I did it.

I moved the blog to Wordpress. I just couldn't stand looking at this template anymore.

I'm afraid the contributors are all showing up as me, but hopefully I can fix that soon. Contributors! E-mail me with the e-mail address you use for Wordpress.

Now maybe even when I don't post I can at least change the look of the site. I look forward to doing that often.

Possession

A. S. Byatt’s Possession was a marvelous read. When I read it, at the age of 30, I was surprised that no one had told me about it before. And when I later recommended it to some people I have called friends for years now, I was distressed to find that they had already read it and loved it, but never told me. If I were a literature prof, I would make it required reading for my classes, just for fun. It somehow succeeds in being a satire of literary criticism as well as an unabashed epic romance.

I think I will prove my nerdiness once and for all by admitting that I was immediately won over by the following lines in the opening paragraph:

The librarian handed [the book] to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library... Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square.

I knew at once that this was the book for me and that this character was someone I would happily follow. However, characters reading in libraries admittedly can’t sustain a plot forever, so all this romance and mystery soon develop. Mystery is great; romance annoys me a little bit.

Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never the same telling.

Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever―he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation.

We are always shaping our lives into stories. It is the same tale (as Sabine notices in this passage) and the end is always the same, but still we have a certain liberty in drawing the form of the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. We can make a good life into a captivity or a demon into an idol. The romantic love story is one pattern that helps us perform these conjurings in our minds.

Our charming government

I never thought I would be singing the praises of the recent postage rate hike, but if I hadn’t had to buy some make-up stamps today I would have missed a great pleasure. I bought two packs of fifty one-cent stamps from a postage machine and they appeared in the most elegant form, folded accordion-style and sealed in a tiny wax-paper envelope with a sticker. To think, people who pay their bills online will never see or feel this.

Above: Pepe fingers the packet, to reveal scale. The photo does not, however, capture the exquisite density of the packet. You must buy one yourself.

Also, I am meaning to post soon about two books: Possession by A. S. Byatt and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands by Paul David Tripp. I just haven’t had the time to write something that does them justice. Maybe I should just say I loved them both and highly recommend them, in case I don’t succeed in posting anytime soon.

Helmet head

I have a principle against putting my picture on my blog, but this is an exceptional occasion, and I think you will be grateful.

As I was riding around the lake today, a little girl and her mother were getting out of their car.

“I like your hair,” the little girl said. Ignoring the amused look on her mother’s face, I thanked her, and she said I was welcome.

I could not suppress my curiosity as I continued around the lake and rode home. What did my hair indeed look like? How much of it was visible? It may be hard to believe, but I had not looked in the mirror back at home as I was gathering it into a ponytail and crowning it with my helmet.

Above is a photograph of my coiffure, essentially as it was seen by my admirer. There was about another hour of high-speed bicycling in a strong wind by the time I got home and took this photo, but I hope that vestiges of the glamour will still be perceptible.

The young lady’s praise is especially valuable to me because she appeared to be of African descent, and I think it’s reasonably likely that she has some experience with impressive hairstyles among her family and associates.

Most magnificent trees

For fun, here is a picture of a local tree I admire. It takes up an entire lot. The house next to it is included for scale.

Some blogger has put up a nice list of the ten most magnificent trees in the world, with photos. The subjectivity of such an exercise does not detract from its worthiness.

My favorite is the baobab; what about yours?

The Flower

Here is a little Easter Herbert for my reader(s). This poem is a longtime favorite of mine. I sort of wish it didn’t turn into a sermon at the end, but it is still a delicious piece of work.

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! Ev’n as the flowers in Spring,
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring;
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivell’d heart
Could have recover’d greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are Thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quick’ning, bringing down to Hell
And up to Heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing bell.
We say amiss
This or that is;
Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise where no flower can wither!
Many a Spring I shoot up fair,
Off’ring at Heaven, growing and groaning thither;
Nor doth my flower
Want a Spring shower,
My sins and I joining together.

But while I grow to a straight line;
Still upwards bent, as if heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide:
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

This book is realism and escapism thrown together in a strange soup, nonchalance spiced with melodrama, a brew of every flavor of bizarreness and impropriety. Eric Newby tells us the tale of taking off with a friend for remotest Afghanistan in the 1950s with allegedly little experience and preparation. He calls for no sympathy; tragedy is dismissed and pleasure denied. The reader must suspend disbelief at practically every turn.

