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...