At a party this weekend, I found myself involved in a feminist discussion of why the words ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ should be universally replaced with ‘Ms’. As a former ‘Miss’ and current ‘Mrs’, I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the argument. Certainly, the origins of distinguishing a woman’s availability while ignoring a man’s is rooted in patriarchal history, and the disparity is both obvious and undeniable. Neither do I see anything wrong with ‘Ms’, despite not choosing to adopt it myself. But at the same time, I don’t believe the genesis of any word – unpleasant or otherwise – constitutes the be-all, end-all of its usage. The terms remain not because of patriarchy, but because the distinction they make between married and unmarried still exists. In common parlance, calling oneself ‘Mrs’ is no more than an acknowledgement of marital attachment, just as ‘Miss’ denotes the opposite.
That no such qualifiers have entered the language on the male side is purely historical. While this still concerns a previous imbalance, the fact that the offending social norm has already dissipated makes any linguistic attempts at correction both forced and, ultimately, redundant. English is littered with the cast-off shells of old concepts, some reinhabited by new meaning, some turning quietly to dust; but it is vital to remember that the positive or negative implication of words – as opposed to their objective meaning – is determined by society, and not their manner of entry into language. Thus, previously hurtful slang terms like ‘wog’ and ‘queer’ have been cheerfully reclaimed by the groups they were originally used against. With ‘Ms’ now their permanent companion, ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ need imply nothing beyond their technical meaning.
However, there is still the social question of why that information should be relevant. In these enlightened times, does it truly matter whether a woman is married? Shouldn’t she, like her Y-chromosome-sporting counterpart, be free to embrace a form of address that denotes nothing more personal than her gender? The answer is, of course, yes: and that is why ‘Ms’ is now on the menu. But rather than argue for why women should still have the option of declaring their marital status, it seems more relevant to ask, what would happen if a man wanted to make the same distinction about himself? There are two sides to every coin, and it is worth considering that while ‘Mrs’ lets everyone know the score without explanation, plain old ‘Mr’ can lead to confusion. Neither ‘Miss’ nor ‘Mr’ warns of a non-marital attachment, but while language is never perfect, the point here is one of choice. Women may elect to be known as one of three things, depending on their inclination; men may not. Certainly, we have fought for and earned that privilege, but that only seems to deepen our obligation to continue offering the choice.
Marriage – or the absence thereof – is nothing to be ashamed of. I would rather move towards a society in which we are free to declare our romantic commitments without fear of repercussion than one in which our only option is ambiguity, no matter what our gender. Ultimately, it is the social judgements with which we burden our language that create difficulties, and not the words themselves. Just as it is disheartening when women become ‘Mrs’ out of apprehensive tradition, so it is disconcerting when ‘Ms’ is used in reflexive defence. As long as the choice is ours to exercise, we should do so out of individual preference, and not because of what we worry anyone else might think. ‘Mrs’ ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms’, we are still far more than any one syllable can convey – so why quibble over someone else’s ‘M’?
Monday, December 3, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
Songs Of A Sentimental Geek
"Ding, dong - the myth is dead!
Which old myth? The Howard myth!
Ding, dong - the Howard myth is dead!
"It's dead like the Democrats -
they'll go, the party will implode
now Costello has flown,
"So everybody:
"Ding, dong at Bennelong -
Howard's gone, he won't hang on -
Ding, dong - the Liberals are dead!"
Pardon the obscene gloating, but after eleven years of having my views utterly unrepresented at a federal level, it's hard not to scooch down the hallways in a semi-permanent victory dance.
Since Saturday night, I've been drafting this blog in my head, plotting out new and inventive ways of repeating myself - health, education, infrastructure, Aboriginal affairs, trade with China, Kyoto - but everything I want to say has already been said, intelligently and ad nauseam, by more knowledgeable commentators than me. Howard is gone, and that's the bulk of what matters.
But politics is never so clear-cut as The King Is Dead - Long Live The King.
Because Kevin Rudd, although, yes, a Labor Prime Minister, and a decent economic manager, and a fluent speaker of Chinese, and quite emphatically not John Howard, is still worthy of suspicion, even - perhaps especially - by those who voted him in. There are two extremely good reasons for this, viz:
1. He is still human.
2. He is still a politician.
The day any Prime Minister, President, Dictator, Chancellor, God-King or Lord High Screaming Oligarch gets into power and does everything they said they would, exactly as was promised and as easily as they said it is the day hordes of demonic cherubim flood the Earth and institute a global moratorium on pants. It has not happened. It was never going to happen - and, indeed, never will. Even as I write, some pre-election promise or other is undoubtably being sidelined in accordance with the ever-shifting, primordial muck of compromise that is federal government. But should something dear to my heart get shafted, then I will feel every bit as happy to complain about Kevin Rudd as I have been about Howard - without the slightest tinge of hypocricy.
Here's why:
Back when I was in primary school, I used to play soccer at lunch. In keeping with the fact that we were all nine years old, the only rules involved the presence of two teams, a roundish ball and a mutual desire to kick said ball between either of two "goals" - usually a pair of fence posts versus a tree and a rubbish bin. Everything else was fair game, a policy I wholeheartedly embraced. Running with the ball, I decided, was not nearly so much fun as trying to take the ball from someone else, and so my method of play became to switch sides as soon as the team I'd been playing for had possession. In the run-up to the election, these fond memories started to worry me, because deep down, I've always loved being the underdog. Had those soccer games actually been a disturbing harbinger for my future moral/political life - would I go on to become a Liberal voter as soon as the ball changed hands?
And then I came back to reality. Soccer, like most sports, is a poor metaphor for politics, because it involves two mutually exclusive agendas, well-defined goals, evenly matched teams and zero grey area. No one party will ever entirely support your views - or at least, their actions will never be identical to their rhetoric. At its most basic level, politics is about finding someone who can do what you want and making them do it, either by granting concessions elsewhere, twisting their arm or offering incentives. Beyond the necessary evil of party loyalty, fidelity has, in practice, little or nothing to do with good government, simply because the Perfect World option is so rarely compatible with the pragmatism of what can actually be managed.
All of which means that even though I think Labor is far and away the lesser of two evils, they'll still deserve backlash when the feces hits the rotational cooling device.
But, in the interim, I've still got this pesky speck of optimism left. Colour me crazy, but I just can't seem to stop smiling at the thought that the economy might become important, not for its own sake, but as a means of providing better social and public services. As wild cheers grip the floor of Parliament, I imagine Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd climbing onto one of those spectacular wood-and-leathern tables and making like Paul McCartney, singing:
"I'll give you all I've got to give
If you'll say you love me too,
I may not have a lot to give
But what I've got I'll give to you
'coz I don't care too much for money -
money can't buy me love!"
Which old myth? The Howard myth!
Ding, dong - the Howard myth is dead!
"It's dead like the Democrats -
they'll go, the party will implode
now Costello has flown,
"So everybody:
"Ding, dong at Bennelong -
Howard's gone, he won't hang on -
Ding, dong - the Liberals are dead!"
Pardon the obscene gloating, but after eleven years of having my views utterly unrepresented at a federal level, it's hard not to scooch down the hallways in a semi-permanent victory dance.
Since Saturday night, I've been drafting this blog in my head, plotting out new and inventive ways of repeating myself - health, education, infrastructure, Aboriginal affairs, trade with China, Kyoto - but everything I want to say has already been said, intelligently and ad nauseam, by more knowledgeable commentators than me. Howard is gone, and that's the bulk of what matters.
But politics is never so clear-cut as The King Is Dead - Long Live The King.
Because Kevin Rudd, although, yes, a Labor Prime Minister, and a decent economic manager, and a fluent speaker of Chinese, and quite emphatically not John Howard, is still worthy of suspicion, even - perhaps especially - by those who voted him in. There are two extremely good reasons for this, viz:
1. He is still human.
2. He is still a politician.
The day any Prime Minister, President, Dictator, Chancellor, God-King or Lord High Screaming Oligarch gets into power and does everything they said they would, exactly as was promised and as easily as they said it is the day hordes of demonic cherubim flood the Earth and institute a global moratorium on pants. It has not happened. It was never going to happen - and, indeed, never will. Even as I write, some pre-election promise or other is undoubtably being sidelined in accordance with the ever-shifting, primordial muck of compromise that is federal government. But should something dear to my heart get shafted, then I will feel every bit as happy to complain about Kevin Rudd as I have been about Howard - without the slightest tinge of hypocricy.
Here's why:
Back when I was in primary school, I used to play soccer at lunch. In keeping with the fact that we were all nine years old, the only rules involved the presence of two teams, a roundish ball and a mutual desire to kick said ball between either of two "goals" - usually a pair of fence posts versus a tree and a rubbish bin. Everything else was fair game, a policy I wholeheartedly embraced. Running with the ball, I decided, was not nearly so much fun as trying to take the ball from someone else, and so my method of play became to switch sides as soon as the team I'd been playing for had possession. In the run-up to the election, these fond memories started to worry me, because deep down, I've always loved being the underdog. Had those soccer games actually been a disturbing harbinger for my future moral/political life - would I go on to become a Liberal voter as soon as the ball changed hands?
