Inspirations

This isn't more of the promised old poetry revised and revamped. It's new, well newish, stuff. There are three poems here that were all written at a poetry workshop about a year ago and subsequently redrafted and tightened up a bit. The first is a bit of doggerel that occurred to me after the fire that destroyed Tracy Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, an artwork consisting of a tent on which she had embroidered all the names that gave it it's title.

The Fire

Tracy Emin made a tent,
Embroidered it with names,
Said, "These were all the lovers
Who shared my night time games."
The warehouse where the tent was kept
Burned to the ground one night.
I can't be sure a lover did it,
But I'm certain that one might.

The second was a variation on the never-ending discussion of "what is art" on one of the message boards, that only occasionally turns ugly. It was inspired by a rather more well-known and conventional piece of art - The Venus de Milo.

When does it cease to be art?

A statue.
A figure of a woman.
Flawless. Perfect. Sublime.
A wonder.
This is surely art.
Cut off the arms.
Pound them to gravel.
Bury it.
Forget it.
And what remains,
Flawed, imperfect, reduced
Remains yet
A piece of art.
Everyone says so.
It must be true.
Lose the head.
Lose the legs.
Cleave the torso.
In two. In four. In eight.
In a million.
Grind it to dust.
Scatter it to the wind.
This is not art.
Not the remains of art.
This is less than nothing.
But when was the transition.
When did it cease to be art?

The third and final poem was inspired by another piece of modern art, Anthony Gormley's Event Horizon. I was there with a friend and though both of us liked it we had completely different reactions to it. The poem tries to capture my own feelings about it and then punctures my pomposity with my friend's feelings. At least that's the effect I was aiming for.

Event Horizon

Distant figures,
Sinister and silent,
Motionless,
Watching me
The centre of their Universe.
On the rooftops
That surround me
Engulfing
Diminishing
They are my event horizon.

They are frozen in the moment,
Caught in the amber instant
Between the then and the now.
I shiver with insignificance.

My companion has another view.
"Playful, aren't they?" she says.

Palin, Biden and Flesch-Kincaid

A wordcraft regular points to this report which suggests that Sarah Palin "speaks at a higher grade level" than Joe Biden. The source is The Global Language Monitor, whose ludicrous claims that that English language contains (at the time of writing) exactly 997,311 words and will soon be reaching one million, have been ridiculed and debunked by just about every rational person with access to a blog. What then are we to make of their claims in this new, political, forum?

Well, for a start they claim that their calculation is performed by "a modified Flesch-Kincaid formulation". Hmm. That would be the Flesch-Kincaid READABILTY calculation then would it? Let's just say that again, a bit louder, READABILITY. There's a bit of a clue in the name. It's a relatively crude formula for calculating how easy a written text is to read. That's WRITTEN and READ. It's based on the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word.
Spoken text is a completely different animal. The validity of applying this particular method to spoken text is, to be as charitable as possible, dubious. But they do say "modified", don't they? They don't say how it's been modified (just as they don't say how they go about counting the words in the language) but let's suppose, just for argument's sake, that it's been modified by a magic wand that makes it applicable to speech. There is an even more fatal flaw in using the results to comment on the intelligence or credibility of the candidates. I'll say this nice and loud too, A HIGHER SCORE ISN'T NECESSARILY A BETTER RESULT.
When it comes to what politicians say I like clear, easy to follow concise English. I much prefer it to cunning constructions and clever words. It's much harder to hide a lie in a simple sentence than in a complicated one. What a lower score actually means is that the candidate in question has been more effective at getting his or her message across to more people. It's more accessible. Of course a score of 0 or less would make it comparable with Dr Seuss and nobody wants a(nother) President or Vice-President that talks like a children's book but a moderate score shows only that the speech is aimed correctly at the everyman that a shrewd politician wishes to reach. And what exactly is wrong with that?

(And, for the record, this blog entry has a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 9.6.)

