Nouveau South

Since mid-October I’ve been learn­ing Span­ish, mostly while I drive my car. I’m using the Pim­sleur Method, of which I highly approve. I can now speak Span­ish far bet­ter than I could after tak­ing three quar­ters at Emory.

I can speak, but not read or write it very well. That’ll come later. They don’t want me doing that yet.

The Pim­sleur Method is based on the recog­ni­tion that most peo­ple on the planet who’ve learned a lan­guage, i.e., chil­dren, learn to speak it pretty dang well before they can read any­thing. They learn by speak­ing and hear­ing, a lit­tle bit at a time, and fig­ure out on their own verb tenses and conjugations.

I spend about 45 min­utes a day speak­ing and hear­ing Span­ish. What I’ve learned is mostly tourista Span­ish. We talk about mak­ing reser­va­tions, order­ing food, make small talk about the weather and people’s families.

After fin­ish­ing the first 86 of 120 lessons, I can now order Mex­i­can food and con­verse with my servers in Span­ish about it. I can make small talk with lovely senori­tas at the bar. That goes some­thing like this:

Me: Vienes aqui con fre­quen­cia?* (Do you come here often)

And the senorita gen­er­ally says some­thing which in con­text sounds some­thing like, “I think you’re a creepy old man.” (There seems to be inter­cul­tural con­sen­sus on this point.)
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You are a busy per­son. You have to drop the kids off at soc­cer prac­tice, cook din­ner, and still man­age to find the time to watch 6 hours of TV. I’ve cre­ated this handy list that will improve the two most impor­tant aspects of your life, your sex and your blog, in less than 5 min­utes. Read the rest of this entry →

We made our first mis­take yes­ter­day, Grace and I real­ized in the check­out line at Wal-Mart. Our sun­screen, inner tubes, and life­jack­ets beeped and passed into bags, but we relin­quished our PBR tall­boys to the impos­ing woman in the blue apron. For just a sec­ond, I con­sid­ered try­ing to pay her off. We knew a recent leg­isla­tive change now allowed alco­hol sales on Sun­days in Geor­gia. We did not know that you still could not buy alco­hol before noon. The leg­is­la­tors did not want their church­go­ing con­stituents to play catch-up. We would float down the Chat­ta­hoochee River in 107 degree heat with­out alco­hol. Read the rest of this entry →

I’d like you all to meet Otto Marseus van Schrieck. A painter of the Dutch Golden Age and mem­ber of the Bentvueghels, van Schrieck was known for his detailed nat­u­ral­is­tic stud­ies of weird plants and creepy ani­mals. It is said that van Schrieck kept a plot of land out­side of Ams­ter­dam stocked with a small menagerie of rep­tiles, amphib­ians, and insects to use as his sub­ject mat­ter. For rea­sons that don’t quite click with me but appar­ently do with the author of his Wikipedia page, he was for this rea­son “called the snuffe­laer, or ‘snif­fer’, because he was always sniff­ing strange lizards and snakes.” What?

Before today, I didn’t know there was some­thing called the Bentvueghels, or Otto Marseus van Schrieck, or the Dutch Golden Age — and then I read a big plaque on the wall next to his paint­ing at the New Orleans Museum of Art. I barely knew any­thing about Dutch and Flem­ish art before today, but now here it is mid­night and I am one of the world’s fore­most experts. That’s what muse­ums can do!  Read the rest of this entry →