Interrobang

I love the interrobang because it’s elegant—the meaning is obvious at a glance, and visually funky at the same time. And I’m childish enough that the word “bang” sometimes makes me laugh even though I know it’s programmers lingo.

The interrobang is typographical shorthand for the slangy, yet so useful, phrase “right?” As in:

“Wow, that was some crazy YouTube video of the screaming goat.”

“Right?”

The interrobang is the shock-and-awe bringer of typography, incredulity and acceptance, confirmation and amazement rolled into one tasty glyph… Right‽

Ampersand

It’s a logogram! It’s a ligature! It’s a bit of Ancient Roman. I love and hate the ampersand. It’s often the coolest character in a typeface, but seemingly just as often ignored by the apparently fatigued typographer. It easily possesses the greatest design of the punctuation on U.S. keyboards… and it’s impossible for people like me to create by hand.

The ampersand’s importance speaks for itself. It’s the cool person who doesn’t have to do anything to show their coolness and whose total awesomeness doesn’t become pretension. It conveys a closeness the word “and” cannot. It reveals that plain “and” for the pedestrian word it is and “+” as suitable for nerds only. You can even graft on a period to create the unclassifiable &c.

Here’s the thing: you write most punctuation but you draw the semicolon. It’s a mini work of art. What other punctuation mark has an (interesting) Tumblr feed devoted to it?

Semicolon

Aldus Manutius invented italics and created the semicolon. Isn’t that enough typographic street-cred already?

Naysayers maintain that the semicolon is redundant and pretentious. Take a break from the tweed the whinge, just take that mutant offspring of the period and a comma off life support and use the full-stop.

But the semicolon is so not the same as the period or the comma. The semicolon is hip without Birkenstocks and elegant without a tie. The period marks a division; the semicolon marks a relationship. The comma claims that two have become one, hippy style; the semi-colon understands that a bond can exist alongside individuality. The period is an emphatic marking of territory; the semicolon is a winking lover’s embrace of one utterance to the next and—importantly—vice versa.

I am large; I contain multitudes. I enjoy the spare style of Raymond Carver. I don’t object to the short sentences. I like the punch of the single-breath line. But I also dig the David Foster Wallacian line, meandering and exploratory; the line that can’t stop, breathless with discovery; the implicit dare to the writer and the reader, can they handle it?

Ellipsis

First, let’s get one thing straight: the ellipsis (…) is not composed of three periods (…) or three periods separated by spaces (. . . ). Thanks to the lack of typographical prowess of most browsers and their typefaces, you might not see a difference between all three examples. So an image to illustrate:

Isn’t the first line the most beautiful? That puny ellipsis in the second line is three periods without spaces; the grotesque example in the third line has spaces between the periods.

I don’t know how three periods would function grammatically… Really stop this time? I’m like so totally done now?

Second, I don’t care about the boring use of the ellipsis as an omission of quoted text. Yes, I use it that way. No, it’s not worth talking about.

Third, I am not going to get into the debate about whether you put spaces before or after an ellipsis. I have a system of omitting the space before when used as a trailing off or a kind of elliptical pause, a space before and after when using it to represent a literal omission of text. But let’s just say some typophiles have met gruesome ends at the hands of other who disagree with them.

No one knows from whence the ellipsis came or how it came to mean what it does.

The ellipsis is not beautiful because of its physical form—in fact I’ve never seen an ellipsis that is remarkable typographically. The ellipsis is beautiful, breathtaking even, because it’s a bit of typographical poetry. It’s a line break for prose… not a full stop, but not as exclusive and strong a pause as that brute, the comma. It’s a myth-level transformation of the simple period glyph into something more than the sum of its parts… I can’t help but love it.

Pilcrow

Another punctuation mark of mysterious origins. One common there is that it represents the apex of an evolution from the capitulum character in Latin:

The pilcrow appeals to crazy conservationists, who appreciate the paper it saves by not adding all that wasted space between paragraphs, the classicists, who like that it hearkens back to the days of Medieval scribes—who took their writing seriously—and myself, because of its perfect balance: it’s unique shape is unmistakable, it’s solid enough to stand out from text in a glance, and it has just enough decoration to appear both a little bit baroque and a little bit rock and roll.

It doesn’t hurt that if you squint a little it looks a bit like my initials: cll.

Question and Exclamation Commas

Here we have typographic fraternal twins, marks so obvious in their necessity I can’t believe they’re only 20 years old.

