Curse the Darkness

Some thing I saw of TV the other night got me thinking about “curse” words. I understand the religious prohibition on blasphemy. Not necessarily the specifics – was stoning really necessary for speaking the secret name of God? – but the general rule I can deal with and vaguely understand. I can understand not using ‘damn’ as a general swear word unless you really mean you think that thing/person/rule/whatever should be sent to hell. I have even, unsuccessfully, toyed with not damning things lightly. What I don’t get is why other ‘four-letter words’ that have no religious connotations are also usually considered wrong to use by the religious and culturally are less polite than the religious ones (in the US at least). Now ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, and ‘ass’ are generally considered impolite ways to refer to sexual intercourse, feces, and one’s backside* and their derivatives, which may or may not have anything to do with the original meaning, are equally vulgar. One should certainly be mindful of one’s company when using these words. But, why do the religious care about them? They aren’t blasphemy – no taking of God’s name in vain, no casual damning of innocent inanimate objects.

The seven words you can’t say on TV are becoming more and more socially acceptable. One day you may even be able to say them on mainstream TV, at least in fleeting usages or, of course, in culturally appropriate situations^.As the “younger” generations work their way up into positions of power in the FCC things will change, slowly, if we can ever get the religious fanatics to shut up long enough to understand the difference between blasphemy and vulgarity.

This leads me to a tangent**: You may recall the wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl half-time a few years ago. Shortly after this, and the resulting kerfuffle, I heard a father commenting (a letter to Morning Edition perhaps?) that the SB is family entertainment and he didn’t appreciate his young sons being exposed to a nipple. I’d been watching that half-time show. Personally, if I were going to be offended by a brief flash of female bits I would have been doubly offended by the half-time show. Based on the comment of that father, dry-humping one another while wearing little more than a bikini is OK but the human body is bad. (I may be mixing my half-times up. The scantily clad, practically stripping dancers may have been another year.) Consistency anyone?


*Ass is perfectly acceptable if referring to a donkey, even in church.
^ This is why it’s OK that ‘fuck’ appears in every other sentence in Saving Private Ryan but it has to be beeped out of an Emmy acceptance speech.
**This is not particularly timely, I know.But we will be subjected to dubious singing and dancing during the Super Bowl half-time again soon.

Top 100?

This list, via Chad, is the "Top 100 books" from the NEA/The Big Read (although I can't find the list on the site). Apparently most Americans have only read 6 of these. I find it a very odd list. There are a number of children's books. Just about all of Jane Austen's works, listed separately, but Shakespeare gets only two? (one being "complete works of") The Da Vinci Code? No Faulkner, Bradbury, or Vonnegut?

Here's my list. (Bolded titles are the books I've read; books in italics are ones I've seen movie adaptations for; an asterisk is for books I started and didn't finish; a caret for the books I intend to read):
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (most of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (book 1)^
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*^
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh^
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini^
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell^
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley^
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov^
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A few comments on the my list - I devoured Da Vinci Code but don't think it belongs on a list of great or must read books. I've read some Waugh and Dostoyevsky, just not the titles listed here. I've tried to read Victorian novels and find them deadly dull, but I love the movie adaptations (and Masterpiece Theater just did the complete Jane Austen this spring) so I've seen the Austen and Bronte sisters' works on the small screen but have no intention of reading them. I'm not a huge fan of Dickens but have read a few and generally like the movies. The NPR station in DC played the BBC radio (I think) production of Hitchhiker's Guide when I was a kid; I loved listening to it as much as I enjoyed reading it. I haven't seen the whole movie adaptation yet, I'm a little afraid to. I've not read the entire works of Shakespeare but have read (and studied) four or five plays. I'm not much of a play reader, I don't sink into the story the same way I do with a book. Wuthering Heights is the only book I was suppose to read but didn't finish. It was assigned as summer reading for rising 12th graders which, because of our move, I didn't learn about until 4 days before school started. It is, I believe, the only thing I ever bought Cliff Notes for. So I've read 24 of them, then again I've never claimed I had good taste in books.

What, dear reader, do you think of the list?

Writing Implements

A comment on Sarah's post about Gender Genie reminds me of the English professor* (actually most likely a grad student) I had for World Lit. II (mid-19th to mid/late-20th century). World should perhaps be in scare quotes since almost everyone/everything we read was by an English speaking author and most of the more modern stuff was by Americans, but that's a whole other story. Much as Nick's mate's class found masculine and feminine imagery in everything, this professor found sexual imagery in everything.

One day when we broke up to discuss a short story (don't remember the name) in groups, the group I was in tried to find the most ridiculous things (usually because there was something better and more obvious) to make into sexual references. For example, the wife is using a candle snuffer to put out the chandelier in the dining room leaving the only light in the house the fireplace in the living room. She moves the candle snuffer, obviously a phallic symbol, away from her body. I don't remember what we said it meant. A shallower reading of the piece might have had one commenting that she's making the house dark to wait for her husband's body to be brought home, how silly. Probably the funniest thing she did was while discussing this story she started talking about a scene in a Steinbeck short story I'd read in American Lit. And read excessive, to me anyway, sexual imagery into it. Taking off gloves is not, without other indications, a proxy for getting undressed.

It's not that phallic symbols don't show up in stories or that there are never any subtle images, it's just that I tend to think the simplest explanation is more likely to be correct and what the author intended.


*I feel like I've written about this before. If so, I'm sorry. I hope I'm not repeating myself.

When Bad Gammar Attacks!

Drove past what must be the most pessimistic church ever this weekend.

As I drove out to pick up Ellen and her dogs for a walk I noticed the sign at the church at the corner. I assumed it had a version of the standard "God doesn't give you more than you can handle" aphorism. Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed it said 'no' not 'on'. The message board/sign read:

God does not put no more on you than you can bare.

I'm not sure what God is putting on you so that you can't show or divulge it all but I thought God was suppose to like us.

OMG, do I wish I could have snapped a picture for you. My camera was shipped back yesterday afternoon! Hopefully all fixed. If it's still up after my camera is back, I'll get a picture.

Why didn't you tell me?

It's National Poetry Month. I could've spent the last 17 days subjecting you to my bad poetry.

I like attempting haiku because it is both difficult and easy to say something in such a short piece. You have to cut the idea/feeling/moment down to bare bones necessity. I've never approved of calling any very short poem a 'haiku', as is sometimes done because it is so hard to say anything in English in 17 syllables. (Isn't that kind of the point?) Then I read that actually Japanese haiku have 17 sounds (or moras for you linguists) – that just crazy ass short.


For example:

Fearfully longing
For the bright springtime
My wintry heart.

Has 17 syllables (5/7/5) but 31 sounds (9/13/9). If I'm counting right, to say approximately the same thing in 17 sounds you get this:

Fearing
Bright Spring
My heart

But, at least to me, it's harder (because we don't do it much) to count sounds and much MUCH harder to actually say anything that way. I'll stick to syllables.

Morally Ok? Ethically Ok?

To me the difference between morals and ethics is that morals apply to all aspects of life and ethics are more specific. Ethics are often rules that apply to one's profession that may or may not apply outside of it. This can mean that something ethical may not be moral and vice versa.

A lawyer has to behave ethically as defined by the state bar association but he does not have to behave morally. A doctor may do some thing that is morally correct but if it violates the medical board's ethics standards, she may be punished. Some professional organizations, like licensure boards, do require that members be "moral upright" members of society but that's vague and probably difficult to enforce. The ethical standards of a profession are, on the other hand, often spelled out and enforced.