josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Compare 'constantly going to break into some other Monk song' from March 2002 with 'playing with the same theme forever' from fourteen days ago.
'syncategorematic': forming a meaningful expression only in conjunction with a denotative expression (as a content word) <logical operators and function words are syncategorematic>
No one should ever have to use this word or know what it means. Where oh where did we lose our way.
There's like one joke in Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art but I will grudgingly admit that the man had a sense of humor. In The Philosophical Review, Volume 61, Issue 2, he wrote: 'The explanation in terms of resemblance is very good except for being so wrong.'
Jess writing about Kompakt.
'Schaffelfieber' sounds like a German muppet. On German Fraggle Rock.
None of this is to say that I just read 'Personism' just the other day. For the first time, I mean. I have read it many times. I like to reread it like the English Candy Drill scene in Gravity's Rainbow, because it's funny. Also it makes me feel like I have allies. I have not, however, ever given actual thought to it in the three years since I first read it at the tender age of twenty-two (no thought then either). This is part of my 'methodology'.
Also, incidentally, I had to look up 'Lucky Pierre'. I am like the guys in Office Space who look up 'money laundering' in the dictionary.
By comparison, I mean. Comparatively. My thematical acumen is of course still astounding in its own right. Really.
P.S. I'm not totally sure what 'a poetics' is but it sure has sounded exciting since I read Perloff's book and found Silliman and all these other poetics people blogging. It was even scarier when I saw some old person somewhere complaining that people in English never care about 'thematics' anymore, since I don't exactly know what that is either and definitely don't know if 'poetics' and 'thematics' have any other friends. Sometimes the interweb really bites, as a research tool. In the hands of the lazy and apathetic and swivel-headed.
(This is tied to my recent uncertain revelation, if you can have those, that in just about any area of life or thought you could think of, I am all up in poetics' ass and am totally retarded about thematics.)