Greetings, blog; I probably will not post on you, my mostly-ignored place of semi-public diary/soul-baring/mindpoo.
Here is an update for ...well, no one, since I managed to befriend my blogfriends offblog:
I still have two (2) cats.
I have many, many more books than I had even a year ago.
My ability to speak German has dwindled into infinity. French seems not far behind.
I am still in grad school. DO NOT ASK ME WHEN I WILL BE DONE. Unless you want me to bite off your nose, in which case, go for it.
My hair is again mostly its normal color, including several gray hairs that delight is sticking straight up instead of remaining hidden.
I am engaged; August 30, 2013 is the date. Here is what I have learned:
Planning a wedding is easier than planning a f*cking dissertation. It is about the same level of enjoyable, i.e. NOT AT ALL.
My fiancé is way more ...everything than I ever thought I'd find. Tall, way handsomer than me, both smarter and dumber than I am, can drink a lot, is beloved by everyone, loves puppies and doesn't know how to pick up children. He takes cat-allergy shots. This is how I know he loves me.
That's really about all I've got. Writing a blog post these days (when I'm *supposed* to be writing three paragraphs on John McLure Hamilton, an artist nobody knows anything about) feels indulgent and useless, but I wonder if it might be a good place to encourage me to write. ...No, that's a terrible idea; it would only distract me and I'd pay more attention to writing blog posts (which are so much easier to write) than on the things I should be writing.
So, Aloha for now. I'll see you when I see you.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sunday, January 30, 2011
boo, brr, blah
The gulf between deciding one is a fat lardass and actually doing something about it is particularly difficult to span if the temperature is 1 degree above freezing and the two inches of snow still on the ground have been pummeled into so much dirty grey slush. PMS doesn't help, either, since all I want to do is sit around and eat chocolate while obsessing over how I am a failure at life. Ugh. Can this day just end, already?
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
From the New York Times, obviously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.
We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.
So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.
But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.
Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.
It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.
IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.
In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.
For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.
We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”
When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.
So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.
But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.
Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.
It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.
IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.
In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.
For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
um, gross
How do you react when one of your friends posts the following update on Facebook:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!baby poopy in his new potty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had SO MANY knee-jerk responses to this:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!baby poopy in his new potty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I had SO MANY knee-jerk responses to this:
Gross.
Jealous! Wish *I* could do that!
Congrats on your baby's bowel movement!
Really, [redacted], did you just post a status update on your baby's feces?
But will he use this power for good... or eeeevil?
Now all you have to do is train your husband! Zing!
Then I noticed her mother had made the following comment: "Grab the camera next time if you can...this is huge." Ha!Jealous! Wish *I* could do that!
Congrats on your baby's bowel movement!
Really, [redacted], did you just post a status update on your baby's feces?
But will he use this power for good... or eeeevil?
Now all you have to do is train your husband! Zing!
Um, just don't post the *photos* on facebook, mmm k?
I hope the toilet still flushes.
...And then I realized maybe her mom was in on the joke. (If so, her mom is TEH BOMB.) If this person is a TRUE friend, she will take a photo of her baby's water-logged feces ...and tag me as the toilet.
I hope the toilet still flushes.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
I see married people.
In terrifying news, I have discovered that YET ANOTHER one of my ex-flames, The Rebound, is engaged. This comes hot on the heels of discovering--all in the same 6 months, mind--that The College Ex got married and the ex-boyfriend immediately following--the guy who broke my heart so bad I didn't even think about kissing anyone else for about two years*--is not only married but has HAD A FRICKING BABY.
...I am comforted by the fact that they are all world-class morons, of course.
I am further comforted by the fact that I have somehow, despite all odds, completely inexplicably managed to secure the attention and affection of a strapping young whippersnapper of an Aussie boyfriend. This sort of luck bemuses me--if anyone knows who spiked his punch and how I can make sure I have that person on staff in perpetuity, please contact me ASAP.
*Ok, that's a slight exaggeration... understatement. Whatever.
I am further comforted by the fact that I have somehow, despite all odds, completely inexplicably managed to secure the attention and affection of a strapping young whippersnapper of an Aussie boyfriend. This sort of luck bemuses me--if anyone knows who spiked his punch and how I can make sure I have that person on staff in perpetuity, please contact me ASAP.
