Let's talk about a cruise, a cruise you don't want to be on, a cruise recommended to you by your analyst, a cruise as recovery from a marriage gone bad. That's what Rosenblatt's "Floater" is about. What makes it so fun, though, is the voice.
Years ago, on first reading Catcher in the Rye, it was the voice that astounded me there. The voice had attitude. Attitude makes for great writing. But it can also make for bad writing, if it's overdone. Finding the balance is harder to achieve than one might initially think. Rosenblatt does that here. And what makes the surly, don't-want-to-be-here voice so much more interesting is that it's happening on vacation. If there's any time to lay off the cynicism, an expensive trip on a ship is it. Not our narrator, though. He really isn't happy to be alive. And somehow we're glad to hear that. Read it here at the Barcelona Review.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
On "The Tree Poachers" by James Zerndt (3925 words) ***
Stealing a tree is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of an action story, and I suppose this isn't so much an action story as one that involves an old man and a younger one and what life teaches you--or doesn't. Will the two succeed? And who gets the credit if they do? Read the story here at Fiction Weekly.
On "Hunger of Memory" by Richard Rodriguez ****
I've known about this book for years. I haven't heard much about it since I moved to the South, but back when I was an undergraduate in California, this text was mentioned frequently in various lectures. And Rodriguez's book Days of Obligation (or something like that) came out during those college years as well and was something of a popular seller. Whether it's that I live in the comparatively Hispanic-poor South (although Hispanics are now fast gaining ground in terms of percentage of population in the area) or that I've been out of school and thus out of the earshot of folks referencing Rodriguez, I haven't heard much about him or his writing since leaving California.
Rodriguez's book is on my language reading list chiefly because it is, in part, a book about learning language--learning a second language, as a child (it is the second of two autobiographies about language education on the list). Language is the subject of the first couple of chapters of the text, and it's interesting what Rodriguez has to say about it, given that he is one of those kids who assimilates by learning the language of his host country, while his parents don't quite. Sure, his parents speak English, but it is accented and stilted; Rodriguez and his siblings, by contrast, learn to speak the English that native-born Americans speak. But it was not always that way. Rodriguez, before going to school, chiefly spoke Spanish--because that is what his parents and the family spoke in the home. This meant trouble, however, in school, where Rodriguez struggled to communicate in English. To ensure that their kids did better in school, his parents began to speak English in the home.
For Rodriguez, this was a pivotal moment. Before, Spanish was his language--and his life. Spanish, for him, is the language of family, of private concerns. English, by contrast, is a language for the public. So moving to English meant moving into the public sphere, moving into the world. And it also meant splitting, in a way, from his family. This is the hunger--a desire for the nostalgic past, the private past, the private language, he once had (he is no longer, he claims, a good Spanish speaker).
But contrary to what one might expect, he embraces this hunger. It is natural. It is what comes with becoming an American, with moving into the public sphere, with becoming educated. It is the price one pays for opportunity and for assimilation.
Other chapters focus on Rodriguez's Catholic upbringing (the chapter I enjoyed most, I think), as he moved from Catholic schools to non-Catholic universities; on Rodriguez's skin color (his desires as a young person to be more white); and his relationship with affirmative action and the academy.
Regarding skin color, I thought a bit in relation to my own very white skin. Rodriguez hated to undress, when younger, lest he get too dark a tan; I have never liked to undress because of a lack of a tan (and no desire to spend hours trying to obtain one). For Rodriguez, dark meant poor--like Mexican day laborers; what does light mean to me? Unadventurous?
On affirmative action, Rodriguez's comments remind me a bit of an episode of What's Happening? when the waitress Shirley gets a job in an office--as the token black. She quits when she finds this out. Rodriguez admits that he's done well by the system but that he is uncomfortable with it. For him, the problem is that he does not consider himself disadvantaged. It is the poor who are disadvantaged, no matter the color of the skin; to promote people who are already comfortably off based on skin tone seems to him unfair--not just to whites (who often bemoan affirmative action, but mostly for reason pertaining only to their own selfish ends) but most importantly to those who most need it, the people at the bottom of the ladder economically. He has a good point, though given that, then really our focus as a society would have to be not on jobs or higher learning but on the very start of learning, the early years, on ensuring less-advantaged children have a chance.
Rodriguez ends with a chapter on writing, on how writing is a public act in which one reveals secrets. The private, intimate language of home can be put into the public sphere via writing--though in the process, it becomes not private at all but some kind of public rendition of it. I was left to think about his ideas of private family talk, given that they seem so tied up in this Spanish/English divide. My mom grew up speaking German, but like Rodriguez, switched over to English in school; now, she knows no German. This is at it should be, she says--as Rodriguez says, kids must put on the public language. I've tended to think that bilingual education is useful to those who have it, that it is not the danger some make it out to be.
As an English only speaker, I guess I don't quite know what Rodriguez is driving at with these languages used for different purposes. I too have a private language, but it is not based on which national tongue I speak. It is based on who I am talking with (I do not speak the same to everyone). And like Rodriguez, writing is a strange thing, where I put out in public sometimes things I would never say in public or in private, except in the privacy of my own head. Why writing makes certain people feel this way, I don't know.
Rodriguez's book is on my language reading list chiefly because it is, in part, a book about learning language--learning a second language, as a child (it is the second of two autobiographies about language education on the list). Language is the subject of the first couple of chapters of the text, and it's interesting what Rodriguez has to say about it, given that he is one of those kids who assimilates by learning the language of his host country, while his parents don't quite. Sure, his parents speak English, but it is accented and stilted; Rodriguez and his siblings, by contrast, learn to speak the English that native-born Americans speak. But it was not always that way. Rodriguez, before going to school, chiefly spoke Spanish--because that is what his parents and the family spoke in the home. This meant trouble, however, in school, where Rodriguez struggled to communicate in English. To ensure that their kids did better in school, his parents began to speak English in the home.
For Rodriguez, this was a pivotal moment. Before, Spanish was his language--and his life. Spanish, for him, is the language of family, of private concerns. English, by contrast, is a language for the public. So moving to English meant moving into the public sphere, moving into the world. And it also meant splitting, in a way, from his family. This is the hunger--a desire for the nostalgic past, the private past, the private language, he once had (he is no longer, he claims, a good Spanish speaker).
But contrary to what one might expect, he embraces this hunger. It is natural. It is what comes with becoming an American, with moving into the public sphere, with becoming educated. It is the price one pays for opportunity and for assimilation.
Other chapters focus on Rodriguez's Catholic upbringing (the chapter I enjoyed most, I think), as he moved from Catholic schools to non-Catholic universities; on Rodriguez's skin color (his desires as a young person to be more white); and his relationship with affirmative action and the academy.
Regarding skin color, I thought a bit in relation to my own very white skin. Rodriguez hated to undress, when younger, lest he get too dark a tan; I have never liked to undress because of a lack of a tan (and no desire to spend hours trying to obtain one). For Rodriguez, dark meant poor--like Mexican day laborers; what does light mean to me? Unadventurous?
On affirmative action, Rodriguez's comments remind me a bit of an episode of What's Happening? when the waitress Shirley gets a job in an office--as the token black. She quits when she finds this out. Rodriguez admits that he's done well by the system but that he is uncomfortable with it. For him, the problem is that he does not consider himself disadvantaged. It is the poor who are disadvantaged, no matter the color of the skin; to promote people who are already comfortably off based on skin tone seems to him unfair--not just to whites (who often bemoan affirmative action, but mostly for reason pertaining only to their own selfish ends) but most importantly to those who most need it, the people at the bottom of the ladder economically. He has a good point, though given that, then really our focus as a society would have to be not on jobs or higher learning but on the very start of learning, the early years, on ensuring less-advantaged children have a chance.
