Posts by Jolisa
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I think "privilege" does some of the work that "blind spot" used to do (before the latter was presumably consigned to the Memory Hole for its hint of able-ism). With the difference that "privilege" has the advantage of calling attention to a sense of ease that a person may never have noticed simply because it's the water they swim in (e.g. straight people casually talking about their partner without dodging around pronouns). But the word seems to have calcified, lost its original "aha" value, and developed a new definitiveness: "Check your privilege" => "Checkmate! You're privileged!"
Argumentative shorthand is great, especially when it's new and cathartically funny. "Mansplaining" cracked me up the first couple of dozen times I read it, and still makes me giggle, despite or perhaps because of its cheeky essentialising (it could have been invented for Alasdair Thompson and his explanatory woes).
But at the same time, I find a lot of jargon as disempowering and mentally itchy-making as others find it handy and empowering. My linguistic quibble with both "privilege" and "blind spot" and indeed "tone argument" is that they're nouns, and nouns are just so... nouny, so stolid and lumpen. They sit there in the middle of the table, taking up space, neither proposing nor inviting obvious action. What do you do with a noun like "privilege"? You "check it" -- but how? In the mirror, or at the left luggage office? At least "blind spot" suggests immediate remedial action, encouraging a person to move their eyes in the direction of something they haven't seen before, or to mentally occupy a position they've never stood in, or simply to ponder the possibility that what-they-see is not all-there-is.
And "tone argument" is just ambiguous.
I dunno. Give me a plain verb any day (like when, in the parable Deborah linked to, the gecko asks the dog to just listen; or when a march route goes up steps instead of a ramp, because people with feet forgot about people with wheels). Verbs help people of good will figure out what to do -- this time, next time, any time.
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(The term, not the practice itself, she adds hastily)
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to 81stcolumn,
I think I prefer the original term, 'patronising.'
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Older son is incensed on your behalf, and suggests that if you aren't allowed to rebuild on the land itself, you consider the obvious alternative... the river.
Yes, HOUSEBOATS. Take the side out of Avonside, and float your way out of the dilemma.
Sorry, marine-mad nine-year-old lateral thinking is the best I can offer right now.
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Awful sinking feeling reading this post, starting with the absolute, utter heartbreaker of an opening paragraph.
I may have also said some unladylike words. Probably even, like Emma, some ladypart ones.
I should think Radio NZ's science columnist (whatever his sketchy understanding of lifeboat theories) would be in a position to at least make some noise about this? Go to it. We have your back.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Lilith __,
Around here we were wondering what happens to the balloon-dinosaur when it bumps into the giant, invisible, Spiny Norman.
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to recordari,
You know what, I think (on reflection) that the ending of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is meant to be unfinished, wide open and (like the title) completely ambiguous. It's a little frustrating, given the thriller-like structure of the novel, not to find out What Happened; but I think the author very cunningly holds up a mirror to our own prejudices and expectations, showing us that the dots can be joined in many different ways to make many different pictures. (I also think that had he come down on one side or the other, readers would still have been mad or frustrated, just more simplistically so).
Interesting round-up of the reviews here.
I love this particular thought from an interview with Mohsin Hamid:
I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker
That's definitely what I was trying to get at, about why the attack on New York felt so fundamentally wrong. Not that an attack on, say, Disneyland, or the Mall of America, would have been in any way right. But an attack on New-York-as-America is just wrongheaded. When you're inside the place, New York is in some powerful way not really American, but truly global in its composition and outlook - a cosmopolis, a world-city, not a nation-city.
NB This might be just a collective fantasy of the inhabitants, but it feels real -- and here I thank Creon for enthusing about the value of the symbolic -- and so I was thrilled to see Hamid put it into those words.
(Is there a NZ parallel - 'I was, in four and a half years, never a New Zealander; I was immediately an Aucklander'?? OK, maybe Wellington?)
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A couple of serendipitous links via my twitterstream from the last few days: James Wood, writing in October 2001, about the possible impact of the attack on the novel in general, and novels about New York in particular:
Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan.
And then Zadie Smith's brilliantly stroppy reply the following week -- "writers do not write what they want, they write what they can":
I want to defend the future possibility of some words appearing on pages that will be equal to these times and to what I feel and what you feel and what James Wood feels; that is, this fear that has got us all by the throat. He argues against silence and against intellectual obfuscation. He says: tell us how it feels. Well, we are trying. I am trying. But as DeLillo dramatised (again, in White Noise), it is difficult to discuss feelings when the TV speaks so loudly; cries so operatically; seems always, in everything, one step ahead.
(Both worth reading in full, of course).
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Great question, Carol... I'd need to get my head around that before answering at length. I'd have to say I think I prefer books that allow the subject in sideways, rather than tackle it head-on. And more and more seem to do that, in a way that's both subtle and authentic. Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector (a sort of rewrite of Sense and Sensibility set during the dotcom bubble) was one recent example.
I tried to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close when it first came out, but it felt too soon. And also, somehow, a bit off; the precocious child narrator didn't quite do it for me (and it's probably telling that I think of the title as Extremely Loud and Incredibly False). Apparently I wasn't alone, but it would be interesting to try it again.
Like Jackson, I loved The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- a quick and beguiling read, with bonus attraction for anyone who's ever flirted with the world of management consulting. But I read the ending three times and am still not entirely sure what actually happened, in the end. (Dunno if that's a failure of writing, or of reading). Coincidentally, there was a really nice piece by Mohsin Hamid in the Guardian the other day, on the strain (or absence thereof) of inhabiting two places and two languages as a child.
James Hynes (whose earlier academic fantasias I absolutely loved) tackles 9/11 obliquely in his latest novel, Next. Alas, I thought it rang false at every level, but enough people loved it that The Believer just picked it as their novel of the year. Go figure!
Here's an interesting article on which of the early 9/11 novels still stand up - I've read two of the three mentioned, and wasn't crazy about them. Again, go figure.
Would love to hear other people's recommendations and impressions - thank you for the question, Carol!
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Putting it on the list - ta!