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elisem asked about the idea of not-exactly-haiku earrings, based on the Fibonacci sequence:
I
Am
Tempted
By something
New and intricate
With earrings waiting as a prize.
boxofdelights asked about comfort food, past and present:
Hot tea, now and again when I was a child: it's so much a part of my daily routine now that I have to be careful not to have too much, or too late in the day, which might be easier if it weren't also still a great comfort.
Chicken soup, sometimes, especially matzoh ball soup.
Pudding was, I think, once in a while. (Now, it's something I eat and like now and then, but with no emotional overtones.)
One I no longer eat, or want: canned cream of mushroom soup.
Things that weren't comfort food as a child, and are now (these are things I never had as a child): oatmeal, congee, pho.
I can't think of anything I didn't like as a child that is now comfort food (the general category "didn't like as a child, do now" is not quite the same as "vegetables I will now eat," but the two are fairly close); also, nothing is coming to mind that was just okay when I was a child and is now comfort food.
haikujaguar asked whether, and why, people liked, or wanted, content warnings on stories and talked about why she doesn't. She included some notes about how people decide whether to pick up printed books, which led me to write:
One thing nobody else seems to have mentioned: if I am looking at a book in a bookstore, it has a cover and a blurb. I may or may not have seen the marketing, but I'm not coming at it with just a title and author name: it's being offered to me as "this will scare you silly" or "a heart-warming story of..." or "the world's greatest romance" or "the harrowing tale..." or "a true story of survival during World War II" or the like. ("So-and-so's best novel yet" is less helpful than "So-and-so breaks new ground in her first contemporary fantasy.")
I prefer that sort of book cover to the one that basically assumes "you know about this writer, all we need to tell you is that it's her latest book": title and author on the front, and the back just has an author photo and maybe the tag "Fiction." If I don't, in fact, already know the author, I probably won't pick that one up. If I do know their work, maybe I'm in the mood for letter T in the Kinsey Milhone saga, or maybe I've had quite enough of Robert Parker's wisecracking hero whose first name is probably something like "Wilberforce" from the way he conceals it. [Maybe Parker is writing something different now, but the marketing isn't going to tell me that.]
I guess what this comes to is that I think warnings can be useful online in part because online fiction generally doesn't come with covers and blurbs.
shweta_narayan was talking about language, and the advantage of being able to talk about how, as a writer, she can give information about a culture by things like what words they use for directions and relationships, and that it's nice to be able to talk about that without having to first take time out to dismiss the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of the comments talked about English tending toward precise terms for things. Shweta said the commenter was being overly English-centric, and I added:
We can be quite precise about some things, but consider the ambiguity of the word "family." Not just in things like whether "father's brother," "mother's brother" get the same word, or that "father-in-law" used to mean both "spouse's father" and "mother's husband," but more broadly, in who counts as family. The word is slippery because different people have different answers.
From a Spanish perspective, it may look odd that we use the same word for "conocer" and "saber" ("know" in the sense of "I know her" and in the sense of "I know how to make an omelet" or "I know the price of tea"). (Is there a language that uses distinct simple verbs for "know a fact" from "know how to do something"?)
Prompted, oddly, by a discussion inrysmiel's journal:
I don't think I'd mentioned to you that the New York transit authority used to have a series of short poems on ad-type displays. They then did a series of philosophy, quotes from people like Thomas Jefferson. Now, they've decided to give us very brief quotes that someone thinks are deep.
The first two of those are up now. The someone in charge of selections appears to be a pessimist. One is a cheerful bit about everyone thinking the limits of their vision are the limits of the world. The other is Kafka. Yes, that Kafka, the very beginning thereof.
It's enough to make a person miss the Spanish-language AIDS-education soap opera in comic strip format.
peake explained why he doesn't care about spoilers or use spoiler warnings and wondered, in comments, if those who do care are reading only for plot:
I don't read only for plot, but I do read for plot, especially with mysteries (defining that term somewhat loosely: stories where a significant part of the point is figuring out what comes next or who did something crucial).
Depending on the story, knowing what comes later can also change how I view the character. When I reread, knowing that a character is going to lose his beloved daughter and this will change his character means I see him differently even before that. So, yes, I do reread, but rereading is a different experience from reading something that is new to me. I like both, and spoilers can distort the reading-something-new experience. Also, I think there's a difference between remembering having seen the whole thing unfold, and getting information out of order in terms of how the book is put together.
Over inoursin's journal, she was talking about the difference between admiring and loving a book. I brought up guilty pleasures in that comment thread, and she posted on "Must Pleasures Be Guilty?" and offered the idea of embarrassing pleasures:
Yes, I think "embarrassing pleasure" is useful here.
There are pleasures that could be guilty, I think, but they aren't the ones generally talked about as such. The person who is caught driving dangerously fast in a residential neighborhood should feel guilty about that pleasure, but even if they do, if someone asks "do you have guilty pleasures?" they're not likely to say "drag racing where there might have been children playing." Nor do we use that phrase for the person gambling with the rent money (assuming they enjoy the gambling), or even the person who is doing something pleasurable and otherwise acceptable when they should be taking their turn minding the kids.
Someone who skips studying for an exam in order to go see a movie may feel guilt over the not-studying, but would they call the movie a guilty pleasure?
Stipulating here that, for example, kleptomaniacs and child molesters take pleasure from their crimes: the discourse about such acts tends to gloss over that, taking it as read. "Guilty pleasure" is used for smaller things, even if in the specific case, the criminal does feel guilty for what they've done, rather than justifying it to themselves.
elisem asked about the idea of not-exactly-haiku earrings, based on the Fibonacci sequence:I
Am
Tempted
By something
New and intricate
With earrings waiting as a prize.
boxofdelights asked about comfort food, past and present:Hot tea, now and again when I was a child: it's so much a part of my daily routine now that I have to be careful not to have too much, or too late in the day, which might be easier if it weren't also still a great comfort.
Chicken soup, sometimes, especially matzoh ball soup.
Pudding was, I think, once in a while. (Now, it's something I eat and like now and then, but with no emotional overtones.)
One I no longer eat, or want: canned cream of mushroom soup.
Things that weren't comfort food as a child, and are now (these are things I never had as a child): oatmeal, congee, pho.
I can't think of anything I didn't like as a child that is now comfort food (the general category "didn't like as a child, do now" is not quite the same as "vegetables I will now eat," but the two are fairly close); also, nothing is coming to mind that was just okay when I was a child and is now comfort food.
haikujaguar asked whether, and why, people liked, or wanted, content warnings on stories and talked about why she doesn't. She included some notes about how people decide whether to pick up printed books, which led me to write:One thing nobody else seems to have mentioned: if I am looking at a book in a bookstore, it has a cover and a blurb. I may or may not have seen the marketing, but I'm not coming at it with just a title and author name: it's being offered to me as "this will scare you silly" or "a heart-warming story of..." or "the world's greatest romance" or "the harrowing tale..." or "a true story of survival during World War II" or the like. ("So-and-so's best novel yet" is less helpful than "So-and-so breaks new ground in her first contemporary fantasy.")
I prefer that sort of book cover to the one that basically assumes "you know about this writer, all we need to tell you is that it's her latest book": title and author on the front, and the back just has an author photo and maybe the tag "Fiction." If I don't, in fact, already know the author, I probably won't pick that one up. If I do know their work, maybe I'm in the mood for letter T in the Kinsey Milhone saga, or maybe I've had quite enough of Robert Parker's wisecracking hero whose first name is probably something like "Wilberforce" from the way he conceals it. [Maybe Parker is writing something different now, but the marketing isn't going to tell me that.]
I guess what this comes to is that I think warnings can be useful online in part because online fiction generally doesn't come with covers and blurbs.
shweta_narayan was talking about language, and the advantage of being able to talk about how, as a writer, she can give information about a culture by things like what words they use for directions and relationships, and that it's nice to be able to talk about that without having to first take time out to dismiss the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of the comments talked about English tending toward precise terms for things. Shweta said the commenter was being overly English-centric, and I added:We can be quite precise about some things, but consider the ambiguity of the word "family." Not just in things like whether "father's brother," "mother's brother" get the same word, or that "father-in-law" used to mean both "spouse's father" and "mother's husband," but more broadly, in who counts as family. The word is slippery because different people have different answers.
From a Spanish perspective, it may look odd that we use the same word for "conocer" and "saber" ("know" in the sense of "I know her" and in the sense of "I know how to make an omelet" or "I know the price of tea"). (Is there a language that uses distinct simple verbs for "know a fact" from "know how to do something"?)
Prompted, oddly, by a discussion in
rysmiel's journal:I don't think I'd mentioned to you that the New York transit authority used to have a series of short poems on ad-type displays. They then did a series of philosophy, quotes from people like Thomas Jefferson. Now, they've decided to give us very brief quotes that someone thinks are deep.
The first two of those are up now. The someone in charge of selections appears to be a pessimist. One is a cheerful bit about everyone thinking the limits of their vision are the limits of the world. The other is Kafka. Yes, that Kafka, the very beginning thereof.
It's enough to make a person miss the Spanish-language AIDS-education soap opera in comic strip format.
peake explained why he doesn't care about spoilers or use spoiler warnings and wondered, in comments, if those who do care are reading only for plot:I don't read only for plot, but I do read for plot, especially with mysteries (defining that term somewhat loosely: stories where a significant part of the point is figuring out what comes next or who did something crucial).
Depending on the story, knowing what comes later can also change how I view the character. When I reread, knowing that a character is going to lose his beloved daughter and this will change his character means I see him differently even before that. So, yes, I do reread, but rereading is a different experience from reading something that is new to me. I like both, and spoilers can distort the reading-something-new experience. Also, I think there's a difference between remembering having seen the whole thing unfold, and getting information out of order in terms of how the book is put together.
Over in
oursin's journal, she was talking about the difference between admiring and loving a book. I brought up guilty pleasures in that comment thread, and she posted on "Must Pleasures Be Guilty?" and offered the idea of embarrassing pleasures: Yes, I think "embarrassing pleasure" is useful here.
There are pleasures that could be guilty, I think, but they aren't the ones generally talked about as such. The person who is caught driving dangerously fast in a residential neighborhood should feel guilty about that pleasure, but even if they do, if someone asks "do you have guilty pleasures?" they're not likely to say "drag racing where there might have been children playing." Nor do we use that phrase for the person gambling with the rent money (assuming they enjoy the gambling), or even the person who is doing something pleasurable and otherwise acceptable when they should be taking their turn minding the kids.
Someone who skips studying for an exam in order to go see a movie may feel guilt over the not-studying, but would they call the movie a guilty pleasure?
Stipulating here that, for example, kleptomaniacs and child molesters take pleasure from their crimes: the discourse about such acts tends to gloss over that, taking it as read. "Guilty pleasure" is used for smaller things, even if in the specific case, the criminal does feel guilty for what they've done, rather than justifying it to themselves.