Flesh falling off in slices! [VIDEO]

Today's excitement: Hawks! I was on the way to lunch when I heard one shriek. Several of us stopped and craned our heads, but it was hard to see anything into the sun and, without another cry to guide us, we soon gave up. Shortly after I came back to my desk, there was a commotion over by the windows and I jumped up to check it out.

A large (even chubby) adult red-tailed hawk was on a low branch of a maple not six metres from the glass. There were squirrels in the tree, some of them clearly juveniles. At first we only saw a couple, but eventually I counted six--one high up in the top branches and the rest arrayed along the trunk from about one to two metres up. We speculated that the parents might be trying to distract the predator while their offspring fled, but no one seemed to be in a hurry to get anywhere.

We chose sides and began rooting. No prizes for guessing that I was Team Hawk. He made several swoops at the trunk but failed to come away with anything. "They're much more effective at picking them off when they're on the ground," opined one coworker. Eventually the bird flew to another tree further away and it was back to business as usual.

Speaking of lunch, I went back to Naf Naf figuring it'd be less mobbed, which it was. This allowed me a clearer view of the spits and I realised for the first time that there was no one cutting the meat. It was all done automatically by a robot slicer prominently labeled "Der GERÄT" (German for "the tool"). Here's a quick demonstration of it in action:

There's a fuller version on the infomercial (complete with black-and-white film of hapless strugglers) available on YouTube. (The inventor seems to have inspired a Popeilish cult.)

SASLgate

For some reason (probably that I'm not really actively studying one or reading any untranslated lit at the moment) it's been a while since I posted anything linguisticky. But my eyes perked up at the sign language controversy swirling around Madiba's memorial service. Partly it's just such a bizarre story: The sign language interpreter hired for the event was apparently a complete incompetent. Seeking to deflect blame, the government announced an investigation of the agency they used--only to find that it apparently doesn't exist. For his part, the soi-disant interpreter has tried to explain away his flailing as the results of a schizophrenic episode (revealing in the process that he's had violent episodes in the past and was due to be evaluated for re-hospitalisation on the day he was tapped to stand on a podium within swinging distance of a sitting US President).

From a language geek point-of-view, probably the most interesting aspect is how quick other sign-language speakers were to spot the fraud despite the fact that many of them did not speak SASL or another language belonging to the same family. This is one of the more constructive explanations, who major points I think are worth reproducing in full:

1. [H]e signed with relatively little facial expression. Brow raises and furrows, for example, are important visual correlates of rising and falling intonation in spoken languages, and such features are regularly used in sign languages to distinguish questions from statements, as well as group particular elements of a sentence together.
2. [T]here was a lack of mouth actions. Many sign languages use mouthing of spoken language words alongside some signs and/or mouth gestures (such as a slightly protruding tongue or pouting lips) with other signs.
3. [T]here were noticeably long pauses between his signed utterances, jerky transitions between signs, and too few signs to actually translate the full content of the memorial service speeches.
4. [T]here appeared to be random repetition of certain gestures, and no detectable regularities or matches to recurring spoken language words that could be their equivalents.
5. [T]he patterns of body and head movement as well as shifts in eye gaze did not appear to align, as would be expected, with elements of the sign language production.
6. [T]here was no use of fingerspelling at all in his signed production, even though South African Sign Language has such as a system of manual letters for spelling out the names of people and places mentioned in the service.
7. South African Sign Language has been influenced by a number of sign languages that I am familiar with, such as British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language (from which Auslan is derived), and yet I did not see any vocabulary items that I recognise from these languages.

It makes me wonder how easy it would be for the typical oral language-user to spot a similar fraud. Some of the points would seem to have clear analogues--for instance, the use of fingerspelling for proper names would correspond to the appearance of those names as phonetic loans in the translation. But names can undergo extensive deformation to fit the phonology of an unrelated language, making them indistinguishable from common words. ("George Bush", for instance, becomes in Mandarin "Qiáozhì Bùxī".)

At least having done some preliminary reading on SASL, I'm now better able to understand the Deputy Disability Minister's claim "There are as many as a hundred sign language dialects." Apparently, it's very much an emerging koiné at this stage. That is to say, schools for the Deaf there variously taught Irish Sign Language, American Sign Language (both ultimately derived from French Sign Language), or British Sign Language (which is not) depending on who founded them and when. So though SASL is now reckoned to the BSL family (which has itself come under increasing influence from ASL in recent years) it's not as closely tied to it as Auslan or NZSLm which are collectively referred to as "BANZSL". It's still a dismissive claim (implying as it does that the interpreter was using some legit dialect of sign language even if it wasn't one familiar to particular critics), but at least she wasn't characterising all signed languages as "dialects" in contrast to "real languages".

