Midnight On Your Left September 26, 2008
Posted by krgaskins in literature, local, noteworthy encounters.1 comment so far
I really like the smell of books. Especially, old or used books. And something that a good used bookstore can be sure to have is a wide variety of works by obscure (and popular) poets, and an unnecessarily large selection of poetry anthologies.
If you’re local to Boston, I like Brookline Booksmith (new and used books) and Rodney’s Bookstore.
One of my favorite ways to discover new writers is poet roulette (i.e. randomly choosing a poet I’ve never heard of, and reading on for a bit). That’s how I stumbled onto John Godfrey, an urban-influenced (Manhattan) poet who published primarily in the 80’s. As of late, I’ve been all over Boston and Cambridge, largely underground (“The world made of this city / dark when she steps out of her jeans”), engrossed in Midnight On Your Left. I almost forgot to get off at my T stop today.
The book is a mix of poems and prose, and both are pretty trippy. Godfrey’s imagery is a colorful ride that you find you’re more than happy to get on– here, there, within, without, city-steeped, celestial, idealist, terrestrial… His diction is entrancing and well-chosen on all accounts, even when it’s rather opaque… and his moments of utter lucidity, when they peek in through fascinatingly obscure dialogues (which, by the way, he conducts with equal confidence), resonate with some sort of stirring, mystical authority that makes you tingle just a bit.
“When was the last time you passed on a secret specific to sighs and gasps, a pleasure so exquisite you identify yourself by the memory of it?“
I was surprised to find that many of Godfrey’s poems aren’t accessible online, so I’ve reproduced two of his more “lucid” ones from Midnight On Your Left:
“This Train”
I could have had you lie down
on a railroad coach
I could have had you in my heart
when I’m too old to dream
After six years of bright
cocktail sun through that window
It lights up the fleece
on the back and thighs
you carry in such a way
you must inspire yourself
i can’t see you with justice
i can assist your freedom
“Encore”
You are so wonderful in the ordinary
You stand on a corner
fresh from the desert island
where you were lonely
and secure in your beauty
Now there is this all around you
Your neighbors name the grime
behind their ears as they
develop it on the hairs
of their forearms, while you
step back from the vase of
apple blossoms with paint
all over your hands
You feel who you are
You cling to life the
same way I do from
hour to hour by the airshaft
I count the nights of
aurora borealis and collaborate
on the highly absorbent
surface of the moon
Otherwise, I go my way singing
the song that names the stairs
At the top I am there
as the you that is yours
The Language Barrier September 12, 2008
Posted by krgaskins in Psychology & Language, noteworthy encounters, psychology.2 comments
One of my favorite legitamo-pop psychologists, Steven Pinker, (currently working at Harvard) recently released a new book called The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.
Mine is currently en-route from half.com. Thought I’d share, as it looks pretty interesting.
Below is a review from The Washington Post:
Reviewed by Jonah Lehrer
Language comes so naturally to us that it’s easy to believe there’s some sort of intrinsic logic connecting the thing and its name, the signifier and the signified. In one of Plato’s dialogues, a character named Cratylus argues that “a power more than human gave things their first names.”
But Cratylus was wrong. Human language is an emanation of the human mind. A thing doesn’t care what we call it. Words and their rules don’t tell us about the world; they tell us about ourselves.
That’s the simple premise behind Steven Pinker’s latest work of popular science. According to the Harvard psychologist, people are “verbivores, a species that lives on words.” If you want to understand how the brain works, how it thinks about space and causation and time, how it processes emotions and engages in social interactions, then you need to plunge “down the rabbit hole” of language. The quirks of our sentences are merely a portal to the mind.
In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between “linguistic determinism” and “extreme nativism.” The linguistic determinists argue that language is a prison for thought. The words we know define our knowledge of the world. Because Eskimos have more nouns for snow, they are able to perceive distinctions in snow that English speakers cannot. While Pinker deftly discredits extreme versions of this hypothesis, he admits that “boring versions” of linguistic determinism are probably accurate. It shouldn’t be too surprising that our choice of words can frame events, or that our vocabulary reflects the kinds of things we encounter in our daily life. (Why do Eskimos have so many words for snow? Because they are always surrounded by snow.) The language we learn as children might not determine our thoughts, but it certainly influences them.
Extreme nativism, on the other hand, argues that all of our mental concepts — the 50,000 or so words in the typical vocabulary — are innate. We are born knowing about carburetors and doorknobs and iPods. This bizarre theory, most closely identified with the philosopher Jerry Fodor, begins with the assumption that the meaning of words cannot be dissected into more basic parts. A doorknob is a doorknob is a doorknob. It only takes Pinker a few pages to prove the obvious, which is that each word is not an indivisible unit. The mind isn’t a blank slate, but it isn’t an overstuffed filing cabinet either.
So what is Pinker’s solution? He advocates the middle ground of “conceptual semantics,” in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. (As Pinker admits, he owes a big debt to Kant.) The tenses of verbs, for example, are shaped by our innate sense of time. Nouns are constrained by our intuitive notions about matter, so that we naturally parcel things into two different categories, objects and substances (pebbles versus applesauce, for example, or, as Pinker puts it, “hunks and goo”). Each material category comes with a slightly different set of grammatical rules. By looking at language from the perspective of our thoughts, Pinker demonstrates that many seemingly arbitrary aspects of speech, like that hunk and goo distinction, aren’t arbitrary at all: They are byproducts of our evolved mental machinery.
Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. He uses the f-word to explore the topic of transitive and intransitive verbs. He clarifies indirect speech by examining a scene from “Tootsie,” and Lenny Bruce makes so many appearances that he should be granted a posthumous linguistic degree. But profanity from Lenny Bruce can’t always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing ‘isms. Sometimes, the payoff can be disappointing. After a long chapter on curse words — this book deserves an “explicit content” warning — Pinker ends with the banal conclusion that swearing is “connected with negative emotion.” I don’t need conceptual semantics to tell me that.
The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can “transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations.” It’s a nice try at a happy ending, but I don’t buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can’t even comprehend. Flaubert was right: “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
