The Finish Line - Snow Patrol

The limits of language and a blue guitar.

It's strange how certain thoughts constantly reoccur in your mind. I say this because since last night I've been quietly mulling over something I read on the act of reading itself. In fact it reminds me of Wittgenstein's idea of "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." The writer Robert Rowland Smith argues that "the book you're reading can't release any meaning without your mind to coax it out, the book suffers the same limits you do-it can mean only as much as your mind is capable of letting it mean." ('Breakfast with Socrates') In other words the "verbal aquarium of characters, colours and currents" can only become so in the mind. Yet there could also be another interpretation here and one that sends me back to the dictionary for the daily digest; that is to say the life of the text is bound or determined by our internal or mental dictionaries. I'm no fan of Arthur Scargill but he once said that his father would read the dictionary every day: "he says your life depends on your power to master words."  So it's back to the dictionary then after some lunch of course.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
('The Man With the Blue Guitar' Wallace Stevens)

Snow Patrol - Set Down Your Glass

New Year's Resolutions

I was always taught that at the beginning of each new year, it was tradition to make three new year's resolutions. Now from experience, come February and whoops what's happened to the resolutions, the new start, the new you... well perhaps not going that far. Chances are that if you have already been doing the activity such as going to the gym, then it becomes much easier to see the resolution through to the end of the year. So here goes for 2011 and the big three:
1. to read at least one book a month (with work and research commitments this could be a challenge)
2. to practise more art (much easier to do a drawing or painting a week)
3. to go to the gym at least 3 times a week (perhaps the easiest of all as I usually do anyway)

Tips from a psychologist to  keep those new year's resolutions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12068595

New Year Celebrations in London 2010

These superb photos are from the BBC website. It seemed like a great night with all enjoying themselves which is the main thing.

                            http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/8436891.stm

Cleverness and Wisdom

Isn't it such a good feeling when someone who you really cherish buys you a special gift. It was a fascinating book or a series of essays incorporating philosophy, psychology, literature and so much more. In fact I came across this earlier on when the writer explores the differences between cleverness and wisdom. He points out that "where cleverness satisfies itself with winning arguments in the abstract, wisdom is a practical art, aimed at making deft judgements in the midst of everyday complications." I'm reminded of what a former colleague once said to me that anybody can be 'clever, clever' just paraphrasing or quoting writers, but what really changes society is having the wisdom, decency and goodness in knowing how to act in given situations or when faced with "everyday complications."

Perhaps on a similar note and again worth quoting are the famous words from Socrates who felt that "the unexamined life was not worth living and preferring dialogue to speeches, he'd get you to reflect on yourself and your actions in a way that would either lend them greater meaning or inspire you to make changes, and so create the meaning your life lacked." I think this is so true to ensure that each day can have fulfillling experiences.

The Good Samaritan

I was so pleased on arriving home on Christmas Eve. After a long and fatiguing journey back on the train, I thought that my mobile phone had been stolen; there I was at Piccadilly Station in Manchester rummaging through all my pockets and with five layers on, I was sweating away. I even traced my path back along the platform just hoping that there it would be just before my eyes, my treasured mobile phone. Unfortunately it was not to be and I resigned myself to being a victim of crime until I arrived home when I was confronted with the great news that a good samaritan had picked it up and handed it in to the lost property office; I was so relieved, so here's celebrating the good samaritan and the festive spirit.

Christmas Wishes

Christmas wishes to all and let's try and make the good spirit last all year; wouldn't the world be a much better place then. I've just found this article in the online Guardian newspaper by one of my favourite writers/essayists/philosphers: AC Grayling at Cambridge University.  

Peace and goodwill to all

Taking the season's greetings and applying them on a full-time basis might just make the world a better place.

• 
• AC Grayling

If the expression "ordinary person" applied to anyone - and assuredly, except in the most reductive of statistical senses, it does not: the rule everywhere is individuality, and wonderfully so - you could get few gamblers to bet against a world-wide poll showing a massive majority in favour of the following (very meaningful) abstractions: peace, stability, justice. Why, then, is there so little of any of these things in so many parts of the world?

