Lecture Notes for Language Myth 2: “Some Languages Are Just not Good Enough”—Ray Harlow

Because some languages aren’t used in a variety of ways doesn’t be that they couldn’t be, yet for some, reverence, frequency of a language’s use, and the amount of people who speak it equate to a language’s worth and potential.

-in many cases, a minority language either is or has been treated with some level of scorn.

-it can be awfully tough to distinguish language from identity, and the way this could be perceived is that if one’s language isn’t good enough, that person and his/her people aren’t good enough, and just assimilate, dammit!

 

There was a time that many saw Latin with the same perspective—that it just wasn’t good enough. Like language itself, attitudes and perceptions of languages can and often do change.

 

Remember, too, that one component of any language is that it changes, and with change comes the opportunity for an expanded vocabulary and more ways to express ideas and opinions and words and etc.

 

In David Robson’s article “There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow,’” he states that “Languages evolve to suit the ideas and needs that are most crucial to the lives of their speakers.”

-Some make “the argument that ‘X is not good enough because you can’t discuss nuclear physics in it’” (Harlow 12).  Thus, some claim that a particular language may be superior to another “because there are topics you can discuss in one but not the other” (Harlow 12).

-A language’s history is not the same as its possibilities for use.

 

The idea exists that language reflects characteristics of the people who use it, which is a generalization, and (like many generalizations), a dangerous one.

 

“Some languages have developed vocabularies to deal with topics which are just not discussed in some other languages” (Harlow 13).

-the language and its users employ a language’s ability to change to accommodate new meanings, and this ability isn’t limited to a select few languages.

 

The situation with the Maori in New Zealand bears similarities to a situation that surrounds us here—attitudes toward Ojibwe by some English speakers in the Bemidji area.

-within the last couple weeks, the Star Tribune, Duluth News Tribune, and other sources have printed a story about the White Earth Ojibwe tribe wanting to put up signs along the highway in both Ojibwe and English.

-article claims that there’s some opposition, but the example provided is more of a concern than an objection, but still, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some negative sentiment floating around.

 

Because languages don’t have the vocabulary to talk about certain things doesn’t mean they can’t.

-English has evolved to accommodate for many, many topics, like electronic technology, and, indeed, nuclear physics. English is by no means the only language to have acquired this change.

 

Attitudes vs. number of speakers go both ways—Latin is still fairly revered, but it’s no one’s first language.

 

“Foreign” words with no direct English translation?

-we’re missing out on some good poetic descriptions

-Ya’aburnee (Arabic)

-Litost (Czech)

 

Works Cited

Robson, David. “There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow.’” The Washington Post. The Washington Post. 14 Jan. 2013. Web. 10 June 2016.

Examples of Sound Changes

A pretty straightforward assignment. We’re to note sound changes we’ve overheard/used in our daily lives. Thus–

 Assimilation

-alveolar nasalization: good night –> gunight or g’night

-in preparation for the nasal /n/, the vowel becomes more nasalized than it otherwise would. The nasal /n/ pulls the /d/ back, and the /d/ receives relatively little vocalized attention, and for many speakers, the vowel is shortened, as well.

 

Palatalization: pulling sounds either forward or backward in the mouth

-residue –> residual

-adding –al changes the /d/ stop to an affricative /dƷ/ by pulling the sound backwards.

-critic –> criticize

-the stop /k/ becomes a fricative /s/ in preparation for the voiced fricative /Ʒ/

-could’ve –> could of (which, I’m sad to report, is an actual example from a past student of mine). But allomorphically, it makes sense, in that ’ve and of can both sound the same (Ʊv).

-natural –> načural

-alveolar consonant and a /y/ glide

-alveolar /t/+/yu/ becomes the affricate consonant /č/

 

Deletion: dropping a morpheme present at the phonemic level—pronouncing it differently at the phonetic level

-medieval –> medeval

-loss of /i/. The diphthong becomes a monophthong

-chocolate –> choclate

-loss of the unstressed /o/

-Most people, upon abbreviating Marlboro (the cigarette brand), refer to it as Marb.

-loss of /l/

-simplification. It’s easier to transition into the stop /b/ after one liquid instead of two.

-concert tickets –> concertickets

-loss of multiple stops. It’s just easier that way.

 

Metathesis: switching sounds

-the classic children’s example of pronouncing spaghetti as pisghetti (or pisketti)

-another example is pronouncing prerogative as prerogative

                        -though the case could be made that this is deletion instead of metathesis; that the first /r/ is being dropped entirely instead of being switched around.

–et cetera becoming ec cetera

                        -for the record, my mom hates this switch. I used to do it on purpose to bother her, and then, lo and behold, now it bothers me, too.

 

Fronting: For lack of any better examples, changing the /ŋ/ at the end of present-progressive verbs to /n/

-sleeping –> sleepin, studying –> studyin, ec cetera.

-The velar consonant is changed to an alveolar consonant; the short /I/ vowel is formed in the front of the mouth, as is the alveolar consonant, and is another example of pronunciation convenience.

 

Multiple-Rule Process: Simplification of consonant clusters

-raspberry –> razberry

-loss of stop multiple stops. The voiceless /p/ is dropped in favor of the voiced /b/.

-From this, the voiceless /s/ is pulled to a voiced /z/ in preparation for the voiced /b/. Deletion, then assimilation.

-The same is going on with pumpkin becoming punkin. Again, we’re seeing the loss of multiple stops, in that the bilabial /p/ is dropped in favor of the velar /k/.

-the /m/, produced at the front of the mouth, is pulled backward to a nasal /n/, produced at the back of the mouth, in preparation of the /k/, which is also produced at the back of the mouth.

-Again, deletion, then assimilation.

 

Insertion

-gosh –> garsh, and wash –> warsh

-These two courtesy of my Grandma Verna.

– A phenomenon called rhotacization—an /r/ following a vowel, like “I sawr a film today, ol’ boy” or “vodker” or “Canader.” Sometimes called an r-colored vowel.

-Grandma Verna’s case is called medial rhotacization, since it occurs in the middle of a word.

-As I understand it, rhotacization occurs when the tip on the tongue is raised during the pronunciation of a vowel, and there’s some constriction in the throat which produces a rhotacized vowel. The IPA symbol for a rhotacized vowel is ɚ.

*Thanks to Dr. Swain for help with the technical term and pointing me in the right direction with this one.

5 Words that Gotta Go

So, in response to LSSU’s List of Banished Words, we’re to come up with our own list of words that the English language could do without, if we’re to have our druthers. So, without further ado, off we go.

(I’ll mention, too, that I’ve been listening to the late, great Bill Hicks for the last hour or so, and this post is a wee bit more sardonic than usual).

Guesstimate— According to the OED, this portmanteau is defined as “an estimate which is based both on guesswork and reasoning.” This, as it is, seems logical enough, and is a perfectly valid word. What irks me about it is at the semantic level. Most of the times that I’ve heard/read this word, I’m left with the impression that the user isn’t using the word to denote both guesswork and reasoning, but rather, as a fairly trite attempt to be clever, as if he/she is trying to flex the muscles of his/her lexical prowess. In most cases, either “guess” or “estimate” is just fine, and little-to-no meaning is lost without using “guesstimate”.

Effective— As we’ve noted, one aspect of language is change. One possibility of language change is that words become overused, and for me, that’s what’s going on with “effective”. My attitude towards this word has shifted in the last year or so, and much of it has been self-inflicted. I used to use it in my comments on students’ essays/assignments: “effective transition,” “effective use of a semicolon,” etc. And what started occurring to me was that without any elaboration, what I was trying to communicate to the student was pretty vague; a more descriptive or explanatory word/phrase could convey a clearer message to the student. Because I’ve been self-conscious about the word, I’ve naturally started noticing it in other contexts, and I’m left with the same opinion in almost all of them; that “effective” is a rather ineffective word for descriptive purposes.

Need (verb)– You’ve seen links around the Internet that say something like “You need this video of yawning kittens in your life”?

Meanwhile, there are people starving to death around the world.

Want ≠ Need

Deserve— In 2009, when smartphones were surging in popularity, I was talking to a friend, and he said “I deserve Internet on my phone.”

Meanwhile, there are people starving to death around the world.

Want ≠ Deserve

Very–Again, pertaining to students’ essays, I’ve been more aware of the use of “very” as an intensifier, but more often than not, the only thing it intensifies is an essay’s word count. “Very” describes very little, and is often used as a way to skip further elaboration. I may be guesstimating here, but some people may not want to put forth the effort to try to describe something so that the reader can get a vivid picture of it and better understand what the author/speaker is talking about, and the mindset is that the use of “very” is an effective way to denote meaning.
“This painting is very good.”
Somebody tell Monet that all his hard work is paying off.

Some Thoughts on The Singular “They”

As Dr. Swain mentioned on the first day of class, the singular “they” was chosen as the word of the year for 2015. According to Prof. Dennis Baron, Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois, the “singular they has been popular in English speech and writing for over 650 years.” It is often used if the gender of the antecedent is unknown—for example, “I saw someone speeding, but I don’t know how fast they were going.” In many ways, the singular “they” makes sense. English does not have a gender-neutral singular pronoun (In chapter 5 of our textbook, A.A. Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame comments on this); defaulting to “he” as the preferred pronoun is (un)surprisingly patriarchal and many people do not care for this; using “he or she” in speech sounds awfully stuffy; etc. The singular “they,” then, is a logical choice.

 

Despite that, a little part of me cringes whenever I hear it. I do not like the singular “they.” I actively try to steer my students away from using it.

