EthicalDative

A Drumbeat

Posted on July 28, 2023 by JMN

I can’t remember the journalist’s name (Jon Pareles?), but several years ago I read an article about James Brown’s “Funky Drummer.” In the recording, Brown puts the spotlight on his drummer Clyde Stubblefield, who plays a brief but memorable drum solo. “Ain’t it funky!” Brown intones during the catchy, hypnotic riff.

According to the journalist, Stubblefield’s creation became a standard rhythm used in hip-hop and other genres. He cited songs in which it appeared, and one of them was Sinéad O’Connor’s “I Am Stretched on Your Grave.”

I put “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” on my special playlist as soon as I heard it. Its appeal is hard to codify: an ethereal chant melding majestic salt with sorrowful sweetness. It’s a piece of music I don’t tire of hearing.

Along with “Maccrimmon’s Lament” sung by Fiona Hunter, “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” enshrines a voice whose soulfulness lifts me up.

Sinéad O’Connor, present in song: 1966-2023.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged music, personal | 2 Comments

Accent and Affect

Posted on July 27, 2023 by JMN

I heard a Nebraska state legislator say, “I’m extremely from Nebraska.” The adverb was novel. I’m from Texas, but not “extremely.” If I’d been raised in Terre Haute I’d be a Hoosier (but not extremely). What arrests me more than birth-accident proclamation is how locale inflects idiolect.

Katherine “Kitty” Carmichael, Dean of Women at Chapel Hill (North Carolina), hosted sherry to a group of graduate students at her home once. She said of her southern accent, “Wherever I go, people don’t listen to what I say, but to how I say it.” Her remark held bemused resignation. This patrician academic was not of a mind to shrink from her roots.

Author Barbara Kingsolver, a Kentucky native, spoke similarly in a podcast interview by Ezra Klein. When she entered Depauw University (Indiana), fellow students pestered Kingsolver to say “syrup” and “mayonnaise,” smiling at her Appalachian twang. “People heard my words, not what I said.” She began shedding what she called her “Kentuckian affect.”

I worked on losing my Lone Star affect from an early age. My aim was to light out for parts unknown and cloak myself in alien tongues; didn’t want to be pigeonholed by a drawl if I could help it. Now that I’ve washed up in Texas again, the mixed vowels and languid enunciation have seeped back in. My cloak is frayed.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged dialect, language | 7 Comments

Etel Adnan: ‘Words Are Social’

Posted on July 26, 2023 by JMN

Etel Adnan, “Untitled” (1961/62)…Credit… Etel Adnan. [Published in New York Times, “Etel Adnan’s Bittersweet Arrival at the Guggenheim,” 12-2-21).

Lebanese-American painter-poet-novelist Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was interviewed by Gabriel Coxhead for the June 2018 issue of Apollo.

In the 1970s, having returned to Beirut to work as a journalist, she was forced to flee to Paris when the civil war broke out… Living mainly again in California, she published numerous volumes of poetry and prose… such as The Arab Apocalypse (1980), Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993), and In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005).

“If I were just a painter, maybe my work would have been different, more encompassing. But my writing is rather pessimistic, because of the angle of history I got involved with, being born in Beirut. Also, it’s because words are social. I think it’s more natural if an event bothers you to express it in words. Art also is a kind of language – but it’s a language of feeling. When I paint, I am happy. I am both an optimistic, happy person, and caught in and aware of tragedy. And although I lived in California most of my life, I never had a spell of time where I could forget about the problems of the Middle East. Every morning the newspaper would remind me.”

Posted in Quotations | Tagged art, language, painting, poetry, writing | 4 Comments

A Crestomathy of Crescendos

Posted on July 25, 2023 by JMN

From prose pieces published in Poetry, July/August 2023:

Douglas Kearney, “On Spite: Folly Comes Daily”

… Kit, who pokes at poetry with a long sharp stick to make certain it’s dead before skulking past it…

***

Elisa Gabbert, “On Self-Pity: Go Eat Worms”

Children love screaming when nothing is wrong because something has been wrong, something will be wrong — don’t worry about timing, just get your catharsis in when you can.

***

Wayne Koestenbaum, “On Panic: Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know”

Today is Valentine’s Day. Time to hand me an “O thou” — the kiss of apostrophe, the grope of the vocative.

…

Poetry leads to panic because you must ferret out the secret story behind the words… What if metaphor skein blocks your fingery entrance?

…

Suspension of certainty — I think I know, but I don’t really know if I know — produces epistemological ecstasy, if you’re built to enjoy not knowing.

…

If I dislike panic, then I’m exiled from poetry, whose founding ploy is the propagation of fear.

Posted in Anthology, Quotations | Tagged language, poetry | 6 Comments

Notes on Poetry (Feelings)

Posted on July 24, 2023 by JMN

“Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelin’s. He just did what he hadda do. So what they didn’t know is once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelin’s, THEY WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO SHUT ‘IM UP!”
(Tony Soprano)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged humor | 2 Comments

Basically It’s Sort of Like About Two Tech Dudes Grokking AI

Posted on July 23, 2023 by JMN

… It’s about a woman named Joan who’s sort of
like
a mid-level manager at what appears to be
a big Silicon valley tech company,
and she discovers one day that
unbeknowst to her
there is a TV show being made about her life
starring Salma Hayek as her and basically
this show is running on this
fictional version of Netflix called Streamberry
using some kind of
like
generative AI quantum computer that can
like
take the things that
she is saying and doing
and put them into a TV show that’s basically
like
a one-to-one representation of her life.

