Language at Play

Language at Play: Love, Lust and Savagery

from the Stephen Daiter Gallery

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Long before this edition of MAKE had its theme, an image of pure play had fixed itself in my mind. It’s a picture by the Chicago photographer Art Shay that I first saw when I was a child. Though I can’t remember where or when I saw it first, I never forgot it and rediscovered it years later in a collection of Shay’s Chicago photographs. The scene is an open area between two or three tenements, traditional Chicago back porches girding this dingy lot. A couple overflowing garbage drums spill debris beneath barred windows. Piled in the middle of this empty space are seven or eight ratty mattress, and a group of ten-year-olds are taking turns leaping from one of the back porches onto the mattress pile. One boy is in mid-flight, wholly horizontal, arms outstretched, Converse kicked back. A trio watch from the porch, in different stages of take-off preparation. In the foreground, a boy who has just landed bounds at the camera. He’s out-of-focus and so his triumphant laugh appears kinetic, limbs and lips twitch with an electric joy.

The image depicts sheer play—an unadulterated ecstasy that comes from simply leaping—but it also demonstrates a crucial aspect of being at play. Imagine isolating the three groups in this scene. First, picture the kid in the act itself, the boy in mid-flight. If the image were only of him, our reading would change significantly. We’d judge the distance to the mattress, consider metaphors about being suspended between helpless and hopeful. We’d consider time—the second before and after—and wonder what motivated the jump and how softly he’d land. Or, what if we saw only the boy poised on the edge of the porch banister, the one who peers uncertainly from under his arms at the photographer, the one so conscious of our judgment and expectation? Through that boy’s consideration of us viewers, we consequently project hesitancy onto him. He’s seems untrusting of his own ability, afraid to leap, looking for assurance or a way out. We might—despite ourselves—consider a metaphor for the fears of a young, poor black male on the precipice of manhood in treacherous Chicago. Consider even if we ourselves were on the banister, toes curled over the 2-by-4, peering at the pile, without any friends or fellow leapers. We likely wouldn’t feel joy, but apprehension, terror for a few floating moments, then relief, accomplishment, confidence that we’d keep proudly inside. We’d be focusing on the act and our own participation in it. Now, lastly, consider the kid who has completed the jump, the one in the foreground. There’s no doubting his delight. And what delirium does this taste of neat joy provoke? The boy is running toward the camera, toward Art Shay—in his happiness he wants the photographer (and the viewer, too) to participate. The picture demonstrates the point: play is not self-absorbed, inherent to the act is the urge to include. Being at play is a state only attained in commune with others.

So what, then, does it mean for the writer to be “at play?” An author can tell her readers a joke, but there is little chance she will hear a comeback. Nabokov once explained to Playboy how he thought bliss was born in the reader-writer relationship. He called the play of literature, “the bliss, the felicity of phrase [that is] shared by writer and reader: by the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.” Nabokov, and most writers in our contemporary conversation, never really hand over the dice and ask the reader to roll. In this schema, the reader is simply grateful to be able to linger behind the table and watch the author wager. And since those readers, ninety-nine times out of 100, are reading in some other time or space, the Nabokovian author has to imagine even their gratitude. For the most part, the writer simply satisfies himself and hopes he’s satisfied a reader, too. Those poets and authors in need of real play with other writers can imagine themselves in conversation, creating pastiches and picking arguments with poets from the past and the future, trading barbs on the vicissitudes of the heart. But what of actual play—of actually sharing the bliss of words with readers both immediate and definite?

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fieri sentio excrucior.

Which translates to:

I hate and love. You wonder, perhaps, why do I do this?
I have no idea. I just feel it. I am crucified.

Who at the same time delivers playful ribbing to a friend such as this:

“To [your] cleanliness add an even cleaner
asshole, than any saltcellar more polished,
and you shit less than ten times in a year, and
what comes out is as hard as beans or pebbles—
if you rubbed it in your hands it wouldn’t
leave the least mess, even on one finger.”

When reading Catullus, his overwhelming skill is immediately evident: aside from headache-inducing choriambic hendacasyllabic meter, the poems are riddled with alliteration, assonance, and tropes like chiasmus and anitmetabole. But what becomes apparent when reading all of Catullus’s work at once, is Catullus’s zeal for engaging his compatriots directly. Almost all of his 116 poems employ the vocative case. These poems are epistolary and epigrammatic, both calling directly on his friends, enemies, rivals, lovers, whores, politicians, and fellow poets— and calling them names, too.

