The Private Listener by Pamela Lu

The Private Listener
27 pages
$6

Pamela Lu was born in Southern California and studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1995 she has worked as a technical writer in Silicon Valley and co-edited Idiom (www.idiomart.com), an online journal and chapbook press. In addition to a book of fanciful non-fiction, Pamela: A Novel (Atelos Press,1999), she has had prose and poetry published in a number of journals, including Chain, Chicago Review, Clamour, Explosive Magazine, Interlope, Mirage, and Poetics Journal. Lu lives in San Francisco.

from The Private Listener

Eventually I come to my senses. It could be that the boy speaks not standard Tarquinian, the parlance of urbanites and bureaucratic officials, but a provincial mountain dialect of which linguists have identified at least five variants. Each dialect has distinct tonal qualities and pronounciations, but all obey the same grammatical rules and can be transcribed into standard Tarquinian script. (Incidentally, I'm a great admirer of Tarquinian calligraphy for its exquisite design. On my bedside table, I keep an album filled with reproductions of legendary parchments, precious mementos from what remains of the national collections. Late at night, when the streetlights dim and the traffic sounds have slowed to the rhythm of a distant ocean roar, I take up this book and draw a kind of moral sustenance from the elaborate ink sweeps, dashes, and curlicues that grace its pages. Nevertheless, I cannot read a single word of it.