Stars in the sky. They've been around a long time, and been used for many different things by different peoples. Navigation has always been one of their big functions (yay, Polaris!). I also think immediately of the Greek constellations which still remain part of our culture today. That's pretty impressive staying power, and it's clear to me that whatever society is first to assign a categorization system to something can retain great influence in the way that thing is represented by other groups (for a very long time!). I should also mention the Southern Cross, which features on my husband's native flag. I've seen it from the Southern Hemisphere - and boy, is it a kick to see Orion upside-down!
The other day, stars in the sky featured prominently in the Curious George cartoon show. George went to the country and became so fascinated by the stars that he tried to count them all. This involved him falling asleep counting multiple nights in a row, until he found a constellation he could use to keep track of which regions he was counting. (I wouldn't have had the heart to tell him it was hopeless, would you?) The interesting part for me was when he went back to the city and tried to count, he couldn't see the stars at all until a citywide blackout occurred. Something about that episode had a beautiful, personal quality for me. It's not just about whether the stars are there, or about teaching that cities have a lot of light that obscures the stars - it also had George being sad that he couldn't see the stars that were his friends. Perhaps it's a little like my own feeling of oddity when I see Betelgeuse below Orion's belt: it situates me in the world.
My Varin world is underground, but when I first wrote about it, I had people swearing by the heavens. Then I went back and said, Hey! One possibility would have been to suggest that they swear by something else. Some of the locals, I decided, do swear by the Pit of Darkness. But instead of "fixing," I decided that the heavens connection should suggest something about the history of the Varin people: that they had once known the stars, but lost them when the society moved underground. From such a simple "error" an entirely new dimension of history and worldbuilding was born, and I'm glad of it.
Here's to the stars.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Sleepwear!
This morning I told my daughter I'd mentioned her on the forums, discussing the comic books that we just bought for her and her brother (Supergirl and Spiderman, respectively), and she suggested that I should mention her new pajamas. So here I am.
There's actually more in sleepwear as a topic than you might think (there always is). Do people dress for bed? Or do they undress for bed? Do they wear hats in bed (remember The Night Before Christmas?) to keep from being cold? Or would sleepwear be considered a waste of money because it's a piece of clothing no one but the family sees?
Actually, this is not true, as my daughter just wore her new pajama top to preschool. It's purple with black trim, an image of a black kitten on a broomstick, and the words "Spooky but Sweet."
This brings me to color and gender.
As we were walking up to the store, my son was saying he wanted Spiderman pj's, and we were joking with him, suggesting that he get bright pink with orange flowers and purple stripes - he said that would be girly (he's learned that, but not from me!), but actually I don't think even my daughter would want to wear something with that design. I suggested maybe it was just "too much." My husband mentioned fairies and we collectively bemoaned the fact that so few people in this world know about the cool and awesome male fairies that are out there. (Don't get me started on Disney Princesses, a good few of whom aren't even princesses but are still trying to take over the world of small females.)
When you think about it, gender assignment of colors etc. is a lot like manners. If you ask someone what they would say in a polite social situation, they will tend to tell you what they believe they should say, rather than what they would actually say. And if you ask people which colors, or symbols, go with which gender, they'll have very clear ideas. Fortunately, if you look out into the world beyond clothes-and-toys-marketing-for-children, you'll soon realize there's a lot more nuance out there than you think. Even Disney has to bow to the fact that the market is not all for pink and purple - which is why I was able some time ago to find my daughter some Lilo pajamas which were turquoise and orange and absolutely gorgeous.
Don't get me wrong - I love pink and purple myself. But at least for our family, love of the color purple transcends all boundaries. All four of us love it.
Thanks, with hugs, to Nonny for suggesting the topic.
There's actually more in sleepwear as a topic than you might think (there always is). Do people dress for bed? Or do they undress for bed? Do they wear hats in bed (remember The Night Before Christmas?) to keep from being cold? Or would sleepwear be considered a waste of money because it's a piece of clothing no one but the family sees?
Actually, this is not true, as my daughter just wore her new pajama top to preschool. It's purple with black trim, an image of a black kitten on a broomstick, and the words "Spooky but Sweet."
This brings me to color and gender.
