CAFE: The Condensed Papers (long: 40kb)

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<< From Lojban Canterbury Tales to The Ckafybarja Newsletter >>

  This is a record of the Development of the Ckafybarja Project,
  the Main Ideas, the Conversations and Differences of Opinion
  concerning the Characterization of the Cafe Personnel.
  The English Background Descriptions accumulated till the end
  of August.

  This is NOT a straight record of the conversations on the net.
  I have deleted a lot of material -- either redundant or not
  essential for the project at the present stage. I have also
  taken the liberty of making some minor changes to the text
  following the deletions so that the resulting joints are more
  natural.

  **************************************************************

A. lojbab's original Lojban Canterbury Tales proposal

lojbab:

The geminal start of English as a literary language was Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, and someone mentioned that Italian has a similar
medieval literary landmark, the Decameron. Perhaps other languages
as well. The essence of the Canterbury Tales is that they are a
bunch of 1st person tales, rich and colorful, often baudy. Why not
write something similar for Lojban, or at least start to do so. We
can get a lot of people involved, who need only commit to writing a
single short tale - a page long would be fine. A couple of the more
expert Lojbanists - Nick, Ivan, and Mark, for example, might do some
longer tales, perhaps about characters that might have a more
complex story.

One charm of the Canterbury Tales is the variety of personalities of
the characters - we can achieve that by having many authors.
Stylistic consistency isn't necessary, since different people have
different ways of talking.

One rule - if you have a specific story idea, whether you want to
write it or not: don't talk about it in English. The stories are to
be LOJBAN stories, and whatever appeal they have, as the first
Lojban literature, will be emphasized by their not existing in
English first. If you have trouble with the language, you can ask
how-to-say-it questions here on Lojban List, or send messages
privately to Nick, Ivan, Colin, John Cowan, Mark Shoulson, or me


Less experienced Lojbanists might team up on a story, in which case
you can talk privately with each other in whatever language about
your story, or if necessary, with the one experienced Lojbanist that
you interact with from the above list.

Veijo:

I don't think the way to founding original Lojban literature can be
found in emulation. It takes great literary talent to transform an
existing story into something worthwhile -- not a mere imitation. A
literature arises from an existing cultural and linguistic
background and the only thing we have at hand is a half-baked
language. This is the fact we must start from. If we are to lay the
foundations of a literature we must look at the world -- the
language -- we have. What is the world of Lojban like? What sets it
apart from the rest? If you take Lojban sans tanru, lujvo and
le'avla it presents a remarkably Platonian view of the world. The
most distinguishing feature of gismu and many cmavo is that they
describe a very ideal world, every word brings out the essence, the
underlying principle of a class of phenomena. In most natural
languages the general is described in terms which are either alien
or complex, in Lojban the opposite prevails. This makes it possible
to present a distilled view of the surrounding world without
resorting to unnatural expressions and also to contrast the general
and the particular in a single utterance or even a single bridi. The
avoidance of tanru and lujvo can be thought of as another form of
controlled and recognizable ellipsis -- only the essential is
expressed and the particular is suppressed. Other areas where Lojban
excels are the tense system, the attitudinal and emotional
indicators and of course the connectives. We have a very rich
apparatus offering unprecedented opportunities for expression but do
we have something to say?

I think we mustn't hurry. We need the stories, the literature, but
we must not push things. We must first try to see the world -- a
slice of the present, some particular past, the future -- through
Lojban 'glasses'. The literary world we eventually create must have
a distinct Lojban flavour to it, it mustn't be a mere
re-representation of some other world. It doesn't suffice to avoid
translation, the world must be conceptualized in a Lojban way from
the ground up. I don't think the stories need much of a plot, the
settings give enough opportunities for fruitful utilization of the
language. Even quite ordinary things can form the scaffolding around
which the story unfolds. If you read the stories by e.g. Ray
Bradbury, quite many of them have a negligible plot. The something
hangs in the atmosphere, in many little things. That, of course,
takes great talent. I don't know whether any of us can muster that
but we ought to be able to utilize Lojban for the necessary special
effects -- with due constraint. The thing mustn't be overdone, we
are not aiming to produce a linguistic fire-works. The language
ought to be utilized subtly to produce a mosaic of shadow and
sun-light, soft generalizations against which sharp detail can be
engraved, the dull monotonous every-day or whatever described in a
few, quick indicators and the richer moments of life in ever
increasing detail using the full array of tools available for the
task. If we don't try to reproduce the world in the way we are
accustomed to see it, to use the imagery of our respective native
languages -- or our secondary languages -- but try to see our
surroundings through the Lojban glasses I think we may find quite
many things worth depicting.