Rodriguez ends with a chapter on writing, on how writing is a public act in which one reveals secrets. The private, intimate language of home can be put into the public sphere via writing--though in the process, it becomes not private at all but some kind of public rendition of it. I was left to think about his ideas of private family talk, given that they seem so tied up in this Spanish/English divide. My mom grew up speaking German, but like Rodriguez, switched over to English in school; now, she knows no German. This is at it should be, she says--as Rodriguez says, kids must put on the public language. I've tended to think that bilingual education is useful to those who have it, that it is not the danger some make it out to be.
As an English only speaker, I guess I don't quite know what Rodriguez is driving at with these languages used for different purposes. I too have a private language, but it is not based on which national tongue I speak. It is based on who I am talking with (I do not speak the same to everyone). And like Rodriguez, writing is a strange thing, where I put out in public sometimes things I would never say in public or in private, except in the privacy of my own head. Why writing makes certain people feel this way, I don't know.
Monday, April 4, 2011
On "Fried Chicken" by Lee Smith (3879 words) ****
In fewer than four thousand words, Smith takes us into the contradictory life of a murderer's mother. It's contradictory because the mother simultaneously claims a normal life and eschews what normality is offered to her. In her own mind, she is so much more than the mother of a murderer; yet in her mind, all the towns folk think of her as is the mother of a murderer. But when people are friendly to her, is it because they're trying to be extra nice to the mother of a murderer or just being nice the way they always were. The limited perspective here doesn't let us know. But what it does let us know is how lonely this woman is. Her son was everything to her, and now he is in jail. She can't think about what he's done. She can only justify him. And cook chicken, hoping for someone to take her away from what her life has become. Read the story here at Blackbird.
On "The Story of My Life" by Helen Keller ***
Helen Keller has becomes part of the national mythos. I've known vaguely, since I was a kid, that she a blind and deaf child who managed somehow to overcome her circumstances to get an education and to be of aid to other handicapped people. I knew Anne Sullivan was her teacher. And that was probably about it.
The focus on language as instinct got me to think about Keller and to various ideas that linguists are exchanging regarding language acquisition. Here, after all, was someone who had not learned language as a baby and yet still mastered it, who had not had a chance to babble--with hands or with tongue, to hear or to see language, and yet who still managed to learn.
But in the end, she does not discount the theories of Pinker or Chomsky, for Keller, as this early autobiography makes clear, had both sight and sound for the first eighteen months of her life. Hence, the instinctualists could claim that those early months were what allowed her access to our language-based world. Keller claims, for instance, that before she had lost sight and sound, she had learned the word for water. She called it "wa-wa." It is how she remembers that word sounding. And she claims to remember certain sights too (this goes against someone else's insights, wherein the author claimed that with the loss of sight, one's memories of it began to fade too).
"Wa-wa" proves to have crucial importance in the book (as it does in various movie adaptations of Keller's life), for it is water that Keller first learns to interpret in sign language--a language she has to learn by feeling her teacher's hands. Before this, apparently, there is some vague usage of signs for specific things, but by an large, Keller is cut off from language as a child, and her frustration with her situation is evident in the various tantrums she throws. How one could bear to live without either sound or sight is beyond me, especially if there is no means to communicate with the world outside one's self. It seems an utterly solitary life, like being buried alive. How Keller finally makes the intellectual leap to understand that signs have meaning and that each item has a name is beyond me. But she does it. It all seems very reasoned out in her autobiography.
A more difficult word for Keller is "doll," for it takes her teacher a bit more skill to convey to her that "doll" is not a specific doll but anything of this particular category that Keller is holding. "Love" proves to be difficult as well, for it demands the Keller begin to grasp that some words refer to things that are abstract rather than concrete. But each symbol is grasped in time. In total, given the reasoned explanations she gives for each step along the way of her learning, she seems one closer to confirming Geoffrey Sampson's claims regarding language than Pinker's.
And really, that is one of the amazing things about Keller's story, for she makes the leap to language not only in terms of learning to feel signs and to read braille but to read lips (with her fingers) and to speak with her own tongue, all of this through much effort rather than some innate ability. Nothing seems beyond this woman. She recounts her difficulties with math in school. Math? I can't imagine trying to do complex algebra in my head, for that seems the only way one could do it without the help of one's eyes.
Another amazing thing is Keller's attitude, which remains so almost completely positive throughout her educational ordeal. She's just happy to talk and to listen and to read. The last half of this book--after she finishes discussing her move into language and her education--is mostly about the books she likes and about the people she's met.
Finally, there is the way that Keller tells her story that is rather fascinating. One realizes just how much our vocabulary depends on verbs revolving around our sense of sight. There is much here in this text about touch and smell--the feel of the waves at a beach, the acidic essence of the air before a thunderstorm, the rattle of the ground near thunder--but Keller often will comment on particular elements she's experienced being the most wonderful thing she's seen, as if she's seen any of it. Moonlight and sunshine--both of these are words that call to our attention chiefly what passes before our eyes--but for Keller they are just as real, even if they are just a feeling on the skin. The book can be read or downloaded here, and the audio version here.
The focus on language as instinct got me to think about Keller and to various ideas that linguists are exchanging regarding language acquisition. Here, after all, was someone who had not learned language as a baby and yet still mastered it, who had not had a chance to babble--with hands or with tongue, to hear or to see language, and yet who still managed to learn.
But in the end, she does not discount the theories of Pinker or Chomsky, for Keller, as this early autobiography makes clear, had both sight and sound for the first eighteen months of her life. Hence, the instinctualists could claim that those early months were what allowed her access to our language-based world. Keller claims, for instance, that before she had lost sight and sound, she had learned the word for water. She called it "wa-wa." It is how she remembers that word sounding. And she claims to remember certain sights too (this goes against someone else's insights, wherein the author claimed that with the loss of sight, one's memories of it began to fade too).
"Wa-wa" proves to have crucial importance in the book (as it does in various movie adaptations of Keller's life), for it is water that Keller first learns to interpret in sign language--a language she has to learn by feeling her teacher's hands. Before this, apparently, there is some vague usage of signs for specific things, but by an large, Keller is cut off from language as a child, and her frustration with her situation is evident in the various tantrums she throws. How one could bear to live without either sound or sight is beyond me, especially if there is no means to communicate with the world outside one's self. It seems an utterly solitary life, like being buried alive. How Keller finally makes the intellectual leap to understand that signs have meaning and that each item has a name is beyond me. But she does it. It all seems very reasoned out in her autobiography.
A more difficult word for Keller is "doll," for it takes her teacher a bit more skill to convey to her that "doll" is not a specific doll but anything of this particular category that Keller is holding. "Love" proves to be difficult as well, for it demands the Keller begin to grasp that some words refer to things that are abstract rather than concrete. But each symbol is grasped in time. In total, given the reasoned explanations she gives for each step along the way of her learning, she seems one closer to confirming Geoffrey Sampson's claims regarding language than Pinker's.
And really, that is one of the amazing things about Keller's story, for she makes the leap to language not only in terms of learning to feel signs and to read braille but to read lips (with her fingers) and to speak with her own tongue, all of this through much effort rather than some innate ability. Nothing seems beyond this woman. She recounts her difficulties with math in school. Math? I can't imagine trying to do complex algebra in my head, for that seems the only way one could do it without the help of one's eyes.
Another amazing thing is Keller's attitude, which remains so almost completely positive throughout her educational ordeal. She's just happy to talk and to listen and to read. The last half of this book--after she finishes discussing her move into language and her education--is mostly about the books she likes and about the people she's met.
Finally, there is the way that Keller tells her story that is rather fascinating. One realizes just how much our vocabulary depends on verbs revolving around our sense of sight. There is much here in this text about touch and smell--the feel of the waves at a beach, the acidic essence of the air before a thunderstorm, the rattle of the ground near thunder--but Keller often will comment on particular elements she's experienced being the most wonderful thing she's seen, as if she's seen any of it. Moonlight and sunshine--both of these are words that call to our attention chiefly what passes before our eyes--but for Keller they are just as real, even if they are just a feeling on the skin. The book can be read or downloaded here, and the audio version here.
Friday, April 1, 2011
On "Turf" by Elizabeth Crane (3468 words) ***
I think it was the voice that first attracted me to Crane's work. (Okay, it was actually a book review, which made her work sound intriguing--but once I had the book, it was the voice.) Here she is at it again, with a slightly nerotic narrator (this one unidentified) who feels the need to explain and explain and explain everything--but in a way that is a pleasure to read. What happens when a dog walker meets a dog lover and the two don't get along? The neighborhood won't remain quiet. Read the story here at the Collagist.
On "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Arika Okrent *****
This is by far the most entertaining book I've ever read about language. Okrent's subject is artificial languages, and in delving into the subject of invented tongues, Okrent reveals a lot about what language actually does--and why artificial languages rarely move beyond theory to actual practice.
Invented tongues have been around for a long while, but Okrent's story really gets started in the late 1600s, during the Age of Reason, with a man named John Wilkins. Many philosophers at the time thought that a language based in philosophy would be a benefit to mankind. Wilkins, something of a scientific aid (he worked with many top scientists in his day through scientific communities) set out to create just such a language. Meanwhile, another man set out to do the same thing. The other man created a language that for "ease of use" was based on a long epic poem, with various vocabulary words pointing to various lines in the poem. Wilkins thought it more important to place terms in a kind of tree form, categorizing each type of thing and creating a word based on that. Okrent sets out to find Wilkins's four-letter word for excrement and finds the search rather difficult, for the term isn't under body or bodily functions but under motion (related to things like vomiting). As a language Wilkins's effort proved less than fruitful, but as it turns out, his categorization scheme became essentially the base for today's modern thesauruses.
Next, Okrent turns to the more familiar story of Esperanto. While the first chapter focuses on philosophical languages, the second focuses on languages meant to be easy to learn and to unify the world. In fact, many of these languages are created with the hope that they will bring world peace--if we could all just understand one another, after all, there might be less fighting. The proof seems to be otherwise, for in almost every case, the languages break down before they even come to fruition. One faction wants to make a change that another doesn't want to make, and we end up with not one version of Esperanto but two, then three, then four, then thirty-two. It's rather sad, really, to think how even in this, we humans can't get along.
Nevertheless, Esperanto--the original--did manage to garner enough of a following that there are actually speakers of the language. They meet at a conference each year, and Okrent's description of the conference is fascinating, as is her description of the language (for example, of how Esperanto can say some things we simply can't say in English, such as "the sky is bluing"). Also fascinating was the story of an Esperanto rock star--a native Esperanto speaker (his parents met through the language and then spoke it in the home, raising their children to learn it as their first language). Okrent's enthusiasm for the tongue almost makes me want to go out and learn it.
Next, Okrent moves to symbol languages, as inspired by Chinese (or a misunderstanding of it). Chinese characters, Okrent notes, were once based on sounds (morphemes), though in some cases their usage has strayed far. Charles Bliss, who was fascinated by how the same symbol could be used in any language for a word, set out to create a new system of writing, with symbols that would be easier to interpret. His system would eventually be adopted by some schools for the disabled (for kids who can't talk or write), and it would do wonders for those children, allowing them, for the first time, access to express themselves. But Bliss, as Okrent shows, was a fascinating man not just for his language but for his psychological problems, and his insistence of utter control over how his symbols should be used would put him on a crash course with medical administrators and eventually the law (can one copyright a language?).
Similar issues arise in Okrent's next chapter, on yet another language that tries to apply philosophy--this time, logic--in its creation: Loglan. Instead of categories, this language sets up each phrase as a mathematical formula that people then insert the appropriate function into. Or something like that. It seemed an utterly difficult language to me. But the initial idea for it was interesting. Its inventor wanted to test Benjamin Whorf's theory regarding how language perhaps limits our way of thinking, by creating a new language and using it in experiments with those who learn it. Unfortunately, its inventor proved to be a control freak too, and as a result, the language group splintered, and various lawsuits resulted.
(But even if a language takes life, and a reasonable number of people begin to speak it, as with Esperanto, the natural processes of language take over. Okrent shows how in Esperanto, the great simplicity manifest in the language is itself simplifying among next-generation speakers, but in the process the language is also becoming irregular [and thus, in another way, more complex] where once it was regular. Hence, the object case endings are disappearing, except in cases where an expression is so well founded that the case ending remains.)
Finally, we come to a chapter on Klingon and other languages invented for film and art. The story of how Klingon came to be is interesting, and it's also interesting to read about how the language is spoken and about the community that speaks it.
Along the way, Okrent also briefly introduces us to other languages, such as a language in which every syllable is one of seven sounds (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti), such that it can be played on an instrument just as it can be spoken; or a language created for women, in which concepts such as pregnancy take on not just a single word but a set of words for pregnancy at various stages. She also talks briefly of Hebrew, a dead language brought back to life among a group of people without a common tongue. And she does it with great humor and verve. This isn't just a history of language but a history of thought and of art and of human expression.
Invented tongues have been around for a long while, but Okrent's story really gets started in the late 1600s, during the Age of Reason, with a man named John Wilkins. Many philosophers at the time thought that a language based in philosophy would be a benefit to mankind. Wilkins, something of a scientific aid (he worked with many top scientists in his day through scientific communities) set out to create just such a language. Meanwhile, another man set out to do the same thing. The other man created a language that for "ease of use" was based on a long epic poem, with various vocabulary words pointing to various lines in the poem. Wilkins thought it more important to place terms in a kind of tree form, categorizing each type of thing and creating a word based on that. Okrent sets out to find Wilkins's four-letter word for excrement and finds the search rather difficult, for the term isn't under body or bodily functions but under motion (related to things like vomiting). As a language Wilkins's effort proved less than fruitful, but as it turns out, his categorization scheme became essentially the base for today's modern thesauruses.
Next, Okrent turns to the more familiar story of Esperanto. While the first chapter focuses on philosophical languages, the second focuses on languages meant to be easy to learn and to unify the world. In fact, many of these languages are created with the hope that they will bring world peace--if we could all just understand one another, after all, there might be less fighting. The proof seems to be otherwise, for in almost every case, the languages break down before they even come to fruition. One faction wants to make a change that another doesn't want to make, and we end up with not one version of Esperanto but two, then three, then four, then thirty-two. It's rather sad, really, to think how even in this, we humans can't get along.
Nevertheless, Esperanto--the original--did manage to garner enough of a following that there are actually speakers of the language. They meet at a conference each year, and Okrent's description of the conference is fascinating, as is her description of the language (for example, of how Esperanto can say some things we simply can't say in English, such as "the sky is bluing"). Also fascinating was the story of an Esperanto rock star--a native Esperanto speaker (his parents met through the language and then spoke it in the home, raising their children to learn it as their first language). Okrent's enthusiasm for the tongue almost makes me want to go out and learn it.
Next, Okrent moves to symbol languages, as inspired by Chinese (or a misunderstanding of it). Chinese characters, Okrent notes, were once based on sounds (morphemes), though in some cases their usage has strayed far. Charles Bliss, who was fascinated by how the same symbol could be used in any language for a word, set out to create a new system of writing, with symbols that would be easier to interpret. His system would eventually be adopted by some schools for the disabled (for kids who can't talk or write), and it would do wonders for those children, allowing them, for the first time, access to express themselves. But Bliss, as Okrent shows, was a fascinating man not just for his language but for his psychological problems, and his insistence of utter control over how his symbols should be used would put him on a crash course with medical administrators and eventually the law (can one copyright a language?).
Similar issues arise in Okrent's next chapter, on yet another language that tries to apply philosophy--this time, logic--in its creation: Loglan. Instead of categories, this language sets up each phrase as a mathematical formula that people then insert the appropriate function into. Or something like that. It seemed an utterly difficult language to me. But the initial idea for it was interesting. Its inventor wanted to test Benjamin Whorf's theory regarding how language perhaps limits our way of thinking, by creating a new language and using it in experiments with those who learn it. Unfortunately, its inventor proved to be a control freak too, and as a result, the language group splintered, and various lawsuits resulted.
(But even if a language takes life, and a reasonable number of people begin to speak it, as with Esperanto, the natural processes of language take over. Okrent shows how in Esperanto, the great simplicity manifest in the language is itself simplifying among next-generation speakers, but in the process the language is also becoming irregular [and thus, in another way, more complex] where once it was regular. Hence, the object case endings are disappearing, except in cases where an expression is so well founded that the case ending remains.)
Finally, we come to a chapter on Klingon and other languages invented for film and art. The story of how Klingon came to be is interesting, and it's also interesting to read about how the language is spoken and about the community that speaks it.
Along the way, Okrent also briefly introduces us to other languages, such as a language in which every syllable is one of seven sounds (do, re, me, fa, so, la, ti), such that it can be played on an instrument just as it can be spoken; or a language created for women, in which concepts such as pregnancy take on not just a single word but a set of words for pregnancy at various stages. She also talks briefly of Hebrew, a dead language brought back to life among a group of people without a common tongue. And she does it with great humor and verve. This isn't just a history of language but a history of thought and of art and of human expression.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
On "History for a Wedge" by Paul Martone (3259 words) ***
You can only ignore the future for so long. That, I take it, is one of the themes of this story. This story's greatest strength to me, however, is the way it pulls us through a rather mundane afternoon before pounding us with a highly disruptive conclusion. Sure, the end is set up, but we don't think too much about it until it arrives. Instead, we're focused on, um, trivia, which is precisely the point--precisely what our narrator is trying to focus on. Read all about it, and learn a few Trivial Pursuit answers, here at Stickman Review.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
On "All-American" by Jenn Stroud Rossmann (1865 words) ****
This is the first story about a rape that I've read from the point of view of someone other than the victim or the perpetrator (though one film I've seen presented points of view from both the victim and the victim's boyfriend). That distance helps make this story the strong piece that it is, the way that it takes the stereotypical "strong American man" and puts him in a situation that is demands vulnerability and helplessness. The story is further aided by its second-person narration. Try putting it in first person, and it would sound silly. Put it in third person, and the distance seems even greater. "You" catches just the right amount of identification in the reader. You can read the story here at Failbetter.
On "Educating Eve" by Geoffrey Sampson ***
Sampson's book is essentially a refutation of the concept that humans have a "language instinct," as proffered by Steven Pinker (and his predecessor Noam Chomsky). Such "nativist" theories, as opposed to rationalist theories, are particularly dangerous, Sampson believes, on a philosophical level. And in the end that is Sampson's main focus--whether humans are biologically limited machines (drawing on a set of fixed possibilities, even if large) or creative beings able to make an unpredictable something out of nothing, and whether there is a mind as opposed to just a set of chemical reactions in the nerve center we call the brain. Sampson calls into question materialism, which I have no problem with, but I'm not sure how or why a nonmaterialist centers so much discussion on evolution as such, since a belief in dualism would tend to work against a materialist theory such as evolution (after all, did the nonmaterial "mind" evolve, and if so, how?).
Sampson puts up a very clear and formidable argument against the language instinct concept, refuting nearly every major point brought up by Chomsky and Pinker. I am probably slightly more persuaded to Sampson's point of view than the other, though even Sampson admits that on some level, this is the old nature versus nurture debate, and we all know that the answer to that lies somewhere in between. Sampson sides heavily on the nurture side; Pinker and Chomsky on the nature side. Academics can argue and argue, but the true answer probably does lie in between.
To the idea that language acquisition in young children learn language too quickly for it to be anything but instinct, Sampson asks, "Too quickly compared to what?" It takes a child two years--that's a fairly long portion of the human lifespan. Sampson doesn't bring this up, but I was thinking about walking. It is something we "learn," but it's something all children eventually do. Would the fact that it takes two years (as compared to other animals, who walk immediately) put it in the learning camp? Or would the fact that virtually all children eventually DO walk put it in the instinct camp? Were a child to grow up in a society that crawled everywhere crawl rather than walk? In a sense, these are the kinds of questions linguists are arguing over when debating over how natural or acquired language is. And in a sense, the question isn't completely answerable, without doing something horrendous, like taking a bunch of kids and putting them in a place where they couldn't learn to walk or learn a language from adults. What would happen then?
Well, we know in part the answer with regard to language. The case is demonstrated by one "Genie," who grew up severely neglected and who could not learn grammar once she was found, as a teen, by proper society. But Sampson questions even this, claiming that one child cannot a theory prove, especially when Genie came out of a case that was also an emotional trauma as well. Perhaps, there are other reasons she did not talk, he points out. (He doesn't discuss the Indian some centuries back who did exactly what I noted--locked up a bunch of babies so that they couldn't learn language--to see what happened. The anecdote is in either the Pinker or the Davis book.)
That children do learn language more quickly and easily in general does seem to be true to me, but it is also true of most basic things, Sampson says, since as we get older our minds become less sharp. He points to adults who do manage to master second languages--something the nativists say doesn't happen (at least not without significant accents). On this point, one could probably point to examples of both, it does indeed seem that children do better than most adults at acquiring new tongues. Of course, Sampson's reply would be that children are motivated where adults often aren't--a child thrust into a new setting with friends and society around that speaks the new language is going to find more reason to learn the language than an adult who can fall back on the old language, especially in an immigrant community. To arguments that adults can learn physics while children can't, Sampson would point to the need for undergirding knowledge.
The fact that children aren't motivated also points to why they won't learn something like math or physics with the same degree of speed or in a manner that is seemingly automatic.
Some of Sampson's arguments aren't particularly convincing to me. The least convincing of the counterarguments he actually bothers making is one that involves headless nouns. Here, he pulls out Pinker's claim that a headless compound noun will add the plural -s but a nonheadless one will take on the irregular form. We're talking about words like "mailman" here. "Men" is the plural of "man," and when combined with "mailman" becomes "mailmen" in the plural. But a headless noun doesn't follow that rule. Take a word like "tenderfoot," and make it plural. A tenderfoot is not a type of foot--foot is not the head of the compound. "Tenderfoot" is a whole other word, and thus becomes "tenderfoots" in the plural. Sampson argues that he might well say "tenderfeet" (and so on for the various examples); I find this doubtful. Each example Pinker noted seemed like the more common use to me. So Sampson does some research and finds a case where the irregular does sometimes apply to the plural of a headless noun, and to his American example, I can say that he's entirely correct, since I've used it (though I would likely now just use the singular as the plural in conjunction with other words like it). The word is "Blackfoot," as in the Indian tribe. No one says "Blackfoots" for the plural, but some writers do say "Blackfeet." That said, one also refers to several English, several French, several Cherokee or several Cherokees, so the more common usage would seem to me to be "several Blackfoot."
Another argument that proves to be less effective to me is one that Sampson makes in a couple of cases, where he essentially doesn't argue the point at all. He states that since the nativists bother to argue a given point, it proves that the point isn't self-evident, which means that empiricism must be the cause of the particular phenomenon. In other words, if you argue the point, you must be incorrect, because if you were correct, you wouldn't bother to argue it. This seems to me the old witch trial (float and you're a witch and deserve to die; drown and you probably aren't a witch).
