In our relentless quest to dominate the universe, we are experimenting with site map generators. Please ignore this post if you are human. If geek, what have you tried, and what works?

In the current New Republic, there’s a thorough and interesting review (by John Banville) of the first volume of Beckett’s letters. It runs to 752 pages, costs US$50 and there are to be three more volumes. Beckett stipulated that, of the 15,000 letters he wrote, only those should be printed which related to his work. An impossible brief. It looks like a very long wait for the complete correspondence, an expensive investment in the meantime, and to hell with the general reader.

The review quotes a passage which will no doubt go straight into the Beckett primers.

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

As Banville says, this is the kind of pronouncement that has enthralled critics of modernism and it’s gravy for the deconstructionists.

? yet reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language “best used where it is most efficiently abused”? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?

One day, I hope, someone will be able to trace the full variety of motives for the twentieth century’s attacks on the organised and ordered word and the various goals of the attackers.

Oh, Banville gave me an idea for the next Wordability competition. Sharpen your keyboards.

Dr Gillard, not content with his Belloc quotation, has come up with this quatrain (see his comments on our previous post).

Writing verse using words of two letters
Is a thing that?s not done by my betters.
But I must here have something to show -
So it is up to me to do so.

Nine two letter words! The Wordability judges deliberated long past their bedtimes: was this an actual English poem? Some said no, others didn’t hear the question. But the oldest judge pointed out that it was (a) unquestionably a poem (b) in English, even if (c) line 3 resembled something he once saw on a Serbo-Croatian desk calendar.

We do not expect to see a better entry or a wittier last line. If Dr Gillard would forward us a stamped addressed envelope his prize will be on the way.

Therewith ye ben so mery and jocounde
That at revel when I see you daunce
It is an oyntement unto my wounde,
Though ye to me ne do no dalliaunce.

The refrain of this bit of Chaucer’s ‘Rosemounde’ contains six two-letter words in a row.

Find a line of English poetry with seven.

Get respect in the workplace

Vote ‘Yes’ to industrial action!

See how easy it is?

Spatial common reasoning is strongly related to sight sense. Many times we reference our position with what we see, although we don?t be exactly in that place. ? We call this the source-target problem and we have added a new spatial relationship, hasNiceViewsOf, to model this problem.

Geoconcepts Ontology v1.2 & v1.2_swrl

A Song

Would’st thou once view Celia’s charms
Freed from fear of Love’s alarms?
Then be thou source, and target she,
NiceViewsOf her will ravish thee.

Tho’ thou be near, and she be far yet
Cupid’s dart will find its target
Which, striking true, then hath such force,
It turneth target into source.

What’s reason then? what then is sight?
When source and target merge by night.
Let spatial reasoning others chuse -
This far excels the Nicest Views.