The Most Dangerous Letter

The other day I was asking a friend who's living in Port-au-Prince if she knew anything about how Haiti same to have so many k's. The inspiration was the mountain village of Kenscoff, just south of the capital, that figures in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. We're still trying to track down the origin of that name, but Kreyol (aka Haitian Creole) has lots of k's, whereas French, the country's other national language, has, more or less none.

A few searches turned up a great long answer, a chapter in the book Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

My take-away from the article (most of which you can, and should, read) that Kreyol orthographies are various and contested, and that the first major promoted one (McConnell-Laubach) seems to have been introduced by American protestant missionaries (hey, we do love translating into local dialects!). The Wikipidia entry on Haitian Creole points out that most Kreyol spellings are very similar to the words' renditions in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Meanwhile, I'll type for you my favorite sentence from the Language Ideologies chapter...

Among the most contested letters is k, which not only represents the danger of U.S. imperialism but has even been claimed to represent the threat of communism.

As for k's in French, they're all from other, non-romance languages. Here's the entire k section from the admittedly pocket-sized 1968 Dennison French Dictionary ("All Important Words"):

kangaurou, kayak, képi, kilogramme, kilometre, kiosque

What's really fun is imagining using all six of those words in a single sentence!

--

The whole idea of dangerous letters leads us, of course, to Costa-Garvas's 1969 film Z, a very slight fictionalization ("Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.") of a political murder in 1960s Greece.

The film (quite good and gripping, by the way), explains its title in a bit of screen text tacked at the end of the epilogue, just after we hear of the subsequent terrible things that happened to all the characters:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"

Tiki in Berlin

In a recent Feat of Correspondance I realized that two college friends were both doing academic things in Berlin at the moment. Emails were sent. And they did get to meet up, o'er Indonesian food, no less. A few days on, I received the following report:

We've decided that next time we're going to search out Berlin's tiki bars. We've concluded that the American presence here for so many years, especially in Schoeneberg, should mean that there's a good tiki bar remnant still around here somewhere! Let us know if you hear of anything in that magical network of yours.

Well I couldn't turn down a challange (plea for help?) like that. Thus:


Berlin Tiki Establishments
[via the requisite Google search etc.]

From the dates and pictures I found, Berlin's tiki establishments all seem to date to the last decade or so, which calls the occupation/cold war theory into question. Perhaps there were tiki bars in the 50s and 60s, coinciding with the American tiki wave, and the current establishments traffic both in the at-home retro as well as the we-love-america-now-and-then retro.

OK, back to the shortlist:

• Rock-a-tiki (but it seems more like a skater-store?)
• tabou tiki room (they get points for referencing French exoticism too)
• Aloha-Luau Lounge
  
• Trader Vic's (invented the Mai-Tai at their Oakland, CA location. Now a global chain w/25 outposts, 6 in the Persian Gulf!)
• Tiki Heart Cafe (their Tuesday Special menu doesn't, though, seem that Polynesian, or even Pseudonesian:
  
  Menue 29.01.08
  
  Avocado - Rote Beete - Cocktail [Avocado - beets - Cocktail]
  Barbarie-Enten-Carpaccio auf Auberginen Mousse (als veggie: Tofu Carpaccio) [ Barbarie duck carpaccio-on eggplant mousse (veggie option: Tofu carpaccio)]
  Geschmorter Burgunderbraten vom Rind mit Sauce von weißen und schwarzen Feigen, dazu Kartoffel-Rösti und Wurzelgemüse (als veggie: Tofu -Burgunderbraten) [ Geschmorter Burgundy roast of beef with sauce of white and black figs, plus potato hash browns and root vegetables (veggie option: tofu roast Burgundy) ]
  Gefüllter Milchreispudding [Stuffed milk rice pudding]

Tiki aggregators: some proof that folks take this stuff very, very seriously.
http://www.tikieurope.com/
http://www.critiki.com/cgi-bin/map.cgi

And he establishment weighs in:

NY Times 3/20/05:

Berlin
Where to wear it? The best people-watching can be done at White Trash Fast Food, a bar, restaurant and club in a former Chinese restaurant. It feels like a ''Cantonese Tiki bar'' gone wild, says Stefanie Roth, an editor at the German style magazine Lodown. What to wear: Veronique Branquinho suede boots. Devi Kroell python hobo, $2,690. Levi's Superlow Skinny jeans, $40. Jil Sander trench coat, $2,040. Dries Van Noten scarf, $995

NY Times 11/12/06:

Surfacing
Street Food With Ambition in Berlin
By GISELA WILLIAMS

NEW YORKERS have hot dog stands, Parisians have crêperies, but street food in Berlin is all about imbisse — a word that encompasses everything from sidewalk stalls that sell currywurst (sliced sausage smothered with curry powder and ketchup) to holes in the wall that serve Turkish döner kebabs (thick pita sandwiches stuffed with shaved meat, salad and yogurt sauce).

They’re great if you’re in a rush or need to save some beer money (the price rarely exceeds 3 euros, or less than $4 at $1.28 to the euro), but don’t expect a culinary revelation. The taste usually ranges from salty to saltier.

But lately, Berlin’s fast-food scene has gone foodie. Imbisse (the singular form of the word is imbiss) with an epicurean twist are popping up all over this city, Western Europe’s most affordable capital, bringing fancy fast food to the masses.

One of the best is the W Imbiss (Kastanienallee 49; 49-30-48-49-26-57; www.agentur103.de) on the stylish edge of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, whose logo resembles the golden arches turned upside down. If you’re lucky, Gordon W., as its Canadian chef and owner calls himself, will be in the tiny open kitchen, wearing his signature fez and manning the tandoor.

Four euros will get you a delicious and filling nan-bread pizza, topped with fresh ingredients like pesto, fresh arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts. Six and a half euros buys one of the popular rice bowls, piled high with marinated tandoori salmon, leafy greens and Japanese-style dressing. Besides being cheap, everything is made to order, so expect long waits — though no one in this tiki-inspired joint seems to mind..

Re:Rereading. Also, Men in Boats Asleep

PATRICIA: Have you ever slept on a boat before?
JOE: No.
PATRICIA: It really affects your dreams. I look forward to it. Even though, sometimes, the dreams really shake me up. Okay. Good night.
JOE: Good night.

—John Patrick Shanley, Joe Versus the Volcano

A few days ago I finished rereading the Odyssey—I think this was the third time to completion. Among other things it brought back to mind a question I've asked myself before, whether it's better to read three great books once or one great book three times (or, indeed, whether they amount to somewhat the same thing). In the past year or so I've fallen out of the habit of having one of the 6–8 books I'm working through at a given time (not counting the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) be a reread. New ground is always so tempting, but I think it's a good discipline. But did I start a new-oldie after the Odyssey? Not yet anyway.

One detail of Homer's plot that I was especially thrilled to rediscover is that Odysseus, the great wide-awake sefarer, sleeps through the whole of his final homeward voyage. The crew that's bringing him back to Ithaca carries him and his parting gifts ashore so he wakes on dry land. There's something very moving about that image, and its other ancient parallels: Jonah asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed ship that's (trying) to take him away from Ninevah and God's calling; and Jesus, asleep in the bow of a similarly wind-vexed boat on the Sea of Galilee, right before his disciples woke him up and he calmed the storm. Three great wanderers, asleep at the wheel.

On M.I.A.

M.I.A., "Bird Flu"


M.I.A., "Boyz"

I heard second second track yesterday on KCRW ... a preview of M.I.A.'s sophomore album, due out later on. As usual, the UK/Sri Lankan rapper (um, chanter?) is up to her in-your-face, low-resolution tricks. But musically I find it a lot more interesting than a lot of the stultifyingly repetitive dancehall-beat stuff I've heard (largely reggaetón but not exclusively) over the past few years. Beyond that, there's the M.I.A. aura, aggressively transcultural, sort of an anti-Peter-Gabriel. And the lyrics are, for a get-on-the-floor dance song, a tremendous celebration-cum-feminist-critique of rowdy masculinity and its geopolitical consequences.

One thing that comes up for me, perhaps irrelevantly, is the sticky authenticity question. On the one hand, as Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker review of her debut album put it, she's giving voice to the third-world street (and its first-world urban echoes), delivering music "from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot". (it's a great line by Frere-Jones, but I don't know how much M.I.A. herself talks about trying to be or not to be anybody's version of an authentic voice).

But M.I.A.'s whole approach, from music to videos to her artwork and anti-fashion attire (like a can't-stop-looking-at-it 1980s nightmare, with giant Reebok logos spraypainted on in a sort of piracy of piracy itself), is extremely canny, intellectual, and in ways more first-worldly than third-. Which is what lifts it over the bar and onto KCRW or into the New Yorker, where someone like me hears it and likes it—or at least can't stop listening—and feels a bit more authentic, hip in the way that certain NGOs are hip, for doing so ("pull up tha PEE-ple, pull up the Poor").

Le Bac

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )