My pendant whatnots had a fiery itch. I bashfully exposed them to the Dermatologist. “It’s excruciating,” I said. She cast her glance and looked up brightly. “Ah yes, I see what you mean,” she said.
I pressed for amplification. “It’s neuro-dermal,” she said. “I’m going to prescribe something to calm those nerves.”
She and I have a clinical past. She knows my sun-wrecked carapace, my sordid history of sleeveless, shorts-clad tennis played in ultraviolent radiation. Now she knows my whatnots. She has also twigged, over time, to my verbal pathology.
“Is it in the nature of a psycho-dermal epithelial conflagration, then?” I said. She nodded solemnly.
“And you’re going to prescribe a palliative tubal emollient with which to put down the revolution?”
Brisk nod again. She recited a regimen of application for the tube of goo, smiled expertly, and exited the examining room. Walking gingerly out of the clinic I felt better down there already. It helps to talk things out.
“The 1927 Odalisque with Grey Trousers, though beautiful, showed how the painter had become creatively paralysed” (Credit: Musée de l’Orangerie / H Matisse / ARS).
“Organised chronologically, Matisse in the 1930s begins with a look at the Nice period, exemplified by his voluptuous Odalisque with Grey Trousers (1927). A seductive model in harem pants lays on a green bedroll, surrounded by brilliant red and yellow wall patterns.” (Diane Bernard, “Matisse’s The Dance: The masterpiece that changed history,” bbc.com, 1-18-23)
The mugwump who rails about “grammar errors” invariably goes down as a pitiable loser in greater society’s estimation, and not undeservedly.
Never mind that. I don’t give a damn what people say and write in ordinary discourse, but it sticks in my craw when a professional, native-English-speaking journalist in the hire of a reputable organ such as the BBC, writing a published article that presumptively has undergone editorial vetting, commits the hideously common fuck-up (pardon my language) exemplified in the above quotation.
For my sins, I’m condemned to be foolishly bothered by this particular fuck-up (pardon my language) and to cease being interested, invariably if unjustly, in whatever else the journalist may have to say. If you live by the expository published word, you’re perceived according to the level of your mastery of it. It’s a hotly denied truth.
(*This potty-mouthed post is emitted in the heat of petulance, to be repented at leisure. Whenever I spew invective I know I’ve slipped the bonds that tether me to good taste.)
If you’ve worked with lumber you know knots are harder than other parts of the wood. Their toughness can stymie a handsaw and defeat a nail. There was once a vogue in home-building circles for “knotty pine.” Prized for its marbling of streaks and whorls, knotty pine paneled the dens of many a ranch-style home. The knots served decorative ends.
Metaphors are the knots of poems. It will start an argument to call them decorative. They aren’t… always, but metaphors can grind your teeth. If a metaphor doesn’t land with a certain immediacy, it’s a bomb that doesn’t detonate. The tricky thing for a versifier is that emotive force doesn’t necessarily travel on perfervid vocables. Compare these two texts:
“Sobs typhooned the wheelhouse of his heart, / as the Pink Johnson of his passion’s pilgrimage, / bottled caravel wrought for a jeroboam of exile, / lay shattered now on the ruptured crown — O ye gods! — / of his lifeless Nefertiti, / the ermine chariot of his muse’s Icarus, / his Eloise of chalcedonic eyes.” (Me)
Earth, receive an honored guest: / William Yeats is laid to rest. / Let the Irish vessel lie / Emptied of its poetry. (W. H. Auden)
The first text spoofs the ginning up of ersatz pathos by shaking fizzy words and spraying them at the reader.
The second text starts the ending of an elegy. It pivots from the expansive, conversing mode that has preceded to a strict, rhymed cadence betokening the ineluctable. In spirit, lump in throat, the reader falls in with fellow celebrants to walk behind a writer’s coffin. As moving speech, it explodes.
Sam Altman, left, one of the founders of OpenAI, and Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, agreed to a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019. Credit… Ian C. Bates for The New York Times.
Generative artificial intelligence is a colossal genie blasting out of its bottle as we speak. A key player in the crowded field is named Altman. Get it? Altman —> Alt + Man —> Alternative Man. I made the name up to make a point. Or did I?
A.I. has made it where we can’t know now, and in future even less, whether an utterance or an image comes from a human or from a machine. What could go wrong with such technology? Bad actors, of course. They will make sure it’s misused — there’s no new evil under the sun, nothing human is alien to me, etc. — all the platitudes are germane.
