Author: Joe Page 21 of 32

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Plucking the Canard

On October 11, 2017

As much as I respect Alan and Shawn at The Prancing Pony Podcast, I have to warn people when we can’t trust them. Life in France is one of those times. In their first episode on The Hobbit they repeated the slanderous canard that you can’t get a glass of ice water in a French café.

Your Idiosopher is not one to duck the obligation to give back to the community of scholars, so here’s how you do it.

The cheapest thing on the menu in most any bar is an apéritif called “pastis”. Maybe it goes under a brand name like Ricard or Pernod or 51. It’s anise flavored, tastes like licorice. Most people don’t like it, but that’s not important right now. What’s important is that you drink it with ice cubes and water. At expensive bars, it comes with a carafe of ice. Even in the cheapest dives, the waiter will bring you a glass full of ice cubes with a tablespoon of liqueur in it, and a pitcher of water. Pour the pastis into the gutter, pour the water over the ice, and you’re back in America for five minutes.

You see? Told you!

I suppose you could try telling them to “hold the pastis”. I never tried that, because I actually like the stuff. It’s a working-class drink, totally unfashionable. My father-in-law laughed for years at the sight of me drinking like a retired plumber, because he didn’t understand the true objective of the exercise.

The Agony of the Failed Archivist

By Joe

On October 1, 2017

In Slow learner

One of the strangest things about last winter’s course in literary Research Methods was the citations in the reading assignments.

Back in the 1980s I subscribed to a bunch of magazines of politics and ideas: The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic (it was on the left back then), In These Times, Utne Reader…. All of these magazines had a section in the back entitled something like “Books and the Arts”. I would read the articles if they were talking about an author or a subject that interested me. I would just skim the ones that devoted half their column-inches to hashing out arguments so obscure that even the writers seemed to have to make an effort to care.

All that remains of the glory of old

I thought I was making a gigantic intellectual swerve when I decided to start studying literature, so it was a surprise to see that half the references in the reading assignments were to magazine issues that I’d read, and in some cases even vaguely remembered. All the back issues used to be piled up in a precarious stack at the end of the sofa, where I could refer back to them easily. (I even had a minor triumph one time, when a dispute about the price of anti-matter came up in the conversation and I was able to grab the relevant article out of Physics Today in one minute. It was only about 16 inches down.)

I’ve moved three times since then, and the Army proverb is true: “3 moves = 1 fire”. Besides, my wife had some concerns about that style of decorating. And ce que la femme veut, Dieu le veut, as they say down at the Farm Supply.

So this week’s project had me reading an article about William Gibson and his relationship to postmodernism, which referred the reader to an article in In These Times in 1988. Alas, the ITT online archive goes back only to 2001, so I can’t track down the reference without a library. It’s frustrating — I know I used to have that issue!

I wonder if medieval Scholastics, trying to track down a quotation from some ancient Greek, ever had the same feeling.

Tolkien meets the Oulipo

By Joe

On September 21, 2017

In fantasy, literature

An Epitome of the Idiosophical method

(The core of Idiosophy is that the idiosopher can be misinformed and incorrect at every step in a logical process, and still arrive at a meaningful conclusion.) Our starting point is an earlier post, on which Tom commented, wondering what the “Ents’ Marching Song” would sound like in Latin.

1. The riposte humorous: Hexameters! Longfellowish sprawling hexameters.

2. Noticing a flaw in the joke: Wait, no. Archy the cockroach liked hexameters because he had six feet. Ents all have two feet.

3. Transfiguration: But ents have lots of toes. Ent-latin should have big feet with lots of syllables.

4. Observation: They do. The first line is definitely one long foot. I suppose it’s possible to argue that the second line is a jumble of small troches and dactyls, or maybe iambs and anapests with stray syllables at either end, but that’s not how I hear it.

⏑⏑/⏑⏑⏑⏑/⏑⏑⏑/⏑⏑/
In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the spring.
/⏑/⏑⏑/⏑⏑/⏑/⏑/⏑⏑
Ah, the sight and the smell of the spring in Nan-Tasarion!

LotR, III, iv

5. Following the thought wherever: How could we construct a sound-pattern for big feet that makes them into poetry? Alliteration is matching the sound at the beginning of the foot. Rhyme is matching the sound at the end. If we’re just using iambs and troches, rhyme and alliteration are our only choices. With big feet, though, we have the possibility of matching sounds elsewhere. That would be a novel poetic structure! Dactyls have three syllables. Can we match the middle consonant?

6. Noticing that someone smarter is ‘way ahead of me: “Errantry” has lots of that kind of central sound-match. It’s neither rhyme nor alliteration, but my ears enjoy it the same way.

he built a gilded gondola
to wander in and had in her
a load of yellow oranges
and porridge for his provender…

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 3.

7. The unexpected arrival: J.R.R. Tolkien was a Modernist writer, and “the most striking element of modernist poetry is the invention and experimentation of new modes of expression.” This is what my heroes in the Oulipo are interested in, too. This is derived from a root as mathematical as any of their self-imposed constraints.

Up at the top of the page, I promised a meaningful conclusion. Coincidentally, Dimitra Fimi just published an essay in the Times Literary Supplement about world-building. She points out that writing speculative fiction is about creating a different set of rules from those we see in the world around us, and writing your story in strict adherence to those rules. But, she says, that’s exactly what the Oulipians do, except they’re doing it at the level of the text, while fantasy and science-fiction writers do it at the level of the story. So it’s entirely reasonable that JRRT was doing this on purpose,working on both levels at once.

Hazards of French Châteaux

By Joe

On September 17, 2017

In squibs & crackers

Alan Coren (1938-2007) wrote some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. I first encountered him when my mother went on vacation to England and brought me back a copy of an issue of Punch as a souvenir. That magazine is awfully moldy and tattered now, but Coren’s column is still legible.

I’ve bought every book by Alan Coren that I’ve been able to find, over the years. That includes a copy of Golfing for Cats that was never published in the USA; I found it in an antiques store in Palm Springs. None of them contains the article that introduced me to Coren. Some entrepreneurs have acquired the Punch archives, but they’re only interested in selling the cartoons.

So I’ve rescued “And a Gray Dawn Breaking…” here, under the “20th Century Paleography” rubric.

We are totally somethinged

By Joe

On September 16, 2017

In trivial

A blog post I read was lamenting the current state of the world. The author discreetly summed up, “We are totally s—-ed.” The dictionary built into my Unix operating system informs me that there are 130 English words that fit that pattern.

Soliped

Some of the words were unexpected; they were familiar words that I didn’t think of as fitting that pattern. Some of the words I’d never heard before (“savoy” is a verb?!). There was an impressive list of 25 words the author might have actually meant (some more probably than others). Most of them, of course, are just past participles of ordinary verbs.

Unexpected	New to me
samoyed semiped seaweed seedbed sexiped sickbed soliped succeed sunweed	salited savoyed sweered sheered stonied
He could’ve meant	Ordinary Participles
sabered saboted scabbed scalded scalled scraped screwed scuffed scarred scorned scummed sewered shabbed shafted shagged shammed sharded shanked skinned sludged slugged smeared slashed slabbed snubbed	saddled sainted satined savored scarfed scarved scented scooped scoured sepaled serried settled sharded shawled sheaved shedded sheeted shelled shipped shotted sickled sighted sinewed singled siruped skeered skidded skilled skimmed skulled skirted slacked slatted sleaved sledded sleeved slipped slitted slopped slotted smelled smudged smutted snagged snapped snooded snouted sparked sparred spasmed spathed spatted spavied specked spiffed spitted splayed spoiled sponged spotted spurred squared staffed staired stalked stapled starred starved statued stealed stemmed stepped sterned sticked stilted stinted stooded stopped storied straked striped strived stubbed studied stuffed stunted subdued sugared sweated swelled swooned syruped

Multilingual Ents

By Joe

On September 11, 2017

In fantasy

The twitterati were discussing Ents in foreign languages yesterday. The marching song of the Ents is so primitive, so devoid of nuance, that it’s got to be fun for a translator to work on. “We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door.” In my French translation, they don’t usually worry about rhythm in their translations of the poems (that’s not a French thing to do) but this time they couldn’t resist: “Nous allons, nous allons, nous allons en guerre, pourfendre la porte et briser la pierre!” It’s a literal translation, which insists that we put the accent on the “al”s and turns out to be amphibrachic meter. Now, if you know anything about French poetry, that’s about as likely as Dr. Seuss writing a rondeau. Somehow it seems to go with Rohan, but it’s too light-footed for Ents.

Olga gave us two Russian versions. One is prosaic: “Мы смерть несём за шагом шаг.” I like this. Literally it’s “we’re bringing destruction, step by step.” It’s not entirely prosaic, I must point out: “shagum shag” is a nice onomatopoiea for the sound I’d make if every step I took required pulling a root out of the ground. The poetic version, though, is amazing: “Идём-грядём, судьбу несём.” I translate that as, “We go, we’re climbing the ridge, we’re bringing doom.” Let me try to give an impression of the sound. That “ë” is pronounced “yo”, and I can’t resist putting the stress on those. “idYOM, gradYOM, sud’bu nesYOM”. That’s heavy. That’s twenty tons of oak talking. It goes really well with “hoom” and “hom”, which Treebeard uses either as interjections or as punctuation. Massive kudos to the translator. JRRT cared about the sound of his writing as much as anything. I think he’d have liked this verse, based on a line in Letter #142: “the time I once spent on trying to learn Serbian and Russian ha[s] left me with no practical results, only a strong impression of the structure and word-aesthetic.”

Coda

I went looking around the Web for a basso aria from a Russian opera to illustrate this post. Bozhemoi, what a downer! Pro tip: don’t do that without professional assistance. Russian composers are some of the most depressed people on earth, and nothing good has happened to characters sung by basses since the Baroque. The death of Don Quixote at the burning of his library isn’t even the worst one I found. To anyone who would undertake a similar quest, I recommend that you wait for a sunny day, get a Prozac prescription, surround yourself with friends and loved ones, put a newly-adopted kitten in your lap, and only then start listening to the results of a web search for Russian basso arias.

Echoes of Númenór

By Joe

On September 2, 2017

In fantasy, Vive la France

Akallabêth tells us there were three languages in use in Númenór:

For though this people used still their own speech, their kings and lords knew and spoke also the Elven tongue, which they had learned in the days of their alliance, and thus they held converse still with the Eldar, whether of Eresséa or of the westlands of Middle—earth. And the loremasters among them learned also the High Eldarin tongue of the Blessed Realm, in which much story and song was preserved from the be inning of the world; and they made letters and scrolls and books, and wrote in them many things of wisdom and wonder in the high tide of their realm, of which all is now forgot.

Alan and Shawn at the Prancing Pony Podcast reminded me of this. Languages are parallel between Númenór and medieval England:

	Númenór	England
Common people	Adunaic	English
Aristocracy	Sindarin	French
Scholars	Quenya	Latin

This Númenórean social divide persisted all the way through the Third Age, and it shows up in the way Gondorians talk. Let’s look at two words for strong fighting men, both of which make teenage boys snicker: “doughty” and “puissant”.

“‘Happily your Caradhras has forgotten that you have Men with you,’ said Boromir, who came up at that moment. ‘And doughty Men too, if I may say it; though lesser men with spades might have served you better.’” The common folk of Minas Tirith hear rumors that “When the Riders came from Rohan, each would bring behind him a halfling warrior, small maybe, but doughty.” Grimbold of Rohan gets that adjective, as would many warriors of the Rohirrim. Frodo describes the Rangers of Ithilien as doughty, and he’s being polite. “Doughty” is a good Old English word, meaning “the guy who gits ‘er done.” It’s appropriate for Rohirrim, hobbits, and other such plebs. Boromir, despite being of a noble family, has a strong mixture of base blood, so he uses it to refer to himself and Aragorn.

But the blood of Westernesse runs “nearly true” in Faramir, and when Tolkien says that about him, he means the blood of the Númenóreans who escaped to Middle Earth at the last minute: the Faithful; all from the aristocracy. Now listen to Faramir talking to Éowyn: “You desired to have the love of the Lord Aragorn. Because he was high and puissant…” The word “doughty” is gone, replaced by its French synonym. Faramir is an expert rhetorician — putting some social distance between his target and his rival is a nice move — though perhaps only a professor of philology would expect such a maneuver to work in that context.

More than three thousand years later, the social-linguistic fracture lines endure in Gondor. And Denethor at least was proud of it. Florence doesn’t seem so bad any more.

Won’t you be my neighbor?

By Joe

On September 2, 2017

In graphs

I’m playing with graphs again. Here’s a picture of my net-neighborhood out to two steps, i.e., the sites on my blogroll and the sites on their blogrolls.

Web Neighborhood

The funniest thing about this graph is that, despite the fact that it was designed to be my neighborhood, Idiosophy isn’t in the center. Olga’s Middle Earth Reflections is. (Fair enough; her blog has more than a thousand followers.) Science teaches humility, along with everything else.

Nobody else is interested in economics, so Grasping Reality is ‘way over in the corner. The rest of the network is easier to read if I cut that one link.

Zooming in on the non-economic network

J.R.R. Tolkien brings together some diverse parts of the world. There are priests and theologians along the south, language-inventors up in the northwest corner, medievalists in the northeast, and a little knot of modernists on the east side. Nobody who knows Tolkien’s curriculum vitae would be surprised to see that list (except perhaps for the economists and the physicist), but if there’s anything else in life that connects these communities, it doesn’t come immediately to mind.

Technical note

Drawing these graphs took ten minutes. The tools you can download freely from the Web are amazing. This was made by the “igraph” package in R. To make these plots, I used an algorithm that simulates a simplified physical system to place the nodes. It puts an electric charge on the nodes, so they want to be separated and legible. Then it pretends the links are rubber bands, so inter-linked nodes are pulled tighter together. I learned how to do this from an excellent tutorial by Katherine Ognyanova. (Who must be one of us; she posted the etymology of her name on her blog. I wonder if she’s related to the Vedic fire-god Agni.)

Twitter Voices

By Joe

On August 22, 2017

In trivial

I have just listened to two podcasts by people whom I know only from Twitter.

Elaine Treharne spoke with a Stanford University podcast on Anglo-Saxon literature, as I mentioned the other day. Sarah E. Bond talked to the New Books Network about Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean, her study of professions that were excluded from polite society in Ancient Rome. (Seriously, U.Mich. Press? $80?)

Prof Treharne’s voice sounded just like I expected. Prof. Bond’s was a surprise. She sounded like my sister. In retrospect this makes sense; she grew up just a bit down the road. But why my different reaction? Why do I have an expectation of the sound of someone’s voice from reading their tweets?

Fan Art by Morticia the Cat

After careful examination (the unexamined Twitter feed is not worth following), I have come to the conclusion that I hear all tweets by women as if they were read by Kathleen Turner.

Prof. Treharne’s voice is similarly pitched, with allowances made for her outre-Atlantique accent, and therefore sounded right to me.

This post is of no importance to anyone.

Anglo-Saxons Weren’t Cynics

By Joe

On August 21, 2017

In scholarship

Elaine Treharne of Stanford University did a podcast interview recently. She gives a beautiful reading of the poem that she does not want to call “Wulf and Eadwacer” because it’s not really about those two guys. It’s about the woman who narrates it.

Titles are a problem in other ways, too. The podcast is unfortunately entitled “Reading After Trump”, as if the current president of the USA were in some way responsible for the thirty-year assault on the humanities, rather than just collecting its foul harvest. But let’s pass that by.

The interviewer asked an interesting question: What have we lost, that the Anglo-Saxons of a thousand years ago knew? Prof. Treharne’s response was “hope”, which I think any scholar of Tolkien would applaud. She contrasts that with the cynicism of our modern age. She finds no trace of anything like it in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. That got me wondering about cynicism. Whence does it come? The Bosworth-Toller dictionary contains nothing about cynics.

Looking at the reasons for cynicism, it’s easy to see why it’s a relatively recent development. I studied with expert cynics in my youth, who taught me what to look for:

A government official who takes an oath of office, which he immediately abandons in favor of handing out money to his supporters. This doesn’t apply at all. An Anglo-Saxon expected this of his king. Any king who didn’t do that would get ditched for one who would. They would even flatter a king by calling him goldwine, “gold-friend”. There’s no ground for cynicism here.

A boss who’s several levels of management above me is clueless about what’s really happening, and will make foolish decisions because of his exalted distance. Not generally a factor, because the medieval orders were clearly distinct. The baron to whom I and my ox reported was the highest official who concerned himself with my job. The king was forbidden by custom to care how I did my job, just as I didn’t care how he did his. (Notwithstanding the continental practice of giving Charlemagne credit for figuring out how to grow wine grapes in Germany.) Cynical gossip around the village well wouldn’t happen as a result.

Advertisers who lie to me to get money from me. Not a factor, either. The Anglo-Saxon economy was largely based on gift-exchange. That’s an economics term; it doesn’t mean festive wrapping paper and bows. It means you’re dealing with people you know so they’ll give you seeds in the spring because you will still be around at harvest time to pay them back in the fall. Anglo-Saxon peasants worked that way because they didn’t have much money. (OK, this is disputed, but generally all the cash money got siphoned off as Danegeld.) In fact, one purpose of money is to make it possible to have economic interactions with people whom you do not trust. Kings have to do that all the time, but the general public did not. Money and cynicism go hand in hand. Without the former, it’s not surprising that we don’t see the latter.

People who pretend to love me to get their hands on something of mine. This seems like it should have been possible in a medieval society, even before they had French people running things. In fact, it’s possible that the narrator of “Wulf and Eadwacer” is running a scam like that. This is the one solid case where I’d expect to see hope failing and cynicism prevailing.

So of the top four reasons to be cynical, I find three that don’t apply to Anglo-Saxon England, but one that definitely does. The fact that we don’t see a cynical reaction to that last is some pretty solid evidence for Prof. Treharne’s idea.

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Author: Joe Page 21 of 32

An Epitome of the Idiosophical method

Coda

Technical note