A Swedish Cheferizor?

One thing I've discovered since moving to Stockholm is that this guy actually mimics the funnier parts of the Swedish language pretty accurately! (Also, yes, everyone here is aware of him, and actually pretty proud.) I think I need to spend a little bit more time studying exactly how the Swedish Chef does it, because it's amazing to me how quickly I can get an accent stuck in my head these days. Two episodes of True Blood and I have to stop myself from slipping into the Louisiana rhythms that Anna Paquin does so well, at least to my Yankee ear. I can manage, most of the time, to keep it from my voice, but my thoughts for the next hour or so are as twanging as they come.

When I lived in China, I lost my ability to spell, something I can only attribute to the lack of letters. Mandarin, despite what the BBC may have said during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony broadcast, does not have an alphabet of any sort, and the pictographs sucked the phonics right out of me. Here in Stockholm, I wonder if the reason I'm so susceptible to an American English accent that differs from my own in pronunciation, granted, but mostly in rhythm, has to do with Swedish itself. 

Kiruna is a place in the far north of the country. It's well-known here, if only because there are so few places up there with any significant amount of people. If you read this word out loud, however, and you are not Swedish (or Danish or Norwegian, but I digress), odds are a Swedish person would have no idea where you were talking about. The problem wouldn't be the way you said the consonants or vowels, however. No tricks like that in that word, unlike some others. The problem would be the emphasis. To an American, Ki-RU-na would be a perfectly reasonable rendition. Not so much in Swedish: say KI-RU-NA, hitting each syllable as hard as you can, and Swedish eyes will light up in recognition and relief, grateful that they don't have to deal with the embarrassment of talking to a idiot and appearing impolite. They're really not big on embarrassment here.

So, as is probably clear, I've been spending a lot of time listening to the rhythm of this language and keeping my mind and ears open to those nuances. It's not really surprising, then, that I'd accidentally pick up on a few others. It's something that is distinctly harder for me to manage than accurate Chinese tones. (I may be one of the few people in the world who is like this, I'm well aware.) Next experiment: start speaking the Swedish I do know while doing my best Sookie Stackhouse imitation. It might actually get me closer.

This Gives Me Hope

No matter how many times it's said, I never tire of being reminded that writing is, above all else, a process. This in no way guarantees that everyone's process will ultimately pay off in publication, much less literary immortality, but it is a good reminder that these guys had drafts that looked like mine do now. And look at what we wouldn't have had if they had stopped short. 

Check this out if you need some of that reassurance yourself. I especially like Marcel Proust's graphic, random, method of organization.

New Blog to Follow in Light of "Cinderfella"

Somewhere in my virtual wanderings, I stumbled across Maria Tatar's blog, Breezes from Wonderland. Tatar is a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, and is the author of huge amounts of approchable scholarship on fairytales and folklore. 

Needless to say, I think she's pretty great. 

Recently, she's been behind the translation of some of the newly rediscovered Bavarian folktales (as I mention below), collected by a scholar back when the Grimms were active, and it's worth a read. We don't often see a prince in distress around these parts, for starters. (Or "Cinderfellas," as she terms them.) The language is also still very close to a direct oral transcription--that and several story elements indicate pretty clearly that this piece hasn't been put through the literary filter that colors most of the stories we think of as fairy tales today. Don't let the awkwardness of reading (vs. listening to) an oral piece keep you from checking this one out.

What I really love about this whole 'rediscovery' thing, despite some of the strange elements to the story (apparently a copy of them, in German, had been in Harvard's Widener Library, among other places, the entire time), is that lack of literary and cultural filter. I'm not yet proficient enough in Swedish to check out their chidren's lit, but I definitely know that male characters in the Anglo-American fairytale canon are almost always female. Tatar theorizes in The New Yorker that this might be due, in part, to the storytellers themselves being female and therefore favoring the stories with female protagonists. I can't help but see another layer on top of that--namely, Disney's particular cultural (and gendered) take on the particular stories that were around for the taking.

All that said, check out Tatar's blog!

This American Life's retraction and the question that actually matters

I’m not a fan of This American Life. This will come as a shock to anyone (or any robot) crawling through this site gathering demographic information, because I fit the listener profile to a T: well-educated in the humanities, a writer, a liberal, a youngish white woman who listens to NPR almost constantly the rest of the time.

But the show just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a combination of things, I think. They tell a very structurally-specific type of story, one which, as they say on their website, centers around characters, conflict, and a universal takeaway. Clearly, I do love stories with characters and conflicts, but I find the ever-present universal takeaway on this show a bit too easy, something that allows listeners to feel as though they’re participating in the world simply by joining in the larger feelings-session. (More on this, specifically, later.) Also, I just don’t like Ira Glass’s delivery.

So when I realized last weekend that I was likely to be driving a uhaul truck over the Sunol grade from noon to one pm, smack in the middle of the This American Life broadcast on KQED, I was all set to bring my ipod and listen to another podcast. That is, I was going to listen to something else until I remembered that this weekend was Retraction Weekend, a one-hour show about a January episode entitled “Mr. Daisy Goes to the Apple Factory.” As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. Daisy was less than truthful about what he found in Shenzhen, and This American Life was retracting his piece and spending an hour talking about how and why this had happened. So I tuned in.

This piece encapsulates my impression of the general fact-checking failure; to put it briefly, Daisy told Glass that his translator, Cathy, could no longer be reached. That was that, until holes started showing after the original piece aired back in January. When Glass and his team started looking into things, Daisy said that, actually, her name was Anna, not Cathy, and he didn’t think she’d like to be contacted as she hadn’t known she was in a story at all.

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Pretty awesome local news

The DREAM act gets some momentum.