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shadowkat1. Taking a personal day tomorrow -- for a doctor's appointment. Long overdue physical and to get my blood-pressure checked. (Because my mother took it over the holidays and is currently convinced I have high blood pressure and need to be on meds. I'm skeptical. For a lot of reasons, one, not exhibiting any signs, and two, my mother decided I had a thyroid problem for a bit -- my mother has a tendency to project her own ills on to me. Is this true of all mothers or just mine? Is it a mother thing? Or a human thing?)
The worst part? I have to get there -- and it's going to be frigid. Of course if I were going to work, I'd have the same problem. About equal-distant. It's about an 18 minute walk. 5-10 minutes to the subway near my apt and 10 minutes to the doctor. And less traffic than the City. (It's in Brooklyn).
How cold? Well the appointment is at 1PM. And the high is 17 tomorrow. So with any luck -- it will be 17 degrees, not 6 degrees, like it would be if I were heading to work tomorrow morning instead. I've got an outdoor site tour on Friday, where the high is a rather balmy 25 degrees. (Seriously I couldn't have done this next week, when it will probably be in the 50s?)
Dripping my shower faucet and kitchen sink.
Super calls me at work: Make sure you have all the radiators and heaters on.
ME: I can't turn them off. Also have one in my bathroom.
Super: And leave all doors open in your apartment, bathroom door, and bedroom door, so heat spreads.
Me: I've a radiator in my bathroom.
Super: All radiators on.
Me: Uh...I can't turn them off, and I have the shower dripping.
Super( very thick Polish accent): Leave all radiators on and doors open, management tells us to tell all tenants on M line this, where you live. Thank you for calling us back.
ME: Alright. Thank you. Goodbye. (I gave up. It was like talking to a heavily accented answering service.)
Actually the apartment is comfortable for once. This weekend I had the window open and the A/C because it was 80 degrees in here, and 49 degrees outside. Now it's a cozy 68, very happy. As long as my pipes don't freeze -- have an outside wall for my bathroom. Kitchen is fine -- it's on an inside wall. This happened the last time we had the polar vortex.
Speaking of...I found John Scalzi's post on this rather amusing.
Co-workers: It's worse out in the midwest.
Me: I know. There's a reason I'm living here and no longer there. Been there done that.
Honestly, when I was living in the MidWest, I'd listen to the weather man say that it was going to be -35 degrees with windchill. And I'd look at him and say, look, when it dips below 0, it's cold. I do not need more information than that. Really, -20 or -30, same difference. Apparently not -- according to my mother (whose been reading news reports) it's so cold in Chicago that if you throw Hot water out the window it will immediately freeze when it hits the air. They've been telling people to wear googles if they go outside, because their eyeballs could freeze. The Chicago River froze for the first time ever. And a man fell down in his garage after shoveling and froze to death. (Geeze, I'm very glad I ignored my family members and moved to NYC instead of Chicago. Very wise move on my part.)
2. Hmmm...per SmartBitches of all places.. The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why we need stories to make sense.
(Well, not all of us do. Seriously speak for yourself. If I needed them to make sense, I wouldn't have made it through Slaughter House Five, Ulyssess, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
The English Lit major/Historian in me is fascinated.
The functionality of narrative devices is completely dependent on the audience’s historical and cultural context… and on the author’s. A much more modern branch of narratology, called cognitive narratology, which focuses on the human intellectual and emotional processing of narratives, helped me to ask these questions as a historian—and as a writer. All of those little functional devices—how do they get processed? How do different humans react differently to them? Why did medieval Byzantine historians put obviously fake trope events—like emperors riding bravely into battles they weren’t even present for—into histories the writers swore were true and reported fact? How come readers say they feel ‘cheated’ when an author doesn’t write the ending they expected? Why, for that matter, is it so hard for human beings right now in 2019 to recognize and understand information that contradicts a narrative they believe in very strongly?
How we view a story is so dependent on our shared cultural context. For example someone living in the 1880s would read Huckleberry Finn very differently than today.
And..
