Buggeryville

How to read the Jumble. Those Wordsworth sonnets on capital punishment that Jackson Mac Low mentioned. Another example of cod Hebrew (after a long bit about GI troubles, you might want to skim down for the images of cod Hebrew). Further adventures in homophonic translation.

All of which leads us, naturally, to Donato Mancini's work. The above poem, "The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goth Phase)", is an elaboration of Blackletter Gothic scripts. But if The Simpsons' elaboration on cold war Eastern European text is a quick scherzo, Donato's piece is a fugue. It pushes its elaboration as far as it can go, and it gives an abstract sense of the totality of Gothic script. It feels as though there is no curve or ligature that could appear in Blackletter that doesn't appear here, although no specific letters appear in the poem. Some of the shapes suggest letters that ought to be possible within Blackletter sensibilities but that, for whatever reason, are missing from the actual alphabet. Perhaps the overall shape of the text suggests something of the balance and baroque qualities that Blackletter letters provide? Not to mention how easy it is for the eye to get lost following the lines and curves of the piece, how labyrinthine and navigable it is.

The book that this poem comes from, Æthel, is filled with elaborations of different kinds of alphabets, typefaces, and scripts. Arabic, Latin, ASL, and Cyrillic all make their appearances, as well as Cooper Black (I'm pretty sure -- I've already packed the book to take with me to Toronto) and all are given as thorough a treatment as Blackletter. It's one of those books that I enjoy showing off to people who visit my library -- accessible, strange, well-wrought, funny, and mesmerizing.


"Ligature" is a long poem from Donato's book Ligatures. Here's the gimmick: Each word begins with the last few letters of the word before it. On the version I linked to, the words are all run together, which allows you to fish for the words. So that version starts "a d a m e n r a p t u r e e n t e r t a i n", which I suppose is unpacked something like "adam amen enrapture reenter entertain". When Donato read for Spare Room a few months ago, he read the unpacked version, in a measured, quiet, deadpan voice, going for what felt like fifteen or twenty minutes with this chain of linked words. Sometimes the words linked in what felt like significant ways -- as here, "adam amen enrapture reenter" has a Christian eschatological weight to it -- but mostly it was a stream of words, connected in ways that might have been clear from their spelling but were masked in their pronunciation. It was, in other words, a classic example of a furniture text.

I have to admit -- I had always wished, in my six years of co-organizing Spare Room readings, that someone would read a text that functioned like this one did, a piece that completely succeeded as furniture text. A few came close (Jesse Seldess's reading did something that might seem similar but was ultimately quite different, and is probably worth a separate post), but Donato nailed it.


I had been thinking about reviewing Æthel. But reviewing books is a tricky and irksome thing. Nicholas Manning wrote an blog post recently that captures some of my reservations about book reviewing, but I guess I should point out the two big ones.

1. I could rave about Donato's book (I don't have a copy of Ligatures yet!) but there are all those other books I could also rave about, or books that I think highly of but probably wouldn't rave per se about, or books that are probably very good but just aren't for me, or etc., etc. So I'd almost rather not rave about any books than have the raves I do write appear somehow representative or match up to what books I like, or what books I have more complicated feelings towards, or... etc. Reviewing seems like it is always already a misrepresentation of my thoughts.

2. And anyway, who cares? The urge to review something often comes from the urge to talk about how awesometastic something is. But that's the last thing I want to read in a review. I don't care whether you liked the work or not, I just want you to tell me about it, ideally to give me some insight into how to read it, or at bare minimum to let me know that it exists and what it is that exists. But that you like it? Or even that you think it's important? Who cares?! Liking is a fickle thing, and if we meet in some critical space, I want it to be on terms other than what we, you know, like. Often enough I'm not interested in whether I like something. "Mureau" is probably not my favorite John Cage furniture text. But it seemed like the clearest (or cleverest?) example to get at what I wanted to say in that post.

I decided to use these two works by Donato to talk about two different ways of reading/listening/appreciating. My secret agenda is that I think these works are awesome and I want people to know about them, but by not just coming out and saying that, I ended up talking about a painting of Jerome. And that strikes me as more interesting. Because perhaps we can agree that we like to make connections between things, no matter what our take on those things might be.

(Finis. Also, I really need to get to writing for my reading on June 21st. So there might not be so many posts in the near future...)

I've been throwing around this term "furniture text" as if it means something. (Results 1 - 10 of about 2,080 for "furniture text"; result 19 is this blog, none of the rest seem relevant.) It's loosely based on Erik Satie's concept of "musique d'ameublement", translated as "furniture music", his concept of background or ambient music, to be, at best, half-listened to.

But I'm drawing on my own experiences with furniture music. I think of it as music to be grazed, music which rewards active but inattentive listening, where moments of sense or clarity or beauty, moments of interest, might occasionally bubble up. But furniture music prevents you from fully immersing yourself in it. It encourages floating, rather than swimming (or drowning). And by preventing you from total immersion in it, it retains its status as something that is there, a piece of furniture, rather than fooling you into thinking you're being "transported to another world". It becomes a form of meditation, but one that keeps you grounded in your present situation.

