Yesterday, when I was stuck for what to blog about, I asked Robert for suggestions. Blocking on blogs happens. To me, it happens way more often than blocking on fiction. Usually I have a week a month when this is really hard to do, but it’s not always the obvious one. For instance you would think that I’d have blocked hard last week, but I didn’t. I’d sit down, and the idea for what to write was RIGHT THERE. I just sometimes didn’t have the strength to carry it with aplomb.
Anyway, this week I’m blocking practically every night (I’m trying to write them at night, as that leaves me in better shape to write during the day.) There’s probably other issues at work, like I haven’t gone out for walks, because I have to be on hand for older son, so he doesn’t do stupid things like fall down the stairs, cane and all. Not leaving the house makes me a … lot weird.
So, Robert was sitting here and I asked him what to blog about and he said “Stereotypes. How you use stereotypes as short cuts and they’re part of a writer’s bag of tricks.”
I told him no, because I wanted a topic for ATH not MGC. And ATH is a writer’s blog, and occasionally a writing blog, but not a craft (as such) blog. That I leave for MGC.
So he asked what the heck ATH is. The answer was “Smashed if I know. I talk about what I feel like talking at the time, and most people seem to go along for the ride.”
But it is, if I may be permitted to wax pedantic, actually a blog about the intersection of storytelling, society, culture and of course the inevitable (argh) politics which arise from all of those. In the end politics are sort of a super-form of storytelling. No? Then why in heck would people get all heated up to vote for someone they can’t possibly know that much about. (Particularly if they’re the party that shall not be mentioned, where the letter is never after the name when the news reveal malfeasance.)
This is why people talk about “the narrative” and it fitting or contradicting “the narrative.”
Of course, a lot of the narrative is what the press chooses to say or not say, how the politicians justify their actions, and what the schools teach people really drives the events in the world.
But here’s the thing: none of it would do much without the additional narrative that is told in a hundred little stories, fictional and non. The stories people tell each other at the grocery store contribute to this, but they too are framed and interpreted in the light of the stories we’ve been told since childhood.
I come from a lost world, and was raised on rather moralistic pseudo-fairytales. As in, they were CALLED fairytales (by some atavistic naming convention) but they were usually not magical and involved no fairies. They might or might not have talking animals instead of people but often they had people too. The story was about like Aesop’s fables, with the moral really obvious, and the morals were usually things like “Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you” “Keep a clean kitchen” (I swear. It was the cockroach’s story. No, I mean, she was the housewife. No, you don’t want to know.) “Saving means you’ll have stuff when you need it.”
These stories were conveyed in tiny books – about two by three, and maybe eight? Pages – cheaply printed and sold at the checkout in stores, like candy bars and at the time much cheaper. I think they cost the equivalent of five cents. Mom was not likely to spring for candy bars, being absolutely convinced that chocolate was bad for me, but she always sprang for these little booklets, because it meant she had blessed silence on the way home on the bus, while I read, re-read and re-re-read the story. Usually we got home before I was sick of it. And I was always willing to beg shamelessly for anything printed.
These books presumed you were slow of thought and had at the end, “The moral of the story is:….”
That sentence annoyed me before I was out of kindergarten but the thing is, the “moral” was usually salutary, and yeah, it was being pushed into little kids’ heads, all wrapped in story. Also, some of those morals are now outright subversive “Save so you might have later” for instance, denies most of the things we are now told, about how we “deserve” this or that for free just for existing.
Anyway – those little books, as much as the teaching in school, the newspaper slant or anything else – molded how people think. You might not think it’s affecting you, but it is.
It’s gradual, it’s continuous, and the fact that until recently fiction presented a united front made it more impactful. Our brain is really not good at distinguishing between stuff we’ve lived through and stuff we’ve dreamed about vividly – which is what good fiction does – hence the problem with recovered/false memories.
What does this have to do with “first do no harm?” Well, when we were discussing here yesterday whether the destruction of say the belief in the constitution was purposeful or just the side effect of wanting to be in with the “cool” crowd and of the world being saturated with Marxist claptrap, we failed to take something else into account. Sometimes all it takes is a small push.
Were most of the fantasy authors in the eighties, writing about young spunky female protagonists with abusive fathers trying to make men pariahs and suspect? Some, perhaps. I mean, among my colleagues there are some people who are so walking wounded that they’re more wounded than walking. And some had personal vendettas to work off.
But I’d wager the vast majority of women getting published then and therefore around their thirties, had simply grown up with a traditional family structure. This meant the father was usually the enforcer (okay, not in my family. We were weird.) So when they needed their young female protagonist to overcome a bad childhood, the culprit was usually an overbearing or outright abusive father.
This was so prevalent in the eighties, that I used to roll my eyes when I hit it. But that’s its own problem.
You see, storytellers do use clichés. Robert was right there. You can’t say “never use clichés or stereotypes.” You can’t do that. You just can’t. A book is not reality. If you’re going to write about an inn keeper and instead of fat, jolly and red cheeked you make him small, skinny and harassed-looking, you’re going to arouse the wrong type of curiosity. People are going to want to KNOW why your innkeeper is skinny. Is the food bad? Does he hate his job? Is he not an innkeeper at all?
This is great if you’re setting him up as a nobleman (or poisoner) in disguise, but a royal pain if his entire point in the story is to come out and tell the characters he’s prepared them a private parlor, and the boys will see to the horses.
What’s more, when you’re telling a certain type of story, if you go against the cliché people will doubt your story – at least after the cliché is well established.
So, once the “cruel fathers oppress young women in fantasy settings” bit was set, as it were, in stone, if you had a nice and somewhat ineffective father, people would wonder what he was hiding.
It was easier, particularly for young and not very experienced storytellers to come in and make the father the bad guy.
Is this related to the way courts always favor even unfit mothers over fit fathers for custody? The way men are assumed not to be needed in a healthy family? The way schools look askance at male teachers? The way young women raised by the young women who read that fantasy think that every older man is out to “oppress” them?
I’d be surprised if it isn’t. You see, the human brain is a machine designed to create meaning out of random events. Even the least talented of us create story out of every day things. My family prized this, because my mom is a naturally good story teller with great comedic deliver. She’d come home from the fair and make us all laugh ourselves into stitches by describing some woman trying to get her two year old to behave… with the most stupid exhortations imaginable.
But even that story telling or the story of what happened at the market won’t be exact (ask any policeman about witness reports.) There’s bias in the seeing, bias in the reporting, and bias in how people hear it.
And a lot of how we hear stories is based on the professional stories we heard, particularly when they all resort to the same cliché.
Say you’re a nurse in a pediatric ward, and a kid comes in with an obviously bruised shoulder, and tells you his dad grabbed him and threw him. If your expectation is that fathers do what’s best for their offspring, you assume there is a reason and you dig further, and find out the kid was running out in the middle of the street (actually he got his arm dislocated) and wasn’t going to stop (he was only two, and oh, boy, he could run.) so all the father could do is grab what he could get at (his hand) and pull, throwing the kid onto the sidewalk and himself out of harm’s way in time. (Younger son was Houdini. He forced me to do what I’d always said I wouldn’t and put him on a leash. It didn’t work. So I put him on an harness. It didn’t work. At one time I almost lost him in the airport in Paris, and he was in harness AND leash. I looked away for a minute and he was out of both and running h*ll for leather down hallway. Until his heart issues – now gone – were found at three he was expected to become a marathoner. He loved running. It’s just when he was very young he didn’t have any sense about WHERE he ran.)
But if you were raised on book after book of abusive fathers, if you saw tv shows in which all men are secretly violent, if the news talk about child abuse rings … You start doubting the story, even when the entire family tells you the same thing. You start wondering what they’re covering up. And you make their life very uncomfortable for an afternoon, even if in the end you can’t detain them longer.
Now part of the narrative conformity was enforced from on-high. Publishers tried very hard to sell the same package in everything – and it absolutely was coordinated with the news and the teaching, either because they did so intentionally or because they all attended the same schools and “everyone knows.”
All you had to do was try to have a heroic man, an evil woman, or a hundred other anti-cliches, and the establishment would tell you either that it was outright wrong or they wouldn’t publish you.
And this is how we come to a world where every woman thinks every man is trying to “oppress her” or “put her down” – when reality is so much more complex than that. Yeah, some men are insecure gits who try to put others down. So are some women. Some men are helpful and protective. So are some women.
BUT these days every woman (except us gender traitors!) tends to assume that every man is out to get her – a state of insanity that doesn’t bear describing – and that is the result of the continuously dinned in and reinforced narrative.
So – now that the gatekeepers are gone…
First, do no evil.
Yes, clichés are easier and sometimes they’re unavoidable. But think before you use them. Couldn’t your protagonist have an equally hard childhood if she was raised by her father and was at the mercy of idiot bureaucrats who suspect all men of abominable evil? Does it need to be her father who is bad?
Sure, if you make every hostler ruddy and fat and jolly, the sour faced, bulimic hostellers are going to hate you. But no one looking at a skinny hostler is going to think he’s actually fat in real life.
In the same way, can’t your rich guy have acquired his riches honestly (most did and do, you know. Yes, recently there have been a few trying short cuts, but that’s part of their being convinced that’s how you get rich. Stories again.) Can’t he be a philanthropist? (a lot of them are.) Do all your poor need to be deserving? Sure it’s a cliché since Dickens, more or less, and the cliché is so strong that even when it’s obvious most homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill or both, people call you heartless for saying “What we’re doing isn’t working. We need a separate system for families in temporary homelessness, because they shouldn’t have to live with this. And we need to figure out what to do about the permanent homeless.” They tell you that you’re just trying to remove inconvenience because, well, in stories all the victims are worthy, right? (Except in Pratchett, bless him.)
In reality we know very well that just because you were treated badly doesn’t mean you’re a saint. But we tend to forget that, after reading/watching a dozen or a hundred stories.
So I’m asking you… First do no evil. First examine if you can get away with not using the cliché without distorting the story. And then figure out if the cliché is harmful. (Some aren’t. I have too got a Latin temper, but if anything having the reputation serves people warning they’re dealing with a fully loaded Sarah and that she can go off at any moment. Useful.)
If you must err, err on the side of breaking the clichés that condemn whole groups of people, particularly if these people are designated “oppressors” in Marx’s fake whirligig reality.
Of course you’ll have to have villains. And sometimes your villains will have to be rich, or white, or male, or all, but give them some reason why they’re villains beyond “they’re privileged” (which most white males aren’t, btw.) And if you can make the reason something more than “he was beaten when he was three.” Freud notwithstanding, humans are more likely to commit villainy in pursuit of what they view as wealth, or status or power (or all of the above) or even “just” security than out of the remembered trauma of childhood. Most of us were traumatized enough that we created scar tissue. It’s called being an adult and not overreacting to every event, as though this were the first time we met with it.
More often than not, you’ll meet this in revision, not on first writing, because you naturally fill in blanks on the sides of the story with clichés. But in revision consider changing it.
And if you’re a reader, learn to be sensitive to the clichés and to remind yourself that just because the story says it, it ain’t necessarily so. It will ruin some of your reads, but it might just start turning things around.
First, do no harm.
Different post up at Mad Genius Club.
According To Hoyt 
Reblogged this on mishaburnett and commented:
Don’t really have anything to add to this at the moment.
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James Thurber wrote a whole load of tongue in cheek moral stories. The only one I really remember is about chipmonks and is the counter to “the early bird gets the worm”. IIRC the moral goes “Early to work and early to bed makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead”. Something tells me that this is a moral generations of teenagers could get behind.
One cliche that does seem to hold true is that inherited wealth tends to ruin the possessor of it. Sometimes it’s pretty harmless and all they do is have lots of sex, drugs and the like and die in a pool of vimto but others of course use their inherited wealth to “reform” others. We could use a lot more stories about the evils of out of touch “do gooders”.
The problem with having (say) government bureaucrats as villians instead of flamboyant millionnaires is that government bureaucrts are petty. Even when they go wild and spend $$$$ on a party someone is still filing expenses and auditing and what have you. Though perhaps we need some nice crony capitalist villains….
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In Defense of Evil Corporations
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings would disapprove of tongue-in-cheek morals. Especially nowadays.
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Not to mention that The Three-Deck uses them with all the rest of the cliches.
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I’ve never read that one! lovely
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It seems a natural for this group — almost as natural as Gods
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Yeah – crony capitalists is the way to go. Ones that bribe goverment bureaucrats so they can have their evil way with the hero and/or his/her land/loved ones etc.
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Extra points if your evil crony capitalist says “If it saves one child’s life” as he tries to kill the hero. And the politician nods piously.
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I’d love to see movies with evil gov’t employees. Like the EPA or the IRS.
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but isn’t that too much like reality? And besides, if you make the IRS the villains they’ll audit you. (Great. I’m depressed now.)
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That there is whycome conservatives love the first Ghostbusters movie (EPA) and the first Die Hard (FBI.)
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Sometimes the typing is so prevalent that I have to believe that it’s deliberate. The TV show “Numb3rs”, for example, as interesting as the basic concept was, had no mystery to it because the villain of the piece was always the rich white male, and usually announced himself by saying something non-PC before the first commercial break.