Nick:

Wow. I mean that quite sincerely.
I mean, when I bemoan lojban stylistics, I usually see the trees ---
the complexities of nesting, the uncertainties of place structures
in flux (lujvo and gismu), the markedness of attitudinals. You,
Veijo, seem to have struck at the essence. It is absolutely true
that Lojban (and any language) sustain their own world (it is also
true that one should not be too flashy in pursuing the
manifestations of this world, as happens often in Esperanto
literature); it is also true that exploring this world is the great
task awaiting lojban literature. And it is even more true that my
translations so far have not done any such exploration
(interestingly enough, David Twery's ckafyzda diary *did* --- not
just because it was original writing, but because it looked at the
caf'e in the staccato, explicit way we will come to expect of
lojban. I see now the diary is very much worth publishing in JL
after all).

Veijo:

Expression is a two-way process. It is no use having an elegant
expression if no one can really feel what you are trying to say. In
English - or any other living language - we build our expressions to
rest on the solid foundation of the linguistic imagery which forms
large parts even of the unconscious mind of the potential readers. In
Lojban we have nothing like this available. Even the most advanced
of us will have to struggle - probably for years to come - to attain
a level of competency where reading is no more an intellectual
exercise but a living experience. To really feel the language
requires that it flows in you relatively effortlessly. You must have
a background against which to contrast the author's way of saying
things. Esperanto is so much like the mainstream Indo-European
languages that the early literary efforts could build on the
existing imagery. Lojban is conceptually so different that we have
no such easy way out of our predicament. The imagery will have to be
different otherwise we may end up using modals to rebuild the alien
imagery. At this stage translations may contain seeds of peril as we
don't yet have a living tradition to protect the language from the
dominance of external influences. I don't implicate that we ought to
exclude these influences totally. The language needs the common
imagery of the whole mankind and perhaps even large sections of the
heritage of the main cultures but this imagery must trickle in in a
controlled way, not as an avalanche.

****************************************************************
****************************************************************

B. The Lojban Kalevala Project => The Ckafybarja Project

lojbab:

With the impending completion of the first Lojban dictionary, it is
time to set forth on people writing originally IN Lojban (rather
than in translation from other languages) and hence to explore the
unique point-of-view and style that Lojban's unusual nature might
bring to narrative (the assumption of the uniqueness of this
point-of-view actually assumes Sapir-Whorf is true, but we'll ignore
that problem for now).

Per my intent, we had a long discussion at LogFest, and Veijo's
comments about basing the story(s) on a uniquely Lojbanic
world-view, coupled with Nick Nicholas's identification of what
writings seemed to him to best represent a budding Lojban culture,
underlay much of the discussion and its current resolution.

The goal is Lojban stories written from a common narrative starting
point, written by as many different people as possible, each of
varying Lojban skill levels.

We came up with a scenario that allows, and even encourages, a
motley collection of stories of varying lengths.  We decided to draw
on the limited range of 'Lojban culture' that exists today.  The
first such element identified was the "Jimbob" 'rant' (David Twery's
description of it) that Nick started on conlang and summarized on
Lojban List, and others followed upon.

Then we turned to David Twery's coffee-house (ckafyzda), which Nick
has identified as the first authentic-seeming "Lojban world-view"
text.

We devised an interesting, Lojban-allegorical coffeehouse which is
interesting enough to serve as the subject of stories, as well as a
backdrop for the telling of stories. The concept is a coffeehouse
with an international flavor in which Lojban is spoken. The
atmosphere is vaguely contemporary, but somewhat timeless. Indeed,
one idea was to leave the outside of the coffeehouse, i.e. its
locale, essentially unspecified.

The coffeehouse has 6 employees, each a representative of a culture
using one of the source languages for Lojban (There was a lot of
debate over whether to use a British or American representative for
English, and I would have suggested Australian in honor of Nick, but
people settled on American because unfortunately the majority of
Lojbanists, who are mostly Americans, may be familiar only with
American culture, and we don't want to shut people out of this
effort for cultural blindness.)

We were able to identify a number of "roles" to be filled in a
coffeehouse: manager, cook, waiter/waitress, busboy, cashier. But
some of these are seen as of a lower, subservient nature as compared
with others. Rather than risk association of some culture being seen
as stereotypically subservient by tying a character of that culture
to a particular role (e.g., the Chinese busboy), the workers rotate
jobs, giving the job of cook to a different person each night, with
the effect that the menu is both international, exotic, and a bit
unpredictable. The manager was assigned to the Chinese character,
based on Chinese as the most populous of the Lojban languages.

A friend who came to LogFest with Karen Stein, Phil (whose last name
I never did learn), wrote up three descriptions based on this
concept. Description #2 had a few supporters, but no one was against
it provided that the windows were removed from the description, and
thus the need to describe what is outside the windows.

Meanwhile there is further work to be done, some of which requires
knowledge of Lojban, some that requires only imagination. More
details of the setting need to be worked out, eventually giving
enough information that a detailed floor plan of the coffeeshop can
be drawn, with locations of everything marked, so that people
writing stories can be consistent in describing the scene wherein
the story is told (given that the exterior environment is undefined,
there is no particular need for consistency, or even implied truth,
in the stories themselves, but it was felt that this collection,
being written by a large number of authors of varying styles, needed
to have some one thing that all authors could share and rely upon to
the finest detail.

Indeed the coffeehouse description will be described and finalized
in English, to make sure that everyone understands all the details
in a consistent manner. It also allows people to use a variety of
Lojban expressions and forms to describe the English-defined
setting. Thus the descriptions by various authors will not read
exactly the same, yet the place they are describing will obviously
be the same place.

We welcome and indeed encourage people to write descriptions in
Lojban, recognizing that the description will have to be translated
into clear English. But this gives people something to write about
in Lojban, and you can if you choose use your Lojban text as a
starting point for an eventual story for the collection.

The third phase of the scenario definition is to define the six
characters in enough depth that people can include them in the
backdrop to their stories and have them recognizably be the same
people. The details should range from gender, age, and appearance,
to personality, distinctive mannerisms, and outside interests that
might serve as jumping off places for a story when the indicated
person comes up to the table with a tray of food, or coffee.

This phase will be conducted in the manner of a contest followed by
a vote. Write a character sketch of one of the characters, putting
as much or as little detail into your description as you care to.
The contest will be announced in JL17 (but I'd like to have a couple
of samples by then), and thus people have plenty of time to write
good descriptions before a voting a couple of months later, with the
results of all phases of this introductory work appearing in JL18, I
hope. All those who submit any ideas, text, description, or
otherwise indicate definite interest in participating in the project
will be eligible to vote. Again, character descriptions can be
written in Lojban, but we will also need English translations.

However, the polycultural polylinguistic background of the
characters has led me to identify a fourth task that the more
skilled Lojbanists can start on now, and which is independent of the
actual descriptions of the characters (or at least it may be so).
Each of our 6 cultural representatives will be a native speaker of
their own language - Lojban is the lingua franca that all share, and
the lingua franca of those who patronize the coffeehouse as well
(hence stories told in Lojban therein). But Lojban has many possible
styles, and some of these styles will be dependent on the native
language of the speakers. Thus, the Hindi speaker may be prone to
SOV-order sentences, the Chinese speaker to strange-to-English-
speakers
tanru, and the Arabic speaker to flowery metaphor. The Russian speaker
may choose lujvo forms that are heavy in consonant clusters, whereas
the Chinese speaker will minimize clusters and maximize vowels.

