'The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed

is by being always absolutely over-educated' - if you happen to be Oscar Wilde, at any rate.


I have joked about it before, but I think I genuinely should consider making the electronic taxonomic 'wardrobe flashcards.' I worked with a girl once who had done this, and it was a fine idea. In her case, it was an actual little flip-book of pictures, with outfits and accessories laid out together in various combinations for easy reference. And it was interesting, frankly, since she was the last person most of her friends would have envisioned taking this extraordinary and labor-intensive step in sartorial ecology. She was exceptionally pragmatic and consistent in her dress, a bit of a hybrid between Northeast Yankee and Northwest Sporty, not to say verging perhaps on anodyne, and for the most part her 'dressing up' consisted of leaning more toward the former than the latter. Maybe that itself is why she did it; she may have felt that visual aids would spur greater creativity, allow her to match the salmon stripes on a blue background button-down with a salmon cardigan or salmon trouser socks, something she would be unlikely to contrive impromptu?

In my case, it's not as though I can't put together an ensemble. I start either with an idea of color(s) or a particular garment. The problem is, however, that like my friend I, too, have my habitudes, and that arguably my greater wardrobe may well hinder my selection process and steer my psyche in familiar directions more often than desirable, in an unconscious effort to conserve my mental health and leave what is left of my creativity for nobler ends.

In other words, I wear a lot of sweater sets, pastel jackets, and the same pearl or tiny hoop earrings until I drive myself mad. And, because I am an impossible size for jeans, the same thing holds for the bottom half: skirts or the same kid's size 10 or '10-slim' denims until I drive them mad.

What made me think of all this is that today I am going to a picnic. Since it's not sunny or warm, my clothes can only give a symbolic nod to the concept of 'summer picnic,' rather than being in actuality light and airy. That gives me color, jewelry, purse and shoes to work with.

Well, I have two very summery beaded necklaces, one that I made and one that I bought. One is green and pink, the other just green, so I started with those and managed to convince myself to put on dangly matching beaded earrings. I added a woven silk pink shell under a green fitted button-down, a sweater that matches the shell, a green leather purse (not especially summery, but neither is the weather, and I'm not wearing sandals) and pink slingbacks, as well as a frosty pink on the lips and fingers. And the current pair of favorite (i.e., the best I can do) jeans.

Now, the problem is not that that isn't a reasonable outfit for the occasion, and nice-looking, as well. The problem is the familiarity. I wore those shoes and the cardigan a few days ago. They were in my head - probably from the moment I thought of the necklace. Sure, I matched the purse to the shirt inside, rather than the outer cardigan and the shoes, but it was just lowest-common-denominator outfit-building, inasmuch as a) the handbags are all set out where I can see them and b) my default was 'not the purse you wore the last time you wore the shoes.' That's hardly creative; it's defensive, reactionary.

So, if I had a gallery of pictures, with a taxonomy akin to that of my closet:

Kingdom: Clothes
Phyla: Hanging, Folded (and we'll bracket that one: it's boring and never gets worn)
Classes: Suits, Jackets, Trousers, Skirts, Shirts, Dresses
Orders: Jackets, Trousers, Long Skirts, Short Skirts, Summer Skirts, Knit Tops, Button-Down Shirts, Sweaters, Sweater Sets, Evening...
Families: Black, Reds, Greens...
Subfamilies: Chartreuse, Lime, Celadon, Mint...
Tribes: Black with Metallic Wefts, Blues with White Collars/Cuffs...
Genera: Prints, Solids...
Species: Second-Favorite Off-White Button-Down Silk Sweater: with Detachable Narrow-Gauge White Fur Collar: No Cuffs: Delicate Knit: and Slim Fit Stopping Just at the Hipbone

THEN I would know what I was working with, and have a broader perspective necessarily, as I would have all members of every species equally available to my consideration. I could flip from

'shoes: high: pumps: green: pointed toe: w/buckle'
to
'jackets: whites: creams: patterned weave: w/color: green: belted: oversized-houndstooth cream-lime ribbon-belted self-fabric-button w/tiny pockets.'
And then I could browse the 'solids' genera in creams and greens and blues - and even mangoes if I wished - for tops and bottoms, giving a fair shot to all members equally, rather than too often resorting to the instinctive and the familiar.

I think it's worth a try. And it's manifestly a good excuse/incentive to get that dry-cleaning pile down to an apartment-sized scale. I'd add a photo of it, but it would hurt you, just like it hurts my closet, which can scarcely afford to take on more boarders...




**By the way, has anyone noticed that my former super-double-quotativity, of italics and quotation marks, has now become deluxe-triple quotativity, since I started using pink on quotes some time back. Interesting. Do I think that quotation marks are really all that unclear?

Get Your Own Bloody Flag!

To those of you who hope to dictate the topics or timbre of this blog I have a couple things to say.

One is that it is not your blog. I should think this would be apparent, as it is my picture and my words which figure most prominently herein. But since it clearly is not as obvious as all that, here is my flag. I am planting a flag, so this space is now mine. You are welcome to stay, and have a mint julep or a Bloody Caesar according to your country's custom and some of those canapés over there, and listen to a story or a rant, but you cannot move in and take over the territory. That I have put my flag down here proves that.


Secondly, you should understand you are not my demographic. You are one person. One person is not a demographic, unless that one person is me. That I myself could be construed as my onlylonely target demographic is evidenced by the fact that I use the words 'patently' and 'frankly' with the same frequency as I use the word 'the,' as well as the fact that I employ my own idiosyncratic punctuation scheme in which I italicize words in quotation marks all the time in some kind of super-double quotativity -- and yet don't care. I don't care because this is my blog not my dissertation, and I don't care because if you are not sufficiently entertained as to keep reading, then you should by all means not continue reading.

Unless your intent in continuing is to ascertain before offering me a book deal whether my egregious lapses in syntax, my meretricious embrace of both high and low diction, and my slipping between overdone Latinate multi-clause monstrosities and staccato Anglo-Saxon gunfire can be ameliorated with the assistance of a patient and judicious editor.

Which it is not. Your intent, I mean.

So, if you are disenchanted, if you don't care how much sandalwood or oud I used in the last perfume, if you don't want to hear that I think none of the candidates is qualified to steer this Narrenschiff out of the shoals, or that in an effort to save time I electrocuted myself by toasting bread while bathing, or that I ate nothing but licorice over the weekend, or that I am contemplating making a flip-book of clothing items in order to make outfit selection a more organized and enjoyable procedure, then the best I can do is to relay a rumor recently passed to me that these Interwebs have some kind of 'page' on which you can write your dream of an electronic reading or viewing selection, and the Interwebs will then write for you suggestions of where you can go to find that. If I have been shorter of shrift on the travails of the house of Gucci than you might like, or if you wish I had talked more about the origin of the proscription against the split infinitive in English, then maybe you will find your dream elsewhere. In the meantime, click 'NEXT BLOG' at the top of this page. And may it be in Uzbek!

I'm...Sensing...a...Grammarian...from...Beyond...

We all remember Captain Kirk. Some - the hot alien 'humanoid' chicks on distant planets, for example - remember, no doubt, far, far more of him than we mere human late-night dorm-room Star Trek rerun watchers ever knew. But even we can recall his slicked hair, his ripped shirts, his luck with the ladies, the high attrition rate of his red-uniformed personnel when out in the field.

Mostly, however, what endures is his diction. It was daring, unique, revolutionary, even, not merely to have an African-American woman on the bridge of the Enterprise as an officer, but to also have a main character speak...in...so...repellent a -- manner. It needn't only be repressed trauma, however, that we take from this shared heritage: knowledge of exactly what someone means when he refers to 'Captain-Kirk-Speak' can help us in our quests to make the world a better place -- or at least not make people sick when we communicate with them.

Leaving aside the overrated realm of face-to-face contact, I would like to turn to the written word and, in fact, to pay especial attention within the print world to the problem of email. Email can be a bit confusing, I realize, because we send it to people we know and people we don't know, and we use it with people with whom we share a mutual fondness, as well as with people we despise and who despise us. Still, in hopes that the last category can remain smaller than the penult, I would like to add my own rule to the standard email proscriptions of Don't Write in All Caps; Don't Eschew Standard Paragraph Standards; Don't Assume Something Will Sound Funny and Not Mean Once Written; Don't Use LOL, R U, U 2, C Ya, or suchlike, unless you have not yet graduated high school; Don't Write in Such a Way that Emoticons Seem Necessary to Convey Your Meaning; and Don't Use Emoticons.

