The Spelling Bee

 

The Games section of the daily New York Times includes the Spelling Bee, a challenge to spell as many words as one can using only seven letters, one letter required to be used in every word. Along the way the player attains certain sophomoric goads to success - Beginner, Solid, Awesome, Genius and Queen Bee, the last for finding all of the approved words in the puzzle. I say approved words advisedly since some words, at least, are proscribed on proper grounds - such as racial slurs, obscenities, vulgarities and so on. 

One might expect the rules to lead to fairly straightforward results: no personal or place names, nor words derived from names are used unless they otherwise have an ordinary referent ("Albanian" or "Germanic" for example aren't allowed, but "neapolitan" or napolean" are fine because they refer to things, in this case desserts). This is a tacit rule. One might also expect that the range of permissible words might (tacitly) be limited to English, at least in its American version, but this isn't the case.

In fact there seems to be a bias against perfectly good English words that either the wordbot doesn't know, or that the editors don't; or those that they decide are too obscure or arcane for the average English speaker (both arcane and arcana are permitted). So words like trinitarian, antinomian, antinomy (see Kant's Critique of Pure Reason), marmoreal or porphyry are not, for the puzzle setters, words at all. Antinomy can't pass muster but antimony does. On the other hand lots of words creep into the language from all directions. Lanai (a Hawaiian verandah) is ok (and so is verandah, an Anglo-Indian word like bungalow); but liana (a tropical vine) isn't; raita (a yogurt dressing in Indian cuisine) is good, but riata (a woven rope used by Argentine gauchos) is verboten, as is verboten verboten.

What's more, English also contains a fund of French words in common usage, but which ones count is also arbitrary - entente and detente, bonbon and restaurant are fine, but pensee isn't, nor auberge, aubergine, courgette. Italian musical terms are permitted - lento (but not lenten, as in the season between Good Friday and Easter), tutti, allegretto, molto, etc. Nor is most British English except where it opens the prospect of alternate spellings (catalog/catalogue, dialog/dialogue, ton/tonne). Twit is fine but not twat; and why not wank/wanker or bollocks?

You learn the rules by trying things out - the black box approach. All of this experimentation, however, cannot prepare anyone for the completely whimsical admission of obscure foreign words. You may get by with sirocco (a seasonal wind blowing northward from the Sahara across Spain), but not with lebeche nor cierzo (also seasonal Spanish winds); no mistral (a French wind); but haboob, a trans-Saharan wind is just fine. So is haka (a Maori ritual celebration); lantana (a tropical verbena); llano (a Spanish prairie) but not llanta (a Spanish tire). And there is a catalog of permissible Latinate words (though not "Latinate" itself): I give you but one exhibit A - torus, and its plural forms, tori and torii (a surface of revolution generated by a revolving circle in three-dimensional space one full revolution about an axis that is coplanar with the circle - think 'donut'). 

It's enough to make a person cynical. What was wrong with porphyry, then? And there are those words, presumably English ones, which no one would ever use - openable comes to mind, or nonillion (nine millions), catalytically, deckle (a peculiarly Canadian version of decal). It is just this organic mushiness of a language that keeps it alive and evolving but drives a puzzler to desperate measures: finally at the end of a daily puzzle with maybe three words remaining to find, one's baser instincts come into play and a kind of corrupt invention takes over. One begins to concoct a kind of mad syllabic stew, a jaundiced eye for easy composites: turdhammer (Harbor Freight, only $14.99); slackwad (available on Amazon in plumbing supplies); brassball, globel, globulment . . . but here I go. It is the debasement of the imagination, the beginnings of a new strain of dementia.

Rioja Vieja

 Were I out looking for it I should never have encountered it. The bottle was a decade old, arrayed on a single shelf among some younger, nondescript wines, a few years' worth of dust around its shoulder and clearly not going anywhere soon. I might have overlooked it for the garish display of junk food packets just below the wine shelf.

I was returning from a birding excursion with my friend Rafa, the birder par excellence of Sonora, and we had stopped for something else at a little roadside tienda outside of town. But the bottle caught my notice and I asked to see it. Over its lengthy tenure among the Dorito packets the price had not increased - I took it for 200p (MXN), or about $10 (USD), a Rioja crianza 2015. It was a calculated risk, though not much of one in the scheme of things. Ten bucks is worth the flutter when you might well hit a home run.

I cradled it, carried it outside and held the bottle up to the sun. Through the glass darkly shone a deep, perfectly clear garnet, free of sediment, none of the raisin-browned tinges of a corked bottle. If this is still a good bottle, I thought, then it deserves to be approached with discretion. So I let it rest on its side for a few days; the cork was certain to be dry after years of standing upright through hot Mexican summers. 

Impatient, curious, I opened it a few days later, gingerly corkscrewing into a spongy mass of soft cork. The farther I turned it, the dustier became the bottle neck, until the cork was a pile of wood dust and had bottomed itself into the wine. I had a fine sieve and pitcher at hand, strained the cork out of the wine, poured a bit into a glass, and looked again at the wine through light. The same garnet tones, no inky purple tinge of a too-young bottle, no sign of floating cork - fine so far. A swirl, a genteel sniff, not much bouquet to it at all. A good sign though, since it also didn't give off the musty signs of a turned bottle. 

My first sip was underwhelming, as though secrets were being kept. Very well, I would wait. A half hour passed, another sip and the wine had stirred a bit. What had once been edges had softened, the tannins had settled away; what remained was a nuanced and subtle mouthful of dried mint and anise, a ghost of black pepper - no offputting noise of jammy, fruity over-familiarity. Well, I thought, this may do.

It wasn't really all that old but its indenturement in a hot little snack food joint along a hot dusty highway had aged it beyond its decade. It had all the earmarks of an older wine. Old wines, as compared with recently vinted ones, seem attenuated and understated. They require attention, judgment, discernment - in a word, they deserve as much time and consideration as will recompense a long and perhaps wearisome embottlement.

We live in a time and a culture in which a cellar is now merely a basement. Cellars are for wines. Basements are merely for our existential detritus, the stuff we bought from Amazon and wished we hadn't, rubble for our next garage sale. Our belongings more often than not reside in cardboard cartons in storage units, awaiting our next removal to newer digs. How many people in one's acquaintance still live within a day's travel of wherever they were sired and born? Who can remain settled enough to keep a decent cellar? Consequently wine is made for a market of transients and vagabonds, people impatient of stasis and extended attention. So wine has become, like golf, a democratic amusement and not much more.

The Rioja was soon gone, but in the course of sipping it I remembered a cellar I once had, of wooden crates along the cement floor, of other wines old already when I drank them - austere, brown-tinged clarets; sturdy Italians; fat, complacent late-harvested Alsatians, the kind of wine that winks and says naughty things like, "I would taste no better with a bit of fois gras, but the fois gras would certainly taste better." 

It is a geezer's lament. But I very much like old things, things that keep.

The Samurai Next Door

Occasionally I volunteer my meager skills as a bicycle mechanic to the local bike clinic, run by Brian, who takes donated bicycles, renders them serviceable and passes them along to homeless indigents. The repair shop shares a large driveway with a halfway house where residents can undergo their probation and presumed transition into an enlarged realm of commerce and normalcy. One can easily imagine that the shop is frequently the theater of some raffish characters and lively conversation, much of it encouraged by Brian who readily engages them, transients and habitues alike.

On a recent weekend, as I was busily truing a wheel, the door opened and in walked a short, grizzled stocking-capped fellow in his 50s, I'd guess, a generous walrus mustache beneath a broad nose, an outmoded bit of eyeware above it. Brian recognized him from some past visit and promptly asked after his general well being. The following transcription is a true and reasonably accurate version of the ensuing conversation:

Brian: How are you? Haven't seen you in a while.

Protagonist: I just got out of jail.

B: Oh - what happened? Why were you in jail?

P: Well, back in December I moved into an apartment. On December 21st, pretty early in the morning there was a loud banging on my door. So I went and opened it but there wasn't anybody there. Then about 20 minutes later it happened again. Nobody there. I'm looking around and my neighbor walks over and asks if somebody was just banging on my door. I says yeah, somebody did it twice. I think it's the guy on the other side of you, he says. So I go back inside. Third time, bang bang bang - nobody. So I walk over to the guy on the other side and I knock on the door - hey, was you just banging on my door?

B: So what'd he say?

P: He says, yeah, turn yer goddam music down.

B: Oh, were you playing music?

P: Yeah, I was listening to some CDs.

B: Oh.

P: So I go back and shut my door, and he comes back over and bangs on it again!

B: Uh oh.

P: Yeah. So I get out my samurai sword and I go back over and he comes to the door, and I say, Do you know what this is? So he just says, Aw, put that effin thing away, you ain't gonna use it.

B: So what'd you do?

P: Well, I kinda poked it at him.

B: You didn't stab him did you?

P: Nah, I just kinda tapped him on the chest with it.

B: You didn't draw any blood.

P: Nah. I don't think so. Anyway, he called the cops.

B: So what happened?

P: I got a month in jail. They charged me with assault and menacing with a deadly weapon. And brandishing a deadly weapon. So now I owe three thousand five hundred in fines plus another fifty dollars for my probation.

"Gotta have my tunes."

Biography in Flannel

 A quarter-century ago when I first took up cohabitation with my wife, she sewed me a wonderful lightweight robe in a bold red-and-blue flannel as an apt and thoughtful welcoming gift. And I am still wearing it in good health and connubial joy. What could be better? It is a part of the warp and weft of my days, so to speak, enfolding me in another morning of my quick passage through this vale of light and shadow, like a familiar arm across my shoulders, a comfort in my dotage, my accustomed armor against the chances of another sunrise. 

Naturally, as it's cotton and not chain mail or rubber, it's worn thin in places over the interim. In fact a detractor might call it downright shabby. Each morning I tie around my waist its third belt. It drapes loosely now, the fabric in places a mere tissue, in other places it is no longer. It fails to cover everywhere, it is copiously patched until now there is no patching it since the flannel no longer has the structural integrity to hold the patch. It is in short become a classic, like the thousand-year-old kimonos that are a palimpsest of the time and labor of forgotten souls, ancient narratives of alien fabrics, repairs and loving reinforcements.

But now, within a scant quarter-century I hear murmurs of replacement, gentle yet persistent urgings from the other room to look at a new fabric (how about a nice gray plaid for a gray head?). So what, I protest, that the seat has been patched thrice, that the front is worn through, that the shoulders are so attenuated that they will not support the rest of it on a hanger, or even that the patch across the back is worn through again? It has been only twenty-five years; no need that it should last a thousand. It's fine. I'm fine. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't crawl back into it each morning. It has shared my morning surliness and my unfocused negativity ever since our first halcyon days in one another's company.

At a certain age, different I suppose for everyone, a person acquires a personal museum - a mental catalog of favorite things, or moments, or friends, departed pets, a favorite bicycle or doll or song, perhaps one's signed copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. An iconography of the self. In my own museum this robe will hang in the entrance hall like the feathered cape of a Kwakiutl chieftain or the leathern armor of Genghis Khan.

4.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)

"The Elizabeth Warrens"

This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. 

The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")

Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?

Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical coup de grace, the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its proponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking.

There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.

In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.

 "The Ronald Reagans"

Critic's Notebook: Rhapsody in Cement

Ever since Alamos became a part of the weird world of Telenovela, the town has become self-conscious. So now with some regularity in concert with the local music festival a new bit of statuary appears amongst the derelict vehicles abandoned along its cobbled streets. Last year it was the unobjectionable likeness of a Mexican composer, a bronzed bust in the traditional style.

The latest installation was unveiled just down the street to sedate speeches and muffled applause in a small ceremony (Mexico is a country of ceremony) preceding the current festival. It is a larger-than-life full length of Albert Ortiz Tirado, another native son, the founder of the festival and a late local luminary. Ortiz was a doctor by profession, and the Festival Alberto Ortiz Tirado (FAOT) is his longstanding cultural bequest to Alamos. 

About seven decades ago I went on a school field trip to a museum, a re-creation of an 18th century farm in upstate New York. On display in a shallow open pit was the fabled Cardiff Giant, a crude bit of limestone carved in the 1860s by an upstate farmer and "discovered" by him buried in a field. It was a sensation - a demonstration of the biblical claim that there were indeed "giants in the earth" - and it duly made the rounds of local fairs, carnivals, tent revivals, mall openings and press conferences. Gazing at the crude likeness of El Ortiz I was reminded of my childhood foray.

This latest chunk of  plastic art is a mixed genre - "Brutalo-Impressionism," might serve to capture its various subtleties. It seems cast in cement which lends it a particular stasis, a lack of dynamism, a dearth of expressiveness. An aesthetic hole filled with concrete.

As the eye slides down the slab-like contours, the first thing one notices (after its resemblance to Mussolini in party dress) is the absence of any visible means of locomotion, like an anthropomorphic hovercraft. And of course the large snake clutched to his waistcoat, oddly evocative of some juxtaposed bit of anatomy, presumably a medical reference to the caduceus. Rather than holding it as one might hold a large snake, he is fingering it as though it were a saxophone, the digits spatulate rather than gripped.

The unsettling bit is the fact that the snake has a microphone where its head should be, tucked just at the good doctor's bow tie; an older style of microphone that Harry or Etta James might have tooted or crooned into. This seems an unfortunate mixing of metaphors, a transgression of artistic license. 

The silver lining in this intrusion on my good taste is the fact that it has engaged my civic spirit. If something like this should happen to the memory of Maria Felix, I'll take to the streets in protest.

 

Flights of Fancy

 I thought this post from 2016 might bear a re-post.

"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously." - Max Beerbohm

Logic 101: Lesson One

"Heat is in proportion to want of knowledge."  -  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

In the summer of my sixth year, it must have been, I was lounging on the linoleum in my grandparents' sunny dining room while my grandfather plied his barber shears along the scrawny neck of another neighborhood elder in receipt of pretty much what he had paid for. My grandfather was an inveterate amateur barber whose tonsorial efforts veered from overweening enthusiasm for his tools into the realms of asymmetry. Over the years he had cut the hair of five sons and, from the gallery of family albums, the golden tow of even more grandsons. In his dotage he proffered his ministrations to some of his contemporaries, and the old fellow now seated in the dining room was a regular taker.

I remember this fellow in particular because as his hair was being trimmed, he was engaged with my grandfather in conversation, and specifically in what must have been a theological discussion. They were mining the subtleties of a hardshelled Presbyterian theology, probably some finer point as to whether good works were merely a signal of divine grace bestowed, or whether they were more like redeemable chits along the road to redemption. As points developed and various counterpoints parried, the pace of the conversation became brisker, the volume gradually increasing, until my grandfather in some heat and in complete exasperation said (a pretty direct quote), "Lyle, if you're going to sit here and say that then you can get out of my house!"

"Now George . . ." his interlocutor cajoled, and so the matter was put to rest, followed by an uneasy silence, some further harrumphing and clearing of throats, until one of them opened another gambit - along the lines of which of the McBurney boys had married the Carrothers girl with the walleye after one or another of the wars ("the war" being a principal signpost in the communal memory, exactly which war always a matter of context or pure supposition).

But even at the age of six I knew of a certainty that my grandfather, for all his heat, had just lost an argument. In the ensuing decades I have treasured this memory; it has enabled me to add a completely new logical fallacy to the pantheon of hoary old chestnuts cataloged by Aristotle and his medieval disciples. I call it the argumentum ad domicilium, and place it in its own niche in the catalog alongside such venerable groaners as the argumentum ad batulum ("If you maintain that position I and several of my friends and hirelings will beat you within an inch of your worthless life"); or the argumentum ad populum ("You may wish to maintain your position, Madam, but I fear very much that your friends and neighbors may henceforth shun you"); or the argumentum ad hominem ("I should have expected such an opinion from one like you who shares the embraces of his wife's chiropodist"). I could go on.

But to clarify: the argumentum ad domicilium is what I call the argument from the ownership of a private residence or business. It is a time honored favorite of bartenders and publicans ("Keep your voice down, pal, or I'll chuck you out"). But it, like any fallacy, cannot bear the weight of argument. The threat of force, or ridicule, or minority in opinion, or lowness of character has no bearing on the opinions or conclusions proffered. To such interlocutors, silence in a rhetorical opponent is tantamount to acquiescence. Their first premise is merely "Shut your gob."