But the scourge of malign A.I. poses opportunities for humans who are still trying to have their own thoughts and speak their own words. They lie in fostering creativity that’s distinctly human. For example, cure cancer and fix famine. Solve war. Clean the oceans. Fall in love and make stupid mistakes. Write flawed poems. Learn something “useless” like algebra or Latin that will comfort you a lifetime later. In other words, have a life.
(Cade Metz and Karen Weise, “Microsoft Bets Big on the Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I.,” New York Times, 1-12-23)
A poem by Richard Reeve introduced me to the accipiter. I Googled it to find it’s a cadillac of a hawk built for fast flight in woodlands. Love the word. I listened to the online pronunciator for good measure. The recording said “accipider.” It reminded me of something I notice all the time: We Americans voice our intervocalic apico-alveolar stops! We say “wading” instead of “waiting.” We can’t tell the latter from the ladder or the bitter from the bidder or the writer from the rider. It’s all the more noticeable to me since I listen to British talk radio and often converse with an English republican. How language evolves isn’t at all in the direction of clarity. It’s rather in a direction which tends to mutty the wadder in support of our penchant for talking past one another.
Desserts have been made with unorthodox ingredients, like plankton. Credit… Ditte Isager for The New York Times.
All these words are Pete Wells’s words. I’ve merely culled them selectively from his essay on Noma into a poem-like structure. I’m darned if there’s not a Whitmanesque vibe to it.
It was here in the reindeer lichen and puffed fish skin Here in the signal-orange berries of wild sea buckthorn In the sour, heart-shaped leaves of wood sorrel Picked, snipped and dug up
It was here in the burning hay that perfumed It was here in the keening acidity of pickled and fermented ingredients In the gentle sweetness of parsnips and other vegetables That took the place of fruit in desserts
It was here in the slates, rocks, seashells, logs and rustic pieces of hand-thrown pottery For transporting food from the kitchen to the table It was here in the bony, opaque, angular, off-center, unpredictable, odd-smelling wines made in the Jura and the Loire by natural and biodynamic methods
It was graceful, it was coherent I wasn’t prepared for the shimmering beauty Like the iridescent silhouette of a starfish brushed on a plate with edible paint And covered with the sparkling roe of wild Danish trout
Unprepossessing liquid that looked as if it had simply seeped out of a clam Would turn out to be a sauce full of pleasure and complexity The next course would do it again But in a different key at another volume
The fermentation suite was full of jars of grains and yeasts and fruits Whose molecules were breaking down and rearranging The research and development laboratory was ready for new discoveries The greenhouse was under construction.
“We’re in here for life. But we’re not in here for one thing. It can change.” I can’t quite say I’ll be sorry when it’s gone. In many ways Its excellence had become inseparable from the culture of overkill That now defines the windswept high peaks of fine dining
Once he gets rid of those pesky diners Maybe he could ask a small team of scientists To look into ways to shrink great dining experiences Down to a size that is both more human and more humane
(Pete Wells, “Noma Spawned a World of Imitators, But the Restaurant Remains an Original,” New York Times, 1-9-23)
I’m aware that I read poetry in too forensic a way, particularly poetry of the moment. Is it because I identify as a translator? I broach a new poem in English with a cocked snoot, I’m afraid. It’s recognizable as a defensive stance. I don’t want to be made fool of by a style of poetryship that escapes me.
A friend with a distinguished career of teaching and publishing in a university’s non-fiction program shuns poetry. It smacks to her of too many gatherings in which literary colleagues rhapsodize over poems which only they, and not she, seem to understand. (She said.)
I warm to abstraction and surrealism in painting, but bridle at speech I find unconstruable. Bizarre word reference is predictable. Robert Lowell described a bad morning once by saying, “I woke up in a police whistle.” It’s dotty, but it scans conventionally — subject, predicate, etc. There are days I wake up on Alpha Centauri.
Unlike word reference, what strands me in petulant pedantry is the flouting of syntactic relationships, a je m’en foutiste disregard for the architecture of sentences. Dealing with it is like exchanging pleasantries with the taciturn Gallego encountered in a Spanish stairwell: you’ll not find out whether he’s going up or going down.
Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. Let me see what life is like on Jupiter and Mars. In other words, hold my hand, in other words, darling, kiss me.
Bart Howard’s old song makes no sense! There’s no oxygen to breathe in outer space; no one can walk around on other planets. What does “play among the stars” even mean? But I kind of get the point when it says, “In other words, hold my hand.” Aha, that lets the gas out of the waffle: The song is trying to get across in a flashy way that it would be thrilling to hold someone by the hand. (The rest of it is a street crime in Doha.) The Beatles nailed the thing without the folderol: “I wanna hold your hand.” And “Why don’t we do it in the road? (No one will be watching us.)”
The folderol is the metaphorical bit, of course. It’s the stuffing of poetry, except poems don’t get to the “In other words” part. That’s left to the reader.
A useful rhythm can be extracted from “Fly Me to the Moon.” It clots in triplets, doublets and singlets:
LA-dee / da-dee / DA dee-da-dee / la-dee / da-dee / DUM dee-dee / dee-dee / la-dee-da dee-da-dee / da-dee / DUM dee / da / dee / DA DUM / DUM / DUM dee / DA / dee / da DUM-dee / DUM / DUM
Word doodles can be built using the rhythm as a template — but with subtle variations!
Bluebonnet kool-aid molasses puddled on the roads infrastructure bellyache on bumper-sticker toads jackknifed again play called foul sequestered turd darling kiss me
(Can Chat-GPT do this? I wonder!) The doodles can window gaze real poems that aren’t other-wordable, such as this one:
In this unveiling: a rain-stabbed / blackbird’s obsidian sigh rises // from meat-fragrant slits / in our speech patterns, // where a way of seeing home,/ smeared on walls with elbow blood, // is also a way of nozzling / bird caw to thieved land, // or scissoring fog-lobed night / into crescent moons, // while a bell’s deoxygenated moan / weeping for its lost reflection, // is hauled away on a horse-drawn hearse. (“Unveiling,” Sherwin Bitsui, Poetry, January 2023)*
*Note I quote the poem in its entirety. I’m culpably ignorant of the detail of “fair use” and all that. I may risk one of Poetry’s lawyers pistol-whipping my ass with a copyright clause. My excuse is that when this poem starts there’s no stopping it until the hearse. In other words, actually, that’s true of life. Don’t sue me.
For studying Arabic, Congruent (1) translations can be invaluable for working out particulars of the language’s behavior. Freewheeling translations are more pleasing to read, but can be “noisy” in a such a way as to create their own problems. Does an honorable man compel himself to endure suffering, as opposed to resigning himself to it?
The first verse of a well-known Arabic poem (2) says this:
“When a man’s honor was not (has not been) soiled by baseness, then every garment he puts on is beautiful.”
‘iḏā-l-mar’u lam yadnas mina-l-lu’mi ^irḏu-hu When the man [‘iḏā-l-mar’u] was not soiled [lam yadnas] from baseness [mina-l-lu’mi] his honor [^irḏu-hu]…fa-kullu ridā’in yartadī-hi jamīlu … then every garment [fa-kullu ridā’in] he puts it on [yartadī-hi] beautiful [jamīlu].
Here’s Arberry’s translation of the poem’s second verse:
And if he has never constrained himself to endure despite, then there is no way (for him) to (attain) goodly praise.
wa-‘in huwa lam yaḥmil ^alaA-n-nafs(i) ḍaim(a)-ha And if he [wa-‘in huwa] did not carry (has not carried) [lam yaḥmil] upon the (his) soul (self) [^alaA-n-nafs(i)] its injury [ḍaim(a)-hā]…fa-laisa ‘ilA ḥusn(i)-ṯ-ṯanā’(i) sabīl(u) … then there is not [fa-laisa] to the goodness of praise [‘ilA ḥusn(i)-ṯ-ṯanā’(i)] a way [sabīlu].
Arberry spends a footnote on the verse: “The usual meaning of ḍaim is ‘wrong, injustice’; here the intention is clearly ‘being unjust to oneself’ in the sense of compelling oneself to endure intolerable hardships.” One doesn’t normally take extra lengths to explain what he affirms to be clear. It’s not ḍaim that’s problematic (for me); it’s the verb phrase with ḥamal(a), “to carry.” An interpretation that leads to the forcing of oneself to suffer the “intolerable” doesn’t leap out from the Arabic.
In the Arabic, lam yaḥmil (“he did not carry”) is followed by preposition ^alaA, which can mean over, upon, above, against, to, on account of, and notwithstanding. Its object nafs doubles as “soul” and “self.” Noun ḍaim (“injury)” is the verb’s direct object, and its affixed possessive modifier -hā refers to nafs.
My breakdown of the line is this: “And if he did not carry (has not carried) upon the (his) soul (self) its injury, then there is not to the goodness of praise a way.”
I would have translated it like this: “And if he has not borne personal injury (patiently), then there’s no path (for him) to (merit) good praise.”
With guidance from Wehr (3) and Lane (4), and especially from Wright’s (5) discussion of ^alaA, I can see my way to a translation that approximates Arberry’s:
“And if he has not inured himself to personal injury, then there’s no path (for him) to (merit) good praise.”
Notes (1) Congruent (matches the source text fairly closely, with minimal liberties taken for readability); Omissive (suppresses elements of the source text without obvious justification); Expansive (adds interpretive structure or content not discernible in the source text but plausibly deriving from it); Inventive (carries the “expansive” element to a level not obviously supported by the source text); Transgressive (departs from the source text in a way that seems to betray the poem’s letter or spirit). (2) As-Samau’al, pp. 30-32 in A.J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students, Cambridge University Press, 1965. (3) Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, Edited by J Milton Cowan, Cornell University Press, 1966. (4) Edward William Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon, vols 6–8 ed. by Stanley Lane-Poole, 8 vols (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863–93). The entry for root ḥ-m-l. — fulān(un) lā yaḥmilu-ḍ-ḍaim(a) — “such a one refuses to bear, or submit to, and repels from himself, injury.” — ḥamala ^alaA nafs(i)-hi fīY-s-sair(i) — “He… tasked himself beyond his power, in journeying, or marching.” (5) W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, reprint by Simon Wallenberg Press, 2007, ii, p. 168. — yaḥmil(u)-l-‘insān(a) ^alaA-l-ẖair(i), “induces man to do well” means literally “carries him towards good,” Wright states. — ‘al-fiqh(u) ma^rifaẗ(u)-n-nafs(i) mā la-hā wa-mā ^alai-hā — Learning is the soul’s cognizance of what is for its good and for its hurt. — hamm(u)-l-‘āẖiraẗ(i) yaḥmil(u)-l-‘insān(a) ^alaA-l-ẖair(i) — Concern for the life to come induces man to do well (lit. carries him towards good). — mā ḥamal(a)-ka ^alaA hāḏihi-d-da^waA-l-bāṭilaẗ(i) — What induced you to set up this empty claim?
The “paypal mafia” photographed at Tosca in San Francisco, Oct, 2007. Back row from left: Jawed Karim, co-founder Youtube; Jeremy Stoppelman CEO Yelp; Andrew McCormack, managing partner Laiola Restaurant; Premal Shah, Pres of Kiva; 2nd row from left: Luke Nosek, managing partner The Founders Fund; Kenny Howery, managing partner The Founders Fund; David Sacks, CEO Geni and Room 9 Entertainment; Peter Thiel, CEO Clarium Capital and Founders Fund; Keith Rabois, VP BIz Dev at Slide and original Youtube Investor; Reid Hoffman, Founder Linkedin; Max Levchin, CEO Slide; Roelof Botha, partner Sequoia Capital; Russel Simmons, CTO and co-founder of Yelp. PHOTO BY ROBYN TWOMEY FOR FORTUNE (Jeffrey M. O’Brien, “The PayPal Mafia,” Fortune, 11-13-07)
“Last month, Mark Zuckerberg spent hours touting his love of jiujitsu, wrestling and UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is known for its hypermasculinity. Watching TV was not active enough, Mr. Zuckerberg said.
“Compared with social media, TV was ‘beta,’” [Mr. Zuckerberg said.]
(Erin Griffith, “Silicon Valley Slides Back Into ‘Bro’ Culture, New York Times, 9-24-22)
Postscript: This item is a carry-over from last year’s clogged blog log. I almost discarded it, as it gives me the uncomfortable feeling that in posting it I flirt with melting into the morass of vacuity and snark that already swamps the virtual airways. However, I carry the stubborn conviction that if we wee males don’t stop repressing and brutalizing the females of our species, the species will go down the toilet. On reflection, it seems worth the risk of seeming frivolous in order to document powerful pipsqueaks’ shallowness in support of a deadly earnest point.
EthicalDative 
A Good Clinician Knows Communication Fosters Wellness
My pendant whatnots had a fiery itch. I bashfully exposed them to the Dermatologist. “It’s excruciating,” I said. She cast her glance and looked up brightly. “Ah yes, I see what you mean,” she said.
I pressed for amplification. “It’s neuro-dermal,” she said. “I’m going to prescribe something to calm those nerves.”
She and I have a clinical past. She knows my sun-wrecked carapace, my sordid history of sleeveless, shorts-clad tennis played in ultraviolent radiation. Now she knows my whatnots. She has also twigged, over time, to my verbal pathology.
“Is it in the nature of a psycho-dermal epithelial conflagration, then?” I said. She nodded solemnly.
“And you’re going to prescribe a palliative tubal emollient with which to put down the revolution?”
Brisk nod again. She recited a regimen of application for the tube of goo, smiled expertly, and exited the examining room. Walking gingerly out of the clinic I felt better down there already. It helps to talk things out.
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