From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #123 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Friday, June 2 2000 Volume 02 : Number 123 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: freudian/jungian ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] Re: b/sappho ["David S. Bratman" ] o /sap-pho [GHighPine@aol.com] Re: b/ sappho [GHighPine@aol.com] Re: o /Ghandi/Gandhi [Todd Huff ] jungian and freudian [Kathleen Woodbury ] o/f&j2 ["Donald G. Keller" ] o/scanerrors ["Donald G. Keller" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 10:54:06 -0500 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: Re: freudian/jungian Don, I think you're getting somewhere but you're still reading "freudian" through a "jungian" pair of glasses. A little biased-sounding, to say that freudian stuff doesn't have enough archetypes, which are a jungian invention. Also, I'd take issue with your claim that all fantasy has a grounding in =some= kind of psychological theory. (Sorry if I misquote there.) Theory is the analysis, the post-game barroom discussion of the text. Fantasy is the text, the cause. And even text isn't the cause, "raw" experience; text is the experience processed by the writer. Don't confuse 'em, is my opinion. However I agree completely that there are "freudian" and "jungian" fantasies. I'd say that, broadly, freudian fantasy is pessimistic--James Branch Cabell--and jungian is not only optimistic, but =later= usually. As in, written more recently. Jungian is still tarred with a kind of scholarly brush, and here I'm thinking of Sean Stewart or Richard Grant; optimistic writers (sometimes) but very definitely there's a self-conscious feel to their employment of cross-cultural jungian slipstream theming. (Gosh, I really said that. ) Of course in the lamer versions of this school, as in Ian MacDonald, you don't have cross-cultural theming so much as cross-cultural photo opportunities. I'm supposed to be eating. Instead, I'm reading still-point digests. Would that this were more of a habit. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 14:37:51 -0400 (EDT) From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: Re: b/sappho On Wed, 31 May 2000 GHighPine@aol.com wrote: > Joss, of course, is cognate to Zeus...... Is it? What kind of name is Joss, anyway? Josh I know, but Joss? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 14:27:58 EDT From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: o /sap-pho In a message dated 5/31/00 11:34:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time, dbratman@genie.idt.net writes: << Concerning mispronunciations and misspellings, I would love to know what force compells most English-speakers to misspell Gandhi as "Ghandi". (Or Tolkien as "Tolkein", for that matter.) >> Well, transpositions of e and i are common enough (recieve, beleive) but I share your puzzlement about "Ghandi." Don't know if "most" English-speakers do it (there are probably at least a hundred million English-speakers in India who do not) but it sure shows up a lot, especially on the net. It bugs me too and I sometimes respond with some remark about George Whasington. But on the subject of pronunciation, even Americans who spell Gandhi correctly usually mispronounce it by dropping the h -- in Hindi, the "h" in Gandhi is sounded. (The name means "grocer," BTW, or so I have been told.) But when you start counting up all the foreign place-names and surnames that are commonly mispronounced ... I wouldn't necessarily expect average Americans to know how to pronounce Uruguay or Himalaya or Stalin correctly, but I think that =newscasters= should be strictly trained in the correct pronunciations of foreign names. I wish that when I myself am in doubt about the pronunciation of some foreign leader's name, I could turn to newscasts to find out and trust what I hear. Ironically, the English-dubbed version of the famous Japanese anime film AKIRA actually uses the usual American mispronunciation (ah-KEE-ra) rather than the correct Japanese pronunciation (AH-keera), because the Japanese apparently are too polite to correct the Americans' pronunciation. Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 14:45:11 EDT From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: b/ sappho In a message dated 6/1/00 11:26:18 AM Pacific Daylight Time, dbratman@genie.idt.net writes: << > Joss, of course, is cognate to Zeus...... Is it? What kind of name is Joss, anyway? Josh I know, but Joss? >> It's Chinese trader-pidgin. Originally it came from the Portuguese "Deos," which Portuguese traders applied to the images used in Chinese temples. "Deos" was corrupted to "Joss," and the word gradually came to apply to the incense burned in those temples (you can see incense sold in Chinese stores called "joss sticks") and then, since incense was offered in temples when people were praying for luck and blessings, the word "joss" eventually came to mean "luck." Joss himself says that his name is Chinese for "luck," but it is not a word of Sinitic origin -- ultimately it does trace back to Latin "Deus" (to which, of course, Zeus is cognate). So Joss is God. Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 19:15:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Todd Huff Subject: Re: o /Ghandi/Gandhi > > << Concerning mispronunciations and misspellings, I > would love to know what > force compells most English-speakers to misspell > Gandhi as "Ghandi". (Or > Tolkien as "Tolkein", for that matter.) >> > > Well, transpositions of e and i are common enough > (recieve, beleive) but I > share your puzzlement about "Ghandi." Don't know > if "most" English-speakers > do it (there are probably at least a hundred million > English-speakers in > India who do not) but it sure shows up a lot, > especially on the net. It bugs > me too and I sometimes respond with some remark > about George Whasington. > I always type Ghandi and go back and redo it because I always remember at that moment that it's not spelled the way I expect it to be. As far as _why_ I expect it to be Ghandi, I suspect it's because "gh" is common in American English and "dh" is not. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos -- now, 100 FREE prints! http://photos.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 20:58:55 -0600 From: Kathleen Woodbury Subject: jungian and freudian Donald said: >Bringing this back to the main topic here: =Buffy= is both. Insofar as >it's a "teen drama" and deals with Buffy trying to adjust to "everyday >life" it's Freudian (and Prof. Walsh's "commentary" on matters is >explicitly Freudian); but insofar as it's a "hero's journey" it's Jungian. So is the primal slayer Buffy's id, or is she a jungian archetype, or both? Or am I being too simplistic? Phaedre/Kathleen workshop@burgoyne.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 23:06:26 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/f&j2 David: Thanks for the comments on the Freudian/Jungian theory. I've always thought there was =something= there, despite people like Greg Feeley and Damon Knight pointedly failing to understand what I was saying (they're Freudians, essentially). I hesitate to impugn your first source, but Lin Carter's =Imaginary Worlds= is a pretty awful book, as I remember. Full of errors and bizarre opinions. Though it does serve the purpose, I suppose, of letting the novice know what's out there to look for. (=Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings= is a little better.) That theory about the continuity between Morris/Dunsany/Eddison and sword & sorcery is not Carter's; he got it from L. Sprague de Camp. =My= initial source for this material was De Camp's three Pyramid anthologies from the early 60s, =Sword and Sorcery=, =The Spell of Seven=, and =The Fantastic Swordsmen=. (There was another one from another publisher later, but it wasn't as important to me.) In his introductory material De Camp started with William Morris and spoke of a continuity between that tradition and that of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, etc. To me this has always been based on a fallacy and a historical coincidence. Let me start by saying that I =do= buy the idea that William Morris' prose romances (=The Well at the World's End= et al.) are the first =otherworld= fantasy "novels" (partly because I just love his stuff); and that Dunsany and Eddison and James Branch Cabell belong to the same--well, "tradition" or "school" is too strong a word, but obviously they're doing the same sort of thing. It just so happened that around 1930 that particular "tradition" faded into the background (Cabell and Eddison weren't done, but their reputations waned; Tolkien and Peake were writing but hadn't published much yet), and simultaneously the =Weird Tales= school arose. But Lovecraft, Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith were =not= doing the same sort of thing. Lovecraft especially came out of Poe and Machen and Blackwood, etc.; Smith from Poe by way of the French decadents (he was a good poet himself and translated Baudelaire); Howard from H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs (one of Howard's earliest novels, =Almuric=, is a frank Burroughs pastiche). Leiber's earliest work was sf and horror, only the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories falling into the fantasy camp; and Moorcock wrote Burroughs pastiche early in =his= career as well. The fact that Tolkien didn't publish until the 50s, and actually was a publishing phenomenon of the 60s, makes the continuity of the "Jungian" tradition hard to follow; but it's a different tradition, I think. (By the way, David: reading through Sappho's original Greek, I found that the texture of its language reminded me, oddly enough, of "Galadriel's Lament": and here I thought Quenya was mostly Latin and Finnish...) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 23:08:45 -0400 (EDT) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: o/scanerrors For today's moment of levity: As anyone who works much with text knows, scanning technology has produced a whole new category of errors. It's a combination of the inability of the character-recognition software to read broken type, and inattentive operators who are obviously making the wrong choice when they spell-check. The following are from =one= huge 100-page legal document I proofed last night (12-hour night shift), with correct word first followed by incorrect: funds : fiends borne : home third : thins those : thane note : pate asset : easel(!) price : mice the : tire and : arid made : nude transactions : transitions Some of these made a stuffy legal document more entertaining... Also came across an old post-it with some more: couple years ago, same company, also all from the same document: negigligence : negligee lease : imp(!!) payment : Hymen (note cap; must be an invocation to the goddess) means : measles rate : cam(??) duties : dunes, dukes retiring : rearing, renting, retina(!) ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #123 *****************************