Cool and creepy: the wonder of Facebook

There is so much about social media that pisses me off that I often don’t know where to start.

I don’t even do Twitter. I’m not likely to start doing Twitter because of all the negative things I hear about it, the way it has gone sour, the way people attack each other. The Steven Galloway debacle is a case in point. Margaret Atwood casually swiped at a huge sector of the literary community, calling us frail maidens on fainting couches, claiming that firing Galloway because of his chronic sexual abuse of students was a “witch hunt” and “McCarthyism”.

Tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet, tweet.

It gets worse, but it’s morning and I can barely get my brain around what I want/need to say. I’ve always had problems with people cadging sympathy on Facebook: “oh well, I guess it doesn’t matter that I'll have a migraine when I pick up my Giller Award tonight”, “Sick this week, don’t know how I’ll make my five-week holiday in Greece”, etc. There follows a chorus of sympathy, dozens of comments: “Oh, Diddums, just take care of yourself and I am SURE you’ll be in those Greek isles running around in your bikini before you know it.”

And then there is the “PLEASE, everyone. I am nearly at the 5000 Facebook friends limit and need to pick those last few precious spots myself, so don’t try to friend me! You will only be disappointed. I am so, so sorry, I know it's a hardship for you. But these last few names are absolutely crucial for the promotion of my next novel and might get me a spot on Ellen.”

Yesterday I saw “why do we only get to see posts from, say, fifty of our friends among the thousands we have?” As if it would be possible to see posts from 3500 people a day.

Such problems!

I know there are other things, but the one that is bugging me most right now is “I’m taking a break from social media, guys”. I see this one over, and over, and over again, and NOT ONCE has the person actually taken a “break” of more than two days. Recently it was a woman harmed by the Steven Galloway affair – bruised by a former friend who lit into her for thinking Galloway might actually have done some harm.

I can see this, can see being hurt. I’ve been hurt over and over and over again on social media, and in life. But what she said next, “I’m stepping back from social media for the rest of the year,” was remarkable, because somehow reality changed and the months of November and December collapsed down into two days, which is how long it was before she went back to posting on Facebook every day. But these posts may not even have counted: if she only posts three or four times a day, and the posts aren’t too long, is she somehow, mysteriously, still “taking a break”? Or was it all due to that Greek chorus of voices begging her to come back? Anyway, I am cynical enough now that I kept an eye on that situation, and it went exactly the way I predicted.

Am I in a sour mood? I don’t know. In a December mood, I guess. I’ve had worse. Lots worse. But this is the time of year one’s psyche adds it all up, and - BAM. I wonder what it has all amounted to.

I don’t know why I do Facebook anyway, except to put time in. It’s grey and wet out there, lousy even for taking a walk, and I am “behind” on Christmas preparations which I do not want to make.

I have people in my life, yes, precious and few, and given my family history it’s a good thing I’m not being treated like a punching bag every day. It was unlikely I would ever help co-create something this amazing (though there are those who’ve claimed it just dropped into my lap, undeserved). In truth, I would not change anything about it, or them. But they are growing up, growing away from me steadily. I am no good at loss.

Call it reality. I can’t take a break from life (then come back to it in two days!). It just keeps lumbering along. Already, atrocious things (I won't say what, but you already know) are seemingly normal. We have to do this, I guess, to stand it, to keep trying to enjoy our lives. I enjoy what I can; I honestly do, but they are all such small things.

Facebook reminds me that I will never achieve the big things I dreamed about for so long, though others did, and do. They endlessly shimmy around in their bikinis, Giller Prize in hand, to remind me of it.  Holidays. Awards. New babies. New friends. Exotic recipes that always turn out. And never a family fight. Never an alcoholic in the family. The smooth shiny facet is always kept turned towards your “friends” - but who knows what is on the other side.

Must be kind of exhausting, when you think about it.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. While thoroughly disgusted, and wondering whether I had already posted the Abbie poem and not wanting to look it up (but no one reads this anyway, so who cares), I stumbled upon something remarkable.

I cut this image out of the TV guide, the paper one I mean, back when it still existed. This was probably around 1990:

And I kept it, not knowing the provenance of the picture at all. I couldn't find anything about it, though it haunted me. It was in an ad for some sort of Billy Graham-like religious crusade. I put it in a book somewhere, not able to throw it out but not knowing what to do with it, and that was all, until it emerged again 15 or so years later, and I scanned it.

And then.

I found this, just now, just this minute! This. Is. The. Same. Puppet. It popped out at me on Google images while I searched for disaffected, desolate illustrations for this post.

Years, and years, and YEARS later, this anonymous, strange, unknown thing is now called "Cool Creepy Marionette". That is ALL I can find about this exquisite work of art. On site after site after site, the same image, replicated. 

It HAS to be the same! Even the eyes, even the mask, even the position of the hand - it's all the same. But why can't I find out anything about this except "cool creepy marionette"?

It's because the internet no longer cares about the provenance of anything. It's some sort of ultimate global Communism, everything held in common, nothing owned, least of all works of art that someone actually made - carved - imbued with a soul.

All I know is, this marionette, which looks fairly new, isn't new. In fact, I don't know how old it is.  It means something. Maybe if I keep digging, and digging, and digging, I'll find out - but I don't think so.

I don't know how to feel about this. In part, it filled me with amazement and joy - here he is again! Rediscovered: our puppet of sorrow. But then I wondered where he came from. Another lost boy? And does anybody besides me really care about it?

Dear Blank: the death of the letter and the human soul

For thirty years of my life, I was a prodigious letter-writer, but not now. I just don't do it any more, nor do I know anyone who does. So what's the difference? Emailing is just the same, isn't it?

No, it isn't. It's not even close.

My letters would run to ten or twelves pages, handwritten in coloured ink on funky stationery so my personal "vibe" was thick on them, and went deep into my life and the lives of those around me. When my correspondent answered, the envelopes were always fat, and my heart beat a little faster when I opened them. They were a little bit of Christmas morning in a humdrum day.

My emails are the usual hi, how are you doing, when should we meet for coffee? They are news bites and have nothing to do with how I feel.

The letters - they're gone, and, I think, gone forever. This is after they were humankind's main means of communication over distance for hundreds of years. When has anyone noticed, let alone grieved this loss? Doesn't anybody care? Does anyone pick through old emails, inhale the scent of them, notice how time has made them yellow, crackly and dry?

I've felt a sort of smothered, shameful sense of irrevocable loss about this, because after all, who misses letters, that dinosaur means of communication? It's embarrassing even to admit it. Who even writes them except Grandmas with Alzheimer's who don't know the first thing about computers? It's almost as bad as printing out your photographs and keeping them in a book.

Why don't I text? Why aren't I on Twitter? For God's sake, isn't it a better, quicker, more efficient form of communication than stodgy old email, which is now the dinosaur method of "keeping in touch"?

I feel a smothered shame because I feel left behind, but I am left behind because I don't want to go. Fuck it! It means nothing to me. The blog is important because it's my last means of self-expression, but I know my total of views is small (with a few bizarre exceptions that I still don't understand). I don't write for "likes" or hits or to be popular, but because if I don't write, I begin to die inside.

There follows a small excerpt from a book I intend to read, if I can step off the merry-go-round of my own life for long enough. I did not even think of it as a merry-go-round (sometimes, I admit, it is an ugly-go-round) until I began to think on the things Rebecca Solnit describes here.

Since the Amazon page for her book has a "Look Inside!" feature which gives away hundreds and hundreds of her words, I think I can justify quoting her here. They are but small excerpts from a chapter called We're Breaking Up, but all of them ring true for me. They express a vague uneasiness that never quite leaves me.

I too keep a blur going to partially erase or at least obscure my emotional pain. But until this moment, at least part of me assumed I was the only one who did this. Malignant uniqueness is the malady of the era. In a time when everyone is supposedly connected as never before, there is a profound sense of isolation.

Or at least, I think there is. Maybe I'm the only one.

https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Trouble-Spaciousness-Rebecca-Solnit/dp/1595347534?ie=UTF8&tag=braipick-20

On or around June 1995, human character changed again. Or rather, it began to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete, but is profound — and troubling, not least because it is hardly noted. When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the Internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. News came in three flavors — radio, television, print — and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning.

