far more forthright, direct, humane

Image: The Kahn Memo via The Best American Poetry

The passive voice is wildly overused in government writing. Typically its purpose is to conceal information — one is less likely to be jailed if one says, ‘He was hit by a stone,’ than if he says, ‘I hit him with a stone.’ The active voice is far more forthright, direct, humane.

Economist Alfred E. Kahn in a memo to his Civil Aeronautics Board staff in 1977, cited by his friend Robert Frank in today's New York Times.

Stacey Harwood also wrote about the memo in The Best American Poetry shortly after Kahn's death, and posted image copies online if you'd like to give it a read.

I have heard it said that style is not substance, but without style what is substance? — Kahn

strong legs

Photo via Mu Sochua's official website

I voted for you. But don't tell anyone.

A male farmer and constituent in conversation with Cambodian Parliamentary member Mu Sochua, cited in today's New York Times.

Mu Sochua has recently traded defamation lawsuits with the country's Prime Minister, Hun Sen, after he referred to her with the phrase cheung klang, which means "strong legs", and is an insult when used to describe a woman in Cambodia.

She lost her case, and was convicted in the counter suit that the Prime Minister filed against her (at the same time he stripped her of her Parliamentary immunity). She has refused to pay the $4,000 fine, saying: "Paying the fine is saying to all Cambodian women, 'What are you worth? A man can call you anything he wants and there is nothing you can do.'"

She's currently on the campaign trail, three years before the election, because she's excluded from most media coverage, due to her gender. Everywhere she goes she adopts the deference expected of Cambodian women. "I walk into a cafe and I have to think twice, how to be polite to the men," she said. "I have to ask if I can enter. This is their turf."

mono no aware

Video Trailer: The Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

Mono no aware (物の哀れ, mono no aware, lit. "the pathos of things"), also translated as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity of ephemera," is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of mujo or the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.

From Wikipedia.

Mono no aware figures largely in The Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a Japanese language documentary that contemplates the Japanese fascination -- and market for -- bugs and beetles of all kinds.

Seen at the SxSW 2009 Film Festival. Recommended with a caveat: the film is largely impressionistic. It doesn't attempt to a strict linear progression; it doesn't arrive at a foregone conclusion.

But it does leave a lingering impression of the impermanence of all things; the importance of looking closely anyway, marveling at the beauty of it, and a permitting the emotion that comes when that beauty fades.


p.s. dear beetle queen filmmakers: please add your movie title to the <title> tag on your web site. it'll be better for everyone, I promise.

tongue tied

Being multilingual is a richness. Protecting this richness, keeping it alive, is a requirement of this era.

Ahmet Turk, in an address to members of his political party, the Democratic Society Party, known by its Turkish initials, D.T.P., yesterday in Turkey, as reported by the New York Times.

Mr. Turk delivered the first sentence of his public address in the official state language of Turkish and the second sentence in the Kurdish language -- the use of which is illegal for public addresses.

The live broadcast of Mr. Turk's address was cut off as soon as he introduced Kurdish.

how we roll

Hopeless monoglot that I am, my impossible attempts to properly roll my Spanish "R"s came up last week when I was traveling with a colleague who grew up in Barcelona. She was kind enough to provide me with a primer for getting it right -- and also kind enough to allow me to post it here so that you can all get it right (except for those of you who already know what you're doing).

Tutorial courtesy of Marrrrrria Perrrreda-Rrrrramon. Enjoy.

Can't roll your R? Frustrated that people make fun of your gringo accent? Learn how to roll your R right now!!!

1. Loosen up the tongue
The reason why a lot of people can’t roll their r’s is simple because they’re too stressed, or at least their tongue is. Speakers of American English are actually quite near a rolling r, although most tend to say it’s impossible for them to do. The problem is, however, that they keep their tongue way too far back. The trick is to put your tongue in the front of your mouth, but we’ll get back on that later. First, you want to loosen up your tongue. It’s useful to use a tongue-twister. Three simple words worked to loosen up YOUR tongue: tee dee va. Say these words fast and for a long period, in order to loosen up your tongue. (Warm up your tongue so it can get used to some of the positions required for rolling "r"s. Try to fold your tongue in half, turn it upside down, flutter it, curl it up and down, and so on.)

2. Try to make short trilling sounds
So, you tongue is ‘loose’ now? Good. After a lot of practicing with the above method I you can produce short ‘trrr’ and ‘drrr’ sounds. The reason why you can only make the sound with a t or d in front of it, is because you hold your tongue close to the place it should be with and r when producing a t or d.

After the above technique you should be able to produce short rolling sounds as well. It doesn’t matter if the rolling part only is there for a second, as long it’s there. Just take a deep breath and push the air out trying to make a ‘trrr’ or ‘drrr’ sound.

