SCOTUS Rules

       I should have known, guessed, recognized (but didn't) yesterday when I saw-heard the word SCOTUS.  It's like POTUS, which I learned from The Veep is short for President of the United States.

       Since Antony Scalia employed it, I might have figured (but didn't) that it meant Supreme Court of the United States.  In an enormous dig at the majority yesterday, Scalia "suggested" that along with the previous vote by the Court that favored the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), the Court's favorable vote for it yesterday meant that the ACA might as well be called "SCOTUScare."

       As I say, I didn't catch it first time around, but then seeing it later as just printed, I realized the devilish Scalia might have intended not only to demean the ACA and the majority as out-of-line and unjust but to set forth that they were both very "scary."

       (Now I know that FLOTUS stands for "First Lady of the United States."  New to me also.)

       Merriam-Webster says SCOTUS was the first of these acronyms to be used, serving as an abbreviation in telegrams in the late 1800s; thence to be followed by other such fortunate(?) shortenings. 

        

       Three times accosted by women in the grocery store parking lot wheeling my grocery cart to the  car for transport home, twice today by two different women and once the other day.  Two wanted help for sad personal situations; the other hadn't "yet" asked for money before I turned her down before she asked.

       Whether they truly needed help or were simply panhandlers, I'm not sure.  Since two of the women (was one the same one as the other day?) offered to pay me back, just to give them my address, I suppose further effort to get more money from me was possible that way.  Two of the three offered to meet me for lunch or coffee--apart from payback, it sounded like--and one of them seemed to know I was married.  One of them I didn't answer; the other I said, "I can't do that."

       Was I manhandled, panhandled, womanhandled?  All three?  

I'm "Raisin'" My Hand in Protest

       A Supreme Court  ruling yesterday, something about it being wrong that a Raisin Administrative Committee produce a "raisin" price of raisins by withholding some raisins from market.

       You know these language things tease and drive me a little crazy at the same time.  This front page raisin story made me recall the Minnesota "All Agency Moose Advisory Committee" in my home state; I couldn't help seeing a roomful of moose sitting around deciding what advice to mete out.

       Now we have a tableful of raisins sitting around administering their own fate.

 

A Cheer that Rings through the yEars

      Sports seasons overlap and merge with one another; high school, college, professional sports; women's sports, men's sports, kids' sports.  In thinking how most of them have cheer leaders, and the crazy yells and songs you and I may have given voice to in our lives supporting one team or another, I recalled what our St. Paul Central High cheer leaders came up with in a frivolous mood and which they couldn't help sharing with our student body at an assembly:


               We may lose one,
               We may lose two,
               We may lose three,

               Tee-He-He


We laughed.  That little "cheer" was supposed to die right there.  But it was too catchy and cute and satiric, and we students wouldn't let a game go by without voicing a rendition or two of it.

     

      

"Summer Afternoon"

       Thank you, "Mutts," thank you Patrick McDonnell, thank you, Henry James, and thank you even finally, I believe, Edith Wharton who quoted Henry James from a conversation on a perfect afternoon they spent together, in her book A Backward Glance.

       Yesterday longest day of the year on the solstice, today only a breath shorter I'm sure.  And these long afternoons are good for naps for both Connie and me when you can wake up and find the sun and light still g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s-l-y with us.

      Summer Afternoon . . . Summer Afternoon.

How Does a Cartoonist Keep it Fresh?

       How does the cartoonist keep getting ideas that work for a long-lived comic?  This one jolts a little with freshness partly because it moves you back and forth from the main character to something he couldn't know, the title of the cartoon he's been in all these years.  Of course, the parents know, or if not, they could easily manufacture it right at this moment.  In any case it sure looks like the Mom is contemplating it, and not blushing either.  Of course, Dennis is entirely "innocent," ho ho ho.  And for us, the oh-so-familiar title, which we virtually disregard because of that, is suddenly restored attention--from within the comic itself.

       The cartoon is the thing, but words and rhyme and naming are at the heart of the matter.

(Website to reach Hank Ketcham's "Dennis the Menace" is found here.)

Words and Images Having Fun Together

       I like that the dad cartoonist who's letting his son replace him for a week with the 7 year old's own cartoons (see yesterday's post) refers to what the son is doing as "pun-in-ink" cartoons.  That captures it all the way around.

Another Cartooning Punster has Arrived

A neat annual event around Father's Day at this cartoon site, where "Family Circus" can be located.

Do You Rehearse Real-Life Conversations?

       Have you ever practiced something you were going to say to someone?  I have, often.  If I'm the least nervous, or afraid I'll say the wrong thing and blow a relationship, or fail to persuade on something I really want to happen, I'll go over it imagining the situation and trying out what I'll say.

       Caught myself doing that tonight on something pretty unimportant, but still . . .

       The car needs an oil change, plus windshield washer checked and refilled.  Then I remembered, if it's Santos who does the job, he always fills my tires with air, which is nice, but Santos always puts in maximum air, and the tight tires jolt the hell out of me over slightest bumps for the next several weeks, if not months:


       "Oh, and Santos . . ."

       "Yeah?"

       "I know when you finish, you always pump up my tires, which I appreciate, but could you hold off something short of maximum?   I really don't care if I don't get good mileage on 'em or they don't last as long as they should.  The car's old, and I'm old, and I need as smooth a ride as I can get."


       That'll do it . . . I hope.


       

Wegman's Words Go with his Photos

       When William Wegman titles the photographs of his Weimaraner dogs in his annual "Man's Best Friend" calendars, the language is part of their success.  Witness this one coming up for July:

"Washed Up"

Proper Names into Adjectives: Second of Two Parts

       Those who follow in the footsteps of or are likened to Swiss learning theorist Jean Piaget (pee-ah-ZHAY) have been called in print "Piagetian."  Now is this to be said pee-ah-ZHAY-shn or pee-ah ZHAY-tee-uhn or, perhaps to honor the original pronunciation of the name, pee-ah-ZHAY-ee-uhn?  The mouth wants to make it pee-ah-ZHAY-uhn, but the spelling won't let it.

       It is demeaning to the reputation and memory of one of the world's great conductors when his style is referred to as "Toscaninian."

       Somewhere along the way "Aristotelian" stopped sounding peculiar, and perhaps the same happy fate awaits author Bernard Malamud.  Meanwhile ""Malamudian" doesn't quite make it.  A little inventiveness is in order for these recently famous names.  In this instance, how about "Malamudic?"  That seems to me perfect, borrowed from the manner of "Platonic"with "Talmudic" overtones.

       Now I have seen "Frostean" for Robert Frost, which doesn't quite ring right, at least yet.  So one tries out "Frost-like," gets playful with "Frosted," and hurtles ahead to "Frozen."

       And what about philosopher Martin Buber?  I have heard "Buberian" on the radio, which is pretty bad.  "Buberic" would be no better.  "Bubonic?"  At this point, I rise to my Salperean heights ("Look, Ma, I'm famous!") . .  . and desist. 

       

Proper Names into Adjectives: First of Two Parts

       My pondering has been deepened on the precariousness of becoming famous.  Before one knows it, one's proud family name can be turned into an unfortunate adjective.

       Oh, we have become quite used to Shakespearean and Freudian and Einsteinian, and maybe "getting used to" is what it takes because some "proper adjectives" are not easily assimilable.  I submit the following examples.

       Saul Bellow and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have been modified into the modifiers "Bellovian" and "Longfellovian."

       Film directors have been said to work "in the Mankiewiezian style" or "the Hitchcockian tradition."

       Composer Gustav Mahler transmutes to "Mahlerian," and this sentence appears in a review:

"Conductor George Solti knows the secret of tightening the Mahlerian sprawl and tempering the Mahlerian bombast without devaluing the Mahlerian spirit."

After reading this, one feels vaguely overcome by a tropical disease.

      

      

"Interpretation"

       Two posts ago, I felt I had to write about "hermeneutics," probably gratuitously, but being caught up in words has its hazards.

       Now I need to give you an insight about the word "interpretation," which I proclaimed as being probably the best single word synonymous with "hermeneutics."

       Actually the synyonymity (a word I doubt exists) between the two words makes perfect sense even if we are moving from Greek to Latin:  "Interpretation" means "taking between" by derivation--inter "between" and pret "take," the exact thing we expect a messenger (the messenger god Hermes) to do, take a message from here to there--"between."

       Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, I discovered years back that the earliest implications of the word "interpretation" were commercial, a sense that the interpreter was one who brought goods from here to there between people, sales.

       My profession centering on "oral interpretation of literature," being the conduit between literature and audiences, which I'd always thought far afield from my father's, a men's clothing business, had more in common with his than I would ever have imagined.

      

Speech and Writing can Give Each Other the Comeuppance

       Seeing again today "Duck Tape" being sold on the shelves of a store, I recalled the similar peculiarity based in the news yesterday.

       The product generically is "duct" tape, so named for its special usefulness in sealing places where ducts join,  to prevent hot air or cold air from escaping containment.  Because "t" both ends duct and begins tape, it's easy to hear only one "t" and think the first word is "duck."  A "smart" manufacturer simply named its product "Duck" tape.

       Last night's PBS news had an interview with the prime minister of Scotland, someone I'd never heard of, Nicolas Sturgeon.  I heard she was a woman, and she clearly was when she came on screen.  I thought it peculiar that a woman was named Nicolas.

       Today's newspaper told me that she'd be interviewed on Fareed Zakaria's show, and I saw her name was Nicola, a name I'd only heard of once, and it belonged to a man.  I'd made the "s" from Sturgeon serve by hearing it also as the end of Nicola.

        In the first instance, the two "t"s shrink to one and make the first word "duck"; in the second instance it's easy to hear the single "s" as connected with both names and make the first name Nicolas. 

        Speech and writing sometimes give each other the comeuppance.

      

      

"Hermeneutics"

       In my June 3 post titled "An erotics of art," I used the word "hermeneutics" and, I suppose, figured the context would imply its most common synonym:  "interpretation."  But it struck me in re-reading the post that "hermeneutics" is so little used in everyday conversation, a "word" is in order.

       Where it is commonly used gives a clue to its meaning:  in biblical study, reading-explaining-understanding-translating-interpereting ancient religious texts; this kind of study is called "hermeneutics."

        The way I always remember it is the place the word comes from.  It's Greek, and it's derived from the god Hermes.  And who was Hermes?  He was the messenger god, the guy depicted with fleet wings on his heels to help get him from here to there as fast as possible.

        "Hermeneutics" in general is the study of getting the "message" from one place to another, "reading-explaining-understanding-translating-interpreting texts," literary, Biblical, or otherwise, and is aptly applied by Susan Sontag to a similar process regarding the assimilation, explication--the interpretaion--of art in general.

The Redoubtable Dept. of Debt

       Just found a scrap of torn magazine with content I intended to use for the blog.  From it I learned why we have the silent and not-so-silent "b" in words like "doubt," debt," "dubious," and "debit."

       The "b" demonstrates the English word's indebtedness to its Latin origins in dubitatio and debitum.  

Don't Read "Amelia Bedelia" to an Autistic Child

       I learned something about autistic spectrum children because of the Tony-honored new play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  These children often have gaps in their ability to process figurative language.  The play apparently beautifully illustrates and demonstrates how the world is experienced by someone autistic.  For example, a woman onstage speaking of "the apple of my eye" has a piece of fruit on her face.  The image is taken literally.

       It made me recall the one day I was asked to try working on reading with an autistic student while I was still tutoring reading.  We had a very noisy, distracting environment that day, and I used a poetry book as I recall,  probably full of imagery and metaphors.  My student got up and walked out of the library; I had to follow him, and our only real communication was kicking a ball back and forth before I futiley returned him to his class room.  I had no training or understanding to begin to work with an autistic child and we had actually been instructed at the outset of my volunteering not to accept a special ed. student.

       The Curious Incident is one of the brightest lights of the current Broadway season and won Best Play and four other awards at the Tonys last Sunday.

S.P.A.N.--Student Project for Amity among Nations; an "acronym"

       I was one of those students at the University of Minnesota who went to England in 1950 to study the BBC and glean and understand what I could in my relationships with people from another country for the first time.  It was a wonderful experience.  A newsletter recently from SPAN informed me that my roommate from Minneosta during that English visit had died.  We had long since lost touch with one another, but I remember him and our time spent together fondly--usually in funny yet serious arguments, not disliking one another, while still disagreeing ardently.

       I don't know who thought up the acronym SPAN, but they had to use a not-often-employed word to get the meaningful shortening of the long organizational name--"amity"--friendliness--among nations.

       Didn't know "acronym" was coined only in 1943 to help identify abbreviations like radio detecting and ranging=radar.  Acronym signifies a word created by combining the initial letters or parts of a series of words.  "Acronym" is from Greek:  acro, "topmost" or "beginning of" + onoma, "name."    

"Swords into Plowshares," 21st Century Update

       . . . They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks:  nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

                                                 from Isaiah Chapter 2, Verse 4

click on image to enlarge

(Thanks to nephew Mike Boos for this wonderful image from a gift T-Shirt, purchased if I'm not mistaken, at a music store.)

Was Serena Williams "Cursing"?

       Before finally winning the championship at Roland Garros, Serena Williams dropped the "F-Bomb" more than once.  The Associated Press in the L.A. Times had it this morning that "Williams was warned by the chair umpire for cursing loudly."  I don't think that was correct.

       The actual tennis rules that were applied here and presumably told to Williams were a warning for "audible obscenity."  That sounded exactly right to me.

       "Obscenity" comes from the Greek for "off scene," a stage term to indicate things like murder should not be shown on stage but only referred to, the act being "obscene."  Same holds true here--certain words that most of us may utter at one time or another best not be brought out for display before the public, in this case including millions of ears and eyes both attending the event and around the world.

       I think "cursing" and "profanity" have implications of their source in "taking the Lord's name in vain" from the Bible and probably should be reserved for that kind of "unholy," sacrilegious language.  "Profane" by root meaning is "before" or "in front of" (but not in) "the temple."    

 

The Dodgers and the L.A. Times on the Same Page?

       "For most of the Dodgers, their 2-1 defeat to the St. Louis Cardinals on Friday was only one of 162 games they will play this season.  For Schebler, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience."


       Yeah, Schebler played his first major league game with the Dodgers and got a hit.  This was the main front page story in the sports section of the Times this morning . . . about that player.

       But what I mainly noticed was the first sentence of the paragraph!  That's exactly it.  For the Dodgers, the loss to the Cardinals was just one of 162 games.  You may or may not remember my blog entry of May 29th calling them the "L.A. Slackers."  Six games against St. Louis during the regular season, and they've already lost 4 out of 5 of them.

       The Cardinals are practicing up on how they're gonna murder the Dodgers again in the post-season (if the Dodgers make it that far), but for the "Slackers" it was just another game!!!!!  That's why I called them that before the first of their 6 meetings--and look at them now.  Neither the team nor the L.A. Times seems to think this day's game has any importance.

Silence Produces Words

       Colm Toibin's comments in my post on May 30th from the documentary The 50 Year Argument:  "Reading and writing are done in silence" connected up with my three readings from Martin Luther King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

       The depth and profundity of King's "letter" were no doubt conditioned partly by the words being produced in the silence and isolation of a prison cell.  But, just as Toibin's remarks made clear that words rendered in silence, to be vibrant, must have hovering about them the writer's palpable sense of community, so King in his "deprived" state had a crystal clear sense of the black community he was writing both for and out of as well as the fellow clergy he was addressing and responding to.  They were totally present in that cell with him.

        Regarding "silence," in the same connection, I'm minded of the book I'm currently reading Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum.  Since all are writers, many of them are acutely aware of the increased freedom and ability they have to write without children to bring up.  As Sigrid Nunez, put it:

     
       "No young woman aspiring to a literary career could ignore the fact that the women writers of highest achievement, women like Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, did not have children."  

Is Memory a Crossroads?

       Looking at the part of the film The 50 Year Argument  about The New York Review of Books which I had missed seeing, I saw another quote I thought shouldn't be left out of this blog:


           "Memory arises not only from direct experience but from the                      intercourse of many minds."


It's taken from an essay in the Review by Oliver Sachs of February 21, 2013  called "Speak, Memory."

       Whether we're talking about how we recall a 50 year period argued over by many fine minds, or we're talking about our own individual memories, they have been constructed of what many people's narratives have contributed to.

       Which is why we read or listen or share words at all.

"Chance drizzle"

       My weather source on the web had an upcoming prediction today which reminded me of my  grandmother.  It was brief, appearing in this chart-like form:

                      Today                                       Tonight
       
                      Sunny                                    Chance Drizzle


I could hear it spoken with my Grandmother's slightly broken English,  Yiddish intonation, and especially that marker of her Eastern European or Russian Jewish background in word choice--"chance drizzle"-- minus any preposition, peculiar to look at, but perfectly understandable, especially to me.

"An erotics of art"

       I think I know why I didn't read Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation" when it came out.  It was the year I wrote my PhD. dissertation, got my doctorate, had our daughter, obtained our next place to live and work, in California, and moved there with Connie and Elizabeth.  I had an intense tunnel vision during the year 1964.

       But  I was moved to look at the essay once again when Sontag was one of the writers featured in The 50 Year Argument film about The New York Review of Books.

       Sontag's famous concluding sentence of that essay was "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."  Sontag says critics want to know what the "content" of the work of art is, the intellectual "take-away" so they can put the art work itself behind them, having gleaned what it has to "say," having "interpreted" it.

       Sontag thought that what was needed rather was engagement, a falling in love with the work in its palpable, material form and letting it have its way with you.  If you gave an account of that with your experience and joy in the work intact, that could be a proper criticism.  And she gave examples. 

       My field was (and is) "oral interpretation of literature," and had I read and thought about Sontag's essay at the time, I think I would have seen her as an ally rather than an enemy.  Yes, we try to understand the literature, but in doing it through performance, we are embodying and envoicing the work, not "saying other things" about it.  In giving ourselves to the work, we are fulfilling what Sontag identifies as the need for "an erotics of art."

"A NEW WAGE DAWNS"

       Yes, it's my most recent favorite headline:

               A NEW
          WAGE
          DAWNS
        
       From the front page of the Business Section of the L.A. Times Monday.  The punning headline is followed by this sub-headline which summarizes the actual article:

               $15 an hour, rippling through the economy, 
               wouldn't be as good or bad as each side claims