 

And this is ironic for a few reasons. Aside from being logical, it’s also convenient. We’re always taking shortcuts with language. For instance, consider this sentence—“I’m running to the store. Do you need anything?” If you speak this sentence out loud in a regular, informal situation, it’s likely that you would not pronounce each phoneme. The sentences may sound as such—“I’m runnin’ t’ the store. D’ya need anything?”

As it pertains to this singular “they,” it’s often just easier to use it than to think about proper antecedents and trying to be gender conscious, especially in an informal speech setting.

We’re seeing a pretty big push in the LGBT community for the singular “they.” Some people dislike/don’t feel comfortable with the he/she gender binary, and the singular “they” is a good alternative to that binary. Some people use it with a sociopolitical motivation.

One last reason is that, as you may know, two facets of language is that there’s a lot of consistency and a lot of change. Acceptance of the singular “they” is an example of change, and once the waves of change begin to flow in a language, it’s no easy feat to stop them. The singular “they” is happening, and while I’m probably not going to embrace it any time soon, it’s ultimately futile for me to resist it and try to stop it from happening. But here’s my case against it—take it as you will.

 

So far, I haven’t stopped perceiving the singular “they” as a lack of antecedent awareness. “They” is a pronoun, and pronouns are used in place of nouns. The noun that a pronoun replaces is called the antecedent. Nouns have both number and gender, and the pronoun that replaces it, prescriptively speaking, should match in number and gender. The problem (as I claim it to be, anyway) is that the singular “they” is at odds with this rule.

To say this in a different (and probably harsher) way, I think the singular “they” is an example of laziness with one’s writing/speaking.
Does that claim have merit? Sure. A mark of good writing is thoroughness and awareness of what one is communicating, which includes the minutia. We have more liberty in writing to use “he/she” or “one” with less risky of sounding stuffy as it does in speech.

 

Below is a cut-and-paste of a handout I made up for my Comp/A&E classes about personal pronouns, which focuses more on the second-person “you,” but to the singular “they” also makes an appearance.

 

Personal pronouns are a class of words used to replace nouns (people, places, things, and ideas). Personal pronouns include “I,” “we,” “you,” “us,” “he,” “him,” “she,” “her,” “it,” “they,” and “them.” We use these pronouns because, frankly, language is much more convenient and less irritating with them. (Specifying who “he” or “it” or “you” is in every sentence we communicate would get pretty irritating pretty quickly).

John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary were going to go to dinner, but John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary did not have a reservation. So John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary asked Linda for help with the reservation. Linda told John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary that Linda could help John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary, but Linda’s friend Lisa was busy with blah blah blah when will this horrible story end this is so destructively boring.

So to avoid a nightmare of communication like this, we use pronouns. To further this concept, here is a handy technical term. The noun or nouns that a pronoun replaces is called the antecedent. In the example, “John, Roger, Rachel, and Mary” would be the antecedent to the plural pronoun “they.” “Linda” would be the antecedent to the singular pronoun “she.” “Reservation” would be the antecedent to the pronoun “it.”

In order for a pronoun to be grammatically correct and to make sense, it needs to match its antecedent in number—whether it is singular (1) or plural (2 or more)—as well as gender. Gender can be male, female, unspecified, or gender neutral. Note that plural pronouns like “they” and “them” do not specify gender.

It is a simple concept, yes, but like anything in life, it can be confusing. For example, if a sentence in an essay begins, “In this article, they talk about…” Hold on. Stop and double check this. We have the pronoun “they,” which is plural, so for this sentence to make sense, the antecedent needs to be plural, as well. If two or more authors wrote the article, we are correct in using “they” as the pronoun. If just one author wrote the article, though, we need to go back and change “they” to a singular pronoun—most likely, either “he” or “she.” The key is being able to identify which noun that a pronoun is replacing.

            Quite often, we will be faced with a hypothetical antecedent—that is, there either is nothing to indicate which noun the pronoun is replacing, or both the number and the gender are not specified. When this is the case, we frequently find ourselves defaulting to pronouns that are not grammatically or academically correct. One major offender is “the singular ‘they,’” which is when the plural pronoun “they” is used in place of a singular noun, like “I saw somebody walk past the door, but I didn’t see what color their shirt was.”

Another simple example sentence is “The student checked their phone.” We do not know the gender of the student, but we do know the number—“the student” is singular. So in this case, “they” is not grammatically correct, since “they” is plural. We would instead need to use a singular pronoun to match the antecedent, which is where some students get confused. We have a few options with which to approach this, though. We can assign a gender to the student—“The student checked his phone” or “The student checked her phone.” Or, if we want to be gender inclusive, we could say, “The student checked his/her phone.” Note that while we have two pronouns, they are not being used in a plural sense—we are merely offering two choices of gender (both of which are singular) while indicating to the reader that the student’s gender is not known.

Things can be further complicated if we do not know either the gender nor the number. It is often, in this case, for many people to use the second-person pronoun “you.” An example of this is, “You never know what life has in store.” The issue with this is that “you” is a very limiting, finger-pointing pronoun because it addresses the reader specifically. When “you” is used, the antecedent is, by default, the reader’s name. And that is not a good approach in academic writing, or any writing in which the possibility exists that the writer will be addressing more than one specific person (which is frequently the case). That is because an academic writer wants to accommodate and include a wide range of potential readers.

When gender and number are not known, a good indefinite pronoun to use is “one,” because this refers to “someone” or “anyone.” By using “one” or any other of the indefinite pronouns, identifying the antecedent is not an issue, because an indefinite pronoun either is the antecedent or merely does not refer to an antecedent. Whereas “you” refers to only a single, specific person, “one” can refer to any of the seven billion people on Earth. The example sentence would then read, “One never knows what life has in store.” This opens up a wider scope of people to whom the author of this sentence could be referring—it is not limited to you or the person sitting next to you, but anyone/everyone.

There’s certainly more to say on the matter, and mine is but one opinion (and not necessarily the correct opinion). One of the excellent, frustrating, and frustratingly excellent components of language is that opinions about it are as varied as the language’s users. It’s all something to consider, to whatever degree. As Peter Trudgill claims in “The Meanings of Words Should Not Be Allowed to Vary or Change” in Language Myths, “[w]ords do not mean what we as individuals might wish them to mean, but what speakers of the language in general want them to mean” and “[l]anguage change cannot be halted” (8). Most people who speak English are not pedants, prescriptivists, or purists, and the language will go where it goes. So are we right to accept the singular “they”? Probably. It’s happening and it’s not going to stop. Does an individual need to embrace it? That’s for him/her to decide.

A Note

Entries published between January-May 2015 are for ENGL 6277– Problems of Literary Criticism, which focused heavily on digital poetics, a graduate class of which I was part in spring 2015, under guidance by the brilliant Dr. M C Morgan.

Ideal Readership

During one of the presentations, the concept came up of how the ideal reader would read the piece of digital literature that was being presented. And that was an impetus for me to think about how the ideal reader would read my piece, and how she might navigate the intentional difficulties. So my hypothesis is separated into how the ideal reader would read the main text and what I’ll refer to as the subtext– the texts in a much smaller font interspersed throughout the piece. I’ll begin with the subtext.

Ideally, the reader use the works cited to check the sources listed in an attempt to determine what exactly is hidden in the piece. Some would naturally be easier to base an presumption on than others– song lyrics as opposed to The Things They Carried or Beowulf, based on there being less words in a song than in a novel or epic poem, and therefore less to problematize her presumption. (There is also the added, intentional difficulty of me not indicating which pages of the sources the material is on). There would still be some guesswork with shorter pieces, but less. So with having an idea of where each instance of subtext comes from, the reader would go through the piece stanza by stanza, using the ability to pause the piece to her advantage, and look very closely at each image to try to make out the words. Whether she would/could be able to read them explicitly is probably going to be an issue. I refer to that in this post in the tenth and eleventh paragraphs. I made the subtext intentionally difficult to read to add to the aesthetic effect, and how the ideal reader is going to determine what it actually says is part of the difficulty of the piece. But once she has her determination of what the subtext says, whether it’s accurate or not, she would ideally make an argument about why she thinks the subtext says what it says, including how the subtext pertains to the main text, why the subtext is relevant, and how the inclusion of the subtext enhances the aesthetic effect of the piece as a whole.

How the ideal reader would read the main text is, I think, a little easier. She would read the piece as it progresses through the video, taking it stanza by stanza, and figure out the form of the piece to anticipate which stanza comes next. I think that with that anticipation, she would be better able to look at each image and take in the overall effect of it, as opposed to only reading the text. Once she’s familiar with the structure of the main text, she would be able to look more closely at the gestalt of the piece, instead of just the main text.

Additionally, the ideal reader would not transcribe the main text. I think that, as a piece of digital literature, transcription of a piece onto paper reduces the effect of the piece, like the transcription of Dakota. This makes the piece easier to study, yes, but it also diminishes the aesthetic and takes away from the whole experience of the piece. Once a transcription exists, and once one sees that the piece exists in a non-digital format, expectations about the piece may change, in that it exists as a different entity in an unintended form. A piece like Dakota is not just words, but also music, color, rhythm, and a visual spectacle. And distilling it down to words renders it differently than the authors had intended.

Granted, it would be much easier to transcribe “Night Patrol, South Vietnam” than a piece like Project for Tachistoscope or The Flat. (How one would do that, or if one could do that, I’m not sure). But I think that the ideal reader would approach the piece with a certain respect for its integrity as a piece, like Pound’s qualm with the spacing in different printings of “In a Station of the Metro.” So, ideally, this would be the case, but whether or not that’s a reality is a different matter. Once the piece is out there, the author loses some facets of control over the piece. I can’t think of a suggestion as to how to prevent a reader from transcribing a piece of digital literature other than creating the piece to be intentionally difficult, if not impossible, for that to happen. And while certain pieces of digital literature are frustrating, like Project, it does have that advantage of being pretty well solidified as a piece of digital literature, in that the aesthetic of the piece makes it much more difficult to be a piece of non-digital literature.

