Sunday, April 29, 2007

Illiteracy in China

From the Washington Post:

Illiteracy is increasing in China, despite a 50-year-old campaign to
stamp it out and a declaration by the government in 2000 that it had
been nearly eradicated. The reasons are complex, from the cost of a
rural education to the growing appeal of migrant work that draws
Chinese away from classrooms and toward far-off cities.

In many cases, as in this farming hamlet in China's southern Guizhou
province, villagers whose education ended in elementary school have
simply forgotten basic skills.

From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by
33 percent, from 87 million to 116 million, the state-run China Daily
reported this month. The newspaper noted that even before the
increase, China's illiterate population had accounted for 11.3
percent of the world's total.
...
Literacy in China is defined according to an exam taken in fourth
grade. Even if villagers pass that exam, they frequently do not
pursue further education. Having no reason to read and write, many
forget the skills. This is especially true of ethnic minorities,
rural women and young dropouts, according to researchers.
...
Farmers are expected to learn at least 1,500 characters, according to
state education regulations. Urban residents should master 2,000.
Teachers in Beijing often tell students they need to know 3,000
characters to read a newspaper. College graduates are tested on 7,000
characters or more.

lliteracy Jumps in China, Despite 50-Year Campaign to Eradicate It
Washington Post, April 27, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2dft4d

Saturday, April 28, 2007

That openeth the window...

In this morning's Guardian, Jennie Erdal writes about the art of
literary translation. A few snippets from the article:

In discussing translation, you often find yourself looking for
metaphors, as if translation can't quite be itself and nothing else.
Even 400 years ago, the men who translated the King James Bible into
the common language of the people relied heavily on metaphor.

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that
breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside
the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth
the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.
(From the preface "The Translators to the Reader")

In more recent times, practitioners of the art have talked in terms
of "transplanting" - taking something living from one soil and
setting it in another - or, more prosaically, "importing foreign
goods". Others have compared it to a musical or theatrical
performance, with the translator as conductor or stage director,
working with the original score or script. Umberto Eco, in an image
that will strike a chord with those working at the sharp end,
describes translation as "a process of negotiation" - a three-way
transaction "with the ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing
presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader".

Anthea Bell (who has given us Max Sebald, ETA Hoffmann and Asterix
the Gaul in English) has plumped for a different image: the
translator as tightrope walker. And when you read her translations,
you can sense her cool nerve, her skill and courage during what is
sometimes a precarious balancing act that could go wrong at any
moment. Bell has also talked of "spinning an illusion", the illusion
being that the reader is reading the real thing - that is to say, the
author's original work, not some imitation of it. This is the ideal:
that the translated work should read as easily as the original, while
still remaining true to the author's vision and the spirit of the
writing. Yet this is no easy task, particularly between languages
that belong to different groups.

Translation is sometimes thought of as an imitative process, but in
fact it is much more inventive and imaginative. Quite often there is
no exact equivalence between languages, and sometimes English simply
cannot tolerate certain aspects of the original, at least not without
irony or some other modifying factor. Humour is a notoriously
difficult area - what is funny in one language can look simply inept
or embarrassing in another. Puns, double entendres, malapropisms,
indeed any kind of wordplay - these are all hard to transport safely.

Certain languages are also much richer in sound than our own. In
Japanese, the sound of a word often imitates its meaning, but this
(so I am told) goes way beyond the onomatopoeic miaows, cuckoos and
kerplunks that we have in English. In Japanese, practically the whole
of the natural world - the changing seasons, the different kinds of
rain and wind, the clouds, the sun and the stars - are all
represented by sound. Thus hyu-hyu is a light wind, pyu-pyu blows a
bit stronger and byu-byu stronger still. The English translator is
able to get round this with the help of breezes and gales, but the
music is lost. More strikingly still, the Japanese also use sound
patterns to express their emotional lives: they smile niko-niko, they
weep shiku-shiku and they retch muka-muka. Even the best translators
will struggle to render this subtlety into English.

In Russian, the problems are different. It is such a dense,
elliptical language that sometimes what is only implied in a tightly
packed phrase has to be made more explicit in a longer English
sentence. A single verb in Russian can be a complete sentence,
telling us not only who is doing it, and whether the doer is male or
female, but also whether the activity has been completed or is still
going on. In Anna Karenina, Prince Oblonsky says to a dinner guest:
Prikazhetye, krasnovo? - meaning (literally) "Order, red?" From the
word endings, we know that Oblonsky is asking: "Will you give me the
order to pour out some red wine for you?" This is usually translated
as "Will you have some red wine?" - conveying the sense, but in no
way matching or retaining the ellipsis.
...

Translators are often naturally diffident, used to being in the
background. In many cases, they have colluded in their own
invisibility - I certainly did at one time. They often display a
sense of uncertainty, perhaps because what they do is in some sense
provisional. Translation is a process; even when the work is done, it
is never finished. Translators know they must never overwhelm or
compete with the author, but they know, too, that the author's whole
identity is bound up with the way the words are placed on the page.
Literary translation, when it is done well, is also therefore a
supreme act of empathy...

Jennie Erdal, "Let there be light," The Guardian, Saturday April 28,
2007
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329795379-110738,00.html

Friday, April 27, 2007

More on the Guanghe Theater

Richard Spencer, The Daily Telegraph's China Correspondent, sheds
some light on the Guanghe Theater story in his blog:
"Now I confess I was surprised that I hadn't heard of the Guanghe
Theatre, if it was so famous a landmark, but the stories did point
out that it had been closed for several years, since before I first
came here. But this picture provides another explanation: it wasn't a
famous old landmark after all. A bit of research, and this is what we
discover: the Ming dynasty theatre burned down and was rebuilt in
Qing times, a couple of hundred years back. Well, that's OK, ditto
the Forbidden City. But then the Qing version started to fall down
(after Mei Lanfang started to sing there), and in the general
cultural vandalism that afflicted Beijing in early Maoist times, when
the city walls were also pulled down, it was bulldozed and replaced
with the current perfect example of Soviet-style pebble-dash
modernist concrete."

Spencer writes, "I've occasionally commented on how it is that while
the so-called 'mainstream western media' are accused of demonising
China, it's often actually China itself that is demonising China."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/apr2007/

chinaheirlooms.htm

Bringing down the curtain

"The fat lady is about to sing for Beijing's oldest opera house.
China's unstoppable long march to progress is bringing down the
curtain on the Beijing Opera stage at the Guanghe tea house, which
dates from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but has fallen victim to a
growing Chinese fascination with Broadway shows. The Guanghe theatre
is famous as the venue where the Beijing Opera master Mei Lanfang
launched his career at just 10 years of age, more than a century ago.
[...] We intend to build a modern, professional venue like those on
Broadway in the United States, where regular shows are offered all
year round, and high-end performances can take place,' Ma Dekai, a
construction chief at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture, told
Xinhua news agency..."

The Independent, April 26, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2486640.ece

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Small talk

Hermione Lee writes:

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional
writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse."
Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast,
aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel
as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn
the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed
prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H.
Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how
to live and understand our lives and those of others. The novel's
entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its
justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been
argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness.

Hermione Lee, "Storms Over the Novel," The New York Review of Books,
vol. 54, no. 8, May 10, 2007.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20172

"Trivial discourse" is a good translation of xiaoshuo (小說), but a
more literal one is "small talk." To Zhuangzi, a xiaoshuo was an anecdote.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Four Languages of "Mandarin"

Robert M. Sanders, "The Four Languages of 'Mandarin'," Sino-Platonic
Papers, 4 (November 1987), is available here:

http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp004_mandarin_chinese.html
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp004_mandarin_chinese.pdf
Here's how it begins:

Many hours have been spent at scholarly meetings and many pages of
academic writing have been expended discussing what is to be
considered acceptable Mandarin. Very often these discussions
degenerate into simplistic and narrow-minded statements such as
"That's not the way we say it in …!" or "We had better ask someone
from Peking." Objectively speaking, these disagreements on style
reflect a less-than-rigorous definition of which type of Mandarin
each party is referring to. Because there has been a failure by all
concerned to define fully the linguistic and socio-linguistic
parameters of their assumed language(s), Mandarin oranges are often
unwittingly being compared with Mandarin apples. This paper is a
preliminary attempt to articulate the fundamental differences
distinguishing four major language types subsumed under the single
English heading 'Mandarin'. Though the Chinese terms putonghua/guoyu,
guanhua, and difanghua help to accentuate the conceptual distinctions
distinguishing our four types of Mandarin, it is arguable that even
Chinese scholars are not immune from confusing one language with
another.

Sanders goes on to indentify and discuss what he calls

Idealized Mandarin
Imperial Mandarin
Geographical Mandarin
Local Mandarin

Thanks to Pinyin News for this blog entry:

http://pinyin.info/news/2007/mandarins-four-languages/

Gross National Happiness

"Gross national happiness includes criteria like equity, good
government and harmony with nature. It apparently does not include
harmony with the 100,000 ethnic Nepalis who fled Bhutan after a royal
crackdown on their agitation for democratic rights and have
languished since 1990 in refugee camps in Nepal."

"Line Up and Pick a Dragon: Bhutan Learns to Vote," New York Times,
April 24, 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/world/asia/24bhutan.html

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Homecoming

Young when I left, I now return old
My accent unchanged, my hair much thinned;
None of the children know who I am,
With smiles they ask, "Sir, where are you from?"

He Zhizhang (659-744), "Occasional Lines Upon Returning to My Homeland"

少小離家老大回
鄉音無改鬢毛衰
兒童相見不相識
笑問客從何處來

賀知章, "回鄉偶書"

English translation quoted in Geremie Barme, An Artistic Exile: A
Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975), University of California Press, 2002,
p. 345.

Why we read history

Garrison Keillor wrote a couple of days ago:

"It is invigorating to realize you've been dead wrong about
something. That's why we read history. It's an antidote to smug self-
righteousness, which makes us insufferable. You learn about this from
books. I can't think of any movie or song that changed my mind about
anything, but books of history certainly have. You sit down and read
about the temperance movement of 19th century America, which brought
about Prohibition, which you always thought was a foolish attempt by
blue-nosed puritans to repress bonhomie, which was the view of the
satirists of the 1920s, but there is another point of view: The
temperance cause was a protest movement by women who, having been
shut out of higher education and relegated to menial jobs, were
economically dependent on men and therefore terribly vulnerable to a
man's alcoholism. The temperance crusader Carrie Nation, famous for
busting up saloons with a hatchet, was the wife of a raging alcoholic
who had destroyed her life. The Women's Christian Temperance Union,
which you had thought of as a joke, has certain heroic dimensions and
helped pave the way for women's suffrage."

I'll drink to that.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/opinion/edkeillor.php

Friday, April 20, 2007

42,000 miles

The international press has made much of the new 710-mile rail line
to Lhasa, which crosses mountain passes at more than 16,400 feet. But
as the Independent noted yesterday, China has only 42,000 miles of
railroad lines, compared to 132,000 miles in the United States.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2461401.ece

Thursday, April 19, 2007

E-mail and the lonely crowd

"Don't get me wrong. E-mail is great. It has vastly expanded my
social horizons. Twenty years ago I rarely spoke by phone to more
than five people in a day. Now I often send e-mail to dozens of
people a day. I have so many friends! Um, can you remind me of their
names? Of course, it works both ways. My many e-mail 'friends' also
have many 'friends,' and I'm just one of them. So they can't afford
to treat me like a friend - reliably acknowledging my existence, that
sort of thing. So questions arise. Is Joe - who once answered e-mail
promptly but has fallen silent - mad at me? Or has my social status,
in Joe's view, dropped a bit, so I'm not quite worth his time? And if
the latter: Who the hell does Joe think he is? [...] With the time
you don't spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim,
Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By
ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with
lots of people - and interact along such narrow channels that we skip
the bother of getting to know an entire human being. It's an old
story. Technological change makes society more efficient and less
personal. We know more people more shallowly."

Robert Wright, International Herald Tribune, April 17, 2007
www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/17/opinion/edwright.php

Monday, April 16, 2007

Heart, mind, and soul

In his book on translation and Chinese literature, Eugene Chen Eoyang
writes:

Take, for example, the simple and familiar distinction of "heart" and
"mind." Perhaps since Galen, these two organs have been characterized
in the West as the "feeling" organ and the "thinking" organ. Modern
anatomy would seem to corroborate this specialization of function.
Chinese, on the other hand, uses the same word xin for "heart" and
"mind." Far from posing problems of exposition, there may be
something in a fusing together, not to say confusion so much as a
conflation, of the two notions; for with most acts of conation,
determination, will, perception, sensibility, the faculties of both
thinking and feeling are engaged: it is usually difficult to
determine the proportion of reason to emotion in the effusions of
xin, "heart-mind." "To think with the heart," and "to feel with the
mind," are distinctions in English that might be suggestive; in
Chinese, they would be equivalent and tautologous.

