In an earlier blog post, I rambled on incoherently about the idea of conceptual synesthesia. This is the idea that certain people assign colors and gender and even personalities to letters and numbers. This recent article about language makes the point that gender assignment for objects is often integral to languages, and different languages assign different genders to the same object.

In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it.

I’ve mentioned that I’m currently working on a horror/suspense novel. I’m about 12,000 words in, and it’s coming along, but I’m realizing that the text I’m producing is going to need some work once the whole thing is completed. You see, as I write, if I find myself stuck searching for a certain word or phrase, I tend to just put down something to get the point across, with the intent of going back later and really finessing things. I’m starting to understand that after I’ve got everything down on the page, I’m going to need to go through the book paragraph by paragraph, or even sentence by sentence, and apply that finishing coat of paint. Thinking about this topic today led to a breakthrough in my understanding of the process of writing a novel.

Before I get into that, let me ask you question. Do you know how sometimes you go out at night and you pick up a prostitute and she angers you by reminding you of your mother, so you kill her and stuff her in a meat locker in your basement? And, every couple weeks or so, you go down there and open the locker, and see that she’s decayed just a bit more, until finally she’s just a bunch of bones? Well, now imagine if you could flip some kind of cosmic switch and cause time to happen in reverse. In this case, you would start out with a pile of dusty bones and slowly you would see flesh appear, followed by skin, and ultimately a perfectly normal dead prostitute. Well, I believe writing a novel is like watching a dead prostitute decay if time went in reverse.

Need me to clarify? Well, when you start our writing a novel, you have a basic concept of the story. I had a 20 page screenplay treatment. That’s the equivalent of the skeleton. Then you get in there and think through the detail that more, adding plot points and descriptive detail. This is like putting meat on the bones of the dead prostitute skeleton in your meat locker. Then you go in and take a pass at actually writing the novel, getting down to the nitty-gritty of sentences and paragraphs. This is comparable to having the body of a dead prostitute without skin. The final step, is of course applying that finishing touch — massaging the text so that the descriptions and metaphors make the point without being too cliché, finding the appropriate word where needed. This is the process of putting the skin back on the body. It seems minor — skin is a very small part of the human body — but it’s important. You can take a very attractive woman like Paris Hilton, but if you remove all her skin, she’s not so attractive anymore, is she?

So that’s my theory. A lot of authors will compare the process of writing a novel to giving birth to a child. That’s a legitimate comparison, but I don’t think it’s fully accurate. I think it’s more correct to say that writing a novel is a lot like watching the body of a dead prostitute reverse-decay after you flip a cosmic switch which causes time to go backwards.

I hope that’s helpful to any budding writers out there.

There’s a recent issue of Time magazine with a cover story entitled “What Animals Think” which discusses the current state of science in regards to measuring how aware and self-conscious animals are about themselves and others. It’s fascinating stuff, much of it centered around a 29-year-old bonobo ape who has a very rich and complex vocabulary (not just nouns and verbs.)

There’s a moral aspect to the article as well. Obviously, if animals are smarter than we think, that perhaps we should rethink killing, torturing (which is what much of animal research is) and eating them. The animal rights ethicist Pete Singer is quoted; he basically argues that you should only eat animals that are devoid of consciousness, such as oysters and mussels. It strikes me that there’s perhaps another tact one can take here. For years, we’ve been allowing ourselves to eat animals based on the assumption that they are not like us. If science is slowly revealing that they are like us, perhaps we should then allow ourselves to eat each other. Certainly, cannibalism would be helpful in dealing with many of the issues facing humanity: overpopulation, starvation, obesity, global warming.

Can a moral case be made for cannibalism? I think it’s a question science needs to take a long hard look at.

There’s an article in a recent New Yorker about the various medical dilemmas the medical establishment faces when treating a person at the end of their life. Do you do everything you can to keep them alive for as long as possible, replacing their biological functionality with machines? Or can you try and grant the patient some dignity by letting them die at home, without extraordinary measures? Or can you, as the article insinuates, try to meld both approaches?

