An excuse to talk about Beowulf!

It's pretty impressive that Anglo-Saxon poetry gets as much attention as it does, considering that only about 30,000 lines of it exist. (That sounds quite respectable until you compare it with ancient Greek poetry: The Iliad and the Odyssey together are about 27,000 lines, and there's a lot more besides.) It also has against it the fact that some of that poetry is really bad religious poetry. Some of it is nice, good, vibrant religious poetry, and some of it is complete drivel, the equivalent of unoriginal poetry about springtime. And last but not least, it is in a form that somehow managed not to evolve at all for like five hundred years, which makes it look like a loser in the literary scheme of things.

Oh, and it's alliterative, which Chaucer thought was lame.

Therefore, when someone who is not an academic shows interest in these poems, I am always surprised. And at first delighted. And then annoyed. Because the people who show interest are always poets, and they always manage to say rude things about the academics who did all the heavy lifting that makes it possible for anyone to translate anything at all. For example, there is a new book coming out called The Word Exchange, in which various current poets translate various Old English poems. I think it looks pretty awesome and someday when I have spare money I will almost certainly buy it. But, I did not appreciate what the editor had to say about the book:

"What's so great about this - all Anglo-Saxon poetry has been translated by scholars and academic people. It has generally been very accurate but not always great poetry. They couldn't get that kind of energy into it."

PARDON ME, SIR. This aggravates me in so many ways I need bullet points to address it.

• It is not a new thing for poets to translate from the Anglo-Saxon. Ezra Pound did it in 1912. Seamus Heaney did it in 1999. A bunch of other people have done it in between. This has been going on fairly steadily for a hundred years.
• It is the express duty of scholars to be accurate. Scholars of Old English are necessarily also historians, and they all have their own interpretations of history, which affect their translations of the poem. They translate the poem to communicate a new interpretation. There is plenty of energy in it, but it's a kind that poets aren't built to recognize or particularly care about.
• It is the express duty of poets to be loosey-goosey, touchy-feely, and artsy-fartsy. If you want extreme violence (referring here to Beowulf) beautifully rendered, you go and read a translation by a poet. If you want extreme violence as expressed by the people who knew about it -- regardless of how they expressed it -- go for the scholar.
• The difference between the translations of poets and scholars is only in their approach. Poets are trying to create a version of the poem that will evoke the same feelings in their modern audience that the original version evoked in the Anglo-Saxon audience. They're interested in the experience of the poem, whereas scholars are interested in the Anglo-Saxons. They want to get as close to the original version as possible, because that's what moved the Anglo-Saxons. It isn't about how you are feeling, it's about how they were feeling, and what in the text made them feel it. If you can get there, you're closer to knowing who they were.

I think it's necessary to have both scholars and poets working with these poems, and happily for us, we all have the capability to reconcile both of their approaches in our heads. And since we don't need to choose sides, I see no reason for derision and insults. That goes for everyone, not excepting the scholars who refer to Seamus Heaney's Beowulf translation as Heaneywulf, with the snide implication that it is more about Seamus Heaney and Ireland than it is about Beowulf. Which may be true, but it's still an exceptionally good version of the poem.

Anyway, because so few people care at all about poetry, much less Anglo-Saxon translations, I really just wanted to point out that academics are probably a reasonably large part of the market for this book and it's probably unwise to give interviews in which you basically refer to them as cultural boors. The end.

True Story

"Elisha Scudder was crossing the bay in a canoe -- saw a bear swimming -- struck at him -- missed, the axe going out of his hands into the water. The bear, tired of swimming, mounted into the canoe, and remained in it till it reached the shore; stepping out, and marching off deliberately, without even thanking the ferryman."

When I was 12, "don't touch gravel" was considered an exciting game.

While reading over the weekend I came across this intriguing section:

"After school to-night I went out into Abbie Clark's garden with her and she taught me how to play 'mumble te peg.' It is fun, but rather dangerous. I am afraid Grandmother won't give me a knife to play with."

I looked up mumblety-peg and discovered that it is a game wherein two players stand across from each other with their feet apart, and take turns throwing pocket-knives into the ground, aiming to get as near to their own feet as possible. The person who gets the knife closest to his or her foot wins. You can also win by getting the knife IN your foot, but that is not desirable.

Variations on the game involve drinking while playing, which is obviously a terrible idea, and throwing the knife at the other person's foot rather than your own, which if combined with the alcohol variant seems likely to result in serious injury. Throw in trick tosses and we have a recipe for certain death.

