The Russians Are Coming!

I am not big on the "Russian interference" story currently wafting about in the mainstream Democratic firmament of this country. Apart from the fact that the whole story smells a bit, its perspective is myopic. Attempts by Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis and others to influence American politics by duplicitous means are neither new nor news. The US has tried to influence elections even in recent years, such as in Israel and Palestine. That Russia made such a move is neither surprising nor cause for outrage, even leaving aside our long history of toppling the democratically elected leadership of other countries.

Russia making corrosive moves to influence American politics is not news, and American outrage over it is a combination of sheer hypocrisy and willful ignorance.

The reason Russia may have been able to interfere and corrode the process so successfully is because the American information system had already been poisoned by people like Murdoch and the Kochs, along with a heaping helping from a Democratic Party with unbridled contempt for its own electorate, and all the other stuff I never tire of rambling about.

The Russians may be shitting in our sewer but they ain’t the ones that stank it up. The way in which this line of thought is being put about now is sometimes outright loony. For example, the assertions that the US has a “puppet government run from Moscow” which I have seen more than once today.

It shouldn’t take a nanosecond's thought to see that, in a country like the US, the idea that “evil foreigners are responsible for my country’s problems” is a recipe for all manner of idiocy and eventual nastiness. I have lived in countries where popular political culture is laden with unreasoned paranoia about “foreign agents.” Now, we are nowhere near there. Yet. But some of this stuff I’m seeing about how “the Russians are behind it” has begun to ring some familiar alarm bells. 

Free Elections for Wakanda

Finally saw Black Panther. My immediate impression: ok that was a nice romp, but is Wakanda ever going to have free elections? Do they have a free press? In fact, have they any social thought or political philosophy beyond autocratic rule justified by ritual bloodsport.

The answer to the latter question is yes. In the comic books we learn that it is a militaristic police state with a powerful secret police called the Hatut Zeraze. This is the advanced society of wonders that we are supposed to be wowed by.

I really could have done without the celebration of race-thinking, which made me cringe. The obsession with blood and ancestry, the mysticizing mumbo-jumbo, and the whole authoritarian wankfest were all like Tolkien at his most irritating.

The feelgood pitch to black American fantasies about Africa, and the dream of the Great Uncolonized was not quite as tiresome as I feared it would be. But tiresome it was. I wonder if Shaft stopped in Wakanda while he was in Africa, or if Wakandans tell horror stories about the vampire named Blacula.

Black Panther is blaxploitation's gritty reboot. And what it says about the present moment is quite chilling. Notwithstanding the little flirtation about how we're all one human tribe and all, it seems like the kind of movie you would make if you wanted to prove a bet that a fascist political aesthetic could be made appealing to any demographic as long as you package it properly.

I did really enjoy the spectacle of it. The jokes were funny. There were a couple turns that I did not expect. There are moments that I think might have moved me more if so much else hadn't put me off. Killmonger's suicide might have been tragic, had he not been such a laughable cartoon to begin with that I felt nothing but relief when he finally put himself out of my misery.

Mostly it was a by-the-numbers film about charismatic supermen, with a bit of moral ambiguity pasted on its ass. And we loves us a charismatic superman, lawdy yes we does. Übermensch, 2020! Make Wakanda Great Again!

The left corner of the internet continues to make Much Ado about the nothing of this live-action cartoon. As if it were some kind of political breakthrough or cultural achievement. It all reminds me of that Adolph Reed Jr. quote:

Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. It’s the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities. And that project shares capitalism’s ideological tendency to obscure race’s foundations, as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of “cultural politics” are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They don’t see the industry’s imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This sort of ‘politics of representation’ is no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat.

Pope Pourri

Pope Francis is calling fake news satanic and saying that it goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

Oh please.

In an age when Israeli archaeologists have shown that the Jews were never slaves in Egypt and that Joshua’s conquests never happened, this is like watching Dane Cook making jokes about Carrot Top.

Not to beat a dead cliché, but I automatically suspect news to be fake if it involves talking snakes, magic fruit, virgin births and dead people coming back to life.

But then, the Vatican’s developmental timeline is a slow one. It took them until 1965 to decide that the news of Jewish Deicide was fake.

I Will Put Chaos Into 十四行詩: A Thought On The Chinese Sonnet

I've noticed something about Chinese sonnets. As is often the case with sonnets, the Chinese sonnet is a marked genre, in that the choice of form implies certain things about what content may or may not be appropriate to it. Unlike the Medieval and Renaissance Italian sonnet, it is not marked as amorous. Unlike the medieval Hebrew sonnet it is not marked as "satirical." Unlike Western European sonnets generally, it is not marked as traditional at all.

