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Oct. 20th, 2018 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonWhat I love about academia is that given any thing any experience or impression you have - someone has studied it and given it a name. I was falling into the Wikipedia hole on the bus the other day thinking about Brecht & then Tom Stoppard & I was into Rosencrantz & Guildernstern are Dead when I got jarred & carried away by medieval theatrical concepts.
Locus & Platea
As an aside - during a lull in the action at work the engineer and I started talking about languages, cases & declensions - he's a latin-fan and I... shoot I used to study languages like- academically. Isn't that weird? I was mentioning about how Japanese has different ordinality for different classes of items & different classes of items have different prepositions based on their relative distance (that's my recollection - not making any claims here) and I've been thinking about this lately - the near middle & far distance.
The near - middle & far and then there's a new kind of remoteness & closeness. I wonder if there are modified prepositions arising from the new verbs used around interacting with the faceless mass of humanity through the internet. The online world - is that a place in the theater? Can you see it from the stage?
I used to, when I wrote here much more often, constantly construct a meta-critique of all the things I would do on a day-to-day because I knew that I'd be digesting them here as a log of my impressions & actions. Doing that created a whole way of experiencing reality - you would not, exactly, vault out of your body & see things through astral projection for example- but you would shift your perspective up and to the right, up & to the right- so you'd be seeing your experience as yourself-as-the-player you'd see yourself in the scene not just the scene around you. And you'd use this to make a narrative of events. This perspective was & is valuable.
It's likely I've abandoned it largely owning to lack of utility. Lack of novelty - I don't have to parse or replay events & try to understand them now- I understand them innately - but that's because they've been the same for so long.
Like you always see people coming back to blog it up when they've broken up or had a crisis - because they're seeing themselves as being upon the stage.
Locus & Platea
I'm not much up on pre-modern theater but I'm trying to grasp the concept as best as I'm able without access to a Jstor account. The drama is focused on some actors & they draw attention to the center. But this doesn't occur outside of all existence & the other actors create a kind of background - or rather- foreground that is a zone of compromise between audience & central action and this was based on some kind of mise-en-scene from medieval times involving people around the drama playing... house? Evidently performing as background style extras. Okay. So
Naturally I think of this in terms of the table & rolling dice - the locus & platea shift all the time - some characters are front & center & some are sidebaring together - and that's proper. I think that the disruptive effect in a game - in a session where it breaks down is when the Referee breaks the locus. The Ref has to constantly be there, drawing everyone's attention toward a central drama - and when it shifts away from where it is in a moment to the characters off on the side- if that's ignored the session is derailed, if they get caught up in the character's sidebaring and don't attend to primary drama, if the sidebar dips too far toward audience participation & the characters end up in the audience & the ref's drawn into that (looking at you Monty Python references) - the derailment continues.
I'll probably end up writing an appendix about this for some book I write, how to manage your table the medieval theatrical way! Probably.
But also, and continuing - the perspectives - the prepositional locales between people as mediated by the internet & more as mediated by components of the internet - livejournalists & overwatch teammates are not of the same kind you know. So I consider what it'll be. If this is a medium that will last to the point that there's an alteration to language that will evolve its own arcane rules to describe.
Locus & Platea
As an aside - during a lull in the action at work the engineer and I started talking about languages, cases & declensions - he's a latin-fan and I... shoot I used to study languages like- academically. Isn't that weird? I was mentioning about how Japanese has different ordinality for different classes of items & different classes of items have different prepositions based on their relative distance (that's my recollection - not making any claims here) and I've been thinking about this lately - the near middle & far distance.
The near - middle & far and then there's a new kind of remoteness & closeness. I wonder if there are modified prepositions arising from the new verbs used around interacting with the faceless mass of humanity through the internet. The online world - is that a place in the theater? Can you see it from the stage?
I used to, when I wrote here much more often, constantly construct a meta-critique of all the things I would do on a day-to-day because I knew that I'd be digesting them here as a log of my impressions & actions. Doing that created a whole way of experiencing reality - you would not, exactly, vault out of your body & see things through astral projection for example- but you would shift your perspective up and to the right, up & to the right- so you'd be seeing your experience as yourself-as-the-player you'd see yourself in the scene not just the scene around you. And you'd use this to make a narrative of events. This perspective was & is valuable.
It's likely I've abandoned it largely owning to lack of utility. Lack of novelty - I don't have to parse or replay events & try to understand them now- I understand them innately - but that's because they've been the same for so long.
Like you always see people coming back to blog it up when they've broken up or had a crisis - because they're seeing themselves as being upon the stage.
Locus & Platea
I'm not much up on pre-modern theater but I'm trying to grasp the concept as best as I'm able without access to a Jstor account. The drama is focused on some actors & they draw attention to the center. But this doesn't occur outside of all existence & the other actors create a kind of background - or rather- foreground that is a zone of compromise between audience & central action and this was based on some kind of mise-en-scene from medieval times involving people around the drama playing... house? Evidently performing as background style extras. Okay. So
Naturally I think of this in terms of the table & rolling dice - the locus & platea shift all the time - some characters are front & center & some are sidebaring together - and that's proper. I think that the disruptive effect in a game - in a session where it breaks down is when the Referee breaks the locus. The Ref has to constantly be there, drawing everyone's attention toward a central drama - and when it shifts away from where it is in a moment to the characters off on the side- if that's ignored the session is derailed, if they get caught up in the character's sidebaring and don't attend to primary drama, if the sidebar dips too far toward audience participation & the characters end up in the audience & the ref's drawn into that (looking at you Monty Python references) - the derailment continues.
I'll probably end up writing an appendix about this for some book I write, how to manage your table the medieval theatrical way! Probably.
But also, and continuing - the perspectives - the prepositional locales between people as mediated by the internet & more as mediated by components of the internet - livejournalists & overwatch teammates are not of the same kind you know. So I consider what it'll be. If this is a medium that will last to the point that there's an alteration to language that will evolve its own arcane rules to describe.
