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?

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.

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.