I've found the epigraph for my dissertation:
It is the constructive powers of language to conceptualize the world which have been crucial to man's survival in the face of ineluctable biological constraints, this is to say in the face of death. It is the miraculous--I do not retract the term--capacity of grammars to generate counter-factuals, "if"-propositions and, above all, future tenses, which have empowered our species to hope, to reach far beyond the extinction of the individual. We endure, we endure creatively due to our imperative ability to say "No" to reality, to build fictions of alterity, of dreamt or willed or awaited "otherness" for our consciousness to inhabit. It is in this precise sense that the utopian and the messianic are figures of syntax.--George Steiner, After Babel
It is also in this precise sense that the mantic is a figure of syntax--a syntax with which I've experimented in the past.
Here is my syllabus introduction to AVT 395 / Writing for Artists:
Welcome to AVT 395-–a writing class for AVT students that approaches language from a studio arts perspective. We’ll move back and forth between the writing lab and atelier over the course of the semester, treating text as both a verbal and visual medium. We won’t just write words--we’ll cut and paste them; paint them; collage them; deform, blog, compute, and code them; even eat them. Writing across media and technologies in this way goes hand in glove with writing across genres. We’ll read and in many cases produce encyclopedic entries, analytic essays, image descriptions, SMS poems, artists’ and treated books, cut-ups and codework. We’ll look at how the medium shapes the message: why you might want to text message a haiku but not an epic poem; or blog a movie review, your favorite rap lyrics—even a serial novel--but not necessarily the Freemason’s handshake or a multivolume treatise. And we won’t neglect grammar, the formal system underlying our use of language. Grammar too often gets a bad rap these days, in part because it is perceived as a straitjacket for renegade prose. But grammar, as we shall see, is as much an analytical, creative, and generative tool as it is a prescriptive tool.
An important theme of the course is the relationship between word and image. Traditionally that relationship has been expressed as a paragone, or contest, between the arts. But the word-image dynamic can be collaborative as well as adversarial. Sometimes, for example, one art survives by piggybacking off another: there are lost paintings that have descended to us in verse; and perhaps—just perhaps—spoken words in the grooves of an antique clay pot (trying to recover these archeological sounds is the task of an emergent field known as paleoacoustics).
Writing for Artists wouldn’t be complete without an excursion into the book arts. The book as material object figures prominently in the syllabus and coursework. We’ll establish a baseline definition of book and then do our best to test its tensile strain through a series of related readings and assignments.
1. Onesixty bills itself as "the world's first SMS text message literary magazine."
2. TransL8it! converts txt language into standard english or standard english into txt lingo.
3. Wired news covers the SMS poetry craze.
4. Tinywords sends a diurnal haiku to your mobile phone free of charge.
5. And finally, if you want to get down to the brass tacks of text messaging, check out this dictionary and glossary.
I slow cooked a three pound cut of chuck roast for dinner tonight in my trusty crockpot. My paranoia levels have consequently fluctuated all day: one minute I'm convinced that the crockpot is an irradiation chamber capable of nuking a stray prion or two into kingdom come; the next minute I'm just as certain it's a petri dish growing enough rogue protein molecules to spongify fifty head of cattle.
If my prose turns spongy in coming weeks, you'll know why.
Moo.