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

On April 15, 1940, [Igor] Stravinsky’s unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to his arrest by the Boston police for violating a federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the National Anthem.

—Wikipedia

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.

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

I was talking to my friend P. V. recently about biopics. We tossed around different names of historical and musical and political and otherwise-notable figures about whom movies have not, to our combined knowledge, been produced. We settled on a few top choices.

Mrs. Margaret Thompson was not one of the potential movie-protagonists. But, rereading a passage from The Gentle Art of Smoking, a short, bizarre book about tobacco (mostly pipe-making and the making of “flake,” the baklava-esque tobacco preferred by pipe-enthusiasts in the mid-1950s), I was struck by how odd a scene Thompson’s funerary march would make if filmed. It’s right out of Fellini, or maybe Kaufman. Or maybe Sophie Barthes, whose Cold Souls juggles just the right mix of wtf-is-this-really-the-real-Paul-Giamatti?, gallows humor, and monkey’s-paw super science.

Presently presents the author, the case of the snorting ridiculousness of Mrs. Thompson:

The most notable female snuff taker of this period, as Mr. H. V. Morton pointed out in The Ghosts of London, was Mrs. Margaret Thompson, who died in 1776 and whose devotion to snuff is made clear in her will. She directed that the bottom of her coffin be filled with unwashed handkerchiefs and a sufficient quantity of the best Scotch snuff to cover her body. The six greatest snuff takers in the parish were to act as bearers and, instead of black, they were to wear snuff-colored beaver hats. Snuff was to be strewn before the funeral procession and carried in boxes by her pallbearers for their refreshment as they went along.

—The Gentle Art of Smoking, Alfred H. Dunhill, 1954.

In “D.O.A.,” Jay-Z seems to ask of abusers of Auto-Tune, “Have you left no sense of decency?” We applaud him for his demanding that hip hop not devolve into a succession of fads, each one geared more blatantly at tween girls and their ringtone-money.

The Times points out that Jay-Z’s song has, rather than killing Auto-Tune software, helped spur it to record sales. Hova alone is not to blame. The “Auto-Tune the News” guys and Vimeo are also responsible, as are hordes of wack MCs and would-be humorists with access to Auto-Tune, Flash, and the interwebs.

And yet the Auto-Tune debate isn’t just about fad-ism, I think. Whether or not certain artists use Auto-Tune will be largely irrelevant in a few years. What counts, at least to Jay-Z, is that everyone care what Jay-Z thinks. In his role as the living avatar of hip hop (a role I acknowledge even if Dre3000 is a better rapper, or DOOM more adaptive and fun), Jay-Z must fight for tradition—for any tradition. Public figures must generally either court controversy (as does Eminem) or play the role of the conservative mother-father, the defender of good ole-fashioned common sense about subject X, whatever it is.

(Ever a step ahead of Jay, the incomparably paranoid and too-often-hated-on Nas, with Nick Cannon, recently released this bizarre video trumpeting the upcoming End Times of hip hop, when all rappers will have sold their souls to their corporate overlords.)

But part of the fun and challenge of being public figure in America is straddling lines. How do you come off as a defender of tradition without being stodgy, and how do you challenge norms without annoying your audience? Can you have it both ways?

Jay-Z and all current celebrity artists and thinkers should take a page from another great American publican, a lady’s man with a burly-chic, an avant-garde businessman, a powerbroker with unimpeachable (cobblestone) street cred who went by the name of Bennie “Almanac-Mackin” F-lin. Bennie’s roundly and deservedly honored today by Maria Kalman, who earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

By way of coda: Writing of the Almanacker makes me think of another portly, famous public figure, one not so deft at juggling conflicting images as Franklin or Hova. While Franklin or Hova might get nasty on mulled wine or designer drugs, they’d probably keep it a secret. They’d support liberal politicians and attack wack new sounds, be those sounds pressed to wax cylinder or MP3.

Orson Welles, on the other hand, blazed too quickly, spending his cultural cash early in his private war against William Hearst, and ending his life a crazy-eyed drunk, like a slurry, overweight Dracula. I love the man, but really. The footage speaks for itself.