"The Last Speakers": preserving language in the internet age

The idea that the world is quickly becoming one vast internet-connected village of ideas and commerce is always challenged by the reality of the situation. On a planet of six-billion-plus human beings there are pockets where the very meaning of "civilization" requires no laptop, no electricity, and no connecting thread but a common language. No matter how few the number of speakers, language makes a community.
A team of linguists have discovered in India a distinct patch of language that extends to a group of residents in four bamboo huts. Its speakers share only nine percent of a common vocabulary with the surrounding inhabitants. As the article makes clear, language remains a carrier of common history and culture.

The number of disappearing languages is increasing, and in this interconnected age there is still the surprise in finding new speech and new ways of expressing shared ideas. Here's an excerpt from a recent article written by New York Times writer John Noble Wilford.

Two years ago, a team of linguists plunged into the remote hill country of northeastern India to study little-known languages, many of them unwritten and in danger of falling out of use....

At a rushing mountain river, the linguists crossed on a bamboo raft and entered the tiny village of Kichang. They expected to hear the people speaking Aka, a fairly common tongue in that district. Instead, they heard a language, the linguists said, that sounded as different from Aka as English does from Japanese.

After further investigation, leaders of the research announced last week the discovery of a “hidden” language, known locally as Koro, completely new to the world outside these rural communities. While the number of spoken languages continues to decline, at least one new one has been added to the inventory, though Koro too is on the brink of extinction.

“We noticed it instantly” as a distinct and unfamiliar language, said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Salem, Oregon. ...

When the three researchers reached Kichang, they went door to door asking people to speak their native tongue — not a strenuous undertaking in a village of only four bamboo houses set on stilts. The people live by raising pigs and growing oranges, rice and barley. They share a subsistence economy and a culture with others in the region who speak Aka, or Miji, another somewhat common language. ...

Listening, the researchers at first suspected Koro to be a dialect of Aka, but its words, syntax and sounds were entirely different. Few words in Koro were the same as in Aka: mountain in Aka is “phu,” but “nggo” in Koro; pig in Aka is “vo,” but in Koro “lele.” The two languages share only 9 percent of their vocabulary.

... In The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages, published by National Geographic Books, Dr. Harrison noted that Koro speakers “are thoroughly mixed in with other local peoples and number perhaps no more than 800.”

Moreover, linguists are not sure how Koro has survived this long as a viable language. Dr. Harrison wrote: “The Koro do not dominate a single village or even an extended family. This leads to curious speech patterns not commonly found in a stable state elsewhere.”

... The effort to identify “hot spots of threatened languages,” the linguists said, is critical in making decisions to preserve and enlarge the use of such tongues, which are repositories of a people’s history and culture.

In the case of Koro speakers, Dr. Harrison wrote in his book, “even though they seem to be gradually giving up their language, it remains the most powerful trait that identifies them as a distinct people.”

"Vernacular Typography": preserving the ghost signs of the city

One of the ironies of the mass-information internet age is the rise of handcraft. From craft beer to paper-making, from the use of a certain color tint known as "folk-art blue" (even by self-taught outsider artists) to labor-intensive textile creation, the increasing amount of handcrafting is a response to the ubiquity of corporate branding and, even more so, the easy availability of "how-to" information.

What's ironic about the rush to make the old new again is the abandonment of the art that often surrounds us. This is especially true in cities, where hand-made signs and advertising are fast disappearing in the rush to demolish and replace.

This displacement is no longer just in New York City and other major areas known for the swing of the wrecking ball. Yet the vanishing act is more pronounced and noticeable in urban areas: history slowly disappears day by day, without notice or record, especially when it comes to a city's signs and signage. At Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, curator Jerimiah Moss interviewed Molly Woodward about her ongoing project, Vernacular Typography, which documents the city's daily attrition and is now expanding to cities around the globe.

Currently, Vernacular Typography contains over 5,000 images of found typography from Argentina, Chile, Cuba, England, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Website materials emphasize that contributions to the Vernacular Typography effort will allow the project to expand to new cities and incorporate new elements into the project (printed matter, interactive maps, video shorts, interviews with signmakers, etc) that are vital to the preservation of visual communication in the built environment.

