The pace of youth is so dazzlingly hurtlingly accelerated it can render the background of youth -- the world and all the people in it -- seemingly static. This is an illusion, like the gentle list backward of the platform when the train starts. I don't know when the air around me became so viscous -- sometime in the past few years, I think. But now, back home, I perceive -- as if by means of a new sense -- the tracks that time has trailed through everything around me, the distance that we have all come, the subtle constant motion away from and then towards.

Get Rich Quicker

Officially open for business, my new carding venture: for a small fee, I will select, design, and/or write your cards for holidays, birthdays, special occasions, or just to let that special someone know you're thinking of them.

Prices may vary. Void where prohibited.

Sentences I have loved

A few doozies from the past few months:

"I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane."

That's from what is alleged to be Julian Assange's okcupid profile which now you need to sign in to be able to see. If it really is his profile, this seems a wee bit hypocritical to me. Isn't he supposed to be all about transparency?? But really, what can you expect from someone charming enough to write the above sentences in his quest for love?

"'If there was anyone who kept their calm, it was certainly me,' Mr. Sarkozy added."

From an NY Times article. It doesn't really matter what it was about.

"As a 16-year-old girl in the company of three adult men she was the least likely of the four to be carrying one, let alone two, heavy handguns. It is far more probable that she relied on the pocketknife found in her brassiere for any necessary self-protection."

This is from a 1979 Supreme Court case -- Ulster County v. Allen. I just think it's badass.

Commuting

6:50 am

Last night I rode the bus home and thought --

so dark and yet

so early, only 4:47 pm and already someone has pricked the skin

of the balloon of the sky and the light

has gone rushing out like air and the city

of San Francisco, Coit Tower, the TransAmerica pyramid, the Embarcadero Center

and all the blocky fortresses of capital with bay views

are zipping up their suits of silhouette.

But now the risen bits of sun are pooling on the bay's rim

and spilling out beneath the stuttering bits of cloud

and filling in the gaps between the interlocking fingers of highway on the east end of the Bay Bridge

where the 80 and the 880 and the 580 loop and ribbon

and a light that is one of the colors of the scarf I'm knitting with yarn remaining from a hat

edges up and over to shade the clouds on the other side of the Bridge

and I wonder whether this patchwork of vapor, this fragmented fog

always hanging over us is a mirror

or a screen.

On Internal Tension and the Word "About"

"About" means "concerned with" as in "this article is about the war in Iraq." Used in this way it refers to the central point of something, its gist, its core. Whatever meaning beats at its heart.

But "about" also means "near," "close to," "approximately," as in "it was about 6:30 am when the sun rose on one side of the Bay Bridge."

And it means "all around" as in "there were flowers planted all about the castle."

On in near around at the center of. Is there any preposition that "about" does not contain?

Sometimes I feel sad and my sadness is not "about" anything. This might sound strange unless you think of moods being like the weather -- the sun does not rise "about" anything -- it just rises. Or unless you think about the other meanings of "about" -- the sun rises and casts its light all about the city.

Stop Apologizing: A Manifesto to the Women in My Life

Dear All the Women in My Life:

Please stop apologizing, at least to me. You have done nothing wrong, you are lovely: you are talented, radiant, smart. You read articles and make tarts from scratch and ride bicycles, sometimes down mountains. I admire your courage and grace and insight.

But lately, I have been troubled not only by specific acts of self-deprecation but by the persistence of the reflex-apology, especially when I am on the other end of it. Women—and I don’t just mean in general, or all women, but many women whom I personally know and regularly speak with—apologize with disturbing frequency and for the smallest of acts. Women apologize for being early, for being hungry, for being busy, for asking me questions that I am being paid by the University of California to answer for them, for being confused, for disagreeing with me or with other people, for being wrong, for being right, for being tired, for thinking something is interesting, for not having read something that is being discussed, or worked hard enough, or stayed up late enough, or cared enough, or known ahead of time what could only have been learned through experience.

