Terrible Translation of the Day

While trying to put my Riverdale addition to good use, I went to youtube on a fruitless quest for Polish dubbing. Poles don't do dubbing. For some reason unfathomable to the rest of the world, they prefer to have an emotionless voice reading a Polish translation over the original dialogue. I don't know how they stand it, and it's hard not to see it as part of a complicated plot to keep the rest of the world from learning Polish. Not having any geographical defences, they construct linguistic walls to keep everyone out--except, apparently, foreign wives and Antonia Lloyd Jones.

I haven't found any Riverdale episodes with Polish subtitles which makes me suspect the dubbing is happening to it, the horror. (Imagine deep male voice: O-Jaghaid-ko-ham-chay-eh.) However, I did find a clip of an interview with Cole Sprouse, and the subtitles turned "Jughead" into "Chuck Adam."

If it weren't for the linguistic walls, I'd advise unemployed English Lit graduates to learn Polish and become English-to-Polish translators because something seriously wrong is going on there.

To show friends and enemies (to whom my blog readership is now reduced) the depths of my pop culture/linguistic insanity, here is a Polish translation of "Mad World." For, to quote TV-Jughead's most iconic speech, "In case you haven't noticed, I'm weird. I'm a weirdo." Besides, you'll also see what anglophone students of Polish are up against.

Update: Naturally it is problematic to be watching Riverdale at all. I know that. Sex & the City was a gazillion times worse though.

Brain-changer

Student not working to his capability.

Yesterday afternoon Benedict Ambrose and I went to a lunch party to celebrate Palm Sunday and the Feast of the Annunciation. There were almost a dozen guests, including a relatively recent newcomer to the Edinburgh Extraordinary Form, to whom I have never really had a chance to speak. BA's and my after-Mass social life was much curtailed last year by BA's awful illness, and he still hasn't regained his old energy levels.

However, I was very interested in speaking to this newcomer, in part because newcomers to the Trad Scene are congenial company, but largely because he is a native speaker of Polish. As I've pointed out to my Polish tutor, who feels guilty for being paid for conversations she enjoys, there are many language-learning skills I can develop on my own, but spontaneous Polish dialogue is not among them. 

Speaking languages at parties that few others around can understand is not exceedingly polite. However, occasionally at after-Mass gatherings the Poles or the French-speakers or the German-speakers do have tete-a-tetes in their beloved languages. And so after two glasses of sherry and some interesting chat in English about the development of modern Polish, I asked my surprised interlocutor if we might converse in Polish. 

Amusingly, after my good-natured acquaintance agreed to this plan, he listened to my Polish with a palpable intensity akin to mine when I listen to anyone speak Polish. I assume that I am going to speak Polish with a heavy Canadian accent for as long as I live, but I don't mind as long as I am intelligible. And I seemed to be intelligible, and I understood about 75% of what he said. That, let me tell you, is a massive improvement. 

It's curious, this language building. It is a LOT of work, just as becoming a wiry amateur boxer was a lot of work. But on the other hand, its results come as a surprise. Counting vocabulary cards is easy, but it is difficult to quantify how much your conversation skills have improved. 

While watching a clip from "Riverdale", I saw that Jughead's school records--held against him by Sheriff Keller--were almost legible. I found a screenshot online (above), and I had to laugh because although I did do SOMEWHAT better than TV-Jughead in some courses (and worse in others), the straight As across the board in English, with less impressive grades everywhere else, looked all too familiar. 

Which brings me back again to my post-graduate lesson that hard, hard work can make up for a lack of natural talent. And also to my conviction that externals matter, and what you listen to, watch, experience and speak about shapes your brain and thus your mind and character, too. The Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan invited his readers to watch themselves thinking; I'm watching my brain change, especially the part connected to my ears. 

Not a lot of language skills are immediately transferrable, by the way. You can memorise 2,000 vocabulary words from flashcards and not be able to pronounce them correctly, let alone string them into fluid sentences. However, forcing myself to listen to Polish audiobooks has led both to easier comprehension of Poles speaking Polish (fellow foreigners speaking Polish, not so much) and to hearing recorded lyrics. The latter skill is perhaps not all that relevant, but it is a palpable improvement in my ability to process what I hear.

My goal of ready fluency does not seem quite so elusive these days. One Polish acquaintance who came to the UK with almost no English at all (having not worked much at school) eventually learned to speak it very well, with an accent, yes, but also picking up colloquial Scottish words. When I asked him what changed, he said it was as if a switch in his brain had flipped. 

It's been six years of study, and the switch hasn't flipped for me, but I think it eventually will.   

Language advice bonus: Write online about a country or countries where your target language is spoken. If something you write pleases native speakers of your target language greatly, one or two of them may translate it and pose it online so their non-English-speaking countrymen may enjoy it, too. I just discovered this piece translated into what looks to me like very good Polish. I've read only 350 words of the translation so far, but it seems to be faithful to what I actually wrote and perhaps even preserves my style.

Update: Cancel that. When the first-person narrative begins, I am turned into a man. In Polish, unlike in English, you can always tell if a speaker is male or female from the verb endings. For some unfathomable reason, the translator assumed I was male. Although disappointing, this adds to my motivation to reach the official European Union C1 or C2 level in Polish. Then I can translate all my work likely to be of interest to Poles myself. 

The one problem with this, however, is that I am not sure it is psychologically possible to reach C1 or C2 without an immersion situation.  Polish Pretend Son is definitely at the C2 level, but then he lived in the UK for five years or so and is writing a doctoral dissertation that frequently cites American philosophers.  

Words to Live By

The problems in our society are going to be fixed by people who actually know how things work, not by ideologues.

--Jordan B. Peterson

****
If you have time, read the whole interview.

After you have read the post I wrote this morning, of course. 

Cultural Adventure of Rip Van McWinkle

If you want to be a popular blogger--which I used to be, relatively speaking and within my niche, five years ago---don't  close and open blogs and hop around like I do. However, if you want to write publicly but feel that you are somewhat under the radar, feel free.

It's not entirely an illusion. Words on the internet are as plentiful and frequent as rain on Glasgow. After twenty years of falling, the accumulated words are a vast, unplumbable ocean. Even a targeted Google search by a friend or foe would bring them to the edge of the murky rock pool that is twelve years of my own online writing.

While I was an undergraduate, I lived in a student co-op house for a memorable year, and on the floor below mine was a plump M.A. candidate who read James Joyce and smoked dope. Still overly impressed by graduate students, I mistook Oren for an oracle.

"History," he pronounced during one of our rare conversations, "is text."

A lifelong diarist, I thought those were the truest words I had ever heard that side of campus. They continued to sink into my brain, even when, two or three years after I left the house, Oren said they were complete nonsense. Hadn't I noticed how much dope he had smoked?

Yeah, but traditionally pagan oracles were usually stoned one way or another, wern't they?

Many years later, possibly after I met B.A., I understood that history is also cultural artefacts. I wished I had done a better job, as a diarist, in describing the material objects that would differentiate the 1970s from the 1980s, the 1980s from the 1990s, and so on.

One of the problems, perhaps, is that one does not know which fishes to catch in one's diaristic nets. (How did I know in 1985 that I would want to recreate it in words in 2015?) And then, of course, I gradually lost interest in pop culture, at first lagging behind, but then ignoring it completely. This may be normal for adults, especially childless ones. In 1985, I could had a good idea of the Top 10 hits of the given day. In 2018, I have no idea at all, unless "Believer" by the [Something] Dragons is still there.

I know about "Believer" only because of "Riverdale", and I know about "Riverdale" only because a disaster befell the Historical House and B.A. and I were temporarily rehoused in a flat furnished with Netflix. And being prone to sudden obsessions, I have binge-watched "Riverdale" and gone online to read what other watchers think of it.

Suddenly I feel like Rip Van Winkle, woken up to a new world. Those who were babies when I fell asleep to pop culture are now grown up and writing in a strange jargon, often with a brutal frankness that is crudely obscene. They trade in a host of references to television shows and movies that I have never heard of, let alone watched. I have discovered that Facebook is "for old people", and I suspect blogging is, too. History is no longer text (if it ever was) but digital photographs, digital films, digital music.

This is why, by the way, I stopped giving advice to Singles. My hermeneutic was that human nature doesn't change, and so my experience as a Single adult in the 90s and 00s could be helpful to Singles now. However, I am no longer sure about this because I know that constant attention to digital culture--bathing in music and images and hieroglyphic text speak--rewires the human mind, making the human brain physically different from that of the human being who works by hand, reads, chats to acquaintances in his favourite brunch cafe, and occasionally puts a record on a turntable.

To paraphrase the Buggles, Tinder killed the internet star.

I know also that the very powerful people who direct the digital culture are deliberately trying to change human nature, to bring about the "equality of outcome" that Jordan Peterson is so afraid of.* They seem to think truth is not what is, but what you make it, and they are determined to make truth what they think it should be. This is extremely frightening.

Digital culture preaches a message of tolerance and respect for difference, but only those  differences that are compatible with its own overarching worldview. On "Riverdale", Jughead is corrected for "telling a story that is not his to tell" after he writes indignantly of the massacre of the Native American tribe who used to live where Riverdale is now. But on the most recent episode of Riverdale, yet another character has been dragged against her will to a Roman Catholic home run by Roman Catholic nuns, this time to undergo conversion therapy.

Dear Hollywood, dear Entertainment Industrial Complex, you're performing conversion therapy on us.

I am caught up on all the episodes "Riverdale", and will do my best not to think of it again until Thursday, when the next episode reaches the UK, via Netflix. I'm kind of amazed that, here I am, in synch with a contemporary, still-developing artefact of American pop culture.

Although in the UK, I watch mostly boring television with B.A. (mostly cooking shows and "Sherlock" when it appears), being plugged into something mainstream aimed at, and performed by, American Millennials feels really different. Although "Riverdale" has distracted me from objectively more valuable pursuits, I feel strangely awake.

Riverdale Outrageously Appropriates My Culture

Poor Addicted Seraphic 

This morning I took to the internet to find out if other people are have my substance abuse problem, the substance being "Riverdale". It was a relief to find it described as a "phenomenon" and discover that college kids leave clubs in time to get back to the dorm to watch it. Also a relief: the average age of viewers is 42.

Various entertainment writers ponder why the show is such a hit amongst todays TV-adverse teens, but so far none of them mention dopamine-induced-by-rapid-editing-and-music. But among the various theories is that the "Riverdale" writing team reads internet commentary by fans on the series and tailors their writing accordingly.

Once again I should point out that "Riverdale" is not a show you want influencing your children. Possibly you should be 42 before you watch it, or at least old enough not to compare real-life love interests unfavourably to Archie and Jughead.

Critics seem most disturbed by the astonishingly horrible (but creative!) punishment Jughead and the under-18 wing of the Southside Serpents mete upon the gang's super-crooked female lawyer. However, I think it very unlikely that the vast majority of today's children are ever going to be tempted into such scenarios. They will, however, have to cope with a world that worships sex, and all the teenagers in Riverdale worship sex: ordinary sex, same-sex sex, dressing up in costumes sex.

(Pregnancy, by the way, is a mysterious thing that just happens to the occasional girl, like being pooped on by a pigeon flying overhead.)

Sex as Religion

In Riverdale sex is a religion with excellent ecumenical dialogue between most of its branches. Sex without love is a-okay, if that's your thing, but the attitude of Riverdale's heroes towards actual prostitution remains ambiguous. The old-fashioned kind is considered extremely icky, whereas internet stuff is, somehow, merely edgy. Darling Betty, who is supposed to be the Good Girl, is drawn to the dark cult of stranger sex, as long as it is just online.

(Is a passionate relationship with the tortured leader of the Southside Serpent Under-18's not enough? Dear heavens.)

But for some reason, which I still cannot comprehend, the writers of ""Riverdale" have decided to introduce a rival religion to sex, without actually daring to underscore its formerly famous ethical objections to sex between anyone but the married.  That rival religion is, of course, Catholicism.

It is, however, Catholicism as few Catholics would recognise it.

In Season One, we see flashes of gold crosses on Betty and Betty's mother and, of course, an outrageously stereotyped--verging on a hate crime--Catholic home for unwed mothers and juvenile delinquents, complete with some nuns in post-Vatican 2 habits and others in pre-Vatican 2 habits. One gets the sense, however, that Betty and her family are not themselves Catholics. It's just that Catholics cornered the local homes for unwed mothers market twenty-five year years ago.

In Season Two the treatment of Catholicism becomes utterly ridiculous. We have the Latino Lodges to thank for this. Oh, and The Godfather, naturally.

1. Disrespect for the Queen of Heaven

First, when Veronica's mother goes to church to pray for a friend, she directs her gaze not towards the Blessed Sacrament or a crucifix, but to the worst statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary I have yet seen on television. The statue has big white eyes that I would find comical had I no love whatsoever for the BVM. As it is, I am aggrieved. Nobody would paint eyes like that on a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., so why is it okay to portray any Catholic saint, let alone the most important Catholic saint,  that way?

2. So, like, our Sacraments are sacred, you know? 

Second, when Veronica's parents decide she should be confirmed, it becomes immediately apparent that the writers have absolutely no idea what a Roman Catholic Confirmation is supposed to look like. It's as if they saw some Puppet Masses on Youtube and, while tossing the puppets, retained their spirit.

This could be why Veronica's Confirmation features a tailor-made white dress instead of an alb and Josie of Josie and the Pussy-Cats singing "Bittersweet Symphony" mid-way through Mass.

Reducing the Sacrament of Confirmation a Latino coming-of-age ritual is itself offensive, but this is mildly mitigated by the fact that in Latin America and the USA, Confirmation often is reduced to a Latino coming-of-age ritual.  However, there is no getting around the really horrible scenes around Veronica's reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the Blessed Sacrament.

I fast-forwarded through most of Veronica's bizarre Confirmation Mass because I just couldn't bear it. Her Confession was horror enough. First, you would think that she might have mentioned all the premarital sex she'd had, but no. Mustn't frighten the audience by suggesting for a single second that there might have been something wrong with it. She doesn't go much into her Mean Girl past, either. Veronica's idea of sin is having disrespected her gangster parents a few times. She made a much better confession to Betty in Season One.

But what is seriously awful is that Veronica asks the walking stereotype Monsignor Murphy for counsel, and he refuses to give it to her. He just slaps her with a bunch of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, sketches an absolution, and that is that. From any Catholic point of view, this is outrageous.

And then Veronica takes Communion and rejects Satan, etc., etc., and a golden light LITERALLY shines on her from above.

3. Catholics as Superstitious Butt-covering Hypocrites  

Third, before Veronica's Confirmation, she has a sort of hen party with her female relations, who talk about how they depend on their Catholic faith for hope that their criminal husbands come home alive and to assuage their consciences for all the bad stuff that they do.

To quote the entire generation of North Americans Millennials, that is just SO offensive.

I cannot imagine how one attempts to convince the writers of "Riverdale" not to reduce the religion of over one billion people worldwide, whose rituals are not a secret and can be seen anywhere, to an offensive cartoon.  I am hoping that amongst the social media movers and shakers, there are devout Catholic fans who write "Come on, guys. Don't do that to my religion."

A Modest Proposal

Maybe Father James Martin, SJ, could stage an intervention, which is a mind-boggling thought, but when I think about it, he's the celebrity priest Hollywood is most likely to have heard of, isn't he?  And "Riverdale" is just weird enough that I can imagine Father Martin making a cameo appearance.

And to get the writers' attention, here's for the Google search: "Riverdale appropriates my culture."

Delicious Lies

Does not happen now.

Why do some of us become obsessed with television shows? I am asking this assuming that other people get obsessed with television shows. The secret of my advice-giving success is the insight that my mind is probably only about 10% unique and the rest of it can be classified as Human Female, and therefore things that work for me might work for other Human Females, 90% of the time.

Part of my 10% uniqueness is a terror of mathematics, so don't quote me on those percentages.

I don't want to guess at how much the 90% of Human Female Mind is identical to that of 90% of Human Male Mind. Obviously there are similarities, but there are clearly differences. Interestingly, although men abuse drugs more than women do, apparently, women get addicted to them faster.

But I am not a scientist, so I will abandon any pretence at clinical-trial type objectivity and go with my gut. In short, I think the success of "Riverdale" is tied to its idealisation of the teenage years. It's not just the rapid pace, emotional zig-zags, palpitation-inducing blasts of Imagine Dragons' "Believer," and Archie's chest.  I admit I think those things have a lot to do with the dopamine surges I've been experiencing.  Well, not Archie's chest, which should have its own zip code. Tooooo alarming. But, really, it's the glorious chance to rewrite in our heads the ghastly experience of being teenagers.

First of all, very few of us were that good-looking as teenagers. Not only did we not look like Betty, Veronica and Cheryl, the boys did not look like Archie or Jughead. What we looked like, and what the boys who actually "liked" us looked like, was a source of great pain. Therefore, it comes as a great relief to identify with godlings from Mount Olympus (or wherever Hollywood found them).

Second, very few of us were that clever. Well, few of us were as clever as Jughead, Betty and Cheryl Blossom, who, though criminally insane, is rocking a 4.0.

One of the iconic moments of the show (and not just for me, I have discovered) is when TV-Jughead (who is 10% Original Jughead and 90% smouldering coal) appears at Betty's bedroom window at the top of a ladder and says, "Hey there, Juliet. Nurse off-duty?

Okay, TV-Jughead is 15-going-on-16 when he delivers those immortal lines. In real life, 15-year-old-boys do not say things like that. We wish they did, but they didn't and don't. At least, not in my experience. Although I was at an all-girls' school, I arranged to be around teenage boys when I could, and no, they were not making clever allusions to Shakespeare.

Incidentally, Beloved is Betty's favourite book ever, and while I was so sick on Tuesday I wondered if never having read Beloved meant that I was a Bad Person.

Jughead, age 15/16, is writing a novel, and his model is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which I haven't read either. When I was 15, I wasn't attempting to write a novel.  I was writing Star Trek fan fiction. On the other hand, I also wrote an extra scene for Romeo and Juliet as an English class project, and a dialogue between Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the suitability of Raymond Souster's poetry for study in my Catholic school.  My enthusiasm for literature was tempered by a deep, frowny suspicion for anything overtly erotic.

Jughead also makes allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, which makes me wonder if we are supposed to believe that he (15/16) has actually read Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the interests of separating delicious lies about teenage life from the plodding truth, I now invite readers to tell me what you were reading and writing by choice when you were teenagers, specifically between the ages of 15 and 17, if you remember in that much detail. I did read Sylvia Path at about 13, I suddenly recall. It's not out of the realm of the possible.

Oh, and also: did you ever ride a motorcycle, as either driver or passenger, as a teen? Your humble correspondent did not, although she came close at the age of 27 when she got lost on Capri and a 20-something mechanic gave her a ride back to civilisation on the back of his Vespa.

Did not happen then. 

I have a theory that the writers of "Riverdale", being writers, identify with TV-Jughead because he IS a writer, and therefore have made him, not Archie, the real star of the show. That they have given him a tattoo, a motorcycle, and the crazy blonde is surely evidence of this theory.

The Dating Project

I did not get an wink of sleep on Monday night and as a result was ill all Tuesday. But the bright side of that was that I had an internet fast. That was great because---screen addiction.

How many human beings are addicted to the internet, I wonder. How many are actually addicted to television? How many people are addicted to the rage that surges through them when they read about things that make them mad? I worry about this a lot now, for reasons obvious to my newest readers.

So I was very happy that this week I had the opportunity to write about something that made me happy: an article about The Dating Project movie.

(I also planned a follow-up to this article on an eye-opening homily, so consulted Polish Pretend Son, who pelted me with colourful insults, and his pal The Giant, who didn't.)

I wish more professors made asking someone out on an a chaste, alcohol-free date a prerequisite for passing their courses. Kerry Cronin, the angel of the Lonergan Research Institute, as she really was (and probably still is), used to make it an optional part of her course.  However, she discovered that few students actually went through with it because they were just too scared.

Kerry makes girls ask out boys, not just the boys ask the girls, which I would normally not recommend, but as her motives are educational, I think it at least makes girls consider just how frightening asking a girl out really is for a guy. I read somewhere (or heard from Jordan Peterson) that the terror involved in asking out a girl is directly proportionate to how much the boy likes her, so I'm amazed to think now how totally in love with me most boys were in the 1980s.

Just kidding.