How to do (and not do) an American accent: lessons for Brits from a famous acting/speech coach. Living in Montreal, where many English-speakers are either truly British or have a British accent, I'm more aware than ever of my American way of speech but hard put to identify exactly what I do that gives it away: here's the start of an explanation, amusingly delivered. Repeat after me: fleece, creep, speak...
Dolphin saves stranded whales.
Why are we still so surprised by stories like this? As a child I remember being astounded by researchers announcing that it was "possible" that some animals "communicated." Being out in the woods had shown me clearly that birds spoke to each other, and also that I could speak to them, whether in words or with unspoken calm, a quiet heart, and positive intention. I remain convinced, more than 50 years later, that we have barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of communication, even within our own species. I wonder if any of you have stories about this subject - it's the sort of thing people don't talk about much for fear of being thought of as nuts, but many of us have experienced odd moments of closeness or communication with other species, or witnessed animals clearly communicating with each other.
Valentine's Day in the city was full of red hearts, flowers, chocolate overflowing from gilt packages, a day to remember the people I love. It was also a day of terrible news: another school shooting, almost certainly perpetrated by someone who felt hollow and alone and untouched by the same emotion others were celebrating. Perhaps his choice of the day was not coincidental.
This evening, musing on what can possibly make a difference, this quote spoke to me. It's from a book I liked very much that I think may now be out-of-print.
Even a modest gift of oneself, tentatively, shyly offered, can be qualitatively different from listening with half the soul, withholding some parts or recesses from exposure to the light of day. Some people never give themselves completely, sometimes because they fear there will be nothing left if they do. From Marcel’s perspective, the full experience of presence requires reciprocity, “the exchange which is the mark of all spiritual life.” (Marcel, Homo Viator) …we might consider that we are given a subliminal knowledge of Being not so we may spend the rest of our lives meditating on Being, but so that we may be grounded in an experience of presence that will sustain us in our relations with other human beings with whom we spend most of our lives and with whom we can journey more openly, not just subliminally, into the heart of Being.
On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Ralph Harper, Trinity Press.
There is a very low level of optimism about relations between Islam and the Western world, according to a poll and a new report issued by the World Economic Forum. In mid-2007, about a thousand respondents in 21 countries were surveyed about their impressions of understanding, respect, and dialog between Islam and the West, and whether things feel like they're getting worse or better. Not surprisingly, most respondents were not optimistic.
But what did surprise me was that people in the United States, Canada, Israel, and the Muslim countries all said they felt more interaction would be beneficial, while people in Europe said they did not want greater contact.
This seems to line up with the findings of the recent Bouchard-Taylor Commission on "Reasonable Accomodation" of minorities in Quebec. The people who are the most exercised about immigrants, especially religious minorities (read: Muslims) are the French, especially the rural French, who fear losing their traditional culture and language. The immigrants themselves objected to the very term: "We want to be accepted, not accommodated," they said over and over again at the many public hearings. And - again, it's no surprise - acceptance is greatest in the areas with the most contact between cultures and religions, such as cities like Montreal, Toronto, and New York.
But rather than belabor a point that's been made here before, I simple want to say that this is an area where blogging can do a great deal: to illuminate language, culture, stories of personal experience, of displacement and change, to create greater curiosity and less fear of the unknown. I intend to try to do more of that here in the coming months, and I'd like to especially invite readers from diverse backgrounds, countries, and cultures to make yourselves known and become part of the discussion here. You will find a warm welcome and respect, and interest in what you have to say, and I'll be asking some specific questions from time to time to try to get the conversation moving.
For starters, it would be great to hear from readers: how many of you consider yourselves "ethnic" in some way? Were you or your parents born in a different country from where you are now living? Did you grow up speaking a language other than English in the home, or did you study another language intentionally? Is it important to you to maintain or discover your own cultural roots?
(I don't mean at all to exclude English-speakers and North Americans from answering these questions - if you don't know it already, I, for one, feel like an "ethnic American" for the first time in my life, since I now live in a foreign country - French-speaking Quebec. I've also been married for nearly thirty years to a Syrian-Armenian American, which has broadened and changed my whole perspective on personal identity.)
So - welcome to new commenters and familiar ones who may not have talked about this aspect of your life before: it would be great to hear from you. Let's do our bit for opening at least this channel of exchange and dialog, and reversing that negativity.
In this recent post, I was musing about "this torrent of words and images" and asking if what we do here, on our blogs, on the web, really matters. Then, in the comments, Bill turned the question back at me, asking, "If you knew what mattered, would you need to write?" A very good question, which I've been thinking about in the days since.
It's true that I use writing - and always have - to try to make sense out of the jumble of thoughts, emotions, and experiences of which life is made, and to figure out what matters most to me. In the years before blogging, I was diligent about keeping journals, which -- along with letters I wrote to my mother, my great aunt Inez, my grandmother, and a few friends -- were a record of what I was doing and thinking. I pretty much wrote about the same things I do here, probably with less style and polish, but the voice in those letters and journals is one you'd recognize. The journals, which I still keep but have written in much less frequently since I started blogging, are much more personal, and serve to help me sort out relationship and spiritual issues -- and they probably ought to be destroyed before I exit this earth.
On reflection, I can say that when I was in my thirties and early forties, it was true that I was trying to figure out "what matters," and that writing became the vehicle for that search. But I think I did figure it out. Even though I still question a lot of what I do, and have moments of confusion and doubt, I do know what matters now, and I think I have a pretty good idea why I'm here and what my life is about. At midlife, much more aware of my own mortality and the limitations of time and energy, the quest has changed: instead of trying to reach personal goals, I struggle to make the best use of whatever time and energy I have, not so much for myself, but for other people, because I've learned that giving fully and freely actually enriches my own life much more than being focussed on myself alone. I also try to be grateful for my life, to reflect that gratitude outward, and to learn to meet life's difficulties with greater equanimity. So if the journal writing, along with prayer/meditation/active reflection, are personal practices that keep me, hopefully, from going off the deep end, or being a complete pain to live with, the writing I do here feels like some combination of fun and challenge, gift, ministry, and, especially, conversation.
Finding meaning in the stuff of daily life has certainly become a spiritual practice as well as a literary one for me, and it's a way for me to express my belief that each of our lives has meaning, and that those lives, when shared, add up to far more than they do individually. What I do or say may matter a little, but what we do together matters much more. Our amazing human capacity for communication has evolved beyond language being a tool for basic survival (though our inability to communicate fully with one another certainly threatens survival even now). But I actually see language pointing toward communication, and then past it, toward communion. What we seek, I think, in our interactions and in our speech and our writing is to approach that place of silent communion where we touch on truth, and language falls away and becomes unnecessary.
I write to make a record, to express myself, to tell stories, to try to touch people...but above all to talk to you. Otherwise I would keep my journals and not bother with this noisy and often frustrating medium. When I get discouraged it is on account of the din and the chaos, and a sense of my voice being one among so many, so faint it can barely be heard by anyone - a state that only a few decades ago was much less the case for thoughtful writers.
Still, I find the advantages of the medium outweigh its frustrations, and my purpose in asking these questions in that prior post was not because I'm thinking of stopping, nor was it to solicit compliments or encouragement, as grateful as I am for them. It was more to ask you to ponder the same questions: what matters to you, and why, and how does what we do here together serve that purpose?
In the comments on the previous post, Dave mentions the move by musicians to cut out the middlepeople, and connect directly with audiences online; Lorianne responds, "Isn't that what we're doing with blogs and self-publishing?" and Rana wonders if perhaps the trend toward smallness and de-centralization is picking up momentum. I'm thinking about all of these things too. (I see that Dave is writing more about this today too.)
As artists working with words, what are we trying to achieve, and why? For many writers, let's face it: the dream (whether we'd admit it or not) has been to have a best-selling book. The article cited previously shows just how quixotic the publishing industry is, but what it doesn't show clearly is that they're only talking about the books that actually make the cut into publication at all. There are tons of deserving books which are less likely to find a publisher now than ever before because they are too offbeat or too specialized or some other "too" that translates into "too risky" for a traditional publisher to back, at a time when consolidation and mass-marketing make each title more costly to produce and sell.