Those mail and newspaper deliveries punctuated the day like church bells. You read the paper over breakfast. If there were developments you heard about them on the evening news or in the next day’s paper. You listened to the news when it was broadcast, since there was no other way to hear it. A great many people relied on the same sources of news, so when they discussed current events they did it under the overarching sky of the same general reality. Time passed in fairly large units, or at least not in milliseconds and constant updates. A few hours wasn’t such a long time to go between moments of contact with your work, your people, or your trivia.

The bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common. I would read the paper while listening to the radio, but I wouldn’t check my mail while updating my status while checking the news sites while talking on the phone. Phones were wired to the wall, or if they were cordless, they were still housebound. The sound quality was usually good. On them people had long, deep conversations of a sort almost unknown today, now that phones are used while driving, while shopping, while walking in front of cars against the light and into fountains. The general assumption was that when you were on the phone, that’s all you were.

Letters morphed into emails, and for a long time emails had all the depth and complexity of letters. They were a beautiful new form that spliced together the intimacy of what you might write from the heart with the speed of telegraphs. Then emails deteriorated into something more like text messages… Text messages were bound by the limits of telegrams — the state-of-the-art technology of the 1840s — and were almost as awkward to punch out. Soon phone calls were made mostly on mobile phones, whose sound quality is mediocre and prone to failure altogether (“you’re breaking up” or “we’re breaking up” is the cry of our time) even when one or both speakers aren’t multitasking. Communication began to dwindle into peremptory practical phrases and fragments, while the niceties of spelling, grammar, and punctuation were put aside, along with the more lyrical and profound possibilities. Communication between two people often turned into group chatter: you told all your Facebook friends or Twitter followers how you felt, and followed the popularity of your post or tweet. Your life had ratings.

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.


It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common.

A restlessness has seized hold of many of us, a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing, or doing at least two things at once, or going to check some other medium. It’s an anxiety about keeping up, about not being left out or getting behind.


I think it is for a quality of time we no longer have, and that is hard to name and harder to imagine reclaiming. My time does not come in large, focused blocks, but in fragments and shards. The fault is my own, arguably, but it’s yours too — it’s the fault of everyone I know who rarely finds herself or himself with uninterrupted hours. We’re shattered. We’re breaking up.

It’s hard, now, to be with someone else wholly, uninterruptedly, and it’s hard to be truly alone. The fine art of doing nothing in particular, also known as thinking, or musing, or introspection, or simply moments of being, was part of what happened when you walked from here to there, alone, or stared out the train window, or contemplated the road, but the new technologies have flooded those open spaces. Space for free thought is routinely regarded as a void and filled up with sounds and distractions.


I watched in horror a promotional video for these glasses (Google Glass) that showed how your whole field of vision of the real world could become a screen on which reminder messages spring up. The video portrayed the lifestyle of a hip female Brooklynite whose Google glasses toss Hello Kitty-style pastel data bubbles at her from the moment she gets up. None of the information the glasses thrust into her field of vision is crucial. It’s all optional, based on the assumptions that our lives require lots of management and that being managerial is our highest goal. Is it?

I forget practical stuff all the time, but I also forget to look at the distance and contemplate the essential mysteries of the universe and the oneness of all things. A pair of glasses on which the temperature and chance of rain pops up or someone’s trying to schedule me for a project or a drink is not going to help with reveries about justice, meaning, and the beautiful deep marine blue of nearly every dusk.


It is a slow-everything movement in need of a manifesto that would explain what vinyl records and homemade bread have in common. We won’t overthrow corporations by knitting — but understanding the pleasures of knitting or weeding or making pickles might articulate the value of that world outside electronic chatter and distraction, and inside a more stately sense of time.

Getting out of [the rabbit hole of total immersion in the networked world] is about slowness and about finding alternatives to the alienation that accompanies a sweater knitted by a machine in a sweatshop in a country you know nothing about, or jam made by a giant corporation that has terrible environmental and labor practices and might be tied to the death of honeybees or the poisoning of farmworkers. It’s an attempt to put the world back together again, in its materials but also its time and labor. It’s both laughably small and heroically ambitious.


POSTSCRIPT. (Is that one word or two?). There may be quite a few postscripts here. Let me tell you about a longstanding friendship that broke up  - not easily, but extremely painfully. And it had to do with the issues raised by this piece of writing: in particular, modes of communication and how they can dramatically affect its content.