3. Make a an individual rolling r
The next and crucial step is to be able to make a individual rolling r. This can be VERY hard to do, so be sure you practiced a lot with the ‘trrr’/'drrr’ method. The first few weeks your individual r’s may sound like a weird sissing sound in the beginning. The good part, however, is that after a while you can make looooong rolling sounds without a sissing part in the beginning. Just practice, practice and practice. It can look hard, maybe impossible, to roll your r correctly, but you WILL succeed.

4. Putting your rolling r into words
Putting your newly acquired r into words can be really awkward in the beginning. The only way to overcome this is practice A LOT. Listen to Spanish music and singing along (perro, carro, carretera, Serrano, correa, redonda, sierra, lalalalalala), concentrating on the r’s. Just try it, after some days you can confidently roll your r in words, just like any Spanish native-speaker.

Want some examples and instructions on how to place your tongue? Visit this great website: Phonetics: The Sounds of Spoken Language, hosted by the University of Iowa

the true meaning of its creed

[Lincoln's Memorial is] but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we can make real in our national life, in every state and every section, the things for which he died.

One of the passages excised from the remarks of Robert Russa Moton, President of the Tuskegee Institution, by the sponsors of the 1922 Lincoln Memorial dedication event, when he spoke at the dedication ceremony of the monument. As reported by Anthony Lewis in his review of Eric J. Sundquist's book King's Dream in the New York Times Book Review.

Also reported in the New York Times piece: Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech? He ad libbed the dream part. Anthony Lewis writes:

A remarkable fact of which I was unaware is that the last third of the speech — the part about the dream — was extemporized by King. He had a text, completed the night before. But as he was addressing the crowd, protesting the indignities and brutalities suffered by blacks, he put the prepared speech aside, paused for a moment and then introduced an entirely new theme.

“I still have a dream,” he said. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ”

With that quotation from the Declaration of Independence, King made clear that his vision of the future for black Americans was for them to be part of the larger society, not embittered opponents of it. He reiterated the point a few minutes later. Faith in his dream, he said, will bring a day “when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.’ ”
(...)
Why did King abandon his written text that day at the Memorial? It may be, Sund­quist suggests, that despite shouts of approval he felt he had not really connected with the audience. His wife, Coretta Scott King, thought the words “flowed from some higher place.” In any event, the result was for the ages.

“Speaking suddenly from the heart,” Sundquist writes, “he delivered a speech elegantly structured, commanding in tone, and altogether more profound than anything heard on American soil in nearly a century. In the midst of speaking, King rewrote his speech and created a new national scripture.”

Video: Martin Luther King, Jr, I Have a Dream

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

By Elizabeth Alexander, who was selected to write and deliver the inaugural poem at Barack Obama's presidential inauguration, as reported in this morning's New York Times.

Want amazing? Read Alexander's Neonantology »

Also highly recommended: Poetry interviews Alexander on Obamapoetics »

desperate housewives

To our sincere regret ... it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker.

The Max Planck Institute's apology for the cover of their latest journal, which the Institute believed was a Chinese classical text. However, upon circulation, the Independent reports, it was discovered that the text was an advertisement for a brothel specializing in "Hot Housewives in Action!"

According to the Independent: "The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to 'the northern mainland' seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesque acts by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime visitor."

wordles apart

I'm sure someone else has already done this somewhere else, but I wanted to see for myself.

What follows are word clouds generated by Wordle which give "greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text".

These word clouds were created from the texts of the acceptance speeches delivered by our presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain.

The text of each speech was lifted from two of four (thanks, Anne!). I used the same presentation style for each and executed them in black and white so as not to unfairly bias the presentation of either one.

Embiggen Barack Obama's Wordle »

Embiggen John McCain's Wordle »

speaking of ik'

Vientos: Right on (literally: winds)

Vientos huracanados: Excellent (hurricane winds)

Vientos huracanados aztecas: Completely superb (Aztec hurricane winds)

Some of my favorite chilango, or Mexican slang, found in the Moon Handbook to Mexico City -- which yes, I realize throws the authenticity of whether or not it's really chilango into question.

Runner up to the vientos series is ¿que hongo? a homophonic play on ¿que onda? or "what's up?" (see: Beck) which actually means "what mushroom?" -- but given the prevalence of the little objects known affectionately as "hongo" that dot Mayan sites (but are actually stumpy little penii) -- I'm willing to conjecture that ¿que hongo? might be more accurately translated as "how's it hanging?"




But maybe I'm just over thinking things.

the mundaneum

From his armchair, everyone will hear, see, participate, will even be able to aplaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus, add his cries of participation to those of all the others.