As Rana mentioned in her comment, you see "big predictability" replacing "small specialness" everywhere in our culture now, from the box stores replacing locally-owned shops to the crates of tasteless tomatoes being trucked thousands of miles - even in the middle of summer - to local markets perfectly capable of growing and supplying all the tomatoes anyone could eat. Mass media tells us what to eat, what to wear, what to watch, what to read; in America today (though not in Quebec) I see young people who seem vastly more accepting of authority and less individualistic than my own generation was, and their goals in life seem to coincide with what the media trumpets. Of course there are exceptions, and of course a lot of people in my generation sold out, too, and went for the bucks bigtime in the 80s and 90s. But I think I'm right about the trend; and books like demographer Michael Adams' American Backlash bear me out.
One thing is certain: these forces are not going to change direction, so it is up to individuals and groups to reclaim control over their own artistic work, just as it is up to local communities to regain some control over the production and distribution of food, or the viability of their downtowns. That's not a new discussion.
My question, as a writer, is what is more valuable for me to do right now: work on a book (say, about my father-in-law) that I could end up being responsible for producing and selling, in the range of perhaps 750-1000 copies, or put my writing energy into my blog where I reach 200-300 people per day? Do I continue to try to do both? What is the value of such a book today? How much of it, I must ask myself, has to do with my own ego, my own attachment to the idea of "book"? With so much writing being produced in the world, how important is it that books exist as physical objects with the potential to last on a library or home shelf? If a person is a poet, how important is a physical collection of poems, in an edition of, say 300-500? I think it is important, both to the writer and to the audience - but we can't think of this effort in terms of money; the profits and audience are simply too small. The motivation, for me, needs to be something deeper than that to justify the effort and sacrifices that writing a book entail.
I think of the example of dance: perhaps the most ephemeral of artforms, and yet one that I seek out and find extremely moving. We have close friends who founded and have managed to maintain a successful dance company - Pilobolus - over the past thirty years, and we recently heard them discuss what they do, during a weekend celebrating the donation of their archive to Dartmouth College. The immediate question was "What is a dance archive?" Most of Pilobolus's work hasn't been filmed - my husband photographed them in their earliest days and some of those photos are the only record that remains of their early work. The most interesting part of their archive is probably a collection of notes on the creative process.
Dance exists primarily in the moment, and in the memory of the viewer -- not even so much as images of bodies in motion, but as a feeling. In its purest form, this is perhaps what art is: the movement of the human spirit from one state to another, and the memory that movement creates. As artists, we strive for that in our work. Being motivated by the process itself of using all that we are and all that we have, at a given moment, to express the unexpressable -- rather than the seductive goal of fame and profit -- has to stay uppermost as we seek to share our work. I'm still idealistic enough to believe that when we succeed in that, our work touches people, and has lasting value. The numbers are less important than keeping one's eye on the ball.
"Although the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms put free speech and a free press into the bedrock of Canadian law, neither the public nor Canada's courts views these rights as absolutely as Americans have come to view the First Amendment. The Canadian Supreme court has ruled in a series of cases that the government may limit free speech in the name of other worthwhile goals, such as ending discrimination, ensuring social harmony or promoting equality of the sexes.
Canada's most powerful tool against politically incorrect speech is its hate speech code, which prohibits any statement that is "likely to expose a person or group of persons to hatred or contempt" because of "race, color, ancestry, place of origin, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation or age." Prosecutors are not required to show proof of malicious intent or actual harm to win convictions in hate speech cases, and courts in some jurisdictions have ruled that it does not matter whether the statements are truthful."
This quote is from a Washington Post article quoted in Issues and Views. (That appears to be a conservative black website insistent on totally free dissent, and highly critical of laws such as the Canadian hate speech code. If anyone knows more about it, I'd be interested.)
The key difference between the two countries is stated in the first paragraph: Americans tend to see First Amendment rights as absolute, and that the right of each individual to free speech trumps any other consideration, such as the rights of a group or the harm that may be caused to individuals within that group as a result of hateful speech in the media (this law ONLY applies to broadcast or public speech). In Canada, this code remains somewhat controversial, but to me it seems to serve effectively as a way of insisting on a certain level of public respect and civility, as well as keeping fresh the debate about what kind of society people want to live in, and how that society should deal with pluralism.
I'm not going to go into how these issues played out in the recent Quebec election right now, but maybe someone would like to talk about it in the comments...