There were a lot of problems in this friendship, though for years I had thought of her as my best friend. No doubt some of them had to do with the uneasy transfer from written letter to email. She lived far away, though our connection first began when she lived here. Letters were our preferred method of contact for at least ten years, but like everyone else, at some point we made the switch. What happened was a gradual shift: there were fewer and fewer emails from her, though I continued to send her long, personal ones while hers became increasingly mundane. I felt as if I was running back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net, a pattern I loathe, and which she used to heavily criticize in others.

It wasn't just impoverished content. I couldn't see her handwriting any more. Her handwriting clued me in as to how she was really feeling. (By the way, many schools are no longer teaching cursive writing to children. Why, when they won't be using it for anything?) Pasting on a link to an interesting article just isn't the same as tearing pages out of a magazine and scribbling all over them, marking them up with circles and arrows, comments, criticisms, and exclamation marks. Sending these chunks of paper was fun, but receiving them was a delight.

Then her emails became so spaced-apart that communication had virtually ceased. Occasionally she phoned to try to catch up, and her conversation took the form of, "And how is - " (Bill, my kids, the grandkids, the cat, even my psychiatrist!). Though asking after people is seen as the hallmark of politeness and a splendid way to get people talking about their favorite subject (themselves), it isn't. That's a crock. It's what we used to call in the '60s a "copout", a way of ducking out of any sort of self-revelation, not revealing anything that could create a dangerous vulnerability.

Was she playing it safe? Had she given up? How should I know? She was only my best friend, and she wasn't giving me any clues.

Meantime, her increasingly infrequent but sometimes breathtakingly long emails went from mundane to ranty. These came as huge blocks of tiny flyspeck print with no paragraph breaks (and most people seem to have forgotten paragraph breaks exist). I had to literally copy and paste them and enlarge them in another program so I could make them out.

She lived in a small town in the Bible Belt of Alberta, and increasingly felt hemmed in by what I like to call "small town small minds". But a kind of paranoia was entering the one-sided discourse (for I could not reply in kind - there was a sort of abyss between us now, and I was growing tired of trying to reach across it). Some of them were downright shocking in their sense of persecution, and her sour attitude towards her husband made me wince. She was treating him like a burden she carried with martyrish glory. Surely if she stayed with him, when she really didn't want to, it made her a good person?

She began to obsessively write about her search for an apartment in Vancouver or, perhaps, Saskatoon. An apartment? Yes, she was going on Kajiji every day to hunt for a place to live (which amazed me, because her husband was chronically ill with Parkinson's and she had vowed in an act of total selflessness never to leave him). She was prone to saying things like, "We'll be here another fifteen or twenty years. Or maybe less," in a manner which evoked making marks on stone walls to measure time until her release.

When I figured out what she really meant, it shocked me. Her "release", the thing she was counting down for, was obviously widowhood, something which springs the trap for many unhappily married women.

Finally, I had had enough. I started an email asking her if she and her husband would witness our passport applications, but then it all came flooding out of me: what is going ON here? Are you leaving Sam, or what? Why are you spending hours going on Kajiji every day?  Are you going off on your own, and where are you moving to? Why do you keep saying you'd never even think of leaving him if you're making such definite plans? Does he even know you're thinking of leaving him? 

Then, at the last second, realizing I couldn't send all this stuff and that I'd regret it later, I deleted it and stuck to the request for witnessing our passports.  Shortly thereafter, I received a reply: "Hi, Margaret! I decided I'd expedite things by answering this. Sure, we'd be happy to do that. Sam."

I had come within a hair's breadth of blowing their marriage apart. Or had I? Perhaps he alreadyknew that she was thinking of leaving him - but I didn't think so. It would be the worst kind of news, and I would be the inadvertent messenger, reviled by both of them. But then I was hit with another shock. I didn't know if this was an isolated event, or if he was reading all her emails. Just mine? Or everyone's? For how long? Monitoring email generally doesn't happen unless a spouse is "checking up", suspicious about something. It is not a natural state of affairs.

At any rate, I was furious. Livid! I never wanted to be in that position again, risking having sensitive and highly confidential information disclosed to the wrong person. In fact, I decided I would never use email with her again. Obviously, it wasn't safe.

But she didn't get it, at all, and had absolutely no idea why I was so upset. "He was just trying to expedite things," she said in her very short paper letter, meaning (I assume) she was OK with what he was doing. Or just wanted to stay out of trouble? When I told her what nearly happened, about how I had nearly blown her secret, she had a sort of bland non-reaction. I didn't understand this at all. Did our friendship not mean anything to her now? And what about her marriage? I didn't even want to go there.

I just had the thought right now, as I contemplate the shift between letter-writing and emailing, that never by the farthest stretch of the imagination would Sam have seen one of her letters from me sitting on the table, ripped it open, read it, then answered it "to expedite things".  It just wouldn't happen. Why? It would be seen as a grave violation of privacy, at best unthinkably rude and at worst, creepy and disgusting.

It's like someone rifling through my purse, or upending its contents on the floor and pawing through it, pocketing this and that.

What has happened to privacy in 2016? Do boundaries exist? We casually speak for each other, as if we are doing the other person a "favour". Do we think about the violation of ripping open another person's thoughts and feelings? In my paper letter (which I assumed Sam would not read ), I told  her I felt too frustrated by the longstanding deterioration of meaningful communication between us to carry on with the friendship.

There was a stony silence, and I am sure she withdrew and felt deeply hurt. I had been horribly, monstrously cruel to her, for no reason! She likely believed she had played no part in this at all.

I don't know to what degree the dramatic change in our mode of communication (from letters to email) led to the drying up of our friendship. I don't even know exactly when the change happened. But it can't change back. I don't know what I learned from it, either. Time can't be turned back, we can't start writing with quill pens again. I don't even want to. A few years ago I began keeping my journal on the computer, and it is heaven - no dusty binders, ink blobs, pens running out.

But I understand Rebecca Solnit when she writes about the yearning to return to something real. She mentions knitting in particular. An ephemeral thing, and yet it produces a result, something useful or fun. I have never been more attached to my writing, or less restricted. Something is there, some sense of something growing almost organically. I can't say what it is or why it is there, but it is one of the reasons I sit up in bed, pull out my earplugs and peel off my eye mask, and start my day.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

The Origin of Tweetspeak

(From the Gospel according to Wikipedia):

I cannot doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification, aided by signs and gestures, of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries.

— Charles Darwin, 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.

In 1861, historical linguist Max Müller published a list of speculative theories concerning the origins of spoken language:

• Bow-wow. The bow-wow or cuckoo theory, which Müller attributed to the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, saw early words as imitations of the cries of beasts and birds.
• Pooh-pooh. The Pooh-Pooh theory saw the first words as emotional interjections and exclamations triggered by pain, pleasure, surprise and so on.
• Ding-dong. Müller suggested what he called the Ding-Dong theory, which states that all things have a vibrating natural resonance, echoed somehow by man in his earliest words.
• Yo-he-ho. The yo-he-ho theory saw language emerging out of collective rhythmic labour, the attempt to synchronise muscular effort resulting in sounds such as heave alternating with sounds such as ho.
• Ta-ta. This did not feature in Max Müller's list, having been proposed in 1930 by Sir Richard Paget.  According to the ta-ta theory, humans made the earliest words by tongue movements that mimicked manual gestures, rendering them audible.

Most scholars today consider all such theories not so much wrong—they occasionally offer peripheral insights—as comically naïve and irrelevant. The problem with these theories is that they are so narrowly mechanistic. They assume that once our ancestors had stumbled upon the appropriate ingenious mechanism for linking sounds with meanings, language automatically evolved and changed.



Class, tell me what's wrong with this theory of language development. Isn't it obvious? It's full of DOO-DOO!

But somebody got away with it. Like Piltdown Man, Muller's theories hung around for quite a long time until someone cried "Bullshit!".

I took a few anthropology classes in the '90s. With the massive number of finds and genetic breakthroughs since then, my knowledge might be classified as Stone Age. But it did get me permanently interested.

In particular, it got me interested in language, how it developed, and (the big question in my mind) WHAT WAS THE FIRST WORD.

It's a meaningless question in most ways: surely language, which probably did begin as a series of primitive but meaningful sounds, developed differently in each little region where these scary suckers lived, worked and copulated. So Ugg from Blugg probably couldn't communicate very well with Alley Oop from Valley Bloop.

But somehow. . . Somehow we ended up with these hundreds, maybe thousands of meaningful ways of conveying information to each other.

It's one of those unfathomable mysteries that must have happened somehow, or I wouldn't be sitting here writing profundities about the evolution of language on a perfectly good Saturday morning when I should be at the mall taking advantage of the post-Christmas frenzy of buying iPads and ePods.

So what was the first word? What did those primitive geeks feel compelled to name? There's the inevitable theory that language developed due to that sacred ritual, "the hunt". If men hadn't been out there trying to bring down prehistoric megafauna with sticks and stones, they wouldn't have had to develop that elaborate system of shouting "Get out of the way, asshole, a giant rhino is coming!", which ultimately saved humanity from total extinction.

When I studied anthropology, and I will admit that my knowledge is pretty creaky, I learned that "the hunt"  was prestigious and, if successful, resulted in a giant feast, a community hoo-ha that went on for days. It was considered remarkable mostly due to the fact that it happened maybe twice a year.

Twice a year?! So how did these giant proto-humans stay alive in the meantime? The women, stuck in home base because they had to keep the line going, constantly gathered everything edible that they could lay their simian hands on. Nuts, roots, berries, even the occasional fatal toadstool.

THIS was the food supply that made evolution possible. We won't get into the trivial fact that along the way, women were smart enough to notice that they could make certaint plants grow where they wanted. Voila - agriculture!

But something happened that forever bent anthropology in the direction of male supremacy. Those tools, those crappy blades and stone hand-axes  so primitive that to me they just look like chunks of rock, survived the millennia and are now prized as "man's first technology".

The leather slings that the women used to collect the crucial day-to-day food supply rotted away and disappeared.

Being a woman is a thankless task.

Aside from being baby factories, we disappeared from history, except of course for our purses. Ever wondered why you can't stand to be parted from your purse, and why it feels so totally devastating when you lose it?

This post has wandered way off-course. We were talking about the development of language, of "first words", what early humans felt compelled to name.

Did they name themselves first, and each other? Did it become convenient to number their children: Number One Son, etc. ? And speaking of, when did the concept of numbers become comprehensible to them?

The theories swirling around this mystery include the idea that humans sang before they spoke: that is, they chanted around the fire at night, thumping on ibex skins and blowing into hollow sticks. Gradually the chants took on significance: in other words, somebody invented lyrics.

I like this one better:  Babies develop language in a certain set way based on their ability to hear and comprehend what adults are saying around them. They seem to get it in stages that unfold predictably. Babbling - the "bababababa" or "dadadadada" that Muller forgot to include - comes first (with "mama" a distant second). Probably because you don't have to do much to produce the sound.

But somehow, slowly, magically, real words pop through, even if pronounced in the most unusual fashion.

My son was one of those kids who needed to be translated for a couple of years. "Chicken" came out "could-a". Milk was "woak". When his little sister Shannon came home from the hospital, he would toddle around saying, "Mummy Sheeta."

Gradually real words come into focus, but it is only then that they're strung together in a meaningful way. My son's first sentence was, "Find boy." (He wanted to play with his friend.) Tarzanic though it was, I was thrilled. He had taken a giant leap with those two one-syllable words.

How does this happen? Grammar is practically absorbed through the skin. No one actually "teaches" a child to talk. Could this be the way it happened with humans?  From ba-ba-ba-ba to "get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape"?

There was this story - I'm digressing again, I don't know what's the matter with me today - about a feral child who had been literally locked away for years and years. When she emerged, deformed from being tied to a potty chair, she had no verbal language at all.

This was in the '60s, so scientists practically put her in a wire cage for observation. As if she had fallen into a cult, they immediately renamed her Genie, as in "that magical creature who emerges out of a bottle" (presumably meaning her captivity). What scares me so much is that they saw nothing wrong with any of this and even felt it was in her best interests. Soon she was being shunted from one foster home to another, so that it was impossible for her to feel any emotional attachment or security at all.

Everyone believed that the thresshold for learning language was around three years of age, but this child was thirteen. Though her parents had thought she was  severely retarded, she still had enough ruins of intelligence to pick up the names of things.

She knew how to say chair, tree, spoon, and almost seemed to know what they meant, even if her words were nearly unintelligible. Soon she had this massive vocabulary of something like 200 words. She was a success! She had evolved language all by herself, proving that there was no threshhold for learning how to speak, that you could pick it up at age ten or forty or whenever you wanted.