Some might argue that the casually tossed off “I’m sorry” does not really literally mean that the speaker is sorry, but is instead a sentence ornament like “How are you?” or “I’m fine.” That it is akin to the placeholder “like”: a structural element devoid of independent meaning. But I disagree on both counts, since the prevalence of both ungrammatical “like” and “I’m sorry” seems symptomatic of a general tendency to qualify not only our statements but ourselves. And dismissing this as mere syntax, a grammatical tic, only reveals how deeply our self-editing instinct is embedded.

Please consider this a blanket absolution. At least as far as I am concerned you are all forgiven.

Ever,

B.

More on Annie Dillard

Just something to think about:

"Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish."

I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!

About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had been very much in love and his departure is a shock that the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Lou copes by climbing a monument in town with broad views of "flat sky, flat sea, and flat land" of Cape Cod. High up in the salty air, surveying the scraped world below her, Lou begins to learn to let go.

"For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task."

Thirty pages later, her son Pete, a fisherman, has a similar desire to ascend out of emotional turmoil into cool recollection.

"Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow's nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow's nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took."

Lou's actual monument has become a monument of the mind -- a way of being apart, above, out of the wrack and wreckage of investment and disappointment. Lou, heaving herself up actual steps, realizes the distance she is covering and the immensity of her task. She is quitting Toby like a drug and can only stand to do so for a minute at a time. Pete, too, recognizes the paintstaking nature of the work of self-removal. Rope by rope. Plank by plank. For as long as it takes.

The Garden & The Window

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench in the garden. Who is it for? When was it built? Or you can shift the angle of your gaze and focus on the window itself. Is the glass smudged? How wide are its panes? Can you see your own reflection in it?

Most people when they read look at the garden: the flowers are the characters whose lives we admire and watch grow. It is lovely to look at a garden; we may feel many things. Students and scholars of literature when they read must learn to look at the window: how does the depth and texture of the language through which we read shape our view of the world on the other side?

Learning to see the window takes time -- even learning to care about the window takes time. After all, the garden is so beautiful. And sometimes looking at the window seems silly. Isn't transparency in a window's very nature -- its sole defining feature? Do we do a window a disservice by refusing to look past it?

But over time, the glass' grain emerges. It becomes possible to see within it a bank, a thread where a core of liquid cooled, and the scarce scratches scored by beads of sand colliding. The garden may be pretty but the window is epic, ancient, the site of revolutionary encounters between irrepressible forces.

It is only after the window has occupied you for so long and with such intensity that you have ceased entirely even to wonder about the garden that you make a most surprising discovery: there is no garden there at all -- whether it has disappeared or whether it never existed in the first place is a question for experts beyond your level.

What L didn't tell his students is that if you look at the window long enough, one day it will be the only thing you can see.

After God, there is no more skilled practitioner of parataxis than Joan Didion. "Miami" opens by juxtaposing two short lists of the possessions with which recently deposed presidents have fled Cuba. Didion does not use parataxis merely for effect, though effective it is at evoking both dislocation and intimacy -- dislocation because the austere use of coordinating conjunctions tends to leave the reader adrift in a haze of objects and social conventions whose relationships to one another and to the author are neither accessible nor transparent, and intimacy because of the presumption that they are (both accessible and transparent; in other words, that Didion and the reader are on the same page).

So, for example: "The rain that day had been blowing the bits of colored glass and mirror strung from the tree in the Malaga courtyard and splashing from the eaves overhanging our table and we had been talking in a general way about action of the Left and action of the Right and Carlos Luis had said that he had come to wonder if silence was not the only moral political response." You can almost hear the chills running down Hemingway's spine.

No, parataxis is not just a syntactic conceit but the logic by which Didion's pieces unfold. She does not seek to set us adrift; we are adrift. She just wants to make sure we don't forget that the horizon won't get any closer, no matter how fast we paddle.

Central to her project are three recurring devices: one is the dis-editing or disaggregation of a popular narrative so as to reveal all the material left on the cutting room floor; another is the identification of the social cues and codes from which the kind of narratives she takes apart are assembled; and the third is the use of quotation marks around otherwise unremarkable bits of dialogue to distance the reader from the tropes of everyday life so she (the reader) can begin to look at them critically.

Here is an example of all three: "That the [Miami] Herald should have run, on the 1985 anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, a story about Canadian and Italian tourists vacationing on what had been the invasion beaches...was, in this view, not just a minor historical irony, not just an arguably insensitive attempt to find a news peg for a twenty-four-year-old annual story, but a calculated affront to the Cuban community, 'a slap,' I was repeatedly told, 'in the face.'"

Syntactically innovative and lexically precise, her sentences may also be the best crafted of any I have ever read. (Except for L's, he wanted me to add. He also points out that this excerpt is not paratactic, which is true. It was selected to do different work in this post.)

Adding to the distance and alienation and also the intimacy is the fact that Didion never quotes herself, only other people. When she figures in her own scenes, she is always listening or taking notes or watching. The only voices we hear are those from which we are being critically distanced, and the author herself seems to reach us across a span of silence. No one, the reader is tempted to believe, has heard her voice but me.

i have now read all the words in "infinite jest"

but the term "finished" in no way applies to my relationship with the book.

talking about "infinite jest" while reading it

is like giving a weather report from inside a storm. 

all you can say is that right now it's pretty wet and more rain is falling...

DFW

I have fallen hard, again, for David Foster Wallace. In high school I was intrigued by Brief Interviews and Girl with the Curious and liked both but was never tempted to dip into the novels. In college I exploded through A Supposedly Fun Thing and have never doubted that it's one of the all-time great and wonderful works of creative non-fiction. And I've stumbled across some of the scattered essays from Consider the Lobster and elsewhere over the years.

But this summer I picked up again A.S.F.T. and the jolt of familiarity, recognition, intimacy was almost troublingly vivid. And so now I have started Infinite Jest and I have no qualms and my hands do not shake when I hold it and I do not sigh when I fit all of its thousand or so pages into my bag and I do not think it strange that I might need two bookmarks to proceed through the whole of it. Which I will do. Even if it's all I do this fall.

Because reading David Foster Wallace especially now this summer after so many years of not reading him and never reading his novels, it's like that person in your life, I think everyone has one and I may have several, that person who is there is no other way to say it just really the most brilliant person you know, who seems not to ever walk across a room but to be always propelled forward by the gust of an idea swelling their mind like a sail, but you've never really been so close because in spite of this brilliant mind there is also a lot of pain and it is very close to the underneath of their skin and you can see it there when the sun hits in a certain way, illuminating their veins like rail lines on a city map, and so maybe you see them, i mean really see them, only a few times a year. And when you do, you sit at a table and talk. They talk, mostly. You are so involved in what they're saying, your mind responds so eagerly, that it may be hours before you realize that you haven't actually spoken in hours, and then you forget again, and but then you think they are talking maybe a little too fast or maybe it's a little too loud and you do a mental check for which of your neighbors might be home and which of the ones who might be home might mind, and maybe you get up to double-lock the door or put on some music. And maybe when you come back you lean away a little at this point. Maybe you duck your head or stop making such furious eye contact. The force of what's being said is enough to shave a layer of shine off the table. For a moment you've lost the thread but when you have it again, it is brighter than before.

And then the sun comes up and you go to sleep.

Full Circle

A few weeks ago I saw David M*tchell read from his new book at a bookstore in the West Village. The book, reviewed extensively in pretty much every major literary publication currently on my coffee table, is about Dutch traders on the Japanese island of Dejima in the 1800s, the closest that the closed nation would allow foreigners to approach.

At the reading, he said many beautiful things. This is one of them:

Over the course of the novel, the main character, Jacob, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Orito. Their courtship includes impromptu vocabulary lessons in one another's tongues. "What does Jacob mean in Dutch?" "What do you call this flower?" Etc. At one point, Jacob asks Orito the Japanese word for persimmon -- "kaki," she tells him. They share one, in a luscious passage of flesh-bright prose.

Here Mitchell paused from his reading. "You know," he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I give readings in the Netherlands and people speak such good English there they can follow me without a problem. But when I got to that passage, I wanted to make sure it was clear, so I asked what the Dutch word for persimmon was. It's 'kaki.'"

Had his novel been written in the native language of its characters, Victorian-era Dutch, he would have known that already. But instead, this funny coincidence is in fact no coincidence at all: the word is a trace of the trade that he was writing about all along.

metaphor: from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear"

translate: from L. translatus "carried over," serving as pp. of transfere "to bring over, carry over," from trans + latus "borne, carried"

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

When we think about languages existing and persisting over time, we tend to focus on how they change -- new words being coined, others going stale, rules we no longer follow. The other day, a friend of a friend treated to me on a short disquisition on words that didn't make it into the new volume of the dictionary.

But this article by Frank Kermode in the New York Review of Books about a new translation of the Bible made me wonder about the opposite phenomenon. I think (and this is based on no actual information) that certain works of literature (the King James' Bible, Shakespeare plays, etc.) weigh like anchors, keeping English from drifting too far out to sea. The prevalence and currency of these texts maintains their legibility and their legibility maintains certain features of the English language.

Think of it as a cosmic struggle between Hamlet and Twitter over our souls.

And also...

How come an amnesiac is someone suffering from amnesia but an aphrodisiac is something inducing aphrodesia? 

What is with these suffixes??

Things I Am Wondering About

How come you can be heart-broken but not heart-warmed?

French Burqa Ban

I have been thinking about it and have decided that maybe when I first read the NY Times Op-Ed on why France wants to ban the wearing of burqas and niqabs in public, I judged it too harshly. After all, I forgot to consider the environmental perspective. Back in the old days, when fuel was cheap, France had the luxury of journeying across many oceans in order to subjugate people who were not French. These days, things are not so easy. The environmentally sensitive xenophobe must instead find ways of discriminating against others locally -- n'est-ce pas?

Elegy

"Because our conversations were few (he phoned me maybe 5 times in 22 years) I study his sentences the ones I remember as if I'd been asked to translate them."

--Anne Carson, Nox

Anne Carson's Nox -- an elegy and memorial for her brother, who passed away recently -- is a hybrid between a scrapbook and a translation, an elegantly folded exploration of how grief works its way through a psyche for which syntax is soulcraft. I don't want to write a full review of it here, especially after others have already done such a nice job: here and here.

But I can't not say something about the line quoted above because it is such a poignant way of describing both the need to savor the linguistic remains of someone with whom you can no longer speak and the need to comb fine the surface of a conversation, a phrase, a word, to scrape free any last residue of the mind that bore it.

A reminder that sometimes language is not the only impediment to understanding.

Borderline

This is about translation.

I want to expand this into a full essay, but right now I only have time to get the bare idea out; forgive me if you've heard it before.

One of the things that interests me most about Language writ large is the way that it is at once immensely personal -- a tool for self-expression, for creativity, for art, a vehicle for inside jokes and catch phrases and dialect -- and demonstrably external -- mutually intelligible by all other speakers, objectively definable, exchangeable, recognizable, current. Language has the fluidity of other types of currency in that any two speakers can exchange words with one another, but without the faceless chill of actual currency. Perhaps language represents some sort of ultimate or ideal barter system.

This subjective/objective or internal/external dichotomy is, I think, entirely compelling and what makes language such a rich and fascinating object of study.

In my endless search to find different ways of characterizing the process of translation, I have found yet another: translation requires teasing apart the personal language of the author from the language spoken by his or her community. The goal of the translator is to change the bits that belong to the language into the new language but to leave the author's trace intact. So, if you were translating Hamlet into Icelandic, you would want to change all the English into Icelandic but you wouldn't want to change the parts that are Shakespeare.

