It's surreal

When have you last heard the expression, "It's surreal!"

All the time, is what I say. 

The word "surreal" has become synonymous to "weird" or "strange".

Yet, that's not what surreal means.

Andrea Scott of the New Yorker Magazine, revisits the word in context of surrealism in the art world. 

She writes of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte in anticipation of a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Arts from September 28 to January 12 ("Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary"). 

Magritte's art created a jangling effect on the beholder's sensibilities because he transposed the banal and the unnerving.

Case in point is the painting "Time Transfixed":

How does one make sense of the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace, and in our "normal" thought we don't instinctively associate a locomotive with a bourgeois domestic accoutrement like a fireplace.

But the presence of the dangling locomotive from a living room structure does alter our perception of both the locomotive and the fireplace, and together the two transform the ordinary scene into a strange one.

The effect in totality is surreal. 

When the ordinary becomes strange, it's surreal. 

According to Scott, Magritte "saw himself as a secret agent in the war on bourgeois values, and described his mission as a restoring of the familiar to the strange, because he felt that too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar.

In other words, the bourgeois domesticates and makes natural that which is really created/constructed, whether it be objects or values.

So that's surrealism 101 for you, and next time I hear the word surreal uttered when a centaur appears in the middle of Time Square, I'll wince.

A conversion table for Britishisms

British politeness is no different from American politeness in that sometimes it's just plain rhetorical.

The Britishers, like their counterparts in the United States, say things they don't really mean.

The following is a conversion table that translates British expressions of politeness into the unpleasant truths which such politeness disguises:

WHAT THE BRITISH SAY	WHAT THE BRITISH MEAN	WHAT FOREIGNERS UNDERSTAND
I hear what you say	I disagree and do not want to discuss it further	He accepts my point of view
With the greatest respect	You are an idiot	He is listening to me
That's not bad	That's good	That's poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	He thinks I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest	Do it or be prepared to justify yourself	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally/ by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It doesn't really matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I'll bear it in mind	I've forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I'm sure it's my fault	It's your fault	Why do they think it was their fault?
You must come for dinner	It's not an invitation, I'm just being polite	I will get an invitation soon
I almost agree	I don't agree at all	He's not far from agreement
I only have a few minor comments	Please rewrite completely	He has found a few typos
Could we consider some other options	I don't like your idea	They have not yet decided

Lovely lines

I like to occasionally open my mind to stirring evocations of human, especially female, beauty in literature.

Here is an instance of it from Mark Helprin's new novel In Sunlight and in Shadows:

When she put down her purse on a bench the strap fell over the arm in two perfect, parallel sine waves, as if she were infused with so much beauty it had to find outlet even in her accidents

I feel like I could draw this.

Characterize this

When defense secretary Leon Panetta said he didn't want to "characterize" the electronic communication between Florida socialite Jill Kelly and General Allen, what did he mean?

He added that he "didn't want to do anything," implying thereby that an act of characterizing would be tantamount to doing something.

Doing what?

In a parlance of writing, at least in the parlance that I am familiar with, to "characterize" is to label, or to give something a specific name and ergo an unique identity. Thus to "characterize" would be an active verb in the realm of writing.

I remember asking students in my creative non-fiction class to "characterize" the particular quality of beauty or tragedy (among others) they see in something.

For instance, we would discuss the classic photograph of Marilyn Monroe--the one where she is giving off a full-lipped smile--and students would be encouraged to claim ownership of the beauty that they see and understand in the image through an adjective: how is the image beautiful? Characterize!

No sooner than the active verb of characterizing was released into the classroom, students would generally feel at a loss about what was being asked of them.

But out of the fog would emerge something interesting.

Somebody would squeak out "tragic." That would be a characterizing word indeed, I would assure them. We would go on from there into more specific ways of characterizing the quality of Monroe's "beauty." 

A fab example of a characterizing word is "hard." In her pithy essay on artist Georgia O'Keefe, Joan Didion, nails the quality of the appeal of O'Keefe's painting as "hard." there is a certain "hardness" about her work, claims Didion. 

To "characterize" something, then is to commit oneself to a very specific interpretation in an unambiguous (though complex) way.

When Panetta refused to "characterize" the communication under investigation (as "sexually explicit"--the media's characterizing word of choice), he refused a commitment.

How predictably political of him.   

Words

[...] There are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don't have in English [...] It's like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can't explain, because there isn't a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages of the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion.

---"Breatharians" by Callan Wink

Strategy

The word is frequently used by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

He has been chastised in the media for using the word as a red herring--to detract from the real problem of ignorance which lies within himself. He knows little about the world and about current geopolitical realities. But to avoid exposing his state of blank-slatedness in these matters, he uses the word "strategy" forcefully.

Last night Romney couldn't say anything concrete about foreign policy issues, but said he had a "strategy" for global affairs. At one point he said he had a "strategy" for not only solving the problems in the Middle-East, but also in the whole world.

So, he has a "strategy" for the world?

What does that mean?

Nothing.

The word was made famous by George Bush Jr, except that he said "stragety". The action that ensued from the Bush regime is invasion and war.

