shindotvwelcome to shindo's world

I just read Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s of reminiscent of her Hainish material though this new stuff isn’t related to it at all. Travel to these worlds is by inter-planary (which almost sounds interdimensional) instead of taking years to travel by NAFAL (Nearly As Fast As Lighht) ships. Instead of the Ekumen, there is the Interplanary Agency. For communication, instead of the anisble (which makes communication across light years possible), there is the translatomat to facilitate communication between people of different planes. There are diverse worlds in which to explore humanity through many different types of cultures, beliefs, and in some cases, phenotypes.

With the planes, one society is riddled with the consequences of genetically engineering living things from plants to people without understanding genetics or evolution (they did not have a Darwin or a Mendel), another society follows an avian pattern of migration in their life cycle (reproduce and raise family in the north, live life in the south), while another society lives in silence. Some of the societies have been interfered with by others, such as the avian migration pattern society. A group of foreign visitors represent themselves as a rational society and try to force their patterns of industry, high technology, medicine, life without a cycle, and migration at any time on these people. Some enterprising Americans, people from our plane, commercially colonize an island archiplago in another plane and turn it into a grotesque, worse than Disneyland, worse than Las Vegas, artificially touristy place. The Interplanary Agency is able to prevail on the behalf of these societies and freedom from colonizers is restored.

Changing Planes is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” certainly comes to mind with the mythic, pseudo-historical realm of Tlon where mirrors are forbidden comes to mind. The way people are able to move from one plane to another in Changing Planes evokes the teleportation in The Stars My Destination, which renders most forms of transportation on Earth obsolete.

A delicious read indeed.

I’m writing this a little bit after midnight, so what happened “today” is officially yesterday.

I went to SDSU to get and sign some paperwork for the graduate assistant position I will be doing this semester. I will be doing break-out sections for Professor Amtower’s large English 220 course, which is the intro to lit course. The two breakout sections will have thirty students each and the sections will meet one hour each week while the lecture is two hours every week. I signed the paperwork but the department head had to talk to me.

My problem student was not happy with her grade and complained to the English Department head. It was made known to me that my former student was not happy with getting a B+ and felt it was the result of hard feelings. I discussed my reasons, which I will not post here right now. I think I gave her a fair grade considering the circumstances. While my department head managed to discuss this with me in a non-confrontational, non-accusatory manner, hearing mention of my former student literally raised my blood pressure. I wound up getting a bloody mary after leaving the campus to come down from it.

After the bloody mary, I walked around downtown for a bit and I felt much more calm. I hung out with a friend of mine at the beach later in the afternoon and wound up having a chance meeting with the professor I work with at City College.

After I got home, I spent a couple of hours on the net, which can be the biggest time suck, especially BB’s. I then got out of the apartment and wound up having a slow, relaxing swin at the YMCA in Mission Valley. The water did kind of have that sensory deprivation feel to it.