Short Stories

[Inanna]

I hope that doesn’t happen soon!

[Frelga]

Heh.
I had a hold on both a book and audiobook, and the book came today.

[Beorhtnoth]

My favourite short story is an "ultra short" attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, just six words long.

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn."

[Inanna]

Ohmigod. That’s some short story. A life of pain behind it.

[Beorhtnoth]

It's a slow burner. Six words that, superficially, mean little, but the longer thought about, the more tragic the implications. It gnaws and gnaws away at the reader's imagination.

And only six words.

[Frelga]

I find it interesting that it is usually read as a tragic story, when it could just as easily be about Aunt Edith gifting a toddler with infant sized shoes.

Humans just have a penchant for the dramatic.

[Beorhtnoth]

I find it interesting that it is usually read as a tragic story, when it could just as easily be about Aunt Edith gifting a toddler with infant sized shoes.

Humans just have a penchant for the dramatic.

Very true, but I think you ignore context. If it was Aunt Edith, then there is little reason to tell the tale. However, the tale is being told, so we default to inquisitorial mode. Why tell it if it is mundane?

The answer is that it is being told because there is something fundamental to it that is not mundane, and once stripped of the possibility of mundanity, the dawning horror elevates the tale's simplicity to masterpiece.

[Frelga]

In other words, the tale is not in the tale but in the reader's interpretation of the storyteller's motives. See, penchant for the dramatic.

I dislike Hemingway, for the record.

[Beorhtnoth]

Possibly.

Humans are, thankfully, more complex than simply being receptacles. Tales are not told in a vacuum; it is expected there will be some purpose in their telling, some meaning. The author (possibly Hemmingway) is, by definition, a part of the author/reader contract. The author knows the reader has expectations, and the reader knows the author writes with purpose. Once that mutuality is recognised, the mundane explanations for the story's meaning wither, to be replaced by understanding that what is written is only a part of the tale. The subsequent impulse is to search for what is not written, and hence the dawning horror.

[Inanna]

I find it interesting that it is usually read as a tragic story, when it could just as easily be about Aunt Edith gifting a toddler with infant sized shoes.

Humans just have a penchant for the dramatic.

Gasp. We really do, don’t we.

[elengil]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

[Inanna]

What?


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[Frelga]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

I understood that reference.

[Inanna]

Spill.

Else I’ll start crying.

[elengil]

Spill.

Else I’ll start crying.

Star Trek The Next Generation episode - they meet an alien race that speaks entirely in metaphor. In English but in metaphor.

So the phrase keeps getting repeated until the main characters figure out what is meant by the phrase. The thing is it's a reference to an old story that may or may not be myth but basically the only way to understand the language is to know what all these references are. Think of a world in the future where everyone speaks in movie quotes and the only way to actually understand what is said is to have the common frame of reference of the movie.

It illustrates quite well the idea that context and a shared paradigm often influence how words are interpreted.

[Frelga]

For example.

(the image is from the show, the quote isn't)

Screenshot_20201108-112417.jpg (74.39 KiB) Viewed 5277 times

[elengil]

Exactly.

[Inanna]

Wow. And ROFL.

[elengil]

Frelga, I just realized that's even more perfect than my example of movie quotes - it's like communicating entirely in memes.

[Frelga]

It's a little meta, since it requires fluency both in Star Trek references and 2020 political events.