Indulge me a little on this one.

I was at a Stanford seminar today, and noted once again how often the phrase “the ways in which” comes up.  Is it just me, or is this simply a space-filling way to say “how”?

Try it.  Google “the ways in which” and you can witness all sorts of tormented uses of the English language.  In most cases, the idea sounds simpler and a lot more straightforward if you simply substitute “how.”

Sometimes the phrase can be killed entirely. “There are many ways in which adults can effectively support and extend speech, language and communication development in children,” reads one Google entry.  Delete “in which” and the sentence is fine, saving two words.

Here’s another: “In order to analyse the ways in which universities can take action to improve social mobility, the report breaks down the life-cycle of students into four stages …”  The use of “how” is more succinct.  And as a bonus prize, the writer can kill the first two words, “In order,” which also pad the sentence unnecessarily. That’s a net savings of five words.  That is, “In order to …”  can usually be effectively chopped to “To…”

Next, let’s tackle that other clumsy formation, “The fact that…,” which often doesn’t refer to a “fact” at all.

I’m editing interview transcripts tonight and I’m cranky.  Can you tell?

Who dat?

What does Liu Xiaobo have in common with  Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Jimmy Carter?

Hint: I’ve written about him here and here and here, among other places.  Another hint: remember the empty chair?

How easily we forget a Nobel peace prize winner when it’s inconvenient to remember!   According to PolicyMic, a website founded by recent Harvard and Stanford grads Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, “Liu’s conditions are largely unknown, but many, including Amnesty International, fear the worst the Chinese can offer. The most startling aspect of the Liu Xiaobo case has not just been his arrest for subversion, as his fellow activist Ai Weiwei was in 2011, but the lack of American support for an activist who has been a strong supporter of the United States.”

According to the site, the last time Liu Xiaobo’s fate or existence has been mentioned by the U.S. government was in 2010, “when a bi-partisan group of 30 members of the U.S. Congress wrote President Barack Obama a passionate letter pleading for the president to discuss the release of Liu Xiaobo and fellow activist Gao Zhisheng at the G-20 Summit with President Hu Jintao.”

Here’s the newest development:

In happier times…

Authorities in the Chinese capital on Friday detained a group of activists who tried to visit Liu Xia, the wife of jailed Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo under house arrest at her Beijing home, and beat up Hong Kong journalists who tried to follow them.

Hong Kong activist Yeung Hong, together with Henan-based activist Liu Shasha and two unnamed netizens from Beijing, got as far as the residential compound in a Beijing suburb where Liu has been held under police guard since October 2010, when the Nobel committee first announced her husband’s award.

Holding a placard with the words “Liu Xia, everyone is behind you!” and shouting slogans through a megaphone, the activists were quickly detained, questioned for several hours, and then released in the early hours of Friday morning.

The visit came just days after an international signature campaign begun by Archbishop Desmond Tutu calling on Beijing to free both Lius was handed to Chinese officials, after being signed last year by more than 130 former Nobel laureates across all disciplines.

PolicyMic again:

To help Liu Xiaobo, and his wife Xia, go to Amnesty International and Change. Amnesty International can always use a small monetary donation to do great things; however, if you are a bit more frugal, all the Change petition (led by Desmond Tutu) needs from you is a signature. Let the people of the world try to succeed where Western governments have failed, and in the process try convince those governments to try again … for Liu Xiaobo and Lia, for Gao Zhisheng and Ai Weiwei, and all those unfairly imprisoned by corrupt governments.

Władysław Szlengel was part of Warsaw’s literary scene in prewar Poland.  As a doomed Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto, he read his poems to friends, but longed to communicate with those outside the ghetto.

Now he has.  Journalist and author David Margolick has written about him – and the eminent translating team of John and Bogdana Carpenter have translated his works in the Fall/Winter 2012-13 issue of Philip Fried‘s The Manhattan Review (its website is here).  “In 1942 and 1943 Szlengel wrote with increasing speed. He called his writings ‘poem-documents’ and ‘a poetry of fact,’ but these words should be taken with many grains of salt,” they write. “His sense of irony had evolved into something new, very powerful and tragic. More artistic development, and change, were compressed into the last years of his life than most writers achieve in a lifetime.”

The cover notes the “Poems from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” but it’s the 13-page story that caught my eye.  “What I Read to the Dead” is a terrifying account of the German Aktion (a German euphemism for the massacres) of January 1943.  Szlengel would die in the early days of the Uprising a few months later.

Szlengel describes himself as “the chronicler of the drowning men”:  “For the past few days I keep remembering a scene from a Soviet play whose title I don’t remember. The crew of a submarine doesn’t want to surrender to the Whites and sinks to the bottom. Sixteen heroic sailors wait in vain for help.  Last image: lack of air, death hovering over the sunk submarine.  Six, ten, then fifteen crewmen suffocate. The sixteenth wants to leave – somehow – a record of the annihilation of the crew. But he doesn’t magnify the sacrifice.  After all what is so important in a nation of many millions if a handful of men dies?  Perhaps they perished for a great cause, but the number of sacrificed lies was ridiculously small. Just sixteen!  So what?  In a last effort he lifts his hand and writes with a piece of chalk on the steel wall of his tomb: 200,000,000 minus sixteen.  He subtracts sixteen unimportant existences from two hundred million. It’s done, it’s all that will remain in history.  Numbers.  Statistics.”

Szlengel describes, at first in euphemism (“passed away”), later to the brutal reality of the Aktion.  An excerpt:

During these four days the next-to-last wave of my readers passed away. All those who barely a week ago listened to my poems and the strange adventures of Meier Mlynczyk on the island-barrack of Schultz passed away. The listeners at my liteary evenings of the “broom-makers” passed away, also the closet roommates, neighbors, friends, companions in discussions, often involuntary co-authors of the contents of this volume.

Fania R., who would say “Merde” for good luck before each of my appearances at a performance, who knew many stories about Curie-Sklodowska and Professor Rous, has left, miserable and cold in a sealed freight car.

Gone are my roommates, funny Juzio who slept in a woman’s pajamas and a woman’s stockings, not to produce ambivalent effects but simply because he had nothing else. Gone is his energetic wife who fled the Umschlagplatz [point of departure to the death camps – ED.] with a bullet wound in her back, only to return to the Platz for a second time after five months of hunger and a stubbon struggle for some means to escape to “the others.” She didn’t make it.

Gone is the beautiful Ida L., image of health and the will to live, just last week – damn it!!  You feel like clenching your fists.

I saw the corpse of Asya S. who provoked me to write a second optimistic version of the poem “Let Me Alone.” Gone. And tomorrow, my God tomorrow or the day after, as our secret sources report, the German orgy is supposed to be repeated – how many more will die.  It is to early to make the final account. But I am constantly tortured by the living specters, close to me, of those who were here just the other day, who were confident and at the same time so terribly afraid – in such a moving, human way – of what would happen to them. …

Postscript:  Just got a note from Philip Fried.  He tells me he’s just heard that BBC producer Mark Burman is working with Eva Hoffman on a show about Szlengel – the 27-minute BBC Radio 4 program and will air in late April, and may include the translations of the Carpenters.

A winner

We’ve all had the experience.  You go to a foreign country, and through a combination of simplified English, a scattering foreign words, and vigorous hand signals, you try to get the waiter to understand that you want two scrambled eggs on toast.

The deaf have it the other way around.  The outward communication is fine.  It’s incoming sound that causes problems.

According to Rachel Kolb, deaf since birth, lip-readers catch only 30 percent of the words they see.  They guess and interpolate what they can of the rest.  They miss a lot.  Especially when people mumble, speak quickly, laugh a lot, or have heavy accents – people say something that looks to them like, “Would you graawl blub blub vhoom mwarr hreet twizzolt, please?”

“How does one have a meaningful conversation at 30 percent? It is like functioning at 30 percent of normal oxygen, or eating 30 percent of recommended calories—possible to subsist, but difficult to feel at your best and all but impossible to excel,” she asks in an article, “Seeing at the Speed of Sound,” over in Stanford Magazine this month.

Kolb, a 2013 Rhodes scholar, finds an odd sort of relief in darkness:

The world of the deaf.

Everyone has an Achilles heel, something that exposes her weaknesses. Mine is darkness. When it is dark, my appearance of communicative normalcy no longer stands. No speaker, no understanding can reach me. There is no way for me to penetrate any mind but my own, or to grasp whatever words other minds might exchange.

That sounds bleak, but it isn’t really. With utter darkness comes resignation, a kind of peace. When it is completely dark, the responsibility for communication is no longer mine. Lipreading, writing, seeing: There is nothing more that I can do. I am free to retreat into the solace of my thoughts—which, in the end, is where I can feel most comfortable.

It’s dim lighting, or bad visual aesthetics, that is a torment. When there is even the slightest sliver of light, there is still a chance. When lighting conditions are impractical or when I cannot squarely see the person who is talking, I still try. More often than not, I frustrate myself in the effort.

Transcribing Beckett’s letters (here’s the Cahiers version)

I met Dan Gunn in a crowded little Paris café at one of the more crowded hours of the day back in 2011. It was supposed to be an “English” café, but I remembered nothing English about it.  I can’t remember what I had, except a cold … perhaps a hot toddy … well, that’s kind of English.  Or did Dan have the cold?

Finally. I heard what he has to say.

 I can’t remember.  In any case,  Daniel Medin had spirited me to the place, and one or another of us was late, or lost.  I also can’t recall what Dan or anyone else said – far too head-throbbingly noisy for that – so it comes as something of a relief that the current issue of Quarterly Conversation (which also has my British Academy talk from December) has a long interview between Dan by Rhys Tranter, of A Piece of Monologue blog fame.  That will have to serve in place of a real conversation.

Dan is one of the team of editors working on Samuel Beckett’s letters.  Volume 2 (of a projected four) has just come out.  George Craig, another of the editors, explains the arduous process in a Cahiers Series booklet – read about it here.  Now at Quarterly Conversation you can read another editor’s articulate take on it.

“It is worth bearing in mind that when the project was launched, back while Beckett was still alive, nobody, least of all Beckett himself (who had no notion of how many letters he had written over his life), suspected the scale of it,” Dan explained.  “I myself could not have imagined the number of letters that we would find, or just how hard they would be to transcribe; or all the contractual and legal problems we would encounter that have slowed us down. Had I done so, I might well have hesitated.”

So why did he carry on?  According to Dan:

This is that it is a pleasure, a privilege, a delight even, daily to be in the company of Samuel Beckett. Let me be clear here: I do not believe this would be the case for me if I were working on almost any other writer, or not to the same degree (I am a huge admirer of Proust’s work, for example, but I would not wish to spend my days in his entourage or around the edges of his life). I think that this is the most mysterious and perhaps the most wonderful thing about Beckett: one admires the work, one admires the man, and one would have to—at least I would have to—try very hard properly to distinguish where admiration of one ends and of the other begins (and this when “admire” is a pusillanimous way of saying “love”). There is in Beckett some moral quality—pace those who will accuse me of hagiography—that is an essential aspect of his greatness; that makes his company the company one seeks out and cherishes. While it is doubtless unfashionable to claim something so patently old-fashioned, the greatness of the person is certainly the chief motivation for me in my work on his letters: to spend time with this man who, for all his complexities and hesitations and pentimenti, acts in ways that are so exemplary.

When I asked Avigdor Arikha, on one of the last times I met him shortly before his death, if he could tell me why it was that Beckett had mattered so much to him—he had told me he missed him more and more every day—he explained to me that he was the one person he had ever met—in such a full and dramatic life—who in some part of him “n’était pas touché par le monde” (was not touched by the world). By “the world” he intended, as he went on to explain, all that is low and dirty and nasty. Every time I sit at my desk to work on the letters, or almost every time, I feel I am experiencing the truth of what Avigdor told me that day.

