The latest chap­ter in orga­nized religion’s millennia-​old quest to con­vert the hea­thens is play­ing out in Angola. A Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle last week dis­cussed the Pope’s recent efforts to per­suade African Catholics to relin­quish the tal­is­mans, witches, curses and shamans of their ves­ti­gial ani­mist traditions.  The sit­u­a­tion raises del­i­cate ques­tions about where to draw the line between the occult of yes­ter­year and gen­uine arti­cles of modern faith. 

Read the first half here

And now, as I men­tioned, every­thing changed last week when, for the first time, I had a suc­cess­ful con­ver­sa­tion in Span­ish with a total stranger.

Wait; let me qual­ify that. I had my first unplanned, totally impro­vised con­ver­sa­tion in Span­ish with a stranger with­out any backup from my wife or the cul­tural script that can carry even total non-​speakers through, say, a trip through the super­mar­ket. At any super­me­r­cado, no matter how grand my con­fu­sion, there will usu­ally be people wait­ing in line behind me and so the end is always in sight. Not so at the oft-​empty local Min­istry of Tourism office in our wee town, where my recent tri­umph took place.

I admit that, word-by-word, the story is not par­tic­u­larly impres­sive. It starts and ends on very low notes, and in lit­er­ary terms pales next to the pig face epic (though paling next to a pig face is for­giv­able). In truth, it has more in common content-​wise with the spec­tac­u­lar fail­ures that have often punc­tu­ated my learn­ing process, such as the inci­dent wherein I attempted to con­tribute to a group con­ver­sa­tion about which types of animal manure are worse to live near than others, and only suc­ceeded in blurt­ing out “I love cow­boys” to a stunned and silent audi­ence. The dis­tance between what I said and what I meant to say is wide enough that stop­ping to explain it would be as objec­tion­able as having said it in the first place, so I’ll leave it unadorned. Suf­fice it to say, at the moment of speak­ing, all errors are pos­si­ble. This has become my mantra.

The epochal con­ver­sa­tion began with a pop­u­lar refrain: “Lo siento, no hablo mucho castel­lano, pero…” I no longer feel shame over begin­ning every sen­tence with an apol­ogy, as this phrase has helped to warm up my audi­ences on count­less tar­geted mis­sions. These days, my self-​loathing has shifted to the phys­i­cal rou­tine that I have inad­ver­tently devel­oped around the phrase, includ­ing a coy little half-​laugh and valley-​girl head-​bob. “Learn Span­ish the Fun and Easy Way” cer­tainly did not pre­pare me for this. I’ve looked through the whole book, and nowhere did it warn me, Not only will you suck, you will be so annoy­ing in your meager suc­cesses that, were you a Spaniard, you would simply walk away from your­self in disgust.

‘Don’t use such an expres­sion as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstrac­tion with the concrete.’

–Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”

Epi­graph for the new Poetry Every­where short film.

As far as I’m con­cerned, The Atlantic’s Jef­frey Gold­berg for­feited his claims to jour­nal­is­tic bona fides back in 2002, and I’ve long been puz­zled that seri­ous news out­lets still see fit to pub­lish him on any­thing related to the Middle East. But after read­ing his extended take on Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Chil­dren, I find occa­sion to wonder again. As I said before, I hold no par­tic­u­lar brief for Churchill’s play, but Goldberg’s responses to it are just astound­ing. This is a man who can brook no crit­i­cism of Israel (unless he’s doing the tepid crit­i­ciz­ing); who can’t under­stand inter­est in Israeli war crimes except as a form of “pornography”; who believes that WWII and the events lead­ing up to it mean that Euro­peans have no right to crit­i­cize Israel; and who can’t hear a ref­er­ence to a blood-​stained Pales­tin­ian child with­out accus­ing the refer­rer of insin­u­at­ing the blood libel. An honest ques­tion, then: why does anyone treat Gold­berg like any­thing other than the ide­o­logue and moral cretin he so plainly is?