Please.  No “gifting” this Christmas.

I’m not particular sensitive to nouns used as verbs, but this one gets to me.  I have consulted my Oxford English Dictionary, and apparently it thinks the fault is mine — it lists a variety of instances in which “gift” was used as a verb from the 17th to 19th century.  The OED bids me keep my petty grievances to myself.

But I can’t.  The sudden reemergence of the term coincides with a number of other words that have been recycled into verbs — I am tired, also of people being “tasked” with unimportant activities.  Wordnik has a list of irritations here, and admittedly, in the debauched wordsmithery of journalism, I am guilty of many sins on this score.  “Impact,” for example.

So why do “gifting” and “tasking” irk me so?  Perhaps because of what I suspect is the underlying motive in their use.  “Gifting” someone sounds so much more self-important than “giving a gift.”  Being “tasked” with some trivial occupation gives it the aura of high mission.

But while I’m at it, a recent article I wrote, interviewing literary scholars, turned up these clinkers:  One spoke of “foregrounding” different opinions. I had left the passage in my final article, but it made my editor throw up a little in his mouth, so it was deleted.  Another scholar spoke of “theatricalizing” such differences.

Perhaps we could “gift” people with a few useful synonyms as gifts this Christmas?

Postscript:  Clearly, I am in a minority.  A poll showed that most think “whatever” to be the most grating word, followed by “like.” As Jim Erwin commented on my Facebook page:  “Fail on currenting. Teh mos def gr8ting spelling now is, like, ‘Whatevs'”

Postscript on 12/22: An interesting, lawyerly p.o.v. from Max Taylor on my Facebook page: “Hoary legitimacy only makes the experience of words we wish would go away worse. Like the Latin ‘nuculum’ in which the embarrassing “nucular” might find refuge.”

A few days ago, I discussed UC-Riverside’s Perry Link‘s forthcoming Harvard University Press edition of the writings of the imprisoned Nobel peace laureate, Liu Xiaobo.  I didn’t realize that he had just posted about his friend on the New York Review of Books blog, including his recollections of this month’s awards ceremony in Oslo, dominated by the Chinese writer’s empty chair.  It’s worth a read, here:

The ceremony was one of the most exquisite and moving public events I have ever witnessed. The presentation speech was made by Thorbjørn Jagland, the chairman of the prize committee who is a former prime minister of Norway and now secretary-general of the Council of Europe. Only a few minutes into the speech, he said:

We regret that the Laureate is not present here today. He is in isolation in a prison in northeast China…. This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate.

When he had finished reading these words the audience of about a thousand people interrupted with applause. The applause continued for about thirty seconds and then, when it seemed that the time had come for it to recede, it suddenly took on a second life. It continued on and on, and then turned into a standing ovation, lasting three or four minutes.

The actress Liv Ullman read the full text of the statement that Liu Xiaobo had prepared for his 2009 trial in Beijing. The statement is called “I Have No Enemies.” Chinese authorities halted the statement mid-stream during last year’s trial.

Another friend of the Nobel laureate, Renée Xia, who is overseas director of China Human Rights Defenders, said this about the ceremony: “To us,” she said, “that empty chair is not the least bit surprising. Of course Beijing treats its critics that way. This is wholly normal. If the rest of the world is startled, then good; maybe surprise can be the first step to better understanding of how things really are.”

Hu Ping, editor of Beijing Spring in New York and a long-time personal friend of Liu Xiaobo’s, said he wasn’t expecting China to yield on human rights and democracy.  Why should they?

“As they see it, the current strategy works. The formula ‘money + violence’ works, and we stay on top. We know what the world means by human rights and democracy, but why should we do that? Aren’t we getting stronger and richer all the time? Twenty years ago the West wasn’t afraid of us, and now they have to be. Why should we change what works?”

Liu Xiaobo was more optimistic, in a way.  Hu recalled him saying some years ago: “We are lucky to live in this time and this place—China. It may be difficult for us, but at least we do have a chance to make a very, very large difference. Most people in their lifetimes are not offered this kind of opportunity.”

More on the powerful image of the empty chair here.

The Germans investigated in 1943 (Photo: Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation records, Hoover Institution Archives)

One of the pleasures of blogging is receiving cyberletters from those I mention in the Book Haven. So I was pleased when my inbox showed the name of Timothy Snyder of Yale, who had read my recent blog posts about the current Katyń exhibit at Hoover Institution and also my discussion of his new book, Bloodlands. (I also challenged the London Review of Books for allowing a hostile critic, Richard J. Evans, review the book.)

In his letter, Snyder added a few more reasons why the Katyń atrocity plays such an important part in Polish memory: about two-thirds of the Polish officers killed at Katyń and the four other massacre sites were reserve officers.  University graduates served as these reserve officers.  The move was part of “a general Soviet policy of decapitating the nation.”

“Thus the blow struck chiefly the educated elite — people who, in Polish national myth and also in reality, were crucial to the survival of the nation,” he writes.  It also struck their families:  “Just as the men were being shot, their wives, children, and parents were being deported to Soviet Kazakhstan (about 60,000 people).”

