Who the heck do I think I am?

Okay, so here's something to think about.

The other night, Joel and I were talking about living alone and the high (IMO) density of people who talk to themselves when they live alone or spend a lot of time alone. In the Gweniverse, I'm never completely alone, though, because character-muses constantly provide the opposing voice in my internal dialogue. Like Tom Hanks' character in Cast Away anthropomorphizes "Wilson," I think we as humans need someone to bounce off of, even when that someone is a figment of imagination.

So we're talking about this, and I was saying that it's often characters from books, or TV or movies, and I mentioned how driving is a huge opportunity for this process, and how often these days Will Laurence or Temeraire are my co-pilots (Temeraire because he's a very fun conversationalist and Laurence because he occupies that lovely "straight man" capacity), and that when Granby's in the back seat it's even worse.

And Joel, who's just read His Majesty's Dragon, said he didn't know who Granby was - because, as he put it, he'd "never heard the word pronounced." I said that he'd read the book - he should recognize the name.

And then he said that he never internalizes the pronunciation of proper nouns and names while he's reading things.

I find that fascinating and impossible. I asked about maps: Does he "hear" the pronunciation of streets and such when reading the map? No. He "sees" them as glyphs and then looks for the glyph that matches the picture in his memory.

Bzuh?

So... what we want to know is how anomalous that is, or whether I'm the one who's odd in always figuring out how to say people and place-names when I'm reading. I've known for a long, long time that I prefer to "hear" the words spoken in my head as I read - it's one of the reasons I'm a slow reader - but is that "normal" or is it more normal to take in the word without an attempt to "speak" it and then simply recognize it on repetition? Is it a difference in thought? Teaching? Or actual brain process?

Discuss.

I don't think it's entirely coincidental that over the past few years, every time I have found myself at a potential crossroads, there happens to be an MIT media studies conference I've gone to at just about the same time.

- Futures of Entertainment was two weeks after I left Mount Auburn
- MiT5 was two weeks after I was back out of work from BIDMC (after working briefly in the Surgery department), and two months before I started working there again
- MiT6 was this weekend (and we know that things at work are...less than stable)

( I have a bunch of reactions to this year's Media In Transition conference. )

( My biggest, best thinky-thought this weekend )

I also have new ideas about methodologies to provide assistance to visually impaired readers (i.e., online users) and the transformative nature of vocal interpretations of fiction (i.e., fiction readings, which are themselves performances); the relationship of kennings to poetic mnemonic devices (and linguistic pattern-building); bards in a simultaneous role as performers, memoral agents, and editors; the history of reading aloud (and its relationship to dramatic performance vs. person-to-person file-sharing vs. transformative interpretation); sound and signal and the patterns of reception; collective memory and objectivity vs. immersive experience; and the effect of encapsulating specific stories within and without a fixed point in time as a device to create "safe" viewing distance; the status of queer (and queered) representations and interpretations and their future; and the selective process by which we choose what matters (and what lies outside the realm of the mainstream).

But those are posts for another time.