Month: November 2013

Following up on his post on young polyglots, Robert Lane Greene explores why some multilingual people associate different languages with different identities:

Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of “crib” bilinguals, raised in two languages?

Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behavior in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.

Casey N. Cep surveys a history of “literary siblings [who] challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks.” On the relationship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth:

Although they lived apart during much of their childhood, the siblings were reunited as adults and eventually cohabited for many years in the Lake District. In an essay on Dorothy, Virginia Woolf wrote: “It was a strange love, profound, almost dumb, as if brother and sister had grown together and shared not the speech but the mood, so that they hardly knew which felt, which spoke, which saw the daffodils or the sleeping city; only Dorothy stored the mood in prose, and later William came and bathed in it and made it into poetry.”

Dorothy would copy verses for her brother and assist him with correspondence, but she was also a talented writer. While she wrote little for publication, her journals, travelogues, and poetry are all now in print. It is clear that her writing influenced her brother’s or, as Woolf noted, that “one could not act without the other.”

It was Dorothy who made notes in her journal about a fateful walk the siblings took on April 15, 1802, when they “saw a few daffodils close to the water side … a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road.” Dorothy recorded that she “never saw daffodils so beautiful [—] they grew among the mossy stones and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced.” Only a few years later, William would return to that entry and craft from it one of the most iconic poems in the English language. Written in iambic tetrameter, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” captures “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.”

Speaking of William, Amit Majmudar recently invoked the poet when discussing his theory that literary genius is limited to a 20-year window:

The longest-lived English Romantic, William Wordsworth, spent the last few decades of his life writing now-unread political sonnets. Lyrical Ballads was first published in 1798, which was roughly the time he started The Prelude (which he worked on intermittently, and which was posthumously published, and which, incidentally, bores me to death). Poems, in Two Volumes came out in 1807—this is the volume that contained the Immortality ode and the one about the daffodils. The Excursion came out in 1814. After that, something in him shriveled. …

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written a handful of good novels, but his two, universally acknowledged best came out in 1967 (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and 1985 (Love in the Time of Cholera): Again, inside the twenty-year span. He didn’t write poorly before, and he hasn’t written poorly in the decades since—but within those charmed 20 years, he did the work for which he will be remembered. Likewise Flaubert: Between Madame Bovary and Trois Contes lie exactly 20 years. (He wrote a tremendous number of works before Madame Bovary, few or none published then, few or none readable today.) Rimbaud is another 19th-century Frenchman who follows the rule.

(Image of Dorothy Wordsworth via Wikimedia Commons)

An update on the little race with big implications:

In Douglas County, the slate of four Republican-backed school board candidates eked out a victory over the four teachers’ union-backed candidates after a contentious race that divided the community. That division was reflected in the election numbers: The Republican-backed candidates won by a slight margins of just a few thousand votes.

Jeb Bush applauds the results as others shake their heads. Andy Smarick looks ahead:

Though the surface takeaway is that the Douglas affair is one of conservatives and reformers taking over an affluent district, there’s a much bigger story here: We are likely to see many, many more episodes like this in the months and years to come, though there will be variations on the theme. As statewide teacher-evaluation laws, Common Core implementation, tougher assessments, and other reforms really begin influencing suburbia, the ed-reform debate is going to seriously evolve. New fault lines are likely to appear. I’m not sure what this will look like, but if we thought urban ed reform was contentious, just wait.

Also in Colorado, two out of three voters rejected Amendment 66, a proposal to fund public schools with a $950-million income tax hike. Jack Healy describes the outcome as “a warning to Democrats nationally” and “a drubbing for teachers unions as well as wealthy philanthropists” who spent $10 million in support of the campaign. But Joshua Dunn sees a silver lining for those who want more education spending:

While Amendment 66 went down in flames yesterday, Colorado voters – by an almost exactly inverse proportion – approved Proposition AA, which will tax our now-legal recreational consumption of marijuana. Over one-third of the revenue raised from that measure will be dedicated to funding school construction. … [T]o all the marijuana tourists out there: Please come to Colorado and support our schools. It’s for the children.

Update from a reader:

Let’s be realistic here: these races were not that tight.

The closest race was more than a 3.5% margin of victory and the largest margin was about 6.5%. By contrast, Obama beat Romney in the popular vote by 3.9% and no one except Fox News thought it was a close race.

But that doesn’t mean it’s all rosy for the GOP or education reformers.  I haven’t seen any exit polls or reports on turnout, but the GOP has a huge voting bloc advantage in Douglas County.  There are more than 100K registered Republicans and only 43K Democrats.  Assuming the vote went close to party lines (and turnout represented electorate demographics), that means a vast majority of the 73K independent went for the Democratic side.  Independents tend to get turned off by partisanship and negative campaigning, so it could have been more style over substance.  But this type of agenda won’t fly in most places.

Look at Boston.  The labor unions spent nearly $3 million through outside SuperPACs to help the labor machine candidate, Marty Walsh.   This chart on spending is remarkable. Overall, spending per capita on Boston race was 5x that of the NYC election.  Connolly (both are Democrats) did not run an anti-union campaign, but had a reform mentality on education issues in particular. And Walsh is about as reliable a labor supporter as you’ll find anywhere.  So, Douglas County may have a $800,000 school board race, but Boston had a $9 million mayoral contest.  And Walsh “eked out” a 2 pt win.

Ayun Halliday points to footage of a 30-year-old Woody Allen performing on British TV in 1965:

It does a body good to see him at this ‘childlike’ stage of his career. … As [Allen] told journalist Eric Lax in Conversations with Woody Allen:

“…comics are childlike and they are suing for the approval of the adults. Something goes on in a theater when you’re fourteen years old and you want to get up onstage and make the audience laugh. You’re always the supplicant, wanting to please and to get warm laughs. Then what happens to comics — they make it and they become a thousand times more wealthy than their audience, more famous, more idolized, more traveled, more cultivated, more experienced, more sophisticated, and they’re no longer the supplicant. They can buy and sell their audience, they know so much more than their audience, they have lived and traveled around the world a hundred times, they’ve dined at Buckingham Palace and the White House, they have chauffeured cars and they’re rich and they’ve made love to the world’s most beautiful women — and suddenly it becomes difficult to play that loser character, because they don’t feel it. Being a supplicant has become much harder to sell. If you’re not careful, you can easily become less amusing, less funny. Many become pompous… A strange thing occurs: You go from court jester to king.”

For another piece of obscure footage, below is a reel of bizarre ads Woody did for Seibu, a Japanese department store, in 1982:

Amber Frost captions:

From what I can tell from Seibu’s original press statements, Japan wasn’t even particularly aware of Woody Allen at the time! Seibu’s executives said they wanted someone who was an “adult” to represent their brand. One said “being good-looking is not enough.” You’ll note that Allen’s name is never mentioned in the spots. It’s amusing to wonder if he was hired more for being a “funny looking white guy” than for being Woody Allen.

Lisa Miller checks in on Newtown. A glimpse of the inevitable infighting that follows such tragedies:

As grief settled on the town, so did money.

Cash poured in from everywhere, arriving in envelopes addressed to no one. To Newtown. The town of Newtown. The families of Newtown. There were stories of cheerleaders, having sponsored fund-­raisers, walking around with $30,000 in their pockets. A guidance counselor at Newtown High School reportedly opened the mail to find $1,000 in cash. Around the country, people sold ribbons, bracelets, cupcakes, and sent in the proceeds, five and ten dollars at a time. The Davenport West honor society in Iowa sent in a check for $226.69, and the parents of a 3-year-old named Lillian sent $290.94, donations from her birthday party. According to the Connecticut attorney general, about $22 million has flooded the town since December 14, finding its way into about 70 different charities set up in the wake of the massacre. Very quickly, the matter of disbursing these funds became something else, a proxy fight over how to evaluate grief. …

The biggest fund by far was the one set up by 9 p.m. the day of the attack, under the auspices of the United Way of Western Connecticut. By April, it held $11 million, and local psychiatrist Chuck Herrick was named president of the board of the fund, a position that has made him one of the most unpopular men in town. It was Herrick, along with a handful of others, who had to help calculate the disbursements to the parents of murdered children, and who had to defend those calculations when the bereaved accused the United Way of being unfair, insensitive, condescending, elitist, paternalistic and, in a mantra recited by the grieving, of “raising money on the backs of our dead.”