March 30, 2016 On Language Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason By Ryan Bradley The linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words. A uniform for the Spokane Indians in Salish. The first time Sarah “Sally” Thomason and I spoke, she’d just completed her annual two-day, eighteen-hundred-mile drive from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she teaches, to rural northwestern Montana, where she spends her summers studying Montana Salish. For thirty-four years, Thomason has been assembling a dictionary of this Native American language, which is spoken fluently by fewer than forty people. Thomason, a linguist, is fascinated by what happens when one language meets another, and how those languages change, or don’t. I had contacted her because I was interested in how certain words—say, e-mail, or google, or tweet—had been exported worldwide by American-born technology. I’d already called several linguists, and they all said I had to speak to Sally. No one, they said, had more insight into how linguistic traits travel, how pidgins and creoles are born, and how languages interact and change over time. The French government tried very hard to resist American loanwords like e-mail, promoting in its place messagerie électronique or courriel. They’d formed a whole agency for this purpose. Laws were passed and enforced. And yet e-mail prevailed—it was simply more efficient. But Sally was especially excited about languages that resist such borrowing, even in the face of extraordinary cultural influence and dominance. Montana Salish was one such language. Our conversations followed a pattern: I arrived expecting one thing and ended up somewhere entirely distinct, thinking differently about language and human culture. Is it fair to say that you study what happens when languages meet? Is meet too friendly a word? I suppose there’s a whole range of things that happen, and sometimes it’s friendly and sometimes it’s not. Right, but having a language disappear because all the speakers got massacred is actually really rare. There are a couple of examples where all the speakers of some language got wiped out by a volcanic eruption on an island. And there are a couple of examples, at least one in this country, where almost everybody was wiped out by smallpox and then the remainder was lynched by a mob. What languages are those? Read More
March 30, 2016 On the Shelf Who Is the Black Flâneur? and Other News By Dan Piepenbring William Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2001–2009. Photo: William Pope.L, Pruznick/Grey. All hail Zardulu! She appears in ceremonial robes around Gotham, begging mortals to serve as “tools” in her “grand architectural designs.” And these designs … they may seem, from the outside, like they’re just viral videos. But they’re a new body of myths. Andy Newman reports: “The artist calls herself Zardulu. Her medium is the elaborately staged viral video. As to her own identity, Zardulu will say only that she was born in Manhattan in 1971 … She has been revealed as the force behind the Selfie Rat, who achieved world fame for appearing to take a self-portrait with a passed-out man’s phone on a subway platform. She has been suspected as the creator of the even more famous Pizza Rat, caught dragging a slice down subway stairs in September, though another man claims credit for that video … She does, however, have plenty to say in a more general way about the enduring power of mystery. Like: ‘I think creation and perpetuation of modern myths is a tragically underappreciated art form. It upsets me when I hear people refer to them as lies.’ ” Let’s face it, the flâneur is a white guy. He strolls, he gazes, he observes—he takes these luxuries as his due. What would black flânerie look like? Doreen St. Félix starts with the artist William Pope.L, who “prostrated himself on New York City’s Broadway Avenue for nine years, intermittently. He called the performances ‘crawls.’ Dressed in a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back, the tall, thin, statistically average-looking black American man would crawl on the sidewalk as long as weather and upper body strength allowed, which never exceeded six blocks. Known as The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009), Pope.L’s drama featuring varyingly proscribed cosmopolitan movements—those of the disabled, of the homeless, of commuting black Americans—attracted dramatics from his unwitting public as well. A cameraman documented most of the odd sojourn and the reactions, which ranged in horror, boredom, disgust, delight, and confusion. One passing black pedestrian stopped, so incensed by Pope.L’s state that he nearly kicked the artist in the face.” The grammar handbook is a hard sell. How to get people to care about the serial comma? How to reinvigorate the art of the nonrestrictive which? Frank L. Cioffi’s book goes all Solzhenitsyn on the problem; it’s called One Day in the Life of the English Language, and it shows us the horrors of the labor camp called usage: “It illustrates points about grammar and punctuation using examples drawn from newspapers and magazines all published—online or in print—on December 29, 2008 (hence talk of the financial crisis, the election of Barack Obama, strife between Israel and Palestine). And its author, Frank L. Cioffi, who teaches writing at Baruch College in New York City, is humble. His aim is not so much to enforce rules as to provoke debate. He wants you to look beyond the meaning of the sentence to the choices made by the writer and the editor.” Today in libraries and the delicate art of assertion: “The San Jose Public Library wants its books back. And its CDs and DVDs. Taken altogether, library patrons are holding onto or have damaged 97,000 items and owe the city $6.8 million in fines and fees. The situation is so out of control that about 40 percent of the city’s library cardholders can no longer borrow anything until they return their library holdings and pay what they owe. For a library, this is a DEFCON moment. Maybe not DEFCON 1, but at least DEFCON 3 … Over the years, libraries have fined patrons for not bringing back books and offered no-questions-asked return periods. They’ve published the names of book scofflaws in local newspapers. They’ve paid personal calls on people who hold onto books past their due dates, and even sicced the police on particularly recalcitrant readers. And they still don’t really know how to get their books back.” Remember King Philip’s War? Not firsthand—it happened in the seventeenth century. But it’s a grisly and oft-forgotten chapter in American colonial history: “In terms of percentages, King Philip’s War is the most violent in our national history, and ignoring the per capita numbers, it was in its ferocity and almost gothic horror perhaps the most genuinely violent event in the whole American narrative … We have never really recovered from the trauma … King Phillips War has more than a whiff of the allegorical about it, it is a typological example of a recurring event in American history, a chapter in the dubious sacred scripture of our civil religion, and we witness its continuing battles every day.”
March 29, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Object Lesson By Sadie Stein Andreas Stolz. I was in a cab with a radar detector. “Red light camera ahead,” droned the automated voice from the front seat. “Doesn’t the city mind those?” I said. “It’s great, but doesn’t the city lose a lot of revenue? Because they point out speed traps, too, right?” “Yes, is very good,” said the driver. “But on the other hand, I guess it does prevent speeding—which should be the real point anyway, right? Maybe that’s a better way to think about it.” He smiled and made a polite but noncommittal noise. Read More
March 29, 2016 In Memoriam Jim Harrison, 1937–2016 By Terry McDonell Photo: Wyatt McSpadden. The arts are our wild edge, the wilderness areas of the imagination …—Claude Lévi-Strauss Jim Harrison gained international renown as a storyteller of literary genius, but through all the novels and novellas and films that made him a celebrity, he remained a poet. His first book of poems, 1965’s Plain Song, came out a half century and a year ago. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his poetry in 1969—before he began writing anything else. That “anything else” turned into twenty-one volumes of fiction, two books of essays, a memoir, and a children’s book; and there were fourteen books of poetry, too. During some weeks and months of his life, he wrote poetry every day. Read More
March 29, 2016 The Revel “How Difficult” By Aidan Koch Our Spring Revel is April 5. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of posts celebrating Lydia Davis, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Award. Here, the artist Aidan Koch has adapted into comics Davis’s story “How Difficult,” which was originally published in the collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001). Aidan Koch is a multimedia artist working in New York City. She has published several graphic novels, including The Blonde Woman, which won a Xeric Award, and Impressions. Her short comic story “Heavenly Seas” was featured in The Paris Review’s Summer 2015 issue. Her drawings are on view in the group show “Someday This Will Be Funny,’’ at Company in New York, through April 3.
March 29, 2016 On the Shelf Pacing the Roman Countryside, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Francis Towne, The Baths of Caracalla, 1781. Image via the British Museum/The New York Review of Books. New York’s alright if you like saxophones, but it’s no place for existentialists: “When a boat carrying Albert Camus sailed into New York Harbor in March 1946, he was hailed as a moral emissary from war-ravaged Europe and the glamorous embodiment of a newfangled philosophy known as Existentialism … But a year later, Camus recalled his three months amid the city’s ‘swarming lights’ and frantic streets with a mixture of awe and bafflement. ‘I have my ideas about other cities but about New York only these powerful and fleeting emotions,’ he wrote in 1947. ‘I still know nothing about New York, whether one moves among madmen here or among the most reasonable people in the world.’ ” If you think there’s no possible way for a painter to take a unique approach to the Roman ruins—because who hasn’t painted them?—look at the work of Francis Towne, whose color washes the city in eerie light: “Towne was forty-one, no stripling, when he arrived in Italy in October 1780. Born a Londoner, he had begun his career as a coach-painter, moving in his twenties to Exeter. There, he became a respected drawing master and painter of West Country landscapes, of scenes of the lakes and of North Wales. His work was admired, yet the London art establishment dismissed him as a provincial drawing teacher—while he, on the other hand, was equally disdainful in return, adopting the habit of his Exeter patrons of praising rural retirement and virtue in contrast to the vanities of city life … Towne’s paintings suggest a wariness about approaching the great city. He began with views from without, pacing the countryside … Towne preferred the back of things, the uncommon view, high walls, old Roman gates, suggesting a life beyond. He ignored modern Rome; he gives no hint of grand Papal processions, of high-life, of the color and glamor that wowed the young men on their Grand Tours.” A casual reminder that spending time with Salvador Dalí was statistically all but guaranteed to yield a great story: “Dalí broke his silence. ‘My fisherman-Christ,’ he announced with a toss of the head. Before I had time to register surprise he added in a loud voice, ‘Now it is time to swim.’ Without a glance in my direction he made his way very precisely across the rocks and into the water. I decided that since I was the required audience the only course of action was to strip down to my underpants and follow him into the sea. Dalí began to utter, as though he was in a trance. As he did so he gave me my own surrealist moment, as his head appeared to be floating disembodied on the water, his eyes huge and staring past me towards the open sea, with the moustachios raised a little above the surface like twin periscopes … He launched into a declaration: ‘Every morning upon waking I experience the supreme pleasure of being Salvador Dalí, and I ask myself what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dalí?’ ” Then again, meeting Hilary Clinton can make for a great story, too, if you’re Terry Castle: “I haven’t rehearsed any jokey badinage to cast in HRC’s direction on being introduced; nor even tried out possible facial expressions in the mirror. The moment has arrived and I simply don’t know what to do. Thus it unfolds that even as Her (Mostly) Incorruptible Majesty reaches appreciatively for my hand, I am mortified to hear myself squeak out—like a dying baby bat mewling helplessly for its mother: ‘SORRYMYHANDISSOCOLD.’ Just that—all in a rush, all in a preternaturally silly little voice … Hillary Clinton—two-term First Lady, former New York Senator, US Secretary of State, legendary Iron Woman and all-around Smiling yet Fearless Maker of Executive Decisions on which our Great Country’s Future Depends—takes my frozen mitt in her own, enfolds it Don Giovanni–style, and now regards me with a rakish and appraising eye: ‘Well, Terry [she says]: We’ll Just Have to Do Something (heh heh) to Warm It Up. Won’t We? (Heh heh heh)’ Love-impaled Sappho, help me in my discombobulation! Did you hear that? HILLARY CLINTON IS FLIRTING WITH ME! She’s got my hand and she is warming it up! Bejeezus! (It’s getting positively toasty!) Not only that—my god! She’s giving me the Look! (What look?) The Look You Can’t Mistake! The Nanosecond Too Long Look! The Look you get when someone shows you her trowel for the first time! The Look you get when contemplating the Mysteries of Rosicrucianism!” Last week I reported in this space, perhaps with a bit of alarmism, that artificial intelligences are now writing award-winning novels and that the entire human storytelling tradition is doomed. I may have been wrong. “As Japanese publication Asahi Shimbum explains, the research team first wrote a novel of their own and then broke it down into its component parts. Only then did the A.I. involve itself, arranging the parts it had been given to create ‘another story similar to the sample novel,’ building it from words, phrases, characters, and plot outlines that had been fed to it. The Los Angeles Times claims that this means that the computers ‘did the hard work,’ which is true only if you consider plagiarism ‘hard’ … Literary algorithms almost always seem to work best when they’re producing the kind of texts such as contemporary poems in which we expect to find confusing elements.”