freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with orang-utan civilisation

Outside it's windy and bucketing with rain, and I'm as happy as a duck in a puddle. Personally, I welcome our new wintry overlords. But I'm odd that way.

I have one thing to say this morning, which is that everyone should read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, on the grounds that it's essential subversive propaganda for the age of Bush, spreading via Creative Commons like a particularly lively meme. I just read it in a giant gollup - it moves fast and is a rather beguiling adolescent coming-of-age story as well as a call to arms and an indoctrination to hack.

I shall now head off to introduce oblivious third-year Humanities students to the joys of Internet sex, feeling, for some reason, extra subversive.

Current Mood: subversive
Current Music: Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

Pshaw. The nice encyclopedia press sent me a cheque for $250 for my entry-writing efforts, although given said efforts entailed 30 000 words or so, researched and polished to the back teeth, I suspect I've been swizzed. Now all that remains is to fight my way into Claremont, present the cheque to the foreign exchange desk of the main Absa branch, fill in 23 forms and present 96 bits of documentation, have them send the cheque back to America for endorsement, checking, suspicion, scrutiny with an intense scroot and inscription with mystic runes presumably proof against terrorism and assaults on the American Way of Life, after which the American bank will grudgingly convert it back into electronic monies, and send it back here by torturous virtual routes. I leave here a significant pause into which you are please to insert my usual rantings about human inefficiency and orang-utan civilisation. Also, memo to self: overseas writing gigs may not be worth the red tape they're tied up in.

On a more positive note, however, Making Light have reported on this interesting development, which I cautiously hope may have the potential to strike a blow to fundamentalist wossnames of the more pernicious sort. Turkey has instituted an enquiry into Islam, with a view to a sort of reformation of the religion along more modern and enlightened lines which attempt to excise hundreds of years of closed-minded interpretation of the Prophet's basic common sense. Words cannot express how much I both approve of this, and fear the kind of backlash it might generate among the aforementioned fundamentalists. The Making Light discussion is worth a read. (So is their next post, the Fascist Octopus one, which records for a disbelieving posterity the most unbelievably mixed metaphor known to modern politics).

Current Mood: bit headachy
Current Music: David Bowie, Outside

Rain! I'm all damp, and much less annoyed, and feeling less guilty about not having watered the garden in a while. It was getting all droopy and blasted-heath. Also, my previous medical aid, in a somewhat unanticipated gesture¹, just paid me out enough on my cancelled policy to almost pay off my credit card. (Mother, stop dancing round the house, it's undignified!)

On the orang-utan civilisation front, this, courtesy of Mama Generica, is deeply appealing to my inner jack-booted fascist, particularly the bits of the inner jack-booted fascist which are deeply despairing about the state of the environment. Which is, come to think of it, most of them.

Bruise update: I apparently fell directly onto the edge of the step yesterday, because the bruise is as long as my hand and shaped approximately like a lenticular galaxy, about 5cm wide at the bulge. The purple is now shading, non-fetchingly, into yellow. I look as though someone's slapped me across the rump with a medium-sized lead-weighted cosh. Jocular sod. I can't even pretend to claim it's the result of any dodgily interesting sex-life, either. Sigh.

And, with reference to yesterday's little effusion about Outside, a quick caveat emptor: should the mood strike you for Bowie-acquisition, don't bother with the two-disk second edition. While my affection for the first continues unabated, the second disk comprises increasingly self-indulgent remixes of a couple of the songs, all mindlessly stretched-out beat. Bleah.

Last Night I Dreamed: a sort of subterranean adventure story, in which we dashed through giant underground caves filled with walkways and suspended rooms, trying to (a) collect pocketsful of gems, and (b) avoid the minions of some sort of giant, female, Cthulhoid horror. Eventually we crammed ourselves into a very small car and escaped into the countryside.

¹ I'm not in the habit of thinking of insurance as something that pays me money. They're things you pay money to in return for not having to worry about paying money in the future. Orang-utans, may I point out, would probably never have invented insurance.

Current Mood: happily damp
Current Music: David Bowie, Outside

You know, I meant to rant about students and adolescent narcissism and what have you, but in fact I think this is just about people. Why is it that you can spend fifteen minutes patiently explaining to someone that the system does not permit them to have what they want, and have them ask at the end, "But can I have what I want?" Humanity's sense of entitlement boggles my mind. (Not to mention its ability to close its ears to unpalatable truths). I bet you orang-utans wouldn't hanker after an Economics major when they clearly don't have the maths. I am also coming reluctantly to realise that my alignment is probably, despite all attempts to the contrary, Lawful Good.

While on the subject of exactly the opposite, I feel I need to record for posterity the at best Chaotic Neutral attempts of the actors involved to turn my small, rather silly SCA medieval miracle play thingy into an even more bastardised version of itself. To date, apart from the Shylock impersonations, this includes William Shatner impersonations, the suggestion that we wander a clearly lost and confused Captain Kirk across the back of a scene depicting Da Gama's landing in the Cape, and a demand for tribbles. Onna stick. You can see the theme here. I remain firm in the face of this relentless Trekkism, looking at no culprit in particular. (

first_fallen!)

And, in the Department of Random Linkery Especially For

librsa: Bookhunter! With SWAT team librarians, mysterious book robberies, forensic binding experts and incredible gun battles in libraries! Pleasingly deadpan.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was in charge of a whole school full of little boys, in a huge, concrete-block sort of building up on the side of a mountain somewhere. Also present were two beautiful little Indian girls who were under some kind of threat from Unspecified Evil Out To Get Them. Fortunately all the little boys were adepts with a weird sort of martial art that involved skimming small, flat stone circles (like mini UFOs) capable of stunning people when they hit. We set up watches to protect the girls through the night. Later I was taking part in a mad fantasy war, assisting my brother, who was a prince over several island cities protected by dragons. There was a volcano, and baths in associated hot springs.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: David Bowie, Let's Dance

Recent cultural consumption: Sheri S. Tepper's latest, The Margarets, which I acquired in hardback in a fit of undelayed gratification. It's an interesting novel, positing the weird, apparently multi-dimensional splitting of one future-Earth girl at various significant points in her life, so that in the end seven different versions of her are taking wildly different paths. The setting is the standard Tepper one of a drastically overpopulated Earth and a supporting cast of umpteen alien races ranging in character from the dopily benevolent to the basically monstrous. As usual, Tepper's ongoing polemical interests thread through the narrative, occasionally stepping forward to dominate when her characters have themselves a little rant about human stupidity.

I enjoyed it, although I found it less accomplished than a lot of her other writing - possibly inevitably given the basic plot, it was scattered and a bit wandery, and a lot of the themes felt recycled from earlier novels. What really hit me, though, was her despair - always present in her novels, but particularly strong here. I love Tepper's writing because she articulates some of the same things that I worry about - overpopulation, violence, misogyny, bigotry, human selfishness and shortsightedness, the horrible sense of the sheer momentum of a technological culture that is rushing towards self-destruction because it hasn't bothered to build in restraints - because restraint is, in our world, a sign of weakness and denies the entitlement and self-indulgence that capitalism preaches.

In Tepper's novels, Earth is almost always trampled under the massed hordes of humanity, its biosphere despoiled and destroyed. If the human race survives, it's as often as not because something from the outside intervenes, usually an alien race or a mythic force of some sort. Anyone, Tepper seems to think, is more likely to save humanity than humanity itself. Some earlier novels allow enlightened pockets of humanity to impose rescue on the whole, for example the tough, pragmatic women of Gate to Women's Country, but generally human action is subservient or incidental to the intervention of larger, wiser, more powerful beings. Even in Gate, human self-limitation is only possible because of radical population reduction after apocalypse. In a lot of her worldspaces, humanity is somehow crippled, missing a vital moral or historical sense which would allow it to function more rationally than it does.

This fascinates me. In a sense what she's writing isn't science fiction so much as science fiction fable, a sort of cautionary bedtime story for naughty children: if you can't play nicely, the grown-ups will take your toys away, and spank you for your own good. This is patronising, demeaning, and incredibly bleak, but the horrible thing is that I can't disagree with her. The likelihood of humanity pulling itself up by the bootstraps out of its morass of indiscriminate expansion and destruction without some kind of enormous catastrophe first is, in my opinion, vanishingly small. I deplore the need for the wise intervening alien even as I admit its necessity. This may, possibly, make me a fascist, but mostly I think it puts me in the same boat as Tepper - sadly and despairingly watching it founder, waiting for the water to close over everyone's head.

Last Night I Dreamed: a sort of hidden fantasy realm, either underground or a dream-world (yes, I've been watching way too many Henson movies). This entailed a group of us (we were children for this part of it) trekking through a scenic swamp calf-deep in water, feeling for snakes through the sludge; and getting lost in a strange area composed of giant broken pillars and cracked, moss-covered paving. There was also an elevated railway on brick arches with a completely peculiar train that travelled in jumps to an exact timetable. Later, someone gave me an absolutely beautiful full-length black coat in a particularly fine and silky fur.

Current Mood: bleak
Current Music: David Bowie, Heathen

I can do this new job. It's doable. Bits of it I'm actually good at and don't loathe. So far, though, my ability to come to terms with 9-5 admin is being severely compromised by two things.

1. Traffic. Having been a hedonistic part-timer or home researcher for fifteen years, I have a deep resentment at having to spend an hour of every day in traffic. I'm going to have to leave the house indecently early to avoid rush hour, and it bites that the lack of sleep is more desirable than the traffic experience. It seriously makes me doubt the worth of the salary.

Rush-hour traffic is the absolute epitome of everything that is wrong with twenty-first century humanity as a species. It's a selfish, narcissitic, time-wasting, annoyance-causing unnecessity, to sit stewing in our individual chunks of metal as a bracket to our daily activities. It wastes resources, causes emissions, pollutes, clogs and clutters. It's unaesthetic, but worse, it's inefficient. Anyone could design a more rational system, but we're too snarled up in the complexities and status quo of capitalism, metropolitan living and gosh-darned habit to actually implement it.

And traffic brings out absolutely the worst in human beings, who manifest extreme selfishness, impatience, pushiness, stupidity and whatever the opposite is of civic-mindedness. Traffic sucks, blows and festers in exactly the same way that human culture currently sucks, blows and festers. If a wave of a magic wand could turn all commuters everywhere into orang-utans, I'd be waving 'til my elbow cricked. Bleah.

2. Over-emotionality. I'm good at bits of this job because I fundamentally like students and empathise with their problems. Empathy can be a bugger. I've just had to lock myself into my office for ten minutes in order to cry, having heard the story from the incredibly sweet Zimbabwean student whose curriculum is a disaster area. His widowed mother committed suicide last year, leaving him the sole adult in charge of two younger siblings. He's not sure if her death was the result of the Zim situation, or family issues. He's doing his damndest to get on with life.

Actually, the traffic's not so bad.

Current Mood: still a bit weepy
Current Music: David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust

I don't usually have much interest in the Nobel Prize, but this year's are a bit of an exception. Al Gore receiving the Peace prize makes me very happy, if only because it's an indicator of the status of environmental issues in the public consciousness. Not the right public consciousness (the Scandinavians seem to be pretty much in the forefront of ecological stuff and don't really need their consciousnesses raised) but their stamp of approval has to mean something.

I'm rather saddened, though, by the way the award seems to have brought anti-eco feeling out of the woodwork - a lot of sites mentioning the award seem to have a comment trail to the effect that he doesn't deserve it, it's not a legitimate issue, his activism hasn't achieved anything, and climate change has nothing to do with peace, this last causing me to grind my teeth somewhat. (Even some of the usually liberal and intelligent folk at the Whatever are kvetching no end). I honestly cannot see how anyone can deny either the climate change situation in the face of the current evidence, or the effectiveness of Gore's long-term efforts to wave the the issue around like a flag. I'd be a lot happier if humanity were orang-utans rather than ostriches.

The other pleasing award was Doris Lessing's literature prize. I am afraid to say that I have never yet finished a Lessing novel, being somewhat put off by (a) her creds as a Serious African Issue-Driven Novelist, which sparks my auto-bloody-mindedness response, (b) her writing style, with which I for some reason do not resonate, and (c) a very vivid memory of my late maternal grandmother, who knew Lessing in her early days in then-Rhodesia. At any mention of Lessing, Gran would tighten her lips ominously, say tartly, "Tigger Wisdom? She was a naughty girl," and refuse to be drawn further. In retrospect, it is somewhat ironic that I should have allowed myself to be influenced by this, as it refers to Lessing's unhappy first marriage from which she departed at speed, leaving a husband and two children - I think my gran was horrified by the children-leaving bit. I, on the other hand, am fully behind the rights of the individual to escape an unhappy relationship, and given the social mores of the time, could easily see how Lessing might have been pressured into both marriage and children.

It thus clearly behooves me to dig out the Canopus in Argus series I madly bought about a year ago and have never read, and to darned well read them in the interests of both feminist and sf solidarity. I am happy about Lessing's win because she is a highly-regarded "serious" mainstream novelist who both writes deliberately within sf genre traditions, and, unlike rotten weasel-worders like Margaret Atwood, routinely acknowledges her debt to the genre. The world needs more writers capable of exploding the myth that "if it's good it can't be science fiction." A Nobel rather does that. Heh.

Slightly spacey today, after a hectic and highly enjoyable weekend helping the dreaded jo run her Opera InCognito LARP. Good bunch of players, lovely costumes, perfect setting, much hilarity had by all. Stv took some stunning photos, will link to them when he's released them to Teh Internets. Also saw Stardust. It made me happy. Review tomorrow, when I've killed 20 essays and annotated an Honours dissertation. Sigh.

Current Mood: rather tired and down
Current Music: Radiohead

This BoingBoing post leads to this New York Times article, which has just made me cry bitterly and helplessly for twenty minutes. (NYT requires that you register as a user in order to access articles. It's worth it).

It's not enough that human activity is slaughtering elephants mindlessly: we also have to do it so cruelly, so thoughtlessly that the entire species is going into post-traumatic stress. Human incursions are destroying elephant social constructs, disrupting a slow, complex, careful, supportive and rational system which allows elephants to self-regulate their enormous strength, to socialise themselves and thus contain the exaggerated behaviours of adolescents through the influence of older members of the group. Fragmentation of family groups is wrecking this process. Even worse, experience of the deaths of family members is traumatising young elephants and teaching them about cruelty, and they're starting to attack humans more frequently. We haven't just decimated them, we've broken the survivors, destroyed the functionality and dignity of their society.

The extent to which this study's findings in elephant societies mirrors current trends in human society, breaks my heart. It's one thing for our own young to be deprived of mature parenting and exposed to ongoing violence: our social functioning at the moment is absurd and dangerous, but you could argue that it's our own problem and something we're doing to ourselves. It's another order of iniquity altogether to impose our own disfunctions on another species, as we are undoubtedly doing to other species besides the elephants: not even that we assume, with absolute arrogance, that we have some kind of right to destroy other species for our own profit, but that often we don't even notice. I can't work out if it's worse to be unthinkingly destructive or actively psychopathic. As an individual, the human race is both. It could learn a huge amount about self-regulation from the elephants, who have, if left undisturbed, a far better ability to control their own enormous destructive power.

Things like this make me not want to be human. I am ashamed to be part of a species which could commit this kind of crime. I hope we destroy ourselves quickly, soon, in time that some other remnants of life on this poor planet have an actual chance at survival.

Current Mood: very deeply unhappy

The nice tax man gave me R2500 back this year, which both reminds me of and rather validates my insane tendency to get an unholy kick out of filling in my tax returns.

( Philosophy Ensues. )

On a not entirely unrelated note, courtesy of the wonderful BoingBoing: Bruce Sterling's ironic, witty, terrifying short fiction piece in New Scientist, projecting a horribly dystopian future to current trends in computers as a means of control. Scary stuff.

Current Music: hacking coughs

Mon cher papa, who is a scientist by training and who shares my tendency to depressive ecological awareness, told me about an alarming TV program he saw recently. Apparently Spring is happening as much as 10 days earlier than it was thirty years ago, as a direct result of global warming. This sounds like a minor point, but it has dire consequences. A change in the familiar pattern of the year could bring the synchronisation of various reproductive cycles out of whack: insects out of kilter with the pollen cycles they need to interact with for fertilization to occur, birds laying too early before there is actually insect life to sustain the hatchlings. Some species are adapting to the new conditions, but thirty years is hardly a reasonable time for a quick spot of micro-evolution. We are apparently likely to lose hundreds of species to this particular problem alone.

Global warming is all very alarming in terms of the effects we are beginning to measure, but it's bloody terrifying to consider the as yet unnoticed trashing of the complex, delicate, essential systems we have cheerfully stuck into the pocket of our pants and then sat down on.

Humanity: voted Species Most Likely To Turn Into A Stupid, Destructive Asshole. This wouldn't happen if the orang-utans ruled.

Current Mood: depressed, doom-laden
Current Music: Student Life compilations

My dad phoned from France the other night, and we had a long phone conversation which entailed about ten minutes of catching up on our mutual lives, plans and what have you, and another 35 minutes or so discussing, volubly and impassionedly, global warming. This interchange was something of a revelation to me: I'd always thought I'd got my more or less psychotic environmental angsts from years of reading science fiction, but in fact the rot clearly set in a lot earlier. Given that my father is an animal scientist by training, this also explains why my personal environmental philosophy tends to circle back around population pressure and biodiversity despite the fact that I'm an airy-fairy English academic who wouldn't recognise an exponential growth curve if it slithered up my leg. (It was absolutely no sort of revelation to have this kind of conversation with my dad, incidentally. Both my parents are characterised by an ability to take an intelligent interest in issues in the abstract, which makes them interesting to talk to and is one of the many reasons why I am a Lucky Daughter, TM).

Anyway. Global warming. I find it absolutely fascinating, in doing some back-up reading after the conversation, to consider the sad case of the polar bear. To say that the ice caps are melting is something of a cliché of common global warming discourse. The ice caps are melting, yeah, we know. OK, but did you know how much they're melting? 8% per decade, according to the BBC; at this rate there'll be none left in summer by 2060. This starting to make a serious difference to polar bear populations, not only because longer summers are giving them less time to hunt, but because this summer the ice has retreated 200 miles further north than usual, so they're having to swim much longer distances than usual between ice floes, and significant numbers of them are drowning.

This is sad, and predictable, and a horribly good example of the complex web of relationships which our heedless presence on this planet is joyously and thoughtlessly destroying, and the feedback loops and knock-on effects are going to hit a threshold or trigger or something very, very soon and we're all royally screwed. But what interests me is that Googling for this kind of thing pulls up a rash of articles talking about increased ice cap meltage as early as 2003; various scientists gave dire warnings with dire figures attached, and then the whole thing dropped out of the news for a couple of years. It's only when charismatic mammals are directly threatened that the issue is deemed newsworthy again (it made the cover of a March issue of Time). This also suggests that global warming is gaining increasing status as a valid threat in the popular consciousness, but as far as I'm concerned, it's too little, way too late.

This wouldn't be happening if we were all orang-utans, with a moderate birthrate, a more enlightened culture and the sense not to come down from the trees in the first place. Opposable thumbs, definitely a mistake.

Current Mood: somewhat despairing

I came to a terrible realisation today. If the Tardis suddenly turned up in my front garden and gave me the opportunity to hie me off over time and space, dropping everything that currently constitutes my life, I would so do it. I may pause to write a letter to my parents, and I'd hope I'd be able to drop back and visit, but otherwise I'd be off. Does this make me basically irresponsible?

Current Mood: contemplative

One of the best things about the relaxing of water restrictions - apart from a garden that's actually looking vaguely green - is the birds. I've just put the sprinkler on the front bit, and spent ten minutes watching three white-eyes, a thrush and a sunbird having a whale of a time diving (or running, in the case of the thrush) repeatedly through it, wittering with excitement. Then they take baths in the puddles. I think humanity made a major error somewhere in this whole civilisation business, when our definition of pleasure involves either complex ingredients and major alcohol-producing chemistry, the major death of trees to put little black words on paper, or the entire Hollywood film industry. Even bathing, which I admit is an important pleasure for me, requires hot water and preferably lots of scented additives. See Orang-utans, civilisation, for the use of.

Currently my definition of pleasure involves a day in which my head does not hurt. The last three have been something of a washout, work-wise; if I don't have a headache when I start reading Barthes, I certainly do when I stop. This may have something to do with the weather, which continues hot, but my suspicions are otherwise. Dammit. Matters were not helped yesterday by an involuntary early wake-up: about five ADT operatives (the local security company, who do patrols) chose to park their cars in the corner of the road near our house, and have a loud, Afrikaans argument (including frequent repetitions of the word "poes!", dear me, what can they mean?), starting at 6am and continuing for just over half an hour. Three metres from my bed. In an ideal universe the wall of my bedroom would not also be the wall of the property, or if it was, would be adjacent only to vast tracts of wilderness inhabited only by birds and animals. Quiet birds and animals. Also, while I am generally in favour of the obvious activities of our Boys In Blue And Orange, I would definitely settle for a silent crime-deterrant presence. Anyway, I got up, seething, at 6.30, and went for a brisk walk around Rondebosch Common, which was surprisingly pleasant. Not only everymoment gets to wun! And it says hopeful things for the human race as a species that there is no jogger so out of breath that he or she won't say "Good morning" in passing. Of course, the fact that it was cool and windy and I was striding around with an enormous, silly grin on my face, may have had something to do with that.

In other news, I recommend to your attention

wytchfynder's current exercise in imaginary housemates. They are quirky, compelling and beautifully written, enough that they're worth the side-effect, i.e. causing me to search my conscience regarding the actual year I spent sharing a house with him. I don't remember committing any of those solecisms, but my memory is notoriously erratic.

Current Mood: bothered

Every time I cook an SCA feast, I totter out the other end exhausted, stressed, aching and with swollen feet, swearing I'll never do it again. Until the next time I volunteer. I enjoy the cooking, really I do, but I tend to forget in between how much of a physical toll it takes on me. I suspect it must be a bit like childbirth: memory draws a tactful veil over the experience, of necessity, otherwise the human race would cease to exist* and SCA types would never get fed. To assist the process of blissful forgettery this time round, Lara has promised me her unused foot spa. Also, I didn't over-cater by my usual factor of 1.5 this time: I spent just under budget and had a little food left, not too much. She can be taught. Eventually.

The event was otherwise good, further comment being unnecessary except to note that, damn, our Shire can make more obscene comments per square inch out of the Yule gift game** than one would have believed humanly possible. Noted perps included jo(ty) and, more surprisingly, Simon. Fun was, however, had by all.

I am somewhat under the weather this weekend, with a mad tendency to nausea every time I get into a car. Annoying, although I suppose all things considered, 'tis the season for excess of bile. Further motivation could be found in this week's Mail & Guardian, which has a metric buttload of bad environmental news, including Kyoto Accord summit reports (nothing doing), warnings of increased earthquake risk in East and Central Africa, and news of a possible asteroid collision 30 years down the line. What most nauseated me, however, was the reminder of the existence of emissions control trading, a happy little offshoot of capitalism in which first-world countries unwilling to reduce their pollution levels can instead pay for emissions-control projects in developing nations. I am stunned, floored and horrified by the incredible ostrich-nature of contemporary society: if they're not actually being flooded, drought-struck or blown away right at this very instant, the problem clearly doesn't exist and can be staved off with token gestures. Above all, apparently, thou shalt not threaten the profit margins, or even think about anything sensible like drastic population limitation. Oh, and the Amazon is on fire. This wouldn't happen if we were all orang-utans.

* Not, in my book, necessarily a bad thing.
** That fun one where everyone contributes a small gift, preferably gaudily and attractively wrapped; guests go by numbers drawn from a hat, and can either take a gift from the table or steal one off someone who already has one. Pleasantly inclined to reveal the worst aspect of human nature, in keeping with the spirit of Christmas.

Current Mood: grumpy and nauseated

Well, so much for the Trappist monastery. The Big Seekrit Surprise Baby-Shower for wolverine_nun & family happened yesterday, and Evil Landlord made gluhwein. Bad. Very bad. Well, very good gluhwein, but fatally easy to drink.

Of course, a lot of the drinking has to do with the fact that I don't care for, as in deeply loathe and detest, baby showers*, and endure them solely for the sake of friends for whom I do care. This is true even of the relaxed, non-traditional, both-sexes incarnation of current baby shower etiquette. There is something about the whole weight of cultural expectation/investment in baby-production which makes me twitchy and claustrophobic and inclined to run miles in the opposite direction, screaming and sweating. Alcohol helps a lot in cushioning the agony, thus preventing the startlement of expectant mothers by sudden eruptions on the part of her guests.

It's not that I dislike babies, per se. It's that I dislike the notion of babies as a cultural construction. Like the difference between gender and sex. Something about human society suddenly snaps to attention at the mere whiff of babies, ready to rally around with a bunch of assumptions around the notion that babies are absolutely, completely and inalienably the finest and most important goal of the human race. Apart from the outrage this causes my psycho-feminist convictions, the problem, I think, is that by and large I don't like the human race that much, and am not convinced that it absolutely needs continuation. (See previous posts on orang-utans. Orang-utans, being sensible creatures, don't have baby showers.)

Besides, baby showers alienate me profoundly. They confront me with the need to provide gifts in an area where I have absolutely no expertise and not much interest, and I'm always convinced that what I do provide is the wrong size, shape, colour, alignment or level**. I am forced to face the fact that a lot of my friends are now residing on Planet Baby, which, however fond I am of them, is an alien territory whither I, in my unoffspringed state, may not follow them. Not that I particularly want to, but it's getting a bit lonely on Planet UnOffspringed. (I derive a small amount of consolation from contemplating the happy mental image of Lara's reaction when someone attempts, with malice aforethought, to hand her a dribbling baby. I am not totally alone).

Besides, hemming baby blankets has put my back out something 'orrible, and I'm feeling more like Granny Weatherwax than ever before. Which may explain some of the above rantage. Sorry. *shuffles cronelike off in search of more muscle relaxants*

* What the hell's with the name, anyway? Showers of babies? Makes no sense! My dictionary insists that one meaning of the word is "to lavishly bestow with gifts", which I assume is what they mean. Where's the OED when you need it?

** "What do you mean, I shouldn't give a baby a Red Dragon? Red Dragons make excellent mothers!"

Current Mood: grumpy and pained
Current Music: Murakami, dance dance dance; Perez-Reverte, The Dumas Club

So, I finally succumbed and watched Phantom of the Opera on video last night. Andrew Lloyd Webber directed by Joel Schumacher is, unlikely though it sounds, a marriage made in heaven. Cheesy melodrama squared. As usual, various movie-watching insights were vouchsafed to me in convenient, blog-friendly point form. I seem to have that subconscious whipped.

I am not for a moment knocking melodrama. Melodrama is quite okay by me, and can sweep me up in the dramatic folds of its cape any time it likes. The movie was sumptuously and unashamedly melodramatic. Quite unreasonable and therefore effective amounts of gargoyles, underground caverns, random candles, twisty passages, dripping water, portculli, emotional excesses and general stalking around in masks. However, the scene with arms holding candles all along the walls was, may I point out, directly cribbed from Cocteau, which is Not Cricket. I refuse to believe it was a deliberate homage. Not Joel Schumacher.
The big mistake was for the Phantom to take off the mask. He was kinda hot with the mask, although that might just be my personal weakness for evil-minded sods in cloaks. This involuntary judgement was also completely independent of my later realisation that Gerard Butler also played Lara Croft's bastard Irish boyfriend in the second Tomb Raider. I adored the bastard Irish boyfriend. But I have to admit that the overall Hot Phantom Effect rather removed the horror motif from the being-dragged-off-to-the-underground-lair-and-seduced bit.
Conversely, on the eye candy front, Raoul bore an uncanny resemblance to one of my ex students, who combines cheekbones and a similar sort of shy charm with an absurd degree of hyperintelligence and analytic sensitivity. I like Emmy Rossum, and she has a lovely voice, but she Was Not Worthy of the weird combination of Raoul and student I ended up synthesising as I watched.
I have something of a tolerate/hate relationship with Andrew Lloyd Webber's music, generally it's just too cheesy for words, and the way in which those wretchedly catchy tunes bounce around one's head for days is just horrible. But, ye gods and little fishes, his librettist should be dumped into the nearest toxic waste spill with the Complete Oxford Dictionary tied around his neck. That wasn't language. That was one step up from ape-grunts.
Minnie Driver? Minnie Driver as an opera diva, with voice to match? Stunned, I was. Stunned.
The world is apparently spinning in reverse, since watching Phantom gave me irresistable flashbacks to Pratchett's Maskerade. (As postmodernists everywhere go mad with enthusiasm).

I should add, for the record, that I dragged the Evil Landlord off to watch Fantastic Four this evening. Not quite as horrible as the reviews would have one believe (what is it with reviews, anyway?) - not a great film, but quite endearing, in an ooops-the-dear-little-puppy-is-about-to-be-sick-on-my-feet sort of way. As I say, I have no quarrel with melodrama, which this was. Valiant attempt at a character-driven story, too, and I liked what they made of The Thing. Was it me, though, or did they run out of special effects budget with an audible crunch?

The movie jaunt this evening was because I really needed to recuperate from a day spent with more sisters and cousins and aunts than I care to remember I have. I love my family dearly, but they're all mad individualists and are completely exhausting en masse. Today entailed meeting three teenage cousins I'd never met before (OK, I met the twins when they were 18 months old), which was surprising since they're all madly alternative with sprinklings of goth, which probably means I have more in common with them than anyone else in my extended family. Too weird.

As a bonus, though, there was a rather lovely sunset driving back from Scarborough, through the little settlement which, while having the totally twee name of Misty Cliffs, gives the Celtic Twilight a serious run for its money - the spray from the surf creates a fine fog for that stretch of coast. Beautiful sunset, pinky skies, grey-green waves with pearly white frills, and the sun doing that great big molten apricot thing through the mist. The encouraging bit, though, was to come round the corner and realise that the road ahead is completely clear because all 15 or so of the cars travelling it have pulled over to watch the sunset. When the sun had finally dipped under the horizon, we all pulled back into the road as one. Perhaps the drive towards an orang-utan civilisation is not quite as urgent as I thought it was, if enough people exist who'll still stop to watch a sunset.

My teaching starts tomorrow. Wish me luck...

Current Mood: very tired and post-familied
Current Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber INSIDE MY MIND!!!

One word. Karaoke.

I cannot sufficiently stress how much I loathe, and have always loathed, karaoke. Listening to someone belt out favourite hits, inaccurately, off key, and with tremendous enjoyment, causes an all-over body reaction in which my stomach curdles, my toes curl, I coil involuntarily into a semi-foetal position, and great waves of loathing rocket up my spine and out through my teeth, which are clenched and on edge. In extreme cases, such as last night's rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody", I end up scrabbling at the wall with my fingernails, uttering pitiful moans, and seeking oblivion in booze. And I'm not even a highly-trained musician; I have some training, some experience in part-singing, and a good ear. What karaoke must do to people with perfect pitch, I shudder to think.

What is it with karaoke? There is a tragic logic in the fact that the people who are most drawn to the microphone tend to be those who have the approximate musical and vocal effect of a tone-deaf peacock with a dented megaphone: those with a musical ear, by and large, are able to realise what a horrible din they're making, and consequently don't. (I tried to get Philip to sing Elvis, but no dice). Thus, during the half of the evening I was present, we had precisely one appearance from a gentleman unknown to me, who produced a note-perfect and gravel-voiced rendition of "Wonderful World" that I swear was channelling Satchmo. It was great. Then he disappeared for ever, and the rest of the crowd appropriated the mike for a Sid Vicious version of "My Way", and I had to gnaw my own leg off in self-defense.