The twelve-year-old girl who wrote the section above goes on to say, in the same paragraph: "Abbie Clark has beautiful pansies in her garden and gave me some roots." I gather from this that both players survived the game without incident, but it does leave me in some doubt as to how many children in the past couple hundred years reached adulthood with all ten toes.

Now I Will Never Have an Empty Inbox Either

It's good to have friends who know your interests.

Cf. Ivan's previous post.

Another sequence of events concerning salt.

1. I get up at an ungodly hour for an appointment the cardiologist made me make several weeks ago.

2. Doctor tells me I am totally fine, but I should lie down quickly in certain cases of nausea, pain, or grossitude, or I will probably faint.

3. I wonder why I got up at an ungodly hour, drove fifteen miles, and paid twenty dollars for a six-minute appointment in which I am being told something I have already learned through trial and error.

4. Doctor adds that I can have "all the salt in the world" including "pretzels, chips, whatever, load it on!"

5. I feel immensely satisfied with life, having just been issued a medical imperative to incorporate Cheetos to my daily diet.

6. I wonder what condition I can develop in order to be told that I am also required to ingest all the saturated fat and hydrogenated oil in the world, because otherwise I really only get to lick the salt off the Cheetos, not eat them.

7. I am sad.

Thank you, great giver of alpacas!

On Saturdays, the post office closes at noon, but the building stays open until three, so you can still check your mail if you are very lazy and have not showered by noon, not that that has ever been an issue for me, no sir. Last weekend I happened to miss noon by about ten minutes, which was distressing as I found a yellow card in my box that said, "You have too much mail." That means I have to go to the window and ask for my mail, like it's 1902 and I'm Anne of Green Gables. Sometimes this card means something exciting has come, but more often it means Axa has sent me an enormous report that cannot physically fit into my box. The post office is willing to crush or destroy almost anything to get it in the box, but even they cannot make that Axa report small enough. They might as well file it in the recycling bin, because that's what I do before I even leave the building, but I guess it would be illegal if they did it. Anyway, it didn't bother me much that I was missing out on an Axa report -- until I remembered that I told Axa to start sending them to me electronically. Which means the yellow card indicated that there was a chance, albeit low, of something interesting having come.

This part of the story actually has no bearing on the rest of it, but I felt it needed a bit of suspense at the beginning, so that you could experience, in miniature, the day and a half that I spent thinking, "WHAT IS IT?" and therefore see why it was so funny when I finally found out what it was. When I returned on Monay I was still mostly expecting some enormous nuisance from one of the many organizations that exist to plague me. What I got was this:

I appear to have been mysteriously subscribed to Alpacas Magazine. That, or I hit the best jackpot ever. Which is the jackpot that randomly sends people camelid-related periodicals. Now that I think about this, there should be a lottery that is not about money, but is about completely unexpected things happening at unexpected times. They would be good things, obviously. Things like, you buy a ticket, and six months later a stranger mails you a postcard from Brazil telling you that you are the brightest star. (That will make perfect sense in a minute.) Everyone would win this new surprise-based lottery, and none of them would be tempted to funnel their sudden wealth into a doomed restaurant and lose it all, which apparently is the typical fate of lotto winners.

Anyway. I have been reading this magazine, and so far, one thing I've learned is that the advertising of the alpaca-breeding world trumps all other advertising I've ever seen. For example:

First thought: "That's not Sirius Black!" Second thought: "Actually, Sirius Black was an Animagus, so maybe it could be Sirius Black!" Third thought: "This ad couldn't be any weirder." But I was wrong. Behold the inside:

My loyal friend Simon P. and I have a tradition of trading headlines that we have misread. Recently I sent her the headline "Heavy Rains Linked to Humans." I had misread it as "Heavy Rains Linked to Hamas," which led me to believe for a moment that Hamas had genuinely impressive powers. She wrote back and said, "I misread your Hamas as Llamas." I don't know if that would be impressive for llamas or not. They do spit, after all, if you want to consider that rain. But the point is that I sometimes fall victim to little reading errors. When I read the right-hand side of this ad, for some reason I read it as "Satan King," and I must tell you I was very confused as to why the Satanic alpaca was being depicted among puffy clouds with a heavenly light shooting out of its head. Even now I am not entirely sure what's happening in this ad, but it's sort of a masterpiece if you ask me.

Now that I've got that important advertising analysis out of the way, I should say this is actually a terribly interesting magazine that many people could benefit from. There's this one article on alpaca behavior in which someone complains to the author that his alpaca spits. He believes it is simply the nature of this alpaca to spit. If this alpaca existed in a neutral vacuum, the gosh-darned creature would still spit. The author asks him, nonchalantly, what he is doing when the alpaca spits. He says he is picking nits out of its fur. She says, "Stop doing that." I really think the lesson here also applies to humans. No one is born a spitter. So to speak.

