Dream of New Yorker

 I had a mini-story accepted by the New Yorker.  But when it was about to come out (in the dream) it was merely a negation of my acceptance. Not exactly a letter of rejection, but something that had that same effect.  

Theory of Rhyme

Repetition + difference. 

Marks endings.  

From song to poem and back again

 

Here's what it could be. There is song; a poet imitates the song form and creates the poem. The composer sets the poem to music, and there is a new song.  

But this new song is different from the original, anonymous, popular song.  In 2 ways.  Now the text comes first, and is set to music. (In the original form of a song, music and words both come first, in a way. There is no necessary precedence.)  Secondly, there is a popularization of a text that belongs to the cultured tradition.  

Simple things at a high level

I saw a video by the drummer T. Igoe about doing simple things at a high level of proficiency. That would be my philosophy too.  Complex things done with a high level of proficiency are also great, but complex things done badly are doubly bad.    

As I type

 As I type my fingers act automatically. I don't look at the keyboard: my fingers simply know where the letters are. I make mistakes, but that is beside the point. My brain knows on some level what I am doing. For example, it knows that some words only need the left hand. However, to remind my brain of where a letter is, I have to move my fingers. I couldn't recite to you the querty keyboard.  

On the piano, my fingers also know where the keys are. I can play blind, for example. I can make a mistake if the key I am reaching for is two octaves up. 

The neurological process of writing by hand is different, I'm told.  Maybe better, but there is still a beauty in the unconscious logic of typing.  

Words cannot describe

I've talked about this trope before. In a formulaic way, words cannot describe just means the experience is powerful.  It really isn't about words themselves, but about experience.  You expect me to say something, but any statement pales in proportion to the experience itself. "I have no words..." and then the speaker gives a speech anyway about having no words. 

The next stage of the trope is to focus on language itself. Here, the point is that language is inadequate on some fundamental level. Inadequate for the enormous experience... but I would say also not really suited to evoke even ordinary life. I cannot make my words smell like cinnamon. If you already know what it smells like, then the word just functions as an arbitrary surrogate. If you don't know the smell, or if you don't know the word, then it doesn't work at all.

The third step in my argument is that this is not what language is supposed to do anyway. It was never supposed to be a surrogate for reality itself. It can only be judged inadequate because we have a false idea of what it's supposed to be. Take music. We can use language to notate music, but it is a bit awkward: a quarter note triplet played legato on G4. We have another system, called sheet music, that does the job better, though it is also awkward to read and write except for highly trained musicians. The sheet music is inadequate too, but good enough to preserve musical ideas and tell the performer how to realize them.  

Here's where it gets interesting. Even though that is not the main job of language, language can be evocative also. It is no longer an abstract representation of reality, but an experience that is real in its own right. This is something that we call "poetry." The combination of words gives us something new, something that cuts through our ordinary perception with an intensity. Think of a poem that tries to talk about the experience of listening to Monk play.  Ok.  It will probably be a bad poem because it sets itself up to fail by trying to replicate an experience in an inadequate medium.  Now think of a poem that is not about Monk but replicates the experience of his music in a different medium, adequate to itself.  

 

Terrible arguments

 You need to study humanities because it is the only way to learn critical thinking, etc...  

Then explain how people in the humanities, the actual professors and prestigious intellectuals, propose and accept really terrible arguments?  How will the undergraduates studying these things be able to escape terrible arguments, or judge which arguments are better than others?  We cannot even agree about what a poem means. 

I'm not setting myself up as the arbiter of what a good or bad argument is.  But I am a professor of humanities (at least one of the humanities), and some arguments seem bad to me.  Is it because I didn't study enough humanities?  What if I and another humanist disagree about what a terrible argument is?  Who is going to decide who is right? A third humanist? A committee? 

(I'm not giving examples, because then we would be debating the merits of particular arguments. Maybe my example of a terrible argument is something you think is wonderful. That is the problem in the first place.)

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I guess the shortcut is to think the left wing arguments are supported by critical thinking, and the right wing ones are right wing memes.  But then the critical thinking arguments disappears, because the right (left) answer is always obvious. It is "on the right side of history."  No thinking is required after all! No amount of humanities education fixes this.