We are what we write

 Given the title, come up with five different sentences using those same five words.

Although rearrangement might be your first recourse for solving this conundrum, you don't need to go to such extremes, because the sentence itself allows for emphasis on each of the words, giving sentences that really have different contexts or meanings, proving the point. I know this sounds like another 'he made her duck' scenario, but this is different, because it is reflective.

Each of the five nuanced statements leads to the one conclusion - the written word defines us, & yet we limit ourselves thereto, as if by choice.

Is there a way to escape what we write, or differentiate who we are from the resultant text? That is not an existential problem so much as a technical one. The language that we use is almost always that which comes from within us. To channel another - such as writing in first person - is hard work & rarely successful in creating a distinct personality, due to your own upbringing, etc. You can estimate reactions, gather up opinions, formulate thoughts, but the puppet-master can only give so much life to their puppet. The rest would require an injection of Disney.

The technology exists - & is used! - to determine authorship in reality over tradition. Thus, we now know a lot more about Shakespeare as a writer who co-authored plays than we do about the glove-maker himself. To misquote: the fault, dear reader, is not in our words, but in ourselves.

No mere pseudonym can hide the true author. No amount of linguistic jiggery-pokery will give the illusion of not-self-ness, unless we make the language so bland that it masks intelligence as much as it does upbringing. We can be empathetic, blustery, obtuse, outlandish, simplistic, or take on any other approach character formation or representation, but, when it comes down to it, it's us taking on that role, & then being the author from that aspect of us, not through creating a new 'ideal' writer with such attributes.

.tuo teg t'nac I & edisni deppart m'I pleH

I remember even defining a reverse font so that that looked better. The writer is trapped inside the writer. The brain that powers the pen, the inspiration that drives the content, are all trapped within the history that made the writer themselves. There is no escape. That which makes someone a writer, or makes them write, is what also defines what they write. The closest thing to an exception is fifty monkeys on typewriters for a millennium, or else a classroom full of naive students told to write about a war. The former might get Shakespeare, & the latter might get nowhere.

It would be unusual for me to whine about problems without offering pat solutions, so I'll start with this: we need to change how we represent ourselves. This has multiple aspects. The first is the written word, which, as a concept, needs a refresh, because we've hardly done much since the introduction of spaces (with the possible exception of punctuation). Written language does not reflect spoken language, still, because it was once a rare thing to attempt, whereas we now have fiction (& gossip). 

To jump out of text, vlogs & podcasts allow for the opportunity to express ourselves, as long as we're not following a written script! Poetry slams, being the equivalent of beatniks & modernism in the art world, allow for expression to manifest.

It is not until we understand how our internal language is reflected in the result, that we can do something about it. We can already generate soulless text using AI (& probably trace the output back to its training). We can use this approach to learn how to not be us in what we write. You can't necessarily be someone else, specifically, but you can be a construct. That's what AI is all about. Deep-fake text happens, I'm sure. I'm just waiting for Shakespeare's lost work to resurface.

The only danger is that we will at some point go so far down this road that we will have forgotten where we started from, as a writer, & that negates the need itself.

We write 'what are we?'

Culturally Misappropriated

I have often had problems with the simple question "Where are you from?", because I sound funny, not local. The follow-up of "OK, where were your parents from?" doesn't add any information. Similarly, when I fill in a survey question that asks me to identify my ethnic origins, or worse, indicate which single origin I most identify with, then it causes a mild state of panic that, in the first instance, I don't forget any, & in the last, that I can show my preference appropriately.

You see, cultural identification is just not simple for me. Seven of my eight great-grandparents were born here in Australia, yet I would never say that I was 'culturally Australian', because that has no meaning to me, even if my upbringing was in the vicinity of a hills hoist. The eighth great-grandparent was born in England of predominantly Irish ancestry, & obviously at a time when Ireland itself was under British rule (note how I switched terminology). The Irish are distinct people from the English in so many respects, but there was also a lot of migration both ways. I have Irish ancestors of English heritage, too.

I identify more with my Scottish ancestors, though, & prefer to note my ancestry as 'Anglo-Celtic', rather than British, because the former is cultural, ethnic, & shows a mix, whereas the latter is somewhat geographical & also implies the Empire. There is an idea that my (Scottish) family name, however, had its origins in an English trader of Norman origins nearly a millennia ago.

