Conversation American English Pdf

[Henry Gallagher]

Everyday Conversations is intended for sixth- and seventh-grade students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or English as a Second Language (ESL). Students can listen to and/or read dialogues in English. Topics of the conversations include introductions and small talk, shopping, asking for directions, hobbies, and giving advice.

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This continuing education online course by The Laboratory for the American Conversion is designed to help you understand how to have contentious conversations that don't escalate into the culture wars that have become all too common. You can apply this in your workplace and with family and friends.

The Laboratory for the American Conversation's methodology uses social theory, discourse analysis and large-scale surveys to uncover what values communities express when they enter into public discourse, and what threats they are trying to avoid.

Over the last few months, I\u2019ve attended more than a dozen screenings of our documentary, American Symphony. It\u2019s always surreal to see our lives projected on the big screen, but it was nothing like last night, when I got to see the Isolation Journals community\u2019s reactions to the film in real time\u2014what made you laugh, what made you cry, and how this wild ride of ours has moved you. What an honor it was to share this with you.

American Symphony is now available worldwide on Netflix. Also available is a video recording of the post-screening conversation with me, my husband Jon Batiste, and the brilliant Oscar-nominated director Matthew Heineman\u2014you\u2019ll find it below. I was so delighted to hear and answer your questions\u2014and I have to say, they were by far the most heartfelt and thoughtful I\u2019ve received since we began sharing the film with people. We got to talk about what Jon called \u201Cpeak compartmentalization,\u201D me learning to say \u201CI\u2019m not okay,\u201D and how Matt squirreled his way into filming at the Grammys.

I am always in deep gratitude to this community, but today I feel especially so. American Symphony is an intimate story that follows Jon and me during our highest highs and our lowest lows. Sharing in this way often leaves me feeling exposed and raw\u2014I call it \u201Cthe vulnerability hangover.\u201D But the support and love from this community is the perfect cure. I truly can\u2019t thank you enough.

Absolutely. And, as the really important Ruy Castro books on the development of bossa nova (Chega de Saudade [1990, translated as Bossa Nova] and A Onda que se Ergueu no Mar [2001]) make clear, the relationship between Brazilian music and American jazz has always been a very complex two-way conversation. In Los Angeles, the (barely) unofficial Brazilian ambassador of music has been Srgio Mendes, who arrived in 1964 for the famous Carnegie Hall bossa nova showcase, headed to Los Angeles and never left or stopped being at the center of the Brazilian musician colony here. Whenever I talk to Brazilian and other Latin musicians, they all say that the first thing they do when they get to Los Angeles is go pay their respects to Srgio Mendes. He is like the Godfather, or the Pope.

Before we move over from Brazil, we have to talk about Carmen Miranda. In a sense, the Carmen Miranda project of Americanizing (or Hollywoodizing) Brazilian music in the 1940s is a good example of an L.A. modernist project.

It is. But I understand why and I am very sympathetic to that method. My sheet music project with the L.A. Public Library involved working on an archive of 100,000 pieces of sheet music and songbooks and figuring out which 200 of them are the ones that should be in a book and be our primary storytelling devices.

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Producer Sarah Koenig's mother lives by a set of rules about conversation. She has an actual list of off-limits topics, including how you slept, your period, your health, your diet and more. You don't talk about these things, she says, because nobody cares. This week we try to find stories on these exact topics that will prove her wrong.

Dr. Steven Bratman has spent a lot of time around people with extreme and unusual diets. He tells Ira Glass that for some of them, it's not about losing weight but about becoming more pure.

Dr. Bratman is the author of Health Food Junkies. (7 minutes)

(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "DID YOU EAT?")FELIX CONTRERAS, HOST: From NPR Music, this is ALT.LATINO. I'm Felix Contreras. This week we're going to do something a little different. We're going to have a conversation, an extended conversation about a novel that is making waves for a whole bunch of reasons. The book is called "American Dirt," and it was written by Jeanine Cummins. It's the story behind the book that is generating a lot of chatter on the internet. There's been negative reaction to the book, and it's mostly centered on the fact that a white woman with a distant connection to Latinx culture wrote a book about Mexican immigrants, while others have taken the book and its author to task for her writing style. But there are also many who defend the writer, indicating that as long as it's well-researched, anyone should be able to write about anything, at least when it comes to fiction.It also speaks to larger questions of representation and identity within the arts in general. In an era that has seen movements like #OscarsSoWhite, identity and representation are topics that are often front and center. For the last 10 years, ALT.LATINO has had many conversations about identity in the arts, and this is another chance to do so. So there's a lot to talk about, and I can't just talk to myself, so I invited some ALT.LATINO contributors to the conversation. Catalina Maria Johnson normally joins us from Chicago, but this week she's in Baltimore at member station WEAA. Catalina, welcome.CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hey, Felix. It's great to be here and great to be here at WEAA. Thank you to them.CONTRERAS: And Marisa Arbona-Ruiz is here in ALT.LATINO world headquarters. Marisa, welcome.MARISA ARBONA-RUIZ, BYLINE: Saludos. Good to be back.CONTRERAS: And we want to welcome into the ALT.LATINO universe Isabella Gomez. She is an NPR Kroc Fellow, where she will spend a year working with NPR, refining her journalism skills and teaching an old-timer like me a thing or two. Isabella, welcome.ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: Hola. Thanks for having me.CONTRERAS: OK, there's lots to chew on, but first, let me reference the music we're hearing. This is from an upcoming album called "The New Immigrant Experience: Music Inspired By Conversations With Dreamers." It's by Felipe Salles, who is Brazilian, and his band, the Interconnections Ensemble. We're going to use the music this week to punctuate our conversation and give us time to think about things, absorb our thoughts and those of others. Right now, we're listening to a track called "Did You Eat?"(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "DID YOU EAT?")CONTRERAS: OK, we're back. You are listening to ALT.LATINO. We're about to jump into a conversation about the book "American Dirt." We should also point out that Oprah Winfrey has featured it through her very popular book club. There was a bidding war for publication, and there was already a film deal signed. Many Latinx artists initially endorsed the book, and some have backed off of that. Since then, Oprah has stated that the book has struck an emotional chord, and she wants to hold a discussion about representation and publishing for a TV special in March. So there's lots of stuff there. Let's start with the writing. Now, some have objected to what people are calling stereotypes or trauma porn. What's your own take on the writing? Let's start with you, Catalina in Baltimore.JOHNSON: I found it at best a superficial kind of thriller. And it had shades of, let's just say - I grew up on both sides of the border, so, like, Harlequin romance on this site and Corn Tellado on the other side, the moments that were more suited to really, like, adolescent romance. That being said, the story of this middle-class woman that owned a bookstore and migrates forcibly to the U.S. by riding La Bestia, which is the train, the famous train, at times, once you get to the desert, was more compelling. Throughout, there's a couple of issues in terms of the writing for me that were really distracting. Besides the fact that it didn't seem particularly well-written is that there were so many linguistic foibles is all I can call them, language being mixed from what one might consider to be kind of Caribbean terms to Mexican terms, to kind of, like, terms that everybody would know that were identified as borderline slang or norteo. It just was the oddest sprinkling of the language and made it feel very kind of inauthentic.CONTRERAS: Isabella, what did you think? What's going on?GOMEZ SARMIENTO: OK, I didn't - full disclosure, I didn't read the full book. I've looked at excerpts, and I've looked a lot of the reaction online because I think to me, it's more important to see what people from our community are saying about the way they're being represented than me - I'm not from Mexico. I don't have any experience with border crossings, so it's not something that I'm coming with enough information to be able to assess the accuracy of what Jeanine is saying. What I did read - I think it's just very - the linguistic aspect of it, the way the Spanish sits oddly, it's very clear that it's coming from an outsider's perspective. And that's not how people actually talk to each other. It's not interactions that seem like they're coming from somebody who is familiar with these communities, who is familiar with these experiences. It's very much like someone projecting what they think this experience is like, and I think it definitely reads that way. It doesn't read as something that feels authentic and feels like it's fully stepped into the shoes of the character.ARBONA-RUIZ: I wholeheartedly agree. There is not a lick of Spanglish in there, which a Latinx writer would do. The words - they're fetish words that are just sprinkled in here and there, and they pop out at the oddest times. My first reaction, first paragraph was an eye roll because it's so hitting on trauma porn that it's overkill. And it takes me to a real look at the American psyche, the American thirst for sensationalism and trauma and immigrant trauma with no context for having immersed herself in the culture, for having really researched it fully. And I reacted very strongly to that.CONTRERAS: OK. (Laughter) No one's holding back today, man, which is - this is part of the conversation. Now, one of the things that has happened - NPR has covered the controversy. I want to play two interviews that ran on the morning of January 24 last week. This is NPR's Rachel Martin.RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: This week was supposed to be an exciting one for author Jeanine Cummins. After months of hype, her novel "American Dirt" had finally been published. It got high praise from writers including Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez. Oprah even picked it for her book club. This is a clip from "CBS This Morning."(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "CBS THIS MORNING")ANTHONY MASON: Oprah, drumroll, please.OPRAH WINFREY: It is "American Dirt," "American Dirt," "American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins.GAYLE KING: Yes.WINFREY: Oh, I love it so much.MARTIN: "American Dirt" is the story of a Mexican woman named Lydia. In the opening scene of the novel, her family is murdered by a drug cartel. She and her 8-year-old son are the only survivors.JEANINE CUMMINS: And what follows is that Lydia and Luca, in this one moment, fall out of their middle-class lives and become people who have to run for their lives.MARTIN: And they run to the U.S.-Mexico border. That voice you heard was part of a recorded interview we did with Jeanine Cummins last week, an interview that never aired because the criticism of her book started coming down hard and the conversation about the novel had to change. Latina writers in particular have eviscerated the book, including LA Times reporter Esmeralda Bermudez.ESMERALDA BERMUDEZ: This book has left a lot of white readers with this very fuzzy feeling like, oh, my God, about immigrants. And my skin is crawling. My skin is crawling.MARTIN: You'll hear more from my conversation with Bermudez elsewhere in the show. In light of all the takedowns of the book, we called Jeanine Cummins back. She told me she has tried to avoid the criticism, especially on Twitter, so I shared some of what was being said.I do want to get into some of the details of the critique because it is so widespread, and I understand that you've tried not to engage in it. But we spoke with a writer from the LA Times, Esmeralda Bermudez, an immigrant herself. And she has said - and I'm quoting from a tweet thread - "American Dirt" has left us with a textbook example of nearly everything we should avoid when writing about immigrants. It is hollow, harmful, an adrenaline-packed cartoon.CUMMINS: OK. I don't know how to respond to this. It's - I can't. Not everyone has to love my book. You know, I endeavored to be incredibly culturally sensitive. I did the work. I did five years of research. The whole intention in my heart when I wrote this book was to try to upend the traditional stereotypes that I saw being very prevalent in our national dialogue. And I felt like there was room - I feel like there is room in the national dialogue for us to examine the humanity of the people involved in a much more intimate way. And I - you know, people can decide for themselves whether they feel that I failed or succeeded in that endeavor, but that was my hope.MARTIN: Do you think you were aware of your cultural blind spots as a white woman writing about this who has no personal experience as a migrant?CUMMINS: I think I was as aware of my cultural blind spots as I could be. I certainly centered them in my mind as I was writing. One of the things that I find deeply distressing and disappointing about the current tenor of this conversation is how, in the court of public opinion, I am the white lady now in this narrative. The fact is that I am a white person. I am a citizen of the United States. I am a person who has a very