MICHAEL GOVE DROPS AMERICAN WRITERS FROM BRITISH GCSE

A reviewer, back in 1997, lamented that most of my material in A Dictionary of Proverbs, Spanish and English, was "British." I had compiled that dictionary with the English language in mind, not thinking about nationalities. Proverbs in English, I thought, do not carry passports.
Why this? Because it has been brought to my attention (Vicky Ascorve Harper) that Mr. Sean Griffiths mentions in The Sunday Times, 22 May, 2014, that Mr. Micael Gove, education secretary, has decided to drop American writers from the new English list of GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education). He wishes British students to read British writers.

Writers do have nationalities but their main allegiance is to language, regardless of place of birth. Naipaul, Patrick White, Alice Munro, Tagore, Yeats, G. Bernard Shaw, Hemingway... were born in Jamaica, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, United Kingdom, United States of America... and yet we all read those Nobel Prize winners in English.  They have enriched the language and given it the importance and shine it now has. 

It is a mistake to ban writers because of their nationalities.

In my time I read some American writers who, in my teens, made a deep impression on me. Look them up and read one of their works.


John Steinbeck
J.D. Sallinger
Ernest Hemingway
Eugene O'Neal
Henry Miller
Arthur Miller
Tennessee Williams
James Baldwin
Erskine Caldwell
John O'Hara
Scott Fitzgerald

Poets:
Emily Dickinson
William Carlos William
Robert Frost
T. S. Elliot 
Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is my personal short list of authors I read as a boy. All American.  All wrote in English. 

   

THE MYTH OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY

History is the written record of how people see their reality, how they distort it, fictionalize, change and warp it.                                                        

Edward Berenson in his article “Historians and Collective Memory” (HuffPost, March 25, 2013) tells us what we, in essence, already know: that historical memory is suppressed, distorted, obliterated, erased, biased and even forgotten. I contend that there is no such thing as collective memory. I mentioned, in part one of this post, how memory can actually be distorted on a personal level.

The idea of Collective Memory is an off-shoot of Carl Jung’s (1875-1961) theory of the collective unconscious, the whole reservoir of humankind’s experience, where humanity somehow stores its memory handing it down from generation to generation. This farfetched memory theory does not hold water and never will, even if historians, such as Professor Berenson, think otherwise.

Yet mankind is horrified at the possibility of being forgotten or forgetting. Forgetfulness appears as a curse to be avoided. We can ascertain this by visiting any cemetery where we can read tombstone inscriptions averring that those buried there will not be forgotten. Abraham Lincoln knew that it is in our nature to forget and said so in his Gettysburg Address: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” What soldiers did at the battlefield has been forgotten but the President’s address that day, his words are still remembered, contrary to what Lincoln thought. The ups and down of collective and individual memory.

I sometimes chat with my mother (97 years old) about her experiences in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, and the long postwar, when she was in her teens and twenties. I come to realize that her memories, vivid and true to facts, are her memories, the circumstances she had to live, along with her immediate family. Each person of her age lived a different Civil War, a personal Civil War, with personal sufferings, atrocities, depravations and losses. Younger generations in Spain react to this war as they might react to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808. All traces of personal horror are gone and… forgotten. That is why we can say that there were many Spanish Civil Wars, not just one.

The key to historical forgetfulness is to be found in neuroscience, not in history books. Neuroscientists will soon discover that the answer to the historical survival of humanity lies in forgetting, in starting afresh with each successive generation and shaking off the hindrance, the load, of unpleasant and overwhelming memories of events that happened at a given point in time. Humanity has made it to the XXI century simply because each generation has started anew, as a tabula rasa, creating new memories and forgetting and shedding the old.

December the 7^th is a day, as President Roosevelt put it: “…that will live in infamy”; the day the Japanese Navy and Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor. Yet the country that forced the US to enter WW II is an ally now and most of those who fought that long war are dead. The military, commercial and strategic conflict seems to be fading away in people’s minds while “more” pressing vicissitudes like job hunting, economic growth, health care, terrorism… come to the fore of our concerns, obliterating past historical events and relegating them to “history” books, a branch of literary fiction that focuses on a given subject from myriad points of view, depending on the writer, the historian and his political views and nationality.

History is the written record of how people see their reality, how they distort it, fictionalize and change it. History may be the art of perverting, twisting and misrepresenting bare facts that have no meaning other than how we interpret them.

Our memory of our past, of “our” history, is seldom reliable because hindsight is never 20/20. 

Why You Should NOT Learn a Language from a Native Speaker

Have you ever stopped to consider that the world is full of natives?

There are about 7000 million of them. And they are restless most of the time.

I often feel compelled to ask who wrote a letter, or a notice on a bulletin board, or a simple office sign, that is clearly full of mistakes. I am usually told that it was Mr. X, a native of the language. The few hairs I have left on my head, stand on end.

I cannot help it.
I shudder.

And then I understand why the “writing” has come out like that. It is the result of the work of a native speaker. A restless native, I may add.

• To practice medicine you need an M.D. degree.
• To keep accounts you must be a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).
• To teach at a university you need an M.A. or Ph.D. degree and some publications (publish or perish!).
• To become a language teacher you only need to be a native, to show a passport from any country, which seems to be more than enough to qualify you to teach its language.

Madrid is full of people who teach English and whose only qualification is that they were born in Dublin, or Boston, or London and who, oftentimes, have no idea about the Spanish language and little about theirs.

By the same token, there are professors of Spanish language at American universities who are lawyers, or historians or ornithologists, but they are native speakers, from Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico… And to boot, they set a bad example because their knowledge of English is imperfect, to put it  mildly.

The word native linked to language has magic connotations. It seems that in war and language all is fair, especially if you are a “native.”
It must be something like this: The plumber is from Guatemala, so you ask him to write a sign in Spanish explaining this or that. That simple! No questions asked. You don´t wonder whether the sign will make Spanish speakers laugh because the spelling or the grammar is wrong.
Native speakers feel they own the language they learnt (you may prefer “learned”) as babies. They think they are always right on problems linguistic.

(read the rest at:
http://fairlanguages.com/why-you-should-not-learn-a-language-from-a-native-speaker/)