When my car stalled in the middle of MacDade Blvd, near the Nautilus Fitness Center, I saw my future.

The Plymouth Duster had been patched together for years.  Literally.   Once I found myself  epoxying chicken wire over a dent in the right passenger door and painting it with Rustoleum.  Then I lost myself again, and for years she took me to and from class, climbed the Allegheny mountains and transported kegs of beer to mythic realms where Bon Jovi and Madonna still reign as King and Queen (no one can convince them otherwise).

Anyway, it was a sad day when the tail pipe fell off and careened along the median strip, causing mayhem for the traffic coming in my rear-view mirror.  But the day that I’m recalling — that time of the infamous stalling in the midst of rush hour — is not that day…

During that particular turn of the Earth’s axis I called my father, an automobile mechanic for over forty years, and asked him for help.  I called him from the counter of the fitness center where I belonged and where the body-building guru had once taken a look at my torso and asked me if I’d left “my chest at home.”   My dear ol’ Dad could be just as calloused when it came to my feelings, but as I described for him the car’s diagonal position in the road and how we were about to make the evening news, he seemed downright cheerful and calm.  ”I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said at 5:35 in the afternoon, and with the Fidelity Bank sign blinking the digits of 5:45 he appeared in his greasy overalls and got to work.

First on the agenda involved a problem I failed to mention over the phone.  That is, in my haste to exit the vehicle and run across the parking lot, I had locked the keys in the car.   (Don’t ask me how.)   And so, with the trusty bent-clothes-hanger technique, Mr. Fix-It opened the door.   He then popped the hood and stuck his head into the guts of the engine.  He yanked, twisted, tightened and told me to get in the driver’s seat and try to start her up.

I did and nothing happened.  Nothing…
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“What I am particularly interested in exploring is the border zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, between then and now, between self and other and self as other.  The border is not a fixed site but a movable one where exchanges occur, where encounters happen (between people, between imagination and language), where some material doesn’t get through and what does get through flows out in the odd dream logic of condensation and ongoing deferral.”      –Thomas Heise, The Missouri Review (Vol. 34:111).

Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman from Arizona, is thankfully recovering from the point-blank gun-shot wound that she sustained to her head.  Forensic analysis showed how the bullet entered her skull and exited after passing through the area of the brain associated with speech, and if it hadn’t passed through, the energy from the trauma would have been too much.  The victim would not have survived.

As of last week, of course, we see that Giffords has done considerably more than survive and suffer the comatose or vegetative conditions associated with the aftermath of such horrific events.   She has cast votes in Congress.   She has done interviews.   And most recently she has resigned from her post in the House of Representative and will now be devoting herself full-time to recovery, which may involve a trip to the African continent with her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly.   It may also involve a sojourn to the “border zone” that Heise describes above.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to this story for a variety of reasons:  the relationship between Giffords and her spouse is simply beautiful to behold and I can only imagine the way their private conversations also manifest all that’s good about marriage and the way it’s supposed to work.   I also might point out how Giffords actually stood for very controversial things, gun control among them, and that in Arizona, where the wild, wild west is a point of nostalgic pride, that’s a courageous stand to take.   But most of all, what strikes me about this amazing person’s progress involves the tears associated with her overwhelming drive to communicate, and to communicate in ways that may prove instructive for those interested in semiotics and how language becomes tethered to the rawest right-hemisphere processing of the brain.

Giffords weeps and weeps most often as she attempts to retrieve words and form sentences, things that are now much more difficult than they used to be.  Regarding the violent act which precipitated her injuries as well as the death of others — including a federal judge who appeared with her in the Safeway parking lot … including a nine-year-old girl who idolized her — she is now painfully aware.   That is, she grasps the tragic loss of life, and that she miraculously survived.   She comprehends the psycho-path’s premeditated act, perhaps his warped world-view.  But the visual imagery associated with the actual firing of the weapon is blissfully blacked out… cryptically erased… redacted by the powers of the soul (or the hard-wiring of the brain, which may be inextricably intertwined)…

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Training the Tongue

People say, Use it or lose it, but I’m here to say, all might not be lost. This German language somehow nestled itself in the folds of my brain. After not using it for almost twenty years, I took a placement test and ended up in the fourth class in the Volkshochschule’s German language series.

I love my German class. We meet four days a week for four hours a day. We’re all immigrants and the group is comprised of people from Bosnia, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Korea, Columbia, Brazil, Peru, and Greece. I love being forced to talk to people in German.

Usually at break I talk to a guy who’s a Polish retired policeman, who moved to Germany with his wife and daughter because the standard of living is so much higher here than it is in Poland. His wife works for an elderly woman and my new friend has a pension. Another friend is a mechanical engineer from Turkey. He met his German wife while she was vacationing in his town. A third pal is a young woman from Korea who is practicing for violin auditions this summer. Read more »

It’s a typical scene: while driving through the dense fog above the river, comparing price per ounce at the grocery, or composing a letter, this poem worms through the bottom of my brain and I must recite it in full to get the stanzas to stop repeating.

I recently stumbled on Poetry Post, a project where people are requested to send in their favorite poem and a short note on what the piece means to them. I would send this poem in, but I’m not sure it’s my favorite. Perhaps I just remember it; perhaps it is catchy. Another dimestore obsession.

I had to memorize this poem, “Poema de sete faces” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, several years ago when I was taking a Portuguese class, which is a fairly standard assignment in foreign language classes. This means, too, that whatever I think the poem means might not be exact. It goes like this: Read more »

I didn’t think there was another person on the planet besides my mother,who could scold me in such a manner that I couldn’t make direct eye contact for a full ten minutes afterwards. But alas, I have found such a person and he is my thesis advisor. During our first meeting of the quarter, he quietly dismissed my excuses for not having read but three of my thesis books (that he assigned last Spring). When I said that I didn’t want to be influenced by other voices, he said, that this (graduate school) was the time to be influenced, this was the time to steal.

Provocative, Searing, Blunt. Yes, please.

I came home with his office copy of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Body of Life”, disgruntled with another book that seemed to focus on the Black Experience. Didn’t I already know that CH wanted me to focus on the Black Experience?, Read more »

Our top linguists from the American Dialect Society are gathering tonight to vote on the best words from last year. The words themselves don’t have to be new, but suddenly prominent or notable. Tweet has won in the past, as have google (as a verb), Dracula sneeze (covering one’s mouth with the crook of one’s elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face with a cape), and plutoed (verb meaning to be demoted or devalued).

Follow the fun here. And here’s their list for this year:

MOST USEFUL
**humblebrag – expression of false humility, especially by celebrities on Twitter
FOMO – acronym for “Fear of Missing Out,” describing anxiety over being indundated by information on social media
occupy – verb, noun, and combining form referring to the Occupy protest movement
tablet – lightweight portable computer with a touchscreen to input data
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This is an ironic cowboy. Image credit: Ric Szopa

Every year about this time, the good people at Lake Superior State University produce a list of words that ought to banished from the English language for at least a year. Longer, in some cases. This year’s list is helpful, certainly, even though it includes at least one word that I didn’t realize was in the English language to begin with. (Do people really say “trickeration”?)

All told, they have modestly limited themselves to a scant dozen words and phrases that deserve banishment. I am in favor of a more thorough purge, and as we all know, a good linguistic purge begins at home. So here is the list of words that we (by which I mean, principally, I) really really need to stop using this year. And probably forever.

1. irony/ironic/ironically: Alanis Morissette killed it once in 1996. It has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of everybody who lives in Brooklyn, and/or Portand, and/or wishes that they did. Alas, the time has come for it to die again for a while. Adios, compadre. Read more »

The Quintessential Sound Changer

I’ve recently been wishing for an umlaut rich keyboard, which made me curious about the history of the umlaut. When I typed that curiosity into Google, the first result was “metal umlaut.” Being a dense and literal person, I expected an entry on welding and metal art.

Once I started reading Metal Umlaut, I no longer needed any other information about the umlaut. This entry on Wikipedia is wholly satisfying. It is such good reading that I want to find out who the author is. It is also “the personal favourite of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”

Here are some of my favorite parts:

A metal umlaut^[1] (also known as röck döts)

Umlaut roughly means changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, “around/changed”, and Laut, “sound”

Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead said about the band name’s umlaut, “I only put it in there to look mean.” Read more »

This is a documentary about ASL poetry. The young lady pictured is Aneta Brodski, a deaf poet who I think kicks some serious ass.

This fall quarter I took an introduction to American Sign Language (ASL) class. I’m horrible with language retention (perhaps I’m just too fond of English), but I’ve often been told that I talk with my hands and since I know I’m a visual learner, I thought I’d give ASL a try.

Admittedly, I had an ulterior motive. I have a secret ambition to one day be able to sign my poetry. I love the idea of poetry in translation, but like I said, I’m not so great with the languages and there’s always the problem of something vital being “lost in translation.” ASL I think actually adds as much to a poem as it might take away because it’s a visual language. You cannot casually “read” an ASL poem – you have to experience it and I love that about ASL. I’m drawn to the idea of being able to launch my words into the third dimension.

But I’m not there yet. What I did discover throughout my class though are certain similarities between poetry concepts and ASL concept rules. Here’s a little rundown of seven things that ASL taught me/reinforced about poetry: Read more »

What IS in a name, Shakespeare? And while we're at it, how come you got away with calling your brilliant poems things like "Sonnet 29"?

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, which means it’s practically Christmas. Which means it’s almost spring and holy poo I have to defend my thesis soon. Which means, of course, that I should start writing it.

Confession #1: I actually picked out the name for my thesis about a year ago because things are less scary to me once you name them. So I was feeling pretty good and not too nervous about my thesis until I was browsing Auntie’s Bookstore the other day and saw my brilliant manuscript title on the cover of a young adult book. I rushed home and googled it and discovered my title idea already belonged to at least two books, an indie band, and possibly a dead magazine.

Well, damn. The little well of panic started to set in after that because Confession #2: I suck at titles and kind of hate them. There’s a power in naming things, and naming them correctly, which makes selecting the correct title for any creative work rather intimidating (at least to me, anyway). How do I strike the right balance of drawing the reader in without giving too much away? Is my title establishing the right tone for the poem? And now, of course, is it original? Read more »