Never Too Late to Learn Esperanto!

Ŝi esperantiĝis kiam ŝi havis 70 jarojn!

We can all learn from the example of Agnes Corliss, who passed her preliminary examination in Esperanto in mid–1912, as was reported in the June 1912 Amerika Esperantisto. What the magazine didn’t report was that Mrs. Corliss was a seventy-four year old woman. She began her study of Esperanto, according to her obituary,[1] when she was seventy, which would have been either late 1907, or during just about any part of 1908.

That makes her a fairly early Esperantist, learning it just about at the beginning of the Esperanto Association of North America. Her earliest connection to the movement seems to be in 1910, when she gave 50¢ to EANA.[2] As the annual membership in the organization was also 50¢, I suspect she sent in a dollar and made a contribution of the other part, although I do not see her in the subsequent membership lists. The 1911 EANA Adresaro lists twelve Esperantists in Vermont, eleven of them the membership of the Brattleboro Esperanto Society.

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Gathering Esperantists in Iowa

State? I'll settle for local

Oh, for the days when there were both state and local Esperanto organizations. By the time I had joined the Esperanto movement, most states had but a single Esperanto organization, and if a state (like California) was large enough, it had regional groups, but nothing more. In the mid–1980s, I was a member of the Esperanto Society of New England,[1] shows from what a (theoretically) large area we were drawing our potential members; it might have more truthfully been called the Esperanto Society of Greater Boston. I lived in Cambridge, and the furthest I ever remember going for a meeting was Concord, some 15 miles away.

The same was true, about the same time, when I was one of the founders of the Gaylaxian Science Fiction Society.[2] As the first, we didn’t attach any geographic designation to our name (subsequent groups did, usually on the form [Place] Gaylaxians), but we really were a group for LGBT (and LGBT-friendly) science fiction fans in the greater Boston area. A meeting has to be pretty compelling to spend an hour getting there.

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Those Bloodthirsty Esperantists!

Bloodthirsty?

At least such was the contention of Ellis O. Jones, writing in the January 1908 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine of January 1908.[1] Really, Mr. Jones? Are Esperantists “surely a bloodthirsty lot”? It sounds unjust.

Mr. Jones seems to have been predominantly a writer of sketches for the stage; most of the contributions to which his name is attached are one-act plays, such as Husband Wanted or Faint Heart, although those are both 1929, and it’s twenty-one years earlier that he’s writing about Esperanto (assuming it’s the same Ellis O. Jones, which seems likely). A little web research turns up more about him.

He had somewhat of a varied career, doing everything from working at Life magazine, to activities in the Socialist movement. Not long after that, he contributed a few “Little Essays” to the New York Times, but came back to their attention more than a decade after writing for Lippincott’s as the Chairman (or, as in the subhead, “chairamn”) of the People’s Day Committee, which gathered in Central Park on December 13, 1918 to mourn the death of Liberty. At the time that he wrote for Lippincott’s, he was thirty-four years old. According to Metapedia, where I stumbled on an article, but with which I am not familiar, in 1908, Mr. Jones was the Socialist candidate for Congress from Ohio.

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Longhand Writing in a Digital World

My writing tools.
The Pencil kept sliding down the iPad;
I had to position it high and shoot fast.

Longhand or keyboard? I won’t call this the eternal writers’ debate, since even into the early twentieth century, writers sent handwritten manuscripts to their publishers.[1] Don’t try that now. Even tin the era when publishers would still read a manuscript in yours or someone else’s handwriting,[2] some still sent their manuscripts to be typed (Oscar Wilde, for one). It doesn’t matter how beautiful your handwriting is, no publishers wants to see 5,000 or especially 80,000 words of it. I, for one, doubt my ability to turn out 5,000 words in fair hand, while I know I can type my handwritten draft quickly and easily. I like to draft my fiction longhand.

I need to issue a series of caveats here: I am not a professionally published writer; if everyone who has my stories were to show up at my house for an impromptu cocktail party, I could cope.[3] When I’m writing for my blog, I do not typically draft things out in longhand, but instead compose while typing in a word processing application. For this blog post, I took the atypical step of writing a draft out by hand at first. It would have been faster to just do my typical thing, but it would miss the point.[4]

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Max Nordau and the Breakdown of Esperanto

Max Nordau
(about 1895)
No fan of Esperanto

Detractors of Esperanto have claimed almost from the beginning that were the language adopted across the world, it would splinter into countless mutually unintelligible dialects, the way that English really hasn’t. Yes, the vulgar[1] Latin of the Roman Empire did split into a variety of languages, but there were some special circumstances and a whole lot of time applied there.

Time alone probably isn’t enough. Some years ago, when I was getting my bachelors degree, one class had a single lecture (out of a survey course) on glottochronology, the idea that not only languages change over time, but there’s a a specific speed for such changes. To quote Wikipedia, “any replacements happen in a way analogical to that in radioactive decay in constant percentages per time elapsed.” Then I went to my advanced Old English seminar, where we had a jolly laugh over the idea. (Wikipedia does describe glottochronology as “controversial,” notes attempts to disprove its mathematics, and says that it “has been rejected by many linguists.”)

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Bowie, Rickman, and Cancer

On Tuesday, January 12, 2016, when President Obama said that he wants a “moon shot” for cancer, comparing it to the “space race” of the 1960s, I paused the television,[1] turned to my husband and brought up the recent death of David Bowie, who had died of liver cancer at the age of 69 only two days prior.[2] “We need, not a ‘moon shot,’ not a ‘war on cancer’ (because “war” is always the wrong metaphor), but a global research initiative, so that one day people say, ‘yes, there was a time when sixty-nine-year-olds died of cancer.’”[3]
There is a problem with President Obama’s metaphor of the “moon shot.” The space race[4] might as well have been called the space war, since it was almost a proxy war with national pride at stake. The Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, leading to fears that the Soviet Union was technologically superior to the United States. We’re really not worried that someone—China, Russia, France, or Liechtenstein—is about to find the cure for cancer before we do.

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About This Blog

This is the sort of thing I see

This is my first entry to this blog since December 15, 2015, and that was something special, since prior to that, the last entry had been on October 17. I did not intend to put it aside quite so long; that was not my intention on the morning of October 18. October’s spotty posting (four posts in a month of thirty-one days) was not wholly intentional, but I knew there would be a slow-down, as I intended to spend October writing some stories.

It had to be October, because November was my month for writing an application to an MFA program in creative writing (as of this moment—January 14, 2016—knowing whether or not I got into the program is well into the future). I think inertia just carried me through December.

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