I was turning for comfort and relief to Seneca, as I often do, when he turned around and stabbed me in the eyeball with this triple-forked slam. He’s writing about his contemporaries who have screwed-up priorities. His contemporaries, but maybe also ours.
Quis est istorum qui non malit rem publicam turbari quam comam suam? qui non sollicitior sit de capitis sui decore quam de salute? qui non comptior esse malit quam honestior?
—Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae 12.3
“Who among these creeps wouldn’t prefer that the republic be in disarray, rather than his hair? Who of them wouldn’t be more concerned about how his scalp appears than about his health? Who of them wouldn’t prefer to be more well-groomed than more honest?”
As Fate or Chaos would have it, the LoA collection of Jimmy Breslin arrived on my doorstep this week, so that on the evening when Trump’s guilty verdict was announced in Manhattan, I got to read Breslin’s verdict on Trump from 34 years earlier.
My blanket praise of New Yorkers should not be construed to include the New York Times–then and now, A Part of the Problem!™ I was interested to read Breslin’s take on Trump “The Master of the Steal”, a column that appeared in Newsday back in 1990.
Trump was going through one of his periodic stages of bankruptcy and financial disaster at the time, but Breslin, though contemptuous of Trump, was confident that he would find more people to give him money. “Trump survives by Corum’s Law,” said Breslin.
What is Corum’s Law, and who was Corum? Not the Michael Moorcock character, unfortunately. Bill Corum was a sometime journalist who was hired to run the Kentucky Derby at a time of crisis: “Newspapers all over the world claimed Louisville was a place where Derby visitors were robbed.”
Corum took the job, but he insisted that the problem was not a problem.
“If a guy from North Dakota goes home from here after the race and has to be met because he doesn’t even have cab fare, that guy is going to say to himself, ‘Wow, I must have had a hell of a time. I can’t wait for next year.’ But if that same guy goes home and still has half his money, he is going to say, ‘I guess I didn’t have such a great time after all.’
“Because, gentlemen, this is the rule. A sucker has to get screwed.”
—Bill Corum, quoted in Breslin’s “The Master of the Steal”
Breslin explains Trump’s otherwise inexplicable success with banks and other suckers (like the NYT) by applying Corum’s Law.
It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s television and political career. Suckers have to get screwed, and they flock to his banner. He’s the Sunk Cost Fallacy in (approximately) human form.
So I got an Apple Pencil to use with my iPad. Like everything else produced by Apple it’s a Guaranteed Game-Changer™ that is guaranteed to change your life, or at least your GAME. (I’m been a Mac-user since the early 90s, and in that time I’ve found that the only thing more boring than a Windows/Android evangelist is an Apple evangelist.)
I didn’t figure that the thing would magnify my already remarkable gift for the visual arts. (See below for some evidence of this.) Still, I had some hope for the Scribble function. The idea is, you write with the Apple Pencil, and it converts what you’re writing into etext.
In olden days, because I hated the sound of a typewriter, I would do all my early drafts in a notebook and then laboriously transcribe them into a legible final draft via a typewriter. When I got my first computer I gave up notebooks and started writing first drafts in a word processor.
But my brain and hand have not forgotten their decades-long habit of using notebooks; I kind of miss the messy scribal freedom of handwriting. I’m too lazy to go back to the old practice of transcribing the notebook, though. Plus: no backups! What if you lose the notebook?
Hence the Apple Pencil. In some ways, it’s the ultimate Apple device, because it has no controls or buttons at all. It’s supposed to Just Work.
Well, it didn’t—not straight out of the box. It paired with my iPad when I connected them magnetically, but every time I removed the pen from the iPad it would disconnect. I consulted the interwebs about this problem, which a bunch of people apparently have. The answers were uniformly unhelpful: “turn the machine off and then on” sort of stuff, along which a lot of foamy “You’ll never look back!” recycled ad copy.
I left the pencil sitting on the iPad to charge to 100%, and that was what did the trick. Below is my first effort.
So it’s pretty good for doodling–not quite as good as a chalkboard, but okay. The words were written doing the Scribble function, which takes some getting used to. It took me about four or five times as long to write those words via Scribble as it would have if I had just typed them. The program has real trouble decoding my handwriting–not the first or last entity to have that trouble, I guess. I had to edit nearly every word to make it say what I intended, and they ended up scattered over the page in a confusing fashion. Plus, if you pause for a microsecond while handwriting, Scribble thinks you’re done and tries to make a word fragment into a word.
Below is an unedited sample. I handwrote, “So here I am writing with my Apple Pencil,” which it turned into the gibberish you see, and then “Happy days are here again!” which it turned into “Happy days where again!” Which is a whole mood, I guess, but well off the intended target.
