Funny, I was just wondering whether anyone had used as the basis for a story a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events.

Think of the legal system....

An elaboration I don't think would work: everything you've dreamt is remembered as having happened on Dreamday, the eighth day of the week---this probably being influenced by the band name "Eleventh Dream Day".

Ah, the fungibility of memory. As Frost said, someday I shall say I took the one less taken, and that shall make all the difference, even if I didn't.

Over the years, I've played with the idea of a city of memory—functioning like a medieval memory palace—with an independent, though non-physical, existence. If you can imagine it well enough to find it, you can explore more of it and learn new things.

In retrospect, I think I derived the ambience of the city of memory from the book I quoted in this post, though the specific idea is not part of the work.

This wins the Internet today: http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/6644038.html

ceruleanst writes:

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?

V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?

J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike

Are strange to ours, with their own history:

Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.

V: What say they then, pray?

J: Hachis Parmentier.

V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?

J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.

V: What do they name black pudding?

J: I know not;

I visited no inn it could be bought.

There's more. So much more. It made my day.

Does anyone know of any good 'deep value' handbag makers? Ever since that thread, I've realized the annoyingly short lifespan of my purses/handbags/shoulderbags. I have a bunch of them, but most of them were impulse buys because I liked the outward design, or gifts that are pretty and sturdy but have at least one fatal design flaw.

My current one is ideal in size, but the fastener has gone and was never very good to begin with, so I'm constantly paranoid I'll lose something. I'm looking to invest in something that will stay with me, put up with abuse, and still look presentable.

What I'm looking for now is a bag big enough to hold two books, two small bottles of water, and a small lunch but that would still 'read' to a security person as 'purse' not 'messenger bag' or 'backpack.' Ideally it would have a lot of interior pockets for organization (one of the other weaknesses of my current one.)

I'm willing to make an investment (policemen's boots and all that) but am entirely uninterested in 'brands.' I own several Tom Binh backpacks/luggage items and have considered getting one of their smaller bags as a purse, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a more conventionally styled bag-maker who actually produced items that are functional and LAST.

Ooo, Invisible Cities! I really liked Invisible Cities, though I could never finish If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which my lit geek friends assure me is the worthier effort.

In the category of "Shakesperian pastiche", I submit for your approval... Hamlet meets Doctor Who.

Some time ago, I tried to rewrite Sonnet 116 ("Let me not the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...") in C pseudocode, but it turned out sort of boring and lame instead of funny and geeky. I haven't messed with pastiche since. (Though I *am* toying with a vague idea for a modern Canterbury Tale.)

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities?

Non Sequitur

Joe ducked low, zigzagged through the alley, darted into the street, ignored the honks of angry drivers and made it to the sidewalk, vaulted over a wall, dodged an angry Rottweiler to climb a chain link fence, climbed into a window, sidled into the kitchen and grabbed a cookie from the cookie jar, snuck out the back door ran down the side yard, dashed into the woods, strolled down the path , followed the gravel road past the old abandoned farmhouse, and was almost home, when he clumsily tripped over a clause, smacked his head painfully on a comma, suffered traumatic amnesia, and forgot the subject of this sentence.

Euphemia: A Fantasia on Invisible Cities

There are two things they do not tell you when they wave you through the lines of camels, of burros laden with beads, strings of dried figs and memories of the latest fireworks display over the canals of Venice: you must lose a memory to get a memory. There are some memories that respectable people do not trade.

You find these out soon enough for yourself.

At first, you trade one memory for another that seems better, and feel rich: the palace intrigues, the memories of stars' births, that you get in exchange for the single memory of blowing the fluff off a dandelion at age five. The merchant weighs your memory in his scales, bites it to test its purity; he is satisfied when it spits a few white puffs into the air. They are carried on the currents through the bazaar where the people swirl in cloaks of red and yellow and blue, and disappear in the dust of a place where dandelions have never grown. What is a dandelion? you wonder, thinking this, and decide that it must be the name of this dark corridor where courtiers plot and whisper, or otherwise the explosion of light at the heart of the nebula.

Eventually, full of memories not your own, you perhaps forget yourself a little, or worse, remember yourself only as your darkest deeds: all you have left. You are desperate to get rid of them; you try to palm them off on passersby. One, taking pity on you, turns you toward a shadowed alleyway where customers and sellers whisper and look over their shoulders as they complete transactions, blackmails of the mind. You are reminded of hallways, a dandelion.

You enter the fray. You sell off the time you screamed at your mother before you left Venice and never returned, you sell off the time you broke your leg, you sell off memories of your black night-thoughts, the ones that prey when you cannot sleep. Someone is always willing to buy, and you leave with memories of quenching strange urges that you are sure you never had, of murder and of making your five-year-old daughter cry. You have no daughter.

*

"Rich" is one of the words you traded early, and because you are a shrewd businessman and canny, you got two memories for your one, both from a native of the town:

The richest man in Euphemia is a messenger who runs the most important memories between the high houses and richest merchants' stalls--all the great memories in the city pass through his head, but do not stay there. The houses and merchants appreciate his trustworthiness, discretion, promptness, and tip him lavishly with gold when he arrives at his destination. Memory is not the only coin the city accepts; he could buy Euphemia if he wished.

The richest man is else a tinker so poor he begs on the streets for bread and fights the rats for rancid meat. He has never traded a memory. Some, bitter, call him the stingiest man in the city, but he smiles more than anyone else.

*

The man with whom you traded looks to you, asks if you might know his name. You shake your head, realize what he can no more: the word "Euphemia" was his last hoard.

Moved now by pity to keep your end of bargains he no longer knows he made, for alms you--generous, rich, young and stupid--give to him memories of dandelions.

The name 'Euphemia' reminds me irresistibly of Euphemia Williams a politician* from Westmoreland, Jamaica. She was notable for being the candidate the Jamaica Labour Party ran against P.J. Patterson, Jamaica's longest serving prime minister, which means that she only won once, in 1980, when his party, the People's National Party was swept from power decisively (he wasn't PM then, Michael Manley was).

Anyway, Euphemia sticks in my memory not only because she was a perennial loser, except that once, but because in her official party photograph she was shown giving her party sign, the Winstonian v-for-victory sign, backwards. As a native Londoner I could only say 'oh, dear!'.

Leah @#5

I've been buying LeSportSac bags for some time. They are nylon, and therefore light and durable and somewhat washable. They close by a variety of means, zippers and snaps and magnets. I prefer zippers, though they eventually wear out, but while they work, they work reliably. They come in a variety of colors, patterns and sizes. Most have several compartments. The one I am currently using has two outside zippered compartments, and a main compartment, and a little inside one reached from the main one.

They are not cheap, but I think they are worth the money. Macy's carries them, but I don't know of other places. They also have a website:

http://www.lesportsac.com/

A "house of memory" is also a memory-training exercise, often associated with the Tarot.

That is, having memorized the cards, you would visualize each of them as rooms (or perhaps corridors, according to the Qabalistic mapping). That lets you store memories in them, effectively "indexing" them by association. Naturally it can work with almost any other structured set of images; the point is just to provide a framework for associations.

Has anybody ever written a fantasy story about dust jackets? No, not a book's dust jacket, but a literal one, maybe one worn by an earth spirit?

That "Library Thing" website is neat. I currently keep my records in an Excel spreadsheet. I should definitely thing about uploading it.

Cassandra, #9: Wow. Just... wow.

#13 ::: Serge :::

In Macleod's The Cassini Division, Iain M. Banks' Matter, and probably a whole lot of other stories as well, characters wear clothing/spacesuits made up of a large number of very tiny machines that work together---"flocking" potentially in more ways than one. This is nanotech inspired by fantasy, and well might be considered still in that realm.

(M. Banks, in another book, has an entire assassin just drifting in past planetary defences one mote at a time, then assembling itself into swift and dusty vengeance.)

Two things. First, the cat/theremin sidelight is fricken hilarious. Just had to say that. With a house brimming with cats, that cat is fricken awesome.

Secondly, what is a cheesebear?

Today I celebrated my cat Gypsy's birthday. I don't know the actual day, but he was estimated to be 3 months old when I adopted him in mid-July 1990. At 18, he is thin and frail, but his sight, hearing, and appetite are good, and he still holds his own with the younger cats. He got a dab of cream cheese, a little sliver of butter, and lots of cuddling for his birthday.

He does not play the theremin.

David@12, memory palaces are significantly older than the Tarot, altho perhaps not older than cartomancy in general (did the Romans have playing cards?). It dates back to the ancient Roman schools of rhetoric (there are three main classical references, one is a brief comment by Cicero, the others are what remains of the "Ad Herennium", and something by Quintilian). One of the most definitive works of scholarship on the memory palace tradition is "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates (which I happen to be reading piecemeal right now).

Leah Miller @ 5 -- you might also consider the Tom Binh-like company "Red Oxx" (redoxx.com). I've only bought large duffles from them, but they make a couple of items that might suit. Again, these aren't cheap -- but the zippers are the really heavy-duty YKK brand and the seams are properly bound. Cordura is basically indestructable if the seams don't pull out, so these should last a good long time.

As an aside, the large duffles I got from them are a bargain at $50. For those of you who need duffles. They also have smaller sizes at smaller prices, suitable for jump bags.

Anne, i wish your kitty a few more years. I had my first cat Aja go until about 18, when she had a brief illness and then basically winked out (she did have to be euthanized) and my third cat had a 19-year run and passed on her own after announcing it to the only member of the household awake that morning. I took her to the mortuary for cremation myself with many tears. (I am surprised at how good I am at driving and crying, but helping mom take care of dad in his dying days sort of trained me...)

I did have one cat that had to be euthanized early (11 y-o) because he got kidney disease and he was a nasty cat to any veterinary care. and a cat that we adopted at about 10-12 that was 17-18 when his kidney disease finally took him, we'd extended his life a long time with Sub-Q fluids and medication, and held him until he couldn't take any more.

You WILL know that time for your friend, I assure you. It makes it okay, in a way, because you know you've given them the best in the time they have. When they're not enjoying the day-to-day, it's time.

all my best.

Leah @5, I've been carrying Bagg Lady bags for more than ten years, and my oldest one still looks totally fine.

I have three sizes (really small, large and really extra large), three colors (navy, burgundy, and black) and two different styles (regular and sling back). They're all pleather or psuede, and I just wash 'em, throw them in a zip style plastic bag, squish out all the air, and store in the bottom drawer of my dresser when I'm not using them.

Something odd....

I was just browsing the fictionwise listing for The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and it lists the author as "Spilogale Authors". Spilogale, according to Wikipedia, is a genus of Skunk.

Interesting joke...I wonder whose it is?

Oh, Invisible Cities is one of my favorites.

So far the only other Calvino I've read is Castle of Crossed Destiny, and I found it oddly unsatisfying to the point of boredom. Writing stories based on Tarot cards is not a trivial task. The one time I tried it, anyway, the results were less than inspiring. (I'd post a link to the attempt, but the web page appears to be misbehaving at the moment - it keeps claiming to find no rows in the database even though they're right there. I'll have to troubleshoot it in the morning.)

Of course, having posted a statement like that, I expect any number of people on this thread will take it as a challenge. I'd enjoy that.

Cassandra, btw, you totally won my internets with that post, and my heart with its final paragraph.

My injured-but-still-relatively-hale 15-year-old pointer would love a theremin, but I don't think she could do justice to it the way those cats do.

