Off to spend the rest of the day with my wife and son. Not that I haven’t enjoyed the civil exchange with “professor” Thersites and his confused commentariat, mind you. Just that, well, a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do.
I hope you all enjoy the rest of your Memorial Day weekend. Me, I have no doubt I will, as pulled pork sandwiches and corn on the cob lie just over the gustatory horizon…
Its strange how someone you don’t even know can develop such an intense dislike for your every thought and how it is clearly the result of your position on U.S. military intervention in Iraq more than anything about the other thoughts themselves.
Enjoy the bbq.
Thanks!
Saw a guy at the park rollerblading with a boom box. With not a hint of self consciousnes. It was almost poetic, man.
Ooooh! Was he wearing a headband?
TW: “Summer”. Yeah, baby!
Once upon a time, on a warm summer evening a long, long time ago, a group of us was sitting on the lawn in the municipal park; we happened to notice there was an electrical outlet on the light post.
The next evening we brought vinyl, turntables (Miracord), pre-amps, amps (Phase-Linear), speakers (KLH and Rectilinear) and plugged it all in.
As I recall, no one noticed that first night, then as we did it regularly, the cops noticed first and decided (I presume) that it was good to know where we were (right across from the cop shop) and waved as they passed on routine patrols.
Then the “recreation director” got wind of it and got ticked off that we were providing our own unsanctioned entertainment and removed the fuses from the breaker box on the pole one day, we arrived that evening to a dead plug, so we went to the hardware store and bought our own fuses. He was not happy.
I’ve forgotten the ultimate outcome, but I think the cops told same “RD” to take a hike.
Hmm, well it’s amazing what a rollerblading boomboxer 2/3s of the way across the country that I’ve never seen can dig out of the old memory banks.
Jeff, I hope that your day in the park with Mrs. G & Satch was the stuff of bucolic/pastoral dreams (I realize that you were more likely to have encountered canines and/or their excreta than bovines or ovines, but as my degrees were in biology and medicine, I learned relatively few poetic forms).
TW: nature (I kid you not!)
Joyous sign that soon
Summer comes to the Rockies:
Goldsteins in the park.
I liked the scene where Mr. Keaton walks into the manse in overhauls gunnin’ his chainsaw.
You do that, Mr. Mom? That was too kewl.
BTW, try HWT, Explode the Code, and Singapore Math.
Get the little Red Stater off to fast track after the park, Dad.
I’LL SEE YOU IN SHEOL, GOLDSTEIN!
Now that you’ve kicked the asses of all those doubters of Intentionalism, can you tell me what the one single meaning is of Browning’s “My Last Duchess?” I’ve been dying to know.
Oh, and also, how many words do you think it takes to express the one single, original meaning of a literary text? Cos I have a 10 page paper due tomorrow, but if I can tell the professor that Browning’s intention is for us to “interpret” his poem and “re-encode” it back into his original meaning in like 2 or 3 sentences, that would be so cool.
Oh God. A terrible thought just occurred to me. What if (and I hope this isn’t possible) an author intended his or her work to have like two…or more (this would be apocalyptic) meanings?
Feh, “pulled pork sandwiches and corn on the cob” my ass. You’re eating paste, aren’t you?
Jeff, man, you gotta help me. I’m totally freaking out. I was just reading some A.R. Ammons and I came across this poem:
Their Sex Life
One failure on
Top of another
Dude, the thing is, I was trying to figure out the single intended meaning, and I realized that “failure” could refer to the people having sex OR to the sex itself. In the first case, the poem is about two people that are failures, and in the second case it’s about serial impotence. The thing is, in the poem, it’s totally undecidable! I mean, this is terrible. It’s as if words can have multiple meanings! Or worse, it’s as if language is somehow “metaphorical” and allows for indeterminacy! Jeff, man, what if words don’t have determinate meanings! AGH! I’m trying to keep calm here, but man, you gotta help me out.
I tried to email Ammons, but it turns out he freaking DIED in 2001…you’re my last hope. Please, if there’s some way you can assure me that all words have single, literal meanings, I think I’ll be OK…oh god…I feel nauseous…
d.b. = apparently incapable of intending a double entendre!
and hasn’t read speech acts
– We’ve had a good holiday weekend here in America’s “2nd Hawaiiâ€Â. Saturday I broke my feet and my bank account, treating my son to a 14 hour day at the local Sea World for his “sweet 16″ Bday. Slepping through 25 miles of exhibits with three Godzillateens in tow, with the fun rides, great Calypso smoked barbacue, and of course the obligatory endless shopping for dust collector nicknacks.
– Today, after having partially recovered sufficiently to move the bod again, my son and I took a drive out to Point Loma, to the National WWII Memorial Cemetary, where some 50,000+ small white crosses line a half mile of green grasslands on both sides of the peninsula in long 1000 cross rows layed end to end, and placed American flags on several gravesites. They had an honor guard, and gun salute for the soldiers/sailors/marines/airman lost in the war. It was a typical brilliant, azure sky, gorgeous ocean, sunlit, postcard day, with gentle sea breezes, and 71 degree weather for the occassion.
– We also stopped by the cross on Soledad Mountain that the Atheists are trying so hard to pull down. A small group of the “non-believers†showed up with protest signs. One guy was yelling, “Christians go homeâ€Â. I yelled at him “Do you ever stop for a minute to think you couldn’t do this if these people hadn’t died for your sorry ass?â€Â. He just ignored me. They got booed and yelled at so loudly they stayed for just a few minutes and then turned tail and ran off.
– All in all, the whole weekend makes you proud to be an American, knowing so many died so everyone of us, even the idiotarian creeps among us, are free to live our lives in anyway we choose to.
Heres a sterling tribute to all of our sons and daughters, whose bravery and sacrifice puts us all forever in their debt.
If people like D.B. would spend a bit of time understanding the intentionalist argument instead of trying to write smarmy comments that pretend to undercut what it says (and failing for not having any idea what the argument is), well, we’d have a lot less of these kinds of juvenile comments to work through.
But anyway, quickly: The one meaning of the Browning poem is in the signs, put there at the moment of their signification. How do I know this? Because before then, Browning hadn’t done anything linguistic. It is your job to suss that meaning out. To help, you can use many things, from form to historical situatedness to intertextual similarities to narratology to biographical knowledge about Browning to his own letters and marginalia, etc.
And because each sign can be intended in such a way that it can carry several meanings—the simplest example of this for people like you to grasp, as I’ve noted on several occasions, is to think of intended irony—there is no problem at all with concluding that the meaning of the text is ambiguous. There is no mandate that all words have single, literal meanings. Just that a word is not a word until it is imbued with meaning. Which misunderstanding is why you seem to be having so many problems with intentionalism.
Of course, had you bothered to read the notes I provided, I wouldn’t have to repeat this for the umpteenth time. Or, had you simply asked for clarifications rather than to come in here strutting like you were making some groundbreaking point that would shatter my blinkered theoretical worldview, I wouldn’t have to make you look like the asshole you so clearly are by pointing out that you don’t have much of an idea about how intentionalism actually works.
As a fiction writer myself, I often signify so as to leave a sign “open” to multiple readings. And one can even intend to leave a sign unsignified—that is, to throw in a pure sound form. Both instances would be instances of intent. So again, while you think you are cleverly undercutting the intentionalist argument, you aren’t doing so. You are only reinforcing it.
Of course, you could forget Browning’s intent altogether and just take the signifiers and resignify them in a way you find useful and amusing and call it a day. That is certainly easier than doing the more difficult work of trying to figure out what the author was trying to do—and it has the benefit, if it’s done well, of asserting your cleverness (and that’s what this is all about anyway, right? You?) —but it is not interpretation as such.
My advice to you? If you want to get as close to Browning’s meaning as you can without doing the hard work of trying to figure out what he was saying, and then arguing for why you think your reading closely approximates his efforts, fold the poem up into a paper airplane and hand that in.
At least that way you haven’t tinkered with Browning’s signs, and so from the perspective of interpretation, you’d be a lot better of than just kinda doing whatever you feel like doing with the signifiers he provides.
oh! oh! or you could also cut up the page and glue the words at random onto another page. rto had a friend that liked to do that. he just knew that you could still glean some meaning from the words being out of order.
Wow, Maggie, RTO knew William S. Burroughs?
No. I know Jay S. Albertson, accolyte and presumptive high priest of the non-Heroin school of Burroughsism.
Oh, Jeff, I was only playin’, pal. Wasn’t trying to rock any worldviews. If you’re that dedicated to authorial intent, it’s all yours.
– How about following that paper they did that found that parts of words, and entire words could be missing, as well as the words scrambbled in sequence, and yet the mind can decode it anyway.
– So we cut out the words, cut them into sections, then “paste” (ummm paste) them randomly to another sheet of paper, then hold it to a mirror and take a photo, upload it and print it out.
– Then all thats left is to shred the whole thing and smoke it, while you contemplate its real meaning’s….
– Or as an alternative you could tell your prof he’s free to interpret the intent of your thesis at his own pleasure, since nothing you could say about could obtain his lofty vision.
– (If that works get back to me….)
Happy Mem Day, all.
I called my father (Vietnam Vet), and we spent some time discussing what a shit John Kerry is.
Good times.
If you really want to play with poetry, read Spencer’s “The Faery Queene.” If you read just certain numerically-significant lines and stanzas(i.e., 3, 7, 9, 12), you can read a different poem.
The Renaissance version of playing The Beatles “White Album” backwards.
If you can get your pork pulled, I guess Memorial Day is as good as any.
Incidentally, try the Splenda Brown Sugar Blend in your baked beans. All the gas with half the calories.
Guilt free flatulence.
Teri Garr (“Mrs. Dad”, I suppose, in the movie, though I doubt that moniker would fly) was the very first “MILF” in my own budding pubescence. In hindsight, I’m not sure she was all that hot.
spamword: “Man.” hmm.
– That sweet lisp – It was definately the lisp DK….Maybe the slight overbite… Yes…the lisp and the overbite…. and well the willingness…. The lisp, the overbite, and the willingness… and hey….she did make her initial TV appearance on an early episode of the the original Star Trek in a very short tight skirt showing lots of leg…. Something for everyone…
You need to watch Young Frankenstein again if there’s any doubt in your mind about Teri Garr re: hotness.