Month: February 2017

Greek: in the progressive (he drinks, he was drinking), yes, in the perfective (he drank), no.

My fellow nationals, let us not hide behind our finger. (I think that’s a Greek expression.) Yes, I’m sure none of us here are racist. But racism against Aboriginal Australians is there, and visitors to Australia regularly manage to chronicle it. (It’s the one dark aspect of Bill Bryson’s otherwise panegyrical Down Under/In A Sunburned Country.) Wishing them all dead is something some Australians say, and it’s a rather more extreme attitude than you’ll hear elsewhere in the New World—even the US, which historically excluded Native Americans from their Manifest Destiny.

Yes, Australians are not as circumspect about how they talk in general, and that means that there’s a lot of talk that can come across as racist, but is often just undeferential or radically egalitarian. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

There are a couple of issues people might point to, but I don’t think they’re the explanation.

• Guilt? No, guilt doesn’t explain contempt.
• Embarrassment? Yes, situations in outback Australia are often third-world. I still don’t think that’s cause though; it’s effect. Though not knowing what to do about Aboriginal disadvantage is a challenge that other Australians, with their notions of egalitarianism and a fair go, don’t welcome. After all, Aboriginal Australians were not originally meant to be part of the Aussie fair go.
• Land claims? No, that’s just an inconvenience to miners and pastoralists, and after the initial shock of the Mabo judgement, it has settled down into a regimen of arbitration. The initial panic that Aboriginal Australians would be claiming swaths of suburbia and kicking white householders out proved to be fantasy.
• Not wanting to be lectured at by left-wing defenders of virtue? There’s some of that ressentiment, and you can see it in the libertarian cause célèbres, such as the racial defamation suits against Andrew Bolt or the threats of same against Bill Leak. But though Bolt and Leak are reactionary and reactive, sneering at “light-skinned” Aboriginal activists or deriding the lack of strong family cohesion in Aboriginal communities doesn’t quite rise to the level of the fantasy genocide OP describes (and I’m pretty sure has not made up).

I think the underlying issue, beyond all the current controversies and cluelessness, was the narrative that got entrenched in the 19th century. That narrative was that Australian Aborigines were the most primitive people on earth, and that they deserved to die out by Darwinian imperative. For decades, the government’s paternalism towards Aborigines was akin to palliative care.

The notion of Aboriginal Australians living a traditional lifestyle was that they were museum pieces and savage; remember, they did not get the vote until 1966, and until then they were wards of the State. The notion of Aboriginal Australians living a Western lifestyle was that they needed to be whitewashed and assimilated, and severed from their savage antecedents; hence the Stolen Generations.

Most people consciously realise that those attitudes are wrong; but the subterranean discomfort is still there. This was all ostensibly ancient history by the time of my childhood, but I have recognised in myself a sense of discomfort around Aboriginal Australians. These archetypes die hard, and they only die in sunlight.

You know, all my fans are cool, but I want to single out the ones who don’t comment much if at all, and that I therefore don’t interact with, but that keep upvoting me time and again. I’m going to single out two who’ve been quite consistent recently:

• Meera Chandramouliswaran
• Mike Jackson

Guys! Say hello! And let me know what you’d like to see more of!

• Glamour, as a Scots mutation of Grammar, from the same Education = Witchcraft equation that gave us Grimoire.
• Diocese. I had no idea until a month ago that this is just dioikēsis “administration”.
• For more palatalisation catching me unawares: cemetery from koimētērion.
• Dram, and for that matter Dirham, as derivatives of drachma.

This is of course speculation, because noone outside knows how moderation works, and noone inside is talking.

But we can be reasonably confident that not all moderation is undertaken by humans, and that not all human moderation is undertaken by highly paid staff of Quora: not a little work must be outsourced.

So it is possible that, in the workflows around answers, moderation got its wires crossed, with two separate people (or one person and a robot) both collapsing your answer. They may have done it for different reasons, or for the same reason. One may have left out the appeal link intentionally because of the heinousness of your offence, or they may have somehow left it out accidentally. (Though bad workflow engineering if they did!)

I don’t know about whether some answer collapses are appealable and others are not, I’m afraid; Quora appears to have changed its mind over the years: Why can’t we upvote or appeal collapsed answers now in Quora? Why are downvoted answers treated similarly to answers that violated Quora policy?

… A very good question, Clarissa!

On the one hand, not much, because English is in every household, though the telly and the interwebs. Now, where to find evidence for this?

Journalistic Greek is awash with ill-fitting calques from English, and syntactic loans and semantic field readjustments too, because the journalists spend their time reading (and paraphrasing) what they read in English.

… Except, 150 years ago, they were doing exactly the same with French. So Journalistic Greek is not more globalised now than any elite European lect was a century ago.

There’s a lot more evidence of this on the street. Calques like “give you a call”, say. Effortless codeswitching, even if it is heavily accented. This stuff is definitely going on now, and it didn’t even need to wait for the internet; the globalised mass media was enough, and that’s been in place for 50 years.

But still, that’s comparable to the French superstrate on Russian, or any number of other superstrates. A sprachbund, I think, needs more: it needs daily bilingualism in everyday life and the hearth. It needs people actively speaking English alongside Greek at the shops and at home, not just passively consuming it: that makes it much easier for the linguistic structures to commingle and be remoulded, outside of the occasional calque, and for the commingling to reach into morphology and in-depth syntax.

I don’t think we’re there yet. I think it’s not that far off though.

I had a slightly different take on the final scene, and I’m a little surprised that nobody else had the same take. Must be just me then.

Yes, Andrew starts playing out of spite, because he’ll show Fletcher what he’s made of, and he’s happy to disrupt Fletcher’s show while doing it. But as Andrew goes No More Mr Nice Guy, and he starts yelling obscenities and crashing the cymbal in Fletcher’s face, a change really does come over him. And the looks they exchange in the final cut are looks of mutual recognition.

Sure, it’s recognition that Andrew is now as much a musician as a Fletcher is. But it’s more than that.

It’s recognition that Andrew is now as much a monster as Fletcher is.

I should know the answer to this, being one of them. But it’s actually reasonably hard to introspect this, especially as the novelty of Greek Australians has long since worn off.

I’m going to offer some stereotypes, but as I often do with this kind of question, I’m hoping for someone to step in with a better thought out answer.

• 1st generation. Factory fodder and fast food vendors. Insular, hard working, devious, loud, volatile. Bottom of the totem pole at the time.
• 2nd Generation. Surprisingly insular compared to other ethnicities: still speaking Greek (sometimes), still intermarrying. Arrogant disco bunnies. High achievers, although not everyone noticed at the time. Still loud and volatile compared to Anglo-Australians, almost certainly not compared to Greeks in Greece.
• 3rd generation. Assimilated. Held up as model minority. (The 60s are easily forgotten.) Now at last turning up in areas where high achievers didn’t need to: they are civil servants and musicians, not just lawyers and doctors. Don’t actually stand out that much anymore.

I find this fascinating.

You may not find this fascinating. It involves Greek music of the 40s.

I’ve been listening to Dalaras’ 1980 recording of wartime rebetika. I realised that one of the songs, Haidari, I had already heard before, and loved it. It’s a chilling song about someone about to be executed, in the Haidari concentration camp in Athens. Its lyrics and its music both have an astonishing urgency, with the music careening between panic and sorrow.

You could argue Dalaras’ 1980 recording is overproduced, too smooth. But it’s also oracular the way Dalaras manages. And it’s the version I’ve known and loved.

stixoi.info: Chaidari

Run mother, fast as you can,
run and save me,
and free me, mother,
from Haidari.

For I am about to die
and I am condemned.
A seventeen year old boy
locked up in irons.

They take me from Sekeris St
[where the Sicherheitsdienst HQ was]
to Haidari
and hour by hour I wait
for Death to take me.

Now, it’s a miracle that the Wartime Rebetiko songs were recorded at all. They were not recorded during the war. With many of them pro-communist and most of them suspect, they were not recorded after the war. And that extended to this song, too, which was written in 1943 by the Master of Rebetiko, the Great Markos Vamvakaris.

And with the songs not recorded during the war, or after the war, an inconvenient truth surfaced about Haidari. Noone in 1980 was sure what the tune was. There were multiple tunes in circulation, and what Markos himself had set it to was unknown; Markos himself had died in 1972. All anyone knew was the characteristically curt description in Markos’ autobiography:

[Blog article]

Then [after the war] I went back to perform at Amphissa nightclub. We’d play all my pre-war songs there. I’d written a few new songs in the meantime. One that went quite well was Haidari. A zeibekikos in the niavendi (Nahawand) scale. I didn’t record it. I sang it in parks [clubs].

According to Markos’ son Stelios, Markos himself barely remembered the song, and the recording went ahead with music that Stelios wrote.

It’s an amazing tune, like I said. But it’s no zeibekikos; the article above describes it as a tsifteteli. It’s not in Nahawand scale. And if you think about it (and know the styles), there’s nothing ’40s about it: it’s a setting that wouldn’t make sense before 1960.

What happens if you find Bach’s completion to his last fugue? Or Schubert’s completion of his Unfinished Symphony? Or a Requiem that Mozart finished all on his own, without Süssmayr? Would it be what you expected? Would you want to risk disappointment?

And how much more of a risk would it be, if it was like this song, where the music wasn’t even the original?

Well, I found out today that Markos had remembered the original tune just fine, and a recording surfaced a couple of years ago from 1966.

That blog article was: Το αυθεντικό ‘Χαιδάρι’ του Μάρκου Βαμβακάρη από χαμένη ηχογράφηση του 1966

The audio is abominable, and Markos was never a great singer, but…

… The striking thing about the original Haidari: it’s exactly what you’d expect from Markos in 1943. It follows the path he’d laid out in his 1930s Peiraeus style. It’s jaunty, not desperate (outside of the wavering of Markos’ out-of-tune tenor: the desperation is very subtle). It’s ordered, not impassioned, with all the familiar tropes and Mozartian symmetry of the 30s. It thumps along at a fast pace. It’s not as imaginative and soaring as his son’s setting: after all, his son had benefitted from 40 years of broadening of the bouzouki repertoire. And its tone, ultimately, is all fatalism and little panic.

And it has three more stanzas, one of which is heard in the recording (and all of which had been published in 1947):

You should see Death’s sword,
mother, how it changes things,
oh, and how it will take way
mother, everyone’s life.

And when you see me dead, mother,
tell the other mothers—
for they too have ached
with even greater sorrow—

That I have seen their children
bound in chains,
dressed in the uniform of the condemned,
and unjustly slain.

… I think the new version is greater, it dares more, it feels more. Yet the understated, ordered, fatalistic original, numbly wrapped up in the familiar old tropes and symmetries, is probably truer to how Markos felt, as he saw Jews and resistance fighters being dragged off to Haidari.

For Tracey Bryan and Sam Murray.

This breaks up in three. This… goes places.

Middle-aged

Before I even noticed, I’m 45.

I don’t want to feel the weight of snow on my temples. I just posted about how I refuse to pay Death any mind: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you consciously live your life as “Being-towards-death” (or any comparable idea)? How does it affect your daily life, if at all? I decline Age the same obsequiousness.

I act at times like a teenager (and there’s certainly more about that in Decalogue #6). I hang out with millennials here without compunction, and I feel unflustered camaraderie with them.

But I feel the difference, quite unexpectedly. My knees creak. My crows feet dig in. I’m likely closer to the end than the beginning by now. I go all avuncular here, despite myself. And I’m certainly more scarred and scared than I was two decades ago.

The millennials are my comrades, and I look up to them: Sam, McKayla, Jordan, Pegah, Amy, Zeibura, Lyonel. But on occasion I notice a disconnect (not with them! but with others). And time and again, it’s the middle-aged that I feel the most untrammelled understanding with: Michael, Dimitra, Mary, Jennifer, Tracey.

(I keep telling you Sam, this is not a competition! 🙂 And Jeremy, I don’t know where to place you! Which won’t be a surprise.)

But in some ways, I was always middle-aged. I was always more bookish, more cynical, more circumspect. And the old school song that’s intended to make 60-year olds tear up?

Forty Years On (song)

It makes me tear up now, and it made me tear up when I first learned it, at 15.

Cishet Man

I’m part of the entitled majority. I would have added “white”, but I’m not American, so we aren’t as race-conscious. (That in itself is an issue.)

I have no interest in apologising for being part of the entitled majority. I am who my chromosomes say I am, I have ended up where I have ended up. And apologies is not what those not so entitled need from me.

They do need from me not to be an arsehole about it. And in response to that, I try to listen. Including here.

I haven’t broadcast it here to date, just muttered it in comments; but you will find it if you go Googling at the right time-depth anyway. For about a year in my twenties, I identified as bi. It was pretty damn Gedanken and theoretical, and I certainly did not get any action out of it.

What I did get is the humbling experience of… getting it. Of getting how it felt to be in a minority.

And the even more humbling experience was a couple of years later, when I’d resumed identifying as het. And realising that I no longer “got it”.

I don’t get it, and I won’t get it. Those that do don’t need me to get it. They need me to let them speak, and not talk over them, and be an ally rather than a blocker. And I try.

Recently Married, No Kids

I’ve left it too late, perhaps. And I wasn’t really hanging out for it any more. But I’ve gotten there. Nick Nicholas’ answer to Where did you meet your spouse, what were your lives like when you met, and what were the key events and circumstances that led to you being together?

It’s been work. It’s been solace. It’s been highs, it’s been lows. It’s been what any relationship worth the name has been. It’s been worth the work.

No kids. I’ve definitely left that too late. That’s an enduring regret, though a recent one. I’d have liked to pass things on, I’d have liked to… how did my socialist aunt put it? “Prepare good citizens.” On the other hand, I fear for the world they’d inherit.

But as the Hungarian-via-Esperanto proverb says: Bedaŭroj estas hundaj pensoj. Regrets are a dog’s thoughts.

Not quite sure what that means. We do have a dog, at least. And the dog’s meant a few sleepless nights, herself…