I don't pretend to know enough of the non-English source languages
to try to describe them in any detail, but some Lojbanists like Ivan
Derzhanski probably do; others might be willing to research. The
result will be perhaps a short sample of Lojban "conversation" and
of "narrative" styles for each of the six characters (perhaps each
of them describing the same scene to make for ready comparison),
along with an English language description of the essential
linguistic ingredients that comprise the style, so that others can
try to emulate the styles when writing. The ideal will thus be,
along with distinctive personalities for the 6 characters, a
distinctive style of Lojban speech that will identify the characters
and also lend authenticity to the style.

Description #2

  As I walked under the crossed climbing axes, and into the
  coffeehouse, I felt I was in a place designed to give one the
  feeling of putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes. [The large
  arched windows filled the dining area with light, and since all of
  the booths were lined along the outside, every booth had a superb
  view of the .] The benches were made of old soft oak, in which
  many tales and symbols had been carved. On the bench I was seated
  was the inscription: "Members of the first sandpit expedition to
  find the first digger, or traces thereof- 198?" The table also
  bore other marks of former patrons who had drank their selections
  and transcribed their feelings with pitons.The walls were littered
  with climbing apparel and debris in what might charitably have
  been termed a collage. There were the rusting remains of pitons
  and hooks abutting practically new lengths of the latest high test
  rope. Opposite the door from which I had entered was a ladder - a
  climbing ladder, of course. The ladder reached to the ceiling, and
  a solid-looking trap door that made me wonder of the unknown
  relics that lay beyond, and the stories they might hold.
  Underneath these visible artifacts were the dour reminders of the
  primary business of this establishment-coffee. There were full
  wooden bins of coffee from just about every place in the world,
  with or without caffeine. The cook was visible to all and in the
  process of developing the latest creation on the current menu, and
  not without some debate about the amount of spice the particular
  dish required. This happy riot provided the counterpoint to the
  hissing, and boiling of a near endless stream of coffee beans in
  response to the always cold, often frustrated, and very determined
  clientele. . . ____

Chinese- Manager
Russian, American, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish - Cook/Wait/Bus/Dishwasher

Rotating Menu, With Chinese overtones because of manager
International Menu

 ***************  DISCUSSION ****

Ivan:

Whoever wants to write a story with Chinese, (Hindu) Indians, or
Arabs among the characters had better be _very_ familiar with the
corresponding cultures. I wouldn't venture anything of the sort, and
therefore make the following

_Counterproposal_. Don't specify any national identity or cultural
background for the characters. Make them representatives of an
abstract, undetermined, or fictitious nation. In this case they
might be Lojbanis by birth, for example.

Otherwise you risk to end up with a story that no Arab (say) would
find plausible.

Veijo:

As a quick first comment I support these opinions. It's better to
make these 'background' characters as neutral as possible so that
the writers don't get into unnecessary problems. The characters and
the storytellers/observers in the actual stories are another matter.
A visitor dropping into the cafe isn't observing the 'common' world
when in the cafe. His story or the story he is listening to while in
the cafe may describe various ethnic/national/linguistic groups but
the narrator's relationship to the cafe ought to reflect his
relationship to the Lojbanic culture. He may be a fullblown lojbo or
still have one foot in his original culture which will affect the
way he describes the settings, the balance between superficial and
essential details. Maybe even the male/female dichotomy is
superfluous in this context.

Nick:

Neutral, yes, but not characterless. Exploring stylistic stereotypes
(the sledgehammer JL15 I'm prone to) should be fun. I already had in
mind a tanruist, an attitudinalist, an anaphorist and an SVOist, as
well as the obligatory Prolog speaker :)

I think the monomania of exploring every facet of familiar objects
in a familiar surrounding (the old brick thing) is highly pertinent
to this do. Plots and tales aren't essential; a laid-back,
look-at-what-everyone-else-is-doing-and-how-that-crack-on-the-wall-
runs
attitude is just as appropriate here.

Mark:

Yeah, keep them neutral. I don't think you have to go out of your
way to try to convince me they're native lojbananas, and I always
feel funny about overusing the rafsi-as-name bit; you just can't
trust it. I *like* the idea of giving them distinct, but distinctly
lojbanic, speaking styles, BUT perhaps it would be better not to go
too carefully this route, and play with that in one of your own
stories with a few patrons you bring in (if you think you can do it
and still make the story work, which Ivan fears wouldn't happen).
Remember: If you want something in a character, it can walk in the
door. The *patrons*, over which each writer has more or less
complete control, are the ones which make the stories click. The
staff is background.

You plan might be a good idea, Nick, but it may make writing a real
challenge for normal folk. Remember, the staff are characters that
everyone has to live with. If you want a few characters that you can
deal with that have such speech styles, the door's right over there,
and here they come. It's unfair to ask a beginning speaker to
incorporate such clevernesses into his writings by making characters
common to all the stories have these traits.

Remember, though, that when you tweak the background or the staff,
you're messing with something that *all* the writers have to live
with. Don't build your world and force everyone else to live in it;
bring your world into everyone else's. In fact, if you really need
the waiter to be a certain way, you might even consider having a
replacement waiter that day, just to be on the safe side.

lojbab:

You ask for several changes, all of which remove detail from the
persons and scenery details. To write a good story, the details MUST
be present. If we do not specify the culture of the characters, they
will have no culture; i.e. they will be colorless, which is exactly
what we don't want.

(IVAN : Not necessarily.  They simply won't be identified with
 any one of the existing cultures.)

Actually they won't be - with mostly Americans in the Lojban
community, they will all end up as nondescript American in culture.
I would rather attempt and fail to capture hints of a foreign
culture than not to attempt at all, and have the result seem too
American. We may not succeed in capturing a true Arabic or Hindi
culture (but then we might come close), but we will get a somewhat
non-American culture. One would expect in any case that with people
representing 6 cultures interacting on a constant basis that none of
the characters would be 'pure' in representing their culture - after
all, they do not live with their own people (at least not likely).

The better writers can invent stories and worlds of their own, and
characters as well. Others may choose to have their story rest in an
interaction between patrons and staff in the coffeeshop, which
itself is a basis for a lot of powerful story imagery, and, given
some preparatory work in character development of the staff, allows
people with perhaps less skill or imagination to still tell a
reasonable story, concentrating on the Lojban and NOT on the
creative work that not all of us do so well.

Veijo:

There are many facets to creativeness. It is, of course, quite
difficult to create truly flesh-and-blood characters. But telling
about a person known to everybody may be equally difficult. To be
consistent with the characterization without merely copying, to add
something or just to express it somewhat differently takes skill at
many levels. Actually, it might be much more difficult than making a
quick sketch of a stranger or adding depth to some your own creation
-- even in your own native language. Fitting a limited
expressiveness in Lojban to a detailed microcosm may be in fact
harder than creating the details on the fly from the bits and pieces
of the Lojban you do master. A detailed English plan is, however, a
double-edged sword. It helps, as you said, people to visualize this
microcosm. On the other hand people must get rid of this
visualization not to be hampered by it (jumping from English -- or
Finnish or what so ever -- to Lojban already requires a certain
amount of flexibility of mind). It will also be quite necessary to
transform the plan into a Lojban plan to help the less experienced
Lojbanists to handle the basic premises. I used the word 'transform'
quite intentionally instead of the word 'translate' as I feel that a
translation isn't sufficient, it is quite necessary to try to remove
the 'alien' imagery. At another -- simpler -- level it is necessary
to give the required lujvo and the ways of describing certain quite
elementary things: distances, relationships, the way things hang
together. It might be useful to have a kind of workshop (on the
List) where the novice lojbo would be taught to navigate in this
verbal VR (virtual reality).