His subjects are his everyday interactions with those same contemporaries. Sometimes these people are famous—Caesar spent winters in his parent’s villa, Cicero sent him a book of verse—sometimes they are only known to history as friends of Catullus. Whatever their fame, Catullus humanizes all of them, often directing his brilliant talents to mundane communiques: asking time to pay off a debt, shooing an old flame to a whorehouse, demanding the return of his notebooks from some strumpet. He composes a poem to Thallus, for example, after his associate stole a coat and some napkins from a dinner party. In three lines he calls Thallus a “queen, softer than a fuzzy bunny, than goose fat, than the bottom of an earlobe, or even the languid penis of an old man, covered in cobwebs.” To emphasize the metaphor, Catullus employs words filled with soft, liquid “l”s: cuniculi, capillo, medullula, imula, oricilla. There’s real joy—the writer’s joy Orwell called “aesthetic enthusiasm”— in Catullus’s compositions. It’s a joy that really only comes from being engaged in an intense, hilarious language game with others. If the poems’ meter and syntax weren’t so precisely rendered, one could imagine Catullus singing these songs with friends or shouting them at sometime enemies.

(Woe betide those who truly pissed Catullus off—Carmina 16 holds the distinction of being perhaps most censored poem in history. In response to two critics who called his versus “too soft”—Catullus begins, “I will sodomize and face-fuck the both of you…”)

Modern statue of Catullus at the site of his family's home.

Among its many gifts, Catullus’s work brings with it the joy of repartee. Even his most vicious and personal poems are often pointed, intensely clever, built around tropes and puns. They’re both so precisely and honestly written that we feel in only 116 poems that we know not only the people Catullus flatters and insults, but their friends, relatives, and their society in full. Can you not imagine conducting a conversation like this about a fraying friendship?

“Life is really a bitch for your Catullus
Cornificius, and (my god!) so boring,
and it keeps getting worse now, daily, hourly—
yet have you—it would take the slightest, simplest
effort—offered him any consolation?
I’m pissed off with you. That much for my love, then?”

It’s through the record of Catullus’s playful activity that we come to understand what it was like to live in the center of Roman empire as it was nearing its height: expanding into England and about to crown its first emperor. Rome was just about to burst; Catullus speaks of gifts he received from Spain, about trips across Italy to visit friends, about witnessing his acquaintances argue in court, about the most popular girls in the brothels, about the book stalls in the Forum and the orations in the Senate. The city is bustling with life, and by simply toying with his fellow citizens in this ripe empire, Catullus secures that scene for all of us, for the next twenty centuries, in all its native raucousness.

Bill Savage, in his terrific introduction to a 2009 edition of Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons in Chicago offers an answer by describing an opportunistic young man’s move into Chicago:

“It was a great time to be an enterprising young man. In the era before radio, newspapers were everyone’s source of information. Besides the scores of foreign-language and local papers, more than half a dozen English-language papers competed for the attention, and the money, of Chicagoans…. Newspapers were a deadly serious business, cutthroat in more than a metaphorical sense…. One historian estimates that twenty-seven people died between 1913 and 1917 as men who would go on to become legendary Chicago gangsters, like Dean O’Banion, beat, stabbed, and shot the distributors or readers of competing newspapers. As depicted in Hecht’s classic play The Front Page (co-written with his friend and colleague Charles MacArthur), reporters were hard-bitten, cynical, prone to drink and gambling and the bitterness of thwarted ambition. Reporters saw the entire city, from the Gold Coast penthouse to slum tenement, and knew what was really going on behind the facades of respectable homes and in speakeasies…. The reporter’s job was to know and depict the city, to go everywhere and talk to everyone.” [emphasis mine]

Herman Rosse's portrait of Ben Hecht from 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago.

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What survives in the columns—each written and published in a single day(!) – are the records of those conversations, preserved in perfect Chicagoese. Consider the cop assigned to death row, who speaks in “Sociable Gamblers” about why he often wins at cards against men awaiting execution:

“I don’t think their being doomed for to hang can be held entirely responsible for their losing. You see, I’ve made quite a study of the game o’ rummy, not to mention pinochle and other such games of chance, and if I do say so myself, I doubt there’s the man in Chicago, doomed or otherwise, who would find me an easy mark. Still. as I say, in the case of these gentlemen who you refer to—to wit, the doomed men as I have acted as death watch for—it do interfere with their game. It do.”

You can find that same voice in the half-intelligent, half-humane cop in the Information Age as well as the Jazz Age. Just as you hear Catullus say, “Life is really a bitch,” and wonder if that weren’t that same conversation from the next booth over at the Ramova Grill this morning.

Cary Grant's girl, Hildy

Shortly after the column ran, Hecht lost his newspaper work for publishing a book designed to flout obscenity laws—like Catullus, he favored a language freely utile. He went on to become a praised playwright and the most lauded screenwriter in history, winning two Academy Awards, and being nominated for five others. His most famous play, The Front Page, pictured the raucous and morally malleable life of two enterprising newspapermen. The Front Page is filled with Catullian vulgarity: the word “goddamn” appears on almost every other page, often as an appellation, as in “you goddamn bum,” or “you goddamn Swede.” It was adapted several times for the screen, including most notably as His Girl Friday, in which the role of Hildy Johnson is played by Rosalind Russell. With Russell as Cary Grant’s star reporter, the film becomes a screwball comedy stuffed with Catullian sexuality: honest, suggestive, and clever. Drawing on Hecht’s skill as a dialogist, the film and the play are masterpieces of repartee. Grant, Russell, and the other reporters are licentious, slangy, manipulative and downright cruel.

The Front Page and His Girl Friday idealized the Chicago newspaper scene for the world, and Chicago newspapers—at least through the early 1990s—represented Chicago’s empire as Catullus represented (through his playful record) the Roman empire. If the Roman music was a lewd, passionate song, Chicago’s was trio of keyboards, ringing telephones, and a no-bullshit back-and-forth. This is why the accelerating decline of newspapers is more of a crisis for Chicago than any other great American city. Even if all the papers die, New York will have The New Yorker, and its publishing houses, and Broadway. L.A. can rest assured that neither Hollywood nor TMZ will fade away. But how will a newspaperless Chicago express itself? Though readership has been in decline since the 1950s, Chicago still boasted five daily newspapers with circulations of 60, 000 or more even as late as the mid-1990s, and the Reader was still a 200-page black-and-white weekly behemoth in four sections. As late as 2006, Michael Miner could sincerely extol the virtues of newspapers in the Reader:

“If you live in Chicago and don’t read the papers you’re missing out on one of the joys of life. Most cities have one daily paper, and it probably thinks of itself as a utility like the water works, bland and inoffensive. In Chicago there are two metropolitan dailies (and others in the suburbs). Reporters here compete by oneupping each other. They can’t afford to be second, and they can’t afford to be dull.”

Laments for the decline of newspapers, and arguments over its cause, are a dime a dozen (which is still more than anyone would pay for the Red Eye), but that’s beside the point. As with a pothole, what’s of concern is filling the void, not what dug it. What sustains Chicago’s playful conversation? “The Internet” seems a dubious answer. If the recipe for play is equal parts vulgarity and sophistication, even the most intriguing comment boards flavor far too heavily with the former. (I’ve left three comments on You Tube in my life, for instance. Two were answered simply with, “Fuck you.”)

Dan Savage's playground

Consider Chicago native Dan Savage, (brother of the aforementioned Bill) whose syndicated sex-advice column was already known for being as sexually frank as it was witty. Most of us who awaited Savage’s syndicated column in the early Thursday edition Reader now search it out at the avclub.com or another website. Most of his readers don’t know that Savage holds an editorial position at Seattle’s alternative weekly, The Stranger. Dan Savage may not be Catullus, but he’s not afraid to directly describe sexual acts, nor to pick battles with readers, acquaintances, and enemies, nor to employ the mix of wordplay and cynicism often lumped inelegantly into the web-prominent word, “snark”. His well-known thrashing of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum resulted in the now-popular neologism “Santorum” to describe the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter resulting from anal sex. T-shirts sport his invented acronym DTMFA (“Dump the motherfucker, already.”) In a Catullian lineage, Savage is witty, skilled, sexual and engaged in epistolary play with his readers. He also claims a deep debt to Chicago reporters, famously buying and writing from Ann Landers’s desk. He’s also—like Catullus, Ebert, and the best Chicago tavern companions— sincerely, passionately a humanist.

Let us hope, then, that the legacy of Chicago newspapers—a look at the Saturday Tribune these days will confirm we’re in elegy territory—is an enduring style—that of the writer at play with all of us. A 2002 column by Dan Savage sums up that playful style by describing another Chicago icon:”Despite the fact that Chicago’s El is big, loud, dirty, and dark, people in Chicago clamor to live near it, and streets that are served by El stops—even those dark and gloomy streets under the El—are vibrant and alive.”

The newspaper men immortalized by Ben Hecht are similarly big, loud, dirty and occasionally viciously dark. Yet we clamor to them—from Hildy Johnson to Dan Savage—because participating in their language and storytelling games is so much fun, because that sort of brutal, loving repartee makes us feel vibrant, alive and Chicagoan. It’s no coincidence that Mike Royko, the last of the great columnists, was shown in a 1980s Chicago Tribune commercial at the Billy Goat, getting advice on where he can stick a semi-colon shouted at him by construction workers and businessmen both. The entire basement bar barks its way into conversation with the writer, who himself resignedly grins at this Chicago sort of play.

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1. All Catullus translations are adapted from Peter Green’s 2005 The Poems of Catullus.

2. The estimate of The Daily Southtown‘s circulation, and its position related to other Chicago papers, comes from The Encyclopedia of Chicago.

3. Michael Miner’s comments on Chicago newspapers were found in a Chicago Reader issue called “Chicago 101”. You can read them here: http://www1.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/chicago101/media/

3. Savage’s comments about the El can be found here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12098.

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