The Furry Ungendered

As a present for my birthday, my mother very sweetly sent me an old friend in a squishy padded envelope: Carrots, the quite adorable small white rabbit that you can see in the picture. Perhaps as a result of the rigours of the transatlantic journey, Carrots now has a rakish look: one ear back, the other forward. I certainly don't remember the ears that way.

There's another thing I don't remember, and it's quite embarrassing. I'm pretty sure, but only pretty sure, that Carrots is a she, and not a he. A. thinks this is typical of the apparently large gaps in my memory of childhood. Though it's true that there do indeed seem to be large gaps, I'm not sure about this one. I mean, wasn't Carrots always just Carrots? Carrots's Carrotsishness would seem to entirely trump any trivial concerns about gender. Besides, perhaps Carrots's gender is neither male nor female, but merely: cute.

Them Heavy People

Everything that I've read about Katamari Damacy is absolutely true, both the good and the bad. It's a stroke of genius. It's Tetris-quality game design. I can see how it might not have taken off commercially in the west, though. The games's framing narrative is wilfully, surreally Japanese, and has been kept (so far as I can tell) intact from the original, including the unfathomable name. I'm quietly delighted that they didn't even choose to modify the game's measuring system to switch from metric to imperial for the US market. Though for that reason also it's a shame that the game won't find a wider stealth metrication market.

Ten, fifteen years ago, KD would have stormed arcades all over the world. Not just because it's wonderful, but because it's essentially an arcade game, and there are so few creatures of that nature these days. It's not a massive quest; not a first-person carnage-a-thon; not a cheesily 'authentic' sport simulation. It's a game. There's a feeling of joy about the entire thing. The happy soundrack is buzzing around my cranium as I write this.

I think one of the underappreciated aspects of KD's druggily-adrenaline appeal is that it's based on geometric progression. Though one might start a level pushing around a tiny Katamari beneath a car among mice and scattered bits of odd detritus, within a matter of minutes cars and buildings and even entire islands are being swept up in your inexorable path. That's really possible as a game dynamic because the objects you're able to gather depend on the size of the Katamari, and the growth of the Katamari depends on the objects that you gather. So what you have is a positive feedback loop. It's compound interest, if you like. There are particular moments of genuinely childlike glee, when the Katamari size passes a threshold and suddenly a whole new class of objects becomes gatherable: trees, or skyscrapers, or the pesky policemen who'd been shooting at you (impotently, of course - it's not that sort of game), but whose legs now kick helplessly as they stick out of the side of the Katamari.

Life doesn't have all that many positive feedback loops. Compound interest is one, but even that works in a matter of years, not minutes. The feeling of growing from mouse-size to skyscraper-size in minutes - though apparently seamlessly - and then squishing together all of the world, is one of genuine power. It's an escape from a normality in which feedback rarely exists, and almost never in our favour. In the Katamari world, it's as easy to get from one metre to a hundred metres as it is to get from a centimetre to a metre; that's the geometric progression, and the game wouldn't work without it. Life, however, asks us to expend a hundred times more work to get from a hundred words to ten thousand, than from one word to a hundred. A thousand times more steps to get from a metre to a kilometre, than from a millimetre to a metre.

Ever the tediously didactic maker of analogies, I tried to encourage A. in her work the other day by asking her to compare her writing with the growth of the Katamari. You might start under the car with the mice, rolling around small things and growing slowly, but soon - and before you realise it - even clouds and rainbows and Godzilla monsters are being gathered in. Concentrate on where you are now, not where you're going, and soon you'll grow much bigger than you thought possible. Think of the cookies that you're gathering now, and not the skyscrapers that you'll be gathering soon.

It was a big cheat, of course. The game has the positive feedback loop. Writing, unfortunately, doesn't. That's why it's not a game, I guess.

