From Ariane to Zabergau

For about 5 minutes on New Year’s Day I had the insane idea to eat an apple a day this year in the spirit of the old adage. The biggest obstacle to such a resolution is that I don’t really like apples. They're not altogether unappetizing, but bad experience has turned me off because it is too easy to get a mealy one. There is little worse than taking a bite of an apple and having it go all grainy in your mouth. Horrible.

But I do like a firm apple, and as a word person I’d love if there were more varieties with romantic and evocative names available. This great article mentions the Blue Pearmain, Pound Sweet, Wolf River and Black Oxford. I would try those just for the bragging rights.

If I could get my hands on them. As in the US, in Germany supermarkets offer the same ubiquitous varieties ad nauseam:  Pink Lady, the two Deliciouses, Granny Smith, Fuji, Braeburn, Jonagold, and Royal Gala. If I could drive I could get out to the nearby orchards and get other kinds, but alas, I am not licensed to access unusual apples.

Still, as of today I’m signing up for an apple-a-day January, and will see how it goes. Today I’m doing an Elstar, originally a cross between the Golden Delicious and Ingrid Marie apples. I am not brave enough to bite right into it, but will be using a sharp knife. 

Oh my Darling

The new issue of Prick of the Spindle includes my poem “Clementine.” It’s an object poem, and about the fruit rather than the miner’s daughter. The fruit in a state of decay. Advanced state of decay. Like ready to take off.

It only occurred to me after writing the poem that maybe we don’t call this fruit clementine in English (though I checked now and we do). What the difference is between clementines, mandarins, tangerines, and tangelos is, I don’t know. 

Poet friends Kathleen Kirk and Dana Martin Guthrie also have poems in this issue, so please proceed directly to GO and collect $200.

ID

Last night I was walking the dog in the park and a man recognized her and said she's usually out with your husband, the man with the French accent. I laughed, my husband being Italian.

One of the last times I got together with my father he said my hair gets darker every time he sees me. Was I doing something to it?

We all live under an assumed name. There is no deep stamp on us.

When I called our editing desk in London recently, the person on the other line said, oh it's you, I recognized you because of your German accent.

My husband addresses me by the name nearest at hand. Our daughter's, our dog's, his best friend's wife.

In the morning I take a pair of pants out of the drawer and wonder could these be mine.

Get your kicks on Autobahn 6

Saxony was a surprisingly interesting place to visit. We stayed in an area called “Saxon Switzerland,” which is hilly and full of impressive rock structures, as well as the Elbe river, which famously flooded ten years ago. We saw some great sites I didn’t know existed, including the Bastei and the Königstein Fortress.

I cock an eyebrow whenever someplace claims the fame of another, e.g. “the Florence of the north” (Dresden), or “Little Venice” (London has one, so does Sweden, not to mention the cities of Treviso, Chiogga, Vrobska, etc.), or the personally painful “Mainhattan,” the New York-wannabe nickname for Frankfurt (am Main). It’s lame to rely on resemblance to make a place sound worthwhile. Without exception, the area making the claim is not going to measure up. 

Why the area we visited is called Saxon Switzerland I do not know, and not to ruin the experience I will not inquire further. I’ve been to Switzerland. It’s mountainous! Stunning! Expensive! And riddled with kitsch.

i sing of Olaf

I’ve lived in Germany so long I’m thinking of changing my name to Wolfgang. I like it most because it’s got a wild animal in there, and though you may think it refers to a gang of wolves, “Gang” in English means “gait,” so it is more like “(s)he who walks like a wolf.” Which could practically be a movie.

Not for me Lothar or Uwe or Klaus or Ulrich. As for women’s names, well, there just aren’t any I’m crazy about, except maybe Kunigunde. But the last time a girl was given such a name was around 1230, so it would be difficult to wear comfortably. 

Most people have, at least as children, come up with a name they would have preferred to have. My son, for example, wishes I’d gone with Jack instead of Miles. An acquaintance, whose son’s name is Max, says the boy complains that that’s a dog’s name. 

