Back to how songs function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Here’s a rare modern rock song (not by Radiohead) whose lyrics are interesting to read on the screen or page—a dark pop meditation called “Amplify,” by Arpline, an impeccable indie outfit with a talent for exacting restraint and mesmeric refrains.

The progression of images in “Amplify” kills me, it’s so effective. The words build formally, setting up a pattern—”brace”/”amplify,” talking about talking/silence—that recalls Postmodern Russian poetry, wherein repetition of key words creates a terrible (”awe-inducing”) tension as you read. The words overdefine a space (they seem to say here, “sure, yeah, whatever, let’s talk about us, again”) then define it out of existence (obscure it, through overpresentation, repetition), only to allow it come back, newly sincere, passed through the fire of irony and come out the other end. The last refrain powerfully drives home the newly sincere “amplify”/”silence” dichotomy.

The theme of the song is at once simple and expansive, captured by a simple technique in a short span of words (as with André 3000’s shorter-than-average verse), employing a simple but effective structure.

Contrast the focus on one emotion in this song to how Bobby Dylan iterates out all the possibilities for the Kid to encounter and fall victim to, all the Kid’s upheavals and losses. Here, the speaker/writer has so little to say to the listener, the ex-beloved, that he must stutter out his few rhetorical questions and his one admonition (”brace yourself to hear the opposite of what you want to hear—you want to hear anything, and I offer only silence”).

The overall effect coheres into one tension, one see-saw. Prepare for nothing. Fight nihilism with a blank mind. Give up desire. It’s apophatic (all I can say is that I have nothing to say to you—which effectively says more than I can say), quasi-Japanese, and metaphorically elegant; “desire = heat” is about as far out as we venture into the deep-end of the pool of symbol; yet the effect—again flat with what comes before and after (silence, the real world, the listener’s inexorable thoughts about her own desires)—is chilling:

How can I be wrong
saying how I feel—
I feel about the world—
the feelings you want to hear?
I carry what I can for you,
leave the rest aside…
I feel the lightness of its loss.
I feel the heat that it displays.

Taking time to hear
your complaints.
Can’t say no—
How can i say no?
The terrible heat
of your desire
is burning me,
is deafening…

Brace, brace…
brace yourself for silence.
Brace, brace…
brace yourself for silence—

That you ask me to,
ask me to—
amplify, amplify—
That you ask me to—
brace yourself for silence
if you want me to—amplify

Brace, brace, brace, brace—
Amplify.

For more on post-Postmodern sincerity (the “Protomodern,” post-carnival), see my man Mikhail Epstein, who should be in a rock band (metal), if he isn’t already:

• Epstein on quotationalism—moving through repetitions of emotions, the words of others, until a new sincere, newly-new space is created.
• Epstein on the new sincerity—what happens after Postmodernism.

I wrote this jam for my current literature class and offer it up in the spirit of sharing*. (*The spirit animal of sharing, FYI, is the eastern screech owl.) I’ll follow up with a few thoughts on Postmodernism. But for now—let’s munch on some Mod:

For most historians, modernity begins in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Enlightenment. Modernism (notice the “-ism”) comes at the end of the nineteenth century, with Pound in poetry, Joyce and Woolf (and the earlier Kleist) in prose, and Manet, Matisse, and Picasso in painting.

But Modernism is not some hi-falutin “school of art.”  It’s a shift in thought.  The “crisis of the Modern” hits home after transdiscursive (discourse-inventing, meaning way-of-making-knowledge-inventing) thinkers such as Freud, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Eliot, and Bergson, collectively question our basis for making knowledge (from the past) and of representing Being (which cannot be represented). They are skeptics. They cause a collective shift in thought—a shift from which we have never recovered.

By the outbreak of the Great War, Modernist thought suddenly finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities” (Plato, the bible, science as understood by Bacon and Newton, biology a la Curvier), but in human experience—the succession of moments—the imprint of moments lived, sensations felt, memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

But this focus on the individual and her thoughts shares little in common with the willful Romanticism of the nineteenth century: In just decades, the idea of the unconscious comes to play a huge role in art, as does the Marxist idea that the course of your life is largely determined by class. Darwin’s observations concerning biology’s fatalism (natural selection) completes the trifecta. The Romantic notion of the totally free human is gone, replaced by a mixture of the individual (which is fragmentary, reaching to define self, to ground self in knowledge that she must construct) and the massively social (because the Utopias conceived in the nineteenth century are finally being acted out).

