On taxonomy

I think every biology teacher I’ve ever had has rolled her eyes at the thought of taxonomists. They are necessary people, yes — they speak Latin — but they are (apparently) kind of a drag to be around.

Hence my (slight) reluctance to admit my fascination with taxonomy and my own catalogic tendencies. I’m obsessed with Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia, for one thing, in which animals are fitted into categories like “belonging to the emperor,” “fantastic,” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” Also, I have recently discovered the OED Historical Thesaurus — a taxonomy of every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary — which is incomprehensible but astoundingly poetic. Here, for example, is how you may reach the word ‘shell’:

the external world > abstract properties > existence > substantiality or concreteness > unsubstantiality or abstractness > [noun] > unsubstantiality or lack of substance > superficiality or hollowness > superficial or hollow thing ►shell (1791)

How is “unsubstantiality or abstractness” a sub-set of “substantiality or concreteness”? Why is it “unsubstantiality” instead of “insubstantiality”? Can’t a shell also be a tangible thing, and if so, why is it considered an “abstract property”? Dare I question the methods of the OED?

One of my professors recently asked us to make a list, from memory, of every book we’d ever read, and to then somehow organize this list. How to organize everything I can ever remember reading in my life? Right now, my categories are kind of boring — “books from childhood,” “poetry & drama,” that sort of thing. But might it not be more accurate to have categories like:

• books I read when I was probably too young for them;
• books I refuse to travel without;
• books whose titles I have lost;
• books I wish I had more opportunity to quote from;
• books I claim to have read but haven’t exactly read read ... ?

And — since this is an assignment for a translation class — shouldn’t I also include “books I tend to think about in German” or “books I tend to think about in French” or “books whose original language I will probably never be able to read”?

But actually translation and taxonomy seem to me to be natural partners. Taxonomy is merely the art of making distinctions, and therefore every language is a kind of taxonomy; every language makes different types of distinctions. In Latin or Russian, for example — languages with complex case systems — it is important to distinguish the role of each noun: is it singular, plural, masculine, feminine, a direct or an indirect object? The case ending will tell you. In Chinese, par contre, what is important about nouns is not what they are doing, really, but what they are. Each noun is accompanied by a “measurement word”, which indicates a sort of category: “long soft things,” like fish and feathers, have one measurement word, and “long hard things” like pencils and dogs (?!) have another. Books have their own measurement word, and so do people, and so do cups.

What do these taxonomies tell us? More about the culture than about the objects themselves, I suspect. To go back to my list of books: what would happen if I organized them, not into piles, but into a continuum — based on color, for example, or length, or by when I read them or how much I love them? Would the way I organize my reading material — that is to say, my past — determine my relationship to it?

Things we like VIII

1) Superhero movies!! At least the ones that don’t suck, like Captain America (and unlike Thor, though it pains me to say it, as someone who considers Norse mythology her comfort literature and worships Branagh’s Henry V). Am also now super-excited for The Avengers next summer, since it will apparently involve inter-dimensional travel, eyepatches, requisite mad scientists, and, most importantly, more Tony Stark.

2) The way that manatees a) walk along the sea floor with their flippers and b) sleep. Also, whenever they aren’t eating up to 10% of their body weight, they’re sleeping. I would make an excellent manatee.

3) The Once and Future King by T.H. White. I’ve probably started this book five or six times in my life, always loved starting it, but never got around to actually finishing it. This time am utterly resolved. Currently 100 pages in and adoring it.

4) Proper nouns that sound like adjectives (why are they inevitably British?): e.g. Cavendish; Standish.

Things we like VII

1) Ataraxia, which is absolutely not my current state, and which therefore seems like a worthy goal;

2) English words of Anglo-Saxon descent:

3*) the fact that most anagrams of my name have to do with destruction and disease: Malady Rued, Lauded Army, Mauled Yard, Dreamy Dual.

* doesn’t really deserve to be included in “things we like”; would do better in “things we find amusing and mildly disturbing”

4) this incredibly sad letter from Marilyn Monroe to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson;

5) Leonard Bernstein’s birthday card to Aaron Copland, 1967:

Dear A:

It’s two days before your birthday, but I’m already thinking hard and tenderly about you; and this note is your birthday present carrying with it such abiding love as I rarely if ever get to express to you in our occasional meetings. I don’t know if you’re aware of what you mean, have meant for 30 years, to me and my music and so many of my attitudes to life and to people. I suppose if there’s one person on earth who is at the center of my life it’s you; and day after day I recognize in my living your presence, your laugh, your peculiar mixture of intensity and calm. . . . I hope you live forever.