There's also an entire article on how to take good pictures of alpacas that is really about how to take good pictures, period. And, to my delight, it ends with an explanation of why you should never send a designer an image that is 72 dpi and expect it to print well on paper. Seriously, alpaca-photographers, non-alpaca photographers, and, to cover all our bases, photographers who may or may not be alpacas. Don't do this. It makes your designer spit.

I'm almost done here, but there are a couple more things. First, did you know there was such a thing as Berserk Male Syndrome? Yes, of course you did, because you remember college. But that's not what I mean. Evidently if you hang out with a baby alpaca too much, the baby starts to think people are alpacas too, and then when they're adults, they start feeling that they need to defend their territory from you. Apparently this is quite dangerous, and the condition is incurable, and generally they end up being euthanized. Fortunately it is rather rare. Usually when alpacas are mean, it's because you're picking nits out of them or giving them images that are 72 dpi. Anyway, it's a great name for a syndrome. Flexible usage.

Second, aside from the holy alpacas above, there is some great marketing in here. Take this tagline for example: "When roses aren't enough for your girl... try Rosehaven Alpacas!" While there are relatively few circumstances under which is it practical to bestow a bouquet of alpacas on someone, I love this idea both figuratively and literally.

And third, this:

Jackpot.

And stop sending me junk mail!

Ring, ring.

Simon: Hello?

Dude: Hi Simon, this is so-and-so from Distinguished Academic Press. I'm calling about your resume.

Simon: Okay.

Dude: Now, this position is in Manhattan. I understand you live outside of Manhattan?

Simon: laughs

Silence.

Simon realizes Dude actually has no clue where anything is located north of Yonkers. For all he knows, dragons live there, in the hinterlands.

Simon: Yes. Several hours outside of Manhattan.

Dude: Oh. Really? Wow. Well, we'll call you for a phone interview if we don't fill this position with people we can bring in directly.

Simon: Thank you so much. Goodbye.

All I can think is, surely this press has published an atlas he could look at sometime?

Snow

I'm staying in today and reading a book about seagoing vessels. This is called escapism.

Statistics

Recently, VIDA published a set of statistics that makes it horrifyingly clear how underrepresented women are in book reviews and as book reviewers. Everyone who has anything to do with book reviewing right now probably wants to hide under their desk; it's very embarrassing. For example, The New York Review of Books had 239 book reviewers last year, and 200 of them were men. It published 365 reviews, and only 59 of them were of books by women. These numbers are not just a little hinky, they are wildly insane. And they're very similar across the vast majority of book-reviewing publications.

This subject came up a few months ago and I wrote about it then, wondering whether there simply are more books by men, and if so, why? Apparently men do get published more readily (surprise), and the anecdotal concensus is that it's because women don't submit as much work. The anecdotal logic behind the anecdotal concensus is that women are not as aggressive, are more easily discouraged by rejection, or are probably too busy, you know, doing laundry. There's also a whole thing about the perception of what constitutes "real" literature, as in, if it's about lady-problems, or even just from a lady-perspective, maybe it doesn't really matter universally in the way that books by or about men do. Which is a can of worms that makes me too angry to write about coherently so I'll save that for later.

Anyway, I thought before I started criticizing book review editors' decisions, I should look at what I read over the past year and see whether my completely random reading habits led me down the evil path of accidental sexism. AND THEY DID. Mostly. Facts (not scientific):

• Of the 47 books I read in the past twelve months, only 18 were by women, which is 38%. Since women make up roughly 25% of published authors (last year, anyway), I'm doing better than average. Especially considering that I was making no particular effort to read women.

• However, I was making a particular effort to read more translations, and I managed to read 13 of those, or 28%. Translated fiction makes up less than 1% of work published in the US annually. So the fact that I read that pathetically low percentage of women while reading that ridiculously high percentage of translations suggests to me that I should pay more attention.

• But back to the point: Of the 7 authors by whom I read more than one book, 4 were women. (A. S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, Sigrid Undset.) But, one was a trilogy, so I don't know if that counts.

• Of the books that stand out as being the best writing, 3 were by women, and 3 were by men. (These were, incidentally, Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories, Heller's Catch-22, Dinesen's Out of Africa, Sayers's Gaudy Night, Gavelis's Vilnius Poker, and Cunningham's The Hours -- I recommend them all except maybe Vilnius Poker, which has to be the most harrowing masterpiece I've ever read.)

