“Plotnik's mantra of follow-up”

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[Some sort of Blogger strangeness at work.]

Mail chutes and phone booths

Diane Schirf has two more posts about “relics”: mail chutes and phone booths. Previously: letters and mailboxes.

“Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”

[What’s with the kerning letter-spacing?]

Poking around in a used-book store, I found a copy of Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (1982). The cover is worth a look, both for its once-modern, now-dated Helvetica and for the positioning of the book as a companion to The Elements of Style, also published by Macmillan. It’s not just the title or the Publishers Weekly blurb or the “From the publisher of.” The cover even looks like that of the then-current third edition of Strunk and White. (Plotnik went on to write Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style.)

Much of the advice in The Elements of Editing applies beyond the world of publishing. Consider “Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”: “NOTHING HAPPENS WHEN IT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN WITHOUT WELL-TIMED REMINDERS.” Too true. Some explanation:

Trust and good faith. The words mean something different in communications than in the rest of life. Editors show trust and good faith by signing and renewing contracts, not by expecting people to have infallible memories and priorities identical to their own.

New editors who understand this principle will soon develop into functionally compulsive pests. They needn’t be insufferable. After all, “routine follow-up” is generally accepted as good business practice, and a reminder can always be tactful. Editors must also learn to distinguish between those who need frequent or infrequent nudging, firm or soft nudging. They must learn the best timing for a nudge.

The Elements of Editing is a dryly funny book. I can imagine Larry David and an adversary arguing about the firmness or timing of a nudge.

[It’s called letter-spacing: see the comments for an explanation. Thanks, Daughter Number Three.]

Curbside Haiku

From the New York City Department of Transportation, Curbside Haiku is “a set of twelve bright, eye-catching designs by artist John Morse that mimic the style of traditional street safety signs.”

Curbside Haiku (NYC DOT)
PDF with twelve signs (NYC DOT)
PDF with street locations (NYC DOT)

[Be careful out there, everybody.]

Tocar fuerte

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

Tocar fuerte means knock hard. But you’d think that a psychic reader would know when a customer’s at la puerta.

[As seen while waiting at a red light on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles last week.]

Eames on reams

Charles Eames, in the 1981 film Goods:

“Reams of paper: haven’t you dreamed of reams of paper? It’s absolutely beautiful, beautiful, beautiful stuff. What you do with a ream of paper can never quite come up to what the paper offers.”

A related post
Twine and yarn (From an Eames-themed exhibit)

Twine and yarn

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

These balls and baskets are part of “Eames Words,” an exhibit focused on Charles and Ray Eameses’ “appreciation of the value of humble objects and useful tools.” The inspiration for these objects: Charles Eames’s comments on the beauty of clothesline, rope, and twine in the short 1981 film Goods (“From a three screen slide show made for a lecture on The New Covetables given by Charles Eames during his tenure as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, 1970-71”), one of three films on view in the exhibit. You can watch all three while sitting in a variety of Eames chairs. My favorite: the Eames Molded Plywood Lounge Chair with Wood Base. (List price: an unhumble $779.)

A Charles Eames thought from the exhibit: “Beyond the age of information is the age of choices.” Are we there yet? I think so. Thank you for choosing Orange Crate Art.

A + D Architecture and Design Museum (Los Angeles)
Eames Words (“Interactive postcard”)
Goods (YouTube)

Orange tree art

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

This orange tree stands in front of a house on a Los Angeles street, as if it were an everyday thing for an orange tree to stand in front of a house on a Los Angeles street. Which, in California, it is. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange mug art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art

[Elaine and I went out to Los Angeles last week for Thanksgiving. You can’t really reach out anywhere and pick an orange, but you can get bonus points if you know the source for that claim.]

John Lennon’s to-do list

“H.B.O. Guy coming between 3–5: BE THERE”: a John Lennon to-do list will soon be at auction.

Other posts with lists
“Ambercroombie & Flitch” (Ways to be cool)
Amy Winehouse’s to-do list (“When I do recorddeal”)
Blue crayon (Supplies for an imaginary camping trip)
Johnny Cash’s to-do list (“Kiss June”)
Review: Liza Kirwin, Lists (Artists’ lists)
Whose list? (A found list)

That (in)famous line

[I wrote what follows — on a line from Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’s song “Cabin Essence” — in October 2004. For a long time this essay was available at Jan Jansen’s vandykeparks.com, which site now redirects to Bananastan Records. Given the recent release of the Beach Boys’ The SMiLE Sessions, I thought I’d give my writing (slightly revised) a new home here. Why an (in)famous line? The Beach Boys’ Mike Love, dismayed by what he called the “acid alliteration” of Parks’s lyrics, demanded an explanation of the words “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield.” Parks could not oblige. That brief encounter has come to stand as an emblematic moment in the sad and tangled story of SMiLE. “Cabinessence” appeared on the Beach Boys” 1969 album 20/20. The song is titled “Cabin Essence” on Brian Wilson’s 2004 album SMiLE and on The SMiLE Sessions.]

