King Kong, Part 2

 (It is 1937. Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll, the actress and playwright portrayed by Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody in Peter Jackson's 2005 version of King Kong, are sitting at the breakfast table.)

(They don't look happy. They're not eating, and they're silent for a long while before Ann finally speaks.)

ANN: In love with your hair, aren't you? You can't go a minute without touching it.

JACK: I'll tell you what. You seem to think about my hair much more than I do, my hair seems to be much more important to you, so why don't we put you in charge of it? You can slick my hair back so there's nothing for me to brush away from my forehead. You can braid my hair if you like. Or you can shave my head completely bald.

ANN: I ruined the eggs again, didn't I?

JACK: Don't be ridiculous, they're fine.

ANN: You can't even tell me truth about my cooking.

JACK: Okay, you want the truth about it? The truth is, you can't cook worth a damn. The truth is, I've never eaten eggs worse than yours, and I've had breakfast in a lot of truly horrible dives. The truth is that it drives me crazy how you make a fuss any time I bring up the subject of hiring a cook. The truth is we'd eat much better even if we hired the worst home cook in New York.

(They glare at each other for a moment, then they smile, enjoying this rare moment of frankness, and then they go back to looking sad.)

JACK: The truth is I'd work so hard to make you happy, if you'd give me some idea how to do it. Why are you making that face?

ANN: I wonder whether you yourselves believe what you say, you men.

JACK: "Men"? Are there some other men wearing themselves out trying to please you? What other men?

ANN: I was thinking about Carl, something he said to me when he first met me, when he hired me, the day we set sail -- that was a rather busy day for me, all in all. Now, he said a lot which was obvious nonsense, the sort of nonsense we women hear constantly, but one thing he said seemed absolutely honest. It seemed to come out of him spontaneously, without him wishing to say it or thinking about how it sounded. An earnest expression suddenly came over his face, and he said he was hiring me because I was the saddest girl in the world. And you, too. You fell in love with my sadness, didn't you? And yet you sit there and talk to me with a straight face about wanting to work so hard to make me happy, if only you knew how.

JACK: You, you, you talk about honesty, but that cuts two ways. You can't be honest with me. You went to the zoo again yesterday, didn't you? You visited the gorillas.

ANN: (screams) Yes! Yes! I went to the zoo yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that! I've been to the zoo every day it's been open since we got back to New York, since before he died!

(Jack puts his hands over his ears, squeezes his eyes shut tight and screams.)

Languages and Geography

Languages have been expanded and contracting, moving from one area to another, coming into existence and dying, for thousands of years. It is a mistake to assume that this a recent phenomenon, and the association of a certain language with a certain geographic region is, ultimately, arbitrary, because such associations are never permanent. For example, the majority of people in the United States at present speak English. So, there is a tendency to think that our language "came from" England. But one of the ancestors of modern English, Anglo-Saxon, came to England from Germany in the fifth century AD, replacing the Celtic language which had been predominant for some time in the region which is now England. And Saxon, one of the many dialects of German, has itself moved from place to over the millennia, despite their being one clearly-defined geographical region in Germany today called Saxony. (And two more called Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.) The movement of Germanic languages in the 4th to 6th centuries AD was so extreme that Germans today often refer to that period of time as the Voelkerwanderung, the wandering of peoples.

Celtic languages are spoken today in Ireland, the Isle of Man, on the island of Great Britain in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and also in the region of France called Amorica or Brittany. In each of those regions, a Celtic language is the first language of a minority of the population, although recently, after centuries of decline, they all have been making a considerable comeback, being officially protected under law and taught to schoolchildren. These efforts at restoration have been underway for well over a century in Ireland, and  soon, a majority of the Irish population may have at least some ability to understand, speak, read and write Irish. 

2100 years ago, the Celtic language family was one of five major Indo-European Language families, besides the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian families. Celtic languages have been predominant at one time or another not only in Great Britain and Ireland but also in present-day France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, southern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and western Romania. 

The Romance language group at that time consisted mostly of Latin. 2500 years ago, Latin and related languages were confined to a rather tiny region around Rome, which then was more a village than a city. Rome expanded greatly, and the Latin language spread. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC Rome conquered present-day France, Spain and Portugal, and in those regions Latin quickly replaced the Celtic languages. Then in the 1st century AD Rome conquered present-day England, but the majority of the people there continued to speak one Celtic language or another, until the above-mentioned change to Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons conquered Cornwall in the 10th century, and Cornish declined sooner than the Celtic languages in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which kept their political independence from the English-speakers longer. The Celtic speakers in Brittany in France emigrated from Great Britain in or around the late 5th century. 

To the east of the city of Rome, the Romans established Latin in various regions. In the region known then as Dacia and known now as Romania. Romanian and the closely related Moldovan are the only Romance languages in eastern Europe today. The Romans conquered vast territories to the east which had formerly been under Greek control, all the way to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, to present-day Israel and Syria and Iraq and including present-day Turkey, but in these areas the Latin language did not take over the existing languages. As before the Romans came, the language of government and the upper classes was Greek, while the majority populations spoke a great variety of other languages. 

I can't begin to explain, yet, why political conquest sometimes means the complete linguistic transformation of a region, and sometimes not. At present the best I can do is point out some examples where the language of a region has completely changed under new political leadership, and some examples where it has not. For example: in the Western Hemisphere, in the United States, the languages of the of the inhabitants before the European invasions have been reduced to a much greater degree than the indigenous languages in Latin America. In the US, the most widely-spoken indigenous language is Navaho, with about 170,000 speakers presently. To the south of the US, by contrast, Nahuatl (Aztec) is spoken by nearly 2 million people presently, the Mayan languages by about 6 million, and the Quechan (Incan) languages by 8 to 10 million people. 

HOLLYWOOD SOME MORE!!!

"Here's my pitch: Bad Boys, except in LA with female cops. Expensive cameras, dumb plots, cliched action scenes, dumb catch phrases -- everything exactly like Bad Boys. Don't mess with success. One of the cops could even be one of the Bad Boys' sisters. Whatever. It'll make us billions of dollars without us ever having to use any imagination or creativity -- just like Bad Boys."

"Great! Got a title for the show?"

"Who cares?! 'LA's Finest.' Whatever."

 

 "Great! It's already in production."

 

"Whoa! That was quick."

 

"As a matter of fact, it's a new record: 22 seconds from the beginning of the pitch to the start of production. Here's your first great big bag of cash, thank you very much."

 

"Always a pleasure."

 

"And if you see anyone who has any creativity on your way out --"

 

"I know the drill -- call security immediately. You having the backyard barbecue on Sunday?"

"Yeah. Bring the family."

 

Dream Log: Jennifer Aniston in a Huge Mall/Airport

 I dreamed I was running around inside a mall bigger than any mall in the real world. It was connected to a huge international airport. The terminal for a Japanese airline was adjacent to a part of the mall which contained Japanese store which did business in yen; British airlines were next to British stores which only took pounds; and so forth. There were huge staircases, some more than thirty feet wide with more than twenty steps between landings. The entire mall/airport was bigger than a city and thronging with crowds. (COVID didn't exist in this dream.)

Jennifer Aniston was rushing down one of the huge staircases, carrying a lot of dresses all bunched up in her arms, as I was climbing up. In the dream, she was Jennifer Aniston, the huge TV and movie star, but she also seemed to be partly the character she played on "Friends," who was in the fashion business. For whatever reason, she was often rushing around with armloads of fashionable clothing. She collided with me as she rushed down the stairs. We knew each other, and this wasn't the first such collision. Jennifer smiled and apologized and rushed on.

 I took a seat on a sofa on the next huge landing. Another friend of mine was sitting nearby, a man with blonde hair and a blonde moustache. He said to me, indicating Jennifer, "You know, such behavior could be interpreted as encouragement for you to advance the relationship. Physically." I said, "Yeah," non-committally. I didn't want to discuss it with him. 

I stood up again and continued rushing around the huge airport/mall. In one of the lounges of a Japanese airline, I found an opened, half-empty roll of 100-yen coins. 

 Then I was in a Korean section of the mall, walking past Korean restaurants, bars, clothing stores. On several different occasions, several different men assaulted me. It was not clear whether they were trying to sexually assault me, or to mug me, or something else.

 Then I walked to an American section of the mall which led out into the open air, where it was raining and several old-looking automotive-repair business were arrayed over a hillside.

 Then I was back inside, walking along endless huge hallways, up and down huge staircases, all very new-looking and all very crowded with people in business suits.

It was near the end of the business day, and I saw Jennifer again, in the midst of a crowd. 

 

I have no idea whether Ms Aniston is short, tall or of average height in real life. In the dream, she was quite petite, about 5 feet tall.  Before I had fallen asleep, I had been thinking about a girl I had met when she and I were both 15 years old, perhaps more beautiful than any other girl or any woman I have ever seen, the only person with whom I can remember the very instant I first saw her face, back in September, 1976. She was quite petite, about 5 feet tall. 

Jennifer was wearing a beige business suit, her hair was swept up in a bun. Her arms were empty. No big pile of fashionable clothes this time. I walked up to her, took her hands in mine, and began to babble quite foolishly. Within half a minute i had told her that I was in love with her. Then I hugged her and kissed her on the lips.

She took several steps backwards, staring at me, very wide-eyed, looking very shocked. She said, "I'll see you tomorrow," and turned and walked away.

