Hisashiburi ni

It's been a while, but here I am. No longer Majo in Denver - 

Majo is now in Frankfurt.

I found the gate of academia left open a crack, and I bolted. I'm now a translator for a huge company full of very, very young people. I may not have much of a future there, but for the moment it has got me out of teaching and out of Colorado, and life beyond work certainly has much more to it than Denver could ever offer.

Not that the transition has been easy - in fact, it's been a bit too much of an adventure (ein Abenteuer!), and if I'd had the benefit of foresight I probably wouldn't have come at all. In spite of having moved countries before, I'd never moved anywhere where I couldn't communicate at least to some limited degree. Though of course almost everyone in Germany can speak some English, it doesn't always mean that they actually will, and it has been a long and painful struggle to get practical things sorted out, from setting up my prepay phone to finding an apartment to getting my internet working. Still, now a month and a half in things are settling down. I have a nice apartment, the internet was finally sorted a few days ago, and I bought a Korean rice cooker yesterday - life is civilized again.

In another month and a half I will go back to Colorado (Lufthansa-cabin-crew-willing) and fetch J and the cats. The latter are, of course. blissfully unaware just now that they're going to be uprooted from their home and garden, stuffed into bags and stuck under plane seats for ten hours, but I assuage my sense of guilt by remembering that I have at least found them a place with a garden here too, and that this one often has bunnies in it. They will go out on leashes only (landlady's decree, as well as my own inclination), so there should be no unfortunate confrontations  - but it will be fun to see how they react.

We also have lovely red squirrels, and blackbirds. I have missed the sound of blackbirds in the evening!

BBC English

Is it just me, or is the BBC (at least the online branch of it) completely losing its grip on English usage? On the current cucumber e-coli scare in Europe, it says:

The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were infected with a severe complication of E.coli called hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).

Surely cucumbers can't be infected with such a syndrome? Isn't it rather that contaminated cucumbers have caused people to become infected with it (or more correctly, that they have caused people to become infected with the strain of e-coli that is associated with it, so that those people have then developed the syndrome itself)? Otherwise, wouldn't we be treating the cucumbers instead of the people?

As if the headline wasn't bad enough - "Deadly Cucumbers Claim More Lives." It sounds like something from an episode of The X-Files.

I've been relying on the BBC website for my daily news for years now. Recently I've started paying for the New York Times online, though - it seems to have much higher standards (not to mention a nice blog where one of the news editors monitors and discusses language errors in the published paper).

It's bad enough having to read all of these student papers with "loose" for lose, "then" for "than" (or is it "than" for "then"? In any case, for a large number of my students the two are pronounced just the same, so it's easy to understand why they get confused) and "effect" for "affect," without having to see the BBC let such careless writing pass too. It makes me wonder why I bother.

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I wrote them a "comment" about it through a form on the BBC site, and today it reads:

The cucumbers, believed to have been imported from Spain, were contaminated with E.coli which left people ill with hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS).

Was it because of me? Or a wave of dissenting voices? I don't know.

New Term

The new term is upon us. I am horribly overloaded, since they canceled one of my courses last term and I had to propose a new cancel-proof course for this term to make it up, added to my normal load. It needed to draw a good audience, and it did. A full class today, more people than I could quite focus on - though that was probably more to do with the weird classroom set up than actual numbers. I walked in to find a huge room with vaulted ceiling and windows filling one end, like a 1970s Methodist church, and students packed round tables pushed into a large square - so that I had to move numbers of them before I could even have a front of class to stand in. Throughout the class I felt as if I was stuck in Da Vinci's Last Supper done over in the style of Bruegel and then photographed by Gursky.

The King's Speech

We went to see The King's Speech on Christmas Day, along with a surprisingly large number of other people - a mostly greying crowd of couples or small groups of friends. Somehow on Christmas Day, when it is otherwise so quiet, it can be a relief to see a bunch of strangers and participate in the same activity as them, to be part of a crowd without having to actively communicate with anyone - a comforting but very light polarity.

I'd heard about The King's Speech on the radio and thought it sounded interesting, but had wondered a little at how something so undramatic as a speech impediment and its treatment, and the friendship between patient (king or otherwise) and doctor, could be spun into a whole film. But it could - I thought it was excellent, and for the first time in quite a while never found myself glancing at my watch during a lull in interest. (In contrast - we went to see Tron 2 a few days ago, and there were only about ten minutes of it near the beginning that weren't a lull in interest. Not my type of film, of course, but I was surprised that it didn't even hold my attention with the visuals after the one quite striking game scene at the beginning, with its glowing motorbike trails. And the script was just appalling. I know it's not the point in such a film, but they still have to have paid someone money to write it...)

Lots of good acting in this film - and nicely understated. It was surprising (but gratifying) to see Guy Pearce acting as King Edward (or crown prince, for much of the film) and to remember that most of us first saw him as Mike in Neighbours. Very far from that! He's an interesting character in this film - irresponsible, selfish, and pointedly cruel at times, but with a more human side (for want of a better word) too. I suppose the same is true of each of the characters: complex knots of ambition, pride, fear, friendship and love.

The snobbery towards colonials that comes out when Lionel, the Australian therapist, auditions for Shakespeare (as well as in some of the King's outbursts) is well depicted too - it's something that still clearly exists in Britain today, that baseless sense of innate superiority, but I'm sure was much worse when backed up by Empire. A few days ago I was explaining modern Korean history, and reflecting on Japanese Imperial attitudes of the pre-war period - Japan annexed Korea in 1910, had Koreans learn Japanese and consider themselves subjects of the Emperor, yet they continued to treat Koreans as something lesser - so always presenting the Imperial task as helping another peoples up, but at the same time always making sure that the goal of equality was out of reach. British Empire seems to have worked in the same way, though with varying degrees of "lesser" depending on the colour of your skin. It's astounding to have a system where you expect loyalty to King/Queen and Empire from all subjects, no matter how far they live from the center, and then treat the ex-centric as ill-favoured and backward offspring who should be grateful for the scraps they get from the dinner table.

The way that the fairly simple interpersonal drama of King and therapist is painted against a historical backdrop, both overtly (rise of Hitler, outbreak of war) and more subtly with this exploration of attitudes makes it an engaging film. And all without sex, spurting blood and gore, or 3D effects!

Carols

Merry Christmas, everyone.

It's Christmas morning here in Denver, and I'm listening to my third carol service in three days on BBC Radio - more a freak of the time I've put the radio (computer) on than a planned activity: I have somehow caught Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass, and Christmas Day services while doing morning exercise, making dinner, and grumpily drinking my morning coffee respectively.

Well, I like listening to carol services as an antidote to the weeks of awful popular Christmas music in supermarkets. But after three services, I am driven to record my three most hated carols.

1. Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
I never even knew how much I disliked it until this year. It brings to mind Victorian Gothic, all that over-decoration, piousness, chastity and colonial pride. And it goes on forever. I especially hate that last chorus with all of those soaring triumphant sopranos above the main chorus line. Grotesque!

2. O Little Town of Bethlehem.
Eugh! Eugh! Skin-crawly cloying sweetness! Victorian faux-simplicity! Somehow I remember liking this when I was young, probably because it wasn't Away in a Manger but was easy for children to sing.

3. Away in a Manger.
Same cloying nature as O Little Town of Bethlehem, with a particular added dose of nauseating syrup for the fact that we were always made to sing it at primary school, presumably through adults' love of juxtaposing sweet little children with a Christmas song about sweet little babies in cribs. "Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes" is the worst possible line - patronizing and delusional - and the melody drones and drones (especially when sung by sweet little children).
But it does have the line that most puzzled me through my early childhood:
Stay by my side until morning is night.

Illiterate princesses

I've just finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans" to help with a translation I'm working on.

It seems to me that if they'd given the young princess her own diamond pencil and gold slate and sent her off to school with her brothers instead of having her sit at home on a plate-glass stool looking at her pretty picture book, she'd have been a lot better equipped to write things down when she was forbidden to talk in later life, and would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Evidently, however, being beautiful and pious was much more important than being clever in these fairy tales. I'd like to think all has changed now, but a glance at the recent Target toys catalog that was delivered to us shows pretty clearly how we're shaping our children from early on. Girls: pink pages, princesses, castles, ovens, pink ovens that look like princesses' castles. Nourish, look beautiful. Be a little bitchy to other girls now and then if you have a bit of an edge. Boys, blue pages, guns, spaceships, building sets. Build, discover, destroy.

All the rivers of the world...

Last week I was driving to work thinking about the classes of the day and how I'd like to be back in bed, trying to keep enough attention on the road not to run into any people or kill any squirrels, and listening with about a fifth of one ear to an interview on NPR about Middle Eastern poetry, when I was suddenly jolted awake by this poem:

I live like a bird that does not know why it sings, like a tree that does not know why it grows, like a breeze that does not know why it blows, and like a fish that does not know why all the rivers of the world empty in the frying pans.

(I don't know where the line breaks are, though I can guess. The text is taken from the transcript on npr.org, where you can listen to the program too.)

It is by a contemporary Iranian poet Hamid Reza Rahimi, and is entitled "A Quarter to Destruction." It was the last line that caught me off guard - after three images of nature doing natural things (albeit without knowing why), unexpectedly the image of the fish, not swimming, but roasting in an incomprehensible drought that focuses the entire world, for the fish, in that inescapable frying pan.