Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 04:42:10 -0700 From: Ronald Hale-Evans Subject: GBGBG [sic], etc. To: magister-l@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU Reply-to: magister-l@DRYCAS.CLUB.CC.CMU.EDU MIME-version: 1.0 Lusores-- Familarity with my version of the Glass Bead Game is assumed for this post. If you can't follow this post, please see the GBG pages listed in my signature. (I have recently added material and will continue to do so.) Before I say anything else, I want to announce that the Kenning Game has been renamed. The new name is Kennexions, pronounced "connections." (My book shares the title with the game.) A kennexion (lower-case k) is a multiply-determined KENNing EXpressION. "Multiply-determined" is an extrapolation of the Norse term _tvikennt_, which means "twice-determined." A multiply-determined kenning is one with several parts -- what I used to call a "nested" kenning. And yes, I have just discovered that the Norse used simple ones! For example, if "flame of battle" means "sword" and "the din of spears" means "battle", then "flame of the din of spears" is another way of saying "sword". Most of our knowledge of kenningar comes from the Younger Edda, or Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE. Snorri was the first to develop a theory of kennings, and he preserved hundreds of them in the part of the Prose Edda called the Skaldskaparmal, including the tvikennt kenning above. It is hard to find a translation of the Prose Edda that includes the Skaldskaparmal. There was a 1916 version that included some of it. Fortunately, the only complete English translation of the Younger Edda was completed just recently by translator Anthony Faulkes, and is available in an Everyman Library edition from Tuttle. This is available from Amazon.com for around $8.00, and I cannot recommend it highly enough to those interested in Kennexions. Another book that has explores kenningar in some detail is _The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics_, a massive tome. Charles has quoted the kenning article from the original Encyclopedia on Magister-L before. Charles, the new version has even more detail. I found my copy at Barnes and Noble for the insultingly low price of $10.00 or so. Ah, the joys of the "penny-bin." There are also some books in German that are entirely analyses of the kenning, but as I cannot yet read German, I cannot report on their contents. See the bibliography to the Princeton kenning article if you are interested. ***** Another thing I wanted to mention tonight: I have been working on a typology of Glass Bead Games. So far there are several categories. I include descriptions of these categories below along with my names for them. 1) The Castalian Game -- This is the game as most of us first encountered it in _Das Glasperlenspiel_. It is a purely fictional game and as such is unplayable by those of us outside the world of Hesse's novel. 2) The One True Glass Bead Game -- This is a Platonic archetype, unattainable by mortals. The Castalian Game and every other Glass Bead Game developed, whether fictional or factual, is a shadow of this Game and an attempt to bring it forth in the world of matter. It might be said that the One True Glass Bead Game is both Transcendent Signified and Transcendent Signifier. As such, it has been revealed to humankind under many other names: The Magic Theatre and the League of Journeyers to the East in Hesse; the Library of Babel, the Lottery in Babylon, the Book of Sand, the Garden of Forking Paths, the Aleph -- all these and more in Borges; David Zindell's Universal Syntax; Teilhard and Tipler's Omega Point; Carse's One Infinite Game; the Hindu Lila; the Dharma; the Necronomicon and the King in Yellow; the One Pearl; the I Ching, a "real" Magic Book; the Book of Thoth or the TARO, another; the Law or the TORA, a third; the Tree of Life; the Encyclopedia; Finnegans Wake; the Heavenly Quran; the Logos. One can adduce an infinite number of others, "as many as the breaths of man." 3) The "shadows" of the One True GBG are what I call "gameforms," by analogy with "artforms." Examples: Kennexions, HipBone, Ludus Sollemnis, Glass Plate Game, Waldzell, Bliss-Member, and even the Castalian Game. 4) Properly also a gameform, but the highest we can attain, is the GBG/GBGBG/GBGBGBG/.... This is a recursive acronym in the manner of "GNU's Not Unix". It stands for "Great Big GBG": that which I have previously called the "Grand Synthesis of gameforms." The GBGBG (etc.) is a sort of intergame protocol tying together all our little gameforms (Kennexions, HipBone, Waldzell, etc.) into a unified superset. The greater and more inclusive the unity of the GBGBG, the more we are justified in extending the acronym another few letters, and the closer we approach the One True GBG in the Sky. I have made groping attempts toward the GBGBG and invite you all to do the same. ***** Signing off for tonight. Just wanted to say that I have been printing out and poring over the many thoughtful responses to my early "Kenning Game" posts, particularly those of Charles, Steve Cranmer, and Derek Robinson, and the challenges their analyses present have been of the greatest importance to me as I mull over flaws in the Kennexions game and seek its potential... Best, Ron
Ron Hale-Evans
Founder, Center for Ludic Synergy
Gamemaster, Kennexions
Charter Member, Bamboo Garden of Seattle