> a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events

I recently read something with a very similar premise. Spoilers:

Gur Qbpgbe Jub abiry Gur Fgrnyref bs Qernzf. Vg gheaf bhg gung cerivbhfyl qrgrpgrq zvpeb-betnavfzf ba gur pbybal cynarg unir haqrezvarq gur novyvgl bs gur uhzna oenva gb qvfgvathvfurq orgjrra npghny frafbel vachg naq vzntvarq riragf.

Cassandra?

That's really good. "What is a dandelion?"

May I humbly suggest you submit this for publication? Perhaps here.

Funny, my edition of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places describes lots of Calvino's Invisible Cities, but not Euphemia. Maybe Euphemia is particularly invisible? Perhaps it's been listed in the newest edition.

Michael Turyn @ 16... Banks, in another book, has an entire assassin just drifting in past planetary defences one mote at a time, then assembling itself into swift and dusty vengeance

An assassin made of dust, in the vacuum? I hope his name wasn't Hoover.

Thanks, Lee, Nicole, and Doug.

Doug--thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a shot.

Cassandra... A much belated wow. And may I recommend your sending this to Realms of Fantasy?

The Romans did not have playing cards. The popularity of cards is one of the consequences of printing.

Serge @13 -

There was an old Outer Limits episode about a monster (a dust monster?) that was sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

Also, Spirited Away had those soot sprites in the furnace room who hustled pieces of coal to the furnace.

There's something I've been wondering about for a while now, and I'm hoping you all won't mind indulging my curiosity.

How do you keep up with Making Light? What I mean is, how do you spot the new posts, comments, and particles/sidelights? I'm not as efficient at it as I'd like to be, and I'm looking for possible tips or a new way of managing it.

I have the main page in my RSS reader, so I always know when a new post goes up, but my reader (bloglines) doesn't work with comment threads.* I've had the best success so far by bookmarking the last comment of any thread I'm reading, then periodically going to all the bookmarks to see if there are new comments. Every so often, I go to the main page and check for new particles and sidelights.

It works fairly well, but it does mean that I don't notice comments on older threads, and I spend a lot of time refreshing pages that have no comment activity and changing/deleting bookmarks.

I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining about the site, because I'm not. I'm just wondering if there's something obvious I'm missing.**

*If I sub to a comment thread through bloglines, I get some number of most recent comments on that thread when I first subscribe, but the feed never updates. I haven't poked at it any more than that, because if I'm going to have to manually refresh the page, I'll just go to the individual posts directly. I'm also not convinced that I like RSS for comments because I can't scroll up to see the older comments.

**I do know about the "Most recent comments" sidebar and "Last **** comments" pages, but that long list of intermixed comments from different threads doesn't really work for me. I have trouble finding the oldest unread comment for all the threads I'm following, especially when our hosts have been prolific posters and we have many active threads, as we have recently.

#33, Steve C. -

Weren't there similar dust/soot sprites in My Neighbor Totoro too? (Yes, I know, it is the same writer/director.) Somehow I got the idea that they were a piece of Japanese mythology (is that the word I want?), rather like we think of "gremlins."

R M Koske, I check the site pretty regularly when I'm not at work (*blocking* it at work was the best thing to happen to my productivity in months) and click on the most recent comments of any thread-- not the oldest most recent comment, but the newest. Then I scroll up until I recognize something. It means I read some comments twice, but by the end of a long thread, I'm usually skimming anyway; the reread helps. It also lets me know where I last read the thread. I don't use RSS for anything-- I don't even have a Livejournal Friends page, partly out of stubbornness, partly because I like typing in each name as I want to read them.

In other news, fungus gnats are suppose to get *better* when you stop watering your plants, right? Grr.

Steve C @ 33... Ah yes. The episode's official title was It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, but I later found at a gathering of fans that we all call it the vacuum-cleaner creature episode. Which prompted one fan to make a joke about the brain-house episode, in which a young woman turns to dust at the end.

R.M. Koske @35 -

I believe you're right. My Neighbor Totoro is one of my favorite films - Miyazaki is a genius.

Serge @ 37 -

I'm going have to dig out my OL DVDs and watch that one again. Along with "The Zanti Misfits".

Steve C @ 38... Woodwork's SFX are primitive, especially by modern standards, but I can put myself in the frame-of-mind of the era, and so the whole is very evocative. I do the same thing with the Zanti Misfits, who are quite creepy when one goes beyond their silly appearance.

Shakespeare parody: because it was on TV recently:

NYM: But Bardolph, ho! Where is our Bardolph now? What, Bardolph! Speak!

FLUELLEN: He's gone. Certain, he is gone, there is not a sign of him; there is not a Bardolph anywhere, look you, he is complete vapour'd.

PISTOL: Let's ask the wench Elaine. Boy, do you practice your French tongue upon her.

NYM: An I would she would practice her French tongue upon me, Ancient Pistol.

BOY: Peace, good Nym. Alors, mademoiselle, savez vous ou est le monsieur Bardolph? Le soldat anglais avec le nez enrougi? Est-ce que quelqu'un l'a pris?

ELAINE: Ah, monsieur, le foret est devenu vif et l'a pris.

BOY: Why, sure, the woman's mad.

FALSTAFF: Gentle Boy, what says she?

BOY: The very forest, she said, did come to life, and take him.

NYM: Damnation to her!

FLUELLEN: I must confess to you now, good Sir John, that this is entirely outside the principles of war; for I have soldiered in the wars now twenty years, look you, and there is nothing in my experience to account for it; no, not in the wars of great Pompey, at all.

FALSTAFF: Good Fluellen, you do belie your name; for I have heard it said you have no fear of aught of woman born.

FLUELLEN: Why, Sir John, you are wrong, look you, and my name is not belied; for I do not believe that this is a thing of woman born.

JAMY: Look here! Where Bardolph sat!

PISTOL: A horrid mark of clotted blood!

FLUELLEN: It cannot be Bardolph's blood; for his face was ever as purple as the grape, and no wine of this colour was ever pressed from any grape, it is completely against nature.

NYM: Why, cullies, if it bleeds, we'll make it bleed again!

(All discharge pieces and exeunt shouting.)

Leah @#5: I also have a small LeSportSac bag (manufacturer website, in use), which I like a lot because it's extremely lightweight and reasonably weatherproof.

It's also bigger inside than it looks. In the front compartment I am currently carrying keys, a bundle of thumb-drive-type things, sunglasses, three pens, 1.5 sticks of lip balm, and a roll of antiacids. Middle: wallet, cell phone, PDA. Back: iPod, earphones. If I needed to, I could throw in a PDA portable keyboard, too.

Unfortunately because I have a poor memory for a lot of things I'm not sure how long I've had it. It seems pretty durable, though, in the details of its construction.

ALGERNON: It seems, then, that we are being pursued by some malicious creature.

CECIL: Surely that can be no novelty for a fashionable playwright.

ALGERNON: (ignoring him) It appears to be able to pass completely unnoticed --

CECIL: Would it not to be more accurate, in that case, to say that it does not appear at all? In any case, I was always under the impression, Algernon, that you regarded most of your critics as unworthy of notice.

ALGERNON: (angrily) Damn it, Cecil, Sir Roger has been abducted by this thing, and there you sit, calmly eating cucumber sandwiches!

CECIL: Well, one can't eat cucumber sandwiches in an agitated manner.

Jo@32: Ok, chalk one up for the Anachronisms-to-Avoid list. Altho I do note that Wikipedia says that playing cards were known in Europe slightly before the Gutenberg press and in China in the 12th century -- but as you said, they only really took off in Europe in the mid-to-late 15th century (i.e., after woodcut technology made them more affordable).

Subcutaneous fluids for cats:

If you need to do this, and you haven't already, please try warming the fluid before-hand (ten minutes with the bag in a sink otherwise full of hot water, keep the connector out of it on general principles). It made a big difference to our cat's acceptance of them.

Building or bricolaging a cargo-cult IV stand also helped, because it allowed us to comfortably do it anywhere she felt at home.

Selfish note: doing this for her made her dying a lot easier on me than was the case for cats for whom we couldn't do much beyond ending their suffering.

From email*, a paragraph that I simply cannot figure out how to begin to answer.

Why do you have to learn Dutch? There are now more mainland Chinese speaking English (Chinglish) than the entire population of North America, so why can't the Dutch learn it? Surely the E.U. will legislate for a common language eventually? Don't think for one moment that it will be Dutch!

Suggestions welcome.

-----

* Australian correspondent; the mutual interest is bookbinding.

abi @ 45... Chinglish?

45: I would suggest "...er, to speak to Dutch people with?" followed by a long stare.

abi: ajay's response is good, followed up with "because the immigrant is the one who should learn the majority language", "because I don't think that the disappearance of non-English languages is a good thing"*, and "because whether the EU picks a language or not (and whether it's English or not), right now most of the people I talk to speak Dutch".

*: Assuming you agree with either of those statements. :)

abi, how about "Because learning new languages is cool and fun; because I want to help keep the Dutch language from dying out entirely; because there are social advantages to speaking the language of the country one lives in, even if one can "get by" without doing so; and because I'm sick of Dutch people being able to talk over me without my understanding a word."

Any subset.

I'm still waiting for the Universal Translator to be developed.

R.M. Koske: I use brute force. I try to remind myself to click the terminal comment when I get to the bottom of a thread. When I come back I hit "last 1000" and scroll to the highlighted comments. I then look to see the first new comment above that in the threads I'm reading (usually all of them).

If I forget, then I go to my last comment, and move forward. That often means a lot of re-reading/skimming to find the place I stopped, but it's how I keep up.

abi: That was a real sentiment? The mind croggles. My answer would be, "Because I am living here and that's what they speak." If I were to me more in the tone of persuading, the answers would be; on a practical level, "Even if the EU decides to make a pan-european lingua franca, and it isn't Dutch, that does me little good now."

I don't understand the reference to Chinese at all, it's a bizarre non-sequitor/appeal to majority which baffles me (as I don't suspect she thinks Australia ought to start speaking Chinese because there will soon be so many of them; or somesuch).

Ow, just ow.

I haven't made it all the way through the clips yet, but I just wanted to thank you for posting the clip from Sister Act. That brought back a lot of good memories. (all mine, FWIW)

Abi @45

"because the local land use council meetings are conducted in Dutch, and if I can't attend the local council planning meeting and speak, our house will almost certainly get the picturesque stork nest, the smiling tourists, and, nine months of the year, a miasma of rotting fish"?

Steve C @ 50... Oui, oui... It still stings that ST-TNG's first episode indicated that by the 24th Century French will be a dead language. Then again that's the century where most Starfleet people don't seem to know who James T. Kirk was, which would seem to indicate a bit of a memory problem. (Must be Q's fault. Or maybe Trelayne's.)

Terry 51: I think the point was that if so many Chinese can learn English, why doesn't the much smaller population of Dutch speakers just bow to their wisdom and do the same? It's a pretty stupid point, but it's not a total non sequitur.

abi, am I right in thinking most Dutch people do, in fact, speak English these days? That's what's put the Irish language in danger of dying out entirely (as a native language, at any rate).

And I just want to say that "Hysterically angry motorist vs. Cheesebear" shows an astonishingly patient, even phlegmatic cop. I think the behavior of the motorist, of course, is utterly inexcusable even if everything he says is factually true.

I do wonder how that got taped. The quality of the sound from the motorist implies that the cop was wearing a mike.

#45: Maybe "because it's their home"?

