Category: Writing

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I picked up a couple of books from the library yesterday that I’d ordered based on their being mentioned in other weblogs. One was Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadter. I would give credit to the person who mentioned this, in either a posting or a comment, but I can’t remember exactly where I heard of this book; the people I read tend to drop titles as frequently as Hantzel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs, and for about the same reason — to mark a path.

Well, if you recognize yourself as the person, give yourself a bow, because this book is an absolute delight. Here is a person, Hofstadter, discussing the principles of translation based on a small French poem, but doing so in a manner that is both engaging as well as enlightening. Rather than make the topic more complex and obscure, he simplifies, and in the process creates something infinitely richer.

In the introduction, Hofstadter discusses his obsession with controlling the layout and format of the published book, not just the content. He writes:

 

I know this sounds quite nutty, but it is me to the core. This is my style at its more pure, and, I must say, at its most joyous. Paradoxical thought it surely sounds, I feel at my freest, my most exuberant, and my most creative when operating under a set of heavy self-imposed constraints. I suspect that the welcoming of constraints is, at bottom, the deepest secret of creativity — and that, of course, is why poetry, building on a foundation of constraints, is so central to this book. Translation, too, is a dense fabric of constraints — and thus, needless, to say, the merging of translation with poetry gives rise to such a rich mesh of interlocking constraints that the mind goes a bit berserk in a mixture of frustration of delight.

I’ll relate just one example of the strangely twisty effects of my many self-composed constraints. Early on, I decided, just for the fun of it, to begin each chapter with a bit of a flourish — a few large letters that grandually would shirnk down to the size of the normal text. I soon realized that I had to avoid descenders in those first few letters — in other words, no “g”, no “y”, and so forth — in order to prevent collisions with letters just below. Well, this tiny constraint had quite a big effect in the case of Chapter 2.

An early draft of the chapters started out with a word that had a letter with a descender in it, and my search for a way to reword that first sentence to get rid of the lone descender led to a totally unexpected, unplanned style for that paragraph, which set a distinct opening tone for the chapter, which led to a curiously assonant three-word section head, which then suggested to me the idea of repeating that three-word pattern for all of the section heads in the chapter, and then the various section heads that I created in the appealing mold of that pattern would up exerting a considerable influence on what I actually said in the sections that they headed. Thust the trivial avoidance of one descender in the first five letters had a major impact on the ideas expressed in that chapter. Though this may seem bizarre, it is in fact absolutely typical. It is one of the more easily explained examples, but is not exceptional.

I was charmed by Hofstadster’s admission of this fact — I wonder how many writers would? — but I was hooked when he used ‘twisty’.

The book is ostensibly about the experience and effort of translating one small French poem. I don’t know French, nor is it a topic of particular interest; and my knowledge of poetry is limited. But from the first I was engaged and now can’t wait to finish the book. On a topic I have little interest in. Can you think of a higher compliment to give a writer?

I started this post last night, but left the finishing it to today. This morning, while doing my weblog reading, I found this at Loren’s about the poet Ezra Pound:

 

As I read the Cantos, I constantly wondered whom Pound considered his audience. I’ve had seven years of college English, with a focus on poetry. I’ve had two grad-level courses in Chinese Literature taught by a brilliant Korean professor. I’ve read a wide range of poetry for over twenty years. Yet, I felt totally inadequate when faced with the Cantos. Who, then, did Pound think would read his poem? Did he really expect anyone to be cognizant of all the literary influences found in the poems? Or did he think that, like a prophet, scribes would meticulously study his poems for years, annotating them so that the faithful could begin to truly comprehend his message? At the very least, the poem seems directed at a small, elite group of artist-scholars who believed, as Pound apparently did, that the great poets are seers.

The small, elite group.

I respect the need for any scholar to communicate with those of like mind in order to increase the base of knowledge. But I reserve my highest acclaim for the person who can write something like “Postmodernism for Dummies”, without condescending to the audience, or lessening the topic.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve had the blue funks all week, not that any of you could tell with my usual light and even-handed writing and sunny, calm temperament. This in spite of some good news about one of my domains that I’m just waiting final action on before *spilling the beans.

