“You can imagine what it smells like”
“British comedian does a bit on trans people” is a phrase that normally strikes fear in the heart, but Joe Lycett here is funny without punching down.
What I like about it is that it’s neither making fun of trans people or the idea of being trans, nor doing easy dunking on transphobes, but that Lycett takes the time to explain these concepts in between the humourous bits. Most of the humour here is aimed at the commercialisation of Pride and how much of it only focuses on the “g” in LGBT at the expense of the other letters and how some of these letters, like trans people feel under attakc by the right wing press, but not as much as they are under attack by “my mum’s friend, Linda”. It’s well thought out and sympathetic and it’s so rare to see this. Going through the rabbit hole of Youtube recommended clips of Channel 4 comedy panel shows and stumbling over this was a very pleasant surprise.
Why keep a large library?
Umberto Eco walking through his 30,000 library to get a book he knows exactly where to find it is such a power move:
Some nerdy Economist writer: hE cAn’T hAvE rEaD aLl ThOsE bOoKs:
I’m a huge Umberto Eco fan, fiction and non-fiction.
But his private library – said to contain 30,000 books – is clearly nonsense.
That’s more than *a book a day every day of his adult life*. Can we please get a tiny bit serious?
All in defense of the idea that people only keep books to impress others, a dumb person’s idea of what would impress a clever person. Why would anybody be impressed by the mere fact you can write books written by much more smarter people than you (and the occasional numbnut)? But what struck me the most with this particular tweet from that thread was the sheer inability to understand what a personal library is for and how it functions. That idea that it should only contain the books you’re going to read immediately, that anything else is preening is just incomprehensible. Fair enough if that’s your personal preference, but beware that it’s a strange notion to have if you’re not forced to by matters of economics or convenience.
The entire thread has a very, ah, economist view of books in that they have to be useful and should be discarded if no longer so. It’s on a par with the prolier than thou leftie clickbaiter that you should sell or donate any books you have read or not planning to read right now because otherwise you’re hoarding. The assumption that you always know what you want to read or need to read and can plan accordingly and therefore you only need to keep those books to hand. Real life never works that way. And even if it did, insisting this is the only way to read is denying yourself the pleasures of choice, of having that freedom to say fuck it and read something else.
oh also, people have a comically phony number of books!
The dude in FT story has a library of 8000 books – has he been reading 2 books a week for 80 years??A solid year of reading (say 50 books) = 90cm of bookshelf. So people with 100m of books are full of it.
Perhaps it’s just that you’re a slow reader if you think fifty books is a year’s worth of reading and that’s why you’re so amazed at libraries of thousands of books. But to think Umberto Eco, of all people, wouldn’t have been able to read all the books in his library? Not that he necesssarily had, as Eco knew the value of unread books. The incredulity at what are not that large libraries is hilarious, the misunderstanding that every book in it is meant to be read is dangerous. Not every book you buy needs to be read right away; not every book needs to be read at all. There’s a pleasure in simply having a book. Lords know I’ve bought books with no intention to read them. The greatest joy of any library is having books at hand to be able to read whenever you choose to. Especially if, like Umberto Eco, you grew up pre-internet when you either had to have them yourself or you had to hope the local library had them or you were out of luck…
Let’s just get rid of this idea that you have to justify why you keep a library or when or how you read. Just accept that people differ in how they read and that there’s more value in a library than it just having the books you need to read right now.
All those phonies arguing about Holden again
Latest one day Twitter controversy was the eternal debate about The Catcher in the Rye, kicked off this time by somebody who apparantly felt the need to warn women against men who like Holden Caulfield too much. By the time it crossed my feed, the backlash against that position was already in full swing, but I do feel the need to add my two cents. To start with, is there actually anybody under the age of sixty who has The Catcher in the Rye as their favourite book, or Holden as their hero?
Doubt.
Furthermore, is anybody ever honest about why they dislike The Catcher in the Rye so much? I’ve seen all this before, back to the days of Usenet and rec.arts.sf.written, I know what this is about. It’s the pure resentment of the book nerd for being made to read books in school they didn’t enjoy. Normal people just write this off as just another annoying thing that high school forced them to do, but to your average book lover it’s an insult that they’re made to read books they don’t want to. How dare they make me read this trash when I could be reading something I’d actually enjoy. I don’t need this, I’m a reader, not so slavish television consumer. That’s the mindset we’re dealing with here, the 16 year old intellectual outraged that their teacher puts them on the same level as their class mates. A resentment stoked and nurtured for decades. And poor old Catcher gets it in the neck because it’s one of a few novels everybody had to read in high school.
You can’t really say that of course without being laughed at, so you get all those high faluting excuses about Holden as an exemplar of toxic masculinity blah blah blah. Occassionally you get some earnest young puritants involved too who think all fictional characters should be moral exemplars and who cannot get their head around unsympathetic protagonists, but usually it’s just boomers and gen-xers begrudging their high school English classes.
Translating the untranslatable
English speakers have a fascination with foreign language words that don’t translate easily into their own language, as seen in this New Yorker tweet promoting an article on “untranslatable words” describing happiness:
From “utepils” (Norwegian, “beer that is enjoyed outside, particularly on the first hot day of the year”) to “mbuki-mvuki” (Bantu, “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited”), the Positive Lexicography Project gathers untranslatable words describing happiness.
Which annoyed actual translator Jocelyne Allen greatly:
Auuugh!! Nothing is untranslatable! You translated those “untranslatable” words in this very tweet! They were translated, thus they are translatable! Can we please stop with this stuff before I have a rage aneurysm??
I get where she’s coming from, because it is lazy and dismissive to call this sort of thing untranslatable, when in the same tweet they’re perfectly able to at leasst the concepts behind them. It’s also somewhat patronising, this idea of untranslatable words, there’s always that undertone of if we didn’t invent a word to describe this concept, how important can it be. Othering even, emphasising how strange or silly these foreigners are for having a word for drinking beer outside. So I get the frustration.
On the other hand, there is a difference between having a word for something and being able to describe something. You can describe “utepils”, as that anonymous New Yorker social media person did, but do you grok it the way a Norwegian would? Clearly translating it needs more than just describing it, right, because you can’t just drop in a charmless description like that every time it comes up in your depressing Scandinavian crime thriller. So not untranslatable, but translating it does mean it loses a bit of cultural specificity.