The word of the day

The made-up word of the day is humormeter:

hu · morm · e · ter (hyoo MORM ih ter) n. The little-understood brain mechanism governing the human response to humor.

Sample sentence:

My daughter is laughing at every one of my jokes. Her humormeter must be broken.

Homework

[In his book Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry, Kenneth Koch describes the development of what he calls his "poetry base" -- simply, his "knowledge of the language of poetry." I just asked my students to write about the development of their poetry "bases." Here's my homework.]

I was attuned to songs from very early on, thanks to my father's dedication in exposing me to jazz. When I was three or four I was listening to Joe Turner and Anita O'Day, but it was their voices, not their words, that made an impression on me (the same with Erroll Garner's voice at the end of Concert by the Sea). My first remembered awareness of poetry involves rhymes from the pre-kindergarten and kindergarten eras. My mother used to sing to me:

Michael's a good boy
He is the best boy
He can run and jump and play
He can ride a bike.

In kindergarten, I learned a little rhyme about an imaginary family:

There's mother and father
And baby that makes three
And sister and brother
There are five in our family.

I don’t remember reading any poetry in elementary school, but I remember writing a poem in fourth grade about winter. Where did that come from? It was published in the school paper and now sits in my house in a frame that my grandmother bought for it. I bought a book of Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems when I was ten or eleven, and I remember how much I liked the title of the poem "To E----": mysterious! "Eldorado" was another poem that struck me: it seemed to belong to no time or place. These poems did not move me though to any further investigations of poetry. And high school was a waste land when it came to poetry; I can't remember reading a single poem (and I remember many specifics of my high-school reading). I know that I had a glib contempt for Deep Meaning, as my friends and I called it, though that didn't seem to stop me from scrutinizing Beatles lyrics for clues about Paul's death.

A freshman poetry course in college helped to make up for what never happened in high school; it at least made me realize that poetry was more than the precious, flowery thing I assumed it was. That recognition was largely a matter of discovering what was in the back of the anthology -- some contemporary poetry, including Gregory Corso's "Marriage," the first poem I can remember reading that really spoke in terms familiar from ordinary life. It was interesting to me that Corso was reported to have behaved very badly when he was on campus a year or two before for a reading. People were still talking about it. There was also a poem by Raymond Patterson about the death of Malcolm X, "At That Moment," which helped me understand -- and even get excited about -- the idea of metaphor. In this freshman course we could memorize poems, or passages, for extra credit, and I had (like everyone else) a blue book with my efforts -- five lines here, eight lines there (for some reason we had to write rather than recite).

It wasn’t until my junior year of college that things took off, in courses devoted to 17th-century literature and modern poetry (I thought it would be interesting to take them together). It was really a matter of the professors teaching these courses -- one an old eccentric (Paul Memmo), and the other a highly animated assistant prof (Jim Doyle). Each projected a reverence for the possibilities of language and imagination, and I, like a number of my comrades in English, wanted in a way to be Jim Doyle -- to read poetry with the same intensity of attention. These professors were inspiring models then and now.

So far virtually all my reading was British, in a deeply Anglophile English department. It wasn’t until I started work on a doctorate that I began to read modern American poetry -- Williams, Stevens, and others, but I didn’t really get it. Around the same time, I began reading Charles Bukowski, who for me (and so many other readers) was a gateway poet -- the one that got me interested in other much stronger and more addictive poets, those identified with the New American Poetry of Donald Allen's anthology. I bought Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara and never got beyond "The Day Lady Died." Around this time I began a subscription to the American Poetry Review and found myself loathing the contents and concluding that there wasn’t much of interest in contemporary American poetry.

It was only after finishing my doctorate that I realized that what I loathed was not contemporary American poetry but the version of it that had been made available to me. My eyes were opened via an anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970. I bought it on a whim and found myself completely taken with poetry that was beautiful, funny, odd, opaque, and without the prettiness and pretension of what I was reading in APR. Up Late was followed by two anthologies of language-poetry and then by countless books of recent and contemporary American poetry. I began to go backwards too -- finding my way to French poets who were crucial for some Americans (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Jacob, Reverdy) and becoming more and more caught up in reading Homer and Sappho (in multiple translations). So my poetry base at this point has many strata, the result of some good luck and some self-reliance, all haphazardly overlapping here and there.

And that's my story.

Things my children no longer say

- aminal
- bofay, pronounced bo-FAY (buffet)
- co-Coke, i.e., cold Coke
- the girl hamburger, i.e., Wendy's
- have for has
- he for his: as in "He have to take he nap."
- "I absolutely adore math."
- kid-Coke, i.e., caffeine-free Coca-Cola
- man-Coke, i.e., Coca-Cola
- she for her: as in "She have to take she nap."
- swimming pudd, i.e., pool
- 'What's a politic?": in reply to "What do you think about politics?"

*

August 2, 2019: There’s at least one that got away.

~ cold cream, i.e., ice cream.

Words and bottled water

When I teach a poetry class, I sometimes like to bring in poems in multiple translations. I find that reading across translations helps students to sharpen their awareness of how any word in a poem can make a significant difference to the whole. But it always happens that someone who's less of a nominalist than me will insist that the translations are all saying the same thing, just with different words.

I just thought about this matter when writing the words "bottled water" in a short piece for lifehack.org -- some advice for students about finding a good place to study. Here are two sentences, almost identical, yet they still don't say the same thing. These are sample sentences; neither is from what I've written for lifehack:

When I got home, I drank bottled water and graded essays.

When I got home, I drank a bottle of water and graded essays.

In the first sentence, drinking bottled water is an ongoing activity, something that accompanies work. That may be the case with the second sentence too, but the second sentence is more easily read as a matter of discrete, consecutive activities. The difference in meaning lies in the difference between an undefined amount ("water") and a unit ("a bottle"). I can hear the same difference in similar pairs -- "coffee," "a cup of coffee"; "cigarettes," "a cigarette." (Granted, "cigarettes" involves a number, not an amount.) Such distinctions -- clear to someone who knows the language, elusive and tenuous to someone who's learning it from scratch -- are good reminders that if the words are different, they're not saying the same thing.

"Pencil Parade"

If you like pencils and want some interesting background noise, try "Pencil Parade," an ambient sound from iSerenity. To my ears though, "Pencil Parade" sounds more like a ravenous animal on the other side of the door. And I'm not sure that the door is locked.

There's a remarkable variety of ambient sounds at this site, some more congenial than others. I like "Waterfall Whisper," which I've used in my office to drown out the music from a women's rugby field. Sorry for the pun.

iSerenity.com
"Pencil Parade"

Alvin Fernald forever

The Wacky World of Alvin Fernald is a website devoted to the work of Clifford Hicks, writer of the Alvin Fernald series of children's books.

Alvin's Secret Code was the crucial book of my childhood (see here), so I'm happy to see Alvin's web-presence growing. The Magnificent Brain rules!

3 strikes against Sony

An idiosyncratic list, but mine own.

Strike 1
Sony's execrable handling of its 2000 boxed-set cd reissue of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. The sound -- dismal, dull, lifeless. The packaging -- a disgrace, with the cds in flimsy cardboard holders that leave glue on the playing surfaces. A small collage of just three Amazon.com reviews:

The reprocessing on this compilation is among the worst in years: thin, harsh, and (on the first two CDs) with nearly overwhelming surface noise. . . . Incidentally, all four CDs had glue on the playing surfaces . . . . the glue adheres to the CD edges, even making their way onto the surface . . . . This collection is an inconsistent sonic mess.

You can read more at Amazon. And if you care about this music, buy the JSP set of the same material, less than half the price and infinitely better sound. That Sony would treat Armstrong's music -- a national treasure; no, a world treasure -- as it did already says everything about its understanding of art and commerce.

Strike 2
The rootkit scandal. Need I say more? Boing Boing provides a detailed history, starting here.

Strike 3
The witty, throwaway line in Nellie McKay's song "Clonie" -- "Should've signed with Verve instead of Sony" -- now seems sadly prophetic. Sony-Columbia has dropped McKay and refused to release her album Pretty Little Head (which was supposed to be out yesterday). A New York Times article has the details. McKay, to my ears, is one of the brightest, smartest people in music right now. You can read about her in Orange Crate Art, here and here, and you can read much more at this fan site.

What does this idiosyncratic list add up to? A company with contempt for past performers, present performers, and customers. Sony, you're out.

Misheard

Half-listening to a Vytorin ad on TV Land, explaining the causes of high cholesterol:

"It's not only from that buttered crap . . . "

Oops. Buttered crab. But I misheard what I misheard.

Related post: Misheard

Homer in Art

News of an art exhibition:

The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, October 8, 2005 – January 15, 2006

Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, NY, October 11, 2005 – January 22, 2006

Link: The Legacy of Homer, with links to download thumbnail images

Link: The Legacy of Homer, exhibition catalogue, from Yale University Press

123456

My wife Elaine mentioned yesterday an observation of Leonard Bernstein's in his lecture-series The Unanswered Question -- that audiences inevitably hear tonal patterns in atonal music. We are indeed pattern-seeking and pattern-finding creatures.

Our loyal Toyota today displayed the sequence 123456 on its odometer. Elaine and I took a photo, with a disposable camera whose film won't be developed for some time. You'll have to take my word for it.

This milestone in driving made me recall an anecdote from the great literary critic Hugh Kenner, who once recounted his car's odometer displaying a magically appropriate sequence on June 16 -- Bloomsday, the day on which the action of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place in 1904. What were the numbers on Kenner's odometer? 61604? 16604? I can't recall. But I remember that there was a pattern.

While we're waiting for the film to be developed, I'll share some magically appropriate numbers that rival even those of Kenner's odometer. My copy of Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire is a library discard. The card in its pocket bears a single date-stamp: "OCT 18 1979." The poet John Shade, one of the novel's two principal characters, has a heart attack on October 17, 1958. Charles Kinbote dates his Foreword to Shade's poem Pale Fire October 19, 1959. The card-pocket itself bears seven stamped due dates, one of them in red -- "JUL 5 '78." John Shade was born on July 5, 1898. What's it all mean? Nothing. But I wouldn't trade my Pale Fire for another.

Related post
Bloomsday