Don't even get me started on my German heritage.

I am surely not alone in this confusing ancestry. I may have grown up in Sydney suburbia surrounded by people who looked like me (a long time ago, trust me), but scratching the surface quickly revealed the Catholics of predominantly Irish background, those other Celts called Mac or Mc, the rangas, & other little differentiators that showed how the majority of my classmates were, like me, ethnically from the British Isles rather than Europe, with the occasional noteworthy exception. Of course, it's possible that German ancestry, in particular, might have been still considered unfavourable.

I was thinking all this when I stumbled across historical controversies over Gwen Stefani's catalogue of pop songs. I don't mind her music, but she jumps around quite a bit, so I never noticed just how broad a range of topics & styles she covers within pop music. She is often 'inspired' by a culture or sub-culture. To me, that's the definition of pop music - reflecting popular culture.

However, as an Italian-American (not  my designation), she's been lambasted for using the style of ... well, so many different groups it would be hard to list, but this would include native American, African American, Latin American, & Japanese. Even those labels show a kind of cultural imperialism that befuddles me. We're back to Celts in the British Isles (nomenclature which dates back to Roman times) being called 'British', regardless of their current location or language, for example.

To me, Gwen is doing what the music industry has always done - adapt something for popularism. Pop, born of rock, born of blues, has taken something once close to the hearts of a sub-culture - ordinary Afro-Americans (I won't define that), & made it shiny & exciting & acceptable to Euro-Americans (see what I did there?). However, the 'owners' of the cultures she is representing in her music - probably not anyone in the music culture of that designation - project on her the crime of cultural appropriation. Let's face it, she's got Italian heritage. How dare she advertise a perfume with a Japanese name!

WTF?

Surely, as a perfume, the company that created it has an intended market & a branding, & only it (& its advertising campaign managers) knows whether Gwen best represents their concept of the product. The product itself is not cultural. There is nothing intrinsically Japanese about the concept of perfume. Most perfumes are designed with a primary market in mind, & a company can decide whether to take that global or not, because it's their product. To see a perfume & think that it's Japanese because it has a Japanese name is also a form of cultural appropriation. You're making an assumption on behalf of the perfume manufacturer.

It reminds me of (Euro-) people who would get tattoos in Sanskrit or Kanji or something as abstruse, claiming to know what it meant. The equivalent was seeing Tshirts in China or Japan with a few words in English that didn't make sense (because they're too clever to be tattooed). Is this cultural appropriation? You could think of it as a counter-culture or else tagging the morons to make them easier to round up when the revolution starts. It doesn't matter. There's nothing wrong with it.

What am I saying? Chillax. 

By all means, embrace some cultural heritage - yours or someone else's - & keep some tradition alive if it makes sense, but don't judge others for doing likewise. Genetically, there are almost no Afro-Americans who aren't marginally Euro-Americans (similarly Latin-Americans), so the whole seething mass on those two continents, with the exception of a few pockets of first nations people, are effectively related & share a culture - both in the past, & in the future in terms of world-culture (exemplified in pop music).

We are one, but we are many. I am Australian.

Everyone's a Critic

I used to love watching Margaret & David tear into new movies like a comedy duo. That's entertainment in itself. I was young & foolish, though, & didn't understand the nuanced message, merely accepting that their role on media was to critique ... or criticise.

As I wrote more, I started looking into what was in my writing, how to improve it, how to make it more ... something. I worked on different aspects like relevance, factual content or believability, insight, & also flow, from episodic chapters to longer stories, arcs, multi-book development, etc. It's easy to read your own work & do cursory criticism to define an improvement & refine the content. In my case, it was somewhat iterative, but I believe that's usually referred to as 'drafting'.

That makes me a better writer. However, the consequence of being a better writer is expecting more of others, the published. In believing that my own work was publishable, I started making comparisons, not just to fiction, but also to the scripting of movies & series, on the basis that some of my stories 'could' be viable movie subjects.  It wasn't just book adaptations, though, because they're sometimes 'difficult' by definition, where you have to cut corners to tell a story within a time limit. I'm OK with that.

