Category Archives: Language

Books, Cities, General, Language, Laura Grimes, Poetry

Poem for city travelers: reading and writing on the bus

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By LAURA GRIMES

Anna Griffin’s column today in The Oregonian about poetry disappearing from buses makes my heart hurt. I love those poems, those found sparks of life, and I will sorely miss them if they disappear. Often, when I was lost in thought on the bus, I would spy one of those poems and read it over and over. I would crane my neck around other passengers to follow the lines.

Credit: TriMetPerhaps if the poetry cards go away, riders could start carrying around books of poetry — reading them, exchanging them, passing them around. TriMet could have stacks of books on the bus, donated by riders, free for the taking and dropping off again.

Perhaps riders could start writing poetry. Maybe TriMet could run its own poetry contest. It would be fitting for buses and MAX trains to run local poems. If TriMet pays to print cards anyway for public service announcements, why not some inspiring art? Worried about printing costs? Use recycled paper and Sharpies, have people write their own poems, pick the best and most legible, and paste them on the old boards. Why stop at poetry in motion? Decorate them. TriMet would be so hip. TriMet would be … so Portland.

What’s the harm? What’s to lose? Look at everything TriMet has to gain: public outreach, supporting the arts, good vibes for riders, a happier Portland, impressing tourists, giving itself a great image boost.

Maybe TriMet could spearhead various literary efforts: One week, a free ride if you have a poetry book, for instance. Another week if you have a book more than an inch thick. Another week if you have a Newbery Medal book. It could be a wonderfully organic, perfect-for-Portland kind of thing. Think of the heady, positive impact that could have.

When I had to start commuting on the bus, I didn’t entirely like the idea. I didn’t like the idea of sitting next to people who smelled like pee, or of listening to overblown phone conversations. But I quickly realized it was good head time. I liked being part of the everyday jostlings of people getting to places. The ride made me take the time to see and hear, and made my brain turn over many a matter.

My whole Henry James gig that ran in The Oregonian got its life on the bus.

Don Colburn: gravity on the bus
And that’s where I read As If Gravity Were a Theory, a book of poetry by Don Colburn. I worked with Don at The Oregonian. He sat across from me. He whirs a whistle on occasion when a rowdy celebratory moment deserves it. He’s a health writer by day. But other times he writes beautiful, brain-tickling verse. His title poem ran in The Oregonian. It’s worth every careful winged word.

Don has no idea that I wrote a poem many months ago about reading his poetry on the bus. What poetry ride will you take? Will TriMet take up the challenge?

Don, I Read You on the Bus

Words flit by like traffic lights
blinking colors
in stop and go.

The bus bends
the way you say clouds kneel
and people file on
clinking coins
tumbling.
It’s gray outside.

Heads framed
by wide windows
scuzzy on the outside.
Whole bridges stand in
as backdrops
and then whiz gone.

I drop in and out
of poems
the way I drop in and out
of people.
The everyday.
I rock and sway with suspension,
re-sort my bags
and zone in
on a life sliced uneasy.
I’m lost. Forgotten.
Unconsciously counting the meter
in my head,
rewording the words
and slipping into spaces
of someone else
in some other place.

That was streets ago.
White tennis shoes
center my gaze
blue jeans
coat no hat
and the slow focus
to a face creased brown
like fresh-made paper
and lips flat quiet.

Then the woman
and the hill and the pill.
I’m stepping with her
going up and going down
lost in her rhythm
and life’s seasons

when the driver honks goodbye
to a toddler waving,
his eyes following small steps,
though his expression doesn’t change.

My eyes refocus
to a tan trenchcoat,
black hat and headphones,
a paperback with bus ticket bookmarks.
He’s lost in a John Grisham world.

Black words
make sense of
white paper
and when I read
there in your
poem
15th and Fremont,
my stop in just a few blocks,
it’s not just a coincidence,
but another everyday thing
in a whole spectrum
of in-between colors
in in-between places.

–Laura Grimes

Books, Environment, General, Language, Television, Vernon Peterson

Bathroom reading: What’s in your wallet?

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Japan Scary Toilet PaperBooks come in all shapes and sizes and perform all sorts of functions, in addition to acting as containment vessel for reading “matter.” And almost anything can function as bathroom reading. Where else memorize your credit card numbers? Now, it turns out, almost everything is worth the paper it’s printed on.

Japanese horrorist Koji Suzuki has a new short novella called Drop printed on toilet paper.