Rather, it appears to be marked as slightly "experimental" like the ghazal in German or English. It seems to offer the Chinese poet in the first instance a space to engage in poetic behavior that is metrically structured and rhymed, and quite possibly prosodically complex (using Wen Yiduo's Sishui meter for example) but not traditional. To Chinese Republican poets who were fond of patterned verse, it must have offered an option that wouldn't seem fusty and out of date. On the contrary, the Chinese sonnet seems to be where the poet is allowed to do unexpected or even nonsequitous things. There is a sense in which the real English analogue to Zheng Min writing a sonnet about a Renoir painting is not an English sonnet about same, but rather something like Keith Holyoak experimenting with Chinese prosody, writing regulated verse in English about his time in Tibet, or English "old style" verse about his time with his father.

It seems a worthwhile question because translating the Chinese sonnets of Feng Zhi, Zheng Min, Pian Zhilin etc. as English sonnets, as the kind of sonnets that might be written by modern practitioners such as Kate Light or even Willis Barnstone (or even by Yeats or Larkin or Rilke) seems to miss something. Sometimes it is almost too easy to do. Feng can often be turned into an English that sounds like a good Rilke translation. But Rilke took the sonnet form for granted in a way that Feng could not have.

Feng with his wish to "hold what cannot be held" in the confines of a sonnet is reminiscent of Millay's declaration that "I will put chaos into fourteen lines." But it is Feng who knows that chaos will always escape in the end, and can be only caught in a moment's motion, as wind in a weathervane which is only there at all because it is not at all held there.

I try to think of a model for what Chinese sonnetry in English should sound like and sound with. I take it for granted that there is no perfect option. There never is in any but the most tedious and dry of translation work. Any kind of translation that is worth doing for reasons beyond the narrowly utilitarian, beyond the barest of informational need, will require significant compromise.

But what compromise should there be? The easy thing would be to treat Chinese sonnets like English sonnets. An even easier thing would be to translate Chinese sonnets into free verse. Both seem defensible for different reasons, and to different degrees. But maybe there is something more to be done. A different kind of English rhyming suited to the potential and effect of the 13-track rhymes used by so many modern Chinese poets. Assonance combined with slight consonance combined with full rhyme, maybe, would reduce the contrasting rhyme categories sufficiently. Also, repetition of the rhyme across sestet and octave — as Chinese sonneteers often do — could do interesting things in English. All of which has been done by experimental sonneteers in English of the Larkin/Lowell castes.

I ought to read more about the Chinese sonnet.

When I first started to read Modern Chinese poets using the 13 rhymes of Peking opera, it seemed cheap in a way. I thought: Really? You need all your syllable-codas shoehorned into just thirteen categories? What, rhyming in Standard Mandarin just not easy enough? I almost want to ask "How does this not take all the fun out of it?" but that is actually a stupid question. Still, it seems like Chinese went into rebound not just from the traditional literary language but from everything that went with it, including the tedious discussions of what does and doesn't count as a rhyme (and for what purpose) and just said "ah, fuck it" when it came time to assimilate rhymed forms like this newfangled sonnet thingy.

Anyway, here's an idea:

十四行诗　　　　　　　　　Sonnet
馮至　　　　　　　　　　　Feng Zhi

從一片氾濫無形的水裡，　　To freely overflowing formless water
取水人取來橢圓的一瓶，　　The water-bearer brings an oval jar
這點水就得到一個定型；　　Thus giving definite form to water's matter.
看，在秋風裡飄揚的風旗，　Look! The windvane flutters in Fall air.

它把住些把不住的事體，　　It holds that which cannot be held at all.
讓遠方的光、遠方的黑夜　　Let some of the far dark, the distant light,
和些遠方的草木的榮謝，　　The glory and decay of leaves in Fall
還有個奔向遠方的心意，　　And the mind launching toward the infinite

都保留一些在這面旗上。　　Be captured on that banner-vane this way.
我們空空聽過一夜風聲，　　In vain we've listened to wind sough all night
空看了一天的草黃葉紅，　　Watched grass go yellow and leaves grow red all day.

向何處安排我們的思想？　　How now to focus, hold our thoughts aright?
但願這些詩像一面風旗　　　These verses be a windvane filled with Fall,
把住一些把不住的事體。　　To hold some of what can't be held at all.

De Natura Peiorum

Christians have historically had one literary disadvantage against Roman Polytheists. To be a Christian — a good one anyway — it has until recently been broadly held that one must believe at least certain parts of Christian mythology to be true. (Not all Christians do or ever have, to be sure.) Greek and Roman polytheists of the 1st centuries BC and AD, though, suffered no such problem, and were free to take their mythologies less seriously and more creatively.

Romans of the late Republic and early Empire had no dearth of myths that they genuinely entertained as true, such as that of Romulus and Remus. It was a deeply superstitious society in many respects. Most believed in the supernatural to one degree or another, and even skeptics like Cicero set great social value on religious observance and ritual.

But many of the mythological trappings of Roman literature were myths almost as much to Romans as they are to us. The divine council, where gods behave like human beings (complete with having different rooms on Olympus where they hide, consort, conspire, screw each other, screw with each other, screw each other over, and act screwy with each other) is a Greek idea, probably much inspired by the Divine Councils of Near Eastern religions. Much else of the lore-store we associate with "Roman Mythology" was not widely believed in either. The "world-stream" Ōceanus encircling all the world (personified as a Titan) was not just false but obviously so to Romans of the day who knew, no less than you do, that the earth was spherical. During Rome's classical period, very few, in Greek or Latin, had entertained a flat earth cosmology for half a millennium or so. One such person is Lucretius, who found a spherical earth preposterous mostly because he had no idea what gravity was. (St. John Chrysostom, when he claimed that one could not be a Christian unless one believed in a flat earth, was committing a rank embarrassment for a literate Greek speaker.)

Nor did Romans seem to see much reason to care about such things. Not exactly. As a rule, religion for Romans was of social, not psychological or philosophical, importance. What you believed was not so important as what you did, whom you did it with, and whom you did it for. This is why Judaism could be tolerated more easily than Christianity once it caught on, and why Druids in particular were hunted down and persecuted not for beliefs about the cosmos but for having supposedly incited people to disobey the Senate.

This idea was inherited and — with some qualifications — maintained by many Christian emperors before Justinian. Rulers such as Constantine seem also to have cared less about the contents of anybody's head than about public ritual and public speech.

Suffice it to say that the idea of Roman "pagans" stubbornly clinging to their childish beliefs in childish gods who sit on a mountain somewhere is a Christian conceit. Intellectuals such as Cicero opined that only children and ignoramuses actually believed that these things and beings were literally real. There is all sorts of evidence of wide-spread skepticism, or agnosis, about the reality of the place the Greeks called Hades. Later sources are on record insisting on the metaphorical or monistically symbolic nature of mythological accounts. This was not so much a problem for Romans, for whom matters of what we call "faith" (a non-concept for Mediterranean polytheists) did not form the basis for social order or morality.

Traditional Greek lore did, though, form an appealing backdrop for literature and the visual arts. It is above all else here — in art forms patronized and practiced by an often quite skeptical elite — that celestial matters are taken over most fully from the Greece of five centuries earlier, and where Roman gods are most fully identified with Greek ones (or behave in other ways irreconcilable with Roman religion). This is not all that strange. Most English-speakers no longer believe in magic, werwolves, vampires, witchcraft, dragons, mermaids, haunted houses, fairies, gnomes, elves or unicorns either, and yet happily make and watch movies set in worlds where these things are real, just as they enjoy films about zombies, voodoo, genies and other fantastical or supernatural elements unknown to them until recently. Myths that many English-speakers still believe, or want to believe, are another matter. It is a truism of Near Eastern Archaeology that the Jewish Exodus out of Egypt and Joshua's conquest of Canaan are about as historical as King Arthur or Robin Hood. But piety still dictates considerable restraint when portraying such things.

It is in literature that Mars, equated with Ares, is an irascible war-god who takes pleasure in stirring shit up. This literary figmentation Virgil could call "impius Mars" in the end of his first Georgic. The Mars of Roman religion had a wild side to be sure, but was always more friend than faux. Though the equation of Mars with Ares did give the former a warlike aspect, this made him less a god of combat and gore than of what Americans would call Homeland Security and National Defense, and whether he was real or not was respectable as a personal matter of agnosis.

Eating Pasta Al Dante

Having now finished reading Dante's Commedia twice, I feel about Dante a little bit like he seems to have felt about Virgil. I respect it, I value it, I enjoy it, but it can only take one so far. The retrograde mental universe makes it ultimately irredeemable beyond a certain point. All the valiant hermeneutics of modern commentators cannot save it, anymore than Beatrice could've saved Virgil. He had it in him to transcend the narrow spheres of his Christianity, and at times comes so close to doing just that. He almost half wants to. But even in Inferno IV or Purgatorio I or Paradiso XIX, he never quite manages. He never quite breaks through Heaven's man-made ceiling, and so damns himself to the Limbo of the Virtuous Enthralled. It is only by going down there that one can meet him, and the only way out is by descending into the Catholicism's hellish soteriology, and facing the hybrid Angeldemons that populate the bowels of a Paradise he very nearly condemned himself to.

Layers of Wordplay in a line of Al-Mutanabbi

I just realized that when the poet Al-Mutanabbī says هَلِ الحَدَثُ الحَمراءُ تَعرِفُ لوْنَها ("Does Al-Hadath the Red know her color?") he may be indulging in triplicate wordplay.