The holes I had seen in my own work - missing sequences, illogical consequences, unbelievable events - stood out more glaringly in the work of others. Those deficiencies must have always been there. I know I would once burst out laughing at the worst such, but simply accept that's how things went & move on, drinking in the entertainment value. Now, my attitude towards watching was slowly changing. I don't think my tastes had, though, because I sought comfort in what used to sate that need for light entertainment. I wasn't looking for intellectual stimulation, although I still appreciate it.

Maybe it came of bingeing on Flixnet & the like, watching whole series over a weekend, getting frustrated with bad acting ruining a story. Mysteries are worst, because you can't tell if someone is acting badly or else acting really well to give you a clue that they are performing a bad act. You know you're in trouble when you watch Nicholas Cage play Nicholas Cage & realise that he's quite good at it - but he's still acting!

It comes down to quality. Being more introspective makes you see quality as a thing, without going all Zen Motorcycles. It doesn't make you expect better quality, as such, but it allows you to see beyond the superficial, the gloss, the expensive sets & clothes, to recognise quality, sometimes in attention to detail or depth in representation. I remember watching a sumptuous Turkish series set in WWI that let itself down with a character who was supposed to be a British General, but he wore the rank of a Captain, because someone had confused British & American insignia. That's minor. However, it makes you pause & look at the rest of the setting. Was that music appropriate? Anachronisms are easiest to pick. When it comes down to it, if getting the rank insignia wrong was the worst I was to see, then they did a pretty good job of a period piece. The story wasn't too bad, either.

I'm a critic! I should have just enjoyed the original story, the cultural references that somehow came through with the dubbing (I don't speak Turkish), & the historical context I knew so little about ... causing me to read a book on the birth of Turkey in the modern sense. That's surely a good outcome - it made me want more.

The question remains, however: do we, in general, get more laser-focused on detail with age or exposure, or else is it a consequence of self-criticism?

Choose your words carefully

I have been accused of shooting from the lip & not thinking too deeply about what I say. I've also been accused of hiding salient information in a tightly-packed sentence that covers the full intention if you pore over it word for word. You can't win. Don't try.

However, that's a matter of personality or style.

When it comes to word choice, I like to think I have a reasonable vocabulary & I'm not afraid to use it. If I use a word out of place, without being intentionally ironic, I can often get away with it - & bank on it! - simply because common usage isn't.

There are some words, though, that I simply don't use.

My wife looked down on the dog the other night, who she'd managed to disturb from sleep just by breathing heavily or whatever, & she asked "Why do you look at me like I'm your enemy?"

There's a word I don't use: enemy.

I don't have one. I can't remember having one since I was, say, five, on the basis that I don't live in a cold war drama. As an adult, I don't make enemies. I wouldn't know what to do with one. As a result, no-one can easily become my enemy. I think that's a good thing. You can upset me terribly by forgetting my birthday or suggesting I should seriously consider not playing bagpipes, but that doesn't make you my enemy. That's a temporary state of not as much a friend as I'd hoped.

A word that popped up from social media popularity is 'frenemy', meaning someone you superficially treat as a friend, yet act towards as an enemy (usually behind their backs). As cute as that sounds, it's dumb. It's definitely not clever. The dumbness doesn't come from the juxtaposition, but the idea that you, as a person, need to label someone in your network of acquaintances as someone you'd prefer you didn't know. You even have the modern option to 'unfriend' that person, which doesn't make them your enemy, simply not your friend.

Once you label someone as an enemy - or a frenemy - there is an implication that you should do something about that state of the relationship. No-one ignores the existence of enemies. Some people obsess over their enemies, fearing attack or else plotting to attack such people. You don't 'let sleeping dogs lie' in that case.

Having an enemy takes effort. Admittedly, many people think I'm essentially lazy, but I'm sure that's not the reason I don't have - or make! - enemies. It's because the word is simply not in my active vocabulary that I prefer to not put in the effort to see someone in such an adversarial light. 

As usual, language gets in the way of describing language. An adversary is simply someone who, at some point in time, has goals which oppose yours - like a football team. They are not the enemy. The two of you share a passion for being present on the field, share a respect for the rules & system of adjudication & enforcement. There is simply an unfortunate alignment of those goals such that actions to your relative advantages oppose. Your gain is their loss.

If you don't see any action as leading towards labelling someone as your enemy - even in jest - then I believe you will have a happier life. You don't have to focus on making only friends, but you can focus on things that bring you joy, as opposed to focusing on bringing despair to someone else. 

There's another word I can do without: despair. I don't like feeling it. I would prefer to never feel it. When I do feel it, I would like very much to stop doing so as quickly as possible. That's probably just me. Is that laziness again? Despair is usually about wallowing, which doesn't sound like it requires much effort. There's a counter-argument. Despair must be a lazy activity, then, which you foist upon your enemy with some effort on your part. 

It certainly sounds like an easier life to skip all of that & let everyone else work out their own level of laziness.

I am now going to be politically incorrect

I have decided that I am allowed to b politically incorrect, but only because of a logic flaw that makes you be politically correct first. Let me explain.

My daughter is in primary school, & amongst the testing she gets subjected to, reminiscent of a bygone age, are spelling, grammar, comprehension, & writing skills. Good, I hear you say, because kids today can't write. Well, here's the thing - they can, but they don't. They've made this decision simply because of the evidence that writing properly gets you nowhere but into trouble. If you write too well, then you will be misinterpreted immediately by those who can't, & no amount of dumbing down will get you to the level of incompetence displayed by the vast majority of the English-speaking world, because there is no entry exam to gain membership.

Kids today deal with a world full of varied English skills - & even different (locally valid) spelling. There are dialects & vocabulary beyond the range of one school's teaching. What happens when you get beyond that school, though? Beyond the formal teaching structure?

How do I explain to my daughter that in the real world, I work with people whose language skills range from bad to abysmal? These are just the ones in my office. I also deal with offices around the globe & customers, none of whom are required to prove they can correspond in English, but are determined to attempt it, because English is the international language of miscommunication, so everyone does it.

I was recently told by my boss that she has to use a dictionary when receiving a message from me. This is someone who, on meeting, you could be forgiven for thinking speaks English quite well, but in reality has atrocious comprehension skills & written skills devoid of any correlation between intention & effect. Her own accent stops her ability to spell, leading to incorrect word use & a high degree of difficulty in my extracting the nugget of information from the dross of 'easy' phrases employed.

This is the real world. This is not the world that children are being prepared for.

Now, in the business world, with anti-discrimination laws associated with hiring, someone without language skills yet still qualified to 'do the work' must be employed. If, however, 'doing the work' includes, in any way, communicating with someone else - colleague or customer - then language skills are the most important qualification of them all. You cannot discriminate based on ethnicity, country of origin, etc, but you can - & indeed, you should - discriminate on the basis of presentation & effectiveness in a role. Someone more 'qualified' technically is useless if they can't use those qualifications simply because they can't communicate.

You can't discriminate based on gender or orientation or age. Here, there is no effect on communication skills - with the possible distinction of a youth dialect, for example. This is the key to my own success, though. As I get older, & it becomes harder for me to multi-task & deal with memory-based or complex problems, my qualifications & experience merely increase (albeit more slowly). My ability to deal with people who can't communicate decreases - call it tolerance if you like. I am allowed to be intolerant, because it's a proven result of aging, & we've said that you can't discriminate based on age, so my intolerance has to be tolerated. Not yours - mine.

Therefore, for you to be politically correct, you have to allow me to be politically incorrect simply because I am getting old & doing otherwise is just too hard for me.

Drafted

Writing is a process. We go through a series of drafts, & then publish.

Well, that's the way that the industry works - has worked for centuries - so we must do the same thing when we write a blog post, right? Who are you kidding? Draft? An old version? An historical copy of the full state of the document, which is then marked up with changes to be made in the next round of writing? No. Not happening. If I've made a spelling error, I really don't need that on the record, I'm going to just fix it & move on (assuming it isn't done for me automatically). I don't need interim copies, just in case I lose something. In fact, I don't mind losing some parts - whole sentences or paragraphs - because I can very quickly write it all again, without worrying about running out of ink or typewriter ribbon - or in fact needing to cut a new quill.

The process of writing has changed, but we use the same terms to describe the process, in the same way that airline schedules still look like railway schedules, even though we've added several dimensions to the technology & there's no potential for a slower plane to be run into because it makes more stops along the same route. Yes, even that made no sense.

Drafting, though, is a process that is increasingly misunderstood. Once upon a time - not all that long ago, really - writing something long hand (first draft) & then correcting with a different coloured pen would lead to a second draft, simply because the combination of the original & corrected versions (lines or words) wasn't at all clear. Often, it was easier to rip out a paragraph & rewrite it to get a better sense of what was meant all together. You might target a chapter at a time, because collections of loose pages are just unwieldy. You don't do that now. You simply fix what you need to anywhere at any time. You don't go through the laborious process of creating a 'fair copy' (typing from handwritten notes) so that the publisher has half a chance to correct your spelling. You do that in situ. Your first draft should already be effectively a fair copy ... which is unnecessary.

Now you have the opposite problem - you've corrected things as you went, so do you even need to think of another draft? Of course you do, but the best way to get one is to effectively look at what you have & decide how to rewrite it better. The old way forced you to rewrite it. The new way says that you have the words right there in front of you, so you only need to change the bits that don't work. It makes you think that the fair copy of the first draft is so very close to a final version that it just needs a few tweaks - not in terms of grammar, because that's already done, but in terms of ... creativity or inspiration or word choice (grab a thesaurus), or some such that doesn't need another set of eyes to make suggestions, because there's all this automated stuff that can do it for you.

You are, in fact, an idiot.

Draft. This blog post will go from 'draft' (singular) to 'published' (past tense) at the click of a button. It's so easy, so tempting, & it's a struggle to resist that step that makes this real. It's a struggle to not assume that all of the automated things have helped me get to that point, such that I have reached perfection without any enlightenment, & everything, as it stands, will just be

Contemporanus

Don't ever let me be contemporary.

Even the word should have given it away 'con-temporary'. Your words will be temporary & any other option you come up with is just you trying to con yourself. It doesn't seem that long ago I was writing about a classic novel that was slightly out of time when it was published, but was perfect for the time of publication, even if it didn't intend to be - To Kill a Mocking Bird. It became a contemporary classic in a great sunburst of energy that imprinted on everyone's consciousness. It should have been temporary. Times change. Tempo. Now, reading that book without any reference to its time or place of setting, as it was intended, & also no connection to its time of publication, I easily labelled it irrelevant. 

I'm now reading The Grapes of Wrath, & I've quickly gotten the same impression - the post-depression migration of Americans does nothing for me. I have no sense of why it's important even for them, let alone for me. Yes, it's another book that had a big impact when published, & was picked up quickly to turn into a very successful - again, iconic - movie that I've never seen, but that doesn't make it good literature. In fact, I'd almost call it ... bad. There. I did. The language - the attempt to codify the way that ordinary people speak - is also forced in writing, because it's based on sounds & accents that you can't convey. We often have conventions for this that come about over time, but accents aren't fixed for a long period, so you can't rely on the impression lasting, & it's all relative to the author's own experience. The tone of the book, too, doesn't work for me. It makes sense that the author took a workmanlike approach to writing, because that shows & it fits. That simply makes the book, the process, the result, all a direct consequence of the times. Contemporary.

I know the problem from personal experience, though. I wrote some (unpublished) books in my misspent youth, & then went to re-write them, in the hope that my style had matured (heaven help me). The biggest problem is that such a youth was so long ago that computers were a revelation back then. I was sitting there at one of my laptops, writing my book directly into a cloud service while I was visiting my parents, & the subject of the chapter was the enhancement of computer services from three desktops in a cramped room to a converted pair of tutorial rooms where four desktops were networked to a printer. Heady stuff. How do you convey the excitement of such a transformation that would have empowered a whole range of students to do word processing & ... other stuff (who remembers)? My first thought was to 'dumb it down' or shy away from the reality that what I was writing - what I had written - was quite some time ago. Could I try to make it more 'now' - you know, contemporary? Not likely. In fact, the best course of action - which took a lot more writing - was to make it historical instead. That made sense. "I remember when we didn't have computers!" I do. I was a child. Computers were things that filled a whole room in Sci Fi movies in the 1960s - preferably a closed room, if it was a low budget movie.

All of the magic is happening there - inside that room. Don't open the door, because that's where the past is. Stay here, where we don't have to talk about computers or racism or socialism or any of those things that will just just disappear if we wait long enough. Let's be in the now, without necessarily claiming to be contemporary.