On Caffeine (Coffee Shop Hip-Bop Be-Hop Short-Stop Art-Pop)

Winona, MN--Feeding a growing caffeine addiction--having never really been addicted to anything (Question: does Addiction exist as infinitesimally-spaced points along a continuum or as an on/off switch and does the distinction matter?), I now live in a deep-seated fear of anything-too-much--in yet another coffee shop. Last night we stayed, for the first time, at a campsite inaccessible by car (we parked about a half-mile away), at the end of a slough (pronounced like "flue" with an S; and one of these days I need to learn pronunciation symbols like that upside down "e", although there are many ways to explain how to pronounce words without such symbols and after all even the pronunciation shorthand itself requires explanations drawn from actual words--see e.g. the beginning of any dictionary--and so couldn't it be said that the symbols are so unnecessary to the whole procedure of explaining pronunciation as to serve as yet another example of the leisure classes' cultural exclusivity?) that sees no traffic but is foggy and silent and beautiful in the morning. The campsite was revealed to us, a la the bequeathing of a secret passageway by father to son (Ed.: where do you get these awful metaphors?), by David Echelard, a singer and accordionist and hurdy-gurdyist who specializes in early French music, particularly that of trouvers and troubadours (Ed.: and where do you get off italicizing the former but not the latter? Although I guess trouver is still pretty much an exclusively French word, while troubadour has made the jump, e.g. "sans", to common SWE usage) which if you'll permit me to rhapsodize for a moment (Ed.: and what if we don't? Writing is the aggressive act, reading submissive, and a writer asking his audience's permission is like a dictator asking for that of his subjects) is music that I always love but I don't know nearly enough about, especially as it fits into my whole pop-vs-art-transitions-over-time thing (i.e. the history of European, essentially popular, music from 200 or 500 years ago was required for my college degree; popular music from even 50 years ago was not).

Eve and I were just talking about grammar and its decline in the American curricula and if said decline matters and I started thinking about DFW's (I know I bring him up a lot, but show me a better American essayist in the last 20 years and I'll declare you stark raving mad) essay on approx. the same: "Authority and American Usage," which sounds like the dryest read ever--the type of Essay Stanley Fucking Fish would write, not inthe NYT but rather in some academic journal and in the first paragraph of which he'd only half-jokingly refer to "finally writing something for an educated audience" or some shit, at whichthe two or three young, still passably self-aware English professors would roll their eyes but the rest would nod knowingly--but if you know DFW or even me (hopefully) you'll realize is not that at all. The essay is a review of a book by Bryan Garner (I didn't even have to look that up) on, well, Authority and American Usage (of Standard Written English (i.e. Standard White English), if that wasn't yet clear), and DFW is essentially saying that Garner's brilliant contribution to the debate over descriptivism vs. prescriptivism (i.e., and here I'm really summarizing Wallace's also-brilliant summary of this timeless linguistic conflict, the "Dictionary Wars", whether the role of the dictionary should be to describe or prescribe grammatical and linguistic patterns and changes, such as whether a dictionary should continue to insist that "ain't" ain't a word or whether it should cave to overwhelming popular usage and include it in the dictionary; a more fundamental approach to the debate could even question whether dictionaries matter, because communication gave rise to dictionaries and not vice versa, and whether the basis of language is speech or writing) is that it doesn't really matter what position you take in these debates so long as you acknowledge that there are and will forever be multiple ways of using the language that are equally valid in their respective contexts--hence "Standard White English"--and that what really matters is not "correct" usage but the ability to possess several different dialects and to use them in the correct context.

And I started to think about this in respect to music. (First of all: kudos if you've made it through the above paragraph, let alone understand it, and you should all really just read the article because it's much clearer and more fun there.) Because for all the talk of provinciality in the music world, and despite the fact that the intimacies and details of each musical sphere are much more intricate than those of language (regardless, I think, of whether or not you're a musician, though it might be more difficult for musicians), one of the crucial skills for anyone interested in music as a performer or critic or composer or audience member or whatever is to be able to move between different musical contexts fluidly, to understand that the important musical elements of a work are entirely different from one kind of music to the next, and to understand and adapt our understandings as we go. In one context, "ain't" is perfectly acceptable but "hermeneutics" might as well be a four-letter word, while in another the reverse is true. I think this is all fairly clear, and as DFW points out, most of us go our whole lives not needing to really sit down and think about it because it comes fairly naturally to most of us (to paraphrase, "the kid who doesn't understand that the language you use with adults is different from the language you use with other kids is the kid who gets beaten up by the other kids," and obviously I don't mean "naturally" to mean "by instinct rather than acculturation" necessarily), but it bears repeating and maybe even contemplation if only because debates over quality can so easily leave out the question of context.