As we were walking up to the store, my son was saying he wanted Spiderman pj's, and we were joking with him, suggesting that he get bright pink with orange flowers and purple stripes - he said that would be girly (he's learned that, but not from me!), but actually I don't think even my daughter would want to wear something with that design. I suggested maybe it was just "too much." My husband mentioned fairies and we collectively bemoaned the fact that so few people in this world know about the cool and awesome male fairies that are out there. (Don't get me started on Disney Princesses, a good few of whom aren't even princesses but are still trying to take over the world of small females.)
When you think about it, gender assignment of colors etc. is a lot like manners. If you ask someone what they would say in a polite social situation, they will tend to tell you what they believe they should say, rather than what they would actually say. And if you ask people which colors, or symbols, go with which gender, they'll have very clear ideas. Fortunately, if you look out into the world beyond clothes-and-toys-marketing-for-children, you'll soon realize there's a lot more nuance out there than you think. Even Disney has to bow to the fact that the market is not all for pink and purple - which is why I was able some time ago to find my daughter some Lilo pajamas which were turquoise and orange and absolutely gorgeous.
Don't get me wrong - I love pink and purple myself. But at least for our family, love of the color purple transcends all boundaries. All four of us love it.
Thanks, with hugs, to Nonny for suggesting the topic.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Will humans ever outgrow spoken language?
I suspect it would take something pretty drastic.
Humans have language built into their DNA. Steven Pinker talks about the "language instinct", and while I might disagree with him on fine points, there's definitely something built into us.
Even profoundly deaf babies will begin to babble at the same age as hearing children - the difference is that without the ability to hear spoken language around them, they soon stop vocal babbling. When they're with adult speakers of sign language, though, they start babbling with their fingers! And of course this then develops into full-fledged sign language as the children mature.
In the case of pidgin languages, or languages that come to be used by people of different language groups when they are forced together by circumstance (like Russian-Japanese pidgin, for example), the pidgin itself will have a small vocabulary and rudimentary grammatical system - but once a second generation is born in this language community, the language gets fleshed out by the children and becomes a creole language.
There's something about people - they always want things to mean something. They may not always categorize concepts or objects the same way, but they will categorize. And once categories are fixed, people will automatically try to assign unknown things to known categories. There's a logic to this. If there were no prototypical concept for "apple," then how would we be able to recognize all the different types of apples, and know to eat them? Think of the vast variation in the concept for "dog."
So take a hypothetical situation where people become telepathic suddenly. Will they stop speaking aloud? If the telepathy is effective enough, this seems possible. Will they stop thinking in terms of auditory and visual signals? That's tougher. If the telepathy simply involves the ability to transmit signals directly from one brain to another, I think it would be very likely that the brain would interpret those signals in terms of auditory or visual signals, because those pathways are already primed and have meaning. I struggle to imagine a way that the telepathy would not make use of preexisting patterns of brain activity, especially if it were to be such an effective means of communication that it would supplant spoken language.
Telepathy also has its drawbacks, because I'm not sure if it would be as widely usable in communication with objects, as with programming computers or auto-open doors or other similar technologies. How would you design a receiver for telepathic signals? Or would you rely on written symbols for such communication? The written word is always the slowest to change, as evidenced by the peculiarities of English spelling. We've got letters in the word "knight" that have been around for hundreds of years, long after the sounds they once corresponded to have disappeared.
In language as in technology, there is a tendency for very ancient patterns to persist once they have optimally matured. I would expect that the ancient elements might be difficult for "current" users to distinguish from more recent ones, but I suspect they would still be there, even a thousand or more years into the future.
Thanks to Dave Steffen, known on the forums as steffenwulf/steffenwolf, for suggesting this topic. He blogs at steffenwolf.blogspot.com
Humans have language built into their DNA. Steven Pinker talks about the "language instinct", and while I might disagree with him on fine points, there's definitely something built into us.
Even profoundly deaf babies will begin to babble at the same age as hearing children - the difference is that without the ability to hear spoken language around them, they soon stop vocal babbling. When they're with adult speakers of sign language, though, they start babbling with their fingers! And of course this then develops into full-fledged sign language as the children mature.