Paul Otlet, father of the Mundaneum, a paper based system that prefigured the hyperlink in the early 1900s, speaking to what he imagined his device would make possible. The Mundaneum, and museum that honors it in Mons, Belgium, is featured in today's New York Times.

part of the mission

a found poem

Part of the mission
of this way of writing
is to go down into the cellars
of language and unlock
long buried relationships
between words

"Im Verlassenen" is an invention
formed from the verb
verlassen

to leave, desert, abandon

"Im Verlassenen" means something
like in a place of essential abandonment

it draws to the surface
the derivation of Verlies

the word for dungeon
from verlassen

A Verlies
a place
where you
are abandoned



Found in Nicholas Spice's piece Up From the Cellar in the 5 June issue of the London Review of Books about Elfriede Jelinek's essay Im Verlassenen. Jelinek's essay concerns Elisabeth Fritzl, who was imprisoned by her father in the basement of their family home for 24 years.

non<strike>-</strike>entity

Maybe we should just drop the apostrophe altogether, not just as a nationalist statement but because I'd like my alarm call to work in the morning.

Niall O'Dowd, editor of the Irish Voice, commenting in Apostrophes in Names Stir Lot O' Trouble on the common problem that most computer systems have with apostrophes, dashes, and surname prefaces like "Van".

That is: If they exist they make trouble, so the systems usually make them go away.

O'Dowd is also referring to British colonialism which, according to the AP piece, is responsible for the Irish apostrophe:

The Irish apostrophe began with the British, who put it there because they believed the O looked odd without a link to the rest of the name. Many Gaelic speakers in Ireland refuse to carry an apostrophe, considering it a vestige of colonial days.

He's also referring to the fact that he's unable to subscribe to an online alarm call service because of the apostrophe in his name.

On a more sober note: The apostrophe problem was responsible for thousands of votes that went uncounted in Michigan's Democratic Primary.

polari

Polari, or "The Lost Language of Gay Men" as Paul Baker has it in his wonderfully readable lexicon of that name, is the secret parlance through which gay men secretly communicated with each other during most of the 20th century.

According to a recent article in the Guardian ("What brings you trolling back, then?" by Colin Richardson), it flourished between Oscar Wilde's trial in 1895 and the decriminalisation of homosexuality (in England) in 1967.

Polari-speak is not so much "lost" now, as part of our common culture—witness "cruising", "cottaging", and even the most basic gay word, "camp". By the way, the next time you "cold-call" someone, looking for a positive outcome, you are speaking Polari.

Discovered deep within Evan Zimroth's fascinating read about the coded sex-diaries kept by the Economist, John Maynard Keynes at MoreIntelligentLife.com.

(Not recommended for the easily offended.)

salty language

It's become so common that we don't even notice that it is a philosophical rumination rather than a direct imperative. It's a bit of a social dilemma. On the one hand, you do want the salt. On the other hand, you don't want to boss people around lightly.

So you split the difference by saying something that literally makes no sense while also conveying the message that you're not treating them like some kind of flunky.

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker explicating the phrase: “If you think you could pass the salt, that would be great,” as cited in Of Thought and Metaphor in yesterday’s Toronto Star.

“We have to do two things with language. We've got to convey a message and we've got to negotiate what kind of social relationship we have with someone,” says Pinker.

chi-lexicon

Maybe people use these everywhere, but I had never heard them until I moved to Chicago:

Nutjob: a not entirely rational person, i.e. not a Midwesterner

F***stick: an inconsiderate person

Soup to Nuts: beginning to end (I asked someone where this came from and he said: “Like with a meal – you start with soup and you end with nuts.” And I said: “Do you end a meal with nuts? Do you know anyone who does?” And he said: “Well, no. But that’s what it means.”)

T-boned: what happens when some nutjob turns left on a yellow light and the other traffic is still moving through the intersection

Gaper’s Delay: what happens when someone gets T-boned; variation: Gaper’s Block

like currents through my head

letter g
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

I haven’t traveled to Italy, but I’m told by friends who have that they love the wide open passionate love of life expressed by the Italians they’ve met and observed on their travels. The being unafraid to say it out loud -- and loudly -– to care and ache and weep and love.

Having just returned from Dublin I feel an appreciation a little bit like that for the bald love that I saw there for language and music and melody. As an American I love these things in secret; I finger them in private; I share my love with a few friends and when we’re together our conversation shifts in pitch like initiates sharing a secret handshake. In America to be too fond of words is to be a little too precious, a little effete -- and we’re nothing if NOT that here in America, goddammit.

So here’s a treasure, from the poetry of Brendan Kennelly, found this last week while traveling in the lovely Éire. Here is what I’m fingering now in the quiet of my room at night.

bridge
and in the dark to lean across
like a bridge over a river on whose bed
stones are untroubled by what passes
overhead
and kiss the sleep in your body
with I love you I love you
like currents through my head
that is closer to deep water now
than at any time of the day

Brendan Kennelly
A Time for Voices: Selected Poems 1960-1990