Literal Answers to Rhetorical QuestionsMr. Gradgrind's
Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions
People commonly ask empty rhetorical questions that rarely receive any sort of sensible answer. When you have had your surfeit of poetical whimsy and are ready for some good, hard facts, come here to be set straight.
The world would be much improved if those engaging in windy musings were more often brought up short by a nice, sharp definition or a pointed rebuke. Even the fantastical William Shakespeare, asking himself "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?" goes on (admittedly at excessive length) to list a number of reasons for answering in the negative.
Of course, some questions are so ill-framed as to admit of no sensible answer. Example: Where have you been all my life? It so happens that this question has never been addressed to me; but if it were I should be at a loss to detail the many addresses at which I have resided and worked during the span of existence of some other person, even if I knew that person's precise date of birth. Such idle musings are best ignored.
However, one can learn much by discovering facts that provide satisfactory answers to questions one might suppose at first glance to be pointless. This page is devoted to the pursuit of such answers.
What is so rare as a day in June?
June having 30 days, it is clear that days in April, September, and November are precisely as "rare,"or as common, though they are slightly less common than days in January, March, May, July, August, October, and December. Days in February are the least common, of course, so it is nonsensical to consider June days as particularly rare.
Where are the snows of yesteryear?
If the question refers to the melted product of last winter's snowfall, the answer can sometimes be derived by analyzing the volume of water in the catch basins of dams located on streams downhill from the point of original snowfall. More precise measures may be taken of those snows that contribute to glaciers which move at regular rates ranging from a few centimeters to a hundred meters per year. The easiest place to locate such snow, however, is in the extreme arctic and antarctic regions, where, although snow is very rare and sparse, it remains satisfactorily frozen and fixed in place indefinitely.
How high the moon?
It varies between 356,000 and 407,000 km in distance from the surface of the earth, its average distance being 384,400 km.
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
D. Kolb and E.K.E. Gunderson's study, "Alcoholism in the United States Navy" reports that attempts to prevent, diagnose and rehabilitate sailors suffering from alcohol-related problems are to a measurable degree superior to the older approach of simple hospitalization (published in Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 183-194).
Who wrote the Book of Love?
René of Anjou, King of Naples 1435-1480, wrote and illustrated his Book of Love (Le cueur d'amours espris) some time after 1473 while living idly in Provence.
Tell me why the ivy twines.
Not all ivies do twine, of course: some are mere creeping vines. However, climbing ivies such as are commonly seen covering academic buildings maximize their exposure to light by using twining tendrils to affix themselves to other plants and objects in order to gain altitude and escape their shade.
Would you like to swing on a star?
There has been a good deal of research into the use of long tethers linking space probes which could use the gravitational differential between linked units closer to and farther from a massive object to generate both electrical and kinetic energy (see L. Johnson, B. Gilchrist, R. D. Estes and E. Lorenzini: Advances in Space Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 1055-1063 (1999). However, problems of scale and temperature make it unlikely that this technique will be applied to interstellar navigation any time in the near future; so you would be wise to limit your wishes to swinging from a planet.
How long has this been going on?
Data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe produce an estimated age for the universe of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus a 1% margin of error.
What is to be done?
I find that the Filofax A5 System Organizer efficiently tracks my appointments with a minimum of fuss and is generally superior to the personal information management software products so widely touted by computer enthusiasts.
What's up, Doc?
Presuming that the doctor addressed is a physician, one must assume that the question refers to the identity of the topmost parts of the human body, in which case the short answer is the frontal lobe of the brain, the skull, the scalp, and--if any--the hair.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Paris?
Administered commodity prices resulting in an average profit per farmer of no more than $50,000 per annum should be adequate to discourage profligate trips to France.
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
No one well informed, of course, since the writer in question died in 1941; but during her lifetime she was known to have a sharp tongue, and many persons had reason to fear her wit.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Generally the petals of the flowering parts of plants wither and fall off to decay in the surrounding soil while the remainder is converted into fruiting bodies. However, the blossoms of early-flowering fruit trees such as plums and cherries are particularly subject to the destructive effects of spring rains.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Though the poet neglects to enumerate them, providing instead a mere list, a simple inventory establishes that--if we omit the purely hypothetical posthumous final one--Elizabeth Barrett loved Robert Browning in precisely seven ways.
July 29, 2009
Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions
The Chernobyl Poems of Lyubov Sirota (I'M OBSSESSED WITH CHERNOBYL SO NOW I'M OBSESSED [NOT SURE SO I DID BOTH] WITH LYUBOV -- HOT? HUHN?)
The Chernobyl Poems of Lyubov Sirota
The Chernobyl Poems of Lyubov Sirota
During the ten years that I worked on my book, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984, I corresponded and spoke with experts from all over the world, and even traveled to the Soviet Union. In 1990 I found myself at a remarkable Soviet-American conference in Newport, Rhode Island, called "Facing Apocalypse II," where I met Soviet scientist and Chernobyl activist Dr. Adolph Harash. His impassioned attack on the authorities who allowed the disaster to happen and who then tried to cover it up or dismiss it as unimportant was in striking contrast to the tone of the rest of the Soviet delegation.
