batter up!

[fflo]

Comments

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

well, ya two grand ol' ladies are both about good form, n'est-ce pas?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

we are?

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

but of course! good banter is for formalists. [that should be a t-shirt:]

[fflo.livejournal.com]

isn't 'formalist' a dirty word?

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

hell no! i mean, provided you're a good one.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i guess that's the dividing line with a lot of those thingies, hunh

:)

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

s'pose it is! you could be a good historicist-formalist. those are the best kind.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

what about being ahistorical? i've seen that one flung around. didn't look good. pretty sure, after your report from up north, that i don't want to be a womanist feminist.

tell me about historicist-formalists. or historicism-formalism.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

that's like me :). or like anyone else who thinks about form, but also thinks about what form meant in a certain historical period.

so, for example, how it feels "natural" for history to be in prose, although it need not be. how it used to be "natural" to read poetry, and not so any longer. how we now think that narrative is incompatible with verse, and that certainly wasn't true 200 years ago.

verse was the way to do narrative among the "classics," especially if you wanted anyone to remember the story, because rhyme is a mnemonic device, after all.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

i think i'm following you here.

you remind me of this book i made the library buy, and have at home now (with no competition---i've been able to renew it) --- Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature. night before last i read/watched the chapter on what a "line" is. this burgeoning poetics is kind of exciting to me. and there's this new slam-y ASL poetry going on now, a couple of samples of which rather tickled my fancy. though ella mae lentz's "silence oh painful" had me going through in slo-mo trying to get at individual signs (that was one of the ones with no subtitles, and even though it's simple and she's one of those classic here-you-go-you-hearing-newbie signers, i don't understand so much).

anyway... must back to work & not a good time to try to get into it, or even get my head back to that stuff. but prose v. poetry, fer instance, is kind of a laugh in signed "liter"ature.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

this sounds very cool. i'd be curious to know what a "line" is in that kind of visual.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

well, nobody knows. they're just thinking about it so far.

i was a bit disappointed that wm carlos w's "a line is a unit of attention" idea didn't make it into the what-hearing-writers-have-said part. seems like that one might translate.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

it does indeed. wonder what people who use asl think about the categories used to describe the language, it they think they could come up with better ones. if their language is not just a language.

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

ahistoricist=really bad.

that's about people who don't remember what happened, especially if it happened to others. if it happened to them, they pretend not to remember, because they "move on" (as they are encouraged to do).

[fflo.livejournal.com]

ah... no wonder i'm confused

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

but of course--you're supposed to know history, but only the permitted kind. as soon as you remember anything that doesn't fit, we have to think about whether we like that or not.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

worse, i read you wrong before & thought ahistorical good, ahistoricist bad. ha!

[shmizla.livejournal.com]

womanist feminist = the feminist who thinks that women have the special "sense" for injustice because they are women. the implication is that all women have the same interests and the same troubles and the same goals.

this we know (historically, empirically) not to be true.

this is also why the word "feminist," which was originally used by the white women of america, is not the most attractive one to, for instance, the women of color, because it conjures up that kind of women's movement that presumes to talk for everyone when it doesn't even know who's out there (or pretends not to know). but it's an attractive option if you want to "build communities" and try to sound inclusive; long-term, however, it's very fishy.