Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka? どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。 Why are you studying Japanese? It all started in 1995 with a lightly used copy of Japanese for Busy People and a Kanji workbook, gifts from a good friend who had briefly attempted, and then abandoned, the project of learning Japanese. I became fascinated by the dual syllabaries, …
Author Archives: ivan@ivantohelpyou.com
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
Competitrack had racks of VHS machines set up to record the top broadcast and cable channels in dozens of US cities. Someone would swap in new tapes and box up the old ones for shipment to New York. The team of TV “coders” would receive the tapes and scan through each one to find and …
Millionaire
At 25, I didn’t realize how wealthy I was, or how free. I had a good job and no debt, living in Manhattan at the beginning of a tech boom. My hometown banker told me I had over $6,000 in cash. “What do you want to do with it?”“Well, I may need that money next …
IVAN: A HALF-LIFE
Over the last two months, I’ve written over 40 blog posts. A good start, but it’s time for a pivot. The original idea was 40 chapters, one series of blog posts corresponding to each of the Open Yale Courses, drawing on journals and unpublished manuscripts from the past nine years. But I’m going to press …
The Hollow Rod
This is a story about how St. Nicholas became Santa Claus. It’s not the “real” story about an ad campaign by the Coca-Cola Company, which may have happened just like they say, but who knows? Who invented the Coca-Cola Company? Why should they have all the fun? My invention is an entirely different story, and …
Alpha versions
In 1970, the year of my birth, my father was a Merrill Lynch stockbroker by day and a waterfront security guard by night. In the mid-1980s, he saw that I had some talent with computers. Maybe I could learn the markets and make it big on Wall Street. It also would have been fine if …
Chameleon
Greta, my younger sister, studied abroad for a semester in Grenoble. That June we met up in Paris and traveled by train around France trying different mixtures of ham, cheese, and bread. Our destination was the Basque country, Le Pays basque, where we had a place to stay thanks to close friends of Aunt Florence …
My French Aunts
Both aunts on my father’s side spoke excellent French. This was quite an accomplishment for two Brooklyn girls from a poor Jewish family. Aunt Florence (1920-2009) went to Hunter College. She married a Merchant Marine engineer who joined the U.S. State Department after the war. They were posted in France, Germany, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, and …
Doctor Strange’s Neighborhood
For two years I rented an apartment in Greenwich Village behind a novelty t-shirt shop on Bleecker Street, located just next to the purported address of the Marvel Comics multiverse explorer Doctor Strange. The apartment was on the ground floor. I could unlock the metal window gate of the large back window to climb outside …
The Positioning of Works
In Works (2002), Édouard Levé published a book consisting solely of a list of 533 ideas for new artworks, mostly conceptual. (Read the Guardian review.) Levé followed through on a small handful of these ideas, including Pornographie (2002), which poses fully-clothed models as if they were adult film actors; and Amérique (2006), a collection of photographs taken in American towns named after Florence, Berlin, Oxford and …