CONTORTED PASTA

Longtime readers here will be aware that I usually do something for Lent on this blog, the forty days leading up to Easter when Christians are supposed to brush up their souls a bit. Past incarnations of this have included 40 Days of Art and the introductory series to the thinking of Réné Girard.*

During the US election, I had a brainwave which I decided to save for this year's Lent Blog. It takes a little explanation before I throw you in the deep end on Day 1, though, so please bear with me for this post.

( It may help to know a little of my personal background, here... )

Since leaving home, most of my friends have been areligious. Most of them don't know that I'm not. I get an outsider's view of Christianity through their eyes and conversation. The Republican Party is the loudest voice in American politics, and thereby the world, and for many people, the only exposure they've ever had to Christianity is through that lens. I can see why they think of it as they do, in that case. That is not the Christianity I have come to know, but I didn't know how to explain this without taking them through a course of study as I had done, and frankly, why should they be interested in that?

As I was sitting on my sun-baked patio last summer, dwelling on the latest blatantly anti-Christian thing to come out of a Republican's mouth, it hit me: Just tell the Bible stories as if they had been written about the version of Jesus that Republicans seem to believe in. How better to show up the gulf between their values system and the one in that book they keep flapping around? I lived in a Republican stronghold long enough, and have heard enough of their messaging over the years, to run the simulation in my head. I could write this.

So that is what I am going to do. 40 days, 40 Bible stories, probably mostly from the synoptic Gospels, but with a smattering from elsewhere just for fun. I will post the Republican one first, with the original under a cut below so you can compare. It's not a theology course by any means, but I hope it might at least elicit a tickling sensation inside some people's heads. It's a little uncomfortable at first, but if you sit with it a little while, it often becomes something quite enjoyable! Cognitive dissonance is telling you to resolve a paradox, and I have never regretted undertaking that mental exercise.

*Alas 2019 kind of blew up partway through that, and I am no better situated to finish that series now, as I've lost my notes somewhere in the move. They'll turn up someday. Sigh.

There has been a woodpigeon nesting under one of my office windows. I think she was alarmed the first time I opened the window and said hello, but that didn't put her off continuing to build the nest and eventually laying her eggs and hatching them. There were two squabs (though I think a much better name is pidgelets) and as I had never seen a baby woodpigeon before they were a continual source of fascination. First they appeared under mum, then they got too big for all three to be in the nest all the time, but she would come back and feed them, and sometimes dad turned up in the morning to coo at them. Happy Families springtime hurrah.

On Saturday I checked in and saw one of the two was breathing heavily and bothered by flies. Not long for this world, I thought, but the other was fine and the flies weren't bothering him. Sunday I was doing some watering, and as the spigot is right under the nest I had a poke around to see if the unfortunate pidgelet had been discarded from the nest, but no sign. It couldn't have recovered, could it?

This morning I am back at my desk so I checked out the window, and found both pidgelets dead. This was not an ideal start to the day. It is the way of the world, and if all woodpigeons made it to adulthood we'd be drowning in them, but they were a delight of the workspace and I was looking forward to seeing them – or at least one of them – fledge. I don't know what went wrong; the one was obviously sick, but was it something it ate? Did mum stop feeding them? (I haven't heard her at the nest for a few days.) Were they weakened by the cold wet spell we've just had? They were more mature than I'd expect for a fatality from just failing to thrive. They were both thriving, and then suddenly were not.

On the other side of the house is The Worst Pigeon Nest Ever, a bare assembly of twigs heaped casually on top of some climbing roses. Someone laid an egg in it and scarpered. Having bloomed and finished, the roses are now trying to eat the house, and as the nest was clearly abandoned I went out there this morning and started cutting back the worst of them with the long pole pruning shears. As I was contemplating animal infanticide and the circle of life, a hearse slowly rolled past on its way to the church, followed by a ragtag procession on foot. Some were nursing cans of lager, some in uncomfortable shoes; a couple of eyes were wiped but it was mostly formal. I hadn't heard if funerals were allowed again but they didn't seem to mind. Not that The Virus seems to be much on the minds of people here generally – if the person in the hearse had died of it, that did not inspire much social distancing amongst their followers. Maybe living out in the countryside makes you more accepting of death as a part of life. Maybe they found the comforting presence of friends and family more valuable. Maybe they just don't care. I didn't ask.

This house has been through at least two plagues, as well as the 1918 flu and the current crisis. I am living here because its previous occupants died. I sleep in their bed and eat off their crockery so every day is a reminder they left the house that way. They are not the first to have done so. In it, I am drawing people who all died before I was born. There is a curious blind spot for death in modern Anglophone culture: it's as if those who survived WWII were so tired of it they didn't want to think about it, so didn't tell subsequent generations about it, and thus it comes as a surprise, like a Victorian bride's wedding night. We've got much better about sex, but made death taboo instead, leaving people grasping when it elbows its way into their life. This needs to change. Hopefully that will be one of many positive effects of this crisis.

And I, at some point, will need to knock down the nest with the two pidgelets, because the parents are too busy making new woodpigeons to do it themselves ...

I've been sick this week. It's the third cold in as many months, which is very frustrating, but what can you do? Turns out the answer is sleep. I have slept for about four days. I guess I needed it.

When I came home with a bad cold last year, I discovered the tremendous practical use of television: It is sufficiently interesting to keep me in bed doing nothing, i.e. resting, without requiring as much cognitive effort as reading, which is often beyond my decongestant-fogged brain. Last year I imbibed The Terror; this year I indulged the opportunity to catch up on the BBC's new rendition of the first part of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials.

I remember when the first book came out. It was at the crest of the wave of post-Harry Potter YA Fantasy. I listened to the audiobook back in those days when I had a tape deck at my desk but not a computer. It wasn't notably satisfying and left me a bit hollow, but was a fun dark adventure that kept me on task, and was better than a lot of the YA fantasy audiobooks I was listening to around that time. Eventually I consumed the other two in the series, but the last one put me off. Pullman was the YA Fantasy representative of the secular humanist cabal making a lot of noise post-9/11 (Richard Dawkins being the loudest) and his books were blatantly trying to be the anti-Narnia for a new, enlightened, Godless generation. This was fine as a premise for the series, but by the third book he had managed to get more evangelical than C.S. Lewis ever was. The preachiness of the last book rather soured my taste for the whole series and I didn't read (or listen to) it again.

My curiosity was piqued by the new TV adaptation, which aired shortly after I left for my Antarctic adventure. I was pleased to find it was still available on the iPlayer when I got back to the UK, so I watched it between naps as I tried to sleep off this cold. It has been probably fifteen years since I was familiar with the books, so I cannot comment as to the faithfulness of the adaptation, but it held on to what little I remember both in storyline and atmosphere, and it was a thoroughly admirable production on all fronts even if the approach to polar architecture broke my suspension of disbelief. Despite the excellent performances and wonderfully executed production, though, I was still left with that empty feeling – it was a grand adventure, but nothing much stayed with me, and in marked contrast to The Terror, even in my susceptible state I didn't much care about any of the characters. Why was such an obstensibly philosophical story so devoid of lasting impact?

It seems to have percolated a bit in my sleep since finishing it, and I woke this morning feeling like I'd figured something out.

In order to understand what I'm getting at, you need to be at least passingly familiar with the premise and basic storyline of The Northern Lights, first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy:

( A Story Rundown with Necessary Spoilers )

( And so, what I think is missing ...  )

So once again I find I have been spoiled by Terry Pratchett, who is much better both at storytelling and proselytising for secular humanism, in part because he knows how to show, not tell, and abstains from lecturing the reader. Pullman can't even make the defence that he's writing for children, because one of Pratchett's best deconstructions of organised religion is the Bromeliad trilogy, which is openly aimed at younger readers. The sneaky thing about Terry Pratchett is that, in the midst of tearing down codified belief systems, he nevertheless provides worldly wisdom and teaches the reader how to be a better person, something Philip Pullman leaves hanging. Will there ever be a high-value TV miniseries adaptation of a Pratchett book, that takes itself as seriously as His Dark Materials? There have been a few attempts, but the essence tends to get lost in translation. Someday, maybe. We can but hope.