• Women were more likely to have male main characters than men were to have female main characters. (Michael Cunningham was the sole male author with a female main character -- three, in fact -- although David Mitchell had a pretty awesome female ensemble character in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet who carried the narrative for a while.)

• Women were also more likely to have developed male characters in their ensemble cast than men were to have developed female characters in theirs.

• Men were 100% more likely to talk about genitals. Men were also 100% more likely to write scenes in which women throw themselves at the main character, to the point that it stretched the limits of my credulity. This was particularly true of translated fiction for some reason, but I'm limiting my generalizations today to men and women; perhaps I will generalize about Europeans and South Americans in another post.

• On a non-gender-related note, in the past year I've read nothing published earlier than 1920. It is very odd for me to go an entire year without reading a Victorian novel. I had better go read some Brontës lest I forget how to use words like "lest." (I had to go back and change to "Brontës" from "Dickens." You see, you see how it gets in your head that men are the standard? AAAAAUGH.)

In the future I will probably pay more attention to the gender of the writers I read, because that's the only way to be sure that more of what I read is by women. That may not seem sensible, numbers-wise, but I don't think my picture of the world is complete unless everyone is being represented in at least a reasonably fair way. If female writers weren't living in a male-dominated society, and that society weren't being reflected back at them in 75% of the books they read and learned from, maybe more of them would believe it is their duty to submit their work, that the world cannot do without it any better than it could without work by men, and then we'd have more of their work to read, and then we could change what kinds of attitudes would get reflected back at us. And eventually a woman could run for president without her clothing or her emotions being a subject of debate, and the media would stop blaming the victim, and girls would grow up to be scientists, and everyone would stop using the word "woman" as a qualifier in front of words denoting certain professions, and the 2010 VIDA statistics would be so absurd we'd all laugh.

If Hemingway Had a Pizza Place

Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa is the memoir of a 1933 safari he went on with his wife (the second of four). In it he describes how he mostly fails to shoot anything good, and if he succeeds, someone else gets a better specimen and he gets jealous for a while and then he has a drink in the evening and shakes hands with the other fellow and balance in the universe is temporarily restored. Variations on this theme are brought to a close when he at last proves to himself that he is, indeed, a superior shot. Maybe the best shot ever to have lived. Maybe the best shot ever to live. Hemingway then satisifed that he is the manliest of all men, all is right with the world, and the book ends.

I exaggerate because there is nothing else you can do with Hemingway but mock him and secretly resent that he actually is kind of better than everyone else, his personal problems notwithstanding. Anyway, here's a brief brief exerpt, concerning the long-awaited shooting of a kudu:

"The Wanderobo-Masai and I looked at this kudu, measured his horns, smelled the fine smell of him, sweeter than an eland, even, stroked his nose, his neck, and his shoulder, marvelling at the great ears, and the smoothness and cleanness of his hide, looked at his hooves, that were built long, narrow, and springy so he seemed to walk on tip-toe, felt under his shoulder for the bullet-hole and then shook hands again while the Wanderobo-Masai told what a man he was and I told him he was my pal and gave him my best four-bladed pocket knife."

Not being up on the particulars of African ungulates, I went through the book picturing everything as an antelope because I figured that was roughly accurate for whatever Hemingway was hunting at any given time. I meant to look up kudus and elands after I finished the book but I forgot.

Skip head a few months to this conversation with my sister, enhanced for comic effect.

Sister: We could get pizza for dinner.
Me: Is there a good pizza place near you?
Sister: Well, there's the place up the street. I don't know if it's good, but it's fine.
Me: Hmmm.
Sister: It has animal heads mounted on the walls.
Me: SOLD.

Thinking of a potential blog post, and hoping very much for kudu, I brought my camera and subjected my sister to the humiliation of loitering around while I took not-terribly-discreet pictures. I honestly can't imagine they're not used to people taking pictures inside a pizza place that is full of taxidermied wildlife, but it was still totally weird of me. Yet, so worth it. This hunter-slash-pizza-parlor-entrepreneur had definitely been to Africa and pretty much shot everything in sight, examples below.

Lion (clearly)

Eland, brown bear (brown bear obviously not African)

African buffalo (maybe), a trio of impala in the corner, another impala over the lamp, and an oryx (with the very long horns)

Caribou, (zebra on the other side), caribou, (kudu on the other side), caribou, (ice cream cone on the other side), wildebeest

I'm not wild about hunting for sport, buuuuut there is something so extremely weird about this pizza-by-Hemingway atmosphere that it very nearly crosses the line into "delightful." It could only be better if these were the decorations in, say, a restaurant with an entirely vegetarian menu.

