What’s In Manna’s Library Tote Today?

Yesterday Matt and I headed an on-foot expedition to the library in search of some free entertainment as well as some books to help me revise a paper I wrote about language, grammar, desire, incompleteness and the Language Poetry movement of the 1970s. I hope to use this paper as a writing sample in my grad school applications next fall.

We found so much stuff, we had to purchase a $2 tote to carry them home. Here’s what we toted:

The last great ape [videorecording] / a BBC production ; produced and directed by Steve Greenwood. Call number: 599.8844 L3492

What I should have said was nothing [videorecording] : tales from my secret public journal / Mike Birbiglia ; Phase 3 Entertainment ; Birbigideas. Call number 792.23 W5553 

Of grammatology / by Jacques Derrida ; translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Call number: 401 D438

On the origin of language / translated, with afterwords, by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode ; introduction by Alexander Gode. Call number: 401 D58

Summary: Rousseau’s essay is an important text for semiotics and modern critical theory, as it plays a very important role in Jacques Derrida’s book Of Grammatology. Rousseau supplements his discussion of the origin of languages with theories about the origins of music, melody and harmony, and the relationship of languages to government.

Language and myth / by Ernst Cassirer ; translated by Susanne K. Langer. Call number: 401 C345 la

Summary: In this important study Ernst Cassirer analyzes the non-rational thought processes that go to make up culture. He demonstrates that beneath both language and myth there lies an unconscious “grammar” of experience, whose categories and canons are not those of logical thought. He shows that this prelogical “logic” is not merely an undeveloped state of rationality, but something basically different, and that this archaic mode of thought still has enormous power over our most rigorous thought, in language, poetry and myth. The author analyzes brilliantly such seemingly diverse (yet related) phenomena as the metaphysics of the Bhagavat Gita, the Melanesian concept of Mana, the Naturphilosphie of Schelling, modern poetry, Ancient Egyptian religion, and symbolic logic. He covers a vast range of material that is all too often neglected in studies of human thought.

Sister Bernadette’s barking dog : the quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences / by Kitty Burns Florey. Call number: 428.2 F6348 sis

Summary: In its heyday, sentence diagramming was wildly popular in grammar schools across the country. Kitty Burns Florey learned the method in sixth grade from Sister Bernadette: “It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.” Florey explores the sentence-diagramming phenomenon, including its humble roots at Brooklyn Polytechnic, its “balloon diagram” predecessor, and what diagrams of famous writers’ sentences reveal about them. Along the way, Florey offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature’s most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a getter grammarian? Can knowing how to diagram a sentence make your life better? And what’s Gertrude Stein got to do with any of it?

The deluxe transitive vampire : the ultimate handbook of grammar for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed / Karen Elizabeth Gordon. Call number 428.2 G663 de

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of language.” –Wittgenstein, Zettel, 55

Summary: The Deluxe Transitive Vampire spins a lively gothic narrative with such characters as the Debutante, famous courtesan, wolf, bat, vampire, mastodon, pizza chef, lummox, lamia, and trilingual solitary. Gordon conjures up this eccentric cast with a uniquely wicked, witty, and playful style. Yet every rule is explained with great clarity and precision. While entertaining the reader with the unexpected, she makes the most intricate and impossible usages clear for the first time.

Incompleteness : the proof and paradox of Kurt Gödel / Rebecca Goldstein. Call number: 510.92 G624 in

Summary: With the use of an ingenious proof Gödel was able to demonstrate that in any sufficiently complex system–in short, any system a mathematician would want to use–there are true statements that cannot be proven. Some thinkers despaired at this result. Others, like the formidable Wittgenstein, could never accept it. And still others misunderstood it as a torpedo to the hull of rationality itself. For Gödel, however, it was evidence of an eternal, objective truth, independent of human thought, that can only be apprehended imperfectly by the human mind.

Will I ever actually get through all these super books? I don’t know. But I’m gonna try. Wish me luck, I’ll see you all in a couple months when I get out from under my rock of nerdery.