This might seem like a pretty funny post from someone who has at various times said at panels or written on her business card “I tell lies for a living.”
It is however something that needs to be said. The truth often is.
I was teaching a workshop in Texas last weekend and one of my students wished to write the “Truth” which in his case meant the religious truth – entirely his right, no, his duty given his beliefs. This is not about him, since he doesn’t wish to write fiction.
But at the time I told him all of us writers try to write the truth, otherwise what would be the point of it.
And then Amanda Knox’s case obtruded on my consciousness. (No, I didn’t know about the case. I live under a rock in multiple universes.) And I realized there are many many writers who don’t even try to tell the truth. Instead of the observable truth, instead of the real world (for given values of real) they write about a conventional world – a world that has become accepted by rote repetition and where the mechanisms of reality have nothing to do with this universe you and I live in.
What does Amanda Knox have to do with fiction? Oh, let me count the ways. To begin with, and before my comments become a free for all – I only heard about this case in the last week. I don’t have an opinion on the young lady herself. And no, I’m not going to put my hands in the fire she never killed anyone. I’m not going to put my hands in the fire that anyone but me has never killed anyone. How the heck could I? The Shadow might know what evil lurks in the heart of men. I claim no such power.
I am, however, going to say that not only is it highly unlikely she committed the murder for which she was imprisoned, we can’t judge any of the circumstantial evidence OR her character from anything that came out of Italy or Italian sources. Most of it makes NO sense, to begin with. Again, it’s not the way “any human would act” – and I’m not talking about the murder itself.
Take the girl who said that Amanda Knox asked her if she was a Jew then said “my people tried to kill your people” and “laughed and laughed.” Okay, um… first… is this the first time a twenty year old American met someone who is Jewish? She had to go to ITALY for this? REALLY? HOW? Because the US is Judenrein? Not impossible, but highly unlikely. (Though it might make perfect sense for an European’s view of the US. They tend to believe we live in race-and-religion-segregated communities.) Second: my people… Knox is a German name? Since when? The woman reporting this seemed to assume Amanda Knox was of German ancestry. Perhaps she is. However, nothing about her indicates this prima-facie. And most German Americans don’t consider Germans “My people.” Second “laughed and laughed” – um… Demeanor is different in different countries. I don’t know enough about Italy to talk about that. Also, perhaps she was tipsy. But the whole anedocte is nonsensical and it’s either someone dredging up a story after Amanda was convicted OR and quite likely – as someone who was an exchange student – this was in broken Italian/English mix, and what the girl got out of it was not what Amanda was saying. Was it likely that Amanda had never met a Jewish person? No. Is it likely that by “my people tried to kill your people” she was talking about World War II and Italy being on the other side? Or some combination of the two? Is it possible the laughter was about her own linguistic ineptitude? Heavens, one of my Dutch “classmates” in my exchange student group pronounced “smile” “smell” – he heard it, he just couldn’t correct it. This caused more instances of inappropriate laughter than I care to mention.
So, again, I’m not making a judgement on the young woman’s character or what she actually did, because we can’t tell. We can tell, though, that most of the stuff coming out of Italy is the stuff of insanity – not hers, but the perception of her by everyone around – and we can tell where that insanity originates.
Take the murder. They immediately captured a man with a record, whose DNA was all over (and inside) the rape/murder victim. Amanda’s and her boyfriend’s DNA was IN MINUSCULE amounts supposedly on a bra clasp and a knife handle. This knife, btw, was NOT used for the murder. It doesn’t match the imprint of the murder weapon – in blood – on the bedspread. EVEN if her DNA and the victim’s DNA were somewhere on the knife in minuscule amounts and even if the boyfriend’s DNA WAS on the bra clasp, this wouldn’t make them guilty. Look, I’ve had female roommates, okay? Finding a bra on the breakfast table wouldn’t even begin to be weird. Usually it would mean someone set a laundry basket there on their way upstairs. For the boyfriend to grab it, carry it upstairs and give it to its owner would be the work of a moment. And enough to leave minuscule traces of his DNA. The excuse btw, for why there was almost no DNA of theirs on the scene, but plenty of the third man’s DNA and also his bloody footprint on the hallway floor is that Amanda Knox and her boyfriend apparently cleaned the scene with bleach.