That paragraph probably makes it sound like I'm on drugs. Really, I think this is a stunning insight. But it is hard to express without an example, which I am not going to provide right now. Feel free to express your befuddlement in the comments.

I will say that the essay I want to write will be about borders, and also about heights. How scary it is to be on the border of something, the dizziness, the trepidation. The difficulty of balancing yourself on that sort of edge. And the exhilaration of keeping your balance from word to word, page to page, day to day.

What do you do with the Visual Thesaurus? No, really. What do you do with it?

When I first stumbled upon the Visual Thesaurus, I was so engrossed that I watched the whole demo -- a flower of synonyms bloomed onscreen, each prose petal linked with a colorful filament indicating hyponyms, hypernyms -- basically all the -nyms you could ever want were on display. I watched, mesmerized, as the words shifted around each other, as if in a cool garden breeze.

And then, slightly dazed from the loveliness of the display, I opened a new tab, went to www.thesaurus.com and started looking through lists of words to actually find the one I wanted.

Because, as beautiful as the Visual Thesaurus is, it does not seem, to me, to serve the actual purpose of a thesaurus, which is to help a lowly mortal like myself make the best use of the absolutely astronomical number of words available to an English speaker. Yes, English has a staggering number of words. It is very hard to remember all of them at once and very easy to fall back on the ones you use most often. But one component of good writing is an innovative and rigorous application of our expansive vocabulary, and to that end, I find combing through lists of synonyms to be quite helpful.

The Visual Thesaurus sticks it to traditional thesauri for the long lists I rely on, claiming that by representing the exact relationships between words in a spatial format this tool is more intuitive and thus more useful than some boring list (I mean, when were lists invented, anyway -- the stone age?). And that by somehow recreating the word maps we have in our brains, it will improve the process of...well, the process of what? I use a thesaurus to find the word best suited to my needs. But is that what the Visual Thesaurus is intended to help do? Or does it have another aim in mind? In truth, I'm not sure.

Ultimately, I think this tool is constrained by its design. By eschewing lists in favor of clouds, the number of words that fit on the screen is severely limited. So instead of getting 50 synonyms, you only get 15. And the relationship information doesn't make up for having fewer choices. I don't need a tool to go out of its way to tell me that an individual is a type of witness. That information is already in my brain. I appreciate that the tool is trying to think like me: it's actually kind of flattering. But I don't see the purpose -- unless the tool can think so much like me that it is actually going to write my essay, I would rather it do things that my brain can't do, like store long lists of words!

Is this technology that is still searching for a purpose? Are there other ways of using a thesaurus that I am ignoring? Or is this an example of form winning out over function, a dazzling design that does not get any job done? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

Why Law School is Stressful

There are of course many reasons that law school is stressful: it's difficult; it's competitive; it's expensive. But what I find most stressful -- and most disheartening -- is the way it fuels ritual self-deprecation. Some days I am reminded of discussions that, as a woman, I learned to have in my teens where you go around the table and each woman castigates herself for having eaten a cupcake or failing to do crunches or daring to have hips. I used to speculate about the purpose of this public self-shaming: it seemed like a way of humanizing yourself, offering a piece of yourself to the group, aggressively baring your flaws.

But what happens in law school is, I think, a little different. The truth is that not since high school have I been part of a community that polices itself so zealously. In high school, the monitoring was social: confidants, crushes, companions. Now, it is academic. And it's not just about keeping other people in line but about making sure that you measure up. Thus, again and again I watch one person's sincere question provoke anxiety in someone else: "Why didn't I think of that? I must be hopelessly off-track."

In general, I think that homogenous communities are prone to this kind of searing pressure to conform. And law schools, like undergraduate campuses, are by nature homogenous, or at least homogenizing -- not because of the background of the students, not because of their interests or talents, but because of their goals, fears, and desires. It doesn't matter where you're from or what you read for fun or what challenges you have faced: at the end of the semester, we're all trying to pass the same final and that pressure can squeeze the individuality right out of you. That's why I think that the working world -- where you tend to find age diversity (one of the most important and often overlooked kinds of diversity) -- felt like such a relief to me after college (at least in some ways): in the topsy-turvy dimension outside school, people do all KINDS of crazy things, in any which order, and it's rare for everyone you know to be panicking at the same time, for the same reason.

