Apache | Excerpts from an ethnographer's diary

Digital montage © Roy R. Behrens

Keith H. Basso, "Strong Songs: Excerpts from an Ethnographer's Journal" in Daniel Halpern, ed., Antaeus. No. 61, Autumn 1988, pp. 26-37. These are fragments from a diary kept by a Yale anthropologist while living on the Apache reservation in Arizona during the summer of 1960—

July 11. I spent most of the afternoon practicing my meager Apache vocabulary. It has grown a bit during the last two weeks but my confidence to use it has not. This morning, while Dudley and Ernest [Apache friends] were here, a grasshopper crawled across the floor. I pointed to it and spoke the word for "insect." Dudley burst into laughter. What I had said, he informed me, was "vagina."  He went on to point out that the difference between grasshoppers and vaginas was quite considerable, an astute observation which prompted a broadly grinning Ernest to ask me if I were a virgin.

July 16.…I will attend the ceremony [an Apache healing ritual] with Dudley Patterson and Ernest Murphy. Although I am eager to see what happens, I know [as a White outsider] I will feel conspicuous and self-conscious. When I asked Dudley how I should conduct myself, a quizzical expression crossed his face. "Show respect," he said. Then he grinned. "And don't talk to nobody about grasshoppers."

July 17. Today, I produced my first comprehensible sentence in Western Apache. Sitting outside with Alvin Quay [an Apache boy], I pointed to my horse and said, "That horse eats grass." Alvin, who turned six last week, glanced at the animal, fixed me with a disbelieving stare, and responded in his own language, "Horses always eat grass."  Although my observation failed to impress Alvin, I thought the fact of its delivery—and of his responding to it in Apache—was nothing short of astonishing. Perhaps there is hope for me after all.

Is it true: Oregon, Arizona, and Canada Named

vaudeville

Flora Spiegelberg, "Reminiscenses of a Jewish Bride of the Santa Fe Trail" in Sharon Niederman, ed., A Quilt of Words: Women's Diaries, Letters and Original Accounts of Life in the Southwest, 1860-1960. Boulder CO: Johnson Books, 1988, pp. 27-28—

During the long expeditions of the Conquistadors, Coronado went from Mexico to Colorado in search of gold and silver treasures. He was greatly surprised to find among the peaceably inclined Indians a well-regulated community life in their pueblos or villages. While the Conquistador was transversing what is now Oregon and Arizona, he met several tribes of Indians with very large ears, so he called them "orejones," or "Big Ears." Another tribe that had very long noses, he called "Nazizones," or "Big Noses." We Americans have translated these Spanish names to "Arizona" and "Oregon." 

Another similar incident: the first explorers of what is the province of Canada today, were Spaniards, as usual, in search of gold and silver, and not finding it. As they marched away, they said, "Aqui Nada," meaning, "There is nothing." Later on, when the French explorers came and asked the Indians the name of their country, they replied what they had heard the departing Spanish say, "Aqui Nada," and thus the French changed it to, "Canada."

George Herriman | Are Cubists From Cuba?

George Herriman (1914)

Above A syndicated cartoon panel (repositioned vertically to read while scrolling) by the American master cartoonist, George Herriman, well-known because of Krazy Kat. This was one of his responses to the controversy surrounding the infamous Armory Show, the first US exhibition of Modern styles of art, Cubism among them.

Poster | Why Angels Take Themselves Lightly

Poster © Roy R. Behrens. Purchase online.

Cornelius Weygandt, On the Edge of the Evening: The Autobiography of a Teacher and Writer Who Holds to the Old Ways. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946—
 
We had nearly all of us been brought up on the King James version of the Bible, Mother Goose, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare. We were much easier to teach than the classes of today, classes in which there is no common denominator of culture [p. 56].

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…Captain Makins' daughter had made the voyage to the Orient with her father on one of these trips. In her old age she was something of a Mrs. Malaprop, speaking of the cat licking her plumage and of the cedars of Zebulun. China was always Chiney to her and Portugal Portingale [p. 63].

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You are waiting for Dr. Phillips to haul you home by his car from the dentist's office at Fifteenth and Locust Streets. You have lost five teeth. An old man comes up to beg of you. He sees your despoiled gums. The hand that pockets your nickel withdraws from the pocket's depths a handful of teeth. "These are mine a dentist took out," he says, "at a dollar apiece. See how sound they all are. I wonder will I ever be able to sell them again for what they cost to have them pulled?" [pp. 76-77]

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[On first meeting him,] I got that impression of [Irish novelist] George Moore that I carry with me still. He was built like one of those little figures that you can not turn over, that are so heavy in their posteriors that no matter which way you put them down they come to a sitting posture. He had real eighteenth-century sloping shoulders and a seedy tobacco-stained lugubrious moustache not so walrus-like as [Irish linguist] Douglas Hyde's but incipiently walrus-like [p. 120].

