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Rant on Primary Source Reading — Mary Catelli

An aspiring writer ought to read history. Lots of it.   Even if — perhaps especially if — he intends to write SF or fantasy and build societies of his own. And the most important thing he should read is primary source, which is to say, stuff that was actually written at the time. Jane’s letter to her Aunt Hortensia. Esmeralda Doe’s diary. The cook book, the book about the Rules of Love, philosophical dialogs. Even fiction. Or as Chesterton put it:

“We should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon’s History, Evelyn’s Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell’s own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.”

This isn’t to do research, though you may find it useful later. It’s to expand your horizons. And knock your block off. To learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. You will read things in which people will casually take for granted something you never even dreamed that other people could think. It will let you in the possibilities. And you will learn that even if people thought the way you did, they could talk about it, and reason about it, very differently. It lets you get inside the heads of people different from you. This is why reading a lot of works from societies you have no interest in is still a help. Even if the exact facts you learn do not prove useful, they will remind you not to assume, so deeply you don’t even notice it, that things are the way you are familiar with.

It also helps avert the opposite fault: thinking, “The past is a different country. They do things differently there,” and cheerfully attributing to them behavior that fits the most modern stereotypes about the era, because it’s different. Even on the simplest level — I once read a writer discussing world-building, who asserted that a medieval king would never have been called the Sun King because the term would have had no meaning in a geocentric universe. groan. Plenty of ancient and medieval kings used solar imagery. “Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this son of York” is predicated on the actual use of the sun in War of the Roses heraldry. For one thing, the center of the universe was a bad place to be in the Ptolemaic universe, because it was the bottom of the universe.

As a sideline of this, it also gives an idea of how varied views can be while still fitting in the framework of a very different society. When Millais exhibited The Order of Release, one reviewer denounced the woman in it as “the hardest looking creature you can imagine,” but another praised her as “firm of purpose, sheds no tear” — which was, actually, the common view, since for the first time, they had to put not only a railing but also a guard at the exhibit.

It also develops a sense of how a society fits together. An instinct that alerts you to whether you really can throw together a society from bits of another. A society with a strict hereditary hierarchy is not one in which your oldest son can go gallivanting off on a merchant expedition and then return with a baseborn bride without consequence.

Of course, there’s an art to reading primary source usefully. Lots of reading will give you practice at that, but some pointers:

No one writes anything without a purpose, and that purpose will dictate what they write. Even those who write to illuminate their own time for future generations will illuminate it according to their own lights. Once you learn to glean their purpose, it may be the most valuable thing about them. Even works of history can be primary source for the era in which they are written because they are written with a purpose; Victorian folklorists cheerfully writing of the origin of folklore and fairy tales are often horrible at everything except the mindset of Victorian folklorists, on which they are superb. (Sleeping Beauty is a solar myth, and Hansel and Gretel, and The Frog King — and Napoleon Bonaparte. The writer who gravely proved the last according to the same logic that the folklorists were using on fairy tales probably did the most to ensure that the theory lost currency.)

Not that you can’t take anything at face value. Metaphors are usually safe — which is to say, because a work of St. Augustine’s has the casual statement that something was like a bethrothal, which lasted a year or two, I think it’s safe to say that in his time betrothals generally lasted a year or two before the wedding proper. Aelfric of Eynsham is beloved of Anglo-Saxon scholars because he wrote a work, the Colloquy, to teach his students conversational Latin, and the subject matter was trades and occupations, so he didn’t have an ax to grind about them.

But other than that. . . .

Where most writers go astray, I think, is in confusing prescriptive with descriptive writing. Whether an etiquette book or a law, people saying what people ought to do are not therefore describing what they do do — necessarily. Some people go overboard there, too, and say that rules are only laid down when a behavior is widely practiced, even if disapproved of. This I would think certain only for rules that are argued about and defended. A rule that is off-handedly mentioned may actually be the rule, too widely accepted to get into a frenzy about. OTOH, it can also be a dead letter.

And then, you often have to reconstruct the other side. Wide reading can only do so much — especially in eras when reading everything that exists doesn’t really make it wide. But with, say Andreas Capullanus’s Art of Love, you can read that love is impossible between a married couple — and note that he argues for it at length and presents it as a case settled by a Court of Love. Someone argued against it, even then.

 

Plus, you can fall off a cliff chasing someone’s purpose. You can miss irony. The classic example being the readers who assume that “A Modest Proposal” is serious. On the other hand, you can impute irony when it’s not intended. You can hypothesize that Juvenal wasn’t really satirizing the decadence of Rome, but the stuffy old-guard who minded. John Milton — some people argue that Satan’s arguing for liberty and equality. They miss that Satan interrupts his own argument to point out that the offense against him doesn’t annul degree and position, because he only wants to revolt against God, not have his own angels revolt against him.

There is also the aspect that people tend to write about the extraordinary, not the usual. You get more dramatic effects when you read reports of how horrific a certain noble was. Not only do you have deal with the agenda of the person writing about him, which would probably give motives to blacken him, you also have to deal with the issue that the noble (because he is being written about) is probably an outlier. Or the story of the ancien regime French nobleman whose son said that he had heard his father intended to marry him to a certain mademoiselle and was it true — and who retorted that his son should mind his own business. Not the sort of incident that would occur in a society with more freedom for the young people to make their own matches, but that the story was told at all is evidence that the nobleman had gone — a little far.

A traveler would notice more than the person on the spot, but when reading travelers’ tales, it is wise to remember that he may have misunderstood what was going on. Also, he probably would suffer no repercussions whatsoever if he embellished his account — not only his place in it, but with details that underscore how shockingly barbaric the barbarians are, or just prurient or violent details. So travelers’ tales have their upsides and downsides as well.

Actually, reading good scholarly secondary source is an aid to it, because they discuss their evidence and so afford a good example. But there’s no substitute to reading lots.

 

*Yes, why, I do know the meaning of “sinfully late” — sorry.  I wish I could say I was in a writing fog all day, but no.  The day got eaten by domestic stuff and shopping — not for anything exciting, no.  Just… food, because we were fairly out.  Sorry.  At least the stupid sinus headache is gone.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — is now up on Amazon.

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday.  If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format.  I think it will probably take another three months to finish.  Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game.  It hasn’t happened yet.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

 

 

Wolfe Merrrit, Manager of Manufactories for the Earl of Savage:

 

There are things you can do and things you can’t. And there are bargains you are offered in earnest, and bargains which you are offered but which the other side has no intention of following.

Most of the later bargains you are offered by normal human beings. Look, it’s not that fairyland won’t cheat you. You could say its very nature is deceptive, though I suspect you’d be wrong.

I think by their lights they deal perfectly fair. It’s just their lights aren’t ours, and we’re really very different sorts of creatures.

An old man I met once was convinced that all power in the lands of men was derived from blood of fairy. I didn’t argue. After all, everyone is entitled to becoming a little odd in his old ae and who was I to dispute with a stranger? But the power of humans and fey is different. Humans are physical beings who can – certain of them, can, at least, at certain times – command the power of magic, the kind of power that must have fueled creation itself. Those human beings who have magic must learn to control it, because it interacts oddly with our all too physical beings, our all too fallible wills.

But for the fey it is different. Some of this I learned through living with my wife, and more, much more of it, I’d learned through coming into fairyland to claim my son, whom she’d taken with her.

Coming into fairyland had been necessary precisely because my son was mostly human and humans in fairyland die or go mad, if they tarry too long. In his case probably he would have gone mad. As it was, from his days in fairyland, something remained not quite human in him. Something had broken.

Because, you see, though we interact with them, and they with us, the fey are not of the same kind of … creature. Oh, sure we can breed with them. We’re similar enough. But we arrived at similarity from different ends of creation. They are, you see, mostly magic. The energy that was present at creation, the burst of power, of will of “this be done” in them is shaped into creatures – creatures that often have trouble holding the same shape for any amount of time.

Humans are made of what the Bible pleases itself to call clay: the common elements of the human world, just like all the animals. Into this common clay the creator infused soul and spirit and a bit of magic, a big of ability to create with our minds and our hearts. At least in our version of the human world.

The fairy world, too, was different – a thing of that same burst of creation – as I thought about it, as I stared at my long-lost wife, I wondered if all the worlds were not only separate in space but in time, if fairyland was all the human worlds combined, as they’d been at the moment of creation, or shortly after.

Some very learned magic experts said that the suns and stars and worlds all had been created in a burst of energy. The big bang, they called it. I wondered if that was what Fairyland was, the moment after the bang, when all the energy, all the magic, was still fluid and ungelled, and all the worlds of men were contained in fairyland in potentia. Which would explain the wildly changing landscape and the different passing of time, and also why they contained so many creatures that had haunted humans at their beginning.
Something in me whispered Careful now. It was as though those thoughts were in themselves dangerous or slippery. I had the feeling a man has, when running in pitch dark, he stops just before pitching headlong into an abyss, and leans back, and takes a breath, and determines to be very careful until he’s safe.

Aloud, I said, “No bargains Feidlimid, and no trades. And the lady Helen is nothing to me, but my employer’s daughter, whom I must protect and get back safe.”

Feidlimid looked at me a long time. Her eyes were emerald and sparkling but they had the feel and the look of something like an insect. There was no human response in them, no human understanding.

This is what I mean when I say we’re made of quite different stuff. She was all the will and the magic, all the strength of a burst of creation.

I didn’t think she was making a bargain with me, or if she was – even if I were willing to trade my son for the lady Helen, which I wasn’t – she wouldn’t keep it. She would keep to the letter of it, but that would be worded in such a way that what I’d get would not be the lady, safe and sound, and I would surely lose both her and my son.

I had no intention of performing in this play. I’d lived with Feidlimid, and I knew her weakness, and I knew her fear. And I had no intention of letting her play me for a fool.

I could feel the fog of fairyland, like a living but cold thing creep around me, and I could feel her glamour wash over me in waves, trying to bend me into her willing slave.

It was not going to happen. I’d fought through layers of delusions before, when I’d been here. Delusions only work when you don’t know they’re there.

There was power to being the mere course stuff of human kind. And more power yet in knowing one had a hold over this glittering creature.

Feidlimid had a little smile playing on her lips. She was doubtless thinking of something interesting to do to me. I sighed. “By the power over you Feidlimid, by the part of you you left buried in the world of men—”

“Stop,” she said. She gave a little scream. “Stop.” Because she hates the thought that part of her was left behind, to become part of our soil. I remembered midnight and burying it beneath the oak tree at the green, just by the crossroads. At the time I was thinking of nothing but keeping the child safe, but I’d done the right thing by blind instinct. The crossroads confused the fair folk and the oak too, ancient and anchoring was a presence she could not wish away. Nor could she get back what she’d given up that night.

“By the part of you left behind in Avalon, I require that you—”

She didn’t let me finish the incantation. I didn’t think she would. There was a scream, and a sound of tearing, and I was standing in a green meadow and heard hooves.

There was an army headed for me. Horsemen.

Then I blinked. No. Centaurs. They were riding towards me, in massed ranks.

*This is Sarah: yeah, I know you all know Witchfinder is out and those of you who read fantasy and can afford it have read it.  So I’m not going to push it at you, because I PRESUME you’re not stupid — I’m just going to ask if you have a blog or a face book page and you ENJOYED Witchfinder (I’m not asking you to lie and say you liked it or push it if you haven’t read it.) would you post about it, with the link from the side of the blog and do a little promo?  I get sales every time I put it on my FB, but it feels like I’m being a bore saying “Hi people.  Here’s my book.  Buy it.”  Just echoing someone who posted and liked it makes it less “Hi, have you seen this?”

Now let me explain why — it’s sold pretty well, but since tax day everyone’s sales have been sucky and mine are no exception.  They haven’t stopped — and I do realize 6.99 is high for an indie book, yes, but it’s a massive fat fantasy.  It will come down when it’s been out a year, which seems to be what authors do.  And I’m not going to tell you I need it to eat — I don’t.  We’re going to be a bit tight, meaning nothing special and no impromptu trips to the diner, and no big expenses if we can help it (some of it we can’t.  We have to do a lot of fix-up and dress up on the house before it goes up)  till the house sells and that could be a year or so which means we might or might not make it to Liberty con this year (and if we do it will probably just be Dan and I unless the boys are willing to pay for it out of their own money.  It can’t be just me, because I’ll get lost.)  And I might not make it to Portugal, which is a little worse because Mom seems incapable of understanding “can’t afford it” and seems to think I’m being mean and/or trying to get her to pay for it.  (I’m not.  In fact I turned down her offer to “help” — I know what the downturn has done to their savings — about what it did to all of us.)

But that’s not the issue. The thing is this book is a proof of concept.  I’ve said before, and I’ll say till the end of time, I’ll keep writing for Baen, the shifters and DST and probably/maybe the world war I dragon thing.  And maybe other stuff  that comes up. And there you have it. I’ll necessarily be writing a lot of these on spec.  Which dovetails strangely with how my mind works.

I’ve discovered my writing works weirdly.  It often requires me to write two or three novels at once, just to get one to flow.  This is because I don’t think rationally about writing.  It’s all from the subconscious.  I can shape it in rewrite or shape it as it flows, but the PRIMAL push and work has to come out on its own.

This is the issue, btw, with being under contract, because when I am, I feel I owe money, and the moralizer in the back of my brain won’t let me write anything that’s NOT under contract.  Because I’m in debt, you know.  And so I’ll block and write a 100 words in a month.  Then I get furious at myself…  This is why writing for other houses actually helped me write faster for Baen, because if they were all under contract I could “rotate.”  It wasn’t ideal.  The books I was rotating to weren’t necessarily something I needed or even wanted to do. For instance, when I knew they were dropping musketeers on the floor, I blocked hard on the fifth book. And yet, it still helped.

Anyway, the point is that even just to work for Baen (I think after this I’ll do it without contract) I need to know there’s a place to put the other books, and that means I need to feel indie is worth my time.  Not perhaps on the same level as traditional (well, not up front, though I’ve now made ALMOST as much as I used to get from mystery advances) but not a waste of time, because then the moralist will insist that I’d be better of making the house REALLY clean and the writing stops.

So, it’s important that Witchfinder convince the idiot at the back of my head that indie books CAN work.  And then maybe I can come to a working agreement with it.

So, if you can say anything nice (obviously saying something not-nice won’t work) that I can echo or link and give the thing a little push, it might help you get more free (and otherwise) books in the future.

No pressure of course.  Do it only if you’re okay with it. And now I’ll get out of the way of the Clam who’s got promo.*

Greeting, mammals! Just a couple of entries this week, so go and support your fellow Huns. Don’t forget to leave reviews! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Bug Hunter , Mercenary Wordsmith, and Producer of Pearlescent Puns

William Lehman

Harvest Of Evil

In much of the world, Lycanthropy or Vampirism is still a death sentence if you are caught; however, as a result of the Civil Rights movements of the 1950’s and ’60’s, it’s legal in the US, Canada, and several other European commonwealth countries. Magic and other metaphysical abilities are more accepted in much of the world, but figuring out what is legal and what is not, requires a lawyer and a half dozen research assistants. Of course, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Doing heavy duty magic takes a LOT of energy, staying in animal form too long, can cause you to get “stuck”, and vampires go through a lot of blood, plus that whole daylight thing… In the US though, ‘Thropes, as they’re known, and vampires have “gone mainstream” and come out of the kennel and the coffin. Were they were promptly recruited by the military. Of course both types had been serving before, it was just kept quiet, now it’s out in the open… And what does a Retired Were cougar do when he hangs up his uniform for the last time? He becomes a Park Ranger of course… John Fisher had been having a normal day at the office… That is if your office is a Federal Park police Durango, and you were a retired SEAL from the infamous “SEAL team 12” who’s members were all some form of Preternatural. But then things got REALLY weird.

Cyn Bagley

In the Shadow of Death: Reflections on a Chronic Illness

In January 2003 I spent two weeks in a German hospital before I was diagnosed with Wegener’s Granulomatosis. This collection contains my journey through a chronic illness. This ebook was written as remembrance for Vasculitis month (May) and to all of those people who have lived with and died from a chronic illness.

Also available from these other fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• Smashwords

I normally don’t do two posts in a day, and I never do a post just to say “go and watch this” — well, there’s a first time for every one.

When people ask why I came out politically though it will (maybe has already) cost me readers I say “so you know you’re not alone.”  And also so that I don’t have to lie to myself, till I think I’m crazy.  This might not seem important.  But it is.  To gaslight an entire society you have to get them to keep silent.  You have to convince people that everyone sane believes what you do.  Those other people?  Oh, those are fringe voices, those are crazy and/or stupid.  The good people are all with us.

(And btw, every time I post against the left orthodoxy some idiot calls me “stupid” — Eh.)

I talk so you know you’re not alone.

And I’ve told you before — before the elections “You are being gaslighted” — the elections I maintain were part of it.  (Yes, I know, some people get very upset, but forget the suppression of the tea-party, forget how hard they fight against voter ID and for unverifiable modes of voting like “vote by mail,” I was there and I tell you it was impossible for as many people to have early voted and “forgotten” it as supposedly did so.  Impossible.  And my precinct was low on that compared to others.  Never mind “there is no vote fraud” you were gaslighted, you’re being gaslighted.)

Beyond the elections?  Our economic numbers.  The only way to know what is really going on in our economy is to read foreign newspapers — and discount their bias.  The only way to know what is going on in our own country is to read foreign newspapers.  Those same newspapers you used to laugh at for being left wing, now sound “right wing” to us — because they’re outside the gaslighting  play we’re trapped in.  How is it possible that everyone you know is worse off, that everywhere you look economic activity is grinding to a halt, and yet you’re told we’re in a “recovery”?  You are being gaslighted.

