the wine dark sea

Illus: Pamela Jane Rogers

First came soft measured strokes like the pounding of a distant drum. Then two distinct sounds gradually emerged within each stroke: a deep percussive blow of wood striking water, followed by a dashing surge. Whumpff! Whroosh! These sounds were so much a part of their world that Greeks had names for them. They called the splash pitylos, the rush rhothios.

John R. Hale, writing of the Ancient Greek naval trireme of Athens in Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy, reviewed in this morning's New York Times.

Ancient Greeks + rowing? Added to my list.



Illustration by the artist Pamela Jane Rogers, who accompanied the Trireme Trust in 1992 with her easel in tow. The Trireme Trust is a group of rowers who have reconstructed the Ancient Greek Trireme and put it to a speed test.

city

Warren, PA

cosa morta

cosa morta: the idea "that art divorced from its archaeological setting is a 'dead thing'."

Gleaned from Who Should Own the World's Antiquities, an examination of art, antiquity, nationality and provenance, in the 14 May issue of the New York Review of Books.

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.

Z is for Zion

Lolabola kindly posted a series of comic strips that she found who-the-heck-knows-where after I referred to them when commenting on her blog. She wanted to know how could remember them from so long ago.

What I told her was true: Some girls remember first kisses; I remember when I first learned a new word. [1]

Those Bloom County comic strips taught me the word “snipe”.

I learned the word “happenstance” from a televised documentary. I don't remember the content of the show but I do remember spinning around to ask my dad: “is that a real word?” It seemed too wonderful to be true, a circumstance filled with chance and synchronicity.

I learned the word “Zion” when my stepmom laid it down on the Scrabble board and won a hefty triple letter score for the Z. She was cheating of course: Zion is a proper noun, which isn’t allowed in Scrabble play. But I was still in Elementary school and she was still bigger than me, plus she’d just unlocked a wonderful redolent word that meant, she told us, the Promised Land. So we let it lie.

I knew from Passover, a holiday that we celebrated in our curiously hybrid household, that the Promised Land meant Israel, that next year that’s where we’d be and that there was something wonderful about it – a kind of homecoming after much suffering.

I didn’t know that it meant someone else had to leave. I didn’t know it meant someone else had to suffer. I didn’t know it would lead to this »

p.s. Protect the Human »

[1] (Which isn't to say I don't remember the kisses, but they deserve their own post.)

cocytus

It's too cold to type.

Shown above: Dante's circles of hell where, at the very center, traitors are frozen in the lake of ice, known as Cocytus, to varying depths according to the degree of their treachery.

I now know how they feel.

organic resourcing

The idea was to start with a [Toyota] 4Runner, and take away all the parts that weren’t an incubator.

Timothy Prestero, founder and chief executive of Design That Matters, in Looking Under the Hood and Seeing an Incubator in this morning's New York Times.

In an act of "organic resourcing" Dr. Rosen and Design That Matters have created an infant incubator that relies on auto parts -- parts that are readily available in countries where incubator parts -- and the expertise that accompanies their repair -- are not.

"The heat source is a pair of headlights. A car door alarm signals emergencies. An auto air filter and fan provide climate control."

Human resources are an important part of the equation: “The future medical technologists in the developing world,” Dr. Malkin said, “are the current car mechanics, HVAC repairmen, bicycle shop repairmen. There is no other good source of technology-savvy individuals to take up the future of medical device repair and maintenance.”

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."

skills

Lichens, fungi, and algae are referred to as cryptogams, which literally means “hidden marriage” -- a reference to their means of reproduction, which long remained a mystery to botanists. During World War II, a misunderstanding about the meaning of this term led to a breakthrough of the greatest military importance.

Geoffrey Tandy was the [London Natural History] museum’s “seaweed man.” he only ever published two scientific papers, a lack of productivity that seems to have been owing to a hidden marriage of his own, for Tandy shouldered the burden of running two families in tandem.

His great moment came when a functionary in the Ministry of War became confused between crypotgamists and cryptographers, and recruited Tandy to the British center for signals intelligence at Bletchley Park, where some of the world’s brightest minds were working on cracking the German Enigma Code.

During Tandy’s stay at Bletchley Park several sodden notebooks holding vital clues to the German code were recovered from sunken U-boats, but they seemed damaged beyond recovery. Tandy, however, knew exactly what to do, for the problem was not so different from preserving marine algae. Obtaining special absorbent papers from the museum, Tandy dried the sodden pages and made them readable, an important contribution to deciphering the Enigma Code.

From Tim Flannery’s review of Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum in the 4 December issue of the New York Review of Books.

them's countin' words

We have also found evidence to suggest that McCain and Obama have different thinking styles. Whereas McCain tends to be more categorical in his thinking, Obama is more fluid or contextual in the ways he approaches problems. Categorical thinking involves the use of concrete nouns and their associated articles (a, an, the) and suggests that the person is approaching a problem by breaking it down into its component parts and attempting to put it in meaningful categories. Fluid or contextual thinking involves a higher rate of verbs and associated parts of speech (such as gerunds and adverbs).

From James W. Pennebaker's word count analysis of last night's debate, posted this morning on his blog, Wordwatchers.

Pennebaker's research is grounded in the assumption that "the ways that individuals talk and write provide windows into their emotional and cognitive worlds." He as his colleagues Roger J. Booth and Martha E. Francis have developed the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) application, a text analysis software program that quantifies word usage, from which they then conduct further analysis.

