Also Into You: A Ulysses Book Report

(When I was slightly younger, I read books.

Then I did a humanities degree, and all reading stopped together. Now I'm in Act III of the smash hit So You Had the Nerve to Be Born After About 1980, which sees you trying to save up from whatever work you can get from within the no-experience-begets-no-experience millennial catch-22 to move out of your childhood home.

This has, though, meant I've had access to all of the books again, including my sister's. She read Joyce and Faulkner as a teenager where I went for Woolf and Manley Hopkins (and various Non-English Euro-ish Canon things irrelevant here), so I've been working through them because why not.

Well, I finished Ulysses last month and have been going on about it to people who've politely expressed interest ever since, and I thought to myself that when I wanted to get my paragraph-length thoughts about stuff off my chest there was a time I'd use this blog.

In some ways, explaining my thoughts about reading Ulysses and how I'd suggest working up to could work as a nice form of putting my money where my mouth has been before – I don't think much of my thoughts about things have changed an awful lot in five years (dear Lord) beyond slightly less optimism about things getting better without a really stonking amount of work from us.

So I sat down and wrote what follows earlier today, and halfway through realised that tomorrow is Bloomsday. Or today, when you're reading this, because who on earth would miss a coincidence so hilarious and fitting!

I'd like to imply I might do more things around here, but I don't like to make promises (even obliquely) that I don't know I can keep. I hope you've all been well, anyway.)


How Should I Read Ulysses? [link]

Well, there's a couple of points leading up to that that I think it's worth addressing.

First, "Why should I read Ulysses?" My only answer here is "Because you want to", which to be fair is the same answer I'd give to pretty much anything phrased like that. I don't really think glumly trudging through anything just because you feel obliged to is really worth it, but especially given Joyce's writing (as far as I can tell) is so thoroughly built on humour, an approach devoid of joy and levity is especially unhelpful.

If you don't particularly want to, I encourage you not to read Ulysses. I'm sure Joyce wouldn't be offended. The "you" I've got in mind here is people who think they might like to read it but aren't sure if they'd be able to do it or if they wouldn't understand it or otherwise feel a bit daunted by it.

In addressing the second component of the question "How should I read Ulysses?", which is the assumption that there's a hard and fast answer to that question, I'd like, if you don't mind, to take a detour to Paris like Stephen does between Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the beginning of Ulysses.


Always Having Paris [link]

There are many reasons why you might go to Paris. Maybe you like French and French culture. Maybe you want to see the Mona Lisa, Rodin's sculptures, and Van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône in the flesh. Maybe you want to go for a romantic stroll along the Seine with your lover after dark and look at the Eiffel Tower lit up against the night sky, or pay your respects at Notre-Dame, or lurk around the Catacombs. Maybe you're visiting someone, or you're curious to see what all the fuss is about.

There are easily as many reasons why you might not want to go to Paris, such as the expense, the (other) tourists, the food, Parisians, the stolen artefacts, the way everyone goes on about it, or just because your time and energy is limited and you'd prefer to go somewhere less standard if not outright cliché'd.

These are are all good reasons, and I've thought most of them at one point or another. If you do decide to go (and this will be more or less of an undertaking depending on where you're coming from), your experience will be yours alone. You could spend a weekend going round museums, or four months at Nation and a flat in Clichy (which technically isn't Paris, but is still on the Métro) noodling on an overpriced acoustic guitar and avoiding your course reading, or live for thirty years in a little house at Rue Saint-Maur teaching singing and piano and writing books, or anything in between.

I wouldn't say any of those are the wrong way to be in Paris. You can spend as much time and energy there as you like, but you'll only ever see a part of it, and perhaps really understand less than that. It's the same with anywhere, but that doesn't make your stay pointless. For one thing, you could always go back, possibly after consulting a guide.


Two Jokes Walk into a Bar... [link]

If you were of such a mind, you could say that there are two kinds of humour: jokes that build to a punchline, and the kind of funny story that will make you laugh or smile but as much because of how it's told as from the individual laughter breaks. (Ulysses, I'm happy to reassure you, has both.)

In a similar way, I would say that the type of writing that Joyce (and to a degree Woolf, Faulkner, Flaubert, Proust and Chekhov and many other very "stylistic" writers that we may as well lump together as modernists, though it's far from a new thing) produce is more like the funny story than the punchline-based joke in terms of what it does and what it's about.

In this sense something like Les Misérables or Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace or the Iliad (staying in the "books you're supposed to have read" (ugh) pile) are in the punchline category - they have a plot, and finding out what happens at the end when things get wrapped up is a key part of the appeal and the design of the story. I mention "canon" books I like (and War and Peace) to stress that I don't see this as a bad thing at all, just a difference in approach.

You could fairly easily describe the plot of the second group of books I mention in a sentence or two (possibly rather long sentences for some of them) and feel like you'd got a sense of what they're about. That's not all there is to them, of course - I'm willing to bet you know the plot of Pride and Prejudice even only because it's in the DNA of every romcom ever, but people still read it. But the fact remains they've got that kind of punchline.

I think the thing that really tells you you're in "funny story" territory is that when pressed, you end up saying it's really about nothing, or everything, or people, or the world, or the experience of being alive. You've probably heard that Ulysses follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he goes around Dublin on one day in 1904 (exactly 115 years ago today, in fact) and echoes the plot of the Odyssey, but that's just a pocket map of the Paris Métro. You could go deeper and deeper in reading about Ulysses and Joyce, cover your bedside table with Lonely Planet guides and fill a bookmarks folder with travel blog tabs and restaurant recommendations, but (in that infuriatingly smug old saying) that'll never be the same as doing it instead of reading about it, just as recounting your favourite sketch or standup routine is an unforgivable sin, especially in a world with YouTube.


Origin of the World [link]

I think the deal with a lot of "difficult" writers (the ones who aren't just being wilfully obscure for the sake of it, that is) is that it helps to be tuned into where they're coming from, which often starts from the same place everyone else does. Chekhov started off writing little gag-a-day-newspaper-comic-style stories, and you can follow how his tone gradually develops until he gets to the people-on-a-stage-not-saying-anything zone that his plays (more or less) take place in. Similarly, my advice to anyone interested in getting into jazz (only when explicitly asked, I hasten to add, in the same way that I keep my equally amateur opinions on reading James Joyce firmly to myself unless prompted, honest) is to start early on with the Louis Armstrong (or even Scott Joplin ragtime) stuff and go from there. I say this not just because it's simpler (or more direct), but because it's exactly where all of our favourite things and people in bebop and onwards like John Coltrane and Miles Davis (progressing through such as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt) grew up and sprang from.

In case you're worrying, I'm not now going to say you've got to read the Odyssey before you read Ulysses! (I think a lot of what I've said about not being intimidated out of reading Ulysses can apply to reading the Odyssey if you fancy it, and it's definitely in the punchline category - Emily Wilson's recent translation looks pretty great from the line-by-line readings on Twitter this lapsed Classicist has seen.)

As it happens, Joyce started with a short story collection called Dubliners that very much ties into his later work: various characters from it pop up on Bloom's travels, and he himself originated as a chapter in the collection that rather grew in the telling. I would recommend starting there like I did, though with the assurance that Ulysses has a lot more humour compared to the occasionally rather bleak goings-on.

I don't want to burden you with a checklist of landmarks to colour your impressions going in (I still don't read the introductions until afterwards), but Joyce's meticulous plotting and structuring is definitely there if you know where to look. I just read it straight through cold with no idea and was bowled over anyway.

Next he did his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which introduces his semi-avatar Stephen Dedalus, a bookish but likeable young lad from a precarious household whose warring desires might be his undoing. He's also the other main character of Ulysses: its plot directly follows on from the end of the Portrait.

We start right from Stephen being a toddler and go from there, so you see first-hand the kind of eye-wateringly classics- and church-based education that they were on the receiving end of. Again, there's less humour than Ulysses, and far more explicit references to The Canon because that's what Stephen is immersed in.

Which brings me to the final part of the question "How should I read Ulysses?".


What If I Don't Get the References? [link]

To me what makes a work really great is that it's solid: it feels like a real, living thing. By this I more or less mean that it has depth, but I would hesitate to use that phrasing because of its contamination by canon-fetishism.

Perhaps the simplest two dimensions a work can expand over are what it says (here, the plot) and how it says it (the writing style). The next we could add is kind of self-awareness that I'm similarly unhappy calling irony because of its appropriation by edgelord dickheads.

By self-awareness I mean the work is aware of other works in the area and what a work like itself would normally be expected to do as a result. The next step of this (which I would argue is what Joyce really gets into with Ulysses) is grabbing hold of (traditionally, i.e. expectedly) unrelated works and genres. To resort to cartoonishly broad strokes, we go from such as the Impressionists' deliberate stylistic effects (subverting the expectation for what was now "photorealistic" portraiture) to Duchamp's urinal Fountain.

In humour contexts, this next step is sarcasm or deadpan, the classic marker of adult-level humour. This isn't to say it totally avoids or rejects direct, child-level humour (a fear of perceived sincerity is a defining feature of that later stage of being a child), but has the layered, multidimensional recognition that it is entirely possible, and necessary even, to joke and be serious at the same time.

It is, if you like, a growth beyond binaries, and I think this is where it appeals to my deconstructive/post-colonial, social justice-y little heart.


Queasy Undergraduate Pimple Scratching [link]

It's an accusation that's levelled at modernism and the various 20th century critical "post-"s that they use their elaborate references, vocabulary and structure effectively just to show off and/or pass off trivial and unoriginal observations as Deep Thorts. I would agree that this area does allow bad-faith and just bad writers (okay, okay, writers whose writing I feel doesn't do the kind of things that I think the format enables or indeed requires to justify the strictures of its structures and its demanding demands on its readers), and though you can be a hack in any field, it's rare to leave your dupes so out of pocket.

I would argue that Joyce is respected (appeal to authority alert) because he doesn't do this. It's true that for Ulysses he foregrounds his references to a much greater extent than previously (to the point that they're a focus of the novel just as much as the plot, as is a key modernist hallmark) - there are some famous places where the narrative dizzyingly tries on the styles of various writers, periods and famous works one after the other, mining them for humour and emotional weight equally.

I would argue that if you get the specific reference then that's a bonus, but you haven't had the punchline whistle over your head if you don't know all the books, languages and places that Joyce (or rather, the universe of his novel) does. Mr Bloom doesn't know that he's retracing a warped version of the Odyssey, but Joyce doesn't make him suffer for it - given how the scene changes aren't explicitly marked and how reluctant he was to cough up his very precise blueprint for the book, I don't think he means us to either. (Though he waves us a hint in the title!)


The Cracked Lookingglass of a Servant [link]

So what are the stylistic acrobatics for, then? Well, I'm just a non-Irish underemployed humanities grad stopping by on my way out of a neighbouring field, so you should really ask someone who's better informed about it than me, but here's the feeling I came away with:

I was talking about extended self-awareness, the kind that moves from "I know an X should do this, but this X is doing this" (which you may recognise as the basis of all humour) to "actually, what do you mean by an X in the first place? Does this count as an X? Why?" Along with the style games (and other tweaking of gender/class), there's a pervasive theme of what Irishness is and what Ireland's place in the world is - at one point (early on in the book, in the exchange from which the famous quote about history being a nightmare from which Stephen is trying to awake is taken (I'd argue) slightly out of context) there's a reflection on the problem of an Irish person expressing themself in English, one of the lit essay-friendly soundbites Joyce jokily mentioned deliberately festooning his text with. In that context, you might get a feeling of wondering whether the inauthentic nature (in this sense) of Irish English is like the various literary pastiches (up to and including the Odyssey frame) - or on the contrary, an assertion that if even bogged down by the various frames his novel can tell a compelling story, then perhaps Ireland's cultural position bogged down - to put it far too mildly - by the British can also be withstood and grown past. The deeply, almost manically specific Dublin setting, characters and dialogue can serve as a mirror for the whole world, just as that other pillar of modernism, the stream of consciousness, affirms that the internal thoughts and rhythms of a single person can mirror the whole of human experience.


The Bazaar Fireworks [link]

But to return to my initial theme, I think the reason for the novel's fireworks is just as much because it amuses Joyce to do it like that - no-one's making him, after all. I fully accept that given I have some biographical similarities to Joyce (alas severely limited) in terms of educational background, as I've mentioned in my previous meanderings on the theme I'm less susceptible to being fazed by Difficult Canon Things - I mean having finished Ulysses I'm leisurely picking my way through Finnegans Wake, for heaven's sake. (Take the more out-there bits of Ulysses and just... keep going. I'm having fun.) But though on one level everything in Ulysses is effectively presented as a joke, it isn't at our expense, just as it isn't at Bloom's. I felt like I had permission to wander along the riverbank and admire the view without knowing the names of all the bridges from memory, and I don't see why you shouldn't too.

Once I felt tuned into his humour, I found Ulysses extraordinarily moving and beautiful, and very funny with it. It would be understandable if Joyce was just angry with his position and his country's and took his revenge for the pillage and destruction of his people and cultural inheritance by using the British's own words and works against them, but he refuses to take that kind of easy way out. Instead, through humour and kindness, as reflected in Bloom (mostly - we're still human, and that should be shown kindness too), he makes the far more powerful and demanding statement that he will take all of it, embrace and reflect with love the whole dazzling expanse of humanity and the world in all of its equally beautiful guises and voices just as the Starry Night Over the Rhône dazzles with its declaration that after all the darkness, what matters most is light. We come home from the myths and monsters and misdeeds (including our own) that we refuse to serve, and in the end what counts is the affirmation that's become a cliché but who cares because yes we say yes we will Yes.

(Happy Bloomsday, and bon voyage if you decide to pack your bags and set out!)

On Signifer and Signified, Depiction and Endorsement, and Why Dapper Laughs and Friends Are Complete Tossers

(My laptop got stolen. This is annoying for a couple of reasons, most saliently to this blog because I lost about a dozen posts in various states of completion (along with a load of other stuff that I really should have backed up as well - come back, The Cloud, all is forgiven…). In some ways, though, it's sort of liberating. I'm now back to a clean slate and free to write about whatever I fancy without thinking I should really be using one of the things I've had festering on my hard drive for longer than is probably good for any of us.)

A big thing in the UK in the last couple of weeks has been the rise and fall of a moderately popular Vine user calling himself Dapper Laughs who ended up with his own TV show on ITV 2 (a secondary channel of one of our old commercial terrestrial channels that I can't remember ever consciously watching). His schtick was basically to cat-call and otherwise abuse women in marginally socially acceptable ways and… Hang on, I don't think there was an and. That was it. I mean, I spent half an hour looking through his Vines trying to work out what the fuss was about and honestly didn't really get why he was called a comedian in his Twitter bio, other than that his name had "Laughs" in it. It just seemed to be six-second snatches of some guy being a dick to strangers, which I know some people would laugh at but probably wouldn't call comedy. But I digress.

When the Internet heard of the fact that a well-established national TV channel (sorry, can't quite bring myself to call ITV well-respected) was giving a platform to this guy, a lot of people were fairly unhappy about it, to put it mildly. There were articles in online papers and people tweeting a petition to ask ITV to cancel the show (called Dapper Laughs: On The Pull, just in case you weren't cringing hard enough to rupture something before), in light of which (coupled with its star's attempt to release a charity single to help the homeless while mocking them backfiring spectacularly) the channel announced a few days ago that the show would indeed not be returning, and Daniel O'Reilly, the real name of the man starring in the videos, appeared on a news show saying that he had retired the character going on the recent public reaction to it.

To which I say, fair enough. In the interests of full disclosure, I signed the petition. I end up signing a fair number of petitions opposing the oppression of various societal groups. The thing is, I've seen people around the usual places (Facebook, Twitter, The World Away From A Keyboard) saying that they don't see what the harm was in Dapper Laughs' TV show considering his creator has since said that his character was a deliberate stereotype, and that the censorship of comedy like this is a mark of encroaching social fascism on the part of the PC Brigade (or their Internet counterpart, Social Justice Warriors). I think this raises some general points, so as I'm sure you've been missing I'm going to launch into some conceptual rant stuff.


Signifying Nothing [link]

I think the core issue here is whether the depiction of a behaviour should be judged in the same way that the behaviour itself is. This is the basic problem of creative censorship, which has a lively history going back at least as far, for example, as the Marquis de Sade, whose output delights in trying to disgust the reader in pretty much any way it can think of. I don't want to go into detail, but pretty much any remotely taboo behaviour you can think of is probably described in gory detail somewhere in there.

Semiotics (from Greek sēmeîon, "sign") is the study of the relationship between symbols and meanings. With an opener as woolly as that you can probably imagine it covers a huge amount of thought, so any single-sentence description will be extremely cursory at best. The reference in the first part of the title is to Ferdinand de Saussure's take on this by dividing language (in whatever form) into symbols and what they mean, which translated literally from the French is signifier and signified. (I don't think that’s a very helpful translation, as we aren't nearly so happy to mess around with participles as French is. Oh well.) This doesn't seem like such a revolutionary concept when stated as basically as that (and especially after the intervening hundred years or so of sociological work that you've probably been passively exposed to even if you don't take an interest in it).

The important part is the idea that symbol and meaning are separable. This is something that is actually fairly uncomfortable considering the fact that we consider meaning as expressed through language as something fixed by default. You give someone your word with the implication that it's trustworthy. You quote someone in their own words in order to express what they mean as fully as you can. A large swathe of the Abrahamic religions is that fundamental truths about the world are expressed in the word of God. Misquoting or quote mining is a particularly big deal because using someone's own words against them feels like an unnatural and vicious thing.

But it's true. While we frequently think of language as primarily a means of self-expression, it's really at root a means of communication (just as we like to think of ourselves as individual actors rather than single members of society - not that either pair can't be true at the same time, of course). If you have a language spoken by one person, and no-one else has the capacity to learn it natively, that language is considered dead in the water from a linguistic viewpoint. Language is in this way the only perfect democracy that we are ever likely to see - if you say a word has one meaning, and every other speaker of your dialect says another, then after you the word's meaning will have changed, as it has changed on countless other words before (random example - soon used to mean immediately until people used it enough that it got worn down to the current meaning).

What's this got to do with Dapper Laughs? Well, consider the material released under that name as a set of symbols (yeah, let's overanalyse it to death, I presume if you've got this far you've got nothing more exciting on). We see depictions of various kinds of misogyny without comment, and then are told outside the material that it's satire. The thing is, without being explicitly told that what we're watching is satire, I don't think it's at all apparent that it is, which is the problem - the usual expectation of satire is that it takes a particular behaviour or mindset and exposes its flaws by engaging with it, twisting it until it snaps under its own weight. So, for instance, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal gradually shows that it's satirical as its horrifying suggestion for how to reduce the overpopulation of the Irish poor and their food shortage (hint: both would be resolved at once) is discussed completely deadpan, with no apparent thought given to the implications of the suggestion other than the logistical problems it would cause, and how they could be solved. We could suggest Voltaire's Candide or Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (even Blackadder Goes Forth, considering what year it is) as other examples where the overblown barbarity, pettiness and stupidity of the characters towards the protagonist and each other is never explicitly challenged by the narrative or the narrator, but the infuriatingly placid tone with which they are described suggests a deep sense of outrage (which in Catch-22 is openly expressed by Yossarian and in Blackadder by Captain Blackadder himself, though both are treated as though they are the ones with the problem). In the case of Sade, the impression I get is that beyond simply wanting to goad a reaction out of the reader (trolling is a art, after all) he's playing with the idea of the Enlightenment making reason overcome the so-called natural order of things by his characters thinking up and indulging in such "unnatural" acts, as well as, like Voltaire in Candide, trying to get the reader to show some critical engagement with the ideas presented (a mix of the socially progressive and the usual shock fodder) rather than simply swallowing vapidly optimistic rhetoric wholesale.

In short, satire is generally expected to pass comment on its target by, well, satirising it. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have any sort of ironic distance from the behaviour he's purportedly satirising. The joke seems to be on the women who are being abused; this kind of behaviour is actually so pervasive that but for the camera I don't think many people would be able to tell that this wasn't just some guy walking around and being a tosser. It's true that it's frequently quite hard to tell the difference between the extreme forms of any behaviour or mindset and its satirical imitation, but I'd argue that the lack of any sort of implied distance between the writer and the character kind of makes any claims to ironic imitation fall flat. In the absence of a symbol with an established meaning, the remaining semiotic text remains ambiguous and so open to the simplest interpretation via Occam's Razor, that the guy wandering around and acting like a tosser is, in fact, a tosser.


Noise Pollution [link]

If that was the whole of my problem with Dapper Laughs, I probably wouldn't be writing this post, and I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t have signed the petition. Whatever the anti-PC Brigade Brigade say, those of us who objected to Dapper Laughs' show didn’t just not have a sense of humour. The tipping point as suggested in the body of the petition (i.e. that ITV should #canceldapper) was that the previous questionably-satire was put on national television.

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement. It's just a bit of fun, what's the problem? Why do you have to overanalyse everything? If you don't like it, then don't watch it. Language is communication - that means the things you and other people say affect every other person that speaks or is exposed to your language. If I habitually went in for spuriously gratuitous physics analogies, I'd compare it to the fact that every object in the universe exerts a gravitational pull (however small) on every other one. Just because you decide not to consume a particular piece of media doesn't mean it won't be able to affect you or people around you.

One really useful term I've come across since taking an active interest in Internet social justice is the idea of microaggressions. These are small things that make people of a particular non-privileged group feel unwelcome that might sound petty if complained about individually, but which when they occur hundreds of times a day build up a distinctly unhealthy atmosphere. I've mentioned the phenomenon of people using the word gay as a general-purpose insult: people usually protest that they themselves aren't homophobic, or that they think of it as a different word that happens to sound and be spelt the same way, but it nonetheless contributes to the overriding impression that gay equals bad.

If we want it to become socially agreed upon that cat-calling and casual objectification of women in general is unacceptable (that is, that it's not okay to consider women as anything less than people first and foremost with their own agency and autonomy, rather than a collection of publicly owned body parts) anything that promotes the latter should be challenged. Challenged, not banned, note, because we didn't storm into the ITV headquarters (wherever that is, or whether it actually exists as a single physical building) with pitchforks and flaming copies of The Female Eunuch Gender Trouble and demand that Dapper Laughs be cancelled/his head on a plate/both on pain of torching the place. We signed a petition. Online. I think I was sitting in my dressing gown and with a mug of tea at the time. We asked them to cancel Dapper Laughs' show and stated our reasons (it contributes to the idea that dehumanising women is a source of comedy and therefore acceptable) in enough numbers that ITV listened and did so, because as a commercial TV company they depend on the good opinion of their viewers (or, as some have suggested, because the show was bombing in the ratings and they saw an opportunity to take some credit anyway).


In Conclusion…

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement, fine. It does equal normalisation, though, and there are things that we as a society seem finally to be deciding shouldn't be normal. Transgressive humour (à la George Carlin, Jimmy Carr, Eddie Murphy and Frankie Boyle when still good) incorporates the abnormality of its subject matter as part of its humour. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have been incorporating anything in particular into his act. He's just been being a complete tosser.

(Hmm, now tosser doesn't sound like a word anymore. I imagine for anyone outside of demotic UK English it probably didn't to start with. Oh well. I'm thinking next time might be a music thing, but I don't know. See yous then!)

Primer: Touch Typing

Hi! After taking a break for the summer I thought I'd come back gently with a primer on (what I consider) a useful life skill that I've got into properly recently. Hope you're all well, anyway.


I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I probably type more words in a day than I actually speak aloud (slightly skewed as I've been at home for a bit and my family currently based here tend to be at work a lot of the time), and I get the impression that this isn't so unusual for people of my age and interests.

It used mostly to be the case that people who had to use keyboards (once that group had expanded beyond professional typists) would either "learn to type" (that is, learn to touch type) or rely on a so-called hunt and peck method where you physically look at the keys and pick out the ones you want with one or two fingers, usually the index fingers on each hand. The system that I and a lot of my friends have ended up with is a hybrid system, where we can type blind (without looking) fairly quickly, but not using the classic touch typing method (which uses all the fingers in a regular pattern).


Key Points [link]

One of the little projects I've been working at since I last posted here has been learning to type "properly", i.e. according to proper touch typing technique. I'm still getting the hang of it (I'm typing this post using it, easily at about half the speed I could type with previously), but I think it's a worthwhile thing to be able to do.

I got to this point by going back to looking at more efficient ways to get text into a computer than the standard QWERTY layout (such as Dvorak, Colemak and even chorded stuff as well as steno), which at the end of the day is all really interesting, but looking at the amount of time and effort involved (and the fact that there's no guarantee that someone else's setup will have or support your favourite alternative) made me think it'd be more useful just getting better at QWERTY for now.


Why bother? [link]

When I'm learning a new skill (for instance a new instrument) I think it's important to make sure I've got the basic techniques right. If you're lucky, bad technique just makes your job harder, and after a certain point you have to go back and laboriously re-muscle memorise a load of core stuff, which is annoying, and happens a fair amount in self-teaching (I had to rework a load of stuff on guitar one year in, for example). If you're unlucky, you won't notice your sloppy technique until you do yourself a serious injury at some point, meaning you may not be able to carry on doing your thing or indeed several others. (I heard someone say recently that tendinitis has killed more music careers than heroin - us drummers have to watch our backs as well.)

If you type using a hybrid system you've slowly come up with over the years through frequent Internet use, the chances your index and middle fingers do most of the work. This means there's a fair amount of stretching and shifting going on to get to the different parts of the keyboard, and where there's a lot of uncomfortable stretching going on carpal tunnel syndrome may be waiting on the other side. The idea with touch typing is to balance the work as evenly as possible between your fingers, which also reduces the amount of hand movement you'll need to do. As a bonus you'll probably eventually be able to type faster as well, though be prepared for your words per minute rate to fall dramatically at the start if you do try it out.


Settling In [link]

Good news! If you can already type blind (without looking), you've got a leg up over a lot of beginner typists. The focus will then be on retraining your fingers to pick the right keys unprompted.

To start, we'll get the home position down.

How to get into the home position

1. Lightly rest the index finger of your left hand on the F key and the index finger of your right hand on the J key. (They should both have some kind of dot on so you can find them quickly.)
2. Rest the other three fingers of each hand in a line next to them, so that the keys you're touching are ASDF and JKL; respectively.
3. Finally, rest your right thumb on the space bar (your left thumb can just hover; it isn't used in classic touch typing) and raise the angle of your hands slightly so that your wrists are in the air.

This is the resting position that you start and return to in touch typing. Take your hands off and practise jumping to it without looking. Now you know why the bumps are there!


At Home [link]

Very slowly (slow enough that you can do it without making any mistakes - the temptation to rush is natural and treacherous) practise keeping your fingers in the home position and typing each letter. I suggest getting into the habit of pressing each key as lightly as will register to reduce wear and tear on the keyboard and more importantly your hands. If you like, try saying each one aloud to associate the finger movement and the key better - I found that the spacebar came pretty naturally, as did the commoner letters, but getting a handle on J, K and ; took quite a while, especially once I starting having to move around a bit more.

