, there's a short video of a reading he gave at UC Berkeley. By short I mean an hour. In class he tends to drag on for long tracts of time telling tales of the glory days with Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden and Brooks. Apparently he had some disagreements with ol' Allen Ginsberg about something. Should try to find out that was. Office hours?

bodily-function poems

consider the following rhymes, to be found taped inside the doors of various bathroom stalls:

If it's yellow, let it mellow
if it's brown, flush it down. (Summer Camp Classic)

if you sprinkle
when you tinkle
please be neat
and wipe the seat!
(printed sign, girls restroom, New Dorm B, Brown University)

don't be rude,
flush your poo.
-The Managment
(handwritten in friends' suite in Grad Center tower C, Brown University)

I, for one, cannot imagine signs of equivalent explicitness written in prose:

If you urinate on the toilet seat, please clean up after yourself.

Please remember to flush the toilet after defecating in it.

Gross!!, right? No one would post, or stand for, such a sign.

I haven't developed a working hypothesis about this yet, but i'd like to start by examining the differences between the acceptable and unnaceptable signage above.

The most obvious of these is rhyme. Simple rhymed couplets in folksy meter seem to be standard fare. (slant-rhyme: poo and rude, is fine.)

The words used for bodily functions in the poems are of a different level of diction from my prose examples. 'poo' and 'tinkle' are not the same words as 'urinate' and 'defecate'. i'd characterize them as the words used between parents and children, who must often discuss such matters tastefully.

Who can say what words we use for bodily functions when we are alone in bathroom stalls? they are probably not 'poo' and 'tinkle', but when communication (from an authority?) takes place in the stall, it is couched in terms that are distinctly 'cute'.

And a definition of that terms is wanted. perhaps it is unoffensive, parental, endearing, even distancing? is there an implication in these signs that the management would rather not have to discuss these tender subjects? are signs on dorm kitchen doors also rhyming and cutesy, or is it only 'poo' and 'tinkling' that call for this mode of communication? these are questions for further research.

Wag the Poet

About a week ago, Cristi and I went downtown to a posh little cafe called Tazza to hear some poets on the faculty here at Brown read. It was a fundraiser for hurricane Katrina, or more aptly for those effected by the horrendous 'cane.

Now, I've tried to go to several of these readings. There was one several weeks ago, which due to my own ineptness at reading signs, I showed up mostly too late for. Just in time to hear this guy read some political poem about the situation in Iraq (*yawn*). The poem wasn't bad, necessarily, it's just not my style to indulge politics with poetry. The two, to me, have always seemed at odds. Politics is the doggerel of the masses. This is, of course, perhaps overstating it too much, but the discourse of politics--especially these days, and on these college campuses where "liberal-minded" students are flopping around proclaiming their hatred of Bush every time someone even thinks to say the word "government"--is self perpetuating. The very discussion of politics, supreme court nominees, taxes, war etc. just plays into the system of corruption that no one wants but everyone claims those who disagree with them are for. Poetry, and more generally all art, should be above these base arguments. Leave it for the pundits. Chris Matthews can write the Ballad of John Kerry. The real problems are more deeply rooted than the national political tit-for-tat. A piece of art that wears its political agenda on its sleeve can only become part of that discourse, a ball punted around by those trapped up in the dead end rhetoric of the national politic. The concern of art is the greater philosophical and metaphysical concerns of our time, the "politics" of it (if you want to call it that) will handle themselves.

This distracts me from the point I had wished to make: Poetry readings are very boring. Sitting in the back of the room listening to the poets recite there work, I was struck by how unmoving the whole event was. This frightened me. After all, studying poetry for four years in college has basically made it my milieu (for better or worse). I should be enjoying these types of things. I should be aspiring to read in front of audiences at trendy cafes, lecture halls and bus stops. But after a rash of attending these readings, I can't see why anyone would want to come hear me.

Wag the poet. The poems are wagging the poets. The poet stands before an audience, sidles up to the microphone, opens her book of poems and begins to recite. Hello! Recitation is not reading. Not even close. I like poems an awful lot. Most people do, I've found, despite the fact that most people spend .01% of their time on it. So why get up there, and just... PRESENT... the poem(s). Poetry reading is, at its root, an act of storytelling. This was of course sustained by the nature of the poems being read by wandering bards and minstrels. They were narrative poems. They were stories. Now, though, with most poetry experiencing the postmodern hangover, the poems do not tell stories themselves. This isn't bad. Far from it. But why not use the reading as an opportunity to deliver those anecdotes (stories) which contextualize the more abstract poetry of our times, and sell the idea that they are worth listening to (and not as daunting as they appear to be).

