Apologies: & a New Order at It Was Lost

This was some art that Minnie Molly Mary left lying around my apartment. She described it to me, I think, basically, as Adam deciding between the heavenly Mimosa and God's touch, & leaning towards the Mimosa. (I say, those are some sexy stockings Adam is sporting.)

I've updated the LOCATIONS for our inner outer community of contributers to the greater blogospheric It Was Lost forgottiverse. Mr Quill, of All Forgotten, has ended his bulgarious era, & is now listed as Special Forgotten Midwestern Correspondent, residing in Bloomington, Indiana. Breaking Away! Mr Olaf Mary Mohammad, who declared himself yesterday below "inna Edinburgh" will now be our only European correspondent, & we expect a whole new epoch of Mix Tapes Were Lost. Miss Grainne Proinseas couldn't stand the ten blocks she lived away from me & leaped five blocks closer over the border from Oakland into Berkeley, into the apartment of the friends the Lefkowitz Sisters. Cosmo Wenicky is of course now in Connecticut! And Miss Minnie Molly Mary has added enough art & illustrations & inspiration to itwaslost over the past year, I welcome her to the official roster! What we're all working on, but not posting yet, is a big series of "children's poems", illustrated by Grianne, Olaf, & M.M.M., which I am forced to keep secret for the time being, but I'll deliciously hint that there are stories about outerspace, giant ancient mammals, impossible loves, America, fate & guacamole!

However, things to look out for during THE FALL SEASON on our community weblog:

• An amazing book of drawings by a young girl I found on the street in San Francisco, alternately called "200 Unruled Sheets" or "The Seven and Six Year Olds."
• Fashion!
• More Professional Female Midget Wrestling
• Close coverage of the 2010 midterm elections (as close as we wish to get).
• More befoulers of the verbiage.
• Art, music, shisha, romance, & adventure.

Thank you, gentle friends. Please follow us in that "Followers" gadget to the left, add our feed to your Google Reader or whatever you use for blog feeds, follow S. Sandrigon on Google Buzz, comment often & stay tuned!

Lapidary Verbiage

A summary of this article in the Guardian: Jonathan Franzen publishes yet another Great American Novel. The New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani praised its "visceral and lapidary" prose. Jodi Picoult tweeted "NYT raved about Franzen's new book. Is anyone shocked? ... Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." This gave everyone some nice controversy to discuss for awhile, and the rest of us can feel slightly guilty every time we're enjoying a modern white male author. What bothered me about Picoult's criticism of the critic wasn't that she herself liked the novel, or that Franzen is a tool, or that she's a novelist using Twitter. It's this follow-up tweet in re Kakutani's use of the word lapidary: "Did you know what [it] meant when you read it in Kakutani's review? I think reviewers just like to look smart."

If you can't use juicy words like 'lapidary' in a New York Times book review, where the hell can you use them? Lapidary, by the way (I looked it up), means "pertaining to gems and precious stones, or the art of working them." So, yes, thank you Ms Picoult for suggesting I look up that gem of a word.

On a related topic, I'm working on a novel about angst & ennui behind the façade of the American middle class family.

More Verbiage Spoilage: Sarah Palin's uses "cackle" as a collective noun

Again, I have to disagree with the blogosphere about Palin's twisting of language, & side with the sometime governor for her creativity. I love the use of "cackle" as the collective noun for "rads." The Huffington Post complains that none of the standard dictionary definitions of cackle "are appropriate in the context of Palin's tweet." I recommend wading thru the whole quote:

#Shakespalin folio

While I was warning not to be too hard on Palin for comparing herself to Shakespeare, I didn't realize that twitter was exploring a hatchtag called #Shakespalin, here are some highlights:

But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch.
-@freehawk

To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees
-@normative

Henry VI, part you know, well, all of them.
-@acoyne

I came, I saw, I refudiated.
-@homescribe

Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend / and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV
-@djsamk

"How's all that bein' and not bein' workin' out for ya?"
-@jon_ames

All the perfume in Arabia shall not sweeten this ink-stained, crib-noted hand.
-@spskenski

All the world's a stage, and I can see all of it from my house.
-@paulandstorm

Friends, Real Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to play "gotcha" journalism
-@paulandstorm

More on Sarah Palin poetry here. My essay on Palin & the English language here.

A big welcome to "Refudiate", Sarah Palin's new word in the English Language!

I was just reading at Mediaite.com about Sarah Palin's invention of the word "refudiate" (which she tweeted yesterday afternoon), and the tweetosphere's subsequent mocking embrace of her malapropism.

