Rolling back existence

From The New York Times:

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

If, as Wittgenstein suggests, the limits of one’s language mean the limits of one’s world, this initiative goes beyond rolling back recognition and legal protections. Recognition presumes the existence of that which is recognized. This initiative seeks to roll back existence, erasing identities and insisting that persons are who the government says they are. I think of Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

[Ludwig Wittgenstein describes solipsism in the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus 5.62: : “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”]

Sinatra’s “Lush Life”

From Variety: Frank Sinatra tried Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” for the 1958 album Only the Lonely — and gave up. The outtakes are powerful reminders of how difficult it must be to sing “Lush Life” to one’s satisfaction (if, that is, one is a singer).

The Variety article mentions many other singers of “Lush Life” but makes no mention of Johnny Hartman’s 1963 recording of the song with John Coltrane. For many listeners that’s the “Lush Life.”

“Some apples”

Elaine and I are fortunate to live about seventeen miles from an orchard. Store-bought apples and peaches cannot compare to apples and peaches from the orchard — especially because we buy apples and peaches only from the orchard and have no basis for comparison. Yesterday the orchard had an Applefest, with cider, apple crisp, and thirty-four varieties of apples to taste. George Washington’s favorite: the Newtown Pippin. The orchardist’s favorite: Etter’s Gold. I especially liked the Calville Blanc d’hiver, a French apple grown by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Uncooked, the apple already tasted like pie. My favorite was the crisp, fragrant Ambrosia, though I am disappointed to know that it has much less history behind it, as it dates from the 1990s.

When we traipsed through the orchard, I was on the lookout for “some apples.” And I found them, arranged by nature’s hand.



“Some,” as in “some rocks,” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

*

12:57 p.m.: Wait a minute — was Ambrosia my favorite? The ones we now have at home seem bland by comparison to whatever I liked best at the orchard.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, was not especially difficult, not especially tricky. A great big giveaway straight down the middle breaks open the puzzle: 6-Down, fifteen letters, “Reference standby since 1852.” But I found some pleasant surprises here and there.

1-Down, eight letters, “Bad-weather wear,” yields an answer of surprising dowdiness. Another favorite: 26-Across, five letters, “They take long naps.” And 64-Across, six letters, “Story arcs.” (Huh?)

I was not happy to see 44-Down, six letters, “Silents’ scene-starting shot,” a dubious clue. “Silent-film effect” or “silent-film transition” would be better.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Anthea Bell (1936–2018)

The translator Anthea Bell has died at the age of eighty-two. The Guardian has an obituary. I know Stefan Zweig’s fiction in large part through Bell’s translations. W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz too.

Hand wash cold

From Smithsonian: “If Americans turned down the heat when washing their hands they could save 6 million metric tons of CO₂ every year.”

Even if the numbers here are subject to questioning (hot water isn’t always available in public bathrooms to begin with), washing one’s hands with cold water would seem to make good sense. Done. Though I already do it anyway. Who wants to wait for hot water?

[Found via Matt Thomas’s Twitter.]

Early voting

A dream last night: CNN announced that Beto O’Rourke had won election to the United States Senate. “Already?” I asked. And on the TV screen, a photograph of the three pickups of a Fender Stratocaster. Meaning that the Democratic Party had picked up three Senate seats?

Precognitive, I hope.

Related posts
Beginning King Lear
Dreaming of autumn and fall
Nabokov, dreaming

“The deepest motive for writing”

Richard Lanham:

Motive has always been the question of questions for Freshman Composition. Perhaps more success might flow from assuming, paradoxically, that the deepest motive for writing is not communication at all but the pleasures of writing for its own sake. Writing to others is a writing for ourselves. Clarity in communication may be less the cause of our pleasure in prose than the result.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
“Slow Reading”
Writing and speech

Writing and speech

Richard Lanham:

Much has been written about prose that gains authority through the speaking voice. It gains still more by manipulating time scale. We condense ten hours’ writing and thinking into one hour’s reading. The best ad-libbers always prepare their spontaneity. Writing’s advantage, as a presentation of self, is not that it allows us to adopt the mannerisms of speech but that it allows us to adopt the tempo of speech without its hesitant waste.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
“Slow Reading”
“The deepest motive for writing”

“Slow Reading”

Richard Lanham:

Before prose rhythm can be sensibly considered, one must redefine reading. It cannot be a jet flight coast-to coast. It must be a slow walk in the country, taken, as all such walks should be, partly for the walking itself. Every course in composition ought to be a course in Slow Reading.

Style: An Anti-Textbook, 2nd. ed. (Philadelphia, Paul Dry Books, 2007).

Also from this book
Writing and speech
“The deepest motive for writing”

[Lanham has also written a genuine textbook, Revising Prose (2007), immensely helpful and ridiculously expensive. (Thanks, Pearson). A sentence from that book has been running through my head for years. A presentation of the book’s core, the Paramedic Method of revision, may be found at Purdue OWL. Scroll down or you’ll think you’ve hit an empty page.]