You Can Go Home Again

I was in college during much of the run of Bloom County and have fond memories of reading the strip in the Campus Times, the University of Rochester student paper. So I was thrilled to see this, today:

From: Comic Book Resources

Back in the day, Berkeley Breathed had visited our school, was interviewed by the radio station, and had signed the 'wall of fame' there. (Sadly, it was long since painted over. Sigh.)

We own all the collected strips (along with Bill Waterstone's Calvin and Hobbes) and it never feels old or out of date to re-read them.

I'm a huge fan of 'Dandelion Breaks' and use that term often in my life. One of our family's favorite movies is Second Hand Lions, where the character of the boy grows up to be a cartoonist - played/drawn by Breathed.

I am so looking forward to reading this new incarnation of Bloom County and revisiting my favorite characters. I'm hoping Milo has some things to say about the upcoming presidential election and is ready to torture his Newspaper editor again!

Thank you, Berkeley Breathed, for all the hours of entertainment during my college days and beyond and thank you for coming back into our lives! More Bloom County! Yay!!

 ______________

"Advice & Assistance Obtainable Immediately"

"Advice & Assistance Obtainable Immediately"


Everything you need is inside this poem. Open
it in case of emergency. Open it only
when the emptiness swallows the sky
at night. Open it if you are alone
and hear singing. Open it if you hear
a bird cry and think your heart
must break. Everything you need is inside
this poem. The way a blizzard
is a hurricane of stillness. The way you use
music, loud and pounding to beat back
the darkness. There is an oxygen mask
inside this poem. It will automatically open
when you lose cabin pressure. Place it
over your mouth and nose. Breathe
normally. I made sure there was a tennis ball
here too. Because you may forget
how it makes you laugh watching the dog's ears
flap as she chases it down. Everything
you need is inside. Tears
from raw mustard greens eaten on a dare,
Charlie still riding on the MTA. Belizean
chocolate, fiery with chili. Rosemary
for remembrance. Coriander for chicken in a pot.
Everything you need is inside this poem.
Open it. Open it. Open it. Everything you need.
Goodnight Moon is here. Redwall. Thomas
the Tank Engine. A blue box full of time. Everything.
I am here in this poem shoveling words,
great snowbanks of them, tall as the second story,
the roof of a house that nearly burned to the ground
on a Wednesday morning and even if it had,
even if it had, everything you need
is already here. Is
inside. Inside. Inside.

---LJCohen, 2011

"Listen. Time Passes. Listen."

photo by theirishkiwi, under cc license

My eldest son was the character of Captain Cat in his HS production of Dylan Thomas' "Under Milkwood" this weekend. The title of this post is from one of the lines he delivers in the first few moments of the play.  It is a wonderful work, full of heightened, poetic language.  The play creates a magical, surreal atmosphere but is also grounded and accessible in our own everyday experience.

It is the story of a day in the life of the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village; the old, blind sea captain adrift in the past, yet anchored to the present, the baker with two wives, the town organist who dreams of symphonies, the town shrew and her husband dreaming of poison, the heartbroken tavern keeper, the twice widowed innkeeper who tortures the ghosts of her dead husbands with reminders of their chores. Gossip, pettiness, and drinking all weave through the lives of the town, and yet, there is also a thread of tenderness and acceptance, even love for the place and its flawed people.

It would be easy for a play like this to degenerate into mockery or satire, or even worse, mawkish sentimentalism.  It is Dylan Thomas' incredible grasp of language and character that keeps the town of Llareggub ('bugger all', backwards) a place of great beauty, sadness, and dignity.

The actors, all high school students, approached their roles with great care, playing multiple characters, their ages ranging from school children to elderly townspeople on a minimal set and with only basic costume changes.  I was enthralled from the opening few minutes, performed in total darkness, as the audience is invited to listen in to the dreamers of Llareggub.

