About Me

The basics:

balkopunk indiespaz nerdbomb.

The interests:

the languages, cultures, and histories of the Balkans, how the same reality and history produces so many different meanings for the people here, bike-riding, bike-recycling, public transportation, getting places with your own two feet, tracking global politics and current events, learning Albanian, Macedonian, and Romani vocabulary, progressive activism, internet subcultures, punk and indie rock, mildly dangerous antics in Central and Eastern Europe, pacificism and other forms of gritty optimism, studied spontaneity, urban exploration, “social lubrication.”

The formalities:

Polysemic is the blog of Eric Heath Prendergast, an American linguist specializing in Balkan languages and interfaces between pragmatics, syntax, and semantics. He is also a published writer of poetry, short stories, and essays.

Eric is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the recipient of a Fulbright grant for linguistics research as well as a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship to the Republic of Macedonia. He works with the Department of Philology of Ss Cyril and Methodius University. He speaks Macedonian, Albanian, and a little bit of Arli-dialect Romani. He also speaks Japanese and German.

The lists:

Music

Books

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
  • Season of Migration to the North by Al-Tayyib Salih
  • Obasan by Joy Kogawa
  • The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power by Travis Culley
  • Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
  • The World’s Writing Systems edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Brite
  • Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
  • the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
  • the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt
  • Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki
  • Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman
  • Theory and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by Peter Godfrey-Smith
  • Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • To be more general, I’m a fan of almost anything by these authors: William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman

The mugshot:

Mugshot of polysemic

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