Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Yolande wrote: "it is soooo difficult to get students to participate. Most of them are just not interested ;p."

Yolande! I've been wondering how you're doing, but you -did- mention that work and new roommates have been keeping you away from us, so I assumed it was all good. :)

Man, I can really relate to what you're saying there...things have not been as lively around here as they used to be, sadly. :(

Indeed. :)

Oh wow, it gives you a Jules Verne -like feeling... thanks Ruth!

Michele wrote: "The name "Heinrich" is one of the primary things that jumped out at me every time it was brought up. And the conversations with his son are hilarious. If I was that parent I would spend most of my ..."

I'd have to read a bit more of the novel to comment on the strangely German slant... but yes...

Jennifer wrote: "so much was based in the "ludicrous boring real world", and it's a joy to read about, because, it is really just the opposite . We should remember the "real world" is an amazing place, full of ridiculous wonderful things and people."

Sure, its a look at our contemporary world through intelligent eyes, wouldn't you say? ...and that is to a large extent what the postmodern art/intellectual scene is about. :) Glad we agree!

Here's another one: a lot of the commentary from intellectuals about the postmodern age is focused on the mass media and its effects on society, and in that film lecture Jack gives, propaganda and mass hysteria seem to feature quite strongly.

Speaking of which, where Jack says : “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” , and then afterwards muses: Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean? , have you any commentary on whether you feel there is any truth to it? (Let's take our gray matter for a proverbial walk :) )

Re the hazardous materials, I do know that Mylar is used for thermal insulation, and I imagine that would be something that firefighters would use for example. Not too sure about insulating you from other hazardous materials, but in any case, it's what space suits are/were made of.

Re copyright and patenting, sure, I think it's been alive and kicking for longer than in 1985-ish? According to this article, it was alive and kicking 5000 years ago already...... http://www.informit.com/articles/arti...
...and here's a history of copyright in the US : http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyri...

Okay, but specifically trademarks - yes, trademarks were quite proliferous by the mid 1980's.

Apologies for holding us back, but I had still wanted to comment about the conversation that Jack and his son has in the car. Referring to the son Heinrich's comments (anybody else also find that a rather surprisingly German name? At least it's not Adolf. XD), remember I mentioned in the notes about postmodernist art that it explores issues around relativism? ...and here they're having a conversation discussing exactly that. So, another tick for your po-mo album, Ruth! :D

Ruth wrote: "At the beginning of chap 9, men in Mylex suits try to figure out what is causing health problems at the grade school. Wikipedia suggests that Mylex is a made-up word to have us think of mylar. Really?"

(Oi, the little reply window I now get when using Vivaldi....)
Anyway, yeah, interesting. I get: Mylar is a registered trademark owned by Dupont Tejjin Films for a specific family of products made from the resin Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). The true generic term for this material is polyester film.
I wonder if he didn't want to use the exact word mylex because of all the trouble you can get into these days if you use somebody's registered trademark. Maybe he was just playing it safe.

The actual product Mylar is actually quite interesting, I find.

I can quite understand making changes when people ask for it; but why do some designers always have to turn the users into a kicking screaming mass?

I find the same thing with Windows designers- why re-invent the wheel when we had a perfectly good one everybody was happy with?

...and by that I'm not saying the old GR outlay was perfect- there are hundreds of pages of complaints to attest to that, and I know that they have not responded to many many of those requests. Not listening to us makes it all feel like they're acting in a very autocratic manner. Sadly ALL the book sites around these days seem to be pretty commercialized one way or another. :(

...to change the subject a bit, I wonder why they (and there I suppose I mean Amazon and the GR design team - because a design team seems to have been appointed, and they seem to feel the need to justify their existence :P ) feel they have to keep fiddling with the GR UI so much.

Not only have quite a few things gone from good to worse, like for example the notifications tab which now always shows an error message for me, no matter which browser I use, but they are fiddling with things that have always worked well.

Why does Amazon not spend its time and money on actually IMPROVING the site, such as giving group tree structures an additional branch.

How do the rest of you feel about the recent changes? Has anything changed for the better for you?

Hi June, welcome to the group. Fine thanks, and with yourself?
As you can see, we come here and chat lots, and then we disappear again for periods of time....

Do you enjoy going to the movies?