We could tackle this storywriting also from another angle starting
from the fact that most of us aren't very advanced in Lojban. If we
consider the writing not as an 'instantaneous' act of creation but
as a lengthy process coincident and in synchronism with learning
Lojban, we could see a writer entering a 'gismu-type' ckafyzda and
slowly working his way towards a lujvo like a sculptor uncovering
his masterpiece from beneath the enclosing mass of stone. For the
writer the story wouldn't be just a story but a record of his
journey to la jbotur -- lojbo tutra, the domain of Lojban, Lojbania
-- not in the form of a description of the process but as an
allegorical map where distances are measured on the scale of the
language.

This kind of process might help people to find their own voice and
to cultivate the innate creativity each one of us is sure to
possess.

Nick:

And with what you (Veijo) say about characterisation, too, the
solution is a broad-brush sketch that allows us room to maneuver in;
not too detailed, not too vague. Well, that can certainly be
handled.

I think a Lojbanisation of the brushstroke plan will not be limiting
at all; people do really need that help in simply keeping a
narrative going.

As the mass of writers becomes more familiar with Lojban, the Cafe
will be sketched out in greater detail in the story, and more
successfully, with the end result possibly quite distant from what
we'd anticipated at the start. The more expert of us reinforce those
less expert in the describing.

lojbab:

The plan is that there be 1 coffeeshop, and that the description be
suitably refined in English. People will develop refined
descriptions of 6 characters (or some other number if we abandon the
6 cultures idea - but I don't think you can have a 'cultureless
person' and have the character detail that I think the others want
in the shared characters), which will then be voted on, which means
the characters must also be defined in English.

(Nick : I think it's perfectly possible, but then, I think we're
also looking for different things in character definition. What
maketh a Hindi speaking character? And of course, as background,
they don't have to be that detailed anyway.)

After we have the basic scenario settled, the material can be
translated into Lojban, and people can set up teleconferences of
whatever kind to help each other in writing, or whatever, but while
the project is still in the formative stage, we must make provision
for those who want to learn Lojban but haven't yet done so, and for
those who do not have net access (which is 90% of the community).

(Nick: Cool. Veijo's navigation of Virtual reality can be done once
the description is in place, and the description should not be
exhaustive.)

 ************************  The initial writings stage

Nick: (After Veijo's entry to the Cafe)

Veijo speaks of {.ui.o'u}; that's the feeling I want in the cafe
too. A boisterous place, sure, with lots of emphasis on the {ka
vrici}, but also a very {mela'ezo.i'u} place. The door is nothing
too fancy; plain, wooden, touch heavy, not pretentious. The climbing
axes certainly have been positioned informally (maybe even not
perfectly symmetrically?)

What with the suggested rural setting and the benches, I'm put in
mind of soft *damp* oak, and murky late afternoon light. I don't
think the place need be spotlighted, in any case; the
can't-look-outside windows will do. There's not just tales and
symbols, of course; there's a lot of good old fashioned graffiti (no
need to be too solemn about it.) The place is, I suggest, small and
intimate, with the {vrici} paraphernalia on the walls haphazard and
competing for space, rather than formally set out, museum style. No
more than ten benches (reasonably sized, though).

The ladder stays, but it has nothing to do with {le lisri be le
serti}; an imposing marble staircase would be a touch *too*
imposing.

The menu is on display just to the right of the partition behind
which the cook is visible; handwritten, with the le'avla defined at
the bottom of the list in the six source languages. The coffee bins
are along the walls, I take it? (Beneath the artifacts.) The waiter
does some serving, but for the most part sits with the customers and
socialises. The cook has most of his/her arguments with the
dishwasher, sometimes carrying the arguments outside the kitchen and
asking for support in his debates amongst hapless customers,
slapstick-style (hm, I'm going against the rotation thing --- others
may countersupport it); I don't know what a busboy is either; and
the Manager (and the sixth man/woman out for the night) sit together
and overlook the scene. I don't know if it's worthwhile giving the
Manager his/her own table, and a small table rather than a bench at
that; but I would like the Manager to be a bit more formal than the
rest, a voice of authority amidst the chaos, and somewhat set apart
--- a big gun in a story, held in reserve.

This might be a biiiiit silly, but maybe a small bookcase of NL
dictionaries and Lojban references on the side? And the cafe, I
thiiiiink, should be a bit of a bastion of lojbanism, or at least
lojbanism-aware --- which would give us the opportunity of
satirising traits of the current or future community in it. The
visitors, of course, don't have to particularly like or think about
Lojban --- it's by no means an exclusive venue.

Nick: (Nick's entry)

[] I swiftly and yet grandly make my entrance through the front
door, which is heavy and plain. Opening the door took a bit of
effort, and made it necessary to push. What is behind the door is
illuminated by mild afternoon light, and is comfortably small.
There's about ten tables, I dunno. [] There's some noise and a bit
of merriment. [] The walls are decorated by miscellanea,
unharmonious by the usual standards. The two climbing axes above the
front door aren't quite symmetrical. Nor are the other objects on
the walls --- a pea on a cushion, for example, an old signboard
saying "Best Tailor in the Whole Town", and a belt with
"Cinderelwood" written on it. I look at the table-top where I'm
sitting. It's been inscribed with lots of stuff, in Lojban,
Esperanto, English, even German. The German stuff is in Fraktur
script. [] I could take an ice-pick or climbing-pick from the wall
to my left.[] "Oh, you could have a Tasty-T; it's our most recent
purchase."[] While this has been going on, the cook and the
dishwasher in the kitchen have been loudly and enthusiastically
arguing. The cook occasionally comes out and asks the patrons for
their opinion about the topic he's debating.[] The manager, wearing
a suit, is talking to Veijo. [] New people enter and loudly greet
those already there, who are typically telling stories.

**********************

Nick: (after Veijo's second etude)

I feel veeery hesitant in any interaction with the staff with their
personas still not settled. If people don't like the Manager (and
{jatna} does seem to be the only word we have for "boss" or
"manager") being imperious, they'll be *very* unhappy if I portray
him like that. So for now, let's not probe into the background
characters too deeply.

The even greater danger is in sketching interactions with Real Life
people. Veijo and I are about to start talking, and I'd like neither
of us to make potentially annoying presumptions about the other's
persona. So one should be wary in this kind of thing.

Dave Bowen:

The owner and manager [or perhaps just the owner or just the
manager] of the Cafe Chalet is a man of mystery. It's easy enough to
see him, either hiking among the hills surrounding the village or
conversing with the customers as he makes his rounds. But any
questions about his life before coming to the village are met with
vague replies and a quick shift in the topic of conversation. There
are stories that he used to be a climber himself. A climbing
accident, so the story goes, which killed his lover while the two of
them were attempting a major climb led to his retirement from the
sport. It is said that much of the equipment which decorates the
interior of the Chalet is his.

In appearance he's a big man, with light brown hair and green eyes.
In summer his ruddy complexion turns to a golden tan and his hair
lightens to the point where it almost matches his skin color. On the
slopes, he is often seen in lederhosen and a green alpine hat. While
in the Chalet, these are replaced by conservative gray or navy
business suits. Only his bright paisley ties and an occasional
brightly colored vest show hints of the boy hidden beneath the
serious businessman.

Attempts to determine his background from his speech have been
unsuccessful. Though his English shows most of the signs of British
English, it shows no signs of any other European accent being mixed
in. His German, French and Italian are equally indistinguishable
from those spoken by native speakers and he has shown no problems
conversing with visitors from other parts of Europe and Asia.

