Tyranny of Intentions pt. 2: Hisses and Kisses

Sometimes, my cursive h's look remarkably like my cursive k's, both of which are not all that distinct from my cursive l's. This meant, in my childhood, that I spent several hours of "free time" writing out cursive k's and h's to the satisfaction of my 3rd and 4th grade teachers. This was not the origin of my ongoing distrust of the motives of elementary school teachers, though it was a significant contributing factor.

So I was writing today another insipid bit of verse, which contained the phrase "were [ ]isses," where the double bracket marks the aforementioned indeterminate l/h/k. Of course, I still know what I meant at the time of writing, but it occurred to me on a second read that 1) I often take for granted that one besides myself can determine whether I have written an h or k (or l) and that 2) the context (a snake nipping at one's heel), to my mind, does not favor one reading over another, be it "hisses" or "kisses." Certainly, "lisses" is out of the question; it isn't even a word (I don't think). But even the question of what word is secondary to an orthographic problem.

Both print and its bastard child markup would deal very inappropriately with my graphic "slip of the tongue." Neither typesets nor unicode contain a character that sort of looks like a k but also looks somewhat like an h or an l. This problem could be rectified, I suppose, by enlisting the services of any of a number of companies that transform samples of one's handwriting into a truetype font. They would only need to replicate my own similar characters for this graphic problem to be represented, right? Wrong, as, you see, only sometimes are my h's like my k's. Sometimes, they are quite clearly distinct. This difficulty could be dealt with by using a macro in any of the various text editors to use one character (the indistinct one) at times and another (more distinct) at other times. The irony, though, is that this seems to be a ridiculous amount of effort to go through just to represent digitally (or in print) what otherwise is very simply and obviously manifest in the handwritten document.

This gets at something that has been milling in my noodle for quite some time: it seems the intent of print (and markup), if it can be said to have intentions at all, is to regularize orthography in a way that handwriting does not and to restrict the degree by which one can actually subvert the goals of standardized print. Regularities in print exist to facilitate reading (i.e. make reading facile), to move interpretation from a primarily graphic to a primarily semantic level. This shift is largely an illusion, as anyone with an OCR scanner can show, because text still has to be read on a graphic level first. All standardized print (and markup) has done is invisibilize the visual interpretation of text and the fundamental role it plays in "higher" orders of semantic interpretation. It permits one to disregard the textuality of the document at hand and render it merely an information carrying medium. But in this case the medium is the message, part of it at least, in not only what it does say but also in what it leaves up in the air.

The Tyranny of Intentions

This afternoon I wrote a poem; not a good poem, not a bad poem, but a mediocre expression of a certain lyric impulse. It runs as follows.

this is what the world needs: an abscess to lance
on a hobby-horse dragon, the puss of which will
ooze along the thigh-meat, past the scaly knee
of cedar-wood shingles, upon the shaving talons.

to slay the boil, they say, is to slay the dragon;
to see the white blood erupt, to calm its wooden
breath, forged of fantasies of fire and poison
as thick as puss oozing on down the thigh-meat.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I had no real design in mind as I was writing this. Granted, that design was, at best, vague and ill thought out, but a particular intention did compel me to say particular things in particular ways. I can't honestly say what prompted the faux 6 beat alliterative line (with caesurae), but it led to a certain mock heroic style that did not in any way displease me.

Upon finishing the above, I read through the poem from the top and realized it could be read in a way I hadn't intended at all. Normally, the corrective impulse would intervene, reword certain lines so as to obscure the incipient reading, and thereby erase all knowledge that such a reading had ever existed. Instead, I decided the alternative reading wasn't so bad, if a bit creepy, and appended the following title in order better to hint at it.

drag‘nslayher

As I was composing those two verses, I had no title in mind, which isn't to say I had no particular title but rather intended not to title them at all. After all, they were merely an exercise, an attempt to filter out of my noodle a set of loosely connected lines that had, as Ray Stantz would say, "just popped in there." Now, my moment of submission to fancy didn't mean the wholesale destruction of Manhattan at the behest of a giant marshmallow man, but it did imply something I am still not entirely comfortable with: that the poetic force of my minor poem had very little to do with myself and my intentions and that it had a great deal to do with chance.

And it occurred to me, as I sat feeling very smug and self-satisfied about how I had anticipated what other people might think, that, in reality, all my title had done was obscure my original intentions. Try as I might, I could not recall what it was that I had been thinking or why it was so important it needed to be written down. I wasn't vexed for long, though, as the timer dinged, and I got up to retrieve my shredded beef tamales from the microwave.

feat. Mummy-D et al.

I was more than happy to see the return to my ken of Mummy-D lately of the hip hop trio Rhymester, due in no small part to our girl Ringo-han. J-hop or J-hip-hop or whatever you want to call it has always been something of a mystery to me, much like its American counterpart, if only because it seems the more groups I listen to the less I seem to know what's going on.

Rhymester often beg comparisons to Jurassic 5, a comparison that while sometimes apt fails to account for the fact that J5's style is much more a throwback to classic b-boy styling. Most of their tracks can be reduced to lyric flow over clever mixes. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but it isn't very much like the much more melodic and occasionally instrumentalized music Mummy-D and company put out. If hard pressed for a point of comparison, I'd say they mostly resemble the Roots, but even that isn't quite right.



A song like "The Great Amateurism" is indicative of what I find infinitely more difficult to grapple with in J-hop both visuallly and musically than in our homespun variety. The video doesn't seem to quite understand the aggressive dynamics of the underground freestyle battle it portrays, as Mummy (on the left) and Utamaru (on the right) move in and out of solo and unison flows with relative ease. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps subtly parody) the hyper-aggressive individualism the rap battle is meant to manifest; at one point Jin (the DJ) even breaks in with a few rhymes. Obviously, American hip hop is as much a culture as it is a(n extremely broad) musical genre, and that this culture wouldn't precisely translate is understandable. Japan doesn't have the semi-segregated, urban often poor communities where hip hop was born and certain doesn't have a history of competitive freestyle. It begs the question then whether this transplantation of hip hop is a corruption (a misunderstanding) or an adaptation (an understood-all-too-well). Are the unison choruses prior to each individual flow a beckon to J5 style group efforts or a play to homegrown trends in J-pop where unison singing (especially amongst all-boy/all-girl groups) is the norm and harmony all but nonexistent?

The obvious answer is J-hop is a hybrid, but to what extent and in what ways remains a mystery, as disparate elements of the lyric performance seem to hail to both sides of the pond. Maybe, just maybe, boys and girls, it's meant to.

Spenser, Taxed

My love of Edmund Spenser is somewhat obvious; I find him a much maligned poet (even though, because of his treatment of the Irish, much of that malignance is deserved), often read very poorly or against some arcane scheme (like the apposition of each of the Amoretti to a particular verse reading from the Book of Common Prayer) likely to make ones head spin. And it is well known that Spenser adapted his Italian models, as most English Renaissance poets did, but that word, "adapted," does a great deal to conceal how a poet like Torquato Tasso is adapted in Spenser's sonnets and whether "adapt" is even the proper characterization.

The Norton edition of the Amoretti has a note to sonnet 43 that reads as follows: "The first and third quatrains adapt Tasso's 'Se taccio, il duol s'avanza.'" What follows are those first and third quatrains along with their correspondences in Tasso's rima (#166 in Bruno Maier's edition) and my own somewhat more literal translation thereof. Note, I come to Italian mostly through Dante, through whose verse I generally have to puzzle for hours, so forgive any gross oddities in my own rendition.

Qu. 1 -

Shall I then silent be or shall I speake?
And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall:
And if I silent be, my hart will breake,
Or chokèd be with overflowing gall.

Se taccio, il duol s'avanza;
se parlo, accresco l'ira,
donna bella e crudel, che mi martira.

If I am silent, my grief advances;
If I speak, I increase her ire,
lady beautiful and cruel, who martyrs me.

Qu. 3 -

Yet I my hart with silence secretly
Will teach to speak, and my just cause to plead:
And eke mine eies with meeke humility,
Love-learnèd letters to her eyes to read.

E prego Amor che spieghi
nel mio doglioso aspetto
con lettre di pietà l'occulto affetto.

And I pray Love would show
in my painful aspect
with letters of piety the hidden affection.

Of course, a sonnet is more than just two quatrains, and it is in the second qu. of sonnet 43 that Spenser shows he is more in conversation with Tasso than merely adapting him.

What tyranny is this both my hart to thrall,
And eke my toung with proud restraint to tie;
That nether I may speake nor thinke at all,
But like a stupid stock in silence die?

Spenser has appropriated Tasso's double bind and applied it not only to his amorous situation but also to the problem of the poet adapting his contemporary. For Spenser's tounge is not only enthralled to his lady but to Tasso as well, and if this poem were to remain a simple translation or adaptation of "Se taccio," Spenser's poetic voice and subjectivity would be all but eviscerated. Thus, to maintain the presence of Spenser's voice and Tasso's, the sonnet engages in a kind of poetic correspondence whose mode happens partially to be translation. Of course, the presence of Tasso' "Se taccio" is not obvious in Spenser's poem; I never would have known if it weren't for the textual note. So, a third person is invited into this conversation, a figure whose silence in the poem is genuine and not a mere figure of discourse, i.e. the reader. The poem's concluding couplet casts the reader as the always absent yet ever present lady.

Which her deep wit, that true harts thought can spel,
Wil soone conceive, and learne to construe well.

Tasso's "l'occulto affetto" and Spenser's silent speech can only be revealed through the efforts of their absent Loves, the readers whose task it is decipher the "hidden affection" in pious letters, the speech in silence, and the presence of one poet in another. So while we readers are invited into the discourse of the poem, it expects us all the while to play its game: to be as crafty in reading as it is in writing.

Of Music Reviews

I suppose it's easy to bag on music reviewers; there are all sorts of horrible nasty things that could be said about how practically and, for my purposes, intellectually useless a music review really is. I get the sense that these things are written by people who don't even understand how a song works, how it's constructed, what notes are, what an arpeggio is, or how simply things like melodies and harmonies are composed. I'm not saying a marked lack of musical knowledge should disqualify you from ever writing about music, but at least be honest about what you can say. In the past three days I've come across ponderously vague phrases like "vocal caress," "minor synths," and "so moving it paralyzes." What exactly is "vocal caress?" The reviewer in question chose to use it in what appears to be an assumed way (i.e. "the vocal caress"), but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. The review certainly doesn't make it any clearer.

But I understand what these people go through. Despite years of writing about music, we still lack a critical vocabulary to describe it, and often the more highbrow the discussion becomes the more likely you are to be dismissed by the academes you talk up to and ignored by the four or five people who actually read reviews. Then there's the fact that what makes perfect sense in a song (or whose earnestness is taken for granted) sounds almost silly when you sit down to write about it. How exactly do you represent in writing what may simply be tonal variations on a single syllable? By way of example, the lyrics to the bridge of Regina Spektor's "Folding Chair" run as follows.

Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo
Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo

And in that form, a purely literal form, they are incomprehensible. It would be easy to write off such "nonsense" syllables as nothing but an empty form on which the important play is the note or tone. This speaks to me of the way we regularly invisibilize sound, even in songs. When there are "words," we ignore the sounds and talk about the language. But when there are no "words," what do we talk about? The simple answer is, we don't.

Hirate Masahide

masahide

there is a something in words, an unnecessary
overabundance of thoughts and afterthoughts,
such that, as you afterthink your way through
the thousands of delicate, diplomatic gestures;
kind words to fathers of adolescent daughters;
how he preps the hot water; whether he cares;
and every message tutored from wearily living
out the silences that say more than they ought—
you

take no solace in knowing that killing yourself
is the last thing he will neglect to comprehend.

A Portrait of St. Vincent

I.

While looking for a particular photo of Edna St. Vincent Millay on Google, I came across the following.


I was more than a little befuddled but also amused enough to find out why this photo has been associated with an early twentieth century, now relatively unknown poet like Millay. It appears that someone quoted the last six lines of "I will put Chaos into fourteen lines" in her blog.

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon--his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Because we, in the academy, have largely conspired to decide that Modernism is what happened in literature in the first half of the twentieth century, Millay's sonnets nowadays go largely unread, even though I think their grappling with the unknown and intractable speaks to the somewhat more macabre tastes of contemporary readers. I suppose then (20s-40s) it was considered as silly to write sonnets as it is now. Fatal Interview 9:

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
No more as now their stormy lashes lift
To lance me through...as in the morning skies
One moment, plainly visible in a rift
Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear
And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,
What time the watcher in desire and fear
Leans from this chilly window in the dawn...
Shall I be free, shall I be once again
As others are, and count your loss no care?
Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain
Be powerless to evoke you out of air,
Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright
Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

II.

I fancy myself a rather sophisticated reader of poetry with sophisticated tastes in music and a sophisticated approach to the interpretation of both "kinds" of verse. I'd reaffirmed this fact with my recent discovery of St. Vincent (better known to her birth certificate as Annie Clark) and counted it a great triumph. This morning the New York Times stepped in to remind me how bourgeois my tastes really are.