If you like, try typing these venerable chestnuts of the touch-typing world that only use home position keys:

AS	ADD	LAD	JADA
LA	SAD	LASS	FLAK
JA	FAD	FADS	FLASK

Yes, there aren't many with J. Sorry about that, it's almost like it's a really uncommon letter in English or something.


Playing Away [link]

You may have noted that the keyboard and indeed the alphabet contains more than eight keys/letters, which is inconvenient but difficult to avoid. The way we get past this is that each finger is responsible for the keys above and below it.

So, for instance, you type an E (a useful skill) by moving the middle finger of your left hand from its home position on D up a row, and then as soon as it's finished it goes back home again. That's very important, and why we practised picking out the home position again before - the method only works if you run things primarily from the home row.

A thing that I came up against is the fact that the keys slant a bit between rows, presumably in some misguided attempt at being ergonomic, so sometimes when working things out I found it helpful to slide my hands into a home position a row up or down (so for instance moving up to QWER UIOP or down to ZXCV M,./) to see where I was aiming for.

To test this out, I suggest you (slowly) work out how to type each of the vowels (not including Y just for the moment), again saying the key aloud to bind the motion to the letter And Then Going Back To The Home Position. While you're at it you may as well get to grips with the comma and the full stop (which you're welcome to call a dot or a period if that makes you happy) as well.


Worth Pointing Out [link]

Something you might have noticed right from the off is that the home position and its up- and down-versions leave an awkward gap between your hands (on the home row, covering the G and H keys). To get these ones you stretch the respective index fingers across a key. I know I said before that we're trying to avoid stretching, but with the amount you're avoiding in general I don't think this'll hurt too much.

Going back to the unhelpful key camber, this means that your left index finger is responsible for B as well, which on my keyboard is about an inch from the home position. I still get my right index finger reflexively hopping over and hitting it an annoying amount of the time, but it's worth sticking to the proper fingering so that you can type faster and cleaner in the long run.

A thing that I had fun with and might help you as well is coming up with a mnemonic for what letters are used on each finger, going home-up-down as the home positions are the most memorable. Make yours as silly or lewd as will stick best. I came up with:

A QuiZ			KI-KOMMAn	(,)
Some WaX	FoR VeGeTaBles	HYNJUM!	LOw-DOT	(.)
DECoys			SEMA-Ph-OR	(; /)

(Kikkoman is a brand of soy sauce that I noticed in the family kitchen and amused me. Please don't DMCA me, guys...)

Whether you bother with my daft system or one of your own, I've found it useful to sit down before doing some typing and do the type-and-say-aloud association game going through each finger in the order above (so going AQZ SWX DEC FRV-GTB and so on).


Out Of The Comfort Zone [link]

The home row and its neighbours we've looked at make up the majority of what you'll need to type, but there's also some important stuff to the right of the semicolon and elsewhere. What you do there (and for keys to the left of the A key) is to stretch with the little finger of the relevant hand. Yes, more stretching, but still less than hybrid or (perish the thought) hunt and peck. The bigger keys over here like Backspace, Enter and Shift are easier to get at because of their size, apart from which you'll probably only really need the apostrophe and the question mark with any regularity. (Unless you're one of those tiresome people that refuses to nest round brackets and switches to other ones [like this {or this}] in which case you're on your own.)

Which brings me to an important point: how to touch type the Shift keys. The idea is that you use the Shift key with the little finger on the opposite hand to the one you want. This takes a fair bit of getting used to, but once you've got it down it really helps to keep your flow when you need to use a capital letter or a symbol like the question mark (which is what that abrupt segue was playing off, if you're feeling a little conversational whiplash).


Your Number Is Up [link]

For the sake of simplicity I've left the number keys out till now, but you just treat them like another upper row on top of the letter keys (so the relative home position is 1234 7890 with the index fingers covering 5 and 6 as well). It's tempting if you need a quick symbol like an exclamation mark or a pair of brackets just to go for it with an index finger, but as always If You Use The Right Fingers There Will Be Cake. Plus I find it kind of fun to do the slightly ridiculous finger gymnastics for an exclamation mark.


Some Footnotes [link]

That just about covers the standard keys. I don't know if you go in for keyboard shortcuts (though if you're seriously considering effectively relearning how to type for efficiency I imagine you might be), but I haven't found much consensus about how you should go for Ctrl, Alt, Start, F0 keys and so on (probably because they're a comparatively recent addition since the days of the typewriter).

I tend to alternate between left and right Ctrl in the same way as for the Shift keys, and as I'm on a laptop with an Alt and AltGr combo (and I use enough weird characters that my AltGr key sees actual use)  I've found it comfortable to put my left thumb to work for when I want to use a keyboard shortcut that involves it (and move my right thumb off the spacebar for AltGr). I imagine that probably won't be a problem for especially many people, though - same with the function keys. (They're infrequent and cumbersome enough on a laptop I don't mind about breaking touch typing flow to get at them.)

If you have and use a numeric keypad to the right of the standard keys you might see that the 5 key has a marker on it like the F and J keys, which is for using your right hand with your middle finger on the 5 and using that row as a miniature home row. If you do a lot of data entry it might be worth working at, but I deal with few enough numbers in my pampered humanities world that the normal number keys are fine for me.

As a last remark, you're actually doing a pretty significant amount of rewiring, and in all probability suddenly putting your smaller fingers to a lot more use than they've previously had to deal with. It's normal for your wrists and forearms to ache a bit after a good typing session when you're first switching over - if that's happening, maybe have a break and come back to it later the same day or leaving it till the next.


In Summary


A more colourful version of the above. Source

If you've gone through all of the above then congratulations! You've got the basic knowledge you need to make a go of touch typing. There's plenty of online games and resources to work at your speed and precision (I like http://www.typing-lessons.org for a gradual walkthrough of the various zones and http://www.typingstudy.com for letting you practise with your local layout rather than assuming you've got a US setup) but I've found I got and get as much satisfaction (if not more) from just opening my text editor and typing what I'm thinking or chatting to people (apologising for any mis-hits in advance...) as from sitting there and typing things against the clock that beep when I get something wrong (as useful as that is).

Since I've started touch typing seriously I've found that the activity of typing is much less tiring than it was (even if I still get the wrist aches after a protracted bout, though less than at the start), as I'm no longer hopping around with my hands as much and so can approach typing with a smoother rhythm, if that's not too abstract a way of putting it.


Good luck! I hope this little interlude is helpful. I'm putting the finishing touches on one or two pieces I thought would fit in here, so hopefully see you in a week!

Also Into You: Three Songs From "The Smiths" (Part Two of Two)

(The second half of our Smiths analysis. First half here.

Content warning: the second section of this post deals with extremely disturbing events.)

Songs:	The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, Suffer Little Children
By:	The Smiths
Album:	The Smiths
Year:	1984

The Ghosts In The Storm Outside [link]

There are three slow A major songs on this album - Reel Around The Fountain, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, and Suffer Little Children. If you check the track listing from the first half, you'll see that the latter two both close their respective sides; the three together mark the beginning, middle and end of the record. All three see Morrissey using a gentle, almost crooning register that we don't really hear anywhere else in The Smiths: the high camp vocal tics and mock-hysterical delivery are absent.

In The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, we get what appears to be a fairly straightforward lullaby from a parent figure to a child who can't sleep: "Please don't cry / For the ghosts in the storm outside / Will not invade this sacred shrine / Or infiltrate your mind"; "And when the darkness lifts and the room is bright / I'll still be by your side: / For you are all that matters and / I love you till the day I die". We have overtones of some kind of sexual relationship in the chorus and elsewhere: "There never need be longing in your eyes / As long as the hand that rocks the cradle is mine"; "I once had a child and it saved my life / And I never even asked his name / I just looked into his wondrous eyes and said / Never, never, never again; / But all too soon I did return, / Just like a moth to a flame".

We have an odd mixture of what appears to be parental and sexual love. The obvious interpretation is that Morrissey is eulogising paedophilia (the reading the tabloids luridly went for), and while that isn't an unfounded reading (Morrissey has always loved a bit of shock value), I think there's mainly a parallel between parental love for a child and the Greek male homosexual love of an older man for a younger one (known as the lover/beloved pairing, erôn/erṓmenos), with the latter being stigmatised in modern Western society. I think there's also an implicit attack on the conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia (much more prevalent in the 80s, but still sadly alive and well today, as the remarks the current Russian administration attest) - "See how words as old as sin / Fit me like a glove", "Your mother, she must never know".

In fact, we might be able to take the view that the narrator in this song is the person being addressed in Reel Around The Fountain. The former has an equally ambiguous tenderness: "Fifteen minutes with you / I wouldn't say no", or what scientists have determined to be the most Smiths stanza ever produced, "And take me to the heaven of your bed / Is something that you never said / Two lumps please, you're the bee's knees / But so am I..." (Sugar or welts on his skin?). Is being made "old" being taken from a childish, innocent state and made mature? Does the narrator regret this? If it's the other party speaking in the later song, perhaps his loathing of his desire (returning like a moth to a flame) is reflecting that he too is unsure on the matter. Also stirred into the mix, I think, is Morrissey's fascination with subverting dominant narrators in relationships - one is the elder, one the younger, perhaps regardless of age.


This Will Be No Easy Ride [link]

If you don't feel able to read about the harm of children and don't know this story, I strongly suggest you stop reading now.

I'm from the moors. They're a part of me; when I'm away from them I feel less. My mother was a small child in the North in the early 60s. Furthermore, I was exposed to this story from far too young an age to be able to process it in any sort of detached way; then again, I'm not sure there is an age old enough.

"The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around what is now Greater Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17 - Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans - at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The murders are so named because two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered on the moor in 1987, more than 20 years after Brady and Hindley's trial in 1966. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered." (From Wikipedia, because I can't do it myself. Sorry.)

"I happened to live on the streets where, close by, some of the victims had been picked up. Within that community, news of the crimes totally dominated all attempts at conversation for quite a few years. It was like the worst thing that had ever happened, and I was very, very aware of everything that occurred. Aware as a child who could have been a victim. All the details... You see it was all so evil; it was, if you can understand this, ungraspably evil. When something reaches that level it becomes almost... almost absurd really. I remember it at times like I was living in a soap opera..." (Morrissey in a 1985 interview)

What's the worst thing a person can do? I have no intention of comparing answers, but I think repeatedly abducting, torturing and murdering children for kicks is probably the thing that springs to mind for a lot of people, especially if they're familiar with this story. I can only look at the Wikipedia page for so long at a time because staring at Brady and Hindley's mugshots while they stare back is not something I can really deal with. The judge sentencing them famously called them "wicked beyond belief"; I think Morrissey's "ungraspably evil" covers it as well.

In everyday language we're used to hearing the word sublime to mean excellent. One etymology for the word identifies it with the same root as "subliminal" - that is, it passes under (sub) the threshold (līmen) because it is impossible to comprehend. This is the theoretical definition of the sublime (usually used with the article to avoid ambiguity): that which is impossible to understand or to express by conventional means. It is often mentioned in the context of the atrocities of the World Wars - how can anyone begin even to process, much less react, to the Holocaust, to the prisoner of war camps, to atom bombs, and before that the trenches? What can you say that isn't just a completely trite insult to the memory of what happened? How will you trust the world, knowing that this can and does happen?

Many surreal (see the interview) and/or abstract artistic movements have arisen trying to work out how art can succeed where the literal cannot. The traditional artistic forms have failed, because though they gave humanity culture, it wasn't enough. How can they help the whole world, turned into an entire planet of survivors by the event, come to terms with it, when they were clearly inadequate to start with? A horrified silence, or a mind-rending scream, or a barrage of literal or semiotic white noise might seem to start to react to the snuffing out of another part of humanity and its innocence.

This deeply traumatic event could be said to underpin The Smiths, certainly in the three songs that we're examining. "Over the moor / Take me to the moor / Dig a shallow grave / And I'll lay me down". A part of the narrator has died - are Brady and Hindley part of the audience who "took a child and made him old"? Both were still alive and in prison at the time Morrissey was writing, so "fifteen minutes" with them and the implements of his choice would be a technical possibility. The depiction of the innocent, beloved child in the parallel song takes on an unspeakable level of horror - we've seen the "sacred shrine" that the first scene takes place in, and we are told in this last song, "A woman said, I know my son is dead / I'll never rest my hands on his sacred head". Morrissey addresses each victim by name through the song, as he knows them well. We all do. The lost children deliver their curse on Myra Hindley, but on us as well: "We may be dead and we may be gone / But we will be right by your side / Until the day you die... / This is no easy ride / We will haunt you when you laugh / Yes, you could say we're a team / You might sleep... / But you will never dream"

The figure of Myra Hindley in the song is taken to represent us in this way. (That feeling of revulsion is natural and intentional. See the skin-crawling recording of a woman laughing over the end - or is she crying?) We also hear that "Hindley wakes and Hindley says: / Whatever he has done, I have done / Wherever he has gone, I have gone". The other woman who is given voice in the song is the child's mother. Despite her promise (or one like her) that "My life down I shall lie" if someone tries to harm her child, she has failed. Hindley has failed as well because she has passively supported Brady's horrifying project - she casts in her lot with his (the incantation-like Whatever he has done etc) despite taking a lesser part in it. We hear the refrain, "Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for" - the entire city has blood on its hands because despite the killers' complete recklessness it took years to catch them. Myra Hindley also claimed in prison that she had been brainwashed by Brady into doing his bidding (having been asleep, here), a ploy familiar as the Nuremberg defence ("I was just following orders") in its most famous use that almost always fails to convince anyone of anything other than its user's utter shameless spinelessness.

Brady is never mentioned by name in the song - he is only a nameless he like some kind of demon. There is also the very old naming taboo that Morrissey is invoking in that if you say an evil thing's name it has power over you (where we get the word euphemism). The implicit rejection of this explanation (the children will not leave Hindley or us alone because of it) makes us confront the more horrifying reality than demonic possession - we all have the capacity for that level of evil within us, even if it just results in us standing aside.

A thing that jumped out at me while I was writing this post was that one of the main repeated melodies in the vocal line (first to the words "Lesley Ann with your pretty white beads") has a tritone (on pretty white here), which is only ever used as a brief passing tone, so it doesn't attract attention. The thing is, the Smiths' melodies are almost always very carefully written - I can't think of another example off the top of my head where either of the melodists use this interval which has been called "the devil in the music". I don't mean to imply that Morrissey sat down and planned this out, but the jarring dissonant note hiding amongst the gentle pastoral figures has a very obvious and worrying resonance with lines like "Fresh lilaced moorland fields / Cannot hide the stolid stench of death". It suddenly feels very cold in here.

As a short biographical note, this was apparently the first song that Morrissey and Johnny Marr wrote together, which to me further cements the notion that this is the song at the core of The Smiths. That gentle, finger-picked pattern on the guitar must have sounded like a lullaby for Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey, Edward Evans, John Kilbride and Pauline Reade, one that at the same time meant that we could never sleep as soundly ever again.


In Summary...

I'm sorry if the latter section was upsetting, but I think it's key to understanding The Smiths (who are frequently called depressing, mopey etc). For the record (ahem), I don't think of The Smiths as mopey - if you do, I think you're probably missing the humour that runs through pretty much all of it (except for the latter two songs, for obvious reasons). I find there's nothing scarier than a Smiths fan who doesn't notice the humour - the number of people I've seen who think Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (which Morrissey has described as "a punch in the face") is a sincere love song is frankly chilling... There's also plenty of happy moments scattered throughout: I particularly like the silly happiness of Shakespeare's Sister - "I'm going to meet the one I love! At last, at last, at last!" - or Ask, an enthusiastic consent anthem that's probably the most upbeat thing they ever did.

I think that the two things I value most are honesty and humanity, and I think part of that is not pretending that unhappiness doesn't exist, or that it makes people or their outlook any less valid. (People in the premodern era - in my book pre-1990 - weren't so great at dealing with mental illness or treating depression like an actual thing. If you think people can be insensitive now, look at media and talk to people from around then...) If you ask me, The Smiths manage to make something deeply beautiful out of both.

(I hope that articulated what I meant it to - I hope as well that you think it was worth a week or so slip in our update schedule. Next week we'll be back to less harrowing subject matter.)

Also Into You: Three Songs From "The Smiths" (Part One of Two)

(Here we are with another song analysis. I thought it was a good idea to split this one into two halves, considering both the length and the fact that the second half is really quite harrowing - the reason I've left a few weeks since the last post is because I wrote this piece and then couldn't quite face the second half again. Anyway, this half is okay.)

Song:	Reel Around The Fountain
By:	The Smiths
Album:	The Smiths
Year:	1984

I'm an overeducated Northern student musician, of course I love The Smiths. I also feel like a lot of people I know are put off by the perception either of them as effete, self-indulgent hipster-bait or of Morrissey as a vapid, racist egomaniac. I'll happily concede that he absolutely is that, but in the context of The Smiths I think he's almost unparallelled. It's pretty upsetting.

Now, for me one of the most interesting things about The Smiths is that it isn't just Morrissey and a backing band: Johnny Marr's incredible, melodic guitar figures get just as much room at the front of the sound as the vocals, and Andy Rourke's bass parts are some of the most inventive in their genre since Paul and John Entwistle (of The Who). I've mentioned that I play drums, so you might be expecting me to gush about Mike Joyce's drumming with the band as well, but while his playing is solid and tasteful, I don't find it much to write home about. There's nothing wrong with that - it's far better to have non-flashy, solid parts than sloppy flailing, but I wouldn't list him in my top however-many drummers ever. Anyway, The Smiths being an intriguing, multi-part beast is the first thing I'd like to suggest. If you read interviews with the band members, the instrumentalists (led by Marr) would apparently come up with songs that they would tape and send to Morrissey so he could come up with his part separately. It's really quite impressive how they made it mesh so well.


Shyness That Is Criminally Vulgar [link]

Before we get to the songs I'm examining, I'd like to tackle Morrissey's Smiths persona explicitly. I think for a lot of people he feels fey, arrogant, pretentious and self-pitying - and if you look at some of his work out of context I think it can look that way ("Hand in glove, the sun shines out of our behinds... And everything depends upon how close you stand to me - And if the people stare, then people stare; I really don't know and I really don't care...").

But within the context of Morrissey's delivery and the rest of the songs (and maybe with a familiarity with the traditionally rather dry Northern sense of humour), I think the colour of the lyrics becomes clear. He's taking the piss, guys, almost all the time. Hand In Glove (from the previous paragraph) was their first single, and I think this puts the exaggerated swaggering into perspective. You can see the narrator's insecurity poking through the façade with lines like "No, it's not like any other book - this one's different because it's us!" If you're a band cutting your first single and hoping that it's going to chart (especially one where you've opened up so much of yourself in the writing of it), that sense of obstinate bravado might be the only thing that stops you collapsing into a corner and whimpering to yourself as you'd like to.

But the persona that Morrissey adopts isn't really about the fear of being rejected by the music-buying public. I think in these days where cryptic lyrics and depressive subject matter are almost mandatory in particular genres (guess who that came in from), it's easy to miss the contrast that The Smiths seem to have made with their contemporaries. Instead of the libidinous rock frontman singing about seducing girls (and/or boys) by force of personality, face-melting guitar solos and liberal use of stage make-up and the word "baby" in choruses, Morrissey is a) a scrawny Manc kid who b) doesn't seem to be straight or particularly into sex and c) wants to mix references to 60s girl groups with 19th century poets without d) writing songs like his life is one big amazing party.

Smiths songs create beauty out of the pain of self-doubt and rejection, leavened by the self-deprecating realisation of how ridiculous you sound even inside your own head. For me the purest expression of this comes in the latter section of The Boy With The Thorn In His Side (itself a rather overblown, homoerotic title, don't you think?). The triumphant, almost joyful guitar line is set against Morrissey's "But when you want to live, / How d'you start? Where d'you go? / Who d'you need to know?" (after telling us, "Behind the hatred there lies / A murderous desire / For love") and a heart-breaking falsetto vocalisation (it sounds uncomfortably close to someone breaking down completely) that comes almost in counterpoint to the guitar lines. After being rejected ("How can they see the love in our eyes / And say they don't believe us? ...") and deciding to reject those who have done the same to him, the narrator is pulled apart by the fact that he still needs love and companionship from the people around him. (More familiar might be the chorus of How Soon Is Now?: "You shut your mouth, how can you say / I go about things the wrong way? / I am human, and I need to be loved / Just like anybody else does".)

It's also possible, I think, to read Morrissey as the son and heir of a music hall-style tradition of camp. In response to the ugliness of homophobia and rigid gender roles, the artist presents a distorted version of what society "wants" from its members. In Morrissey's case this frequently involves exposing the seediness inherent in a lot of mainstream rock lust songs - the chorus of Handsome Devil has the memorably revolting "Let me get my hands / On your mammary glands", and the lyrics of Bigmouth Strikes Again (linked rather than reproduced for serious domestic violence triggering) seem to show the rank misogynistic entitlement in the classic take-me-back song expressed as nauseatingly violent impulses that the narrator tries to brush off because they were "only joking". Is either of these examples so far from Gary Glitter (and we all know how he turned out) or Run For Your Life? Morrissey also plays with the expectations of the hypersexual, hyperdominant, hypermasculine frontman in the way he uses tormented, self-doubting lyrics about being romantically dominated, frequently delivered in falsetto with weird grunts and yelps (like in the choruses of The Headmaster Ritual and This Charming Man) and eerie tape effects to add himself on backing vocals, but in what is traditionally a female vocal range (famously in Bigmouth Strikes Again, also on Meat Is Murder (being a militant vegetarian went down so well in so-manly-I-want-to-punch-a-steak land) and Death Of A Disco Dancer). It's almost as if he's saying, Isn't that what you think I'm trying to do? Be a creepy approximation of a woman? Fine, have it your way...


It's Time That the Tale Were Told... [link]

I started with The Smiths' third album (and for my and many people's money, their best overall), The Queen Is Dead, but I feel like I only really started to "get" The Smiths properly when I started at the beginning, with their self-titled debut.

I'm kind of a sucker for whole album readings (having cut my teeth on Pink Floyd), and I think it's often useful to know where the side break is on albums that came out on vinyl first. Here's how it goes down on The Smiths:

Side One	Side Two
Reel Around The Fountain	Still Ill
You've Got Everything Now	Hand In Glove
Miserable Lie	What Difference Does It Make?
Pretty Girls Make Graves	I Don't Owe You Anything
The Hand That Rocks The Cradle	Suffer Little Children

In classic 60s fashion they didn't include this period's single, This Charming Man, on the album, but most CD reissues (and American LPs, again like 60s groups) add it in between the two sides.

If you bear the format in mind you can get the joke in turning the LP over and being met with Still Ill; even if you don't, it stands out that we begin the first track of the first album with the line, "It's time that the tale were told / Of how you took a child / And you made him old". We are instantly informed what the character of this record is going to be like - we're hearing the breaking of a long silence over some kind of trauma, and in the context of the song as a whole we aren't sure to what degree the "child being made old" is consensual (mirrored by the fact that the chords shift from F# minor to D major under the line, a classic tear-jerker manoeuvre that nevertheless ends major).

The organ part (the only time one is used on the album) suggests a religious experience, though whether this confession comes at a funeral or a benediction is left open. (We end the song with a repeated "I do" like a wedding vow, as well...) It's interesting to contrast the use of this slow, warm A major dirge to kick things off on the LP rather than starting with the fast, desperate F minor Hand In Glove like the single. I get the feeling it's meant to serve as a sort of gentle introduction to the ground that the album's going to be covering. It reminds me of Disorder being the first track on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures - fast, Eb major and comparatively joyful given even the next two tracks on the record. It also starts with a (what I think is very consciously) strongly scene-setting line: "I've been waiting for a guide to come / And take me by the hand." Ian Curtis' persona has been hoping for some sort of external help, but it's too late for that. It's the only time he really suggests that he wants to be helped; from that moment on, he is resolved to be on his own. (Various members of The Smiths have commented on being influenced by Joy Division, incidentally, but I think it's a fairly general trope - Homer starts the Iliad with the word "wrath" (mênin) as an overture to his main subject matter, showing that people haven't really changed since.)

(And this is the somewhat arbitrary dividing point. In the second half we'll be looking at the other two songs The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Suffer Little Children, which I'm afraid gets pretty heavy. After that we'll be moving to other stuff, though.)

Geek/Nerd Culture Considered Harmful

(This is a conversation I've had quite a few times. I thought it might be useful to be able to get it down here better fleshed out.

I wrote most of this post before the 2014 Isla Vista killings. I think this tragic event gives this topic a particular relevance, which is why I'm publishing it ahead of schedule, but I think it's been a matter that we as an Internet have needed to examine much more closely for a long time.

Content warning: Some NSFW language.)

I'm aware that using the above title on the Internet is basically signing my own death warrant, but hear me out. I'm not arguing that the terms geek/nerd should be abolished, or disapproving of people identifying with them - identity policing is the last thing that I want to do. My intention is to explore why being occasionally labelled as such by other people makes me feel uncomfortable, and it has to do mainly with the societal attitudes towards such groups.


Origin Story [link]

I doubt it's really necessary for me to explain what geek/nerd culture is for a lot of my audience, but anyway. Basically, after being ostracised and victimised apparently from 80s films onwards, people interested in non sport-related, recreationally intellectual pursuits appear now to have been declared okay by mainstream culture. Partly as a symbol of this, such groups have reclaimed the taunts geek and nerd (there's supposed to be a distinction between the two, but I've never heard a satisfactory or consistent one) as a badge of empowerment. You know, I have no problem with that. I have a lot of sympathy with it, in fact: as a dyspraxic kid (it turns out) I run like someone whose legs have gone to sleep. When I dance it looks like someone's hanging a marionette. As you might have dimly picked up from my ramblings I liked to read and did okay at classwork. If the places I was at had a Homecoming King and Queen (staying in the 80s stereotype zone for the minute) I probably wouldn't have been in the running. I don't mean to imply that my life at school was an unending montage of having my lunch money stolen and being swirlied (I had some great friends that I keep in contact with to this day), but I feel like I was always a little odd until I got to university. And then I decided that normal is a setting on a washing machine and I don't have to interact with people I don't want to interact with. Score!

I don't mean to relate all this to get sympathy from you, dear reader. I've heard some completely horrifying stories about being driven to the verge of suicide by complete arseholes and the people who should have stopped that happening being too overstretched or too uninterested to help. What I mean to say is, I'm not attacking people who are unashamedly in the demographic that geek/nerd traditionally covers, partly because, I'll freely admit, I'm largely there myself.

I feel like in my case the whole mild social ostracism thing was useful to a certain extent - it taught me (a fairly introverted, anti-social person when all's said and done - I'm pretty sure my spirit guide would be a cat) how to get the hell over myself and muck in, as it's termed. Which is useful. It taught me how to tell when no-one's interested in what I've got to say, which is also useful (still working at that one, as you might have noticed...). I could go on, but you get the picture. And I don't mean to come off like I'm saying bullying is character building or any of that toxic bullshit - what I mean is that in my case I feel like I got at least something positive out of the whole experience. I wasn't particularly happy at the time, but then I'm not exactly a little ray of sunshine anyway.

Eech, this is rapidly descending into a LiveJournal entry or something...


Geek Social Fallacies [link]

Anyway, there are some residual problems in a community born of social exclusion, that many more insightful people than me have gone into. There is the danger of having a persistent outsider and victim mentality, meaning that tolerance is extended what I would argue is too far in some cases (humouring people whose behaviour is selfish and harmful long past the point where elsewhere people would have called them on it) and the culture is seen as some kind of secret club that you have really have to have suffered and/or learnt your stuff to get into (viz the appalling treatment of women and girls that show an interest in fields that are deemed to belong to "real" geeks/nerds). As a musician I see just the same types of snobbery and insularity (think of hipsters using their music tastes as an assault weapon), but I think there's an additional, slightly unsavoury element at work that acts to preserve a kind of infantile sense of entitlement.

And again, I don't mean to tar everyone who identifies as geek/nerd with the same brush. But I imagine you can think of a few examples yourself of what I'm talking about. I think it's partly because as a movement it's fairly young (as is the Internet). There are a lot of people who engage in flame wars, thinking that if you shout loudest it makes your opinion more valid. Look at the abhorrently full bloom that the word misandry has come to after taking root in the bowels of the Internet, and geek/nerd culture in particular. (A great quote I saw recently - "In a debate you are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.") With this sudden onrush of completely democratic free speech (let's try and keep Net Neutrality a thing, shall we?) anyone can pretty much say what they like about anything, and it's a big enough Internet that there'll be someone who agrees with them. There have always been conspiracy theorists, creationists, climate change deniers, Scientologists, people who like The Eagles (That Last One Was A Joke BTW), but the advent of the Internet has meant that previously isolated and disparate subcultures can clump together like a reverse amoeba. And you know what, for the most part that's really great. (I can write and you can read my ponderous meanderings from anywhere in the world for free! Which is good, because I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to pay to be subjected to this stuff...)

My personal pet theory/hope is that as the Internet matures we might grow out of the flame war thing. I mean, I can think of few things more pointless than two people yelling at each other via keyboard for protracted periods of time over a topic that they have opposite views on. I personally find that instead of "YOU'RE WRONG" "NO U" it's more useful to go "I think this" "I think this" "Why do you think that?" "Have you considered this?" (the latter two delivered as genuine questions rather than thinly-veiled put-downs). We already seem to be getting over trolls gradually (I've been seeing a lot more "Obvious troll is obvious" posts in the past few years than people taking the flamebait), so who knows what could go down.


Boxing Matches [link]

But this is aside from my main objection to the current societal presentation of geek/nerd culture. When trying to articulate my point, I've find it useful to draw an analogy with the second wave of feminism. Whoa there. I said an analogy, meaning that in certain aspects I feel the comparison is useful, not that I'm equating the systematic violent and dehumanising oppression of women that has been a mainstay of our society since time immemorial with a group of people with unashamedly intellectual interests getting victimised in childhood and adolescence. I'd like to make that very clear right now.

The aspect I'm comparing is the idea that society accepts members of a formerly marginalised demographic on the condition that they adhere to a particular set of norms. So for instance around the time of the second wave (what most people think of as feminism - broadly, the first wave was women getting the vote, the second was the social and theoretical developments of this, and the third wave the movement's growth away from the idea of one homogeneous way to "do" feminism) it becomes acceptable (well, more acceptable) for a woman to have a career and to take a more active role in her social (including romantic and/or sexual) interactions. However, many have noted that this is still prescribing roles for women, just different ones. The woman is told be tougher than the men to show her dominance, use her sexuality like a weapon, play down any traditionally feminine aspects that can be seen as weakness. And all the while there's this nasty undercurrent of "Isn't it sweet/hot, she's all dressed up like a man, swearing like a man, she thinks she can throw her weight around with the grown-ups".

This isn't even to remotely begin on the fact that a lot of this empowerment mostly left out any woman who wasn't straight, white, middle class and cisgender. My point is, while it was a definite advancement on the submissive, patriarchal housewife box, it was still a box that women were crammed into - my definition of a box in this case is a set of expectations that a person with one attribute (in this case, being a woman) is compelled to meet, which have little to nothing to do with the attribute in itself. Failure to fit in this box incurs shame, mistrust and other sorts of societal foulness; one of the worst aspects of this is that it causes people who have the attribute to use how much they fit into this or another box (and it's very rare for someone to do so without contorting or amputating part of themselves) to attack each other with all the seething viciousness that comes from seeing a part of yourself you've been trained to hate in someone else.

See anything you recognise yet? I mentioned before the idea that one of the best ways to stop a society from becoming troublesome is for its ruling class to make sure that the lower and middle classes are at each other's throats - the classic divide and conquer strategy. If the whole of a society is working together, there isn't really a ruling class per se anymore, and those with interests (financial and otherwise) in avoiding this type of democracy have a variety of ways to accomplish this. The main one, as I just mentioned, is to make sure that there are robust social divisions in place - make sure that the income gap between rich and poor is as wide as possible, and education and healthcare are as expensive as possible. Spout rhetoric of inclusivity for those who try, while doing nothing to counter the institutional forms of bias against people from different backgrounds. If someone tries to call you on this, show them one or two token individuals who've "made good" from said underprivileged backgrounds, so that the rest feel that if they fail then the problem is with them, not with the broken society that they live in. Emphasise that some people are just "born" good at certain things that the ruling caste are trained extensively for from birth, just as a little extra kick in the teeth. After that, let human nature simmer with resentment and you and your descendants should be comfortably in control for a very long time.


This Way Up [link]

The way we fight this is by talking and thinking. Tempting as it is to ascribe it to the evils of one group, fascism and patriarchy are really just a known bug in the human mind. The Internet has meant we have more scope to talk than ever before, so that leaves the thinking part. My real problem with geek/nerd culture is how it turns enjoying thinking (how else do you show you enjoy something and get good at it other than when you're doing it for fun?) into a reductive, fetishised box. You know what? I don't think having an active and inquiring mind should be a labellable thing. If you like to read (or consume media) and analyse and talk about what you've read (or consumed), that should be encouraged if you want every person to be as functional a person and member of society as they can. It shouldn't mean that people will expect you to have no social skills, be unathletic, have (what you deem) childish interests and poor personal hygiene. The geeks/nerds of today are the intellectuals of yesterday, people who have the gall to have wide cultural interests (and yes, judging a demographic by the excesses of some of its members as if that's the group's failing rather than the individuals' is just another form of boxing - ask feminists) in a way that makes people feel insecure. If someone makes you feel insecure deliberately, they're an arsehole. If they're not doing it deliberately, then that might be an indication that the problem is at your end.

There are very few words that I don't use. As you might see from my writing style, I believe in using all the words you can to make your point; for me to blacklist one is a pretty big thing. The words I don't use are mostly slurs, racial, gendered, ableist etc. Another is the word pretentious. At root, the word means laying claim to what you have no right to (like a pretender to the throne). What the fuck gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't like if it isn't harming anyone? I've never yet heard a use of the word that hasn't been small people trying to make others feel small. If someone inadvertently makes you feel insecure, that sounds like it's your problem, not theirs. If you've been societally bullied into policing your own thinking as "pretentious", "geeky"/"nerdy" (the latter when used deprecatingly), then that's even worse. The rise of sites like I Fucking Love Science gives an indication of the worst side of people appropriating the external imagery of traditional geek/nerd culture without actually bothering to engage with the subject matter (as illustrated here), but I don't call that pretentious, I just call it a shame.


TL;DR Version...

Let me say again that I don't have a problem with people identifying as geeks/nerds. Someone's identity is their affair. I choose not to identify as such because I don't think intellectual interests should automatically mean you are a geek/nerd. When having intellectual interests is something to be apologised for or self-deprecatory about (the way society currently treats geek/nerd culture, see The Big Bang Theory) is when I have a problem. Having an active mind shouldn't be a divisive factor - while natural aptitude does affect predisposition to a certain skill, the majority seems to come from practice. All the people called geniuses that I've ever heard of worked really, really hard to get where they were, often from very early ages. Some people take that to mean no-one is ever a genius - why not take it to mean everyone can be?

(We'll be back to our regular scheduling next week. I'm probably going to look at boxing and entitlement in future posts, if you fancy sticking around.)

On Some Problems With Problematic Things

(This week I'm back on social justice and how we do it on the Internet - specifically, the practice of calling things "problematic", which probably only gets less hate than telling someone to "check their privilege".)

In one of my previous excursions into social justice territory, you may recall that I cited John Lennon and then put in a footnote (which, despite my undying love for parentheses, I make a point of not doing normally) saying that while I value and respect many of his contributions, there are aspects of his behaviour that I disapprove of strongly, and in fact if I met someone with only those latter qualities I would probably want nothing to do with them and warn people I cared about to do likewise. This is frequently described (online, at least) as a person or work being problematic.

As previously, it is very, very easy for me to misconstrue what my point is and to make large sections of the audience I hope to appeal to feel like I'm attacking them. My point this time is that I find the current usage of problematic on the Internet can be harmful, mainly to the people making the judgement call. (I'm not going to blanket defend people who are called problematic. That's their job. If I engage with them or their works, it's despite their problematic aspects, not ignoring them.)


Problematisation [link]

Let's examine the mechanism of declaring works or people problematic, so we've got a base to work from, and so I can make clear exactly what it is I'm critiquing - this being the Internet, many terms have many meanings to many people, and there's rarely much cause to declare one interpretation more authoritative than another. We come across a work (I'm going to use the less emotive strain of works rather than people) that we like. The writing, the execution, the characterisation, whatever - it appeals to us. We get that great feeling of meeting a new thing and thinking, "Yeah, this is pretty good". If it's a one-off thing like a film or a game or a book, we consider buying it. If it's a series, we consider getting more instalments by paying or subscribing. We might tell our friends and relations about this Cool New Thing we've found, and seek out other people who think the Cool New Thing is also Cool. This is one of the nicest things about the age we live in - there's a boatload of free or cheap stuff out there that we can sample and dive into, and we can meet and join communities formed around appreciating that same thing, all without even having to leave the house (whether this is ultimately a good thing or not isn't really what we're discussing just at the moment). This could also be a work we enjoyed when we were younger and have fond memories of.

But... there's a problem. Some corner of the work expresses attitudes that you don't agree with, whether actively promoting them or passively continuing them because it assumes that everyone thinks like that and it doesn't see anything wrong with them. You might notice them yourself (they might be tucked away in the corner of a later or earlier installment, or just not so noticeable from your first pass through) or you might have them pointed out to you by someone else (in Real Life or in an online community). In any case, there's this part of the work that you (or the person pointing it out to you) would really prefer wasn't there. So what do you do? To my mind there are a few options:

1. It Doesn't Matter

Simple, just ignore it. The rest of it's great, so why should one little bit of it (or one person's reading of it) spoil the fun for everyone involved? This is sadly quite a prevalent viewpoint, and it has some really ugly consequences. By ignoring the oppressive aspect of the work, or by arguing that the rest of the work being something that you enjoy or agree with somehow cancels the oppressive aspect out, you are legitimising it, and consequently undermining the voices of those at risk from it. Oppression doesn't need a culture of active oppressors to flourish - all it needs is a minority of active oppressors and an apathetic majority. You may remember that I said previously that the opposite of activism isn't oppression, it's apathy; this holds true here, and indeed, it's one of the clearest examples of this principle.

2. Lighten Up, It's Just an X

This is kind of an uglier extension of the previous, specifically in the scenario where an individual points out the oppressive aspect to a group. The group is presented with the choice of really examining this thing that they've previously accepted less critically, and just carrying on as they were by dismissing (and even vilifying) the complaining party and their concern. A handy rule of thumb is that if someone's dismissing a member of X group (or for bonus points, all members of X group) for being "thin skinned" about a particular topic, usually while the dismisser is not themselves a member of X group, this reaction is probably in play. The core fallacy for this is the assumption that everyone should read things in the same way that you do - basically, being unaware of your own various kinds of privilege. And again, checking your privilege requires quite a lot more effort than carrying on obliviously, so it is tempting in the early stages of social awareness just to ignore it or to dismiss the concept entirely. It involves accepting that other people have lives and struggles and experiences that you fundamentally can never fully understand, because your life and struggles and experiences are different from theirs. The act of dismissing someone's complaint about oppressive aspects of a work is akin to saying, "Actually, I know more about your life and how you should behave than you do, so shut up". If you don't see the problem even with the implicit expression of such a view, I imagine there's not a lot of point in you reading the rest of this entry or indeed blog.

3. Oh God, It's Ruined Forever!

This seems, on the surface of it, to be the most appropriate reaction to being made aware of the oppressive aspects of a work. If you recoiled in horror at the implicit statement at the end of the last paragraph, I imagine the thought of being inadvertently complicit in oppression makes you feel ill. It certainly does me. And indeed, depending on your life experience and views, the existence of particular oppressive aspects may be a deal breaker for you. I feel that a person's own Deal Breaking threshold is a really, really personal thing that shouldn't be treated as a negotiable quantity. All you're going to achieve by meeting a statement of, "I'm afraid X aspect of this work means I can't enjoy it or engage with it further" with "But, Y aspect is great!" or requiring an in-depth justification of why X aspect is a deal breaker is to jeopardise any standing you have with the person you're proselytising to. Have you ever seen a situation where someone was talked out of a long-held personal view in a single conversation? I know I haven't. I think you owe someone the respect of their convictions regardless of whether you think your view is better or in would make them happier. If the person is open to hearing about why you like X work or movement, then by all means tell them, but forcing your opinion on them (or interrogating theirs) in an effort to convert them is just really bloody rude.

4. Ugh, That Sucks

That said, I don't think complete disengagement should be the default option when encountering oppressive aspects. There, I said it. In saying this, I don't mean to invalidate people's right to disengage from a work that crosses their Deal Breaking threshold - what I do mean is that I think it's a shame for aspects of a work that you disagree with to mean that you automatically drop the work in question. I think the most responsible thing to say, if you still want to engage with the work at all, is, "That aspect does suck, majorly. I would prefer that it wasn't there, and if for you it means that you can't continue to engage with the work, then that's your decision which I will support. For me, though, the rest of the work is good enough that despite its problems I still feel able to enjoy it." Now, that might look quite similar to option one above ("It doesn't matter"), but to my mind the crucial distinction is that you aren't denying or making excuses for the problem's existence, nor are you dismissing the complaint or the right of the complainer to raise it.


Binary Chop [link]

You may have noticed that in the above schematic I've avoided using the term problematic beyond the opening description. This is because to my mind, it can end up promoting the third option above over all else. I've noticed that people sometimes describe works (or people) as "problematic" and just leave it at that. Does that mean that we should expect (and ideally prefer) works that are "unproblematic"? I contend that this is a dangerously reductive binary, and as we in the social justice sphere are familiar with in other contexts, enforcing binaries is Rarely A Good Thing. I contend that genuinely unproblematic works either cannot exist or are rare enough that seeking them out exclusively would reduce our cultural intake and participation to minuscule proportions.

Everyone has problems. It's not surprising to learn that everything has problems as well. Humans seem to be hard-wired to engage in splitting - that is, dividing arbitrary items or groups into a "good" and a "bad" pile, an "us" and a "them". Going back to Plato, we have the idea that objects in the world are merely imperfect reflections of an ideal - a doctrine that endeared him to early Christianity by its adaptability to the concept that people are an imperfect reflection of God or Christ (however at odds with the actual teachings of the Bible that may be). The splitting into an ideal and non-ideal is distressingly prevalent in modern society, too - think of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, or the almost equally foul insistence that only one body type is beautiful or desirable, even when it requires extensive modification (surgical or digital) even to approximate.

My beloved Derrida writes brilliantly on the idea that ideals can be helpful in inspiring us to be the best that we can be, so long as we accept that the pure ideal is unachievable, by definition. (One example of his is that you never really give a gift - you always want something back, even if it's just gratitude. Another is the ideal of justice - it's patently impossible to be perfectly just and impartial. But, the key point comes, that impossibility doesn't mean that the whole exercise is pointless.) Using the fact that an object falls short of an ideal as a tool to instil shame and guilt is a gross perversion of the idea of what an ideal is for in the first place. I'm sure you can draw oppression parallels with whatever group or organisation you're familiar with in this context.

This feeds into the deeply unfortunate prevalence of using "being right" as an offensive weapon (on which more in a separate post). It's a sadly frequent occurrence that someone will use the fact that a work is "problematic" without qualification or discussion to shame those who enjoy it. Now, this is a very delicate point with the distinct possibility of not being understood how I mean it to be. Calling people out on oppressive behaviour is a vital part of spreading awareness of social justice - as I mentioned earlier, the majority of complicity in oppression comes from being unaware of the full harmful effect an attitude can have. However (as I said before), I think that if we genuinely want to help people become aware of social justice, it's equally vital that the calling out come from a fundamentally positive place. Using things that people like being problematic as a method of point scoring to my mind seriously achieves less than nothing - it gives people a distorted, negative view of those engaged in social justice. We don't complain about stuff because we like complaining - we'd much prefer not to have to complain at all; we try to live as responsibly as we can, understanding that our words and actions weigh on the whole of the world and trusting people from other vantage points to tell us when we're pressing too heavily.


In Summary...

To round up, I agree with Mallory Ortberg (who is amazing, and if you like literariness, humour and social justice you should check out The Toast yesterday) that the term problematic is of questionable use when it's extended to the point of talismanic, unqualified demonisation. It seems to me that it enforces a kind of aggressive, reductive binary; it is my opinion that for our own benefit and for the benefit of the social justice movement, it is far more useful to accept that an "unproblematic" work or person is largely an inherently unattainable ideal, rather than an absolute standard against which other works and people must be put on trial.

That said, I'd like to reaffirm that this is not an excuse to dismiss complaints about certain aspects of people or works, or to dismiss the people that make the complaints. If someone finds that the oppressive aspect or aspects of a work or person are enough to make them want nothing further to do with the it/them, then that is their choice and we should respect it, as well, perhaps, as re-examining what it is in the work/person that stops us from doing likewise. The person in question does not owe us an explanation if they do not want to give one. In this way, hopefully, we can grow more considerate of each other than we perhaps always manage to be.

(It's been quite a month for soapboxes, even by my standards. Next week is some more music analysis. See you then!)