What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[xxx]

Deutschland

[Pabappa]

harpsichord I dont know where i found this video ... it may have even come from here ... but its been sitting untouched and unloved on my hard drive for about a year and i just rediscovered it now. music isnt my thing ... to me that is a piano he's sitting at, but it obviously doesnt sound like one.

[Raphael]

Inspired by recent events, I've started reading And The Band Played On, but I haven't gotten far yet.

[chris_notts]

As of episode 7, Star Trek: Picard features conlanging! As in a character is mentioned who invented languages, not just the use of invented languages in the series.

[rotting bones]

I'm recovering from a flu. Miracle of miracles, I actually went to see a doctor for a change. He said it's probably not the flu everyone is thinking of.

I like this song, but the attempted slickness feels a bit alien to Bengali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8W3O70HJqk

The stereotype is that Bengali is a gloriously lame language that sounds more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOgJ8RTnPhg

The first ending, the second opening and the third ending of the 3-gatsu no Lion anime have become some of my all time favorites songs: https://www.mediafire.com/file/rf94iu2n ... D.mkv/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/k3mook5i ... D.mkv/file https://www.mediafire.com/file/nddyysp4 ... D.mkv/file

For leisure reading, I'm rotating among Hermann Broch in English, the Kaguya-sama manga in Japanese and the Talmud on the Sefaria app. "Quality is quality regardless of genre," is what I say to justify my lack of a stable personality.

1. The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch: This is a brilliantly written book by a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature about how he's increasingly nauseated by literature itself! I would recommend it for wannabe writers investigating the craft. If this book has taught me anything, it's that your literary work can express any message you like without sounding too preachy as long as you don't present your argument through concepts. Instead, you must depict it by manipulating symbols connected with the narrative, no matter how tangentially they turn up. Read this book for what looks like 130-something pages of worked out examples demonstrating how to pull it off. But please don't recreate this book. Learn the technique and apply it in moderation.

(As a beginner in German, I feel guilty for not reading this in the original language. If I tried that, there's no way I'd make it to the end.)

2. Kaguya-sama: Love is War by Aka Akasaka: Is this story really one of a kind? There are romcoms where the boy and the girl want to get together, but are frustrated by awkward situations. If those romcoms are firecrackers, this is some kind of a thermonuclear warhead. It's fantastic, and it feels like there should be more stories like it. I can't think of a single example, but then, romance is not my go to genre. Help me out here.

3. The Talmud: I've only made it to Berakhot 11a so far. Chapter 1 ends at 13a. Questions:

What do Reformed Jews think of the Talmud these days? I remember Moses Mendelssohn was not a fan.

Berakhot 6b: Do Jews really rush to enter the Synagogue? I was told rushing to the Mosque is a no-no in Islam. I ask because the Paschal Lamb is a mitzva, and the internet tells me only the Samaritans still offer it.

Berakhot 10b: What, if anything, is known about the Jewish Book of Remedies being suppressed for religious reasons?

[Frislander]

As a family friend has kindly lent us the use of their Netflix account during the lockdown, I've finally had the opportunity to begin watching The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and so far from the first episode I'm enjoying it a bunch.

[Linguoboy]

Just watched the classic UK PSA film Apaches (1977). Sweet Jeebus on toast points, that was disturbing.

[Raphael]

Just read the Wikipedia article on it - I think that'll do for now. So apparently Klaus had a predecessor.

[Linguoboy]

Just read the Wikipedia article on it - I think that'll do for now. So apparently Klaus had a predecessor.

I'm having trouble finding the link, but there's a construction safety film aimed at adults from the same period that's more in Klaus' vein, as well as a PSA called Building Sites Bite, which is the urban cousin to Apaches.

You can clearly see the influence of these films in the brilliantly macabre Scarfolk Council blog. Someone got emotionally scarred by them growing up and decided to make art of it.

[Raphael]

I'm currently reading, or perhaps I have already read, Kate Fox's Watching the English, in the 2014 revised edition. That is, I'm reading different parts of the book out of order, I've already read the last part of the book, and I may have read as much as I want to read for now.

It's generally pretty good, with some caveats - in the introduction, she's a lot more accepting of traditional "study indigenous tribes" anthropology than I wish she would be, and throughout, she's a lot more into saying "men do this thing, and women do that thing" than I wish she would be. That said, it's generally a fun read.

There's one part, however, that pretty much blew my mind, about alcohol:

Another ‘universal: the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. In some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia - about one-fifth of all cultures worldwide), drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of all cultures) drinking is not associated with these undesireable behaviours. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption or genetic differences, but is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations regarding the effects of alcohol and different social norms regarding drunken comportment.

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but also in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. The English believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when they are given what they think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic ‘placebos’ - they shed their inhibitions: they become more flirtatious, and some (young males in particular) may become aggressive.

Is that actually true? Because I would never, ever, ever have guessed that.

[Linguoboy]

Is that actually true? Because I would never, ever, ever have guessed that.

It makes perfect sense to me. I didn't much like alcohol when I was younger (partly because I associated it with these sorts of antisocial behaviours) and, by staying sober around my peers, I noticed a certain tendency for them to act more drunk than they were and witnessed a certain dynamic of living up to expectations of how drunk people are "supposed" to act . Despite this, when I finally did start drinking later in life, I found myself enacting the same dynamic. After all, if your society offers you licence to act in certain exceptional ways and then excuse it afterwards with the words "I must've been drunk", why not take advantage?

As for the science, I know it's been demonstrated with sugar. Despite lack of evidence for any correlation, there's an almost universal belief in the USA that sugar causes hyperactivity in children. Scientists have demonstrated the effects of this belief with double-blind experiments involving placebos, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find they'd done the same for alcohol.

ETA: Here's one summary of evidence supporting Fox' claim with citations to studies: http://www.sirc.org/publik/drinking4.html.

[Birdlang]

https://youtu.be/C7CWQ5clIsE
Watching this video of someone making music on their computer with FL Studio. Can’t tell what kind of music though. Maybe Papuan stringband music?

[Pabappa]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMqL1iWfku4

Relevant again both because S Korea has pulled itself through the coronavirus epidemic better than most, and because the rest of us are getting tired of staying at home too.

[Travis B.]

Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill (Extended 12'' version)

[2+3 Clusivity]

Any recommendations for good beginner to intermediate Spanish grammars/readers?

I have maybe ~a semesters worth of Spanish left in my head from way back.

Hope all are well.

[Linguoboy]

Any recommendations for good beginner to intermediate Spanish grammars/readers?

Do you want an introductory descriptive grammar or do you want a grammar text with exercises?

For beginning to intermediate readers, I always recommend comic books/graphic novels. I can't recommend any specific authors, but I know that Spain has a thriving domestic comic art industry, so it shouldn't be hard to find good work from native speakers.

[rotting bones]

Ethiopian folk: https://youtu.be/mGq8U16Q8C0

Japanese folk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFWS3cfz7OE

Is the apparent similarity an illusion or is it really there?

--

I've made a significant dent in my reading list, finishing Badiou's Logics of Worlds, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke tr. Stephen Mitchell, Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, Oscar Wilde's complete works, Shakespeare's Comedies, A Revolutionary Kind of Science by Adam Kisby, The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort, The Terror by Dan Simmons, three novels by Adam Thirlwell, Hagakure, Metahistory by Hayden White, On War by Clausewitz, Freud's Studies on Hysteria, about a fifth of the complete works of Aristotle, Heidegger's Being and Time (couldn't folow large chunks of it; powered through it on autopilot), Classical Econophysics by Paul Cockshott, The Literary Work of Art by Roman Ingarden, Polyominoes by Solomon Golomb, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Mastering OpenCV with Practical Computer Vision Projects, Bachelard's Poetics of Space, The Philosophy of Marx by Balibar, Empire by Hardt and Negri and The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. I'm currently reading Metaphysics of Meaning by Jerrold Katz. I've already read most of the Greek Tragedies. Once I'm done with Katz, I'll polish off the rest.

I'm not sure I'm learning anything from all this reading. I mostly feel like I'm going crazy.

—

Some songs I like in the Bengali Renaissance style:

By Tagore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWit3MqbYM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d7QX6Di8a8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYebxfBcVBY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wGvjQbAm0E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5BWfICcZiI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7npNsxEBx7U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzR2vsQpADk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VT_mZqvKN4

Non-Tagore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0v5XtgZY7E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaKWd3a6o74
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHRDipbQCQg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtWaltHUBDU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpxjd9AulBA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx62yviCAbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0q4J93TRvk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nge2hWSQyEc

[Curlyjimsam]

I'm currently reading, or perhaps I have already read, Kate Fox's Watching the English, in the 2014 revised edition. That is, I'm reading different parts of the book out of order, I've already read the last part of the book, and I may have read as much as I want to read for now.

It's generally pretty good, with some caveats - in the introduction, she's a lot more accepting of traditional "study indigenous tribes" anthropology than I wish she would be, and throughout, she's a lot more into saying "men do this thing, and women do that thing" than I wish she would be. That said, it's generally a fun read.

There's one part, however, that pretty much blew my mind, about alcohol:

Another ‘universal: the effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by social and cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol. There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. In some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia - about one-fifth of all cultures worldwide), drinking is associated with aggression, violence and anti-social behaviour, while in others (such as Latin/Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of all cultures) drinking is not associated with these undesireable behaviours. This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption or genetic differences, but is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations regarding the effects of alcohol and different social norms regarding drunken comportment.

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research but also in carefully controlled proper scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol. The English believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when they are given what they think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic ‘placebos’ - they shed their inhibitions: they become more flirtatious, and some (young males in particular) may become aggressive.

Is that actually true? Because I would never, ever, ever have guessed that.

I think there might be variation even within countries. In my experience, middle-class (especially upper-middle-class) drinking rarely leads to violence in the UK, even though people in these settings can certainly still drink a great deal.

[Qwynegold]

I've started watching Golden Kamuy. It has some Ainu words and sentences scattered throughout.

[Pabappa]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOHB85vDuow <--- yet another example of why Korean is my favorite Asian language for music ..... it blends so well with English that it took me almost halfway through to realize that there was even any English in the song. And that only because it was the song title and had an /f/, which i know is not a sound found in Korean. I totally missed the words like "tropical" until i looked up the lyrics just now.