For those who have seen Andrzej Wajda’s Katyń, this won’t come as a surprise – the movie portrays precisely one such episode.

After my recent conversation with Hoover archivist Nick Siekierski, he wrote,  “I may have mentioned earlier that while the Soviet’s were preparing and carrying out the Katyń massacre, the Nazis executed about 40,000 Poles in the part of Poland that they occupied from  1939-1940. These were also local government officials, public servants and professionals, the community leaders of their respective areas.”

This was news to me, though I don’t pretend to be a scholar of the war.  I asked Tim about it.  He apparently finds Nick’s numbers a little conservative:

“The first major killing actions of the German Einsatzgruppen involved the murder of educated Poles.  At almost exactly the same time as the Katyń crime, the Germans were carrying out the AB-Aktion, which murdered thousands of people thought likely to resist.  The demographic profiling of the two regimes was so similar that, in some cases, the Germans murdered one sibling in the AB-Aktion right after another was killed at Katyń.  The Germans kept poorer records than the Soviets, but we can be sure that these policies killed more than 50,000 Polish citizens.”

September 1939. Warsaw.

That’s right.  That means the Nazis had a systematic killing that was more than double the Katyń murders.  Who speaks of it?  When it came to the Poles, the Nazis and Soviets worked, more or less, as a team – not a surprise to anyone who remembers the Nazi destruction of Warsaw, as the Soviets waited for the Nazis to complete their block-by-block destruction of the city before they entered the city the following year.

Of course, after the Germans discovered the mass graves at Katyń in 1943, the Soviets naturally blamed the Germans for the crime. This was the version that the Americans and the British found convenient to believe.  After all, we had been allies of the Soviets – and the denial of what Stalin was ran deep.  Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times.

“Thus the Polish sense of abandonment runs a bit deeper than perhaps we like to remember,” Snyder writes.

There’s more.  A little chunk of history even Poles scarcely remember that occurred just prior to the outbreak of war:

“We know now that the Great Terror in the Soviet Union of 1937 and 1938 included a number of ethnic shooting and deportation actions, the largest of which was the Polish Operation.  In the Great Terror, about 700,000 people were shot, of whom about 85,000 were ethnic Poles (who represented only 0.4% of Soviet citizens).  An ethnic Pole in the Soviet Union was 40 times more likely to be shot than his fellow Soviet citizens during the Great Terror.  Katyń was the last time that the Soviets applied the methods of the Great Terror.  It is no less horrifying but it is perhaps less surprising when this prior history is borne in mind.”

August 1944. The destruction of Warsaw.

Why is this so little known, even compared to Katyń?   Tim points out that these Nazi massacres bring back the “awkward recollection” of a time when the Nazis and the Soviets were allies — not a memory the Soviets wanted to revive.  Nick Siekierski suggested this:

“I haven’t studied the issue enough to know so I can only hypothesize. Since the Katyń graves were uncovered during the war and the Nazis made a concerted propaganda effort to use it against the Soviets, it entered the public consciousness early on, and continued to be a sore spot as the Soviets denied complicity for half a century. The cover-up of the massacre magnified the crime. Also, the list of crimes committed by the Nazis is so lengthy that their earlier crimes are less focused on than the Holocaust. It seems that slowly a greater understanding of the breadth and depth of the atrocities committed by both the Nazis and Soviets, against a variety of social and ethnic groups, is emerging.”

And as this understanding deepens,  it certainly gives more weight to Norm Naimark’s arguments in Stalin’s Genocides that our definition of genocide ought to be broadened to include what is certainly a systematic attempt to destroy a nationality through massacre, by two totalitarian states working in tandem.

Liu Xiaobo and wife Liu Xia: "I will embrace you with ashes"

Some time ago, I wrote that it was unfortunate that we had no access to the writings of this year’s imprisoned Nobel peace prize winner, Liu Xiaobo.  All writers, after all, would rather be known for their writings rather than their persecution.

Now it’s official that the prestigious Graywolf Press will be publishing a bilingual edition of the Chinese writer’s June Fourth Elegies.  The book will be out in 2012.  The title of his book, which of course has not come out in China, refers to the June 4, 1989, suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square.

From Galleycat, we also learn that poet Jeffrey Yang will translate the collection. Literary agent Peter Bernstein negotiated the deal with Jeffrey Shotts and publisher Fiona McCrae.

That’s not all.  Harvard University Press (also prestigious) will publish a selection of works by the Chinese dissident, also next year.  The untitled anthology will contain poetry, essays, and social commentary.

The academic press has enlisted UC-Riverside’s  Perry Link to direct a translation team. Said Link: “Until he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo was little known in the West. This collection offers to the reader of English the full range of his astute and penetrating analyses of culture, politics, and society in China today.”

"Hey, mom!"

