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Post by stacyantoniadis on Jan 9, 2023 14:01:00 GMT -5
My first reaction is, wow, really playing with words.
And then there is this: death i think she said is no parenthesis
(borrowed/influenced from e.e. cummings' poem "since feeling is first"... the line reads "life is not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis")
precise, evokes something fixed based on something else (ruler, scale, etc) exact, evokes sameness which can be perceived differently through cultural influences
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Post by stacyantoniadis on Jan 9, 2023 14:12:38 GMT -5
Yes, poets play with words - that's part of the joy of poetry. But just because an author is being playful with language doesn't make it poetry. This leads me to ask the obvious question, is this poetry? Retallack may invite the question by calling it poetry, although there is nothing in the link that says that what I'm reading is poetry. You, Al, answer the question authoritatively, yes, this is poetry. But on what grounds do you make so categorical a statement? I too question what makes poetry poetry.
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 9, 2023 14:41:43 GMT -5
I was indeed interested to learn the Greek word for 'unnailing' in the context of Christ being removed from the cross. The word is Aποκαθήλωσι, literally meaning (according to Google translate) 'unfixation'. There are a lot of words in Greek that don't have direct corresponding words in English. Like one of my favourites, Βρέχομαι, which means 'I'm being rained on.' You are doing fine cat. Showing me that the Greek meaning of ‘unnailing’ is ‘unfixation’ suggested to me that doing things with words might have something to to with unmooring definition. Unnailing it down, so to speak. And an obscurant is simply a relation you have never heard of yet. Anyway, if I can’t understand it, there is so much humour in the poem I sometimes allow myself to think I am getting somewhere if I get the joke.
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Post by Ray Schrempf on Jan 9, 2023 16:12:39 GMT -5
The headnote to one of the sections talks about measuring a banana with a ruler, and then talks about measuring a ruler with bananas. What is the effect of this somewhat surprising reversal? And what does it have to do, if anything, with the idea of doing things with words? This makes me think of a caricature of a monkey holding a banana up to the world to try to make sense of it. The banana might be precisely 5 5/8 inches long but what exactly do you mean by that? I suppose a word is the measure of the thing in the world being described. But the thing in the world is what it is because of how we have measured it. It’s a tautology. ‘Referent’ derives from the Latin for ‘bringing back’. So, as the poet says I can’t claim any great precision for my method of measurement. I suppose she may be somehow ‘reclaiming’ the meaning. It’s easy to get tripped up when we peal back all these claims.
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Post by Kathy Florence on Jan 9, 2023 20:30:59 GMT -5
This poem is a lot.
I enjoy procedural poetry when I can see that the procedure most likely generated unexpected connections and juxtapositions, and then the result was edited to something that I can connect to, something I can somehow “feel” in my bones. In order to connect, I at least need an implied narrative, overarching image, extended metaphor, musical patten, or even just the exhale of one long breath.
Fundamentally, I don’t connect to this “project,” as JR calls her poems. If I understand correctly, this project is an exercise in pushing language to randomness and nonsense using lines and phrases pulled from Austin's lectures and Austen's novels. I love randomness and nonsense as a break, as a variation, as an alliterative echo, as a temporary flight of musical fancy. When the randomness and nonsense is long and constant, my poor brain wanders off, very far off, and then keeps going and going and going. When the poem ends, I do not remember one word of what I have heard or read. Maybe that drifting is the point. If it is, that is ok. Or maybe I am just very tired tonight.
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Post by Colin Powers on Jan 9, 2023 21:22:22 GMT -5
If I could replace every word of this reply with a synonym, or if there were some universal hand motion for parentheses (as explanation) instead of saying "sorry if I wasn't clear, let me try again" that I could whip out in conversation on the street, then maybe I could put into practice some of the playful experiments JR is introducing here.
This chunk really bears rereading. It's nice to hear Joan Retallack read it, because if I hadn't heard her own pace, I would be less inclined to slow down. There's so many "promiscuous" line breaks and run-ons it's easy to become breathless and tumble off a cliff. What Leah S said about the family game of "telephoning" the same experience in different ways really resonates with me. Retallack seems to be emphasizing the effects of improvisation and personal interpretation of text or language as much as she is positing philosophical quandary and equations. "in all sentences of the form p is true note that one might/in/fact hear words like dude or fuck even where not precisely inserted abrupt argyle sock in the eye" reads (to me) about the nuances of spoken and written language and how one will inflect (while reading a bit of dialogue, for instance, or some instruction) without meaning to, or without being asked to read it with anything but deadpan literalism... Language can be like reading facial expressions. By the end of the telephone game, the underside of a freight car is a gun drawn under a spatchcock. It all sounds a little like academic satire, even if it's definitely enacting something heady in the purest sense. I guess when I think of Jane Austen I think of manners. And well, some might see it as not ideal to speak unclearly.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 9, 2023 22:57:31 GMT -5
- Speaking of signs… that stuff is wingdings! Translated with spaces maintained (Interesting how x and y are isolated… I don’t know anything about formal linguistics (J.L. Austin) but I imagine in discussing what language can do, some sort of algebra would come in handy):
...There’s so much more in this poem to notice but tomorrow is a work day and I do have some thoughts about the poem as a whole. Always cautious to “interpret” a poem but I nonetheless think that there is a coherent project that is “hidden” in here. I think this poem is *about* her divorce. It could be that I’m privileging the content that was deepest “hidden” in the signs; it could be that “Excuses,” “passion,” “truth,” and the stumbling diction in the wingdings (along with what feels to me to be a search for more precise meaning via “extablish,” “unmarried”) come together with such astonishing coherence, “since feeling is first”… It could be that I’m enchanted by the idea of JR attempting an understanding of her experience, and immediately being troubled by the trouble with language - familiar formulations are ineffectual, yet when she tries to get language to mean better she finds that the signs are arbitrary and protean, their meanings are slippery and ungrounded. Formal rational argumentation fails; stream-of-consciousness style inquiry into the nature of language also fails, constantly interrupted by herself and others… It’s not until I recognized the truthfulness and candor in presenting these failures as they are that I was able to realize that something had been done with words. What couldn't be said had been preserved and communicated. The “excuse” (for not speaking of her unmarriage directly) was a non-excuse because that way was a dead end to begin with. Richard, you have gone farther with this poem (if it is helpful to call it that) than I could have imagined. And your decoding of the wingdings has put a heart in JR's project that I had not sussed out. I reflect that one of the biggest things done with words is marriage: "I do." What is it, then, to unmarry? (there is not just one way to be 'not a real pig')
The days move on, and I will need to return to this piece of JR's writing later, but I did just check out Austin's Sense and Sensabilia through the Internet Archive. This series of lectures critique the philosophical argument that all we perceive are sense impressions, not objects themselves. At the start, Austin gives his general assessment that the traditional presentations of this argument use language in too simplified a way and fail to appreciate the actual possibilities of language. "The fact is, as I shall try to make clear, that our ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realized; and that the facts of perception, as discovered by, for instance, psychologists but also mere mortals, are much more diverse and complicated than has been allowed for. It is essential, here as elsewhere, to abandon old habits of Gleichschaltung, the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies." (p. 3)
I am led to think that JR is quite sincere in her homage to Austin as well as Austen, and that familiarity with both authors (as well as with Wingdings) will be helpful to a deeper appreciation of "How to Do Things with Words."
-Paul
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Post by ellaadkins on Jan 9, 2023 23:17:30 GMT -5
I am guessing Retallack paired J I and Jane together because a novel is also a kind of performative language. I definitely picked up on this juxtaposition as we see the dance between quotes from both Austen and Austin as well as this mathematical yet chaotic dissection that Retallack seems to be doing to the idea of 'truth' in this piece, among other things. I know Austen has been considered to be part of the literary romantics, which may be up for debate in recent years, so pairing of the romantic Austen paired with the unromantic Austin is mostly definitely causing some sparks surrounding how language and words have the power to be illusionistic whilst simultaneously can de-romanticize and dissect, which we see in Austin. Now I'm rambling, but Retallack may also be enacting a kind of nonsense in this piece, which in doing so shows the ways that language is never enough to explain any phenomenon? Gah, slight flail, but regardless, I feel ignited, as per usual when reading Retallack.
