Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 06:13:21 CST
From: erich-AT-bush.cs.tamu.edu (Erich Schneider)
Subject: tubers


I think the contrast of tubers to, say, fruit trees, is intended to be
rather simple, and the plants involved are to be looked at on a human
scale. D&G are contrasting the food crops of Europe (grains, fruit
trees, domestic animals) to the food crops of, as they specifically
mention, Oceania. I therefore suspect the "tuber" being referred to is
the yam, and am assuming that yams are, in fact, a classic "rhizome"
(a botanical term) like grass is: instead of being a "unified"
structure with a root-structure below and a tree-structure above, it
sends "runners" off in many different directions. Nothing mysterious
about it. (As my distributed algorithms instructor (distributed
algorithms are mentioned in "Rhizome", by "coincidence") told me
recently, "don't make the problem harder than it is" :-).)

D&G realize, though, that one can look at things on different scales
and in different ways, that rhizomes contain "knots of arborescence".

As I write this, a voice in my head says "what about the food
animals"? D&G claim food animals have a reduced status in "the East".
In Europe one has food animals like cattle and chickens, which can be
seen as very "mass-like" structures with clear (sexually-based)
hierarchies (with bulls/roosters on top, cows/hens as the main
"producing" agents). Fish, however, would be a primary food animal of
Oceania. As the wolves mentioned in the next chapter always come in
packs, fish always come in schools. One wonders if fish actually do
have a "pack-like" character - this would entail the fish having
"individual" identity in the school. A very non-problematic case,
though, is the pod of dolphins. What better counterpart to the
joyfully violent wolf-pack than the joyfully playful dolphin pod?

But that's a cut to be danced to when it's played.

Erich Schneider  erich-AT-bush.cs.tamu.edu

"Even the AI hated [my book]?"
"The AI _loved_ it. That's when we knew for sure that _people_ were going
 to hate it."
                      -Dan Simmons, _Hyperion_



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