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Dan watched two of those to see how they used math. They used it badly. In fact, they raped it. Dan stopped watching in disgust (and this man watches stuff just because he started it.) But yes, the Cat Who mysteries are the same. My older son had an obsession with them when he was in first and second grade (for the cats, really. He wanted a siamese) and we bought them for him, so I read them. All the murderers were wealthy white males.
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I don’t know if I’ve ever referred to this movie here, but you want a movie in which a self-made millionaire is a decent man and the hero of the movie? “The Edge,” the character is played by Anthony Hopkins, the movie was written by David I-am-no-longer-a-brainless-liberal Mamet. Directed by the Maouri Lee Tamahori, who is wonderful with heroes who don’t know they’re heroes till the crucial moment.
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Very good call.
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I think the only books where I have consistently seen heroic rich white guys lately are romance novels.
I pretty much raised myself on old books, ones where the hero usually had before World War I morals and was white, and also often enough had money or got it by the end of the story. My father and my uncles were in some ways very much the walking wounded, presumably from the war. Except for the one who was a full blown alcoholic they were admirable in some ways, hard workers who knew how to fix things, but they were also hard drinkers, dad used to get falling down drunk on Christmas and other holidays (not anymore, but he is 90 now) and he never spend much time with me or talked with me. He’d fix my toys, and later my cars, but that meant I brought them to him and was then expected to leave while he did the job. Which probably made me to search for those books which had men I would have wanted to know in them from the time I learned how to read. So I wasn’t exposed all that much to the oppressed female idea, in the stories I mostly read the women usually seemed pretty happy with what they had. And often quite competent too, even when they needed to be rescued in the final act. And during the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s those old books were still fairly easy to find.
Reading got a lot more unsatisfactory when the old books started to disappear from the markets. Especially since I don’t much like full blown romance novels – I like stories which include a romance, but stories where the romance is the main focus and you get page after page of how somebody feels, or nowadays, sex scenes, and any other existing plot seems more like an afterthought not so much – which then were the only ones in which you might reliably find something resembling the old hero types.
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R.F. Delderfield’s trilogy that begins with God Is An Englishman is a good example of reasonably accurate historical fiction. The story starts with the MC, cavalryman Adam Swann, discovering a small fortune in gems in the mud off a battlefield in India in 1857, returning to England and using the capital to establish himself in business as a carter, marrying the daughter of a mill owner. Over the course of the trilogy the family ages through a couple generations and confronts the challenge of adapting from horse-drawn carts to early motor-driven vehicles. A superb portrait of a self-made (sorta — the average soldjer would have likely spent the windfall on booze and whores) in the late-Victorian industrial era.
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Those send decent, I shall check amazon.
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I’m glad to know that I’m not the only put off by the Cat Who books.
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I enjoyed them, up until the last one, but there was always something about them that irritated me, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. The same is true of the books by several other Colorado authors (hostess excepted – I can supply names and books if required). Of course, I also love to re-read Dante’s works as well, so of course I’m an odd Odd.
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The early ones were good, but towards the middle/end of the series they just started to get worse and never recovered.
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Do all your poor need to be deserving? Sure it’s a cliché since Dickens, more or less,
I read that and thought that Dickens didn’t write his poor to all be deserving, most were Fagans, yet look at the effect of focusing on a few deserving poor to change the entire narrative, until today they all are.
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I haven’t read all of Dickens by a long shot, but my sense of him is that while most of the poor deserve to be so, not all of them are undeserving of our compassion … and that those who extend compassion are the greater beneficiaries than those who receive it.
Then there is Bill Sykes. Although Shaw did offer a slightly different view …
I’m one of the undeserving poor, that’s what I am! … I mean to go on being undeserving, I likes it.
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Gracious me …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dsb2wIPga4
The things you discover in the sidebars!
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Mess with a stereotype, expect the stereotype–or your readers–to mess back. Ilona Andrews found this out when they created a male character that broke the “romantic kidnapper” stereotype in their main character. (“Alphas” in Angels of Darkness”, Ilona talks about it here: http://www.ilona-andrews.com/readers/alphas-alphas-magic-rises-and-other-reader-questions) The story had a brutal edge; Lucas was no Ahmad the Sheik, and it upset Andrews’ readers–not me, I pray they’ll come back to the series someday …
Of course, this is no problem to those of us who don’t have any sort of brand. Or audience at all. We can taunt stereotypes all day long and they’ll do nothing but squeak and wave tiny paws at us.
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Oh, and I sympathize with the harness bit–my sister, much younger and suffering from cerebral palsy, had a fascination for busy streets, the deadlier, the better. The moment you took her out of her car seat, you had to body-block her against the side of the car, and do it fast, because despite her disability, she could move like a greased eel when it suited her. So passers-by saw an adult woman crushing an adorable disabled child against a car.
I never got arrested, and I’m still amazed by that.
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You’d have if you were male! Actually I wonder how much of Marshall’s compulsion to “run” had to do with the sensory issues. How much was “escape unbearable stimulus” because it lessened as the disability receded. (Kids usually grow out of it. He might still have lingering bits, but he doesn’t have the disability as such anymore.)
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The single most damaging cliche character that I observed in the rancid 60’s and horrible 70’s was the perpetuation of the whacked-out nutzo military veteran – mostlyon TV shows fictional and whose which claimed to be non-fictional (like *spit* Sixty Minutes), but now and again in movies. It was to the point that generallty society expected all militaryvets to have been severely damaged by their service, especially those who served in Vietnam. Veterans were advised not to put their service on their resumes when hunting for jobs, post-service, and never, ever mention it in casual conversation. It was worse than a cliche – it was character assassination of anyone who served at that time.And it’s been remembered and resented.
Even in the service, the Vietnam vets didn’t talk about it, unless with close friends and sometimes when very, very drunk. Once, when I was in Greenland, I was talking with two slightly older guys I knew; the AF Public Affairs officer, and one of the control tower NCOS. They were both a leeeeetle oiled, and it came up in conversation that both of them had served combat trours as Army troopers in Vietnam – and neither of them had known it, although they had both been in Greenland at the same base and been casual acquaintances for months.
About the first TV charactersr who were Vietnam vets and weren’t basket cases were the lead character and some of his friends on Magnum, PI. This was so fresh and startling, because it went against every particle of the cliche. The stigma of the whacked-out Vietnam vet has taken a very long time to fade, although they’ve attempted to bring it out and dust it off for veterans of OIF and Afghanistan. One thing that many milblogs did (including mine) regarding the more recent war veterans is to land like a ton of bricks on any TV show or movie that does take the lazy way out and perpetuate the old stereotype.
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That one is *deep* in our psyche–I lost a friendship over it. When I told a longtime friend that my son had enlisted, she immediately told me about a poetry program (heard about on NPR, of course) that encouraged vets to tell about their deepest darkest war secrets and their anguish. There was just one rule to taking part (impressive pause, solemn eye) they weren’t allowed to *lie.*
Because of course, all vets have terrible anguished secrets. Because everyone who serves is damaged. I was abrupt and dismissive, and she never talked to me again.
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Of course. Otherwise they would have to choose between supporting the troops or giving up their liberal pacifism-lite. If it is terrible and traumatic, you can infantilize the soldiers and have it both ways.
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“halp uz jon cerie!”
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I beg to differ with you. What you had was a long standing acquaintance. A true friend would not have dumped you simply because you disagreed with her position. Wouldn’t necessarily have changed her mind and it ultimately most likely would have been a topic you decided to agree to disagree on, but her dropping you like that is a mark of someone too fickle and self centered to ever be a true friend.
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A true friend would not have dumped you simply because you disagreed with her position.
Time for more Kipling!
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_thousandth.htm
Is he ever not relevant to the topic at hand?
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Is he ever not relevant to the topic at hand?
No. See also Heinlein, RA
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Not one of Rudy’s better efforts, IMHO.
Is he ever not relevant to the topic at hand?
No, but you sent me off to reread the compliments that Orwell delivered with the back of his hand.
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One tiny bit of defense for the woman–I can be pretty offensive (No! Really?). And I’ve never apologized.
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She accused your son of being a war criminal, and yourself of standing by while he volunteered to have his mind torn apart.
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Finding out your friend was really just an acquaintance, rather than a true friend, is still painful.
The only way to find out is for the friendship to be tried. I’ve had more friends shown to be false than shown to be true.
You lose a friendship, if not a friend.
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Yes– I have been around Vietnam Vets during most of my service (and I married one). There is a reason they stick together and don’t talk about their service. They have been maligned for years.
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I made an enemy in the field about that. She wanted to talk about how awful the US military was and Vietnam vets and damaged Iraq vets and–
I cut her off every five seconds and inserted innocuous stories. She hates me with a burning passion and has conducted a campaign to have me declared evil and mean and all that. But I couldn’t sit there and let this chickie go on.
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Eventually, don’t you get to the point where you decide to just really OWN that black hat role? I mean, almost to the point where you just want to grow a mustache so you can twirl it while you maniacally laugh?
… okay, yes, it would be more difficult for you to grow the mustache. But it’s still tempting, isn’t it?
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Zachary, sweetie… I’m a Mediterranean woman of middle years. If I stop with the wax and the tweezers, I could be the bearded lady in a circus. I could ROCK that mustache.
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Isn’t that what costume kits are for?
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Good for you– when I hear that kind of cr*p, my face starts to turn red, horns and hooves pop out, and the hubby drags me away before I rant. ;-)
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Yes, and I was on the panel, so I couldn’t let my essential nature come through :-P
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lol– she ain’t seen mean yet
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OK, that sentence broke my suspension of disbelief … ;-)
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I recommend Stolen Valor by B. G. Burkett
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TY
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I find it most interesting how very similar are the Vietnam vets to their World War II counterparts, the primary difference being in how society treated them on their return to civilian life. After the big war it was “good job, now back to work, all that mess is over.” And most kept any psychic damage buried deep inside except for the occasional episode after a few drinks at the VFW. OTOH, the Viet vets were all ticking time bombs. They had to be, we were told so night after night on the news and in stories.
IMHO, our society did a horrible disservice to both.
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yes
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Thank You! I’m a Vietnam veteran (not a “Vietnam era veteran, which is something else entirely). My main job was to monitor the “Ho Chi Minh” trail, which was a series of graveled roads in central Laos. We looked for ferries on rivers, bulldozer activity, trails disappearing into the jungle, and “vehicle count”, which was mostly anything that resembled a destroyed truck. Our reports went straight to targeting officers, and we’d check out the bomb damage from the overnight attacks the next day. Sometimes it was gruesome, but most of the time it was boring. There were more than two hundred Army, Air Force, and Australian people working in the unit. Most of us came home angry, not because of what we did, but because of what we weren’t ALLOWED to do — attack and destroy the enemy where he organized before coming down the Trail.
I’m atypical of most Air Force Vietnam veterans, in that I was in two situations where I was shot at, and allowed to shoot back. Combat does change you, whether you admit it or not. Knowing that you’ve taken the life of another human being SHOULD have an effect on you. Knowing that it was necessary only partially mitigates the anger and remorse.
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My manager at my first job was a Vietnam era vet. Stationed for a few months in West Germany when the era was just starting.
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As regards WWII vets, watch The Best Years of Our Lives to see the realistic and sympathetic depiction of the war’s effects. The experience of combat also provides an important subtext, IIRC, in Gentlemen’s Agreement, especially in the story of John Garfield’s character.
And, of course, the effects of that war on its veterans are a major part of the subtext for the entire noir genre and helped give it impetus in the two decades after the war.
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There’s a great WWII movie that most people have never seen. It’s called “BATTLEGROUND”, and it tells the story of the Battle of the Bulge. There are a lot of now-well-known characters in it that were just starting out then, a lot of them combat veterans themselves. It does an excellent job of depicting the sheer terror of combat.
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Great movie, directed by William “Wild Bill” Wellman. A member of the famous Lafayette Escadrille in WWI, Wellman’s screen credits include Wings, the 1927 film which won the first “Best Picture” Oscar and launched Gary Cooper to stardom. In 1931 he directed Jimmy Cagney’s breakout film, The Public Enemy, in 1937 he directed the first screen presentation of A Star Is Born, his 1939 Beau Geste teamed Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston & Brian Donlevy (in an Oscar-nominated supporting role) in the defense of Fort Zinderneuf in the Sahara Desert and his 1942 film Roxie Hart was adapted into the musical Chicago.
Wellman’s films are well worth attention.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0920074/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
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I love Battleground. I make the kids watch it at least once a year (usually around Veterans Day)
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Another great one is “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”. Just watching the husband say to the wife, “I killed [17?] men. Not a distance, but face to face. That changes a person…” Super movie.
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Nitpick: Magnum did have flashbacks of fighting in the jungle. But yeah, he was mostly portrayed as a balanced, gun-loving, goodnatured guy.
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The older British guy also had combat experience not exactly sure where. Don’t watch Warehouse 13. It’ll make you want to throw things at the tv.
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Honestly, because the experience of having been in the military – and in combat – was so much more wide-spread among all social classes in WWII, WWII, the Civil War – I think culturally the general public was much more understanding and realized that only a relatively small portion of veterans had real adjustment problems afterwards. Everyone else might have had some rough patches, or an easy cruise, or something in between, but it was over now, good job well done, and welcome home. The Vietnam vets, in contrast, were treated like lepers by the media and intelligentsia. I also recommend B.G. Burkett’s book –
http://www.amazon.com/Stolen-Valor-Vietnam-Generation-History/dp/096670360X/ref=la_B001K8MUUO_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371680828&sr=1-1
He’s been debunking fake veterans for ages.
One of the things that I took a very sour amusement from during Gulf War I was seeing all the establishment media coming over to the Big Sandbox (AKA Saudi Arabia) and doing all these interviews with members of the military – high, low and every rank in between. They couldn’t hide their pleased surprise at how … very pleasant, competent – and normal all their interviewees seemed to be. Gee, it was as if they were expecting something else entirely …
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Sgt. Major Higgins, British Army, Ret., who apparently fought everywhere the Empire was engaged from WWII through the guerrilla war in Malaysia and beyond.
Magnum P.I. filmed it’s pilot ep right around 1980, which means the fall of Saigon was only about 5 years prior when the show premiered – thus it was all very recent history.
I understand that the production crew on Magnum P.I. had a fair overlap with the crew of one of the most egregious perpetrators of the deranged-Vietnam-veteran-of-the-week meme, Hawaii Five-Oh (the original one, not the recent reboot). OTOH the writers and producers were not the same on Magnum as on Five-Oh, and as noted the Magnum P.I. folks produced one of the first positive representations of Vietnam veterans in popular media, which I at least noticed at the time.
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Donald Bellasario, who wrote the pilot and invented Magnum PI (and is now doing NCIS) was a Marine. It shows in his work.
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I love Warehouse 13. I don’t even know who you’re referring to!
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Not completely unfounded, that one. At least for those generations who fought back when mental issues might get them branded as cowards, and there was no treatment or support to be had if they were not lucky enough to get that from family or friends. My father and uncles and some of their friends had problems which very likely had at least something to do with their experiences in the 40’s wars. But yes, the way that has gotten treated in fiction was and mostly still is quite unpleasant.
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By the way, at least some of the negative stereotyping I have seen in the fiction of my own country seems to have began in the stuff written by the children of those veterans, people who were children during the war. Which is something I can, sort of, relate to. When your father has issues which seem to stem from his service, and make him less the type of father you’d like to have it’s easy to get angry. Add to that the general loss of values and the idea that we are all entitled and the end result may easily become something rather ugly.
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And yes, among the problems probably are the ideas that nothing bad should never ever happen to anybody, and that we have the right to demand that. Not going to happen, no matter what is done. Sometimes it is much better just to learn to deal with the consequences rather than to waste time railing against what has happened.
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Veterans of the Winter War / Continuation War had better reason for PTSD than anyone I can think of.
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Second to that is the emotionally constricted conservative, complete with stick up his or her butt. Especially when “religious” (not “spiritual”) these characters are a font of repression, just waiting to be loosened up and kick the traces over!
It is always the Sandy Olsens, moving toward “freedom” and never Danny Zuko growing up … O Henry would have sneered.
Beloved Spouse & I very much enjoyed The Bird Cage but agreed it suffered horribly by making Gene Hackman’s character a one-and-a-half dimensional caricature of Conservative America. Had they made his character a real live boy their movie would have actually made a real statement about inclusion and tolerance.
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AMEN, RES!
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And it’s been remembered and resented.
Amen.
Part of the “red shirts on Fridays” thing is guys who were drafted for Vietnam being their dad’s age– or older– and seeing “kids” coming back from the various post 9/11 stuff, and going “I will be damned to HELL if I let anyone treat them the way they treated ME!
(To quote an uncle that generally doesn’t cuss around me.)
First time I saw dad get mad at a person who wasn’t doing something dangerous then-and-there was when I came home and told my folks that everyone drafted during Vietnam was either crazy or hated the gov’t and military… dad asked which one he was. :) Mom growled which one her brothers all were– and followed up by pointing out her crazy one eyed brother was crazy before he was drafted.
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Actually, real fairy tales are much more likely to have talking animals than fairies, even in Western Europe where you have actual fairies. (As opposed to the rest of the world, where what you have more of is talking animals than whatever the local folklore is.)
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Portugal didn’t have fairy lore. At all. Which is weird, considering the upper side of the country is heavily Celtic. Go figure.
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that’s — odd.
I was thinking of this.
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That’s because your people killed and grilled them all for supper. Or maybe the Templars did. :)
That is pretty odd. But of course, the people who did most of the kidnapping in that area were Moors and not fairies, and the people who built the strange ruins were Romans, so I imagine the imagination left over for fairies was probably not huge.
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That’s actually likely. The grilling part. Portuguese did that to the bears and the deer and…
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And you know that having talking animals is evil, right?
In case you think I’m making that up …
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Grievance mongers. What would happen to them without grievances?
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Peace in Our Time.
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A desert called Peace.
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Ah, our love for the classics shines through …
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Classic sources, classic literature, or classic solutions?
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Classic sarcasm.
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They’d find something else to mong, e.g. week old fish
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Dammit, my blood pressure did not need that this morning. When children want to learn about the actual animals, they will watch Animal Planet, or the Science Channel, or something like that.
Using anthropomorphized animals allows us to examine cultural questions without engaging the one watching with the visual specific to the issue. For example, we can examine the ostracizing of the other without explicitly choosing which type of “other” is being ostracized. This way, the activity is not specifically tied to one type of difference, like skin color. Of course, I suppose that is another part of the problem, in the minds of the Progs: If you don’t make the target of the hostility specific, they can’t point at it as an example of how [insert victim demographic here] is treated badly. Because it could just as easily be applied to ANY group treating ANY other group badly.
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No man’s blood pressure is safe around me. ;-)
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No man’s blood pressure is safe around me.
One direction or the other then?
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All the autopsies read “Natural causes” … so far.
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In one of his essays Jimmy Breslin referes to a local gangster who died of “heart failure” — his heart failed during the night when a local competitor put a knife through it.
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besides, it’s escapist. It gets away from the here and now.
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Oh. My. How true is THAT?
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That’s a great one. Wish I thought of it first.
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More. They’re afraid we’ll realize their compensatory laws DO treat a guiltless group badly.
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I recently discovered some books by Andrew Lang that contained a lot of fairy tales, folklore, and other material. The books are at Project Gutenberg, usually in both mobi and epub formats, some only in PDF. I realize that I missed these books growing up. I think that was because I was seven before I was allowed to go to the library by myself (it was a half-mile walk from our house, and I WALKED — no riding. The good news was it was next to the school I attended, and I could stop by the library before walking home), and by then I was into other things than fairy tales. What I’ve read so far puts some of Disney’s productions into somewhat unfavorable light. Definitely not PC.
There are also some Kipling and Shakespeare there, also. And it’s all free!
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The color fairy books? I read those all as a child.
Start of a long life of grumbling against the general public ignorance of fairy tales.
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I’m slowly working my way through the Andrew Lang fairy books. It’s interesting to note the patterns and repetitions.
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Everyone complains that fairy tale heroines are passive, and I argue with that.
No one complains that all the leads are female, even though I am fully capable of arguing with that one.
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This is an example of being educated beyond your ability to learn.
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And that person wants kids to be taught about the virtues of ants. It’s like they read Starship Troopers and got confused who the good guys were supposed to be.
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yep.
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I heard about the Menace of Children’s Books too. It’s very telling that the researcher glorifies the ant. After all, from our perspective, ants lack individuality, living only to serve their queen.
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The virtues of ants — and bees — are indeed a stock lesson from days of old. Human beings do, after all, have to live in society.
To be sure, she’d probably revolt if she actually got what she asked for.
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You make a good point, but consider the etymology — and connotation — of the word “myrmidon.” It literally means “ant-man,” and it implies unquestioning loyalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmidons
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Any time the Grasshopper and the Ant story is retold today… inevitably, the hardworking ant is portrayed as a chump… and the lazy grasshopper is rewritten as being a fun musician or something that ultimately gets payed to play music for the ants during the winter.
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I believe the Wikipedia article on the story offers the “alternate explanation” that the ants were selfish, and refers to another Aesop fable for “support”.
I edited it to point out that the animals in one fable to another are not likely to be the same ones, as some die in multiple stories.
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:facepalm:
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I don’t know about that. Pixar did a pretty good job with A Bug’s Life.
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Can’t remember that one. I was thinking specifically of folksy storyteller conventions/events/festivals where these guys often retell some of the classics. The new twist on the grasshopper is something I’ve heard more than once….
Another place to pick up on this is children’s theater. A lot of them will take these classic fables and retell them in cutesy ways. But the changes all tend to be in line with modern ideology. The Gods of the Copybook headings will not be amused.
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But the Gods of the Marketplace love it.
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definitely not.
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I think I first saw that interpretation in a very old Disney short.
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He wasn’t cool– the only reason he survived was the generosity of the ants, and he recognized it was nothing he was entitled to, and even sang about how he’d learned his lesson.
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And to further the doing of no harm via the Human Wave, reminder that
a) the Clarion West Write-a-thon signup deadline is June 22, and
b) the Human Wave Garage Sale and Promo Blitz is happening in early August. Email me at (firstname)DOT(lastname) at the gmail thingy to get on the list.
Sneaky subversion can work–I got a hardcore liberal to thank me for “showing the guy’s point of view”(!) with a *very* gentle mention of the horrors of HR-enforced “everything is harassment” policies. (evil grin). I only put the line in to be funny, honest!
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“Computers Don’t Argue” by Gordon R. Dickson was a 1965 Nebula-nominated short (same year as Repent, Harlequin …) making a very good point on the way in which bureaucratic mills grind exceedingly fine.
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Reminds me of the infamous “last psychology class” I had in college, when they told us “Yeah, so, each of the different psychological theories you have are based on different philosophies, and all of them are fundamentally flawed, and this class explains how and why.” (which I really believed should have been the first psychology class in the major, but ah well.)
In that class, they introduced a theory of “hermaneutic” psychology, where it’s essentially people telling themselves and each other stories. If you can change the stories that someone is telling themselves, you can help them cope with different issues, increase confidence, that kind of thing. Not useful in some cases, but I saw the value in it at the time, because story is a powerful thing.
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As long as the patient involved has a basically “normal” brain (by which I mean, no issues like schizophrenia that NEED drugs to function well), I can see storytelling as being a powerful tool to help change someone’s view on life. I had a roommate once who probably had nothing wrong with his brain, but the story he told himself about the world was that it was out to get him, that he was a victim, and that none of the bad things that happened to him were his fault. From an outsider’s perspective, I could see that the reason he couldn’t find a job was that he was destroying his own motivation, and that if he’d just change the story he told himself, he’d do much better — but I could not persuade him of that. Because the “I’m a victim” story was so much more psychologically comforting than the “I’m screwing up my own life” story that would have been closer to the truth.
That was the first roommate I ever had to kick out. I would never have moved in with him in the first place, except that I only learned about his victim-complex mentality after I moved in with him. Now I always make a habit of “interviewing” potential roommates before I agree to move in with them, to avoid getting into any other situations like this one.
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Once upon a time, a black student went to a college and heard that a professor never gave any black students more than a C- in a given class. But he needed it for his major. So he went in and worked his tail off.
He got a B+.
His social circle froze on him. Much nicer to be a victim than to realize you got a poor grade for slacking off in a tough course.
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I have a college acquaintance whom we set up with one of Dan’s college acquaintances. We came to the US at the same time.
I tried to go finish my degree, but didn’t, because I got pregnant and… it’s a long story. At any rate, I was already overeducated and short of teaching in college, I didn’t NEED a phd. And I’d rather write.
Was I discriminated against? Eh. Idiots will act like idiots. They still do. But I also get discounts at Greek, Russian and Italian groceries, without anyone asking where I’m from (Grin.) Yes, some people think I’m mentally slow when they hear my accent. Most of these people are academics of medical doctors, and it gives me a chance to work off my aggressive impulses and cut them down with quips.
My acquaintance, OTOH had more affluent parents who insisted on paying for her to finish her degree here. They didn’t have our exact degree, and she spoke Spanish, so she went into Hispanic studies. A few years later, she was working retail and complaining about people discriminating against her. Last I heard of her, we called after losing touch for a while and were informed she didn’t want to speak to us, because we’d clearly snubbed her since I was a “big name” published author and she wasn’t. (Let me point out we lost touch because they moved to Portugal and back twice. Also at the time I was supposedly snubbing her, it was 2003 and I thought I’d never publish again. Yeah.)
Look, I made a decision early on that yeah, people would discriminate, but I refused to believe there were more of those than would discriminate against me for being short, or slightly overweight, or over twenty five, or not dressing how they thought I should. Everyone is discriminated against. You just shouldn’t seize on it as an excuse.
