**
JACARANDA
A jacaranda undulates across
three wide windows uptown —
billowing and pressing,
thousands of greedy mouths
trying to reach through the glass
with moist little lilac snouts.
That’s where God likes to be:
waterfalls, whirlwinds,
wildflowers waving
on the edge of the cliff —
God blowing kisses
from the abyss.
God receives countless prayers
from lovers and aging poets,
the guard in his guard-booth at night,
women who date only prisoners,
and other holy and unholy fools
trying to nail themselves to a cross.
The point of being on the cross
is to become a blossoming tree,
the God of the Jacaranda
wants us to see, waving in merciless
glory — showering moist
jacaranda kisses
on you and me,
and the hard pavement below.
~ Oriana
**
Some speak in an appalled tone about the “indifference of nature.” But I like this neutrality. The impartiality of nature, its lack of premeditated malice to me are hugely appealing. To me the main point is: you are not being punished.
In this poem I'm using “God” to mean nature. This upset Milosz, who saw this as a trend: god not as a being, but simply as nature, with predators eating the prey — “everything devouring everything else.” At the same time, he was inclining to dispense with the kind of deity that operates through reward and punishment (even if delayed until the afterlife). I don’t think that’s the kind of god we want. If I were creating a god, I’d want one who understands — the ideal confidant.
But that’s not to be. We have human friends to approximate that. What nature can offer us is beauty. California is still (not as much as before the drought, but still) nature in stunning glory. It’s a country within a country. I’ve come up with this special pledge:
I pledge my allegiance to the Pacific Ocean
and to the beauty for which it stands,
one ocean, indivisible,
with malice toward none,
with waves and sunsets for all.
END OF LIFE AND APPRECIATION OF BEAUTY
OLIVER SACKS (2015, shortly before his death): ~ “A few weeks ago, in the country, far from the lights of the city, I saw the entire sky “powdered with stars” (in Milton’s words); such a sky, I imagined, could be seen only on high, dry plateaus like that of Atacama in Chile (where some of the world’s most powerful telescopes are). It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death.
I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.”
“We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.
I have been comforted, since I wrote in February about having metastatic cancer, by the hundreds of letters I have received, the expressions of love and appreciation, and the sense that (despite everything) I may have lived a good and useful life. I remain very glad and grateful for all this — yet none of it hits me as did that night sky full of stars.” ~
**
Oriana: Milosz also observed that, as he grows older, rather than withdrawing from the world, feeling more indifferent toward its beauty, he finds the world more and more beautiful and life ever more sweet, every day precious.
*
It is a beautiful surprise that the fear of death, which used to occasionally torment me when I was younger, has grown much less as I’ve grown older. This is apparently fairly common. Like Milosz, I too find that the world grows more beautiful and precious every day.
(I feel sorry for those who have never seen the “real” sky, away from light pollution caused by artificial lights of a city. What a vertigo of glow the countryside sky is on a clear night, when one can see billions of stars, and the edge of the Milky Way is very distinct.)
“Culture is continuity with the past: A cultureless person knows only about, and lives exclusively in, the present. Few things are as pleasing—thrilling, really—as reading a classical author and discovering that he has had thoughts and emotions akin to your own. So I have felt, at times, reading Horace, Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and others who departed the planet centuries before my entrance upon it.” ~ Joseph Epstein, in The Cultured Life
Oriana:
I think it's Horace who wrote an essay on noise that's was an absolute delight to read . . . part of the delight being the very antiquity of it, but the sentiments so totally understandable, the humor not dated. And then there's Catullus, so startlingly modern in a good translation. And others, certainly -- a mix of what no longer speaks to us with what still does, and very much so. Notes from the Underground, much of Kafka, even, well, Sherlock Holmes — imagine not being familiar with Sherlock! I can't. Knowing only about Superman and Batman, and never having felt that cultural continuity with past centuries — that's what I can't begin to imagine.
Young Cicero Reading; Vincenzo Foppa (1427-1515)**
“It’s not that I am so smart, it’s that I stay with a problem longer.” ~ Albert Einstein
“Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise. Because of impatience we cannot return.” ~ Kafka
Gustave Doré: Adam and Eve driven out of EdenKAFKA’S “K” POINTS TO KANT
~ “Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost. In two incomplete yet incommensurable novels, “The Trial” and “The Castle,” he submits, as lingering spirits will, a ghastly accounting—the sum total of modern totalitarianism. His imaginings outstrip history and memoir, incident and record, film and reportage. He is on the side of realism—the poisoned realism of metaphor. Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an archive of our era: its anomie, depersonalization, afflicted innocence, innovative cruelty, authoritarian demagoguery, technologically adept killing.
But none of this is served raw. Kafka has no politics; he is not a political novelist in the way of Orwell or Dickens. He writes from insight, not, as people like to say, from premonition. He is often taken for a metaphysical, or even a religious, writer, but the supernatural elements in his fables are too entangled in concrete everydayness, and in caricature, to allow for any incandescent certainties.
The typical Kafkan figure has the cognitive force of a chess master—which is why the term “Kafkaesque,” a synonym for the uncanny, misrepresents at the root. The Kafkan mind rests not on unintelligibility or the surreal but on adamantine logic—on the sane expectation of rationality. A singing mouse, an enigmatic ape, an impenetrable castle, a deadly contraption, the Great Wall of China, a creature in a burrow, fasting as an art form, and, most famously, a man metamorphosed into a bug: all these are steeped in reason; and also in reasoning. “Fairy tales for dialecticians,” the critic Walter Benjamin remarked. In the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan “K” attaches not to Keats but to Kant.
The prose that utters these dire analytic fictions has, with time, undergone its own metamorphosis, and only partly through repeated translations into other languages. Something—fame—has intervened to separate Kafka’s stories from our latter-day reading of them, two or three generations on. The words are unchanged; yet those same passages Kafka once read aloud, laughing at their fearful comedy, to a small circle of friends are now markedly altered under our eyes—enameled by that labyrinthine process through which a literary work awakens to discover that it has been transformed into a classic.
Kafka has taught us how to read the world differently: as a kind of decree. And because we have read Kafka we know more than we knew before we read him, and are now better equipped to read him acutely. This may be why his graven sentences begin to approach the scriptural; they become as fixed in our heads as any hymn; they seem ordained, fated. They carry the high melancholy tone of resignation unabraded by cynicism. They are stately and plain and full of dread.
And what is it that Kafka himself knew? He was born in 1883; he died, of tuberculosis, in 1924, a month short of his forty-first birthday. He did not live to see human beings degraded to the status and condition of vermin eradicated by an insecticidal gas. If he was able to imagine man reduced to insect, it was not because he was prophetic. Writers, even the geniuses among them, are not seers. It was his own status and condition that Kafka knew. His language was German, and that, possibly, is the point. That Kafka breathed and thought and aspired and suffered in German—and in Prague, a German-hating city—may be the ultimate exegesis of everything he wrote. ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/01/11/the-impossibility-of-being-kafka
Oriana:
~ “He did not live to see human beings degraded to the status and condition of vermin eradicated by an insecticidal gas. If he was able to imagine man reduced to insect, it was not because he was prophetic. Writers, even the geniuses among them, are not seers. It was his own status and condition that Kafka knew.” ~
Kafka wasn't published in Communist Poland. His work wasn't officially forbidden (too famous; it would be bad PR) -- just not published. But somehow old copies were found. Our literature teacher, on the last day of school before our high-school graduation exam, read The Penal Colony to us. The silence in the classroom was total. I wondered how Kafka could have imagined all this, and thought: "He went to a German school." Meaning abusive, oppressive. But some years later, I had a more direct answer: his emotionally abusive father.
“The poisoned realism of a metaphor” is an interesting statement. It certainly applies to The Metamorphosis, which is written in an astonishingly realistic way (makes me think of Dali's realism within the surrealist framework).
It never occurred to me that Kafka's “K” points to Kant (aside from obviously standing for Kafka himself). It makes sense: he had a lawyer’s mind. Like Kant, he was a rationalist, desperately trying to make sense of a world that follows more the logic of a nightmare.
Again: Kafka was a lawyer. If we take him for a religious writer, then his god was an insane judge, meting out outrageous, unjust sentences if not on the completely innocent, then on the semi-innocent (but let’s not forget that “the attractive ones are always guilty,” as we learn in The Trial).
While Kafka’s darkness looms much larger than flashes of his absurdist humor, when we think of Kafka the man we should remember that actually he was not a gloomy person. He had a circle of close friends and loved to laugh and tell jokes.
Kafka at an amusement park*
NO SABERS ALLOWED!
"Hilarious 2nd Amendment fact: sabers, bayonets, and other edged weapons were outlawed after the Civil War. We have no problem restricting those. It is still a felony to carry a concealed long knife, as there is no National Blade Association funding candidates and putting out voting reports on Congress." ~ Phil Boiarski
**
It's pointless trying to be nice to the Nazis.*
THE DOMINANCE OF ENGLISH AS A WORLD LANGUAGE
~ Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more.
No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.
One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English – he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes – published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include “last-minute”, “fitness”, “group sex”, and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.
In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: “Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going to trade out ‘sexting’ for texto pornographique?”) Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.
The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode – whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German – have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.
Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.
Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.
*
Until recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonization. (Some languages, such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millennium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a “lingua franca” or “global language” truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a “hypercentral” one.
De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the “peripheral languages”, which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the “central languages”, though a more apt term might be “national languages”. These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.
Following these are the 12 “supercentral languages”: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili – each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation’s colonial past.
Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls “the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together”. The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a “universal language” . For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers – Mandarin and Spanish have more – but that it is “used by the greatest number of non-native speakers in the world”. She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls “Anglo-Globalism”, that “English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global.”
In the last few decades, as globalization has accelerated and the US has remained the world’s most powerful country, the advance of English has taken on a new momentum. In 2008, Rwanda switched its education system from French to English, having already made English an official language 14 years earlier. Officially, this was part of the government’s effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of Africa. Unofficially, it’s widely believed to be an expression of disgust at France’s role in propping-up the pre-1994 Hutu-dominant government, as well as a reflection that the country’s ruling elite mostly speaks English, having grown up as exiles in anglophone east Africa.
When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools. The Minister of higher education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the country “different and modern”, while the news director of South Sudan Radio added that with English, South Sudan could “become one nation” and “communicate with the rest of the world” — understandable goals in a country home to more than 50 local languages.
