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What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing.
God Bless New Zealand for maintaining the time-honoured traditions we’re less attached to in Australia! James Barr’s answer to What are the “Burger-ish” foods in your culture or country? I suspect every culture has their own burger/sandwich-like food: hearty, inexpensive, easy to prepare, consistent with meat in between flour/rice/corn-based bread thing. details the venerable Dead Horse.
James Barr doesn’t call it that: rhyming slang is another, time-honoured tradition from London which Australians have now largely abandoned. Rhyme for “pie and sauce”.
There are pies to be had still in Australia, but they don’t have the hegemony they once did. (And even back in the day, say the 60s, they shared space with Cornish pasties.)
What has taken their place? The burger, certainly. McDonalds and Burger King (here branded as Hungry Jacks) had the hegemony beforehand; but the old fashioned fish & chip shop burger was their background:
And the gourmet burger chains like Grill’d Healthy Burgers are doing very well now:
—to the extent that McDonalds is having to make their own to-order gourmet burgers, to stay competitive: CYT Homepage | McDonald’s Australia
The Steak Sandwich is the other venerable legacy of the fish & chip shop, although it’s not as big now as it used to be:
Of course, we now have burritos, and souvlakis (very very different from souvlakis in Greece), and pork rolls, and sushi.
What accents do you find the sexiest?
Me?
Scottish. Och. I dinna ken why.
Why no, actually, I have not told my Personal Trainer from Edinburgh this.
Nor her equally Scottish wife, for that matter.
READ: Conrad: Youth
The first five pages, I’d decided: nah. The tone is all bouncy and frivolous and a little Hooray Henry. The language is good, but he doesn’t have the magic he had in Heart of Darkness.
Once the first storm hit the ship in the story, the ship was derailed, but the prose was set aright. The amazing use of language was back, just as strong as in Heart of Darkness, though gloomy in a quite different way.
It’s still not a perfect work the way Heart of Darkness is. Heart of Darkness maintains its tone from the first page and the framing scene; Youth takes time to get started. The rueful comments by the narrator about how bold and naive youth is are tacked on, they are not really integrated into the narrative. There’s a couple of passages that veer too close to sentimentality.
But that’s 90% as opposed to 100%. It remains magisterial. It remains what prose should always have been.
Why has booing someone off stage become a negative thing? For whom? All the polite people? The actor stares in my face and asks me a question, am I not allowed to answer him however I please?
More cultural relativism, people. I think Adam Hartline has said it best: Vote #1 Adam Hartline’s answer to Why has booing someone off stage become a negative thing? For whom? All the polite people? The actor stares in my face and asks me a question, am I not allowed to answer him however I please?
I’d like to answer a related question.
In the 18th century, it was normal to chat during a classical music concert. It was normal not to pay too much attention to the stage. It was normal to interrupt music with applause, it was normal to applaud at the end of each movement, and it was certainly not unheard of to boo as well.
The cultural construct of what a classical music concert was about was different then.
Fred Landis is actually getting close in his answer to where I’m going with this. In La Scala, you can still applaud or boo a tenor in the middle of the performance. It’s part of what makes me take opera less seriously as an art form.
But you see, there are two different constructions of classical musical performances going on. The earlier one is a fun night out, with room for audience participation. It’s survived in La Scala, and it’s persisted in jazz concerts (they applaud the solos) and pop and rock.
The conflicting construction is classical musical performance as secular religion. It was pioneered by conductors like Mahler. It said that this is a goddamn religious experience you’re having, not a fun night out, and you’re going to goddamn keep your mouth shut till the end, and not spoil it for everyone else.
I subscribe to the latter, even when it isn’t a classical concert. But one isn’t intrinsically superior to the other. It’s just a different social understanding of what the performance is about.
OK then.
It used to be, OP would argue, that audience disapproval was part of the deal. That if a performance was crap, you had the right, if not the responsibility, to vote not with your feet, but with your catcall.
That comes from a construction of performance which did not elevate the performer, but the audience. It does not treat the performer as a divine messenger (the secular religion take) or as a cherished asset to be nourished, or a fellow citizen who deserves civil engagement (which is I think other respondents’ take). It treats the performer as a hireling. And the audience not as fellow churchgoers, or as fellow citizens not to be impinged on—but as paymaster: if we don’t like the job you’re doing as a performer, we’re going to let you know it. Loudly.
You can argue that a hireling–paymaster relation is grotty, and it’s a good thing we’ve gotten away from that. You can argue that respect in the theatre and concert hall for the audience and performer is a good thing, because it reflects civility in the society at large.
But I’d prefer it if people acknowledge that these are contingencies. People used to think differently. In different contexts (say, standup comedy) people still think differently. The standup comedian is not inherently less deserving of respect than the classical pianist. People’s ideas of what a performance is about have changed; and people’s ideas of what a performance is about are not set in stone for the ages.
Was there anything good about Joseph Stalin?
I’m not a fan, though I did appreciate Sıddäk Ähuja’s answer to Was there anything good about Joseph Stalin?
Taking a line from Testimony (1988 film): he inspired Shostakovich. In a way that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.
If you could own a painting from one European or American artist from the 19th–21st centuries, who would it be and why?
I am a dunce in the visual arts.
I walked through the Uffizi, and kept saying, “meh, Raphael can’t draw… Michaelangelo thinks people are made of granite when he draws… Finally, someone who gets it!” (Caravaggio)
So my choice is a dunce choice. I like it a lot: sensuous, elemental, striking, visceral, driven by symbols, a skilful composition. But the guy was a dead end in the history of art; that much I do know.
Do I trust Quora not to flag this as an NSFW violation? I don’t actually. Not the way reporting has been looking lately.
What is your personal pretentious Latin motto?
You know, I don’t have one.
But I do have several Ancient Greek ones, and those tended to end up in Latin in the West.
Πάταξον μέν, ἄκουσον δέ will do. Verbera sed audi.
“Verbera sed audi.” CloudyQuotes.com
Themistocles, when Eurybiades, commander of the Spartan fleet, raised his staff to strike him. In Plutarch’s Life of Themistocles, Chapter XI.
“Hit, but listen!” Or, to emphasise the Greek contrastive particles more: “You can hit me if you want. But you WILL listen to me.”
Verbera sed audi. Yeah, that will do.
The Decalogue of Nick #4: Long history of engagement with artificial languages
For Philip Newton.
I have had maybe twenty years of engagement with artificial languages, from 13 through to 34. I’m no longer active in the respective language communities; but they have been a big part of how I have been formed, a big part of such fame as I have, and remain a big part of who I am.
- Esperanto was my first, from 13 through to maybe 22.
- Then Lojban, from 21 to 34.
- Then Klingon, from 23 to 34.
- Along the way, more passive interest in other conlangs, including Occidental and Interglosa.
My interest in artificial languages was an interest in languages, in retrospect; it was aided along by the fact that artificial languages are (typically) so much easier to learn than natural languages, so you can get up and running quicker—and get less distracted by the irregularities and quirks that linguists are supposed to find interesting. Then again, there are some bits of language that are not just morphology.
In fact, one of the questions that became more interesting to me, the more I learned about conlangs and language, was where did conlangs get their stylistics from, if they are not subject to normal natural language evolution? (I’d worked out the answer to that eventually, and it was bit less overwhelming than I thought—because I had functionalism in my repertoire by then. Esperanto doesn’t count, because Esperanto was natural enough to get its stylistics from German.)
My interest in artificial languages was also driven by a quest for glory. It was the same quest for glory that drove my interest in Greek linguistics. Artificial language communities are small ponds, and I was quite happy to become a big fish.
I got to be a reasonably big fish in Australian Esperanto community. The next big thing, the future promise, the expert in Esperanto culture and literature, the up and coming poet.
I was a bigger thing still in Klingon. After all, I went after the Big Prize—translating Hamlet into Klingon. I forced myself into some humility by ensuring I had a co-translator for it, so I would not lionise the credit. I earned some more humility by working out that I was not the best stylist in the language—Will “charghwI’” Martin was. A useful life lesson, acknowledging that I could be bested. I was not accustomed to it.
I was the biggest fish in the smallest pool, Lojban. The first fluent speaker, the translator churning out stupendous amounts of text, the animating force behind language conservatism, who then upended everything by supporting the reformers—and, then further, by abandoning activity.
The downside to having been a big fish in all of them was the guilt that came with leaving them behind. The bigger a fish I was, the more the guilt: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is it like to be a kabeinto? What was it like to leave Esperantujo? I just cannot speak to most Lojbanists any more.
But. This sequence is about affirming gains, not my accustomed mourning losses.
I learned from my twenty years.
From Esperanto, I learned poetics, and history, and Mitteleuropa culture, and Central and Eastern European literature, and idealism—and compromise when the idealism doesn’t work out.
From Klingon, I learned stylistics, and translation quirks, and a bit of linguistic typology, and Bible Studies (translating the Gospel of Mark from the original). And humility.
From Lojban, I learned formal semantics, and less formal semantics, predicate logic, and some more linguistic typology, and Robert’s Rules of Order. And responsibility.
And from all of them, I learned collaboration, and aspiration, and expression, and many flavours of fulfilment. For which I am ever in their debt.
READ: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Oh, this was good.
I was in the strange position of having watched the film (SEEN: Apocalypse Now Redux) before the novella. So instead of finding the references from the film to the book, I was going the other way: “Oh! So the Russian is the Photo-Journalist! And the essay is the MA thesis!”
But, yes, this was good. I am all about style in prose, and this had style. This had good style, not caught up in its own cleverness, not self-conscious, but advancing the mood and the narrative, and innovative and unconventional where it needed to be. Striking images, varied tone, good use of 10 dollar words where they would be most effective.
And yet, it wasn’t just style. It was a narrative, breath-taking in its scope and philosophy—all the greater because there wasn’t that much “action”. (And the action was amazing when it happened.) By the end, I wasn’t even noticing the style, the narrative was so well oiled.
Just as Apocalypse Now was only incidentally about ’Nam, Heart of Darkness was in some ways only incidentally about King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo. It was about much bigger, much more global themes. Many of them, I’d have thought, well in advance of their time: there was more than a little existentialism about “The Horror! The Horror!”
In some other ways, of course, Heart of Darkness is very much about King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo. And yes, the blacks in the story are not individuated, and are caricatured, and are incomprehensible stand-ins for the Darkness. But the “pilgrims” are not less caricatured, and hardly any more individuated. And the narrator knows quite well how corrupt his enterprise is—and Kurtz recants on his own pious cant, horribly.
Sometimes, I hear a piece of music, which isn’t in my favourite style, but is in the style that I think should have prevailed. I’ve gotten that feeling about Reger, for example. (Don’t ask.)
Well, this is what prose should always have been like.
Why are Arab and Latin American countries so obsessed with Turkish TV shows?
I know that Greeks obsessed with Latin American telenovelas, and now obsess with Turkish soaps.
My uninformed guess:
Many countries’ romantic dramas feature overt sentimentality and melodrama. They spend a lot of time emphasising the romantic relationship between protagonists, and they do so overtly—music, longing gazes, dialogue.
American soaps feature plenty of melodrama too. But they do not emphasise the romance nearly as much: it is certainly there, but in comparison, it is dealt with in a way that Anglos would say is restrained, and “warmer” people would say is cold. Some music, some longing gazes, but nowhere near as much—much more emphasis on the challenges to the couple. Much less vaseline on the lens.
And obviously this is a Northern/Southern (in European terms) cultural difference.
My guess: Turkish TV is filling a niche of sentimentality unsatisfied by American TV, and much more congenial to Arab and Latino notions of what a soapie should be like.