A long strong hug —

Lenny

Things we like III

1) This beautiful and inspiring TED talk by Zainab Salbi on Women, wartime and the dream of peace. Salbi grew up in war-torn Iraq and is the founder of Women for Women International, which works to help women in post-war zones rebuild their lives and communities. She’s a passionate and eloquent speaker, and she quotes Rumi, so of course I love her.

2) Fereshteh Najafi, who is like an Iranian Paul Klee. I particularly like her series Tara, The Princess, and Searching for Free Human. The image below (her most Klee-esque) is from Tara.

3) Wikipedia! For two reasons: 1) for having audio samples of Finnish, an absolutely wonderful language that unfortunately I don’t speak at all; 2) for having long been my source for accidental poetry and unexpected syntax, most recently in the message from writer Kartika: “I started writing Wikipedia to take away the sad feeling I had whenever I searched for a general and important article that didn’t exist yet in my language.”

4) The fact that Jim Carrey and I are entirely agreed on what constitutes a dream come true.

The order of things

A few weeks ago I dreamt that I had dinner with Michel Foucault at a Chinese restaurant in Paris. As I was talking to him, I was feeling increasingly guilty for not having finished The Order of Things yet, though I’ve been carrying it around for four months.

And for two out of those four, I’ve been in Taiwan, and my Chinese is still execrable. This will all change, I hope, as of next Friday when I start taking bona fide lessons, but until now I’ve been picking my friends’ brains for vocabulary words and grammar rules — and I bring up Foucault because whatever I learn about Chinese grammar reminds me of him, and Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia that prompted so much laughter from him. For example: measurement words. There are certain words in Chinese that don’t have direct counterparts in English, but are necessary to indicate what kind of object is being talked about. Instead of saying “I want a guava,” for instance, you must say “I want [measurement word, meaning roughly ‘of those things there’] a guava.” There are measurement words for: people, books, things you can point to, and things that are small and stick-shaped (including pencils, chop sticks, and I suppose probably syringes and golf tees as well). Such a taxonomy! Straight out of Borges!

Also: two particularly fabulous pieces of Chinese lexis:

1) Astronaut: tài kōng rén, which literally means something like “great space person.” My students taught me this word and find my pronunciation of it hilarious.

2) The characters for “sun” and “moon” put together mean “light”; “light” in combination with the character for “book” means “instruction manual” — literally, sun-moon-book.

When you alight

I must admit, my loyalties are conflicted. I came here to teach English (and not just any English, but the Queen’s own English, since our textbooks insist on such civilized phrasings as “If you become ill, you should go to hospital”), yet I adore the fractured and accidentally poetic dialect already in place. Taiwanese English in general inspires great affection in me, but I have an especially soft spot for MRT English.

At each station, a recorded female voice cautions us, “When you alight, please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” It’s grammatically correct, but it transforms us all effortlessly into little birds in someone’s seventeenth-century sonnet.*

[ * or picaresque novel: Don Quixote, part I, book 4: ‘Here comes a fair troop of guests, and if they will here alight we may sing Gaudeamus.’]

Those of us on the platform, moreover, are requested to allow passengers to alight before boarding the train, and this request is invariably honored. Taipei residents, when not driving, must be the most considerate people in the world. Everyone lines up v. properly to board or disembark (alight) from the trains, and then lines up v. properly to ride the escalator. (Beware, Great Britain — you’re about to be usurped as the monarchs of queuing!)

Inside the train are v. few seats, which are intended for “elderly, infirm, or passengers with baby” [N.B.: the baby may be either inside or outside the womb]. The reminder of this fact reads: “Let each and every seat be priority seat.” It struck me as a beautiful phrase, somehow, like the proclamation of peace after a war over blue plastic territory, and I could imagine the author of that sentence proudly recalling the phrase ‘each and every’ from his or her English class several years before.



P.S. Some of my favorite instances of Chinglish ( = Chinese + English) are those which have an unintentional but amusing compounded significance. At Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall yesterday, we saw a little dispenser of hand sanitizer labeled HANDY WASHER. Little handies, v. handy indeed, and in Germany it would mean a place to wash your cell phone. ;-)