For me, the high point of Dr. Harash's speech was the reading of a poem by a woman who had been victimized by the explosion: Lybov Sirota. Director of a writing program for children near the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, on April 25th, 1986 she was seeking a breath of fresh air in the middle of that night, and went out on to her balcony in the city of Pripyat and watched the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explode in front of her.
The dead city of Pripyat
In the days that followed, she and her son grew gravely ill from heavy doses of radioactive contamination. To express her grief and rage, she turned to writing poems, and collected them in a small book entitled Burden.
It was published in Kiev, the city (now in Ukraine) where she had fled along with the other refugees from Pripyat. She later became involved in documentary films about the disaster and went to work as a film editor at the A. P. Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kiev.
However, repeated hospitalizations for fatigue and pain (typical results of radiation exposure) increasingly interfered with her work. She continued to write, mostly in Ukranian, but it was Dr. Harash's kind efforts which continued to spread word of her work.
I recruited American poet Elizavietta Ritchie to translate the poems and asked Dr. Harash to write an introduction to them, which in its turn had to be translated. It was fortunate that Both Lyubov Sirota and Dr. Harash know some English, for I know no Russian. Selections were read to music on the National Public Radio program Terra Infirma on April 1, 1992; the poem "Radiophobia" was published in the August 5, 1992 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association; one other poem was published in New York Quarterly, all the poems and a revised version of the introduction appeared in Calyx, Winter 1992/1993, and in Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing edited by Sue Brannan Walker & Rosaly Demaios Roffman (Mobile, Alabama: Negative Capability Press, 1992). "Your Glance Will Trip on My Shadow" was reprinted in A Fierce Brightnesss: Twenty-Five Yars of Women's Poetry, ed. Margaret Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, and Micki Reaman (Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books, 2002). One poem has been included in a major anthology from W. W. Norton: Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations,Vol. 2, Second Edition, ed. James Brophy et al.
The article by Dr. Harash has also appeared in the Canadian magazine Woman's World.
My hope was to generate enough interest in her case to bring her and her son to the U.S. for a round of examinations and treatment by American doctors, combined with a series of public readings. However, I was not able to accomplish this.
As the months went by, she continued to grow sicker and weaker, and was at last unable to travel. Doctors told me that at this late date there would be little they could do for her anyway. She developed cataracts and a brain tumor, both probably caused by the radiation. She has been operated on repeatedly in Kiev, and spends much of the year in the hospital.
With Sasha before the disaster.Fortunately her son Alex (nicknamed "Sasha") has done much better than his mother and was sponsored by Greenpeace International on a lecture tour in 1996. He has also visited the now-abandoned town of Pripyat and taken some moving pictures which you can view here. In the spring of 2000 he persuaded his mother to make her own pilgrimage to their former home, taking further pictures which you can also view here.
Sirota's most fervent hope is that her poems will continue to remind people of the need to prevent further tragedies like Chernobyl. To that end, the poems and Dr. Harash's article about her are made available on the Web, with the kind permission of translator Elizavietta Ritchie.
If you would like to correspond with Lyubov Sirota, you can write her at the following address:
Keep in mind, however, that she doesn't have the strength to keep up much of a correspondence and cannot answer all of her mail. However, it cheers her greatly to know that people around the world are reading her work.
On December 15, 2000, the remaining active reactor at Chernobyl was finally shut down. However, many reactors similar in design to the one that exploded are still in operation in the former Soviet Union.
This site led Mark Resnicoff to befriend Lyubov Sirota and her son, and to visit Chernobyl itself. To view his remarkable Web site report, profusely illustrated with photographs, go to http://nikongear.com/Chernobyl/Chernobyl_1.htm.
First mounted June 19, 1995.
Last revised February 22, 2008.
The poems in Russian (Cyrillic font required)
The Chernobyl Poems in Russian Transliteration
The Chernobyl Poems in English Translation
Information about Lyubov Sirota's book on the "Pripyat Syndrome."
Photos of Lyubov Sirota's return visit to the site of her disaster--her former home, Pripyat.
Sirota’s YouTube page containing videos of Pripyat.
Photos from the Abandoned city of Pripyat
Dr. Adolph Harash: "A Voice from Dead Pripyat"
An appeal from the author for international action (in English)
An appeal from the author for international action (in Russian)
International Annual Action: "The Saved Planet" (in Russian)
Poetry of Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus in Russian translation by Lyubov Sirota and Anatoly Tkachenko
Visit Lyubov Sirota's MySpace site at http://www.myspace.com/orantas.
Other recommended sites:Ugo Persi's article about Sirota's poems (in Russian)
In Russian
Petition to make Pripyat a city-monument.This page has been accessed
times since June 6, 1997.
If you are linking to this page, please use this URL: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/chernobyl_poems/chernobyl_index.html
Japanese country and western singer - Toshio Hirano
Correspondent Julie Caine profiles Japanese country and western singer Toshio Hirano. Audio slideshow produced by Julie Caine. Photographs by Lenny Gonzalez.