CQ2 | Ed Murphy

When I was in grad school, I went to a series of lectures by Umberto Eco; they were wide-ranging talks on literary theory but very entertaining despite what you might imagine, covering everything from the freemasons to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to fables (Little Red Riding Hood) and the meaning of truth.  The lectures were eventually published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods.

Eco also talked a bit about his own experiences as an author.  He described how paranoid readers of his fictional books would write to him and complain that so-and-so couldn’t have moved through the moonlit night in Paris because on the date in question there was only a sliver moon.  Notwithstanding the ‘fact’ that the ‘fact’ was ‘fiction.’

He also told a beautiful story — one I still remember, although I have trouble remembering my own mobile phone number — about visiting the planetarium at Santiago de Compostela (maybe it was in Coruna, but this is my memory).  The director as a gift to him had set the night sky to the way the stars appeared at his home on the night of his birth.

At one point in the lectures, he said that we could all accept that it was true that there were no armadillos in the lecture hall — the jewel box of Sanders Theater — but that that didn’t mean they couldn’t exist in a fictional lecture hall.  At that point he held up a fake armadillo, which doesn’t appear in the book.  So beware!

Something about my day today made me remember this.

Of contested provenance, the term sart refers to oasis-dwellers of Chinese and former Soviet Central Asia.  It’s the antonym of ‘nomad.’  At one time it might have had a connotation of “Persian-speaker” but that’s not the current sense of it.  Possibly also pejorative.  V.V. Barthold, the Gibbon of Turkestan, I think had much to say on this matter.  (Gibbon is the Barthold of Rome.)  Wikipedia notes that “the Muslim, Mongol-speaking Dongxiang people of Northwestern China call themselves Sarta or Santa. It is not clear if there is any connection between this term and the Sarts of Central Asia.”

Recently, a colleague of mine referred to “Harvey balls” when I knew he mean “Booz balls,” those quarter/half/three-quarter filled circles that graphically represent low to high scales.  If you need to show, say in a table, a set of values, you can use these Harvey/Booz balls instead of numbers; they make it easy to scan the table.  Consumer Reports uses them, for example.

They’re a consulting staple, and I call them Booz balls because, I have always assumed, they were first used at Booz, Allen, Hamilton.

But why Harvey?

Wikipedia has the answer: Harvey Poppel, a Booz consultant, invented them, so you either honor the man (Harvey balls) or his employer (Booz balls.)

There’s even a very useful Harvey balls font, from a former Booz consultant of course, which gives you a lot of flexibility to use them in, say, Excel.  (For presentations, I think you’re still better off using a graphic.)  You have to be aware of how to use them, though, because in the example above the balls represent one to nine; five and above are variations on one to four, not actually higher values.

Your browser may not represent these properly, but there are also Unicode values for Booz/Harvey balls:

○ ◔ ◑ ◕ ●

Now — and this is really a large piece of awesomeness — you should be careful not to confuse Harvey (Poppel’s) balls with Harvey Ball, the inventor of the smiley face.

So I have a theory, “the standard history” theory, which is that everything was invented, more or less, between 1880 and 1910.  By ‘everything’ I mean Italy, college fraternities, marriage ceremonies, dog breeds, sports, the city of Redlands, and so on.  Everything.  I’m serious.  More specifically, the usual way that we talk about the history of these things follows a standard pattern:

1. Pre-history; fuzzy antiquity, including Egyptians, Native Americans, Picts, that sort of thing, in vague generalities.
2. Invention: coming into focus for the first time between 1880 and 1910.
3. All the rest: the familiar, reassuringly detailed, story from invention to the present.

This is not to say that there weren’t, for instance, dogs before 1880.  But the idea of dog breeds, in our sense of pure blood lines and AKC registration, dates from this period, so that the story of the cocker spaniel or the golden retriever follows my standard history pretty closely — and I chose those examples before checking to see if they fit the theory.  But if you still don’t believe me, go look at the AKC list of breeds and test it against some other examples.  The history of most breeds only comes into focus between 1880 and 1910; before then, they were just dogs, chasing rabbits or whatever.

Sports, too, follow this pattern, precisely.  For example, soccer, rugby, American football and others (Australian rules football, Gaelic football) are all modern variations of games which were played since time immemorial at English high schools (”public schools.”)  These local English games collectively are pre-history; the modern sports that we watch and play today all came about between 1880 and 1910.  After their invention, they follow the familiar story (Knute Rockne, AFL/NFL, Roger Staubach…)

You wouldn’t think, at first glance, that soccer and (American) football have much in common, but their differences are really only a century or so old.  The similarities are much clearer when you put them on a continuum with their relatives, from least to most violent:

• soccer (association football)
• Gaelic football
• Australian rules football
• rugby (union and league)
• American football

Gaelic football, at least to the naive viewer, looks like nothing so much as a bunch of soccer goalies running around.  The ball is the same, there’s very little contact, the goals are similar, and so forth.  Gaelic football was codified by Michael Cusack and others in 1884 while the modern game of soccer is only a few years older (1848 – 1863, thus predating the standard history by a bit; pray forgive me dear reader.)

Australian rules football is similar enough to Gaelic football that the two national associations held interleague tournaments for many years.  The Irish are still angry about the 2006 “international rules” Gaelic/Australian rules match at Croke Park in Dublin and it doesn’t look like the series will continue, although top  Irish players (the Irish GAA is all-amateur) are being poached by the Aussies.

The Australian game is much more physical and looks — to me, at least — more like rugby without the scrums; the ball is a rugby ball, not a soccer ball.  Rugby itself, named after an English high school, is then transitive between the Australian game and the American game, which has seen probably the most innovation over time, including the forward pass and the reshaped ball to aid passing, the idea of downs and yardage, and the subsequently required body armor.  (Interestingly, there was a hybrid Australian-American game that developed during WWII but it never took off.)

You can see remnants in the rules and quirks of each game; American football came to emphasize touchdowns at the expense of the kicking game, which is now vestigal; punters today are wretched specialists, not heroes of the game.  But it used to be that you scored a touchdown in order to get a chance at a kick to score a point; the touchdown itself, like a mark in Australian rules, didn’t itself count for anything.  Over time, the balance shifted away from the kicked score to the touchdown, but we still have the odd ‘extra point’ in American football.  When I played soccer as a kid, I remember a rule, which I don’t think is enforced any more, that the goalie could only take four steps with the ball in his hands before having to bounce it, a rule that is central to Gaelic football.

Other sports besides the ‘football complex’ follow the standard history as well; tennis (handball/squash/real tennis/etc.) and baseball, for example.  Baseball has a much-discussed pre-history, including rounders and other games, a famous invented history (the myth of Abner Doubleday), and the subsequent modern history.  Undoubtedly, other sports, and much else besides, follows the same story, the standard history.

I’ve said this many times before, but I believe it bears repeating: there seems to be a lack of childrens’ books written in Spanish. More narrowly, there seem to be few available Spanish books for toddlers beginning to read which were written in Spain. Commonly available books in the US for toddlers are usually translations from the English. The quality varies widely — some are unbearably bad. But all books, even short little fables designed for bedtime reading, encode a lot of social information in them that is not necessarily easy to translate. Which is good; that’s why you want to expose kids to other worlds, other languages, other cultures. But it means that the language that the book was originally written in, the cultural context to be grand about it, matters.So, for example, in the Spanish story El Verano (The Summertime), the entire contents of the text are as follows:

Cuando el Sol es feliz / y el campo es de muchos colores / y los frutos maduran / y las tiendas cierran / cuando la gente viaja / y el trigo es de color oro / y el sol es más rojo / y los niños van a la playa / y los barcos van al mar / cuando la sed es mucha / y el calor es más / Es Verano!

Which, roughly translated, is:

When the Sun is bright / and the fields are of many colors / and the fruit is ripe / and the stores close / when people travel / and the wheat is golden / and the sun is redder / and the children play at the beach / and the boats go down to the sea / when the thirst is great / and the heat is greater / It’s Summertime!

Almost every single time I read this story to my son, and I used to read it to him a lot, he asked me, “Why do the stores close?” This makes sense in Spain (well, sort of), but not in California. That’s what I’m looking for with books written in Spanish; I want that dislocation.

Even for a book like The Big Red Barn (which I’ve criticized in the past for being part of the nearly-dominant pastoral idyll idiom in childrens’ books) the translation at least yields the nugget that roosters in Spain say “kikiriki” instead of “cockle-doodle-doo.” Both of these ‘facts’ are nearly useless to a kid growing up in suburbia, true, but the point is that dislocation; even the roosters are different.

So, starting when my son was little, I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking around for good toddlers’ books in Spanish. I’m sure that I haven’t done a perfect job of it, but I have tried to find good Spanish books and it’s been a challenge. Now that my daughter is starting to read these books, my task is easier; I just walked over to my son’s room and pulled out all the Spanish books that I know worked for him. Even these, though, are mostly translations (primarily from the English, but also from Japanese, Catalan, and Gallego.)

So, here they are, in case anyone cares. They’re not listed in any particular order.

• El Auto Pequeño (The Little Auto)
  by Lois Lensky, translated by Sandra Streepey

originally published in 1934; we have the 1968 edition inscribed “22 mayo 1970″ in, I believe, my mother’s hand; very old fashioned but, obviously, a sentimental favorite

• Buenas noches, Sol; hola, Luna (Good Night, Sun, Hello Moon)
  by Karen Viola, illustrated by Chi Yung
  translated by Silvia Márquez

a nice sweet bedtime story about a rabbit; will not change the world, but fine

• El Gran Granero Rojo (The Big Red Barn)
  by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Felicia Bond
  translated by Aida E. Marcuse

I really like this translation, a lot; I think it’s better than the original

• Buenas Noches, Luna
  by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
  translated by Teresa Mlawer

unlike the Big Red Barn translation, this one is awful; but kids love the story; a real chestnut

• Mi Libro de Cuentos Preferido (I Love My Little Storybook)
  by Anita Jeram
  translated by Antoni Cósimo

beautifully illustrated book, decent translation but the stories that it refers to are the northern European Aesop’s Fables kind

• Abuelos (Avós)
  by Chema Heras, illustrated by Rosa Osuna
  translated by the author from the original Gallego (!)

wonderful book; easily the best of this group; with lovely illustrations; someone ought to translate it into English; longish for a bedtime story

• Día de lluvia
  Ana María Machado, illustrated by Francesc Rovira
  translated (from Catalan?) by “Atalaire”

short imaginative story about children playing at home on a rainy day; cursive letters; part of a larger series

• Todos Hacemos Caca (Minna Unchi)
  Taro Gomi
  translated by Leopoldo Iribarren

translated from the original Japanese? Or from the English translation?

• La Castañera
  Luz Orihuela, illustrated by Maria Ruis

• La Primavera
  by Josep Ma. Parramón
  illustrated by Asun Balzola

• El Verano
  by Josep Ma. Parramón
  illustrated by Carme Solé Vendrell

• El Otoño
  by Josep Ma. Parramón
  illustrated by Ulises Wensell

• El Invierno
  by Josep Ma. Parramón
  illustrated by Carme Solé Vendrell

These last four are a series of the four seasons by Josep Parramón with a different illustrator for each book; each is lovely; they’re brief little vignettes of the seasons. And my kids now know that wine is made from grapes in the autumn and that ‘golondrinas’ return in the springtime.