The Packbats' Weblog

Here be photos of food, including meat.

With our first two tarot card draws of spring, Maybe begins their village witch work.

Content warnings on this section: food (including meat), hoarding.

So, we just watched an old TED talk - "The transformative power of classical music" by Benjamin Zander, you can look it up if you're bored - arguing that everyone likes classical music, and I feel like there's ... four assumptions? it made that we can't vibe with.

Like, the first assumption is that we need to be convinced that everyone likes classical music, but we'll get back to that.

The second assumption is that everyone always prefers a lively and excited performance to one that is more understated and subtle, which, whatever, I don't care - if one-buttock playing is just how Benjamin Zander plays, so be it.

The third assumption is that people who don't listen to classical music are sitting it out because they don't care about classical music. Like, y'all know how much of the world got fucked over by western European nations to make a tiny portion of folks from western Europe rich, right? Their culture can't escape being the culture of colonizers and oligarchs, so folks are gonna react to that.

The fourth assumption is that music in the western European classical tradition is somehow distinctive in this regard.

Like, okay, yes, Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" is a lovely, heartbreaking piece of music. Bea Miller's "feel something" is beautiful and desperate. MUNA's "Around U" is beautiful and lost. Andy G. Cohen's "Oxygen Mask" is overwhelming, powerful, perhaps despairing. Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 is agonizing, we actually have to turn it off because it hurts so much. We're talking about music here - if you're talking about music and people loving music, you can find music to love.

...because we're not even arguing with Benjamin Zander. We're arguing with the tradition that Benjamin Zander is participating in, of campaigning for classical music.

Like, does Zander know that classical music isn't music? He talks about a scourge of bland, technically accurate performances, then launches into playing a piece he loves with passion, intention, and understanding, and he thinks he's demonstrating that classical music is good. Music is good, my dude! People love the music you play because you're playing them music!

But classical music is a performance by the audience, of class. It is class-ical music. It's allowed to be boring garbage because, to paraphrase early (worse) xkcd, it's about getting some culture in you - and white culture is allowed to be terrible, to be bland and technically accurate, because white oligarchs can pay to have everyone taught that it's great anyway, that everyone should have it in them.

We found Zander's talk in the least charitable context possible. We found it via an Innuendo Studios video about "smart music" - about music you play to show that you have drunk deep the well of colonizer oligarch culture, and that therefore you are worth listening to. Because, in part thanks to Zander and Zander wanting people to love classical music, Chopin's Prelude No. 4 in E Minor makes the list.

I wish he'd been trying to teach people to love music instead. I really do. But the TED people wouldn't have paid him for that, because when the audience is paying six thousand dollars a year to be here, the speakers better be selling something exciting to rich people, and rich people don't want to be told that the problem with classical music is them.

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was published in 2004, and everyone seemed to be enraptured by it, and ... well, the name Packbat didn't exist until 2005, but someone who would take that name in a year read it and thought it was kind of adequate but not great. The worldbuilding was interesting, and this was a time where they didn't tend to give up on books, so they did read it through? But the whole thing felt to that reader like a plot summary - maybe somewhere else there was a version of this story that was enrapturing, but we were reading the TV Tropes recap page of that story, and it was just dry.

Except when it wasn't. Because sometimes Jonathan Strange would try something, or someone else would try something, and it was like being dropped into a story that was happening now, not in a summary. There was dialogue, conversation, perspective. It was suddenly and unquestionably alive, and whoever we remember being "I" then loved it.

Anyway, this year a friend of ours mentioned another book, Piranesi, said it was really good, and we'd been looking for an excuse to go to the library so we checked our library catalogue. And there was a book called "Piranesi" in the catalog, by the same Susanna Clarke, and it was the book our friend was talking about, so we thought, "Maybe Clarke's learned something. Bits of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell were great, even if the book as a whole was a bit of a slog, so maybe this'll be better than that was."

If you liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I apologize? We mean no offense, I know that two people reading the same book will have different opinions.

But Piranesi was terrific. It was alive, not in patches but from front to back. The fantastical was there - we were dropped into an endless house of statues, like Borges's Library of Babel for statues, with waves sweeping through its lower rooms and clouds through its upper - but the fantastical was seen through a perspective. We were dropped into the world of a person, a world he introduced us to and spoke eloquently about and cared about, and cared about in the specific way that he cared about it.

We picked up this book at about one in the afternoon from the library. By seven we were gushing about it in the DMs of our friend who recommended it. By nine-thirty we were through, and reeling.

