EthicalDative

The Camera Has Spoken. It’s My Turn

Posted on January 5, 2022 by JMN

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And out comes a tenderly belabored prospect of dilapidation. Looking at a photograph I didn’t take, I painted a quaint tranche of unleveled-up Britain from the plein air of the shed I inhabit. Painting my two-bit canvases from photos lets … Continue reading →

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‘The Past Stretched Before Us’

Posted on January 2, 2022 by JMN

I encountered the following expression in my Arabic reference grammar: May you be ransomed by my soul!

[**fudiyta bi-nafsiy**] *puisse-tu être racheté par mon âme!* *(formule de politesse à l’époque classique)* — “Grammaire de l’Arabe Classique,” R. Blachère et M. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 1952, p. 333.

Arabic can be sublimely terse and florid in the same breath. Blachere’s example shows optative use of the perfect tense instancing how the preposition bi- can introduce the real subject of a passive verb; it’s said to be a formula of courtesy from the classical era. As I checked dictionary meanings for the root f-d-y used in the phrase, my eye passed over phrases illustrating meanings for a different root f-D-D. One of them was the following:

[**faDDa bakArata-hA**] *to deflower a girl* — “Hans Wehr: A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic,” ed. J Milton Cowan, 1966.

Boom — discordance blossoms. The polyvalence of root f-D-D starts at break open and passes through pry, force, undo, pierce. Its complement, from root b-k-r, means virginity.

Dictionaries preserve words somewhat like sediments preserve fossils. Both teach a lot about what has gone before. Deflower may give way to rape in future dictionaries, but that’s contingent on woman’s lot improving outside language, and the past weighs heavily against it.

In her poem “The Garden” Louise Glück writes: … the past, as always, stretched before us, / still, complex, impenetrable.

The comma after still makes it describe the antecedent past; the past is still, i.e., static, unmoving, intransigent. Also complex and impenetrable.

She continues: How long did we lie there / as, arm and arm in their cloaks of feathers, / the gods walked down / from the mountains we built for them?

The verse asserts correlations that elude me; it hints perhaps at the speaker’s rueing in hindsight a supine cluelessness in respect to a vital mystery; interrogating reverence lavished on dashed idols; voicing disillusionment over a failure to perceive cynical affectation, regret at being duped by feigned camaraderie. The possibilities for misperception of the poet’s intention are boundless, but what dwells immutable for now is deflowered girls staring us in the face.

Posted in Anthology, Commentary | Tagged language, personal, reading, translation | Leave a comment

The Struggle to Lose Control

Posted on January 1, 2022 by JMN

To All a Good New Year!

Audrey Petty describes her first one-on-one conference with her poetry teacher Agha Shahid Ali at the University of Massachusetts. After she read her draft to him, he reviewed it and said, “What if you turned this poem around?” She proceeded to invert the lines.

Reading my writing backward felt like abracadabra as the poem revealed something stranger, truer, more distilled in reverse. Language alchemized as the words loosened themselves from my intention. The poem became more of a poem.
From her essay “Revolving in Your Hand,” Poetry, February 2021.

Petty helps me see how I may hobble myself — in words and in pictures — by oversteering toward wished-for outcomes or banal conceits. Maybe my creations would travel further if I could loosen the media (and self) from my intention.

As the calendar flips over, resolution is on the verge of being made: Dare to see more backwards and upside down.

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Don’t Just Stand There. Squint

Posted on December 29, 2021 by JMN

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My approach to Clint is to grace him with a mighty hat and a bodacious cheroot. Outside the frame he’s packing heat, of course. Clint Eastwood personifies a school of movie acting whose slogan is “Don’t just do something. Stand … Continue reading →

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‘Confound, Torment, Swallow Us Whole’

Posted on December 26, 2021 by JMN

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

To write, first and foremost, is to choose the words to tell a story, whereas to translate is to evaluate, acutely, each word an author chooses.

Thus starts Jhumpa Lahiri’s essay drawn from the afterword of her translation of “Trust” by Italian novelist Domenico Starnone. Through the prism of a translator’s eye, Lahiri noticed how frequently the Italian word invece (“instead”) appeared in the novel.

Invece invites one thing to substitute for another… I now believe that this everyday Italian adverb is the metaphorical underpinning of Starnone’s novel… “Trust” probes and prioritizes substitution… Invece, a trigger for substitution, is a metaphor for translation itself.

Lahiri’s wide-ranging discussion of the craft of translation includes this assessment:

… Language (or, rather, the combination of language and human usage) is impossible to comprehend at face value. We must enter, instead, into a more profound relationship with words; we must descend with them to a deeper realm, uncovering layers of alternatives. The only way to even begin to understand language is to love it so much that we allow it to confound us, to torment us, until it threatens to swallow us whole.
(Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Book That Taught Me What Translation Was,” The New Yorker, 11-6-2021)

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The Moons of Poesis

Posted on December 25, 2021 by JMN

Cover design by Gretchen Achilles. Cover art: “Saturn,” from a 1985 mezzotint by the artist Vija Celmins.

When reading poetry I try to think like astronomers. They are a doughty lot, trucking with the unexpected, stalking questions that defy asking.

“What I really hope for is something we don’t expect” [John Mather, Goddard Space Flight Center, on what he’s looking forward to studying with the James Webb telescope]… “The [Webb] telescope was built to answer questions we didn’t know we had.” [Klaus Pontoppidan, astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute].
(Dennis Overbye, “Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins,” NYTimes, 12-20-21)

“The universe is queerer than we can suppose,” said Arthur Eddington.

I encounter poetry that emits a waveform outside my sensory range. It triggers an attraction-repulsion quandary. Do I try to sharpen my sensors and orbit it to pick up signals? Or do I blow past it and keep prowling for detectible mass and gravity?

I’m currently in orbit around Louise Glück.

… Waveside, beside earth’s edge, / Before the toward-death cartwheel of the sun, / I dreamed I was afraid and through the din / Of birds, the din, the hurricane of parting sedge / Came to the danger lull. / The white weeds, white waves’ white / Scalps dissolve in the obliterating light. / And only I, Shadrach, come back alive and well.
(From “The Inlet,” in “Louise Glück: Poems 1962-2012”)

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Paula Rego Likes to Work

Posted on December 22, 2021 by JMN

“Possession I,” from 2004. Art work © Paula Rego / Courtesy Collection Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea.

Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego (b. 1935) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She lives in the UK.

Quotable saying: “Doing work, that is to say, drawing, is an erotic activity.”

Anna Russell writes that the urgency of Rego’s work “in all its savage, tactile vitality” is keenly apparent in her large pastel portraits.

The Pillowman,” from 2004. Art work © Paula Rego.

After years of collage, oil paint, and acrylic, switching to pastel was a revelation. (She has called the stick “fiercer, much more aggressive” than the brush.)
(Anna Russell, “The Fury and Mischief of Paula Rego,” The New Yorker, 7-7-21)

I’m intrigued by the skewed angles in both paintings; the prominence of the sofa in “Possession I”; that of weirdly inexplicable objects and detail in “The Pillowman.” Is the latter a surreal takeoff on descent from the cross?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged art, drawing, language, painting | 5 Comments

Kafka’s Drawing Isn’t Kafkaesque!

Posted on December 19, 2021 by JMN

Drawing of a whip-wielding jockey on a horse vaulting over an obstacle. Kafka was deeply interested in art while studying law at university in Prague. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

A trove of drawings by Franz Kafka was brought to light in 2019. They share, says Philip Oltermann, features with paintings Kafka describes in his fiction: “… men riding flying buckets, singing mice and creatures made of household detritus… dream-like tales [which] often seem to defy the visual imagination of his readers.”

Drawing of a male figure, entitled “The Dancer” by Kafka’s executor Max Brod. The drawings reveal humour and lightness in the author. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

Oltermann quotes philosopher Judith Butler’s comment “that Kafka’s creations often become harder to visualise the more detail he describes them in,” such as a creature that looks “like a flat star-shaped spool for thread.” Another creature called Odradek, writes Butler, “is described in detail but that description yields no fixed image… Readers have sought in vain to draw Odradek, its bits of multicoloured thread, its spool, crossbar, star, and rod.”

Drawing of a horse and rider. Kafka had instructed his friend, Max Brod, to burn the drawings and his manuscripts after his death. Photograph: Ardon Bar-Hama.

If Kafka’s drawings were not “Kafkaesque,” his antipathy to illustrating his writing does seem so. He begged his editor “never to visualise his most famous creation. ‘The insect is not to be drawn,’ he stipulated in a 1915 letter about the cover of Metamorphosis. ‘It is not even to be seen from a distance.’”

(Philip Oltermann, “Franz Kafka drawings reveal ‘sunny’ side to bleak Bohemian novelist,” theguardian.com, 10-29-21)

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Never Send to Know for Whom the Tale’s Told

Posted on December 16, 2021 by JMN

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/12/09/last-call-for-fomalhaut/)

Did the ancient Texans practice cannibalism? The jury’s out on the matter. It’s possible they gorged on animals rather than human flesh. Data fracking in the Huntsville Shale encountered coprolites of an extinct bovine species — possibly a food source.

Those same sediments yielded human residues showing signs of poisoning. Some anthropologists posit a cult of human sacrifice; others theorize miscreants may have been executed with the poison. In one of history’s many happy twists, analysis of the toxic residues by Isthmian paleontologists furnished a crude chemical blueprint for the marvel that became Texas cologne. The unlikely legacy of a backward culture that burned and bartered carbon syrups near a nameless gulf eons ago jumpstarted the Isthmian toxicology industry, backbone of the duchy’s economy.

I hear you whispering, “What became of Siddhartha Huff?” As we know, Sidd threw his expendable dupe Claw Hammer under the bus. Sidd thus narrowly escaped detection for his ruse to hack Fort Zuckerberg during the Lunation Gala to nick non-fungible hormone tokens for his transition. Chastened and demoralized, Sidd resigned himself to a Rhipidistian decadence frittered away in gilded squalor and frolicky doldrums on sterile rivieras aboard morally vacant yachts.

The best laid plans can come a cropper, however. An uprising led by the ascendant Beni Hammer clobbered the autocracy, upending Sidd’s future such as it was, and rendering Isthmia as we know it unknowable.

~ THE END ~

Posted in Anthology | Tagged Branded Figments, humor, satire | 4 Comments

Mean or Not, It’s a Feat

Posted on December 12, 2021 by JMN

Poetry, December 2021. Cover art by Haein Kim/Canvas.

Can a poem hurt the reader into glimpsing its cargo? The poem discussed is ‘From “Banana [ ],”’ Poetry, December 2021, by Paul Hlava Ceballos.

I encounter poetry I perceive to be all kinds of icky: cryptic, elliptic, hierophantic, delphic, hermetic, jesuitic, typographic, (occasionally ironic); also oblique, discontinuous, nondescript, arbitrary, formless, aimless, obtuse, aleatory, taunting, unforthcoming, inchoate, withholding, slangy, out of reach; a shrill small thing, a large no thing, or a some thing between.

Reading such poems has for me the under-wallop of picking up a stickle of glub stuck to a rugosity, sliding fingerishly over its crigginess, finding no tactible sally for the poesy squat but to drip the bobbit where it lagged, step over its void sprockets, and bumble griffishly along my starry-idle flustered way.

How does that make me feel? It feels like being told to stop feeling with my head. To read harder. To locate my heart’s cockles. Does it have cockles?

A poem that is somehow about bananas, or that is referentially involved with bananas, or that is inflamed thematically by bananas, may have taught me a lesson.

Arrogant, indulgent, outlandish, glib, provoking, insulting, flagrant and intolerable was how it loomed. Its first 3 pages have a skittering of verbiage inhabiting hyper-space.

Then it settles into a one-hundred-fifty-line banana blitzkrieg:

… to banana / be banana / a banana / domesticated banana / object banana / overripe banana…

At this point, bent solely on reaching the end as soon as possible, I ceased reading aloud and shifted into scan mode. Then I realized, reading against the grain, that a vertical sequence of quasi-utterances emerged:

to…be…a…domesticated…object…overripe…as…an…empire… / what…manufactured…nanostructure…prevents…grace…blossoming

These are not necessarily jejune utterances. They are sort of poetic. Does the poem succeed in some way on its own terms by rubbing me so wrong that I give up on it midway in disgust? Then having forced me into the very expedient I took, reduce me to glimpsing strands of message? If I dwell rosetta-stonishly on the poem, might I perceive they twist into a thread? Is it worth the trouble? Should I not, after all, drip the bobbit where it lagged?

Posted in Anthology, Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, personal, poetry | Leave a comment