Total Misrepresentation

 I love Netflix. It allows me to binge trash night after night, rather than think for myself.

I do try to pepper my viewing with 'alternative' shows & 'unknown' productions to widen my perspective or laugh at a different level, but I often watch a series right through, for example, committing to four seasons of something I would have stopped watching after the pilot back in the old days of free-to-air TV.

I also have a habit of sitting in front of the TV with 'alternative entertainment', just in case. This will be my trusty tablet (& my reading glasses), so that I can play mindless games to alleviate the mindlessness of the TV. When I start watching something (even a movie), I like to look into the production of the thing & play 'spot the Aussie' (there is almost always one in the cast), or else find the real locations used. This usually leaves me with some disappointment that there's a man in his 60s in desperate need of a stunt double to do any action scenes - like running a few metres or taking a flight of stairs. This would make some sense if the actor in question is a 'name' extending their career beyond their physical capability, but it's often a 'nobody' getting their big break by being a 'face' whose portfolio has floated around LA for 30 years. Of course, the man in his 60s is playing a character in his 40s, but he got the role because he could act better than anyone younger.

Watching all of these shows, & then knowing that someone is much older than the person they're portraying, or does not have the cultural background because they arrived in LA - in the US! - only the year before, gives you an entirely different slant on the 'quality' of the experience. It's as if the production didn't care enough to think it through, or else is treating the audience like morons. I don't like being treated like a moron. Listen to me - I binge-watch Netflix. I have cultured tastes. I did, once. I doubt that I have any taste left at all, now. I have eaten too much blancmange to appreciate an added twist of lemon rind or raspberry puree.

I can't blame Netflix. It was all happening a long time ago, when LA became just too expensive for a show to be based, so a lot of shows & movies came out of Vancouver, purporting to be based in the North-West of the USA. As long as the extras were careful with their dialect, everything was fine - the lead actors had all worked in the US for years, so they had the accent down pat. To me, so far away, Canadians are just Americans with a conscience. What would I know?

What used to get up my nose was the use of 'diversity' to populate shows. This is all well & good for representing 'now', because I am very used to every corner of the globe being represented in my local shopping centre. My community is that real, so my TV shows should be. However, anything historical becomes quite jarring. Why is Queen Charlotte so brown? She was German. Who is that sub-continental man supposed to represent? Indians hadn't even been invented in King Arthur's time. 

Ah, but it gets worse again! I was watching the dramatisation of a book where the main character apologised for looking a particular way, ethnically, as if explaining the deviation to the fourth wall. I decided to read the book. It made no mention of the character's ethnicity relative to other characters. In fact, further books in the series almost imply that the chosen actress was perfect for the role, from the point of view of how she looked ethnically. Please withdraw your apology. You have every right to that role, even if you are a year or two older than the book says.

For me, if I have some awareness of a book being 'from a period or in a place', then I have in my head certain expectations of uniform ethnicity, unless the opposite is a strong theme in the book itself. If we're talking about Regency London, then I expect all aristocrats to be Caucasian. Anything else is to be remarked upon as out of the norm & also treated as a curiosity by the close-minded English of the time. Even if the author has never been to England, if they convey that expectation of normalcy, then surely it should be followed up with the visuals. If an author represents one continent of their fantasy novels as being dominated almost exclusively by one ethnic group, then it makes sense that the dramatisation would also be exactly that. If you don't like that, then you won't like the book. If the whole point of the dramatisation was to attract the fans of the book, then surely you would be expected to follow it as closely as possible. You wouldn't use a normal-statured person to 'represent' a dwarf any more than you would employ an African to represent someone of pale skin & naturally silver hair.

Long ago, there was a movement of reactionists who would chant that things were 'too PC' sometimes, when certain phrases should be avoided on TV. Now, we simply avoid them out of habit, because it's just polite & inoffensive to avoid such words & no-one has the 'right' to call someone ... anything, really. In the same way, representation is probably something we still need to be made aware of, be conscious of, in the day to day, because society still just doesn't get it. Society still struggles to elect enough women to parliament, let alone non-Caucasian representatives. We think of these 'aspects' of society as 'minorities' (diminishing to single lesbian rural Vietnamese women in wheelchairs with dependents), which is laughable, because that would mean that the Caucasian male population of Australia, which has to be less than a third, & of which I am a fully-paid-up member, has successfully introduced gerrymandering.

I am not advocating diversity. I am only advocating representation of the truth. Once we accept the truth, then all of this nonsense just becomes normal & not worth commenting on.

To Kill a Cultural Icon

 I didn't like To Kill a Mockingbird.

I read it only recently, usually avoiding 'that kind of book' because I thought it was both 'too modern' & 'not of my culture', without having the vaguest notion of what it was about. I've never seen the movie. I'm vaguely aware that Gregory Peck has a powerful scene in it. I had no idea how that famous scene related to the book, so it was definitely time to find out for myself, not knowing anyone who'd read it, & being vaguely aware that the author's only other book was published posthumously.

Very quickly, I formed a dislike for the book in the way it portrays a young child (of about five) with big ideas explaining their philosophy & incidental schooling in a US backwater around the time of the Depression. It tried to be Tom Sawyer, but failed miserably for being too highbrow & hokey at the same time, without the subtlety or innocence of Clements. I kept wondering where it was going, as a book, & what the fuss was about, as a legacy.

I mentioned that I was reading it & disliked it to a colleague, who said that she'd loved it. Because I hadn't finished, maybe it did have a powerful ending ... but it had a lot to make up for. Then it twigged - in what language did she read it? I was reading an untranslated version. Sure enough, she'd read it in Farsi. She'd looked into the process, & had been assured that the book she read was considered the best translation. The problem is, the dialect of the original would have to be translated into English first. I could understand it as it was, but I'm not sure that 'yessum' conveys the right tone when translated into Farsi. 

I've had this problem before. I told another friend I was reading A Hundred Years of Solitude, & she was in raptures over the imagery of one particular passage that I had quite missed. I had read it in English. She had read it in Farsi (coincidence), & the original was in Spanish. Now, we could both be getting it wrong. In this case, it was a noble-prize-winning author that could well have been butchered in multiple languages.

But let's get back to the book at hand. Mockingbird was a bestseller, & the movie was a box-office hit. Americans (if only them) have been reading the book compulsorily since the 1950s. That's the key. It was a book of its time. It was a book that spoke to a movement to recognise (finally) African Americans as no different to any other Americans. That is not the point of the book, but it's an observation within it, mostly shown through the naiveté of the heroine, who is often told that she doesn't understand how the world works, or that she's too young to have her opinion matter.

That's the author, because the book is in first person. The author considered her message - if that truly was germane to the book - as no more than an alternative view to what her upbringing provided. It wasn't just about black Americans being treated as second class - below white trash - or children being ignored, but also state-controlled education, vigilante justice, poverty within a small community, the treatment of fringe dwellers, religious intolerance, & a whole raft of social issues put into the mouth of a child who would not normally see any of this (or recognise it), but is more likely to accept prejudice as the norm than to question it. Repeatedly, the heroine reminds us that she was allowed to question her father, even if other kids couldn't.

The book itself does not come under criticism - is rarely critiqued - simply because no-one wants to touch that subject matter: inequality ... no, specifically the treatment of African Americans. It was then & is now a taboo subject - criticising books that justifiably criticise an historical society. White Americans never treated black Americans with such contempt. How could they possibly have done? But they did, & only a denialist can shout 'fake news' at that without crossing their fingers. The book is a representation of history, for being strictly fiction, & it is ugly rather than being inspiring, because no-one gets a happy ending. This is rather reminiscent of the work of Harper Lee's chief supporter, Truman Capote. I wonder if, if it wasn't for him, the book would ever have been published, or at least published in time. It was timely, but if it had missed its moment in history, it would not have been missed by the passage of time.

 It doesn't matter what language you translate it into, the book's moment has now passed. It is not timeless in itself. It reflects a period in that country's history that was shameful (a long period from the freeing of slaves to the recognition of equality) & should now be considered almost laughable (how could they think that back then?). If you are moved by such a book, then you are yourself living in the Southern states of the USA in the 1950s, because there is no modern revelation to be had from it.

As an afterthought, any counter-argument that suggests that the book is still relevant because there is still prejudice, not just in the Southern states of the USA, but across the world, should take into consideration that the 70 years since its publication should be considered sufficient time for it to 'work its magic'. The world is full of prejudice, but nothing so insular can change that, because the work can be happily pigeonholed in a time & place that no longer exist.

An 'Aha' moment

English is a terrible language to express in writing (he says, doing just that). Perhaps it's the choice of alphabet, which was never meant for English (which isn't even a Romance language, & we've dropped all of the Anglo-Saxon letters), or the fact that English just isn't anywhere near its roots, being about a third foreign by definition, or simply that, over time, we've tried to use writing (as a concept) for things it was never intended for.

Once, writing was done by professionals. The intended audience were the elite - those who could read. Now, everyone over the age of about three in the developed world (at least) could have a fair crack at writing their own name. 200 years ago, a fair percentage of the population couldn't do that. Not only are we using writing to do more things (like writing our own name & putting that down in a permanent state of spelling), but more people are doing it. Almost all adults in the developed world (I don't know how better to express the idea of places where there is a regulated education system) reads & writes daily. Social media has made it worse, because we're all obsessed with reading & writing opinions. That doesn't make us better at reading or writing, but it does make us all think we can do it, & attitude is everything.

We're far more likely now to write what we say. By that, I don't just mean speech bubbles as thought bubbles, but I mean, quite literally, inserting pauses & mumbling & contractions & incorrect word choices & bad grammar. That's making it real. Again, it doesn't make us better at writing, but it does give the writing attitude.

When I was in school (yes, don't ask how long ago), it was drilled into us to avoid contractions unless we were representing actual speech (or giving birth, which was also to be avoided as a teenager). Heaven forbid that you should actually write in Strine! For the uninitiated, Strine is the Australian dialect, where we proudly have a plural for 'you', being 'youse', which is pronounced like a herd of sheep. Sorry, no, it's pronounced in the same way that you pronounce 'ewes', which is a herd of sheep. This is not a load of bull.

It's about now that I get to my point - well, I'm getting closer. If you're writing all of these speech-oriented interjections & such, then you're going to have to somehow indicate ... well, attitude. There's no other way to describe it. Sure, you could write 'he said with a small voice' or 'she shouted', but you're kind of ruining the flow of the conversation if you're trying to represent two people freestyling & they're using their voices like musical instruments, producing a whole range of emotions & feelings in their choice of word, their volume, their pace, their ... yes, attitude.

English is so limited in giving you the capability to do this within the quotes!

A Norwegian friend of mine was telling a joke, in German, & then complained that you can't explain it in English because the joke's punchline was all about the pronunciation & tone, & English is atonal, to which I responded "Oh really?" & he didn't get it.

Neither can you! Did I use a rising or falling inflexion? A rising inflexion would have been a polite query, & a falling one would have been sarcasm or skepticism. How do you differentiate those without tone? How do you differentiate those in print? I'm sure that someone has come up with a system. I should have looked it up before I started writing this post, but I had all of the stuff I wanted to say in my head & I just had to voice my opinion without thinking too hard about my purpose or my audience, & just writing exactly as I would argue it if I spoke to you in person.

The real 'Aha' moment - by which, I actually mean 'Eureka!' without the bathtub - came when I tried to write each of 

• 'Aha' = I understand you
• 'Aha' = I'm still listening (I'm not asleep)
• 'Aha' = I agree
• 'Aha' = I disagree
• 'Aha!' = Eureka (not the stockade)

All of these come down to where you accent the word, rising or falling end, & vowel length, with possibly more context like how long a pause before you say it. Don't get me started on pauses in print. You can pause by ellipsis, or you can pause by cutting things into sentence segments, or you can pause by expressly saying "then she paused".

But  I guess that's where I should.

The 'Do Something' Effect

I am trapped at home. We all are. They call it self-isolation because it's good for us, & for some bizarre reason, we believe them for once. We're all being socially responsible by being socially disconnected - except through social networking. We're connecting more without touching. We're doing more to be connected because we've been told not to connect.

We're all 'doing something' by not doing stuff - not going out, not congregating, not travelling, trying to minimise the shopping. Sometimes, we're 'not doing stuff' in the extreme - like hoarding toilet paper so that we don't have to buy it tomorrow, but if you miss out, then you have to keep coming back until you beat the other people trying to hoard it & make them turn up the next day to try & hoard. But, on the whole, we're pretty good at adjusting to 'not doing stuff'.

However, there are still people who tell us that we don't have to 'not do stuff'. It's all a hoax - not doing stuff won't help anything & it's not going to save you.
This is not your average crackpot, but someone with a wide audience of believers & a history of saying things counter to common sense. This is a person of great authority & influence who says that, this time, not doing stuff is a bad thing.

This is indeed the same person who says that climate change is a hoax & we shouldn't do anything about it. In that case, not doing stuff is what he is advocating, now, he's saying that we shouldn't not do stuff.
I'm confused. Perhaps he's confused.

Let's break it down. When it comes to climate change, doing stuff is bad, because it's not our fault - blame the leprechauns or ignore the data, it doesn't matter, it just isn't our fault (by us, I mean his audience, which isn't me).
When it comes to diseases, not doing stuff is bad, because it isn't our fault - blame the leprechauns (who don't look like us) or ignore the medical advice ... it just isn't our fault.

There's a consistency in denialism (no, there isn't!) that anything is obviously someone else's problem, & they should fix it, because we don't have to. Occasionally, we won't fix it, because they should, which is not any better.
It comes down to accepting no responsibility for anything, ever.
I am reminded, strangely, of the broken window policy (which is zero tolerance for aberrations) - if a window is broken, fix the window, & that will make it unlikely there will be a second or third window broken, & the policy will eventually lead to no windows broken in the first place.
This is (almost) a proven policy. Looking for someone to blame for the first broken window almost always leads to a second. It's a matter of resourcing - wasting your time looking for the culprit stops you from solving the problem.

This would appear to be the main thrust of denialism - if you 'do something' positive, if you follow the expert advice, then you are taking responsibility to fix a window you didn't break. You are taking responsibility for making the world a better place without actually finding out who's responsible for making it worse.
Heavens to Murgatroyd! What are you thinking? What are you doing?

Never ever do something - unless you've been specifically told not to, in which case you should ... or not.

They Fiddle While We Burn

Each night, I watch the news in the hope that something ... is new. Each night, I see the RFS Commissioner describe horrific events or explain the level of destruction to a bevy of politicians & our so-called leaders. Why? Because he knows these things. He knows his stuff. He has built a career in crisis management & he knows how to lead swathes of 'amateurs' to bring some sanity back to this state.
Said politicians nod & make promises. That's it. Definitely nothing new. These are the politicians we elect time & again. They don't understand, they do nothing, they have no leadership skills, no firefighting skills, & they hope that we, the voters, those burning & choking, have short memories by the time the next election comes up.
I believe them. We do.
All of the denialists who said that there is no such thing as climate change because it's always hot in summer - or worse, point to a cold winter! All of the reactionaries who immediately denounce anyone with a scientific explanation for the changes to our environment that every farmer in the fields & person in the street can see (through the haze). All of the apologists who say it isn't their fault, so they can't do anything about it.
That's who we pick our representatives from. That's who makes our laws. That's who lines up to listen to Uncle Shane tell stories about the big bad & ever-blackening real world.
Must we? Must we put up with this, year after year, election after election?
Do we have to sit on our hands & hope that people like Shane can pull us out of the fire again? Do we have to hope that he's done all the preparation he can - not preparation to minimise the risk, or preparation so that we all understand what's going on, but the preparation to make his people ready to get out there & clean up this mess, to minimise the damage, to deal with the consequences of our decisions.
We decide to drive rather than walk or take public transport. We decide to throw out packaging that doesn't get recycled, or simply can't be recycled. We decide to waste water, throw out food, toss rubbish, & close our eyes.
We decide to recycle politicians so that, with a little bleach, they come out looking exactly the same.

Shane deserves a medal. He'll get one - but there'll be a smiling politician standing beside him, basking in the glow.

Where's the Beef?

Those three words have become famous. If you're not an American or are just too young, you won't know why - or indeed, what it means.

It all started in 1984 with a viral hamburger commercial - Wendy's claiming that their hamburgers had more substance than their oppositions'.
At the time, pre-selection for the Democratic party's presidential candidate was underway, & the eventual candidate (Mondale) destroyed a losing candidate's (Hart) nomination by continually using that phrase.
The entertainment industry has dined on it ever since.

In the former case, one might think that 'beef' refers to the explicit animal product, which would be an optimistic association.
In the latter, 'beef' refers to 'substance' - a policy you can sink your teeth into.

Americans generally only eat one red meat - beef.
They don't eat much lamb, moose, deer, goat, etc.
There is an almost one-to-one correlation between red meat & beef in the minds of most Americans.
In most western countries these days, the term (in English) 'meat' generally means some animal product.
In recent years, there has been some debate over this usage with alternative non-animal products trying to call themselves meat, & producers being up in arms as a result.
This could see the general usage narrowing of the term becoming more formal - possibly government regulated. That's an odd thing, when you realise that English has no regulations in general.
There was once an advertising campaign claiming that mushrooms are "meat for vegetarians".
It made perfect sense to me, but it was short-lived.

Once upon a time, 'meat' was ... some solid food (as opposed, say, gruel) - a food of substance, something to sustain you.
You could think of it as a proper meal, not something you pull out of your pocket while out working, for example.
Like in so many things - such as the use of 'mutton' (from Norman French) to mean the cooked meat product, while 'sheep' (Anglo-Saxon) refers to the animal in the field - the usage in upper society becomes dominant over time.
The manor would have been far more likely to have animal products in the main meal, & therefore the association stuck: if you sit down to eat, then your meat includes animal products.
If you want to be considered like the best of society, then you have animal products in the meal.
Scientifically, biologically, chemically, this is unnecessary & leads to flatulent grass-eaters filling the atmosphere with toxins, but don't get me started..

Over time, we got to the narrower use of 'meat' in general.
Then, in another step, Americans, with a limited range of meats, managed to narrow the term once used for the contents of a meal down to one animal product.

Just to make it interesting, "beef" as a term for conflict allows the question "Where's the beef?" to be answered quite reasonably with "Where's your beef?", as in, "Why do you have a problem with the substance of my policies?"
This is, however, somewhat cross-cultural, because it is likely that this use comes from Cockney rhyming slang in the eighteenth century. They wouldn't have had much of the animal product, either.

That's What She Said

On a corporate training day, I challenged two teams to climb a mountain.
They didn't necessarily have previous experience, but they all had basic training in the tools & equipment, safety, scaling techniques, etc, & the climb itself was generally considered "do-able". On completion, the team leads were to report to me with their experiences.
The first team lead came to me rather disheveled. She had her hair, which had obviously been tightly bound in the morning, blowing freely around her face if it wasn't plastered down with sweat. She was covered in scratches & scrapes, her clothes loose with patches of grime. She probably would have preferred to sit down at this point, but she was determined to do this last part of the exercise.
"How did it go?"
"That was exhausting! But it was so amazing, too! I've never done anything like that, & the team really pulled together. I think we've taken our trust in each other to the next level. Even from the beginning, where they said not to rush it just because it looks easy, there were times when we could see that a wrong move - a slip - could have brought us all undone. We plodded through, though - we moved as quickly as was safe. We made sure that everyone understood the next challenging bit that was coming up. We'd pause to work out a few scenarios that would get us up steep bits - you know, the sheer wall? - or over the large cracks. We had a few near misses, & my heart was in my mouth more than once - not just for me, but for some of the less able in the team. But we did it. We got to the summit & looked out over ... everything. It was worth it! The repel coming down was a cake-walk by comparison - even if two of the guys got silly & had to be untangled. We all had a laugh over that, & they were a bit sheepish coming down the rest of the way."

I found the second team lead bent double still trying to catch his breath. He looked up with a wicked grin.
"How did it go?"
"I stuck a flag in that sucker!"

From the audience point of view (me), what did I expect of the two team leads? Did I want the detail, so that I could empathise, or did I want the result so that I could simply mark off the success?
Know your audience.


Language is gender-biased. We all know that. It's also gender-identifying. By that, I mean that you can tell from the way someone speaks what gender they are. Sure, you're thinking, the high-pitched ones are more likely female. I mean speaking on paper, too - not writing reports or business correspondence, which is more formally structured (& usually male-oriented), but speaking on paper - telling a story on the page.
One of the keys is pronouns - it's well known in analysing text that a female writer will use more pronouns than a male. Also, there is the detail - the level of detail that a woman will go into to convey more depth, more context. If you like, it's about the nouns, the things that are there, rather than the verbs, the action that happens. The only exception is fight scenes, where men will write endlessly about the 'action' where a woman might touch lightly on the 'violence'.

This was never more obvious to me than when I recently read two series of first-person fantasy novels from one (male) author, then moved directly to two series of first-person fantasy novels from a female author (don't judge my tastes). Obviously, one doesn't do this often, so the revelation - the comparison - of how the (male) main character was portrayed was blindingly obvious in hindsight. Neither author lived the fantasy, of course. Only one of the authors had been a male.
The male author portrayed a series of challenges that his main characters went through, where grim determination, fear, bloody-mindedness or resigned-ness to fate drove the character forward against & through his opposition - often taking a devil-may-care attitude to the next death-defying scenario.
The female author's challenges were thrust at the reluctant hero who always seemed put-upon by events "Oh no - not another damsel in distress!" he might have opined. The hero was the continuing victim of circumstance, with no control over his fate, even though we were told he had a very good survival instinct.

I have a male colleague who love's the male author's works, & a female colleague who has never felt more connected than she does with that female author's works.

Although it would be a generalisation to say that this differentiates authors by gender, I believe that this epitomises authors' gender-oriented viewpoints from life impinging on their writing. Having read a lot of female fantasy authors before (yes, I know), none of them had been written in such a way that the female perspective was applied to a male hero. I can even correlate how this particular male hero acts in a similar way to a female hero in a different (female) author's work I read recently.

It's not a good thing; it's not a bad thing; but, it is very interesting how authors (those who gender-identify) can imbue their characters (regardless of gender) with the author's gender's world-view.