magic realism

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article about a fascinating language-related development in, of all places, a police department.

In Nezahualcoyotl, a municipality on the outskirts of Mexico City, police supervisors have begun to translate great works of Spanish-language literature from Spanish ... into Cop Spanish. The idea originally came about when supervisors were bemoaning the lack of interest in the tutoring program they had established to help educate its officers, many of whom never even finished high school. At first, the program was the educational equivalent of pulling teeth. But then they got clever.

They decided to start incorporating local police code into the program. A regional chief translated Don Quixote, and, all of a sudden, there was a surge of interest in reading. Police officers began to ask for books. And by the time this article was researched, they were happily discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude - and participating in classes where phrases like "Destroy the narrative line!" were bandied about.

Read the full article here (registration may be required) - it's well worth it.

What particularly interests me about this story isn't, as you might think, the structure of Mexican Police Code, but rather the pedagogical strategy at work. Which is to say this: "Don't dumb it down; just make it accessible."

I mean, Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude aren't exactly pieces of proverbial cake. Hell, I don't think I could tell you what the hell even happened in One Hundred Years of Solitude - I remember a woman eating mud? Is that right?

The point is that these are gutsy choices. And the genius of it is that it sets a really important tone right from the start: "We think you're smart." So often I come across non-fiction that pretends to want to impart information but treats the reader as inferior right from the get-go. The tone in these cases is "I think I'm smarter than you, and I shall deign to acquaint you with my vast intelligence."

I'm thinking, of course, of language books. Specifically, books about advanced English usage. Even more specifically, a certain book that features pandas and punctuation.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, I was deeply unsettled by the tone. Although I'm sure it was exaggerated for comic effect, Truss's disdain for those unacquainted with proper punctuation really put me off. Because it seemed to me that she wasn't writing a book to instruct the uninitiated with regard to apostrophes, but rather that she was writing a book to instruct the initiated with regard to mocking the uninitiated.

And then, she complains that some people don't know any better - and, horror! - that these people don't know any better despite the presence of her book, which would obviously set them straight.

Well: duh. Who wants to read a book that belittles them? And let me say this: just because someone hasn't acquired a knack for commas doesn't mean that they're impossibly stupid. Jesus, people. I cringe at a punctuation error like many others, but that's because I work as a copyeditor. It is, from time to time, my job to cringe at punctuation errors. And if I see a sign that's been professionally error-ridden, I get mad, because one of my colleagues is out there doing a shitty job. But do I assume that just because someone slips an its/it's error into an email that they're somehow subhuman? No.

I have limited classroom experience, having formally taught in only two situations: last year I volunteered as a tutor, and during my brief stint in grad school, I was the TA in a course on Middle Eastern government and politics.

(Which was particularly absurd because I knew absolutely nothing about Middle Eastern government and politics - my focus was East Asia. But apparently for my departmental coordinator, one non-European culture was as good as the next. Plus ça change....)

So I can't say that I really understand first-hand the practicalities of teaching. But I am an overeducated swot who comes from a family of teachers, which means that I actually spend a great deal of time thinking about the mechanics of education. And this is what I believe: oftentimes there's an initial hurdle to learning, kind of a barrier to entry, if you will. Study, frankly, can be scary. However, the solution to that doesn't have to be bar-lowering. Instead, try enjoyment-raising - the metaphorical equivalent of setting up a trampoline. Make your teaching witty, make your teaching entertaining, but above all, make your teaching respectful. Because if you don't respect your students from the get-go, I guarantee that unless your students are the type who crave positive pedagogical feedback (in which case they probably don't need any encouragement to study, as this is a key trait of the classic teacher's pet), they will shut down and stop listening.

In fact, unless you're actually in a school, don't even think of your students as students at all - because they don't have to be there. And you don't have any authority over them, no matter how much of a megalomaniac you might be. Instead, think of them as customers - and you have to fight for them.

