Here and here is a little more about negative and positive face, in connection with politeness strategies - using positive and negative face applied to other people, to make them feel better - because if others feel good, we feel good, or so the theory goes. It’s pretty interesting, and it works subtly differently in diffferent cultures which makes it even more interesting.
This is something I have surely mentioned before, but for me, there are three main components to a book that can make me like it or not: style, plot, and characters. Of these, style is probably the most central. There are books I know are really good that I just really dislike because of the style.
At the moment, I am reading Dorothy Dunnett and, for some reason, Robert Jordan. Yes, I am indeed reading the Time Wheel series, skipping as much as possible of the dialogue and the descriptions of people, not to mention inner monologues; some chapters I avoid entirely. Jordan could really plot a story, and I am curious to see what will happen. I have read the first six books before, as a matter of fact, and even rather liked the first four of them, then. Not so much this time.
There are some rules about how people in Jordan’s books behave. All people, without exception. Most important of these rules is that if a man is talking to a woman or a woman to a man, the main purpose of the conversation is to score a point of some kind. This is usually also true when women are talking to each other, and occasionally when men converse with each other. However, many men are able to carry on a conversation that is at least reminiscent of something two real people could have. Never, ever so in discourse between people of different genders. Of course there are people like that in real life, but in Jordan’s world it is true of everybody. My theory is that Jordan was overly obsessed with the strategies that sociolinguists refer to as positive and negative face, strategies that people use quite unconsciously to negotiate communications (at least this is true for English, and also for Swedish and many other Indo-European languages. It is always dangerous to assume that a feature of language is universal.) But Jordan’s characters don’t do it unconsciously, they think about the negotiating strategies all the time, the same way we do when we meet people from a very different culture, for instance, or our new boyfriend’s parents, or some other situation where we are very anxious not to offend and to say the right thing. Or, on the other hand, there could be situations where we consciously use these strategies with an aim to say the wrong thing; my point is that the normal case is not to pay this much conscious attention. Even people like me who often feel quite awkward around other people including people I know well, don’t think about the face strategies that much. Jordan’s people do, though. All the time.
They also sometimes ignore the basic face strateies in a rather unrealistic way in order to score points. Communicating is a game played to win. Again, yes, there are peple like that, but there are also people - the majority - who are not like that, in the real world.
And that is the heart of why his characters are so unrealistic, unlovable and all-out annoying, I think. It’s not primarily that no men can ever understand a woman, and no woman ever understand a man (although all women understand one another perfectly even when they are from radically different cultures. The men are again somewhat closer to real people, but only somewhat.) It is not primarily that every single person acts and thinks like an extreme stereotype of a moody teenager, and that none of them develops or matures - they are still very young 13-year-olds, mentally, by the end of book 6. It is not primarily that values and morals are American conservative values and morals, everywhere on the supposedly very huge continent and outside it. All these things are annoying, but the obsession with face, and the underlying premise that communication is a game where you win or lose, that’s what makes the dialogue and characterisations jar so much that I have to skim rather than read them.
And yet I do read these books, for the story. And I read Dunnett at the same time, as a balm for the soul.
Actually, I think “boot camp” only refers to intensive training for new recruits, and this weekend is intensive training for the whole choir. I left a bit early today because I wasn’t feeling very well, and anyway I wasn’t staying overnight so I wanted to get home before it got too late - so here I am, dutifully producing another PeBloWriMo post. Of the things we are rehearsing now, I don’t like the Britten piece, God’s Grandeur: I can only manage to sing about half of it because the rest of the alto part is too high, but apart from that it’s just not the kind of polyphony I like to listen to or perform. Apart from that the current play list meets with my approval: Three Songs from Shakespeare by Vaughan Williams is fun and I think it’ll be quite good once we’ve learnt it properly, Rheinberger’s Cantus Missae is a piece I’ve sung several times over the last ten years and I like it immensely, and we’ll sing some early music as well. Oh, and we are rehearsing Händel’s St John’s Passion - yes, Händel’s, and no, we didn’t know it existed, either. The 2nd altos get to sing 1st tenor which is wonderful. I’m not going to be here over Easter however, so won’t get to perform it, but it’s fun enough to rehearse.
So right now the other choirists are partying and I have just had some Jansson’s Temptation and predict some DVD watching in the near future. And an earlyish bed. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to go back for the second day of choir boot camp, tomorrow.
Last time, we finally found the library. Finally! I’m not sure how long we’d been looking for it. The detour to the floating island with Bollomb, the slightly insane fire spirit, our inprisonment there and our fight to liberate the islanders from the tyrannical rule of Traka and Anoda, took some time. Just our luck to pick the wrong trail of butterflies to follow. On the other hand, that trip taught us much about this mysterious magenta-coloured sea of air and how to travel in it. And we got two excellent new companions who joined our group from the Bollombi people.