In the case of pidgin languages, or languages that come to be used by people of different language groups when they are forced together by circumstance (like Russian-Japanese pidgin, for example), the pidgin itself will have a small vocabulary and rudimentary grammatical system - but once a second generation is born in this language community, the language gets fleshed out by the children and becomes a creole language.
There's something about people - they always want things to mean something. They may not always categorize concepts or objects the same way, but they will categorize. And once categories are fixed, people will automatically try to assign unknown things to known categories. There's a logic to this. If there were no prototypical concept for "apple," then how would we be able to recognize all the different types of apples, and know to eat them? Think of the vast variation in the concept for "dog."
So take a hypothetical situation where people become telepathic suddenly. Will they stop speaking aloud? If the telepathy is effective enough, this seems possible. Will they stop thinking in terms of auditory and visual signals? That's tougher. If the telepathy simply involves the ability to transmit signals directly from one brain to another, I think it would be very likely that the brain would interpret those signals in terms of auditory or visual signals, because those pathways are already primed and have meaning. I struggle to imagine a way that the telepathy would not make use of preexisting patterns of brain activity, especially if it were to be such an effective means of communication that it would supplant spoken language.
Telepathy also has its drawbacks, because I'm not sure if it would be as widely usable in communication with objects, as with programming computers or auto-open doors or other similar technologies. How would you design a receiver for telepathic signals? Or would you rely on written symbols for such communication? The written word is always the slowest to change, as evidenced by the peculiarities of English spelling. We've got letters in the word "knight" that have been around for hundreds of years, long after the sounds they once corresponded to have disappeared.
In language as in technology, there is a tendency for very ancient patterns to persist once they have optimally matured. I would expect that the ancient elements might be difficult for "current" users to distinguish from more recent ones, but I suspect they would still be there, even a thousand or more years into the future.
Thanks to Dave Steffen, known on the forums as steffenwulf/steffenwolf, for suggesting this topic. He blogs at steffenwolf.blogspot.com
Friday, September 26, 2008
The Sparrow: A Ridiculously Close Look
I've been meaning for the last week to get back to looking at narrators, so today I'll do a short entry on the opening of Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Fascinating book. One of the things that always surprised me about it was the omniscient narration. I think I was sensitized to it by the fact that I'd begun writing tight third person narrators, and kept expecting to find them all around. But the omniscient narration in this book is well done.
I'll start with the first sentence, the way I did with my last post, because an opening has to tell so much about what is to follow:
"It was predictable, in hindsight."
The first thing I notice is that this is not a personal sentence. This sentence isn't giving us a person to relate to, because it has no content pronouns at all, only the word "it" which refers obliquely to a situation.
On the other hand, "it was predictable" does imply a narrator - because it expresses an opinion, and therefore must involve someone to opine. This someone is left deliberately absent, so we have to wait for further information to identify where the opinion comes from.
"In hindsight" also implies a narrator, because it also expresses judgment. Judgment is something that does not require POV pronouns, but can be used well in something as simple as this five-word sentence.
Look, too, at the juxtaposition. "Predictable, in hindsight." Something was predictable, perhaps even should have been predicted, but since we are "in hindsight", obviously it was not. What does this give us? Curiosity, of course. A desire to read the next sentence, which is this:
"Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research."
I don't want to discuss every word on this one, but I will note a few things. First off, this sentence depends crucially on the one before it. If we didn't know that there was some event, predictable but not really predicted, this would make less sense and do less to draw us in. But since we do know, we can gather here that the event in question also involved deft and efficient action, exploration and research.
We can gather from the brevity of the phrase "everything about the history of" that the history itself is not relevant, but that if we were to ask, it would serve to support the narrator's contention that the Society has a tendency toward the aforementioned deft action, etc.
The last things I'll point out are the words "Society of Jesus" and "bespoke". They do fit together well. Bespoke to me has a distinct biblical feel, particularly when it accompanies Society of Jesus (without that phrase I might accidentally interpret it as the particular type of telepathy used by Ursula LeGuin).
Also, I'll point out that the word "Jesuit" doesn't appear in the book until sentence number three. Since that word is probably more commonly known to the general population, why wouldn't she use it first? Well, because in saying "Society of Jesus," which is what the Jesuits call themselves, she gestures toward their point of view. The story itself is about a group of Jesuits who go to another planet, about their judgments and the consequences thereof. So the implication here is entirely appropriate to set up reader expectations.
Even when you're in a third person omniscient, point of view never goes away. Don't forget that even tiny alterations in choice of words can tell you a whole lot about what's coming.
I'll start with the first sentence, the way I did with my last post, because an opening has to tell so much about what is to follow:
"It was predictable, in hindsight."
The first thing I notice is that this is not a personal sentence. This sentence isn't giving us a person to relate to, because it has no content pronouns at all, only the word "it" which refers obliquely to a situation.
On the other hand, "it was predictable" does imply a narrator - because it expresses an opinion, and therefore must involve someone to opine. This someone is left deliberately absent, so we have to wait for further information to identify where the opinion comes from.
"In hindsight" also implies a narrator, because it also expresses judgment. Judgment is something that does not require POV pronouns, but can be used well in something as simple as this five-word sentence.
Look, too, at the juxtaposition. "Predictable, in hindsight." Something was predictable, perhaps even should have been predicted, but since we are "in hindsight", obviously it was not. What does this give us? Curiosity, of course. A desire to read the next sentence, which is this:
"Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research."
I don't want to discuss every word on this one, but I will note a few things. First off, this sentence depends crucially on the one before it. If we didn't know that there was some event, predictable but not really predicted, this would make less sense and do less to draw us in. But since we do know, we can gather here that the event in question also involved deft and efficient action, exploration and research.
We can gather from the brevity of the phrase "everything about the history of" that the history itself is not relevant, but that if we were to ask, it would serve to support the narrator's contention that the Society has a tendency toward the aforementioned deft action, etc.
The last things I'll point out are the words "Society of Jesus" and "bespoke". They do fit together well. Bespoke to me has a distinct biblical feel, particularly when it accompanies Society of Jesus (without that phrase I might accidentally interpret it as the particular type of telepathy used by Ursula LeGuin).
Also, I'll point out that the word "Jesuit" doesn't appear in the book until sentence number three. Since that word is probably more commonly known to the general population, why wouldn't she use it first? Well, because in saying "Society of Jesus," which is what the Jesuits call themselves, she gestures toward their point of view. The story itself is about a group of Jesuits who go to another planet, about their judgments and the consequences thereof. So the implication here is entirely appropriate to set up reader expectations.
Even when you're in a third person omniscient, point of view never goes away. Don't forget that even tiny alterations in choice of words can tell you a whole lot about what's coming.
I'm back!
I hooked up my new DSL this morning because the cable company - friendly and helpful as their representatives were in person - was just plain unable to fix my service reliably. A half-hour of internet here and another there wasn't doing it for me. Just hooked up at 9 this morning.
I would just like to say an initial thanks to all of you who have visited faithfully this week despite my silence. You help me feel like I'm not writing alone in a small locked room, and I appreciate you.
More soon...
Juliette
I would just like to say an initial thanks to all of you who have visited faithfully this week despite my silence. You help me feel like I'm not writing alone in a small locked room, and I appreciate you.
More soon...
Juliette
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Further internet difficulties
Just a note to say that I'm having more problems with my internet service, so if you suddenly don't see a post from me for a few days, chalk it up to that. I'm going to do my best to keep up, and to get the problem resolved. Sigh.
More soon...
More soon...
Friday, September 19, 2008
A Sense of Time
Are you one of those kinds of people who can't go anywhere without a watch? My husband is; I used to be that way, until I lost my watch once. Then I realized that if you're looking around, you can almost always find a clock somewhere. Of course, this may put you in the situation where you can't find one and you have to ask someone for the time. As I'm not shy, that's not really a problem.
The sense of time changes over the course of one's life. I remember feeling like a class I disliked in elementary school was going to last forever. Now I can guess pretty accurately when five or ten or twenty minutes have gone by. I've even heard that this has been studied scientifically, and it really does change.
It's not only the internal clock that gives you a sense of time, though. It's events. This is where you can start putting on the worldbuilding glasses if you like. I spent so long listening to school bells that I still get an adrenaline rush when I hear the bells at my son's school and feel I might be late. School years versus summers have always divided my life, because my parents work in the university setting. A working life, though, perhaps that's measured differently. Holidays mark time in our lives. Birthdays. Once I was an adult, though, I found that it became harder to remember which gift came from a year ago, and which from three years ago. Gee, I thought, time is running together!
And then I had kids.
Kids change your sense of time like nothing I've ever experienced. When my son was born he used to nurse for 45 minutes every two hours, twenty-four hours a day. For a straight month, there was no day and no night, only this endless sequence of feedings and attempts at sleep. I had to restart everything. Once I had day and night again, I found that minutes would creep by. I'd struggle to get through the last ten minutes before my husband got home, for example. Hours would feel interminable. Yet at the same time, the weeks would fly by. It's that funny feeling where you're so busy you can hardly breathe, but at the end of the day you can't really identify a single thing you did.
The clock-style life is treated differently by different groups (the California party-goers who are always half an hour late, the BART trains which are usually within 2-3 minutes of on time, the Japanese trains which run brutally on time and some of which come every 45 seconds during rush hour, etc.). But it's not the only one. I think about farming families who used to wake with the sun and go to sleep with it, and whose years are measured by temperature, frost and season.
There are also different ways of measuring time. This whole clock thing is convenient, but the clock, and its "clockwise" - turning hands were decided upon by consensus at one point. In ancient Japan they didn't use the same hours we do, but would measure time according to slightly larger blocks named for animals - "the hour of the ox", for example. So when you're designing your world, don't feel you're restricted. Pick a cultural and environmental reason for the way your people measure time.
Wikipedia has a great entry ("Second") which links the current measurement of our seconds to fluctuations in the element cesium. I once decided to create a time measurement system that was influenced by binary calculations, with 64 seconds in a minute and 64 minutes in an hour, all of that measured on the basis of the observable movement of a nearby star.
There are lots of options, but for now I'm out of time. :-)
The sense of time changes over the course of one's life. I remember feeling like a class I disliked in elementary school was going to last forever. Now I can guess pretty accurately when five or ten or twenty minutes have gone by. I've even heard that this has been studied scientifically, and it really does change.
It's not only the internal clock that gives you a sense of time, though. It's events. This is where you can start putting on the worldbuilding glasses if you like. I spent so long listening to school bells that I still get an adrenaline rush when I hear the bells at my son's school and feel I might be late. School years versus summers have always divided my life, because my parents work in the university setting. A working life, though, perhaps that's measured differently. Holidays mark time in our lives. Birthdays. Once I was an adult, though, I found that it became harder to remember which gift came from a year ago, and which from three years ago. Gee, I thought, time is running together!
And then I had kids.
Kids change your sense of time like nothing I've ever experienced. When my son was born he used to nurse for 45 minutes every two hours, twenty-four hours a day. For a straight month, there was no day and no night, only this endless sequence of feedings and attempts at sleep. I had to restart everything. Once I had day and night again, I found that minutes would creep by. I'd struggle to get through the last ten minutes before my husband got home, for example. Hours would feel interminable. Yet at the same time, the weeks would fly by. It's that funny feeling where you're so busy you can hardly breathe, but at the end of the day you can't really identify a single thing you did.
The clock-style life is treated differently by different groups (the California party-goers who are always half an hour late, the BART trains which are usually within 2-3 minutes of on time, the Japanese trains which run brutally on time and some of which come every 45 seconds during rush hour, etc.). But it's not the only one. I think about farming families who used to wake with the sun and go to sleep with it, and whose years are measured by temperature, frost and season.
There are also different ways of measuring time. This whole clock thing is convenient, but the clock, and its "clockwise" - turning hands were decided upon by consensus at one point. In ancient Japan they didn't use the same hours we do, but would measure time according to slightly larger blocks named for animals - "the hour of the ox", for example. So when you're designing your world, don't feel you're restricted. Pick a cultural and environmental reason for the way your people measure time.
Wikipedia has a great entry ("Second") which links the current measurement of our seconds to fluctuations in the element cesium. I once decided to create a time measurement system that was influenced by binary calculations, with 64 seconds in a minute and 64 minutes in an hour, all of that measured on the basis of the observable movement of a nearby star.
There are lots of options, but for now I'm out of time. :-)
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