How is it possible that your new insurance is going to require you to sell off your place, get a cheaper one, that you can’t find your doctor anymore (just FINDING mine, who had to join a group to conform with new regulations was like a game of Where’s Waldo, and frankly, I HATE the new arrangements), that you’re being told your course of treatment is no longer available, etc, but you’re being told everyone “loves” Obamacare?  You are being gaslighted.

The IRS?  Just a few rogue agents in Cincinnati, when we have emails from DC?  Dear, you are being gaslighted.  The bleeding wound in our national honor that is Benghazi?  Just a protest?  You are being gaslighted. (He left them to die alone, the coward.)  The Ukraine?  Most citizens want Russian rule?  You are being gaslighted.  The “Arab Spring”? You are being gaslighted.

The cure for what ails us, higher taxes?  You are being gaslighted.  Global warming, Climate change, Catastrophic weather event our most important crisis?  The government can wish “Green technology” from the ether? The poles are melting? You are being gaslighted.

Israel is the problem in the middle East while surrounded by enemies?  You are being gaslighted.

The money we’re spending doesn’t matter, because we’re just printing it?  And Wall Street is jus’ fine?  You are being gaslighted.

The first ammendment is a “collective right”?  You are being gaslighted.

“War on Women” is going on?  Republican lawmakers want to ban contraception?  Never happened (never could happen.  What kind of supermajority do you think you’d need) but Gosnell and his house of horrors are what we pay to keep abortion “safe” (is that safe?)  You are being gaslighted.

There’s too many humans in the world?  You are being gaslighted.

And suddenly our most important issue is inequality and all the party organs government supporting press is harping on it in the same words? Could it be because they know you feel pinched and they want you to direct your anger at the people who are better off (there is always someone who is better off, no matter by how little) not at the administration?  Could it be that you’re being gaslighted?

And people don’t gaslight you when what they intend for you is good or nice.

This is why I speak.  This is why all those of you who can must speak, and learn to read between the lines, too.  You’re not crazy, and you’re not alone.  If it seems to you the future never changes (it’s always ‘glorious’ and we’re always ‘going to come roaring out of this depression, recession, tepid recovery’ but the past keeps changing because it was a protest because of a movie, a terrorist attack and we always said so, what difference does it make anyway? And we’ve never had summer of recovery one and two and three and four, so you should totally believe us now.  This time, this time, once the bad weather passes, we’ll have recovery. You are being gaslighted.)

Go see this, now.  You are being gaslighted.  These are only the most obvious, verifiable incidents, and even in these, they’re telling you to believe the people in power and not your lying eyes.

You are being gaslighted.  GO WATCH IT.

YOU ARE BEING GASLIGHTED.

*This is a blast from the past post from May of 2011.  I’ll note that I’m still hearing how the world is ending or “game over, man, game over.”  Sometimes it’s just in terms of “our civilization ends, and then it’s a boot stomping on a human face forever” and sometimes it’s literal: asteroids, nuclear war, and oh, yes, everyone has been talking about the super volcano again (does it have a little cape?) Then there’s zombies.  I think part of this is what drove the “end of world” thing in the seventies.  People who had a lot of very odd beliefs — this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius! — saw them burst like so many soap bubbles during the Carter presidency and not only did they want to escape (gas lines — what a gas!) but hey, the end of the world means never having to say you’re sorry you voted for the peanut farmer.  I suspect some of it is at play, plus the fact a lot of our… ah… opinion drivers are in their sixties, and having your beliefs implode when you’re in your sixties really hurts, and you can’t change that easily.  I’m not particularly sorry for them.  Stalin, Mao, Castro all were giant clues written in big letters of fire in the sky that the stuff they thought Marxism would bring was not what it did bring.  But what do I know? I came after the madness.

In all this, I still find my grandma’s ideas of how the world would end — just flame up and burn out one day — more terrifying than any of their predictions.  (I suppose if the sun went supernova?)  There was the understanding that our souls would live through it and likely get planted in a new world to try again, and that scared me most of all, because what if I never found the people I loved again?  This tells you how much of an introvert I really am, despite the layers and veneers of social hept I try to put on — because you know, eternity with strangers, THERE’s a fear.

Anyway, this morning I’m writing novel, as soon as I drink enough caffeine that the headache goes away.  Being mid novel means I wasn’t plugged in enough to life to actually have something to write about…  So, this is the end of the world.

BTW the story that has the same title as the blog post is by Ray Bradbury and quite good.*

I’m not going to talk about the end of the world, except sideways and stiltedly. Of course I don’t expect the world to end today. I don’t expect the world to end ANY day.

One day the world will end for me, of course. One day the world will end for each of us. But despite all the planet killing events that are possible, I don’t really expect an end to everyone at the same time. Or perhaps it would be more true to say I don’t want to the world to end for everyone at the same time.

Honestly, even in times when I wish otherwise, I’m a woman of very little faith. I hope there is life after death, I don’t see any reason not to believe there isn’t – just like I see no proof there is, though there are a couple of borderline experiences that prove it sufficiently for ME personally, but not enough to prove to anyone else. I have a vague idea of what might be on the other side – if anything – but wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got it completely wrong. Sooner or later I’ll find out. I try to live in a way that if what’s on the other side is an eternity alone with my thoughts, I won’t have too many regrets. (Some are inevitable in the human condition.)

But I believe in life after death – firmly. Need to – in the sense that I believe life will go on after my death. You see, it might be a failing, but I like people. Most people. The vast majority of them who are fairly decent and mind their own business and try to do what they can with what they have. And I’d like to think that millenia from now, when my remains would qualify as an archeological find, there will be families living on Earth, kids laughing, elders complaining, human individuals going after their lawful business.

I do realize that the Earth too will eventually have an end, and I hope we have managed to go to another world, another star by then. I know most species have ends, like individuals do, but I hope if we must end it will be because our descendants have mutated and are better than us, but still us in a way.