But, most bizarre of all, the participants, may their vocal cords atrophy, have such fun. It's not just the levels of alcohol; there is a mad, zesty joy in the perpetrator of karaoke, a fine abandon in the way they unhinge their inhibitions and simply have at it. It says to me, for a start, that way too few people simply sing for any reason. But more than that, it's enormously sad that our forms of mass cultural production have alienated listeners from the music we consume to such an extent that they have to re-appropriate it at the cost of losing all dignity; in a weird sort of way, any form of personalisation is so desirable that actual ability doesn't mean a thing. (Although I suppose you could argue that in a wide swathe of pop music, actual ability is hardly the point, either. How long before it's no longer necessary for pop musicians to be able to hold a tune? Wait, R&B. It's happened already). Folk art forms (communal, self-produced, participatory) no longer have a place in our media world; mass culture has taken over. In Marxist terms, we are alienated from the means of production, in spades. I suppose, on purely ideological grounds, I should be approving karaoke as the last-ditch stand of the consumer resisting passivity. It hardly seems worth it.

(Oh, and well might you ask what I was doing in a den of karoke, anyway. 21st party for a younger CLAW type. I hope he appreciates the sacrifice I was making.)

Current Mood: the edges of my teeth
Current Music: will never listen to music again

Actually, bits of it are ok, but large tracts of it make me want to convert to something sensible, like orang-utans.

It is a fearful and wonderful thing, to be an English academic in a time of terrorist bombings: the opportunities for linguistic analysis would make your toes curl (unless you're

starmadeshadow, in which case there's no knowing what they'll do). I am fascinated by the extent to which responses to the London bombings have divided themselves into two camps, which are in ongoing and dynamic tension as they try to colonise the opposition: the sensible/rational/measured response versus the deliberate attempt to emotionalise. People like Blair and certain media sites are doing their damndest to turn this into a black/white, us/them process: big on words like "horror", "terror", "atrocity", very low on actual logic. The bus didn't blow up, it was "ripped apart". This isn't an attack on London's people or transport system, it's an "attack on values and lifestyles". Sensationalism scares me, not only because it whips up extreme emotional responses, but because it suggests that those are the terms in which the majority of people actually want to respond. The rational voices suggesting that this could have been a lot worse, and that maybe we should wait for evidence before jumping to conclusions about the nature of the perpetrators, are a minority, and they're not the ones in charge. Politics these days seems to be interchangeable with mass media - you have to say what sells. I hate it.

Today was an annoying day. Last night's game was lack-lustre and is giving me crises of confidence about my ability to DM, or at least to bludgeon my brain into something like wakeful energy during games. The belated discovery that today is the deadline for tax returns didn't help; of all the things I hate about being a Grown-Up, tax returns are about the third worst. It is also one of the many ramifications of Sod's Law that this morning should have seen me bitten suddenly with inspiration re this thrice-dratted Tolkien paper, since I almost immediately had to stop chasing up fascinating ramifications of fan culture in order to wrestle with numbers and bureaucratic language. (You try making sense out of tax certificates when two-thirds of your brain wants to be wandering Middle-Earth in analytic mode.) The total non-appearance of a vital tax certificate didn't help, but, in a bizarre twist of hitherto unsuspected efficiency, the medical aid company provided me with an online copy in about two and a half minutes flat. I think I'm still faintly stunned. I was able to post the wretched thing about five minutes before the post was collected from the box, having exchanged furtive and guilt-ridden grins with two other people in the photocopy shop as we all frantically copied forms and certificates. Inefficiency, the great human commonality.

Just think. If we were an orang-utan civilisation, we probably wouldn't have to fill in tax returns. Bananas don't generate that much paperwork.

Current Mood: rather cross
Current Music: Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers

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someone to fool us, someone like you
don't tell God your plans
all bruised passivity
across the universe
waiting for the scythe
all the nobody people
noble gassing
anger and pain
system of the world
humanity i hate you
bears
more with the Doctor Who
baths and Barthes
Repentance oft before I swore
Great showers of babies, Batman!
The PHA-aaaaaaaantomoftheoperais heeeeere....
Reasons To Convert To Orang-Utan, Part II
I do not like the human race

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with orang-utan civilisation

someone to fool us, someone like you

don't tell God your plans

all bruised passivity

across the universe

waiting for the scythe

all the nobody people

noble gassing

anger and pain

system of the world

humanity i hate you

bears

more with the Doctor Who

baths and Barthes

Repentance oft before I swore

Great showers of babies, Batman!

The PHA-aaaaaaaantomoftheoperais heeeeere....

Reasons To Convert To Orang-Utan, Part II

I do not like the human race

Profile

December 2024

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