ANOTHER VOICE | Exhibition Opens Today

Political Illustration Exhibit Opens at MCAD

Above Good news, believe it or not, on a day of infamy. Opening today at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design is a powerful exhibition of satirical political art. Curated by legendary art director Patrick JB Flynn of the Madison-based THE FLYNSTITUTE, the exhibition is ANOTHER VOICE: Political Illustration of the Late 20th Century. Don't miss the opening this evening, with a curator's talk and a panel exchange in early February. Poster illustration above is by Henrik Drescher © 1985 from The Progressive. For more information see Another Voice.

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Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1936, p. 24—

We had a maid named Betsy, a fat elderly woman who might have been made amusing by [Charles] Dickens; for it was she who, when the groceries came home one day, horrified the entire family by clapping a vinegar bottle to her lips, drinking with zest, and, as she set it down, exclaiming: "I do LOVE winnidar!"

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David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956, p. 40—

[At a certain dinner during World War I] Vanessa [Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf] was put beside Mr. [H.H.] Asquith, then Prime Minister and a man with many burdens, including the conduct of the war. Vanessa rarely read a newspaper in those days, though she was always interested in picture papers…which might suggest subjects for picture. She had missed Mr. Asquith's name, but his face was almost intolerably familiar to her…Yet she could not place him. Giving him the smile of an innocent but daring child, she risked the remark:

"Are you interested in politics?"

Vanessa's best remarks were like that, experimental and haphazard shots in the dark. When she coined an epigram it was often because she had forgotten a cliché.

"In that house you meet a dark horse in every cupboard," she once exclaimed with some indignation. And of Maynard [Keynes]: "It runs off his back like duck's water." But of all her sayings the most withering was: "Ah, that will be canker to his worm."

Typographic Poster | Hastings Walsh

Poster © Hastings Walsh (2016)

Above Typographic poster (©2016) by Hastings Walsh, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh. New York: Dover Publications, 2004—

He [Ernest] was, however, very late in being able to sound a hard “c” or “k,” and, instead of saying “Come,” he said “Tum, tum, tum.”

“Ernest,” said Theobald, from the arm-chair in front of the fire, where he was sitting with his hands folded before him, “don’t you think it would be very nice if you were to say ‘come’ like other people, instead of ‘tum’?”

“I do say tum,” replied Ernest, meaning that he had said “come.”

Blind Leading the Blonde

Calendar page (2013) ©Rob Bauer

Above Layout for a calendar page (its theme determined by a quote) by Rob Bauer, graphic design student in the Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Dr. Peter H. Gott, "Health Q&A" in The Fresno Bee (Fresno CA), 4 May 2000, p. E-6—

After my father's bypass surgery, he felt so dreadful that he insisted his doctor stop most of his medication. Thereafter, he felt fine. While such a drastic action is not everyone's cup of tea, you would have to know my father to appreciate how relentlessly stubborn he was. He claimed to have "accurately misunderstood" his doctors, didn't want them to put [all] his "aches in one basket," was fearful of "dying for nothing," and wished as an adult to be "the blind leading the blonde."

Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), p. 344—

[The poet W.H. Auden] says that in the train club car on his way to lecture at Yale, some students sent him a note: "We can't stand it a minute longer: are you Carl Sandburg?" He wrote back: "You have spoiled mother's day."

Digital Montage Parody | Kelly Cunningham

Self-Portrait Parody (2013), © Kelly Cunningham

Above Digital montage by graphic design student Kelly Cunningham (University of Northern Iowa, 2013), a self-portrait parody of A Nymph in the Forest by Charles-Amable Lenoir, oil on canvas, n.d. The original painting is shown below. 

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Bunny Johnson, quoted in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground Book: A Circle of Friends. Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992, p. 274—

We've some good friends who put words together more entertainingly than most of us. For instance, at Christmas they put "ointments" on the tree. Once when she went to visit the Mennonites up in Jefferson County, she stopped to ask the policeman where the "morphodites" lived.

When his ulcer was acting up, he reported that the doctor had told him "not to eat any more plumage." That gives new insight into the meaning of "roughage," doesn't it?

World-class achievements go into the "Gideon's Book of Records." And once after a "hockey expedition game," they took us out to eat "garnished hen."

They've had such an influence on their friends that sometimes we can't remember whether the color, for instance, is really "burgamy" or not. 

Charles-Amable Lenoir, Nymph in Forest (n.d.)

Finnegans Wake | James Joyce

Roy R. Behrens © Combat Fatigue. Digital montage (2004).

When I initially made this digital montage—in a form that alludes to a book spread—it had nothing to do with the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce (1882-1941), at least not directly. In fact, the obscured image on the right is reworked from a photograph (in the Library of Congress) of an equally admired writer and Joyce's contemporary, the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). But it had everything to do with writing and designing. Years earlier, when I was in an architecture class in graduate school (the only one I've taken), I began to think about Venn diagrams in relation to figure-ground patterns, and then, by extension, to architectural building plans. In part I was led to this by the writings of Christopher Alexander. It seemed to me then that one can make purposeful "category confusions" (puns, rhymes, parodies, allusions and so on) in architectural building plans as easily as one can with words. I was "reading" Finnegans Wake at the time, so to some extent this came to me because of their concurrence.

