Favourite German-English idiomcy of the week: a friend confesses to ‘bunch-watching.’ That’s when you borrow an entire season of some tv show on dvd and watch the lot.
Favourite personal neologism of the night: idiomcy. I didn’t have the right word (it’s not exactly ‘mistranslation’) and didn’t want to insult my friend’s English. As I typed, out it came.
I guess his invention can be applied in all sorts of ways. Bunch-drinking. Bingey-jumping. The Brady Binge, a story of blended families.
Just watched the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. Until recently I imagined it was a video game: a world all but invisible to me. Turns out it’s a television series.
Melodrama. It’s a kingdom of sighs, and costume. I’ve never seen such a celebration of unthinking brutality. Well, not since A Clockwork Orange. It doesn’t just document, it glories: beheadings, rapes, all filmed in lingering detail. A small boy is pushed out of a window off-handedly. The script is littered with casual misogyny. A man wakes up among his dogs and his enemy sneers, “Better-looking than the bitches you’re usually with.” “Soon enough that child will spread her legs and start breeding.” “Thank the gods for Bessie, and her tits.”
The kingdom is populated entirely by supermodels. There’s a lot of modern slang and the bad characters and good characters have neon signs above their heads. The good have an edge of self-pitying martyrdom, the bad have sensation instead of feeling. If there ever is a dystopian future in which this kind of glamorized yet boring reconstruction of some imagined medieval past holds sway, people like me will either be queens or court jesters or we won’t last very long.
Watching television news for the first time in several years. Things have changed. The screen (huge!) is split into seven sections with different background footage, text, or video showing in each of them. A continuously changing crawl line along the bottom distracts attention from the main ‘story’, with unrelated headlines. There’s even a graphic indicating the state of the stock exchange at allegedly this very moment. (My investments! My fleet of investment advisors! My inflamed self-importance!) The ‘story’ is about the arrest of three more suspects in the Boston bombing and the reporter on the scene seems to be speculating & conducting her own investigation. Her storytelling is looping and diffuse. But it’s hard to notice that because of the intrusive text flashes & gripping minute-by-minute footage of a black van being backed very slowly, over and over again, into the garage of a large building. What the hell is going on? This show seems intended to make the viewer feel like they are the centre of operations in some big detective show. In fact the information given, before boredom and frustration drove me from the room, is minimal and almost meaningless. As though it were a gossip magazine the ‘news’ describes the appearance and apparent mood of the suspects. They talk to ‘neighbours’ who say I’m shocked, this sort of thing doesn’t happen here, etc. I have never looked to television news as a font of insight and wisdom but still: the level of stupidness seems to have risen markedly.
If you have a TV and if you feel that watching this stuff is helping you ‘keep up to date’: maybe think again.