Having the blue funks isn’t a bad thing, but I have things to do and places to go and no time for being blue funky, so I’m pulling out all the stops this weekend to eliminate it: classic rock n’ roll, old black & white science fiction movies, cooking a nice meal, and walking in the rain.

As I was writing this, I wondered if the phrase ‘blue funk’ survived international borders. For instance, would it mean the same in the UK, in South Korea, Australia, or South Africa? How about next door in Canada?

Out of curiosity I did my usual when I’m trying to discover the meaning of a particular phrase: typed the phrase in quotes and the word ‘phrase’ into Google, and the first site that showed up is the World Wide Words page for the word funk, including the associated phrases and derivatives, such as funky. According to the author of this site, Michael Quinion, blue funk means different things in Britain then the US. In the US, a blue funk means being dejected, or slightly depressed. However, in the UK a blue funk is a state of fear or panic.

(Just as a point of clarification for my British readers, but I am neither panicky, nor in a state of fear.)

Exploring further in this intriguing site, I found this article on other odd duck phrases: “good egg” and “nitty-gritty”. According to Quinion, the British Home Office minister, John Denham, used the term “nitty-gritty” in a speech, and was chastised by members of the audience for using a racially offensive term. The Guardian investigated this and found that the police in Britain can’t use terms such as “nitty-gritty” and “good egg” because of possible connections with racial slurs such as “egg and spoon”.

Quinion wrote:

 

While sensitivity over language is not inherently bad, sometimes political correctness passes from needful consideration into a parallel world of misunderstanding and mealy-mouthedness. These days, it seems even PCs have to be PC. The chances of a British policeman using the phrase good egg in conversation with a member of the public is roughly the same as his pursuing an outfangthief or enforcing the rules on the right to turbary.

The terms “good egg” and “nitty gritty” are racially offensive? But I’ve used the both more than once. This deserved more investigation, so I searched on nitty-gritty as a phrase and found another article on the incident at the Telegraph, and this frankly humorous EZ Board thread, demonstrating what happens when a fact of this nature connects up with the loose free association typical of these types of sites.

However, back to more serious issues, including my use of a racial slur all these years. From the EZ Board discussion, someone brought up an association of “nitty-gritty” with the slave trade. Further Google investigation of nitty-gritty in association “slave trade” brought up this BBC News transcript of the investigation of the use of this term by the Denham. According to John Ayto, author of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang:

What it is supposed be is that how the story goes is that nitty-gritty originated as a term for the grit that accumulated in the bilges of slave ships and that therefore it has particularly painful connotations to Afro-Americans and to Blacks in general. But, as I said, that may be true, but I have never seen any evidence that it is true so the case remains open as far as I can see.

(From the transcript of the interview, I also found out that the phrase “rule of thumb” is from an old English law that men couldn’t beat their wives with rods thicker than the width of their thumbs, but according to Quinion, this is most likely urban legend. However, it most likely also couldn’t be used by the British police.)

Anyway, back to good eggs and the nitty gritty scandal. Quinlian summarized the incident with:

 

The matter became more convoluted the following morning, when John Denham wrote to the Guardian saying that he had checked most carefully and had established that there was no list of banned words in the police force. The Guardian report hadn’t said there was, but that officers could face a charge of breaching the codes on tolerance if anyone complained, a more subtle form of control that requires officers to self-censor every word (and yet still leaves them open to frivolous or malicious complaints).

Amid confusion and denials, the main loser here seems to be the English language.

And there you have it — a little light reading for a Saturday morning. And be careful what you say out there: Someone is Listening to you.

*spilling the beans (from Phrase Finder):

“When votes were taken in Greece, white beans indicated positive votes and black beans negative. Votes had to be unanimous, so if the collector ‘spilled the beans’ before the vote was complete and a black bean was seen, the vote was halted.”