Nesting

The thing with parentheses has been going on for a long time.

And it's not limited to the post-sig poetry, tagged on to perfectly bland email messages because the words have to come out somewhere and email is better than laundry lists, albeit only marginally.

There is an issue with nested parenthetical comments in daily speech and writing. (The 1K emails sent per month; this testifies to the paperless (but not necessarily energy-saving (and what about the idea of putting solar panels on the roofs of all of California's cars?)) office.)

There is That Thing With Lisp, back in the early eighties. Having (a?) Lisp was what the coolest people did. They had the best Fortune-file printouts, too, and they didn't mind my quiche. And don't get me started about Prolog and Concurrent Prolog (God created the world in seven lines of Concurrent Prolog. And the last one was End()))))))).)

But the source is earlier. Salinger. Seymour, an introduction.

"An unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses; like this (((()))). ...I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bowlegged- buckle-legged-omens of my state of mind and body at this writing. Professionally speaking which is the only way I've ever really enjoyed speaking up (and, just to ingratiate myself still less, I speak nine lanugauges, incessantly, four of them stone-dead [...]"

I think I fell in love with the Buddy Glass (not Seymour. He's nowhere near far enough into the autism spectrum for me) at that point, a passion that has peaked and slumped, sine curve-like, forever since. It's up again, now.

Not Seymour. He's dead, of course. But he's also deified, sanctified, beatified, and married to Muriel (she of the nailpolish). Buddy is accessible, or at least, accessible to anyone sitting on a large enough stack of books. And he makes multilingual, erudite puns, marking a verbal boundary (building a paranthetical line) between those who get it and The Rest Of Them. At fourteen, it was unbeatable.

A quarter-century later, I'm still looking for updates on that blog (Seymour, An Introduction, is as bloglike as you can get without a computer).

I find myself reclining on a nest built and padded with the straw-like remains of the paranthetical bouquet he placed at my feet. Soft. Round. And the seeds that dropped out of the flowers make the nest prettier, I think.

(((())))