Posts tagged with prose
-
![The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
[[MORE]]
It was Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, not Yeats’ poem, that has been my totem throughout my 20s, because she has that gift that all great writers do of hitting on universal truths by admitting very personal ones. “One of the mixed blessings of being 20 and 21 and even 23 is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before,” she writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay about her time in New York in her 20s.
Reading that sentence for the first time at 21 and knowing, at some level, that she was right, was not nearly as comforting as realizing that there was an antidote to feeling young and confused — and that antidote was narrative. As Didion writes in another equally brilliant collection, The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.
I don’t recall why I first picked it up, but I can still conjure up the musty smell of the paperback I borrowed from the University College London library and the jarring contrast of being engrossed in Didion’s 1950s New York during a train ride between London and Manchester.
Mostly, I remember how homesick I felt reading Didion’s take on the American dream at a time in my life when, living far away from home for the first time, I was finally figuring out my own national identity. The irony of this feeling is that Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t what you would call a “feel-good” read. Most of the essays are set in California in the 60s, some of them are reportage on Haight-Ashbury hippies and Howard Hughes, and others are personal reflections on Didion’s life in exile from a California that “resembles Eden,” where “it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished.”
Throughout the book, Didion is constantly shuttling between the coasts, back and forth from this promised land. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” in which Didion reports on a woman who murders her husband, she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” California stands in for the American dream: Its streets are always paved with gold, but its promise is never attainable. Didion’s writing — and her whole concept of California — nonetheless operates on the premise that all things are possible, because they have to be:
California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.
But Didion’s California (and New York, for that matter) is a promise that never delivers, which she nonetheless can’t seem to give it up. She admits, “Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.” I understood that differently upon first reading it in England — during a semester abroad in which all time was suspended for me and all post-graduate futures infinitely possible — than I do during my fourth year of racking up frequent flier miles on the US Airways shuttle between DC and Boston.
It’s a romantic point of view to hold when you come from a place that makes you feel exiled for living outside it, and in that sense my hometown of Boston and Didion’s Sacramento have much in common.
Mostly, I keep reading and rereading these essays because Joan Didion is a writer’s writer. In the spirit of her declaration in “Goodbye to All That,” I have to imagine that there are many other twentysomething writers out there with dog-eared copies of this book, but since I haven’t met them yet, I continued to think I was the only one for years after I discovered her. More recently, I have taken to recommending her to anyone whose literary taste I’m trying to judge. I lent a friend my copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem once with the earnest warning, “If you don’t read this, we can’t be friends,” and during the months while I waited for him to return it, I sometimes worried that I would have to cut him off.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem isn’t just a collection for hopeful writers or even for people who are young and unmoored. It’s for all people who have lost their sense of place or sense of time or sense of self. It’s for “the quiet ones” that people always tell you to beware. Didion is all of these things, but especially the last:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
It’s easy to forget that line in the preface once the essays about Charles Manson and John Wayne give way to more personal ones about Didion’s relationship with her hometown and her grapples with self-esteem. It’s easy to think instead that the stories she tells of her struggles with depression are unvarnished, but at some point you have to ask: Why is this self-proclaimed shy, aloof reporter spilling so many of her secrets?
Her power to mythologize is so great that it must extend even to the stories she tells of her own life. Early in “Goodbye to All That,” Didion writes, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” But by writing years later, she already knows the ending; she alone controls the narrative. In life, sure, it’s easy to concede that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” but writing is different from life, and the contrast between the two in Slouching Towards Bethlehem makes the former a much more appealing occupation.
— Kara Hadge](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d116063cbe56c089cf4fc7d577efe4fd/tumblr_mklejntVhV1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Joan Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series from The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). This is the final installment of Tumblr Storyboard’s version, but you can still submit to The Rumpus for publication! Thanks for reading.
I came across a Facebook post recently in which someone offered W.B. Yeats’ poem “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as encouragement for a peer going through a quarter-life crisis. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” Yeats writes. It’s a feeling everyone has at some point, but for a twentysomething in the midst of an identity crisis, it sounded especially appropriate.
Joan Didion must have felt the same way when she chose the poem as an epigraph for her essay collection of the same name.
View post 297 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
[[MORE]]
I was in eighth grade and my favorite aunt and uncle were moving to a new home. They were young — my aunt Patty is 18 years younger than my father, only eleven years older than I am, and she was everything that I thought was good and exciting in this world. She introduced me to Bon Jovi, and her boyfriend, who would later become my favorite uncle Shawn, had hair as long as hers. He played the drums and loved KISS, and though I never really liked KISS, I started playing the drums because of him. What made them so magnetic, though, was that they took me seriously, always. They took me seriously enough that when they were moving, Shawn opened up his boxes of college textbooks and pulled out a few he thought I would like. One was Thucydides. I don’t remember the others, but I remember that I was the kind of young person an adult (a really groovy adult) thought would like this book. Which is to say I was a grandiose, pretentious little shit. My one defense, perhaps, was that I did actually read the Impressive Books I carried around. If I was pretentious, at least I tried to be an authentic kind of pretentious. I don’t know that I read them well, but read them I did — except Thucydides.
Even at the height of my Homer fanaticism, I don’t remember even opening this book, or even looking at the table of contents. That was 17 years ago.Three degrees. Four moves to four different states. In all of that time, I’ve done nothing more with Thucydides than shelve and unshelve it, box and unbox. Better, more well-loved books have been given away in all of those moves. It’s not even that it has sentimental value — Shawn likely doesn’t even remember that I have it. I don’t think we ever had a conversation about anything approaching the topic, either. I’ve thrown away their wedding card (and everyone else’s). Why keep this book?
The only answer I can think of is that this book was a gauntlet. It’s not that anyone threw it at my feet in challenge, but there it was, the unread reminder, until this past summer.
I was having a conversation on Twitter with a person who I have never actually met, but whose writing I admire and who I like all out of proportion to how much we actually know each other (basically not at all). He brought up The Peloponnesian Waras a personal favorite. All day every day I see people online praising and recommending books, and sometimes I read them but more often I don’t. I’m not sure what about this conversation actually made me pick up Thucydides, but I did. What I found was a strange and most welcome kind of company. It isn’t that Thucydides’ writing (albeit in translation) had anything in common with my own, but (odd as it seems) he sounds like people I know. The sentences are dry and acerbic and often palpably exasperated. In commenting on the Trojan War, Thucydides writes,
[T]here is no reason why we should not believe that the Trojan expedition was the greatest that had ever taken place. It is equally true that it was not on the scale of what is done in modern warfare. It is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer’s figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated.
Fucking poets (and so say many of us, particularly as we understand that, for Thucydides, the “poet” was anyone involved in the creation of story — whether it was song or play or fireside tale). I am reminded of the person who recommended the book to me, whose incredibly low threshold for bullshit is something I frankly envy. I am reminded of my graduate school friend Patrick, who was cynical, impatient, and incredibly brusque, and also one of the most intelligent, most secretly kind people I’ve ever met.
I love this book for what feel like the wrong reasons. I am used to loving books for their story or their language or the very construction of their sentences — something that says content in one way or another. But I have to admit to only the most passing interest in the matter of the Peloponnesian War. The pretentious eighth grader in me is gratified to know a bit more about it, to say “look at this knowledge I now have,” but the rest of me is often bored by the minutiae of negotiations as Thucydides relates them, and relate them he does. The book contains set speeches, the terms of treaties — as one expects a solid history to do. But there’s also a lot of commentary on the process, on the state of humanity, and Thucydides asks the same questions we are still asking. Thucydides shakes the same crotchety finger I shake at my composition students:
In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way — even when these stories concern their own native countries … Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
And yet, Thucydides is no particularly objective recorder. In discussing his methods for relaying those speeches, he writes,
I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.
Thucydides faces the creative nonfiction writer’s dilemma but demonstrates not the slightest bit of doubt in approaching it. He has found his solution to his own satisfaction, and he pushes on, recreating long verbal missives from one camp to another, from one tyrant to the next. It is impossible to read forward with complete academic confidence, then — he confesses to taking liberties not three paragraphs beyond the imprecation to never take anything at face value. But he admits to the taking of liberties, and the prose is so emphatic, so certain. I seldom feel so convinced by myself. I wedge my fingertips between the pages and believe in osmosis.
The translator’s note in my edition, written by Rex Warner, begins, “It is difficult, pleasurable, and bold to attempt to translate Thucydides into English.” Warner’s note explores the doubt that underwrites translation as a whole, the knowledge that something will inevitably be lost in the process, but also that there is so much to be gained from the task. Warner nearly apologizes for his work, but he seems unable to keep himself from attempting the challenge of Thucydides. I like to believe that that’s what my uncle Shawn was thinking when he gave such a book to an adolescent: in reading it well before I was of an age or an experience to understand more than simply the words and events, something would inevitably be lost, if I ever even read it. Reading Thucydides would be difficult, but maybe I would feel bold in doing so, and either in the content or the undertaking, I might find something pleasurable.
I didn’t read it then, and having read it now, I don’t feel bold. The reading was difficult — I couldn’t let my attention lapse for a sentence or two, couldn’t skim if I wanted to know the fullness of the events. I did lapse, though. I did skim. Ultimately, I didn’t care as much as I wanted to about the debate at Camarina. But in Thucydides’s tone, in his interrogation of uncertain facts and his assertion of his own reconstructions, in the way the act of reading re-tied me to people — no matter how little-known or now-distant — there was familiarity and connection, and I can think of no greater pleasure.
— Holly M. Wendt](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8f58b77a94cf012daa9fd5791df4a596/tumblr_mjb78zK0d21rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: History of the Peloponnesian War
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.
View post 3,161 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to place the collection in the horror genre, if only to align it with my own desires and my love affair with horror movies. But the book certainly contains enough blood, guts, and magic to earn a place there.
[[MORE]]
The stories are set in a world twisted by the end of days, a skewed place filled with darkness, terror, and danger. Instead of focusing on the cataclysm of the world, the book turns our attention to stories narrated by 26 different fathers struggling to raise children and create families against the backdrop of a doomed planet amidst environmental chaos. The setting gives way to imperfect fathers and kids that are born inhuman, some physically — sons born covered in fur, daughters that resemble sirens — some otherwise. The combination unglues the modern sense of parental love and authority and shows that there really is no set paradigm for raising a family.
The book is molded by Matt Bell’s writing, which is at once sad, beautiful, darkly funny, and refreshing. Bell is so steady and deliberate in the physicality of his prose that I found myself rereading passages aloud multiple times to feel the weight of each word. There is purpose and intent behind the brittle fur, the bones poking through skin, the thick clots of blood and flesh, the tears staining parents’ faces. His deeply unsettling characters feel real and sympathetic. The setting, despite its supernatural tendencies, feels wholly natural.
Parenthood is in the foreground of the blood, the dirt-borne daughters, the flesh-hungry children. The book asks questions that feel oddly universal: How do you survive and take care of your children when the world is undergoing such rapid change and chaos? How do you maintain traditional familial roles when the children you see as flawed are merely an evolving present tense, a natural part of a future that you can’t stop? What makes a “good father”?
I’ve been asking myself similar questions about fatherhood, not because I plan to be a father soon but because of how I see my father now. I see the age, the wrinkles, the years in which he would never know me, and his attempts to know me now when it feels too late. Our relationship is complicated at best. His time away from home when I was young and his rigid Korean traditions that, at times, border on xenophobia have kept him at a constant distance. Even in my adulthood, I have this inherent feeling that I will never quite match up to his expectations, and I ask myself why I need to.
I remember in kindergarten, my school had a celebration for Father’s Day. You bring your father to school — when really he’s the one bringing you — and they have a big party with food and activities. They did the same for mothers on Mother’s Day. I remember a picture of my mother and me painting a spin art piece. A sheet of stiff cardstock spinning like a record. My mother and I squeezing bits of paint onto it. I wanted so many colors until they all mixed into a muddy brown with orange and red streaks. My father and I never made it, but I remember the intention, the want for it.
We showered together that day. I think I said something or did something or was a bad son, enough to annoy him. “If you don’t want to go, we don’t have to go,” he said in the shower. He turned off the water. He dried off. He left the bathroom and turned off the light. I sat in the tub, cold. I think I cried, but I couldn’t tell with the water still on me, dripping from my hair. I knew when I stepped out that I would have to confront … something, that something bad would happen, so I stayed in the tub. I think I sat there for half an hour, naked and shaking. I remember the crack on the hinged side of the door closest to me, the white light streaming in on the other. I don’t remember what happened next. I don’t know what my father said. I know he didn’t come back for me. I know there are no pictures or spin art. I stood and trembled and dried off.
My favorite story in Cataclysm Baby is “Justina, Justine, Justise.” A man is put to trial for his adulterous crimes by his three blind daughters. They amputate his thumb, then his hand. He seeks consolation from the one daughter who defended him. “She meets my apologies with a slap, squirms free. She says, Don’t think I’m still daddy’s little girl. She says, I only defended you because no one else would. She says, In justice, we are divided, but in punishment, we are one.”
I understand their judgment, not from the perspective of the unfaithful father, but as one of the daughters, as the persecutor, the judge, the jury. I think about kindergarten and the years that followed when my father was a distant, intimidating figure, but I sympathize with the father in the story — in all the stories, really — and the pain he endures. I know the looks I give my father, the silent criticisms, the hurt he feels, and the life he missed in order to support his family. As I write this, I realize that I’m not as angry at my father as I’d thought. I am disappointed and scared of the person I’ve become and the good son I never truly was, and I am sad for the father I never truly knew. I don’t know if we will have a happy end, but Cataclysm Baby gives me hope that, even in the midst of apocalypse, there is still time to forgive, embrace, and build up from the dirt.
— Alvin Park](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d194d756c523ec2259439222b366f2ed/tumblr_mixxmpYWUN1rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Cataclysm Baby
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
Cataclysm Baby, a short story collection by Matt Bell, explores fatherhood under the guise of a book of baby names. The innocent abecedary form belies the book’s dark contents. I don’t think it would be inappropriate to place the collection in the horror genre, if only to align it with my own desires and my love affair with horror movies. But the book certainly contains enough blood, guts, and magic to earn a place there.
View post 4,281 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death — and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face — now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof. I dream of houses. I dream of owning a home, post-Great Recession, and despite the weight of federal student loans on my back. I am frequently visited by visions of curtains that open up to reveal a cold sunlight in the morning, of a cubbyhole library, perhaps in the attic, and of backyards that lend themselves to Slip ‘n Slides and crisp autumnal leaf piles. I would dream of brownstones, except I’m in the wrong tax bracket. Crippling pragmatism happens sometimes.
[[MORE]]
Occasionally, after these fantasies, I return to Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, originally published in 1959 by Random House. As with many books, my allegiances to certain characters evolve over time and with age. As a teenager, Beneatha Younger from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was my afro-haired spirit animal, always being smacked down (literally) by the elders in her life for her spunk and willingness to redefine her place as a black woman in America and in her family, always questioning and never satisfied. Just before I turned 30, and after a couple of failed relationships with men who had ill-defined or nonexistent ambitions, my allegiances turned to Beneatha’s sister-in-law, Ruth Younger. Ruth, who did so much and asked for so little, who faced economic realities that caused her to consider an abortion while her husband was waxing poetic about liquor stores.
In Brown Girl, Brownstones, which I read two years ago, I started out heavily involved with and invested in the protagonist, Selina Boyce — a second generation Bajan-American living in Brooklyn — and have lately embraced Selina’s mother, Silla, who is similar to my own mother and her American dream-centered ambitions. A South Side Chicago girl (Chatham to be precise) with college-educated parents, my mother gave directives to her female offspring that were very clear: get good grades, do a stint in Jack and Jill, go to college, avoid out-of-wedlock births, procure a good job and, perhaps later, a husband and children. In that exact order.
Selina is given similar instructions from her mother, who dreams of owning a Brooklyn brownstone: join the Barbadian church group, get good grades, become a doctor, meet an “acceptable” guy — a member of the community — and buy a brownstone. In that exact order. Though the story focuses on Selina’s coming of age in terms of her ethnicity, class, and sexuality (it is no accident that subsequent editions of the book were published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York), it is Silla’s dreams of owning a brownstone that haunt me.
This is not to say that Selina’s struggle is any less compelling. Her teenage rebellion, culminating in a dramatic outburst intent on embarrassing her mother, struck a note in me, as I pulled a similarly childish stunt during a Jack and Jill conference while in high school. How clever I thought I was, railing against bougie pretensions in that petulant teenage pitch (you know the one). Yet in my thirties, I find myself comparing my life to my mother’s at this same age, understanding what she wanted of me and desiring it on my own. Career. Husband. Children. House. In that order. A yard built for raising a family and upon one can look out on from behind the aforementioned curtains, watching the world go by.
Silla is portrayed as cruel and oppressive, unyielding. Her children fear her; her husband Deighton spites her. “For always the mother’s voice was a net flung wide, ensnaring all within its reach,” Marshall writes. Through Selina’s eyes, Silla is like a chapter from the Book of Ruth, Hansberry edition, without the empathy. Yet, as a 30-something woman, I can understand how she might have turned so bitter, so angry, raising three children in poverty while her husband pursued whims like being a trumpet player, an accountant, a radio repairman, or a car mechanic with the unrealistic fervor reserved for buying lotto tickets, and leaving Silla to be the main financial contributor. She earns her family’s money as a domestic, dealing with subtle and aggressive racism all day long while working on her knees. Her desire to own four walls and a roof are simple in comparison. The brutal way Silla and Deighton wreck each other midway through the book, I see years later, as a commentary on how easily the American dream and capitalism can corrupt even the most earnest desires.
Reading the contrasts between Selina and Silla reminds me of a stretch of time in my twenties. It’s a period in which you feel smugly certain that your life is vastly different from your mother’s. You don’t imagine that your mother fell in love with inappropriate men and had sex just because she liked a guy’s dimples. You don’t imagine that your mom wanted to take off and live in another city to live a grand adventure, or explored bohemian scenes, or lived selfishly, or did only things to please herself — sleeping until noon, smoking, or leaving work early. So you do those things with gusto and abandon, but before you know it, you are speaking to a child in the same way your mother spoke to you, or giving your boss the same look your mom gave you when she knew you were lying.
At a critical point in Brown Girl, Brownstones, Selina makes peace with the ways she is like her mother, in a quietly devastating way.
“Everybody used to call me Deighton’s Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I’m truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that’s what I want. I want it!”
Silla’s pained eyes searched her adamant face, and after a long time a wistfulness softened her mouth. It was as if she somehow glimpsed in Selina the girl she had always been.
The summer I read this book, I made a similar peace with my mother. I began calling and Skyping home more, trying to bridge a physical distance of more than 900 miles. On holidays, we’re hugging more, and listening. I’ve inherited her voice and wry mannerisms. I’ve fulfilled some of both of our desires, but I understand more about her extremely rich experiences. I imagine that a Brown Girl, Brownstones sequel would show Selina, back in Brooklyn after her excursion to Barbados, shaking her head knowingly at a young, Angela Davis-crowned version of herself. She would probably tell her to mind the bohemians and beware of men with idle hearts and hands. The daughter will pursue her own dreams, evolving over time, just as her mother once also did.
— Stacie Williams](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8eab767f8ceee6570f7e165582a3b8e8/tumblr_mila5fzvzp1rrpm57o1_r2_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones
The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.
My dreams, for so long unrestrained by land, air, or even death — and frequently including scenes of me tumbling through the air on glossy black feathered wings or jumping into an abyss with a smile on my face — now generally take place in a building with four walls and a roof. I dream of houses. I dream of owning a home, post-Great Recession, and despite the weight of federal student loans on my back. I am frequently visited by visions of curtains that open up to reveal a cold sunlight in the morning, of a cubbyhole library, perhaps in the attic, and of backyards that lend themselves to Slip ‘n Slides and crisp autumnal leaf piles. I would dream of brownstones, except I’m in the wrong tax bracket. Crippling pragmatism happens sometimes.
View post 1,459 notes -
![Language Is a Virus: How Loanwords Move the World’s Tongues
There are an estimated 6,700 to 6,900 languages in the world today, and they drift through the air like a meteorological echo — Hello! Hallo! Allô! — a roll of thunder or a set of bird calls off in the corner of the ear and the eye. And accompanying every tongue are loanwords, or, rather, lehnwerts, the tin-eared telephone line tossed from house to house, the improvised bridge of a tree knocked across a river’s expanse, or, more prosaically, words one “borrows” from one language into another. Loanwords explain how and why English speakers can say things like Frankfurter, pretzel, hinterland, dreck, or kaput without their conversational co-conspirator batting an eye.
[[MORE]]
Loanwords imply a certain baseline of connectivity. Though it’s hard to imagine one unified language, a transnational tongue in which all the work is finished and everything is “just so,” it’s equally difficult to imagine a language perfectly shattered. To weave between the two means not only wandering into a news kiosk with newspapers from all over the world — as I’m currently doing in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts — but enlisting the Tumblr community, too, whether they’re chronicling “Polyglot Problems” —
— or whether they’re just an average citizen, like Cheila Sousa — a student in Portugal who had caught a cold, and — in her words — “now wears big sweaters, scarfs, and tissues all the time.”
As for linguistic activity already happening, you can see Mehreen Kasana translate “Haters gonna hate” into Urdu as “Nafrat karne walay nafrat karain ge.” You can watch one blogger try to say “Good night” in Khmer — the language of Cambodia — by saying “Reil drai soos day” and read the confused hotel staff’s reply, “… real dry Tuesday?” Otherwordly blogs about untranslatable words like “kintsukuroi.” Lingua Fandom re-blogs the idea of keyboard smashes being dubbed “typerventilating.” Rzeczpospolita Polska blogs out individual Polish words, like “Biba” (party) or “Mnie to rybka” (literally — “It’s a fish to me,” but it means, “I don’t care”). One blogger started The Polyglot Playlist and told me that they enjoyed catching phrases more common to vernacular than what the dictionary said and ordained, i.e., “In one Arabic song a woman says a man’s eyes look like ‘a painting drawn in childhood.’ Its literal meaning is confusing when translated, but in Arabic it means that he has ‘innocent eyes’ or he is ‘childishly innocent (naive.)’”
If we start the figurative daisy chain with German — the language of Goethe, Schiller, Casper, Prinz Pi, Sebald, and others, the language of the “Blaue Stunde” and “Seeräuberjenny” — and ask a German teenager of a word both simultaneously German and Dutch that comes to mind, we get “helden,” heroes, which in turn summons phrases like, “Een held op sokken” (a hero without socks), or the gently chastising “Du bist mir vielleicht ein Held” (“You are to me, perhaps, a hero”); and if we ask Dutch student Ceyda Dilek — Dutch being the language of “Honkbal” (which came about in defiance of German occupiers and fills the summer soccer gap), Van Gogh, fietsen, and Harry Mulisch — for a word simultaneously French and Dutch, we get “etage” (“floor,” which is étage in French). And which — in part — brings to mind the work of Heidi, who sketched this out — — and has more like it on her blog. If we reach out to someone in France — French being the language of Ben L’Oncle Soul and the European Court of Justice and people who argue like dopes about Celine on shows about books — and we ask for a word in Romanian, we could get “Eugène Ionesco” or “Tristan Tzara,” but we could get masculin, feminin, bebe, a construi and construire, and a whole host of others; and if we ask a Romanian — Romanian being the language of youthful words, as one blogger pointed out to me, like “jumbix” and “smardoi” (“fellow” and “fight”), and old words too, like bălan (blond) and vârtos (imposing because of muscle mass) — for a word simultaneously Romanian and Turkish, we get talaz (wave) and dovleak/dövlek (pumpkin). If we ask a Turk — Turkish being the language of Yakup Kadri, Resat Nuri, Halide Edip, Aka Gunduz, Faruk Nafiz, Orhan Seyfi, of Ataturk reading a book by the Hungarian linguist Gyula Nemeth and seeing a Latinized Turkish as the way to go forward in the century, of Fenerbahçe chants filling the stands — for a word simultaneously Turkish and Persian, we get lutfen and lutfan (لطفا), as in, “Please,” or “hava” (هوا) which means, “air/weather”; and if ask an Iranian for a word that is the same in both Farsi and Arabic, we get ketab and kutub (book), or — as it should be written — كتاب and كتب; and if we ask Anna for a word in both Arabic and Hebrew, we get “Yalla Balagan,” which Anna — who blogs at Fire in the Heart — told me is used by Israelis so much, “and it means, basically, like, ‘Let’s go crazy,’ and ‘yalla’ is Arabic — ‘balagan,’ I think, is originally Persian” (though that is a bit of a cheat). And if we want to take a break before we tug at another portion of the daisy chain, we can switch to ASL, American Sign Language, and move our hands in the silence (to play off the idea of “typerventilating.” One Tumblr user realized that if they learned ASL, they could do “visual keymash”), a language which deals with loanwords just the same as any other, whether it’s in watching Stephen Fry’s Planet Word to see how you say “Obama” (an “O” turning over and becoming an American flag flapping in the wind) or in breaking down fingerspellings into current usage, i.e., “B-A-C-K” becoming “B-K,” or the verb “to train” becoming “practice” with the letter ‘T’ at the front, “society” becoming S + “group,” or “twin” becoming T + “to be born,” as Julie Weisenberg at SUNY Stony Brook points out in an excellent paper.