When someone comes along and provides evidence to prove a scientist's pet theory, it usually goes over very big. You hardly even have to twist the facts.

But predictably, it didn't work, mainly because the whole case was handled with jaw-dropping insensitivity. Because the novelty had worn off and no one knew what to do with her, "Genie" was returned to her biological mother, the one who had stood watching while her father lashed her to a toilet for thirteen years. She was only taken away again when - surprise! - her mother beat the hell out of her for vomiting.

The only reason her father was absent from this scene was that he had committed suicide, leaving a note that said, "The world does not understand."

Anyway, to wrap up this impossibly desolate story, the little girl's language began to fade and fall apart. These brilliant scientists one day woke up to their tinny little intellectual alarm clocks to realize that saying individual words isn't the same as speech. Isn't the same as language. Their little test subject had failed them, so she was tossed aside, no longer of any use to them. After research funding dried up, her loving foster parents abandoned her like an unwanted dog. Eventually she was placed in a nursing home where she mysteriously became "non-verbal" once again.

All I'm saying is. . .

All I'm saying is, these clever proto-humans must have broken that single-word barrier, must have leapt from individual names and words to some sort of primitive grammar: meaningful ways of stringing words together that included nouns and verbs and all that kind-a stuff. Pointing and grunting was no longer enough.

Language is like music. Randomly tapping on a xylophone isn't it. Even picking out a simple tune doesn't cut it either. There is so much more to it than that.

There are other factors - and God help me, I will soon run out of factors before I go have breakfast. Some of these clever anthropologists say they can determine language development by looking at a skull. Something about the opening into the larynx. But how did THAT get there? How did it evolve, and how long did it take?

It's chicken and egg.

The human brain, which by now is so fucked-up that it's at the point of no return, is permanently wired for language: the template is there, waiting for the information to be downloaded. Or else waiting for a Twitter account and a Smartphone.

As gadgets slowly, awfully take the place of literacy and individual thought, as language is steadily eroded by truncated spelling and twisted or non-existent grammar, communication will eventually devolve. In fact, we're already devolving, with Tweetspeak now considered a valid human language. Atrocious spellings that remind me of I taught I taw a puddy tat (speaking of tweets) will become the norm. If I came back in a hundred years, my hair would stand on end from trying to understand the degenerated blather that passes for language.

It's coming, folks. In fact, it's already here.  And this time, it's too late to start all over again.

The flight attendant from hell, part 1

Yesterday I heard a disturbing news story about a flight attendant on an American Airlines aircraft (still on the ground, fortunately) who flipped out and began screaming in an incoherent, paranoid rant that went on for 15 minutes before the crew dragged her out of there in handcuffs. The “story” (not yet confirmed, yet blasted all over the so-called “social network” which is about as sensitive as an old-time carnival crowd at the freak show) is that she’s bipolar and missed her medication, but I wonder about that.

Would an airline hire someone as a flight attendant if they knew they were bipolar? Would NOT hiring her violate her human rights? What about the risks of being a flight attendant for someone with that sort of condition: constant fluctuations in sleep, time zones, meals, stress? I'm not trying to hold up people with mental illness for criticism. But as a concerned consumer, I would like to know the policy.

If in fact the woman is bipolar (or HAS bipolar disorder: people don't go around saying "I'm Parkinson's disease" or "I'm rheumatoid arthritis", do they?), did she feel compelled to hide the fact so that she could be hired? What would be the official policy for those other illnesses, or chronic conditions in general? And why is it that the only time we ever hear anything about mental illness is when someone goes completely over the edge? Some commentators are calling this an opportunity to "educate the public" about mental illness, but this idea rattles me down to the fillings in my teeth.

Educate them how? To associate bipolar disorder with behaviour that is frightening, destructive and completely out-of-control? Won't that just intensify the smart quips about "crazies", which are meant to distance us from them as far as possible?

I have read from reputable sources that over 80% of bipolar patients live “normal” or “nearly normal” lives, meaning that they are "functioning" to one degree or another. But surely that means more than machinelike/mechanical functioning. It should mean having meaningful work and meaningful relationships and joy in living, “even” (and why do we need that word?) with a disability as serious as this one. 

It's almost a truism or an old saw by now that artists, writers, and all that lot (which of course does not include me, because my blog has been deemed "embarrassing" by someone who nevertheless never stops reading it, waiting for something more to attack) are much more vulnerable to these kinds of illnesses.

The psychiatrist /author Kay Redfield Jamison has made an entire career out of proving this, to the point of claiming that almost every famous writer we have ever heard of was bipolar.

Does the illness create the need to make art (since it seems to go along with a kind of hypersensitivity to the human condition? Not that we want any of THAT.) Or does making all that art drive people crazy, causing them to scream and yell and scare the hell out of grounded airline passengers who are violating every rule in the book by recording it all on their "Smart"-phones (a misnomer if ever I heard one)?

In the video footage I saw on the news, people were gawking, rubbernecking, not even staying in their seats. I heard quite a bit of arrogant laughter. I can just picture the late-night talk show hosts playing this up as a rich bit of business. "Hey, how about that American Airlines flight attendant who went nuts on the plane?"

I can't even think of a punch line for this because the  very idea sickens me. I can just see Letterman doing the Top Ten Reasons Why you Don't Want to Fly American Airlines (which is bankrupt anyway). No doubt the parade of nasty little jokes would mingle mental illness issues with terrorism and demonic possession.

There are certain cliches that always materialize at a time like this. It usually  comes down to “oh, she didn’t take her meds”, as if missing one pill causes a person to resemble Regan from The Exorcist. It’s remotely possible for a person with a heart condition to miss one pill and drop dead, but  it's also highly unlikely. No doubt much, much more was going on, but it might be better for us all if we never know about it. She is a human being with an illness, but unfortunately it manifested in the worst possible way for someone working on an aircraft.

No: scratch that. It was just a lot of screaming and yelling. No guns, no explosives, no box-cutters. It could have been a LOT worse, folks. But will anyone even think of that as they gleefully shred and dissect this woman's pain with millions of badly-spelled, ignorant tweets? Let us hope the social network piranha don't devour any more of her privacy and dignity than they already have.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Singing in the dead of night

This started out as something else. Something about Twitter, Tweets, twights, twats (sorry, it's just too tempting) and other things I can't get used to. Not so much the three-or-four-syllable "communications" that people fling at each other, using splng tht lvs a bt t b dsrd. It's the whole concept of alarmingly shorter and shorter attention spans resulting in messages that have been reduced to a nanosecond-long chirp.

Worse than that: like the frog in the pot, the water temperature gradually increasing until the frog is quite contentedly cooked, nobody seems to notice or particularly care what we have lost.


Anyway, tweets. Why tweets? Somebody (now probably massively wealthy) thought up this idiotic avian name. Couldn't be more idiotic, unless it was Cow Pat or something. Airbrained. Lightweight. Imagine Keats ("My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness. . .") twittering, tweeting Ode to a Nightingale. Shakespeare ("Love tweets not with the eyes, but with the mind/ And therefore is winged Twitter painted blind") chirping like the bloody chirper he actually was ("chirper" being a nasty name for a blithering Englishman).

"You'll have to learn how to do it," my husband says to me, "because you won't be able to survive if you don't." That's worse than sex. I'll have to do it, as if it's some dire and unpleasant bodily function you nevertheless can't avoid. But what alarms me is what fun everyone else is having, doing something I just bleepin'ly dread.


So anyways. Somebody had the bright idea that we should all become birds, and just twitter and twatter, nitter and natter at each other all the day long. Birds chitter and chatter, but they also kill. They evolved from dinosaurs, more directly than any other living species. In fact, they are now known to be the only direct descendents. Dinos ran around with feathers on, you see, long before they learned how to fly. I can't imagine how creepy that must have been.

Given the shrill vocalizations of most birds, including Jasper my addle-headed lovebird who must think he's a full-sized Amazon parrot, those dino-birds must have been deafening. They probably had the same cold round beady black eyes my pet bird has, those scaly feet (some remnant of lizard scales, no doubt). My bird feels a strong attachment to me, but that's because he's convinced I'm either his mother or his mate. Without the steady flow of seed mix, he'd completely ignore me.

So anyways. What am I getting at here? Nothing much. Why not Bark-bark or Neigh-neigh or Worm-bluggh (or whatever worms do to communicate)? No, it had to be Twitter.


I'd call that Twittiotic.

Tweet, tweet-tweet, tweet-tweet