The Grammar of Love

Page 7 September–October 2009 recognizing perplexing collapses in relationships, and unexplainable disaffection of feeling. The short pieces work together, as do their disparate worlds, both fanciful and mundane: they hinge, and open. They also facet and reflect, as the panels of a three way mirror, giving a multiplied and fractured image in certain regards, but one which seeks to give us a more complete vision of ourselves. Joanna Howard is the author of On the Winding Stair (2009) and In the Colorless Round, a chapbook with artwork by Rikki Ducornet. She lives in Providence and teaches at Brown University. Howard continued from previous page and they form of themselves new and unexpected creatures. In “The Ominous Philologist,” soundplay and wordplay point us to an evolving and elaborate lexicon describing a mutated pearl: “The doubled pearl is likened to twins who, by birth interlarded, rattle one another’s temper. The doubled pearl, phlap-phlap, personifies that human rarity, as does the double-flapped felt hat.” Malapropisms abound in “The Doorman’s Swellage” as he leads us on a tour of his building, but he praises the power of conversation, lucidly: Right now as we speak together, the air around us is disturbed. The sounds we make are elastic; like acrobats they bound about! Shadows stir, dust lifts, inertia is subverted by vibrations. Even before we have time to appreciate what is happening , our ears have averted us to the fact of conversation. The vibrations, dear sir, are accompanied by…an emotion. You will agree with me: nothing is more marvelous than the faculty of speech. Because the pieces in The One Marvelous Thing favor a very short form (in some cases, stories are less than a page), Ducornet has little interest in emphasizing traditional plot development, instead working with truncation and fracture in a way that suits the lives of the characters, many of whom are The Grammar of Love Angela Szczepaniak Love: that inchoate emotion winking restless through the “feeble language” we commit to “ivory linen paper” or “gray-green computer screens” in vain attempts to encapsulate the ineffable. At least, that’s the word from Love Sentence, a collaborative project from the Nothing Moments series between writer Lynne Tillman, artist Tami Demaree, and designer Emily CM Anderson that scrutinizes the elusive notions of love that have been culturally inscribed, as “[o]nce upon a time the impassioned word [love] was scratched into dirt, smeared and slapped onto rough walls, carved into trees, chiseled into stone, impressed onto paper, then printed into books.” This book, however, isn’t satisfied with simply printing love “with a flourish.” As the title suggests, Love Sentence dissects the very grammar of “I love you,” since, according to Tillman, love—the concept, the incarcerating emotion itself—“resides in language.” The intangible quality of the diction, perceptions, and clichés of love, combined with her angst over an absent lover, sends the protagonist, the aptly named Paige, into an existential linguistic crisis that results in earnest contemplation of those “[t]hree ordinary, extraordinary, diminutive words.” Fueled by paper-towel-heart crafts and extrapolated through periodic epistolary addresses to her lover, Paige reflects on her own past and present relationships , calling on contributions from writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians as varied as Sappho, Andrew Marvell, Robert Creeley, and The Troggs to consider how textual manifestations of love, as they may transmute over time and through genre, have influenced her conception of the “eight sweet letters” that philosophically paralyze her. Paige’s dialogue, with the reader as much as with the quoted texts, is supported by Demaree’s illustrations of the quoted figures—a series of portraits that accompany their observations on love. The connections between the illustrations, quotations, and the Paige narrative are suggested through layout and design, rather than explicit exposition, which cleverly invites readers to participate in the collaboration . Beyond a simple collation of various cultural representations of love, Tillman et al. orchestrate a constellation of voices that begin a larger discussion with the reader— one that encompasses the materiality of “love talk” and the texts in which it is found. Paige begins the book wondering, “did the printing press change love? Did the...