When I was three we lived in a little dilapidated black house with white trim. I have so many memories from that house, from swimming in my underwear in a plastic wading pool in the back yard, to pedaling my little plastic Jaguar down the sidewalk along our cross-stile white fence. I can remember finding my first Lego set, sent from my grandmother in Vancouver, Washington, waiting for me under the wood burning stove. Also from that time I have two distinct memories of movies. One was some kind of devil-worship film with cloaked figures in a circle; after all it was the sixties.
The second movie memory was of a little girl dressed up as a ham for a school play. She fell down a hillside and her brother ran home in the rain to get help. However, when he got home his sister was already there, having been carried by a scary man who was hiding in their shower. This frightened me tremendously and caused me to always check behind shower curtains before "doing my business" for years and years. Finally in high school we watched the old b&w version of To Kill A Mockingbird and I recognized the frightening scene. It was very much like Freud has postulated: if you can truly get to the source of the fear you can eliminate it.
Films that truly had an emotional or psychological influence on me includes Star Wars. It came out in 1977 when I was still in grade school. Everyone I knew had already seen the film at least once but my parents didn't want to pay the raised price to go to a theater. Movies were suddenly at a staggering $4.00! I was finally able to see the film with the next door neighbor at a bargain theater the following summer. It blew my little mind. I became obsessed. My neighbor and I began to make our own films and I grew increasingly in love with special effects and movie make up. I spent an allowance on the action figures of C3PO and R2D2. My mother was furious that I had spent my money on two tiny pieces of plastic, so she threw them in the outside garbage pail and forbade me to go digging them out, which is of course what I did that very night. I still have those figures sitting inside the original Millineum Falcon my parents broke down and got me. It wasn't until I was an adult though that the little robots gained the company of Chewbacca, Han, Leia, Luke and Darth Vader.
Jaws and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind affected me greatly too. Speilberg has always been good at drawing me into the film with good acting and clever pacing. I have never once felt like anything more than a mere observer to a Michael Bey or Bruckheimer film. In their films I could not care less if the main characters get killed which is the true sign of a badly told story.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
on Interpreting
This last Friday I was at my monthly Deaf Advocacy Committee meeting and noticed something interesting. While one of the hearing people was speaking I found myself watching the sign language interpreter. I do this a lot since I will always pick up some new sign, and I find the choices each interpreter makes to be fascinating.
This particular interpreter is brand new and the poor girl had to work for over two hours straight, signing what ten hearing people were saying and then saying what the deaf people were saying. She did wonderfully and didn't seem to tire. Her word choices were very insightful, choosing to sign the single word "goal" for the entire phrase "heading toward something better". Sure she may have lost a tiny nuance by omitting the word "better" but the meaning remained mostly intact.
What was so different this time is that I actually found myself tuning out the speakers and focusing on the interpreter. I was actually much more precise and clear. English speakers tend to throw in a ton of emotional baggage, judgments, humor and completely useless information into our sentences. The interpreter cuts most of this out and concentrates on the core sentence meaning.
A while ago I met the director of the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, Sue Bungard at Spaces Gallery to pick out some artwork for the Center, which since its construction has been virtually art-less. Sue is deaf but can read lips and speak excellently. She faced me and said "hello" and then as I began to tell her how my morning had been going, she turned her back to look at some of the colorful paintings on the gallery wall. I found myself standing there with my mouth open. I wondered for a moment if I should tap her on the shoulder so she could turn toward me and "hear" what I was telling her. Then I realized nothing I was saying was actually important in any way. It was just noise, or to Sue it was just a bunch of lip flapping. My guess is, since much of what people say is filler, she takes in the person's intent and then shuts her active-listening-mind off, essentially turning her back on the person.
I do sometimes wish people would be more succinct in their speech. Time and again I have been plagued with a student asking a 26-part question that requires a telling of personal history in order to "put it into context". Yes, this is an exaggeration, but not by any huge degree.
One can be too succinct. My partner Robert hates to listen to my stories which admittedly can tend to have too much information, asides, commentary and references. However, I like to tell stories in chronological order with the built-up payoff at the end. Robert on the other hand tells the punchline of the story first and then proceeds to fill in all the details afterward. Once I've heard the denouement, there's very little reason to listen to the rest of the story because there's no build-up.
An example of one of my stories may start out with "it was very cold yesterday", meander through "just like the Columbus Day storm of 1964", and finish with "her car slid out of control and hit the embankment!"
Conversely an example of one of Robert's stories may start out with "Did you hear that she was in a terrible accident yesterday?", which leads to, "it was only 19 degrees outside" and finally end with "she had just finished paying off that car too."
I wonder how the interpreter would phrase these stories? I'll bet she'd be very succinct.
This particular interpreter is brand new and the poor girl had to work for over two hours straight, signing what ten hearing people were saying and then saying what the deaf people were saying. She did wonderfully and didn't seem to tire. Her word choices were very insightful, choosing to sign the single word "goal" for the entire phrase "heading toward something better". Sure she may have lost a tiny nuance by omitting the word "better" but the meaning remained mostly intact.
What was so different this time is that I actually found myself tuning out the speakers and focusing on the interpreter. I was actually much more precise and clear. English speakers tend to throw in a ton of emotional baggage, judgments, humor and completely useless information into our sentences. The interpreter cuts most of this out and concentrates on the core sentence meaning.
A while ago I met the director of the Cleveland Hearing and Speech Center, Sue Bungard at Spaces Gallery to pick out some artwork for the Center, which since its construction has been virtually art-less. Sue is deaf but can read lips and speak excellently. She faced me and said "hello" and then as I began to tell her how my morning had been going, she turned her back to look at some of the colorful paintings on the gallery wall. I found myself standing there with my mouth open. I wondered for a moment if I should tap her on the shoulder so she could turn toward me and "hear" what I was telling her. Then I realized nothing I was saying was actually important in any way. It was just noise, or to Sue it was just a bunch of lip flapping. My guess is, since much of what people say is filler, she takes in the person's intent and then shuts her active-listening-mind off, essentially turning her back on the person.
I do sometimes wish people would be more succinct in their speech. Time and again I have been plagued with a student asking a 26-part question that requires a telling of personal history in order to "put it into context". Yes, this is an exaggeration, but not by any huge degree.
One can be too succinct. My partner Robert hates to listen to my stories which admittedly can tend to have too much information, asides, commentary and references. However, I like to tell stories in chronological order with the built-up payoff at the end. Robert on the other hand tells the punchline of the story first and then proceeds to fill in all the details afterward. Once I've heard the denouement, there's very little reason to listen to the rest of the story because there's no build-up.
An example of one of my stories may start out with "it was very cold yesterday", meander through "just like the Columbus Day storm of 1964", and finish with "her car slid out of control and hit the embankment!"
Conversely an example of one of Robert's stories may start out with "Did you hear that she was in a terrible accident yesterday?", which leads to, "it was only 19 degrees outside" and finally end with "she had just finished paying off that car too."
I wonder how the interpreter would phrase these stories? I'll bet she'd be very succinct.
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