Some would argue that the gaps are already somewhat apparent, and that’s partially true. You can’t walk “etage” from one side of a country’s border to the other and expect life to crack golden and open in front of you like a great ephemeral egg.
Yet it’s also worth noting that there are thousands and thousands of flights per day. Borders are repeatedly crossed with elan. In 2008, there are some estimates that put worldwide commercial flights at 93,000 per day; this year, there are some estimates that put it topping 100,000. That has a consequence for language. Sixty million people pass through Heathrow Airport outside London every year, which means it and others like it are a place where — as one photographer who had a ten-hour layover in Tokyo after visiting Catalunya told me — one can “practice speaking other languages, even if it’s only a few words, to ask for a bottle of water or a sandwich, for example.”
In the Netherlands, for instance, there’s a library smack dab in the middle of Schiphol Airport. Simple practice of briarpatch words has a chance to explode into an out-and-out forest. The librarian even has a Twitter account, chronicling when the Turkish books go missing and reappear again and other items of incident.
There you could probably find Shakespeare in every tongue, whether it’s Boris Pasternak — Nobel Prize winner and author of Doctor Zhivago — translating Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, King Henry IV, Macbeth, and King Lear into Russian, mysteriously excising references to corruption in Hamlet, deflating the sexuality of Hamlet, Cordeilia, Othello, and Desdemona, and translating “Is this a dagger I see before me?” into “Where did you come from, dagger?”. Or whether it’s Nicanor Parra — the great Chilean anti-poet — translating King Lear into lines that swim, i.e., “Este es el maligno Flibbertigibett. / Aparece a la hora de queda / Y se marcha al primer canto del gallo / Transmite la catarata.” Or even Hamlet in Italian, Arabic, or Polish, or King Lear in Hindi or Mandarin, or any of these at all.
But our daisy chain has been left languishing, and we’ve yet to tie other languages to it, like the language that — as Gregory Rabassa — translator of Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and others — put it, sounds like a kind of string quartet: Portuguese, a language wherein one screenwriter in Lisbon said her favorite phrases included “engolir um sapo,” (as in, swallow a toad, as in, eating crow), “não chegar aos calcanhares de” (to not reach the heels of = to not be nearly as good as), or “pôr o carro à frente dos bois” (get your cart in front of your oxen = to get ahead of yourself); a language where Cheila Sousa said she likes “the way people from Açores talk. The most common Portuguese accents are from there and from Porto — it’s where people talk very differently and are sometimes even hard to understand, which can be somehow funny.”
If we are to look for a word that exists simultaneously in Portuguese and Japanese — Portuguese being the language of Jorge Ben Jor, Gilberto Gil, O Folha de SP, and Sócrates, Japanese being the language of Haruki Murakami and the homeland of haiku and Kurosawa and Ozu and so much more — we can pick candeia, candle, which is properly written as “カンデヤ” and pronounced the same. And if we are to look for a word that is both Japanese and Korean — Korean being home to a carbon-copy of Saturday Night Live of its own (weirdly and wonderfully) — we can settle our finger on (as they’d write in Japanese) “玉” and (as they’d write in Korean) “다마,” pronounced as “da-ma,” meaning (for a time) “lightbulb,” shifting its meaning to “bead” in Korean, and eventually being consigned to the linga-franca of an older generation that was once occupied by the Japanese, though its meaning is still known today. I had thought of writing out similarities as they are in Romanized script, i.e., “jurumi” meaning “relaxed” or ‘’kagami” (JP) and “kakami” (KR) meaning “mirror,” but that’s not entirely fair.
And if we wish to use a word that’s both Korean and Italian, we can use 비엔날레 — or, rather, “biennale,” which are both pronounced the same and mean the same thing (a large art exhibition/festival); and if are to use a word that’s simultaneously Italian and Polish — Italian being the language of clunky atonality and Polish being the language of Jerzy Pilch, Wisława Szymborska, and Kieślowski — we land on tomato, which is “pomodoro” in Italian and “pomidor” in Polish.
