Culinary

A new blog!

Gelman

Gelman has died. Here is a free version of a poem by him that I did a few years ago:

Cadence

Anyone can get warm
wearing the hide of a wild boar

but to satisfy a real hunger
nothing like a mother's soup.

At the table nobody imposed conditions--
bread, sometimes beer, bright-red

tomatoes, oil, the salt
that makes forgetting easy to eat.

What a spoon for the rice!
How it sang against the bowl!

What am I supposed to do with this
appetite for what was and what wasn't?

At five in the morning
streets of poverty

and language slipping by,
the sun giving grammars of peace

to the plants in the courtyard,
glimmers that left too soon.

Passive loathing

Here is the definitive Pullum article on fear and loathing of the passive. Enjoy!

Comp Lit

Let's do a little old-fashioned comp lit to start the new year:

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n’aperçois,
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcs que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.

Vois quel orgueil, quelle ruine : et comme
Celle qui mit le monde sous ses lois,
Pour dompter tout, se dompta quelquefois,
Et devint proie au temps, qui tout consomme.

Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
Le Tibre seul, qui vers la mer s’enfuit,

Reste de Rome. Ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.


***


Buscas en Roma a Roma, ¡oh peregrino!,
y en Roma misma a Roma no la hallas:
cadáver son las que ostentó murallas,
y tumba de sí propio el Aventino.

Yace, donde reinaba el Palatino;
y limadas del tiempo las medallas,
más se muestran destrozo a las batallas
de las edades, que blasón latino.

Sólo el Tíber quedó, cuya corriente,
si ciudad la regó, ya sepoltura
la llora con funesto son doliente.

¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
lo fugitivo permanece y dura.

What are people interested in when they are interested in language

Since I am a language teacher (at least in part of my professional role) and an academic specialist in the artistic use of language (i.e. poetry), and a poet and translator myself, I have thought about what it means for someone to be interested in language, and what people mean by this.

One of the main areas of interest is in stigma. People love stigmatizing others for how they talk or use language. Whether it be those interested in the enforcement of "zombie rules" (non rules) of grammar like split infinitives, or in stigmatizing accents, regional dialects, or vernacular habits of speech as ignorant or lower class. At its least offensive, an interest in stigma becomes an interest in mere sociolinguistic difference, without a negative value attached, or an admiration for prestige dialects.

(Disfluency is supposed to be a sign of moral or political corruption. I never understood that. I might hate the linguistic habits of people I agree with politically, for example. Wouldn't that be more my problem than theirs? Or if right-wing people are poor spellers, well, that means that they are poor spellers, and nothing more than that.)

Another category of interest is in words and etymologies. Some people who like language just like word origins. That's fine. I happen to know some etymologies, though I can't say that's the source of my interest in language. I like words, but I like sentences more than words per se.

Some people are interested in the process of language learning. I have some interest in that in my role as teacher.

People are interested in Whorfian ideas about language shaping thought.

But most of my interest in language is in the area of linguistic prosody: rhythm and intonation, pretty much. I think syntax could be pretty interesting, but I don't follow technical discussions of it, lacking formal training. Cognitive linguistics, related to the study of metaphor, is also worth my time, as is the study of idiomatic expressions and proverbs.

No trilogy

I decided against the trilogy idea. Another book by me on Lorca is not what the world needs (after my 2nd I mean). What I should do for book 6 is something completely, utterly unrelated to Lorca.

I think it should be a book on prosody. That's the subject I've thought the most about without publishing anything about it.

Contents

What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity

Preface*
Hermeneutical Introduction*
Chapter 1: What Lorca Knew*
Chapter 2: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetics of Cultural Exceptionalism
Chapter 3: The Anatomy of Influence: Lorca in Contemporary Spanish Poetry
Chapter 4: The Grain of the Voice
Chapter 5: New York Variations: O’Hara, Motherwell, Strayhorn*
Chapter 6: Queering Lorca
Conclusion: Elegy For Modernism

I've honed this table of contents so that it reads better. I realized I didn't need to have Lorca in every title of every chapter, or have explanatory subtitles every time. Title chapters refer to Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom, and Roland Barthes. And Frank O'Hara, I guess, since he often wrote poems like "Ann Arbor Variations." Is that too cute?

Looking at a colleague's work recently, I noticed that the title of every article was very, very long. I'm trying to go in the opposite direction, or at least have a balance between long and short titles. An asterisk means that chapter is written. I'm trying to finish chapter 4 this calendar year.