Siggy Vicious

Further, lived moments do not exist purely as affects in the heroic human brain (as per the intense emotions of the Romantics), but as medialized, technologically-distributed information. Signs. With Modernism and a shift away from the Enlightenment’s insistence on a rational, discoverable world (with Bohrs and Einstein, and with Joyce, and with Picasso and the Dadaists), we see the prefiguration of the current age, Postmodernism, and the current condition of thought: a vast chain of signs—shared, created, effaced, mutated, and judged via media (social networking, calls on phones, TV, emails, texts, books, ads)—stored and changed via the still-mysterious alchemy of the (biologic) brain.

The center of knowledge is no longer (only) the past, no longer authority, but the immediate, centerless, distributed, individually-experienced present. We agree upon certain canons because they are expedient (allow for the manufacture of iPods and cars…), but we constantly threaten them in order that they should not lead us into the pre-Modern error of supposing there is a Truth or Perfection to be empirically “detected” by humans somehow, even, especially in art. It simply isn’t possible. Michelangelo isn’t perfect. Science is incomplete and will continue to be. Science, with the uncertainty principle and the discovery that the best contemporary models for the universe (string theories, leading to brane theories) can’t be tested empirically, ever. (To see the universe at its absolute level, we require a particle collider the size of the universe…)

Knowledge is part of the experience of being human, and humans are not computers. We are highly sensitive animals who write poetry and scamper and go crazy. Knowledge is not separate from poetry and scampering. Though we know quite a lot within a certain framework (science—the Enlightenment), there is much, mainly our own consciousnesses, that we cannot “know” or that we have yet, at least as a global culture, to find a framework for.

Knowledge itself, with the smashing of the atom (going back to relativity’s rise in the late 1800s) and the smashing of the rational mind (Freud and Mach, in the late 1800s), is merely a convention. (I know I’m biting Foucault here; knowledge is what is made by power. Psychoanalysis opens a knowledge to control sexuality; post-seventeenth-century prison systems open a new knowledge of “reform” and “discipline” to control the population.)

And there’s more. The fact that I can formulate the above sentence means we are living in postmodernity. “Post-” here implies less “after” than “aware of.” I could say we live in paramodernity (”beside modernity”), since we can examine it at our leisure, using its tools (technology, psychology, modern biology, economics and history after Marx).

But that’s another essay. The point of this one izzz: Modernist thought finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities,” but in human experience—the succession of moments lived—sensations felt, of memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

And I’m out!

Deal w/it:

From this skyscraper,
all the bustling streets converge
towards the spring sea

—Richard Wright

In “Mass-Market Epiphany,” professional lowest-common-denominator Ross Douthat shakes in fear because we Americans synthesize our religions, consider our mystical options, and generally enjoy our grand Jeu—the play of the Transcendent across a broad, globe-spanning, history-informed matrix of signs, rituals, faces, styles of dress, chants, worship-centers, and sacral texts.

It is true. We have been from the first a lovely patchwork of agnostics, Deists, Puritans, satanists, hippies, materialists, born-agains, Methodists, Quakers, Muslims, Buddhists, and so on, and so forth.

It is true. William James gave us our own meta-genius of religion (the genius of the study of religious geniuses), so we’ve always had options, a book of faiths from which to choose.

And then we invented Anton LaVey and televangelism; and I don’t care where he was born, we invented John Lennon, too, that ur-syncretic mentality and shaggy humanist-expressionistic chutzpah (see: Melville, Whitman, the Beats).

And then we took the internet from a Brit and made it what it is (mostly a font of Japanese pr0n), and the new religion of hyperconnectivity is as ours as it is anyone’s (though I suppose that obscures the grace of the rhizome, to speak of the nationality of it).

So, Ross, why are you so scared of the power of American adaption and adaptation? Why are the deaths of the old traditions and the births of new ones—deaths and births which are forever in process, but particularly, increasingly so since Nietzsche and World War I and globalism—anything to fear?

Douthat’s are the same old conservative anxieties that have always plagued us. Times are changing too quickly! We’ve traded in religion for new-fangled séances and snakeoils, and wires and tubes! Here’s Douthat waxing at his most lyrical:

Without them [severe, ole-skool religious practices], too, we give up on what’s supposed to be the deep promise of religious practice: that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

I actually quite like his take on the promise of the shattering power of the Divine, the Mysterium’s ability to transcend our ability to even contemplate it, to put it in any box. But I disagree that the loss of ye old religions in any way diminishes man’s ability to experience this shattering.

The fact is, the Divine is never familiar except to those who experience it, and then it is unique, in each case. It has never been transferable via tradition; these traditions have never engendered true revelations, hence the constant defections from them, culminating in modernity. It is ridiculous to write of America as being more or less affected than other nation’s by the world’s gyring out of a dark age of cathedrals and sharia law.

If anything, America is simply more heterogeneously affected, because to be “American” is to be any number of such a wide range of types and sub-types—each of which may transmit the revolutionary and the impossible in different ways, with different signs, while still feeling the touch of the same unnameable Transcendent.

More expandable than Douthat’s thesis (”Americans = ‘losing’ religious feelings) is any thesis that looks at how the Divine strikes us, in the era of the hypertubez. The future saints may already preach on Facebook (shudder).

In any event, I look forward to abler writers’ analyses of the machines of religion as they mutate forward through history, ever new, ever the same (hierarchically organized to make money and control populations; individually mind-blowing, as experienced by individuals, within their own matrices of signs).

Some literary techniques are easy to abuse. I hate to admit that the portmanteau is one of these (thanks, Snickers). While still one of my favorite all-time ways to get bizzy with words, portmanteauing has become a central facet of our experience as consumers and internet-era digesters of signs. We are asked to constantly hybridize language. We are verbal garbage disposals.

We cannot escape this technique, and so its art becomes mundane craft; its essence as witty relief from the normal is distilled into punnery. We are, we feel, ultimately the victims of portmanterrorism:

Would it make a difference to say we suffered
from affluenza in those days? Could we blame
Reaganomics, advertainment, the turducken
and televangelism we swallowed by the sporkful,
all that brunch and Jazzercise, Frappuccinos
we guzzled on the Seatac tarmac, sexcellent
celebutantes we ogled with camcorders while
our imagineers simulcast the administrivia
of our alarmaggedon across the glocal village?

—”Portmanterrorism,” Nick Lantz,
from The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, 2010.

Lantz’s poem goes on and is as nigh-unreadable as it is spot-on. Props to Junio for bringing this dopeness to my attention

In other news, this site offers a very simple guide to literary wildlife such as the portmanteau. Just text, no shenanigans.

Back to how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation…

Consider this pre-hip hop jam by the unsane Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman:

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Johnny’s in the basement
Mixing up the medicine,
I’m on the pavement
Thinking about the government,
The man in the trench coat,
Badge out, laid off,
Says he’s got a bad cough,
Wants to get it paid off—
Look out kid,
It’s somethin you did—
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again—
You better duck down the alley way,
Lookin for a new friend,
The man in the coon-skin cap
In the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills,
You only got ten—

[Two more verses...]

Ah get born, keep warm,
Short pants, romance, learn to dance,
Get dressed, get blessed,
Try to be a success,
Please her, please him, buy gifts,
Don’t steal, don’t lift—
Twenty years of schoolin
And they put you on the day shift—
Look out kid,
They keep it all hid—
Better jump down a manhole,
Light yourself a candle,
Don’t wear sandals,
Try to avoid the scandals,
Don’t wanna be a bum,
You better chew gum—
The pump don’t work
Cause the vandals took the handles…

Here, the line breaks hardly matter, and the rhyme and meter are so irregular that it’s hard to say in what way they matter (though they certainly do).

Reading the song on the page or screen, I come away with a general sing-song-iness, and I am dazed, battered into accepting the stream of signs. It’s a very medial song, prefiguring McCarthy: The poor Kid gets told a dozen things by a dozen interlopers, none of whom has his interests at heart. The world consumes him, even taking the fucking handles off the pump. (And what does the pump pump? Water? Gas? I’ve always wondered.)

The next song I’d like to explicate is Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” which deserves a vast, vast space.

Today, right now, I suggest writers of songs consider how their words are read, even as an exercise, and readers of words begin to read aloud, breath to breath, sign to sign, feeling the ideas glued to the instruments’ sounds separate and present themselves, one by one, in time.

The news is generally frightening. I learned a few days ago that, in the Lone Star State, one Debra Medina is fighting to become the Republican candidate for governor. Her platform is staunchly conservative, and she’s so bat-shit crazy that even Glenn Beck isn’t amused. Quoth the New York Times:

Ms. Medina also appeals to state’s rights advocates who long to shift power from Washington to state legislatures. A leitmotif in her speeches is the idea that the federal government has usurped power from the states and that Texas should be able to nullify federal laws and regulations it deems unconstitutional. Her first target would be the Environmental Protection Agency, she says.

“We will tell the E.P.A., ‘You have no authority here,’ ” she told the Fort Bend County Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.

Thanks, Debbie. I can picture the freedom now: Those goodfernuthin E.P.A. pansies will quake as they’re forced by the noble Texas rangers to unlock Emperor Obama’s hidden oil-filled mega-caves off the coast of Corpus Cristi!