And then I came back to reality. Soccer, like most sports, is a poor metaphor for politics, because it involves two mutually exclusive agendas, well-defined goals, evenly matched teams and zero grey area. No one party will ever entirely support your views - or at least, their actions will never be identical to their rhetoric. At its most basic level, politics is about finding someone who can do what you want and making them do it, either by granting concessions elsewhere, twisting their arm or offering incentives. Beyond the necessary evil of party loyalty, fidelity has, in practice, little or nothing to do with good government, simply because the Perfect World option is so rarely compatible with the pragmatism of what can actually be managed.
All of which means that even though I think Labor is far and away the lesser of two evils, they'll still deserve backlash when the feces hits the rotational cooling device.
But, in the interim, I've still got this pesky speck of optimism left. Colour me crazy, but I just can't seem to stop smiling at the thought that the economy might become important, not for its own sake, but as a means of providing better social and public services. As wild cheers grip the floor of Parliament, I imagine Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd climbing onto one of those spectacular wood-and-leathern tables and making like Paul McCartney, singing:
"I'll give you all I've got to give
If you'll say you love me too,
I may not have a lot to give
But what I've got I'll give to you
'coz I don't care too much for money -
money can't buy me love!"
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Political Quote-Mongering
As Saturday's election looms, I can't resist quoting Anya, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in reference to John Howard. Thus:
"Captain Logic is not steering this tugboat. I smell Captain Fear at the wheel!"
And with Pamela Curr speculating - not unreasonably - whether today's 'magic boat' of asylum seekers might have been nudged along for the festivities, it's small wonder. Coast-guard to Liberal Party: you are taking on water. Keep your necks out of it and wait for the Defence Force to send out the Emergency Flotation Device (currently deflated and draped concealingly over a bevy of large, helicopter-shaped objects).
Or, to quote Lorne of the Buffy spin-off, Angel:
"If I was about to face your future, I'd make like Carmen Miranda and die."
Annabel Crabb has (as usual) hit the nail on the head, remarking on the strangeness of John Howard guaranteeing his retirement from politics - however hypothetically - instead of hanging on like Monty Burns to a wad of greenbacks. Much like the Richard Nixon of Futurama, one imagines Howard persisting as a not-so-spectral talking head (gefilte fish jar optional), haunting parliament with such rousing dictums borrowed from the future Earth President as:
"Let's storm the place!...Without my prior knowledge."
But, as they say, it's rarely wise to count one's chickens before they hatch - or to assume that a grinning, bespectacled, bean-counting unionist will break shell in place of a blepheronic*, troglodytic, Republican-fearing shemp. As A. A. Milne once beautifully opined:
"You never can tell with bees."
Well, politicians. But the principle's the same.
*Blepheronic - A sadly defunct adjective descriptive of anyone with abnormally large eyebrows.
"Captain Logic is not steering this tugboat. I smell Captain Fear at the wheel!"
And with Pamela Curr speculating - not unreasonably - whether today's 'magic boat' of asylum seekers might have been nudged along for the festivities, it's small wonder. Coast-guard to Liberal Party: you are taking on water. Keep your necks out of it and wait for the Defence Force to send out the Emergency Flotation Device (currently deflated and draped concealingly over a bevy of large, helicopter-shaped objects).
Or, to quote Lorne of the Buffy spin-off, Angel:
"If I was about to face your future, I'd make like Carmen Miranda and die."
Annabel Crabb has (as usual) hit the nail on the head, remarking on the strangeness of John Howard guaranteeing his retirement from politics - however hypothetically - instead of hanging on like Monty Burns to a wad of greenbacks. Much like the Richard Nixon of Futurama, one imagines Howard persisting as a not-so-spectral talking head (gefilte fish jar optional), haunting parliament with such rousing dictums borrowed from the future Earth President as:
"Let's storm the place!...Without my prior knowledge."
But, as they say, it's rarely wise to count one's chickens before they hatch - or to assume that a grinning, bespectacled, bean-counting unionist will break shell in place of a blepheronic*, troglodytic, Republican-fearing shemp. As A. A. Milne once beautifully opined:
"You never can tell with bees."
Well, politicians. But the principle's the same.
*Blepheronic - A sadly defunct adjective descriptive of anyone with abnormally large eyebrows.
Monday, November 12, 2007
Breeding Familiary
When the guy who works at your local take-away starts commenting on your new hair, you know you've well and truly stopped cooking.
I'm not quite sure where it began. First, it was the StarMart employees, memorising faces as we trotted up for milk or catfood on the cusp of the graveyard shift. They'd ask after our cats, we'd answer, jokes all round. Then it was the pizza delivery guy. Admittedly, our favourite place only ever sends the one bloke, but ever since he came to our door on auto-pilot with a neighbour's order, I think that excuse is bunk. And now the deli attendant, who not only commented on my haircut, but noticed the all-but-intangibly failed effort at going a different colour.
Truly, these are grim times.
Setting aside the shame of being recognised for our currently less-than-stellar dietary habits, it's a curious kind of relationship to have with people we see regularly but superficially. It's different to school, work or university, because the familiarity there is impersonal: beyond your immediate circle of friends and acquaintences, it becomes a matter of recognition without interaction or, by and large, interest. Nothing about either party is given away: you are each just passing by. But the people who serve our meals, examine our shopping trolleys and provision us with alcohol only ever appear to us in their official capacity, while we are forever off-duty. The pizza guy knows our address, our cats, and our predeliction for meat lovers' and the Mediterranean special - but we know nothing about him.
Food-wise, I have a habit of entering ruts. Once I find something I like - deli pies, sushi, sashimi, Boost smoothies, toasted chicken-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches - I have a tendency to go nuts. Provided there's a nearby outlet, I'll eat the same thing for lunch all week, every week until a new craze comes along - and in the meantime, the service folk get to know me by sight and dietary preference. Having worked in hospitality, I remember things from the other side of the cash register: amazement at regular coffee-drinkers who would come in for the same four, ill-advised short blacks every second day, conscientious consumers of wheatgrass shots who dropped by via the gym, breakfast stalwarts addicted to hotcakes with syrup. Apart from trying not to go crazy, there's precious little intellectual stimulation in the food service industry, and the consumer usually provides it. We behind the counter remember, and after a while, we'll know you don't need a menu - just a swift injection of caffiene before your bowl of nachos.
And now, I, too, have joined the ranks of the Predictable Customer. Long story short: familiarity may well breed contempt - but so, it seems, does a prolonged and exclusive affection for Hollondaise sauce.
I'm not quite sure where it began. First, it was the StarMart employees, memorising faces as we trotted up for milk or catfood on the cusp of the graveyard shift. They'd ask after our cats, we'd answer, jokes all round. Then it was the pizza delivery guy. Admittedly, our favourite place only ever sends the one bloke, but ever since he came to our door on auto-pilot with a neighbour's order, I think that excuse is bunk. And now the deli attendant, who not only commented on my haircut, but noticed the all-but-intangibly failed effort at going a different colour.
Truly, these are grim times.
Setting aside the shame of being recognised for our currently less-than-stellar dietary habits, it's a curious kind of relationship to have with people we see regularly but superficially. It's different to school, work or university, because the familiarity there is impersonal: beyond your immediate circle of friends and acquaintences, it becomes a matter of recognition without interaction or, by and large, interest. Nothing about either party is given away: you are each just passing by. But the people who serve our meals, examine our shopping trolleys and provision us with alcohol only ever appear to us in their official capacity, while we are forever off-duty. The pizza guy knows our address, our cats, and our predeliction for meat lovers' and the Mediterranean special - but we know nothing about him.
Food-wise, I have a habit of entering ruts. Once I find something I like - deli pies, sushi, sashimi, Boost smoothies, toasted chicken-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches - I have a tendency to go nuts. Provided there's a nearby outlet, I'll eat the same thing for lunch all week, every week until a new craze comes along - and in the meantime, the service folk get to know me by sight and dietary preference. Having worked in hospitality, I remember things from the other side of the cash register: amazement at regular coffee-drinkers who would come in for the same four, ill-advised short blacks every second day, conscientious consumers of wheatgrass shots who dropped by via the gym, breakfast stalwarts addicted to hotcakes with syrup. Apart from trying not to go crazy, there's precious little intellectual stimulation in the food service industry, and the consumer usually provides it. We behind the counter remember, and after a while, we'll know you don't need a menu - just a swift injection of caffiene before your bowl of nachos.
And now, I, too, have joined the ranks of the Predictable Customer. Long story short: familiarity may well breed contempt - but so, it seems, does a prolonged and exclusive affection for Hollondaise sauce.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Encore!
In lieu of the fact that I didn't win on the Melbourne Cup, I spent much of yesterday evening and afternoon watching glutionous amounts of Buffy and Angel. By now, I've seen every episode at least once - more like twice or three times, in most cases - with a select few being even more familiar. I never tire of them. In ages past, this ability to continually rewatch favourite flicks has been remarked upon by family and friends, who generally can't bear to watch or read something more than once. Repeat performances, when they do happen, are spaced years apart, with few exceptions.
