The absolute first thing I want to do here is thank everyone for whom English is a second language and who works hard at reading and writing it, speaking it and understanding it spoken. As you probably learned after your first few interactions with Americans, you work harder at the language than we do -- we who allegedly grow up with it as our first language. My wife has stepped back and forth between the dual careers of doing journalism and teaching journalism at the college level, and the stories she tells drive me to the edge of despair. One student in particular seemed to embody the problems that exist in many young people working today in print and broadcast media. He was articulate -- glib, even -- but his written work was full of howlers like "for all intensive purposes" and "visa vee" (instead of vis-a-vis). Pique, peek and peak were all the same to him, spelled differently depending on the day of the week. What weak grasp he had of English he gained conversationally, not through study of the written word. He admitted that he had never read for pleasure and wasn't about to start. I'd like to say that this idiot washed out of the journalism program and went on to a great career in standup comedy, but in fact, he was working at a small daily as a staff writer before he finished school, despite all the bad grades my wife could throw at him. He was confident and personable, not phone-shy, and could turn a school board meeting into twenty inches of editable copy quickly. America's newspapers are full of him and his kind. He probably won't ever have trouble getting a job. But he could hold the written English language in one hand and a steaming pile of pigshit in the other and not know the difference. Now, to pull this all together. Dave Douglas is obviously an articulate guy.

From the few interviews with him that I've read, he chooses his words very carefully. Coincidentally, I'm the same way. I've had occasion to be interviewed for stories three times in my life, and I was a sweating, shaking mess afterwards each time, because I was so nervous about being misheard or misquoted. If I were Dave Douglas, a working professional in music, subject to being interviewed several times a year -- or if I were Skip Heller, Ellery Eskelin, Stephen Drury, David Slusser, you name it -- IF I was one of those people, AND I knew what William Crump knows about young working "journalists" -- I'd consider chucking it all and getting a job behind the counter at McDonalds, rather than risk any part of my career in their hands. The fact that they don't speaks highly of their commitment to their work.

If I were Dave Douglas, I'd be nervous and irritable at interviews too. If I thought American interviewers were bad, I might be even more defensive and precise when interviewed by someone for whom English is not their first language. Most likely a foreign interviewer will work harder to be precise than an American interviewer, but how can he know that going into the interview? All he can do is use language as precisely as possible. Not wanting his words to be rephrased (and thereby possibly misinterpreted) may be an effort to maintain that precision on both sides of the Q/A divide. I don't blame Samuel Delany for insisting on written interviews over spoken ones. Now, some specific points:

From: Fritz Feger <mail@fritzfeger.de>

If I want to know if someone understands what I say it doesn't make any sense to let him repeat what I say. The only way to figure that out--granted I am interested in the slightest--is to let him rephrase it, isnt't it?

It's true that depth is only achieved by two+ points of perspective. If I stand in front of a house and say it's a white house, and you're standing behind it and the back side is painted red, then you might think I'm sadly misinformed or dangerously delusional. (Thank you, Robert Heinlein!) Efren's rephrasing can be seen an effort to shed light and bring depth via two-point perspective. But the interviewee may be concerned, often rightly so, that the interviewer is only viewing the matter from their perspective and not coming over to look at the house from THEIR side. This is why an interviewee might conceivably bristle at rephrasing.

And to make my interviewer working harder after him saying not even a whole sentence: I beg your pardon.

Response A: I don't know you mean by this. We may be working with a partial language barrier here. (Please note that I'm going out of my way not to rephrase it for you. I'll simply announce my confusion and let you provide the rephrasing, and thus the second point of perspective.) Response B: I don't know what you mean by this. We may be working with a partial language barrier here. Is the "I beg your pardon" part you begging my pardon, or DD begging EdV's pardon, or EdV begging DD's pardon? Or something else? (In this version, I provide the second point of perspective. Which is better?)

If DD had considered Efrén's English as dangerously weak (why should he?) there would have been many more polite / didactic / operational ways to tackle that.

I agree. But in a world where John Zorn can get away with the rudeness he gets away with, I found Dave Douglas' responses blunt, but not outright rude. Best, William Crump