I am actually finding myself more persuaded in some ways by Pinker as I review these points. But there is much to find disingenuous in the nativists cause as well. Sampson notes some disturbing things with regard to the research done on the family who couldn't learn grammar that Pinker talks about. The family lacks a grammar gene supposedly--or does it? Sampson points out that the family, if you actually look closely, by and large tests lower than average on IQ tests; grammar isn't the only problem--it's not isolated. (The family members with grammar problems average 85 in IQ; average population is around 100; then again, Sampson doesn't address the anomaly of at least one that supposedly scored 110 among the problem grammar group.)
Pinker does a lot of pulling sentences around to trace elements as we move from a statement to a question, and uses this part of grammar to prove his instinct point. He also talks of sentences not being about to house phrases inside of a phrases. It was a discussion that interested me little, and Sampson's pointing out that these points seem highly artificial--and not even necessarily true--made sense to me.
But Sampson's main concern is that Pinker and Chomsky are, in his mind, arguing from a Platonic point of view wherein there is limited knowledge, all of which is already known, and that all we are doing is "remembering" it. Taken to this extreme, I wouldn't be able to side with the nativists either. But taken to the other extreme, that we can create something from nothing, I don't think I can side with Sampson either.
Sampson puts up a very clear and formidable argument against the language instinct concept, refuting nearly every major point brought up by Chomsky and Pinker. I am probably slightly more persuaded to Sampson's point of view than the other, though even Sampson admits that on some level, this is the old nature versus nurture debate, and we all know that the answer to that lies somewhere in between. Sampson sides heavily on the nurture side; Pinker and Chomsky on the nature side. Academics can argue and argue, but the true answer probably does lie in between.
To the idea that language acquisition in young children learn language too quickly for it to be anything but instinct, Sampson asks, "Too quickly compared to what?" It takes a child two years--that's a fairly long portion of the human lifespan. Sampson doesn't bring this up, but I was thinking about walking. It is something we "learn," but it's something all children eventually do. Would the fact that it takes two years (as compared to other animals, who walk immediately) put it in the learning camp? Or would the fact that virtually all children eventually DO walk put it in the instinct camp? Were a child to grow up in a society that crawled everywhere crawl rather than walk? In a sense, these are the kinds of questions linguists are arguing over when debating over how natural or acquired language is. And in a sense, the question isn't completely answerable, without doing something horrendous, like taking a bunch of kids and putting them in a place where they couldn't learn to walk or learn a language from adults. What would happen then?
Well, we know in part the answer with regard to language. The case is demonstrated by one "Genie," who grew up severely neglected and who could not learn grammar once she was found, as a teen, by proper society. But Sampson questions even this, claiming that one child cannot a theory prove, especially when Genie came out of a case that was also an emotional trauma as well. Perhaps, there are other reasons she did not talk, he points out. (He doesn't discuss the Indian some centuries back who did exactly what I noted--locked up a bunch of babies so that they couldn't learn language--to see what happened. The anecdote is in either the Pinker or the Davis book.)
That children do learn language more quickly and easily in general does seem to be true to me, but it is also true of most basic things, Sampson says, since as we get older our minds become less sharp. He points to adults who do manage to master second languages--something the nativists say doesn't happen (at least not without significant accents). On this point, one could probably point to examples of both, it does indeed seem that children do better than most adults at acquiring new tongues. Of course, Sampson's reply would be that children are motivated where adults often aren't--a child thrust into a new setting with friends and society around that speaks the new language is going to find more reason to learn the language than an adult who can fall back on the old language, especially in an immigrant community. To arguments that adults can learn physics while children can't, Sampson would point to the need for undergirding knowledge.
The fact that children aren't motivated also points to why they won't learn something like math or physics with the same degree of speed or in a manner that is seemingly automatic.
Some of Sampson's arguments aren't particularly convincing to me. The least convincing of the counterarguments he actually bothers making is one that involves headless nouns. Here, he pulls out Pinker's claim that a headless compound noun will add the plural -s but a nonheadless one will take on the irregular form. We're talking about words like "mailman" here. "Men" is the plural of "man," and when combined with "mailman" becomes "mailmen" in the plural. But a headless noun doesn't follow that rule. Take a word like "tenderfoot," and make it plural. A tenderfoot is not a type of foot--foot is not the head of the compound. "Tenderfoot" is a whole other word, and thus becomes "tenderfoots" in the plural. Sampson argues that he might well say "tenderfeet" (and so on for the various examples); I find this doubtful. Each example Pinker noted seemed like the more common use to me. So Sampson does some research and finds a case where the irregular does sometimes apply to the plural of a headless noun, and to his American example, I can say that he's entirely correct, since I've used it (though I would likely now just use the singular as the plural in conjunction with other words like it). The word is "Blackfoot," as in the Indian tribe. No one says "Blackfoots" for the plural, but some writers do say "Blackfeet." That said, one also refers to several English, several French, several Cherokee or several Cherokees, so the more common usage would seem to me to be "several Blackfoot."
Another argument that proves to be less effective to me is one that Sampson makes in a couple of cases, where he essentially doesn't argue the point at all. He states that since the nativists bother to argue a given point, it proves that the point isn't self-evident, which means that empiricism must be the cause of the particular phenomenon. In other words, if you argue the point, you must be incorrect, because if you were correct, you wouldn't bother to argue it. This seems to me the old witch trial (float and you're a witch and deserve to die; drown and you probably aren't a witch).
I am actually finding myself more persuaded in some ways by Pinker as I review these points. But there is much to find disingenuous in the nativists cause as well. Sampson notes some disturbing things with regard to the research done on the family who couldn't learn grammar that Pinker talks about. The family lacks a grammar gene supposedly--or does it? Sampson points out that the family, if you actually look closely, by and large tests lower than average on IQ tests; grammar isn't the only problem--it's not isolated. (The family members with grammar problems average 85 in IQ; average population is around 100; then again, Sampson doesn't address the anomaly of at least one that supposedly scored 110 among the problem grammar group.)
Pinker does a lot of pulling sentences around to trace elements as we move from a statement to a question, and uses this part of grammar to prove his instinct point. He also talks of sentences not being about to house phrases inside of a phrases. It was a discussion that interested me little, and Sampson's pointing out that these points seem highly artificial--and not even necessarily true--made sense to me.
But Sampson's main concern is that Pinker and Chomsky are, in his mind, arguing from a Platonic point of view wherein there is limited knowledge, all of which is already known, and that all we are doing is "remembering" it. Taken to this extreme, I wouldn't be able to side with the nativists either. But taken to the other extreme, that we can create something from nothing, I don't think I can side with Sampson either.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
On "Matt: How It Will Happen" by Amanda Nazario (562 words) ***
This is dream gone absurd. What makes it absurd but also amusing and interesting is its specificity--and its oddness. I'm reminded a bit of Miranda July's work. Here, a woman obsesses over her ex-boyfriend, but we're not going to see a retread of the romance here. And we're not going to see revenge. We're just going to see more obsession. More really weird obsession. Read it here at Smokelong.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
On "Work in Progress" by Kristin Kearns (1783 words) ****
Kearns attempts to bring short story form to real life in this piece--or to bring real life to short story form. The effect is rather mesmerizing.
I remember once asking a friend why movies always seemed so much better than life, and what he told me has always stuck with me: movies only last two hours.
A story has a conflict. A story has a resolution. We get an arc, a rise and a fall in action. Often, we have a happy ending. But life--life goes on. The happiness isn't the end. The rise and fall is only one of a series of waves. How does one transfer story making into such life? Read how Kearns tries to do it here at Big Ugly Review.
I remember once asking a friend why movies always seemed so much better than life, and what he told me has always stuck with me: movies only last two hours.
A story has a conflict. A story has a resolution. We get an arc, a rise and a fall in action. Often, we have a happy ending. But life--life goes on. The happiness isn't the end. The rise and fall is only one of a series of waves. How does one transfer story making into such life? Read how Kearns tries to do it here at Big Ugly Review.