(Then they’ll have to free the animals, sending the august turtles-o-th’-sea to their native breaker islands, the ones used by our proud military to broadcast sub rosa numbers stations, thus preventing the start of Secret World War IV.) [Lol.]

In other news, liberals continue to drift farther from liberty. In the same Times that gives us that lovely snippet about the E.P.A., we have Paul Krugman shouting:

…The real story behind the euromess lies not in the profligacy of politicians but in the arrogance of elites — specifically, the policy elites who pushed Europe into adopting a single currency well before the continent was ready for such an experiment.

Firstly, shouldn’t we capitalize “Euromess?” I have a hunch that “Amerimess” (shudder at the fugliness) would get the cap. Or is this a reference to the currency, the euro (€); in which case, why doesn’t Krugman write “euro mess” or “euro-mess?”

Secondly, what the fuck? The problem with Europe is “elitism?” Sayeth an elite, in a country whose numero uno problema is that most of the country thinks there’s a problem with elitism (and intellectualism, and Darwinism, and most any -ism, even the ones that work pretty dern well) and is thus resistant to reform of any kind?

I mean, a) is this true? Did Jozef-the-Plombier, the average European citizen, really let himself get “duped” into supporting a strong currency? And, even if this is true, b) is the lesson that we Americans should learn from Greece’s financial woes that we should never, ever “trust the elites?”

The problem is probably semantic. I think the word “elite” is skunked (along with “postmodern,” to name just one), meaning it’s so often debated, so hotly, that no one even knows what it means any more. It’s a word everyone runs from and accuses everyone else of running into.

I wonder who these Euro-elites are, for example. Do they represent a powerful, self-interested business class that actually exists? On one level, I’m sure Krugman knows his economics and knows what and who helped fuel poor Hellas’ rapid decline.

But, simply by calling these avaricious policy makers “elites,” Krugman muddles an already complex issue. Thanks to that word, they become the same bogeymen feared in America (slick-talking Obama-analogs, the intellectuals against whom Palin bravely speaks, when she’s not distracted by the reminders scribbled on her hand). [Double lol.]

The problem with the idea that “elites” can’t be trusted is that they in fact can be. George Washington was an elite, in terms of class, money, education, military decoration, political ambition and achievement, and hair-style (mega-wig).

Even hardcore Marxists must admit that not all silver-spooned, Hahvahd-educated elites are wrong all the time. In the postmodern world, ideas are judged pragmatically (usually by professional hard-ass and British person Simon Cromwell, an online vote, or some combination of those two).

Of course, just to make the world wend round weirder, David Brooks posted an essay today arguing that we should trust the elites, though Brooks can’t resist telling us that the elites of the Olden Days were luckier and happier, and that our cold, autistic world is through.

If only the problems of the failing hyperintellecutal micromanagerial nouveau oligarchs here were simply their lack of empathy and their reliance on Blackberries—and not, say, their lack of Empire, their lack of money, &c. Then we really could have elected an Obama and known that our Obama would use his oligarchy’s surplus of cash and emotional equity and military trust around the world to affect positive change.

Instead, we lose the EPA (no need for the hilarious supernumerary periods) and find more bogeymen, everywhere we look: It is our leaders’ elitism that dooms them, their lack of empathy—anything but their stupidity and hubris, their playing out a cycle on a stage that has seen the cycle played before.

The following is the first installment in a lengthy, madcap investigation of how songs I like function as texts, read on the screen or page, sans instrumentation. Prosodists, sharpen your metrical pencils.

She said, she said:
“Nothin’s wrong—and I belong on stage…”

—Ted Leo, “Hearts of Oak.”

Songs aren’t always satisfying poems when read on the page. Many songs lean heavily on the voices of their performers—how their performers breathe them forward into time, meter them into space, packet of sound-information by packet of sound-information, toward our ears. The signs of the song march along, one by one, and we assemble a meaning that is not purely textual (signal, verbal) but also sonic/phonic, playful, almost religious.

In some cases, however, the written song meanders back and forth between poetry (decent, if not mind-blasting) and something else entirely—prose that’s simply being fed to us at a certain clip.

This is one reason I like hip hop so much. It doesn’t try to achieve the lyricism of a great written or spoken poem. Let the rockers try to match Dante. Rappers ape another form entirely. Their songs are often political, usually essayistic, and almost never anything but prose, spoken in a quasi-meter, with a few forced rhymes to keep up the illusion of “song”-ness.

This isn’t a criticism of my favorite genre of music. Hip hop’s strategy of not having to be poetry pur sang is brilliant. It’s freeing. Hip hop sounds more powerful, not less, for giving back to the page the powers of the line, and giving back to the metric breathers the power of the rhyme and the accented/unaccented syllable.

