Dichroic Reflections

you know WHO???

I am glad I posted those questions the other day. I wrote them not as a test but in hopes other people would share some of the off coincidences and bits of knowledge that please them. I'd have to say that succeeded, at least as far as coincidences go.

As a direct result of some ensuing conversation, one reader and I discovered some mutual friends.

Now, the world has always seemed smaller to me than the number of people in it would indicate. I was amused when we were two days out on a trail in Big Bend, one of the more remote parts of Texas, and someone hiking by the other way recognized me from Houston. I thought it was a little bizarre when we went to a rock-climbing class at Smith Rock in Central Texas and ran into someone I'd worked with at Penn. Aerospace is a smaller world, so I wasn't terribly shocked to walk through the halls at my company right before I left and run into a coworker from three jobs before who was just starting there, or to meet someone yesterday who had first hired a rowing friend of mine who used to work at yet another site in this company and is now in DC.

But this .... this is really weird. I'm not sure I can get across the oddness of this coincidence without lots of background and more details on other people than I want to give, but I'll try. This reader suggested that we might have some mutual acquaintances given our common interests and city of origin, so we exchanged a few details of who went to school where and so on, and I suggested a few names. Now, granted some of the interest communities are tight, but Philadelphia's a big, big city. It turns out that my best friend in high school was her best friend in junior high -- so I realized later on that some of the stuff she'd told me were things I'd already heard, back in about 10th grade from our mutual friend. We never had met, because none of us had driver's licenses yet so it was easy to lose touch after transferring schools.

That's not all of it, though. I have (still have) a friend I met when I was in college. He was a bit older but worked in one of the labs and used to hang out with some of my other friends. We became good friends when I got into folk music, because he'd been a fixture in that community for years. It turns out this reader has known him since she was a pup, because her parents were into some of the same groups. Now, he has no connection (that I know) of to my high school friends other than me and this reader; if they were ever met at all, it's likely to have been at my college graduation party.

This is just mind-numbingly odd. Or as she wrote, "There are only 87 real people in the world. All the rest are just bad special effects."

Anyhow, answers are below the cut tag.

• What character appears in the works of both John Myers Myers and Susan Cooper? Golias in Silverlock is the archetypal bard; his use-name comes from medieval French romances and his other names are other mythical [song]makers throughout Western tradition. They include Widsith (Old English / Norse), Orpheus (Greek), Amergin (Irish), Demodocus (Greek again), Boyan (Russian) and the one I'm most familiar with, Taliesin (Welsh). It is Taliesin who guides Will and Bran through the Lost Land in Susan Cooper's The Grey King. Taliesin shows up also in Tennyson's Idylls of the King and, if I'm not misremembering, in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain trilogy, and in Charles de Lint's Moonheart (or maybe its sequel). He's an archetype and a well-known one; he makes appearances through a lot of fantasy.

  (And it's here I wish I were a fiction writer. You know how the subject of a wizard portrait in the Harry Potterverse can make appearances not only in adjacent frames but also in her or her other portraits hung anywhere in the world? What if Taliesin could rove throughout any of the books and myths in which he appears?)

• Name one book written by the man whose own personal library has been transplanted to the top floor of the Philadelphia Public Library's main building.
  When he died, the book collector A. Edward Newton donated his books to the Philadelphia Free Library. Newton was a contemporary and frequent customer of Dr. A.S. Rosenbach. His wife and daughter decided that if the Library were getting his books, they ought to have the whole library as well and so it was dismantled and relocated from his house in the suburbs, Oak Knoll, tothe Central Library in Center City Philadelphia, on the sixth floor just past the rare books section. They even have lighted backdrops outside the windows to make it look as if the room looks outside. I visited the library in December of 2001. Nearly two years later I was reading Newton's The Book Collecting Game and was shocked to realize I had actually stood in his library. Other books by Newton include The Greatest Book in the World and Other Papers; A Tourist in Spite of Himself and A Magnificant Farce and Other Diversions of a Book Collector. I have The Book Collecting Game and The Greatest Book in my favorite section of my library, the books about books. (My library doesn't compare to Newton's by several orders of magnitude in almost any aspect, but I like it.)
• When I was in college two of my favorite Japanese restaurants were named respectively Hikaru and Genji. For what literary reason is this amusing?
  The hero of Lady Murasaki's A Tale of Genji, which some people call the first novel ever published, is Hikaru no Genji, The Shining Genji. I think I learned about the coincidence of Hikaru and Genji while reading something speculating on Captain Sulu's first name. I still maintain a steady diet of F&SF is one of the easiest ways to become well-read, at least by proxy. (I mean, if you haven't read all the great stories and histories, you've at least read about a lot of them.)
• Cite internal proof (in his songs or on his CDs) that Stan Rogers read Robert A. Heinlein.
  If the lines in Stan Rogers' song Lies, "So this is Beauty's finish / Like Rodin's Belle Heaulmiere / The pretty maiden trapped inside the ranch wife's toil and care" don't owe something to the analysis of Rodin's sculpture in Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land, I will eat my copy of Stranger. There was something on one of Stan's album covers, too (From Fresh Water, maybe) but I can't remember now what it was.
• In what way is John Adam's daughter Nabby's name the opposite of the word "apron"?
  The indefinite articles 'a' and 'an', and the possessive 'my' and 'mine' (archaic) sometimes bleed over into the next word. So "an napron" used to be "a napron" - this is also why you see "nuncle" for "uncle" in Shakespeare. John and Abigail Adams' daughter Abigail was called "Nabby" to distinguish her from her mother. I'm fairly sure that "mine" for "my" wasn't commonly used by the Adams' time but I'd bet Nabby for Abby, like Nan or Nancy as a nickname (originally "an ekename", meaning "an also-name" by the way) still sounded natural as sort of a survival from when "Mine Abby" would have sounded right.
Posted by dichroic at November 10, 2004 10:14 AM