I was going to let this percolate a while before putting anything down, as there are lots of things to think about and connections that can't be made in an immediate response, but I think holding it in is adversely affecting my health, so all plans are off. Here goes.

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

Yesterday on Twitter was one of those days where you keep getting the same long-read link from unrelated people on your timeline. I usually try to avoid these, as they're time sinks which only add to the sense of global despair, but after enough iterations I finally clicked on the link. I provide it here for you if you're interested: it took me nearly three hours to read (with occasional breaks; I suggest breaks) so do be advised what you're getting into before crossing that threshold.

The Ghosts of St Joseph's Catholic Orphanage

TL;DR: Basically every orphanage horror story you can think of, in this case at an institution in Vermont run by the Sisters of Providence, with a dash of clerical sexual abuse, which is all the rage these days. The frame story is a group of orphanage survivors taking the Church to court over what happened there, and their long frustrating legal battle, but the history of the place is laid out in flashbacks and testimony.

Part of the reason I finally clicked that link was that the sample image embedded with the preview on Twitter. It's of a nun in a habit with a big padded wimple, showing a group of happy children the new elevator. I recognised that wimple – it appears in an old family group photo, taken, I think, when my mother was about 5. It was my job to dust, and one bookcase was covered in old photos, so I saw it every week. I know I was told multiple times who it was but I don't remember now; I think it must have been my grandmother's sister, of which more later. I'd forgotten it until seeing this link.

( Thus ensued much pondering ... )

Six years ago I was sat in the Pret near London City Hall, writing postcards while it poured outside, the beginning of what was going to be a very wet summer in Britain. At noon I needed to catch the Tube to Heathrow to fly back to LA after an amazing three weeks chasing the Scott centenary up and down the country – London, Oxford, Edinburgh, Dundee, Selborne, and my first encounter with Cambridge. I dreaded going back to LA, and in fact the whole next year turned out to be an incredibly difficult one, as I felt trapped in a place and life and culture and climate I couldn't stand, but couldn't find a way out of. I wonder frequently what might have happened if I'd listened to the depression and applied for the visa to come here then, rather than the following summer ... There are things I would have missed, but how much would I have missed them? I'll never know.

I think about this every April 17th, and probably always will.

While in the Pret, writing, there was a song on their playlist with a nice melody but whose lyrics I couldn't quite make out – it sounded for all the world like there was a line about getting stuck in the loo. I jotted down what I could piece together and looked it up when I got back. It was this:

Watch on YouTube

This island really is extraordinarily rich in narrativium.

In October of 2007, the Decemberists and Lemony Snicket released the latest (and in the case of the latter, last) instalment of their respective oeuvres in the same week. The Crane Wife and The End are still inextricably intertwined in my mind, and either will strongly evoke the flavour of my last autumn in Vancouver and everything bound up with it.

This week, the Decemberists have released their latest album, and next Friday the new series of Netflix Snicket is released.

The pattern-seeking part of my monkey brain can't help but wonder if we're on the cusp of something again.

An interesting opinion piece from a new(?) contributor to the CBC, on the cracks possibly starting in the NRA's stranglehold of American politics ... I, personally, think he's being a bit overoptimistic: he makes an intriguing observation that the paranoia game is harder to play when you have a government friendly to your cause, however if the midterm elections bring a swing in the balance of Congress it'll be right back to where it was before.

Mainly, though, I like the article for this line:

"... confessed gunman Nikolas Cruz unwittingly left behind the NRA's worst nightmare: articulate, engaged teenagers."

Maybe the reason Millennials are done down so much by the establishment is that they (the latter) can tell they have the potential to change the world.

In January, I went to New Zealand to be able to place my imagination authentically in locations important to the Terra Nova.