The NYC typography record includes numbers, ghost signs, hand-painted signage, grammatical errors and fading fallout shelter signs -- reminders of the atomic age. The larger global project hopes to encompass much more. In her own description Woodward hopes to create "a collaborative effort with local typographers and sign-makers to document, map, and preserve these fragile remaining examples of a representative cultural art form that is being swept away by the uniformity of corporate advertising, which ignores and subverts local history and tradition in large and small urban areas: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Kowloon, Melbourne, and Sydney, and in smaller, fringe communities, like Tuxtla Gutiérrez and Alice Springs."

Here's an excerpt of the interview with Molly Woodward at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York, by curator Jeriemiah Moss.

Q: How are you defining "Vernacular Typography"?

A: I guess it should technically be Vernacular "Lettering," but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn't have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it's just any visual representation of language. ...

Q: What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A: A sense of the city's history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don't see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

Q: What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

A: I think there's less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there's less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation, and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

Vernacular Typography can be accessed here. (Images from the Vernacular Typography website.)

Xmas Words, from Roy Blount Jr.

Xmas Words
By Roy Blount Jr.

It is at this special time of the year, and especially of this extra-special year in particular, that we realize how urgent is our need to foster love and faith and brotherhood and —at any rate faith, and by that I mean consumer confidence. When Americans, of all people, are afflicted with what the singer-songwriter Roger Miller called “shellout falter”—a reluctance to spend—then the whole world is liable, as Mr. Miller put it so well in his song “Dang Me,” to “lack fourteen dollars having twenty-seven cents.”

Are we going to let it be said that all we had this Christmas to cheer was cheer itself? No! Let’s put the holly back in shopaholic, let’s get jingle-bullish. We owe it to ourselves, to the world, and to future generations. The more presents we spring for now, the lighter the tax burden is going to be down the line.

You notice how much more merrily that last sentence bounced along because I chose spring to express spending, instead of, say, plunge; and lighter instead of, say, less staggering. Words are important. So let’s say “bah, humbug” to b-words like bailout and bankrupt. Let’s digress from anything ending in -ession. Let’s entertain some new, upbeat holiday words.

Why not wake up tomorrow morning feeling consumptious? Rhymes with scrumptious, and approaches sumptuous. When we’re consumptious we’ve got that fire in the belly that’s burning a hole in our pocket. We’re going to be pumping bucks today, we’re going to open our hearts to goods and services, we’re going to take it upon ourselves to help America, and consequently the world, reconomize. In so doing, we can personalize what is just about the only appealing phrase regarding the economy that has emerged this year: each of us can be his or her own stimulus package.

The season of giving is upon us. Need that sound like such a threat? Let’s see if we can spruce up that venerable old word generous, which can be so cringe-inducing when we hear it spoken over the phone by a stranger calling in the interest of a charity. “I hope you will be as generous this year as last” puts us on the spot, so let’s spread generous out. I don’t think we want to go to heterogenerous, because people might think we’re talking about sex, and there will be plenty of time for that after we get our mercantile heat back on. (For this reason, even businesses whose appeal is essentially spicy should resist, for now, the temptation to send their customers illicitations.) But autogenerous, as in autobiographical, might remind us that giving unto others is also giving unto ourselves, especially if others give back unto us and therefore unto themselves, and we buy our presents at their store and vice-versa. Does auto- strike an ominous note? Let me just say that if each of us becomes a cargiver this Christmas, there will be a lot more shining faces this New Year’s in Detroit. And Japan.

Let us not shrink from taking a look at the word Christmas. It’s a fine old word and I for one would be loath to suggest that it has lost its edge entirely. But it doesn’t exactly sing. The only thing it rhymes with is isthmus, and that but loosely. How do you like the sound of Jingle Day? Says bells and sunshine, says catchy marketing, says plenty of change. The rhymes sell themselves: mingle, tingle, Kringle, Pringles, bling’ll, and hey, sleigh, pray, pay, hooray. We might even go a little more on-the-nose: Ka-chingleday.

And incidentally, when you take your tree down and put your ornaments away for next year (yes, of course there will be a next year, don’t even ask such a question), do you know the best way to protect those ornaments? By wrapping them in newspaper. Several sheets per ornament. Maybe a whole newspaper section per ornament. And magazines and books are good to put between wrapped ornaments for further protection. Not to knock the tissue-paper industry, but what has it ever done for, say, people who support themselves and their families (not to mention the Jingle Day puppies their families have been promised) by thinking up words?

From The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays by Michele Clark and Taylor Plimpton (Abrams Image, 2009).

Translating the sutras: a warning for the 33rd century

No-sword is the personal website of Matt Treyvaud, a writer, translator, and linguist who lives in a seaside town near Kamakura, Japan. He has posted about the process by which Buddhist sutras were first translated into Chinese in the tenth century, and under the heading "Teamwork" outlines the nine-step process.