Guys, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t selectively clean your own DNA from the scene and leave someone else’s.
There is also a welter of other things they supposedly did which we simply can’t tell if they’re true or not, including a lot of inanity about hearing the victim scream and accusing someone else. Why can’t we tell? Because they interrogated Amanda Knox for FIFTY TWO HOURS straight. The main reason against using this for interrogating terrorists (which would never be allowed to spend that long on the spot) is that you don’t get good information. I’ve been awake for forty eight hours and at the end of that I was hallucinating.
I can only imagine being FORCED to stay awake for days while interrogated in a language I’m not fully fluent in, by strangers, with no advocate present.
So, that’s all garbage. Leave it out of my comments, please.
Let’s us however examine the STORY the persecutor thought was reasonable enough to explain the rape/murder and which a panel of judges and/or a jury (I’m not sure how the initial trial was conducted. Italy operates under Napoleonic law. QUITE different from ours.) thought reasonable enough to convict on.
He thought Amanda and her boyfriend got high on pot – this is important – and decided to ask this acquaintance to join in on a rape/murder for thrills. He thought this story was perfectly reasonable. A suburban girl with no record of violence goes to Italy, gets high ON POT and immediately decides to join in rape-murder. No, wait, decides to DIRECT rape murder.
Does this sound likely? I don’t know about you, but not where I’m from. She didn’t have the history for this sort of thing. Her boyfriend didn’t either. Also, pot is a depressant. It doesn’t cause someone to indulge in rape/murder. It might cause someone to react weirdly to finding a corpse, but that’s about it. Does this story sound familiar though? Oh, h*ll yes.
This sounds EXACTLY like the plot of any of a dozen of “teenage wasteland” summer movies. No, I don’t know their titles. I have watched their type a lot though – all of us have. Perfectly normal teenagers+intrusion of disaster or dislocation = murderous psychopaths. Who, then, btw, return to their normal life without ever betraying what they’ve done.
This is a “truth” that exists only in those movies, which all seem to take lessons on human behavior from Lord of The Flies, which btw, by itself made sense only in the universe inside Sartre’s mind. (No, I don’t care if it’s a classic. It’s stupid.)
Or rather, these movies are produced for the thrill-and-shock value, and for a frisson of insinuating that “no one is decent or normal” a “revelation” that might have been thrilling in the twenties but which is now a big, jaw-cracking yawn.
They are accepted and watched as fantasy in the US, because we KNOW none of our teens are like that. Or at least none of our relatively “normal” teens. (Defined as wasn’t actually raised in hell and isn’t an habitual crack user.)
BUT – and this is very important – anyone outside the US doesn’t KNOW. They consume our fables and they take them at face value. They think “Our kids aren’t like that, but American kids must be different. Otherwise, why would ALL these movies tell the same story. And why would Americans watch them?”
I can’t begin to tell you the mythic dimensions the US assumes in foreign minds. We’re the land where stories happen – and most of them happen as narrated. Even I, when I came to the US in the early eighties, thought American teens lived lives of debauchery and drugs. (Yes, in Stow, Ohio. Why do you ask?) It took me months to realize these kids were both less sophisticated, less deviant and more – yes – “decent” than my classmates in Portugal. (This is no slur on Portugal. I attended a large, urban high school, though, as compared to a little suburban high school in the US.)
Every time I go back to Europe I am confronted with this mythical US – beyond the teen thing. Take the conditions in Portugal, at the moment. Home invasions are so common that my parents – who live in a relatively safe and relatively prosperous area – have contingency plans within contingency plans for should it happen to them. Also, most homes have bars on the windows or shutters that effectively make the house impregnable. The cars are outfitted with ways to remove anything of value, and occasionally the wheel, while parked in even the “safest” areas. My husband jokes next time we go over they’ll remove everything from the car, fold it and put it in their pocket. Because it’s the only way to prevent theft.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, I often forget to lock my car for days. (Okay, once we’re fairly sure someone slept in it overnight, but the car was still there.) Our windows don’t have bars. Our next door neighbor leaves her door unlocked. In fact she doesn’t know where her key is.
