fixing it

What can you say about the movement towards writing in a regional dialect, rather than in Modern Standard Arabic? Is it very common, and has it affected the audience or marketability of the texts in question? What about logistical issues, like accurately representing a spoken dialect in the Arabic alphabet given the presence of non-standard phonemes?

This is such a meaty question! We could do a whole interview on this topic. I'll try to hit some of the highlights.

[Children's literature] is a thorny issue. Some authors want to write picture books in spoken dialect—and some have, like Sonia Nimr—but publishers tend to be very opposed, as they want to be able to sell into multiple markets and submit to prizes. Unfortunately, this even goes for dialogue. I loved Rania Amin's Screams Behind Doors, which won the Etisalat Prize for best YA novel last November, but it felt weird to have these girls speaking to each other in Modern Standard Arabic. Rania told me she'd written the dialogue in Egyptian, but the publisher “fixed” it, worried they couldn't otherwise submit to prizes and suchlike. A bit galling.

Henry Ace Knight interviews Marcia Lynx Qualey, blogger at ArabLit.org ("Arabic literature in English").  The whole interview is terrific, with many new names (to those, anyway, hitherto unfamiliar with ArabLit.org) to follow up.  The rest at Asymptote, here.

tomato tomato?

For most of the twentieth century, Arabs, Arab nationalists, and their Western devotees tended to substitute Arab for Middle Eastern history, as if the narratives, storylines, and paradigms of other groups mattered little or were the byproduct of alien sources far removed from the authentic, well-ordered, harmonious universe of the "Arab world."[3] As such, they held most Middle Easterners to be Arab even if only remotely associated with the Arabs and even if alien to the experiences, language, or cultural proclivities of Arabs. In the words of Sati al-Husri (1880-1967), a Syrian writer and the spiritual father of linguistic Arab nationalism:

Every person who speaks Arabic is an Arab. Every individual associated with an Arabic-speaker or with an Arabic-speaking people is an Arab. If he does not recognize [his Arabness] … we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand … But under no circumstances should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes, whether ignorant, indifferent, recalcitrant, or disloyal; he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feelings, and perhaps even without conscience.[4]

This ominous admonition to embrace a domineering Arabism is one constructed on an assumed linguistic unity of the Arab peoples; a unity that a priori presumes the Arabic language itself to be a unified, coherent verbal medium, used by all members of Husri's proposed nation. Yet Arabic is not a single, uniform language. It is, on the one hand, a codified, written standard that is never spoken natively and that is accessible only to those who have had rigorous training in it. On the other hand, Arabic is also a multitude of speech forms, contemptuously referred to as "dialects," differing from each other and from the standard language itself to the same extent that French is different from other Romance languages and from Latin. 

Franck Salameh, "Does Anyone Speak Arabic?" (Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2011) ht LanguageHat

100 best Arabic books

Courtesy Marginal Revolution, a link to M. Lynx Qualey's blog Arabic Literature in English, which has posted an annotated translation of a list of the 100 Best Arabic Books. (Annotation: whether an English translation is available, some additional information.) Original list (from the Arab Writers' Union) on Arabic Wikipedia, here.

the cheetah's counsel

Managed to get a copy online of A F L Beeston's Samples of Arabic Prose in its Historical Development (A Manual for English-speaking Students), a wonderful pamphlet which I believe has long been out of print. (Would love to see OUP issue a reprint.) Each section gives a brief account of the author and his place in literary history, a passage in Arabic, a translation, and linguistic notes.

Here is part of Beeston's translation of a passage by the Sufi Ibn Ganim (d. 628/1279),

The cheetah's counsel.

While I was immersed in this deep thought, suddenly the cheetah addressed me, saying, "You know me to be proud and of a haughty temper; in the chase I am not like the horse, or the lion pouncing on his prey. Because of my high resolution and lofty ambition I keep watch on my objective, while sitting close to my master, and outmatch my quarry by dint of my guile. But if I do not catch it at the first attempt, I am most terribly angry with myself; my folk then try to comfort me (but I will not be comforted), and apply a whole world of coaxing to me. My wrath is due simply to my shortcoming and ineffectiveness. So if a man sets himself to hunt perfection and fails, or calls on himself to perform noble deeds and then shrinks back, he ought to be proudly angry with himself, and turn to repentance and start again; he must not be content with lowly ambition in himself, nor with vacillation of will-power.

[In his introduction, Beeston comments that the extract, "the speech of the cheetah, or hunting leopard, displays a close acquaintanceship with that animal - its affectionateness to its master, its sulks when it fails to make a catch, &c." - a comment which somehow gives the impression that Beeston himself had extensive experience of the animal.]

SOAS Arabic course

A reader once wrote to ask: Do you really think learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other? I assure you this is wrong.

I'm sure she's right. There may be some piece of knowledge whose acquisition would persuade people not to fire rockets at schools where children are hiding under desks; if I knew what it was, I would certainly publish it on this blog. Supposing, that is, that it was an abstruse piece of information not readily available, something no newspaper or commercial publisher would touch, so that one could only get the closely guarded secret out into the world by blogging.

Since I don't know what that remarkable piece of information might be, I pass on instead information about the SOAS Arabic course. This is somewhat abstruse, since the course is normally sold only at the SOAS bookshop. I found it useful for learning such Arabic as I know. Those who think they might find Arabic useful, but are nervous that it might weaken their resolve to bomb civilians, can, I suspect, make use of the course with perfect equanimity.

I once did a two-term course at Oxford on reading Arabic. The Oriental Institute rejected out of hand my request to attend the undergraduate introduction to the language, which met every day at 9 and included the spoken language, the view being that it was irrelevant to my doctorate and might interfere with work on it; Mustafa Badawi persuaded them the following year to let me take the two-term MA course instead.

I then spent some time using the SOAS course at the University Language Centre. This was back in the mid-80s - back in the days, in other words, when PCs still had a drive for 5.25-in floppy disks and the internal hard drive had either not been invented or was not commercially available - so the the audio course was on cassette, or rather cassettes, lots and lots and lots of cassettes. (It's a shame, but perhaps not surprising, that no one has had the energy to transfer this mass of cassettes to a more readily accessible format: Joseph Burridge, of the SOAS bookshop, tells me the course is still being used by undergraduates; the books can be bought, but the audio materials are not commercially available.) It's not at all clear to me that this time-consuming, inefficient way of tackling the language was any less damaging to my doctoral research than simply taking the course that met at 9am, but Jones aliter visum.

Apart from the audio materials, anyway, the thing that's especially good about the course is that, starting with Volume 2, it gives the reader a great deal of practice with reading handwritten Arabic. I've scanned in a few pages so you can see why this is helpful:








Beginners tend to rely heavily on dots as a means of identifying letters, so the note on written treatment of dots is well worth having early on.

It may be that other introductions to the language give similar sets of exercises on writing and reading handwritten text; I mention this one since it's not normally available in shops and readers are unlikely to come across it.

Mr Burridge has sent me the following details for those interested in ordering one or more volumes (NB I am not at all sure that my Volume 2 corresponds to his Volume 2, a point worth clearing up if anyone thinks of sending in an order):

Arabic Year 1 Book 1 £10.20
Arabic Year 1 Book 2 £8.20
Arabic Year 1 Book 3 £6.50
Arabic Year 1 Book 4 £7
Arabic Year 2 Term 1 £6.50
Arabic Year 2 Term 2 £9.50
Arabic Language Lab Book for Books 1 & 2 £6
Arabic Language Lab Book for Books 3 & 4 £5.50
Arabic Course Syntax Supplement £4
Arabic Course Glossary & Index £9.50
Saudi Arabia in the Balance £20
Arabic Course Grammar Supplement (First Year) £4.50

MAIL ORDER

Should you require mail order...

Postage is £4 per item (UK standard - approximately 3- 5 days for delivery)

For international deliveries...
Europe - £6 standard - approximately 7-11 days for delivery
Europe - £8 airmail - approximately 3-6 days for delivery
Rest of the World - £8 standard - approximately 10-14 days for delivery
Rest of the World - £12 airmail - approximately 4-7 days for delivery

Email/phone your credit card number, expiry date & security code (+ issue number if your card has one) or send a cheque payable to 'Arthur Probsthain Bookshop'.

Joseph Burridge
SOAS Bookshop
Brunei Gallery Building
Thornhaugh Street
London
WC1H 0XG
UNITED KINGDOM

(020) 7898-4470
International +44 (0)20 7898-4470
bookshop@soas.ac.uk

Open
Monday-Friday 9.30-5.30
Saturday 12-4

Arabic dictionary

A reader contacted me recently in connection with the mooted list of Top 1000 Words in Literary and Philosophical Arabic.

Those who have tackled Arabic will know how much time a novice can spend trying out one root after another in an attempt to track down a word. Rob Sides has responded to this annoyance by setting up a searchable Arabic dictionary in Excel, based primarily on Wehr (though other lexicographical contributions are welcome). The dictionary can be seen here; anyone interested in helping to add entries can contact RS here.

I know that Aha! moment

I felt a warm rush of gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled doctor. It made no difference that he was Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, or that he was threatening to slaughter large numbers of Americans. He spoke a slow, clear fusha, the formal version of Arabic I had been struggling to decipher on the page for 10 hours a day. Even better, his words matched my limited vocabulary: arsala, “to send”; jaish, “army”; raees, “president.” I was almost drunk with exhilaration.

Robert F. Worth, Beirut bureau chief for the NY Times, in the Sunday Book Review. (The rest here.)

paperwork

It's 6.50 am. I got up at 6.02 to put more coal in the ovens before they went out. It's tricky because you have to leave the flu open for a while to get the carbon monoxide sucked out, but it can't be open too long or all the heat leaves and the coal burns down. TAR ART RAT has given me a number to call for compressed wood briquettes.

Johanna Thompson likes the idea of the pret-a-parler language lessons, though our meetings lately have been taken up with abortive attempts to get me signed up for health insurance. Since April having health insurance has been a legal requirement in Germany, and insurance companies are legally required to provide insurance to people who have jobs that offer benefits, but they are not required to insure people who are self-employed.

