Breakfast with Pandora

Still another item for Language Log

Here's another sign of our nation's ever-evolving attitude towards the English language: this item in the local newspaper:

The authors of the state constitution didn't anticipate Beverly Perdue.

In laying out the role of governor in North Carolina, Article III of the constitution describes the job soon to be assumed by the state's first female governor using the male pronoun "he" or "his" 25 times.

The article goes on to explain that because of the masculine pronouns-- as opposed to our more recent preference of "he or she"-- there might be some "problem" as to the constitutionality of a woman governor's taking office.

Incredible. Not much more than 10 years ago, it was bedrock correct grammar and common practice among educated people in my parts to use "he" as the inclusive singular pronoun, and "he or she" was considered awkward. In the mid-nineties-- I remember well because I graded essays then-- students experimented with "s/he" and some brave ones even used "she" as an inclusive singular pronoun, a usage I now hear from the pulpit often.

In other areas of the nation, such as my old politically liberal stomping grounds of Santa Cruz, California, political correctness had already taken the usage closer to its present form, but not everywhere.

The debate was lively, and welcome. Anytime people take care with and are aware of their own language, only good things can happen.

Legally, there appears to be need for clarification, as the article goes on to explain:

Gerry Cohen, the longtime director of legislative bill drafting, says a state statute covers the constitution's pronoun problem.

G.S. 12-3 notes that "every word importing the masculine gender only shall... be applied to females as well as to males, unless the context clearly shows to the contrary."

Which makes the whole item a non-item. I think the real item is that a journalist at a big-30 metropolitan area daily seems not to know that "he" can count as inclusive (just as "she" can), although "he" has become very out of fashion.

Clearly, the debate has been decided.

Favorite actresses

Over at MoominLight, a continuation of a fun meme: your 20 all-time favorite movie actresses.

This seems to be a movie buff's meme rather than a mythologist's. I don't really follow actresses for themselves. I usually remember an actress based on a movie I love in which they star. I haven't seen Scarlett Johansson in anything since Lost in Translation, for example, but she will always be a favorite for me based on that movie.

This quirk also means that some of the more obvious names, such as Lauren Bacall, Katherine Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe get left out because there isn't a movie that I liked that much with them in it. (And no, I never really got into Casablanca, The African Queen, or Some Like It Hot). I did like The Big Sleep, but for me, Bacall's little sister (naturally, the sexy, unstable one, played by Martha Vickers) was the attraction there.

Forthwith, the list, in basic order, though there's no way to go strictly 1-20:

 

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's

 

Grace Kelly in Rear Window

 

Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally

 

Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma and Louise

 

Kim Novak in Vertigo

 

Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. This one is not from Broadcast News, but it's representative of Miss Hunter's beauty.

Emma Thompson in Dead Again

Natalie Wood in West Side Story

 

Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation

 

Audrey Tautou in Amelie

 

Catherine Keener in Capote

Glenn Close in The Natural

Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman

 

Isabelle Adjani in L'ete meurtrier

 

Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice

 

Lorraine Bracco and Edie Falco in The Sopranos

Honorable Mention:

 

Emma de Caunes in Mr. Bean's Holiday

Annabella Sciorra in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

And I would not willingly omit Carrie Fisher in the original Star Wars. I am a former Luke Skywalker wannabe. Too bad she was my sister.

Images of Christmas, 2008

At 5:30 PM I took Phoebe, neighbor dog, out for a walk. It was clammy, drippy, springlike. At 7 PM I went outside again. It was 10 degrees warmer.

This is not Christmas, unless it is Australia.

But up until today it was freezing, and I took to wearing long johns just because I knew I would be warm no matter what.

But it is Christmas. I made cinnamon rolls, under the watchful eye of Zoe, who licked up whatever sugary precipitation came her way.

At church this evening, my eyes stung from the incense; I popped cough drops like jellybeans; we sang all the old favorites, to the accompaniment of a brass quartet.

I used to hate Christmas, for many reasons. This year I welcomed it as one would a family member who has mellowed over the years-- or one who is more pleasant because of how I have mellowed.

We are keeping dogs for those on vacation, 3 in all. Tomorrow morning, by 6 AM or so, the 2 corgis will want to go outside, do their business, and have their breakfast. Which means that my day will start in less than 6 hours.

I'd better get a little rest.

Merry Christmas, all. 

Inaugural poetry

For the first time in 12 years, there will be an inaugural poem.

President elect Obama has chosen Elizabeth Alexander, a poet and professor of African-American Studies at Yale University, to offer a poem. Her bio is here (she is almost exactly as old as I am, and Obama is a year older. Hurrah for the late boomers).

As I listened to the interview with Professor Alexander, I found myself thinking that I'd like to give an inaugural poem, and that maybe others would, too. Poetry is the great democratic literary form: as Alexander herself puts it, 

Poetry is the human voice
And are we not of interest
to each other?

So I looked about on the web and found a poetry blogger who wants to have 1,000 inaugural poems performed throughout the USA on January 20, 2009.

I guess if I can find a local event, I'll go, but in any case, I'll post it here. And anyone else who's interested in posting their poem as well, send me your web address and I'll link you.

There is a tremendous amount of emotion ready to pour out on this important day, and I would love for some of it to be in a form that is beautiful and thought out, enjoyed by many, and preserved for future memory.

Here is a party pooper who thinks there should be no inaugural poem. But regardless of whether there is or isn't, I think the American people should celebrate with poetry, among other things.

Winter in California a la Steinbeck

I'm reading John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, a novel I'd never heard of, but which in 1947 was considered a major literary event.

I love Steinbeck, because he describes places I've been: mostly California and Baja California, Mexico. His evocation of them is perfect and brings out acute nostalgia.

Photo is from here.

His observation of people, emotions, and the world itself is absolutely precise, accomplished by moving in and out of an omniscient point of view to a finely observed tight third person, one paragraph for one character, two for another. Even houseflies get a couple of paragraphs here and there.

It's not in style nowadays, but he weaves it perfectly.

The novel is set near and in the central coastal range of California in the rainy winter, a time of deep and indelible memory to me. I wanted to quote two passages, one about spring, the other about winter:

In the deep spring when the grass was green on fields and foothills, when the lupines and poppies made a splendid blue and gold earth, when the great trees awakened in yellow-green young leaves, then there was no more lovely place in the world. It was no beauty you could ignore by being used to it. it caught in the throat in the morning and a pain of pleasure in the pit of your stomach when the sun went down over it.

And the second:

The gray wall of water obscured the hills and there was a dark, metallic light with it. The heads of the lupines bent down, heavy with water. The petals of the poppies were beaten off and lay on the ground like gold coins. The already wet ground could absorb no more water, and little rivulets started immediately for the low places.

If you have never been to California and lived through at least one winter storm, you must do it, if only to see the poppies and their dropped petals like gold coins. There is nowhere like it anywhere else on earth, and with the way the climate is changing, who knows if we'll ever get another chance to see rain in California again.

Photo here.

Britney's Woman-izer

When Britney Spears was riding high late in the previous millennium, I mostly ignored her. She seemed to be a good dancer, and popular. But my kids were young and listening to Radio Disney CDs: things like Hampton the Hamster's Hamster Dance. "Oops I Did It Again" was the novelty song in our family.

Nowadays, daughter is on the cusp of teenagehood and has thrown herself into it with enthusiasm. She likes her top-40 music and switches the car radio to it when she knows Dad won't switch back to NPR.

I heard "Womanizer" first on the car radio and got hooked on the vocals. I still haven't been able to sing cleanly with the radio the line that goes like this:

Boy don't try to front I (I) know just (just) what you are (are are)

As a scholar trained to analyze ancient poetry, this line obsesses me. First, because it is so consciously trochaic.

The English language is naturally iambic. It proceeds in 2-syllable units (feet) that go ba-BUM ba-BUM ba-BUM. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, which means lines of five ba-BUM rhythmed feet. For example:

But soft what light from yonder window breaks 

Notice that the natural stress goes on soft, light, yon, win, and breaks. Iambic rhythm.