But every time I go back I hear some variant of “I’d love to visit the US but I don’t know if I could take the daily rape/mugging.” And they won’t believe me when I tell them the truth, because, duh they’ve seen the movies.
We won’t even mention how I was convinced for months that my future BIL was a rapist/murderer because he wore a biker’s chain holding his wallet in, had a beard and rode a motorcycle. I had seen movies. I KNEW. (In retrospect, let us be grateful that David never guessed that. As a self-consciously “bad boy” he’d have had a field day with that.)
So, what is this all about? Am I going to prevent people from writing fiction, because it’s not the truth, and because it might give people abroad ideas?
No. You guys know I don’t want to prevent anyone from writing whatever insanity they want to.
I just want to plead with you, when you write, to make sure the truth that shines through is YOUR truth, not anyone else’s truth. There is a risk when you pile on someone else’s cliche that was once shocking and startling of your feeding an alternate reality which, yes, could hurt other people. There is even a greater risk you’ll cause your readers to crack their jaw while yawning. And there is an even greater risk that you’re creating an image in people’s minds that has nothing to do with the reality they live in and thereby making the young and impressionable act in ways that will hurt them.
No, I’m not arguing with the “conventions” of each genre. Of course the boy and girl KNOW when they meet that they will be in love forever. That’s a genre convention in romance, and most people see past it by the time they’re fourteen. Ditto with the amazing detective who out thinks the police. Or the fact that every SF hero is a born engineer. Or that every Fantasy female is an expert swords woman while wearing medieval garb. All of those are conventions without which the genre book wouldn’t exist as such and must become one of those 1000 pages slice of life tomes.
I’m arguing for each writer observing real behavior, which wasn’t got out of fiction books or bad movies. I’m talking about going out there and mingling with real people and, yes, reading autobiographies or biographies and seeing how real people react to being marooned in an island, say. I’m talking about building your character arcs in ways that don’t cause the gods of rationality to cry to the heavens for vengeance (no matter how many times the irrational way has been used, so that it’s like a literary convention, now.)
I’m talking about telling your lies in a way that the truth shines through. Will you always be successful in getting to some ultimate truth? No. But at least you won’t be piling on to a “big lie” which makes people – abroad or here – react in ways which in this real world we live in will seriously hurt them or others.
The life you save might be your own.
According To Hoyt 
Nice post.
LikeLike
Sarah: Gosh, does that mean the “flesh freezes instantly at 40° Below Zero” tales are gonna be fixed?
Because _I_ have stood on a scrap of cardboard box, naked and shampooing and washing my bod, on Canada’s High Arctic Ice. I cooled the hot water (from the snow melter) with chunks of not-yellow snow, so I did not scald my epidermis. Drying my hair was more a matter of getting the quick-frozen water off of the hairs, than actual removal of water. And I think that a lot of the rinse-water sublimed straight into vapor, rather than being removed by use of my towel…. Once I had dried the bottoms of my feet, it was possible to walk quickly back to my sleeping-trailer, altho wearing my felt-liner-equipped Sorrel boots was a good idea, because the steps into the trailer were treaded with perforated metal….
LikeLike
Oddly enough, in both cases, writing and being accused of crime, how one presents oneself seems to trump everything else. Someone on line got it right by comparing Knox to Lindy Chamberlain, of the Australian case in which her baby was snatched and killed by a dingo. She was convicted of murder because she was just about the worst possible person to defend for such a case – she belonged to a cult (Jehova’s Witnesses? 7th day advent?) that forbade mourning, mourning one’s dead baby cast doubt on God’s will (!) Knox frankly seems to have struck everyone as a self-centered little bitch, which did not mean she was guilty of anything, but it did play hell with attempts to make the jury sympathize. And Italy seems to be going crazy anyway; there’s a scientist there who is about to go to prison because he said he didn’t expect an earthquake anytime soon, and one happened.
About “Lord of the Flies,” C. S. Lewis was asked by Kingsly Amis or Brian Adliss what he thought of the book, and he said, well it’s just about the best island in fiction, beautifully described. Not much of a plot, puerile philosophy, but darned well-written. And Lewis has enthusiastically defended novels that were written with great imagination, fantastic story, and … rather crude, pulp styling. But the smooth, upper class drawing room style seems to be all that matters now, a word or two off and a pulpish moment and the critics go, ewwww.
LikeLike
Charles, do you have a citation for that thing about C.S. Lewis? I can see him praising the description of the island, but not the rest of it. And I’ve read nearly everything Lewis wrote that’s been published. I’d have remembered something my favorite author said about a book that I detested — and I’m not remembering this at all. Thanks!
LikeLike
Yeah, Lin, a hard to find collection of essays called “Of Other Worlds.” Includes a passage in which Lewis sits around with Amis and Adliss talking about SF on a tape recorder, great stuff. Also includes much of his writing about SF and fantasy, some essays ending with a few notes because he didn’t finish them.
LikeLike
And that was emphatically all that Lewis could think of to praise about “Lord of the Flies,” the other two took the conversation elsewhere, arguing about whether the book was sf or not.
LikeLike
Adliss brought up “LofF” and Lewis thought to mention how weird the style was, that the island was seen with a kind of hallucinatory vividness, that the island was seen with the kind of vividness one experiences after having a bad fever. He said nothing else about the novel.
LikeLike
Charles, what you said at first isn’t what you said later. Lewis, speaking to some acquaintances, said something nice about one part of the book and nothing about the premise, etc. IOW, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. I would imagine a fly on the wall at a meeting of Inklings would have gotten a rather more intense critique, along the lines of “The Abolition of Man”.
LikeLike
I’ve not read Lord of the Flies (I escaped high school w/o reading it, and thereafter i was old enough to know to avoid it.) But I recall the name William Golding on the cover. JP Sartre was a playright-philosopher who may well have influenced Mr. Golding, which may have been your intent.
Let me press on to my main point. This is a topic best discussed in a comfy pub over drinks with a roaring fire in the hearth.
I’d like to briefly rise in defense of the too-earnest religion users who sought to write The Truth. And undermine Your Truth. One hallmark of post-modernism is the notion that there is no single objective Truth from which we interpret phenomena and derive opinions. Opinions that are colored by our cultural baggage, experience, and limited perspective. This contrasts with the Age of Reason when everyone went around proving or disproving propositions to arrive at The Truth. Since I think “Truth is what God knows,” I disagree with both the denial of Objective Truth and the sufficiency of Reason to reliably get it all. (Thoughts of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, et al. intrude, but I’ll try to stay focused.)
You cite Italian jurists holding ridiculous opinions about Americans and correctly premise this upon the cinematic myths produced by Hollywood. But these myths spring from screenwriters merely expressing THEIR Truth, which is predicated upon experience with mean kids in junior high and compulsory reading of Lord Of The Flies and New York Times headlines about bullying. What we call American culture is large part group-think predicated by the fixations of these taste-makers.
Meanwhile, your earnest student takes up his Bible and uses it as a lens through which to not only interpret phenomena, but to judge his culture. We are all like George Nada in “They Live” in need of sunglasses that will take us past Our Truth and get to The Truth. I imagine the scum who hijacked airplanes on 9/11 thought the Koran provided the lens through which to judge American culture. So, not all sunglasses are created equal. If truth is what God knows, and if God is transcendent, we are at his mercy to disclose The Truth and we are responsible when it diverges from Our Truth.
My premise won’t go down well with Atheists or Agnostics. Sorry guys. Maybe we can enjoy the fire and another round of drinks.
LikeLike
I’m not complaining about people wanting to write the truth of their religion. For one it’s explicitly marked “religion” which you can then add to your reasoning. It is writing this idiotic version of humanity (and you’re correct on Sartre as an influence — at least I presume so, not having read the bios of the authors. It’s early, I’m uncafeinated. But if two people arrived at that view of the world independently, well… Also, I hate Sartre, that’s my disclosure of bias.) and pretending it’s reality and not “belief inspired” that drives me nuts.