How difficult could it be, one might ask. Well, consider the hurdles of meaning, understanding, and the relative flexibility of each language itself. Today, of course, the Google Translator slice-and-dice method suffices for most of us on our electronic devices with the click of an "enter" button. A warning: the mind-blowing, word soup of Google Translator is something no one who loves reading and language should look into too closely, and use with an extreme caution.

Google Translator's resulting vertigo-inducing cliffs of non-meaning are steep. Put Whitman's I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass into the Google masher, select Arabic, for example, and you get

أنا loafe ودعوة نفسي

والحقيقة أنني أميل loafe في سهولة مراقبة بلدي الرمح من العشب في الصيف.

Put that translliteration back into the wringer, ask for English, and the result is:

I call myself and loafe

In fact, I tend to easily monitor loafe in my spear of grass in the summer.

You can alternately select an even more tortured word taffy as the Translator asks in a motherly fashion, Did you mean أنا love ودعوة نفسي والحقيقة أنني أميل loaf في سهولة مراقبة بلدي الرمح من العشب في الصيف ?:

I love and call myself and I lean loaf at my ease of control of the spear of grass in the summer.

To get the meaning of the sutras right, tenth-century Chinese had a committee of translators to buff the texts to a high gloss -- working in tandem to get the Buddha's thoughts more exactly correct. Treyvaud reveals in his post the division of labor nearly replicates the Google Translator somersault: as he writes in his post, it had been previously thought that the assembled were "an array of faceless, more-or-less bilingual monks working alone or at best in parallel. It turns out that the process was much more involved. In Kanbun to Higashi Ajia 漢文と東アジア (Kanbun and East Asia), Kin Bunkyō 金文京 gives an account of the 982 C.E. translation of the Heart Sutra into Chinese by a team centered on an Indian monk named Devaṣanti 天息災":

A large number of monks and officials (官吏) gathered ... and performed the translation via the following division of labor:

1. 訳主 ("Lead Translator"): Read the Sanskrit original aloud. Devasanti performed this task.

2. 証義 ("Meaning Certifier"): Sat to the left of the Lead Translator and discussed the meaning of the Sanskrit original.

3. 証文 ("Text Certifier"): Sat to the right of the Lead Translator and confirmed that the text had been read aloud without error.

4. 書字の梵学僧 ("Scribe Learned in Sanskrit"): Recorded in Chinese characters the Sanskrit that was read aloud. [...] For example, the Sanskrit word hṛdaya was written 紇哩第野, and sūtra was written 素怛羅. [...]

5. 筆受 ("Receiver via Brush"): Translated the Sanskrit written in Chinese characters into Chinese. For example, 紇哩第野 would become 心, and 素怛羅 would become 経, combining to form 心経, "Heart Sutra."

"Bhagavatī Heart of Perfect Wisdom" by Zhao Meng Fu,

main part 1254–1322 A.D.

6. 綴文 ("Text Composer"): Rearranged the individually translated words into the correct Chinese word order; which is to say, into kanbun.

7. 参訳 ("Translation Barger-into"): Checked the translated text against the original Sanskrit, and corrected any errors.

8. 刊定 ("Trimmer/Finalizer"): Edited cumbersome or long-winded expressions down to size. Sanskrit texts had a tendency to be detailed and lengthy, but in Chinese texts brevity was prized.

9. 潤文官 ("Text-Juicing Official"): Determined whether the translation was appropriate as Chinese text, and added rhetorical flourish as necessary. For example, the "度一切苦厄" ("he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty") of "照見五蘊皆空 度一切苦厄" ("he illuminated the five skandhas and saw that they were all empty, and he crossed beyond all suffering and difficulty") was not in the original; it was added at this stage. The previous eight steps were performed by monks, but this step was performed by a lay official.

Consider the Engliish-language simplicity of the title Heart Sutra, which is itself an approximation of the original Sanskrit (Roman alphabet: Bhagavatīprajñāpāramitāhṛdaya) into Tibetan (Roman: bcom ldan 'das ma shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa'i snying po), through the Chinese (Roman: Bhagavatī Heart of Perfect Wisdom).

Tibetan editions add bhagavatī, meaning "Victorious One" or "Conqueror", an epithet of Prajnaparamita as goddess. And, compounding the matter even further, despite the common name Heart Sūtra, the word sūtra is not present in known Sanskrit manuscripts.

Treyvard does point out in closing that "the above has no small element of ritual to it over and above what is necessary to get a translation done." Still, the process raises the fascinating specter of all the English language "text-juicing" that lays ahead when everything is pushed through the latest version of ancient and revered Google Translator results -- some time in the 33rd century.

"Shady Characters": a history of punctuation



 



Left, from the pen of Isaac Newton; right, detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia” (1698). Courtesy the Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation.

 

Keith Houston at The New Yorker's "Page Turner" blog has a few examples of punctuation history taken from his new book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Houston unmasks the history (and often arcane names) of symbols such as the ampersand and the pilcrow in his Shady Characters blog. 

Above are examples of that pesky little electronic annoyance, the hashtag. There's no record that Newton found it useful enough for a twitter account, however; the shortened form  for the words "pound weight," the Latin libra pondo, is also familiar in the abbreviation lb, or lbs. Here's Houston's short history of the hashtag, or what engineers designing the Touch-Tone phones jokingly dubbed the octothorpe.

The story of the hashtag begins sometime around the fourteenth century, with the introduction of the Latin abbreviation “lb,” for the Roman term libra pondo, or “pound weight.” Like many standard abbreviations of that period, “lb” was written with the addition of a horizontal bar, known as a tittle, or tilde (an example is shown above, right, in Johann Conrad Barchusen’s “Pyrosophia,” from 1698). And though printers commonly cast this barred abbreviation as a single character, it was the rushed pens of scribes that eventually produced the symbol’s modern form: hurriedly dashed off again and again, the barred “lb” mutated into the abstract #. The symbol shown here on the left, a barred “lb” rendered in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl, is a missing link, a now-extinct ancestor of the # that bridges the gap between the symbol’s Latin origins and its familiar modern form. Though it is now referred to by a number of different names—“hash mark,” “number sign,” and even “octothorpe,” a jokey appellation coined by engineers working on the Touch-Tone telephone keypad—the phrase “pound sign” can be traced to the symbol’s ancient origins. For just as “lb” came from libra, so the word “pound” is descended from pondo, making the # a descendent of the Roman term libra pondo in both name and appearance.

"Don't read this": some witty advice on reading banned books

For many localities, it's back-to-school week already, and with the return to classes comes the annual specter of reading outrage by young or (usually) old. Perennial favorites will be assigned, read, and inadvertently re-discovered as targets for censorship or outright ban, usually by individuals who didn't read the books in school themselves years ago in the first place. 

Reading banned books, of course, becomes the illicit thrill of discovery. There are traps for unsuspecting readers on every page: "inappropriate" language, "desensitizing" violence, "stimulating" stories. The idea of reading "exciting" literature, for young and old alike, has made folks crack open books from Twain's Huckleberry Finn to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis 

As Anna Quindlen comments,"And then there's Faulkner. Oy."

Quindlen wrote a witty column for Banned Books Week in 1994 in which she outlines a week's worth of reading censored books, and comes to a "wonderful end to a depressing week" -- she re-reads Bridge to Terabithia and finds it even better. Her final recommendation? Tell kids there are certain books not to be read, and then watch the reading scores soar. If only.

Monday: Begin Banned Books Week by reading Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, which parents in several school districts have tried to remove from required reading lists. Weep copiously at realistic tale of friendship and loss among children. ... 

Discover that Terabithia caused such a stink in Oskaloosa, Kan., that the school board has required teachers to list each profanity in any book they assign and how many times the profanity is used. Page through book. Find a "damn" and write it down. Feel like a fool. "I hate to say it, but sometimes grown-ups are really stupid," says oldest child. ...

Tuesday: Read reams of material about the banning of In the Night Kitchen, fanciful account of dreams of little boy by Maurice Sendak. Boy falls out of clothes, is naked, has penis. Penis has been described as "desensitizing children to nudity" (Beloit, Wis.), "nudity for no purpose" (Norridge, Ill.) and "the foundation for future use of pornography" (Elk River, Minn.). In Missouri copies of book were distributed to kindergarten class after artist was commissioned to draw shorts on boy. ...

Wednesday: Contemplate bookshelves in office. Moby Dick encourages whale hunting, Anna Karenina adultery, Shakespeare teen suicide, usury and the occult. Faulkner, oy. ... Realize cat with hat encourages children to make a mess while mother is out. Discover in American Library Association Banned Books Week literature that the Bible was challenged as "obscene and pornographic" at library in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fear for future of human race.

