Book meme leftovers
Jun. 24th, 2005 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkWell that’s probably the least appetising subject heading yet. All it needs is a good dollop of cold semolina and….
Topic: there was a five things book meme doing the rounds a few weeks ago that I thought about but never actually did. Anyway my ‘5th ‘book that influenced you’ was going to be a collection of five half-remembered sf stories that I imprinted on as a teenager and for some reason I’ve been thinking about them today. The first, and this one I do actually remember most of, was Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison. I just like the title image for some reason. The story was some hippy druggy nightmare about LSD trips gradually turning real. I just like the title OK.
There’s a second imagery one, I think by Gene Wolfe, about a man with a face in his stomach who meets a girl with the same condition and they kiss. The third is a Roger Zelazny novel where the science premise has to do with chirality and the existence of a (literally) mirror world where L forms of organic molecules replace D. Or is it the other way round. I can’t remember what happened in the story at all, I just thought it was a neat premise.
The fourth is a longish short story by James Tiptree Jnr that had something to do with rats and a ‘king rat’ forming as a collective rat consciousness but I remember it more for the not-a-love-story going on at the same time. There’s a man and a woman talking about bonsai trees and how their beauty is essentially a product of major tree torture and it ends with one of them asking something along the lines of whether two broken things can ever make a bonsai. So I’m a complete sap but I think that’s my big romance kink right there. It’s probably a major part of what I liked about S7 of Buffy. Because there’s Buffy and Spike and Xander and Anya and they’ve all broken each other beyond hope of repair and yet by the end they seem to find something new. Not something big, noisy and passionate, but small like a bonsai is small. Quiet. I like the quiet.
And my fifth story I think must be classic sf. Because there are Venusians and the point is that Venus is a drab looking place to our eyes but the Venusians have adapted to it by developing a much more finely tuned sense of colour in that part of the spectrum. So to them viewing our beautiful Earth landscapes is a garish epilepsy-inducing experience. Well I always liked the idea (apparently not true) that Inuit languages contain dozens of words for different grades of snow.
Topic: there was a five things book meme doing the rounds a few weeks ago that I thought about but never actually did. Anyway my ‘5th ‘book that influenced you’ was going to be a collection of five half-remembered sf stories that I imprinted on as a teenager and for some reason I’ve been thinking about them today. The first, and this one I do actually remember most of, was Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison. I just like the title image for some reason. The story was some hippy druggy nightmare about LSD trips gradually turning real. I just like the title OK.
There’s a second imagery one, I think by Gene Wolfe, about a man with a face in his stomach who meets a girl with the same condition and they kiss. The third is a Roger Zelazny novel where the science premise has to do with chirality and the existence of a (literally) mirror world where L forms of organic molecules replace D. Or is it the other way round. I can’t remember what happened in the story at all, I just thought it was a neat premise.
The fourth is a longish short story by James Tiptree Jnr that had something to do with rats and a ‘king rat’ forming as a collective rat consciousness but I remember it more for the not-a-love-story going on at the same time. There’s a man and a woman talking about bonsai trees and how their beauty is essentially a product of major tree torture and it ends with one of them asking something along the lines of whether two broken things can ever make a bonsai. So I’m a complete sap but I think that’s my big romance kink right there. It’s probably a major part of what I liked about S7 of Buffy. Because there’s Buffy and Spike and Xander and Anya and they’ve all broken each other beyond hope of repair and yet by the end they seem to find something new. Not something big, noisy and passionate, but small like a bonsai is small. Quiet. I like the quiet.
And my fifth story I think must be classic sf. Because there are Venusians and the point is that Venus is a drab looking place to our eyes but the Venusians have adapted to it by developing a much more finely tuned sense of colour in that part of the spectrum. So to them viewing our beautiful Earth landscapes is a garish epilepsy-inducing experience. Well I always liked the idea (apparently not true) that Inuit languages contain dozens of words for different grades of snow.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-24 02:25 pm (UTC)According to The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax the various Inuit languages do have lots of words for snow, it's just that they're compounds rather than monomorphemic, and there aren't nearly as many as The Meejah like to claim. So the whole thing is interesting but trivial in the sense that it doesn't tell us anything new about language and perception.
Austrians also have a lot of words for types of snow :-)
This comment was brought to you courtesy one of my Previous Lives.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-24 08:03 pm (UTC)I'm wondering why English doesn't have more words for all the different types of rain I got caught in this afternoon.
I suppose the underlying idea that we have abilities that learning the wrong language has caused to atrophy is sort of romantic. I remember an article in Nature (OK I'm a geek , I went and looked it up) that was looking at a distinction between tight and loose fit, which is present in Korean but not English. Apparently English speakers were much less attuned to the difference than native Korean speakers, but 5 month old babies of either nationality were just as good as the Korean adults. But they ended up admitting that English speakers were perfectly capable of perceiving the distinction once it was pointed out.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 08:31 am (UTC)Long time just lurk. I've been reading your journal entries, though, just haven't had time to comment lately. But term is winding down now and I suddenly find myself with lots of time on my hands and a desperate urge to put off cleaning the house ;-)
they ended up admitting that English speakers were perfectly capable of perceiving the distinction once it was pointed out.
And therein lies the rub, of course. I can't help noticing that Germans find English progressives fiendishly difficult, not because they can't distinguish between an action with duration in time and a punctuative one but because they're just not used to having to encode that distinction gramatically. And Chinese learners of English have enormous trouble with "he" and "she" (oh, the scope for humorous errors, ha ha!) but it would be hard to argue that this is because they have toruble perceiving the difference between male and female.
English has quite a lot of expressions for different kinds of rain, even if they aren't words in the very strictest sense - moist, drizzle, sleet, pouring down, bucketing down, raining cats and dogs etc.