Ingridients:
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Ingrid doesn't like spam
email: i(at)jamver.id.au
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Mon, 28 May 2007
I was looking up hysteresis in the dictionary, and flicked past the page where hebetude was defined ("the state of being dull or lethargic"), and I wonder why I don't hear this word more often, because it sounds like it was invented by Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
I got back to hysteresis, and I'm now a little doubtful if I can use it as a good feminist. It's used to describe a process that lags behind whatever is activating it, and comes from the greek hysteresis, "shortcoming". I can't help noticing that we have a few other words from the Greek starting with hyster- and they all refer to women or the womb.
We've already more or less disposed of hysteria as excessively sexist, and I think I can do without the mental association of the woman being required to walk several steps behind the man when thinking about delayed (hysteretic) processes.
Sigh. Every so often, I am reminded that despite everything, English is not my native language. It is of course Albert Herring James is singing in, and his part is the Mayor. Anyone who was wondering why a military officer would be wearing a top hat is forgiven.
I have not one, but two, thesaurus spam sitting here in my inbox that I think might qualify at least partially for "opposite meaning". I need some word for the unintentional irony here.
Our product is an all earthy herbal tablets incorporating a mixture of herbs known for advancing intimate longing with discharge. By using my product you should go through a gain in sexual craving, an amelioration in your size and execution, also as increased energy and joy during sexual activeness.Hands up everyone who'd like more "discharge" from their intimate regions? And "a gain in sexual craving" - is that when you put on weight because you can't stop eating during sex? And who thinks "all earthy" is a desirable quality in herbal tablets? I'd prefer if they washed the soil off first, thanks.
The second spam is an interesting beast, as it appears to be a sibling of my original thesaurus spam.
Our product is an innovative fat-bandage accessory which withdraws grease from the board you gobble! Formulated with the mighty fat-binding fibre, the medley of all-natural multipliers..I'm defining sibling in the obvious biological sense here - both had the same "parent" message, which hopefully actually made sense, and different thesaurus replacements have been made.
The two things that strike me from comparing the siblings is firstly, the reappearance of my dear friend "gobble", and secondly, I'm in some doubt whether these are generated with a computer program or if there's actual human intervention.
This one has a pattern of 'fat - grease - fat', where the original has 'grease - fat - grease'. This could of course just mean a simple program that rejects the same "thesaurus synonym" twice in a row, from a listing containing only 'fat - grease'.
But apart from all the things one learns from a second example of the same thing, there's something delightful about the specific "thesaurus synonyms" chosen for the first sentence.
"Bandage", "accessory" and "board", with the neutral "product" (rather than "pills") conjures visions, for me, of termites with some kind of fat-storage belt, and the innovative new gadget on the belt that strips away all those nasty oils and pollutants from the wood automatically, unlike the bad old days, when the termites had to transfer them to the storage belt themselves. Clearly, these are eco-warrior termites, cleaning up human messes, and I think they deserve all the new technology they can get, but I'm not sure why I'm getting their email.
I've just finished reading "Villette" by Charlotte Brontë. What an extremely peculiar book. I can certainly understand why "Jane Eyre" is better known and more popular, although I'm not convinced it's better.
The issues that make it peculiar include the fact that it appears partly to have been a way to get some unrequited love out of Brontë's system. Much of it is based on real people and real events, except when it appears to me to switch into blatant wish-fulfillment.
The story is told by Lucy Snowe, mainly of her time in "Villette" (based on Brontë's own time in Brussels). She is appointed as the English-speaking governess to the children of the headmistress of a girls' school, learning French as she goes, and eventually becomes the English teacher at the school.
Lucy, even as the first person narrator, appears to be an uptight, humourless killjoy. Certainly she's an unreliable narrator - she herself admits to not telling us certain things, or only later. Her reasons strike me as vague or even self-contradictory - she claims to be very calm, rational and dispassionate, but there are hints that this is achieved simply by not telling us or anyone else much about her emotions.
I found this fascinating, as well as frustrating, because I thought the unreliable narrator, at least in such an explicit form, was a later development in literature. Also it is unclear to me how much this is deliberate on Brontë's part, and how much Lucy's character is just a reflection of her own.
I can recognise that one of the issues is a feminist one - Brontë is trying to say something about the restrictive circumstances available to "good" women at the time, and Lucy seems to sort of be rebelling against this. But at the same time, she is so much a creature of her time that from my point of view she is just reinforcing the fact that once the brainwashing has happened, there isn't much freedom available.
The point of having Lucy live more or less alone, as an Englishwoman in a foreign country, is clearly to illustrate loneliness, isolation, and lack of love or any other strong emotional interaction. The problem for me is that Lucy appears to be causing an awful lot of the loneliness and isolation herself. She's not exactly making the best of a bad situation, although she'd like to think she is.
The whole thing reminds me very much of the joke about how many Jewish mothers-in-law it takes to change a lightbulb - "None! I don't mind sitting here in the dark vilst u goes out enjoying yourselves.....". I hope any potential offense at a Jewish joke is compensated by the fact that it's a good English Protestant (as we are told repeatedly) who's carrying on like this.
Lucy also has a tiny problem with men. Her opinion of them strikes me as a bit dubious, because she seems to think she'll never attract male interest because she's not physically attractive (and remember, we only have her word for that.) Also she's not worthy of the kind of men who might be suitable. Martyr complex or something.
There is a romance of sorts in "Vilette", eventually, between Lucy and M. Paul, the literature teacher. The relationship seems to circle around and around Lucy's not wishing to admit that at this point, she is starved for attention and part of her psyche has had about enough with the keeping aloof thing.
There is no doubt that part of the awkwardness of this relationship is that M. Paul is based on the teacher who was the husband of the real headmistress in Brussels. Brontë had a serious infatuation with this man, and he turned her down. Brontë doesn't manage quite so well figuring out what the single M. Paul will do about Lucy. Hence the strong air of wish-fulfillment towards the end.
However, Brontë must have admitted to herself that she couldn't really figure out what Lucy and M. Paul living happily ever after might look like, and yet didn't want to commit Lucy to more torment, and so wrote the most spectacular "You can't possibly be doing this now, you've just given up, haven't you?" last page I've ever come across.
As you can see, my tendency to audience participation is still strong.
Certainly, "Vilette" is far more complicated than "Jane Eyre", and depending on the extent to which the effect is deliberate, quite brilliant. I mean, if the point is that Lucy is having such an awful time of it because she's creating her own misery, I managed to maintain interest well past the point I'd have thrown any other book about a person like this at the nearest wall.
But I still want to give her a good shake and tell her to lighten up a bit.
You wouldn't normally guess that a best-seller with a foreword by Frank McCourt would be about punctuation. I've now had this book praised by a number of people I respect, including Annette, so it is officially on my list of "Cool books I wouldn't mind having a copy of someday".
I was proof-reading a research abstract for Thomas, and I came across a sentence fragment that whirled my mind off into SF:
....publication of reports of a disturbing number of non-existent organisms.
Oh, and I did point out to Thomas that he probably meant "publication of a disturbing number of reports of non-existent organisms."
Back in the sixties, Georges Perec and his acquaintances experimented with a new form of art. They took two different, unrelated texts of similar lengths. Starting with one, they attempted to find "related" texts by replacing words with synonyms or phrases of similar meaning, such as you might find in a thesaurus. The process was then repeated on the altered text, and so on for several rounds, the aim being to produce the second text after sufficient rounds.
If I remember correctly, the project didn't succeed, but did create some interesting results. I apologise for the vagueness of the details; I read about the project in David Bellos' excellent biography of GP, and unfortunately, I've had to return the book to the library.
Perec strikes me as someone who would have been able to do amazing things with access to modern computer technology - not letting the computer replace his creativity, but getting it to do the tedious parts of the process. I think he would have succeeded if he'd been doing this now.
Recently, I've been noticing spam that attempts to evade spam detectors by replacing key words with, well, not quite synonyms, but words one might find in the same thesaurus entry. I think of it as "thesaurus spam".
The spammers are apparently under the impression that their missives will convey the identical sense if they employ thesaurus replacements; adherents of "Pretzel" and other word game players acknowledge that you can traduce the intention dramatically.
So in the spirit of found art, I hereby present this spam from this morning's email:
This pills is an advanced grease-fastening addendum which removes fat from the nourishment you gobble! Explicated with the potent grease-fastening fiber, the alloy of all-biological constituents...
Audit it
Other Georges Perec fans may guess, and be right, that it was the phrase "nourishment you gobble!" that got me thinking of Georges Perec and art. But I'd already laughed so hard at the first "grease-fastening" (I assume that was "fat-binding") that I actually had to recover for a couple of minutes before I got that far.
"Audit it", which was presumably "Try it" (it's a hyperlink in the original email which I have chosen to spare you from; after all, if this is indeed found art, I kinda have to do something to it, to assert my artistic authority) is particularly charming as it almost reverses the intended meaning of the email.
I'm now on the look-out for a thesaurus spam that manages to convey the exact opposite of the intended meaning.
Going through David Jones, past their CD section, I couldn't help but be struck by two adjacent CDs:
Emma: Free me
Fantasia: Free yourself
Also, Bed Bath 'n Table appear to have employed my doppleganger. At the moment they are selling mugs and bowls, in white, with colour words, painted on in the given colour. The idea will be familiar to anyone who got an invitation to my Rainbow party back in 1994. The fact that the two colours on sale are green and blue, my crockery colours, just proves it must be my doppleganger.
And I've just received this email:
The University of Queensland last night received a report that the Brisbane City Council's Dutton Park ferry terminal at St Lucia had sunk into the Brisbane River.
About 6.50pm a ramp and a pontoon submerged into the river, adjacent to Sir William MacGregor Drive.
The area has been fenced off and the University has not received any reports that there were passengers in the vicinity.
Considering a controversial bridge is being planned nearby, the conspiracy theorist in me considers this remarkable timing.