Meeting with Milla 5

     I just met with Milla for the fifth time. She was very excited today, because she just took her ACCUPLACER test for Tarrant County College. The TCC professors told her she got the highest score on the reading and writing section of any international student that had ever taken the exam: a 90/100.

     Milla feels as though a big weight has been lifted off her shoulders. All she has to do is straighten out her finances and finish some paperwork, and then she can enroll in TCC. Since she worked as a lawyer in Venezuela, she thinks that she wants to try paralegal studies here in America. Her second option is to study government, like she did in Venezuela (her undergraduate degree was in political science). Her third option is to study education and become an elementary teacher. She used to teach at a university in Venezuela (in addition to working as a lawyer), and she says she likes to work with people on the extreme ends of their education—either early childhood or college.

     She currently doesn’t know what she’ll end up studying, but her plan is to stay at TCC and get her associate’s degree. After that, she may transfer back to TCU and get a bachelor’s degree. The last time I met with her, she told me how much she loved the Austin area, so I asked her if she’d ever consider moving south and studying at UT. For now, she said, she’s content to stay at TCC. After that, who knows? The main thing is that she needs to stay in school to stay in America.

     I told Milla that I’m looking at doing a law internship this summer, and she was very confused. The educational system works differently in Venezuela, apparently, so she didn’t understand that we don’t have to profess in what we major in in America. She knew that I was previously majoring in journalism, so she didn’t understand why I wanted to explore law as a job opportunity. She figured I was just going to work as a journalist.

     After I straightened her out on the educational system here, I told her that I had my first oral Spanish exam this morning. She was excited to hear about it and we started discussing the Spanish language.

     She asked what we study in Spanish at TCU and I told her we always do vocabulary, grammar, and culture in each chapter we study in Spanish class. I told her that in Spanish I and II, we had to listen to people from different Spanish-speaking countries talk about their lives for the culture sections. That got Milla and I into talking about the different Hispanic accents. I told her I can only recognize the difference between somebody from Spain and somebody from Latin America; I can’t recognize different accents between individual Latin American countries.

     Milla explained basic differences between Latin American accents: Mexicans have a very sing-songy way of speaking, people from Paraguay are very aggressive with their syllables, Venezuelans are very calm and even in their accents, etc. She then asked me about how I speak in Spanish. I told her I wasn’t an expert and that TCU is teaching us weird things. For example, I’m in Spanish III and they haven’t taught me to say body parts, but I’ve had a lesson on bargaining and heckling. What body parts I do remember, I told her, are the ones I learned in high school.

     I went through the body and named everything I could remember (which were the basic names for everything) and then we got to talking about grammar. I told her about my difficulty with Spanish prepositions, specifically how to know when to use “a” and when to use “para.” She gave me a lesson and cleared that up for me, which I greatly appreciated. We then talked about how useful it is to know a second language and by the time we got done discussing that, our time was up and we both had to leave.

     I’m grateful to have Milla to help out with my Spanish troubles, and I’m glad that I can help her work through using English fluently in return. We’ll meet again later this week, and I’m looking forward to talking with her again.

Mark Twain, Part 2

     The second half of The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain wasn’t much better than the first. In fact, I found it less amusing and/or witty than the first half.

     By the time I came to the end of the book, I had only marked 12 quotations that I had found funny or that had made me think. The fact that I only found 12 quotations interesting enough to mark for later reference out of a 257 page book says a lot, I think.

     Nevertheless, I have narrowed down my favorite quotations for tomorrow’s class, and I have selected my favorite quotation to blog about tonight. My favorite quotation can be found on pages 76-77:

     “Returning home after a weekend in the Maine woods, Mark Twain was lounging in the smoking car of the train to Boston, He could not resist the temptation to boast to the rustic-looking New Englander seated beside him about the twelve big fish he had caught.

     “‘The season is closed for fishing now,’ he confided, ‘ but just between you and me, my friend, out there in the baggage car I’ve got two hundred pounds of the best rock bass that you ever laid eyes on.’

     “‘Waal,’ drawled the New Englander, ‘that’s interestin’, but d’ye know who I am?’

     “‘No,’ said Twain. ‘Who are you?’

     “‘Waal,’ said the homespun gentleman, ‘I’m the state game warden.’

     “Mark Twain puffed on his cigar. ‘That’s interestin’,’ he said. ‘But d’ye know who I am?’

     “‘No. Who are you?’ asked the warden.

     “‘I’m the damnedest liar in the United States.’”

     I found this quotation very funny. I did not expect the cognitive shift of Twain using his reputation as a liar to get out of the trouble he had put himself into, and I thought it was very witty of him to do so. The nature of this wit and cognitive shift reminded me a lot of what we read in Tales of Juha.

     Juha is usually presented as a character who can get out of any situation with extreme wit and unexpected wisdom, and I feel like several of the Twain quotations I marked as favorites involved Juha-esque wit.

     With that being said, however, I’d like to point out that my overall reading experience with this book has not been pleasant. I enjoyed Tales of Juha very much, and even though a few of Mark Twain’s quotations reminded me of things Juha would say or do, there were too few of them in The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain.

     As I said in my last blog, I feel like this book was mostly filled with pointless quotations that were neither witty nor funny. I’m glad I found a few quotations that I enjoyed, but I do not feel as though I found enough enjoyment in this book to want to recommend it to anybody else to read.

Mark Twain, Part 1

     I just finished reading the first half of The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, and I must say that I’m really not impressed by this book so far. I’ve found a few quotations that I think are witty and another few that made me laugh, but the ratio of quotations I actually found valuable to those I found pointless is greatly out of balance.

     One of the quotations I found witty and funny is about clothes on page 43:

     “Returning from a trip to Europe, Mark Twain grew impatient as a customs official rummaged through his baggage.

     “‘My good friend,’ said the author, as politely as he could, ‘you don’t have to trouble yourself. There are only clothes in there—nothing but clothes.’

     “But the suspicious official continued poking about until he struck something solid. He reached into the suitcase and pulled out a quart of the finest-quality bourbon.

     “‘Just clothes, eh?’ gloated the official. ‘You call this “just clothes”?’

     “‘Sure,’ replied Mark Twain calmly. ‘That is my nightcap.’”

     I found this funny because you don’t expect Twain to come back with such a witty response to the officer’s questioning. The response provides a cognitive shift. This type of humor also plays into the superiority theory because we see how Twain makes his intellect superior to that of the police officer’s.

     I actually laughed out loud when I read the quotation I listed above. However, I didn’t find myself laughing at all at most of the quotations I’ve read in this book. Some of them I’ve even found pointless. An example of this can be found on page 33 under the cats subtitle:

    “Mark Twain was a passionate lover of cats, and this enthusiasm was shared by the rest of his family. Cats were always a major topic of discussion in the Clemens household. Once, when he was away on a lecture tour, Twain wrote playfully to his young daughter Susy: ‘I saw a cat yesterday with 4 legs—and yet it was only a yellow cat, and rather small, too, for its size. They were not all fore legs—several of them were hind legs: indeed almost a majority of them were.’”

     What is the point of this quotation? I have no idea. Why is this funny? Why is this witty? Where is the wisdom in this? I don’t understand why quotations like this were included in this book, because I’m not gaining any knowledge or pleasure from them at all. It frustrates me to have to read them, and unfortunately, the book is mostly full of these (in my opinion).

     In short, I’m not finding this book a valuable read at all. I’ll be back to report if I’ve changed my mind when I reach the end of the novel, but since I’ve already read 130 pages of mostly pointless quotations, I doubt the outlook is good.

Accents, etc.

     My fourth meeting with Milla didn’t have any huge thematic element. We sat and casually discussed several different topics last week.

     I got to meet Milla’s husband, who happened to be on TCU’s campus. He was a really nice man and I was surprised to find that he was extremely fluent in English. As it turns out, one of the companies he worked for in Venezuela required him to learn English to work in conferences with the CEO in the United States. Milla said his education was much more advanced and intensive than hers is at TCU. His company hired a private tutor that practiced with him every single day.

     Milla’s husband left us alone to talk after I met him. She told me about how she was going to go to Houston to cast her vote in Venezuela’s upcoming election. As anyone can see from my last post, she did not want Maduro to serve the rest of Chavez’s term. Since Maduro did win, however, I’m curious to see her response when I meet with her again this Wednesday.

     Milla expressed again how much she loves Venezuela and how she’d love to go back someday. Unfortunately, the political situation is preventing her from doing that.