Library Association sends information on case in Wyoming challenging Judy Blume book Forever. Judy reigning Queen of banned books, maybe because writes books about teen-agers in which they talk and think like actual teen-agers as opposed to adult's idea of what teen-agers should be like. (How quickly we forget.) Parent complained Forever contains sex described graphically. Spells graphically "grafically."

Read that parent in Lambertville, N.J., objected to The Amazing Bone by William Steig, because animals use tobacco. Love Steig, love Bone, hate tobacco. Heart sinks. Reports of censorship at highest mark in last 10 years. Find myself counting uses of Lord's name in vain in Catcher. Read dictionary instead. ...

Consider entire K-12 curriculum of banned books, beginning with Night Kitchen ... Great stuff all. Foolproof pedagogical method: tell students they cannot, repeat, CANNOT, read these books. Too stimulating. Watch reading scores soar. Next stop, Faulkner. .. Decide oldest child is right. Reread Bridge to Terabithia. Even better the second time.

In Osaka, the perils of using English as a "decorative" language

A unique shopping opportunity in Osaka

An October post on Bellemeade Books discussed the labyrinthine process of translating the Buddha's teachings across multiple languages in the tenth century. A recent post at the Japan Subculture Research Center site offers oddly heartwarming proof that no matter the labor-saving devices offered to contemporary users, attention to detail and, ultimately, meaning, are still primary components to correct translation.

The following advertising example also brings to attention (as if any were needed) the mess any online translating machine may make of language without careful cross-reference. Misunderstanding can be a two-way street: it would be difficult to estimate what many Chinese/Japanese language tattoos on so many American homeboys may actually be broadcasting to the 'hood and beyond.

Here's the post, by the site's curator, Jake Adelstein. Responses demonstrate some cultural curiosities that are worth a browse, too. (One suggests that the Chinese characters for "meat lover" may be an unintended tattoo message on a friend's arm. Or maybe not.) Several respondents mention the phenomenon of using English as a decorative letter-form in Japan and elsewhere, and of absent language meaning. Navigating the path to true international understanding, apparently, is still a bit tricky.

... God knows what the people in this Department Store in Osaka were thinking when they came up with this advertising slogan but Zarina Yamaguchi, a friend of a friend, was thinking “pretty damn funny” when she snapped this picture on January 4th. Zarina explains:

"Well, a childhood friend of mine and I were strolling along the local street in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. Being around the extra-genki Osaka-jins and salesladies screaming ‘Irashaimasse’ from every direction for the ongoing New Year Sales has never made us feel more at home. On our way to catch up over coffee, I walked into this store to check some things. Truth is, I didn’t even notice the posters. When I looked around, each corner had posters that printed ‘fucking sale’. I didn’t know how to react but what caught me by surprise was that none of the people around me seem to understand the profanity. My friend Sarah and I, both of mixed Japanese descent, both bilingual in Japanese and English, were struck with the comical twist. Pretty sure I would have never seen this elsewhere, I had to snap a shot."

The store is located in Shinsaibashi right next to Hearton Hotel Shinsaibashi and Planet 3rd cafe, she adds.

I should note that Zarina’s childhood friend is Sarah Kashani, my friend and one of the most knowledgable scholars on Koreans in Japan. Sarah verified the authenticity of the signage and the sale, although neither side has disclosed whether they actually bought anything at the sale.

2012 is going to be a fuckin’ awesome year in Japan. You can’t help but feel that way. Our thanks to Ms. Yamaguchi-sama for her contribution. We’re f*ckin’ grateful. 超感謝ですよ。

(Photos by Zarina Yamaguchi at the Japan Subculture Research Center site.)

"Now Dig This": Tip-top Terry Southern's adventures in the quality-lit game

Now dig this: Here's two hundred fifty pages of wildly unclassifiable, wholly entertaining (and, yes indeed, some unspeakable) bits and pieces of Terry Southern's magazine writings, interviews, stories, and routines.

A genuine literary anarchist with a wicked wit and an incredible eye for detail -- his Esquire piece on the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 is classic eyewitness journalism -- Southern was also a screenwriter (The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One, Barbarella, Easy Rider, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and others), a satirist, and an agent provocateur who relished goading people into revealing their true personalities. He became adept at telling stories that finished with "the put-away," the telling detail that drove home the point of the tale. Poor E.B. White of The New Yorker comes out the worse for wear for Terry's over-the-top interrogation techniques, I'm afraid.

Fueled by booze, pills and powders, Southern swings through the decades not just as an observer but a participant at the center of it all (he was a writer both for National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live, pals with Lennon, the Stones and Burroughs as well as Kubrick and George Plimpton). It seems there's hardly a scene he doesn't make, including an appearance on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

The book is filled with newly discovered bits of weirdness -- a lost scene for Kubrick's 1980 draft of Eyes Wide Shut then called "Rhapsody," an outrageous SNL sketch idea taken from National Enquirer called "Worm Ball Man," incendiary letters sent to the editors of Ms. Magazine, and a pitch to Lenny Bruce for a part in Southern's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One in 1964:

Len Big Bopper -- Enclosed please find cine script by yrs truly ... It is our very real hope that you will consider the role of the "Guru Brahmin" -- which can be altered and grooved up infinitely, natch, to your own outlandish specifications. You will be rubbing shoulders, Len (if not, in fact, pelvic regions) with such star and feature players as Sir John ("Jack") Gielgud (Francis), Jonathan Winters (Harry and the Dreamer), Rod Steiger (Joyboy), Liberace (Starker), Dana Andrews (Gen Schmuck), Keenan Wynn (Immigration Officer), and a host of other show-stoppers of equally curious persuasions. Director is tip-top Tony R, the Oscar-copping madcap, and, as I say, chief scripter is yrs truly. ... The Guru's lines appear on pages as per follows: 75, 76, 93, 119, 120, 141, 142, and 143. Please note that scene 131 gives you an excellent shot at the fantastic winner of our young beautiful girl star, whose name I will not reveal to you at this moment due to its effect of instant shoot-off.

 

Terry Southern photographed by Stanley Kubick, 1963

It's easy to romanticize (and criticize) the alcohol and drug-taking frenzy of so much of Southern's work, yet the sheer variety of it all (of which this book is just a part) is amazing, not to mention the amount of "quality lit" he produced for newspapers, magazines and journals -- Grand Street, The Nation, The Herald Tribune. He may have just been paying bills in between the more grandiose flights of fancy, but Southern showed a genuine interest and admiration for writers like Henry Green, the British novelist whose works had not been yet published in the U.S. His lengthy interview with Green in The Paris Review (1959) was done at Southern's own suggestion. And then there's his wry appreciation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym:" "Here is a work which does not appear on any reading list at any school in the country -- by virtue of its extreme weirdness." 

Southern spelled out his artistic credo in an interview in The New York Times, 1964: "The important thing in writing," he said, "is the capacity to astonish. Not shock -- shock is a worn-out word -- but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency. The Titanic couldn't sink, but it did. Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting. I want to blast it." 

He was a painfully shy man and reluctant to talk much about himself, but when he was asked how he felt about his treatment at the hands of the critics over the years, he quoted T. S. Eliot. " 'Poetry,' he said, 'is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.' Here's the put-away," Southern continued. " 'But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.' "

Southern outside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral, Barcelona, Spain

Ironically, Terry Southern's wildly prolific writing career created a literary reputation that has only undergone a transformation in the past few years. His son Nile has set about refurbishing his father's literary estate, approving a biography (A Grand Guy, by Lee Hill, 2001) and publishing a memoir of his father's time in 1950s Paris writing for Olympia Press (The CANDY Men, 2004), as well as collecting the wealth of material that appears in Now Dig This, compiled with Josh Alan Friedman. A good chunk of Southern's unpublished material -- including an early Kubrick interview (1962) -- appears in a 2004 issue of Stop Smiling magazine. Nile Southern writes in his introduction, entitled "Resurrection Now!":

I realized I had a strange beast on my hands: as a link between the Beats and the Beatles, pop culture and "Quality Lit," Terry was a literary anomaly. With over 40 boxes of "archive," I got busy. I turned to the neglected work ... I copied everything and began "packaging" dear old dad. He may have defied labels in his day, but in today's pop culture, Terry Southern needed some re-branding.

In 2005, Nile Southern was asked in an interview what his father would make of television's current obsession with reality programs. After the interviewer pointed out the echoes of Southern's 1968 comedy The Magic Christian and what people would -- and would not -- do for money, Nile replied: "I think he would look at them and he'd say, 'Wow!' I think he's gathered around with the ghosts of Michael O'Donoghue and Lenny Bruce and looking at all this with astonishment. And chuckling." For more information on the grand guy himself, visit www.terrysouthern.com.