Embedded Files
That's the cross between "punctured" and "punctuated"; I'm being parenthetically skewered by my em dash (that most problematic of marks) and I don't give a colon o'scopy. And I'll settle down in a bit and tell you all about it.
I got a new book.
Big deal, I know, but this really is a NEW book. I often get books in digital Kindle format. I sometimes buy used paperbacks from Thrift Books (Jeff Bezos and Amazon are hurting over that). I even occasionally pick up a discarded book from the "help-yourself" shelf in my apartment lobby. This is a NEW BOOK! Hardcover. It's called On the Mark: A History of Punctuation from Ancient Egypt to the Emoticon. I was an English teacher in a former life. Be still, my beating heart.
I wasn't going to. Buy it, that is. Friend Nora in Vancouver has all the books I would ever need to borrow with just a short ferry ride, and what she doesn't have I could fly to Ottawa for. I still know those kinds of people who have libraries that would make the props managers of Downton Abbey envious. But a book on the history of punctuation? Eat your hearts out, Vanvouver and Ottawa.
So, this will be a bumpy conversational ride as I find myself lured into the pages of my NEW book with its various chapters. Where was I?
Did you know talking preceded writing? Silly me; of course you did. And if the talker were to be delivering a lecture, or sermon, or poem, they would need (or the original author would have included instructions concerning) knowledge about emphasis. It might be considered passive-aggressive oversight for the instruction of reciters-to-come.
"The lesson in this parable, my children, is what?"
The speaker should give some emphasis at the end of this utterance, perhaps by more forcefully expelling the breath. I know. I'll stick in a dot as a stop sign and then make a wavy squiggle above it to tell them to give some force to the outbreath. Enter the question mark? Yes.
Even earlier, when the vocal stream of scoeps and tribal history-keepers got set down on hides or papyrus, it was one long screed, just the way a vocal stream is. Enter the word breaks, those bits of white space after each "word". This could be considered the first punctuation mark. Don't overdo it, though.
Dr. Florence Hazrat dedicated her book to "all the punctuation-inventors across the thousands of years of its illustrious history from ancient Babylon to modern-day Japan." And her encyclopedic knowledge takes us from the pictographs of clay impressions of commercial transactions (always business before leisure) to the papyrus scolls at the library of Alexandria and on to Gutenburg and Caxton et al.
And that brings me to these poems. I may have mentioned somewhere along the line that I once taught English. I can say that now because the consequences are much diminished. They used to be embarrassing. I would have conversations like these:
"So, you teach English. What do you think Tolstoy was saying about totalitarian regimes through his use of climate metaphor in his War and Peace?"
"Unh, I've never read it. Probably never will."
"Well, closer to home, there's the question of accessibility with Joyce's Ulysses."
"Yeah, never accessed by me for sure."
But now? (forceful expulsion of breath!) I'm old and stupid and no one any longer starts conversations with me about literature-type thingies. The most I get are requests from myopic friends (more and more of them lately) to read a price tag on a grocery item or a box of beer. But once, I taught poetry and I specifically lectured on the reading of poems. It was simple.
Don't do drama! The poet just wants the words put out there; the emotion is up to the listener. If you want to know what emotion the poet hoped would be experienced, check the appearance of the poem. Punctuation, font size, typeface, spacing, arrangement of line breaks will all constrain (that's the key word) the presentation, but very few of those will affect the auditory component. Yes, some poets are graphic artists and their works are designed as pieces of visual as well as auditory art and may call for shouting or hissing, but those are not the norm. Generally, when you read it, don't do drama.
Here's two poems, from different eras, and they show what simple layout can do for the experiencing of a piece of text. You can find other examples in my web site "free stuff" section with the powerpoint or pdf of "Poetry & Poetics" Look at the difference that layout with punctuation made for Carl Sandburg's piece.
Grass - by Carl Sandburg (as simple text)
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
Grass (as Sandburg wrote it)
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
And I had a go at layout to present one of mine. This cannot be read aloud with the same effect as just visually taking it in. It was a hard day at the chalkboard when I did it.
Academic Dyspepsia – D Peach
But I have this NEW BOOK. And I'm learning all sorts of things about the expression of this language of ours. Marshall McLuhan, I think, called it an organized stutter and for sure it's the punctuation that translates the stutter into prose. I won't do the synopsis thing here, except for one item (or maybe two).
Going back to the question mark? Remember the Valley Girl speech of the 90s. Every utterance ended on a rising inflection, what the people who study such things call an "uptalk" or more formally (because they're still in the teaching business) a "high-rising terminal". The Wiki entry is interesting reading – well, I found it interesting – in that it notes how widespread was/is the phenomenon when we just thought it was spoofing those pretentious teenyboppers from California. Try some of it on family members right now and see how long they endure before the spritzer bottles come out.