The project immersed Dan in the lost art of letter-writing.  Here’s what he says about that:

My Virgil in Paris

I find it utterly astonishing that within my own lifetime I have witnessed the demise of a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages and beyond, a tradition by which—think of Dante’s letter to Cangrande—individuals expressed what was most dear to them in the form of a letter which they addressed to a single individual but which they, however secretly, knew was always also addressed to something beyond or before both the one writing and the one reading. I say I have “witnessed” this demise, but of course I have also participated in and contributed to it: as an adolescent I used to write long detailed letters, and I maintained the habit well into the era where it came to seem almost quaint to be letter-writing at all; only to succumb to the conquering force of email. People worried in the past that the telephone would be the death of the letter (and one of the reasons Beckett’s letters are so rich is because of his antipathy towards the telephone). But letter-writing survived the phone, only to be devastated by email.

When I work on Beckett’s letters I am in touch not just with a great writer and a great spirit, but with an era that, though so recent, is no longer. I am moved to wonder if, in time, the digital media will permit a writing that encourages the depth of introspection and discovery that the letter form, for centuries, achieved—to wonder and to hope, but also to doubt. Working on Beckett’s letters does not make me nostalgic for the era of the letter, exactly, nor does it have me longing to smash my computer. But it does make me feel especially privileged to be partaking in what amounts to a late flourishing of a genre on the eve of its virtual extinction.

Read the rest here.

Prof. Joseph Frank and his wife Marguerite (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

The New York Times obituary for Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank is up today.  I don’t know why they chose to compare his work with three other books in the first paragraph, but other than that, it’s a good read.

It traces the story of Joe’s beginnings in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, his debilitating childhood stammer, the death of his father while a boy, and the acquisition of a stepfather who bestowed the name “Frank” (he was born “Glassman”).  He was rejected by the military (that stammer again), lost both mother and stepfather within the same year, and did poorly in high school.  He bypassed a bachelor’s degree, and went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950.  (He got a PhD from the University of Chicago a decade later.)

According to the New York Times, “Mr. Frank was an emerging critic in the early 1950s and preparing a lecture on existentialist themes in modern literature when, to provide historical background, he began studying and analyzing Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky’s anguished cri de coeur in the voice of an embittered ex-civil servant, a novel that had influenced Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. The close encounter with the text changed his life, pivoting his interest to the intellectual culture of 19th-century Russia and consuming him to the degree that he undertook to learn Russian.”

His Dostoevsky biography, after Volume One:

“Not only a great book about the early life of a great writer,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “but probably the best book any American writer has yet given us on the literary culture of 19th-century Russia.”

Magnifique!

His Dostoevsky biography, after Volume Two:

“Everything about this ambitious enterprise is splendid — its intellectual seriousness, its command of the Russian setting and sources, its modesty of tone, its warm feeling,” Irving Howe wrote in The Times Book Review. “Mr. Frank is clearly on the way toward composing one of the great literary biographies of the age.”

His Dostoevsky biography, in toto:

“It’s now regarded as the best biography of Dostoevsky in any language, including Russian, which is really saying something,” Gary Saul Morson, a Dostoevsky scholar and professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University, said in a telephone interview, referring to the five-volume work. “That’s more or less universal. And this is my opinion, I don’t know if others will agree, but it’s the best biography of any writer I’ve ever read.”

Enfin,

“But he would always follow the evidence where it took him,” Robin Feuer Miller, a 19th-century Russian literature specialist at Brandeis, said in a telephone interview Friday. She added that his influence was immense. “Every time he would write something,” she said, “what a change in the reading of a novel it would engender!”

Read the rest here.  A terrific man, a terrific scholar.

Postscript on 3/6:  Washington Post obituary here.  “I cannot remember a time when I was not writing,” he once said.