“Desolation Row” -- Norwegian version

Bob Dylan’s legendary concert in Oslo,  15 October 1965, offered an early version of the classic ballad “Desolation Row” -- in Norwegian! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuxWYEw4prQ

Note -- This is not a cover!  Even though he is singing in what is obviously a Scandinavian language, fans will still easily recognize the peculiar phrasing and inflections of the Midwest master.

This is the first time he is known to have sung in the heritage language of the Vikings (to whom Robert Zimmerman is related on his mother’s side) -- or indeed, in any Germanic language other than English.

Dylan in Oslo

Mor, gi meg solen!

So -- enjoy!

And note:  All proceeds from this concert, go towards the charity,   “Save the Gefillte Fish”.

You may also enjoy this version of “Desolation Row”, sung by Dylan in a concert at Gallaudet University  in American Sign Language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWq_sOMoq9w

As for his little-known Tel Aviv concert in Hebrew, we must leave this for another time;  but a (grainy) video can be viewed here:

            געפֿילטע פֿיש

[Note:  Hebrew is written from right to left, but read from left to right.  Or is it the other way around?  Anyhow, apologies if my text-editor mangled things during the copy-and-paste process.    Me I haven’t a clue -- those meaningless squiggles are Greek to me.]

~

I studied Old Norse at Berkeley (with Madison Beeler, a gentle old man;  he bequeathed me his complete Grimm’s Wörterbuch when he retired, though I proved unworthy as a bailee).  That sturdy Viking tongue has changed as little, in the past thousand years, as any language on earth.  Accordingly, I can more or less read modern Icelandic.

Norwegian is a different kettle of kippers, however.  Even so, though I am not expert here, it does appear to my unpracticed ear that Mr Dylan (or his Norwegian lyricist) has taken certain liberties with the text.   The whole thing seems to have come out rather a tergo, if you catch my drift.  For, with all due attention to the disparity between the eastern and the western dialects of Norway, the weakening of strong verbs over time, and the Bokmål/Nynorsk/Riksmål/Høgnorsk tetraglossia, what he seems to be singing is:

Paul is dead

dead dead dead

deader than deader than

deader than death itself --

done-for, doomed, down, deceased,
dousing the daisies,

displacing the dandelions,

departed in demise.

O save the gefillte,

the poor dear gefillte,

for pity’s sake:

Save the Gefillte Fish!

~

“Desolation Row” is an affecting song, in a hypnotic sort of way;  but it contains (among many gems) some of the worst lyrics that Dylan ever wrote:  which is to say, the worst that anyone ever wrote.   Couplets like

Einstein disguised as Robin Hood / with his memories in a trunk,

passed this way an hour ago / with his friend, some jealous monk.

tells you nothing of value, either about the father of Relativity, or the hero of the greenwood, or monasticism.    And the further observation, that the celebrated physicist “went off sniffing drainpipes, and reciting the alphabet”,  has little competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Award ™  (a contest actually unfair to Mr. Bulwer-Lytton, who never wrote anything as bad as that).

The Norwegian lyrics are in some ways preferable.

Even so, his delivery is (as ever, in the early/middle period) exquisite.  In the couplet above, the final word of each line  receives is articulated with an aspirated final -k, perfectly attuned to his sardonic mode.   This phonetic polemic power simply deserves a better excipient (classically, in “Positively 4^th Street”).

In the same song, he uses that same word-final plosive to good effect  in the better couplet

I received your letter yesterday,  about the time the doorknob b-broke-hh.

When you asked me how I was doing -- was that some kind of j-joke-hh.

Simply  bare on the page,  that may be  unimpressive;   but his delivery evokes, from that,
a poignancy
impossible to imagine,
unless you have   (suffering, clutching)
heard it.

~

Hmm.  This wonderful nice post has received remarkably few page-views.  Can it possibly be because people think I might just be having them on?   Or is it rather that it features tew few newd pixxx?  Well that is easily remedied!

Icelandic beauty Aurelia Delvaukisdottir

(Ah, nice.  The number of pageviews just doubled.

