English Is a Disease: Catch It!

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part one of a trilogy. 

Remember SARS? From one apartment block in Hong Kong with dirty water slopping floor to floor, a killer disease spread around Asia and the world. It was in the newspapers every day, and everyone talked about it all the time.

English Corner at Taipei City Hall's Department of Information is that apartment building in Hong Kong. But it's clean. And there's no dirty water or sickness here—just great English. At English Corner, we speak great English, listen to great English, and write great English. English is the disease, and we're giving it to people every day.

Think about it. Diseases are bad—they make you tired, unhappy, and dead. But English is good. It makes you smart and interesting, and it can't kill you. Languages and diseases spread the same way: from person to person. Someone with a cold coughs on you, you catch a cold. Someone with good English speaks to you, you catch that, too. Lucky!

It will start slowly, but everyone in Taipei will catch the English. First, a few visitors to English Corner will catch the English. They'll talk with each other, and their English will get stronger. Then, those people will take the English back to their departments at City Hall. Without knowing it, they will pass it to their colleagues. And in all those offices, the English will begin to grow.

Soon, every part of Taipei City Hall will have caught the English. We'll be giving it to thousands of new people every day. The newspapers will take note: "Hey, City Hall's got the English—where did they get it?" The high school teachers will perk up: "City Hall's got the English—we want it, too." People all over—in Kaohsiung, Tokyo, and Seoul—will be looking at Taipei, asking, "How can we catch the English?"

Every day you pass by English Corner you can grab a new piece of English. The place is like a barbecue with all its delicious verbs and nouns sizzling and smoking. Pick one up and pop it in your mouth. Better yet, pick one up and pop it in your friend's mouth.

English Is a Shirt: Iron It!

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part two of a trilogy.

We all know the world is getting warmer and warmer. We drive in cars, we eat tasty hamburgers, we go to Julia Roberts movies. All the while, the big pieces of ice that cover the North and South Poles are getting smaller and smaller. They are melting.

Global warming will give us some problems. Every time you turn on the TV, Bangladeshis will be crying. The oceans will get higher, and we will have more floods and heat waves, typhoons and hurricanes. While this is happening, remember one important thing—you need a clean and wrinkle-free shirt.

The English language is that shirt. Think about it: when you are ironing it, you can whistle a happy tune. Everything is right in the world. English is the same: when you are learning it, your worry about other things flies away.

Ironing shirts is complicated, and English is complicated, too. On a shirt, you have to be careful around the buttons. They require skill. English grammar is just like that. Once, at a party, I tried to use the simple past (I ate a pickle) but instead used the future perfect progressive (I will have been eating a pickle). What a mistake! Everyone looked at me with hard eyes. But when they did, all they saw was my great-looking shirt—and they smiled.

Global warming is beyond your control. Can you reduce how much garbage you produce or pollution you create? No one can. Instead, worry about the things you can improve: your shirt and your English. The United Nations will do the rest. 

English Is a Rock: Skip It!

From a previous life. Intended for ESL students. Part three of a trilogy.

You walk along a river, whistling. A seagull flies overhead, screeching. A green rock lies in the shallow water, glistening. You think to yourself, The rock looks like jade, but only because it is wet. What will it look like when it is dry? This is a natural question. Go ahead.

English is that river rock. Think about it: There are millions of languages, but only one true language. You have searched your whole life, and now you have found it: the perfect skipping stone. When you pick it up and send it skimming across the clear water—plip, plip, plip—everything is right in the world. Clouds rack through the sky and airplanes fly to faraway places. Children take naps and teenagers sing pop songs on buses. Businessmen get massages. Trees breathe their hot breath.

Sometimes, in England, schoolgirls sing on the playground:

Are bicycles there to be ridden? Yes. Are presents there to be given? Yes. Are secrets there to be hidden? Yes. River rocks are meant to be skipped.

And English is meant to be spoken. The language is like a potato: hard, and popular in Ireland. So speak it! Speak it like it is a nickel in your mouth. Feel it warming up and clacking on your teeth. Spit it out in your hand. Take a look. This is the real thing, the real English. Pop it back in your mouth. Run your tongue along the smooth edge.

Have you ever been married? I was married once. I learned something: if you look at your wife’s cell phone while she is in the shower, you may find a message from "Marvin." But you don’t know a Marvin. The message might say, “You’re so cute. You left your socks here.” Hire a private detective.

Marketing and Sales on Civilization

 Some things shouldn't be told slant.

E. B. White on Imitation in Writing

"The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost impossible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good."

– E. B. White, in "An Approach to Style," which first appeared in the second edition (1959) of "The Elements of Style"

Describing: John Galliano

John Galliano. Image: Richard Avedon, 2003

Galliano’s personal hair-and-makeup team had been briefed in advance on the look he wanted to achieve, which was inspired by the evolution of dance. “I am feeling very Spanish tango dirty creepy with oily black hair,” he said. His stylist got the message: he glued a stringy goatee onto Galliano’s chin and trimmed it to a neat triangle; after that, he spent half an hour curling Galliano’s hair and then applied a thick coat of mascara to the lashes beneath his dark-brown eyes.

Galliano wore hoop earrings. His muscles were oiled, then covered by a layer of grime – so that he would look like a toreador when he took his victory lap. (Most designers simply dart onto the runway at the end of a show; a few take a quick stroll in the company of the models. Galliano struts the catwalk all by himself, and he does it with the hauteur of Naomi Campbell.)

– Michael Specter, in "The Fantasist," a profile of fashion designer John Galliano in the September 22, 2003, issue. 

Galliano, of course, is watching his professional life implode. His slurred anti-Semitic slurs in a Paris bar provoked Christian Dior, the fashion house that employed him, to terminate their 14-year relationship. It appears he'll also face charges for "anti-Semitic and abusive behaviour." Oh, and Natalie Portman is pissed. No word on Ashton Kutcher.

Specter today blogged an interesting update to his eight-year-old profile. While Galliano "deserves all the blame and ignominy that befall him," he says, he's amazed at people's  expressions of outrage. "Galliano’s act of self destruction was about as shocking as the widespread discovery, also this week, that Charlie Sheen is a vulgar fool."

I disagree with the cheap kick at Sheen – the slack-jawed television public seems committed to extracting a confession he has no obligation to give – but we can save the debate for our next drink. Say what you want about the guy, but "droopy-eyed, armless children" is genius.

UPDATE: More on the still-burning Galliano situation from Richard Brody, who is, appropriately, a New Yorker cinema editor. (It's possible he also does background work on period films about naturalists.) Galliano will be charged with injure raciale ("racial injury"), which is commoner in France than you'd think. Conviction would carry a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment and a fine of €22,500. 

Describing: Scientology Spokesman Tommy Davis

Tommy Davis with wife Jessica Feshbach. Image: i50.tinypic.com

I flew to Los Angeles and waited for him to call. On Sunday at three o’clock, Davis appeared at my hotel, with Feshbach. We sat at a table on the patio. Davis has his mother’s sleepy eyes. His thick black hair was combed forward, with a lock falling boyishly onto his forehead. He wore a wheat-colored suit with a blue shirt. Feshbach, a slender, attractive woman, anxiously twirled her hair.

– Lawrence Wright, in "The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology," in the February 14th issue

Describing: Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL

During his visit to Dulles, Virginia, a thousand AOL staffers crowded into a tent to hear from their new C.E.O. He walked onstage with his jacket unbuttoned and the knot of his yellow tie not quite pulled up to his shirt collar. He stands six feet four, and has a full head of wavy black hair, high cheekbones, and large front teeth. Although he limped slightly from an old hip injury, he exuded a sense of command. "Are you guys committed to putting America back online?" he bellowed.

– Ken Auletta, in "You've Got News," a profile of AOL's new CEO, Tim Armstrong, in the January 24th issue

Gopnik and Gladwell on Canada: Nation or Notion?

I know, I know: this debate between Malcolm Gladwell (l) and Adam Gopnik happened a while ago.  But they played it on CBC's Ideas last night in its entirety, and I listened to it and drank, sitting in my green chair, two glasses of Cono Sur merlot, on sale this week for $10.47 a bottle at the LCB.

