Guilt by association

I've played English country dance music for years.  It's a lovely repertoire, and playing for dances creates a wonderful synergy of sound and movement.  My previous band, Crooked Sixpence, featured a fiddler who is an exceptionally talented musician.  She hails from England, and is married to an Irishman from west Cork, so she is deeply familiar with the music of both the UK and Ireland.

One day, the dance caller we worked with sent us the set list for the next gig, and on it was a tune called "Lilliburlero."  I played through it, and it's a sprightly little thing, but I didn't know it by that name; I'd heard it as the tune to a bawdy seventeenth-century song called "My Thing is My Own."  I'll leave to your imagination what the "thing" was the singer is laying claim to, but... it's meant to be sung by a woman, and here's one verse as a clue:

A master musician came with intent
To give me a lesson on my instrument;
I thanked him for nothing, and bid him be gone,
For my little fiddle must not be played on.

The tune, I found out, is often attributed to Henry Purcell, but apparently predates him by at least three decades.  (The link is to a lovely performance of the song by Ann and Nancy Wilson, of Heart fame, if you want to hear the whole thing.)

So I was surprised when Kathy, our fiddler, told the caller, "I'm not playing that."

Upon inquiry, it turned out that "Lilliburlero" also goes to a different set of words, lyrics that were written during the invasion of Ireland by the troops of William of Orange and which are meant to ridicule Irish language, culture, and religion.  Read through the lens of history, you can easily see why they're deeply offensive, and remain so to many people 350 years later -- to the point that just playing the tune can raise hackles, even though it existed as a dance tune, and then a (non-bigoted) bawdy song long before the ugly anti-Irish lyrics became attached to it.

Songs and tunes can be powerfully evocative, both positively and negatively.  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago was the birthday of late nineteenth, early twentieth century British composer and musician Hubert Parry, most famous for writing a gorgeous musical setting of William Blake's poem "Jerusalem."  I heard a performance of it on the satellite radio classical station on my way home from my volunteer gig (sorting books for the Friends of the Library used book sale), and later that day saw it posted more than once on social media:

The commenters on the posts seemed evenly split between "I love that piece" and "I hate it."  This by itself isn't that unusual, considering how variable musical tastes are, but it got interesting when I read why some of the latter disliked the piece so intensely.  I kind of figured it out when one person wrote, "Yes!  England's second national anthem!" and another responded, "Goddammit no it isn't, it's jingoistic trash, and people need to STOP SAYING THAT."

Parry wrote the music at the height of the British Empire and English colonialism, and for many, it has become associated with that spirit -- "the sun never sets on the Empire," "the White Man's Burden," and the exploitation of indigenous people and their land to serve the power-hungry and the bigoted.  What's interesting is that Blake's poem was written in 1808, and if you read the lyrics, it's not clear -- to me, at least -- that it's at all celebratory of any desire for the English to run out and conquer everything and everyone:

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold,
Bring me my arrows of desire;
Bring me my spear, O clouds unfold,
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant land.

To my reading, the lyrics are not saying that the English are The Chosen People 2.0, but that they have a long way to go before God would find the place worthy of building a new Jerusalem there.  After all, it's pretty clear that Blake's answer to the four questions in the first two stanzas was a resounding "no."

William Blake, Ancient of Days (1794) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And it bears mention that Blake himself was more of a mystic than a politician.  In fact, he was arrested (later acquitted) of uttering "treasonous and seditious statements against the king," and was notable for being anti-war and critical of the damaging effects of the Industrial Revolution on both the natural environment and public health.  (Thus the line about England's "dark Satanic mills.")  I find a lot of his writing kind of obscure at times, and certainly evocative -- but hardly jingoistic, like much of the work of Rudyard Kipling.

What seems to have happened here is guilt by association.  A mystical poem is set to music, and then becomes famous during a time when that pro-Empire sentiment was at its height.  It became used as a recessional on Saint George's Day.  It's a staple of the choral repertoire, meant to stir the hearts of loyal Brits the world over.  The 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, about the 1924 Olympic Games, got its title from the lyrics, and the song is played at the end of the film.  In fact, it was played at the opening of the London 2012 Summer Olympics -- as well as at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.  In 2019, it was voted "Britain's favorite hymn," although if you read the lyrics, it's debatable whether it even qualifies as a hymn in the traditional sense.