At Berkeley’s “Slavic Choral Concert Christmas in Kraków”, described yesterday, I had to scour the rows to find a vacant chair, even as a singleton.  It seemed that the entire Slavic population of the Bay Area was in the crowded Hillside Club.  Naturally, I went to the front, first: I never underestimate people’s unwillingness to be close to the action.  Two African-American matrons, dressed to the nines for the occasion, were holding down the front seats in the lefthand corner.

“Well, you don’t look Polish!” I said to them.  They laughed.

“We’re all part of Mother Africa!” said one.

It’s true.

Don’t believe me (or her)?  Listen to Ian Morris, who received a very good review in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review (Orville Schell calls him “a lucid thinker and a fine writer,” with the tone of “an erudite sportscaster”):

“Historians like giving long, complicated answers to simple questions, but this time things really do seem to be straightforward. Europeans do not descend from superior Neanderthals, and Asians do not descend from inferior Homo erectus.  Starting around 70,000 years ago, a new species of Homo — us — drifted out of Africa and completely replaced all other forms.  Our kind, Homo sapiens (“wise man”), wiped the slate clean: we are all Africans now.  Evolution of course continues, and local variations in skin color, face shape, height, lactose tolerance, and countless other things have appeared in the 2,000 generations since we began spreading across the globe.  But when we get right down to it, these are trivial.  Wherever you go, whatever you do, people (in large groups) are all much the same.”

So, as Tiny Tim said, “God bless us, every one!”

Or, in the words of the cheerful African-American woman at the Slavic gig:  “We’re everyone!” she said, waving toward the crowd on the darkening Thursday evening among the Christmas lights, the mulled wine, and the decidedly un-African decor.

Postscript on 12/15:   was named one of the top ten books of 2010 by the New York Times.  Tk it out here.

I’ve always liked Christmas carols — even with their sing-songy obvious rhymes (bright-light-night) and simplicity of form.  Perhaps that’s why I like them.  I’m happy to say Czesław Miłosz shares my enthusiasm.

In any case, last Thursday I made the terrible trek to Berkeley during rush hour.  The occasion:  the eighth annual “Slavic Choral Concert Christmas in Kraków” at the Historic Hillside Club.  I guess all the recent posts about Katyń have returned my mind to Poland.

Carols are an important part of Christmas for all Slavic peoples, especially Poles.  The program brochure put it this way:  “The melodies are truly Polish – jolly, meditative, tender, and sometimes humorous. The Polish Christmas carol occupies a unique place in the musical literature of Christianity.”

The event was heavily attended – a crush, really – and among other seasonal accoutrements was a Polish szopka, an elaborate, cathedral-like Nativity scene.

Miłosz wrote in his A Year of the Hunter, “In Poland, it isn’t easy to separate ‘folk’ elements from the contributions of Church writers and musicians, not to mention seminarists and minstrels who worked for the parish.  The most intense activity occurred in the 17^th century; thus, old Polish ‘folklore’ and, most of all, the carols bear a strong imprint of the Baroque.”

My favorite is “Bóg się rodzi” – a Polish Christmas carol that is, in part, a national anthem.  The carol is actually a mazurka,  which is to say, a Polish folk dance in triple meter, with an accent on the second or third beat.  The lyrics (“God is Born”) were written in 1792 by Franciszek Karpiński, a leading poet of the Enlightenment period.

In the Andrzej Wajda movie Katyń, the imprisoned Polish soldiers sing “Bóg się rodzi on their somber Christmas Eve.  A mazurka usually has a lively tempo, but not this one  (it’s a little after 6.20 on the Youtube video here); the melody remained with me long after the carol movie was over.

In a controversial move (and I can’t remember why it was controversial), Miłosz ended his A Year of the Hunter with a story attending the Pastorałka: “Without a doubt, Polish carols possess a particular charm, freshness, sincerity, good humor, that simply cannot be found in such proportions in any other Christmas songs, and perhaps one ought to look at them for the essence of Polish poetry,” he wrote.  “My susceptibility to that performance can be explained by my having listened to carols from childhood, but also because only the theater has such an impact, appealing to what is most our own, most deeply rooted in the rhythms of our language.”

The occasion, of course, was not just for Poles.  A number of other national groups performed – each accomplished, and together emphasizing the distinct and very vibrant cultural groups of Eastern Europe — a Ukrainian performance; the curious flattened singing of the Hungarian Christmas carols that’s a sound unlike any I have heard; the loud and noisy Bulgarians, with bagpipes, singing and stamping — the brochure referred to their “antique, pre-Christian and Hellenistic roots”

Miłosz wrote that “to this day I am united in enthusiasm … with the entire audience, when Pastorałka concludes with a Dionysian dance.  This is total madness, an unbridled frenzy on stage, a letting-go beyond all bounds, although the words are as plain as can be.”

I thought the same, as I pulled away during the intermission for the trek back to Palo Alto.  The excited crowd had spilled out into the sidewalk and curb.  And in the midst of the clapping mob, the exuberant Bulgarians with their bagpipes, stamping and singing and dancing as if it were their last night on earth.