RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 971 (just too much magic stuff) Another idea, in line with this linguistics stuff, that always fascinated me was, when I lived up Elmira way, there were two other small towns some few miles off. Their names were fascinating, and I'm sure there are many more like this  -  but think of the lost magic of what I'm about to show. Each town, the town origination stories went, had been named by settlers, supposedly, who used the firs things they saw, defining the area, and made that the name. What it all meant to me, of course, was the usual balderdash. Local natives (what we still call 'Indians') wuld probably have referred to this as, say, 'Wo-Wo-Kena-Towa, then meaning 'High Land of the Raging Waters.' Interesting. Vivid. Descriptive. What then do the settlers call these places  -  dull, ungracious, blowhard thick-skulls as they may have been? They name one town 'Painted Post,...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 970 (what did you say?) 'Candasmoor, abirto pirada foir, metala on non-distact furtna dey.' Yes, that's the truth. Can you believe there really was a time when I was trying to make up my own language. It was an urge I'd always had. Failed completely, and that's way to the good, believe me. That sentence there was sort of meant to say 'The farther you go, the more it is seen, harshly, that you have not traveled from your fortune,' (or fate, it also was meaning). Now, how my pathetic brain made the leap, say, of using 'furtna' instead of 'fortuna' for 'fortune', is still beyond me - it would seem far more obvious, sensible, similar - but in doing all this I was more taking a message in words from beyond than anything else. It showed me any number of things, as lessons, that remained important to me. Even the little axioms I was coming up with (like this one s...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 969 (comedy night on fright lane) You know how sometimes a reporter is said to have a nose for news; possessing that quality of knowing that what is before them right then does somehow throw off an odor worth investigating. so as to lead into something else? Snooping and disclosure? That doesn't really get said these days any longer, now that internet and other forums just swarm over most events, newsworthy or not, and turn them into fodder for the mobs of jeering fools tuned in. But, back in the old days, there really was that quality of what I've just mentioned, There were 'agents' working for stars and those wishing to be so, who would plant stories, and push them - placements into newspaper gossip columns and cocktail rumor mills were a big deal. That's all gone now too and that entire old, felt-covered world has been buried with the last stiff who went down with a typewriter in the c...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 968 (time passes, and only fools stay on the bus) One of the first things I noticed, once I got there and began living a somewhat normal NYC life, in the 'poorest of economies' ways, was how I'd oddly enough stepped back a bit in time. That's hard to explain a meaning for, but you need to visualize: I'd come from a more than stupid place, in fact the differences were planetary. The things each location valued were miles apart from each other in proper thought. I'd just been relieved of, in August 1967, the vestiges of suburban blight and glitter to the extent that, in, say, Avenel, the value of a combined idea of supermarket and parking area was considered gold, whereas in NYC the same was considered a laughable joke, without meaning and having no referential reality. Part of the 'continental' urban experience was the walk and the street-life during that walk to get supplies, ...