Since the raging seas and stormy winds parted my love and I

[sovay]

I dreamed that I won the right to a cameo mention as some kind of Boston-area folkloric creature in Margaret Ronald's latest novel by singing "The Lowlands of Holland" in a kulfi shop. You ordered a particular flavor, they asked you to sing for it. I had that terrible real-life blankness that seizes the brain when you know literally more songs than you count and someone says vaguely but encouragingly, having no idea of this, "I don't know, whatever you feel like." Turned out one of the other patrons knew the same version; we wound up trading off harmonies. Is there a kulfi shop anywhere in Boston?

. . . This is probably the most realist dream I've had in months.

My poem "Theseid" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

Comments

Re: random linguistic rambling

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That's very interesting.

I've always sort of wanted to learn Arabic,* but never got round to it.**

But have some half-educated linguistic rambling anyway!

Always fun, that. And you're ahead of me--the best I was able to manage was thinking that the first consonant in kulfi sounds a little bit like the Irish broad-c, but without the hint of a w-glide at the end that my dialect would tend to put there if it occurs in an initial or a medial context.

*A PhD student from Near Eastern Studies who took my favourite history professor's Ireland and India class told me I should learn Persian instead. If she'd offered to teach me, I'd have taken her up on it, but no such luck. A pity, really: "Let's learn each others' languages" has always struck me as the ultimate in delightfully geeky pickup lines.
**Realistically speaking I'll spend the rest of my life just trying to speak Irish at a level I find acceptable, and maybe I'll manage to get my French back, and once that's done there's enough Swedish to properly berate my grandmother's shade for all the years she pretended to never have spoken it, and Yiddish...