Single All the Way - a film review

 There are so many ways to look at art criticism. As a teacher, I've always been fond of the self-deprecating line, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." I get a superior feeling from acting humble. I've seen a lot of bad teachers, but probably even more good ones, so I'm very proud to be associated with the teaching profession. Right up there, I think with the nursing profession. People who see how wretched things can get but are not deterred, and go on acting as if the world can be made a better place.

There's a corollary to "those who can't, teach...," an extension. Those who can't do and who can't teach become critics.

A friend I share movie recommendations with just recommended Single All the Way to me, the Christmas film Netflix released two months ago, on December 2nd, in time for the Christmas season. One of those smarmy Hallmarky-type films (this one's Canadian) aimed at middle-class America. The type serious critics sneer at. The play on words with "Jingle All the Way" is trying too hard to be cute, maybe, but when you go Hallmark, I guess you go all the way. 

First, let's get its limitations over with, legitimate reasons a critic looking for insightful drama, tension or originality might find it wanting. It's got the most clichéd of plot lines - boy goes home to his small town family for Christmas, realizes what treasures they are (the town and the family) and leaves his fast-track life in the big city (Hollywood, in this case) behind. And if that were not enough, it pushes the plot lines until they scream: the perfect solutions to his dilemma all fall in his lap, although the story does need a deus ex machina to make it work; the boyfriend writes one children's book which makes him enough money to live months without a job; and people encounter other people at just the right time to make the story cohere.

Peter, our protagonist, played by Michael Urie of Ugly Betty fame, works on social media campaigns in Los Angeles and hates his job. He decides to go home for Christmas, but dreads all the gas he knows he's going to get from his family because he doesn't have a boyfriend. He persuades his roommate and best friend, Nick, played by Philemon Chambers, to come with him and pretend to be his lover to keep his family off his back. But before he can tell his mother that he and Nick have gotten together romantically, his mother, played by Kathy Najimy, who showed her acting chops playing Sister Mary Patrick, the with-it nun, in Sister Act in 1992, has set him up with James, her gym trainer, played by Luke Macfarlane, who played the gay lover of Kevin, one of the brothers in the 2006 TV series, Brothers and Sisters.

I know this is too much information squeezed into one short paragraph, but I did it for a reason, which I'll get to in a minute. Nick, it turns out, really is in love with Peter, but has never told him so. The feeling might be mutual, but Peter has a terrible record of not being able to make any of his relationships work, and is determined not to risk exposing his feelings for Nick because their connection too would probably go off the tracks and he would lose his best friend. Or so he fears.

His mother is pushing Peter into a relationship with James, the drop-dead gorgeous trainer. Peter's father and sisters, on the other hand, are convinced he belongs with Nick. It's not as cheesy as it sounds, because the actors are so appealing and you get caught up in the subterfuge. 

But here's the problem, at least for me. I thought Luke Macfarlane was one of the most attractive men I'd ever seen when I saw him play a romantic character on Brothers and Sisters. So ordinarily, I'd think of Peter as an idiot for not thinking likewise (I know, I'm showing my inability to separate fiction on the screen from real life). But at the same time, the more I watched the Nick character, Philemon Chambers, the more I decided he's every bit as attractive as the James character, and how did Peter ever get so lucky as to have this dilemma to have to work out?

Here's why I risked squeezing too much information into a single paragraph. And here's why I say I'm really not interested in listening to critics tell me this is a grade B movie at best. Perhaps so, if you want to keep your bona fides as a critic in top shape. But I'm a gay man who was a teenager in the 1950s and homophobia is the chronic disease of the age that affected me most directly. I can't help watching every gay-themed movie without seeing it as a sociologist does, as a measure of social progress and the fight for gay liberation.

Do you have any idea how good it feels to watch a film where a gay man comes home to an entire loving family of folk who want him to find a life-partner and be happy? Mother, father, sisters, crazy aunt? They're all working full-time assuming they have it in their power to make love happen. There's not a single ounce of homophobia in this story. It's not just an appreciation of same-sex love and marriage; it's a celebration of it.

