DEW Consulting

If you’re ever in Savannah, be sure to visit the birthplace of famed short-story writer Mary Flannery O’Connor. It’s on Lafayette Square in the Historic District.

After her father died of lupus – the same disease that killed her at age 39 – she and her mother moved to a farm in Milledgeville, GA. That’s a place I won’t recommend you visit.  At least not unless you have a secret affinity for red clay and peacocks. The latter liked to stand on top of her mother’s house-roof and scream at visitors. Which brings to mind the first of many memorable O’Connor quotes. This one is about her own style of writing, known as “Southern Gothic.”

“To the hard-of-hearing you shout. And for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Or this one, which neatly sums up her complex feelings on the mixture of an uncomfortable faith with fallen human nature in the Deep South:

 “If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then to hell with it.”

Or this, after watching a TV movie based on one of her short stories, in which a feel-good finale is pasted onto her trade-mark bleak ending:

 “The best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse. Just conceivably.”

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There’s a review of Ethan Hawke’s new movie about O’Connor in yesterday’s NYT, here. Hawke cast his own daughter, Maya, in the Mary Flannery role. If you’re an afficianado of O’Connor’s work, as I am, you might conceivably like this movie – just conceivably. But if not, then maybe it’s best to skip it. She is, after all, an acquired taste. And if you have any doubts on that score, then consider this from the reviewer:

Her stories are full of darker things, the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman’s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.

You get the picture. Me, I’ve got a soft spot for O’Connor’s grotesqueries.  I’ve also got a soft spot for what’s described as the movie’s central scene, in which  a bedridden Maya-as-Mary, suffering from one of her many bouts of lupus, asks to see a priest, who is played by Liam Neeson.

The priest at first offers her pleasantries and aphorisms about dealing with suffering. But after listening to her agony, his affect changes. He, as she does, understands the pain of trying to see his way through the fog of life.

She begs for reassurance that it’s good to pursue her writing and that God also cares for her. “Is your writing honest?” the priest asks her. “Is your conscience clear?” When she nods, he continues. “Then the rest,” he says, “is God’s business.”

Honesty with a clear conscience: We could all do a lot worse.

There are three people in this world I absolutely adore. John Cleese. Eli Manning. And David Sedaris. One from each follows. The first two are short and sweet. The last is longer, but still well worth the read. “Only the third bottle from the left contains poison?” Hoo boy. That David Sedaris.  He is such a card.

Not long after we moved in, I was heading to the lobby, and a neighbor I would later get to know as Tommy boarded the elevator one floor below mine. He nodded at me, and as the doors closed I raised a finger. “May I ask you a question?”

“Not if it’s about how much to tip the doormen at Christmas,” he said.

That was exactly what I was going to ask. Quick, I thought, think of a replacement. “Can you recommend a cobbler?” I asked.

Now it is five years later. I’m on my way to the lobby and when a woman boards at 14, I ask, “How long have you known your dentist?”

She thinks for a moment. “Fifteen years. Why?”

“Just curious,” I say. “I knew my old one for almost that long but then we moved to New York and I had to start over.”

“And where did you move here from?” she asks. And then we’re off, pleasantly conversing until we part ways on the ground floor.

How long have you known your dentist is such a good icebreaking question, a real keeper in my opinion. I didn’t make it up, it’s not mine, rather I found it on Duolingo, an app my friend Dave turned me on to. He’d been using it to learn Spanish. Me, I started with Japanese. It offers over forty languages, free with ads, and free of them for a pretty nominal charge.

Each program features the same cast of animated characters: the excitable little boy, the bored teenage girl with hair covering her face. There’s an athletic-looking blond fellow, Vikram, who wears a turban, and Bea, who, according to her profile, is of West African heritage: eleven in all, including a talking bear named Falstaff. Sometimes Duolingo will give me a sentence in English: “How many desks are in the room?” and I have to translate it into Japanese choosing from the menu of words written in hiragana at the bottom of the screen. Other times I have to read a sentence out loud and the characters will either accept or reject me, based upon my pronunciation. My least favorite is when they give me the sentence and I have to write it in whichever language I’m studying. If you’ve only ever learned English you maybe don’t know that in other countries, “I gave her the suitcase,” might go, “I gave to her the suitcase,” or “I had to her the suitcase gave.” You have to grasp a new word order. Then there’s the spelling to worry about.

My friend Mike is learning Yiddish with Duolingo and one of the sentences it taught him is: “My uncle is a broken man.” I used its French program to freshen up before a trip to Paris not long ago, and was both surprised and not by the question, “What is he doing in our bed?”

I’m a dilettante, and always have been. Rather than really buckling down and mastering anything, I flit from one language to the next. Thus I noted how different Duolingo’s Japanese was from Duolingo’s German version. In the latter, the characters have definite opinions. “Your apartment is dark and ugly.” “I don’t like your sweater.”

They give the impression that German people are direct and judgmental, but also outdoorsy, generous, and sure of themselves. Thus such sentences as, “I’m sorry, but your doctor is playing volleyball today,” “I am giving one hundred toilets to my father,” and “Spain needs us.” There’s a lot of talk about witches, but no mention of them dating one another, this as opposed to Duolingo’s Japanese program where seemingly everyone is gay. “Is that your grandmother’s new girlfriend?” is one of the questions I was taught. Suddenly the guy with the headband on had a husband as well as a son. Even the bear was dating another guy.

I often complained about the last Japanese learning program I used, Pimsleur. So much of the talk was, as it is on their German and Polish and Romanian courses, about drinking. “Do you want a beer? Wine? Sake? Whisky? How many bottles? Should we drink at your place or mine? What time should we start drinking? Do you know what Tenaka-san drinks? Does his wife drink too? Have you ever had drinks with his parents?”

Pimsleur taught me a lot of practical things though, like how to make reservations and buy train tickets. “Which track do I leave on? At what time do we arrive? Is it an express train or a super express train?”

When it comes to icebreaker questions though, the type one might ask in an elevator, both Pimsleur and Duolingo pale compared to Teach Yourself Japanese, a book a woman in England sent me a few pages of. It was what her dad used back in the ’50s, and it includes the phrases: “What will become of us if father dies? Grandmother has turned blind. The man with small hands is my friend. I no longer take any pleasure in my work. Shall I kill myself tomorrow?” and “It is only the third bottle from the left which has poison in it.”

What age, I wonder, are these students? If you no longer take pleasure in your work I’m guessing you’ve been at it for a while, yet your grandmother is still alive, and newly blind? And just how small are the friend’s hands? I’m thinking of someone with the equivalent of raccoon paws, trying to open a bottle of pills he can kill himself with.

Depressing phrases or practical ones, you’ll never become fluent through an app or a book, no matter how many hours you devote to it. You have to talk to actual people. My friend Scott has tutors in both Japanese and French and is miles ahead of me in terms of conversing and understanding. He does his lessons once a week on Zoom. I suppose I could do the same, but I’m afraid I won’t like the tutor, and won’t know how to put an end to our relationship. It’s the same reason I don’t see a psychiatrist or hire a trainer.

Most of the doormen in my building are from Ecuador and one, Adrian, has, at my request, started speaking to me exclusively in Spanish. I took it in high school, so we didn’t have to start from scratch. The problem is that, because he essentially works for me, he’s not going to be as strict as, say, the French teacher I had in Paris. Not that I’m not progressing. Recently I learned that Adrian calls his mother Gordita, which means little fatty. It’s a nice bit of information to start your day with, though it leaves me wondering, and phrasing the question to myself in Japanese, French, German, and now, tentatively, in Spanish, “What does he call me?”

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More David Sedaris is here.

Mark Twain in a passage about crows excerpted from

“Following the Equator.”

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Woke up this morning and had a post all ready to go. Yeah, ready to go, for Cinco de Mayo. But then I saw this “Rules Of The Blues” thing, and I thought to myself:  Dang. I don’t care what day it is. 5/5 will come around again next year. Today, we gotta sing the Blues. “Teeth like Margaret Thatcher?” Hoo Baby!

PS. If you really need something to tide you over until next 5/5, you can read that one here.

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