Patricia Cohen reports in “Next Big Thing” that literary criticism and psychology have merged, via technology, to form a hybrid science by which scholars are learning more about more about how we make memories, and what we think as we read.

Literature, then, may be headed toward a technological singularity along with the rest of human enterprise. Drat. Here I thought we’d be smoking meerschaum pipes and perusing cracked yellow tomes, even as the robohumans zoomed past us on their iFlyingWhales, listening to their crazy post-technocrunk…

Turns out instead we’ll be scanning our students’ brains and watching the screen flash green as they struggle through the texts we assign. This could be fun.

We already explored how Douthat thinks we Americans have synthesized our religions into meaninglessness, over-complicating the beautiful austerity of the monks and dervishes, giving up tradition for a syncretic post-reality that makes him shiver-n-shake. Now let’s talk politics.

In “Hollywood’s Political Fictions,” Douthat gets all hot and bothered about the state of America’s ability to represent itself viz-a-viz its 54th state (Iraq—after P.R., the Philippines, and Japan) on the silver screen.

Douthat insists we Americans reduce the complexities of war into easy-to-resolve dichotomies, good/bad, us/them, &c. This is precisely the opposite of his accusation re: religion. We complicate that; we simplify war. We (heterogeneous we) just can’t win.

“Americans believe in evil, but we’re uncomfortable with tragedy,” sayeth Uncle Ross. I think that’s reverse-true, meaning, colloquially, bullshit. I think Americans are perhaps more unused to tragedy than people living in non-empires, sure. We’ve had an unfairly sweet run, this past century.

I think some Americans are perhaps more apt to equate “the enemy” in a given situate with “evil,” but I hardly think we’ve all given up on nuances, gray areas, and, well, post-structuralism. (I realize most people don’t think, “Gee, I’m such a dope-ass post-structuralist!” But they do try to imagine the “other” side, even if they end up endorsing some patriotic nonsense. The attempt to juggle multiple language games, multiple centers of “truth” at once requires no particular schoolin’, just a certain openness of mind.)

The fact is, Americans know that there aren’t easy solutions in this life. That’s why we work hard at changing things (usually fucking them up, granted). That’s our gift and burden. We’re all too aware that the world is not simple, and that our actions have consequences. We just often mis-predict those consequences.

And even if many Americans were duped, for a time, into allowing Bush 2 to propagate wars based on the myth of easy solutions, this hardly means all or even most of us are still enamored with a simplistic, good-evil view of the current wars.

President Obama, for example, was never for the war, and now that he has to prosecute it, does anyone, even Ross Douthat, think he’s doing it simply or with a simplistic mentality? Has Obama reduced the conflict into a matter of good versus evil? (Whether you think Obama should pull out of Iraq immediately or not doesn’t matter. What does is his ability to see the conflict as nuanced, difficult, and non-Douthatian.)

Our collective non-simplicity is important to value, whether or not you agree with Douthat that the Matt Damon thriller Green Zone “refuses to stare real tragedy in the face.” Do I think, based on interviews, his other work, and Green Zone, that Damon is a smart dude who has realistic views about the American empire and its agenda in the Middle East? Sure. But does it really matter who Matt Damon is? Naw.

What matters is that I know there is no “simple” “good” or “evil” in the world. There are tyrants, sure. There are shitty situations, psychopaths, liars (Hussein, Bush…), plutocrats, oligarchs, oil men, bomb manufacturers, those who would gladly revise history (the leaders of Iran and Israel), and good ole-fashioned dumbasses. There are, as far I can tell, no vampires, no Doctor Dooms. Conversely, there are no classical heroes, only women and men who struggle to live and let live. Philosophies grow and mutate and die or are absorbed, all without strict goods and evils, without Meka-Hitlers or Jason Bournes.

Do I care whether or not Douthat enjoyed Green Zone? Naw. But I do mind that a syndicated columnist so brutally assaults reality, so often. Douthat claims “the narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare.” There was a good nation, a brutal dictator, a cause for war (WMDs), and (he reiterates) a brutal dictator, “in his labyrinth.”

The minotaur of the labyrinth is a great archetype of pure evil, as in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the urban-Gothic Tekkon Kinkreet. References to the labyrinth only too clearly betray Douthat’s essential problem: He’s protesting too much. Who’s the one reducing the complexities of war to a glib chunk of art? Douthat, invoker of the tyrant-as-minotaur, invoker of Big Willie S. and his clean, classical arcs (and unclean, human characters—and positively nucleic inherent moral struggles).

For all his easy-to-pick-apart bluster, Douthat does attend to one aspect of polemic that I admire—language. He calls for less poison and more “radical sympathy“—post-structural sympathy, sympathy with all the parties in a conflict, not just the Marines—and I wholehearted agree with him. I just think Matt Damon, for all his popular ninja-inspired gun-banging silver-screen antics, is more likely to create a new sympathy than Douthat, who is (perhaps like the author) trapped in a realm of addictive symbolism, a reduced realm, full of fire and the leavings of past epics.

It’s hard to get the news from poems (Green Zone is not, Douthat’s right, a good way to learn about the real conflict in Iraq; it’s a movie; it’s entertainment, big business). It’s harder still, for anyone with a poet’s brain (and liver) to eschew symbol and give up his minotaurs and five-act arcs.

I agree we should not comfort ourselves with “portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.” Nor should we lambast Hollywood for not living up to the legacy of Kant. Let Matt Damon blow shit up, and let Obama and his crack team of technocrat do-gooders help Iraq pull itself out of the last decade, brick by brick, street by street, symbol by symbol. In the future, I’d like to see Iraq’s version of Green Zone.

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.

The cowboy stories have taken up a fair chunk of time. Thus there have appeared here fewer posts on grammar and whatnot of late…

While awaiting more delicious words about words, please do enjoy this blog-post about a rum made from the ink of the legendary Kraken,—what killed Cpn. Thom “Ruckus” Marwallach back in 1905 (the only man to ever sail to the North Pole entirely in the nude),—not to mention the first of the Fumarole settlers in California in the early nineteenth century (who, it is said, summoned the beast by sacrificing to grim Triton a new breed of terrier which was never again seen to piss or heard to bark on this earth),—nor even to contemplate the whole township of Zollenkramshaftige, Deu., which disappeared into a tremendous black tentacle on Ash Wednesday, 1666, just as the monks were distributing festive steins of “salt-spiced” Zollenbier (the beer’s briny/umami flavour came from human bone-ash).

Entrepreneurs, take note: Assuming this rum sells even moderately well, consider launching rival brands such as:

• The Sweat of Ulysses. A foul but paradoxically aphrodisiacal ouzo distilled from 100% legendary Greek people (heroes, villains, hermaphrodites, lion-people, people-who-turn-into-trees-in-order-to-escape-horny-deities, &c.).
• Loup Grenache. The unsurprisingly delicious cherry-flavoured sweat of the vegan werewolf.
• “Thunder.” This mystery vodka comes to us from Hohoq, the Flying State, and we don’t know what’s in it, only that it sells for $7.99 at gas stations in the South and Midwest and tastes like battery acid. Rumored to have powered a “green” vehicle farther than expected. Rumored to blend well with grapefruit juice.

Further suggestions welcome.

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.

Francis Bacon did us a solid when he wrote a little number called “Of Envy,” an essay that pretty much trashes haterism and covetousness to death with a lead pipe of logic.

That being said, I am still well envious of commercial diver Lenny Speregen and NYPD detective John Drzal, who provide the meat of a New York magazine investigation into the murky depths (well, mostly shallows) surrounding the city.

Two highlights of this superb submarine report are The Case Of The Spilled Silver Ingots (in 1903, a barge between Staten Island and New Jersey capsized, spilling 7,678 silver ingots; 6,000 were reclaimed; the rest, worth $26 million, are still down there) and The Case Of The Sunken Ice-Cream Truck Armada (in 1969, the Department of Environmental Conservation dumped a fleet of scrapped Good Humor trucks off Atlantic Beach in order to build an artificial reef).

Even more envy-inciting is the work of filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy, who’s dived beneath the Hagia Sophia, discovering 800-year-old submerged graves, secret Ottoman tunnels, and possible connections to the Anemas Dungeons, where Byzantine Emperors imprisoned each other for fun.

Granted, this is a free country, more or less; I could go swimming every day and apply for a job with the Underwater Eel Police, or whatever the proper department may be. Granted, my envy could be mitigated by action.

But I’m lazy, and I’m terrified of not being able to see more than a foot in front of me—and of dodging booze-cruise yachts, and encountering the aquatic octo-rats that have surely evolved off the Brooklyn coast. (Octo-rats always wanna battle, even though they can’t rhyme in English, and I don’t understand F’thskreek, their ink-twitch language.)

Green-eyed landlubber, I suppose, I’ll remain.