We talked to the DAK, her insurance company, and they said that they could not insure me because I was self-employed, but if I signed on with the Kunstlersozialkasse they would then be able to provide insurance. The KSK paperwork takes 6 months to process, but the longest journey starts with a single step; we got the forms, which required a survey of my employment history from the time I finished my doctorate to the publication of my first book; they also required a form from the insurance company I proposed to use. So Johanna got the form from DAK, and we filled it in and went back, and they explained that they could not sign off on it unless I was already insured. If I took out private insurance they could then sign the form; otherwise not. If I had been overseas and had proof of insurance there that would be all right. So it might be necessary to go back to Britain and get a certificate from the NHS. Or it might be possible to sign on with Sozialhilfe, claiming phobia of the spoken word as a mental disability presenting obstacles to employment (this is not a dodge, just a statement of fact, but that does not necessarily give it a better chance of making the grade).

I once knew a woman who wrote a novel about German bureaucracy. She had been knocked off her bicycle at Checkpoint Charlie and had had to go through a complicated procedure to get compensation. For some reason there were penalties associated with not claiming compensation.

The next room smells strange. I open the windows. The air is fresh and sweet.

Mark Greif has been sending the proofs for the excerpt from Your Name Here which will appear in the next issue of n+1. The designer has not yet finalised the Arabic so it's hard to tell what it will look like.

Impossible worlds

This time last year I tried out an Arabic puzzle on Mithridates -- a puzzle I was thinking of using in Your Name Here. I wrote a couple of English sentences from a well-known writer in Arabic letters, to be deciphered. He wrote:

Helen

This took me almost 2 hours (is that too long?), so I have not  had time to
check my findings thoroughly. I'm sorry, but I  didn't color the letters in b/c
I would have had to go out to buy some and  didn't have time for that either.
I know it's an important part of the exercise,  so I apologize.

Below I have transcribed what I wrote above each word on the sheet. I've
written what I think is the name of each letter (I reverse the order  below to
show how I came to my conclusions), the sound it makes (with  hyphens to
indicate where I thought the letters were joined to form a single  word), and finally
my guess at what the English word is supposed to be. I had a  couple of
difficulties, having absolutely no knowledge of Arabic or its alphabet  before
receiving your email. First, I couldn't figure out how the first line (if  I I've
figured out what it is saying, of course) is grammatically connected to  the
rest of the first sentence in lines 2 & 3. The same goes for the last  line,
although that's easier to figure out (I assume it signals that the line is  from
[  ]'s book?). But the circle that I thought was a period in line 3  doesn't
seem to serve the same function in line 9, where it appears _before_ the  word
that I think is supposed to spell "wonderful." And then there was the
problem of figuring out which sound a letter such as waw makes--sometimes it  seemed
to make the long o-sound, sometimes the w-sound,  sometimes a short
u-sound--and ya', which seemed to make both a short i-sound and a long e-sound.  The
biggest stretch to me seemed the use of ghain to imitate the v-sound in
"ever," if that's in fact what's going on. I could only figure that out by  using
the context, but wondered why fa' wasn't used to approximate the "v" in  "ever";
you use it in "of," which seems to my ear to make a sort of v-sound. I
suppose that that's what makes it puzzling, come to think of it, so don't listen
to me. And one last question: Does "lam" lose its little flag on its top
right-hand side when it is connected on the right side to another letter? at  first
I thought the lam at the end of a word could have been alif plus another
letter simply because it didn't seem to have the little fin.

It was really enjoyable. I'd love to see how I did. If I did all right,
could you to teach me how to spell some real Arabic words? I'd love to know 10  of
the most beautiful words you know in Arabic.

I was worried that the puzzle was not well constructed -- I thought it would be helpful to have the Arabic in outline form to be coloured in, but perhaps this was just confusing. He wrote:

Wonderful! I'm so happy I could be of some use. I really think you should
KEEP the outline/color-in-the-letters format--although I really DID think  that
fa' was ghain, but thanks for pointing out my error; I see it now. I was  able
to figure the puzzle out, so it wasn't that big a problem. If I  had colored
markers, I would have used them and it probably would have helped  the letters
to stay more firmly put in my memory. I will try to color them in  when I get
my hands on some markers or crayons. Maybe I'll teach my little  nephew Kyle;
he'd really enjoy this. The outline format works. It makes the  puzzle more
challenging without making it impossible. It forces you to RECOGNIZE  the
letters - sort of like being able to recognize English among all the  different
sorts of typefaces and handwritings.  Also, the outlines look  so GORGEOUS - why
lose that?  Though I'm sure you could find  other formats that are just as
nice....

I'm guessing that no one who has never tried to decipher the Arabic  alphabet
before will assume that such a puzzle could take less than 2 hours.  Leave it
in! Leave it in! Besides, it didn't feel like 2 hrs, perhaps because  I'm
avoiding revising this Pater thing like the plague, but nevertheless.

I wondered whether I should change the font to have a ghain and fa' that were more easily distinguished. He thought not. He then wrote:

Good news (I hope). I gave your  puzzle to 3 friends and they all solved it.
I hope it was OK for me to give it  to them and that I didn't overstep my
boundary. I told them about it while I was  in the computer lab at school and they
asked to see it. I figured that if they  could do it, then that would help to
bolster your confidence. It only occurred  to me later that it's your puzzle
to hand out and that I should have asked you  first. They each did it
separately and sent me the results a few hours later.  None of them know the Arabic
alphabet. In fact, only one of them speaks a  foreign language. They did agree
that the first line might benefit from being  placed in quotation marks in
order to avoid confusing it with the Dahl  quotation, for whatever that's worth.
But they all really enjoyed it and felt  they profited from it. I thought this
would be welcome news. Do you mind if I  let my mother and my nephew take a
crack at it? My nephew's 9 and very  precocious and I think it would be great
for you if a 9-yr-old could figure  it out. And if he can't, who cares? He's 9.

