English novelist Charles Dickens was born 2 centuries ago Tuesday, but he remains relevant even now said Archbishop of Canterbury because his books and characters explore what it means to be human.

In January 1842, Dickens sailed to America for the first time.

He wanted to see the Niagara Falls with his own eyes and also the American prisons and asylums.

He also traveled to a historic American city near Boston to see how textile workers, especially women, were treated in the busy and crowded mills.

And we want you to name that 19th century industrial city.

Lowell, Massachusetts is the answer to the Geo Quiz.

It was a place that Dickens sought out in 1842 when he first came to America.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Natalie McKnight about Dickens’ American tour to chronicle the injustices of the Victorian age.

Jan Seymour-Ford, a Research Librarian at Perkins, reflects on Charles Dickens.

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“Out in the Arctic wilderness, hunters dressed head to toe in skins would answer satellite phones and check their GPS co-ordinates… Some Polar Eskimos may live in tiny, wind-beaten wooden cabins with no running water, but Amazon delivers. “

“Most 8 year-olds who live in Qaanaaq and the remote settlements have the latest smartphones. Media entertainment will, however, never be produced for a language of 770 speakers because it is loss-making. Technology, be it mobile phones, DVDs or video games may support the top 50 languages maximum, but never more than that. Some languages are not suited to these technologies: Greenlandic words are too long to subtitle and to use in text messaging. Polar Eskimos tend to send text messages in Danish or English because it is easier.”

A Grammar for Cities

In South Korea, the grammar of urban organization is lacking a few key signifiers. I can attest to this. In 2002, I spent three weeks reporting there. Every day I got lost. Or rather, I would fail to reach my destination, because I couldn’t decode the addresses.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the numbers on most South Korean buildings have nothing to do with their location, and so have no correlation to the numbers of buildings around them. Instead, they constitute a record of when the buildings were constructed. It’s a chronological thing. So helpful…

It’s not just me who found this utterly impenetrable. South Koreans do too. So the government is overhauling its address system.

For more on the language of architecture, the seminal work is A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. Much in urban planning has changed since it was published more than three decades ago, but many in the field still swear by it.

English Language Learning

Under US Justice Department pressure, the state of Massachusetts is revamping its training for teachers who have English Language Learners among their students.

So it’s a good time for a visit to a Massachusetts elementary school that’s become a model for teaching English to non-native speakers.

More here.

Zappa’s Typist

In 1967, a young typist working for a London temp agency got the call to head over to the hotel room of a rock star. She was to type up some lyrics .

Pauline Butcher was the typist– prim and, as she says, naive. Frank Zappa was the rock star– eccentric, bombastic, satirical, profane.

Butcher typed the lyrics accurately, when she understood them. Sometimes, when she couldn’t follow what Zappa was saying, she just made stuff up. Not surprising when you consider some of the fabulously nonsensical verses from the 1967 album Absolutely Free:

Call any vegetable, call it by name.

Call one today when you get off the train.

Call any vegetable and the chances are good

The vegetable will respond to you.

And:

And I know, I think, the love I have for you

Will never end (well maybe).

And so my love, I offer you

A love that is strong, a prune that is true.

Pauline Butcher completed the typing job. It went well. She followed Zappa back to Southern California and worked for him for several years. She’s just written a memoir of that time.

Should diplomats learn the languages of the countries they’re assigned to?

Diplomat Sherard Cowper-Coles says yes. But, he adds, be careful not to overreach.

Cowper-Coles tells two stories of foreign language overreaching.

The Hebrew Overreach

When he was the British Ambassador to Israel, Cowper-Coles liked to try out the Hebrew that he had learned. So once, in a restaurant, he ordered (he thought) chicken breast. He did this, logically enough, by combining the Hebrew words for chicken and breast. But to the native Hebrew ears of the restaurant’s staff, the dish he had actually requested was not one they had ever before served: a woman’s breast on a chicken.

The French Overreach

Cowper-Coles also tells a story about Tony Blair. Blair “had learned his French in a bar outside Paris” between high school and college. So it wasn’t perfect.

Fast forward several decades. Blair, as Prime Minister, was hosting his French opposite number Lionel Jospin. After a “drinky” lunch, Blair decided to address the French media in French. Intending to say something like “I’ve always been envious of Lionel’s policies and whatever positions he’d taken,” Blair instead said “J’ai toujours envie de Lionel, même en toutes positions.” (Roughly: “I’ve always lusted after Lionel, in all positions”).