On "Mother Tongue" by Joel Davis ****
Joel Davis's Mother Tongue covers much the same ground as Pinker's Language Instinct, at least to start, but without as much of a clearly defined or argued thesis. In that sense, I found myself wanting back into Pinker's book; I liked that he had an agenda, that he was about to make a point and prove it. And yet, despite that, Davis, for me, seemed the better, more entertaining writer. Mother Tongue seemed aimed toward a popular audience; The Language Instinct seemed aimed toward a scholarly audience and then somewhat weakly (or superficially) adapted to appeal to a wider range.
Part of what bored me with the early portions of Davis's book was that I'd read so much of this before. He starts by trying to define language, which, while not covered in the previous book, was not the most exciting discussion to me. I understand that he has to establish his terminology, but language--you know, yes, that's right, we know. We know it when we hear it. Or do we? That comes up later, so these early discussions actually come to be of some importance.
Next, we have a history of languages, some of which was interesting, but again much of which was covered in Pinker. Essentially, Davis goes into theories about proto-languages, the supposed languages that might have broken down in our various language families, how, for example, we can trace French to Latin and Latin is probably from a larger family called Indo-European because it shares many traits with Sanskrit, and on and on back. Then comes a discussion of phonemes, of morphemes, of grammar. And so it goes.
But the book really got interesting to me in its second (of three) parts, when Davis delves into the brain. Some of this was covered in Pinker's book, but much of it was not. Davis gets down to detail here, focusing on how exactly the brain works and how language may interact with it. He talks about the scientists doing research in this field and the techniques they use.
Early on (like 150 years ago), one researcher would cut open the skulls of dogs and tear out parts of the brain to see how they'd react. This was essential research to our early understanding, but obviously it wouldn't today. Early twentieth-century researchers and even some today do experiments, by consent, with some who are having brain surgery. Here's the thing: the brain doesn't have nerves that feel pain, so researchers who are in there anyway can probe around, hitting this or that with a little electric stimulation and seeing what happens. You can be awake for this, simply on local anesthesia, since you can't feel it. That means, you can also be asked questions as the work is done. Pretty cool, eh?
Now, add into that sophisticated machinery--CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans--and researchers can check out what parts of the brain are reacting during different events. And that brings us to language. Two particular areas, discovered early in research on the brain, seemed to have much to do with language. The reason these conclusions were reached were that certain patients--World War I vets hit in the back of the head, for example--couldn't speak or couldn't speak certain groups of words. They might lose the ability to create syntax or the ability to say words related to musical instruments. (Other things also can go wrong in the brain--the ability, for example, to recognize faces. You might still be able to recognize a voice but a face means nothing to you--very trippy, I'd say.)
But further research is showing that it isn't just two regions where language is stored. It's really all over, but most especially in the left hemisphere of the brain (only a few oddballs have language more in the right hemisphere, usually because of an early childhood accident). Theory, now, is that rather than the brain moving language laterally from back to front, the brain has all these little sectors in which information is stored. That information is all sent to a single gateway where it is processed and put into form. Davis does a lot of comparisons to computers, and his example here seems to help. If you've ever run disk defragmenter on Windows, you know that information gets piled on to the hard disk wherever there's space. Your computer gathers all that info up to run its various programs. So too does our brain--but at a much quicker speed and with multiple processors (so that more can go on at once).
(I'm reminded a bit about something Pinker had written that I didn't mention--namely, how complex grammar is that attempts to get computers to listen, analyze, and respond to human languages have proven near impossible. One of the interesting things is that computers might be able to learn to understand one person's voice, but each person's voice is so unique that the computer can't manage to understand many different voices. And yet, we somehow learn to be able to separate that stream of phonemes and morphemes coming from peoples lips into actual words.)
And that in turn brings me to the third section of Davis's book, which focuses on babies and on how they acquire language. Davis seems to be in the Pinker school here, with more of a leaning toward an instinct than just learning--though neither, I think, are saying that environment has nothing to do with language acquisition. The key thing is that language acquisition is wired into the brain as something unique to our species.
So children, up to puberty, can learn languages easier than adults. But what Davis also brings out is that babies actually can pick up on differences between phonemes that even adults can't. Before one year of age, a child is pretty open to any phoneme, but as the kid becomes accustomed to the mother tongue, it loses the ability to distinguish between phonemes that aren't used in the particular language. The classic example is how difficult it is for Japanese to pronounce L and R because those two letters are essentially one "in-between" letter in the native tongue. And really, what is the difference between B and V or some of our other phonemes--it can be pretty subtle. Experiments show, however, that though babies can pick up the phonemes more easily, children can still pick them up, in short time, if placed into another language context, while adults have much more difficulty. Moreover, adults exposed to certain phonemes through second languages as adults, even if they no longer speak the language, have an easier time distinguishing those phonemes than those adults who had not be exposed, though a harder time than those who still use the language.
There's also a discussion of consciousness, which Davis claims is unique to humans because language is unique to us. It's not that animals don't have consciousness, but they don't have it at the same level. Without language, there isn't as clear of a distinction between the me and the world out there. Both Davis and Pinker think animal language is dubious. They may communicate, but it's not language as we know it. Davis raises an excellent point about various animal studies into language--in almost all cases, the researcher is beside the animal, more or less pushing the animal to use the language. (Want candy? Ask for it. Say, Yes.) It's not as if the language is really conveying anything the researcher doesn't know--it's not true linguistic communication. That is saved for us humans, with our special brains and childhood development.
Part of what bored me with the early portions of Davis's book was that I'd read so much of this before. He starts by trying to define language, which, while not covered in the previous book, was not the most exciting discussion to me. I understand that he has to establish his terminology, but language--you know, yes, that's right, we know. We know it when we hear it. Or do we? That comes up later, so these early discussions actually come to be of some importance.
Next, we have a history of languages, some of which was interesting, but again much of which was covered in Pinker. Essentially, Davis goes into theories about proto-languages, the supposed languages that might have broken down in our various language families, how, for example, we can trace French to Latin and Latin is probably from a larger family called Indo-European because it shares many traits with Sanskrit, and on and on back. Then comes a discussion of phonemes, of morphemes, of grammar. And so it goes.
But the book really got interesting to me in its second (of three) parts, when Davis delves into the brain. Some of this was covered in Pinker's book, but much of it was not. Davis gets down to detail here, focusing on how exactly the brain works and how language may interact with it. He talks about the scientists doing research in this field and the techniques they use.
Early on (like 150 years ago), one researcher would cut open the skulls of dogs and tear out parts of the brain to see how they'd react. This was essential research to our early understanding, but obviously it wouldn't today. Early twentieth-century researchers and even some today do experiments, by consent, with some who are having brain surgery. Here's the thing: the brain doesn't have nerves that feel pain, so researchers who are in there anyway can probe around, hitting this or that with a little electric stimulation and seeing what happens. You can be awake for this, simply on local anesthesia, since you can't feel it. That means, you can also be asked questions as the work is done. Pretty cool, eh?
Now, add into that sophisticated machinery--CT scans, MRI scans, PET scans--and researchers can check out what parts of the brain are reacting during different events. And that brings us to language. Two particular areas, discovered early in research on the brain, seemed to have much to do with language. The reason these conclusions were reached were that certain patients--World War I vets hit in the back of the head, for example--couldn't speak or couldn't speak certain groups of words. They might lose the ability to create syntax or the ability to say words related to musical instruments. (Other things also can go wrong in the brain--the ability, for example, to recognize faces. You might still be able to recognize a voice but a face means nothing to you--very trippy, I'd say.)
