#49: Three Things that got me thinking

🌍 Languages + 🎹 Music + ✍🏽Writing

1. Connecting

Last week, the Washington Post published a fascinating profile of hyperpolyglot Vaughn Smith, a man who speaks 24 languages and has some basic knowledge of another 21. (It’s a moving and informative read, enriched with sound clips and videos.)

He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not.

Smith’s main motivation, writer Jessica Contrera explains, is to connect with other people. In a world where learning certain languages—the “worthy” or “useful” ones—is often seen as a necessity or a mark of status, Smith’s pleasure and curiosity warm my heart.

As a child:

… he overheard a Russian woman in a grocery store. “Здравствуйте, как поживаете?”. Vaughn asked. Hello, how are you? He explained that he was trying to learn Russian.

He liked the look he put on that woman’s face. “Like she was hit with a splash of happiness,” Vaughn remembers.

As a teenager:

There was a clique of Brazilian students, so he started to learn Portuguese. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in Romanian, and watch as Vaughn memorized them all. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic. […]

In an environment where he never felt like he fit, he was connecting in a way that no one else could.

As an adult:

… every language is really a story about the people it connected him to.

He learned American Sign Language from Gallaudet University students at a club called Tracks, which had a dance floor known for its vibrations.

He picked up some Japanese from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week.

When his niece liked the way the word chicken sounded in Salish, they started studying it together, befriended leaders of the language school on the Flathead Indian Reservation and road-tripped to Arlee, Mont., twice.

On the way back from Boston, where MIT researchers scanned his brain with an fMRI machine:

He’s bouncing as he talks about all the connections he made in a single day with the researchers and the strangers he’d introduced himself to in a coffee shop. All the people who were, as he would say, “hit with a splash of happiness.” This is what I’d discovered getting to know Vaughn: By putting in the effort to learn someone’s language, you’re showing them that you value who they truly are.

I’m wondering if Vaughn will ever see that same value in himself.

(Right after reading this piece—and now that I have a decent phone!—I finally downloaded a language learning app and am having fun with it. I thank Smith and Contrera for the prod 🌱)

Photo by JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN on Unsplash

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2. Playing

My son asked that we play the piano “without a book”. He wants to watch the hammers as he hits the keys, and experiment. (In two of our home’s languages, we “touch an instrument” rather than “play” it. He definitely wants to do both.)

I made a conscious effort to play with him, and for myself, not play a favourite song or attempt a sonata. My mind went What a shame I can’t remember the chord progressions from those jazz improv classes, so I tried to think less and feel more. Then I heard something actually nice under our fingers and thought Oh, I should write this down, and then Ah, I should record it with my phone, and then I asked my brain to PLEASE please SHUSH.

That’s when I started actually playing.

The problem with parenting tips is that the best way to help your children become the kind of person you want them to be is by surrounding them with the kinds of people you want them to be. This includes you.

Austin Kleon, Love what you do in front of the kids in your life

Photo by Tim Cooper on Unsplash

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3. Love-Hate

Have you watched Call My Agent? This French series (originally titled 10 Pour Cent and broadcast on public TV) is streaming on Netflix in most countries, and has spawned several international remakes. The series feels so easy and fun to watch that I was surprised to hear how much show runner Fanny Herrero suffers during the scriptwriting process. But obviously, ease for viewers requires meticulous plotting and lengthy finessing for writers.

Here’s how Herrero describes her love-hate relationship with scriptwriting—and what keeps her going anyway—in a podcast interview with Belgian standup comedian Fanny Ruwet (in French. Pour les francophones, I’ve included a longer quote in the footnotes¹.)

The joy is very occasional; it often arrives at the end, when it’s over and people start laughing, or are moved by what I’ve written. Then I think All right, it was worth it. But otherwise, all the writing process is very painful for me.

At the same time:

Because I’m very demanding, very nitpicky, it suits me also. In a way, there is something playful in the idea of solving lots of little problems. […] For me, it’s tied with childhood, with playing a game, you know, completing a game. I do enjoy that part. […] But yes, it comes with a lot of fear, a lot of anguish that I won’t make it.

PS: Herrero has a new show on Netflix, titled "Standing Up".

dixpourcent

A post shared by Dix Pour Cent (@dixpourcent)

1. Starting around 41:33 in Les Gens Qui Doutent, episode 45:

Herrero — La joie est très ponctuelle, elle est minoritaire et souvent elle arrive à la fin, quand c’est fini, quand les gens commencent à rigoler ou à être émus par ce que ce que j’ai écrit. Là, je me dis Ah quand même, ça valait le coup. Mais sinon tout le process d’écriture, il est très douloureux pour moi. […]

J’ai choisi les séries qui sont vraiment un truc au long cours, c’est long à écrire, c’est long à produire. Le scenario, c’est vraiment par définition un objet qui n’est jamais terminé, il est toujours perfectible. […] J’ai encore du mal à trouver du plaisir dans ça.

Ruwet — Mais pourquoi tu fais ça, alors?

Herrero — Je suis folle (rires). […] Comme je suis très exigeante, très tatillonne, très maniaque, finalement ça me va bien quand même. […] Dans le fond, il y a aussi, malgré cette souffrance, quelque chose d’assez ludique dans l’idée de régler tout le temps des petits problèmes […]. Ça pour moi, c’est assez lié à l’enfance, à faire un jeu, tu vois, à compléter un jeu, ça j’aime quand même assez bien. […] Mais oui, ça s’associe de beaucoup de peur, de beaucoup d’angoisse de ne pas y arriver.