Not to pretend to explain Joyce's comic novel, its two central characters are HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) and ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle). Beyond that, you can find a detailed and reasonably good summary at the Wikipedia article on the book. For the moment, I would simply like to share a few examples of the astonishing word play that Joyce employs throughout the book.

He frequently offers sentences that say one thing and yet, by the way they are written, they echo (or parody) other famous passages, especially religious texts. Listen to these two examples:

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singitime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!"

"Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allaluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger."

The complexity of the patterns he makes is beyond belief. Here's a particularly interesting part in which he poses a question, then follows with an answer:

"8. And how war yore maggies?

Answer: They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, as born for lorn in lore of love to live and wive by wile and rile by rule of ruse 'reathed rose and hose hol'd home, yeth cometh elope year, coach and four, Sweet Peck-at-my-Heart picks one man more."

Finally, I don't know how many people realize that, throughout this astonishing book, Joyce has embedded word sequences—words that begin with h, c and e—to allude of course to HCE (the protagonist). There are tons of them, but here a few:

"Howth Castle and Environs. he calmly extensolies. Hic cubat edilus. How Copenhagen ended. happinest childher everwere. Hush! Caution! Echoland! How charmingly exquisite! human, erring and condonable. heptagon crystal emprisoms. Heave, coves, emptybloddy! Hengler's Circus Entertainment. Heinz cans everywhere."

Sort-Crossing at Summerhill

Greta Sergeant on A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill school in the UK, as quoted in Jonathan Croall, Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel (NY: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 229—

Once he [Neill] visited a school in Stockholm, and was taken in to a geography lesson. He went up to the map on the wall, pointed to Italy, and said: "This is London." The pupils stared at him in surprise. At Summerhill when he did things like that, they laughed and told him he was a silly fool.

Du Strubbel

From Carl (Charles) Sandburg [his autobiography], Always the Young Strangers (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1953), pp. 92-93, recalling his Swedish immigrant parents—

Early the mother pronounced it "Sholly," which later become "Sharlie" and still later the correct "Charlie," while the Old Man stuck to "Sholly, do dat." She learned to pronounce "is" as "iz" and "has" as "haz" while with him it stayed "iss" and "hass." He said "de" for "the," "wenlup" for "envelope," "Hotty do" for "How do you do?," "yelly clay" for "yellow clay," "rellroad" for "railroad," "Gilsburg" for "Galesburg," "Sveden" for "Sweden," "helty" for "healthy." …Anyone who couldn't get what he was saying was either dumb or not listening. He invented a phrase of his own for scolding Mart and me. When he said, "Du strubbel," we knew he meant "You stupid" and he was probably correct. He would impress us about a scheme he believed impossible to work out, "You could not do dat if you wass de Czar of all de Russias."

Chart in Heaven

John Burnett, ed., Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (Middlesex UK: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 41—

[In Victorian England] Many children misunderstood the words of prayers and hymns, and received either no explanation or explanations which further confused. "Our Father Chart in Heaven," intoned Winifred Relph at her infants' school, where much of the teaching was done by charts thrown over the blackboard.

Forgive Us Our Christmasses

From the Notebooks of British novelist Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon)—

The little Strangs say the "good words," as they call them, before going to bed, aloud and at their father's knee, or rather in the pit of his stomach. One of them was lately heard to say "Forgive us our Christmasses, as we forgive those who Christmas against us."

Bête Noir

As reported by Lady Maud Warrender (wife of Sir George John Scott Warrender of Lochend, 7th Baronet) in My First Sixty Years—

The beauty of Lord Curson's first wife had impressed the Indians. She was the daughter of Mr. Joseph Leiter of Chicago. Her mother's twistings of words are worthy of immortality: "What did I like best in Rome? Why, the Apollo with the beveled ear, the Dying Alligator and Romeo and Juliet being suckled by the wolf." She used to say that it was essential to have a ventre-à-terre in Paris; also that she had given her decorators bête noir to do what they liked; and she thus described her first meeting with her future husband at a costume ball—"He was dressed in the garbage of a monk and I said to Momma, 'Alma Mater, Ecce Homo!'"

Living With Morphodites

Bunny Johnson, as quoted in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground Book: A Circle of Friends (Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992), p. 274—

We've some good friends who put words together more entertainingly than most of us. For instance, at Christmas they put "ointments" on the tree. Once when she went to visit the Mennonites up in Jefferson County, she stopped to ask the policeman where the "morphodites" lived.

When his ulcer was acting up, he reported that the doctor had told him "not to eat any more plumage." That give new insight into the meaning of "roughage," doesn't it?

World-class achievements go into the "Gideon's Book of Records." And once after a "hockey expedition game," they took us out for "garnished hen."

They've had such an influence on their friends that sometimes we can't remember whether the color, for instance, is really "burgamy" or not.