Oblique Review

This novel contained

sentence after sentence

with only punctuation

to control traffic.

As I read the novel,

the weather went

from sunny to rainy

and back again.

I find that climate

is an infinite novel

with new weather

chapters periodically.

It's funny (peculiar)

how words trick

a reader's mind into

creating a novel.

Readers should get

paid more for doing

all the work. Every

art form got taken

over by industry,

so that novels became

manufactured goods, see?

This novel is okay by me. 

hans ostrom 2020

Punctuation Meditation

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Punctuation Meditation

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The exclamation point isn't a point. It's a line and

a point together--a verticle board photographed

in air just above a soccer ball. The period is a

point, but a point's not a period any more than

a day is an era. A dash doesn't move, so it should

change its name. "Super-comma" is a

more marketable name for the semi-colon,

especially since a period is half a colon, whereas

a semi-colon is a leaking point. What

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does a sickle hanging above a dot have to do

with questions? When words want to pretend

they're not there, they hide between brackets,

but nobody's fooled. When they want to whisper,

they pull parentheses close like curtains, but

everybody can hear. The slash lived in obscurity

for centuries. Lots of marks did. Then came

computers. Now every squiggle and scratch

is a celebrity living in hypertext. How weird, period.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Food, Gas, and the Oxford Comma

We drove one of our aged Volvos to Bellingham yesterday so that our trusted mechanic could work on it. Bellingham's 90 miles north of Seattle, which is about 50 miles north of where we live, so you can see how eccentric our auto-mechanic arrangements are. After we drop off the car, we take Amtrak home. Amtrak's arrangements can be eccentric, too, however. From Bellingham, one takes an Amtrak bus to Seattle, and then one may take either the Sounder, a local commuter train, or the Cascade, which goes all the way to Portland. Why Amtrak is unable to schedule a regular train from Bellingham to Seattle remains a mystery, at least to me.

On the way, I saw a sign that read as follows:

FOOD-GAS
LODGING
NEXT EXIT

I think the choice to put a hyphen between FOOD and GAS was ill-advised because doing so makes "food" function as an adjective modifying "gas." Consequently, the sign informed me that methane gas in some form (one doesn't want to spend too much time reflecting on the subject) was available by means of the next exit.

If I were in charge of writing such signs, I probably would have written "Food, Gasoline, and Lodging: Next Exit," but more letters and punctuation translate into a bigger sign and greater expense. I understand. Still, I prefer the series of three, with the comma before the "and"--a comma known in some circles as the Oxford comma because it is favored, I assume, by many British writers and editors.

For about three years (quite some time ago), I wrote a books-column every two weeks for a local metropolitan daily. The copy I wrote was apparently fairly "clean" because the copy-editors rarely edited it significantly, although of course the headline-writer also gave the column its title. After I'd been writing the column for about a year, however, a copy-editor called me and said, "Look, in almost every column of yours, you use the Oxford comma, and I take it out, so how about you stop using it?" He was pretty ticked off. I don't blame him. I should have been more sensitive to the fact that the AP Style Manual does not recommend using the Oxford comma. I agreed that, from that point forward, I'd leave the Oxford comma out of the columns I wrote.

On occasion, the absence of that comma may cause some confusion, but that's pretty rare. I think I just like the symmetry and tidiness of the comma: X [comma] Y [comma] and Z [period].
Probably we shall never see the following road-sign:

FOOD, GAS, LODGING, AND THE OXFORD COMMA: NEXT EXIT.

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Now there's an enticing topic--the semicolon in modern thought.

There are two kinds of writers; one kind thinks there are two kinds of everything in the world; the other kind doesn't.

Actually, what I meant to say was that one kind likes semicolons and the other doesn't.

For example, poet Richard Hugo, In The Triggering Town, calls the semicolon "ugly." He refused to use it in his poetry. Maybe he used it in his technical writing at Boeing, but I doubt it. Whenever we get to that part of the book in class, at least one student says, "But I love the semicolon," and I always agree with the student. The semicolon possesses its own awkward beauty, as far as punctuation-marks goes; in fact, the semicolon refuses to punctuate; it semi-punctuate; it ends something but not really.

But there are so many problems with the semicolon. By U.S. rules, you are not supposed to use it unless there is an independent clause on both sides of it; moreover, the very fact that one has to start talking about clauses puts people to sleep--as does further discussion of coordinating conjunctions versus sentence-adverbs. One may also use the semicolon to separate items in a series that are so large they include commas. In England, as far as I know, the rules for using the semicolon are different, just as there is no "comma splice" in German. After all, these are printers' marks, these periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons--based on venerable handwriting marks. It's not like they existed in the deep grammar of our brains.

Of course, the main problem is that a semicolon is a period on top of a comma. The semiotics of this situation suggest indecision or error.

Anyway . . .: a poem concerning the semicolon:


The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom