[Image above depicts two street paintings by Peter Gibson, which I found at the inhabitat.com site. Click it for their post about Gibson’s work.]

From whiskey river:

Epitaph

Now I’m not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I’m sorry

And I know who I am
I’ll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside —

be glad for me.

(Franz Wright, from Walking to Martha’s Vineyard)

…and (italicized portion):

There is a kind of attentiveness that can be cultivated and deeply relished, and a whole secret life of the street that it brings to light. It gives to the human-made world almost the same kind of delight that the lover of the natural world (and I am also one of those) might take in lizard eggs, bird colonies, feathers, droppings, rocks, and lichens. It does not oppose the wild and the made worlds but conjoins them, finds their overlap and resonance, sees the wild in the made, pays to the rust stains on an old corrugated iron wall the same receptivity it gives to dewdrops delicately strung in a spider’s web. It includes but goes beyond spotting and classifying…

In my own looking around I have met people who walked the stormwater tunnels; people who walked the underground train system in the quiet between midnight and 3 a.m. on Sunday mornings, searching for the “false starts,” the abandoned tracks, the odd buildings said to remain in obscure places; people who visited disused gasworks, brick-pits, the underneath of old wharves; people who boat up old industrial canals, who comb landfill sites and take tours through sewage treatments plants; people in Sydney who know about the underground passageways linking old mental asylums with landing-stages on the harbor. There’s a lovely freedom in momentarily stepping back into the privilege freely taken by children, finding the gap in the cyclone wire fence and sauntering along in that heightened state of casual alertness, just having a good look around.

(Susan Murphy, “The Secret Life of the Street,” from Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary — I love that “sees the wild in the made”)

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Like many Americans, I’m embarrassingly illiterate in any languages other than English. The one exception is/was Latin, for which I had a truly strange affinity all through high school (even though the Latin program there only went through junior year). My freshman year in college, I took a Latin advanced-placement test which landed me in a third-year Latin class, among people who’d decided to major in the classics at a time when I myself still thought that an ability to use the phrase “ablative absolute” correctly in a sentence marked one as a hopeless nerd. (Of course, thinking so required a little bit of mental sleight-of-hand, to forget that I myself could use the phrase that way.)

One of my sisters and I once “tried” to pick up a smattering of German. I think this was inspired by the fact that Dad had fought in the European theatre in WW2, although he had not (I think) picked up much of the language himself. All I remember now of that brief experiment was Das haus ist gross, which cracked us up because we could immediately think of many gross hauses.

Years later, I supervised a group of programmers among whom were three Chinese immigrants. They all spoke English well, but it still felt awkward and exclusive to me — it seemed unfair that they’d volunteered to endure all the communication difficulties, while the rest of us just babbled on in our hodge-podge of idioms, slurred consonants, and more or less formal or casual diction. So I asked one of them to offer lessons in spoken “Chinese” (Mandarin, I guess?) every now and then, during lunch breaks, to whomever among us wanted to attend. (Always big on teamwork, I think I had some vague idea that we could come up with some catchphrases and in-jokes which other programming groups couldn’t hope to penetrate.)

And all I remember of that, now, was the notion that two identically pronounced sounds could mean two wildly different things, depending on whether one’s voice was rising or falling.

I’m not sure where in the last few days I picked up a link to this page — wherein The Economist investigates and/or woolgathers on the subject of the most difficult (and still extant) language in the world. But it’s an interesting piece, which told me in its fairly short length much that I didn’t even imagine to be true. I mean, differences in spelling — the mapping of sounds to writing — they can make things difficult, sure. Ditto unfamiliar grammar, although the article cites some confounding and unforeseen possibilities even so:

Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions. Estonian’s cousins in the Finno-Ugric language group do much the same. Slavic languages force speakers, when talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not… And to say “go” requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or other conveyance.

…George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class [i.e., something like a gender] of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

But the truly mind-blowing section of the article is the last, “Yes we (but not you) can.” (The section title itself deserves an appreciative laugh.) In it, The Economist reveals its nominee for most difficult language: something called Tuyuca, a language spoken on the eastern reaches of the Amazon. Among other interesting features:

Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

I’ve always liked imagining a story which featured the last speaker of a particular language who also spoke no other languages. The story idea especially haunts me to consider it set in prehistoric times, when no Teach Yourself Language X courses were even on the horizon… and, worse, no one who spoke Language X would have been the least motivated to teach it to a stranger anyhow.

It had to have been just about one of the loneliest of human experiences, no?

The Missus and I watched a PBS American Masters show last night on Dalton Trumbo, the novelist and Hollywood screenwriter who (with several others) was jailed and blacklisted from working on films for refusing to answer questions about the alleged Communist affiliations of himself and his friends.

The show — 90 minutes — was terrific. No qualification necessary; it was so good I couldn’t believe it was airing for the first time in early September, rather than at the height of the viewing season. If you get a chance, and are at all interested in the history of Hollywood, free speech and other First Amendment issues, screenwriting, and/or the political atmosphere in the US in the 1950s*, I hope you too get a chance to see it.

The main technique the documentary’s makers used was to have Trumbo’s words read straight to the camera by various actors (Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Liam Neeson, David Straithairn, and others), intercut with memories by his family and friends and with archival video and audio clips of the man himself. This technique highlighted something about Trumbo which I’d never known before: he was one damned good writer of letters.**

One letter in particular stood out. It was a letter to his son, enclosed with two books which Trumbo was sending to him at college. I’d hoped to find the text online for this post. But, even better, someone’s already put it up on YouTube. (Transcript here.) The letter is read by Nathan Lane; it’s hilarious, at moments moving, stylistically over-the-top, and also rather risque. Please don’t play it if you’re squeamish about s*x, particularly the variety which requires only one participant.

But I’ll tell you one thing: whatever the subject, that sonofabitch could write — even if his son (as he says in the video) had to read the letter with a dictionary close by. (I almost said “with a dictionary in one hand” but realized the racy implication.) (Noticed it and let it stop me at first, anyway, though obviously my resolve weakened in the parenthesis.)

_______________________

* Among the news to me was this tidbit: that the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens, vacated after World War II, were at one time being re-tooled as internment camps for “radicals,” i.e., people opposed to the activities of the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). Egad.

** I knew about his writing in general; check out this list of his works if he’s knew to you.

[The post below uses the words author and artist more or less interchangeably. Apologies to those in either camp who might dispute the lumping-together.]

A long-time friend and I have kidded each other for years about being disingenuous. This started, as I recall, when I once teased her in terms like, “You’re even more disingenuous than you think you are” or maybe, contrariwise, “Don’t look at me like that. You’re not all that disingenuous.”

(Oh, stop. Like you don’t have any weird in-jokes with your friends.)

Exactly how it all started doesn’t really matter. The point of the running joke is that the word disingenuous seems (at least to my friend and me) to mean, sounds like it means, sort of the opposite of what it actually does mean.

(Embedding it in some kind of complicated syntax, as in either of the two possible statements above, makes the meaning even more slippery.)

The word gratuitous is like disingenuous: it seems to mean something convenient, so people grab for it even when it’s not really the right word… or when it’s the right word, but for the wrong reasons.

All of which (whew) has been triggered by a post over at the writing in the water blog, where the pseudonymous “mapelba” (who is both an artist and a writer) has asked some unnerving questions. Questions like these:

Can art or story be too pretty to be any good?… What are your expectations when you walk into a museum or open a new book? What expectations do you have for your own work?

Well, they unnerved me, anyhow. I tried twice to answer them in a comment but both times broke down and deleted what I’d typed. Part of my difficulty (as I’ve said before) is that I tend to focus on “writing pretty” first, and worry about “writing story” later.

And part of my difficulty lies in that word “expectations.” There’s a big rub there, no? To wit: The expectations of the work’s creator and those of its audience cannot be assumed to match.

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One of my favorite Biblical stories seldom gets ranked among others’ top ten lists. Maybe only someone who aspires to use words professionally could so like Genesis 2, verses 19-20 (Revised Standard Version):

So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field…

I’ve always been charmed by this moment in the creation story, which feels almost like the birth of language. (If you can’t name something, you can’t really talk about it.) And I’ve always been a little jealous of Adam for his having that opportunity, always liked to picture myself in his shoes, or in his feet I guess. It would go something like this, I imagine:

God: Okay, for starters let’s try these little things.

JES: Hmm… Wow. You know what they remind me of? You know how when You’re way up in an airplane—

God: I haven’t created airplanes yet.

JES: Okay, fine, just bear with me. Say You’re sitting up there on a cloud and You look down and You see all the people—

God: Nonono, you don’t understand, you’re the first—

JES: Jeez, give it a rest wouldja? And I don’t mean on the seventh day either. I know how this goes, all right? SO anyway You’re on a cloud and You look down and there are all these opposable-thumbed, tool-wielding bipeds swarming around down there. You know what they look like?

God: They look like a—

JES: Stop! I’m doing this, all right? But You’re absolutely correct. They look like ants. So that’s what I’m gonna call these little six-legged critters eating my damn cheese and crackers here on the picnic blanket with us.

God: I guess that makes sense. Why didn’t I think of that Myself?

Etc.

The point is, writers like to invent new ways of referring to things: persons, places, objects. Except, er, well, when it comes to their own works.

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[A modified version of the image above appears as the cover of Pascale Petit’s 2008
collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale. It also pretty much perfectly accompanies
Petit’s poem appearing below, as the first whiskey river entry in today’s post.]

From whiskey river:

What She Wanted

What she wanted was to return
to the original rainforest

hear water pushing
through the sapwood

and leaves eating light
as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature
was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove
of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,
and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,
past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

(Pascale Petit)

…and:

On those occasions when one’s serenity seems about to collapse, I recommend that one step out into the backyard and vigorously spit.

(David Huddle)

Not from whiskey river… a poet catalogues the waters and other landmarks on the map of her life:

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Just kidding. I don’t really have such a meter — except in my head.

The progress being metered, as you may guess if you’ve visited here before, is progress towards completion of a book — especially a novel. You can find real such tools scattered around the Writing Web, enabling you to depict your progress en route to some expected goal (a word count, most likely). A particularly snazzy one is at the StoryToolz site (requires free registration); not only does it show the progress linearly, it also provides a link to more detailed information, showing how the daily word count progressed (or didn’t) day-by-day, for example.

In the weekend writing workshop I took years ago (and wrote about here and here), David Gerrold provided us with blank daily progress tracking sheets. Like other such tools, they require that you set a daily word-count goal, using whatever criteria you want. A given writer might work it out like this:

Hmm, I have a day job, so maybe 100 words would be good on those days…

…and maybe 500 words a day on weekends…

…which totals up to 1500 words a week, or on average say 200(ish) words a day.

So you’d set your benchmark at 200 words a day. Every day, without fail, you’d record the number of new words you set to paper, and note the percentage of your target achieved. I forget what the exact rules of thumb were, but David told us that on average, say, a 30% accomplishment, especially day after day, constituted “breakdown”; 50% or above, success; and 80% or above, breakthrough.

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From whiskey river:

There will come soft rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

(Sara Teasdale)

…and:

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

(Mary Oliver)

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