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!)

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!)

On Gender (Linguistic and Otherwise)

(Here we are with more linguistics stuff, but still flavoured with a bit of the old social justice angle. I'm sure you'll cope, right?)

The other day I was looking over Mark Twain's The Awful German Language again - if you've got experience of learning German (or grappling with any other language's different way of doing things) a lot of the narrator's satirical grievances will be painfully familiar. One of his favourites is the fact that the genders of German nouns (i.e. whether they're grammatically masculine, feminine or neuter) frequently have little to do with any quality of the noun itself or what is termed its natural sex (for living things):

"Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print - I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female, - Tom-cats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body, are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it, - for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, hips, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience, haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay."

This got me to thinking that the topic of gender in language is quite interesting in itself, if you can stand me po-facedly tearing down the preceding...


Time Flies Like an Arrow [link]

The first thing that I thought might be of interest is exactly why it is that linguistic gender is so apparently illogical. Well, with grammar as with people the ultimate answer (that I'm sure someone else has already phrased better than me) is that there usually is a reason why we do things in a certain way, but the reason often makes no sense.

A little gobbet of information that I remember from when people used to send those benign-ish chain emails with mildly interesting but often useless facts (if they were actually facts) was the origins of common phrases. Take, for instance, "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite". The part about the bedbugs is evident enough, but (as I was reliably informed by a chain email with a forward header about three times the length of the actual text) the part about sleeping tight refers to people using ropes or buckles to tie a mattress together In Days Of Yore. (On checking it turns out that isn't actually true. Oh well.)

Whether it's actually true or not isn't the point, though. We have a phrase that originally had a clear literal or figurative meaning that has over time lost this - it becomes a single unit of meaning that people say to mean "sleep well" without needing to understand its derivation. People want to understand, though (wanting to make sense of the world is, after all, one of our most fundamental urges) so we end up with folk etymologies like the above where people rationalise a meaning out of thin air. Whether their explanation is historically accurate or not is an entirely secondary concern.

This neatly mirrors the linguistic concepts of synchronic and diachronic meaning. The two words are from the Greek khrónos (time) and the prepositions sún (with) and diá (through), meaning "at the same time" (exactly cognate with the Latin-based contemporary) and "through time". Features that synchronically don't make sense (i.e. you just have to learn them) will clearly, at some point in the past, have made sense, before the language moved on. A classic example is irregular verbs. Diachronically, there's no such thing as an irregular verb: it's just a verb that got left high and dry when the grammatical tide went in. In Semitic languages and in the Indo-European ancestor language it's perfectly reasonable and regular to change the vowel in a verb (or root) to express different meanings; for Modern English, though, a verb going sing-sang-sung (song) rather than play-played-played (play) is a strange remnant to keep an eye on in case it tries something funny.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a synchronic world-view - it is, after all, what 99% of people using a language to communicate will be using. Diachronic analysis is sort of like archaeology in this regard; it's interesting to see how the lie of the land has changed, but the average person living in it doesn't really need to know how it looked thousands of years ago to get by. Actually, we get to see a really interesting version of tectonic plates sliding along each other in the form of analogical levelling.

Analogical levelling is the linguistics manifestation of the rationalising drive I mentioned a minute ago. It's basically where people meet a form they don't recognise and correct it in their heads so that it fits the regular pattern (synchronically speaking), sort of like the adorable phenomenon of eggcorns - people who don't know or remember how to spell a word make a guess that's ingenious in its own way (so eggcorn for acorn, in the feeble position for fetal position and so on). They're nothing new - the term "bridegroom" comes from the Old English brȳdguma meaning "bride's man" (the word guma is cognate with homō in Latin), but when the latter word dropped out of English it was replaced with groom, as though the husband-to-be has to tend to his future spouse like a horse...

A more usual example is the way that strong verbs (verbs of the "sing-sang-sung" variety) have a habit of being strong-armed (ahem) into being weak ones ("play-played-played"). There are lots of verbs that used to be strong but now aren't, and if you've got a writer with a taste for old-fashioned forms you'll probably meet a few of the stragglers. I remember finding to my delight that it used to be thrive-throve-thriven and that colours could be "blent together" (where I would expect thrive-thrived-thrived and blended). Languages change and percolate and it's a lot of fun to watch ("text" seems to be becoming a strong verb - "I tex't her last night").


Rooting About [link]

The way this ties in to the synchronically arbitrary distribution of genders in some languages that mark them is (as you might have guessed) that it relates to the original form of the word. In Indo-European languages (basically most Western ones, the top half of India, and Iran) the gender of a noun mostly just depended on what vowel the word used in its stem. Here's some words in Latin with their genders attached:

Noun	Stem	Gender	Meaning
annus	annō	masculine	"year"
bellum	bellō	neuter	"war"
mēnsa	mēnsā	feminine	"table"
spēs	spē	feminine	"hope"
gradus	gradū	masculine	"step"
genū	genū	neuter	"knee"

You can see that the stems in O and U are masculine or neuter (more on which later) and the ones in A and E are feminine. This useful system still survives more or less intact in Italian and Spanish - in Italian il ragazzo is "boy" and la ragazza is "girl", and the equivalent el chico and la chica works the same in Spanish. In French, however, a lot of Latin roots got really chopped up, especially at the ends (they still don't like pronouncing the letters at the ends of words). The Latin word for water is aqua, which pops up in Italian as acqua and Spanish as agua. The French version is eau! (pronounced /o/) It keeps its underlying feminine gender despite the fact that that useful -a ending went AWOL quite a while ago. So if eau is feminine, does that mean that château (castle) will be too? Unfortunately not. The root is castellum, neuter O stem, so because the masculine and the neuter have merged it means it's masculine. Confused yet? We get a lifeline in the fact that some French feminines that used to end in a consonant and an -a still have an -e on the end: so port (a sea port) is masculine and comes from portus (masculine U stem), but porte (door, gate) comes from porta and the -e shows that it's feminine.

What this comes down to is that when you learn a French word you learn it with the article welded on - la porte, le port, le château etc. (The elision in L'eau means you usually get a little (f.) afterwards.) Same with German - der Hund, die Hand, das Fenster and so on. I promise you that the original Proto-Germanic forms had gender-marking endings (der Hund comes from *hundaz, for instance), but they dropped off and anyone who can't accept that it's Just A Thing You've Got To Learn will either never get very far in German or write a hilarious satire of people who think that way.


Typecasting [link]

If you're keeping score at home, you might have looked up at the end of that section and thought, "So, you said that gender was arbitrary because it's traditional, and then you said it's really that way because of old vowel stuff which is also... arbitrary." Very perceptive of you, dear reader - might I invite you to cast your gaze back up the page to where I said that there's usually logic behind most things in languages and in life, but that the logic frequently makes no sense?

If we put the word gender under the microscope, we see that it comes from the Latin genus, which means type, or family. It in turn comes from the same creating root that produces (hoho) generate, general, oxygen, photogenic, gonads, polygon, kin, king and so on. Basically, it just means "type". In the Eurocentric sphere I and a lot of people I know move in, we get used to the idea of there being two or at most three genders, relating male, female and objects (we still distinguish he/she/it in English, even if grammatical gender hasn't been a thing since Old English); outside of that there are languages that have much wider classification systems.

The canonical example is the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language, which has four classes/genders:

I	-	Animate objects, men
II	-	Women, water, fire, violence
III	-	Edible fruit and vegetables
IV	-	Everything else

The second class was used for a title for a linguistics book by Lakoff (as Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), because who in their right mind would pass on such a gift of a phrase?

There are languages that have even more classes (a Wikipedia page I consulted for this mentions that "... the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light"), and if you saw my previous pontification on language learning you might remember that Mandarin and a lot of East Asian languages have a similar system of over a hundred classifiers (set count words) that you use with nouns. Others (like Basque and some South Indian languages) have just a two-tier animate/inanimate system.

It turns out that Indo-European used to be one of the latter group. Going back this far involves a certain amount of speculation, so pack spare asterisks (they mark we-don't-have-any-direct-written-evidence-but-we're-pretty-sure reconstructions), but most research suggests that originally there were only the O stems (like annus/bellum) and equivalents. This would be why the masculine and the neuter share so many endings: they're originally one pattern. The idea goes that the neuter plural in -a (think the of stuff like millennium having the plural millennia) was taken as a collective and so an abstract (like lots of true things collectively being "the truth").

The innovation (in the linguistic sense of a grammatical feature suddenly appearing) came when these abstract neuter plurals were reanalysed as singulars with an A stem, which hadn't existed before (there's quite a lot of debate over whether Proto-Indo-European originally even had an A sound). And guess what, presented with this new category which represented abstract, "other" things, people decided to apply it to women.


You Are What You Speak [link]

Think about that for a minute - since before recorded history, women have been intrinsically marked as "different" in the language group that has the most native speakers in the modern world. We still see the repercussions of this all the time when the masculine is used for concrete, strong things and the feminine for delicate, abstract ones, when male is the default option when gender is unspecified or mixed. Now, in languages that have grammatical gender this is less jarring - in Russian, for instance, "person" is chelovyék, which is a masculine noun, so it sort of makes sense that if you're not referring to any person in particular you would use the masculine. This isn't always the case, though - in French the word for person (personne) is feminine (ends in an -e!), so in phrases that explicitly use the word the person will be feminine; however, if you have an unspecified person (like quelqu'un, meaning "someone") it's still masculine.

Some languages manage to have separate, native words for male, female and human. Classical Greek has ánthrōpos for a person in general, the stem andrós for "male", and gunaikós for "woman". This is where you get the terms misanthropy (using the root miséō, "I hate") for a general loathing of mankind, misogyny for woman-hating, and the recently coined "misandry" for hatred of men. (The validity of the latter as a concept is something I haven't got the time or the patience to take on here.) In fact, in older English man was gender neutral: this is why you frequently come across "man" used as a synonym for "humankind" (e.g. This is one small step for man...). We've already seen one of the words used for male (guma), and there's also the word were (cognate with Latin vir, also "male", root of words like "virility" and "virtue") which survives in "werewolf".

As a useful sidenote, this is an example of synchronic and diachronic usage in action. I've heard people defend the use of man for "humanity" in contemporary English because of its etymological basis as a non-gendered term. However, I think this is to ignore the synchronic reading that reinforces on a deep level the idea that women don't matter, or that men are somehow more integral to humanity, because the word man is no longer ungendered in the way it once was. It's sometimes hard for people unfamiliar with social justice work to grasp first time the effect that subtle so-called micro-aggressions like these have on the oppressed party; each is small enough that drawing attention to it opens the complainer to accusations of being petty or demanding, but the combined effect of all these tiny hostilities is a climate where the oppressed party is made to feel belittled and unwelcome. What, you defend your use of "gay" as an insult because you don't actually actively hate gay people? Regardless of your intentions, it still enforces on whatever level the concept that "gay" equals "bad".

There's a seductive idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that states (in its strongest form) that you can't think of something you can't express in your language. The idea in that original form has several flaws that have been pointed out, but the core idea that how you talk affects how you think is a pervasive one. Words are power - that's the idea behind a whole host of things, from NLP to prayer and mantras to magic. Even if we reject the strong form of the hypothesis, I think it's still valid to recognise this interplay. Does the fundamental grammatical otherness of women cause or result from their marginalisation by society?

We call heterosexual people straight, even if it's largely no longer socially acceptable to call people who aren't bent. But at every turn, our language tells us that being straight is correct - the root rect means straight itself, as does right. Do you know right from wrong? Roots beginning wr- in English involve an idea of turning or twisting (wrap, wrist, wriggle, write, wreck...) so we're still hammering away at the straight vs bent dichotomy. A ruler is the one who keeps the country on the straight and narrow, and hopefully defends their subject's rights. People who aren't telling the truth are lying, the opposite of right is left, which is also abandoned (the Latin word for "right" is dexter, giving dexterity, but for left it's sinister!). These are all connected etymologically.

You might be wondering about the validity of slamming people over-relying on diachronic analysis only to pull out a great heap of word derivations myself, but what I wanted to show is that certain biases are very deeply woven both into our languages and our psyches. If you describe someone as straight it can mean that they are a law-abiding citizen (or have become one) rather than a crook (itself from crooked). Tell me then that there's nothing wrong with not being straight, even though you have many more positive associations for straight than for gay, lesbian, bi etc. We've got a lot of work to do.

This post is already long enough, but if you're interested in what a female-centred language would look like, the constructed language Láadan was explicitly designed by a woman (author and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin) to cater to women. I don't know of any native speakers of it, but it would be fascinating to hear the effect that the language had on their world-view.


In Summary...

What I've been interested in exploring is the way that arbitrary linguistic categories like gender work, are preserved, and perhaps influence their speakers' thought processes. I think if it was more felt that gender is at root a social construct (the usual distinction is that sex is the physiological distribution of chromosomes and reproductive organs, and gender is the rest) we might be able to be less rigid in our definitions of what it "means" to be male or female (or indeed, to be neither, or both). In a sense Mark Twain is right to be astounded that mouths are male and hands are female in German - the truth is that there is really no good reason for any set of characteristics to be thought of as fundamentally or exclusively masculine or feminine.

Beyond the general physiological tendencies of male people toward higher muscle mass and female people to a higher hip-to-waist ratio it seems more useful to me to consider people primarily as, well, people, with different physical and mental characteristics arising from this rather than from their adherence (or lack of it) to one or another vestigial mental box. I don't mean that I think that gender should be eradicated from people's individual identity, just that I don't think it's helpful to consider someone as primarily defined by their gender. After all, we could as well be classed as edible plants but for a few historical coincidences...

(Hooray for deconstructing things. Join us next week as the foray continues...)