But yes, we reached the library. The decomposing remains of the librarian were there. Although we’d been expecting to find him dead, it was still very sad. The Queen will grieve when she hears of it, and it is such an immense pity that we never got a chance to learn about the Westrings from him. I do not think there is anybody alive now who knows as much as the librarian did. What we had not expected to find was the troop of oafish guardians that the library had attracted; a tribe we didn’t know of (small wonder, since we know almost nothing of this part of the country anyway) and who didn’t even know about the Queen. It was fortunate that one of us had a brooch with a likeness of the librarian’s familiar engraved; that made them trust us enough to allow us into the library, and when we encountered the familiar and it acknowledged us, they seemed to accept our presence. They are very stupid, though. When they heard the librarian scream it didn’t even occur to them to climb up and see what had happened, because they had been told they couldn’t enter the library without his permission. Not that they could have protected him against what killed him, if what we believe is true.
The library itself is a marvellous place: huge, circular, lit by alehcmical lights and stocked with uncountable numbers of books. Surely we will find at least some answers here.
Tonight is my RPG night.
So as I mentioned, a new phone. The old one was… five years or so, I think. It was reasonably functional still, although the sound quality was terrible to the point where I often couldn’t hear the person I was talking to at all, and the “6″ (mno) key was bad so I usually had to press it several times. So all in all it didn’t feel like too much of a mad splurge to get a new one.
I wanted to stay with Nokia because it’s what I’m used to; I got a 6085 (sand gold). It has a camera, and I can listen to the radio, and in theory also to mp3s. In theory only, because you need a Windows computer to transfer music - but I knew that before I bought it and I wasn’t looking for an mp3 player anyway. Nor a camera, and the one in this phone is fairly bad, which again I knew. The things I was looking for work just fine though. The sound quality when I use the phone to talk is excellent, and the sms sending also works great. And I can send and receive pictures!! Oh, and there is a hook where I could attach the Moomin I bought a year ago in Helsinki, for the day when I’d get a new mobile with such a hook. And there is a Sudoku game, which means I don’t have to miss the Backgammon on the old phone, especially since that was getting a bit too easy to beat.
No particular downsides to it, so far. It’s annoying that the pre-set template messages can’t be erased, but I suppose that’s a Nokia thing, and unlike my old phone this one doesn’t seem to run out of memory very quickly. Good phone, I’d recommend it as long as you’re not looking for a superduperultrawow thing. (I still covet an iPhone of course, but that won’t be possible for normal humans to buy for several years, I believe.)
Oh dear, bedtime and no blog post. I’ll just post some game links and hopefully noone’ll notice…
The Great Kitchen Escape is a fun clicky game where the object is to get out of the kitchen.
Treasure Box is some kind of… interactive art, I suppose.
You are lucky! is more than a little reminiscent of GROW! only different.
And Trapped parts one and two are unavailable. That sucks - they were great games and I was waiting for part 3.
Mythaxis is a new online short story magazine, which publishes fantastic fiction (that is, science fiction and fantasy) in English. There is one issue, just published, available at the moment; I have read two of the stories and enjoyed them, so have no compunction about linking to the site. Good quality writing by people I’d like to read more from; mostly previously unknown names but also one story by HG Wells. They welcome submissions of sf/fantasy stories and artwork, btw.
I know the editor of Mythaxis, he is gil of MCiOS fame. I knew he was into sf related activities, and his writing is on par with his widdershins strile. Read Mythaxis Magazine.
Jean-Michel Jarre is coming to Sweden this year. He’ll give one performance, in Stockholm, on April 4. Tickets were released today. Last time Jarre was in Sweden, ten years ago, I missed it. This time, I wasn’t going to. But the tickets had already sold out by the time I tried to book, just after lunch. This is very annoying. (But as Stina said - it’s cool that we are so hip! Or possibly hip - cool.)
We bought a new bed today! Or actually just a really hightech mattress, to go in our old bed. Our current water mattress is 12 years old by now and they did say it might start getting leaky at 10, so it is a matter of some priority. We didn’t go for water this time, however, but something that sounds like Japanese batter. I read up on Tempur before we went to the store, and it seems as if people either love or hate it — but they do have a return policy in case it turns out we won’t adapt to it. But we both liked it very much in the store, so we’re hopeful. Delivery in 5-8 weeks’ time.
Today is Zot’s birthday. We just got home from the celebration; naturally, we gave him this book. It was fun and the food was excellent.
Before that, I met Stina, Anders and Ale; I see them very seldom these days and it was a lot of fun. Stina is one of those rare people who I can get together with after a long period of not being in touch, without feeling awkward; we just pick up where we left off, which is very restful. I took some pictures of Ale, who is now one year old, but they probably didn’t come out very well. [Note to hypothetical foreign readers: "Ale" is pronounced with a long "Ah" sound and a distinct final "e".]
Stina also displayed her iPod Nano, which made me realise that that’s probably what I want - my iPod is quite functional but the battery doesn’t last very long and it’s doubtful whether it would be better value for my money to get a new battery for the 3rd generation iPod I have rather than get a new one. (In particular a Nano, which really isn’t that expensive, and I would be likely to use it much more.)
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