CALM UP, v. Last weekend some friends told me that their three-and-a-half-year-old says “calm up” in addition to “calm down.” Usually in the context of raising a video’s volume.
Everything about this is wonderful:
the kid’s close-but-not-quite intuition that “calm down” means “be quieter” (which is interesting because I think parents tend to use “calm down” as both “be quiet” and “sit still,” while internet commenters mostly mean “stop having so many feelings and opinions contrary to my own”)
and if “calm down” = “be quieter,” therefore there must exist a corresponding phrasal verb, “calm up,” that means “be louder”
(I stopped writing here to text my friend to ask this kid what she thinks the word “calm” means, just to be sure, and the answer was indeed “be quiet”)
the demonstration that kids learn language not only by repeating things they’ve heard, but also by forming new phrases that nobody has ever said to them
the native English speaker’s impulse, when forming a new verb, to add a preposition at the end, rather than a prefix like “re-” or “de-” (this newsletter has previously discussed prefixes in English and German)
You don’t have to add a preposition to make a verb. In English, you can rely on sentence structure to do the work for you. In the Talia Hibbert novel I was reading this week, but have not finished because this week has suuucked, one main character said to the other “I’m gonna fake-boyfriend you now.” A verb!
There’s this great Calvin and Hobbes strip that illustrates the same idea:
And as much as I love Bill Watterson, Hobbes is wrong about “mak[ing] language a complete impediment to understanding.” There’s no danger of that, which the comic itself demonstrates. We invent new words all the time—and if you go back far enough, all words were newly invented. “Verbing weirds language” is understandable, as is “calm up.”
This week in small-r romance, I read
A book I abandoned. Alas. At least it was a library book and not a purchase.
Snowspelled (m/f, both cis and het, historical, fantasy) by Stephanie Burgis. A totally charming romance in a Regency-esque fantasy setting. The love story is between a prickly, determined woman (yesss) and the man who’s still desperately in love with her even though their engagement fell apart (yesss!!). The worldbuilding details are delightful: women are politicians, men are magicians, and it is women who wield the power to “compromise” men into marriage. I look forward to the rest of this series.
I Wanna Be Where You Are (m/f, both cis and het?, young adult, contemporary) by Kristina Forest. Okay, technically I didn’t read this. I read the first couple of chapters and then I bought it for a teen reader in my life who has been feeling down. (This week, y’all.) This YA romance stars a young woman who sneaks out to go to a ballet audition while her mom is away, but her annoying(ly cute) neighbor demands to tag along on her road trip or else he’ll tell on her. The teen I gave it to really likes it so far, which cheered both of us up.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I’m about halfway through Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83, a novel about a nightclub in a Congolese city (called “la Ville-Pays,” the City-Country, in the text, and inspired by Lubumbashi). Like the nightclub, the prose is joyful, crowded, sweaty and alive. The text reads a little bit like a prose poem. It’s sometimes composed of long, overflowing lists and it’s shot through with the refrain “Do you have the time?” (l’heure, as in “what time is it?”), which is one way that the sex workers in the Tram 83 nightclub approach potential customers. The novel is also full of trains, since the City-Country is dominated by an unfinished 19th-century train station, a semi-functional memorial to the colonial past. The first scene is at the train station, at “seven or nine o’clock.” The trains “no longer know what time it is.”
So because of that, I’ve been thinking about the Charles Wright line “The subject of all poems is the clock,” which comes from this poem “Portrait of the Artist with Hart Crane” (The Southern Cross, 1981).
It’s Venice, late August, outside after lunch, and Hart
Is stubbing his cigarette butt in a wine glass,
The look on his face pre-moistened and antiseptic,
A little like death or a smooth cloud.
The watery light of his future still clings in the pergola.The subject of all poems is the clock,
I think, those tiny, untouchable hands that fold across our chests
Each night and unfold each morning, finger by finger
Under the new weight of the sun.
One day more is one day less.I’ve been writing this poem for weeks now
With a pencil made of rain, smudging my face
And my friend’s face, making a language where nothing stays.
The sunlight has no such desire.
In the small pools of our words, its business is radiance.
The subject of all poems is the clock, I think, or at least the clock (and getting the fuck free of it) is the subject of Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous” (“Get drunk”), which is good enough for me.
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là ; c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu à votre guise, mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge; à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront, “Il est l'heure de s'enivrer ! Pour ne pas être les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous ; enivrez-vous sans cesse ! De vin, de poésie, de vertu, à votre guise.”
A super quick and casual translation, because I know how to have fun on a Saturday night: translating a prose poem from 1869.
You must always be drunk. It’s everything; it’s the only question. To not feel the awful burden of time that breaks your shoulders and stoops you to the ground, you have to get drunk without stopping.
But on what? Wine, poetry, or virtue, whatever you want, but get drunk!
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the bleak solitude of your room, you wake up, buzz already faded or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock; ask everything that flees, that groans, that rolls, that sings, that talks, ask what time it is and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will reply, “It’s time to get drunk. So you won’t be the martyred slave of time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, poetry, or virtue, whatever you want.”
And lastly, this week in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I really appreciated Malinda Lo’s essay “The Invisible Lesbian in Young Adult Fiction” (published in her newsletter, which is cleverly named Lo and Behold).
I also read a little more of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, the history and overview of the war(s) in the Congo by Jason Stearns, which is an incredible feat of writing. It’s gripping.
But due to the aforementioned shittiness of this week, there were enough bad things happening locally that I couldn’t handle reading about bad things happening elsewhere. Apologies for being so vague, but it’s not my story to tell. I am okay; it’s just hard to be adjacent to a tragedy.
Anyway, Saturday night, Sunday morning, or whenever you’re reading this, it’s definitely time to get drunk. And not on virtue. I don’t know what Baudelaire was talking about there. I’ll stick with an occasional glass of wine—and words, made-up and impermanent as they are.
Sorry for being kind of a downer. Here’s to a less bad week!