privileged life. I am also Puerto Rican. And I - you know, that fact has been attacked and sidelined by people who, frankly, are attempting to police my identity.MARTIN: Your grandmother is from Puerto Rico.CUMMINS: Yeah, and that was the ethnicity and the culture of my father. And no amount of vitriol on the internet can make that untrue. But I feel like I understand that voices of color and women's voices have been hijacked and devalued for a very long time. I am a person who has always hoped to be on the right side of those arguments. I wrote a book that I believe in. I wrote a book that I hoped would remind readers that any one of us could be migrants.MARTIN: You did write an op-ed in the New York Times in 2015 saying that you didn't want to write about race. Quote, "I'm terrified of striking the wrong chord, of being vulnerable, of uncovering shameful ignorance in my psyche."CUMMINS: Yeah. I mean, that is - you know, that's one of the things that I have seen taken out of context over and over again in this conversation. But the fact is that that whole essay is about me reckoning with race. And in that essay, I acknowledge that I am the beneficiary of white privilege. I am always examining my position in society and the positions of the people around me because I am deeply, deeply committed and interested in equality. And so it's particularly painful to be in the sort of crosshairs of this really, really big conversation. But I think, you know, in some ways it's a conversation more about who gets the attention for their books.MARTIN: Do you think there's a problem, an imbalance...CUMMINS: Oh, absolutely.MARTIN: ...In the publishing industry?CUMMINS: To be sure. Yes, there is. Yeah. And that's not a problem that I can fix, nor is it a problem that I'm responsible for. All I can do is write the book that I believe in, and I did that.CONTRERAS: OK, now the second story that ran on "Morning Edition" the same day.MARTIN: A new novel by Jeanine Cummins has opened up a debate about white privilege, racism in publishing and the unintended consequences of telling a story that is not your own. The book is called "American Dirt," and the much-hyped new novel was released this week. It's the story of a Mexican woman named Lydia and her 8-year-old son, Luca. Here's part of an interview I did with Cummins.CUMMINS: The idea of this book for me was to remember the humanity of migrants, and I feel like so often the conversation in this country when it comes to migration and immigration turns around a very specific kind of stereotype. And I wanted to make sure that Lydia was a character who could turn that stereotype on its ear, you know, that she would be counter to our typical sort of notions of what a migrant looks like.MARTIN: Lydia feels like she has no other choice but to flee, and the book is the story of their harrowing journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. It has been hailed as a "Grapes Of Wrath" for our times. In fact, that quote is on the cover of the book. And that's one of the many problems with "American Dirt," according to several critics. There have been tweet threads, essays all arguing that the book deploys harmful stereotypes. There's even a hashtag, #mylatinonovel, where people write their own parodies. Elsewhere in the show, you'll hear my interview with Jeanine Cummins and her reaction to all the criticism. But there is so much more to say about these very difficult issues of race and identity in publishing and which voices are elevated in the broader culture. So we called up one of the most vocal critics of "American Dirt." Her name is Esmeralda Bermudez, and she's a writer with The LA Times.BERMUDEZ: In 17 years of journalism, of interviewing thousands of immigrants, I've never come across anyone like "American Dirt's" main character. She's this middle-class, bookstore-owning woman who left Mexico with a small fortune in her pocket like she was going to go to France or something, with inheritance money, with an ATM to her mom's life savings. And why did she leave? Because she was flirting with a drug lord who's now trying to kill her. This is a wonderful, you know, melodramatic telenovela, something I would love watching, like, on a - just for cheap entertainment, like a narco thrill on Netflix. But this should not be called by anyone the great immigrant novel, the story of our time, "The Grapes Of Wrath." Why? How did we get to a point in our industry, in the book industry, in society that this is the low standard that we have?MARTIN: Bermudez, like many others speaking out against the book, says despite the author's intentions, it doesn't reflect the truth of the migrant experience.BERMUDEZ: My grandfather, my aunt, my uncle were killed in El Salvador at a time of death squads, death squads sponsored by the U.S. I was separated from my mom. I didn't meet her until I was 5 because of all this violence. I wanted to see myself reflected in this book. It's painful that not only did I not see myself but I found all these things that constantly make us feel small.MARTIN: She understands Americans who are not migrants themselves or come from migrant families might walk away from this book with a completely different feeling.BERMUDEZ: This book has left a lot of white readers with this very fuzzy feeling like, oh, my God, about immigrants. And my skin is crawling. My skin is crawling.MARTIN: Esmeralda Bermudez of the LA Times. Her piece on "American Dirt" appears in the paper today.