A few days ago I found a note from DHL in the letterbox. It said that a package had been left for me in the shoe shop next door. I had to wait until Saturday to pick it up as the store closed before I finished work. The package was from LSB. I think you’ll agree that it was worth the wait?
1.The pioneering beggar
Every day I see an oval-faced man on Grafton Street holding an enormous wooden sign, which points you in the direction of the Sweet Emporium on Duke Street. He has been holding this sign day in, day out for many months. For years before that he sat slumped on the steps of the insurance building next to Hodges Figgis with a tin covered in chipped orange paint. His eyes were too sad and vacant to be those of a charity collector; he was a pioneering beggar. Somebody must have noticed him there and decided that if he was going to stay in the city centre looking for money all day, he might as well send people to the Sweet Emporium. Now he works double shifts because I’ve seen him back by the steps on Dawson Street at evening time. He’s been on my mind on and off for years. I wonder what we’d talk about, if I ever found the courage to introduce myself.
2. The Man with long, blonde hair
Since my schooldays, I’ve been passing an extremely tall man, with long blonde hair and thick pink lips. When he walks, his whole body jolts heavily forward and then bounces back, as if on a spring. He has a long, beige face, which blends in with the bewildered expression he wears. When I watch him, he seems to be looking at something beyond what I can see. I think he is the wildest and gentlest man I’ve ever seen and I also think that he is intellectually disabled. I feel sad when I see him, because of the way he moves, and because of the large blue pools which are his eyes. Every once in a while he puts on black, knee-high women’s boots and stumbles down the street in them. Sometimes I try to imagine his mother and father but I can’t because I can’t paint their pictures in my head.
3. The Opera Singer
He wears a smoking jacket and bow tie and sings to the crowds of shoppers as if he were on stage in an Italian opera house. He has a neat, tight face with symmetrical features and short, sandy brown hair. He could be from the Czech Republic or from Slovakia, but in fact he comes from our own shores. I’ve heard him speak; he asked a lady last week if he should sign her CD “To Anne with an E”.
His body language, coupled with his attire is highly comedic. I know this because once I was sitting by the window upstairs in Bewley’s watching him speak to a middle-aged lady, who happened to be a fan. He bent forward to touch her arm and tilted his head backward to laugh at what she had said. He used his hands constantly, flapping them politely in her direction and then mock-modestly at her wide-eyed praise. He’s a charmer.
These three men are in my life but I’m not in theirs.
In a shop on the banks of the Delaware river in Philadelphia I picked up a book with the title “Newspaper Blackout” by Austin Kleon. I thought it would be about the decline of print media but it wasn’t. It was a book of poems.
In 2008 Kleon was just out of college and living with his girlfriend. He was trying desperately to make it as a short story writer but he had writer’s block. His girlfriend had stacks of the New York Times at home and Kleon, struggling to find any of his own words, resorted to the papers, which had millions. Armed with a permanent marker, he began to read and to draw lines through the words he didn’t need. He was left with the realisation that although he’d “never wanted to be a poet, .. dang if they weren’t poems”.
He posted some of his poems on his blog. Over time, they began to get attention and it wasn’t long before his work was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition.
Kleon says “writing should be fun. Everyone can do it”. It something that I have to remind me of sometimes when I’m staring at a blank computer screen late at night.
I was teaching an advanced English class today and decided to give “newspaper blacking out” a go. There were only three students in the class: a girl from Saudi Arabia and two boys from Japan and Switzerland. We read a few of Kleon’s poems first and then I gave them each a chunky board marker so they could try their own.
I’d picked up three metroheralds on the way to work. We chose to work on the cover story – the guilty verdict in the Jackson doctor case. I gave them about five minutes to complete their poems. Three completely different pieces materialised: three unique ideas jumped from the same article.