My feeling is that most death, whether prolonged or not, is undignified and often quite painful. Whether you die because the machine that’s been pumping air into your lungs can’t keep up with your other failing organs or a more natural death — essentially starvation or suffocation — it’s going to suck. That’s why I’ve always advocated for out and out euthanasia. People should have some mechanical monitor placed in their head that keeps tabs on their mental function, pain levels and muscular ability. When this drops below a certain level, a device placed in the brainstem should activate, causing a deluge of microwaves to fire and instantly cook the brain.

There’s only one downside to this: as we know from watching the remake of “The Last House on the Left,” microwaving a person’s head causes it to explode. So it is possible a person could be having a sensitive conversation with their niece about the meaning of life, only to have their head and brain matter splatter all over the family. It is also possible that if a family dog or cat is there, this pet might immediately start eating the tasty fried brains now splattered all over the place. But this is only a small downside to what I feel is a otherwise quite elegant solution to an issue that has plagued mankind since the beginning.

Post-reading “Sex at Dawn” I found myself browsing through the web for information on nonstandard sexual relationships. I came across discussion of “polyfidelity” which is essentially group marriage. This led me to a website for the “Kerista Commune,” a polyfidelous experiment that took place in San Francisco (where else?) from the early 70s to the early 90s.

The website, maintained by ex-members of the commune, is fascinating and includes a pretty honest assessment of the whole project. On one hand, the advantages of living in such a society are unpretentiously listed.

…once you were in Kerista, you had a real sense of belonging to a tribe. You always had a group of friends to move around with. You didn’t have to worry about paying your bills – the community took care of that. Those of us who were parents did not have to bear the stress and strain of raising kids alone. You always had help figuring out a difficult problem. And, somewhat more abstract, yet still significant, you always had a sense or belief that you were doing something good for the world.

But there’s also much discussion of the downsides.

Our living spaces were disgustingly messy and unaesthetic, largely because no one felt any personal responsibility for them. It was everyone’s – and therefore, no one’s – problem. People felt free to spend money on all kinds of things in a way that they would never do if they were solely responsible for balancing their chequebooks and making ends meet. (And, as it turns out, when the accounting was done after the commune’s demise, we found that our communal fund had been running in the red for years.)
…
Every ex-Keristan I have talked with remembers numerous instances of going along with the prevailing group sentiment on an issue rather than take a contrary stand, or, worse still, without even bothering to really think the issue through independently… There are memories of this sort about which many of us will probably continue to cringe for years to come . . . times we gave some innocent person a hard time for thinking, saying, or doing something that didn’t synch with current Keristan doctrine.
…
Though we had never considered ourselves to be guru-centred (after all, we believed in democracy, equality of the sexes, and other “politically correct” positions), from our perspective today, Kerista was in many respects a cult with a charismatic leader. Jud’s forceful personal style of conversation and confrontation became the model for how Keristans related to each other and outsiders; only the most courageous Keristans dared to openly disagree with Jud.
…
We used to scoff at people who would show up at one of our rap groups and ask, “But what if you end up in a group with someone you aren’t attracted to?” We would tell them they obviously didn’t understand-you only joined a group if you wanted to be with all the people in it, and they all, wanted to be with you. That was the ideal, which made sense. In reality it was often not that way. Many of us did find ourselves at different times in bed with people that, on our own, there was no way on earth we’d have ended up with. The way it sometimes worked was that a few influential members of a group would be interested in a new person, and they would “gestalt” (read, harangue) others who didn’t share that feeling until they assented to accept the new person.

So how exactly did they arrange these polyfedilous relationships? There was a schedule which mandated whom would be sleeping with whom each night. In strict egalitarian fashion, after a person slept with a partner, they would sleep with every other potential partner before returning to that first partner*.

Did being paired with a person mandate sex?

Sex was not mandatory, but it was expected. Most people did have sex, as far as I know. If you weren’t having sex with a certain someone then something was probably wrong in your dyad. Rotating partners every night is a sure way to feel like you should fuck this person who you hadn’t been with in several days.

The whole website appears to be an interesting overview of the appeal and follies of hippie culture.

* The modern classical composer Arnold Schonberg had a similar system devised for music. He would create orders of musical notes containing all the notes in the chromatic scale, and then dictate that his compositions had to use every other note in the order, before reusing the first note.