Pennebaker's post regarding Summary Comparisons of the Candidates’ Language in Speeches and Interviews is particularly interesting. He's also the subject of He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns) in Tuesday's New York Times.

true mavericks

Samuel Augustus Maverick: A Bostonian who got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants. Maverick headed for Texas in the 1800s where he became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Fontaine Maury Maverick: A two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

Maury Maverick Jr.: A firebrand civil libertarian and lawyer who defended draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society. He served in the Texas Legislature during the McCarthy era and wrote fiery columns for The San Antonio Express-News. His final column, published on Feb. 2, 2003, just after he died at 82, was an attack on the coming war in Iraq.

Terrellita Maverick: A sister of Maury Jr., Terrellita is a member emeritus of the board of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. She's quoted as saying: “I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick, ... [he] is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

Clipped and paraphrased from today's New York Times piece on the Mavericks of Texas, who give us the word "Maverick", and are known as a family with a "long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals".

a.k.a.

Barack Obama = Renegade
Michelle Obama = Renaissance

John McCain = Phoenix
Cindy McCain = Parasol

Joe Biden = Celtic
Jill Biden = Unknown

Sarah Palin = Denali
Todd Palin = Driller

Secret Service code names for the U.S. presidential and VP political candidates and their spouses as reported by The Guardian.

Other code names of interest (per Wikipedia):

JFK = Lancer
Reagan = Rawhide
Nixon = Searchlight
Clinton = Eagle
Ford = Pass Key
Carter = Lock Master (or Deacon)
George Bush Sr. = Timberwolf
George Bush Jr. = Tumbler

And, inexplicably, Prince Charles = Unicorn.

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.

queens english

I'm just a goy who was raised, as I think I've mentioned, by a Jewish girl from Queens.

Which means, gentile that I am, my vocabulary is sprinkled with Yiddish. I schmooze, I schlep, I have no patience for schmucks and nothing but appreciation for the rare mensch.

And I know schmutz when I see it.

Growing up with my stepmom may be the reason Manhattan feels like home to me -- especially Kari G's neighborhood where the bossy Jewish ladies live -- even though I only lived there for a brief flash when I was three. The cadence of her voice may even be the reason I fell hard for a guy from Far Rockaway almost as soon as I got to college (he sounded like home.) (&oh. yeah. he was brilliant.).

She's the reason I adore knishes and noodle kugel and halavah. The reason I make my Thanksgiving stuffing with challah, and will be making matzoh brei as soon as that box of matzoh gets stale enough (topped with Deer Mountain jam, of course. stay tuned for recipe.).

She's the reason too that I seek out museums and theatre and even State Capitols and U.S. Mints like a cat seeking a spot warmed by the sun, because, shipwrecked New Yorker that she was, stranded in the outbacks of Denver and Seattle and desperate for culture, she did everything shy of manufacturing it.

She's the reason I light the Menorah in the dead dark of winter to remember the light, and the reason too that I'll be joining my Jewnitarian peeps for Seder tonight; breaking the matzoh and tasting the bitters.

So no, I’m not Jewish. I'm all goy. But because of my stepmom, my passionately tempered unfailingly curious stepmom who no, wasn't always, shall we say, calm, but yes, was always there, because of my stepmom I learned early that we choose our worlds, we choose who we are, and we choose who truly is our family, through the simple daily discipline of choosing to love.

backronym

A backronym (or bacronym or also retronym) is a phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word or abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym.

—Wikipedia

Stumbled across the word while reading about MXML. Other bacronyms of interest (from the same Wikipedia entry):

Golf: Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden
ISO: International Standards Organization (coulda fooled me)
Wiki: What I Know Is (when in fact Wiki was originally derived from the Hawai'ian word for "Quick")

And, interestingly, Perl, which: "does NOT stand for Practical Extraction and Report Language (although it appears in Perl documentation.), because according to Perl documentation., Perl is NOT an acronym."

green-up

Green-up: When the snow melts and new grass sprouts.

From Saturday's NYTimes piece Anger Over Culling of Yellowstone’s Bison.

The Maya too, both ancient and new, speak of this thing called "greening". It describes something like sap flow -- a vitality that moves through all things. The Chinese would probably call it Chi.

It's something very much like Spring.

Wait!
thou Maker, thou Modeler,
look at us, listen to us,
don’t let us fall, don’t leave us aside,
thou god in the sky, heart of Earth,
give us our sign, our word,
as long as there is day, as long as there is light.
When it come to the sowing, the dawning,
Will it be a greening road, a greening path?

Give us a steady light, a level place,
A good light, a good place,
A good life and beginning.
Give us all of this, thou Hurricane,
Bearer, Begetter,
Grandmother of Day, Grandmother of Light,
When it comes to the sowing, the dawning.

—From the Popul Vuh

entrainment

“Entrainment” is not an everyday word, but it’s a term used in various fields of science. It can describe the phenomenon of one organism rhythmically and internally adjusting itself to another. It’s when life-pulses coordinate.

Fireflies lighting up in synchronization has been described as entrainment. Jazz musicians locking in together is, in its way, entrainment.

Ben Ratliff defining "entrainment" and how it features prominently in Van Morrison's new release "Keep It Simple" (due out 1 April), in today's New York Times' piece: Van Morrison on Science, the Spiritual and Rituals.

so would a rose

I can't tell you how often I've heard guys who wanted their kid to be able to say truthfully 'Danger is my middle name.' But their wives absolutely refused.

Michael Sherrod, author of the book "Bad Baby Names" as quoted in "A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names" in this morning's New York Times.

Sherrod and co-author Matthew Rayback combed census records for bad baby names and found these among others: Emma Royd, Post Office, King Arthur, Helen Troy, and Ima Hooker.

(Apologies: No links 'til later. Posting by cameraphone. Outbound to L.A.)

Update: Linked.

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.