It’s weird that I need to believe these things, that I WANT to believe these things, because it was not how I was raised. I grew up believing not only that there would be an end of the world (NOT Christian theology, though disguised that way, because the insertion of “our lady” doesn’t make any sense in those stories. I suspect it was ORIGINALLY “Our Lady” Ballaat, in Phoenician, but I don’t have proof of that either, just the fact that their footprints are all through the area I grew up in. But at any rate, the stories made no reference to the Bible, except to mention the deluge which appears in almost all western legends.) but that the world had already ended several times. “World” understood of course as most of humanity except for a family or two, and world as “civilization.”

My grandmother raised me in the first belief I would live through the next end of the world. She rather pitied me for this, but the wisdom that she’d received from her grandmother indicated it would happen in my generation.

You see, when the Lord created the world THIS time – understood I think as the grand clean up after the last end, though I don’t know I got the impression this was a new planet too. Gee, no wonder I write science fiction and fantasy – He set it in spin and said “Till the year two thousand you shall last, and over two thousand you shall not go.” (Shut up now. I assume omniscience and all, he referred to the year 2000 of the current date. Or at least my grandmother did. I don’t remember giving it much thought, and yes, even at four or so I KNEW the world was more than two thousand years old, because I liked stories of Greece and Rome.) And then Our Lady (See what I mean about it not being a Christian story?) Got a handful of dirt (cosmic dirt?) And threw it over the earth and said “I add these many years.”

Now, maybe she had very dainty hands, because my grandmother didn’t think it would be more than a couple of decades.

I know this sounds insane to people not raised this way, but I used to spend hours planning what to do and how to survive when the end of the world came – in fire, this time, of course, because Our Lady was distressed by seeing so many drowned babies floating on the waves after the deluge.

I can’t tell you when I stopped assuming the world would have a very definite end for everyone at the same time. The corollary for the other “doesn’t accord to facts” idea I grew up with, that “there have been many civilizations before ours and some more advanced” I’ve never quite managed to shake. Oh, I try. I know it’s not rational. But it’s there all the time at the back of my mind, and I keep trying to figure out the type of story that would “explain” or justify this feeling.

By ten I definitely no longer believed in an “end of the world” – but then we were in the seventies and, oh, my, other people did. End of the world and UFOs and… the silly season in full bloom. (I almost spelled that fool bloom.)

So what is this in the service of? Nothing. Just noting that predictions of the end of the world have always been with us, and some cult or sect is always proclaiming it. Remember the Heaven Gate cult? The world ended for them.

I find it unusual that this time the prophecy is receiving so much air play. Part of it is that I think it’s oddly escapist. “If the world ends, I don’t need to worry about my mortgage being upside down anymore” kind of escapist – just like the inanities of the seventies. (For the record, I’m even willing to endure elephant bells to escape the end of the world, but please refrain.) I think there’s an hysteria to it, an air of “Save us, end of the world, you’re our only hope.” The other part of it is that the stories are fun, in the middle of distressing news about the world and our economy.

It’s of course, entirely possible the world will end today – or any day — but I rather doubt it. A world-wide Earthquake seems a difficult thing to achieve.

But I hope it doesn’t. I hope the world and humanity goes on for a long time after I’m gone – World Without End.

I have lived all my life in a village, Miss Marple says. There’s nothing I don’t know about human wickedness.

That line struck me as played for laughs in most productions, and, of course, in most readings of the story. But I don’t think Agatha Christie meant it that way. I certainly wouldn’t.

You see, I lived all my early life in a village.

First of all let’s disposed of the hazy, romantic idea of villages that inspired Hilary Clinton’s “It takes a village.” This is, if I may say so, a typical city-girl’s idea. They go into a village, and they hear the kids call every woman aunt, and they go away with their heads stuffed of incoherent stuff about the connections and the love and the caring and the collective beauty of villages and folk life.

Villages are – surprise – inhabited by humans, just like everywhere else. There’s good ones, there’s bad ones, and there’s “Oh my heavens, no.”

The difference is, in villages like the one I grew up in, and the one Miss Marple grew up in, (or Agatha Christie’s grandmother on whom Miss Marple was based) is that there were two other factors absent in even most villages today, except maybe in Africa: people had been there for uncounted generations, and people were BORED.

I don’t think any of us can understand the level of boredom I grew up with – not even me, and I vaguely remember it. The reason I read EVERYTHING that came into the house, including instructions for assembling machinery I wasn’t allowed near, my cousin’s “Portuguese romances” (the bullfighter dies. The singer who played him false mourns him forever) and my ten year older brother’s school books was that I was bored out of my gourd. I also religiously followed the almost bewilderingly stupid radio soap operas (everyone did) and after eight, when we had TV, religiously watched 40s American movies, in black and white. Those were a G-d send, as Sunday was the only day the TV station ran all day AND had movies (instead of variety programs, game shows and other local and cheap entertainment.) It meant that I never was tempted to do what other people did for fun on Sunday. Well, not after three or so, when I used to do it with my grandmother. What was that? Sit-at-the-stoop. For me it was literally sit on the stoop (I was little) but the older people brought chairs out, and sat by their front door. The entertainment? See who else was sitting at their door and what they were wearing. And since girls and boys “walked out together” to keep an eye on who was stepping out with whom. And for those who had “foreign” (from another village) family, like my mom, to watch them walk up main street on their way to the trolley car, and to note every aspect of how they were dressed what they did, etc.

Much was deduced and talked about from your expression walking up the village street. One of the first things I was schooled in was “do not frown, never look like you cried” etc. etc. It didn’t matter if the reason you were frowning is that you’d just come up with a cool idea and were working it out, or the reason you had cried was toothache. Next thing you knew you were the subject of a soap opera in which your parents beat you regularly and you were about to run away from home.

Most village gossip was/is bokum. My life was far more interesting in the gossips’ minds. You see, for instance, I was brought up as “honorary sister” to my brother’s closest childhood friends. This meant they were likely to pick me up in Porto, if they saw me walking, and give me a ride home. One of my honorary brothers, having caught on to my dentist schedule (I had extensive work done in 81) would be waiting for me in the coffee shop beneath the dentist every time because I usually had appointments after school and it was getting dark, and he didn’t want me walking alone in the dark. From this the gossips decided he was playing his fiancé false and was going to marry me. Dan? Oh, he’s just from the next village over, though I met him in Germany. (The last place I went to.) Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

However, if you are smart, you can sift through the chaff. Smart women were feared because they knew exactly what you’d been up to. Miss Marple’s feats of reasoning, figuring out a murder from how the vicar’s wife wore a stocking with a hole in it or whatever, aren’t unlikely. I saw my grandmother do that type of thing all the time.

The problem with it is that when you pay attention you discover that in this small bucolic village there was just as much evil and malice as anywhere else. Worse, villages have long memories, and people would expect you to do things because your grandparents had done them. (Is it accurate? Well, it’s mixed. First, there is the expectation. Say, my great grandmother (true) left her husband and kids and ran off with some guy (well, she had good reasons, but never mind.) I understand my great aunts grew up with everyone EXPECTING them to do the same any minute. If you grow up with that there’s only two ways you can go and neither is normal. You either become a plaster saint, or you give in and go “sure, I’ll be the village whore.” (Fortunately this was my maternal great grandmother, and I grew up in a different village.) Second, there’s such thing as raising. If your parents starved your grandparents to death to inherit (not in my family thank heavens. Partly because there wasn’t much to inherit, but yes, a family in the village.) chances are your family life isn’t that warm and wonderful and that the principles you were given were less than stellar. Yes, there might also be a genetic component, but given those two first bits…)

Now this had its good side effects. It’s hard to tell, because, well, how can you? BUT I’m almost sure I had the same sensory issues my younger son suffered from, and so did my brother, and that they were resolved at about the same age (though even there, repetition in doing the tasks helped more than any fancy therapy.) I remember feeling that shirts that didn’t “prick” anyone else were rough. I remember having great trouble writing on a line WELL into my teens. I remember having trouble hearing directionally. I still have trouble with visual focus, which is what scares me about driving (among other things, like a culture that didn’t expect “normal” people to drive, but only the particularly gifted. Those things are hard to get out of the subconscious.) Now, even in the village this wasn’t normal. But as the youngest of a tribe that had gone through village schools (my great aunt on that side was the school mistress when dad was little) there was lore there. “Oh, she’s an Almeida” (I wish. It was actually “oh, she’s a potato seller”) “they’re all weird as children, but they’ll take the national exams in fourth grade beautifully. Don’t push her too much.” So, elementary school I came in when I very well pleased. I did homework when I felt like it. I mostly read – a lot. It worked for me, as it had worked for everyone from dad’s time on. If I’d been subjected to the discipline my kids endured, I suspect I’d have hated learning.

Other advantages, when people like you and/or know your family and know you’re mostly all right fall into that “non standard” mode. Our postman, for instance, started drinking when his wife left him. We would find him passed out in the gutter in the middle of the day. The way people dealt with it was to deliver the letters, take him inside, put him down in a sofa, and give him some tea or broth when he woke up.

He straightened out after six months of this or so, and he kept his job, because the village liked him (or at least he was one of us, and his wife was no better than she should be, and he was a fool to marry her – I’m reporting what the village thought.) So no one reported him to his supervisor in the next village, and everything went on fine.

These disadvantages are weighed down by everyone having known you when you were two. There is a reason for “no one is a prophet in his own home.”

The village I was brought up in no longer exists. It’s been filled with stack-a-prole apartments, and has self-concious “parks and meeting places” (We had the dirt paved plaza where everyone met coming and going because it just happened.) It has “Athletic associations” and “clubs” but it’s really just a suburb of the big city and most people there don’t know each other and their ancestors lived heaven knows where.

BUT if the village still existed, even if I were to become a mega bestseller (say on the Rowling scale) and go back, I’d be greeted with “Don’t you go putting on airs, missy, I am not surprised you make up those scandalous stories. I remember when you told everyone you met a sugar pig in life size around the edge of the field.” (It was a pink pig. Pigs in the village were black or brown. I’d never seen a pink one. They used to sell pink pig sugar candy, though, so I thought he’d come to life. Took a while to figure out there actually was a live pink pig.)

Worse, they’d say “I knew your grandmother and your great grandmother. Your grandmother also made up scandalous falsehoods when she was little. Was a lot of trouble to her mother.”

Impressed? Ah!

And this is why most people ran away from villages as fast as the industrial revolution permitted it, to the mingling pot of the cities, where you can be as anonymous or as chummy as you wish but few people can say “Young lady, I knew your great grandparents and they—”

Do I miss the village, sometimes? Oh sure. Who doesn’t miss their childhood? Though most of all I miss dad and grandma, and walks in the fields, and the cats and the dogs, and sitting really still on top of the terrace on a summer night, and looking up at the starry sky and dreaming.

Note, however, I didn’t choose to raise my kids in a village. There’s something about knowing people are staring at you and making much about everything you do and say that drives you a little insane. Or as my husband, who has heard my stories, says “it takes a village to drive someone around the bend.”

On the other hand, as a petri dish of human behavior, I’d recommend it to any budding writer.

I know a lot of malice. I grew up in a village. The worst villains in my stories come from that (fortunately not most of them my generation, but things grandma’s grandma told her.)

But then I grew up in a village, I know a lot of heroes.

In the states, in Portugal now, in most “advanced societies” heroes are people in stories and movies, people in the news, people who’ve done something big.

I knew a lot of heroes and angels. They didn’t carry swords. They didn’t have hallos. They were people who absorbed immense disaster (a wife who left, a husband who died very young) and went on, working at things they never thought they’d do, or coming home from a full job to clean and cook and be “mother” as well as father to two small children. I knew people who as a matter of course dove into traffic, to pull out a lost child or a lost dog. I knew women who walked in into the middle of a domestic dispute between a neighbor couple, where a knife had just come out, and stood up to the aggressor and said “That’s enough. Think shame on yourself.”

