I've never been a fan of the music of Norah Jones (Noh RAjones, en prononciation Monsieur E). It's all a bit too jazz-lite for me; not that I am some big jazz snob - far from it, in fact - but I always found her songs just rather boring and samey. For some reason Monsieur E did like her, although I think he has since denied all knowledge of this - I'm sure it had something to do with her exotic heritage being just exquisite enough for his tastes.
Anyway, Ms Jones didn't particularly knock my socks in her film début, My Blueberry Nights, either. There wasn't anything wrong with her performance - perhaps her character provided limited scope with which to demonstrate her full potential as an actress or perhaps the presence of three of my favourite actors - Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman - distracted me from Jones's attempts to OMG-so-alone her way around the States.
Jones plays Elizabeth, a New Yorker who bursts into the life of Law's New York café owner, Jeremy, after she finds out that her boyfriend has been seeing another bird. Jeremy is - I think - supposed to be a Mancunian and while there were occasional moments when I could have been convinced that Ian Brown or Liam Gallagher was there in the café, for the most part, Jeremy's accent is more Harrogate via Jude Law's regular accent. Elizabeth and Jeremy bond over keys and blueberry pie before she skips the tristate area on a Greyhound and waitresses and mopes her way around America meeting a variety of quirky characters along the way, including cop/alcoholic Arnie and his estranged wife Sue Lynne (Weisz) in Memphis and gambler-with-a-heart Leslie (Portman).
Law, Weisz and Portman all seem to be acting against type here. The characters they all play are usually sleekly groomed and dressed, whereas Jeremy is low key in his jeans and t-shirts and with his mop of curls (that actually suits him very well) and Sue Lynne, by night, is wild, angry and uncontrollable - the ultimate girl with a curl right in the middle of her forehead, the rest of her mane wild and untamed as she slinks and snarls her way around the Memphis bar - and by day, she is more put-together and composed. Natalie Portman, of course, makes even a tight perm and bad bleach job look good, although her trashy character couldn't be any more different from the role of Anne Boleyn, which she will be reprising in a couple of weeks.
Although it is the nights of Elizabeth's journey that are mentioned in the title, the film focuses a lot on the contrasts between day and night. In Memphis, by day, Elizabeth works in a diner as "Betty" where she serves steak to a local cop; my night, she is "Lizzie" and she is serving that same cop his eighth whiskey in the dive bar that is her second place of work. In Nevada, where she meets Leslie, Elizabeth voice-overs that she liked the casino because she didn't feel like such an insomniac when she had no idea what time of day it was. The noise, lights, cards and people in the casino starkly contrast with the sleepy vibe of the Memphis bar.
Along the way of this bizarre, extended road trip, Elizabeth has been sending postcards back to Jeremy, who, in turn, tries desperately to track her down by calling every Memphis bar he can find in the phone book before giving up. Inevitably, she finds her way back to NYC, as many people do, even though it took almost a year - a year in which almost nothing happens.
I guess that was my biggest problem with the film - nothing really happens. Well, there is action and even death but it doesn't quite feel relevant enough. Arnie, Sue Lynne and Leslie are all interesting enough characters but our Goodbye Girl never seems to stick around long enough (at least in terms of minutes in the film) for us to feel too involved with them. I still quite liked the film and it was beautifully shot, with some great Manhattan scenes and then the flashing, glaring brilliance of Vegas, although it was perhaps too consciously arty for my taste with its almost constant use of slow-mo and some clever focusing technique for which I don't know the name but involves shifting the focus slightly away from the character so we feel slightly distanced from her as we try to empathise with her.
As a bonus, there was only one Noh RAjones song on the soundtrack - The Story, which didn't annoy me any more than any of her other songs - which opened the film and so as soon as you hear it again, you know the film is about to end. A couple of good Cat Power songs and Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding are my other picks from the soundtrack.
I'm glad that I only quite liked this film and I suspect that when The Other Boleyn Girl comes out in a couple of weeks I am going to hate it, even though I love Tudor history, I think Natalie Portman is a good actress and I quite enjoyed the Philippa Gregory book on which it is based, pulp historical(-ish) fiction though it is. Finally, perhaps, a chance to rant not gush!
23 February 2008
22 February 2008
It Just Can't Buzz Any Slower
Yes, Oscar-related buzz abounds at the moment, unsurprisingly. Thanks to my frequent visits to the Arts Picture House this year (2008 is seven week weeks old and I have been to the cinema seven films, with another one to come - hopefully - tomorrow), I have actually seen enough of the movies nominated for various Oscars to make it worthwhile picking my favourite in each of the main categories (although this is not a prediction of who will win; I am not the best reader of the mind of the Academy or of the interests of the unwashed masses, for all the influence that my have).
Best picture [I've seen 3]: Juno [Not least because it's good even though it's funny; I think it was a compliment when Papa compared me to Juno.]
Best direction [seen 3]: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Artsy-fartsy, fabulous. Music, cinematography and a great, ethereal experience.]
Best actor [seen 1]: DDL [By default; I definitely want to see Michael Clayton but I may have to wait for the DVD.]
Best actress [seen 2]: Ellen Page [She did well - I'm not sure she deserves an Oscar but as the only other film I've seen is Elizabeth I: II, I'd have to say Page gets my vote.]
Best supporting actress [seen 1]: That naughty Briony from Atonement. [Again, by default.]
Best adapted screenplay [seen 3]: There Will Be Blood
Best original screenplay [seen 1]: Juno [By default, but the screenplay was great anyway, even if old fogies like to say that no one really speaks like the characters in that movie do; I guess they never really noticed Dawson's Creek, in which all of the characters are unusually loquacious but that's hardly the point.]
Best music [seen 1]: Atonement [I probably would have voted for this anyway; I really like the score, especially Elegy for Dunkirk, which accompanies that epic five-minute shot of the beaches of Dunkirk that will probably in itself scoop the Best Cinematography award, even if it is a vanity shot. I'm surprised There Will Be Blood isn't nominated as that score was great too. As for best non-score music, Juno had a good mix of Bexquisite-friendly tunes (apart from the Kimya Dawson and Moldy Peaches stuff), and the music of The Diving Bell tickled my fancy too.]
I don't think I've seen enough/any films in the other categories to go through the motions. I don't think my favourites will do very well against the actual results but rather like a (consistently inconsistent) Wolves match, the Oscars are predictably unpredictable.
Best picture [I've seen 3]: Juno [Not least because it's good even though it's funny; I think it was a compliment when Papa compared me to Juno.]
Best direction [seen 3]: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [Artsy-fartsy, fabulous. Music, cinematography and a great, ethereal experience.]
Best actor [seen 1]: DDL [By default; I definitely want to see Michael Clayton but I may have to wait for the DVD.]
Best actress [seen 2]: Ellen Page [She did well - I'm not sure she deserves an Oscar but as the only other film I've seen is Elizabeth I: II, I'd have to say Page gets my vote.]
Best supporting actress [seen 1]: That naughty Briony from Atonement. [Again, by default.]
Best adapted screenplay [seen 3]: There Will Be Blood
Best original screenplay [seen 1]: Juno [By default, but the screenplay was great anyway, even if old fogies like to say that no one really speaks like the characters in that movie do; I guess they never really noticed Dawson's Creek, in which all of the characters are unusually loquacious but that's hardly the point.]
Best music [seen 1]: Atonement [I probably would have voted for this anyway; I really like the score, especially Elegy for Dunkirk, which accompanies that epic five-minute shot of the beaches of Dunkirk that will probably in itself scoop the Best Cinematography award, even if it is a vanity shot. I'm surprised There Will Be Blood isn't nominated as that score was great too. As for best non-score music, Juno had a good mix of Bexquisite-friendly tunes (apart from the Kimya Dawson and Moldy Peaches stuff), and the music of The Diving Bell tickled my fancy too.]
I don't think I've seen enough/any films in the other categories to go through the motions. I don't think my favourites will do very well against the actual results but rather like a (consistently inconsistent) Wolves match, the Oscars are predictably unpredictable.
19 February 2008
The Joy of Schwa
Geoff Pullum's Language Log post today on regional pronunciation variants in British English reminded me of one of the first linguistics essays I ever wrote, back in my first year at university when I was amazed that someone had actually taken the time to write a whole damn book about one vowel, namely schw
a, an unrounded mid-central vowel, which tends to substitute for many English vowels in unstressed syllables, economy but economics, or, indeed, Rebecca) and which is linguistically transcribed as an upside down e.
Pullum's post wasn't really about schwa (the name apparently coming from a Hebrew grammar term) but about the linguistic detective work he underwent to determine the pronunciation of the syllables knowes in the place name Silverknowes. I love the fact that schwa has its own name - what other vowel can claim this? In fact, it has more than one name - in French, they call it e muet ("silent e") because in some regional varieties of French it is pronounced (particularly in more southern and rural dialects) and in others it isn't. It also goes by the more affectionate sobriquet e chantant ("singing e"), as it is a favourite of poets and songwriters who can manipulate their schwas in order to make their lyrics fit the tune.
The new Mrs Sarkozy, for example, in her rather jolly little ditty Quelqu'un m'a dit, sings:
On me dit que le destin se moque bien de nous qu'il ne nous donne rien et qu'il nous promet tout [They tell me that fate is mocking us and that it gives us nothing when it promises everything]
Two nice schwas at the end of moque (pronounced mock-uh) and donne (pronounced donn-uh) help La Bruni keep the rhythm in her chanson. Edith Piaf's La Vie-uh en Rose-uh would probably abound with further examples of singing e but I can't face reproducing lyrics of that song here (only because her voice isn't exactly to my taste).
Usually, though, the first thing I think of when someone mentions schwa is Craig Venter because no one (particularly the pod squad at the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast - even this very week) can mention his name without either calling him the bad boy of science or simply a maverick and the very first linguistics essay I wrote was entitled as follows: "Schwa is a maverick vowel. Discuss with reference to the French language." I think the next book on my reading list definitely ought to be John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? before my total disillusionment with the study of the non-scientific side of linguistics moves closer to completion by the day.
Incidentally, schwa is only a bad boy vowel because it doesn't behave in an entirely predictable way and thus the French panic because it breaks their neat rules and means different things to different people and basically annoys people because they don't know how to categorise it or how to react to it. Rather like Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, really...
a, an unrounded mid-central vowel, which tends to substitute for many English vowels in unstressed syllables, economy but economics, or, indeed, Rebecca) and which is linguistically transcribed as an upside down e.Pullum's post wasn't really about schwa (the name apparently coming from a Hebrew grammar term) but about the linguistic detective work he underwent to determine the pronunciation of the syllables knowes in the place name Silverknowes. I love the fact that schwa has its own name - what other vowel can claim this? In fact, it has more than one name - in French, they call it e muet ("silent e") because in some regional varieties of French it is pronounced (particularly in more southern and rural dialects) and in others it isn't. It also goes by the more affectionate sobriquet e chantant ("singing e"), as it is a favourite of poets and songwriters who can manipulate their schwas in order to make their lyrics fit the tune.