Regardless of whether a politician uses the word "strategy" or a Bushism version of it, I believe the word itself is an empty, and permit me to say this--a hoax word.

It's a managerial word that implies nothing but a deferral of action, or a form of action that is monolithic and gets botched easily because it doesn't take into account the messy changeability of real situations. Real situations continually evolve and take up different direction at varying points in space and time. No "strategy" can manage and control this.

We could campaign for bidding adieu to "strategy".

Sentences...

There is a rumor that Condoleeza Rice could be Mitt Romney's vice-presidential nominee. Rice denies this and says she doesn't want to re-enter politics. But as the NYTimes reports, "a barnburner of a speech" Rice gave to Romney's donors a few weeks ago, "apparently created a boomlet of support for her potential candidacy."

As I extrapolate from the report I see the following: "A barnburner of a speech creates a boomlet of support." Alliteration in politics! The English language in connection with politics is going places. Orwell would've been happy. 

Natural and economic disasters

Economics is everywhere. Its omnipresence is so pervasive that it "sucks".

Now, even the world's most famous, end-of-the-world terminologies, that used to have at least a quasi, if not pure, religious connotation, have been co-opted by economics.

The word "deluge", for instance, is now part of the parlance of the much publicized doomsday scenario of an imminent global economic disaster.

What would future deluges and tsunamis of currencies look like? An avalanche of currencies untethered to any nation, and hitting the shores of countries in a state of loose untetheredness, and rendering the economies of nations weaker and weaker.

Who are the Noahs? The Goldman Sachs? And whom will they take aboard their ship? the 1%?

"Fug" has ceded place to "cu&^"

According to linguist Ruth Wajnyrb's dictionary of slangs, Expletive Deleted, dirty talk cements fellowship within the group doing the talking and obscenity enhances one's vivacity.

This I find to be true, as I have been a half-hearted ear witness to many a dirty talk bonding on NYC subways. My experience tells me that Dominican Republican-American kids hailing from the Bronx specialize in this sort of bonding.

Sex, or adolescent sex, is the richest contributor to their slang.

Wajnyrb discusses ethnic variations of verbal filth. The Arabic and Turkish like elaborate and "surrealist" curses: "You father of sixty dogs."

Bosnians tear apart families: "May your mother fart at a school meeting."

Scots and African-Americans hold actual competitions of verbal abuse.

Here is a prize-winning entry:

I hate to talk about your mother, she's a good old soul,
She got a ten-ton pussy and a rubber asshole.

Wjnyrb's words of wisdom: "Fuck" (pronounced as "fug" by American G.I.'s in Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead) has ceded first place to "cunt."

Modern & Modernist

Teaching Modernist poetry, in the form of T.S. Eliot, can be a tricky task, especially if the classroom is dominated by undergraduates who take "Modernist" to mean "Modern," and then simply the meaning of "Modern" to mean anything that is connected with "moving forward" in a most jejune sense of the term--technology.

Reading a review of a collection of letters by Samuel Beckett this morning tells me that I need to get traction in my explanation of how "Modernist" poetry could be the opposite of what to be "Modern" in the early 21st century signifies to a bunch of people with thinking that is pretty straight-jacketed.

Beckett was an arch-Modernist. He wanted to shear expressions off linguistic excess. He is best known for sparseness of expression, and he felt that sparseness would enable him to hold up for the reader's viewing that which he is really trying to show.

Language can diffuse the picture of what one tries to show, or language can cloud our vision of the "nothingness" that Beckett felt ultimately lay behind language.

Here is a sample of that linguistic bareness: 

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands—no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.

Beckett is establishing his Modernist stance here: Trying to express/represent that we see almost everyday and hold in our memories--the scene of an oldster holding the hand of a child and moving.

The linguistic bareness upholds the motion. We see the two walk.

The Modernists like Beckett thought the middle class wanted too many words behind which they conveniently incubate in their complacency. The aim of the Modernists were to jolt, amaze and shock the middle-class out of their complacent thinking of what it means to be modern.

T.S. Eliot might have wanted to do the same: unhinge the bourgeoisie's settled ways of thinking. I'm not sure technology by itself can do that. Where communicating ideas are concerned, technology, I feel, can cast the already nonsensical verbiage that is spewed in the name of "expression" every day (especially on the Internet), in a further sheen of mental staidness. 

Modernism can help us understand where we confuse words and meanings.

American Constitution Needs To Be Upgraded?

According to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, the U.S. Constitution can no longer serve as a model for emergent and contemporary democracies:

 I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. 

Not only is this a sign that American prestige and power in the world of today is waning, but it also signals the continual displacement of the old by the new and is a poignant testament to the dynamism of change. Change is a process and things are always in flux. Let's bow to that.

What demoralizes me, however, is the language in which this history of change is being minted: It's the same old language of the Web and the market. Thus, for instance, a prominent legal scholar has attributed the decline of the American constitution's global influence to the following:

Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1. 

The scholar is referring to the the availability of "newer" and "sexier" and more powerful operating systems in the Constitutional marketplace.