Junot Diaz and Nerd-Speak

In his interview with splicetoday.com, Junot Diaz talks about the roles nerd-speak and Spanish take on in his book The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here, Diaz is surprised that his mainstream readers are more “rubbed” by his use of Spanish than his use of nerd-speak. The use of nerd-speak, he explains, is way more prevalent than his use Spanish, and is annoyed by “America’s long tradition of anti-Hispanic bias and nativism that makes Spanish so problematic.” It is quite amazing that the second most common language of America, spoken fluently by 12% of the population, becomes such a problem to American readers.

But are such genres even more common than Spanish? There is no doubt that books and movies like Harry Potter and Twilight have become, dare I say, cool to read and watch? The sales of black plastic-rimmed glasses have skyrocketed in the past 5 years(see graph). Have these series made it cool to be a dork? I’ve noticed that even my friends and I have stopped caring about how loud we speak about the Final Fantasy Franchise, or how much we look forward to the Zombie apocalypse.
Junot Diaz has a right to be pissed off about people’s problem with the Spanish in his text. Wikipedia does not have a statistic showing the percentage of the population that speak Elvish, but if they did, by God, that number better not be over 12%!

Free Period

    

Free Period

A silver cigarette case,
with a plastic purple jewel
open and shut with a click, tink.
Last Camel Light
between the thumb and index.
Am I holding it right?
And with a sharp sting
at the back of my throat,
I squeeze my lungs tight
to hold back the cough.

Aged Gibson acoustic
passes around the circle.
“Here comes the sun,” “Wish You were Here,”
“A Lack of Color,”
Do you know any songs?
No.

Free period after lunch,
I was convinced to ditch last class
And drive to City Park.
They leaned on columns,
cigarettes bobbing
with every movement of their mouths.

But I, away from the group,
distracted.
Cement Lion that guards
my childhood memories
whispered them in my ear:

You swerve the bike between
cigarette butts,
a new game
ending with a scraped knee
and dad singing
“While my Chris
gently weeps.”

do you remember?


Side Tidbit:
I tend to go off by myself and daydream a lot, as you can see with this poem. One of the main reasons why, is because I sometimes wish life was more interesting, like a fantasy novel. I sometimes wish that my trips from home to school involved being chased by velociraptor, or fending off large ferocious dogs. So that is why I decided to make this blog, as a sort of homage to the way life should be.