language

Homophony, metaphor, and visualization: the problem of scale

In the comment stream following an article here about cyberbullying,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=bullies-turn-cyberspace-sour-13-05-11

someone writes, “Social media could be seen as a sort of petri dish for studying the methods and morays of such individuals.”

About which, two images.

From my former life, a petri dish full of bacterial colonies, with a human hand to show scale:

From my present life on a reef-girded island, a moray (photograph not by me):

And on behalf of language and its property of evoking visual imagery, a song of joy:

O tempora! My hovercraft (as M. Python once exclaimed) is full of eels!

“I commit”: the administrative intransitive

The Jerry Sandusky football sex scandal at Penn State reverberated in the school’s policy chambers, where the Board of Trustees belatedly learned that it had been kept in the dark by the school’s then president. Reacting, the school’s new president made a pledge to the board about future communications.

“I commit,” he said, “to loop you in.”

http://chronicle.com/article/Penn-State-Board-Accepts-Blame/132895

And that’s how we learned about Penn State’s new varsity sport.

— Jon,
SCHS ’58,
PSU ’62

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

The article from Inside Higher Ed,

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/12/appeals-court-backs-artist-lawsuit-watched-many-universities

is titled “Sports Artists vs. Universities,” and it reports that the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit has ruled that the University of Alabama can’t prevent an artist named Daniel A. Moore from painting pictures of Alabama football players, even if they’re wearing their trademarked uniforms. Said the court, “Like other expressive speech, Moore’s paintings, prints, and calendars are entitled to full protection under the First Amendment.”

But the University of Alabama was joined in court, amici curiae, by 27 other universities. Please stand now in respectful silence and hear the words of their brief. They testify to the power held by the American university system over the English language.

And shall we remain standing a moment longer to remember Walt Kelly (1913-1973), prophet of the state of the language in 2012?

Push and shove, hook and crook, Bernstein

When push comes to shove, as it has, I read Stein’s war years as a survivor’s tale. Jewish, female, homosexual, elderly (Stein was 66 in 1940), living in occupied France, Stein and Alice Toklas successfully escaped extermination. That is something for which we can be grateful. And I’m also glad that, by hook or by crook, Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis. In the end, Stein was able to go on to write her great feminist opera, The Mother of Us All, a celebration of American democracy.

— Charles Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight.” http://jacket2.org/commentary/gertrude-steins-war-years-setting-record-straight

Text 1: “When push comes to shove, as it has.”  Writing in defense of Gertrude Stein’s politics of survival in Vichy France, Charles Bernstein opens with a cliché (“setting the record straight”), then doubles down. “When push comes to shove” is another cliché, and a bad one: a dead metaphor, one that won’t bear being brought back to life in the same body language as Vichy words like “Drancy” or “Vélodrome d’Hiver.” But Bernstein’s giggly postscript “as it has” deconstructs the corpse. “Of course I know better,” says that little verbal tag. “Notice how wittily detached I am from any simple-minded idea that words can have a non-verbal reference. Of course I know that if the record is a record, it can’t be set straight.”

As a career move, that has been a winner for Bernstein. Romping through fields of crumpled newsprint, Bernstein texts like “Of Time and the Line” or the sublime “this poem intentionally left blank” (which I have now quoted in its entirety) bestow on their readers the great gift of knowing laughter. There’s no guilty “but” to follow that happiness, either. Bernstein’s poems are language in its pure animal function, eating and sleeping and reproducing and then lying down to die in unafraid unconsciousness. Bernstein’s is a poetry with its own “The End” built in.

Text 2: “By hook or by crook.”  Art is inseparable from art collecting, and art collecting is inseparable from crookery. That’s how the Elgin Marbles got to England. At smaller scales, of course, the crookery can get uncomfortable. It may even involve pushing and shoving. Some of Gertrude Stein’s coreligionists discovered that when they returned home after the war and tried to move back into their looted houses.

Kielce, Poland, July 1946

Text 3: “Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis.” Some kinds of looting, some kinds of pushing and shoving, are preferable to others. Lots of women had to suffer for Pablo Picasso’s art. Lots of men had to die for Andrew Carnegie’s libraries. Presumably the suffering and dying wound up with a market value after all. The cliché under the surface of Bernstein’s sentence is something like “On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs.”

Punchline: “How am I? Oi, don’t ask.” Specifically, don’t ask why the collection wasn’t looted, because the answer will only be another cliché. This one will just lie there on the page, too: unmeaning because unconscious. It has been spoken by many thousands of people over the years, sometimes in complete sincerity, and yet not one of those thousands could think through to a definition of any of its terms. In that sense, it is dead language — that is, language which was born unmeaning, language which therefore can never be a poem.

But since you have asked, reader: Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis because it was under the protection of a powerful Nazi crook named Bernard Faÿ. Together, Faÿ and Stein collaborated in their own special translation, from one dead language into another, of the text “Some of my best friends are Jews.”

Game theory

1

In the middle of Loren Eiseley’s essay “How Flowers Changed the World,” the freshman comp class snapped awake for a moment when a girl hit a startling assertion and uttered a pretty little scream.

“Flowers are sex organs?” she cried.

“What did you think they are?” I Socratically responded.

Pause.

And then the girl ventured: “For decoration?”

2

The woman’s denim pants from South Korea are purses for an invisible currency. Their decorated pockets hold nothing but an object of imaginative speculation. Playfully, they deploy optical illusion to shape an idea of the body they coyly hide.

Playfully, too, they are labeled with nonsense words and an anachronistic image from a symbol system which still retains prestige in its provincial borderlands.

Click to enlarge.

H. M. Regiment of Royal Korean Cowgirls.

3

The beggar is holding a sign which we can’t read at that angle.

“Beggar’s dog – Hoboken,” ca. 1910-1915
Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.10090

But we can be sure what it must say. Advancing on our sympathy behind the shield of his sign, the beggar is notionally selling pencils and shoelaces: things everybody needs, things with a value in any economic system. But in the trade zone behind the sign, what is transacted is only an exchange of money from one pocket to another. Except for that transfer, everything in this image is decoration. The beggar’s pencils are no more for writing with than a hedge funder’s bling watch is for telling time.

Making it playful, the beggar has alienated his tin cup from the transaction by hanging it around his dog’s neck. Accustomed to seeing pictures by the rules of narrative convention, we think of the dog as smiling. The dog is also wrapped in something gauzy. It may be something like a woman’s shawl; it may be a completely threadbare blanket. Presumably it is worn against the cold, but we are going to read it too as part of the game. Coming closer and closer to the outline of the dog’s body, it playfully beckons the decorative twists of the iron bars behind it into what might look like the final shape of a life.

That gauze, those iron helices, that dozing bald man, have become part of a pattern they can no longer outlive.

Adjective neutral, noun bad

 

At minute 4 of this video about a small lake in New Hampshire called Jew Pond, the director of the New Hampshire Jewish Federation makes the point that the noun “Jew” is pejorative when it’s used as an adjective. His examples are “Jew politician” and “Jew lawyer,” and he might also have mentioned T. S. Eliot’s scornful phrase about one of his benefactors, “Jew publisher.” “If the name had been ‘Jewish Pond,'” the director tells the interviewer, “we would not be having this conversation.”

And that’s why Republicans say “Democrat Party.”

—

Addendum: Gary Ostrower writes to recommend the Wikipedia article “Democrat Party (phrase),” and adds,

“The difference between using ‘Democrat’ as an adjective and ‘Jew’ as an adjective is that the latter has nearly 2000 years of negative connotation behind it. Not so ‘Democrat.’ Most — maybe all — of my own students would not recognize ‘Democrat’ as slur; not so with ‘Jew.'”

And that’s true enough. Just two days ago one of my own rhythm-challenged students sent me a friendly e-mail beginning, “High Professor Morse.” No, he didn’t mean “Herr Oberprofessor,” and no he couldn’t hear the pause where the comma should go. For that matter, when I took my physical exam for the draft in 1966 the sergeant in charge of the paperwork instructed us to fill in the Race blank “Neg” if we were, as he carefully put it, Negroic.

—

Further note, March 14, 2012: Jew Pond will now be renamed. Story here:

http://forward.com/articles/152987/nh-town-votes-to-rename-jew-pond

Coed

In the course of the Republican primary campaign of 2012, the conservative policy intellectual Rush Limbaugh weighed in on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown student who had addressed some Democratic members of the House in favor of birth control coverage under government-mandated health insurance. According to David Crary’s article for the Associated Press (Honolulu Star-Advertiser 3 March 2012: A3), Mr. Limbaugh told his radio audience on February 29:

What does it say about the college coed . . . who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

About that, three language notes.

