"It is our belief that no writer can improve his work until he discards the dulcet notion that the reader is feeble-minded, for writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. Ascent is at the heart of the matter. A country whose writers are following a calculating machine downstairs is not ascending—if you will pardon the expression—and a writer who questions the capacity of the person at the other end of the line is not a writer at all, merely a schemer."
(E.B. White, An E.B. White Reader)
I love Henry James. He writes sentence I can get lost in. I like being lost in a work. Really lost, not just so completely immersed that the toast burns. Style is a gift we give each other.
I've developed a punctuation fetish. Largely as a result of having my English corrected.
I spend a lot of time studying the comma. In a punctuation book I love, the writer cautions against using too many commas, as the reader today has a short attention span and will not suffer these long sentences. The author's suggestion is to keep it simple. Vary sentence length, yes, but don't ask too much of the reader.
The authors I like ask a great deal from me. In reading them I attempt to meet those expectation. I am grateful to them for having the faith, not only in their own work, but in me, a dear reader. Books, and stories (when retold every season) allow you grow into them, to look over them, searching for lost moments and striving for more complete understandings.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
02 August 2012
05 July 2012
Obsolescence
from Curzio Malaparte's The History of a Manuscript (Kaputt, 1944)
"Let us hope that the new era will really be anew and that writers will enjoy liberty and respect, I say 'let us hope' not because I lack faith in liberty and its benefits—I belong to that group of people who have suffered imprisonment and deportation to the Island of Lipari for their freedom of spirit and their contribution to the cause of liberty—but because we all know how difficult it is in Italy and throughout large sections of Europe to be a human being, and how dangerous it is to be a writer."
These words were written about a time not unlike these, our own. I write with the same hopes and the same sentiment, always attentive to the difficulties of being human and the dangers of being a writer.
I constantly justify my work—novels, Navajo language, traditional arts and culture. Language itself seems to have become obsolete. Hand prepared meals and non gmo food elitist. Home a class struggle by a small percentage of people that refuse to even consider the ethics of occupying an occupied territory.
Even other artists ask me what I get out of writing—what's in it for me. Where is my fun? And why don't I make the change to something shorter and more interactive, something more likely to interface with the contemporary world, not this world I seem to believe in, this world of my grandparents.
They raised me. Their world is not a memory, but a reality I still build, around myself, every morning with herbs ground in my great grandmother's molcajete. We live in the same world, they have gone on, while I remain. This is the world they lived in: facing urbanization, baptism, English only and relocation/deportation. They planted food. They told stories. They embroidered cloth and fabricated garments from the remnants of the food we had eaten—its containers made of cotton, not hide. They clothed us in their knowledge of what it meant to be alive. Life required vision: to be human. This is the kind of human we are: cook, farmer and embroiderer.
They remind me to remember who I am and who I am related to: Navajo, Pueblo, Congolese. Writers make connections according to a grammar they find within their soul. Together, being human and making connections, I am vulnerable to severe fiscal and social punishment. It has always been this way, for a long time, in large sections of Europe and in these United States of America.
My grandparents fought. They fought each other most of all. But their overwhelming disagreement was how to achieve victory, not the absolute need to defeat the lies they found themselves under the weight of. This is their world. We live inside it too.
"Let us hope that the new era will really be anew and that writers will enjoy liberty and respect, I say 'let us hope' not because I lack faith in liberty and its benefits—I belong to that group of people who have suffered imprisonment and deportation to the Island of Lipari for their freedom of spirit and their contribution to the cause of liberty—but because we all know how difficult it is in Italy and throughout large sections of Europe to be a human being, and how dangerous it is to be a writer."
These words were written about a time not unlike these, our own. I write with the same hopes and the same sentiment, always attentive to the difficulties of being human and the dangers of being a writer.
I constantly justify my work—novels, Navajo language, traditional arts and culture. Language itself seems to have become obsolete. Hand prepared meals and non gmo food elitist. Home a class struggle by a small percentage of people that refuse to even consider the ethics of occupying an occupied territory.
Even other artists ask me what I get out of writing—what's in it for me. Where is my fun? And why don't I make the change to something shorter and more interactive, something more likely to interface with the contemporary world, not this world I seem to believe in, this world of my grandparents.
They raised me. Their world is not a memory, but a reality I still build, around myself, every morning with herbs ground in my great grandmother's molcajete. We live in the same world, they have gone on, while I remain. This is the world they lived in: facing urbanization, baptism, English only and relocation/deportation. They planted food. They told stories. They embroidered cloth and fabricated garments from the remnants of the food we had eaten—its containers made of cotton, not hide. They clothed us in their knowledge of what it meant to be alive. Life required vision: to be human. This is the kind of human we are: cook, farmer and embroiderer.