You seem to think I am telling people to use reason to achieve transcendental truth. Meh. I’m telling people to reflect the truth of the world in how they write, so that people who might disagree with them on the larger truth will still enjoy their works (and so, if their intent is to convert, these people can be converted.) And also so as not to seed parallel reality into the real world where it will bring nothing but suffering.
I’m saying people SHOULD base “how people act” on their own experience and non fiction. The NYT is a low blow it barely qualifies as such.
Also, you seem to be under the impression that I’m atheist. I don’t speak of my faith in public because I fail to see where it’s anyone’s business. OTOH while I’m sure my student and I would disagree on many, many doctrinaire points, his vision of humanity in the world and mine were largely the same. And I recommended he read Giovani Guarescchi (sp? Way too early) who again would disagree with him on all doctrinaire points — or almost all — but had a similar vision of humanity and great technique to get it across.
LikeLike
SP, I think you missed the point. Sarah has nothing against people writing about their religious truths. She is asking people not to, when writing fiction, continue falsehoods. All Italians in Chicago were gangsters in the 20s, and people were killed by tommy guns the moment they poked their noses out of the house — which is what our popular culture would have you believe, but which was not at all what it was like (My mil, who lived in Chicago at the time, has told me that women could walk anywhere after dark and not worry about being molested, because the gangsters wouldn’t allow that sort of thing. Which is something that doesn’t really come across in popular culture, either).
So, as Sarah said, this is *not* about religion or Religion.
LikeLike
Very nice. Very, very nice.
I don’t know how many times I’ve stopped reading books because they just were not believable. The “lies” were cliches, and badly told cliches at that.
Telling unbelievable lies is a good way to have a short and unsuccessful career in this business.
Wayne
LikeLike
This was my problem with the Da Vinci code and the Hunger Games. Both reasonably well written and compelling, but early on, there was a premise that was so irrational that it threw the entire prospect into disarray.
I forget what my exact objection to Da Vinci code was, probably something to do with its very poor grasp of art history, but in the hunger games it was apparent from page one.
They forced people’s children into gladiatorial contests as a way of suppressing revolution?!
Now, I know I would put up with a lot to keep my kids safe, but if some tyrannical regime came after my kids, or anyone’s kids, that would not suppress anything, it would pretty much guarantee violent conflict right then and right there!!
Everyone tells me it’s a great book, but I just couldn’t swallow that and finish it. Already in my mind while reading I was writing another story where I was hiding my children and gathering guerilla forces to overthrow the regime of President Snow. It felt so much more natural and rational I couldn’t go back to the book.
LikeLike
I’ve often said that if Beslan had happened in the US there would have been an armed revolution. Your problem with The Hunger Games is the same one I have. As for the Da Vinci Code, let me count the ways: first, the one true descendant of Christ and Magdalene — um… that long ago? There would be millions of descendants. Same with his grasp of church history. Ninth grade History in Portugal in my year WAS Catholic Church History. Plus the fact, he’s admitted it’s based on a New Age book The blade and the… what? Charles? which is a passel of nonsense.
LikeLike
Brown based it on Holy Blood, Holy Grail — which was based on a bunch of papers mysteriously “appearing” in a file in a library in Paris. The papers were bogus, written by a crank trying to prove himself either the heir of Napoleon or the heir of Jesus, or both (I read it when it came out. “Laughable” doesn’t begin to cover it. You know the “one broken link breaks the chain of logic”? These idiots had more breaks than links, and so did their “source” who was arguably insane). Dan Brown had so many mistakes when it came to history, and church history, and art history that the mind boggles. And because of Dan Brown’s book, Israel has suppressed the previously reported oldest place set aside for Christian worship in history: a second century mosaic, part of a building with ‘stalls’ set aside for various religious practices of the Roman Legions in and passing through Jerusalem, on the floor of which was a mosaic saying “Jesus, God, savior”. They’re not allowing photographs of it to be published, and it’s got a tarp over it and is not being allowed to be seen by anybody. Because Dan Brown is evidently more of a tourist draw. ::rolls eyes::
LikeLike
Indeed.
I don’t remember the specifics. All I remember was that Brown’s book was soooo bad on art history as to be snort-worthy.
