The Surrealistic Gamble

I reckon almost any time a poet publishes a poem, even when the publishing is in the form of handing the poem to a person, she or he gambles. The stakes aren't high, financially or otherwise, except, I suppose, in some rare, extreme instances. The poet gambles that the reader will want to read the poem, will read it, will understand what the poem is up to, and will then appreciate what the poem is up to. Also, a poet may have some feelings or pride invested in the poem; poetry is "art," after all, so allegedly there's more at stake emotionally than there is, say, in a draft of a report, but I think people who draft and share reports--in a business or a not-for-profit organization--probably feel as if they're as much at risk as the poet who shares a poem, and if their job is at stake, they may feel much more at risk. Yes, poets should take pride in their work and be invested in it, but I also think it's possible to over-dramatize what's at stake in a poem.

But back to poetry itself: I think that, in the case of poems that deploy surrealism in one form or another, the risk that the reader won't "get" the poem almost always increases significantly. Robert Bly, for one, would adamantly insist that the risk is always worth it. He wants poems--his and others'--to "leap." He celebrates the surrealistic work of Spanish poets, for example, and he often derides American poetry for being flat-footed, for only hopping, at best. (One book he wrote on the subject is in fact called Leaping Poetry, as in poetry that leaps, that associates rapidly and freely, not as in jumping over poems.)

I think a poet hopes that the juxtapositions, associations, and non-rational, intuitive leaps will convey meaning, perhaps in the way our dreams convey meaning to us--but not in the way our dreams fail to convey meaning to others when we tell them about our dreams. (It seems not even psychiatrists are interested in the dreams others, even paying, clients have; the stock of dreams has gone through the floor since Freudian and Jungian heydays.) Maybe there's a rough, workable analogy to jazz here. The jazz musician hopes the listener will "get" the leaps of improvisations.

I was mulling all of this over when I decided to post the following surrealistic poem, which I think hops, at least; maybe it leaps, according to Bly's criteria; but maybe it also falls flat after it gets up in the air. I like the poem well enough, he said, feinting with damned praise, but with surrealism, I'm almost never sure what the reader will think, whereas with other kinds of poems that may be quite imaginative but not surrealistic, per se, I usually fee as if I can predict roughly how a reader will respond. Oh, well: it may be surrealism, but at least it's only four brisk stanzas of the stuff, so there's that.

Oranges Night, Oranges Day

Morning tosses oranges to night,
which juggles then peels them,
inhaling a blossom-rubbed
sea-breeze. Peeled whole oranges

become lanterns lit by juice.
They quiver at the sound
of a midnight train, its long
announcement preceding it

into town. The sun steps off
the train carrying a valise
in the shape of a quarter-moon.
The sun has traveled all night

and wants a bath,
maybe a glass of orange juice,
perhaps a nap beneath
gray flannel clouds.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Dickens: In Print, Or On Screen, Or Both/And?

When is it all right to give a loved one a gift that you know you will enjoy, too? I don't think I'm a good judge of this question because I'm the defendant.

I recently gave my wife a boxed set of DVDs--multiple BBC series based on novels by Dickens: Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and Martin Chuzzlewit [I may have missed one.] In my own defense (I can't afford a lawyer, so I will have a fool for a client, as the saying goes), I will say that my wife enjoys Dickens on film and in print as much as I, and that we enjoy watching Dickens on film together more than we do separately. Nonetheless, . . . .

I happen to like the BBC's way of adapting fiction in general and Dickens in particular. The BBC's approach seems to be to keep much of the original language, as well as the bones of the plot; to hire good costume-designers; to hire able actors and exquisite character-actors; and to keep the film-making simple. The BBC seems to film efficiently--lots of interiors and close-ups, not much fancy camera-work, little wasted motion.

But I acknowledge that the BBC series may be too boring for cinema-purists, and for Dickens- purists, any film-version may be heresy. I'm in the camp that likes Dickens both in print and on screen, although of course I like some of the novels much more than others and some of the adaptations much more than others; indeed, I've deliberately avoided some adaptations. The experiences of reading a long novel and viewing a long (by video-standards) series are different, but in the cases of the BBC and Dickens, the experiences overlap, partly because the language is honored, as are the zest and exuberance of CD's fiction.

We started with an episode of Our Mutual Friend tonight--with its great opening on the Thames, and a father and his daughter making a living by retrieving floating corpses. Dickens, of course, wastes no time and no corpses, so the corpse figures immediately and significantly into the almost instantly twisted plot. The father relieves the corpse's pockets of money. His former partner floats by in a boat. --Former because he allegedly took money from a man who was not yet quite a corpse. (Timing is everything in show-business, and every profession has its ethical standards, I guess.). They argue. The father shouts, "To what world does a dead man belong? To the other world! To what world does money belong? To this world!" . . .And so Dickens' most money-obsessed (arguably) book--er, BBC series--begins.

The episode refreshed my memory of how rhetorical Dickens' work is, not just in terms of his prose style, which is often Ciceronian, but also in terms of arguments, in which all his characters engage, regardless of their status, age, situation, or gender. The ancient joke about hockey is that you go to a fight and a hockey-game breaks out. With Dickens' work, I often feel as if I read (or, in the case of the DVDs, view) arguments, and a novel breaks out. The arguments and style are so superbly executed that the prose becomes poetry at times, as in the beginning and the end of A Tale of Two Cities.

Incidentally, I plead guilty, or at least nolo contendere, to the charge of "gifting" self-interestedly, as well as to the charge of treating "gift" as a verb--a linguistic development of which I became aware only a few years ago. And just this year, I heard for the first time "re-gifting" uttered. Hmmm.

Homeopathic Treatments for Writer's Block

The chief way in which I have responded to writer's block has been denial. I just keep writing. Maybe stubbornness is a better descriptor than denial in this case. Being involved with or interested in several kinds of writing helps, so if you find yourself unable to write one thing, you can shift to another. But I try not even to take that exit, and if poetry, for example, isn't going well, I just stick with it; sometimes the results aren't pretty. But I refuse to acknowledge the block, and I keep the pen or cursor moving. No one ever said the job of a poet was going to be easy (wink).

A digression with(one hopes) a point: when I was attending U.C. Davis, I tried to go to as many poetry readings as I could, but I missed one by Denise Levertov, unfortunately. I didn't get another chance to hear her read, as things turned out. One of my classmates reported not just that the reading was good but that Levertov suggested that poets should not force themselves to write. As reported by my classmate, Levertov's view was that writer's block was a self-imposed neurosis. I take her point, if indeed that was her point, but at the same time, poets (for example) often teach or have other day-jobs, and/or they have families to take care of, and sometimes the opportunities to write aren't abundant, so simply waiting out the dry spells or the writer's block is not always an attractive option, and often neurosis isn't the problem; it's just that you had set aside this hour, day, or week to write, and the writing's not going well, so what might you do?

Here, then, are some homeopathic treatments (in addition to denial and stubbornness) I've found helpful for poets' writer's block:

1. The list. Make lists of anything and everything (I exaggerate, of course). Words, phrases, things, memories, peeves, names. At first, you can even do this like a robot. Your heart doesn't have to be in it. Rather quickly, however, you will become interested in, intrigued by, or fascinated by this or that list. You'll "get into it." The list or an item, word, or phrase on the list will suggest a poem--or, if you get lucky, the list will turn into a poem, or at least a rough draft of same.

2. Official language. Use what normally would be regarded as inappropriate language to write a poem about a given subject. For example, write a love poem in the form and language of a memo. Or use the language of a late-bill-notification to write about birds or a garden or a capitalist. The contrast between the language and the subject sometimes creates a productive, poetic "torque." Sometimes something witty, uncanny, or at least surprising occurs. W.H. Auden was extremely good at borrowing official language and using it in poems, as in "The Unknown Citizen." He even slips some into his grand elegy for W.B. Yeats, when he is "talking" about the temperature outside.

3. Be literal. (Part of my background is Scandinavian, so this comes naturally to me, as does stubbornness.) Write about your own personal writer's block. Writing on the Edge, a journal published at U.C. Davis, has a continuing series of one-panel cartoons featuring the image of a literal writer's block--a cube. Is your personal block made of wood, granite, plastic, post-consumer fiber, iron, or glass? Where do you keep it? How big is it? Do you try to camouflage it? Do you call it a "nightstand"?

4. Homage. Write an homage-poem for anyone or anything you think deserves the honor. A dead writer--or a living one. The one honest politician you met in your life (as if). An aunt. An obscure actor. (I would probably choose Warren Oates, R.I.P.). A film-maker: my choice might be Preston Sturgess, R.I.P.

5. Report. Write down things you hear people say, signs you see, everyday oddities, and so on. Today I went to the pharmacy, and I overhead a woman say, "Go home, take drugs, and get in bed: that's all that I can do." I thought that might work as a first line for a poem. There's a nice rhythm to the phrasing, for one thing. . . . My brother-in-law, who is something of a free spirit, once said, not as a boast but merely as a casual observation, "I don't believe I've ever owned a house-key." He's owned lots of houses, but he never carries a house-key. Think of the implications! Think of the possible poems!

6. Write a poem that is imagined voice-mail from, well, anyone you like. It's your poem, and it's your voice-mail. Richard Nixon, Paris Hilton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka, or Napoleon (I guess you'd need an automatic translator for the latter two, or you'd have to write the poem in Franz's and the Napster's native language.) The sister or brother you never had. The person who taught you to drive a car. God.

7. Poets stress sound and image so much that sometimes focusing on odors suggests a fresh way to write a poem. Get some spice-bottles out, open them, and take whiffs. What comes to mind? Any memories? What is the worst thing you've ever smelled? What were the famous odors of high school? Of your worst job?

8. "Why did we think that was normal?" Maybe your family or your friends used to do something that, back then, seemed normal, or at least unremarkable--routine. For example, because we lived in a remote canyon in pre-cable days, our television could receive only one channel, and if a snowstorm came--forget about it. Routinely, then, my father would go outside, often in freezing weather, and rotate the antenna. One of his children would be posted at the open door (cold wind rushing in), yelling reports to him about whether "the picture" had improved. It was all futile, farcical, and--in retrospect--absurd. But at the time, we thought of the activity as a routine way of "watching television." And later it made for an okay poem as well as for some astonished, embarrassed wonderment.

Block that block!

Thing-Poems for Spring?

For college-teachers, these early days of January compose the interval in which we create plans for courses we are slated to teach in Spring. Our quirky little name for such plans is "syllabi," the plural of "syllabus." Before one of my recent high-school reunions (I suspect it was one I did not attend), a former classmate found my home-page on the Internet, and I put syllabi from courses on there. He sent me an email in which he claimed never to have used the word, "syllabus," in his life, partly because he hadn't (he informed me) gone to college. (At least at our high school, in our era, one did not hear or see the word "syllabus".) The remark was his not-so-subtle attempt to point out the obvious: I am a nerd. I always was a nerd, even though I played sports, came from the backwoods of the High Sierra [something hickish this way comes], and didn't wear horn-rimmed glasses or compete in debate-tournaments. I wrote back and told him that if I hadn't become a professor, I probably wouldn't have occasion to use the word, either. I mean, it's not like I derive measurable satisfaction simply from saying or writing "syllabus," nor am I attempting to put on airs by using the word. When one works a job, learns a trade, or joins a profession, one picks up the lingo, that's all. When I worked as a carpenter's assistant, I used the words "partition," "truss," "stud," "joist," and "eight-penny [nail]," but it wasn't personal.

Working on a syllabus for a poetry-writing class, I went in search of some thing-poems: poems that express some kind of concentrated, fanciful, and/or vivid view of an object (although I often lump poems about creatures and vegetation into this category, too.) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheel Barrow" is a classic example of a thing-poem--and an ironic one, for the main thing that makes the poem famous (arguably) is the line "So much depends," not the description of the barrow, per se. One impetus behind the writing of thing-poems in the early 20th century--an impetus that has persisted--was the desire to get away from flaccid poems about emotions and abstractions. A thing-poem may certainly evoke emotions and imply concepts, but the first task is to look at and to represent a concrete thing. "No ideas but in things," wrote Williams, in his poem, "A Sort of Song."

Of course, by the time the class reaches the official day for thing-poems, we will have already read and discussed--and written--thing-poems, including Williams' famous one. But on that official day, we will, I decided, discuss the following poems (from The Norton Anthology of Poetry):

1. "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins--a counterintuitive choice, I must admit. The title suggests something theological. But the poem itself is a tribute to "dappled things," "stuff" (not Hopkins' word) that on first glance looks like a bit of a mess but on closer inspection is beautiful. The implicit advice is to look for God's grandeur in ordinary, mixed up, disheveled things of this world.

2. "To a Chameleon," by Marianne Moore. This is not her most famous poem, but in my opinion it is as good as if not better than her most famous poems.

3. Charles Simic, "Watch Repair." Simic gives us an accessibly surreal, whimsical look inside a watch--an old-fashioned watch, not a digital one. I've probably mentioned this poem before on the blog.

4. Eric Ormsby, "Starfish." An accomplished, effective poem. I may also use "Skunk Cabbage," by Ormsby.

5. "Facing It," by Yusef Komunyakaa. This poem concerns a visit to the Viet Nam War Memorial--and the wall itself. Obviously, this is a potentially treacherous subject for a poet to take on, but Komunyakaa has the chops, and the poem is terrific.

6. "The Ant Hill," by Cynthia Zarin. Fresh description.

The anthology doesn't include another favorite thing-poem of mine--and one students tend to like: "Manhole Covers," by Karl Shapiro. His descriptions and comparisons are exquisite, and tells us (or reminds us of) why we sometimes find these huge round metal plates so fascinating. I still stare at and read the words on one near campus frequently.

Any thing-poem enthusiasts out there? It's okay to include plants and animals, in my opinion.

The most famous thing-poem in English? That's a question guaranteed to start an argument among syllabus-wielding nerds. I'll get the argument going by claiming the answer is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats. Hang that answer on a joist and see how you like it (the answer, not the joist).

Bowl Season

Marketing turns everything into a season; if something is a season, a sense of urgency can be created around it, and a sense of urgency might lead people to spend money. So, or example, we are very close to the "Spring Fashion Season," not because Spring is near but because the marketers have sold all the Winter clothes they're going to sell.

Now the season of football "bowls" is upon us--or upon those of us who pay the slightest attention to bowls of this kind (my wife pays no attention, whereas I pay token attention). Two football teams are invited to play a game in a stadium; the game is sponsored by a corporation and televised; money streams in; the colleges the football teams represent get some of the money. At home or in bars, we are allegedly entertained by the spectacle. There is something called "pageantry." There are tight close-ups of cheerleaders. You get the idea.

"Bowl" as applied to stadia and to games played in the stadia is an Americanism, according to the OED online, which cites the following early appearances of the word:

1913 Yale Alumni Weekly 4 July 1073/1 I voice the thanks of all Yale graduates for the ‘Bowl’... I am glad that Yale..prefers the good old word ‘bowl’ with its savor of manly English sport, to the ‘coliseum’ of the Romans or the ‘stadium’ of the Greeks.

1923 Pasadena (Calif.) Star-News 1 Jan. 1 Cheered to the echo,..a crowd of about 50,000 people in the great Rose Bowl, Pasadena's new Stadium in the Arroyo Seco

That the writer in the Yale Alumni Weekly yearned for a word that would provide a "savor of manly English sport" suggests an insecurity about masculinity and Americanism that I associate with Ivy League universities and with academia in general. I think Americans and Brits both think that "real academia" exists in England and elsewhere in Europe, but not in America, even at Harvard and Yale, even though the latter two universities can afford to buy any scholar from any country any time they want.

I'm not sure I agree that "bowl" provides a savor of anything manly or English or even sporting. It seems rather domestic, which might make it masculine, feminine, neither, or both--but not necessarily "manly." I may be wrong, but I think those gladiators in the coliseum were pretty darned "manly," both in the sense of being violent and murderous (two things we associate with men) and in the sense of how Hollywood likes to portray gladiators: muscle-bound, shaved, oiled, and scantily costumed (Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Brad Pitt, and that Australian guy). I think literary critics call this "over-determined" masculinity. (See the remark about insecurity above.)

The second citation makes me wish they'd named the stadium "Arroyo Seco" instead of the Rose Bowl. How poetic "Arroyo Seco" is--great syllables, great rhythm! Rose Bowl sounds rather morose, like two blasts of a foghorn. Does it (the former) mean "dry gulch"? I think so. But that's okay. It's not like the Rose Bowl is really a bowl full of roses, so we're not going for literal denotation.

In my ever-more-distant youth, there were only three bowls of much--let's say any--significance, to the degree bowls can have significance: The Sugar Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and the Orange Bowl. Then there came along the Blue Bonnet Bowl and the Sun Bowl. Then a proliferation of bowls occurred, and they took on highly visible sponsors, so now we have the All State [insurance] Sun Bowl or the IBM Rose Bowl or whatever. I think there are over 30 bowl games now. Some of the teams in the bowls have records like 7-5. At least one of the bowls might be called the Barely Competent Bowl.

Bowls I would like to see played, to make "bowl season" more interesting:

1. The Despair Bowl, featuring the two worst teams in college football. Different faith-traditions could sponsor this bowl and offer hope to the teams and their long-suffering fans.

2. The Absurdity Bowl, in which, if a team "scores," points are subtracted, not added. So if a team scored a lot, the scoreboard would read "-58" or something like that. The defenses would attempt to let the offenses score; they would be hospitable, polite, and supportive. The offenses would be inoffensive, reticent, and shy.

3. The Don't Go To War Unless It's Absolutely Necessary Bowl, featuring teams from the military academies. Before the game, all in attendance would pray in their own fashion that the players would never have to see military action and especially not have to suffer wounds or get killed in combat, ever.

4. The Poetry Bowl, in which players from the two teams would choose their favorite poems and read them aloud to the crowd during the four timed quarters. There would be a half-time, during which the teams could change their strategies and consult different anthologies. Judges would determine which set of poems was more interesting and which team gave better readings. All the players would earn academic credits in English at their respective universities.

5. The Zen Bowl, featuring no teams, only spectators, who would file in and look at the empty field. Cheerleaders representing no teams would "cheer" silently.

6. The Interpretation Bowl. This would be an ordinary football game, but on television, you could select different commentators to describe and interpret the game. The menu would include political scientists, feminist scholars, anthropologists, game-theorists, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, and so forth. Everyone at home would get the deeper meaning of their choice.

7. The Out Bowl. This would be a game between two teams composed of players from all teams across the nation--perhaps East and West. Players would be invited to come out as gay, but no player would be outed without his permission. One aim would be to assemble enough gay players to field two teams. Another aim would be to help the United States get over its homophobia and realize that about 10 per cent of any given group--including athletes--is gay. (Consider the appeal of gladiator-movies.) I predict that this Bowl will not occur soon.

8. The Soup Bowl. Innumerable corporate sponsors would support this Bowl lavishly, but all the profits would go to feeding the homeless, who would be able to attend the game for free (if they so desired), after a good meal, a hot shower, and a fresh change of clothes.

Putting Poems in Their Place(s)

Another blogger I read regularly wrote a post about poetry and a sense of place, and after reading the post, I thought about poets who have seemed (to me) to be especially good at evoking a sense of place.

I thought of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travelogue that includes poetry--haiku. There are crisp, vivid images of the countryside through which he walks, but the book also includes images of the common-folk he meets along the way. Of course, especially after the Romantic era, we may be inclined reflexively to think of "nature" when we think of "place" and poetry, but upon further inspection, even "nature poets" usually include human beings and their behavior in their poems. For instance, Robinson Jeffers was, arguably, not just a poet of place but a philosopher of place; his poems often express a moral outlook that aggressively prefers nature to people. But, paradoxically, he still needs to mention people, even as he often finds they don't measure up to nature--that hawks, for instance, seem to have more integrity and dignity than most people.

In the Jeffers-vein of poetry situated in California lies the poetry of William Everson (Brother Antoninus) and Gary Snyder. Snyder's The Back Country includes poems of place from around the globe, but Turtle Island is set chiefly in Northern California, as are many of Everson's later poems. Bill Hotchkiss's poetry is set almost exclusively in the Sierra Nevada, with some poems from the southern Cascades. When it comes to Alaska and poetry of place, John Haines is the go-to poet, methinks, but a former student of mine, Jessy Bowman, has some great Alaska poems, too, as does Art Petersen.

But what of urban places? Well, ironically, Mr. Lake Country, William Wordsworth, has that terrific sonnet about London, as viewed from Westminster Bridge. Ferlinghetti has that memorable, funny poem written from the point of view of a dog wandering through North Beach in San Francisco. Philip Levine has some great gritty Detroit poems, and Rita Dove evokes Akron from a variety of perspectives. I guess Sandburg wrote what we think of as "the" Chicago poem, but I'd bet there are a lot of Chicago poets and readers of Chicago poetry who wish that poem hadn't been written.

We tend to think of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in terms of Modernist fragmentation, myth, and elaborate allusiveness, but in some ways it's best read as a picture of "the city"--a depressing picture, certainly, but what did we expect from Eliot? I remember attending a reading/talk by Stephen Spender, at which he said that he believed Eliot (in that long poem) wanted to write "a series of satiric sketches about urban life." That seemed like such a sensible, accurate description of the poem--and a great counter-weight to the overblown criticism written about Eliot's work. . . .

. . . .I love Langston Hughes's vision of Harlem in the 20th century--in Montage of a Dream Deferred. It isn't a vision of a place so much as it is a vision of people in a place--and in myriad situations dictated by history, ethnicity, economics, personality, gender, and sexuality.

Oddly enough, when I think of such places as L.A., Paris and other cities in Europe, and places in the American South, and when I then think of writers whose work is situated in such places, I tend to think of novelists and/or short-story writers--and sometimes of detective writers--rather than poets. I'll need to give more thought to who are the poets of L.A. and Paris, Berlin and the Rhineland, and the urban and rural South. If you have some suggestions, let me know.

Holmes For Christmas

I didn't receive any books of poetry for Christmas, but I did get the third volume of Leslie Klinger's new annotated edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction. This volume includes the novels; it's published by W.W. Norton, and it replaces Baring-Gould's famous annotated edition. Klinger has the last two volumes of tales to go before finishing the complete annotated set. For every page of fiction, there are usually at least three or four long notes, just to give you some idea of how detailed the volumes are. They also include splendid illustrations and bibliographies. Klinger is an extremely professional amateur scholar, a lawyer by trade but a Holmesian at heart. His scholarship is superb.

I have long thought that the appeal of detective fiction in general and Holmes-fiction in particular was similar to that of poetry; in the case of both genres, there are certain well defined conventions within which the author is supposed to work, but at the same time, aficionados of detective fiction and poetry are always ready to entertain a disruption of the conventions--as long as it works. Among the more satisfying improvisations in the Holmes canon is his "defeat"; the genius is outwitted in "A Scandal in Bohemia," by the woman--and an American!--Irene Adler.

In addition to reading poetry (Cavafy and Housman at the moment), I'm also reading detective fiction. I just finished A Man's Head, a Maigret novel by Georges Simenon, and I have to say it ranks with the best Maigret novels. I think my favorite may still be Maigret's Revolver, but A Man's Head is superb. As usual, there is a great deal of pipe-smoking, brooding, drinking, and eating--as well as detecting. Freud, a detective in his own right, might claim that Maigret has an oral fixation. I'm part way through an Agatha Christie novel featuring Poirot, Murder in Retrospect. It's one of the later ones, and it's not bad at all. Christie, via Poirot, seems to come out in favor of modern (that is, surealistic) painting; that was a bit of a surprise.

I gave books for Christmas, too. One family member received The Jane Austen Cookbook, which, in addition to including recipes, includes information about dining practices in Austen's era and social class. Another family member received a travel-memoir about Sicily.

If you a) take part in a gift-tradition of some kind this time of year and b) like books, I hope some gift-givers came through for you. In any event, we are into the prime reading weeks of the year--deepest, darkest December. Put a soup or a stew on the stove, get a real or faux fire going, and crack open a good book. Salve for the soul.

Amusing English

As the semester comes to a close, many students, professors, and members of the staff express fatigue. One of my colleagues said she felt "overwhelmed," and then she added, "Does anyone ever just feel 'whelmed'?"

I'm reluctant to claim that English is stranger than other languages when it comes to oddities such as the one my colleague pointed out. I've studied Spanish, Swedish, German, and a smattering of Latin and French, however, and those language do seem more regular in the way they "manufacture"--and spell--words; and English is notorious for being more extraordinarily inclusive--some might claim cannibalistic--than other languages. With regard to the sheer number of words Brits, Canadians, and Americans use, for example, English is much bigger than German. If I am recalling correctly what a German teacher once told us, German has a working vocabulary of about 60,000 words, whereas that of English may be twice as large. (And now, of course, I will need to check these pseudo-factoids, after I finish the post.) When I was in Sweden, some Swedes were about as proud as Swedes ever get about the fact that their word, "ombudsperson," had been devoured by English. (In Sweden, it's unseemly to appear proud of anything; celebrities and others from the U.S. should be sent there to detoxify the ego.) Only about 8 million people have Swedish as a first language, so other languages tend not to borrow much from Swedish.

Sometimes in class when we touch on how difficult English must be to learn as a second or third language, I mention the words "enough," "bough," "through," "threw," and "thorough" and suggest how just these five words would raise enormous difficulties for a new student of English.

In any case, my colleague's comment got me to thinking about other oddities:

1. If someone can be "feckless," can someone else be "feckful"? Apparently not. "Feck," according to the OED online, shares roots with "effect" and "effective," it seems. How about "fecky" or "feckie"? (And don't you love Stephen Colbert's coinage, "truthiness"?)

2. The same goes for "ruthless" versus "ruthful." If "ruthless" is a pejorative adjective, wouldn't "ruthful" be an honorific one?

3. Is the opposite of "exhausted" "inhausted"? As if! How about just "hausted"?

4. Sometimes I am precipitous in my actions. When I am excessively cautious, should I be described as "postcipitious"? Or maybe I'd just be late in that case.

5. When I feel as if I should express thanks, I am "grateful." When I feel the opposite, I don't think of myself as "grateless." And shouldn't "grateful" really mean "full of the capacity to scrape"?

6. Most people, not just English teachers, know how useless the word "incredible" now is. When people say "that's incredible," they don't mean that the thing is not believable; they do mean that the thing is good, but "incredible" is used so frequently that it doesn't even mean that anymore. It just seems like a worn-out word. Maybe we should say "That's ultra-credible" instead. It's funny that saying "That's credible" really isn't much of a compliment. It seems to imply something like "Well, it sounds as if you're telling the truth for once."

7. I like the word "discombobulated." I always have. However, one cannot be "combublated," apparently, or even "bobulated." ("Oh, man, I got so bobulated last night!") And how did "bob" get in there? Was the word originally "discomrobertulated"?

I hope your day has been just right--combobulated in just the ways you like it to be.

Bigger Than Large, Smaller Than Tiny

I've always been quite interested in science but also terrible at doing it. In chemistry classes, the math confused me, and when I read "mole," I thought of the underground animal. I was terrible at measuring things--hence I'm one of those intuitive cooks who glances at a recipe and then estimates the measurements. (The professional chefs on TV seem to do the same thing, so I feel vindicated, even as my fare is simpler than theirs.) I didn't like doing experiments that were just exercises, either. I wanted the teacher just to tell us how much sodium was supposed to be left over after the reaction and be done with it--and tell us what the point was.

I read, but do not understand much of, such books as Einstein's Universe, Cosmos, and Hawking's book about the universe. I read Science News with fascination and buy Scientific American at the airport every so often. I like it when scientists tell me more about how things work, although they change their minds a lot. Since I first studied science--after a fashion--in grade school, the universe seems to have gotten a lot bigger, the particles seem to have gotten a lot smaller, and the artist's rendition of what an atom looks like has change completely. Every so often, I have this sneaking suspicion that scientists just make things up, like poets. I mean, how am I going to check up to see if their new drawing of the atom is accurate? I can't ask an atom.

On CNN yesterday, I saw a report about an enormous stream of gamma rays and x-rays leaking out of what they now call a "super black hole." The stream is so enormous that it can wreck a smaller galaxy if it runs into it and, of course, fry any planets in said galaxy. The astronomer said the stream could last another 100 million light years, which he said wasn't a very long time in the context of the life of the universe. CNN showed what it claimed was a picture of the stream. The thing looked like a blue river in space. For all I know, it was photo-shopped. . . .One hundred million years is a "relatively short time"?! And here I was thinking it takes a long time to pick up a package at the post office during the holiday season.

Anyway, a while back I decided to summarize, in a short poem, my sense of the universe, focusing on "units"; of course, the "units" by which scientists measure things seem to change often. I remember when atoms used to be the smallest "building blocks" of matter; it turned out, however, that atoms were made of smaller building blocks, in a manner of speaking. Here is the poem, which I envisage as an extremely short chapter in a "science" book (which makes me think of that guy on NPR who whimsically claimed to have "a Master's Degree--in Science!!"):

Units: An Introduction

by Hans Ostrom

Everything is made
of little units, which
are made of even smaller
units. The smallest units,
undetectable by us, are
reality. All units larger
than these are rearrangement,
illusion, phony structure.
They constitute a kind
of molecular cinema
watched by us and
understood by God,
who is exempt from
the unit-arrangement.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, copyright 2006 Hans Ostrom.

You Know You're Addicted to Books When....

You know you're addicted to books when . . .

1. . . . You can't find one of your favorite books, and, instead of waiting a while to see if it will turn up, you immediately consider at least three ways of procuring another copy.

2. . . . .You almost always have between two and six books on a table next to your bed--and another two-to-six books on the bed, and if anyone gets the bright idea of moving any of them, you become extremely anxious.

3. . . . You have just had dinner out with your significant other, and she or he asks what you'd like to do for fun next, and you hear yourself say, "How about if we go to a used-bookstore?"--and you don't stop yourself from uttering this suggestion, even though you know how coldly or mockingly it will be received.

4. . . . You consider cataloging your books on LibraryThing to be an excellent use of your time.

5. . . . In a garage or an attic, you exhume a book you have not seen in a long time, and you stare at it and touch it as if it were a piece of expensive jewelry.

6. . . . You reflexively memorize precisely what the spines and covers of certain books look like.

7. . . . You don't just have favorite books or authors but favorite copies of books. If a certain copy of a book were to disappear, you would become depressed, even if millions of other copies of the same book exist.

8. . . . You immediately think "a book" when someone asks you what you want for your birthday, an anniversary, or a holiday. In fact "a book" appears in your mind even before the person has finished asking the question.

9. . . . You were, at some early point in your formal schooling, told not to take so many books home with you because the person telling you this thought that you couldn't possibly find time to read all those books; and you were, of course, mystified by this apparently absurd admonishment.

10. . . . You like books apparently as much as cats like lying in the sun on a cold day, and you may come very close to purring when you pick up a favorite book.

11. . . . You wonder why there isn't a National Book Day in every nation, a Day that is as solemnly observed as any holiday in each respective culture.

12. . . . You hear the commandment, "Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's goods," and you agree with it, except that you make an exception for books.

13. . . . You go to a party at an apartment or a house, and instead of talking with people, you stare at the bookshelf and hope no one interrupts you with an "entertaining" story.

14. . . . You knew that something like Kindle was coming, and you generally appreciate electronic technology, but you still suspect that Kindle is the spawn of the Devil.

15. . . . You consider "biblioholism" to be a blessing, not a curse, and if someone forced you to attend a support group, you would read a book instead of listening to people share stories of their "affliction."

Desultory Musings Concerning Kindling and Kindle, Reading and Grieving

When will the total ban on burning wood in fireplaces occur? Sooner rather than later, one suspects, especially with the news that the oceans are becoming much more acidic because of CO-2 introduced by humans. When will "the fireplace" finally seem as distant and quaint as jousting? What percentage of fireplaces are already "gas-inserts," which apparently burn much more cleanly than wood-burning hearths?

. . .Culture tends to consume itself: the automobile burns up the horse-and-buggy, and something else will burn up the automobile, which is already undergoing significant mutations. If culture is a fire, red coals of old products ignite newly obsolete products; the "family" sitting around the hearth is composed of economics (capital), science, governments, and . . . taste? Fashion? Expedience?

How to chop kindling is becoming or has already become a bit of consumed, arcane cultural knowledge, I suspect. Should you need to chop kindling, my advice is never to use a hatchet or even an ax. If you use either, you're likely to lose a finger or gash your leg. Use a splitting mall, which has a heavy "head" like a sledge-hammer and a relatively dull blade on the other side. Let the heavy head do the work; that is, just use the handle to lift the head a bit above your head, but there's really no need to drive the thing down, nor even to lift it directly over your head. Just let the wedge-shaped heavy iron head fall; it will work for you. Presumably you'll be chopping dry, soft wood--pin, fir, cedar: such make the best kindling. You'll be chopping in the direction of the grain, and the wood will "want" to split, as long as you don't try to split a knot in the wood or, literally, go against the grain. I think in the South they refer to such soft wood as "sapwood" because it's full of pitch. It's also less dense than hardwood, so the combination of pitch and soft fiber makes for a highly combustible wood--or kindling.

I used to chop heaps of kindling in the summer, loading up cardboard boxes for winter. In cold country, you want all your wood and kindling ready and under shelter well before Fall arrives. To be out in winter cutting wood is bad form and hard work. There is a kind of art to chopping relatively thin sticks of kindling, and it's fairly pleasant, rhythmic work. But with bans on wood-burning, such chopping is, as I noted, becoming arcane work.

My father chopped kindling to get his mind off worries. After his younger brother died of cancer, my father phoned me and said, "I go out and chop kindling, and even that won't take my mind off it [the death, the grieving]." In my father's universe, work was supposed to solve everything. A couple years later, my father suffered from congestive heart failure and died. After that, I often went into the garden to work and to try to get my mind off his death and my grieving. . . .

. . . . .And now a product called Kindle has arrived--a reading-machine onto or into which one downloads books. It comes from amazon.com, and I assume the head honcho (Bezos?) did enough research to know that the machine will indeed catch on, so I also assume that the long-predicted demise of the book-as-paper has officially begun. I was about to write that the clock is ticking, but digital clocks don't tick, and one's phone tends to be one's clock. (Culture consumes itself.)

In Winter sometimes, I and other members of my family would occasionally sit in front of the fireplace and read books. Such basic human activity: using wood for heat; using wood for pulp, which becomes paper, which becomes books; sitting in wooden chairs in front of a wood-burning fire reading paper-books.

In the Newsweek article (paper-form, not online) I read about Kindle, the writer noted that "Kindle" allegedly refers to the ignition of ideas in the mind--an ignition triggered by reading. I harbored a more sinister interpretation. I think Kindle refers to the cultural, technological fire that will burn up paper books. It had to happen sometime, this fire, but we paper-book enthusiasts need not like it. Luddites, by the way, didn't so much hate technology as they did enjoy having a job. I don't hate the technology of Kindle, which I think will be grand for scholarship, but I still do love books as artifacts. I think I'm what's known as "torn.". . .

. . . .Poets traditionally--perhaps "customarily" is a better word-- have been amongst the most enthusiastic book-lovers, partly because they often printed their own books or were at least more closely involved in the process than other writers might be. William Blake is a shining example; he printed and illuminated his own books. William Everson (Brother Antoninus) was both an accomplished poet and a professional printer. Poets have often joined with other poets to form small publishing "houses"--meaning they bought an old used letter-press and produced chapbooks. City Lights Books in S.F. is a good example. I wonder to what extent old fashioned paper chapbooks will survive the arrival of Kindle and its cousins. . . .

. . . .I've just recently begun to catalog my books on LibraryThing, where old-fashioned book-lovers, compulsive readers, and book-collectors collide, as it were, with digital technology. So it's been a contradictory month for me, technologically. I think Kindle is "the real deal"-- the machine that will accelerate the demise of the paper-book, even as publishing has already been undergoing massive changes. I've been entranced by this digital beast, LibraryThing, which is built for lovers of paper books. I've been sent off on meditations about kindling and fires and such basic "technology" as the hearth and the iron splitting-mall attached to a polished hardwood handle. And now I'm writing an old-fashioned, desultory, meandering essay, a la Montaigne--except it's digital--about books and the death (or radical transformation) of books, about fire and wood, printing and paper, blogging and cataloging, reading and grieving, working and musing.

Net Worth?

So, if things continue to move apace (what a wonderfully vague contingency), we'll move into a condominium in March or April. Separately, we lived in dorm-rooms, rooms, and apartments of various kinds before we met, then we lived briefly in an apartment, but otherwise we've only lived in houses--aside from relatively brief stints in NYC and Sweden. This condominium-thing, then, will be new to us. "It" is in a refurbished old (by West Coast North American standards) building, built like a battleship, if battleships were built of brick and concrete. The floors are composed of concrete, ten inches thick, for example. The interior walls are concrete, too. The builders also recycled lava-rock taken from ships, in which the rock was apparently used as ballast; some of the lava-rock is situated between layers of concrete, for insulation. I like Old School improvisations like that. (Assuming the ballast-story is true, I wonder if the ships in question came from Hawaii.)

Condominium is a good gray Latin word, and when it got absorbed into English, it meant something like "joint ownership" or "joint sovereignty," according to the OED online, anyway:

a1714 BURNET Own Time (1823) IV. VI. 412 The duke of Holstein began to build some new forts..this, the Danes said, was contrary..to the condominium, which that king and the duke have in that duchy.

1882 Sat. Rev. 16 Sept. 361 The establishment of a new condominium with all Europe.

So, in the example from around 1714, the king and the duke have joint control--or condominium--over that "duchy." Co-dominion might be an improvised cognate, yes?

Not until around 1962--and in North America, probably the U.S. first--did "condominium" get used to refer to joint ownership of a building combined with individual ownership of spaces therein. One example from the OED online is taken from the Economist, a British magazine, which was reporting on this new concept (and a new denotation of an old word) from the U.S. However, I don't know how new the concept was, really, as I assume apartments had been "owned" in various countries around the globe for a long time before 1962. But, apparently, the word "condominium," applied to the concept, was new in '62.

Of course, unless one has the capacity to pay "cash on the barrel-head," as my father used to say, one must secure a loan, and to do that, one has to (or two have to) estimate "net worth." When I think of this concept, I sometimes think literally of a net. "What is your net worth?" "Not very much, but I have caught some fish with it, if that interests you." At other times, I imagine a scene in which someone arrives in Heaven and, wanting to impress an angel, scribbles something on a piece of paper and says, "This was my net worth on Earth!" Thunderous laughter then rocks the Afterlife.

--A poem, then, not about a condominium, but about wealth and worth. I don't remember which came first, the experiment with blank tetrameter verse or the topic; a confluence of the two might have occurred. Anyway, . . . :

Wealth and Worth

He is a nervous, wealthy man.
He fidgets, squirms, and giggles; counts,
Divides, and multiplies. He rubs
His face. And when he comes into
A room, he seems determined to
Invest himself in it and get
Its interest in him as return.
He wants and gets. He plans and plots,
Accrues. He is confused because
The more he gets, the more he gets,
And yet and still and nonetheless
He seems to him to be just he,
A discontented “I,” a sphere
Of fear and calculation and
A worry-furnace. He’s a rich,
A nervous, wanting, getting man,
So oddly sad, despite his wealth,
Because despite net-worth, he can’t
Account for feeling worthless.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Photo of Bear

Somehow this bear got stuck under/in a highway-bridge near Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada. He or she may have been on his/her way to Reno or Lake Tahoe to gamble. He or she seems to be pondering the situation. The species is Black Bear, but the individuals often have brown fur.