And that's just the beginning of the good news. Things just get better when you see who got to play the major roles in this production. The three men in the triangle, Peter, Nick and James, are all gay in real life. The mother, Kathy Najimy, is a hero to the LGBT community for her activism for women's and gay rights - she and her husband were married by Gloria Steinem, no less.  (The husband has a cameo role in the film, by the way.)  The father is played by Barry Bostwick, who launched his career playing opposite Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975. Aunt Sandy is played by the comedic bombshell (that's the Hallmark male hetero word for women with big boobs, if I'm not mistaken.) Jennifer Coolidge, known from a large number of films, including the four cult-film sex comedies, American Pie. Peter's sister, Lisa, is played by Jennifer Robertson, known for her hilariously funny role as the sister in Schitt's Creek. All in all, it's a great crew of first-rate, mostly Canadian, actors.

If you're of the gay political camp that hates it that gays and lesbians are trying so hard to go mainstream, this is not the film for you. It's also not for you if you squirm when you see black characters living so tight inside an otherwise all-white world, with no other black characters in sight, or if you have other reservations about what is a bit of socialist realism. On the other hand, watch it if you're Canadian, and be proud. Watch it if you're LGBT and feel it's time we had a happy film completely free of homophobia. An unabashed gay romcom and not a coming-out story. Watch it if you need an antidote to the steady diet of bad news we've been getting lately. Put it off till the next Christmas season, if you have trouble putting Santa and February in the same sentence. But then watch it. A little schmalz won't hurt you.

photo credit

Remembering the Holocaust

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

Today, January 27, is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It's also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. Since 1997 this day has been declared a day of remembrance in Germany, and in 2005, the United Nations expanded that to an International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The flag is lowered over the Bundestag and the president addresses the parliament on the topic.

When you mention the holocaust, the first thing most people think of was the Nazis' genocidal plan to eliminate the Jews. That's appropriate, given the number - six million - of Jews who perished. But thousands of others perished as well, specifically the Sinti and Roma people, then known as gypsies, male homosexuals, people with physical and mental handicaps, Slavs - Poles in particular, socialists, communists, and Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious groups who expressed opposition to Hitler.

There have been other genocidal events in human history, including the "no good Indian like a dead Indian" policies inflicted on the indigenous population of the Americas by European settlers, and the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, to name only two of relatively recent history. And arguably the evils of Pol Pot, the mutual destruction of the Hutu and the Tutsis in Rwanda, the racial conflict in Darfur, Sudan, the turning of neighbor against neighbor in the former Yugoslavia are all examples that are pressed into service for those who would argue there was nothing unique about the German destruction of Europe between 1933 and 1945. But those of us who identify with Western Civilization still have the Nazi Holocaust in mind when we remind ourselves of Santayana's aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I just tuned into a German site where the conflict was being discussed between right-wingers in Germany like the AfD, the new right-wing political party, and most of the rest of the country over whether to "draw a line" under the term holocaust, and just get on with it. The good news is that three-quarters of the country say the holocaust should never be forgotten; the bad news is a quarter of the country thinks it's time to put it away with other historical horrors which need not take up too much of our time.

Growing up in a German-American home in the immediate post-war era, I had to come to terms with the concept of collective guilt and the question of the responsibility of Germans born after the war for what went on before. I decided long ago that the idea that one is responsible for the sins of one's fathers doesn't fly - at least not with me - but I believe in collective responsibility of those born into a country with a history of genocide to assure that it not be repeated. That means I take the side of those who insist on never forgetting. It also means I am on the same page as those Germans who see the defeat of Hitler as a victory and not a defeat for Germany, because it cleared the ground for the German democracy that leads the Western world, in my opinion, on how a modern democracy can and should be run. And, by the same token, I chafe at the daily reports of a critical mass of modern-day Republicans in the United States willing to push Democratic voters, particularly black people, off the voting registry, thus supporting white supremacy over democracy. Like ships passing in the night, just as the majority of Germans show evidence that they have not forgotten how life was in their non-democratic past, Americans, many of us, seem all too ready to toss American democracy on the trash heap of history. 

It's worth digging into the numbers here. A poll taken in Germany by the Research Group Wahlen e. V., in Mannheim, published in 2020, asked this question about "drawing a line" (i.e., Should we be paying less attention to the Holocaust?"). The poll revealed a number of trends, including these facts and figures:

• 28% said yes, 67% said no
• more women than men said yes
• the less education one has, the more likely one is to say yes
• people in rural areas and small towns are more likely to say yes than people in big cities
• ditto for more people in the West than in the East
• and for older people more than younger people (that one comes as a surprise!)

The figures show that fewer people each year want to keep these special memorial events going. That's probably inevitable, as fewer and fewer people each year have direct memories of the times. But what I find disturbing is that here in the U.S. there is this campaign to keep critical race theory out of the schools. And I don't know what's worse, the fact that the idiots making this pitch haven't got a clue what it actually is and are simply using the term to mask white supremacy. Or the fact that they can't see the parallels between the swastika and the Confederate flag as symbols of racism.  Remember the marchers in Charlottesville shouting "Jews will not replace us!" ?

And who said, last week, "African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans”?

If you guessed it was the Senate Minority leader Republican Mitch McConnell, you guessed right.

photo credit: Berlin Holocaust Memorial

Gendering

Friends of Humanism, Berlin-Schöneberg

I have a clear memory of the first time I was forced to consider whether social change could be effected by linguistic change. I was in a sociolinguistics class in graduate school, quite recently in the greater scheme of things, in my case. That question immediately begged a previous question: can linguistic change be effected by decree? The standard answer to the decree question is no, that language can only evolve over time, that language changes from the bottom up, not top down.

When I used to bring my report card home, my mother would sign it, "Mrs. John S. McCornick." That was in the dark ages. Few women I know would do such a thing today, because we have come to believe women should not take their identities from their fathers or their husbands or anybody else, that women should be treated as equals with men and language should reflect that equality. Many women don't take their husband's family name when they marry, and we have pretty much retired the word "Miss" and replaced it with "Ms." because we no longer think, collectively, that women should be marked by their marriage status. And the fact that Ms. has become the standard form of address for a woman instead of Miss, shows that "the standard answer" I spoke about in the first paragraph isn't totally accurate. There are times when we can "legislate" language.

This is not just an American or an English-language phenomenon.  Germany uses "Frau" the way we have traditionally used "Mrs." and when I was a kid they used "Fräulein" the way we used "Miss." But they have assumed the same feminist consciousness we have, and have all but eliminated the word Fräulein, at least for adult women, and use only Frau these days.  For the past couple weeks, at regular intervals, in large part as a means of escaping the depressing news of the spread of covid and the evidence of a likely collapse of American democracy, I've been listening to a debate raging in Germany over what they call "gendering." They've taken the English word "gender" and made a verb out of it - gendern - "to gender," and they use it to heighten the awareness of the now discredited patriarchal practice of assuming women can be subsumed under masculine-identified words and eliminating the problem by means of language-fixing.

We have a similar thing going on in English, where we used to use he to represent both he and she, as in "Everybody intending to use the pool should bring his (sic) own towel." Today, we are careful to say something like "his or her" own towel. And, actually, we've kind of settled now on using their as not only a plural pronoun but a singular pronoun as well, because his or her is just so clumsy-sounding. "Everybody should bring their own towel."

Speakers of all Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages are all faced with the same challenges to a newly heightened feminist consciousness, since those languages are all gendered. In Spanish, todo is all in the masculine and toda is all in the feminine: all the boys is todos los muchachos and all the girls is todas las muchachas. No problem there. But if you want to say this applies to everybody, you say esto se aplica a todos, unless you know that "everybody" is meant to refer to a bunch of women only. Then you say esto se aplica a todas. The default is always masculine; you use the feminine form only when you're referring specifically to women only. Todos means all the men or all the men and women; todas means only all the women. The same applies to other Romance languages as well: tout means all (male), toute means all (female), toutes is the word for all in the plural (female only) and tous is the word for all in the plural also, but means all males or all of both genders). Same in Italian: tutto-tutti and tutta-tutte - tutti meaning all (masculine or masculine and feminine) and tutte meaning all (feminine only).

Advocates of gender equality in Spanish-speaking countries have been trying to find a solution to the "masculine-default" for some time now. You regularly see Latinx now for what in English we call Latinos, people of hispanic origin. Others are suggesting the -o masculine ending and the -a feminine ending be gotten rid of and replaced in both cases by -e. Latinos and Latinas would become Latines.

Nice try, but so far no cigar.

The Germans are having a particularly difficult time of it. On the one hand, to the greatest extent possible, most educated speakers of German, especially when they are speaking in public, make the effort to do what is called Beidnennung ("both-naming"). That is, they don't say Alle Ärzte, for all doctors, using the traditional masculine plural form and subsuming female doctors under the word.  They "double up" and expressly lay out both the masculine and the feminine forms. These days they go to the trouble of saying Alle Ärztinnen und Ärzte. This is what they mean by gendering.

You can probably see the problem coming down the pike. You quickly run into difficulties when the attempt to be all-inclusive makes you look foolish. It makes sense to say the plural of worker in modern-day German is Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter and not simply Arbeiter, and if you go to the online German/English dictionary dict.cc and type in "Welcome, dear readers" on the English side, Google will reveal its raised feminist consciousness by translating this for you as Willkommen, liebe Leserinnen und Leser. Try it, if you don't believe me.

But what happens when you take out "readers" and put in "murderers"? Google will, very helpfully, supply a translation. But not Willkommen, liebe Mörderinnen und Mörder, but simply Willkommen, liebe Mörder.  They know not to gender bad people.

And, just in passing, it's kind of fun to note that if you type in simply Mörderin, you'll get the English translation murderess. Don't you love it? They give you the word with the now archaic suffix for feminine equivalents to masculine words for professions (and occupations like murderers). Was Amelia Earhart a pilot or a pilotess, an aviator or an aviatrix? We still use host and hostess, but we've given up air hostess, and replaced both steward and stewardess with flight attendant. So if you look at this historically, we first consciousness-raised ourselves from acknowledging that flying a plane was not just a man's job, but a woman's as well, by creating the word pilotess to pair with pilot. And then raised ourselves again by eliminating the word pilotess and reverting back to pilot as a word which is meant to specify both men and women. And there is a ton of meaning in the fact that we don't have the pair butcher-butcheress but we do have the pair actor-actress, still in active use (although many insist these days on referring to actresses as actors).

Apparently, this practice of Beidnennung ("both naming")," i.e., always making the effort to use the feminine plural forms along with the masculine forms and not letting the masculine plural be the default for both men and women, has begun to sit heavy on modern-day teutonophones. People are looking for alternatives. And they've not had much luck.

One of the ways they've tried to shorten things is to use a slash. Instead of Lehrerinnen und Lehrer for teachers, some people are writing Lehrer/-innen. Others leave out the dash: Lehrer/innen. Still others leave out the slash as well and capitalize the letter i: LehrerInnen. And there are still more possibilities. One can use what's called "the gender star": Lehrer*innen. Or "the gender colon": Lehrer:innen. Or what they are playfully calling "the gender gap": Lehrer_innen.

And that leads us into the murky land of some wildly clumsy circumlocutions, where you have to wonder if you've gone too far. A congressperson or representative in Germany, a member of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, is called ein Abgeordneter (if he's a man) or eine Abgeordnete (if she's a woman), and this leads to translating the English representative by „ein_e Abgeordnete_r“. Welcome to the world of "oh, why bother!" and "this is getting ridiculous!" For one thing, how do you pronounce such a product of political correctness? What sort of works in writing really falls apart when speaking.