*****************************************************************
*****************************************************************

C. The Cafe Jbolaz Newsletter proposal

Nick:

Every two months, an electronic *and* snailmail set of Cafe
descriptions gets mailed out --- this is necessary to allow the
off-net participants to keep up to date. For net participants, a
month after posting their cafe article on the net, they must submit
a revision incorporating all comments made. For those off net, the
newsletter ed forwards all comments (net and snail), allowing the
contributor to post a revision, say, four months later. The
newsletter is all-Lojban, and people (preferably on the net, and
preferably grammar- competent) can take turns editing it. The
newsletter is cafe *only*, other literature being forwarded as usual
for JL consideration. Cafe articles need not be tales at all ---
*any* piece to do with the cafe (like Veijo's navigation or my
Fraktur rant) is legit, as is any genre. If we all approve on this,
the newsletter can be announced in JL. Some central on-net personage
should be nominal editor (forwarding mail to the editor de jour who
must commit him/herself to passing all articles through the current
parser, and glossing lujvo as appropriate.)

lojbab:

I see no problem with such a newsletter, but feel that it is
appropriate AFTER the getting started period of the first two issues
of JL, which will serve to give more people a chance to decide to
participate who are in the snailmail set.

After the next two issues of JL, I suspect that there will be enough
people motivated by the project AND skilled enough at Lojban, that
there will be more than just Nick and Veijo trying to write stuff
that is appropriate, including some people no on net. When the
non-netters feel comfortable in participating, then I personally
will have no qualms in letting the project go where it will,
including letting whatever leaders have emerged at that point assume
both control and responsibility. I would hope of course that LLG
would be offered first publication rights on the results, as well as
to get as much archival data as possible on this, the first
organized-and-skilled creative writing effort in what is obviously
about to become a living language.

Veijo:

The original plan called for stories told at the Cafe. We have
already had differences of opinion concerning background details.
Now Nick is proposing that we widen the scope to include also other
kinds of related literary works. (NB my srinuntroci or navigations
as Nick calls them are just kind of etudes, not meant to be the
stories, though widening the scope will make them eligible for
publication.) In principle I am for this change of policy as it
makes it possible also for the less advanced lojbo to participate in
the creative process. It is much less demanding to produce a
snapshot of a few lines than to produce something like Nick's
Fraktur rant. We could have many more people contributing if this
were an acceptable option. I think the non-netters would profit most
from this change as longer stories do need more rounds of feedback
from others.

Nick:

Certainly the editorship need not be formal. Let me attempt to
refine my proposal: the editor du jour is entrusted with the
typographic preparation of the journal, the style preferred in
his/her number (namely, subjective minor issues of expression ---
lujvo phrasing, optional punctuation and spelling, minor
grammatical errors --- can be left to them). They also do the
chasing up of correspondence and editing of discussions eventuating
from articles published in their issue, adjusting the work
accordingly and resubmitting it on the expiry date to the current
editor for publication. What I'm saying is that a given ed du jour
is responsible for all articles first published by him. For example:
suppose I, Mark, and Colin are eds du jour, and, oh, Nancy Lebovitz
(say) submits an article that gets corrected and published during my
editorship. *I* then, and not Mark, follow up any subsequent
discussion and correspondence about Nancy's article, *I* make the
suitable adjustments, and hand the finished result, and only the
more interesting highlights of the discussion, to Colin (say) for
republication. I suppose that means that my norms, rather than
Colin's, go for the republished article; but at least work gets
shared out that way.

The reviewing of text is of course carried out by all subscribers to
the newsletter, on net or off. But one person has to tie all the
threads together at the end, and take responsibility for touching up
the text in accordance with the criticisms made; let that person be
the first publication's ed du jour.

The editor in chief takes care of the editorial; his/her address
appears in the newsletter as the address to which all correspondence
is directed; has a certain amount of veto as to article content
(checking for consistency and so forth), vetts the newsletter just
before publication, and reports to the wider community through JL as
needed.

Well, the LLG can have all the archival stuff it wants (and with
editorship a net activity, there'll be plenty of it). I'm not sure
about publication rights though. I envisage a periodical
publication, rather than a book-form corpus, that certainly is
distributed by the LLG, and sold at a profit to the LLG, but which
is produced by a decentralised body, which is not necessarily
equivalent to the LLG.
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 Veijo Vilva       vilva@viikki21.helsinki.fi