isoglossia

One year ago, I had only a vague idea of what a ‘blog’ was. I did not read any blogs at all aside from two maintained by old friends, which allowed me to more or less keep up with their lives. Their blogs served as a sort of email supplement, but that’s as far as it went. Ever the Luddite late-adopter, I started this website one year ago today for reasons that remain unclear.

Copping to the B-word
Wait, now I remember. There was something about a baby, a very needy baby, who was taking up so much of our attention that our friends and families began to assume we’d fallen into a bottomless Karstic sinkhole. So this blog^[1] seemed a lazy way out, an economy of scale for disseminating information about and pictures of our vomit-flecked and sleepless existence, for those few who could stomach the documention of same.

Any readers who have blogs of their own (and that’s 75% of you, as far as I can tell — more stats below) know quite well that maintaining one of these electronic navels for gazing into is not quite the time-saver you might first think. In retrospect I am baffled as to how I managed to find the time to simply get it up and running, never mind actually write anything. I do recall a few near-all-nighters last February during which I wrestled endlessly with tiny bits of }css{ and resized images and tracked down hex codes for burnt sienna and so on. If nothing else, maintaining this site has made me a much more efficient user of the internet. I’ve learned a great deal about maximizing bookmarks and browser tabs & extensions, search engines & on-line references, as well as various sites which a year ago I’d never heard of: Flickr, Technorati, del.icio.us, Bloglines, WordPress Codex, and on and on. Keeping this site going has also made us more discerning consumers of our own photographs, which has had its own follow-on effects for the better.

But the biggest change in my internet habits in the last year^[2] has been the reading of other people’s blogs. When I started this little island of self-absorption I had no idea about the billions and billions of other people out there doing projects that were similar, only interesting. What began as a trickle of browsing progressed to regular reading, and now there are not only a generous handful of friends and family whose blogs I use for keeping in contact, but also numerous strangers out there whose lives I keep up with on a daily basis — people I’ll never meet. Some of them know I’m out here. Others have anywhere between no clue and fawning assurances that their postings bring me joy, whether they are daily-as-sunrise, reliable as the newspaper, or long awaited with great anticipation. It’s a very interesting way to know people without having to actually deal with them.

This project has also yielded some human interaction, too. It was only a few months old when some other foreigner-bloggers in Slovenia tracked me down and dragged my misanthropic ass out for bowling (of all things) and beer (mmm, beer…) Via the magic of email and comments I’ve also cyber-met many people I wouldn’t otherwise have known existed.

Year in review — pseudo-stats
As promised above, some more statistics:

• As of this posting, there are approximately 100,000,000 blogs in the ‘blogosphere’
• On average, a new blog is started every single second
• 25% of new blogs are abandoned within the first year
• 66% of blogs go without an update for over a month
• 87% of blog content consists of reasons for not posting more, sorry people, but things have been like, all crazy around here.
• 98% of blogs kind of suck^[3]
• Reading the other 2% takes up way too much time

These statistics are only partly made-up, but any actual information contained within them comes from the internet, so it’s a bit like the fox guarding the henhouse here.

Your #1 stop for tits + “nova gorica”
Before I began this post I stopped by isoglossia’s in-house statistical analysis division and asked the chief for some ore from the year’s datamines. Here now, the dross:

• The year’s posts number 156, or an average of a post every 56 hours. I’m generally satisfied with this, considering our month’s absence in August, pressing family matters in the fall & winter, and Adam’s unabated neediness
• The word ‘Adam’ appears in 38% of all posts, not including this one
• ‘Buckwheat’ is used in five posts
• ‘Malkovich’ appears in four posts
• The year’s post which generated the most comments was also the most complicated one, Java-wise.
• 78% of our readers are equally divided between Slovenia and the U.S., followed by Spain, Poland and Japan as top isoglossia-reading nations.
• 66% of you use some version of Firefox. Yay!
• isoglossia yields high-ranking search results for strings like:
  • tits + “nova gorica”
  • funny + pictures + of + monkeys + wearing + birthday + hats
  • song + who + makes + the + monkey + dance
  • crippling + back + pain
  • “Faberge Organics Shampoo”
  • bloody + rage + override + code
  • danish + vegetable + vocab
• I hope you like the changes to the layout to mark our second year here. The look has gone through ten amateurish variations, which can be seen here, for all you sentimentalists

