I bet this showed up on your friends page and you didn't read it. Go read it, it's interesting and disturbing. But you should read the article it links to before reading the post.

(I know, this is nothing to the kinds of things other countries do, but I always tend to assume Europe is fairly normal. Although I guess I should really know better by now.)

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2009/11/08/12520.html

While I was driving yesterday, Anna Russell's "How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Opera" came up on my iPhone music rotation. It is still lovely and entertaining, even after all these years. (It was recorded in 1953, and I've been listening to it intermittently since probably the early '90s.) I particularly like Russell's one-person madrigal singing and her excellent Gilbertian multisyllabic rhymes. And the line "Things would be so different if they were not as they are."

And it occurred to me that some of y'all may be unfamiliar with Ms. Russell's work. She started as an opera singer, but by the mid-'40s had started to find her true calling as a parodist and comedian. She did a bunch of stage shows, and made a few recordings.

A fair bit of her comedy revolves around high music culture of the period, and so may be less than fully accessible to people (say) my age and younger, especially those of us who aren't opera aficionados. But her two best-known pieces—the above-linked G&S piece and "The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis)"—are brilliant and semi-timeless.

I say "semi" because both rely to some extent on the timelessness of other work. In particular, people unfamiliar with G&S will probably not enjoy the "How to Write Your Own" piece as much, given that it's primarily a fifteen-minute-long condensed and semi-modernized parody of H.M.S. Pinafore (and, to a lesser degree, various other G&S operettas), along with meta-commentary about the standardized template of a G&S show's plot and characters.

On the other hand, I think her twenty-minute "analysis"/summary of the Ring cycle may've been my first exposure to that story, and I've still never seen or heard the full Ring cycle itself; I imagine people familiar with the full version would enjoy Russell's discussion even more than I do.

Anyway. If you like musical parody (in the sense of parodies of songs and styles, not in the sense of new words to existing music), and/or if you like Gilbert & Sullivan or Wagner, then give Anna Russell a try.

Both of the abovelinked pieces can be found on her album The Anna Russell Album, which combines the music from her LPs Anna Russell Sings? and Anna Russell Sings! Again? In the iTunes Store, both pieces are "album only"; then again, the full double album costs only $9 (for nine pieces, but these two pieces are long, so the whole album adds up to about 75 minutes). And the other pieces on the album are also fun, albeit not the tour-de-forces of the two longer works.

Unfortunately, the 30-second preview clips don't come close to doing justice to those two pieces. But if you think from the descriptions and titles that they might be the kind of thing you would like, then you're probably right.

I am guilty of having done a post here that could only have been understood by cybertelepaths. I had all the backstory for my new novel in my head, I had all my linguistics-stuff in my head, so I just went blithely along with that post as if you [youall] were similarly encumbered. I am greatly blessed that houseboatonstyx came to my rescue with a comment, and -- with that resource in hand -- I am going to do my best to straighten up the mess I made. Here's the first paragraph of the comment:

"If we're looking for sounds that would be PERCEIVED as something other than vowels or consonsonants or something along that continuum -- that's an issue about the perceivers, isn't it? If they've been trained that to be meaningful, a sound must be classified as v, c, or in between -- then won't anything that might be meaningful be stuck into one of those categories, whether it physiologically fits the physiological definition or not?"

Yes. Terran linguists listening to the speech of native speakers of an ET language are going to expect to hear vowels and consonants because that's what they've been trained to hear, and are going to sort the sounds they hear into those two categories for that reason. Only after the U.S. Corps of Linguists (USCOL) had accumulated a large database of ET sound-based languages that included vowels, consonants, and "something else" would it be possible to train them to identify and analyze that "something else." And my conviction is that that would take a very long time to happen.

And here's the next paragraph of the comment:

"Are we looking for sounds from the vocal tract that would be so different physiologically/phonetically that they COULD NOT be fitted into those v-c categories, even by a sort of legal fiction? But would somehow be clearly meaningful so that they COULD NOT simply be disregarded or somehow marginalized?"

Yes again. My Brethandi ETs -- because their anatomy is very different from the anatomy of the Terran cattle they so closely resemble to the casual eye -- are able to speak in a fashion comparable to Terran speech, although they of course have distinctive accents. [I knew that. So I did a cognitive SHAZAM-leap and took it for granted that you would know it too. Sheesh.] And my question was serious. Supposing one or more of the Brethandi languages was composed of three meaningful classes of sounds -- vowels, consonants, and something else -- then what, I wanted to know, could that something else possibly be?

One possibility turned up in a comment from kelsied:
"Consonants, vowels, and rests. As in music. The rhythmic and intentional interruption of consonants and vowels to modify their meaning."

That option -- musical rests -- is the one I used in my USCOL story "Honor Is Golden," published in Analog. [Not online anywhere, so far as I know.] It worked, to my satisfaction and my editor's, although I got slammed for it in a review. My linguists weren't able to isolate the rest-phonemes or work with them, but they were able to establish communication. Which was their primary goal.

I hope this clarifies things just a tad. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll try again.

How the revolution ends.

Thanx to spacecrab.

Happy birthday, aenodia

11:54 It's always awesome when another instrument-playing friend comes over to hang out. Spontaneous live music in my house all day! #

21:35 Just made some pumpkin pie. #

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INwatch: Core Rules: 435, Lilith: 375, Eli: 353, Liber Umbrarum: 222, Litheroy: 214 (pi?), Asmodeus: 184, Infernal Player's Guide: 117, GURPS In Nomine: 78.
Adventures: City On Fire: 115, Feast of Blades: 92, Strange Bedfellows: 92, The Rats' Revenge: 86.
Free Adventures: A Very Nybbas Christmas: 4125, The Sorcerer's Impediments: 2685.
Not IN: Sahudese Fire Drill: 76, GURPS Classic All-Star Jam 2004: 60, GURPS IOU: 58 (another sale and I could track it more easily...). Not IN or mine: Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and RPG: 216.


( Dragons under fold )

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2009/11/07/12518.html

Have you ever written fiction in which the protagonist doesn't have a name, and/or in which the protagonist's name doesn't appear?

If so, I'm curious about what led to that choice. Did you have a particular reason or goal? For example, were you trying to distance the character from the reader? Were you trying to let the reader see themselves as the character? Did you want the character to feel archetypal? Did you want to emphasize the character's role rather than their personhood? Were you trying to obscure the character's identity and/or what kind of a person or being they were? Did it just feel right? Was it an experiment? An accident?

Also, what approach did you take to avoiding the name? Did you call the protagonist "the man" or "the woman" or "the old queen" or "the man in yellow"? Did you use a job title? Did you just use pronouns? Were you calling attention to the lack of name, or trying to be subtle about it? Did the character have a name in your head? Did the lack of a name make you-as-writer more invested in the character, less invested, neither?

(You don't need to answer those questions one at a time; just tell me anything you want to say about your nameless character(s).)

I'm also curious about the other side: how do any of you (whether writers or not) react as readers to nameless protagonists?

In my experience reading submissions, I think I often find it kind of annoying when a protagonist is nameless. (Or even, though this is a different thing, when the protagonist is referred to only by epithets and pronouns in the first few paragraphs and then is given a name.) But sometimes it works. And sometimes I don't even notice it. And there's certainly a long tradition of nameless protagonists; a lot of fairy tales have them, for example.

So I don't mean to suggest that it's inherently bad. Just thinking about what kinds of effects it can have, and about when it's a good idea and when it isn't. Discussion welcome.

http://www.kith.org/journals/jed/2009/11/07/12517.html

Another news video segment showing soldiers returning home to their kids, this one from Christmas 2007. The narration is kinda goofy, but the clips themselves are heartwarming.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the links.

I was thinking last night as I woke up "huh, there was that database upgrade they were doing this morning, was that to upgrade elver and fry to the same version as cygnet and gosling? I never actually looked at what they were doing, I should do that" -- and thought "...huh, no, actually, I shouldn't". And then later, I did it again: "Huh, I wonder how that upgrade went? I should log in and check my ... oh. Right."

I think the whole not moving thing is actually a big part of it. I came home from work on Friday, I'm having a pretty normal weekend, and then I'll leave for work on Monday. It'll just be a totally different job with totally different people in a totally different place doing totally different things. But everything else is basically normal and the same. Disconcerting.

Still looking forward to it. It's just an odd experience at the moment.

The second batch of your comments I want to tackle -- about a possible "third class of meaningful sounds" in an ET language -- is those that propose various kinds of noises. The noises described in your comments included percussives [sounds that could be made with drums, rattles, and the like]; crackling; clicks; whistles; burps and belches; teeth-clicks; farts; squeaks; squeals; and more.

Those of you who've complained that I didn't define my terms -- neither "vowel" nor "consonant" -- are absolutely right, and I apologize. For me, vowels are speech sounds that are produced without any obstruction of the flow of air through the vocal tract; consonants are speech sounds for which that flow of air is obstructed in some fashion. That of course means that the vowel/consonant distinction has to be a continuum, not an either/or binary split. As pgdudda has pointed out, the English liquids [L and R] and the English glides [Y and W and H] are neither strictly vowels nor strictly consonants; they fall in between the two, somewhere on the continuum.

My opinion -- and it's only that, an opinion, since I've never encountered an ET language -- is that all of the varieties of noises proposed in your comments would be perceived by Terrans, and by Terran linguists, as falling somewhere on the vowel/consonant continuum; that is, as either vowel-like or consonant-like. I don't believe they would perceive the noises as a separate, third class of meaningful speech sounds.

I could be wrong about this. For sure.

via randysmith: New Scientist on swine flu myths that could endanger your life.

I just knocked off work for an hour to go pick Geoff up at the airport. His being back means that I will almost certainly start cooking dinners again; I haven't been taking the time for it while I've been home alone, what with the working until 10:30 or 11 pm. Plus there will doubtless have to be pesky socializing and stuff. Dammit, I'm not even sure I'll feel able to go to church tomorrow, given my workload, and watching Supernatural is a vague fantasy. On the other hand, I think I sleep better with him than without him. Oh coffee, how I am loving you this week.

[a Dreamwidth post! | read comments at Dreamwidth | post a comment at Dreamwidth | How to use OpenID]

Sometimes--often--I'm not fully aware of why I do something: I just do what seems right, changing when it no longer seems right. I can often figure out most of my motives, sometimes almost all: the conglomeration of petty, generous, loving, fearful, protective, experimental motives that we all have.

I was surprised when a friend in e-mail linked my having the idea of the PoC-to-ICFA gift to that of apology. A whole new light to look at things in.

Was my impulse an apology? Partly, or more accurately a kind of remedy for what I had come to see as one area in which I had been less active than in others.

Not an apology to specific RaceFailers, ghu knows. I regret a lot of what happened, but at best almost everyone was talking past the other, the misunderstandings far from one-sided. I'm not fond of having old writing of mine on that topic linked to, because it does not represent my thought now, but I did say it, and I knew it would be out there in the future no matter what changes I went through. And I embrace the process of change, which would not have happened without the writing. So.

And it's understandable that I've been doing more for fat-rights issues and GBLT issues than for other social concerns: I don't apologize for putting those first.

However, I also try to do things for other social-problem areas as the possibility arises, and race had been an area of neglect, except in a kind of passive don't-be-an-asshole way. I'm certainly not obligated to do more than that, but I want to be better.

So here was an opportunity to do something for the ICFA and for a social area I had neglected. Our action was precipitous--as womzilla said, "literally thoughtless", especially in not giving the IAFA board a heads-up--but it felt right to do.

And still does. Today I'm less sad, more finding the humor of it all. ithiliana--who, I was disappointed to find out, is someone I liked from the conference, wrote "stop responding here, or anywhere else. Stop thinking you can defend yourself." In one way, that's great advice, though I'd have to be a somewhat different kind of person than I am to take it. In another, it's absurd: OMG, we committed the crime of offering a gift from our own pockets, which of course is indefensible!

Back when I was in therapy, the excellent psychologist used the word "transparent" for how I live my life--he said it approvingly, though I do know the costs, for myself (which I bear gladly) and sometimes for those around me (which I regret unless they tell me not to). I'm trying to become more diplomatic, but I don't think the transparency will change, because I don't think I want it to. Drama llama that I can be as a result.

Mood: rushed but contemplative

The first batch of your comments on my ET phonology question that I want to tackle is the batch that doesn't try to answer my question. I don't know whether it's because I didn't make myself clear, or because the question was perhaps read too quickly, or because the commenters just preferred not to color inside the lines. In any case...

My question was narrow and specific:
Suppose the ET language we're dealing with has three classes of meaningful sounds: vowels; consonants; and something else. What could the something else be?

Comments proposing that the something else could be colors, or smells, or the position of the speaker's face/ears/tail/fur -- something other than a class of meaningful sounds -- are answering a different question. It's an interesting question, and I thank you for the comments, but it's not the question that I asked.

In typo veritas

Thanx to Shakesville