Today, I was reading a description by Pennell, commander of the Terra Nova, of his travels from New York to Vancouver via Quebec City, in 1905. These are all places I have been, and could have pictured in my head well before even knowing he existed. Yesterday I was reading the end of Worst Journey for the first time being able to picture Pennell landing at Oamaru from personal experience; today I got to picture Pennell crossing the prairies and walking around Stanley Park, which was quite a lot weirder.

Growing up in western North America, one is always aware of how much has changed in the last hundred years (especially in Vancouver, which has changed a lot in the last ten). But it was funny to see how little had changed in some respects – Americans’ “win or die” attitude to sports; the tendency of Americans and Canadians to keep their buildings hot and airless, compared to Britain; Brits’ disdain for people claiming Britishness who aren’t British; a Quebec court case in which the defending counsel questioned the court’s jurisdiction over the matter at hand, and the Government side, overpaid, pontificating on the broader issues without much concern for the specific case.

Here's a video of Vancouver in 1907, about 18 months after Pennell came through. The grand 'castle' at the beginning was the old Waterfront Station; it would only be around for another few years before being replaced with the brick one we know and love now.

So it's finally happening.

When the news broke about Harvey Weinstein and the exposure of Hollywood's groping culture turned into a cascade of denouncements which were suddenly being taken seriously, I wondered how long I'd have to wait until there was enough of a crack in the happy family for someone to point a finger at John Lasseter.

I was female at Disney, so of course I heard things – the 'whisper network' as Variety calls it, though it was more brazen chat over lunch than hushed secret messages in shadowy corridors. Avoid him at wrap parties or anywhere there's enough alcohol. He's all right at work, but you should know. He's not a predator, he's “just really tactile.” That's just how he is. Oh, JL; chuckle, sigh, head shake.

I only ever encountered him once, when I raised my concerns about a minor edit on Princess and the Frog which I felt had serious emotional consequences for the storytelling, and to my shock was listened to. He came to dailies (wherein I happened to be showing a scene) and I was pointed out to him as the one who had spoken up about the edit; afterwards he clapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me on the good call and the courage to speak up. There was no grope, no sexual subtext beyond what you might read into any powerful man touching a young female rookie. I felt it was no different from how he might have touched any of my male colleagues, and I am still very much of that opinion. My own feelings at the time were that he left his hand there a little too long, but: he's just really tactile. The 'tap on the shoulder' from Lasseter is a signal of favour and advancement. I was a lowly apprentice and he was the most powerful person in the animation industry. Expressing discomfort at such a beneficence would have been profoundly ungrateful if not downright paranoid and/or rude, especially when I already have a low personal threshold of discomfort with being touched. If I had a problem, it was my problem.

Disney, and the LA animation scene more generally, is a very huggy place. It's common to exchange hugs as a form of greeting. This took some getting used to, coming from a more reserved culture*, but get used to it I did. For the most part a hug is just a hug. Compared to the accusations levelled at Weinstein, 'unwanted hugging', even with the occasional wandering hand, is very much the Disney version of a sexual assault scandal. But you can almost always tell when physical contact is made as a social gesture, and when it's done more for the gratification of the toucher. I never received one of Lasster's hugs, but I saw them being dispensed, to men and women alike, and they appeared to me to be the latter, which is why I believed the 'whisper network' even though neither I nor any of my close friends among the studio's lower ranks had had any such experiences first-hand.
*My classmates and I did get into the habit of hugging, but we spent most of two difficult years locked up together, so we're practically family.

I won't deny it was a little gratifying to see the news break last night, and not because I harbour much resentment of his interpersonal behaviour, but because finally an unhealthy workplace culture and hierarchy would come under scrutiny. Lasseter sits at the top like a charismatic messianic cult leader – the Second Coming of Walt in all but name – and is both toadied to and unchallenged in ways I don't think he's even aware of. Everyone down the pyramid from him works around and towards him, angling for his favour, and he elevates whom he wishes. He has absolute power when presiding over creative meetings; the self-censorship based on anticipating what Lasseter will and won't like is systemic and almost, at this point, unconscious. His goldenboy-to-outcast-to-saviour story is powerful, and as he's brought us all such success, how can we question how he runs things, or his taste, or his conduct? He is successful, beyond successful, therefore he must be right.

I was expecting to wait a lot longer than a month and a half for the searchlight to land on Lasseter. Not just because 'no one would believe it' but because it's such a closed society with such a fervent dogmatic belief in The Pixar Way and Our Great Leader. People on the inside are conditioned against, and restricted from, talking openly to the outside world, and representations of the society to said world are very, very carefully controlled.

Rashida Jones, as an outsider with an established career, didn't owe anything to Pixar, and they couldn't hold anything over her, so she had both the insight (from having worked with them) and freedom (by leaving and not fearing the consequences) to say something – and as a respected writer outside of animation, was more likely to be listened to than some no-name cartoonist. I believe her when she says she left because of philosophical differences rather than sexual discomfort: a certain amount of discomfort is, sadly, par for the course in these sort of situations, but the constant fight with contrasting values in the interest of creative cooperation can really wear you down, and start to drive you crazy if you're an observant type. This is in no way entirely down to Lasseter either, but his heroic stature in the company, and the encouragement to fall into step with the values he and his core team established, intentionally or not, don't encourage dissenting voices. Having him and his example on top gives permission to a handful of little abusers, sexual and otherwise, to carry on below him. Removing him from the top of the pyramid makes the lower levels less structurally stable, and that's where a great deal of attention needs to be paid, and change to happen.

I don't like John Lasseter personally, and I definitely have beef with him professionally and artistically, but I almost feel a little sorry for him having this blow up in his face. I don't think he realises that he makes people uncomfortable, or that everyone was too afraid of him to mention it. I think he genuinely believes he just has a lot of love to share and can't understand why people don't want it. But this selfish viewpoint is in itself a problem, and the dysfunctional society that has grown up around him, that has preserved this limited perspective for so long, is an even bigger problem. The near future is going to be very hard for a lot of comfortable people, but I hope things will be better for everyone on the other side.

As Lissa Treiman very rightly points out, these studios are full of very talented and perfectly decent, loving, supportive, non-creepy people. They're the ones who actually make the movies. Don't let the tearing down of the figurehead ruin your appreciation of the work done by these people. Hopefully they'll get some appreciation within the studios themselves.

For the studios' sake, there's another very important aspect to this reckoning: succession. When Walt died, the company was bereft, and spent decades in the wilderness. There is no apparent strong leader to step into Lasseter's shoes, only people who have risen by proving their subservience to him. When I was there I was concerned about succession because he seemed at imminent risk of popping, in some cardiovascular way; I'd never have imagined he'd be removed from office for his behaviour. I don't think this is the end of him at Disney – I think the leave of absence is to allow the goldfish mob to forget about sexual harassment and be upset about something else, at which point they can quietly reinstate him – but I do hope it wakes studio leadership up to the idea he's not going to last forever and they'd better have a Plan B sorted out sooner than later.

For the next six months, though, while the cat's away, let's get some new voices heard and talents appreciated. There are a lot of deserving people out there waiting to shine.

How Flying Seriously Messes With Your Mind

Most of these effects are familiar to me, not least the drowsiness, though some of that may be adrenaline backwash and release of tension, having finally boarded the flight and not having to worry about missing it anymore.

This also supplies the explanation for Cabin Pressure's statement that everyone's tastebuds are shot at 35,000 feet.

Mainly, though, I link the story because I have a long-held but as yet unsubstantiated theory that some of the stereotypical traits of people living in the Los Angeles area are, in fact, symptoms of chronic mild hypoxia. The LA basin and the valleys surrounding it are usually occupied by a famously stable air mass, which is why it was chosen for observatories on one hand, and why it has such a problem with smog on the other. A high population density all running internal combustion engines 24/7 will eat up the oxygen, and with no atmospheric disturbance to bring in fresh air, you end up with that airless miasma of a meeting that's gone on too long in a small room with closed doors.

Crankiness, mild confusion, lingering fatigue, depleted critical thinking skills and response times, heightened emotional sensitivity – these are all endemic in Angelenos. Is it a coincidence that they're also signs of mild hypoxia?