*Ok, that's a slight exaggeration... understatement. Whatever.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Exclusive: John Cleese Slams Ex-Wife, Terry Gilliam, Republicans, His Hotel ...
I thought I'd take a little time out of my busy not-blogging schedule to bring you an interview from NYMag with the fabulous, fabulous John Cleese:
Cleese performing his one-man show earlier this month. Photo: Getty Images
Funny-walking, parrot-returning comedy deity John Cleese is headed to New York for a Monty Python reunion on October 16, after the premiere of IFC’s hilarious warts-and-all documentary: Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), airing on IFC October 18. Logan Hill spoke to him about the new Fawlty Towers Remastered DVD set, out (October 20), his recent ugly divorce, Monty Python’s even uglier breakup, and his apocalyptic new work in progress “Why There Is No Hope.”.
What age are you, Logan?
34.
Well, I have a rule not to date people less than half my age, but I guess it's okay to be interviewed by one.
Another difference between you and some of the other Pythons.
Entirely right! [Sixty-seven-year-old Terry Jones just fathered a child with his 26-year-old girlfriend.]
How are you holding up? Sounds like you’ve had a rough divorce. You've called your ex "the special love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills."
I went through a very unpleasant divorce and discovered just how hopeless the American legal system is. There are a couple of occasions when I began to realize just how bad the damage was going to be. For me, most of the things people know me from —Fawlty Towers or A Fish Called Wanda — are things I’ve been able to write on spec because I had enough money to live. Now I have to pay one million dollars a year until I’m 76. So that means I have to organize my life around earning the first million dollars every year. And the normal sources of income for people like me are drying up. There aren’t as many film and TV parts — and you can do interesting documentaries but they don’t pay anything. So I’m doing one-man shows and other things ...
Like interviews like this, to sell some Fawlty Towers DVDs.
Yes, that’s a big help. I’d always hoped that, at this stage in my life, I could live on the royalties and do the things I really want to do.
It’s a large settlement.
Well, the absurd thing is, my wife brought no assets or income and we had no children. And yet she seems to have finished up with a lot more than half of the money. That’s the insanity.
Can you laugh about something like this?
You know, as they always say, it depends on whether you see life as a tragedy or a farce.
You’ve often made terrible things seem hilarious. Basil Fawlty was a jerk.
Well it’s like in W.C. Fields — he’s just about my favorite comedian, but if you actually met that character in real life, I don’t think you’d like him. Basil’s awful. He’s a terrible, shallow creature, completely obsessed with class. Ah, but he is funny. We laugh at Basil because, although he behaves appallingly to other people, a lot of the time it’s because of his fear that Sybil will get very angry. We also feel sorry for him. When people behave badly out of fear, it’s much funnier than if they were just behaving badly because that’s their default mode.
And we recognize our own worst impulses in him?
Oh, yes. I think that there’s an enormous number of people in England who, given enough stress, behave very much as Basil does. That marvelous book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman has this tremendous phrase: “Stress makes you stupid.” So the more stress you put on the protagonist in the farce, the stupider he gets. That’s one of the delights of it. They make worse and worse mistakes.
You’re speaking to me from a hotel right now. Are you a double celebrity among hoteliers?
Yes, most of the hoteliers I encounter are aware of Fawlty Towers, but it doesn’t stop them being terrible hoteliers. I mean, this place that we’re in at the moment, the Radisson … well, the accountants try to save a few pennies and meanwhile they absolutely ensure that somebody like me never comes back.
Why?
They’re greedy. Earning a reputation gets completely forgotten in the rush for quick short-term profit, which is the great sin of American business. I am often quite surprised at how poor the service is in even the most expensive chains, but I always exempt The Four Seasons, because I do think that’s a marvelous chain. But this Radisson, it’s a mess. The wastepaper baskets! There’s far too few wastepaper baskets, and when you do find them, they’re always hidden away. Like they are objects of shame. I have by me now a tiny little wastepaper basket which contains a billowing plastic bag that makes it almost impossible to get anything into the bin. But that’s so the maid doesn’t have to touch it. The hotel is run for the benefit of the staff rather than for the customer.
Like Fawlty Towers. Maybe you should open your own hotel.
I think it would be a tremendous thing to do, and I may produce some training films again, because most people are absolutely clueless, but I like projects that have ends to them. With TV or a movie, you work on something for two years or six months and at the end of it, you move on. I would not be good at something that required year after year of attention.
That’s a big point of the new documentary on Monty Python. The other Pythons were angry when you quit the show a year before everyone else.
Two things: One is I did not like the fact that we were repeating a lot of our material, even if other people didn’t notice; the others didn’t care. They were having a good time. I think if one was playing “I’m the pure artist,” I would win on that one. The other thing was that I was carrying the alcoholic [the late Graham Chapman]. That seems to get forgotten in all of these discussions. They were completely blind to an extraordinarily important point, which was: I was the guy who was having to work with the alcoholic. They never said, ‘We’ll share part of that burden with you. I’ll write with him one day a week.’ This is never mentioned. It was ‘Oh, John was rather difficult … ’
How bad was it?
Well, I never knew what he was up to, because alcoholics — I now know quite a lot of them — they are all, I’m afraid, basically liars. The words are almost synonymous. There were two types of days: days where I did 80 percent of the work and days when Graham did 5 percent of the work. He was basically lazy, but he had two great qualities: He was the most extraordinary sounding board and he was capable of coming in with very good off-the-wall ideas. But he was very lazy.
In the doc, Terry Gilliam bashes your respect for psychotherapy.
I think Gilliam was so frightened of what he’d discover if he ever explored his own conscience. He is completely unbalanced, as are many of the Pythons. He is notably unbalanced.
You were the first man to say “shit” on the BBC, and possibly the first man to say “fuck” at a funeral — Chapman’s. What do you make of the controversy over an actress saying “fucking” on Saturday Night Live recently?
I think the older you get the more you begin to realize what a madhouse we live in. People get upset about things that don’t matter at all and people don’t really get upset at all about things that matter a lot. You’ve got a rotten, rickety old legal system that anyone with money can manipulate — and nobody goes around saying this; they go around worrying that somebody said “fuck.” I mean, frankly, it’s pathetic and so completely half-witted that you give up any expectation of any kind of rational behavior of any kind, in any way, as you get older. It’s a madhouse. There are small pockets of sanity, but the rest of it is irretrievably second-rate at best. So when these things come along now, I just shrug.
On the Fawlty Towers commentary you say it’s harder to laugh now.
You laugh less at entertainment because you’ve seen most of the jokes before and you can guess where the new ones are going. It’s not like when you’re young and you discover Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields or Eddie Izzard or Bill Hicks. What you begin to see is how funny life is. You turn Sean Hannity on and there is wall-to-wall insanity. They have absolutely no idea what clowns they are.
As you get older, are people getting stupider?
It can be depressing. But you have to let go of the idea that this can ever be a decent and rational place. I already have quite a lot of material for a new show I will call Why There Is No Hope. I’ve tried it out. A friend said it was fascinating afterwards because the more I destroyed people’s hope that this could ever be, in any way, a rational planet, the more they laughed.
Could you give me a preview?
Well, I’m a funny kind of professor at Cornell, and there is a psychology professor there called David Dunning who discovered that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitude as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. In other words, if you’re a really good tennis player or mathematician then you know how to tell how good you are. But it also means if you’re absolutely no good at something then you lack exactly the skills to realize your idiocy. It explains why so many idiots out there have no idea that they’re idiots.
Do you run into this in comedy?
You find this particularly with scripts. I wrote a really good script for Disney, and the woman in charge wanted to make changes which were completely and utterly wrong. She had the confidence of the truly stupid. Then you look at the Republican Party: Here are people that are so out of touch with reality that it could be screamingly funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
As politics gets more childish, does satire get harder for you?
Yes. Take Sarah Palin — so many Republicans love her. I suddenly realized that in order to actually understand that someone is not very bright — or to be brutal, that they’re rather stupid — you really have to be more intelligent than them. Most Republicans aren’t smarter than Sarah Palin. It’s true.
If there is no hope, you must not trust Obama.
No, I have real hope for Obama, because I think without the slightest doubt he is operating from a considerably higher level of mental health than we’re used to in our politicians. I think that’s what frightens the shit out of Republicans. Because if you put very mad people in a room with very sane people the mad people start feeling madder, do you see what I mean? Whereas, if you put mad people in together — if you put the Gestapo in together — they’re all sort of reinforcing each other’s madness and everyone’s happy.
Cleese performing his one-man show earlier this month. Photo: Getty Images
Funny-walking, parrot-returning comedy deity John Cleese is headed to New York for a Monty Python reunion on October 16, after the premiere of IFC’s hilarious warts-and-all documentary: Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut), airing on IFC October 18. Logan Hill spoke to him about the new Fawlty Towers Remastered DVD set, out (October 20), his recent ugly divorce, Monty Python’s even uglier breakup, and his apocalyptic new work in progress “Why There Is No Hope.”.
What age are you, Logan?
34.
Well, I have a rule not to date people less than half my age, but I guess it's okay to be interviewed by one.
Another difference between you and some of the other Pythons.
Entirely right! [Sixty-seven-year-old Terry Jones just fathered a child with his 26-year-old girlfriend.]
How are you holding up? Sounds like you’ve had a rough divorce. You've called your ex "the special love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills."
I went through a very unpleasant divorce and discovered just how hopeless the American legal system is. There are a couple of occasions when I began to realize just how bad the damage was going to be. For me, most of the things people know me from —Fawlty Towers or A Fish Called Wanda — are things I’ve been able to write on spec because I had enough money to live. Now I have to pay one million dollars a year until I’m 76. So that means I have to organize my life around earning the first million dollars every year. And the normal sources of income for people like me are drying up. There aren’t as many film and TV parts — and you can do interesting documentaries but they don’t pay anything. So I’m doing one-man shows and other things ...
Like interviews like this, to sell some Fawlty Towers DVDs.
Yes, that’s a big help. I’d always hoped that, at this stage in my life, I could live on the royalties and do the things I really want to do.
It’s a large settlement.
Well, the absurd thing is, my wife brought no assets or income and we had no children. And yet she seems to have finished up with a lot more than half of the money. That’s the insanity.
Can you laugh about something like this?
You know, as they always say, it depends on whether you see life as a tragedy or a farce.
You’ve often made terrible things seem hilarious. Basil Fawlty was a jerk.
Well it’s like in W.C. Fields — he’s just about my favorite comedian, but if you actually met that character in real life, I don’t think you’d like him. Basil’s awful. He’s a terrible, shallow creature, completely obsessed with class. Ah, but he is funny. We laugh at Basil because, although he behaves appallingly to other people, a lot of the time it’s because of his fear that Sybil will get very angry. We also feel sorry for him. When people behave badly out of fear, it’s much funnier than if they were just behaving badly because that’s their default mode.
And we recognize our own worst impulses in him?
Oh, yes. I think that there’s an enormous number of people in England who, given enough stress, behave very much as Basil does. That marvelous book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman has this tremendous phrase: “Stress makes you stupid.” So the more stress you put on the protagonist in the farce, the stupider he gets. That’s one of the delights of it. They make worse and worse mistakes.
You’re speaking to me from a hotel right now. Are you a double celebrity among hoteliers?
Yes, most of the hoteliers I encounter are aware of Fawlty Towers, but it doesn’t stop them being terrible hoteliers. I mean, this place that we’re in at the moment, the Radisson … well, the accountants try to save a few pennies and meanwhile they absolutely ensure that somebody like me never comes back.
Why?
They’re greedy. Earning a reputation gets completely forgotten in the rush for quick short-term profit, which is the great sin of American business. I am often quite surprised at how poor the service is in even the most expensive chains, but I always exempt The Four Seasons, because I do think that’s a marvelous chain. But this Radisson, it’s a mess. The wastepaper baskets! There’s far too few wastepaper baskets, and when you do find them, they’re always hidden away. Like they are objects of shame. I have by me now a tiny little wastepaper basket which contains a billowing plastic bag that makes it almost impossible to get anything into the bin. But that’s so the maid doesn’t have to touch it. The hotel is run for the benefit of the staff rather than for the customer.
Like Fawlty Towers. Maybe you should open your own hotel.
I think it would be a tremendous thing to do, and I may produce some training films again, because most people are absolutely clueless, but I like projects that have ends to them. With TV or a movie, you work on something for two years or six months and at the end of it, you move on. I would not be good at something that required year after year of attention.
That’s a big point of the new documentary on Monty Python. The other Pythons were angry when you quit the show a year before everyone else.
Two things: One is I did not like the fact that we were repeating a lot of our material, even if other people didn’t notice; the others didn’t care. They were having a good time. I think if one was playing “I’m the pure artist,” I would win on that one. The other thing was that I was carrying the alcoholic [the late Graham Chapman]. That seems to get forgotten in all of these discussions. They were completely blind to an extraordinarily important point, which was: I was the guy who was having to work with the alcoholic. They never said, ‘We’ll share part of that burden with you. I’ll write with him one day a week.’ This is never mentioned. It was ‘Oh, John was rather difficult … ’
How bad was it?
Well, I never knew what he was up to, because alcoholics — I now know quite a lot of them — they are all, I’m afraid, basically liars. The words are almost synonymous. There were two types of days: days where I did 80 percent of the work and days when Graham did 5 percent of the work. He was basically lazy, but he had two great qualities: He was the most extraordinary sounding board and he was capable of coming in with very good off-the-wall ideas. But he was very lazy.
In the doc, Terry Gilliam bashes your respect for psychotherapy.
I think Gilliam was so frightened of what he’d discover if he ever explored his own conscience. He is completely unbalanced, as are many of the Pythons. He is notably unbalanced.
You were the first man to say “shit” on the BBC, and possibly the first man to say “fuck” at a funeral — Chapman’s. What do you make of the controversy over an actress saying “fucking” on Saturday Night Live recently?
I think the older you get the more you begin to realize what a madhouse we live in. People get upset about things that don’t matter at all and people don’t really get upset at all about things that matter a lot. You’ve got a rotten, rickety old legal system that anyone with money can manipulate — and nobody goes around saying this; they go around worrying that somebody said “fuck.” I mean, frankly, it’s pathetic and so completely half-witted that you give up any expectation of any kind of rational behavior of any kind, in any way, as you get older. It’s a madhouse. There are small pockets of sanity, but the rest of it is irretrievably second-rate at best. So when these things come along now, I just shrug.
On the Fawlty Towers commentary you say it’s harder to laugh now.
You laugh less at entertainment because you’ve seen most of the jokes before and you can guess where the new ones are going. It’s not like when you’re young and you discover Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields or Eddie Izzard or Bill Hicks. What you begin to see is how funny life is. You turn Sean Hannity on and there is wall-to-wall insanity. They have absolutely no idea what clowns they are.
As you get older, are people getting stupider?
It can be depressing. But you have to let go of the idea that this can ever be a decent and rational place. I already have quite a lot of material for a new show I will call Why There Is No Hope. I’ve tried it out. A friend said it was fascinating afterwards because the more I destroyed people’s hope that this could ever be, in any way, a rational planet, the more they laughed.
Could you give me a preview?
Well, I’m a funny kind of professor at Cornell, and there is a psychology professor there called David Dunning who discovered that in order to know how good you are at something, it requires almost exactly the same skills and aptitude as it does to be good at that thing in the first place. In other words, if you’re a really good tennis player or mathematician then you know how to tell how good you are. But it also means if you’re absolutely no good at something then you lack exactly the skills to realize your idiocy. It explains why so many idiots out there have no idea that they’re idiots.
Do you run into this in comedy?
You find this particularly with scripts. I wrote a really good script for Disney, and the woman in charge wanted to make changes which were completely and utterly wrong. She had the confidence of the truly stupid. Then you look at the Republican Party: Here are people that are so out of touch with reality that it could be screamingly funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
As politics gets more childish, does satire get harder for you?
Yes. Take Sarah Palin — so many Republicans love her. I suddenly realized that in order to actually understand that someone is not very bright — or to be brutal, that they’re rather stupid — you really have to be more intelligent than them. Most Republicans aren’t smarter than Sarah Palin. It’s true.
If there is no hope, you must not trust Obama.
No, I have real hope for Obama, because I think without the slightest doubt he is operating from a considerably higher level of mental health than we’re used to in our politicians. I think that’s what frightens the shit out of Republicans. Because if you put very mad people in a room with very sane people the mad people start feeling madder, do you see what I mean? Whereas, if you put mad people in together — if you put the Gestapo in together — they’re all sort of reinforcing each other’s madness and everyone’s happy.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
gyro?
I think I may be drunk.* In Florence, bitches. (I just wrote "in Florence, itches," which may refer to my very first cold sore** breakout in Rome after 30 years of no cold sores and 6 months of celibacy. Which sucks, let me tell you. I mean, if I get cold sores then I should at least have done something ENJOYABLE to deserve them, right? None of this "I have no idea where they came from" crap. Because I am hideously vain, I retouched EVERY single picture of myself from Rome. Crusty face wounds are not so attractive.)
Otherwise, Florence is great. I've climbed up to the VERY TOP of the Palazzo Vecchio, have rambled around the restricted vaults of the Duomo (in between the ceiling vaults and the timber roof, pictured--it's like a moonscape), trundled up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, gone to Positano on the Amalfi coast, fortuitously run into the Giro d'Italia, and visited Rome for 5 days. Amazing!
*Expansion of comment on Bee-spot.
**Yeah, face herpes.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
popping the reality TV talent competition cherry
Ok, so I've had my little procrastination moment this morning and watched Susan Boyle perform on Britain's Got Talent (YouTube won't let me embed the video).
As former a musical theatre junkie, I am intimately acquainted with her song, "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. Now, I have to say that I was moved by her performance, but I think that that was due--at least in part--to the song itself, which is incredibly moving. To contrast, please listen to Ruthie Henshall (from the "Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert" 10th Anniversary performance in October 1995):
*Tears!* Boyle's excessive vibrato seems empty in comparison to Henshall's powerful but very well-controlled interpretation. Just singing loudly and vibrato-y does NOT a good singer make: Vibrato is not a toy, people! Nor is it a substitute for thoughtful interpretation or musical ability.
I was more impressed by this dude (Paul Potts):
At 0:27, he looks EXACTLY the way I feel when I'm forced to sing in front of people (and also, I imagine, the way people look when they're forced to listen to me sing in front of them). He sounds a tiny bit better than I do, though.
My confession: this is the FIRST TIME I've ever, ever watched one of these reality TV talent shows. You know what this means? I have never encountered Simon Cowell before. There's something quite... sexy, about him, isn't there? It's weird. In the video of Susan Boyle, he does these odd things with his eyebrows, and with Paul Potts, he's playing with a pen in his mouth. I'm a little disturbed. Is he like this on American Idol?
**If you want to listen to another musical theatre exemplar, go to YouTube and type in Lea Salonga.
As former a musical theatre junkie, I am intimately acquainted with her song, "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables. Now, I have to say that I was moved by her performance, but I think that that was due--at least in part--to the song itself, which is incredibly moving. To contrast, please listen to Ruthie Henshall (from the "Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert" 10th Anniversary performance in October 1995):
*Tears!* Boyle's excessive vibrato seems empty in comparison to Henshall's powerful but very well-controlled interpretation. Just singing loudly and vibrato-y does NOT a good singer make: Vibrato is not a toy, people! Nor is it a substitute for thoughtful interpretation or musical ability.
I was more impressed by this dude (Paul Potts):
At 0:27, he looks EXACTLY the way I feel when I'm forced to sing in front of people (and also, I imagine, the way people look when they're forced to listen to me sing in front of them). He sounds a tiny bit better than I do, though.
My confession: this is the FIRST TIME I've ever, ever watched one of these reality TV talent shows. You know what this means? I have never encountered Simon Cowell before. There's something quite... sexy, about him, isn't there? It's weird. In the video of Susan Boyle, he does these odd things with his eyebrows, and with Paul Potts, he's playing with a pen in his mouth. I'm a little disturbed. Is he like this on American Idol?
**If you want to listen to another musical theatre exemplar, go to YouTube and type in Lea Salonga.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
the best time of my life
Hogwash. And the next person who tells me that being in one's 30s is so much better than being in one's 20s is going to get a swift kick to the head. Let's put it this way:
And this morning I learned that:
I waited until I hung up.
Listen, I know I am ridiculous. But I'm turning 30 on Sunday (did I mention that?) and it kind of sucks in the "personal life" department right now. Thank God I have Blythe on speed dial to talk me down from the ledge.
- I'm turning 30 on Sunday.
- The most recent Ex moved across several continents to be with Girlfriend 2.0.
- My college boyfriend is engaged.
- The English boy who broke my heart in 2001 is married.
- My little brother is married.
- I haven't dated anyone seriously for almost 2 years.
And this morning I learned that:
- My little brother's wife is PREGNANT.
- Also, I'm turning 30 on Sunday.
I waited until I hung up.
Listen, I know I am ridiculous. But I'm turning 30 on Sunday (did I mention that?) and it kind of sucks in the "personal life" department right now. Thank God I have Blythe on speed dial to talk me down from the ledge.
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