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2004-04-23 pie! (utc+1)
A bunch of Merkins have ("has") established
that poets live to an average age of 62, compared to 68 for
non-fiction writers.
Forskarna har flera teorier om varf�r just poeter d�r unga.
- Det kan vara f�r att poeter �r pl�gade och ben�gna att vara
sj�lvdestruktiva, s�ger James Kaufman.
The researchers have several theories on why poets die young.
"It
may be that poets are tormented and inclined to be self-destructive",
opines James Kaufman.
In the same way that there's a Whig account of history, there is
surely a Romantique conception of fair Poesy, and if there's anything
certainer than that this is it, I should certainly like to hear about
sporting odds offered on it.
The accompanying listis
topped by Karin
Boye and Dan
Andersson, who I take to be Swedishes, and then rounds up a fairly
usual bunch of suspects. (Although counting Dylan Thomas as a poet is
pushing your luck if you ask me.)
Meanwhile, an excellent idea:
Once somebody had an apparently daft idea - poems on the London
Underground. Then it went further, with poems in 4,000 NHS waiting
rooms. Now someone else has had what seems an even dafter idea: poems
by foreigners in NHS waiting rooms. And the Foreign Office has
welcomed it with open arms.
Next Saturday thousands of international dignitaries will find posters
of 10 poems by foreigners on display at a grand open day staged by the
Foreign Office in London to celebrate the accession of 10 states to
the EU on May 1.
Poems on the Underground was a triumph and has gone through a several
iterations and experienced retrobookification,
and we may well hope that this project has also legs. The Grauniad has
permission to reproduce a few - I don't, so I won't.
But hoorah for that and hoorah in particular for Denis "Denis"
MacShane, minister for Yoorp, for causing it to be a thing which
happened.
[Permalink]
2004-04-23 12:06
Fans of the game
"One song to the tune of another" will recognise both the allusion
and the principle involved; others may find the following helpful:
This is the round in which the tune of one song and the words of
another are brought together and combined as if they were both one
song. It's hard to get your head round that at first, but if you try
to think of it as one song without the tune but with the words to the
tune of another song but without the words, it may help.
An enclave, then, is one country without the nationhood with the nationhood of another country without the
territory, and there's more of it than you might think:
Enclaves in the
Yoorp! As Language Hat
points out, 7,6
m2 isn't a very generous allocation for the 1500
persons of B�singen, even if they are German.
Enclaves
in Yoorp and elsewhere!
[All enclavage via David von Teflsmiler
in the guestbladet, tak!]
[Permalink]
2004-04-23 morning (utc+1)
Today is St. George's Day, England's national day. By ancient custom,
this is celebrated across and throughout England by going entirely
unnoticed and unremarked. In particular, it is not a
holiday. and the only reason I noticed it myself was this
post at Living in Yoorp:
On April 23, is Sant Jordi, Catalunya's co-patron saint. He's the
well-known saint that kills the dragon. In Catalunya, his saint day
is also the book publishing's biggest day.
Most of the book stores ring up their biggest sales during the year,
more than Christmas, as they're premitted to offer a 10%
[discount]. The publishers put out their latest titles and the
authours are out in force prompting their books. One of the fondest
memories I have when I visited Barcelona at that time are the outdoor
kiosks and stalls of just about every publishing house in Barcelona.
If we were going to celebrate our national day, and to be honest I
think that would be a bit too demonstrative for the English taste, a
combination of cheap books and large quantities of beer would
certainly work for me.
[Permalink]
2004-04-22 belated (utc+1)
�1. A hat, a palpable hat!
(Norwegish kronprinsess Mette-Marit takes precedence in this bladet
since she is already a kronprinsess.)
At the dippning ("baptism") of her new prinsess, she
wore a hat:
Kronprinsesse Mette-Marit str�lte p� datterens store dag - med d�pens
mest omdiskuterte hatt.
Kronprinsess Mette-Marit beamed on her daughter's big day - with the
dipnings most talked-about hat.
By producing an heir, Mette-Marit has now fulfilled pretty much all
that destiny asks of a kronprinsess by marriage, and if I were her I'd
taken a few years off on holiday before going back to the daily grind
of waving and smiling, but it is said she's a trooper who wouldn't
hear of any such thing.
�2. Stamps!
It's all Knudella all the time out there in Denmarkland, and now
there's stamps
(also here):
Post Danmark fejrer sammen med Postverk F�roya og POST Greenland det
kommende kronprinsepars bryllup med frim�rker og s�rlige miniark.
Post Danmark celebrates together with Postverk F�roya (the Faroes) and
POST Greenland the coming kronprinscouple's wedding with stamps and
special miniark.
And the only tidbid ever to elicate any trace of approval of the
proceedings from our Native Informante, Birgitte, is this proper
fairytale detail:
Der d�kkes op med de gamle s�lvtallerkener, og de 13 fornemste g�ster
f�r guldmundt�jer, som best�r af ske, kniv og gaffel.
The table will be laid with old silver plates, and the 13 foremost
guests will have gold cutlery consisting of spoon, knife and fork.
Spoon, knife and fork - they're pulling out all the stops for
this one, that's for sure!
[Permalink]
2004-04-22 pie! (utc+1)
First a link to Scott
von Pedantry's article in defence of prescriptivism which is the
most Marxiste by which I mean the best article on the subject that
I've seen because this after all a blog and that a blog should
certainly have links is agreed by all prominent authorities.
But we have taken the Medium
Lobster as our own personal lobster, and through mumbling assorted
mantras and also varied other mantras we have moved onto a higher plane of
consciousness or else we're coming down with a head cold. It's
one of the great mysteries that life holds if not the greatest how
difficult it is to distinguish these two conditions, especially from
each other.
Presciptivisme is when persons say "Oh no you should not speak or write
in that way or manner for it is uncouth and vulgar and reveals you to
be a person of no class or breeding and not much education, gosh it makes
me angry to see the glorious cultural treasure and patrimony that is
my beloved tongue abused and mishandled in this why it's a crying
shame!"
And then there's other persons who say instead "Oh no you should not
criticise or censure in that way or manner for it is uncouth and
vulgar and reveals you to be a person of no class or breeding
and not much education, gosh it makes me angry to see a someone who don't
realise that people talk how they talk and that's fine and just as
it should be."
And all the disagreeing that they do all the time, especially with
each other, means that it can easily go unnoticed that they're in a
relationship of dialectical opposition with respect to what people
should do they share completely a commitment to telling people what
they should do with respect to and regarding language.
Even the rawest novice in the service of the Dialectique knows of
course that an opinion that something doesn't matter much is an
opinion about the something in question but this isn't quite that -
this is shouldisme, in which the opinions and behaviour of other
persons are, as is so much more enjoyably the case, the ones deeply in
need of being adjusted to the opiner's satisfaction.
From up here where the air is crisp and cool and invigorating yum
yum, and where when the Dialectique unfolds you can see the creases, it
is clear that discourses on language in either case and on both sides
are trapped and confined within the crazy world of "should", and this
is the zeroth and hardest thing to grasp about language - that it is a
thing that all its users have strong opinions about, which they are
seldom reluctant to state or give "reasons" for.
These "reasons" are as should be and therefore isn't completely
obvious to everyone examples as clear as can be found of ex post
facto rationalisation and very far from having caused the opinions
they are alleged to justify, which is the way with reasons in very
much more generality of course but you are probably not yet ready for
my critique of the explanatory power of causality so I won't go into
that yet.
[Permalink]
2004-04-22 morning (utc+1)
Is the Spanish eyeing up the Frenchy-French's status as Importand
Global Language?
"La globalisation, comme l'�crivent Emilio Lamo de Espinosa et Javier
Noya dans le rapport 2002 de l'Institut Cervant�s, est bonne pour
l'espagnol, alors qu'elle est mauvaise pour d'autres langues, comme le
fran�ais." En effet, "l'existence d'une importante communaut� des deux
c�t�s de l'Atlantique assure la reproduction d�mographique de
l'espagnol, les moyens de communication tendent � r�duire le risque de
fragmentation -linguistique-, les �migrations latino-am�ricaines
�tendent la capacit� de reproduction de la langue ; le commerce et le
poids de la culture en espagnol impulsent un excellent march� de
l'espagnol comme langue �trang�re et deux grands pays comme les
Etats-Unis et le Br�sil assurent la pr�dominance de l'espagnol en
Am�rique."
