Plaited Thorns

Posted on April 13, 2020 by JMN

Before reading the article I scanned this painting as a king and courtier munching a corona-bat monster that has been spitted and roasted. The courtier picks his teeth and licks his fingers while the king gnaws a bone ruminatively and ponders where he will take his next bite from.

“Crucifixion,” 1959. Souza’s most notable works embraced the sacred and profane, teetering at times on the edge of violence. Credit… Tate/Estate of F.N. Souza. All rights reserved, DACS/ARS 2020.

The article mentions the painting as follows:

His brutal “Crucifixion” (1959), purchased by the Tate in 1993, showed a black, jagged-edged Christ, “scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns,” as Souza described it in his collection “Words and Lines” (1959).

I got the “brutal” more or less right in my first impression. Then there’s this:

“With a few slashing lines and a raw, expressive energy, Francis Newton Souza stripped away all subterfuge,” The Times of India wrote in a 2010 review of a retrospective of his work at the Dhoomimal Gallery in New Delhi. “Be it the sluts or the suits, the seamy side of life or the steamy, the gnomish, pox-scarred boy from Goa who went on to become one of the first Indian artists to be feted in the salons of Europe, laid it bare.”

(William Grimes, “Overlooked No More: F. N. Souza, India’s Anti-Establishment Artist,” NYTimes, 4-9-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Aerosolized Precarity

Posted on April 10, 2020 by JMN
Demetrius Freeman for the New York Times.

Having been involved with languages, both natural and programming, for a time, I always experience a moment of pleasurable surprise when I meet a word I feel I should have met before.

Today’s new friend is “precariat.” It comes to me from Viet Thanh Nguyen, a writer who teaches English at the University of Southern California; author, most recently, of “The Refugees” and editor of “The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.”

A precariat is a person from a class that lives in a state of precarity, whose employment and income are insecure, whose existence lacks predictability as well as security.

The word has the added attraction of (a) being British, and (b) being a portmanteau word built from “precarious” and “proletariat.” What’s not to like? — as it says on the wall of my favorite Jewish deli.

Here’s how Mr. Nguyen uses “precariat”:

If the illusion of invincibility is shredded for any patient who survives a near-fatal experience, then what might die after Covid-19 is the myth that we are the best country on earth, a belief common even among the poor, the marginal, the precariat, who must believe in their own Americanness if in nothing else.

His essay points to the root of our precarity:

What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable.

(Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus,” NYTimes, 4-10-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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¡Viva el pinche Franglaisismo!

Posted on April 9, 2020 by JMN
While the English and French languages mix freely on the streets of Montreal, traffic signage is largely in French. Credit… Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times.

Mixing English and French with artistic abandon “irks some purists.” The irking of purists is always and never a good sign for those who straddle irkdom.

FouKi, a popular Quebec rapper whose real name is Léo Fougères, observed that Franglais rapping didn’t just irritate those determined to preserve French.

“My father will hear my raps and say to me, ‘Isn’t there a word for that in French?’” he said. “But other older people say to me, I don’t understand anything you say.”

(Dan Filefsky, ‘What Rhymes With Purell?’ Franglais Rappers Push Language Boundaries in Quebec,” NYTimes, 4-7-20)

I can almost identify with older people, although at a venue near me where youth gather the Saxonized Anglo locution “motherfucker” makes itself persistently heard on Pocho-inflected, hip-hop breezes, so not all gets by me.

Mathieu Bock-Côté, a sociologist and influential columnist, has pointed out the ghastly consequences of young Québécois “turning to English as a default to show emotion and express themselves”:

“Without French, Montreal would be Pittsburgh.”

(c) 2020 JMN

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A Sober Voice

Posted on April 9, 2020 by JMN
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.

“And that man’s a doctor!” as the endearing old refrain of the vouching Jewish mother goes.

A recurring thread in recent news is how in a decapitated republic certain U.S. governors are stepping up to provide badly needed leadership in responding to the pandemic.

While discussing the desperate need for supplies at a recent news conference, [Virginia governor Ralph Northam] methodically listed all the resources a single coronovirus patient in the ICU would use in terms of staff — nurses, an attending physician, a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, an infectious disease specialist, a respirator therapist, a pharmacist and technicians to administer IVs and X-rays. The same patient would also require about about 240 items of protective equipment.

(Alan Suderman, “Nation’s only doctor governor offers sober voice on virus,” AP, abcnews.com, 4-9-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Africa Felt Better

Posted on April 8, 2020 by JMN
A highway checkpoint in Nakuru, Kenya, last month, set up to detect coronavirus symptoms. Suleiman Mbatiah/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

With the United States now leading the world in Covid-19 cases, the health care system fraying and the economy faltering, some American citizens — especially those living abroad — are starting to see their country in a new, unsettling light. As a result, some Americans have decided to stay in Africa, which was among the places that President Trump notably described with a disparaging and vulgar epithet.

“Africa just felt better,” said John Shaw, who has lived for two years in Nairobi, Kenya, with his wife and two sons. “There are a lot of unknowns in terms of how Americans will deal with this crisis. It didn’t feel obvious to us at all that it will go well there.”

(“For some American expats, ‘Africa just felt better’ amid the pandemic,” NYTimes, 4-8-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Poisonous Language Travels (Like a Virus)

Posted on April 8, 2020 by JMN
An empty street in Barcelona on Sunday. The health ministry reported on Wednesday another increase in the number of dead — 757 deaths overnight — bringing Spain’s toll to 14,555 since the start of the outbreak. Credit… Samuel Aranda for The New York Times.

As news filtered from the Joaquín Rosillo nursing home on the outskirts of Seville that a few residents had tested positive for coronavirus, worried families scrambled for information.

But amid a nationwide lockdown, with their movements limited, there were no clear answers. Manuel Borrego, whose mother lives in the home, heard through contacts that people were dying. But the nursing home’s management told him that it was “fake news.” [my bolding]

On April 6, 2020, 24 people were reported to have died at the facility.

(“Families fight for answers from Spanish nursing home where dozens died,” NYTimes, 4-8-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Neck-Broken

Posted on April 6, 2020 by JMN
Henry Adams. Credit… Bettmann/Getty Images. [ca. 1883 per Wikipedia]

A photo of Henry Adams helped draw me into a review by George F. Will of an anthology of conservative thinkers (“American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition,” Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich).

In “The Education of Henry Adams (1907),” Adams recalled “visiting ‘the great hall of dynamos’ at a 1900 exposition of modern technologies.”

There he felt “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of force totally new.” This illustrates Bacevich’s theory that “modern” American conservatism “emerged in reaction to modernity,” by which he means “machines, speed and radical change — taboos lifted, bonds loosened and, according to Max Weber, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’”

(George F. Will, “The Mind of Conservatism,” NYTimes, 4-1-20)

My bond with Henry Adams’s work is not with his famous “Education,” but with his “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres,” privately published in 1904. Wikipedia describes it as

a pastiche of history, travel, and poetry that celebrated the unity of medieval society, especially as represented in the great cathedrals of France. Originally meant as a diversion for his nieces and “nieces-in-wish”, it was publicly released in 1913 at the request of Ralph Adams Cram, an important American architect, and published with support of the American Institute of Architects.

It’s good to be reminded during a plague of soulless conservatism that a sensibility and tongue such as Adams’s once stood and spoke for the better kind, even in disenchantment.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Sauerkraut Ice Cream

Posted on April 6, 2020 by JMN
Matt Dorfman.

George Will reviews “American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition,” Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich. Being susceptible to typography-based graphics I was drawn in by the illustration. Will’s opening statement added enticement.

When assembling an anthology of writings representative of a political persuasion, the challenge is to acknowledge the persuasion’s varieties without producing a concoction akin to sauerkraut ice cream, a jumble of incompatible ingredients.

Two passages of Will’s critique sum it up. In the first, note the “however”; it betokens serious preceding quibbles.

The volume is, however, a nourishing cafeteria of writers, many of them justly forgotten but still interesting because they once were interesting.

Joan Didion. Credit… Associated Press.

The second passage credits Bacevich’s most inspired selection to be Joan Didion’s “1972 stiletto of an essay ‘The Women’s Movement,’ which begins, ‘To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them.’”

Didion, who long ago contributed to National Review and in 1964 voted for Barry Goldwater, here exemplified an analytical acuity, stylistic verve and unenthralled mentality that conservatism, like other persuasions, rarely attains.

(George F. Will, “The Mind of Conservatism,” NYTimes, 4-1-20)

I confess to having to be reminded that there are, or have been at least, capable minds behind conservatism. The current scene belies it.

(c) 2020 JMN

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If There’s a Heaven, It’s Parody

Posted on April 5, 2020 by JMN

Your neologismic servant, a spastic parodic — or is it “parodian” —, speaks his title. For one crowning moment, the Gray Lady really was “fake news.” An October surprise, so to speak.

Before The Onion and “The Daily Show,” Not The New York Times set the standard for news parody. The spoof was the work of dozens of writers and designers. Credit… Andrew Sondern/The New York Times.