This is not meant to be self-congratulatory, other than the part about having dodged that ‘25% of all blogs fail’ statistic. Despite the year’s many bouts of infrequent posting, this period has seen a small but loyal fanbase build up, and I thank you all for taking time from your obviously not-all-that-busy schedules to drop by now and then to read about our flecks of vomit and shaking tiny fists of rage.

The next baby, I promise we’ll be documenting in far greater detail.

^[1] Yes, I give up. It’s a blog, already.
^[2] As always when I make a sweeping statement like this, I have in mind the qualification “not including Adam-related factors”
^[3] Not yours, of course.

Particularly disturbing to us is the mournful inchoate ghost-baby, XXL, upper center, and his smaller doppelganger to the left.

Part 1 of I wake up screaming.

Magda fibrillates with anticipation at the thought of a box of books being shipped — through the mail! — from Poland just for her reading pleasure. I can relate to this; few things fill me with such a Christmas morning-y feeling as clicking on that Place Order button at Amazon. She is a bilingual reader, but sometimes the pull of the mother-tongue is just so strong. I mean, it even led her into the arms of Da Vinciewa Cifra, for crying out loud, so there’s desperate for you. If my guess is right, one of the three slips of paper in my pocket will be exchangeable for her books at the Pošta this afternoon. No clue what the other two are for. Maybe I ordered some books I’ve forgotten about…?

Adam is already obsessed with shredding reading material: magazines, catalogs, Where To? Ljubljana pamphlets, and books. He started out many months ago with The Book Of Fruit, but has since graduated to more engaging, tactile works such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies. Also the clothbound cloth version of The Kite in the Park.

Other than sharing Adam’s choices of literature, I haven’t been reading much these days, I am sorry to say. Just this morning I had not one but two conversations with colleagues about how little I manage to get read anymore. What used to be my favorite way of passing free hours has slipped off the narrow little chart that logs my daily sliver of free time. For this reason, responding to this book meme is going to be a little bit tricky. When I got memed previously I was intractably grouchy about it. This one is a good deal less silly, so I’ll try to be more meme-compliant.

[1] Name five of your favorite books

This takes some thought. There are various criteria I could apply here, but I think I’ll go with re-readability. There are certain books that I can read over and over, and do, so I’ll give them the honors. In no particular order:

• A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
  This is a beautiful, terrible novel veined with many varieties of love. I try to get people to read this more than is becoming. It was a favorite book of mine before I moved here to the area where it is set, and each time I read it I love it a little more. This book has caused me to seek out a specific museum in order to stand in front of a single painting. The painting is very small.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
  ‘Segundus’ is among the top 100 words in this book*. That should say it all, really. Reading this last winter made me happier than almost anything before or since, book-wise. When I finished its insufficient, please-let-there-be-more, 326,729 words I almost started it over again right away. But I have been forcing myself to wait until enough time has gone by to have it feel new again. Not much longer now…
  *Amazon now has some statistical analysis of books’ text that is a lot of fun to sift through. My favorite: “Statistically Improbable Phrases.”
• Fisher’s Hornpipe, Todd McEwen
  This is another book about which I have been a shameless proselytizer, and another I can read again and again, or open at any random page and laugh myself slack-jawed. The slightly-not-right protagonist’s worldview is so on-target in its warpedness and wonderful, correct misanthropy, that I find myself thinking Fisher’s thoughts more often than can be healthy. William Fisher compares favorably with Ignatius J. Riley in A Confederacy of Dunces, another book I am overdue to re-read.
• The Aubrey-Maturin books, all 20 of them, Patrick O’Brian
  Easily dismissed as escapist sea stories or historical fiction, these are both. They are also some of the most engaging and engrossing books I’ve ever read. Few writers are able to so completely enfold you in a vanished world as O’Brian can. I’ve heard them described as “Jane Austen for boys”, too, and think that’s somewhat apt though sexist, as the minutiae and mores of life two centuries ago come so completely alive that you are there, or then, or whatever. I once did an experiment to see if it was possible to read nothing but these twenty not-unhefty novels around and around in an endless loop. It was not possible, but only just. There are not many writers I could say that of. The characters are so finely drawn that you come to know them intimately, and miss them when you’re not reading. I cried when Barrett Bonden died [umm, spoiler alert]
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TriQuadriQuintilogy, Douglas Adams
  The first of these books made it onto the list of the person who tagged me, and she explained better than I could why they matter. Remember that you can’t judge a book by its movie. Like with the preceding entry, I realize that listing the complete set is cheating on the number here, but I own them bound in one volume, so sue me. I also like his Dirk Gently books (the first of which just appeared one day in the mail, hard-cover first ed inscribed to me by Adams. It turned out to be the doing of Rodden Longue), and his curious, sad, humanistic non-fiction about endangered species, Last Chance To See.

