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

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

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

What’s your Erdős–Bacon number?

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

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

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

(&c.)

Viscount St. Alban, Original Ruff Rider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I like.

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

Teh winter, ZOMG, is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

§

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope the children all go as Anonymous this year.

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

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.

Many moons back, my friend Seth, who writes under the nom de plume “Sparrow Hall,” asked me to work with my friend Sam, the rock paragon behind the bands Arpline and Courtier, to create a tripped-out hip hop song for the soundtrack to Sparrow’s new… novella?

He wants a soundtrack to a story? I thought, remembering McSweeney’s #6, for which They Might Be Giants and a few other decidedly un-crunk musicians created a soundtrack, one designed to exactly complement the stories in the journal from front cover to back.

But Seth’s idea is more grand in scale: He wants to publish stories and books that involve rich multimedia packages, including songs, videos, dances, &c., each of which reflects rhizomatically the progenitive central piece (in this case, a novella about love and memory loss called Two Blue Wolves).

I had a blast making “Stranger In The Strangest Land,” the ant-mentioning ekphrastic song-about-the-novella with Sam. I also ended up editing the novella.

And now it’s all finally available, on SparrowHall.com. Check it.

The soundtrack features music by a dude from Elefant and many other fascinating artistic souls, including several good friends.

Also, 15% of sales benefit the Alzheimer’s Foundation.

So once more, Gentle Reader, I murmur “check it” into the windy crevasse of the internet. Stories have finally entered the post-postmodern age.

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.

So there’s a British prisoner named Charles Bronson who named himself after the actor Charles Bronson. And this prisoner has, courtesy some anonymous British media djinn at Wikipedia, gifted us with a truly worthy list for us. From Wikipedia:

Bronson has been involved in over a dozen hostage incidents, some of which are described below:

• In 1994, whilst holding a guard hostage at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
• In 1998, Bronson took two Iraqi hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh prison in London. He insisted his hostages address him as “General” and told negotiators he would eat one of his victims quickly unless his demands were met… He later told staff: “I’m going to start snapping necks - I’m the number-one hostage taker.” He demanded a plane to take him to Cuba, two Uzi sub-machine guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and a cup of beans. In court, he said he was “as guilty as Adolf Hitler.” He said: “I was on a mission of madness, but now I’m on a mission of peace and all I want to do now is go home and have a pint with my son.” Another seven years were added to his sentence.
• In 2007, two members of prison staff… were involved in a “control and restraint incident” in an attempt to prevent another hostage situation, during which Bronson (who now needs spectacles) had his glasses broken. Bronson received £200 compensation for his broken glasses, which he claimed were made of “pre-war gold” and given to him by Lord Longford.

A fascinating monster, an artist, or an aberration utterly unconnected with the reality in which the rest of us participate every day? Gentle reader, you make the call. I am too busy laughing my ass off at “pre-war gold.” It’s even funnier if his specs really were given to him by a Lord.

But I’d rather not know the truth of these tales. The man, a bad-ass (pointlessly so) in real life, invented himself in homage to an actor who played a bad-ass on the big screen. The amphisbaena wriggles in both directions.

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…