Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your Essay "Right You Are if You Say You Are-Obscurely" [Dec. 30] was merely an acute masochistic reaction formation to your own hostile-aggressive syntax, which itself derives from an inadequate ego-syntonic defense system with paranoiac overtones...
...Ulysses. The few letters from Joyce's rakehell father have all the style and fresh idiom of Simon Dedalus in the book. And Molly Bloom's long, affirmative soliloquy comes to life in the letters of his wife, Nora-artless, rambling and totally innocent of punctuation, syntax or correct spelling...
Poetry Editor D.S. Ament has two poems here, one an untitled experiment in anti-syntax ("deep as death's yet pools are/her eyes") which has some interest but some impossible tin-ear cacaphony ("and then more than ever i know of"). His other effort, "The Deed," is doggeral. The rhythm of its short rimed phrases suggests Bob Dylan's fine song "Like a Rolling Stone," but comparison insults Dylan. Ament's phrases are all empty rime-tags...
...Donald Justice," perhaps the best, is infinitely deeper and wholly more ambitious than early Grenier poems, which tended to be terse conversational fragments of point-blank incorporations of the physical environment, piece by piece. It presents motion without the encumbrances of consecutive common-sense description, and uses syntax without bowing to it. "First Settlement and After" is a brilliantly integrated "topical" piece, just as cinematic as the other...
...world, and probably the most voluminous. Scientists rely on precise Chinese records of supernovae, sunspots, etc., for the nearly two millennia that Europeans did not believe in such phenomena and thus did not see them. That the Chinese have no word for "no" is a statement about syntax, not diction-there are common words for "not," "don't," "never," etc.-and even so, TIME'S statement is true only of classical Chinese, not of the spoken language. The Chinese word for freedom means freedom and nothing else. Its origin is indeed from two characters that by themselves mean...