The New York apartment building Hugh and I live in isn’t terribly big. I wanted a nice view, so we’re on a high floor, the drawback being that we need to rely on the elevator—not for going down so much, but only my friend Dawn would carry a load of groceries up twenty flights of stairs. The building has doormen, so between me and the street there is definitely one, but more often, two or three occasions for small talk. Nobody likes this kind of thing. That said, there’s a definite art to it.Not long after we moved in, I was heading to the lobby, and a neighbor I would later get to know as Tommy boarded the elevator one floor below mine. He nodded at me, and as the doors closed I raised a finger. “May I ask you a question?”“Not if it’s about how much to tip the doormen at Christmas,” he said.That was exactly what I was going to ask. Quick, I thought, think of a replacement. “Can you recommend a cobbler?” I asked.
Now it is five years later. I’m on my way to the lobby and when a woman boards at 14, I ask, “How long have you known your dentist?”
She thinks for a moment. “Fifteen years. Why?”
“Just curious,” I say. “I knew my old one for almost that long but then we moved to New York and I had to start over.”
“And where did you move here from?” she asks. And then we’re off, pleasantly conversing until we part ways on the ground floor.
How long have you known your dentist is such a good icebreaking question, a real keeper in my opinion. I didn’t make it up, it’s not mine, rather I found it on Duolingo, an app my friend Dave turned me on to. He’d been using it to learn Spanish. Me, I started with Japanese. It offers over forty languages, free with ads, and free of them for a pretty nominal charge.
Each program features the same cast of animated characters: the excitable little boy, the bored teenage girl with hair covering her face. There’s an athletic-looking blond fellow, Vikram, who wears a turban, and Bea, who, according to her profile, is of West African heritage: eleven in all, including a talking bear named Falstaff. Sometimes Duolingo will give me a sentence in English: “How many desks are in the room?” and I have to translate it into Japanese choosing from the menu of words written in hiragana at the bottom of the screen. Other times I have to read a sentence out loud and the characters will either accept or reject me, based upon my pronunciation. My least favorite is when they give me the sentence and I have to write it in whichever language I’m studying. If you’ve only ever learned English you maybe don’t know that in other countries, “I gave her the suitcase,” might go, “I gave to her the suitcase,” or “I had to her the suitcase gave.” You have to grasp a new word order. Then there’s the spelling to worry about.
My friend Mike is learning Yiddish with Duolingo and one of the sentences it taught him is: “My uncle is a broken man.” I used its French program to freshen up before a trip to Paris not long ago, and was both surprised and not by the question, “What is he doing in our bed?”
I’m a dilettante, and always have been. Rather than really buckling down and mastering anything, I flit from one language to the next. Thus I noted how different Duolingo’s Japanese was from Duolingo’s German version. In the latter, the characters have definite opinions. “Your apartment is dark and ugly.” “I don’t like your sweater.”
They give the impression that German people are direct and judgmental, but also outdoorsy, generous, and sure of themselves. Thus such sentences as, “I’m sorry, but your doctor is playing volleyball today,” “I am giving one hundred toilets to my father,” and “Spain needs us.” There’s a lot of talk about witches, but no mention of them dating one another, this as opposed to Duolingo’s Japanese program where seemingly everyone is gay. “Is that your grandmother’s new girlfriend?” is one of the questions I was taught. Suddenly the guy with the headband on had a husband as well as a son. Even the bear was dating another guy.
Here’s a story: I was listening to “That’s Just the Way that I Feel” by Purple Mountains on the day I wrecked my wife’s truck. Here’s the truth: I was drunk on a Wednesday, the way I always was. I was in tennis clothes because I’d told my wife I had a lesson on Wednesday nights, allowing me to drink in the office till 8, then use the drive home to verbally practice stories about the lesson. I planned to give her an update on a fellow player, “Phillip Feetshoes,” who played in Vibram FiveFingers instead of tennis shoes. I’d mentioned him before; he was modeled after a regulatory lawyer I knew. It was summer in Austin, but I had the heat on high so I’d have a post-workout sheen of sweat when I got home. I thought about pretending the next lessons were a half-hour later, for 30 more minutes of vodka. Then I ran a stop sign, a subcompact smashed into the passenger side, I blew three times the legal limit and went to jail for the night. I vaguely remember trying to laugh off my field test performance and telling the police that the plastic zip lines they used instead of cuffs were environmentally unfriendly.I don’t actually know what song I was listening to, but it would have been a perfect story: the lead single from David Berman’s final album, chiming “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting” as I ran through a stop sign on August 7, 2019, the same day Berman hung himself. It was, in fact, the last day I drank.
The case of Manako Kajii—or ‘Kajimana’ as she was known in the mass media—had intrigued Rika ever since her arrest. Rika had been part of a different news team at the time but the case had continued to niggle at her, and she was now approaching the age that Kajii had been at the time of her arrest. The election coverage she’d been involved with up until now was wrapping up, and it seemed that she would finally be able to start pursuing stories at her own discretion.
‘I bet Kajimana eats an absolute ton! That’s why she’s that huge. It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her! Is her cooking that good, or what?’ Ryōsuke said.A chill ran down Rika’s spine. She saw a frown flit across Reiko’s brow and then disappear. Reiko had always been even more sensitive to misogyny than Rika herself was. But it wasn’t that Ryōsuke was particularly insensitive. What he’d just given voice to was, Rika supposed, the standard response of the average man. The reason the case had garnered so much attention was that this woman, who had led several men around by the nose and maintained such a queenly presence in the courtroom, was neither young nor beautiful. From what Rika could see from the photographs, she weighed over 70 kilos.‘Rather than trying to find a new lead in her case, what I’m interested in is the social background to it all. I feel that the whole case is steeped in intense misogyny. Everyone in it, from Kajimana herself to her victims and all the men involved, seems to have a deep-seated hatred of women. I don’t know whether I can really get that aspect across in a men’s weekly magazine like ours, but I want to try. I’ve written to her several times, though, and had no response. I’ve even been to Tokyo Detention House twice in person, but it seems she has no intention of meeting me.’
“We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed to be in charge”
The two girls return to ninth grade at the end of the summer. They have been in band since the early grades. While marching in the annual Zanesville parade they come to a sudden realization that band is weird and if they march in the parade, they will be in it forever. They make a break for it mid-parade.
A new cheerleader, not realizing that the two friends are not part of the in crowd, invites them to a ‘cool girls party’. There are boys there and the narrator feels even more awkward than usual, especially after Felicia gets paired up and she doesn’t.
Beard nails what it was like to move from childhood to adolescence in the days before cell phones. She wrote this book as a YA novel but adult women will be drawn back to the days when life was centred around wearing the right clothes, getting their first period, discovering boys, dealing with pesky and/or dysfunctional families and, above all, fitting in. I loved it.
I left New York for France in September 1968, a few months after les évènements de mai — the student riots, the barricaded cobblestone streets, the Molotov cocktails—and the end of a two-year love affair. The civil unrest in Paris still made the news but no longer the headlines. In a mood as gloomy as mine and a cityscape as grim as la Ville Lumière, I would easily fit in, dressed in black, sitting in sidewalk cafés, drinking endless cups of exprès, and smoking Gitanes.
It was not to be.
At the Alliance Française, one of my classmates is Czech. He fled to Paris soon after the Soviet Union invaded his homeland with $5 in Western currency in his pocket and a visa good for three months. For two months, Pavel and I practice our French together, explore Paris together, become lovers. With ten days remaining on his visa, instead of seeking asylum and remaining in the West, Pavel decides to return to Prague with stops along the way in Avignon, Nice, and Rome. He asks me to accompany him as far as Rome. I say yes. Read more
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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
In his October 1935 column for Esquire magazine called Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter, Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) shared his tips for writing with an aspiring author nicknamed ‘Mice’ (abbreviated from Maestro – on account of his ability to play the violin). In the guise of ‘Y.C’ (Your Corespondent), Hemingway addresses a young man who had in real life hitch-hiked from upper Minnesota to the writer’s home in Key West, Florida, to ask him a few questions about writing.
Leaving my home one morning I discovered a note taped to the outside of my front door. It read, "Please do something about your dog! The dog's barking each night is keeping me awake. I need my sleep!"After reading his note, I thought to myself, "What jerk." I then walked back into my house and wrote my own note, tearing his down. My note stated that I did not have a dog, that he was mistaken, and at the moment, in an unrestrained impulse, via in an insult... "If you have anything on your mind it can't possibly be anything more substantial than a hat, also, please take into consideration that the barking which you claim is disturbing your sleep, may likely be coming from your wife."A couple of days later, I found another note taped to my front door, stating, "There's no need for you to be hostile and sarcastic with me. Your note is mean spirited and beyond insulting. Let's bury the hatchet. I merely made a simple request. If I am wrong, then please accept my apology. All I was asking is for some peace and quiet if it is your dog barking at night. Sorry if you felt insulted...Your well meaning and neighborly friend"I discovered his note on my door once again. Later that night, I gave Rex some treats. He jumped up on the bed with me as he always did. I petted him and said, "Good dog. That's my boy. Who's daddy's best boy?" while, as I scratched his tummy as he howled. with delight.