To put it another way: my brother is dismally bad at art. One of those people who will screw up stick figures. He was otherwise a model student. My parents didn’t expect me to be better than my brother (cultural, but other reasons too) and so they told me early on that it was okay to have Cs and Ds in art. I did, until I got out of highschool. The rest were As and Bs. It took till I was an adult to find out I REALLY liked art and had some talent in it. But I’d been given pre-permission to fail.
My best friend growing up was one of three kids in my class that tested Mensa qualifying (long story, and a group from England doing the test) in elementary school. She was always a c with the occasional b student. Yes, she was appallingly dyslexic, but she could overcome it if she concentrated. But she was the 11th of 13 and her older siblings were all c students. So if she brought a c or even a d home, she was consoled, given cookies and told she’d tried.
I can attest she was brilliant (and I owe her a debt. She was my first reader/critic) but she never rose above low average in work, because she didn’t have to.
Victimhood kills.
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(There are four or five comments to which I want to respond, but, at least until the evening, I’ll restrict myself to this one.)
Yes, victimhood kills. A long time ago, a black friend in grad school had the makings of a research-caliber scientist. IMHO he was blighted precisely because the system pampered him and did not push him to extend his limits. He stands in contrast to the squadrons of hacks who have glided into cushy academic lives via affirmative action. A waste. Come to think of it, a Latino acquaintance encountered turbulence because he refused to play that game en route to tenure and beyond.
(My own career folly is a separate matter…)
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“Yes, some people think I’m mentally slow when they hear my accent. Most of these people are academics of medical doctors”
WTF?! They’ve never interacted with people with accents?!
I couldn’t have made it through college without being able to deal with multiple accents — various Indian, Korean, Chinese, Polish, redneck — just from the professors and instructors! I almost felt sorry for them for having to deal with American accents from Yooper to Chicago to Kentucky and St. Louis.
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A friend of mine was an Army drill instructor for a few years. He volunteered to go back to Nam to get out of it. He said one of the hardest things he had to deal with was language and accents. Every new platoon had at least one person who didn’t speak English, or spoke it poorly. He had a funny anecdote that one of the guys that he had the hardest time understanding was a German who spoke eleven languages, but had very poor English. Tom spoke German fluently, but refused to speak it, or allow the recruit to speak it, unless it would have caused a very unsafe condition. Tom said he used to pull the guy aside and read him the riot act in German, then shove him back into ranks and tell the entire platoon what to do in English.
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Rob, a woman I know, who is from Peru, with an accent superficially similar to Sarah’s (though I’m sure THEY would say they are totally different-sounding), tells me that when she misunderstands something that is said, and asks people to repeat, she is frequently treated like she is dumb, even though the people she is talking to have to ask her to repeat things often, due to her accent.
This woman is intelligent, driven, and has gone from being a new immigrant about 10-12 years ago to being a production manager for a product line at Procter & Gamble here, after nearly leaving her husband and going home because she originally had such a hard time getting used to this country’s differences. So what Sarah said didn’t really surprise me.
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It’s actually impossible for our accents to be similar — though you might have classed them that way. A lot of people hear me and say I have a Spanish Accent — but they only say that after finding out I’m Portuguese. I actually had someone say I sounded like Ricky Ricardo. Look, Portuguese sounds are completely different from Spanish sounds — all of them pretty much. I can’t MAKE most Spanish sounds. The only thing we have in common is the long and short e confusion. The Rs are different, Portuguese don’t have the same aspiration sounds, etc. BUT the human ear is an amazing organ, and people ear what they expect to ear. For instance, my first boss in the US thought Alice — pronounced like Elise in English — was the same as Feliz. Because I was “from somewhere in South America.”
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I understand what you’re saying, but you should also understand that, besides one of my wife’s doctors (who is Czech, so her accent is far different also), she is the ONLY person I know who has an accent other than “Hillbilly”. So to ME, they sound “superficially similar”. I even predicted you would say they were very different. In fact, when I finally played, a few days ago, the whole interview you did with Stephen Green, I was starting to pick up the differences, but I would have to spend more time to really understand.
Of course, I still think it’s hilarious that someone I met on the bus, who is from South America, is married to a guy I graduated High School with.
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It’s a small world. But yeah, if it’s the only accent you ever heard it would sound similar. Heck, it might sound similar anyway, if you had this idea that I was from the same area (I know you don’t.) The human ability to hear the expected is extraordinary. If you ever go to a foreign country do me a favor. Go into a room, close the door, when there are people talking across the house/outside the room. You’ll “hear” them in English. GUARANTEED. My host parents sounded like they were talking Portuguese, downstairs in the kitchen when I was in my room, and now, when I go to Portugal, if my parents are far away enough I have to make an effort at listening, they’ll sound like they’re speaking English. Fortunately the orientation for exchange had informed me of this, so I didn’t go all paranoid. But it’s an universal effect. I had to warn my kids of it. :)
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Oh, I really want to try that now. I’m completely fascinated by things like that.
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Apparently the brain does this. It’s sort of like seeing shapes in a blog, or that sort of thing. Yeah, it’s fun, but when we’re traveling abroad, now my default mode is English, it’s FREAKY. Let’s just say the way the sounds assemble is not always nice. “Did the waiter just tell the busboy they’re going to fry us?” Something my brother says a lot “vamos embora” — “let’s go” — sounds to the English-trained ear as “Fuzz Butt” For the longest time Dan suspected my brother of nicknaming him that. (And when he realized what it was, for the longest time in our family “fuzz butt” meant “let’s go.” We’re weird that way.)
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I would argue that they would sound similar, both of you are women, which is a sort of accent of its own, and while you may say Portuguese and Spanish sounds are different, I recall a white male missionaries son I went to school with who spoke both, and I couldn’t tell which he was speaking. Both have that lilting Latin flavor to them, rather than say the much more guttural flavor of German.
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Then he spoke both very badly.
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Listened to your VodkaPundit interview, and decided it’s more evidence that I can’t do accents because your accent sounded RUSSIAN to me.
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No, no. That’s EVERYONE’s guess. I sound more Russian than Portuguese. Whatever the Portuguese, overlay British accent and slight midrange hearing loss did, it made that. Dot’s husband says I sound like South African Portuguese accent and that’s possible, but I don’t sound PORTUGUESE accent. In fact, last time I had honest work that wasn’t teaching, my boss was Russian and he refused to believe I wasn’t. Every other morning he’d walk behind me and say something in Russian, and when I said “I still don’t speak Russian, Alexander.” he’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “Sure. Portugal. Bah, we all said what we had to say to get in during the cold war.” :-P
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I must admit, you sound somewhat like Russian to my ear – but it’s off, because it’s definitely not a Russian Far East accent. Which only proves that I go from familiar accents to try to place something foreign, and I know no other Portuguese.
On the other hand, immediately upon meeting you in the flesh, my darling man was somewhere between homesick and experiencing that strange flowering of joy of finding the unexpectedly familiar and long-lost in a foreign environment. Beyond the fact that you are a beautiful and highly intelligent woman, I think he looks forward to seeing you again so he can hear those familiar cadences.
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Well, I feel SLIGHTLY better!
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Sure, I say that and she threatens to bean me. YOU say it and you get away with it …
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I’m cuter. So are my minions.
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I don’t know. I might demand more pictures of the leetle minion who is a total cutie…
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You and all my relatives; poor boy has dozens of pictures… all still on the camera.
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I see you practice Hoyt photography. ONE year Dan compiled pictures of the guys and got them to the grandparents. Most of the time they stay in the camera.
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Well, I ain’t reproducing just to suck up to Sarah.
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I don’t think that’s why Foxfier did it!
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Yah, but you don’t know.
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However, to the original point — I also have mid range hearing loss. If I am somewhere really noisy, I can’t understand a word, though my mind often assembles coherent sentences from loose sounds, so I THINK I heard. I imagine I sound like a total idiot then.
However, it’s the total package. Most of the time I forget to got to the hairdresser and bum around in jeans and a t-shirt/sweatshirt (sometimes pretty ones) I am short, dark haired, olive skinned, a bit over weight. Clearly, I came over the border and have minimal education. (No, I don’t look Mexican, but lots of people THINK I do. Not that Mexicans or South Americans are stupid. It’s just easier to get in from there than from Portugal.) Hence, they start explaining things to me about how this means… GAH>
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Suggest that she start cupping her ear like she’s a bit deaf. I did it after I noticed background noises kill my ability to understand, and noticed I get empathy instead of “you’re an idiot.” (no accent, but several small children.)
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A fact all too many Americans seem able to grasp is that the discrimination they experience here in America is
a) often the fault of the d*mn chip on their effing shoulder and
b) comparatively mild compared to what discrimination is like in the rest of the world. Seriously, when you rank discrimination on a scale of 1 to 10, what you get in America is a paper cut
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Oh yes.
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See, I got that class in my first semester, and ran screaming all the way into languages ;)
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The “abusive father” stereotype (usually physically/emotionally abusive rather than sexually) is one thing that’ll throw me right out of a book, because it instantly makes me suspect the author has An Axe To Grind. I vaguely remember picking up a book, seeing the protagonist get treated like dirt by her innkeeper father who basically used her as slave labor, and mentally rolling my eyes and being unable to take the rest of the book seriously. Can’t remember which book it was — I think it might have been one of Lackey’s Valdemar series, but I really couldn’t tell you for sure. But I distinctly remember how it made me suspect the rest of the book of having An Agenda, and
destroyedgreatly lessened my enjoyment of the story. (I recall the writing being at least good enough that I kept going rather than throwing the book against the wall).LikeLike
Lackey is big on the abusive father being a source of her characters’ woes.
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Huh. Makes me wonder if she thinks that’s a common thing in real life or something. From what I can tell, absent fathers are a much bigger problem these days… but somehow I don’t see that showing up in too many novels. Because (putting my cynical cap on) that might give the impression that men (specifically fathers) are good, positive influences, and how does that win you any points with the PC crowd?
(Note that I’m not saying that this is Lackey’s motivation for overusing that trope. I don’t know her, and haven’t read enough of her writing to be able to make informed guesses about her motives. In the absence of knowledge, I prefer to refrain from speculating about specific people; the above is meant more as a criticism of the modern-feminist, “men are the source of all evil” worldview.)
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She has no children, and from interaction with her, she gets her ideas of fathers, teachers, schools, etc from the media and other fiction books.
So, yeah, she really thinks that.
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I can respect an honestly wrong* conviction a lot more than I can, say, a calculated agenda.
* By which I mean “incorrect”, not “morally wrong”
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She might also have experienced it. Also, her fans tend to reinforce it because they are the people who went through it — her VOCAL fans — so she has no idea it’s a small minority of ALL readers.
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Kids who run away from home and end up on the street tend to feature heavily in her SERRAted Edge series, as I recall… and it was clear to me from reading those books that her primary concern was for the good of those kids, rather than deliberately* bashing fathers. (As I recall, she includes a little blurb in the back of the book about shelters for runaway kids, and a hotline number to call should any of her readers actually find themselves in such situations.) Which inclines me to cut her quite a bit of slack, because she seems to be acting out of misplaced concern rather than out of conscious malice.
* She’s still contributing to the general anti-male zeitgeist by using those stereotypes, as you pointed out in your post… but since she seems not to be doing it on purpose, I find it a lot easier to forgive her.
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I loved Charles de Lint’s stories, and still do the older ones but abused kids, especially sexually abused kids, and kids who ended up as runaways because of that reason got to be a stable in his stories at some point which is the main reason why I haven’t read him lately. It got predictable.
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The hotline information is in the foreword, too, and before the author’s note at the end. Charity info too, iirc.
I think she’s often wrong, but good hearted and not malicious, with really easy to remove biases. And tells stories with near magical skill.
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I suspect some sort of anti-Catholic history, though. Oy.
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Really, I would have put that as anti-Christian, since she also has Protestant minister villians in multiple stories. It got to be so bad that I haven’t read any of here books in a long while, and some I highly enjoyed.
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Yes, that seriously bothers me. I think though again, she believes what she sees on TV…
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I don’t doubt she dislikes all Christian groups, but it just gets so tiring that every Evil Church save one is Catholic with a paint job. (There was one baptist survivalist group.)
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One series I threw across the room– she justified setting up all the deaths resulting from the creation of the Church of England (with vision-clips) because it was good for the elves.
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Eh, that’s not a pecularity of hers. The Pillar of the Community can be recognized as the villain as he first appears, often enough. Along with what Sherwood Smith so aptly dubs the Evil Priests in Red.
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Well, there is Write What You Know. Some writers stick firmly to the same sorts of characters in the same plots and show their genius or lack thereof by their variety — and when they stray, show how wise they were to stick to it.
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she gets her ideas of fathers, teachers, schools, etc from the media and other fiction books.
I really disliked her story in a recent Baen Christmas collection. Breaking a promise (to support his wife’s artistic abilities) and stifling their daughter’s aspirations was considered sufficient cause to murder the father. Never mind that would leave the girl an orphan (in Victorian England?) and lead to grinding poverty. (A family “friend” was supposed to take care of her but I was having trouble believing it.)
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Yeah, dh and I had to stop reading her back in the day because we got so very tired of it … started calling her Mercedes Lacking in frustration. I’ve been leery of women fantasy authors ever since. So sue me.
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I keep hearing people say they’d rather have their molars pulled out without anesthesia than try new female authors. Sigh.
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Try new female authors? Splendid idea!
I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, said cunning old Fury: I’ll try the whole lot, and condemn them to death.
Authors who happen to be female, OTOH, are a whore of a different off-colour.
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I judge authors on their work not their gender. I maybe weird but it’s the blurb– not the cover that entices me. I’m more word than picture oriented.
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Agreed. Too few good authors to discriminate on the basis of gender or genre. I am an indiscriminate reader! (Wait; what? Err …)
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Me too. A cover needs to be really repulsive (look up Hardcover cover Draw One In The Dark) to put me off a book.
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A good cover, not just an attractive one, but one that evokes a style of similar books in the genre, is very important to book sales. Some publishers do a better job than others in crafting a cover.
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I do, too, because I’m too dense to figure out what their gender is if it’s not unambiguous, and even then I understand that there are some who have sex-changed pen names.
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I’m sorry, that came out sounding more dogmatic than I intended. Also, since the rise of epub, not being limited to what’s on the store shelf, it’s changing everything about finding new authors/works. For awhile there, though … you know ….
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No, I understand, I have the same issue, and for a long time female names made me suspicious. They’d have a higher bar than males, because I’d been bitten so often. And of course, you couldn’t JUST download a sample. Now I can, and I can delete it if my head explodes. People used to frown on standing in the isle reading a quarter of the book… (I’ve been thrown out of bookstores in four European countries…)
However, I keep seeing this all over the net, in general about the not-ladies of SFWA. “All female authors are crazy. I won’t read anyone who is female. I’d rather have brain surgery performed with flint knives.” And everytime I read that my heart sinks.
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Not me. I’m not necessarily the most enlightened Neandertal in town but I’ll read anything regardless of whether the author is male or female. Of course, at the rate I read, I have to …
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Well, to be honest DST has an abusive father… but there are REASONS for that…
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He’s not just an abusive father, like everyone has (/snark). HE is a monster. A very special monster. So OK, every story needs a monster. :)
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Yes. The Mules wouldn’t consider themselves human, which is part of the issue. they weren’t RAISED to think of themselves as human — which sort of destroyed them from the beginning.
Also, technically, he’s not her father.
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That was no father, that was her sire. Dam.
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Carp. At speed.
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Hah – your carp am wasted. Know thou that I am defended by an aerial circus, a squadron of miniature biplanes piloted by the finest kittens, aerial acrobatics dedicated to ensuring that no fish, no matter how flung, will pass their perimeter.
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The Cat in the Ring squadron?
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Are you sure they aren’t kzinti?
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Rickenbacker would be surprised if so.
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At this point, having pondered the matter, I observe that plot reasons are not the only possible reasons. Characterization may matter too. And characters need some clutter in their backgrounds to avoid being too thin.
To take an example: Order of the Stick. Of the six main characters, three have serious Daddy Issues, of which only one is really integral to the plot. Emotional abuse rather than physical, to be sure —
SPOILER WARNING!!!!!
Roy’s father was emotionally abusive of his son, especially when Roy wanted to be a fighter like his grandfather, not a wizard like his father. When Roy was a small boy, his father was so negligent that he caused the death of Roy’s younger brother; we don’t know the details, except that Roy knew at the time that it was dangerous.
Elan’s father is an evil tyrant, who can not realize what his son would like and dislike because Elan’s good. Indeed, recently, even though he’s a rather childish, idealistic and foolish character, Elan went through some character development in which he realized that his mother had divorced his father for his sake, and both of them were better off without him, and so gave up his childish dream of their reuniting. (The father is a major character so this is the plot-relevant one.)
Halley’s father is the most excusable since he was doing his best and trying to raise her in a city that inspires paranoia at any time, and is troubled at the thought that he might have harmed her. Still, the mistrust he inculcated in her nearly ruined her life and her chance at love.
END SPOILER WARNING
The real problem is the popularity of the trope, in which any given case is not guilty, any more than any given raindrop is responsible for the flood.
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I’ve read a couple of Lackey’s books, and noticed the sequence. Even in “The Lark and the Wren”, it’s prevalent. There, the early antagonist was a scheming mother, rather than a father, who was totally absent from the book.
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The thing I remember, I think about that book, was the rigid centralized control that a medieval society held over the repertory of songs.
Furthermore, the Church approved of the genuine medieval love songs. The rebels sang more modern in sentiment ones.
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Secret Organization Of Free Spirited Bards With Elf Friends, vs dead, well-trained, well funded, officially promoted band of musicians with colleges and stuff who think everybody that’s not totally human– and their kind of human– isn’t human. -.-
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I vaguely remember picking up a book, seeing the protagonist get treated like dirt by her innkeeper father who basically used her as slave labor, and mentally rolling my eyes and being unable to take the rest of the book seriously
Some of her stuff just BEGS to be interpreted as a spoiled, oblivious brat– or worse– telling their story.
There’s one book she did that’s urban fantasy, around an American Indian character, where the first read bugged me… I went back years later and re-read it, and realized it was the most racist, racially obsessed work I’d ever read. The POV character was two types of Indian, and thus a victim, but if anybody was even a little not-Indian… they were crud. If they “acted white” as anything but a plot? Either going to die, going to convert or evil. etc.
The innkeeper example has me thinking “Gee, because working like a dog was SO unusual in that time and place, and daddy was TOTALLY not going to be doing the same….” (A flaw I see in myself is the “only what I’m doing is real” depression thing; I take out the trash, it’s a big to do; my husband does it, and it’s just a five minute job.)
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It is a basic of human psychology that we value that which we give up for another more highly than we estimate the value of what they give up for us. Taking that trash out is a disruption of your routine which requires you dry out your hands and ruin your nails with the extra washing.
His getting up from the NBA Game Six to fetch a box of butter for tomorrow’s breakfast for you because you don’t like going into the basement/garage after sundown is a trivial inconvenience; after all, the game was already in its second overtime, so how good could it be?
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Which is why in a marriage if you want to split everything 50-50 — it won’t work. You need to give more than you get in your own eyes.
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Oh yeah — it really helps a marriage if split things 70 – 30 each.
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Does…if both sides feel like they’re getting 70.
It’s a matter of mindset/perspective. It is best if both sides give roughly what they get– but it’s BAD if both sides are focusing on getting at least what they give.
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We tend to try to give — eh. We like each other — and never worry about what we get, unless, say, you’re really ill and the other fails to notice and make allowances (it’s happened once or twice for each of us, usually because the other person was also coming down with something and/or buried under work.) I won’t hold us up as a model. It’s a marriage of Odds. BUT we have been married 28 years.
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I give Jean 100% of what I am. She does the same for me. We’ve been married 47 years, and are still happy with one another. ‘Nuff said.
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On this principle?
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Sort of– but you add in that if you know a hat by “feel” and believe it’s the purest white possible, then OF COURSE it’s better than all the gray hats.
(On a side note– I realize that part of why I give Eddings a pass on his “heroes” and their… negotiable heroism…. is because it’s just a fairy tale. It’s OK to kill folks and take their stuff, or lie and steal from the Villain, an a fairy tale. It just takes some airs by trying to…de-sugar the fairy tale stuff.)
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Left a lot of sugar on. I was once contemplating some scenes in Eddings’s works and what they would feel like, treated more realistically. It was creepy.
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Goodness, yes. Liberal use of “rule of funny,” too.
One of those things that is not to be taken seriously in the least, even though the story takes itself relatively seriously.
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Hey, I didn’t get along all that well with my Dad. He’s been dead now for a few years, and I’m in my sixties m’self, so I reckon it’s up to me to get over the problems, and I probably won’t do it very well, because, well, I’m in my sixties, and it’s hard to turn into somebody else when you’re old.
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I got turned off of Lackey early. It seemed to me that everything of hers I picked up was a feminist rant.
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It wasn’t that that turned me off. I don’t know what it is, just that I didn’t like her work.
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That’s interesting. I LIKE her work, I just feel like the repetitive theme is off-putting after a while.
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It doesn’t feel like you followed the “tell no harm” principle in “A Few Good Men”. The men are all evil except the gay ones. It’s an impressively PC book except for the libertarian part.
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Not nearly all the men are evil. In fact, Nat’s dad is not, Simon is not, the guy at the farmer they stay are not. Heck, some of the younger Good Men are not. If you saw all men as being evil, you were using your own tinted glasses. For reasons of gen-engineering, most of the people in power i.e. the GOOD MEN are evil. That is the world setup — they’re also the government, btw. As for except the gay ones quip — very funny. The only gay ones are the main characters, and a couple of minor characters, and one of those while not evil annoys Luce profoundly. He does also mention an outright evil gay couple, in passing. Or at least an ill-intentioned one. Again, if you saw that, you were wearing VERY funny glasses.
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Sure, I can only see things through my own eyes, but evil men rule the world and the hero is gay seems very PC to me.
So, if I’m not untypical, then you have (apparently) unintentionally violated “tell no harm” for some portion of your audience. If you think I’m the only reader who sees it this way (or just one of a few), then, by all means, ignore my feedback.
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So in brett-land men can’t be evil and the bad guys? I don’t get it. If she’d made the bad guys female she’d have got called sexist. They’re male so she’s pc.
See this is the problem with you vileprogs — there’s no winning with you.
For the record. I know Sarah personally. She writes the characters in a way that works for the book. Not to feed nor to offend the biases of her audience. Sometimes she has profound disagreements with those characters’ attitudes.
See Niven’s Law, below.
Once more with feeling, Brett — don’t be an idiot.
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Brett, this is actually pretty close to “I hate you because penguins.” If I wrote a book about Stalin, in which a gay man escapes Russia, would it be “impressively PC”? Does this mean I can’t write books with gay heroes because they’ll be impressively PC?
One thing is to see the world through your own bias — the other is to ignore the worldbuilding. All the mules were male, so they wouldn’t reproduce and overtake REAL humans. That’s why all the good men are male. (And some of their kids aren’t evil. If you live thousands of years and canibalize your own “kids” you’ll be pretty evil yourself, even if you didn’t star that way.) We see EXACTLY one of those on camera, and we don’t know how evil he is, other than being in power and wanting to stay that way. I don’t recall saying anything about ALL men being powerful and evil and all women powerless. I do, however, have men who are good, and bad, and a mixed bag. So… the rulers are bad. If this makes for “an impressively PC book” I tip my hat to you. Powerful penguins in your head.
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Oh, incidentally, if you read the rest of the series, not all Good Men are straight. I personally have my doubts about Thena’s dad, but his sex life is not something I’d approach without a gas mask and a protective suit, so we don’t go into it.
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Did you even read the book? If you did, you would see that not all straight men in it are evil. In fact, the vast majority of the men in the book are anything but evil. They certainly aren’t all gay. But then, maybe you just have an issue with the main characters being gay.
If you had read Darkship Thieves or Darkship Renegades, or even really read A Few Good Men, you’d see the foolishness of your comment. How many male characters are there in any one of those books? Now, how many are gay or straight? And of those, how many are “evil”?
Before you go off on the “all the rulers are male and evil and that proves my point”, I’d remind you that they aren’t all evil, especially in AFGM. So, before you start trying to paint the story with your own paintbrush, go back and really read it first. And then present actual text evidence to support your position.
But that’s just my opinion — and, btw, I have read all the books, several times, which is why I find your statements not only confusing but ludicrous.
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I have a test. Let’s give AFGM to a selected group of SFWA not-ladies and watch the reaction. If it’s not like a vampire to garlic, I will has a sad. Since the Not-Ladies are high priestesses of PC, the test should be valid. If they rush to nominate it for a Nebula, I shall assume something went horribly wrong and I wrote PC cannon! Anyone care to place a SMALL wager on the chances of that happening?
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I did note that I found it PC EXCEPT for the libertarian part which will make it unlikely to get you a Nebula nomination.
I was just trying to provide some subjective reader feedback. Sorry to have riled everyone up.
The curse of authorship is that the information conveyed is not necessarily what the writer intended, but rather what the reader chooses to infer.
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Dude, seriously, we’ve been NICE so far. You really REALLY want to let it go before Kate “The Shredder” Paulk gets hold of you…
And again, seen Niven’s Law, below.
You’re being an idiot Brett, quit.
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“Subjective reader feedback” – well, my goodness, is that ever the truth! You are being **subjective** to the point of imbecility. You are in your own little, special snowflake universe. “What the reader chooses to infer” – yep. That’s what we’ve been telling you, Bret old boy – you’re inferring things into a book you never read that somebody has *told* you to infer.
Therefore, your “opinions” are worthless chaff, to be blown away at the slightest breath of reason.
If you, the reader, can “choose to infer” whatever you want, may I suggest you confine yourself to the Oxford English Dictionary (unabridged)? It has all the words in it, and you can infer them in any order you want. You’ll never have to read anything an author put together again.
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And the curse of readership is that you will get called out when you fail to note major parts/portions of a book that everyone else can see as plainly as their reflection in a well-lit mirror. Perhaps you should consider that and ask yourself if maybe you didn’t see what you wanted to see instead of what was actually written IN ALL OF THE DARKSHIP UNIVERSE NOVELS! (and yes, I do mean to yell at the end)
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To be fair, perhaps Bret believes in postmodernism, in which case what he sees is what is there FOR HIM. I’ve often wondered why postmodernists bother to read anything beyond “see spot run” interpreted different ways. OTOH maybe they don’t.
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C’mon, guys, lighten up. The man is expressing his opinion of how the book hit him. Assuming he’s honest, then that’s what it is. He’s not making a “thing” about it. And even if he were (politely), why wouldn’t we let him say so (free speech and all that)? Sauce for the goose…
Let’s save the red alert for the real trolls. :)
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Karen,
It’s not even VAGUELY close to what the book is, as anyone who has read it can testify. And I resent being called PC when I’m so non-PC I’ll never reap THOSE rewards. In fact you can say I threw away my career for NOT being PC, so being accused of being PC is mind-boggling and offensive. Also Brett’s argument boils down to “that’s what I see” — and I’m sorry, that is post modernistic pap.
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Oh, he’s also accusing me of hypocrisy, and backing it up with nothing more than “because that’s how I see it.”
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At the risk of drawing fire myself…
I don’t think I would assume that every commenter on your blog has been here long enough to know in detail all your personal history, and therefore I wouldn’t assume that a comment about the book is necessarily a critique about your life and career. Even a comment about hypocrisy could be construed to relate to just the text of this article, and nothing wider.
I haven’t heard much trollish in this discussion myself, just a lot of defensive fire. A book that strongly refers to the American Revolution is making a point, after all. It’s not surprising that other points are perceived, whether intended or not. When a reader tells me something he perceived about a book I wrote that seems boneheaded, I can’t really declare him to be “wrong”. I might consider him dumb, or blind, or any number of rhetorically comforting adjectives, but I also have to believe that if that’s the impression he got, then probably I could have expressed things a bit more clearly. Or maybe that wouldn’t make any difference.
Either way, I’m with Queen Liz about not wanting to make a window of men’s souls. I do find the jumping all over this sort of expressed opinion a bit disappointing (and inhospitable). Wouldn’t it be more interesting to draw it out into an engaging discussion instead of circling the wagons?
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Karen — he’s been here long enough.
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Also, I’m sorry, but unless you’ve read the book (and no, you’re not obligated to — I read blogs of writers I don’t buy) you wouldn’t know the comment is trollish, but it is. Saying every straight male is evil is either trollish or deranged. The villains are an oppressive regime that has been maintained for 500 years. For reasons of bioengineering, the rulers are male. BUT even among the rulers not all are evil — Simon and Jan for ex. And certainly among the non rulers, most of the men who appear on stage and are named are decent folk, though some are profoundly weird. (That pig is wearing an apron.) I didn’t do that on purpose, mind, I just don’t see straight men as evil.
I will confess to using a cliche for the secret police. No time to make them individuals before I killed them.
Anyway — it’s not circling the wagons. I said before that what gets me most in the raw is criticism I CAN’T UNDERSTAND. I.e. “I hate you because Penguins.” If you’d read the book, you’d know Bret’s comes close to that, and instead of explaining how these people — whom I named in my first response — are evil, he defaulted to the post modernist “It’s the reader’s perception and you can’t question it.”
If that’s not trollish, it’s insane. Take your pick.
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Karen – are you saying you write books, or was that sort of a generic “IF I wrote books…”? If you write books and somebody comes and tells you on your blog: “I hated your book because all the females had hairy armpits and smelled bad” and you had mentioned *one* female who had a hygiene problem – would you say philosophically, “Ah, well, it’s what that reader read, even though I wrote nothing of the sort, it’s the reader’s right to see whatever the reader wants to see in what I sweat bullets over writing a certain way”? Or would you be rather put out that it seemed likely somebody told that reader that’s what you did, and the reader had never actually read the book at all? I’d bet bucks to navy beans it would be the latter.
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Bret has been here long enough for most of us to automatically assume trollish (or at very least highly anti-Sarah) comments as soon as we see his name, which probably increases the speed and volume of the return volley. However I would like to point out that some of the villians are also gay, which makes the villians straight, heroes gay trope that Bret tries to point out ridiculous.
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Kitteh-Dragon,
Not only does she write books, but she writes good ones. :)
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And folks are expressing their opinions about how the opinion hit them. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, indeed.
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And at some point, you have to consider unstated message which looks a lot like “I am going to offer this criticism. And my statement of critique should be immune to criticism.”
The Huns are a well-meaning, good humored and occasionally sharp-elbowed crowd. I’ve been on the receiving end myself when something I said was insufficiently clear or misinterpreted, and I elbowed right back. In this case, though, I think the statement was clear enough, and the defense thereof was a restatement of “Hey! You can’t critique my critique!”
(Be very glad that I’m not posting an Xzibit “Yo Dawg, I heard you like critique” picture here.)
The Huns have a very low tolerance for what they perceive as drek, particularly of the deconstructionist, Marxist, critical theory type. There’s a reason Musashi Miyamoto said the samurai should study both sword and pen – words can (and occasionally should) cut. The Huns exemplify that thought.
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Okay, once I thought of it, I couldn’t NOT do it.
WARNING: IRONIC XZIBIT PICTURE LINK.
http://madpoet.tumblr.com/image/53441789256
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I don’t think you read the same “A Few Good Men” that I did. (And which I just re-read four days ago). Perhaps you are confused with the movie of the same name?
Of perhaps you are just so upset that an author made you care about a gay protagonist that you’re thrashing around and seeing evil where none exists. Where, pray tell, is the evil in Sam? In Simon? In Mr. Long? No, don’t worry, I’m not going to list all the non-gay, non-evil males in the book. Which you haven’t read, anyway. Go watch your movie again. “You can’t handle the truth.”
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Bret,
This is kind of a broad brush here. ALL the men are evil except Nat and Luce? Could you perhaps explain how Nat’s brothers are evil? His father? The farmers who help and shelter Nat and Luce?
I’ll wait until you have an answer for me.
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“The men are all evil except the gay ones.”???? WTF? Did you read that book with one eye shut?
All the men except Nat’s dad, Simon, all the people we meet during Luce’s recovery in America, all of the broomers in Simon’s, Nat’s and Luce’s lair …
The “Good Men” aren’t men (they’re mules) and aren’t good (they’re the living embodiment of Power Corrupts.) The men working for them, guarding their prisons and policing their foes are not evil, they are useful idiots.
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See, if he’d started this with “The fathers in DST and AFGM are evil cliches, aren’t they?” that would be different and it would be an opening for discussion. Are they fathers? Not technically. Are they cliches? No, I took care to draw them out not to be so — at least as fathers. But when you open by saying “the men are all evil unless they’re gay” I can’t even make sense of it beyond “I hate you because penguins!”
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I just noticed this line in your post, which I had somehow missed on my first readthrough:
… having the reputation serves people warning they’re dealing with a fully loaded Sarah and that she can go off at any moment.
The Four Laws of Sarah Safety:
1. All Sarahs should be considered loaded at all times.
2. Never point a Sarah at any target you are not willing to destroy. Or at least, utterly humiliate.
3. Be sure of the target and what philosophies lie behind it.
4. Avoid Sarah’s hot buttons until the target is within sight.
:-P
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LOL.
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Were Jeff Cooper still alive, I’m confident he’d endorse those rules.
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Uh, Bret, you’re a nitwit.
In Darkship Thieves Nat tortures Luce’s “father” to death. Nat is ruthless as hell and Luce freely admits to being a monster. The Good Men are evil of course but that’s what they have to be. Nat’s family are mostly straight and they’re not evil.
My guess is you’re reading your own biasses into the story and blaming the author.
Do try to remember Niven’s law.
“There is a technical, literary term for the people who mistake the attitudes and biases of characters in a story for those of the author. That term is ‘idiot.'”
Don’t be an idiot Bret.
Either you’re breaking Niven’s Law, or you have some issues with your own sexuality. In the former I repeat — don’t be an idiot Bret. In the latter I’m not qualified to assist you, but I’m sure your therapist will be gratified you’ve had a break through.
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A tip of the hat to J. K. Rowling for Arthur Weasley.
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Yes, indeed.
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Really? I always saw Arthur as the magical equivalent to the bumbling husband, controlled by his wife. Of course, when the going gets tough, so does he, but mostly the other.
In general, though, I thought she had a nice mix of good, bad, and indifferent characters.
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Arthur Weasely is indeed somewhat of a cliche — at the beginning. But that is alleviated by the character’s arc through the story, especially his handling of truly serious matters, such as Ginny’s experience of Tom Riddle’s Diary, his discussion with Harry at the train station in Prisoner, or his near-death experience outside the Department of Mysteries. Consider him in his natural habitat and how much his interactions in the Ministry reflect typical office behaviour.
Many men play the bumbling husband because, while they see no sense in many of Mom’s attempts at household rule, they understand that any objections can only make matters worse by undermining her authority. Thus they handle the situation by abstracting themselves somewhat, neither challenging nor fully endorsing Mom except when forced to do so — and taking care to avoid being caught in a situation where they must do so.
Rowling took the cliche and expanded it into three dimensions, which is the proper treatment for all cliches. Innkeepers, for example, tended to be fat because they usually ate relatively well (one advantage of running a restaurant, eh?) and were jolly because that is the mask of hospitality they must don for their customers. Consider the Threnadiers in Les Miz and how they are the very model of obsequiousness until they perceive no benefit. Or consider Procrustes, the very model of geniality until you went to bed.
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I see. I’m in an area where I have never observed that behavior. Of the couples I know, either the man is the definite leader, or they have worked out a division of labor and/or authority, but present a united front to the children, or else they are dysfunctional and fight with each other over everything.
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We do the division of labor thing. If you come to us with a carpentry or household management issue, you’ll think Dan is a total non-entity. However, social scheduling or car issues, or computer issues or even plumbing and electricity, I’m the non-entity. And our specialties are so different, unless someone shares both, they tend to think each of us married beneath him/herself.
The only thing I GENUINELY had to put the pants on, that I resent, was disciplining the boys. I still do. No, we don’t “discipline” them as such now — they’re adults — but if they want us to go out and do something fun (zoo. elephants) for the day, or want some special food, or want a movie, or something they go to Dan. PARTICULARLY if they think I’ll say “no.” Particularly if they’ve given me cause to say no.
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He let her run things for the day to day with the kids and didn’t get in the way… when things went wrong, though, he pitched in.
They look the same, until something goes wrong.
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BUT these days every woman (except us gender traitors!) tends to assume that every man is out to get her – a state of insanity that doesn’t bear describing – and that is the result of the continuously dinned in and reinforced narrative.
I am minded of Larry Niven’s assertion that paranoia is a survival trait. It’s also kind of a maximin calculus (if I’m using that term right). Walking in a public place, where crimes against persons have been committed, everyone should be situationally aware, and wary of any approach. I can see how that can get extended to other arenas in life.
But, through my lead character, I’m trying to subvert the PC-grievance-feminist memes. It’s partly a thing I’ve stumbled into while trying to rationalize certain assumptions I’ve made about the character with traits that have popped up on their own as she’s developed outside of my head. (Is that even possible? The outside-the-head thing? I mean, it seems like she’s picking up traits and habits when I’m not thinking about her…) And I can only draw from life, so to speak, and so adapt traits of real women I have known, graft them onto Dolly, and then try to smooth out the lumps until the whole looks coherent.
So… what does a woman look like who not only does not have those fears, but has never been exposed to the influences from which it is thought those fears arise? I’ve had an object for comparison, and that is Heinlein’s Friday. And I’ve thought on occasion that she (Friday) is a bit wrong in the sense that, being an artificial person, she seems in every other way to be a normal person. (Bear with me; I can hear you bouncing in your chairs, getting ready to pounce.) So… Am I wrong that nature and nurture combined can make of a person who is notionally “one of us” someone so alien that even the great RAH couldn’t imagine her? Or… did he have a different point in mind?
Sorry if this seems disjointed. But Sarah asked the other day, “Why do you write.” I write — or, I write THESE particular stories — to try to figure this out. To try to learn in my own crooked autodidactical way. And I’m not even sure the syllabus makes sense, let alone that I’m learning anything worthwhile.
M
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Mark– I think that you have got it slightly twisted– I don’t know of any woman who has not been exposed to fear or fear influences. Like anything else, it is how a person reacts (or decides to react) to the fear that makes her the person she becomes….
For instance, here are ways to react–
1. The now-common reaction is to decide that the female in question is a victim and will never be anything else.
2. become paranoid
3. Personality– I know men and women who go cold or go into another dimension when they are in a fear situation and know instantly how to react.
4. Or the rest of us, who don’t always have the best instincts, but who decide on how they will react… and the body (and mind) remembers those situation…
Stamp. Stamp. IMHO a person who has never felt fear or felt fear influences can easily break at an important moment. A person like that is too sheltered.
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Tricky. It seems to me that to one extent or another these fears are pretty much endemic. You might consider the biographies of some upper class WWII era women (or their daughters). Many of them would have thought that “that sort of beastliness could only happen to others” which is probably about as close as you’ll get
In Friday Heinlein is really talking about the chains of slavery that get embedded into a person. Friday thinks she’s not really a person and hence what happens to her doesn’t matter (and she even comes up with rationalizations to help herelf cope with the idea that she’s not a real person). Externally of course everyone who meets her not only thinks she’s human but that she’s also a superwomen in almost every sense of the word however despiet that she is still trapped in her mindview as a sub-human. I don’t know what Heinlein thought but it has occured to me that Friday is really a book about slavery, racism from the viewpoint of the freed slave
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Yep.
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She’d probably be a lot like one of those homeschooled kids, the ones with a strange amount of maturity, self-possession, manners, and independence. You look at them, and wonder what’s different, and finally figure out that they never had to deal with twelve years of hierarchical social crup in school.
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Well, I wanted to say “no bullying,” but even kids who were popular and nice in school still had to deal with the enforced kiddy social crup, and thus aren’t as free and mature as homeschoolers usually are.
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But why is this a “girl” thing? All children have been small, all have had to learn to be wary of bullies and malevolent adults, all have had to make fundamental decisions (usually in early childhood) about giving up or resisting. The roughest, toughest, largest person was small once.
So I would say that everyone needs situational awareness, and that greater or lesser degrees of it, underlain by personality plus experience, is a gender-neutral requirement. Just because some of us are smaller than others or more easily raped doesn’t really change that — it just feeds into the specifics of the situational awareness.
There’s always someone bigger and stronger and smarter (and better-armed)… And sometimes you run into them crossways.
That’s one of the (many) reasons why the official “woman-as-victim”/”men-as-villain” psychodrama is so reprehensible. We all have to learn how to cope with life.
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Thank you ALL for your comments. They act as seeds for a lot of consideration and cogitation. I, however, may have been too brief.
This character is the way she is in large part because she’s an artificial person — a soul cast into a created body. She literally has NO personal experience of human life. (There are loopholes, but that generalization is pretty true.) So, to an extent, she’s a child. An infant, even, in an adult body. It’s not intentional, but there are parallels to Mike in Stranger.
Cyn: The “breaks-easily” is already a part of her nature, but you have given me a different focus. Good insight. Thank you.
Mas: You, too, have helped me. I see where the comparison to Friday (which I’ve always thought was superficial anyway), falls apart even faster on close examination.
Banshee: EXACTLY. Pedantic. Brain faster than mouth. Dolly compensates in another way by using verbal tics that belie her intelligence, but YES. Home-schooled. Definitely.
Karen: It needn’t be a girl thing. Or, rather, the character(s) (there are five of them) started out all being female, and, in exploring them, I wondered why the smallest of them turned out to be the alpha. And then, in thinking about the character, I wondered what it is about society that takes an utterly fearless toddler and turns her into a timid little mouse by the time she’s ten? It struck me as cruel and tragic that the world uses children so and (yeah, I got all bleeding-heart on it) I’m trying to work out some of the reasons and apply them to the stories.
But you’re right. It could easily be about a boy. In fact, it could be about ME at some stages of my life. And, yes, about bullying — or dominance dances that all humans do and children don’t have the … compassion to gentle. it’s just that, in this case, the characters started out as girls and I don’t see any point in changing their sexes now.
M
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I heard David Morell talk about First Blood (the first Rambo movie taken from his book) once. It’s genesis, he said, was in the anger he heard from Vietnam Vets in the creative writing class he taught. When Sylvester Stallone got involved, he changed the story so that Rambo does not directly cause the death of any of his pursuers. (Morell’s story had Rambo shoot up the whole town and die in the end.) He said Stallone explained that if you have Rambo die at the end, you’re saying that all these Vets are useless.
Morell wasn’t sure, but described sitting in the back at an early public showing that was packed with Vets, and was astounded at the emotional release and applause he saw in the theater. Unfortunately I still think he doesn’t get it, but thank heaven for Stallone. Sly Stallone is one of our writing heroes–read the story of the first Rocky picture.
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As I commented on an earlier post, the stories we tell ourselves make up our cultural DNA. Story telling can be a sort of self directing evolution.
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Television is terrible for this. I get really tired of every single character having daddy issues.
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But I’d wager the vast majority of women getting published then and therefore around their thirties, had simply grown up with a traditional family structure. This meant the father was usually the enforcer (okay, not in my family. We were weird.) So when they needed their young female protagonist to overcome a bad childhood, the culprit was usually an overbearing or outright abusive father.
Plus, female power tends to be both devalued/ignored, and hard to show. (remember the old one liners about “my wife says I’m the boss, but I better make the right choices or I’m in trouble?)
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Dad had this joke that “He was the Head of the family but Mom was the Neck and you know who turns the Head”. [Wink]
Seriously, I always believed Dad was the “head of the family” but I also believed he took Mom’s opinions seriously.
Minor note, I often asked Dad for permission when I knew Mom would say No. Of course, I knew better than to ask Dad *after* Mom had said No.
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Thank goodness.
We’re trying to teach the Princess that you cannot ask mom or dad permission for something after the other one said no…but you can ask them to try to talk the other parent around. (Mostly, ask dad to try to talk mom into stuff. Mom sometimes says “no” and then regrets it.)
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My sister and brother-in-law call that splitting the parents. It is highly frowned upon.
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Same here.
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I’ve been particularly interested with the depiction of female power in a specific manga called Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, “Kono Watashi no Mono Tonare, Yuusha Yo,” “Kotowaru”. And yes that whole thing is the name of one manga series (Apparently there are several related Maoyuu manga series dealing with different characters, some more jokey, some one-shots, but the one I listed is the one I’m most familiar with.) The series uses a pretty standard fantasy trope – demon war – to talk about, of all things, economic development. There are particularly powerful women in it, and it’s been great to see the different kinds of power on display. My favorite in the manga is the daughter of the chief of the dragon demons. Her approach to a very traditional female role strikes me as a very interesting use of “soft” power. Anyway, it is Japanese manga, and a lot of the standard tropes apply. YMMV. > >
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Is this related to the way courts always favor even unfit mothers over fit fathers for custody?
Note: not actually true. Sister is constantly getting victimized by this false claim. If the mother recognizes that fathers are important and doesn’t try to totally remove him, she stands a good chance of being punished at every turn– even when the father is a serial drunk driver, has a prior domestic violence (against his dad) arrest and already has a live-in girlfriend by the time it goes to court.
I know there are psychotic judges who do it, but it is not an “always,” or even “if all else is equal” thing.
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This leads to one of the horrible things about really bad cliches– when folks realize that they’ve been lied to, they often go too far in the opposite direction. Imagine someone that thought that a father is never going to be abusive, because they saw too many “fathers are always abusive” shows, so it’s something that only happens on Tv…..
(Note: not what I think actually happened, figure the original was not intended to apply universally.)
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oh, it can happen. And that’s another way cliches are bad. They invite backlash.
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Yes
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Oh, yes, fair mothers get hit. I’ve seen that too. But if a mother wnats to take the slightest advantage, she can.
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So long as she does it from day one, yes.
And even if she is ever more clearly in the wrong. (A friend’s ex-wife is abusive to the kids–locking them out back in a dog-box in the cold with no coat, for example, and her new husband sexually abused the girl. There’s a six month wait before he can TRY to get custody away from the crazy blankers.)
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But the women who want to give the guys a chance a dual custody, etc. get punished. I think part of this is the assumption that if a mother doesn’t want the kids all to herself must have something wrong with her because Rousseau.
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Yup, Rousseau’s on my time-travel hit list.
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We’re doing this together, right? Rousseau I want to kill with a nail file. Don’t worry. You’ll see.
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You play time travel assassin too? Awesome.
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You know, it’s a good thing for some people that we don’t have Kickstarters for hitmen.
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And I left out the part about him bouncing her off of walls, because she left, instead of going to the hospital or the morgue. (or calling the cops the times she was sure it was All Her Fault he hit her)
Or how they now do exchanges at the police station, because he bounced their son off of a car in front of her at a prior custody swap. (He’s recently started showing a personality that isn’t Daddy Jr.. Probably the worst day of her life, because if the scum hurts the boy she’ll be sure it was All Her Fault for the rest of her life, for not removing him from his father.)
Yeah, I’d do a kickstarter on that.
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Your pronouns are completely confusing me. Who’s the “he” who’s doing all of this? Your friend, or his ex-wife’s new husband?
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Sorry, my sister’s ex did that junk; the friend’s biggest flaw is that he’s a Marine and deployed a lot. (or it was, until he left the Marines to fix it… and they got divorced)
I get a little distracted, as you can see.
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Oh wait, I think I see. This post is talking about your sister and her ex-husband, not about your friend and his ex-wife. Confusion cleared up now.
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That could be an interesting story idea.
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I saw what happened to one of my nephews because my brother couldn’t get custody. Not a pretty sight. His mother is a meth addict. By the time he got custody when his son was twelve, the course was set.
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Hello Sarah, I’ve been reading your blog daily ever since “ungovernable”. not sure how I was led to it, but by golly, I sure have enjoyed it. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
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Thank you, Steve. :) Since I DO take the time and sometimes I wonder “should I continue?” these comments are always welcome. :)
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Do continue. Ever so enlightening. Plus as far as virtual hangouts go it does seem nice and full of teaching..
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One thing to keep in mind is the matter of whether, when writing, your use of cliches reinforces or confounds expectations. It is one thing to use a cliche innocuously, quite another to reinforce reader preconceptions. The best use is to expand the cliche, turning it inside out and exposing the underlying truth.
Having a greedy Jewish pawnbroker is cheap, easy and reinforces bigotry. Making that character’s reasons for that greed* and that profession** apparent, understandable and even justifiable gives it a whole different complexion.
*Saving for a child’s operation, or because he is soaking the rich while secretly giving charity to the poor
**Not many professions available for a man of his Faith in the culture — and because he is not of their faith the townspeople only suffer him to fill an economic niche no other person is allowed to. Besides, when their debts get too high they can, in good conscience, repudiate them as he is not “one of us.”
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Or because when he has to move because they’re after him, he needs to have enough to start in another town. There’s a reason stuff like “doctoring” was Jewish. You could take the knowledge with you.
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The problem is that one era’s amusing anti-anti-Semitic play against stereotype turns into another era’s proof that you are anti-Semitic. Shakespeare used to be noted for The Merchant of Venice’s tolerant portrait of both Shylock and Jessica as human beings just like everybody else, but now not so much.
Georgette Heyer (who was of Jewish heritage) had a scene mocking the standard scenes of evil Jewish pawnbrokers (with her heroine Sophy declaring, as always, that all that was required to deal with any difficulty was resolution and hard work, and that the pawnbroker ought to have a daughter like herself to make him live better). This is routinely cited as a shocking anti-Semitic scene, instead of mockery of tons of earlier English lit of the evil Jewish pawnbroker type combined with a scene hilarious in itself (ie, the heroine capturing a baddie and holding him helpless, instead of the other way around).
Heck, I’m sure by now there’s somebody ready to call Disraeli anti-Semitic for something.
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Actually younger son wrote an analysis of the Merchant of Venice as a debunking of anti-Semitic myths of the time, during the year I was homeschooling him. It involved such froo froo things as “distancing devices”
Eh.
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I have been holding my peace here for so long that I don’t have the stamina to read all the comments, so if somebody else has brought this up I apologize for the repetition.
The post bothered me in a way I had a hard time getting hold of. I finally decided that it is because of a long held peeve of mine. I despise the very idea that any reporting can be without bias, and by extension that any storytelling can. This idiocy poisons both the Journalism and Entertainment industries. The pervasive Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressive bias in both is a symptom; the problem is the very idea that content neutrality is desirable or even possible.
I became interested in Politics at a relatively young age, during the Watergate flap. From then until the present I have read all kinds of whining about Bias; mostly from the political Right, but some from the Left as well. I very early on grew impatient with it; if you think the news (or any means of communication) is biased against what you believe to be the truth, don’t bitch about it, buy a newspaper or a publisher, or a film studio and put out your own bias, dammit!
So, from my point of view, it is less a matter of “Tell no harm” than it is a matter of “make your point as best you can”. Read some of the great newspaper stories from the end of the Civil War through the end of WWII; they are, all of them, biased. And most of them can’t be bothered to pretend otherwise. Now, compare that to the output of the New York Times today; they can’t tell a gripping story to save their lives!
The old saw that there used to be a market for multiple newspapers with multiple points of view is largely bosh. Mencken makes it clear in his autobiographical works that in Baltimore there was the Newspaper of the ascendent political party – which got the government contracts and therefore made money – and the Newspaper of the opposition Party, which was customarily supported by somebody wealthy with political ambitions, and lost money. And that was the set up in most cities that Mencken knew about…barring, possibly, New York, London, and a few other vast metropolises.