“I recommend listening to Polish hooligans and their language,” Karolina Zawadzka — an architecture student tumbling in Warsaw — told me. “We have a word ‘pierdolic’ and it is something like ‘fuck.’ If you want, you can add a few letters and create other words like odpierdol sie (fuck off), pierdol sie (fuck you), napierdolic sie (to get drunk or beat someone) and many more. It’s really common and everyone uses it. But I’m trying to avoid swearing. Women shouldn’t speak like that. … Once, when I was watching tv, a reporter was talking about landing of Dreamliner in Poland. He said he didn’t like the name and proposed to call it ‘Marzenka’ which made me laugh so hard because Marzenka is a diminutive of the Polish name Marzena, constructed of the word marzenia (dreams) and marzyć (to dream.)”
And if we want to leave that behind and use a word that means the same in both Polish and Czech, we get “Wyrok,” as in, “sentence, verdict”; and if we’re looking for a word that exists simultaneously in Czech and Hawaiian — Czech being the mother tongue of Kundera and the stunning Josef Koudelka — we get “pukowi,” as in, “birch tree”; and if we want a word that simultaneously exists in Hawaiian and Spanish, we use “paniolo,” as in, “cowboy.” With Spanish being the language of rapid-fire Chilean, of one Colombian student telling me that a lot of call centers are located in their country because it has the most “neutral” Spanish, of a photographer living in Guatemala telling me that he couldn’t really answer my questions about languages, given that there were 21 different Mayan languages in the country — we are now looking for a word that simultaneously exists in both Spanish and Tagalog, as Tagalog is a common second language of the Philippines, which gives us phrases like bungang-tulog (fruit of sleep) to describe dreams, daga sa dibdib (mouse in the chest) to describe worry, and others — and we get “realidad” and “reina”/”reyna.”
If we want to see a word that exists in both Tagalog and Hindi, we get veranda/baranada and “guro”/गुरु; and if we wish to say something that means the same thing in both Hindi and Urdu, we can say, Mein kamrey main hoon, as in, “I am in the room.” And if we wish to use a word that exists in both Urdu and Punjabi — and here we can zoom in Danny Boyle-like to micro-profile Misha in London speaking a swarm of languages and selling lots and lots of hedgehogs — “my brother bought all of us siblings a hedgehog for Christmas and we didn’t realize they breed like crazy!” — who peppers her sentences in English with Punjabi and Spanish, i.e., “What is this bakwaas, you kamchor? Go make my comida a toda maquina!” (What is this rubbish/nonsense, you slacker/slouch/good-for-nothing? Go make my food quickly!). Here we could say Abbu in Urdu and Abba in Punjabi (meaning “father”), Ammi and Ammi (meaning “mother”), Taya, Tayee, Chacha, and Chachi (two ways of saying Aunt and Uncle); and if we wish to pick a word that exists in both Punjabi and English, we could pick school/sakul (though “madrasa” is probably more common); and if we wanted to see a word that was the same in English as it is in Swedish, we could use “telefon”; and if we wanted to say a word that is the same in Swedish as it is in Norwegian — well, heck, you could say “Jag kommer från Norge” in Swedish (“I come from Norway”), and all it would translate to once it crossed the border would be “Jeg kommer fra Norge.”
I don’t know which paper to get. I’m in the Out of Town News kiosk and I don’t know what to get. They’re all so expensive. I look at copies of Le Monde and El Pais, The Irish Times, and others, walking in a short semicircle, trying to avoid omnipresent tourists. There are no papers here in Catalan, Gaelic, or Creole. I look at the papers again.
In a follow-up e-mail with Karolina Zawadzka, she wrote that she had “read a great interview with Michal Rusinek — he was a personal assistant of Wislawa Szymborska (you should have heard about her ;).) Rusinek is a polish scholar and writer, and a journalist asked him, in what he sets his hopes and he said LANGUAGE!”
I paid for my paper and left.
— Evan FleischerPhenakistoscope image by Eadweard Muybridge, ca. 1893.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/536f558b8f8373e92bbe1f8b461ae0ed/tumblr_mgqigqwWxJ1rrpm57o1_r1_500.gif)
Language Is a Virus: How Loanwords Move the World’s Tongues
There are an estimated 6,700 to 6,900 languages in the world today, and they drift through the air like a meteorological echo — Hello! Hallo! Allô! — a roll of thunder or a set of bird calls off in the corner of the ear and the eye. And accompanying every tongue are loanwords, or, rather, lehnwerts, the tin-eared telephone line tossed from house to house, the improvised bridge of a tree knocked across a river’s expanse, or, more prosaically, words one “borrows” from one language into another. Loanwords explain how and why English speakers can say things like Frankfurter, pretzel, hinterland, dreck, or kaput without their conversational co-conspirator batting an eye.
View post 15,377 notes -
![The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
This is the first of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with The Rumpus, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next 10 weeks.
The front cover of the last book I loved bears neither gold seals nor laurels to rest on. If you’re looking for flashy art direction, keep moving. Here, there’s just a shadowy still life photo (inventory: one open notebook, one glass ashtray, one bowl, two pens, many loose leaves of paper) set against a plain white background. And yet, if ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one. Open it and you’ll learn that the cover photo is not stock but Treilles, 1996 by French theorist Jean Baudrillard. That’s your first clue. I Love Dick doesn’t look like any other book on the shelf, and it doesn’t read like any other book I’ve read either.
