A Prismatic View of Grice’s Maxims
I’ve often turned to my friend, M. Webster, for guidance during confusion. Getting to the bottom of a complex matter or phenomenon, for me, can’t happen without a careful analysis of the words people use, words people own and can do whatever they want with. But words break down at the worst times when abused and misused to confuse or obfuscate or deployed with neglect without thought. Only by scoping out the ruptured pipe or soaping up the tire to find the leak can the sewer flow or the bicycle bike. Word surveillance is a tedious necessity when one aims to separate what was said from what was meant. Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes. In the push and pull of the circuits of life, what words are used, by whom, how many, how, why, and when carry different kinds of cargo. Of course, you own your words, you’ve probably made some…
On Defining Your Terms
Golden oldies… golden years… Mary Ann texted me the other day something about the “golden years,” characteristically ironic, as if to say ‘keep your head on a swivel,’ ‘what you get, what you get, don’t fro a fit.’ She had read a then-recent blonde boy post and was encouraging me to keep on communicating with the world. I know, I know—an interpostal deictic reference. Autonomous text is an oxymoron. So, characteristically, I googled my old friend Merriam Webster, whom I became intimate with in fifth grade. What I read buoyed me up in a perverse way. First, Merriam lists it as a plural noun, severed from the semantic fields of a single golden lucky year, a fluke alignment of the stars reserved for the fortunate few. We all get golden years. Second, M. Webster offers to use it in a sentence, assuring me of the living status of the plural…
Eavesdropping on somebody else’s zone
Memories of childhood recalled in old age are brittle. When I write about the blonde boy and his experiences in these posts, I believe in spiritual truth even as I know full actual historical truth is beyond my reach. Too many people have died and reduced collective memory. The blonde boy from the ravine grew to become a drummer and a guitar player; my brain recorded the growth in my muscles and bones even as my memory created a blonde boy mythology with real seeds in the soil of the past—a blue plastic uke from a carnival, a pair of 2B drum sticks, a photo of the First Impressions in the local paper. Not much to go on. Half a mile north, up the gravel road, along the creek separating gentle hills from the valley and the gravel, a trough of clear glittering water in summer that flooded in storms;…
Late August under a Fig Tree
As I continue to gain experience not only as the drummer, the guitar player, sometimes the bass player, and the backup vocals trapped in an iPad, but also as the roadie, the booker, the baker, and the candlestick maker, in Euphemism’s Prism, I see more clearly that live music is an ambiguous phrase with at least three senses. There is the live audience, feeding energy and purpose to the live musician(s). The audience, of course, cannot reside on a track in an iPad, but must be physically in the room, sometimes dancing, smiling, holding hands, etc. Then there is the live musician(s), serving up a chef’s concoction of sounds through body and breath, joyfully using the tools of the art they have honed. Then there is the group together on common ground that holds fast only for this event, cannot be replicated though it can be filmed or recorded, the…
In the Zone of Proximal Development
Winding its way up a gentle, tree-lined hill behind the house, a foot path beckoned the blonde boy who was coming through the weeds along the creek one morning in the 1960s. The last day of third grade passed a week ago, a sad day for him, marking the start of a long, sticky, lonely summer. He would spend many of his upcoming waking hours in the shade of the trees in a clearing at the crest of the hill where the foot path ended, where he had built a fort from the wreckage of a billboard a tornado had obliterated the previous summer. He’d seen a funnel cloud whip through the ravine, roaring like a train, spinning objects like toy tops, alert to high danger, oblivious of the treasure it was bringing him. Miscellaneous pieces of billboard were scattered all along Route 6, building material for a fort. In…
Mr. Tambourine Man (Part II—Antimetabole)
What do Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Bob Dylan have in common? Together with their power to stir emotions with words, each writer received a Nobel Prize for Literature. My selection of three White men to put on the stage with Dylan is not intended to suggest that I believe this 2016 prize and its bestowing institution are elements in some sort of Western, macho, racist, language-oppressive, canonical-coddling, spiffy, symbol-crash conspiracy, floating in history on a stagnant Aristotelian vanilla hegemony, a band of elite gypsies hiding a broken flag behind a flashing ring bogged down in a magnetic field, struggling to disconnect some cables from a lost audience of persistent, serious readers—and reconnect with the new thinking in a trumpian world where a folk singer from the Sixties rates right up there with the top of the class. Not. To quote my friend, Joe, “indeed,” Svetlana Alexievich from…
Antimetabole: Music in Literature, Literature in Music—Part 1
Used back to back in reverse, the repetition of words can compress a lot of meaning into a small space: Love of philosophy? Philosophy of love? I turn on the burner and melt butter in a pan. I scent the onion, in layers, and I begin to cry. ‘Philo’ means ‘love,’ the outer layer, and ‘sophy’ means ‘wisdom.’ ‘Love’ means ‘love’, of course. Love of the philo of wisdom? Philo of the wisdom of love? I shake my head and wooden spoon the sauté. Tear it up, language falls apart. Take it in pieces, it makes a puzzle. Regardless, as these words sit in the saddle of antimetabole, as we cling to words as horses fording the big river from one consciousness to another, ‘loving’ philosophy doesn’t mean you agree with or even have a particular philosophy or read philosophy or write philosophy. Google it or whatever. ‘Love of philosophy’…
Magic Made in the Moment
Saturday night at 36 Handles in El Dorado Hills, where Euphemism’s Prism played its first quasi-post-pandemic gig, was the setting for the performance of some musical magic that helped me understand more deeply what I’ve thought of forever as a binary choice. Music is either a) live or b) recorded—I’m not counting music written on the page as “music,” though my bracketing of sheet music is arbitrary, I realize. Literate musicians do “hear” music through their eyes as they read it, but I’ll leave that avenue for later. Even a week before the gig, magic happened. I own an electric 12 string guitar built almost two decades ago, one of only 1,000 to have been built by a master builder. I’ve wanted to get my hands on another one, but they show up for sale but rarely, and finding one at a brick and mortar would be like a needle…
Magical Moments and Music
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on music, its making, its meaning, well, its magic. Before Covid (BC), I hadn’t fully appreciated the nuances and subtleties of “live” vs. “recorded” music. I remember Three Dog Night live in Chicago around 1969 performing in a cavernous warehouse, long hair twining through giant strobe light flashes, dancers alone, in pairs, and in clusters, obviously tripping on one thing or another. Try a Little Tenderness sounded like the recording, passionate, powerful, but it was bigger, not just louder; more raw, gutty, gritty, sweeter. It took until 2020 for me to plumb the depths of this insight as I pursued my second childhood dream of making a last stand with a band—hence, Euphemism’s Prism. Once the dam broke in my consciousness, all of these memories of bands and musicians came flooding in—audio memories of live bands (Beach Boys anyone?), old analog tapes of Small Circle of…