We are eating roast chicken - the same bird that was suspected of harboring avian flu in my trunk the other day. It is an halal chicken, difficult to get in rural Vermont; I brought it back from the city to cook for our Muslim friends. The skin is crackly and brown with its coating of cumin and dried lemon and olive oil, and we eat it with cucumbers in yogurt, J.'s pilaf of rice, currants, parsley and vermicelli, and stir-fried carrots and zucchini.
Shirin is going back to Iran for Noruz, Iranian new year. "I am counting the days," she says, happily. Her whole extended family will meet in Tehran and travel north toward the Caspian, where they will all stay together in a house for two weeks. "It will be WONderful,"she says, her face radiant. "Have you decided yet whether to come?" she asks, turning toward her husband.
"That is a heavy dose of your family," he says, laughing. "I'm not sure I can take it. But it will depend on what's happening at work."
The main meal finishes and we bring tea and a plate of baklava. Shirin's gift tonight - she is constitutionally and culturally unable to come to a friend's house empty-handed - is a huge, heavy pomegranate, and I hand it back to her with a knife and a plate, and give several paper napkins to each of us to soak up the sticky pomegranate juice.
"Have you bought your tickets?" we ask.
"Yes," she says, as she expertly divides the pomegranate and cracks it open to reveal the dark red seeds; she is pleased and says, "Good anar!" before passing the plate around the table.
"I got a very good deal. But I was talking to the travel agent - she was a very nice woman - and I told her I needed to arrange for special meals on the airplane - it's such a long flight anyway. 'What kind of meals do you require?' she asked me. 'Islamic,' I said. So she went through the list and said, 'I'm sorry, I don't have Islamic here.'"
"So I asked her what she did have. 'Let's see', she said. 'All I have is vegetarian, diabetic, kosher, and Muslim.' So I told her Muslim would do."
For those of us who are interested in publishing, printing, and digital processes, here is a fascinating story about how the New Orleans Times-Picayune has kept publishing this past week.
Outside today I met two of my neighbors, planting flowers. The man is a very expressive French Canadian; he talks with his hands waving all over the place - so much so that you occasionally have to get out of the way - and his jovial round face contains eyebrows that rise up and up as if they're headed over his forehead, and lips that can purse forward practically as far as the tip of his nose. He speaks very good English and goes back and forth between the languages with ease, often in the same sentence, and he knows I'm trying to learn so he doesn't switch to English-only. It's the sort of language virtuosity I've gotten used to witnessing here, and it fills me with both determination and resignation; I can't imagine my lifetime being long enough that I'll ever get to this level - nor do I really need to. But what I'm quickly losing is my embarrassment: I just plunge in, and if baby talk it has to be, baby talk it is.
The other night, discussing a micro-bus from B.C. that had appeared, parked and locked, in his usual parking spot overnight ("They're probably asleep in there! Merde!") we concluded our chat with an invitation to him and his wife to join us for a glass of wine some night. "Oh," he said, "ma femme ne parle pas un mot d'anglais. She's very animated in French, but when she's with English speakers she gets very quiet." All right, we thought, that's too bad but never mind. So today, when I saw Madame with him, I stopped to talk and did the best I could. Right away she was surprised and friendly; her husband gesturing at her and me - "Talk to each other, you can practice!" with that endearing sideways tilt of the head and the flip up of the eyebrow on the same side as the shrugged shoulder - "why not?"
She looked at me, skeptically, dangling the watering can from one hand, and after a few sentences said, in French, "Oh you are much better than I am, you can understand French, I can't understand any English."
"Non, non," I said, and then offered, tentatively, "nous pouvons practiquer." The husband looked at the two of us, waving his hands encouragingly; she looked dubious - it was clearly an old subject - but was smiling.
"So...le Westfalia a bougé!" I said.
"Ah, oui!" they said, faces lighting up. "Enfin!"
"J'ai vu l'affiche," I said (I'd noticed a handwritten sign on the windshield in the morning, which said something polite, but pointedly in French, like "stationnement privé, s.v.p. deplacez l'auto".) "Vous avez la mis?" They grinned and said of course, and apparently it had worked, it was gone. I admired the flowers, said goodbye; they wished me a good lunch.
It felt like an entrée of sorts. We had communicated.