Or, to take a converse example, consider the concept of "soul" in
English: usually contrasted with the corporeal essence, with "body,"
the soul exists concurrently with the body when it is alive (either
in the same place or in different places, if one accepts certain
notions of telekinesis and mind transport), and it survives the body
after death, to wander the earth, or to enter heaven, hell, or
purgatory, or to begin a new reincarnation (depending on whether one
believes in ghosts, Christianity, or Buddhism). In Chinese, however,
there are two souls: po 魄 and hun 魄. The corporeal soul, the po,
stays with the body, and it dies with the body: it might be likened
to the vital force, the spirit of a person, his "élan vital," as
Henri Bergson might say. But there is another soul, the hun, which is
not bound to the flesh and which can roam at some distance from the
body. One trope of Chinese poetry is the transport, across vast
distances, of the hun to visit friends in dreams. If the distance is
considerable, this is usually taken to be an indication of a person's
death, since the hun is conceived of being able to roam further than
a regional distance only with the death of the body, and only when
separated from the po. A famous stanza, by one poet in the Tang
dynasty who encountered another poet in his dreams, expressing
concern that the friend may be dead, since his hun seems so
wideranging, exploits this belief:

Old friend, you appeared in a dream.
It shows you have long been in my thoughts.
Perhaps it was not your living soul:
The way's too far, it couldn't be done.

End of quote.

Eugene Chen Eoyang, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation,
Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii
Press, 1993), pp. 317-318.

The poem is Du Fu's "Dreaming of Li Bai." Du Fu lived from 712 to
770; Li Bai from 701 to762.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Cities are the "greenest" of all places

Next time I feel tempted to pat myself on the back for buying
organic, locally grown food and fair trade products and driving a
small car a few times a week, I'd better remember that I live
in a big, 250-year old house in the mountains, and that on a per
capita basis, cities use less energy than the inhabited countrysides
of North America and Europe. Or so I learn from an article by Douglas
Foy and Robert Healy in the Boston Globe:

"This may come as a surprise to those who think of environmental
issues largely in the context of wild places and open spaces. Cities,
often congested, dense, and enormous consumers of resources, would
not be the place one might first turn for environmental solutions. In
fact, cities are inherently the 'greenest' of all places. They are
much more efficient in their use of energy, water and land than
suburbs. They provide transportation services in a remarkably
equitable and democratic fashion... New York City, for example, is
the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2
million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its
electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of
Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more
efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in
Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses
dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a
state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per
capita basis, than any state in America."

"Cities Are the Answer," Boston Globe/International Herald Tribune,
April 11, 2007.

www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/11/opinion/edfoy.php

Friday, April 13, 2007

Literary Translation

I find that the best place to listen CBC's The Best of Ideas is the
kitchen, while fixing supper. Last night I heard an entertaining item
on literary translation:

"Barbara Nichol discusses literary translation with some of its most
gifted practitioners."

Listen to Part 1:

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070402_1888.mp3

Part 2:

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070409_1889.mp3

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut

The morning papers say that Kurt Vonnegut has died.

Vonnegut once wrote of his uncle Alex, who was educated at Harvard,
"I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used
to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of
them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no
matter what else might be going on." Timequake (Berkley Trade, 1998),
p. 182.

I miss the days way back when I read Vonnegut's very funny books,
some of them great, because they gave me reason enough to feel
honored to be alive, no matter what else was going on.

Monday, April 9, 2007

How Taiwan Became Chinese

Tonio Andrade argues in a new book that the Dutch are responsible for
the sinification of Taiwan:

"Intensive Chinese colonization began abruptly in the 1630s, shortly
after the Dutch East India Company established a trading port on
Taiwan. The Dutch realized that their port's hinterlands could
produce rice and sugar for export, but they were unable to persuade
Taiwan's aborigines to raise crops for sale -- most were content to
plant just enough for themselves and their families. The colonists
considered importing European settlers, but the idea was rejected by
their superiors in the Netherlands. So they settled instead on a more
unusual plan: encourage Chinese immigration. The Dutch offered tax
breaks and free land to Chinese colonists, using their powerful
military to protect pioneers from aboriginal assault... In this way
the company created a calculable economic and social environment,
making Taiwan a safe place for Chinese to move to and invest in,
whether they were poor peasants or rich entrepreneurs. People from
the province of Fujian, just across the Taiwan Strait, began pouring
into the colony, which grew and prospered, becoming, in essence, a
Chinese settlement under Dutch rule. The colony's revenues were drawn
almost entirely from Chinese settlers, through taxes, tolls, and
licenses. As one Dutch governor put it, 'The Chinese are the only
bees on Formosa that give honey.' "

Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, Columbia University Press,
2007, quoted in a Salon.com article by Andrew Leonard:

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/05/taiwan_china/index.html

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Eostre

The history of Easter celebrations in America parallels the
controversies surrounding Christmas. Puritan sects viewed Easter
dimly, as a holiday that smacked of popery. Until the mid-nineteenth
century, only certain Protestants and the relatively small handful of
Catholics in America venerated Easter as a religious feast. American
folk observations of Easter (the name derives from an Anglo-Saxon
goddess of fertility or spring, Eostre, whose sign was the rabbit),
however, date back to the eighteenth century and greatly influence
contemporary celebrations. The Pennsylvania Dutch imported the
Oschter Haws, or Easter Hare, who delivered colored eggs to good
children (or rabbit pellets to the naughty) who put out their hats
for a "nest." By the early nineteenth century, entire Pennsylvania
Dutch villages would turn out with gaily decorated Easter eggs to
play games, including egg-eating contests and "picking" eggs, in
which young gladiators would butt eggs until one competitor's egg
broke. For good health, the Pennsylvania Dutch ate wild greens,
especially dandelion, on Maundy Thursday. They gathered eggs laid on
Good Friday for consumption on Easter, for use in folk medicine, or
as talismans against evil spirits. A favorite Pennsylvania Dutch
Easter bread depicts a rabbit in the preposterous posture of laying
an egg. By the later nineteenth century, most Protestant groups had
eased their opposition to Easter...
Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2004.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Portuguese

Gregory Rabassa is well-known for his fine translations of the novels
of Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and especially Gabriel García
Marquez. But he also translates from Portuguese. In his highly
entertaining memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its
Discontents (2005), he confesses:

"At risk of offending or dismaying many friends who speak Spanish, I
must admit here and now that I prefer Portuguese, especially in the
Brazilian oral mode with all its unique sounds and rhythms. Some of
the sounds, like the open O and the dark L, are closer to Slavic
noises than to those of other Romance languages."

"As I have noted, Portuguese, and most especially the Brazilian
variety, is eminently supple, matching English in this respect,
unlike French and Spanish, and therefore it renders translation
equally free and easy, less restricted. With Spanish I have to walk
that narrow line between tight and loose structure, careful not to
betray one language or the other. With Portuguese I can let myself
go, in a manner of speaking, careful to avoid the other vicissitudes
involved."

Friday, April 6, 2007

Bad Apple

As a Mac user, I was disppointed to read in yesterday's Independent
that Greenpeace has rated Apple the worst among major electronics
firms for its environmental policies. In a survey of 14 major
companies, the manufacturer of the Mac, the Powerbook, and the iPod
was put bottom of the list for its policies on the elimination of
toxic substances and recycling. Surprisingly, the first place on the
list was the Chinese PC maker Lenovo, which displaced Nokia.

Chongqing

The International Herald Tribune (April 5) reports that Chongqing in
Sichuan province has 4.1 million people living in the city proper
but when its surrounding areas are considered, it's home to more
than 31 million, which makes it the largest population center in
China. Chongqing's annual GDP per capita is $1,363, which isn't
particularly impressive when you think about it. Last year, U.S. GDP
per capita was $43,500.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Classic

Legge noted that the Latin word textus and the Chinese term jing
[classic] both etymologically refer to the idea of "thought woven
into writing"—that is, the fabric of ancient thought is given
special authority and classical weight by being written down and
systematized by a great mind or author.
Norman Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's
Oriental Pilgrimage (University of California Press, 2002), p. 428.

The Chinese character is 經, which originally meant "warp in a loom,"
and possibly was a picture of a loom.

In the middle of the night

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the
night to write."

This is often attributed to Saul Bellow, but I'd like to know where
and when he said it.

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Despite the peculiarities of their language

There's a curious passage in Jonathan Spence's To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960. When Peter Parker, an American missionary doctor, was about to set sail for China in 1832, "he discovered that despite the peculiarities of their language 'the Chinese understand each other perfectly well' and that thanks to the labors of Morrison and Remusat in compiling dictionaries and grammars the 'auxiliary means are not now wanting for those who are desirous of learning this curious idiom.' " Parker spent many years in China working as a surgeon and learning Chinese. Spence writes that by 1844, Caleb Cushing, first minister plenipotentiary from the United States to China, made Parker secretary and interpreter to the United States Mission, though Parker could still not write Chinese documents and had to rely on a Chinese assistant to take down dictation and, I'm guessing, correct his mistakes and polish his language.



Names are a graveyard of words

Last week's Der Spiegel had an article about a "Namensforscher," a scholar who investigates the origin and life of personal names, named Jürgen Udolph, who says rather poetically that the ca. one million German names are a graveyard of words, a "Friedhof der Wörter." Words live, evolve, and die, but they sometimes they live on in names. Friedrich Schiller and Otto Schilly had cross-eyed ancestors ("schielende Vorfahren"). Heidi Klum's name comes from "klamm," which used to mean humble or miserable.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

You're soaking in it

As Marcuse pointed out, there is such a thing as totalitarian democracy, and to quote an old detergent commercial, "You're soaking in it."
The Village Voice, March 30, 2007