A Small Complaint

I’m not overly fussed about etiquette.  By virtue of being an American in the UK, I’m automatically rude before I open my mouth (but then, I do have an expressive face.)  I don’t take umbrage at spelling and punctuation mistakes in social media (unless it strikes me as funny, then God help you).  My phone conversations often begin without greeting and my guests are expected to raid the fridge.

However.  I’m starting to get annoyed.

I am a person who values . . . now can you guess what a writer might value?  Her thesaurus, yes.  Any other suggestions?  A room of her own.  Okay, all Ph.D. students are prohibited from answering for a moment.  You.  Yes, you, the woman in the back who slept in her clothes and has that look of impatience on her face.  (She’s probably American.)

Communication.  Exactly.

I communicate now to the purveyors of a writer’s work.  When you solicit us.  When you head hunt a writer.  When you want us to spread the word about what you’re doing, you have entered into an etiquette contract with us.

For all the editors who ask us to write something for your publication, the polite thing is to email a response when we ask for clarification or parameters, or to put forward topic suggestions.  The organisers who want your production reviewed, please say yes or no when we ask for an interview rather than pretend we didn’t.  The directors who want your play featured, please keep us in the loop when you change the rehearsal venue or time or both.  The groups who charge double digits for your competitions, announce your short list, because the losers financed that shindig. 

 

Life can be rough enough without breaching etiquette.  In the bigger scheme of things, of war and poverty, abuse and bigotry, this is a small complaint.  But the way we treat each other in the mundane exchanges can sometimes make or break us. 

Being a writer does not mean I’m a voice activated word generator.  If you want me to write for you, communicate with me.  The rude American thanks you.

Don't Kill the Monster

It’s been a wonderful and strange week in this world, hasn’t it?  The US government’s still shut down.  In the UK, legislation was passed to make landlords, banks and GPs participate in the xenophobic witch hunt called immigration control.  And the Spirit Moose in Canada was legally killed by non-indigenous hunters. 

Then Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize.  We chuckled over David Gilmour showing his narrow minded ass.  The White Hats win and they’re worn by women.  Canadian women.  If Munro had been gay and Chinese, I would’ve gone back to church.  Having said that, it’s here where we move a little too close to the self-destruct edge.

Let me tell you about a cat.  Stray Eddie.  A pot bellied, one eyed, scrofulous, geriatric stray with hair like an American opossum.  In other words, icky.  We very kindly brought him into our home where he promptly savaged the Butler, terrorised the much smaller females, urinated in all the wrong places, jumped up on the table during meals with the expectation he could eat from our plates.

What an ingrate.  He had to go.  The Butler rang round and was told by cat rescues that the only solution was euthanasia.  Okay, our home had been taken over by the North Yorkshire Monster, but euthanasia?  You do know what that means.  Kill the monster.  Kill.  The.  Monster. 

Kill.

We weren’t going to do that.  Fortunately, our vet explained cat behaviour to us and we realised we’d been making Stray Eddie more and more stressed out.  Here we had an elderly cat with a collar mark still in his fur who apparently had never been let outside and seems to’ve lived alone with one person who treated him like a human companion.  Now he’s been turfed out only to find shelter where he's under siege by other cats and the new humans have no manners.  On the plus side, he seemed to like the Big Nosed Dog. 

So we’ve implemented the vet’s attitude adjustment plan (to the humans) and immediately, things’ve calmed down.  The cats aren’t merrily skipping round a May Pole, but the reign of terror is over.  Stray Eddie and our calico are in the kitchen together watching birds as I write.  I’m certain they still hate each other, but you can’t have everything.

The same tactics apply to the human world.  In his interview, Jon Stewart asked Malala how she reacted to learning that she’d become a Taliban target.  She said her first thought was that she’d take a shoe and defend herself.  Then she thought, if she used violence, she’d be no different than her attackers.  She decided that she would tell them how important education was – for their children, too – and then say, ‘Now do what you want.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGL6YY6oMs

I doubt she had time for dialogue before she was shot.  However, even after the attempt on her life, she believes that we can only bring change through dialogue and peace.  How wow is that?

We have the power to be wow, too.  Or to be Monsters to someone else.  Writers tweet, blog, express more succinctly and thus more convincingly than most.  Therein lies the strength and the danger.  We can be the GOP holding an entire nation hostage – not just Democrats but children, cancer patients, veterans, the elderly – or we can be Malalas who put down our weapons and recognise the humanity in each other.

Today is National Coming Out Day.  Today there will be children as young as Malala and adults as old as myself who take that step, who hope they will be met with dialogue rather than weapons.  Some lives won’t survive today.  But the reason the possibility exists for a Coming Out Day is because of the belief that dialogue and communication can win out over weapons and hatred.  When they do, it takes our breath away.

My hand is up to say I’m guilty of all sorts of –isms.  I know they’re more naughty fun than being Malala.  But you and I are the communicators.  We have a huge responsibility to do no harm.  After you’ve been shot, after someone kills your Spirit Moose, after the opposition passes a bill you dislike, don’t pick up a gun, don’t shut down the government, don’t kill the monster.  Don’t deride, don’t ridicule, don’t alienate. 

Create.  Communicate.

Austen & Twitter

Since last I wrote, we've celebrated the 200th anniversary of Pride & Prejudice, and my list of Twitter followers broke the 20 threshold.  The conglomeration of synapses which is my brain combines these two things to ponder the constant flux in culture.

I’m the one never given a Netflix vote in our house because inevitably, I choose a costume drama.  At sixteen, my favourite author was Tolstoy and even today, I’m not above causing a pained look on my son’s face by admitting in public that I really love Dickens.  Along the way, I’ve read everything Austen.

 

                                                           My current read.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m happy with my era.  While I quite fancy Georgian breeches, they in no way compensate for the lack of antibiotics.  It’s the effect of time and place on perception that intrigues me.  Who would I be, had I been born a hundred years earlier than I was? 

                                                   Obviously the hired help.

But cultural change happens today at a rate I imagine is unprecedented.  If you were walking down the street and overheard a conversation between two strangers, would you interject?  Would you interject abusively?  If you were at a party talking to an interesting person who changed the subject to something that didn’t interest you, would you walk away without excusing yourself?  

                                         Or would you cut off their virtual head?

These things happen on the internet all the time.

Being a newbie, the Twitter culture still fascinates me.  The  compression of complex communications into 140 characters, the etiquette, the sudden and truly wonderful connections with a wider community.  Followers come and go so quickly, it has nothing to do with me.  I’m the person followed, but the following isn’t personal.  When I post a blog pertinent to the texture and flavour of bananas, then I collect a banana enthusiast following.  When my next blog is about the evils which be snow, I lose banana followers and gain snow invasion conspiracists. 

                                                        Big Nosed dog rescue.

This may seem basic e-procedure, but it’s also a cultural dynamic.  With the information overload on the web, we have to discern and discard quickly.  It’s what our brains do in order to set aside the superfluous when there’s a tiger stalking us.  In fact, we have a wonderful ability to habituate and ignore irrelevant stimuli.  Stick a rose under your nose and see how soon you stop smelling it.

But . . . on the other side of the snow blog that you’ve rejected, there is a person.  We are changing the way we interact with and habituate people.  Don’t think I’m gearing up to rage about the erosion of society.  This is an observation on society in flux.  Just as I look backwards via Austen, Tolstoy and Dickens into an imperfect representation of their societies and try to imagine that experience, I look forward to myself growing old in a society that puts an electronic spin on interpersonal dynamics. 

So the Tolstoy loving teen that I was didn’t own a mobile and had limited access to the telephone because there was no call waiting.  Notes were passed, not text messages, and depending on the situation, might be confiscated by adults loitering in my environment.  Letters often took a week to arrive, were written on paper chosen to designate the level of intimacy with and personality of the sender AND the handwriting was as personal as the message inside.  Communication took time, attention to detail and could be attributed to its source.

Today, if you wait 24 hours to answer an emotion wrought text or email, you’re ignoring the sender, rather than giving it the weight you may think it deserves.  The generation growing up with electronic and instant communications has to field and respond at what my teenage self would have thought was an impossible speed.  There will be a trade off for this virtual age, but I believe humanity will still want to belong, will still want authenticity and intimacy in its relationships.  I hope I’m founded in that belief because I think it will be a singular challenge.

                              Unlike our excursions into the past, we won’t have a map.