Not laughing.

I learned in one of my Chinese classes at the University of Michigan – was it philosophy before the Han Dynasty? Or the survey of Chinese poetry? – how important names were in ancient Chinese culture, a mystical forecasting the destiny and inner traits of the child. I learned from Robert Alter that when the angels told Abraham he would have a son with Sarah, he fell on the floor laughing (and his wife laughed, too, a little more discreetly). After all, he was 100 and she 90 years old. Hence, their child was named Isaac, a transliteration of the Hebrew term Yiṣḥāq which literally means “He laughs/will laugh.” Names meant something back in those days.

Today’s Middle Eastern world doesn’t quite have the hang of this custom, for the new group of thugs terrorizing the region re-baptize themselves every other day – first ISIS, then ISIL, then IS, then the Islamic Caliphate.  Who can keep track of it all?  Apparently, they are unhappy with the monikers, discarding them one after another, like a 16-year-old Valley Girl trying on jeans in an Abercrombie and Fitch fitting room. May I join the party and do the same? I think I need a new title, too. From now on, I think I shall call myself the Pearly Queen, and you are all the Book Haven’s subjects (don’t applaud, just throw money). It seems the perfect moment to renew our long-lapsed Orwell Watch, in this case for the abusive manipulation of language for political ends.

The new me.

The Associated Press desperately tried to get on top of the history, not realizing that the terrorists were making it up as they go along – each name more grandiose, promising more legitimacy than the previous one: “In July, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced its rebranding. He declared that the territory under his control would be part of a caliphate, or an Islamic state, shortening its name from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL — the acronym used by the Obama administration and the British Foreign Office to this day. The Levant can refer to all countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean, from Greece to Egypt.” The story added: “The inconsistency, while confusing for some, has not deterred the group’s growing exposure on social media, with so many hashtags, posts and tweets ultimately directing readers and viewers to their news.”

Anyway, “Vive la France!” France has always been a nation that takes its language seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Académie Française was established in 1635 to adjudicate the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, and to publish an official dictionary of the French language. Since then, they have been doing their best to drive out foreign incursions into their Larousse, fiercely rejecting neologisms and Americanisms such as “drugstore,” “cookies,” and “weekend.” The French diet became so dire that in recent decades America had to send them CARE packages with new words in them, parachuting the boxes past the Académie Française gunners.

Such a persnickety people are not going to fall over themselves trying to accommodate terrorists – at least not when it comes to language. According to the Huffington Post here:

The French foreign ministry released a statement earlier this week referencing the Islamic State group as “Daesh.” The new moniker is a transliteration of an acronym of the group’s Arabic name “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham. It is also similar to the arabic word that means “to trample.”

And as a reward, we will send them some new words.

France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius explained that he views the organization as “a terrorist group, not a state.”

“I do not recommend using the term Islamic State because it blurs the lines between Islam, Muslims and Islamists. The Arabs call it ‘Daesh,’ and I will be calling them the ‘Daesh cutthroats,'” Fabius said, according to France 24.

Oh well, “to trample” is a good place to start. I wonder what the correct name for “to behead” or “to crucify” might be? (Fabius in the press conference referred to them as “butchers,” but apparently that name didn’t make the final cut.) Egypt had its own innovation: “Egypt’s top Islamic authority, Grand Mufti Ibrahim Negm, last month called on the international community to refer to the group as ‘al-Qaida separatists’ and not the Islamic State.” It doesn’t end there. In Britain, a group of Muslims in the UK has called on the government to call the group the “UnIslamic State.” How wet. Kind of like calling acetaminophen “non-aspirin.”

Aux armes, citoyens!

Here’s the bad news: the terrorist group is not happy with the French innovation. C’est dommage. According to the AP: “Several residents in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city which fell to the extremist group in June, told The Associated Press that the militants threatened to cut the tongue of anyone who publicly used the acronym Daesh, instead of referring to the group by its full name, saying it shows defiance and disrespect. The residents spoke anonymously out of fear for their safety.”

If all of France uses it, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever will have its work cut out for them – that’s 66.03 million people. In any case, the French are pros. They’ve been through the beheading thing before. Vive la France!

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Bad case of antisyzygy

The big day arrived. Scotland voted on a referendum deciding whether to declare independence from the United Kingdom or stick together. My own thoughts turned to Stanford’s Scotland expert, and I wondered how he might be faring. We’ve written about Bliss Carnochan and his book Scotland the Brave here and here. We dropped him a sympathetic line to ask for his thoughts on this momentous occasion.

He replied within an hour or so, long before the votes were tallied and much faster than I was expecting:

“On the front page of the Financial Times today is a very large headline and, below, an image of the Scottish flag, the Saltire, against a background of clouds and atmospheric effects.  The headline: BEAUTY AND TERROR GRIP A NATION POISED ON THE BRINK OF HISTORY.

Good case of Laphroaig

“The acres of coverage produced by the independence vote have been astonishing, as if the fate of the world depended on this decision by a small nation, five million people only.  The question of Quebec’s independence produced nothing like this.  No doubt more is at stake here, political, economic, otherwise. But I think Scottish identity-fever, shared by many who have little or no Scottish blood, adds its share to the apocalyptic vision of beauty and terror.  We’re all Scottish now, anxious about our true identity.

“In Scotland the Brave, I wondered whether a yes vote might diminish the creativity (and the enmity to England) of so much Scottish thought – a perverse reason to vote no, which I’d probably do if I had a vote. Having voted no, then I’d probably wish I could have a second chance.  Being a Scot, even five generations back, leaves me of divided mind.  It’s what Hugh MacDiarmid called the “Caledonian antisyzygy.”

According to Wikipedia, “The term Caledonian Antisyzygy refers to the ‘idea of dueling polarities within one entity’, thought of as typical for the Scottish psyche and literature. It was first coined by G. Gregory Smith in his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence …” Read MacDiarmid’s poetic take on it is here.

Now here’s the hard part to figure out. The ballot is pictured below left. It’s said to be the simplest ballot evah. So how did Scotland wind up with 3,261 rejected ballots, which were indecipherable? What’s to screw up?

Huh?

As the votes were counted well into the night, and the nays were in the lead, Bliss emailed me again: “Good: the bad guys have it. Oh dear: the good guys lost. Looks like it will be Scotland v. England forever.  But can somebody explain why Shetland, Orkney & the Western Isles all said no??”

As for me, I poured a wee draught of Laphroaig to toast the Scots as we rolled past midnight, and were still awaiting the vote from the Highlands. Laphraoig’s own isle of Islay in the Argyll and Bute region had voted “no” by 58.52%. I had to agree with Paul Krugman and the other nay-sayers about the economic and political catastrophe that was likely to ensue had the referendum passed. Had the “yes” vote won, I would have had to head down to the nearest BevMo to stockpile Laphroaig while the price was still within reason, to make sure I had the comfort of Scottish peat within the confines of my home, come what may in the world at large.

“Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics.” So wrote Italo Calvino‘s translator, William Weaver (we wrote about the humble translator here). But that brings us quickly to the question: What is a classic, anyway? Calvino’s 1991 book Why Read the Classics? was assembled after the author’s 1985 death; the author had intended to compile something of the sort himself, but didn’t live to see the project to fruition. He begins with 14 thoughtful assertions:

1.  The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’

2.  The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

3.  The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.

4.  A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

5.  A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

6.  A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

7.  The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.

8.  A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

9.  Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

10.  A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

11.  ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.

12.  A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.

13.  A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.

14.  A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

The New York Review of Books published Calvino’s elaboration of these comments in 1986 – it’s here.

In English, s’il vous plaît…

A Polish friend and blogger, Artur Sebastian Rosman, sent me this youtube clip of the Irish Nobel poet Seamus Heaney reading the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. We’ve written about Seamus here and here and here, and Herbert here and here and here – and my visit with Herbert’s cat Szu-Szu in Warsaw is discussed here.

Artur considers Herbert’s satirical poem about labor conditions in Poland during the 1960s, “Report from Paradise” here, along with a few theological peregrinations. Poet and translator Stanisław Barańczak noted that in Herbert’s poem, even heaven has been “degraded into a social utopia, a sort of fairy-tale socialism,” in which the only solution, in Herbert’s words, is “to mix a grain of the absolute with a grain of clay.”

Bully.

This reading, however, begins with Herbert’s famous and devastating (to me) poem, “Apollo and Marsyas,” and ends his Seamus’s own sonnet on the Polish poet’s death, in which Apollo also figures. Frankly, I’ve never been able to think of Apollo in quite the same way after reading Herbert’s poem. A bit of a brute…well, more than a bit.

Anyway, here’s Seamus’s 2008 reading at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. Like it? There’s more: Part One of the reading is here and Part Two is here.

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Ready, aim …

Robert Pogue Harrison‘s “Children of Silicon Valley” is still making waves, as I rather suspected it would when I wrote about his New York Review of Books piece in “Robert Pogue Harrison socks it to Silicon Valley” over here. But now his Silicon Valley critique has leapt across the Atlantic, and is stirring things up in Germany, where it was published in translation by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (here) and in Italy’s Corriere della Sera (alas, no link, just paper). The two newspapers are sometimes called the New York Times of their respective nations.

So what did people have to say? Not much at NYRB, to my surprise; the responses were verbose and not particularly insightful. On the whole, the techie world seemed to come up with the most informed responses, even when one mischaracterized Robert this way: “Those people are really angry, they are frustrated and angry and pissed off that nobody told them that when the nerds reshaped the tools of the world into something they liked better, there [sic] choice to ignore nerds would leave them badly under equipped to live in that world.” Don’t worry, Chuck McM, whoever you are, Robert has just returned from an extended trip to Italy, has a new book coming out soon, and is doing just fine!

Another reply over at Hacker News from dkarapetyan: “Silicon Valley is no longer changing anything. I don’t know if this was ever the case but the reason I started learning about computers and the theory of computation in general was because I saw it as a way of empowering people and giving them a means of achieving their own goals. This is no longer the case. I see very few companies that are using technology with that intention or building something with that goal in mind. All I see are ways of tricking people into clicking on ads or tricking them into doing free work by giving them tokens, e.g. Yelp. This isn’t to say that technologists are entirely to blame but they played a large role in disempowering an entire generation by giving them gimped tools that were meant more for control than empowerment. Why the hell do I need to know what ‘rooting’ a device means if I want to fully utilize all its capabilities. What is the point of locking down a general purpose computing machine if not for control.”

Are we becoming … boring?

Countering one reader’s claim that “Universal mobile connectivity is huge. Instant access to the world’s information is huge. Instant access to each other is huge,” dkarapetyan wrote again: “Instant access to each other we’ve basically had since email and text messaging and that hasn’t changed. What has changed is business capitalizing on those connections to make money, i.e. Zuckerberg repackaging the internet as Facebook. I don’t really know why you say geolocation is huge. I like my GPS but I can get around just fine without it. It might be huge in terms of government’s ability to spy on me though. Maybe I’m a little too cynical but none of what you brought up changes the fact that all the tools and services we make available to people are more a means of oppression and control than they are as a lever that they can use to move the world. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are all toys for teenagers. Google and other mega corps are information silos with secretive operations and basically black boxes that print money.”

“Technology should be used to distribute power and wealth but instead it is used more and more every day to concentrate it in fewer and fewer hands. Financial sector you mentioned being an excellent example of such use.”

Over at Union Square Ventures, Nick Grossman considered Robert’s remark, “Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption…” He wrote: “That one makes me think. On the one hand, it’s true – disruptive innovation is about abandoning the idea of fixing/maintenance in favor of building new. On the other hand, the ‘architecture of the internet’ is extraordinarily maintenance-friendly – layering and open protocols make it possible to swap out/fix/improve the components of the network like never before.” He doesn’t get it. He is thinking of software, not civilization, and thinking in terms of months and not years, let alone decades and centuries.

Is it a good witch, or a bad witch?

Robert had written, “Becoming a boring human being is the fate of most people who keep the tech economy’s lights burning deep into the night. These industries may be among the most vibrant and dynamic in the world, yet those inside the hive are among the most tedious people in the room, endlessly plugging into their prosthetic devices.” The responses from people who countered that they knew “lively,” “articulate,” “interesting” computer folks with “hobbies” are disquieting. I was struck by the lack of metaphysical aspiration.

Many no longer seem to know what a profound person looks and sounds like. I’ve been honored to know a handful, but from the responses I’ve read, I get the feeling that most people haven’t met any. By which I mean the people who have changed the course of my life, not merely entertained me. I hesitate to elaborate, because I feel like I’m speaking in an ancient tongue, as if I were typing these thoughts out in WordStar 3.0 and not in WordPress, or responding to a TV gameshow in archaic Greek. How to define? (“Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,/The light less public and the meaning of life/Something more than a mad camp…”) Let’s start with a quality of being, not merely a lists of accomplishments or degrees, and consider wisdom rather than knowledge. Then add a varied mixture of suffering, conscience, self-knowledge, choices and the enduring payment for those choices, all fermented over time, time, time. But that’s only the starter kit. It gets deeper. You won’t find anything like it in the internet chatter.

Belly of the Beast.

Gdańsk at nightfall, overlooking the Motława River. (All photos by Zygmunt Malinowski)

The Book Haven’s roving photojournalist Zygmunt Malinowski was far, far away from his New York City digs last month, and back in his native land – in particular, he visited Gdańsk. I didn’t remember how strongly the Baltic port is linked with Czesław Miłosz. Fortunately, Zygmunt did, and he took plenty of photos, with Gdańsk writer Stefan Chwin and Krystyna Chwin‘s book, Czesław Miłosz: Gdańsk and Vicinity, as a guide.

“The words are written down, the deed, the date.”

He writes: “I was invited for the opening of European Solidarity Center on August 30 – an imposing newly built museum dedicated to preserving the history of Solidarity, as well as an international institution ‘to ensure the ideals of Solidarność – democracy, an open solidarity society, and culture of dialogue – maintain a modern perspective and appeal.’ It is situated close to the Monument to the Fallen Shipyard Workers where Miłosz’s poem, ‘The Poet Remembers’ is engraved in bronze.”

The lines on the monument at right (the whole poem, “You Who Wronged,” is worth a read here): “Do not feel safe. The poet remembers./You can kill one, but another is born./The words are written down, the deed, the date.”

He is one of three people represented on the Solidarity monument, along with Nobel peace laureate Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II. Miłosz visited Gdańsk the year after his 1980 Nobel to meet with Wałęsa. The Solidarity movement was in full swing, and the exiled Polish poet, returning to his homeland for the first time in three decades, was greeted enthusiastically by crowds of shipyard workers. He would come again in subsequent years (other than the years of martial law, which was imposed in 1984 and lifted in 1989), returning both as a private person and a public figure. He made a permanent return to Poland in 2000. Each visit was closely followed by local and international press.

Gdańsk had sad memories for Miłosz, too, as well as happy ones: His family, including cousins as well as parents and brother were displaced by the ravages of World War II, and moved into a house in nearby Sopot. His mother Weronika Kunat Miłosz died in the nearby village of Drewnica, during a wartime typhus epidemic in 1945; she is buried in the nearby Sopot Catholic Cemetery.

“Gdańsk and Sopot, a resort town, both situated on the Baltic Sea, provide a festive atmosphere for visitors and tourists during the summer who admire its unique architecture and relax in its many friendly cafes and restaurants, entertained by street musicians and performers,” Zygmunt wrote. “Gdańsk University, School of Fine Arts, and Academy of Music add to a sense of culture.”

“During his visits in the 1980s and 1990s,  Miłosz gave several poetry readings, met with readers and students, was hosted by city officials, and gave press interviews. He stayed in the majestic Grand Hotel in Sopot overlooking Baltic Sea, and Hanza Hotel by river Motlawa in Gdańsk. He visited his cousins and the family grave where his mother is buried. While in the Pod Holendrem café on Mariacka Street, considered to be one of the most beautiful with elaborately carved portals, street musicians fêted him with a song for his 85th birthday [that would be 1996 – ED]. In Sopot, he was hosted at City Hall and town officials named one of the city’s green spaces in his honor.”

There’s some good news for Zygmunt in all of this, too:  “My photographs of the New York demonstrations supporting Solidarity were acquired by the European Solidarity Center for their archives. Some are being used in the museum multimedia presentation, and one was even chosen to be reproduced in large format for the permanent exhibition. Concurrent with the the center opening in Gdańsk, Sabine Weier, a known curator based in Berlin, included some of my photos in a collection for an online exhibition titled ‘Strajk.'” We’ll include the link when we have it.

More photos below.  Thanks and congratulations, Zygmunt! (All photos copyright Zygmunt Malinowski.)

The grave of Miłosz’s mother, who died in a wartime typhus epidemic, in the Sopot cemetery.

Stone marker on Czesław Miłosz Square with his words: “For me, the most important moment is at dusk”

Mariacka Street in Gdańsk.

The former Miłosz family home during WWII on 23 Wibicki Street in Sopot. The house seems recently renovated.

The Sopot hotel where Miłosz stayed during one of his visits.

The new Czesław Miłosz Square.