The Landscape of Twitter

As I was sorting through my Google news feed the other day, I came across an article about Neil Gaiman's recent win of a Hugo Award. I was thrilled — but what thrilled me more than his win (but of course The Graveyard Book won!) was the fact that the writer was on Twitter.

So, I leaped over to Twitter and checked out his Tweets. (I learned that Tori Amos has written about him in some of her songs. And that someone in Russia was keeping him up past his bedtime right about the time he won his Hugo. Oh, and that he used salty language when he won his Hugo.)

I couldn't resist. I began following Neil Gaiman.

But wait — there's more.

I also started following a whole bunch of new cool people, too, including John Cleese, Stephen Colbert, Penn Jilette and Stephen Gould (the latter of whom was advertising for the adoption of a rooster who is "very sweet" when "not assaulting the chickens"). Oh, and God the Father as well as God the Mother. (Hey, I follow Sockington, a cat, so why not a couple of deities?)

I don't expect to learn the deep, dark secrets of what makes them brilliant (though if any wish to offer a clue, I wouldn't turn it down). I may not find much more than "Coffee and freshly shampood hair" (Emmy Rossum). I might laugh aloud at "Granny crashes into Walmart. You say that like it's a BAD thing" (Stephen Gould) or anything by Kevin Smith (which I can't quote here and keep my "most everyone" rating). I might blush at PostSecret's re-Tweet of Kama Sutra cookies. I don't care of they Tweet for themselves — I will enjoy the Tweets no matter who gets the credit.

So, from time to time, I will receive a brief note from someone I don't know but find interesting because of their line of work. They might make me laugh, or merely chuckle. Or I may just read about the everyday world of someone else on Planet Earth.

I won't always understand what they write; I'm still learning what "@" and "#" really mean in this brave new world, and I'm sure I've improperly re-Tweeted (though I have direct replies down to a science). Who knows.

Someone will have a salad, someone will get lost, someone will try to adopt out a rooster — and I will be bumped back into reality by a New York Times or BBC headline that reminds me that life goes on.

But I'm following Neil Gaiman. And that's a start.

Using Your Tongue to Make the Shoe Fit

Whenever I speak to someone in Spanish, I feel for them — and not just because they have to suffer through my halting and grammatically creative attempts at their native tongue. English is a difficult language to learn and speak, and I don't blame them for preferring to speak in a language in which they are more comfortable.

Recently, a man told me how much he despised people who came to this country and didn't "learn the language." He was somewhere near a hundred years old, and he lived only a couple of houses down the street from where he was born. Chances are he didn't leave the country unless it was on Uncle Sam's dime, and I can bet he was sent to a country that had policies in political opposition to his homeland (which doesn't make for warm fuzzy thoughts about "foreigners").

I was not in a position to either change his mind or voice my opinion, so I did neither.

I did not mention to him that I grew up in a bilingual household, where my mom spoke Spanish as often as she spoke English. She and my grandmother spoke both languages in Panama, the country of their birth.

Alas, I was of the lazy generation: we could, as I put it, "eavesdrop like the dickens, but couldn't spit out a sentence to save our lives." I didn't have to speak Spanish while Mom or Mimi were around — and with their lovely Castilian Spanish and perfect English, and the ease with which they slid between the languages, who would?

As I grew older and more observant, I noticed how English-only speakers showed prejudice toward my grandmother. I watched how people who heard her speaking Spanish would lower the estimation of her IQ. They would speak unkindly in front of her in English then be shocked and embarrassed when she easily switched to English to converse with them. Even when she spoke only English in their presence, some people supposed much about her because she spoke with an accent.

What they supposed was wrong. She and many of her 12 siblings left their marks on their country — including one brother who engineered skyscrapers that still stand today. When my family visited Panama when I was a child, the president of the country gave us a private tour of the presidential palace — and greeted my grandmother as a dear friend and professional equal. And yet cashiers at Pic 'n Save would look at her as if she was just a "dumb wetback." Even if she could not count these achievements to her credit, she certainly did not deserve the derision of these people. No one does.

When I visited Panama, the English-speaking side of the family was greeted with kindness by people who knew we didn't speak the language. My father was never underestimated, nor was he ignored, dismissed or snubbed. People showed patience as they ascertained what he needed or was trying to say to them. Despite the language barrier, he was always shown respect.

I wish I could say the same about my North American English-only counterparts toward non-native speakers.

In the United States, we are fortunate. We live in a big country in which most people speak the same language. A person can drive from Modesto, Calif. to Sioux City, Iowa and still communicate in the same language. In Europe, or even Canada, that wouldn't be the case: you'd hit different provinces or entire countries and chances are that you'd need to be conversant in another language. You'd need to know the words for gasoline, bathroom, map, gum, right, left.

For fun, write down 10 words you would need while traveling. (No, you can't use any of the same ones I did.) I'll bet you don't know how to speak them in French, the language of the Olympics and the diplomatic language until about a century ago. It's likely you don't know them in German, considered by the international community as the language of mathematics. And odds are you couldn't begin to pick them out in Chinese, a country whose inhabitants outnumber the U.S. population by 3 to 1.

Before casting aspersions on those who don't speak your language (something all of us have done from time to time), think about how hard it is to communicate in your own language — then be patient with the next person who struggles to be understood. Next time, it could be you, and wouldn't it be nice to have that courtesy extended in return.

Poetry Has Jumped the Shark!

Here is the most recent e-mail I received from the Academy of American Poets:

In honor of Shark Week, the Discovery Channel's annual weeklong series of television programs devoted to sharks, Poets.org has compiled 35 Poems about Sharks, and examined how the animals have been represented in classic and contemporary poetry.

Described by poets as "death-scenting," with "lipless jaws" and "eyes that stare at nothing, like the dead," sharks have long served as a cultural symbol of mortality and looming danger. Despite the fact that sharks kill fewer than 20 people a year, their reputation as the ocean's most allusive and deadly predator continues to inspire fear and fascination in audiences throughout the world.

Included are poems by Carl Sandburg, Robert Graves, Martín Espada, Denise Levertov, Joel Brouwer, Walt Whitman, Tomasz Rózycki, Herman Melville, Alan Dugan, James Dickey, Vivian Shipley, Jamey Dunham, Nancy Willard, and many others.

On the web at: www.poets.org/sharks.

Well, what are you waiting for?

Beauty and Tragedy, Hand in Hand

Sometimes you just need a poem.


Miracle of Bubbles

A woman drives to the video store
to rent a movie. It is Saturday night,
she is thinking of nothing in particular,
perhaps of how later she will pop popcorn
or hold hands with her husband and pretend
they are still in high school. On the way home
a plane drops from the sky, the wing shearing
her roof of her car, killing her instantly.
Here is a death, it could happen to any of us.
Her husband will struggle the rest of his days
to give shape to an event that does not mean
to be understood. Since memory cannot operate
without plot, he chooses the romantic — how young
she was, her lovely waist, or the ironic — if only
she had lost her keys, stopped for pizza.

At the precise moment the plane spiraled
out of control, he was lathering shampoo
into his daughter's hair, blond and fine
as cornsilk, in love with his life, his
daughter, the earth (for "cornsilk" is how
he thought of her hair), in love with the miracle
of bubbles, how they rise in a slow dance,
swell and shimmer in the steamy air, then
dissolve as though they never were.

by Barbara Goldberg
From Cautionary Tales. © Dryad Press, 1990.
With thanks to The Writer’s Almanac.

Memoirs, in Memory of Frank McCourt

The passing of Frank McCourt, the 78-year-old author of the wildly successful Angela's Ashes, made me think about the memoir — specifically, what good memoirs I have read.

I will give McCourt his props. His memoir was grand, sweeping and one of the most heart-wrenching books I had read to date. It broke my heart to read about children experiencing such abject poverty, hunger, cold and disillusionment. I watched the movie with my friend Carole the first weekend of its release, and neither of us was a terribly happy camper when we left the theater that night.

Here are a few other memoirs (in no particular order) I think are worth reading.

• If I am Missing or Dead by Janine Latus. A thoughtful and harrowing story of the author's younger sister — but even more so, the story of the author herself. The book jacket starts the story with the disappearance of the younger sister, but the author wisely begins the story at the right place: at her own beginning.

• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. For those of us who did not experience it, parental neglect seems unfathomable. Try cranking it up a notch or 12 with Walls' book. I borrowed Carole's copy, tabs and all, and I was floored at the conditions under which these parents kept the children. The author begins her tale with an anecdote: seeing her mother living as a streetperson in Manhattan. Most authors wouldn't know where to go from there. Walls takes us to the right memories, weaving a story of sadness and disappointment that lingers.
  

• I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallmann. Africa takes center stage in this memoir of a European woman who escapes to Africa after tragedies in her life. For her, Africa is home and we experience her life in a very visceral way. I cried more than once as I read her tales of hardship and sadness, loss and despair. It was one of the most beautifully written books I had ever read.

• How I Lost Five Pounds in Six Years by Tom Arnold. I laughed, I cried. It was a sweet, honest and rare story. The persona Arnold presents to his audience as an actor or a TV writer is much different than the love story he writes to his future children. I laughed at his self-deprecating humor. I appreciated the difference between a joke at his expense and being a joke — and never was he the latter. I loved this book so much I purchased a copy to use as a reference guide when I wrote my own memoir. (I will, however, leave out the meat processing plant job in mine.)

• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen. It's the story of a hiker who gets lost on his way down from trying to climb Mt. Everest and winds up in a tiny village whose inhabitants tend him back to health. In return, he promises to build them a school. Only he doesn't stop at one school for one village. I mentioned this book to my friend Wayne before his deployment to Afghanistan; he lamented the dove-ish approach of education, reminding me the true responsibility of the military. On his first R&R six months later, he commented that his humanitarian efforts made more difference by far than his military might. I think Greg would have agreed.

What are some memoirs you have enjoyed — or not?

Read It and Marvel at Their Courage

Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence? It's a surprisingly direct document. (Go here and watch some amazing people read it aloud for you.)

Then think about what we're doing here today: celebrating our freedom from tyranny, the courage of our forebears. It's a miracle that we have today what they conceived, roughly, in 1776. It took a few years to iron out a few of the details, but the single act of sedition did a lot for our nation and our expectations of the world.

It's a fantastic and wonderful gift we have been given. We accept it without a second thought and toss around the word "rights" without contemplation and without giving it the gravitas it deserves.

So, when you're enjoying that barbecue and watching those fireworks, please take a moment to think about what you're celebrating.

Then make sure you do what you can to keep the flame of liberty, human rights and democracy shining as best you can in your corner of the world — and keep an eye on the people we've chosen to do the same on our behalf.

Declaration of Independence

Have you ever read it? I mean, really sat down and read the words that brought about this nation?

It was an insanely seditious thing to do, declare independence from the monarchy.

Everyone was in a monarchy in those days (the "gang" of the 18th century), so the colony that went out on a limb to become its own country would stand alone. Only France, itself on the cusp of revolution, would deign to support its independent brethren.

An even more important question is who among the world's monarchs would not try to quash said revolution? Think about it: if one small upstart colony was successful, how many colonies would try the same thing? Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

So, please watch this video I view often to remind me what the Declaration of Independence meant back in 1776 when Benjamin Franklin declared, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." And appreciate the risks taken by our forebears who risked much to create the cornerstone of this ever-evolving democratic republic.

Happy Independence Day. Sic semper tyrannis.