• Up In The Air, which teaches us that no one believes in Love. (I disagree with this thesis, but who am I to argue with the walking cellular mound of excellence that is George Clooney? Also, Vera Farmiga is hypnotizing, not to mention smokin’.) Points for words, and for the cowboyish commercial pilot.
• Inglourious Basterds, which teaches us that the Nazis were the bad guys. Points for lols, lulz, “The Bear Jew,” &c.
• The White Ribbon, which teaches us to fear the children, who want to murder us. Oh, God, how they want to murder us— Points for creepy historical accuracy, making a straightforwardly nice-guy protagonist work, and the Lynchian/dreamlike disappearance of the characters, amid the violence of youth, on the eve of the dream- and youth-shattering War.

I’m listing this under “Adventure” as well as other, perhaps better expected categories because the Learning of Useful Words & Phrases should be considered adventurous—that is, profitable, if at times exceedingly dangerous.

Following up on an earlier post regarding paratext, I’d like to further explore some other uses of para. (That’s my motherfuckin affix.)

Being a humble and yet oh-so-trill Greek word for “beside” or “near,” or sometimes “past,” “beyond,” or “contrary,” or, in my head, “to/on the side of”—para gives us such high-profile hits as parable and paranormal. Yet we’d be remiss, Gentle Reader, not to give serious props to some of these words’ stranger kin.

Parabasis (”going to the side,” Gr.), for example, is the part in a Greek comedy when the actors exit and the chorus sings to the audience directly, often about some topic unrelated to the play. I think of this word sometimes when I’m sitting, waiting, bored, perhaps watching a distant television, and suddenly an engaging feature about rabid prairie dogs comes on. I feel as if the world is speaking to me directly, telling me a joke to keep me entertained.

(Damn the actors. The shadows falling across the set come alive. The man in the fourth row texting venom becomes the playwright.)

Parataxis (”arranging side by side,” Gr.), meanwhile, is a literary term, meaning the use of short, simple sentences, without conjunctions, the opposite of hypotaxis. Beckett rocked hella parataxis. Small children also tend to rock hella parataxis. See Spot cavort.

Often the links between paratactic sentences and fragments—the negative spaces—provide as much to chew on as the words themselves. As with all minimal techniques, crafting elite parataxis is all about knowing what not to say.

On the same minimal tip, we have—perhaps not from my Greek affix—páramo (”wasteland,” Sp.), a high-altitude, uh, wasteland, between the upper forest and the snow line, featuring a variety of glacier-formed lakes and bogs and stands of gnarled trees and grassy plains dotted, here and there, with shaggy donkeys.

Descriptions of the páramo can be as vivid as the wild terrain itself, a changeling land belonging neither to the lifeless, tundral realm of the high peaks, which we cannot but pass through warily, nor to the city or the farm, nor even to the superabundant jungle, which—however full of plants and lakes and predators and pitfalls and features, in general—takes one familiar form, where the páramo changes as it’s traversed, a chimera.

All this fancy talk brings to mind parament or parement (”to prepare,” Lat.), which is a word for rich, elegant hangings, robes, altar cloths, furniture, and other ornaments, usually connected to powerful people or places, especially religious and political potentates.

But, purple, hypotactic descriptions aside, where on the páramo would you find parament? Perhaps in a parador (”inn,” Sp., a place to stop), a lavish hotel housed in a castle or abbey.

The appearance of a sumptuously-furnished parador on the bleak páramo would represent, in a highly metaphorical way, a parabiosis, or a natural or artificial union of the parts of two organisms—a transplant, the creation of a chimera…

Still stranger are chimerae of the sign: Take paragoge (”addition to a word,” Gr.), or the addition of letters or syllables to the ends of words, often to round out a loanword in a new language. (”Computer” in English must end in a vowel in Japanese and so becomes “konpyuuta;” “note” becomes “nouto;” &c.)

And then there are those para-concepts whose to-the-sideness (signal perpendicularity) leaves me on a mental páramo, wading across chill fens of ground rosette and tussock, looking everywhere for the hint of a burro trail… These chimerae, like the word “parachor“—a “scientific quantity” whose definition I don’t understand (P = γ1/4 * M / d)—are at the very side of language.

Clearly, these paras are not not-language; they are not gibberish. But because I cannot grasp them (maybe they are too abstract, as in the math formula, or—for someone who has no examples handy—too alien, as with linguistics terms like “paragoge”), these para-paras are not allowed into my common pool of words; they are not, for me, what language is; they are extra building blocks, unused Legos strewn outside my ill multicolored castle.