The cult film The Ring is based on one of his scary stories, so there is a certain inevitability to his penning a toilet bowl tale. As bathroom reading goes, that may take the cake. I’ve seen dollar bills printed on t.p., filthy lucre, and I can guess the face of Mona Lisa has been printed there to.

Bathroom reading does have its horrors, its downsides, its backsides. Remember the Seinfeld episode where George hauls an expensive art book, French Impressionist Paintings, off to the toilet at Bretano’s, is forced to buy it, and then can’t get rid of the contaminated book?

Careful what you borrow. Not to worry reading a post, of course. Though “blog” is suggestive, as is the “upload” function necessary to feature the photo of Suzuki, above.

Back in my day on the Great Plains (this would have been the early 1950s) most of my farmer relatives had outhouses where the reading fare there was last year’s Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, also the t.p. Wishes and dreams gone down well.

Drop, apparently, is a scary thriller set in a public restroom, takes up about three feet of paper, and can be read in a few minutes or strung out over the course of several sittings.

Touche!

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Happy birthday to an American literary original

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Yogi Berra/Googie Man/Wikimedia CommonsToday is Yogi Berra’s 84th birthday, and it’s a good question whether baseball fans or lovers of language are lighting the most candles in celebration. If you’re both, line up for a slice of the cake.

Yogi was, of course, one of baseball’s greatest. Some people who know a lot more about the game than I do say he was the best defensive catcher ever, with cat-quick feet and a shrewd intelligence that belied his public image as a lovable knucklehead and linguistic heir to Mrs. Malaprop, the syntax-mangling heroine of Richard Sheridan‘s 1775 stage comedy The Rivals. In truth, despite that image as a free-wheeling zany Berra’s always been a pretty careful man, highly selective in his decision-making: In 7,555 lifetime big-league at-bats, he struck out only 414 times. A few modern sluggers can whiff that often in two seasons.

It’s a fair question how much of the Yogi myth is actually based on fact and how much was simply laid at his feet by sportswriters and other denizens of the cultural deep. As Yogi is reported to have declared, “I never said most of the things I said.”

Still, some of the things he either did or didn’t say are humdingers. And like Shakespeare, they can be adapted to the times. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore,” Berra supposedly groused. And, once asked what he’d do if he found a million dollars, he displayed a keen grasp of the theory behind governmental bailouts of train-wreck private companies. “I’d find the fellow who lost it,” Yogi said, “and, if he was poor, I’d return it.”

A lot of Yogi’s real and supposed sayings have a sly twist that goes beyond mere flub-a-dubbing to a canny second level of meaning. And like jazz, that other great expression of the American spirit, it revels in the delight of the unexpected, the little rhythmic jump that reinvents. Here, culled from www.brainyquote.com and www.rinkworks.com, is a selection of Yogi-isms. Mrs. Grundy wouldn’t approve. I trust you will:

“Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.”

“It was impossible to get a conversation going. Everybody was talking too much.”

“The towels were so thick there I could barely close my suitcase.”

“I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”

“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

“Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

“So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

“You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

Bob Hicks, General, Language, Theater

Man who didn’t write Shakespeare doesn’t have birthday

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St. George slaying the dragon/Gustave Moreau/Wikimedia CommonsToday, as much of the world is eager to tell you, is William Shakespeare’s 445th birthday. The Bard of Avon, the Sultan of Stagecraft, the Titan of Tragedy, the Crown Prince of Comedy was born beneath a twinkling star on this day, April 23, in the Year of Our Lord 1564, whereupon he was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, and …

Oh, wait. Wrong myth.

It’s popular these days, as it has been for centuries in certain circles, to declare that the penny-pinching commoner WS couldn’t possibly have written all that stuff ascribed to him, and that the real genius behind the greatest achievements in the English language was Kit Marlowe, or Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, or a committee of sophisticates united in an elaborate literary conspiracy, or possibly Saint George, in an expansive mood after he’d polished off that pesky dragon.

Now Art Scatter discovers that not only did Shakespeare maybe not write Shakespeare, but maybe he wasn’t even born on the day we’ve all assumed he was. See this, from Anthony Holden, author of William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius:

So another myth must be dispelled at the outset. There is no evidence, alas, to support the popular belief that William Shakespeare was born – as fifty-two years later he was to die – on 23 April, the date celebrated in England since 1222 as the feast day of dragon-slaying St George. As the poet’s posthumous fame grew, securing a unique niche for his country in the cultural history of the world, it was a natural enough temptation for posterity to unite the birthday of England’s national poet with that of its patron saint. But the tradition is based on a false assumption, that Elizabethan baptisms invariably took place three days after the birth.

