"Why Haven't I Seen This Before," take number one hundred eight

“Why Haven’t I Seen This Before,” Take Number 108


I’ve written many times that philosophers, anthropologists, novelists, political scientists, psychologists, economists, and intellectual historians should hang out more with one another. (Poets, designers, artists, and architects should chime in when appropriate. Everyone should be made to shut up when appropriate, which is the hard part.)

The creators of courses for fledgling fantasy writers are probably the best theorists of human behavior without quite realizing what it is that they are doing. (Few human beings ever realize what it is that they are doing, so this is not to be held against them. Note that “what it is that they are doing” is not quite “what they are doing,” incidentally. Editors to the contrary, the slight awkwardness of phrase keeps us from lapsing into the inattention of overfamiliar wording. Novelists know this. Academicians do not; indeed they insist upon using the right Magic Words of the Season.)

( if these words interest you even for a moment, you are lost )

on never getting it quite right

I had to look up the phrase I had slightly misremembered, of course. I shall let you figure out what it actually was.

"Why haven't I seen this before," as long-suffering joculum readers will already know, are the words of Doctor Edward Morbius when the practical-minded Commander has figured out, from the enigmatic words of his ship's physician, what the monster of Forbidden Planet really is, and the light dawns in Morbius' hitherto self-deceiving brain.

I only occasionally use it for belated realizations in my ongoing Theory of the Theory of Everything, a.k.a. "A Firm Grasp on the Perfectly Obvious."

museums of innocence

I never posted the upshot of a friends-only query asking for information on the existence of Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. It was answered not only with the discovery that Pamuk was about to deliver a lecture on the topic that an LJ-Friend attended and reported on to me, but with a feature story in the New York Times the following Sunday. As was said of a certain novel's publication date, timing is everything.

And having posted a serious note unrelated to the Berlin Wall anniversary, I feel compelled to copy here the relevant closing paragraphs of my friends-only post, which LJ-Friends have seen already: ( ich war dabei )