Cozette’s Corner, LMST 345 Fall 2020

 This book is hilarious when you stop and think about it. The plot is less a story and more a complete dissection of communication and it's plasticity, but it's a book that's carrying the discussion. Thinking about it, the sparsity of Babel-17  is probably a deliberate echo of the apparent epigrammatic language itself. Like, we get only glimpses of the geo-galactic-socio-political background, and absolutely nothing about the 'Invaders' beyond all the connotations behind the word itself. Language is really fascinating, especially when you need to describe  it and its mechanics, because it's like having a mirror try and reflect itself, which gets complicated. Too complicated for the average level of linguistic understanding most people have, which is sad, because the more you understand it, the less you have to use. It compacts on itself even as the meaning behind it expands - paradoxically logical.  English is pretty much one of the most complicated to learn lang...

Total Points: 86 Classes attended: 7 Points: 7 Extra Credit completed: Week 1: The Gothic A Lecture, by David Punter, Week 1: Frankenstein 1931 film, Week 2: Nosferatu 1922 film, Week 3: Best Lecture Series: Godzilla and the Making of a Global Icon, by Dr. William Tsuitusi, Week 4: Cabin in the Woods (2011), directed by Drew Goddard, Week 5: The Witches (audiobook), by Roald Dahl, Week 6: Three Tolkien short stories. Points: 10 Books read: The Picture of Dorian Gray  by Oscar Wilde, Dracula  by Bram Stoker, Perdido Street Station  by China Mieville, The Golden Compass  by Philip Pullman, Akata Witch  by Nnedi Okorafor, Lud-in-the-Mist  by Hope Mirrlees, Trail of Lightning  by Rebecca Roanhorse, Kwaiden  by Lafcadio Hearn, Sirens of Titan  by Kurt Vonnegut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms  by N.K. Jemison, Warbreaker  by Brandon Sanderson, Soulless by Gail Carriger, and Dune  by Frank Herbert. Poin...

 The past becomes the future is I guess the idea here. And Rebecca Roanhorse brings in a perspective I've never considered and am the better for reading. I actually found it extremely reassuring that the end of the world is a natural process that's happened before. Sure it's chaotic and violent, but that's what change is as it's happening all at once; it eventually settles. Peace returns. People adapt, and stories are passed down. And that's basically why we tell stories, write books and watch movies. We have things we can learn about ourselves and our lives from the experiences of those before us and those different from us. The current market of port-apocalypse young and new adult fiction is distinctly lacking the tradition and pathos of Trail of Lightning. The best  post-apocalypse story I've ever read was Station 11  by Emily St. John Mandel, and it is the other kind of return to tradition. It follows the intersection of lives as touched by art and liter...

 Herbert obviously had a lot of thoughts when he wrote Dune , and now I have a lot of thoughts as well. And it's not really like he did anything new per-say, just extrapolated and taken to their extreme. In the strangeness of prophetic reclamation and centuries of eugenic cultivation under intergalactic imperialism, the humanity of the characters lends us readers a foothold to place ourselves in as we journey through Dune . I kind of get the feeling that Herbert mixed past present and future ideas in creating his world. Feudalism and religious centrism, the natural gas fuel crisis, space travel. Everything stretching and growing into a singularity that can no longer sustain itself and where even in subverting is reinforced. Dune  reads half like a traditional novel and half like a history book, which I feel is fitting for the purposes of this novel. Dune  could have easily been a satire in how it exposes this flawed organization of human priority, but it's not, because th...

Leaf by Niggle: Fascinating that the narrator addresses themselves in the story of the painter, Niggle. He seems to be some sort of entity beyond life and beyond death, and it is very obviously Tolkien’s voice. The trees rather give it away. This story somehow manages to talk about several very important ideas very neatly, and that wouldn’t have been possible without Tolkien’s own eloquence and experience. What is the value of art? Unless you’ve ever been by the need to make something and actually done it, your answer is likely Tompkins’s equivocation of “Of course, painting has uses.” Not everything that has value is useful, and subjective emotional responses are not ubiquitous. The world people like Tompkins imagine sounds stifling - they aren’t able to extrapolate. Appreciate. Understand the leaf is the tree is the forest is the foothills is the mountains. And even when a creator manages to explain themselves, non-creators are quick to brush it off. Sometimes they come around, but ...

 It's fascinating how cavalier the people are about the Witches and what they do. And the logic behind everything, from the witches' plans to how not taking a bath ever is the best solution to avoiding witches, is very much childlike in its simplicity, but that lends it a special credence from the perspective of a child.  And while the witches are scary, and you would definitely not like to run afoul of one, they don't actually harm the children? The transformation into a mouse is so painless our main character almost doesn't notice he's been changed - the other child needs to have it pointed out to him. They technically leave the rest up to nature. And it's not really the motivation  to harm and or torture children - it's to do something to stop them from being horrifically offensive to their noses. And that's it, that's the sum total of their plans with all the power of magic at their disposal, that we know of. Why they don't just all go into ...