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José Vergara (see this post) was kind enough to send me a copy of his article “The Embodied Language of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools” (Slavonic and East European Review 97.3 [July 2019]: 426-450), which is available at JSTOR, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Sokolov (see this post for my take on A School for Fools); in particular, it gets the importance of language in his work in a way that scholars who concentrate on psychology or (feh) politics don’t. I’ll quote some relevant passages and recommend the whole thing to anyone with an interest in Sokolov (or, really, modernist literature in general):

A third factor that bears consideration is Sokolov’s attitude toward language in general and Russian in particular. The author has consistently advocated a perspective that places the literary word above all else, as in an interview with David Remnick conducted after his return to Russia in 1989:

Texts are more important than life, for me. Language is more important than life. So if you deal with language, you are creating not only texts, but also something more important than life. It’s been said many times, of course, but it is true that first there was the Word, and God created the Word, the Word is God, and God is more important than life.

His novels, in turn, reflect these beliefs, as Sokolov prioritizes the intricacies of his language over plot, character and setting. […]

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The phrase “old army game” has flickered at the edges of my consciousness for decades; I never bothered to investigate it, contenting myself with the sense that it was some sort of con. Now Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has done the research and told the story:

The old army game is a phrase that has gone through a number of different meanings over the years. It started out as a name for a gambling game—exactly which one varies with the telling—shifted to refer to sucker’s game—like three-card-monte—and then comes to mean any kind of confidence game or deception. Meanwhile, in baseball it developed three distinct and contradictory senses.

The earliest use I have found of army game is as another name for the game commonly called chuck-a-luck. It apparently got that name because of chuck-a-luck’s popularity among soldiers during the 1861–65 U.S. Civil War. The particular use, however, is from a chapter subtitle in William Rideing’s 1879 travelogue, A-Saddle in the Wild West, and the army game is great, not old […] For those unfamiliar with the game, John Philip Quinn’s 1890 book on gambling, Fools of Fortune, gives a description of chuck-a-luck and explains that while the game can be played on the level, a skilled player can easily rig it to take money from the unsuspecting […]

Other early appearances of old army game use it to describe other or unspecified games of chance. […] And given this association with rigged games of chance, it should be no surprise that old army game generalized to refer to any deception or confidence game. There is this article from the 24 May 1910 Jersey Journal that uses old army game to refer to what can only be described as a predecessor to the “Nigerian prince” email scam so familiar to us today. […]

But we also see the old army game used in baseball, and in ways that are difficult to reconcile with both the gambling senses and with each other. At first, the phrase in baseball parlance referred to a style or tactic of defensive play, perhaps one involving some kind of deception, but exactly what is unclear. […] The second baseball sense is that of an aggressive style of play, involving bunts, base stealing, hit-and-run plays, and the like. […] But old army game could also mean exactly the opposite, a strategy that relies on slugging and long balls. […] So, in the case of baseball, the old army game is what we call a Janus phrase, one that has meanings that are diametrically opposed to one another.

See Dave’s post for the (sometimes lengthy) illustrative quotations and for further discussion; I particularly recommend Quinn’s lively description of chuck-a-luck. The OED has no occurrences of “army game,” though they do have an entry for chuck-a-luck (“A gambling game played with dice,” first citation 1836). It’s particularly striking to me that “army game” was used in baseball with such different senses — you’d think it would have gotten settled in one. But I guess it never caught on enough for that.

I’ve enjoyed Sergei Dovlatov’s writing for years and posted on him various times (e.g., here). But I had no clue regarding one feature that Anatoly Vorobei describes. I’ll translate a couple of paragraphs:

Rereading Dovlatov’s Zone, I find myself unable to overlook a particular stylistic trick. Surely many are unaware of this interesting principle. From the ’80s, Dovlatov’s books obey a severe restriction. Different letters must begin the words in each sentence. The rule is strict; deviations exist but are quite uncommon. […]

His style appears in many ways determined by this rule. Sentences wind up quite brief. Sometimes chopped up. Many short, but afterwards you notice one unexpectedly long, thirteen words (I espied fifteen!). You sense how the author operates, finding words but making changes if letters repeat.

It’s a strange restriction, not very easily complied with, unlikely to be perceived.

Phoebe Weston writes for the Guardian in journo-apocalyptic fashion:

Knowledge of medicinal plants is at risk of disappearing as human languages become extinct, a new study has warned. Indigenous languages contain vast amounts of knowledge about ecosystem services provided by the natural world around them. However, more than 30% of the 7,400 languages on the planet are expected to disappear by the end of the century, according to the UN.

The impact of language extinction on loss of ecological knowledge is often overlooked, said the study’s lead researcher, Dr Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, a biologist from the University of Zurich. “Much of the focus looks at biodiversity extinction, but there is a whole other picture out there which is the loss of cultural diversity,” he said.

His team looked at 12,000 medicinal plant services associated with 230 indigenous languages in three regions with high levels of linguistic and biological diversity – North America, north-west Amazonia and New Guinea. They found that 73% of medicinal knowledge in North America was only found in one language; 91% in north-west Amazonia; and 84% in New Guinea. If the languages became extinct, the medicinal expertise associated with them probably would too. Researchers expect their findings from these regions to be similar in other parts of the world. […]

The areas with languages most at risk were in north-west Amazonia, where 100% of this unique knowledge was supported by threatened languages, and in North America, where the figure was 86%. In New Guinea 31% of languages were at risk. The anticipated loss of linguistic diversity would “substantially compromise humanity’s capacity for medicinal discovery”, according to the paper, published in PNAS. […]

Dr Jonathan Loh, an anthropologist and conservationist from the University of Kent, who was not involved in the research, said he was surprised by the degree of linguistic uniqueness in medicinal plant knowledge. He has previously spoken about the parallels between linguistic and biological diversity, commenting that these had evolved in remarkably similar ways, and both faced an extinction crisis.

I doubt humanity’s capacity for medicinal discovery will be substantially compromised, but if it’s exaggeration, it’s in a good cause. And if you think that’s apocalyptic, check this out: Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Thanks, Trevor!

Back in 2006 I mentioned Gaddis in my list of ten unread books; I don’t know why I picked J.R. rather than The Recognitions, since I owned them both and the latter was published first (by twenty years), but Vanya mentioned it in the first comment and I grouped them together in my 2020 comment linking to a Christopher Beha piece on Gaddis “so I’ll be able to find it when I want it, if and when I ever get around to deciding to tackle J.R. and The Recognitions.” Well, my wife and I finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House (and were sad it was over — I highly recommend it, and we’re eagerly awaiting her next, whenever she chooses to produce it) and were trying to decide what to read next, and for whatever reason I pulled the doorstop paperback of The Recognitions off the shelf and said “Want to try this?” and she agreed, so we started it last night, and after the first few pages we’re enjoying it (and its thousand pages should keep us going almost to the end of the year).

But Gaddis, like a good modernist, is wildly allusive, and though I was able to translate the Goethe epigraph for my wife and explain a couple of references, there were a number of things I wondered about, so this afternoon I turned to the internet and googled “The first turn of the screw pays all debts.” Imagine my surprise and delight when I was taken to A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, which will be my vade mecum throughout the long voyage! For the turn-of-the-screw quote it has:

The first turn of the screw pays all debts: that is, one’s debts on shore can be dismissed with the first turn of the ship’s screw – a sentiment, says Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases, “so optimistic as to verge upon the mythical.”

But what really boggled my mind was this, on two counts:

Reverend Gwyon: according to de Rougemont, Gwyon was a Celtic divinity whose name “(whence ‘guyon’ meaning ‘guide’ in Old French) means the Führer who has in his custody the secret of initiation into the way of divinization” (LWW 210 n.1). Also relevant are Gawain from the Grail romances (see FRR) and Gwion, a semilegendary bard whose poetry hides “an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery” (WG 55); one of Gwion’s poems is quoted at 467.5. (Asked once how to pronounce Gwyon, Gaddis said he didn’t know; he had never said it aloud. It probably should be pronounced as one syllable, like “Gwynne,” its modern form.)

In the first place, it astonishes me that Gaddis didn’t know the pronunciation of the name of one of his main characters; in fact, I’m not sure I actually believe it. Anyone so aware of the sound of words (as is evident when you read his sentences aloud) surely must have vocalized it on some level. And in the second place, it would never have occurred to me to say it as one syllable; it seemed natural to read it as /ˈgwaɪən/, so that’s what I did. I guess I’ll switch to /gwɪn/ unless someone presents arguments to the contrary. At any rate, what a great resource to help the striving reader through a strenuous text!

Yoram wrote me saying “This map is fun, and so are the replies, including the video.” I hope you can see the Twitter post; it shows a “map of oaths and affirmations taken languages other than English” at the swearing-in ceremony of the new Scottish Parliament. “Some patterns: Doric around Aberdeen, Gaelic mostly in the Highlands and Islands, Urdu in Glasgow”; Claire McAllister adds others: “Arabic, British Sign Language, Canadian French, Doric, English, Gaelic, German, Orcadian, Punjabi, Scots, Urdu, Welsh and Zimbabwean Shona…” Thanks, Yoram!

