Saturday, April 28, 2018

w-w-w-w-W-AK-ing

(Saturday morning,  late-lying abed,
 head full of cobwebs…)


Logy  like a   pot of  honey
slowly  seek  release

from        layer upon   layer   of
dream - drenched     sleep …

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Women & Wisps



who, when
she danced,

left a stab of perfume    in the air,

like a white azalea

-- Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca  (1938)

~

the smoke of her cigarette   whirling back over her shoulder
like a sweet-smelling  scarf    in the wind

-- William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946)


~

Mary Ann Weaver  on Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi:

She was an icon -- beautiful, imperial, aloof -- passing, almost dreamlike, through the dust and exhaust fumes.
-- Pakistan (2002), p. 172



Sunday, April 22, 2018

Daffy Dactyls


Headline in today’s  New York Times:

Incursions by Turkey
put Greece on Alert

(Chant to the beat of  “To market to market / to buy a fat pig”.)




Politico-prosodical footnote:
While world history is being made on the fly,
POTUS is venting  unedited -- and without scansion.
At the least, he should be required to phrase everything
in dactylic measures.
That would also  give time  for reflection.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

The World’s Scarcest Resource


What -- oil?  water?  tungsten maybe?
No -- linguists!  Satisfactory intepreters and translators.

We earlier outlined Germany’s shortage of adequate translators, in a CT context:


There, the unmet need was for Arabic.  And now, in the more general context of the massive influx of immigrants to Germany, today’s Die Zeit documents how, since 2017, over two thousand interpreters had to be let go -- in large part, owing to inadequate command of German:



So:  Should you ever have the good fortune to run into a practicing, credentialed philologian -- Be nice to them!  Do them little kindnesses -- Bring them coffee!  And managers -- Double their salary.  A really good linguist is hard to find.


For further True Life Adventures of these rare beings,  try this: