Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 12

queer God

logical sentiments

method of tenacity

Beethoven Syndrome

intrasentential codeswitching

koine

community of inquirers

informational necessity

congruent lexicalization

psychophysics of belief

Recently Reading #1: Bryon Dudley

In this series I'll be corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we've been reading lately.

Bryon Dudley has been an avid reader for as long as he can remember and became an avid writer not long after that. He reads everything from comic books to post-modern literature to technical manuals, has most of a Master's degree in American Literature, and once taught high school English and creative writing. He writes about music and culture and lives in Ames, Iowa, with his wife, two cats, and a neurotic dog. 

Nate: So, Bryon, what've you been reading recently?

Bryon: I've been reading The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. I'm about 3/4 of the way through it. It's the first book by this author I've read. It's the first book of The Broken Earth Trilogy, which is a fantasy series. It takes place in what seems to be an entirely different world, made up of one continent, and is about orogenes, who are people that can control the earth. They can feel vibrations between tectonic plates and either increase or decrease them, that sort of thing. There's a couple of different story threads, each following a different female orogene. The plot sort of moves slowly, but I'm liking it quite a bit because it's great world building, and I'm a sucker for that. 

Nate: Nice, that sounds great. You think you might keep going with the series?

Bryon: At the moment, I think I'm planning on reading the whole trilogy, yeah. I bought the second book anyway, so I'm at least THAT committed hahaha.

Nate: Okay, for my first book I'm going with one that's very relevant to me and this blog, which is Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan. I obviously have a unique interest in this topic, but Duncan is writing for a general audience and I think it'd be illuminating to anyone who is interested in book studies or literary history. 
 
It traces the history of book indexes all the way from the pre-history of ancient libraries and monastic concordances into the invention of the printing press, the proliferation of periodicals, and all the way up to our present-day uses of search engines. I never really appreciated that Google works by creating an index of the internet and then searching that index when you type in a term.  
 
Duncan shows how developments in indexing paralleled, and in many ways drove, changes in reading habits and the uses of books. When you have an index, you can do research by looking up a specific term and not have to read the entire book searching for that term. Some scholars have historically objected to that type of reading and those concerns are mirrored in contemporary anxieties about Google making us dumber by letting us look up any tidbit and abstracting it from its context.

Especially heartening for a professional indexer is Duncan's defense of human versus computer indexing. When you tell someone you're an indexer they often say "can't AI do that?" And while, yes, AI can do an approximation of indexing, a truly useful index is created by a reader for a reader, and that sensibility isn't as digitizable as just "find-the-words-and-put-the-page-numbers-next-to-them." To illustrate his point, Duncan includes part of a computer-generated index for this book as an appendix and its pretty funny, it makes the differences with the actual human-created index by Paula Clarke Bain very clear. 

 
Oh, and an inspiring nugget: Virginia Woolf was an indexer! She made indexes for nonfiction books published by her and her husband's Hogarth Press. She's one of my favorite writers so it was very cool to see quotes from her about being mired in the indexing doldrums. I was like, "I've been there, Virginia Woolf, I've been there."

Bryon: That's pretty interesting about indexing, I hadn't thought of Google as a giant online index like that before, but that makes complete sense. I can see where letting AI index things would lead to problems with context and relevance for sure. Just searching for words in a written work would be somewhat useful, but it probably isn't going to be entirely what you're looking for. 
 
And that's amazing that Virginia Woolf was an indexer, wow! I never would've guessed that from her writing. 
 
Nate: What else have you been getting into lately?
 
Bryon: Outside of the N. K. Jemisin novel, I've been reading a book that walks through the Gentle Giant albums, track by track. Gentle Giant are a progressive rock band that were fairly popular in England and Europe, but never really struck paydirt here in the States. Their songs are pastoral but intricate, and I've been getting more into them, so I wanted to read up on them a bit more and dig a little deeper. 
 
I also started what is essentially a textbook about music production in Cubase, the software I use for recording. It's pretty dry, and a tome of technical writing, but I'm also really excited to see if there's something more I can learn. 
 
And I read a ton of comic books. Right now, I'm reading a run of new Avengers comics. They've had the same writer for the last four years or so, and he's wrapping up a huge story that he's planted the seeds for along the way, so it's fun to see that come into fruition. And I'm also on a run of Doctor Strange comics from the early 70s. I'm a sucker for that stuff, where comics were just starting to experiment with getting a little less square and a little more weird. You can tell it's right when writers and artists were just starting to experiment with drugs lol.
 
Nate: My son is getting into comic books and I'm unfortunately not well-versed in that medium at all. He actually was just expressing some interest in Avengers comics. What would be a good place to start there? Could that new series you're reading a launching point, or should he go back further?
 
Bryon: I'd say for Avengers comics it might be better to go back a bit. The really early stories are pretty dated, so I wouldn't go back to the beginning, but a good place to start would be a story called the Kree/Skrull War. It's been published in trade paperback format a bajillion times and should be widely available. That one gives a good overall background of the Avengers team, throws them into the middle of an intergalactic war, gets a little cosmic, and plants the seeds for tons of stories after that. 

Nate: I’ll try that! Another notable read for me recently was Yukio Mishima's short story "Patriotism." I checked out the Criterion DVD of the film version from the library and it came with a nice booklet that included the short story among other writings. I'm not endorsing Mishima's politics at all or claiming to understand all the historical context behind them, but this story and the film (which he directed and starred in) are very powerful. 
 
It's a stark narrative about a soldier's preparations to commit seppuku (a gruesome ancient form of ritual suicide) as a symbolic protest against Japanese modernity intended to demonstrate support for the Emperor, who was no longer the primary source of power in Japan after World War II, a development that disturbed Mishima. He enlists his wife as a witness and entrusts her with following him in death. 
 
It's especially chilling to read this and see him act it out on film because Mishima actually did this in 1970, ten years after the publication of the story: he disemboweled himself as a political gesture. In Paul Schrader's film Mishima:A Life in Four Chapters there's a scene showing Mishima acting in and directing the film adaptation and it looks exactly like the original film. 

 Mishima was interested in collapsing the divide between literature and world, representation and action, "the pen and the sword." The similarities between "Patriotism" and its author's biography are a clear demonstration of that idea. But, again, this is not an endorsement! 

Bryon: I agree with you on the Mishima stuff - it's super compelling, even though I don't agree with his politics. Still, you have to admit, he was very, very committed to his worldview! He was not messing around in the slightest. And the film was incredible.

 

Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 11

missionary linguistics

hydrohegemony

Dung House

catachresis

horizontal violence

Rahab's Reading Prism

geoeschatology

ambiveilance

heteroglossia

Christian slavery

Real Terms, No Context: Vols. 1-10: The Alphabetized Collection

The Abode of the Message

Acadian Orogeny

accidental war

advanced sort techniques

afterlife doctors

agentic space

algorithmic catastrophes

allele surfing

audit culture

autochthonous demons

bear lexicon

blend wall

Bologna mint

bone of truth

Borking

Chthulucene

coercive ideation

concept laundering

concordant discordance

constant capital

cooperative resentment

cradle nones 

D-dimer

doxic positing

dragons of inaction

edible memory

Emergency Liquidity Facility

extramasticatory tooth use

follicular stimulation

fossilized smoke

Friends of Fish

Garden of Cosmic Speculation

ghost states

gossip pole

grog shop

hedonist calculus

heterogeneous fluctuation

hypnogogic jerk

iconoplastic deconstruction

imaginary phallus

immanent totality

impotent ennui

inductive etceteration

ischematic infarct

krumping

laminar flow

lateral knowledge

lid-like heaven

machinic subjectivity

mechanical organicism

medical food

mental fences

metapolitical triangulation

meteorological warfare

mindblindness

mnemic reveries

mnemonic fragmentation

mortality salience

the mouthly

nested soul

neurocranial globularity

nihilating comportment

nonhuman charisma

noseover pattern

nostalgic fabric

OTHER cells

pathos of facts

phallic shine

phallophanies

plagal cadence

plastiglomerate

pluralistic ignorance

present absence

priestly stools

psychiatric brainhoods

pyro-osteomancy

Raisin Administrative Committee

render farm

reputational entrepreneurs

self-concealing concealment

serene certainty

silly archive

squarks

symbolic bankers

Tariff of Abominations

temporal diremption

this-izers

tonal fugitives

true untruth

undulatory mechanics

unisonance

unthinged ground

the unthought

vague alterity

vegetal creativity

ventriloquation

viral resurrection

yogurt run

"Yours Truly: Johnny Dollar"

Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 10

reputational entrepreneurs

nostalgic fabric

meteorological warfare

lateral knowledge

Garden of Cosmic Speculation

autochthonous demons

gossip pole

unisonance

mnemonic fragmentation

silly archive

Acronym Collectors Tribune (ACT): issue three

 ART

     See assisted reproductive technologies

MODE

     See motivation and opportunity and determinants

ASAP

     See American Society of Adaptation Professionals

RAGE

     See Retire All Government Employees

GnR

     See gonadotropin-releasing

Sub-entry Sampler 4

moose

     as metaphor

evil

     as non-being

twinning

     folic acid in

Form

     of Couch

reality

     as thinglet