There’s a lesson in this …)

Dylan’s intonation in this song is by no means unrelievedly sardonic (and here I speak of the album version, as well as bootleg performances of the time, rather than the Norwegian, which instead is characterized by a certain je ne sais quelle mélancolie du nord -- those endless summer days, those long winter nights), but can be, where the lyrics warrant it, quite tender.

~

The above was mostly satire -- or rather, sotie:  having fun with something, not making fun of it.  All in fun;  no harm done.

Yet let us dig down another layer.

This is a strange and slippery business, these backwards soundtracks.   Very few recordings could be illuminated (let alone improved) by this.   Those that admit it, must be (hypothesis here) hypnotic to begin with.   That is, the delivery and the lyrics  must already proceed  from the land of dreams.  The reversal -- rerouting, from the Gates of Ivory, to the Gates of Horn.

We have previously highlighted the reversed version of “Rain” .  Here, the fit is perfect.   The original was already so “aturdido”, that the two are simply duals of each other.  With equal justice, you might say that the album recording  was a reversed version of this one.  (In mathematics, neither dual is privileged w.r.t. the other.)

~

And noch another layer, now:
wir möchten, in des Wiener Nervenarzt Gesellschaft,  etwas weiter hinunterwühlen.   
Of all unexpected things, that satirically-intended photograph above of Mlle. Aurélie Delvaux,  has sparked an insight.   It has to do with duality,  and reversal.

The fascination of that image  presents, upon further reflection, a puzzle.  And puzzles ask to be fiddled with, turned this way and that, and  if possible  taken apart.

For the normally constituted observer, the nates are devoid of interest;  the star of the show, apud virum -- the main course, so far -- hangs (or, circumstances being favorable, stands) in front.

Yet the homologous spot chez la femelle, seems to be somehow lacking something;  in certain stages of arrested development, the attention then swings wildly, to the rear.  The latter (dull flesh, of no procreative power) thus receives the cathexis that, by rights, should settle vorne. 

~

By the time  “Desolation Row” debuted, I was as much a Dylan fan, as the little teeny-tweeny girls (my future bride among them) were Beatles fans.   I had my acoustic guitar, and a harmonica in a holder;  much as, in 1956, I’d had a coonskin cap.  So when I say now that lines like “Einstein disguised” etc. are pretty random, versteht sich:  when the album came out, in 1965, I hearkened to it, every word, with the same intensity as Orphée listening to  “L’oiseau chante … avec ses doigts”.  And the lyrics of that song marked my own  for a time, for better or worse:  as, this poem,

            Mardi Gras

which sprang from the brow of “Desolation Row”, with lyrics like:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging;

they’re painting the passports brown.

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors;

the circus is in town.

~

Okay, all satire aside:  What is Desolation Row, exactly?  It is nothing so simple as an Unhappy Place.

Heard superficially, “Desolation Row” sounds like a bummer, a place you’d want to escape from if bad luck landed you there -- something like Cleveland.   But listen to the lyrics.

First, for those outside, it is a Strange Attractor:

And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row

Next,  some people voluntarily go there -- indeed, “escape”:  not from it, but to it:

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls
“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row”

And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row

And in the final stanza of the song -- one of his finest lyrics -- Dylan makes plain that, if you do not understand the meaning and the milieu of Desolation Row,  you are not on his wavelength, and attempts at communication are pointless:

Right now  -- I can’t - réad tóo góod --
Don’t send me no more - letters, -- no-o-o …

Not unless // you mail them from :

Deh-soh-la-tion -- Row.

Lyrically, this hearks back to that immortal ballad, Birmingham Jail:

Write me a let-ter / send it by mail,

send it in care  of / the Birmingham jail.

I well understand what Dylan is talking about in this song -- I sought to go there myself, back in the sixties, when I would suck-down a Camel while listening to “Visions of Johanna”.  Laus deo, that much is now behind me.