They remind me to remember who I am and who I am related to: Navajo, Pueblo, Congolese. Writers make connections according to a grammar they find within their soul. Together, being human and making connections, I am vulnerable to severe fiscal and social punishment. It has always been this way, for a long time, in large sections of Europe and in these United States of America.
My grandparents fought. They fought each other most of all. But their overwhelming disagreement was how to achieve victory, not the absolute need to defeat the lies they found themselves under the weight of. This is their world. We live inside it too.
02 July 2012
Language
Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium were written in anticipation of his delivery of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-1986.
In his memo on exactitude he wrote:
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words."
Twenty six years later my own use of English is strained in conversation—I take a slow pace, meticulous and careful, thoughtful about what I say, and the exact language I use to say it. I am not surrounded by listeners. Certainly not in my public existence: at the market, post office, or among neighbors. Yet I expect more. I've been told these expectations are my downfall.
"It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
I am not looking for a common language. I am looking for the deep translation required by life. This translation requires a search for meaning, most relevantly, the meaning of particular words for particular moments. A diminished vocabulary results in a diminished existence.
On my first day in High School I walked into Western Civilizations for my final period. Sr. Damien handed out an assignment sheet with the course textbook listed along with Funk & Wagnalls' A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1894). Our assignment: read ten pages, look up every word we did not know, and write down the definition. We should be prepared to discuss the readings. I was twelve. I already knew all there was to know and reading comprehension was my strength. I had the test scores to prove it. So I read away and didn't crack the spine on my Funk & Wagnalls. I only purchased the book because you had to show it to her the next day before you were allowed to take a seat in the classroom. On Friday we sat down and were told to take out a piece of paper and write the definitions of the words listed on the chalkboard. They were all in the reading. If we had done the assignment, we should know every word. If we didn't at first, we should have looked them up. I failed.
"It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably."
Sr. Damien's philosophy: if we didn't understand the word we could never understand the reading. The words were assigned, someone had chosen them for us. She would guide us, however twisted the path, through them, page by page. Life does not assign everyone a Sr. Damien. I couldn't wait to get rid of her myself. But there is power in demanding exactness in thought. Everyone deserves to be asked to understand clearly and to express themselves clearly. Access to language is not a privilege. Language is a responsibility we share.
"At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of the epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
Whose responsibility is it to reverse the language shift?
In Narratives of Navajo-ness, Deborah House writes about the language shift among speakers of Navajo. She illuminates the solution very astutely, writing: "Reversing Navajo Language shift is the responsibility of those persons who need the language in their lives, and their children's lives and reversing Navajo Language shift can only be done when those individuals who can speak the Navajo language do speak the Navajo language at every opportunity; when those who can't speak the Navajo language, start taking advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak it; when those who can model benefits of speaking the Navajo Language get out there and do model it. It doesn't have to cost a dime."
How it works: speak. (The Oral Tradition)
How it works: read. (The Written Tradition)
House continues: "It's the easiest thing in the world to tell people how to reverse Navajo Language shift, but actually doing it is going to be hard; it's going to be an everyday, day after day, year after year, commitment—at home, in the community, in the Chapter House, at the Trading Post, at school, at work, at prayer, at the polls and wherever else a person happens to be. And just talking about it won't make it happen."
Every day, year after year, a commitment to language, memory, exactness of expression is what carries the people and their knowledge forward. Every day, year after year, we can manifest this commitment in our own speech, in the stories we tell, and those we read. Calvino's belief that literature, maybe even literature alone, can protect us from this plague holds within it the knowledge of a certain attention to language made by writers and readers. We can share this in our speech and in our reading—if we tenaciously endeavor to.
In his memo on exactitude he wrote:
"It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words."
Twenty six years later my own use of English is strained in conversation—I take a slow pace, meticulous and careful, thoughtful about what I say, and the exact language I use to say it. I am not surrounded by listeners. Certainly not in my public existence: at the market, post office, or among neighbors. Yet I expect more. I've been told these expectations are my downfall.
"It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances."
I am not looking for a common language. I am looking for the deep translation required by life. This translation requires a search for meaning, most relevantly, the meaning of particular words for particular moments. A diminished vocabulary results in a diminished existence.
On my first day in High School I walked into Western Civilizations for my final period. Sr. Damien handed out an assignment sheet with the course textbook listed along with Funk & Wagnalls' A Standard Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1894). Our assignment: read ten pages, look up every word we did not know, and write down the definition. We should be prepared to discuss the readings. I was twelve. I already knew all there was to know and reading comprehension was my strength. I had the test scores to prove it. So I read away and didn't crack the spine on my Funk & Wagnalls. I only purchased the book because you had to show it to her the next day before you were allowed to take a seat in the classroom. On Friday we sat down and were told to take out a piece of paper and write the definitions of the words listed on the chalkboard. They were all in the reading. If we had done the assignment, we should know every word. If we didn't at first, we should have looked them up. I failed.
"It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably."
Sr. Damien's philosophy: if we didn't understand the word we could never understand the reading. The words were assigned, someone had chosen them for us. She would guide us, however twisted the path, through them, page by page. Life does not assign everyone a Sr. Damien. I couldn't wait to get rid of her myself. But there is power in demanding exactness in thought. Everyone deserves to be asked to understand clearly and to express themselves clearly. Access to language is not a privilege. Language is a responsibility we share.
"At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of the epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language."
Whose responsibility is it to reverse the language shift?
In Narratives of Navajo-ness, Deborah House writes about the language shift among speakers of Navajo. She illuminates the solution very astutely, writing: "Reversing Navajo Language shift is the responsibility of those persons who need the language in their lives, and their children's lives and reversing Navajo Language shift can only be done when those individuals who can speak the Navajo language do speak the Navajo language at every opportunity; when those who can't speak the Navajo language, start taking advantage of every opportunity to learn to speak it; when those who can model benefits of speaking the Navajo Language get out there and do model it. It doesn't have to cost a dime."
How it works: speak. (The Oral Tradition)
How it works: read. (The Written Tradition)
House continues: "It's the easiest thing in the world to tell people how to reverse Navajo Language shift, but actually doing it is going to be hard; it's going to be an everyday, day after day, year after year, commitment—at home, in the community, in the Chapter House, at the Trading Post, at school, at work, at prayer, at the polls and wherever else a person happens to be. And just talking about it won't make it happen."
Every day, year after year, a commitment to language, memory, exactness of expression is what carries the people and their knowledge forward. Every day, year after year, we can manifest this commitment in our own speech, in the stories we tell, and those we read. Calvino's belief that literature, maybe even literature alone, can protect us from this plague holds within it the knowledge of a certain attention to language made by writers and readers. We can share this in our speech and in our reading—if we tenaciously endeavor to.
27 June 2012
Translation
Mikhail Bakhtin's "works in print can in fact be seen as ripped-out segments of one vast philosophical project. . . on the nature of language, literature and moral responsibility."
My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.
"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."
The essence of all human communication.
Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.
"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."
I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.
Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.
"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."
I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).
"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."
I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.
"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."
These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.
All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)
My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.
"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."
The essence of all human communication.
Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.
"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."
I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.
Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.
"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."
I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).
"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."
I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.
"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."
These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.
All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)
25 June 2012
How It Works
"I think all writers live off of obsessions. Some of these come from history, others are purely individual, and still others belong to the realm of the purely obsessive, which is the most universal thing a writer has in his soul."
the Paris Review: Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68
When I was five my mother lived next door to Jesus. I lived at home with my grandparents. On certain days my Grandma would let my mother take me for a sleep over. As the year wore on I stayed with her for a few days at a time. I spent these days waiting for Jesus. He'd leave early and come home late. I'd sit by the window and watch for his head. We were on the ground floor on Naples. He lived in the unit around the corner. To get to his door he had to walk down the hill a few feet, so his head would pass by the window and he'd grow miraculously smaller.
Jesus was famous, and he lived next door to me. I wanted to ask him a question. I don't remember what my question was, I only remember that I waited for hours to talk to him. I never did. My mother moved from Naples and on her last day I stayed up till two in the morning waiting for nothing. I went back home where all we read was St. Joseph's Missal and True Crime Magazines.
the Axe: Language, Translation, Novels and Obsolescence
We didn't have books. We had music. Every room had at least one stereo (my Uncle specialized in hot ones). My mother had a hi-fi console and when she moved in with me she brought her records: Neil Diamond, Johnny Mathis, Janis Joplin and Barbara Streisand. I was nine. My world was Fosse and Dolly Parton. My Grandmother and I watched Lawrence Welk every weekend and my Uncle kept me up with him to watch Creature Features. I was used to spending my days with my Grandfather walking through Dogpatch. He was in for wine from the corner store. I was in for toys at the junkyard. Chances are things were gonna be different.
I didn't understand that Indians could write until I went to college and found Custer Died For Your Sins on the shelf at Cody's.
"If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need books to affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, Franz Kafka
(Chapter 5) How it works:
1. the Axe will post five days a week.
2. Monday through Thursday I will post once a day. Each statement will be titled: Language, Translation, Novels or Obsolescence.
3. On Fridays I will answer three Letters to the Editor. To send me a question simply send me an email (the address is in my blogger profile). I will select three questions a week and answer them in a post titled: Letters to the Editor.
"Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world."
Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino
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