There's a difference between willfully stupid and willed-to-be stupid. I have nothing but contempt for one and compassion for the other. I leave it to you to figure out which is which.

morituri te salutamus

While I was watching television last night, I couldn't help but wonder: is HBO's slightly irritating high-brow marketing strategy to blame for The Wire's piddling ratings share? (I'm convinced, by the way, that the marketing strategy was pitched something like this: "We have a great show on our hands: it's energetic, emotional, entertaining - I know! Let's only focus on talking about how complicated and impossible to follow it is. Then we'll snag that coveted 35-to-pretentious demo. Victory!")

The reason I couldn't help but wonder was this: I was watching American Gladiators. Which had an extremely promising Nielsen debut on Sunday night and probably had nearly as many viewers on Monday. So in between the important intellectual tasks of trying to figure out if the Travelator is fixed or exactly how old Wolf is, my brain was doing something like this: American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers! American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers!

Eventually, the solution to The Wire's rating problems became clear:

play or get played

I'm finally emerging from a three-week cluster-fuck of publicity, international travel, and familial interaction, each of which exhaust me to a similar degree, which is to say completely. Next week I'll have belated dispatches from Budapest, thoughts on Hungarian, and a sneak peek at the awesomely cracked-out 2008 calendar I got from my local grocery store.

Nothing, however, deserves my first-post-of-the-new-year slot so much as this: The Best Show on Television. The fifth and final season of The Wire premieres this Sunday on HBO, and I feel that it's my duty as someone who typically watches upwards of 80 hours of television a week to do my own small grass-roots part and remind people to set their TiVos or DVRs or VCRs or even - gasp! - to make a note to actually sit down at 9pm and watch the thing like back in the old days. (And if you have HBO OnDemand, you'll find that the season premiere is already available for viewing.)

The Wire is so much better than anything else on television that some might consider it an insult to call it mere television. But I'm Midwestern, earnest, and full of a surprising amount of optimism after the results of last night's caucus (on the Democratic side, in any case), so I choose instead to think that The Wire is one of the few shows that actually does my idea of "television" justice.

Initially, I resisted The Wire as a starlet eschews sobriety. Which surprises even me, in retrospect, because the great Homicide: Life on the Street (another David Simon and Ed Burns project) was a defining show for me growing up. True story: I once wrote a short story for my freshman English class about an imagined interrogation between a serial killer and Andre Braugher's Detective Pembleton. But in the early years of The Wire's run, I was far too emotionally invested in Six Feet Under to consider trying out another of HBO's serial offerings, no matter how sentimental I might have been about the series creators.

Then, last year, the fourth season of The Wire really, finally started to garner some serious mainstream attention. Which, for me, had the opposite effect of that intended: I was just plain put off. I felt like I was being force-fed by ostentatiously liberal TV critics, the kind of critics who were just so thrilled to be championing a show about the inner city, because that made them so fucking real, yo. So many of those pieces felt to me like lady-doth-protests-too-much pleas by the super-white and super-privileged. Like, "We watch The Wire every week! With our black friends - of whom we have many, by the way!"

My response was something along the lines of "Fuck that, I already sat through Crash because of you motherfuckers - and I have me some Wife Swap to watch."

Then, this summer, something amazing happened: my beloved St. Louis Cardinals started sucking. Which opened up a lot of free time for me. So I finally picked up the first season of The Wire.

And: holy shit. When I say Best Show on Television, I am not using hyperbole.

Watching The Wire is like watching a 55-minute master class - in acting, in writing, and in the righteous fury of the disenfranchised. And it's not just watchable for its impeccably researched look into the nuts and bolts of the drug trade or law enforcement or city politics. What makes the show so uniquely compelling is its startling depth of human compassion coupled with its clear-eyed understanding of the inherent brutality of the system, a system that will grind you up and spit you out, no matter what your intentions, no matter what your excuses. You don't just watch the characters on The Wire, you love them - no matter how flawed they might be. And you will rage and rage against the forces that keep these characters so impossibly down.

Because this show is as real as it gets, and if you don't respond on a visceral level to that realness, then I might suggest that you double-check to make sure you're not some sort of early model replicant.

Case in point: my favorite character is Omar Little (no relation), a gay stick-up artist/legend/poet/assassin. The law would label him a murderer. And a lesser show would make him a villain. But on The Wire, Omar takes his mother to church every Sunday. He treats Butchie, the blind bar owner, like his own father. And he loves Honey Nut Cheerios. Every episode, I root for Omar. But I don't root for his redemption necessarily. Nor do I necessarily cheer him on in his more criminal behavior. I just want him alive and living free and honest. In season four he argues that the truth means something, telling Detective (The Bunk) Moreland that "a man's got to have a code." I want him to have the chance to keep on living by that code.

But, in the end, what The Wire has done for me is much more than turn me on to a bad-ass, brilliant homosexual. Which, since this is me we're talking about, is pretty much the definition of shooting fish in a barrel. (Related aside: I would argue that the privileged white version of Omar is Greg House. Discuss.) What the Wire has done for me is, in fact, the greatest gift I could ask for: it got me thinking again.

Let me explain, in the aforementioned earnest Midwestern style:

I grew up in St. Louis, which, along with Detroit, is right up there with Baltimore in the competition for most fucked-up urban environment. Whenever the year's crime stats come out, friends and acquaintances invariably ask me what it was like for me living in what the numbers seem to indicate is basically an out-and-out war zone. Here's the thing, though: I hardly saw that side of the city.

I was born and raised just outside the city limits, in a place called University City. Many might argue (and many have argued) that U-City isn't nearly as sheltered as other St. Louis suburbs. After all, it does abut the city proper, and it's also an area that seems to be a poster city for racial diversity - it's about half black and half white. In St. Louis county, it has a reputation for being progressive and open-minded and even a little bit dangerous. When I was in elementary school, the mother of a classmate once expressed concern to my mother that we lived in an area with so many potential "criminal elements." (I leave it to you to read between those lines.)

So usually, U-City residents are crown-to-toe top-full with pride for their vibrant, diverse community. President Clinton even came to speak in front of our city hall when I was in high school, praising all of us for coexisting so well. Yay, us!

Except for this one small detail. There are two main east-west corridors in U-City: Delmar and Olive boulevards. North of Olive, the white population falls to nearly nothing. South of Delmar, the same thing happens to the black population.

In other words - in honest words - U-City is in fact a poster city not for diverse coexistence, but instead for the country-wide trend of micro-segregation that county-level census data so cleanly covers up.

What I thought was better was actually worse: because I had no excuse, no excuse whatsoever for being so blind to the realities of my city. I thought that I understood the city because I was in a nominally diverse environment, because I had friends of many colors, because I played basketball with a bunch of girls from the city in some seriously shitty neighborhoods. But the truth is this: I lived a mile away from urban heartbreak for eighteen years and was able to pretty much ignore everything that was going on around me - the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the deteriorating schools.

And then - then! - I moved to New York. And once again praised myself for living in diverse areas, moving from nearly inner-city to outer-borough. And I was doing the exact same thing, keeping my head down while wrapping my progressive neighborhood identity around me like a complimentary PBS-pledge-drive muffler.

It took The Wire to give me a good, hard kick in the hypocrisy.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I'm now, like, down with the thug life or whatever. I don't run a drug-outreach program or write about the institutional inequalities in the nation's schools or lobby for changes in the nation's foster-care programs. I write about language and books and television. Let's be honest: in the grand scheme of things, I'm just another sheltered, privileged asshole. But now I'm seeing things I wasn't seeing before. I'm a little more aware.

And I'm thinking more and more - which is what, in my heart of hearts, I believe the best television - the best art - should do.

Thinking isn't doing; thinking isn't changing. But it's a good first step.

So make a New Year's resolution and watch the goddamn show already. Because if you think being a mile away from the realities of the American City and still managing to ignore them is reprehensible, recalculate that equation based on the distance from your couch to your TV and see how you feel then.

snowblind

In light of the first big snowfall of the year (and because I had a long time to think about various language-related topics as my car crept from Harvard Square to Brookline over the course of ninety minutes this afternoon), I thought it only appropriate to bring up one of the most infamous bits of bad language intelligence.

I refer, of course, to the notion that the Eskimo language has 10/20/50/100/a bajillion words for snow.

It might make for a lovely lede, but the truth of the matter is this: Eskimo does not have a bajillion words for snow. In point of fact, there isn't even really a language called "Eskimo."