But Britney's line consciously adds extra syllables to create an opposite, BUM-ba, BUM-ba rhythm. In her line, boy, try, front, the second I, the first just, what, and the first and third are's are stressed.

This line in ancient Latin poetry is called a trochaic septenarius catalectic, one with seven BUM-ba feet and a stray syllable at the end.

The word "womanizer" is a natural trochaic dimeter, or two-foot unit, and this line is a trochaic octonarius, or eight-foot line.

Womanizer woman womanizer you're a womanizer

Getting even more basic, the word "woman" itself is a natural trochee. Maybe the songwriter, through the words and the rhythm, was interested in having "woman" be a kind of mantra, woman woman woman woman, always in the background.

Boy don't try to front I (I) know just (just) what you are (are are)
woman woman woman woman woman woman woman wom

Which brings us to the video. It's mostly about Britney alternately enticing and punishing the title man, who doesn't seem as much a womanizer as a guy who's startled to find stiletto heels in his face.

Britney also grabs the lioness's share of the camera and skin time, and in the lyrics decisively lets the man know he has no power over her. Despite the title of the song, the message seems to be more the woman than the izer.

Which, to me, goes along with my recently ruminated idea of the natural power of the American woman, power that antedates feminism. I like what Oscar Wilde has to say about them, including things like "She behaves as if she were beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm."

That is intended as an insult, but it is telling.

I do believe that American women have great self-esteem. Britney has been through a lot that has beaten her down. But it is American of her to perform a song that proclaims a woman's power, despite all the things to the contrary that have happened to her.

Bond: Solace of Violence

I do not consider myself a pop culture pundit. I always get to things after the fact. For example, this post was going to be about Britney Spears' new song and video, Womanizer. When I saw the video on YouTube, it had already been seen over thirty million times.

Impressive.

The new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, has also been out for a while now, and I just got around to seeing it with my son tonight. I immediately made plans to rent From Russia With Love, to see what the last serious Bond spy film was like, and do some comparisons. QoS is a radical departure from the campy Bond pictures of the 70's and 80's, and is the better for it.

But I also wanted to comment briefly on a phenomenon that happens a lot (to me, at least) in serious films with a lot of violence and weighty doings. There is the irresistible message that while we theatergoers lead our normal lives-- going to work, getting groceries, worshipping at church-- there is somewhere out there another world, a real reality that is realer than our normal lives.

In this real reality, invisible forces are at work shaping our fake, humdrum lives: International corporations, crime networks, shadow elements of national governments. There are some good guys out there attempting to keep these forces in check-- thank God.

But we will never know how much this real reality is really real, because if it is really real, then by its very secretive and invisible nature, we cannot detect it.

The upshot? More and more I come out of these movies thinking that my own actions matter. You might think it was the opposite: we're all controlled by these powerful people, so our actions don't matter.

I'm just the opposite.

I start to think I have nothing to lose if everything is controlled by others. So I should follow my heart and my integrity-- be true to myself, as they say, and to my beliefs. In a way, it's a solace to know that, regardless of how much oil prices are controlled by shadowy people who for some reason think that having eleventy billion dollars just isn't enough, I still can look someone straight in the eye and stand up for myself. 

Easy to say, not so easy to do, but worthy to try.

Pillsbury kneads you

Here is another post on a commercial, and another post on American mythology. This does not mean BwP has abandoned the Greeks, or become a marketing blog. Not yet, anyway. But we're all about stories, and commercials are telling them.

If you've ever clicked on an Internet news video, you know that you're in a for a large advertisement-to-content ratio. You get a thirty-second commercial, and then a minute-and-a-half news item. Which is why I tend not to click on Internet news video links. It's like being charged $20 to take out $40 from the ATM.

This morning, I did click, and got the whole news item, and the commercial didn't load until afterwards. Kind of different. I decided to give the commercial a go.

Now's your chance to go see it. Go on, click.

You're back.

Didn't Pillsbury hit a home run? Wasn't it lovely? Didn't you love the reference to The Wizard of Oz? Weren't the people in it attractive? Didn't those crescent dinner rolls look perfect? And the music: straight from Touchstone Pictures.

