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On Chatter, Celebrity and Exclusive Deals
Ok so I’ve decided to join the conversation and start a blog. Now you’ll have to check in here every day—well maybe every week—well more or less—if you want to keep up with the latest wittiest most sage commentary and yadayadayada. Anyway, you’ll have to check here I mean as well as the two hundred other…
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Foreign Tongues
PART V Everything I read is a translation. Some cosmic ether reshapes everything I receive. Certainly, when I read anything written in a language other than the one I learned in infancy, I rely on the work of some intermediary, someone who has made the myriad decisions about words, figures of speech, things that are…
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Foreign Tongues
PART IV A huge gap yawns between formal, printed, taught language, and what come out of native speakers’ mouths. People who have learned languages in a classroom discover this the minute they try to have any kind of conversation with one of those native speakers. At least, the way classrooms presented non-native languages to me…
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Foreign Tongues
PART III When I bought those books in second-hand stores their margins of course were scribbled all over. Usually in buying a pre-imbibed work, underlining and / or marginal notes are about as attractive to a buyer as bird droppings on your windshield. If they’re only occasional and in pencil you can try to erase…
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Foreign Tongues
Part II Neither of my surviving grandparents, both native born, had learned English until they went to school—and Grandpa’s family had been citizens since the Revolution. Someone in that family had been scalped, another was a Hessian deserter, as I understand the matter. But I’m probably garbled: When the information was available to me I…
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Foreign Tongues
Part I When my public school introduced me to French, in 1960-something, I discovered a French-language broadcast from Montreal. Radio, then, was still mostly AM—Amplitude Modulated—and FM, Frequency Modulated, was in its commercial infancy; the radios in our house didn’t have it. When FM did debut on the newer radios over the next four or…
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A Prayer
Dear God, I don’t ask to become a model for the ages. I don’t hope any more to do anything that will be admired and rewarded; I’m at a point where I just enjoy doing some things because I like doing them. Such as my singing: I’ve never had good pitch. When I try to…
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The Price is Weird
Part IV Offhand I can think of several sources for the unease that has dogged my life and made me yearn for a simpler, more stable order: psychological, religious / spiritual, social. Price disorientation. The music kids play nowadays. Historical. In Part III I listed a few changes which seemed significant—at least noticeable—in my generation. Before…
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The Price is Weird
Part III If there was some time you could go back to, what would it be? My friends and I sometimes kicked this question around, before we had families and on occasion after that event. It’s been a long time since any of those occasions. I suppose that gradually our attentions were simply captured by…
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The Price is Weird
Part II In his 2013 book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” author Thomas Piketty observes a curious phenomenon about prices: Throughout the 1800’s, novels reported the incomes of their main characters—servants and peasants, not so much—as a way of benchmarking their social positions. Incomes also revealed something of family history for the gentry, because people…
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The Price is Weird
Part I ITEM: My family settled into a house in the 1950’s that featured three bedrooms, French doors with lead-glass panes separating dining from the first living room, a second living room, and electric sconces around both. It had a semi-finished attic, a garage, and a tiny back yard. I don’t know what the down…