Mark Trail interjections

[“Whooa!” Mark Trail, November 11, 2014.]


[“Whoa!” Mark Trail, November 21, 2014.]

I do not yet understand the grammar of Mark Trail’s interjections. Is whooa reserved for interior monologue? For underwater use? For moments when one’s own life is in danger, and not some bear’s? For use when one is at least partly clothed? Clearly, more study is needed. Whooa!

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[I think it unlikely that whooa is what Van Dyke Parks calls a misprink.]

Misheard

The television was on for “warmth.” Hamilton Burger was speaking to Lieutenant Tragg: “It’s an anonymous hipster. See if you can trace the call.”

I misheard what I misheard. But then there’s this shining moment. Perhaps the tipster was a hipster after all.

Related reading
All misheard posts (Pinboard)

Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.

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. As Leigh Fermor prepares to leave Vienna, he hears a story about the Holy Roman Emperor Maxmilian I:

Someone was describing how he used to escape from the business of the Empire now and then by retiring to a remote castle in the Tyrolese or Styrian forests. Scorning muskets and crossbows and armed only with a long spear, he would set out for days after stag and wild boar. It was during one of these holidays that he composed a four-line poem, and inscribed it with chalk, or in lampblack, on the walls of the castle cellar. It was still there, the speaker said.

Whoever tells the story writes out the poem, “with the old Austrian spelling painstakingly intact”:

Leb, waiss nit wie lang,
Und stürb, waiss nit wann
Muess fahren, waiss nit wohin
Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.

Leigh Fermor’s translation:

Live, don’t know how long,
And die, don’t know when;
Must go, don’t know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.

These lines remind me of a sentence from Guillaume Apollinaire: “la beauté de la vie passe la douleur de mourir.” And of lines from Frank O’Hara: “Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.” All wonderful, compact philosophies of life.

Related posts
“Footpads and knaves” : From A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel : Leigh Fermor’s eye : One word from A Time of Gifts

[The poem exists in several versions and is also attributed to the theologian Martinus von Biberach. The Apollinaire sentence is from the calligram “La cravate et la montre” (The Tie and the Watch). The O‘Hara lines are from “In Memory of My Feelings.” Relineated, they appear on O’Hara’s grave marker.]

Ivory Tower to air on CNN

The CNN film Ivory Tower (dir. Andrew Rossi, 2014) airs on CNN this Thursday, November 20, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.

A related post
The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else (On the future of college)

A teacher’s response to school reformers

From high-school English teacher Ian Altman: Seven things teachers are sick of hearing from school reformers (The Washington Post). Move past the listicle title and you’ll find a deeply thoughtful response to school reformers. One choice passage:

Educators talk about and analyze test score data, and supposedly let that data “drive instruction,” but the truth is that numbers and measurements gleaned from those tests are not data.

They are a flat, bleached replacement of data, because they replace the substance of learning with an abstraction, a false image of learning, much the way Descartes replaced the idea of physical things with the concept of graphable spatial extension. The acts of thinking, learning, and knowing, are not objects that can be replaced with abstractions about thinking, learning, and knowing. In that specific but crucial sense, all school test data are fake.

I wish I had had Mr. Altman for English.

“Notorious Dead Criminals”

[“Close-up of file drawer at FBI office.” Photographs by George Skadding. United States, 1944. From the Life Photo Archive. Click either image for a larger view.]

The file-drawer label “Notorious Dead Criminals” is worthy of Chief Wiggum. That’s Pretty Boy Floyd in the second photograph.

The Real Housewives of NPR

Andy Cohen, executive producer of The Real Housewives, plugging a book this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday: “Some people say to me, ‘Oh my God, that’s your show ?’ And I say, ‘Look, don’t blame me. Either turn the channel, or get on board.’”

Duly noted.

Public radio ought not to serve as an organ of publicity for junk-pop-culture. NPR’s willingness to do so makes me less and less interested in kicking in to support NPR.

Related posts
NPR, sheesh
PBS wants me to flip my phone open

[Note: junk-pop-culture. Not all pop culture is junk, not by a long shot.]

Happy birthday, Ted Berrigan

[From A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988).]

The American poet Ted Berrigan was born eighty years ago today. He died on July 4, 1983. I‘ll quote from an essay that I wrote some years ago for a reference series on American poetry:

In twenty-five years of writing, Ted Berrigan created a poetry that melded intelligence, emotion, and wit in unexpected ways, a poetry of what he calls in sonnet LIII “baffling combustions.” Berrigan’s poetry can be at once dazzlingly opaque and utterly clear, full of dense verbal collage and unashamed sentiment, blatantly appropriative yet singularly original.

Berrigan established himself as a poet with the radical formalism of The Sonnets (1964), turning the form, as he said in a 1978 interview, into “fourteen units of one line each.” The poems of this sequence collage fragments of Berrigan’s own unsatisfactory early work with words lifted from elsewhere, creating rich and strange textures in fourteen (or fifteen or sixteen) lines.¹ In his final years Berrigan discovered a new possibility for a radical formalism in the writing project 500 American Postcards, which took the postcard as a poetic form, a fixed space determining (along with the variable of handwriting) the size of the poem.

“Whoa Back Buck & Gee by Land!” is a postcard poem. It takes its title from a song Leadbelly sang (but it’s the lamb, not land ). The third line comes from Frank O’Hara’s poem “River”; the fourth, from Auden’s “A Lullaby”; the sixth, from John Wieners’s “Act #2” (“Women in / the night moan yr. name”). Those are the sources I recognize; there may be others. The poem itself, however, could be the work of only one poet. “Man, that was Ted Berrigan!”

It is 5:15 a.m. Happy birthday, Ted.

Related posts
Canon-formation
“A Final Sonnet”
“Resolution”
Separated at birth: C. Everett Koop and Ted Berrigan

¹ Rich and strange: including lines from The Tempest.

“LEASH-CURB AND CLEAN UP”

[Local signage.]

Leash-curb ? Or leash curb ? Non-native speakers are rightly confused. Leash, curb, and clean up: items in a series.

Related reading
All signage posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, the dog walker looks like an extraterrestrial.]

Jeepers, they’re euphemisms

Did you know that gee is “probably a shortening of Jesus! (or Jerusalem! )”?

Did you know that jeez or jeeze is a corruption of Jesus?

Did you know that jeepers is also a corruption of Jesus?

And did you know that sheesh is “probably an alteration of jeez ”?

I found my way to these words after using the word jeepers in an e-mail and wondering where it came from. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies all four words as originating in American English. Gee is the oldest (1895). The OED labels jeez (1923) and jeepers (1929) as slang, sheesh (1959) as colloquial. 1959? Sheesh was in use well before that. I can hear Ed Norton speaking to Ralph Kramden, somewhere in the 1955–1956 season of The Honeymooners: “Sheesh, what a grouch!” Get on it, OED.

[My answers to these questions: yes, yes, no, no.]