Reading roundup and the end of the Ulysses Pact
38. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages -- OMG, this was delightful! lunasariel recommended the book to me last year, when I was searching for a nonfiction book for the 2014 Reading Bingo, and one of the local libraries had a copy, but I was on my Kindle kick, so I read something else instead. Then I was dealing with lost books on various library cards (thanks, L!), and only recently recovered the ability to take out hard copy books from the library, and finally remembered to track this down. I think I'm buying a copy, because I bet B would get a kick out of it, too -- even the parts that I didn't already read aloud to him or retell.
This book, for me, was the perfect combination of a bunch of things that apparently make for ideal non-fiction reading for me: 1) fascinating subject matter (I love languages, duh, and have dabbled in conlangs myself, for the Magnum Opus), 2) a book that works as some kind of story (best example of this in any of the nonfic books I read this year) -- I was actually really impressed with how Okrent organized the whole thing, showed the progression and the ties to other things going on at the time, and framed it with personal experiences, 3) a sense of character in the subject (this is why, even when I didn't read nonfic at all, I would occasionally pick up biographies), 4) simpatico writing style (I was not expecting her delightful snark!), and 5) a sense of the author as a person and someone I'd love to hang out with for a couple of hours over a beer. Basically, everything I could possible want.
I was at first surprised by the focus on language inventors as much or more than the languages themselves, but that turned out to be really great for the story and character aspects above. Even languages I thought I already knew about and wasn't that thrilled about reading about, like Esperanto, made for fascinating reading. And some of the biographical stories are really poignant and quite sad: Charles Bliss (born Karl Blitz, an Austrian Jew, WWI soldier and Holocaust survivor) and his descent into irrationality, which sabotaged the innovative use of his Blissymbolics that could have helped more vulnerable people than it did was probably the most affecting for me, but reading about Molee's idyllic Norwegian-American childhood, reading that Zamenhof, Esperanto's idealistic creator who dreamed of "absolute human justice" died before WWII and was thus lucky not to have lived to see WWII and his children's death in Treblinka, stuck with me as well.
As mentioned above, the book is organized in a very logical fashion, talking about specific "eras" of language invention, with multiple examples, and tying them to larger socio-historical trends, which worked really well for me (though I'm sure, perforce, this left out all kinds of things that did not fit the pattern). "John Wilkins and the Language of Truth" talks about philosophical languages of the 17th century, where people tried to organize concepts into categories -- and arrived at, rather than any sort of usable language, a proto-thesaurus. "Lucwik Zamenhof and the Language of Peace" talks about Esperanto and other attempts at an international language as a way towards universal brotherhood and understanding. "Charles Bliss and the Language of Symbols" talks about the rise of simplified English and further simplifications, into pictographs, and how they were used for purposes other than as a universal language but no less important. "James Cooke Brown and the Language of Logic" is the chapter about Loglan and the language that splintered off from it, Lojban; as far as the languages go, this was the chapter least interesting to me, but the story itself is basically about the sort of crazy splintering that your read about on fandom_wank, and from that point of view it was quite fun. "The Klingons, the Conlangers, and the Art of Language" is basically what it says on the tin, people who dabble in language-creation for fun or artistic pursuits, and is the most autobiographical chapter, because Okrent actually started learning Klingon and attended some conventions.
Stuff I learned/learned about:
- Hildegard (the 12th century nun) appears to have been the inventor of the first documented invented language. Newton and Liebnitz dabbled in them, as did Tsiolkovsky and Bertrand Russell.
- I did not realize that Esperanto has some native speakers, like the Danish rocker Kimo and his son. Apparently, with the appearance of native speakers, the language is also changing, dropping some of the more awkward constructions and preserving them just in fixed phrases, like "saluton" (hello) and "dankon" (thanks).
- Another thing I did not realize about Esperanto is that "In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo. [...] More than 3% of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language (a higher percentage of Esperanto speakers has never been achieved in any other country), and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go."
- Zamenhof was apparently active in the Zionist movement, but then became disillusioned in the nationalistic approach, and decided universal brotherhood would "bring much more good to my unfortunate people".
- 1914 "language wars" in Israel, where teachers went on strike to protest the decision that German (rather than Hebrew) would be used as the language of instruction at Technion, which had been founded by German Jews. (B had known about the debate, though not the sepcifics, and described it as people saying that of course you can't teach math/science in Hebrew.)
- Ogden's Basic English found a fan in Winston Churchill, who even had the BBC present in it.
- Blissymbolics was used by a school for children with cerebral palsy in Toronto, chosen because the children didn't need to know how to read to communicate with this language. Okrent interviewed a woman who learned to "speak" this way, who is paralyzed except for being able to roll her eyes.
- Gestuno, the "Esperanto" of sign languages, which didn't really work, and has been replaced by "a spontaneous sort of pidgin signing now called International Sign." (It makes total sense that sign languages would have the same difficulties of inter-communication as spoken languages, but I'd never thought about it before...)
- Loglan was created to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (ostensibly, anyway), but creating a language to be learned that would be divorced from any sort of culture or other confounding factors.
- Laadan, the women's language created by Suzette Elgin, a sci-fi writer, which features neat words like "rathoo: nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty" and "ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask."
- Evidentials, like "I know because I perceived it myself" or "I assume it's true because I trust the source"/"I assume it's false because I distrust the source", which Elgin imported into Laadan because they're neat.
- The problem of nuclear waste isolation, where Thomas Sebeok was trying to come up with a warning message on sites where nuclear waste had been buried that would be intelligible for ten thousand years. "The best way to make sure the message would get through to the future, he proposed, was to include a second 'matamessage' with a 'plea and a warning' that every 250 years or so the information (including the metamessage itself) be re-encoded into whatever languages, symbols [...] were current at that time. [...] As added insurance he suggests the creation of a sort of folklore, perpetuated through rituals and legends, that would promote the development of a superstition or taboo about the dangerous sites. An 'atomic priesthood'" -- I kind of want to read a sci-fi novel with this premise now...
- I'm doubtless paying more attention to it than any other profession, but there seem to be a lot of chemical engineers among amateur linguists... (Whorf, of Sapir-Whorf, was one, as was Bliss.
Quotes:
"Wilkins was at the very center of scientific life in his day, but his particular gifts were not of the type that go down in history. He was a mentor, an organizer, a promoter, a peacemaker, and a soother of egos." He was friends with Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, for example. I wonder if he set them up with the digs in Prague where we saw the plaque... "Wilkins own work was not groundbreaking (it was suggested that he got along so well with everyone because he didn't arouse jealousy) [...] He was perhaps the first popular science writer."
On the (relative) success of Esperanto vs the previous philosophical languages: "The Esperantists worked to create a community and a culture. Yes, they did this somewhat artificially and self-consciously, but it did work [...] and it turne dout that many people who may not have been inspired to learn a language in order to use it for something would learn a language in order to participate in something."
Humphrey Tonkin on his experiences with Esperanto as a young man, when he was followed out of the Paris Esperanto Society meeting by "your typical 1950s Paris Marxist, and he bent my ear at enormous length about Marxism. The awful thing about it was that I discovered that Esperanto really works. I understood every word he said." XD
On the rise of English as the new lingua franca in the 1920s: "English had added to its arsenal even more compelling advantages: jazz, radio, Hollywood. It became the language of a new, media-driven popular culture. It was the lingua franca not jus of elite pursuits -- diplomacy, business, science, belles lettres -- but of good ol' entertainment."
"Before you judge me as some knind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it."
On reading the Lojban (rigorously logical language) reference manual: "I read the whole thing-- I swear I did. And I'll tell you, not only did I still not speak Lojban, but I started to lose my ability to comprehend English." As an example: "One day during my weeklong immersion in the Lojban grammar, I was watching an Elmo video with my son when a friendly puppet character popped up to ask, 'What are the two numbers that come after the number 6?' I had no idea what this puppet was getting at. 'What the hell does she mean?' I wondered. 'There are an infinite number of numbers that come after the number 6.' I honestly did not know what the answer was supposed to be until the video told me (it's 7 and 8, by the way)."
On making a mistake when speaking Lojban: "I didn't feel too bad, though. Lojbanists are always making this kind of mistake. They are always making all kinds of mistakes. [...] In fact, the main topic of Lojban conversation is Lojban itself. When one heated exchange (in English) led a commenter to write "Go fuck yourself!" in Lojban, it turned into a lengthy discussion of why he hadn't said what he meant to say, and what the proper Lojban expression for the sentiment might be."
"The best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection."
On Klingon: "'membership poured in from people who thought this was all about playing Klingon. You know, the foreheads, the costumes. But when they found out what we really did, they couldn't hack it. It was too much work.' Those who can hack it feel a haughty pride in their linguistic accomplishments, despite the fact that one one who hasn't attempted to hack it can understand what they have to be proud of."
On learning Klingon via correspondence course: "I was confident, bigheaded even. After all, I was a linguist (and we don't get many opportunities to feel superior)."
bingo: non-fiction, author I've never read before
39. Sergei Lukyanenko, Shestoj Dozor [Sixth Watch] -- whatever I may think about Lukyanenko's politics, his Watch books are compulsively readable. I was really in the mood for urban fantasy, and after The Diviners didn't seem to be doing it for me (I'm not sure if I've totally given up or should just wait for a different mood to pick it up again) I went for this book, which was part of ikel89's New Years goodies package.
So, every book in the series has felt like "the last book" since book 3, but apparently this one is really the last, given that spoilers! Anton loses his magic at the end -- or at least it's the last about Anton, and Lukyanenko could pick up with Nadya and Kesha if he wanted to. As per usual, there are a ton of twists. I liked the Tiger's going-native humanity, I liked the revelation that Arina was the leader of the Witch's Conclave (let's be honest, I'm happy pretty much any time Arina shows up, as at this point she's my favorite, given that Semyon has been pretty solidly sidelined -- he has exactly one line and another mention in this whole book bah; except the one thing I didn't like about Arina was the revelation that she was apparently in love with Anton; please, she can do so much better, pshh) and that she's been coccooning and biding her time in the Sarcophagus of Time. I was amused by the revelation that Zavulon is Anton's grandfather, which explains some of the very weird interaction they've had before. I liked this grown-up Yegor, and the way Nadya and Kesha's friendship has developed (Anton the overprotective father, scaring off prospective suitors with magical static from Nadya's protective amulets, was pretty funny). Kostya coming back yet again truly felt like it came out of nowhere, and I was pretty sick of him the first couple of times, but at least that revelation was close to the end, so I didn't have too long to be annoyed with it.
And the whole thing with the incarnation of the dual god... IDK, it's hard to keep raising the stakes every time the way these books do (the Dresden Files have a similar problem), but I liked some of it, in particular the time they pretended to be kids in a hijacked car (I feel like this book showed quite well that he's learned to make some questionable decisions, and probably would've made a decent Dark One, as Zavulon would have liked). I don't really understand how all the logic holds together -- how did Anton figure out that everybody in the Sixth Watch would have to designate a sacrifice? just from what the Tiger said about the futures in which Nadya dies vs Anton maybe-dies? But, whatever, I don't think too hard about these things, or the philosophical aspects of the series, 'cos that's not what I read them for.
There were some additional bits of worldbuilding I liked, like the revelations of Piotr the neanderthal vampire and Hena the smilodon shifter, and the info that the Dozory leadership for Europe are the French Night Watch and German Day Watch.
Some of my favorite random bits: Ivan the Night Watch doctor knowing Bulgakov (and referring to him as "Mishka"), and enjoying watching Young Doctor's Notebook for this reason (while apparently being totally unaware of Harry Potter). Zavulon and Geser's one-upmanship and bickering are always fun, and I enjoyed the bit where we learn that the Day Watch offices have moved to a cubicle open-floor setup in Moscow-City (aka Techno-Mordor). I also really liked the idea of the girl "comparison-shopping" by working for Night Watch and Day Watch (as a chef) before choosing whether to be initiated and as what, to the great consternation of Geser and Zavulon (millennials! XD)
There was also what I thought was a totally gratuitous mention of Majdan, a couple of digs at Obama, and more gay jokes than I remember in previous books (though the one about the "very progressive reading" of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, when Nadya is talking about becoming blood sibling with Kesha and her parents think she's talking about sex, was actually a funny moment). Well, Lukyanenko... *sigh*
bingo: book not in English, author's first language isn't English
40. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love -- this is one of the books on the "mandatory rec" list for the CSRB, and I hadn't made up my mind to read it, just encountered it in the library stacks when looking for something else entirely. I'm a great believer in library shelf serendipity, so of course I took it. I would've thought "Geek" had its modern meaning here, but deeplyunhip had explained this was a book about a carnival freak show. The carnival setting and the deeplyunhip connection contrived to make me expect this book to be something like the Big Fish movie, which I love. Spoiler: it's not at all like Big Fish. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- it was a powerful read, and something I wouldn't have picked up on my own, which is a good thing for me when it comes to bingo reads. But way, way darker than I prefer my reading to be (very dark magical realism more than horror, probably, but not that much more), and not a book I foresee much desire to revisit.
This book is grotesque, and revels in its grotesqueness, but it's not gratuitiously grotesque. The setting was already fairly stomach-churning to me, because I have a thing about birth defects, a phobia, and that's basically the premise -- Al Binewski and his wife Crystal Lil set out to breed their own freak show with the aid of a regimen of pills and radiation while Lil is pregnant. They get Arturo the Aquaboy, with flippers instead of limbs, Elly and Iphy (short for Electra and Iphigenia) the Siamese twins, Oly (Olympia) the albino hunchback dwarf (and our narrator), Chick (Fortunato), Major spoilers from here! the apparently-normal youngest son with telekinetic powers, plus the Jar Kin, the babies that didn't make it to term or died in infancy -- Janus, the other cojoined baby/ies with a tiny little "butt-brother", Leona the Lizard-Girl (possibly painted green by her father posthumously, to make here more interesting to visitors), and several others. (I'm so happy I wasn't reading this book while pregnant! *shudder*) The kids are all put to work -- Arty does shows from his tank, the twins play piano and sing, and Oly, who isn't grotesque enough to attract a crowd, is trained as a barker and ticket-taker. Chick is at first trained in telekinetic pick-pocketing and gambling-fixing, then relegated to (non)manual labor when that doesn't work out, then his ability to keep pain at bay is turned to some really sinister use. Bascially, things only get darker from here, as Arturo sets up a megalomaniac cult around himself, founded on the idea of spiritual liberation through amputation, and conscripts Chick as surgeon, hands the twins over to the guy who almost shot them all as children and is now, post self-inflicted shotgun blast to the face, has trailed after him to become a kind of servant, with the result that they (sharing a womb) are impregnated by him just as their mother shoots him, one of the twins is lobotomized (for unclear purposes), they deliver a monstrous baby who only eats and sleeps, and the whole thing culminates in an infanticide-sororicide-suicide of epic proportions that destroys the whole family, except for Oly and Crystal Lil, who's now solidly out of her mind.
All that said, and much as I sort of mentally squirmed whenever I was reading the book, I did like some of the characters -- the twins, and especially Chick, who was the one I really, really wanted to rescue from this whole mess. I also liked the secondary norms or near-norms that are part of the Fabulon's orbit: Horst the cat man, who ends up taking care of Oly after everything is destroyed and was clearly sort of Al's second in command in the goold old days, Zephyr McGurk, the electrician who follows Arty, and Norval Sanderson, the reporter who starts out investigating Arturism and ends up traveling with the show, embedded more than believing, but feeling some measure of admiration for Arturo anyway, who also likes him despite being adversaries.
There is also a framing present-day story, told by a grown-up Olympia as a missive to her daughter Miranda (her and Arty's, conveived by artificial insemination-via-Chick's powers, who does not realize she is not an orphan), in which Olympia sets out to save Miranda (and Miranda's tail, her only sign of deformity) from Miss Lick, a villain-philantropist who pays beautiful young girls a lot of money to destroy their looks, ostensibly so they would focus on their studies and live up to their fullest potential, but there's definitely a darker undercurrent to her motivation. I found the framing story dull at first, but once Olympia got to know Miss Lick, that changed, and I think the relationship between the two of them, the way Olympia comes to understand Miss Lick and care about her, even while she's plotting methodically how to kill her in order to save Miranda, ended up being one of my favorite things about the book. For one thing, because I find Olympia's affection for Miss Lick easier to understand than her complete, self-abnegating devotion to Arturo.
The prose is interesting and vivid, though also aptly grotesque, but when I thought about noting down some quotes, I really couldn't see wanting to come back to them later, which is the reason I copy them out when I do.
So, well. I'm glad I read it. But when I was finishing up, I told B I was reading this book, and it was really fucked up, and he asked me why I was reading it. It was a bit like a trainwreck at that point, and I guess part of it was that. Part of it was that it was really well written. But I'm not planning to go in there again.
bingo: rec from "mandatory" list, author I've never read before
And, posting a few days ahead of the June 16 deadline: I have completed the Ulysses Pact! And thus:
41. James Joyce, Ulysses -- Well, it's done. I'm glad I front-loaded the reading so I could space the Molly chapter over several weeks, as I couldn't read it more than a couple of pages at a time -- there's stream of consciousness, and then there's TOO stream-of-consciousness. It was interesting to see Bloom from the side but from somebody who knew him well, and interesting to see Molly from the inside after Bloom obsessing over her for so much of the book, but her inner voice didn't work for me as well as his did (though a lot of that was probably just the lack of punctuation). I don't know that I have any grand thoughts overall now that I've finished the whole thing. I'm thrilled I finally read it, after planning to for years, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the Bloom bits. I'm not sure I've ever read a book where I had to look up so many words, or float along while understanding so little through some parts of it. The whole thing *is* quite mad, and I don't understand how people devote their lives to studying it, or, rather, how they avoid going mad while doing so (maybe they don't?).
bingo: school requirement you missed
And CSRB update, since I have a couple of new bingos this week: [cards and lists]
Serious: BINGO! (3 bingos, 19/25 squares, 1/7 challenges)
School requirement you missed: Ulysses
Rec from friend or media (CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list): Geek Love
Book with nameless protagonist: Rebecca
Book by an author you've never read before: Jennifer Lee, Fortune Cookie chronicles
Book not in English: Tsvetok Kamalejnika, Gromyko
Book set before 1900: The Duchess War (Courtney Milan)
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book with a protagonist with a physical disability: Wonder
Book by an author of color: Akata Witch
Book with a protagonist with a mental/social disability: Prisoner
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Book by a queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Mix'n'Match: BINGO! (8 bingos, 23/25 squares, 2/6 challenges)
School requirement you missed: Ulysses
+ CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list: Geek Love
Book with nameless protagonist: Rebecca
Book where I watched movie first: Divergent
Author's first language isn't English: Gromyko, God Krysy: Putnitsa
Non-fiction book: Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Book set before 1900: The Duchess War
Book heavily featuring animals: God Krysy, Gromyko (CHALLENGE MODE: book heavily featuring rodents)
Collection of short stories: Love is Hell
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book with a protagonist with a disability: Wonder
Rec from friend or media: Mistborn
Book with a female protagonist: Akata Witch
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Random: (3 bingos, 19/25 squares, 4/7 challenges) -- how weird... I thought Random would be the easiest one, but actually, except for the number of challenges, it is currently matched with Serious, which I figured would be the hardest...
+ CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list: Geek Love
Book where I watched movie first: Divergent
Book your parent/child loves: Looking for Alaska
Book heavily featuring food -- Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Book with a plant in the title: Tsvetok Kamalejnika, Gromyko
Book heavily featuring animals: God Krysy, Gromyko (CHALLENGE MODE: book heavily featuring rodents)
Book without magical creatures: The Duchess War
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book heavily featuring kids (CHALLENGE MODE: from a child's POV): Wonder
Book set on a continent you've never been to: Akata Witch (Africa)
Book from friends or media: Mistborn
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
(no point in uploading the card for this one)
This book, for me, was the perfect combination of a bunch of things that apparently make for ideal non-fiction reading for me: 1) fascinating subject matter (I love languages, duh, and have dabbled in conlangs myself, for the Magnum Opus), 2) a book that works as some kind of story (best example of this in any of the nonfic books I read this year) -- I was actually really impressed with how Okrent organized the whole thing, showed the progression and the ties to other things going on at the time, and framed it with personal experiences, 3) a sense of character in the subject (this is why, even when I didn't read nonfic at all, I would occasionally pick up biographies), 4) simpatico writing style (I was not expecting her delightful snark!), and 5) a sense of the author as a person and someone I'd love to hang out with for a couple of hours over a beer. Basically, everything I could possible want.
