Posts by Jolisa
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Hard News: Rape and unreason, in reply to Danielle,
We totally are soaking in it, and it does get in.
I've never felt as utterly powerful as the days I spent in my early 20s walking around Tokyo at midnight, by myself, in a blissful bubble of ignorance, having been told (I forget by whom) that it was perfectly safe to do so. It was mad, and it was wonderful, and it was the exact opposite of everything I'd been taught, explicitly and subliminally, about how to behave in the world. For those brief shining moments, I felt like a free person. On those nights, nothing "happened" to me -- except the overwhelming feeling of gaining a whole extra dimension of humanity.
But the old messages die hard and old habits (and the evidence of my own experience and friends, even though so much of the evidence was domestic in its location, familiar in its perpetration) soon kicked back in. Safety first; trim your wings; curb your enthusiasm; abandon the streets, hide from the dark.
Recently, via a combination of bloodymindedness and encouraging visualisations, I'd almost talked myself into being brave enough to go out for a run, alone or with a friend, in my familiar streets in the (not-yet-dark-but-nearly) evenings, which is the most convenient time to get some exercise. And then fucking Bob fucker Jones figuratively came to my house wrapped in newspaper and metaphorically punched me. It fucking hurts.
Per Dylan's concerns, I was reminded of some research from ages ago, by Canterbury academics, about discovering that -- counterintuitively and rather upsettingly -- anti-racism/anti-sexism classroom curricula produced a brief increase in kids saying racist/sexist things (NB carefully out of earshot of the teacher). It was as if the very act of raising the topic somehow gave the kids license to experiment with/briefly occupy the mindset under discussion. The paper is mentioned here, sorry couldn't find a digested version of it. The good news is that once the teachers in that experiment became aware of the hidden curriculum that was playing out under their noses, they were able to tweak the message and the presentation to make space for that reaction, and address it, and get through it. So any transient empowerment effect, if that's what it was, was temporary, and discoverable, and fixable.
So maybe it's actually good to lance the boil in that way, y'know?
Also, if a campaign that appears to say "Dudes, y'all might be rapists" is upsetting to blokes, then it's probably working as a useful empathy check, by offering a tiny, tiny glimpse into the way women feel about dealing with the 24/7 message "Ladies, y'all might be raped."
I mean, I do get what Dylan's saying, technically, linguistically, logically, in that I can see in principle how (for example) "Yo, don't drive drunk, people" does seem to imply "Yo, people, you're driving drunk". But that doesn't really actually give people license to do it, does it? And it hasn't stopped us running those campaigns, has it? And rewording and rethinking them as necessary? And seeing positive change from each iteration?
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What a gorgeous essay, and you're right, we need some good synonyms for following your nose when your nose is more of a virtual organ. I've always quite liked "meander", both for the process of writing and of reading/link-following, because it sounds aimless but very much isn't...
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea.
The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
I love the straightforward expression of it as an algorithm; an earlier (and more poetically written) take on the same metaphor can be found here. I like the way it veers from material to metaphorical to absolutely material again at the end:
...Flattened out, the thin human cortex, the gray matter of the brain, is much too large for the skull within which it must fit. The problem has been elegantly solved by intricate pleating and folding, as if the cortex were a piece of thick fabric gathered in tightly to fit. In anatomy books, we can see pictures of cross-section slices of the gathers. The shape is unmistakable, like a close-packed river shot from above, meandering within.
So, a vote for meander.
Also, a whimsical bid for "brachiate", to swing from limb to limb. Arboreal locomotion; the Internet as forest.
Or perhaps, given the labyrinthine nature of the web, and the string of links we generate as we go, we could find a non-uglifying way to verbify Ariadne?
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Just watched the doco. I was so delighted to see Jim behind the desk at the Civic during the Film Fest -- only now do I fully realise how delighted he was to be there himself!
What a fantastic and generous insight into Jimmy's world, and the sheer determination it takes for him to move through the rest of the world. His irrepressible charm and humour is such a strength.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Deborah,
I think I would be happy with “Mrs” if it carried its original connotation of an adult woman, as “Mr” still does for men, c/f “Master” for a boy.
What if we made people pronounce it "Mistress"? That could be fun.
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We married for a visa (not even a green card, ow), and then had a really big party later when we were back in NZ. No pomp and ceremony (okay, there may have been an impromptu Best Best Man speech competition at the party, won by our friend Kathryn); no vows beyond the basic "take thee as lawful wedded whatnot" plus a bonus promise Never To Be Boring.
But we did put this satirically sniffy dowager duchess line from Dorothy L. Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon on the party invitations, cos, LOL:
"They were married in the old, coarse, Prayer-book form, and the bride said Obey - I take this to be their idea of humour, for she looks as obstinate as a mule."
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Southerly: Now I Am Permitted, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
A loo with a view! As opposed to David's loo with a peeee-yew.
Superb blog, David - always worth waiting for.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s better than a recipe book.
And even betterer AS a recipe book? If only we knew an editor-type person...
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A flashback to the original "do you stand by your product and would you consume it on air" stunt (although that one was voluntary, on behalf of the cunning stuntman at least; not so much his junior sidekick).
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Notes & Queries: In The Face of Global…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Don't make me mention the war... !
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Mixed emotions, mostly negative ones: "O, the lack of humanity."
Which is the opposite of my initial response to the event itself: a cry of anguish, "The people!" That cry has never really stopped or changed (I have mostly managed to wall off the part of my brain that wants to return and return to the thought of what it was like to be one of the adults on those planes telling a child it would be all right.) and continues to be my response to any disaster, monumental or tiny in scale. The people.
So I wonder at the casual dehumanisation on display here. Only number 9 seems to engage with the event with any genuine humanity; the fact that the project traumatised its creator to the point where he was physically unable to work on it for a long while is pretty eloquent. And strangely reassuring.