Tongue-tied

Cathy LaGrow 6 Comments

Did you ever wish that you could speak a foreign language? Yeah, me too.

Did you ever actually go out and learn one? Yeah, me neither.

When I was fourteen, my family traveled to Europe for two weeks on the good graces of my grandmother (and I’ve been pining to go back, ever since.) We had the same tour guide for the entire trip, a lady named Brigitte who was rumored to speak a whopping eight languages. Whether this was an exaggeration or not, she definitely spoke the language of every country we visited: that included German, Dutch, French, and of course, English.

A year previously, I had tried to learn French from a book and tape series. After many weeks of diligent study, I could count to five and say “Where is the toilet” – and that’s it. I didn’t even know how to introduce myself. By the time my family made it to France, we were all at the mercy of the charming Brigitte. I was fascinated; I simply could not believe she could keep that many entirely different languages straight, in her head. I freshened my resolve to learn another language, any language – surely I could manage just one?

A quarter of a century later, I still speak only English.

Recently I read a magazine article that made a passing reference to Sir William Jones (born 1746), a British philologist (someone who studies languages.) Jones was a linguistic prodigy, learning up to 7 languages as a child. By the end of his life, he knew around 40 languages, either fluently or partially, making him a “hyperpolyglot” (a polyglot is a person who uses several languages.)

Jones was amazing. But he looks positively lazy, next to Giuseppe Mezzofanti.


Mezzofanti was born in Italy during Jones’ lifetime. He became an Italian cardinal, and he remains the world’s most famous hyperpolyglot. By the end of his life, it was generally accepted that Mezzofanti spoke 28 languages and 50 dialects fluently, and another 30 languages somewhat less fluently.

Keep in mind, these guys lived in the 18th century, when foreign travel was torturous and time-consuming, and when there was no technological help whatsoever, no way to record anything aurally. The industrial production of paper hadn’t even begun yet. Both men started learning languages as children, which is a key point: most experts agree that the earlier in life an individual starts learning other languages, the easier it is.

So what about the present day – are all the extraordinary linguists long gone? Not quite. Meet Alexander Arguelles.

Arguelles is an American – which is surprising, in itself, since only about 9% of Americans speak more than one language (as opposed to 60-70% of people, worldwide.) In the 1980’s, when he was in college, he studied French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Medieval French, Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse. He earned his PhD and became a language specialist, subsequently learning a truckload of foreign languages.

In recent years, Arguelles has focused more on reading languages than on speaking them; his website contains a list of the languages he can currently read, and a self-ascribed “score” for each, indicating how well he understands it. There are 33 languages and dialects on the list. The highest score, 100, is for his native English. The lowest score, for Modern Greek, is 80.

So there you have it.

As for me? I would still dearly love to learn another language – but ever since the babies were born, I actually seem to have lost ground in my mastery of the English language. Things aren’t looking so good for ambitious new brain projects.

I still harbor a secret (shhh) dream of living in Italy some day. Perhaps I will just have to pretend I’m deaf, then. (By the time I ever get to Italy, I probably will be deaf.)

Smile and wave, girl, smile and wave.

Writing that rocks – Disturbing the Universe

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

You can find the most interesting things in other people’s garages.

We were all at Brother #2’s house, a few months ago (this was the same visit where I learned of the North Sentinel Islands), and the guys and I ended up in the garage, looking through boxes of books that hadn’t been unpacked yet, after my brother’s recent move. We kept exclaiming over novels that we’d all read as children, some of which I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years. Of course, as soon as we’d “Oh-my-goshed” over a book, we immediately tried to identify which of us the book originally belonged to.

Such things are taken seriously, in my family.

After a few minutes of this, my brothers picked up a paperback book and started raving about how great it was. It had a creased cover and yellowish pages and was titled Disturbing the Universe, by Freeman Dyson. I’d never seen it before.

“You’ve got to read this,” both brothers said. “It’s by a scientist, a physicist…it’s his memoir.”

What luck! This dovetailed nicely with my very recent obsession with space and physics.

They handed the book to me, and I added it to a small stack of books that I’d pulled out because they either belonged to me; probably belonged to me; or possibly belonged to me, subject to further investigation. When we left that day, I jammed the books into the back of our van, where they tumbled over and fanned out across the floor. (My patient husband didn’t say a word. We’ve been married for twenty-one years and he knows, by now, that no matter where we are, books tend to attach themselves to me like barnacles.)

A few days later I picked up Disturbing the Universe and started reading. And, oh my stars.

First of all, Freeman Dyson is a great writer, not in a flashy way, but in a steady, sturdy, draws-you-in kind of way. Secondly, the book covers a particularly fascinating period in history, a period which included the creation of the atom bomb and the birth of space exploration. Dyson includes everything from technological details to arguments over the morality of both programs. There is philosophy. There is quoted poetry, quite a lot of it (Dyson is something of a Renaissance man.) There is, of course, physics.


Dyson was born in England in 1923, and became captivated by science as a small boy. During World War II he worked for Bomber Command, using mathematical analysis to try to reduce Allied casualties (all the while wrestling with his personal moral opposition to bombing.)

After the war he came to America for graduate studies, then went to California and worked on the General Atomic program (which eventually foundered.) He was involved in the test-ban negotiations of the 1960’s, and he spends chapters musing over the ethics of everything from defense strategies to DNA research. He worked alongside some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th-century, and he pays tribute to them with a great many personal anecdotes.

The last third of the book is devoted to space exploration, and this section is particularly dazzling (at least, if you’re a space nerd, like me.) The book was published in 1973, and it is evident that Dyson thought that by now (2010), the space program might have been more advanced than it is. He discusses all the possibilities that physicists were then debating, including extraterrestrials and interplanetary colonization. (He also admits that the latter is not likely to happen, and explains why.)

Disturbing the Universe is still in print, a testament to its enduring appeal. After I’d finished it, and was raving about it on Facebook, Brother #1 told me, “You know, I think that copy is actually mine.”

To which I maturely replied, “I don’t see your name in it. Finder’s keepers.”

Because blood may be thicker than water, but when it comes to a good book, it’s every man for himself.

The Curious Case of the Collyer Brothers

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

My hubby and I love the old TV show Frasier. We own every season on DVD (except the first one, which I refused to buy because Kelsey Grammer’s hair was so bad that year.)

We never really watched the show when it originally aired but, after our first baby was born, when we were housebound in the evenings (and stupefied with exhaustion), we started watching Frasier episodes, one after the other, on DVD. Even in our foggy post-baby state, we loved how smart and fearless and funny the show was. The acting was pitch-perfect, the writing was beyond clever – it still makes us laugh today, even after repeated viewings.

Anyway, this post isn’t about Frasier. It’s about a passing reference that was made in one show. In that episode, Frasier and Niles were acting even more neurotic than usual, and Frasier’s dad (an ex-cop) warned them that they could turn out like the Collyer brothers.

Well, that sort of thing is just catnip to me. I headed to the Internet.

Turns out, Homer and Langley Collyer, well-educated brothers born in the 1880’s into a distinguished New York family, were quite famous for being eccentric recluses. Once they reached adulthood, they lived together in a large, beautiful brownstone on Fifth Avenue for two decades, shunning human contact and existing without water, electricity or gas because they wouldn’t pay the bills (although they did have money in the bank.) They never threw anything away; instead, they piled up junk in their home and made small tunnels through the mess so they could move around. They were extreme “hoarders” 50 years before the term was coined.

During the last several years of their lives, they were rarely seen in public. In 1947, working on a tip about a terrible smell coming from the house, police entered their home and after hours of tunneling through junk, they found the body of one brother. An extensive search went up for the other brother, while workmen started removing debris from the home. After more than two weeks of this, the body of the other brother was found – just ten feet from where his sibling had been recovered. Here is a police photo:


Langley Collyer had died while crawling through a tunnel to bring food to his brother; a pile of junk had collapsed and crushed him. Homer, who was blind and depended on his brother for survival, starved to death a few days later.

There are so many degrees on the mental health spectrum, from well-adjusted to eccentric to completely mad. Nature, nurture, a little of both? Evidently the boys’ physician father was quite peculiar, paddling a canoe to his job at the hospital and eventually abandoning the family. We’ll never know exactly what the boys suffered from, since they were never treated (although that may have been a blessing, for them – the 1940’s were the heyday of the horrifying lobotomy craze.)

A final note: 130 tons of garbage were eventually taken from the Collyer’s home, and the building had to be razed. Among the items removed from the house were some 25,000 books.

Which is the one part of this story that sounds perfectly normal, to me.

Writing that rocks – Rick Bragg

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

He writes more gorgeous sentences per capita than any writer I’ve ever read. For a while, after you finish one of his stories, most other writing seems flat and uninteresting (yes, even the good stuff.) Without having a college education, he became a long-time reporter for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize (and more than 50 other writing awards), received a Nieman fellowship to Havard, and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.

His name is Rick Bragg, and words turn to pure magic in his hands, that’s all.

In 1999, after many successful years as a newspaper journalist, Bragg started publishing memoirs, mostly about his own rural Southern family – and the critics went nuts. Several things converge in these stories: he is deeply passionate about these people; his family tree is chock-full of the most colorful characters imaginable; and Rick Bragg is simply one of the best writers and storytellers alive.

After I read the first chapter of All Over but the Shoutin, I set the book in my lap, looked off into the distance, and thought to myself, “You have got to be kidding.” You know how great writers can sometimes craft sentences that are so beautiful, they seem to reach out of the page and shake you? And you stop and read those sentences a few times over, just for the joy of it? With Bragg, every single page is peppered with those kinds of sentences.

It’s no good trying to articulate what he does. So I’ll give you some of his own words. (This is the very end of the prologue to All Over but the Shoutin, a book that is sort of a love letter to his mother):

No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.
God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.

Incidentally, I met Rick Bragg at the public library in Salem, Oregon, on a rainy evening in early 2006 when I was very pregnant with my first child. My brother and I sat in a medium-sized lecture hall and watched as a woman from the library escorted Bragg to the podium. He was taller than I’d expected, a brick of a man with floppy hair and a heavy leather jacket that he never took off. He seemed guarded, as famous people are.

Like many great wordsmiths, he was not overly eloquent in person – or maybe he was just tired. He gripped the podium with one hand and talked a bit about writing his previous books, and about his upcoming one (The Prince of Frogtown, which I am reading now.) After answering a few audience questions, he went into the hallway and sat at a folding table to sign books.

My brother bought a book and we stood in line. When we reached Bragg, I was too shy to say anything more than “Hi.” But my brother bent over the table, gestured to me and said, “My sister, here, told me that you are America’s greatest living writer.” (It’s true. I had said that.) Bragg looked at me and his mouth turned up a bit at one corner and he joked, “Well, then, I’ll have to put your baby through college.” He scribbled his signature and we said goodbye and walked down the hall and out the door.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, to redeem that moment by saying something more than “Hi.” But how do you convey to someone, in thirty seconds, what a monstrous talent they have; and what’s the point? Surely they know it. Surely, when you reach a certain level of success, all strangers look like fawning sycophants.

If I had a do-over, though, I think I would tell him that his writing is beyond beautiful, and that reading it is a pleasure and a privilege. (And maybe, if I was bold, I would also ask him if those unearthly sentences flow out of him easily, or if he has to wrestle the words onto the page. But then, what if he didn’t give the answer I’d prefer?)

Do yourself a favor. Read his family trilogy, starting with All Over but the Shoutin or, if you prefer, Ava’s Man (a book about Bragg’s maternal grandfather.) Finish up with The Prince of Frogtown.

It’ll be some of the best few hours you will ever spend reading.

The L.H.C. (Wait…we can DO that?)

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Right now, as we speak, something freaky, mind-boggling, unbelievable (insert your own adjective here) is taking place within a circular tunnel buried underneath France and Switzerland. And it’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard a word about it.

The tunnel, which is 17 miles in circumference and lies some 330 feet below the ground, holds the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, for short), the largest machine ever built (as in, since the beginning of time). It is operated by CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research. (The U.S., although we chipped in a cool $542 million to build it, does not have an official seat at the table – but there are more American scientists working on the LHC than those from any other country.)

So what is it? The LHC is a particle accelerator (stick with me, this is fascinating), and with it, scientists are hoping to recreate conditions that were present at the beginning of time.

Here is how it works, to the best of my understanding. (Science was actually my worst subject in school, so I’ll make this quick and easy.)

We all know about atoms, those basic units of matter, and how they are comprised of electrons, neutrons, and protons. (And protons and neutrons are composed of even smaller particles, called quarks.) Within the LHC complex, physicists strip electrons from atoms, creating what are called “free protons.”

Two of these protons at a time are beamed into the huge particle accelerator from opposite sides. They are sent around at faster and faster speeds and then, when they reach their maximum speed (more on that in a moment), they are forced to collide. (The first collision of this type took place on March 29, 2010.)

And that’s pretty much it. That’s what this gargantuan, expensive ($9 billion) machine does.

So why have roughly half (7200) of all the particle physicists in the world devoted themselves to this project? According to them, the only way to fill in gaps in our understanding of the “standard model” of particle physics (the building blocks of the universe) is with experimental data. They hope to examine the matter that is created by these “big bang” collisions and learn more about: dark energy; dark matter (which makes up a stunning 96% of the universe); extra dimensions; and, of course, they are hoping to either prove or disprove the hypothetical “Higgs Boson” (which I am not going to go into here.)

Okay, I’m done. Told you it would be quick.

Here are a few fun facts, though, and you may want to be sitting down when you read these:

  • A single magnet in just one of the stations positioned around the LHC has a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.
  • The LHC’s magnets must be chilled to a temperature of –271 degrees Celsius – which is one degree colder than deep outer space. Thus, somewhere in the bowels of this machine lies the coldest place in the universe.
  • Each proton goes around the entire 17-mile ring an impossible 11,000 times per second. This is 99.999999% of the speed of light. (It is impossible for matter to reach the speed of light – this is about as close as we can get.)

If you are a total nerd like me, and you need to know more, click here to read the excellent article “The Genesis 2.0 Project” from the January 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, which is where I first learned about this.

Click here to see pictures of this amazing machine.

And here is the very chipper, official website for the LHC, which is surprisingly easy to navigate, surprisingly low-tech (I guess they have better things to do than create flashy graphics), and which is written by endearingly enthusiastic people who use lots of exclamation points. As well they should.

(Lastly, I don’t have room in this post to debate the merits or morality of this endeavor, from a resources standpoint. I am probably sympathetic to both camps, pro and con. But as always, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment…)