Desolation Row is like Hell as depicted by C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce (unloved, but clung-to by its miserable inhabitants), or like the neurosis of a patient whose epinosic gain precludes cure by analysis.

Yet *Another* Abject Retraction

When you blog about as many subjects as I do (sometimes late at night, after I’ve had a few, when wiser men would already be abed), you inevitably wind up occasionally putting your foot in it, and wind up having to apologize all round.   (If this continues, I may have to join the Republican Party;  they never apologize.)  This latest example is one of many.

In this essay,

De Stultitiâ

we quoted the following blameless paragraph, and rattled on about it with inexcusable cluelessness:

To assert that topoi correspond to theories  is not to deny that certain topoi may be viewed as models for our logic.  Models may be described syntactically by “diagrams”, so theories may be said to include models.  Our point is that, in general, topoi may be viewed as theories.  In particular, some topoi which arise semantically  are better understood as theories than as models.  Thus we regard topos theory as the “algebraic” form of this higher-order intuitionistic logic.

-- Michael Fourman,  in the introductory first paragraph of “The Logic of Topoi”, in: Jon Barwise, ed. Handbook of Mathematical Logic (1977), p. 1054

That may well be a modern exemplar of the expository art;  but at the time, I was too dense to realize that.

Accordingly, older and, if not wiser, at least sober, I have emended that essay with the following heaping serving of humble pie  (contents:  crow):

I happened to reread this last section just now, and found my then-remarks quite stupid.  I would delete it, or apologize for posting it, except that, after all, the point of this essay is to share with you the wrenching sense of what it feels like to be this stupid, so that you will stop moaning over orphaned teddy-bears in Borriobooola and quit sending them all your aluminum pull-tabs  and instead contribute to a Riemann-related charity such as the Dr Justice Retirement Yacht Fund (all contributions tax-deductible for citizens of Antarctica, donations in Swiss francs only please).

However, the good or at least less-than-awful news is that, upon mature reflection, the quoted passage about theories and topoi seems much more straightforward and intriguing, then it did back then;  sparking perhaps even   a glimmer of understanding.   In fact, I’d like to retire from my day-job right now and study this subject on my, um, yacht …

In fact -- With a small amount of encouragement, I would gladly shut up forever and quit blogging, and just go tooling around the Mediterranean, contemplating the infinite and determining which IPAs make the best chasers for which Outer-Hebrides single-malts.   And with this we kick off our

Super Summer Solstice  Fund-Drive !

(Donations accepted in Schweizerfranken or bullion;  please no dollars or second-party food-stamps.)

In the forecast: Scattered apologies, heavy at times

An excellent article in this morning’s Washington Post:

            If this article offends you, I’m sorry

It offers several choice examples of the “non-apology apology”, e.g.

“I regret very much that the efforts on health care were badly misunderstood, taken out of context and used politically against the administration,” said Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities,” Reagan said to the nation in March 1987. “As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior.” It’s an I’m-sorry-my-subordinates-are-so-terrible apology.

It's about time!

We ourselves, on this site, have perfected the groveling apology to a fine art.  Choice examples here:

Apology to Mitt “the Twit” Romney

Apology to that bumbling wazzock François Hollande

Apology to that human(oid) haemorrhoid Donald Trump

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

This just in!   Setting the stage for a “mass apology”, held in a stadium on international television, chanted in unison by thousands of penitent breast-beating Mexicans:

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — FIFA has opened disciplinary proceedings against the Mexico team for what it has called the “improper conduct of spectators” at the World Cup.

Mexican fans taunted the opposing goalkeepers in Mexico’s 1-0 victory over Cameroon last Friday and in Tuesday’s 0-0 tie with Brazil with a traditional cheer that ends by shouting a word widely regarded as a derogatory term used against gays.

Mexicans have taken to social media and television to defend the chant.

“Why do they want to take away this cheer that identifies us, that is lovely, that is euphoric, and that is in no way homophobic?” asked Martha Figueroa, a host on ¡Nuestro Día!, a morning television show on the network Cadena Tres.

