I was born at four in the morning. 4:10 to be exact, or so says the certificate. That's exactly how I'd start my memoir if I ever had the nerve to write a memoir, or if I even thought that's where I began. In any case, I feel a special kinship for the Museum of Four in the Morning (mofitm) for its fascinating chronocritical obsession.
By asking its audience to crowdsource any and all cultural references to that specific time, the mofitm has compiled a significant archive of 4 ams. A remarkable thing happens as you scroll through more and more references (there are nearly 600 of them, if we count by number of Tweets): what seems to be merely a time of the day (or the morning), quotidian in the truest sense of the word, emerges from anonymity fully clothed in culturally constructed self-consciousness.
The phrase is less of a time and more of a hyperbolic expression of lateness. 4 a.m. isn't a time so much as it is an idea and a feeling. It's a hyperbolic expression of lateness. It's a bipolar hour, a space full of either mania or sleep. It becomes more and more apparent that nothing actually happens precisely at 4 a.m., that the specificity of the time 4:00 is almost universally a white lie. It means, simultaneously: "exceedingly late" and "exceedingly early." It seems insist upon the marriage of such opposites--it is simultaneously a time of extreme inactivity and extreme activity, particularly comprising the unpleasant mash of the two together. Which of the two (late or early) it means in any given context or usage is hard to determine, it seems to mean both at the same time. Such paradoxical duality in a temporal statement would be no surprise if we were talking about, say "noon" or "midnight," those moments that seems to stand between two days, between am and pm, that announce themselves as temporally peculiar therefore merit their own names and titles ("the witching hour")... but who would have thought that 4 am would find itself turned into an idiom, an expression, into a temporal idea of comparable liminality?
I was born at 4:10 a.m., March 16, 1988. Pisces.
Lesson learned: 1) the exploration of sets of ideas grouped under relatively random or frivolous categories can bring surprising insights; 2) crowdsourced databasing is fantastic -- leads to a "natural" or seemingly organic growth of archives that refuses the prejudices a singular curator would necessarily impose on it 3) Umberto Eco would love this.
Friday, June 5, 2015
Unsorted thoughts.
Who ever thought the Big Dipper looked like a giant spoon was the most unimaginative of stargazers. If anything it looks like a giant question mark in the cosmos. Recently I saw it rising in the northeast, hooking slowly over the horizon, looming evermore overheard, a slowly rising crescendo of cosmic uncertainty. Or maybe it's an interrobang -- ‽
It recalls, to me, pseudomorphically Thomas Cole's Oxbow -- though his was asking a different question entirely. I should look up different cultures and their imaginings of the ursa major -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major
--
Lately I've been feeling the anxious urge to read a dictionary. I wonder if anyone else gets this feeling. I know Robert DeMaria surely does -- surely one feels only more anxious once you finish reading it. I wonder which one I'll shoot at next.
--
I should apply for Triple Canopy and attempt to enact my dedications book. Youth fiction has to be full of excellent dedications. Sci Fi has to have a rich compendium of dedications. What I am talking about here is a database of dedications. None of the boring ones -- the boring ones ("to my mom" "to my adoring husband" "thanks for putting up with me") can be cataloged as a statistic: i.e., 95% of all dedications are total boring drivel, saccharine redundancy befitting the speeches professional athletes give after winning a championship. Who cares about a precise statistic anyway? Let's just say it: 99% of dedications are totally boring. But then again... so are 99% of most things written! The collection of dedications I have so far are in completely different genres.. there needs to be a good categorization.
What is the point of the dedication exactly: the theory of dedicating. OED: "3.a. To inscribe or address (a book, engraving, piece of music, etc.) to a patron or friend, as a compliment, mark of honour, regard,"
It is a moment of humility (turned funny / ironic by the lack of it often) written, ideally, at the end of such a project, at which someone acknowledges a single figure or source without which the book wouldn't have been possible. It's the acknowledgement (but it is not the acknowledgements: I regard that as an entirely separate genre of writing) that everything ever written or made is built on the creation of something previous; the ol' Sagan adage: "to make an apple pie from scratch one must create the universe" -- in this way one could see the research and focus on dedications as one way of tracing influence.
The American literature category seems to be a good one. It could actually be a useful resource to have such a database available.
American children's literature could be a sub category of that. This is really a matter of going through the shelves. 19th century books have probably already been scanned and the work can be done online. 20th century might require a lot of just flipping through teh shelves and photographing.
[return to this..]
----
I need to get better at teamwork, that is, sharing ideas and working together with others to enact them. Otherwise they all just die in my head.
Color pianos. Playing images.
It recalls, to me, pseudomorphically Thomas Cole's Oxbow -- though his was asking a different question entirely. I should look up different cultures and their imaginings of the ursa major -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major
--
Lately I've been feeling the anxious urge to read a dictionary. I wonder if anyone else gets this feeling. I know Robert DeMaria surely does -- surely one feels only more anxious once you finish reading it. I wonder which one I'll shoot at next.
--
I should apply for Triple Canopy and attempt to enact my dedications book. Youth fiction has to be full of excellent dedications. Sci Fi has to have a rich compendium of dedications. What I am talking about here is a database of dedications. None of the boring ones -- the boring ones ("to my mom" "to my adoring husband" "thanks for putting up with me") can be cataloged as a statistic: i.e., 95% of all dedications are total boring drivel, saccharine redundancy befitting the speeches professional athletes give after winning a championship. Who cares about a precise statistic anyway? Let's just say it: 99% of dedications are totally boring. But then again... so are 99% of most things written! The collection of dedications I have so far are in completely different genres.. there needs to be a good categorization.
What is the point of the dedication exactly: the theory of dedicating. OED: "3.a. To inscribe or address (a book, engraving, piece of music, etc.) to a patron or friend, as a compliment, mark of honour, regard,"
It is a moment of humility (turned funny / ironic by the lack of it often) written, ideally, at the end of such a project, at which someone acknowledges a single figure or source without which the book wouldn't have been possible. It's the acknowledgement (but it is not the acknowledgements: I regard that as an entirely separate genre of writing) that everything ever written or made is built on the creation of something previous; the ol' Sagan adage: "to make an apple pie from scratch one must create the universe" -- in this way one could see the research and focus on dedications as one way of tracing influence.
The American literature category seems to be a good one. It could actually be a useful resource to have such a database available.
American children's literature could be a sub category of that. This is really a matter of going through the shelves. 19th century books have probably already been scanned and the work can be done online. 20th century might require a lot of just flipping through teh shelves and photographing.
[return to this..]
----
I need to get better at teamwork, that is, sharing ideas and working together with others to enact them. Otherwise they all just die in my head.
Color pianos. Playing images.
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