We all know the feeling of doing something foolish and escaping the consequences. Newby seems to want to present his adventure as such a case, but there is clearly some understatement of his qualifications. He is funny, but I felt like he was trying too hard to deprecate their achievements. It got annoying. Even the reader who does not know their backgrounds as outdoorsmen and adventurers cannot question the determination of these two men. Newby describes disasters, disappointments, and pain, without self-pity. Somehow the account seems scrupulously honest and blatantly unbelievable at the same time. I suppose that is its charm.

That two men went to immense trouble to have this largely meaningless adventure was a consolation to me. Perhaps I wouldn't want to work closely with Eric Newby, but his carefree humor and his crazy story are enjoyable. I am all for stodginess and responsibility, but I can't help admiring, from afar, the courage of some of our planet's more oddly-dimensioned souls. Besides, anyone who would ride a bike around the office is a friend of mine.

Newby died late last year.

There is no rose

I finished The Name of the Rose and wanted to start over again. It has everything the soul could possibly want: northern Italy, fantastic monasteries, monastic murders, underground passages, fog, secret libraries, rafts of manuscripts, a riot of languages, codes, maps, labyrinths, herbalists, unicorns, hunchbacks, traps, fires, poisons, Gregorian chant, crypts, clues drawn from handwriting, ox’s hearts, midnight trysts, dreams, doodles, heresies, allusions, anachronisms, and fried cheese.

It is strange to admit how close my world is to the one in the book. When I moved here I pretended I was embarking on a monastic life, enfolded in the protective robe of the Church. I would dedicate my days to her service, walking the pretty halls of the church building and plying my trade in a humble office. I would do the closest available thing to illuminating manuscripts: edit the church’s newsletter and supply decorative graphics to promote her events. In fact, my newsletter archives would be a parochial equivalent of the chronicles of Bede.

It’s turned out to be a satisfactory life for me. I feel tolerated, even appreciated, at work and free to pursue my solitary interests at home. I understand that the romantic expectations I have described in the previous paragraph will raise many questions for some readers, like the opening of a novel that is certain to depict the starry-eyed main character’s fall from innocence. What about the nasty church politics that anyone working for the church must inevitably face?

First of all, I am not that starry-eyed. I would rather affirm what is good and leave the nasty fights to the people who care about that kind of thing. For now church politics is a responsibility I am grateful not to have to engage in. I have brushed against it from time to time and find that the battles in my denomination today are ludicrously similar to the politics described in Adso and William’s delightful conversation about heresy.

“The trouble is,” I said, “I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patrines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Lucierines. What am I to do?”

This book is both wonderful and vexing because I believe the author delights in confusion and complexity. Innocence, knowledge, faith, skepticism, love, lust, sensation, cogitation, laughter, devotion, experience, reason... Everything important is taken and turned around in the hand and deeply felt and playfully examined. Both the naive Adso and his rational master are innocent in different ways, and the ending of the story is... what can I say without giving it away... powerful.

Here is an example of the interactions between the two that fill the book with its special joy. Adso and William escape the labyrinth and see the stars at the end of one long night.

“How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,” I said, relieved.

“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.

Maybe it says something about me that I adored the book, despite or because of its stubborn refusal to assign a final meaning to anything.

For my Polish friend

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license. First, of course, she had to take an eyesight test. The optician showed her a card with the following letters:

C Z W I X N O S T A C Z

“Can you read this?” the optician asked.

“Read it?” the Polish girl replied. “I know the guy.”

The Pines of Rome

How often do people write music in honor of trees?

There is Handel’s famous, heart-swelling “Ombra mai fu”:

Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,
soave più.

Never was a plant’s shade more dear, pleasant, and sweet.

The emperor Xerxes is said to have written an ode to an Oriental plane tree (Platanus orientalis), and this aria is Handel’s dramatization of the act. Most of my life I had heard it in instrumental arrangements as the blandly-named “Largo,” and I was mightily pleased to learn a few years ago that this sublime music was a love song to a tree.

