Undone

Just 'cuz no one seems to be able to get into either the post on meaning in language or the thing about the NaGraNoWriMo, I thought I'd put up something with a little more mass appeal. Not quite a vidblog (hopefully, something will soon be in the works), but not a heavy-thinking post either.

Meaning in Space

Over at Johnny T's a discussion/argument has been churning over the past couple months across a number of posts. This conversation has spanned a number of topics, but one of the more interesting to my mind has been our treatment of a text's Meaning and its relation to Authorial Intent. I tie them together inexorably, seeing that each text has one true meaning. Johnny T does not, opting to see multiple meanings per text. In his most recent post, on little horses, he asks me two questions:

How does the reader determine the intent of the author? If the intent of the author is unknown or unknowable, is the text meaningless?

I thought my answer might make good fodder for the thinking among you, so I'm reposting it here. Bon apetit.

---

1) How does the reader determine the intent of the author?
I don't believe that the reader has the ability (on this earth) to determine infallibly the intent of any author. I think we interpret somewhere between understanding and misunderstanding. If we were to present this mathematically, it would look like:

perfect understanding > our interpretation ≥ misunderstanding

I think that with people who communicate well together, interpretations will fall more often along a curve dominating the Understanding side of things. People who do not communicate well (or people who know nothing of each other) will more often fall on the Misunderstanding side of things.

That said, I think that if the reader is interested* in receiving the communication effected by the author, he should engage in those activities that general lead toward a better understanding of intent. Some of the tools of such readers are research into an author's context, understanding of "common usage" of whichever language the author chooses to communicate in, a familiarity with potential deviations from common usage that the author is likely to engage, and best of all, some explanation or clarification from the author himself as to what he intended. These tools, while aiding in interpretation do not guarantee a correct interpretation**; they merely give us the best potential for running into the correct interpretation.

* I think it's fine if readers aren't interested in receiving the effected communication. There is nothing wrong with this. But. We cannot say they are interested in the text's meaning. They are rather more likely to be interested in giving the text meaning - which is an entirely different endeavor.

** by "correct interpretation" I'm speaking of author intent.

2) If the intent of the author is unknown or unknowable, is the text meaningless?
The text is not meaningless, but if we cannot ascertain intent then we cannot discover the text's meaning. Of course we can add whatever meaning we want, but that's our meaning, not the text's.

As an example, let's say I am in the depths of the Pacific, searching for the lost civilization of Mu. I find an ancient tablet and discover a symbol that looks roughly like this: <o>

Now I could add meaning to that and say that they Mulians must have some connection to Milo Rambaldi. But that would be me, the reader, transmitting meaning back upon the author. And as funny as that might be, it doesn't help me figure out what the symbol means. Not knowing anything about the author (who or when they lived, whether they were human, whether the mark was made by sentient beings or whether it was carved by time and chance), I cannot possibly decipher the symbol's meaning. It may be absolutely packed with meaning but none of that transmission of meaning reaches me. It's been obscured by its sheer lack of context.

So the short answer: if author intent is unknowable, then the text is not necessarily meaningless but meaning has been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

NaGraNoWriMo 2006

As November comes to an end, quite a few bloggers are breathing a sigh of relief as NaNoWriMo 2006 comes to an end. That unwieldy abbreviation stands for National Novel Writing Month and November is the domain over which it stands as grim sentinel over the creative forces of would-be novelists across the internets. As if the soon-coming stress of the holidays is not enough for these over-eager souls, they take it upon themselves and their over-worked keyboards to craft, in the space of a solitary month, a complete draft to a 50,000 word novel (that's 175 pages).

To be honest, the event never appealed to me. But then, I've never really cared to write a novel, so my apathy in this respect seems entirely reasonable.

Yet still, this month of November 2006, I did embark on a very similar project, a sister project if you will. A few intrepid souls have decided that a NaGraNoWriMo (a National Graphic Novel Writing Month, if you will) would be better suited to their creative energies and so: NaGraNoWriMo 2006 is now drawing to a close concurrently with NaNoWriMo.

When Dave Carter first suggested the project, I thought it sounded cool enough and so I took stock of the month to see where my responsibilities lay and so I lo-and-beheld the fact that I could maybe take part. I've been spending evenings at coffee shops and at outdoor areas with fountains and other relaxing settings, scribbling with waxing/waning ferocity in my little, black composition book.

But I won't finish on time. My novella is much longer than the demanded 175 pages (approaching a figure closer to 325 pages). I just finished a sort of page-by-page plotting of the story and only have five pages of actual script penned. But still, it's been an exciting endeavor and I'm pretty proud of my story and how I envision the finished work will turn out. I plan to have a second draft of the script finished and in the hands of a critical and thoughtful friend or two for review by New Year's and will begin creating the art for the book sometime after that.

