More lies

I am, despite what it looks like, writing something for this blog. The material fought me at first, and frankly, is still resisting a bit, but I think I am within spitting distance of getting this to work. In the meantime, I want to apologize for the delay; it is unconscionable, but I hope to make good on it very shortly. Thank you for your patience. 

Investment advice from the fifth dimension

I got an email from my sister who’s not really my sister the other day, which is a relationship sufficiently out of the ordinary to call for some explanation. Barbara and her family lived next door to us in the Bronx, back in the days when Ike was the President of this our Great Republic and all was right in the world, except for the usual suspects like the Middle East, which was as intractable then as it is now. Barbara was a teenager then and whenever Mom and Dad had to go out, she’d come across the hall to baby-sit my brothers and me. Her own mother was in the last stages of lymphatic cancer then, so Barbara and my mother became very close during what had to have been an incredibly trying time.  Barbara always called our mother Mommy and we (my brothers and I) always thought of her as our cool older sister. She took us to the park and the playground and to the movies too; I still remember seeing Goldfinger and Thunderball—I was big on James Bond then; I had the action figures and everything—and Barbara took us all to see Mary Poppins when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in 1964, a year, I should point out to the younger readers, when there were no dinosaurs living in the New York City sewers or anywhere else on Earth, except for Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the shock wave from the asteroid hadn’t arrived yet. 

As time passed, Barbara’s fate was the fate of all cool older sisters: she went to college, she got married, and then she moved away and started a family of her own. We stayed in touch, though; she called her Mommy at least once a week, no matter where she was, and when we needed advice, we’d call her and talk to see what she thought. And we would listen to what she had to say, because her advice was always sound and because she was our big sister, and we loved her and her good opinion was important to us. 

So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I got an email from her the other day advising me to invest in hotels in the greater New Delhi area.  Like my mother, Barbara was always on the lookout for a good deal, although the sudden interest in foreign real estate puzzled me. She’d never shown any interest in the subject before she died last year of the same kind of lymphatic cancer that killed her mother in 1959 and I wondered why she’d developed such an interest now. But I suppose being dead broadens one’s horizons in much the same way that travel does, and getting investment advice from one’s dead relatives via email certainly makes more sense that having to go to séances run by Madame Griselda, who tells her customers that she is a Hungarian Gypsy and who is, in reality, a third generation Italian American from Secaucus, New Jersey, or cracking out the old ouija board and wondering what the spirits are trying to tell you. Email is a much more efficient form of communication than mediums, ouija boards, or even the occasional burning bush, even if burning bushes have a really good spam filter.

And getting investment advice from the dead certainly makes more sense than getting advice from some Wall Street financial type. With the latter you have to spend a good amount of time wondering if they are trying to get you to invest because it’s good for your portfolio or whether they want you to invest in one thing or another because they intend to make a fortune shorting the stock once they’ve gotten enough suckers to take the bait. With your dead relatives, on the other hand, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart, assuming, of course, that they weren’t organ donors and their heart is now in some checkout clerk at a Wal-Mart just outside of Boise, Idaho. It’s not like the dead have any interest in earning sales commissions or shorting stocks or have someplace to spend the money once they’ve earned it. There’s a good reason why there are no good delicatessens or Citroen car dealerships in American cemeteries and the steadfast immobility of the deceased labor market probably has something to do with that.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. We live in a cynical age and I know that you’re thinking that the person on the other end of those emails is not my sister who’s not really my sister, but some subcontinental digital goniff who hacked into her account and does not know that I am on to him and his thieving ways. I would be a terrible person if I even considered this idea for even a moment. If I did, then I would be the kind of person who thinks that someone who did something like this is the verminous spawn of a syphilitic latrine cleaner of the Bhangi caste and a leprous sow, a piece of filth who enjoys inserting razor blades into his own penis in order to alleviate the pain of his baseball-sized kidney stones and telling people that if they like their doctor, they can keep them. Well, maybe that last one is an untruth too far, but you get my point. We may live in a cynical age, but I refuse to allow this to affect my happy and joyous outlook on life or to wish my older sister who isn’t my sister all the success in the world in her new career in finance and real estate.

GIBBERISH AND ITS USES: Foreign language studies are an unjustly neglected part of American education these days, a fact that I think every American ought to feel a bit embarrassed and then more than a little concerned about. The study of foreign languages, like the study of history, expands the mind and slows the creeping provincialism of time and place that is all too often a defining characteristic of American civilization. It seems odd that in a society as relentlessly empirical as that of this our Great Republic there is no voice supporting the study of foreign languages as a tool for personal and professional advancement, but facts remain facts: Americans are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages. Indeed, one could make an excellent case that the troubles Americans have in learning foreign languages are dwarfed only by their struggles to learn English, an obscure West Germanic dialect whose native speakers are found, for the most part, on fairly large islands and pool halls.

The slow death of foreign language studies in American schools is counterbalanced by the growing demand for self-instruction CDs, so that the average person who wants to learn a foreign language may pick up the rudiments while driving to and fro from work. I can personally attest to the benefits of this approach, as I have spent a goodly number of transport miles deep in the study of Gibberish. My knowledge of Gibberish, although shallow at the moment, has already stood me in good stead. On my occasional photographic forays to the Great Metropolis, where I do my best to capture the indigenous inhabitants in their native habitat, a few well chosen words of Gibberish are often all I need to fend off the hordes of overly aggressive street vendors trying to sell me everything from a small A-bomb (the better to eliminate your boy/girl/whatever friend with a minimum of physical evidence left over to send you to the slammer) to tap dancing zebus (don’t ask). Faced with such a situation I merely say,
“Ag’du na cha’u’ay no tritogash angleskui.” Then I smile apologetically and say, “No spik Eeenglish.” I follow this blatant falsehood with a small bow and then walk away. The small bow is crucial, however; most Americans may not speak Gibberish with any degree of fluency, but everyone knows that Gibbers are an extremely polite people, almost as fastidious as the Japanese in their respect for the proper use of etiquette in any social situation.

Why, you might be asking yourself, would anyone choose to learn such an obscure language when there are so many other, more popular languages I could attempt to learn. There is Spanish, after all, which remains the most popular foreign language still taught in American schools, followed by French, Japanese, and Chinese. Latin is still extremely popular amongst dead people, as is classical Greek and Akkadian, and Akkadian, which is written on clay tablets with a wedge-shaped stick, also counts as a ceramics class credit in a good many universities nowadays. In the foreign language marketplace, Gibberish is a distinct nonstarter and yet this language has become wildly popular amongst the nation’s cultural and governing elites.

Why this is so is something of a mystery. The Gibbers are a small people, as ethnic groups go; most modern Gibbers and their country as well would fit comfortably inside a caravan of recreational vehicles heading up from Florida to see the grandkids over the summer holidays. But even with their demographic and geopolitical deficiencies, there is scarcely a capital city anywhere in the world where you will not find devotees of Gibberish. More than one modern politician has made a great name for him or her self for spouting nothing but the purest Gibberish in public, and the interested legal researcher can find whole passages in much of today’s proposed legislation written in nothing but Gibberish, usually without a convenient translation. The concerned citizen will often find such exercises in monolingualism in the section where the pol sponsoring this particular bit of boondogglery explains how the government is supposed to fund his legislative brainstorm. There’s nothing that brings out the inner Gibber in any politician faster than having to explain where the money is coming from; some things just sound better (and cost fewer votes) in Gibberish than they do in English.

Gibberish has also become extremely popular in many other walks of life, such as the arts and the academy. One can seldom read a critical essay on modern art, for example, without finding long purplish patches of Gibberish explaining why the reader is too dumb to recognize a modern masterpiece when they see it, a phenomenon that occurred with great frequency as the latter half of the late and now unlamented twentieth century slid its way towards a long overdue retirement. So much modern artistic criticism is written in Gibberish nowadays that it is difficult at times to tell the difference between a paean to the genius of Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol and the New York City regulations regarding alternative side of the street parking during a prospective snow emergency. The trick of distinguishing between the two seems to be that the latter tends to be a bit more abtruse than the former and comes with a large number of meter maids willing to ticket you for your inability to speak Gibberish well.

What is odd in all of this is that the Gibbers themselves have little use for law, the arts, or the academy. Natural anarchists, the Gibbers’ own revolutionary period began and ended when they set fire to their country’s only opera house as a wandering troupe of Wagnerians rehearsed Die Gotterdammerung while listening to the Beatles’ White Album inside. No one is quite sure whether it was Wagner or the Beatles that the revolutionaries objected to, but the troupe did escape from the fire unscathed and with the record unscratched. The record player, on the other hand, was a total write off. When asked about the cause of this terroristic action, one revolutionary told the press that the music sounded too much like the death scream of the yellowfin tuna for your average Gibber to bear, an excellent answer until one realizes that Gibbers live nowhere near the sea and so have no idea what sounds a yellowfin tuna chooses to make in extremis or whether they make any sounds at all beyond those necessary to give the fishermen the middle fin, but then no one ever said that the Gibbers were an especially bright group of people.

To return to the subject, and yes, I think it’s about time too, nowhere is the relationship between Gibberish and its devotees more intense than in the case of the modern academy. Your average professor will write more Gibberish in a week than your average literate Gibber, assuming you could find such a rara avis, will write in twenty years. The Gibbers banned compulsory education after a particularly acrimonious teachers’ strike in 1523 and now educate their children at home. Since most Gibber families are dumber than rocks, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the general level of educational achievement amongst Gibbers tends to be on the low side; they are, however, excellent at sharpening scissors, which is the national sport as well as their country’s leading export. Given this, it is something peculiar that academics find Gibberish so attractive. There are many explanations, but I think the most persuasive one is found in Gibberish’s ability to convey the most complex and subtly nuanced shades of meaning in more than a few words, something that plain English is incapable of.

Still, even with the language’s popularity amongst the elites, it is a shame that more people do not take the opportunity to learn the language. It is among the most beautiful of the unnecessarily polysyllabic tongues and it is among, or so I have heard, the easier foreign languages for an American to learn. I turn to it whenever my decades long pursuit of Spanish frustrates me to the breaking point. My attempts to learn Spanish have been an exercise in linguistic futility, leaving me with little more than the ability to order two beers and ask where the men’s room is. Important things to know, to be sure, but not something that will allow me to read Don Quixote in the original or impress a date with a well-chosen line from Garcia Lorca. Spanish, Polish, Danish, Yiddish, Swedish, Gibberish, Finnish already, they are all mysteries to me, I fear.

Okay, it's halfway through June and noting new here. I suppose I should get on with it and think of something. It's not like there isn't a lot to write about, it's just a matter of working up the mental energy to sit down and get on with it. I wish to report, however, that I am thoroughly sunburned, which looks fairly unattractive on me; other people tan, I merely turn deep red and then start shedding skin like a snake. This is not a good thing, I think. For those interested in such minutiae, I went to an annual festival here in our happy little burg, which is always fun once you get past the didactic leftism of the vendors and the entertainment. All of the little kiddies had fun, though. And out happly little burg is awash in Puerto Rican flags these days; the Puerto Rican Day parade must be coming up soon.

UPDATE: Working on something now, boys and girls; it will be up soon.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: It's done; typing it up tonight and, barring major rewriting, it'll be up tomorrow.