It was like reading a book about the 1929 world series and having the author say someone went to the penalty box for icing and then later in the game one team scored a touchdown, and that at the half the score was 15 – Love!! It was that bad.
LikeLike
Accepted truths, that aren’t. The consensis of most climate scientists is . . . I saw a whole lot of Greenhouse Earth Dystopias when reading slush. When something is accepted as truth, it can be amazingly harmful, in a murder trial or Cap and Trade legislation.
As a writer, we don’t want to preach, and chase the readers away, but we can avoid backdrops and assumptions that we individually haven’t accepted as truth. And stay a bit skeptical, because it would be nice if our books were read in fifty years by people who were _not_ howling with laughter.
Of course, if you have a really neat idea for a story with space aliens sneaking around collecting biological samples, go for it. Just don’t put the UFO abductions in because everyone says it’s true.
LikeLike
because it would be nice if our books were read in fifty years by people who were _not_ howling with laughter.
YES!
LikeLike
UFO abdutions? If aliens were abducting people while did they let them go? [Wink]
My aliens had been kidnapping humans for years and were keeping them.
(of course, the children & grandchildren of the kidnapped people were preparing a little surprise for the aliens. [Evil Grin]
LikeLike
Holy Blood Holy Grail by Baigent and Leigh. And yes, Lin, I got mixed up blogging at work. If I remember correctly, Lewis said nothing about the novel except that the island was beautifully described in a strange, intense style. I got the strong impression he really found nothing else about it interesting. Also, Lewis had the greatest admiration for some works of modern fiction as literature that were non-Christian or anti-Christian. “Childhood’s End” by Clarke, and he found “A Voyage to Arcturus” by David Lindsay a great inspiration in writing Narnia, even though he found its philosophy “nearly demonic.”
LikeLike
IIRC Lewis used one of Lindsay’s ideas in the Screwtape Letters.
LikeLike
I wouldn’t consider Childhood’s End anti-Christian. Or even non-Christian. Chillingly weird, more.
LikeLike
Way back in the 1980s I toured Italy with my college roommate. Every time we presented our University of Chicago student ID cards to get the student discount the reaction was always the same: “Ah, Chicago! Bang, bang, Al Capone!”
I’ve got a little rant of my own up on a topic related to this one: the lazy, conventional thinking that people seem to default to when considering science fictional issues. It’s here: http://www.jamescambias.com/blog/2011/08/lazy-thinking.html
LikeLike
I have a similar reaction, even in the US, when I tell people I was raised in Vegas. They all expected that my dad was an Elvis impersonator and my mom was a showgirl. Of course the truth that one was an endocrinologist and the other a school teacher was far less sexy, so after a while I started to “go” with it.
LikeLike
I think Lewis’s reaction to “Childhood’s End” was, here someone has depicted the human race advancing and changing to something else, like people rising to heaven. His picture of heaven was more science-fictional and grand than most conventional wings-and-halos versions. And “Voyage to Arcturus” was very very dark, but Lewis was stunned by the spiritual journey depicted as a physical journey through fantastic places.
And prejudice against people from certain areas? My mother was from the Appalachians. Sigh.
LikeLike
So you aren’t married to your cousin, have 18 blood hounds and make moonshine in your own still? lol.
LikeLike
I don’t know -_ Charles, what’s the exchange rate of cats vs. blood hounds?
LikeLike
Sometimes people just can’t handle the Truth — or refuse to accept it when presented. One of My Family’s Stories is about my father as a lad, going from West Virginia to a summer camp in New York. The fact he spoke perfect English and dressed pretty much like everyone else at camp was discarded by the other campers, who KNEW West Virginians went barefoot etc etc etc
Or look at what is being done to History & Truth in the Middle East today.
Humanity being what it is, most people seem to prefer a comfortable myth over an uncomfortable truth (or even an unfamiliar truth.) Watch John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
LikeLike
When my exchange student group hit NYC for two weeks orientation we went through the same. A) we didn’t look “exotic” B) Portugal can be as “mixed” a country as the US — or it could at the time, anyhow. Our group included a readhead and an Asian girl. Our camp counselors just couldn’t concoct a story to fit this, so we made up this tale of being invaded back and forth in WWII, including by the Japanese (!) (And no they couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese. The Asian girl was from Macao.) We were very bad and I wouldn’t do it now, but we were astonished people bought it.
LikeLike
If you have spent any appreciable time in the Middle East, you realize that “Truth” is what it needs to be and not an absolute rule. No on ever tells you what they really think until you become quite close.
I don’t know if this is the product of living in a despotic state, where lying about your true feelings is not a vice, not even a virtue, but a survival trait. I also suspect it is deep rooted in the psyche of the region. In the inscriptions of the Pharaoh’s for example, the Pharaoh never stumbles, never loses a battle.
LikeLike
but in the end Childhood’s End the culprit, the “I shall take you to heaven” “tempter-aliens” were the devil and pre-remembered in our myth as such. I mean, they looked like the devil. And their “Uplifting” made us go extinct. I thought it was a rather good theological allegory, and twisty too.
LikeLike
Ack. Spoilers should be marked please.
LikeLike
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought everyone here would have read Childhood’s end in adolescence and correcting Charles’ point required it. Idiot assumption on my part. I read it at fourteen so everyone must have read it at fourteen. “Is it self centered here, or is it just me?”
LikeLike
Something I have appreciated about storytellers such as Joss Whedon is that, as in Firefly, he has demonstrated an ability to stay true to his story and his characters rather than his politics.
LikeLike
I meant Lewis’s idea of heaven, I know Clarke had no idea of heaven. I know how “Childhood’s End” ended. As a kid I felt a slight, nasty glee that the folks bought the line that the devil wasn’t the devil, then he destroys earth. I meant, Lewis could take some great work of fantasy that was very dark as an inspiration and say, I could do that, using my beliefs as a basis.
In the mountains? Cats just showed up, I think. Many cat spells in my huge book of Blue Ridge folklore; rub your new cat’s feet with butter and walk around your house three times clockwise with him in your arms to keep him from running away.
I only visited where Mom lived in the mountains a few times. Mom’s family was well to do till a disgruntled worker murdered her dad on the front porch. On her ninth birthday. They ended up taking one of the buses recruiting mill workers for Gastonia, the Piedmont lowlands.
By the way, “a Voyage to Arcturus” can be read on line for free.
LikeLike
If you are going to make a comment like:
it is really nice to provide a link to Project Gutenberg or wherever you found it for those of us who’d like to re-read a wonderful classic.
It’s been over thirty years since I read the book. I’ve just installed the EPub version from Gutenberg on my IPad, and I’m really looking forward to this.
Wayne
LikeLike
the butter thing I grew up with, btw. Possibly Celtic.
LikeLike
Sorry Wayne, but I have no idea now where I found it. I just googled the title and clicked in and, yeah, that’s the complete text. Yeah Sarah, all the folklore of the Blue Ridge Mountains is Celtic, Childe went to the Appalachians when he got tired of cataloging all the Celtic folk songs of the British Isles, and found all the same songs in mutated form.
LikeLike
Charles, I NEED to talk to you tomorrow. We need to get you on line so that you can start blogging.
LikeLike
Great idea! Listen to Sarah. Do what she says Charles, she knows what she is talking about.
Wayne
LikeLike
Ever seen That Seventies Show? My High School was like that. But worse. We had a bunch of smart ass farm kids, of which I was one. Then we get this poor, innocent little German Exchange Student… We lied to her. And lied again. And she bought every damned lie. We had her so confused that she was going insane.
She finally started to catch onto us. She got a lot more skeptical about what we said. And a lot more careful. It all came to a head one day at about the four month point, when we were discussing breakfast.
We’re Canadian. Pancakes came up. And Maple Syrup. She asked what it was. We told her it came from trees.
Things went downhill rapidly from there, culminating with her accusing us of fixing Encyclopedia Britanica as part of our nefarious scheme to make a fool of her.
I often wonder what her parents made of the changes to the sweet, compliant daughter who left for Canada, and the cynical, hard nosed woman who came back.
Wayne
LikeLike
Your reaction to Amanda Knox is exactly like mine – I remember when I first heard about the case (I’m a crime buff) and I thought the charges sounded completely off given the circumstances of the crime. Hearing the evidence was bogus just confirms it.
But you’ve just answered one of my big questions – how on earth could the prosecutor come up with this absurd scenario in the first place? I find this quite disturbing. But I think you’ve hit on it.
I’ve grown up in Texas, and I run into all the bizarre things people think about Texas all the time, though that’s mostly amusing. And I’ve run into young males from foreign countries who are certain that all American females jump into bed with total strangers (which was also amusing to watch, frankly).
LikeLike
I thought Lord of the Flies was stupid, but with the exception of 1984 it was the best of the required reading books in school. Anybody know who chooses the books for required reading? Because they have terrible taste.
Luckily I learned speed reading in junior high, and after that the only required reading book that I actually read at normal speed was 1984, because it was the only one I found worth wasting the time on.
As far as books with ridicolous premises I can’t think of a better example than the Jean Auel books. Why anyone would possibly think that prehistoric man was peaceful is beyond my comprehension, when all evidence is to the contrary, and man has never been peaceful in recorded history, why anyone would assume that we decended from peaceloving ancestors is beyond me. But besides being bestsellers, several other authors have picked up that premise and ran with it, perpetuating yet another ridicolous falsehood.
LikeLike
agree with you on ridiculous premises. it’s a transposition of the Garden of Eden, I think. Yeah, my sons loved Dickens, because it was the BEST they could read in school. :/
LikeLike
I saw a Hollyweird SF movie once. (I watch very damn few movies and less SF)…in which vacumn was the bad guy. Brief exposure to vacumn caused a person to literally explode as if he’d swallowed a grenade…
LikeLike
Shucks, _I_ am getting to the point where I click away from the NEWS, be it Legacy TV media on: Sun, CTV, CBC {the Communist Broadcasting Company (in Canada)}, MSNBC, CNN, or Fox, due to bad clangers. One of the recent ones was in reference to the Forest fires in Texas, where “The Wind-fueled flames …..” was a common comment, by an excited Announcer. [for those still UNfire-trained, the Fire Triangle requires Heat, Fuel, and Oxygen].
LikeLike
Coming to this late, as usual, but I encountered the Amanda Knox story during the appeal and wondered how in Ghod’s name they managed to win the appeal to acquit her.
Not because she didn’t deserve to have her conviction reversed, but how mangled a system had to be reach such a conclusion to compare with the Duke soccer players’ rape case. [White privileged jocks must always rape, when provided the opportunity, impoverished black women compelled by society to become strippers.]
As the authorities, you’ve arrested a career criminal whose DNA and statement place him on the scene, a criminal with a rapsheet including a history of violence and burglary, so you arrest a college student?
Yet the object of modern journalism is to sell advertising and copious copies of copy, not report the facts in a **well-reasoned** context.
I lived as a child, for a time, in Central America. Granted, it was in the PCZ, a largely Anglo-Saxon military enclave, but people such a my school teacher who lived outside the base, lived in homes with bars on the windows yet experienced regular burglaries, as Sarah described. The US? Pfffh. As an older teenager, returning by bus from college, I walked from the depot to my grandmother’s quiet suburban home ten miles away — late on a Saturday night through Camden, NJ, as the only visible white person — utterly unaccosted.
As for Golding’s Lord of the Flies, stepson of Sartre’s The Flies, it is a hypnotically beautiful book and one must wonder how badly Golding must’ve been bullied as a youth for being an asocial dick to describe the alien pod creatures who populate the story.
In the earliest Chip Harrison porn-striving-to-rise-above-porn comedy novel by Lawrence Block, the naked narrator describes the difficulty, circa 1960, of stealing clothes from backyard clotheslines when, as Chip concludes, all the novels and movies where one observes this happening with ease were written by lazy male writers echoing a meme already then decades out-of-date, after women demanded cheap home dryers.
[I recall my mother requiring us to pin **bed linens** to our infrequently employed clothesline in the mid-70s, but not clothes. My paternal grandmother did the same until the late-90s. It had nothing to do with drying as much as the air-blown freshness of the fabric.]
Cliché is the enemy. Just try asking for the “pepper and salt” to see.
JJB
LikeLike