Some of my many conundrums today have included:
- Why does no-one on Eastenders watch Eastenders? And…
- ..if soaps reconstruct geographical reality by inventing ‘Albert Square’ (for example), why haven’t they invented a fictitious soap that everyone watches as a simulacrum of TV reality?
- There’s a dialogue gambit in soaps (particularly The Bill) that goes like this: Person A to person B (who has just experienced a violent death/tragic illness in the family) “I know what you must be going through”. Person B to Person A then says angrily “No you don’t! How could you possibly know what it feels like to…”. Those moments teach me, very effectively, that ‘I know what you must be going through’ is not a good opening line to someone whose life partner has just been cut up and put into bin bags. So how come that people in soaps, whose real-life counterparts would watch the soaps that they are in, don’t learn the same lesson?
- Why is it that I can remember any sentence in a foreign language that was couched in the conditional/subjunctive, like the one in the title of this entry, that two friends in Spain helped me construct nearly 20 years ago? I also retain anything that I overheard in the aorist tense in Macedonian, which is handy, of course.
- Discrimination is a good thing if you’re talking about wine, food, art, literature, a bad thing when it comes to race, gender, age and sexuality, so how can you teach someone to discriminate (in the good sense) when you disapprove of the process?
I’m going out of my mind, reading through endless proceedings of the ICKL (International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation) conferences. This cheered me up no end.
By the way, ICKL may be my favourite acronym of all time.