 Homophobic slurs are nothing new to soccer stadiums around the world. During the tournament’s opening ceremony, Brazilian fans directed a chant — usually reserved for opposing players and referees — against their own president, Dilma Rousseff, in an episode that caused much hand-wringing around the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/sports/worldcup/fifa-looking-into-possible-use-of-gay-slur-by-mexican-fans.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

“Nuestra culpa -- nuestra culpa!  Nuestra máxima culpa!”

  

The New York Times being too genteel to print the actual word and let us judge for ourselves, here is the original in Spanish:

[ !! Trigger warning !!    

The following paragraph contains words in some sort of strange foreign kind of language.  Some of the letters even have these pointy little thingies on them, of unknown function.  Shield your children. ]

La costumbre (extendida en México) de gritar 'puto' ['maricón'] al portero del equipo rival cada vez que este saca de puerta podría acarrear a su federación de fútbol una sanción económica que, en caso de recurrencia, podría traducirse incluso en una penalización deportiva.

http://www.juareznewstv.com/deportes/2077-la-fifa-amenaza-a-mexico-por-los-cantos-homofobos-de-su-hinchada

And a similar incident in Portuguese:

e insultos de “viado” (“maricón” en portugués) por parte de muchos .

[Latest update!]  This site has just been obliged, owing to a consent decree with the World Mathematical Authority,  to issue yet another humiliating retraction:

            Disregard everything bad I ever said about topos theory

[Update 24 September 2014]  In Ferguson, Missouri, everyone has been walking on eggshells so as not to offend the already offended.   Here, a man responding to an accusation of X, states that X is false -- but “apologizes” anyway.

Authorities said the cause of the blaze is under investigation. Steven Rosenthal, the Ferguson fire chief, said the burning candles usually surrounding the memorial may have started the fire. But residents said that they smelled gasoline and some believed that the fire had to have been set on purpose.

Tom Jackson said in a statement Tuesday that the first police officer who responded tried to put out the fire but was unsuccessful.

“To anyone who believes we didn’t do everything in our power to put this fire out I want to apologize and let you know that was not the case,” he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/24/a-day-of-unrest-in-ferguson-ends-with-protesters-and-police-facing-off/?tid=hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e

Here, apologize no longer means ‘to express repentent regret for something bad one has done’, since the man in question had done nothing wrong to begin with.  Rather, it means ‘to grovel for reasons of political correctness; to genuflect in the direction of a victims’ lobby’.

[Update 25 September 2014]  Hmm, not enough;  grovel a little lower, please.

Ferguson, Missouri, Police Chief Thomas Jackson apologized Thursday to the parents of Michael Brown, as well as to any peaceful protesters who feel he didn't do "enough to protect their constitutional right to protest".

Here, by the way, is a glimpse of the exercise of that constitutional right:

While many peaceful protesters took to the street Tuesday night, violent elements within the demonstration stoked chaos, attacking police with guns, rocks and bottles, and vandalizing and looting businesses, Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson said. One person threw a Molotov cocktail at a parking structure, and there was an attempt to set a gasoline fire at a custard shop, he said.

Two officers were injured, one of whom was struck by a rock below the eye.

There have, of course, been no apologies for this behavior, from Ferguson blacks, BLM, or their MSM codependents.  The apologies run only one way.

(The guilty officer has apologized for interfering with the constitutionally protected free trajectory of the rock.)

[Update 25 September 2014]  Good lord, now this:

Cameron to Apologize for Saying Queen ‘Purred’

David Cameron, the British prime minister, disclosed Queen Elizabeth II’s reaction to the result of the Scotland vote.

Look -- It’s not as though he said she “meowed”.

Rx:  No world leader should ever publically say anything.   Let your thoughts be known only through spokespeople, who can always be reprimanded and sacrificed.

Celebrate the Solstice

In celebration of this day,
we offer the hymn of St. Francis to Brother Sun.

~  ~  ~

Laudato sie, mi Signore cum tucte le Tue creature,
spetialmente messor lo frate Sole,
lo qual è iorno, et allumini noi per lui.
Et ellu è bellu e radiante cum grande splendore:
de Te, Altissimo, porta significatione.

 

Anglicè:

Thank you, Lord, for Brother Sun.

He warms us till the day is done.

With joy we gaze upon his face,

the image of Thy perfect grace.

Theodiscè:

Dank’ Gott, um Bruder Sonne.

Uns ist er reine Wonne.

Schenket uns mit Wärm’ und Licht:

ihm wir schenken  dies’ Gedicht.

Romanicè:

O frère Soleil

nous fais merveille.

Merci au Seigneur

qui fait pousser les fleurs.

Egyenletesen sürü számsorozatok

We have oft lamented, how … hard things are, particularly in math and physics.  Let alone actually coming up with any worthwhile contributions yourself, nor even simply “keeping up with the literature”, but merely :  taking in -- understanding one  classic work done forty years, fifty years, a century ago.

I have on my nightstand  volume one of John von Neumann’s Collected Works (so titled, in English, and published in 1961).   Now, most Americans, myself certainly included, think of von Neumann -- “Johnny” to those who knew him -- as a Princeton luminary equal to those of Gödel and Einstein, and who, even more than they, was significantly responsible for ushering American into the front ranks of modern math and science, and best known to the general public as the co-author of the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), whose subsequent significance has only grown.

Yet those more familiar with the man will also be aware that he was born in Budapest, where he attended a German-speaking high school, eventually pursuing post-graduate studies in Switzerland and teaching at the University of Berlin.  He moved to Princeton in 1930 (a wise move, as things turned out), and remained there to the end of his days.

Accordingly, the reader confronted with his Collected Works, will be prepared for many of the early papers to be in German.   For this reader, that presents no problem at all.  But in any event, the Pergamon Press has organized this collection, not by date, but by topic, the first volume containing  “Logic, Theory of Sets, and Quantum Mechanics” (spot the odd man out, but anyway).   For the technical reader, rather than the biographer, that is convenient and commendable.  (Cf. the philologian Hugo Schuchardt, in “Sachen und Wörter”, second paragraph:  “Stofflich geordnete Glossare  gewähren manche Aufklärung, die in alphabetische geordneten vermißt sind.”)   And you would expect that, thus organized, each volume would contain a mixture of articles in German and (later) English, with the exception of those treating of the theory of automata, or the game theory, which he never wrote about before coming to America, since he invented both of them here.

Yet the first volume contains no single article in English -- but does have one in Hungarian, whose title I have placed in the subject-field of this post,  pour épouvanter les érudits.

Synonymy and “Elegant Variation”

By all accounts, classical Arabic has an extraordinary wealth of vocabulary.   But a better term might be:  a huge heap of words.   Quantity does not qualify as ‘wealth’ in this area, unless it translates to quality.  Only then does a Worthaufen become a Wortschatz.

Accordingly, while writing my dissertation at Berkeley (in linguistics, not Near Eastern studies; a necessary distinction), I endeavored to examine specific areas (Wortfelder) of CA lexical semantics in the spirit of Jost Trier’s classic Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes.   The results, alas, were disappointing.

Now, I had not then (and have not since) read widely or deeply enough in Classical Arabic literature, to have any real Sprachgefühl in the matter.   But even an algebraist would be struck by the frequency of cases in which, in that literature, subjects (X, Y, Z ) are given attributes (a, b, c, …) in the following pattern:

<X is a, b, and c;   X is b, c and d;  X is a, c, and e;  Y is a, b, and d;  Z is a, b, c, and e; …>

without intervening material distinguishing the nuances of the predicates.  Such procedures do not enrich the language, but impoverish it:  much as the supernumerary letters appended by medieval copyists who were paid by the line  did much to complicate, but little to improve, orthography. 

European philologists have similarly complained of Middle French historical texts, which only at first blush appear to offer a rich characterology of their actors, but the purportedly psychosocial portrayals turn out to be boilerplate.

