One of the best (and, sadly, only) stories I've read in a while about interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan is this piece by Neil Shea on NPR/Foreign Policy. What's so great about it is the way he shows how progress (if that's the word to use) on the ground depends not on the number of interpreters, the amount of money that the Pentagon pays to defense contractors to supply those interpreters, or the quality of the interpreters themselves. What matters is the interaction from all sides of the language barriers that occurs in the traffic of words. Both sides fail; they can't help themselves.

Shea writes:

U.S. troops rely on translators. There is no alternative. On the battlefield and in the shuras, young officers like Kearney, raised in the get-down-to-business culture of America and its military, often express themselves to their translators directly and with heaps of slang, roughly the way they might talk to a college buddy. The terp is then expected to decide not only how to translate the words but also how to bridge the gulf of propriety and custom. But although this colloquial language is informal, it is still complex. And unfortunately, it assumes even more common background and idiomatic understanding than a more formal diction would: Think of phrases like "man up," "freedom isn't free," or even "shoulder responsibility" and "build your nation." In the best circumstances, the most successful shuras, it would be unrealistic to expect all this meaning to pass intact to a group of old men from another world. Try filtering it through a translator who didn't attend college, was never your buddy, and didn't grow up surrounded by phrases Americans take for granted, and the chances for error or insult multiply rapidly.

This resonates in interesting ways with David Mitchell's new masterwork novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel, which I just finished reading. The novel takes place on a small trading island where the Japanese keep their Dutch trading partners contained, like dangerous viruses. They're managed by a guild of Japanese translators and interpreters (interestingly, whole families get into the language business, and fathers pass positions to sons) who not only communicate messages but also act as censors and procurers, and who even engage in corruption themselves. The Dutch don't learn Japanese -- except for de Zoet, who begins the novel as a wet-eared but canny lower clerk pining for a girl at home and ends up, many years later, as someone so inside the culture and language but who still couldn't be with the Japanese woman he loves. Over and over Mitchell shows how the real trade isn't in copper or porcelain; neither is it in ideas (an early scene has de Zoet fearful that his Psalter will be confiscated; Christianity is prohibited in Japan) and knowledge (the Japanese clamor for Western medical expertise). The real traffic is in words and what they mean.

As a depiction of the economy of language in a pre-colonial context, Mitchell's novel is excellent. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, translation and the economies of meaning determine outcomes -- not only in terms of geopolitical resolution but in terms of what has to happen in order for US soldiers to be able to leave those places and come home, alive.

I'm back from two weeks of traveling to Anchorage, Alaska, and the Aleutian islands for vacation, then to Sonoma, California, for a day job meeting. When skies were sunny, they looked like this:

Researching my previous post on the web, I came across an Austrian-born, NY-based conceptual artist, Rainer Ganahl, who works in and around languages -- not in the way artists usually do (contrasting text with image) but getting at the political and cultural conditions for learning and speaking certain languages. This is very exciting for me, even though it's late in the game, book-wise. One project has been to learn foreign languages and document the time he spends doing it, mainly on video. As of 1997 (I think), he'd worked with 10 languages, which he describes in a quite brilliant essay, "Traveling Linguistics." Another project is a legislative movement to get the European Union to declare Chinese a European language and get it taught as a second or third language in schools. His motivation for doing this he articulates in his essay this way:

I have become increasingly aware of the psychoanalytical and identity-shaping consequences of my interest in studying foreign languages that can probably be best expressed in the "special note" of my file, basic linguistic services: "keep moving away from your mother tongue". However, I felt the need to question my own interest in the languages, their significance (romantic, powerful, marginal aspects, etc.) and the implications of the studies as well as the specific, privileged context within which I was able to free the energy to engage in these studies.

Hence the "traveling linguistics." Learning foreign languages, he claims, is informed by tourism and migration as a paradigm -- even if actual tourism or migration do not occur -- a paradigm that emerges in the 19th century in Europe, closely allied with Western imperialism and Orientalism (in Edward Said's sense). What existed before the tourism/migration paradigm? Before that was the nationalist paradigm, where one embarked on expertise in a language to shore up one's own claim to belonging to that nation and to no others. Before that was the scriptural paradigm, where the power of the church had to be engaged in its own language(s), but also in terms of the vernaculars. All this feeds the cultural fascination with polyglots and hyperpolyglots, and helps explain why the polyglot may be a distinctly Western cultural icon.

Colin Dickey (who wrote an awesomely creepy intellectual history, Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, about the 19th century fascination with the skulls of geniuses, which were dug up, dissected, hidden, stolen, lost) alerted me to Kevin McCann's article in the newest Cabinet Magazine about Louis Wolfson, an American writer who, starting in the 1960s, began obsessively studying foreign languages, starting with French, German, Russian, and Hebrew.

So of course I was interested. Was Wolfson like the hyperpolyglots I'd met?

His account of his language obsession, Le Schizo et les langues, details his methods and process. What Wolfson does and what the people I talked to aren't very similar. For instance, I met no one with Wolfson's level of obsession. Writes McCann: "Wolfson decided to eschew any contact with the English language. To drown out people speaking English, he used a short-wave radio tuned to foreign language or classical music broadcasts." But because he lived in the US, he couldn't escape English entirely, so he developed methods to transform English words into foreign ones, neutralizing their Englishness. The linguist is interested in knowing if Wolfson's transformations were solely in the spelling of the word or also in the phonology; McCann doesn't say. I also wanted to know more about Wolfson's "defensive system": were these transformations something that he ran in his head, talking to himself, or did he actually vocalize them?

Sure, the hyperpolyglots I write about wanted to prove themselves by learning lots of languages, but they didn't take it to this level of obsession; even Christopher, the polyglot savant, doesn't spend all his time working with languages. Like Wolfson, some of them search for commonalities among languages that they experience at a subjective aesthetic level, but not as the focal point of the practice, not to the level of detail, and not with such arbitrary details as Wolfson, "who discovered that the letter combination dg in English words can generally be replaced by ck in German...for Wolfson, such discoveries constituted scientific breakthroughs," McCann wrote.

And somewhat comically, and even sadly, Wolfson was never very good in encounters with real speakers, or at least according to what he wrote in Le schizo et les langues. When the rabbi came to sit with his dying mother, Wolfson tried to say "God is the bomb" to him in Hebrew, but he said it incorrectly, as "God is a bomb," which the rabbid disagreed with and then turned away. The hyperpolyglots I write about all take basic communicative competence as a personal goal and a learning standard.

On the other hand, no hyperpolylot I know of had a reputation among French intellectuals in the 60s and 70s like Wolfson did, on the basis of his books, which have never been translated into English. (Maybe McCann is going to change that.)

I'm glad to have come across this article about Wolfson, who's still alive and living in Puerto Rico (McCann writes that he interviewed him, in French; maybe he knows Spanish, too), for the purpose of contrast. You may think that making yourself fluent in a bunch of languages is insane, but Wolfson really is genuinely weird.

You're going to go look up Louis Wolfson on the web now, but you'll only find something about Louis Wolfson, the deceased financier. So here's an opportunity for someone to write something up for Wikipedia, if you want.

So plagiarism is in the air; the NY Times caught the bug (with a reasonably nuanced nondemonization of the perpetrators) the other day, with an article that's, at this writing, the most emailed. Or maybe they stole the idea from me -- my essay for The Morning News, "Cheater, Cheater," burned up the tweetosphere (for a summary, go here) in June. The Times did an earlier story about the technology being employed to catch plagiarists. (Just kidding about them stealing the idea.)

The focus of both of those articles is on student writing -- but not student computer programming, where the plagiarism of code is also a rampant problem. That's a tougher situation to think about, I think, because if you're talking about literary (loosely construed) authorship, you have recourse to a couple thousand years of authorial traditions, with all its various threads and permutations. You also have recourse to reconsiderations of the postmodern sort, like mine, one result of which is to alter the moral valence of plagiarism as an activity, but also introduce new themes for pedagogy. Instructors of programming have no such recourse.

Another complicating difference is that writers actually do have to come up with their own language and ideas a great portion of the time, depending on appropriation, pastiche, riffing, paraphrasing, etc. as legitimate tools but one that, from a craft perspective, you don't want to use too often. And if you do use them, you may not want to admit to it. (Naturally, there are some writers who embrace the pastiche as a practice; see David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto as the most recent example.) My point is that the gap between what the classroom ideal is (you do your own work) and the actual practice (you come up with your own language) are very close.

I don't know much about the coding world, but what I do know suggests that the gap between the pedagogical ideal (you do your own work -- some of which means facing the blank screen and making the first steps) and the actual practice is much, much bigger than in the literary/compositional world. the coding world, And yet, in the actual work of writing code, copying/borrowing/appropriating is the only way to get the job done, so the gap between classroom practice (and academic values) and actual practice is much wider than it is in composition. I got an email recently from someone in response to The Morning News essay; the writer (who disagreed with my take) then admitted, "In my line of work, copying code from others is essential to getting my job done and an important skill, but also the worst kind of cheating if done in class to avoid completing an assignment."

Could someone get back to me and fill this in?

Pioneering bilingual researcher Francois Grosjean has just published a new book with Harvard University Press, Bilingual: Life and Reality, which explores some of the misunderstandings held about bilinguals. He outlines some of the myths in a post for the HUP website.

Another common misconception is that bilinguals have equal knowledge of their languages. In fact, bilinguals know their languages to the level that they need them and many are dominant in one of them.

There are also the myths that real bilinguals do not have an accent in their different languages and that they are excellent all-around translators. This is far from being true. Having an accent or not does not make one more or less bilingual, and bilinguals often have difficulties translating specialized language. Then there is the misconception that all bilinguals are bicultural (they are not) and that they have double personalities (as a bilingual myself, and with a sigh of relief, I can tell you that this is not the case).

I highlight these because these myths about bilinguals are also used to discredit, or discount, hyperpolyglottism as a real, significant, and interesting phenomenon:

•hyperpolyglots can't really be considered to speak or know a language unless they don't know the culture
•hyperpolyglots can't be given credit for speaking or knowing a language because their vocabulary is limited and they can use the language only in limited domains
•hyperpolyglots must know all their languages to an equal, and very high, degree of proficiency; otherwise they're fake

Grosjean (in his post, and presumably in his book, too) elaborates on these myths and discusses their impact. In the American context, other damaging myths exist -- most notably, the notion that being an English/language X bilingual is equal to not speaking English.

In my Design Observer essay, "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention," I imagined what I called an "attention tax" that aspiring writers, musicians, artists, et al. should pay. It was based on the notion that writers don't read or buy enough books, and we pay fealty (and real money) to cultural forms that don't kill writing directly, but endanger it by competing for attention. I summarized the tax like this:

If you want people to read your book, then you have to read books; if you want people to buy your book, then you buy books. Give your attention to the industry of your choice.

I might have also said, don't bemoan your inability to sell your book if you don't yourself buy books.

Well, the indie press Tin House Books and literary journal Tin House has stipulated that submissions between August 1 and November 30 must be accompanied by a receipt from a bookstore.

In the spirit of discovering new talent as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts dated between August 1 and November 30, 2010, as long as each submission is accompanied by a receipt for a book from a bookstore. Tin House magazine will require the same for unsolicited submissions sent between September 1 and December 30, 2010...ALL MANUSCRIPTS WITHOUT RECEIPT OR EXPLANATION WILL BE RETURNED UNREAD IN SASE.

I love this and heartily support not only the requirement, but that it be made permanent. There's a work-around for writers who can't afford books or prefer e-books, so it's not absolutely exclusionary, which is fair. Anything that makes writers, who would publish and presume upon others' attention, examine what attention commitments (and economic commitments) they themselves make is a wonderful, wonderful thing. (And to see part of my essay come true, well, that's just icing.)

Did Calvin Coolidge's family use sign language when they didn't want to be overheard?

I don't know, but that was the search query someone used to get to the website for Um... recently.

I always thought that Coolidge's best weapon against being overheard was not to say much at all. There's a nice anecdote in Um... about Coolidge, who used to gather reporters to the White House every week for off-the-record chats. He was the first American president with a policy against being quoted verbatim (as I write on page 236 of Um...) -- reporters weren't allowed to quote him directly or even write down his words. One time, Coolidge castigated a reporter he saw taking shorthand of what the president was saying.

"Are you taking down in shorthand what I say?"

"Yes, sir," the reporter replied.

"Now I don't think that is right," Coolidge said. "I don't think that is the proper thing to do. Who do you represent?"

"David Lawrence," the reporter replied.

"Well, I wish you would tell Mr. Lawrence that I don't think it is the right thing to do...I don't object to you taking notes as to what I say, but I don't quite throw my communications to the conference into anything like finished style or anything that perhaps would naturally be associated with a Presidential utterance," Coolidge said.

The irony is this: we know exactly how the exchange went because it was recorded by a White House stenographer.

Last week, The Morning News published an essay I was first assigned to write by Rolling Stone back in 2002, in which I found the first student I caught plagiarizing and interviewed her about how it impacted her life. The piece got killed (because I didn't know what I wanted to write) but I remained fond of the work and recently decided to resuscitate it. The essay is here.

It sparked some conversation around the interwebs when it was reposted at The Awl, Huffington Post , and D Magazine. You can read how and where it was tweeted around here.

It also provoked a letter to the editors at The Morning News, which was posted today here. The letter came from Elliot Hartwell, a graduate student at UC Davis. Here's my response to Elliot:

Dear Elliott,

Your note is puzzling. You start out agreeing with me, and by the end you're in full-blown ad hominem mode. I won't venture to diagnose what this suggests your experiences as a graduate student or as an instructor might be. I will say that nowhere in my piece do I say that I removed a statement of plagiarism policy from my syllabi. Nowhere do I claim to have stopped hunting plagiarists. And nowhere do I say that I stopped dealing with people I caught. You have felt free to read that into my essay. I wrote an essay that pursued nuance of morality and biography, yet it seems to have provoked you (and a few other readers, judging by the comments that were left on websites where this essay was linked) to accuse me of some sin against civilization itself. I invite you to quote for me from my essay where I said that moral standards do not matter. I'll make that offer even broader: I invite you to quote for me from anything I've ever written that glorifies or sanctions cheating in any form. But the essay is imperfect, because I didn't describe what I did when I discovered plagiarism in the semesters following. I responded by doing my primary job, which was to teach writing. Of course, I had to uphold institutional policy, but when policy conflicted with teaching, I let the pedagogical guide my hand. I should have assigned more writing to Haley, not less--as it stood, she only wrote six papers that semester (three drafts, three revised drafts), not the eight papers that her classmates did. I should have made her write me an apology. I should have made her write an apology to the website's author. I should have made her accountable, and I should have made her articulate her accountability in writing. I happen to think that school at any level should endeavor to make better people, not merely better students. In that, the punishment failed. I failed. As for the integrity of the academy you believe in, well, let's just say that scholars and researchers are part of the culture, not apart from it, despite their insistences to the contrary. I don't know you, but allow me the presumption of hoping that you learn this gently when the time comes.

Michael

Clearly, the conundrum that is student authorship in higher education hasn't gone away, and neither has the tendency to moralize simplistically about what instructors' proper responses should be.

Needless to say, we've talked more about signing than we've actually signed. DOG and CAT get into regular rotation, as does MORE. Other than that, we're using spoken English. All throughout the last couple months, the baby's said phantom words a couple of times. For instance, you ask him some question, and he responds with something that sounds like "yes." Dad double takes, Mom double takes, and we ask each other: Did you hear that? Who's talking in the baby's mouth? (Babies, of course, precipitated the birth of ventriloquism: up to about three months ago, I could give voice to stuffed animals and he'd look at the stuffed animal, but now he looks at me. It's not enough motivation to learn how to throw my voice, but I do see where the impulse comes from.)