walkingshadow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walkingshadow) wrote2005-11-18 04:22 am
walkingshadow) wrote2005-11-18 04:22 am
Entry tags:
i reached out my hand
as cousin m. predicted, jonathan strange & mr norrell is a book i was contractually obligated to love, being an 800-page novel about the restoration of magic to early-nineteenth-century england with cross-referenced footnotes. i've never been enthusiastic about fantasy in general, but this is so well-rooted in the atmosphere and language of the time and society that the magic is a natural extension of it. it's the perfect mix of pedantic, realistic, and fantastic, and the voice never falters.
my favorite footnote:
we're about to enter thanksgiving territory, meaning a couple of weeks of huge, home-cooked meals, so i suppose now is as good a time as any to read kitchen confidential, the only unread library book left on my shelf. the second disk of arrested development is ready for pick-up, as is babylon 5: the gathering. the new wave of requests:
the education of henry adams - henry adams
the spy who came in from the cold - john le carré
pattern recognition - william gibson
naked lunch - william s. burroughs
nip/tuck (season one, disk one)
the man from u.n.c.l.e.: the deadly toys affair and the minus-x affair
does anyone who watched the man from u.n.c.l.e. watch NCIS? david mccallum plays erudite medical examiner dr. donald "ducky" mallard. abby, one of the lab techs (an adorably perky goth girl), once asked agent jethro gibbs (the adorably cranky mark harmon) what ducky was like when he was younger; straight-faced, gibbs replied, "illya kuryakin."
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after hurricane wilma came through and we were all sitting in the house for a week without power, i thought i came to understand life before the twentieth century, the powerless ages: the hours they kept, the infrequent bathing, the letters they wrote, the walks they took, the candles they lit, the number of children they had—all stood explained! the letter-writing understanding was particularly interesting, because we still had phone service, but the urge was still there. partly, i think, because 1) there was nothing else to do! and 2) no matter what, sitting in a dark, quiet house quickly makes you feel anxious and isolated, as cousin m. mentioned repeatedly—and she didn't have power for eleven days after the storm. plus, letters are great! there's nothing better than getting mail—good mail, real mail, not bills and flyers and unsolicited catalogs. those are just a cruel, cruel tease.
i didn't actually strike up a correspondence with anyone while the power was out (though after another week or two i might have done ANYTHING), but recently![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gjstruthseeker and i have been exchanging email. we're three hundred miles apart and she never answers her phone, so this is a convenient solution. and suddenly the volume of correspondence in times past makes sense in a completely different way, because communication via letters is SLOW. i don't mean travel time, because with email it's instantaneous and therefore irrelevant; even taking into account the time it takes for someone to actually sit down at a computer, check their email, and then respond to it—none of it would matter; the problem is in the letter itself.
we've been talking mainly about two things: 1) the tiny-text phenomenon on livejournal icons, and 2) stargate: atlantis fandom, source, fiction, and characterization. i want to say letters are great for imparting information and relating events (better, maybe, than the phone or face-to-face conversations), but they're incredibly inconvenient for discussing anything. when i say they're slow i mean that an issue that might take us a couple of minutes to define and a few more to explain our opinions about suddenly requires the exchange of half a dozen emails, refining and explaining what you meant in the ones before you respond to something new. i have a sneaking suspicion this is due in part to my—our—being unschooled in the art of letter writing and the perfectly clear expression of thought (also, you know, sometimes i can't shut up or won't let things GO already). but still—email is instantaneous and i still get impatient when it turns out i had misunderstood something she wrote or i had been unclear in making a point myself. how much worse it must have been for people who waited days or weeks or months between replies i don't want to begin to imagine. i have this newfound awe for anyone in history who got actual work done through long-term collaboration via letters. i think we're making a good go of it, but it's a surprising amount of work.
my favorite footnote:
Stephen described how, not long after Julius Caesar had arrived upon these shores, he had left his army and wandered into a little green wood. He had not gone far when he came upon two young men, sighing deeply and striking the ground in their frustration. Both were remarkably handsome and both were dressed in the finest linens dyed with the rarest dyes. Julius Caesar was so struck with the noble appearance of these young men that he asked them all sorts of questions and they answered him candidly and without the least diffidence. They explained how they were both plaintiffs at a court nearby. The court was held every Quarter Day to settle arguments and punish wrongdoers among their people, but unfortunately the race to which they belonged was a peculiarly wicked and quarrelsome one, and just at present no suits could be heard because they could not find an impartial judge; every venerable person among them either stood accused of a crime, or else had been found to have some other close connexion with one of the suits. On hearing this Caesar was struck with pity for them and immediately offered to be their judge himself - to which they eagerly agreed.
They led him a short way through the wood to a grassy hollow between smooth green hills. Here he found a thousand or so of the handsomest men and women that he had ever seen. He sat down upon the hillside and heard all their complaints and accusations; and when he had heard them he gave judgements so wise that everyone was delighted and no one went away feeling himself ill-used.
So pleased were they with Julius Caesar's judgements that they offered him any thing he liked as payment. Julius Caesar thought for a moment and said that he would like to rule the world. This they promised him.
we're about to enter thanksgiving territory, meaning a couple of weeks of huge, home-cooked meals, so i suppose now is as good a time as any to read kitchen confidential, the only unread library book left on my shelf. the second disk of arrested development is ready for pick-up, as is babylon 5: the gathering. the new wave of requests:
the education of henry adams - henry adams
the spy who came in from the cold - john le carré
pattern recognition - william gibson
naked lunch - william s. burroughs
nip/tuck (season one, disk one)
the man from u.n.c.l.e.: the deadly toys affair and the minus-x affair
does anyone who watched the man from u.n.c.l.e. watch NCIS? david mccallum plays erudite medical examiner dr. donald "ducky" mallard. abby, one of the lab techs (an adorably perky goth girl), once asked agent jethro gibbs (the adorably cranky mark harmon) what ducky was like when he was younger; straight-faced, gibbs replied, "illya kuryakin."
+
after hurricane wilma came through and we were all sitting in the house for a week without power, i thought i came to understand life before the twentieth century, the powerless ages: the hours they kept, the infrequent bathing, the letters they wrote, the walks they took, the candles they lit, the number of children they had—all stood explained! the letter-writing understanding was particularly interesting, because we still had phone service, but the urge was still there. partly, i think, because 1) there was nothing else to do! and 2) no matter what, sitting in a dark, quiet house quickly makes you feel anxious and isolated, as cousin m. mentioned repeatedly—and she didn't have power for eleven days after the storm. plus, letters are great! there's nothing better than getting mail—good mail, real mail, not bills and flyers and unsolicited catalogs. those are just a cruel, cruel tease.
i didn't actually strike up a correspondence with anyone while the power was out (though after another week or two i might have done ANYTHING), but recently
gjstruthseeker and i have been exchanging email. we're three hundred miles apart and she never answers her phone, so this is a convenient solution. and suddenly the volume of correspondence in times past makes sense in a completely different way, because communication via letters is SLOW. i don't mean travel time, because with email it's instantaneous and therefore irrelevant; even taking into account the time it takes for someone to actually sit down at a computer, check their email, and then respond to it—none of it would matter; the problem is in the letter itself.we've been talking mainly about two things: 1) the tiny-text phenomenon on livejournal icons, and 2) stargate: atlantis fandom, source, fiction, and characterization. i want to say letters are great for imparting information and relating events (better, maybe, than the phone or face-to-face conversations), but they're incredibly inconvenient for discussing anything. when i say they're slow i mean that an issue that might take us a couple of minutes to define and a few more to explain our opinions about suddenly requires the exchange of half a dozen emails, refining and explaining what you meant in the ones before you respond to something new. i have a sneaking suspicion this is due in part to my—our—being unschooled in the art of letter writing and the perfectly clear expression of thought (also, you know, sometimes i can't shut up or won't let things GO already). but still—email is instantaneous and i still get impatient when it turns out i had misunderstood something she wrote or i had been unclear in making a point myself. how much worse it must have been for people who waited days or weeks or months between replies i don't want to begin to imagine. i have this newfound awe for anyone in history who got actual work done through long-term collaboration via letters. i think we're making a good go of it, but it's a surprising amount of work.
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Oh that made my day, and I still don't even know what NCIS is about. Why, why are such things so glee-inducing, can you tell me?
i have a sneaking suspicion this is due in part to my—our—being unschooled in the art of letter writing and the perfectly clear expression of thought
Is perfectly clear expression of thought even a possibility? :) I think I have a pretty good idea of what you mean about the impatience, but I've always thought that, to me, at least, it's more about just the contrast between "regular" discussion, where you 1) can correct and amend and adjust your sayings as you go, based on instant feedback, and 2) can't necessarily remember every single word-choice well enough to return to it in detail ten minutes later, and "letters" where you 1) can't and 2) can, than about straight-forward lack of some mythical skill of clarity. If the point is to get a point across, you'll never know if you need to work on it more until you get the feedback. And this because, in my experience, the impatience doesn't go away even when you're used to it - I had a discussion of BtVS meta going on over email (and also old-fashioned paper letters) with the same person for years, and still it would occasionally get to the point where we'd both be, you know, screw this, we'll never get it sorted out unless we talk face-to-face.
(Uh, there was a point I was trying to make somewhere in there, but it may have drowned along the way.)
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*fishes your point out of the deep and gives it CPR* see, okay, obviously perfectly clear expression of thought is an unattainable ideal, but i meant that i (and my correspondent) are unused to letter-writing, and that we treat it like a conversation, in that we don't bother explicitly defining our terms or really working at breaking down what we think. sometimes we don't know what we think! it wouldn't solve the problem, but i think we could be better. several times in the course of responding i'm always ready to delete what few lines i have written and replace them with, exactly, "screw this, we'll sort it out when we're face to face." . . . at least i hope that was your point, otherwise i don't want to know whose mouth i was breathing into.
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Hee, yes. (What my personal jury is still out on, though, is any MacGyver references in any series within any franchise involving RDA...)
And, yes, I think you sort of made my point in the way that I completely didn't. Thank you. *g* (Re: "sometimes we don't know what we think!" - isn't that half the point of any conversation, anyway? Not just figuring out what the other person is on about, but figuring out what the hell you, (I mean generic you), yourself, are actually on about? *humm*)
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As I told my mother, I think it's totally better when you read his stuff after seeing his show. The voice and inflections really, really do match up to his writing so it's kinda like having your own minature Bourdain in your head.