Canon to the right, canon to the left

February 28, 2023
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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay since 2015 for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz. The readership for each site seems to have little overlap, and so, I thought if I might repost some of the Spirit essays on my own blog, it might achieve a wider readership. This one, originally from May 1, 2021, is now updated and slightly rewritten. 

My house is filled with books, and so many that I will never live long enough to read them all. It is a personal version of a universal problem: So much has been written over the past 4500 years that no one can ingest more than a wee fraction of the total. That’s four and a half millennia of culture. So, what counts, these days, as being cultured, or well-read? 

No work of literature or art exists in a vacuum. Even the newest book has a past. Culture is an accumulation: Each new work builds on the past, and requires a shared understanding of that past with its audience. Just as you have to learn vocabulary in order to read, so you need some handle on the past to fully understand what is written now. But, there is too much for any one person to absorb, and no way for any author to assume his readers will recognize and vibrate to what is there, subliminally, in the works. That past is there even in best-sellers by Diana Gabaldon or Dean Koontz. 

There used to be an agreed upon canon of literature that any well-educated person was assumed to be familiar with. But, as the world shrank through communication advances and progress in transportation, the canon looked increasingly provincial. It was almost wholly white, male, and European. What of Asia and Africa? Why were there not more women included? Perhaps, too, that white European bias was the root evil of colonialism. 

I can’t answer all these questions, but it is important to raise them as we begin to lose the common cultural inheritance that the canon used to provide. Acres of writers over the past centuries have quoted or riffed upon the words of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. It was assumed that anyone with a decent education (even a decent high-school education) would understand the references. When Abraham Lincoln wrote “Fourscore and seven years ago…” his listeners would have tacitly resonated to the biblical “three score and ten” years allotted to a human life. He could have just said, “Eighty-seven years ago,” but he didn’t. The force of the Bible gave his words a tidal power that made his rhetoric memorable. 

Ernest Hemingway used the past, and expected his readers to know. Papa’s novels drip with the power of allusion. The Sun Also Rises comes from Ecclesiastes 1:5. For Whom The Bell Tolls rings from John Donne. A Farewell to Arms has Vergil’s Aeneid buried in it. 

T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland is a midden of such buried cultural memes. Some are explicated in the notes at the end of the poem (should poetry require footnotes?), but most are just there to be felt or be vaguely familiar. The poet expected his readers to share his erudition and quietly appreciate the roots that sprouted the verse. He explicated his position in the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. In his Wasteland notes, he tells us that line 23 (“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief”) is a gloss on Ecclesiastes 12:5 (“the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden”), which seems a bit of a stretch, but he doesn’t feel it necessary to point out that the opening line of the poem (“April is the cruelest month”) is an ironic reversal of Chaucer’s “Whan that Aprille with its shoures soute…”). He thought that too obvious to mention. What in today’s world can be considered too obvious to mention? 

Eliot’s poetry, itself, is now the cause of allusion (“I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” Ask Woody Allen). 

There are at least two problems with such allusions. The first is epitomized by Ezra Pound, who so completely built his Cantos on fragments from obscure writers and historical figures that no one without the same erudition as himself could have any clear idea what he was talking about. If the main point of your reference is the reference, the main point is also pointless. And Pound’s reading was so idiosyncratic and esoteric that no reasonable human should be expected to share it. 

The second problem is best displayed in the work of John Milton. There is no doubt of Milton’s greatness as a poet: He is the second-most quoted author after Shakespeare. Bartlett’s is stuffed with him. But Milton was so casually familiar with the Bible and Classical writers that you often now need a gloss to know what he means when he writes of his muse that intends to ”soar Above th’ Aonian mount” which his educated readers would have known was Mount Helicon, where the Greek muses lived by the Hippocrene spring, a spring created by the hoof-stamp of Pegasus, the winged horse that symbolized poetic inspiration because he could fly to the top of Mount Olympus, home of the gods. Any self-respecting gentleman of the time, with any degree of education, could read Ovid in Latin and would be familiar with all the gods, godlets and nymphs and fauns mentioned in The Metamorphoses, a foundational work of Western literature and thus slide past them knowingly while reading Paradise Lost. Few of our contemporaries read Ovid and hence the need for footnotes. The Norton Critical Edition of the poem, often used in college courses, is as much gloss as verse. 

Now you can go through 12 years of public school and four years of university and never getting any closer to Ovid than a NASCAR fan to the ballet. 

When novelist William Styron wrote about his battle with depression, he named the book Darkness Visible, referencing Milton. Milton also shows up in Philip Pullman’s science-fiction classic, His Dark Materials. There was a Playstation video game named Pandemonium. For someone so seldom read, Milton gets around. 

We should expect that cultural reference comes and goes, it blossoms and then fades with time. Once, Milton was one everyone’s tongue, now he is for doctoral candidates. Once the Bible was lingua franca, now, it seems, those who know the book at all only know the parts they like and ignore the rest.  (“Who’s the greatest contortionist in the Bible?” “Balaam, because the Bible says he tied his ass to a tree and walked away.”) The best-known of Shakespeare is still recognizable, but I venture few would remember to context to “Put out the light, then, put out the light” or “All that glisters is not gold.” “To be or not to be” is too familiar, but even those who can quote the first six words of the soliloquy probably don’t know that the rest of it contemplates suicide, or where it comes in the Hamlet story — or why. 

It has always been the habit of the educated — the initiates in the cultural legacy — to lament the loss of that inheritance, and condemn the ignorance of the younger generations. I have been guilty of that myself, because I have spent so much time imbibing my cultural past and fear the loss of meaning that evaporates with the loss of memory of past culture. I, who know Gilgamesh and Beowulf, who reads the Iliad annually, who have ingested my Ovid and Livy, my Melville and Faulkner, weep for those bereft of such treasures. But I need to recognize the evanescence of such knowledge. One set of cultural touchstones is inevitably replaced by a new set, piece by piece, like the original wood of the Argo. 

I doubt we can do without a cultural gravity pulling us toward a center, but it needn’t be the one that worked in the past. Just watch a Quentin Tarantino film and see how the cinematic past enriches the Pulp Fiction present, how he uses the styles of Hong Kong in Kill Bill, or the tropes of Western movies in The Hateful Eight. Inglourious Basterds is built, not on a knowledge of history so much as on the digested habits of World War II movies — and in much the same way as Paradise Lost is rooted in Ovid and the Bible. Just as Milton expected his readers to be familiar with Ovid, so Tarantino expects his audience to be familiar with Johnnie To and William Wyler. 

I have recognized that my own cultural memory is mine and must let the younger generation have theirs. But I nevertheless worry about this difference: that mine subsumes four millennia of accumulation building on itself, while what I see in the coming cultural horizon barely extends back a hundred years. When I see an online list of “greatest films of all times,” I am appalled that almost no films listed are more than 30 years old. Have none of these movie fans seen Metropolis, Battle of Algiers, or Rules of the Game? Surely their lives would be richer if they had something to draw on psychically and emotionally other than American Pie or Fast and Furious. 

My twin granddaughters do stunningly well at school — now at university — but neither knows any Bible stories. This is not picking on them: No one who is secular in their generation does. How much of their cultural patrimony is blank? Nor does their generation soak up Sophocles, Dante, Hawthorne or Yeats. They have their touchstones, but I cannot but worry that their inner lives are undernourished for it, l’eau sans gaz. 

But I am also humbled by my own ignorance. Is my inner life starving because I cannot read Latin? French? Russian? Chinese? I think of all the books I haven’t read. The list seems nearly infinite. My own bookshelves shame me. I own the books that populate them, but I haven’t gotten around to reading everything waiting there, inviting me in. There isn’t time. 

In the belly of the beast

February 20, 2023
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On New Years Eve in 1853, the famous scientist Richard Owen and 21 invited guests, the cream of Victorian English science and letters, gathered for a dinner, laid out for them inside a giant dinosaur. 

Actually, only 11 of them fit into the half-finished sculpture of an iguanodon, the rest sat at tables around the monster. At the head of the interior table, inside the skull of the beast, sat Owen, presiding over the affair well into the early hours of 1854. 

The menu was astounding

It was all a publicity stunt, promoting both the creation of a series of dinosaur sculptures by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, but even more importantly, promoting Owen, a notorious publicity hound. 

Richard Owen and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

The iguanodon statue/dining hall was part of a huge project Hawkins was involved in, to create life-size models of 33 different dinosaurs, to be exhibited on the grounds of the newly relocated Crystal Palace Park just outside London. The Palace was taken apart and moved at the end of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in the summer of 1851 in Hyde Park, London. The Exhibition was a kind of Worlds’ Fair, and the palace, made of glass and steel, was a wonder of architecture and although originally slated for demolition at the end of the exhibition, it was instead rebuilt in Sydenham Hill, south of the River Thames and made the centerpiece of a new park. (The Crystal Palace itself  burned down in 1936; the park is still there.) 

The creation of the new park was a hugely expensive operation, and with money always short, Hawkins’ plan for the 33 dinosaurs was cut back, but he still managed at least 25 of them — which are still there today, after having been restored several times in recent years. 

Hawkins’ sculpture, then and now

The iguanodon in which the banquet was given was a vast project itself. Hawkins wrote of it: 

“In the instance of the Iguanodon [it] is not less than building a house upon four columns, as the quantities of material of which the standing Iguanodon is composed, consist of 4 iron columns 9 feet long by 7 inches diameter, 600 bricks, 650 5-inch half-round drain tiles, 900 plain tiles, 38 casks of cement, 90 casks of broken stone, making a total of 640 bushels of artificial stone.

“These, with 100 feet of iron hooping and 20 feet of cube inch bar, constitute the bones, sinews, and muscles of this large model, the largest of which there is any record of a casting being made.”

The dinner kicked off a veritable Victorian dino-craze. and various scientists and amateurs went around the geology of England with pick and hammer trying to unearth new fossils. 

Actually, interest had already been going on for a few eager bone hunters. In 1824, bits of a Megalosaurus was found; in 1833, a Hylacosaurus; in 1836, the first dinosaur footprints. But after that, it was an explosion: in 1856, the Trachodon; in ensuing years, the Hadrosaur, Compsognathus, Archaeopteryx, Bronto- and Stegosauruses; and, by the end of the century, Triceratops and Diplodocus. Jackpot came in 1902 with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

That branch of science we call paleontology hit its first stride in England beginning in the early 1800s, when the first dinosaur fossils were recognized and begun to be classified. It began in 1822, in Cuckfield, West Sussex, when a doctor from Lewes named Gideon Mantell — or his wife, Mary Ann (stories vary) — discovered a fossil tooth of a prehistoric beast they named “Iguanodon,” based on supposed similarities between the fossil tooth and the teeth of iguanas. It set off a fad for bone-hunting, and soon more fossils were excavated, and in 1834, a pile of bones were dug from a quarry in Maidstone, about 30 miles east of London. Mantell acquired the pile and attempted to reconstruct his iguanodon from the bits. His initial drawing looked something rather like a giant squirrel. 

Mantell’s bones and his drawing of recreation

In the bones was a horn, which Mantell assumed was like a rhinoceros horn or that of his iguana. And so he drew it on the nose. 

 In 1842, it was Owen who coined the word “dinosaur” for the recent finds. He attempted a more accurate reconstruction of the iguanodon and came up with a reptilian rhino, horn still on nose. It was Owen’s version that Hawkins attempted to replicate. 

The year after the dinner in the belly of the beast, Samuel Beckles found giant three-toed footprint fossils in the Isle of Wight. He later discovered the hind limb of an iguanodon and the foot matched the prints, and so it was decided that the iguanodon was not a four-legged rhino-reptile, but stood like a kangaroo, on its hind legs. This completely revamped thinking about the beast, and for the next hundred years, iguanodon rather mimicked Godzilla. 

Then, in 1878, a whole herd of iguanodon fossils were discovered in a coal mine in Bernissart, Belgium. These confirmed that Iggy’s back legs were longer than his front, and so confirmed (so they thought) the upright posture. More importantly, the horn no longer fit the nose, but turned out to be the thumbs of the dinosaur, held firmly in the perpetual position of the hitchhiker. In 1895, the British Museum of Natural History acquired an iguanodon skeleton and assembled the pieces into its kangaroo pose that held up for a century. 

This was, of course, the version most of us grew up with. Upright, tail-dragging like a Piper Cub, and with his spikes giving us the “Thumbs-up” gesture. But in the 1990s, closer study of the fossil skeletons, reexamined with newer methods and anatomical knowledge, changed things once again. The iguanodon was set back on four legs once more, although allowing him to rotate upwards on his back legs occasionally to reach food. And it turns out the the vertebrae and their attending tendons were stiff, and the iguanodon tail did not drag, but, more like the cat wagging its tail to announce its mood, held out stiffly backwards and in the air.

So, Owen had been right, although for the wrong reasons. 

So much of what we now surmise about the dinosaurs has changed in the past 40 years. Not only the cat-tails lashing about in the air, but the warm blood of at least some of them, and the possibility — even probability of feathers, and the realization that dinosaurs are closer to being birds than reptiles. 

You have to wonder what the future holds out for the iguanodon. The future constantly reinvents the past. It is the heart of science to do so. The sun used to revolve around the earth; then it didn’t. Atoms were the smallest particles of matter until protons, neutrons and electrons were found and then until quarks were posited, and now we wonder about string theory. Maybe no particles at all, just vibrations. 

When I was a boy in my astronomy phase, there was a viable argument between Fred Hoyle’s “Steady State” theory of the expanding cosmos, and the newer “Big Bang” theory. The expanding universe found by Edwin Hubble shouldered out any idea we could have had of the static cosmos that had held sway for millennia. New discoveries and reformulated conceptions have pushed science ahead, sometimes by inches, sometimes by light years. 

Hawkins’ dinosaurs under construction 1855

The continents were rock solid until they started floating around the world like barges. Plagues were caused by “bad air,” until bacteria and viruses were discovered. Phlogiston was the substance of fires before the role of oxygen was understood. 

The dino park today

Sometimes the changes circle back on themselves, like the once-again four-legged iguanodon. In the ancient and Medieval worlds, moods were controlled by the four humors. Psychology gave up on such things and went Freudian, and now, neuroscientists have rediscovered brain chemistry — really the humors updated and modernized. 

The people who created these theories and ideas were not stupid. We should not hold ourselves superior to them. They were working with the data available and were often quite ingenious. The math behind the Ptolemaic system is absolutely brilliant, and as complex as anything on a blackboard at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. 

“Despite the fact that later evidence proved these theories wrong, I don’t think we should say the scientists involved made mistakes,” wrote Peter Vickers, professor of the philosophy of science at England’s Durham University. “They followed the evidence and that is precisely what a good scientist should do.”

Dinosaurs when I grew up

It’s a constant plod, one foot in front of the other. Mantell knew this when he first tried to understand the iguanodon in the 1820s. 

He wrote: “Imperfect as are the materials at present, they will be found to possess sufficient interest to incite further and more successful investigation that may supply the deficiencies which exist in our knowledge.”

And so, dinosaurs now have feathers, like Quetzalcoatl.

This is one of the glories of science — the willingness to be wrong when a more complete idea is proved. The entire world progresses because of this humility. We must leave it to the flat-earth people and anti-vaxers to be so damn certain they are right. Every step in the history of science is provisional. That is why the safest bet is to cast our lot with those who practice it.

Listomania

February 18, 2023
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One of the most popular — but meaningless — excrescences in current culture is the explosion of Top 10 and Top 5 lists. They are everywhere, on the internet, in magazines and newspapers, and on TV. 

When I took an early buyout from my newspaper a decade ago, it was largely because, as a feature writer, I was increasingly asked to provide what are artlessly called “listicles,” that is, newspaper articles in the form of lists: “Five things to do in Sedona,” “Five best pancake toppings,” “Top five wines from Indiana.” 

The direction the newspaper was going was to avoid any actual writing of prose and substitute a quick list — easy to put together, popular with readers, and completely and utterly devoid of substance. I could see the handwriting on the wall, and decided it must be time to leave the profession. 

Of course, I am guilty of making such lists, too. We all are. For this blog I have written several lists, including the ultimate lists of the 50 greatest lists of all times (link here). My list of the Top 10 films of all time has at least 40 movies on it. Heck, my list of best foreign films counts 100 of them (link here). But I am now doing penance for my sins. 

Top 10 lists, such as the year-end lists by movie critics, are only just a record of the taste and opportunity of the critic in question: No critic has actually seen all the movies released in a given year, and the final choices depend entirely on the likes and dislikes of the reviewer. There is usually some overlap, but no two critics will offer quite the same list. Such lists are fun to read, and may be a vague guide to what films might be worth seeing, but as an ultimate judgment of quality and ranking, the lists are just smoke to blow away with time. 

There is no actual, objective, outside omniscient and divine judge to parse differences between, say The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Above a certain level, it is all cream. 

Many of the artists who show up on such lists, whether actors or directors or costume designers, know full well that art is not a competition, and that comparing a great tragedy and a great comedy is worse than apples and oranges. Hilary Swank was voted best actress in 2000 for her role in Boys Don’t Cry, and it was a powerful and moving performance, no doubt. But was she quantifiably better than Annette Bening, Janet McTeer, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep? They were all good — as were a passel of actors who had films out that year who weren’t even nominated. Should Moore consider herself a failure because Swank came out on top? Silly, of course. 

People working at that high a level of accomplishment are all beyond mere ranking. 

This came flooding back on me because lately, I’ve been immersing myself in recordings of Beethoven symphonies. When I first began listening to them, more than 50 years ago, I had the Toscanini set on LP, which I played on one of those ancient drop-front Sears Silvertone record players, and as a mere youth, thought Toscanini was the greatest conductor ever in the history of the universe anywhere. When you are young, you are prone to rash and categorical judgments. (I have always owned a set of Toscaninis, in its various release permutations and remasterings. I’m not ready to toss him overboard just because I have found others who also do well.) 

Since then, I have heard the music uncounted times in concert and even more often on recordings. For many years, in the middle of my time on earth, I foreswore them, having — as I believed — worn out my ability to hear them as anything but background music. I knew them too well; they were too often programmed at concerts. Another Beethoven Fifth? God help us.

But after taking a 30-year break (outside of the concerts I attended or reviewed), I have come back to them and can hear them all again with fresh ears. And they are a marvel. There is always something fresh to hear. 

I currently possess  26 full sets of the Beethoven symphonies, ranging from the historical (Mengelberg) to the historically informed (Gardiner) and when I listen to them, yes, I have my favorites, and could (if paid) produce a list ranking the top 10. But they would merely be the ones I, personally, like the best. If I am fair, I have to say that pretty much all of them deliver the goods. 

(The only two exceptions are a set I no longer own — the Roger Norrington set — which is pure ordure in a garden of blooms. I threw it away; and the recordings of Sergiu Celibidache, which are perverse, and which I keep, mostly as a party record, to play for friends as a joke). 

But I can put on a Pastoral by Josef Krips, or an Eroica by George Szell, and I am hearing Beethoven. The wayward rubatos of Furtwangler or the strict disco beat of John Eliot Gardiner both bring me worthy Beethovens. 

