Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar
Well, it seems that I’m one of the few blogging here at the SSAG blog these days, though believe me, I would love to see more of the other voices here. Because I’m no expert on games, or science fiction, or fantasy—though I know Charlie does post on some of these things, since she writes in those genres among others.
I noticed the split that runs through the book in the two San Francisco readings for the book. The January 25 reading was weighted pretty heavily toward games and fantasy, and the February 1 reading was towards science and technology. (Charlie and Annalee read the same sections of their contributions at both readings, so they kind of balanced each other out.)
It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, that geeks can run the whole span from fantasy to the deepest truths of nature. I used to be at the “deepest truths of nature” end of the spectrum as a geek, until I realized I hadn’t even been hacking anywhere near the forest containing those, much less the particular cluster of trees shading the Truth. (Now I’m a sort-of geek who has forgotten more physics than most people will ever know—and believe me, most people do not need to know higher physics!)
The whole split makes me think of a quote by the English poet William Wordsworth that I swear I read once, where he described the two different aims of his poetry versus fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry. It boiled down to, Wordsworth tried to make the strange feel familiar, and Coleridge made the familiar into something strange.
Of course, now I’m wondering which side maps to which. I would have said that I can relate to making the strange familiar—but as I think of it some more, physics research in a way is more about making the familiar strange, isn’t it? Because it’s very possible to look at everyday phenomena and find some really peculiar behavior. And so the comic book writers and gamers and character bloggers might be the ones making the strange familiar.