There is something about the phrase Favorite Thing Ever that makes me want to write upbeat zany reviews with lots of Wow! and digressions and silly blather. I mean, we’re enthusing, right? This week I enthuse about Will Ferrell and Stranger than Fiction (scooping Matt, who really really wanted to review it too), and 
Kelly shares her new shiny love for Alan Bennett and An Uncommon Reader.
A couple links, first: my Quantum Leap rewatch of “A Single Drop of Rain” is up at TOR.COM, and there’s a new review of Indigo Springs here. Reviewer C.N. Rivera wasn’t crazy about the back and forth between the two storylines, and she hated Sahara from the git-go. To the latter, I confess I thought: “GOOD!”
Second, because she’s so darned interesting, I want to show you my friend Linda Carson, talking about art history and Lady Gaga’s references to same. (It’s a quickie: the Waterloo Ignite talks give speakers five minutes and twenty slides–the motto is “Enlighten Us, but Do it Quick.”)
I’m thinking “Bring on the meat dress!” may become a new catchphrase here at Chez Dua, which ties into some musings and observation of mine about language. None of us speaks quite the same language, you see: we all have our own DIY dialect.
Groups of people start building their own language as soon as they come together. Work groups, friendships, sports teams, theater companies, lovers… it’s part of the process of forging connections: in-jokes, the task-specific language, all this in-speak forms the true secret handshake. Once established, it can be used to refer back to specific facts, to memories, to emotions; it can also be used include or exclude. Your personal language is a merger of these separate variations, a fusion of the tongues of the family, the workplace, and your variety of social spheres.
The inspeak also can come with grammar and usage conventions. This spring I learned that in birding, the use of the term LBJ can refer to any one of the numberless brown handful-sized birds out there. LBJ stands for little brown job, and means, therefore, your basic bushtit or sparrowy bird. But I dug further, and discovered that within birding culture, you can’t just just go sticking this label on every LBJ that comes along. Once or twice, and you’re in the club. Once too many times, and you become some schmuck who can’t identify what’s in front of them.
(Also, if you’re me, this leads to an earworm of: LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Which sparrows appreciate not at all. Or it takes me to memories of the weird-butt animatronic LBJ cracking jokes at the Presidential Library in Austin. Really. Not joking.)
One very rich and heavily mined source of inspeak, of course, is pop culture. Here in North America, we eat, sleep, and breathe movies, TV, and books. We transform catchy quotes, imbue them with our own meanings, and sometimes make them impermeable to others in the process.
Some examples:
In my house, Monty Python has provided the line “S/he is a standard British Bird.” To us, this means any UK actor we recognize from multiple costume dramas, but don’t know by name. Not Dame Judy, not Rupert Graves… but the actress who was in Sense and Sensibility, say, who then played the King’s widow in Young Victoria. (I know, I could look her up, but that’s not the point.) Anyway, she’s an SBB.
Or the two blink and you miss ’em little boys on BlueBloods (What, you’re thinking, there are kids on Bluebloods?) have become Dr. Quinn and Medicine Woman thanks to Will Ferrell and Talladega Nights
Kelly and I crack up pretty much every time we say this.
Finally, no Child of the Eighties private language would be complete without a scattering of quotes, some mangled, from Ghostbusters
This is a basic human behavior, but it can be a tricky thing to set up in fiction. If you’re writing something contemporary and you use actual pop culture, you may be stale-dating your stories. If you’re not, there’s a process. You make up the source, put it in context, use it appropriately… and bang! When you bring off that effect, of letting the reader in the club, of having them understand perfectly, on an emotional level, something that doesn’t make actual sense when scanned… it’s a powerful thing. It’s hard to do but it’s also something I find hugely compelling, when I encounter it as a reader.
Where do your linguistic quirks originate? If you’re a writer–have you ever pulled this off in a way you’re exceptionally proud of?
I saw a skunk on Wednesday on my way to the cafe. It was six in the morning, raining hard and very dark–so, no chance of a photo. That, combined with the fact that it was a skunk, meant I didn’t even try to give chase. I was nevertheless delighted to see him waddling down Woodland in high gear, wavering between the west side of the street–and the fenced-in safety of a Terasen work site that is popular with a lot of the urban wildlife–and the garbage dumps of Greyhound Cate’s alley on the east. I don’t see skunks that often, and it has been at least a year. I took it for a good sign.
Yes, out and about at six. My timetable has shifted slightly, and now every day starts with an early fiction-writing session at the cafe. It used to start at half-past eight on Monday to Friday, and then early on Saturday-Sunday. Now it’s all crack of dawn, all the time. As an Xtreme Morning Person, this suits me… but every change has effects, and some have been hard to quantify.
Still, there’s been some “Mmm, must eat this meal at this point in the day now,” and a bit of “Gotta figure out when I’m getting to the pet store,” and “Hey, the frozen food run is sooo much more convenient!” I didn’t count on having to slot in a replacement for the semi-conscious woolgathering I used to do at five in the morning, five days a week. ( I’m not waking up any earlier, in general; I’ve just shifted around the daily must-do list in a way that’s been mostly pleasing.)
A thousand tiny consequences, some to be sorted; some, savored. The weekends are glorious, because K and I are on exactly the same clock, and we’ve already spent a couple long, delicious days together, reading and hanging out. Saturday when we went to the opera, we had a leisurely two hour window to get there… for ten! There was also a fit of self-indulgence wherein we destroyed the living room’s fitness for visitors by arranging the couch and our armchairs back-to-back, to maximize TV viewing comfort on the former and fireside-reading in the latter.
We are still muddling through the process of figuring out when and how to hang out with people when one runs out of brain at seven and goes to bed at nine.
Early bedtime has also proved to be the final nail for choir rehearsals. After the January 22 concert, I am planning to become a non-singing volunteer: meaning I’ll finish out my term on the Board and continue to run the website, but for the first time since 2003 I won’t be rehearsing or performing.
I read So Cold the River
So Cold the River
Soon enough the outsider and the big supernatural bad are engaged in a freaky struggle for the whole ball of wax, by which I mean the lives of everyone in town who fails to reach minimum safe distance.
The heroic outsider in this case is a cinematographer, Eric Shaw, who fried a promising Hollywood career a couple years ago by breaking a famous director’s nose. Since then he’s been self-destructing as fast as he can: alienating his wife, refusing to work on anything meaningful and drinking more than he ought. Ooh, he’s a real bundle of joy, our Eric. He’s found one paying gig that suits his self-loathing: making souped-up funeral slide shows for well-off families who can’t operate Powerpoint. It is one of those vids–and the fact that he’s just a teeny bit psychic–that lands him a job doing a private biopic on a dying man, a patriarchal old tycoon who has never told his family the first thing about his past.
So Cold the River
Past Bloomington to Bedford, and then the highway hooked and lost a lane in a town called Mitchell and began to dip and rise as it carved through the hills.
Carved. Good verb! And the cadence is just like a road trip.
The novel builds well almost to the end, and the answer to its central mystery–who is the old man whose family knew so little about him, and what is with his freaky bottle of eighty-year-old spring water?–is both creepy and satisfying. In terms of flaws… well, both Eric and his chief antagonist, the town redneck, have sidekicky friends who are far more interesting and (in Eric’s case) likeable than they are. And as things wind up to the piano-wire tautness of the necessary dangerous confrontation, the twists and turns get predictable. But these are minor complaints. So Cold the River
This week my Favorite thing Ever is gay marriage, by way of a ramble through Fame, Glee
Glee
This is also why I admire the It Gets Better videos that are popping up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds with such regularity; the soul-destroying abuse of queer kids in schools is on people’s minds and that is great, totally amazing.
My friend Jay Lake, as many of you know, has a stunningly honest and revealing blog about his life and, lately, about his battle with cancer. I admire Jay’s openness, but I don’t aspire to it. Oh, I’ll happily post images of every square inch of Vancouver or anywhere else I happen to go. I’ll tell you about writing, and reading, and teaching and other bits and pieces. But I conceive of and then discard a stunning number of posts that deal with the nuts and bolts of my day to day life, because I suspect a lot of it of being kinda dull, and because I am a fairly private person.
That said, I don’t have much use for closets or coyness. I’ve been always been out online, made it known that I’m proudly queer and genderqueer, and I’ve even occasionally made reference in my blog to having been gay-bashed in my teens. I do this because there’s a difference between privacy and pretense. While I almost never go looking for big conversations or comment streams full of virtual hugs, I’m not gonna lie to avoid ’em.
So, anyway. The part of the Glee
I haven’t ever seen the mirror held up, on a TV show, with such clarity. There was heebie and jeebie, folks.
Then it passed, and instead I got to thinking about the yay of my marriage to Kelly, and that’s what led to this Favorite Thing Ever post. And next week I will spin back to the Eighties and watch Sam and Al get their gay on for TOR.COM when I rewatch “Running for Honor”.
After that, who knows? Though there’s probably a 75% chance that a photograph of a bird will be involved.
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage