Some rocks, talking

At Oscar’s Day, “some rocks,” in conversation.

[Context here.]

Hi and Lois, the sixtieth anniversary

I’ve noticed in recent weeks that the artwork in Hi and Lois seems to be getting better. I don’t think it’s my imagination: as I learned today, the strip is nearing its sixtieth anniversary, a good reason to neaten up. People are watching. You can read more about the anniversary here and here. But let me make my case about the art:


[Hi and Lois, September 16, 2014.]

Those walls! Or is it wall? This panel has the general strangeness that has prompted me to speculate that the Flagstons live in a German Expressionist suburb. See also this 2011 interior.

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[Hi and Lois, September 19, 2014.]

The rooms of the Flagston house are often rendered, at least in the daily strip, in the most minimal way: white space and dripping black lines. The panel above is representative.

*


[Hi and Lois, October 17, 2014.]

Again with the dripping lines. But the background is, well, backier. Things are getting better.

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[Hi and Lois, October 11, 2014.]

Here too, a better background. I especially like the care the artist has taken with the clapboards. Consider this 2008 panel as a contrast.

*

Sunday’s Hi and Lois always seems more carefully drawn. And for some time now, the Sunday strip has been getting its gradients on. (Does any other strip vary so much between daily and Sunday modes?) But look at the difference between these Sunday panels:


[Hi and Lois, September 28, 2014.]

The only real background: Lois. Lois, you’re a fine woman. You deserve better.


[Hi and Lois, October 12, 2014.]

The amount of background detail in this panel from today’s strip is especially noteworthy. Depth!

I look forward to the week of Hi and Lois anniversary strips that starts tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what happens to the strip’s art after that.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Three Virgils

Something I wrote when comparing translations by Robert Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and Stephen Mitchell:

A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all.

So too with Virgil’s Aeneid , which I’m now teaching. A couple of days ago I found myself admiring these lines from Stanley Lombardo’s 2005 translation (in the Latin, 4.522–529):

It was night, and all over earth weary bodies
Lay peacefully asleep. Woods and wild seas
Had fallen still, and the stars were midway
In their gliding orbits. Ox and meadow were
    quiet,
And all the brilliant birds who haunt
The lapping lakes and tangled hedgerows
Were nestled in sleep under the dark, silent
    sky.

But not Dido, unhappy heart.

For me, Lombardo’s translation of these lines shines even brighter when read against translations by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles. Here is Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation:

The night had come, and weary in every land
Men’s bodies took the boon of peaceful sleep.
The woods and the wild seas had quieted
At that hour when the stars are in mid-course
And every field is still; cattle and birds
With vivid wings that haunt the limpid lakes
Or nest in thickets in the country places
All were asleep under the silent night.
Not, though, the agonized Phoenician queen.

And Fagles’s 2006 translation:

                                     The dead of night,
and weary living creatures throughout the
    world
are enjoying peaceful sleep. The woods and
    savage seas
are calm, at rest, the circling stars are gliding
    on
In their midnight courses, all the fields lie
    hushed
and the flocks and gay and gorgeous birds
    that haunt
the deep clear pools and the thorny country
    thickets
all lie quiet now, under the silent night, asleep.
But not the tragic queen . . .

In FItzgerald’s translation, the clause beginning “cattle and birds” seems weighted down with prepositional phrases: “with vivid wings,” “in thickets,” “in the country places,” “under the silent night.” Fagles’s translation is marred by clichés (“dead of night,” “savage seas”), redundancy (“living creatures,” “calm, at rest”), and strangely extravagant phrasing (“gay and gorgeous birds”). Here as elsewhere in his translations, he . . . trails off.

Looking at Fitzgerald and Fagles helps me to notice how Lombardo captures the Latin pictaeque (“painted,” “colored”) with the one word brilliant and avoids the predictable “silent night.” Looking at the Latin (via the Perseus Digital Library) helps me to admire what Lombardo does with the final line, “At non infelix animi Phoenissa” (literally, ”But not the unhappy Phoenician soul”). From soul to heart : a reasonable shift. And, I suspect, a tip of the hat: in William Morris’s 1876 translation, 4.529 refers to Dido as “that most unhappy heart.”

For my money, it’s Lombardo first, Fitzgerald second, and Fagles a distant third.

Related posts
Aeschylus in three translations
Three more Virgils
Translators at work and play
Whose Homer?

Sharpening yourself

From pencilsandotherthings, an account of an initiation rite for new employees of the MItsubishi Pencil Company. I like these words of a Mitsubishi executive: “A pencil cannot be of service unless it is sharpened. In the same spirit, I encourage you to be diligent in sharpening yourself, even after this first day.”

[Found via Lexikaliker.]

OS X Text to Speech inhalations

A beautiful detail of OS X’s Text to Speech: “Alex,” by far the most natural sounding of the six Text to Speech voice choices, begins sentences of eight or more words with a slight inhalation. Seven words, no inhaling. Eight or more, he inhales.

If you listen to radio or television commercials closely, it’s easy to notice missing inhalations. Omit needless breaths: that’s the logic, to cram in as many words as possible. The result of course sounds highly unnatural. That someone or ones at Apple took the time to work out a logic of breathing for Text to Speech is deeply impressive. Hey, Apple: I noticed.

[My favorite use for Text to Speech: proofreading text I’ve transcribed.]

Flannery O’Connor on interpretation

Flannery O’Connor, writing to a professor of English in 1961:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction.

O’Connor’s letter is available at Letters of Note.

Related posts
Against “deep reading”
Seventeen ideas about interpretation

[I guess I just wasn’t made for e-times. I had the book Letters of Note as an e-loan for two weeks and got only a quarter of the way through. Out of sight is out of mind, or at least my mind.]

No smoking

I didn’t realize until the late afternoon: it’s twenty-five ago today that I smoked my last cigarette. And I still notice the cigarette displays in convenience stores and supermarkets. Look, there are the Camels. Look, there’s the Drum. I still sense the magnetic field when I walk past the shop where I bought tobacco and papers for three or four years. I still dream of cigarettes, and then I dream of them some more. I have engaged in a self-interview about smoking, and another, and I still identify with Apollinaire’s beautiful poem “Hôtel”: “Je ne veux pas travailler je veux fumer.”

Just last week, after a wonderful lunch with Elaine, I was sipping coffee, and I felt a pang. If someone had offered me a cigarette at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to resist. But you can’t smoke in restaurants anymore, and besides, it was almost twenty-five years since I’d stopped. I am, like they say, so over cigarettes. Never even think of them even.

Elaine and I wrote a song several years ago in response to an unusually specific Google search: “Please Don’t Smoke.” It’s addressed to seven-year-olds (really), but it’s good advice for all.

Seventeen ideas about interpretation

1. Literature exceeds criticism. There are no complete interpretations; there are only complete poems, novels, plays.

2. Criticism is about literature. It makes a gesture toward identifying or illuminating some aspect(s) of a work or works.

3. Criticism is not a negation of pleasure. Knowing more about what it is you’re reading can only inform and deepen pleasure, if there’s genuine pleasure to be had. Knowledge (not ignorance) is bliss.

4. One interprets, but one interprets what’s there. In other words, criticism involves a reader and a text.

5. We can value works that concern our own particular preoccupations. But we can’t merely hunt for — or worse, create — our own preoccupations within texts. We can also read for something other than our own preoccupations. Or we might find in a work of literature a new preoccupation. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, was a serious student of Buddhism.

6. It’s a truism to say that a work of literature means something different to each reader. But the meanings of a work of literature are contained in language, and words cannot mean anything.

7. What a text can be said to mean and what its author can be said to have meant: these are two ways of talking about the same thing.

8. The meaning of the text isn’t in an author’s mind but in all the relevant intricacies of her or his words.

9. How do you know what an author meant? By reading and reading and reading what she or he wrote and constructing a sense of what the text means. And, perhaps, after doing that for a long time, by reading what other (good) readers have written too.

10. A text’s significance is not of its author’s making. For instance, the ways in which the Iliad has a particular significance to the philosopher Simone Weil thinking about Nazi Germany, or to the poet Alice Notley thinking about the war in Vietnam. For instance, the ways in which William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” can serve as a paradigm for thinking about Romantic poetry and nature.

11. A question to always consider: what’s the basis for making a particular interpretive move? What’s the basis for saying that the red wheelbarrow is anything other than a wheelbarrow? The basis for a move might be an appeal to what an author meant, to textual evidence, or to interpretive conventions. It’s not enough just to say that “x” is what you get from the poem. The questions that follow: Did you really get “x” from the poem? (See no. 5.) If so how? And if so, is the how a plausible how? (Is, say, counting the number of letters in a poem a plausible how?)

12. Good readers notice details, and they know what details have pointed them toward particular understandings of what they’ve read.

13. Many student-readers don’t realize that interpretation is typically a matter of adjusting and refining and revising — noticing one detail, noticing another, noticing something else that requires rethinking what you were thinking. The hermeneutic circle — from a sense of the parts, we construct a sense of the whole; from a sense of the whole, we construct a sense of the parts — suggests that interpretation is continually under revision. All of which might mean that really reading works of literature often demands more time than is available in a survey course.

14. Many student-readers profess disdain for “the critics” while simultaneously seeing in critical work an enormous interpretive authority.

15. It’s not scandalous that critics can often explicate works with greater facility than the makers of those works can muster. The work of noticing and explaining is different from the work of making literature, just as musicological analysis is different from making music. And many makers, whatever their critical abilities, prefer not to explain, just as composers and visual artists do. An interpretation provided by a maker would in any event be an interpretation. (See no. 1.)

16. To say that an interpretation is plausible need not mean that you agree with it. To say that an interpretation is plausible is to say that it deserves consideration. Allowing for points of view other than your own is typically called critical pluralism.

17. What makes an interpretation plausible? The ways in which it accounts or doesn’t account for a text. What makes an interpretation implausible? The ways in which it accounts or doesn’t account for a text.

[The number in the post title is no Internet ploy: I wrote these observations, with this title, somewhere in the late 1980s or the early 1990s, probably to share with students in a course on “theory.” The printout is from an Apple ImageWriter. What’s underlined there is italicized here.The context for no. 11: a hypothetical off-the-wall interpretation of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” See also this post.]

From the same file folder
Aglio e olio
The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston
Coppola/“Godfather” sauce
Jim Doyle on education
Mary Backstayge marigold seeds
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tile-pilfering questionnaire

Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe:

The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal — or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube — and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. The icicles, too, and the trampled snow, the logs piled on the sledges and the peasants stooped double under loads of faggots. When children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone—children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs — moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath. When the wintry light crept dimly from slits close to the horizon or an orange sun was setting through the branches of a frozen osier-bed, the identity was complete.

The cover of the New York Review Books reprint shows a detail of Hunters in the Snow. Muffled roofs: exactly. Katy Homans is the book’s designer. Here is an article about her NYRB covers.

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts : One word from A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s eye

Word of the day: hamper

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977), I keep a pencil and memo pad at hand to collect words that need looking up, mostly (so far) words from architecture, art, and German. This flurry had me reaching for my pencil: “gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades.”

It wasn’t oriel that got me: I already have that one. And a well-head is a structure that covers a well. The puzzle here is bell-hamper. The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for bell-hamper, and nothing for hamper that seems to help. Webster’s Third strikes out. But there’s a relevant definition of hamper at the UK site Looking at Buildings: “In 20th-century and later architecture, a visually distinct topmost storey or storeys.” And via Google Books, an example of the word in use:


[John Newman, The Buildings of Wales: Glamorgan (New York: Penguin, 1995).]

Thinking about the hamper as the top storey — or story, in AmE — led me back to the OED which — lo! — has an entry for top-hamper. I had missed that term, cross-referenced in a definition of hamper that I’d thought irrelevant:

Naut. Things which form a necessary part of the equipment of a vessel, but are in the way at certain times.

That meaning of hamper comes, as you might suspect, from the verb hamper. And here’s top-hamper :

a. Naut. Weight or encumbrance aloft: orig. said of the upper masts, sails, and rigging of a ship; later, also, weight or encumbrance on the deck, as in a steamer, ironclad, etc.

b. transf. and fig. An encumbrance on the top or upper part of anything; something that makes it “top-heavy”; the “head-piece.”

And an OED citation, from Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (1861):

Though the top-hamper of houses had long been removed, and the piers patched and strengthened at various times, the [London] bridge was becoming every year less and less adapted for accommodating the increasing traffic to and from the City.

The everyday equivalent of the bell-hamper might be the walls that enclose rooftop water towers.

It amuses me that it’s the top or upper sense that explains the architectural hamper. I like the idea of a hamper as a snug enclosure for a bell. Granted, a bell-hamper wouldn’t be made of wicker. The noun hamper itself is made from the noun hanaper “by elision of middle vowel, and assimilation of np to mp, as in ampersand.” A hanaper is “a case for a hanap [“a drinking-vessel, a wine-cup or goblet”] or hanaps; a plate-basket; a repository for treasure or money,” or “a round wicker case or small basket in which documents were kept.”

Do you see how much work went into figuring out hamper? That’s why it is the word of the day.

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s eye

[A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube is the first of three books recounting Leigh Fermor’s journey from the Netherlands to Turkey. The others: Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986) and The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos (2013). The first two books have been reissued by New York Review Books.]