I tried my own when I got home today. Not sure I’d really call them “poems” but it was fun to eliminate words at will. See if you can read them here:
What I like most about Kleon’s poems is that you feel part of the craft of writing. You have the sense that these words were chosen actively, by eliminating others. I wonder if this kind of crafting is at odds with the processes of writing creatively. One of the biggest differences is making newspaper blackout poems is that you’re not bound by the structure of the sentence, which usually ensnares you as you begin to write. This kind of writing allows you to draw pictures and to bounce ideas abound without worrying whether your sentence is grammatically and aesthetically pleasing.
Check out Kleon’s Work at http://www.austinkleon.com
I wish I could lie to you but I can’t. The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, a large proportion of which change shape according to their position in the word. A select few are awkward and refuse to join with letters to their left. Many have the same shape when in the beginning or middle of a word but have a different number of dots above or below them. There’s a special symbol to let you know the absence of a vowel sound. In case you were, you know, in doubt.
I’m just back from my second class and am rather disappointed that there has been no opportunity to practise speaking, given that learning the alphabet seems to take an eternity. For this reason, I’m going to teach what I’ve learnt in the way I would have liked to learn it. I’m really not one to say a bad word about teachers (believe me, I’ve a vested interest) but as one of my classmates mumbled after class “she’s awful serious.. she’d want to ligthen up” and of the homework “It’d put you to sleep alright”.
To get us started, watch this. I dare you not to feel a smile creeping uponon your lips.
The only two things you need to remember from this video:
1.That little boy’s adorable voice (Bieber who?)
2.that Arabic has three vowels, which correspond loosely to ‘A’. ‘E’ and ‘U’. They’re a bit like fadas in Irish. For ‘A’ you put a dash above the letter; for ‘E’ below and for ‘U’ its a little sign that looks like a number 9 above the letter. That’s why in the song they sing ‘A, U, E, Be Bu Beey’ etc.
Okay, enough about the alphabet. (For my sake, not yours).
For those of you who don’t know me (I’m looking at the seven people who googled “smail” and were referred to my blog today. Though on second thought, perhaps it was was just one massively enthsiastic malacologist.)
“ismee Kate Katharina”
Say it.
Go on.
Now tell me who you are.
ismee= I
Your name=Your name
Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy.
Now, Kayf- haluk? How’s life?
I’d hate to pre-empt you but are you feeling fine, thank God? And are you male? Then say this:
Tayeb al-hamdu lelah
Are you feeling fine thank God but worried, because you are female? Then say this:
Tayeba al-hamdu lelah.
Same? Nope. All adjectives (as here ‘fine’) have genders. How do we make an adjective feminine?
Add A.
Hmmm. There’s a problem, isn’t there?
Some of you are not fine. Some of you are tired. Fine. It’s a late blog post. You have an excuse.
Say this if you’re a man:
Ta-ban, which the stress on the ‘ban’.
If you’re female, say….???
Come on, you know this one.
Yes, you got it Ta-ban-a.
I (ismee) really am Ta-ban-na now..
So I guess I should take my leave from you and say
Mass-salama.
Go on, reply to me. It’d be rude not to.
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PS- Remember ‘share the luv’ on bebo? Well my lovely blogger friend Clariice over at Reise meines Lebens has shared the luv by nominating me for a Liebster blogging award.
I’m not sure if this is an actual award or simply a way to get bloggers to share each other’s work but I’m going to take the opportunity to link you to some blogs that I really enjoy.
1. Comeheretome: UCD history students writing interesting short pieces about cultutal landmarks. They often include scans of really interesting historical documents they have access to. Warning: also write about football.
2. Inside the brain: Love this blog. Irish neuroscientist summarises latest research in his fields in layman’s terms
3.Broadside New York-based writer and author of Malled: my unintentional career in retail writes short, poignant pieces in beautifully crafted prose
4. Kat Richter: Serial-dater from Philadelphia. What more can I say? Addictive and witty.
5. Last but definitely not least: Clariice herself. She writes wonderful poetry in language that I love. It’s totally unique in that it’s sparse but also satisfyingly clunky. Her words are real, soulful and off-beat.
Kate Ferguson 