Alex Ross’s New Yorker pieces on music are always worth reading, and I particularly enjoyed his latest, on Josquin Desprez [archived] — I remember enjoying Josquin’s music in my college music-history class and have heard it with pleasure on the radio over the years, but I never really knew how to listen to it. Renaissance music is very different from classical and later, so it takes significant immersion in it to figure out what’s going on, and I never got that immersion. (Of course, in this age of YouTube it’s easy to get whatever you want; here’s a nice clip of Josquin’s “Ave Maria,” one of the pieces Ross discusses, with an animated graphical score that lets you follow the music easily.) What brings it to LH are the opening and a passage near the end. Here’s the first paragraph:

The singer and composer Josquin Desprez traversed his time like a diffident ghost, glimpsed here and there amid the splendor of the Renaissance. He is thought to have been born around 1450 in what is now western Belgium, the son of a policeman who was once jailed for using excessive force. In 1466, a boy named Gossequin completed a stint as a choirboy in the city of Cambrai. A decade later, the singer Jusquinus de Pratis turned up at the court of René of Anjou, in Aix. In the fourteen-eighties, in Milan, Judocus Despres was in the service of the House of Sforza, which also employed Leonardo da Vinci. At the end of the decade, Judo. de Prez joined the musical staff at the Vatican, remaining there into the reign of Alexander VI, of the House of Borgia. The name Josquin can be seen carved on a wall of the Sistine Chapel. In 1503, the maestro Juschino took a post in Ferrara, singing in the presence of Lucrezia Borgia. Not long afterward, Josse des Prez retired to Condé-sur-l’Escaut, near his presumed birthplace, serving as the provost of the local church. There he died, on August 27, 1521. His tomb was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Gossequin, Jusquinus, Judocus, Judo., Josquin, Juschino, and Josse — that’s what I call variety! And here’s a thought-provoking passage on the perils of not leaving a name behind; it comes after an account of how an analysis suggests that the motet “O virgo virginum” is not actually by Josquin:
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From Bruno Roy, “L’Humour érotique au XVᵉ siècle,” via Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti:

Dans la circonstance, je ne connais pas de meilleur euphémisme que le radicalisme; j’aurai donc recours à trois «radicaux» trilittères: vit pour le pénis, con pour le vagin et cul pour le derrière⁹. Nous pouvons dès maintenant apprécier l’humour d’une première devinette:

    Quel est le mot le plus poilu du psautier?
    —«Conculcavit».

9. Ce sont les mots employés par le traducteur de la Chirurgia d’HENRI de MONDEVILLE (éd. A. BOS, 1897), bien qu’à la même époque (déb. du XIVᵉ siècle) le vocabulaire médical ait déjà commencé à se dissocier du langage commun; cf. Placides et Timeo, ms. Paris, B. N. fr. 212, f. 60v («…laquelle verge comme dit est se nomme preape, et en commun laigaige franchois l’en dit vit»).

In summary, the old French word vit ‘penis,’ added to con and cul (which you probably already know), can produce the innocent-seeming Latin word conculcavit ‘trampled under foot.’ Gilleland adds the relevant biblical quote: “miserere mei Deus quoniam conculcavit me homo” (Psalms 55.2). A fine example of scholarly and teenage humor combined.

Balashon discusses an interesting development in Hebrew:

I recently came across an early draft of the speech my son prepared for his bar mitzva, ten years ago this month. It was rather nostalgic to see it again. And while I enjoyed hearing his points, I was actually more fascinated with the typos and misspellings in this first draft. On the one hand, they prove that he actually wrote the speech himself, which was impressive for a 13 year old. But it also was cute to enter the mind of a kid who grew up in Israel, spoke English at home, and tried to straddle both worlds when writing his speech.

One of the most curious phrases he used was “the tearing of the Red Sea.” Normally, in English we say “the splitting of the Red Sea.” But he directly translated the Hebrew phrase kriyat yam suf קריעת ים סוף. The verb kriya, from the root קרע, means “to tear” and so in the literal sense, his translation to English was logical.

But this actually brings us to a more substantial question. Why do we call it kriyat yam suf? In the Bible, the verbs used to describe the splitting of the sea are baka בקע (as in Shemot 14:16, 21, Tehillim 78:13 and Nechemiah 9:11), or less frequently, gazar גזר (as in Tehillim 136:13). Both roots mean to split, with various nuances. So why did Rabbinic Hebrew (like in the Dayenu song found in the Haggadah) prefer a different Biblical root: kara?