If you care to read of my progress, I posted occasional updates on the official NaGraNoWriMo 2006 blog.

Sunday Morning Woes

Sunday morning, I awoke from a fitful sleep after a night dominated by an immediate and acute trouble with my breathing, and all the coughing and weezing that accompanies such states. I roused, while breathing mostly regularly, to a strange assembly of maladies - chief of which was the fact that I was at odds with my own body. It seemed foremost to my mind that my arms had grown by several inches in length and I had not yet time enough to adjust to their new extension; as such, I became quite ill at ease with myself and could only hope that time would comfort me and that I would find my recently acquired condition to be some sort of boon.

Additional distress was caused by the fact that I felt the pain of extreme hunger in a newfound manner - newfound to me that is (I wholly suspect that there are entire tribes living in the remotest peaks of some the world's more famous ranges that live each day in this particular state of internal strife). It was a hunger that found itself not so much at home in my stomach but more made its residence in the entire community of my organs. I felt this strange starvation in the whole cavern of my torso. These pangs assaulted my liver, pancreas, and appendix, and found a special habitation in my lungs.

Yes. My lungs were hungry. Woe unto us all.

First Thoughts on a Book

So. Eragon. The hardcover is currently in Amazon's top 150 bestsellers. The movie adaptation is coming out a couple weeks into December. I've seen the book on the shelf at Borders pretty consistently over the last couple years. The children of friends are raving about it. Even some adult friends are speaking of it in terms usually reserved for the likes of a young Harold Potter. So. I thought I'd check it out. And after a couple false starts, I'm now about sixty pages in and am certain that I'll finish it in a week or so. And what do I think?

I think it's a great book. For something written by a seventeen-year-old.

No really. After reading about twenty pages with a furrowed brow and wondering how on earth a book with writing this, er, pedantic(?) could 1) get by an editor and 2) get published to acclaim, I made known my hesitations and was told that the author wrote it as a kid. Further inquiry reveals that the book was self-edited. The pieces all began to fall into place.

My impression was that the author was someone who had absolutely fallen in love with the English language yet did not have the kind of experience with it to know when to reign it in. The author practices his craft without reserve, heaping adjective after adjective into sentences. Just when you think a sentence cannot bear with a single other adjective, just when you think another descriptor will burst the gut of the sentence, he proves you wrong, stuffing at least five more in previously unfilled nooks and crannies.

The author revels without moderation. He is simply drunk with adjectives. And with simply awful names for proper nouns. I think he's read too much bad science fiction/fantasy and learnt to accommodate some of the genres' worst tropes. This deserves its own post so I'll hold off for now, but here is a note to all young sci-fi/fantasy authors out there: stop using apostrophes in names. Just stop it, please.

It may be that you've read this and still haven't figured out what I think of the writing of Eragon (by the way: Eragon is pronounced exactly the same as Aragorn but minus the second R). Allow me to clear that up straightaway.

Eragon features some of the worst writing I've read in a published novel. A real editor may have done the book a world of good, but we'll never know because we're stuck with this pile of pages that should never have left the notebooks that originally housed it, should never have been bound into any sort of printed edition, should never have been marketed to the public. I feel bad saying this because I'm certain that the author, Christopher Paolini, put his heart and soul into these books; but I'm also certain that when Mr. Paolini is thirty, he'll be horrified that the thing he is most known for is this awful little bestseller that somebody should have had stopped him from self-editing. Really, rough-draft it up when you're a kid, but hold onto those drafts until you're actually capable of writing with discernment.

Sigh. Only 300 or so more pages to go. My only hope is that the story stops being derivative retread of every other fantasy tale out there.

Wedding Dumbness: Episode 2

Not to harp too long on the inclusion of the Divorce Lecture that's wormed it's way into many contemporary wedding ceremonies, but - well, yes - I'm going to continue. You probably know what I'm talking about if you've been to more than a couple wedding in the last couple decades: officiants warning the bride and groom of the solemnity of marriage admonishing them based off the statistics that say about fifty percent of Christian marriages end in divorce.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't discussion of the likelihood of divorce at a wedding incredibly tacky? I mean it's one thing for the wedding guests to quietly have a pool going on how likely they believe the couple are to last, but for the pastor to bring it up during the ceremony? Classy. And so much for celebrating, huh?

I mean look at it this way. At a baby shower, you don't announce to everyone that, statistically speaking, there is some probability that the baby could be still born. At Grandpa's eightieth birthday, you don't ask everyone to celebrate in earnest, because, you know, it could very well be Grandpa's last. And why don't wedding officiants then also produce some word about adultery - after all, statistics show that it is certainly not improbable. And really, adultery within marriage is worse than adultery without, so what's the deal? Why don't we mention these things?

Because it's in bad taste.

Really, what pastors are saying is: "Look. I know you're happy now. But you won't be soon. And statistically speaking, there's a betting chance that you guys won't be married five years from now. So really, let's try to make it okay? Please? I know that I've said this same thing to all those other couples - some of whom are now divorced - but I'm gonna say it anyways, 'cause, well... you guys have seen that Jesus movie right? You know that part where Pilate washes his hands? Yeah. That's me right now. I know it's tacky and that I've cast a black pall over what should have been an entirely joyous occasion, but well. I just don't want to feel guilty down the road when things aren't looking so rosy."

Blargg, I say. Blargg.

The Dane vs. The Linerider (part ii)

Wanting to try building a course with little of that straight-line hatching that I used on my prior two courses, I made one using solely the bumpy kind of lines that come from the natural movement of the mouse. This one has a lot of bumping and flipping in the place of speed and loops. I've entitled it Goodnight Moon.

Wedding Dumbness: Episode 1

So at maybe a full quarter of the weddings I've been to over the last decade, somebody (whether pastor or father or hired wedding/rodeo clown) suggests that it would really probably be a pretty good idea for the couple to tear from their dictionaries the page that includes the word, divorce. It sounds rather superstitious to me, but I've been advised that the idea might be that if a couple never uses the word, the idea of divorce might likewise be absent from their minds - which would be especially valuable after a wife says, "I hate you and wish that Janie McIntyre, who introduced us, had never been born!" and her husband blandly responds with "Oh yeah. Well, what're you going to do about it?"

Really, I kinda like the idea of crossing things out of dictionaries to prohibit them from happening in your life. It's kinda neat in a sci-fi sort of way. Like I would totally cross out heartburn and acne and syphilis ('cuz, hey, you can't be too careful) and murdered and broke, poor, poverty, and unhappy ('cuz yeah, why not?).

Or even, really, more with the heart of those advising such dessication of the English language (that is, promoting the foreignness of immoral choices), why not just get it all with one fell swoop. "Now, Ricardo. Cheryl. I speak solemnly when I offer you this advice. It was offered to me when I married my first wife and I offer it to you now in the same manner. When you go home tonight, I admonish you, with vigour and with the knowing smile that you now see on my face, take down your twenty-six-volume Oxford Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language and abridge it. I recommend strongly, in this age of prominent divorce, in this era of failing marriages, to tear the word, "sin," from your dictionary."

Remove "divorce" from your dictionary? Really. Such pansies. When I get married, I'm gonna remove the dictionary from my dictionary.

Dreams of an Insomniac

Last night I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed with that weary kind of wakefulness that belongs only to the true insomniac. Then, when I at last fell asleep around 4:oo in the morning, I dreamt that I was in bed trying without success to fall asleep. Then I woke, realized I was dreaming and couldn't get back to sleep.

It was exhausting.

The Dane vs. The Linerider

For those of you who are just plain unaware, Linerider is the recently hip computer toy produced by *fsk. I first ran across the little program on a few weeks back on Deviant Art, but now it appears there's a fostering community site at linerider.org.

The long and the short of it is that Linerider has two aspects: creation and play. To begin with, the user (in this case, me) has a rudimentary set of tools (i.e., a pencil, a trash can, and a save/load feature) and is given a blank canvas, not unlike what one might find on a recently shaken Etch-a-Sketch. The user then simply draws a series of lines (sometimes referred to as a "track" or "course") and when satisfied, clicks the Play Button. This begins the Play aspect of the toy. Perhaps a video illustration will help explicate the wonder of this toy.

Now that you have the basic idea, I highly recommend going forth and playing for yourself. The physics "engine" behind the toy is just fun enough to make some pretty cool stuff possible. Imagine if the course creation part of Excitebike on the old NES didn't suck. I know, pretty tough request. But if you can imagine such a thing, that is a pretty close approximation to what's going on in Linerider. And just to give you a couple ideas, here are two "courses" that I carefully cobbled together myself. Bon ape!

And for those who are interested, here is a full view of the course I made for Ups & Downs.

[[ NOTE: for those who missed it, you can download the Linerider toy here - third link in the list... ]]

Two Months Later

It's not swollen like it was two (or even one) month ago and I've got a fair amount of movement out of it now - but if I hold something wrongly or something heavy, white blinding pain. *sigh* And drawing for any duration longer than fifteen minutes is tough on it.

Grr. Pain, how I hate thee!

Lord of the Flieses

Here's a custom dvd cover (for the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies - a.k.a. the spooky version) that I'm in the midst of fiddling around with. Not happy with the text yet, but it's just a matter of time (and many, many font changes), I'm sure. I do love the large, hi-fi fly with the very lo-fi Sharpie crown.