Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

1) A wonderful piece of writing on sexual objectification, from kestrel: For Sale: The Joy of being sexually objectified (content warning: sexual microagressions treated in a satirical manner)

2) Any time I buy raisins, the package always specifies that they are "Seedless"... I know seedless grapes are a (relatively) new thing, in the history of agriculture... But is it even possible to buy raisins with the seeds in, anymore?

3) Songs originally written for the Hearing, and translated into Sign for the Deaf often make me go "hrm," because a) it often comes from the assumption that the Deaf are "deprived" of music (music, like language, resides in the human mind, and Deaf have their own forms of [visual] music, thank-you-very-much), and b) the qualities of a song that make it musical to the ear are usually lost when translating the lyrics into Sign. But this video gives me all the feels. For one thing, the signers are, themselves, Deaf, and each of the performers has translated the meaning of the English lyrics in their own way -- showing the flexibility and nuance that's possible in Sign. And also, the message of the song itself:

(BTW, at the very last line, the final two performers are signing "We support you.")

4) Oh! The most recent "Inspector Lewis" episode on Masterpiece: Mystery! passed my Disability Test... The young brother-in-law of the murder victim was paraplegic, and a wheelchair user, and he wanted: to get free of his overbearing mother! \o/

5) Another bit of writing that's not from me, but I wanted to share... This time, from Dave Hingsburger: Red and white

On Tuesday, I posted this:

From the end of the second verse [eta: of Mystery Song]:

Reporting live from the frontline
We carry the torch for the ones who're scared to shine

The last verse:

One thing I know is for definite
Soul, body and mind, you got the same benefit
If you trust your heart, there ain't no way of losing it
Keep doing your thing, against all etiquette.
10, 9, 8, start the countdown
7, 6, 5, about to go down
4, 3, 2, 1, sing along now.


ETA #2: At first, I thought I'd just leave it there, and not burden you guys with me gushing on about a language I love but don't live in.

But thanks to trouble, I learned about a video (reported on by Huffington Post) by a couple of ignoramuses claiming to be covering a song in ASL -- but really, all they're doing is flailing their hands about in a stereotypical, audist, hateful way. And then, they're removing and blocking all comments by actual Deaf, Native ASL Signers who are calling them out on it. So I thought I'd put dedicate some of my space to real True-biz Sign Rapping, to thumb my nose at those fools.

( The Answer to the riddle I posed (With video of the whole song) is below this cut )

As my mother would have phrased it: "If I could write like that (in a third language, no less), I wouldn't talk to anybody!"

A TED talk-affiliated lecture: TEDxIslay - Wayne Betts Jr. - Deaf Lens

An eighteen and a half minute talk (in ASL) about how the use of a visual language in his everyday life influences how he uses the visual language of film-making to tell a story (Closed Caption Default Track, English). Posted here because I have the impression that I have many film buffs in my circles who are generally interested in How Things are Made, and the ways to Tell Stories, even if you're not interested in American Sign Language in particular.

And then, there are the two films he's made that he cites in his talk:

Vital Signs (3 mins. 19 secs). This one has a captioning track that mentions music and sound effects, but it's actually silent. I suspect that's because the person who uploaded it is actually deaf and would have no way of knowing. But since this was made by a Deaf man for a Deaf audience, the fact that sound is missing doesn't change much.

and:

Gallaudet: The Film (8 mins. 48 secs). This never had any sound to begin with. But he's translated the sign language into English, and embedded it into the film itself, in a way that I think is really cool.

This is closed captioned in English; click the little cc thing:



(the captions say "he," but the sign is actually third person singular, no gender specified. So it's more a fault of English than a "mistake" by the vlogger. English should have a "gender irrelevant, here" pronoun, imnsho)

I've had a bunch of ramdom thoughts in my head for vague-long time, now --each being too random (and/or silly and/or short) to make a post of their own. But I now have a collection:

( 1) We're living in a musical! )

(Actually, I realized, after I wrote it out, this next one was neither random, silly, or short. But at the time I was originally going to post it, I got so discouraged, I shoved it to the back of my mind and forgot about it, until now)

( 2) I wanted to squee about a television episode about Justice, but... )

( 3) And then I found that someone gave a comment I made on a YouTube vid months ago a positive review, and my mood improved again. )

This one is short enough to leave outside a cut.

4) I learned, yesterday, that a newly edited edition of Elias Hicks' Journal has been published. And in the review of this Journal, it was mentioned that his children were disabled (but it didn't say how). And now, I'm kind of itching to buy the book, even though I don't have room in my house for any more permanent editions to my book collection. And I have far too many books still on my "To-be-read" pile. Oh, well.

Elias Hicks was a nineteenth century Quaker who was instrumental in the split of the religiion into two main "sects." He also painted those Peaceable Kingdom paintings; this version is one I've lived with all my life.

( 5) Now that it's 2010, it's time for the U.S. census to start (PSA; ASL )

This time, it's full of holiday cheer!

(Coulton's lyrics, with a gloss for the ASL translation [useful for showing that ASL is, in fact, a different language, with its own sentence structure and grammar] can be found here, in his info section)

There's a meme floating around our hearing world that poor, suffering d/Deaf people have no sense of music or rhythm, unless good-hearted hearing people translate the songs into sign language for them (and, naturally, throw in some pantomime to suppliment the signs, since sign language is obviously lacking). And, I'm afraid, my last post fed into that stereotype.

So, now, I'm posting an antidote. Your vid players are not broken -- there is no melody or voice-over behind this performance. It was created by a Deaf man for a Deaf audience. And he clearly has a strong sense of rhythm (at least, to my eye -- some of this has been playing as a brainworm in my head).

From what I can gather, based on the written comments, and people replying to replies, it's a satirical review of the book To Become a Human Being -- another "book of wisdom" where a privileged white dude mines the exoticism of the "great aboriginal peoples" for fame and profit.

Much of this vid flies right over my head. It will take a while of guessing and trawling online video dictionaries to fill in the signs I'm missing. So I'll just give the timestamps and translations of the sentences I'm certain of.

( And I'll put it behind here. )

...And I'm fuzzy on the ending, where he wraps everything up and gets to the point. I wish there were a handshape-based sign dictionary online (there is one in print, arranged in order based on phonemes, but I find video easier to follow than line drawings). Until then, I'll have to make best guesses on the English words, and type them into the search boxes until I come across the signs I recognize but don't yet know...

Still, this gave me a laugh, even though I missed about half of it.

The truth is, as I've been reexamining my relationship to ASL and my tenuous connections to D/deaf acquaintances from the past,* it just feels off kilter to have my journal so music-and-phonocentric. So I'm in the process of coming up with something new.

For those who view everything in your own style, this is a miniaturized screengrab of what I have up on my LiveJournal page, now:



Also, what with the cartooning I've been doing lately, I've discovered that I'm quite fond of black and white. I'm thinking of drawing some new black and white line art for a wallpaper/background design for this page (up until recently, the background for my LJ was a musical score for the song "Vive La Compagnie!" with green and yellow swoopy stripes) -- ferns and vines, that sort of thing. And making a new black and white icon... maybe from one of my monster pictures (I've got several -- I like monsters).

As you can see, I'm stumped for a title (feedback would be welcome). Options running through my head are:

Sticking with "Witty, Meaningful Title (clever subtitle)" or
"Odd Bodikins (and weird wonders)" or
"Gregarious Hermit" or
"Into the Forest (Where the Silly Things Are)" or
"Life is Just a Bowl of Queries"

---

*(for a whole host of reasons, that I've touched on before, not the least of which, my mother died just as I was studying for my midterm in my first semester of ASL at university... So that was a very intense time for me, emotionally. And the funny thing is, ASL class was where I felt most calm and at peace... maybe spending focused time, thinking in an entirely different language, gave me a break from the relentless, terrified, voices in my head... I dunno; It was during this time that I realized how strongly our my adrynal gland was tied to auditory imput...)