By their applause, the crowd voted Gopnik the winner, I think because he was 35 per cent funnier. Both were powerfully interesting, though, and, I have to admit, a touch whinier than I'd have hoped. Below are the two primary arguments; judge for yourself.

(In his intro of the two writers, Maclean's national editor Andrew Coyne used a qualifier in front of "unique." Yikes.)

Friday Miscellany

Go ahead, try to find the link between Chinese propaganda, the Theory of Everything, dark thoughts about Peter Hessler, and the subtle virtues of pannioli.

I still read the magazine. These long absences as a sign not of a slackening regard for you, dear reader, but of a daunting work schedule. I know, I know: how long does it take to blog?

Anyway, the others are in a sales meeting right now—on the invitation I was listed as "optional"—and so I've stolen a few moments, in the now wonderfully deserted digital media bullpen, to give you a few recent thoughts about New Yorker articles that come to mind.

—The one about CTGZ, the Chinese propagandist (above) with piles of books all over his dorm room ("Angry youth," by Evan Osnos; July 28th):

1) Why isn't Peter Hessler (one of my favorites, and a writer for whom I could work up [okay, already feel] a dark mixture of envy and admiration for) covering this story?

2) His video sucked; Osnos's description of it does it way too much poetic justice. It looks exactly like something you'd produce on Windows Movie Maker in a half hour's patriotic arousal—which isn't to say it fails as propaganda. I watched it with a Mainland Chinese colleague, who, as it ran its six minutes, more and more got a sheen of "See?" and indignation about her, even as I snorted at the amateurishness and paranoia, crescendoing drums and strings.

—The one about the surfer dude who may have cracked the Theory of Everything ("Surfing the universe," by Benjamin Wallace-Wells; July 21st):

1) Everybody loves the idea of the rogue intellectual who comes in from the hinterland and solves the unsolvable problem. I'd never given a full thought to the idea that, within an academic discipline, proponents of the ascendant theory—in the particle-physics case, string theory—hold sway and make things miserable for dissenters like Garrett Lisi, this article's central character. I have a friend in linguistics who says it's this way with Chomskians (Chomskiites?) and Universal Grammar at the moment. That debate harks back, of course, to John Colapinto's fantastic (top ten, easily) article about the Piraha, who live in the Amazon rain forest

2) The dude has a novel way of consoling himself: "When Lisi encounters a physicist of his own age whose skill he envies, he reminds himself that he is a better surfer. When he comes across a better surfer, he thinks, I’m much better at equations." And I suppose if he comes across an older, better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I'm younger and hotter." Or if it's a younger, hotter better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I am distinguished in my carriage."

We all play this handicapping game in our minds, though, no? What do you say to yourself? (Ashamed as I am to admit it, one of mine once had to do with proficiency at golf. Now it's all gerunds and how well I hold my liquor.)

—The one in which Paul Simms shows, once again, that he's far and away the funniest bastard doing Shouts & Murmurs ("Stump speech," July 28th), with occasional competition from Jack Handey:

"I’m talking about the young man—a boy, really; he couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old—whom I met in an online game of Halo, who said to me, 'Headshot! Suck it! Pwned! Be less gay!,' after he had killed me by camping a respawn point, which really should be illegal.

"I’m thinking and talking about a man I met in New Carsmell, Vermont, before my campaign even began. He had inherited from his step-uncle, after much legal wrangling, the family diner. I remember as if it were yesterday asking this man for a ham-and-cheese sandwich. And he made me one. But, before he served it to me, he smooshed it down in this hot-presser thing that sort of looked like a copy machine. So, when it was done, the sandwich was like a flattened-out grilled cheese with ham, which the man claimed was an Italian delicacy. That thing was delicious. I can’t remember right now what it’s called, but more and more places are starting to serve them, so, if you ever get the chance to have one, definitely try it. I think it might have been called a 'pannioli' or something. Something Italian-sounding."

Okay, back to work. I hope you're well.