This is, I assume, not quite how Erik Satie thought of it. That's OK.

It might be a bit closer to how John Cage thought of it, though. He was a Satie booster; he organized the first public performance of "Vexations" and reworked Satie's "Socrate" into his own "Cheap Imitation".

Cage was a great producer of what I'd consider furniture texts. "Mureau", above, is a piece written through writings of Henry David Thoreau. (I'm not going to the specifics of the process because discussion of these types of pieces always get bogged down with the specifics of the process, as if it's a strategy to avoid reading the works!) You can graze over the text for snippets of sensible fragments, mixed in with a hum of less sensible fragments.

The title is a portmanteau of "music" and "Thoreau"; the piece is a mix of Cage's and Thoreau's sensibilities. As you might expect from Cage, the text is intended to also work as a score for performance. You can listen to Cage read a sample of "Mureau" at Ubu (mp3). Sensible bits, nearly-sensible bits, and not-at-all sensible bits carry you along as you float.

If I felt up to it, I'd talk about "active but inattentive" listening (or reading), the kind that furniture music (or text) encourages, and how it problematizes the suspicious binary of "active" and "passive", or maybe I'd tie it in with some half-understood Buddhist precepts, or even with advanced channel-surfing techniques. But all that seems, I dunno, obvious.

But also: I suspect a lot of people who don't regularly attend poetry readings think that this kind of listening is not appropriate for such a lofty art form, or find it too similar to "being bored", or feel intimidated because they couldn't "make sense" of "everything". Which is a shame, because it's a mode of paying attention that I really enjoy, and I appreciate poetry that encourages it.

(To be continued. Also, sorry for the atrocious title.)

There's an old anthology of medieval Latin called Millennium. The cover has the above painting on it, in a black and white reproduction. I showed it to a friend. "He's looking... chipper", he said. Well... Then I tried to figure out who the guy sitting at his desk was. He has a halo, he's a writer: Was it Augustine? Jerome? I checked inside; it was Jerome. Then I looked again at it and realized I had checked the answer too soon; it had to be Jerome.


It's not terribly clear in this jpg, and only slightly clearer on the book's cover, but this particular scroll is written in Hebrew. And there's only one sainted post-Classical Latin writer likely to have Hebrew text hanging around: Jerome, translator of the Bible into Latin from Hebrew, Greek, and [presumably] Aramaic, creator of the Vulgate Bible, the standard Latin bible for well over a millennium.

I don't read Hebrew, which puts me in a terrific position to think about this aspect of the painting.

1. It might not be in Hebrew. Both reproductions are too small to make out this scrap of text, and I haven't seen the original painting. But it's Jerome, so you'd expect some Hebrew, and it looks like Hebrew.

2. It might be a relevant quotation from the Bible, maybe something punchy about writers. Certainly, painters often try to be clever like that.

3. It might be a random quotation from the Bible, or from some other Hebrew source. That way, it could be a legit sample of Hebrew.

4. It might be a poorly transcribed sample of either relevant or random Hebrew. Consider the lorem ipsum dummy text, mangled in the copying by people who probably didn't know Latin, and whose main concern was coming up with something that looked like text. This could be Hebrew furniture text.

5. It might not be real Hebrew at all, just an elaboration on what Hebrew looks like. Something like fake Cyrillic fonts (except not so tied to the English/Latin alphabet -- after all there are fake Hebrew fonts as well, and the Hebrew in the painting is probably not Hebrewized Latin), or perhaps even more, like fake Chinese tattoos.

Any of these are possible. The audience only needs to recognize the text as Hebrew and make the connection between Hebrew and Jerome; it's unlikely that the painter knew Hebrew or expected his audience to. I'd like to think (I think I'd like to think) that the artist made the effort to find an appropriate bit of Hebrew and copied it accurately. But then, I'd also be curious to see what shapes the artist thought were "Hebrewish", just like how it's fascinating when, say, British people try to imitate an American accent. They usually get it painfully wrong (and I'm sure we get British accents painfully wrong as well), but it reveals the contours of the American accent described, exaggerated, and contorted through the expectations of another, and helps you see how one cultural artifact is heard through another (not that you're not recontorting it through your own set of expectations, but that's as maybe).

One last small detail: The scroll in the painting seems to be written with the text going from one edge of the scroll to the other edge, whereas typically (I believe -- I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, so there might be a whole class of exceptions that I don't know about) the text on a scroll goes from one roll to the other. Scrolls were no longer commonly in use by Christians in Europe in the fifteenth century, when the painting was made, though I believe the Torah would still have been painstakingly written on a scroll.

(To be continued.)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The lorem ipsum dummy text is an elaboration on what text looks like, a variation on fragments of Latin text that carries the shape of text while shucking most of its meaning, an aggressive misspelling in a language half-forgotten, but retaining a flavor of latinity, the shape of Latin, without the understandability, which is of no matter, since it is used in a non-Latin context, and is not meant to signify.

This is furniture text, meant not to be noticed, but some sense pokes through every so often. How much sense do you like in your text?

(To be continued.)