I was at first surprised by the focus on language inventors as much or more than the languages themselves, but that turned out to be really great for the story and character aspects above. Even languages I thought I already knew about and wasn't that thrilled about reading about, like Esperanto, made for fascinating reading. And some of the biographical stories are really poignant and quite sad: Charles Bliss (born Karl Blitz, an Austrian Jew, WWI soldier and Holocaust survivor) and his descent into irrationality, which sabotaged the innovative use of his Blissymbolics that could have helped more vulnerable people than it did was probably the most affecting for me, but reading about Molee's idyllic Norwegian-American childhood, reading that Zamenhof, Esperanto's idealistic creator who dreamed of "absolute human justice" died before WWII and was thus lucky not to have lived to see WWII and his children's death in Treblinka, stuck with me as well.
As mentioned above, the book is organized in a very logical fashion, talking about specific "eras" of language invention, with multiple examples, and tying them to larger socio-historical trends, which worked really well for me (though I'm sure, perforce, this left out all kinds of things that did not fit the pattern). "John Wilkins and the Language of Truth" talks about philosophical languages of the 17th century, where people tried to organize concepts into categories -- and arrived at, rather than any sort of usable language, a proto-thesaurus. "Lucwik Zamenhof and the Language of Peace" talks about Esperanto and other attempts at an international language as a way towards universal brotherhood and understanding. "Charles Bliss and the Language of Symbols" talks about the rise of simplified English and further simplifications, into pictographs, and how they were used for purposes other than as a universal language but no less important. "James Cooke Brown and the Language of Logic" is the chapter about Loglan and the language that splintered off from it, Lojban; as far as the languages go, this was the chapter least interesting to me, but the story itself is basically about the sort of crazy splintering that your read about on fandom_wank, and from that point of view it was quite fun. "The Klingons, the Conlangers, and the Art of Language" is basically what it says on the tin, people who dabble in language-creation for fun or artistic pursuits, and is the most autobiographical chapter, because Okrent actually started learning Klingon and attended some conventions.
Stuff I learned/learned about:
- Hildegard (the 12th century nun) appears to have been the inventor of the first documented invented language. Newton and Liebnitz dabbled in them, as did Tsiolkovsky and Bertrand Russell.
- I did not realize that Esperanto has some native speakers, like the Danish rocker Kimo and his son. Apparently, with the appearance of native speakers, the language is also changing, dropping some of the more awkward constructions and preserving them just in fixed phrases, like "saluton" (hello) and "dankon" (thanks).
- Another thing I did not realize about Esperanto is that "In 1908 the tiny neutral state of Moresnet, the orphan of a border dispute between the Netherlands and Prussia, rose up to declare itself the first free Esperanto state of Amikejo. [...] More than 3% of the four thousand inhabitants had learned the language (a higher percentage of Esperanto speakers has never been achieved in any other country), and their flag, stamps, coins, and an anthem were ready to go."
- Zamenhof was apparently active in the Zionist movement, but then became disillusioned in the nationalistic approach, and decided universal brotherhood would "bring much more good to my unfortunate people".
- 1914 "language wars" in Israel, where teachers went on strike to protest the decision that German (rather than Hebrew) would be used as the language of instruction at Technion, which had been founded by German Jews. (B had known about the debate, though not the sepcifics, and described it as people saying that of course you can't teach math/science in Hebrew.)
- Ogden's Basic English found a fan in Winston Churchill, who even had the BBC present in it.
- Blissymbolics was used by a school for children with cerebral palsy in Toronto, chosen because the children didn't need to know how to read to communicate with this language. Okrent interviewed a woman who learned to "speak" this way, who is paralyzed except for being able to roll her eyes.
- Gestuno, the "Esperanto" of sign languages, which didn't really work, and has been replaced by "a spontaneous sort of pidgin signing now called International Sign." (It makes total sense that sign languages would have the same difficulties of inter-communication as spoken languages, but I'd never thought about it before...)
- Loglan was created to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (ostensibly, anyway), but creating a language to be learned that would be divorced from any sort of culture or other confounding factors.
- Laadan, the women's language created by Suzette Elgin, a sci-fi writer, which features neat words like "rathoo: nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty" and "ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask."
- Evidentials, like "I know because I perceived it myself" or "I assume it's true because I trust the source"/"I assume it's false because I distrust the source", which Elgin imported into Laadan because they're neat.
- The problem of nuclear waste isolation, where Thomas Sebeok was trying to come up with a warning message on sites where nuclear waste had been buried that would be intelligible for ten thousand years. "The best way to make sure the message would get through to the future, he proposed, was to include a second 'matamessage' with a 'plea and a warning' that every 250 years or so the information (including the metamessage itself) be re-encoded into whatever languages, symbols [...] were current at that time. [...] As added insurance he suggests the creation of a sort of folklore, perpetuated through rituals and legends, that would promote the development of a superstition or taboo about the dangerous sites. An 'atomic priesthood'" -- I kind of want to read a sci-fi novel with this premise now...
- I'm doubtless paying more attention to it than any other profession, but there seem to be a lot of chemical engineers among amateur linguists... (Whorf, of Sapir-Whorf, was one, as was Bliss.
