Just a place to jot down my musings.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

American and British punctuation

All international students, especially those who grew up in the Commonwealth or went to a Commonwealth-curriculum school, will know the pain of having to switch to the American system of spelling and punctuation. Many refuse to spell words the American way, out of practice or out of a desire to not conform; others change their ways, but inconsistently, with their deeply-ingrained old ways of spelling and writing never really going away, like that accent that always leaves behind its traces.

Of all the differences in writing punctuation, the only one that I truly dislike is the American habit of having the quotation mark in a phrase come at the end of a clause or sentence. Having grown up with the British system, where the logic of the context determines whether or not the punctuation belongs inside or outside the quotation, I've always found the American system misleading. Here's an article that points to the difference between American and British usage, and offers a historical* reason for why this is the case.

I'm certainly guilty of inconsistency, but I deem that to be less of a problem than being guilty of an illogical consistency. I will try henceforth to place my commas and periods where they logically belong, at least in writing where I'm not penalized for grammatical errors!



Is the fishing industry humane?

There's a lot of noise these days about the unsustainable nature of the meat-and-dairy industry, particularly in the United States. Such criticisms target the vast amount of resources that the meat-and-dairy industry consumes, the utterly shocking conditions under which most animals are housed, and the unhealthily high level of antibiotics and other chemicals being pumped into these creatures to maximize their yield. There are clearly serious issues at stake here, although there are no straightforward non-ideological answers.

But what happens under water? What sorts of practices are employed by the fishing industry? How sustainable are our massive yields? Peter Singer's terrifying article called "If Fish Could Scream" argues that our current practices are morally indefensible and ecologically utterly unsustainable.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

"Grieve not!"

This is a truly wonderful ghazal by that master of the Persian language, the Lisān al-Ghayb, the Tongue of the Unseen, Hafez of Shiraz. I recently read two different translations of it into English, one of them a beautiful (albeit secularized) version by Haleh Pourafzal and Roger Montgomery (p. 54 of their book Haféz: Teachings of the Philosopher of Love), and another, much more literal, much more archaic, version by Wilberforce Clarke (pp. 499–500 of The Divan-i Hafiz). The two translations are hugely different in style, and there are a few points where they vary in semantics as well. I thought I'd give it a shot and produce my own version. It's heavily inspired by Pourafzal and Montgomery, but sticks a little closer to the literal sense of the poem (at least as far as I can understand Hafez!).

Before that though, some of the verses of this ghazal in the inimitable voice of Mohammad-Reza Shajarian:

Sunday, September 12, 2010

States and "legibility"

I read a wonderful book by James C. Scott this summer, with the impressively long title Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book is about a lot of different things, and is difficult to summarize into one sentence, but if I simply had to do it I'd say: "The book is an examination of the systematic erosion of locally-generated, locally-relevant, practical knowledge by states over the course of time, and provides sobering historical accounts of particular schemes where human beings went too far with their efforts to superimpose a grand order from above."

Not all such efforts were entirely "bad", of course. The metric system, for instance, superseded a staggeringly diverse variety of measurement systems, each of which was relevant and usable only within a tiny locality. Undoubtedly it's far more difficult for humans to relate to an abstract measure of length like a metre than to a concrete measure like an armspan. But at the same time, this also makes trade and communication harder, especially over large distances. The metric system, imposed top-down, is equally abstract in all places and thus far more suitable for enabling trade.

But there were other cases in which such top-down efforts were not so benign in their unintended consequences. 

Friday, September 3, 2010

"Three Butterflies"

What can I say about ‘Aṭṭār? Would that the well of my words were deep enough!

A truly marvelous poem, so simple as to be recited by a child, so weighty in meaning as to drown an intelligent adult, and yet so beautifully winged as to carry the listener aloft into a world of infinite meaning and experience that is at the same time not separate from our own mundane. Beautifully sung by Salar Aghili.




The words in Persian are (if you didn't want to read the beautiful nastaliq font in the video):


Wednesday, September 1, 2010

"Waris Shah"

63 years ago, modern South Asia went through its liberating, but bloody, birth. Lest we forget that over a million people died at the moment the modern nations of India and Pakistan were born: this heartbreakingly beautiful poem by Amrita Pritam (recited by Gulzar).


(link and some verses after the jump)


Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”