Taught me to sing the notes of woe

Ben's wife Kate asked her friends to send her favorite poems she could share with her students in the literature class she's teaching. More than one person sent in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." When I read that poem, I always think of how my tenth grade math teacher told us he was going to record a country & western version of it. His slow, twangy version of it is the default voice (with dobro backing) I always hear when I read it: "let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky..."

My math teacher that year was a cool guy who didn't seem to mind that I was a terrible math student. He was very into lateral thinking as a way of life--he was also an inventor and a Buddhist and an outdoorsman--so he had us do writing assignments sometimes to show the different ways that math can work. Inspired by his C&W Eliot, I created a recurring character of a country chanteuse who was very good at intuiting scale problems; obviously, the country chanteuse part of it soon took up more effort than the actual solving math problems part...

For some other assignment, I created an imaginary metal band: Metal William Blake. From the band's grunge period, "The Sick Rose" (in the promo materials I created, Mark Romanek did the music video for this one. It was 1996 and Chris Carter's follow-up to The X-Files, Millennium, had just premiered with an episode about William Butler Yeats and strippers [of course]... I feel like the aesthetic was all over the place in the '90s):

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

And "London" fits into that period, too:

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Given the band members' introduction to Blake via Huxley, there's obviously a few psychedelic experiments in the band's catalog.

Then they made a questionable swerve into emo with "The Chimney-Sweeper":

A little black thing among the snow,
Crying! 'weep! weep!' in notes of woe!
'Where are thy father and mother? Say!' -
'They are both gone up to the church to pray.

'Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

'And because I am happy and dance and sing,
They think they have done me no injury,
And are gone to praise God and His priest and king,
Who made up a heaven of our misery.'

(Really, "they clothed me in the clothes of death, / And taught me to sing the notes of woe" is as good as an encapsulation of metal as there could possibly be. Or emo. Yuck.)

A wink amidst Turkmenistan's madness

Saparmurat Niyazov, aka "Turkmenbashi" ("Leader of Turkmens"), is the former dictator of Turkmenistan who died two years ago of natural causes (to everyone's surprise). His rule was characterized by autocratic decrees so ludicrous (banning opera, long beards and lip-synching) that they would be laughable, if he hadn't been simultaneously filling secret prisons and unmarked graves with journalists, aid workers and members of his own party who displeased him.

I think enough time has passed that I may share the following anecdote without stepping on any toes. When I worked as a consultant to the Presidential Administration of Georgia (the country), I organized a conference on energy policy. I invited energy ministers from dozens of nearby nations in Europe and Asia: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, etc. But there was a problem when it came to Turkmenistan: no sooner would I identify a minister to invite than we would get word that he, along with other cabinet members, had recently been arrested and never heard from again. I finally couldn't invite anyone but Niyazov himself (who tended to shun conferences) because mailing a new invitation to Turkmenistan was so sure to take longer than a minister's posting would last--and, as you can imagine, Niyazov was having a hard time finding anybody left to promote.

Now, I understand that realpolitik require cordial and friendly outward relations between diplomatic corps, and I don't argue with the United States having embassies staffed with friendly ambassadors all over the place. Which is why I am surprised to see, on the website of the US Embassy in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the following street address:

Street Address:
American Embassy
9 1984 Street (formerly Pushkin Street)
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
744000

It's a nugget of wit implanted in a mountain of intentional (and generally well-advised) blandness. To whoever is responsible, bravo.

New York Review of Books: no other personal ads compare

Reason number one to subscribe to the New York Review of Books: the personals, which hide out on the last two pages but deserve to be read first.

Examples, all taken from a single recent issue:

Pleasure loving writer and intellectual; dark hair, nice slender shape. Academic with no time for the academic hooey; immoderately literary, unexpectedly sexy. Ardent, if unsophisticated, observer of rivers, trees, and tides.

As a friend pointed out when we were reading these, there are more semicolons in the New York Review of Books personals than balls in a gay bar.

Then there's this stunner:

UNUSUAL EUROPEAN

Scholar-adventurer, 60, former revolutionary, published author, fit, polyglot, lives half in Africa, half in Europe, married, seeks long term mistress or full second wife in complete agreement with first (an African academic). Requirements: 30-45, independent, adventurous, witty. Strong preference for dark lady (BLACK/ARAB/LATINA).

I'm speechless. After this personals ad, writing poetry is barbaric.

Finally, just after "SMART AND BEAUTIFUL. Yet unequivocally cute.", there is:

BRIGHT, BEAUTIFUL. Passionate, intellectual. Slender, adventurous, fun--full of happy surprises and delightful unexpected contrasts. Quietly confident with upbeat spirit and true heart. People person par excellence, anthropologist at heart. Cultured, sophisticated, yet down to earth--humanitarian, international change agent.

As my wife Kate points out, who doesn't want an international change agent full of happy surprises? Who is, I add, an anthropologist at heart, unlike all you superficial anthropologists.

She's not done, either:

...drawn to Positano, Lake Sevan, Kyoto, MoMA, Bilbao, Guggenheim. Loves film, theater, NGOs, papadums, fresh lichees....

