On the seventh day He rested:
le calme du créateur
qui a accompli son œuvre,
et ne se soucie plus du reste
(--Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
(1919) )
Monday, February 26, 2018
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Pacific Theatre reconnaissance tableau
They left in mid-morning sunlight,
with great shafts of gold
dancing across the waters of Tulagi
bay.
-- James Michener, Tales of the
South Pacific (1946)
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
lime/light monostichs
The lime-tree:
its fragrance, fresh from the late rains
Julia and I stood at a window …
watching the wind at work
stripping the lime trees …
[From: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Monday, February 19, 2018
Volkswort du jour: Morgestraich
We earlier saluted the German “Schoduvel” festival:
and likewise the Swabian Schowo.
And now here’s a new one:
Das freut Fasnächtler und Beizer
gleichermassen: Kalte Temperaturen und trockenes Wetter sorgten für einen
wunderschönen Morgestraich. Tausende säumten die Strassen und wärmten sich mit
Mehlsuppe auf.
Seine Magie verdankt der
Morgestraich dem Augenblick: Innert einer Sekunde, präzise dann, wenn Schlag
vier Uhr morgens die Lichter ausgehen, erlebt Basel seine einzigartige
Metamorphose. Die Verwandlung ist total – auch an diesem Morgen: Die
Strassenbeleuchtung erlischt (die Schaufenster müssen ohnehin verdunkelt sein),
aus allen Gassen ist der Befehl «Morgestraich, vorwärts marsch!» zu vernehmen.
Überall ertönt der gleiche Marsch: der «Morgestraich». Er wird während der
ganzen Fasnacht nur einmal gespielt. Tausende Trommler und Pfeifer intonieren
ihn gleichzeitig, jedoch nicht synchron. Die Züge setzen sich in Bewegung: Jede
Clique hat ihr eigenes Tempo, ihren eigenen Rhythmus, so dass sich Chaos und
Einheitlichkeit in einem unendlichen Meer aus Klängen und Lichtern vermischen.
Dieser Cocktail für die Sinne lässt selbst abgebrühte Basler erschaudern.
 |
| Morgestraich, vorwärts marsch! |
Prosit, Fasnächtler !
Sunday, February 18, 2018
What did you do in the Linguistics Wars, Daddy?
Awhile back I offered an essay in Mathematical Lexicography:
It led off with this:
It led off with this:
First, a sociological/tautological non-definition:
What is mathematics? One proposal, made in desperation, is
‘what mathematicians do’.
-- -- Ian Stewart, How to Cut a Cake (2006), p. 27
That stab in fact fails to offer even the virtue of a
tautology, since it isn’t even true, without
the further qualification that it is what mathematicians do… when they are doing mathematics. -- If you’d tried similarly, without
qualification, to define linguistics based simply on the
activities of linguists (ex officio: faculty and students in the Linguistics
Department) at Berkeley during the years I was there, you would conclude that
the field consisted of: fixing
your Volkswagens[**]; eating Chinese
food; and dabbling in neighboring
fields like psychology and philosophy (later all these fields hopped into the
hot-tub together and were newly baptised as Cognitive Science) -- all this
while studiously ignoring most of the work done in the previous centuries of
philology and language-sciences.
[**] Sprawling supine beneath one's VW Beetle or Bus was known locally as the "Berkeley lotus position".
[Note: The title of this post alludes to an insightful, delightful sociohistory of the era,
Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993)]
[For further reflections on Berkeleyana, click here.
For the place of linguistics among the sciences, here.
For sociohistorical reflections on other sciences, here.]
[**] Sprawling supine beneath one's VW Beetle or Bus was known locally as the "Berkeley lotus position".
[Note: The title of this post alludes to an insightful, delightful sociohistory of the era,
Randy Allen Harris, The Linguistics Wars (1993)]
[For further reflections on Berkeleyana, click here.
For the place of linguistics among the sciences, here.
For sociohistorical reflections on other sciences, here.]
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Jack Reed’s deathbed
Moscow, 1920:
In the early hours of October 17,
the heart stopped beating, the body grew still,
and nothing became all.
[Robert Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: a biography
of John Reed (1990), p. 382]
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Jack Reed monostich
He whispered to
her in the night:
“I thought your fire was crimson,
but you burn blue in the dark.”
“I thought your fire was crimson,
but you burn blue in the dark.”
[Robert Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: a biography
of John Reed (1990), p. 138, citing the testimoney of Reed’s love-conquest,
Mabel Dodge]
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Jimmy Hoffa’s last minute alive
Told in the words of his longtime friend and assassin:
When Jimmy saw that the house was empty,
that nobody came out of any of the rooms to greet him,
he knew right away
what it was.
 |
| limina mortis |
[Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses (2004), p. 257]
The Lost Notebooks of Dashiell Hammett
The author Dashiell Hammett paid his dues before he published his classic noir stories
and novels: first, as a detective
with the Pinkerton Agency, based in the rough-and-tumble West, and secondly, as
an observer of underclass American speech, which he scouted out in the dives of
the era immediately after the first World War, recording what he heard in unlined, now-yellowed
notebooks. It has been our
good fortune to have located and purchased one of these, from a shady
bibliophile in Istanbul; and
here present previously-unpublished excerpts.
~
Overheard at the Sangsue-ci Lounge, in Cicero, Illinois:
So he shows me his .32.
I sez, Dat all ya got??
A nod of the head indicates a customer loudly holding forth
at a table across the room.
“So who’s t’ wise-guy?”
“Some cit thinks he’s the cat’s own jockstrap,
but fact is, he’s from hunger.”
“Some cit thinks he’s the cat’s own jockstrap,
but fact is, he’s from hunger.”
Job interview:
“I hear you paint houses.”
“Oh yeh? Who toleja dat?”
The Darwinian origins of Altruism:
“So why would I help you out, a rat like you?”
“You’ll do it for my bright blue eyes.”
“You’ll do it for my bright blue eyes.”
~
~
~
For an additional
glimpse of the hard-luck life,
back in the railroad
days, try this:
~
~
~
.
Friday, February 2, 2018
Tableaux noirs
The light from the funeral parlor
made a
golden wedge on the sidewalk
-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)
*
Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série
noire
en argot authentique
d’Amérique :
*
the smoke of her cigarette whirling back over her shoulder
like a sweet-smelling
scarf in the
wind
-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)
 |
| Fais-moi mal, Johnny |
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Stakeout: tableau
Dillinger glanced at the parked
cars.
Several, he noticed, were pointed
the wrong way.
-- Bryan Burrough, Public
Enemies (2004), p. 160
