A Literate Comic Strip

 He (who is gay) is Her roommate.  They are dance partners in a ballet company.  He has also danced lately with Fernanda.
                                                                                                                                                                           

Click on strip to enlarge.

When's the last time you saw the word Brobdingnagian in the comics?

Few but Telling Words

       Sometimes a handful of words can right the course for you.  Manolo spoke little but helped me improve my tennis game immensely.

       Watching me hit, he said, “You should see the ball over one shoulder on the backswing and over the other on the follow-through.”  What a simple instruction, but I started to hit with authority:  my swing had more scope and power.

       Manolo watched me serve, said two things: “Take it easy” and “Now use your wrist.”  I immediately started getting my first serve in regularly, and when I use my wrist, there’s speed enough to tie up my opponents, often for a missed return.

       Manolo’s few words reshaped my game! 

Starting a Conversation, How Hard Is It?

       Not sure the source of this dream.  Maybe my friend Toby Lurie who always reminds me we are friends and who himself speaks with people readily and easily.  Or maybe my friend Marvin Holloway, who died this past year.   He was open and loquacious to all around him.

       Extraverts attract me, I guess, partly because I’m pretty introverted myself.

       The dream seemed to be saying to me (was I on an airplane, a stranger sitting next to me?), “Start a conversation.  Let the world in.  You’ll be pleased, surprised!”

       “Even when I have nothing to say?” I seemed to be thinking, “nothing, only dullness?”

       “Yes!” came back the dream.

       I turned to my seat-mate and asked, “Is this a dull moment?”   He smiled, and we began to converse. 

Therapist Has Words, Will Travel

       Connie's home after more than a week in a skilled nursing facility for her painful back, and Kaiser's home health corps has followed.  Today an occupational therapist came in with practical help on things like getting on sox and jeans without twisting your back in doing so.

       I noted  a couple linguistic "twists" during the visit.   Connie was asked if she'd ever tried a "stockade."  "A what?" I thought, "Kaiser wants to put Connie in prison?"

       "Sock Aid" was the actual word.  This item helps you get your sox on without bending over or bending your knees, both of which are hard on the back.  You can see a picture of one here.

       Our therapist came in pulling a pack that rolled on wheels.   The carrying device looked strong and efficient, and as she departed, I saw it had a name:  "MAGNA CART."

Birds, Poems, and Reality

       How do birds sleep?  It’s a question I put online to answer a doubt I have every time I say a certain poem, which is often.

       The poem called “Today Is Forever” by Malka Heifetz Tussman speaks of a bird scratching a small trough for itself in the earth, lying in it like a crib, and resting.
 
       Do birds rest and sleep this way?

       My online informants testify to a good number of ways birds sleep, not only claw(s) grappled to a twig or branch; for example, huddled up on the floor of a bird cage, and I suppose the poet’s description to be a possible one also.

       I wish I knew all that David Attenborough knows, but I guess I am satisfied this poem does not transgress the bounds of reality.

Two Poems by Grandson Micah

Oh Wind

Oh wind I see you how you sway
to the left and the right.
You always make me sleep.

Oh wind you always make me dance.   
Your music is so beautiful
you sometimes make me laugh.
Your sways make me sway.

Micah Bernard (Age 8)

                                                               

Spring

Oh the Spring
A good time

We can enjoy the summer…
Solstice
Oh mighty rain
Give/our/plants/water
Says the desert man

Oh Spring finally you,
No more Winter

Micah Joseph Bernard
Age 11

                                                                                                                                                            

"Oh What a Tangled Web..."

       Another adage such as the one I brought up the other day, arose in conversation with friends.  We’d been talking about marital infidelity and how one lie can lead to another to cover for the first, etc., until the truth is suffocated.

       The saying we finally pieced together from our memories was the following:

            Oh what a tangled web we weave
            When first we practice to deceive.

This rhyming aphorism is a moral one rather than a practical one like “a pint’s a pound the world around” but very useful to remember!  It was said by Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott over 200 years ago.

Don's Sonnet to Connie for Mother's day

       Thou were you at first and only that to me,
       Your person, self, and life were one and all.
       Then wed we were and double joined to see
       If two could make one life, without a fall.

       That life has grown and mingled our true love
       And fashioned for us labor, joy, and smile,
       And made a marriage of earth and heav’n above:
       Husband, wife, and lovers all the while.

       Till double yoked we double child produced
       Of either sex in perpetuity;
       This two, now one, not halved, nor yet reduced
       But blissed and arched a rainbow progeny.

       Though children, husband, make thee Wife and Mother,
       No less, no more to me than wast, nor other.

       At the time I wrote this decades ago, I was asking my college students to memorize and perform a Shakespeare sonnet "by heart."  With this I think I was challenging my own understanding of the form by composing one.

"A Pint's a Pound the World Around"

       This is something Connie taught me that I’d never heard before but was a part of her "folk" knowledge.  These pithy, often rhyming catch phrases are useful and memorable.
 
       I know it now too and have used it.  Weighing myself this morning, as I do every day, I forgot to delay the two cups of water I also have every day to ward off kidney stones until after weighing; but I knew I could subtract one pound from my weight, and it would be accurate!  “A pint’s a pound the world around.”

A Friend Closed with "Sent from my smarter than I Phone"

       I trust there are others who resent "sent from my iPad" or "sent from my iPhone" as the closing line on an email.  (I understand the phrase cannot be eliminated from the message by customers;  triple the blame on Apple then.) 