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Post by Lou Nelson on Jan 10, 2023 10:22:04 GMT -5
Some thoughts on Joan Retallack’s “How to Do Things with Words” #1 “The subject of this paper, Excuses, is one not to be treated, but only introduced”
1) JR alludes to but does not directly explore the issue of Excuses
2) JR draws on mathematics in asking the question ["we ask ourselves whether (...)] (a)
“(a) truth (...) sometimes but not always ‘real’ is not a normal word at all” Note the hinge of ‘real’. It serves as both the end of the expression “sometimes but not always real” and the start of another, “’real’ is not a normal word at all” Here we could look at length at “normal”; what an interesting word choice. What would make a word ‘not normal’? It would have to be a word that performs a different function than normal words. So, a word that subverts function, that subverts truth? Then ‘real’ would embody, perhaps, that which is outside of the normal, that which is not graspable... But, as a word, how could it function un-normally, abnormally, in a sentence? What if we replaced “real” with another word, say “dark”. Is it truly possible to separate form from meaning?
3) “in all sentences of the form p is true (...)what interests me is x”* So when she encounters a statement claiming truth, she looks for everything/anything that is not covered by that statement: ‘x’.
4) “or perhaps is being as in the expression a or x ‘is a’ or ‘is x’ It’s interesting to note the emphasis on “as in”, which itself introduces a possible multiplicity of examples, of truths. And the way in which “is” seems to suddenly function as ‘truth’ or ‘real’. The things we take for granted. We think we can perceive what is real, or what is truth.
5) In the second paragraph there is a shift; mathematics is left behind and we turn to an environment where, perhaps, the “passions here as commonly in popular fiction” are touched on. We have a speechless We, an Elizabeth who would rather be believed, and young men who while despising novels, read them in secret. And then there is the silent “the”: “how the remains silent when it is necessary to speak”. Indeed, there is so much silence that the word which normally comes after “the” is not even present.
I have to say that reading Retallack is like wrestling with brambles. Things cling and branch out and can barely be grasped so much do the possible interpretations overwhelm. But it's kind of fun. She is definitely doing things with words, and I appreciate being taken to the edge of meaning.
*[google search of p is true}: Let P be a sentence which is true or false, but not both true and false. The sentence ``P and Not(P)'' is known as a contradiction. Regardless of whether P is true, ``P and Not(P)'' is always false. If P is true, Not(P) is false and the ``and'' of the two of them is false. If P is false, the ``and'' of the two of them is false. [https://math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/Logic/PandNotP.html]
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Post by Lou Nelson on Jan 10, 2023 10:32:15 GMT -5
Wit is important when it comes to making words mean something different than they might when used algebraically/mathematically. Wit might involve taking a serious idea and making it light/silly, just by changing a very few words or sounds within that idea. Wit or humor can take the heavy and make it lightly absurd. Bring the nonsense - it's so important. Wit, or at least verbal wit, also often has to do with a strong command of language and idiom. In this poem, Retallack takes a hammer and chisel to some words here and there, breaking parts of words off from their suffixes, leaving us hanging, or leaving the word itself hanging, perhaps. Or the poet leaving herself hanging, because there is risk in not completing the sentence, not completing the thought, in overtly witholding, in making no sense. (Women in particular being regarded, so often, as nonsensical/emotional, it can be hard for a "serious poet" to overtly take on that role at times.) Thanks for that insight leahs.
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Post by Richard Wang on Jan 10, 2023 11:11:32 GMT -5
The days move on, and I will need to return to this piece of JR's writing later, but I did just check out Austin's Sense and Sensabilia through the Internet Archive. This series of lectures critique the philosophical argument that all we perceive are sense impressions, not objects themselves. At the start, Austin gives his general assessment that the traditional presentations of this argument use language in too simplified a way and fail to appreciate the actual possibilities of language. "The fact is, as I shall try to make clear, that our ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realized; and that the facts of perception, as discovered by, for instance, psychologists but also mere mortals, are much more diverse and complicated than has been allowed for. It is essential, here as elsewhere, to abandon old habits of Gleichschaltung, the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies." (p. 3)
I am led to think that JR is quite sincere in her homage to Austin as well as Austen, and that familiarity with both authors (as well as with Wingdings) will be helpful to a deeper appreciation of "How to Do Things with Words."
-Paul
One wonders if said possibilities existed at the time of the traditional presentations in question... For me at least, there's the trouble of finding British analytic philosophy a complete bore to read so hopefully I can find some good summaries out there. -Richard
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Post by Jason Luz on Jan 10, 2023 15:07:58 GMT -5
1. Why pair J.L. Austin and Jane Austen (a linguistic theoriest and a novelist)? 2. What is the field or area of rhetoric in the poem's writing? Consider this phrasing, for instance: "Thirdly, let us consider the question whether it is true that..." 3. In what way can "precisely" be distinguished from "exactly"? 4. What is to be gained, if anything, from "the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense"? Here's my initial take, framed by Al's questions on this densely whimsical and maybe quixotic piece : It's a very apt pairing Austin and Austen. Austin's interest in affect and performativity in everyday speech, and Austen's world, a world in which the the economic stability and hence the quality of life, the happiness of her female protagonists, depend so much on their comportment--a large part of it being what they say and how they say it as much as what they do. So with both authors, it's speech that is both affective and effective, the world of the marriage plot. There's definitely a playfulness to this work, the tongue-in-cheekness of the propositions, the way that foray into modal logic, the plight of the snow geese, leads to other strange passages ad absurdum, the bananas, that sudden sequence of dingbats proffered as libretto cum mathematical proposition. Maybe what Retallack is offering in these absurdities, this nonsense is the value of play, nonsense and insensibilities as a dialectic or critique of a pernicious kind of rationalism, maybe the kind of rationalism that spurred the dadaists. So that wordplay, slippages of meaning could potentially spur different here-to-fore unimaginable possibilities, the way the word lives on after the act of poesis as well as after death.
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Post by jenniferspector on Jan 10, 2023 15:54:19 GMT -5
The headnote to one of the sections talks about measuring a banana with a ruler, and then talks about measuring a ruler with bananas. What is the effect of this somewhat surprising reversal? And what does it have to do, if anything, with the idea of doing things with words? In general, rulers have a different curve than bananas. Bananas tend not to be graduated, and lengths might be best defined in terms of whole bananas. Rulers, on the other hand, are generally graduated, so fractions of a eg: metre ruler might be expected. But, if the ruler is straight and long, it might prove difficult to measure the curved banana along the curve (which is probably what is desired). If the ruler is short, a more accurate length of the banana along the curve is probable - this reminds me of measuring coastlines with rods of differing lengths and the fractal nature of coastlines. Where does language lie? Is it a "long ruler" able to give rough but rapid representations, or "short ruler" able to be more "precise" - although when dealing with fractals, precision is a dangerous thing to think about. Also, is language commutative - is a fractal ruler measuring a straight line the same as a straight ruler measuring a fractal between two points? inside the spheric, with all float of the animal-mineral-the word and its measure, I find this poem places a concentration on what lies outside the measurable, the contained and instances of 'exactitude'; in that slim twist a cord that distinguishes the "precise" from the "exact" may be the very place of influx -- that which can be done; words in their going preparing the fabric for new intelligibilities. How apropos the leaning toward the inconstant lines from any coastline, introduced by Martin---as if measuring a coastline could get you There -- and yet it is done, there are methodologies and appartuses to do so, as a poem too has theirs; word/space/time/silence. It lays a mark then disappears. Or it morphs or leads astray, or lies, or conflates, or gives flesh to. Or perhaps, in gradation of fading, an asemic watershed Retallack with her own mark is laying on the fray of that new borderline. This might be an ongoing bracket? "Logical" or not (and Mary questioned why stated as such, I wonder too)-- is this based on logic, or is it inherently understood within the shade of poetry that the illogic is wove to inverse mimesis and may in the very abstraction, make the logical more clear? In JT's reading of this poem from 1991 as Al mentioned, (7 years prior to the published form we read) words stutter and collide, hitting unsecured landmarks, as if trying to claim some space of their own, laying forth, to my mind, the idea that meaning is immeasurable, that it contains multitudes of shards off the broken frow of the wood of word. Then too, is this a place within the bracket? -- could that not too, be a spheric / lingual "waiting room" as revived on P. 91? It is perhaps in that place of uncertainly, where all is denuded or unclaimed from dream, where all who have come with their doubts and enquiries, buckets full of unbrought tides, must sit down at the new waterline which can only build from new usage.
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Post by Paul K on Jan 11, 2023 0:40:43 GMT -5
The days move on, and I will need to return to this piece of JR's writing later, but I did just check out Austin's Sense and Sensabilia through the Internet Archive. This series of lectures critique the philosophical argument that all we perceive are sense impressions, not objects themselves. At the start, Austin gives his general assessment that the traditional presentations of this argument use language in too simplified a way and fail to appreciate the actual possibilities of language. "The fact is, as I shall try to make clear, that our ordinary words are much subtler in their uses, and mark many more distinctions, than philosophers have realized; and that the facts of perception, as discovered by, for instance, psychologists but also mere mortals, are much more diverse and complicated than has been allowed for. It is essential, here as elsewhere, to abandon old habits of Gleichschaltung, the deeply ingrained worship of tidy-looking dichotomies." (p. 3)
I am led to think that JR is quite sincere in her homage to Austin as well as Austen, and that familiarity with both authors (as well as with Wingdings) will be helpful to a deeper appreciation of "How to Do Things with Words."
-Paul
One wonders if said possibilities existed at the time of the traditional presentations in question... For me at least, there's the trouble of finding British analytic philosophy a complete bore to read so hopefully I can find some good summaries out there. -Richard The "traditional presentations," as I continue to read Austin, are some ancient; but the ones he focuses his critique on belong to the last few centuries, and especially the 20th, notably Ayer. It is not that our language has become more complex or subtle, but that it has always been; and it almost always needs to be evaluated in its full context to be understood. Attempts to abstract language lead to the creation of problems that do not exist in practicality. For example, inspection of when and in what ways we use looks, seems, and appears show that these words, while sometimes interchangeable, are very often not. In their variety of context, they convey quite clearly what they need to. As far as I have read, he appears to argue that there is no good reason to separate talk of objects themselves from their sense-impressions, and hence no need to choose between the statements: we perceive material things directly vs. we perceive only sense-impressions. Neither statement is constructed in a sensible way. It is a false dichotomy.
It seems consistent with this view of the rich, context specific nature of "everyday" language to understand that language is not solely about making truth claims. (Have I accurately described the world?) It is about interaction, relationship, expression, influencing others behavior, and more.
Still reading and thinking...
-Paul
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Post by siobhan on Jan 11, 2023 12:13:45 GMT -5
I am amazed by everyone's comments. People seem so smart in these forums and I guess I shouldn't be surprised because smart people like poetry and poetry is smart - on many different levels. But the interpretations I've read (I've read all the previous comments) give me ideas that I never would have come upon on my own. The thought of the book "How do Poems Mean" just popped into my head and I thought 'does a poem mean?' Does this poem mean? Or is it meant to be nonsense? Is it a 'fresh type of nonsense?' Perhaps it is. I think the thing that bothers me about her poetry is that I don't feel anything; it is mostly abstract ideas and not too many concrete 'things'. I do think there is a connection between the Austen quote and the Austin quote. It seems like the Austen quote is sort of an answer to the Austin question. Perception is relative so the answer to Austin's question is that it is different for "every body." Sometimes we use the same words to describe very different experiences or sometimes we don't and we can't correlate one persons thought with anothers. It's usually the latter. The poem seems to be stringing together unconnected fragments of thoughts. Or is that a tautology? It reminds me a little of John Ashbury although I see more humor in his poetry than I see here. Precise is defined as 'marked by exactness and accuracy' and exact is defined as 'not approximated in any way; precise' both from (I believe) the Oxford English dictionary (and google). it's funny but I think if I measure a banana with a ruler it is precise and exact but if I measure a ruler with bananas it is apporoximate. Because bananas differ in length. What is normal? There is no normal in the sense that all geese migrate north is not an exact statement. There are things that seem normal yet in a world of 7 billion people is there really anything that is "normal?" I think that normal is an illusion and fashion and fate are illusions or perhaps everything is an illusion. She says "yet we, that is, even philosophers..." Is she labelling herself as a philosopher as opposed to a poet? In some ways it might make sense although that really doesn't quite fit either. Either meaning Poet does not quite fit, in my opinion.
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