Call for submissions

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Chris B said:
Nice bong you got here. I will add you to my roll if you don’t mind.
I see a cat pic and heard a mention of Hendrix…nuf said
# 17 March 2009 at 10:20 am

remora said:
I married Japan (a long time ago) so I assume that amounts to a certain degree of commitment and interest – but not necessarily Love.
What are your guidelines in regard to submissions of a Poetical Form? as I fancy myself as a Poet (as are we all).
We might as well air this freely and openly as it might encourage a lot of other budding expat poets who are inexplicably struck dumb when presented with the “huge” challenge of 3 lines of unrhyming verse and a measly 17 syllables.
thanx
rem.
# 2 April 2009 at 5:16 pm

Esther Nelson said:
Dear Stefan,
I received a tongue-in-cheek email supposedly lamenting the use of foreign terms in American English. It was hilarious, written in Yiddish/American English. Appended at the end of this. As I was about to reply that other languages had infiltrated American English, especially since WWII, I began to wonder why Japanese contributed only nouns, unlike Yiddish, which brought us a treasure trove of adjectives and adverbs, besides the usual nouns and some common verbs we can all understand.
I googled the interspersion of Japanese (where I found your name) and found ONLY NOUNS! Foods, military terms, furniture, comics, literary types, etc. But always in English syntax.
I’m sure English words are used by Japanese immigrants to the U.S. (just as my ethnic group — Mexican Americans use English words, but in Spanish syntactical patterns). But are Japanese patterns so different from those of English that we simply can’t borrow Japanese verbs or adjectives?
Here’s the email:
There may be those among you who support including Spanish in our national language.
I for one am 110% against this!
We must preserve the exclusivity and, above all, the purity of the English language.
To all the shlemiels, shlemazels, nebbishes, nudniks, klutzes, putzes, shlubs, shmoes, shmucks, nogoodniks, and momzers that are out there pushing Spanish, I just want to say that I, for one, believe that English and only English deserves linguistic prominence in our American culture.
To tell the truth, it makes me so farklempt, I’m fit to plotz.
This whole Spanish schmeer gets me broyges, specially when I hear these erstwhile mavens and luftmenschen kvetching about needing to learn Spanish.
What chutzpah!
These shmegeges can tout their shlock about the cultural and linguistic diversity of our country, but I, for one, am not buying their shtik. It’s all so much dreck, as far as I’m concerned.
I exhort you all to be menschen about this and stand up to their
fardrayte arguments and meshugganah, farshtunkene assertions.
It wouldn’t be kosher to do anything else.
Remember, when all is said and done, we have English and they’ve got bupkes! The whole mayse is a pain in my tuchas
# 4 November 2009 at 5:57 am

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