In Modern Literary Arabic, and in various Arabic vernaculars, there are a number of terms used for pale-skinned foreigners, ranging from the benevolent to the insulting. One of them is plain ابيض "white" calqued off of European usage.
In Classical and Medieval Arabic the term used for non-Arabs, especially Persians, Greeks or "Franks" who were seen as being of lighter complexion, was actually احمر "Red". (Greeks in particular could also be بنو اصفر "Yellowsons, Sons of the Yellow" usually in a demeaning fashion).
كل اسود منهم واحمر (All the blacks and reds among them) = "Every one of them, Arab and not". A saying attributed to Muhammad in Islamic mythology has it that "بُعِثْتُ إِلَى الأَحْمَرِ وَالأَسْوَدِ " (I was sent to the red and the black) of which the most straightforward interpretation is "to all mankind, Arab and not." The form Al-Ḥamrā' can be used as a collective term for "foreigners." What I just learned is that it could also refer to emancipated slaves.

Al-Hadath Al-Ḥamrā' "Red Hadath" is the traditional appellation of the city. For Al-Mutanabbi, it was previously a "red" (foreign, Greek) city because it was in the hold of the Byzantines, which it no longer is. It is now "red" (emancipated from slavery) now that Lord Realmsword (Sayfu l-Dawla) has relieved her of Byzantine hold. Despite her traditional appellation, she may not even know that she is red in one sense, and was red in the other, so completely has she now been redeemed to her proper place under Islamdom.

Alien Nation

There is something smelly about Science Fiction shows using clashes of different sentient species as a metaphor for race or ethnicity or culture in order to talk about how "we" (whoever this "we" is) deal with The Other™. Race is an ideology. It is not biological. Nor are ethnicity and cultural difference. The idea that racial or ethnic conflict exist because people just have trouble with "Those Who Look Differently" is a cretinous absurdity that ought to disgrace even a college activist. The implication, or assumption, behind much of this genre of putatively socially aware storytelling in Science Fiction is that these differences are much more essential than they are in fact. The culture producing this stuff seems to take as a matter of pious faith that the way to "get beyond differences" is by obsessing over them, taking for granted their fixity. So much so that different biological species seem sensical as a metaphor for different groups of humans. It lends itself particularly well to tales of people expressing their "essential nature" in categorical terms. 

Neither Time Nor Season

Now, you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the Tower of Song
— Leonard Cohen

Why did rhyme and meter grow so displeasing, offputting or simply invisible to so many Anglophone literary intellectuals over the course of the 20th century?

Part of the reason, put simply, is I believe this: they are liked by the wrong people, and by too many of them. It is not merely a matter of conservatism vs innovation, or freedom vs regulation. As much as any of that, it is a matter of elite values; elite disdain for popular verse forms, and (in the 21st century) elite attachment to an increasingly irrelevant print culture. Our literati don't usually take modern rhymed verse as seriously, because the masses enjoy rhyme too much. Even the Neo-Formalists, in trying (with some partial success) to reintroduce patterned prosody and rhyme to contemporary elite verse and print culture, had to take pains to avoid many of the other traits of popular verse.

Best say something about popular verse in English, which is badly misunderstood in a way so commonplace as to pass for common sense. Anglo literary intellectuals like to think, and like even more to bemoan, that the masses have no appetite for poetry and well-turned lays. "Poetry is a dying art" is a cliché. A conspicuously false one.

Popular verse in contemporary English tends to be sung, or performed to musical or percussive accompaniment. We usually call it song or music, even (as is often the case with rap) when there isn't much singing involved. We just do not call it poetry. We do not even call it literature unless someone really presses the point. How distasteful, distressing and insulting Anglo literati find the very idea can be sensed from how they spent well over a week shitting a collective brick over Bob Dylan winning a Nobel Prize conferred by a bunch of Swedes. One wonders how they would square this with the literatus' readiness to admit that the poems of Hafiz or Bernard de Ventadorn are of course literature.

To this it may be objected that most contemporary popular verse in English is bad or mediocre. This is true but also irrelevant. Most poetry in contemporary elite forms is also bad or mediocre. Most poetry throughout history has not been of enduring resonance or relevance, nor did it aspire to. Sometimes there are (I think) circumstances that favor better or more versecraft, and sometimes there are not. But that is a different matter altogether.

There is no intrinsic reason why popular verse, or song lyric, should be rhymed. Ancient Greek, Roman and Israelite song (popular and not) was unrhymed. But English popular verse, sung or spoken, has mostly been rhymed for the past thousand years.

It is sometimes said that English is especially rhyme-poor, that it is therefore too hard to write rhymed verse well in English (and unreasonably hard to translate verse well into rhymed English.) This is not true. If it were, anyone who made this objection ought to treat English popular verse as a formal miracle. It's true that "perfect rhymes" like fellatio/Horatio, Niagra/Viagra, penis/Venus, fistula/Vistula, death/breath or even sea/me/tree/etc are not as readily available as in French or Persian or Chinese. The reasons for this need not detain us here. But popular verse in English is rhymed and metrical all the same, as has much elite verse before the early 20th century. Strophic verse like Don McLean's "Miss American Pie" has no trouble rhyming. English is not as effortlessly easy to rhyme in as French (though the rhyme requirements of English have never been nearly as exacting as they have been in literary French.) But it is not intrinsically rhyme-resistant. And it did not suddenly become harder to rhyme ca. 1950. Rather, elite verse mostly abandoned a practice, and its practitioners mostly lost a skill, that popular verse retained.

In fact, as it stands, the techniques used to produce rhyme in contemporary English popular verse are by almost any standard more inventive, flexible and rife with untapped potential than the rhymes familiar from a Norton Anthology. One popular poet rhymes music/wounded, ready/sent me, boredom/reward them, heavens/weapons, baby/station in a single poem composed in accentual pentameters (these rhymes alternate with a single -in rhyme throughout.) Why is this kind of rhyming not admitted into elite verse forms in English? Why do we not translate rhymed poetry from other languages with this kind of rhyming into English?

Take a more extreme example. Another popular poet, again in a single composition, rhymes aimed/sprays/stays/days, hair/wear, office/problems, government/loving it/dumping it, squirts of piss/words exist/suburban kids/turbulence, hooked right in/looked like them, America/Erica/Character. 

Assonance is not "intrinsically" more appropriate to song or popular lyric. In other literatures (e.g. Medieval Irish, Old French, Modern Spanish, and even at times Dutch) it has been the vehicle for all kinds of literary composition from epic verse to hymnody to erudite panegyric to surreal love lyric. This is no shock to anyone who reads Neruda or Lorca in Spanish.

Literary intellectuals in English sometimes call this "off-rhyme." But it is not the kind of off-rhyme most favored in literary verse. Poetry in literary verse that uses "off rhyme" is more likely to employ consonance. Often, as in the verse of Seamus Heaney or in Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, nothing but the final consonant of a word need be repeated to qualify as rhyme. This has the effect of making the patterning easy enough to see on the page, but hard to detect with the ear, producing a kind of sound-repetition that is as unlike the rhymes of popular verse as anything imaginable. I think this is precisely why consonance is the kind of off-rhyme most congenial to elite poetics in English today.

It is no surprise that modern English literati do not often know how to dance on their prosodic feet, and do not care to learn. How can they dance, when they can't even hear the music anymore?

Vulgar Latin

"Vulgar Latin" is not a real thing.

Many features of Romance had their origins in high-register usage rather than that of the vulgus. Pre-Romance features which originated among the educated include adverbial -mente, a future formed with inf. + habēre and the suppletion of the monosyllabic forms of īre with corresponding forms from vādere.

Anyone who has been alive in a literate society knows that it is common for the uneducated to imitate the speech of the educated. That features presaging Romance have been almost exclusively sought in, or attributed to, basilectal "uneducated" usage says much about philological prejudices regarding Latin vis-à-vis Romance.

Furthermore, while it is often possible to tell what was going on in speech beneath the surface of the literary language, it is a mistake to attribute such features exclusively to the speech of the uneducated. As speakers of Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Welsh, Tamil and Finnish know well, there is no reason why an educated speaker might not write one thing but say another. Americans of all social classes use "to be like" in the sense "to say" but few will use it in writing except in the most informal contexts such as text messaging.

There is no reason at all to think that Emperor Hadrian had much use for the inflected passive when grumbling about the weather. 

Look Alive, Soul

In Hadrian's death poem (animula vagula blandula) addressed to his departing soul there is a line whose full resonance may lie in a pun recoverable via historical philology:

Quae nunc abībis in loca
(Into what regions will you [my soul] now pass?)

The crux of the wordplay is abībis. In the Latin of Hadrian's day, b and v had merged in intervocalic position. This would make abībis "you will pass" a near-homonym for the (colloquial?) form advīvis "you survive, you go on to live." It might also make nunc abībis "you now will pass" almost identical in pronunciation to nunquam vīvis "you never reside."

Just one Iota of the Yod in יהוד

An early Greek poet with an interesting non-Greek name is Ananios or Ananias from the 6th century BC, of whose work a few definite fragments are preserved by Athenaeus. Some of the poems attributed to Hipponax may also in fact be his. If parsed as Greek, the name Ananias would mean "pain-free" or something of the sort. But, apparently, it does not occur elsewhere as a Greek name.

Elsewhere when men are called Ananias in Greek, such as in the Septuagint, in Strabo, in the New Testament and in Josephus, it is is as a rendering of the Semitic names Ḥananyāh "Yahweh is Gracious" and ˁAnanyāh (variously interpretable as "Protected by Yahweh", "Yahweh's Cloud" or "Slave of Yahweh".)

Semitic names were commonplace throughout the ancient Mediterranean, and the names of slaves and artisans attest to much ethnic mixing in the Greek-speaking world as elsewhere. But Semitic names with "Yah(weh)" as a theophoric element would by this time have been prominent only among one group.

It seems to me that this Ananias may well have been a Jew. It would make him by far the earliest Jew recorded in Greece, and one of the earliest whose existence is recorded in non-Jewish sources.

Ex Sacro Crescat Excrementum

G.K. Chesterton is invaluable. I learned much from him, seeing what a cultivated mind produces when fertilized with nightsoil. Both as a luminous demonstrator of the sorts of sloppy thinking one ought to avoid, and as a cautionary example of what such thought-rot can do to a fruitful brain, he is without peer. No pen before his had carved such lapidary prose monuments to the degeneracy of a good mind gone bad. 

Speaking the Queen's Welsh

Disdain for the British royal family is an admirable Welsh tradition. Charles Philip Arthur George's attempt at Welsh hasn't stopped people from expressing their opinions as to where the "Prince of Wales" can go shove his crown.

So it's ironic that, in a way, Welsh may owe some of its good fortune to a Briths monarch. 

Queen Elizabeth I of England, the Elizabeth of Elizabethan Fame, was not hostile to Irish or Welsh. More than that, she had her government fund the production of an Irish typeface to facilitate the printing and dissemination of an Irish translation of the Bible, and appears to have been a driving force behind the act of Parliament that made the first Welsh Bible translation possible.

The order was for Welsh Bishops to have a Welsh Bible, a Welsh Book of Common Prayer, and a Welsh administration of the sacraments in every Welsh-speaking parish by 1 March 1567. Texts were produced to meet this sudden need. The resulting Welsh Bible was arguably a superior translation to any English Bible then in existence, produced as it was just half a century after after the first translation of the Bible into Modern English, and half a century before the KJV was even a gleam in the eye of Elizabeth's successor James. Without Elizabeth's insistence on vernacularity, the Welsh Bible and Prayer Books produced by William Salesbury and William Morgan would not have had a market, let alone funding. The Welsh Bible in particular was initially so big and expensive that every parish only got one. It would be another half century before personal copies of the Welsh Bible were available.

Elizabeth did, as a practical matter, think the Irish and Welsh should also learn English, but her aim was to ease them into bilingualism, not to supplant one with the other. She was keen on having English text available alongside Irish and Welsh.

Given her religious politics, you could say this was a cynical matter. It served her self-interest mightily. It was aimed at stomping out popish use of Latin in the British Isles. She probably got quite a few jollies out of pissing off counterreformationists. 

I'm not the sort inclined to cut any monarch any slack. But a few things are worth considering.

First, anti-Latin policies in Early Modern Europe frequently had the effect of suppressing regional languages by imposing the language of the Crown or the State at the expense of everything else, Latin and not. This is how things played out in places like Cornwall and Occitania. When backed by a centralized state's strong-arming and strong force of arms, it was brutally effective. Elizabeth did not really have to make provisions for regional languages in order to put the kabosh on Latin worship.

Her main goal was self-interest. But she also would have understood that Britain was big enough for more than one language. She may well have been the most multilingual monarch England has ever had. She is known to have spoken at least English, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek and Latin. Some of these she spoke and read far better than she could write them. (Her spoken French was reported to be quite fluent, but her secret letters to the Duke of Anjou, which for obvious reasons couldn't be proofed or drafted by anyone else, are written in a crabbed and awkward French full of unidiomatic phrasing. This is unsurprising. When you have a corps of diplomatic functionaries and secretaries to draft correspondence for you, you only need to write things yourself on rare or personal occasions.)

She may have also learned at least some Welsh from her lady-in-waiting Blanche Parry, who came from a family of Welsh-speaking (and highly Welsh-literate) gentry. Parry was also involved in getting the Welsh Bible project underway.

Elizabeth was interested in learning Irish, too, a language for which there were at that time no learning materials for non-natives. Whether she made much progress in the language nobody will ever know. But she did commission Christopher Nugent, the Baron of Delvin, a bilingual Anglo-Irish nobleman, to write something up for her to help get the basics of the language. He did so. The result was the Queen's Irish Primer, a little booklet roughly equivalent to today's Lonely Planet guides for tourists: a phrasebook and word list plus a basic outline of the grammar. This was the first known written attempt to explain a Celtic language to an adult learner, and it was produced at the personal behest of the English crown.

The final point is the importance of the Welsh Bible. This can't be overstated. Vernacular Bible translations in Early Modern Europe seem to have functioned a bit like health insurance for languages. Once the Bible was available in a language, that language's long-term prospects were much higher. A Bible Translation offered not only the prestige of a written form, but something that speakers would be motivated to read and reread. Even under conditions of oppressive language policy, anybody trying to take people's Bibles might be vulnerable to theological objections or at least arouse great religious opprobrium.

The Welsh Bible was even more important than most other Early Modern Bible translations. Many have credited the widespread use of William Morgan's Welsh Bible as the major and even determining factor in the fate of Welsh-language literacy and culture. It would not surprise me if in 300 years, Welsh is the only Celtic language still alive. Welsh would definitely not be in this enviable position were it not for the fact that churches in Welsh-speaking areas were, and doggedly remained, free to conduct their parochial and spiritual affairs in Welsh.

It's worth comparing the fate of Welsh to that of the other Brythonic language under the English crown: Cornish. Cornish was brutally suppressed by Elizabeth's father, King Henry VIII, who in an attempt to root out the Latin liturgy, was content to have English enforced in Cornwall at swordpoint, rather than bother subsidizing the regional vernacular language. With the crushing of the Prayer Book Rebellion, use of Cornish in worship, or any official capacity, came with great risk. It was a risk that few were interested in taking. Within a century, the last known monolingual Cornish speaker, Chesten Marchant, was dead. The century after that saw the death of the last known fluent native speaker who was able to write in the language, the famous Dolly Pentraeth. In the 19th century, though there were a few people who still spoke Cornish still, they were very hard even for well-meaning antiquarian scholars to find. Generally Englishmen no longer knew what Cornish was, and did not recognize it on the rare occasion that they heard it. Mostly evidence of continued Cornish use takes the form of puzzled descriptions, such as a reference to some kind of bizarre-sounding non-English spoken by a few illiterate miners from Falmouth. And in 1914 came the death of one John Mann, the last person known to have spoken Cornish as a child. On his deathbed, Mann could remember only a few words and phrases of the language he grew up speaking. Despite great antiquarian interest in the language throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Cornish was effectively dead by the time revival attempts got under way.

All through this, Welsh was still holding its own. Despite a few fairly dicey decades, when prospects for its future were not at all certain, Welsh would ultimately survive the oppressive language ideologies and language policies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today in Wales, ability to speak the language is enough of a social asset that learning it is often part of upward mobility in English-speaking areas. This is thanks in large part to the continuing robustness of Welsh-medium Methodist churches which were able to provide not only an alternative source of literacy outside the English school system, but a strong spiritual identification with the language. It's a lot harder to get somebody to abandon their native language when they talk to God in it. Welsh also had a thriving literature written in a standardized register based largely on the language of Morgans' Bible. Although hymnography often tends to quash talent rather than nurture it, Welsh-language hymnography was the medium of quite a few brilliant poets, such as Ann Griffiths, whose work was preserved in oral tradition before being fixed in writing.

On the other hand, the Bible wasn't translated into Cornish in its entirety until 2011, as part of the  language-resurrection movement.

It's a supreme irony that the good prospects for the Welsh language owe a great deal to the shrewdness, temperament and intellectual disposition of an English Monarch whose main goal was to consolidate her power. 

Heineken's "World Apart" and Corporate Sociopathy

Watching the recent Heineken ad I was instantly reminded of when Donald Trump told Caitlyn Jenner she could use any bathroom she liked at Trump Tower. Then I realized it was nowhere near that dignified. The ad is apparently working quite spectacularly. It's a successful ad, in that it made more people feel positively toward the Heineken brand without undermining the company's bottom line. That is its job. To artistically convey a message. Much like propaganda. When propaganda truly has warmed your heart, you know you've been had.

If you think I'm cynical, consider how cynical this ad is.

What actual substantive discussion did we even see the climate change guys engage in? Do you think this is an accident?

How plausible is it that the cause of the sudden(ly visible) political polarization in the present moment honestly can be explained by reference to questions of gender, gender identity and opinions on climate change? How plausible is it that the good people of Heineken or Publicis London think that?

Heineken claimed in a tweet that these are not actors, and that what we see is not staged. Despite the fact that people do seem to have been rather selectively "cast" for their roles in this experiment, it hasn't been staged or scripted. It's simply been directed and edited.

Toby Dye, who directed the commercial for Publicis London, also directed a vile commercial for Persil, a laundry detergent, in which he told prison inmates that they spent more time outside than the average child and filmed their reactions, and then featured a prison guard telling the audience that if kids aren't filthy with dirt and in need of a bath, they haven't played outside hard enough. The man's editing and direction were able to make it look like incarcerated prisoners thought that kids growing up at home had it better than they did behind bars.

Consider moreover some of the things these people you see in the ad probably already agreed on, but which Heineken would never dare allow to be aired in a commercial. For example, a majority of Britons believe that big business and wealthy donors have too much influence on government and politics. I dare any beer company to show beer drinkers of different walks of life agreeing — as in reality they often do — on that point.

What else might these people actually have in common? For one, they were all part of a social experiment whose purpose they did not understand. Presumably they were paid to participate. In other words, if anything actually binds these people together is that they have to work for a living, and really could use the money.

Finally: just how many pairs of people do you suppose Toby Dye actually had to film before he got a handful that could serve as beer ad posterchildren in ways that played to all the right demographics' sensibilities without actually saying anything dangerously substantive?

Publicis London's slogan of “You have to lead the change, if you don’t want to be led by change” sounds rather unintentionally sinister in this light.

If you wonder what the full unedited substance of these people's conversations was, too bad. As like as not, they probably were made at some point to sign away the rights to publicly disclose any of it.

It's true. Heineken is indeed Socially Aware. This ad proves it. All the social awareness of a highly successful sociopath.

Not Much Left

People for whom the left is little more than a cultural sensibility, whose idea of social justice doesn't go beyond disparities between ascriptively reified groups, sometimes irritate me on a deeper level than libertarian conservative intellectuals. Why? Probably because I am fed up with the weaselish hypocrisy, the racial bad faith, the ease with which they rationalize the substantially inhumane for the sake of the symbolically satisfying. Few things are more emblematic of modern political dishonesty than a transparently narrow-minded person screaming that the only way to truly be openminded is to agree with them.

I once knew an asshole in college who would treat the dining hall staff like dogshit and insisted that true "oppression" was the absence of halal food from the dining hall. I have far more contempt for him than I do for Milton Friedman.

Between someone who is honestly wrong, and someone who is dishonestly half-right, I'm not so sure that the latter is always preferable.

At least the honestly wrong can —some of the time — have honest discussions, and may be open to new information.

The dishonestly half-right are on a steady diet of bromides.

The Poem Not Itself

Opinions like this make me headdesk.

"The poem's lyric qualities can hardly be brought over into English. The clear strong articulation of the Spanish vowels gives them a beauty not easily reproducible in Northern tongues"-Paul Rogers (The Poem Itself)

Leaving aside the fact that "clear" vowels are indeed to be found in more northerly languages (such as Welsh) and that complex phonology and many slurred or reduced vowels can be found in other southerly Mediterranean languages (such as European Portuguese, or Moroccan Arabic), stuff like this pisses me off because it assumes that native or native-like Spanish speakers aestheticize their vowel inventory in the same way a non-native would.

English vowels often seem complex and varied and reduced even to Spanish speakers who are fluent in it. But when we Anglophones read, say, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson we do not experience their sound-play in terms of varied complex or unclear sounds.

There are some aesthetic universals related to phonology. For example high front unrounded vowels (as in the "ee" of sheen) have been experimentally demonstrated to sound more sprightly and happy (and, in names, more feminine) than low back rounded vowels (like the oo of boom) which in turn sound slow, heavy and sad (and, in names, more masculine) in a variety of different cultures from Scotland to Japan to Lebanon.

But such constancies are few and far between.

In understanding the sound-texture of verbal art in another language, it is important to not look at the sounds of one language in terms of another.

Stranger in a Strange Tongue

DID YOU KNOW

Germanic-speakers developed the habit in the middle Ages of calling their language variants of the word þeodisk meaning "What People Speak." (Whence the words Diets, Duits, Dutch, Deutsch, Tysk, Taytsh in various Germanic languages. If the cognate had survived into modern English, it would have been "theedish" or "theech")

By contrast, the word þeodisk was borrowed into Proto-Slavic as *tiudžǐ "foreign, strange, unintelligible." (c.f. Russian чужой, Czech cizí, OCS tuždǐ.) It is the word used in Saint Cyril's prologue to the Slavonic gospels to describe the unintelligible languages of Hebrew and Greek, as opposed to the clear language of the Slavonic translation.

A Sinical Question

Despite the absurd saturation of Arabic studies and the insane amount of students graduating in the US every year with Arabic degrees, majors, and/or minors, very, very, very few of them are at all proficient in the language. Few can read an academic article in Arabic without a dictionary, or discuss it with a native speaker. It's rather hilarious. And don't anybody tell me it's because Arabic is so hard. Sinologists do a far better job with Chinese, after all, than Arabists or even Persianists do with their languages of specialization. And Persian is quite frankly very easy as languages go.

When, I wonder, is the study of Arabic and Persian literature going to reach the maturity of literary Sinology? Arabists and Persianists ought to be roundly embarrassed by what they look like compared to Sinologists. They are in a lot of ways where Sinologists were in the 60s.

Cultivating an Existence

There is an irony in demonizing immigrants, migrant laborers, extraterritorial ethnic groups, or anybody whose way of living does not involve a fixed domicile. The irony is the forgetting of something very important about humanity.

To wit: we hominids tend to move around. A lot. We almost always have. Sedentary multi-generational existence restricted to a single bit of land, which many of us take for granted as the norm, is in some sense an aberration. Humans went over ninety millennia without it. For 90% of the time in which our species has walked this earth, such a form of existence was largely unknown. And it has been known only to a minority of humans for about half of the remaining 10%. The rigid forms of it we know today are of course even more recent.

When we engage in trades other than agriculture, when our resources aren't bound to particular pieces of land or to particular urban centers, and when we have the freedom to move if we want, we do move around. Consider how most Americans spend their adult lives in a different state from the one they grew up in.

Alongside from the ability to use language in order to utter completely novel sentences, something that makes humans exceptional as a species is our ability to move around into extremely different and diverse habitats, and find ways to survive in them not primarily by natural selection, but using these big heavy brains of ours. In other words, through culture. Culture is what happens when adaptation shifts from being a matter of the genome to a matter of the mind.