This evening, I am attending the birthday party of a friend, who has chosen a theme of Film Noir. In planning my costume, I came across this infographic, which does a far better job of explaining the genre than I ever could. Reproduced for you here then is the BFI’s guide to the genre:
If you’re having trouble viewing the image, try here instead.
Apologies for the brevity of this post, it’s been an odd sort of a week. But we’ll come to that later.
Today’s moral: don’t be a snob.
But keep reading for more entertaining reflections.
Snobbery kind of comes as a natural consequence of being an avid reader. The more you read, the more you begin to notice what makes a good book, and what makes a bad one. This is particularly true of books that are a part of the literary canon. These are books that have been deemed to be better than all others, to the extent that they ought to be kept together within an exclusive little club.
And that’s all well and good, because the majority of those books represent the best representations of their particular genre, or are noteworthy for being pioneering in some other regard. It is very useful to have a canon. Many of the books that you will have studied in school will be considered a part of the canon (even if you came to hate them).
When this becomes a problem is when a judgment is made about a person’s reading habits based on them reading outside of the canon. As an example, there is an abundance of crime novels in the world. Not every single one can be written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie – they are (sadly) deceased, for one thing. Therefore, there will be a great many novels in this genre that are somewhere between ‘Not-quite-as-good’ and ‘Abominably-bad’. And there will be people that want to read as many of these books as they can.
And that’s ok.
If they are happy to read those books, no matter how they are received by the press or public, then they should be left to do so. As readers, we should endeavour to encourage more reading, rather than discourage certain reading.
So by all means, recommend a ‘better’ book to a friend, if they want to read more of the same. Or if you think they’ll enjoy it. Or you have a powerful passion for the book in question. But please, please, please don’t tell people not to read what they’re reading. It will do very little other than to turn people off reading. Or you.
And that’s not a good thing. So, instead my recommendation to you is to help people find ‘better’ books themselves. The bonus of this being that you’ll stay friends.
Winner.
Let’s talk about sex, baby.
Or rather, the weirdness of sex – etymologically speaking. Anything else is an entirely different blog post. And blog.
I will warn now: I was uncomfortable writing this, so I won’t be offended if you change to a different page.
But I digress. So: sex. Our word descends from the Romantic line (entertainingly) of English, coming originally from the Latin ‘sexus’, which shares one definition with our modern word, but can also be defined as being the verb ‘to cut’, which isn’t too far from it’s alternate, as cutting implies penetration, as does the physical act of sex. Somewhat icky, but accurate (for penetrative sex, at any rate). In sexual relationships that include a man, it works on a symbolic level – men are identified with phallic images, such as blades and other weapons, the purpose of which is, of course, to cut.
So there’s that. ‘That’ of course, being the physical act of making love.
But as it’s St Valentine’s Day tomorrow (patron saint of affianced couples*), let’s look at other types of love. Because why not?
While sex and love do not always have to be linked, they are often encountered together. This would be considered a part of erotic love (eros to the Ancient Greeks), which is expressed as a certain type of madness, that can override reason and lead the individual into acts that they would otherwise not contemplate**. An easy example of eros would be the phenomenon of love at first sight. It’s an instinctual kind of love, that does not always function in the best interests of the afflicted. Many Greek authors were of the opinion that it was a terrible affliction, and led the sufferers into debasement, depression, or death – usually through nonreciprocation or madness.
It is this kind of love that can be seen woven into the characters of the English Renaissance, with one example that immediately comes to mind being De Flores in The Changeling, whose lust for Beatrice Joanna drives him to murder for her, and then ultimately ends up killing himself and his beloved. There seems to be only a very fine line between this sense of erotic love and the concept of lust-as-sin. Quite where that line comes is sometimes difficult to define, but appears to lie between where a lover admits their love, and where that lover performs cruelties upon their beloved in order to scorn them for their disinterest.
On a more positive note, the Platonic conception of eros is that the lovers are attracted to more than just the physical, being attracted to one another in an intellectual, if not spiritual, sense. Eros inclines towards the beautiful, but that beauty does not have to physical – it can be an aspect of the individual instead. In his ideal, Plato argues that eros can be for the concept of beauty itself, wherever that might be found.
A bit of a mixed bag then.
Next up is familial love – or philia. You may recognise this if you have a particular hobby – philia being the suffix used to denote an enjoyment of something. Bibliophile, for example, would be a lover of books. Now, philia is a kind of brotherly love – the kind you might share with siblings, or with good friends. As ever, a Greek philosopher had something to say about this model of love†.
Aristotle argued that there were three levels of philia. The lowest level was almost entirely superficial, and consisted of only the most basic interactions. We would probably consider this as individuals being or becoming acquaintances. The example that he suggests is a customer purchasing goods from a merchant. Their interaction is minimal, functional, and is complete before either can get to know one another fully.
The next level would be what we would consider a friendship. It occurs between people who share an interest or activity. They interact on a more meaningful level, as they share more in common and spend more time together, than do the people in the previous level.
At the highest level, philia is between people who genuinely enjoy spending time with one another, and are not forced to spend time together, either by custom, as in the first example, or by shared activity, as in the second. Instead, the driving force behind the relationship is mutual care for one another.
A much more positive model, though perhaps less romantic.
Which leads me very nicely to the next idea: storge. This is a type of natural affection that can grow out of philia, and develops the relationship from a friendship into romance. Much like in those romantic films where the main character realises that the person that their perfect partner has been in front of them the whole time. Strangely, it can also be used to refer to a familial love, between parents and their children.
On the topic of children, the final form of love that I want to write about is agape. Also known as unconditional love, it is the divine form of love that is most commonly used to describe the relationship between the individual and God (at least in the Christian worldview). Because of its use in The New Testament, much of the discourse of agape is shaped by this interpretation.
The story goes that because God’s love for mankind is unconditional and eternal, it is the reasoning behind sending his son to Earth to redeem mankind for our sins. Agape then cannot be shown for an individual, as the concept is far too large (not to mention nebulous) in order to do so. Instead, it is a kind of love that is shown towards everyone – the proverbial love towards one’s neighbour. And that’s always a positive thing, whether you believe the stories or not.
And that’s spiritual love.
So even if you’re single on the day of St. Valentine, just think of the other kinds of love that you could have.
Otherwise, maybe have a glass of wine‡.
* Along with beekeepers and the plague, incidentally.
** If this is bringing back memories of youth: don’t worry, you’re not alone.
† Which makes a lot of sense, what with it being a Greek concept and all.
‡ Obviously, only drink in moderation.
English* has a bit of a problem – it’s addicted to other languages. As the now-infamous post from the olden days of the Internet attests:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle[sic] their pockets for new vocabulary.
– James Nicoll
One symptom of this addiction is the nigh-omnipresence of ‘chimeras’: individual words that are made up of multiple parts from different sources. Almost as if the language is attempting to get its fix for words by mixing scraps together and hoping it works. By and large, the words themselves are used everyday, with only linguistic purists becoming incensed at their continued use**.
Their name, of course, comes from the Ancient Greek myth of the beast that had the head and body of a lion, the head of a goat from its back, and a tail that was a serpent. It could also breathe fire. Because why wouldn’t it? Eventually, the creature was slain by Bellerophon. So that’s a happy ending for everyone who isn’t the chimera.
But back to the words. Let’s suppose that you went to a hospital to visit a friend who has had a baby. They would be in the neonatal ward. Or that they had had to have a tonsillectomy, and you were bringing them some ice cream. Or that they’d had a rather more serious accident, and as a result of electrocution, were rendered quadriplegic (hopefully only temporarily).
As an alternative, maybe you went to Minneapolis, and somehow happened across a polyamorous wedding – so that the individuals involved would be committing polygamy. If they were marrying one another, there’s a good chance that some of those partners would be heterosexual, while others would be homosexual.
Alternatively, you could just choose to stay at home and watch television, where politicians might discuss noopolitik.
There are so many.
But how have they been put together? Well, let’s break them down:
Unsurprisingly, English tends towards the Classical languages when creating its Frankensteinian words – presumably because these are the languages that most technical terms are constructed from. Which makes a lot of sense, with various models being followed depending on the context: -ectomy being the suffix that denotes the removal of an object from the body, while tele- is the prefix used to imply distance. The clinical nature of the Classically-rooted words is worthy of note in the context of those that refer to sexuality, as many now prefer ‘straight’, ‘gay’, etc., feeling that the terms seen above are loaded with meaning from a period where non-straight sexualities were seen as a medical (potentially psychological) phenomenon.
But perhaps that’s a post for another time.
It is also worth returning to the other origins that have cropped up. In particular, German, which is not particularly surprising in and of itself, given English’s heavy reliance on that language for shaping its development, but still worthy of note; and Dakota, the Native American language of the Dakota people. I like this because unlike Greek and Latin, whose influence has had many, many centuries to percolate through every layer of English, Dakota has only been known to English-speakers for the past few hundred years. And yet there it is, affecting the language already.
So those are some chimeras. Watch out for the firebreath.
* Among other languages, including German and Japanese.
** Trust me, they are an angry group.
Bookaccio 