Klingon

I’m not ashamed to say it. I love Star Trek. I was raised on it. Growing up, I thought the only literature that existed was Star Trek novelizations. And Hardy Boys, the occasional comic book. Everything else was schoolwork.

What I liked best about Star Trek was how fundamentally optimistic it was. Some part of this had to do with the fact that the creators allowed entire races their history and culture, for culture’s sake. I mean, sure, Kirk would still probably bang anything that moved and the history didn’t usually amount to a whole lot but someone made the effort to put that all in there regardless of how easily cliche it all was.

Arika Okrent has a post up on Slate detailing the history of the Klingon language and its linguistics. Here’s something I didn’t know which delighted me. I can’t speak or understand a word of Klingon btw. Yet this is testament to its universality and awesomeness.

“Klingon is….an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The linguistic features of Klingon are not especially unusual (at least to a linguist) when considered independently, but put together, they make for one hell of an alien language.”

Stephen Fry’s letter to his younger self

This makes me glad to be alive. I have a certain picture I address when I read this out loud. Sappiness++

Of course, I’m quoting out of context. This letter’s true purpose is to confront Stephen Fry’s (from Fry and Laurie, Blackadder and QI) younger self’s struggles with his homosexuality but it’s more than that. Fry says as much, which makes me feel okay about co-opting his wonderful words. It’s a universal adolescent struggle, I think, that mad combination of despair and yearning. It made my heart soar a little bit reading. I wonder what my younger self would think of me now.

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

God is not in the earthquake but in the still, small voice

That’s a John Ruskin quote.

I was reading this article in a poetry journal and then it occurred to me that many of my favorite paintings are from a school of 19th century American art called Luminism whose primary concern is with the depiction of light within a landscape. I’m always engaged by works that rely on light for texture, whether it’s in art, literature or even life.

Libraries

One of the panels this year at AWP was apparently literature about libraries. I love libraries. Ever since I was informed of this panel, I’ve been curious about what they might have spoken about. More people should write about being in them.

In the Library
-Charles Simic

There’s a book called
“A Dictionary of Angels.”
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

On torture

There’s nothing I have to add about the efficacy of standard interrogation techniques than this post off Andrew Sullivan’s blog over at The Atlantic. It astounds me that anyone can claim to be empirical when they talk about the necessity for torture. Still more astounding is the fact that people even have to discuss efficacy in this day and age. Torture is wrong. That’s all there is. Even if it were effective, which as you will see, it isn’t.

Andrew Sullivan’s blog

Staged learning 1

I teach English Composition at Rutgers-Newark. I enjoy it a great deal but I didn’t always. In fact, in my first semester last year, I can honestly say I taught my students nothing.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for new instructors tends to be where students are in the Perry cognitive development scheme. This is true especially as they arrive via the New Jersey public school system, where for some strange reason, students are taught how to summarize an argument they don’t agree with without calling into question why they don’t agree.

How can you personally support racial profiling while at the same time, write a paper opposing it simply because it was asked (as some of my students did)? Of course, these papers weren’t ever any good, which could be because of the dissonance set up between what they were asked to do and their own unquestioned beliefs. Grading these papers were hard for me as well. My students couldn’t articulate why the author chose an opposing position so they summarized the reading but not before letting some of their prior beliefs reduce the effectiveness of the analytical portion of the paper. My students did good work. I can’t fault them too much. They read. They followed instructions. They didn’t care though.

I had to wonder if my students were really so blase and unaffected by a non-fiction reading that takes an opposing point of view. I questioned them afterwards about this. I asked them if their point of view had shifted at all after writing an argumentative paper against racial profiling. They said no. Clearly, something was wrong. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was because of some allegiance to a heirarchy of authority.

The Rosenthal Rule

OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus

-A.M.Rosenthal, former editor, The New York Times

Andre Neher on hope

A very interesting Jewish philosophical take on silence especially. I stumbled on to Neher recently. Loving him so far. I sort of read him as a French answer/companion to Aharon Appelfeld, who is awesome in his own right. However, everything’s better in the original French.

L’espoir n’est pas dans le rire et dans la plénitude.
L’espoir est dans les larmes, dans le risque et dans leur silence
— André Neher, L’Exil de la parole

In other news, I got me some Zola from The Strand. Also, in keeping with the French theme, here’s a song I love. You should too.

A Man Meets a Woman in the Street

I’ve been reading archives of The New Republic and one thing led to another, I stumbled on to a poem I absolutely adore. It’s not like me to like old poetry but apparently I’ve a taste for it now. Read a lot of this guy, Randall Jarrell, especially. He reminds me oddly of Larry Levis, who Brandon introduced me to. Levis is awesome! Every time I read this poem, I appreciate the turn more and more. Damn you, research on economic policy, for your wicked procrastinating ways!

A Man Meets a Woman in the Street
-Randall Jarrell

Under the separated leaves of shade
Of the gingko, that old tree
That has existed essentially unchanged
Longer than any other living tree,

Review of Michael Graziano’s Love Song of Monkey (Fiction)

So your neurotic, unfaithful wife, driven to desperation by your apathy, manages to (unknowingly) cure you of AIDS, rendering you immortal, then dumps you in the bottom of the ocean tethered to a bust of Venus. What do you do when you awaken? Why, forgive, of course, and love. Takes eternity, but still. Princeton psychology professor Michael S.A. Graziano’s new book, Love Song of Monkey (Leapfrog Press), removes his protagonist Jonathan from humanity itself so he can arrive at that startlingly simple conclusion.

Love Song of Monkey harkens back to a time before the complications of the novel. It’s very short, doggedly fantastic, the sort of straight-line narrative that widens eyes around campfires or at bedtime, while being beautifully post-modern.