But further research is showing that it isn't just two regions where language is stored. It's really all over, but most especially in the left hemisphere of the brain (only a few oddballs have language more in the right hemisphere, usually because of an early childhood accident). Theory, now, is that rather than the brain moving language laterally from back to front, the brain has all these little sectors in which information is stored. That information is all sent to a single gateway where it is processed and put into form. Davis does a lot of comparisons to computers, and his example here seems to help. If you've ever run disk defragmenter on Windows, you know that information gets piled on to the hard disk wherever there's space. Your computer gathers all that info up to run its various programs. So too does our brain--but at a much quicker speed and with multiple processors (so that more can go on at once).
(I'm reminded a bit about something Pinker had written that I didn't mention--namely, how complex grammar is that attempts to get computers to listen, analyze, and respond to human languages have proven near impossible. One of the interesting things is that computers might be able to learn to understand one person's voice, but each person's voice is so unique that the computer can't manage to understand many different voices. And yet, we somehow learn to be able to separate that stream of phonemes and morphemes coming from peoples lips into actual words.)
And that in turn brings me to the third section of Davis's book, which focuses on babies and on how they acquire language. Davis seems to be in the Pinker school here, with more of a leaning toward an instinct than just learning--though neither, I think, are saying that environment has nothing to do with language acquisition. The key thing is that language acquisition is wired into the brain as something unique to our species.
So children, up to puberty, can learn languages easier than adults. But what Davis also brings out is that babies actually can pick up on differences between phonemes that even adults can't. Before one year of age, a child is pretty open to any phoneme, but as the kid becomes accustomed to the mother tongue, it loses the ability to distinguish between phonemes that aren't used in the particular language. The classic example is how difficult it is for Japanese to pronounce L and R because those two letters are essentially one "in-between" letter in the native tongue. And really, what is the difference between B and V or some of our other phonemes--it can be pretty subtle. Experiments show, however, that though babies can pick up the phonemes more easily, children can still pick them up, in short time, if placed into another language context, while adults have much more difficulty. Moreover, adults exposed to certain phonemes through second languages as adults, even if they no longer speak the language, have an easier time distinguishing those phonemes than those adults who had not be exposed, though a harder time than those who still use the language.
There's also a discussion of consciousness, which Davis claims is unique to humans because language is unique to us. It's not that animals don't have consciousness, but they don't have it at the same level. Without language, there isn't as clear of a distinction between the me and the world out there. Both Davis and Pinker think animal language is dubious. They may communicate, but it's not language as we know it. Davis raises an excellent point about various animal studies into language--in almost all cases, the researcher is beside the animal, more or less pushing the animal to use the language. (Want candy? Ask for it. Say, Yes.) It's not as if the language is really conveying anything the researcher doesn't know--it's not true linguistic communication. That is saved for us humans, with our special brains and childhood development.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
On "To Wade Alone" by C. B. Calsing (3436 words) ***
One time, back in grade school, I wanted to join a football game. I was told no. I was told I was too small, that I would get hurt. These kids were about my age, maybe a year older than I was. They were playing football--tackle football, as I recall--on pavement, so of course I'd have gotten hurt, as would they. But they were crazy kids, I know that now. Still, at the time, being told no was a little off-putting. Sure, I was their age, but I was small and skinny. They were watching out for my safety. The little guy. I couldn't make the decision regarding my safety for myself.
Put that in an adult context, and it becomes all the more jarring. It becomes ridiculous. And that's what happens in this story. Betty Carmichael is a little lady, quite literally, a tiny gal in a freak show. Everyone at the show looks out for her, and everyone at the show prevents her from ever growing up. All she wants to do is go to the beach. All she wants to do, in others' eyes, is risk her life. They know better. Betty is, after all, just a little woman. Read the story here at On the Premises.
Put that in an adult context, and it becomes all the more jarring. It becomes ridiculous. And that's what happens in this story. Betty Carmichael is a little lady, quite literally, a tiny gal in a freak show. Everyone at the show looks out for her, and everyone at the show prevents her from ever growing up. All she wants to do is go to the beach. All she wants to do, in others' eyes, is risk her life. They know better. Betty is, after all, just a little woman. Read the story here at On the Premises.
Monday, March 14, 2011
On "White Charles" by Sarah Monette (8604 words) ***
Monette's story gives new meanings to the term creepy. Ostensibly the story of a creature gotten loose from a pack of old books, the characters slowly realize that this isn't just a rat or a mouse but something not quite definable. I'm reminded a little of the first Alien movie, where what exactly we are to expect is unknown, but things just keep getting more and more gruesome the deeper in we go. Here, the creature has a different goal and a bit more reason, but that doesn't stop this story from engaging like any good adventure suspense would. Read it here at Clarkesworld.
Friday, March 11, 2011
On "Mercy" by Glen Pourciau (943 words) ****
When I was nineteen, I visited Argentina. While I was there, San Francisco had a huge earthquake. I lived in Los Angeles, but some of the people I was traveling with were from San Fran, and despite the distance, any huge disaster back in one's home state is still news and still cause for concern. I thought often about how awful it would be to be vacationing while something bad happened back home and having no ability to do anything in response. Glad I wasn't from San Fran.
And yet, after reading Pourciau's story, I can't help but wonder if the lucky person is the one who doesn't find out about the troubles back home but instead simply gets to discover them upon returning. Is it better to know and to worry or to be blissfully ignorant. Pourciau's story centers around a nosy neighbor who feels the need to inform vacationers about what's happening in their own home. Creepy? Yes, indeed. Read the story here at Freight Stories.
And yet, after reading Pourciau's story, I can't help but wonder if the lucky person is the one who doesn't find out about the troubles back home but instead simply gets to discover them upon returning. Is it better to know and to worry or to be blissfully ignorant. Pourciau's story centers around a nosy neighbor who feels the need to inform vacationers about what's happening in their own home. Creepy? Yes, indeed. Read the story here at Freight Stories.
On "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker ***
The first of ten or so books I'll be reading about psycholinguistics--the study of language and its relationship to the brain--is a good introduction to the various subissues that arise: where language comes from, how we learn language, why some people have problems with language, to what degree do animals have language, and so on. Pinker, a linguist, approaches the topic mostly with regard to grammar. His point: that the human mind has a language instinct, or to put it in slightly more precise words: that human beings have an underlying impulse toward speaking grammatically. We do this without the help of teachers or of parents. If we exist among other people, then as babies, we are indoctrinated into the world of grammatical language, whether that be nonstandard English or classical French.
I found much of this book immensely interesting. The first two chapters, which are mostly theoretical and lay out Pinker's argument, were the most intriguing. Later chapters also have a lot to offer. Unfortunately, chapters 3 and 4--the chapters where Pinker really lets loose with the sentence diagramming--were a bit much for me. I enjoy diagramming a sentence, but I'm not too inclined to read about it or to see someone else do it, over and over and over. To liven things up, Pinker brings in zany examples from e-mails and tabloid newspaper headlines, which seemed usually, to me, like a gloss. "I know you're bored, so here's some tangential materials that you might find funny to sort of help me make my point." I could have done with shorter chapters.
But this is a quibble. After chapter 4, things picked up again for me, and there were another seven chapters to go. In those early chapters, Pinker lays out one basic point, which was interesting to see explored. He does not believe, as some theorists do, that we are as humans defined by our language. Readers are reminded of the anecdote about an Eskimo tribe with 120 words for snow; Pinker says this is a myth, and points out that English itself has tens of words for frozen precipitation. Just because a word doesn't exist for an item in our language doesn't mean that we can't conceive of it, he says. And further, he notes, we do not think in language. Thoughts are something else. How do we know? Because we can often have a thought but fail to find the right word to express it. Common sense, indeed. (And yet, I know that I think in words in one way because I have conversations with myself inside my head. So perhaps words begin to fill in for thoughts? These are issues for another brain person to write about.)