At least that’s the way Cowper-Coles tells it.

Music as Language

Yang Ying grew up in the 1960s and 1970s during China’s Cultural Revolution. It was a time when people deemed enemies of communism were forced to work as manual laborers.

That happened to Yang’s father, who ended up working in a coal mine.

He thought his daughter might escape that fate if he taught her to play an instrument-well enough to enter an elite music academy.

And so she learned to play the traditional two-string erhu. She studied under her father’s tutelage for several hours a day. Because the family’s apartment was so small, and the walls so thin, she would practice the erhu in the park.

The hard work paid off. Yang won a national competition playing a famous piece of music called River of Tears.

Her success led to a place at a music conservatory in Beijing. From there she became a soloist with the Chinese National Song and Dance Ensemble. She performed for countless foreign dignitaries on their visits to China, including American presidents.

“I played for Ford, Carter and for Nixon,” Yang says. “I remember three. I probably performed for more.”

More important to Yang though, were her tours of China, where she learned about the country’s regional differences, the music and the dialects. The many dialects of Chinese “really had an effect on the music.”

But while Yang was being exposed to new sounds, she still had to perform the same old stuff.

As an erhu soloist with a renowned national ensemble, “you probably only play two, three, four repertoires your whole life.” Yang says it tired her out. “And I really wanted to do something new.”

It was the late 1980s. China was opening up. Yang started going to rock concerts put on by the US Embassy. Clubs were opening, bands were forming. She taught herself the bass guitar. She said it was like learning a new language.

Yang founded Cobra, China’s first-ever all female rock band. She knew that she was breaking several taboos at once, and that many people would disapprove.

Yang says her father was “not very happy.” And other classical musicians, “thought I was crazy.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fk9mG5kasM]

Yang tried to infuse some of Cobra’s songs with traditional elements. She even re-imagined a traditional folk song as a rock anthem.

That spirit of anything-goes fusion ultimately moved Yang in another direction. She emigrated to the United States, and began studying jazz. She recognized common elements between jazz and Chinese folk music. Both rely on improvisation, and make the instrument sound “as if it’s singing, like the human voice.”

She started playing the erhu with an American jazz group.

That has brought her back to China, where she and her group recently performed at the Beijing Nine Gates Jazz Festival.

Also in the pod this week: teaching in two languages in Massachusetts, where bilingual education is banned. And Pakistan’s Sindh province is introducing mandatory Chinese for schoolkids aged ten and older.

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The former presidential candidate has been under house arrest since February.

Recently, Mousavi was allowed to meet briefly with his daughters and according to news reports, he told them that if they wanted to know what his detention is like, they should read a book called “News of a Kidnapping.”

The news caused a run on Tehran’s bookstores as opposition supporters rushed to buy their own copies.

“News of a Kidnapping” is not an Iranian book. It was written in Spanish in 1996 by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The English translation of the book was released in 1997. It describes the abduction of politicians in the author’s native country, Colombia.

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College, Massachusetts, about why Iranians are seeking out the Colombian author.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Mullins: There is no release in store for the leader of Iran’s opposition, former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. He has been under house arrest since February. Recently, Mousavi was allowed to meet briefly with his daughters and, according to news reports, he told them that if they want to know what his detention is like they should read a book called “News of a Kidnapping.” That caused a run on Tehran bookstores as Iranians rushed to buy their own copies. “News of a Kidnapping” is not an Iranian book though. It was written in 1996 by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Columbia. Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts. The book, “News of a Kidnapping”, he says, describes the abduction of politicians in Columbia.

Ilan Stavans: This is the story of a friend of Garcia Marquez, Maruja Pachon and her husband Alberto Villamizar, who in the late ’90s were kidnapped by drug cartels. These two abductions were actually part of a larger orchestrated effort by the drug cartel to kidnap major celebrities in order to be able to put the government in a difficult position and give in to what the drug cartel needed at that time. Garcia Marquez enters the world of these two individuals, Maruja and Alberto, and through them the world of many more that at that time felt vulnerable to this paramilitary entity, the drug cartel, that was actually doing what it wanted without any control from the government. It is a very different context from what is happening in Iran today. But the fact that this can be taken as a metaphor for a larger picture, the larger picture being that if you are going to speak to your mind against the government you are going to end up being pushed aside and silenced, is one that they clearly is speaking very loudly in Iran today.

Mullins: Is the…was the speaking very loudly in Iran today…is there something about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing that is particularly universal or is it just the circumstances he’s talking about in terms of political persecution in Iran, or those who go up against the drug cartels in Colombia that has a resonance?

Stavans: Not too long ago we read another important book that came from Iran “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a book about finding good literature and trying to use it as a way to understand a world that was being declothed by the religious fanaticism at that time. That [??] can be embraced in a society like Iran is, in many ways, something similar that is happening to Garcia Marquez. Garcia Marquez is a writer that becomes universal precisely by focusing on the particulars of his country; on the reality in Bogota, in [??], and other parts of his country. I love the fact that a good literature when it is able to transcend its own borders, it proves that it is not only written for the immediate readers of that particular country; that literature has no nationality but it becomes something global. On the other hand, I wonder what it means to become a bestseller in Tehran? A bestseller in Colombia can be 3,000 copies, 5,000 copies. Perhaps it really doesn’t matter how many copies in the end are circulating. What matters is that a book is being used as a message to show that the paradime of a politician in one country is very similar to the one in another country regardless of the differences those two countries have.

Mullins: Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

There’s no shortage of studies related to bilingual education. Here are the cases for and against . Also, the National Association for Bilingual Education, and some other links.

Reporter Andrea Smardon of WGBH-Boston has been looking at why the ban came into being, and its effects– whether non-English speakers are now picking English faster, or whether they’re dropping out of school. There’s more on her series here.

Also in the pod, more conversation with UK-based American, Lynne Murphy. Murphy teaches linguistics at the University of Sussex. She also writes the clever and droll blog, Separated by a Common Language. In the last podcast, we talked about twangy accents, pronunciation of the world water, and the declining status of British English in the United States. This time, we consider politeness, and why neither Yanks nor Brits live up to each others’ expectations. One word encapsulates this: toilet. Misuse this word at your peril. But there are others: excuse me and sorry have subtle differences in usage, which if you don’t get them right, may result in the locals thinking you arrogant.

Murphy has an entertaining theory about British people and the word sorry. If you’ve spent any time in the UK, you’ll know that the word comes up all the time, especially in official announcements (“We are sorry to announce that the 9:16 train to Chingford is delayed due to a staff shortage.”). But when Brits bump into people– which they do a lot on their crowded island– they don’t always apologize. Murphy suspects this is because they are in denial about having made any physical contact.

We round off the pod with some girl pop from the 1960s, en español.

Back then, Francisco Franco was still running Spain with an iron fist, and his government resisted anything that smacked of youthful rebellion. But there were mini skirts (not quite so mini in Spain). And there were carefree female singers.

Spain’s best known singer was Marisel.

Marisel is one of many artists featured in a new CD called Chicas: Spanish Female Singers 1962 to 1974.

Most of the tunes on the CD were released as original singles, composed by Spanish song writers.

They had been influenced by British rock, American soul and dance crazes like the twist. The lyrics are Spanish, but the musical language is very much imported.

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Unloading salt in Massachusetts (Photo: Harvey Burrell)

The shipment of salt in question arrived in the eastern United States not too long ago. It came from Mexico. And that’s where you come in.

We’re looking for a Mexican island where a lot of industrial sea-salt is processed. This island is in the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.

The place got its name from Spanish explorers who mistakenly thought the island’s trees were cedars.

So what’s cedar in Spanish?

The answer is Cedros Island. Reporter Chris Burrell recently visited a port in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where road salt from Mexico and many other countries is unloaded.

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(Photo: Katy Clark)

This is a time of high anxiety for the many Japanese citizens living inside and outside the country.

That’s certainly true for the dozens of Japanese families whose children are enrolled at the Amos Lawrence Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The lobby of the Lawrence School is busy with parents dropping off their sons and daughters. Many pause briefly to ask after family and friends in Japan.

With around 60 Japanese students enrolled here … plus a large alumni network … everyone seems to know someone feeling the affects of the earthquake. That includes P.T.O board member Ikei Kobayashi.

“My side of the family is okay, but my husband’s side lives between Tokyo and Sendai. So we are really really scared about radiation,” Kobayashi said. “We recommend that they evacuate to the west side of the country, but they said they have no gasoline, they can’t do anything.”

She said all they can do is pray that there’s no more disaster.

Kobayashi’s doing more than just praying, though. She and other parents are raising money to help with the quake relief effort. They’ve collected more than $6,500 so far in part through bake sales. Japanese rice balls have been one of the most popular items.

Teacher, Akiko Kawai-Marbet said that the school doesn’t know yet what it will do with the money. But that’s almost secondary.

“What’s so nice is that having these fund raisers gives us an opportunity for the Japanese community to get together and hear about families,” She added. “American families or other families in the Lawrence School are coming to ask us how we’re doing, and they’re showering us with such warm words.”

She said it’s a healing process.

The American families are also benefiting. Carie Leung said some of her son’s best friends have been the Japanese students at the Lawerence School. She’s designed a lapel pin made out of floral-patterned ribbon that’s also being sold at the school.

“It’s a plum blossom,” said Leung. “And the reason for it is the plum blossom is a spring flower, so it shows hope.” The black ribbon on the back, she said, “recognises the disaster that’s happening right now.”

Ties to Japan run deep here at the Lawrence School. Many of the Japanese students here spend several years in the Boston area while their parents study or do research. The Lawrence School also sends a teacher to Japan for a week each fall.

Soon the school will be sending money, and a thousand origami cranes, too.

“Japanese people believe if we build 1,000 cranes, one of our wishes will come true,” Akiko Kawai-Marbet said. “It’s also a symbol for world peace. And so we’re building cranes as we speak.”

She said she’s not sure where the cranes will be donated just yet. She hopes, though, that they’ll go to a school in the Sendai area.

For now, building paper cranes and selling baked goods is a project everyone here’s getting involved with. If nothing else, it’s a way to keep their hands busy while their hearts are thousands of miles away.

Amos Lawrence Elementary School

100 years ago, Sigmund Freud made his first and only trip to the United States to deliver a series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Jeb Sharp talks to Clark University archivst Mott Linn about the historic visit.

“In Europe I felt as though I were despised, but at Clark I found myself received by the foremost of men as an equal.”
—from Freud’s autobiography

Pictured at Clark University in 1909 are, from left (front): Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; (back) A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sandor Ferenczi. (Photo courtesy Clark University)

100 years ago this weekend, Sigmund Freud made his first and only trip to the United States to deliver a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Anchor Jeb Sharp talks to Clark University archivist Mott Linn about the visit.

Pictured at Clark University in 1909 are, from left (front): Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung; (back) A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sandor Ferenczi. (Photo courtesy Clark University)

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: A hundred years ago a Viennese doctor paid a visit to the city of Worcester in Massachusetts to give a series of lectures. This man had big ideas – about the unconscious, the id, and the ego. Yes we’re talking about Sigmund Freud. But back in 1909 when he made his first and only visit to the US his name hadn’t yet become an adjective. In fact back then Freud was desperate for some recognition. He got it at Clark University in Worcester. At the time the school was renowned for its psychology program. Mott Linn is the chief archivist for Clark University.

MOTT LINN: Today Freud is such a big name but back then he wasn’t. This was sort of his coming-out party. We had some credibility that he was hoping to get. And yet in Europe it may have been because of his new ideas; it may have been in part because he was Jewish but he wasn’t able to get into most areas of academia. And so this was a way to try and …. Okay we’ll go to Clark, get better well known in the US and hopefully that will reverberate into Europe.

SHARP: Let’s go back a little bit. How old would he have been and what stage of his career was he at? And also paint a picture of the journey. This is 1909.

LINN: He was a little over 50 years old. Now he came with a couple of other psychoanalysts – most famously Carl Jung. And Jung was much younger. He was 34. Both of these men ended up getting honorary degrees from Clark University. Freud’s is noteworthy because it’s the only honorary degree he ever received. And so they came over. It took a couple of weeks to sail across the ocean to New York City. Then sail to southeastern Massachusetts, took a train to Boston, took a train to Worcester. And they were there for about a week.

SHARP: So Freud comes to Clark. He gives a series of five lectures on the origin and development of psychoanalysis. Describe the impact both on the people who heard these lectures but also on Freud.

LINN: Well it really kick started his career. Before then not a lot of people knew of him and took his work that seriously. But there was very little of that. His famous book, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” came out in 1909 and even six years later only a few hundred copies had been sold worldwide. So that kind of demonstrates how little cache his ideas had. And this really did kick start his career; was taken more seriously in the US and as he had hoped it translated to being taken more seriously across the Atlantic.

SHARP: I understand Freud and Jung delivered their lectures in German. Was there translation?

LINN: There was not translation there. Back then all your best universities had been in Europe, mostly in Germany. And so if you wanted to be a scholar you had to learn German. And so all these professors of psychology and all the graduate students of psychology would have known German and to a greater or lesser extent would have been able to understand what Freud was saying.

SHARP: Tell me more about his trip. What happened to him? What did he see? What were his impressions?

LINN: Well after Worcester they took some time off. They took a train trip out to see Niagara Falls and then another train trip into the Adirondacks. One of the highlights of the trip, according to Freud, was he seeing a porcupine. And so for whatever reason he thought that this was a wonderful thing.

SHARP: Lovely. Archivist Mott Linn of Clark University. Thanks so much for coming in.

LINN: Thank you very much.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Aurelia’s world is not permeable to reality. That’s made clear when Aurelia ignores the voice of man on her answering machine urging her to pick up the phone.

In fact we don’t know who or where Aurelia is. Until she finally emerges lazily…. out of a chest of drawers on the stage.

Aurélia Thierrée. Photo: Richard Haughton

Thanks to her visual tricks and acrobatics, Aurelia seems to come out of the drawers limb by limb. It’s comical, and visually mind-boggling, as is the entire performance. The character “Aurelia” is Aurelia Thierree in real life. And she comes from an illustrious line of entertainers.

“Aurelia’s Oratorio” is the brain child of Aurelia Thierree’s mother, Victoria Chaplin Thierree. She is one of Charlie Chaplin’s daughters.

She lives in France. And with her French husband, Jean-Baptiste Thierree, she dreamed up a new kind of circus in the 1970s. No animal tricks — but lots of acrobatics, dance, and aerial numbers. It’s visually playful, mysterious, and whimsical. It’s the kind of performance that gave birth to new circuses like Cirque du Soleil.

Aurelia Thierree was born into this show business….and almost on stage.

“I was born premature and my mother was still doing the show, and I met someone who was in the audience when her water broke.”

Thierree grew up on the road, touring 5 months out of the year throughout Europe, and living in a trailer with her parents and her younger brother James.

“And it was fun I mean I miss waking up and looking out of my little plastic window and checking out the landscape. Mostly it was parking lots….. (laugh) but then it was Italy, and it was Spain…. it was fun.”

Inevitably, she began performing at an early age. That may be especially true for “Aurelia’s Oratorio.” There are lot of unpredictable props… They create a topsy-turvy world that was inspired by a book of medieval drawings.

In the upside down world of “Aurelia’s Oratorio,” flowers are placed in a vase head down, a kite flies a person, and laundry is hung out to dry… only to be watered on the rack.

Aurélia Thierrée. Photo: Richard Haughton

And the props seem to have a mind of their own. Objects thrown into the wings boomerang back onto the stage. In this show, no one wears clothes — the clothes wear you. Dresses, suits and coats appear out of nowhere, wrap, dress and chase the actors on stage.
They lead to dance numbers with Aurelia or her partner, Jaime Martinez. And the set has a very strong and haunting presence too.

In one scene, Aurelia is hanging between the curtains that frame the stage, way up high, when a wind storm begins to shake the entire set.

Even though Aurelia seems in jeopardy, she looks amused.

The show looks like the world of a mischievous child, full of freakish creatures, both comical and frightening.

It’s a surreal world that some have compared to the paintings of Salvador Dali or Rene Magritte. There are many poetic elements in it, like the scene in which Aurelia plays an old Italian song on alarm clocks old and new.

There is no dialogue in “Aurelia’s oratorio. Its wordless dreamy quality is what gives the performance universal appeal. But Thierree says the experience changes — depending on the venue.

“Aurelia’s Oratorio” will head out to Australia and California in the Fall. This week, Aurelia Thierree is performing her show at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts — where her parents first performed two decades ago.

For The World, I’m Adeline Sire.

More information:
American Repertory Theater
www.berkeleyrep.org
http://www.lajollaplayhouse.org