     She wanted to know an update on my life, so I told her about how my work for the TCU speech and debate team has taken over my life recently. I told her that I just went to nationals, and had been working nonstop for a month preparing for the competition. My speech was difficult, I told her, because I had to switch between four different accents and characters repeatedly for 10 minutes while reciting my piece.

     The amount of work I was putting in to mastering accents surprised her, and she began asking me how to do different accents. I’m always impressed by Milla’s thirst for knowledge. I spoke in the southern drawl I used for one of my characters, but couldn’t quite figure out how to tell her how to do that accent. I didn’t have to work too much on identifying the intricate sounds in that accent as I’m from small-town Texas and have heard the sounds my entire life. I did, however, have to work at identifying exactly what sounds were different in the English and French accents. (My fourth accent was just a normal, Midwestern American.)

     Milla was especially interested in learning a French accent, so I told her the key basics of what I’d learned in my month of practice: drop the “h” when it appears at the beginning of a word (so “how”=“ow”), change the “th” sound to a “z” (so “that”=“zat”), pronounce the “r” with a throaty, saliva-ey noise, and put the verbal emphasis on the last syllable of words.

     By the time I finished explaining the basics of the French accent and she had practiced a couple of words, it was time for our meeting to end. Milla’s husband came to escort her home and tell me goodbye, and she told him about my work with accents. He became interested as well, and asked if I noticed any differences in Hispanic accents. Since I haven’t studied those accents extensively, I told him, I didn’t notice a huge difference right away. I did, however, notice that he spoke with a much quicker rate of speech than Hispanics I know from Mexico and El Salvador. His rate of speech resembled that of some of my Cuban family members, I told him. He granted that the rate of speech was different and complimented me for picking up on that difference. It was then time for he and Milla to leave, so we said goodbye and parted ways. 

Tales of Juha, Part 3

     The last few chapters of Juha were relatively unentertaining for me. I did not find myself particularly moved either joyously or angrily by any of them. I found this to be strange, since I enjoyed the rest of the book so much. I was still interested in the reading, but I didn’t have any emotional reactions to it.

     I did appreciate the lessons behind the tales presented in these chapters, however. For example, I appreciated the chapter about boastfulness and false pride. The stories in that chapter, I imagine, were (and perhaps still are) used to teach children the meaning of and value behind being humble. I appreciated this because this showed how the character of Juha was transformed from just an entertainment pawn into an educational tool.

     I discussed previously how Juha is a blank slate character that’s used to teach us about a different culture. I feel that in the final chapters of the book, the author is trying to show us why Juha is an unforgettable character. Not only is Juha a comedian in all forms, he is also a valuable instrument in the development of youth. Juha is used to teach children what is appropriate in the culture he’s presented in: from humor to values to day-to-day treatment of others.

     Although Juha may not exist in every culture around the world, the author is right: we all have a Juha. It’s important to remember our versions of Juha so that we don’t forget about our core selves. What do we value in life? How should we conduct ourselves? What is appropriate? All of these are questions that are answered through lessons that are learned in childhood and adolescence. I feel that we learn best when we can observe situations and therefore see causes and outcomes of situations. I think that’s why we use stories to teach children morals and right from wrong. We use a story to plant easy-to-remember ideas in children’s minds and then discuss them to develop our own sense of morals.

     Overall, I enjoyed Tales of Juha. I found it an interesting book to read, and a valuable lesson on and look into the Arab world. Although I am not be an expert on Arab humor or values by any means, I feel as though I’m at least a small step closer to understanding the culture after reading this novel.

     Looking to the future, I think this would be a valuable book to keep in the Literature and Civilizations humor curriculum. Dr. Williams was asking us how to approach certain forms of “taboo” humor (such as sexist and other derogatory jokes), and I think this is a good introductory tool to use when breaching the subject. Students can observe how this type of humor is used to shape worldviews and values in youth and further into adulthood. I think looking at it from that academic standpoint would make the humor easier and less offensive to discuss. The class could then breach the subject without having to go out looking for derogatory jokes and offend classmates by trying to justify their selections. As long as a healthy discussion can be facilitated, I think it’s a great thing to try. What is an honors class if it doesn’t allow you to observe and question provocative ideas?