That’s a difficult list to compile. There are too many candidates, but I’m happy with the criterion I chose. Fortunately, item [4] in this meme gives an overlapping crack at it.

[2] What was the last book you bought?

You know what, internet? I have to say that I am really not sure. My reading speed has crept to such a crawl that I have an enormous backlog of stuff I’ve bought and not gotten around to reading yet. I think the answer to that is The Cold Six Thousand, still uncracked, ordered after Rodden Longue got me to read its prequel, American Tabloid, both by James Ellroy. Or it could’ve been The Command of the Oceans: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815, by N. A. M. Rodger, which I started last autumn and then bogged down in the economics of. As I do lately.

Wait! The last book I bought was also the last book I read (below), Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. It pains me to say it, but it wasn’t very good. Maybe it was me. Mil Millington is assuredly hilarious on-line, and I hate to dismiss this book, but it was a let-down after the joy of his website of the same name.

[3] What was the last book you read?

See [2]. I guess we can discount the two books currently holding down my nightstand, which are The Hundred Days (#19 in the Aubrey-Maturin series) yet again, and that historical linguistics book I’ve been ignoring since I last mentioned it in this space. So the last one I read in its entirety is TMGAIHAA, above. Although to be entirely accurate, the last book I read was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like, several times a day.

[4] Name five books that have been particularly meaningful to you (in no particular order)

Here I’ll ignore the meme’s “no particular order” stricture and go with chronological:

• Knight’s Castle, Edward Eager
  This was a much-read children’s novel in our house of five kids. The original copy ended up as tattered and bedraggled (and serially loved) as a hand-me-down teddy bear. I think my older sister still has that copy. It’s entirely possible that this book was the most pivotal of many in forming my love of reading at an early age. Eager wrote lots of such stories and I read them all, but this was and remains my favorite kids’ book. It has aged well and remains outstanding decades after I first loved it. I recently ordered it for one of my nieces. Thank god such things remain in print. Susanna Clarke for kids. Knocks Harry Potter into a cocked hat.
• The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
  This was the book that made me realize how many interesting arguments there are out there. Philosophy 101.
• By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, by, umm, I forget
  It’s fashionable to downgrade Hemingway as embodying the worst of the Dead White Male canon; misogynist, braggart, macho poseur, bunny-killer, you get the idea. I would argue that this take on the man as a writer is overblown, and that more careful reading of him will usually yield opposite results. I’d argue uphill, but anyway. This book is a collection of short pieces of non-fiction: political pieces, sporting sketches, war reportage, and some remarkably tender ‘human interest’ stuff. A fair amount of it comes from his free-lance days before he was famous — and famously self-aggrandizing, something that does come through in some of the later pieces, though with humor. But anyone who thinks of Hemingway as hawkish or obsessed with war would do well to read the prescient, pacifist pieces he filed between the two world wars.
  
  Anyway. This book was and remains meaningful to me because it was my travel reading at a formative age. I bought it in Florence the winter I was 20 and it went everywhere with me. The original dog-eared copy is one of very few things I’d like to get out of my mother’s cellar before she sells that house.
• Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  This book could just as easily have made the list of favorites, but it has more meaning. My father remembered reading this book in serialized form in a magazine while in an army hospital with pneumonia. Why was he in an army hospital with pneumonia? He had been forced to fall out in his field jacket, which was wet, in freezing weather. Because why? Read Catch-22 again.
  
  Oddly, this book was in my pocket the day I signed up. I cannot adequately explain how anyone who’s not only read Catch-22 but RE-READING it can join the army, but apparently it is possible. Maybe I wanted to know whether Heller was exaggerating. (He was not). No number of decades or generations will dull the satire and incisiveness of this book and how well it examines the monumental, absurd chowderheadedness and banal evil that is the military. This book is not so much a novel as a user’s manual.
• Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay
  I have not read this book. Sometimes a book is a talisman. One of the last times I saw my father alive he gave this book to his youngest grandson, my son, whose middle name is my father’s given name. My father was named for a great Roman poet and this book, a small wafer of a thing in faded dark blue cloth, was a gift to him on his fifth (!) birthday. It was from his grandfather, inscribed to my father by Adam’s great-great-grandfather in pale ink, and by Adam’s grandfather (to himself, I guess) in brown crayon scribbles, first, and then in my father’s distinctive hand seven decades later, to Adam. It’s all terribly sentimental, I know, but it’s one of the only objects I might pause to grab if the house were on fire.

[5] Name three books you’ve been dying to read but just haven’t yet

Another tough one. I am so far out of the loop concerning what to read these days, as well as having so little time to do it, that I don’t have a long wish list — or rather my backlog is so great that I’ve just given up wishing. But this has made me think that I need to make more time for reading.

• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace
  I have heard such positive things about this guy while managing never to have actually read him that I am very interested to see what all the recent fuss is about.
• One Man’s Wilderness, Sam Keith and Richard Proenneke
  This is about a guy who went to Alaska to build a cabin with nothing but a Leatherman, apparently. He’s 80 now and still living there, and I want to read about the experience of building a home from nothing but trees and dung. A Christmas gift from my sister and a brother-in-law who has built a few homes out of dung in his time. Gorgeous photographs, but still sitting on a shelf waiting for me to get to it.
• Anything by John McPhee that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I need to order some books.

[6] Tag five people and have them fill this quiz out on their own

The last time I responded to a meme I declined this part on moral grounds, but now I’ll completely contradict myself and do it, mainly because I’ll be genuinely interested in reading the responses, if any.

• The Fiery One, at Palinode’s Palace. Because I said I would if I ever got memed again, and because he eats books.
• Sarcastro, at Watching the Defectives. Because he will likely educate me about what I should be reading. Or not.
• E, at I Do Not Think They Will Sing To Me. Because it will make her all introspective and want to eat madeleines or something.
• Holly, at Nothing But Bonfires. Because I am dead curious to know what she reads when she is not being sucked into reality TV or harassed by drunken rednecks.
• Skot, at Izzle! Izzle Pfaff! Because he is “a cranky shut-in who only snarls at things like The Arts any more” and uses Statistically Improbable Phrases like “japing, fibrous, pemmican golem” to describe Mick Jagger.

Click on any picture to start a Flickr slide show

Well, Adam —
You’re turning into quite the little boy. Ironically, since it appears that you’ve just learned to say the word baby. At this point your language abilities are not progressing very rapidly. You’ve got mamamamamama of course, and an approximation of the father variant, and you know that your name is Abum or Abuś or Wabam or something similar; your passive vocabulary is pretty good. You can point to a hau-hauek in a book, and you know what noise one makes. But that’s about it. To be honest, we are not in a real tearing rush to have you burst forth into speech. As it is, you do an awful lot of talking. It is still not in any language we recognize, but from meta-linguistic data we can tell that you spend a lot of time complaining, wheedling, hectoring, and trying to reason with us:

It’s interesting to have a conversation with you. In the above picture, it went something like this:

Papa: No, Adam, this is not a toy.
You: Bug lug lyu dikkadikka big…
Papa: Sorry.
You: GAUW! Bwisha gweeg-geg!
Papa: You still can’t have it.
You: Bugga-dugga-dugga, gwah!
Papa: That’s as may be, but no.
You: AUK! Wuzza bigga digga…
Papa: I give up. Here’s the remote. Just TAKE IT.

And you do love yourself some remote. Nothing is so entrancing to you. And occasionally soothing… In no particular order of preference, your favorite objects in the house include all remote controls (there are three currently active), mobile phones (same number), cameras (no idea), flashes for cameras (only one, thankfully), bars of soap (one adult, one baby), stoppers for sink, tub, bidet (three removable), chargers for anything electronic (an Amazonian rainforest of cords), wires, cables, Bluetooth adapters emerging from back of computer (see chargers), and the drawers that open and close with that mesmerizing whirrr that take in or disgorge shiny shiny circles (four). And oh, those shiny shiny circles… I’m happy to report, though, that you are no longer going through the desk drawers like a starving hyena disemboweling a wildebeest. Our briefly famous homemade babyproofing has worked and also had the now-obvious but originally surprising benefit of conditioning you not even to try. How Pavlovian it is to have a baby around. Or Skinnerian? I don’t know. Our latest project with the negative conditioning is to get you to leave the oven the Malkovich alone.

Things have been fairly busy around here. A cousin dropped by to visit, which is always nice. This brings to five the number of family visits we’ve hosted here. Which over the course of more than four years does not exactly constitute an endless parade of guests. We are so unused to company that it’s a bit pathetic how exciting it is to host someone. Ben had been prepared to represent New Zealand at the Olympics in Torino, but instead found himself with some time on his hands in central Slovenia. So the natural thing was to head west to “chick oat Nover Grica.”*

“We took Adam out and I showed Ben around Nova Gorica,” Magda reported when I came home from work on Tuesday.

“How long did that take?”

“About 15 minutes.”

Okay, it’s not the most exciting town in the world, to be sure, but it’s conveniently located. Yesterday was a national holiday, officially called “Slovenian Culture Day” but falling on the anniversary of the death of France Prešeren, the poet. Midweek holidays! Ben and I drove an hour up the Soča Valley to Kanin for Slovenia’s highest skiing. Spending even the laziest day skiing with an Olympic-class athlete is a really really REALLY bad idea for someone as creaky and ancient, not to mention sucky, as I am. Having my Mariana-trenchlike fitness level so glaringly revealed made me weep like a schoolgirl. An ancient, creaky, crybaby schoolgirl. Though that analogy is an affront to ancient, creaky crybaby schoolgirls everywhere when you take into account how much I sucked. Bitter, mascara-streaked tears froze to my blushing, parchment-like skin as I flailed like a panty-waisted nancy-man, becoming intimate with the interior of every adoring bank of snow. And still I failed my friend Matt’s acid-test for did you really tele-ski?, which is can you sit down on and get up from the toilet unassisted the following day?, but just barely. Walking is not so wonderful today, however. An overrated activity, walking.

Ben brought a gift for Adam from New Zilend**, an authentic canned kiwi (flightless bird, not fruit; toy, not food), which you can see in the upper photo.

I like the idea of national-mascot-in-a-can; is anyone else doing this? Can I go to Mexico and get a can of Speedy Gonzáles, for example? Oh, wait, that’s not right. Never mind. Adam is so happy playing with a can that it seemed a shame to finally open it and let the bird out. See? Pathetic.

*accent is not guaranteed to be authentic
**or guaranteed not to be authentic