The whole notion of side-ness has perhaps been under-explored. For most of us, uncommon words such as the paras I’ve handpicked for this essay are to the side of language. They are not even ornament (parament), but something else, available but invisible—or visible but un-see-able, like shimmering figures in dreams who dissolve when turned toward.

The question is not, then, of what words we know or have never ever heard of, but of how many words—how many signs and concepts, in toto—have we encountered but never fully or even partially deciphered?

I must have heard every word in Spanish by now, and yet I know few (horse terms from cowboy fiction, curses, religious phrases); I have forgotten German, and yet I must have known, and thus must still know, in a sideways way, its forms and sounds and agglutinations; I know Japanese imperfectly, and yet I can recognize it; it is at once alien and familiar, a chimera, a double-thing. It is not a concept, like love or God, that can be theorized about ad infinitum: It exists; I could re-learn or better learn it, all of it (until I became a paragon). But I do not.

I meanwhile learn words like “paragoge,” a demonstrably useless term. (No one else in my life outside some professor probably has ever heard of it, so I can’t use it; it’s a non-part of my life.) Japanese would be useful; I have Japanese friends. But it remains to the side, there but not there.

There but not—parapresent, nearby, beyond, framing by absence. What we don’t know is so much greater than what we know, or what we can ever know. We are the excitations of only a few ideas, almost (just almost) randomly jumbled together and set a-drifting, like the tumbleweeds on the limitless dusty avenue of the Divine.

• The Haunted Vagina by Mellick Carlton III
• HELP! A Bear is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen
• Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read In School by the man himself

These book non-recommendations come courtesy Abe Books’ Weird Book Room, an indispensable trove of books I don’t really want to read (Haunted Vag. and HELP! A Bear aside). Other weird books include Blessed Are the Cheesemakers and What’s Wrong With My Snake?

Bob Dylan is from another planet, a distant heavenly sphere on which it is always Christmas. He earns an Honourable Badge of Merit for this festive gem of festive gems, a very merry polka-zydeco chase sequence:

Now back to my regularly scheduled fare of Shostakovich, hip hop, and electro from other dimensions. Advised listening:

“Hold the Line” - Major Lazer

“Deadbeat Summer” - Neon Indian

Flying Lotus’s impeccable remixes of Lil Wayne

“Popular Demand” - Lupe Fiasco

Happy Festivus from Atlanta.

Frappez, Entrez, Rompez Tout.

(”Strike, Enter, Break Everything,” Fr.)

This title is so hard, it forces our imaginary troubadour to venture into new psychic realms for rap material, such as the realm of real space beer you can actually buy.

Space Wasted.

The front matter is the stuff before the stuff. You open a book, but it doesn’t start right off. It starts with some weird crap about how happy the author is you picked it up, what edition it is, why he wrote it, and blah blah blah. What up with that?

I’ll tell you.

⁂

First of all, front matter, back matter, cover, and illustrations comprise a text’s paratext (”side text”), meaning frame or way-into the text pur sang. The text isn’t just, say, a novel; it’s an experience: A sexy cover catches your eye; a screaming title and subtle subtitle play with your naughty lizard brain; a table of contents or epigraph or short foreword make you want to learn more.

Paratext helps you ease into the text. Even the dullest novel benefits from a title which refracts its principal themes. And, yes, texts benefit from illustrations, and they always have. (Remember the weird spermazoid line in Tristram Shandy?)

Each piece of front matter has a specific paratextual purpose, often simply to delay you as you flip towards Chapter One (”Eating Better: Weeping Best” or “The Cowboy Who Was An Indian!! Part One,” perhaps).

⁂

Often comprised of a poem or a few lines therefrom, an epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of another piece of writing that serves as an introduction, a summary, an ironic or admonishing counterexample, and/or a link to a wider literary-historical continuum.

The epigraph frames the rest of what follows. If it’s doing its job, you should forget it, in the moment, but continue to munch on it, in your back-brain, as you read the rest of the story or book. When I hear the word “epigraph,” I always think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.

—Dr. Johnson.

⁂

Preamble is primarily a legal term. A premable introduces a document, explaining its purpose and the philosophy underlying its writing. You hear this word used often in conjunction with the constitutions and other important, top-level legal coda of sovereign states. Just remember “We the people:”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

⁂

A foreword is short, comes before the author’s introduction, and is written by someone other than the author. This is as opposed to the preface, which is written by the author. The writer of a foreword may describe how he came to know the author of the book, or why he was asked to write the foreword. The foreword may explain why the current incarnation of the book has been printed. (”Errors was made. But we fixed em,” e.g.)

