Savannah Lee http://savannahspage.com/ A writer's blog. en Copyright 2008 Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:54:22 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss "I'm not very fond of yoga," said the yoga student Ding an sich (thing-in-itself). Its "effects" are completely inseparable from it. I don't do yoga for the "effects." If anything, the effects of it were absolute hell for three solid months as my stunned body had to re-learn how to live in the world. Suddenly it couldn't just collapse in the cozy armchair anymore. That was too contradictory; it was too confused. These days, it's much more able to do asana when it's asana time and curl up like a Sedentary American when it's Sedentary American time, but for a good while...by the way, yeah, I know all this "it" stuff is revealing my first chakra 'schizoid/creative' grounding issues. Yes, the dear thing is sometimes more of an 'it' to me than it probably should be. That does help, though, when you're super-rotated six different ways at once and gasping for air but the thought of 'exploding' back upwards on the inhale is so overwhelming that you'd rather just stay there forever or until you lose consciousness. Yes! Great idea! I can has faint? At which time you remember George Orwell's treatise on how terribly hard it is to do that (lose consciousness) even in totalitarian prisons, and Margot Fonteyn's deep envy of ballerinas who had the trick of passing out from exertion. (She just got nauseous. The backbends in "Firebird" made both her and Maria Tallchief throw up. Ballerinas: they're tougher than you. Well, but we knew that anyhow from how hard they work to hide it. They wouldn't fetishize their floatiness so much, their appearance of delicacy, if they weren't linebackers inside.) Where was I? Oh right. Yoga. So anyhow, doing yoga for the aftereffects is like drinking for the hangover. What?? Exactly. I don't do twists so I'll feel something later. I do twists because they're twists. I mean, how can you not? It's irresistible. Yet here was a fellow student, not two feet away from me, who apparently had a totally different experience of all this. And who knows, maybe six months from now my own subjective experience will change. But for now...]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/im_not_very_fond_of_yoga_said_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/im_not_very_fond_of_yoga_said_1.html Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:54:22 -0600 Chakras, seriously Errol Morris's "Fast, Cheap and out of Control" where the mole-rat specialist says "If it ducks its head, get it OFF YOU IMMEDIATELY"? You should.) In the US, the word "chakra" has become welded to the concept of "overly crunchy," as in hippie. This is unfortunate, because if nothing else, it's a perfectly sensible metaphor for the mobius strip of communication between mind and body. It's a more organized way of saying something which westerners have known for years: Many physical symptoms are tied to emotional experiences...and many emotional symptoms are tied to physical experiences. This is obvious, right? The chakra system just organizes and codifies it. So there are seven of these puppies, running from tail to top. Per Judith: #1 deals with stability and basic survival issues, #2 with emotion and sexuality, #3 with will and self-determination, #4 with love and interaction with others, #5 with communication and self-expression, #6 with seeing things as they are, and #7 with higher knowledge. They're located in perfectly logical parts of the body given their functions: #1 in the tailbone, the sitting-place, the gravity-spot; #2 in the lower abdomen, #3 right in the gut where our feelings of drive and determination tend to come to us, #4 in the heart-space, #5 in the throat, #6 in our forehead near our eyes, and #7 in the top of our heads. # At first glance, it would seem fairly obvious that I have an excessive fifth chakra. Nobody could blog this damn much, freelance, and (more slowly since starting the blog, but still) continue to plow through my eleventy-hundred simultaneous long-range fiction projects...plus wake their longsuffering husband up at 4am to yammer at him some more...without having a fifth chakra in serious overdrive. The thing is, though, the chakras are never about first glances. If you know me and my history of TMJ, ear infections, and psychosomatic throat problems, you know that the real issue is that I'm blocked. My intense drive to put words down is a lifelong effort to wash the blocks away. In fact I think my entire story is one of having developed tremendous power and drive just in order to stand still. I'm pushing against inner blocks which are so massive that we're locked in stalemate. Or you could picture it like a thumb over a garden hose; the pressure builds, so whatever does get out is scattered. Water can't get tired, but a person in that situation can and does. I'm tired all the time. But I'll keep learning. # A teacher of mine once said, "You work very hard." "Thank you," I said. "No," he said, "that's not a compliment. It's a fact. You work incredibly hard." But what else is there? In the end, what else is there?]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/chakras_seriously_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/chakras_seriously_1.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:54:52 -0600 For two people to find each other That tiny cafe, all white and yellow, the tables so small that my knees were forced into delicate negotiations with the knees of whoever might be with me that day. The other tables were so close by that they formed walls, pushing me into an invisible room with my companion. A sliver of bounded space. Yes, it would be the perfect place for two people to find each other, especially two people who hadn't planned on it. Maybe that's why it still hangs over me. As if it isn't done with me yet. It needs me to come back so it can surprise me. http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/for_two_people_to_find_each_ot.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/for_two_people_to_find_each_ot.html Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:30:50 -0600 'Cause I'm just that kind of (Bond) girl whether the new James Bond is fun enough, I will be over here reading and re-reading Juan Cole's excellent treatise on anti-imperialism in "Quantum of Solace." He doesn't deal with the film as a film, as a work of visual art--and I mean he really doesn't. He confines himself to tracing the outlines of its anti-imperialism. While everyone else is saying "Bond got all glum," he's saying "Bond got all lefty:"
"[Director Marc Forster] and his screenwriters are simply performing the work of the intellectual, interrogating the way the wealthy and powerful in the Bush era casually overthrew (or tried to overthrow) foreign governments in the global south to get at the resources they coveted...