Cognitively, the audience has a set of shared communal knowledge—we can call this an encyclopedia, like the French theorist Doležel does—which they use to comprehend the text. This encyclopedia, says Doležel, “varies with cultures, social groups, [and] historical epochs”—the shared communal knowledge of a 10th-century Byzantine intellectual is clearly not the same as that of a 21st-century Byzantinist trying to understand narratives in Sweden in 2015, let alone that of a teenager somewhere in America reading her first graphic novel. We can think of the reader/perceiver’s knowledge about the storyworld, filtered through their own knowledge about the universe, as their fictional encyclopedia. In order to “reconstruct and interpret” a narrative, the reader/perceiver must “reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the [story]world’s encyclopedia”. (That’s Herman again, explaining how storyworlds are cognitive processes.)
When Marvel decided to bring the original five teenage X-men to the 21st Century from the 1960s, they had a lot of fun with the cultural disorientation. Demonstrating how differently someone from the 1960s would view the team dynamic and someone from today. The same is true of other literary forms, James Joyce's Ulyssess was banned as pornographic in the US in the 1920s and 30s. Now, no one raises an eyebrow and it is considered great literature, if a tad difficult to comprehend.
Storyworlds are, therefore, not confined to genres that we traditionally consider ‘fiction’. A storyworld can also be ideological: “stories construed as strategies for building mental models of the world” applies just as well to conceptions of ‘how a state functions’ as it does to ‘what is a plausible event in a novel’. A person can reorient their cognitive stance to match an ideological narrative interpretation of historical events just as well as they can do so to interpret the narrative of a novel or a television show.
We can in fact imagine all of society as a storyworld. But my storyworld—my rules for how the world ought to behave—are different from my neighbor’s, who has had different experiences than me. The stories that make sense to my neighbor may be incomprehensible when I think about them, and vice versa. This is how fanaticism happens: how people believe things which are not true, even when they’re presented with evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t match the narrative. It doesn’t fit in the story. The world doesn’t make sense with this evidence, so the evidence must be wrong.
Oh, I've had so many experiences on this front. From television series to religion to politics. Ever have a discussion with a friend or anyone, in which you thought, okay you just don't make sense. This is...incomprehensible?
It is also the key to understanding how to convince someone—whether you’re an author, a politician, a scientist, or just trying to get along better with your neighbor. Can you fit the new information you’re presenting into your audience’s storyworld so that they don’t reject it out of hand? If no readers blink when your handwavium whisks your protagonist away through a wormhole into a distant part of the galaxy, you’ve built the storyworld of your narrative convincingly enough that wormholes are a true and plausible thing. If you can convince Great-Uncle Malcolm that climate change is real, even though it is snowing outside, by asking him if it snowed more often when he was a child, then you’ve fit your information into his narrative of how the universe works: into the storyworld that governs his everyday interpretations.
It takes me back to a creative writing teacher telling me -- it doesn't matter if your grandfather survived three brain tumors, the reader doesn't buy it. You have to as an author find a way to fit your information into your audience's storyworld. If it lies outside of it, they will reject you out of hand.
3. In other news on Smartbitches...EL James has written a new book, this one actually appears to take place in England (so she's at least writing about a place she's been to and knows), and the characters are both adults and experienced. But, eh, I've burned out on badly written erotica -- so sorry. In fact, I'd be insanely bored by 50 Shades now. I read my posts on it and thought, what was I thinking and who was this crazy person? What can I say? My tastes change. Also after awhile, most erotica is the same and my mind can come up with far more interesting stories.
Also, Smartbitches asks if I was a fan of the Nanny (really not, her voice was like a nail going down a chalkboard). Me and situation comedies tend to be generally speaking, unmixy things. I've loved a few, and despised many. (I don't tend to like slapstick, scatalogical, sex/ethnic joke, or embarrassment humor -- which is basically 98% of situation comedy humor in the US.) I like absurdist humor, witty, dry intellectual, and often satirical (if it is subtle, American Television Writers generally speaking aren't good at subtle).
Situation Comedies that I loved:
* MASH
* Sports Night
* Coupling (British Version by Stephen Moffat - I find Moffat funny)
* As Time Goes By ( British)
* News Radio
* Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
* WKRP in Cincinnati
* Cheers
* Fraiser
* (Original and first three-five seasons) Murphy Brown
* Seinfield
* The Good Place (although it's been hit and miss of late, and I'm struggling with the characterization, but S2 was hilarious)
* Roseanne (first three seasons) and The Connors
* Cybil (first two seasons)
* Dick Van Dyke Show
* Mary Tyler Moore Show
That's about it. I'm picky. And I can't stand anything that is down in documentary style.
Good night. Taking a shower -- mainly to keep the water going through the shower and to clean the sinuses. And to bed.
The worst part? I have to get there -- and it's going to be frigid. Of course if I were going to work, I'd have the same problem. About equal-distant. It's about an 18 minute walk. 5-10 minutes to the subway near my apt and 10 minutes to the doctor. And less traffic than the City. (It's in Brooklyn).
How cold? Well the appointment is at 1PM. And the high is 17 tomorrow. So with any luck -- it will be 17 degrees, not 6 degrees, like it would be if I were heading to work tomorrow morning instead. I've got an outdoor site tour on Friday, where the high is a rather balmy 25 degrees. (Seriously I couldn't have done this next week, when it will probably be in the 50s?)
Dripping my shower faucet and kitchen sink.
Super calls me at work: Make sure you have all the radiators and heaters on.
ME: I can't turn them off. Also have one in my bathroom.
Super: And leave all doors open in your apartment, bathroom door, and bedroom door, so heat spreads.
Me: I've a radiator in my bathroom.
Super: All radiators on.
Me: Uh...I can't turn them off, and I have the shower dripping.
Super( very thick Polish accent): Leave all radiators on and doors open, management tells us to tell all tenants on M line this, where you live. Thank you for calling us back.
ME: Alright. Thank you. Goodbye. (I gave up. It was like talking to a heavily accented answering service.)
Actually the apartment is comfortable for once. This weekend I had the window open and the A/C because it was 80 degrees in here, and 49 degrees outside. Now it's a cozy 68, very happy. As long as my pipes don't freeze -- have an outside wall for my bathroom. Kitchen is fine -- it's on an inside wall. This happened the last time we had the polar vortex.
Speaking of...I found John Scalzi's post on this rather amusing.
Also, it’s cold as balls right at the moment: -2, without windchill. Yes, I know other places in the US are colder at the moment. You know what? -2 is cold enough. This isn’t the Freeze Your Gonads Off Olympics. And if it is, I’m happy to let someone else take the gold.
Hope if it’s cold where you are that you’re keeping warm. And if it’s warm where you are, well. Have your smug little moment, I suppose.
Co-workers: It's worse out in the midwest.
Me: I know. There's a reason I'm living here and no longer there. Been there done that.
Honestly, when I was living in the MidWest, I'd listen to the weather man say that it was going to be -35 degrees with windchill. And I'd look at him and say, look, when it dips below 0, it's cold. I do not need more information than that. Really, -20 or -30, same difference. Apparently not -- according to my mother (whose been reading news reports) it's so cold in Chicago that if you throw Hot water out the window it will immediately freeze when it hits the air. They've been telling people to wear googles if they go outside, because their eyeballs could freeze. The Chicago River froze for the first time ever. And a man fell down in his garage after shoveling and froze to death. (Geeze, I'm very glad I ignored my family members and moved to NYC instead of Chicago. Very wise move on my part.)
2. Hmmm...per SmartBitches of all places.. The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why we need stories to make sense.
(Well, not all of us do. Seriously speak for yourself. If I needed them to make sense, I wouldn't have made it through Slaughter House Five, Ulyssess, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
Narratology is, broadly, the study of narrative structures and the way in which humans perceive, create, and are influenced by them. It’s a type of literary theory, and like most literary theory, it is full of terms that can seem overtly and deliberately obscure. (Why, for example, do we need the term focalization when we’ve already got the perfectly good and fairly explicable concept of point of view? There are some reasons, but most of the time I’ve found that point of view works just fine, especially when I’m speaking as a practitioner—a writer—rather than a literary analyst or critic.) But what narratology does—especially in its newer forms, like ‘cognitive narratology’—is give us tools to think about not only the patterns in a narrative but how narratives are part of how human beings understand and interpret events which happen to them in their everyday lives.
The French term narratologie was coined by Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary critic, in his 1969 book Grammaire du Décaméron. In that book, Todorov encouraged literary critics to shift their focus to the most general structural properties of a narrative, properties which would apply no matter what kind of narrative you looked at: things like sequencing of events, character, narrator, audience, perspective. Todorov’s call for a new way of thinking about narrative became the academic discipline of narratology. But he certainly wasn’t the first person to try to identify systems and patterns in storytelling.
Ancient Greek philosophers were awfully concerned with this, for example, because they were worried about genre: what kind of story is this, and how can we tell? (Is it the true kind or the made-up kind or something in-between?) In The Republic, Plato said there were basically two different kinds of storytelling: one, called mimesis, was an ‘imitation’—speech or thought or action made by characters who were inside the story. The other kind, diegesis, was for speech or thought or action that belonged to the author. This division is still fundamentally important to us in interpreting stories—we think about it when we think about narrators, point of view, and showing vs. telling. Plato wasn’t the only Greek who cared about narrative distinctions, either: Aristotle, in the Poetics, distinguished between the totality of events which could take place inside the world of the narrative and the actual plot that was narrated, which is only a subset of those events, chosen and arranged by the author on aesthetic grounds.
The English Lit major/Historian in me is fascinated.
The functionality of narrative devices is completely dependent on the audience’s historical and cultural context… and on the author’s. A much more modern branch of narratology, called cognitive narratology, which focuses on the human intellectual and emotional processing of narratives, helped me to ask these questions as a historian—and as a writer. All of those little functional devices—how do they get processed? How do different humans react differently to them? Why did medieval Byzantine historians put obviously fake trope events—like emperors riding bravely into battles they weren’t even present for—into histories the writers swore were true and reported fact? How come readers say they feel ‘cheated’ when an author doesn’t write the ending they expected? Why, for that matter, is it so hard for human beings right now in 2019 to recognize and understand information that contradicts a narrative they believe in very strongly?
How we view a story is so dependent on our shared cultural context. For example someone living in the 1880s would read Huckleberry Finn very differently than today.
And..
Cognitively, the audience has a set of shared communal knowledge—we can call this an encyclopedia, like the French theorist Doležel does—which they use to comprehend the text. This encyclopedia, says Doležel, “varies with cultures, social groups, [and] historical epochs”—the shared communal knowledge of a 10th-century Byzantine intellectual is clearly not the same as that of a 21st-century Byzantinist trying to understand narratives in Sweden in 2015, let alone that of a teenager somewhere in America reading her first graphic novel. We can think of the reader/perceiver’s knowledge about the storyworld, filtered through their own knowledge about the universe, as their fictional encyclopedia. In order to “reconstruct and interpret” a narrative, the reader/perceiver must “reorient his cognitive stance to agree with the [story]world’s encyclopedia”. (That’s Herman again, explaining how storyworlds are cognitive processes.)
When Marvel decided to bring the original five teenage X-men to the 21st Century from the 1960s, they had a lot of fun with the cultural disorientation. Demonstrating how differently someone from the 1960s would view the team dynamic and someone from today. The same is true of other literary forms, James Joyce's Ulyssess was banned as pornographic in the US in the 1920s and 30s. Now, no one raises an eyebrow and it is considered great literature, if a tad difficult to comprehend.
Storyworlds are, therefore, not confined to genres that we traditionally consider ‘fiction’. A storyworld can also be ideological: “stories construed as strategies for building mental models of the world” applies just as well to conceptions of ‘how a state functions’ as it does to ‘what is a plausible event in a novel’. A person can reorient their cognitive stance to match an ideological narrative interpretation of historical events just as well as they can do so to interpret the narrative of a novel or a television show.
We can in fact imagine all of society as a storyworld. But my storyworld—my rules for how the world ought to behave—are different from my neighbor’s, who has had different experiences than me. The stories that make sense to my neighbor may be incomprehensible when I think about them, and vice versa. This is how fanaticism happens: how people believe things which are not true, even when they’re presented with evidence to the contrary. It doesn’t match the narrative. It doesn’t fit in the story. The world doesn’t make sense with this evidence, so the evidence must be wrong.
Oh, I've had so many experiences on this front. From television series to religion to politics. Ever have a discussion with a friend or anyone, in which you thought, okay you just don't make sense. This is...incomprehensible?
It is also the key to understanding how to convince someone—whether you’re an author, a politician, a scientist, or just trying to get along better with your neighbor. Can you fit the new information you’re presenting into your audience’s storyworld so that they don’t reject it out of hand? If no readers blink when your handwavium whisks your protagonist away through a wormhole into a distant part of the galaxy, you’ve built the storyworld of your narrative convincingly enough that wormholes are a true and plausible thing. If you can convince Great-Uncle Malcolm that climate change is real, even though it is snowing outside, by asking him if it snowed more often when he was a child, then you’ve fit your information into his narrative of how the universe works: into the storyworld that governs his everyday interpretations.