I have wondered if we give our children the names we would have wanted for ourselves. For me it's not the case. When I chose my daughter’s name, Luisa, it struck me as a dark, sensual name because of the deep /u/, and very feminine. But it was never the case that I said, “I wish my name were Luisa.” And I never would have named my son, or daughter, Wolfgang.

Tears, who needs them

Cedar smells better than lilies, and does not sicken the audience as it fades.

Camus suffered from tuberculosis for years on end, an ailment compounded by heavy smoking, but a car accident killed him within seconds.

Exercising one's willpower over a bad habit just for the sake of saying so is exchanging one weakness for another.

In the barracks of Russian labor camps, those who had memorized stories were the most prized inmates.

What could ever be objective about choosing between the last names Motherwell and Frankenthaler?

I considered learning Spanish to read Garcia Lorca, but if I pursued that line with consistency I'd also have to learn Portuguese to read Pessoa, Polish to read Szymborska, Serbo-Croatian to read Vasko Popa, Russian to read Akhmatova, etc. etc. und so weiter.

The bulb throwing its dim light down the steps like grey fur.

Misread "abominable teeth" as "abdominal teeth."

Cabbages & Kings

One linguistic tic that seems pre-programmed to annoy is using the name of the person being addressed to punctuate a sentence, e.g. -
"I have a few questions about your report, Bill."
"There's something I don't understand, Joan."

Unlike placing a name at the start of the sentence, where it asks for someone's attention, using the name at the end seems patronizing, a mark of presumed superiority. With it the speaker takes a stance. It's even more pompous used in writing than in speaking, when it's completely clear to the reader that s/he is the person being addressed.
"There's one thing that sits oddly with me about your comment, Nathan."

A friend in the office says this linguistic device is taught in business school as a way of "establishing closeness with an employee." Gack. More like a way of demonstrating bossdom. To me it's the linguistic equivalent of someone poking you in the chest when talking to you.
I do admit there are times when it could be used simply for innocuous emphasis. But even in a positive sentence it seems weird, e.g. "I really like this cake you made, Bill."
Does that make it seem like the speaker was expecting not to like the cake?

I'd be interested to know what others think. I should take more time to read linguistics! Maybe I will.

Anyway, in a tenuous segue from linguistics, my poem Liaoning Snapshot is up at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Ages ago I taught and studied in Liaoning province in a city named Dalian, another huge Chinese city no one has ever heard of, whose cabbages inspired the poem.

Baby Names

Combine Ethel and Ethan and the results are almost lethal, but not to worry because even though non-native speakers find them equally hard to pronounce, these two are never seen together.

In many things they are the inverse of each other. Ethel is, for example, tight as lips around a cigarette, tight as a perm at Saturday noon. Ethan, on the other hand, is loose, his shaggy hair uncombed. His taste tends to those baggy jeans that made boxer shorts a million.

While Ethan was the 2nd most popular boy’s name last year, Ethel was #7202 on the girls’ list. Reverse the clock by 92 years, and it’s the other way around.

Ethel and Ethan are like twins separated at birth, albeit about nine decades apart. A few years before Ethan’s popularity began its upward climb, Ethel, piece by piece, virtually dropped off the face of the earth.

Ethan is working hard to keep those pieces hidden.


Tomorrow: Nathan and Lilith.

the france less traveled

Dingdon
Hermit
Whimper
Pays à Lot
Eyesore
Cher
Trés Cher
Bois Sauvage
La Flopp
Forgerie
Lac de Funds
Chateau Morose
Pointe Strangl
Funerale
Giesz Louise
Alibi
Moustache Blanche
Le Spazz

and there in a wood

I've had some time off, which means walking the dog. On one of my many journeys through the park, I was naming the trees (Octopussy, General Grant, Burgermeister Meisterburger, Frau-Frau, Funeral, Scarface...), and it occured to me that the famous Bong Tree of The Owl and the Pussycat fame must be the Baobab.

"They sailed away
for a year and a day
to the land where the Bong tree grows.
And there is a wood...."