Music has a tremendous capacity to evoke emotion, and when lyrics are attached, even more so.  This causes the music itself to gain an additional layer of meaning that persists even when it's performed as an instrumental.  The interplay between music, words, meaning, and emotional response is complex and highly individual -- as I described in a post a few months ago, creativity is a dialogue, and each person brings to the experience their own background, opinions, worldviews, and tastes.  So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the same piece of music can set the heart pounding in one person, anger the absolute hell out of another, and leave a third unmoved either way.

Like with other matters of the creative relationship, chacun à son goût -- and the checkered history of some pieces of music make the matter even more complicated.

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Propriety, privacy, and prudery

I think a lot of the problems I have come about because I've never really understood people.

Yes, I know, I am a people.  But that natural, seemingly effortless ability most folks seem to have, to look at an interaction and say, "Oh, here's why they did that," or better yet, to predict what's going to happen afterward -- I think I was born without that particular brain module.

So I've no doubt that many of my difficulties come from my own inherent inabilities.  It's like the hilarious opening scene of the Doctor Who episode "The Halloween Apocalypse," which finds the Thirteenth Doctor and her companion, Yaz, suspended upside down in mid-air by their ankles over a lake of boiling-hot acid:

"You know, I can't help feeling that some of this might have been my fault."

Take, for example, the weird reaction someone had to a photograph I posted on Instagram a couple of days ago.  It was a selfie I took after going for a swim in my pond on a sweltering day.  I was happy, and my phone was right there on the dock, so I snapped a photo of myself and later that day, I posted it.

I think the problem was that in addition to some innocuous hashtags like #outdoors and #fingerlakesny, I tagged it #skinnydipping.  Our pond isn't visible from the road; unless you were actually standing in my back yard, the only way you could see it is from a low-flying aircraft.  So I never bother with swim trunks.  Not only do I prefer skinnydipping over getting out and having clammy wet fabric clinging to my skin, trunks would be another thing to wash, dry, and mess around with.  I figure it's not a problem, since the only ones who can see me when I'm swimming are my wife, who has seen me naked once or twice, and my dogs, who don't care because they also enjoy skinnydipping.

Well, furrydipping.

In any case, that prompted the following DM that evening, from someone who followed me but apparently doesn't any more:

I don't know why you have to post photos like the one you posted today.  Everyone is entitled to indulge in the lifestyle they want, but that doesn't mean the rest of us want to see it.  Posting nude selfies is offensive to a lot of us and it's just plain rude.  That's why we have laws about keeping your private parts covered.  So if you choose to post stuff like this, I choose not to follow you.

Now, before we go any further, here's the photo she objected to:

If you will examine this photo closely, you will see that there aren't any salacious body parts even close to showing.  If I had stopped before snapping the picture to put on my shorts, there'd be no way to tell.

For the record, I would never post an actual naked pic on Instagram, for two reasons: (1) it's against Instagram's Terms of Service; and (2) actual naked pics do offend people, because they're often construed (whether or not that was the person's intention) as an unwanted sexual advance, and knowing something will probably offend or upset people but doing it anyhow is synonymous with "being an asshole."

But what my ex-follower seems to be objecting to is implied nudity.  The rules of propriety, apparently, have to be applied even to what you can't see.  It reminds me of the joke the eminent biochemist, writer, and polymath Isaac Asimov used to tell to illustrate the meaning of the word prude:

A woman owns a house overlooking a river with a gravelly beach frequently used as a swimming spot, and one warm day she looks out of her window and sees some teenage boys skinnydipping, so she calls the police to complain.

The police come and give the boys a warning, telling them either to put on some swim trunks or else move farther up river and away from the woman's house.  The boys acquiesce and decide to find another spot.

An hour later, the police get another call from the woman complaining that the boys are still swimming in the river naked.

"They came back?" the policeman asks.

"No," the woman said, "but I can still see them if I lean out of my window and use binoculars."

It really does seem like there are a lot of people who look around for stuff to be offended by.  Maybe they like being offended, I dunno.  As I said, I'm flat-out mystified by people a lot of the time.

Just to be on the safe side, maybe from now on I should only post selfies that look like this:

On the other hand, and I am loath to point this out: underneath all these clothes, I'm still naked.  You can't get away from implied nudity no matter how hard you try.

So anyhow.  My apologies to the people I've offended, and I'll be a lot more careful when I post photos, not only apropos of what you can see, but of the stuff you can't see but imagine you could if the camera was pointing in a different direction.

However, I still don't think I'll ever really understand what makes some people tick.

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Content warnings

Last week's Fiction Friday post -- about how (or if) we should continue to read writers whose work gives tacit acceptance to such repugnant views as racism or homophobia -- resulted in a few interesting responses and questions. 

The first one had to do with how I as a writer approach other sorts of sensitive topics, especially sexuality and violence.  It did immediately make me wonder why here in the United States those are so often lumped together; we often talk about "sex and violence" in one breath, with regards especially to movie content.  I have no idea why something that can be an expression of pleasure and loving intimacy is somehow put in the same category as harming someone, but that's just one of a gazillion things I don't understand about my own culture.

But accepting for now that they're frequently thrown into the same "this is taboo" category... in my own work, I've written both sex scenes and violent scenes.  To me, both of these in fiction ramp up the emotional intensity, and I have no hesitation including them if it seems appropriate for the plot and characters.  However, I've also seen way too many examples of gratuitous content, where such scenes are simply pasted in to titillate the reader/watcher, and that to me is no more excusable than any other action that leaves you wondering what the point was.

I'm reminded of how some of my students responded to seeing The Matrix Reloaded.  If you haven't watched this movie, there's a scene where Neo and Trinity are desperately horny and looking around for somewhere, anywhere, that they can get each others' clothes off.  They finally succeed, but other than giving us a chance to see Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne Moss buck naked, it really did zilch for the plot.  And you'd think a bunch of teenage guys would have thought that was awesome, but one and all they branded it as a "stupid scene."

As far as gratuitous violence, consider the amount of goriness in Kill Bill as compared to The Usual Suspects.  I've never taken a body count of either movie; suffice it to say it's high in both films.  But the amount of blood flying around doesn't even begin to compare.  The Usual Suspects, for all of the death and destruction, is a subtle movie, and leaves way more to the imagination than it shows you.  Kill Bill... isn't.

In my own work, I do sometimes include explicit sexuality or violence, but I hope none of it is unnecessary.  Also, there can be many reasons for including such content.  The sex scene in Sephirot is between the main character and a woman he will soon desperately regret getting friendly with; in Kári the Lucky, it's sweet and sad, between lovers who are headed for inevitable tragedy; in Whistling in the Dark, between two characters who have found love and healing in each other after suffering terrible emotional damage.  The same with violent scenes; in Gears, which might be the most overall-violent book I've written, one character gets her arm broken and is choked nearly to death, another is killed by being thrown against a wall, another third shot in the middle of the chest, another crushed by a (psychically-generated) landslide, yet another murdered by a deliberately-loosed falling piece of masonry.  Even so, the violence isn't the point of the story.  If anything, the point of Gears is that goodness and courage and steadfastness will always win over greed and deception and ruthlessness.  The violence is there not only to advance the plot, but to set in stark relief how a choice to be brave and moral isn't without risks, but it's still what we should all aspire to.

Another question generated by last Friday's post had to do with "content warnings" or "trigger warnings."  Should they be present on a book's back cover?  A related question -- are there topics that are over the line for me, that are enough of an emotional trigger for me that I can't write them?

I've never included a content warning for my own work, although I did one time mention to someone I thought might be sensitive to it that Sephirot has a fairly explicit sex scene (as it turned out, the reader in question had no problem with it).  In my work, pretty much What You See Is What You Get; the back cover blurb will give you a pretty good idea of the content of the story, and readers can make the decision whether or not to read a particular book based on that, without needing a specific content warning.  I mostly write speculative/paranormal fiction, so you can expect lots of spooky atmosphere, but (I hope) nothing that really offends.  

However, since we're talking about the capacity for offending readers, it must be mentioned that some of my characters have the tendency to swear a lot.  This is partly because I swear a lot.  I try to make it appropriate for the scene and character, but Be Thou Forewarned.

Be Thou Even More Forewarned if we ever sit down and have a beer together.

As an amusing aside -- I recall being at a book signing event, and a rather prim-looking woman coming up to me and saying she'd really enjoyed Lock & Key, but "the character of the Librarian sure does use the f-bomb a lot."

I responded, completely deadpan, "I know!  I tried talking to him about it, but he told me to fuck off."

Well, at least I thought it was funny.

In all seriousness, the problem is that different people have different sensitive points.  I gave up on the book The Third Eye (by T. Lobsang Rampa), and walked out of the movie Brazil, because of torture scenes; despite my fascination with Scottish history, I refuse to watch Braveheart because I know damn good and well what happens to William Wallace at the end.  However, I know people who had no problem with any of those -- the scenes in question might have been unpleasant, but not enough to cause them serious upset.

In my own work, there are three kinds of scenes that I can't stomach writing; rape, pedophilia, and animal abuse.  I just can't do it.  As far as the last-mentioned, I found out from another reader that I'm not the only one who can't deal with reading about harming animals even in a fictional setting.  In Kill Switch, the main character's dog, Baxter, is his constant companion.  I was stopped on the street by someone in my village who told me he was reading Kill Switch, and so far was enjoying it -- but then a frown crossed his face, and he said, "I know people are gonna die.  I'm okay with that.  It's a thriller, after all."  He brought his face near mine, and said in an intense voice, "But if you kill Baxter, I will never speak to you again."

The scene that for me danced the closest to the edge of that line is, once again, in my novel Sephirot (yeah, it's a pretty emotionally-fraught story, in case you hadn't already figured that out).  A character is the recipient of a brutal bare-back whipping -- it's absolutely necessary for the plot, but it was right at the boundary of "this is too awful for me to write about."

I guess everyone has their limits -- and we as writers need to be cognizant of that.

Anyhow, there are a few responses to the questions and comments generated by last Friday's post.  I love hearing what people think, and what thoughts my posts bring up for readers, so keep those cards and letters comin'.  As for me, I need to get to my work-in-progress, and see what diabolical plot twists I can think of for this novel.  As Stephen King put it, "In a good story, the author gets the readers to love the characters -- then releases the monsters."

So now I'm off to give the monsters some exercise.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Taking offense

A few days ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the following perceptive words:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin.  And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’.  That’s just treating other people with respect.” 

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it.  It’s peculiarly enlightening. 

I know what you’re thinking now.  You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Which I agree with, for the most part.  Gaiman is right that people often use "political correctness" as a catchall to cover their own asses, to excuse themselves for holding opinions that are bigoted or narrow-minded.  To me, the phrase has come to be almost as much of a red flag as when someone starts a conversation with, "I don't mean to sound racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

On the other hand, there is an undeniable tendency in our culture to equate "offensiveness" with "having our opinions challenged."  Witness, for example, the professors at the University of Northern Colorado who are being investigated for offending their students -- by presenting, and asking students to consider, opposing viewpoints.

One professor was reported for asking students to think and write about conflicting views of homosexuality in our society.  As part of the assignment, the professor had asked students to consider the following:  "GodHatesFags.com: Is this harmful?  Is this acceptable?  Is it legal?  Is this Christianity?  And gay marriage: Should it be legal?  Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?"

Note that the professor wasn't saying that homosexuality is immoral, or that the answer to any of the other questions posed above was "yes;" (s)he was asking the students to consider the claim, and creating an evidence-based argument for or against it.  The student filing the complaint didn't see it that way.

"I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated," the student wrote.  "[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics.  Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities."

Because learning how to counter fallacious arguments with facts, and answer loaded questions rationally, somehow creates an "actively hostile space."

[image courtesy of photographer Fredler Brave and the Wikimedia Commons]

The second professor's case is even more telling, as it came about because (s)he had assigned students to read the famous article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which addresses precisely the problem I'm writing about in this post.  After reading the paper, the professor asked the students to consider the questions raised by the article, specifically the issues of "trigger warnings" for minorities such as homosexuals and transgender individuals in reading controversial material.

"I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic] I was very offended and hurt by this," one student wrote in the complaint.

The university complaints office backed the student.  The professor was instructed not to interject opinions into his/her lessons -- including those of the authors who wrote the article.

So there's something to be gained by having students avoid all opinions that they disagree with?  If they think they're not going to run into those once they leave college, they're fooling themselves -- and if they haven't been pushed into thinking through how to respond to bigots and people who are simply ignorant, they're basically choosing to be intellectually disarmed adults.

Students should be forced to consider all sorts of viewpoints.  Not to change their minds, necessarily, but to allow them to think through their own beliefs.  I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "You might well leave this class at the end of the semester with your beliefs unchanged. You will not leave with your beliefs unchallenged."

Now, note that I am not in any way trying to excuse teachers (on any level) who try to use their classrooms as a field for proselytizing.  I only have the one source for the incidents at the University of Northern Colorado, and there might be more to the story than I've read.  If these professors were using their positions of authority to press their own bigoted viewpoints about gender and sexual identity on their students, they deserve censure.

But I suspect that's not what's going on, here.  We've become a polarized society, with half of us lambasting the political correctness movement and simultaneously feeling as if their right to free speech makes it acceptable to offend, and the other half afraid to voice an opinion for fear of treading on some hypersensitive individual's toes.  What's lost is the opportunity for civil discourse -- which, after all, is one of the best and most reliable pathways toward learning and understanding.