1. A septuagenarian myself, I remember the term “coed” from the 1950s. I don’t think I’ve heard it since then.

2. The OED traces the term back to 1893. From 1903, it offers an anti-Limbauvian quotation: “Any college where the girls are commonly called ‘co-eds’ is not a truly co-educational institution.”

3. For conservatives who understand that conservatism of thought entails conservatism of language, Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” offers this reassuring statement of faith.

I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us participates in the “triumph” of the Revolution Society. If the king and queen of France and their children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities, (I deprecate such an event, I deprecate such hostility,) they would be treated with another sort of triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king of France in that situation: you have read how he was treated by the victor in the field, and in what manner he was afterwards received in England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality,— nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.

Mots gratuits

1

In the middle of the crowded final exam, the football player was suddenly in trouble. Waving his arm to attract my attention, he held up his pen, shook it, and pantomimed despair. I held up my own pen, pointed at it to signify comprehension and impending action, and then slow-pitched it over other students’ heads to him.

Every muscle in the football player’s body suddenly became alert. His head swiveled as he followed the trajectory of the approaching pen, and his eyes glittered. With a gesture as efficient as a ballerina’s, he reached up, wrapped his huge hand around the pen, and pulled it down through the air toward himself.

For that fraction of a second, an intelligence had been at work. It had taken control of the pen so completely that it had no need for any words that a pen might write. It was an intelligence purely of flesh making contact with plastic, body to body. It was love.

2

Twice a night, late at night in my time zone, the comment spams come through to my blog. They’re all the same: a few anonymous sentences of extravagant but vague praise, not just mistyped but typed as if the typist doesn’t even know the alphabet. “You hpeled a brother,” say the sentences. “Thnaks!”

I’m told that they look that way because the typists actually don’t know the alphabet. In rooms full of keyboards in India or the Philippines, people type and type and type, for pennies an hour, transmitting alphabets into the aether on behalf of other people who think that such an act will cause search engines to notice their existence. In the aether, electronicized words say “Love.”

3

Click to enlarge.

4

If you have the pen, you don’t need the words. If you have a computer programmed to transmit the word “Thnaks,” you don’t need love. Look:

if you have the shadow, isn’t that enough?

Planes; a blackbird

1

Jack Delano, January 1941,
“Commuters, who have just come off the train,
waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.”
Library of Congress http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsac.1a33849/
Click to enlarge.

As if their picture with its rounded corners were an aquarium, the commuters are pressed against the image’s front plane. Their heights are almost uniform, and so are their colors and shapes: dark and boxy, in the somber fashion of their era. Behind them is a black wall, and behind that wall their train has gone away. On the roof and on the ground around them, the snow will never melt. Off to the right of the frame, their bus will never arrive. The winter light is dying along the shaft that bears an unlighted lamp. It is the only part of this composition that is not exactly like every other part. The image has allocated its space with absolute uniformity. Nothing in it will ever change again. A dark afternoon has become forever.

 

2

Detroit Publishing Company, about 1910,
“River packet Charles H. Organ landing at Mound City.”
Library of Congress, via http://www.shorpy.com/node/10552

Here in parallelogram-shaped Tennessee, the right side of what you see is human bustle. The man sitting on his boiler is paired off with a woman dressed like a clipper ship under studding sails, and the horse who is looking on is ready to leap into motion.

Just behind them, their picture world is busy with another motion: up and down.

But off to the left, two trees have quietly slipped away to take a dip in the river.

Motion in more than one plane as fulfillment of a divided composition. At a snowy curb in New England, the sad losing struggle of color against darkness, but here along a sunny southern river, the great simplification of black and white. The point where the boat has come to its stop is the place of happy ending.

 

3

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a New England poem by a man who lived in Connecticut but loved the South. Another of his poems begins, “I placed a jar in Tennessee,” and a second is about a woman walking along the shore in Key West and singing the warm Florida night into starry order. Language’s way of making the flying blackbird one with the moving river is a third ordering: a simplification of the sad confusions of the colored world into an arrangement purely external to man, like the silver halide crystals on a glass plate just removed from one of the Detroit Publishing Company’s big wooden cameras. At water’s edge and on into the water with the trees, here along a sunny southern river, you have been given black to look at, and its negation, white. What more did you think there could be to desire?