49, 53: in other words "because I don't trust the Dutch*, and I want to be able to understand at least a few important phrases like 'look, the dike has given way, flee politely to the nearest high ground**', 'so, it's agreed, we start persecuting everyone who isn't blond and over six foot four tonight?' and 'hands up everyone who doesn't want a miasma of rotting fish around their house'".

* No insult to the Dutch intended, they all seem very nice.

**Belgium

ajay @ 58... Don't the Klingons say "Don't trust a Dutch bearing gifts" ?

Serge @ 50 -

I can see the scene...McCoy leaning over the French dictionary: "It's dead, Jim."

"Well, too bad...say, it's been two hours since I got laid, and I'm getting twitchy...any girls around?"

Serge @ 50 -

I can see the scene...McCoy leaning over the French dictionary: "It's dead, Jim."

"Well, too bad...say, it's been two hours since I got laid, and I'm getting twitchy...any girls around?"

#36, Diatryma - The LJ Friends page is a particularly kludgy implementation of RSS, IMO. I had trouble keeping up with it unless I kept the number of regularly posting friends down to >5.

For some reason having to type in (or even open from favorites) a site on a regular basis is something I find annoying. Things that are only mostly-good get culled out pretty quickly when I have to do it.

(Would it help with the gnats to pull out the vacuum and suck them up? I do that when we get a fruit-fly invasion, and it seems to help a little.)

#51, Terry Karney -

I managed to teach myself the habit of clicking on post-timestamps to make the page scroll instead of scrolling the regular way. So even if I forget to click on the terminal comment, I'm usually close when I look for the highlighted comments.

I'm suspecting variations on brute force are the usual method. But it was worth a try. :)

ajay --

Not so much "I don't trust" as "it's darn hard to participate in my local community when I can't speak the language"; the stork is intended as a humorous example of why you would care.

The "when the notice comes in the mail that the power will be off for four hours Tuesday morning" case is much more realistic, but perhaps not as funny.

abi, #45: The first thing that springs to my mind is --

"Because I want to communicate with the people around me NOW, not at some unspecified time in the indeterminate future."

Xopher, #56: Indeed. I keep wanting to hit some of the people in the "Goose-stepping" thread over the head with it, and wondered if that might have been part of the reason it was noted in the first place.

Many, many responses here I agree with. I am learning Dutch because everyone here speaks it, because the laws, contracts and customs that bind me are in Dutch*, because it's damned rude to come here and not speak it, because I like the language, etc, etc. There have even been instances where people have spoken about me in Dutch right in front of my face.

The problem is that there is so much to say that I am lost for a polite way to say it. It's like 10 people trying to go through a doorway at once—in the end no one gets through.

Xopher @55:

am I right in thinking most Dutch people do, in fact, speak English these days? That's what's put the Irish language in danger of dying out entirely (as a native language, at any rate).

Most Dutch people can speak English, to one degree or another. Even road construction workers can muster enough to give directions and explanations. But they don't speak it to each other†.

Gaelic stopped being everyone's native language in Ireland - native Irish households would have English as the home language. Here in the Netherlands, however, it's only funny foreign families like ours that have a household language that's not local.

-----

* You can take the driving theory test in English here, for instance, but the laws that the courts interpret and enforce are the Dutch ones, not the English translations.

† Except for swearing. English swear words like "shit" are considered innocuous enough for even older children to use.

#65, abi -

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that non-local curses are considered to be mild in a way that has nothing to do with their heat in their native homes. Which is annoying because I always find myself tempted to add them to my vocabulary.

Abi:

The only possible (maybe polite) answer is, "Why *wouldn't* I learn Dutch? I already speak X other languages ..."

Michael Turyn @1: [..] a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events.

Think of the legal system....

Not quite the same thing, but in medieval Europe dream evidence was accepted in the witchcraft trials; i.e., "I dreamt I saw so-and-so meeting with the Devil" was accepted in the courts as evidence that so-and-so had in fact met with the Devil.

abi,

I'm going to be impertinent: do you know if your Australian correspondent has a)ever traveled to a country where s/he didn't speak the language or b)had any dealings with non-English speakers in his/her community?

abi 65: There are still places where Irish is the home language. As of a couple of decades ago there were still people who spoke Irish but not English.

These are, of course, the poorest parts of Ireland.

Btw, there are several different Gaelics (Irish, Scots, Manx, Northumberland, others), and they're mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Since you've lived in Scotland, I'll take your word that they just call their non-English language "Gaelic" there, but I have it on good authority that the Irish call their Gaelic "Irish"--when speaking English.

abi @ 45

Having picked my jaw up off the floor...

I'm amazed. Yes, English is commonly the default language, particularly in Europe for mixed-country gatherings, but you're living in the Netherlands. Speaking Dutch will make all sorts of things in everyday life easier (reading signs, understanding labels, taking part in numerous little transactions, jokes etc..

Ever year when I go to the European conference for zoo/wildlife veterinarians, I am humbled by all the people around me who are presenting papers in English, and conversing with me in English. I am very aware of the number of groups of vets from other countries who speak several languages and politely switch to English when I join them, because this poor Englishwoman cannot manage enough of any other language to hold a conversation in it (I have managed a semi-French conversation on rare occasions, so long as I could answer in mostly English).

Ronit @69::

do you know if your Australian correspondent has a)ever traveled to a country where s/he didn't speak the language or b)had any dealings with non-English speakers in his/her community

I do not know; we converse intermittently on the challenges of being a self-taught hobby bookbinder, with only the most peripheral information about our lives.

I would suspect from the tone about the Chinese that he has encountered Chinese immigrants to Australia and not been impressed. But because we generally do not get into peripheral matters, I can't really see how to address how very strange I find his comments.

I'm casting around for some way to tell him that he's got no clue whatever about the realities of European life without either ranting or foaming at the mouth. Because I am a little tempted to do one, or both, of those things.

You see, it is almost possible to live here without learning Dutch. It's possible enough that it drives me nuts that people suggest it, in the way that a suggestion that we all switch to Basque does not.

abi #45: Yeah, it sure seems like it would be hard to really consider someplace home if you didn't speak the native language, even if most everyone could speak yours. Besides, there's something really cool about understanding foreign language conversations around you, especially when the speakers don't think you will be able to.

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

Serge, #46: Don't know what it means to an Australian, but in Hong Kong, "Chinglish" is the word used -- mostly by Chinese with good English -- to ridicule errors caused by using English vocabulary but Chinese grammar.

In the theater of memory

Every play is an improv,

Stored bits remade from

Piles of scattered stuff --

Yet the taste of the first kiss

Remains so real.

albatross #73: people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English

From the "How Others Hear Us" department, that brings to mind an old Benny Hill skit where he would be dressed in American tourist couture and speak using his impression of a standard American accent. Funny but odd.

Malthus #19:

Another nice book on medieval memory (and its classical antecedents) is Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. It doesn't just do memory palaces, but also looks into the connections between memory and narrative.

I tried very hard, when living in Venice, to stick totally to Italian. This was made much easier by the fact that I was staying in a relatively non-touristed area, and that tourists generally have no need to get replacement pot handles at the ironmongers. Result, I made some friends (or at least friendly acquaintances), such as the 80-year-old lady at the dentist (she practiced her English and I practiced my Italian). The dentist himself only spoke Italian, so I had to mug up on vocabulary before even making the appointment. The weirdest conversation, though, was at the ironmongers; the proprietor, convinced that I was Inglese rather than Americana, insisted on discussing, in great detail, the (then-big-news) rift between Prince Charles and Diana. However, I think my graduation exercise must have been deciphering the manual for the programmable thermostat; this was much more difficult than taking notes on a fifteenth-century diary.

(It only now occurs to me to wonder if the thermostat manual was the Italian equivalent of those electronics manuals whose English versions appear to have been produced by Google Translate.)

Xopher @70:

Re Irish/Gaelic

Interesting. In Scotland, Scots Gaelic (pronounced "Gal-lic") is generally discussed in contrast with Gaelic (pronounced "Gay-lic"), which is the Irish language. I shall note the Irish usage for the future.

abi -- hey, maybe everyone learning Basque is actually the answer. It would be a great leveler. (Oh, wait. Then we'd have the factions for Rumantsch, Sorbian, and what-all fighting for primacy, like scrapping siblings.)

But I do sympathize, both with the necessity of learning the local language and impatience with the "but English is everywhere, why bother?" mentality. And teaching ESL, I've come to realize that for a lot of Europeans, English is something that they learned at school, maybe 20 years ago, and haven't necessarily had to use again. So just blithely expecting that *everyone* speaks and understands English is ... unrealistic. Just like expecting me to use the French I learned in college. Oy.

albatross @73:

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

It's a real challenge. But I've found that if I reply to the English comment in Dutch, I can often drag the conversation back into Dutch.

One day I was at the post office trying to mail a parcel, and was making a real hash of things. I apologised to the woman behind the counter for my bad Dutch. And the guy behind me, clearly keen to get his business done, asked what my first language was.

"English," I replied.

"She speaks English," he said (in Dutch)

"I know," I said, still in Dutch, "but I need to practice."

And the two of them bestowed on me a matched pair of delighted smiles. He stepped back, and she and I made it through the transaction in Dutch.

My current strategy for practicing is to only IM my Dutch colleagues in Dutch (our office runs about half on Skype chat rather than actual talking to one another). I had to give that up this afternoon, when I was frustrated for other reasons and hadn't the patience to try to convey what I needed to say in my clunky Dutch. But I do try to do it all in Dutch.

Tony Zbaraschuk @75:

Excellent.

I'm just glad nobody expects me to use the COBOL I learned in college any more. heh.

joann @67:

"Why *wouldn't* I learn Dutch? I already speak X other languages ..."

Well, though, there's the problem. Dutch is the fifth language* I've studied, but let's look closely at the list, shall we?

1. English, in which I am reasonably fluent.

2. Spanish, in which I can pretty well get along as long as we're talking in the present tense. My high water mark there was 8 days in a hospital where no one spoke English, but that was 17 years ago.

3. Latin, which is not taught as a spoken language. I can compose things in Latin, or translate into it, but not quickly.

4. Classical Greek, a language I never loved and have forgotten almost entirely

I have never achieved what I would consider adequate fluency in another language than English. Something in me secretly doubts that I can. That's hard to fight against, harder than any other obstacle.

----

* by which I mean natural language; we glide over my fluency or lack thereof in BASIC, Pascal, C++, ML, COBOL, REXX, and C#

Stories of Memory

All agree that Euphemia has been inhabited since ancient times, but many are the arguments over how it has grown, and which neighborhoods began first or have grown the most. There are some who tell the tale of an English poet who spoke a couplet, ten iambic feet*, that crawled out upon the bare ground, sat for a moment, and began to unpack itself into a new and shining neighborhood of homes and shops and bustling crowds. They say if you walk to the edge of town, you can find it unpacking still.

The sages of Euphemia are quick to point out that the city is the center of all that is or could be imagined, for memory is a fragile and mutable thing, often transforming and rearranging itself into new shapes. Certain it is that one can look out from the battlements of the city's towers and see memories of the past, or look through the grilles in the walls of the crypts under the city and see future memories. More than this, those who know the city best will tell you of places where you may gaze into what might have been, or scry what can never be.

* "Remembrance and reflection, how allied,
   what thin partitions, sense from thought divide."
     - Alexander Pope: Essay on Man

Earl Cooley III: I have a Thai freind, who was in Japan with Americans who spoke brilliant Japanese. He could get by (with, as usual better comprehension than speech). So when someone spoke japanese, the Americans tended to answer.

Once the response was, "Oh, look, your monkeys can speak", to which he put on his thickest Indian accent and say, in English, "Yes, they can, isn't it wonderful?"

He said the faces slamming shut when they realised he wasn't japanese was wonderful.

re speaking the local language: When I go to Ukraine I don't speak the local language, but rather Russian. Because I am plainly not Russian (even with a decent accent, my stresses are so-so and my grammar has gaping wounds where English is too solidly part of how I parse things), they cut me slack.

I do try to use Ukrianian versions of polite noises (though one has to be careful, a sloppy rendition of thank you can sound terribly offensive, sounding something like "prick"), and that helps, but my greatest trump card is apologising for only having taken russian for one year.

Never mind that it was a year where I was in class, studying Russian, 40 hours a week, plus homework, study and living with 160 people all doing the same; I leave that out.

When they hear that, they think me an incredible speaker of russian, and I get even more slack.

You do realise, all of you, that the storytellers of Euphemia are often hanged as counterfeiters?

RM #34: I do something like brute force. Because I comment way too much, I tend to do a backward search for "albatross," and then skip ahead until I start seeing unfamiliar posts.

You can always do the "distinguished points" trick. Choose some high volume poster whose posts you remember, and then search backward for their name until you get to the last post of theirs you've read. That gets you passably close to the end of what you've read.

I've heard a couple of people complain that ML is too hard to read because of the volume of the comment threads and the lack of sub-threading within these threads. IMO, it is high volume, but dividing up the subthreads would lose a lot of what makes it wonderful.

albatross @88:

Because I comment way too much

You comment somewhere between not quite frequently enough and just the right amount.

Terry @ #86, was your Russian study at the Post-Grad school in Monterey?

I spent 5 hours a week learning Russian in both my junior and senior years in high school, but it's mostly long gone. I can still read and verbalize what I read, but I don't necessarily understand it.

Being Open-thready:

Sticking my favorite Pope couplet on that last post made me think about the concept of "golden lines", the lines of a work or an author that stand out above the lines they're with. The classic example is

    a rose-red city - "Half as old as Time!"

    That hour, O master, shall be bright for thee;


    Thy merchants chase the morning down to the sea,

What are your favorites?

I've had to get by in Estonia with Russian (as Terry said of Ukraine, being obviously not Russian helps), and in Hungary with German. I can say "I don't understand" and "thank you" in Hungarian, and little else aside from song lyrics. I don't know any Estonian at all.

I try and use German when I'm in German-speaking countries and Dutch when I'm in the Netherlands, except when I'm socialising or dealing with accommodations. It's far more exciting than it should be when a Dutch person actually responds in Dutch; I don't have the same problem of being answered in English when I'm in Vienna. This could be in part because I have actually studied German (even if only for six months), and have only picked Dutch up sort of randomly. Also, German's far easier to pronounce. :) (I consider myself lucky to finally be able to more often than not hear the difference between -ee- and -ij- in Dutch; reproducing the latter is another story. Not to mention -ui-.)

Of course, then I have to hope I actually understood the reply....

It was also fun when I was studying in St Petersburg and had been there long enough for the lady at the AmEx office who was keeper of the incoming mail to start complaining to me about the clueless American tourist who'd been ahead of me in line, in Russian. Getting randomly harangued in Russian, along with a young Russian girl, by a babushka at a bus stop was another highlight.

How do I keep up?

I don't, haven't since February, too many things to do outside, behind on everything online and in the house. Only here the last couple of days because I've got a head cold where all the symptoms are dialed up to eleven.

abi,

Except for swearing. English swear words like "shit" are considered innocuous enough for even older children to use.

ha, same with english swearwords in hebrew. i was very taken aback my first year, when an ultra-orthodox woman, with whom i was slightly acquainted & whose baby i was holding, asked me "did he make shit?"

swearing in arabic, on the other hand, is double swearing. as hebrew is a recently resurrected language (& resurrected by goody-two-shoes marxists) there are very few good swear words in hebrew itself.

on people switching to english when they hear your accent,

yeah, barreling on in my grating hebrew usually worked for me. after living there four years, my accent got so good people asked if i was french, or russian.

on easily mispronounced phrases you're better off not trying on natives (re terry),

my sister-in-law is russian, so my brother gets her to teach him russian phrases to use with her relatives. they gave up on "where are you going?" because he could only say, "where are you, idiot?"

I read ML by clicking on the "See last 1000 comments" link and scrolling down to the last one I've already clicked on. I open the first one after that in a new tab and read the thread from there on, then close the tab and scroll up the list until I get to a different thread, then open that one in a new tab and read to the end. I repeat until I'm done, and then click the very top comment to hold my place until I come back.

abi @72 & 81:

I would suspect from the tone about the Chinese that he has encountered Chinese immigrants to Australia and not been impressed. That sort of linguistic entitlement and cluelessness comes from somewhere.

It must be very strange indeed, with all the effort you're putting into achieving fluency, to hear this nonsense from your correspondent.

In the spirit of open threadery, and in honour of the Republican party standard-bearer's latest contribution to economic theory:

Prices are rising, driving us all mad,

we all agree that no one can relax;

this is the worst condition, things are bad,

and we can't bear up under these attacks.

McCain says "Cheer up, every lass and lad,

don't shiver in the face of these small cracks!

There is no reason for you to be sad.

We'll just remit some eighteen cents of tax!"

No one could doubt that someone would be glad

to send old John an email or a fax,

explaining just exactly how to add

some more gravitas to his ancient tracks.

For while we suffer he still has to pad

around selling ideas taken from mouldy sacks

and smelling rather worse than day-old shad:

"We'll just remit some eighteen cents of tax!"

Linkmeister: Not at the NPG (Naval Post Grad) but DLI-FLC (Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center: yes, I've been institutionalised).

They are a few miles from each other.

albatross: I didn't say that I used my name to find things, in part because I am so frequent a commenter. I've learned better than to say things like, "I post too much".

I don't, for one, think you post too often.

Then again, I don't, really, think anyone here posts too often. I do think threading would be the death of much of what I value here.

I'm not keeping up with ML well just now, but my technique works all right when I have the time. I keep a tab open on any thread I"m actively following, and when I have time I go to a tab and reload it, go to the bottom, then scan back up for posts I've already read. This works as long as I don't have so many open tabs that I forget to check some of them, and fall so far behind I either have to skim through or abandon the thread.

I tried using GoogleReader to watch RSS for individual threads, but two things defeated me: the lag between posting and seeing the post in the reader, and the fact that I couldn't get the Reader to keep the posts in numerical order, totally confusing me as to what I had read and what I hadn't.

abi #65: In Dutch-speaking (Batavophone?) countries English swearing may have a touch of exoticism. I'm still puzzled by a English-language graffito I saw in an alleyway off the Domineestraat in Paramaribo "yrg gur cbyvpr shpx gurz nyy". Since Surinam is a Dutch-speaking country this was rather odd.

albatross @ 73:

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

I know several non-Dutch astronomers who had two or three-year postdoctoral postiions in the Netherlands, and they've said the same thing.

(Dutch astronomers are almost invariably the most fluent non-native English speakers and writers in the astronomical community. I'm told this is partly because much of the Netherlands has historically been able to receive British TV broadcasts, and even the Dutch channels apparently broadcast foreign television shows with Dutch subtitles, rather than dubbing them.[*])

[*] Although even dubbing television programs into the local language is preferable to the approach taken by Polish TV: turn the original soundtrack way, way down and have one person read all the parts from a translated screenplay.

Mirian Beetle @94 -

ha, same with english swearwords in hebrew. i was very taken aback my first year, when an ultra-orthodox woman, with whom i was slightly acquainted & whose baby i was holding, asked me "did he make shit?"

Okay, that's the funniest thing I've read today.

Peter Erwin @101:

even the Dutch channels apparently broadcast foreign television shows with Dutch subtitles, rather than dubbing them.

Apart from children's TV, this is pretty well universally true. It's also the case for films, again except for kids' films. (Kids aren't expected to know English yet.) My colleagues also cite this as a reason that their English doesn't get rusty even when I'm not about.

My fellow student of Dutch in the office says he learned the word for body (het lichaam) by watching CSI and reading the subtitles.

I had a great time one night in Germany watching an American movie, in English, with German subtitles. It's how I first learned the word 'verfolgen' (from the title of the movie) and that 'spiel' is "play" but also "game."

The only Dutch I have is "I'm sorry I don't speak Dutch" - and I've never had to use it. I've only ever encountered one person in Holland who couldn't get by in English - and she spoke German as well as Dutch.

Interestingly, although I can't speak Dutch, I can read it - or at least, make sense of most things - simply by reading it aloud in German and listening to myself in English (if you see what I mean).

Two memories of my last trip to Amsterdam:

Watching the checkout girl in the local corner shop as she spoke to customers in front of me in the queue - Dutch, German, French and then English. She spoke four languages and was working a till - in England they'd make you a cabinet minister if you could do that.

And standing by a canal with a street map out, trying to work out just which bridge over which canal it was. A chap cycled past, glanced at me and immediately hopped off his bike, strolled over and said "Good morning, are you lost, can I help?" I can't think of any other capital city where the first passer-by would offer help. (I'll give him a pass on automatically assuming that a clueless tourist must be English)

Interchangable memories? What a weird concept. After a while you will forget who you are. Or someone else will.

Terry @98, I just wondered because we briefly lived in Monterey while Dad attended the NPG school (not for languages, though).

When we lived there I attended a school at the top of a hill. At the bottom of that hill was my house. It was a long (mile, maybe? I was 8) bike ride around and up to get to school, but the ride home was about 5 seconds of absolute exhilaration.

Bruce at 91: may we just share lines, couplets, and verses we love?

He's not in fashion, but this verse of Swinburne's still takes my breath away.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

And also, from Robert Bly:

I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Since this thread has fairly few comments on it so far, here is my start of a Making Light song, sorry I couldn't write the whole thing.

(to the tune of Model of a Modern Major General)

I seek illumination from the writers on the fluorosphere.

Each time I look at Making Light I see that even more is here.

Politics and parodies and poems mean a lot to me

as well as all the minor lore of dinosaurs and sodomy.

Chorus:

As well as all the minor lore of dinosaurs and sodomy.

(I envision the chorus singing some lines disemvowelled and some lines in ROT 13, but rhyming with lines that aren't.)

Sylvia Li @ 74... Thanks for the clarification. Mind you, in all the years I've been around the Bay Area or dealing with its denizens, I have never met any immigrant from Asia(*) who didn't have a better grasp of English grammar than Dubya has. All right, that is setting the bar pretty low.

(*) Or from anywhere else for that matter. I see one from Québec in the mirror every day.

Swinburne has some really incredible lines, like Prosperine

holding all things mortal

In her cold immortal hands

but I've never really been able to read them for mre than just individual lines.

I studied French for several years in school but never got up to full conversational fluency (and it doesn't help that it was a completely different dialect from the one spoken a day's drive from here). As is usual with people who learn languages in school, my reading comprehension is much better than my aural comprehension. When I see French-language movies, I often wish that they had French subtitles instead of English ones; it would make it much easier for me to parse the spoken language, because I wouldn't be context-switching in every sentence, and probably help me keep up the skills I have.

I've heard that people trying to learn the language of the country they've moved to often use closed captions for the deaf when watching TV, for the same purpose.