Unlike, say, the Rob Ford story, which I've been following just for the yuks, this is one that represents a confluence of several important issues: official promotion of sign languages (where South African policy is actually quite progressive); perceptions of mental health and its relationship to security considerations; vetting of foreign-language interpreters; the ongoing lack of formal certification in South African employment; and so forth. The level of reporting could be better. (Why, when reporters spoke to the interpreter on film, didn't they bring along someone with a sound knowledge of SASL who could put the man's expertise to the test?) But it doesn't seem to have yielded all of its secrets yet.

Reading is a lot like life

Everyone in the PRC has their stories about the Cultural Revolution. It's unavoidable, given the incomparable scope of the upheaval. If they didn't live through it themselves, they have the accounts of their family and family friends. From the point of view of the average American, these stories are all incredible. They are also, after a while, much alike. I've read enough of them by now that as I soon as I see the words "during the Cultural Revolution" on the blurb for a book, my eyes glaze over and I slip it back onto the shelf.

So if I'd know that Su Tong's 河岸 (The boat to redemption) covered the period 1966-1977, I never would've picked it up. But not only was that information kept from me in what I read about it, it was concealed in the text itself until fairly late in the game. Hidden in plain view, really. I'm sure the average Chinese reader can chronologise the events almost exactly based entirely on the political slogans worked into the dialogue. To me, however, they just sounded Maoist. So all I really had to go on were the frequent mentioned of Chiang Kai-shek, which revealed the setting to be sometime after 1949 and before the General's death in 1975.

It's not that politics are entirely absent from the novel, it's just that the focus is so entirely on how they play out in a very restricted milieu that major turning points--such as the death of Mao--are never even mentioned. I found that extremely refreshing. The protagonists are so relentlessly oblivious to politics that it's a wonder they survive. Their status as boat people acts as a mysterious shield against the consequences of upsetting the landbound authorities.

Naturally, it's ripe with allegory and symbolism. The fact that many of the characters are so apolitical and reactive is itself a commentary on the futility of trying to whether the reversals of policy and administrative chaos of the period. One of the reviews I peeped at described the book as "picaresque", but I think that's an overstatement. There definitely is an arc to the story, it just isn't as complete or as evident as in other superficially similar novels. Su is still fascinated with the ways people are horrible to each other but also (moreso than I recall from reading Rice) with the ways they develop ties of affection.

But what really carried me through this book was the humour. Su has an ear for vulgar dialogue; every interaction involves a harangue, and some of the insults and imprecations had me laughing out loud. The narrator is sensitive, but not too much, and has an impetuous streak that undermines him at every turn. No matter what, he cannot stop paying for the crimes of his father, and he develops a debilitating fascination with a woman who's just as haughty and shortsighted as he is.

From that, I went right to Kawabata's 雪国 (Snow country in Seidensticker's translation). Fittingly, I chose to put off reading it until there was snow on the ground and finished it this afternoon, just as it began to melt a bit. Here the allegorical nature of the setting is much more explicit, and might have grown ponderous if the text weren't so short. The economy is amazing; entire scenes are sketched with a few deft sentences. Once or twice this left me confused for a few pages (notably at the beginning of Part 2) but in general it was very effective.

Now I've moved on to Dai Sijie's Par une nuit où la lune ne s'est pas levée (Once on a moonless night), but I'm not sure I'll stick with it. For starters, it breaks my rule of not reading something in translation when I know the language well enough to read the original. And he's kicked off with one of my least favourite opening gambits ever: a brief frame story leading to the introduction of a character ("from another age", predictably) who is the mouthpiece for an exposition dump delivered in implausible circumstances (in this case, on a tramcar) in a ridiculously literary style. (At one point, a historical figure's name is even followed by birth and death dates!) I know basically nothing about the narrator and so far his account is an unconvincing mélanage of dry history, precious fantasy, and salacious palace gossip. But, hey, there's a pomo twist coming up apparently, so I guess I'll hold on until then or until something else shinier catches my eye.