dolor-sit-amet

Happy NaNoWriMo 2008, everyone! This is my fifth year doing it, and already it's going better than ever before. I actually have well developed characters this time, for pretty much the first time ever, and it's a weird experience. I just played out a game of Cribbage between two of my characters, and I knew how they would play and what they were thinking about as they played. Creepy.

These two, Dr Peterson and Molly, are trying really hard to take over my story, but I think they will peter out sooner or later, and then I can write the rest of it.

eighth-story

Today in World Religions, among other things the professor gave a stirring description of Bhakti Yoga, roughly the Hindu path to God through love. It was a fairly moving description that tied in with other divine-love traditions. The idea stuck to me.

Today in Eugene Onegin, I read chapter 3, where Pushkin discourses on the nature of love of the squishy kind. It brought to mind my professor's explanation of the connection between erotic and divine love in Bhakti writing and similar traditions, and I began musing on how this might relate to a vision I had.

I was overwhelmed by love for a moment, so that I could think of nothing else. I recommend it.

Lately I've been thinking about an idea I had, call it "postliterate art".

There is preliterate art, music and literature that was made and passed on without the use of writing. Things were constrained by the limits of memory, but they were also living, since people passed on the traditions and kept them going, updating and combining variations, creating regional differences, etc. Preliterate art is alive in a sense, because it grows and changes and even reproduces, variations of a song or story becoming separate works of their own.

Then things are written down, and even printed, so now you have a fixed author and a standard way for a piece to be. This doesn't just affect the recorded instance of a work. Having a "right way" to sing Stairway to Heaven means that even when other people play covers of it, they will base them on the standard recorded version, so you get far less growth and development, but you can make much more complex and directed works, and there is less danger of things getting lost.

Then comes the realization that things don't have to be written down, and there doesn't have to be a right way of doing something. That is when you get postliterate art, art that you could record or write down, but make a conscious decision not to. Instead, you pass it on orally or aurally, and encourage these works to grow and reproduce.

It can't be distributed over the internet, not while keeping it intact. Sure you could record a variation or several, but those would just be isolated instances, whereas what is important is the phenomenon itself, not one particular instance of it. Not everything belongs on the internet.

I've started a side account, eighth-story for my NaNo '08 story, "The Eighth Story". This way I can post NaNo stuff without having it clutter up my main account.

I know it's not even September, but the ideas are coming fast and furious, so I want to make sure I have everything together for when November rolls around. It always comes up faster than I expect, even taking into account that it did that last year too.

Ok, I'm sick of the pretension that things have to be grim to be great. Hamlet, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Of Mice and Men, grim grim grim. Existence is too wonderful to constantly be bogged down in unpleasantness.

I want recommendations. What are the best, happiest books you've read, movies you've seen, etc? No bummers, please. Also, tell me something about why it is important, how it uplifts, what is so great about it. Long lists are fun, but not exactly useful.