Take a look at the Ethnologue listing for members of the Eskimo-Aleut language family here:

Aleut (USA)
Inupiatun, North Alaskan (USA)
Inupiatun, Northwest Alaska (USA)
Inuktitut, Eastern Canadian (Canada)
Inuktitut, Western Canadian (Canada)
Inuktitut, Greenlandic (Greenland)
Yupik, Pacific Gulf (USA)
Yupik, Central (USA)
Yupik, Central Siberian (USA)
Yupik, Naukan (Russia (Asia))
Yupik, Sirenik (Russia (Asia))

Granted, all but Aleut could be classified as "Eskimo" - but notice that none are, in fact, called "Eskimo." So when you say "the Eskimo language," you might as well be saying "the Romance language," which means ultimately that you might as well just be spouting general nonsense.

After all, if the word "bajillion" is not the least straightforward and transparent word in a sentence, you know you're in some real trouble.

The truth of the matter, no matter what your average language-indifferent trivia buff may tell you, is that the Eskimo-Aleut languages do not have a crazy high number of words for snow - I believe the number of words in Greenlandic Inuktitut for snow is about twelve. I would quote exact numbers with more authority here, but sadly I don't currently have access to any Eskimo-Aleut dictionaries or any of my usual language books. Although I did pick up an extremely promising-looking guide to Manchu while in Cambridge yesterday. (It's a sickness, it really is.)

But to find out more (and more specifics) about the reasons why the Eskimo language myth has become so prevalent, I highly recommend reading the titular essay of Geoffrey Pullum's great and memorable collection, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, in which Professor Pullum efficiently and brilliantly cuts to the heart of the matter - and manages to get in a few entertaining digs at poor Benjamin Whorf's expense as well.

But even though the linguistic community has long been aware that the Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax is just that - a hoax - popular media persists in using it like an amateur chef with an excess of fresh parsley.

Which brings me to my point: if you're currently stuck at home, watching the slush or sleet or flurries or flakes piling up outside your window, do your own small part to subvert mass misconception. If your friends or relatives try to tell you that if they lived in Greenland, they'd have many more ways to describe the stuff they're going to bitch about having to shovel out their driveways the next morning, don't agree with them. Instead, ask them this: if the Eskimos having bajillions of words to describe snow says something important about their culture, what does it say about Americans who have bajillions of words for "complain"?

(Whine, bitch, moan, complain, grouse, grumble, bleat, fuss, bleat, carp, moan, snivel, gripe, kvetch, bellyache, crab, bemoan, bewail, grouch - luckily, this is something that I don't need a dictionary for.)

Happy digging!

boston ruins

When people ask me what's the most important thing when learning a new language, the response I give over and over is this: don't be afraid to get things wrong.

If only that sentiment applied to everything. Like, oh, say, driving in Boston.

I've been in Boston now for less than twenty-four hours, and I've already managed to get lost about fifteen separate times. "How is this possible?" you might ask. "Didn't you live in Boston for, like, five years?"

It's possible because a map of Boston looks something like this:


That's right. The streets of Boston might very well have been made with house paint and cigarette butts. It's a wonder Clement Greenberg managed to resist its allure.

And if the lack of city grid weren't already enough of a challenge, then there are Boston drivers to take into consideration. Now, I have to admit that I have nothing but respect for Boston drivers. They are downright malicious, yes, but they're also skilled, which is a refreshing change from the drivers of my childhood, who tend to be downright dumb. (My favorite stretch of Highway 40 in St. Louis is a curve near Clayton Road where everybody inevitably slows down in evening rush-hour traffic because the road suddenly points due west. As if it's a huge surprise every single day that the sun is actually setting in that direction.)

That being said, I've been coddled by three years of New York City driving, having gotten used to things like buses that actually signal before cutting you off, and I nearly died at least three times today.

Which is probably why I keep getting lost, because I'm too busy focusing on NOT DYING to look at my map.

In language, if you get something wrong, you risk nothing more than public embarrassment. When driving in Boston, though, you risk your very life and limb.

Which is to say: God help me because I have three more days left in this city.