In the foreword to Umbrella Academy: Dallas, Neil Gaiman merges his praise of the soon-to-follow graphic tale with a warning of the conflict that is already happening, in medias res, in that tale—thus collapsing the narrative distance between the reader and the text unexpectedly. Postmodern forewords by fictional critics accomplish the same trick, usually with less Abraham Lincoln. See: Pale Fire, &c.

⁂

A preface is an introduction written by the author, in which he typically outlines the Grace-guided genesis and pothole-challenged actual-writing of the text, sometimes (but not necessarily) acknowledging his immense debts to the people who’ve supported his broke ass for the last five years as he’s scribbled page after page about telepathic monkeys, or whathaveyou. A book’s preface follows its foreword and precedes its introduction and its prologue.

⁂

An introduction or prolegomenon is, broadly, any initial piece that explains the purpose of what follows. All introductions should be engaging. In literary works, an introduction follows a preface and may speak to the work’s goals, when a preface sticks to its origins.

“Prolegomenon” sounds more formal, as them big-ass Greek words are wont. A prolegomenon may ask you to interpret what follows in a certain way.

One strong “prolegomenon” is the Greek title of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, which sets forth many of the logical, methodological, and philosophical errors historians can make when writing history; suggests history can be viewed through the lens of various class and economic conflicts; and in other ways predicts, from across a gulf of seven hundred years, modern historiography.

In a sense, Khaldun, in his Prolegomenon, asks us to interpret not only what happened up until 1377, but all of history afterward through the lens of the book: His book is a prolegomenon to the greater Book of time.

⁂

A prologue precedes the main story but is told in the voice of a character or omniscient narrator, as opposed to that of the author. (In some books the distinction is meaningless.) A prologue is, in some way, part of the “the plot” of the book. Often, events in the prologue take place years before those of the chapters that follow.

My favorite prologue is the title of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking Of The Odradek Stadium. The title forms an important plot element—one whose importance only comes into focus, however, on the last page of the book, making it recursive. To end a reading of the epistolary madness that is The Sinking is to begin again, at the end of the plot, with the title…

For this feat of front-matter manipulation, and for many, many other writerly acts others of note, Mr. Mathews receives today’s Honourable Badge Of Merit. Happy Monday, all.

Have you appeared in a movie or TV show with someone who’s acted alongside someone who’s acted with Kevin Bacon?

Have you published a mathematics paper with someone who wrote a proof alongside someone who’s been published for having worked with prolific genius Paul Erdős?

It’s all delightfully, terribly confusing. Frequent Simpsons guests Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have their numbers (7).

What’s your Erdős–Bacon number?

And can you join us, Gentle Reader, in agreeing that essayist, nobleman, villain, genius, and primitive super-scientist Francis Bacon would surely have the lowest (best) Erdős–Bacon number, were he alive today or in the recent past?

Just imagine Viscount Bacon stridin down the set of Law & Order (Court Clerk With Food On Lip, 1 line), or Dexter (Miami Mel, serial killer who uses power of rational thinking to convince his victims of their unworth). Imagine him whipping out the gilt cellie and dialing up K-Bacon, just because he can…

“Whattup, Kev Beezy.” “Nuthin, Frank—whattup with you.” “Just publishin a proof with a prolific math genius.” “Word to that, lunch later?” “No doubt, tapas or bust.” “And we never bust!” [Francis hangs up on the clod.]

(&c.)

Viscount St. Alban, Original Ruff Rider:

The other day, the New York Times ran an article called “Tax Tax Revolution,” playing off the title of the popular video game Dance Dance Revolution (once known by the more prosaic title Dancing Stage). [Which makes me wonder if Super Mario Brothers was originally Jumping Fraternal Twins, or if Zero Wing was ever simply Funny Introduction.]

The appeal of the XXY name scheme is immediate yet hard to explain. Merely repeating a term (”Dance Dance”) is not, I don’t think, the source of the pleasure of the name. It is, rather, the juxtaposition of the perfect, symmetrical, duplicate set of terms (a term and its echo) with the imperfect dangler, the rude awakener—la Revolution, for instance. (The bullet of revolution has no echo.)

Nothing quite does the XXY construction right like Smile Big Smack Hamster, a favorite of mine in two categories—television shows and Japanese nonsense.

In SBSH (which could have should have wasn’t named Smile Smile Smackham, or Smack Smack Smilester), players strapped into giant hamster costumes chant along to a beat, answering the host’s call of “[Color 1], [color 1], [color 2]!” with appropriately colored nouns.