The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic. China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than any other country. Some prominent English teachers have become celebrities, conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands. In South Korea, meanwhile, according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English is a “national religion”. Korean employers expect proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage.
The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or “English frenzy”. Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion, occasionally this “frenzy” spills over into medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: “An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans.”
There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a potent metaphor for English’s peculiar status in the modern world. It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have English in their toolkit.
*
Aneta Pavlenko, an applied linguist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who has spent her career studying the psychology of bilingual and multilingual speakers, has found that speakers of multiple languages frequently believe that each language conveys a “different self”. Languages, according to her respondents, come in a kaleidoscopic range of emotional tones. “I would inevitably talk to babies and animals in Welsh,” reports a Welsh-speaker. An informant from Finland counters: “Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly. Therefore it is easier to tell my children that I love them in English.” Several Japanese speakers say that it’s easier to express anger in English, especially by swearing.
In recent decades, sociolinguists have arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the influence of language on color perception, orientation and verbs of motion — but in general, the more expansive notion that different languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not been proven.
Nonetheless, some version of this idea continues to find supporters, not least among writers familiar with shifting between languages. Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków: “This radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.” The Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo described something similar in her recent memoir, writing about how uncomfortable she felt, at first, with the way the English language encouraged speakers to use the first-person singular, rather than plural. “After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? … But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular — urgently.”
In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language. It’s just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013’s evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyze various assumptions — social, spatial, emotional and otherwise — latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.
Reading Wierzbicka’s work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old “how natives think” school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their endless use of expressions such as “I think”, “I believe”, “I suppose”, “I understand”, “I suspect”. They prefer fact over theories, savor “control” and “space”, and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific concepts called “right” and “wrong”, which they mysteriously believe to be universal.
Wierzbicka’s description of English’s subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more speakers of this most global of tongues. But it is also a reminder that, despite its influence, English is not truly universal. Its horizons are just as limited as those of any other language, whether Chinese or Hopi or Dalabon.
For if language connects people socially, it also connects them to a place. The linguist Nicholas Evans has described how Kayardild, a language spoken in northern Australia, requires a speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal directions. Where an English speaker would orient things according to their own perception – my left, my right, my front, my back – a speaker of Kayardild thinks in terms of north, south, east and west. As a consequence, speakers of Kayardild (and those of several other languages that share this feature) possess “absolute reckoning”, or a kind of “perfect pitch” for direction. It also means removing one’s self as the main reference point for thinking about space. As Evans writes of his own experiences learning the language, “one aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in their place.”
Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of English should also remember the role it has played in some societies – especially multi-ethnic ones – as a bridge to the wider world and counterweight to other nationalisms. This was especially keenly felt in South Africa, where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of apartheid. When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974, the decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as the Soweto uprising. Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of deaths, and is considered a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle. Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since the 1940s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of English.
*
In some ways, the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow “normal”. This is something that’s often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration.
Before the era of the nation-state, polyglot empires were the rule, rather than the exception. Polyglot individuals abounded, too. For most of history, people lived in small communities. But that did not mean that they were isolated from one another. Multilingualism must have been common. Today, we see traces of this polyglot past in linguistic hotspots such as the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, where children as young as 10 routinely juggle four or five languages in daily life, and learn several others in school.
A resident of another linguistic hotspot, the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, once told Evans: “It wouldn’t be any good if we talked the same; we like to know where people come from.” It’s a vision of Babel in reverse. Instead of representing a fall from human perfection, as in the biblical story, having many languages is a gift. It’s something to remember before we let English swallow the globe.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/27/english-language-global-dominance
WORDS, MEANINGS, CULTURE
~ “The fundamental problem with English for me was that there is no direct connection between words and meanings. In Chinese, most characters are drawn and composed from images. Calligraphy is one of the foundations of the written language. When you write the Chinese for sun, it is 太阳 or 日, which means “an extreme manifestation of Yang energy”. Yang signifies things with strong, bright and hot energy. So “extreme yang” can only mean the sun. But in English, sun is written with three letters, s, u and n, and none of them suggests any greater or deeper meaning. Nor does the word look anything like the sun! Visual imagination and philosophical understandings were useless when it came to European languages.
Another curious realization came when I discovered that I used the first-person plural too much in my everyday speech. In the west, if I said “We like to eat rice”, it would confuse people. They couldn’t understand who this “we” was referring to. Instead, I should have said “We Chinese like to eat rice”. After a few weeks, I swapped to the first-person singular, as in “I like to eat rice”. But it made me uncomfortable. After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? The habitual use of “I” requires thinking of yourself as a separate entity in a society of separate entities. But in China no one is a separate entity: either you were born to a non-political peasant household or to a Communist party household. But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular – urgently.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/10/xiaolu-guo-why-i-moved-from-beijing-to-london
Beijing, The Tianning Pagoda built around 1120 **
Mary:
Ah, language, our most magical and defining invention! We live in and through language, but in thinking about it must avoid both determinism and romanticism. First it is important to realize that like the history of species the history of language has lost more to extinction than the total number of extant forms now alive — and this is normal. Extinction happens all the time, whether we cause it or attempt to prevent it. The evolution of societies from a multitude of small tribal groups to eventual larger communities and then nations was also the development from many distinct languages to ones spoken and understood by all members of a nation. In this process the majority of languages were lost — spoken by fewer and fewer people until only one last speaker was left, and a language can't survive with one speaker. There have been projects to record and save such languages, but they are now merely historical, no longer alive.