In my book The Semantics of Form in Arabic, I treated this matter in the chapter titled “Accumulation”.  The word is here a sort of learnèd pun:  accumulation in the (diachronic) sense of heaping up and retaining vocabularly over the course of the pre-Islamic, Koranic, and later Islamic centuries, and in the (synchronic) sense of Latin accumulatio (ah-koo-moo-LAH-tee-oh), a term of rhetorical analysis referring to the piling-on of descriptors in parataxis.   Deftly done (by writers like Gunther Grass), it can be exquisite.  If done in lazy pseudo-synonymy, the device serves only as a preventive against misprints or misspeakings  (“I do hereby solemnly swear, affirm, and attest, that I do leave, devise and bequeath…”).

~

Contiguous/paratactic Häufung (accumulatio) is only one category of a more general phenomenon, which  since Fowler  has been known as elegant variation.  (Wikipedia has a brief but informative article on the subject here.)     It is the process whereby the student drafts out something like

Animal Farm was an interesting book.  It interested me very much.  It says many interesting things about many interesting animals, in a way that holds the reader's interest.

and then, having been admonished not to keep repeating and repeating and repeating the same words over and over  again and again, reaches for the trusty thesaurus (a.k.a. dictionary of synonyms a.k.a. semantic lexicon) and revises as follows:

Animal Farm was an interesting book.  It fascinated me very much.  It says many intriguing things about a plethora of gripping animals, in a way that holds the reader's fascination.

Mr Roget, you have much to answer for.

~

These reflections from grad-school days (indeed, from high school, when I read Fowler’s Modern English Usage religiously  devoutly  with intensely fascinated gripping interest) returned earlier today  as I listened to “Morning Edition”.  The anchor announced that Russia had “rejected” the new U.N. report alleging Bad Things Happening in eastern Ukraine.   The verb struck me as comical.   Such a report consists of a sequence of allegations and attributions -- sourced propositions assessable as to truth value, warrantability of assertion, etc.   You can refute a statement (proving it untrue), or deplore it (conceding its likely truth but denouncing the circumstances of publically stating it), or pooh-pooh it (conceding that it might be true, but is too unimportant to warrant your attention);  but reject sounds as though it has some official and effective status, as when you reject a suitor or reject an invitation (in which case the original proposal is null and void).  Russia can certainly veto a proposal in the Security Council, but what does it mean to “reject” an entire report (and does that mean: in part, or in toto)?

That is to say:  If the court accuses you of having carnally interfered with Mrs O’Leary’s cow, and of murdering her eleven children, you are not in a position to simply “reject” the accusation, like writing “Return to sender” or “Not at this address” on an unopened envelope.  If summoned to appear in court, you might plead Not Guilty; you might point out that, being but four years old, you are not legally answerable to such a charge; but you do not really have the Bartleby Option of replying “I would prefer not to.”

But the broadcast segued into the segment from a reporter, who, covering the identical facts, used a different verb for the Russian response to the report:  dismiss, if memory serves.  [Note:  Both the NPR and WAMU web sites are seriously deficient in listing and/or indexing major stories -- this was after all the lead item this morning.   Searching those sites, I could not find it.   So I might have misremembered one of the three or four verbs that were used pseudo-synonymously on that broadcast this morning-- discount was one of them, I believe -- , but structurally the point being made here remains intact.]

Dismiss is marginally weaker;  as, a judge may dismiss a case in the sense of declining to hear the appeal or sending it back to a lower court,  which is a weaker result than explicitly finding against the appellant.

Shortly after that, a different reporter used yet a different verb to describe the Russian response, one with yet slightly weaker connotation.

That sort of thing cannot be as easily explained as the case of the interest of our interested reader of an interesting book, since the texts in question were not contiguous, and were uttered in each case by someone different.  Still, it may be significant that the strongest -- and least justifiable -- term  came at the outset, from the anchor.   That strategy -- draw the listener in from the beginning, then gradually let him down  (“We don’t have that particular item you saw in the window  available for sale today, but perhaps we can interest you in…”) -- is widely abused in journalism;  we dissected one such case from this morning’s Washington Post here.