Some are suggesting that the way to go about things is to use the glottal stop in speaking where you see a gender star or colon or gap or capital i.  That's the sound that you make before pronouncing the two o's in "oh-oh!" Very common in German, so not as crazy as it sounds.

But still crazy. And just when you think you've had all the tsuris you can take on this subject, along come the queer theorists who complain that the problem with the "Inside i" - the i in LehrerInnen - may reflect a feminist consciousness, but it also furthers the heterosexist failure to recognize a binary-bias. People are not just male or female; they are also bisexual, pansexual, and asexual, not to mention none-of-your-damned-business-sexual. 

So much for solving problems by catching your breath.

I absolutely don't want to trivialize or minimize the efforts in the more enlightened spots on the planet to seek to diminish racism, sexism and homophobia. Those issues are near and dear to my heart.

But I have to admit I'm taking to my couch here. I don't have to address crowds in the German language or write for the German-language media, so I can just observe these goings-on from afar and wish everybody well.

Hope you find your way through the maze before the Rapture takes us up into heaven to live with the angels and we learn at long last whether the fact that Gabriel and Michael are the only two angels mentioned in the Bible means that all angels are male. If not, do we then need to speak of them as Engelinnen und Engel in German, as opposed to just Engel?  And EngelInnen?  or Engel*innen? when we write about them in our diaries?

photo credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-Gap_(Unterstrich)

Bye-bye, Berkeley?

I miss the How Berkeley Can You Be parade that used to march down the streets of downtown Berkeley until Berkeley shut it down for being too Berkeley. Once upon a time - from 1996, to be precise, Berkeleyites used to gather to celebrate (satirize) Berkeley's inclination to be on the hypercorrect side of political correctness. You've seen those postcards of the globe with the communist countries - China, North Korea, Cuba and Berkeley - in red. One of the reasons the parade was shut down - after the 2008 parade - was that while the city might have gone on allowing people to parade in the nude, they drew a line at shooting spam at the parade-watchers with bazookas, and marching with flame-throwers.

What some see as ridiculous political correctness, most of us see as a heightened consciousness to be proud of. I live in the Le Conte neighborhood (yes, it's still called that) two blocks up from what used to be called, no surprise, the Le Conte Elementary School. It is now called the Sylvia Mendez Elementary School, after a woman of Puerto Rican/Mexican heritage who took Orange County to court back in 1947 for sending Mexican kids to remedial schools. She won. The case, Mendez v. Westminster, effectively ended de jure segregation in California and helped pave the way for the American Civil Rights movement.

What's wrong with that, I ask you? It's a hell of a lot better, don't you think, than sending your kids to a school named after Joseph Le Conte, a former slave holder who fought for the Confederacy. He and his brother John remained ardent white supremacists, even after becoming professors at the University of California at Berkeley.

The problem with fighting racism on the one hand and political correctness on the other is, of course, figuring out where the line should be. How much calls out for change, how much should we just let things be and save our energy for bigger battles? One of life's great moral dilemmas.

Was Berkeley right, for example, in changing the names of schools named after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? They were slave-holders, too. Do we weigh the fact that they were arguably of the more benign type of slave-holders, that Jefferson apparently loved a slave his whole life long and released his slaves upon his death? And does the fact that Washington won America's War of Independence from Britain no longer figure in the calculus?

I think Jefferson and Washington should stay in the pantheon, that we only trivialize the issue when we bend so far backwards to purge ourselves of the mistakes of historical figures. Robert E. Lee, no - he preferred to break the country apart in order to keep slavery going. But Washington? I don't see the line as blurry at all here.

Boalt Letters on the trash heap of history

The University of California followed suit when the Berkeley School Board ditched Le Conte in 2018. It too has removed not only Le Conte's name from a university building, but dropped the famous name of the building housing Berkeley Law School, Boalt Hall, as well, wiping out 100 years of legacy. This happened just recently, in January 2020. And apparently now on a roll, in November of that year they removed the name of Barrows from another building, and two months later, they took down Kroeber from Kroeber Hall.  