I then tried the puzzle with similar success on my friend Peter Weis and his son Henry. Good news.

The reason I had thought of having the puzzle in the book was that several years earlier I had introduced David to 10 letters of the Arabic alphabet over lunch in Covent Garden. (David had been traumatised as a child by being sent to Hebrew classes in which they were permitted only one letter a week; it was important not to re-enact this early trauma.) In this exercise too short English words were written in Arabic letters, an easy way to get the hang of the script. He got the hang of it in about 10 minutes and could not wait for lunch to be over so we could find a grammar in Foyle's (Cowan's Modern Literary Arabic, less overwhelmingly comprehensive than the Haywood-Nahmad of an earlier post). He returned to Leeds, got about halfway through Cowan (no small feat for an overworked Professor of Latin), managed to use Arabic to work out a problem in a text of Theophrastus --

Well, what can I say? People quite often tell me they read The Last Samurai and thought: I can learn Greek! I can learn Japanese! (This is one of the reasons Mithridates got started on Greek, long before I was sending him Arabic puzzles by e-mail.) Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if the public at large, rather than random individuals personally acquainted with me, could make the same thrilling discovery about Arabic? And instead, of course, I have simply thrown a boulder into Ilya Gridneff's literary career.

Because, sadly, everyone is not so susceptible.

I gave my former editor the very exercises I had given David -- the very thing to while away a few minutes on the plane, I thought -- and never heard about them again. A couple of years ago Steve Gaghan, director of Syriana, wanted to make a film of The Last Samurai; we agreed on terms, there were problems with his agency; a friend of mine offered to draft a contract, there were problems with my friend; I said I would draft the contract, and I thought I would also draft a press release including the sort of Arabic one might teach a small child. While I was drafting this press release there were more problems with my friend (I compress 9 years of Days of Our Lives to a handful of foam). Gaghan is c-c-c-c-crazy. DeWitt is c-c-c-c-crazy. Down the drain. But Gaghan had said he was a friend and a fan and would do anything to help; surely the director of Syriana would be only too happy to seduce the public at large to the joys of Arabic... I sent some great mass of e-mail attachments. Never heard from him again.

I am a leetle demoralised. I keep thinking if I had written some completely different sort of book -- something like Flashman, say, only with Arabic and Pashtu -- it could have come out years ago and possibly been of some use. The other day Kristof Hahn, a rock musician who has translated a biography of John Peel and would like to translate YNH into German, said he had read about 10 pages and thought: Hey! Arabic! You know, I could do this!

I may put some puzzles on my website.

New Arabic Grammar

I've been glancing through Haywood and Nahmad's New Arabic Grammar. This really is a very useful book: it includes passages at the back from a range of authors; it has an appendix on metre; it devotes a chapter apiece to just about any irregular verb form you can think of. None of this, though, really gives the flavour of the book.

A typical chapter, 43, tackles Number. It gives examples of the formation of the plural of various sorts of nouns. (Diminutives of words denoting things and irrational beings; .) It then has Exercises. Exercise 83 comprises extracts from a sermon by Ibn al-Jauzi. Exercise 84 offers various English passages for translation into Arabic.

A. The three Muhammads co-operated in the committing of this crime; then the first two repented of it. I forgave them, but as for the third, I don't know what the outcome will be. He is not the son of poor parents; indeed, his father and his uncle are wealthy, and give him everything he asks for. But it seems that he reads the crime stories of modern European authors, and takes every opportunity to thieve and fight. The police have arrested him seven times in the last seven months.

Chapter 48.

Adverbial Usages, Including Miscellaneous Quasi-adverbial Particles

Exercise 94.

I met him walking slowly by the river bank, taking short paces. Where has this strange man come from, I thought, and why does he walk sadly as if the cares of the whole world were on his shoulders? I will invite him to my house, as I am a rich man, and I will give him tasty appetizing food. Perhaps when he leaves my houses he will be happier than he was previously!

I called him, but he did not hear me and made no reply. It seemed that his private thoughts were too important for him to heed a passer-by. I called him again in a loud voice, and he turned towards me frowning.

He hesitated a little, then said aingrily: "Have I met you before? Do you know me?"

"No," I said, "but I thought that you were perhaps in some difficulty, and I wanted to help you. Will you come to my house, and sstay a little while and eat and drink something with me?"

"They say that an Englishmena's home is his castle," he replied, "but you want to make yours an hotel, poorhouse, or orphan's home. Do you think that a stranger likeyou can help me? Allow me to give you some adivce; and even if you won't allow me, I will give it: mind your own business!"

Then he went off, and I continued on my way.

On the following day I read in the local paper that the body of an unknown man had been found in the river, that he had drowned, and that there was no apparent cause for that. And even now I do not know whether it was the man who I had met who had drowned, or someone else. But I always imagine that the troubles of that poor unfortunate frownhing man became too great for him to bear, and so he committed suicide by juping into the river. And I still ask myself occasionlly: Could I have saved him?

aside

Before I forget -- have found this wonderful archive of recordings of spoken Arabic, covering dialects across the Arab world. It's the Semitisches Tonarchiv of the Ruprecht-Karles-Universität Heidelberg. The last time I tried to add it to the sidebar Blogger rolled over and played dead. Try again.

The Best of Times

I bought an iMic Griffin off Ebay the other day. As I was leaving the apartment this morning I passed the Postlieferin on the stairs; she had a package for me; it was my iMic Griffin! The first thrill was soon alloyed with exasperation and nostalgia.

An iMic Griffin is a device that enables you to transfer recordings on vinyl or cassette to a Mac or PC -- they can then be saved in iTunes or burned to CD. I have quite a lot of audiotapes of Arabic books I would be likelier to listen to if they were not on cassettes; I have a recording of Eliot reading selected poems on cassette, I have a Radioscopie interview of Barthes by Jacques Chancel; I've been wanting to do something about this for years. And now here is the iMic.

There's one slight problem, which is that to connect a turntable or cassette player to the iMic you need a cable. Not only is this not included, there's nothing in either the documentation or the online support to tell the technically retarded buyer what sort of cable is required.

FAQ: How Do I Record From LPs Onto My PC in Plain English?

A: First connect your device (let's say it's a turntable) to the input of the iMic.

Once connected to the "IN" on the iMic, you will flip the switch on the iMic to "line" if you're using a line-out of your receiver (that would be the red and white RCA type connectors) or "mic" if you're using the output of the turntable. Plug the iMic into a USB port on your computer. "Mic" mode engages the iMic's internal preamp, which you'll probably need to boost the signal of the turntable.

And much much more, but the Q, And just how to I connect my device to the input of the iMic, whether in Plain English, Fancy English or Swahili? while undoubtedly FA, is nowhere to be seen. This is a job for the Automathilfe -- except there IS no Automathilfe. I go to Conrad's with my iMic and cassette player, explain that I need a cable to connect them, am shown a cable with two male plugs, and all is well. (I write having transferred Side C of Munther A. Younes' Tales from Kalila wa Dimna, Yale University Press 1998, to iTunes. It can be done.)

My guess is that quite a lot of people using turntables would know the sort of input cable they needed without being told -- but the sort of person who needs everything explained in Plain English is likely to need more handholding. The sort of person who has cassettes, anyway, can probably remember the days when electrically powered windows in cars were exciting. (When Jonathan Lethem interviewed Paul Auster for The Believer he asked how much technology one should mention in fiction, and Auster thought it was stretching a point to include mobile phones. My guess is that Auster doesn't have Naguib Mahfouz's Khan al-Kalily on cassette and is not kicking himself for not having made better progress and so is not asking himself whether getting Mahfouz into iTunes would make a difference, but if he did no one could say that Griffin Technology was meeting him halfway.)

The reason this made me nostalgic, anyway, is that it reminded me of my first year at Oxford. I went up to Oxford to read Literae Humaniores in 1979. Britain has a higher voltage than the US (230V rather than 120), which means it is possible to heat water quickly in an electric kettle; one of the first things any undergraduate does on going to university is buy an electric kettle. So I went into the Woolworth's in Cornmarket, bought an electric kettle, took it back to my college and took it out of the box -- only to find a cord ending in three wires where an American expects to find a plug.

Yes. In Britain, in those far-off days, electrical appliances could not be sold with a prefitted plug. The buyer had to buy the plug separately (making sure it had the right number of amps). The buyer ALSO had to buy a tiny screwdriver. The back of the plug had to be unscrewed, tiny screws inside had to be loosened, coloured wires threaded under the appropriate screws, the screws retightened, the back of the plug screwed back on, and an hour or so later the novice electrician was either sitting down to a nice hot cup of ground cockroach or frying on the floor. It's said that electrical fires were a common source of death.

Once you got the electric kettle up and running, of course, you appreciated it in a way that you wouldn't if you hadn't had to work for it. On the one hand, just switching it on was a source of pride; on the other hand, you always wondered if it was about to blow up. You didn't take it for granted; just drinking instant coffee, prepared with a kettle with owner-installed plug, put you one up on all the pampered American consumers at Harvard and Yale. Not ONLY were you in a place where you would read the whole of Homer in Greek, the whole of Virgil in Latin, but you could ALSO do electrical wiring! Self-taught! And you were in a strange, quaint country whose entire population, you suddenly realised, was an inexhaustible market for tiny screwdrivers. (You saw at once, of course, that the tiny screwdriver was destined to be lost; a British household with an assortment of lamps, kettles, radios and so on probably had at least 5 tiny screwdrivers on the premises. The average American household had none.)

Well, the British market for tiny screwdrivers has gone through the floor, because you can now buy a Rowenta kettle in the iMac palette with the plug unimaginatively attached to the end of the cord. Accidents arising from classicists absentmindedly threading the earth wire through the wrong hole are pretty much a thing of the past. So, unfortunately, is the quaint oldfashioned spectacle of classics undergraduates reading the whole of Homer and Virgil.

Blair is out, Brown is in. He's said to be keen on education. Not so keen, I'll bet, as to restore the full maintenance grant which was phased out by Thatcher, Major and Blair and replaced with student loans and top-up fees.