"Globalisation", as Emilio Lamo de Espinosa and Javier Noya write in
the 2002 report for the Cervantes Institute, "is good for Spanish,
while it's bad for other languages, such as French." In fact, "the
existence of an important community on both sides of the Atlantic
assures the demographic repruduction of Spanish, the means of
communication tend to reduce the risk of linguistic fragmentation,
emigrants from Latin-America extend the languages capacity for
reproduction, the business and cultural weight of Spanish propel an
excellent market for Spanish as a foreign language and two big nations
like the USA and Brasil assure the predominance of Spanish in
America."
Roughly, the Yoorpean situation is that Spanish teaching has gone up
by a factor of a gazillion in Poland, in much the same way that we're
forever hearing that bungee kite-skiing or some such is the fastest
growing sport in "Slovenia". What there isn't a great deal of in the
UK, I have noticed again since I've been sort of learning the
language, is Spanish language periodicals - is there really no major
league Spanish hebdo? The quotidiens ABC and El Pa�s are around, but
I do not especially have the taste for quotidiens.
[Permalink]
2004-04-21 hometime (utc+1)
You will of course recall that Bulgaria and Romania are scheduled to
join the EU in a second wave of enlargement in 2007, and now Croatia
looks
set join too:
L'entr�e au sein de l'Union europ�enne, le 1er mai, de huit pays
d'Europe centrale et orientale, plus Malte et Chypre, ne se traduira
pas par un ralentissement de la politique d'�largissement, au
contraire. La Commission a donn�, mardi 20 avril, un avis favorable �
la candidature de la Croatie et recommand� l'ouverture de n�gociations
d'adh�sion avec Zagreb, confirmant ainsi la strat�gie de l'UE
d'"europ�anisation" des Balkans.
The entry into the EU of eight central and eastern European countries
plus Malta and Cyprus, is far from the end of the policy of
enlargement. On Tuesday the Commision gave the green light for
opening negociations on joining with Zagreb, confirming the EU's
policy of "Europeanising" the Balkans.
Anyone giving odds that Serbia gets in before Turkey? If all the bits
of the former Yugoslavia turn up, will that be usefully different from
Yugoslavia having joined, only with a ten year delay and a whole bunch
of mass graves?
For that matter I'm still not in a very good mood, and I'd be willing
to bet Byelorussia gets in to the EU before Turkey.
[Permalink]
2004-04-21 wet (utc+1)
It's raining and I got quite wet while getting my samwidge so I am not
in a mood to do justice to the prinsessgossip. First a philosophy
joke:
Q: How's things?
A: Reified!
And now a Russian joke, three ways:
1. pa-russkie:
- Ya opyat' khochu v Parizh
- Chto, uzhe bilee v Parizhe?
- Nyet, uzhe khotel...
(The Cyrillic is in the link, of course.)
2. pa-fishskie:
- I again want into Paris.
- What, they were already in Paris?
- No, already he wanted...
3. pa-desskie:
- I want to go to Paris again.
- You've been before?
- No, I've wanted to before...
I want, you may be sure, to go to Paris. Now, you may be very sure
indeed, is good.
[Permalink]
2004-04-21 morning (utc+1)
Spain,
Jan Morris.
(This book, incidentally, is one of those that is invariably cited in
support of the position that Jan Morris bestrides the world of
travel-writing like an itchy-footed colossus. It is, co-incidentally,
currently out of print.)
Originally published on Franco's beat and revised after his death,
this is a magical and evocative description of Spain, and that's
precisely the problem. Celebrating Spain, as Morris does, as a
glorious anachronism has since become an anachronism itself, and all
the genius-of-the-race malarkey is apt to provoke eye-rolling, at the
very least, of us with more univeraliste tastes.
The ostentatiously poetical mix of history and personal impressions is
often very lovely, though - the effect, at best, is as if Michael
Ondatjee was impersonating W S Sebald - so it is worth persevering
with.
But this was all before Spain was folding back into the welcoming
bosom of Yoorp, and Morris's prediction that the future "is bound to
make the Spaniards more ordinary, as the petty squalors of industrial
life overcome them too, and they lose their sense of separateness" has
come true and I, for one, am in no hurry to accept that this is a
thing anyone should regret.