Well, there ya go! I think we have figured out what Hitler and Elvis had in common. Both of them were popular with the masses, and good manipulators of people's emotions on a mass level. Hitler, of course, in a much more sinister way....

And also - have you ever seen Elvis perform? He wore these shiny outfits and this coiffed hair, and he really put on this big show with dancing and hip-gyrating, so. like you said, Jennifer, they were both showmen who could put on a performance that could transport the masses to a point of hysteria.

Apparently Hitler had a sort of animal magnetism that made women swoon for him - I wouldn't know, but that's what they say. And that is something that Elvis also had. Girls were screaming for him - well, you know the rock-star scenario.

So, I would say that both Elvis and Hitler fit in with one of the novel's themes - that of people putting on an 'image' in order to manipulate the public. (Which fit in with advertising and propaganda- did you know that advertising science and the art of propaganda had the same roots in public relations - it started with books like the 1928 Propaganda by Edward L. Bernays, who is also called the father of public relations.

Jennifer wrote: "I suspect the Elvis /Hitler thing has to do with the fact they are still very much alive, despite actually being dead. In some ways more so than when they were actually alive."

Also a good point yes - there are many people who refused to believe either of them died when they were supposed to have died, and then of course, as mentioned, they were both famous, if for different reasons.

...but do you also see what I mean about how they are sort of making Hitler's persona into something different than what Hitler was about?

In a certain sense, though, Hitler is a good choice from the author's point of view, since he was a master propagandist, who knew how to play on the emotions of the masses and use it to his own advantage.

Oh, totally agreed about the accent. That was a poor judgment call. Pity.
They should not have given him an accent at all.

Still, in a multilingual world, what are the chances accents will differ? ..but yeah, I can see how the accent mixed with the awkwardness is a bad call. In fact what were they thinking with that? :(

LOL, basically I see no correlation except that both of them were pretty well-known in their time.

I suspect the sort of subtle point being made might be (since Elvis was a celebrity )(and this is only a guess) that these people are actually making Hitler into a sort of celebrity.
(Which is just yet another way to illustrate how po-mo people don't care about the essence of things (such as that Hitler was in essence a monster) but rather about what things or people can do for us-Hitler's "shock"-value, or sensation value can be used by Jack and his institution to further their careers.
...but I might be missing something huge.... :P

Yes, thanks, Amy. There is a little bit of all of us in Jar-jar. We are all just hapless creatures cast into a huge universe beyond our control and beyond our understanding, and we make do as best we can. :)

...so... nobody up for a slight challenge? Nobody got an opinion of the, er, juxtaposition of Hitler and Elvis? ;)

...and about the "image" that Jack Gladney's boss wants him to construct, the necessity of which Jack seems to agree with?

Jennifer wrote: "I was drawn into the family from the get go. One of my favorite scenes from the book was the conversation with Jack and Heinrich about the rain.

I wasn't bothered my Jacks description of Babette...."

Yes, thanks for pointing out that lack of guile is actually used in a positive sense here; I must say that I also enjoyed his later descriptions of her;
(view spoiler)[Babette, whatever she is doing, makes me feel sweetly rewarded, bound up with a full-souled woman, a lover of daylight and dense life, the miscellaneous swarming air of families. I watch her all the time doing things in measured sequence, skillfully, with seeming ease,
and
Babette was moist and warm, emitting a creaturely hum. She runs, she shovels snow, she caulks the tub and sink. She plays word games with Wilder and reads erotic classics aloud in bed at night. What do I do? I twirl the garbage bags and twist-tie them, swim laps in the college pool. When I go walking, joggers come up soundlessly behind me, appearing at my side, making me jump in idiotic fright. Babette talks to dogs and cats. (hide spoiler)]

Well... tribal people aren't physically clumsy; usually quite the opposite; and he is PHYSICALLY clumsy just the way a geeky physically inept dork is usually depicted as.

So, for me, the usual stereotypes are deconstructed and mixed up enough for me to simply find him funny in a silly way.

Hmm, though he was clearly more clumsy and more of a do-do than the rest of his tribe, but in an endearing manner, so I'm good with that. :) Such people do exist too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...and it was done in the comical style of; he managed to do cool stuff exactly by being clumsy and a do-do. :D His battle scenes always make me laugh.