What's a spritzer bottle? you ask. Dated myself, didn't I. Look it up - the pictures will be worth the effort. You might want "Three Stooges" but you'll get the idea. Back to punctuation.
There are two punctuation signs whose use is controversial today, besides the semi-colon; although I personally love using the semi-colon. Those two are: the em dash and the Oxford comma. Don't be afraid; they won't bite. See, back there, a simple comma would have done, but I'm a semi-aficianado. Em-dash, here we come.
It's the width of a capital letter M—your Mac will give you one with a shift+option+hyphen—and don't bother with spaces before or after. There you have it—no thanks needed—but don't overdo this one either. Editors and even just your casual readers—the ones you write letters or emails to—will bring out the real or metaphorical spritzer bottles. You'd like to introduce me to one now? There's an en-dash too, but I'm outa here.
Why did Oxford get to stick their name onto a punctuation mark as common as the common comma? Well, Wiki has a lot to say on the matter, but you just want to know the juicy bits. If you have a list of things such as intoxicants, dinosaurs, ex-spouses, and curmudgeonly teachers you have known, you could use a comma before that "and" or not. That would be the Oxford—or Harvard—comma, and its use or omission might change the meaning of your sentence. Try it. Some publications tell their writers to use it (before the final "and" in a list) while other forbid it—important proviso coming up—except where its use is necessary for clarity. Talk to us, Dr. Hazrat.
On 15 August 1968, William S. Burroughs, an openly bisexual drug addict and a violent alcoholic, had a fist fight over punctuation in front of a historical textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, with his friend Jack Kerouac, a French-Canadian chain-smoking thrice-married bad boy. Kerouac refused to accept the necessity of the noble Oxford comma. Burroughs, a Harvard graduate convicted of fatally shooting his wife in the head, insisted on the mark's kingly place among all of punctuation. The brawl got so dangerous that the police arrested the frenemies and brought them to the station, where, according to the plaque commemorating the event, Burroughs 'corrected the spelling and grammar of the police report'.
This is a juicy story befitting the two slightly eccentric authors who alongside Allen Ginsberg spearheaded the Beat Generation. And it's untrue.
Considering the Oxford comma's ability to ruffle feathers, the anecdote is plausible, and it would fit with the tragic end of Kerouac who passed away a year after the supposed incident, from cirrhosis several weeks after sustaining injuries in another drunken bar fight in Florida. But the fake clash has persisted because of Kerouac's notorious attention to detail, including regarding punctuation with which he had a love-hate relationship, finding it both cumbersome and germane for what he was trying to do. Kerouac was completely and utterly addicted to writing, and would certainly defend his ideas by force if necessary.
Kerouac was a figurehead of the Beatniks, a social and literary movement of the 1950s, clustering around California and New York where their bohemian lifestyle caused outcry among polite society. Jack and his friends like Burroughs and Ginsberg understood themselves as 'beat', that is, weary of the numbing, conformist routine the American system trapped its people into; instead, they were hungry for genuine lived experience and expression, improvisation, and spontaneity.
And Kerouac practised what he preached, criss-crossing the United States and Mexico from east to west, from north to south, and back again several times between I948 and 1950, travelling by bus, hitch-hiking, on foot, working in fields, borrowing money, going hungry, making love with different women, and always moving on, moving forward, whipped by his insatiable desire to know every inch of what there is to know in this life.
Between 2 and 22 April 1951, Kerouac strapped himself to his typewriter and banged out a "full-length novel" of I25,000 words, as he wrote to his friend Neal Cassady in a letter a month later: the 'story deals with you and me and the road'. The book might have been done within a magical spell of three weeks, but it took the author six full years to get it published, and when it finally appeared on the shelves of bookshops across America, it had been rejected many times, and severely edited, although Kerouac had fought tooth and nail to protect its original form.
I know it was a long excerpt, but she tells great stories and I just had to tack on those last three paragraphs. That "original form" of Kerouac's On the Road was a 120-ft scroll of typewritten sheets taped together to feed through his typewriter as one long paragraph with very few punctuation marks. It was six years before any publisher was willing to touch it, and then the editors cut it by half and inserted, in Kerouac's words, "thousands of needless commas", probably some Oxford ones among them.
But that was my last comma, Oxford or otherwise. I'll let you know when I find some more juicy gossip in these pages I'm perusing whilst pondering some future bloggables.
Google Sites
Report abuse