Barrows was an anthropologist and professor of education who later became UC president. He served on the board at Mills College, as well. Although he took on the white man's burden approach to the third world (are you listening up there, Rudyard Kipling?), he was once described as a "humanitarian imperialist," if you can believe that. One of the good bad guys. No matter, Barrows Hall is no more....

Kroeber was an anthropologist, as well. One of his "mistakes" is said to be treating California Indians as a dying breed when they themselves insist they are alive and well and thriving. One member of the department tells us they agreed with the name removal unanimously. There is also considerable disagreement over his role in bringing Ishi to the campus as a living monument. See the remarks of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, for example.  And not that he needs special credit for it, but he's also the father of Ursula K. Le Guin.

That brings us to Bishop George Berkeley. When George came to America, he settled first in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he purchased three slaves for his personal use. He kept them in the basement and urged his fellows to baptize their slaves, founded a mission to the "American heathens," and favored separating Indian children from their parents if they resisted. He was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who argued that tables and chairs could not exist if they were not perceived. But don't worry if you can't see those things. God sees them, so that makes them real. But lest you join me too quickly in rolling on the floor, please note this sentence from a Wikipedia article on the man: "While (his) work raised much controversy at the time, the conclusions are now accepted as an established part of the theory of optics."

He has a permanent place in the development of Western philosophy. Schopenhauer called him the father of idealism. Others list him with Locke and Hume as one of Britain's greatest thinkers. But philosophy aside, what do we do about his practical side? He took a great interest, before emigrating, in the orphan children of London, and served as governor at London's Foundling Hospital, so you can't exactly call him a Nazi. But there is this bit about his slaves. Do we toss the name of my much loved home on the trash heap of history along with Le Conte, Boalt, Kroeger, Washington and Jefferson? Will the Yale Divinity School follow suit if we do? And the library at Trinity College, Dublin? They too bear his name. Wasn't it bad enough we changed the pronunciation from bar-klee to burr-klee, do we now rid ourselves of him entirely?

I suppose we could simply let Oakland absorb all the streets north of 66th up to the borders of Albany and El Cerrito. I live only six blocks from that line, and spend nearly as much time in North Oakland as I do in Berkeley anyway, so what's the big deal?

Something tells me, though, that Berkeley won't go down without a fight.

Ain't no way we're going to give up our nuclear-free zones.

photo credits: 

People's Republic T-shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Funny-Peoples-Republic-Berkeley-Communist/dp/B079PDCZ7W

covering the Le Conte name on the former Le Conte building until a new name can be found: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/11/18/uc-berkeley-strips-the-names-of-professors-with-racist-views-off-3-buildings

letters chiseled off the Boalt Law School: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/14/boalt-halls-name-is-gone-but-its-history-is-examined-in-new-exhibit/   Photo by Alex A. G. Shapiro, Berkeley Law's executive director of communications.

letters chiseled off Kroeger Hall: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/us/uc-berkeley-removes-kroeber-from-anthropology-building-trnd/index.html

Ablauting, candles, noses…

Bet you didn’t know what you call the wick of a candle after the candle has been blown out. It’s called a snuff. I learned that this morning looking up the German word schnuppe. Schnuppe is a German word which captures the semantic range that runs from “hoot,” through “damn” to “flying F***,” as in “I don’t give a schnuppe.” But it also means snuff, as in “burned out candle wick.” 

I’ve been fascinated with linguistics since I took a historical linguistics course while at the Russian School in Monterey back in the dark ages, taught at Monterey Peninsula College by a teacher from the Bulgarian department, if I remember right. Germanic linguistics, in particular. He was a phonetician, so the course was all about such things as

and Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, aka "The Great (first and second) Germanic Consonantal Sound Shifts." I realize this is a seriously esoteric subject to most people, but I love it that you can go down the list and find where the cousin languages English and German parted ways in dozens of places. The distribution of p and f and pf, for example: English apple, German Apfel; English pepper, German Pfeffer. And in Danish it's æble and peber.

That puts the snuff/Schnuppe contrast in context. And while we’re at it, what’s not to love about the German word for meteor or falling star? Star is Stern and falling star is Sternschnuppe. That’s why I was looking up the word Schnuppe. I was reading about a kindergarten in Bremen called the Sternschnuppe Kindergarten.                                                                                                                  

The German way of saying “to take a walk” is “einen Spaziergang machen” (literally, to do a “promenade – going.”)  When Taku and I take the girls out for a walk, we call it a Schnüffelgang, schnüffeln being the German word for sniff, since the girls have to stop to smell every blade of grass between here and France.  (I could also call it a Schnuppergang.) 

So not only do German words in f or pf line up against English words in p, but German words in “sh” (written “sch” in German, or s before t and p) line up with English words in “s”.  English “Apple Strudel” is German “Apfelstrudel” where the strudel part is pronounced “shtroodle.” Not only is English sniff German schnüffeln, but English snout is German Schnauze and English snap is German schnappen.

Ablauting is the linguistic term for that way Germanic languages have of alternating vowels within a semantic category. We do it with tenses, in German and English (and other Germanic languages as well). English “spring-sprang-sprung,” is German “springen-sprangen-gesprungen,” and “sing-sang-sung“ is „singen-sangen-gesungen.“  (My computer is beginning to scare the bejeezus out of me – how did it know to switch the open quotes from the top of the line, the way we write them in English to the bottom of the line, as we write them in German? I feel a paranoia coming on.) 

The English verb to sniff is a “weak” verb, i.e., it doesn’t ablaut, but has the principle parts: sniff, sniffed, sniffed. But when you cross the line into German, to sniff is not only schnüffeln, but schniefen. You might say sniff is to use the nose to smell something delicately, while snuffle is to do the same thing noisily, but people often blur this distinction in actual usage. But then, sniffle means to breathe through a snotty nose, like when you’re crying, and snivel means to make whiny noises when you’re crying, drawing a distinction between cute, you might say, and obnoxious. But both these words, sniffle and snivel – and sniff, as well, are translated by the German word schniefen. Gets complicated. 

Then there’s this grated black tobacco people used to sniff through their noses called snuff. Not to be confused with the burned-out candle wick snuff. You can see the connection there between sniff and snuff, of course. German for to snuff or to take snuff, incidentally, is schnupfen, schnuppern, or schüffeln – take your pick.) The word snuff has since been extended into the English idiom, “not up to snuff,” meaning not up to standards or expectations. And to the German idiom “Es ist mir schnuppe,” meaning “it’s all the same to me (stronger, actually; more like “I couldn’t give a good hot damn.”) English has also pressed the word into the service of “to do somebody in” – as in snuff films – films of people being murdered. And there’s also the British slang expression, to snuff it for which Americans use the terms to croak, to kick the bucket or to bite the dust. But that's enough about ablauting and such for the time being.    

Time, once again, for breakfast.

Which makes me think of that insightful observation that there's no difference between being young and being old except that when you're old breakfast comes every fifteen minutes.

 

Everything is connected

Bruce Liu, Chopin Gold Medal winner,
Warsaw 2021

Now don't go telling me I've got too much time on my hands. I have lots of time, yes, but it's still the year-end holidays and we're still effectively on Covid-lockdown, if you're in the especially vulnerable category and choose to be prudent about kissing strangers in the street and things like that. I like to think that I lean towards prudence.

One of my heroes, Bruce Liu of Montreal, the gold winner of last October's Chopin competition in Warsaw, has just signed up with Liu Kotow. They're big in the world of management of musical talents. I'm happy to see Bruce will have these promoters (Shannen Liu and Grzegorz Kotow) bringing him to the attention of more and more people who can appreciate his ability to wow at the piano keyboard.

Liu Kotow also manages a number of other world-class artists of the piano, as well as violinists, cellists and others, including conductors and ensembles. They manage the Van Cliburn International Competition, so I trust Bruce is in good hands.

Now to the "too much time on my hands" issue. Liu Kotow are a German organization. Their headquarters are at Schiffgraben 59 in Hanover, in Lower Saxony (Hannover, Niedersachsen). Hannover, whether with one n or two, is a kind of home town in my family. My mother was born in Celle, and in the old days before postal codes and that sort of thing, towns in Germany were regularly identified by a nearby big city. So "Celle" was routinely referred to as "Celle bei Hannover." 

I like to identify my home as "Berkeley bei San Francisco." Gives it a little boost, somehow. "Bei," incidentally, is the German word for "chez" as in Chez Panisse, Berkeley's famous restaurant you have to mortgage your children to afford and wait six months to get in. Alice Walker's restaurant, often credited with being the home of "California cuisine."

My cousin Daniela, from Hamburg, just wrote me she's moving in with her new love interest, who lives in Han(n)over, so there's that. Daniela also managed to dig up my mother's birth certificate some years ago, which I will reproduce for you here:

In German: 

Celle, am 30. März 1915

 

Erstwhile Provincial House of Midwifery,
Mühlenstraße 8, Celle, now repurposed as
the district court

Der Direktor der Provinzial-Hebammen-Lehranstalt in Celle zeigte an, daß von der Ehefrau des Bereiters Karl Schultheis, Anna Luise Berta geboren Rühmann, beide lutherischer Religion, wohnhaft bei ihrem Ehemann in Celle, Am heiligen Kreuz 9 zu Celle in der Hebammen-Lehranstalt am fünfundzwanzigsten März des Jahres tausend neunhundert fünfzehn nachmittags um neun dreiviertel Uhr ein Mädchen geboren worden sei und daß das Kind die Vornamen Klara Berta erhalten habe.

 

Vorstehend 16 Druckworte gestrichen

 

Der Standesbeamte

 

Austerfeld 

 

In English:

 

Celle, March 30, 1915

 

The director of the provincial Midwife Academy in Celle announced that to the wife of the Bereiter Karl Schultheis, Anna Luise Berta, née Rühmann, both of the Lutheran religion, residing with her husband in Celle, Am Heiligen Kreuz 9, in Celle at the Midwife Academy on the twenty-fifth of March in the year one thousand ninehundred fifteen in the after noon at nine and three quarter hours a girl was born and that the child received the forenames Klara Berta.

 

(16 printed words stricken)

 

The Registrar

 

Austerfeld

Am heiligen Kreuz (Holy Cross St.) today, Celle

Holy Cross Number 9 is the address of the place where my grandmother grew up - I've got a schoolbook with an arithmetic textbook her sister wrote her name and address in when she was about eight years old.

Now when you go to Google Maps and check the distance between Am Heiligen Kreuz 9 in Celle and Schiffgraben 59 in Han(n)over, you find it is precisely 43 kilometers via Highway B3, and Google tells you you should be able to drive that in 38 minutes. Depending on traffic, obviously. Or two hours and thirteen minutes by bicycle. It's a little less (39.9 km) if you go by foot, but that would take you, Google informs us, about eight hours and nine minutes. I've always wondered who they used to calculate distance on foot, how long his or her legs were, how often they needed to stop to pee.

But I digress.

Am heiligen Kreuz 9, the actual house
now has a bank on the ground floor.

Time to go down to breakfast. The house feels empty, since friend Bill left to go home to Indiana yesterday after spending the year-end holidays with us again this year and we're back to just Taku and me and the girls, now scratching at the guest room door and wondering what happened to their Uncle Bill.

photo credits

Bruce Liu - https://www.iheartradio.ca/virginradio/windsor/canadian-bruce-liu-wins-18th-chopin-international-piano-competition-1.16320277

Midwifery Institute - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeshebammenlehranstalt_Celle

Am heiligen Kreuz today - https://www.alamy.com/fachwerkhuser-am-heiligen-kreuz-celle-niedersachsen-deutschland-image334198726.html

the actual house at Number 9 - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Celle,_Am_Heiligen_Kreuz_9.jpg