The fact is, while you may absolutely detest the oozy legato strings of Herbert von Karajan, or the granitic tempos of Otto Klemperer, they are all excellent performances, and if you only owned one set (heaven forfend) you could be completely satisfied. Monteux, Chailly, Zinman, Bernstein, Leinsdorf, MTT, Harnoncourt — any of them — all give excellent, if different performances of the symphonies. You can have your favorite, but you have to admit, none of them is negligible, and all have something to say. 

It is like having to choose between Rembrandt and Vermeer. Is one of the better? Stupid question. Is Titian a better painter than Monet? What is the greatest novel? War and Peace? Don Quixote? Madame Bovary? Ulysses? Á la recherche du temps perdu? C’mon, man, rankings are idiotic. 

As an art critic for 25 years, I got to visit hundreds of art shows, from major international exhibits in New York, Chicago or LA, down to children’s art in grade school, and it is not that I am saying it was all wonderful — some art is certainly more accomplished than other art — but that universal approbation is no indicator of value. 

Yes, Jeff Koons or Kara Walker may be the names on trendy lips, and we may think of them as among the leading artists of our times, but I saw work by local artists that, given the right breaks, could be just as famous and lauded. There are tons of artists — painters, actors, musicians — just as good as some of our most praised, but who either lacked the vaulting ambition for publicity, or never had the dumb luck to have been discovered by some influential critic. 

Is there any reason that David Hockney is ubiquitous and that Jim Waid is not? Waid is clearly as good a painter, and his canvases as original and distinctive, yet Hockney jet sets, and Waid paints in his studio in Tucson, Ariz. (I don’t mean to imply that Waid has no reputation — he does nationally — but nothing like the magazine-cover familiarity of Hockney). And I could find a dozen artists from any of the United States whose work would be as worthy. 

Sports may seem easier to listify, as we can always quantify the ten highest batting averages for any season or for career, although any real baseball fan knows that batting average doesn’t tell the whole story. And while we might compile a list of the greatest pitchers of all time, and there might be some agreement on the names, ranking them from the best on down will depend on one’s team allegiance or the era in which you most closely watched the game. Walter Johnson on top? Nolan Ryan? Bob Gibson? Sandy Koufax? Mad Dog Greg Maddux? Again, at that level, it’s all just opinion. 

Top 10 presidents? Again, there is cream at the top, and some sludge sinking to the bottom — and a fair consensus for top and bottom, even if the vast middle ground is murky, but how do we rank them all? Was Polk a better president than Hayes? Does Grover Cleveland get two spots on the list? Or just one, combined? 

List making is addicting, perhaps, but it is also empty calories. When I go scrounging through YouTube offerings, I am besieged by lists. They are click-bait and I have long ago learned to ignore them. Who was the worst mass-murdering tyrant in history? Who was the best defensive player in basketball? What are the Harry Potter books listed from best to worst? I don’t care. If you have something substantive to say about Hitler or Genghis Khan, about Bill Russell, or about the philosopher’s stone, then write something meaningful. Lists are an easy way to avoid engaging with actual thought. 

And I’ve made a list of them… 

Used-book stores

February 15, 2023
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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay since 2015 for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz. The readership for each site seems to have little overlap, and so, I thought if I might repost some of the Spirit essays on my own blog, it might achieve a wider readership. This one, originally from Dec. 7, 2021, is now updated and slightly rewritten. 

There are pleasures to be had in this world. And for a small group of particular people, one of the great pleasures is the used book store. Days can be spent wandering the aisles, like negotiating an English hedge maze. 

I confess that I am one of those people. An afternoon in a used bookstore is heaven. When traveling, my late wife and I would always stop for any used bookstore we came across, and even in the Midwest, where towns may be 20 miles apart, there was usually at least a little shop off Main Street filled with paperbacks. Others might seek out theme parks or historical monuments; we sought out-of-the-way and forgotten emporia of discarded books. 

But the days of the best used bookstores is gone, I’m afraid. 

It is used-book stores I mean, not used bookstores. Although, thanks to Amazon, bookstores are not as used as they used to be.

There are still lots of used-book stores, but their character has changed. Many are just storefronts in minimalls, stuffed with paperback mysteries and romance novels. Or, more recently, a spate of former grocery stores or automobile dealershops taken over by stores selling used books, records, CDs, DVDs and T-shirts with store logos on them. 

Bookmans in Phoenix and Mesa, Ariz., is one of them. I loved going there when I lived in Arizona. But it is in a shopping mall with acres of parking and the store itself is a refurbished supermarket. It is well organized and they make it easy to find what you want. But it is less fun to be lost in. 

I am old enough that I remember Manhattan’s Fourth Avenue, known in the 1950s and ’60s as Book Row, where there were, at one time, 48 used bookstores, many specializing in one type of book: cookbooks, or science books. In its heyday, Book Row spanned the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Union Square and Astor Place. They are all gone now, lost to exploding rents and the retirements and/or deaths of the stores’ original owners. The only vestige of Book Row is the Strand Bookstore, which isn’t even on Fourth Avenue anymore. In 1957, it moved to Broadway and East 12th Street. 

In many of those old dinosaurs, the books piled high on swayback shelves, with rolling ladders to get to the high-up books. There was must in the air, and any book you picked up tended to have a patina of dust along the top, which you blew off, like foam from a glass of beer. 

In such bookstores, you didn’t usually enter looking for a specific book, but rather, you were treasure hunting, seeking some wonderful volume you didn’t even know existed. Old books, from the 19th century, or the 1920s, with silver or gold titles on dark blue cloth binding. Their texts were letterpress, and each wonderful letter was embossed into the paper, leaving a texture on the surface. 

In one such bookstore in Virginia Beach, Va., — now long gone — the proprietor had a word for the die-hard book lover. She called us  “bibliopaths,” and she recognized us as soon as we entered the shop. A bibliopath is more than a book lover, but rather someone with an addiction that cannot be satisfied without a constant fix of more and more pages. 

In such stores, the books are not always well organized. They stuff the shelves, and rest in stacks on the floors. 

When I was in college in the 1960s in North Carolina, the Book Exchange in Durham was one of these troves. It finally closed in 2009 after 75 years in business, but back then, it had multiple stories of books, piled high and deep. I miss it like I miss my grandparents, long gone. 

One old customer remembered, “The Book Ex was enormous. It seemed to go on forever, up, down and sideways. It was a warren, a maze of narrow aisles between towering bookshelves and precarious piles. There were ladders propped everywhere, for reaching the shelves extending high overhead. As you wandered around, attempting to decode the organizational system and snuffling up the scents of old paper, new ink and dusty floorboards, you felt like an explorer about to make a life-changing discovery, and you felt right at home.”

It was never a “clean well-lighted place.” 

Another recalled, “When I walked in to this place, I noticed a sign up from the fire marshal, granting them some sort of exemption for having … gosh, I wish I could remember the exact phrase … something like ‘high stacks of flammable material.’ Anyway, that mental image might give you some idea of the inside of The Book Exchange — shelves and shelves of books going up the walls, everywhere you turn.”

Most current used bookstores of any size have cleaned up, added bright signage and clever display racks. Stores like McKay’s Books in Greensboro. It has a coffee bar attached and modern hanging lighting, making the interior bright and cheery. There is still a great deal of treasure to be found, but the store has a more corporate feel to it. 

Some of the old stores, like Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Ore., have kept up with the times. The first time I went there, it felt a bit like the Book Exchange. The store covers an entire city block and had multiple floors of books. The staff was astonishing. You could ask for some obscure title and — this was before computer cataloguing — the clerk would take you three aisles over, up to a shelf seven-feet in the air and pull out the book, as if he had just left it there earlier this morning. 

Powell’s is still the largest used bookstore in the world, but it has modernized and made itself user-friendly. Good lighting, modern display racks — and a coffee bar. 

In Ellsworth, Maine, (actually a few miles out of town), there is the Big Chicken Barn, which still has the old feel, with creaking wooden floors and sagging shelves. It is an antique shop on the bottom floor, but upstairs is all books and magazines (you can find pretty much any Life magazine or Saturday Evening Post you might want, all racked up). The old wood shingled building is as long as a football field. Perfect for getting lost in the books and finding something you didn’t know you belonged to have. 

The owners and proprietors of many a shop is as eccentric as their catalog system. Often, they have spent their whole lives with books, and are more comfortable with them than with the people who come looking for them. 

We went once to a now-defunct used bookstore in Tucson, Ariz., called The Mad Hatter. We found out why. There was a sign that said, “No Talking,” and the man behind the cash register sat reading, bearded and scruffy. We asked about a particular book we wanted and he flew into a rage. “No talking!” he yelled. When we tried to apologize, he told us we were scum, and said, “Get out, now! Leave or I’m calling the police.” I don’t think he really wanted to let go of any of his stock, but sat on it like a dragon on its hoard. 

There is a place just south of Asheville, where I now live, called Morrison’s Paperback Palace Guns & Ammo. One side of the store is a welcoming warren of shelves, by and large unsorted, covered with books so diverse they must have been bought by the dumptruck. The other side of the store was racks of rifles, shotguns and pistols, with display cases of cartridges and hunting gear. Most of his customers barely looked at the books; they were there for the ordnance. The man behind the counter tolerated our presence on the bookish side of the shop. 

In contrast the quiet and aged owner of Alcuin Books in Scottsdale would rather have a long discussion about early Christianity, or the Latin language than take your money. Richard Murian often helped me find something I needed, even if it took a week, and he’d phone me telling me he had gotten it. He is a gem of a human being. 

Or Sylvia Whitman, who currently runs Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. Famous for its original owner, Sylvia Beach, who kept the bookstore as a haven for expats in the 1920s, the store maintains its bohemian culture and will let writers down on their luck sleep there. And often, when someone could not afford a book, it was given or “lent” to them. 

It is on the Left Bank, near the rows of outdoor booksellers and their kiosks, where old books can be pored over and treasures found. 

So too was the owner of a fly-by-night used bookstore that operated out of an attic in Greensboro in the late ’60s. I can no longer remember the name of the store, or of the generous owner of it, who also loved to talk with his customers, offering them coffee from a hotplate pot. He saw, one time, that I was especially interested in a photography book by Edward Weston. He wouldn’t sell it to me; he gave it to me, saying he knew I was the right owner for it. 

I still have California and The West by Weston and Charis Wilson. I treasure it, as my benefactor knew I would. We bibliopaths recognize each other. 

That book is now worth something on the collectors’ market, which is a plague on those of us who love the books. We buy them to read, and a cheap price is essential. But books that used to be shelf fodder are now priced beyond our means. The old Modern Library volumes used to stuff the shelves and were priced at a buck fifty or two bucks and gave us a chance to load up on classics. Now, an old Modern Library book can go for $20 or more to someone who isn’t interested in what’s inside, but whether it has its original dust jacket. 

Luckily, whatever old, musty used-book stores still remain can harbor the old books — naked without jacket — and the price pencilled onto the flyleaf when it arrived at the store, maybe 20 years ago. 

It is the treasure we bibliopaths hunt. 

A short history of gibberish

February 9, 2023
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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay since 2015 for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz. The readership for each site seems to have little overlap, and so, I thought if I might repost some of the Spirit essays on my own blog, it might achieve a wider readership. This one, originally from Oct. 1, 2021, is now updated and slightly rewritten. 

When I was a wee bairn, back in the wilds of New Jersey, I remember a certain consternation when listening to — and being forced to sing — various Christmas carols. What, I wondered, does “Fa-la-la” mean? Couldn’t the song writer think of any real words? I tended to sing the Walt Kelly version: “Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla-Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo.” 

But those nonsense syllables continued to bother me. And fascinate me.

And in school, we sometimes had to sing songs with such nonsense words in them, like “Tra-la-la” and “Hey, nonny-nonny.” When I got a little older, and learned to read and write, I wondered if these had actually been just corruptions of real words, as a kind of mondegreen. Like “round John Virgin in Silent Night.

Then, as a school kid watching Warner Brothers cartoons on television, I learned of certain popular tunes from the 1940s — which to me in the 1950s seemed as far away as the Middle Ages — like “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey/ A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?” Such songs would show up in Loony Tunes. Another was “Hut set rawlson on a rillerah, and a so-and-so and so forth.” from the 1942 cartoon  Horton Hatches an Egg. I was sure I must be mis-hearing the lyrics. Only later did I find out that no, I wasn’t, but “Mairzy doats” was, in fact a mondegreen for “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.” Which is still pretty much nonsense. 

Oh, but then. Then, I became a teenager in the ’60s. Little Richard (I then thought of myself as “Big Richard”) sang “Wop bop-a-loo-bop a-wop bam boom.” And “Tootie-Frootie, Ah Rooty.” And then in 1958 came: “Ooh-eee Ooh-ah-ah, Ting-Tang Walla-walla Bing Bang.” And the next year with “Shimmy-shimmy ko-ko-bop.” We were off to the nonsense syllable la-la-land. “Rama Lama Ding Dong.” 

“Well, be-bop-a-Lula she’s my baby 

Be-bop-a-Lula I don’t mean maybe” 

Gene Vincent’s phrase “Be-Bop-a-Lula” is similar to “Be-Baba-Leba”, the title of a 1945  Helen Humes song, remade by Lionel Hampton as “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.” This phrase, possibly being ultimately derived from the shout of “Arriba! Arriba!” used by Latin American bandleaders to encourage band members. Things work the rounds. 

I have since learned that these sounds are officially known as “non-lexical vocables.” There are learned papers written on the subject, some of which can be downloaded in PDF form (“Non-lexical Vocables in Scottish Traditional Music” by Christine Knox Chambers, 1980, 340 pages). 

Later, in college, as a music minor, I had to learn solfège, in which the syllables “do,” “re,” and “mi” stood for the notes “C” “D” and “E.” Originally, it was “ut,” “re” and “mi.” If you’ve ever wondered where this all came from, as you are singing “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” blame the Middle Ages. As a mnemonic to remember a tune, each pitch was assigned a syllable (this was before standard musical notation) from the beginning syllable of the prayer: “Ut queant laxis/ resonare fibris/ Mira gestorum/ famuli tuorum/ Solve polluti/ labil reatum, Sancte Iohannes.” (The last note combines the S and I from “Sancte Iohannes”) 

Translated: “So that your servants may,/ with loosened voices,/ Resound the wonders/ of your deeds,/ Clean the guilt/ from our stained lips,/ Saint John.” 

In the 1600s, because “Ut” was harder to sing, it was changed to “Do.” And “Si” is sometimes changed to “Ti.” Giving us “Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti and back to Do,” which, is Homer Simpson’s favorite word.

Ah, but  before all this pedantry, I meant to be writing about silly lyrics. “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo.” “Poppa Oom Mow Mow.” “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da.” Or the name song: “Katie, Katie, bo-batie,/Bonana-fanna fo-fatie/ Fee fi mo-matie/ Katie!” 

There really is a long tradition. I opened up my Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 559 pages) and found “Fiddle-de-dee, fiddle-de-dee, The wasp has married the humble bee,” and “Diddlety, diddlety, dumpty, The cat ran up the plum tree.” “Hickory-Dickery Dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo.” “Hey Diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle.” 

This sort of thing is all through the tome:

Open up Child’s Ballads, or English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Cambridge University Press, 1904, 723 pages), you find refrains such as

Shakespeare from As You Like It: 

Elizabethan songs are often called “Hey Nonny Nonnies.” 

As in Ophelias “mad song” from Hamlet:

Opera has its share of nonsense, and some of that is in the libretto. Hector Berlioz wrote a chorus for the demons in The Damnation of Faust that goes on quite a while with stuff like this: 

And Wagner liked to invent gibberish almost as much as he loved himself. The famous Ride of the Valkyries actually has words. And what are they? “Hojotoho! Hojotoho! Heia ha-haeia!” Over and over. 

And his Rhine Maidens, gurgling underwater, sing the praises of the Rhine gold: “Heiajaheia! Heiajaheia! Wallalalalala leiajahei!” 

There’s at least a section of gibberish in each of his operas. The sailors in The Flying Dutchman all sing a Wagnerian version of “Yo-ho-ho” — “Ho-ho! Je holla ho!” And when they make merry: “Ho! He! Je! Ha! Klipp’ und Sturm’, He! Sind vorbei, he! Hussahe! Hallohe!” This kind of gibberish is of a different order from the gibberish that passes as Wagner’s philosophy. 

But is any of this different from “Fododo-de-yacka saki Want some sea food, Mama.” Or Frank Sinatra’s “Doo-be doo-be doo.” 

This stuff is all over the place, from Sly and the Family Stone: “Boom Shaka-laka, boom shaka-laka,” to the hit song from 1918 (yes, it’s that old): “Jada, jada, jada-jada-jing-jing-jing.”

Going back further, there’s Stephen Foster’s “Camptown ladies sing dis song, Doo-dah, doo-dah,” and Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay was a vaudeville and music hall song made famous in 1892 by British performer Lottie Collins. But its provenance goes back further, at least to the 1880s, when it was sung by a black singer, Mama Lou in a well-known St. Louis brothel run by “Babe” Connors. 

Then, in 1901, Yale graduate Allan Hirsh wrote the fight song, Boola-Boola.  “We do not know what it means,” Hirsh wrote, “except that it was euphonious and easy to sing and to our young ears sounded good.”

As far as “boola,” it was rumored to be a Hawaiian word for “good,” but linguists point out, there is no “B” sound in the Hawaiian language. 

“Sometimes, with these college fight songs,” said Kalena Silva, director of the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii  at Hilo, “they just made up words.” 

After the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, which featured a popular Hawaiian pavilion — which sported floor-to-ceiling flowers, pineapple give-aways, a back-lit aquarium and the Royal Hawaiian Quartet playing music, with a steel guitar — a craze for Hawaiian-themed songs took over Tin Pan Alley. 

The year 1916 gave us Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula, which begins: “Down Hawaii way, where I chanced to stray/ On an evening I heard a Hula maiden play Yaaka hula hickey dula, Yaaka hula hickey dula.” 

It should be stated that “Yaaka hula hickey dula” is not Hawaiian — or any other language. Also from 1916 was They’re Wearing’Em Higher in Hawaii, and Oh How She Could Yacki Hacki Wicki Wacki Woo.

Later came more exoticism: “Bingo Bango Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo.” 

Of course, African-American culture gave us scat singing, which features improvised nonsense syllables. There are great examples from Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller.

But perhaps the most popular for the scat was Cab Calloway, whose Minnie the Moocher gave us “Hey-dee-hi-de-ho.” But also, “Skeedle-a-booka-diki biki skeedly beeka gookity woop!” And, “Scoodley-woo-scoodley-woo scoodley-woodley-woodley-woo Zit-dit-dit-dit-dittle but-dut-duttleoo-skit-dit-skittle-but-dit-zoy. 

Calloway made an appearance in the 1932 Fleischer Brothers animated cartoon, Minnie the Moocher, with Betty Boop, whose catch phrase, “Boop-Boop-a-Doop,” was originally a scat phrase.  

The phrase was heard by some blue-stockings as a euphemism for something rude and a backlash developed, leading to a 1932 cartoon, Don’t Take My Boop-Oop-A-Doop Away,” where Betty sang a little song:

The following year, Jimmy Durante gave us Inka-Dinka-Doo, which sang:

Getting into the 1940s, Disney has given us a share, from “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah, Zip-A-Dee Ay, My, oh my, what a wonderful day” to “Sala-gadoola-menchicka-boo-la bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.”

The tradition continues, as even Lady Gaga has Bad Romance:

I’ve already mentioned the non-lexical vocalisms from Little Richard and Gene Vincent. Now we move on to Iron Butterfly and their notorious 17-minute 1968 extravaganza, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. 

I mentioned mondegreens earlier. Apparently, the lyrics to the song were supposed to be “In the Garden of Eden,” but when song-writer Doug Ingle played the song for his bandmate, Ron Bushy misheard the words, sung in a drunken slur by Ingle after drinking a gallon of cheap red wine, as “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” and wrote it down that way. I suppose it could have been corrected the next sober morning, but it wasn’t, and has gone down as legend. 

The Beatles had a history of using nonsense words in their songs, from Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da to the “na-na-na” chorus of Hey Jude. Sometimes they used nonsense to fill out a song, usually with a plan to add better words later. 

Ryan Miller of the alternative rock band Guster said that many songwriters use sounds a placeholders — the way movies are made with “working titles” before the real one gets put in place. 

“Ninety-eight percent of the time you replace them with words but sometimes those sounds fit the spirit of the song or even become the spirit of the song,” said Miller. “And sometimes I don’t want there to be words — there can be a Rorschach version this way where you have your own experience with the music.”

When Paul McCartney was writing Yesterday, he had the tune, but not the words, so in the demo tape, he used placeholders and sang:

“Scrambled eggs” and “yesterday” scan the same. Go ahead, sing it with the old words. It works. But he did the right thing and switched up the words.

Other Beatles songs, though, feel as though the placeholders were just left in. “Well you can syndicate any boat you row,” or “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.”

The all-time champ must be I Am the Walrus. 

John Lennon said he was tired of listeners trying to “analyze” Beatles lyrics, and wanted to write something to confuse them — the “Rohrschach effect” that Ryan Miller mentioned. 

And so:

Putter-inners, taker-outers

February 8, 2023
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Those of us who have written professionally have all faced editors. There are those who despise those who have that power over them, and those of us who welcome their help. I was lucky: I always had supportive editors, whose work always only made my prose better. 

But I also feel sympathy for them, as a whole, for having to put up with my tendencies. I wrote for a newspaper, where the ideal prose is that which disappears, is clear as spring water, and is aimed at a readership that wants to get the information it needs in as short and pithy a means as possible. Short sentences; short paragraphs; direct communication. 

Unfortunately, that was not what I usually did. I wasn’t a trained journalist and I never quite caught the knack. I loved the words as much as the matter they conveyed. Subordinate clauses, parenthetical asides, amplifying sidenotes — these were what I loved, and what I plopped down, like a dead fish, on the desk of my poor editors. I’m sure I used more em-dashes and semicolons than the entire rest of the writing staff combined. My sympathetic editors let me get away with it — usually. 

My ideal writers, those whose works I loved to read — and the operative word is “love” — are those who expatiate, amplify, pile up metaphors and imagery, i.e., whose prose was tasty and rich. Authors who one reads less for the plot or subject and more for the glory of the words themselves. Melville, Thoreau, Gibbon, Laurence Sterne. Words to gobble up and savor over the palate. 

I wrote about this in a previous blog, where I described the kind of writing I enjoyed:

“My ideal can be found in the long serpentine railways of words shunted hither and thither over dependent clauses, parenthetical remarks, explanatory discursions and descriptive ambiguities; sentences such as those found in the word-rich 18th century publishing world of Fielding, Sterne, Addison, Steele, or Boswell, and perhaps most gratifyingly in the grand, gravid, orotund sentences of Edward Gibbon, whose work I turn to not so much for information about the grandeur that was Rome, but for the pure sensuous pleasure to be had from those accretive tunes built from the pile of ideas and imagery (to say nothing of ironic asides), and peppered liberally with the notations of colons, semicolons, dashes and inverted commas.”

One sentence; 114 words; 14 commas; a semicolon; a parenthesis; a hyphen; and the supporting gravy of digression. Sentences such as that must have provided my editors with reason enough to keep a sixpack of Pepto-Bismol in their desk drawers. 

The fact is, writers tend to be those who hone their text down to the essentials, like Hemingway, or those who pile it on with a rich depth of detail, like Faulkner. They are perhaps the exempla of the two tendencies. 

In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his sometime friend, Thomas Wolfe, urging Wolfe to prune his prose down to essentials, cut back on some of that overwhelming exuberance, and advocating for Flaubert’s laconic supremacy over the wordier Emile Zola. Wolfe wrote back, in a bit of understandable pique: “Flaubert me no Flauberts, Bovary me no Bovarys. Zola me no Zolas. And exuberance me no exuberances.”

 Wolfe argued: “I have mentioned Don Quixote and Pickwick and The Brothers Karamazov and Tristram Shandy to you in contrast to The Silver Spoon or The White Monkey as examples of books that have become ‘immortal’ and that boil and pour. Just remember that although in your opinion Madame Bovary may be a great book, Tristram Shandy is indubitably a great book, and that it is great for quite different reasons. It is great because it boils and pours — for the unselected quality of its selection. You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners — greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers and will be remembered for what they put in — remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.”

Yeah — Take that! (The Silver Spoon and The White Monkey are two of the three books in the John Galsworthy trilogy, aka The Forsyth Saga, along with Swan Song.) 

Wolfe knew who he was and what he wanted to do, and yes, his editor, Maxwell Perkins (also Hemingway’s editor at Scribners) did manage to trim some 90,000 words out of Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward Angel, which first came to his desk at 330,000 words. And Wolfe did complain constantly about Perkins’ blue pencil, eventually leaving Scribners because of it. And yes, Perkins’ work immeasurably helped Wolfe become a great writer. 

In his letter to Fitzgerald, Wolfe painted a wonderful caricature of how the public pictured Wolfe as an author:

“The little fellows who don’t know may picture a man as a great ‘exuberant’ six-foot-six clodhopper straight out of nature who bites off half a plug of apple tobacco, tilts the corn liquor jug and lets half of it gurgle down his throat, wipes off his mouth with the back of one hairy paw, jumps three feet in the air and clacks his heels together four times before he hits the floor again and yells ‘Whoopee, boys I’m a rootin, tootin, shootin son of a gun from Buncombe County — out of my way now, here I come!’ — and then wads up three-hundred thousand words or so, hurls it back at a blank page, puts covers on it and says ‘Here’s my book!’ Now Scott, the boys who write book reviews in New York may think it’s done that way; but the man who wrote Tender Is the Night knows better. You know you never did it that way, you know I never did, you know no one else who ever wrote a line worth reading ever did. So don’t give me any of your guff, young fellow.” 

As an experiment, I thought I might take a famous bit of “putter-inner” prose and give it the Flaubert treatment. Herman Melville writes a prose as fertile as anyone ever planted on a page, with excursions, explosions, eructations and effusions all over the place. It is, of course, what makes Melville Melville, and why anyone reads all that stuff about harpoons and try pots. The exuberance of the words piled onto the page is what makes the book such fun to read. 

And so, I imagined the opening paragraph of the first chapter, “Loomings,” and took my pencil to it. 

As it was written: 

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

I love that paragraph. Full to overflowing; images piled on images. A great introduction to our narrator, whose personality becomes the substance of the book. But, I thought, what if a gimlet-eyed editor from a harried city newsroom saw that coming across his desk, what would he do to it. Take out all the hoopde-doo. Just the facts, ma’am. 

“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago having little in my purse, I thought I would sail and see part of the world. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. There is nothing surprising in this. Almost all men cherish the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

See how much more efficient it becomes. Gets straight to the point. 

But really, if he wasn’t on deadline, he might well send it back for rewrite. I which case, we could turn it into right perfect journalese:

“My name is Ishmael. A few years ago, when I was broke, I decided to go to sea. Whenever I’m down, I do that. I believe that most of us feel the same about the sea.”

And really, do we need that last sentence? Out it goes. Editorializing. 

I believe that most of us feel the same about the sea.

It always reminds me of Woody Allen describing how his mother used to “run the chicken through the deflavorizing machine.” The value is weighted heavily upon the words, rather than the mere story. The flavor. 

I look back now on my 25 years as a critic with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and feel tremendous gratitude to the many editors who put up with me, let me write what I wanted to, and mostly let me write it the way I was constitutionally built for, and often let me use a vocabulary beyond what was found in McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader. I wouldn’t have had a career without them. 

Fuzzy logic

February 6, 2023
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In addition to this blog, which I have been writing since 2012, I have written a monthly essay for the Spirit of the Senses salon group in Phoenix, Ariz., since 2015. The readership for each site seems to have little overlap, and so, I thought if I might repost some of the Spirit essays on my own blog, it might achieve a wider readership. This one, originally from July 1, 2022, is now updated and slightly rewritten. 

The world is fuzzy. I am constantly reminded of the fact that when looked at with any concentration, what might have seemed sharply focused, is, in fact, quite blurred. 

No matter how precise we try to make our language, there is always a nimbus of ambiguity clouding our meaning. What we mean by a word, and what our hearer means is only explainable in a Venn diagram. Some overlap, much personal and distinct. 

We keep trying to clarify our thought, to make it more precise, to nail down just exactly what we mean, but that whittled edge always seems to elude us and we are left with “sort of” and “it’s like …” 

What I’ve come to understand is that it has to be that way, and that meaning and communication can only happen in that aura of mist and glimpse.  

We try to sort out our reality with definitions and categories, but, so much is simply uncategorizable, and definitions are often murky.

I was re-reading my Lucretius, an epic poem about science written in Latin in the First Century B.C. De Rerum Naturae  (“On the Nature of Things”) is some 7,000 verses long, divided into six books and explains the universe in surprisingly modern detail. Lucretius was an Epicurean, and spends a portion of his book explaining atomic theory. If you allow for the use of metaphorical thinking instead of mathematics, and allow for guesswork to replace the subsequent 2,000 years of scientific advance, the poem can often stun you with its prescience. 

Yet, is De Rerum really science? Or is it poetry? Like a good epic poem, it begins with an invocation to a goddess. But like science, it spends its time discussing being and nothingness, matter and space, the atoms and their movement, the infinity of the universe, time and space. But then again, it’s in verse. 

So, was Lucretius a poet? A scientist? A philosopher? I need an optometrist: It’s all gone fuzzy. 

This uncertainty is constant in our intellectual lives. Is light a wave or a particle? Is Beethoven a Classical composer, like Mozart, or a Romantic, like Wagner? A case can be made either way. When did the Renaissance begin? Was Camus an Existentialist or an Absurdist? When and where, exactly did Latin turn into French, Spanish and Romanian? We tend to think of all these categories as discrete, yet, when looked at, they blur out. Can a Londoner really understand a Yorkshireman? They both speak what is called English, but evidence says Londoners are as confused by northern language as Americans are. We all need subtitles. 

Language divides things up so we may talk about them. Cats are one one side, dogs on the other. Mammals on one side, reptiles, birds, and fish on the other. Animals are on one side, vegetables and minerals sit on the other side of the room. Divide, divide. Name, name. 

But anyone who has ever tried to re-organize their homes or office has run into the problem: Here are letters; divide them into piles. Business letters, personal letters, old letters, current letters, personal letters discussing business, business letters with a personal P.S. added. Letters to you, letters to your wife, letters addressed to both. How many piles do you make? The biggest file by far can only be those uncertain of classification — and maybe next time you go through them, you can decide. In other words, the biggest pile is “miscellaneous.”

As the obscure philosopher Anne Burnette said, “The world has miscellaneous built into it.” 

The same if you organize books. Fiction, non-fiction. But where on its best-seller list should The New York Times have put Edmund Morris’ Dutch, a semi-fictionalized biography of Ronald Reagan? Is poetry fiction or non-fiction? Is Lucretius science or literature? In the end, you wind up subdividing your categories so finely, that perhaps each volume gets its own subcategory. How is that different from chaos? 

The New York Times now prints 11 weekly lists of best-sellers, all subdivided: Combined Print & E-Book Fiction; Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction; Hardcover Fiction; Hardcover Nonfiction; Paperback Trade Fiction; Paperback Nonfiction; Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous; Children’s Middle-Grade Hardcover; Children’s Picture Books; Children’s Series, Young Adult Hardcover. And that’s not counting the monthly lists: Audio Fiction; Audio Nonfiction; Business Graphic Books; Mass Market; Middle Grade Paperback; and Young Adult Paperback. 

Burnette says, organize your books by color. It’s as good as anything else. Even the Dewey Decimal System has “miscellaneous” built into it and the Library of Congress organization actually begins with it, called “General Works.” 

Just talking with each other and trying to communicate requires fuzziness and imprecision. Trying to be too precise only invites misunderstanding. Total order and total chaos are, after all, identical.

I was once playing with my brother’s dog and thinking about scientific nomenclature. How should I classify Roxanne? She had a very distinct personality. A one-in-a-million springer spaniel, for sure. Science does it with a hierarchical layering of categories. Once we separate animals out from everything else, we then divide them up into phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. A dog, for instance is phylum chordate; class mammal; order, carnivore; family, canid; genus, Canis; species, familiaris. We usually only use the last two for identification: Canis familiaris. 

But even the category “dog” can be subdivided into breed: schnauzer; doberman; chihuahua. Breeds get broken down, too: water spaniel; springer spaniel; cocker spaniel Indeed, the nomenclature is constantly being subdivided into sub-phylum, sub-order, etc. Taxonomists are fervid with smaller and smaller divisions. Family is subdivided into sub-family, tribe and sub-tribe; there are subgenera and subspecies. 

But these categories are sometimes squishy. Not every taxonomist agrees, and the labels can change over time. And so they can’t be satisfied with one rank, but often try to find distinctions within genera so they may create new ones. In times past, for instance, a lion was classified as “Felis leo,” that is a cat of the lion species; But no, that wasn’t enough. It was noticed that cats come in two varieties: Small and large — i.e., those that can purr and those that can’t. And so, Felis was divided into Felis and Panthera and lions became Panthera leo. 

 

But even that wasn’t enough for some taxonomists, who found enough difference between tigers, leopards, on one hand — and lions on the other, to create yet a new genus: Leo, held solely for our leonine brethren, and so, it became Leo leo. But there were African lions — Leo leo leo — and the subspecies of Asiatic lions — Leo leo persica. Enough already. Indeed some taxonomists have gone back to using Panthera. And the Indian lions have been relumped back into Panthera leo. Not all zoologists agree, and if you visit different zoos, you will find different labels attached to cages, depending on who is choosing the name (and also how often zoo officials update their signage). 

To take the whole enterprise to absurdity, that dog we were discussing can be so roundly classified as to prove the meaninglessness of the attempt to do so. We classify in an attempt to make order of chaos. But the more we subdivide, the more chaotic we make things. Your dog is not only separated out as a chordate mammal carnivore canid of the familiaris species, but also of the breed spaniel, the kind springer spaniel (they come in multiple colors), and the individual name, Roxanne. Every dog can be thus subdivided down to its individual name, meaning that at the end of the most precise descriptions, there are as many categories as there are things in the cosmos — in other words, chaos. 

In other words, the more precise a word is, the less it describes, and perfectly precise language is functionally meaningless. Meaning depends on fuzziness. “Dog” is ambiguous, but we all know what is meant, more or less. “Roxanne” has only meaning to those who know that particular dog. 

And so, fuzzy is good. Precision is a phantom. Fuzziness helps us communicate, creates a wider field of shared experience. 

But I’m using language only as an exemplum. Fuzziness is characteristic of the world in general, and is a necessary, or at least helpful ally in negotiating it. 

Like an Impressionist painting, which can actually look more real than the finely detailed and finicky painting of the Renaissance and Baroque. The fuzzier river reflections in the Impressionist painting are almost photographic compared with the sharply detailed but unrealistic reflections in the older painting.

(And where exactly does the Baroque shade into the Rococo? Or the Romantic Age become the Victorian? Where did Modernity begin? With Picasso or Einstein? With the Crimean War? With Napoleon? With the Enlightenment? With the Renaissance? With Rome? With Egypt? With agriculture? History is always fuzzier than our outlining of it.)

Where do you, as a person, begin and end? It would seem that one’s skin is the border between self and not-self. But proprioception can create a different self: Amputees can “feel” their selves extend into phantom limbs. And for most, if you are driving a car, say, your sense of selfness can extend to the limits of the car — you become one thing operating on the streets, like man and horse becoming centaur. You can back into a parking space because you have a proprioceptive sense of how far you and your automobile extend into space. 

And you can feel uncomfortable if someone invades your personal space. So, where does the self end? 

National borders and identities have the same issues. When Winston Churchill wrote his books, he titled them History of the English Speaking Peoples, because he couldn’t draw a line around England without extending it to Scotland and Wales, and then the United States and Canada, and then, what about Australia and New Zealand? 

National borders keep shifting. Poland has appeared and disappeared many times over history. In the 20th Century alone, it disappeared and reappeared twice, and after World War II, the entire country picked up its skirts and skidded west by roughly 200 miles, ceding part of its former self to the U.S.S.R. and taking in turn a chunk of what was used to be eastern Germany. 

We are watching borders shift constantly. Where will Ukraine be two years from now? South Sudan popped into existence; Yugoslavia evaporated.

We think of the world in nouns, as if it were static, but truly it is all verb, and the constant motion blurs every outline.

Riding the rails

January 29, 2023
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I can’t be everywhere. But I want to be. 

I have lived all around the United States, but no matter where I’ve staked my claim, I wanted to travel elsewhere. When I was a teacher, my wife (also a teacher) and I had all summer long to travel. Later, as a writer in Arizona, I wrote hundreds of travel stories for my newspaper. I’ve been to three continents, seen more than seven seas, been to all but one state (Hawaii) and to all Canadian provinces and territories (save Nunavut, Labrador and Prince Edward Island). From Hudson Bay in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, travel has been a source of experience, growth, joy, and enlightenment. 

Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

Travel dissipates provincialism, fosters tolerance, expands awareness, and perhaps most importantly, keeps one alive, awake and engaged. 

But I can’t be everywhere. And now that I am 75 with wobbly knees and the straitened pocketbook of a retiree, travel has become difficult. Long hours driving are too exhausting, and the last time I flew anywhere, I thought it would kill me (I’m six-foot-four and the airplane seats keep getting more and more squeezed: On the last flight, I had to angle my legs out into the aisle — and then the passenger in front of me decided to recline his seat. And that doesn’t even account for the madness of gate hopping at a sprawling hub-airport.)

 

When I was a kid, my parents made sure that my brothers and I were exposed to travel and they spent many summer vacations taking us to places, such as Niagara Falls or Washington, D.C. And when at home, in the 1950s, I’d watch whatever travel shows turned up on TV. There were a few: Bold Journey, Kingdom of the Sea, I Search for Adventure. Col. John D. Craig, John Stephenson and Jack Douglas hosted these shows, made mostly of home movies of travelers, and with lots of South Sea islands and exotic tribes. I ate them up. 

And so, television provided a surrogate for travel. And I continued to watch any travelogue I could find, up through Michael Palin and Tony Bourdain. (Food and cooking shows were often just as much about travel and culture as about frying or simmering.)

 

Now that YouTube has elbowed its way past TV, it has its own brand of travel, and one variety I have found absolutely riveting are the many — hundreds, really — postings of train journeys, filmed from the front window of a locomotive cab. These videos usually run anywhere from about a half hour to up to 9 hours, and typically run unedited, showing the view from the front of a train as it crosses huge swaths of countryside. 

Scottish Highlands

You learn a huge amount about nations from such trips. Normal travel shows tend to focus on the highlights and the cities. But the train, running, say, from Nice to Paris, shows you the land that tourists pay little attention to. And yet, it is those long “flyover” miles that can speak most eloquently about a nation’s character. 

Admittedly, no one is likely to watch a three-hour uninterrupted window view, which can become monotonous, but I put the video on while I do other things and keep track of the voyage, the same way you might read a book on a real train trip and glance out the window from time to time to see how the countryside had changed. 

Slovenia

Nevertheless, I find myself hypnotized, wanting to see what is just around the next bend, and that often keeps me watching for hours. 

These videos vary in quality from fuzzy, low-resolution and often shaky, hand-held images, to the highest quality HD productions, sometimes sponsored by the nation itself, or the rail line. But always, they take me traveling when I cannot leave the house. 

Norway

They come from almost everywhere, with the three biggest sources being Switzerland, Norway and Japan. But I’ve found train trips in New Zealand, 

New Zealand 

Siberia, 

Siberia

Montenegro, Which turns out to be one of the most beautiful countries I’ve never actually visited. 

Montenegro

and “the mountains of the Netherlands” (Yes, I’m not making that one up). 

Train yard in Oslo

Norway comes to us by a YouTuber going under the rubric RailCowGirl. She is a train driver and has uploaded more than a hundred train trips, seen through her windscreen. (A second train driver has also posted videos, under the name “GingerRail.” It’s worth checking those out, too.) They cover many seasons and weathers, and while many of them are of the same trip from Bergen to Oslo, there are also excursions to other sites, including the Arctic Circle. Following the seasons alone is often simply beautiful. A few run over the mountains in a snowstorm with the rails completely hidden under the white. Wind blows, window-wipers try to keep the view clear, the snow comes swirling down, although “down” might be wrong to describe horizontal weather. 

The Switzerland videos focus primarily on the Alps and mountain landscapes. There are also several city tram videos, and at least one I’ve found taken from an aerial tramway (It’s stunning). 

 

The winner, though, as far as I’m concerned, is Japan. I’ve learned more about Japanese geography from these videos than from almost any other source. We tend to think of Japan as an urban nation, with 14 million people scrunched into a city of blaring neon lights, loud traffic, and a million tiny ramen shops and pachinko parlors. But take one of these train trips out of the city and you discover that the vast majority of Japan is both rural and mountainous. 

A special aspect of the Japanese videos is found in the many local regional trips on diesel-powered one-car trains that go from countryside community to to other countrysides, on old, squeaky tracks through the backcountry of Japan, into mountain valley villages and riverside towns. They travel at a slower pace and you can see so much to the right and left of the tracks — the farmland, the houses and architecture, the local businesses and the people, often waving at the train as it passes. 

Other Japanese videos do go through cities, and often from one jammed up urban center to another, with lots of rural clean air between them. There is a fastidiousness to most of the Japanese train videos that vies with the commercial professionalism in the Swiss films. 

I often choose a Japanese trip above any other for its beauty and peacefulness. It’s just amazing watching a trip through the springtime with all the cherry trees in bloom. 

In contrast to the tidiness of the Japanese videos, those from Eastern Europe and Russia often show us overgrown tracks, decaying railway stations, abandoned rolling stock, and an industrial landscape with no environmental concern evident. The rural trips are nevertheless often beautiful, even if weeds are growing in the rail ties. 

Romania 

You can take the jungle ride from Peru’s Machu Picchu down to the flatlands. 

A trip to New Zealand

British Columbia’s Kootenay River Valley

Colorado’s Royal Gorge

Through Queens on New York’s elevated subway

Singapore,

Taiwan

Thailand

Multiple trips through Vietnam go from crowded hovels in the back streets 

To beautiful pastoral countryside

You can get a very wide picture of a country from multiple of these train journeys.

For railfans, there are tons of tunnels

Bosnia

And bridges

Vietnam

And views of locomotive controls

French train from Nice to Paris

RailCowGirl often begins her videos with her engine in a yard and we watch as she inspects it before boarding, drives it through the yard to pick up passenger cars, and brings it into the station, before taking off on the journey. It is fascinating for anyone interested in railroads and rail procedures. 

Not everyone has the patience for a four-hour stare out the front window of a train, but for those who do, there is a world to learn. 

I’ve concentrated on train travel. But there are also many videos of boat and ship travel, and a great series of British intercity bus trips. 

A number of Americans have posted “dashcam” footage of road travel, including at least one running for 9 hours using time-lapse photography to squeeze in some 3000 miles of driving. 

Watching these over the years I have supplemented my own travel across portions of the globe, and gotten an overpowering sense of the roundness, smallness, and the continuity and kinship of the world. 

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On turning 75

January 12, 2023
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The first photograph I have of myself is at 15 weeks old, being weighed. Those first moments of life are only measured in weeks. 

Then, in the first year or so after we are born, our age is normally given in months. “He is 10 months old,” or “18 months.” We don’t usually start counting years until after the age of two. Then, it is a year-by-year thing. 

Perhaps there is, when very young, a tendency to split years in half, so that one might claim to be “two-and-a-half years old,” but that soon changes. It would sound very odd for some freshman in high school to say he was “12-and-a-half years old.” Or worse, later on on a job application to claim to be “23-and-a-half years old.” 

So, from three on, we tend to measure our lives in whole years. One is five, or twelve or 18. The last year, though, that gets its own frame, is probably 21, a year with a certain magic ring to it, as if, “Now I am officially an adult.” 

And so, the 20s slip by and the next major milestone is 30, then 40, and 50 and 60. As adults, we think in decades. “I’m in my 40s,” or “My 60s.” 

To go along with that, of course, there is the accelerated sense of time, so the decade becomes a reasonable yardstick for age. The difference between 32 and 33 is basically meaningless. Not like the difference between being four years old, and being five and first heading off to kindergarten. 

And so, the measurement of time goes from months to years to decades. And the psychological perception of time passing changes, too, and so summer vacation after you were in second grade was an endless horizon of infinite time — at least until you were trundled off to third grade. 

So, the years become the milestones, then the decades. When we are young, the day can seem forever, with all that daylight after school to go out into the yard and play until dinnertime. But this diurnal spinning speeds up, so that when you are become a grandparent, the sun circles  across the sky like the dizzy spinning an airplane propeller. 

But there is another stage in this time-perception shift. I just turned 75. Three-quarters of a century. And I look back and see my time on this planet divided into chunks of 25 years — quarters of a century. I have now completed the first three chunks, with no promise — even likelihood — that I will see another quarter-century. And I look back and see a very different landscape in the rear-view mirror, one divided into segments of a century — the unit of a hundred years now seems the yardstick to use. 

Bits of a century: Me, in Lion King pose, at roughly 20, 50, and 75

I was born just after the world war ended. The Korean War happened mostly before I was old enough to go to school. The Kennedy assassination was the present I lived through, before it became current events, and later a chapter in a history book (and by now, probably a paragraph). It is fading into a past that has gobbled up most of my life. 

There is a through-line from the earliest memory to the moment I am typing this. Parts, of course, have faded and other parts no doubt given unearned importance, but that skein of fabric runs continuous, but in longer and longer segments, and so, now, 25 years seems a meaningful chunk. 

Five generations: Great grandmother, grandmother, mother, wife and son

But I can also sense the longer sway of time. Now that I have lived 75 years, I can easily imagine the quarters-of-a-century before my birth, back to my father’s birth in 1919 or my great grandmother, Anna-Gurine Kristiansen, who was born in Norway in 1871. I knew my mother’s grandmother, Aase Aagesdatter, born in the Old Country in 1879 and lived until I was 30 years old, when I was still counting by decades. 

And I can see my granddaughters, born at the turn of the newest century and now entering the decade-by-decade portion of their lives, and see that time spreading out ahead of them well after I am gone. And so, perhaps even centuries are not long enough to gather it all in. 

In Ancient Rome an age — a saeculum — often translated as a “century,” was measured from the birth of your parents to the death of your children after you. It averaged perhaps 110 years, but was left indefinite. That was a meaningful container for time to be understood. My father, born in 1919, me in 1948, my daughter in 1963 and her twin daughters in 2001. That age will end when they grow old and look to the future of the children they might have. 

When I was young, the present moment was the fulcrum of time, leaving the past to the past and the future to obscurity. But now, having lived through my portion of a century, I sense no pivot point, just a continuum, in saecula saeculorum, from back before any memory and ahead past any speculation.  

Ovid’s new clothes

January 6, 2023
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 Translation is a funky thing. You might think a literal transcription would be best, but language doesn’t work that way. 

If we translate Holly Golightly into French, and have her window shopping, the French reader will assume she is looking for a glazier — i.e., shopping for windows. If the original had been in French and we translated it to English as “licking the glass,” we’d assume Holly was more than slightly daft.

You can try to be literal and lose all the flavor, or you can try to find equivalent idiomatic expressions, or you can recast the whole thing, as if you were writing an original from a similar inspiration — your own words for a similar thought. 

I recently posted a blog entry about various versions in English of Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. (link here). 

“It’s amazing that all the translations are so different,” responded a friend. And they are. I have been fascinated with the issue of translation for years, now, and have compared many versions of several works and am also “amazed” at how different they can be. 

Most recently, the Ovid comparisons has been obsessing me. And so, I went back to the original to see what I could ferret out about these variations. One discovers that although Ovid’s language moves quickly and simply, there is some ambiguity built in to those words. A translator has to disambiguate the text, and in the process make a single meaning for what in Latin can be multiple. 

The first four lines of the Metamorphoses, in Latin, read: 

The Latin is alien to English speakers first because word order is not a central concern of Latin grammar. Ovid arranges his sentences according to his metrical choice — Latin hexameter. And that is built around syllable length, not stress. And so if you were to just put down a word-by-word transference from Latin to English, you get, essentially, nonsense.

In 1828, a British publisher printed an interlinear translation, intended to help students in learning Latin. To simplify the project, Ovid’s word order has been shifted to mimic English word order. Thus published, the sense, more or less, becomes clear.

That is: “My-Spirit prompts to tell of forms changed into new bodies. O-Gods (for ye have-changed even those). Breathe-kindly on-my attempts and-carry-down the-continuous song from the-first origin of-the-world to my-own times.” 

(The hyphenated phrases are Latin single words that must be broken into multiple words to be rendered in English). 

All this is good, and one could easily smooth all this out into very plain English: “My spirit prompts me to tell of forms changed into new bodies. O Gods (for you have changed even those), breathe kindly on my attempts to carry down this song continuously from the origin of the world to my own times.” 

And there you have it: Ovid translated cleanly and understandable.

Except.

 

Except that this version, as plain as it might be, avoids some of the complexities of the Latin, which doesn’t so easily give up its meaning in a one-to-one way with our King’s English. And it doesn’t explain the wide variants rendered by translators from 1567 to our own times. 

Over the years, translators couldn’t make up their minds whether bodies were changed into new forms or forms into new bodies. Ovid writes forma into nova corpora. But in English that seems backwards. 

It’s been explained as hypallage (a rhetorical trope in which elements are switched from the place expected, as in “the angry crowns of kings” instead of the “crowns of angry kings.” It was a trope often used in Latin writings.) Ovid talks of “forms” changed into new “bodies,” where, in English, we might expect “bodies changed into new forms.” The difference is that in Latin, “forma” describes the “true” shape of something, in other words, the way it was created, such as your body or mine. Ovid is saying that the true shape of his mythological figures are being altered to new, perhaps temporary, bodies — in other words, the new bodies are not the “real” bodies.

In English, we would tend to word it the other way around, so that our “real” bodies are given new “forms.” And so, some translators write it that way, while others maintain the forms-to-bodies version.

This may seem like a trivial thing, but if you grew up with Platonic ideals and they were ripped apart into “false” new shapes, you’d understand what Ovid is getting at here. Of course, he does not make a big thing about it: He expected his listeners (or readers) to understand that the way we might understand “three strikes and you’re out.” It is just buried in the culture. Theirs, though; not ours. 

Most English translations really start with anima: 

“My spirit prompts” can be understood as “My design leads me” (1899 Riley); “I want to speak about” (1903 Kline); “My mind is bent to tell of” (1916 Miller); “My soul is wrought to sing of” (1922 More); “My purpose is to tell of” (1955 Innes); “My intention is to tell of” (1955 Humphries); “My soul would sing of” (1993, Mandelbaum); “My spirit drives me now to sing about” (2012 Johnston); “My mind leads me to speak now of” (2012 Martin); and most recently, “My spirit moves to tell of” (2022 McCarter). 

But of course, the poem really begins with the word “Nova”… “New.” And a few attempt to mimic the Latin word order, approximately. One could attempt something in English, contorting it like a gymnast: 

Certainly, that is awkward sounding, and I am not recommending it as a preferred translation. We should want something that moves as cleanly in English as Ovid moves in Latin. Mimicking Latin won’t do that. 

But there are other issues, too. You’ll notice I used “weave the thread” of song. Ovid has “deducite” — to lead away, draw out, turn aside, divert, bring out, remove, drive off, draw down. It is used, says one set of notes, to mean to extend like a chain, or, as I have it, “weave the thread,” but more like “add links to links to make up a whole chain” of mythological stories. 

You can see the problem here: Which idiomatic Latin usage of “deducite” should you use here — again, without turning the passage into something utterly unreadable. 

That chain, and its metaphorical maritime implication is echoed in “adspirate,” which implies a fair wind in the sails, as if the gods were blowing their breath to move ships. These things are not clear in English and are only implied in Latin, but they are there. 

The multiple possible meanings of many of these words can bring variation to a potential translation. “Carmen,” for instance, can be a song or a poem — or a prophecy, an incantation, a tune. “Tempora” can be time, or a season, or a duration. “Fert” can be to pick something up, to carry it, to take something up. A translator has to decide what is best meant and how in English to make that clear.

 

There is a giant ambiguity in these lines that gets very differently translated. When Ovid calls on the gods, he says “nam vos mutastis et illas,” which means, literally, “for you (plural) change (or move, or remove, or move away from) and that (or there, or yonder).” What do you make of that? 

In previous centuries, it was taken to mean, basically, “for you gods caused those changes.” And that seems to make sense of it. But beginning in 2001 with Michael Simpson’s translation, many have assumed it is the poem that the gods have changed. “Gods, inspire this poem I’ve begun (for you changed it too)” (2001 Simpson); “O gods (it is you who have even transformed my art)” (2004 Raeburn); “inspire this undertaking (which you’ve changed as well)” (2004 Martin); “inspire my work (for you’ve transformed it too)” (2022 McCarter). 

These two interpretations can not both be correct. Ovid is obscure here, and leaves a good deal to the discretion of the translator.   

Or to the edition. A translator has to pick among variant texts in Latin, collated by different editors. And the Latin is not completely identical in all of them. Remember, Ovid survives not in manuscripts from Roman times, but from copies made by monks in scriptoria through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, and when copies are made, mistakes are made. Which is the true version: That is the job of an editor putting together a modern published edition. 

Joseph Reed, in his annotations to the new edition of Rolfe Humphries’ translation write of this confusion: “Most manuscripts have ‘for you, gods, changed those [forms] as well’ (nam vos mutastis et illas), which Humphries seems to be translating here, omitting the troublesome ‘as well,’ which has no clear reference. Since the 1970s, most editors prefer to read the slightly different text, ‘illa,’ found in a few manuscripts, which yields the very different sense: ‘for you changed that [undertaking of mine] as well,’ referring to the new direction Ovid’s own poetry now takes from his earlier themes and metrical forms (love elegy) to those of epic-length mythological narrative.”

The difference between “that” and “those” (illa et illas). No matter how you parse it, the original is obscure. 

Finally, you must decide what you want in your Ovid. If you are a scholar you want whatever is closest to the poet’s original language, even if it is obscure. And I sympathize with the impulse. But if you are simply a reader who is looking for Ovid’s storytelling, then you will be just fine with letting the translator turn the ambiguity into something that makes sense (culturally and linguistically) in English. Sometimes the actual words don’t relate the actual meaning. 

Ovid is lucky, in that he really does survive translation well. He can be reworked without losing his essential Ovid-ness. And it is true that some writers survive the tidal pull of translation better than others. That pull can distort some works beyond help, while others keep their gussets unruffled. Hence, a good translation of the Iliad or Shakespeare can work just fine in a new language, because the story is paramount. Shakespeare tends to travel well. His plays are valued in many lands and many languages. There are famous examples of Macbeth in Swahili, of Hamlet in Russian, and dozens of operatic versions in Italian, French and German. They all pack a wallop. And Shakespeare is loved in all those languages by their native speakers.

But that other class of writing, where the effect depends on how it is being said can defy the best translator. I have never found a good translation of Goethe, for instance. In English, his poetry often sounds commonplace. But I am assured by a native German speaker that Goethe’s poetry is the best from his country by being written in the most elegant of German language. Horace in Latin is similar; in English you wonder what the fuss is all about; in Latin, it is the height of sophistication and elegance.

Going in the other direction, how in hell can you translate John Milton into French? You can tell the story of Paradise Lost, sure, but how can you convey the special organ-tone quality of his language.

“Round he throws his baleful eyes.”

Translate it into French and it comes out as the equivalent of: “He looks around him malevolently.” Not the same thing, all the poetry is gone out of it. These things are untranslatable, and hence, Milton can never have the global currency of Shakespeare. 

There is behind language, a world. You can concentrate on the language, or on the world. It is easy to be lulled into forgetting the difference, to think that words describe the world, and that the best language is the most accurate lens on the things of this world but they are not the same, but rather, parallel universes, and what works in words does not necessarily explain how the world functions. In the reality of our experience, there are no nouns, no participles. There is only “is.” Can you get at that “is” through words. We try. And we try again.

And so, Ovid is lucky, he takes translation with grace, even glee. For although his Latin is singled out as impeccable, it is the stories that matter, and we can get them in English (or French or German or Chinese). 

Which is why my favorite version is Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid, which is only a partial translation (it includes just 23 of the hundreds of stories Ovid retells) and is really more a metamorphosis of Ovid into English: rewritten as if Hughes himself were telling the stories, rather than translating the words of Ovid. It is a re-creation rather than a translation. 

It is a version I recommend to everyone as a complete joy. 

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