I do not believe a language determines how or what its speakers experience, but the order of a language, its grammar, the forms and sounds of its words, (like the portmanteau words found in German and some Native American languages, or the musicality of a language) can influence both experience and thought. Language is a cultural form, so there is interaction between what is said, how it is said (or can be said) and what is done (or can be done) — what is seen as important, what is remembered, and what is forgotten. Imagine living in that language that demands your location in space, imagine you must know that location in order to speak . . . And consider how none of that information is necessary, revealed or even always accessible in English, or most languages we know.
There is also an inevitable interaction between language and history. The German language used to sanction the classification of millions of human beings as vermin, and to organize their systematic extermination, can never escape that history, that usage. It will carry that foul and poisonous echo forever. English, as a language of colonialism, as used both in the defense and the abolition of slavery, also encapsulates that history in its vocabulary: words that can bring old nightmares, old injustices, old prejudices, back into play. These echoes are particularly strong in vocabularies of forbidden words, words that have unusual weight, curses and prayers. Think of the "N" word in the United States, or of the politics embedded in insisting our civil war was about “states’ rights," not the perpetuation of an economy based on slavery. Think of the difference between calling secession a "rebellion" instead of "treason."
I don't think there is any mystery in the preeminence of English globally. The primary determinant is economic, and the universal perception that knowing English will help one succeed is difficult to counter. It may not be sufficient, but is generally necessary. Even countries colonized by France are turning from the colonizers’ French to English — perhaps as a refusal to honor the colonizer, but perhaps even more as a matter of pragmatics. And English continues to be a great borrower from other languages, with a huge and ever growing vocabulary, even as English terms are appropriated by other languages. This is a living process difficult to resist and probably impossible to reverse, despite even the most fervent efforts of the French purists.
The study of language, like the study of its creators, is infinitely fascinating — perhaps central to linguists and poets, but something universally shared by all, and universally necessary to all human enterprise. Without words, we are hardly human.
**
Oriana:
Even as recently as before WW2, and definitely through the 19th century, French was still ahead as the universal language — to be educated meant to have at least a reading knowledge of French. French was elegant and beautiful; it was an established marker of a social class. Unlike English, thought to be “mercantile,” French was the language of “culture.”
Then Germany started forging ahead as the most advanced country while the British Empire began to decline, and German gained some popularity as a second language — but the catastrophe of the two world wars put an end to that, except in countries like Poland where German can still be useful for conducting business. Yes, pragmatics again, though to a limited degree.
After WW2, though French still lingered in Africa for a while, there was no longer any question about which second language children should study in school: the emergence of the United States as the leading world power consolidated the status of English. And the richer, more ambitious parents invested in private lessons as well.
As you insightfully note, it’s above all a matter of pragmatics. And now English mainly exports new words. The world of science and technology depends on the short, wonderfully usable terms like “stress” or “wi-fi.” A scientific study needs to be published in English — at least the abstract. No matter how important the findings, they will remain unknown if published only in, say, Hungarian.
As the article points out, English is not especially pretty. I’d add that it’s hard to pronounce, its spelling is chaotic and archaic, and its grammar can get maddening when it comes to the verb tenses — there is a crazy excess of tenses (and of prepositions as well). As in all languages, there is completely illogical stuff that makes it more difficult for non-native speakers. Native speakers of English do have an unfair advantage, but — that’s reality. One hundred years ago, we’d likely be saying, “C’est la vie.”
The Chinese ideograms have a poetic quality, but I suspect that a different system of writing would have to be adopted for Chinese to emerge as a hyper-language, even as China gains more and more dominance in technology.
I remember the period when Japan began to make huge strides, and American businessmen were signing up for Japanese lessons. That didn’t last — a message not lost on the rest of the world, where English lessons remain a constant feature of the lives of children lucky enough to go to school. There is something admirable about those multilingual tribal villagers, and with each lost language we lose some particles of special perception or music or a word for a feeling that may not exist in any other language — but, as you say, there is no stopping a natural cultural evolution.
Let’s record the songs, though — there is something special about songs that comes through without having to know the meaning of the words.
Baalbek, Lebanon, the temple of Dionysos (Bacchus). Let's not forget that Greek was the hyperlanguage of Antiquity, at least in what was later to become the Roman Empire; educated Romans spoke Greek. *
“VIOLENCE CAUSES MORE VIOLENCE”: TRY TO CURE IT, NOT PUNISH
~ “In the 1980s and early 90s, American epidemiologist Gary Slutkin was in Somalia, one of six doctors working across 40 refugee camps containing a million people. His focus was on containing the spread of tuberculosis (TB) and cholera. Containing infectious diseases relies heavily on data. Public health officials map out exactly where the most transmissions of the disease are occurring. Then they can focus on containing the spread in these areas. Often, this containment happens by getting people to change their behavior so that a rapid effect can be seen even when larger structural factors can’t be tackled.
