The Misadventures and Misunderstandings of KenBro

KenBro was not like the other words of his language,
he was wild and silly, and so full of anguish.
He jumbled up pronouns, and tossed around nouns.
Misused capitalization and chased punctuation around.
He tried on mutually exclusive verbs, often at a whim.
And didn't mind that adjectives had nothing on him.
He placed E's before I's and U's before O's
running aruond feilds yelling I am KenBro.
Suffice it to say, KenBro did not play well with other words.
Even the laws of grammar found him absurd.

And so it was ruled that KenBro's transgressive nature
was an affront to grammar's orderly nomenclature.
In an act that was all but discretionary
they exiled him out of their little dictionary.
His absence was an example of how not to act,
if you wanted to keep your place in the world intact.
When children were admonished for playing with their words,
they were often told the story of the fate of KenBro.
Of how language has meanings that depend on rules and constraints
and when these are transgressed you leave its ranks.
And so words like KenBro that set out to beguile,
Must live out their days in the backwoods of the wild.

Of course no one knows if this story is true,
or just a cautionary tale that was simply construed
to harry little children into the proper uses of grammar
perhaps because restrictions and prohibitions are not enough to enamor.
But there have been stories of pilgrims qua travelers
encountering a strange word in the here and after.

Traveler one, a cartographer by trade,
fell upon KenBro by chance one day,
"What an extraordinary word, and what curious features,
However shall I categorize this strange tattered creature?"
Several schemes were concocted,
some traditional, some doctored.
ANd so KenBro was placed in a traditional taxonomy,
if rather low in the biological hierarchy.
Unfit for phylum and too wild for kingdom,
He didn't quite fit with the other critters among them.
Too brutish for genus, and too unstable for species,
he was labeled a mutant, an exception to all of these.
Next he was fit into geographic space,
into a hand-drawn map where everything had its place,
but he was no mountain, he was no land,
nor a tree or a lake, nor a beach made of sand.
And so like the mermaids and dragons of before
he was labelled terra incognita of the marginally explored.
And with that the cartographer said, "may you be of sound mind,
for your role in life has finally been defined."
Before KenBro could fully respond,
the cartographer was up and gone.

Traveler two, an industrial leader by fame,
on vacation spending his riches and gains,
stumbled upon KenBro and saw an opportunity,
to raise up this word towards the ranks of impunity.
"You see Mr. Word," he carefully began,
"I can clean up your act if you follow my plan."
KenBro responded, "you may call me by my name,"
"Ah," replied the traveler, "That is precisely what I wish to change.
To civilize your behavior and domesticate your form,
to standardize your uses, and keep them uniform"
And so he developed a rubric and technique,
a curriculum of sorts enhanced by the week
by which KenBro learned syntax and lexical functions,
Semantics, semiotics and logical reductions.
KenBro could turn a phrase in less than a minute
his use of prefixes was so sic there was no end to it.
In eleven strokes he could spell out his name,
his mechanical movements flawlessly tame.
"But traveler sir, this feels a bit too formal"
"That's right kid, its the feeling of normal."
Before KenBro could fully respond,
The industrial leader was up and gone.

A third traveler was wandering without a care in the world
enjoying the music made by the song of the birds.
He looked past the trees and fancied the clouds.
That's when he heard the noise, not too faint, not too loud.
Just beyond the brush was a marvelous scene
a raggedy word jumping about the evergreens
chasing a chipmunk or perhaps a squirrel
the sensational image was just a quick blur.
Sometime later the word slowed down for a rest,
"Excuse me my good word but I don't mean to be a pest.
But I rarely see a word as I do before me,
that isn't strung to other words forming a story.
And so I'm curious to hear how you came to be
if you're willing to share your story with me."

"Are you here to cateogrize me and show me my place,
or to train me, and tame me, in the name of grammatical grace?"
"No" laughed the traveler, "I am simply exploring"
"Giving my time to others is what I find rewarding"
KenBro grew quiet and looked his listener in the eyes,
"I usually talk non-sense, and speak out of turn,
I don't bother rhyming, or keeping my form,
but you seem honest enough to have a real conversation,
so I'll put all my literary tricks on standing reservation.
My story, if you're interested, has become quite the myth,
children taught writing have all heard of it.
My name is KenBro and I'm an example of all vices grammatical,
of errors semantic, structural, and analytical.
I did not meet the standard of linguistic purity
and so language cast me out for all of eternity."
"Yes," said the traveler, "I have heard the tale indeed.
The way the school of grammar tells it, it's quite the creed"
"But before that myth ever took its course,"
confided KenBro, "I was part of a story far worse."

"This story is universal though rarely spoken.
It begins when my name wasn't KenBro, but broken.
Yes broken was my original name,
only people said it with far greater disdain.
Not just at broken tools and broken machines,
but at broken relationships and broken dreams.
And whole peoples were labeled broken when they were thought to be impure
or of wretched religion, ethnicity, gender, or some other trait feared.
And so my story is a history of derogatory slurs,
mixed with discrimination and prejudiced wars.
Science hates the emotional in the search for the real,
and colonists can hate natives with a fervent zeal.
Some skeptics hate religion beyond belief
most AIDS victims are never sent relief,
because it's easy to stigmatize and easier to hate,
that which isn't deemed purified, or glorious or great.
Even the schooled and even the learned,
find others deficient and ignorant in turn,
Even the artists who are suppose to endorse compassion,
instead judge the photographers for their snazzy contraptions.
Even the naturalists who are supposed to be transcendental
Label technologists as inhuman and detrimental
Even the religions that teach the golden rule,
happen to find their own expression of it much more pure.
and even the grammariticians who help us be communal
are ready to put creatives like KenBro on tribunal.
The logic of impurity warns that things broken are to be avoided or discarded
and so i remixed my name, just to keep things lighthearted.
And played language games just to show the world,
the joy of creativity and dialogue and poetry unfurled.
And thank you my traveler for withholding your urge,
to categorize or fix me or enact some other purge."

"Well," said the traveler, "I am horrified by your fate,
is there anything I can do before it's too late?"
"Stay lighthearted, and keep being calm,
we don't need revolutionaries calling for arms.
Instead just be an example of how to give up the quest
for purism, realism, idealism, and the rest.
In the wake of perfectionism you can begin to face outwards,
and during your encounters with strange things and unknown words,
Don't avoid them or destroy them in the quest for purity forsaken
instead remember you are working with something not of your own making
something that wants compassion and health and loving understanding,
poetry and dignity and dialogue without puristic reprimanding."




Well Blog readers, I was going to leave it at that, but Kylie reminded me that I should probably blog about this weeks readings... fortunately it is this weeks readings that inspired this poem.

I do not know if this poem speaks for itself. In the context of new media it makes a great deal of sense to me, especially given the article about how media is often judged as artificial and impure. Remember the painter’s critique of photographers in Bolter and Grusin’s piece. This was the quest for “immediacy,” as the paper termed it, which is a fetish for realism that, in my opinion, induces a non-compassionate understanding of forms of expression (including new media, their designers, and their users) because the expression is held to the critique of perfectly reflecting reality, rather than appreciated for its own unique character. Fortunately, the Manovich piece goes to lengths to listen to new media genuinely and to reveal its characterists. This is a more compassionate approach than moralistically charging that new expressions of reality are less than reality, and thus somehow impure. Fortunately, none of the articles we have read seems to attack new media in this manner, but unfortunately several articles (I wont name names) are borderline idolizing new media as a ‘pure’ media leaving other lesser ‘impure’ older media in its wake. Or worse, one article idolizes users of new media as ‘pure’ natives, and non-users as impure ‘immigrants,’ who are too soiled by the natural world to wrap their unevolved minds around new media. So this poem was a reaction to what I call the purisitic fallacy that crops up somewhat in our readings, and even more in mainstream media amongst pundits and fanatics. The introduction of the three travelers was also strategic and drawn from this week’s reading. The first traveler represents Saussure from the Ryan reading, and the second traveler represents Frederick Winslow Taylor from the Manovich reading. I conceptualized these as two further approaches to purity – one through linguistic or geographic relations to put everything in its place, in a purified system of Truth, and one through scientific management to create a docile body that is so rigid in form that it is pure in function. Both are frightening approaches to rid the world of the marginal and impure.
One could go as far as to say KenBro is a symbol of new media, a word that has reinvented itself through remixing and remediation, but one does not need to take this step, for KenBro represents all media including the basic units of language itself – words. more importantly, KenBro represents that there's more to words than representing reality, there's the possibility of words to help us communicate with one another, to express ourselves and noble truths, to help us face up to our existential limits of not fully knowing others or reality, but trying to be at peace with these limits nonetheless. words, old media, new media can serve this powerful functions, i believe.


On the other hand, I believe the poem does speak for itself in a way. I wrote it not just to communicate my perspective on this puristic fallacy, but because I had no other words to describe the fallacy with. In fact, I made up the terms puristic fallacy and puristic reprimanding just to try to express some of the issues central to new media and new media critique. That there are no ready-made words to describe some of the central issues of new media, much less the central forms and functions of new media, is very telling indeed. It helps explain why some of the chapters we read this week bent over backwards into fields of philosophy and history, just to try to salvage words or terms that could be used to describe new media. New media is so novel, and our appreciation of old media still so limited, that we are lacking a basic vocabulary to detail the characteristics, forms, functions, and effects of new media. Without this basic vocabulary, new media has little resources to defend itself against attacks that simply see media as artificial and ‘less than’ reality. This poem has tried to show those arguments to be fallacious and based on a puristic ideology.