This was taken down by her people & a correctly spelled one was quickly put up. "Refudiate" was already a big hit tho, & her response is endearingly both self-deprecating & aggrandizing:

She was mocked for comparing herself to Shakespeare. The headline at Mediaite was "Sarah Palin 'Refudiates' Criticism, Declares Self Shakespeare on Twitter". Okay, that's a masterpiece of a headline, but slightly false advertising, because comparing yourself humorously to a great writer is a different bird than Declaring Self. (Somewhat unrelatedly, John Lennon actually said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, but he didn't mean he wanted them to be. He was just making an interesting point that resulted in a lot of Beatles burning parties. When he later sang "they're going to crucify me," he actually was Declaring Self, but again with a wink. Luckily, bardophiles aren't generally into book-burning, and have a subtler appreciation of celebrity metaphor, or there'd be a lot of "Going Rogue" bonfires.)

I want to urge the blogosphere to back off from defending Shakespeare against Palin's comparison! She's absolutely right! And she even makes an important point that Americans especially of all English-speaking nations shouldn't forget. In France, there is a committee that makes sure no foreign words creep into their pure tongue. And they ended up with a very silly language! English has always been mostly the opposite, letting itself evolve naturally, and gladly welcoming slang, foreign words, incorrect foreign words, mistakes, malapropisms, portmanteaus, nonsense, & coinages from all corners. I think that this makes English healthier, more chaotic, more fascinating, and more honest about the nature of language than faux [sic] French puritanism. Palin was also dead-on to compare it to "misunderestimate", because a number of Bushisms were lovingly adopted by a world that hated him & are now used widely even in contexts which contain no reference to Bush. (Another word, "strategery ", was invented by Saturday Night Live in 2000 to parody Bushisms, & not only became a real English word, but was adopted by the Bush administration itself; they had an official Department of Strategery. Stephen Colbert's word "truthiness", coined in 2005, is included in the latest American dictionaries.) .

If you want to read a good book which discusses the debate between keeping English a controlled language versus letting English be an organic language, I recommend Simon Winchester's easy read The Professor & the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. On the losing side of this argument was 18th century Irish author Jonathan Swift, here's an excerpt from his treatise "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue".

There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables; yet, to same Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. This was a Pretence to take up the same Custom in Prose; so that most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

That is right, under Swift's proposals, we would not or should not be allowed to contract or abbreviate words, lest English be difficult to utter. It cannot be! Swift also had grievances about many 'slang' words entering the language, like "banter" & "mob", which he accused of being "invented by some pretty Fellows" & "now struggling for the Vogue." Heaven forfend! Since the beginning of time, every generation has groaned about newfangled words becoming trendy. The word "lengthy", for instance, was once thought to be a horrible American abomination.

I think the archtype for an American nonsense word becoming common in languages around the world, is "okay." The etymology of "okay" is shrouded in academic controversy, probably because some academics have trouble accepting that it could have originated in a dumb joke. To sum it up, incorrect acronyms were popular jokes in New England newspapers in the 1830s, and "O.K." (meaning 'All Correct') came to being during the presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson (who was supposedly a bad speller) and Martin van Buren (who maybe tried to re-define the acronym to stand for his nickname, Old Kinderhook.) According to the wikipedia, "The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in okay's history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States." But there you go, political humor leading to the creation of a word that's now ubiquitous all over the world. It's alternately been attributed to Greek origin, Native American (Choctaw), & African slaves, each of which is a more tidy & rational explanation, but language isn't tidy or rational.

Anyway, the speed with which trendy words or political jokes can become language has increased with the internet, so that Sarah Palin can coin a word on Sunday & I can write an essay defending it on Monday. Welcome to the English language "refudiate", whatever the fuck it means.

(PS, to prove it wasn't a typo, and actually a word that Sarah Palin thought existed, here's the archive video of her actually saying it earlier this year.)

More Sarah Palin Poetry: Small Mayors Quote Unquote

Befoulers of the Verbiage

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

-Sarah Palin

Last November, Julian Gough famously wrote about Sarah Palin as a poet: "What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse. [...] A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges." He was referring to a poem he had rewritten in verse & called "The Relevance of Alaska" (we quoted it here last November - "And the relevance to me / With that issue, / As we spoke / About Africa...") Sarah Palin poetry is back like the eskimos: Hart Seeley has a collection at Slate.com, there's some analysis by John Lundberg at the Huffington Post. Someone named Beau Vent is selling an eBook called "Tap That Verbiage, Also". And seemingly unrelatedly, last night, Conan O'Brien had William Shatner read some of Palin's resignation speech as beat poetry with bongos & upright bass:



I love that Alaskan imagery, especially the bit about being midway between extreme temperatures. I've also already posted this, but I feel it didn't get enough notice, the composer/pianist Henry Hey set accompaniment to one of Governor Palin's rambling sentencagraphs in the style of Steve Reich's The Cave:

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns--
Quote, unquote--
They're on the front lines.