Further elaboration on the project and other concepts

In looking at the third draft of the project (the one I showed in class), I started thinking about the other two drafts which are still up on YouTube. I mentioned in a previous post (paragraph 2) that I’m a little uncomfortable talking about my writing , but with the idea of questioning reading practices, I think many of us have an expectancy that, unless prefaced or made clear that a piece in still in a stage of development, the piece will be finished or nearly finished when we see it. So to step outside of my own comfort level, I’ve resolved to leave the drafts available for viewing. The first draft is here, and the second is here. (The second draft only goes through the ninth line).

Along with talking about my writing and showing unfinished making me uncomfortable (and I’m willing to venture that I’m not the only one), I’ve been thinking about this initial idea of calling into question reading practices and aesthetics, and I don’t think this is limited to other authors’ writings. For me, if I’m going to accept this challenge, I think it extends to challenging my practice and expectations of others’ reading practices of my own work– what I offer to the reader and what I anticipate from him/her in the form of expected criticism. And I don’t mean “expected criticism” in terms of what I think the critic will say, but rather, the themes/ideas of what I think the critic will talk about.

Going with the idea of discomfort and it pertains to pieces of digital literature, I want to talk a bit about the pieces we’ve encountered in class. A good many of them, like Project, Chroma, The Flat, et al. made me uncomfortable, in the sense that I didn’t (and to an extent, still don’t, but I’m at least aware of that) know how to approach/experience/read/interpret these pieces in the way that I’m familiar. I think this is alluded to simply by use of the word “experience” instead of a more definite word like “read” (as Andy pointed out), in that the pieces are that different from print literature, where expectations of experience are (by and large) met. It even comes down to specifying what I would otherwise have called “literature” as “print literature.”

The pieces of digital literature that I’ve experienced, as well as the essays I’ve read about them, prompt a deeper look at why the literature is what it is, and this is not just limited to dig lit– this prompting has been extending to print lit, as well. I think I’m coming away with a stronger sense of want/desire of a reason why an author rendered a piece the way he/she did (in both dig and print lit). Further, I think I’m more critical, or at least more aware that I should be more critical, of myself as a reader in trying to figure out why the lit is what it is. And I’m certainly no expert in figuring out the why of a piece yet, but I’m aware, with something of a different perspective, that that why exists, and I have more of a motive to try to better understand the piece’s motive.

To go along with the final project a little, the chronological process of initial idea, to a more fleshed-out process, and a few other words can be found in the ethers here, here, and here. One problem I want to address from the presentation on April 20 was that of actually being able to see the text of the piece as it was playing. I’m not sure if it was the angle of the screen, or that I was standing and looking at the screen differently than everyone else, or the reflection from the windows, but I had a pretty difficult time actually reading the text as the piece was playing. And while that unexpected aesthetic might not actually be a bad fit for the piece, it wasn’t what I intended– I want the reader/experiencer to be able to read the main text (albeit with a little bit of intended difficulty), and to be aware, but not able to read, the smaller text alluded to in the works cited page. I’m not sure if that intended effect would be easier on one’s computer with the screen at eye level (it seems to be for me), so I’m not sure if this is a consistent problem or not. It is on my radar, though, and I’ll experiment a little further with the brightness to see if it is easier to read/experience and to see what sort of aesthetic effect it renders.

A little more on the project

I want to take a closer look at some aspects of the piece that I didn’t write about yesterday. To start, there is some ambiguity in the piece, which is intentional. I tried to use the form of the three-sided tornado to incorporate an air of mystery and urgency about what is going on. The two ways I look at it are

-the coffee is speeding up the soldier’s bloodflow to his locus of immediate thought, and this is being done through his internal trail of arteries. With an increase in bloodflow, his sense of awareness is heightened, and with the feeling of paranoia, the shadows he sees might be real, and they might not be. This is occurring at night, and the dark and his imagination might be playing tricks on him. The mention of “blood” in two of the six lines gives the piece (I hope, anyway) a feeling of urgency– that the threat of bloodshed may be near, but it may be far, as well. I also want “The jungle, the body” to carry an ambiguity, functioning as either a collective whole, or as two distinct units. If the latter is so, I hope the question is that of whose body?, to further heighten the urgency.

or

-the soldier is sipping coffee to stay awake and alert. The internal trail is the Ho Chi Minh trail, and someone is nearing him. Blood is approaching, whether that blood is the threat of violence, or the blood inside of the other person. The shadows may be imaginary, and they may not be. But the soldier’s paranoia and fear are increasing, and his reflexes may take over– the locus of immediate thought. The jungle and the body may still be a collective whole, or there may be a body within the jungle.

When I was writing this piece, I had an American soldier in mind, and I think that idea is furthered with the inclusion of the Tim O’Brien quotation(s?), as he was an American soldier. It seems to me, though, that that’s my ethnocentrism coming out. There’s nothing in the main text that even alludes to the soldier being American. He could be an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam– aka South Vietnam) soldier. Or a North Vietnamese soldier camped out in South Vietnam. Or a Viet Cong guerilla hiding in the jungle, keeping watch. But I think my initial thought of the soldier being American has to do with expectations, since it seems most likely for me, an American, to have written this about an American soldier. I’ve been trying to embrace the idea of challenging reading practices, and I don’t think that’s limited to reading. If we’re challenging reading practices, why not challenge writing practices, as well? This piece did that for me– I’m not sure that I would have thought otherwise about who the soldier is without this challenge in mind.

One of the programs I used to make this piece was Windows Live Movie Maker, which, as I’ve mentioned, is a pretty simple program. One of the features of it is the ability to tint images. I had tinted some of the images with a cyan hue, and admittedly, I linked how they looked. However, the only image that survived into the third draft with tint was the transitory image between the poem and the works cited. While I like how the images looked with the cyan tint, when an image would appear without the tint, it looked off– the effect seemed cheesy and forced. I thought about tinting all the images, but the problem I encountered was that the red words didn’t appear to be red, and it was more important to me that the read remained visible than the tint. So alas, the tint had to go.

Regarding the works cited pages, they are there not because I’m a raging academic, but for two other reasons. One is to give credit to the sources I used, but I would have been comfortable doing so without MLA citations. The other reason, more pertinent to a concept of digital literature itself, is to further stimulate close reading. What’s hidden in each image is, I hope, hidden well. The reader, like the soldier, may have a sense that something is there, but doesn’t know what. The works cited pages are there to give the reader a better sense of what’s there, but doesn’t specify exactly what. The reader, like the soldier, may never know what was actually there. This is also something of a reference (though I’m not sure how strong of a reference) to citing digital literature with respect to code– we know it’s there, but we may not know how to access it or what to do with it if we do access it. The piece is procedural in the sense that it is constrained. It doesn’t go all over the place, the thread isn’t tangled– it has a form, and a pretty simple form when one looks at it in the right way. (Or maybe even in the wrong way. Or the almost right way. Etc.). And when this process is laid out, the procedure that the poem follows is stark– one can figure out which line will come next and what progression the poem will take.

As I was working on the project and uploading unfinished drafts to YouTube, a new challenge presented itself. In the video, there are two black bars on either side of the piece. This led me to think about paratext, although the bars are obviously not text. (Parabars?) Though they’re not a main part of the piece, they are there. Like aspects of “Dakota,” (the reference to Art Blakey, the album number, etc.) these are blatant parts of the work that the reader can’t ignore. So, what to make of the bars? I don’t know. They exist without any input from me. Does that make YouTube part contributor to the piece? It might. They add something to the aesthetics of the piece, whether I had intended them to be there or not. So with this in mind, what sort of aesthetics do the parabars add? For me, it looks like they block out the left and right side of the screen, and make the reader focus on the images of the piece, like horse blinders. That could be taken even further and attributed to a representation of tunnel vision, that the soldier is so focused on what’s right in front of him that he’s not paying attention to his peripheries. I could attribute one of these meanings to the parabars, or a reader/viewer could attach that meaning, or come up with his/her own meaning. So then, what happens when meaning is attached to a facet of the literature when it wasn’t part of the author’s intent? It gives us something to think about during revision– many of us have received feedback with an insight or new perspective about the piece that makes us think differently about it. And that’s a problem of criticism we need to face– intent vs. reception, and lack of intent vs. reception.

A finished draft, process, and something of an analysis

I’ve uploaded a finished version of “Night Patrol, South Vietnam” to YouTube, and it can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNculDxYJM0

Something I’ve never been very good at is talking about my writing and my writing process, and I think that stems from the idea that once I’ve submitted a piece, whether to be workshopped, critiqued, or graded, I’ve let go of the control of the piece. While I’m working on drafts, I usually keep the process and content pretty quiet. But once I’ve let it out, I equate that to being me making a statement about the piece– that it’s as done as I can make it at this point, and once it’s out, it’s not my place to say anything about it. The work speaks for itself. And I will listen (usually) to what others have to say about it, but very rarely will I engage in a conversation about the piece, because that communication isn’t always going to be a factor– what others have to say about a piece isn’t always going to be with the author sitting right there, ready to talk about it.

But anyway, for the purpose of this post, I’ll talk a little about it.

I’d mentioned in a previous post that the piece I’m working on follows a form that Sean Hill gave to me called three-sided tornado, in which the same six lines are repeated in a particular pattern. When laid out to get a better sense of the pattern, it looks like like so. (Read this top to bottom).

