Halloween Costumes

Maybe this entry should be titled, "where my time has been going for the last month..."

I've always loved Halloween, and even celebrated it when I lived in Japan with the other Americans I could find. My mother always sewed costumes for me and my brother, so now I do it for our family. Isn't it marvelous how a costume can change how you feel? Not too many cultural musings today, as I'm seriously sleep-deprived from all the sewing. But I thought I'd share photos. The little kitty is my daughter (age 3, with her gymnastics teacher) and the Batman is my son (with others from his kindergarten class). The clowns are me and my husband. I have heard rumors that the clown costumes may be all too appropriate for us...



Happy Halloween, everyone!

My grocery store in Tokyo

Our grocery store was called Kitamura, and to get to it we could either ride bicycles or walk (we had no car, and it would have been highly impractical to have one). It was down a steep hill from our apartment building, on the main road of the neighborhood which was lined with cherry trees.

There were two halves of Kitamura: the food half, and the dry goods half. These stood across the street from one another, and both were very small - but enormous compared to the buildings around them.

The dry goods half included basically everything from toilet paper to pots and pans, clothing, hardware, etc. It also contained a bookstore section, which was where I got my Japanese cookbook. I walked in there shortly after we arrived and said (in Japanese) "I'm looking for a cookbook of Japanese food with lots of pictures." When you don't know the basics of ingredients or of cooking terminology, the pictures are very important. I ended up walking home with a little book from the "new housewife series" called "Yummy! Simple!" (oishii! kantan!) It would have been embarrassing except that it was so exceedingly helpful.

I bought this cookbook for two reasons. First, because I like Japanese food, and second because I wanted to save money.

Food is very expensive in Japan. When I was living there you could buy a box of strawberries - all precisely the same size and shape - for about $7. You could buy a monster apple about five inches in diameter for about $5. The shocker for me was that rice cost so much more there than in the US. I would buy five kilos of rice for about $25. If I'd wanted to try to cook American, the prices would have been much higher than for cooking Japanese food.

So I explored. The store had a whole case dedicated to fish and seafood, which might not seem amazing except that it took up so much shelf space relative to the total size of the store. If you wanted to buy a whole chicken (not one previously carved into cuts), you'd have to special order it, but you could easily buy a whole squid, and take it home while it stared at you out of its styrofoam dish.

By the way, the carts at this store were made to fit the size of the aisles: they were metal carts with spots to put baskets. Since the baskets were about the size of the American over-the-arm shopping baskets, the cart effectively doubled your hauling capacity. Given that you then would have to carry everything you'd bought up a very steep hill on foot (or bicycle), it made sense. You just had to go to the store more often.

You would go through the checkout lines, which were in general very quiet. Nobody in line ever started a conversation with me, and neither did the checkout staff. I, being American in my heart, I guess, started conversations with them, and they didn't seem to mind. Then you'd take your baskets to a counter and bag them yourself, all plastic bags, for the purposes of getting them home.

I love my experiences overseas because they acquaint me with different values on parameters of life that I have never considered. So for all you worldbuilders out there, give some thought to how your people get their food, what markets look like and how much of their total budget they expect to spend on food and lodging. It'll deepen the world, and be fun at the same time.

Culture - inside us or out?

Very often we imagine culture as something passed on from one generation to the next. It is easy enough to construe this as if culture resides in an individual and is passed on to that individual's children. However, while culture is expressed in and enacted by the individual, it also has a source outside the individual, namely the cultural group itself.

Some groups, like churches and schools - or even gangs - may have privileged individuals who are expected to take the lead in teaching the group's values to new members, while other members are expected simply to enact their roles appropriately. Some groups do not.

Sports culture is one that I've been considering lately. I can't tell you how much I've learned about sports since meeting my husband, who as an Aussie seems to have a limitless interest in sports and the statistics thereof. What I've found is that by picking up some of the culture's relevant terms, such as a sense of which scoring structure belongs to which sport, I can have more interesting random conversations with guys. Fortunately my husband encourages this. I think in a way it keeps that area of his life from being boring and unreachable to me. I guess you could say that the sportscasters function as the privileged individuals in this group, teaching terminology etc. Even the idiosyncratic expressions (boo-yah, anyone?) of particular individuals can get picked up by the group and become part of the local lexicon. This is also a group that encourages the use of puns that might make others scream. While it forms a part of male culture, it is not exclusively male; I'd say it forms an intersection with the male group.

The other one I'm thinking about is child culture. This is the one that blows my mind currently. I'm talking not about things that teachers teach to kids, but the things that children teach to each other. Little rhymes and songs can take on a life of their own, passed from child to child on the playground and thereby staying alive for years, hardly noticed by the adults all around. I find myself hearing my son say things I remember from my own childhood, but never taught him - and it occurs to me that so long as the playground talk stays alive, and the repetition continues there, why shouldn't a particular rhyme stick around for thirty years?

Subcultures like these have their own language patterns, so don't forget to consider what subcultures might exist in your worlds. While you're at it, consider that a culture can even deliberately change their language - witness the revival of Hebrew to a living language by the people of Israel. Language is a badge of membership in a culture, and also in subcultures.

So to answer the question I started with, culture is inside us, and it's outside us. We enact it, we mark ourselves by enacting it, and in enacting it, we take part in its processes of change. Those guys in business aren't wrong when they talk about the "culture of an organization." Neither are we wrong when we talk about "my culture."

Come to think of it, we all have multiple cultures within us - and if those cultures come into conflict, as when we must deal simultaneously with representatives from two different subcultures in our lives, that's when things get interesting.

Absolute and Relative Direction

Did any of you out there have difficulty learning the difference between right and left? Have you ever gotten confused over "my left" and "your left"? What about north, south, east and west?

Both of these are senses of direction. Right and left are relative, and orient relative to the position of the speaker unless otherwise specified. North, south, etc. are absolute directions, and orient independently of the movement of the speaker. No surprise to anyone, because in English we have both of these types of orientation words.

Interestingly, though, at least one Australian aboriginal language doesn't use the relative positioning words - only the absolute ones. So that they would never say "my right foot"; they would say something like "my northward foot" or "my southward foot" etc. I think you can see that it's awfully critical to maintain an absolute sense of direction if you're going to be speaking of about parts of your own body differently depending on which direction you're facing.

I would love to see a group of aliens with only absolute direction words - or, to take the concept further, only a set of absolute words to refer to something we generally use relative expressions for, like pronouns. Imagine how confused an alien from this society would be to hear every human referring to him or herself with "I." They would probably construe it incorrectly as a proper name.

While I'm on this topic, I'd like to mention the Japanese words "kochira" "sochira" and "achira," which can be roughly translated as "this direction" "that direction" and "that direction over there." Like English "this" and "that," "left" and "right," "I" and "you" they are relative terms, which take their meaning from the identity and position of the speaker. You can probably guess from the translations, though, that they aren't defined quite the same way.

The ko- prefix indicates a direction or an object associated with the speaker (or more precisely, in the speaker's in-group). The so- prefix indicates something associated with the person that the speaker is talking to - the other guy in the conversation. The a- prefix indicates something that is associated neither with the speaker nor the other guy in the conversation, but is outside both of their circles.

I mention the Australian and Japanese examples because I think it's fascinating to consider other methods of organizing reality. Also, though, I want to bring attention to our own way of organizing reality: organizing it around ourselves. If you look around, the English language is full of expressions that are relative (I, he, this, that, here, there, today, yesterday, just to name a few).

Never forget that relative expressions are your allies in the construction of point of view. If you are trying to create a close point of view, try looking around for opportunities to use relative expressions instead of absolute ones. You may find more than you expect.

Come, Follow

I just learned about this new "followers" function on blogspot, thanks to my friend Ann Wilkes. So for those of you who visit here a lot, you can sign up to follow if you like, and your name will appear here on the page. Now I'll have to go looking around and find my own favorite blogspot blogs to follow!

Makes me think of that song about the greenwood tree...

Considering Deafness

I've been thinking about deafness a good deal recently because I have a deaf character in a story I'm working on. Deafness fascinates me because it is, in one sense, a medical problem - caused by nerve defect, for example, or accident, or abuse of the ears over a long period of time - but in another sense it is a badge of membership in a language community.

The difference between auditory languages and visual languages is sometimes called a "channel" difference. Channel effectively means which sensory pathway is chosen for the language conduit, and in past entries I've discussed this a little; I know I've mentioned chemical scent languages a couple of times.

In a sense, by being born without hearing or becoming deaf, a person loses one channel. They then have two choices: attempt to "cure" the deafness medically, or use another language channel. In school I saw a fascinating video about cochlear implants, which can cause some deaf people to begin to hear. In that video was one woman who lost hearing as an adult, and she definitely felt rescued by the implant which restored her hearing. Then there were the children, and therein lay the conflict.

A pair of hearing parents with a deaf child had no hesitation about "restoring" the child's hearing.
A pair of deaf parents with a deaf child did not want to take away the deafness which was part of what defined her, didn't want in a sense to evict her from the cultural community to which they belonged.

Part of what entered into their decision was having someone assess the speech of other children who had had cochlear implants, and tell them whether they "sounded deaf" or not. They made their decision to forego the implant because they felt that giving her hearing would oust her from true membership in the deaf community, and they weren't convinced that it would give her true membership in the hearing community.

This last one is an issue of brain plasticity, or the ability of the brain to learn new language information. A rule of thumb on child language states effectively that the brain loses the ability to acquire nativelike phonological ability (i.e. pronunciation) at about age 6; grammar not until about age 13. Thus the later a child receives a cochlear implant, the more difficulty that child will have in processing the sound and turning that into natural-sounding auditory language.

Personally I thought it a shame that the child in question should miss out on hearing all the wonderful sounds of the world - but on the other hand, I understood the parents' cultural point of view.

I want to talk also about sign language a little, but I'm going to have to save that for another post.

Character judgment and psychology

I had lunch today with a friend who wears rings on her toes - one on each foot. She told me that someone recently asked her if she was Indian (she's not), because apparently there is a tradition involving wearing one toe ring on each foot if you are a married woman. This isn't a tradition I'm familiar with myself, but I do have a necklace my mother brought back from India, which my mother told me is a "married woman's necklace."

This kind of thing provides terrific evidence of the fact that even the smallest things can be judged significant in people's lives. A man's earring worn on the right ear versus the left used to have significance in the gay community. The closing of a kimono left-side first or right-side first can be significant, or the way you pick up a teacup.

In each case, the significance of the object or act is in the head of the character doing the judging.

This relates to my post of yesterday, inasmuch as characters can be differentiated by the way they judge situations. I find it fascinating to write a conversation between two people from two different cultural groups, and to switch point of view halfway through, so that readers can share the difference between what the two people notice in the interaction, how they judge the significance of one another's clothing, posture, etc. The most fun for me is when the two don't understand each other because they can't entirely back off their own cultural categories and judgments.

Individuals can also have different ways of judging. Imagine the way that a detective looks at a room, compared to the way that a child looks at it. Each will be looking for different things, putting importance on very particular and personally relevant details.

And then there are the characters with extreme, or impaired, judgment. This is where psychology comes into play. When I write a character as simply mean-spirited I find I don't know where to go; I'm grasping at mean things for that person to do. When I go into their psychology to identify a traumatic event that has changed their judgment, or even to identify a mental illness that alters their perception and judgment of events, it has a wonderful effect: it ties down the driving forces behind their behavior. Suddenly their behavior is no longer random, but principled, and I can take their strangeness much further without straining credibility.

I'd like to add one last observation that comes from the "show don't tell" arena. Having a character with a complex cultural background, or a mental illness, doesn't mean that everything about their culture or judgment has to be explained. They can demonstrate it in the kinds of things they treat as unremarkable, or where they suddenly take offense. Even an offhand descriptive adjective can be turned toward illuminating their point of view. I've even gone so far as to try to build the mental characteristics of a character into the prose style I use to write their voice. I'm thinking in particular of an obsessive-compulsive Machiavellian character I'm working on, who has a tendency to fixate on a topic and return to it over and over in his thoughts, always judging things instantly and never questioning himself in any way.

I'll admit here that I have trouble writing non-chronologically. The trick is, I really like the feeling that each chapter will be different because of subtle changes in character viewpoint that grow out of the character's experience.

In any case, character judgment and psychology are productive avenues to explore, if you haven't already.