scatterall

Occupy Wall Street library

I was a little taken aback by the flood of tweets about the destruction of the #ows library this morning. There were a few about pepper spray, a tree being cut down, an injured protester hauled out on a stretcher, several about the court order. At least 20 about the books.

My feed is slanted toward book people, but are book people really so much more concerned about the fate of books than they are about people? I thought readers were more humane (some recent study, possibly faked for the grant money)? Is the destruction of 5000 books worse than the cracked skull of a human being?

If it was my kid with the cracked skull, or really, any non-violent protestor’s skull, I know what my book-loving answer would be: burn ten thousand of the damn things, just keep your clubs off the human beings. I doubt any one of those books was a unique single copy. Every one of us is exactly that.

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“It is what it is.” Since before you were born.

I love it when a phrase that makes language prescriptionists crazy, turns out to be older than their great-great-great-grandmas.

In a column by J.E. Lawrence in the Nebraska State Journal in 1949 about the way that pioneer life molded character: “It is what it is, without apology.” http://painintheenglish.com/case/4284

And then, thanks to contributors on the board at the Straight Dope (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=468948):

1919 (The Monist by Hegeler) ” It is what it is because of its other.”

1873 (The Cornhill Magazine) “There is no escape therefore for any regular contributor to a journal from a share in the responsibility of its circulation. A paper is bought and read because it is what it is, and every contributor has a share in making it what it is.”

1836 (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke) “First, Essence may be taken of any thing, whereby it is what it is.”

1726 (Joseph Butler, 15 Sermons) “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”

And finally:

1600-1601 (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 4 Scene 2) Clown: …”for, as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorbaduc, ‘That that is is’”

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Keats, hanging out

I read Keat’s letters every once in a while.

Here he is writing to his brothers. I was startled because I didn’t think this slang was used before the 20th C.

I am… getting initiated into a little band. They call drinking deep dyin’ scarlet. They call good wine a pretty tipple, and call getting a child knocking out an apple; stopping at a tavern they call hanging out. Where do you sup? Where do you hang out?

He is being funny in the last two sentences (context-obvious). And he was having dinner with Wordsworth the next day. So, if you imagine Keats ironically joking to a friend in a bar that he “hangs out” with Wordsworth, your imagination may be historically accurate.

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Best thing I've seen this week

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Emma at the window

I’ve been focused on reading and writing lately, less on music. I have a lot of new albums, and many of them are good, but I’m not in love. This may be partly because construction guys are in my back yard all day, cutting stone and hammering and playing the radio, so I have less music time. I’m not an earphones fan, wearing them I often feel like I want the band to back away to a decent distance, stop breathing on me.

I think another part of the problem is that I’m 44, and have not mellowed much. I can’t really relate to operatic 20 year old angst anymore, am glad to have my personal experience of that be a distant memory. Middle aged angst is a powerful but different beast. It’s harder to find new bands that knock me sideways.

I’ve been reading Madame Bovary this week, the Lydia Davis translation. It’s good, you should pick it up. It gets the nature of our rock-star emotions a lot better than most of the bands I’ve heard this week.

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I will rearrange your scales

I adored R.E.M., in college and beyond. Then they started getting kind of soupy, and lost me, more recently. But when I saw the news today, I pulled out Life’s Rich Pageant and put it on the turntable and yes indeed, that is still a great record.

I remember a guy in college, ye olde college guy with a guitar on my roommate’s bed, who could sing a lot of the songs from the appropriately named Murmur, but in parody, perfectly correct, with great flair, but with no more knowledge of most of the lyrics than any of the rest of us, singing them as if they were in a foreign language.

I’m a lyrics fan, I like the words and music to live up to each other. But they don’t always have to seem clear. Sometimes it’s best when they just snag your mind in tandem with the music and let it go.

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None of you will sleep here.

When I was 13, I got into musicals. This was another category in my mother’s record collection. I liked the dark ones best, a taste that would only intensify over the next few years. I loved a lot of them, but I especially remember being deeply in love with Lotte Lenya in the 1950s NYC production of The Threepenny Opera, singing “Pirate Jenny.”

I identified with this song to a degree that gives me a different set of chills, listening to it now. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only adolescent girl to be enraptured by this fantasy of total revenge. Things had been going very badly for me for a few years, in all parts of my life, and everyone was always telling me to smile, because I was so pretty when I smiled (and damn the rest of me). I was a docile girl, and don’t recall that anyone noticed my attraction to stories of horror and destruction. I knew it would be better when I grew up, and I was right. But the attraction is still there.

I found a few YouTube videos of this song. I was in love with the English version, but I’m very taken with the German version I just tripped over, especially when they close in on her deadly eyes.

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