I have never understood this.
Presumably, my parents thought this predeliction for hiring the same seven films each time we went to the video store was a childish phase I'd grow out of - a sort of juvenile conservatism, wherein only the familiar is acceptable. But insofar as books, films and TV shows are concerned, it never has. On the surface, people often assume that either I'm too boring or precious to try something new, despite the fact that I do like to branch out. It's the sheer number of repetitions which startles them. But there are advantages to watching things over and over - not always to my favoured extent, but twice or three times in general - which are often overlooked.
For one thing, there are some subtleties of plot that can only be appreciated when you know what to look for, and which otherwise go through to the keeper. To take an example from Buffy and Angel, a running joke about The World Made Entirely Of Shrimp, derived from one character's shoddy explanation of possible worlds, spans several seasons of both shows, and is only really apparent with a rewatch. Regardless of genre, writers like to hide lead-ins to crucial events, like deaths or changes to relationships, much earlier in the narrative. Murder mysteries are the obvious example, but also a poor one: once they know whodunit, most people don't bother with a second viewing. This is because the tension in murder mysteries relates to our ignorance of one crucial fact, which the set-up is designed to remedy; take this away, and there can be little left to enjoy. But in other genres, writers can and do seed references to later events in a way which is only apparent the second time through, and which can be immensely satisfying, especially with characters we care about. George R. R. Martin, creator of the Song Of Ice And Fire series, is deviously brilliant at this. In Book 2 (to pick an example at random) one character, called Daenerys, has a vision of crucial events which don't take place until almost two books later, and which don't - at that point, anyway - relate to her. Not the kind of thing you notice first time around, but once you have, apart from making your eyes widen, it inspires confidence in the writer: evidence, plain and simple, that their story is following a planned trajectory.
In digital media, second viewings also make the dialouge easier to follow: because we already understand the plot, we can worry less about the setting and listen more to the wordplay. I'm a big believer in watching favourite films with friends - not just for the joy in sharing them, but because two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. Back before Quine and I were together, he and my then-boyfriend, Seafood, convinced me it was a travesty against God and man that I hadn't seen Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, and sought to rectify the situation. They'd both seen it only once, back in the dim days of youth, but assured me that time could not have altered this classic. We watched. I enjoyed. One line in particular made me laugh: before the Prince has left Africa, he and his faithful friend are staring at a map of the United States . Awed, the Prince comments on the sheer size of the country - how much there is to explore; how many endless possibilities!
'So,' the friend asks, deadpan. 'Where shall we go: Los Angeles, or New York?'
As I rolled around on the lounge, Quine and Seafood stared at me. They hadn't noticed the joke. I made them rewind the tape.
'Ohhh.'
I've learned a lot about narrative structure from revisiting books and films. Once you know what's happening, it's like peering behind the curtain: you see what tools have been used to set the stage, and are in a position to judge their success. Perhaps more importantly, you learn to identify familiar tricks in different stories. After long exposure, I've grown particularly adept at picking the killer and motive in murder mysteries. Quine treats my habit of prophecying the payoff with jovial irritation: jovial, because he enjoys the theories, and irritated, because when I'm right, it can ruin the ending for him. For me, however, enjoyment is increased. Instead of sailing blind into the murder, I have a secret weapon: knowledge of narrative imperative. What actual clues don't give away, the shape of the story might - and does, more often than not.
But beyond my seer-like grasp of cop show finales, there's a more important reason for revisiting favourites: the characters themselves. As Roald Dahl wrote at the end of The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me, 'A good book never ends when it's full of your friends' - because there's really only two places beloved protagonists can live: you head, and the place where you found them. So rather than setting aside the habitants of Joss Whedon's Buffyverse (to pick an example purely at random), I visit from time to time. Some stays are longer than others, but I think it's fair to say that I've always gained from doing so.
Which is why, when I get home and drop gratefully in front of the TV, I won't be slothing. I'll be enriching my grasp of narrative causality. Natch.
I have never understood this.
Presumably, my parents thought this predeliction for hiring the same seven films each time we went to the video store was a childish phase I'd grow out of - a sort of juvenile conservatism, wherein only the familiar is acceptable. But insofar as books, films and TV shows are concerned, it never has. On the surface, people often assume that either I'm too boring or precious to try something new, despite the fact that I do like to branch out. It's the sheer number of repetitions which startles them. But there are advantages to watching things over and over - not always to my favoured extent, but twice or three times in general - which are often overlooked.
For one thing, there are some subtleties of plot that can only be appreciated when you know what to look for, and which otherwise go through to the keeper. To take an example from Buffy and Angel, a running joke about The World Made Entirely Of Shrimp, derived from one character's shoddy explanation of possible worlds, spans several seasons of both shows, and is only really apparent with a rewatch. Regardless of genre, writers like to hide lead-ins to crucial events, like deaths or changes to relationships, much earlier in the narrative. Murder mysteries are the obvious example, but also a poor one: once they know whodunit, most people don't bother with a second viewing. This is because the tension in murder mysteries relates to our ignorance of one crucial fact, which the set-up is designed to remedy; take this away, and there can be little left to enjoy. But in other genres, writers can and do seed references to later events in a way which is only apparent the second time through, and which can be immensely satisfying, especially with characters we care about. George R. R. Martin, creator of the Song Of Ice And Fire series, is deviously brilliant at this. In Book 2 (to pick an example at random) one character, called Daenerys, has a vision of crucial events which don't take place until almost two books later, and which don't - at that point, anyway - relate to her. Not the kind of thing you notice first time around, but once you have, apart from making your eyes widen, it inspires confidence in the writer: evidence, plain and simple, that their story is following a planned trajectory.
In digital media, second viewings also make the dialouge easier to follow: because we already understand the plot, we can worry less about the setting and listen more to the wordplay. I'm a big believer in watching favourite films with friends - not just for the joy in sharing them, but because two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. Back before Quine and I were together, he and my then-boyfriend, Seafood, convinced me it was a travesty against God and man that I hadn't seen Eddie Murphy's Coming to America, and sought to rectify the situation. They'd both seen it only once, back in the dim days of youth, but assured me that time could not have altered this classic. We watched. I enjoyed. One line in particular made me laugh: before the Prince has left Africa, he and his faithful friend are staring at a map of the United States . Awed, the Prince comments on the sheer size of the country - how much there is to explore; how many endless possibilities!
'So,' the friend asks, deadpan. 'Where shall we go: Los Angeles, or New York?'
As I rolled around on the lounge, Quine and Seafood stared at me. They hadn't noticed the joke. I made them rewind the tape.
'Ohhh.'
I've learned a lot about narrative structure from revisiting books and films. Once you know what's happening, it's like peering behind the curtain: you see what tools have been used to set the stage, and are in a position to judge their success. Perhaps more importantly, you learn to identify familiar tricks in different stories. After long exposure, I've grown particularly adept at picking the killer and motive in murder mysteries. Quine treats my habit of prophecying the payoff with jovial irritation: jovial, because he enjoys the theories, and irritated, because when I'm right, it can ruin the ending for him. For me, however, enjoyment is increased. Instead of sailing blind into the murder, I have a secret weapon: knowledge of narrative imperative. What actual clues don't give away, the shape of the story might - and does, more often than not.
But beyond my seer-like grasp of cop show finales, there's a more important reason for revisiting favourites: the characters themselves. As Roald Dahl wrote at the end of The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me, 'A good book never ends when it's full of your friends' - because there's really only two places beloved protagonists can live: you head, and the place where you found them. So rather than setting aside the habitants of Joss Whedon's Buffyverse (to pick an example purely at random), I visit from time to time. Some stays are longer than others, but I think it's fair to say that I've always gained from doing so.
Which is why, when I get home and drop gratefully in front of the TV, I won't be slothing. I'll be enriching my grasp of narrative causality. Natch.
Friday, November 2, 2007
Dualism
Are you a cat person, or a dog person?
If asked that question, I'd normally answer 'cat' - that was until either Boof or Nano (I suspect Boof) dragged a dead pidegon into our house at 5AM and left it outside our bedroom door, whereupon Quine, my husband, trod on it with bare feet. This has made me a temporary swing voter.
Prior to living with Boof and Nano, Quine was entirely a dog person. Nowadays, he's about a 50-50 split; or perhaps 60-40, seeing as the cats are here, while his childhood dog is in another state. Stretch that to 70-30, when Boof, endearing black fellow that he is, falls asleep on his chest; maybe even 80-20, if Nano does something cute. But switch those numbers around again, if we go to visit Gus.
That's the trouble with dualistic pidgeonholes. They just aren't helpful.
The cat-person, dog-person divide is a common example. Should one answer that they like both cats and dogs equally, they are accused of fence-sitting. A reply to the effect of being a horse-person, rabbit-person, budgie-person or mouse-person is frowned upon as a non-sequitur. Socially, we like nice, clean distinctions. Two categories is preferable; three or more is considered unwieldy. Tea or coffee? Personally, I drink hot chocolate instead of either. Result: raised eyebrows. Gay or straight? If someone answers 'bisexual,' it's considered a cop-out, even if it happens to be true. The assumption is that they're either ashamed to be gay, or straight and wanting to sound more exotic. Result: scoffs of derision. League or Union? Actually, I don't care about either. Result: filthy stare more commonly reserved for Milton Orkopoulos. Labor or Liberal? Not the only two parties, but people mislike being told that while you're going to vote for Kevin Rudd, you've actually got more in common with the Greens, and wouldn't it be nice if some bright young thing reformed the Democrats? Result: glazed expression, audience falls to floor, insensate.
At school, the schism was Maths and English. You picked sides early on: declaring for both was unheard-of, while favouring neither meant you were stupid, delinquent or both. And it wasn't just the students who thought so. After I made my English preferences clear, a succession of Maths teachers took this to mean that even though I was bright, their efforts at knowledge transferral were better spent elsewhere. I saw the same thing happen to Maths kids in English classes. Even among society's adults - parents and non-parents alike - the idea that you're either language or maths-oriented is treated not so much as suspicion, but fact. Hence the stereotyping at university: Arts students can't count higher than twenty, and Engineers struggle with more than three words per page.
At a glance, it's hard to say whether Western religion has provided a cultural context for these black-and-white divides, or if it simply sat well with something older. No matter your background, good and evil are ancient notions, reflective of other naturally occuring dualities: light and darkness, night and day, sun and moon, male and female. But even though some of these distictions are absolute, others are more blurred, with plenty of grey to explore.
When circumstances dictate that we draw a line in the sand between good and bad, the disputed ground becomes nonexistant, growing again when we have the luxury of leeway. And it's important to remember that you can't have the grey without the extremes: there's no such thing as a middle point without something on either side. But when it comes to the small things - cats or dogs, tea or coffee, Ray Martin or Kerry O'Brien - we could stand to ease up a little and let a few third alternatives through to the keeper.
Yes or no?
If asked that question, I'd normally answer 'cat' - that was until either Boof or Nano (I suspect Boof) dragged a dead pidegon into our house at 5AM and left it outside our bedroom door, whereupon Quine, my husband, trod on it with bare feet. This has made me a temporary swing voter.
Prior to living with Boof and Nano, Quine was entirely a dog person. Nowadays, he's about a 50-50 split; or perhaps 60-40, seeing as the cats are here, while his childhood dog is in another state. Stretch that to 70-30, when Boof, endearing black fellow that he is, falls asleep on his chest; maybe even 80-20, if Nano does something cute. But switch those numbers around again, if we go to visit Gus.
That's the trouble with dualistic pidgeonholes. They just aren't helpful.
The cat-person, dog-person divide is a common example. Should one answer that they like both cats and dogs equally, they are accused of fence-sitting. A reply to the effect of being a horse-person, rabbit-person, budgie-person or mouse-person is frowned upon as a non-sequitur. Socially, we like nice, clean distinctions. Two categories is preferable; three or more is considered unwieldy. Tea or coffee? Personally, I drink hot chocolate instead of either. Result: raised eyebrows. Gay or straight? If someone answers 'bisexual,' it's considered a cop-out, even if it happens to be true. The assumption is that they're either ashamed to be gay, or straight and wanting to sound more exotic. Result: scoffs of derision. League or Union? Actually, I don't care about either. Result: filthy stare more commonly reserved for Milton Orkopoulos. Labor or Liberal? Not the only two parties, but people mislike being told that while you're going to vote for Kevin Rudd, you've actually got more in common with the Greens, and wouldn't it be nice if some bright young thing reformed the Democrats? Result: glazed expression, audience falls to floor, insensate.
At school, the schism was Maths and English. You picked sides early on: declaring for both was unheard-of, while favouring neither meant you were stupid, delinquent or both. And it wasn't just the students who thought so. After I made my English preferences clear, a succession of Maths teachers took this to mean that even though I was bright, their efforts at knowledge transferral were better spent elsewhere. I saw the same thing happen to Maths kids in English classes. Even among society's adults - parents and non-parents alike - the idea that you're either language or maths-oriented is treated not so much as suspicion, but fact. Hence the stereotyping at university: Arts students can't count higher than twenty, and Engineers struggle with more than three words per page.
At a glance, it's hard to say whether Western religion has provided a cultural context for these black-and-white divides, or if it simply sat well with something older. No matter your background, good and evil are ancient notions, reflective of other naturally occuring dualities: light and darkness, night and day, sun and moon, male and female. But even though some of these distictions are absolute, others are more blurred, with plenty of grey to explore.
When circumstances dictate that we draw a line in the sand between good and bad, the disputed ground becomes nonexistant, growing again when we have the luxury of leeway. And it's important to remember that you can't have the grey without the extremes: there's no such thing as a middle point without something on either side. But when it comes to the small things - cats or dogs, tea or coffee, Ray Martin or Kerry O'Brien - we could stand to ease up a little and let a few third alternatives through to the keeper.
Yes or no?
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Real Mature
Whenever I've read columns about Big Kids, Peter Pan Syndrome or Men Who Won't Grow Up, I've nodded my head sagely: a sign of the times, I think. Because I agree that, yes, there is a certain type of perennially childish bloke who fits these descriptions, I've let it fly under the radar. But reading Sam de Brito's latest offering, I realise how little thought I've really given my position. First and foremost, it strikes me as odd that we only ever talk this way about men. Which seems a gross inequality: whereas unattached 30-something males are touted as being selfish, emotionally immature louts who look no further than their next shag, beer or Halo deathmatch, unattached 30-something women are simply labelled "career driven." Childishness is hardly restricted to those with a Y-chromosone, and ambition is not a by-product of oestrogen. So why are only men seen as immature?
For a while now, I've had my suspicions - shy, nameless thoughts perkolating somewhere in the hindbrain, but never fully articulated. Today, they have come clear. Behold my revelation: being "career driven" is just the same as having an unhealthy fixation on boozy one-night stands, because both behaviours are equally immature. There are many ways to define maturity, but I would contend that an ability to balance (or at least juggle) all the spheres of one's life is a key point. Immaturity is picking a selected aspect - such as play - and running with it to the exclusion of all others, and whether this is because we find it easier to deal with or simply more enjoyable, the result is the same: an immature person. Being "career driven" is viewed as socially acceptable only because we have a tendency to conflate fiscal success with personal development. Surely, we think, if someone is out climbing the corporate ladder, they are Meeting New People. They are making Plans For The Future. They are Building Their Nest Egg and Taking A Long-Term View Of Their Happiness.
I submit to you that this is not the case.
The problem society has with immature men is the lack of priority they give their romantic lives. No commitment - just a few sexual partners here, a smattering of girlfriends there, and no thought of settling down. Plenty of time for that later on. Why not enjoy their youth?
Compare with career-driven women. Not enough time for romance; they're busy working hard getting the good job, breaking the glass ceiling, saving money. Partners, children and houses can wait until after they've got the corner office. Plenty of time for that later on. Why waste their best years?
The problem with both positions is the belief that relationships will happen as scheduled. One day, the logic seems to go, they'll get sick of all-night raves or have finally gotten ahead, and will wake up the next morning to find their significant other helpfully strapped to the wardrobe, ready for use. These are people who have taken the phrase stages of life literally. Instead of a measurement applied largely in retrospective, they view it in the fashion of an 80's arcade game: a series of distinct, 2D screens to be dually progressed through, acquiring new tools in a pre-determined, linear sequence. You only progress to the marriage level after you're heartily sick of goofing around with mates or uncovering career path. The idea that any of these might be achieved simulteanously or returned-to later is either uncomfortable, too difficult or unthought-of.
And this is the crux of the matter. When immature men carouse, wench and party like it's going out of fashion, it's as if they've convinced themselves that committed relationships can't be fun. No more XBox, no more drinking, no more passionate sex - better cram it all in before that happens! Similarly, it's as if career-driven women think that family responsibilities preclude a great job. The question becomes one of child-rearing and time out of the workforce - a genuine consideration, to be sure - but where offpsring are on the cards already, the fearful need to have the career now, lest it be denied later, seems identical. Once I've had children, I won't be able to get back on track - better climb the rungs first!
(For the record, neither the traditional 'male' immaturity nor the desperate career drive are gender specific: vice versa, some girls just wanna have fun, and some blokes crave high-power jobs. The diversity is omnipresent, but stereotypes are more specific, and the above criticism applies equally to all parties.)
Getting married and having children doesn't equal maturity; neither does indefinitely postponing the future, earning a boatload of money or doing everything we legally can plus a couple of things we can't. (Britney Speares could be a poster-child for all five.) Maturity is a tricky thing to define, and we all have our own specifications - but at heart, I think it means the ability to deal pragmatically with life. Long-term goals are all well and good, but if they aren't grounded in reality then you might as well plan to invent a green elephant. With all the freedom of choice we have nowadays, there's a tendecy to assume that 'everything' is an option: twenty years of childhood, a decade to party, a decade of career-building, a decade to get out of debt, a decade to save, and another twenty years to raise a family of our own. But biology is a harsh mistress, let alone alcohol, HECS, the ATO, the Reserve Bank, real estate agents, Eros and Lady Luck. Sooner or later, the immature 30-somethings of this world will be forced to take the plunge and try a few things concurrently, or without their preferred amount of money in the bank - it's that, or risk missing out altogether.