The new Mrs Sarkozy, for example, in her rather jolly little ditty Quelqu'un m'a dit, sings:
On me dit que le destin se moque bien de nous qu'il ne nous donne rien et qu'il nous promet tout [They tell me that fate is mocking us and that it gives us nothing when it promises everything]
Two nice schwas at the end of moque (pronounced mock-uh) and donne (pronounced donn-uh) help La Bruni keep the rhythm in her chanson. Edith Piaf's La Vie-uh en Rose-uh would probably abound with further examples of singing e but I can't face reproducing lyrics of that song here (only because her voice isn't exactly to my taste).
Usually, though, the first thing I think of when someone mentions schwa is Craig Venter because no one (particularly the pod squad at the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast - even this very week) can mention his name without either calling him the bad boy of science or simply a maverick and the very first linguistics essay I wrote was entitled as follows: "Schwa is a maverick vowel. Discuss with reference to the French language." I think the next book on my reading list definitely ought to be John Carey's What Good Are the Arts? before my total disillusionment with the study of the non-scientific side of linguistics moves closer to completion by the day.
Incidentally, schwa is only a bad boy vowel because it doesn't behave in an entirely predictable way and thus the French panic because it breaks their neat rules and means different things to different people and basically annoys people because they don't know how to categorise it or how to react to it. Rather like Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, really...
17 February 2008
Parler Pour Ne Rien Dire
When I saw the BBC News headline Language GCSEs 'Could Drop Orals', my inner linguist immediately clicked on the link to see what all the fuss was about. The first piece of text that caught my eye was, "oral tests was "predictable" and "stupid"." My first reaction was that the adjectives were referring to the tests themselves. Of course, the full sentence was actually:
Chris Woodhead said the idea of abolishing oral tests was "predictable" and "stupid".
I'm not so sure. Obviously, language teaching en Angleterre is in a bit of a mess (teachers just about have the time to inform their conscripts what the French for ASBO is so that they know for what they are being arrested when engaging in lager loutery overseas), but I think the QCA has a valid point when they note that one's performance in an oral exam isn't necessarily an indicator of one's ability to communicate in a foreign language.
The real issue, though, is that it doesn't really matter if they scrap oral exams at GCSE or not because they don't really test anything as it is. Yes, oral exams are quite stressful (I hate them, myself, and always clam up and tend to forget obvious words, like the French for film director or that the French for vegetable is not végétable) but the real problem is that the exams don't really test anything much and although it might be very well for me, the linguist, to say they are too easy, but plenty of girls at my school who were crap at French and could hardly ask for a beer, let alone hold a conversation still ended up with an A grade.
My oral exam, admittedly eight years ago now (jeez), consisted of the following:
1. Roleplay B [Roleplay A being for a lower exam tier; god knows what it contained]. This was the most ridiculous part. I was given a card with three questions I had to ask or things I had to tell my teacher (AKA the examiner). I was in a department store in France trying to buy a gift for my French exchange's family. I first had to select one of the three pictured items (plant, chocolates, picture) and ask the teacher (playing a shop assistant) where I could find it. I then had to ask where I could find the lift, the tills or (if I was feeling like a klepto) the exit. Then, I had to say what I liked doing in France (tennis/sailing/cinema); um, non-sequitur much? Surely the point of a roleplay is to have a conversation that you might actually have in the real world with a non-demented human being...
2. Roleplay C. I can't actually remember what was in this one as it all kind of blurs into AS-French. However, it was slightly more involved and less ridiculous than roleplay B, although probably didn't require me to say anything I hadn't been able to communicate as a seven-year-old let loose on the streets of Paris.
3. Discussions! The exam board produced a list of about 10 topics, ranging from family to future plans to food. We all had to prepare one topic to discuss with the examiner and she would then pick another at random for another brief discussion. I picked sport as my topic and never forgave myself for saying "au fin" to describe the end of a rowing race instead of using the feminine, although I did at least correct myself. My teacher thoughtfully picked food as my second topic, although as I was a vegetarian then, I did at least have something to chat about (to be fair, I suppose, the complicated set of rules and exceptions that govern my eating habits would probably have kept us busy for hours), which was when I let slip my végétables gaffe (which wouldn't have been so tragic if, three years earlier, on hol in Chamonix, my father hadn't accidentally made the same mistake; naturally, I had teased him about it ever since, so that was a nasty karma boomerang).
Nervous as I got, the exam was a walk in the park and I spent most of my revision time learning poncey phrases involving the subjunctive, the conditional and relative pronouns like dont and lequel. As I said, I'm not the best example in this case but I still don't think the oral exam was really very challenging or proves anything much at all about a candidate's oral ability, in its present form. What is most important in mastering the oral component of a language is regular exposure to the spoken language and, more importantly, regular practice. While I don't think scrapping the oral exams at GCSE will affect standards very much, if a consequence of this change was that teachers didn't bother at all with the teaching of spoken French (which seems likely in this learning-for-the-sake-of-the-curriculum climate), that would be much more dangerous. Language is, after all, about communication and a person with a good grade in GCSE French is more likely to find herself in a situation where oral skills are more important than being able to write in French.
I was lucky enough to have a really great, inspiring French teacher for the final five years of school and it was probably because of her that I really got into languages in the first place. She was an exception, though, and given that the GCSE and A-level modern languages curricula are so utterly boring, it's a miracle that anyone goes on to study languages at university. The problem surely lies not in the method of examination but the teaching...and the government has already made itself clear on its opinion of the value of languages.
Perhaps the title of this post would be more accurately named, Examiner pour ne rien examiner ("examining for the sake of examining").
Chris Woodhead said the idea of abolishing oral tests was "predictable" and "stupid".
I'm not so sure. Obviously, language teaching en Angleterre is in a bit of a mess (teachers just about have the time to inform their conscripts what the French for ASBO is so that they know for what they are being arrested when engaging in lager loutery overseas), but I think the QCA has a valid point when they note that one's performance in an oral exam isn't necessarily an indicator of one's ability to communicate in a foreign language.
The real issue, though, is that it doesn't really matter if they scrap oral exams at GCSE or not because they don't really test anything as it is. Yes, oral exams are quite stressful (I hate them, myself, and always clam up and tend to forget obvious words, like the French for film director or that the French for vegetable is not végétable) but the real problem is that the exams don't really test anything much and although it might be very well for me, the linguist, to say they are too easy, but plenty of girls at my school who were crap at French and could hardly ask for a beer, let alone hold a conversation still ended up with an A grade.
My oral exam, admittedly eight years ago now (jeez), consisted of the following:
1. Roleplay B [Roleplay A being for a lower exam tier; god knows what it contained]. This was the most ridiculous part. I was given a card with three questions I had to ask or things I had to tell my teacher (AKA the examiner). I was in a department store in France trying to buy a gift for my French exchange's family. I first had to select one of the three pictured items (plant, chocolates, picture) and ask the teacher (playing a shop assistant) where I could find it. I then had to ask where I could find the lift, the tills or (if I was feeling like a klepto) the exit. Then, I had to say what I liked doing in France (tennis/sailing/cinema); um, non-sequitur much? Surely the point of a roleplay is to have a conversation that you might actually have in the real world with a non-demented human being...
2. Roleplay C. I can't actually remember what was in this one as it all kind of blurs into AS-French. However, it was slightly more involved and less ridiculous than roleplay B, although probably didn't require me to say anything I hadn't been able to communicate as a seven-year-old let loose on the streets of Paris.
3. Discussions! The exam board produced a list of about 10 topics, ranging from family to future plans to food. We all had to prepare one topic to discuss with the examiner and she would then pick another at random for another brief discussion. I picked sport as my topic and never forgave myself for saying "au fin" to describe the end of a rowing race instead of using the feminine, although I did at least correct myself. My teacher thoughtfully picked food as my second topic, although as I was a vegetarian then, I did at least have something to chat about (to be fair, I suppose, the complicated set of rules and exceptions that govern my eating habits would probably have kept us busy for hours), which was when I let slip my végétables gaffe (which wouldn't have been so tragic if, three years earlier, on hol in Chamonix, my father hadn't accidentally made the same mistake; naturally, I had teased him about it ever since, so that was a nasty karma boomerang).
Nervous as I got, the exam was a walk in the park and I spent most of my revision time learning poncey phrases involving the subjunctive, the conditional and relative pronouns like dont and lequel. As I said, I'm not the best example in this case but I still don't think the oral exam was really very challenging or proves anything much at all about a candidate's oral ability, in its present form. What is most important in mastering the oral component of a language is regular exposure to the spoken language and, more importantly, regular practice. While I don't think scrapping the oral exams at GCSE will affect standards very much, if a consequence of this change was that teachers didn't bother at all with the teaching of spoken French (which seems likely in this learning-for-the-sake-of-the-curriculum climate), that would be much more dangerous. Language is, after all, about communication and a person with a good grade in GCSE French is more likely to find herself in a situation where oral skills are more important than being able to write in French.
I was lucky enough to have a really great, inspiring French teacher for the final five years of school and it was probably because of her that I really got into languages in the first place. She was an exception, though, and given that the GCSE and A-level modern languages curricula are so utterly boring, it's a miracle that anyone goes on to study languages at university. The problem surely lies not in the method of examination but the teaching...and the government has already made itself clear on its opinion of the value of languages.
Perhaps the title of this post would be more accurately named, Examiner pour ne rien examiner ("examining for the sake of examining").
Mashing Up the Parisian Café Scene
It's clear that I have been deprived from NYC/Paris for too long... Now that I finally have the opportunity to use my pristine Moleskine Paris, I spent a couple of hours today compiling the Google spreadsheet containing lists of all of Paris's bars, restaurants, shops, cafés and places that I can remember visiting. I did already have a bare-bones Excel version but Google is much better - not least because the rest of my family will be asking for Bex's latest guide to Paris before too long.
Hopefully, this next trip will fill the book up a bit more - I've been to Paris dozens of times (there was a time, while I was at primary school, when we would go at least once a term: Dad would fly out on Friday morning in time for a meeting and then Mum, the bro and I would leave school at lunchtime and skip down to Heathrow) but mostly with my parents and mostly before my parents got cool. A few trips with Monsieur E, combined with the wisdom of Gridskipper have helped me update the "trendy bars" section, although a lot can change in a few weeks or months.
In the meantime, I thought I'd try my hand at a Google Maps mashup; the preview thinks this is going to work but I may be too much of an HTML muppet to have entered the code correctly. What should follow below is a list of seven of my favourite cafés and assorted purveyors of coffee, chocolat chaud and other hot beverages. The upshot is that I know now the French for all of the little Googley commands and functions - for some reason, it thought that as I was looking at the Google Map of France, I wanted its info in French! "Essayez avec cette orthographe," for example, is French for "Did you mean...?" Fascinant, n'est ce pas?
Agrandir le plan
Hopefully, this next trip will fill the book up a bit more - I've been to Paris dozens of times (there was a time, while I was at primary school, when we would go at least once a term: Dad would fly out on Friday morning in time for a meeting and then Mum, the bro and I would leave school at lunchtime and skip down to Heathrow) but mostly with my parents and mostly before my parents got cool. A few trips with Monsieur E, combined with the wisdom of Gridskipper have helped me update the "trendy bars" section, although a lot can change in a few weeks or months.
In the meantime, I thought I'd try my hand at a Google Maps mashup; the preview thinks this is going to work but I may be too much of an HTML muppet to have entered the code correctly. What should follow below is a list of seven of my favourite cafés and assorted purveyors of coffee, chocolat chaud and other hot beverages. The upshot is that I know now the French for all of the little Googley commands and functions - for some reason, it thought that as I was looking at the Google Map of France, I wanted its info in French! "Essayez avec cette orthographe," for example, is French for "Did you mean...?" Fascinant, n'est ce pas?
Agrandir le plan
16 February 2008
L'Art du Café
OK, I'm happy now; I have found a place in Nowheresville that produces a reliably good cappuccino (well, three times out of three, anyway): The Black Cat Café on Mill Road. I was meeting my friend for brunch and actually managed to get out of my house and over to Mill Road for a time that was still a.m. and the meal was thus worthy of the title "brunch."
Being all Californian and healthy, my friend just had a herbal tea and an egg-white omelette, but I went pigged out on (delicious) pancakes with maple syrup (American style pancakes, not crêpes) and a cappuccino. I didn't even mind that they had put chocolate on top (I don't like to mix the two pleasures of chocolate and coffee) as a) they used chocolate syrup and not cheap-ass Nesquik powder and b) it was so beautifully applied in the design of the Tudor Rose - artistic enough to give even Joe, The Art of Coffee a run for its money.
It may not be Marylebone High Street but the Black Cat was bustling this morning, so much so that CD and I had to allow people to perch at the edge of our table, which was already overflowing with crockery and the Grauniad (in which I learned that two favourite bands of mine are on tour in the UK and the restau the Graun believes the best NYC burgers are found). Definitely not a bad Saturday morning, by any means.
Being all Californian and healthy, my friend just had a herbal tea and an egg-white omelette, but I went pigged out on (delicious) pancakes with maple syrup (American style pancakes, not crêpes) and a cappuccino. I didn't even mind that they had put chocolate on top (I don't like to mix the two pleasures of chocolate and coffee) as a) they used chocolate syrup and not cheap-ass Nesquik powder and b) it was so beautifully applied in the design of the Tudor Rose - artistic enough to give even Joe, The Art of Coffee a run for its money.
It may not be Marylebone High Street but the Black Cat was bustling this morning, so much so that CD and I had to allow people to perch at the edge of our table, which was already overflowing with crockery and the Grauniad (in which I learned that two favourite bands of mine are on tour in the UK and the restau the Graun believes the best NYC burgers are found). Definitely not a bad Saturday morning, by any means.
Confirmation Bias at the Movies
It occurred to me earlier that I rarely write an entirely negative review of a film I have seen at the cinema. It's certainly not true that I have never seen a film I truly hated but given that I go to the cinema quite often, it might be surprising that over the past five years, say, the only films I can think of that I saw at the cinema and really disliked are Punch-Drunk Love, Elephant, Legally Blonde II ('nuff said) and the Star Wars one about the clones (to be fair, I only know that I dislike it because I fell asleep after ten minutes and I never sleep through films).
Of course, there are plenty more films about which I have been ambivalent or which I quite liked but wouldn't be fussed about seeing a second time (Cold Mountain, The Break-Up and Cursed, for example) but there are very few films that seem to be without redeeming qualities, in my mind, and what the films in both of the lists above have in common is that I didn't choose to go to see any of them. I enjoy going to the cinema for the sake of going to the cinema and if someone invites me to go with them, I generally will, regardless of whether I want to see the film (so long as there isn't something I'd rather watch showing).
Does this mean that I can just tell by watching the trailer or reading a review or even by hearing the synopsis of a film whether or not I will enjoy it? Maybe so when it comes to films that I give six or seven out of 10: most thrillers (regardless of actors, setting or plot), for example. Other films should be harder to predict because my tastes are so diverse - The Last Picture Show, Mulholland Drive, The Dreamers, Speed, The Matrix, Before Sunset, Reservoir Dogs and American History X are quite hard to lump into a single category other than that of 'Bex's favourite films'. They're all quite gritty, I suppose (except Speed but the two Keanu films differ from the others in a number of ways) and aren't terribly happy. Apart from Speed and The Matrix, they focus on the relationships between people, but then most films do.
Perhaps instead I am just falling victim of the confirmation bias. "I have heard that this is a good film and I have liked these other similar films in the past therefore I will like this one too," sez I.
I know that the opposite is true - I decided that I wouldn't like Punch-Drunk Love or Elephant, mainly because my friend Monsieur E was extolling their pretentious virtues and indeed, I hated both of them. I'm sure my stubbornness and my desire to annoy Monsieur E may have played a bigger role in my dislike of both films than I cared to admit at the time.
The same thing happened at the opera - Monsieur E dragged me down to Covent Garden to see The Magic Flute and I said that I would hate it and it would be awful and boring - and I did and it was.
If this confirmation bias is the cause of my positive opinions of movies, I'm not sure what I can do to remedy it. My taste in film is already pretty diverse so other than going to see films I actually dislike the sound of, or encouraging people with generally good taste in films to take me to see a film I wouldn't necessarily have chosen myself (but that is unlikely to be objectively crap). I'm not sure it matters a great deal; I moan about enough things to have to worry that I am being too positive for once.
Oil Is Thicker Than Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson (whose film Punch-Drunk Love I was criticising only a couple of days ago) might well have named his latest film There Will Be Mud instead of the actual title given the abundance of mud in the film. Oil is a dirty business, you see, literally as well as figuratively and our protagonist (antagonist, really), Daniel Plainview, played superbly by Daniel Day-Lewis, proves early on in the almost-three-hour movie that he isn't afraid to get his hands - or any other part of his body - dirty in his attempts to become a successful oil man. When he first finds oil, he christens his son, HW, by daubing his forehead with oil; the baby doesn't look too impressed (even after his careless father has spiked his milk with whisky) but seven years later, he becomes his father's "business partner" anyway.
Oil is also a noisy business. The film is punctuated with explosions, thuds and gunshots but it is really Jonny Greenwood's fractious and intense score that takes centre-stage and keeps you on edge throughout the film and prevents it from dragging in the more action-free scenes. The deep whine of the cello (?) wails like an air-raid siren every time something bad is about to happen and the more staccato pieces build up tension out of nothing.
The first twenty minutes or so of There Will Be Blood are dialogue-free as we see Daniel down in an underground shaft striking silver and then, several years later, oil. Ordinarily, the lack of dialogue would have irritated or bored me - I am, after all, a linguist and I love to learn about people through their language. You have to work harder when the characters don't speak but the direction and Day-Lewis's acting here was good enough to indicate that Daniel isn't a terribly nice man. He is massively greedy, narrow-minded and ambitious to the point of callousness. A worker dies in the shaft? Well, that's a shame but at least we've got the oil now.
No, Daniel is not a nice man at all, but in the first part of the film, at least, it seems that greed and selfishness are his worst crimes. He loves his son - sure, a part of that is that he likes having a cute young face along with him when he is pitching with small-town folk to lease their land on which he hopes to dig for oil - and seems to have been traumatised by the death of HW's mother in childbirth. He comes off as a workaholic who throws himself into his oil wells because he can't bear to think about the past. He is a horrible bully but maybe there is some explanation for this in his past.
One day, Daniel is approached by Paul Sunday, a strange, zealous young man, who sells Daniel information - namely, the address of his family's farm where he guarantees that there is oil available. Daniel is distrustful but reluctantly pays off Paul and heads up to the Sunday ranch with HW under the guise of a quail-shooting trip. The Sundays allow Daniel and HW to camp on the land and even cook them meals; HW becomes friends with the younger Sunday daughter, Mary. Before long, Daniel makes an offer Abel - the gentle, simple patriarch - he can't refuse: he'll buy the land for $3000. Abel's other son, Paul's twin Eli, however, isn't so sure about this. He understands the true value of the land and although his father does agree to sell, Eli soon becomes Daniel's biggest opponent, when it comes to winning over the hearts and minds of the residents of the small California town of Old Boston.
Part of the problem with Daniel is that although he isn't a terribly sympathetic person, the plot isn't as simple as to pit the big, evil, money-grabbing businessman against the sweet, good, small town folk and indeed, the only characters that really inspire much sympathy are HW and Mary (whose supposedly gentle father Abel apparently beats her when she doesn't pray - something that enrages Daniel, so much so that he attempts to make it up to her by buying her new dresses and showering her with attention). Eli certainly isn't very likeable. He certainly isn't the naive, small town man who will easily be taken advantage of and it is immediately obvious that he has his own agenda: promoting his church, the Church of the Third Revelation, which comes off as something of a cult with Eli's massively OTT exorcisms and determination to suck people in to his church against their will.
Somewhere along the way, both Daniel and Eli seem to morph into exaggerated versions of themselves (or, at least, their true personalities become clearer) as their opposing motivations become more and more important to each of them. Daniel, it emerges, is not such a good, loving father after all and nor is Eli such a good, loving son and both HW and Abel are left as pawns in this battle of wills.
Still, Eli is, ultimately, just a subplot of a film about the extents to which one man will go to satisfy his own greed and competitive nature; in his own words, "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people" - if that doesn't shout out sociopath, I don't know what does. Even when Daniel is at his least likeable, you can't quite bring yourself to hate him, partly because he is actually quite funny and partly because he is a great character, even if he isn't a nice character, and this, again, is a testament to Day-Lewis's acting. "I don't like to explain myself," he explains, as though this explains everything. He certainly has a hard time justifying his actions to himself; indeed, he turns down a deal for $1 million because he thinks his would-be partners have accused him of being a bad father (which would probably be true in the circumstances, except the partners hadn't done so). Ultimately, his own success and ambition are enough justification for him to quiet his conscience.
There are many other elements to this complex and troubling film that I haven't really touched on; it certainly wasn't the cheeriest ways to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon but it was a good story and the score itself made good listening, although not exactly the kind of thing to relax to in the bath with a glass of Merlot...
Oil is also a noisy business. The film is punctuated with explosions, thuds and gunshots but it is really Jonny Greenwood's fractious and intense score that takes centre-stage and keeps you on edge throughout the film and prevents it from dragging in the more action-free scenes. The deep whine of the cello (?) wails like an air-raid siren every time something bad is about to happen and the more staccato pieces build up tension out of nothing.
The first twenty minutes or so of There Will Be Blood are dialogue-free as we see Daniel down in an underground shaft striking silver and then, several years later, oil. Ordinarily, the lack of dialogue would have irritated or bored me - I am, after all, a linguist and I love to learn about people through their language. You have to work harder when the characters don't speak but the direction and Day-Lewis's acting here was good enough to indicate that Daniel isn't a terribly nice man. He is massively greedy, narrow-minded and ambitious to the point of callousness. A worker dies in the shaft? Well, that's a shame but at least we've got the oil now.
No, Daniel is not a nice man at all, but in the first part of the film, at least, it seems that greed and selfishness are his worst crimes. He loves his son - sure, a part of that is that he likes having a cute young face along with him when he is pitching with small-town folk to lease their land on which he hopes to dig for oil - and seems to have been traumatised by the death of HW's mother in childbirth. He comes off as a workaholic who throws himself into his oil wells because he can't bear to think about the past. He is a horrible bully but maybe there is some explanation for this in his past.
One day, Daniel is approached by Paul Sunday, a strange, zealous young man, who sells Daniel information - namely, the address of his family's farm where he guarantees that there is oil available. Daniel is distrustful but reluctantly pays off Paul and heads up to the Sunday ranch with HW under the guise of a quail-shooting trip. The Sundays allow Daniel and HW to camp on the land and even cook them meals; HW becomes friends with the younger Sunday daughter, Mary. Before long, Daniel makes an offer Abel - the gentle, simple patriarch - he can't refuse: he'll buy the land for $3000. Abel's other son, Paul's twin Eli, however, isn't so sure about this. He understands the true value of the land and although his father does agree to sell, Eli soon becomes Daniel's biggest opponent, when it comes to winning over the hearts and minds of the residents of the small California town of Old Boston.
Part of the problem with Daniel is that although he isn't a terribly sympathetic person, the plot isn't as simple as to pit the big, evil, money-grabbing businessman against the sweet, good, small town folk and indeed, the only characters that really inspire much sympathy are HW and Mary (whose supposedly gentle father Abel apparently beats her when she doesn't pray - something that enrages Daniel, so much so that he attempts to make it up to her by buying her new dresses and showering her with attention). Eli certainly isn't very likeable. He certainly isn't the naive, small town man who will easily be taken advantage of and it is immediately obvious that he has his own agenda: promoting his church, the Church of the Third Revelation, which comes off as something of a cult with Eli's massively OTT exorcisms and determination to suck people in to his church against their will.
Somewhere along the way, both Daniel and Eli seem to morph into exaggerated versions of themselves (or, at least, their true personalities become clearer) as their opposing motivations become more and more important to each of them. Daniel, it emerges, is not such a good, loving father after all and nor is Eli such a good, loving son and both HW and Abel are left as pawns in this battle of wills.
Still, Eli is, ultimately, just a subplot of a film about the extents to which one man will go to satisfy his own greed and competitive nature; in his own words, "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people" - if that doesn't shout out sociopath, I don't know what does. Even when Daniel is at his least likeable, you can't quite bring yourself to hate him, partly because he is actually quite funny and partly because he is a great character, even if he isn't a nice character, and this, again, is a testament to Day-Lewis's acting. "I don't like to explain myself," he explains, as though this explains everything. He certainly has a hard time justifying his actions to himself; indeed, he turns down a deal for $1 million because he thinks his would-be partners have accused him of being a bad father (which would probably be true in the circumstances, except the partners hadn't done so). Ultimately, his own success and ambition are enough justification for him to quiet his conscience.
There are many other elements to this complex and troubling film that I haven't really touched on; it certainly wasn't the cheeriest ways to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon but it was a good story and the score itself made good listening, although not exactly the kind of thing to relax to in the bath with a glass of Merlot...
11 February 2008
To Buy or Not to Buy
I don't think I need to take any of Garth Sundem's "you can decide anything with maths" calculators that are available on the Horizon website.
1. Should you buy something (or not)? Always (the former).
2. Should you apologise? Yep!
3. Should you join a gym? Absolutely!
Yes, having clicked on the "should you buy something" link and been met with a load of maths, I think my option is definitely more painless. Just to humour them, though, let's play along: should I buy a new pair of boots?
-- W = How much do you want it (1-10 with 10 being "1969 Mustang Fastback")? I'll go with 7 (my standard answer in such things - I'd quite like some new knee-highs as my current boots are suffering from five rainy English winters, but then there are other things I would like more).
-- N = How much do you need this item (same scale as before)? Relative to what? Food, water and Google? I'll be mean: 5.
-- I = How good an investment is this (1-10 with 10 being "legal insider trading")? Erm... what's an investment? No, I'll probably get years of wear from these little beauties. 8.
-- M = How many months have you been ogling this item in catalogues, shop windows and/or online? Ha, that's more like my kind of question. Say, six months.
-- S = Your monthly salary. I couldn't possibly admit to that here, but suffice to say that it's a small enough figure to leave me debating over the purchase of new boots for months on end.
-- B = Your monthly bills, R = Your monthly rent/mortgage, £b = Balance of your current account, £i = Cost of the item (£775).
And the results? I scored 29.9; apparently a score of 1.0 or more means you should buy it. That seems off somehow; maybe I overestimated my bank balance or my desire for the boots. Ultimately, you see, I don't need the calculator. I know there are other things I want more than the boots and so even though I really like them and even though I have the money in my account, I'm not going to buy them and I knew that from the beginning and don't need no stinkin' maths to make me realise that.
The apology one is just as unnecessary:
-- D = How big a deal was the issue? (1-10 with 1 being 'forgot to take out trash before work' and 10 being 'forgot to turn off the gas before leaving for vacation')
-- Ra = Actual responsibility (On a scale of 1-10, how responsible are you in reality for this blunder?)
-- Rp = Perceived responsibility (On a scale of 1-10, how responsible does this person perceive you to be in this matter?)
-- P = How pissed off is this person? (1-10 with 10 being 'mail-order thumb screws have already arrived').
No need for (D [Rp (Ra + P) + D (Ra - Rp)] = A); if you feel bad and you care about the person to whom you are contemplating apologising, just blood apologise!
This is what happens when mathematicians are set free from their topos theory and are let loose on the real world. They "solve" problems that really don't need equations, just a little empathy (er...wot?) and common sense... Honestly, what's next? Mathematicians coming up with an equation for love? Oh no, wait; that was four Valentine's Days ago...
Actually, having read the main article in the BBC News Magazine, I do concede it is quite interesting - the parts about cognitive biases, anyway - if nothing particularly novel.
1. Should you buy something (or not)? Always (the former).
2. Should you apologise? Yep!
3. Should you join a gym? Absolutely!
Yes, having clicked on the "should you buy something" link and been met with a load of maths, I think my option is definitely more painless. Just to humour them, though, let's play along: should I buy a new pair of boots?
-- W = How much do you want it (1-10 with 10 being "1969 Mustang Fastback")? I'll go with 7 (my standard answer in such things - I'd quite like some new knee-highs as my current boots are suffering from five rainy English winters, but then there are other things I would like more).
-- N = How much do you need this item (same scale as before)? Relative to what? Food, water and Google? I'll be mean: 5.
-- I = How good an investment is this (1-10 with 10 being "legal insider trading")? Erm... what's an investment? No, I'll probably get years of wear from these little beauties. 8.
-- M = How many months have you been ogling this item in catalogues, shop windows and/or online? Ha, that's more like my kind of question. Say, six months.
-- S = Your monthly salary. I couldn't possibly admit to that here, but suffice to say that it's a small enough figure to leave me debating over the purchase of new boots for months on end.
-- B = Your monthly bills, R = Your monthly rent/mortgage, £b = Balance of your current account, £i = Cost of the item (£775).
And the results? I scored 29.9; apparently a score of 1.0 or more means you should buy it. That seems off somehow; maybe I overestimated my bank balance or my desire for the boots. Ultimately, you see, I don't need the calculator. I know there are other things I want more than the boots and so even though I really like them and even though I have the money in my account, I'm not going to buy them and I knew that from the beginning and don't need no stinkin' maths to make me realise that.
The apology one is just as unnecessary:
-- D = How big a deal was the issue? (1-10 with 1 being 'forgot to take out trash before work' and 10 being 'forgot to turn off the gas before leaving for vacation')
-- Ra = Actual responsibility (On a scale of 1-10, how responsible are you in reality for this blunder?)
-- Rp = Perceived responsibility (On a scale of 1-10, how responsible does this person perceive you to be in this matter?)
-- P = How pissed off is this person? (1-10 with 10 being 'mail-order thumb screws have already arrived').
No need for (D [Rp (Ra + P) + D (Ra - Rp)] = A); if you feel bad and you care about the person to whom you are contemplating apologising, just blood apologise!
This is what happens when mathematicians are set free from their topos theory and are let loose on the real world. They "solve" problems that really don't need equations, just a little empathy (er...wot?) and common sense... Honestly, what's next? Mathematicians coming up with an equation for love? Oh no, wait; that was four Valentine's Days ago...
Actually, having read the main article in the BBC News Magazine, I do concede it is quite interesting - the parts about cognitive biases, anyway - if nothing particularly novel.
10 February 2008
Irrationality at the BAFTAs
Atonement, it seems, is very popular - with the British Academy, anyway - it won best film, although Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and Joe Wright missed out on leading actress, leading actor and best director, respectively.
It also failed to scoop the award for the best British film, which reminded me of a logical fallacy I first read about in Stuart Sutherland's excellent book, Irrationality, in which a group of people were read a list of facts about a woman called Linda who "is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations." They were then asked to rank a series of statements about Linda in order of how likely they were to be true.
The subjects thought it was much more likely that Linda was a feminist bank teller than she was just a bank teller, which is, of course, very illogical but the subjects were obviously looking at the "Linda is a bank teller" statement and thinking, nah, that doesn't sound like Linda, and then reading the "Linda is a feminist bank teller" statement and thinking, ooh, now I just bet Linda is a feminist, so that one is at least half true. As Sutherland explains, the subjects were averaging the probabilities instead of multiplying them.
The scenario at the BAFTAs isn't really the same, although it does rely on faulty reasoning and it does take me back to my days of truth tables in philosophy of language classes:
I bought roses entails I bought flowers
I bought flowers does not entail I bought roses
I didn't buy roses doesn't entail I didn't buy flowers
I didn't buy flowers entails I didn't buy roses
Similarly, the first and fourth lines of this truth table aren't upheld here, although the other two are:
Atonement is the best film should entail Atonement is the best British film (but doesn't)
Atonement is the best British film does not entail Atonement is the best film
Atonement is not the best film does not entail Atonement is not the best British film
Atonement is not the best British film should entail Atonement is not the best film (but doesn't)
Hmm, I'm beginning to think that the only point I have proven is that my logic anxiety really was the reason why I gave up on semantics in favour of pragmatics. Perhaps what is going on here is that different criteria are used to judge the two awards, but this isn't made obvious on the British Academy website. I guess they never anticipated visits from anyone who goes into hyper-pedantry mode in the face of such lacking logic: if it's the best film - the top overall film - and it is British, how can it not also be the best British film? It's like saying a dog is the best example of a pet and a trout is the best example of a pet fish but that the best example of a pet fish is actually a goldfish! Oh wait; I think I just added weight to Jerry Fodor's case....
On the bright side, this wild goose chase did remind me what a great book Irrationality is. Another favourite example involved a 1982 study where a couple of psychologists picked one paper from each of 12 top psychology journals by authors from the most eminent psychology departments in the States. They then removed the names and any potentially identifying information and listed the authors as having fictional names and affiliations (like Dr Ima Fake (no, not really) at "Tri-Valley Centre for Human Potential") and then resubmitted to the same journals. Three of the journals noticed that they had already published the article, but eight of the remaining nine rejected the resubmitted paper. Each of these eight papers was seen by an editor and two referees and all of them noted that the paper didn't merit publication in said journal.
Of course, there could be perfectly rational reasons for the rejection of the second submission of the paper (new developments in the field. Sutherland prefers to assume that these editors and referees are falling victim of a cognitive bias known as the halo effect. The first information the referee reads is the authors' names and their affiliations and if these are prestigious, it is likely to cast a warm glow of awesomeness over the whole paper. If, on the other hand, the paper is authored by Dr (or Ms) Random at Hicksville Polytechnic, the referee is more likely to look for flaws and to be more sensitive to what is wrong than what is right.
This was 26 years ago and thanks to Teh InterWebz and the joys of Google Scholar and, even, text mining, you might think that these results wouldn't be replicated and yet...I can imagine it being all too easy to do so. Irrationality does, after all, prevail, even in the peer review of scholarly journals; perhaps especially in the peer review of scholarly journals.
Edit: I refuse to spell BAFTAs Baftas, which according to Language Log, is a recent development in British newspapers (hence Defra and Nato), one I refuse to acknowledge. However, I do concede that at the very least it may highlight to people that BBC is not an acronym (but an initialism or alphabetism) and so is spelled in upper case rather than the funny-looking Bbc; acronym (abbreviation in which the resulting word can be pronounced as a word) vs initialism (abbreviation where the letters are spelled out one by one). Only an Eastern European could pronounce a word as vowel-starved as sftc...
It also failed to scoop the award for the best British film, which reminded me of a logical fallacy I first read about in Stuart Sutherland's excellent book, Irrationality, in which a group of people were read a list of facts about a woman called Linda who "is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations." They were then asked to rank a series of statements about Linda in order of how likely they were to be true.
The subjects thought it was much more likely that Linda was a feminist bank teller than she was just a bank teller, which is, of course, very illogical but the subjects were obviously looking at the "Linda is a bank teller" statement and thinking, nah, that doesn't sound like Linda, and then reading the "Linda is a feminist bank teller" statement and thinking, ooh, now I just bet Linda is a feminist, so that one is at least half true. As Sutherland explains, the subjects were averaging the probabilities instead of multiplying them.
The scenario at the BAFTAs isn't really the same, although it does rely on faulty reasoning and it does take me back to my days of truth tables in philosophy of language classes:
I bought roses entails I bought flowers
I bought flowers does not entail I bought roses
I didn't buy roses doesn't entail I didn't buy flowers
I didn't buy flowers entails I didn't buy roses
Similarly, the first and fourth lines of this truth table aren't upheld here, although the other two are:
Atonement is the best film should entail Atonement is the best British film (but doesn't)
Atonement is the best British film does not entail Atonement is the best film
Atonement is not the best film does not entail Atonement is not the best British film
Atonement is not the best British film should entail Atonement is not the best film (but doesn't)
Hmm, I'm beginning to think that the only point I have proven is that my logic anxiety really was the reason why I gave up on semantics in favour of pragmatics. Perhaps what is going on here is that different criteria are used to judge the two awards, but this isn't made obvious on the British Academy website. I guess they never anticipated visits from anyone who goes into hyper-pedantry mode in the face of such lacking logic: if it's the best film - the top overall film - and it is British, how can it not also be the best British film? It's like saying a dog is the best example of a pet and a trout is the best example of a pet fish but that the best example of a pet fish is actually a goldfish! Oh wait; I think I just added weight to Jerry Fodor's case....
On the bright side, this wild goose chase did remind me what a great book Irrationality is. Another favourite example involved a 1982 study where a couple of psychologists picked one paper from each of 12 top psychology journals by authors from the most eminent psychology departments in the States. They then removed the names and any potentially identifying information and listed the authors as having fictional names and affiliations (like Dr Ima Fake (no, not really) at "Tri-Valley Centre for Human Potential") and then resubmitted to the same journals. Three of the journals noticed that they had already published the article, but eight of the remaining nine rejected the resubmitted paper. Each of these eight papers was seen by an editor and two referees and all of them noted that the paper didn't merit publication in said journal.
Of course, there could be perfectly rational reasons for the rejection of the second submission of the paper (new developments in the field. Sutherland prefers to assume that these editors and referees are falling victim of a cognitive bias known as the halo effect. The first information the referee reads is the authors' names and their affiliations and if these are prestigious, it is likely to cast a warm glow of awesomeness over the whole paper. If, on the other hand, the paper is authored by Dr (or Ms) Random at Hicksville Polytechnic, the referee is more likely to look for flaws and to be more sensitive to what is wrong than what is right.
This was 26 years ago and thanks to Teh InterWebz and the joys of Google Scholar and, even, text mining, you might think that these results wouldn't be replicated and yet...I can imagine it being all too easy to do so. Irrationality does, after all, prevail, even in the peer review of scholarly journals; perhaps especially in the peer review of scholarly journals.
Edit: I refuse to spell BAFTAs Baftas, which according to Language Log, is a recent development in British newspapers (hence Defra and Nato), one I refuse to acknowledge. However, I do concede that at the very least it may highlight to people that BBC is not an acronym (but an initialism or alphabetism) and so is spelled in upper case rather than the funny-looking Bbc; acronym (abbreviation in which the resulting word can be pronounced as a word) vs initialism (abbreviation where the letters are spelled out one by one). Only an Eastern European could pronounce a word as vowel-starved as sftc...
09 February 2008
E-T-A-O-I-N-S...
...so begins the English translation of the perpetual, rhythmic, melodic chanting of the alphabet in order of frequency that reverberates throughout Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly), like an emotionally charged combination of Countdown and Scrabble. Of course, while the English subtitles give us the most frequent English letters first (e, t, a, o, i, n, s...), in the original French, we hear e, s, a, i, t, n, r...
Based on the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle, who became fully paralysed after a severe stroke and although he could still hear and was fully aware and awake, he could only communicate with the world through his still-functional left eye; this is generally known as locked-in syndrome.
The film opens with Bauby waking up from the coma he has been in for three weeks. The doctors start asking him questions and he responds but they don't pay any attention. He slowly comes to realise that he can't talk or, indeed, move at all. After his initial panic, though, the dry, tender voice of his mind remains throughout the film and is actually very funny. On meeting his sexy, female physical and speech therapists, he thinks he has died and gone to heaven but when he realises he can't flirt, can't touch them, can't feel their caresses, he realises it is actually hell. The torture is prolonged when, as part of his speech therapy, Henriette blows kisses at him, with her full, sensual lips, and asks him to blow them back but, to his chagrin, he can't.
Henriette is dedicated to her patient, though, and devises an ingenious system through which Bauby can communicate with her and with others. She recites the alphabet, in order of frequency, and he will blink once to tell her when she has reached the right letter. She then repeats until she has come to the end of the word, at which point he will blink twice to hit the metaphorical spacebar. The system is slow and laborious, especially at first, and Bauby gives up, several times, as he realises he doesn't know what to say, other than je veux mourir, which pisses off Henriette big time. Soon, though, they get the hang of it and, rather like a primordial form of predictive texting, she gets very good at guessing what the word will be before he has finished spelling it out, which saves a lot of time.
Perfect it ain't but in the circumstances, it is remarkable, and soon, Céline ("not my wife; she's the mother of my children") is able to talk to him, much as it obviously pains her to see the man she obviously never got over in such a condition. Very poignant is the father's day scene, when Céline takes Bauby out to the beach in his wheelchair and their children dance and sing and run around. They kiss their father and try to show him they still love him, but they are too young to properly understand what has happened (except the son and heir who is all too knowing), which only saddens Bauby even more as he can't hug his children any more, can't hold them, reassure them, support them, and he feels he has failed as a father and that he now disappoints them. He isn't the superman they once thought he was.
More poignant still is the conversation between Bauby and his mistress, Inès, who refuses to come to visit him. She loves him madly, passionately, with all her heart, she says, but she can't bear to see him like this. This conversation takes place over the phone but as Bauby cannot reply, Céline must "translate for Inès," which turns out to be incredibly painful and awkward for all parties. It is a sign of Céline's love for Bauby that she consents for this - she knows how important it is to Bauby - even though it breaks her heart to hear him say that he misses Inès and that she means the world to him, and then again when Inès acts like such a tool and says she'll see him when he's "back to normal."
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon is the story of a book but it is also the story of the telling of a story - the story of Bauby's life but particularly his life locked in the diving-bell. Before the stroke, he had signed a book deal and was planning a modern take on The Count of Monte Cristo - an update that would play on the idea of female vengeance - and he decides that instead, he will write his memoir. He does this by meticulously spelling out his mellifluous sentences to Claude, his scribe, who then reads them back to him and helps him to edit the work. Each morning he wakes up and plans what he is going to say for three hours before dictating and in the end, the finished product is published and receives great reviews.
When he isn't painstakingly communicating with his family and with his scribe, Bauby inevitably still has a lot of free time and this is where his strength of character truly comes into play as he revisits old scenes from his past (a conversation with his father, a visit to his children, a dirty weekend in Lourdes with Inès) and imagines a rich tapestry of new, invented scenes to entertain himself and to inject some meaning into his newly minimalist life. He is fed up of "TV dinners" (the TV has just been turned off and his intravenous feed has just been started) so he imagines that he is in a great Parisian fish restaurant, eating an erotically charged dinner with Claude the scribe, as they gorge themselves on oysters and feed, touch and kiss each other passionately.
A lot of the film is shot from Bauby's perspective - the scenes are often blurry and out of focus, characters move inadvertently "off camera" and we are part of Bauby's blinks. The contrast between the clinical, subdued, white scenes in the hospital where he stays and those that take place in his memory and his imagination, filled with colour, noise, passion, energy and vigour, is exquisite. This is interspersed with shots of a real diving-bell, underwater, and of Bauby in his wheelchair on a pontoon out to sea. All of this is set to a great soundtrack with songs ranging from Velvet Underground's gorgeous Pale Blue Eyes to Charles Trenet's classic La Mer (also heard at the end of one of my film favourites, The Dreamers) and the haunting, melancholic score, including the Theme for the Diving-bell and the Butterfly.
There are moments of small joy and relief for him but ultimately he is trapped, alone and unhappy, locked behind huis clos, and, rather like the characters is Sartre's play, his hell is being with other people and yet still being isolated from them and unable to be the part of their lives he once was.
It could have been a very depressing film but while not exactly being a riot of laughs (save a few funny moments, mainly involving Bauby's spirited wit), Le Scaphandre et le Papillon was more uplifting and inspiring than nihilistic and despair-inducing. "Il y a de l'espoir," sez the doctor, several times. There is hope. That, there is; no matter how hard it might be to see it at times, there is always reason to hope and Julian Schnabel's beautifully shot, and well acted film, with its warm, funny script, powerfully demonstrates this and fully deserves its Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay. An enlightening and moving experience.
Based on the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle, who became fully paralysed after a severe stroke and although he could still hear and was fully aware and awake, he could only communicate with the world through his still-functional left eye; this is generally known as locked-in syndrome.
The film opens with Bauby waking up from the coma he has been in for three weeks. The doctors start asking him questions and he responds but they don't pay any attention. He slowly comes to realise that he can't talk or, indeed, move at all. After his initial panic, though, the dry, tender voice of his mind remains throughout the film and is actually very funny. On meeting his sexy, female physical and speech therapists, he thinks he has died and gone to heaven but when he realises he can't flirt, can't touch them, can't feel their caresses, he realises it is actually hell. The torture is prolonged when, as part of his speech therapy, Henriette blows kisses at him, with her full, sensual lips, and asks him to blow them back but, to his chagrin, he can't.
Henriette is dedicated to her patient, though, and devises an ingenious system through which Bauby can communicate with her and with others. She recites the alphabet, in order of frequency, and he will blink once to tell her when she has reached the right letter. She then repeats until she has come to the end of the word, at which point he will blink twice to hit the metaphorical spacebar. The system is slow and laborious, especially at first, and Bauby gives up, several times, as he realises he doesn't know what to say, other than je veux mourir, which pisses off Henriette big time. Soon, though, they get the hang of it and, rather like a primordial form of predictive texting, she gets very good at guessing what the word will be before he has finished spelling it out, which saves a lot of time.
Perfect it ain't but in the circumstances, it is remarkable, and soon, Céline ("not my wife; she's the mother of my children") is able to talk to him, much as it obviously pains her to see the man she obviously never got over in such a condition. Very poignant is the father's day scene, when Céline takes Bauby out to the beach in his wheelchair and their children dance and sing and run around. They kiss their father and try to show him they still love him, but they are too young to properly understand what has happened (except the son and heir who is all too knowing), which only saddens Bauby even more as he can't hug his children any more, can't hold them, reassure them, support them, and he feels he has failed as a father and that he now disappoints them. He isn't the superman they once thought he was.
More poignant still is the conversation between Bauby and his mistress, Inès, who refuses to come to visit him. She loves him madly, passionately, with all her heart, she says, but she can't bear to see him like this. This conversation takes place over the phone but as Bauby cannot reply, Céline must "translate for Inès," which turns out to be incredibly painful and awkward for all parties. It is a sign of Céline's love for Bauby that she consents for this - she knows how important it is to Bauby - even though it breaks her heart to hear him say that he misses Inès and that she means the world to him, and then again when Inès acts like such a tool and says she'll see him when he's "back to normal."
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon is the story of a book but it is also the story of the telling of a story - the story of Bauby's life but particularly his life locked in the diving-bell. Before the stroke, he had signed a book deal and was planning a modern take on The Count of Monte Cristo - an update that would play on the idea of female vengeance - and he decides that instead, he will write his memoir. He does this by meticulously spelling out his mellifluous sentences to Claude, his scribe, who then reads them back to him and helps him to edit the work. Each morning he wakes up and plans what he is going to say for three hours before dictating and in the end, the finished product is published and receives great reviews.
When he isn't painstakingly communicating with his family and with his scribe, Bauby inevitably still has a lot of free time and this is where his strength of character truly comes into play as he revisits old scenes from his past (a conversation with his father, a visit to his children, a dirty weekend in Lourdes with Inès) and imagines a rich tapestry of new, invented scenes to entertain himself and to inject some meaning into his newly minimalist life. He is fed up of "TV dinners" (the TV has just been turned off and his intravenous feed has just been started) so he imagines that he is in a great Parisian fish restaurant, eating an erotically charged dinner with Claude the scribe, as they gorge themselves on oysters and feed, touch and kiss each other passionately.
A lot of the film is shot from Bauby's perspective - the scenes are often blurry and out of focus, characters move inadvertently "off camera" and we are part of Bauby's blinks. The contrast between the clinical, subdued, white scenes in the hospital where he stays and those that take place in his memory and his imagination, filled with colour, noise, passion, energy and vigour, is exquisite. This is interspersed with shots of a real diving-bell, underwater, and of Bauby in his wheelchair on a pontoon out to sea. All of this is set to a great soundtrack with songs ranging from Velvet Underground's gorgeous Pale Blue Eyes to Charles Trenet's classic La Mer (also heard at the end of one of my film favourites, The Dreamers) and the haunting, melancholic score, including the Theme for the Diving-bell and the Butterfly.
There are moments of small joy and relief for him but ultimately he is trapped, alone and unhappy, locked behind huis clos, and, rather like the characters is Sartre's play, his hell is being with other people and yet still being isolated from them and unable to be the part of their lives he once was.
It could have been a very depressing film but while not exactly being a riot of laughs (save a few funny moments, mainly involving Bauby's spirited wit), Le Scaphandre et le Papillon was more uplifting and inspiring than nihilistic and despair-inducing. "Il y a de l'espoir," sez the doctor, several times. There is hope. That, there is; no matter how hard it might be to see it at times, there is always reason to hope and Julian Schnabel's beautifully shot, and well acted film, with its warm, funny script, powerfully demonstrates this and fully deserves its Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay. An enlightening and moving experience.
07 February 2008
Venus When She Smiles, Juno When She Walks, Minerva When She Talks
Quite different from 4 Months... is Juno, but then there was never any question of that, despite the fact that both are movies about young women who fall pregnant and don't want to keep the baby. Neither film moralises on the decision made by the respective characters - the point is not the choice but the consequences and inevitably, the very different circumstances of Juno and Gabita produce very different films and I really appreciated both, for pretty opposite reasons.
Juno, then, is a precocious, grounded and bitingly sharp 16-year-old who gets pregnant after sleeping with her best friend/on again-off again boyfriend, Paulie. Her first reaction (after three home pregnancy tests and a lot of Sunny D confirms the bad news) is the Big A but on the day she heads down to the clinic, she is intercepted by one of her classmates who is playing the role of stereotypical anti-abortion campaigner ("all babies want to get borned!") and on this occasion, the protest works and the images of tiny fingernails are implanted in Juno's mind and she knows she can't go through with it.
Plan B (no, not that Plan B; we know there was none of that here). She can't keep the kid and can't bring herself to have the abortion so the obvious solution is to check the classified ads for a couple, unable to have children, looking to adopt. Along come Mark and Vanessa, on the surface, the perfect rich, attractive, happy couple; all that is missing from their perfect lives is a baby. Vanessa, played by the gorgeous, fragile Jennifer Garner, blows hot and cold; it is obvious how much she really wants this baby but you have to wonder how much she really just wants to check off another box on her Great Life Plan (husband, job, house, nursery with gender-neutral walls...). Later on, we do see her playing with a kid at the mall and she is genuinely happy for the first time in the movie, so perhaps the baby isn't just a last-ditch attempt to save her seemingly perfect marriage from faltering.
The relationship between Juno and Vanessa is quite complex, mainly because they are so unequal. Juno is doing Vanessa this massive favour by carrying the child she so desperately wants but is unable to have. To Juno, though, she knows only that she can't keep the child and this is the most convenient option for everyone, although obviously, it's nice that she is doing this great thing for Vanessa and Mark too. Vanessa's nerves (she has been let down in this situation before) show through and she is often tense and overly cautious and tries too hard when Juno is just happy to go with the flow.
Things are not, however, what they seem. Mark is a composer (Like Bach? / More commercial. / Like what? / Like commercials.) and is most passionate when talking about music. He and Juno bond over guitars early on - in fact, this was probably the only thing that stopped Juno walking out of the house and out of the deal when the first meeting is somewhat awkward. He used to be a rocker and is obviously having regrets about selling out and settling down and seems almost bewildered by the life he has come to live (Juno, on Mark's music room: "She gave you... your own room in... in your whole house? For your... for your stuff? Wow, she's got you on a long leash, Mark.").
He is also clearly not sure he really wants to be a father. This only really comes out, though, when he and Juno bond over horror films and rock music:
Mark: ‘93. I’m telling you that was the best time for rock and roll.
Juno: Nuh-uh, 1977! Punk Volume 1! You weren’t there, so you can’t understand the magic.
Mark: You weren't even alive!
An unexpected bond forms between the two and there is a certain chemistry that almost surfaces on a couple of occasions. Juno finds herself showing up at his house with a new mix CD she has made him and the first song is the song he danced to at his senior prom in 1988 (which doesn't really add up given that he's probably mid to late 30s) and they dance briefly, mainly because they are both alone and somehow united by this huge physical bump between them, not to mention the huge emotional bump known as Vanessa. Juno does sometimes come across as rather naive and without an understanding of how certain parts of life work, but then this is probably only surprising because it's easy to forget that the girl is only 16 when she just takes everything in her stride, is always true to herself and just doesn't let the bastards get to her.
Anyway, the film then veers away from the adoptive parents and focuses back on Juno and on her relationship with her family and Paulie, which, inevitably, I found rather less interesting than the other sub-plot, but it isn't my film...
The above could all have been incredibly cheesy and/or emo but actually it was just hilarious. Yes, there were a few poignant moments but most of the audience were shrieking with laughter at the fantastic banter between Juno and her dad, Juno and her step-mom, Juno and...well, everyone! It's been a long time since I've seen such a funny film (witty rather than slapstick, of course) and it was a welcome relief to be able to laugh and to think - but not to have to think too hard or about too serious an issue. Ellen Page, who played Juno, did a great job and was beautiful and convincing throughout, so I guess my Oscar vote would be with her, even if that's only because I haven't seen any of the other nominees.
Hoorah for a smart, sharp, funny, fresh comedy that doesn't degenerate into an emofest or a farce!
Juno, then, is a precocious, grounded and bitingly sharp 16-year-old who gets pregnant after sleeping with her best friend/on again-off again boyfriend, Paulie. Her first reaction (after three home pregnancy tests and a lot of Sunny D confirms the bad news) is the Big A but on the day she heads down to the clinic, she is intercepted by one of her classmates who is playing the role of stereotypical anti-abortion campaigner ("all babies want to get borned!") and on this occasion, the protest works and the images of tiny fingernails are implanted in Juno's mind and she knows she can't go through with it.
Plan B (no, not that Plan B; we know there was none of that here). She can't keep the kid and can't bring herself to have the abortion so the obvious solution is to check the classified ads for a couple, unable to have children, looking to adopt. Along come Mark and Vanessa, on the surface, the perfect rich, attractive, happy couple; all that is missing from their perfect lives is a baby. Vanessa, played by the gorgeous, fragile Jennifer Garner, blows hot and cold; it is obvious how much she really wants this baby but you have to wonder how much she really just wants to check off another box on her Great Life Plan (husband, job, house, nursery with gender-neutral walls...). Later on, we do see her playing with a kid at the mall and she is genuinely happy for the first time in the movie, so perhaps the baby isn't just a last-ditch attempt to save her seemingly perfect marriage from faltering.
The relationship between Juno and Vanessa is quite complex, mainly because they are so unequal. Juno is doing Vanessa this massive favour by carrying the child she so desperately wants but is unable to have. To Juno, though, she knows only that she can't keep the child and this is the most convenient option for everyone, although obviously, it's nice that she is doing this great thing for Vanessa and Mark too. Vanessa's nerves (she has been let down in this situation before) show through and she is often tense and overly cautious and tries too hard when Juno is just happy to go with the flow.
Things are not, however, what they seem. Mark is a composer (Like Bach? / More commercial. / Like what? / Like commercials.) and is most passionate when talking about music. He and Juno bond over guitars early on - in fact, this was probably the only thing that stopped Juno walking out of the house and out of the deal when the first meeting is somewhat awkward. He used to be a rocker and is obviously having regrets about selling out and settling down and seems almost bewildered by the life he has come to live (Juno, on Mark's music room: "She gave you... your own room in... in your whole house? For your... for your stuff? Wow, she's got you on a long leash, Mark.").
He is also clearly not sure he really wants to be a father. This only really comes out, though, when he and Juno bond over horror films and rock music:
Mark: ‘93. I’m telling you that was the best time for rock and roll.
Juno: Nuh-uh, 1977! Punk Volume 1! You weren’t there, so you can’t understand the magic.
Mark: You weren't even alive!
An unexpected bond forms between the two and there is a certain chemistry that almost surfaces on a couple of occasions. Juno finds herself showing up at his house with a new mix CD she has made him and the first song is the song he danced to at his senior prom in 1988 (which doesn't really add up given that he's probably mid to late 30s) and they dance briefly, mainly because they are both alone and somehow united by this huge physical bump between them, not to mention the huge emotional bump known as Vanessa. Juno does sometimes come across as rather naive and without an understanding of how certain parts of life work, but then this is probably only surprising because it's easy to forget that the girl is only 16 when she just takes everything in her stride, is always true to herself and just doesn't let the bastards get to her.
Anyway, the film then veers away from the adoptive parents and focuses back on Juno and on her relationship with her family and Paulie, which, inevitably, I found rather less interesting than the other sub-plot, but it isn't my film...
The above could all have been incredibly cheesy and/or emo but actually it was just hilarious. Yes, there were a few poignant moments but most of the audience were shrieking with laughter at the fantastic banter between Juno and her dad, Juno and her step-mom, Juno and...well, everyone! It's been a long time since I've seen such a funny film (witty rather than slapstick, of course) and it was a welcome relief to be able to laugh and to think - but not to have to think too hard or about too serious an issue. Ellen Page, who played Juno, did a great job and was beautiful and convincing throughout, so I guess my Oscar vote would be with her, even if that's only because I haven't seen any of the other nominees.
Hoorah for a smart, sharp, funny, fresh comedy that doesn't degenerate into an emofest or a farce!
03 February 2008
Random Gawkery
I haven't subscribed to the Gawker feed for a while - too many posts and not enough of interest to me for it to merit interrupting my day via Google Reader. Still, there are some amusing posts in there (much as I might pretend I'm not interested in celebrity gossip, if it's NYC celebrity gossip, I can be persuaded to take a look) and I'll often take a quick look once or twice a week.
1. How to Market an Academic Book. Gawker disses a Stanford academic for invoking Bible stories to sell his book on birds who go for older guys. According to Publishers Weekly, "[The author] casts a wide net over literature... to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men--in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth'--is integral to our society."
This just reminded me of the amusing tale of Woolworths getting into trouble for naming a bed marketed towards young girls "Lolita" and (best of all) for their efforts to pretend that they hadn't Googled "Lolita" before going ahead with the name before committing themselves to ridicule, scorn and mockery. Then again, I've heard of marketing decisions with less foresight...
2. Depressed, Estranged Spouses Find Stability In Virtual Fantasy World. "While they're not the first (or thousandth) couple to marry after meeting online, Kristen Birkin and Steve Sweet sound like the most heartbreakingly redeemed. They met in Second Life, where both had dealt with their loveless marriages and dead-end lives by bravely escaping into a virtual world on the Internet."
The blushing bride said, of her altar-ego [hee], "The avatar I am now is quite stunning. She is everything I should have been years ago, slim and attractive. I finally felt I could be who I wanted to be. I felt stronger." The couple have now married in real life too - isn't that a nice tale of the Joyz of Teh Interweb?
3. Moby Busking in London Tube Makes £5 (filed under the tag "failure"). Poor old Moby. It's a good thing he didn't need the cash as the Sloane Rangers weren't impressed with his busking... Dear, dear.
4. Facebook Outrage: Insurance Company Demands A Peek At Kids' Profiles. This might serve as a warning not to be so emo in your Facebook status as an insurance company, which refuses to pay out for treatments for anorexia and bulimia as they are "psychological," has demanded access to the FB and MySpace accounts of a couple of teenagers to determine their "psychological state." Never mind that the causes of eating disorders are far from fully certain or that the online persona people choose to display online doesn't have to be an accurate reflection of either what they write in their own private journals or, for that matter, their "psychological state."
I'd better not start writing "Bex has a migraine" as my Facebook status in case my insurance policy goes up; hopefully, "Bex is tired, among other things" is more acceptable - it certainly is accurate but not debilitating.
1. How to Market an Academic Book. Gawker disses a Stanford academic for invoking Bible stories to sell his book on birds who go for older guys. According to Publishers Weekly, "[The author] casts a wide net over literature... to argue that the power dynamic between younger women and older men--in which daughters fall in love with their father's lives and older men are tempted by the intoxicating power and promise of youth'--is integral to our society."
This just reminded me of the amusing tale of Woolworths getting into trouble for naming a bed marketed towards young girls "Lolita" and (best of all) for their efforts to pretend that they hadn't Googled "Lolita" before going ahead with the name before committing themselves to ridicule, scorn and mockery. Then again, I've heard of marketing decisions with less foresight...
2. Depressed, Estranged Spouses Find Stability In Virtual Fantasy World. "While they're not the first (or thousandth) couple to marry after meeting online, Kristen Birkin and Steve Sweet sound like the most heartbreakingly redeemed. They met in Second Life, where both had dealt with their loveless marriages and dead-end lives by bravely escaping into a virtual world on the Internet."
The blushing bride said, of her altar-ego [hee], "The avatar I am now is quite stunning. She is everything I should have been years ago, slim and attractive. I finally felt I could be who I wanted to be. I felt stronger." The couple have now married in real life too - isn't that a nice tale of the Joyz of Teh Interweb?
3. Moby Busking in London Tube Makes £5 (filed under the tag "failure"). Poor old Moby. It's a good thing he didn't need the cash as the Sloane Rangers weren't impressed with his busking... Dear, dear.
4. Facebook Outrage: Insurance Company Demands A Peek At Kids' Profiles. This might serve as a warning not to be so emo in your Facebook status as an insurance company, which refuses to pay out for treatments for anorexia and bulimia as they are "psychological," has demanded access to the FB and MySpace accounts of a couple of teenagers to determine their "psychological state." Never mind that the causes of eating disorders are far from fully certain or that the online persona people choose to display online doesn't have to be an accurate reflection of either what they write in their own private journals or, for that matter, their "psychological state."
I'd better not start writing "Bex has a migraine" as my Facebook status in case my insurance policy goes up; hopefully, "Bex is tired, among other things" is more acceptable - it certainly is accurate but not debilitating.
01 February 2008
Historical Linguistics Makes the Headlines Again
AKA The evolutionary biologists try their hand at modelling this 'ere thing called language.
"Languages evolve in sudden leaps, not creeps," sez New Scientist today. Oh does it? Well, apparently, that's what some (non social-) scientists in Reading found. I'd love to read this paper as the abstract of the paper by Mark Pagel published in Science doesn't help much:
Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups—Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian—to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.
I did a fair amount of historical linguistics during my degree - in fact, before I discovered the joys of evolutionary psychology, describing (and trying to explain) language change was one of my favourite parts of the course. Semantic change (the change of a word's meaning over time) or lexical change (additions, deletions and modifications to the overall vocabulary of a language) tend to be the hardest to explain away of all the types of language change, simply because the meaning of words and their use are so dependent on context and culture (to some extent, one's accent is too, in some countries, although Italy, for example, has no equivalent of RP). But, if you want to study the history of a language, you have to use the written language and lexical items are the easiest units to study, simply because certain basic concepts seem to be universal and comparison is, thus, easier.
The other thing about studying lexical change is that unlike some types of sound change, the use of a new word to stand for an old concept or of a new concept to be represented by an old word is pretty binary: I either possess the word "internet" or I don't and am forced to paraphrase. According to one model of language change, individual language changes (e.g. the use of the word muptard instead of idiot) spreads from speaker to speaker at a rate that produces an S-curve, with the first 20% and the last 20% being the slowest rate of change. The abstract of Pagel's paper seems to suggest that their results go against the so-called lexical diffusion model, with the most rapid change taking place soon after the language has formed its own branch on the family tree perhaps as part of some in-group bonding type activity. Hay, look at us; we have our own speech patterns that you can't replicate because you're not part of our gang.
Creating phylogenetic-style family trees to represent the "speciation" (or the division of one language into more than one distinct language or dialect) is hardly new in linguistics - it's been going on for over 100 years, in fact. The problem of defining what a language is still remains, though. If we pursue the evolutionary biology model, speakers of the same language are able to communicate to produce fertile conversation (as members of the same species reproduce to produce fertile offspring). But then, the concept of language is often a politically-motivated one: Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are all mutually intelligible to some degree, although Norwegians are better at understanding Swedish and Danish than Swedes and Danes are at understanding each other, and Swedes and Danes understand Norwegian better than they understand each other. It is often convenient, when political boundaries exist to say "Norwegian stops here; long live Swedish" even if there tends to be more of a continuum of intelligibility rather than an abrupt cut-off.
The term "dialect" doesn't help much either, particularly as in some countries, it bears negative connotations of backwardness and peasantry. Until recently (30-40 years ago), no one spoke standard Italian as everyone spoke their own regional variety of Italian, each of which was strongly influenced by the vocabulary and pronunciation of the dialect of the area. Again, it's a fine line between regional variations of a language and dialects.
Presumably, the authors were using some method of linguistic reconstruction, in which you take basic vocabulary items that crop up in all/most languages and trace them back, using cognates in related languages to put together a hypothetical proto-language - the Eve of linguistics. Proto-languages - like Proto-Indo-European - are a bit tricksy because they are based on potentially flawed assumptions and it is easy to think two languages are linguistically related when they are simply geographically close as a lot of lexical borrowing between the two is likely to have taken place, even if the underlying structures of the language are very different. Nor was it likely that this Proto-Indo-European was a homogenous tongue spoken across Eurasia, transcending mountains, lakes and rivers...
One of my main objections, which may well be answered in the article, is that these scientists, who get so defensive when laymen "misuse" words like electricity, don't necessarily exercise the same caution when it comes to other disciplines. I would definitely need to read Pagel's explanation of how he is delimiting a language and when he is beginning to measure its start point before I can really comment any further on this paper. Shame.
In the absence of being able to read the paper itself, the media will have to do. The Economist gets confused by filing its article under the "linguistic evolution" section, whereas I would tend to use linguistic evolution to describe how it was that humans came to have this special communication device known as language, rather than "oh look, words change hands and meaning a lot, particularly when a language is the NKOTB, like" but fair enough. In The Telegraph, a co-author on the paper, Quentin Atkinson, sez:
[Although English seems to be changing rapidly today,] "this is unlikely to be due to the processes we describe in our paper, since English is not currently 'splitting up' into new languages - if anything it seems to be increasingly homogenised under the influence of globalisation and electronic communication."
Perhaps news of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift haven't yet reached the M4 corridor, but one of the most surprising facts about contemporary US English is that although many of the smaller, local language particulars are being eroded over time, these two major vowel shifts are causing the speech of Americans in the north to diverge sharply from that spoken by Americans in the south. This hasn't yet reached the point of mutual intelligibility (although I've never been to Miss-Hippy or elsewhere in the Deep South so I probably can't judge this) but the two varieties are certainly not becoming homogenised. In Rochester, Buffalo and other urban centres along the northeast border with Canada, words like Rochester are pronounced [rahh-chester]; this same [ahh] sound also appears in the south, but in pronunciations of words like time as [tahhm] with a flattened diphthong. NPR has a good interview about this with sociolinguist extraordinaire, Bill Labov, here.
Whether the Yankees are just trying to distinguish themselves from Dixie, and vice-versa, as a means of exerting their own social identity and independence, is something only time will tell. Maybe we are still a long way from fully understanding the motivations for and the mechanisms by which languages change and indeed what causes some changes to spread through a linguistic community. Roger Lass was definitely on to something when he proposed that when it came to explanations of language change, "Even second best is not the same as universal darkness and there may well be areas in which second best is best because first best is simply not possible in principle."
"Languages evolve in sudden leaps, not creeps," sez New Scientist today. Oh does it? Well, apparently, that's what some (non social-) scientists in Reading found. I'd love to read this paper as the abstract of the paper by Mark Pagel published in Science doesn't help much:
Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We used vocabulary data from three of the world's major language groups—Bantu, Indo-European, and Austronesian—to show that 10 to 33% of the overall vocabulary differences among these languages arose from rapid bursts of change associated with language-splitting events. Our findings identify a general tendency for increased rates of linguistic evolution in fledgling languages, perhaps arising from a linguistic founder effect or a desire to establish a distinct social identity.
I did a fair amount of historical linguistics during my degree - in fact, before I discovered the joys of evolutionary psychology, describing (and trying to explain) language change was one of my favourite parts of the course. Semantic change (the change of a word's meaning over time) or lexical change (additions, deletions and modifications to the overall vocabulary of a language) tend to be the hardest to explain away of all the types of language change, simply because the meaning of words and their use are so dependent on context and culture (to some extent, one's accent is too, in some countries, although Italy, for example, has no equivalent of RP). But, if you want to study the history of a language, you have to use the written language and lexical items are the easiest units to study, simply because certain basic concepts seem to be universal and comparison is, thus, easier.
The other thing about studying lexical change is that unlike some types of sound change, the use of a new word to stand for an old concept or of a new concept to be represented by an old word is pretty binary: I either possess the word "internet" or I don't and am forced to paraphrase. According to one model of language change, individual language changes (e.g. the use of the word muptard instead of idiot) spreads from speaker to speaker at a rate that produces an S-curve, with the first 20% and the last 20% being the slowest rate of change. The abstract of Pagel's paper seems to suggest that their results go against the so-called lexical diffusion model, with the most rapid change taking place soon after the language has formed its own branch on the family tree perhaps as part of some in-group bonding type activity. Hay, look at us; we have our own speech patterns that you can't replicate because you're not part of our gang.
Creating phylogenetic-style family trees to represent the "speciation" (or the division of one language into more than one distinct language or dialect) is hardly new in linguistics - it's been going on for over 100 years, in fact. The problem of defining what a language is still remains, though. If we pursue the evolutionary biology model, speakers of the same language are able to communicate to produce fertile conversation (as members of the same species reproduce to produce fertile offspring). But then, the concept of language is often a politically-motivated one: Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are all mutually intelligible to some degree, although Norwegians are better at understanding Swedish and Danish than Swedes and Danes are at understanding each other, and Swedes and Danes understand Norwegian better than they understand each other. It is often convenient, when political boundaries exist to say "Norwegian stops here; long live Swedish" even if there tends to be more of a continuum of intelligibility rather than an abrupt cut-off.
The term "dialect" doesn't help much either, particularly as in some countries, it bears negative connotations of backwardness and peasantry. Until recently (30-40 years ago), no one spoke standard Italian as everyone spoke their own regional variety of Italian, each of which was strongly influenced by the vocabulary and pronunciation of the dialect of the area. Again, it's a fine line between regional variations of a language and dialects.
Presumably, the authors were using some method of linguistic reconstruction, in which you take basic vocabulary items that crop up in all/most languages and trace them back, using cognates in related languages to put together a hypothetical proto-language - the Eve of linguistics. Proto-languages - like Proto-Indo-European - are a bit tricksy because they are based on potentially flawed assumptions and it is easy to think two languages are linguistically related when they are simply geographically close as a lot of lexical borrowing between the two is likely to have taken place, even if the underlying structures of the language are very different. Nor was it likely that this Proto-Indo-European was a homogenous tongue spoken across Eurasia, transcending mountains, lakes and rivers...
One of my main objections, which may well be answered in the article, is that these scientists, who get so defensive when laymen "misuse" words like electricity, don't necessarily exercise the same caution when it comes to other disciplines. I would definitely need to read Pagel's explanation of how he is delimiting a language and when he is beginning to measure its start point before I can really comment any further on this paper. Shame.
In the absence of being able to read the paper itself, the media will have to do. The Economist gets confused by filing its article under the "linguistic evolution" section, whereas I would tend to use linguistic evolution to describe how it was that humans came to have this special communication device known as language, rather than "oh look, words change hands and meaning a lot, particularly when a language is the NKOTB, like" but fair enough. In The Telegraph, a co-author on the paper, Quentin Atkinson, sez:
[Although English seems to be changing rapidly today,] "this is unlikely to be due to the processes we describe in our paper, since English is not currently 'splitting up' into new languages - if anything it seems to be increasingly homogenised under the influence of globalisation and electronic communication."
Perhaps news of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift haven't yet reached the M4 corridor, but one of the most surprising facts about contemporary US English is that although many of the smaller, local language particulars are being eroded over time, these two major vowel shifts are causing the speech of Americans in the north to diverge sharply from that spoken by Americans in the south. This hasn't yet reached the point of mutual intelligibility (although I've never been to Miss-Hippy or elsewhere in the Deep South so I probably can't judge this) but the two varieties are certainly not becoming homogenised. In Rochester, Buffalo and other urban centres along the northeast border with Canada, words like Rochester are pronounced [rahh-chester]; this same [ahh] sound also appears in the south, but in pronunciations of words like time as [tahhm] with a flattened diphthong. NPR has a good interview about this with sociolinguist extraordinaire, Bill Labov, here.
Whether the Yankees are just trying to distinguish themselves from Dixie, and vice-versa, as a means of exerting their own social identity and independence, is something only time will tell. Maybe we are still a long way from fully understanding the motivations for and the mechanisms by which languages change and indeed what causes some changes to spread through a linguistic community. Roger Lass was definitely on to something when he proposed that when it came to explanations of language change, "Even second best is not the same as universal darkness and there may well be areas in which second best is best because first best is simply not possible in principle."