Christopher has posted an entry over at his new blog Безѹмниѥ (Bezumnie). It’s depressing to have to think about the intersection of Indo-European philology and racism, but his entry reminded me of some of the connections between the Journal of Indo-European Studies, several issues of which I own, and the eugenics and racist Mankind Quarterly (which does not have a working website): Roger Pearson (here and here), publisher and editor. Mankind Quarterly is published by Scott-Townsend Publishers (which does not have a website) which is supported by the Pioneer Fund (here and here). Pearson, a British citizen, was invited to come to the USA in 1965 by Willis Carto who is the founder of the Liberty Lobby and the Institute for Historical Review.
Oh, dear, more crank linguistics from the Beeb. What will they say over at the Language Log? The article is about how the South Asian accent of English is the “same”. The biggest laguh though is at the end of the article:
Ms Mathur’s own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar—seven, for example, is saith in Welsh, saat in Hindi.
“These kind of things really struck me,” she said.
“When I reached number nine they were exactly the same—it’s naw and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence.”
She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University’s School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language—the proto-European language.
“It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit,” Ms Mathur added.
“So basically that’s where this link originates from.”
And this is news to some folks? The BBC could’ve done their homework and looked at a copy of the Encyclopædia Britannica. During my time in Wales, I never heard anything approaching an Indian accent.
Jonathon Delacour, over at The Heart of Things, has an entry examining the misinterpretation of a Talleyrand quotation by Bertolucci at the end of his Prima della rivoluzione (1964):
He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is.
Or so read the English subtitled translation that he and I both read and interpreted as the regret of an aging reactionary pining for the good old days. The original quotation, (from François Guizot’s Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, 1858), is different:
M. Talleyrand me disait un jour: “Qui n’a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1789 ne sait pas ce que c’est que le plaisir de vivre.”
(Monsieur Talleyrand said to me one day: “He who has not lived during the years around 1789 can not know what is meant by the pleasure of life.”)
Not before the French revolution, but immediately before and after the pivotal year 1789, the very year of the revolution. Go, read his entry.
My entry title is from Napoleon regarding Talleyrand after it was discovered by the former that the latter was negotiating with foreign powers.
Ah! tenez, vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie.
(Oh, get out of here, you piece of shit in a silk stocking!)
Just watched both the 1934 and 1959 version of Imitation of Life over the weekend. It started because I was leafing through a book of Fassbinder’ writings, and was reminded, again, that I had never seen any of the works of Douglas Sirk. There is a DVD containing both films, and Netflix had it. All in all, I liked the Claudette Colbert / Louise Beavers version better than the Lana Turner / Juanita Moore one. The story, about a young black woman and her obsession with “passing” is dated. But one theme that has not is only present in the later film: working woman. In the first movie, Colbert is as entrepeneurial as they come in the midst of the depression. She tries Beavber’s flapjacks and starts a restaurant which in a decade or so transmogrifies into an Aunt Jemima style pankcake empire. In the Turner version, Lana becomes a famous actress, with no help from Moore, and then starts the John Gavin nagging machine: you cannot be a mother (and a wife) while you’re a successful actress, &c. Colbert has a boyfriend, too, but he’s an ichthyologist and quite oblivious to the fact the she’s a pancake queen (BTW, I see from IMDB that this version of the movie was co-written by Preston Sturges).
Timothy Burke has written a nice little entry on neo-cons, the war in Iraq, and love poetry, triggered by this pæan to Paul Wolfowitz from David Brooks of the NYT. If only the evening news was so well written and reasoned.
This week’s news about the shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a US-manned barricade is a good example. For months now, both Iraqis and observers have been talking about a pattern of reckless military aggression at checkpoints. They have often been met with overwrought, hysteric condemnation from pro-war pundits and bloggers, with accusations that showing concern over such incidents is just a tactic in a conspiratorial attempt to weaken the war effort. Hitchens hit the low note perfectly when he declared that the US can only lose in Iraq if it defeats itself, with the clear suggestion that any and all criticism of the war effort is a form of treason. Sorry, but that’s got it exactly opposite. If the war really is following the most generously constructed version of the neocon argument, it is absolutely crucial to treat every Iraqi citizen with the same presumptive respect as the US Constitution instructs the US government to treat its own citizens.
The whole point of the occupation is to demonstrate the virtues of the rule of law, to move Iraqis from subjugation to autocracy to a society in which their rights-bearing humanity is fully recognized by the state. I’m absolutely in sympathy with the soldiers at those checkpoints, with their legitimate anxieties and fearfulness, facing the very real possibility of death from suicide bombing. They’re not monsters when they shoot quickly at any possible threat. But at the same time, if you hand the men and women on those dangerous, deadly firing lines a ready-made alibi, if you don’t have meaningful oversight or a demand for restraint, even saints in time are going to pre-emptively open fire on anything that even vaguely concerns them, and more orphans and even allies are going to tumble out of the back of cars coated in the blood of their loved ones and associates. And afterwards, they’re going to say that the car was speeding, or failed to respond to commands, when very possibly the car and its inhabitants were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the uncritical, unthinking defenders of the war habitually froth at the mouth every time this happens and cry “Rally round our troops, boys!”, presumptively believe that whatever the Pentagon is serving up today must be true, they’re turning their backs on their own declared war objectives. The Iraqis are owed the same oversight, diligence and skepticism about authority that we would demand for ourselves.