“Anyone care to analyze the lyrics?”

In a recent rec.music.artists.beach-boys thread of that name, concerning the lyrics for SMiLE, someone wrote:

I’d like to see an analysis by someone trained in poetry, someone who is good at that sort of thing, like one of my English profs in college . . . No, it wouldn’t be definitive, but might provide some insights.

I’m a professor of English, so I guess I’d better say something.

The twentieth-century American poet Ezra Pound describes three qualities of poetic language: logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia, or the play of meaning, sound, and visual imagery. Take Van Dyke’s (in)famous line from “Cabin Essence”: “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield.” You can see the lyricist playing with meaning: is cries a verb, or a noun? It might seem that a crow is crying “Uncover the cornfield,” but there are no quotation marks in the printed lyric, so cries must be a noun. Uncover is more puzzling. What would it mean for cries to uncover a cornfield? Perhaps crows are cawing as they fly away, leaving the field as it was before they arrived and covered it. Uncover could be a surprising, logopoetic way to say that.

There’s considerable play of sound in this line: over and over, the long o in over and crow, the hard c in crow, cries, uncover, and cornfield, the repeated r sound in over, crow, cries, and corn. You could say that the line performs the repetition that it speaks of, making the same sounds, again and again. Just say the line a few times and you can hear its richness. It’s a mouthful, literally. And it has an emphatic rhythm:

DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM da da DUM DUM

That’s almost a line of Homer — dactyls (DUM da da) followed by a spondee (DUM DUM). (Homer’s lines though have six feet each, this one only five.) The long o sounds also echo roll and over in “Roll Plymouth Rock.” So this line is rich in melopoeia in itself and in relation to another part of SMiLE.

As this line suggests, Van Dyke’s lyrics are often a matter of logopoeia and melopoeia: “The diamond necklace [a queen?] played the pawn,” “hand in hand some . . . handsome,” “canvass the town . . . brush the backdrop” (“Surf’s Up”). That sort of play with language is a large part of the pleasure of poetry. Such play may not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s what I see (and love) in Van Dyke’s lyrics, along with witty cultural shorthand (for instance, the reference to Ramona in “Orange Crate Art”).

As for phanopoeia, the visual image of crows leaving a field might not seem like much, but Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is at least one precedent for poetry of the ordinary, everyday bird. Making a striking image out of everyday stuff is one thing that modern American poets (William Carlos Williams, for instance) tend to do very well. In the context of the first section of SMiLE, the image of crows leaving a field might suggest nature in flight from the European presence in (and devastation of) North America — the presence that has brought the “ribbon of concrete,” the bicycle rider, railroad tracks, truck-driving men, mechanized agriculture, and an empire of homes on the range.

None of what I’ve written is what the line “means,” in any simple way, but it’s often more useful with poetry to ask what a line does, or what it evokes, or what it gives a reader to find pleasure in. To say that the line means that crows are leaving a field is in fact to kill everything that’s interesting in the line. That’s the kind of approach that literary critics used to call “the heresy of paraphrase” — the reduction of the poem to a bare statement, as if the point of reading poetry were to cut away the beauty of language to get to some sort of message.

And none of what I’ve written is a matter of guesswork about what the line “really” means, or what its writer “really” meant, or what Van Dyke was thinking when he wrote the line. Those ways of thinking about poetry begin with a misleading model of what it means to write, a model in which what the poet says and what the poet means are two distinct matters, the first happening on the page and the second happening in the poet’s consciousness (and thus unavailable to us). A much more workable approach is to think of the poet’s meaning as something we construct, by bringing to bear as much attentiveness and as wide a range of relevant reference as possible.

In an essay written last year for the SMiLE tour booklet, Van Dyke professes still not to know what “Over and over . . . ” means. That’s indeed a respectable position for a poet to take. John Ashbery, whom many readers would consider the greatest living American poet, has said that he has no idea what it is he’s doing when he writes. The work of making and the work of noticing and explaining are two different things. I tend to distrust poets who are willing to explicate their work, and I cringe a little when someone asks “What did you mean by that?” It’s for the reader to make something of what he or she reads, and that’s what I’ve been doing here.

As I write these words, it’s autumn in the American midwest, the cornfields are down, and I’ve begun to notice crows everywhere. I noticed them in field after field while riding the train home from Chicago, where my wife and I heard SMiLE earlier this month. When I put in a daily walk and bring SMiLE on my Walkman, I hear crows loud and clear along with the music (and along with the animals of “Barnyard”). That’s another dimension of poetry — its capacity for changing your perceptions of the world.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts