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[jcreed]

After getting home from work immediately appeared to be a traintastrophe in the making, went to see Esther Schor talk about her book "Bridge of Words". Kinda neat. The stalled train situation had resolved itself in the meantime, got home, had some ramen with K.

Comments

[nightspore]

Oh cool. Second time you've gone to see a colleague of mine. (First was Harry Mairson). This is her book on Esperanto right? She told me all about it a couple of years ago when I was at Princeton I've known her since college - her name to her friends was and is Starry Schor, and we met in a Blake class, where the teacher then quoted Blake's great lines: "The watery shore, / The starry floor, / Are given thee / Till break of day." (Harry, Starry and I were all in the same college class, though I didn't know him then.)

[nightspore]

Oh, right, just saw the tag. Esperanto. One thing I told her, probably too late for the book, was about my grad school German teacher. Her husband's parents were idealistic linguists who spoke only Esperanto in their house, so Esperanto was his first and only language. When he was 6 the nazis took his parents away - eventually they were murdered. And he was orphaned as the only native, non-bilingual Esperanto speaker in the world. Which was not the worst thing that happened to him, but didn't help.

[jcreed]

Interesting! Yeah, it is the Esperanto/travel memoir thing.

I was >this< close to, during the question period, asking if she had heard of that bit of verse that began "aliaj lipoj flustros vin" that I mentioned researching some months ago, since she made a definite point of being interested in e-o poetry in particular during the talk, but at the last minute I felt awkward that the poem wasn't Serious Poetry enough and I didn't want to embarrass myself. Still, I'll keep wondering who wrote it, until such a time as I actually find out --- it's just too tantalizing to not know, when the very subject of the poem is being forgotten/remembered.

[jcreed]

I suppose there's always still email, if I ever get over myself.