Living with a talented six-year-old is a recursive indulgence. Brandon, he's my son, he picks up language with surprising skill--surprising for me, anyway, this being my first go-around living with and raising a developing mind. He is, in most ways, a regular 21st Century boy: likes Power Rangers S.P.D. and attention from his older brother, can be selfish with his toys and selfless with his love, is lost in catatonia during shows, snapping out precisely as the first commercial begins its whorish song.
He doesn't think about it, and ay, that's the Hub. He doesn't know that he continues to pick up new words, abstract ideas like imagination and responsibility, technical terms like detach and meditate, perfectly placed verbs that outrebound the basics of prepositions.
This morning: "Mommy, Stephan tickled me, I peed! I peed! I didn't mean to--he tickled, so I react on pee." One can try to teach this, but it won't work. There is a capacity here with context that will continue to build on itself. Vocabularly increase plus contextual expansion is a forming universe.
Is he John Keats reborn? Is he just another kid? Either way, on a blizzardic day where leaving is no option and the denizens of our homes are too loud for thoughtful odes, I can't imagine a better conceit.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
Hear the joke now
No one tells a story like a Trinidadian. There is a skill at work when one in the group gets things started with a key phrase, signifying something new is about to be shared. The room never gets quiet, the group never fully stops talking, but the attention, even if partial, goes to the speaker. Sometimes the interest is keen, sometimes the spite is evident, but never does anyone leave. It's on.
The oral traditions of poetry are clearly in motion. A rousing call turns microscopically aural in a turn of a phrase: absolute intonation incantation, and always an occasional silence to allow the others to comment, very much like your vision of a new testament church service, that same passion and shared focus, just irreverently so. Changes in pitch complement not just brilliant language colors, but the props of the play--a suck-tooth, a whoo-whee, a well boy, and dozens of onomatopeiac accents. Understanding dialect is not an issue for stories that hit us in a core many of us don't visit or even knowledge.
The story itself? Almost irrelevent to the joy of communication, the community of memory and purpose. I fear describing this too much from the side, but I also refuse to try to transcribe the moment. How quickly nice stories can rub us the wrong way; a journalist of different cultures toes lines of characteristics that too often spoil the point: as my beloved poetry professor William Kloefkorn said as only he can say, no guts, no sausage.
The oral traditions of poetry are clearly in motion. A rousing call turns microscopically aural in a turn of a phrase: absolute intonation incantation, and always an occasional silence to allow the others to comment, very much like your vision of a new testament church service, that same passion and shared focus, just irreverently so. Changes in pitch complement not just brilliant language colors, but the props of the play--a suck-tooth, a whoo-whee, a well boy, and dozens of onomatopeiac accents. Understanding dialect is not an issue for stories that hit us in a core many of us don't visit or even knowledge.
The story itself? Almost irrelevent to the joy of communication, the community of memory and purpose. I fear describing this too much from the side, but I also refuse to try to transcribe the moment. How quickly nice stories can rub us the wrong way; a journalist of different cultures toes lines of characteristics that too often spoil the point: as my beloved poetry professor William Kloefkorn said as only he can say, no guts, no sausage.
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