Dr. Metablog

Signs of Spring

 

 

Pictured is a variety of daylily called the Charles Johnston. Looks good, doesn't it?  First introduced by Gates in 1981, it won an award of merit 1988 from the American daylily society. I ordered a couple from a nursery in Tennessee because they are VE (very early), tetraploid, fragrant, and reputed to be accomplished re-bloomers (although daylillies that rebloom in the upper south don't always do so in Vermont). It's the VE part that interests me because I don't have any early reds. "Rich burgundy blooms."  Sounds delicious. I think I'll put them in the vegetable garden temporarily, where the soil is, as LERM says, "like chocolate cake" and plant them out in the perfect place, yet to be determined. Somewhere where the large VE blooms can make a statement.

I wonder how my gardens survived my Covid 2020 absence. We'll find out in three weeks.

The Brown Corpus

Interviewing ten candidate a day for a couple of days can make a guy a little crazy. On the one hand, you owe each candidate your thoughtful attention, because careers are at stake. But conducting interviews is a tedious process and everyone who has ever done it knows that faces and voices and attitudes tend to blur into an indistinguishable lumpy mass. So much earnestness! So much contrived presentation of self!  

I remember one such endless day in a featureless room in a high floor of a pretentious modern hotel in Chicago, or Atlanta, or perhaps Houston. We were making an appointment to our budding "Writing Program" -- an academic innovation that I now believe to have been a total disaster. Writing Programs hired "writing specialists" -- experimentalist social scientists who believe in "theory" and who generally can't themselves write a lick. Or half a lick.

I remember one candidate with whom I had this remarkable exchange: 

Me:  "Could you remind me about the subject of your dissertation."

He:  "I worked with the Brown Corpus."

Me (astonished): "What the heck is the Brown Corpus."

He:  "It's a computer file of one million edited words drawn from magazines and newspapers. It was compiled at Brown University. The idea is to study the English language as it actually written."

(I interrupt this conversation to say that "Brown Corpus" may be the most injudiciously-named academic enterprise in history. To me, "brown corpus" might have something to do with decayed corpuscles, or a fecal mass, or someone or something a-mouldering in its grave. Not a phrase with much poetry to it. But let us proceed.)

Me: "That seems interesting. What exactly did you study in this corpus."

He: "I studied the use of the comma."

Me: "The comma. You studied the comma." (More astonishment). "What in the world did you learn about the comma?

He:  "I learned that the comma is used to link a sequence of nouns, or phrases, in a series."

I was already giddy and aghast when I heard this news and I had a sudden revelation, a flash. I saw myself picking up the candidate and throwing him through the plate glass window and watching as he plummeted painfully to the street below. But I controlled myself and thanked the candidate and, I believe, ended the interview politely. I didn't even indulge myself with something snarky, like, "do you intend to do any follow-up work on a more challenging mark of punctuation, as for example the exclamation point?"

Dumb Luck

I can remember five near misses -- five times when through inattentive or incompetent driving I put my own and others' lives at risk. I give thanks that I avoided killing or mangling myself or the innocent victims of my failings. What wondrous life is this I lead -- how fortunate I have been!

The first: it was 1963. I was an inexperienced, overconfident driver, traveling westward, somewhere in southern Illinois. My first cross-country trip. A two-lane highway, a downpour, very wet pavement. I saw, or thought i saw, an oncoming car in my lane. There would have been plenty of time for him to pass and dive back, but I panicked and braked hard. My vehicle, an old Rambler, not a great handler in the best of times, swerved into the oncoming lane, then spun out of control and landed backward in a ditch on the right side of the road. We sat there, stunned, relieved, because I had been in the left oncoming lane long enough to have killed ourselves self and others. (Within a minute, a man pulled up in a truck, attached a chain to our car and winched us out. I'm perpetually grateful to this Samaritan.)

A second instance: an icy winter day in Boulder, early 1970s. Driving the old yellow Saab with my sister Phyllis (legally, sister-in-law) in the "death seat" east on Arapahoe, I hit a slick of black ice and made a bad situation worse by applying the brakes. The car spun out of control and eventually halted facing backwards in the oncoming lane. Once again, no one injured or even inconvenienced.

Another: driving across the USA alone in the clunky blue Camry, doing 80 in a 55 zone, I didn't quite fall asleep at the wheel but certainly lost focus, and didn't see a car stopped in the parking lane until I was just adjacent to it. If I had been a bit to the right or if there had been someone fixing a tire, I would have crippled myself and murdered an innocent. Here's another one, probably the most idiotic. Driving alone through Chicago in heavy traffic, on one of those horrible highways where there are eight lanes east and another eight west, I found myself in the third lane from the right and needed to exit right. Instead of playing it safe, and continuing on, I impulsively dove across two lanes and made it to the exit. Angry horns to the right of me, horns to the left of me. Why did I take such a risk? I don't know but I thank the drivers around me for being alert. What arrogance, what stupidity! The most recent event, and most inexcusable, happened just a few years ago. I was returning home from a very disturbing visit to the "memory care" facility. Somehow, in my grief, I ignored a prominent red light and sailed right through a busy intersection -- a gross violation of sense and law. But there was no crash and no police and I proceeded blithely on my way -- only, after a few moments, realizing with shock and horror that I had put my own life and that of others at completely unnecessary danger.

When people two hundred years from now look back on our "civilization" -- assuming that there will be people on this planet two hundred years from now, which is not a certainty -- they will wonder how was it possible that those people in our century were able to survive. Dashing 70 or 80 miles an hour in a tin can just six feet from a line of onrushing tin cans? Weaving among giant tandem trucks and buses and cement mixers -- and expecting to survive. What sort of brave or foolhardy individuals were these strange, death-defying people?

For myself, I'm astonished at the dumb luck that's allowed me to preserve my life and mobility to this advanced age. So far, that is. It's not over until it's over.  

Linen, Silk, etc.

I've been reading about the origin of spinning and weaving -- specifically E. J. W. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton, 1991), a comprehensive and exhausting survey of everything that was known about the subject thirty years ago. I'm dazzled -- in part by the author, who turns the story into an adventure, but even more so by our brilliant neolithic ancestors. Some among our forbears, starting perhaps 30,000 years ago, looked at this plant, common flax, 

and figured out how to turn it into linen -- a complicated, many step process. How did they even begin to imagine such a transformation? Did they examine the plant and say, hey that looks like it will make a nice shirt or a pair of pants? To arrive at such a concept seems like an act of almost preternatural intelligence. After all, there was no template or model. It's not as though there were other fabrics made from other plants fibers. Flax into linen was a first. There were predecessors. Clothes, I imagine, in the form of animal skins or furs, must have been in use. I've read that reeds and other plant materials had been plaited into baskets and nets. But flax into linen was not at all obvious. We can be proud of our ancestors.

Here's a picture of the oldest recovered linen garment: the so-called Tarkhan Dress, which was found in a cemetery near Cairo in 1913 and radiocarbon-dated to between 3482 and 3102 BCE, or 5 and a half millennia ago. It's quite stylish and isn't in much worse shape than some of the favored garments in my own personal wardrobe.

My Life in Coffee

Although both my parents were dependent on their morning coffee

percolated out of a can like this one, I myself never touched the stuff until my first year at college. In the 1950s, coffee was 10 cents a cup and I drank gallons of it, morning, noon and night. It became essential to my well-being. Black, no sugar or milk, but in truth, not black but barely brown, weak by present standards. In the early 60s my hipper than I -- not much of a leap --  friend SDS introduced me to the coffee shop. Figaro in Greenwich Village, mighty sophisticated for a boy from Flatbush. I became addicted to coffee shops as well as coffee itself for many a year. I couldn't handle any routine paperwork, or indeed grade a tedious set of papers without infusions of caffeine. With the Starbuck's revolution, coffee became tastier and more luxurious. But, conservative as I was, I never succumbed to fancy drinks but kept to what had come to be known simply and condescendingly as "Americano."  

During these thirty-five or so years of pleasant coffee dependence, atrial fibrillation became an annoying feature of my life. Frequent bouts, longer and longer. Debilitating, possibly dangerous -- there's a strong association of fibrillation with strokes. Finally, a doctor suggested that I might consider giving up caffeine. So I stopped on a dime. It took six weeks to get the caffeine out of my blood and put an end to the longing for coffee -- but the atrial fibrillation came to a total halt. Ceased. Not a single episode these last two and a half decades. Astonishing. I had been poisoning myself -- or at least, compromising my well being.

Do I miss coffee? Yes, I'm afraid so, every morning. I still love the odor (which was always better than the taste). More than that, I miss the society of coffee cup and conversation. In those days, I loved to sit with a book in a nook, warming my palm with a bottomless cup. Once, only once, about two years ago, I did venture to order a medium Americano -- but I couldn't stomach more than a couple of sips. Coffee's an acquired taste, and one that I had I de-acquired. 

Tea? I haven't found one that is more than barely tolerable. Hot chocolate? Feels juvenile. Acceptable for breakfast but not for Peet's or Ozo or Starbuck's or the Trident.   

On the other hand, a heart that keeps to a regular rhythm and doesn't go creatively syncopated several times a week is also a pleasure.

Beffa -- April 1, 2021

Regular readers of this metablague know that Dr. M. has resumed his study of Italian. Foolish say some, but heroic say others, because to try to master a language when one is an octogenarian is truly daunting. However, native speakers of English, even older ones, can, if patient, slowly acquire Italian. Its sounds are similar and sometimes identical to those of English; the conjugations, only three of them, are on the whole regular; and many of its words have English or Latin cognates. For me, pronouns present a problem, because they're sometimes required when I wouldn't think to use them, and sometimes dropped when I'd prefer them to be there -- and, moreover, they come in slightly varied direct, indirect, and reflexive forms. And then there are the pronomi combinati or double pronouns which are confusing in themselves and which are sometimes but not always attached to infinitives, gerunds and imperatives as enclitics. It's probably too late in the game for me to become a fluent speaker, but I have hopes of becoming a competent reader. I can now read at about the 6th or 7th grade level; I have the grammar under control so it's mostly a problem of vocabulary and idiom.

For a greater challenge, I've begun to study a little Beffa. Beffa is a Kartvelian language with admixtures of Cascagian and Ghetti. Fortunately for me, there's a small Beffan community here in our town. I work with an introductory textbook -- Pathways to Modern Beffa (2012) by Divino Divano -- and with a native speaker named Ismail Kartakov. We meet three times a week when he's available. Sometimes I enjoy a Beffa-speaking dinner with Ismail and his wife Soraya and their three young children. I've also been to some Beffan parties and exuberant dances. I sometimes feel odd-man-out but it's been fun. The Beffan community, reputedly hostile to outsiders, has been very welcoming. And the goat, mountain oyster, and black radish stew is superb.

Beffa is a bit more complicated than English. For example, while English has 26 consonants, Beffa has 56, including a two kinds of glottal stops that sound almost like clicks as well as a voiced glottal fricative that resembles a cat's purr. It also has both a voiced and unvoiced bilabial trill that sound a lot like an English "raspberry," and an unusual, possibly unique lingual-dental stop in which the tongue is pushed firmly against not the upper but the lower teeth. One peculiarity of Beffa is its consonant clusters -- a word may begin with as many as six consonants yoked together before the first vowel appears. Some words have an initial six consonants followed by a vowel and then a cluster of five or six more consonants. This can be strange to English speakers and sometimes I notice Ismail's younger children giggling at my feeble attempts to replicate their plosives. (Voiceless plosives are usually aspirated and one must take care not to insert a schwa between aspirants.) Beffa also has a varied repertoire of vowels, including a number of diphthongs and a couple of triphthongs. There aren't any tones, thank goodness. There's one triphthong the use of which can be perilous, for if you get it wrong the observation "your blue parrot is pining for the fjords" apparently sounds almost exactly like "my knife is longer and sharper than yours."

Nouns have both natural and grammatical gender. Nouns can be masculine, feminine, neuter, ambiguous, common, animate or inanimate. They can be singular, dual, plural, or paucative (i.e. a few). Neuter nouns rarely have duals. Beffa has six fully formed declensions, distinguished primarily by the fact that plurals in declensions 1 and 3 are formed with a prefix, in 2 and 4 by a suffix, and in 5 and 6 by an infix. There are also some fifteen cases, all useful but some slightly unusual. There are the familiar nominative, possessive, accusative and dative (or indirect object). There are also a series of cases that describe motion: the locative ("the ball that is lying on the ground"), the ablative (("the ball that is coming in your direction"); the separative ("the ball that is moving away from you"); the commitative ("the ball that is touching your hand"); the partitive ("the ball that has left your hand"); the terminative ("the ball that has stopped moving"); the superessive ("the ball that is on top of another ball"); the penetrative ("the ball that is inside another ball"); the perditive ("the ball that is lost"); the oscillative ("the ball that is going back and forth"); the thumpative ("the ball that is bouncing"); the plungitive "the ball that has fallen into the water"); the remunerative ("the ball that has been bought or sold"); the joculatorative ("the ball that does not fall to the ground"); the alfactorative ("the ball that stinks like a corpse"); the perplexive ("the ball that has disappeared"); and the insouciative ("the ball that has disappeared and no one cares"). Nouns can be either proximate or obviative; nouns that are central to the discourse (proximate) are declined very differently than nouns that are of marginal importance (obviative). There is also an unusual suffix (at least, unusual to me, for I had never encountered it before) that indicates whether the object specified touches the earth or is removed from the earth. And an infix which indicates whether the object is horizontal, vertical, diagonal, spiral, or invisible.  

Verbs can be singular dual, plural, paucative, or undetermined: active, passive or middle. There are five fully-formed conjugations and apparently remnants of three others that are retained from the past when the language was more fully synthetic. The most commonly used tenses are present indicative, imperfect indicative, past imperfect indicative, future indicative, future imperfect indicative, future perfect indicative, pluperfect indicative, past pluperfect indicative, future pluperfect indicative, future stative, pluperfect resultative, present optative, future optative, past imperfect optative, present subjunctive, future subjunctive, past pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect subjunctive, future pluperfect conditional subjunctive, and future pluperfect optative conditional subjunctive aorist. Curiously, there is no future imperfect subjunctive. Moreover, there are two kinds of vocatives: one when a woman addresses a man; a second when a man addresses a woman or an animal. There is also votive, a tense that was formerly used for addressing the deities in prayer, but is now reserved for tribal chiefs, heads of state or royalty. The votive is very similar to the conditional and the erroneous substitution of a conditional for a votive was formerly grounds for mutilation but nowadays leads only to acute embarrassment, or, in the case of a particularly egregious grammatical lapse, to exile.  

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

.

Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.

Some verbs are ergative so that the subject of either a transitive or intransitive verb can be in an absolutive case. Some common ergative verbs are "to become," "to eat,", and "to gouge" (as in, "to gouge out the eyes of an enemy").

Beffan script is known as "dabbenaggine." This passage comments on the familiar Beffan proverb, "If you steal my horse, I will steal your wife."

.

Beffa used to be written boustrophedonically, but since the reforms of 1912 has been written right to left. For some reason which I cannot possibly imagine, dabbenaggine leaves no spaces between words but runs them all together without breaks, which makes it just slightly harder to master.    

Pronouns and determiners are difficult and complicated and perhaps I'll describe them sometime in the future when I'm more familiar with their multiple and various forms.