The Fourth

[“Hungarian refugee Irene Csillag pledging allegiance to new flag on first day in American school.” Photograph by Carl Mydans. Indianapolis, Indiana. December 1956. From the Life Photo Archive. This photograph appeared in a Life story, “They Pour In . . . And Family Shows Refugees Can Fit In” (January 7, 1957). The principal at the Csillag children’s school: “They’re not the first to come here, strangers to the country and to English, and soon be at home.”]

Theodor Haecker on tyranny and difficulty

Writing in Germany, 1940:

Tyrants always want a language and literature that is easily understood, for nothing so weakens thought; and what they need is an enfeebled thought, for nothing keeps them so firmly in power. When the ideal and the order is to write an easily understood style, anyone who is difficult to understand is eo ipso suspect.

Journal in the Night , trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Pantheon Books, 1950).

A related post
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty and simplification

[Journal in the Night is available at archive.org.]

Geoffrey Hill on difficulty and simplification

From a Paris Review interview (no. 154, Spring 2000):

I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

Related posts
Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty (more from the same interview)
Theodor Haecker on tyranny and difficulty

[Theodore Haecker’s Journal in the Night is available at Archive.org.]

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016)

From Mercian Hymns (1971).

And: “What / ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad / and angry consolation”: from CXLVIII, The Triumph of Love (1998).

Long ago, as an undergrad, I figured out that the best way to read Geoffrey Hill is with an Oxford English Dictionary close by. I cannot think of another poet whose work brings me to a closer consideration of words as embodiments of history.

Here are obituaries from The Guardian and The New York Times . (Notice the volume of the OED in the portrait. Hill had the no-magnifying-glass-needed edition of the OED at home, as a photograph published with this interview shows.)

Related posts
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty
Geoffrey Hill, pencil user

[Like The Waste Land , Mercian Hymns has notes. XXV has more of them than any other poem in the sequence:

XXV: ‘the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera’. See The Works of John Ruskin, London (1903-1912), XXIX, pp. 170-180.

‘darg’: ‘a day’s work, the task of a day . . .’ (O.E.D.). Ruskin employs the word, here and elsewhere.

‘quick forge’: see W. Shakespeare, Henry V , V, Chorus, 23. The phrase requires acknowledgement but the source has no bearing on the poem.

‘wire’: I seem not to have been strictly accurate. Hand-made nails were made from rods. Wire was used for the ‘French nails’ made by machine. But: ‘wire’ = ‘metal wrought into the form of a slender rod or thread’ (O.E.D.).

Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1871-1884), by John Ruskin, written to be a “continual challenger to the supporters of and apologists for a capitalist economy.” Archive.org has the text. Letter LXXX (July 16, 1877), begins on page 83.]

Word of the day: tarmac

The word is — cough — in the air. But where does it come from? The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

ˈTarmac, n .
A kind of tar macadam consisting of iron slag impregnated with tar and creosote; also designating a surface made of tar macadam. Now freq. with lower-case initial. the tarmac (colloq.), the airfield or runway.

A proprietary name in the United Kingdom.

Proprietary, capitalized: huh. The Dictionary’s earliest citation is from 1903.

[Context: Bill Clinton’s confab with Loretta Lynch as their planes were parked on the you-know-what. I’m surprised to see that tarmac is missing from the list of trending words at Merriam-Webster.]

Some rock

[Nancy , July 1, 1949.]

It’s the first day of Nancy’s summer vacation, and there’s nothing to do but lean on some rock.

Fans of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy love the strip’s frequent use of the decorative device “some rocks.” You can read Bushmiller strips six days a week at GoComics.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Silver or stainless steel

Rosemary MacLane has just announced to her grandmother, her mother, her sister Barbara, and Aunt Josie that she will not be choosing a silver pattern. So what will she and her husband use to eat? Stainless steel.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Remember: for Rosemary and Greg, the only important possessions are books and records. Rosemary goes on to explain that Greg knows a couple with a potter’s wheel who can make dishes for the newlyweds — “in warm earth tones.” And Rosemary will be making place mats out of burlap. The kids these days!

And speaking of the young, or the younger: this passage is a good example of how sixteen-year-old Barbara has begun to see her eighteen-year-old sister’s wedding as her own event to manage. Like the protagonists of Beverly Cleary’s other First Love novels, Barbara will move toward greater self-knowledge, and she’ll come to understand that the difference between eighteen and sixteen, like the difference between silver and stainless steel, is pretty vast.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, Rosemary is eighteen, a college freshman. Greg is twenty-four, a graduate student getting a teaching credential.]

“Illinois, Illinois”

As reported in the Chicago Tribune this afternoon:

The Illinois House on Thursday approved a stopgap budget that would keep state government afloat for six months, ensure schools open this fall and provide help to struggling Chicago Public Schools after Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democrats who control the General Assembly hoped they struck a deal amid intense political pressure with the November election looming.

The 105–4 vote follows two days of closed-door negotiations, the first meaningful round of give-and-take on the budget as the state was about to enter a second straight year without a full spending plan come Friday. The bill now heads to the Senate, where approval is expected later Thursday.

<irony>Wow, they wasted not a moment in putting together another short-term fix. Great job, everyone!</irony>

*

4:07 p.m.: And now the Senate has approved it, 54–0.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

[“Illinois, Illinois”: from the state song. To be sung in a minor key.]

Aspirational or delusional or both

Signage, aspirational or delusional or both:

We are more than APARTMENTS,
          we are a LIFESTYLE

No, they’re just apartments, and not especially nice ones.

The woes that the Illinois budget crisis has brought to our town are prompting property owners to take extraordinary measures. In nearly thirty-one years, I have never before seen in our town the kind of wild (and sad) claim this sign makes.

Recently updated

Imaginary word of the day: misinflame Now there’s a noun.