For instance, “Yellow, yellow, gray!” may be answered, on beat, with “Lemon, lemon, elephant!” Or “Red, red, green!” may yield “Blood, blood, leaf!”  (If I wrote the show, I would throw down the C-bomb and ask for “Chartreuse, chartreuse, glaucous!“)

The XXYs continue, full-tilt, until a player messes up three times, at which point said player is shot through a giant sculptural cat’s mouth, replete with a huge felt tongue covered in hot pepper or mustard…

Now, how the hot-hot-fire eye irritant relates to the creation of XXY gestalt nouns, I don’t know.

But I like.

Tis that time of year when solitude creeps in and can’t be kicked out. The warm fuzzies of holiday parties, exchanges of knacks and knicks, downings of buttered rums and unbuttered, crapulently spiced seasonal beers—all these do little stave off the feeling that the short cold days are not on your side, and that all your fellows, as wonderful as they may be, are ultimately kept secret and distant from you by an unseen wall of selfish cells, spent time, differing routines, and twisting, unrelenting private thoughts.

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

And yet that’s no reason to despair. We have a dude named Maria to help us through, for he has written many dope verses about the human spirit, its singularity and lonesomeness, and how it can interact with other spirits—like a chipper terrier at a sometimes-empty dog run (only, you know, a terrier made all ectoplasmic and goopy-divine and whatnot).

Kick back, and let Maria (Rainer _____ von Rilke) jam on human interactions, and why sometimes a little winter of the spirit is a good thang:

It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

There are no classes in life for beginners. Right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Word.

Related and also worth considering is this Gordon Marino essay on the difference between depression and despair. According to Marino, Kierkegaard defines despair as a self’s inability to live as… itself. Anybody, even a happy person, can know a deep sense of despair. Simply, if you can’t be content being you, and being stuck alone being you, then winning the lottery and impressing millions of people mean nothing.

Perhaps some people—the lucky few, the Lamas, the Buddhas, the Neil Youngs—just know who they are, straight up, no fakery. Most of us, however, are locked in a battle with ourselves, autumnal cannibals. We are our own uncharted hinterlands. We know less, we worry, as we learn about ourselves, and the dead of night jumps on us like a cat, forcing us awake with a start: Who am I? (Think Jackie Chan now.) What do I want?

Recently, in my solitude, I have just barely limned in dreams the edges of my spirit. I have seen the holy mountain, as it were—but I have astigmatism, and my glasses were nowhere in sight.

The following is the totality of my understanding of my own spirit, as of this night, Tuesday, December the First, MMIX:

• Want: [ ], blue mint birds, books written, everyone clapping, rapping music, shaving more excellently, solitude is like Rilke, cat will be flying, winter is making cat turn invisible-white and make noise from horns mysterious to grow on its brain-head, plus all the beer at the bar really red wine and I am not even drinking it.

• Do not want: books writing, making bad verse recordings, shavings bump, solitude is like Beavis and Butthead in later years when first member of duo passes due to lung cancer (very sad never aired episode), winter is not ending, cat is awake even though I am thrown all of Roma library at him until he is bleeding Gibbon, plus never anything to drink but beer.

In a Killing the Buddha review of God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars by Benjamin Lazier, historian James Chappel writes:

Perhaps the problem is the one diagnosed by Hannah Arendt: the collapse of orthodox religion has not caused us to turn towards the world with the piety and love once accorded God.

But was God accorded that piety and love—or did we instead accord love to the old comforting myths, rituals, social institutions, and ancient traditions?

Is the problem that people have stopped sincerely believing in and loving supernal Powers Beyond Time & Space and failed to transfer that intense, gut-level belief/love to something new? Or that people have stopped putting effort into maintaining outmoded traditions, even if those traditions served valuable psychological functions?

Am I saying we should go back to the old religions? Hecks no.

Yet how we frame the question of wha’ happened to God is important. A contrast cannot be drawn between “sincere belief” and some modern or postmodern apostasy. Humans still have complex feelings about their roles as living beings, mortal but equipped with powerful imaginative faculties. We are still mortal.

(Rebecca Goldstein argues that both Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes viewed religion as based on a terror of mortality and thus anarchic forces to be curbed by the rational state.)

We have not turned to the world with the love we accorded God, because a) God is not the world and b) we never accorded God anything. We still feel deeply. But today’s world is worse at channeling intense, transcendent feelings. These feelings leave our heads at night and drift out over the city like gray bats. They cause us stomach pains at work. They are sublimated, turned into a general conviction that things are okay, because we elected Obama, because we ourselves are not starving (and sorry to anyone truly starving who reads this).

To slay the metaphor, the mash-up between a rational, urban, modern life and a very old terror is not yet finished being edited.

I, for one, am excited to see the final cut.

People always ask me, “Wythe, what the fuck is punctuation all about? I mean, why we do it? How I’m supposed to?”

I usually wave my hands descriptively and draw crude mantic sigils in the wintry earth with a rod stolen from one of the quaint trees of McCarren Park. The asker usually massages his brow and departs, none the wiser.

But some askers persist. In honor of their persistence, I am now going to try to answer the question: “What be punctuation?”

Ahem.

§

Punctuation is the orthographic representation of any number of meaningful pauses in prose. It is not only meant to duplicate the naturally meaningful, unconscious pauses we make in when we speak; rather, punctuation also represents those mental pauses that both precede spoken words and dictate the rhythm of written ones.

Each mark has evolved a number of often conflicting uses over the years, but all essentially demarcate shifts, however subtle, functional, or dramatic, in rhythm and, occasionally, tone.

On the most abstract level, the marking of punctuation is an attempt to positively represent a negative or contextual type of information (apophasis). Punctuation is not “meta” information, but the context for the information we’re generally seeking. (Thus, punctuation exists on the same order of information as the prose it frames.)

When examined individually, the origins and histories of most punctuation marks are as richly textured as those other glyphs, even moreso. And yet few debate the merit of, say, the letter B, while many probably question the raison d’etre of the vein-tightening semicolash (;—) or the venerable double dagger (‡).

Daggers aside, except in certain scholarly and experimental works, punctuation should be invisible. A writer’s words should be sufficient to propel a reader’s eyes forward; the flow of positive information should not be tripped up for lack of punctuation—as in “yes but I didn’t know then that Mr. Welles a famous director whose movies I had seen had also made commercials for crappy wine which I sometimes enjoy myself truth be told.”

But neither should punctuation become burdensome. Beckett and other anti-punctuationalists set out to make use of the minimum possible punctuation, at times to very strong effect.

In general, punctuation’s rhetorical uses vary, and each mark’s function has changed and will continue to change over time. Regardless, all punctuation works essentially to help readers avoid confusion (or, in the case of some experimental writings, to cause an intentional confusion via anti-use).

Invisible and unloved, the comma and its kin soldier on. Thank ye kindly.

The NYTimes reports on our ongoing war against the grotesque—and consequently against fun, against childhood, and against the imagination. The war’s a pity, since it will never be won.

By excising Scream masks from public schools, officials will only encourage children to go home and experiment in the “Satanic” (as Halloween is described in the Times piece by one Illinois school district spokesman) on their lonesomes. Sales of Left For Dead and True Blood DVDs will rise. The truly maladjusted will continue to torture housepets and use depth charges to destroy their parents’ bowls of Grape Nuts. When all is said and micromanaged, keeping schools free of darknesses, real and imagined, will not drive those darknesses from the world.

Meanwhile, children will miss out on a wonderful holiday, a non-religious day of atonement on which reckless merrymaking, sugar-consumption, and grotesque miming lead us down too-often unexplored paths in our minds.

Grotesque miming does us a real mythological service, I think: It allows us to confront our demons in the daylight, in the shapes of our friends and frenemies. A dance party full of Franken-people, vamps, James Browns, cosmonauts, Elvises, and unicorns becomes a vivid, tangible dream wherein before there was an empty floor and a pair of speakers. (Nightmares serve a similar function and can be similarly cathartic.)

A classroom full of Kanyes and zombies (oh my) asks children to externalize their own fantasies and terrors, and to confront those of their peers. The pooled child-mind purges itself of gorillas, Beyoncés, pirates, and ghosts. Darkness is made grotesque, overwrought, impossible, silly—in a word, real. And thus its power vanishes.

I wonder what is to be learned in a realm of positive costumes, where approved archetypes (unicorns) and the mimesis of role models (Beyoncés) are okay, but confrontations with fears real (pirates) or imagined (zombies) are not. On a day of what should be cathartic, real-problems-preventing rule-breaking, the enforcing of vague rules of costume-etiquette and pseudo-taste strikes me as imagination-hamstringing, at best.

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

• Novel-T Bartleby shirt. 4 mai scrivenin.
• Animal mummy, pref. a chimera (duck + snake + autistic rabbit; leopard + macaroni; two cats who hate each other + okra + Nile heron missing right wing; &c.).
• Box of crayons w/Latin color names. (1st grade teacher: And what color is your bedroom painted, Wythe? Me: Smaragdinus. With a bright xanthinus architrave 4 mai G.I. mothafuckin Joes and NaS cassettes.)