In honor of John Wiley Price’s peculiar brand of idiocy, I propose we celebrate this Friday with a racist martini. Since most anything can be labeled racist these days, there’s really no avoiding it.
If you missed it, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, with a reputation for grandstanding and bizarre behavior, took offense when fellow Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, referring to a government agency, said, “It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole.”
Well! Price (who is black) demanded an apology from Mayfield (who is white). Price explained that it’s just like “Angel Food Cake” and “Devil’s Food Cake.” Everyone knows those are racist terms, don’t they?
Now Drinksmixer.com did not ask to be brought into this, and I want to make it clear that I have no reason to think that the fine folks at that site have the slightest inclination toward racism. But then, I never thought Stephen Hawking was a racist either. (Not to mention PBS. Oh, my!) I have friends who prefer to drink White Russians as opposed to Black Russians and never attributed it to racial prejudice. Who knew?
But here it is, in black and white, as it were:
Black Martini
2/3 oz gin
1/3 oz black sambuca
Pour ingredients over ice. Shake gently. Strain into cocktail glass.
And while we’re pushing the envelope, how about another:
Black Martini #2
4 1/2 oz Absolut vodka
2 oz Chambord raspberry liqueur
1 oz Blue Curacao liqueur
ice
Combine in shaker. Shake vigorously. Strain into cocktail glass.
I will try these black martinis and toast Ken Mayfield on the occasion, but I still recommend a gin martini, made with Tanqueray and a niggardly dose of Vermouth.
Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons
July 11th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Language, Leisure, Politics |
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Brett Stephens writes, “A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.”
It’s Not Just the Episcopalians, notes GetReligion. “The [Presbyterian General Assembly] voted on a number of controversial statements about Israel and the Palestinians; approved a $2 million war chest to sue congregations seeking to leave; approved a change to one of the PCUSA’s confessions that would remove mention of homosexuality from the church’s confessional documents; voted to rescind thirty years’ worth of church policy on the incompatibility of homosexual behavior and Christian life; and voted to remove language from the church’s constitution requiring ordained ministers, elders and deacons to live in faithfulness in marriage or chastity in singleness.”
Newsflash: Democrats in Uniform. AP writer Nancy Benac bases an entire article on having found one soldier who supports McCain and another who supports Obama. This apparently portends a trend in Benac’s mind away from a military comprised entirely of Republicans. To back up this anecdotal foray, she reports the statistical bombshell that Obama has received $367,000 from people who gave at least $200 and claim to be in the military. Note to Benac: this is not a mutiny. It means Obama has at most 1,635 high-rolling contributors in the military, which comprises a whopping one-tenth of one percent of the 1,368,226 people now serving as active-duty military personnel. Last time I checked, the army doesn’t screen its recruits for party affiliation, and it’s not news that Democrats routinely engage in honorable military service.
My Bad. Ron Rosenbaum writes on “catchphrases,” those annoying sayings that are “past their sell-by date” and “need to be thrown under the bus along with ‘thrown under the bus.’” It’s a target-rich environment.
Really, if you “drill down,” to use another corporatism, there’s something kind of industrially extractive about “takeaway,” isn’t there? The impulse to reduce everything to a PowerPoint action item? All the most interesting things in life are the things you can’t extract and “take away.”
So, Dude, going forward when you want to explain where’s the beef, better think outside the box to hone your elevator pitch because anything more mission critical is going to receive a thumbs down. Your street cred depends on buzzwords for a takeaway. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
A Carrier for the Times. Check out the U.S.S. William Clinton,
The ship is constructed entirely of recycled aluminum and is completely solar powered with a top speed of 5 knots. It boasts an arsenal of one (unarmed) F14 Tomcat or one (unarmed) F18 Hornet aircraft which, although they cannot be launched or captured on the 100 foot flight deck, form a very menacing presence.
PJ Country has pictures and everything.
July 6th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Ammo, Language, Politics, Religion |
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Historian David McCullough spoke at the Boston College graduation ceremony and offered this advice on what the graduates could do for their country:
“Please, please do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation,” McCullough implored Boston College’s class of 2008 at commencement ceremonies Monday.
He said he’s particularly troubled by the “relentless, wearisome use of words” such as like, awesome and actually.
“Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, ‘Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually,” he said.
Graduates apparently thought his speech was, like, awesome. They gave him a standing ovation.
Right on, David. Far Out! But seriously, most of the fad expressions of the baby boomers eventually died out, so there’s hope for the demise of current kidspeak. We boomers came up with a few rhetorical flourishes that were colorful or cryptic, although we peppered our speech with “like” and “you know” out of sheer laziness – perhaps as much as the current generation.
The problem seems rather the same as it was in 1960 when Lee Adams wrote the lyrics to Bye Bye Birdie:
Kids!
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
May 21st, 2008
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Language |
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Behold the wit and wisdom of Sean Penn. He was quoted today on the topic of Barack Obama.
I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be.
That’s a tall order for any candidate. Maybe Penn would do better to stick with the Army’s slogan – the potentially achievable “Be all that you can be.” Then again, maybe he would do better to stick simply to acting. Then again . . .
May 14th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Film, Language, Politics |
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As I said, the University of California at Santa Barbara conference entitled “Intimate Labors: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Domestic, Care & Sex Work” is a gift that keeps on giving. The abstracts of the papers delivered at this conference vividly illustrate the sad state of feminist scholarship.
Jinan (Chaun) Chen wins the award this week for Best Theatrical Trailer:
Cheang Shu Lea’s Japanese sci-fi porn film I.K.U. inducts the viewer as corporate manufacturer and consumer of the polymorphous sexual experiences collected mostly by simulation Japanese women. As viewer, the distinction between production and consumption collapses, as replicant female Japanese sex worker becomes both the instrument for the accumulation of sexual experience and the direct instrument of sexual pleasure. The replicant sex worker implodes fixed framings of the relationship among abstract labor, the body of the laborer, and commodity capitalism.
So, you’re probably wondering what this film is really about and whether you should put it in your Netflix cue. It must be a very serious art film indeed to become the object of scholarly research and commentary.
The reviewers at IMDB.com apparently haven’t given sufficient thought to the serious side of this movie. Here’s what the critics say:
Directed by a woman, this film is a mix of styles that reminds me of Blade Runner, Tron, Yellow Submarine, Matrix, (nearly) hard-core porno, bio-sex-technology, and a lot more.
The story thread of this is clever enough to warrant description.
No, it’s clever enough to warrant a dissertation!
Its designed as if it were a chapter in a “Bladerunner” world: replicants designed for (or at least adapted for) sex. The story is pretty complex, not in what you see but in what is explained. A replicant takes on seven bodily forms, so as to collect a variety of intense orgasms (apparently the Japanese term for orgasm is iku). The purpose of this is to transfer them to a pill so an evil corporation can make money and gain power. By transferring the orgasmic knowledge to the company, the replicant will buy her freedom.
Corporations are always evil in films and feminist conferences, but would it be so bad to have an orgasm pill? Snippets from other critics:
. . . a cyber punk piece of censored frustration.
I lost track of the so-called story after the first naked Japanese babe showed up on screen.
If you look at the box art and read the description this movie sounds like a Japanese “Barbarella” with sex scenes. Instead what you get is a silly porn masquerading as art.
Mercifully the version I saw was only 73 minutes long. I enjoyed it and found it exciting but soon started looking at my watch when it was apparent that nothing was really going to happen beyond sex scene after sex scene.
Form over substance sex video that forgot to make the sex interesting.
Embarrassing waste of time.
April 5th, 2008
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Education, Language |
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Harvard’s schizophrenic position on gender segregation of its gym is only one manifestation of the utter confusion that pervades academia and its crazy aunt “women’s studies.” Feminists in academia are split on the issues of pornography and prostitution. Those opposing pornography find themselves uncomfortably allied with anti-feminists and Christian conservatives. Those advocating legalization of prostitution find themselves uncomfortably allied with the English language. Prostitution has been gussied up as “intimate labor,” and the definition is expanding to sweep in traditionally noble work in the home: maids, nannies, nurses, and wives. Prostitution can be grouped with these others because they all result from the tyranny of patriarchy. (You have to ignore the fact that prostitutes generally do not work in the home.)
Last fall, the University of California at Santa Barbara held a conference entitled “Intimate Labors: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Domestic, Care & Sex Work.” No less that 50 papers were presented by professors from across the U.S. and Canada. The paper titles and abstracts give us a peek at this exciting field of scholarly research.
John Kaiser lays out a nice introduction:
“Intimate labor” is itself a compelling choice of words, as it draws attention to distinctions around what may be analyzed as “intimate” or not and what may be considered to be “labor.” One useful way of exploring intimate labor as a category of analysis is to think about the importance of contexts in the way intimate labor articulates with power, gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and other lines of experience.
It’s apparently important not to focus on gender alone, but to bring in other factors like race and class. Immigrant status is a favorite and migrants are everywhere.
The UCSB conference is so rich in material, it seems to be ripe for a new kind of Bulwer-Lytton contest. Reading the abstracts is like reading the opening line of a bad novel; the prose is as contorted and the concepts are as disjointed and nonsensical. I can handle only three examples today.
Lachelle R. Hannickel wins the award for fantasy. She begins her abstract by creating her own ambiguous word and noting its ambiguity:
The (im)migrant worker has long occupied an ambiguous position in France.
(Yes, in France and elsewhere.) But this is especially true with domestics.
The role of the (im)migrant domestic has been particularly difficult to define, as she works and, in many case, resides, in the private space of the home.
I can understand the concept of an immigrant domestic, but what is a migrant domestic? Does she migrate from one home to another, or does she merely migrate from the kitchen to the laundry room?
Laura Agustin can’t figure out where customer service ends and sex begins, and has trouble distinguishing prostitutes, singers, and tour guides:
What’s the difference between loving and caring? Or caring and cleaning? What about tending, assisting, listening, advising, explaining, putting at ease? Where does sex begin - with the flirting, the first kiss or the bed? What happens when one of these activities metamorphoses into another - when, for example, the carer offers caresses or the prostitute wraps a warm towel around a spent penis? . . . [T]ea-sellers, karaoke performers, tourist guides, hostesses, . . . migrants offering quasi-domestic services in their homes and prostitutes who sell from the street all describe situations in which a positive feeling for a customer can appear at any moment and result in a less mechanized, more affectionate and intimate encounter.
Migrants offering services in their homes? Well, never mind. Laura wins in the romance category. We have prostitutes with hearts of gold, a first kiss, and an affectionate encounter with a tea-seller. Positive feelings are just around the street corner.
Neel Ahuja wins the thriller award, slaying academia’s favorite bogeyman.
In my presentation, I will review the history of the 1942-1943 venereal disease dragnets that the U.S. and Panamanian governments collaboratively carried out in the Republic of Panama. Officials attempted to strictly segregate white U.S. soldiers stationed in the Panama Canal Zone from multiracial (Asian, black, and Latino) Panamanian and Caribbean migrant women. As an initiative aimed at criminalizing sex work near major U.S. military bases, the dragnets ultimately criminalized the public life of women in Panamanian cities as new medical diagnostic technologies helped enforce hospitalization of large numbers of women associated with venereal disease.
Sex work here becomes a locus of political struggle as it is in part a result of U.S. presence and as it threatens the racial-sexual logics of wartime U.S. imperialism (in both its military and client state manifestations). The fact that the dragnets spurred women’s political resistance to U.S. empire demonstrates the ways in which the development of new carceral approaches to medicine and health across colonized space provided important terrains of subaltern political mobilization.
This thriller abstract has it all. The evil U.S., suppression of the intimate worker trade, racial prejudice, prejudice against migrant prostitutes, and denial of the freedom to be “associated with venereal disease” - all carried out as part of wartime U.S. imperialism. But it has a happy ending apparently as multiracial call girls migrate peacefully across colonized space to threaten racial-sexual logics and to resist having to go to the hospital for treatment.
March 31st, 2008
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Education, Language |
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Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), novelist, playwright, and statesman, has among his credits The Last Days of Pompeii and Rienzi. But his most famous line is the opening to Paul Clifford:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
In homage to this overwrought verbiage, the English Department at San Jose State University initiated the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” With numerous categories and 25 years of history, the Bulwer-Lytton contest has generated a vast compendium of awful prose. The 2007 winner:
Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.
Other winners and honorable mentions abound, and you will find your search for intentionally bad writing amply rewarded. You may be impressed by irony . . .
With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.
. . . or revel in the linguistic descent through multiple layers of nonsense.
Professor Radzinsky wove his fingers together in a tweed-like fabric, pinched his lips together like a blowfish, and began his lecture on simile and metaphor, which are, like, similar to one another, except that similes are almost always preceded by the word ‘like’ while metaphors are more like words that make you think of something else beside what you are describing.
March 28th, 2008
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Language |
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Roger Kimball writes of a breakthrough in teaching English: Educators have discovered that students learn English better when they are actually taught grammar.
I too am flabbergasted. But there it is. Under the splendid headline “English as a proficient language,” The Oregonian reports that some 9,000 students passed the state English examination last year, up from 4,000 the year before. Why the dramatic improvement? Because, say “educators” (don’t you love that word?), “a new way of teaching that has swept Oregon” classrooms teaching English as a Second Language. The novelty? “Schools have begun explicitly teaching the grammar, rules and structure of English. And they are doing it in a carefully ordered way, making sure that students don’t miss any of the building blocks of how English verbs are conjugated, words are ordered, conversations are expected to proceed and sentences are constructed.”
Elsewhere, at The Weekly Standard, David Gelernter asks “Can the damage to our mother tongue be undone?”
Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. (”Thou art the thing itself.” “A plague o’ both your houses.” “Can one desire too much of a good thing?”)
Invoking the memory of E.B. White, Gelernter argues that feminism imported useless syllables into words and useless words into sentences, placing politics over clarity.
He-or-she’ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the Establishment couldn’t help noticing. So feminist authorities went back to the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar–which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional.
National Grammar Day was March 4, in case you missed it. Make that “National (Omigod) Grammar Day” for the folks at Language Log, who announced their intention not to participate and who brand Gelernter’s article “a mad rant.” Language Log can’t figure out what’s so great about a language with agreed rules. It offers three reasons:
The first is the assumption that non-standard variants are unclear and therefore impede communication. This proposition is mostly just taken for granted, without any kind of defense — in what way is “between you and I” less clear than “between you and me”? in what way is “all shook up” less clear than “all shaken up”? they’re non-standard, certainly, but LESS CLEAR? — and the occasional explanations of how particular non-standard usages are unclear don’t survive scrutiny. Instead, it’s just an article of faith that non-standard variants (and conversational, informal, and innovative variants, and variants restricted to certain geographic regions or social groups) are unclear, vague, sloppy, or lazy; the written, formal, established, generally used standard variants are taken to be intrinsically superior, and everything that deviates from them to be intrinsically debased to some degree. I have yet to see actual arguments in favor of this idea, and it has always struck me as deeply mean-spirited. After all, you can point out that some variant is standard (generally used by the educated middle class) and an alternative non-standard without demonizing the non-standard variant.
The second is the very odd view of “communication”, in which respecting and honoring “the rules of English” is what permits people to convey meaning to others. This is a travesty of what happens when people use language. Instead, writers and speakers work to adjust what they say for their audience, and (most important in this context) readers and listeners work to gauge the intentions of their interlocutors. It’s a complex collaboration, in which all the participants have to deal constantly with linguistic and cultural differences, with a good bit of indeterminacy and a certain number of inevitable misfires, with differences in knowledge, assumptions, and goals, and so on.
“Just between you and I,” I never knew shared rules were “a travesty of what happens when people use language.” At the risk of sounding mean-spirited, a situation in which the speaker and listener assign the same meaning to words seems like a good thing, if your goals are to convey information clearly and to promote understanding. Without shared rules of language, communication certainly becomes a complex collaboration. When I speak with my German friends, we adjust what we say and we struggle with linguistic and cultural differences. I would hope to avoid that problem with people who claim English as their native tongue.
Language Log’s third point:
Paul Kiparsky has noted on several occasions that while in some European countries the prescribing of language forms for certain public purposes is the job of official bodies, which normally include language scholars (as well as literary figures), this sort of regulation has been PRIVATIZED in English-speaking countries: it’s managed by commercial publishers, newspaper and magazine editors, and a whole industry of free-lance advisers, only a few of whom know much about either the nature of language or the structure and history of English. Such an arrangement resonates with American free-enterprise ideals and also with the widespread American disdain for “experts” and “intellectuals”. . . .
Kiparsky’s point is one that at first sight seems paradoxical: an official regulatory body, properly constituted, can damp down the ugliness of privatized (and decentralized) prescription, by providing an authority everyone can appeal to, and by making clear the contexts in which its prescriptions are supposed to apply.
So the problem according to Language Log is that only a few publishers and editors know much about the nature of language or the structure of English – unlike a governmental body that would presumably contain some language scholars. Omigod, as it were. They want government as the arbiters of English, the same government universally renowned for clarity of prose and elegance of style.
No, thanks. Remind me to promote National Grammar Day next year. In the meantime, I suggest you join the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG). And feel free to correct my grammar when necessary. No one will take offense. We would rather spend our time promoting good grammar than trying to excuse our errors.
March 8th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Language |
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