Rag

And now, a mini-love affair with the word "rag"–detritus, shamefulness, being "on the rag," being at the ragged edge, playing a syncopated rag(a) with a ragged rhythm.

Walter Benjamin writes that

the ragpicker is the most provocative figure of human misery. "Ragtag in a double sense: clothed in rags [I mistype "rages"] and occupied with rags. "Here we have a man [sic] whose job it is to pick up the day's rubbish in the capital. He collects and catalogues everything that the great city has cast off [I mistype "has to offer"], everything it has lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic" (Du Vin et du Hashish, Oeuvres, vol. 1, pp. 249-250). As may be gathered [!!gathered!!] from this prose description of 1851, Baudelaire [and, we might postulate, Benjamin himself] recognizes himself in the figure of the ragman. The poem presents a further affinity with the poet, immediately noted as such: "a ragpicker stumbles past, wagging his head/ and bumping into walls with a poet's grace,/ pouring out his heartfelt schemes to one/ and all, including spies of the police." (Arcades Project, 345-50).

And Leo Spitzer (http://www.jstor.org/pss/2909131) traces the etymology of ragamuffin back through rigamarole to rag(e)man (the devil) and Rehoboam (?could be related to Rahab: name of a Biblical monster, from Heb. rahab, lit. "storming, against, impetuous," from rahabh "he stormed against" (cf. Arabic rahiba "he feared, was alarmed")), the overly harsh Israelite king, in Spitzer's brilliant, linguistic-detritus-gathering article "Ragamuffin, Ragman, Rigmarole, Rogue," Modern Language Notes, 62:2 (February 1947), pp. 85-93. Please note that this was published in 1947, right after the war that killed Walter Benjamin, right after the fall of the Reich that turned people like Benjamin and Spitzer into garbage, refuse, detritus. Both were writing against their own disposal, both were salvaging, scavenging every bit of human language/consciousness/activity, from the most noble to the most abject, and making strong connections between artistic practice and ragpicking.

rag (n.)
early 14c., probably from O.N. rogg "shaggy tuft," earlier raggw-, or possibly from O.Dan. rag (see rug), or a back-formation from ragged (c.1300), which is from O.N. raggaðr "shaggy," via O.E. raggig "rag-like." It also may represent an unrecorded O.E. cognate of O.N. rogg. As an insulting term for "newspaper, magazine" it dates from 1734; slang for "tampon, sanitary napkin" is attested from 1930s. Rags "personal clothing" is from 1855, Amer.Eng. Rags-to-riches "rise from poverty to wealth" is attested by 1896.

rag (v.)
"scold," 1739, of unknown origin; perhaps related to Dan. dialectal rag "grudge." Related: Ragged; ragging.

rag-bag
1820, from rag (n.) + bag. Fig. sense of "motley collection" is first recorded 1864.

raga
1788, from Skt. raga-s "harmony, melody, mode in music," lit. "color, mood," related to rajyati "it is dyed."

ragamuffin
mid-14c., from M.E. raggi "ragged" + fanciful ending (or else second element is M.Du. muffe "mitten"). Ragged was used of the devil from c.1300 in reference to "shaggy" appearance. Used by Langland as the name of a demon (cf. O.Fr. Ragamoffyn, name of a demon in a mystery play); sense of "dirty, disreputable boy" is from 1580s.

rage (n.)
c.1300, from O.Fr. raige (11c.), from M.L. rabia, from L. rabies "madness, rage, fury," related to rabere "be mad, rave." Related to rabies, of which this is the original sense. Similarly, Welsh (cynddaredd) and Breton (kounnar) words for "rage, fury" originally meant "hydrophobia" and are compounds based on the word for "dog" (Welsh ci, plural cwn; Breton ki). The verb is mid-13c., originally "to play, romp;" meaning "be furious" first recorded c.1300. Related: Raged; raging. The rage "fashion, vogue" dates from 1785.

ragged
"rough, shaggy," c.1300, pp. adj. from rag (n.), but earliest use is not directly from the main sense of that word and may reflect a broader, older meaning. Of clothes, early 14c.; of persons, late 14c.

raggedy
1890, from ragged + -y (2). Raggedy Ann doll first attested 1918. Raggedy-ass by 1930.

raghead
insulting term for "South Asian or Middle Eastern person," 1921, from rag + head.

Ragnarok
in Norse mythology, the last battle of the world, in which gods and men will be destroyed by monsters and darkness, 1770, from O.N. ragna, gen. of regin "the gods" + rök "destined end" or rökr "twilight."

ragout
1650s, from Fr. ragoût (mid-17c.), from M.Fr. ragoûter "awaken the appetite," from O.Fr. re- "back" + à "to" + goût "taste," from L. gustum (nom. gustus); see gusto.

ragtag
1820, from rag (n.) + tag; originally in expression rag-tag and bobtail "the rabble" (tag-rag and bobtail is found in 1659), from bobtail "cur," 1619. Tag and rag was "very common in 16-17th c." [OED]

ragtime
"syncopated, jazzy piano music," 1897 (in song title "Mississippi Rag" by W.H. Krell), from rag "dance ball (1895, Amer.Eng. dialect), possibly a shortening of ragged, in reference to the rhythmic imbalance.

ragtop
"convertible car," 1955, from rag + top (1).

ragweed
1790, from ragged + weed; so called from shape of the leaves. Applied to a different plant, ragwort, from 1650s. Ragwort itself is attested from mid-15c. (see wort).

Opening Salvo

Here it is, this Banff-mandated experiment. My new blog will, I hope, be a way to generate writing and ideas for my larger Text, Textile, Exile project, which is more of a floating matrix (constellation, in Benjamin's terminology) than a form into which content will be poured.
Please send useful links, other blog suggestions and so forth so i can make this as interactive as possible.

The image is Open Up and Bleed: for James Osterberg, Jr. (Iggy Pop). There's a short piece of writing that goes with it that I'll share anon, but right now I'm using it as an example of the fancy lettering I like to use. And here's a bit of writing I did in response to a query I got from a colleague on the subject:

Why Do I Use Elaborate “Fonts”?

This is a question I was asked by my colleague Qadri Ismail, who can be counted on to ask engaging questions and who has become interested in the modernist and contemporary visual arts of his native Sri Lanka, especially those paintings that concern the political conflicts that have consumed much of his country’s energies in the past half-century or so.

No one had ever asked me that, and I took the question to mean a couple of related things. Whether or not this is what Qadri had in mind, I found it useful to proceed to answer what I thought he was asking as a way to clarify what I do and why.

I took his question to mean, first, that elaborate lettering is a sign of elitism and elegance; and second, relatedly, that elaborate lettering indicates old-fashioned, or at least pre-modernist, aesthetic values.

I use elaborate “fonts” in order to foreground the materiality of the letters and by extension, the materiality of language. Like contemporary graffiti, these hyper-rococo, distended, or otherwise distorted letters underscore the “defamiliarization,” or ostranenie, in Viktor Shklovsky’s terminology, that forms the basis of the literary. We are in the realm of the imagination, of people trying to create something. The same old same old can’t be taken for granted but must be challenged. Letters’ and words’ use as instruments of domination without substance of their own must be destabilized, and this challenge is mind-opening. The illumination of letters illuminates the mind by posing a puzzlement: how to read the letter? It’s not a transparent window onto meaning; it must be confronted as an (art) object itself. Traditionally, letters have been illuminated in manuscripts to indicate their status as sacred, and to mark the beginning of a page or passage, an entryway into the world of the text, where different things become possible. It’s a sort of threshold, or border. The words “border” and “embroider” may have etymological kinship; hems and edges are often areas that attract the embellishment of the needle arts, and borders, in eco-systems, are where the most diversity, the most abundant, varied and proliferant animal and plant life flourishes. So the ornamentation of the letters, their being turned into ornaments, marks them as unnatural, as cultural “constructions,” as the old phrase has it, and as cultural creations. At the same time, they are a connective tissue of communication, and this element of their being is materialized by their being rendered in tissue; in cloth and in the elements of cloth: thread, yarn. I initially wrote “threat” and “yearn” here, by error, because words and letters do, after all, signify affectively and cognitively. In the Kabbalistic tradition, letters are spiritual emanations of divine energy, and each has its special divine properties, they are “vessels of fiery potential,” just as in astrology or numerology each configuration or number has characteristics. That they are somewhat abstract–shapes and signs rather than images, which are forbidden–makes them more appropriate representations of the Divine. Paleolinguist and textile scholar E. J. W. Barber postulates that sewing for necessity (joining pieces of animal hide together with needles for shelter or clothing) is contemporaneous in origin with, not precedent to, ornamentation. She observes that the oldest needle archaeologists have found dates from about 23,000 BC, the Paleolithic era; remains of two humans, an adult woman and a male child, each wearing a hat ornamented with three stones sewn into them through central piercings, date from about the same period. The row of three small stones is an ornamentation that supercedes (supplements but is not of a secondary order) the garment’s creatural utility, suggesting that their presence has ritual purpose, though ornamentation in a secular society has come to suggest a second-order, decorative, self-regarding impulse. Thus the ornate is inseparable from the origins of culture, of made-ness and reflection on it: “ornate” anagrams “orante,” the woman who prays.

The other reason–or an other reason–I use ornate fonts is precisely this idea of “old-fashioned”ness. In most, but not all, cases, the cleanliness of modernist style is what I want to avoid; modernist precision is, in its way, more “elitist” –whatever that means, really–than the earnest, petit-bourgeois desire for fanciness whose pathos is at the heart of the “bad poetry” I find so valuable. In the same way that outsider poetry is often marked by indices of passé poetic values–flowery diction, rhyme, contrived or clumsy metaphor–the overly fancy letter suggests a “wannabe” status, the outsider looking in and imitating, in exaggerated and slightly awkward gestures, what s/he perceives as elegance. S/he is not even a parvenue, but a wannabe parvenue. Nancy Spungen dyeing her hair blonde and crying to her mother that even her friends don’t want to spend time with her. John Keats overusing words like “sweet” in order to be poetic, much to the condescending amusement of the literati of his day.