Changing behavioral norms is far more effective than simply giving people information. To change behavior — whether it’s using rehydration solutions, avoiding dirty water or using condoms — credible messengers are essential. “In all of these outbreaks, we used outreach workers from the same group [as the target population],” says Slutkin.
After more than a decade working overseas, Slutkin returned to his native Chicago in the late 90s, exhausted from the perpetual travel and constant exposure to death. “I wanted a break from all these epidemics,” he says. But he returned to a different kind of problem: a skyrocketing homicide rate.
His ideas about tackling the problem began as a personal project: he gathered maps and data on gun violence in Chicago. The parallels with the maps of disease outbreaks he was accustomed to were unavoidable. “The epidemic curves are the same, the clustering,” he says. “In fact, one event leads to another, which is diagnostic of a contagious process. Flu causes more flu, colds cause more colds, and violence causes more violence.”
This was a radical departure from mainstream thinking about violence at the time, which primarily focused on enforcement. “The idea that’s wrong is that these people are ‘bad’ and we know what to do with them, which is punish them,” says Slutkin. “That’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of the human. Behavior is formed by modeling and copying. When you’re [looking through] a health lens, you don’t blame. You try to understand, and you aim for solutions.”
He spent the next few years trying to gather funding for a pilot project that would use the same steps against violence as the WHO takes to control outbreaks of cholera, TB or HIV. It would have three main prongs: interrupt transmission, prevent future spread, and change group norms. In 2000, it launched in the West Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago. Within the first year, there was a 67% drop in homicides. More funding came, more neighborhoods were piloted. Everywhere it launched, homicides dropped by at least 40%. The approach began to be replicated in other cities.
“When we were trying to control outbreaks of HIV, it was all about changing your thinking about risky sexual behavior,” says Slutkin. “That’s much harder to change than violent behavior. People don’t want to change sexual behavior – but they don’t actually want to have violent behavior.” Although there were many deeper structural factors contributing to Chicago’s violence – poverty, lack of jobs, exclusion, racism and segregation – Slutkin argued that lives could be saved by changing the behavior of individuals and shifting group norms.
As in many places, discussion of violence in Chicago often takes on a highly racialized tone. The city is deeply racially segregated. Many South Side neighborhoods are 95% or more African American; others more than 95% Mexican American. Most of these areas are socioeconomically deprived and have suffered years of state neglect. Homicide rates can be up to 10 times higher than in more affluent, predominantly white areas. But Slutkin emphasizes that this clustering is not to do with race, but to do with patterns of behavior — usually among a small section of the population, usually young and male – that are transmitted between people. “Language dictates the way people respond, so we don’t use words like ‘criminal’ or ‘gang’ or ‘thug’ – we talk about contagion, transmission, health,” he says.
Demetrius Cole is 43, spent 12 years in prison. He grew up in an area of Chicago afflicted by violence and, at the age of 15, saw his best friend die in a shooting. Nonetheless, he had a stable home life and stayed out of gangs. He planned to join the Marines. When he was 19, a close friend bought a car. Some other boys from the neighborhood tried to steal the car, and shot Cole’s friend. Cole didn’t stop to think. He retaliated. In those few minutes, his life changed. His friend was left paralyzed, and Cole was sent to prison. “I reacted off emotion like you see out here today,” he says. Since October 2017, he has been working for Cure Violence in West Englewood, a South Side district of Chicago. He finds people in the same situation he was once in, and tries to persuade them to pause. “We try to show them this is a dead end. I tell them, there’s only two ways this thing is going to end. You’re going to go to jail or you’re going to die.”
Cole works as a “violence interrupter”, employed by Cure Violence to intervene in the aftermath of a shooting to prevent retaliations, and to calm people down before a dispute escalates to violence. “We try to come up with different kinds of ways to deter these kids from the ways they’re used to thinking,” he says, “and give them a different outlook.”
Violence interrupters use numerous techniques, some borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy. Cole reels them off. “Constructive shadowing”, which means echoing people’s words back to them; “babysitting”, which is simply staying with someone until they have cooled down; and emphasizing consequences. “A lot of kids don’t know where their next meal is coming from, [or] their mother’s getting high,” says Cole. “People say everything is common sense. No. Sense is not common to a lot of people.”
Interrupters’ ability to be effective depends on their credibility. Many, like Cole, have served long prison sentences and can speak from experience. Most also have a close relationship with the community. They can respond when a shooting takes place, for instance by convincing loved ones not to retaliate. But they are also aware if conflict is brewing between two individuals or rival groups, and can move to defuse the tension or suggest peaceful alternatives.
Although it must always be adapted for each location, Cure Violence follows roughly the same steps when establishing itself in a new place. First, map the violence to see where it clusters. Next, hire credible workers with a local connection. These interrupters patrol the streets on their beat, getting to know shopkeepers, neighbors – and building links with the young men and women deemed to be the highest risk. “They’re able to know if there’s been a fight, or if there’s a fight brewing. That’s what makes violence interrupters successful. You have to be there.”
“You have to have a few tricks up your sleeve,” said Jermaine Peace, an outreach worker at Grand Crossing. Sometimes he might catch someone’s interest by telling them he can help them get photo ID, like a driving licence. “Some of these boys and girls think no one cares,” he said. “Once you start showing you care and you call them, they may call one day and say, ‘Man, I ain’t ate in two days.’ You go over there and buy them something to eat, you get more chance to talk to them.” Peace uses these openings to try to change their outlook on violence. Outreach workers assist with whatever their clients need – referring them to addiction treatment, finding jobs, or even buying new clothes to wear to interviews. The work is challenging, particularly in the younger age bracket where peer pressure is strong. One young man Peace was working with was recently shot dead, just as he was starting to engage with the process.
While Slutkin emphasises how quickly this model can be effective in reducing homicides, and how it costs less than mass incarceration, there is no escaping the fact that it takes a lot of workers to get results. Some of Chicago’s gang territories are very small, just a few blocks. A violence interrupter respected in one area may be unknown, or even mistrusted, in another. To work, there must be at least one interrupter with strong connections in each district, so that if a conflict erupts, someone with the trust of the group can mediate. “I’ve been there. It’s hard coming back from prison and back into society,” says Cole. “If people know of you and know your history, you’re able to stop a lot of things when it comes to shootings and killings. I’m able to show people: you can do this, you can change.”
Despite the ever-growing evidence, governments are sometimes reluctant to properly invest. “The difficulty is not how to reduce violence – it is the way people understand the problem,” says Slutkin, his frustration visible. He draws a parallel with Aids and the stigma attached to those who contracted it during the first outbreaks in the 80s.
On a sunny evening in downtown Chicago, I watch Slutkin give a talk to an audience of young professionals. In Chicago, homicides reached a 20-year high in 2016, and the following year President Donald Trump threatened to “send in the feds”. Slutkin presents graphs showing that every time Cure Violence’s funding is cut in a certain area, shootings spike, and when it returns, they drop. (Critics argue that it is impossible to draw conclusions about causality, due to other factors at play.) “Despite massive amounts of data, it’s hard to get funding for this,” Slutkin tells the audience. “Mass imprisonment has no good data – but it’s funded. This is the only epidemic health problem not being tackled by the health department.”
*
Thirteen years after it was established, the Glasgow Violence Reduction Unit has retained its flexibility and openness to new ideas. In 2012, Iain Murray, a policeman working for the unit, travelled to Los Angeles to visit Homeboy Industries, a catering company that employs former gang members. In addition to providing employment for a year for former violent offenders, Homeboy gives mentoring, psychotherapy and other support. Murray came back inspired, thinking how to put a “Scottish spin” on it.
The result is Braveheart Industries, a social enterprise run by the VRU. Its main business is Street and Arrow, a food truck that sits in the Partick area of Glasgow, dishing up peri-peri chicken burgers and fish tacos. It hires former violent offenders for a year, and provides intensive mentoring from a navigator as well as regular psychotherapy and assistance with literacy, housing, parenting and anything else that is required. Participants must have a criminal history, must abstain from drugs and alcohol, and must be ready to change.
Allen, 27, has been working at Street and Arrow for three months. When I ask how long he had spent in prison, he isn’t able to tell me: he’s lost track. But according to Murray, he’s been sent to prison 27 times. “I didn’t come from a supportive background, so I chose the wrong path – drink, drugs, violence, chaos, prison,” says Allen, a tall, well-built man who avoids eye contact. “That was my life. It’s hard to escape once you start.” After his last prison stint, he went into rehab. Someone there told him about Street and Arrow. He applied for a job, and was shocked when he got it. “I came up here with nothing, and I mean nothing,” he says. “But the more I was away from the chaos, the more my life just got better and better.”
The rain suddenly stops and the sun comes out. Allen gestures at the sky. “In my area, when it was sunny, it made me even more anxious as there were more people out, with knives,” he says. “I’m not anxious when it’s sunny any more. I’ve got a future ahead of me.”
For many participants, apparently simple things can be a challenge: arriving on time, taking orders, wearing a uniform. The navigators support them through this, so that, at the end of a year, they’re prepared for a normal job. At the same time, there are echoes of Chicago’s interrupters, modifying behavior to prevent the transmission of violence. The navigators build a relationship with trainees and help them change their responses to conflict.
The program has been highly successful, with 80% of participants staying out of prison and going on to other employment. Murray has noticed the drastic difference in Allen. “I know from my previous roles in policing over the years that I could have arrested that guy 10 times in a row and I wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to his behavior. By supporting him and connecting with him, I can make a long-term, sustainable change to his behavior,” he says. “I cannot believe how good that guy is. I cannot get him to leave work. It’s remarkable to see. You start caring about them and they start caring about themselves.” ~
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/24/violent-crime-cured-rather-than-punished-scottish-violence-reduction-unit
A job-training food truck in Glasgow. Glasgow used to be regarded as the "murder capital of Western Europe." Oriana:
But I wonder if the urge to condemn and punish is stronger than the urge to understand and show caring. Of course it’s vastly more expensive to keep someone in jail than to provide job training and business clothes suitable for an interview. But as the article points out, in politics being “soft on crime” is a suicide. Training a disadvantaged youngster to be a chef? “Nobody ever trained me to be a chef!” I can hear the bitter outcry from those who try to make ends meet by working two poorly paid jobs.
When I worked in prisons, I heard how guards sometimes sabotaged the inmates’ classes because of their envy of the education the inmates were receiving and the “fun” they were supposedly having, and the attention and respect they were getting from the instructors. Prison educational programs have been shown to dramatically cut down on recidivism, but getting funding is always a struggle.
**
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre and de Beauvoir at a fair, 1929**
REPUBLICANS ARE WRONG ABOUT DEMOCRATS AND VICE VERSA
~ “Blacks made up about a quarter of the Democratic Party, but Republicans estimated the share at 46 percent. Republicans thought 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual, while the actual number was about 6 percent. Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. The actual share was 2 percent.
People also overstated the numbers of these stereotypical groups within their own party — Democrats thought 29 percent of their fellow Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual — but they weren’t off by as much as members of the other party.
If you told someone on the phone whom you had never met before that you are white, that single fact would not tell them much more about you. But if you told them that you are a Republican, they could reasonably assume that you are not black, lesbian, gay, transgender or bisexual, nonreligious or Jewish. They could also assume that you don’t live in Washington, D.C., and that you don’t believe racial discrimination is the primary reason blacks aren’t making more advances in today’s America. If you told them you are a Democrat, they would have good reason to believe that you are not a white evangelical Christian and don’t live in coal country in Kentucky. (We should not exaggerate how perfectly sorted people are: In raw numbers, there are still plenty people who buck their party’s stereotypes — young and non-evangelical Republicans and Democrats who are religious and non-urban.)
And which party people belong to is important because there is some evidence that instead of people choosing their party affiliation based on their political views (and changing parties if their views are no longer represented by that party), they shift their views to align with their party identity. The clearest case of this might be polls showing Republicans with more favorable views of Russia and Vladimir Putin after the 2016 election.
But you can also see people molding their political opinions to their party on other issues. Opinions of the FBI, for example. Or, perhaps, the half of Republicans who have told pollsters that they support separating children from their parents at the border.
“The danger of mega-partisan identity is that it encourages citizens to care more about partisan victory than about real policy outcomes,” Mason told me. “We find ways to justify almost any governmental policy as long as it is the policy of our own team. What is best for America, Americans or even small children is secondary to whether our party’s team gets what it demanded.” ~
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-are-wrong-about-republicans-republicans-are-wrong-about-democrats/
*
“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” ~ Aldous Huxley
“We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests—patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds—can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.” ~ Edward Said
“Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.” ~ Dr. Samuel Johnson
**
“Once, Picasso was asked what his paintings meant. He said, 'Do you ever know what the birds are singing? You don’t. But you listen to them anyway.' So, sometimes with art, it is important just to look.” ~ Marina Abramović
Picasso: Boy with a Pipe, 1905*
“Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” ~ Theodore Roethke
Chagall: Artist at Easel**
LIFE AFTER DEATH? NOT A SINGLE PSYCHIC COULD GUESS A DEAD MAN’S MESSAGE (OR EVEN COME CLOSE)
~ “Rolf Erik Eikemo, a Norwegian man who should have been in the prime of his life, instead succumbed to cancer last year. But he will live on — at least on Google — because he agreed to a very cool experiment proposed by the TV show Folkeopplysningen (Public Education).
Editors of that program, which frequently takes aim at superstition and woo, heard that Eikemo’s days were numbered, and got in touch to ask him if he would write a secret message on a piece of paper, seal it in an envelope, and put it in a safe.
The idea was that after Eikemo died, psychics from around the world would be given the chance to either remote-view the note via paranormal means, or would somehow get inside the deceased’s head to learn what he had scribbled.
With Eikemo gone, some 2,000 people from around the world participated in the challenge, e-mailing the TV makers with what they thought they’d been able to glean. Many had obviously googled the man and gambled that he’d left a note of consolation to his children (wrong). Others wrote that the secret note said carpe diem or other thoughts and clichés that might pop into a dying person’s head (also wrong).
When the actual Eikemo note was removed from the safe and opened, it turned out that he had written a wonky World War II reference:
‘Two ME 110 Messerschmitt planes fly over Gandsfjord on April 9, bank west, and fire on Sola Airport.’
Did any of the 2,000 self-described psychics come at all close? Was there at least one person who guessed something about fighter planes, or war, or Gandsfjord, or an airport, or April?
Nope.
Shortly before his death, Eikemo told a TV interviewer that
‘The illusion that there’s life after death is used to take advantage of the survivors, the loved ones. I would like to show that that’s wrong.’
And he did.
Maybe the episode will put a dent in the number of Norwegians — almost 33 percent of them — who believe there is life is after death.” ~
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/10/14/not-a-single-psychic-in-the-world-came-close-to-guessing-a-dead-mans-secret-message/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=FBCP-PATH&utm_content=friendlyatheist
Oriana:
One could argue that this isn’t about life after death but more about the falseness of the psychics’ claims in general. But a lot of the psychics’ business comes from allegedly communicating with the dead, who tend to spout inspirational platitudes rather than reveal the cure for arthritis or the location of an employee who absconded with the money, or anything useful or specific.
As long as the inspirational platitudes are emotionally supportive, not much harm is done, but sometimes the so-called psychics are real scam experts who manage to extract a lot of cash from the survivors.
*
HOUDINI, CONAN DOYLE, AND THE AFTERLIFE
Interestingly, Harry Houdini devoted a lot of time in his last years trying to find even one honest “medium” — and discovered nothing but fraud. Still, he too left a “code” for his wife Beatrice (Bess) which he would use to communicate with her after death — should he indeed exist and be able to communicate. Bess held yearly seances, waiting for her beloved Harry to manifest his presence. No conclusive results were obtained, and after ten years Bess ended the seances.
Alas, Houdini’s unmasking of the mediums’ tricks destroyed his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of hyper-rationalist Sherlock Holmes believed in the spirit world and communicating with the dead — who were all around us and apparently eager to chat. But Houdini, himself a master of tricks — “There is something interesting about the way he was always so convinced by the evidence of his own eyes. Theatre is all about directing the eye,” Eidinow says, “and where people look. It’s about controlling what people see and don’t see” — could apparently outthink even Sherlock. And Doyle could not cope with Houdini’s brutal honesty (please pardon the cliché — “brutal” because so many people desperate cling to the belief that they and the deceased loved one will “meet again” and all will be forgiven and beautiful).
(By the way, one of the “proofs” that Conan Doyle tried to use to convince Houdini was an alleged letter from Houdini’s dead Hungarian-Jewish mother, produced via automatic writing. The letter was written in grammatically correct English; Houdini dismissed it by saying that his mother’s English was terrible.)
(source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/10/houdini-and-conan-doyle-impossible-edinburgh-festival)
Houdini in chains; Conan Doyle in uniformOriana:
I too would love the afterlife to exist in some form (preferably not the eternal hymn-singing of Christian heaven), but my first choice would be simply to live for centuries right here on earth — I'm always curious about happens next, and my appetite for beauty appears inexhaustible. I would not be bored just looking at things: nature, art, people’s and animals’ faces.
So it’s not that I'm devoid of the longing to continue. It’s rather that the alternate explanation of how consciousness ceases seems very convincing to me. Consciousness (“soul”) is not a thing that can leave the body after death and go anywhere, be it heaven, hell, purgatory, or some mysterious “spirit world” filled with colored lights and music of the spheres. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb — a process, a brain function that ceases when all brain function ceases.
When a candle gutters and goes out, we don’t ask, “Where did the flame go?” The fuel that fed the flame got spent, or else the oxygen supply was cut off (I used to love watching the sacristan snuff out the tall church candles with a special metal hood, like an executioner). Likewise, where a movie ends, we don’t ask, “Where did the movie go?” It ceased to be projected or downloaded — but the process can be repeated again. Not so with us — even if we download our memories on a computer drive, that will hardly be the same thing as being alive. Alas . . .
**
EFFECTIVE DOSE OF ASPIRIN DEPENDS ON BODY WEIGHT
~ “Researchers found that a daily dose of 75 to 100 milligrams of aspirin lowered the risk of cardiovascular events by 23 percent for people weighing less than 154 pounds, but had no effect in those weighing more. In people over 154 pounds, low-dose aspirin increased the risk for a fatal cardiovascular event.
Higher doses — 325 to 500 milligrams a day — were effective in lowering cardiovascular risk in people who weighed more than 154.
Low-dose aspirin reduced the risk for colorectal cancer in people weighing less than 154 pounds, but not in those weighing more. High doses lowered the cancer risk in people between 154 and 176 pounds, but not in those heavier than that.
“There are a billion people worldwide taking aspirin regularly, and every randomized trial is based on the same dose for everyone,” said the lead author, Peter M. Rothwell, a professor of neurology at Oxford University. “It may be that we’ve got that wrong, and have to tailor dosage to the individual, as we do with other drugs.” ~
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/well/an-aspirin-a-day-for-heart-health-it-may-depend-on-your-weight.html?mabReward=ACBMG2&recid=17ZGgyc3kg3tqs9rYhWiDSXPsjP&recp=2&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine
Oriana:
Note: “ In people over 154 pounds, low-dose aspirin increased the risk for a fatal cardiovascular event.”
Shouldn’t this research have been done decades ago, before issuing guidelines on low-dose aspirin for the cardiovascular protection? And shouldn’t drugs in general be dosed according to body weight, as is the common practice when animal lab studies are performed?
Meanwhile millions of men, who generally weigh well over 154 lbs, have been put on low-dose aspirin. Less means safer, right? Oops!
I think the baby aspirin was chosen on the basis of studies that showed that it takes only a small amount of acetylsalicylic acid to inhibit platelet aggregation, thus reducing the likelihood of a clot. But the anti-clotting effect just one benefit of aspirin. It has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect, and reduces body temperature (this is a positive thing —- even for a person not having a fever).
The anti-inflammatory effect probably counts more, since aging means increased inflammation (hence the term “inflammaging”) — and cardiovascular disease is inflammatory, meaning that our own immune system is killing us (in many ways, but cardiovascular disease is the number one killer).
My guess is that not only the person's weight, but also their age and personal and family medical history should be taken into consideration.
For prevention of heart attack or stroke it’s best to take aspirin at night rather than during daytime.
If you are concerned with damage to the lining of the stomach, the Alka-Seltzer type of aspirin (with baking soda) has been shown to cause no damage.
*
ending on beauty:
The dog days of summer are upon us:
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion's Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
~ Homer, the Iliad
Munch: Summer night in Asgardstrand
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