Christmas with mayhem

Just prior to Christmas i was shown an e-card. It was on someone's computer at work. It was completely scary. Let me tell you why.

It started with a snowy forest scene. Two cute mice came into view, pushing a snowball. A cute cat and a cute dog came into view, also pushing snowballs with their noses. A banner came down asking us to help our little friends. With enormous trepidation, we clicked to put the three snowballs one on top of the other. We then clicked on the little friends to help them make the features of a snowman. They helped each other up to get to the high-up bits. Then a banner came down saying Happy Christmas. Bells jingled. The snowman waved an arm and magic light was sprinkled all over the forest. It ended.

As we watched, the first thing i expected was the carnivores to eat the mice in some gory manner. The Disneyesque cuteness continued. As we stacked the snowballs, i expected the snowman to come to life and slaughter everbody with a bazooka or perhaps a flame thrower at the very least. It was hard to be told to stack the snowballs when we feared we were endangering the lives of cute forest animals. But we did it because that's what the Christmas e-card banner told us to do. i just hope you understand me here, right?

By the time we got to the jingling and the fairy goddam lights nothing would satisfy the expectations of the narrative except total muthaf%&*ng mayhem. At this point the sheer adorable tweeness of the scene required mass destruction, and it had to be gory, and it had to be loud, and it had to make teenage boys punch the air and shout 'Yes!'.

i sent the e-card to others and got the same reaction, especially among the young adults in my life. They waited for the explosions. They 'kept expecting something really bad to happen'. They were inexplicably disappointed when 'nothing happened'.

i suppose if nothing bad happens, then nothing happens. What is with our aesthetic sensibilites here? Too much Call of Duty Black Ops? Are we just cynical bastards who are tired of Christmas and who are all brought up on a media diet rich in irony?

Or is it something older? There is a view that there are only seven plots in the world, and that e-card had no plot. We know how this is supposed to work. A joke has a punch line. A story has a plot. The ending has to satisfy the demands of a recognizable plot. When we are confronted with a thing that looks like a story but isn't, we try to insert a story to make sense of it. We use what we have to hand - popular images from the mass media.

An e-card with no plot is like an unfinished






Cruel, eh? See what i mean!

in praise of 'like'

i am a fan of the ways young people communicate. Unlike my daughter, who texts in full, grammatically correct sentences with semi-colons, i lyk 2 txt free from the contraints of grammar and spelling and even common sense. i was born with a red pen in my mouth, and with parents who would correct my grammar even when i was in tears.

i am a fan of some of the vogue words. i enjoyed 'random'. i am amused by 'shit for Africa' and use it myself. 'Epic' is also fun. But my favourite is 'like' which seems to have stayed the distance of years. You know, it was like, cold, so he was like wearing his hoodie and like the police thought he was like some gangsta so they like ...

'Like' is great because it introduces fundamantal ontological uncertainty. There was like a hundred people at the party. That's a delightfully open statement. How many people were there? Did you, like count? No, but it felt like a hundred. Or it may have been about a hundred. Reality is subjective. Perception is malleable. Everything is context. We are aware of the observer's paradox, aren't we? Even if it is only that we forget to count ourselves in the crowd.

'Like' is also usefully sociologically fuzzy. He was like a gangsta. He may have been one. But he was like one. There were definite similarities. But for now we will reserve our judgment. Until i see the colours, he was like a gangsta. In the mean time, we will be humble and observe restraint. 'Like' calls us to reflection. Who had the knife? The black man? The white man?

Of course, there is nothing like otiose pseudo-academic speculation to put a young person off their stride. Perhaps if we point out the splendid intellectual underpinning of their communication habits, they will be resentful of us and thus go forth and strive for precise and measured speech in order to piss us off. i suspect not. i suspect language will continue to change and evolve and in a year or two we will be saying something equally charming, and ephemeral, and unconsciously wise.

Found poetry #2

Here are some tips on reciting found poetry. Much found poetry is only truly found once it is recited. Remember, you are harking back to ancient times, when learning took place by listening and speaking. The blood of the bard runs through your veins....

Start with some un-found poetry. Made up poems. Try Dylan Thomas. Now then, please in your best Richard Burton voice:

Do not go gently into the dark night,
but rage! rage against the dying of the light!

or the gorgeous 'new rhythm' of Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatmess, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.

Here are two poems found in song lyrics. Both of them are all in the reciting. The first one comprises most of the lyric of a rap song. It should be spoken as if you are reading Dr Seuss to a child, or maybe presenting a children's play. Use your brightest, enthusiastic voice and cock your head to one side. Go for a sort of maxed out perky:

This is why
this is why
this is why

I'm hot!

I'm hot
'cos I'm fly
you ain't
'cos you're not

This is why
this is why
this is why

I'm hot!!

OK, the next one is lyrics by Marilyn Manson and it needs to be recited in serious, credible tones as if reading the news on public radio:

You can't see the wood
for the trees.
You can't smell the shit
when you're on your knees.

The beautiful people
the beautiful people
the beautiful people.

i think Marilyn (whose actual name is Brian Turner, and Brian Turner is a well known New Zealand poet. Ha!) anyway i think Marilyn would approve and maybe so would Brian.

Found poetry No. 1

A good method of finding poetry is to start with google's home page and type in half a common sentence. This throws up common searches. It generates enough randomness to be amusing and also enough content you can make sense of. These change over time, depending on what people have searched for recently. Some are song lyrics, and some you may recognize from famous speeches. Try it. Minutes of fun for you and your fellow cubicle dwellers!

Here are the best two:

Type in 'It is not' and you get:

It is not the critic who counts
It is not good for man to be alone
It is not death to die
It is not meant to be tame impala
It is not our darkness that we fear
It is not the benevolence of the butcher
It is not in heaven
It is not illegal to be illegal in Massachusetts
It is not a tumour.

And try this one, slightly less lyrical but no less cryptic, by typing in 'It is':

It is well with my soul
It is what is
It is written
It is 416 kilometres west of Sydney
It written Oceania
It is people it is people it is people
It is not OK
It is finished.

Next time i will discuss timbre, metre and voice in reciting found poetry.

Problems with the poverty of induction

Since Hume, academic philosophers in the West have known how problematic induction is. There is no proof for it. Just because the last fire you touched was hot, and the fire before that, and every other fire you ever touched, was hot, it does not follow that the next fire you touch will be hot. Of course we can't live like that in the real, philosophically naive world. We would get helluva burned up for a start. But Hume successfully turned logic on its head and it's been that way ever since.

Since the Christchurch earthquake, i have felt less trustful of induction even at its most ingenuous. Just because i drove down that street yesterday, it does not follow that i can drive down it again today. Today, it may be blocked off because aftershocks have caused fissures in the road. It can take several attempts to get anywhere.

Here in New Zealand we have benefited from an incredibly stable and safe social and physical environment. We expect today to be the same as yesterday (although we hope we may be a little richer and a little thinner). The uncertainty of the earthquake and its aftermath, where some people still have no water and raw sewage arupts into people's houses, has shocked us.

If we lived almost anywehre else it the world we would perhaps be more flexible. Perhaps if i lived in Mexico it would be fairly ordinary to avoid a street one day because a new drug lord had taken it over. In parts of Vietnam, houses flood every year and everyone decamps to their top storeys for a few weeks until it is over.

Now it is our turn to trim sails and adapt and do life differently for a while.

The state of the police

Or the police state, given the number of them working in Christchurch since the earthquake. This has led to some interesting findings, as houses fall down and there are just so may police around. Somebody set up a P lab in an abandoned house - full marks for entrepreneurialism. One poor woman in her 50's tried to keep her cannabis plants alive with no water or power and was so relieved when the Police finally removed them.

Then there is the state of the police station. The building has always been on a bit of a lean, and i'm sure the lifts move sideways. Now they don't move at all. The top 4 floors of the 13 storey building are unusable due to earthquake damage.

The cells at the best of times are best described as a cross between an abbatoir and a submarine. A maze of concrete cells, the worstone being the 'tank' which is a concrete box with a drain. They put the prisoner in the recovery position with his/her face towards the drain, which then accommodates vomit/blood, shit etc and there is minimal cleaning afterwards. The cells always smell of vomit, blood, shit etc, and alcohol, and disinfectant and rotting rats. Rats appear in the cells at night, leading to people screaming and flinging themselves against the bars. Sometimes even the prisoners become alarmed.

Post earthquake, the cells, which are underground, have cracks in the walls and shake badly in the aftershocks. Several times a day they are plunged into darkness. There is a nasty ka-joonk noise, and all the watch house computers die, and by darkness i mean primal chaos type of darkness. Like, Darkness. That leads to people screaming and flinging themselves against the bars. Sometimes even the prisoners become alarmed.

Actually, what am i saying. Down in the cells people scream and fling themselves and rattle bars and hurl abuse all the time.

Another earthquake story. The girls of my daughter's high school are taught earthquake drill and how to get under their desks. Being plump Kiwi girls, most of them can't get under the desk, and crawl around the floor like snails.

Keep Calm and Carry On

This old World War Two British motto has become a catchword for life after the earthquake (AE). It does seem to characterise how we are managing. Work goes on - currently people are painting my roof. My workplace is uninhabitable so we are camping in a crowded office in the suburbs. We have now had over 500 aftershocks and i sleep through most of the night ones. We can probably guess magnitude as the aftershocks happen - hmm, i would say that one was about 4.7.

i think i would handle it differently if i had had a terrible experience. If i had major damage to my house, or a narrow escape, or had toddlers who were frightened, i may be taumatised. One teenage girl is still managing her mother who continues to panic after each aftershock. One man struggled through the broken glass as the earth rocked, carrying his tddler under one arm and trying to get to the baby crying in his cot. His wife was away, in Wellington, and he feared that she had been in an even bigger earthquake, because Wellington is earthquake prone. Fearing her dead, he managed his panicking toddler until she could return. Some people are still without sewerage and using public port-a-loos. A hospital security guard is trying to carry on at work while struggling with his own constant panic. Lots of people are just plain over it.

The state of emergency was lifted today. There is still a very small cordon around some of the CBD. One of the most poignant sights for me was driving past the Peaches and Cream Adult Superstore at night. The building was cordoned off.and clearly damanged. A mannequin wearing pink bunny ears and a fluffy pink negligee still posed in the broken window, the little cute pink skirt fluttering sadly in the night breeze.

We now have celebrity geologists. The best website is Christchurch Quake Map which has excellent graphics showing the Big One and all the subsequent aftershocks with magnitude, depth and time. i look at it daily.

Everyone has an earthquake story. i like this one:

Ollie age 6 was looking forward to returning to school because he had News! Liam age 8 says to him, witheringly, 'It's not the eathquake, is it, because everybody's got that one'. No, says Ollie, patently lying, it is the Brick, the souvenir brick he took from the fallen chimney. When you are 6 your world is quite small, and the earthquake was special because it happened to you. When you are 8 your world is bigger, and you also get to be scathing.

i think Christchurch will never get back to normal in the sense of BE (before earthqauke). It's a bit like having a baby - you do get back to normal but it is a different normal and it is years after the birth.