More from Kate: "This woman sounds like she was born from that stuff white people love website." After all, that website is basically just a list of topics in The NYRB and The New Yorker.

My favorite run of adverb-adjective pairings, however, is the following:

sexually active, psychologically stable, politically informed, not religious or "spiritual."

Amen.

But the gem among gems is this one. Which word is not like the others?

soft-spoken, widow, spontaneous, and easy-going.

I hope she finds someone looking for an easy-going widow. Smart, easy-going widows everywhere truly deserve love, and for all my laughing I'm glad there's an cloyingly intellectual classifieds page where they can announce themselves.

The disuse seems a worse evil

Paul Collins is my favorite skeptic of the decline narrative, and he's in good form in this Slate article about the decline of the semicolon:

Yet in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself "mortified" by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon's popularity. By 1865, grammarian Justin Brenan could boast of "The rejection of the eternal semicolons of our ancestors. ... The semicolon has been gradually disappearing, not only from newspapers, but from books—insomuch that I believe instances could now be produced, of entire pages without a single semicolon."

1865? But surely that's a century off: Isn't modern life to blame?

One of my favorite lesson plans for University Writing is to have the students diagnose their "compulsive sentences": what's the sentence structure that you over-use because you've gotten good results from it in the past? Everyone has to find an example of the structure which works well in a paper and an example of where it works less well. They also have to explain why they use it--not in some Freudian way, but just in a 'this is how my syntax reflects my thinking' kind of way.

The lesson always gets wonderful, rich results at all levels of sentence complexity. We've discussed the over-use of "in effect," "indeed," and "thus" as transition words which fake the work of actually explaining the connection between ideas. "Furthermore" is another usual suspect. One student noticed that she often began sentences in her conclusions with the phrase, "it is impossible to say" because she wasn't sure what types of statements actually belonged in conclusions. I asked another student why he joined unconnected clauses with semicolons in every paragraph. He said he had heard the semicolon was the way to look smart.

I like to tell them about my compulsive sentence from high school. My friend Paige and I were enamored of the 'clause; rather, clause' structure and tried to fit into all the papers we wrote. When we had to co-author a policy paper for Model UN, we labored over where to best set our jewel. In an inspired moment, we changed the font size for that single sentence to 12.5.

"I don't even know why we did that," I say, "because the sentence was so awesome that they would have noticed it anyway."

Slanting waves of optic horror

Tove's comment about Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" inspired me to check around to see how book jacket illustrators have rendered the "sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin." I did a Google image search and found these examples:


"It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

"The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-burning sunlight.

"It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others."


It looks like most of the illustrators have picked up on the "sickly sulphur tint" rather than the "lurid orange"--the main color choice seems to be mustard or related hues. Gilman's short story is a good one for English classes because the examples of figurative language are plentiful--almost too plentiful, like the fungus that the pattern gets compared to in the second half of the story. You can do some good stuff with synesthesia (the "yellow smell") and even historical context (I heard a good lecture in college about Gilman's connection to the Yellow Peril discourse that was popular at the time).

"This paper looks to me as if it knew what vicious influence it had!

"There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck, and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.

"I get positively angry with the impertinence of it, and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where the two breadths didn't match; and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression inanimate things have!"


I'm looking at a copy from the Barnard library--one of the few that's not in course reserves, which gives some indication of how popular the book is for classes--and it's funny to see so many different people's handwriting in the margins for so many different types of readings of the story. For example: feminist declaration... Freud's talking cure... bloat & addiction... *!!... wise... fat and blood... wise... Mitchell thought it was all physical as opp. to Freud's mental. "We all know how much expression inanimate things have" indeed!

"This wallpaper has a kind of subpattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then. But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so--I can see a strange provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design."

You know that question about writing descriptively--why is it that we reach for metaphors so often in description? And the answer is hard to articulate: because we worry that we can't approach accurate portrayal in plain language and so resort to approximations, which take the form of similes. Because it's easier to compare than to explain, because the brain likes comparisons in order to make sense of things. This story in some ways presents the opposite problem for portraying the wallpaper: you can't draw all the weird stuff that the narrator thinks she sees in it because it's in her head, but you have to be able to suggest that it could be there "skulk[ing] behind that silly and conspicuous front design." Is that why so many of these designs from different eras look similar?


"I know a little of the principles of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that i ever heard of.

"It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise.

"Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of 'debased Romanesque' with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

"But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase."


The exception to the diagonal patterns are these lovely limited edition collapgraph prints by Crystal Cawley, which I found on antiquarian book site. From the catalog description: "The frontispiece paste paper and 3 collagraphs are in yellow, the first two on acrylic-stained paper and the third on tracing paper collaged with acrylic medium, representing the narrator’s descent in madness. This is a handsome edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic – the first fictional treatment of post-partum depression."


It looks like the Feminist Press editions from different years (the ones with the afterword by Elaine R. Hedges) take two approaches: pattern vs. no pattern. The narrator has trouble following the pattern in the paper as she sees so many things in it, so any visual rendering of it would make some interpretation of where the paranoid pattern recognition stops and interior design begins:


"The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction.

"They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion.

"There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all,--the interminable grotesque seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction."

In the end, trying to determine whether there's a pattern leads to my favorite metaphor for being out of control, the comparison to fungus. Not only does it represent prodigious growth, it inspires more and more metaphors, so that the metaphor becomes like a fungus itself:

"In a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a certain lack of sequence, a defiance of law that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.

"The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.

"You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following it, turns back somersault and there you are! It slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples on you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions--why that is something like it."

For good measure, the metaphor is repeated at the end, but even peeling away the wallpaper won't work:

"Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly. And the pattern just enjoys it. All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision!"

The unbelievable Celtics

Teary, ecstatic Kevin Garnett said it from a place that transcends the physical realm: "Anything is possible. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLLLLLEEEEE!!!!!!!!"

By the Celtics as a team, one of the greatest basketball performances of all time. I've never seen half as many steals in any game. By Kevin Garnett, one of the greatest post-game freakouts of all time, complete with kissing strangers and the floor and hopping around like a madman 15 minutes after his teammates calmed down, and he's just getting started.

Plus they stopped Phil Jackson from passing Red Auerbach.I'm so happy I was wrong about Doc Rivers.

Plus a performance by Rajon Rondo that put to rest all doubt about who this championship team's point guard is. My sister texted me after his bajillionth steal and Kobe-esque layup, "How do you say 'Can I be your baby mama' in Elvish?"

Lorrie Moore: Clinton campaign obit

Lorrie Moore, writing in New York magazine at the end of Hillary Clinton's campaign, confesses her obsession with watching Hillary:

In the animated Disney movie of Snow White it is the evil queen, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who has all the screen presence. I once watched the film in a Greenwich Village art house in the seventies, and although Snow White wasn’t actually hissed, the jealous older queen got all the applause and cheers and audible moral support.
...
How does she do it? she perhaps was asked a lot.

And the answer, of course, is with mirrors.

Don't be koi

It's a design trend I'll never have enough wherewithal to manage, but I'm delighted by bizarre wallpaper and textile patterns. Mark Mothersbaugh, formerly of Devo, has turned his eye to designing wallpaper patterns (from LA Weekly, link via boing boing):

Mark Mothersbaugh wants to put snakes on your wall. Now that the Devo lead singer and composer of film, television and commercial soundtracks has conquered the world of fine rugs, he’s set his designs, literally, on wallpaper. One pattern he’s calling “Black Forest” is a mutated collage of a 19th-century image of a bird. Those who recoil at the idea of reptiles splayed 24/7 across the walls of their kitchen should steer clear of “Snakes in a Tree,” a pattern of snakes, in trees. The unenlightened might find this one creepy, but Mothersbaugh’s wife, Anita, pictures it in a kids’ playroom, to enhance a safari-adventure theme. On the other hand, “Don’t Be Koi,” with its cheerful orange fish patterns, would be lovely even in Martha Stewart’s bathroom.

The NY Times did a brief feature on Richard Saja, who embroiders extra details onto eighteenth-century textiles. His blog has some great examples, including a werewolf explorer and a bird-man (from the same pattern).

I loved Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik books when I was little--it's a great series for obsessive list-makers and systematizers--and one of the details that stands out in my memory is that she wanted the wallpaper in her bedroom hung upside-down. From Anastasia Krupnik:

And she missed her old wallpaper. She had gotten to know the funny-looking bicycle riders on her old wallpaper quite well. She had given them names. The lady in the long skirt who rode a unicycle and played a violin was named Sibyl. The man on an old-fashioned racing bike who rode no-hands and played a flute was Stanley. Stanley had chased Sibyl around the walls of her old bedroom for years. She wanted them back.

When she tells her mother that she misses them, her mother remembers Stanley's "sexy little mustache." The upside is that in her new larger house, her bedroom is in a turret. Both wallpaper and turrets seemed so exotic to me as a young reader.

I was trying to make a list of other good children's book characters who had cool wallpaper--any ideas from older children's books when wallpaper was fashionable? For example, I did a Google search for references to wallpaper in Elizabeth Enright's books because I remember wishing that I could live among so many architectural and design quirks as her characters did. She describes wallpaper designs as "bunches of broccoli" in Gone-Away Lake and has the Melendy children peel away old wallpaper to find secrets in The Four-Story Mistake. The title house in that book had another detail I admired without quite knowing what one looked like in real life, a cupola. Google Books' list of keywords for Doublefields, a collection of short stories with lots of descriptions of old furniture and heavy draperies, gives some indication of Enright's taste for wonderful nouns: Place des Vosges, Woodmere, galoshes, parcheesi, gorgon, caterpillar, Mary Pickford, governess cart, Rupert Brooke, kobolds, Avalon, arpeggios, scrod, Bordighera, cocoon, moths, intaglio. And now I find that she was Frank Lloyd Wright's niece and that Thimble Summer was inspired by her trips to Taliesin. So that explains a lot!