"Pikakirjoitusvihko" and pikakirjoitusvihko

Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect has a poem whose title sent me in search of help: "Pikakirjoitusvihko." "Pikakirjoitusvihko" is a long poem written in the spirit of what I like to call dailiness — a series of aphorisms, notations, quotations. For instance:

Courtesy is more efficient than the lack of it.

*

If I get a fatal disease, I am going to be very mad at it. I will blame it for my death.

*

"The worth of that is that which it contains, / And that is this, and this . . ." (Shakespeare, almost Gertrude Stein, Sonnet 74)

The last entry of "Pikakirjoitusvihko" notes that the word pikakirjoitusvihko is Finnish and appears on the cover of "this notebook," presumably the one in which the poet has been writing. So I suspected that the word means, simply, notebook. Google could not confirm my hunch, returning only eight results, four of which are references to Padgett's poem. I tried a Google image search, hoping to find perhaps an illustration from a Finnish stationer, with no luck. Next, Babel Fish, which, I found, doesn't do Finnish. I then e-mailed my friend Norman, linguist and translator, who worked out a possible explanation:

pika=express (like express train)
kirjoitusvihko=exercise book
vihko=notebook, booklet

express exercise book

Does that make sense?

Norman, who has some knowledge of Finnish, used an online Finnish-English dictionary (I didn't imagine that there was such a thing). As he explained though, it wouldn't have helped me:

You would have found kirjoitusvihko, but it is not easy to know where you are supposed to split a Finnish word. Knowing that kirjasto is "library," I guessed that pika must be the first element.

But Norman wanted to check with another translator, Sheryl, who pointed out that the word divides after pikakirjoitus, which means "shorthand" or "stenography" (express writing!). So pikakirjoitusvihko means "stenography notebook" or "steno pad."

Norman adds:

Icelandic, like Finnish, has a calque or loan translation . . . hraðritun, which also means "express writing" (hraðbraut means "expressway").

Kiitos, Norman and Sheryl! And kiitos, Ron Padgett, for sending me on this journey.

Now I'm going to look up stenography.

More, in an e-mail from Ron Padgett:

I had the same trouble. Thinking that I had bought the notebook in Kiev, I went to the Ukrainian Museum here in NY to ask for a translation, but of course they were puzzled by the word and said they didn't think it was Ukrainian. Some time later something made me think of asking Anselm Hollo, and of course Bingo! "Stenographer's notebook," he said. Which, in light of the poem, turned out accidentally to be the right title. Then he tried to teach me how to say it in Finnish. He's still trying.

Related reading
Calque (Wikipedia)
Anselm Hollo (Poets.org)
Ron Padgett (Poets.org)
Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook (Jean Harlow, taking dictation)
TElephone EXchange NAmes in poetry (from a poem by Ron Padgett)

Forever, a film by Heddy Honigmann

From the distributor's website:

Through a leisurely tour of the world-famous Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the final resting place for legendary writers, composers, painters and other artists from around the world, Forever provides an unusually poignant, emotionally powerful meditation on relations between the living and the dead, and the immortal power of art.

A film I look forward to seeing, most likely on DVD. Proust is buried in the Père-Lachaise, of course, as are Guillaume Apollinaire, Maria Callas, Jim Morrison, Francis Poulenc, and a cast of thousands.

See the trailer and read more via the links:

Forever (YouTube)
Forever (First Run Icarus Films)
Père-Lachaise Cemetery (Wikipedia)
Père-Lachaise virtual tour (in French and English)

Olive sizes

Mark Hurst at Good Experience wonders today about the words used to classify olive oil — pure, virgin, and extra virgin: "I mean, what's the difference between 'virgin' and 'extra virgin' in any other context?" Mark's conclusion: "Olive oil suffers from name inflation."

Which reminded me of the strange array of words used to size olives, something I first learned about (and still vaguely recall) from a Marshall Efron skit on The Great American Dream Machine.

You can find the Colossal — what am I saying? — the Super Colossal word-hoard of olive sizing via the link below. Colossal? Super Colossal? Brilliant? Superior? Fine? Only your extra-fancy olive-industry insider knows for sure.

Olive Sizes (Practically Edible)

Watching GUIDE

GUIDE, as the remote-control button calls it, is sometimes more thought-provoking than the shows themselves:

Dec 12	10:00 PM
36 WE	Hair Trauma
37 DHLTH	Trauma: Life in the ER

Van Dyke Parks and the present tense

A Twin Peaks fan has posted a short interview with Van Dyke Parks about his participation in the television series. I like this choice sentence, which follows VDP's acknowledgment that he'd seen none of David Lynch's work before getting his part:

"Generally, I stay out of the present tense."

Van Dyke Parks interview (Twin Peaks Archive)

Related posts
A new Van Dyke Parks interview
Van Dyke Parks speaks
Van Dyke Parks interviewed
Arts and science

Proust summarizes Proust

Another Proust passage of summing up. Two words: Une vocation.

Then, less dazzling no doubt than the one which had shown me that the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again, a new light dawned on me. And I understood that all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my table, I could not find a subject. So all my life up to that day could, and at the same time could not, have been summed up under the title: A vocation.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 207-8

Related posts
Monty Python and Proust
Proust summarizes Proust

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 17 in a series)

From a newspaper review of a concert:

an anchor of the famous "Hallelujah" chorus

That would be an encore. The moral of the story: when handling an unfamiliar word, don't trust intuition or a spellchecker. Use a dictionary and make sure that what you're writing is what you mean.

This post is no. 17 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

Related posts
On "pneumonic" devices
Oops

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Frank Sinatra's popcorn

Driving, listening to a station devoting its December air-time to "holiday music," I was delighted to hear Frank Sinatra singing "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" (words by Sammy Cahn, music by Jule Styne). I'd never heard a Sinatra version of this song.

But delight turned into doubt, for it's difficult to imagine Frank Sinatra doing what the I of the lyric claims to have done. Recall the song's start:

Oh! The weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

It doesn't show signs of stopping
And I brought some corn for popping,
The lights are turned 'way down low,
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!

Would Sinatra show up on a lady's doorstep with popcorn? It's difficult to imagine:

"Frank! I thought you'd never get here."

"I had to look at a swinging new arrangement with Nelson Riddle. And the roads are very bad tonight. But I brought you something I think you will like."

[Presents gift. It makes a shaking sound.]

"Popcorn?"

As I have previously stated, it's difficult to imagine.

With Dean Martin, who also recorded this song, popcorn is more plausible. A fella gets a little tipsy, he reaches for the box with the new earrings for his girl, picks up the popcorn instead, doesn't realize his mistake, gets in his car: these things happen. But Frank Sinatra and popcorn? As I have previously stated, it's difficult to imagine.

You may be wondering about the song's lyric: is it bought or brought ? Sammy Cahn's Rhyming Dictionary (2002) gives brought (and all the exclamation points!).

And now (as I have not previously stated) it's back to my double-shift at the Continental Paper Grading Co.

December 8, 1980

Yoko Ono has written a letter to John Lennon:

I miss you, John. 27 years later, I still wish I could turn back the clock to the Summer of 1980. . . .

Letter from Yoko to John (Imagine Peace)

The Sound of Jazz, fifty years ago today

[Billie Holiday listens to Lester Young, December 8, 1957.]

Fifty years ago today, CBS broadcast The Sound of Jazz as part of its series The Seven Lively Arts. Gunther Schuller: "Unquestionably the finest hour jazz has ever had on television." Here are four highlights, courtesy of YouTube:

Henry "Red" Allen, Wild Man Blues
Jimmy Giuffre, The Train and the River
Billie Holiday, Fine and Mellow (mislabeled as 1944)
Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk

Watching these clips this morning, I began to think about the number of posters that could be made from the often iconic images therein.

The Sound of Jazz (Wikipedia)
The Sound of Jazz (Amazon)

Related post
On December 8