Category: Ramble Page 56 of 57

When I was told that our prompt for this week’s 52 blogs post was the word ‘special’ I had three soundbites pop into my head almost immediately. Two are tangentially related, but the third is nothing more than an entertaining memory. I’ll save that one for last.

Special is Different

Back in 2009, shortly after coming first in the Next President of the United States, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to be a guest on a chat show… and he did a pretty good job of demonstrating why presidents don’t go on chat shows with the fall-out from this offhand joke:

Obama: No, no. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like … it was like Special Olympics, or something

As it turns out I’d actually misremembered the quote a bit and looking at it now it does seem a bit insulting: the clear implication being that special olympians aren’t as good at their sport as regular olympians. Either way, my initial (mis)understanding of the gaffe got me thinking about the use of the word special. It’s one of those occasions where a word in a certains contexts has developed a whole array of meanings, some of which are derogatory (think also of ‘gay’).

I’m fascinated by the way that language changes, how words evolve, get appropriated and misappropriated, develop meanings other than those that were originally intended. Special is one of those terms that you would assume emerged out of political correctness, but you have to wonder whether it’s used to make the ‘special’ people feel better or the ‘regular’ people feel less uncomfortable using words such as ‘disabled’. If we really wanted the ‘special’ people to feel better I expect we’d just call them ‘people’ – we wouldn’t have special olympians; we’d just have olympians – but instead we have this condescending terminology which equates to saying to someone: I’m going to call you special so you think that your difference makes you superior but in fact the word is just going to serve to highlight the same difference that we’re busily trying to brush under the carpet.

In consequence, we now have a culture where you can successfully insult someone by calling them ‘special’ (which is the crux of Obama’s gaffe: that ‘special’ is inferior).

Special is Fatal

Now, since this is my blog let’s go ahead and make things even more sinister.

If you have even the vaguest awareness of World War II history you’ll quite probably have the same upsetting connotation come to mind as I do. If you’re a history noob then all you need to know is that the Nazis used the term ‘special treatment’ because even those sick, murdering bastards realised that you can’t get away with having your business diary openly state: “Tuesday: murder another million jews, gypsies and homosexuals”.

While I don’t expect there’s any conscious link between the two uses of the term, it is interesting that the word ‘special’ is used in both cases as a mask: in one case to hide the use of murder, and in the other (I’m guessing here) to hide the use of a word such as disabled which could be seen as insulting, derogatory, prejudicial, offensive, disturbing or merely uncomfortable (of course, now the word ‘special’ can be seen as all of those things).

There’s also the use of special to signify other: you’re not the same as me, I fear you – you’re other – but I shall mask my distaste with a positive sounding term. … too cynical?

(Incidentally, I had assumed when I started writing this that the Special Olympics were inaugurated before the war, before the unfortunate misappropriation of the word. So it shocked me a bit to learn that they first one took place in 1968 – years after the Holocaust – but maybe the sinister connotations of the word special weren’t quite so widely considered at that time).

Special is The Same

The second sound bite comes from Babylon 5, a darned good sci-fi series from the 1990s that gives me plenty of brainfood even to this day.

To give you the briefest possible context you just need to know that the below quote involves three character archetypes: Delenn is the Wise Alien; John Sheridan is the Hero; Ivanova is the Voice of Reason. So… John has just been talking to Delenn and found her pretty impressive, then has the following exchange with Ivanova:

Sheridan: “Ever had a long talk with Ambassador Delenn, Commander?”
Ivanova: “Yes, from time to time. Why?”
Sheridan: “She and the universe seem to have a special relationship.”
Ivanova: “… Don’t we all?”
— Sheridan and Ivanova in “A Distant Star”

This was a pretty big eye opener for me. I was well used to science fiction giving us wise aliens and treating them as ‘special’ (both in the sense of being different and ‘other’, and in the sense of having some sort of wisdom or ability the rest of us might covet). Suddenly, with one almost offhand remark, all bets were off: we’re ALL special!

In the sense of the above quote we all have our own special relationship with the universe – such a simple truth, but one that most scriptwriters would avoid because they need their characters to stand apart from one another. In a more down to earth context we’re all special because we’re all unique and different; by the same logic no-one’s actually different because we’re all different. You’re only as special or different as the next person because that next person is just as unique as you are.

Sorry …

Special is Awesome

Let’s comfort ourselves with a reminder that in more innocent times, before you read this post, special could mean something awesome. That’s the message in the song I’m going to talk about, but it’s not the reason why I’m bringing it up.

Some years back I used to work in a UK record store called Our Price. One day a colleague of mine put on a Pretenders album and Brass In Pocket eventually came on (it’s probably one of the few Pretenders songs that I genuinely like, but that’s neither here nor there). My colleague’s humming along and we come to the chorus – the moment where Chrissie Hynde drawls “Ahhhm Spesh-aahhhl” – and out of nowhere my colleague puts on his best falsetto and joins in echoing “Speciaaaal!”

It got a laugh out of me at the time and whenever I hear Brass In Pocket I will always hear my old colleague singing it like a castrati (“Speciaaaal!”).

Check out the video below: the moment I’m talking about, if you don’t already know the song, is when the band members hold up the menus with – you guess it – ‘special’ written on the top.

Also, I never, ever found Chrissie Hynde remotely attractive, but this video …

Full disclosure: I chose this week’s topic; not because I had something in particular to write, but because I thought it would be a less abstract topic for people to tackle this week. However, having chosen the topic I quickly realised that I really didn’t have anything clearly in mind to write. Nevertheless, let’s press on…

As said above bedtime is one of my favourite times of day (no really, it literally says those exact words just above). It always perplexes me how resistant my six-year-old son is to the concept of going to bed. I tell him how it’s the best time of day: you get to lie there and sleep! But, no: he would much rather run around and throw himself at the furniture … which does sound kinda fun now that I write it down.

Up until recently it was a challenge to even get him to stay in bed: ironic given the challenge associated with getting me or his mother out of bed. Lately, however, he’s learned to read and we’ve found it much, much easier to get him into bed – he may not go to sleep when we want him to, but more often than not he’ll just be lying on his bed reading (and not throwing himself at the furniture).

I like to think that he’s finally discovered the real value of bedtime: it’s that time when you finally get to escape the day (for more, similar, thoughts on escape read my wife’s blog post on the subject).

Bedtime: part one

For me bedtime doesn’t necessarily start at the moment I climb into bed. It starts when I decide that I’m done with the day and I’m going to move towards achieving that vegetative state. That moment usually comes at around 10pm.

Many years ago, when I was living on my own I had a semi-regular ritual that would involve chocolate and bourbon (yeah, that sounds much more interesting that it actually was, so maybe I’ll just leave it there with whatever mental picture you’re desperately trying to evict from your brain right now).At the moment bedtime effectively starts with what my wife and I call “Friends’o’clock”, which is when the reruns of Friends start on Foxtel (9:30pm to 10:30pm, if you were wondering). Once I decide to embark upon Friends’o’clock it means no more computer, no more domestic tasks, no more of anything constructive or energy-draining: it means the productive day has officially ceased.

Bedtime: part two

Vegetating in front of the TV naturally evolves into vegetating in bed and reading. Traditionally this would involve reading books, but during the last few years I became fairly ill-disciplined and allowed myself to get distracted by browsing the internet on my iDevice. This year I’m trying to make amends by getting back into proper reading.

Reading provides the real escape: the chance to properly escape your day and immerse yourself in someone else’s world. I think it’s important to have that tangible, mental break from whatever issues have taken up your day. It’s all too easy to switch the light off, put your head down, then find all the unresolved details of your day bouncing around, repeating and recreating themselves, giving you grief all over again.

I occasionally have trouble getting to sleep. Last night it was because I had a coffee at 5pm (it was a great coffee: it was totally worth it). Other nights it’s for no reason at all. I’ll go through days or weeks of taking hours to get to sleep, then weeks or months of sleeping just fine.

When I was much younger I used to, for want of a better phrase, play movies in my head to help me get to sleep: I’d put myself in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, or imagine I was Batman, etc. 

As it happens I do much the same now, except I think about the stories I plan to write (and let’s not come away from this thinking that my stories are just great for sending people to sleep!). Bedtime is when I get most of my best ideas: the idea for Colder Still came from me lying in bed listening to a dripping tap; Graves came from an image I woke up with of a gravestone in my front garden; there are numerous other instance where the idea has popped into my head during bedtime, or the full plot has magically congealed itself.

Bedtime: part aaargh!

There’s a slightly more sinister side to bedtime, which I’ll briefly go into here since I don’t have any other ideas about how to end this post.

Once the lights go off everything … changes. A noise outside becomes more pronounced, a creak inside becomes sinister. A doorbell or phone ringing would be utterly heart-stopping. These aren’t things that necessarily keep me awake (though I will dwell upon them if I happen to be awake) but they all become more intrusive once you’ve turned the light off and decided that it’s time for the day to end.

Of course, these things also provide great prompts for stories …

I would have been six years old when my Mum took me to Leicester Square (braving the impossibly tall and vertigo-inducing escalators of Leicester Square underground station) to see Star Wars. It definitely wasn’t the first film I ever saw but, as with many people of my generation, it was one of the first to make a lifelong impact.

Suddenly there were heroes, villains, princesses, spaceships – and a whole galaxy in which to fly them. There were insurmountable odds and terrific victories, death and rebirth, machines that you wanted to have as your best friends and heroes that could save the whole universe.

(It wasn’t until many years later that I started doing things like looking for the tape holding Carrie Fisher’s breasts down, or thinking: “A farmboy, a pirate, a walking rug and an old man taking on squadrons of enemy soldiers while trapped on the most technologically advanced battle station in the galaxy? They’re totally gonna die!”)

When I thought about the topic ‘rescue’ for this week’s post one of the first images that popped into my head was this:

One of things I remember most about Star Wars, it turns out, is Luke beseeching: “We have to rescue the princess!”. Years later the phrase “Save the cheerleader, save the world” would get similarly stuck, and now I must wonder if there was a slight echo in the heads of the scriptwriters for cheers.

Probably not, but it’s nice to think so.

Of course, one of the best things about Star Wars – and having been brought up on Disney films, I must have noticed this at the time – is how the princess didn’t really need rescuing. Sure, she was locked in a cell, in that same technologically advanced battle station, with an imminent death sentence hanging over her head, but once she hooked up with Luke and Han they were on equal footing right from the outset (“Didn’t you have a plan for getting out?!”)

It’s an important lesson for an impressionable six year-old: classic stories have heroes rescuing princesses, but the truly great stories have the princesses rescuing the heroes once in a while.

The other picture

As a totally unrelated side note, while I was googling for the above picture I also found the image below which I have never, ever seen before in my life. While I don’t profess to be a Star Wars obsessive, I’ve still been enough of a fan to have seen most of the existing promotional shots several dozen times over. Finding a promo still I’ve never seen before – and one that’s clearly from A New Hope – is pretty exciting to a geek like me.

Check it out: Leia is clearly in her New Hope costume, complete with donuts, but Luke almost looks as if he’s from Return Of The Jedi. Look a bit closer: is Mark Hamill actually in his own clothes, had he only just been cast? Could it even be part of Han Solo’s costume? What’s the background to this picture?

The voice is one of a writer’s most important tools. Sure, being able to write good and spel stuff is important too, but if a writer can truly grab their audience then some sins can be overlooked. In fact, along with plot and character, voice is one of the three key tools in the writer’s workshop. Together they give you: what’s going to happen in your story; who’s going to make it happen (and, if you’re doing things properly, why); and how it’s going to be told.

Warning – the rest of this piece will unavoidably include some shameless plugs for a few of my stories…

One of the great advantages of the short story form is that it lets you try out a multitude of voices with only a limited risk of pissing off your audience. For a budding writer such as myself this is an infinite and invaluable playground: I can not only take time to discover my own voice without having to go back and rewrite screeds of fiction but also try on plenty of other voices for size.

For my first two stories, Colder Still and Graves, I didn’t give much thought to the voice. I was far more concerned with telling the story and, at that stage in my non-career, simply finishing it (actually, the finishing is still proving an issue…). With Colder Still, in particular, I was a little surprised to end up with two characters who bore virtually no resemblance to myself: one a bitter drunkard; the other a soldier in World War II (I am neither of those things). In fact for a time I was marginally worried that readers would think that the the bitter drunkard character was in some way meant to represent my own inner voice (he doesn’t in any way). 

For Graves I was far less ambitious. I made no real attempt to define a voice since the main character simply provides a viewpoint for the reader; he doesn’t drive the story greatly, merely lets it happen around him. For stories like that you sometimes want a Generic Male (or Female) so that readers can more easily put themselves into the story. (As a footnote here, judging by the reception for Graves, which is easily my most popular story to date, I think I’d successfully found my voice by this point).

Obviously then I got cocky. My next story, Bunnies, proved a real challenge. Following a slightly tortuous development I eventually settled on a story in two halves, with a different primary character in each half… which, of course, meant two voices again. To make life even harder for myself I decided the first half would be from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old girl (and I haven’t been one of those since ever!). After writing the first page a few dozen times I realised the interesting conundrum this posed: how to give my story the voice of a nine-year-old girl but not make it read as if it had been written by a nine-year-old girl. I got there in the end, but it took quite a few drafts to get to a point where I was happy with what I was doing.

While most of my stories default to a Generic Male voice, the experience of writing Bunnies did give me the confidence to not shy away from other voices when needed. For The Last Laugh, a parody of pulp/noir fiction, I not only had to move out of the horror genre that I’d settled comfortably into (unless you find clowns scary, in which case we’re still right at home there) but make sure that my main character had just the right hard-boiled tone about him.I’m not sure how successful I was with the story, but it was certainly a lot of fun to write.

In perhaps my boldest departure yet, the story I started last week is written from the point of view of … well, I don’t want to give too much away but let’s just say the main character could hardly be further away from who I am. I hope I can pull it off.

As a last footnote I’ve noticed, while writing this post, that I’m not particularly keen on the voice it uses. It seems – to me at least – a little self-important (“When I was knocking back some beers with my good friend Shakespeare the other day, I gave him some points on that new Scottish play of his …”). I’ve toned it down a bit but since I don’t want to labour this post, and since it’s probably just me being self-conscious, I’ve decided to leave it as it stands. Just seemed an interesting final irony …

Cake.

What would life be without cake? Cakeless, I guess, but let’s not dwell on that horrific, potentially post-apocalyptic scenario (and let’s just hope that even when the world ends the good old-fashioned bakery will still prevail).

Although I’m not a huuuuge cake eater it’s reasonably safe to say I’ve never met a cake I didn’t like. Put a cake in front of me and I will eat it (put two cakes in front of me and I will eat both and score myself a nickname for life). I prefer chocolate based cakes … actually I prefer chocolate based anything – and I’m frequently unexcited by mere sponge cake but, as you’ll see below, several of my favourite cakes don’t even involve chocolate.

So, what follows is a list of my top 5 cakes; cakes that have made an impression on me over the years; cakes that I would have to do my duty by nomming into oblivion were they to be placed in front of me; cakes that, by all rights, should be an essential component of a carefully calorie-controlled diet.

5 Manor House

This is one of of Mr Kipling’s ‘large cakes’, but if your definition of large is the same as mine then you’re likely to be disappointed at first. However, if your definition of large is ‘can I eat this entire cake in one sitting’ then you’re in good company with a Manor Cake.

It’s true that this isn’t the best cake in the whole world, but it’s one of the most convenient (just open the packet and slice… or not) and it saw me through many a hangover in my teenage days. For that reason alone it makes it into my top 5 cakes.

4 Jaffa cake

Is it a cake or is it a biscuit? Well, it goes hard, rather than soft, when you leave it out (oo-er) so it’s a cake. Actually they tell you it’s a cake right on the packet so if you still think it’s a biscuit then there’s nothing more I can do for you. Eating an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes is all too easy: the dark chocolate, the tangy orange jelly, the firm, spongy base. What’s not to love?

3 Carrot cake

Vegetables? Plus cake? What dark sorcery is this? That was mostly my reaction when I was first invited to try some carrot cake. Since then I’ve been hooked. It has to be moist and it’s better with the cream cheese topping (and some cream cheese filling too just for good measure). Dry carrot cake is a bit like flat beer: you’ll drink it, but you’ll hate yourself with every mouthful.

2 Cheesecake

I love almost any cheesecake. It can be a packet mix with ground-up digestive biscuits for the base, or it can be a full-on New York style baked cheesecake: I don’t discriminate when it comes to cheesecake. While the filling is the best part, it wouldn’t be anything with the contrastiness of the crumbly, crunchy base – possibly what draws me to Jaffa Cakes too.

OMG – what if they made a cheesecakey version of Jaffa Cakes? Has anyone done this? Can we patent this idea?!?

1 Chocolate fudge brownie cupcake

The best cake in the universe is one my wife makes (no I’m not being biased there: you’d totally agree with me if you tried one of these). We bought the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook a few years back, tried the Chocolate Fudge Brownie Cupcake recipe and never looked back. I think we’ve only tried one other recipe from the book since we got it.

The basic recipe for this cupcake is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. And butter. It is chocolate in cake form: all the chocolatiness of chocolate and all the cakiness of cake (if you’ve been disappointed by other ‘chocolate’ cakes then you’ll understand what I mean). The recipe is supposed to include icing, but you don’t really need it – the cakes are *that* good. If you live in Sydney you might be lucky enough to try an ‘original’ at one of the weekend markets otherwise grab a copy of the book and try some homemade – it’s worth it.

(Disclaimer: I’m not sure how much of the awesomeness is in the recipe and how much is from my wife’s tender, loving, mad baking skillz but you can only try and hope for the best.)

I’ve set up, and am participating in, a new blogging initiative called 52 Blogs. The idea is simple: to get all participants to post (at least) one blog per week. Full details are here if any readers fancy joining in.

The first topic is cake, so if you find yourself wondering why I’m suddenly writing about cake, well … now you know 😉