My rule, friends, is simple: it is Do Not Abuse the Ellipsis. We all have our problems, our own crosses to bear, but years of living upon this earth have taught me that most of them derive from bad parenting, poor health, and imperfect decision-making skills. I can think of exactly none that could possibly be traced to run-ins with three...sequential...printed...dots. So take out your pain on something else.

Here is the lowdown on the skinny re the 411 about the ellipsis (plural ellipses, and coming from the Greek ἔλλειψις, meaning, unsurprisingly, 'omission').

• You can use it in quotations, to indicate you are leaving something out, as in this bit of Yeats, where I show I hacked it from the front and back and tore some guts out of the middle, as well:

1. - ...Our breasts are heaving...our lips are apart...

• You can stick it at the end of something, to indicate you could go further, that there really is more to be said (again, an omission), but you are opting not to, for reasons patent or opaque. You might also see this type of usage in fiction writing to describe the trailing off of one party's side of a conversation.
  

1. - Obviously I never planned to sleep with Jennifer...
2. - Surely you're not wearing that shirt...
3. - Ronald was doing perfectly fine until he met up with those Heideggerians...
4. - Now that you mention it, I don't remember turning the stove off...
   

• And I admit that it can be used, at least in casual situations, at times, to represent a pause longer than a comma between two parts of a sentence. Alright, fine, even between two sentences, but again, only in very casual communication, and not all the time, and not to imbue the writing with a gravitas that it lacks qua writing (which is how and where writing should get its bloody gravitas, if it even wants any to begin with. Not from dots. No dots I know of are capable of impregnating any pause).
  

1. - He told me he loved me...again.
2. - I rewrote the article...with no ellipses this time, sir.
3. - Well, yes, it seemed odd...but he is a Heideggerian.
4. - Of course I turned the stove off, pet...or was that yesterday?

What it shouldn't be used for is a crutch, as with habitual attempts to render thought processes typographically. Nor again, as per the above, to make things seem thinkier or deeper than they really are. Think of it as simple mathematics: if you look at a page of writing, what does it mostly contain? Positively tons of letters, only here and there interspersed with dots and other punctuation. The punctuation is there in the service of the letters and the words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs those letters make up. The punctuation is like the boom-mike guys on a set: necessary, but hardly the crux of the matter.

So these sorts of things frighten me:

1. - time to...think, and...reconnect, with self...
2. - wanting to...understand
3. - to think...and to feel...
4. - for me...and...for you
   

I don't know what they mean. I don't know what the ellipses mean, either. That's a bit of an exaggeration: I do, to a certain extent; the ellipses are there, in cases like those, alternately to 'soften the blow', to serve as a proactive, prophylactic defense against allegations of callousness, and to prove, through graphical representation, that each word was labored over until just the right one, or, minimally, the least wrong one, out of such an imperfect selection, was at last found. I'd say more here, but I'm...thinking...right...now, in fact. Is it not obvious? Can you still suspect I am not, despite the preceding proof?

Dear...friends (see? it's creepy, no?), the Japanese are the only ones on this planet who can use ellipses routinely without thereby increasing my chances of dying of stress-related illness. The reason is that the Japanese are the only ones on this planet with a culture that demands much be left unsaid, in order to preserve dignity and promote harmony. Because of this, there is a whole infrastructure, thousands of years of precedent, giving context and meaning to each incompletely-uttered thought. That in practice means it is far from impossible in the vast majority of cases to deduce what lies on the far side of the dots.

1. - Yes, Friday is perfect... (It's just that)...
2. - I didn't sleep with Jennifer... (But that was only because I fell down the stairs untying my shoes)...
3. - We'll certainly consider your proposal... (And by 'consider' I mean laugh about it and toss it in the trash)...
4. - I would be ever so happy to join your Heidegger study group... (I'll just make sure to be elsewhere and unreachable every Wednesday from 3 o'clock on...)

All four have implications that conflict with at least part of the stated sentence. And in spoken Japanese, or English spoken by a Japanese person, this fact would be obvious in the moment, as would be the gist of what remained unsaid. But unless you are Japanese, and dropping a few dots at the ends of things to maintain decorum and foster civility and good will, I beg you: be chary with the ellipses. Plus, if you save up enough of them, you won't have to worry about coming up with any pithy Final Words with your last breaths; you can just whisper 'Dotdotdot' and leave the world to make the necessary inferences from your life.