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VAGUE ETHNICALITY

Sue B. responded to "Lost by an Ethnicality":

I had to laugh when I saw your Parvum opener. It made me recall a conversation at Easter dinner. I was at my friend's house and she was talking about her son who plays in orchestras for Broadway and off-Broadway shows. He has a new girlfriend who is half African-American and half Italian. The new girlfriend is a dancer. She had auditioned as a dancer for an upcoming show. Though the people she auditioned for told her that she was a good dancer, they said they were looking for black dancers and her ethnicity was "vague". They couldn't hire her. Just imagine the new US census with the added ethnicity category of "vague".

Well, things continue to be nuts, don't they? African-American and Italian don't become "vague" when mixed. It used to be that if a person had any known or visible traces of black African heritage, that person was officially "black" ~ the "one drop" rule. Now one still has to pick one from column A and that's all.

Tiger Woods, of course, refused to play this game. He is of mixed heritage and calls himself Cablinasian, as in Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian. Made people mad, mostly black Americans. I don't recall any real outcry among the Ca-In-As segments.

DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE

Dave DaBee sent this, which really belongs in Scott Adams (Dilbert) annals of In-duh-viduals:

Meanwhile, on a conference call tonight, the speaker said "I mean, LITERALLY, LITERALLY, we are going to draw a line in the sand around the situation ~ that's a boundary condition, isn't it?"

"Boundary condition"?

I'd like to see that speaker stick his head in the sand and then draw a line around it. Literally.

HOW ENGLISH MAJORS HAVE FUN

My friend Jes, English professor suprema, passed on some entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, "The Dark and Stormy Night Contest" run by the English Department of San Jose State University. Contestants write only the first line of a very bad novel of their own imagining. The contest honors the memory of a 19th century writer who is mostly otherwise forgotten, but whose opening to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford lives on with Snoopy and others:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents ~ except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Well, I've read worse. People smirk at the redundancy of "dark night" but in fact some nights are lighter than others. If you have a full moon and no clouds, visibility can be quite good. But I digress.

I submitted an entry to the Bulwer-Lytton contest some years back, but unfortunately didn't get even a dishonorable mention, and my writing was as bad as anyone's. I don't have my entry anymore but I remember an albino was involved.

I kind of like this entry in this year's Purple Prose category:

The golden-haired dawn curled back the fading face of night in a perpetual coiffure like an Ace comb in God's hand parting the day, making pompadours of mountains, crew cuts of Kansas wheat fields, and trendy cuts of the oceans' rolling waves.

Gordon Grant

Savannah, GA

But there are other bad writing contests. The Faux Faulkner and Hemingway Parody contests were formerly sponsored by Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, but they've dropped it because last year's winner was politically partisan, according to Folio. I don't know where the contests have gone. I hope they come back. While trying to track them down, however, I found Annotated List of Best Language Sites, with some interesting links to sites about language.

IT NOT FAIL THEM

At last I've found The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English online, or at least a bit of it, a phrase book of which Mark Twain wrote, "One cannot open this book anywhere and not find richness." Here's an excerpt from the chapter "For to see the town":

There is it also hospitals here?

It not fail them.

It's unfair to make fun of a person's mistakes in English, or any other language foreign to him, but it is required to make fun of anyone who would write a foreign-language phrase book who is so bad at it. Twain said he was not the first person to mine this gem by one Pedro Carolino.

HOW DO YOU SPELL C*l_a siS

Son Foy passed along a paragraph that's been making the rounds for a while of all misspelled words. The theory is that if you have just the first and last letters of a word, people can figure out the middle, therefore spelling doesn't matter. I won't reproduce it because I wrote about this in PO 41. But this time it reminds me of the way spammers get past your spam filters by fooling with the spelling of the words that are most likely to trigger them, for instance certain drugs, especially the ones that promise to enlarge and improve body parts.

MYSTIC

The retreat Fred and I organized for Bernadette Roberts yielded no PO material, except for something I may have discussed before. This is the confusion about what "mystic" means. It does not mean spiritualist or magician or mysteriousness. In a Christian context, and even in Buddhist and Sufi and other religions (if Buddhism can be called a religion, since it does not discuss a god), a mystic is a person who has attained union with God or enlightenment. One fellow of my acquaintance, a bright guy (though not on the PO list), asked if it meant someone like David Copperfield? Or maybe in the old days, Jesus? There's a guy who wasn't taken to Sunday School when he was a boy. You may never hear the concept of mysticism in a Protestant church or even a Catholic church (the Christian writers on mysticism, such as Saint John of the Cross, were mainly Catholic), but if you went to Sunday School you could never come away putting Jesus in the same category as David Copperfield.

SO MUCH DEPENDS

Today I saw a wooden wheelbarrow painted red decorating someone's front yard, a suburban front lawn that would not have garden implements lying about carelessly. I wondered if they knew William Carlos Williams' poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow".

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

It was raining hard today, too, but there were no chickens, just a wandering deer that had gotten lost from the woods across the main road. Nearby on a small farm a young deer has been grazing with a half-dozen cows ever since its mother was killed on the main road last year. I don't know if it found the cows or the farm owners found the young deer and brought it into the field.

SOMETHING NEW! Check out the new "I Eat Dead Things" T-shirts for dogs and people, and the Protestant Work Ethic items in the Parvum Opus CafePress shop, plus a new Parvum Opus mouse pad! Now you can buy neat products with the Parvum Opus / KeithOps Catti logo at CafePress.com/parvumopus.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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