There are the slam poets. I hate slam poetry. So I'm not going to discuss it. Watch Def Poetry Jam and tell me what you think. That's a discussion I'd like to have.

... A poetry reading should be a gathering of friends, a time to unwind and listen. It should not be a time to sit in a room feigning rapt attention before an edifice of words that is for the most part delivered unemphatically and with supreme arrogance. I'd like to conclude with a quotation which I think sums up the "attitude" I witness at these readings:

"Peter Ackroyd's biography of Eliot claims that the first reviews [of The Waste Land] in England were "variously baffled and respectful"-- partly because of the notes and references, which left some critics mystified enough that they couldn't come out and say they didn't like the poem for fear their ignorance of his learned and sophisticated methods would be discovered."

Everyone, let's stop pretending we understand and start asking to be helped along. We'll all be the better for it.

our philosophy of language homework

well, we've come head-to-head with the enemy. an upper-level philosophy course purportedly all about language that has, so far, been all about truth, and i'd like to share and ridicule a "logical" "proof."

this is a real answer from our first problem set. the comments in brackets were not on our homework.

6) Given the definition of truth: For any proposition x, x is true iff [if and only if] (for some p)(x = the proposition that p and p). Does this definition entail the proposition "The proposition that John is bald is true iff John is bald."? Yes!

1. By the definition of truth provided, the proposition that John is bald is true iff (for some p)(the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that p and p).
[The proposition that p is a concept, keep in mind, and 'p' is a statement about the real world. a fact, if you will. from outside language. but i shouldn't have written it in quotes just there, because that makes it a sentence, which is different from either a fact or a proposition.]
2. By Assumption, the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that q and q.
[we all konw what they say about assumption...]
3. By Assumption, the proposition that John is bald is a true proposition of language L.
[oh ho! yeah, this seems like a good place to start.]
4. It follows from the given Equivalence Principle that if the proposition that John is bald = the proposition that q, then John is bald iff q.
[if the propositions are the same, then the facts in the world are the same. ?]
5. By 2, 4, and logic, John is bald iff q.
[don't ask me what logic is.]
6. By 2, 5, and logic, John is bald.
[don't ask me what logic is.[did i just state the same proposition twice?]]
7. By 1 and 6, and the Rule of Existential Instantiation, John is bald.
[honestly, i've forgotten what the REI is already, but it was very handy for situations like this, where we needed to be able to get from the proposition that John is bald to the fact that John is bald via our previous assumptions both implicit and explicit... clearly, if 'john is bald' is true, then john is bald. don't quote that.]
8. By 2 and 7, if the proposition that John is bald is a true sentence of L, then John is bald. (conditional proof).

there's a second argument to this proof, but we don't know if it's necessary or not... just to give you some idea, though, it begins with "1. By assumption, John is bald."

i'm so glad language is actually illogical. all this common sense makes my head hurt.

Can Poetry Matter?

Recently, I've been picking through Dana Gioia's book Can Poetry Matter? which seems, thus far, to be a worthwile read if you have the time and interest. In the title essay, Gioia more or less comes down hard on contemporary poets for hiding in the academy. He laments the lost times of poetic bohemia when poets were out amongst the people.

Honestly, I have a little trouble buying this. Poets (writers in general, pretty much) have always been of the academy. Eliot, Creeley, Cummings, Ashbery et al. are Harvard chums (Creeley dropped out though.) Poets of the time period Gioia is dealing with, seem to me, to have always been a part of the academy.

It is true, though, that the Creative Writing boon has shaped the nature and practice of contemporary poetry. It could not have done otherwise. I'm less quick to indict this as a bad thing. If anything I see it as a chance to open up a populace to the idea of reading poetry. This is, of course, the central problem. Poetry just isn't vital to people. Who now can afford time to it? Can this ever change?

Lit mags though. He hits them pretty soundly. Currently, I'm editing the poetry section of Clerestory, which is Brown University literary magazine (more or less). I'm pretty daunted by the possibility of having to select undeserving poems for publication. The magazine simply demands a certain number of poems, which must be filled. There are, of course, several excellent even awesome submissions, but generally... Pretty weak.

Speaking of Clerestory and poems. This poem of mine appeared in the most recent edition:

Zapruder Film

Your death transpired
just as I had imagined it.

Except, of course,
for pink explosion.

That was a surprise.

Yep. And then this little gem (which I loved) from Brian Stefan (who is apparently a graduate student here).

Mail Art

as
an introduction
to language
"pringles"
fails

*

you could say i'm trying
too hard
and be right
you could
fuck a horse

*

male
art
i
make
male art

*

shackleton, the explorer
died at forty-seven
in antarctica
while you read this
again

usage of the next week

Consider the sign posted next to the elevator in the science library:

Handicapped Restroom Located on Level B.

First of all, (to once again quote the Big Lebowski), dude, "Handicapped" is not the preferred nomenclature. It's "differently abled," please.

But really, is

Differently Abled Restroom Located on Level B.

any better?

Why is it we feel we can't address differently-abled people themselves on signage? We'd never see

Restroom for Differently Abled Students Located on Level B.

Maybe that's in poor taste.

So we go on, ignoring the fact that the restroom is handicapped on the sign. And we all understand it anyway.

usage of the week

well, we're back from our fabulous new york weekend trip, and the big apple brought to our attention an invented usage!

at all the metro-card vending machines, when you opt to pay by debit card, a message appears on the screen:

Please dip ATM card.

What!? "dip"? we were shocked! crazy new yorkers, we muttered...

but it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. after all, what is to "dip" but to put something into something else and then remove it quickly? what more convenient phrasing could the metropolitan transit authority have come up with? "please insert card, and remove it quickly"? "

also, any phrase of the form "please ____ ATM card" probably has a pretty obvious meaning... give them your money.

thank you, come again.

That's what i'm talkin' about!

In a certain informal speech style (the same one that uses 'like' frequently?), speakers often use tags like "you know" and "i mean," perhaps to check that the listener is following.

Consider Scott's recent observation: after any sentence, it is possible to meaningfully insert the phrase "you know what i'm trying to say." For example, "i think you're great. you know what i'm trying to say" or "the sky is blue... you know what i'm trying to say" or even "the taste of mango... you know what i'm trying to say?"

and this is the vagueness and power of language. we don't say things in the interest of logic or truth; we speak so that people will know what we're trying to say. each word or phrase is a stand-in for all the things we know we can never describe.

articulation is a personal favorite example. it is impossible to describe the condition of the tongue in real time, because as we speak, it moves, and we can never catch up with it. so we generalize to statements like: "every time i laugh, the base of my tongue hurts." here we've used language to simplify our experience into cause and effect (or at least correlated events) that recurr in patterns. if my statement isn't true EVERY time i laugh, or the pain is a little different each time, it's ok because you know basically what i'm trying to say.

well it's been... awhile.

So, it's been some time. Right now Cristi and I are back in Providence and in the midst of settling in and getting our rooms in order. There's been a lack of updating. This will change.

Stayed tuned. More updates to follow. Classes start next week!

long live the king

sorry for the recent lack of posting, but we're getting ready to head back to school...

and because of that, a lot of my recent laptop and linguistics time has been spent on mmy Semantics final from last semester, so i thought i'd share some puzzles from that.

Bertrand Russell posed this simple and now-famous problem to truth-conditional semantics: what is the truth value of the sentence "The King of France is bald"? is it false in the same way as "the Queen of England is bald"?

Russell argues that the use of definite descriptions such as 'the king of france' actually asserts the existence of the king, so that someone who says "the king of france is bald" is actually saying "there is a king of france, there is only one king of france, and that individual is bald," and if any of these three assertions is false, the entire sentence is false.

people have proposed three-place truth conditions to handle sentences like this, with T, F, and N (not determine, or something), but their truth tables got more complicated...

then Strawson came along and answered Russell on his own king-of-france turf, arguing that the existence of the king of france is presupposed by the sentence, and that the sentence itself cannot be evaluated as true or false - only statements made with contexts to go with them can be true or false.

anyway, i don't know if any conclusions have been reached on this, but it's an interesting puzzle, and my grade depends on it.

ahwosg book club pt 3

i went ahead and finished 'a heartbreaking work of staggering genius' last weekend, and am sparing scott the trouble of doing the same.

i had hope for this thing until the bitter end. all the terribleness of it could have been redeemed by one really powerful, yes, heartbreaking, scene. but as the book wore on, i began to have less and less idea of what that might be, and it became clearer that dave eggers didn't know either.

he sets it up to be a book about redemption. he makes his main character (himself, i guess) unlikable, self-absorbed, and full of doubt, but promises (or, i anticipated) that he would learn something valuable, would change, grow, learn something about writing, at least!.

but the final major metaphor of the book is the narrator's mother looking down from up above (ooh, heaven?), while he plays on the beach with his brother. and his apologies for trite and silly metaphors earlier in the book can only lead us to believe there are metaphors in the book he thinks are good, great, genius.

and yes, alright, his characters speak to him. but they don't jump off the page, which is what i was tempted to write in that last sentence. 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!'.

we're left with tragedy after tragedy piled on top of one another in a way the author admits is gratuitous. the characters know they're being used, but is eggers trying to say he used them to make us feel a certain way? is he saying that we actually (in 'real' life) use the tragedies of others in the aftermaths of our own? we don't know. and the characters, and eggers, and his use of them are so boring by the end of the book, that i don't really care anymore.

and, the book's final redemption could have been 'this is powerful because it's labeled 'non-fiction' but really, everything is a fiction because it's presented a certain way by a certain author, and the reader has no choice but to take it for what it's worth...' but in my edition, eggers closes even this reading by including an appendix called 'mistakes we knew we were making.' i read enough of it to find that it was an attempt to display the TRUE non-fiction of the book.

this author, whose characters speak to him only about himself, whose book about his parents' death is so glibly titled, who displays some particular boring side of his boring characters in writing so unappealing he continually apologizes for it, is actually attempting tell you the truth of his story, and is desperate for you to care enough to read it.

(next book club we'll pick something we like... although we tried to do that this time, and look where it's brought us...)

what the definition of 'is'... is.

i still highly recommend Johnson & Lakoff's 'Metaphors We Live By.' this 'metaphors structure the way we think and act about concepts' is right up mine & scott's alley.

the attempt at an organized heirarchy of metaphors isn't, so much. for example:

The most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture.

So, language seems to emerge, in this model, from some 'culture' that speaks through people, and is able to contain values and norms and so on. but they've already backtracked a few times to explain the uses of terms that shouldn't be considered natural totalities, and maybe they'll do that here too.

for example,

We will continue to use the word 'is' in stating metaphors like MORE IS UP, but the IS should be viewed as a shorthand for some set of experiences on which the metaphor is based and in terms of which we understand it.

i really hope to see more of these kinds of acknowledgements as the book goes on. i mean, it's one thing to link concepts like 'more' and 'up' in a given language or culture, but it would be a whole nother to say that 'is' is itself a metaphor, and i'd like to see that said.

i talked a bit about this over the weekend in this post, when i said that our ability to talk about anything (create coherent nouns, assign potential verbs to subjects and objects) is this type of metaphoricity. i hope that's where J & L are going... there's a chapter upcoming on 'ontological metaphors'.

metaphors we live by

just a quick post to give a shout out to my boyz, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

i just picked up their co-authored book, "metaphors we live by," and i'm really enjoying it. its basic premise is that all language (in a pretty general sense - they also include thought and action) is founded on metaphors that can be studied in "ordinary" speech. how do we choose which verbs and prepositions to attach to abstract concepts? why is happy described as 'up' and sad 'down'? why do we 'spend' time and 'attack' arguments? big questions, interesting answers!

posts with more content are up-coming.

chomp, ski.

in 'language and thought,' chomsky writes,

The basic assumption that there is a common store of thoughts surely can be denied; in fact, it had been plausibly denied a century ealier by critics of the theory of ideas who argued that it is a mistake to interpret the expression "John has a thought" (desire, intention, etc.) on the analogy of "John has a diamond." In the former case... the expression means only "John thinks" (desires, etc.), and provides no grounds for positing "thoughts" to which John stands in a relation. To say that people have similar thoughts is to say that they think alike, perhaps so much alike that we even say they have the same thought, as we say that two people live in the same place. But from this we cannot move to saying that there are thoughts that they share, or a store of such thoughts. Philosophers have been misled by the 'surface grammar' of a 'systematically misleading expression.'... Argument is required to show that thoughts are entities that are 'possessed,' as diamonds are. How solid the argument is may be questioned, in my opinion.

hold the phone, noam! i mean, i agree that there isn't a mind full of thoughts the way there's a mine full of diamonds. but the use of the phrase "john has a thought" doesn't imply that at all, and it certainly doesn't mean exactly the same thing as 'john thinks'.

our ability to say 'john has a thought' indicates only our potential ability to imagine thoughts as objects capable of being possessed. to argue about the actual existence of those thoughts, or even the assertion that 'thoughts' exist based on the sentence is to miss the point.

semantics assumes that each element in a sentence should have similar contributions to the meaning. meaning that in 'john has a thought', and 'john has a diamond,' diamonds and thoughts should contribute the same type of meaning to the sentence - in this case, they are objects that john can posses. and i love semantics, but this is why it has to change. 'john has a' does NOT mean the same thing in each of these sentences.

the sentence isn't a puzzle with pieces missing. what goes in the object position changes the entire sentence, changes the meaning of the verb, changes the meaning of the subject, changes the context, the reason for speaking, and so on.

no one has ever seen a thought; they don't exist in the physical world. but they're important to talk about. and the concept is built up from our talking about it. our ability to conceive of them as objects, or even of 'think' as a verb is a matter of convenience. the use of 'thought' in the language shouldn't be mistaken for an assumption that it exists, but only as a useful way of categorizing a phenomenon that we NEED to discuss.

charlie and technology

After the mixed reports i heard about Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy, i was skeptical. but tim burton's unique and structured take on this now-classic story makes its terror darker and its humor more sugary.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now a tale about just that: a boy and technology. every moral is built from the characters' adherence to various technologies, both actual (television, manufacturing) and metaphorical (family, money, success). caution! spoilers follow.

the opening shots of the film are cgi machines producing thousands of wonka bars, five of which are wrapped with golden tickets. the machines exist in a dark space, operating seemingly by themselves, but it is Willy Wonka who adds the tickets, the spark, the magic.

willy wonka is the ghost in the machine - he controls and is surrounded by the most fanciful of all technologies. unfortunately, he is so caught up in them as to be totally detached from social interaction and the normal workings of human contact. he's a bit rude and a bit creepy.

when one of the brats sees oompa-loompas whipping a cow to make whipped cream, she says "but that doesn't make sense." and willy (in invented usage fashion!) rolls over this objection; children and candy makers shouldn't get caught up in the gears of logic.

the world is not all bleak for this film. in opposition to technology stands the family. charlie's father lost his assembly line job to a machine, and the family lives in a slanty shanty cut off from the rest of the industrialized town. wonka's own family history is a clearly painful subject - his dentist father had him strapped into headgear from an early age, and this rigorous adherence to dental science kept young willy nearly tortured, as he was barred from eating any candy at all.

and charlie chooses family. the choice between joining willy wonka in his ultimate technology, the great glass elevator, and being able to stay with his family is no choice at all.

only when the family no longer stands outside and excluded from technology is the conflict of the movie resolved. charlie's dad learns to work with technology and gets a better job repairing the machine that replaced him. and the entire house is moved from the periphery of town, to the center of the factory. and this is the triumph of the film: that technology, while dangerous and dehumanizing, can function with and within a strong family system. and perhaps that system is another technology that isn't so bad as it seemed.

more poetry stuff, you language lovers you

Oh no. Not again. Read and look into the conservative heart of poetry.

from An Interview with Joan Houlihan in Doug Holder's Blog

DH: You have written a number of essays lamenting about the lack of accessibility in poetry today. Do you think this is a major problem?

JH: Oh yes. It’s a scary trend from my point of view. I like eclecticism in poetry. But the whole school that started the “Deconstruction” and the “Language” poets in the 70’s, has evolved into a favorite mode of younger poets. I find it moving away from what I find valuable about poetry: meaning, humanity, and enlarging your sense of being in the world. There seems to be a huge intolerance from the “post-avant” community. It’s almost fanaticism. It has a political ethic to it. I’ve been called right wing because I don’t believe in that kind of poetry.

DH: In another essay you characterize the new avant-garde as the “new senility” trend in poetry.

JH: A lot of my essays have humor. This is tinged with some humor of course. To be honest, a lot of members of that school were upset with my use of the words dementia and senility. The major offense for these people was around me calling them on their lack of a “there,” there. A lot of people went after me in a strange way. The people at “Fence” magazine were quite incensed. I don’t attack poets, but I do attack poems. There is a distinction. They attacked me personally. They literally called me an idiot. Anyone who put my name in Google two years ago would come up with: “Joan Houlihan is an idiot.” I started to think this was a scary movement in poetry.

To quote the Big Lebowski (vaguely):

"No Joan, you're not an idiot. You're just wrong."

How can some of these poets not take it seriously when your critique of their poems completely questions their agency as poet/author?

JH in a comment on Ron Sillman's blog from April 25, 2005:

Have you really read my essays? They are often pages long, which means they say more than the two quotes you (falsely) attribute to me. You are summarizing, I guess, using your capsule summary as a way to dismiss me. In fact, I spent quite a bit of time analyzing some lines from a poem in Slope magazine by someone named Christina Mengert in one of my later essays (and was, by the way, criticized for taking it "out of context" just as Silliman has done here, and as all critics do routinely).

I've italicized what I believe to be the funniest part here in light of the actual subject of some her essays (see comments on my previous post). I guess she would prefer we reorder the words of her essays to demonstrate how they don't mean anything in the first place??? I'm sorry that she's been subject to the lynch mob, but when you're as invective as she chooses to be then you've got to expect it.