The next morning, I saw her, and I said that I wasn't going to take back anything which I had said, because it has all been true. But, I said, naturally I realized that I shouldn't have blurted it all so suddenly, and I apologized for that. I said that of course I realized that that was the sort of thing which I should have gradually let her know, over the course of a year or two or three, being alert for signs that she wanted me to stop. I also apologized for kissing her without asking, and without having received any clear signal that she had wanted to be kissed.

She came up to me and hugged me and put her head on my chest -- I'm 6 foot 3 -- and said that I talked too much. We were silent for a while, holding each other. Then I asked her whether I could kiss her again. She said, "You better!" and then we started snogging, and I woke up.

The Lindisfarne Gospels

 The brightest historians have been trying to tell us, for a century and more, that the Dark Ages weren't so completely dark, and they keep pointing to Dark Age Ireland and England as examples of that, and the best examples of what they're talking about which I've found so far are the spectacularly illuminated books made in Dark Age Britain and Ireland. The most celebrated example of these is probably the Book of Kells. Other famous pieces of insular illumination ("insular" referring to the islands of Britain and Ireland, and "illumination" to the decoration) are the Echternach Gospels, ca AD 690; the Book of Durrow, ca AD 650-700; and the Codex Amiatinus, ca AD 700, the earliest surviving complete Vulgate Bible.

But to me, the fairest of them all are the Lindisfarne Gospels, and my favorite page of that volume is Folio 3r:

The colors remind me of stained glass. 

Besides a tremendous amount of color and imagery, imagery which, in the style typical of insular illumination, draws both on Christianity and on pre-Christian Celtic culture, the volume contains the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in a version referred to as the "insular Vulgate," which has a higher admixture of readings from the Old Latin than do some other versions of Jerome's Vulgate, and higher than that which eventually became the Catholic Church's standard version, commissioned at the Council of Trent in  the 16th century.

The volume is generally agreed to have been made around AD 700 in Lindisfarne in northeastern England, by a monk named Eadfrith, who became Bishop of Lindisfarne in 698. Recently, however, some authorities have argued for a later date, and for Ireland as the manuscript's origin. I do not know nearly enough to be able to weigh in on this controversy. 

According to the traditional account of things, still widely accepted, the Lindisfarne Gospels were made as a tribute to St Cuthbert (c634-687), who was very deeply revered in the region in his own time, and would be made more widely famous by Bede's Ecclesiatical History. In AD 795, Lindisfarne was raided by Vikings, and the traditional story is that monks from Lindisfarne carried this volume around with them as they wandered homeless for quite a long time after their abbey had been destroyed. Whatever actually happened to the Lindisfarne Gospels in the Dark and Middle Ages, it can be said with somewhat more confidence that Robert Cotton, one of the greatest collectors of English historical documents, owned the volume around AD 1600, and that it was given to the British Museum when that institution was founded in 1753, and it belongs to the British Library today. 

I have never actually seen the Lindisfarne Gospels. I would have to go to London to see the volume, and even then, there is very little chance that I was see it other than through a very thick pane of glass. I have seen pictures of it, in books and online, and I have spent some time wondering which of those photographs more accurately represent its appearance. 

Given its (generally accepted, I believe) date of ca AD 700, I was surprised at first not to find this manuscript being cited among the witnesses for the 4th edition, 1994, of the Stuttgart Vulgate. But then I examined the list of witnesses for the New Testament in the Stuttgart Vulgate a bit more closely, and saw to my surprise that almost half of them are actually older than AD 700. I'm used to looking at lists of manuscripts of works of Classical Latin, where one single manuscript as old as that is quite sensational, and the Bible is an entirely different ballgame.

However, there is one linguistic aspect where the importance of the Lindisfarne Gospels reigns supreme. Take a look at the photo in this post. You see all of those words in tiny print between the lines? Those words are between the lines all throughout the volume, all throughout all four Gospels. They were added to the volume in the 10th century. They are a word-for-word gloss in Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, of the Latin text. It's just a gloss, not a complete stand-alone translation in correct Anglo-Saxon syntax; still, it makes the Lindisfarne Gospels the oldest surviving manuscript of an English Biblical translation. 

The Odor of Mendacity

"Hide all ads from Noom." "Done." YES! What a relief! 

I am not against attempts to lose weight. I have spent a considerable portion of my life trying to lose weight. And yet (and therefore?), I have never seen an ad for a weight-loss program which I didn't find deeply annoying. 

I've also never seen an ad for a language-aquisition program (other than for the traditional kind: schools and universities) which I didn't find deeply annoying.

Perhaps for the same reason in each case: because I don't think there are any easy ways to lose weight or acquire new languages. Both require lots and lots of hard work and self-discipline for almost everyone.