It just makes me sad to see some of the very brightest people I know criticize themselves on a daily basis for doing something other than reading Examples & Explanations 12 hours a day. And this is my rant about it.

Procrastinating

Richard Betts, paraphrased in a New Yorker piece about wartime intelligence, says that there is an inverse relationship between the accuracy and significance of information. In other words (and only in some situations), the more precisely we know something, the less sure we are of its value to us. Or maybe, the only things we know for sure are those things that don't really matter. The more certain we are, the less we should care.

It seems counterintuitive and that's probably why I find it so appealing and want to say that it's ALWAYS true. That might be an overstatement.

But I'm sure this applies outside the specific scenario of spying. And once I'm done studying for Con Law, I will try to figure out when...

Semi-colon

I decided recently that if I ever get a tattoo, it will be a semi-colon. It is my most favorite and expressive punctuation mark. It suggests two thoughts are connected without up and telling you how they are connected, forcing you to suss out the relationship for yourself. It is subtle and pleasing to the eye, the delicious fusion of a comma and a colon. What more could you want?

I am not the only one who feels this way. French people totally agree, as manifested by their rampant and glorious over-usage of the semi-colon. It turns out that there is a reason for this. In her brutal review of the new Simone de Beauvoir translation, Toril Moi points out that:

French and English differ significantly in their tolerance of relatively vague connections between sentence elements. The translation theorist Jacqueline Guillemin-Flescher has shown that English requires more explicit, precise and concrete connections between clauses and sentences than French and, conversely, that French accepts looser syntactical relations. In other words, if French syntax is imported directly into English, sentences that work in French may come across as rambling or incoherent in English.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

Yes! This is indeed the case. French sentences are often conglomerations of many clauses that could stand on their own, but are instead stitched together with commas and semi-colons. In French, this seems elegant, suggestive, flirtatious. In English, this seems pretentious, misguided, and distracting.

Sadly, I found an example of this in a translation of one of my favorite French authors, and I am trying to decide how I feel about it. Is the translation merely offering the respect due the original? Rendering the delicacy and decadence of the prose in another language? Or is it weirdly attached to empty syntactic structures that weigh the English down instead of dressing it up?

The example I would offer involves commas. The original line is: "Je n'etais pas encore tombe tout a fait, c'etait mon premier poste, j'avais vingt ans." (Note: the accents are missing. I am not going to figure out the formatting nightmare that is inserting accents on blogger right now.)

Translated as: "I hadn't fallen yet, not exactly, it was my first post, I was twenty."

HMM. Thoughts?

Crim Law 101

My first-year criminal law course is not quite what I expected. Instead of Law & Order, it's maybe more like...Deadwood. All the stuff that everyone was excited about -- the right to an attorney, Miranda, unreasonable search & seizure, habeas, the 5th Amendment -- all the good stuff that lends that particular glint to Sam Waterston's eye is Criminal Procedure.

Crim (as opposed to Crim Pro) is more like, how was larceny defined under the common law? Which, OK, sounds a little dry. But it has its moments.

Like the definition of 2nd-degree murder, which in many places includes reckless murder -- when you kill someone in a way that isn't quite intentional but is so deeply thoughtless it means you are probably a zombie. The language that many states use is "recklessness manifesting an extreme indifference to human life and an abandoned & malignant heart."

Abandoned & malignant -- isn't that evocative? It's like you left your heart on the bus one day and it got dumped at the terminal and then it just sat there, growing increasingly enraged, until one day it struck out on its own to do evil. Or like your heart turned to ash sitting right inside you. I think I have seen this happen to items that get left in the fridge...I'm pretty sure that we have some abandoned & malignant pesto from L's birthday that is trying to climb out of its bowl...

