A murder of crows: Collective nouns for birds

November 7th, 2011 by David Miller - stoke, writing

I love nomenclature like this. A “drift” of quail. A “siege” of herons. A “charm” of goldfinches. A “murder” of crows.

It all points to a time when people had a different connection with place, a complex knowledge of and taxonomy for describing flora and fauna.

For a great dictionary of these kinds of terms, not for birds but for general terrain, check Home Ground edited by Barry Lopez.

The following is taken from Wikipedia:

The standard collective noun for a group of birds of any type is a flock.[1]

For a number of individual birds, there exist collective nouns particular to the type of bird. Many of these collective nouns are fanciful and not in common use in English. The book A Mess of Iguanas… A Whoop of Gorillas by Alon Shulman is a good reference for the collective nouns and their etymology. James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks is devoted to these collective nouns, many of which originated as hunters’ terms and have been in the language for centuries.

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future pitayeros_0 Enlarge

And then, as if it were all planned, you see her walking through town. She gives you the face-smile, but here in the sunlight it seems embarrassing to move right up to her with all these bags in your hand and a 5 gallon water jug over your shoulder. You’re not sure if you’re supposed to kiss again, so you just set everything down and stand nearby, studying her face, checking – nervously now – for signs that she really doesn’t want to talk to you, that she’d really rather just continue on doing whatever else she was doing.

“Hola,” you say.

“Hola.”

— From 'How to get laid in Meixco'
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walking into a place in latin america

September 18th, 2011 by David Miller - writing

You can’t walk through a door in Latin America without greeting the place itself. You’ve decoded this the same way you’ve decoded the language. It’s a process that feels subtractive, as if removing certain parts of your consciousness, so that as you step into the internet cafe in Todos Santos, it’s only your 29 year-old body saying (to nobody in particular)  “buenas”  - and what feels like a much younger, almost toddler-age version of yourself listening for cues, some kind of validation that you’ve said it right.

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interview with megan boyle’s poetry

September 17th, 2011 by David Miller - writing
cover of 'selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee' by Megan Boyle. Book will be available 15 Nov 2011. Enlarge

Each event, thought, impression, or idea is isolated or localized in a way that to me seemed unprecedented in this exact form. It’s like each moment or situation noted is, to some degree, broken free from any overarching metanarrative, belief system, culture (except for pop culture), history, place, or other abstractions. I get a similar feeling when I’m on Twitter in that all points of reference are more or less assumed. A person tweeting doesn’t explain why he’s doing something, or even necessarily the context. He or she just says it. There’s a kind of freedom in that, and in Megan’s case it feels very reflective of the way people often seem to think, but up until now haven’t really expressed in written form beyond Twitter. I believe over time however that more people will begin writing this way.

–from  review of megan boyle’s poetry book .

 

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tutto letto

August 23rd, 2011 by David Miller - travel, writing
tutto letto Enlarge

A 24-hr bus ride, the “Tutto Letto” full 180 degree reclining seat service from Buenos Aires.

The three rearmost seats that sway and pitch boat-like, worse after dinner (porkchops, polenta, a 375 ml bottle of malbec / syrah) when we’ve finally reached the open pampa and no lights anywhere, the Ruta 5 all potholed and the diesel motor on the other side of the firewall reverberating 2 feet from your head.

Some movie on, a mainstream flick with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, but mostly ignoring it, holding Micael, feeling a sense of claustrophobia, or not so much fear of being closed in but something parallel to it that no music selection from Neon Indian to Nas to finally Brian Eno can put a dent into, this general sense of not traveling but being conveyed, trapped within this particular vehicle / set of musical options / familial situation, the last of which creates an ancillary sense of guilt to the point where I feel Micael’s tiny body against my chest and wonder about the two of us actually being trapped in this situation together, which activates a paternal instinct to protect him, diminishing the fear somewhat, but then as I think about the fact that we’re heading back to where he was born, our “home” for now, and how loose of a term that is in our situation – it’s more where we’re “based out of” – I begin feeling it again, and think about getting there, if only we could just fucking get there, if we could just make, if I can just stay here lying down in the tutto letto without my heart exploding from a massive infarction – and if, in the meantime, I can just deflect the horrible looping scenarios / visualizations of having to alert my wife that I’m having a heart attack or whatever, as everyone else is asleep, the monitors dark now, Micael on my chest but still shifting positions constantly, unable to fully get comfortable, and probably affected by the constant engine noise, Brian Eno’s same riff now having looped for at least the 40th cycle, and then Micael awakening, passing him across the swaying aisle to Lau who has suddenly awoken, asking her for water to take a xanax which, as soon as I have it down my esophagus, is already creating a placebo effect of slightly diminished anxiety that then kind of stretches and spins into a taxonomy of panic attacks and factors, particularly the timing, the very first one having occurred the eve of traveling back from California (where I’d bee “based out of” Huntington Beach) back to Atlanta and this sense of not really knowing what awaited there.

I check the iPod then and it’s just turning 3 AM.

Within an hour I’ll fall asleep and dream that I’m in some kind of van that won’t crank so we neede to roll-start it (somehow it’s manual transmission) – when Lau will shake me awake saying “mira.”

The first thing I’ll notice is that the bus engine is idling but there’s no movement.

We have stopped.

Outside, the broad expanse of meseta, the hillocks and shrubby coirón will all be covered in snow. A light snow drifts down from the sky as well. The dawn just breaking over the eastern plains.

Within the general sense of disorientation, concerns about the road status, and a stoke for the terrain in the predawn colors, there will be this sense of: I made it through.

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