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by Hugh Cook |
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summer lightning mogura |
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Section 116 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 July 08 Thursday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Up at 0500 this morning and out of the door at 0615, already sweating in the torrid oppressively tropical heat of the Tokyo-Yokohama area, which is now definitely in summer mode. There followed a long journey, during which my head was busy with thoughts of UFOs, alien invasions and flesh-eating bacteria. The science fictional premises dancing in my head had nothing to do with my creative writing. Rather, they were part of my sober workaday effort, the scenarios in question being intended for some "let's speak English" curriculum development work that I'm doing. The idea of exploiting this science fictional material for teaching purposes is not original. Aliens and UFOs not infrequently crop up in textbooks used for teaching English as a foreign language. I don't mean to suggest that there is a plague of this kind of material, and I don't mean to suggest that every textbook is infested with it, but if you were to work your way through a library of such texts you would probably start finding examples before too long. The question is: Why? Why do aliens and UFOs lend themselves to the teaching of English? And the answer is that they have a high profile. Certainly, here in Japan, every schoolkid has seen the lowest common denominator science fiction devices (aliens, UFOs, robots, starships and so forth) dozens of times over, as they crop up in comic books and on TV shows and in movies aimed at kids. At a junior high school once, I gave some students some photocopied pictures of New Zealand, the exercise being to find words for the things in the pictures. ("Tree," "lake" and so forth.) One of the kids looked at one of my photographs, which had developed a couple of flaws as a result of being enlarged on the photocopier, and, pointing to one of the flaws, declared "UFO!" The same background knowledge persists into adulthood So, for teaching English, there's no need to explain what a "UFO" is. The student already has an image, and the image is probably going to be similar to the teacher's. If you say "Imagine you go to McDonald's," then there's an economically explained scenario right there, complete with colors, smells, furniture and a tempo. (McDonald's here in Japan is pretty much like McDonald's anywhere else in the world, except that, currently, it will typically have a smoking section somwhere, and I would guess that in some other countries there is no place to smoke at Mickey D's.) Similarly, "Imagine you meet an alien" is also an economical way of mapping out a scenario. So a possible exercise that you might (conceivably) find in a textbook might be .... Well, let me think back to my childhood. Someone told me about a certain TV show they saw. On the TV show, humans met actors. The humans were smokers, and the aliens didn't understand this business of "smoking." Why did the humans light tubes of fibrous material and stick the smouldering tubes into their mouths? (This TV show was a long time ago, I think back in the 1970s, back when smoking was still the norm, and the approach, apparently, was light-hearted rather than serious.) I've seen similar exercises used in textbooks. One person has to explain the ins and outs of something familiar (making coffee, for example) to an alien who is curious but who doesn't understand either the how or the why. The cross-cultural familiarity of the SF/alien/UFO material, then, makes it suitable for economically setting up some kind of conversational scenario, without getting bogged down in a lot of scene-setting and explanation. But it's that very same familiarity which makes this material difficult to work with for creative fiction. UFOs? Aliens? What is there that's new? What can you do with them that hasn't already been done before? (Today I don't have the answer. Just the question.) Section 116 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 July 09 Friday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) I often go for days without meeting other Westerners, days without having so much as a word of conversation with a native speaker of English. So I don't often talk about life in Japan with people who are living in this country as foreigners. However, the other day I did happen to meet up with a couple of Westerners, and heard the following rather weird question: "Hey, is there anything in Japan about reading other people's newspapers on the train? I mean, I'll look at someone's newspaper or magazine in the train, and they'll catch me doing it, and suddenly it's, oh - they'll wrap up the magazine and put it away or turn the page, a kind of, what are you doing reading my newspaper kind of thing." Well, I don't imagine there's any official taboo in Japan about peering into someone else's reading material, but it's the kind of thing you just don't do, and common sense should tell you so. If you're in the park, and someone's eating a hamburger, and you suddenly get the notion that you'd like to wander up and stand behind them and inhale deeply, breathing in the fragrance of their