A

B

C

—

a1     a1     a1

b1     b1     b1

c1     c1     c1

—     —     —

c1     c1     c1

C      C      C

a1     a1     a1

—     —      —

a1     a1     a1

A      A       A

c1    c1      c1

—     —      —

C     C      C

B     B      B

C     C      b1

The form of the piece makes much more sense when laid out side-by-side. In my last post, I did not lay it out like this– it’s all vertical, and the form is much more difficult to see. And for me, anyway, it’s also pretty difficult to see the form while watching the piece in its video form, because it isn’t all displayed on a piece of paper, where one has a better chance of seeing it all and being able to pick out the repetitions in the form.

One trepidation I have about the piece and with the project as a whole is whether this can really be considered as digital literature. All the pieces we’ve experienced in class so far are much more technical than this– the Young-Hae Change duo, J.R. Carpenter, William Poundstone, Brian Kim Stefans, etc. have created pieces that use code and (at least) seem to express an understanding of how code works and how to use it. My piece is nothing like that.

Robert Simanowski, in the introductory paragraph of “Defining Digital Literature,” notes that the purpose of Reading Moving Letters is to “investigate literary innovations with respect to new ways of aesthetic expression” (15). I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that the piece I made is innovative, but there are some aesthetic factors that would be lost or the effects reduced were it in print format. (I’m thinking either printed on regular white paper in 12 pt. TNR or if each .jpeg file of the piece in its current form were printed out). For example, I tried to use the smokey background not only for an aesthetic effect, that of night, urgency, and potential fear, but also as a camouflage for some other stuff. (I don’t want to say too much about that yet, though). Also, seeing this piece typed up on a Word document, I think something is lost with it being just words. To render the piece into something more than a poem, I think something more needs to be done to it, and I’m not sure what that something would be outside the realm of digital literature. Further, Raine Koskimaa says, in Reading Moving Letters, that “[i]t is not a question so much of experimenting to break down established conventions, as it is of experimenting trying to create new conventions” (130). These new conventions help give the piece its aesthetic effect, as well as (I think) help give it a different poignancy than it would have on paper.

Later in the book, Alexandra Saemmer says that “digital literature is continuously changing, gradually discovering its specific potential” (163). I’ve created a piece of digital literature, even though I don’t know much about specific processes, like code. Well, specifically, I don’t know how to write code, but for this piece, I manipulated sets of codes to create the piece– starting with each image which began as an image, converting it to a .jpeg, adding those .jpeg images to Movie Maker, setting the time lengths and effects for each image, and finally uploading it to YouTube. And I think that this same lack of deeper knowledge can be applied to print literature. If I want to write a novel, for instance, I’d most likely type it on a Word document, print it on paper, and send it to a publisher, who would then print and bind it on paper. But there’s quite a bit in the process of putting words on paper that I don’t know. Not the process, but the artifact itself— paper begins as a seed, grows into a tree, is cut down, turned into paper, someone writes/types/prints words on it, the paper is then bound into a book, someone opens the book, begins reading left to right and top to bottom. All I know how to do is put words on the page and read left to right and top to bottom– the other aspects are beyond me.

I’ll get into the piece itself a little bit now. One effect of digital literature that I hope I’ve utilized is to stimulate close reading, or the idea of it. Throughout the piece, there are things (and I’m being vague so as to give away as little as possible) in some of the frames which are separate from the poem. What I have in mind with these is something akin to what Poundstone does in Project for Tachistoscope. The main text is black, and the other text is white. I don’t know if they are separate from each other in content or ideas, but the different colors is enough to pique one’s close-reading interest– wanting to know what those words say is one way Poundstone draws us in.

With this in mind, the piece I wrote is about a soldier in Vietnam assigned to night-watch duty. I don’t use names, pronouns, or any specifically human indicators, but the context of the piece is probably enough to discern that. The way I want to pique the reader’s interest to close-read is by the inclusion of this other text. It’s there. You know it’s there. Sometimes more than other times. What does it say?

And I’m hoping that this mystery adds to the overall feeling of the piece– that of a building paranoia that something else is there, and sometimes knowing that it is, and that that paranoia is legitimate. As the piece moves on, I’m hoping that that feeling continues to build, and is, what I imagine, what a person who had to do that would have gone through. This is also the reason that there’s no music in the piece– sometimes silence is more unsettling.

Another effect I’m interested in exploring is Saemmer’s idea on page 166 of Reading Moving Letters. She says, “[w]hen the relation between the content of an interactive medium, the manipulation gesture and the content of the media discovered or processed by the gesture appears surprising or even incongruous, when it thus destabilizes the reader’s expectations, I would propose to call these phenomena figures of manipulation.” The figure of manipulation I use is related to an idea that I don’t remember reading about, but it has to do with the rhythm of one’s internal narrator. At the beginning of the piece, each image stays on the screen for the same amount of time, but after a while I change the duration of some of the images. Sometimes it’s subtle and maybe one won’t notice, and sometimes it’s notably shorter or longer. The purpose of that is to go back to the idea we talked about on the first day of class of calling reading practices into question. I want to disrupt your rhythm and for you to be aware that your rhythm is disrupted.