Because sure as things aren't getting any cheaper, twenty, plus forty, plus twenty does not equal retirement at 60.
For a while now, I've had my suspicions - shy, nameless thoughts perkolating somewhere in the hindbrain, but never fully articulated. Today, they have come clear. Behold my revelation: being "career driven" is just the same as having an unhealthy fixation on boozy one-night stands, because both behaviours are equally immature. There are many ways to define maturity, but I would contend that an ability to balance (or at least juggle) all the spheres of one's life is a key point. Immaturity is picking a selected aspect - such as play - and running with it to the exclusion of all others, and whether this is because we find it easier to deal with or simply more enjoyable, the result is the same: an immature person. Being "career driven" is viewed as socially acceptable only because we have a tendency to conflate fiscal success with personal development. Surely, we think, if someone is out climbing the corporate ladder, they are Meeting New People. They are making Plans For The Future. They are Building Their Nest Egg and Taking A Long-Term View Of Their Happiness.
I submit to you that this is not the case.
The problem society has with immature men is the lack of priority they give their romantic lives. No commitment - just a few sexual partners here, a smattering of girlfriends there, and no thought of settling down. Plenty of time for that later on. Why not enjoy their youth?
Compare with career-driven women. Not enough time for romance; they're busy working hard getting the good job, breaking the glass ceiling, saving money. Partners, children and houses can wait until after they've got the corner office. Plenty of time for that later on. Why waste their best years?
The problem with both positions is the belief that relationships will happen as scheduled. One day, the logic seems to go, they'll get sick of all-night raves or have finally gotten ahead, and will wake up the next morning to find their significant other helpfully strapped to the wardrobe, ready for use. These are people who have taken the phrase stages of life literally. Instead of a measurement applied largely in retrospective, they view it in the fashion of an 80's arcade game: a series of distinct, 2D screens to be dually progressed through, acquiring new tools in a pre-determined, linear sequence. You only progress to the marriage level after you're heartily sick of goofing around with mates or uncovering career path. The idea that any of these might be achieved simulteanously or returned-to later is either uncomfortable, too difficult or unthought-of.
And this is the crux of the matter. When immature men carouse, wench and party like it's going out of fashion, it's as if they've convinced themselves that committed relationships can't be fun. No more XBox, no more drinking, no more passionate sex - better cram it all in before that happens! Similarly, it's as if career-driven women think that family responsibilities preclude a great job. The question becomes one of child-rearing and time out of the workforce - a genuine consideration, to be sure - but where offpsring are on the cards already, the fearful need to have the career now, lest it be denied later, seems identical. Once I've had children, I won't be able to get back on track - better climb the rungs first!
(For the record, neither the traditional 'male' immaturity nor the desperate career drive are gender specific: vice versa, some girls just wanna have fun, and some blokes crave high-power jobs. The diversity is omnipresent, but stereotypes are more specific, and the above criticism applies equally to all parties.)
Getting married and having children doesn't equal maturity; neither does indefinitely postponing the future, earning a boatload of money or doing everything we legally can plus a couple of things we can't. (Britney Speares could be a poster-child for all five.) Maturity is a tricky thing to define, and we all have our own specifications - but at heart, I think it means the ability to deal pragmatically with life. Long-term goals are all well and good, but if they aren't grounded in reality then you might as well plan to invent a green elephant. With all the freedom of choice we have nowadays, there's a tendecy to assume that 'everything' is an option: twenty years of childhood, a decade to party, a decade of career-building, a decade to get out of debt, a decade to save, and another twenty years to raise a family of our own. But biology is a harsh mistress, let alone alcohol, HECS, the ATO, the Reserve Bank, real estate agents, Eros and Lady Luck. Sooner or later, the immature 30-somethings of this world will be forced to take the plunge and try a few things concurrently, or without their preferred amount of money in the bank - it's that, or risk missing out altogether.
Because sure as things aren't getting any cheaper, twenty, plus forty, plus twenty does not equal retirement at 60.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Cultural Underpinnings
What things make us the people that we are? More often than not, we don’t recognise the turning points in life until they’ve stopped happening, usually because they require so much of our focus that any detached, quasi-objective introversion is impossible. We have moments of epiphany in which we realise a new perspective, but the events which provoked our change of heart are, by that point, historical, and we draw our fresh conclusions about the world by dint of having had time in which to digest what’s happened. When we are children, this process is called ‘growing up,’ and when we are teenagers, it is dubbed ‘maturing.’ There’s no fashionable term for it happening to us as adults, but happen it does, the idea being that we are always going forwards. We can recollect our self-altering adventures, misdemeanours, turmoils, idiocy and passions from the comparatively safe vantage of the here-and-now, but it’s a rare, sharp clarity of vision which lets us feel the seeds of change take root, and more uncanny still that we might follow the process through from start to finish even partially aware of how we’re altering ourselves.
But culture is another thing entirely. One good book can provoke more insight than a decade of emotional pain; powerful films can flip all your previous notions on their heads and make a willing convert of you in under four hours; TV shows, radio, theatre, art, music, poetry; even, I will argue, video games, newspaper articles, blog entires, graffiti and advertising. Different people are susceptible to different things. And the beauty of this sphere of human development is that we can return to it afterwards, whole and unchanged, and continue plumbing those depths of content which moved us to begin with. Here, we are not the protagonists; we are the audience, and fully able to comprehend our changes of heart exactly as they come, able to set down the book or pause the TV while we gather our thoughts before the next immersion. This process makes us active collaborators in our own improvement, which is arguably the most important thing of all: by watching how it is we grow, we’re in a better position to comprehend the why, rather than becoming the end product of mere circumstance.
Not all such changes have to be deep, life-altering dramas, either: our sense of humour is just as important as our moral compass – sometimes, it is more so – and we would be foolish to discount things which altered the course of our interests simply because we weren’t moved to tears. All human beings are slightly more than the sum of their parts, and what can seem like frivolous quirks to us might speak volumes about our character to those we know.
I had planned to list my Top Ten books in ascending order from the age at which I first read them, but the number of things this unfairly disqualified grew steadily longer, until it became another list in its own right with a much more haphazard chronology. So here, instead, is my revised list of Most Important Cultural Influences, in no particular order.
The Goon Show – Unless you have a close family member whose interests are rooted firmly in British radio comedy of the mid twentieth century, you can be excused for not having heard of The Goon Show. The direct spiritual predecessor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it was produced by the BBC and created by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe, each of whom tended to voice upwards of three characters during the course of a half-hour episode. Upon first hearing it at the age of six or seven, I found it much too fast and difficult to follow: apart from being completely absurd – with episodes titles like The Affair of the Lone Banana – it seesawed between being bitingly clever and darkly humerous with skilful frequency. Once I’d learned the trick of keeping up with the pace, however, and understood some of the more inventive terms, it was impossible to sit through an episode without laughing uproariously. Even now that I’ve heard almost every instalment at least fifteen times, I’m still hard-pressed not to chuckle at the antics of Neddie Seagoon, Major Bloodnok, Eccles, Bluebottle, Henry Crunn, Minnie Bannister, Moriarty and Grytpype Thynne whenever they caper across my radiowaves.
Cairo Jim – It was in the Point Clare Primary School library, under the diligent supervision of Mrs Adams, that Kristy Allen first introduced me to Geoffrey McSkimming’s Cairo Jim books. Cairo Jim, as every book says at least once, is a well-known archaeologist and little-known poet, accompanied on his expeditions the whole world over by two faithful companions – Doris, an intelligent talking macaw, and Brenda the Wonder Camel, who ate the whole Encyclopaedia Brittanica as a foal and subsequently became very wise indeed. The trio are constantly trying to save valuable artefacts from the unscrupulous clutches of one Captain Neptune Flannelbottom Bone and his raven Desdemona, who are always out for money, a really good manicure and a tin of important Japanese seaweed respectively. Apart from cementing my passion for archaeology, poetry and Shakespeare at an early age, the books gave me a desire to visit exotic places and a fascination for history, two things which have never since left me.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – As was the case with The Goon Show, it was my father who first introduced me to the now late and very great Douglas Adams by gifting me with the radio series of Hitchhiker’s Guide one birthday. Having no idea at all of what to expect, I inserted the disc into my CD player and sat listening. After less than five minutes, I was laughing so hard I had to take a half-hour break, and to this day, I find it impossible to listen to Arthur Dent’s bitter description of where, exactly, he finally found the notice ordering his house to be knocked down (“It was at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard!”’) without giggling manically. My first real taste of science fiction, it was also a turning point, as I realised – quite unexpectedly – that setting a story on a different planet didn’t mean it couldn’t be funny.
Penny Arcade – Up until Year 10, I had never heard of a webcomic or even met anyone who had. That all changed when I joined a new group of friends who promptly sought to remedy my ignorance. The first such comic I ever read was Penny Arcade, written by Jerry Holkins (‘Tycho’) and drawn by Michael Krahulik (‘Gabe’). After reading through the archives from 1998 until the then-present year of 2001, I was utterly hooked, and webcomics became – and remain – a staple of my day-to-day existence. In 2007, this makes me able to say, with pride and sincerity, that I was reading Penny Arcade before it was really big. Not long before; and arguably, they were already doing well for themselves when I joined the scene, but six years is a long time, and the fact that Gabe and Tycho now host their own yearly gaming convention and charity drive suggests that things on their end have just kept getting better. It’s only since the end of high school that I’ve been able to stop quoting quite so compulsively (as any of the friends who made me a fan will – with some relief – attest), but even among relatives and co-workers who have no idea what I’m talking about, I still can’t entirely repress the urge to make jokes about the location of someone’s pants, things that are exactly what I didn’t want, and hair.
The Jungle Books – Once upon a time, my parents gave me a beautifully illustrated edition of Rudyard Kipling’s classic, which sat on my bookshelf for at least a year before I ever opened it. As a child, I fell just as madly in love with the stories of Koktic the White Seal, Toomai of the Elephants and Rikki Tikki Tavi as I did with those of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera, but it wasn’t until my teenage years that I discovered there was a Second Jungle Book. Finishing it at last on the train home from school, I cried as Mowgli was sung the Outsong of the Jungle, and ever since then, both volumes have been irreversibly imprinted on my heart. For me, there is now such a depth and wealth of profundity in the stories that more than the final poem can move me to tears, and it seems utterly incomprehensible that for so many years, I never knew the story of How Fear Came or Baloo’s poetic teaching: “As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forwards and back / For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf; and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” When I have children old enough to listen, it will be one of the first books I read to them aloud, and I suspect that when I’m in my eighties, it will still mean as much to me then as it does today.
The Sandman – Until university, the only narrative comic I’d ever read was a graphic novelisation of one of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, which I’d liked well enough without ever exploring the genre further. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman changed that, when a friend, as part of a rather eccentric present, gave me the entire collection scanned to disc. I was gripped from start to finish, and despite how tiring reading from the screen could be, I ploughed on and finished the lot in a couple of days. Since then, I’ve bought the collection in its ten trade paperback volumes and reread it many more times; and never once has it failed to move me. I’ve been a fan of mythology since I was six, but nothing has ever come made those myths realer to me than Sandman. They were my first introduction to Gaiman as a writer, and given that he’s become one of the principle influences on my story-style, it’s hard to articulate exactly how enriching they’ve been. Dream and The Endless are the kind of creation it’s impossible to feel truly envious of, because as much as I would love to be brilliant enough to tell their stories, there’s an even greater pleasure in watching a true master do the work for me.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – As has been previously mentioned, despite the entreaties of more than one high school friend, I only ever watched one Buffy episode live-to-air, and as it was an arcing plot point smack-bang in the middle of Season Five, I was missing too much context to want to come back the following week. It was only my discovery of Firefly that brought me to an appreciation of Joss Whedon, rather than being, as happened with most fans, the other way round. Renting the DVDs while living in college, I finally cottoned on to what I’d been missing: brilliant scriptwriting, great characters and a fascinating dichotomy between straight-laced fantasy, satire and mockery of same, drama, comedy, mythology, metaphor, an awesome soundtrack and some catchy musical numbers. In short, it was just about everything I had come to love bundled into one, and since then, I’ve never looked back.
Shakespeare – Way back in Year 4, an American-born substitute teacher, Mrs McHugh, took over our class for the Halloween period. While most class members had never so much as gone trick-or-treating, the holiday being nowhere near as popular in Australia as America, we were set festively-themed assignments, one of which was the memorization of the witches’ chant from Macbeth. With the help of my father and our stout, leather-bound, two-volume edition of the Bard’s complete works, I ended up the only student to complete the homework and was subsequently made to recite it in front of the class. But rather than turning me off for ever, this had the opposite effect: I became an absolute devotee, started reading my way through various plays (or at least, as much of them as I could understand) and watching as many productions as I could lay eyes on. It was the origin of my love not only for good theatre, but poetry as well, and since that first piece of Macbeth – which I still know by heart – I’ve added Hamlet’s soliloquy, some Much Ado About Nothing and several pages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to my repertoire.
Get A Grip – At the age of nine or ten, I remember being startled to hear my mother laugh out loud at a book she was reading. When I asked what it was, she said I wouldn’t get it, and after I insisted on reading the page in question to prove her wrong (unsuccessfully, although I laughed like I’d understood), my in-built contrariness made me resolve to read the whole book myself until it did click. The book in question was Get A Grip, writer Kaz Cooke’s first collection of columns, and although there were some things I didn’t comprehend straight away, I loved her tone, word-use and general not-so-much-tongue-in-cheek-as-boot-up-arse approach to politics. The older I became, the more sense the columns made; and although most of the current events are no longer current (allowing for the fact that John Howard is still Prime Minister and the vast majority of his Cabinet are still utter wankers), the memory of them – and Kaz Cooke’s hilarious writing – is enough to keep me rereading indefinitely. Possibly the only Australian writer whose work I ever voluntarily and knowingly picked up, it was also my first induction into the glorious, scum-spattered world of political commentary.
The Matrix – No matter what criticisms are now levelled against the Wachowski Brothers for Reloaded and Revolutions, 99.99% of all people my age and a little either side are lying if they claim the original Matrix wasn’t, at the time, the coolest film they’d ever seen. Genre-defining as it was, it’s hard to remember that at the time of its 1998 release, it pioneered the now-ubiquitous pause-and-wrap-around camera techniques and made PVC-and-leather-sci-fi mainstream. As a twelve-year-old geekling positively glued to her cinema seat, The Matrix resonated with my budding psyche, and I doubt I’m the only one of my generation who was left, after that first fateful screening, with the unshakeable belief that while subverting The Man with ingenuity – and, where appropriate, violence – was the noblest aspiration one could have, it would be even cooler if one could do it wearing sunglasses and a black leather trenchcoat.
And, finally:
The Games – As a ten-or-eleven-year-old viewer, there was much in The Games – a satirical mockumentry perpetrated with skill and wit by John Clarke, Gina Riley and Brian Dawe in the lead-up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games – that went over my tender head; but at the time, I was so busy laughing I rarely had time to notice. Coming on the heels of my induction to Kaz Cooke, it introduced me not only to cynicism (something which had served me particularly well by the end of school) but to deadpan humour, the perils of bureaucracy and the idea that politicians and journalists were more than mere sources of ludicrous opinions – they were also complete bastards who could generally be trusted no further than a gold-winning hammer-thrower could have flung them at any one moment. And who knows how long before I’d figured that out otherwise?
But culture is another thing entirely. One good book can provoke more insight than a decade of emotional pain; powerful films can flip all your previous notions on their heads and make a willing convert of you in under four hours; TV shows, radio, theatre, art, music, poetry; even, I will argue, video games, newspaper articles, blog entires, graffiti and advertising. Different people are susceptible to different things. And the beauty of this sphere of human development is that we can return to it afterwards, whole and unchanged, and continue plumbing those depths of content which moved us to begin with. Here, we are not the protagonists; we are the audience, and fully able to comprehend our changes of heart exactly as they come, able to set down the book or pause the TV while we gather our thoughts before the next immersion. This process makes us active collaborators in our own improvement, which is arguably the most important thing of all: by watching how it is we grow, we’re in a better position to comprehend the why, rather than becoming the end product of mere circumstance.
Not all such changes have to be deep, life-altering dramas, either: our sense of humour is just as important as our moral compass – sometimes, it is more so – and we would be foolish to discount things which altered the course of our interests simply because we weren’t moved to tears. All human beings are slightly more than the sum of their parts, and what can seem like frivolous quirks to us might speak volumes about our character to those we know.
I had planned to list my Top Ten books in ascending order from the age at which I first read them, but the number of things this unfairly disqualified grew steadily longer, until it became another list in its own right with a much more haphazard chronology. So here, instead, is my revised list of Most Important Cultural Influences, in no particular order.
The Goon Show – Unless you have a close family member whose interests are rooted firmly in British radio comedy of the mid twentieth century, you can be excused for not having heard of The Goon Show. The direct spiritual predecessor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, it was produced by the BBC and created by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe, each of whom tended to voice upwards of three characters during the course of a half-hour episode. Upon first hearing it at the age of six or seven, I found it much too fast and difficult to follow: apart from being completely absurd – with episodes titles like The Affair of the Lone Banana – it seesawed between being bitingly clever and darkly humerous with skilful frequency. Once I’d learned the trick of keeping up with the pace, however, and understood some of the more inventive terms, it was impossible to sit through an episode without laughing uproariously. Even now that I’ve heard almost every instalment at least fifteen times, I’m still hard-pressed not to chuckle at the antics of Neddie Seagoon, Major Bloodnok, Eccles, Bluebottle, Henry Crunn, Minnie Bannister, Moriarty and Grytpype Thynne whenever they caper across my radiowaves.
Cairo Jim – It was in the Point Clare Primary School library, under the diligent supervision of Mrs Adams, that Kristy Allen first introduced me to Geoffrey McSkimming’s Cairo Jim books. Cairo Jim, as every book says at least once, is a well-known archaeologist and little-known poet, accompanied on his expeditions the whole world over by two faithful companions – Doris, an intelligent talking macaw, and Brenda the Wonder Camel, who ate the whole Encyclopaedia Brittanica as a foal and subsequently became very wise indeed. The trio are constantly trying to save valuable artefacts from the unscrupulous clutches of one Captain Neptune Flannelbottom Bone and his raven Desdemona, who are always out for money, a really good manicure and a tin of important Japanese seaweed respectively. Apart from cementing my passion for archaeology, poetry and Shakespeare at an early age, the books gave me a desire to visit exotic places and a fascination for history, two things which have never since left me.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – As was the case with The Goon Show, it was my father who first introduced me to the now late and very great Douglas Adams by gifting me with the radio series of Hitchhiker’s Guide one birthday. Having no idea at all of what to expect, I inserted the disc into my CD player and sat listening. After less than five minutes, I was laughing so hard I had to take a half-hour break, and to this day, I find it impossible to listen to Arthur Dent’s bitter description of where, exactly, he finally found the notice ordering his house to be knocked down (“It was at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard!”’) without giggling manically. My first real taste of science fiction, it was also a turning point, as I realised – quite unexpectedly – that setting a story on a different planet didn’t mean it couldn’t be funny.
Penny Arcade – Up until Year 10, I had never heard of a webcomic or even met anyone who had. That all changed when I joined a new group of friends who promptly sought to remedy my ignorance. The first such comic I ever read was Penny Arcade, written by Jerry Holkins (‘Tycho’) and drawn by Michael Krahulik (‘Gabe’). After reading through the archives from 1998 until the then-present year of 2001, I was utterly hooked, and webcomics became – and remain – a staple of my day-to-day existence. In 2007, this makes me able to say, with pride and sincerity, that I was reading Penny Arcade before it was really big. Not long before; and arguably, they were already doing well for themselves when I joined the scene, but six years is a long time, and the fact that Gabe and Tycho now host their own yearly gaming convention and charity drive suggests that things on their end have just kept getting better. It’s only since the end of high school that I’ve been able to stop quoting quite so compulsively (as any of the friends who made me a fan will – with some relief – attest), but even among relatives and co-workers who have no idea what I’m talking about, I still can’t entirely repress the urge to make jokes about the location of someone’s pants, things that are exactly what I didn’t want, and hair.
The Jungle Books – Once upon a time, my parents gave me a beautifully illustrated edition of Rudyard Kipling’s classic, which sat on my bookshelf for at least a year before I ever opened it. As a child, I fell just as madly in love with the stories of Koktic the White Seal, Toomai of the Elephants and Rikki Tikki Tavi as I did with those of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera, but it wasn’t until my teenage years that I discovered there was a Second Jungle Book. Finishing it at last on the train home from school, I cried as Mowgli was sung the Outsong of the Jungle, and ever since then, both volumes have been irreversibly imprinted on my heart. For me, there is now such a depth and wealth of profundity in the stories that more than the final poem can move me to tears, and it seems utterly incomprehensible that for so many years, I never knew the story of How Fear Came or Baloo’s poetic teaching: “As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forwards and back / For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf; and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” When I have children old enough to listen, it will be one of the first books I read to them aloud, and I suspect that when I’m in my eighties, it will still mean as much to me then as it does today.
The Sandman – Until university, the only narrative comic I’d ever read was a graphic novelisation of one of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, which I’d liked well enough without ever exploring the genre further. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman changed that, when a friend, as part of a rather eccentric present, gave me the entire collection scanned to disc. I was gripped from start to finish, and despite how tiring reading from the screen could be, I ploughed on and finished the lot in a couple of days. Since then, I’ve bought the collection in its ten trade paperback volumes and reread it many more times; and never once has it failed to move me. I’ve been a fan of mythology since I was six, but nothing has ever come made those myths realer to me than Sandman. They were my first introduction to Gaiman as a writer, and given that he’s become one of the principle influences on my story-style, it’s hard to articulate exactly how enriching they’ve been. Dream and The Endless are the kind of creation it’s impossible to feel truly envious of, because as much as I would love to be brilliant enough to tell their stories, there’s an even greater pleasure in watching a true master do the work for me.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer – As has been previously mentioned, despite the entreaties of more than one high school friend, I only ever watched one Buffy episode live-to-air, and as it was an arcing plot point smack-bang in the middle of Season Five, I was missing too much context to want to come back the following week. It was only my discovery of Firefly that brought me to an appreciation of Joss Whedon, rather than being, as happened with most fans, the other way round. Renting the DVDs while living in college, I finally cottoned on to what I’d been missing: brilliant scriptwriting, great characters and a fascinating dichotomy between straight-laced fantasy, satire and mockery of same, drama, comedy, mythology, metaphor, an awesome soundtrack and some catchy musical numbers. In short, it was just about everything I had come to love bundled into one, and since then, I’ve never looked back.
Shakespeare – Way back in Year 4, an American-born substitute teacher, Mrs McHugh, took over our class for the Halloween period. While most class members had never so much as gone trick-or-treating, the holiday being nowhere near as popular in Australia as America, we were set festively-themed assignments, one of which was the memorization of the witches’ chant from Macbeth. With the help of my father and our stout, leather-bound, two-volume edition of the Bard’s complete works, I ended up the only student to complete the homework and was subsequently made to recite it in front of the class. But rather than turning me off for ever, this had the opposite effect: I became an absolute devotee, started reading my way through various plays (or at least, as much of them as I could understand) and watching as many productions as I could lay eyes on. It was the origin of my love not only for good theatre, but poetry as well, and since that first piece of Macbeth – which I still know by heart – I’ve added Hamlet’s soliloquy, some Much Ado About Nothing and several pages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to my repertoire.
Get A Grip – At the age of nine or ten, I remember being startled to hear my mother laugh out loud at a book she was reading. When I asked what it was, she said I wouldn’t get it, and after I insisted on reading the page in question to prove her wrong (unsuccessfully, although I laughed like I’d understood), my in-built contrariness made me resolve to read the whole book myself until it did click. The book in question was Get A Grip, writer Kaz Cooke’s first collection of columns, and although there were some things I didn’t comprehend straight away, I loved her tone, word-use and general not-so-much-tongue-in-cheek-as-boot-up-arse approach to politics. The older I became, the more sense the columns made; and although most of the current events are no longer current (allowing for the fact that John Howard is still Prime Minister and the vast majority of his Cabinet are still utter wankers), the memory of them – and Kaz Cooke’s hilarious writing – is enough to keep me rereading indefinitely. Possibly the only Australian writer whose work I ever voluntarily and knowingly picked up, it was also my first induction into the glorious, scum-spattered world of political commentary.
The Matrix – No matter what criticisms are now levelled against the Wachowski Brothers for Reloaded and Revolutions, 99.99% of all people my age and a little either side are lying if they claim the original Matrix wasn’t, at the time, the coolest film they’d ever seen. Genre-defining as it was, it’s hard to remember that at the time of its 1998 release, it pioneered the now-ubiquitous pause-and-wrap-around camera techniques and made PVC-and-leather-sci-fi mainstream. As a twelve-year-old geekling positively glued to her cinema seat, The Matrix resonated with my budding psyche, and I doubt I’m the only one of my generation who was left, after that first fateful screening, with the unshakeable belief that while subverting The Man with ingenuity – and, where appropriate, violence – was the noblest aspiration one could have, it would be even cooler if one could do it wearing sunglasses and a black leather trenchcoat.
And, finally:
The Games – As a ten-or-eleven-year-old viewer, there was much in The Games – a satirical mockumentry perpetrated with skill and wit by John Clarke, Gina Riley and Brian Dawe in the lead-up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games – that went over my tender head; but at the time, I was so busy laughing I rarely had time to notice. Coming on the heels of my induction to Kaz Cooke, it introduced me not only to cynicism (something which had served me particularly well by the end of school) but to deadpan humour, the perils of bureaucracy and the idea that politicians and journalists were more than mere sources of ludicrous opinions – they were also complete bastards who could generally be trusted no further than a gold-winning hammer-thrower could have flung them at any one moment. And who knows how long before I’d figured that out otherwise?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Numerics
Back in highschool, I was never much good at maths - not through any innate stupidity on my part, but because things weren't always explained in a way that made sense to me. That might sound like an excuse, but it's a real problem in the way highschool maths is taught. The logic underpinning commonly used equations is often vastly more complex than most teachers can articulate, and so the process becomes one of rote-learning: students repeating a pattern rather than comprehending the reason for it.
Formulae were my biggest weakness. Without understanding how and why they actually worked, I found it impossible to apply them. Algebra left me queasy, and class after class was spent staring at a page full of numbers I had no hope of conquering. But I remember the startlement of one teacher at my perfect score in the most difficult section of a maths exam, covering material I'd barely coped with in class. She took me aside after the papers were handed back and shook her head in bewilderment: rather than using the workings we'd been taught, I'd figured out my own way of solving the problems.
'How can you do this when you can't get the simple stuff right?' she asked.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It just makes more sense this way.'
Up until that point, she'd assumed my poor grades were the result of inattention and a stubborn, self-imposed ignorance of all things mathematical, but from then on, she took more time to try and help me. Even so, my opinion stayed the same; and I dropped maths the following year.
Now, numbers feature prominently in my day-job - not figures, but contact details, scheduling times, document numbers, file numbers, job numbers, extensions, dates, timesheets - and in greater profusion than my teenage self would ever have thought likely. And on top of that, there's the personal stuff: credit card numbers, mobile numbers, Medicare numbers, tax file numbers, superannuation account details, student numbers, subject numbers, exam numbers, due dates for bills, utility account details, bank account details. I deal with it all, but that early trouble with maths is still with me in spirit, so that every time I'm handed a new assignment that even peripherally involves numbers, I get a jolt of the old, siezing panic and think: I won't be able to do this.
And every time, when it turns out I can, I wonder: how many other people have the same problem? It would be absurd to think it a phenomena restricted to me. In my instance, it manifests as a specific Pavlovian reaction to columns of digits on paper. I'm excellent at household budgets; I can add, subtract, divide and multiply in my head - but show me a pile of someone else's tax invoices and I'm suddenly fifteen again, chewing my pen-lid and staring out the window as I count the seconds until lunch, idly wondering whether anyone would really notice if I set my desk on fire.
Formulae were my biggest weakness. Without understanding how and why they actually worked, I found it impossible to apply them. Algebra left me queasy, and class after class was spent staring at a page full of numbers I had no hope of conquering. But I remember the startlement of one teacher at my perfect score in the most difficult section of a maths exam, covering material I'd barely coped with in class. She took me aside after the papers were handed back and shook her head in bewilderment: rather than using the workings we'd been taught, I'd figured out my own way of solving the problems.
'How can you do this when you can't get the simple stuff right?' she asked.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It just makes more sense this way.'
Up until that point, she'd assumed my poor grades were the result of inattention and a stubborn, self-imposed ignorance of all things mathematical, but from then on, she took more time to try and help me. Even so, my opinion stayed the same; and I dropped maths the following year.
Now, numbers feature prominently in my day-job - not figures, but contact details, scheduling times, document numbers, file numbers, job numbers, extensions, dates, timesheets - and in greater profusion than my teenage self would ever have thought likely. And on top of that, there's the personal stuff: credit card numbers, mobile numbers, Medicare numbers, tax file numbers, superannuation account details, student numbers, subject numbers, exam numbers, due dates for bills, utility account details, bank account details. I deal with it all, but that early trouble with maths is still with me in spirit, so that every time I'm handed a new assignment that even peripherally involves numbers, I get a jolt of the old, siezing panic and think: I won't be able to do this.
And every time, when it turns out I can, I wonder: how many other people have the same problem? It would be absurd to think it a phenomena restricted to me. In my instance, it manifests as a specific Pavlovian reaction to columns of digits on paper. I'm excellent at household budgets; I can add, subtract, divide and multiply in my head - but show me a pile of someone else's tax invoices and I'm suddenly fifteen again, chewing my pen-lid and staring out the window as I count the seconds until lunch, idly wondering whether anyone would really notice if I set my desk on fire.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Nerds, Dorks & Geeks
If any of the above terms has ever been applied to you and your immediate group of friends, you've probably had The Argument. Let me set one of the many possible scenes: you, your friends and at least two laptops, sitting round and rolling dice to see if you're getting drunk of a lazy afternoon. Conversation turns to Magic: The Gathering, or perhaps Munchkins, and before you know it one of your party has cracked a joke about six foot square Gelatinous Cubes, Celestial Badgers or their housemate's alleged Fridge Of Holding. Once the laughter has died down, however, someone - and fingers will be pointed - has the hypocritic temerity to call the joker a dork. Heatedly, the accused will reply that while they are most certainly not a dork, they are - quite proudly - a geek. Matters might end here, but inevitably some would-be Cicero chimes in that nerd is the more culturally applicable term - and then The Argument rapidly goes downhill.
Sides are taken in earnest: what defines geekhood as opposed to dorkhood or nerdliness? Which term presents the most accurate description of those present? After many countless hours, my friends and I eventually agreed upon the following definitions:
Dork: Any awkward and socially unskilled introvert.
Nerd: Any individual with a stance on Linux routinely called upon by the rest of their friends and family to perform tech support duties.
Geek: Anyone who can recite, at random, the names of fifteen Buffy episodes, ten Star Wars races, eight anime shows and five webcomics. (Other permutations accepted.)
If the above definitions are taken as accurate, then it is possible for someone to be simultaneously a dork and a nerd and a geek, in varying ratios of dominance. These three spheres of classification - the unsociable, the technical and the subcultural - are often linked, but nonetheless distinct. Much of the confusion has come from a thoughtless bandying about of terms by the uneducated; cricketers, for instance, talk about 'bat nerds' or 'bat geeks,' meaning team members who, in the estimate of their fellows, know entirely too much about the different kinds and history of cricket bats for comfort. In this sense, the words 'nerd' and 'geek' are being used in their non-specific slang forms, as slightly disparaging terms to deliniate both intelligence and an in-depth, detailed knowledge about one or more (objectively) obscure or (subjectively) uninteresting topics.
During my many run-throughs of The Argument, much time was devoted to the question of whether or not obsessive affection should form part of the definition of any term. Eventually, it was decided not, as while the quirk is omnipresent across all types, it isn't a necessary condition of any.
I'm not dork: given half a chance, I can comfortably talk someone's head off; I'm married; and I only wear my ThinkGeek shirts every other weekend. It's up in the air as to whether I'm only a psuedo-nerd or the genuine article: although I do know enough about Linux not to freak out at a GUI-less screen and have been used as my family's tech support, I'm nowhere near as savvy as most of my friends.
But I am, quite undeinably, a geek. If asked, I would crew Serenity with Cap'n Mal Reynolds, walk the Dreaming of Oeniros, wield my Vorpal Blade against a crew of theiving gnomes, drop-kick Keitaro Urashima until he twinkled in the distance, thwart the Pointy-Haired Boss with Dilbert, fight alongside Aayla Secura and Quinlan Voss...
...but not bite the heads off chickens, as per the historical definition of 'geek' provided at dictionary.com
We've come a long way, baby.
Sides are taken in earnest: what defines geekhood as opposed to dorkhood or nerdliness? Which term presents the most accurate description of those present? After many countless hours, my friends and I eventually agreed upon the following definitions:
Dork: Any awkward and socially unskilled introvert.
Nerd: Any individual with a stance on Linux routinely called upon by the rest of their friends and family to perform tech support duties.
Geek: Anyone who can recite, at random, the names of fifteen Buffy episodes, ten Star Wars races, eight anime shows and five webcomics. (Other permutations accepted.)
If the above definitions are taken as accurate, then it is possible for someone to be simultaneously a dork and a nerd and a geek, in varying ratios of dominance. These three spheres of classification - the unsociable, the technical and the subcultural - are often linked, but nonetheless distinct. Much of the confusion has come from a thoughtless bandying about of terms by the uneducated; cricketers, for instance, talk about 'bat nerds' or 'bat geeks,' meaning team members who, in the estimate of their fellows, know entirely too much about the different kinds and history of cricket bats for comfort. In this sense, the words 'nerd' and 'geek' are being used in their non-specific slang forms, as slightly disparaging terms to deliniate both intelligence and an in-depth, detailed knowledge about one or more (objectively) obscure or (subjectively) uninteresting topics.
During my many run-throughs of The Argument, much time was devoted to the question of whether or not obsessive affection should form part of the definition of any term. Eventually, it was decided not, as while the quirk is omnipresent across all types, it isn't a necessary condition of any.
I'm not dork: given half a chance, I can comfortably talk someone's head off; I'm married; and I only wear my ThinkGeek shirts every other weekend. It's up in the air as to whether I'm only a psuedo-nerd or the genuine article: although I do know enough about Linux not to freak out at a GUI-less screen and have been used as my family's tech support, I'm nowhere near as savvy as most of my friends.
But I am, quite undeinably, a geek. If asked, I would crew Serenity with Cap'n Mal Reynolds, walk the Dreaming of Oeniros, wield my Vorpal Blade against a crew of theiving gnomes, drop-kick Keitaro Urashima until he twinkled in the distance, thwart the Pointy-Haired Boss with Dilbert, fight alongside Aayla Secura and Quinlan Voss...
...but not bite the heads off chickens, as per the historical definition of 'geek' provided at dictionary.com
We've come a long way, baby.
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