Ambrose & Elsewhere

The Pantheon dome and its oculus as the Moon and the Earth. (From APoD.)

“Boy meets pig. Boy frames pig as a jewel thief. Boy loses pig, and has all his leather-clad supermodel/cat-burglar sidekicks karate-chopped into submission by pig. It’s practically the world’s oldest story.”

(From the “Inventory” feature at Onion AV Club. The subject was “13 Films With Wildly Mismatched Romantic Pairings,” but the other twelve weren’t as funny, unless you like remembering Bennifer the First.)

At the risk of vexing people who’ve seen enough about the shootings at Virginia Tech, I thought I’d pass on some messages about Jamie Bishop (a German professor at VT and son of sf writer Michael Bishop) from an unlikely source–it surprised me, anyway: the Classics-L listserv.

The messages are archived here and here.

Re the killer:

The images (from photos and video) in Cho’s package addressed to NBC didn’t tell me much. But his words, as he rambled on the soundtrack, suggested to me that the guy might have been schizophrenic. One of the American media’s famous pseudo-conversations is taking place even now about gun control. But if Cho was mentally ill (as seems possible), the real issue here is not whether we need more or less guns.

There are hundreds of thousands of schizophrenics in the US living in private infernos, unnoticed or at least unhelped because their pain turns inward and they hurt themselves or their families, not random strangers. Cho may or may not have been insane, but our treatment of the mentally ill is certainly crazy.

This week’s Writer’s Five.

Questions about where your main character lives

Answered for Morlock, as usual.

1 – What type of home is it?

Morlock is essentially homeless, so he lives wherever he is. By preference he’ll live in a cave, but he moves around a lot; he might be camping out or sleeping in an inn on any given night.

2 – What city do you live in? or if not a city where?

Anywhere from the deserts and jungles of Qajqapqca to Wuruyaarria, the werewolf city in the far north of Laent.

3 – Is your home messy?

Not too much. He wants his things where he can get them when he has to move on, which might be any time. He’s lost almost everything he once had, so he may be somewhat irrationally protective of the stuff he has left.

4 – Do you live alone?

Usually, but not always. Sometimes he travels with other people, and he once had an apprentice who lived and travelled with him.

5 – Where do you eat the majority of your meals?

Wherever he happens to be. He’ll buy them made if he’s in or near a town, from a tavern or a cookshop; if he’s on the road he’ll make them himself. But it would never be haute cuisine; food is just fuel as far Morlock is concerned.

More from Howard V. Hendrix. (Then I first saw the name a few days ago I thought it was a legal case–Howard versus Hendrix.) This installment by way of GallyCat. He regrets the inflammatory choice of words (without reference to his pixel-stained magnum opus) but doesn’t seem to have rethought his thinking, insofar as I can follow it.

The pixel-stains on my virtual fingers were fading a bit, so I engaged in a bit of technopeasant wretchedness by updating my egomaniacal shrine to myself website. Most of the changes are to the stories page, where I shifted things around a bit and added a link to the preview for the latest Morlock story.

Actually, I did this to celebrate the arrival of Black Gate 10, which has been a long time coming, but worth the wait.

I’ve been reading and enjoying the stories, and will probably post later about them. In the “Letters” column there some kind words from readers about “Payment Deferred”.

Kurt Vonnegut died last night in Manhattan (according to Reuters and the NYT).

This week’s Writer’s Five

Time to get your Evil on – Questions for your WIP’s villain –

Answering for the insectlike, mountain-dwelling Khroi who afflict Morlock (and vice versa) in an upcoming novella in Black Gate; I’m hoping they will also make each other’s lives miserable in a sequel I’m struggling with at the moment.

1 – What is your villain’s main pet peeve?

Spiders.

2 – What is the most depraved thing your villain has ever done? (even if it’s not all that depraved)

Genocide.

3 – What is a redeeming quality your villain has? (if any)

They’ll pay anything they see as a debt.

4 – Does your villain think he’s evil?

Yes. (But not because of the answer to question 2.)

5 – What is your villain’s justification?

It’s for the children.

(Poetry meme filched from eeknight.)

If they told you I’m mad, then they lied. I’m odd, but it isn’t compulsive. I’m the triolet, bursting with pride; If they told you I’m mad, then they lied. No, it isn’t obsessive. Now hide All the spoons or I might get convulsive. If they told you I’m mad then they lied. I’m odd, but it isn’t compulsive. What Poetry Form Are You?

I like linguists and linguistics but a recent post at Language Log about the proposed California “Compassionate Choices Act” (AB 374) reminded me why linguists, like anyone else, need a smack with a wet fish every now and then.

Geoff Nunberg says in the offending post that

The law doesn’t actually mention the word suicide. In part, that’s because the use of word tends to have a huge effect on people’s opinions about this issue. In a 2005 Gallup survey, 75% of respondents agreed that doctors should be allowed by law to “end the lives” of patients suffering from incurable diseases if the patient and his or her family requested it. But when the question was worded as permitting doctors to “assist the patient to commit suicide,” only 58% of the respondents agreed.

Intent only on the issue of the wording, Dr. Nunberg assumes that the mere form of the wording is the only issue. But allowing doctors to “end the lives” of terminal patients might easily be construed as allowing doctors to withhold “lifesaving” measures or turn off life support on persons who are actually or effectively dead: far less controversial measures than assisted suicide.

Are linguists terrible people who want to kill our ill and elderly over their weeping protests? No. But, intent on words, they may miss the thing the words are intended to signify.

The relevance for writing fiction? Maybe there’s none. But I think here’s a danger for writers, especially writers who want to write well, to fixate on the word over the thing, the signifier rather than the signified. In a way, this makes sense: stories are made of words, not things (except insofar as words are also things).

It’s sensible, but it’s death. Here, as always, I think of Le Guin. Quoting from memory: The artist says what cannot be said with words. A writer is an artist who uses words. Therefore, a writer is an artist who uses words to say what cannot be said with words. I take this to mean that we write not with words but through words, using words to direct the reader’s inner eye toward things we’ve imagined that it might not otherwise see. If the reader stops at the surface of our words and sees only them, we’ve failed.