In other words: I believe that those ads heralding great breakthroughs in weight loss and language acquisition (and there are many similar ads claiming easy breakthroughs in other areas of life. Wealth acquisition comes immediately to mind), breakthroughs which make it easy and fun, are LYING to you. 

And they're also lying to you if they've got you convinced that there's something seriously wrong with you if weight loss or language acquisition doesn't come easily to you, what with this miracle breakthrough at hand which is transforming our...

MENDACITY! THIEVES AND FRAUDS! Don't let them get you down or talk you into despising yourself. There are a few cases where someone has lost considerable weight or acquired fluency in a new language while full-grown. A very few cases. Mozarts of weight loss or language acquisition, or wealth acquisition, or musical virtuosity. For every single one of those geniuses, there are a great number of heartless grifters trying to convince you that you can do it easily, and that all that's been stopping you up until now is that you hadn't yet come across this miracle breakthrough program now advertised in this advertisement before your eyes, available now for three easy payments...

 It'd be nice to see some sort of miracle breakthrough in stopping these low-down heartless grifters. First things first: we've got to get that grifter out of the Oval Office.. 

Cicero verteidigt Lisa Eckhart. Sollte man lachen?

Als aussen-wohnender Auslaender (ich wohne in den US) verpasst man auch im guenstigsten Falle eine grosse Menge der jeweiligen fremden Kultur. Zum Beispiel, bis jetzt kannte ich den Namen Lisa Eckhart nicht. Zweiter Beispiel: ich weiss sehr wenig von deutschem Humor, schon weil deutsche KomikerInnen und KaberettistInnen nie in dem sorgfaeltig vorgetragenen Hochdeutsch der ARD und Germanistisk-Professoren sprechen, und ich deshalb bestenfalls ein Wort in fuenf mitbekomme.

Mit Unmengen von Kannmichirren also: mein bisheriger Eindruck von Cicero war einer von unfreiwilliem Komik, gar nicht der Verteidiger, den sich ein/e Komiker/Inn sich wuenschen wuerde. 

Ich lese Nietzsche gern, mit zweieinhalb grossen Ausnahmen: er schreibt komplett ahnungslos ueber Krieg und "Weibern" (seltenst "Frauen"), zwei Bereichen des Lebens, welche er nur von Hoerensagen kennt. Wenn man hoert, dass jemand "leidenschaftliche Nietzsche-Leserin" ist, ist man schon nervoes, weil man nicht weiss, ob sie Fan von den daemlichen Teilen ist. Und die andere halbe Ausnahme, die gar nicht Friedrich Nietzsches eigener Schuld ist: der Antisemitismus seiner Schwester, die 46 Jahre lang (!) Verwaelterin seiner Schriften war, und leider Gottes sehr erfolgreich bis zum heutigen Tag seinen guten Namen und Ruf mit dem Dreck der Antisemitismus and Deutschtuemmelei verbundet hat. 

Ich googlete Lisa Eckhart und fand, dass man seit ein paar Jahren darueber streitet, ob einige ihrer Witze antisemitisch sind. Und dass unter ihren Verteidigern Henryk M Broder ist. Ach, Broder... Also, ein Quagmire auf einem Mal. Es geht hier um eine mir ganz unbekannnte oestereichische Kabarettistin, welche einige Leute fuer nicht lustig halte, und eine liberalala Zeitschrift, welche nicht nur ich fuer albern halte. Man fragt sich, was Lisa Eckhart von diesem Verteidiger haelt -- von Cicero, meine ich. Der Broder ist noch ein weites Feld. Hmm. 

Also, dem Cicero gab Eckhart ein Interview vor nur einigen Wochen. Das enttaeuscht. Aber, widerholt gesagt: als aussen-wohnender Auslaender verpasst man so manches. Ich bekomme ungefaehr ein Wort in Fuenf eines deutschen Komikers mit. Ich hatte bisher gar nichts von Lisa Eckhart gehoert, usw. Kulturen sind doch verschieden, und das gehoert zu den Schwierigkeiten des Uebersetzens. 

Aber in wievielen Faellen schon war ich zuerst unueberzeugt von der ueblen Nachrede, spaeter aber schon und in Unmengen: bei Botho Strauss, bei Peter Sloterdijk... Und wieviele Nietzsche-leser/Innen haben sich doch entpuppt als rechte Arschloecher -- gewiss nicht alle, natuerlich. Nicht ich, nicht Walter Benjamin, viele andere noch auch nicht. Versteht sich. Und mein Instinkt, Dichter und Kuenstler im Zweifelsfall zu verteidigen, scheint mir noch wie vor wie ein gesunder. Trotzdem, in diesem Fall bekomme ich ein ungutes Gefuehl. Vieles erinnert mich schon an andere ungute Faelle. Aber der Fall ist mir noch neu, noch ganz nagelneu, und ich werde zuerst weiter zuschauen und mich nicht entscheiden.