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.

• 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.)

It’s apparently the end of baseball season: Even as I write, millions of Americans are gearing up to watch the World Series [Of America Only], during which rival cohorts of swollen, tights-clad men with cudgels will parade around sandy rhombi.

One last hurrah these quasi-gentle giants will have, before they all catch H1N1 and are reduced to ague-wracked skeletons. But what a hurrah t’will be. The winners will literally eat the losers alive, and, if we’re lucky, the Gods Of The Games will be pleased enough to let Susan Boyle sing our National Anthem, perhaps alongside T-Pain…

I lose myself in reverie. The point of this essaylette is that John “Touched The Sky” Updike was the only person whose words have ever made me truly give a dang about sports.

Now, I may have railed against Updike sometimes for focusing too intently on the more boring facets of life in America, such as sports and tedious divorces. But Mr. Updike was truly a wonderworker, all told, as his cornucopic corpus of soul-lifting fiction, nonfiction, sportswriting, and poetry attests. He even wrote a story about prehistoric mammals (and divorce).

What’s more, he even made me love baseball. For about five seconds.

So now, Gentle Reader, in honor of baseball’s icy death at the hands of November, in honor of its various color-coordinated, beer-sodden teams & players, and most of all in honor of Mr. Updike, who is (presumably still) dead, I present a snippet from King Kaufman’s lovely Salon.com encomium of John-Updike-The-Sportswriter:

Six-thousand words later he’d summed up Williams’ career and that final day at Fenway, capped, of course, by the Splendid Splinter hitting a home run in his final at-bat. That inspired Updike to write the most famous thing ever written about the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. It’s the last sentence of this passage describing the aftermath of Williams’ final swing:

Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Gentle Reader, check it: “Six Meditations On Re-Reading,” a short essay on reading and re-reading and re-re-reading (&c.) whilst trying to learn history, all of it. Thanks to Electric Literature’s Outlet for the hook-up.

I haven’t read the work of recent Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, a Romanian-German novelist, poet, and essayist who’s married to a guy named, no lie, “Richard Wagner.” And yet, skimming Müller’s Wikipedia entry, I am tickled various shades of light red by her titles. I’m a big fan of mysterious and engaging titles, and now I’d like to read a few of these books. Perhaps others share my epiphilia*.

A selection of Müller’s titles, courtesy Wikipedia:

• Drückender Tango (”Oppressive Tango”), stories, Bucharest 1984
• Wie Wahrnehmung sich erfindet (”How Perception Invents Itself”), Paderborn 1990
• Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel (”The Devil is Sitting in the Mirror”), Berlin 1991
• Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger (”Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter), Reinbek by Hamburg 1992
• Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett (“A Warm Potato Is a Warm Bed”), Hamburg 1992
• Der Wächter nimmt seinen Kamm (”The Guard Takes His Comb”), Reinbek by Hamburg 1993
• Angekommen wie nicht da (”Arrived As If Not There”), Lichtenfels 1994
• Hunger und Seide (”Hunger and Silk”), essays, Reinbek by Hamburg 1995
• Der fremde Blick oder das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne (“The Foreign View, or Life Is a Fart in a Lantern”), Göttingen 1999
• Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame (”A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot”), poetry, Reinbek by Hamburg 2000
• Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird (”Home Is What Is Spoken There”), Blieskastel 2001
• Der König verneigt sich und tötet (”The King Bows and Kills), essays, Munich (and elsewhere) 2003
• Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen (“The Pale Gentlemen with their Espresso Cups”), Munich (and elsewhere) 2005

*I think this technically means “love of surfaces,” but since we often use epi- to indicate “something to do with titles,” I’m sticking with it for now. Suggestions as to a better title-lurvin word = welcome.

My man Roger Cohen writes, in the New York Times:

I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits, and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis.

The final sentence of the four quoted says it all. Why wouldn’t we want a public option again? Oh yeah, millions of dollars are lobbying against it, and money weighs more than sound logic, goodwill, public service, or common sense.

But, the healthcare debate aside, we must also consider Mr. Cohen’s use of a powerful verb in “chillin.” Chillin. Chillaxin. The only verb in the infinite tense. Synonymous with “lazin” and “nothin-doin.”

The verb is contrasted with labor, a Marxian work-horse who functions more typically as a noun, an unit of economic power, a push towards birth, a word championed by Soviets and grandfathers. Rugged types.

Cohen goes on to point out:

Individualism is more “rugged” when housed in a healthy body.

Word up, Mr. Cohen. Individualism is the jam, for sure, but why should it conflict with a public option (option being a key word) for healthcare? Options are, generally speaking, most chill, in the adjectival sense, in which something “chill” (or, strangely enough, “ill”) is dope, or is hell of all right by this guy [points to self w/thumb].

Word up, indeed, Mr. Cohen. Now, if only I could make this common cold I’m getting chill out… perhaps with a pill…

The New York Times periodically makes verbal mistakes of the sort I feel the need to exegete and file under “Wackness.”  This latest might be called The Case Of The Invisible Punctuation.  Or, even better, The! Case: Of, The? Invisible; Punctuation.

In “A Corporate Culture Cornfed on Greed,” Manhola Dargis’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s new tragicomedy The Informant (Matt Damon = a greedy white dude screwed by his own greed), we are told:

Notably, there’s no punctuation mark in the title of Kurt Eichenwald’s book “The Informant: A True Story,” though there might as well be.

And yet a colon (:) clearly separates the book’s title from its subtitle. Hrrm.

Last time I checked, a colon counted as a punctuation mark. True, it’s doing its job here by quietly linking a sort of super-sign (the book’s title) to an appositional, paratextual fact (that the book is based on the downfall of a real biotech exec at ADM).

But no matter how quietly it does its magic on us when we glance over it, the colon is still a mark of punctuation; it indicates a slight pause after the first sign; it asks us to prepare to analogically link that sign to something yet to come…

And yet it would be nitpicking to put Dargis on blast merely for making a mistake. I get it: There’s no exclamation point in Eichenwald’s title, and there is in Soderbergh’s. He so crazy!

So why doesn’t Dargis’s sentence read “there’s no exclamation point in the title?” Are we afraid to write the names of our punctuation marks? Is the exclamation point really all that bad, that its name must be an anathema and its presence obfuscated, even in an article which begins with a discuss of, wait for it, exclamation points!?

The exclamation point, she serves a noble purpose, especially circumscribed within the interrobang (!? or wtf mark). Without her, our zany cartoons would be far less zany. Just look at any comic book.  Without the exclamation point, our ZAM!s, ZOT!s, POW!s, KERPLINK!s, SCHLORP!s, FAP!s, BAMF!s, FUNF!s, and SNIKT!s would affect us less; and the deaths and introductions of our most brightly clad heroes would be, not STUNNING! or AMAZING!, but merely STUNNING, which word on its own, naked, brings to mind not so much the power of the imagination to redecorate the night journey again and again for successive generations of young dreamers, but the power of a Tazer. To stun you.

Or is it that the colon is really so invisible that she cannot be mentioned by a professional reviewer!? Is the colon the bad seed!? Has the colon lost her syntactical judo-prowess, the ability to shoot information forward: To motivate terms, face-first, into other terms, creating bold new chimeras of logic, new tangles of gestalt super-words!?

Gentle reader, I leave it to you to scorn these marks or to scorn those who abstain from naming them. For my part, I will continue to defend them reflexively, perhaps stupidly, the way a mother panda defends her sons’ bamboo-cud sculptures, long after the sons themselves have been captured to display in San Diego.

God damn you, San Diego. And long live the quiet colon:  And her sister, the mark of wtf!?

Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty win an Honourable Badge of Merit, not for chiding us that our handwriting is spastic, nor for implying that this is due to a degenerating decade and a half of instant messaging and texting, but for finally explaining to me why the fuck it’s so hard to read traditional “cursive,” or, as I think of it, confusing word spaghetti.

The answer is that we read the tops of characters to determine their meanings. We don’t read the bottoms. Loop all the tops together, and you have a senseless bird-language. Write the upper halves of letters cleanly, and you have the language of Samuel Johnson, bell hooks, and fictional wise-acre Peter Griffin. (Loop the bottoms of words together, and you may have ill graffiti. Depends on your handstyle.)

1. The heart, the linguam, the earth’s core, the tongue.
2. The eyes, the ears, the arms, the legs, the jaws, the twins.
3. The true eyes, the witches, the French knights-vigilante, the Trinity.
4. The dog’s legs, the inner planets, Death in Asia, the seasons and the winds.
5. The starfish’s arms, the fingers, the toes, the senses.
6. The monk’s dots, 111th the Beast’s mark, the true senses.
7. The Seas, the Deadly Sins, the Dwarves, the Virtues.

I’ve been mining the archives, sorting old papers, smudged, marked up copies of dead stories, ghost-poems, unsent thoughts on friends’ sleeping novels. Dust in the nose, a note I wrote to myself two years ago to watch for spiders.

I like lists and poems mortared up from lists. Lists ask us to link together any number of items, however strange, and to withhold our questions until the end. Lists beg us to logically concatenate a bunch of crazy bullshit, then to sum up that concatenation—to find the stolen topaz dropped in the outhouse muck.

1. The snake eats you.
2. The snake dies of indigestion.
3. The snake is a wheel of fire.

This last exemplary list is very important to the moral fate of humanity. I wrote it during the dark Bush years, before my lists were tamed by city-dwelling, rent-paying, and drink. Then, my lists grew like wild hawthorn, crêpe-white jonquils, the dry whirling fruits of a starving Prospect Park ailanthus, or the horns on gray, shag-coated goats. This last list grew backwards through logic, shedding its brains as it went like some Greek king off his rocker. It is named “The Order of Evils.”

1. Strangling Wholpins
2. The Pursuit of the Worthless
3. Squatting Over the Qur’ān
4. Literary Bugbears
5. “More is Less”
6. Cell Phone-Pas
7. Dixie Cups of Tequila
8. Onion Dip Gone Bad
9. Movie-Dinosaur Sound “FX”
10. School of Writhing Autistic Sharks
11. The Cantaloupe
12. Karl Rove
13. Saying Anything Barbarous

Written like a paraplegic f, the long s (ſ) was an indispensable, unembarrassing part of the English language until relatively recently. The long s began s-words (”ſee the gleam of the ſwords of the Franks”), and with few exceptions was the only s used in the middles of words (”words being moſtly ſcurilous tax aſſeſſments”).

Why we lost the long s over the course of the nineteenth century is easy to see: It looks like a damn f, and don’t nobody want to go squintin when they don’t have to. (”Has your ſiſter ſeen my new fave flick, the ſtupendouſly fantastic 2 Faſt, 2 Furious, ſtarring the famous Vin Dieſel?”)

But still I wonder about my name (”Marſchall”) and the other countless words whose shapes so differed only two centuries ago. And when I see emoticons, when I see the Apple command symbol, I hear the ghosts of dead punctuation marks scratching at the edges of discourse, all those daggers and commashes and ligatures, and especially the once-ubiquitous ſ.

Will people eventually un-learn other letters?  We don’t need the c, which just steals limelight from the s and the k. Perhaps, in another two hundred years, c and ſ can chill out and ſimply ſip ſex on the beaches together, in the purgatorial crappy cantina of laid-aſide orthography. Perhaps, my confuſing friend. Perhaps.