I have long dreamed of doing a series on this blog memorializing the most admirable trees of Dallas. One of the trees I would feature is pictured above, a venerable cedar held up by numerous braces, forming a dark, romantic vault above the walkway to the front door of its house.

Trees are marvelous. They tower over our measly dwellings and they outlive us, witnessing centuries of history. I have personally met the largest recorded Sitka spruce and Ponderosa pine. I think there are several other famed arboreal personages in my past, but my memory is bad and I have not been faithful to keep a list.

So you can imagine why, when I got a free ticket to I pini di Roma last week, my heart leapt. I think I must have heard it on the radio at one time, liked it, told myself to remember it, and forgotten it. I had some mysterious attachment to the piece that could not be completely explained by its woodsy subject matter.

In any case, it is possible that I exaggerated my anticipation of the event beyond reasonable hope. On websites I saw conjectures about which particular trees had inspired Ottorino Respighi, and pictures of the trees. My research convinced me that I would love it.

Respighi’s work is in four parts:

The Pines of the Villa Borghese
Pines near a Catacomb
The Pines of the Janiculum
The Pines of the Appian Way

They were accompanying the music with a light show in the symphony hall. The music at the beginning was circuslike, and the lights were gaudy and ridiculous. A man in the row behind us had an especially endearing chuckle that set us laughing even more. Eventually, though, you settle into the mood, even though no pine tree you’ve ever known has elicited such emotion. I was reminded of the promise of “18 minutes d’emotion totale” at the World War II memorial in Caen—another example of making a potentially serious subject into a spectacle.

The entire catacombs part was lit with red lights and flamelike shapes. There was no subtlety about it. I wondered what would have happened if they had lit it in a cool color from time to time. The plainsong melodies could easily have been peaceful and not hellish. At one point you hear a soft, beautiful melody, played perhaps by an English horn or an oboe? But it would have to be a marvelously sweet horn or oboe, and no one on stage is playing. You can’t find the soloist anywhere. Then you see him return to the stage—oh, a marvelously soft trumpet. I suppose hiding him underneath the stage is one way to muffle the sound. It was lovely.

The Pines of the Janiculum (a noted Roman hill, but not one of the official seven) was my favorite part, with lovely moments for the clarinet and the lesser woodwinds. The music and light show were more natural here, soft and peaceful and healing. There was even a recording of a nightingale singing. At this point I had some revelations about literary nightingales that hadn’t occurred to me before.

Finally came the Appian Way, with trumpets and trombones playing from the balconies above the orchestra, with wild splats of light and sparkling fireworks. I could detect nothing coniferous about this section. It made me smile, though, like an overeager little boy makes you smile. You just can’t help it. It was fun.

The wild spectacle went beyond what I was expecting. But I am still determined to like The Pines of Rome.

Self de luxe

I recently came across Geoffrey Pullum’s “The Miserable French Language and Its Inadequacies” and enjoyed it immensely. It points out things that immediately disturb one when one begins learning French but which one is afraid to point out lest one be thought an ignorant philistine.

This is a language used by people who are supposed to be the big experts in love and kissing and sexy weekends of ooh-la-la, and they don’t have words for “boy”, “girl”, “warm”, “love”, “kiss”, or “weekend”.

Still, they seem to get along okay.

A friend of mine just came back from Paris and brought me a copy of L’Express, complete with a separate “Styles” section. Writers on fashion and the arts tend to be frequently allusive, liberal with jargon and wordplay, and it was interesting to see this manifested in French. Words that were apparently English poked up everywhere in the most baffling contexts. Apparently a “checking” is a cash register, a “self” is a cafeteria, “hype” means fashionable, and “look” appears in multiple contexts, such as in the phrase “total look” (whatever that means) and, most ridiculously, fitted with French verb and adjective endings: “relooker” and “lookées.”

Out of 50 restaurants featured under “Restaurants aussi beaux que bons,” fully one-quarter of them have English or part-English names: Eatme, Caviar House & Prunier, Sensing, Tokyo Eat, Mood, Cristal Room Baccarat, Black Calvados, Rich, Ze Kitchen Galerie, No Escape, Gold, Canteen, and Noodles.

One of the most amusing activities I did when I taught English in France was to give the students lists of French words used in English and teach them how to pronounce them and what they meant. It was a hoot.

Anyway, all this makes me rethink the Académie Française. Perhaps it is better for them to stick with pure French after all, to save their dignity.

Verdurous glooms

Today is the anniversary of the death of the poet Keats, who was 25 when he died in 1821. On this day it is traditional to recite “Ode to a Nightingale.”

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South!
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

Universal good taste

My parents sent me this. I don't think I’ve ever seen a better restaurant ad. Also note the bike racks in the background. Why, oh why, do I live in Dallas?

Anno porcis

Recent events are auspicious. My knees feel great even though I’m running more than ever, I got six red roses for Valentine’s Day, I kissed The Head last weekend, and I now own a pair of boots. I’m excited about getting reading glasses next week, signaling the ripeness and maturity I will soon reach as a thirty-year-old.

I will report future events as they confirm the good luck and prosperity portended by this year’s animal.

The Kite Runner

This book was gripping and emotionally captivating. However, cynic that I am, I found myself questioning it for that reason. I have never liked being emotionally manipulated, and after crying several times towards the end, and sensing that tragedies were being piled upon tragedies, to the point of disbelief, I began to feel like I was being toyed with. When discussing it together, several of us felt rather insulted by the lengths to which the author goes to underline his significant moments. Things seemed artificial.

Well, what is any story if not artificial? The author does what he does well, we agreed. He arranges events in a meaningful way and tells a great story of guilt and redemption. If some of the literary coincidences were cheesy, the main character was certainly realistic and fully drawn, we agreed, and the ending, while melodramatic in its artistic touches, was ambiguous and far from obnoxiously triumphant.

I was annoyed, however, with the way the supporting characters were devices to advance the plot of the main character’s life. I suppose I am speaking principally of the wife here, who I think was unforgivably used, but the most important secondary character also seemed to have little human depth. Because they were not fully evoked as characters, I felt like they missed an opportunity to speak something of their own perception of the world.

I have a problem with mixing literature and life. Nabokov says that the shallowest kind of reading of all is identifying with the characters. I don’t really care for that statement. I tend to judge stories with the full panoply of ethics and common sense that life wears, and perhaps I deck out real life with too many romantic expectations.

In real life, when you’re going through something painful, the most annoying thing to hear is “It’s always hard.” Always? What do you mean? Don’t tell me I’m acting out the umpteenth iteration of a timeworn formula. What I am experiencing is the only grief, the only tragedy, the story that has never been told and the emotion that no one else in all of time will ever feel.

So, back to The Kite Runner: perhaps it wasn't so much the fact that it provoked emotions in what I considered an unfairly artificial way as the fact that it calls into question all the other books I have read and loved that have made me feel a certain way. I begin to fear that if I reread just about any of my most beloved children’s books―for example, those wonderful Newbery Medal winners that make you feel so grown-up and full of delicious sadness and glory and heroism―today, I would see through all its plot development and literary devices and realize that the things I felt then were illegitimate and invalid and that the things I feel now must not be valid either, because they will pass away and turn into something else, and I am in fact living the plotted life with fewer and fewer chances of being surprised or delighted again.

Magnolia zone

Reverence for magnolia trees is legendary in my family. One popular story tells how my great-grandmother wrecked her car because she was admiring a magnolia tree instead of looking where she was driving.

Magnolias were one of the few aesthetic compensations of moving here. Their citrus-smelling blossoms bewitch your nostrils when you’re out walking at night. The trees are grand, glossy, and primitively beautiful. They are considered “primitive” among plants, with ancient characteristics like separate flower parts that are the same size and grow in spirals below the ovaries.

Pierre Magnol (1683-1715) was the lucky guy who got his name applied not just to the genus of magnolia trees (Magnolia) but to the entire class of dicotyledons (Magnoliopsida), one of the two traditional categories of flowering plants. Most of the things you think of as trees and flowers (except for mosses, ferns, weird plants, conifers, and long-bladed flowering plants like lilies) are in this category. I enjoy following the branches underneath it to the subclass Magnoliidae, the order Magnoliales, the family Magnoliaceae, the subfamily Magnolioideae, all the way down to the genus Magnolia. That’s something for Pierre to be proud of.

Formerly only familiar with the plain old freely growing tree, I have been surprised and charmed by the creative cultivations of this plant visible on my daily commute. One cannot fail to admire the gigantic specimens growing in the park along the creek:


Not too long ago they finished remodeling one of the châteaux, and I was impressed with the staggered rows of exquisitely trimmed small magnolias that they planted next to it. Alas, their gardener has not been vigilant in retaining the trees’ lovely vase shape, but please try to imagine how it could be:


Finally, just the other day I noticed espaliered magnolias. I have never seen this phenomenon elsewhere, but I approve. See how those with neither gardens nor châteaux can still dwell with the great tree and gaze upon it when they park:


I intend to include one more picture of a plain old tree, but I haven’t taken a picture of it yet. Perhaps I will also switch these dull photos with photos taken in a more enchanting atmosphere if I get the chance.

Happy inefficiency

“It is seldom the efficiency of a writing system or script that determines its longevity and influence, but rather the economic power and prestige of those using it” (Fischer).

I had no idea that the Korean writing system was not just another logography, but rather an ideal script. The characters systematically represent the sounds of the language, much like Tolkien’s Fëanorian script. I didn’t realize there was a working example of this in our messy world. It took the edict of King Seycong in 1446 to replace the hand-me-down Chinese logographs his country was using, which were inadequate to represent the Korean language, with what Fischer calls “the most efficient system ever devised in the history of writing.” It is attractive as well.

It’s strange how we take our writing systems for granted. Of course we would write English with the Latin alphabet... But countries have switched from Arabic systems to Roman systems to Cyrillic systems at the whim of their emperors. If it happened to us, it probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. We adapt.

English spelling is notoriously awkward. But diglossia―having a written language that is essentially a different language from the spoken one it is supposed to represent―is the natural result of time’s passing, and the whole world lives with it to various extents. There are benefits to the way written language tends to stay the same while spoken language mutates. We still easily understand Shakespeare’s texts, even if he wouldn’t recognize the sound of his words in our mouths.

At least our script has had a systematic relationship to spoken modern English across the centuries. The poor Japanese conquer scriptological insanity to become literate. From what I can understand, they borrowed a script (Chinese characters) that did not necessarily correspond to the sounds it represented in Japanese and could not convey all the grammatical information that Japanese words had to convey (this was the same thing the Koreans were dealing with before King Seycong). The Japanese continue to use Chinese characters, but tack on a couple other scripts to indicate inflectional endings, grammatical particles, glosses, and speech sounds. They can write their language using any one of the scripts, but apparently they prefer to mix them. The Roman alphabet can also be used.

One can always find a silver lining in one’s circumstances. Having all the Chinese characters is kind of like our having homophones like bear and bare; the script contains information that the speech does not, and Japanese, like Chinese, is full of homophones.

Many populations besides the Japanese function with an ill-fitting script. Yet few nations shackled by language become Boston Tea Partiers in response. Part of it is powerlessness, of course, but could it also be that we love our languages for their absurdities, not despite them? “Written language, so East Asian writing teaches us, is not subordinate to spoken language,” Fischer says. I talked earlier about the the aesthetic pleasure of Chinese characters. The idea that a well-formed character has merit in itself, aside from its linguistic function, fascinates me.

Many important things in life are inefficient: art, love, sports, children. Fischer says, “It is well known that because of its writing system, Japan forces its young to endure many more years of education―placing demands on its young people and at great cost to the state―than are necessary in other countries. Yet this may also explain, if only in part, Japan’s manifest success. One thing is clear: in no way has Japan’s writing hindered the intellectual growth of its users.”

In a different way, French culture has proved to many of us that it’s worth taking time to do small things well. We are still left with the question of which small things to choose.

Forests of symbols

I’ve been reading Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing ever since Christmas and finally finished it. It’s sort of hard to follow (I think he could have used a more systematic editor), but it has prompted much reflection on the nature of writing.

Writing fascinates me. Learning new alphabets is fun; handwriting is important enough to experiment with and remodel from time to time. Letters are exciting. Living in another era, I would have been temperamentally inclined to credit the myths that described writing as a sacred gift from the gods.

In truth writing probably began with accountants, who made knots in ropes, scratched notches on sticks, or inscribed clay tokens to symbolize unwieldy animals. It was when the marks they made assumed a phonological significance apart from the objects they represented that this became complete writing. Fischer emphasizes that this was a groundbreaking technological innovation, not an evolutionary process. He suggests that complete writing was invented only once in all history: a rare idea indeed. All the diverse instances of it around the world, from the most awkward to the most ingenious, are variations on the unique idea of complete writing that popped up in Sumer around 3700 BC:

1. Its purpose is communication.
2. It consists of artificial graphic marks on a durable surface (or electronic medium).
3. It uses marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech.

It is not that unromantic that we owe accountants for the concoction of letter magic. After all, what is a story but an account? In French, a compte rendu is a summary of something you’ve heard. And a conte is a pure fairy tale.

To populate our tales (a word that used to mean counts, just like tallies,) we need all the races of letters―gothics and grotesques, romans and moderns and humanists, capitals and uncials and minuscules. We delight in their anatomy of bowls and crossbars, ears and crotches, legs, arms, apices, vertices, tails, terminals, hairlines, stems, spurs, and spines. Not to mention heng, shu, and the other limbs I haven’t learned yet, to make beautiful creatures I mentioned earlier.

With picayune pecunia we assemble the words that form our armies of arguments. We can take nothing for granted in our accounting. The tale of writing is rich.

Simple patio or vast estate?

Tonight I installed a cuter (and hopefully more reliable) modulator-demodulator. I am filled with good humor at being able to post, and at a happy ending to my long, heroic battle with the Enemies.

I have discovered that you get better results with “I need this replaced. It doesn’t work and it’s under warranty” than with a reasonable articulation of the problem. At the Apple Store it got me an appointment with the less than enthusiastic Geniuses (have you heard of them??) after they were officially closed, and at the cable place it got me the cute new modem, no questions asked. I was delighted at the force with which the taciturn employee hurtled the old one into a bin in a cabinet plastered with “LUV YA” and “SWEET BOY” hearts. I was expecting they would test it, it would work, and I would drive the 45 minutes back home crying.

I have always prided myself on being reasonable, but now I am beginning to appreciate that unreasonable and closed-minded women may be more highly evolved for today's society.

So anyway, since I am in a good humor, I think I will postpone my planned post on life as a long defeat (which gets ever more confusing the more I think about it) and just share some silly things that have amused me lately.

I.
I was driving to work this week and heard two delightful radio ads, one after the other. One was for an outdoor lighting installation service that will meet your needs “whether you have a simple patio or a vast estate.” That made me laugh. Alas for them, I have a simple patio that is already amply lit.

II.
The other ad was for some kind of car-leasing arrangement, I think. I wasn’t really listening. At one point the man said, “How would you feel about buying a pre-owned car whose previous owner wasn’t a person?” He goes on to explain that the previous owner was the car dealer, but not before my mind had pictured King Kong or some large muddy reptile at the wheel of my fine automobile.

III.
So, speaking of strange creatures, I just have to share these wonderful peoplemals. My favorite is the octopus.

One of my childhood friends drew a silly picture of a person once. For a long time I kept it because I couldn’t help laughing every time I saw it. I have no idea what is was about that picture. I still have it somewhere, backed with cardboard and stuck to a popsicle stick. I hope these peoplemals have a similar effect on you when you see them. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to link to them for a long time, but do you ever need an excuse for this?

IV.
I love it when you buy a head of lettuce and the metal twist tie around it says, “Eat 5 a day for better health.”

Those are all the funny things I can remember right now (that are appropriate to share with my vast and diverse readership). I should have kept a list.

Here Be Dragons

For someone who had always pictured Kings Richard and John of England as cartoon lions, Sharon Kay Penman’s book was an enlightening read. I thought John was especially well portrayed. I want to read more about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For me the great value of this book was in the details about life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For instance, they spread rushes on the floor as a sort of carpeting, and changed them when they needed to be changed. I might try that one of these days. It might beat vacuuming.

The most shocking thing for me was that they only had one meal a day in Wales, in the evening. I would have died. I was comforted that it was a significant adjustment for the main character, too.

Pictured above is one of several small scenes I encountered upon coming home yesterday. My guest―a delightful friend who sows beauty and poetry wherever she goes―had posed my penguin with his wing in the almond jar. She’s also the kind of guest who replaces certain disapproved-of items in your pantry with higher-quality or less-toxic varieties. It cracks me up. I appreciate her audacity... and generosity.

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok. But I don’t want to spoil the scene for people who haven’t read it. What do I do? I guess I will have to keep quiet. Some kind of blog.

Conclusions

I have come to some conclusions about life lately. I have decided that Out of Africa is now my favorite book and that of Brahms’s symphonies, my favorite is the fourth.

Also, I’m kind of off the bunny kick. A majority of my family is anti-bunny. Several acquaintances have been unenthusiastic. I don’t really have time to give a bunny the attention it needs. And before Christmas, a wise-looking elderly man in Tucson’s best used bookstore, glimpsing the About Your Rabbit book I was carrying under my arm, warned me that they are twice as much work as you expect them to be. What could be more convincing than an aging stranger’s unsolicited advice?

Since my blog must remain inconclusive, I will wrap up with today’s wildlife sighting:

In the distance behind me I hear the consternation of a woman whose dog has gotten loose. I keep walking ahead, hoping not to encourage the animal, but as I hear it approaching I grow curiouser and curiouser. A great whirring and flapping indicates a beast of significant size.

Sure enough, a huge brown hound (please pause to say that out loud) is soon trotting beside me, its spine almost as high as my hipbones, its head down sniffing, taking no notice of me. I am content to have such a calm and independent creature at my side, filling up the empty half of the sidewalk, but after a few steps I begin to worry about its owner, who is becoming breathless in her pursuit.

I turn around and wait for a few moments while she approaches. I express my amazement at her pet’s dimensions. “And he’s just a puppy,” she says. “Eleven months.”

“Do you mean he’ll get bigger?” Truly, this is a marvelous beginning to the day. The words “huge brown hound” bring considerable merriment to the rest of the walk. I know, it doesn’t take much.

An ear for German

I was reading some Rilke to a friend two nights ago and was happy to hear her say it was beautiful. I have always wanted to prove to someone that German is a pretty language, or at least could be thought of as pretty. Most people think it isn’t. But would they think so if everyone else hadn’t told them that from their inception? Is it really an objective truth?

Take a word like Friedrich. If you say it right, it’s the gentlest rippling of air through your mouth, a relaxing of control to let a soft breeze pass along your throat, tongue, and teeth. You have to smile to say it.

Now German is the poorer for lacking our exquisite th sounds, but it has other sounds that fall in the same class of feather-soft, downy, maternal whisperings.

As for Rs, I think German’s uvular R is superior to the French velar one. It is liquid rather than raspy. I enjoy hearing my German-speaking friend pronounce her French Rs à l’allemand.

I think what people hear and dislike about German is a lot of stops and fricatives. But German is about control of the vocal passages. Americans don’t have to open their throats, and we become unpleasantly nasal. However, German is a rhythmic river of sound, a carefully restrained singing.

Useless characters

Recently my mom sent me a story from The New Yorker about a guy who made miniature palaces. He was a big hit with the king who hired him. This artist could carve not only an apple the size of a grain of sand but the fly on the apple. He got better and better, carving the fly’s hairs and the molecules of the hairs. His work got steadily more and more precise until neither he nor anyone else could actually see what he was carving. They didn’t fire him, just shut him up in a room alone and had food brought to him while he carved his amazing but pointless carvings. He was perfectly happy, obsessively happy.

Sometimes I think I could be like that. I consider myself a writer by nature and I have a job that involves writing and layout and graphic design. I enjoyed drawing as a kid, and I used to create newspapers for fun, so it’s all right up my alley. But sometimes I feel like my tastes take a turn that is obsessive, minute, approaching uselessness.

Most people who consider themselves “visual” or “creative” can come up with great schemes or ideas. There are days when I have good ideas and grand schemes. I think I am reasonably productive. But the grand scheme is not my greatest joy in life. I am happier staring at a black-and-white page of type (the right type, set in an attractive manner) than at a colorful poster. I am happier staring at a single perfectly curving letter than at the flashiest full-color effect that a Photoshop artist can produce.

People who consider themselves writers often have plots and ideas. Sometimes I have plots and ideas, but I’m best at just amassing words. People will complain about too much information on a page and I will nod my head, completely uncomprehending. I love spreadsheets and pages of words. Or I look at closed books and revel in all the wisdom and adventure and beauty that I know, without even opening them, is inside.

When you read about the carver of miniature palaces, it does occur to you to wonder if the things he is carving really exist, since even he must be unable to see them. But that is not the conclusion that I reached at the end of the story. I believe that he really could carve things that minuscule. I believe that his gift continued to approach the ever-more-slightly tinier limit of perfection until he died.

I am interested in Chinese calligraphy right now. Chinese writing is remarkable because it conveys meaning that speech alone cannot convey. To us, written language is an imperfect system for representing speech. Chinese script, however, is more perfect than speech.

In China, calligraphy has historically been an art form as eminent as (or even moreso than) poetry or painting. The characters are important for their appearance, not just their meaning. A specimen of calligraphy is described this way: “reeds on the shoreline of a quiet lake―the slender strokes bent by the night breeze rustle in the still twilight,” or compared to dancers, farmers, forests, waterfalls, in Johan Bjorksten’s book pictured above.

I could get lost in this arguably useless world forever. Fortunately I have a marvelously broad range of tasks at work, including talking to people, and ample extracurricular activities that keep me away from home, so there is no immediate danger of ending up in a lonely room with food passed to me under the door. I know I would probably hate it if I actually did have that much solitary time on my hands. But I admit I dream of it sometimes.

Double delight

One of my favorite things is setting up surprises and waiting for them to hatch. It can be tricky when you’re targeting a large concentration of people with a single source of surprise, because you want as many unique instances of surprise as possible. This was satisfactorily achieved over my Christmas vacation, with no particular care on my part.

I got my brother and sister-in-law a blue faucet light. It wasn’t really a Christmas present, but I wanted to get them something extra for their house since I was staying there for a long time. I came across the light in my favorite gift shop. I had no idea they existed, but it was prophetically clear that this had to be purchased for them. Gift-giving is one of my greatest sources of anxiety, so it is wonderful when the perfect gift appears. Everything is right. Nothing is better than that.

You may be wondering about the blue faucet light. It is not a cheesy gift. It is a reputable, high-quality piece of hardware that installs onto the end of your faucet after you remove the existing mesh thing. It comes with batteries installed PLUS a second set of batteries. It also comes with two adaptors, making it likely to fit any faucet in America. My siblings were pleased with the improvement it caused in their faucet’s water flow. The light it emitted was remarkable. It would even flash after you turned the faucet off, as water continued to drip.

So we installed it. I have to mention here that the reaction from my siblings was disappointing. They seemed to think it more weird, less amazing. But I persevered in my enthusiasm, and I think they eventually saw it for what it was. They began looking forward to episodes of discovery by the guests at their New Year’s party.

Meanwhile, I was anticipating the joyful reactions of my parents, who arrived later than I did. They flew in and went straight to their hotel the first night. The next time they were there, I casually asked if anyone needed to wash their hands and no one wanted to. (Pigs.) It might have been a days later when the older generation finally came over to the Little Presidio after dinner. While everyone was hanging around in the living room accomplishing nothing, I finally couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “I think you need to wash your hands. They smell kind of funny.” My sister-in-law, sitting across from my dad, lowered her face into her hands and tried not to laugh audibly.

“Oh, OK,” Mom said, and headed into the bathroom. I guess decades of raising tactless children keeps one from taking offense too easily.

She used the toilet and then washed her hands. I imagined her happiness at seeing the unexpected electric-blue water.

She came out of the bathroom. “Why is the water blue?” The room erupted in riotous laughter. “That’s really cool!” she added. I knew my mom had taste!

“Bear, you need to go use the sink,” she said. “I think you’ll like it.” My dad was sitting in the epicenter of the hilarity, reading The Arms of Krupp.

“Oh, really?” he said, slowly entering the 21st century. He hesitated, got up, walked slowly down the hall as if he feared some trap, and went over to the sink. Then he gave his daughter the gift she wanted: a spontaneous “That is so neat!”