Yeah, it was sort of
like
talking to
like
your most conspiracy-minded friend
… and I always just kind of love that
kind of behind-the-scenes
detail because it’s so easy to
like
appreciate the effort of someone who
like
sat in a little hut in the wilderness for six months to
like
get the perfect shot of the snow leopard
on the one day that it
like
emerged and tripped the camera sensor,
like
that is the kind of delicious detail that
just makes it so much more enjoyable
knowing that someone spent all that
effort just to get that
one shot that
you saw on your TV,
like
that is the kind of thing that
makes me think that
AI-generated movies may be a long way off.

(Transcribed from The Hard Fork, a New York Times podcast about technology)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged journalism, language, style, technology | 4 Comments

Kevin Young: ‘Usher’

Posted on July 22, 2023 by JMN

…
The dead wake for nothing.
Or wake & nothing
is still there.

The wide meadow. Deep grass.
Distant ships.
The far fires

Only glimpsed
from a distance.
Nothing looks back,

blinks twice.
…
(Kevin Young, from “Usher”)

That “blinks twice” produced a red-letter reading moment for me, a laugh of surprised delight and recognition. Recognition of what? I ask myself. I suppose it’s recognition of a conceit, an old word, I think, in the poetry vineyard. It turns on the term “nothing,” a workaday word if ever there was one, repeated 3 times in an increasingly interesting way. When it’s still there, fair enough; when it looks back, wait a minute! When it blinks twice, the full punch is delivered.

Spooky and delicious. Rather than a container of absence, “nothing” is turned into a presence, perhaps even ominous and aggressive. I think of the Canadian forest fires “blinking” at us. The mega-nothing which they imply encroaches.

The entire poem, with others of Kevin Young’s, is published in Poetry, July/August 2023.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, reading | 1 Comment

The ‘Weird Causality’ of Passive Voice

Posted on July 20, 2023 by JMN

“Mistakes were made.”
(Politicians from Nixon forward)

Jamelle Bouie cites a passage from Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields:

Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

The actor vanishes from the act because the statement is in the grammatical passive voice. In this construction, the victim becomes the apparent subject of the sentence, and his own skin color masquerades syntactically as the cause of his affliction.

A rump-end “agent” phrase introduced with “by” is the only way to smoke out the doer of the deed:

Black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color by White Southerners.

Here’s the statement in active voice:

White Southerners segregated Black Southerners because of their skin color.

(Jamelle Bouie, “The John Roberts Two-Step,” New York Times, 7-8-23)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged grammar, language | 4 Comments

Saskia Hamilton: Escapement

Posted on July 18, 2023 by JMN

… And yet
the escapement enforces its circle
of unbreakable numbers…

Sakia Hamilton’s verse “From ‘All Souls’” in Poetry, July/August 2023 refers to a pocket watch in a cupboard.

Dancing with a technical term in a poem is a wily achievement. Words like “escapement” have a life of their own even when you don’t know exactly what they mean. Lookup is a chance to phrase a complex definition in one’s own words — an act of assimilation. Here goes: An escapement is a contrivance that triggers a periodic, measured shift of position in one mass relative to another. Using those words gives me a sense of owning the term, and a greater appreciation of how it enforces its circle / of unbreakable numbers in the poem.

Hamilton throws a curve ball in what follows, which is also the conclusion of her poem:

… Someone
has let it run down. Don’t turn back,
it’s the wrong way, is the relation of
chronology to history at all valuable here.

At first blush I want to see a question in the last sentence, yet the structure makes it impossible. What I perceive instead is a flex of syntax permitted by English in which a subordinating conjunction and copula are elided before an adjectival clause modifying “relation.” The words “that is” are to be understood before “at all valuable here.”

Perhaps I should have said that the poem has remarked prior to this on the fragility of the wound-down clock’s hands: They would snap off with pressure / from the smallest finger. Turning them back is the wrong way to rewind the clock. The numbers, on the other hand, are unbreakable, and the escapement enforces an inexorable forward motion around them. History likewise flows in only one direction, and that’s the relation to clock time that has value.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry, reading | Leave a comment

Eco-ing How to Read Poetry

Posted on July 16, 2023 by JMN

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems become when they are recited by actors, who, wanting to “interpret,” ignore the meter of the verse, make dramatic enjambements as if they were declaiming prose, concern themselves with the content and not with the rhythm. To read a classical poem in rhyme, you have to assume the singing rhythm the poet wanted. It’s better to recite Dante as if he had written children’s jingles than to pursue only his meanings to the exclusion of everything else.

(Umberto Eco, author’s postscript in his novel The Name of the Rose. This quotation was shared with me by OutsideAuthority.)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, poetry, reading | 1 Comment