INTERLUDE

So the other day, I mentioned to my classmate that I travelled back in time from the year 2004. She took a moment to digest this, then asked me whether or not time travel hurts.

"Oh yes indeedy!" I replied. "Ever push your head through a shirt collar that’s too small?" She nodded. "Well, in time travel, the collar is the size of a pinprick, the shirt is made out of titanium, and instead of pushing your own head, it’s being throttled at speeds of up to 300 miles-per-hour!"

"That sounds like it would hurt," was my classmate’s reply.

"You could say it’s quite a straaiiin," I said with a grin. But she didn’t understand how I was making light of being shoved through a pinprick-sized hole in a titanium shirt at 300 miles-per-hour. I haven’t spoken to her since.


ADVENTURES IN SPEECH THERAPY, CIRCA 1999

Classes are going okay, I suppose. It’s only the third week, and I finished my first paper for Dr. O’s Production of Speech course. The topic was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, an old linguistics theory Dr. O expects will be the source of much debate next Tuesday.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argues that any two speakers of different languages will have trouble understanding each other, not just because each language uses different words to indicate the same thing, but because people who speak different languages also THINK differently. For example, eskimoes have, like, several dozen words that mean snow. There’s a word for soft snow; a word for falling snow; a word for hard igloo wall snow. Since we English speakers have just one word for snow (that word being "snow"), the Eskimo language concept of frozen animal urine snow as being separate from on-the-ground snow would probably cause us confusion.

But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been revisited and revised over the years, cites the lack of mutual intelligibility as temporary. Sapir-Whorf states that concepts of any language can be properly explained to non-speakers. The trick is to make the concept fit neatly into words and phrases of the confused party’s language. To borrow the example from the textbook, the myriad of Eskimo words for snow is no different from the multitude of English names for "flying objects that aren’t birds." After all, there are certain Native American languages where a single word encompasses "flying objects that aren’t birds." Hence, we are all capable of acquiring mastery of foreign languages!


BOOKS I’VE FINISHED READING, AND THOUGHTS PERTAINING TO THEM

Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray. Ending felt like a cop-out. Also, I’m unclear how so many readers came to the conclusion that Becky Sharp is a sociopath. She is certainly single-minded in her ambitions and a horrible parent. But some of the tricks she pulls (What she does to those nobles when Napoleon’s army is supposedly descending) are admittedly clever, and wouldn’t be entirely out of place coming from a Jane Austen heroine. Also, Thackeray never makes clear whether Becky cuckolds Rawdon, which would make a big difference. I will say, though, that towards the end, I really was rooting for Becky to get her comeuppance. That’ll probably upset the feminists…

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. Hated it when I started reading it, loved it by the end. The author is certainly kinder to Tess than he is to Jude, but that isn’t saying much. I definitely plan to see the 1979 Polanski film within the next few weeks.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 1, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I don’t think this first 6-issue miniseries is as clever as it thinks, nor as spectacular as people have told me. It also doesn’t hold a candle to Moore’s Watchmen, but what comic book series ever could?

I will say, however, that I can definitely see how a movie studio would be interested in LoEG. Swashbuckling adventure (Well, up until Nemo ruins it); Edward Hyde; the Invisible Man; such properties—I mean, characters, could appeal to audiences of all ages. Too bad the original material is written for grown-ups.

I haven’t seen "LXG—the Movie," but I witnessed its trailers. If the movie didn’t make a complete mockery of the source material, I would be stunned. For one thing, a lot of the sly humor in Kevin O’Neill’s artwork stems from foreground/background relationships. Certain panels you can stare at much longer than others, just because of the activity on two separate planes. When I think of similar spatial relationships in movies, and the directors who can pull it off, I think of Orson Welles, sometimes William Friedkin. Stephen Norrington, director of "Blade (1998)," does not spring readily to mind.