Three Magic Ingredients

One of the dominant motivations in my photography is to show patterns and the interplay of straight and curved lines. This photo has a great mix of all three of those elements. (Click it to see a larger version.)

Stuttgart Train Station (excerpt)

Americans, Russians, Egypt, and "Risk"

No original thinking from me in this post. Instead, I’m highlighting a recent opinion piece  Russian-language maven Michele Berdy wrote in the Moscow Times. Berdy is not just “a Moscow-based translator and interpreter,” as her byline notes, but also a pretty insightful cultural observer. As an inside-outsider in Moscow, she seems able to see life in Moscow and Russia in interesting and enlightening ways. And all the better for word geeks like me, her socio-cultural-political observations are couched in explorations of the nuances of the Russian language and what those nuances suggest about the character and habits of its speakers.

In her 4 February piece, “Risking Life and Limb,” she recounts a curious juxtaposition in the stereotypes of how Americans and Russians treat risk.

“As I’ve watched events unfold in Egypt, my mental storehouse of differences between Russians and Americans got a new load of evidence. American tourists on a luxury cruise ship docked near Luxor said they were comfortable, had plenty of food and were in absolutely no danger, but yet demanded that their government immediately airlift them out — at the taxpayers’ expense incidentally. Russian tourists splashing around the Red Sea not only didn’t demand immediate evacuation by their government, they refused to leave.”

She recognizes these factoids don’t necessarily say anything definitive, but suggests they might just turn some stereotypes on their heads: “self-reliant Americans” vs. Russians who crave “cradle-to-grave” state aid. It could be that Americans and Russians have “vastly different expectations of what our governments can and should do for us.” Or it could be that we have “different notions of acceptable risk.” (I think it may also have to do with the demographics of people who might be on a luxury cruise ship docked near Luxor, but that’s just me.) Berdy then goes on to explore the different types of risk that inhabit Russian consciousness, as reflected through the different linguistic expressions of it.

But that’s not my point here. I just like dwelling for a while on the implications of the juxtaposition she highlights.

Why Trees?

Green and Gold (Black Forest)

Anyone tracking my photography for any length of time will have noticed an abundance — over-abundance, according to some tastes — of trees. I admit it... My name is Yash, and I’m an arboholic.


I’ve often wondered what lies at the root of this fascination. If I think back, which I’m doing now, I realize that trees have had a special hold on my imagination since I was a kid. It might come from Disney’s film of The Swiss Family Robinson, about which I remember only the ostrich race and that fabulous, magical tree house. Also, when I was around 10, we went to Disneyland. The only memory from the trip that doesn’t come from old, discolored photos is, again, the Swiss Family Robinson tree house, which brought the magic achingly alive for me and probably set the hook in my cheek forever. (You can imagine how the Avatar film turned me into a kid again...and again with the ache of longing.)

January Sunrise (Killesberg Park Stuttgart)

A few stabs at describing my reaction to trees:

• When you actually hug a tree (maybe “hold” is a less charged word), it can produce a visceral shock of awareness. This thing is not just a hunk of cellulose, but alive with startling solidity and unexpected vitality. Looking up, you see it sway, while at the same time you feel like it’s connecting you directly to the core of the planet. I recognize you probably have to be predisposed to get this reaction from hugging cellulose — and I feel sad for those who aren’t.

Forest Fogset

• When you climb a tree, or get a peek past a leafy exterior, or just stare up along the trunk of a living tree during the summer for a while, you realize the tree is its own little world, abuzz with bugs, birds, assorted mammals, and its own inexorable sappy flows and chemical processes. You — well, I — imagine myself transported into that world.

• When I see or hear of trees being cut down, I feel a knife in my gut. That’s the best way I can describe it. The reason for the felling doesn’t matter. I know there are good and necessary reasons to cut a tree down, and of course I do like wood furniture. But my first, unanalyzed and uncontrollable response is a pang of regret.

I’m no poet. But Robert Frost was:

The Sound of the Trees

Turning Seasons (Bärensee Stuttgart)

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

From the Ministry of Countering English (France)

There isn't really a ministry set up to counter English in France. But there is the Académie Française, the keepers of French language purity.  It was founded in 1653 by Louis XIII (not the cognac) and Cardinal Richelieu, whom many might remember as the mean guy with the pointy beard in the movie The Three Musketeers. The Académie's 40 members ("Immortals") are charged with "guarding the French language" (more info here in English).

I had a run-in with the Académie in 1990 when my wife and I were living in France, around the time our first daughter was born. It turns out they're also the equivalent of a Supreme Court for Naming Children, although the Académie's recommendations aren't binding, and I might be mixing some other memory into this story. It's probably more relaxed now, but back then the government had at least some say in what you could name your child -- on the principle that you really didn't want to handicap an innocent babe with a name like "Fingernail", so you got to choose from a list of acceptable names. My pioneering American frontier spirit bridled at the implications. Did that mean I couldn't name our baby "Dweezil" (apart from the fact that it had been taken) or "Popcorn"!? Exactly. Well, that and the fact that my wife also got a vote. 

Whether the Immortals themselves or some other regulation was the source of this invasion of my naming rights, it was around the same time that I learned about the Académie, in the context of its futile attempts to keep English loan words out of  French. Official France, and that included broadcasters and advertisers, had to use good old French words, or good new French words to cover for the lack of a good old French word (ordinateur instead of computer). No more could you use the obviously Anglo interloper hamburger (pardon us, all you residents of Hamburg, Germany). The meat and bun combo now had to be called something ridiculously forced, but French. I wish I could remember where I wrote it down.

Anyway, since the end of WWII they've been having a tough time of it, what with English exploding all over the world and that internet thing. It's probably a rear-guard action. But the other day, I came across a curious word in an official French document: courriel. This "portmanteau" combines two decent French words, courrier (which means "mail") and électronique (which means "I guess it's too late to keep out the Greek"). According to this article in 2003, the French government's national register, the Journal officiel, published an edict whereby the English e-mail was banned from official communications, to be replaced by courriel.

This effort is a bit like that Vuitton model Gorbachev thinking he could stop repressing people's freedom of expression (glasnost) and reform communism in a nice way, while still keeping control (perestroika). In the French case, it's a case of creatively adapting in order not to have to adapt to the onslaught of les anglos and their corrupting language.

Despite my thinking the Immortals have met their match in English, and they just don't know it, I've nothing against courriel, since I'm a big fan of portmanteaux. I also like Dweezil.

Fro-Mo

Air bubbles trapped in an icy stream literally freeze motion

Thinking about words and light

I started this blog as a place to write about words and language, and also to write about my photography.

There's the old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words," which sort of suggests an opposition between the two. It's true that an exceptional image can tell a story or evoke countless thoughts and reactions all on its own. 

But I find there can also be a kind of symbiotic connection between words and images that brings them together or adds a new dimension to both. (This can be as simple as the photographer's choice of an image title.)

So in this space you'll find me posting some images, musing on words, and sometimes exploring the intersection between the two.

It makes sense, then, that this first post should be about the word photograph. The word combines two Greek roots meaning "light" and "to write".* So photography is, both literally and figuratively, "writing with light" - a metaphor others have explored.

A Little Light Writing, then, offers a little light reading about words and images.

o - o - o

* One of my favorite websites is the Online Etymology Dictionary, which will pop up again and again here. While it's not the real OED, I'll use that abbreviation informally to refer to it. Accordingly, my "OED" gives the following information: the Greek root photo-, comes from phos "light," while -graph comes from graphein “to write, express by written characters".