A postmodern abecedary.

My recent noise about philological congeries—which, like spring, must inevitably turn a young man's fancy to thoughts of fragmentary material and the means of arbitrarily arranging it—coincided handily with being reminded of the word abecedary. In its basic sense it means an inscription of the alphabet, used especially as a pedagogical tool—try telling your first grader that the two-zone print alphabet above the blackboard is a paper abecedarium, he'll win friends and influence bullies. More interestingly, though, the word applies to texts organized according to an alphabetical scheme.

This of course blew my windy intellect toward Louis Andriessen, who wrote a little suite of songs for the odd 1991 video festschrift M is for Man, Music, Mozart, a sort of euro-PBS celebration of Mozart's tricentennial. The first piece's vocal text was actually written by Peter Greenaway. It is, of course, the postmodern abecedary in question:

A is for Adam and
E is for Eve;
B is for bile, blood, and bones.
C is for conception, chromosomes, and clones.
D is for Devil.
F is for fertility and for Venus’ fur.
G is for germs and growth and genius.
H is for hysteria.
I is for intercourse.
J is for Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue.
K is for kalium, or potassium, if you like.
L is for lust—and lightning, lightning.

Clearly it's a red letter day (Ha! Ha! Good grief, forgive me.) I'll restrain myself, sincewe don't want a rehearsal of my Carson piece any time soon, and be brief. Now, let it be said that this is a vile text—all the little self-satisfactions of our crumbling civilization wrapped into one biologicized parcel; but I have come to bury Greenaway in exegesis, not to praise him. A couple of things are particularly interesting: for instance, the abecedary stops at L. Now there's the archaeology, which teaches us that ancient abecedaria were sometimes left incomplete for ritual or magical purposes; I'm reminded of the folkway of the ouija board that instructs you to stop the planchette if it begins to cycle through the alphabet in order. But putting that aside there's the element of the arbitrary: organizing a fragmentary text according to the alphabet presumes exhaustiveness, doesn't it?

Electric cabinets of unreal curiosities.

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti recently mentioned his collection of asyndetic privative adjectives, a philological curio cabinet at this point not only marvelously expansive but—apparently—still growing. Bless G-d, said I, a collection, really? On the internet! Well, the whole notion transported me, as Noel Coward sang of the unleashed matron—

hot flushes of delight suffused her,

—changing my whole demeanor. Well, well, well. Here we are in the dregs of time, to be sure, but this is a really charming way to wait for the barbarians, isn't it? I can't explain the charm of this kind of Alexandrian hobbyism, but I spent a happy hour looking through that arbitrary and charming word-cabinet and was glad.

Partially I think it's a symptom of that nameless, quasi-postmodern delight in imaginary collections: I think of the preposterous and lovely books in Prospero's library according to the 1991 Peter Greenaway film or Borges' imaginary compendia. The endless, trackless, authorless noise of Web 2.0 gives us an opportunity to realize little fragments of this ur-fantasy, doesn't it? I mean, imagine.

This is a compendium of all the asyndetic privative adjective-series in Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit.

This is an anthology of 124 spurious fragments from Ennius' Annales, and arbitrary corruptions of them.

This is a collection of the last lines of verse published by every English poet 1914-1934, hyperlinked to deleted lines in the variorum of Tennyson's Idylls.

This, interpolated into the Homeric hymns, is a hidden cabinet of Theocritean hapax legomena.

This is a gallery of 400 famous images that include a eunuch.

It's only a half-formed thought, but I wonder if this fascination with fantastic pedantry might have something to do with the out-of-control vastness of the 21st century logos. There's so much written, so much available for recension, so much lost both through evanescence and human limitation—I think some of us must come to carry around the fantasy of stumbling over something immeasurably rare and immoderately specialized, some literary cabinet of curiosities that reflects the eternal-lifetime of abstraction we want but can never have.

Ankh ankh, en mitak:
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh.

Live life, thou shalt not die:
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years,
For millions of millions of years.

Well, it's the old longing, from Amenhotep to transhumanism. The text is from one of the best passages in one of Philip Glass' better operas, by the way.

An academic parlor game.

The lengthy essays I've been writing lately put me in a position to learn how to introduce "keep reading" breaks into my main feed, which of course couldn't be called "keep reading »" or "read more »"—no, my friends, I'm chased by this need to be clever as ever was Orpheus chased with snakes and torches. But to the point, my insipid chalkboard humor brought me to think about the doctrine of the lectio difficilior and, predictably, realize that I know nothing at all about textual criticism.

Here though, I have a game you can play while knocking back your gin and water. You'll need at least two people of perverse disposition, a third who's painfully literal-minded—ferret out a philologist, it shouldn't be hard—and at least two copies of a short poem, perhaps twelve lines, the more modernist the better. Give these to your incorrigibles.

The rules: make a glorious mockery of lectio difficilior potior and brevior potior too, if you have enough liquor. Your text should be counterintuitive enough to begin with; exploit that. Make strange words stranger. Strain English syntax with gleeful brutality. Propose lacunae after you've secretly manufactured some of your own. Pervert the allusions, and do it convincingly. But it's an absolute statute that whatever you produce should be probable, even if it's confounding; your heterodox text should crumble, not rot.

Now the fun begins! Destroy the originals utterly. Your poor scribbler of dissertations should be by this point both impatient and curious (in that pedestrian way he has), so hand him the copies—all the better if they're inscrutably handwritten; and lo, the scholars shall say, nay, but there shall be a redactor over us; that we may also be like all the philologists, and that our redactor may judge us, and apply cruxes for us, and edit our texts. (This is part of the rules.) Of course he shouldn't be familiar with the poem, so make sure you've picked something obscure in provenance as well as in the ordinary ways.

For extra fun, offer him gradually diminishing prizes according to his final accuracy in comparison to the ur-Texte. Finally finish the game by subjecting the redacted text to close reading, carried out with utmost moral seriousness, then defend the redacted text against the original: reveal to the historiographer that the "original" has been purposefully and badly mangled just for this exercise and that he is frightfully intelligent to have untangled so much depravity so well; continue dissimulating in this manner until everyone is too sauced for further pretense.

Well! I seem to be expiring from surfeit of leisure, which at any rate has given me the pleasure of celebrating Housman's deathless odium philologicum in the shape of his essay "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism." In seriousness, does anyone know of a good introduction to the subject, especially for English texts?