[quoted from Easily Distracted]
You learn something new every day: Gotteschalc a
I’m currently reading a book, and reading it slowly because it’s so damned fine.
The BBC can, in its The Spoken Word, try to ban from the air There’s two, everyone followed by plural verbs, data used as a singular, between you and I, and like as a conjunction, and insist on the use of less money but fewer people, while at the same time showing some tolerence for who instead of whom, different than as well as different from, the splitting of infinitives, the placement of only somewhat distant from what it modifies, and none followed by are. It can do this, and insist on doing it, because those who control the airwaves say that is how English should be used rather than how it is used. English grammar is what they say it is rather than what we might observe it to be. Those who treat grammar like this do not concern themselves with most of the rules of language; they are not even aware of them. They insist on prescribing a few arbitrary rules that we are required to follow or suffer social consequences. the few rules become the “grammar” we concern ourselves with and the great many uncontroversial rules we all follow are ignored completely. And many of us are willing participants in this controversy whose only victims are ourselves.
[Ronald Wardhaugh Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language. Blackwell, 1999, pp.105f. (Dr Wardhaugh is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Toronto.)]
And a tip of the language hat to Geoff Pullum for suggesting Wardhaugh’s book on Language Log.
Listening, bleary-eyed early this morning, to the Internet radio station run by Dr Yo, I heard out of the corner of my ear:
And if you survive till two thousand and five
I hope you’re exceedingly thin
For if you are stout you will have to breathe out
While the people around you breathe in
[Pink Floyd, Division Bell, “Point Me At the Sky”]
Leave it to Pink Floyd to warn me about my slowing metabolism.
Just got off the phone with the international department at National / Citer in Paris regarding the Citroën we rented in Europe last month. On the second day of driving, a passing truck flung a pebble at us which dinged the windshield. Not much we could do, but try to forget it until we returned the car. Fast forward to two weeks later, when we drop off the car early on Sunday morning, tell the only National representative at the airport about the damage. She waves us off with a Gallic shrug and a “That’s OK.” On Friday, I get a registered letter from France threatening the entire minimum deductable of nearly 500 euros because we didn’t turn in an accident report. Also included is a blank accident report to fill in and instructions to return it ASAP. Of course, when I phone, their office is closed. Nothing to do but wait out the weekend, during which time I notice a charge on my credit card bill from the rental company for 280 euros. WTF? I filled the gas tank. Anyway, this morning I get up extra early to call Paris again. The friendly woman explains that the credit card charge is for fixing the windshield. I can turn in the accident report, but it won’t help, and she’ll fax me the paperwork from the people who fixed the damage. All in all, not as bad as I imagined it when the pebble was first flung.
Something happened. What? UJG took a hiatus. I’ve been meaning to blog about a recent trip to Europe, but the flu I caught in the Rhineland—my second of the season—took it out of me. That and a rash of spicy pork product infesting the trackback pings. For now, a quick entry about two films I saw recently: Rick and Anbe Sivam (both 2003). They make a weird double feature, and I only saw the first third of Anbe Sivam. Rick was written by Daniel Handler who is better known as Lemony Snicket. It was directed by Curtiss Clayton, better known as an editor. In fact, Roger Ebert tells the following story about Clayton:
NOTE: The director is Curtiss Clayton, who has edited many of Gus Van Sant’s movies. He was scheduled to be the editor of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, but walked off the job on the first day of post-production when Rick was green-lighted. I don’t know what passed between them, but Gallo told me he “freaked out” when Clayton bailed; is it possible that Gallo’s propensity for putting hexes on people was the inspiration for Michelle’s great scene?
In Rick, Michelle (Sandra Oh), after being verbally abused by Rick (Bill Pullman) during a job interview and at her place of work, curses him. The story of Rick is based on the Verdi opera Rigoletto (Rick’s name is Rick O’Lette). (Of course, the funny part of this story is that Gallo and Ebert had a hissy-fit shouting match at Cannes which ended with Gallo putting a curse on Ebert’s colon.) Most of the reviews have been negative to middling, but I think Handler got the raw feel of new economy corporate America down pat on his first try.
The other, Tamil-language movie, needs a little back story. After work, I went to visit my friends Sandhya and Krishnan who have been indulging themselves in Tamil movies. So, while I sat chatting with Krishnan and drinking some madras coffee, in went the DVD and on came the flick. We started watching with German subtitles (curiously intermixed with English as is the Tamil) and then switched to English. A young Indian, who works as an ad executive in the States, comes back to India to marry. He’s no longer a typical Indian, but pretty much one confused Desi. He’s loud, obnoxious, impatient, and constantly and facilely swearing in English. He lands in Orissa, north of Tamil Nadu, and discovers that planes and trains to Chennai have been cancelled. So, he ends up in the company of a wiser and older man, who turns out to be a Trade Union rep who is returning to Chennai with a large injury settlement check. This character, played by Kamal Hassan, is also a sympathetically portrayed communist. Unfortunately, we stopped the movie after the first big song (on top of a bus after the ad executive has ingested some bhang), because Sandhya had already seen the film a couple of times and found the last two-thirds sad. Turns out that the woman the ad guy is marrying was also the previously engaged to the trade union guy, and her father owns the factory that he was injured in. I’m sure there were also plenty more songs.