       WHO CARES WHERE YOU SENT IT FROM?!

               sent from my toilet,
                       Don

Blog? What's that?

       Connie's home for first full day from skilled nursing facility. 

       I'm too tired and happy for words.

Creative Listening? (Or Hard of Hearing)

       When your hearing’s getting a little frayed around the edges, it can lead to some creative listening.   At dinner one night at in-laws and friends Jean and Michael’s house, it was noted that Michael’s father, now passed on, had not eaten meat.  Jean said, “But that was because of sexual issues.”

       I thought, then paused, finally asked, “Did you say ‘sexual’ issues?”  There was broad laughter at the table.
  
       Jean had said “textural.”  (Meat hard to digest?  I didn’t pursue the question.)  Michael was especially amused, realizing if I’d thought I heard “sexual,” why I just had to ask!

       We seem unable to live with a blurred, indefinite meaning; we’re gonna fill it in with the best we can make of it.

"Sonnetto for Furious Nursing Baby"

       I can't resist putting this poem in my blog.  It is scrupulously observed, and the language is perfectly attuned to its subject.


Frothy and pink as a rabid pig, you-
a mauler - a lunatic, stricken with

a madness induced by flesh - squeeze my skin
until blotched, nicked. Your fingernails

are jagged and mouth-slick. Pinprick scabs jewel
my breasts. Your tongue, your wisest muscle,

is the wet engine of discontent.
It self-fastens by a purse-bead of spit

while your elegant hands flail, conducting
orchestral milk, and sometimes prime the pump.

Nipple in mouth, nipple in hand, you have
your cake and eat it too. Then when wrenched

loose, you’ll eat sorrow, loss - one flexed hand twists,
as you open your mouth to eat your fist.
           
           by Julianna Baggott
             appeared in Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2010  
                Selected by Shafiq Naz

Comic Strip: Teenager Communicating with Parents

Click on Strip to Enlarge

"Cairo," Illinois; "New Madrid," Missouri

       On my way recently to the Los Angeles Radio Reading Service to read the day’s newspapers over the air for the blind and print-impaired, I heard an announcer on my car radio slightly uncomfortably pronouncing the name of a nearby town.  I wondered if he was new to the area.

       Then on our own broadcast, as my reading partner Mike read an article on the floods in the Midwest, I realized I had an advantage because I grew up in the Midwest while Mike grew up in Burbank.

       If you hadn’t heard it occasionally, how would you know the Illinois town “Cairo” is pronounced KAY-roe or that “New Madrid” in Missouri is pronounced nu-MAD-rid, not nu-muh-DRID?  We’ve all got some “inside” linguistic knowledge simply because of where we were raised.

Mark Swed's Joyous Writing about Music

       When a great music critic gets turned on, he or she can be as artistic a writer as any wielder of prose around.  I submit this paragraph from Mark Swed last week, written of young violinist Jennifer Koh, Chicago born of Asian background:

        "Her tone is big, bold and drop-dead gorgeous, just the thing for Romantic-era repertory.... Less than three years ago, she appeared at the Cerritos Center with the Moscow State Symphony as soloist in the soupy Bruch Violin Concerto.  A blindfolded listener could have been fooled into thinking that an American woman of Korean heritage in her early 30s was, in fact, a burly old-school Russian virtuoso in rumpled suit specked with dandruff reaching into the throbbing depths of a passionate, vodka-besotted soul."

      

From "Stem" to "Stern"

       I'm a speech person because I consider speech the source of language but I'll grant that visual symbols helped regularize speech and make it more widely accessible.  Those who favor words on a page or a screen, though, will have to grant that sometimes these visual entities get us screwed up.

       One of my favorites is how, especially in some fonts, the "m" and "n" and "r" can cohabit with one another in less than communicative ways:  the actress Laura Dern can change before your eyes into Laura Dem.  And the front and back end of a boat can both be the same, in the phrase "from stem to stern."

      Yes, the spoken word can mumble and jumble and hem and haw, but the printed word has its  special vulnerabilities.  And I shall never be happy with a front page story making me turn multiple pages to get to the rest of a single word that has been broken off in its middle while the thought that is an intelligible sentence evaporates!

My Only Joke

Wordplay

       Playing with words gets to be a habit.

       I recall the captured Boston Marathon bomber being forthcoming about his crime.  Then I wonder if he'd confess even more in a fifthcoming.

       But there was or is or will be a Second Coming.

       The first coming I remember---I must have been 15.
    
       If you're sonically-minded or speech-minded (and pun minded), no telling where words will take you.  (And some will wish there were no telling.)

       "Forecasting" anyone?

"Uptalk," "Vocal Fry," etc.

       There's worry about teenagers adopting certain speech traits which are au courant amongst their friends but offensive or annoying to their elders, including potential employers.

       One of these traits is an upward inflection at the end of declarative sentences, changing a statement into a question and doing it habitually.  The other is taking on a kind of gravelly voice into which meaningful utterances tend to disappear.

       This reminded me of when I was teaching speech to New York City college kids.  We tried to get rid of ng clicks ("Long  Gisland" ), intrusive r's ("Genar and Bob went to a movie"), saying "toime" for "time,"etc.

        A doctoral study found that those same kids who habitually spoke this way among peers would, without instruction, virtually eliminate these "faults" during job interviews.