As you know, I've been fishing through YouTube (now that I can) looking for vids in ASL to help keep those passageways of the brain clear.

One of the sensitive issues among Deaf vloggers is whether or not to provide captions in English. On the one hand, there's the whole question of: we have to cater to you Hearies' comfort level all the time, anyway, why should we expend extra energy to make you comfortable when we're talking amongst ourselves, with what we do to have fun?

On the other hand, not all deaf people know Sign, and signed languages are no more universal than spoken languages (British Sign Language and American Sign Language are mutually unintelligible, for example), so there are those who argue that not putting captions in your vids divdes the D/deaf community.

One guy I've found puts captions on all his vids out of principle, just so that the example is out there, and to prove that it can be done fairly easily. He also puts them in as closed captions, so you can switch between turning them off and turning them on. I like this, personally, as a language learner, because I turn the captions off, so I don't become dependent on them, but then, turn them on to double-check that I've caught everything.

Anyway, I don't like every vlog he does -- a lot of them are funny mostly to his personal friends, I'm sure. But here's one that I think may appeal to the gamer geek / horror spoof fans on my f'list.

There's a common belief out there, even today, that signed languages are universal -- somehow closer to pantomime than spoken languages -- that native Deaf signers, and CODAs ([hearing] Children Of Deaf Adults), for whom sign is a first mode of communication, don't so much talk about things, in the abstract, as act them out. There's a facet of this meme that somehow, sign is more "natural," and speech is "cultural." If you are someone who idealizes the "natural state" and sees Culture as a corrupting influence, you are going to idealize sign language as "more romantic," and/or "pure" than spoken language, as Rousseau did in his essay On the Origin of Language (1781):

(quote)

Love, it is said, was the inventor of drawing. It might also have invented speech, but less happily. Not being very well pleased with it, it disdains it; it has livelier ways of expressing itself. How could she say things to her beloved, who traced his shadow with such pleasure! What sounds might she use to work such magic?

(unquote)

If you are of a school of thought that idealizes science and rational explanations for things, on the other hand, as the writers and producers of PBS' NovaScience Now do, you might grudgingly admit that sign is a "real" language, but you're likely to still demand that proof of higher-order thinking be expressed in properly controlled, vocal, communication, as this snippet of a transcript from a recent episode illustrates (July, 2009):

(quote)

ZIYA TONG: Most mammals make particular sounds only in reaction to a specific situation, like a dog that growls when it's threatened. Efforts to train apes and other land-dwelling mammals to control and modify the sounds they make have largely been unsuccessful.

LEAH COOMBS: Knock. Good. Knock, knock. [Walrus makes a knocking sound in his mouth] Good.

ZIYA TONG: A lot of animals obviously communicate through sound, so what's different about a walrus?

RONALD J. SCHUSTERMAN: What this training shows is they have incredible control over this, so that they can learn to produce these under certain occasions and inhibit them under other occasions.

(unquote)*
(you can watch the full video of the segment, or get a link to the full transcript, here).

The main point about signed languages that some people make to argue that spoken language is more logical and require higher-order thinking than signed languages is that signed languages are iconic -- that is, you can just make a picture of what you're talking about with your hands (tracing the shape of whiskers for CAT, for example), rather than assigning an arbitrary sound to the subject. So, the argument goes, signed languages don't really need as much thinking as spoken languages do.

But, frankly, I believe this "common knowledge" is really just a "common falsehood," and that actually, it's the other way around entirely: That it's vocalized speech that is primitive, with a more direct connection to our emotions than signed languages.** And it's really only the power and privilege that comes with being in the linguistic majority that convinces hearies otherwise.