One last note to make for now is that of juxtaposition (which I mentioned in my last post, but I think it bears repeating). I’ve only experienced Vietnam through books, videos, and stories. I wasn’t there, I have no idea how it was, nor do I have any idea what being a soldier is. In this regard, I don’t know anything about combat or war. And I feel a little weird having written this piece. With a similar sentiment, there’s quite a bit I don’t know about digital literature, not to mention writing it. (For that matter, I’ll same the same about non-digital literature, both writing, reading, and understanding). But I’ve written a piece of digital literature that has to do with Vietnam. Whether that’s good or bad, I have no idea. But it’s something that exists, and we have to do something about it, even if it’s as simple as ceasing to acknowledge it after a moment.

Ideas for the Final Project

I’ve been kicking around some idea about how to approach this project. The notion of creating a piece of digital literature is appealing, but there are some hindrances that had been stopping me from going about it. The main issue being that I have no idea how to write or read code, and it seems that every piece of digital literature we’ve encountered thus far has either been composed by an author (or authors) who understands code (or at least know someone who does), or is, at the very least, much more versed with the technical processes of computers than I am. Like a fellow classmate, I, too, am a monkey with a banana at a keyboard.

But working on a creative piece has an appeal that I can’t shake. Maybe it’s the mediocre writer in me– I’m not sure. So what I’ve been working on may not fall into the category of digital literature (more on that in a bit), but here’s my pitch.

Several years ago in a Poetry class, Sean Hill was a guest speaker, and one of the gems he gave the class was a poetic form that he called the three-sided tornado. Its definitions are that lines A, B, C, a1, b1, & c1 form thirteen stanzas, each with three lines. The poem is thirty-nine lines long, but is only composed of six lines. A fleshed-out layout of the form is this–

A

B

C

—

a1

b1

c1

—

c1

C

a1

—

a1

A

c1

—

C

B

C

—

a1

b1

c1

—

c1

C

a1

—

a1

A

c1

—

C

B

C

—

a1

b1

c1

—

c1

C

a1

—

a1

A

c1

—

C

B

b1

—

And I think it’s a pretty cool idea, but the trouble this form runs into on paper is that something of the effect is lost– I don’t want to grasp at too many straws, but I think this form lends itself to representation other than ink & paper to achieve a fuller effect. So that’s what I went with.

Now here’s the sad part. I made the individual components on a free program called Serif DrawPlus Starter Edition, which even I could use. (While still eating a banana). From there, I (read: the computer) converted the Serif files (labeled as .dpp) into .jpeg files, and then went to work with the super-impressive Windows Live Movie Maker, and ended up with a 1 1/4 minute video.

Again, my big concern is that I’m not going very deep in the creation of this piece– I’m not delving into the poetics of how the piece is. So, is it a piece of digital literature? That’s debatable. However, I think it’s fairly reasonable to claim that the piece possesses literariness.

The authors we’ve read, as well as we as a class, have been discussing how one defines “digital literature,” which raises questions of how we define “literature” (of the non-digital variety). From what I’ve gathered, there is no definite definition of digital literature– it’s still growing and evolving, and the authors contributing to it have created pieces that are wildly different, from interactive piece, to pieces that further blur the distinction between literature and games, to videos. And my big push is in the last category.

Another aspect I feel is important to mention goes back to our first day of class, in which we were introduced to the concept of calling into question reading practices and aesthetics. The authors of pieces of digital literature are looking to do this, and (for me, anyway) I’ve been looking at how this affects reading practices of print literature. I think, though, that calling into question the reading practices and aesthetics of digital literature is something to take head-on, and that’s something I’m trying to do with this project. I didn’t write it in code. The piece isn’t even all that pretty. It’s quite basic. It has literariness. So…is it digital literature? I don’t know. But it exists, and that’s something we have to deal with, even if it’s as simple as glancing at it and dismissing it.

Here’s a link to the first rough draft. Overall, I’m not displeased with it, but there are some other things I’d like to do with it, so this particular draft isn’t going to make the final cut.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG0O3fz80RA&feature=youtu.be

While I decided to keep the same smokey background in the second draft, the biggest change I wanted to make was for each frame to have one line, as opposed to one stanza, because I think it will help blur those distinctions have give the piece a more uncertain, urgent feel. So here’s the link to the second draft (and it is not done, by the way. I wanted to test it out and get a feel for it before I went too far. It ends at line 9).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r5JL4DjUNg&feature=youtu.be

One more aspect I want to mention is juxtaposition. I’m working on a piece of (what I’m calling, anyway) digital literature, though I know nothing about code. I’ve written a piece about Vietnam, which I only know about through book, videos, pictures, etc. I have no idea what the experience was actually like, and there’s no way that I could. So I’m creating a piece whose subject I don’t know, and I’m doing so through a medium that I don’t know. Maybe this will be a trainwreck. I suppose trainwrecks have their own aesthetics, though.