The question is only partly rhetorical. The part that is rhetorical recognises that there are many reasons why these abstractions remain so, and alas a lot of them are not just down to the activities of competing state-or-economy-controlling power elites (though they are the ones with the money and the biggest guns, and therefore are the major cause), but from lack of knowledge about other people and other ways, and the resulting possibilities for suspicion, fear and hostility on the part of enough "ordinary people" who otherwise wish that those abstractions would become concrete.
It's a mess: it means that in regard to what most of us most want, we are ourselves parties to ensuring we are least likely to get it.
Lip service is paid to these abstractions at this time of year, in parts of the world where a seasonal reminder occurs that they are meant to be our best goals. Of course it is a good thing that for a couple of weeks people send one another cards and greet one another in the street with professions of hope that goodwill and peace on earth will reign, whatever the basis of the hope: which for a humanist consists in taking very seriously indeed the obvious fact of the difference in people's lives between suffering and joy, deprivation and opportunity, captive minds and open hearts; conjoined with a profound desire to see everyone everywhere liberated into the rich possibilities that being human can bring. But how much better still if we sent each other cards and said these things all year round.

The task is an essential combination of the political and (take the word in a strictly secular sense to denote the fulfilment of the needs, aspirations and potentialities of heart and mind) spiritual. While there is poverty and conflict, millions are condemned to the loss of possibility that, as a result, makes "village Hampdens and mute inglorious Miltons" of them. What chiefly stands in their way is the fact that they are regarded as nothing but instruments (and at other times as obstacles) to the wealth and power of the few. The fact that things have ever been thus is no excuse, although surprisingly this is a premise of all conservatisms; there are precious few institutions of any kind which are not, just in virtue of being institutions, conservative in some way or degree.

Immanuel Kant argued that the arena of moral endeavour should be regarded as a "kingdom of ends". That everyone should always be treated as an end in himself or herself, never as a means to anything else. Think what it would mean if everyone actually thought this way. And this, incidentally, is the least of it: I would include all animals in this domain, as "moral patients" although they are not moral agents - that is, as worthy of moral regard. But the immediate task is to prevent people being too often and too reflexively thought of in the mass, individually indistinguishable, as numbers and statistics, treated as units for employment in industry or war, or for marketing purposes, or as percentages of votes.

When thinking about future housing and infrastructure, and estimating demographic effects on school and hospital provision, planners have to think in the lump, of course; just as they must when organising aid for refugees. But good planning gets down to particularities sooner rather than later. When the result includes such details as (say) toilets that have twice as many water closets in the ladies' as in the gents' you get the approving feeling that someone succeeded in planning for real people at last.
"Real people" rather than "ordinary people": that among other things is what a sense of the individuality of individuals means, and it should at very least give anyone pause who thought about the consequences of big political and economic decisions, like going to war or failing to control industrial pollution. In particular, it is where thoughts of the near-universal desiderata of peace, stability and justice typically obtrude, because they are essential parts of the framework that help to make individual good lives possible.
That suggests the other aspect to be addressed: the individual responsibility to stop thinking of others as bearers of singular identities differentiated only by generic characteristics: "Jew, black, this, that" - these are always a potential source of horrors. And people who think of themselves under the rubric of a singular identity ("I am an X") do themselves a disservice as well as those upon whom they place the distorting demand to treat them just in that one light. In an ideal world - the one where peace, stability and justice are the norm and their breakdown a terrible aberration - individual human beings would encounter one another first and foremost as exactly that: individual human beings, and whatever else they are (women, men, Christians, atheists, tennis players, Labour supporters, lovers of film, Stones fans, regular holidayers in Turkey, and so on for the many other things any one person could be) would be additional to that, and they would merit (or sometimes not) friendship and respect on the basis of their personal qualities, and only secondarily for some of their major choices about beliefs, politics and the rest. You might disagree with someone's views on a number of topics, but if he is kind, thoughtful and honourable that will trump much, which shows what really matters here.
In that ideal situation, seasonal hopes about goodwill and peace would be a lot less a matter of mere hope than they are now. But that is no reason for not continuing to hope. So I wish peace and goodwill to you all, and a happy new year.

                    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/25/peaceandgoodwilltoall

Christmas Cheer

I found these lovely images on Google so it's time to celebrate the festive spirit ^^

Where has grammar been hiding all these years? | Macmillan

I came across this article earlier on. Whoops apparently according to the self appointed guardians of the English language, one should never end a sentence with a preposition nor split an infinitive despite the classic example from James Kirk. Perhaps we should all boldly go forward and study Michael Swan's 'Practical English Usage' or Martin Parrot's 'Grammar for English Language Teachers' to consider how the language is used today rather than how it should be used; usually this is based on an 18th century Latin model of grammar and what is the present year 2010, oh yes I almost forgot. Perhaps as David Crystal points out it's time to consider the variety of Englishes used by around 2 billion people throughout the world, the vast majority of whom are non native speakers as opposed to the models used by the 60 million speakers in the UK.

Click this link to access the article:

 Where has  grammar been hiding all these years? Macmillan

A Winter Landscape

There's been a lot of criticism towards the authorities lately in Old Blighty but I love the winter snow clad landscape; to go out for a stroll in the crisp chill air is so refreshing and healthy too, as long as you're wrapped up of course. So why try to fly halfway around the world chasing the heat of the sunshine? There's nothing like returning home to a cosy warm room, pleasant music and a good film or an interesting novel after a morning or afternoon stroll . So here are a few photos of the beautiful winter.  

The Business of Language

For all those interested in language I came across this on an English language teaching website. I think it's worth reprinting in full as I was quite surprised and pleased at Fiona's stance.  

A stiff letter to The Times - has the BBC gone mad?

Submitted by Fiona Aish on 5 August, 2010 - 12:51

"Dear BBC

I am a lover of radio 4 and am constantly energised, fascinated and enriched by its programmes. However, I feel moved to comment on the utter nonsense I was subjected to on The World Tonight, Tuesday 3rd August in the discussion on language and specifically “verbing” between Felicity Evans and her guest Rhea Williams, chairman of the Queen’s English Society.

The discussion centred on whether “verbing”, changing a noun to a verb, is acceptable, in response to President Obama’s comment that American troops would be “partnering” those from Afghanistan. Now this is a topic that delights the pedant (and therefore a certain percentage of the radio 4 audience) but produces nothing short of apoplectic rage in me. It is bad enough having to listen to yet another ill-informed discussion on language change and standardisation, but having to listen to non linguists bandy about their emotional reactions to something they just don’t like and clearly have no understanding of is both fury inducing and a waste of everyone’s time.

There are many linguists in the world such as the entire staff of the department of Educational and Professional Studies at King’s College London where I studied the MA English Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics or countless other academics who would have been able to provide an informed and reasoned discussion on this topic but no, someone at the BBC decided that the appropriate body to approach for an intelligent, well informed discussion would be The Queen’s English Society. Now, while I admit that some of their work is admirable, many of the comments in the discussion served as a reminder as to why I chose the words “utter nonsense” in my opening sentence.

Some examples on the topic of whether “verbing” is acceptable and I quote from the programme:

1.       Rhea Williams: ...it depends if they are ugly or not.

Felicity Evans: Yes, I’m with you on that. If it’s elegant one should be able to get away with it but the trouble with that is that it’s a question of personal taste.

Yes, is it – discussion should end here.

2.       RW: to grow a company, that’s actually just vile...What’s’ wrong with we’re trying to get the company to get bigger or we’re trying to make it better?

Indeed, but what’s wrong with to grow a company? Exactly, please. What... is... exactly... wrong?

3.       RW: My most favourite one is “This door is alarmed”.

Oh how droll you are – I too can hardly contain myself for laughing.

4.       RW: ... I think an awful lot of them are really horrid.

And I think you’re insane.

5.       FE: ... if you fail to properly communicate what you mean, the language has failed.

Or there has been a breakdown in communication between the speaker and listener which is likely to be clarified by the use of repairing strategies such as saying “What do you mean?”

6.       RW (in answer to FE’s previous insightful observation): Absolutely.

How?

7.       FE: Business jargon is the worst. I saw a press release about encouraging children to access oily fish. How do you access an oily fish?

Go to Sainsbury’s – they have loads of fish.

8.       RW: We often turn things into a verb for speed so you could say “Are you lemonading or wining?”

Mmm. At 9 syllables it is longer than “Do you want lemonade or wine?” which is 8 syllables. So the point about speed is what exactly?

9.       RW: But if you’re going to try to access a fish, that’s just bonkers.

FE: It is bonkers.

Not nearly as bonkers as you two.

