I recall vividly Ian telling me that grammar was lost on students at UMass. I think that was a gross exaggeration but he was a non-fiction editor and the other disciplines tended to write for him more than me (I was fiction).
His complaint then was that following the word “and” 90% of the population would put a comma where it evidently didn’t belong.
Let me first state that if you’ve read anything of mine, you’d realize grammar wasn’t my forte, and not that there’s any reason to be sloppy with grammar but its on the other side of the discipline from where I stood. While English and its focused study has countless fractured off shoots there remains, for the purposes of this commentary, two sides; the Grammarians, and the Linguists.
To catch up to speed those who may have chosen a more exciting path than to labor through the doldrums of the English study, for all intents and purposes, the two should look like this (with regard to belief):
Grammarian – A set an unwavering, cast-iron laws has been created for the construction of words, sentences, and language. These rules are not to be broken. Changes are to be deliberated on at great length and are required to come before large bodies of fellow grammarians. (this body is generally vigilante, and has no real authority to speak of)
Linguists – Those who feel that language is created by the people, not handed to us from some higher power, or Titan-like god of yesteryear. Words are words because of use, and popularity determines what language is. While its never been said to me one way or the other, I believe that linguists can assert that a word may fall out of use, but I would suspect they think that words never die.
But my position in all of this, which I should have likely gotten to in the first place is, that while linguists have no commentary on grammar, and of course grammarians do, there should be an understanding and sympathetic approach to grammar once the rules have been firmly understood.
Again I should come to my point. I was reading a passage in the book I’m currently in the middle of and they were citing a letter from 1892. As they were in Chicago, far from the academic northeast, rules were cast to hell and anything went. I started reading it how best I thought it intended but ultimately I could see in this letter the difference between grammatical ruling, and a sort of theatric dialogue, something that was written as it was said, or at least with that aim.
I started to read words like a musician might jazz notes; with an understanding of the rules and an intention to ignore them. I started to hear the Baptist Ministers, adding pauses and lingering on syllables that might otherwise be ignored but the classically trained liturgist (or pianist as the metaphor goes) and saw in this understanding, the true fruition of what English could become. The notion that words had more personality than the stodgy, clinical Times New Roman might display them as gave reading a far more power effect. In reading in a manner, as one might here a narrator in a Ken Burns film, we are able to retain information and citation in far greater capacity. We no longer had to settle for what characters thought, but in a fashion, why they thought, and where their rationale and philosophy might rest.
In any given sentence, there is a feeling in a word or two, and several other words surrounding that feeling to elicit a reaction, to prove a point and to convey a message; emphasis is the courier of that emotion. It is here that we realize reading is little more than understanding concepts on a page and how to stop, or pause over them like a tour bus driver, letting those who stand in awe of the architecture around each corner that a city has to offer, the bucolic beauty the ocean becomes as backdrop , or the local flaws of culture that give the buildings a feeling, and like tourists, as we pass over these concepts at certain rates of speed, with certain weighs of emphasis, here we are snapping photos so that our memory may recall the understanding of dreams realized or yet imagined.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
An open letter to hipsters
When I was but a young lad, I used to look at photos of my parents wedding, their friends and my extended family and think, "did they really think these outfits look good?" I got concerned that maybe we all looked at equally terrible and when the blinding bulb of hindsight was turned on, 20 years on, we'd all be throughly embarrassed. This entry would go for days should I write theories on fashion so lets skip it, but let it suffice that I have a good idea those people did know who unbelievably foolish they looked.
Fast forward to last weekend when I was in the western most portion of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, a supposed hotbed of Hipster activity. I was talking with a guy I'd just met about the situation and he said it was unbearable. "They all run around here with their cut-off jean shorts, their handlebar mustaches, and stupid bandannas.Their everywhere."
You can imagine how I recoiled given that in the Peoples Republic of Cambridge, we have such a heavy Ivy influence that nothing that vulgar would really be seen in populous. And then it hit me. Hipsterdom, the very zenith of counterculturalsim was in danger, as all fads are, of trying to outdo itself, tripping itself up in its own quest and unraveling ultimately because of it.
Up in Boston they are a stronger force in the population, less easily discernible, but the soul of the movement has a healthy froth here and what I heard of in New York stands to undermine everything.
If we're being honest, its about enforcing a rigorous standard of taste that is impossible to attain, and a hipster int he running to be such is always falling out of the ethos because he's attained a level and created a new one. Thats the positive spin. Non-hipsters will tell you that we're tasteless assholes who seek to get high enough on our horse to look down on everyone else we can. While fashion has become part of the deal, its not what matters.
Whoever is right there, the level of taste and who actually adheres to it is no doubt rough and at a higher level than most academics or elitists. While hipsters generally relegate themselves to music, it would be foolish to presume that preferring a late era Pollack to a pre-populous Dali wouldn't assign you and Pollack to a commercialized tool of the man. These New York insurrects are chasing Ansel Adams as a god.
And theres the problem. Snarky is the deal, yes. Theres no way around that. But Irony, while functional, cannot be used to undo eons of work, refining a rebellious, shit-starting, antagonistic attitude that we've moved to a level which almost seems refined. We're but lonely inches from subverting the children of the WASP class, and these reformed frat boys are in danger of ruining it for everyone who was sick of the three classic rock stations you got in your hometown in the sticks.
Its hard not to imagine the mustache coming up within the culture in how we might imagine "Stagger Lee" (Nick Cave) or when guys like Jack White grow one for the hell of it, but the cut off jean shorts and mullets have never been a part of the culture, just a parallel running social current thanks to the internet took off. By why this, and why here? Why don't hipsters start dressing like Chuck Norris, or Mr. T. Or Transformers. With all the horrible 80's references, where are the Night Riders driven by David Hasselhoff? No one looks like Robert Goulet. Basically anyone else Will Ferrel might have played on SNL in the late 90's.
The reason i'd wager is because none of these hard very much to the principles on which the first hipster was born. When we look at the primordial ooze of pop culture and counterculture that the first born crawled from, there aren't traces of the 80's kitsch, or the idiot middle school girls who always dress like Olivia Newton John from "let's get Physical" when they want to do a "crazy, fun" Halloween costume.
Their idiots. <~~~~Hipster statement.
Don't Taze me bro. <~~~~~ Frat boy.
If its on a Snorg Tee, its likely not within the realm of the hipster.
My point in all of this there is a reprehensible, but valuable and needed personality out there in the American ether that acts as a catalyst for cultural stimulation. The shove of the hipster can lead art forms to come full circle, but not for years and never can you say that in their presence there is stagnation. The overarching idea is that with constant movement, the intermix does a few things:
1. makes it less easy to adapt to some fad. Hair Metal rules the 80's after having started in the mid 70's and went strong until 1993. Rap/Rock died in 3 to 4 short years.
2. Because no sound can dominate, a mix and experimentation has to come to a forefront, and it almost demanded by a nation with a shrinking attention span and a growing access via the internet to new, different, better.
3. The sticking point to the creation of new art now is personality, and personal preference. In the big cultural swirl, all that remains is you. if you don't know who you are you're in the swirl, too indecisive to commit, and not confident enough to create. If you do know who you are you don't care where the swirl is going, you know it will come back.
Think what you want about it, but as John Stewart Mill would suggest, the more philosophies we have out there, the better off we are as a society. If its the case that you're outwardly against the inclusion of a hipster mentality, let me remind you that something will take its place, and as we speak it looks to be 1970's urban-dwelling redneck-idolizing revisionists of 1970's good-ol-boy culture. And by the very nature of their approach, a humor on par with a 1970's humor; Andy Kaufman. An inside joke between one man, only now its a bunch of unsightly pasty clowns who have spawned and over run a group of elitists who by name alone exclude.
Everyone has exclusionary groups until they become imperialist. Think hard america, its time for the great ecumenical movement within art to cast these heathens out, for the sake of everyone else.
Snarkily,
Brow
Fast forward to last weekend when I was in the western most portion of Brooklyn, Williamsburg, a supposed hotbed of Hipster activity. I was talking with a guy I'd just met about the situation and he said it was unbearable. "They all run around here with their cut-off jean shorts, their handlebar mustaches, and stupid bandannas.Their everywhere."
You can imagine how I recoiled given that in the Peoples Republic of Cambridge, we have such a heavy Ivy influence that nothing that vulgar would really be seen in populous. And then it hit me. Hipsterdom, the very zenith of counterculturalsim was in danger, as all fads are, of trying to outdo itself, tripping itself up in its own quest and unraveling ultimately because of it.
Up in Boston they are a stronger force in the population, less easily discernible, but the soul of the movement has a healthy froth here and what I heard of in New York stands to undermine everything.
If we're being honest, its about enforcing a rigorous standard of taste that is impossible to attain, and a hipster int he running to be such is always falling out of the ethos because he's attained a level and created a new one. Thats the positive spin. Non-hipsters will tell you that we're tasteless assholes who seek to get high enough on our horse to look down on everyone else we can. While fashion has become part of the deal, its not what matters.
Whoever is right there, the level of taste and who actually adheres to it is no doubt rough and at a higher level than most academics or elitists. While hipsters generally relegate themselves to music, it would be foolish to presume that preferring a late era Pollack to a pre-populous Dali wouldn't assign you and Pollack to a commercialized tool of the man. These New York insurrects are chasing Ansel Adams as a god.
And theres the problem. Snarky is the deal, yes. Theres no way around that. But Irony, while functional, cannot be used to undo eons of work, refining a rebellious, shit-starting, antagonistic attitude that we've moved to a level which almost seems refined. We're but lonely inches from subverting the children of the WASP class, and these reformed frat boys are in danger of ruining it for everyone who was sick of the three classic rock stations you got in your hometown in the sticks.
Its hard not to imagine the mustache coming up within the culture in how we might imagine "Stagger Lee" (Nick Cave) or when guys like Jack White grow one for the hell of it, but the cut off jean shorts and mullets have never been a part of the culture, just a parallel running social current thanks to the internet took off. By why this, and why here? Why don't hipsters start dressing like Chuck Norris, or Mr. T. Or Transformers. With all the horrible 80's references, where are the Night Riders driven by David Hasselhoff? No one looks like Robert Goulet. Basically anyone else Will Ferrel might have played on SNL in the late 90's.
The reason i'd wager is because none of these hard very much to the principles on which the first hipster was born. When we look at the primordial ooze of pop culture and counterculture that the first born crawled from, there aren't traces of the 80's kitsch, or the idiot middle school girls who always dress like Olivia Newton John from "let's get Physical" when they want to do a "crazy, fun" Halloween costume.
Their idiots. <~~~~Hipster statement.
Don't Taze me bro. <~~~~~ Frat boy.
If its on a Snorg Tee, its likely not within the realm of the hipster.
My point in all of this there is a reprehensible, but valuable and needed personality out there in the American ether that acts as a catalyst for cultural stimulation. The shove of the hipster can lead art forms to come full circle, but not for years and never can you say that in their presence there is stagnation. The overarching idea is that with constant movement, the intermix does a few things:
1. makes it less easy to adapt to some fad. Hair Metal rules the 80's after having started in the mid 70's and went strong until 1993. Rap/Rock died in 3 to 4 short years.
2. Because no sound can dominate, a mix and experimentation has to come to a forefront, and it almost demanded by a nation with a shrinking attention span and a growing access via the internet to new, different, better.
3. The sticking point to the creation of new art now is personality, and personal preference. In the big cultural swirl, all that remains is you. if you don't know who you are you're in the swirl, too indecisive to commit, and not confident enough to create. If you do know who you are you don't care where the swirl is going, you know it will come back.
Think what you want about it, but as John Stewart Mill would suggest, the more philosophies we have out there, the better off we are as a society. If its the case that you're outwardly against the inclusion of a hipster mentality, let me remind you that something will take its place, and as we speak it looks to be 1970's urban-dwelling redneck-idolizing revisionists of 1970's good-ol-boy culture. And by the very nature of their approach, a humor on par with a 1970's humor; Andy Kaufman. An inside joke between one man, only now its a bunch of unsightly pasty clowns who have spawned and over run a group of elitists who by name alone exclude.
Everyone has exclusionary groups until they become imperialist. Think hard america, its time for the great ecumenical movement within art to cast these heathens out, for the sake of everyone else.
Snarkily,
Brow
Monday, November 3, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
on god and nature
"he once wrote of the young man standing alone in a church, juggling balls in the air, each one tossed in a swirly feat of personal mastery; it was something he could do. It was the one thing he could offer up to god when they were, as best as he could arrange it, alone together" - Chris Matthews on William F. Buckley
its always too much white and never enough green. All medicine and no immune system. If these people were lawyers, the letter of the law would trump the spirit...
I lost god somewhere after Maire. I couldn't explain why but I'm glad for it, because back then I had it all wrong. It was all white back then.
I took a course on Christianity when I was at UMass, it was more of a historical view that was taught by this Methodist preacher. We read some letters once that were written during the Inquisition and one of them was from the paladins lead oprative in the field; it said that should the holy father (meaning the pope) decree that "black" was "white" then he would see it no other way.
The way it was written was more powerful and more alarming but thats along the lines of where I was before it all fell apart. All white, all letter. No spirit. I was dictated to, afraid, and slavish. I look back and think of what an embarassment I'd made of myself.
I've come back to religion slowly, like a healing wound, where my beliefs were made with experience and a tangible knowledge, where text is a consideration but nature and its forever shifting and reinterperting is truth.
if forces in the universe were truely the work of god, then the truisms about life must be true about the afterlife and god too. in many ways I liken life to architecture, if only for good metaphors. I looked at destruction, or things that have been badly damaged and I'd think that they should be abandoned.
Through experience I know that parts are taken apart and put to use while others are melted down and crafted again, but ultimatly I learned that nothing was really destroyed.
Recently i went to the House of Seven Gables and while touring the facility they told us about the many changes the house had undergone in its time; additions, detractions, transplants, internal reworking. Previously I'd have thought reconstruction to this degree would have ultimatly compramised the structure, but not only was it rebuilt stronger, it was coming up on a 400 year anniversery. The idea of change in any capacity was aboloished.
While architecture can't account for everything, it had certainly made its point.
For a time back in the 80's, Prince used to think you could fuck your way closer to god. thats too cursory for me to applaud on just that mark and it would likely send the wrong message, not to kids, but to spiritually lazy adults should I leave it there at that point, though I can't say that he's wrong. To each their own, and I guess thats my point.
As a linguist I'm aware of the potent poison stagnant words become. god may be eternal but his lessons are ever-changing. What one man learned 700 years ago and committed to paper should never trump the lesson god would be teaching you now. In short, he had no script to learn from, he only had experince. While he should not be faulted for writing it, those who follow it as eternal and unwavering should.
i've never subscribed to the idea that one mans writing should supercede what you feel. I don't have it in me to think that I should teach people things, or preach to them because they've not felt what I have or that they might have missed their clarion call.
What we come to know is universal, what we learn is common and in our own way we will eventually understand. Like a child learning the proper way to hammer a nail so that his thumb remains healthy. The lessons may hurt but they will be learned. Boards will break and nails bent and rendered useless, but all things like knowledge are reuseable.
Our experience is a treasure, but stagnant words cannot save a generation from smashing their thumbs. Black and blue. Bloody and bloated. they will regenerate, reborn from the damaged and destroyed.
Have faith in god that he will show us faith in ourselves. Have knowledge in ourselves that god will show others in time. And understand that our paths our are own, even if they appear to be exactly the same.
its always too much white and never enough green. All medicine and no immune system. If these people were lawyers, the letter of the law would trump the spirit...
I lost god somewhere after Maire. I couldn't explain why but I'm glad for it, because back then I had it all wrong. It was all white back then.
I took a course on Christianity when I was at UMass, it was more of a historical view that was taught by this Methodist preacher. We read some letters once that were written during the Inquisition and one of them was from the paladins lead oprative in the field; it said that should the holy father (meaning the pope) decree that "black" was "white" then he would see it no other way.
The way it was written was more powerful and more alarming but thats along the lines of where I was before it all fell apart. All white, all letter. No spirit. I was dictated to, afraid, and slavish. I look back and think of what an embarassment I'd made of myself.
I've come back to religion slowly, like a healing wound, where my beliefs were made with experience and a tangible knowledge, where text is a consideration but nature and its forever shifting and reinterperting is truth.
if forces in the universe were truely the work of god, then the truisms about life must be true about the afterlife and god too. in many ways I liken life to architecture, if only for good metaphors. I looked at destruction, or things that have been badly damaged and I'd think that they should be abandoned.
Through experience I know that parts are taken apart and put to use while others are melted down and crafted again, but ultimatly I learned that nothing was really destroyed.
Recently i went to the House of Seven Gables and while touring the facility they told us about the many changes the house had undergone in its time; additions, detractions, transplants, internal reworking. Previously I'd have thought reconstruction to this degree would have ultimatly compramised the structure, but not only was it rebuilt stronger, it was coming up on a 400 year anniversery. The idea of change in any capacity was aboloished.
While architecture can't account for everything, it had certainly made its point.
For a time back in the 80's, Prince used to think you could fuck your way closer to god. thats too cursory for me to applaud on just that mark and it would likely send the wrong message, not to kids, but to spiritually lazy adults should I leave it there at that point, though I can't say that he's wrong. To each their own, and I guess thats my point.
As a linguist I'm aware of the potent poison stagnant words become. god may be eternal but his lessons are ever-changing. What one man learned 700 years ago and committed to paper should never trump the lesson god would be teaching you now. In short, he had no script to learn from, he only had experince. While he should not be faulted for writing it, those who follow it as eternal and unwavering should.
i've never subscribed to the idea that one mans writing should supercede what you feel. I don't have it in me to think that I should teach people things, or preach to them because they've not felt what I have or that they might have missed their clarion call.
What we come to know is universal, what we learn is common and in our own way we will eventually understand. Like a child learning the proper way to hammer a nail so that his thumb remains healthy. The lessons may hurt but they will be learned. Boards will break and nails bent and rendered useless, but all things like knowledge are reuseable.
Our experience is a treasure, but stagnant words cannot save a generation from smashing their thumbs. Black and blue. Bloody and bloated. they will regenerate, reborn from the damaged and destroyed.
Have faith in god that he will show us faith in ourselves. Have knowledge in ourselves that god will show others in time. And understand that our paths our are own, even if they appear to be exactly the same.
Worth a read
I read this from boston.com, but it brings up some interesting points to think about...
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/11/02/five_questions_about_america_this_election_may_answer/?page=1
If you're still out there, let me know what you think. All 1 of the political junkies who reads this.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/11/02/five_questions_about_america_this_election_may_answer/?page=1
If you're still out there, let me know what you think. All 1 of the political junkies who reads this.
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