(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "CROSSING BORDERS")CONTRERAS: At this point, it's important to note that many people have defended the work, including noted Latinx author Sandra Cisneros. Now let's take one of those music breaks to let it all sink in. Again, this is from Felipe Salles' upcoming album. This track is called "Crossing Borders."(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "CROSSING BORDERS")CONTRERAS: OK. So that sets up the two versions of the approach, two sides of the coin. I think what we want to do next is talk about - move away from the book itself and talk about the broader issue of, basically, can anyone write about anything in the fiction world? And before we get into that, I want to read a quote from an AP story written by Russell Contreras, who points out that there have been at least a few well-known instances of writers expressing themselves outside of their own cultural background. He wrote about Edna Ferber, a Michigan-born Jewish novelist who is widely admired by some Latinos for her portrayal of Mexican-Americans in her 1952 novel "Giant".John Steinbeck enjoyed a following among Mexican-Americans for his stories set in Northern California. And in 1974, California-born John Nichols was praised for his novel "The Milagro Beanfield War," which explored the complicated relationships between Hispanics and whites in northern New Mexico and the battle over water rights. Now, that's from this story from Russell Contreras from AP. OK, panel, can anybody write about anything in the fiction world? We'll start with Marisa.ARBONA-RUIZ: Well, it takes a lot of insight. You have to immerse yourself in the culture. You have to be enlightened about that culture. I saw the film of "The Milagro Beanfield War," and I loved it. I thought it was funny, but that's because it had Latino actors and it brought across a Latino humor. And that's a part of our culture that is so important and is so absent in this book. If you're going to put yourself out there and cover another culture, you really have to know what you're saying, know what you're doing, know the people. Feel it. Feel it. Live it. Breathe it so that you can express it appropriately.CONTRERAS: Isabella.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Yeah. I mean, I think the question, you know, can anyone write about anything in the fiction world, but who is given those opportunities? - because on the sleeve of the book, Jeanine Cummins said she wishes someone slightly browner than her would write it. But people who have lived these experiences do try to write these stories, and they're not given that type of access. So I think for me, it's more of, like, who gets passed the microphone? - because this is a lot of the, like, voice for the voiceless type of rhetoric.CONTRERAS: Right.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: And nobody is voiceless. Like Marisa's saying, a lot of my favorite journalists who cover migration and do so empathetically are not Latinx. They're not migrants. Sometimes they're white people. But I think you have to go into it with a certain empathy and a certain understanding and know that you don't have agency over those people's stories just because you're helping elevate them. And I think there's a difference between that and between thinking that you're the person who's allowed to control that narrative.CONTRERAS: Yeah, who can write about what in journalism is a whole different topic.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true.CONTRERAS: (Laughter) OK. Catalina.JOHNSON: Well, I was looking and thinking about the examples you cited. You know, 1952 and 1974 - I think things have changed a little. I think we are a lot more aware of narratives that are created, who's creating them, why are they creating them, how do they approach those creations. So I agree with everything absolutely that's been said. If you do it well, if you do it with a deep, deep, deep understanding of what you're portraying, then you're likely to have accomplished what you wanted to do. But here we are, all music people, and so here's a musical term. Everything about the way this was done is pretty tone deaf. I mean, it's like (laughter) - so yeah, you can sing about anything you want, but if you can't sing and you're singing out of tune and you are trying to be the representative of, you know, another people's music, then we're likely as music people to say, you know, there's lots of people that can do this way better. And I think that's at the heart of it.(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "II. THEIR STORIES HAVE NEVER BEEN TOLD")CONTRERAS: We'll come back with more conversation about identity and representation, but first, a little more music from Felipe Salles and The Interconnection Ensemble.(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "II. THEIR STORIES HAVE NEVER BEEN TOLD")CONTRERAS: You're listening to ALT.LATINO. I'm Felix Contreras. Let's move on to the impact of social media on this discussion because - and I want to bring something up. I was talking to Isabella when this story first broke, and it reminded me of a book called "Famous All Over Town." Some of you may remember it. This is from 1983. It was written by a writer named Danny Santiago, and it was celebrated as a fresh, new Latino voice in fiction. It was about a Mexican American family in East LA. But Danny Santiago was really Daniel Lewis James, a middle-aged white guy from Kansas City who used a pseudonym for a lot of different reasons. He said he used to be a member of the Communist Party who was blacklisted. There were a lot of reasons that he gave. He had lived many years among Mexican American families in LA, and his book initially was praised for accurate depictions. I wonder what the reaction would be to "Famous All Over Town" now in the age of social media. What do you guys think?ARBONA-RUIZ: Oh (laughter).CONTRERAS: (Laughter) Isabella, you're...GOMEZ SARMIENTO: I'm just shaking my head. I mean, I think the reason things like - it would have gotten the same type of outrage as "American Dirt." I think that now with social media - I mean, this reviewer, Myriam Gurba, wrote this terrible review. It got killed by the magazine, so she just published it on her blog, tweeted about it. It's - with media being so much more democratic and accessible for so many people, I think that would never get by now. The thing with Danny Santiago - it's very parallel to this story because he said that, you know, he just happened to pick that pseudonym not necessarily because it implied that he might be Latinx but just because that was just a pseudonym to go by. And it's similar to Jeanine Cummins now coming out and claiming that her grandmother is Puerto Rican, which - you know, that's totally fine. But I think there's a big difference between coming to terms with your identity and cloaking yourself in it as an excuse to why you should be able to profit off of the experiences of other people.ARBONA-RUIZ: Right.JOHNSON: When you don't have that in your psyche.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Exactly.ARBONA-RUIZ: Well...GOMEZ SARMIENTO: It's great if she's Puerto Rican, but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the book is harmful and that she's making so much money off of it. And I think the Danny Santiago thing is another example of - you know, people are plugged in. People have a means of expressing their voice now with social media. And it's just - people are going to keep calling you out if you keep thinking that you can take control of their stories.CONTRERAS: I do have to say that I remember reading about "Famous All Over Town" because I used to have a subscription to the New York Review of Books. I was reading all kinds of stuff. And that's where his real identity was initially exposed by a writer friend of his. And I remember very distinctly not having anyone to talk to about this because not many people had heard about it, you know, where I was living in Fresno at the time. There were a few people on the college campus and all that. But that lack of feedback, that lack of being able to sympathize and just kind of kvetch like, whoa, can this really happen - it just felt like it was - like it didn't happen. If we didn't talk about it, it didn't happen, right? And it just stuck with me all of these years, I guess, subconsciously because when this came up, that's the first thing I thought of - been around for a while before the internet, OK?(LAUGHTER)CONTRERAS: OK. OK.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: It would have inspired a ton of really hilarious memes.JOHNSON: (Laughter).CONTRERAS: Oh, my gosh. Can you - yeah.ARBONA-RUIZ: Yeah.CONTRERAS: All right.JOHNSON: Well, that...CONTRERAS: There's that, too.(SOUNDBITE OF FELIPE SALLES' "SURVIVOR'S GUILT")CONTRERAS: OK. Catalina Maria Johnson in Baltimore, thank you so much for joining us.JOHNSON: Thank you so much, Felix. I really, really enjoyed kind of being able to share thoughts about this. It's important.CONTRERAS: Isabella Gomez here, welcome to ALT.LATINO, and thank you for joining us.GOMEZ SARMIENTO: Thank you for having me.CONTRERAS: And, Marisa Arbona-Ruiz, again, thank you so much for being part of the show.ARBONA-RUIZ: Thank you.CONTRERAS: OK, what do you think? Write to us. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. We are NPR's ALT.LATINO. Also, don't forget about our playlist. Since we are a music show, every week we have the best new music, things that you should know about. And I want to put out a personal reminder. Check out the show I did last week. It was a visit to Cuba to follow Tank and the Bangas and some bands from New Orleans and Cimafunk. It was a lot of fun. Th