7 January 2008 - 8:44The Deep Deep Sea

A moment of pure comic art (to borrow a phrase from Sam) from Herge’s Tintin in the Land of Pharoah:

Besides beauty, this strip illustrates an important principle in comic book semantics: namely, that the ultimate contents of speech balloons are *phonetic strings*, i.e. sounds– and *not* propositions, thoughts, or what have you. This is pretty clearly shown by the fact that “… ous … al … ent …” expresses no thought. This is more or less that same as “says” as in  “John says, “you are a mushroom” “, as opposed to “says” as in “John says that you are a mushroom.”  So you can think of the balloon itself as a function which takes a phonetic string and returns a predicate of individuals. For example, the balloon surrounding “hi” represents that someone (the target of the balloon tail) says “hi”. Surprisingly, there is a lot of semantic intervention that goes on between the final representation of the phonetic string and the marks on the page. I’ll get into some of these complications in later posts.

Location. Unrelatedly, I’m in Chiapas with my parents, on family vacation. We’re currently staying in a beautiful bed and breakfast in St. Cristobal. St. Cristobal is lively artsy town, which appears to be an odd mixing pot of indigenous merchants and craftsmen, and mexican and foreign tourists (more of the former than the latter). The result is a tourist town of a very different flavor. St. Cristobal has been one of the hubs of the Zapatista movement, as well, so (apparently) indigenous peoples have greater than normal political representation. More on this as information arrives in my head.

Food. On the plane: delicious corn chips which looked basically like Fritos, except that they were flavored with lemon juice. Yum! Dinner: A great, salty walnut and chipotle soup (possible bean base), and quesadillas, which were more like folded pockets with cheese and various extremely good fillings, including a sauteed mushrooms and onions, beans (pinto?), vegies (spinach?), and something else I couldn’t identify. Really good. For desert, a mediocre chocolate donut who really wanted to be at much better mexican breakfast pastry.  Did I mention I’m pausing veganism during this vacation?