Quotes:
"Wilkins was at the very center of scientific life in his day, but his particular gifts were not of the type that go down in history. He was a mentor, an organizer, a promoter, a peacemaker, and a soother of egos." He was friends with Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, for example. I wonder if he set them up with the digs in Prague where we saw the plaque... "Wilkins own work was not groundbreaking (it was suggested that he got along so well with everyone because he didn't arouse jealousy) [...] He was perhaps the first popular science writer."
On the (relative) success of Esperanto vs the previous philosophical languages: "The Esperantists worked to create a community and a culture. Yes, they did this somewhat artificially and self-consciously, but it did work [...] and it turne dout that many people who may not have been inspired to learn a language in order to use it for something would learn a language in order to participate in something."
Humphrey Tonkin on his experiences with Esperanto as a young man, when he was followed out of the Paris Esperanto Society meeting by "your typical 1950s Paris Marxist, and he bent my ear at enormous length about Marxism. The awful thing about it was that I discovered that Esperanto really works. I understood every word he said." XD
On the rise of English as the new lingua franca in the 1920s: "English had added to its arsenal even more compelling advantages: jazz, radio, Hollywood. It became the language of a new, media-driven popular culture. It was the lingua franca not jus of elite pursuits -- diplomacy, business, science, belles lettres -- but of good ol' entertainment."
"Before you judge me as some knind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it."
On reading the Lojban (rigorously logical language) reference manual: "I read the whole thing-- I swear I did. And I'll tell you, not only did I still not speak Lojban, but I started to lose my ability to comprehend English." As an example: "One day during my weeklong immersion in the Lojban grammar, I was watching an Elmo video with my son when a friendly puppet character popped up to ask, 'What are the two numbers that come after the number 6?' I had no idea what this puppet was getting at. 'What the hell does she mean?' I wondered. 'There are an infinite number of numbers that come after the number 6.' I honestly did not know what the answer was supposed to be until the video told me (it's 7 and 8, by the way)."
On making a mistake when speaking Lojban: "I didn't feel too bad, though. Lojbanists are always making this kind of mistake. They are always making all kinds of mistakes. [...] In fact, the main topic of Lojban conversation is Lojban itself. When one heated exchange (in English) led a commenter to write "Go fuck yourself!" in Lojban, it turned into a lengthy discussion of why he hadn't said what he meant to say, and what the proper Lojban expression for the sentiment might be."
"The best hope a language inventor has for the survival of his or her project is to find a group of people who will use it, and then hand it over and let them ruin its perfection."
On Klingon: "'membership poured in from people who thought this was all about playing Klingon. You know, the foreheads, the costumes. But when they found out what we really did, they couldn't hack it. It was too much work.' Those who can hack it feel a haughty pride in their linguistic accomplishments, despite the fact that one one who hasn't attempted to hack it can understand what they have to be proud of."
On learning Klingon via correspondence course: "I was confident, bigheaded even. After all, I was a linguist (and we don't get many opportunities to feel superior)."
bingo: non-fiction, author I've never read before
39. Sergei Lukyanenko, Shestoj Dozor [Sixth Watch] -- whatever I may think about Lukyanenko's politics, his Watch books are compulsively readable. I was really in the mood for urban fantasy, and after The Diviners didn't seem to be doing it for me (I'm not sure if I've totally given up or should just wait for a different mood to pick it up again) I went for this book, which was part of ikel89's New Years goodies package.
So, every book in the series has felt like "the last book" since book 3, but apparently this one is really the last, given that spoilers! Anton loses his magic at the end -- or at least it's the last about Anton, and Lukyanenko could pick up with Nadya and Kesha if he wanted to. As per usual, there are a ton of twists. I liked the Tiger's going-native humanity, I liked the revelation that Arina was the leader of the Witch's Conclave (let's be honest, I'm happy pretty much any time Arina shows up, as at this point she's my favorite, given that Semyon has been pretty solidly sidelined -- he has exactly one line and another mention in this whole book bah; except the one thing I didn't like about Arina was the revelation that she was apparently in love with Anton; please, she can do so much better, pshh) and that she's been coccooning and biding her time in the Sarcophagus of Time. I was amused by the revelation that Zavulon is Anton's grandfather, which explains some of the very weird interaction they've had before. I liked this grown-up Yegor, and the way Nadya and Kesha's friendship has developed (Anton the overprotective father, scaring off prospective suitors with magical static from Nadya's protective amulets, was pretty funny). Kostya coming back yet again truly felt like it came out of nowhere, and I was pretty sick of him the first couple of times, but at least that revelation was close to the end, so I didn't have too long to be annoyed with it.
And the whole thing with the incarnation of the dual god... IDK, it's hard to keep raising the stakes every time the way these books do (the Dresden Files have a similar problem), but I liked some of it, in particular the time they pretended to be kids in a hijacked car (I feel like this book showed quite well that he's learned to make some questionable decisions, and probably would've made a decent Dark One, as Zavulon would have liked). I don't really understand how all the logic holds together -- how did Anton figure out that everybody in the Sixth Watch would have to designate a sacrifice? just from what the Tiger said about the futures in which Nadya dies vs Anton maybe-dies? But, whatever, I don't think too hard about these things, or the philosophical aspects of the series, 'cos that's not what I read them for.
There were some additional bits of worldbuilding I liked, like the revelations of Piotr the neanderthal vampire and Hena the smilodon shifter, and the info that the Dozory leadership for Europe are the French Night Watch and German Day Watch.
Some of my favorite random bits: Ivan the Night Watch doctor knowing Bulgakov (and referring to him as "Mishka"), and enjoying watching Young Doctor's Notebook for this reason (while apparently being totally unaware of Harry Potter). Zavulon and Geser's one-upmanship and bickering are always fun, and I enjoyed the bit where we learn that the Day Watch offices have moved to a cubicle open-floor setup in Moscow-City (aka Techno-Mordor). I also really liked the idea of the girl "comparison-shopping" by working for Night Watch and Day Watch (as a chef) before choosing whether to be initiated and as what, to the great consternation of Geser and Zavulon (millennials! XD)
There was also what I thought was a totally gratuitous mention of Majdan, a couple of digs at Obama, and more gay jokes than I remember in previous books (though the one about the "very progressive reading" of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, when Nadya is talking about becoming blood sibling with Kesha and her parents think she's talking about sex, was actually a funny moment). Well, Lukyanenko... *sigh*
bingo: book not in English, author's first language isn't English
40. Katherine Dunn, Geek Love -- this is one of the books on the "mandatory rec" list for the CSRB, and I hadn't made up my mind to read it, just encountered it in the library stacks when looking for something else entirely. I'm a great believer in library shelf serendipity, so of course I took it. I would've thought "Geek" had its modern meaning here, but deeplyunhip had explained this was a book about a carnival freak show. The carnival setting and the deeplyunhip connection contrived to make me expect this book to be something like the Big Fish movie, which I love. Spoiler: it's not at all like Big Fish. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it -- it was a powerful read, and something I wouldn't have picked up on my own, which is a good thing for me when it comes to bingo reads. But way, way darker than I prefer my reading to be (very dark magical realism more than horror, probably, but not that much more), and not a book I foresee much desire to revisit.
This book is grotesque, and revels in its grotesqueness, but it's not gratuitiously grotesque. The setting was already fairly stomach-churning to me, because I have a thing about birth defects, a phobia, and that's basically the premise -- Al Binewski and his wife Crystal Lil set out to breed their own freak show with the aid of a regimen of pills and radiation while Lil is pregnant. They get Arturo the Aquaboy, with flippers instead of limbs, Elly and Iphy (short for Electra and Iphigenia) the Siamese twins, Oly (Olympia) the albino hunchback dwarf (and our narrator), Chick (Fortunato), Major spoilers from here! the apparently-normal youngest son with telekinetic powers, plus the Jar Kin, the babies that didn't make it to term or died in infancy -- Janus, the other cojoined baby/ies with a tiny little "butt-brother", Leona the Lizard-Girl (possibly painted green by her father posthumously, to make here more interesting to visitors), and several others. (I'm so happy I wasn't reading this book while pregnant! *shudder*) The kids are all put to work -- Arty does shows from his tank, the twins play piano and sing, and Oly, who isn't grotesque enough to attract a crowd, is trained as a barker and ticket-taker. Chick is at first trained in telekinetic pick-pocketing and gambling-fixing, then relegated to (non)manual labor when that doesn't work out, then his ability to keep pain at bay is turned to some really sinister use. Bascially, things only get darker from here, as Arturo sets up a megalomaniac cult around himself, founded on the idea of spiritual liberation through amputation, and conscripts Chick as surgeon, hands the twins over to the guy who almost shot them all as children and is now, post self-inflicted shotgun blast to the face, has trailed after him to become a kind of servant, with the result that they (sharing a womb) are impregnated by him just as their mother shoots him, one of the twins is lobotomized (for unclear purposes), they deliver a monstrous baby who only eats and sleeps, and the whole thing culminates in an infanticide-sororicide-suicide of epic proportions that destroys the whole family, except for Oly and Crystal Lil, who's now solidly out of her mind.
All that said, and much as I sort of mentally squirmed whenever I was reading the book, I did like some of the characters -- the twins, and especially Chick, who was the one I really, really wanted to rescue from this whole mess. I also liked the secondary norms or near-norms that are part of the Fabulon's orbit: Horst the cat man, who ends up taking care of Oly after everything is destroyed and was clearly sort of Al's second in command in the goold old days, Zephyr McGurk, the electrician who follows Arty, and Norval Sanderson, the reporter who starts out investigating Arturism and ends up traveling with the show, embedded more than believing, but feeling some measure of admiration for Arturo anyway, who also likes him despite being adversaries.
There is also a framing present-day story, told by a grown-up Olympia as a missive to her daughter Miranda (her and Arty's, conveived by artificial insemination-via-Chick's powers, who does not realize she is not an orphan), in which Olympia sets out to save Miranda (and Miranda's tail, her only sign of deformity) from Miss Lick, a villain-philantropist who pays beautiful young girls a lot of money to destroy their looks, ostensibly so they would focus on their studies and live up to their fullest potential, but there's definitely a darker undercurrent to her motivation. I found the framing story dull at first, but once Olympia got to know Miss Lick, that changed, and I think the relationship between the two of them, the way Olympia comes to understand Miss Lick and care about her, even while she's plotting methodically how to kill her in order to save Miranda, ended up being one of my favorite things about the book. For one thing, because I find Olympia's affection for Miss Lick easier to understand than her complete, self-abnegating devotion to Arturo.
The prose is interesting and vivid, though also aptly grotesque, but when I thought about noting down some quotes, I really couldn't see wanting to come back to them later, which is the reason I copy them out when I do.
So, well. I'm glad I read it. But when I was finishing up, I told B I was reading this book, and it was really fucked up, and he asked me why I was reading it. It was a bit like a trainwreck at that point, and I guess part of it was that. Part of it was that it was really well written. But I'm not planning to go in there again.
bingo: rec from "mandatory" list, author I've never read before
And, posting a few days ahead of the June 16 deadline: I have completed the Ulysses Pact! And thus:
41. James Joyce, Ulysses -- Well, it's done. I'm glad I front-loaded the reading so I could space the Molly chapter over several weeks, as I couldn't read it more than a couple of pages at a time -- there's stream of consciousness, and then there's TOO stream-of-consciousness. It was interesting to see Bloom from the side but from somebody who knew him well, and interesting to see Molly from the inside after Bloom obsessing over her for so much of the book, but her inner voice didn't work for me as well as his did (though a lot of that was probably just the lack of punctuation). I don't know that I have any grand thoughts overall now that I've finished the whole thing. I'm thrilled I finally read it, after planning to for years, and I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the Bloom bits. I'm not sure I've ever read a book where I had to look up so many words, or float along while understanding so little through some parts of it. The whole thing *is* quite mad, and I don't understand how people devote their lives to studying it, or, rather, how they avoid going mad while doing so (maybe they don't?).
bingo: school requirement you missed
And CSRB update, since I have a couple of new bingos this week: [cards and lists]
Serious: BINGO! (3 bingos, 19/25 squares, 1/7 challenges)
School requirement you missed: Ulysses
Rec from friend or media (CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list): Geek Love
Book with nameless protagonist: Rebecca
Book by an author you've never read before: Jennifer Lee, Fortune Cookie chronicles
Book not in English: Tsvetok Kamalejnika, Gromyko
Book set before 1900: The Duchess War (Courtney Milan)
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book with a protagonist with a physical disability: Wonder
Book by an author of color: Akata Witch
Book with a protagonist with a mental/social disability: Prisoner
Book with a female protagonist: Guardian of the Dead
Short story collection: A Blink of the Screen
Non-fiction book: Musicophilia
Books with a protagonist of color: Smek for President
Free Space: Point of Knives
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book given to you as a gift: Wool (birthday present from my friend R)
Book with red cover: Benedict Jacka, Hidden
Book by a queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Mix'n'Match: BINGO! (8 bingos, 23/25 squares, 2/6 challenges)
School requirement you missed: Ulysses
+ CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list: Geek Love
Book with nameless protagonist: Rebecca
Book where I watched movie first: Divergent
Author's first language isn't English: Gromyko, God Krysy: Putnitsa
Non-fiction book: Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Book set before 1900: The Duchess War
Book heavily featuring animals: God Krysy, Gromyko (CHALLENGE MODE: book heavily featuring rodents)
Collection of short stories: Love is Hell
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book with a protagonist with a disability: Wonder
Rec from friend or media: Mistborn
Book with a female protagonist: Akata Witch
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Funny book: A Blink of the Screen
Book with an author or protagonist of color: Smek for President
Book given to you as a gift: Republic of Thieves
Free Space: Hidden (Alex Verus #5)
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Second book in a series: Red Seas Under Red Skies (Locke Lamora #2)
Book with queer author or protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
Book by an author I've never read before: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Random: (3 bingos, 19/25 squares, 4/7 challenges) -- how weird... I thought Random would be the easiest one, but actually, except for the number of challenges, it is currently matched with Serious, which I figured would be the hardest...
+ CHALLENGE MODE: rec from supplied list: Geek Love
Book where I watched movie first: Divergent
Book your parent/child loves: Looking for Alaska
Book heavily featuring food -- Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Book with a plant in the title: Tsvetok Kamalejnika, Gromyko
Book heavily featuring animals: God Krysy, Gromyko (CHALLENGE MODE: book heavily featuring rodents)
Book without magical creatures: The Duchess War
Graphic Novel: The Rift
Book heavily featuring kids (CHALLENGE MODE: from a child's POV): Wonder
Book set on a continent you've never been to: Akata Witch (Africa)
Book from friends or media: Mistborn
Book set in a place you've wanted to visit for a long time: Guardian of the Dead (New Zealand)
Book written by someone famous for things other than writing: Musicophilia (Oliver Sacks is a neurologist)
Book by an author who shares the first letter of your last name (challenge mode: author who shares your initials): Smek for President, by Adam Rex
Free Space: Red Seas Under Red Skies
Book where male and female protagonists don't fall in love: Three Parts Dead (counting Tara and Abelard as the mains)
Independently published book: Wool
Book by queer author: Melissa Scott, The Kindly Ones
Book with queer protagonist: Melissa Scott, Point of Knives
(no point in uploading the card for this one)