"The original Bond was Eton-educated, a member of the British elite...Daniel Craig's bond, who is from a considerably lower social class than Flemings', has chosen to defy the white-tie set."
What's genius about this as a piece of film analysis is that it pretty much stops itself right there. It doesn't try to extrapolate this onto society in general, as in all that godawful "'Father of the Bride' showed Elizabeth Taylor in a highly traditional gender role so the entire 1950s were 100% reactionary" crap that's still out there. No, see, Cole isn't talking about society. Cole is talking about the Bond franchise. Instead of talking about how films reflect society, he's talking about how artists are chewing on recent history ("interrogating the way the wealthy and powerful in the Bush era...") and spitting out strange new Bond movies where the martinis have all run dry. He's writing about the movies, in other words, purely and simply...which pretty much makes it great movie writing. Very few people do this. # Roger Ebert says, "Leave the action to your Jason Bournes. This is a swampy old world. The deeper we sink in, the more we need James Bond to stand above it." Maybe so. But maybe escapism proved airless in the end for this venerable franchise. Maybe, right now, there was nowhere else to go but back to ground. The ground we're fighting over, far away, in wars we never signed on for and mostly don't even know about. We need someone who already means something to us from other contexts to drip this mix of pity and terror into our veins. Maybe. Maybe.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/cause_im_just_that_kind_of_bon.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/cause_im_just_that_kind_of_bon.html Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:25:03 -0600 What asana am I? You Are the Half Moon Pose
You are able to look at the world from many points of view.
You don't mind if everything is turned upside down.

No matter what life throws at you, you always seem to regain your balance.
You don't really get stressed out. You just try to change your perspective!
What Yoga Pose Are You?
It was actually a toss-up between Half Moon and this one:
You Are Warrior III
You are open and fearless. You just go for it in life!
You aren't afraid to fail, but you rarely do fail.

You are patient. You know that the best things in life don't come easily or quickly.
You are both flexible and powerful. You don't have many disadvantages.
What Yoga Pose Are You?
For me, it hinged on whether I was more "Open-hearted" or "Strong-minded." I seriously, honestly can't answer that except with "yes." I am both an utterly accepting, sympathetic, yielding, tender, putty-in-the-right-hands, bleeding-heart little critter and Attila the Hun, if he would have been content with ruling his inner universe rather than the outer one. So I'm just going to have to be Warrior III too.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/what_asana_am_i_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/what_asana_am_i_1.html Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:25:37 -0600 How to talk to businesspeople The cap rate is really low." (Second to last paragraph, and yes, I know it's the last page of the entire article.) If you read the paragraph, you will see that "cap rate" is what pop-journalist Malcolm Gladwell says when he means 'the degree of success at developing human potential.' He breaks this phrase out for an audience of "thought leaders" (aka "primarily corporate and venture-capital types"). I find that significant in an Orwellian kind of way, because we already have a word to describe what he's getting at. That word is: education. To educate someone is to develop their potential in all kinds of ways. It has a stepsister, too: training. Training fills in any gaps left by education. What we want is a population that is thoroughly educated and trained in everything--reading, writing, arithmetic, technology, self-discipline, professional behavior, relationship skills, science, social studies, history, art appreciation, basic accounting, driving, home-cooking, What Not To Wear (which should be called How To Shop, because if people knew, they wouldn't need to be on What Not To Wear)--that the modern miss or mister needs to conduct a meaningful life. For whatever reason, though, talking about education and training appears not to compile with businesspeople. They would rather go to the trouble of learning the concept of "cap rate," which is THE EXACT SAME THING, only once removed. I wonder why.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/how_to_talk_to_businesspeople_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/how_to_talk_to_businesspeople_1.html Sat, 15 Nov 2008 09:21:46 -0600 Looking forward to Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers. I think that, as usual, he's ahead of the curve in sensing the public mood; I think that, in the current economic situation, rugged individualism has run its course and people are quite ready to hear that we are every bit as much the product of luck and environment as we are of our own effort. Or as every Democrat ever born would put it: "DUHHHHHHHHHH" The interesting thing is that reviewers, so far, seem unwilling to let go of their cherished Horatio Alger fantasies. Today in Slate, Edward Tenner picks up his glove and smacks Gladwell's face with the deadly "Not even wrong." As in, Gladwell's argument is so poor that it doesn't even rise to the level at which you could argue back at it. Tenner clutches to his belief that "outliers" (great men) really do succeed because they're better and work harder. "Even upper-class outliers had a lot to overcome," he points out. Yes, Mr. Tenner. And being upper-class helped them do that. Luck and social positioning do not eliminate obstacles. Luck and social positioning enable smart, fanatically determined people to overcome them. Gotta run...]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/looking_forward_to_malcolm_gla_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/looking_forward_to_malcolm_gla_1.html Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:16:33 -0600 Not feeling good and very busy favorite combination. Sigh. See you all tomorrow...]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/not_feeling_good_and_very_busy.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/not_feeling_good_and_very_busy.html Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:41:49 -0600 Who defines style? never have mistaken an 1870s European silhouette for an 1880s one. (Neither decade was particularly successful from an aesthetic standpoint, imho.) When you've seen all the ways the human body has dressed itself over the centuries, it gives you a certain detachment. People talk about "style," but what do they mean? We live in a time that's very confused about what it means to look good, and that's because we seem to want everything at once. Other ages pretty much picked a focus and went with it. Roughly speaking, and this is a massive oversimplification, the 17th and 18th centuries took a conical torso and perched it on top of a big bell. (We're talking, by the way, about women's clothing here. European/American women's clothing.) At the very end of the 18th century and into the first decade and a half (or so) of the 19th, there was the Grecian style. You know when you watch Sense and Sensibility, the ladies' costumes hug the breasts and then free-fall in ecstasy to the floor? That's pretty much it. Then along about the 1820s, the hourglass shape arrived. Perched, once again, on top of a bell (of varying widths, from "Gone With the Wind" to the pinched-in hobbles of the 1880s), the hourglass shape went on to dominate the entire rest of the 19th century and even the first two decades of the 20th. And then we all got kinda bewildered. The flat silhouette of the 1920s arrived and changed everything, except it also didn't. That silhouette has been duking it out with the ever-durable hourglass ever since. It's led to a confusion which has rarely even been articulated, let alone resolved. What are we supposed to be? Hangers for conceptual art? Or the locked-and-loaded heirs of the 19th century silhouette? The unofficial consensus seems to be "yes," which is why style shows try to tone down the curves of curvy women, inscribe curves into pencil-women, give height to the short, 'break up' the visual expanses of the tall, and so on and so on. Compensation is the rule of the day. Are we actually achieving anything? It's hard to say. The idea is to "find your style," to "figure out what works for you," but the problem is, how do we define "what works"? If you've taken a look at other time period's ideas of "what works" (hello, Elizabethan men's clothing), you realize that this question is not at all obvious. Here's what it comes down to. Are our clothes supposed to make our bodies look good? Or are our bodies supposed to make our clothes look good? Take this Lucky Magazine online tutorial on slope-shouldered sweaters. If you hit the link, you'll see a lady so slim she makes Barbie look like the Venus of Willendorf. This lady dutifully serves as the human hanger for two long, slim sweaters, one worn over jeans and the other worn over a skirt. The copywriter claims that this sort of sweater is "quite flattering." I submit to you that the writer has it exactly backwards. That sort of model is "quite flattering" to the sweater. Anything that hangs loose on the body--anything that hangs on the body period, or bells out from it, or uses it as a springboard for its own starkness or fabulosity or asymmetry--is the type of outfit which exists for its own sake. When this look goes to extremes, it's called avant-garde. The problem is: this choice is out there, yet not everyone is 'supposed to' make it. The unwritten rule is: you're only 'supposed to' dress in conceptual clothes if you have the 'right body' for it, which usually means tall and thin, and even then, if the conceptual piece doesn't 'break up' your height, you might get flack. Because we have the style of conceptual clothes, but we do not have the mindset of conceptual dressing. The other sort of clothes--the ones described with words like "fitted," "structured," and variations thereof (aka the aforementioned "high-stance" "lock-and-load" jacket--do you see the containment meme here?)--are "flattering," aka they will do the work for you. These are the sorts of clothes which, in general, are designed to point out that, yes, there is a waist in here. If you have a large chest, they'll nip inward underneath, so that you don't look like you're seven months along. They are the heirs of the pick-a-silhouette legacy of western fashion history, the daughters of the hourglass. This is where our mindset is (still) at. We are torn between these two poles. Flowing and/or slouchy clothes, versus structured/fitted clothes. They're not just styles, they each represent an opposing ethos. Yet this potentially illuminating fact is lost in the drive to get "tips" for your "body type." In other words, to compensate, to make yourself look less like you and more like some imaginary ideal--a woman neither tall nor short, neither too curvy nor too pencil-y, neither top- nor bottom-heavy, and not fat. So, American women are caught between these vortices--what looks good to their eye, what they're told looks good for their body type, what kind of self they want to convey, what feels good on--all of these things can be different from each other, and, to make matters a lot worse, we don't even know what clothes are FOR anymore! We have this root clash between the 1920s ethos, where the body is a hanger, and the prior-centuries ethos, where the clothes are an exoskeleton! How is anybody ever supposed to figure anything out? # Here is my new style hero: New York fashion designer Jussara Lee. Check out that picture of her. Look at that. Lee's beautiful jacket is a perfect blend of the two paradigms I just described above--it holds the body (lightly), yet is independent of the body. It flatters the body, subtly and distantly, yet uses the body as a canvas. (It's an astonishing work of fiber art.) Lee herself completes her artwork with her face and hair, and this is very important. If you've hit the link, I want you to notice how utterly natural she is. She does not 'look' natural, she is natural. That there is raw human skin and hair. I've talked about this before, that the natural human face gives us so much more to look at than a made-up one. We can see this in Lee's case. If she'd put makeup on, the incredible variety of light, tone and texture on her face would be erased. The small scar/birthmark on her lip, a punctuation mark that defines this three-dimensional painting, would be gone. If you think that's all to the good, you are not an artist. And her hair--look at how much we're getting from the simplicity of her pulled-back hair. We get a sense of her hair's texture, we get a sense of the shape of her head. Now imagine someone on a makeover show got hold of her. We can all write the dialogue in our heads. "Jussara, you're such a beautiful woman, but you need something to give you a waist. This jacket does not give you a waist. Plus, we need something to draw the eye upward and give you height. Our hairstylist is going to give you a very cute, very fresh short haircut with a lot of choppy layers that come forward onto your face. This will draw the eye upward and give you height (because on TV you have to repeat everything fifty times in a row), and it will also make your face look less round, give you a more youthful appearance, and show your creativity. You're in a creative field; your hair should reflect that. Then our makeup artist is going to show you how to even out your skin tone and create a very natural look for day." See what a disaster that would be? It wouldn't be wrong, mind you...it would just be hopelessly, tragically beside the point. And that's the point.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/who_defines_style_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/who_defines_style_1.html Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:55:20 -0600 Greenwald: "we have strayed indescribably far from the system of Government we were supposed to have" on the continued collapse of the separation of powers in our government. In the Clinton and Bush II Adminstrations, the President, who we increasingly insist on fetishizing as "the Commander in Chief" (can we all just get a room and a safeword, please?), has used Executive Orders to create many of this country's laws. Um...no? That would be the job of the Legislature. But apparently that concept is starting to prove a little too complex for the "ooh...commander" part of our brains. We want to see displays of power, dammit! Of muscle and will! We want ourselves some home-grown Alexander the Greats, making and re-making worlds with the stroke of a pen! Enough with the dithering committees, we cry, like a frustrated cop on a TV show. Enough with all this red tape! Let's get stuff DONE! Meanwhile the Founders, who were not real enthused about displays of power and will, are spinning like ice champions in their honored graves. I hope this trend reverses itself. Soon. But I won't be holding my breath.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/greenwald_we_have_strayed_inde_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/greenwald_we_have_strayed_inde_1.html Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:12:28 -0600 Anne Rice's re-conversion: But how does she know she wasn't writing for Jesus *before*? always been writing for Christ? After all, she cared enough--about him, his teachings, his church--to break away when none of it seemed to add up right. (It still doesn't, but she says she can't let the neanderthal politics of some branches of the Catholic Church come between her and Christ anymore, so she just ignores it.) But anyhow: she cared enough, took him seriously enough, and was brave enough to walk away when that was what she felt she had to do. If I'm remembering what I read correctly, then she did it in order to protest the suffering of women, of gays and lesbians, of all of life's victims which the church often too-easily tells us will all be redeemed bye and bye. The technical term for that is a Christ-like act. She sacrificed her own comfort, her past, a big chunk of her identity, for the sake of truth and others. Jesus never lied; when he felt abandoned, he said "Why hast thou forsaken me." He never tried to pretend things were all right when they weren't, just to shore up God's ego (or his own). I think Anne Rice has written for Jesus her whole life. And yes, that would include the Sleeping Beauty books. But that's another post.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/anne_rices_reconversion_but_ho.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/anne_rices_reconversion_but_ho.html Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:24:44 -0600 Speak, oracle You Are Psyche!
Eternally in search of purpose and insight.
You're curious and creative with a total sense of wonder.
Totally empathetic, you pick up on other's moods easily.
Just be sure to pamper yourself as well!
What Goddess Are You?
Blogthings. Is just. Fun. It just is. Where else can you find out, not just what mythological entity you are, but what color your hair ought to be?
Your Hair Should Be Red
You are a passionate person... both in love and in life.
You have many causes that are important to you. You can be very intense.

You are very fiery. You speak up, and you don't mince words.
You also have a very flamboyant personality. You love to show off.

You are both eccentric and expressive. You like to share your unique point of view.
You can become quite impassioned. So impassioned that you can seem a little overbearing.
What Color Hair Should You Have?
And, having discovered that, delve even deeper into the topic:
You Should Be a Fiery Redhead
Bold, head turning, and sure to show off your skin and eyes.
What Kind of Redhead Should You Be?
I wonder what would happen if I actually did that...]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/speak_oracle_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/speak_oracle_1.html Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:37:14 -0600 I wish I could feel sad for him the postmortem on the Bush Administration. It's not really the story of any individuals. It's the story of a mindset. It's the story of how Hubris ("we're an empire now, and...we create our own reality") met Delusion ("we're an empire now, and we create our own reality"). They pretended to fall in love with each other, got married, and spawned various children such as Cruelty, Greed, and Recklessness, who were allowed to do as they wished as long as they brought home plenty of tribute to shore up the power of Daddy and Mommy. Daddy and Mommy (Hubris and Delusion) thought this would go on forever, because they didn't see how the increasingly marginalized masses below could possibly do anything about it. Or even want to, because H&D were running a really sweet propaganda machine. Up was down, black was white, poor was rich, and, above all, war was peace. Because "We're an empire now, and we create our own reality." But as Englehardt put it,
"As it happened, reality possessed its own set of shock-and-awe weaponry."
It did not take kindly to being told that it was mere putty in the hands of Hubris and Delusion, to be squeezed and twisted and "created" as they saw fit. Reality had its own ideas about who was the boss. # I've been feeling like watching "Unforgiven" again. You know, Clint Eastwood's 1992 revenge western in which a reformed psychopathic killer, desperate for money to support his family after the death of the wife who had saved him, hires himself out to shoot a man who mutilated a prostitute. "Unforgiven" always felt like an allegory, but the question was, an allegory of what. Like most Eastwood movies, it's a bitter tale in which everything unravels and everyone loses. The reformed psycho (William Munny) spends the whole movie insisting "I ain't like that no more," which of course means "Watch it, morons," which of course means "God, it's going to feel so good to be back." He can feel it coming; he's just waiting, calmly, for the moment, for the right excuse. When he grabs a bottle for the first time in years, he does it so casually, so offhandedly, that we know the moment he actually crossed the line is way back there in the dust. But you know, there's always the chance. "Unforgiven" is an upside-down tree of choices, of forks in the road. For 90% of the film, there's the chance, the chance, that no one will quite push the button hard enough and William Munny will go home. And he's okay with that. He is. He lets people hit him, he lets his horse throw him in the dirt, he takes a lot of crap. After all, someone's getting hurt, even though it's him; that's good enough for the demon within. It's fine. It's cool. "The Dude abides," to cite another very American allegory. But then, ah yes, the villains take a step too far (as they always do), and it's toilet time. The thing is, William Munny's vengeance isn't cleansing or healing or constructive. It's just bloody. He himself is not a moral actor, but an embodiment of forces that seem almost impersonal. He's a scourge. In light of the last eight years, I'd say...he's reality. Think about the fact that he was a reformed killer. The nature of reality is pitiless and indiscriminate; "rain falls on the just and the unjust," and all that. Yet reality can be influenced and even changed. Reality creates us, but we also create it, and we can "reform" it and make it kind. Medicines, just laws, social progress, all these forces "reform" reality, making it gentler to everyone who encounters it. If I can put on the erotica-writer hat, these forces are the receptive lover; tender, passive, 'yin,' and containing. Somehow she gets reality to slow down and get a taste of what life is like under her nurturing command. (And that's the central mystery of the movie, which ends with a voice-over saying that no one understood why the dead, unseen wife had ever gone with him in the first place.) However it happens, she offers the already-half-tamed reality a fascinating new experience: it can slow down and softly merge with her. It can take without hurting or killing or wrecking. It can be itself in a pleasurable rather than destructive way. It likes this; it starts to seek to kiss rather than kill, caress rather than crush, listen and persuade rather than command. But its nature hasn't changed and its worst capacities are still right there. If you start to put it under stress... "I ain't like that no more," it lies in your face, giving you the only warning you are ever going to get.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/i_wish_i_could_feel_sad_for_hi_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/i_wish_i_could_feel_sad_for_hi_1.html Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:39:38 -0600 Mistakes of attention You don't actually need world history to realize the word "Hawaii" isn't a Germano-French sort of word. (Though for that matter, people should realize that "Alaska" doesn't sound terribly English either.)
On the other hand, native speakers of the Hawaiian language are pretty few and far between, as are native speakers of one of the 22 Alaskan native languages. A casual visit to either state is going to show a lot of English or Spanish speaking folk. So it's sort of ignorant to forget that there were once, y'know, other people here, but not the most amazingly "duh" stupid thing, either.
Kim, you're right. These are everyday sorts of mistakes, and, as you point out, it's very obvious and understandable how they happen. But, imho, they're mistakes that wouldn't happen in quite the same way if people were paying attention. We pay attention to what we think is important (or to what's screaming at us from the TV). I can't speak for my husband, but he has shared with me that as the years pile up and the incidents of well-meaning people displaying total ignorance of Native Hawaiian culture and issues keep drifting by, it gets increasingly upsetting because it's a form of annihilation. It means your world, your identity, your history, is like gum on the bottom of someone's shoe. "Is something down there? Oh, what's that? Wow, I didn't see it." What makes it almost even more painful is that this effacement, this erasure, is usually totally unintentional. My college roommate, who was from Finland, once told me that "You don't understand what it means to come from a small country." She wasn't mad or anything, she was just trying to explain that it really hurt her when Americans didn't know that Finland isn't "Finland" (it's Suomi), and so on and so on. We had this conversation because she was so excited that Matti Nykanen had just won three gold medals in Calgary, and no one else even cared. None of us were rude or anything, but we were kind of puzzled why it meant so much to her. We were (inevitably and understandably, but still unfortunately) ignorant of a lot of realities there. Fortunately, I was blessed to have her there to teach me and open my mind up in ways it might not have otherwise been opened. There's no way one person can know everything. Like I said, I have been and am stupendously ignorant about a lot of places on this globe. I think it's not so much knowing the specific facts--about Alaska, about Hawaii, about Finland, about the African continent--that matters. We're all going to have big gaps in our knowledge, it's just a matter of where they are. I think the important thing is to try to recognize and challenge the mindset that allows the self to just gloss over things. That's how a lot of these mistakes arise--allowing the mind to gloss over unfamiliar things. So yeah--small, understandable mistakes, but symbolic ones. Thanks so much for your comment.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/mistakes_of_attention_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/mistakes_of_attention_1.html Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:09:39 -0600 In light of Fox News's revelations, I declare it African CONTINENT Day on this blog Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent, I hereby, in her honor, re-link to the 53 Nations In Ten Minutes quiz. A while back, I vowed to keep coming back to this quiz until I could name all 53. I have done that--it was Mozambique in a squeaker--and today, in honor of Sarah Palin, I'm going to do it again. # And now, for your further enjoyment of African CONTINENT Day, this little quiz: 1) Which of the following is NOT a sub-Saharan nation? (A) Rwanda (B) Liberia (C) Tunisia 2) What's the Sahel? (A) A new dance popular in Senegalese nightclubs (B) The national dish of Eritrea (C) A transitional climate band between desert and savanna. 3) From which ethnolinguistic group do the majority of African-Americans trace their descent? (A) Yoruba (B) San (C) Dogon. 4) How is your cellphone implicated in human rights abuses? (A) Huh? (B) I don't know, and even if it is, what has that got to do with Africa? (C) "Armies of business" are waging an eye-wateringly-savage war in Eastern Congo over the mines which produce the coltan needed to make cellphones. 5) Why do we need to know all this? (A) Because. (B) Because. (C) BECAUSE!! # Answers: 1) C. Tunisia is a North African country. 2) C. 3) A. 4) C. 5.) Take your pick. # ED.: Melinda Henneberger in Slate calls bullshit on the Africa thing, declaring "I do not for one second believe that [Palin] did not know Africa was a continent." If you watch the Fox clip, right around 0:33-0:38 they say "We're told she didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a country just in itself." Sadly, with the way people tend to use the word "Africa," I can believe that a reasonable person (who's not paying attention) would think that "Africa" was "a country just in itself." I studied what was known by inevitable shorthand as "African" (see?) art in graduate school, and the tales I heard were really scary. Someone's grandmother, upon hearing that she studied "African" art, said "Then you need to see 'The Lion King!'" How much you want to bet that this individual, who I'm sure was quite well-educated in many ways, would have been bewildered if you'd asked her whether "Africa" was a country or a continent. The sad truth is, you're rarely in danger of over-estimating Americans' lack of knowledge about the rest of the world. A well-meaning person, who immediately realized she'd made a huge mistake and was terribly embarrassed, once asked my husband if the Native Hawaiians had their own language. Once when I was in college, I made some remark or other which demonstrated a stupendous degree of ignorance about Bangladesh (I think it was something like "Was [a recent benefit concert] for the whole country?" Duh, the concert was for a flood that had occurred, and since the entire country wasn't flooded, the answer would be no). Naturally, I was asking my incredibly stupid question to a Bangladeshi citizen at the time. I only found out in said college that Iranians were not Arabs. A friend of mine who shall remain both nameless and gender-less, a highly educated individual with a graduate degree, was embarrassed to admit, post-9/11, that they did not know the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam. I only knew the difference myself because I'd taken comparative religion in college. Plus, there's the confusing example of Australia, which is both "a country just in itself" and a continent. Given the levels of ignorance I have both personally exhibited and witnessed in others, therefore, and given that there's at least one case of a continent also turning out to be a country, I have to say I can believe that Sarah Palin might well have been unclear about Africa. ED. again: Besides the Australia two-for-one example, there's also "South Africa," "Central African Republic," and the commonly-used phrases "North Africa," "East Africa," "West Africa," and "sub-Saharan Africa," all of which could mislead even an otherwise educated person into believing that the continent constituted a single giant nation (or two or three, each named "_______ Africa"). ED. a third time: Technically, since Hawaii is no longer an independent nation and therefore not part of "the rest of the world," the individual who momentarily failed to realize that its people had their own language was evincing ignorance of our own nation...but of world history, since she momentarily lost sight of the fact that Hawaii HAD ONCE BEEN an independent nation and its people possessed a long history of their own prior to being annexed by the US.]]> http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/in_light_of_fox_newss_revelati_1.html http://savannahspage.com/2008/11/in_light_of_fox_newss_revelati_1.html Thu, 06 Nov 2008 09:18:54 -0600