Here's where I give you a bit about how I came to this belief:

When I was going to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for my Masters in Creative Writing, I had the opportunity to sign up for formal classes in ASL as a foreign language. These classes were total emersion -- all nearly all communication was through sign, and/or reading messages on the blackboard from the teacher (Who was, himself, Deaf, and whose parents had been Deaf), from the very first minute of the very first class. They were Tuesday-Thursday classes, from 8:30 to 10:00 am. Being a college campus, the only students up and about at that hour were others going to that same class, and when we'd meet on the campus walkways, we'd sign to each other, as practice, instead of speaking. And in my case, being a graduate student, my next classes after that, where I'd have to switch back to English to do my work, wouldn't be until well after supper. So: On my "Sign Days," for three-month stints at a time, I'd start thinking about ASL at around 6 am, and wouldn't start thinking about English until at least noon.

It wasn't long before I switched, in my brain, from thinking about ASL to thinking in ASL, at least for some of the self-talk that goes on in my head.

And that's when the realization hit me: That, really, there's one thing -- and one thing, only -- that an auditory language can do that a visual language cannot:

Warn someone who cannot see you of impending danger, such as a falling rock, or a stalking sabre-tooth tiger. Period. That's it. And for that, all you need is a primal scream, really -- something to get someone's attention, so they'll look up from what they're focused on, see the danger for themselves, and run (or bung a rock at it). And really, when you think about it, even our modern, high-tech alarms and auditory warning signals are still little more than primal screams: the clanging of a fire alarm, the ringing of a telephone, the siren of a police car or an ambulance,*** the rantings of Rush Limbaugh...

This was vitally important to our survival as a species, yes, especially since we have binocular vision, and cannot see what's around us very well at all. But it's hardly the sine-qua-non of complex reasoning or the refined delights of civilization and fellowship.

Yes, human beings have evolved greatly since the days when life meant running from a sabre-tooth tiger, and our vocal-auditory mode of communication has evolved to a much more refined state than the primal: "AAuuuuGGhh!" Auditory communication has given us Homer, and Shakespeare, and Mozart. But its roots lie deep in the primative, instinctual parts of our brains, and sound is still used to manipulate our emotions without engaging our reason -- just think how an effective soundtrack to a movie can suck you in even when the script is tissue paper thin.

Now, about that "Iconic vs. Abstract" distinction, and why I wish it would just go away forever:

First: Spoken languages are more iconic than many people realize -- as Roy Blount Jr. points out in his introduction to Alphabet Juice (A book I borrowed from, and returned to, the library, so I can't cite pages) "Sphinx" and "Sphincter" come from the same Greek root word for "Strangle" (the way that the Sphinx killed her victims), and when we speak the 'inx' sound, our throats squeeze shut a little bit.

Second: Signed languages are less iconic than many people realize. I dare say that most of what we think of as iconic elements of signs are actually just mnemonic devices that we're taught after the fact, when we are learning a Sign Language as a second language.

Third: If signed languages are slightly more iconic than spoken languages, it's because they are three-dimensional languages working in a three-dimensional world and so they can be. If spoken languages can't, that's more to do with their weakness than their strength.

Finally: even highly iconic signs like CAT are far from pure icons -- distilling the entirety of cat-hood into a single attribute of whiskerness, is a symbolic abstraction, and further distilling that attribute into a single movement that can be made with one hand is another layer of abstraction.

So there.

So... when I did a poll about what I might post on this topic, a few of you on my LJ f'list said you kind of knew what ASL looks like from TV, but were not really that familiar with it. So I've been searching around for examples of ASL in use by native speakers, that wouldn't, at the same time, be overwhelming and just incomprehensible. I finally decided on this duo (The CODA brothers) -- they're native signers but they also do English voice-overs for their vlogs (video-blogs). Enjoy:

---

*So... (I thought, as I watched this) you're saying that people who cannot control their voices, either because they are pre-lingually deaf, or have a condition like CP, or Tourrette's Syndrome, aren't as fully human as you are? How special for you!

**I actually believe they're equal (mostly). I'm just reversing the argument completely, to make a point

***Police and Ambulance sirens are actually more confusing than informative because we can't rely on the Doppler Effect to help us determine whether the sound is coming or going, or how fast its traveling. All they do is trigger our adrenyl glands