The instruction given to parents in the 1559 Prayer Book, published five years before Shakespeare’s birth, was to have the christening performed before the first Sunday or holy day following the birth ‘unless upon a great and reasonable cause declared to the curate and by him approved’. In 1564 the 23rd day of April happened to fall on a Sunday, four days after the feast day of St Alphege and two before that of St Mark – traditionally an unlucky day, so the curate’s permission to avoid it may well have been forthcoming. But the contemporary inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb in Holy Trinity – that same church where he was christened on 26 April by the vicar of the parish, John Bretchgirdle – reads that he died in his fifty-third year (‘obiit anno . . . aetatis 53‘). We know that he died on St George’s Day, 23 April, so this would seem to imply that he was born before it, however marginally. There are few more satisfactory resolutions of this problem than that of the poet Thomas de Quincey, who suggested that Shakespeare’s granddaughter Elizabeth Hall married on 22 April 1626 ‘in honour of her famous relation’ – choosing the sixty-second anniversary of his birth, in other words, rather than the tenth of his death.

See — it was Saint George!

shakespeareAll right, so I’m jumping to conclusions based on the thinnest of evidence. Which is pretty much, we here at Art Scatter tend to believe, exactly what the anti-Stratfordians have been doing all these years. The most rational response to this whole dust-up, we tend to believe, is that the guy whose name is on the cover actually wrote the stuff inside. But we also tend to think that, unless you own stock in downtown Stratford-Upon-Avon, which has a huge vested interest in the local boy actually being who he said he was, it doesn’t make a lot of difference. The play’s the thing. And the plays aren’t going away. (As a side note, Art Scatter would like to declare that we approve mightily of the historical existence of a character named Vicar Bretchgirdle. Did the good vicar know Sir Toby Belch?)

It’s good to point out that although Holden doubts April 23 is Shakespeare’s birthday, he doesn’t doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. And it’s good to note that inventing birthdays is a time-honored tradition. Jesus was almost certainly born sometime in spring, not on December 25, a date adopted to co-opt all those pagan solstice celebrations. And the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong didn’t really know when he was born, so he settled on July 4, 1900, because … well, because in America, July 4 is a pretty special day.


So never mind all the kerfuffle, Bill. Here at Art Scatter we still believe in you. As Rosemary Clooney used to sing, a very merry unbirthday to you!

Bob Hicks, General, Language

Apostrophe’s and groundhog’s: on promiscuous punctuation

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Courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons
As the great lexicographer Bob Dylan might have asked, “Where have all the apostrophes gone?”

In Birmingham, England, it turns out, they’ve been long time passing: According to an Associated Press report via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, city bureaucrats have been dropping the little floating comma from Birmingham’s street signs since the 1950s. So it’s no longer “St. Paul’s Square”; it’s “St. Pauls Square.” And, as some critics are sniffing, it’s no longer the Queen’s English, it’s the Queens English (which sounds, if you think about it, like the argot of a particular borough of New York City).

Here at Art Scatter we like to think of punctuation as little road signs along the great linguistic superhighway, helpful warnings that a curve is coming in the road and you need to slow down, or a thought has run its course and you need to stop. Pay attention to the road signs and the meaning comes clear, not to mention the rhythm that is playing in the author’s head, and which presumably she or he would love to plant in your own intellectual pulse.

The presence or absence or substitution of a punctuation mark can alter meaning. “What do you mean?” is most likely a simple interrogative: “Can you please explain yourself a little more clearly, so I can understand what you’re saying?”

“What do you mean!” is more likely a challenge, even an exclamation of outrage: “You can’t be serious! I reject with every fiber of my being the very principle on which you build your argument, and I am shocked that a purportedly civilized human being could hold such an errant point of view!”

Groundhog/Wikimedia CommonsMore poetically (and less argumentatively), the use of punctuation is a handy writers’ tool in the construction of mood and suggestion: “He’s driving fast fast fast” is simply faster to a reader’s eye than “He’s driving fast, fast, fast” — and if the blur of speed is what you’re trying to get across, using commas is like driving in the Indianapolis 500 with your emergency brake on.

Here in The Great Republick That Our Forefathers Built (or is it Forefather’s?) we seem to welcome all those apostrophes banished from Birmingham: As the photo at the top of this post illustrates, we like to throw them into words willy-nilly, like candy confetti on top of a cupcake. For an amusing exploration of the subject, see The Care and Feeding of Apostrophes.

Nor is the comma the only mistress of Americans’ punctuational promiscuity. Over at Blogorrhea, the courtly Mr. Mead Hunter has introduced us to the perverse pleasures of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, a photographic compilation of signage screwups that are, as the MasterCard commercials say, priceless. And Art Scatter itself confesses to a fondness for the colon that verges on the indiscreet: Like a politician with a wayward passion for that little taste of danger, we let ourselves be seen in public with the slatternly Ms. Colon on our arm far too frequently.

What to do, then, when, punctuationally speaking, we’re not sure what to do? Americans are a practical people (as a nation we are Rome, not Greece; engineers, not artists) and the obvious answer is: avoidance. Just don’t let it be an issue. Around Portland, that means eliminating the historical struggle between Sauvie’s Island and Sauvies Island by settling, at least officially, on Sauvie Island. Nationally, let it be noted that tomorrow morning, when Punxsatawney Phil pokes his head out of his burrow and sniffs around for signs of spring, he will not be marking Groundhog’s Day or Groundhogs Day. It’ll be a singular event: Groundhog Day. And if he casts his shadow just right, maybe we can avoid misplaced apostrophes for six more weeks.

Note: Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Beall, Flickr Creative Commons

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

From Lar to PAW: a Monday link and scatter

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Lar Lubovich Dance Company. Photo: ROSEThings have been busy here at Scatter Central the last few days; so busy that we haven’t had a chance to post since we left poor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the clutches of all
those nasty French critics. Never mind, Jean-Paul. As far as we’re concerned here on our far side of the puddle, you’ll always throw a mean left hook.

So, time for a little update.

Lar Lubovitch, a genuine. living and working part of American dance history, shows up Wednesday night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland, and the White Bird dance series reports it still has good tickets available. The Lubovitch company hasn’t toured in 10 years, and it’s been a good deal longer than that since it’s been in Portland, so this is a good opportunity. The program looks intriguing, and all of the dances are relatively recent: last year’s Jangle, Four Hungarian Dances, set to Bela Bartok’s Rhapsodies #1 and #2 for Violin and Piano; 2000’s Men’s Stories, A Concerto in Ruins, with audio collage and original score by Scott Marshall; and 2007’s Dvorak Serenade, set to Antonin Dvorak’s Serenade in E Major. Plus, Lubovitch will be on hand for a question and answer session after the show.

White Bird has some deals on tickets, including 30-buck Level 3 seats, in addition to its usual student/senior rush tickets two hours before the 7:30 curtain. Details here.

mandy_greer_dare_alla_luce_05Over at his alternate-universe home, Portland Arts Watch (or PAW, as we like to call it), Scatter impresario Barry Johnson has been following the proposed merger between two Portland art stalwarts: the financially struggling Museum of Contemporary Craft and the recently vigorous Pacific Northwest College of Art. Good idea? Bad idea? Necessary idea? In his Monday column in The Oregonian and on Oregon Live, Barry comes down with a case of cautious optimism. Read it here.

And speaking of synchronicity (we were, weren’t we?) my review of the craft museum’s two newest exhibits, by installation artist Mandy Greer and textile artist Darrel Morris, will run on Friday, Jan. 30, in The Oregonian’s A&E section and on Oregon Live. Look for it then.

Did we say alternate-universe homes? We’re embarrassed to reveal that only recently have we discovered the second virtual home of one of our best online friends, the ubiquitous and perspicacious Mighty Toy Cannon of the invaluable Portland arts and culture site Culture Shock. Seems MTC also maintains a fascinating, if less regular, music site called, appropriately, Mighty Toy Cannon. From Nick Lowe and Richard Fontaine to Ruth Brown and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MTC takes a welcome and refreshing curatorial approach to the wonders of the YouTube musical world. Give it a look, and a listen.

Henry James, by John Singer Sargent, 1913Meanwhile, who’d have guessed that the path to understanding Henry James runs through William Shakespeare’s most infamous stage direction? (That’s “exuent, pursued by a bear,” from The Winter’s Tale, by the way.) The grapevine that slithers through our mutual abode tells us that Part Five of Laura Grimes’ running riff on all things Jamesean, coming Sunday, Feb. 1, in The Oregonian’s books pages and on Oregon Live, is going to be a doozy, complete with Shakespearean bear. In yesterday’s Part Four, Grimes — Friend and Supporter of Art Scatter First Class — gets caught up in a neighborhood book group and unveils a Henry James contest, complete with a prize. Read it here.

