Years ago the Firesign Theater surreal comedy troupe put out an LP entitled, "How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All?" I loved it and, as a nascent philosophy major it helped move me along the path out of preconceived ideas. I thought of that this morning when I read -- or rather tried to read -- an article on "quantum entanglement," about quantum physics and the concept that things are really weird at that level. Brought me back to this: I "understand" that on that level things are not what we think, and, for example, my writing table is not really solid, being instead a mass of atoms that feel solid at the level of normal human perception. But, I ask myself, does that really matter, since I live on the level of normal human perception. And if someone were to pick up that piece of solid wood over there and whack me on the head with it, I doubt it would matter if I "know" it's really illusory, it would still hurt like Hell.
It gets even weirder when you consider that atoms have no colour. Everything that exists are colourless blobs, and we do not really see them, we do not see anything but the light being reflected from any object. Just a vast expanse of atoms involved in complex chemistry. What must it look like to God?
Old man alert. Every once in awhile I recall an elementary school class in which the teacher talked to us about the "town square," the cluster of buildings circling around the downtown county courthouse. I was living in a smallish town and county seat, about 6,000 people surrounded by farm land. I wonder what it's like for most people who have or are growing up in communities where the downtown is essentially empty, save for antique and convenience stores, with all the shops and stores out on the perimeter. Just a different way of thinking, I guess. Not better I'm sure, not worse I suppose, just different.
I once considered a sci-fi/fantasy story in which a person figured out how to get the point at which all possible parallel worlds were possible, but gave it up when I realized the only "person" who could handle that would be God.
When I was a girl, we often went shopping "downtown." I remember my mom would leave me and my brothers at the lunch counter at Kresge's while she went and did her thing. Kresge's is of course long gone. The 1960s were the era of the emerging shopping malls and that's mostly where we go now. Downtown has become a mix of eclectic shops and trendy restaurants. I'm really not a shopping mall kind of person. They exhaust me.
It's like every time I write a flash fiction, I get up to about 489 words, and it's like "I need more words!" so I go over the whole story and see where I can cut out words! Cut, cut. It's routine.
Flash is hard as hell. I need a lot more words than what flash allows to write something complete. That's my weakness, I guess, and I should overcome it. I do want to write Flash. It's been forever since I last tried. I keep saying that I'll try but I haven't gotten around to it. Actually, I don't even remember the last flash I wrote. I think it was for the .com LM genre challenge. Yeah, I really should try soon...
I looked up "Flash Fiction" on google, just in case I missed something. Google's definition is: Meh. I've written a few six-word stories here, and on the longer scale, I also wrote two or three one-thousand-word stories. They're fun.
Malls are mostly history around here. Back to the kid days, in summers we used to walk "downtown," to the "dime store" and then to the soda fountain at Boyer's Rexall drugstore, and usually over to the Purina "grain elevator" owned by my best friend's dad.
In this land of long, snowy, windy winters, the big indoor mall used to be the equivalent of the community meeting place. Its owners priced the small storefronts out of reach of local merchants, then the big anchor stores like Macy's and Sears closed. There is a small indoor playground that people with small children still visit, but the place is just a shadow of its former self. Downtown has been revitalized, but I don't venture down there very often, either.
Sure, I'll give it a try. I think I might be a little late now, though, seeing as today is the last day of October.
Fair enough. I just checked out the Flash Fiction contest, but it closes today. Alas! Woe! Aye, woe -- and alack-a-day! Anyway, we'll see what happens with the new contest. I look forward to it.
In the far future, when a ton of stuff has been written and originality is completely dead, how do you write phrases that have never been used?
I suggest (politely) that your question is meaningless, if interesting. Why presume that originality would be "dead" simply because much as been written? A phrase can be original with you even if it is not unique. Moreover, simply because much has been written, it doesn't mean that much, or even most, of that has been read. Or that everything possible has been written.
I recommend reading the book How To Read Literature Like A Professor by Thomas C. Foster. its funny, for one thing, but touches on this exact conversation. Chapter 5 is called "Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?" ...if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences... as you read, it may pay to remember this: there's no such thing as a wholly original work of literature (pg 29) to me, literature is something much more alive. More like a barre of eels. When a writer creates a new eel, it wiggles its way into the barrel, muscles a path into the great teeming mass from which it came in the first place, It's a new eel, but it shares its eelness with all those other eels that are in the barrel or have ever been in the barrel... but the point is this: stories grow out of other stories, poems grow out of other poems (pg 32-33) He uses a lot of examples from various different authors and works (chapter 6 is called "When In Doubt, It's From Shakespeare..." and the 7th chapter is called "....Or The Bible"). But the main takeaway from this chapter is that, even though nothing is "original' anymore, our own lived experiences, quirks, and identity bleeds into what we write, making it just a little bit different (or, creating a new eel to put into the barrel)
Interesting thought @GrahamLewis and nice recommendation @J.T. Woody And as language changes, perhaps originality will always be possible? Indeed the question is somewhat pointless for us here and now.
So, earlier, we were discussing the wind talkers of World War II, and the fact that currently, the Ukrainians are using Hungarian-speakers for the same reason. So ... it gave me the inkling of an idea. What if someone decided to recruit Khuzdul speakers, or Sindarin/Quenya speakers, for the same reason? Just imagine the enemy is tracking your radio communication, and suddenly all he can hear is Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! or Ishkhaqwi ai durugnul! or similar. Not as well-known as that, of course. Also, I only said it was the inkling of an idea. I never said it was either a good or bad idea. But what do you think?
I have to question the idea Hungarian is being used like the code talkers used the Dine language. Dime was used because it wasn't taught anywhere but on the reservation, and the US government had been trying to eliminate it with the Christian schools. How effective is a code if your enemy can break it by buying a copy of Rosetta stone?
