There’s no question that O.K./okay is an American coinage, going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I’ll touch below on the various theories of its origin, but first I want to give some evidence of what Mencken calls its “success.” In fact, without intending any hyperbole, he claims that O.K. is “the most successful abbreviation ever coined, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere.”
Wait, you might ask, what do Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist writer and Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, have to do with one another and, for that matter, with the Boca do Inferno? That’s a good question. The answer is surprising in all sorts of ways and also slightly crazy and definitely confusing and then maybe even verging into the territory of….
In the Preface to The Drunken Silenus (2020), the first volume of Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings Trilogy”—which continues with The Fate of the Animals (2022), and culminates in the just published The Grand Valley—Meis tells us why he wrote this first book: “I was working on a style.”
There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and managed, somehow, to teach himself to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will realize is not such an easy thing to do.
Sometimes illumination comes to us from a single word. This recently happened to me when I was reading the Gospel of Luke and encountered this verse from the Passion narrative, about Pilate, Barabbas, and Jesus: “And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.” (KJV 23:25) It’s the deadly precision of “will” that makes the sentence disturbing.
Listening without thinking about what you are hearing or reading requires discipline and restraint. Whenever you find yourself thinking—agreeing or arguing, praising or scorning, composing and rehearsing your response—you need to let that go and return to what’s being said or sung, just that. But it’s difficult if not impossible to stop thinking’s chariot once its wheels start turning.
In the video recording of The Cure performing A Forest for Dutch television in 1980 one encounters a version of The Cure that doesn’t quite jibe with later versions of the band. Robert Smith, in particular, has short spiky hair and looks nothing like the fully-coiffed gothic prince that he would soon become. He also looks annoyed or indifferent.
One of Theodore Baird’s essays goes much further. In “Sympathy: The Broken Mirror,” he argues that this short-circuiting of the distance between the words we read and what they mean applies also to how we “read” others, as well as ourselves. To claim to know any Other tempts us to make a leap of the imagination into a world where at best we see darkly.
Scott Cairns’s new poetry collection, just published by Slant Books, is called Correspondence with My Greeks. The title is intriguing. “Correspondence,” of course, has a dual meaning: “communicating with” but also “connection or similarity to.” I think both meanings are at play in this collection. What Cairns gives us in this volume are seventy-eight such conversations (correspondences) as connections.
Our mouths, our words, can be used for good or ill, to liberate or enslave, to bless or curse or encourage, to ask difficult questions. We share our stories, so others might be invited to tell their stories in turn, allowing us to not simply scream at and past each other but to see what values we might hold in common, to perhaps one day even arrive at a place of mutual understanding and esteem.
If you are or can become a patient reader, Rowan Williams’s The Edge of Words is then not like a dancer en pie spinning on a single ever-elusive “point,” but whirling like a dancer along a discursive path towards the destination announced in the title: towards the “edge of words.”
There’s a mistake I sometimes make in my close reading of literature. In the classroom work I’m doing, or in the essay I’m writing, I tend to interpret the words, lines, and sentences at the beginning and the middle from the vantage point of the end. I know where the poem or piece of prose has concluded, and I project what I have come to know into what I had earlier read.
The marvelous thing about the first paragraph of Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), by Patrick Mackie, is how carefully the narrator builds Mozart’s world in front of our eyes, as if it were being created sentence by sentence as we read about it.
Among my favorite activities are writing, reading, and knitting. So when my sister told me about an essay collection with the aptly punned title, Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, I of course bought it immediately. Here were three of my top pastimes all together: I could read what well-known writers wrote about their knitting experiences.
I can’t remember what moved me to pick up David Whyte’s recently revised Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words; but I’m having trouble putting it down. With the Table of Contents a list of common words in alphabetical order—and with a flip-through showing three to ten paragraphs per entry—you might think you’ve got in your hands a sort of dictionary. But you’ve got nothing of the sort.
Novels are my bedtime reading. I especially like very long novels—so that there’s an already familiar world I can re-enter each night. So when I decided to take Swann’s Way off my shelf and up to bed with me, I knew I was in for months of Proust’s unique world created in the seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past.
My interior life often proves a struggle between Teutonic Ordnung and Gallic laissez-faire. I’ve seen my German roots on visits to the Vaterland: tidy vegetable gardens like the one my father kept, a measured propriety bordering on obsessive-compulsion, and a dreamy Romanticism often overlooked by outsiders for whom German history and culture is a monotonous succession of wurst and potatoes, oom-pah-pa bands and lederhosen, and—most of all—lust for power and unspeakable atrocities.
Some months ago I decided to read Vergil’s Aeneid, all of it, in Latin. A rash idea, given my spotty knowledge of the language. But curiosity and the uneasiness of having missed some essential wisdom by not having met the Aeneid in Latin drove me on.
Blake Lemoine, the now (in)famous engineer at Google, had a conversation last year with LaMDA, Google’s version of the now (in)famous new generation of chatbots. He released a transcript of some parts of the conversation as evidence that the machine learning tool had become effectively sentient. That was the first shot. Lemoine’s conclusion was mostly ridiculed.
I can’t remember exactly what my sister and I were talking about on the phone when she suggested that I might find it interesting to look into ChatGPT, which went public just this past November. It could have been when I was telling her about this blog, with its focus on literature and language—and she mentioned the OpenAI language models. Whatever the prompt was, I did open a ChatGPT account. I was curious to see what chatting with ChatGPT would be like.