Don't ask me why I had this revelation on a frosty grey German day. There wasn't a Baobab in sight. But recently I’ve been leafing through a book called Remarkable Trees of the World, which features a number of fabulous Baobabs. It's also called “the bottle tree” (and you need a bottle to make a bong, right?). It's also called “the monkey bread tree,” “the cream of tartar tree,” “the chemist tree,” “the sour gourd” and “the lemonade tree.” And get this - there's a place in Tanzania called Bong'wa where this tree grows. Tanzania is a coastal country, thus reachable by peagreen boat. I know I've sometimes taken the Owl & Pussycat thing too far, but I'm sure Edward Lear couldn't resist slipping Baobabs into his poem, disguised as water pipes.

This photo shows Baobab alley in Madagascar, which, as you probably know from playing Risk, is an island off the eastern coast of Africa that split from the continent 160 million years ago. Since then you've had to sail there, although of course these days you could also fly.

There are different species, but mostly Baobabs are famous for just being weird and difficult to climb. You can see more here & here. And here are a bajillion more.

the priest sat in the airport bar, he was wearing his father's tie

The name of the tram stop two stations south of mine has been changed. What used to be Versorgungsamt is now Prieststrasse. Until just recently the Versorgungsamt, a state office that deals with subsidies for maternity and paternity leave, was here, but apparently they’ve packed up shop. Versorgungsamt translates literally to something like the “care-taking office.” The nearest intersecting street is Prieststr., so the stop has been renamed, even though the priest surely left ages before the care-taking office did. There is neither a state office nor a Christian authority at this stop to care for you. What is there, and very prominently, is the new Jewish cemetery. It’s easy to identify because of the bright Hebraic script above the entrance, but otherwise it’s fairly nondescript. The best name for the stop would have been "New Jewish Cemetery," but as you might imagine, those who take care consider it better not to draw attention to this.

Threw the Book at Him

Unlike the free world, you can’t name your kid anything you want in Germany. It has to be a recognized name that’s appropriate to the child’s sex and not dreamed up on your last gin bender. Thus there is no Moon Unit or 4Real; and no, unlike a New Jersey couple, you can’t name your child Adolf Hitler. The only exception is for foreigners. I was allowed to name my son Miles because as a foreigner I’m not subject to the great book of names. (I do have to suffer the very original joke about Lufthansa’s frequent flier program in regard to Miles’s name, but by not laughing I try to teach by example.)

Although German parents can’t name their kids Apple, there aren’t restrictions on how many names they can give him/her/it. This struck me today as the country got a new economics minister named Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. Especially charming is the last name “von und zu Guttenberg,” meaning “from and to Guttenberg.” He can’t decide. All those names have confused him.

Kind of makes you dizzy, no? And a little sick to your stomach?

the joneses

Our new aupair is here. He came in on a bus from siberia. It took 5 days. I always worry we won't find the aupair at the station when s/he arrives. And if i get in the bus and yell "Dmitriy!," half the males answer. Anyway, he's really tall. So riding my bike is out. Also the bed in his room may have to be chopped for firewood. I don't even know how tall he is. But it's no problem because my husband is a gigantic talker. The good thing is he can help us spy on the neighbors' gardens. We've needed some help with that.

embedded in my name

Alas, Torahs
Has La Roast
As A Harlot’s
Aloha Tsars
Aha! Lass Rot


Your name here.

miles primo

Happy birthday to Miles,
who turns 9 today.
He neither smokes nor
plays guitar, and I hope
he'll skip the former.

Before he was born I considered naming him Jack, but Carlo didn't like Jack and it turned out that half the boys born in 1998 were named Jack. I also liked Dexter, but the Italian in-laws said that sounded like a robot name. I liked Quinn, too, but the Italian in-laws could only pronounce "queen," so that was out. Fletcher was briefly considered, but my brother Thatcher said he'd never survive the playground (I still like Fletcher). Morgan was a last-minute contender, but it disturbed my father as a preppy name for a beauty-pageant-type girl. I don't live in the US so some of this cultural nuance was lost on me. My father even called the night before Miles was born to "discuss" it, which I found rather touching, to be honest, that he cared that much. But it didn't matter because we'd already decided on Miles, middle name Primo after his paternal grandfather. Of course Miles would way rather be named Jack. What can I reply except "if only my parents had named me Maybelline!" Whatever, he is such a crazy wonderful boy that I always say I wish he'd been twins.