lapsus linguae

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the dictionary lately. Either I’m getting smarter or my Collins Concise is woefully out of date. We’ve been on-again off-again since high school. Seen some rough patches. My mother said I’d never get anywhere in life because I can’t spell. How can you look up a word if you can’t spell it? So the Collins got shelved. I mostly just talked my way through art school. And then spellcheck came along. So many obstacles between the dictionary and me. But we’ve always pulled through.

This may seem like a digression, but bear with me. Last month Stéphane and I went to a dinner party. We were all quite drunk by the time we noticed the three saris hanging overhead. We fell into a “how to wrap a sari” discussion with two French philosophers, three new media artists, a documentary filmmaker and a translator. Do they wear underwear underneath? We all wanted to know. Do they use pins? They must use pins. I said: The ancient Romans pinned their togas at the shoulder. Oh what is that word? The translator exclaimed! When she was a child her favourite dictionary had a picture of a toga pin in it. She’d memorized the word. Now here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use it in public and she couldn’t remember it. I said: Who cares if you don’t remember it, I’ve just fallen in love with you for falling in love with the word for a toga pin! That’s when Stéphane piped up. Fibula, he said. The word is fibula. Needless to say I went home with him.

We walked the translator part of the way home. She said: You know when people say: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book? Well I’d want it to be a dictionary. If I were stranded on a desert island and could only have one translator I’d want it to be her. Or my brave friend Daniel Canty. He translated the text of Les huit quartiers du sommeil this summer. Pauvre lui. But that’s what he gets for getting me started writing on the theme of sleep in the first place. Somehow when he invited me to submit something to Le Livre du chevete, the third anthology in the La table des matières series published by Quartanier, it didn’t sink in that whatever I wrote would only appear in print in French. I have no idea how long it took Daniel to translate les huit quartiers. It took me six hours to learn how to read, in French, what I had written in English. And that was with the aide of a gigantic Le Robert & Collins French-English dictionary left over from the decades when my French Canadian mother-in-law was an English teacher at Ecole Secondaire Paul-Gérin-Lajoie. I made copious notes on possible replacements for all kinds of words that I thought were errors until Stéphane explained that in most cases they were in fact such brilliant translations that they went right over my head. When I went to meet with Daniel to discuss the text you better believe the Robert & Collins came with me. When he saw it he said: That’s a big dictionary. But it won’t help you.

The next week I handed in an essay for a publication commemorating the tenth anniversary of Studio XX, a feminist art centre in Montréal dedicated to providing women access to technology. Given how complicated the translation of les huit quartiers du sommeil had been, I thought I’d keep this essay simple. It turns out that simple English is the hardest thing to translate into French. I wrote a light-hearted third-person-plural pre-history called: Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together. The first thing I realized when I got the text back from the translator was that that whimsical title is utterly untranslatable. Something else was wrong too, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Le Robert & Collins was no help. Finally I got Stéphane to look at it. He pointed out that although it is perfectly correct for the third person plural to default to masculine subject-verb agreement in French, in this case, because Studio XX is a feminist organization, all the people in the “we” are women so everything has to agree with the feminine. In my humble opinion, even if Studio XX were a centre dedicated to providing men access to technology, like all the other centres, the translation was still a little flat. As Dr. Michael J. Boyce later pointed out: “The piece is a very good example of the difficulty involved in any translation of any sort of writing that is indelibly stamped with the personality of the writer. The difficulty is not registered in the machinery of transliteration, but rather with the task of capturing its authorship. In this respect, the translator’s failure to capture voice in the grammatical sense is only symptomatic, I am sure, of his inability to grasp the spirit, the soul, the personality – in sooth, the voice – of the writing. To coin a phrase, he just didn’t get it.” Fortunately a second translator was called it and once the gender issues were cleared up I was able to see ways to reinsert my voice. As in writing, as in life.

In the midst of all this translating, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I was using the hell out of her old dictionary – though not quite in those words. She said she had an extra French-only dictionary if I wanted it and I said: Yes! Absolutely. Then she said she had an English-only dictionary that had the meanings in it, did I want that? I said: But I already know what the words mean in English!

Now I regret that hasty decision. Over the weekend the spine of my geriatric Collins Concise cracked in half at ke: keel over, to collapse suddenly. Now it’s very hard to flip through. Which is really too bad because I’ve recently become addicted to Scrabble – a game I swore I’d never play. Sure I’m witty with words in a cutting cocktail chatter kind of way. And I do write for a living. So you’d think I’d just love Scrabble. But if you had descended from the long line of grammar snobs, spelling fascists and cryptic crossword puzzle fanatics that I did, I assure you, you’d rather chew your own arm off than play Scrabble. So what gives? For one thing I’m not really addicted to Scrabble but rather to Scrabulous, a far superior game. First off all, it’s online. We as a society are no longer limited to playing board games with whomever we happen to be stuck spending the holiday long weekend with. Now we can play long tedious drawn out board games with people we actually like. And we can eat and drink and walk the dog and talk on the phone and maybe even get some work done in between moves. If that’s not progress I don’t know what is. Our chances of sustaining out friendships with our favourite opponents in real life are greatly improved now that we don’t have to endure the sight of their smug scheming or listen to their clucking with triple word score delight. My favourite thing about Scrabulous – you get to use the dictionary! This is great opportunity for Collins Concise and I to spend some quality time together before it falls apart altogether and I trade up to Oxford English. So please don’t tell the old dogeared dear that there’s dictionary built into the Scrabulous application. And a list of two-letter words. Finally, world domination is within my reach! Um, well, word domination at least.
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Who is this girl in the auburn locks? Does anyone know?

I met her at a party the other night. We had a long conversation about the power ballad. But my attention was divided. Patti Smith was in town. And every time the doorbell rang I got my hopes up just a tiny bit. Auburn locks sat on a sofa next to a tiger calm as could be, beneath a seahorse lamp across the room from a rack of records next to a rack of antlers. There were at least four record players in the room. They played early Led Zeppelin and early George Michael, but wisely not at the same time.

The hostess was a leggy redhead with a way words and closet full of dresses. Guest girls came and went in them, passing each other with bare-armed polyester swishes up and down the not-quite-spiral night-blue stairs. In the kitchen canapés were served: swordfish squares and sliced duck skewers. I met this blond on the way to the bathroom who didn’t seem to know anyone. Then what are you doing here? There was a Pop Montreal poster on the doorway. So you just wandered in? Patti never wandered in. By the time I made my way back from the bathroom the girl with the auburn locks had up and disappeared. I’m fairly sure the tiger on the sofa was to blame.

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or, the path to the twentieth century via the kicking and screaming route

believe it or not, until last Monday morning we still had a dial-up Internet connection. and me, a web artist and all. we suffered these retrograde conditions for as long as we did in part because until recently we had plenty of neighbours with unauthenticated high-speed wireless routers spewing out connection left right and centre. as I explained to a friend last winter: our neighbours stomp up and down the stairs and walking around with boots on over our heads at all hours – so we clog up their internet connection with as much high-bandwidth data transfer as possible. my friend said: well, that’s showing them. ha. this past July first moving day the last of these unauthenticated hosts moved out and left us signal-less and oh so slow.

another reason it took us so long to make this transition was we were looking for the perfect solution and we were looking to pay less. we wasted months comparison shopping for bundles, packages, deals. now we know. there is no perfection solution and everything costs a lot. the best we could do was to get a lot more bang for our buck. after months of saying we have to do something about this soon, and then weeks of grumbling about how we haven’t done anything about it yet and more weeks of comparing notes about all the things we hadn’t thought of yet and then more hours online (on dial-up), and more hours on the phone (and so, therefore, with no internet access), and without endorsing any brand names or companies (because really, they’re all charlatans), here’s what we came up with:

we now have cable internet. it isn’t high-speed exactly, it’s intermediate speed. maybe eventually we’ll think it’s too slow, but right now we’re pretty darn happy with ten times faster than dial-up at four dollars a month more than dial-up. we also have cable telephone. it costs ten dollars less than what we were paying and instead of being forced to pay for call waiting even though we didn’t want it, we now have call display, which is a miraculous invention and a huge load off our minds. we can now not answer the phone in peace. we can also talk on the phone and use the internet at the same time. we have an encrypted connection, so forget about it neighbours, just back off.

we were on a roll so we decided we’d better consolidate our cell phone spending too. this was rather difficult as we were both already on the cheapest plans possible. we found a couples plan that worked out to a few dollars less per month and offered us more minutes than what we had and free incoming calls and unlimited calls between us, and all those things couples plans figure couples need. we’d have to sign a contract of course, but we were willing to do it – mostly because I needed a new phone. my old phone was so old it was made of metal. the display was black and green. there was no camera, no mp3 player, no internet, nothing. not that I minded so much, having plenty of other devices capable of these fulfilling functions. the real problem was that I’d stepped on the recharger cable thingy one too many times and was having an increasingly difficult time getting it to stay plugged into the phone. eventually the ability to charge the phone supersedes the phone charges, and I had reached that point.

so there we were on the phone the other night with a cell phone company we’ve been clients off for years, armed with an absurd arsenal of couples plan and phone feature trivia. things started off alright but soon became irritating. the couples package comes with two new phones, but all the good phones cost money and staring down the barrel of a two to three year contract, I did not want to get stuck with a piece of crap phone. now, in all our years of giving this company money we’d accumulated a fair amount of “reward dollars”, but we were not aloud to apply these dollars to purchasing the new phones that come with the package because they were already being offered at a reduced rate. fine. and the couples plan price originally quoted to us does not include call display – an absolute must have – for which we will both have to pay and additional six bucks extra. whatever. then they put us both through credit checks, even though we were already paying customers in good standing, and THEN they refused us a special reduced rate on the first three months because we were already clients. by this time it was nine thirty at night and my zucchini flower risotto was languishing on the back burner and we were about to die of starvation. and we were pissed off. I said: you know what, forget it. we’re not saving any money here and we’re not agreeing to a contract while we’re pissed off. so forget about it, we’ll stick with the plans we have. would that it were that easy. we were so far along in the process that we were already on the couples plan. the sales guys was almost as miserable as we were. he kept saying: I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do. finally he gave me a 1-800 number to call in the morning and we hung up. the zucchini flower risotto was awesome, which was of some consolation, but I didn’t sleep well that night, worried about the 1800 phone call in the morning. it felt like we’d somehow stumbled into a Las Vegas wedding – seedy and schmaltzy but still legal and not so easily annulled.

this story may be long and tedious and all too familiar to some, but it does have a happy ending. it turns out that that sales guy did do one great thing for us. the 1-800 number he gave us was magic. it led to a whole other plane of existence. I called in the morning to file for a divorce from the couples plan. I quickly realized that I was speaking to someone with real power. suddenly call display was free for both of us for the duration of our contract, which finally made it cheaper for us to be on the couples plan than to have two separate plans. when I told the Wizard of the 1-800 number that last night we hadn’t even got to the part where we order new phones, she asked if we had any reward dollars. yes, I said, but we were told we couldn’t use them for the phones that come with a package. she said, they couldn’t do that for you in that office, but here we can. my god! it was like getting out of high school and into university and suddenly you get to pick what courses you take and you’re legal drinking age too! I quickly called up the web page detailing all the phone options so as to pick out way better phones than what we were going to settle for when we though we were paying cash (good thing we’d taken care of that pesky not being about to talk on the phone and browse the internet at the same time problem a few days before) because now that we were paying in magical “reward dollar” money we were in a whole new playing field, phone-wise.

Stéphane didn’t even need a new phone. he was going to take whatever phone they’d give him for free and give it to a friend of his who’s old phone was even older than my old phone. the magic 1-800 allowed him to use his points to get her a way nicer new phone – with a camera and an mp3 player and everything. on the card we wrote: you have no idea what we went through to get you this phone!!

my new phone is slimmer and more sophisticated than I am but we get along great. I still dress up a bit when we go out together. I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually. it helps that new-phone has a metal casing just like its prehistoric predecessor did – one does need some thread of continuity amidst all this change.

we put it off for as long as possible and once we decided to do it, it took quite a bit of doing, but I do believe we have now irrevocably entered the twenty-first century.
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One vacation leads to another. It took a lot of doing to get us to Toronto in June. But then, on the train back to Montréal, we read an article about 1001 Pots in the Via Rail magazine and since we were feeling pretty brazen after pulling off a week away together that we thought – How hard could a day trip up to Val-David be? So we decided we’d find a way to go check it out and finally we did.

1001 Pots is a huge outdoor ceramics festival/exhibition/sale – the largest in North America according to the brochure. It’s in its 19th year now. It costs all of two bucks to get in and it lasts a whole month. And Val David is only a little over an hour out of the city. So really, the odds of getting up to check it out are pretty good.

By the time we got to 1001 Pots we’d already visited two fromageries and had a picnic beside a river. It was hot and sunny and we were a little out of it. 1001 Pots is all outdoors, which is lovely in the shade. The first thing we figured out was that there were many more that 1001 pots. We wandered around in a daze trying not to break anything. The second thing we figured out was that everything was extremely expensive and the third, that a lot of it looked the same. No harm done, we thought. It got us out of the city, we thought.

And then we came upon this one table that totally blew our minds. Thankfully I took pictures; otherwise I’d be hard pressed to describe these amazing oddball over-the-top eccentric bright chunky wonky wonderful totally unique pieces. We soon discovered that they were the creations of special-needs kids from Maison Emmanuel, a community centre in Val-Morin. We went to sit in the shade and have a little think.

What we decided was, we were in need of cake plates and who better to buy them from than the kids of Maison Emmanuel. We ventured out into the sun again to make some tough decisions. Each plate was a work of art. How to choose? None of them matched. Not that any of our dishes match. None of them were the least bit practical. But all of them would look awesome on our yellow Formica table. Finally a lady came over to where we were clutching teetering stacks of highly irregular plates and asked if we needed any help. Do you have any more of these hidden away somewhere? We wanted to know. The woman beamed: Do you know who made these plates? Yes, the kids from Maison Emmanuel – we pointed to the prominently displayed sign over the table. And do you know that I’m their ceramic teacher? Well! We all got really excited. She went off to find us more plates while we contemplate possible uses for the ones we had already fallen in love with and in the end we wound up with quite a discount on two of the world’s most impractical cake plates and a cheese plate that doesn’t wobble at all if you put a folded tea towel under it.

All three are works of art. We can’t stop looking at them. This picture doesn’t do them justice at all. They do indeed look awesome on our yellow kitchen table. None are likely to see the inside of a cupboard anytime soon.

In a postscript: We realized when we got home and consulted the catalogue that the only other stuff we admired at 1001 Pots was made by the kids’ ceramic instructor, Maggie Roddan. Thanks Maggie Roddan, thanks 1001 Pots, thanks Maison Emmanuel.

More information: Maison Emmanuel

More information: 1001 Pots
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