We can talk about what happens if you like? There's some heavy stuff in there, so if you do want to read it, you might want to check first, see if it hits something that affects you strongly. We had to ask our friend for some content warnings, which it gave, and that was helpful, and assuming we get along we'll do the same for you if you ask ... but our friend also said the story benefits from reading with very little idea of what will happen, and the story does. It would perhaps be helpful if you came into it having heard of Battersea...? but even if you haven't, you'll likely figure things out quickly. The protagonist and narrator is not deceptive towards you or me.

It's currently four thirty in the morning, typing this. We'll go back to bed in a moment. But we couldn't lie just in bed waiting for all these thoughts to slip through our fingers into sleep.

And you don't have to read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It is just a book, two hundred and forty-five pages among uncountable billions, and you have other calls upon your time. But we have to gush about it for a minute, because we were hoping it would be alive and it was.

(We were also hoping it would last us longer than a day, but somehow I think we'll live.)

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell

We talk a lot about the conlang Toki Pona because we think it is delightful. We haven't talked a lot about our experience with the online Toki Pona community, once we moved beyond watching jan Misali videos and talking to friends of friends.

It was bad. It was real bad.

Now, this is a blog post written in mid-2023 about events occuring mid-2023. You, dear reader, might find the Toki Pona communities you encounter to be different. Our experience with tokiponists around our side of fedi (which actually bans people who adopt white supremacist memes, like functional antiracist communities do) has been positive. Toki Pona, the language, has not been hostile to us.

But ... listen, if you recommend people read Sonja Lang's book about Toki Pona without mentioning that there's a strong theme of jan Sonja's religion through it, then that's a big thing to leave out but not a big deal - there are a lot of atheists, including us, speaking Toki Pona, and jan Sonja seems like a nice person and explicitly queer-positive. But a history of racism is a big deal. And it's a big deal that Toki Pona communities are going to have to deal with, and keep dealing with for so long they get sick of having to keep dealing with it. That's how wrestling with a racist history works.

And if you're just learning Toki Pona in 2023? Stars, I'm sorry to have to tell you this. But stay safe. jan sin o, o awen e kon sina.

We've been following this scanlation by knight heron of Onna Tomodachi to Kekkon Shitemita (Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend) by Usui Shio, and we've been really enjoying it - it's a cute and sweet story. And we want to talk about it, because we don't know where it will go, but we know one place it shouldn't. Because this isn't just a story about friends getting married, it's also a story about blowing past the "Romances Only" sign on Emotional Intimacy Highway in your friendship car and a little bit worrying that someone's going to pull you over.

Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend takes place in a world which puts up those signs, and was made in a world which puts up those signs, and it has things to say about those signs. It's a story about beginning and developing life partnerships and a story about being and becoming good roommates, but it's also a story about caring more than you're 'allowed' to and that being a good thing.

Trying Out Marriage With My Female Friend knows what it's about, is the thing. It knows about the hierarchies of relationships enforced by its society, and ours. It knows about amatonormativity - this isn't an accident. And as of Chapter 23, its thesis is pretty clear: amatonormativity is wrong, and this friendship marriage is good.

So no, we don't know where it will go, but we know one place it shouldn't. Because what it's saying so far needs saying.

(mi kama sona e toki pona kepeken lipu mute)

(I think.)

There are other reasons why it's taking us ages to learn a hundred and twenty words and how to use them, but part of it is like the old joke: someone with one watch always knows what time it is, but someone with two watches is never sure.

Which is to say: jan Misali analyzes "x li y" as a subject x performing an intransitive verb y ... but because the same content words function in both roles, you could just as easily analyze it as a copula: x is y, as both jan Lentan and jan Sonja do. And jan Lentan analyses the 'kepeken ala' in "o kepeken ala ilo ike" as a verb used without 'e', but jan Sonja analyzes it as a preposition. The same sentence, understood the same way, but analyzed very differently.

And it's ... good? Like, we are much better off watching jan Misali and jan Kesi's videos and reading jan Lentan's lipu sona pona and referencing jan Sonja's official books and getting feedback from speakers and looking up articles on the Internet than we would be doing only one of those things, but we feel much more strain, trying to develop our own interpretations in a mess of other peoples'.

We're almost halfway through lipu sona pona, though. We need to learn numbers, learn pre-verbs, learn 'la', learn 'pi', learn sixty-ish more words. And read, and write, and converse.

A preface: nothing in this post is the fault of Edmund J. Bourne, PhD, author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (fifth edition). That book introduced us to the concept, but we are not psychologists and our interpretations are our own.

That said, we hate most of the posts we can find on the World Wide Web on the technique, so we're writing our own. Hit us up in the comments if you have thoughts on our presentation of it. Content warning for discussion of self-loathing, albeit in a healing way.