Happy Birthday Jane

I've been thinking about delimiters. They are used by computers to know where things begin and end, stuff like using {braces} to define functions. Some people have been quite clever in incorporating them into their blogs, and writing. Using <!-- to enclose comments --> for example. However, I get really irritated by all.the.periods.

The way my bleak understanding of this stuff goes, things like window.event.srcElement.tagName in the document object model are hierarchical. Each variable following a sequence of periods acts, or is dependant on, or derives properties from, the previous object. So, a construction like net.narrative.environments follows the basic syntagm of the programing model. A construction like not.so.soft is a purely arbitrary thing, having nothing in common with its programing heritage. It makes no sense to me, except as a gesture of cleverness which falls flat on me. Perhaps I'm just too far out of the blogging paradigm.

That was the cool thing about Jane Austen really. She never went outside what she knew. You won't see two men conversing alone in her books, or any "inner dialogue" from the men in her books. She neatly delimited what her concerns were, and her concerns were primarily relationships between men and women. Entering into her stories, you know what the rules are. She doesn't arbitrarily invent them, and she sticks to writing what she knows. Austen is one of my favorite writers because you know where she's coming from, and where it's likely to end. You just don't know how it's going to get there. Tracing the story, in the moment to moment dialogue, is satisfying challenge enough, without any extra complications. It is possible to address deep issues without the added difficulty of redefining what language is and what it does.

I love Percy Shelley deeply, but I think he got lost in that language game. It narrowed his audience, and it makes him distant and unapproachable to most people. Not so with Jane Austen. Jane wrote for anybody.