Jill and I just fell down a bit of a Wikipedia hole. Here are some of the weird backwaters of English. First, a sentence with syntax but no (non-poetic) semantics from Noam Chomsky:

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Some strings demonstrating lexical ambiguity, which are syntactically correct, but presented without punctuation which would aid parsing:

That that is is that that is not is not is that it it is

“James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher.”

Homophonic complexity can be used to generate stunningly opaque sentences with valid syntax:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Latin has a good one: “Malo malo malo malo.” The supposed translation: “I would rather be, In an apple tree, Than a naughty boy, In adversity.”

Atypical punctuation we were looking at included the percontation point (⸮), or irony mark, which can be used to mark rhetorical questions or ironic statements. Hervé Bazin (the novelist, not the film critic) suggested some more:

such as the “doubt point”, “certitude point”, “acclamation point”, “authority point”, “indignation point”, and “love point”.

The exclamation comma and question comma were patented in Canada in the early 90s and fell out of it shortly thereafter. The patents probably stopped their general uptake. Yeah!, I’m sure,? totally⸮

The godfather of rap has left the building at 62 — far too young.

He was right too: the revolution was sent over TCPIP. Seriously though, I’m just beginning to develop a consciousness that this poem speaks to now — a kind of disgust combined with “makerism.” I feel that somewhere along the line I became too wrapped up in spectation and became a good audience member, perhaps at the expense of being a good performer.

Here’s an article on misotheists, people who believe in God and hate him/her/it. I just want to talk about the last sentence in this paragraph:

When it comes to God-hatred, a collective blindness seems to settle on us. First, we lack a generally agreed-upon name to refer to this religious rebellion. And anything that doesn’t have a word associated with it doesn’t exist, right?

Um, no. Hell no! Is that actually an idea that people have? Both language and its limits are terribly important, especially for anyone trying to understand — well, anything.

I’ve run into this idea and some similar variants quite a lot. A director gave us an amazing lecture, and then asserted that anything could be conveyed through language. “OK,” I said, “orgasm.” That shut him up — if language could predictably convey orgasm (and I’m sure it can for some) then phone sex operators would be the highest-paid profession on Earth and radio would be illegal.

In this case, words don’t describe all of reality — ask anyone who’s invented anything. That would require that The English Language was handed down from on-high, full of words we now use for concepts that, at the time, were reserved for future definition. “No, Heinrich, don’t call that a ‘computer’. They’ll need that word in the 20th century.”

Last, language is woefully insufficient to describe the sensorium. Anyone who’s been blessed with mushroom poisoning or who has seen a photograph, or heard music, or smelled a flower, or tasted literally anything, could tell you that.

My blog posts are generally written off-the-cuff in one sitting. Sometimes I go back and tweak them a bit before (or after) they get posted. I don’t know if you noticed but I aim for 300 words, which I now have an intuitive sense of.* Sometimes my browser spell checks them; my own reading probably won’t catch any grammar mistakes I make in writing.

I challenge any non-blogger to a timed, 300-word essay-writing competition. I WILL DESTROY YOU.

There’s a certain amount of specificity in training: marathons won’t help your football tackle (although power cleans will). Because of my blogging, I can write assignments and technical documents up to 500-words that will get an A on the first draft. Beyond 500 words I run out of steam and have to take an iterative approach to writing like everybody else.

Part of the reason I originally started blogging was to deprogram myself from the academic writing style I was using my thesis. Now I write everything as if I’m writing for the web. It’s a pretty transferrable style, but my friends and family occasionally call me out.

I happily tell employers and anybody else who will listen about how blogging has improved my writing. I’d recommend it to anybody else who wants to improve theirs. But as Alex warned: you need to practice the kind of writing you want to get good at.

* If I can get my point across in less words that’s all the better, so don’t count this post.

I have been working on an essay about Asylum‘s film-theoretic grounding FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE. It is seriously becoming a giant panic-attack-inducing slog… and I blame blogging.

Most of what I write on here is a first draft, and I’m sure it shows. My blogging output, for better or worse, is prolific. But I hate going back and doing revisions for some reason. I have pages of notes that I find it impossible to piece together into a written flow.

Maybe that’s it though. Looking some of my notes I have no idea WTF I was thinking, and it seems that the moment to shape the prose is lost, the state of flow has passed:

AAA Is partly a film about cultural practices, and is necessarily insufficient wrt context, as is QVM. did aaa become an exotic backdrop for my own exploration? sadism / victorian repression

Good writing, supposedly, is like sculpture — you start with raw materials and hack away until you have an elephant. Except I don’t even sculpt like that… I make things from smaller pieces, not larger.

Or maybe it’s software that’s ruined me? The idea of writing a program by typing every line of code that pops into my head and then cutting it down to just those that work seems ridiculous. Except that’s kinda how you are supposed to code — premature etc is the root of all whatever?

Maybe I’m not broken though — I can do this, back to it. But where do you start when every thought is half-complete? TODO: Finish this and this and this. Argh. When is it appropriate to expand the notes into thoughts!!1!!!!eleven PaNicK

I can only write the words “sexual dialectic” so many times before I feel the onset of a kind of terminology-based-insanity; wondering if, in fact, I’ve gone around the bend and am just scrolling around my sixteen pages, randomly inserting gibberish.

Episodes held together with the corridor sequence — progressing towards the light — just as QVM is episodic, and held together with a birth-death symbolic structure of sexual dialectic

Argh.

I am writing at the moment, but not for this blog. I’m keeping a mental health journal documenting dreams and pills and mood states, mostly in narrative “I went here and did this and felt that so took this”, sometimes in poems I won’t bore you with.

Within the last week I’ve felt annihilated, one of my worst moods ever — worse, by far, than I’ve felt in around five years. Then I felt happy, for the first time in however long — actual happiness, not ironic victory: a mild, pleasant sense of well-being.

Now, once again, I feel hopeless.

If you conceptually graph “challenge of” versus “skill at” a task you get something like this:

I can’t remember the last time I felt anything like being on the right side of that graph. Maybe “Boredom”. Maybe. Mostly I feel as though I move from Apathy through Worry to Anxiety and back. I feel that everything I do — including what I’m writing right now — is just really terrible and unskilled.

And, it turns out, there’s no pill for that — which was one of my big fears. This might be one of those mitigable-but-insoluble psychological problems that is going to cause me pain for the rest of my life.

Okay, back to sucking at whatever I can force myself to do next. This letter from Stephen Fry always helps.

I’m entering a screenwriting competition tonight. I left myself five days to get the thing done but for wonderful reasons I’ve procrastinated that time away.

I’m now hectically hacking away at my second revision — well, not at this very instant, obviously. The ideas are all there but it needs work to make dramatic sense. I think it actually needs more cuts than additions, which is nice. I also need to avoid killing a character or to kill him in a more dramatically effective way. Death is a cliché.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. This situation reminded me of Time Management for Anarchists, not least because one of the characters I’m writing is militantly anti-employer. TMA has been the organizing theology of my life since the comic (now hard to find online, so I did it for you) was published.

I’m not always a righteous member of the faithful — I’ve gone through long periods of apostasy, atheism, and sin — but I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ hard to avoid the tyranny of evil men.

Selah.

There’s a poetry slam starting in Victoria today, The Canadian Festival of the Spoken Word.

I’m incredulous towards Canadian poetry (hence the “bah, humbug” in the title). Just as in painting, where I think cleaving to our G7 heritage limits us, I think Canadian poetry typically overuses weather themes to the point of extreme boredom. It’s the poetry-is-to-television equivalent of watching the Weather Channel (not Service, though — his stuff is gold).

“Oh, Canadian poetry”, I teased a Canadian poet once, “Let me guess: The bleakness and isolation of the farmhouse in Winter is a metaphor for the bleakness and isolation of the souls of its occupants?”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, do you?”

“Not at all,” I said, “but that’s how I feel.”

Anyway, I always hold out hope for art — hence the “?” in the title — so I’ll be attending to see how slamtastic the festival is, and hopefully hear some good stuff.

I expect any Canadian spoken word festival to have a healthy complement of Maritime and Acadian accents, if not outright French. In my experience that’s where really exciting usage which is uniquely Canadian comes from. I’d really like to see something Aboriginal too, like the rappers on APTN.

That might be a tall order for Victoria, but we’ll see.

“When did you stop beating your wife?”

When I complain about the CBC that kind of reporting is what I’m talking about. You have to listen for it, it’s subtle, but it’s there and the bias is clear.

“Is the Monarchy an anachronism?”

When the title character of the Scottish play and his best friend are described as cleaving the Danish lines like “cannons double-cracked” that is an anachronism because the technology for double-cracking cannons didn’t exist contemporaneously with those characters.

But the Canadian monarchy currently exists. It cannot be an anachronism because it is contemporaneous. It’s crazy-making to argue the point, you get to definitional tautology that quickly. The answer is “no”, but only in the sense that the question is ridiculous.

Q: “Is the Monarchy a stylistic error in chronology?”
A: “How much scotch did you have for breakfast?”

The question frames the debate poorly (unless you hate royalty). CBC: If you want to get rid of the institution, just say so. Don’t ask if it’s a foible of timekeeping and leave dangling the implication that such “eccentricities” should be “corrected”. Asking questions like that is what salespeople do, it’s called yes-laddering, and it’s disgusting, manipulative journalism.

Ask this, it’s neutral: “Should the monarchy exist?”

Anyway, I have to stop there. It’s time for bed and I promised myself I wasn’t going to care about the news media.

… just give in to the voices.