If you live nearby and these photos do not convince you to find this place and go there, I will add that the pizza is pretty good, too. However, I firmly believe it would be worth a trip either way. This decor is rather rare. As, I now suspect, are caribou.

Dogsled Racing at Mendon Ponds

A couple of weeks ago I went with some pals to see the dogsled races at this year's Winter Fest. It was extremely cold and I was too concerned about losing toes to frostbite to take very good pictures. Also, dogs are fast and my camera is slow. Especially in the cold.

These people came with six dogs and hooked them up to this chain one by one. I have a terribly cute picture of them adoring a little girl, but one can't just go around posting pictures of people's kids on the Internet, so you don't get to see it. It is super cute, though. They were very friendly dogs.

Apparently there is this thing where you attach dogs to yourself while you're on skis, and they pull you. It is very strange, but it looks like fun. These dogs started off at a leisurely trot, as if to communicate to everyone present, "We were not bred for this, but we have been promised treats at the finish line."

 

I was the most surprised to see this handsome fellow racing, as my experience with Golden Retrievers suggest they are not into running flat-out for four-mile stretches. His accompanying skier said that this is the only Golden Retriever he's seen doing this. Usually they're so much more interested in being with humans that they want to wrap themselves around your legs rather than pull you. I bet this one fetches, too. Weirdo.

 

Here's an actual dogsled. The Huskies (or whatever kind of mix they are) were impressively fast. There were never more than three to a sled, but it would have been cool to see a whole pack racing.

Huskies are very adorable, but they remind me so much of wolves that they make me slightly nervous. It must be some kind of primordial instinct. I will probably stick with Golden Retrievers in the future, even if they aren't star athletes.

After the dogsled racing I came home and threw up a lot. So that day was a mixed bag. But the morning, at least, was pretty awesome.

La La Land

I sometimes forget how much LA is like a foreign country... this strange land where you wake up, do situps by the ocean while the palm trees sway, where you grab your iced coffee in a corn-based to-go cup, meet your friends for movies at the swanky theater with the reserve seating and the leather couches, stop at the organic market for floss because you know the selection will be good (and you've been worried about all that discarded plastic) and end up going home with one that is not only biodegradable but has a Fresh! Cardamom flavor. This is my life.

It's pretty ridiculous.

What to do with extra Fimo.

If you are working on a project and you buy the wrong kind of Fimo and find it next to impossible to sculpt into the shape you want, what you should do is use it to make models of sea slugs. Or, better yet, you should show your friend a picture of a sea slug and demand that he make one for you while you work on something else.

Obviously you would need to have an unusual kind of friend, and you would be need to working in an atmosphere in which the phrase, "Sea slugs happen to be a particular interest of mine," is met with a frankly bizarre level of indulgence.

That should explain, to anyone who sees it, what this rather unique object lying around my house is. It's a homemade Chromodoris magnifica magnet, of course, what else?

Sequence of Events

1. Doctor suggests I may not be getting enough salt.

2. I imagine myself being issued a medical imperative to incorporate Cheetos into my daily diet.

3. Doctor recommends drinking some V8.

4. I am sad.

Inspector Havers

I have been making my way through all of the Inspector Lynley episodes in existence. It occurs to me, as I near the end, that Inspector Lynley is an idiot. The main conflict of the story, at least in the beginning, is that Lynley is an aristocrat who drives a fancy car and appears to do police work just because it's fun and he happens to be okay at it, while his detective sergeant, Barbara Havers is working-class, has a generally bad attitude, and bitterly hates everything about him that is privileged. Here's the thing: Havers is by far the better detective. Lynley is always like, "He can't have murdered anyone, he went to Oxford," or "Yes, I totally pulled strings to get this case because it involves cricket," or "I am too emotionally crippled to focus properly on my job." Meanwhile, Havers is doing all the work, taking all the risks, standing up to everyone, putting all the clues together, and being one hundred percent awesome, all while maintaining an admirable level of snark toward her superiors. If there is one thing I wish we could have seen resolved before the show was cancelled, it's Havers getting promoted to detective inspector and getting out from under Lynley's kind of condescending shadow. Which I hope would have happened eventually. I suppose I could read the books, but the books are way more brutal than the show, and I can't handle them. My plan is to make Ivan read them all, and give me the "good parts" version.

Oh Gray Day, Oh Perfect Gray Day

This is how hedgehogs celebrate the new year: with fermented apple cider.

This could go on for some time, in case you wondered.