The most ridiculous consequence of the idiot idea that New can be neutral is PBS. Only in America; a government owned broadcasting system that supposedly exists to present unbiased News…and is persistently biased in an anti-patriotic slant.
Anyway; I agree that unthinking lockstep with the dominant cliches makes for bad art. I just maintain that the root of the problem is the very idea that there is such a thing as a ‘neutral’ point of view.
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Oh, I wasn’t saying to be “neutral” — I don’t think any ADULT can be, and artists need to be adults. I was just railing against using cliches that are going to pile on and make things worse for people — particularly when they’re completely divorced from the reality you and I and everyone can see. Like, you can’t say every man is evil — unless you were raised in and live in a high security prison. And probably not even then…
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Funny how the people who denounce stereotyping of women, gays, persons of colour, citizens of the third world, Progressives … have no problem stereotyping men of pallor.
A cynic might think their objection is not to the invidiousness of stereotyping but to the issue of who benefits from the stereotype. The poor, honest, exploited noble worker is no less a stereotype than the greedy employer … and probably no more accurate.
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It’s not just the idea that someone can be neutral. It’s the idea that being neutral is better than having a position and arguing for it. That means people can be lazy, not do their homework, not make a hard choice, and feel intellectually superior for not having to think.
A total smokescreen, yes, and one that stinks to high heaven, but there it is.
So, maybe you do need to write in order to harm that worldview? It will certainly be perceived as harm by the people who need a worldview adjustment. (And sweet balm to those who need encouragement) A surgeon, after all, cuts into peoples’ living flesh with a knife. Ultimately it’s for their benefit, but to the inexperienced it looks like torture and death. > >
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What nonsense! You (unsurprisingly) utterly fail to recognise that neutrality is a matter of variance from a baseline, not some absurd straddle between opposing views.
My positions are based on science, logic, common-sense and compassion.
Your positions are ideological, unreasonable, anti-science and a variety of strains of phobia-induced bigotry.
Obviously, I am neutral while you are partisan, biased and a sloppy dresser.
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Ha! You’ve committed the error of thinking that I would do something so crass, so bland, so bourgeoisie as getting dressed at all!
Bwah, ha ha ha ha haaaaaa! > >
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Young man! People on this blog wear pants or kilts. Go put yours on immediately. No, don’t turn this way — argh.
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Agreed; Nobody free of inhibitions is fit for polite society. Please develop some.
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of course, given my er… interesting spelling, some people on this blog now wear quilts.
Well, they look very pretty. Is that a wedding ring pattern?
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In light of recent NSA revelations, I am compelled to inquire: you do know that they can use the camera in your computer to observe you, don’t you?
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which is why the camera is taped over and has been for years. AH!
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I trust you used the special, opaque to all wavelenghts tape?
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I used duct tape, like a good red blooded American. I trust they’re not in on the secrets of good, red blooded Americans, given what they are.
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Duct Tape is like The Force
It has a light side and a dark side and it holds the Universe together.
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First thing we do with a new computer is tape the camera.
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However, they do not substitute for pants. Kilts do, and quilts, but not inhibitions.
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OPPRESSION! TYRANNY! The MAN can’t force wardrobe on us unless we ALLOW…
Wait… will it help with all this chafing?
(grumble, grumble… puts on pants… grumble…)
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you need powder for your chafing.
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Monkey butt powder works. (No, it’s not being evil — it’s what it’s called.)
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There’s a picture of a monkey on the cannister. Not a genuine monkey; just a cartoon monkey, but no actual monkeys were inconvenienced in the making of Monkey Butt Powder. That our monkeys know of.
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Dave Freer hasn’t told me they ground any members of his tribe for powder…
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I use Goldbond.
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Powder to the people!! Ungowah!!!
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I can’t remember the name, but there’s also a lotion which dries on the skin to leave a surface that feels remarkably like powder, and prevents chafing by providing a slick surface to cut down friction. At my weight, there have been times when I used it even WITH pants…
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Well. of course. I find that When I’m larger than usual my thighs rub and cause chafing.
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You may not be interested in wardrobe, but wardrobe is interested in you.
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Being undressed is a style of dress. On some people it looks quite good.
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Not on me, bub. Not on me. I don’t want peglegged whalers running around Central Texas because of sudden reports of a white whale. And some of us don’t have webcams. (thank goodness)
“Its in the doing, not just the thinking, that we accomplish our goals. If we constantly put our goals off, we will never see them fulfilled.” – Thomas S. Monson
On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 11:36 AM, According To Hoyt wrote:
> ** > RES commented: “Being undressed is a style of dress. On some people it > looks quite good.” >
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In fact, if you go up, you’ll see what I said about witness reports. I used to be close to policemen (long story) and they all laugh at the idea of reports that agree.
I’m sorry if I didn’t get the point across, but in essence what I was saying was “don’t be lazy” and “write YOUR truth, not someone else’s truth.” This is why I don’t condemn Mercedes Lackey (though her latest books have got … odd and don’t necessarily get read) for her odd views on parents, children, schools. She’s telling what she truly thinks is the truth: the truth as she has experienced it, mostly vicariously, through stories fictional and not, and possibly (I don’t know her well enough) the truth she’s lived. Even her “evil father” don’t feel like off the shelf cliches. I might not like them — my prerogative — but it’s her writing. What I oppose is the interchangeable — the interchangeable sexy vamp, or conflicted werewolf, or evil dad, or mean male, or…
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Oh yeah. The last-but-one time I reported a crime, I wrote down my impressions before I called the cops, so that my testimony could not be influenced by my talking to people.
It wasn’t much of a crime, just some yahoo teenager throwing a traffic cone he’d stolen at the mailbox of an old lady’s house I was minding for her. Nonetheless, I took it seriously and wrote everything down before I called the cops. The cop who arrived pretended to take me seriously, took my statement and had me sign it, then threw the traffic cone into the trunk of the cop car and drove away.
I ended up fixing the mailbox with my money.
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I was treated the same except I got a lecture about being a nosy neighbor. I am still unhappy about that one–
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Every time I run into that attitude I get the urge to say “Son, I don’t work for you, you work for me.”
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Exactly.
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In John Hemry’s Rule of Evidence Paul tells another witness that each of them will write down what they saw, and then compare lists.
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This may be OT, and if so, please forgive me, but I was just over at Vox Day’s blog arguing about “Ideological cleansing”, which I believe was the title of the post. It had to do with SF and SFWA.
Now, I think that Vox is smarter than I am, and knows more than I do, so I am usually content to just lurk on his blog; sit at his feet and learn, so to speak.
However, this latest business with the crazies in SFWA seems to have flicked me on a raw spot, as in, “These people are messing with _my_ SF!” I have been moved to comment at Vox’s, and also here.
I, too, started to noticed about twenty or so years ago that it was getting harder and harder to find good new SF in the book stores. I did not know why this was so until Mrs. Hoyt explained it to me. Thanks, Ma’am!
As someone who doesn’t think he has a creative neuron in his head, I rely on my SF authors to supply my deficiency, and I’ll pay money for that, if I have any. Please don’t let me down, boys and girls!
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My advice is that if you don’t like the current crop of authors, then go back to slightly before the earliest authors you like band work backwards. There’s a lot of backlog, and time has done a fair job of winnowing what was too tiresome to preserve.
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The problem is that while you may not exhaust it, you can exhaust all the backlog readily available to you, and end up needing something to read while you track down the odder stuff.
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Interlibrary Loan can get you an amazing variety of stuff, and Librarians tend to like people who use it. It makes them feel that they are using their degrees, I guess.
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That, also, can be exhausted. After all, we need reading material for decades.
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This whole thing reminded me of the reaction for a story I wrote for a creative writing class. Set in a female dominated, goddess worshiping pseudo-eskimo tribe, it’s about a boy becoming a man and finding his place in society. It was actually the first chapter of a novel and I made sure that was clear. One of the girls in the class was just so happy that I wrote a story where the women had all the power and the men were the ones struggling for their place in society. Yeah, she wasn’t going to be happy with how the book ended. Once I finish it, I kinda want to find her again and have her read it. If I piss her off enough, I’ll know I’ve done the job I wanted to.
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Doubtless the idea that a story ought be about personal development of a character, with a plot and with well-realized characters is secondary to the polemical value of women having all the power and letting men struggle.
Just imagine the reaction if instead of female dominant / male subordinate your society was male/female or white/black (I am sure she would have been fine with a black — or brown — dominated society where white men struggle) but was otherwise identical.
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Yeah, her stuff wasn’t any fun to read, either. Very grrrrrlll power heavy and no plot to speak of. The biggest complaint I got was that the characters felt too real.
The story I had planned would be guaranteed to piss off all the not-ladies I’ve ever met. I should really finish that book…
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Keep in mind that the idea that a story should be about character development is relatively new. In many ways, that’s what makes ity harder for most people to read older books. It isn’t that the language is archaic, though that doesn’t help, it’s that the structure is radically different.
That’s what is so extraordinary about the Lord of the Rings films; they injected character development into books that (save for Merry and Pippin) didn’t have any, because they were modeled on 7th Century Eddic sagas.
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I have spent (wasted?) the last two or three days reading way back in Sarah’s blog. Right now I have stopped at her post comparing DMV to Portagee bureaucracy. That one is just magnificent. Sarah is my second-most-favorite Portagee-American, after John Philip Sousa. (PBUH)
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Hey, what about Larry Correia?
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Larry can’t play a Sousaphone.
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He can’t? Well, there it goes. My illusions have been shattered.
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Better than having your eardrums shattered.
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Um… makes note. At LC ask Larry about using Sousaphone against banshees.
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I used to have an LP recorded by the Band of the Grenadier Guards, with lots of national anthems on it. I regret to say that I cannot remember all the tunes, but I remember the title to the Portuguese National Anthem.
I think it was something like “Herois do Mar”, translated as “heroes of the Sea.” If I ever recover enough of my inheritance to afford me a nice boat, Sarah, you and your family are invited to go sailing with me.
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It is. The last lines are “March against the cannons. Let’s hear it for anthems of early twentieth century vintage. “Our kids are cannon fodder, and we’re proud of it.”
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Yes, Sarah, but as a Portagee you do have inherent congenital navigational and sailing skills, yes? It’s like, Punic, or something.
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ROFL. I can’t even swim.
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All the more reason to navigate and sail. Keep from hitting rocks that way, so you don’t need to know how to.
(Notorious, how little men who worked in boats used to be able to swim.)
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LOL. I also know nothing about boats or sail, except what I’ve read in books. You know, part of this is that though I lived less than ten miles from the sea as the crow flies, as people drove back then, on little more than medieval streets, it took about two hours to get to the beach. Now it’s fifteen minutes…
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Oh, more on the DMV post: It is perfectly legal here in Flarduh to ride yer bicycle on the sidewalk as long as you yield to pedestrians. I think I might be one of two bicyclists in this county who actually yields to pedestrians. I think pedestrians on sidewalks should always carry umbrellas, regardless of the weather, and if they see a bicyclist approaching who doesn’t seem disposed to yield, bring the umbrella to the position of Assault, and try for one of the bicyclist’s eyeballs.
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Omg, I have been reading more there! “Robert has a size nine head…” I thought mine was pretty big, at 7&3/4. I mind The Donovan, whose head is so huge he had to have a prescription helmet in the Army, so he got to take it home with him. I tease him from time to time, about having two brains in that huge head of his, one of which is an autistic co-processor which he can hot-swap when he feels the need. Your kids’ heads seem even bigger. Are you quite certain y’all don’t have any autistic tendencies?
Doesn’t bother me; if it weren’t for my autistic tendencies I would be in a world of hurt. Thanks to my autistic tendencies my bank account doesn’t have much in it.
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Massive heads run in the Almeida side. I wonder how wives coped with them? I think it’s the neanderthal blood. My head is a size seven and a half (men’s — I don’t know if it’s different) so in winter I wear men’s hats. Now, keep in mind before I lost two inches (long story) I was five seven, and before I gained weight I was a size seven. That’s a massive head for my size. We buy Robert hats from hats in the belfry. In CO, in winter, a hat is not a luxury. Robert keeps insisting he’s in the spectrum but I don’t think so and no one else has ever thought so. The youngest has certain sensory issues autistic people often have but no other symptoms. Those issues also run in my family, but I’m told they’re not covalent with autism. As in if you’re autistic you’ll have them, but you can have them without be autistic. I’m several kinds of brain damaged (literally) but until I sat at home alone and wrote too long I was always very good with people. Perhaps excessively empathetic. As I said, it’s the neanderthal blood.
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I have a 7 1/4 head (five eight) many pounds heavier than my likable weight of 160. ;-) Always had big head, big feet, and big hands. My feet are the same size as the hubby– my hands and head are bigger.
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Well if you were a man, you know what they would say about those big extremities …
/runs/
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Even with the astigmatism, my throwing skills are very very very good. THRUPPPPPPPPP
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