It takes me back to a creative writing teacher telling me -- it doesn't matter if your grandfather survived three brain tumors, the reader doesn't buy it. You have to as an author find a way to fit your information into your audience's storyworld. If it lies outside of it, they will reject you out of hand.
3. In other news on Smartbitches...EL James has written a new book, this one actually appears to take place in England (so she's at least writing about a place she's been to and knows), and the characters are both adults and experienced. But, eh, I've burned out on badly written erotica -- so sorry. In fact, I'd be insanely bored by 50 Shades now. I read my posts on it and thought, what was I thinking and who was this crazy person? What can I say? My tastes change. Also after awhile, most erotica is the same and my mind can come up with far more interesting stories.
Also, Smartbitches asks if I was a fan of the Nanny (really not, her voice was like a nail going down a chalkboard). Me and situation comedies tend to be generally speaking, unmixy things. I've loved a few, and despised many. (I don't tend to like slapstick, scatalogical, sex/ethnic joke, or embarrassment humor -- which is basically 98% of situation comedy humor in the US.) I like absurdist humor, witty, dry intellectual, and often satirical (if it is subtle, American Television Writers generally speaking aren't good at subtle).
Situation Comedies that I loved:
* MASH
* Sports Night
* Coupling (British Version by Stephen Moffat - I find Moffat funny)
* As Time Goes By ( British)
* News Radio
* Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
* WKRP in Cincinnati
* Cheers
* Fraiser
* (Original and first three-five seasons) Murphy Brown
* Seinfield
* The Good Place (although it's been hit and miss of late, and I'm struggling with the characterization, but S2 was hilarious)
* Roseanne (first three seasons) and The Connors
* Cybil (first two seasons)
* Dick Van Dyke Show
* Mary Tyler Moore Show
That's about it. I'm picky. And I can't stand anything that is down in documentary style.
Good night. Taking a shower -- mainly to keep the water going through the shower and to clean the sinuses. And to bed.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 02:43 pm (UTC)In my long sojourn in the Midwest, I experienced -20 wind chills many times, and -20 degrees F (with no wind) once. Minus 20 F (-29 C) is not fun. Wind chill is a joke, unless you plan to ran out in the cold half-naked and stay there. I remember the TV weatherman in Columbus, Ohio attempting to answer a viewer question about how wind chill is calculated. "Well, it's a table. You look up the temperature and cross reference it with the wind speed." In other words he had no idea how it was calculated. He just read it off a chart that who-knows-who drew up who-knows-when. There is a newer method. The following applies to Fahrenheit.
Calculate the wind chill using the National Weather Service's new formula. Multiply the temperature by 0.6215 and then add 35.74. Subtract 35.75 multiplied by the wind speed calculated to the 0.16 power. Finally, add 0.4275 multiplied by temperature, multiplied by wind speed calculated to the 0.16 power.
Or just say it's not a great idea to go out in a cold wind unprepared for wind.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-01 12:05 am (UTC)I had a similar experience in the Midwest (17 years for me, which was long enough, not a fan). But, it does appear to be getting colder now. It was -23 F in Chicago today. (That's not factoring in windchill at all. Which is abnormal. When I lived in Kansas City, we'd get 10 degrees with -20 factoring in windchill -- which eh, it's just cold, but with wind - insane. But in Chicago, they couldn't go outside at all, because it was -23 and with windchill, -40 or more.)
Next week? It'll be practically balmy, in the 40s and 50s.
Same here, 50s and 60s. People will be out in t-shirts and shorts, mark my words. I know NYC.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 04:32 pm (UTC)Actually the apartment is comfortable for once.
That doesn't surprise me -- we feel coldest when a room/space is cooling and when it's really cold the heating runs a lot to keep up.
That said yesterday night it was cold enough that I was eager to get into bed early. Just too much temperature leakage I suspect.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 10:54 pm (UTC)Tomorrow will be harder -- since I have to leave before the sun gets up and I have to wander around outside at a construction site in Queens, NY -- near the ocean, with work boots (aren't warm) and a hard hat. Then wait in the cold for a frigging train. But it should be brief.
That said yesterday night it was cold enough that I was eager to get into bed early. Just too much temperature leakage I suspect.
If you're windows aren't insulated it can be brutal. Also if it's windy. It got cold for me in the living room both this morning and last night...because of wind. I used to winterproof the windows, but they fixed them so they do leak as much and it's been warmer -- also the heaters blast.