That's logical

A long, long time ago, when I was a mere speccy geek of an eleven year old, we had a teacher whose real name is now long forgotten but who went, for reasons I never did fathom, by the nickname of Mud. He was, I recall, a geography teacher. Possibly with a bit of RE* on the side. One day he had a brainwave. He took all of us speccy geeks and sat us at the front of the class, and all of those who didn't have to wear glasses and sat them at the back of the class. When asked why he had done this he explained his rationale thus: the ones with glasses have defective vision and need to sit closer than the ones without glasses who don't have defective vision. A single moment's thought picks up the essential flaw of the argument. And if you can't see it try substituting the word "corrected" for "defective".
The result was a lot of kids whose lives had so far been gloriously optician-free sitting at the back of the class and squinting, and a different lot of bespectacled kids whose mothers had taken them to have their eyes tested sitting at the front saying, "but sir, I can see from the back."
This is the kind of logic we don't see enough of, completely and utterly specious but making perfect sense to the person suggesting it.
But what does any of this have to do with the current cold weather? Quite a lot actually. We are barely tiptoeing into the beginnings of Autumn but the weather is also throwing some rather cold mornings at us. And what do we do on cold mornings? Correct! We wrap up warm. I, for example, wear a fleece under my coat and, should it be raining as well as cold, a waterproof over my coat. This protects me adequately on my twenty minute walk to the Metro station. There I get onto the Metro. Now, for those who have never travelled by Metro, it is a fine and wonderful service and for ninety per cent of the day it is moderately comfortable and you can get a seat. For the other ten per cent - during the rush hour - it isn't and you can't. More than that it is frequently overcrowded to a quite remarkable degree.
Last week they were showing "Return From The River Kwai" on TV and there is a scene where the fiendish Japanese guards are cramming the prisoners of war onto a cattle train. They are overseen by George Takei, who in between being a helmsman on Star Trek and Hiro Nakamura's Dad on Heroes, must have moonlighted as a camp commondant in a Japanese POW camp. Anyway they were wedged in and the doors forced shut and barred and it still looked more comfortable than the Metro on a bad day.
So, I get onto the Metro and, because it's such a cold day everybody on there is wearing overcoats or anoraks or multiply layers of coats and jumpers. Some of them probably have thermal underwear. And that's where the leap of logic comes in. They have the Metro heaters turned on full because it's cold. No matter that people are collapsing from heat stroke - or would be if there was room to fall down - it's autumn, it's cold outside, put the heaters on. At the moment it's merely unbearable but as the days get colder and people wrap up even warmer it will become positively satanic, I know I've been there before. I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone to turn the heaters off during the rush hour. Probably not. That would be like putting the kids with corrected vision at the back of the class.

(*In case you don't know RE=Religious Education, a topic which may or may not still be in the school curriculum in these more multicultural times.)

Restore to Factory Settings

Some years ago I was on a hiking holiday in Italy. Now, while I am not the world's most naturally gifted linguist, I always learn a few phrases of the local language. I can say hello, goodbye, yes, no, please, thank you and – crucially – two beers please, in about twenty different languages. The trouble is that it doesn't, for most languages, extend much beyond this most basic of basic vocabulary. In fact the only language in which I could claim any kind of proficiency, apart from English, is German. And therein lies the heart of the matter. In Italy, one morning, preparing for a day's hike, I went into a bakery to buy some bread. My Italian was restricted to the aforementioned phrases. The baker's English was an unknown quantity so when I found my Italian inadequate I switched to my default language.

And my default language was German. Now, why that should be I don't know. While I can get by in German I can't claim any high degree of fluency, certainly nowhere near native competence. So why did I switch to German rather than English?

I don't know, but it seems to happen time and time again. It's happened to me in countries as far apart as Peru and China. When my knowledge of the local lingo fails me I try German – NOT English.

I was discussing this with my friend John on Sunday over a few beers and it seems that the same thing happens to him. When in a foreign country and unable to communicate he automatically reaches for German rather than English.

My theory is that our brains are recognising two things, English and Foreign. Having realised that what they are hearing isn't English they aim for the only alternative available and go for German. (Actually John also speaks French, but that's by the by.)

It's really quite an odd phenomenon and I wonder if it afflicts anyone else. It's as if when I go abroad the settings in my brain get changed. The default setting gets switched to "foreign". When I return home the factory settings are automatically restored. Just as well really, I'd hate to find myself trying to communicate with my Dad in German as, rather bizarrely, his sole phrase in the language is "Frohe Weinachten", and that's a bit limiting in conversation.

Has anyone else ever noticed anything similar?