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Nuance is a hard thing for people to grasp hold of. We like our reactions to be simple, uncomplicated, straightforward. We like to love good things and hate bad things, and anything in-between is scary and confusing and difficult to comprehend.
Just a couple of nights ago, I was asked my opinion on a film that the askee clearly loved beyond all reason. "It was good," I said, my nonchalance clearly emphasising the fact that a "but..." was implied. Naturally, the other person ignored the first three words and concentrated on the unspoken "but". Even though I liked the film, I was positioned as being a detractor, not just in her eyes, but in mine as well. She argued the merits of the film. It was my place to counter her arguments, to explain myself, and that necessitated me listing all the ways the film had failed. Despite the fact that I really liked it.
This is just how conversation and opinions work, and it's fine when you're talking about films or music or art. It's not as fine when you're talking about criminals.
The other day, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. As I write this, they appear to be hashing out the details of his extradition to the USA. All over the net, people have been loudly voicing their opinions on the man and what he had done and what should become of him.
I should have known better, but I waded hip-deep into the argument, and there I made the biggest mistake of all: I tried to argue nuance.
Decades ago, Polanski skipped the USA before final sentencing for his 1977 crime of sexual intercourse with a minor. This is the only fact about the man that most people know about, and they've argued their opinions passionately based on this one piece of information.
The moment the arrest was made, a mob mentality broke out amongst a lot of otherwise-intelligent people. Mob mentalities are very satisfying. You get to join with a group of like-minded people and excercise moral righteousness. Blogs and Tweets have replaced torches and pitchforks.
The problem with the mob mentality is that you cannot then deviate from it, even slightly, without feeling very uncomfortable and a little bit dirty. If you introduce nuance, or play devil's advocate, you soon realise that the small step you've taken into ambiguity has put you out in the cold, away from the warm safety of the pack. It's not pleasant. It's so much nicer back in the middle of the pack, where you can get angry about words like "paedophile".
And you should, too. "Paedophile" is a word that should anger anyone who isn't one. It's a nasty word. (Actually, I don't find it nearly as abhorrent as "paederast", but I won't get into the semantics of definitions here. "Paedophile" can encompass it all for the time being.) Getting angry, though, doesn't preclude seeing the other issues at hand.
What other issues? Well, for that you'd need to see the excellent 2008 documentary Wanted and Desired, which unravels the whole post-arrest affair. Of particular note is the behaviour of Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, who was clearly more concerned with how he looked in the media than with the actual passage of justice. When you look at the judicial malfeasance that was taking place, it's hardly surprising that Polanski hopped on a plane to Europe.
Try arguing that, though. And try doing it on Twitter, where the 140 character limit is geared against nuance and complexity. Suddenly, you're in favour of paedophilia and letting its perpetrators go, especially if they made a film or two you really liked.
The lines were drawn in the sand when a group of film directors (including Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese) signed a letter calling for the release of Polanski. The two camps were clearly-defined, and George W. Bush's "You're either with us or against us" seemed to have survived a transition into the Obama era, the era that promised us complexity and intelligence.
So, what do I think should happen to Polanski? Guess what: I don't know. And it's okay not to know. It's okay not to have a solid, rigidly-defined opinion on what should happen next. The details of his crime tend to disgust me when I read them, but that doesn't mean I want to throw away the key. The problem with the concept of hell is that there are few crimes that should necessitate an eternity of torture, which is why developed countries have a judicial system that, theoretically, judges crimes to require varying degrees of punishment, not one all-purpose eternal prison. A free society still affords certain rights to those who break its laws, and the idea that Polanski should be suddenly devoid of all rights is a particularly stupid one.
What happened in that courtroom thirty years ago was as much a crime against Polanski's rights as it was against his victim's, who deserved to see her rapist tried fairly. The situation itself is messy and complicated and confusing for people who like their villains in black capes and their victims in dresses and their heroes in white. Any argument or conclusion that can be reduced to 140 characters is too simplified to be relevant to a case as difficult as this one.
Put down the pitchforks, douse your torches, and we might actually be able to talk about this.
I often argue with friends about their CDs. Sometimes passionately, occasionally heated, mostly halfheartedly, but arguments nonetheless. The nature of these arguments are not, as you might assume, that they shouldn't have bought such-and-such an album by that talentless group of hacks. No, I actually support those poor choices. My argument is that they should embrace them.
By that, I'm talking about a devoted section of your CD collection. Not everyone has a CD collection, mind you, even people who regularly buy them. (When I'm in any house with stacks of cracked and disorganised CDs, it takes a Herculean test of wills to prevent myself from instigating an alphetisation.) Those who do take care with their display tend to do so with a certain degree of pride, as they should. To many, the art you love says quite a lot about you, and such collections are defined not by what's in them, but by what isn't.
So, when friends decide to discretely discard the first album they bought because they did so in a state of confused hormonal teenageriness, I voice my objection. Such albums, regardless of their presumably embarrassing status, must maintain that devoted space in your collection; after all, they maintain a devoted space in your past.
To this day, I still have a fair number of albums I bought in my youth that I wouldn't necessarily buy today. These have, to my ever-so-slight relief, been drowned out by the large amounts of "worthy" and "indie cred" albums that loom either side, but they're still there. For instance, sitting down the bottom amidst the Rs and Ss is Seal's second album, which, like his first, was called "Seal". It's the sort of imaginative titling you only expect from George Foreman nine months after he's impregnated someone.
This album was significant to me, not just because of the songs that were on it, but because of the liner notes. Apparently, he'd been asked why he hadn't included lyrics in the album sleeve, and he decided to explain in his second album. "How many times," he writes, "have you fallen in love with a lyric that you thought went 'Show me a day with Hilda Ogden and I'll despair', only to find that it went 'Show me a way to solve your problems and I'll be there'?" (I have no problem admitting that I immediately recognised this to be a reference to "Show Me" from his first album. Oh yes, I was a big fan.) To his credit, Seal acknowledged that the reader's interpretation of the lyrics was far more important than the literal truth of the words.
At first, I was satisfied that I was one of the people who had correctly understood that lyric. Then, upon reflection, I wished I had actually (mis)heard it as "Hilda Ogden" lyric. Would I have got more out of it if I'd heard something different? Have I misheard other lyrics and not realised?
A few years later, I realised to my horror that "Stuck In The Middle With You" opened with the line: "Well, I don't know why I came here tonight..." as opposed to the version I'd always heard: "Well, I don't know why Kaye needs a knife..." This is a minor mistaken inference until you realised that Kaye is my mother's name, and Stealers Wheel had inadvertently become my own personal Sophocles.
Having completely forgotten about Hilda Ogden at this point, I became concerned with this "Stuck In The Middle With You" error. Briefly convinced that I was the only one who made this sort of error, I began scouring all of my favourite songs for their lyric sheets. Soon, I discovered that mishearing lyrics was such a wide phenomenon that it had a name: Mondegreen.
In 1954, American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term when she discussed the 17th Century ballad "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray." She'd always heard the opening stanza as:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray
And Lady Mondegreen.
Of course, the slain party was the Earl O' Murray, and the final line was actually: "And laid him on the green."
"The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them," she said, "is that they are better than the original."
Better than the original? She might have a point. The Rock Bottom Remainders is a rock band whose members are all writers (including Simpsons creator Matt Groening, horror author Stephen King, poet Maya Angelou, and many others). Amongst their playlist is the song "Louie Louie" by Richard Berry, made popular by The Kingsmen. In 1964, the FBI initiated what would turn out to be a two year investigation into the song, after claims that the garbled, nonsense lyrics were actually terribly obscene. (The warbles were, rumour suggested, a graphic description of a sailor and a woman going at it hammer and tong.) These false lyrics, which had resulted in the song's banning in many US States and on numerous radio stations, soon made their way into the public consciousness, and The Rock Bottom Remainders have taken delight in performing the obscene version whenever they can.
The "Louie Louise" debacle was decades ago, and has had plenty of time to seep into the consciousness of musicians and singers. So what if some of them actually do it on purpose? What if there are singers who bleed words into one another, over- or under-emphasise lyrics, deliberately put out a confused interpretation of what was originally written?
I used to wonder that whenever I'd listen to Tori Amos. Her beautiful distortion of her own words give her songs a tremendous amount of character, and it's impossible to imagine them without it. Was it deliberate, or is that just how she sings? I actually prefer not to know. I'm pretty sure I've misheard nearly every one of her songs to some degree, and I could fill pages and pages with lists of things I thought she'd said. I can't any more, though. My natural curiousity led me to look up the actual lyrics, and now the correct versions have replaced my imagined versions.
I'm fairly sure it's the rhythm in Mondegreens that we respond to, rather than the meaning. After all, who the hell is Hilda Ogden? The other day when I was idly murmuring one of the lines of Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence", I got to "...and the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made..." which is the sort of lyric that's brilliant when written in the 1960s, but wouldn't really work if written today. My friend Hannah noted that until recently she'd thought the line to be "...and the people bowed and prayed to the neon gothic maid...". "...which," she said, "I think is way cooler." I can definitely see that. I mean, had Paul Simon actually written "neon gothic maid", it wouldn't have made much sense, but that slight difference changes the line's rhythm completely. Finding out the lyric you've been singing all your life is something different feels wrong, and it's natural to want to keep singing the Mondegreen.
Even Bob Dylan has been a victim of the Mondegreen. When he offered marijuana to the Beatles, he was surprised to discover they'd never had it before. His shock was largely to do with the fact that when he'd heard "I Want To Hold Your Hand", he'd misheard "I can't hide" as "I get high". I really like this story, not just because Dylan hanging out with the Beatles is the music equivalent of Spider-man teaming up with the Fantastic Four, but because it pretty much proves that the Mondegreen gave rise to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
I've learned to embrace the Mondagreen. Even if they're not technically better, they are emotionally better, a fact acknowledged by someone I know who, when listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business" sings "baking carrot biscuits". Or, when hearing Motorhead perform "Ace of Spades", shouts "He hates his face!" during the chorus, a Mondagreen that started life as a genuine misapprehension, but was kept when the error was made clear. It doesn't matter who Lady Mondagreen is, or who Hilda Ogden is. As far as I can tell, they're both just neon gothic maids.
I've noticed a trend in America (it could be in other countries as well, but I've only noticed it happening in America) to say the word "redundant", when I think what they mean is "tautological". For instance: "So, on the news last night they were interviewing this corrupt politician... though I realise that's probably redundant!" (Truth be told, they likely said "realize" instead of "realise", but I couldn't bring myself to type it. Even though I just did. Hey, now I'm redundant!)
Sentences like that always require an extra moment or two to decipher. "Hang on, which bit is redundant? The interview was redundant? Why? Had someone else interviewed him earlier?" Then it becomes clear it was the word "corrupt" that was redundant, not the entire statement, and suddenly everything makes sense, even if you then missed the following sentence to figure it out.
I don't know why they do this. "Tautology" is brief and to-the-point. It highlights the fact that there is an adjective-noun combination (or, sometimes, an adjective-adjective combination) that you immediately know to hone in on. "Redundant" is too broad, too generic. You could be referring to anything with "redundant", including, pertinently, the fact that you said anything at all.
A bigger problem for me is that this imprecise language is used by people I admire -- really smart people, at that -- leaving me unable to engage in that terrifically fun exploit of insulting their overall intelligence based on a singular word. (Insulting the intelligence of such people is not something I'm proud of, but it is immensely satisfying, particularly if you already harbour a dislike of them.) When it's someone you like who does it, it immediately becomes nothing more than a perfectly-acceptable mistake, and even calling it a mistake is a bit on the harsh side. Keep in mind, I'm someone who used to say "for all intensive purposes", right up until the day I realised it didn't make sense, and that I should have been saying "for all intents and purposes". I'm man enough to admit that.
Another redundant tautology* is the phrase "I thought to myself". It's easy to see why people say it: it's lyrical, and so much more poetically satisfying than just saying "I thought". Again, I refrain from making fun at the expense of such people, because of the most popular iteration of that phrase. Think Louis Armstrong. Think songwriters Bob Thiele, George David Weiss, and George Douglas. Think one of the greatest songs of all time.
If you're going to tear the tautological "I think/thought to myself" asunder, you're going to have to dismiss "What a Wonderful World", the ballad that rendered nearly every subsequent ballad as being, well, redundant. The word "sentimental" is often used pejoratively, but this song is one of the few great defences that sentimentality has left. At less than three minutes long it doesn't overstay its welcome, and the incomparable Louis Armstrong elevates it stratospherically. "And I think to myself" is infinitely more beautiful a turn of phrase than "And I thiiiiiink". Even if the dragging out of "think" is done so with Armstrong's addictive vocals, I still prefer the "to myself", despite its position as the ultimate tautology.
Or, he asks enigmatically, is it?
Language changes over time. This is a fact of life. It evolves as society and humanity evolve, and even if this evolution is sometimes used a pathetic excuse by a minority of lazy educators to justify not teaching spelling and grammar, it's still fascinating to watch. The most alarmingly sudden evolution of language -- and I suspect that if it happens suddenly, it might no longer be called evolution -- has happened only recently, and I'm not sure anyone noticed.
I have only recently heard of Professor Kevin Warwick, so I won't presume to talk about his work with any authority. He is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, as well as, amongst many other things, one of the first proper cyborgs that humanity has produced. A chip he had implanted in his head allowed him to control a robotic arm that was hooked up to said chip via the internet. From New York's Columbia University, he was able to control the robot arm which was, at the time, at the University of Reading, all simply by thinking. The implications for this are astonishing and wide ranging, but I am, at the moment, primarily concerned with how it affects "What a Wonderful World".
You see, the next stage of Warwick's experiment was communication. An array was implanted in the brain of Warwick's wife -- who, in terms of spousal support, must surely win a prize of some kind -- and the two were able to communicate basic levels of empathic emotion from a remote distance. That, right there, is surely the future, and I suspect that Kevin Warwick may one day be a name that's casually rattled off with other scientists the general public may be aware of (Newton, Einstein, Hawkings, Feynman, etc).
His vast array of achievements, both in this field and similar fields, are deserving of acclaim, but they may cause a significant tangental achievement to be swept under the carpet: thanks to Warwick's work, the phrase "I think to myself" will, soon, no longer be a tautology. Once we gain the ability to think at another person, think at a wide range of people, and have them all think back at us, thinking to yourself will be an important distinction worth making. Suddenly, a classic song with an endearing and forgivable slip-up becomes a classic song with a poignant message pertaining to the modern human condition. All thanks to the extraordinary unpredictable relationship between scientific advancement and language.
What a wonderful world.
* In a fit of paradoxical irony, it should be noted that "redundant tautology" is, in fact, a redundant tautology.
As a writer, I'm often asked the same question over and over again: "Would you please not touch me there?" Afterwards, when my busy hands are kept to themselves, I'm then asked another question: "Where do you get your ideas from?" This is a very difficult question for a writer to answer, largely because the idea was probably stolen from somebody else.
Coming up with the idea is not the difficult part. That part is usually a mathematical process, adding two incongruous elements together to create a "what if?" scenario. ie: What if a zombie became President? What if bar stools became super-intelligent? What if the world's tallest woman fell in love with electricity
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It's been a while since I've thanked a major chain of department stores for anything, so I'd like to take this opportunity now to say a big THANK YOU. I won't say which store I'm thanking, as I don't want to embarrass them, but they know who they are.
I want to thank them because of the freedom they've given me. In the past, other department stores have curbed my freedom, telling me which products I can and can't buy, and it's been horrible. In fact, it was so horrible, I didn't even realise there was something better on the horizon until I walked into Better Department Store and saw a sign proclaiming their latest slogan
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There should be Alcoholics Anonymous-style meetings for people with socially-alienating traits that might exclude them from the specific social circles they live in. Like, rock aficionados who are afraid to admit that they don't like the Stones, or fantasy novel enthusiasts who don't "get" Tolkein, or comedy fans who watch Family Guy. Really embarrassing stuff like that.
My name is Lee, and I don't get the Three Stooges
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I don't want to alarm anyone, but I think I know who the next US President will be.
The debate regarding whether Star Trek has any sort of accuracy in predicting the future has been hotly contested. Well, warmly contested, anyway. On one side of the fence, you have people who argue that the medical recorder McCoy used in the original series managed to predict, by many decades, medical devices that are only now being developed. On the other side, Trek also claimed that the 1990s would see a global Eugenics War, and, based on my perusing of the internet, I can see that didn't happen. (I did, however, develop a huge amount of respect for latter day 1990s Trek for maintaining continuity in its acknowledgement of the wars, instead of shying away from a clearly-inaccurate claim by its 1960s predecessor.) Star Trek is about as popular as filmed US science fiction has ever been. Even Star Wars, which is not actually science fiction, doesn't get this sort of debate about future predictions, largely because it's set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away", meaning that it is, at best, historically inaccurate
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The English language is not an easy thing to follow. It has many unimpeachable rules that are frequently impeached and then peached. Take, for instance, the famous mnemonic "I before E except after C". Even the rule itself has its exception built into it, like someone proclaimed "I before E" and then found out that the rule was only correct 50% of the time, thus rendering it completely useless. Putting in the "except after C" bit only served to make life more complicated when people tried to write "speceis", "fanceis" and the doubly-confusing "deficeinceis".
To make life easier on everybody -- and hopefully make money by featuring as a chapter in a primary school text book -- I'm going to try to explain various elements of English that may cause confusion, beginning with opposites
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Living in the Age of Self-Realisation as we do (actually, I just think we live in an age of self-realisation, but I decided to add capitals to give it some Faux Importance), there are a lot of largely-depressing facts that you become aware of as time passes. Only recently have I come to terms with the fact that I may never play professional soccer, that it's possible I won't become a world-class musician, and that, given my advancing age, I'm unlikely to be a child prodigy. At anything.
One other recent realisation is that live music and me don't mix
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There are only a few subjects that cannot be written whilst they are taking place. Death is probably the most obvious one. You can talk about the lead-up to death, and, for those who have been brought back from the brink by a clever doctor or a fortuitously-placed car battery, you can talk about it after the fact, but you can't really talk about it right at the moment it's taking place.
The bigger one -- perhaps even more horrible than death itself -- is writer's block. Surely the very act of writing about writer's block means it's no longer an affliction, yes
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Comment by Lee Zachariah
on Roman Wasn't Destroyed In A Day
Procrasturbating