When words and their meanings got pulled apart by po-mo theorists, some people decided that signification (meaning) was old-fashioned and tacky, but the signs (words) were shiny bright and fun to toss around like glittery little trinkets. For other people, though, this pulling apart of things made the structure of meaning itself — the mutiple threads and interconnected nests — even more sexy and fun. Gary Kibbins, one of my favourite writers, belongs to the latter group. I worked on his book, Grammar & Not Grammar, briefly while I was at YYZ. Now that it is published I'm enjoying it very much again. Some day I will write a proper review. A single-author blog post is not enough. Luckily Von Bark is more babblicious than I. VB says: Gary Kibbins is clever and funny and has interesting things to say about art. I do not want to toss off some glib little comment, I really want to go into depth, but there are so many dimensions of possibility that I can't possibly sum it up in a few sentences. Gary Kibbins comprehends the mercurial nature of nonsense. The tyranny of narrative helps us to understand the world, so Kibbins embeds subtle threads of narrative in a gleeful indulgence of nonsense. Nonsense, the media he swims in, reveals truths about the world we live in that cannot be accessed by rational thought, kinda like 'Alicia in Terra Mirabili'.
Thanks, Sally and George. Glad to see it on there and out there,
Andrew James Paterson
Of course I should have mentioned that Andrew James Paterson edited the book and wrote the excellent foreword! Quote: Grammar, referring to either correct or incorrect grammar or syntax, is most definitely a controlling system and an indicator of class status and other significant stations. But, as Matias Viegener points out in his thoughtfully perceptive afterword, "Speculative Grammar" (2005), language is never static and grammarians thus divide into prescribers and descriptarians. "Bad" grammar indeed becomes accepted in specific contexts and even institutionalized. Witness the current tag team who grant themselves the privilege of speaking on behalf of the "free world." The current president of the United States is deemed "authentic" by many cynical pundits: courtesy of his mangled syntax, he is not an effete liberal intellectual. Meanwhile, the same "observers" consider the current British prime minister to be a serious statesman, simply because he speaks in lengthy but consistently complete sentences.
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When words and their meanings got pulled apart by po-mo theorists, some people decided that signification (meaning) was old-fashioned and tacky, but the signs (words) were shiny bright and fun to toss around like glittery little trinkets. For other people, though, this pulling apart of things made the structure of meaning itself — the mutiple threads and interconnected nests — even more sexy and fun. Gary Kibbins, one of my favourite writers, belongs to the latter group. I worked on his book, Grammar & Not Grammar, briefly while I was at YYZ. Now that it is published I'm enjoying it very much again. Some day I will write a proper review. A single-author blog post is not enough. Luckily Von Bark is more babblicious than I.
- sally mckay 2-26-2006 3:20 am
Thanks, Sally and George. Glad to see it on there and out there,
Andrew James Paterson
- anonymous (guest) 3-08-2006 11:49 pm
Of course I should have mentioned that Andrew James Paterson edited the book and wrote the excellent foreword! Quote:
- sally mckay 3-09-2006 1:10 am