The question and exclamation commas really shine in that language construction most useful to the long-winded: the list. I adore!, worship?, and can’t resist the list. I’ll even put up with the pedantry of the Oxford Comma if it’s one of these little guys.

If only there were a way to put them to use on the keyboard.

Irony Mark

Unlike the SarcMark, which some yahoo copyrighted, or the so called snark mark (.~), which is more emoticon than punctuation, the irony mark is both philosophically and practically fulfilling. How can I resist⸮

The problem? In most—maybe all—typefaces the irony mark can only be produced through the hack of interchanging it with the rhetorical question mark (see how I did that up there at the end of the last paragraph?) The irony mark should be smaller and elevated from the baseline…

Related posts:

1. Listography 12: Favorite Lost Things
2. BAP 2004 (5): “Your friend’s arriving on the bus” by Craig Arnold
3. Links, Links, Links (weekly)

“Studies for Shylock” (Richard Parkes Bonington). Wikimedia Commons

The Merchant of Venice inspires many questions, not least of which is both who is the play actually about and who (or what) is that person really? The “merchant” of the title is Antonio but it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing this as a play about anyone but Shylock. I’d bet most people who haven’t read the play (and probably many who have) think of the title as referring to Shylock.

And what are we to make of Shylock anyway?

The Merchant of Venice was categorized as a comedy in the First Folio, but the rom-com characteristics are eclipsed by the drama of love, hate, mercy and revenge. Shylock as a villainous buffoon might be the reading that most directly suits Merchant‘s placement in the catalog, but it also seems the shallowest approach to one of the most complex characters in any of Shakespeare’s plays.

Yes, it’s funny—absurdly and sadly so—to see Shylock raving, “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!” seemingly unable to settle on which loss is worse. His materialist appetite finally knows only the bounds cleverly tied around him by Portia. But Shylock has also been deeply wronged. He is routinely abused by those who are happy to use him when they have to. And they abuse Shylock not just by their actions of borrowing when necessary, but directly as Antonio acknowledges he has and will again:

SHYLOCK
Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say
‘Shylock, we would have moneys:’ you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: moneys is your suit
What should I say to you? [...]

ANTONIO
I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.

Shylock is twisted and stunted, but unless we embrace a deep anti-semitism we have to admit he wasn’t destined to be so. Who can remain what they once were in the face of serious injury? He has been grievously wounded, as evidence not just by the famous “if you prick us, do we not bleed” speech, but more so by his sadness at Jessica’s theft of the ring he’d given his late wife:

SHYLOCK
Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal: it was my
turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor:
I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

Yes, it’s horrible and funny to witness Shylock so repetitively insist on having what is his by the “bond” between himself and Antonio. Shylock utters the word “bond” more then Al Gore used the term “lock box” in his famously terrible presidential debate. But there’s a heart-wrenching sadness in his desperation and his clinging to the bond, one thing he can be sure of and (arguably) until now could count on being sure of: money and the laws of commerce in a nation whose very survival depends explicitly on both.

I’m glad Antonio didn’t have to yield the pound of flesh, but the final degradation and destruction of Shylock is anything but funny. Taking away his money might have been itself a poetic justice, but forcing him to convert to Christianity? There’s something noble in Shylock’s refusal to renunciate his faith through all of those painful years…forcing him to do so at the end is a cruelty at least as great as Shylock’s intentions to gain a pound of Antonio’s flesh.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

The pound of flesh. What exactly is the pound of flesh that Shylock wants anyway? He proposes to cut it from Antonio’s breast “nearest his heart,” which I read to mean he wants to take Antonio’s heart. But might he be thinking of something a little more…personal? Merchant is rife with biblical allusions. Various bibles use the word “flesh” to refer to the penis, a practice Shakespeare adopted in his plays. Combine that with all of the myths in the conflict between Jews and Christians—that Jews circumcised Christians and used Christian blood for ceremonies—and I have to wonder…

Rings. There are a lot of rings in this play, literally and figuratively. Shylock’s ring provides crucial evidence of his humanity. The rings Portia and Nerissa give to Bassiano and Gratiano are both an important token of commitment and the heart of one of few truly comedic exchanges in the play. And the bawdy closing couplet spoken by Gratiano invokes rings as sexual euphemism: “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.”

The Christians aren’t so great either. Were it not for the tragic aspects of the play, it might seem funnier that Bassanio is a debt-ridden playboy who borrows money to buy his way to a rich heiress, that Jessica steals her dead mother’s ring on the way out the door, and that Nerissa only agrees to marry Gratiano if his close buddy Bassanio chooses correctly and wins the hand of Portia, thus ensuring him some wealth as well. Even Portia, who is a pretty flawless character who we sympathize with thanks to her father’s manipulation from beyond the grave, cheats and has her musicians play a song that clearly indicates which casket Bassanio should choose.

Music. I’m sure a book or two could be—and has likely already been—written about the symbol, motif, and role of music in The Merchant of Venice. But I’m not going to.

Related posts:

1. Reading Log: Henry IV, Part 2 (William Shakespeare)
2. Reading Log: Romeo & Juliet
3. Reading Log: Henry IV, Part 1 (William Shakespeare)

POV I: A few weeks ago I lost my therapist. Worse, I discovered she had passed well after the fact when a friend-of-a-friend mentioned she might apply for her vacant position.

POV II: A few months ago, during a self-imposed trial separation, my therapist broke things off with me. “It’s not you,” she said, employing the kind of therapeutic cliche she rarely indulged in, “it’s me.” She needed to do something new. She couldn’t be the person she needed to be and still be with me.

My therapist—I’ll call her K—isn’t dead, though judging from the tall, therapist shaped hole in my psyche she might as well be. She was a medical provider, so she (probably) didn’t break up with me, but being totally unaware of her other relationships makes it feel personal. The kind of people who have years of therapy behind and ahead of them are almost certainly the kind of people who either don’t hear the rational side of their brain telling them it’s not personal or who can’t believe it when they do.

K left her practice to study industrial design. I think. I can’t recall specifically because I was so shocked at the news I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation. Her choice of a new field—something involving designing and making things—isn’t surprising seeing that it’s completely the opposite of the always-incomplete work of therapy where success is intangible. I feel the same yearning at least once a week. Or every day.

But I was surprised she actually left. In the abstract, my own surprise shouldn’t be surprising. How could I know or predict it? My sum knowledge of her personal life is she was married (because that happened while we were together), she needed sleep or else she’d get really grumpy (because I have sleep issues and she once resorted to a personal story) and she was a runner (because I once ran into her at a coffee shop with a group of friends wearing skinny, stretchy athletic clothing and talking about some race or another). Maybe she left because I didn’t pay enough attention to her.

I was with a series of therapists before I met K. I could never commit. I dabbled with a few men, but that just wasn’t my thing. As Lord Macklemore would put it: I’ve liked the girls since I was Pre-K trippin’. I tried to make things work with therapists who were older, my age and sometimes even younger. I dropped a few who just weren’t smart enough. I gave up on a few who just wanted me for my insurance. I didn’t call some back because at the time I wasn’t serious about establishing anything long term.

I was skeptical about K at first too. She was a little too young to have sufficient experience, a little too pretty to be smart enough to slip through my well-established denial and practiced fictions. But somehow it worked.

I went through phases she assured me were not atypical, excessive wariness and withholding (and occasionally lying) then feeling like a john paying an escort for confession while secretly hoping she’d love me a little. For a time I thought I was in love with her. She handled it gracefully until I realized it was the kind of love someone with chronic back pain might feel for a great massage therapist. Who could be better than this person who gets it, who doesn’t judge and who doesn’t quit on me even when I’ve quit on myself?

Therapy isn’t like most other medical practice. Mental illness isn’t like physical illness. Therapy only works when the therapist and patient establish a connection, a relationship, something they build together over time. If I had a brain tumor I’d be content with any brain surgeon with a good reputation digging around up there. If that surgeon dropped dead (at any other time than in the middle of surgery) I’d be OK with another doctor taking over. A physical body is, in most respects, like other physical bodies.

Monkeying around in the often bleak part of my broken brain where my psyche hides out throwing critical feces around is different. I have no replacement for K. There are probably therapists as good as she was out there somewhere. There are many therapeutic fish in the sea. But the mere thought of trying to find one and go through the (years of) preliminaries to be sure she’s the (next) one makes me even more depressed. I don’t want to have to build up to the point I can tell someone else all the things I told K. I don’t want to have to try to build up to the point that I can hope, again, that I can be fixed.

None of those others will be her. It stings to know there’s someone running around out there who knows practically everything about me—certainly more than literally anyone else does—who thinks nothing of it or of me, who doesn’t miss me and who, thanks to a set of rules and conventions not dissimilar to those of therapist and patient, I can’t have contact with even to say goodbye. And she’d be the only person who could really understand that goodbye anyway.

This is all mixed up and rightly so. I don’t plan to revise this brain dump—I mean stream-of-consciousness piece—to forge a coherent picture or fake some grand conclusion where everything makes sense and that epiphany makes everything OK. There is no ending where where I look out over the city and know it’s my home, the tumor disappears of its own accord and I can dance like no one’s watching.

Because I can’t help but be angry. K said she’d never give up on me but she did. I can’t help but be hurt. I wasn’t fascinating enough to keep her inspired or even interested enough not to dump me in favor of designing water faucets. I can’t help but think maybe I am a hopeless case. Maybe I’m the one the young doctor couldn’t save, her professionally voiced inner-monologue leaving her so dispirited she left the profession, massive student loans, disappointed doctor father and all.

Maybe I can’t be saved because I’m a hostage to myself. Maybe this is the best I’ll be. Maybe this is the final alone in which I’m destined to live (too long).

Related posts:

1. On Suicide
2. Kindness and Generosity…Not.
3. Cruel to Be Kind

Anecdatally, those crazy kids nowadays love the Facebook.

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1. Hopiates
2. ASCRAP
3. Wowledge

One can be generally wise without specific knowledge; one can have great knowledge without any wisdom at all.

Lewis Hyde has deep wowledge of intellectual property as a phenomenon of culture, anthropology and technology.

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Romeo is an intellectual, impetuous, mercurial, idealistic, violent, love-sick man-child. In other words, he’s a smart teenager. He loves Rosaline ardently, or so he thinks, until he finds what is undeniably true love–or a kind of true love–with Juliet.

Adolescents are constantly trying to figure out how to be. When Romeo kisses Juliet for the first time, she notes that he kisses “by th’book.” What he feels at that moment is something that he has read about but that leads to a love he feels rather than one he has been trying on as it appears has been the case with Rosaline.

I understand Romeo because I’m not sure I ever stopped being some version of him. I suspect Romeo resonates with so many people because they are either eternally man-children, like myself, or some part of them wishes they were even as they are wincing while remembering the constant raw-nerve feeling of youth.

Juliet is, as girls often are in comparison to boys of the same age, at least more mature if not more intelligent. She teases Romeo for his “by th’book” comment but is soon enough nearly as lost in her own turbulent emotions as Romeo is. But where Romeo’s guilt and sadness diminishes greatly when it involves anyone other than Juliet, Juliet’s sadness over Tybalt’s death is significant enough to cause her to question her current circumstance, caught between love and family in the most direct way thus far in the play.

While the obvious theme of love in its various forms was the theme that I remembered most from my previous readings of Romeo and Juliet, what stood out for me now was was the heavy-handedness of the role of fate and the significance of the questions about Romeo’s masculinity.

The presumption that our lives are largely—if not completely—dictated by fate is everywhere in the play. Famously, the “star-cross’d” lovers’ relationship is “deathmark’d” in the prologue, but the emphasis is everywhere. Romeo sees his fate “hanging in the stars” as one of “Fortune’s fools.” Juliet foresees the grave as her wedding bed and notes she has an “ill-diving soul.” Friar Laurence blames “unhappy fortune” for the delayed letter whose tardiness ultimately results in the death of Romeo and Juliet.

But fate—or the perception of fate—isn’t necessarily a side-effect of violently passionate love and its consequences, or at least not only of “real” love as Romeo’s love for Juliet is as compared to his love for Rosaline. Romeo notes before going to the party where he meets Juliet that some “consequence yet hanging in the stars” is going to “bitterly begin his fearful date” that night. Does fate really play a role in every circumstance—does the universe toy with us all the time? And what of the smaller possibilities of fate that happen throughout the play: that Romeo knows an apothecary who can produce the poison, that he happens to be invited to the aforementioned party at all, that the letter is delayed, Romeo is tempted into the fight where he kills Tybalt, and on and on it goes. Are these fate or chance?

Of course at the meta-level they are neither…they are products of Shakespeare’s imagination. But things become dizzying rather quickly if we consider that possibility that “all the world’s a stage.” Fictional characters are by nature fateless, but are we?

The constant questions about Romeo’s masculinity didn’t register at all the first few times I read the play. Perhaps they only do so now because I’ve become so lost in my own readings that the meaning of just about everything in a play is potentially meaningful. I first took the exchanges about Romeo’s manhood to be the usual adolescent bravado of male banter. But while the exchanges with Mercutio before the part are in part comic, they aren’t solely a comedic interlude as is the exchange between the musicians after Juliet’s death. If the question that Romeo’s love for Rosaline has made him something less than a man—or what convention dictates a man should be—aren’t wholly serious, they become so when those same questions are considered when he is in a different, altogether too real, kind of love with Juliet. Nor is it just Romeo’s young friends who question him. After Tybalt stabs Mercutio, Romeo asks of himself whether “beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper soften’d valour’s steel,” referring to both masculinity as a concept and metaphorically to physical masculinity.

It may be my mood, my over-familiarity with the play or my routine exposure to elements of the play and characters in other media, but I came away from this reading of Romeo and Juliet feeling that it’s one of Shakespeare’s weakest efforts. Or, to be more accurate, for me at my age it is one of Shakespeare’s least effective. I have to believe it’s a flaw in myself because other plays that’ve been victim to as much more more media saturation, such as Hamlet, remain timeless; I am moved and inspired and get lost in my head every time I read one of them.

Finally, a few quotations that received my top-secret double underline + punctuation annotation:

▫ ▫ ▫

FRIAR LAURENCE
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

▫ ▫ ▫

ROMEO
[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

JULIET
You kiss by the book.

▫ ▫ ▫

MERCUTIO
You are a lover; borrow Cupid’s wings,
And soar with them above a common bound.

ROMEO
I am too sore enpierced with his shaft
To soar with his light feathers, and so bound,
I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe:
Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.

MERCUTIO
And, to sink in it, should you burden love;
Too great oppression for a tender thing.

ROMEO
Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.

MERCUTIO
If love be rough with you, be rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

▫ ▫ ▫

BENVOLIO
Then she hath sworn that she will still live chaste?

ROMEO
She hath, and in that sparing makes huge waste,
For beauty starved with her severity
Cuts beauty off from all posterity.
She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair,
To merit bliss by making me despair:
She hath forsworn to love, and in that vow
Do I live dead that live to tell it now.

BENVOLIO
Be ruled by me, forget to think of her.

ROMEO
O, teach me how I should forget to think.

Related posts:

1. Reading Log: King Edward III (Shakespeare)
2. Reading Log: Henry IV, Part 2 (William Shakespeare)
3. Reading Log: Coriolanus

DiDiodata has it absolutely right, absolutely wrong and covers most of the spectrum in between. Does National Poetry Month trivialize poetry? Yes. Of a particular kind. For a particular group of people. Does NaPoMo celebrate poetry? Yes. For a particular group of people. Does it stimulate genuine interest in reading and writing poetry? Yes. Again for a subset of people who engage with it. It’s a net gain to the art and practice, as far as I’m concerned. But then I don’t have the ego to pronounce what poetry must be to be valuable and how it must be approached to be respectful.

Poetry is and does many things, each of them valuable. The political. The epiphantic. The “uselessly” beautiful.

Nor do I see human attention as, in practical terms, a zero-sum currency. I see no reason to divide the calendar into discrete months during which our attention should only be drawn to one thing. After all, the slacktivism that characterizes the shallow attention given to Cancer Awareness Month is easily subject to the same criticisms of shallow treatment and slacktivism in the case of its own very important subject.

▫ ▫ ▫

Poetry is badly trivialized (and, in Donald Hall’s way of talking, made into the “McPoem”) when it’s designated an April activity which poets everywhere are expected to celebrate through token acts of writing. The gesture is fake & insincere, designed to turn it into a spectator sport. It’s just another way to institutionalize the poet’s calling, another aspect of the “spectacle” it’s become: writing class poetry, performance & publication are, in fact, all departments in Poetry Inc. to which poets pay their dues if they want to be recognized. In fact, it dishonours the lives of poets everywhere who’ve had to face imprisonment, death & real alienation through self-expression (Radnóti Miklós, Joseph Brodsky,Václav Havel, José Martí, Paul Celan, García Lorca, Forugh Farrokhzad, Liu Xiaobo etc.). I will celebrate a ‘poetry month’ only when poets in our part of the world have to face real persecution for their work.

April will always be to me only one thing: Cancer Awareness month. I’ve lost to cancer too many friends, relatives & acquaintances. I won’t dare for a moment to share this month with anything that has the potential to divert people’s attention away from the vital issues of cancer and cancer research. Compared to this poetry (certainly as it’s practiced in North America) is a frivolous pastime for people who are little able to appreciate what commitment to art really means.

—from: April is Poetry Month: but again not here, folks

▫ ▫ ▫

Photo: “Handwringing” – CC Image by Shmoo Mentality

Related posts:

1. National Poetry Month (2010)
2. In Defense of National Poetry Month
3. NoPoMo (or NoMoPo)