There are no failed experiments, only failed experimenters. I guess this was worth trying. But it looks like I’m going to have to forego handwriting my drafts or accept the extra work that goes with them.
Posted inGadgetry, writing|Comments Off on Happy Days Are Where, Again?
For one thing, it erases the repetitions in the original. For another, references to drinking have been prissily expunged. To translate “we’ll take a cup of kindness yet” the translator writes manūs iungāmus “we’ll join hands”.
I get that not everything has to be about drinking. I especially get it today, since someone spent a chunk of the early morning hours blowing chunks into the yard of the house next door to the fortress of Engitude. I listened with a mixture of sympathy for the sufferer and relief that I don’t do that to myself anymore.
But a drink doesn’t have to be alcoholic, and I strongly feel that you should translate a text accurately or leave it alone.
Today it occurred to me that you could render the first stanza and refrain of the song (which is all that anyone ever sings) this way:
I think that’s fairly singable, if you ignore elisions and vowel quantities (which is usually the case with sung neo-Latin).
Obviously, this occurred to me a month too late, as it’s already (as I write) after sunset on January 1st. But I prefer to think of it as eleven months early.
In the course of an ultimately frustrating and pointless conversation online today, I found myself thinking of the multiple meanings of fair in English–at once, “light-skinned/light-haired”, “beautiful”, and “just, even-handed”.
The meanings are so different that I wondered if they actually had distinct etymological sources that ended up in homophones/homographs. But it seems not: anyway the AHD and OED derive them all from Old English fæger; Orel (Handbook of Germanic Etymology) derives fæger from Proto-Germanic *fagraz. The online OED goes as far as to connect the Germanic form to PIE *peh₂ḱ– “join, connect, agree”, making it cognate with Latin pax (loaned into English by way of French as peace), also page, pale (as in “stake”), the –pinge in impinge, and pagan.
It makes sense that things that fit together would be considered beautiful, and that fairness is a way for people to fit together. But I didn’t find an etymological explanation for how fair means “pale”, as well as “beautiful” and “moral character”; the three things don’t obviously go together. (Except in the minds of racists.) I wonder if the well-attested association between femaleness and paleness in the classical world might be part of the process. I’m not sure I have a resolution to this question; I’m still walking around the ideas and kicking their tires.
Greek has a similar deal with καλός which means both “beautiful”, and “morally good; noble”. And people still tend to map goodness (along with intelligence and other irrelevant qualities) on beauty, and evil (along with stupidity, etc.) on ugliness.
The other English fair (“festival”) comes into English (via French) from Latin feriae (“holidays”) and seems to be unrelated to the word meaning “just, even-handed”. If you’ve ever been cheated at a fair, now you know why. They’re not supposed to be fair.
Mary Brown, “Carnival of the Animals” (after Saint-Saens)
I’m reading Ǫrvar Odds saga at odd moments when I should be working, lately. I was looking up útnes which C&V (un)helpfully gloss as “an outer ness”. The AHD more helpfully told me that a ness is a cape or headland, and also that the word comes from PIE *nas- “nose”, which I thought was kind of funny.
The AHD’s etymological entry for *nas- also mentioned nark “informer”, which floored me. I always thought that nark was an abbreviation of narcotics, as an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the drug trade. But apparently nark is older than that (attested in 1846 according to the OED). It may, as AHD suggests, derive from Romani nak “nose”. English nose as “police informer” is attested in the late 18th century and is probably older still.
The OED throws some shade on the idea that nark derives from Romani, pointing its nose toward knark (roughly: “a jerk”), attested 1851. But there’s no reason to prefer knark over nak as the source of nark, particularly as knark does not appear earlier and the OED doesn’t know the source of knark either.
Eric Partridge suggested French narquois as a source, which means “cunning, deceitful; crook” as early as the 1600s. But I think I incline towards Romani nak “nose”, if only because it’s funnier.
Seneca’s line is almost a baseball conditional. Although, since I don’t keep track of baseball, my favorite examples aren’t from sportswriters.
For instance, in Kornbluth and Pohl’s Gladiator-at-Law (a minor work of midcentury satire, but nonetheless on my “always reread” list). In it a minor character tells the main character, “You mess with the big boys, they punish you.”
John Berkey provided the art for the 1960s Ballantine edition of Gladiator-at-Law. If you’re going to read the book, avoid the 1980s reprint which was mutilated by Pohl’s rewriting.
Seen on Bluesky: Gustaw Gwozdecki’s “Evening Melancholy”, c.1905.
I didn’t know it on sight, but somehow it felt familiar. I wonder if I saw it a long time ago and it re-surfaced from my subconscious when I needed a creepy scene for the “Festival of Furies” section of “Three Festivals” (in Tales from the Magician’s Skull 9).