There is magic in beautiful language.  Not only can you hear it, but you can feel it move through you, like music, its rhythm a new heartbeat beside your own.  Dylan Thomas was a poet and "Under Milkwood" is as much a prose poem in many voices as a play.

I keep hearing that poetry is dead.  That it has no relevance in our modern lives.  That it doesn't fit into sound bites or social network updates.  It takes too much time and concentration, too much work to read. I call bullshit.

If you could have listened. . . if you could have heard the ease and grace of Thomas' bright lines flow from the lips of these teens. . . if you could have seen the rapt and enchanted expressions on the faces of the members in the audience. . . you would never doubt that poetry is an alive, vital, living art form.

The power of words

One of the colleges my eldest kiddo applied to allows for a family recommendation, in addition to the academic ones.  Their reasoning is they want to really get a sense of the student's personality through the lens of someone who knows him or her best.

Since I'm the writer-parent, my husband handed off that job to me.

One of the questions on the form was to write down the first words that come to mind when thinking about the student.

It wasn't hard.

Articulate
Passionate
Motivated
Creative
Engaged

My son is all those things, and more, and when I reflected on the recommendation, I realized that he has had these character traits since he was a very small child.

There may have been times when I (in my frustration in being a new parent) may have looked at these in different and negative ways.  Honestly, there were times when I wanted to shove earplugs in my ears and scream rather than listen to another lecture on dinosaurs or trains or wolves--some of his vocal passions as a youngster.  I may have seen his motivation and engagement as rigidity and stubbornness.  I am certain that his unique view of the world often drove me insane.

But all those traits that challenged my skills as a mother back then?  They are exactly the same attributes that makes him an amazing young man today.

There is a great power in being able to find the right words at the right moment to make sense of our reality.  How much better it would have been if a decade or more ago, I had been able to recast my negative labels into the positives they really were.

And I am grateful that I am able to see him in this way today.

Confessions of a Language Geek

I love language. That's probably why I worship at the altar of poetry the way I do. Word choice, word position, and word juxtaposition all have the ability to radically change meaning and emotion.

That's powerful stuff.

If I had known there was such a field as linguistics, I might have gone down that road in college.

This article, on the pronoun, got all my geek circuits glowing: They Get to Me: A young psycholinguist confesses her strong attraction to pronouns, By Jessica Love

I had read about the study she cites near the end of the article, linking gender based language to gender-based associations. If you don't want to read the whole article (though I would highly recommend doing so--it's fascinating and very well written), I can summarize:

Some languages, unlike English, assign gender to nouns. The word for bridge is 'feminine' in German, 'masculine' in Spanish. Bilingual speakers (Spanish/English and German/English) were shown photos of a bridge and asked to describe it.

German speakers described the bridge in 'feminine' terms, Spanish speakers in 'masculine.' Though one researcher points out: "Just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn’t mean he’s going to ask one out on a date")


The other piece of Love's article that I found fascinating was her analysis here:

The lead researcher has an interesting interpretation: listening to proper names, over and over again, can be disruptive. Each proper name will bring with it a host of associations—not all of them particularly relevant.

Novelists spend a lot of time writing about characters interacting with one another. One of the no-no's is to overly reference the characters' names in dialogue or exposition. Yet, we also must make it clear who is speaking when and to whom. This can be especially challenging when there are two of the same gendered characters in a scene.

If, in a scene with two woman, say Jill and Kathy, and if using names all the time is disruptive, then you are left with the difficulty of referring to both characters as 'she'. Without extremely careful use of context (also referenced in this excellent article), the readers may be left in the dust.

A third element of Love's article that I found interesting is in the remarkably similar pronoun confusion of young children learning spoken English and ASL (American Sign Language). I took a semester of ASL in college and found that the spatial nature of the language extremely challenging to my distinctly un-spatial brain.

Love reminded me that ASL speakers will refer to someone by their proper name the first time in conversation, giving them a place holder by pointing to a specific place around them for that person. In continuing conversation, that person is referred to by referencing that point in space.

Further research suggests that when English speakers use pronouns, the places in their brains responsible for spatial relations lights up.

Cool, huh?

(hat tip: Dave Fenton)

Quote of the Day

One of the things on my google home page is a quote of the day.  Often, I don't even read them, but today's had a lot of resonance for me.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
  - Martin Luther King Jr.

Maybe there's hope for all of us misfits after all.

:)

Language, thinking, and alien cultures

When written well, science fiction and speculative fiction can open a window on current social structure and mores in a way that can profoundly change thinking without being overtly threatening. One of the ways these genres can do this is through the depiction of alien cultures. Think of Ursula K Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness", for example. The way in which she explores gender and makes the reader quietly question his or her own gender assumptions was groundbreaking at the time the book was published. It probably had more influence on ideas about gender than many college lectures given in those same years.

Part of that is certainly worldbuilding and sheer writing skill, but some is also the way in which Le Guin has her characters use language to shape both their culture and our interpretation of that culture. One of my reader pet peeves is when writers simply omit contractions and have their alien races all talk a stilted version of English as a way to demarcate culture. True confession--in the first draft of the first novel I wrote, I had my Fantasy shapeshifters talk like that. At the time, I [cringe] thought it made them sound mysterious. Looking back, they just sound silly. Another peeve is the use of vernacular English with some simple substitution of a made up word for its English counterpart. (I think the Turkey City Lexicon calls this 'calling a rabbit a smeerp' problem.)

Language, culture, and thought patterns are intimately linked in ways we are only beginning to understand. For a fascinating example of this from current science, take the research of Lera Boroditsky. She is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University and was a guest on the WBUR show "Here and Now" on July 1, 2009 (follow the link and select the podcast to hear her interview). She is specifically looking at how language shapes the way we think.

If you'd rather read than listen, her article, "How does language shape the way we think" is fascinating.

In both the radio show and the article, Boroditsky presents some of her research. In one study, she looked at Aboriginals in Australia who speak in terms of the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) rather than in relative terms (up, down, beside, etc). This is not simply a language pattern, but it is part and parcel of how they interact with the world and understand abstract concepts such as time. She also talks about how thought patterns about nouns are altered in cultures that assign gender to objects. A particularly interesting example of this is the word for bridge is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers are more likely to describe a bridge in terms we associate with femininity (elegant, beautiful) while Spanish speakers use more masculine terms (strong, imposing.)

If you are a writer working with alien/invented cultures, I urge you to read Boroditsky's article and find the ways that your invented civilizations differ from our own in the way individuals think and use language, even if you never leap to the level of insanity of creating a complete language. (cough. . . Tolkien, LOL)

Follow the patterns of language and you will find your culture to be richer and more fully realized, making your story stronger.

Automagically and other words that ought to be

I love that English is a language that grows and changes. One of my favorite YA books was "Frindle" by Andrew Clements. If you haven't read it, it's the story of a young boy who decides he is going to coin a new word for pen and see what happens and how widely used the word will get.

In our household, we coin words (and use words coined by others) all the time.

I love 'automagically'. I am certain I didn't come up with it--I honestly don't remember where I heard it, but it expresses to me the magic of certain mechanical processes.

Other coined words: def*cktive. Far more emotionally true to the experience of something not working that ought to and *needs* to work.

Then there are the invented slang words, a la cockney, that have sprung up in our household.

capybara

Yes, I know it's a large rodent. But it is echoes the rhythm and sound of 'happy belly'. When my kids were little, I would ask them if they had a 'happy belly' after eating, eg, are you full. That morphed into 'capybara', which we still say, even though the boys are teenagers.

My 15 year old has started to use 'Henry David' as a stand in for the word thorough. Thorough echoes Thoreau.

Maybe that makes us a house of word-nerds, but so be it.

We have fun with language.

Do you use invented words?