Read some new fiction of mine in The Collagist, an excellent new online mag from Dzanc Books.
Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, Middle Age is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis,' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car.
UNESCO has unveiled an interactive online version of the new edition of the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger:
Manx, Aasax, Ubykh, Eyak: Once spoken in, respectively, the Isle of Man, Tanzania, Turkey, and Alaska, all four languages have died out in the last 35 years. Of the 6,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 2,500 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left, according to Unesco.
You can get a world of very cool detail about these languages-at-risk via the Atlas. You can search by name, country or area, or level of vitality (unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered, and extinct). Each search takes you to a Google map with balloons that mark the epicenter of each language and, when clicked, give you virtual notecards with intriguing or depressing facts about the language. There's also space to add your own expertise.
Good news for Anglophones: We're not the problem, at least not entirely, according to the Atlas's editor-in-chief, an Australian linguist named Chrisopher Moseley. “It would be naïve and oversimplifying to say that the big ex-colonial languages, English or French or Spanish, are the killers, and all smaller languages are the victims,” Mr. Moseley says in a UNESCO news release. “It is not like that; there is a subtle interplay of forces, and this atlas will help ordinary people to understand those forces better.”
Don't forget International Mother Language Day on Feb. 21.
VQR has put its 1973-2005 archives online, including a short story of mine called "Act of Humanity." If I were writing it now, I'd go with a different title, but I am still glad to see it available in something handier than the dreaded PDF format. Thanks, VQR.
Dear Facebook:
I am not my music, even though I sometimes wish I were. I do not want to share 25 random facts about myself with even one other person, much less 139 of them. I do not want you to help me create my Witness Protection Program name. I do not want to know which English word I am. Don't get me started about the whole Superpoke business.
Can't I just use you? Keep your memes to yourself and we can make this thing work.
Your friend,
JHoward
It seems I joined the so-called slow-blogging movement without intending to. Sorry about that. Time to get back to slapdash, off-the-cuff posting.
So what *have* I been doing lately? I've been out to Montgomery College to talk to a continuing-ed group about the short story I wrote for D.C. Noir. The takeaway: It's fun to talk about fiction, and I miss writing it. Must do something about that.
The larger theme was Washington as more than metaphor. I made the point, not for the first time, that for some of us, "inside the Beltway" describes where we live. I talked about Louis J. Halle, a State Department employee in the 1940s who used to get up before dawn and bike all over town to look at birds. His 1947 book Spring in Washington describes how he "undertook to be monitor of the Washington seasons, when the government was not looking." It's a neat little piece of work, part philosophy and part natural history, and an example of some of the literary possibilities this town offers if you look past the political metaphors.
I also asked the continuing-ed group how they felt about the devolution of Book World, which as many of you know is going away as a stand-alone print section. These readers are very ticked off about it. They don't want to read BW online, and they don't want to have to browse Outlook, Style, and Sunday Arts in search of reviews.
We didn't have time to get into some of the deeper questions about why, or whether, book coverage deserves its own section. That would be an interesting conversation.
To be continued.
My Mom says
she sees candy
I ran up
Where where
I askd over
there says
Mom
the end
(Editor's note: This may be my 6-year-old's first foray into fiction-writing.)
