“In the Blink of an All Seeing Eye”

Vic Graburn is so famous that if this story were true you would have heard of him. You would have seen him on a spin-off of Entertainment Tonight or read his name in the opening credits of one of his films.

Vic Graburn first attracted the attention of the studio system after directing a series of highly successful multi-language ad spots for Nabisco and Ford Explorer. The ads avoided culturally specific signifiers, instead taking aim at a universal target demographic; relying on voice-over narration rather than on-screen dialogue in order to facilitate translated re-dubbing. The commercial for Nabisco eventually aired in a staggering 37 countries.

Read the complete story at The Fanzine

“Agnes and Iris” regarding twin apartment managers

Originally published in The Shore Magazine, 2004 also recorded as a podcast for KQED’s Writers Block.

The tenants avoided Iris and Agnes, the identical twin managers of the West Park Apartments. They didn’t avoid them for the usual reasons. They didn’t avoid them because they were behind on rent or because they had painted the kitchen a very dark shade of green. Although of course some of them had done these things, too.

Instead they avoided Iris and Agnes because it was impossible to tell the two apart. There were rumors that Iris was taller or that Agnes had a mole on her neck. But these claims were never substantiated. The tenants lived in fear of calling one of their landladies by the wrong name. One of the twins became angry if she was called by the wrong name. Most people thought it was Iris who hated to be confused with her sister. But even if the name of the easily angered twin could be confirmed it wouldn’t do much to help. There was still no way to tell the sister with the temper from the one without. The man in 506 had once called Iris “Agnes” and she had erupted into a fury. When he moved out a month later, it was rumored that he had received only half of his deposit back.

Continued at The Shore.

Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny

Originally published in The Shore.

One afternoon last spring Chris had to flex and twitch his groin muscles to prevent urine from spurting out as he ran home from school. He lived in a neighborhood of identical beige houses. It was difficult to tell them apart. In his urgency he charged into a house thinking it was the one he lived in.

The Developmentally Disabled Blonde Girl from Oklahoma who Spoke Perfect Korean

A modern parable based on a misunderstanding of Chomsky’s inborn language hypothesis originally published in Kitchen Sink and Canadian literary magazine The Shore.

Most of the babies born in Oklahoma City in 1972 weren’t born with a preference for any particular language. They were born with brains eager to learn English or French or Taiwanese or the Cherokee language of Tsalagi. But there was a little girl born with textbook perfect Korean inside of her head. When the doctor pulled her soft round skull into this world she wailed “Gamsa hamnida!” which means “Thank you.”