Amphigory or Allegory

As I've said before, an amphigory is something pithy that's actually nonsense. And an allegory is a story. So, I drew two pictures and which is which?

Possible caption for picture on the left: "Daphne Escaping From Apollo", illustrating a Greek myth.

Possible caption for picture on the right: "Scorns of Outrageous Fortune", illustrating a phrase from Hamlet's famous speech.

But are either of them really allegories or amphigories? Does the state of having meaning rely only upon the artist/poet having premeditated the meaning (as in picture 1)? Or does a picture that was created thoughtlessly, but happens to be characterized by its name to invoke certain trails of thought also allegorical (as in picture 2)? Can you separate the meaning of the painting from the interpretation and the intention?

In The Doldrums

"depressed, dull and listless" Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer

Often, I'm in the doldrums for no particular reason. "In the doldrums" is a phrase that refers to boredrom as described the lack to tumultuous weather in a region (the doldrums) near the equator that has very mild winds and tides, hencing being slightly boring to meteorologists. But, how does boredom come about?

For about 10 years, I had a routine. Every day, after school and before dinner, I would practice on my flute for anywhere from 1 to 3 hours. But, all the sudden I stopped. Perhaps it's the deluge of other things going on in life, but this doesn't seem to be the case because, on impulse, I bought a violin and started to learn how to play. It appears that I simply got weary of playing the flute.

It seems a waste of 10 years of practice, but there are a few things I've discovered because of it. One: musical skill is somewhat universal because learning to play the violin turned out to be easy, even without a teacher. Two: when you get to a certain level of finesse, it's easy to get bored because it's harder to improve. This is true in other things as well. For runners and swimmer, it's particularly difficult to loose that 1 crucial second when you already run or swim very fast. It's the same with music. When you reach a certain level of playing, there's a sort of dilemma. Option A: you could continue to play at the same level, but this won't bring you to the next level and sooner or later, since you're not improving, your skill deteriorates. Option B: you could try the next level, but this is generally very difficult and will require much more time that option A. To give an idea to how much more time, I'll note that most of the pieces I was looking to play in option B take over half an hour to play. Assuming that it takes 30 minutes to warm up and 30 minutes for exercises, and that you should play a piece at least 3-4 times, the practice should be at least 2.5 to 3 hours of practice. No one really has 3 hours to dedicate to a hobby per day. Besides, this kind of practice time is not reasonable for health reasons (repetitive strain is hard to heal), despite all the stories about the composer who grew up with a mother who practiced violin 6 hours a day. (Yes, very excessive.)

I'll add a disclaimer here that this is never a problem for a serious musical genius, who would, of course, bypass both options by having genetically-inherited strongly-built hands (hence the ability to practice for 6 hours a day), love of music (hence able to endure to listen to him/herself play for 6 hours a day, but this is rarely the problem), and the brilliance to learn very fast (hence no need to practice for 6 hours a day).

So, clearly, to avoid this kind of no-win dilemma with options A and B, I subconsciously opted for option C, which was to play violin. Is this really the result of boredom, as it seems? Perhaps, it's a different thing altogether. Perhaps it's the thrall of new challenges and new sounds. After all, boredom is not very strong; it doesn't drive revolutions or revelations.

Venal

venal: "open to corrupt influences and especially bribery" Merriam-Webster Online

Basically a venal person is someone who is willing to do unscrupulous things for money. I don't know the whole story of how the word "venal" came to be, but I do know that, in Latin, a venalicius was someone who sold slaves, who, from a modern-day viewpoint, would indeed be venal. But, back in Ancient Rome, it was probably absolutely normal. Of course, in Ancient Rome, all the men memorized the Iliad and the Odyssey and in modern times, few people even know what the Iliad is about, apart from the terribly inaccurate Wolfgang Petersen movie.

But the question is, where does money come from and when is a person venal? Are Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron venal? I think this is a question of perspective and of ethics, which along with the Iliad, is rarely ever studied by the average Joe. But, above all, this pertains to the very idea of money? What is money?

That last question was answered in Atlas Shrugged, by philosopher Ayn Rand. In the middle of the book somewhere, the character Francisco D'Anconia goes into the worth of money and how, in American English, money is "made". Not "earned", or "obtained through stealth and trickery", or "deserved", but made. It's a simple lexical choice that makes all the difference in the world. It's not the whole of Francisco's speech by far, nor does the idea encompass the whole idea of money, but it does give an inkling to the origin of money. For a better idea, I'll have to refer you to Atlas Shrugged. But venality is something hard to define and yet seemingly so prevalent in a weary world.

Fysigunkus

fysigunkus: "one who lacks curiosity" (Grandiloquent Dictionary Online)

If you were curious enough, I'm sure you can find this word in a giant dictionary - otherwise, you'll just have to take my word for it. When I found this word, I wanted to find a fysigunkus and make an example of them, but interestingly enough, it's actually very difficult to find a fysigunkus. Sure, if you pestered people with information like what a goliard is, where Galilee is, who Emmy Noether was , and when the preexilic era was, they might not be too interested. This is because most people attach interest with human factors.

For example, in a high school textbook (which I got very familiar on my previous job), the most important part of the lesson is not the rule or definition being taught but, instead, the little spiel about the mathematician who discovered it, the architect who used it, or the scientist who found it essential to his work. Even then, it's not interesting for people to learn that Chopin is considered one of the greatest pianist ever, though he only performed approximately 100 times. But, it's extremely fascinating that Chopin fell in love with feminist writer George Sand (whose real name was Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin Dudevant). And, a description of Percy Shelley's poetry and his idealism might not be interesting, but the fact that he often couldn't live up to his idealistic moral of monogamy is absolutely captivating. Of course, his biographies almost always mention that his wife was Mary Woolstencroft Shelley (Frankenstein writer). Why stop there? Most biographies go ahead and link him to Mary Shelley's mother, the great feminist Mary Woolstencroft. There you have it, the degrees of separation between great literary figures.

So, oddly, the love of meddlesome gossip brought extinction upon fysigunki (the dictionary didn't have the plural form, maybe they think there can be atmost 1 fysigunkus). Until next time, I'll leave you with a few answers: a wandering student/artist/musician who usually worked as a minstrel or jester; somewhere in Africa near Jordan; female mathematician (really narrows things down); period in Jewish history before the Babylonian Exile.

Amphigory

Amphigory of December
by Girl With Weltschmerz

decades ago in
canons of white
discipline,
chromatic ascendance and
reppraisal nonplussed of
conflicting histories was the
December of the world.

Wow. Such depth. It's talking about the dark ages with its discipline of the unwashed mob, or the world wars. "December of the world" is such a poignant phrase; December refers to winter so winter of the world is some kind of dark era. The poem talks about canons, as in the canons of Switzerland, and chromatic ascendance, which is probably something profound in philosophy, a conception enforced by "conflicting histories". But before I get carried away with analysis, I should tell you the definition of amphigory.

amphigory: "a nonsensical piece of verse" Encarta Dictionary

In other words, an amphigory is a poem that looks like it's profound, but is actually nonsense, like the one at the beginning of this article. Want proof that this Amphigory of December is actually almost randomly generated? Well, here's how I wrote it.

1. While reading the preface to Reinhard Diestel's Graph Theory, I wrote down random words that caught my eye as the first world in each line (decades, canon, discipline, etc.).
2. I read each word and, ignoring the other words, wrote down the first word that came to my mind and left it blank if nothing came to mind.
3. Then, I added simple verbs ("is") and punctuation and propositions, such that the whole poem made some grammatical sense.
   

A while ago, I was looking to get some of my actual poetry published in some literary magazine. I read through several ezines and other magazines in libraries. What I found was that there were lots of poems that made minimal sense, quite like my Amphigory of December. It seems that people attach philosophical and literary profoundness to things they can't understand. Just like the Emperor attached beauty to the robe that he could not see. It's a kind of poetic weltschmerz.

Xenophobia

"intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries" Oxford English Dictionary

A few school terms ago, I worked at a job that involved a lot of programming and some testing where the programs ran for a long time. During that time, I got to have a few good conversations with my coworker, the Small-Town Engineer. The Small-Town Engineer is, overall, a very nice guy studying engineering, who hails from a very small town. After reading the news about the London bombings and terrorism, we had this following conversation, which has be presented here in a more eloquent manner:

Me: So you don't think that this terrorism is really bad for the world.

Small-Town Engineer: Well, yeah, but it's not something that really affects everything

Me: Well, let's think about this. Are there a lot of people of racial minorities, where you grew up?

Small-Town Engineer: No (laughs), I think there was possibly 3 in my whole high school.

Me: So, because there are so few of them, is it fair to say that it'd be easy for people from your town to "generalise" about minorities, as in heap them all under the category "foreign people" or something?

Small-Town Engineer: Yeah, I can see some people thinking that.

Me: And because there's so few people in this category of "foreign people", would it not be easy for kids and parochial people to immediately associate the terrorists that they see on the news with this category of "foreign people".

Small-Town Engineer: Well ... sure, I guess that might happen.

Me: So, would you now agree that the current events are making a basis for the fear of "foreign people" and increasing things like racism? And hence are of stupendous importance for the state of the world?