Going postal with Going Postal

So I'm reading the new(-est) Pratchett, Going Postal, and it's shaping up nicely as a tale of the value of the public sector in a free-market world - with jokes. Last night, though, I hit a sequence that actually made me grouchy. Pratchett introduces a very minor character who has a fundamental problem with apostrophes, and is, of course, a greengrocer. His speech comes out something like this:

"Be with you in jus't one moment, s'ir, I'm ju'st-" the man began.

It's not a bad gag - though not a great one - but it introduces a couple of related problems. The first - the one that made me grouchy - arises from the fact that I'm reading the book aloud to A. at bedtime. So I'm faced with trying to convey the gag as I read aloud, and I haven't a clue how to do it. The underlying problem is that this is a visual gag, conveyed as reported speech. Such things are a bit of a favourite of Pratchett's, the most famous being the way Death speaks in HOLLOW CAPITALS, so that his entrance into a scene can be wonderfully dry and economical. We literally see him coming. There's a crucial difference, though. Death's HOLLOW CAPITALS might be visual, but they have an aural analogue. A dramatised version of the story might use some distinctive echo effect, or I might just put on a funny deep voice when I'm reading Death. And the reader is quite capable of imagining for himself what the HOLLOW CAPITALS sound like, because they presumably do have a sound. That's the point.

A litter of misplaced apostrophes, on the other hand, has no sound. Perhaps in Klingon, or some other fictive language, but not in English. Their work is accomplished by morphology, not phonology. That's actually - and this is important - exactly why people fuck them up so much. Their language skills have been acquired by hearing, and not by reading, so apostrophes are a silent arcane mystery to them. This leads to a nagging inconsistency in Pratchett's gag: the greengrocer finds apostrophes unfathomable precisely because they're silent, but the expression of his finding them unfathomable requires that they make some sort of sound. It's not enough simply to propose that it's merely a visual gag, because the visual in this case is still the representation of the greengrocer's speech, which, in the world of the story, has sound. What would it sound like, were we to hear it? It makes no sense to render the apostrophes with sound - that's not how they work in English (and no jokes at the back about this being Ankh-Morporkian, not English, please). Yet the joke vanishes into thin air unless they are rendered somehow. Hence my reader's annoyance with Pratchett in this case. The joke is simply impossible to tell.

Unless, perhaps, we infer something even more complicated, but still problematical, which is that the greengrocer's apostrophes shouldn't in fact be rendered aurally - because were we to hear the greengrocer we'd not be aware of their existence - and that they exist as a special bonus joke only for readers of the printed page. It's not such a bad idea, but it implies something else that also requires explanation: how do we know that the apostrophes are there in the greengrocer's speech, if they make no sound? Not: how does someone listening to the story read aloud know that the apostrophes are there - they don't know that they're there - but: who has decided that they're there? The greengrocer? How would we know that he's decided they should be there? Pratchett, as the author? How would he know that the greengrocer has decided that they should be there?

I can bore on an international level about how important point of view is in fiction, how getting it right is the main difference between a good story and a great one. The question to ask is: who is telling the story? The telling of the story must belong to someone, and if the author doesn't figure out who that person is, and configure the narrative accordingly, something vitally important will be lost. It's perfectly okay for the author to be telling the story, natch, and that's typically the case with Discworld books: Pratchett's voice is layered over the top of everything like frosting on a cake, and he doesn't ever pretend that it's otherwise. But even the omniscience that placing himself in the position of ownership of the story gives him doesn't resolve the point of view conundrum he creates with the greengrocer. If the story was told from the point of view of the greengrocer himself, whether as first person or a limited third-person, then the apostrophe gag might have been supported. We'd then probably imagine the greengrocer speaking the words as he knew he would write them. In Pratchett's voice, however, the gag falls foul of the most basic heuristic of story-telling: he must resort to telling us about the apostrophe gag, rather than being able to show it to us.

I know. I know. It's just a throwaway joke. Sheesh. And, no, I probably wouldn't care half as much about this if I knew how to read the damn gag out loud.

Please don't

This afternoon, on the side of a church minivan in Koreatown:

Please don't go to hell. Believe in Jesus Christ.

No idea why, but it tickled me to see going to hell portrayed as some sort of dreadful faux pas, from which one's social standing might never recover. Or maybe it should be interpreted as:

Please don't fuck off. Believe in Jesus Christ.

In Other Words

Some of the blogs I read were standing in open-mouthed dismay at this section of the transcript of a Bush Social Security event in Tampa yesterday:

Q -- really understand how is it the new plan is going to fix that problem?

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it. (Laughter.)

It's worth ramming this one home: this was a stage-managed event, with a hand-picked, partisan audience, and this is the official White House transcript, post whatever cleaning up they deemed to be prudent. That's the most powerful man on the planet speaking as if channeling the late Stanley Unwin. Look, if you were paying an accountant to work for you, and he showed such a complete inability to describe clearly something that he's proposing, you'd get the heebie-jeebies and look for another one. Wouldn't you? Chance the Gardener was, at least, concise.

And, no, what's shown here isn't merely a language problem. It's a comprehension problem, perhaps also a conceptualisation problem. Also perhaps a laziness problem. This, from the same transcript, is spine-tinglingly scary:

MR. HUERTAS: Normally, there's a manager, right, that is the finance manager that controls the funds. All you need to do is decide how much money you want to put on each account. And of course, there's always a choice of -- whether you are younger, you usually put more money on the risky finances and less money on the other one. When you are older, like I'm getting, I will put less money on those risky -- (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: I wish I was your old. (Laughter.)

Bloody fucking hell. 'I wish I was your old.'

An old friend crops up in the first section I quoted: 'In other words'. It's a favourite construction of his - one of the most often used blocks in the damaged Lego Duplo set that he thinks of as English. It raises the hairs on the back of my neck. There are twelve occurrences of 'In other words' in this forty-nine-minute transcript, a good but not exceptional crop.

I think Bush's use of 'In other words' has one or both of two purposes: one is about how he relates to himself; the other is about how he relates to other people. The first is the simpler: it's what in the US tends to be called a 'do-over', or a 'Mulligan'. Bush's life has been littered with situations - familial, financial, social - in which his privilege has dug him out of holes that would have destroyed someone without that safety net. It's a concept he's used to; it's something he perhaps unconsciously feels entitled to. And it's certainly something he needs. So, in full view of the appalled world, he allows himself linguistic 'In other words' do-overs, ending up like a driver who can't parallel park to save their life, but persists in going back and forth, ramming the kerb, scraping the car, and raising the blood pressure of anyone behind waiting to pass. Example:

THE PRESIDENT: That's good, he knows something -- in other words, he's an expert on the subject.

That's a do-over. He took a second run at it, because he knew that the first attempt was clumsy.

Bush's second use of 'In other words' is, I think, also related to privilege, at least in his case. It's sometimes a characteristic of people who live in a social bubble that they have difficulty accurately perceiving what's normal, or what the range of normality might be. Because their experience is narrow, they're basically just badly calibrated for society, and fall back - whether consciously or not - on their own situation as a measure of normality. Add to that Bush's paralysing lack of curiosity about the world, then add to both of those a new context in which he's protected from his own idiotic reflection by a toadying administration that'll pull any stunt to save face, and you have a situation in which Bush is trapped within his own perceptions, projecting them outwards onto the world.

This is very aptly shown in Bush's effusive praise for Tony Blair's oration skills, whenever the two of them have to speak together. Blair is indeed a fine speaker, of course, but what Bush seems not to grasp is that something like Blair's fluency tends to be expected of senior politicians the world over. In his bubble-world, however, Bush is calibrated only for himself, so it's Blair who seems the exception - and therefore worthy of special mention. To Bush, this must seem like a generous compliment, but by overpraising adequacy he merely reminds us of his own inadequacy.

Bush's bubble extends to his own linguistic problems, too. He praises others to an audience when they show nothing more than basic competency, because he feels sure - projecting his own incompetence as a baseline - that the audience feels the same way he does. It's both an act of genuine generosity and a calculating attempt to get the crowd on his side. Look, he's saying, this fancy fellow is all well and good, but he's not like us ordinary folks, right? Underneath, it's a way to plead for kinship and belonging. Politically, it's a smart move. Anti-intellectualism is a big vote-winner in the US.

And so 'In other words' is really just an extension of Bush reaching out, having projected his own linguistic ability across the audience as a standard. He's clarifying for them, because he's clarifying for himself. He knows they need help to grasp a concept, because he needs help to grasp a concept. It might almost be seen as patronising the audience, talking down to it, but it's really not. Bush is genuinely talking to the people he sees as equals. This is the sort of thing that happens as a result:

When Social Security was designed, the life expectancy was about 60 years old. In other words, you were expected to live that long.

That's not the inept parallel parking of the first example. Here, Bush is genuinely trying to be helpful. He feels that the phrase 'life expectancy' is complex enough to need some clarification. But he's clarifying, primarily, for himself. The effect for someone who doesn't need any clarification is indeed of being talked down to. It's childishly redundant.

Westward on Washington

I was taking A. to an important appointment yesterday morning, so of course when we headed out to the car we discovered that a tyre was flat. A call to AAA got the wee narrow spare put on (this is the point at which I swear I'd have done it myself but for the fact that we don't have a functioning jack), and I got A. there not too late, then headed to a tyre place on Washington that she'd been to before and felt good about. I hauled out the flat, which they pumped up nice and big, then dunked in water to find the leak, only to discover that there was apparently no leak. Odd. Maybe a valve problem caused when we'd gone for an oil change the day before and they'd checked the tyre pressures too? Either that or someone had let the thing down, which is feasible, I suppose, but worryingly bizarre.

Dawdling west on Washington, taking the scenic route back to Santa Monica, I then passed a clean and well-maintained, brutally '60s rectilinear building on the north side of the street, and realised that I recognised it from something I'd seen recently: Ray. It was the RPM International building that had been Ray Charles's offices and studio for the last 40 or so years of his life. Perhaps they'd spruced it up a bit for the film, because it was immaculate in the morning sun, but I doubt it. In any event, it had the dated but still timeless look of '60s LA architecture.

One of the very best things about LA - certainly one of the most characteristic things, whatever one might make of it - is the way that landmarks of genuine significance are often quite unheralded, and sometimes shockingly neglected. There's a point of view that LA has no great heritage to speak of. With the caveat that such a young place of course can't expect to have heritage of great age, it's nevertheless hooey to claim that there's little of greatness. The trick is just to realise that LA's greatness is in its celebration of the ephemeral and the popular. The unfortunate corollary of that, however, is that the ephemerally great is so easy to discard, its cultural value having been vastly underestimated. What happens then is a kind of accelerated stratification. Even where cultural artefacts are lucky enough not to be swept away, they're soon buried beneath the next layer of ephemera.

One of the reasons why I love to drive the length of Broadway is because it's such a clear example of this stratification. It's the cultural analogue of one of those geological curiosities in which a rock-face has been uncovered to expose millennia of layered history. Broadway hasn't been uncovered; the new strata are simply so flimsy that one can see right through them to the strata beneath. On the surfaces - and in the cracks and the bowels - of the great movie palaces that once lined the street over which Harold Lloyd dangled, a vibrant, day-glo raucous Babylon of hucksterish multi-ethnic commerce now flourishes. Yet several of the movie marquees still carry the sad remnants of previous commerce. Lift your head above the cheap electronics, the sweat-shop clothing and the pushy evangelicals, and you'll catch a glimpse of Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid.

It's sad, and it's comforting. Empires fall - or, in the case of LA, they just move to Burbank - but nature pushes on. In a quiet section of the mostly unloved Washington Boulevard, there's no more Ray Charles, but there is now a Ray Charles Square, and his studios are now officially a historic landmark. Still, most passers-by just pass by. Perhaps they've got a flat tyre that needs to be fixed.