Sarah Wrote That | language

veblenesquegorge:

“To really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female.”

-Caitlin Flanagan, in The Atlantic

No. Didion is one of the few female writers that has crossover gender appeal. I know a number of males who adore her. Something that probably can’t be said of Caitlin Flanagan.

Reading Flanagan’s piece—twice—I had the unnerving sensation of being kept late at the end of a party by someone determined to get in the last word long after the drinks have run out and the person she was arguing with, or wanted us to see her arguing with, has left for home. Mixing textual analysis with anecdote, the piece blurs the distinction between Didion’s reception in different eras, her social presence (mainly in the ’60s and ’70s), and her writing itself. A feat, to encompass the object of your gaze in such qualified admiration as to narrow the circle of her appreciation and claim her for we few, we mournful few, who know what to make of her.

But the interpretations of Didion’s words—not of Didion the social figure, which I can’t affirm or dispute—seem to me as off as the characterization of those words’ appeal (at least their later appeal).

Read on →

Reblogged from A Veblenesque Gorge

peterfeld:

This is going to be the most fun election of my entire life.

Also, that Times caption: best dangling modifier ever? Unless Newt’s speeches and interviews are capable of electromagnetic pulses; then we really are doomed.

Reblogged from think locally act globally

"a huge, irrational, metaphysical Canada"

- Russian blogger Aleksei Navalny, describing his hope for a future Russia (tens of thousands protested today).

andrewgraham:

“NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview. So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.”

— GOP Objects To ‘Millionaires Surtax’; Millionaires We Found? Not So Much (via Tumble DC 25)

I’m thrilled NPR did this piece, but I wish they’d been more systematic—maybe they have been elsewhere—and interviewed at least one tax expert and somehow more directly fact-checked this:

The [GOP] argument is that many small-business owners report company profits on their individual taxes because of the way their businesses are structured.

Summarizing a misstatement lends it an air of validity, of objectivity, that anecdotal rejoinders don’t entirely dispel.

Read on →

Reblogged from this might not hurt, but close your eyes anyways

So what’s it like in Ceylon? I’d much rather go to Mars or the Moon.

tinglealley:

Near the end of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer mentions a D.H. Lawrence letter that he describes as Lawrence’s “grouchiest letter ever - the grouchiest letter ever?” and a “masterpiece” of irritability. Dyer quotes choice bits from the letter; but if you were ever curious about how the whole thing read, here it is. I hunted it up at the library a while back. It was written to Lawrence’s friend Earl Brewster in 1921, the same year this photo of him and Frieda was taken. (Photo via.)

To E.H. Brewster, from Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, 2 November 1921

Dear Brewster: Yours and Achsah’s from beyond Crete received today: and by coincidence, one from Alpha. So the family voice was uplifted in one strain on this feast-day of All-Souls. Anyhow you’ve got as far as Port Said.

No, I don’t understand a bit what you mean about rightness and about relationships and about the world. Damn the world, anyhow. And I have ‘understanding’ people, and I hate more still to be understood. Damn understanding more than anything. I refuse to understand you. Therefore you can say what you like, without a qualm, and never bother to alter it. I shan’t understand.

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I’m always amazed by how Lawrence’s sentences land perfectly, and yet are totally natural, uncrafted-seeming and unaffected. Such an elemental writer. And I love this:

Is everybody there as beshitten as here? I’ll bet they are.

Reblogged from Tingle Alley

Should I apostrophize?

love, the English teachers of America.

ewilcox answered your question: Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary

“The town was asleep. The pillars of the marketplace stretched their long shadows out. The whole earth was grey, like a summer night.”

Yes! I love the inversion of scale in your last sentence, the way “a summer night” makes “the whole earth” extend.

Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary →

Lydia Davis’ piece in the current Paris Review makes me even more excited to finally read her translation of Madame Bovary, and pleased that my delay means getting the revisions in the paperback edition.

One example she cites of the translator’s difficulty is:

Le bourg était endormi. Les piliers des halles allongeaient de grandes ombres. La terre était toute grise, comme par une nuit d’été.

Which she translates as:

The town was asleep. The pillars in the marketplace cast long shadows. The earth was grey, as on a summer night.

and an earlier translator, Steegmuller, “amplified,” as she says, to:

The town was asleep. The pillars of the market cast long shadows, and the pallor of the road in the moonlight gave the effect of a summer night.

Steegmuller’s seems to me an entirely different spirit, excessively detailed and too obviously trying to be picturesque, ending up as rhythmically clumsy, and introducing a heavy authorial hand by replacing Flaubert’s light, sentence-ending simile with a fussy direction how to interpret the just-given description (the pallor that wasn’t even in the original).

I’m no doubt revealing the narrow limits of my French idiom, but I miss “allongeaient” (“lengthened,” “elongated”) in the English. Breaking it into verb + adj works, but is less active. English, however, has no real equivalent to “grande”; “big” would be too casual, “great” might work but has a lofty sound, and the reflexive implication of “de” (whose shadows? The pillars’) is something we can’t do as deftly:

The town was asleep. The market pillars lengthened [their] long shadows. The earth was all greyed, as by a summer night.

“Par” has so many possible translations. The direction of Flaubert’s thought here seems to me to be imparting volition to inanimate things, but how would that read, coming across it in context? How would you translate it?

Living and Loving Underground in Iran →

Language changes so quickly, reflecting, shading eras. The Hour’s Abi Morgan let anachronisms, or Americanisms such as “I’m a fan of yours,” slip into her 1950s Britain; Circumstance writer/director Maryam Keshavarz experienced the inverse with her tale of underground Iran:

Though the main actors are all fluent in Persian, it is of a variety “frozen in time,” as Ms. Kazemy put it, from the era of the shah, and so a dialogue coach was brought in.

To update her vocabulary, “I would hang out with Iranians in my town, many of whom are recent immigrants,” Ms. Boosheri recalled, “and I couldn’t keep up with them. They call each other ‘bro,’ and they would laugh when I talked. They would say, ‘You speak so by the book,’ or ‘You speak like an old person.’ ”

[The Hour article via Emma Garman via Maud Newton]

“Does it matter that so many of the stories we tell take place in some ecological make-believe, where plants and animals are treated as [...] interchangeable ciphers for conveying life lessons?” →

In Design Observer, Adelheid Fischer wonders about the consequences of how comfortable we are with scientific ignorance:

in a culture where most Americans now hunt and gather in the food aisles of the local Safeway, what’s the point of knowing the difference between a hawk and a nighthawk? Confuse the two, and nobody gets hurt.

Or do they?

[…]

Names are the alphabetic fragments with which we build a language of knowing. And knowing opens up the possibility of caring, the root of which is the Old English cearu, which means to guard or watch, “to trouble oneself.” In the face of the planetary holocaust, troubling ourselves is nothing short of an ethical charge. For writers it means, at the very least, taking the time to get the ecological details right on the page, differentiating a hawk from a nighthawk. It means swearing a pledge of allegiance to the particulars of the world […]

How we use words to portray the world in acts of imagination is a serious matter. Metaphors have the power to structure attitudes that express themselves in actions. The verses from Matthew encourage us to believe that the birds of the air live by virtue of a kind of bottomless birdfeeder of providence. In reality, they survive using exquisite algorithms that have been honed through millennia of trial and error here on earth.

10 Jun 2011 10:35