A friend noticed that this extra in the climactic scene of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog bears a suspicious resemblance to a certain high-profile member of the cast of another Joss Whedon production in a wig and glasses:
Aha!
Some of the items listed below are authentic magic items from the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Players Handbook. Some of them are fragments of lines from erotic short stories. Can you tell which is which?
A. Sacred Rod
B. Magic Rod
C. Rod of Wood
D. Glistening Rod
E. Rod of Satan
F. Rod of Dark Reward
G. Rod of Steel
H. Rod of Harvest
I. Rod of Reaving
J. Rod of Flesh
K. Rod of First Blood
L. Fuck-Rod
Answers:
Penis:
A, C, D, E, J, L
Magic Item
B, F, H, I, K
I was looking at my gmail and saw the following ad for Ben Stein’s new Intelligent Design film:
“Expelled – Ben Stein - www.Expelledthemovie.com - Why is Big Science suppressing the evidence of Intelligent Design?”
Big science!? No! Laurie Anderson NOOOOOOOOO! Why must you suppress evidence with your hypnotic, hypnotic music?
So, I heard on Journalista the other day that Neil Gaiman is offering his novel American Gods for free online for a month. I’d never read it, having had a friend read it for a high school project and haaate it. I’d always meant to give it a shot for myself, though and hey, free’s free, so I went ahead and started it. I just came to this passage, where the main character, Shadow, is talking to a girl, Sam, about Herodotus.
“And there’re battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he’s running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, ‘Tell them to build me a temple here.’ So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, ‘Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple.’ It’s really matter-of-fact, you know?”
“So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations?”
“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not it.”
She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It’s just brains.”
“I like my theory better,” said Shadow.
“What’s your theory?”
“That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.”
[…]
“I bet it’s like space aliens,” she said. “These days, people see space aliens. Back then they saw gods. Maybe the space aliens come from the right side of the brain.”
American Gods was published in 2001. In the the collected version of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, published 1999, Moore expands in the appendix on something his character Gull says:
Gull’s remarks about how divine visions are reported quite routinely in ancient historical accounts are born out by everyone from the historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, to the Old Testament including a mass of old parish records along the way. One account in the Roman military logs tells how a column of troops had reached a river which they suspected was too fast and deep for them to cross, even though the delay might add days to their march. At this point, the log records, the Great God Pan appeared, picked up one of the heralds trumpets, waded easily across the river and blew a fanfare upon reaching the opposite bank. Unsurprisingly, the soldiers took this to auger that they should cross the river, which they did in perfect safety and continued with their march as planned. As Gull remarks here, medical researches seem to indicate that the corpus callosum–the strand of neural gristle that connects the twin lobes of our brain–has become more complex and efficient across the centuries. As a purely personal speculation, I would point out that in today’s world, the act of crossing a busy road is similar to the problem afforded the Romans by the river. We judge, by looking and listening, how far away the approaching cars are, which way they are coming and how fast they are bearing down upon us. Somewhere in the depths of our subconscious an extremely complex calculation is performed at lightning speed, telling us how fast we need to walk in order to cross the road in safety. That message is then flashed from our unconscious right brain to our conscious left brain across the narrow causeway of gristle that connects the two
If we accept that in the past the connection between the two halves of the brain was less sophisticated, then presumably there would have been a different relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds. Perhaps the subconscious of the Roman soldiers was perfectly capable of making lightning calculations as to the river’s depth and the speed of its current, but was unable to pass it to their conscious minds int he direct manner that modern brains employ. Could it be that the visions of gods or supernatural figures that populate our histories are projections, messages from an unconscious that was at the time unable to communicate in any other way?
Carl Jung has suggested that even such comparatively modern phenomena as UFOs may be projections of what he calls the mass unconscious.
Reference to Pan? Two lobes of the brain? UFOs? I guess Alan Moore’s influence on Gaiman didn’t stop when Gaiman stopped making comics.
As I walked rapidly to work this morning, I listened to the Mindwebs version of Harlan Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman. It struck me as kind of ironic.
As I walked home, I listened to the new Escape Pod, Friction. The Ellison story is a classic (no doubt partly because of its really awesome title) but it really had nothing on this story. This one goes on the “Why Science Fiction is Worth Reading” shelf. Or, in this case, listening to. It might be the best Escape Pod I’ve ever heard, and it’s one of the best stories I’ve read in months. I’d love to see this one get some love at award time.
Comic tomorrow.
I’ve mentioned in several of these commentaries that at the time that I was writing these comics, I was working a lot. Specifically I was working in a call center taking credit card applications. That’s when I came up with this joke, not realizing that it’s kind of an old one. I’ve since heard this basic joke a bunch of times, and every time it makes me shake my head and sigh.
