June 2009

Exposing tasteless pornification

25 Jun, 2009  3 Comments

I read a story recently about outrage over a former children’s performer appearing in Ralph magazine. Kellie Crawford, who had appeared on the children’s program Hi5 for ten years, had posed in lingerie for the May Edition of Ralph magazine.

It caused great concern to Julia Gale from Kids Free 2B Kids who said:

Older teenage girls will wonder why performers feel the need to pornify their image.

I was outraged and disgusted … PORNIFY – thats not a word. While Ms Crawford tastefully poses for Ralph Magazine Ms Gale tastelessly misuses the English language. But she is not the only one! Someone has coined Pornification to refer to a game where you change a legitimate movie title into an X-rated version. It can also be done for Shakespeare plays; some examples:

Two Gentlemen and Verona

Measure for Pleasure

The Desperate Wives of Windsor

Any other tasteful suggestions (moderation applies)?

The rule of three

14 Jun, 2009  No Comment

This post is about the rule of three.

This is NOT the Wiccan rule of three: the belief that the energy you put out into the world will be magically returned threefold. That’s witchcraft!

This rule of three is the writing principle that suggests that grouping things into threes creates clear arguments, establishes patterns and makes things easier to remember.

Single objects are straightforward, pairs can be similar or contrasting, but threes create patterns that establish concepts. Groups of more than three become lists.

Important conceptual things are written in threes because three is the smallest number that can create a clear pattern. Some brilliant threes include:

  • Father, Son and the Holy Ghost

  • Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

  • Rum, sodomy and the lash

But remember that in good writing the rule of three is not witchcraft its wordcraft!

One person’s curse is another’s salvation

14 Jun, 2009  No Comment

In the early 19th century, a purple-flowered, native European plant called Purple Viper’s Bugloss, or Echium plantagineum, made its way to Australia. It has been a villain and a hero to generations of farmers in the inland. The outback farmers gave it a few names that reflected their relationship with it.

Nurseries sold echium in the 1850s as an ornamental plant to be grown in country gardens. Due to its high seed production it soon escaped to the wild and spread rapidly. One of the main sources of the spread was the homestead garden of the Patterson family near Albury. The plant’s seeds were carried widely by the cattle that travelled along the stock route through the property.

Echium became known as Patterson’s Curse because it chokes pastures and poisons stock. The large number of seeds was difficult to control. When eaten it causes liver damage to animals resulting in loss of condition and sometimes death. Most susceptible are pigs and horses with sheep, goats and cattle less affected.

Less poisonous to cattle, Patterson’s Curse was used as emergency fodder for them during severe droughts. To some this rescue led them to call the weed Salvation Jane. Others suggest it was given this name by beekeepers because of the high quality of honey that it produces. The beekeepers almost stand alone against the modern eradication of the weed because it will reduce the quality of their honey.

Less commonly, but for at least a hundred years, the plant has also been called Riverina Bluebell. This it earned in the flower trade where it was commonly used in flower arranging.

Many years ago I worked as a farm hand on the Breeza Plain in the New England region of New South Wales. In the December heat I chipped the weed out of the wheat field before the harvestor came through. That summer the local kids, celebrating finishing school, used a lawn-mower to write a huge and frank expression into the Patterson’s Curse on the hill overlooking Tamworth, the major provincial town. This was Patterson’s Curse Hollywood-style.

Dystopian visionary dies

4 Jun, 2009  No Comment

The author, J.G.Ballard, died in April. He was known mostly for his successful autobiographical work, Empire of the Sun, but his work is found most often on science fiction shelves. His brand of science fiction created dystopian visions of society challenging his readers’ perceptions.

As a young man I had read mountains of science fiction, including Ballard’s, which I either bought or borrowed from the library. I was a bit surprised when I searched through my old and yellowing paperback collection to find only one of Ballard’s books amongst the Vonneguts, Moorcocks and Philip K Dicks. I enjoyed reading the pulp adventures stories of galactic battles and malevolent extra-terrestrials but it was these writers exploring the perversities of our own real world that I recognized as providing the true alternative futures.

Ballard was one of these writers who used the science fiction genre to explore the dark side of modern, suburban life; to create dystopian worlds where what we take for granted is twisted and darkly exposed. In an obituary his works were described as apocalyptic fables of technological and social anarchy.

Dystopian is the opposite of utopian. Utopia was an island invented by Thomas More (1516) as the location of his perfect society; a society with perfect legal, social and political systems. His derivation of the word is based on Greek and its literal meaning is nowhere - a deliberately ironic derivation. Utopian came to mean idealistic and impossibly visionary.

Dystopia was coined by John Stuart Mills (1868) to describe a society where all things are bad. It is a portmanteau word made up of dys meaning bad, abnormal, or difficult and a modification of (u)topia.

The great fictional dystopias include the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, the society of George Orwell’s 1984 and the misfunctioning bureaucratic place of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. They were Ballard’s stock in trade.