Wrapped Up In Books

Growing up, Friday night was always Red Rooster night. Mum would buy a whole chicken and two large chips. I would demand a whole large chips to myself, regardless of whether Dad was overseas or not at the time. Friday was also the day that Mum went to the supermarket. She would buy me a packet of chocolate biscuits; depending on her mood they would either be Cadbury's Squiggly Tops, Toffee Pops or (the unfortunately now defunct) Rainbows. Always Cadbury, never Arnotts. After dinner I would take my packet of chocolate biscuits and go into my parents bedroom to watch television. When watching television, and this is a predilection that I still have to this day, it is imperative for me to hear absolutely every word and take in every tiny detail of the program. There can't be any talking or any form of interference at all. In order to achieve this I needed to find the quietest spot in the house, and as we only owned 2 televisions at the time, my parents’ bedroom was where I would find the least disturbance. The program that I would watch on Friday night was Sliders; either the second or third best sci-fi program ever; depending on whether you count Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis as one entity or two. The basic premise of Sliders was that Quinn Mallory had invented a devise that could transport people between parallel dimensions. However something goes awry after the initial "slide" leaving Quinn, his friend Wade, The Professor and Rembrandt "Cryin' Man" Brown unable to return directly to their dimension. And so the four of them had to continue sliding between random dimensions in the hope that one day they'd get lucky and slide back into their dimension. Anyone familiar with the theory of parallel universes will be aware that this provided the writers of the show with an endless amount of options for storylines. Some universes our heroes slid to were vastly different from ours, and some only had minor differences (leading to the false hope that they were actually back in their home dimension). I was reminded of this aspect (the minor differences) of the show today when I walked into a chain of the mega-bookstore "Chapters". It all looked very familiar, yet I had an inkling I wasn't quite in Kansas.

Since leaving Melbourne all of my reading had been of either newspapers or Wikipedia. So I thought it was about time that I bought a book. Aside from a periodic fascination with Haruki Murakami, for the last 5 or 6 years I have favoured non-fiction over fiction. In my late-teens, however, I read quite a lot of novels. I would track down the classics 20th century literature, devour them and then send the books off to girls I'd thought I'd made a connection with in internet chatrooms. The books never returned and as a result my personal library is as conspicuously devoid of fiction as my life is of love.
Upon entering "Chapters" I did have every intention of buying a novel, however apart from a brief sojourn through the literature section, it was obvious that this was never going to happen. I don't know where my aversion to the fiction stems from. Maybe I still bear the scars of poignant prose poisoning my precarious palpitations, or maybe, at the moment, I just find non-fiction a little more interesting.
There is one book that I've had my eye on ever since it became a prominent point of discussion in the Canadian press in March and April of this year. The book is Sorry, I Don't Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won't Go Away by Graham Fraser; a political and cultural analysis of language in Canada since the passing of the Official Languages Act in 1969. Unfortunately, the book is only available in hardcover, which not only makes it more expensive, but is also terribly inconvenient for a transient like myself. I don't understand why paperbacks cannot be released at the same time as hardcovers. The demographic of those who buy hardcovers would still do so even if a paperback was available. Quite frankly, I believe it is a discriminatory practise and no doubt publishing houses around the globe will soon be receiving letters from me telling them so.
A pleasing aspect to Borders, I mean "Chapters", is that it is not frowned upon to take a book from the shelf, sit down and read it. It not uncommon for me to begin reading a book, remember my place and then return to the store whenever I have available time to continue from where I left. I have finished many a book using this method and I believe that the reading of I Don't Speak French will be accomplished in the same fashion.
It's approaching 3 years since I became absorbed by the subject of linguistics. Over this time the majority of books I have read have been language biographies, books on language change and death, linguistic theory and accounts on the everyday quirks of language. And while I'm fully aware of becoming almost myopic with my reading material, my fascination doesn't seem to be abating. And so after much perusing of the bookstore shelves, I bought a book on Yiddish.
For about 2 years around the period of 2003-2005 I lived in the suburb of Caulfield in Melbourne. Caulfield and its surrounding suburbs are known for their large Jewish populations, mainly Polish and other Soviet Bloc Holocaust survivors and with visible Orthodox and Hasidic communities. Because of this Yiddish is a major language in the area. I would often walk or get the tram down Carlisle Street in order to hear it being spoken. Currently I live in the Outremont area of Montreal, which also has a large Orthodox and Hasidic population. However for some reason it is very rare to hear Yiddish on the street here, you'll almost always hear the Jewish people of the neighbourhood speaking English. Apparently, this goes across the board for most Ashkenazi in Montreal, whilst the Sephardi seem to prefer French (and obviously have no connection to Yiddish).
The book I purchased Born To Kvetch - Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods by Michael Wex, seems to be more of a series of portraits of Yiddish in its everyday use, rather than a biography of the language. However, I'm sure it will provide me with enough history and insight to satisfy my intrigue.