Categories & Cooking

From last week's New Yorker article about a Turkish chef --

"His monograph on keskek -- defined in the dictionary as "a dish made by slowly boiling well-beaten wheat, together with meat" -- is less about boiled wheat than about a process unfolding over a certain geography. Musa has identified twenty-four regional names for keskek, which may be eaten at funerals or weddings, on New Year's, Muhammad's birthday, Easter, or Ramadan; in the Turkish bath, during rain prayers, or in honor of special guests. In some villages, keskek is cooked at home and eaten with walnuts; in others, villagers bring their keskek to a communal oven that is operated only seven days a year. Keskek is sometimes cooked in vats with prickle juice, or, like rice, with chickpeas and cumin. 'There are dishes without wheat that are still called keskek,' Musa writes. He later told mea bout a kind of dessert keskek, made with dried fruit instead of meat. The facts of the dish, resisting definition, turn out to be almost incidental. What really interests Musa about keskek is that it embodies a living series of social functions."

Apart from delicious, this passage is also intriguing, because of what it says about categories. My brain is too addled from studying right now to fully articulate this -- but it has to do with a sort of diversion or misdirection. You think you know what the common elements are in a dish -- the ingredients. But you're wrong. The dish is a practice, a habit, an activity. We are what we eat, and what we eat is what we do...

That's about as far as I can take this right now, but I welcome other thoughts and comments.

Living as I do in the palace of the Victorian novel, I have started to see narratives everywhere. For example, last night the three volumes of Paul Ricoeur's "Time and Narrative" arrived in the mail. The first two were translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer -- the third by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. There you have it: some event, a marriage or a divorce, slipped in between Volume 2 & Volume 3. I don't know what exactly happened, but that small change speaks volumes.

Another gloss on "gloss"

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer is a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with executive power. 343 U.S. 579 (1952). You may know it from such recent scandals as John Y*o failing to cite it in his infamous memo.

We just read it in class, and one of the concurring opinions, by Justice Jackson, has some really fascinating language about how life adds meaning to words:

“Deeply embedded traditional ways of conducting government cannot supplant the Constitution or legislation, but they give meaning to the words of a text or supply them. It is an inadmissibly narrow conception of American constitutional law to confine it to the words of the Constitution and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon them. In short, a systematic, unbroken executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned, engaged in by Presidents who have also sworn to uphold the Constitution…may be treated as a gloss on ‘executive Power.’”

This is a fascinating and fairly controversial argument -- that over time, the executive may gain power through a mechanism almost like adverse possession, by exercising that power, so long as Congress does not affirmatively tell him or her to stop.

A textualist or formalist would be disturbed by the idea that present practices or norms could somehow alter our interpretation of the Constitution's words.

This is why Constitutional law is so thrilling -- it's a domain where the stakes of reading and interpretation are tremendously high and words like "gloss" can cause a whole big fight...

Translation Project

I started a new translation project yesterday. I won't tell you what it is and I won't post it here, not to be coy, but because I'm not sure what the rules about such things are (law school has infected my mind already)...I will tell you that my goal is to finish the first chapter by the end of the summer, and then stay up really late one night and make a huge mistake by sending it to the publisher/author as a gift or offering and hope they don't sue and/or laugh at me. I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meantime, I wanted to talk about process. So far, I have a first draft of the first section of the first chapter. The first draft is fairly literal, taking into account the word order in the original and the use of prepositions and relative pronouns and the length of sentences and paragraphs. Once the first draft is done, I am going to start a second draft in a new document. The goal of the second draft will be to refine the first draft so it sounds more or less like standard English, and the only remaining departures from familiar idiom are those being intentionally deployed for effect. The third draft, another new document, will tackle the problem of recreating the feel of the original text in English. Successive drafts will follow, as needed, until the summer is over or I am sick of working on it.

As I was mapping out this plan, it occurred to me that the ideal translation -- that mythical beast with iridescent wings and stained glass eyes who flits through our reading minds -- would be a composite of all these drafts, a sort of palimpsest. If I could write on tracing paper and place each revision over the one preceding it, starting with the French original at the very bottom, I could render visible the layers of denotation and connotation composing each phrase. The complexity of meaning would be manifest. And of course, the whole would be totally illegible.

