Things I had to look up: tannoy

From a story today in the U.K. Guardian:

'We can't give you information. We haven't got a Tannoy'

The Guardian, Saturday March 29 2008

I knew we were in trouble when the man in the shiny suit appeared with a trolley of bottled water and granola bars.

Our British Airways flight from Vancouver had already been delayed twice -- trouble refuelling and trouble finding somewhere to dock -- but even as we walked into the crowded but strangely inactive baggage hall in the new Terminal 5, nobody was telling us that we had just flown into the sort of fiasco that the British seem to do so particularly well.

Queues had already formed at the customer assistance desks but the smiling, slightly wild-eyed staff had almost nothing to offer. Even after six hours of chaos, nobody had been briefed. Nobody knew anything. The desks, probably knocked together by a carpenter some time during the night, were bare. I'm not even sure they had telephones. Not that it would have helped if they had. "I have tried calling," one young woman told me, waving a sheet of contact numbers. "But nobody's answering." ... As the jet-lagged crowd slumped on the floor in the vast baggage claim area (the genius of the Richard Rogers Partnership did not extend to a single chair or bench), BAA officials were keen to impress on us that they had done their job. The lights were on. The conveyor belts were turning. BA officials meanwhile blamed the BAA computer systems. And all the time, every 10 minutes, an Essex voice was cheerily announcing in a loop designed to send even a strong man insane: "British Airways would like to apologise for the delay to baggage collection. British Airways are doing their best to address the situation."

"Why can't you give out some proper information?" I asked a BA manager. "We can't," he wailed. "We don't have any -- and anyway, they haven't given us a Tannoy."

It turns out that "Tannoy Ltd is a British manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems," and that the phrase is also used -- as implied in the headline of that story -- informally to mean being informed or paged, as in a comment this bebo profile reading:

I managed to lose my purse -- without my knowledge -- till i got a tannoy from the front desk and was proper confused as to how exactly they knew i was in the library in the first place...

Contra status quo

I do not know the work of Belgian novelist Hugo Claus, who died this week, but I like this quote used to describe his relation to the world:

I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things.

technorati: authors, writers, obituaries

Hiding

My friend Anna calls her periodic retreats from the world, usually to concentrate on her doctoral dissertation, "going underground." This week Cris and I have gone underground in a slightly different way, borrowing the house of our friends Sara and Martha while part of our house is being painted. This week the work on our house -- which we have undertaken for some reason despite being quite broke -- happened to coincide with their trip out of town to the east coast.

Sara is one of my best friends, and I've been over to their house many times in the last ten years, often with a group of friends to watch "The Sopranos." It's a large two-story house in the heart of the Mission District, with an enormous, beautiful garden. And much quieter, as our house is near busy Cesar Chavez Street. It's a wonderful retreat. We should switch houses more often -- only our house is about 65% the size of this one.

Movie night: Morituri

I'll imitate my friend Marilyn and report on a video we watched: Morituri, with Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, a completely forgotten war thriller in which Brando plays a sort of double agent, a pacifist masquerading as an SS officer aboard a cargo ship, with Yul Brynner as the sullen "good German" captain who has no use for the Nazi political officer on board. It's long and convoluted, but the direction has moments of real brilliance, and the performances are terrific.

technorati: films,Marlon Brando,Yul Brynner

Things I had to look up: bien pensant

bien pensant -- A French term meaning "right-minded" or "right-thinking," it is used as a literary term in English to refer to those who adopt the orthodoxy of others to substitute for their own thoughts and opinions.

Context: In a long profile of V.S. Naipaul in the Guardian/Observer:

By 1971, the year in which he won the Booker Prize for In A Free State, Naipaul's literary self was fully at large in the world and would fuel three decades in which he travelled a long way from the comedy of his early fiction to the more sinister images of A Bend in the River, his masterpiece, and the later, more personal fictions, The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. His journalism and incessant travelling took him into the muslim world of Among the Believers and Beyond Belief and made him enemies among bien pensant western liberals as well as muslims. Today, he exudes the satisfaction of one who has been proved substantially right about Islam. He says he does not like some of the controversy he has aroused, but affects insouciance. 'When I read those things, I am immensely amused. They don't wound me at all.'

I was not aware of this phrase's origins, so when I see it baldly translated and used without irony as an adjective -- as in this sentence from an editorial today about the suppression of demonstrations in Tibet:

The current protests in Tibet and the response of the Chinese authorities have attracted the attention of every right-thinking man or woman with access to the free media, and the vast majority of the people are sympathetic toward the Tibetans

One has to wonder if people who use the phrase without irony are aware that it's supposed to be used ironically. Or is it possible that using the French version carries irony that the English cannot?

Treading water

Not much to report on lately. I haven't gotten any writing done and I don't feel like it. It's a symptom of the ambivalent mood I'm in that what ideas I do get have nothing to do with the two books I'm supposed to be working on; instead, I find myself thinking about the crypto-mystery I thought of a few years ago. So I'm really getting nothing done, just keeping the house and my job and Cris and everything else taken care of. Sorry I've been so dull this year.

Here's something: Courtesy Perry, a "trailer" for a film about Wonder Valley, the remote desert spot where several friends live and which has in the last 15 years become an art colony, its first step to utter destruction, but for the moment, it's still nice.

Starbucks co-founder a troublemaker at heart

For a long time, anyone who flew far enough on Alaska Airlines to get served a meal received on the tray a prayer card that:

are shared as a gesture of thanks which reflect the beliefs of this country's founding as in the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, Pledge of Allegiance and every U.S. coin and dollar you handle.

It seems that Gordon Bowker, co-founder of Starbucks and other businesses, liked to twit the plane's crew by loudly reading the card.

Q: You used to recite the complimentary prayer aloud on airline flights. Why?

A: I really resented them putting the prayer there in the first place. Everyone has a certain amount of fear of flying, so what's the idea of putting a prayer on there? Please don't crash? God help us, don't crash? I thought, you know, if they had the guts to put the prayer out there in the first place, what did they expect people to do with it? So I would read it out loud. I also was curious what kind of effect that would have. The flight attendants didn't like it at all.

technorati: Starbucks, airlines, Alaska Airlines

Hoaxers as superheroes

To bring this week's literary scandal to a close -- a quite minor scandal it was, but one that bloggers have chewed thoroughly as if it were the last piece of steak before a year-long Buddhist retreat -- NYT books reporter Motoko Rich drew up a collection of literary hoaxers from Clifford Irving to JT LeRoy to the current, soon-to-be-forgotten Peggy Seltzer.

While looking over the illustration (left) for Rich's article, I suddenly realized that her rogue's gallery suggested a sort of sick Legion of Literary Super-villains who went over to the dark side; I envision them sitting around in their decrepit Brooklyn headquarters, all trying to write "true memoir" versions of their experiences while drinking out of the same bottle of cheap Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joes and all sharing the same cellphone while they try to get an agent or editor to return their calls. When the cellphone rings they all dive for it and end up in a heap on the floor, the wine puddling into a stain that can never be washed away.

The Super-Hoaxers, their true identities, and some details about them: (Note: all have the super-power of assuming others' identities; each has at least one additional power)

• Wannabe Girl (Peggy Seltzer) -- Her uniform is a red hoodie and red kerchief with baggy jeans and $150 Timberland boots. She speaks in a patois of fake South Central ghetto-speak until the other Super-Hoaxers cover their ears and tell her to shut up, whereupon she starts asking them to help her write a prep school memoir. Her super-power is making bourgeois editors believe that the cultural signifiers of powerless people are actually powerful totems that magically grant a sense of authenticity and genuine feeling.
• Big Lummox (James Frey) -- Speaks in a strangely high-pitched voice, tending toward whining when talking about himself. His uniform is a Gap denim shirt and Relaxed-size jeans with $300 Nikes. His super-power is getting women to feel sorry for him.
• Red-Faced Man (Tim Barrus) -- Growling, mumbling, often drunk, his speech is often unintelligible, but Wannabe Girl pretends to understand it. His uniform is red plaid shirts, cast-off red kerchiefs from Wannabe Girl (though they are often thought to be romantically involved, they actually can't stand one another), dirty brown trousers, and moccasins. His super-power is that, while everything else in his books is a lie, he actually knows how to fish, though in Brooklyn this skill is useless.
• Cherry Pie (Laura Albert) -- Though middle-aged, her uniform is a 12-year-old Victorian child's dress, worn with a floppy hat from the 1960s. Her super power is being able to sound like any other human being, but only on the phone; if you watch her performing this feat of vocal impersonation in person, it just looks weird. She also has a sort of super-hypnotic power that can make others believe that some random people she's with are actually family members or somehow also famous, but it only works on has-been celebrities, and it's weakening as time goes on.
• Super-Daughter (Kaavya Viswanathan) -- Her uniform is smart college togs from H&M, and she speaks like an east coast prep school student, but can turn on a curry accent when provoked. Wannabe Girl is dying to be her best friend. Her long hair is capable of reaching out and entangling reporters, college admissions officers, editors and potential mates, and she also knows everything, but no one believes her.

technorati: hoaxes, JT LeRoy, Peggy Seltzer

Robbe-Grillet's legacy

Last month's passing of French avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet has occasioned little comment, but today Salon threw dirt on the grave with a piece entitled The Man Who Ruined the Novel. I found the article extremely unconvincing. I don't claim to know much about Robbe-Grillet's work, though I have read a few of his novels, and I found them sort of inspiring, not discouraging. Like Kathy Acker, he mixed explicit sex with a disdain for narrative and a sense of weird freedom. "Project for a Revolution in New York" gave me permission to break rules.

You know whose work I found really discouraging? Toni Morrison. After reading "Song of Solomon" I almost despaired of ever being a writer, thinking "Christ, I could never do anything like this."

Not that my stuff is anything like Robbe-Grillet. But I sure responded to it better than that Salon writer.

technorati: novelists, novels, books, Robbe-Grillet

Today's fake: she wasn't half-native American or a gang chick

A woman who wrote a memoir about being a half white, half Native American gang chick who worked as a drug courier for South Central L.A. gangs made it all up, and the publisher is pulling all unsold copies and cancelling her book tour. Her rationale?

I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it's an ego thing -- I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.

She was found out when the New York Times published a profile of the author last week; her sister read it, agog, then called the publisher to squeal.

I wonder how many of these the publishing industry will take before the entire memoir genre becomes a thing of the past.

technorati: hoaxes

Contraction

With her unable to work due to illness, Cris and I have decided we have to pull in our spending, so one of the things to go will be my writing office at a friend's house. That's $400 a month we'll be spending on groceries -- cheaper groceries -- instead.

And speaking of writing, I finally heard back from the publisher for whom I wrote How They Scored. They want a major rewrite. How will I accomplish this without an office to write in? I guess I'll have to go into my dayjob and work there. The good part about that is that after a year of working there, I moved to a much nicer cube by the window. Not only is it full of light, with a view of the mountain right across the freeway, it's much larger than the other cube. There is not, however, quite enough room for the chaise longue I bought for my office. And there's no room at home for it, either. I guess I'll have to sell it. If you're interested, click here to see a picture of it. $350.

The other good part about working at my dayjob office is that the cats don't compete for my attention. And I can't surf the internet -- if you do it too much, an automatic warning pops up, like you're a little kid. Well, so much the better to focus. I've got to get that rewrite done. I need the money.