Years later, when I'd been in the country for years and had a B.A., a D.Phil. and about 20 tiny screwdrivers to show for it, one of my graduate supervisors talked about a sabbatical he'd taken at Stanford. Russell said the graduate students spent their first two years doing the sort of thing we did in the first half of the undergraduate course: reading their way through very large numbers of texts. The Oxford system depended on a method of student funding that enabled students to spend vacations on an ambitious programme of independent reading; once the funding was gone, once vacation jobs were the norm and the syllabus was cut down to what could be covered in term, the thing that had made it worth studying in the Land of the Tiny Screwdriver disappeared.

The iMic Griffin does not have the glamour of Proust's madeleine, but it did bring lost time briefly back. The mood is not good.

Looking on the bright side, I can now transfer my cassette of Barthes interviewed by Jacques Chancel to iTunes. (I know it's here somewhere.)

Ausgeschlossen

Locked out for 2 days. Camped out at Ingrid's. Went to the Schlüsseldienst in Katzbachstraße at 10; he told me to come back in an hour. Retreated to Yorckschlößchen. Back to SD who drove me to the house in his car (he does this now after the time I confused 1700 hours with 7pm and was not waiting on the doorstep). He cracked the lock. I gave him a 50-Euro note and thanked and thanked and thanked.

SD: Es ist meine Arbeit.

It's my job.

The Schlüsseldienst lives in a tiny pocket of reality where someone who DESPERATELY needs a very simple thing done NOW can actually pay a paltry 50 Euros to get it done by the type of person who sees doing it NOW as his job. Once he has done that simple thing I have a place to stay, my books, my clothes, my papers, a kitchen, a bath. (Still no phone, though, and no Internet access, because there's no one at T-Com or anywhere else who can be paid to fix it NOW.)

I know it's his job; I love the fact that it's his job; I must do something to make sure that he makes much more money out of the job. I must advertise the SD on the sidebar so all English-speakers on the Kreuzberg-Schöneberg border know where to go. Yes.

I go back to Yorckschlößchen, gestresst. It's 11.34 am. I tell Jerry I must have a beer and Walker's crisps, and he says Que? and I point. I walk round the bar to have a better look at the ranks of Walker's crisps hanging from laundry clips. Olav (who owns Y'n) and Katrin are standing by.

I say: (This is all in a series of sentences bearing a family resemblance to German, but never mind that now) Don't you have anything other than Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail? Don't you have Ready Salted?

(I have just had an e-mail from an Israeli sniper who is now being retrained in a one-week crash course in computers, because she has almost finished her National Service and sniping is not seen as a sufficiently transferable skill. She can't think of anything but Gaza. She says she wishes she had been killed on a mountain by another sniper, someone who saw her brown skin against the green. She has a scholarship to Harvard which she has had to postpone for 2 years. While camped out at Ingrid's I have been TRYING to get her to put her ticket to Boston on one of my credit cards so I know the ticket is actually booked and she will go, but she now says she has bought the ticket through her factory and does not have to pay till July 1 and she will probably -- well, she has various ideas for jobs that do not sound like very good ideas. I think she has in fact booked a ticket from Tel Aviv to Newark. We had a correspondence a while back about Your Name Here, which tries to engage the reader with Arabic; she said: Do you really thinking learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other? I assure you you are mistaken. (She does speak Arabic; she has an Iraqi grandmother, who does not want her to waste 4 years on Harvard.) The many readers who acted as guinea pigs for the Arabic puzzles thought they were great. The few publishers who have seen the book are not wildly keen -- though not, as far as I can make out, because sceptical that learning Arabic will make people stop killing each other.)

I say to Olav and Katrin: Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail are the worst flavours of crisp. That's why they are always the last to sell -- nobody likes them.

Olav says: No, actually they're the most popular. When we didn't sell crisps Salt & Vinegar was the flavour everyone asked for. Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail.

I say: Oh.

I say: Well, that's echt Britisch. Salt & Vinegar, Prawn Cocktail. And Marmite. Echt Britisch.

He says: Yes. Very British. What flavour do you like?

I say: Smoky Bacon. Smoky Bacon is the best.

Meanwhile Jerry has been down to the cellar and come back with a packet of Ready Salted crisps.

Salt & Vinegar. Prawn Cocktail. These are the Da Vinci Codes of the world of crisps, crowding out Smoky Bacon, Cheddar Cheese, Cheese & Onion and Ready Salted -- flavours that are not sold out because popular, merely kept in the cellar to leave the laundry clips free for the crowdpleasers.

Many many thanks to the readers who have generously made contributions to my PayPal account. For those who are sitting on the fence, remember that a packet of Walker's Smoky Bacon crisps costs 1 Euro. According to OzForex,

PayPal charges 30 cents plus 3% commission, which means that a remote-purchased packet of Smoky Bacon Crisps costs $1.66.

Sending Arabic puzzles out into the world is clearly not my job. Writing a novel with Arabic in it was clearly not my job. Writing September 11 novels without Arabic is clearly the job of quite a lot of writers, since quite a lot of writers (Updike, McInerney, Foer, McEwan, DeLillo) have managed to get paid for it. It's not my job, but I think it's meine Arbeit. My poor head.

If Updike or McInerney or Foer or McEwan or DeLillo had learnt Arabic they would have known how exciting it is to make the first breakthrough into the language. If they had known that they would have wanted to know everyone to know it. So if some earlier writer -- a Borges or a Calvino or a Bowles -- had written fiction that enabled the reader to make that breakthrough, Updike et al. would have made that breakthrough and they would have been different writers from the ones they were. But because no earlier writer had brought out the Smoky Bacon, they themselves were in no position to bring out Smoky Bacon, and so there never has been and never will be a market for Smoky Bacon. Except that when I ask readers to act as guinea pigs on Arabic puzzles they generally get very enthusiastic.

That remote-purchased packet of Smoky Bacon crisps could keep the author sending Arabic puzzles (that Smoky Bacon of the world of books) out into the world when publishers and Israeli snipers were not wildly keen. That remote-purchased PDF of Your Name Here (a bargain at $10) sidesteps the sort of publisher who will only publish Salt & Vinegar and Prawn Cocktail. You know it makes sense.

The Ohrwurm

I'm in talks about talks with Mark Greif, an editor at n+1, about possible publication of the beginning of Your Name Here. I report this development to my co-scripteur, Ilya Gridneff.

All is not well on the business side. I told my agent, Warren Frazier of John Hawkins Associates, that I was happy for changes to be made to the book, but any revisions should be carried out by extremely fabulous Mr Ilya. Warren said he thought the message this sent was that I was washing my hands of the book.

Mr Fabulous writes:

miss hell
n+1 sounds good maybe a conduit to publishing - --> great they like it, maybe they have sway- auctoritas like augustus in the New Pork publishing welt-klang< --- mike was always a big fan off them too- as does Rebecca send me the odd article. someone with more foresight or the strength to carry a loaf of literature ... was thinking if warren (or someone of his ilk) wants to cut me out in thes idea of making the book work- i understand or accept how a book could be concocted sans gridneff etc etc..i don't particularly want this and realise the, ahem, integeral role i play, though can also see how it may hamper your own movement forward---.i could then place the stuff you worked on regarding me, like the frantic bishkek emails and chasing the posh spice money lines in my bag 2 brit - maybe a deal of publish this dewitt book but also gridneff's too...try to make every one happen- but this would be like a whack over the head by the wrong samuari...just a sordid thought sorely thought.. learnt a new german phrase from a german in the pub the other day (

[today's e-mail from IG [9 May] explains that the next para was off the record, so ***]

) the neue wort ist/// --->' ohrwurm' - meaning that catchy tune you have stuck in your head...i love the german language sometimes, it is an Ohrwurm//
well below is the latest symbol of entropy i guess, one loss is another gain. or my own loss in producing something from nothing--- is that entropy?
- aussie's benefiting from the apocylaptic bio-collapse of American bees- its just the tip of the swarmberg...surprised the little fellas don't get homesick and return to sydney where it is safe, free from pesticides and fullof friendly people...

who knows what happened to the gossipy Perez sydney role- Benny Hill-ton gone wild- saw the person in charge, who asked me to come forward into the eyes wild shut like exclusivity of Sydney Confidential, but she was all a fluster what with the MTV awards, snoop dogg being banned by immigration and fasssssshion weak---\et al said 'speak to you later...

[more off-the-record comments from IG]


saw the Pillow Book, highly recommended, great great-- greenaway is so good- ewan's willy too makes a consternated appearance, if this tickles your video rental /purchasing proclicity - it pops out at several piquant moments...you will really love this film--beautiful beautifiul...
ok keep the faith like an Iranian Baaji- or petty official in the babyklapper design team

now now/// i know it must be maddening but with new bike parts and a lust for berin life who knows what lies in wait...i have to get out of here--->
did you receive le poste?
kanibal gulag?
ilya


By Ilya Gridneff

Australian bee keepers are buzzing with unprecedented business opportunities as a mysterious disease wipes out overseas bee populations.
So significant is the drop in American and Canadian bee numbers, Australian apiarists and industry chiefs complain there aren’t enough cargo flights to export our queens to growing foreign demands.
Billions of honey bees in America and Canada have failed to return to their hive over the past two years in what scientists first detected in Europe and now call: ‘Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).’
Scientists are baffled why close to ten billion honey bees have vanished in a trend Penn State University said has halved the American bee population since 1971.
Scientists have posited a range of reasons from pesticides, mobile phones to new parasites and mites mutating within the natural biological cycle.
German scientists blaming mobile phone use and wireless technologies for CCD, believe increased electromagnetic fields fatally interfere with bee swarms but a principle research scientist and bee expert at Australia’s CSIRO Denis Anderson hotly contests this theory.
“The cause of Colony Collapse Disorder is not yet known. If it is a distinct disorder then it is more likely to be caused by pesticides or result from secondary effects of microbial pathogens associated with the already detected Varroa destructor mite or the tracheal mite,” he said.
“The varroa mite, first detected in Asia, is like a hypodermic needle that it injects viruses and other pathogens into the bee's blood as it is feeding. The resulting infections may weaken the bee without killing it and then when entering harsh weather or bad conditions this is the final straw.
“Australia has the same mobile phone infrastructures as around the world but we are not reporting any similar behaviours to the US or Canada. The downfall of bee numbers in the US has also been reported in country areas where there’s little radio frequencies or mobile phones.
"CCD is an important issue to the wider community as one in every three mouthfuls of food can be linked to bee pollination. There is a massive flow on value from bees to all aspects of life. Bees are worth a lot more than the $60-70 million a year Australia makes in honey production.”
Doug Somerville from the NSW Department of Primary Industries echoes this sentiment and adds Australia had been exporting bees for the past 20 years but the last two has seen a boom.
“Traditionally northern hemisphere countries imported bees from Australia in their winter (our Summer) to replenish colony numbers quicker for pollination purposes, but it’s gone from zero to millions in the last two years” he said.
"Californian almond plantations traditionally saw the world’s largest seasonal migration of bees but this was an internal migration from other parts of America.
“Now the largest migration is from Australia and there isn’t enough space on flights. Exporting is also difficult as bees are sensitive to heat and as a colony in a box moved from plane to plane there is great risk they don’t make it.”
He said there were 1000 full time commercial bee keepers and 10 000 registered bee keepers with annual exports estimated at around least $3 million. Somerville added the value of bees in Australia's agricultural production ran into the billions of dollars.
One hive of bee export activity cashing in on CCD is from country NSW, Oberon, where Australian Queen Bee Exports, the country’s leading bee exporter sends millions of bees to the Middle East, Japan and America.
Warren Taylor whose trade with America alone is worth millions of dollars each year said he will meet with Qantas to discuss cargo costs.
"The last time I sat down with Qantas was in the High Court because the carrier lost one of my shipments and had to settle the damages in court. Qantas realises the potential there and wants to talk.
“With CCD everyone is benefiting, there have been all sorts of spin offs for Australian businesses.
"Bees are a high yield export as they don’t weigh a lot but sending them on palettes costs the same as other produce.
“We really can’t get enough direct flights to the US to stem demand and now there’s growing competition with airlines to capture bee exports.
“We send the best healthiest bees overseas and considering we were in a drought the future is promising. The sky is the limit. America has been worth a couple of million of dollars so far and we expect to double that next year as they will be unable to make up the lost numbers this spring and then winter.”