Small-Town Engineer: Okay... But, you're never going to have a racism-free society and there will always be some people who will be racist. It doesn't matter if they have a basis for their racism.

Me: Well, sure. But, the point here was that it's overall a bad thing for society that all these things are happening, and shouldn't just be disregarded as news. The point is that people are supposed to care about things like this happening.

(And, in tune with the rest of the blog, here comes the welschmerz part.)

Small-Town Engineer: But they can't not happen, just for the sake of an utopian world. And if there's nothing anyone can do to change it, who cares?

Vitiation and Viswanathan

vitiate: "to spoil or impair the quality or efficacy of" Compact Oxford English Dictionary

Kaavya Viswanathan and her book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life", with its unfortunate infamy is sort of yesterday's news, but it's not too late for the other side of the story. It's a shame what happened to that poor girl. She's at Harvard, she had a publishing deal at only so young, and she has a great future ahead of her. I can think of three reasons right now to hate her. But after reading her book for an hour in the library, I thought it was a great book. It was funny and the description of the parents (which bear resemblance to overzealous people everywhere) is hilarious and certainly not lifted from any other source. But plagiarism is a big deal.

The question is: if the shoe is red with flowing red ribbons, but a mirror shows it to have dots and a wrapped yellow ribbon, is the mirror still a mirror?

"Utter originality is of course out of the question," said a great poet named Ezra Pound once. And, as discouraging as it sounds, it's mostly true. There are cases of books with similar phrases everywhere. There are only finitely many ways to express ideas and, no matter how boundless you think originality is, writers have the same idea once in a while. For a point of illustration, look at the following two quotes:

"All that glisters is not gold" Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

"All that is gold does not glitter" Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

These two quotes are differ only slightly in meaning and use almost the same words (Tolkien added an extra "does") with order differing only slightly. The similarity of these two phrases are more substantial than the similarity between the "plagiarized" phrases in Viswanathan's book and their original counterpart. Viswanathan, at least, did change the proper names in the sentences that she "copied". But, I've never heard of Tolkien being denounced as a copycat. In fact, there are "similar" books everywhere. Many fantasy novels, written after Lord of the Rings, share plot components or setting components with Lord of the Rings. But, none of these books have been publicly ridiculed.

In particular, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter shows certain characteristics of orphans and boarding school that can be traced to Dickens. But that certainly was not plagiarism. Why? Because it's okay to write Dickensian books as long as you don't copy specific plot details and students. But, is writing a book with the same structure another book really less atrocious than having a few lines that are similar to another book?

The fact of the matter is that Viswanathan's book has 320 pages and at most 5 pages of allegedly plagiarized material (about 40 phrases). Besides the phrases of questionable originality, Viswanathan managed to come up with approximately 315 other pages, some of which are very entertaining.

Vitiation is the word of the day. The word I actually wanted was the word that means "singled out for punishment for a crime that a large population of people commit" and describes the feeling of being pulled over for speeding when everyone else was going the same speed as you (so if anyone knows this word, please suggest it). But, did Viswanthan vitiate her book and her credibility as a writer by remembering her readings a little too well? Or did the vicious reading community vitiate them for her because of her overwhelming success? Aren't budding writer always told that they write what they read (and hence, go read some good books)? All this lack of originality and vitiating of careers - it's a little like weltschmerz, isn't it?

Weltschmerz

"pessimism; an apathetic or vaguely yearning outlook on life" Oxford Canadian Dictionary

Weltschmerz is, historically, a feeling of cynical detachment to the world - a world-wearniess in its direct translation from German - felt by great literary figures like Heinrich Heine and Lord Byron. Coined by Jean Paul, a German author, to describe the feeling that the reality we live in can never satisfy the mind, is the inspiration of this blog and many other books and poems by other cynical people.

High school was a long 4 years of work - if you're like me and you believed in the idealistic importance of work - and what really became of it? I've still ended up in another 4-5 years of study (though of better material), along side plenty of other people who hadn't and still haven't learned the importance of work. It seems that change does not exist.

So, weltschmerz is when you sit back and try to picture what 10 hours of concentration of an assignment really means in the long run, or when you go to a group interview for a job and, in response to why he applied for this job, a pompous, didactic guy replies with such jargons about how he wants to serve the students and the adminstration that you're thankful for studying long vocabulary lists in high school because you're now armed with heinous words to describe this pompous guy and the disappointment that you feel in the world at seeing such an empty, conceited suit being created by some process in the job market or university, or when youths in 19th century Germany just finish reading the Sorrows of Young Werther, or when Goethe enthusiasts realize that the name of the character whose sorrows were so bitter and deep is now the name of a sweet and mindless candy (Werther's Originals, mmm good), or when - well, you get the idea ...