What does hip hop retain? The ordered flow of signs.

Consider one favorite of mine—“Throw Your Hands Up” by 8Ball & MJG, featuring Outkast, an epic and wry anthem which steers an ostensible call-to-have-a-party back again and again into the political. Sure, the people should party, the song says, but they should also examine their roots, and how they’re allowed to communicate with/in the larger world… Leaving aside its grander themes, I like this song as a song. I wouldn’t want to read most of it in a book. But there are exceptions.

First, of course, there’s MJG’s immortal couplet: “Ham sammich in the driveway—drop top, / naked women in the den, playin—hopscotch.” Wow. Talk about an image that perfectly fuses effortless cool (eatin a sandwich, ignorin the party) with money (got my cool car, dropped its top, probably put some Ds on it) with sex (the women are naked, playin around) with jeu, the game, the perhaps unintended metaphor for hip hop (hopscotch—a jumping game, a game of metered movement, accompanied by sing-song, by proto-rap).

This couplet is strongly metered and so isn’t a great example of hip hop’s prosaic-poetic style of rhetoric, but it does strike at the heart of image control. It moves us sign by sign, image by image, toward a picture of MJG, a mosaic of the generic (post-jaded/post-carnival impresario, laid back southern rapper, sandwich aficionado) and the specific (MJG—who else rhymin about sandwiches?).

But the ruckus gets brought with André 3000’s verse:

You wouldn’t understand, if you stood under it—(Oooooh)
It’s like the more that I talk to you, the dumber that I get—
The closer that I walk to you, the further that we stand,
apart, distant. Nobody has the upper hand, but my body’s resistant—
So now, throw your phalanges in the ground.
I’m still abound. Unbelievers stay from hell around.
I found negatives n*ggas, they only keep you down.
Transmitting from Native American burial grounds,
I carry around the weight of all worlds on my shoulderpads.
I’m s’posed to blast space invaders: I’m somebody’s dad…

This is complex imagery laid out complexly, via enjambment (spilling over, line to line). There’s almost no song-like meter (meaning the meter of the song is the natural meter of English prose)—at least, so far as I read these words on the page or screen.

The rhyme scheme is simple, and it’s nicely buried by enjambment and echoes and the effect of the images, which concatenate, compiling future and past (video games and Native American burial practice), to create a moment-by-moment, modern consciousness—a fully realized portrait of a writer bound up in details and vexed by many of his listeners’ failure to reform their lives in full honor of his words.

The imagery speaks prose-poetically to this frustration of the generator at his consumers: First, let’s ask ourselves what it means to be “abound.” Wiktionary gives us a hint: “To be plentiful; to be very prevalent; to overflow.” And: “To be copiously supplied; to be wealthy in; to teem with.” The example given, “Where sin abounded grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20), is enlightening in that it situates the word in a religious context. André likewise compares himself to “unbelievers.”

We also have “abound” emanating out of “abounden,” from “abonder” (Fr.), “abundare” (Lat., “to overflow”), all the way back to “ab” + “unda“—the latter meaning “wave” (think of the water-spirits called the undine). We have the verb of abundance overflowing out of the simple sign of the wave. Then we have this ultra-abundant verb being frozen in noun form—indeed, in the form of a living dude—by the frustrated writer. He’s still abound. He’s vexed but still the generator, still the verb, made flesh.

Beyond the incarnate verb, we have the notion of the world’s weight, of Atlas’s burden (the mic—mediality—gripped by titanic phalanges), which speaks to the flipside of stardom: When not eating sandwiches with fine women, the rapper is a target, abandoned continually by his shifting, gadfly fanbase. He is, to boot, in the end, a father as well—a real man, as complex and human as he is simplistically in control, generator and “overstander.”

Throughout, the cadence of the words—long pauses devolving into fast runs, runs carried over into the next lines—guides us from thought to thought at such as speed that we can read the words any number of time without being able to settle on a center or focus.

This rap is flat, merging with what comes before and after it (the chorus—heavily metered, political, a chant, a beautiful thing to listen to but in a different sphere of art from this prose-poetic verse).

The words here merge seamlessly with the chorus even as the chorus demands that we throw our hands up in appreciation… appreciation of a verse about how we’re not getting it, we’re wrapped up in the wrong things, trapped by the wrong signs… Let’s give the guy an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

In the next 100% FREE future golden American ambitious installments of this pseudo-column, Reading The Song, we find: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” indie rock, Lupe Fiasco’s “Daydream,” Iggy Pop, the early and impeccable Jigga, & much, much more…

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?

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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: