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.