The first novel from art critic and experimental filmmaker Chris Kraus, I Love Dick was originally published in 1997 by Semiotext(e), an independent press which also happens to be co-edited by … Chris Kraus. Probably no other publisher would have touched it, and thank God (or Chris Kraus?) for that.
Let me give you some idea why. In the novel, a fictional version of the author spends one sexless night with the titular Dick, a well-known theorist, and becomes exponentially, embarrassingly obsessed with him. She calls this nuit chez Dick a “conceptual fuck,” and one assumes it registers pretty high on the Conceptual Fuck Richter Scale because she goes on to write a terrific series of confessional letters to him in collaboration with another man: her husband. A husband she’s no longer sleeping with. The letters are ostensibly a game, until they’re not at all. And all of this coincides with a strange and, at times, emotionally exhausting ride across America from the California desert to the New York avant-garde art scene. It is a trip.
Salacious plot points aside, the chief thrill of reading I Love Dick comes from how inventively it rewrites representations of the dreaded female inner life. Books by women are sometimes condescendingly described as intimate, inconsequential, or limited to domestic subjects — like the rest of women’s work — making them the literary equivalent of a patchwork quilt. In I Love Dick, Kraus takes a seam ripper to those criticisms. “How much information about one subject can you juggle in two hands?” she asks. Importantly, her book isn’t an answer. It’s hypothesis — the fun part.
Fiction and autobiography, theory and scandal, humor and pathos, the diaristic and the dialectical; Kraus reaches for them all to test how much insight they can offer. No matter how “small” or “limited” the picture seems, “the trick is to discover Everything within the frame.” There are whole worlds in there.
If you think that great writing should be about more than intellectual gymnastics, you can exhale now. I Love Dick delivers practical life lessons too. Here’s one: In order to learn you have to fail, right? So I mean it in the best way when I say that Kraus has fashioned an ode to personal and professional failure, bolding and underlining the key notion that, in the eyes of history, if you’re a woman you are all but destined to be forgotten.
Take her description of an installation by artist Eleanor Antin:
Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas. … It was an ordinary scene (though its very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the 50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?). … I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand?
Kraus counts herself a member of that unremembered constellation — always the plus one at art parties, never the guest of honor. In one of her letters to Dick, she writes, “I tried my best but [my film] still failed.” And then: “Is there any greater freedom than not caring anymore what certain people in New York think of me?”
I read the better part of I Love Dick during many long Toronto subway rides to and from my desk job. (I read faithfully, like a penitent, when I can’t or won’t make time to write.) It was just a book but with that title you might as well be hoisting a billboard. I received a few stares and practiced not caring. Mostly, I pretended to be Rihanna.
On one commute the woman across from me fingered her rosary and I imagined (hoped) that she was praying for my soul. Not because I needed to be saved but because I felt so strongly that there was nothing left worth saving.
Which is why, when I think back on it, it seems likeliest the woman wasn’t staring at all but looking right through me. Because if that’s true, what else is there to console myself with except the promise of freedom by invisibility? As Kraus puts it, “Once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want.” After that I started seeing last hurrahs everywhere.
One night while the fictional Chris Kraus was feverishly writing to Dick in an Oklahoma motel, I was watching two women named Thelma & Louise take another vital road trip across my TV. I was only going to watch the first half hour or so, just until Louise shoots Thelma’s rapist dead. (Later, a giddily deranged Thelma will spit one of the film’s most satisfying lines: “You should have shot him in the dick!”) Inevitably, I watched the whole thing.
When it seems like the two friends have exhausted every mile of open road, Thelma tells Louise that she can never go back to the banal indignity of her old life. “Something’s crossed over in me,” she says. “I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live.”
Well, she didn’t go back. She didn’t live either.
But she tried.
I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the “subversive utopia” that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for. When I quit that desk job in November, with no real plans to speak of, I remembered I Love Dick. That Kraus, who considered herself a failure, could write this book at all gives me a shot of courage, and makes me less willing to wait my turn to really live.
— Stephanie Wong](http://24.media.tumblr.com/d023dfd6c3773fb23ea5fa460c9197d2/tumblr_mhf0tgcZoO1rrpm57o1_r2_1280.jpg)
The Last Book I Loved: I Love Dick
This is the first of an ongoing series, produced in partnership with The Rumpus, to highlight Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here. We’ll publish our favorites every Friday for the next 10 weeks.
The front cover of the last book I loved bears neither gold seals nor laurels to rest on. If you’re looking for flashy art direction, keep moving. Here, there’s just a shadowy still life photo (inventory: one open notebook, one glass ashtray, one bowl, two pens, many loose leaves of paper) set against a plain white background. And yet, if ever there was a book that should be judged by its cover, it’s this one. Open it and you’ll learn that the cover photo is not stock but Treilles, 1996 by French theorist Jean Baudrillard. That’s your first clue. I Love Dick doesn’t look like any other book on the shelf, and it doesn’t read like any other book I’ve read either.
View post 333 notes
Most Popular
We