Later chapters focus on specific subjects. Can primates learn language? Pinker says no, and he says the question is ludicrous anyway, for primates may be from the same evolutionary ancestor but that does not mean that they too would have language. Language, Pinker believes, came about after the human tree split off.
A grammar gene? Pinker sites studies of families wherein grammatical difficulties reside in a high percentage of the people, such that they have problems knowing when to use "are" with a noun (he are; they are--it doesn't make a difference in the family). Likewise, there are idiot savants that can speak completely grammatically but whose every sentence is nonsense (the cows are doing nicely in the bathtub, don't you think? I rather like shiny plastic. But my mother says colors are for babies). He looks into our brains and discusses exactly where language resides. He talks of how grammar is something we develop before the age of nine or so, and of how, failing that--as has happened with some unfortunate neglected and abused children--the ability to state things grammatically is forever lost, as the brain devotes those parts to other tasks.
There are sections in the book on phonemes and morphemes. Pinker draws out the reasons that some of our irregular words actually make linguistic sense, which was interesting to see. He points out that children generally learn how to format words according to the rules of the language without ever learning actual words (so that, given a nonexistent verb, they can easily conjugate it--he wugs, they wug).
He touches on the grammar books that tell us not to split infinitives and how many of these rules are absolute hogwash. He also touches on the possible origins of language.
In the latter element, I am left a bit startled. Pinker is big on natural selection and on evolution and assumes virtually every "educated" reader will be as well. Count me out. As much as he can explain that over time a person with linguistic abilities would outsurvive those who didn't somehow mutate such traits and pass them on, I fail to see how (1) humans would have simultaneously developed organs that could talk (something primates don't have) and the mind that could forge sentences, and (2) what advantage abstract concepts such as "purpose" or "meaning" would offer to evolutionary evolved beings. In the end, we have to part company there, because his science, as I see it, is as much a faith as mine.
The last chapter discusses some of the implications of his basic thesis, the main one of which is very intriguing indeed. If we have a language instinct, Pinker notes, than all humans have a fundamental biological tie to one another. In essence, we are not determined by our culture but by our biology. Of course, this is qualified, for even Pinker understands that such things work hand in hand.
I found much of this book immensely interesting. The first two chapters, which are mostly theoretical and lay out Pinker's argument, were the most intriguing. Later chapters also have a lot to offer. Unfortunately, chapters 3 and 4--the chapters where Pinker really lets loose with the sentence diagramming--were a bit much for me. I enjoy diagramming a sentence, but I'm not too inclined to read about it or to see someone else do it, over and over and over. To liven things up, Pinker brings in zany examples from e-mails and tabloid newspaper headlines, which seemed usually, to me, like a gloss. "I know you're bored, so here's some tangential materials that you might find funny to sort of help me make my point." I could have done with shorter chapters.
But this is a quibble. After chapter 4, things picked up again for me, and there were another seven chapters to go. In those early chapters, Pinker lays out one basic point, which was interesting to see explored. He does not believe, as some theorists do, that we are as humans defined by our language. Readers are reminded of the anecdote about an Eskimo tribe with 120 words for snow; Pinker says this is a myth, and points out that English itself has tens of words for frozen precipitation. Just because a word doesn't exist for an item in our language doesn't mean that we can't conceive of it, he says. And further, he notes, we do not think in language. Thoughts are something else. How do we know? Because we can often have a thought but fail to find the right word to express it. Common sense, indeed. (And yet, I know that I think in words in one way because I have conversations with myself inside my head. So perhaps words begin to fill in for thoughts? These are issues for another brain person to write about.)
Later chapters focus on specific subjects. Can primates learn language? Pinker says no, and he says the question is ludicrous anyway, for primates may be from the same evolutionary ancestor but that does not mean that they too would have language. Language, Pinker believes, came about after the human tree split off.
A grammar gene? Pinker sites studies of families wherein grammatical difficulties reside in a high percentage of the people, such that they have problems knowing when to use "are" with a noun (he are; they are--it doesn't make a difference in the family). Likewise, there are idiot savants that can speak completely grammatically but whose every sentence is nonsense (the cows are doing nicely in the bathtub, don't you think? I rather like shiny plastic. But my mother says colors are for babies). He looks into our brains and discusses exactly where language resides. He talks of how grammar is something we develop before the age of nine or so, and of how, failing that--as has happened with some unfortunate neglected and abused children--the ability to state things grammatically is forever lost, as the brain devotes those parts to other tasks.
There are sections in the book on phonemes and morphemes. Pinker draws out the reasons that some of our irregular words actually make linguistic sense, which was interesting to see. He points out that children generally learn how to format words according to the rules of the language without ever learning actual words (so that, given a nonexistent verb, they can easily conjugate it--he wugs, they wug).
He touches on the grammar books that tell us not to split infinitives and how many of these rules are absolute hogwash. He also touches on the possible origins of language.
In the latter element, I am left a bit startled. Pinker is big on natural selection and on evolution and assumes virtually every "educated" reader will be as well. Count me out. As much as he can explain that over time a person with linguistic abilities would outsurvive those who didn't somehow mutate such traits and pass them on, I fail to see how (1) humans would have simultaneously developed organs that could talk (something primates don't have) and the mind that could forge sentences, and (2) what advantage abstract concepts such as "purpose" or "meaning" would offer to evolutionary evolved beings. In the end, we have to part company there, because his science, as I see it, is as much a faith as mine.
The last chapter discusses some of the implications of his basic thesis, the main one of which is very intriguing indeed. If we have a language instinct, Pinker notes, than all humans have a fundamental biological tie to one another. In essence, we are not determined by our culture but by our biology. Of course, this is qualified, for even Pinker understands that such things work hand in hand.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
On "He Did and He Didn’t" by J. A. Tyler (1063 words) ***
The work of J. A. Tyler, the editor of Mudlucious, that I've read has always been extremely well written and very lyrical. This piece is no exception to that. What stands out here, though, is the way he's able to turn that language to his advantage in telling the story of one man's obsession. Even as he feels himself falling apart in the face of his responsibilities, he also finds himself falling apart in the face of another human being. I've had a few times where women managed to do this to my head--one's feelings about it are, well, complex and contradictory, and that comes through in Tyler's piece. Read the story here at MFA/MFYou (an interesting journal devoted to comparing MFA writing and experiences to non-MFA writing and experiences).
Saturday, March 5, 2011
On "Pigeons in Real Life" by Nancy Conger (1837 words) ****
Swink was on of my favorite literary journals based on its main page, which never updated. And in that was much sorrow. It showed up, stuck around, and then stopped publishing. But that changed in January 2010. It's back, and putting out good stuff again.
One of those good things is this story here. The trouble with nightmares is that when we're in a nightmare, we rarely stop to think that they aren't real. And somehow, nightmares seem all the more heinous when we are children. Conger milks these facts in this piece, presenting us with Andrew, a kid who can't tell reality from dream. And neither, in a sense, can we, since the two worlds don't seem all that different. And that's what makes this piece so horrifying. Read it here at Swink.
One of those good things is this story here. The trouble with nightmares is that when we're in a nightmare, we rarely stop to think that they aren't real. And somehow, nightmares seem all the more heinous when we are children. Conger milks these facts in this piece, presenting us with Andrew, a kid who can't tell reality from dream. And neither, in a sense, can we, since the two worlds don't seem all that different. And that's what makes this piece so horrifying. Read it here at Swink.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
On "Fracture" by Bryan Walpert (3055 words) ***
We build our stories around little things. When we build the stories well, the little things relate to the big things, and everything makes a nice whole. This story here is about the hand--or more precisely the fingers, and even more specifically the thumb. Walpert manages to use finger nicknames to full effect while also telling us much about the human hand--and about this particular couple and an unfortunate incident with their baby. Read the story here at Fiction Weekly.
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