Readers of my LiveJournal blog may have noticed that my user name is Ann_Amalie. Some may have wondered where that came from. When I first started to write (fanfiction set in a sword-and-sorcery world), “Amalie” was my alter ego. She was a telepath, a misfit, who comes to this fantasy world in Read More
From Phyllida's Desk
Perception and Reality
September 19, 2010
Since my last post, (Seeing Blue) I've been thinking more and more about perception in a larger sense. By “perception,” I mean the way the act of seeing, or more precisely, reading, determines the way in which we understand a work of fiction.
“The camera doesn't lie,” we often hear, especially after being confronted with yet another candid snapshot of one's “self” looking like a star-nosed mole having a bad hair day. Read More
“The camera doesn't lie,” we often hear, especially after being confronted with yet another candid snapshot of one's “self” looking like a star-nosed mole having a bad hair day. Read More
Seeing Blue
September 14, 2010
In the third season of Mad Men, Don Draper's latest extramarital interest, a freethinking schoolteacher, asks that unanswerable question: How do we know what you call “blue” is the same thing I see and call blue? Now a new book goes even further, telling us English has more color words that many other languages, and that ancient Greek appeared to have no word for blue at all. (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
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