Here's another way of thinking about this -- dictionary.com offers the following definitions for "gloss":

1. A surface shininess or luster

2. A brief explanatory note or translation of a difficult or technical expression usually inserted in the margin or between lines of a text or manuscript

2a. A collection of such notes; a glossary

3. An extensive commentary, often accompanying a text or publication

4. A purposefully misleading interpretation or explanation

5. To give a specious interpretation of; explain away

Moving from literal to figurative meanings, we see a gloss is a decorative layer that adds shine; an artificial coating that conceals fault; a descriptive layer that elucidates meaning; a deceptive layer that conceals meaning by explaining away a problem; or a deceptive layer that misrepresents meaning.

This word evokes our desire for a transparent commentary (or translation) that would act as a lens we could look through to see a text more clearly. But it also betrays our deep mistrust of any screen inserted between reader and text, no matter how alluring or seemingly clear.

I want to write on onion-skin, I want to write a pathway to the center of the text that a reader could walk with her eyes open. But in the end, there will be just one version in black letters on plain white paper and it will have to stand on its own.

Question

Why does "discernible" mean something that can be discerned (the object of discernment) but "sensible" means something that can sense (the subject of sensing)?

Will anyone ever figure this crazy language out?

An Argument for Guilt

When taken in moderation, anxiety can be a productive emotion. Pick the motivational metaphor that appeals most -- it could be a type of fire, or fuel, or motor. When everything else is in balance, a small dose of anxiety gets me up early in the morning, helps me focus in class and on tests, keeps me going through long afternoons of reading, reminds me to study my music, and provides a backdrop against which the relief of slipping into the pool or singing an open fifth in a wood-panelled room is all the more pronounced.

I don't mean to advocate anxiety, and certainly not in its more pathological forms -- all I mean is that, if everything else is in balance, anxiety is not merely wasted energy, but is a sort of creative force in its own right.

But what about guilt?

I recently failed to participate in an event -- a protest -- that I felt very strongly about and later wished I had been a part of. The more I sought to justify (to myself) the reasons I had flaked out, the more ornate my reasoning became, until finally I was captivated by the extent to which my mind would go to protect me from the discomfort of my remorse. I felt frankly (and unexpectedly) like an oyster (which has never happened to me before), diligently coating a tiny displeasing grain until I had a smooth-shelled jewel, an opal drop of rationalization.

Of course, one could dispute the value of such a trinket -- are excuses, no matter how intricate, worth anything? Are they anything more than diversions at best? I don't have an answer. I was just astonished to find, at the heart of an emotion I had long viewed as entirely dispensable, a generative spark.

I heart the federalists

How about that James Madison! What a writer, huh?

Full disclosure: I haven't read the Federalist Papers before, so taking Constitutional Law this semester promises to be a MAJOR thrill from start to finish.

An initial taste of mind-destroying eloquence: "As far as laws are necessary to mark with precision the duties of those who are to obey them, and to take from those who are to administer them a discretion which might be abused, their number is the price of liberty."

BAM. Could you write a more perfect sentence about the balance between regulation and individual liberty?? I dare you.

On Being Philip Larkin

Does anyone know what happened to Philip Larkin in his mid-twenties to sour him to such an extent on the age-bracket? His poem "On Being Twenty-Six" uses both "putrescently" (an adverb so obscure that blogspot declines to recognize it) and "putrid." I remember the moment when I realized, with a sensation of falling swiftly, that I could no longer say I had "just graduated" from college. The very young are perhaps always shocked by the notion that they may one day become merely...young.

But I don't know yet what to make of this poem...my outlook is certainly not so glum as his and I can't imagine that a mere age -- and a pretty decent age at that -- could bring on such a flood of desolate imagery.

Any Larkin experts want to weigh in with biographical or textual insights?