Sing us a Thing, Piano Man

I always liked this post of Schneeblog's, maybe because I remember as a middle schooler being shocked that anyone could prefer the third Harry Potter book (which is all plot twist) to the first (which is all Things). I like Things. There are noble abstracts and linguistic thickets and essential errands and all sorts of wonderful verbs in the world but at the end of a long day of negligible weather and negligible phone calls I find the concept I want to curl up with is pretty Things.

This, I think, is part of why women subscribe to catalogs.

I wrote recently here about the question of how not to get carried away with “Torah im Cool Stuff”.

Of course, if you pursue Things long enough, you discover on your own that the proportions are off and the story is not solid enough: that the novel that is your life has to have a theme and a protagonist, also.

Art Installation

original

translation into Chinuk Wawa:

Mitlite nika tumtum siah kimta sun-get-up, pe mitlite nika siah-siah kopa klip-sun.

Howkwutl nika mukmuk, pe howkwutl mukmuk chaco tsee?

Howkwutl nika mamook huihui nawitka, pe

Tsiyon kow Pil lope, pe nika kow Arav lope?

Klah mahsh konaway kloshe Sfarad, kahkwa

Hyas ticky nanitch polallie kokshut Hyas-Tyee-wawa-Home.

Chinuk Wawa, or 'the Chinook jargon,' evolved in the course of the 19th century as a means of communication between the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest and the "Bostons" who began to move to the area.

It is a characteristic, more or less dying, language of the end of the West of this novel continent.