I found a detailed discussion of the question in this article […] The author, Tzion Okashi, focuses primarily on the distinction between baka and kara, and suggests two possible reasons for the later use of kara. One might be from Aramaic influence, as is frequently found in words adopted in Rabbinic Hebrew. He point out that the Aramaic translations of the Bible use the root בזע to translate both בקע and קרע, which may have led to the shift of one usage to the other.

The other answer I found more interesting. He says this is due to a change in the perception of the nature of the event. While the Torah uses the word baka, that is generally applied to the splitting of a solid, hard object, like a rock or a block of wood. That type of splitting can not be repaired or restored. The action of kriya, however, is associated with the tearing of softer items like garments (as is practiced, for example, in Jewish mourning.) According to this theory, those who preferred to refer to kriyat yam suf visualized the sea closing up on itself after the split. The split was not permanent, just as clothing can be repaired, or a zipper can close the opening in a garment. Okashi writes that the Tanach chose to focus on the force of the miracle, which split the sea as one would break open a block of wood, while the Sages preferred the image of the water letting Israel pass through, only to close upon the pursuing Egyptians.

I’m curious about “the splitting of the Red Sea”; it seems to me “the parting of the Red Sea” is much more common in English. Is “splitting” common in Jewish usage?

Daisy Hildyard’s TLS review of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, by Leah Price, is mainly about countering the familiar story of “the demise of the printed book: […] the digital medium is killing print and destroying our capacity to read long books”; what I’m posting here, however, is a digression that was of more interest to me:

Elsewhere, when Price steps outside the academy, she expands the sense of what books can be. She attends an event organized by The Reader, a Liverpool-based charity which runs community reading groups. Price describes the experience of reading gratuitously after years of training herself to focus on the formal aspects of texts. In her university seminars, it would be unusual for class members to discuss, for example, how much they like the characters in a novel. Reading aloud, without a syllabus, was eye-opening. “I expected the group to feel cosy. Instead the room felt raw, exposed.” There is a sense that she is somehow chastened by the reminder that books have many extracurricular lives.

This is something I have felt, too. Last year, while teaching at a university, I also took over the running of a reading group in a retirement community and care home. In the seminar room, I would guide undergraduates away from general pronouncements on moral behaviour or on their personal experiences, and towards the words in the text. In the Over-60s reading group, however, I found that we would tend to approach a story by considering how it resonated with our own experiences, and that these discussions could feel raw and exposing, as Price describes. At other times, the readers would ask heretical (to me) questions – discussing, for example, whether they believed the author to be a good person – and when they joked around, as they often did, I couldn’t discipline them. While these discussions could involve misreadings or a drift away from the text, the sessions also felt more urgent and more joyful tha[n] the careful, within-the-parameters approach to literature deployed in educational institutions.

This is yet another example of déformation professionnelle. It is entirely understandable that professional historians and critics of literature have to wean themselves off normal ways of reading — they have other goals than the average reader and need to take part in the current discourse of their profession, whether that revolves around structures, politics, reception, colonial history, or whatever is in vogue at the moment — but it’s sad in a way that a surgeon having to get used to the sight of blood isn’t. It divorces the professional from what everyone else takes to be the value and importance of literature and turns it into a more or less abstract object of study like quarks or mitochondria. Vera Dunham read shelves full of dreadful exemplars of Stalinist “socialist realism” to write her classic book In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (which taught me a great deal — see this 2018 post), but she knew how dreadful they were, writing in her preface “I have avoided the freedom and prophecy of true literature and have turned to establishmentarian chronicles because it is only here that inadvertent testimony to the accommodation between private and public spheres in a large segment of Soviet society can be found.” I am afraid, though, that lots of literary scholars obliterate the difference altogether, pretending that the crap they shovel into their Big Data sets is just as valid as Shakespeare — it’s all grist for the mill of scholarship, which is what matters. And ever since the 1970s the woods have been full of critics who claim that criticism is as important as any other kind of writing, and perhaps more so — after all, if a critic can tell you what Shakespeare was up to, where he got his language and stories from and where he got wrong, surely he’s on a level above Shakespeare.

This is all pernicious nonsense. Ordinary readers are right to ignore the formal aspects of texts and focus on how much they like the characters and how a novel resonates with their personal experiences; that’s an important part of what literature is for, and to the extent that writers lose interest in it and appeal exclusively to professional reader-analysts, their writing withers on the vine. The older I get, the more grateful I am that I never got sucked into academia, where I would have had to at least pretend to care more about theory than books; I can read whatever I want and respond to it with disgust or enthusiasm based on its appeal to me personally, though of course my reactions have been greatly informed and altered by my extensive reading of good critics and historians. No offense to my academic readers — I have the greatest respect for what you do, I’m just glad I don’t have to do it myself!