If you are anxious to patronise celebrate the
colourful traditions of proper peasants there's always South America,
after all, as any youth of today could tell you.
[Permalink]
2004-04-20 postsamwidge (utc+1)
The International Herald Tribune's web pages are so excellent in their
design that it's taken until now until I've been able to see this
story, but it's
a good 'un:
Matjaz Gantar, a businessmen, said he didn't particularly like the
current flag but didn't see any need to change it. "Our flag is
suitable for a local fire brigade," Gantar said. "But this is our flag
and that's it. What can we do?" "Also the name Slovenia isn't very
nice. But what can we do?" Zlatko Sabic, a professor of political
science at the University of Ljubljana, has an answer out of a modern
marketing manual: branding. "If you want to put Slovenia on the map we
have to find a niche," he said. "Finland has Nokia. Sweden has Ikea."
Pointing to Luxembourg's role as a financial center, he added,
"Everyone knows where Luxembourg is." "We just need a trademark,"
Sabic concluded, particularly at a time when Slovenia - as well as
Slovakia- is about to join the European Union. Janez Potocnik,
Slovenia's future representative on the European Commission in
Brussels, said that Slovenia could be branded as the "one-hour
country." The country is so small that everything- mountain peaks,
Baltic beaches, Ljubljana- can be reached in about 60 minutes.
"Baltic beaches"? That's just perfect, isn't it? The cake is now
fully iced. (Genuinely hapless persons should note that "Slovenia"'s
alleged coastline is on the Adriatic - nobody speaks of "Balkan
beaches", although that's clearly what's on our journaliste's mind.)
We are in a land of total quality excellence here, for sure:
Erwan Fou�r�, the head of the European Commission's delegation to
Slovenia, recalls getting a memo recently intended for the
commission's office in Slovakia. A Slovene ambassador in a European
capital, who asked not to be identified. says his staff meets someone
from the local Slovak embassy at least once a month to exchange
wrongly-addressed mail.
Just imagine if you were the "Slovenian" ambassador to Slovakia! (Is
the embassy on Baltic Esplanade? It clearly should be.)
[via Anna K, ages ago]
[Permalink]
2004-04-20 samwidge (utc+1)
Invention of traditions, isn't it? Glorious patrimonies While U Wait.
Young poets need it emphasised, which I have:
Language had very little to do with these basic economic grievances,
and in fact, the Catalonian language had been on the verge of dying
out completely. In 1860 it was spoken only in the most remote and
obscure villages, while Castilian was taking hold in cities like
Barcelona. The revival of the language was originally the work of
a small group of intellectuals and poets, but after the defeat of
the conservative forces in the Carlist wars of 1876, the Church turned
to the support of Catalanism. Businessmen who had grievances against
Madrid joined them in a party, the Lliga Regionalista, led by
Francisco Cambo. Catalan nationalism flourished greatly at the turn
of the century, to the dismay of the central government, and became
increasingly troublesome in its demands.
R F Inglehart and M Woodward, "Language Conflict and Political
Community" (1967), collected in Giglioli (Ed) Language
and social context(1972)
Now, that's language preservation, isn't it? And that is also
why I remain ambivalent about such projects: the necessary fashioning
of a self-conscious community of the users of a language is a complex
enterprise, and one that, if successful, is likely to have side
effects not reducible to the Living Museum of Ethnique Quaintness that
often seems to be implicit in the project of well-meaning linguistes.
Which is not to say that I'm against such things either - I merely
observe and contemplate the mysterious unfoldings of the historical
dialectique.
Back in 1967, when optimism about the future was still in fashion in
some circles, Inglehart and Woodward anticipated that these tensions
would be defused by rising prosperity and colour TV's, but they had
the disadvantage that their predictions concerned the future, which is
always a lot harder.
This book (which seems to be out of print, but shouldn't be hard to
track down in the UK) in general and this essay in particular rock my world like
it is all too infrequently rocked. If it was written with a more
explicitly Marxiste agenda my life's work would have been accomplished
before I was born, so I'm not about to complain. (There are even
German prinsessor in it, so you can imagine!)
[Permalink]
2004-04-20 mornin (utc)
�1. Prepositives
The new BBC French for persons
who know some French feature has a test
on the Frenchy-French prepositions. To my surprise, I only got one
wrong (I don't write French, so I never need this information).
�2. "Slovenia"
The BBC (yes, again)'s series of quizzes on the EU newbies rolls
around to "Slovenia",
and I got 8 out of 10. It is typical, of course, that my best score
to date should come on a country I continue to insist is in fact an
elaborate hoax.
[Permalink]
2004-04-19 15:34
�1. Genocide, Schmenocide
It's all fun and games until somebody loses a national, ethnic, racial
or religious group, isn't
it?
General Radislav Krstic had been jailed for 46 years for his role in
the killing of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in
1995.
The court rejected Krstic's appeal that the numbers were "too
insignificant" to be genocide - a decision likely to set an
international legal precedent.
That must have been an interesting experience for the defence lawyers:
"You call that genocide, Mr Justice Big Girl's Blouse? I've been in
worse bar room brawls than that!" Anyway, the definition of genocide
has been tweaked:
According to the 1948 Geneva Convention, genocide is defined as "acts
committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group".
The BBC's Geraldine Coughlan, at The Hague, says the Krstic ruling
expands the legal definition to cover the killing of men only - rather
than including women and children.
She says the definition may now be applied to conflict in a small
community, where local atrocities can be labelled as genocide.
�2. Wales
Micronationalismes, what a fun
game it is (until somebody loses an etc.):
PLAID CYMRU President Dafydd Iwan has reaffirmed his party's
commitment toindependence for Wales, saying it was time for the
country to build a "new relationship" with England.
[...]
He said it was "unimaginative" to argue that countries like Malta,
Estonia and Slovenia could join the EU in May but an independent Wales
could not.
This certainly works for me, but a hot-headed rabble-rouser pitching a
glorious vision of a Greater Wales that included Cornwall and maybe
the Isle of Man would be even more entertaining, isn't it?
(Probably the most shocking thing about the Balkan disintegration for
me is the way lots of persons seem to hold as though such behaviour
were in some way intrinsically restricted to the genius of the peoples
there. Nationalismes, nice and nasty, are all around, and don't think
they're not.)
[Permalink]
2004-04-19 12:29
Lah-di-dah literary review
�1. Lem
He's still writing, but he's given up with the (science-) fiction:
Durante el estado de sitio en Polonia fui con mi familia a Viena. All�
todav�a segu�a escribiendo, pero cuando volvimos a Polonia, a la
Polonia independiente eso fue hacia el a�o 89 � 90 la literatura
fant�stica simplemente me dej� de interesar, ya que la realidad misma
me pareci� bastante interesante. Ya no era tan est�ril, tan vac�a, tan
falsa y tan totalitaria como antes. Todav�a sigo escribiendo,
art�culos para varias revistas, ahora lo hago m�s bien como
observador, comparto mis reflexiones respecto al mundo contempor�neo
compar�ndolo tambi�n con los tiempos de la guerra en Polonia. Creo que
los tiempos que estamos viviendo ahora son tan tormentosos que ya no
vale la pena dedicarse a la ciencia-ficci�n, porque esto ya es
ciencia-ficci�n.
Spanish, isn't it? Translation mine; set your disclaimerisers onto
11, 'cos I surely don't know from Spanish:
During the state of seige in Poland I was with my family in Viena.
Even then I kept writing, but when we lived in Poland, in the
independent of Poland that happened in 1989 or 90 the fantastic
literature simply stopped interesting me, while reality itself seemed
interesting enough to me. Now it wasn't so sterile, so vacuous, so
false and so totalitarian as before. I still keep writing, articles
for various reviews, now I do it more as an observer, I reflect on the
contemporary world as well as comparing it to the war in Poland. I
think the times we're living through now are tempestuous enough that
it's not worth the trouble to do science-fiction, whatever that is
these days.
Apropos the unravellings of Iraq he opines that "it's easier to get on a tiger
than to get off again." Is that a Polish proverb or a Spanish one, or
did it get invented in the Polish to Spanish to English trippages?
�2. Dennett
The inner life of
thermostats, and why not?
He's famous among philosophers as an extreme proponent of robot
consciousness, who will argue that even thermostats have beliefs about
the world. This argument turns out to be more about what constitutes
our own beliefs than about the inner life of a thermostat. Part of
this is because he uses the term "opinions" for the kind of conscious
and considered ideas about the world that many people would mean by
beliefs. He doesn't think a thermostat is conscious. But he thinks its
behaviour embodies assumptions about the world, and these can't be
distinguished, in their effects on the world, from beliefs:
"Intentional systems have beliefs, or as-good-as beliefs. I use the
word beliefs for the intentional states of all of them, including the
notorious thermostat. But we have opinions as well as beliefs."
It's long and hagiographic (He plays tennis! He plays jazz! He
sails! He has a beard!) but if you want the Dennett, the
Dennett you shall have.
�3. Auden
A celebration of song:
The likes of Porter and Ira Gershwin are Auden's patron saints in such
versifying. Witness the characteristic quickfire exchange of rhymes
between Inkslinger and the Chorus in "No 15, The Love Song" in the
Auden-Britten Paul Bunyan: "Appendectomy" ("'s a pain in the neck to
me"), "Ichthyosaureses" ("Won't sing in choruses"), "Septuagesima"
("Ate less and lessima"). This was the cod-rhyming of the playground,
respun now for adults with the verbal zaniness of popular American
song in their heads. It was investing in what Paul Bunyan celebrated
as (lovely Auden phrase) "the accidental beauties of silly songs".
I always did like Auden, or at least I always did after I started
reading him, which was a couple of years ago.
[Permalink]
2004-04-19 09:35
�1. Foopball
If you want to hear a broad variety of UK regional accents, you could
do a lot worse than listening to BBC Radio 5 when it is
covering the foopball, which is to say pretty much any time. I have
been listening to the station for the occasional crumbs of crickety
goodness they occasionally sweep from their sm�rg�sbord to make room
for more foopball.
�2. Foopball again.
Gosh it's almost like Radio 5 there's so much foopball we love it!
In fact, due to the allophonic rule that inserts glottal stops before
unvoiced syllabic final consonants, the correct pronunciation is more
like "foo?pball" (where "?" marks the glottal stop).
�3. More foopball!
While we're being assimilated, I spent much of my foopball career
wondering why it was called "hamball" when somebody touched the ball
with their hand or arm. Then at the age of 11 I switched to the code
of rugby union (aspirational parents, isn't it?), which only real
tosseurs and a half call foopball, and where the use of the hands is
far from being frowned upon.
�4. Guttural, my arse!
I got Charles Berlitz's "Learn German" from the Amnesty bookshop, which is
still cheap enough to indulge foolish whims, and the flyleaf is at
pains to remark that his connection with the Berlitz language schools
is strictly genealogical (I suspect lawyers) and that he has written
over 100 language teaching books (I suspect a team of assistants and a
diligent disregard for quality).
Certainly he appears to have done his level best to blottify the
Berlitzian escutcheon: page xiii remarks of German "ch" that it is "a
guttural sound, deep in the throat, similar to the Scottish word
'loch'". The term "guttural" is used exclusively by fakeurs the world
over to refer to any consonant not found in Italian. (Nobody knows
why - this is just one of life's great mysteries.)
Even without the "guttural" malarkey, the problems with this are two
(2) in number: firstly, German "ch" represents two (2) different
sounds; secondly, neither of the two (2) sounds it represents is made
"deep in the throat", although one is similar to the sound in the
Scottish word "loch".
We will consider this one, since it is also the sound of "j" in
Spanish, which is also often poorly described. The IPA symbol is [x]
(square brackets denote phonetic transcription), and it is best
described as a velar fricative. The velum is the soft palate at the
back of the mouth, which is where this sound is made. Another velar
consonant is [k] as in English "cup" (IPA [kUp], but don't worry about the
other symbols). Try making a [k] as in "cup": you'll notice that the
body of the tongue is pulled up and back to the velum at the back of
the mouth. Now release the stop slooowwwllly, while breathing out and
notice that when it's just released there's a noisy sound of
turbulence. That's [x] - it's just a [k] with a gap that lets air
through, and is by no means made "deep in the throat".
On page 9, incidentally, Berlitz claims of "achtung" that "the g is
always pronounced like the g in 'go'". The mind boggles...
[Permalink]
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