This is high-gloss. Pillsbury spent a lot of money. And to top that off, they want the ad to go viral. They're donating money to a food bank charity every time you email the video to a friend. (No donation if you blog about it, unfortunately).

Now my first reaction was, "So it's a home run. Is it going to make a difference?"

Crescent rolls are so twentieth-century. They're white bread, the least cool food on the planet these days. More and more people seem to be coming up allergic to it. Rolls also take time to make, in a conventional oven (= global warming). Plus, how many of us are sitting down to dinner anymore on a work or school night? Who is home to make these almighty rolls?

Dinner bread. Pterodactyls. Think about it.

But. But. But.

Pillsbury has one important thing on their side: thousands of years of agrarian history and prehistory. Which means thousands of years of mythology, religion, and tradition.

This spring a nutritionist, a friend of the family, visited my house and proclaimed that if I wanted not to be depressed, I would need to cut out all wheat and most starches from my diet. I listened, and then I had two pieces of toast with butter.

Bread packs a caloric wallop. It is more dense in calories than almost any other food, which is why human beings can subsist on it and almost nothing else during times of famine.

All that to say bread equals security. Bread equals freedom from fear. Bread equals comfort, happiness, and home. The slightly sweet taste of white bread adds that little extra pleasure that we first got from the taste of mother's milk.

There's a reason my American Mythology category is called Cinnamon Toast with Pandora.

And then there's the smell of hot bread. Wow. There's nothing like it to get our pleasure sensors firing.

And of course, in Pillsbury's case, the Doughboy, a divinity, an American icon of all-right-ness.

So few things these days promise security. The media, in the name of content, has done in-depth reports on everything we have loved for thousands of years and almost everything leads to death. Add to that the bad economy, the ongoing wars, American car companies as good as begging on the street. Socially, we've got challenges, too. We have a new president of unfamiliar skin color, and marriage is opening up to couples of the same sex. It's a jangly time, folks.

Anything that can suggest comfort at this uncomfortable time seems like a good bet. General Mills is Pillsbury's parent, and it's trading around $60-something a share right now, closer to its 52-week high than its low. That's pretty fantastic in this stock market. I guess it can afford a glossy, Christmastime ad campaign.

And to shell out a few extra dollars for those folks who can't afford any kind of bread at the moment.

250 words on the mythology of Christmas

What is your favorite holiday?

Mine is Easter.

A friend of mine announced over pumpkin pie last Thursday that Thanksgiving was his.

I speed-dated a woman once a long time ago who said she liked Ash Wednesday best. (Did I run away screaming? Of course not! I was impressed.)

But many people say Christmas. The warm fuzzies are several inches thick all over this holiday. And mythology pervades it, so that certain Christians strive to remind us that the birth of Jesus is "the reason for the season."

But there is nothing more carnal, even among Christians, than this exercise in wish-fulfillment.

Santa Claus need not enter into the equation, though he almost always does. The basic story is that the world is freezing cold and dark; a need is present; a "spirit" of Christmas appears from nowhere and infects everyone, who all turn magically nice to each other; the need is fulfilled; and then it begins to snow, warm, gentle flakes from a calm night sky.

This narrative has seduced millions of Americans, because we are sentimental, because we love the beginning of hope, and because the expectation about the coming of a Messiah is never much below our consciousness.

I will admit that when I begin going to work in the dark, and coming home in the dark, the festive lights and smell of pine seduces me. San Francisco at Christmas is grand, and cracked dungeness crab and champagne for Christmas Eve dinner, then Midnight Mass where you walk into church puffing dragon breath into the chill.

This experience, for me, is independent of mythology. I am most silent at Christmas, and, unlike myself, have no thoughts, but let my senses flood themselves with pleasure.

This year, it's America's duty more than ever to wade into the pre-Christmas chaos for the sake of the economy. But perhaps the economy will allow us to have a quieter holiday, where we stop for a minute to enjoy the silence of that moment when all is calm, and all is bright.