I wonder whether you could get a real expert i.e. a linguist in to discuss language change and the factors which influence it, in the process debunking some of the myths surrounding the subject. I’d be happy to provide a list of names and contacts but in the meantime please remember the following:

All languages change

Change is not wrong, it is change

Communities and groups use specific language or jargon for many socio-cultural reasons – leave them alone

Most people use language in a range of social situations and change it to adapt the situation

Business is not corrupting English, it is doing business

There is no such thing as Standard English. "

Yours, 

Outraged, South London

For the entire discussion, go to:http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t6trb/b00t6tqd/The_World_Tonight_03_08_2010/ and start listening from 25.50 minutes in.

An interesting read.

"How I Got Lost in Translation"

I've just finished reading this article on the importance of translation; it's from yesterday's Observer newspaper  and I think it's worth reprinting in full here. Let me know what you think, thanks. 

How I got lost in translation and found my true calling

Translation can be an underpaid, anonymous job. Yet it is crucial for the cross-fertilisation of literature and for Maureen Freely, it has become a deeply satisfying life's work.

 

Maureen Freely

The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010

Outside the Anglophone world, it is not unusual for novelists and poets to work at some point in their lives as translators. Though most will say that they did so mainly to subsidise their own writing, it is often clear, when you look at that writing, that it has been enriched by the imaginary conversations they've had with the poets and novelists whose words they have translated.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

by Orhan Pamuk

If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today's most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they read is in translation. An up-and-coming Colombian novelist might be inspired not just by Borges, Conrad and Faulkner, but by contemporary novelists from Asia, Africa and Europe; his literary response to their work will go on to influence what his contemporaries on the other side of the world write next. These complex patterns of cross-fertilisation would end overnight if it were not for literary translators and the publishers who support them. So you'd think people would thank us, wouldn't you?

Well, sometimes they do, but in the next breath they'll tell you what a terrible career move you've made. To a degree, they're right, because the pay is pretty appalling. Although some translators get a sliver of the royalties, most work for a flat fee. We who translate from non-western languages will often discover, if a book becomes a world phenomenon, that most other translations will be from our translation and not the original. But by and large, we receive no extra fee and it is only when those working from our translations send us frantic emails that we discover how far our words have travelled.

World literature is the big new thing in literature departments, so you'd think our good name would be assured here at least. Sadly, universities and their regulators tend to be suspicious about translations, possibly because they don't know what yardstick to measure them by. For the last Research Assessment Exercise, I was asked to explain in precise terms how my translations had contributed to world knowledge. For the next one, I shall also have to demonstrate their economic impact.

You could say that all we're doing, really, is replicating someone else's thoughts. And aren't we soon to be replaced by machines? I don't think so. Here is the sublime first sentence of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories of a City as rendered by Google Translate: "A place in the streets of Istanbul, similar to ours in a different house, with everything I like, twin, or even exactly the same, starting from childhood lived another Orhan a corner of my mind I believed for many years." And here is the first sentence of his seminal novel, The Black Book, replicating the Turkish word and suffix order as closely as possible: "Bed-of top-from tip-to as-far-as stretched-out blue checked quilt-of rugged terrain-its, shadowy valleys-its and blue soft hills-its-with covered sweet and warm darkness-in Rüya face-down stretched-out sleeping-was."

When I translate, I become something akin to a shadow novelist. When I am shadowing Pamuk, what I want to do most is capture the music of his language as I hear it. Accuracy is important, but a lot of what I need to be accurate about lies deep below the surface. After consultation with the author, the first sentence of The Black Book became: "Rüya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet, warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt." The first sentence of Istanbul was: "From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double." I can see, even as I type these sentences, how ephemeral they are. Other translators will find their own ways to capture what they see and hear in the text.

I was initially drawn to this art because, after many years of journalism, I longed for a quiet life. I imagined weeks and months of solitary reflection in my favourite chair. And of course there were periods like this. But if you are translating a controversial author, the world is never far away.

My first rude awakening came while I was translating the first chapters of Pamuk's 2002 novel, Snow. A Turkish newspaper got in touch; having heard what I was up to, it wanted to know what I thought of the headscarf issue, about which Snow has a great deal to say. My innocuous answer (that a woman should be able to choose what she wears on her head) was transformed into a provocative headline ("I curse the fathers!"), following which I was bombarded with emails from an extremist Islamist newspaper. I could not help but notice that their questions were almost identical to those asked by an Islamist extremist in the chapter I'd just translated. It ends with said extremist pumping a few bullets into his interlocutor's head.

Over the years that followed, and especially during 2005 and 2006, when Orhan Pamuk and many other writer friends of mine were subjected to hate campaigns for speaking openly about the Armenian genocide, later to be prosecuted for insulting Turkishness, there were times when I felt as if I had wandered into the book I was translating.

There were also the lesser fictions in which I featured as a süperajan (no translation needed). Many Turks who feel ambivalent about Pamuk like to attribute his international success and most especially his Nobel prize to his translators, who have, they claim, "improved his words for western consumption". The ultranationalists who drove the hate campaign went so far as to say he had sold his country to Europe for the sake of his career.

If I were just a translator, I might not have thought it necessary to write in Orhan's defence in the media here and elsewhere. I might not have become involved in the campaigns for free expression that went on to change my life and will doubtless carry on doing so. But this seems to be the rule for translators and not the exception.

Most of us do a great deal off the page. More often than not, we are the ones who bring new authors to the attention of publishers. Some run programmes that bring together young writers from countries that were once at war. Some run programmes in schools, working with children who speak a language other than English at home. Many are also novelists, poets, journalists and teachers. Some – most commonly those who translate out of minority languages – are agents.

I know all this because there aren't very many of us. We all work for the dozen or so publishers which remain committed to fiction in translation even as the walls of fortress English grow and grow. If the art of literary translation continues to thrive in this country, it will be thanks to them, and also to the British Centre for Literary Translation, which is training the new generation, and the Translators Association, which speaks up for us when we're exploited, and the Independent foreign fiction prize, whose organisers work hard to take our best efforts to a larger audience.

Why do any of us bother, when the odds are so against us? Because it's fun to discover new books and new writers. It's gratifying to see at least some of them do well. For me, it makes a welcome change from my old life, when I mainly looked after number one, wasting acres of times fretting about bylines and book sales and column inches. Somehow, this feels more romantic and far more worthwhile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/28/maureen-freely-translation-orhan-pamuk

Mike Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock as Directors.

I was reading this article the other day about Mike Leigh's latest film: "Another Year." Being a great fan of Hitchcock, a director who put all his ideas onto a storyboard then meticulously followed this through so all his actors usually had to fall in line, I couldn't believe just how Mike Leigh works. He seems to create the dialogue or script organically; effectivly he works with his actors and then a kind of script follows from their natural performances. This liberates the actors by allowing them to be more true to their roles; it's like method acting where the actor becomes the character, Al Pacino is a master at this, and taking it one step further. So I guess it allows the audience to believe in the reality of the film. Hitchcock was an expert at manipulating the emotions of his audiences with his great suspense films of the 40's and 50's, but Mike Leigh seems to be engaging the audience in a totally different way.

Alberto Manguel on Reading.

Alberto Manguel is one of my favourite writers~he always has interesting things to say on all things literary. I found this article on the homepage of his website and I think it's worth quoting in full so see what you think.

"Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves. The battle of every reader is therefore against the enforced education of stupidity in a consumer society that tries to turn every citizen into a buying automat incapable of reflection. In that sense, the act of reading becomes subversive, since it can lead to questioning and thinking for oneself. The enemy is not, as some would want us to believe, the electronic technology. Manguel argues that the electronic technology is not in competition with the technology of the book: they apply to different fields of creative pursuit and overlap only occasionally; the perceived antagonism between both is fostered by mercantile interests to promote the sale of electronic products, constantly updated less for scientific or intellectual reasons than for purely commercial ones -- to sell more computers, not to elicit more ideas. Manguel also believes in the intrinsic illuminating and healing quality of literate texts when they allow constantly renewed readings and in-depth exploration. By literate text, Manguel means that which Northrop Frye defined as a classic: "a work whose circumference is always greater than that of the best of its readers." In his book Into the Looking-Glass Wood, Manguel wrote: "In the midst of uncertainty and many kinds of fear, threatened by loss, change and the welling of pain within and without for which one can offer no comfort, readers know that at least there are, here and there, a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink, to grant us roof and board in our passage through the dark and nameless wood." (Jean-Luc Terradillos)

http://www.alberto.manguel.com/