In September 1978, a strike by pressmen had shut down New York’s major newspapers. In the resulting vacuum, a “living room full of New York writers… wrote, designed and distributed a satirical replica of The New York Times.”

In one parody column, the writer, walking past a pile of skulls to interview Genghis Khan, praised his ability to “get things done.” It took a “six-month investigation by a team of 35 Not The Times reporters” to determine that cocaine “appears popular.”

Ideas for articles bubbled up from Mr. Cerf and other writers, many of whom were literary stars of the day and wanted in on the fun. Credit… Christopher Cerf.

“The first person I called was the New Yorker writer Veronica Geng…. She came over and handed me the piece on the front page, ‘Carter Forestalls Efforts to Defuse Discord Policy.’” (Rusty Unger)

“I wrote the James Reston column. It wasn’t entirely about him, but it was about [the foreign correspondent and columnist] Cy Sulzberger and people like that who have this rather elevated view of the world, and were always meeting with princes and presidents, and giving the authoritative word on what’s going on.” (Frances FitzGerald)

Creating three full sections of material in the design style of The Times was a key to making the parody feel (almost) like the real thing. Credit… Andrew Sondern/The New York Times.

“There was an air of secrecy about my involvement. I’m sure I told my parents, but not many other people. There was a great fear that The Times was going to hate this, and they would go off on some Trumpian purge of employees who’d had anything to do with it.” (Steven Crist)

“Nobody was being paid and nobody was going to get credit, and there was never a better atmosphere of creativity and freedom and camaraderie. Where are you going to find those parameters again?” (Rusty Unger)

(Alex Traub, “When All the Zingers Were Fit to Print,” NYTimes, 4-1-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Rare and Pastel

Posted on April 5, 2020 by JMN
A mature South Philippine dwarf kingfisher. Credit… Miguel David De Leon/Robert S. Kennedy Bird Conservancy.

A friend likes birds and will see this. I like them too. This amazing bird will brighten the day of all of us who like birds. It impresses me how its young simply “rocket away” from the nest when ready to fly

A juvenile kingfisher, with its distinctive black bill. Credit… Miguel David De Leon/Robert S. Kennedy Bird Conservancy.

… The South Philippine dwarf kingfisher is particularly hard to spot. “It perches quietly and darts invisibly from perch to perch,” Dr. Kennedy’s bird guide warns.

And as Dr. De Leon’s group soon found, the fledgling is even sneakier. While birds of other species often stay close to their nests while learning to fly, the young kingfishers rocket away. “Even if we’re watching them closely, they just disappear,” he said.

(Cara Giaimo, “How an Eye Surgeon Got a Picture of This Rare Pastel Bird,” NYTimes, 4-3-20)

Addendum: I read the article and jotted the above note on April 3. Today, April 5, my friend sends news of birds that are common in that country, and inquires as to birds common in mine. The state bird where I live is the mockingbird. It has a longish tail, drab coloring, a reputation for being peevish and for appropriating the abandoned nests of other birds for its own. There’s a hoary song called “Mockingbird Lane” whose title is all I know of it. We have hummingbirds, who are thrilling when they appear making free of the jatropha blooms. The mourning dove is a built-in bird here; its coo sounds halfhearted, resigned. A roadrunner lived near me once; he or she was a treat to behold and, true to form, never left the ground before diving into the bushes. There was a solitary owl nearby, the only one I’ve ever seen in the flesh. In Waco at springtime birds I called blackbirds literally — and I mean “literally” in a literal sense here, not as a bogus elative — blackened the sky in their swarms, and perched in ranks of thousands along telephone lines all over town. I’ve heard the honkings of geese passing over towards their southern roosting in the fall. Sparrows are ubiquitous. There’s a bird here called a jackdaw, which may be another name for that blackbird. I’m afraid I’m not equipped to distinguish birds that are black from black birds. There are robins and cardinals. And then there’s a “redbird.” Is that the cardinal?There are seagulls on the nearby coast; and in the fields there’s a long-legged white bird that hangs about herds of cattle and feeds off seeds in their droppings. I’ve always called them “dookie birds,” not the scientific name, I’m sure. There’s a preserve nearby that has been devoted forever to trying to keep whooping cranes extant. There are quail, though I never see them. There is a whitewing season, a kind of dove, I think, during which men go out and shoot masses of them. There’s also a duck season, so there are wild ducks to be shot. There’s a long tradition of baiting turkeys and deer with grain from feeders, and hiding in special blinds to shoot them. Called hunting.

(c) 2020 JMN

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