Friday 8 December 2017

Associative Thought

There is nothing linear about this:

Stieg Larssson's Jewish character, Jan Bublanski, reminded me of Poul Anderson's Max Abrams and SM Stirling's Moishe Feldman so I posted about all three;

(Abrams appears in Ensign Flandry);

I mentioned that Bublanski talks to God in a Catholic church;

this reminded Sean of Don Camillo, a Catholic priest, talking to God in a church;

this has led to reminiscences about Don Camillo and also to a post about prayers by fictional characters.

If I knew where we were going, I would say so.

2 comments:

David Birr said...

Paul:
Poe's Dupin demonstrated the ability to follow other people's UNSPOKEN trains of associative thought — and though Sherlock Holmes derided this as "showy and superficial" when Watson mentioned it, he later showed that HE wasn't above doing it, too.

I once traced back the chain of thoughts that'd led me from glancing at the picture on a calendar to humming the theme from the movie *Never On Sunday*. It wasn't a LONG chain, but it WAS an eccentric one:
The calendar picture, a humorous scene set in a museum, included an exhibit of pottery labeled as an urn.
This led me to think of an old pun, "What's a Greek urn?" (earn) "Oh, thus-and-such many drachmas a day."
That triggered recollection that the female lead of *Never On Sunday* is a Greek who earns her living as a prostitute.
And I began humming the theme.

As I said, a short chain ... but warped.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, DAVID!

And your comments here reminded me of the dreadful Gwen Ingolfsson, in Stirling's DRAKON. She said somewhere that she had been trained to accurately to accurately interpret the subvocalizations many of us unknowingly do. To such an extent that it looked like telepathy to others.

It seems to me that training in both not sub vocalizing and control of body language would thwart this convenient source of information for Gwen and her fellow Homo drakensis.

Sean