I have a cold that’s wallowing around in my chest like a melancholy yak on codeine and it’s slowed me down a bit, but Bernadette advises us to write through our fatigue, so here… I … go …

Kevin Davies, one of the most enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers I know (in a community of enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers), makes the following delightful characterization and sends along a question in response to my statement that “I loathe structure.”:

So: you hate structure but like, not form, but forms, is that correct? You do seem pro-forms but not inhibited or contained by them. I attacks on the mind sorry TAXONOMIZE you as counter-hegemonic lyric discourse with opals and ornithography liable at any moment to flip a coin and go postal on patriarchy, yeah that’s it.

[this para also from KD — sorry, I haven’t figured out how to format this blog properly yet and have forgotten my html, which I’d got pretty good at before the stupid injury two years ago. i’ll review it, I *promise*] Kept thinking of Alan Davies’s thing in Signage where he talks about hating structure. [“I, a private and concrete individual, hate structures, and if I reveal Form in my way, it is in order to defend myself.”] But the emphasis, as I think Alan would probably agree now, is on hate rather than structure. But what _about_ Alan? He is one of our mutual passions. His work, that is. Do you ever find him insufficiently “ornamental”? He seems to, at least sometimes, want to get at the stripped-down emotional “facts” of what’s in front of him to write, which to my Asperger-addled mind (truthfully, I could use a little _more_ Asperger) might put him at odds with your pro-ornament argument. (I wonder how “pro-ornament” would come out on the software.)

[Nada again] I’m happy to report that “pro-ornament” came out as “pro ornament”, hyphen-less but accurate. But what _about_ Alan, indeed? To talk about him and ornament in the same mental breath I’m seeing that I need to hone my terms a little better. Either that or expand them to define “ornamental ™” (if I really am going to latch on to that term and make it “mine” — ugh) as “what I like”. Maybe I need to clear up the misconception that “ornamental” always means “frou-frou.” I’m not using “frou-frou” pejoratively — I’m one of the few people I know who actually *likes* Fragonard — but just as a delimiter of a certain kind of ornamentation. Actually, there’s a type of ornamentation I prefer that may be best exemplified by an anecdote:

The first time I went to France I had been living in Japan for a couple of years and was thoroughly imbued with Japanese sensibilities. I found the France I had dreamed of for so many years disappointing. I had been spoiled by the subtle asymmetries and striking combinations of elements that I lived among in Japan. The rococo gold ornamentation I saw in France seemed very “done”, almost dead, in comparison. I almost couldn’t see it. I’ve come to a more balanced appreciation of both European and Asian modes since I’ve come back to the USA (that is, give me anything but Americana, please!), but for the time I lived in Japan I was quite certain that there was no place where the objects were more beautiful.

Here’s a definition the Japanese notion of “kazari” (or “ornament”) from the