The Unicorn Evils

Tonality and Accents

2008-05-21T12:46:00.005+10:00

When discussing languages, we distinguish between those that are tonal, such as Chinese, and those that aren't, like German. In tonal languages, one word can have multiple meanings depending upon its inflection: whether the sound is clipped or drawn out, rising or falling, glottal or rounded. To non-tonal speakers, the prospect of learning such a dialect is often intimidating - not rationally so, but in the way of the unfamiliar, like a new alphabet or backwards-reading script.

In the case of English, however, I wonder how applicable this distinction really is.

A weekly sketch on the Armstrong and Miller Show features two WWI flying aces. All their scenes are shot in black and white; their mode of speech is upper-class British. There is only one glaring (and deliberate) anachronism to spoil the historicity and source the humour: despite their accents, the pair speak in current teenage slang. So when the pilots are berated for cowardice, and one replies in his Eton-voice, 'That's, like, racism, but against cowards!', it's hilarious. And part of the reason has to do with tonality: the meaning of the words hasn't changed, but the context is incorrect. Properly, such phrasing belongs to the youth of a different class and generation: said with the wrong accent, it becomes absurd. The same can also be said of black American slang - it doesn't sound right unless spoken with its originating inflection, and for a middle-aged white man to attempt a 'what up, homie?' would either be deliberately ironic or appallingly incorrect.

Think of something as simple as repeating a joke you've heard. Hit the wrong emphasis, muddle the voices, and the humour is lost. If the original teller had a different accent to you, prepare to find the process harder. Commedians as diverse as Corinne Grant, Kenneth Williams, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Dave Hughes, Rowan Atkinson, Sascha Baren-Cohen, Judith Lucy, Woody Allen and Arj Barker all generate a large part of their humour through their distinctive tones.

In conversational English, a rising or falling inflection makes the difference between asking a question and stating a fact, if it comes at the end of a sentance, or the topic under discussion, if in the middle. To cite subcultural precedent for both points: in Friends, Rachael mistakes Monica's question 'got the keys?' for a statement. Result: the pair are locked outside, as each assumes the other has the keys. Similarly, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Anya brings Spike to an Initiative party. On realising where he is, Spike protests, 'You brought me here?', just as Xander accuses, 'You brought him here?' To which Spike replies, 'I just said that! Only I hit the 'here' part.' Result: inflection and emphasis make the characters concerned about two different things: Spike with being near the Initiative, and Xander with Spike being there at all.

English isn't tonal; not in the deliberate and structured way of other languages. But our multitunious slang forms, jokes, emphases and accents all contribute to certain normalities of speech, phraseologies that, beyond being merely social, cultural or geographic, have the power to change the meaning of words. And that, I think, is often overlooked.

To Blog, Or Not To Blog

2008-05-13T14:39:00.004+10:00

Let's face it: there's a weird allure to blogging, as evidenced by the fact that it encourages two significant behavioural contradictions. These are:

1. Private, introverted people happily display their innermost thoughts in a public forum; and

2. Individuals who would otherwise never keep diaries or aspire to writing careers, do so.

The first is, far and away, the more intriguing phenomenon. What compels people to bare their souls - and, more importantly, what makes them think that no-one will notice? It's common emotional sense to disregard the potential scrutiny of strangers, but in every online community I've been part of, uproar has occured when this blog or that is discovered by acquaintances of the creator. It's a strange problem: in treating their blogs as private diaries, writers feel free to criticise, complain about, badmouth, lament, mock or otherwise denigrate friends, family, co-workers, lovers and love-interests with the same implied impugnity as they would celebrities, sports teams or politicians. But the percieved protection is, in fact, utterly absent, and if a quick Google by Bored Person A of Blogger B's name reveals a treasure-trove of dirty goss, then problems will arise.

Personally, I see this as the writer's own lookout. On sites like livejournal, it's easy to make your posts private - that is, only viewable to those of whom you approve. Failing that, it's just as easy to write under an online handle (as most people do), leave your real name off the site (to prevent Googling) or - and here's the biggy - rename your friends when bitching about them, (as in whistleblower interviews). What stops people from doing this seems to be a variant of writer's conceit: the desire to have your (excellent) skills and viewpoints correctly attributed on the offchance that some passing bigwig wants to give you money. Beyond that, if you're going to blog critically about your nearest and dearest, non-anonymity seems foolish - although this isn't the general opinion of those caught. More often, the response is anger that whoever-it-was had read their private thoughts, as though the reader had broken the lock after rummaging through the proverbial sock drawer. Knowing you've found a friend's blog, runs this argument, imposes the courtesy of not actually reading it, especially if they haven't told you it's there. The boundaries of individual privacy in a global forum are, admittedly, still being decided, just as online ettiquite is still being learned, but in the interim, taking no measures to secure privacy and then bewailing the consequences seems akin to leaving your house permanently open and expecting not to be robbed.

As for bloggers themselves, the blank canvas has issued a siren-song to our kind throughout history. At the simplest level, we carve our names in trees and graffitti walls - a way of saying that we are here, and of hoping that, when we're gone, a part of us won't be. More than this, however, it's what makes us look longingly on rows of beautiful notebooks, pristine in their unsullied whiteness, and dream of putting them to use. Here lies potential, they seem to promise. With us, you can say anything. Your handwriting will be perfect. You'll always use the same pen. You'll never need to cross anything out, and when you're done, each book will resemble a work of art. And so, thus enlivened, we buy one, carried forward on a wave of creative enthusiasm - only to have our usage inevitably taper off. The ink smears; we draw doodles; we tear out pages, ramble on, write messily in a number of different colours and, all of a sudden, that weight of potentiality is gone, marred by the non-linear scramble of human thought.

But blogs - lovely blogs!- are digital. There is no mess to be made. We can edit without besmirching the look of the thing, change the colour in an ordered, mannerly fashion, put up pictures and alter the font. There is no bulk of unused paper to intimidate or demand thoughtful contribution: each blog is exactly as long as we make it. The sense of potentiality is never diminished by squalid appearance, and thus we keep writing, even if our entries are entirely banal. Which, ultimately, is the defining characteristic of the blogging era: no matter how many entries, authors, topics or sites, there's no guarantee that what's being said is worth the paper it isn't written on.

O Tempora, O Mores

2008-05-07T23:51:00.004+10:00

I was sceptical of Lions for Lambs when I saw it advertised at the cinemas. Somehow, the idea of watching Tom Cruise portray a rabidly militant Republican Senator pushed all the wrong buttons, and so it became a wait-until-DVD moment. Watching it tonight, I was pretty impressed: the script is fantastic, the ensemble casting spot-on, and the message powerful. I could devote many more lines to reviewing it in full, but instead, I'll focus on what hit me as I rented it today: the profound effect of terrorism on recent cinema.

Going back a few days, the thought was with me as I watched Iron Man on the big screen. In early scenes, the script goes out of its way to emphasise that Tony Stark - weapons-maker, industrialist and all-round American anti-hero - is, first and foremost, a patriot. The truth of this assertion is never questioned, but what does come under siege is the working definition of patriotism itself. At first, the description hinges on having a bigger stick than the other guy; but as Stark questions the logic of producing arms to save the world, this view becomes unstuck.

Here as elsewhere, the choice is to support the system for the principles on which it rests, or abandon the system when those principles cease to be applied. Moreso than the films, it's a central theme to the Star Wars comics that sculpt the context for Episodes II and III: the dilemma of Jedi defending a morally indefensible Republic for the sake of its democratic ideals. When the system breaks down, can it be repaired from the inside out, or must a new structure replace it? We're getting away from terrorism, but only into related areas. Like it or not, the moral, social and political dilemmas of our time are being played out in our cinemas, and not always with the intended effect.

From the outset, some films make their agenda plain. V for Vendetta is an obvious example, as are Syriana, The Constant Gardener, Children of Men and Apocalypto, but the retconning of older stories to incorporate modern terrorism is, in one sense, more significant. Batman Begins is an interesting case in point: beyond the corruption of Gotham City, Raz Al-Ghoul is best described as a corporate jihadi, while Daniel Craig's new-look 007 in Casino Royale faced terrorists and their backers rather than the traditional communists. We might count S.P.E.C.T.R.E as a terrorist organisation, but the definition of modern terrorism is not nearly so - for lack of a better word - corporate. It is no longer the evil henchmen, white cats and grey jumpsuits so aptly parodied by Dr Evil in Austin Powers: it is dirty, violent, random and brutally personal. Even Bruce Willis, repraising his role as John MacLean in Die Hard 4.0, is fighting a different breed of terrorist to his original enemies. Pure profit is no longer the incentive: instead, the effect is mayhem, and the motive ideological.

Periphary but related themes are the mistrust of government, corporate crimes, lies in the media, socio-political relations and the ubiquitous question of 'religon', usually translated as 'Islam vs. Everything Else.' Notably, The Kingdom failed spectacularly at all of the above, the bitter irony of which being that the writers were trying to protest exactly the ignorance they ended up committing. The first and last scenes achieve what the intervening hours utterly bungle: an effort at painting Saudis and Americans as equally (morally) human. 300 deserves a longer critique for similar reasons, but the practical upshot is the Battle of Thermopylae being used as an allegory for the military triumph of Western democracy over the Middle East. Babel is a better, if ultimately disturbing, example: there are always people on both ends of a bullet, it says, and neither of them needs must be a monster.

There are differing interpretations of all these films, but what can't be denied is that Hollywood, by and large, is trying to come to grips with terrorism and its consequences. How their efforts are viewed now as distinct from the reaction of future historians is yet to be seen, but with the privilege of hindsight, what influence might we see? Stylistically, all films belong to a certain era, and it seems extremely doubtful that a new Fight Club could be made too soon: a story in which our generation lacks a defining war, where violent terrorism is espoused by the protagonists, and where - in the triumphal, final moments - Western civilisation literally collapses, skyscrapers emblazoned with an ironic smiley face tumbling into rubble as the anarchist lovers look on and grin. Instead, we have Southland Tales, where Armageddon is pre-empted by left-wing terrorism, and a chilling reversal of T.S. Elliott's famous line prevails throughout:

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a whimper, but with a bang.

An Ugly Trend

2008-04-17T00:10:00.003+10:00

Today's universe is unsympathetic to school children, it seems. In New Zealand, six teenagers and their teacher have died on a canoeing expedition as the result of an inexplicable flash flood; eighteen Ugandan girls between nine and twelve have burned to death in their school dormitory, along with one adult; and in India, at least 44 school children died when their bus drove off a bridge and into a canal, with another 20 passengers still unaccounted for.

There's no greater point to make. It's just an ugly trend.

Blatant Political Speculation

2008-04-15T12:41:00.003+10:00

There's an aura of foregone conclusion to the current American political race, in the sense that nobody gives two hoots about the Republicans. This year, it's all about Obama vs. Clinton and the Democrats. Not that I'm complaining, mind, but throughout the campagin coverage thus far, something has been niggling at me, and it is this: whoever wins through, their policies will have had almost nothing to do with it. Instead, the next leader of the Democrats (or America) will be elected almost exclusively on the basis of either their race or gender, and in such an overt fashion as to lay the whole concept of an intelligent democracy open to question. I am not deaf to the potential significance of the first black or female President, but the irony is enormous: neither milestone has been reached exactly because, historically, Western politicians have been elected on the basis of race (white) and gender (male). The fact that these elections are reversing the criterion hasn't removed the element discrimination, as so many people seem to believe: instead, it has merely reversed it.

As an active government policy, reverse descrimination has been tried in various parts of the world as an antidote to previous racism, notably in South Africa. Regardless of job experience or suitability, employers are encouraged, if not required, to hire black staff over white, and while the intention of the policy is equal opportunity, it is creating a wealth of problems, particularly in teaching and academia. Previous discrimination meant that many black children were denied education - a travesty, to be sure, but one compounded when those same uneducated children, now adults, are given teaching jobs in turn. Some are barely literate; others lack basic qualifications. This is not their fault, and it doesn't make them unintelligent, but it does mean their students will suffer, and where such teachers are attempting to educate a new generation of black students, it prolongs the ill-effects and negative consequences racism. It also breeds resentment: the fact that white people have had hundreds of years on the beneficial end of discrimination doesn't make the objection to being passed over solely on the basis of race less painful, or - more importantly - less valid.

Which brings us back to Clinton and Obama. Arguably, I'm not looking hard enough, but almost every scrap of commentary I've encountered on the Demoncratic primaries has, at some point, touched on the indecision all black women 'must' be feeling: whether to vote for their race, or their gender. This indecision is undoubtably true in many instances, but if it constitutes the whole of a voter's struggle over which candidate to support, as opposed to being one issue among many (or even a tie-break question), then the problem is bigger than we think. The idea that some black women might be Republican, a la Condoleezza Rice, hasn't been mentioned at all.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Barack Obama was contending, not against Hilary Clinton, but another black man. The milestone would remain, but the deciding factor in victory (one hopes) would be policy: at the very least, it physically couldn't be race. Similarly, if Hilary were to battle another white female candidate, the issue of gender - while lack of a precedent would see it mentioned - would not set one above the other. Of course, given that the Republicans have put forward the the traditional white male, these issues will still remain at the actual election, but that's (for now) a separate conundrum.

All of which raises the question: does policy matter at all? The cynical pragmatist in this writer already believes that the necessary evils of compromise, backtracking and deception render political policy as hawked at election-time a poor auger for what will actually happen: pure democracy, like all original ideology, changes in the transition from paper to real life. Nonetheless, we are still voting for something more relevant than biology, and even were my anarchistic half to argue that choice, in this respect, is an illusion generated by large amounts of conflicting information and media hype, it still leads to a complex decision-making process. In this instance, however, commentators are presenting us with a much more simplistic dilemma: do we want a black leader, or a woman?

Ultimately, I'll be content (though unsurprised) if the Democrats win the election. Were I an American citizen, I'd vote for Obama on the grounds of his policies, agnosticism (reading between the lines), intelligence and charisma; Hilary is too rightwards-leaning for my taste. But whoever gets in, I hope - perhaps unreasonably - that they are elected for the right reasons, and not the physicality they were born with. Because that's the point of democracy: an intelligent, thinking leader is all well and good, but nothing can beat an intelligent, thinking populace.

Some Thoughts

2008-03-23T19:16:00.002+11:00

When we think of modern society compared to previous eras, there tends to be one underlying assumption, and it is this: that even if we are no happier than before (although we strongly suspect this to be the case) we are nonetheless better off. What 'better off' means in this context can vary from person to person, but by and large, it equates to intelligence: that is, we know better, therefore act better, and therefore live better. Tuning semantics even more finely, we might ask what 'better' alone means, which provides a much more variable answer due to the vast range of subjects and issues that 'society' encompasses. Sometimes, it is a flat-out value judgement: medicine and science, for instance, are inarguably better than in the sixteenth century. Othertimes, the matter is more clouded: there are enough monarchists, zealots, anarchists, malcontents, theocrats, thinkers and others of a similarly contrary mindset in the world that 20th century democracy isn't universally lauded as the political panacea it is often touted as, which makes it impossible to state declaratively that our social institutions are, as concepts, better than those which preceeded them, even if we might argue the comparative success of their results. And then there are moral (or purely social, which is to say, random and behavioural) gains or losses: alway nebulous, as individual bias tends to fling any measuring needle across every extreme with all the circular abandon of a broken compass.

With all that in mind, then, here are a few of my own thoughts on a select gamut of modern phenomena. A very select gamut, in point of fact: namely, feminism.

This is a word with which I've always had an uneasy relationship; not because I disbelieve the concept, but because of a tendency to challenge its ongoing application, at least in my part of the world. Certainly, there has been unexpected fallout from society's overdue decision to acknowledge women and men as equal creatures: fallout, in the sense that (a) every action has consequences we don't always anticipate; (b) that not all of these are welcome; and, more specifically, (c) - that even though the political and legal institution of social mysogeny has been abandoned, other customs and mores which developed alongside (or because of it) haven't, and the fact of that association doesn't necessarily mean they should be. This is, essentially, the crux of the matter: we went ahead and created a new world, but are still learning how to live in it, unsure of which relics to cast aside, keep or reforge.

Equality, for instance, cuts both ways. As women have the right to be breadwinners, so do men have the right to be stay-at-home parents or partners. As women have the right to delay having children (or remain childless), become defactos, seek divorce or remain single, so too do men. And yet, the logic of these positions is often grating or unobvious. Many a recent female columnist has lamented the idea of 'lost boys', grown men who refuse to get married and seemingly cling to childhood - but if marriage and parenthood are no longer socially compulsory for anyone, any right to such complaint is absent. This is a prime example of unexpected fallout: at least some women imagined that, once the old rules were broken in their favour, men would continue to keep playing the same game with just that single exception. It has been a shock to many to learn otherwise.

When we look back at other historical periods, we are quite often able to tease out certain social concepts with which we agree, albeit for different reasons than were offered at the time. This, I feel, is the most crucial and significant gain the passage of time has offered us: that where we once acted ignorantly in accordance with current practice, we have subsequently searched out the relevant theory. To divert momentarily from feminism, an example can be found in the practice of conservation. Tribes and subsistance farmers comprehended the principle of 'leave some for next year' generations before science ever popularised the language of 'environment' or 'conservation' - and yet, when our societies grew and industrialisation emerged, we lost those ideals because, in a sense, the global theory had never been understood. For the main, old-world 'conservation' applied, not because of any deep-seated knowledge about the limitations of natural resources, pollution or deforestation, but because it was practical in the short-term. Once that immediate practicality was lost, we stopped short of looking over the next horizon, and it wasn't until (ironically) our new societies allowed us space to examine our own mechanisms and impact that we realised the unintentioned sense of what had come before, and began to apply it again with the theory in mind.

Socially, then, we are now in the process of learning similar lessons, most prominently biology: no matter how far modern medicine has come; no matter the importance of gains when it comes to women's rights, equality, the demands of the modern workforce and social practice, there is still a time limit on when any given person may have children. To pretend otherwise is folly, and to act as if social learnings somehow prohibit or overrule the fact is similarly foolish. This, I think, is the single greatest question that feminism has produced, and it tends to suggest some uncomfortable bedfellows. No matter the law or society, men do not fall pregnant, give birth and breastfeed. Women do. Ultimate equality would entail a world in which, regardless of gender, these functions could be passed to whichever partner was deemed most willing or best suited; and while science fiction would have us believe that this is not entirely out of the question, we still needs must live in the now.

Ultimately, I feel, the lessons of feminism and equality can (and, perhaps, should) be boiled down to two core concepts: the freedom for each to choose their own roles in life, and the space to be happy in them. There will always be restrictions on that choice - biology, mortality, finance and whatever other social burdens the given age seems fit to impose - but if we can cling to those two ideals, uphold them and continue to believe and know the theory behind the practise; then, I believe, there will always be hope for us.

Mirror, Mirror

2008-03-19T23:44:00.002+11:00

When I was little, my grandmother would take me to the Chatswood shops on weekends. We'd walk around for hours, and at the end of the day, I'd usually end up with a new book, ten or so dollars in coins and a McDonald's lunch. I've got a lot of memories from those outings, but one of the clearest (and most abstract) is of standing between two mirrors in a ladies' bathroom, trying to see my face in a series of echoing, bending reflections.

I don't recall whether it was my first experience with the sensation, or exactly how old I was - around six or so, from where I remember my eye level resting - but there was something powerful and a little scary in it. After turning my head this way and that, I finally realised that I could never see myself reflected all the way through: but I could see everyone else.

Reading Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad for the first time in high school, I was captured by a paragraph warning of the danger in standing between two mirrors. It was this:

"You can use two mirrors like this, if you know the way of it: you can set them so that they reflect each other. For if images can steal a bit of you, then images of images can amplify you, feeding you back on yourself, giving you power...
And your image extends forever, in reflections of reflections of reflections, and every image is the same, all away around the curve of light.
Except that it isn't.
Mirrors contain infinity.
Infinity contains more things than you think.
Everything, for a start.
Including hunger.
Because there's a million billion images and only one soul to go around.
Mirrors give plenty, but they take away lots."

And the more I think on it, the more it seems like standing between two mirrors is the best way of describing human belief. We can never fully scrutinise how faith or scepticism suits us: always, our head gets in the way of looking at itself. We can only ever watch other people, and be watched in turn, but no matter if we shut our eyes or ignore the glass, the reflections keep on bending away into ever. And what's being reflected is us: bounced back, altered, observed and in plural, but if we didn't stand between the mirrors, there'd be nothing to reflect.

Which is a poetic way of saying that no matter what we believe, or our meta-thoughts on why and how and we believe it, the process always has more to do with who we are in the first place than most people will comfortably acknowledge.

Just as the reflections in the mirror can prompt us to alter our appearance, or prolonged staring engender a perception of beauty or ugliness beyond what is actually shown, so too can examining our beliefs lead to their alteration. But in arriving at them first off, no matter how unconsciously, we still choose the terms and conditions of our faith.

While some are strengthened from seeing their convictions reflected, others are weakened, or humbled, or shamed - and some see only themselves.

If you were to stand between two mirrors, what would you see?

I Heard The News Today...

2008-02-20T10:56:00.003+11:00

An era has come to an end.

After fifty years as Dictatore Supremo of Cuba, Fidel Castro is stepping down. The fact that he's lived long enough to do so is, of itself, surprising, America having spent the last half-century trying - and, by various means, failing - to assassinate him. His governance has been a geopolitical constant for so long that ending it is akin to the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union (an event which Castro himself survived, despite his reliance on their funds). The boards of history are being redrawn, one feels. We do not know what will happen next.

Human beings are narrow creatures. Deliberately or not, most of us spend our lives believing that the way things are now is the way they will always be, because ours is (surely!) the society for which the rest of history has been working. If we envisage future change, it tends towards one of four categories, viz:

1. Naively minimal - refining the status quo through better technology;
2. Hopefully progressive - hovercars, space travel, nuclear fission and green power;
3. Cynically dystopian - corruption and socio-economic divides after global cataclysm; or
4. Apocalyptic - end times, the Rapture, Ragnarok or other such death by explosion.

The problem with these models is twofold. Firstly, they are each contextually based on current perception: the naive minimalist doesn't comprehend the unknown; the hopeful progressive determines all future need based on currently percieved deficiencies; the cynical dystopian assumes that the worst of the status quo will endure; and the apocalyptic believes things are irrevocably going downhill. This is because - quite understandably - we cannot divorce ourselves from the present. It is foolish to assume that nothing of the current era will endure, but equally unreasonable to guess at what survives. There is, admittedly, nothing else to go on; and yet we forget the precariousness of predictions, assmuing (each in his own way) that this thing or that will never alter.

Secondly, however, is the problem of rogue elements - the ultimate catalysts for the above problem. There are several billion people on our planet, all of them acting individually and in hugely disparate circumstances. Throw in the necessity of coincidence, and it becomes impossible to tell what events are really shaping the future.

How, then, does any of this relate to Fidel Castro?

There are moments in life when we hear something new, experience something significant, and undergo the uneasy realisation that the world has altered; that our perceptions of future continuty, however intelligently founded a moment ago, are bunk. Often, these moments of epiphany are shared across a wide-ranging consciousness, sparked by a single event. John F. Kennedy's assassination. September 11. Man walking on the moon. The end of the French Revolution. And whenever it occurs, some small part of us is either rattled or elated: despite the breadth of global possibility, despite the laws of time and the passage of history, we had never really believed this thing could happen.

And now it has.

Life Is A Song

2008-02-14T13:10:00.003+11:00

Music has been such an integral part of human culture for so long that describing why has become largely impossible. Asking why different songs can move us deeply is a bit like questioning why we have two eyes, or the reason for round planets - like trying to pin down the precicse mechanisms that result in love, the answer either varies from person to person or becomes an admission of intrinsicality, viz: It Just Does. Through a combination of music and lyrics (or sometimes just music, or sometimes - if we broaden our definition to encompass poetry and rap - just lyrics), music can perfectly express moods that we otherwise struggle to pin down, to such an extent that in this day and age, we may well refer someone to the iTunes store when asked about our day.

Which makes me wonder: what songs best define your personality?

Obviously, it's not an easy question. People are multifaceted, not to mention ever-changing. What described us perfectly at the age of 15 may no longer apply, while a ditty we adore now might bring shudders in a decade. But here, at least, is my attempt to self-describe through song.

Teenage Years:
Touched - VAST
Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols
Goodbye To You - Michelle Branch

Politics:
Can't Buy Me Love - The Beatles
Big Yellow Taxi - Joni Mitchell
Loose Lips - Kimya Dawson

Whimsy:
Sand In My Shoes - Dido
A Place Called Home - Kim Richey
Love You - The Free Design

Happiness:
Release - George
Stevie - Spiderbait
19-20000 - gorillaz

First Poem of the New Year

2008-01-14T16:44:00.001+11:00

Belief does not bring peace of
mind. Depression
digs its fingers in
to man of cloth & child of sin
alike; & in the tumbled heart
where tangled tubes & vessels burn
we break apart & shatter in
the knowledge that we will not learn:
humanity is flawed; but lo! –
we linger on; we will not go.

Despair does not unravel hope.
The measure where the mind gives way
to madness in (the
echo found); the day
today, the curling ground below
the satin sway of sky; the pearling
blue & vaulted black beyond the reach
of human eye, which seeks (unseen)
for what we lack:
life weeps; but in the silver rain
we wash our hearts, and loving
will remain.

The Owning Of Cats Is A Difficult Matter

2008-01-07T13:53:00.000+11:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone foolish enough to be possessed of a housecat must be in want of a dead mouse. Or, possibly, a live mouse. Delivered to their bed. At three o'clock in the morning.

At least, this is the logic under which Bop was operating last night. Having already woken Quine and me up by brawling furiously across our feet with Nano at 1:30, he came back an hour and a half later, walked around on us a bit, and then left, no doubt looking pleased with himself. Trying to fall back asleep after this interruption, I heard Quine mumble, 'I think there's a mouse in the bed.'

Any enthusiasm I might have felt at this knowledge was instantly quelled by the fact that I was (a) tired and (b) completely unbothered by the prospect, in the strange, detatched way of someone unwilling to get up for anything less than World War III or the next George R. R. Martin novel.

'Mmph,' said I, rolling over. I heard Quine rise - heard his feet shift on the wood as, with bleary ceremony, he examined our bed.

It was at this point I felt something twitching under the doona near my leg. Ah.

'Mouse,' I mumbled. Quine dove and, after a struggle of epic proportions, wrestled the invader into submission. I heard banging and muffled swearing, the unmistakeable sound of Bop and his latest gift being thrown unceremoniously out of the kitchen.

Quine returned. We went to sleep.

Ten minutes later, Bop - and his mouse - were back. A sterner, grumpier eviction followed, of which I took no part but relief when, after another return to restless sleep, the incident was not repeated a third time.

Whence, then, has come Bop's recent fascination with mice? I say 'recent,' because - unlike just about any other cat in the known universe - Bop is a fairly useless hunter. To date, he has caught two rats (one only rumoured by an old lady he used to visit) and a dove. Possibly, there is a small number of mice to add to this list, but I am disinclined to count them, owing to the fact that, nine times out of ten, he loses them; and on the other occasions, he's never quite sure what to do. In fact, whenever Bop manages to bring down a kill, he sings to it - a weird, lilting cat-croon that is quite different to his usual vocabulary, and which I have heard him use in no other context. It is as if he is mourning a dear friend, unable to understand why his companion of so many joyful minutes has suddenly quit the game midplay.

Certainly, he does nothing so vulgar as try to eat them: he goes on playing, and then - when they don't wake up - he makes eulogies. Contrast to Nano, who, owing to Bop's habit of eating both their dinners, often subsists on a diet composed enitrely of mice. She hunts with the brutal efficiency of the true predator, and eats in quick, small bites lest we try to steal her food. Her only efforts at display are to run in very quickly, prey in mouth, and growl, thereby announcing her prowess - but then she darts back out again, through the window and into the night. Or afternoon. Or morning.

But Bop - bless his velvet paws - is a special case. And I think, after our recent trip to Sydney, that I finally understand why.

As a kitten, our old neighbours gave him a particular cat-toy their own pet had rejected: a plush mouse, about the size of a golf ball, which squeaked realistically whenever it was moved. It didn't run on batteries, nor was it a chew-toy: it was more the kind of mechanism one finds in those little insect boxes in National Geographic, where the act of tilting said box causes it to chirrup. In any case, Bop fell madly in love - but when we moved to Melbourne, the mouse got left behind.

Recently, my parents found it again. We took brought it home after Christmas. Bop was wary at first, but seemingly, his memory of it has returned, because in almost a week and a half, he hasn't left the damn thing alone. He sleeps with it, either cuddled between his paws, safe under his belly or tucked beneath his chin. He disembowls it, bites it, chews it, rolls on it, throws it around and chases it, and throughout all this activity, the mouse talks back to him: ee! ee! ee!

I must conclude, therefore, that the toy mouse has warped his idea of death. It never dies. It is never silenced by fear. It is a worthy adversary, constantly returning, able to be flung down the hall in full chorus by any passing human and still be licked, chewed and purred over for the better part of two hours. Until the toy came back, it was a once-a-month-but-rarely event that we saw Bop with a real mouse, and then it would never be for long: either the mouse would die, or he'd let it escape. But now, whenever he's had a long stint with his toy, he goes and fetches a real mouse. And looks disappointed when it expires, or - presumably - we don't throw it for him to fetch. (He does play fetch, incidentally. Clearly some wires are crossed.)

Pet psychologists everywhere, eat your heart out.

(Anti) Resolutions

2008-01-03T10:42:00.000+11:00

At this time of year, tradition dictates a list of resolutions for the new annum - things we will strive to improve upon, take up or cut back for the wellbeing of our collective flesh and psyches. I have many such plans for 2008, but as listing them would constitute a trite and obvious exercise for everyone, here instead are ten things I will NOT be doing:

1. I will never again purchase and consume an entire family-size barbeque chicken in one go.

2. Bored to hunger, I will not return multiple times to hang on the door of my snackless fridge, hoping that somehow, new food has grown since I last looked.

3. I will no longer leave my clean washing on the line for a week and a half, then become irritated when it gets rained upon.

4. I will not ignore whatever housework needs doing in favour of sprawling listlessly on the lounge and bemoaning the fact that I have nothing to do.

5. I will not leave my shoes under the loungeroom table, the kitchen table, or anywhere else they can be simultaneously hidden from view and tripped over.

6. I will no longer rent shitty movies and fail to return them on time. Why the hell should I pay more for not having watched the entirety of Daredevil or Caligula? They suck.

7. I will no longer pretend that my preference for drinking bourbon and coke isn't boganly.

8. I will stop spending so much Goddam time on Facebook. Seriously. I mean it!

9. I will not learn to tap-dance.

And, finally:

10. I will not, under any circumstances - no matter how dire - regret that John Howard lost the election.

Missus, Will You?

2007-12-03T09:53:00.000+11:00

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’?

Songs Of A Sentimental Geek

2007-11-26T12:09:00.000+11:00

"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!"

Political Quote-Mongering

2007-11-21T11:52:00.000+11:00

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.

Breeding Familiary

2007-11-12T09:13:00.000+11:00

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.

Encore!

2007-11-07T14:25:00.000+11:00

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.

Dualism

2007-11-02T12:26:00.000+11:00

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?

Real Mature

2007-11-01T11:00:00.000+11:00

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.

Cultural Underpinnings

2007-10-26T13:04:00.000+10:00

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

2007-10-23T16:32:00.001+10:00

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

2007-10-22T14:47:00.000+10:00

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.