Silly me, I meant B-Minor. Bach. Tho I could have meant the Haydn Lord
Nelson or the Bruckner D-Minor almost as easily. I love the late Haydn
masses, not to speak of Bruckner. I was thinking about the latter's name
just yesterday--probably means "bridge-tender," but in my imagination it
became "troll," because if the habit of same to live under bridges, and
there's a trollish quality to Brickner's music.
Good clearing the air.
That attention deficit disorder seems to be going around in my
neighborhood, too.
Mark
At 03:32 PM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>Dear Mark - nobody's tarring you, with brush or feathers, that was just a
>general remark about *pomo* in the context of foreground/background theory
>- nothing I've read by you seems remotely like what I meant by it. I *was*
>by quoting Carroll's not-so-nonsense gently (gingerly) pulling your leg
>(not your knee) about the slightly maudlin tone of
> >got clobbered by incomprehension for my troubles.< (Unless it was
> ironic, in which case kneejerk yourself!) I'll try to read your long
> poem, though I am presently suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder or
> something like it & have trouble finishing books or very long mails. I
> was using deep structure in a very vaguely Chomskian sense - I'm not sure
> that brain chemistry will ever explain the mysteries of language or the
> soul, but I do not assume that all languages have the same deep
> structure(s), just as all musics do not. Benn, of course, had never heard
> of Chomsky, who was more than knee-high to a cricket in the mid-50s but
> unknown in Europe at least. Which Mass in D-minor do you mean?
>cheers
>Martin
>
>
>Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>I'm not defending pomo in general (and it's annoying being tarred with
>>that brush), I'm explaining the thinking behind a process as a way to
>>understand "nonsense."
>>
>>The disorder I suffer from isn't so much "insufficient attention" as
>>"knee-jerk irony," or what I took to be such. Forgive me if I misread.
>>
>>What we can I think say about a poem that works is that the constraints
>>on possibility mount as the poem proceeds--the first word, image,
>>construct can be anything, the last can be very few, tho we often don't
>>know, as writers or readers, which one until it happens. As in
>>music--there are lots of D-minor chords, there's only one Mass in
>>D-Minor. But add to that that there need be no other externally
>>articulable rules governing the process in a poem--it invents its rules
>>as it finds them.
>>
>>The deep structure (I'm not using the term in Chomsky's way, and I don't
>>think you were--was Benn?) is finally brain chemistry, which has limits
>>(within which a great deal of variation) that we're almost unaware of.
>>The question isn't collapse into chaos so much as how much chaos can be
>>maintained, how much of and how complex a world apprehended.
>>
>>Kozer loved my long Australia poem Different Birds, up as an ebook at the
>>Shearsman site. He said he read it biting his nails--"he's going to lose
>>it, he can't sustain the balancing act"--until the end. A case of a lot
>>of material kept in the air until it discovered its resolution.Ifd it
>>hadn't, tant pis--I can always write another poem.
>>
>>
>>At 12:54 PM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>>
>>>Oh, but they do receive attention - one just doesn't always react
>>>overtly to what one attends to (think of all those lurkers...). You seem
>>>to be suffering from Insufficient Attention Disorder ;-)
>>> >Think about a complex German sentence, which, until it's capped with a
>>> verb prefix at the very end, may not be clear as to its meaning or even
>>> entirely what it's talking about.< Well, I often think about complex
>>> German sentences - here's one where the whole doesn't quite make sense
>>> until the semantic information delivered by the participle at the end
>>> arrives: Sie gestand, sie habe eines Abends nach einem alkoholisierten
>>> beiderseits vereinbarten Wiedersehen aufgrund verschiedener
>>> gewalttätiger Übergriffe seinerseits und zugegebenermaßen in Erwartung
>>> einer beträchtlichen Erbschaft den besagten schon lange
>>> getrenntlebenden Ehegatten mit seiner Seidenkrawatte, die sie vor
>>> vielen Jahren anlässlich seines Geburtstages in einem Berliner
>>> Modeschäft erstanden habe, erdrosselt. But of course the Satzbau (which
>>> the late Gottfried Benn thought was behind everything) is a form,
>>> infinitely variable, it is true, a preexistent deep structure
>>> permitting precisely that longterm expectancy of closure not to
>>> collapse into psycho-semantic chaos, just as in music - as you say -
>>> the whole (the first movement of the *Eroica*, say) only really fully
>>> makes sense at the end, if that expectation has been set up, which
>>> requires a background (as Hans Keller would say) to set up/off the
>>> foreground. If we agree on that - which is somehow selbstredend, I feel
>>> - then there is a consensus - whether or not the background is of a
>>> material or an ideal nature (they are two sides of the same coin.) But
>>> I've seen a quite a bit of *pomo* poetry that sets up no background &
>>> doesn't therefore succeed in creating a foreground gestalt. And I agree
>>> with Pound that no vers is libre for the poet wanting to do a good job,
>>> or words to that effect.
>>>There's no etymology for "gingerly" apparently - a pity, as you say.
>>>cheers
>>>mjay
>>>Mark Weiss wrote:
>>>
>>>>Thanks for the kind thoughts, Martin--they serve as a reminder of what I
>>>>was alluding to. My ideas apparently deserve no attention.
>>>>
>>>>Be nice to know the history ofthe word, how a common spice became
>>>>synonymous with apprehensiveness.
>>>>
>>>>Mark
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>At 11:54 AM 1/6/2005, you wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Mark wrote
>>>>> >This is an area I enter gingerly, as it's essentially the same set of
>>>>>ideas I proposed some time ago and got clobbered by incomprehension for
>>>>>my troubles.<
>>>>>
>>>>>'"I weep for you", the Walrus said, "I truly sympathize"'....
>>>>>
>>>>>"Gingerly" * is* a lovely word, innit?
>>>>>
>>>>>cheers
>>>>>mjay
>>>>
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