Portland’s stages have been simply aburst with fresh new work, thanks to the citywide Fertile Ground festival of new plays. At The Oregonian, Scatter friend Marty Hughley kept up with some of the most recent action in Monday’s paper: Read it here.

Scatter’s been hitting the festival, too. We’ve already run our report on Apollo and Vitriol and Violets. And my review of Northwest Children’s Theater and School‘s new jazz version of Alice in Wonderland also ran in Monday’s Oregonian; read it here.

reGeneration: 50 photographers of Tomorrow, a traveling exhibit that’s just landed in the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, is a chilly but pretty darned fascinating look at 50 young photographers worldwide whose work, the shows’s curators believe, will still be vital and important in the year 2025. My review ran in brief in Monday’s Oregonian; for the much more complete version, see it on Oregon Live here.

Finally, we’ve been amused and bemused by the misadventures of operatic tenor Jon Villars, who walked off the stage during a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, reportedly because he didn’t like the conductor’s tempo. Here at Art Scatter, we confess to skipping out on a show early a time or two over the years, too. But not when we were part of the cast.

Bob Hicks, General, Language

The inauguration: a high-flying day to remember

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Our neighbor Barb had a bunch of people over this morning to watch the inauguration ceremonies, and the mood was festive: Coffee and bubbly for breakfast will do that. But it wasn’t just the refreshment. There was relief, and anticipation, and — OK, yes — hope. A sense that, as another neighbor, Karen, put it, “now we can have our flag back.” And indeed, she and her husband Ted had hung theirs on their front porch. Inspired, my wife followed suit. Beats all those years we’ve had the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag folded in the bedroom drawer.

What struck me most during this long but compelling (and by the looks of it, very cold) morning was that the power of language has reasserted itself at the center of our national conversation. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. and his model, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama speaks with a plain but lofty straightforwardness. He assumes a certain level of intelligence on the part of his listeners, an ability to follow an argument. He was gracious in victory, which might be a tougher task than being gracious in defeat. He talked down to no one, but encouraged everyone to look up. When he spoke to a particular constituency it was not, as is usual with politicians, with an air of pandering or cynical duplicity but with a measure of inclusiveness and respect. And he melded, as no other politician I can think of since John F. Kennedy, the descriptive and inspirational aspects of language: a vision, yes, but also a caution that realizing a vision requires hard work. Obama’s pie is not in the sky. It’s grounded, practical, sustaining. And if it’s his recipe, it takes a lot of cooks.

I have no illusion that miracles will be worked. Barack Obama waves no wands, and he will make mistakes — probably a lot of them. He is only, it seems prudent to remind some of his more fervid followers, human. But he represents in so many ways the best of what being human means. And by loving and respecting language — by being able to articulate both his own goals and his vision of what our vast and intermingled culture can and ought to be — he helps all of us articulate our own roles in the body politic.

I’ve long believed that Abraham Lincoln is one of the tiny handful of genuine literary geniuses the United States has produced. In the beginning was the word, and it created reality. Oratorically, Obama is is no Lincoln, at least not yet: For clarity and conciseness and passion tethered to intelligence, nothing can match the Gettysburg Address. But clearly, from a literary point of view, Obama is in the Lincoln grain. He has the gifts to be, in the Lincolnian sense, a citizen artist. And it’s been a long time since the White House has seen the likes of that.

So, let the flag fly. Maybe this time, we can look at it as a promise and not a provocation.

Bob Hicks, Books, General, Language

King, Obama, TR and Taft: thoughts about America

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Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I’m thinking not just about the great civil rights leader but also about the state of the nation — where we’ve been, where we are, where we might be going. That leads me to reflections on a couple of former presidents, and also on the challenges facing our newest president, Barack Hussein Obama, who will be sworn into office tomorrow. And I’m thinking of what advice Dr. King, who never held a public office but was one of our greatest leaders ever, might have for Mr. Obama, who takes office at a time of multiple perils and instability.

So, first: to Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the man who succeeded TR as president in 1908 and whose bid for a second term Roosevelt scuttled in his own failed third-party campaign in 1912, awarding the presidency to the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. We don’t usually think of Taft as one of our more nimble presidential thinkers, but he did have his moments, as Candice Millard passes along in her fine book The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, which we discussed earlier here. Here’s what Taft had to say about the man who first put him into the White House and later kicked him out:

“The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die in the battle field. He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”

Roosevelt was a great man, but we’ve had enough of that. You can’t say George W. Bush has the spirit of a berserker — this is not a man who wants to go onto a battlefield and join in the carnage himself — but he has acted with an impetuous relish for war when patience and diplomacy would have served the entire world far better. Obama, we have the feeling, is not a rash man. Yet, as all presidents are, he will always be pushed by those advising quick and violent action.

So it’s good — not just today, but all days — to listen to Dr. King. Here are a few of his thoughts, for Barack Obama and for all of us:

“Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.”

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

“War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”

“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

Barry Johnson, Environment, General, Language

Scatter dodges the snass, just this once

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The snass arrived last night, though here at the sprawling Art Scatter compound on the Northeast Plateau, at least, nothing like a “major weather event” occurred, which is surprising after all of the “flood of floods” warnings bleating from the television the past few days.

“Snass” is the Chinook Jargon (or Chinuk Wawa) word for rain — it rhymes with moss. It is the only word for rain I was able to find in George Gibbs’ famous 1863 dictionary of the trading language, which was used by many tribes of the Pacific Northwest, especially along the Columbia, as well as French and then British trappers and traders. I would have guessed that native peoples employed at least 111 words for the varieties of precipitation that come our way here, from mist to lashing downpour, and the languages of various individual tribes may well have such words. But not Chinuk Wawa, and frankly, I like its economy. Snass. Most of the time here, we know it means light rain turning to drizzle from sometime in November to sometime in May, with periods when it is merely overcast. Snow, by the way, is called “cole snass”, a little English sneaking in there.

Who invented Chinuk Wawa? That’s a major debate in the circles that debate things linguistic involving Native Americans. One side argues that the French started it to communicate with Northwest tribes, which explains all the French words that Gibbs recorded, word like lamonti for mountain or lapeep for pipe. But sometimes this isn’t conclusive. The jargon word for fowl is lapool, which is certainly French enough, but then the Siwash word for grouse is also lapool, according to Gibbs.

My own suspicion, and these days the majority opinion, is that a lingua franca (that wasn’t franca) united the tribes, who were big traders before the French arrived. That language was elastic enough to bend and merge with the language of the new European arrivals — each side used the words of the other. It was a living language that changed with times, until the tribes were routed by force of arms, disease and the sheer number of Euro/Americans flooding the countryside. And maybe it still is — the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have an ongoing Chinuk Wawa language program.

The people of the Lower Columbia have been on my mind lately, especially the people who lived right here, where the Willamette meets the Columbia, the Multnomah tribe. Like many of the other tribes we gather under the name Chinook, the Multnomah have been something of an anomaly for anthropologists and archaeologists trying to create a nice, clean developmental account of human history on the continent. We’ll get to that in our next post.

Books, Cities, Environment, General, Language, Visual Art

Scatter links: A beer with Henry James, a bail-in for Detroit, why NOT sell off some art?

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Cool things to read in other places:

— Laura Grimes, charter member of Friends of Art Scatter, has a delightful piece in the Sunday Oregonian’s books pages about reading Henry James‘s The Ambassadors (or trying to read it) on the bus, and whether James was quite the sort of fellow you could sit down and have a beer with. Read it here.

— Also in The Oregonian, on Monday’s op-ed page, is a bell-ringer by Tim Smith on how to “bail in” the reeling auto industry instead of bailing it out. Smith, a principal at SERA Architects in Portland and a Detroit native, suggests: “(L)et’s reorganize GM to replace it. Why not fund a conversion of General Motors from a purveyor of private transportation hardware to a planner, fabricator and supplier of a renewed, nationwide public transportation system?” An elegant, provacative piece, with some historical sting. Read it here.

— And, in case you missed it in the New York Times the day before Christmas, this intriguing piece via Art Journal about the brouhaha over deaccessioning art at museums to raise bucks, a move that’s recently put New York’s cash-strapped National Academy Museum in hot-to-boiling water. Is it an idea whose time has come? Maybe so, maybe no. Author Jori Finkel talks with, among others, former Portland Art Museum director Dan Monroe, now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Masachusetts. Read it here.