woobiquity

I love to tell the story

That’s the first line of a 19th-century hymn. Maybe you know it. The next line begins “Of Jesus and his glory…” I bring it up because it was sung at my great-grandmother’s funeral this week, in tribute to her talking abilities.

She had the storytelling gift, and while Christian faith was the blueprint beneath most of the stories she loved to tell, the stories she loved to tell weren’t particularly religious. There was the rotting dead horse in the drinking-water stream that she and her sister came upon one fine Virginia girlhood day. There was the boy in the Roanoke department store where she worked as a teenager, who kept harassing her for a date, until finally she sent him one up on the dumbwaiter. A candied date.

Flashing forward, when extreme old age turned her body into an immovable carcass and took her eyesight so that she could no longer read, these retold stories helped sustain her. “I’m just an old woman thinking back on what’s happened in my life,” she would say. Or “did you see all those cats on the way in?”  Or “how do you like my new house?” There were no cats, and she had lived in the same house for 20 years, but so what. Here was the imagination of a reader and a do-er who could no longer read or do, showing its resilience and its appetite for new material in ways that were only uncomfortable for the listener –- and then really only when she asked you to go in the other room and bring back some imaginary thing.

And it turned out mainly she just needed oxygen. After that, the stories were a lot less  fantastical. By the end, being 105 was the only true story she still had the wherewithal to shape, and she gave it everything she had. Doctors didn't know what to do for her. People would stop by just to have a look at the oldest person in town, who would profess, with increasing weariness, that she had no idea why in the world "the Lord keeps me here".

So anyway, gather ye rosebuds, read Proust and the Russians. Do some daring stuff that will make good stories later. It's a depressing thought that one day if you live long enough (too long, you might feel by then) the stories may be all you've got. But not having any would be worse.

I like it; it's kind of cool

I refer, of course, to that "separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma": no, not the colon; the semicolon.

While rumors of the apostrophe's death may or may not have been greatly exaggerated lately (its [sic] alive and well, just in all the wrong places), the semicolon has been quietly slipping out of sight. So much so that when one is sighted on New York public transportation the event is reported in the New York Times and the article shoots to number one on the newspaper's Most Emailed List.

Here is clear evidence that people are wearying of political campaign news. All the professional editors have swung back, with a satisfied sigh, to reading about punctuation; everyone else, presumably, is watching basketball.

The article does not mention (I think) the funniest and most psychologically intense usage of the semicolon: a lengthy passage in Lolita in which Humbert Humbert, having mentioned an admiration for his rival's use of the punctuation, proceeds to subtly and adeptly and quite possibly subconsciously outshine with his own employment of it in the text.

Asked in the Paris Review whether any editor (“By ‘editor’ I suppose you mean proofreader”) had ever given him useful literary advice, Vladimir Nobokov spoke of a few “limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor,” adding, “which, indeed, a point of art often is.”

Update: Tee-shirt for the burgeoning Semicolon Appreciation Society. There are also stickers which guerrilla members can  use to amend signs -- although something tells they aren't the type. A commenter adds: "The semicolon? How about some love for the colon? Oh, wait..."

Not going to live forever

Most of the platitudes about death are true, including the one that goes: even a death that's been a long time coming still carries a surprisingly gut-wrenching gloom.

My great-grandmother, Odessa Holt, was 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 105.5, 105.6... At these ages every breath is a bargain, and yet when there's a woman out there claiming to be 120 who can blame the little part of you that thinks everyone in your family is going to live forever. They're not, and you're not, and yesterday the half-expected, half-denied call came. She had gone peacefully in the early morning, shortly after her eldest daughter had walked through the door of her nursing home room.

After a beloved relative hits 90, every time you say goodbye wisdoms are listened for, potential last words are memorized. Fifteen years of that is a lot of wiping the slate to make room for another set of last words. By December, when I saw her last, the parting moments were unrecognizable from how they had started out. She no longer cried. There were smiles instead. And while the final last words were not anything momentous they were perfect -- the words of every Southern grandmother since time immemorial.

Hurry back.

From Gatwick Airport this morning, I'm hurrying back.

The difference a letter can make

'MINI ABS 24 HOURS', Upper Street, Islington, yesterday evening.

Faulkner or fake?

"The chair-arm flat cool smooth under my forehead shaping the chair the apple tree leaning on my hair above the eden clothes by the nose seen..."

Is it William Faulkner or is it German text translated by machine? Take the quiz and find out. I’m too embarrassed to say what I scored. At least there’s no implication that a monkey could have strung words together with the prose force of our laureate.

Perhaps because the monkeys were all too busy making paintings. So if reading impenetrable but possibly literary sentences is a bit too ambitious for your time-wasting pleasure, there’s also the picture-based Artist or Ape. Or the even quicker Pollock or Bird Poo.

What the internet doesn't know

Well, for starters it didn't know what kind of tree this is. Now, with diligence anyone could probably find photos online which, with squinting comparisons, could have named this tree. But that would take time, and the internet is all about saving time. Was I naive in thinking Google might zero in on this single tree, which after all sits in the center of a prominent London park, and tell me almost instantly its name, sex and serial number? Probably. But I'm not alone in this naivety. I'm not the only one who occasionally forgets that, no, everything that is knowable cannot be found instantly in online search results. Or not yet anyway.

(It's a European beech by the way. In the event, I showed the picture to a botanist, who not only confirmed the type but told me lots of fascinating stuff about beech trees that I never would have absorbed while scanning for keywords on an html page. Useless information, you might say, but it certainly feels valuable in the sense that I know I can't just find it again in my browser history.)

Students and writers (and oh dear, but I belong to both categories) make quiet fools of themselves all the time now by going online 'for research purposes' and typing in the most inanely specific search strings, in full faith that Google will have the answer in a jiffy. "What are the dominant themes in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle?"

I know this in part because I can see it in the referrer data for this blog. "Stereotypical tourist attractions in Paris" was, I'd bet, a fellow writer looking for the easy way out.

I get steady traffic from people desperate to know why they can't find a certain brand of canned ham in any supermarket within a 50 mile radius. Even though my answer is really more of an aside, it's been deemed the best the internet has to offer on the subject. I guess that's because it occupies that space just by The Edge, where the great abyss begins (All That is Not Known by Google), which must make it valuable to some. This may be a special case, however, since I have a suspicion it's closure these people crave more than information or ham, this belonging to a special category of searches that could be labelled Raunchy Nostalgia in a menu filter, because it recalls a time when people actually had time to open a can at suppertime.

And so I've been wondering. When the day comes that the internet really does know everything, when we've all got Google chips implanted in our brains (early adopter nerds no doubt will be mocked for wearing the clunky external versions on headbands, surfing the vast pool of human knowledge while manouvering a bumpy sidewalk on their vintage Segways), when no knowledge must be known in order to be owned -- what then? Will education become a spiritual quest for that which can never be known, one big creative exercise, an orgy of art-making and scientific daring from age 3 onward? Or will school be redundant, leaving so much more time for ping pong, texting and Halo 3?

Meanwhile those tree branches sway unbothered in the February breeze.