EthicalDative

Language Is a Weapon, Too. Keep It Sharp

Posted on May 29, 2022 by JMN

… Any honest accounting shows that more of the blame for these senseless rampages lays at the feet of bought-and-paid-for politicians who have blocked any reasonable gun control measures in order to retain their own hold on power.
(Kara Swisher, “In the Texas Rampage’s Wake, Social Media Can Reform Itself,” NYTimes, 5-26-22)

When we lay fit blame at the feet of the venal, the craven and the vulpine, the blame lies at their feet.

Language standards must stand their ground. They’re all we’ve got at the moment.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged grammar, journalism, language, Remember Uvalde-El Paso-Sutherland Springs, Texas | Leave a comment

To Whom It Concerns

Posted on May 27, 2022 by JMN

Hey, you. I’ll love you every kind of always.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged personal | Leave a comment

Crisis Antidote: Neighborhood Bookshops

Posted on May 27, 2022 by JMN

Cecilia Fanti, owner of the Céspedes bookstore, curates the books that appear on her shelves daily. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

The small shops are sprouting where their readers are, in residential areas, keeping alive the rich literary scene that made Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, one of the cities with the most bookstores per capita in the world.

Readers at the Malatesta bookstore in Parque Chas. Small neighborhood stores became lifelines under pandemic restrictions. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

“Argentina may always be in crisis but there are a lot of readers,” said Cristian De Nápoli, author and owner of Otras Orillas, a small bookstore in the Recoleta neighborhood. “And they aren’t just any readers, but readers who are always in search of what’s new.”

Nurit Kasztelan at her bookstore, Mi Casa, in Villa Crespo. Credit… Magali Druscovich for The New York Times.

(Daniel Politi, “Through a Recession and a Pandemic, the Book Business Is Thriving in Buenos Aires,” NYTimes, 5-26-22)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged culture, literature, miscellaneous, society, writing | 2 Comments

The Hardest French Word to Pronounce for a Texan

Posted on May 26, 2022 by JMN

“Bucked,” (detail), oil on canvas, 24×36 in. (JMN 2020)

L’aurore (the dawn)

“Low roar” is the best we can do.

Governor Abbott, born kids have a right to life, too.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged language, personal, Texas | Leave a comment

A Good Outing: Roger Angell (1920-2022)

Posted on May 24, 2022 by JMN

Roger Angell at his Manhattan home. He was sometimes referred to as baseball’s poet laureate, a title he rejected; he called himself a reporter. Credit… Patrick Andrade for The New York Times.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team,” he wrote in his book “Five Seasons” (1977). “What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”

The bit about “caring” serves a large dollop of sentiment. The seriousness which the spectatorship invests in professional sport looks deucedly perfervid from outside the circle of fandom.

I warm more to the Angell who said, “The stuff about the connection between baseball and American life, the ‘Field of Dreams’ thing, gives me a pain… I hated that movie.”

And the one who “once referred to Ron Darling as ‘the best right-handed part-Chinese Yale history major among the Mets starters,’” and wrote that Carl Yastrzemski, “like so many great hitters, has oddly protuberant eyes.”

(Dwight Garner, “Roger Angell, Who Wrote About Baseball With Passion, Dies at 101,” NYTimes, 5-20-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, personal, style, writing | Leave a comment

Bah-BOOM-BOOM Riff

Posted on May 22, 2022 by JMN

To Her

One’s home is her castle,
a refuge from hustle
and bustle of office,
the jostle of mobs;
nest in which refuge to seek
from apostles of doom
by the wherry that’s painted on wood
on a wall of the room.

Kitchen to mortar and pestle
the herbs for the grub
that she rustles;
nook where to nestle
in comfort and wrestle with issues,
indite her epistles,
ensconced at the trestle desk
cunningly made from a door,
delight in the whistle
of blackbirds, bristle of brushes,
the thistle-and-mistletoe theme
of the rug on the floor.

(JMN)

Posted in Anthology | Tagged doggerel, language, personal | 1 Comment

‘Drawings Are the Great Teachers’

Posted on May 20, 2022 by JMN

Henri Michaux, “Untitled,” a 1954 watercolor in “Take Three” of “Ways of Seeing” at the Drawing Center. Credit… Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris.

… The mark-making basic to drawing is the starting point of so much else: the development of written language, numbers, musical scores.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled,” 1965, in “Take One” and “Take Three” at the Drawing Center. Credit… Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Drawings are the great teachers; they educate the eye and make us more conscious of seeing. They present visual power, relatively unbuffered by materials or size.

Stanley Whitney, “Untitled,” 2020, exuberant grids of scribbled color in crayon and graphite, at the Drawing Center. Credit… Stanley Whitney.

(Roberta Smith, “Drawing, a Cure for the January Blahs,” NYTimes, 1-20-22)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged art, drawing, language | 4 Comments

They Put the ‘Art’ in Partnering

Posted on May 15, 2022 by JMN

Milton Avery’s “Blue Trees” (1945) at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., the first retrospective exhibition of this American modernist painter in the United States in 40 years. Credit… Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Sally Michel (1902-2003) was 17 years his junior when she married Milton Avery (1885-1965) in 1926. A painter herself, she provided income as a freelance illustrator for 30 years while he painted full time. He never had a studio, and worked in their living room.

In Milton Avery’s “Bus Ride” (1941), on view at Yares Art, the Avery family is pictured on an Amsterdam Avenue bus. Credit… Milton Avery Trust and Yares Art/Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.

The view that Avery worked for decades to achieve a final blast of brilliance seems as antediluvian as the idea that he worked alone in a style that overpowered his wife’s work. First of all, they were more or less joined at the hip, working side by side, looking at and talking about art, for 40 years. As other art historians have suggested, it may be impossible to think of their style as anything but collaborative, especially since Michel was an illustrator, adept at abbreviating forms.

Sally Michel’s “Mother and Son” (1975) at D. Wigmore Fine Art. Her paintings, our critic says, “have a sharpness of composition and a boldness of color that gives them their own sense of weight, tension and emotional force.” Credit… Milton Avery Trust/Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY.

(Roberta Smith, “A Singular American Painter and His Perennially Disregarded Wife,” NYTimes, 5-12-22)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged art, language, painting | 2 Comments

Cry the Belovèd Reader

Posted on May 10, 2022 by JMN

“Mandible Wishbone Solvent” by Asiya Wadud (Poetry, March 2022). Pass 3 of 3.

Previous comment:

https://ethicaldative.com/2022/04/25/mandible-wishbone-solvent-pass-1-of-3/
https://ethicaldative.com/2022/05/01/mandible-wishbone-solvent-pass-2-of-3/

You. Be. Here. It’s an affirming imperative to exist, or be situate, in the speaker’s space-time. It’s addressed to “tilt” — twice “tender” now — and angled vertically to a plane christened “unearth,” or else one required to perform an act of unearth-ing, understood venturesomely as slipping Earth’s bond. The text pivots here as elsewhere on function-fluid diction in blurred contexts.

The reader has a blue-sky moment: A rocket breaking free of terrestrial gravity blazes its way towards a far trajectory. Gain of height thins blue atmosphere to a vanishing wake. Land and sea resolve into map-like features. It’s all a function of the “scant excess” of mad tilt, wrapped in whatever that “film” is. Such a sweet, severe angle would be “remiss in skies,” aeronautically delinquent for earthbound flight.

And to what end? “To wrest time.” Wresting is an act of forceful seizure. All life yanks itself from the jaws of death from one moment to the next, grabbing bits of time. Those “brimmed solvents,” the carbon syrups milked from ancient sediments on which futures for too long have been staked and stoked, are bested in promise by what “gives more” for snatching increments of futurity, which is …

And the reader’s meditation collapses. In the final analysis the text stands its ground, enclosed in its film, true only to its own designs. The reader has shaken his mind’s fist at it saying, You. Be. Clear. It has stayed frosty. It doesn’t give a shit for his demands. But when he averted his gaze in disgust, his eye had caught movement peripherally; the text made him look back. A loop was entered: attraction and repulsion went to war.

At length the reader exited the loop by ceding something — maybe a bit of complacency. Surrender feels not all good and not all bad. The reader makes a thing of his squabbles with the text. What you think isn’t what I wrote, says the poet. The reader responds, But you triggered a striving. You induced in me a commitment to be baffled for a time. And the reader is grateful for her text. He keeps whatever it wrested from him. It’s personal now.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged grammar, language, lexicon, personal, poetry, reading, rhetoric, syntax, translation | 1 Comment

In Praise of Walls

Posted on May 8, 2022 by JMN

I’ve admired artist Outside Authority’s (www.outsideauthor.wordpress.com) lyrical renderings of UK churches and churchyards for some time. It’s stimulating to see a similar devotion to these spaces reflected in this Guardian article.

Wildflowers among the graves at St Pancras church, Plymouth. Less frequent mowing of grass in churchyards improves biodiversity enormously.

“Eight hundred years ago, pagan sites – springs, wells or woodland glades – had Christian churches built on top of them… Around the church is an area – the litten – where people are buried. A couple of hundred years later, somebody decided that all churches should have a wall placed around them. Since then, they’ve never been ploughed, treated with chemicals or anything like that. So you have this amazing genetic bank, which originated in whatever that habitat was 800 years ago, just sat there – and it’s still there.”
David Curry of the “Living Churchyards” project

An old yew at the entrance to St Pancras church, Plymouth.

(Alexander Turner, “God’s own gardens: why churchyards are some of our wildest nature sites,” theguardian.com, 5-6-22)

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged art, miscellaneous, painting, personal | 2 Comments