One upside of that little foray into the belly of the credit industry is it taught me a little bit more about what “pre-approval” means. Actually it’s a pretty brilliant and horribly frustrating use of ambiguity by corporations. See, what most people think when they see the phrase “pre-approved,” they assume it’s being used somewhat like the way rice cooker uses the word “pre-declined.” That is to say, they assume it means “We already went through the whole application process and we know you’re good–you’ve been approved before we sent you this letter.” It’s an added enticement to call: if you’ve already been approved, why not go ahead and accept the card? The companies do nothing to keep people from thinking this. On pre-approved offerers, they call the credit card application an “acceptance certificate,” even though it’s exactly the same as the application that non-pre-approved offers get.
You see, credit card companies can’t get all of the information that they need to actually get you a credit card until they get your application. Which is why “pre-approved” doesn’t mean what most people assume it means. What it actually means is something close to preliminarily approved. You’ve been approved to receive a credit card offer, in essence. The credit card company paid some money to one of the credit bureaus in order to get a list of names meeting certain criteria, probably involving credit score. People who meet these criteria are pre-approved and get the offer, which may or may not be available to anyone. It’s a deeply sleazy use of ambiguity
Still, generally speaking, the pre-approved offers were better deals than their non-pre-approved counterparts. Still, they aren’t necessarily the best deals available–if you are in the market for a credit card, I recommend doing the homework yourself at bankrate.com, rather than responding to offers you get in the mail. Credit cards can be very dangerous, but they can also be very useful tools, if you know how to use them. It’s actually a pretty big problem that people don’t get taught about how to deal with credit cards in school–these days, it’s practically a necessary survival skill.
Anyway, that’s my financial planning lecture for today
Since I wrote about the nominees for the short story category of the Hugo awards earlier, I thought I ought to mention that the winners have now been announced. My favorite of the short story nominees, “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, pulled out the win. I guess my tastes aren’t as wonky as I sometimes think. I’ve read the winner for best novella, “A Billion Eves,” by Robert Reed. I quite liked it, but I can’t exactly comment on it’s choice, since I haven’t read any of the other nominees. I haven’t read the winner for best novelette, “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald, so I certainly can’t complain about that choice, but I have to admit that I was pulling for another nominee, “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” by Geoff Ryman. This was a pretty controversial story, but pushed my buttons nicely.
I found it interesting that all three of these short fiction winners were published originally in Asimov’s Science Fiction. In fact, “The Djinn’s Wife” and “Impossible Dreams” actually appeared in the same issue. When I looked at the nominees, I realized that this wasn’t as surprising as I’d originally thought, Asimov’s was the source of four out of the five novella nominees, three out of the five short story nominees, and two out of the five novelette nominees. No other publication was the source of more than one of the fifteen. This says a lot of good for Asimov’s editor, Sheila Williams, especially when you consider that 2006 was only her second year at the helm.
In fact, it makes it almost look a little odd that she lost to Gordon Van Gelder (editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine) for best editor. But, hell, I love F&SF and have been reading it for much of Van Gelder’s 10-year run. I’d have probably voted for him too.
Film award went to Pan’s Labyrinth, no shock there, although I think the category was stronger this year than a lot of years–at least judging from the previous winners. I certainly wouldn’t have argued if The Prestige won, although I know a lot of people didn’t like that as much as I did. From what I’ve heard, Children of Men was excellent as well, although I still haven’t had the chance to see it. Guillermo del Toro deserves a Hugo, although I’d probably have given it to him for The Devil’s Backbone ahead of Pan’s Labyrinth. Then again, I suppose the voters might have considered that too much of a horror film to fit into the SF/fantasy paradigm–it wasn’t even nominated, and even if it had been, there was pretty much no way it was going to beat out The Fellowship of the Ring. It also seems that it’s only the second film to win the award that wasn’t made in English–after only Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It does seem that a lot of the best SF film is being made outside of Hollywood these days, so it’s good to see that the Hugo voters acknowledging that.
At any rate, you can check out all of the winners here, and the nominees here. If you’re reading this sometime later, you’ll probably be able to get all the info at the second link; the winners were just announced in the past couple of days and Locus hasn’t gotten them up yet, but I’m sure they will.
I’ll get today’s Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut up later today, but I just had to share this right now. Myself and my lovely girlfriend just got back (way too late) last night from an excursion to Montana. The trip was awesome and maybe I’ll talk about some of it later. Right before we started our drive over last Thursday afternoon, I was burning CDs of stuff to listen to on the drive. Like it often does, this included the podcasts I needed to catch up on, including Escape Pod, the SF podcast I’ve mentioned here twice before. Since I did a big road trip the weekend before, I had gone through most of the recent episodes, so I really wanted the one that was going to come out that Thursday. Usually they’re up by about the time we were scheduled to leave, so I spent the last few minutes before driving off in a frenzy of refreshing on iTunes only to be disappointed. So that’s the story of why it was four days before I learned that something really awesome happened to me.
You see, a couple of weeks ago Escape Pod started doing a “blog of the week,” giving away a mention and a book to one blog picked randomly from their Technorati referrers. But this week, in the podcast I tried and failed to download before leaving last Thursday, Steve Eley stretched his own rules and picked a blog non-randomly because it was “too cool not to mention.” That blog is the one you’re reading right now. This was based on my post about the story Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush. He described the Angriest Rice Cooker as a comic on his regular reading list. He said that the Angriest Rice Cooker would give the book in question three stars.
Having comics I wrote referenced obliquely in a piece of media I listen to anyway? Awesome.
A July 29th New York Times article about some research by linguist Mary Bucholtz on nerds in California high schools has been bouncing around the internet lately. The thesis of the research, as presented by the article is that nerds are distinguished from non-nerds as “hyperwhite,” meaning that unlike cooler students, they don’t appropriate elements of black culture. Dirk Deppey linked it on Journalista, and offered this critique:
[N]erdiness is also an absence of redneck culture, Jewish culture, Hispanic culture, Native-American culture, old-money culture and any of hundreds of other kinds of culture. Likewise, — though I’m sure this is something of a stretch for cultural-studies types — one shouldn’t discount the possibility that nerd culture is pro-something, rather than anti-black culture, or that it may in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with race. And come on, statements like “a culture based on theft is a culture not worth having” are, if anything, antithetical to practical nerdishness: Just ask the Japanese. (Isn’t Quentin Tarantino’s worship of 1970s blacksploitation films part of what makes him a nerd?) Still, don’t let any of this stop you from seeing life exclusively through a simple black/white dichotomy, Ms. Bucholtz!
The next day, he linked to this post by Jason Tocci, which approvingly quoted the above critique.
What both Deppey and Tocci, and to a certain extent the original article, are missing is that Burcholtz is a linguist. Her work is about language use and how it reflects culture. Their focus is on media studies (specifically comics in Deppey’s case). A big part of the problem, of course, is that the article in question comes through the popular media–and not even the popular science media. The Times article came from the Style section, which is hardly the best place to get news about scientific research. Fortunately, the actual study she published can be found with about five minutes of Googling. It’s entitled “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness.” It was originally published in in 2001 in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. You can read the complete article here.
Now, the article is written for an audience of linguists, so it throws around a lot of terminology that won’t be familiar to people who haven’t had at least some undergraduate level linguistics (and probably a little bit of specifically sociolingustics). So I’m going to use my intro-level understanding of linguistics and slightly higher than intro level understanding of sociolingustics to walk through what she’s actually saying. Because even though she’s talking about language, something we all use every day, linguistics and anthropology are sciences and while we certainly don’t have to agree with her findings, dismissing them without understanding them is unfair.
The first thing to understand about the article is that it refers exclusively to high school nerds. So adults who have a knee-jerk reaction saying “that’s not me!” can take a step back and consider it from that perspective. In fact, her research is limited to one high school in California, and never pretends otherwise. The article is less about nerds as a whole than it is a case study of one group of people who are “racially marked” in spite of adhering to racial norms. This concept of “markedness” is critical to understanding what Burkholtz is saying. In short, this concept says that certain features are “marked” in society and others are “unmarked.” In white mainstream society, whiteness is an unmarked feature–it’s considered the norm and deviations from it are remarked on. White people in white-dominated places don’t think of themselves as having a race at all. This is also true of dialect. People who speak mainstream (or standard) English don’t think of themselves as speaking in a dialect. Of course, they are. Everybody speaks in a dialect. It’s just that Standard English is unmarked.
These are purely social constructions. Objectively, there’s no difference between Standard English and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of which is a dialect and which is not–they’re simply different. In fact, Standard English doesn’t really exist as a spoken language–it’s an abstraction in our minds. We don’t speak the way we write, but we have a prescriptive vision of the pure kind of spoken English, English without an accent. In mainstream society this unmarked dialect is strongly associated with the unmarked race–white. There are white people who speak in ways that are marked–the redneck culture that Deppey mentioned is one of these. Although these people are white, their form of whiteness is marked. They speak with something less than Standard English, therefore their whiteness is poisoned. They are incompletely white.
It’s also important to remember here that “black” and “white” are also pure abstractions, socially constructed. They are not limited to color of skin, but to significant linguistic and cultural factors. In the same way that black students who are seen to achieve academically can be marked as trying to be “white,” white students can be marked as somehow outside the unmarked norm.
This is all background that Bucholtz cites at the beginning of her paper if you want to follow the paper trail on this stuff, you can look at her references. Suffice it to say that up till now there’s not a lot here that I didn’t read in sociolinguistics textbooks in college. If you want a good intro to these and other concepts and how they impact rights, I recommend Rosina Lippi-Green’s English with an Accent. She does a good job of laying out the results of years of linguistic research and why they matter.
One final piece of linguistic jargon that is important to understanding Bucholtz’s thesis is “register.” This simply means a way of speaking that is specific to a given context. For example, a person testifying in court is likely to use a formal or hyperformal register, depending on their level of comfort. A person speaking with friends uses a different, less formal register. There’s a variety of features that linguists look to to determine register–word choice, syntax, level of ellipses. A full discussion of that is beyond this post, but suffice it to say that linguists are very good at figuring out what register people are using.
The novel phenomenon that Bucholtz is looking at is that some people have a marked racial identity in spite of the fact that they adhere to the writing-influenced norms of Standard English. In fact, they have a marked racial identity because of their perceived over-adherence to these norms. This is the opposite of what we usually see–white people with a marked identity because they don’t adhere to mainstream norms. The group she’s talking about are high-school aged nerds.
She studied this by going to a large urban high school with a lot of diversity. In spite of the variety of races represented, race was generally seen as a European American/African American dichotomy by the students. Note that this is a research finding, not something that Bucholtz brought into the research. Although the European American students were more aware of their whiteness than people in nearly all-white schools (like the one I attended in Boise, ID), European American norms were still the unmarked racial identity. This form of identity can only exist as a reaction to black identity–unmarked standards are only ever really formed in response to the marked standards. But ironically, the unmarked majority took a large quantity of their slang and other cultural features from the marked African American minority. This created an odd balancing act. White students who took too much of African American culture–for example those who were too into hip-hop, were marked in the traditional way, as somehow not quite white. Yet the definitions of cool were intrinsically linked with African American identity. In fact, it’s been argued that the very concept of cool is borrowed from African American culture–even the word itself originated from the version of AAVE spoken by jazz musicians the first time that that dialect emerged from the South and was exposed to a mainstream audience.
But students marked as nerds, both by other students and by themselves, are also seen as outside the mainstream, in spite of the fact that they don’t use dialect from outside Standard English. In fact, they speak in a formal, hyperformal, or academic register even when talking amongst themselves–something that cool students never did. They speak in a way derived from writing, pronouncing words as they are written rather than as they are spoken in Standard English. Bucholtz labels this Hyperstandard English–a form of English that adheres to the norms of Standard English so closely that it becomes marked. They refused to use slang–when asked about current slang terms, they responded in an academic way and humorously offered literal definitions. In one case, a nerd did use a slang term, but it was marked with a hesitation and a false start, and she modified the term (wack) so that it fit the patterns of Standard English rather than AAVE (wacked). Because of the racial dimension of their marking, Bucholtz declared them “Hyperwhite”–adhering to the white norms in such a way that they become marked for it.
The point isn’t really, as Deppey takes it, that nerds are defined as a reaction to black culture. The point is that they are defined as a deviation from the unmarked white culture–but in the opposite way of what people usually are. This would be interesting to study, but I imagine that in places where the primary marked group is not black but, for example, rednecks, you would find an unmarked majority that samples elements of that identity and a group of hyperstandard nerds who reject it entirely. Note also that this definition does not preclude nerds from being members of other races, but it does mean that nerds of other races are marked as such in part because of their adherence to white norms. She points to the example of Asians, a nerd stereotype. She discusses how Asians are considered, in mainstream culture, to be the “almost white” race–this is a racial ideology that dates back hundreds of years.
Now, none of this is to say that Bucholtz’s argument can’t be argued against. But if people are going to argue against it, they should argue what she’s actually saying, rather than arguing with what they imagine she’s saying.
If you are a nerd reading this and you still don’t think it describes you or the nerds you know, I recommend reading the article itself, particularly the actual descriptions of nerd behavior. I didn’t think that her research would have described the kinds of nerd I remember being in high school and am today, but reading it I did recognize a lot of myself and my friends.
EDIT: In one of his comments to his post Tocci responds to the actual article as well, and acknowledges the more complicated version of racial identity that I’m trying to get at here. This was actually posted before I wrote this, but I managed to skip over it somehow, as is abundantly clear by my posting the link two comments down from him doing the same thing. Oops.
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