hamburger, you shouldn't ask yourself "Hey, I wonder if there's any official taboo against that?" Idea for a fiction story: a guy goes to some place, carrying along a guidebook which has a complete list of all the official taboos. If it's not officially taboo, then he feels free to do it ... unfortunately I don't have time to write the story. Section 116 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 July 12 Monday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The very first cicada of summer started up on Sunday morning, "Bzzt, bzzt, BZZT!" - then abruptly fell silent and was heard no more. Maybe something ate it. Or maybe the cicada realized it had made a terrible mistake, because Sunday was not a cicada-friendly day. Instead, it was a rainstorm day. Rain, and thunder, and lightning. Really impressive lightning. White bolts of it hammering down from heaven. What was really interesting was the way (and I saw this several times) three successive peaks of lightning would seem to pulse down one and the same track. The track of a single bolt of lightning would throb with light three times in success, in a really fast-paced zap-zap-zap, as if the track of whiteness was a kind of hose down which enormous gouts of energy were being pumped. I guess what was happening was that, in each case, three closely-spaced but separate bolts of lightning took the identical track to the ground, and the after-image supplied the illusion of a continuous connection between heaven and earth. The thunder didn't seem to trouble the baby, who, presumably, has no grounds for differentiating it from any other loud noise, such as a door slamming. "Thunder is God burping the clouds," I said to baby Cornucopia, though I am not sure whether this is strictly true, since I am weak on both theology and meteorology. Other things I'm more sure of, and I explain them to my daughter in a series of rather one-sided conversations. For example:- "This is ironing. This is a very important part of life. This is one of the reasons why we're alive. It's not the only reason, but it's one of the main reasons. You'll understand that when you're older." And now it's 0400 Monday morning and I have five clean white ironed shirts hanging in the closet, and I'm ready for the working week. Which is starting for me right now, as I get down to the latest phase of my curriculum development project in the cool of the early hours of the morning. Section 116 Entry 0004. Date: 2004 July 13 Tuesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) It seems our humble lives here in Japan may be menaced by a terrifying monster known as a mogura. This engine of destruction lives underground, where, or so it is alleged, it toils away to ensure the downfall of your foundations and the destruction of your house. The following appalling scenario has been dancing through my imagination: the mogura, working unimpeded, toils away to such effect that eventually, without warning, our house gives way in the middle of the night and collapses, falling, perhaps, into the cavernous hollow of an old World War Two chemical weapons bunker, the existence of which has previously been unsuspected. And we, bewildered, wake from the ruins of our dreams to find swirls of chemical smoke boiling around us as antiquated munitions begin to do their worst, while, from nests of huge proportions, the dreaded white ants, the shiroari, pour forth to cleanse our bones. And what prompted these dire thoughts? Well, a patch of what looked like damp earth in the middle of the scrap of green that serves us as a lawn. I thought, vaguely, that perhaps my wife had buried some garden waste there. Or that (my imagination was working hard) someone had come sneaking into the garden to bury a corpse of some description. (But it would have had to have been a pretty small corpse.) Then my wife asked me:- "Did you dig here?" And I said, "No." And then she raised the spectre of a possible mogura. I was half-inclined to suspect a crow, because I am sure I saw a crow flapping upwards from that approximate patch of the garden only a couple of days or so ago. But what would a crow be doing to produce a patch of smeared flat earth in the garden? Anyway, I pushed and prodded at the soil, trying to figure if something might be living within it, but my investigations were decidedly ambiguous, since the entire lawn (or what we call a "lawn") was spongy in the aftermath of heavy rain. So I guess I'll have to get on the Internet some time and try to find some pictures of real molehills. I'd always imagined little miniature mountains, of the kind you see in comic strips about moles, but perhaps the reality is just this kind of smeared wad of muck, possibly (or possibly not) blocking the entrance to an underground mole burrow. (Mogura, in case you were wondering, is the Japanese for "mole.") Later: 2004 July 19 Monday: with dry weather, it became apparent that the suspected molehill was actually the entrance to a new ants' nest. After discussion, it was agreed that we were not prepared to tolerate the existence of a nest of large and extremely industrious ants right in the middle of our tiny patch of garden, so, with some reluctance, I applied Terminal Solution X, the nature of which is too horrific to disclose on the Internet. |
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