_________________________________________________________________
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It's hard to see why an overworked, underpaid editor would not be thrilled to be in correspondence with this kind of correspondent (and I am NOT washing my hands of the book, I see my my role at this point as that of incorporating Arabic verbs of vague application into the text for the enlightenment of underinformed FBI agents), but, well, no comment.

Verbs of vague application 2

Wright concludes the chapter as follows:

§8: 18. Since the differentiation between a verb of specific application and one of vague application very often resides simply in a difference of short vowels, the beginner reading unvocalized material will often face a problem in deciding which is intended. Here again (as with the case of the ambiguity over the status of a prepositional phrase mentioned in §2: 11) the overall structure of the sentence is the deciding factor. When a verb is of such a nature that it implies the participation of two entities, then it can only have a specific application if either the sentence itself or the context in which it is placed mentions two entities: if mention is made of only one, then the reader must assume that the other entity is unmentioned and that the veb is a form of vague application. Take the following example:

قتل بعضهم اللُصُوص الذين هجموا على القَرْية فى تلك اللَيْلة

mentions two entities, and the verb is therefore of specific application, and the sentence is capable (according to contextual likelihood) of standing for either 'the robbers who attacked the village on that night killed some of them' or 'some of them killed the robbers who attacked the village on that night'; but if قتل بعضهم is a complete sentence, then it may represent 'he killed some of them' provided that the context suggests the participation of a previously mentioned 'he' in the action, but if this is not so then the verb must be assumed to be of vague application, and the statement represents 'some of them were killed'.

Verbs of vague application

I was going through papers looking for a story I wrote a long time ago. I came across a photocopy of Chapter 8 of Wright's Arabic Grammar, VERBS OF VAGUE APPLICATION; PARTICIPLES. I wished I had come across this earlier so I could have put it in my new book before it was sent out.

Wright says:

§8: 1. The verb forms which have hitherto been discussed carry with them a specific mention of the agent, or 'doer' of the action: both أخْبَرَني (akhbarani) 'he (implying an already known individual) informed me' and أخْبَرَني الوزير (akhbarani-l-wazir) 'the minister informed me' are structures which state the identity of the informant, and are to that extent specific in their application. Parallel to these there exists a set of verb forms, distinguished by different vowel patterns, which do not state this identity but imply vaguely that 'someone or something unspecified' is the agent.

§8: 2. Verbs of vague application are characterized throughout all verb types by a vowel sequence u-i in the perfect and u-a in the imperfect. ... Forms of vague application of Type IX verbs do not exist. It will be noticed that the imperfect form of vague application of a Type IV verb is indistinguishable from that of a Type I verb.

§8: 3. When the specific verb has a direct object, the corresponding verb of vague application varies in its form as if the direct object were the agent; the direct object functions in the sentence structure as a surrogate for the unmentioned agent. ...

§8: 6. The participle is a recognizable word pattern which is primarily an entity-term associated with a verb, and connoting the agent of the verbal idea but without adding any other information about that agent. The participle form associated with the verb كتب يكتب (kataba yaktubu) means simply 'writer', that is, an entity definable solely by the statement 'he writes' or 'he has written' and carries no further information about the entity. Consequently, الكاتب is congruous in meaning with الذي كتب (aladhi kataba) or الذي يكتب (aladhi yaktubu) 'the person who wrote/writes', and كاتب (kaatib) with مَن كتب (man kataba) or من يكتب (man yaktubu) 'a person who has written/writes'.

I like this sinister grammatical form of unmentioned informers and vague application. I like the idea of a form that means an entity definable solely by the statement 'he writes' or 'he has written' and carries no further information about the entity.

W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language (3rd Edition)

http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Arabic-Language-3rd/dp/0521094550