I know a lot about good. I grew up in a village.

Human nature is the same everywhere, but in a village you see it up close and personal, and you know the stories of generations.

It’s impossible to believe in a grey goo world of shades of grey and of people who are all a little tarnished.

In a village you know that people are certainly never like their public image. And that some are unimaginably worse.

But you also know that some are unimaginably better – and stronger, and nicer than you could ever be if you tried.

Growing up in a village gives you the dark and the light tints, as well as the grey. You can’t deceive yourself that good or bad don’t exist, that everything is “sort of good” and “sort of bad.”

Those are city illusions, contracted by people who only know people in books written (mostly) by boring German philosophers.

If you grew up in a village you know real people. You can’t help it. And you know that humans can be unimaginably vile, but also unimaginably good.

And you can’t help but write Human Wave.

I’ve said before that I was a non-standard size for Portugal for my generation. This is true. Nowadays you can get clothes in almost the same range you can get in the US – though shoes still stop at 12 for men, but then so do most shoe shops in the US – but we’ll leave for another time the effects of better diet, clean water and antibiotics.

When I got married, I wore a size 7 and was five six. (I’ve lost a couple of inches.) I could go the entire length of the city of Porto (the second largest city in the country) and not find a pair of pants I could buy. In fact most shops told me they didn’t “carry clothes for fat people.” This was at a time when you could literally count my bones through my skin (no, I’m sure it wasn’t healthy and yes, I’m sure it has a lot to do with my weight problems now, but I was trying very hard to fit in.) But I was a non-standard size and therefore “fat.” Also I grew up with nicknames like “Whale” and “mastodon.” At a size 7. But I was bigger in all directions than a standard woman, in a country where the proverb about feminine beauty is “Women and sardines should be the smallest possible.”

No, I’m not whining. Yeah, it used to bother me, until I came to the states as an exchange student and realized my native culture was out of its frigging mind.

Also, this wasn’t personality warping, because we only started buying me off the rack clothes when I was in highschool. (And even then mom often had to alter them.) Before that, mom made the clothes for me, in her spare time.

And that, yes, is where I’m trying to get to – you see, women in the village came in as varied shapes and sizes as people at a science fiction convention, and to tell the truth, if you looked closely, you’d think they were all either too big or too small, and their figures were not what we’ve grown to expect.

That’s because they didn’t expect ANYTHING. There was no TV (Okay, two in the whole village,) to even buy a fashion magazine you either sent for them from relatives abroad or you schlepped to the next large commerce area to buy one. But there weren’t many native ones, and you didn’t take the German or French ones seriously. I mean, their models looked odd, but what do you expect from foreigners, anyway?

The interesting thing looking back is that none of the women in the village not even the ones who had no obvious body definition, felt a need to diet or pinch or tie. I am actually the more or less same rough shape and size as my grandmother and great grandmother, (translated taller) but I can’t let myself go, because I’d never fit ready made clothes.

I mean, before you guys say something about “well, being too fat” – yeah, it’s not a good thing, and these were mostly working women, tending the family farm, cleaning and cooking all day. If you started being impaired in that, then you MIGHT make efforts to lose weight. (They rarely worked.)

What I mean though, is that all these women were non-standard. I was the closest to standard issue and shops in the city didn’t know what to do with me.

But more importantly, none of these women THOUGHT of being standard. If you asked them if they were normal, they’d have said “Yeah. I can cook, clean, look after the kids, etc. I’m normal.”

(Most of them were “somewhere in normal range.” I have a theory that a reason those sizes in Portugal ran so narrow through the middle eighties is that most people were still having clothes custom  made. Only the “fashionable” set, already making efforts to look right, which if I remember in the seventies often  involved girdles and pressures not normally found in nature, bought from shops. But what I mean is that there was a total lack of worry about being “a size” or “fitting in.”)

This is not about body sizes, though – that was just an illustration. People in the village didn’t worry about fitting standard sizes because by and large standard sizes happened to other people. Take shoes for instance. Most women’s shoes stopped at 6. (I thought I was a size six. I THOUGHT it was normal to “break the shoes in” by wearing them through the raw flesh and the blisters, till they stopped hurting. I’m actually a size nine.) Grandma was a size, at a guess, eleven. She wore clogs. Clogs were unisex, and so came in her size. (The male laborers likely had larger feet than 12 too.) She didn’t like the noise they made, so she’d cut strips of old tires and nail them to the bottom. It worked. For formal occasions, she would find men’s shoes that looked a little more feminine and wore those.

IF Portugal had been a more “standard” society at that time, her shoes would have been a real problem. But they just weren’t. And I was blissfully unaware how non-standard my feet were, because I thought everyone “broke shoes in” the way I had to. (Mom did.)

What I’m trying to say is that we live in a “post mass” society. Our perceptions, ideas and expectations have been deformed by mass manufacturing and the catering to the “normal” – that is to the broadest range, be it of sizes, interests or personalities.

For mass manufacturing to be profitable, it needed to appeal to the broadest range possible. This not only set a certain number of standardized sizes (and body types. When I’m skinny I can’t find jeans to fit me without wrinkling under the behind, unless I buy “Italian cut” – apparently my inseam is … odd. And clearly hereditary. I mean, type wise.) but it set a certain “standard way to be.”

What I mean is, how much of the way we think families should be comes from watching families on TV? And how many marriages might have foundered because the internalized ideas from childhood failed to materialize?

And how many people feel uncomfortable – still – and possibly “crazy” when they disbelieve the mainstream news channels? (Despite repeated proof they lie with every tooth they got (as grandma would say) more often than not.) And how many people read atrociously written “bestsellers” once those get initial push and they’re “what everyone is watching”. And how many people start watching a TV show because “It’s so successful?”

Yes, part of this is the human herd instinct, the need to fit in. But it was given a greater force by the idea that there was such a thing as a “standard” or “normal” way of being that we should all fit into. (Curiously, I wrote about the perils of originality at Mad Genius Club.)

That was an idea fostered by the manufacturing methods and profit margins of the industrial age. The MASS-manufacturing age, the MASS-information age, the MASS entertainment age.

It was necessary for the then extant manufacturing modes to serve the broadest strip of people possible and to make them fit into the mold as much as possible.

That is past. Yes, it might mean some of us will happily get as blobby as some village women, or as skeletal. (I’m more in danger of the first, but it’s actually unlikely, if I can get out of here and stop getting sick (partly through not trying to look after this huge house). I like moving too much to get massive to that degree. It’s the times I’m sick and can only sleep that are bad.) But it also means you don’t need to feel “weird” when you think that whoever has succeeded Dan Rather is full of it and making things up wholesale.

Mass manufacturing, mass information and mass entertainment are ideas of the past.

We’re not absolutely sure what the future will bring, and we’re likely to never get fully there. Like Moses looking onto the promised land, we can glimpse it but not fully cross over, because our mind was formed in another time and in different circumstances. We’ll never fully be free of wanting to fit in and – c’est domage – the mainstream media will retain at least a little power until our generation passes from this world.

Which is part of the reason we need to remind ourselves daily that while there might be some virtue in the standard body (Well, I shop at thrift stores, and fitting things helps) there is no virtue to the standard mind.

The mass is over. We’re free to go free.

Yesterday before I went to bed I had an idea for a blog post and in fact wrote half of it in my head. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, except it started with a rather icky story from my childhood – but there are so many of those that I don’t remember which precisely.

So instead I decided to follow right up on what Kate was saying yesterday and jump onto “Diversity is our Strength.”

Has anyone ever proven that? I mean in the terms that PC understands diversity that is.

Look, when I was a kid, I had a group of five friends who gathered around for any group work. This was actually an issue as most teachers wanted groups of three. (The forms were usually 34 people, Portugal not having yet heard that low student to teacher ratio was essential for learning. This was the gifted forms, btw, which at the time was interpreted not as “you’re special flowers” but as “You can take all the punishment we dish out.” We were doing graduate-level research in 9^th grade. And doing it well. I’d stack my middle/high school learning against anyone who went to a school with “good ratio of students to teacher”.) But we’d found a “diverse” enough group.

Now you couldn’t tell by looking at us. I mean, we had a blond and a redhead, but they were blond and redhead by Portuguese standards. I believe in the rest of the world their hair would be called “shades of brown.” And we were all more or less of Portuguese ancestry. (If you take in account that for centuries Portugal was crusade land, and that most of the people coming for the crusades were French (come on, Jean Pierre. Why go to the holy land? We’ll go to Portugal. It’s an easier commute, the climate is better, and the moors will never see us coming. It’s a mini-crusade, close to home) or various shades of German/Italian, and if you add that on top of the invasions that came before, Celts, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Alans, Swabians, Guanos (okay, I made up that one) Visigoths, Astrogoths, Rockinggoths (I might have made up that one, too), British, Irish, Spanish… well, Portugal was sort of the welcome mat of Europe where everyone wiped off their DNA. Saying we were of Portuguese ancestry would be like selling a cat as “Genuine Domestic Short Hair.” I can guarantee most of us were homo sapiens, but then Portugal was one of two places in which Neanderthals lingered a few thousand years longer than anywhere else and demonstrably mated with homo sap, sooooo. Soooooo even on that homo sap, you’d be taking a risk.)

By current Portuguese standards we weren’t diverse at all. (Current standards? Why, yes. You see, in an effort to be a “modern country” they’ve imported affirmative action. This despite the fact that in the continent, when I was a kid, there was really no identifiable minority. The first time I saw a really blond guy, I had nightmares for weeks. You see, I thought he was a doll that had come to life. As for black people, I think I saw the first when I was six. Of course there are a lot more now. (Once in a sfwa forum someone told me I was lying about that, because she’d met black people in continental Portugal and eaten their wonderful food and danced their lovely dances – could that be any more patronizing? – apparently unaware that all these black people came to Portugal to escape the glorious liberation of the African colonies, when the places were handed over to Russians and their Cuban mercenaries.) So the principle of affirmative action doesn’t even make any sense in the sense of redressing evils, etc (except in the same way an immigrant who comes here from Africa today is suddenly entitled to “redressing.”) HOWEVER to be hip and modern and all that, Portugal now has affirmative action applying to gypsies (non of which consider themselves nationals of any country, but never mind) and of course every other shade of tanning. Not blonds, though, though they ARE a genuine minority in Portugal and made fun of in a lot of jokes.) And we were all girls, because the school was all female.

BUT each of us had a “specialty.” We had the artist, the writer (waves hand), the researcher, the scientist and the historian.

Our project on ancient Egyptian religion was kept by the teacher as a reference to TEACH ancient Egyptian religion, because we had more fun than should be allowed in school, from detailed drawings of the gods, to scientific explanation of the mummification process, to … well, all of it. (I had much fun with symbolism in the writing of it.)

This is because we had a genuinely diverse group. Diverse where it counted. Inside the head.

PC “diversity” seems to be “diversity of grievances” and is only useful in the sense of trying to inure yourself against lawsuits. “We had a black person on the team to ensure that black people will not have problems with this desert topping that is also a floor wax.”

In an age when people SERIOUSLY maintain that “brown bag” is a racist term (and not, you know, a description of the fact that it’s a bag and it’s brown) and think niggardly has anything in the world to do with race (because everyone knows black people are stigmatized as frugal, right? Look at all those black Scots.) this is not an inconsiderable good, but it is a problem for two reasons.

First, it assumes people are widgets. No, seriously. What would the idea that “diversity is having a black person on the team” mean, unless you think the contents of every black person’s head are exactly alike.

And once you realize this is what is at the basis of it, you’ll have trouble not laughing like crazy. Yep. Thomas Sowell, or the black guy next door? Totally the same thing, even though the guy next door is twenty and studying English. He could totally teach economics at any second. Because he’s black, and that’s all that matters.

Me? I’m Latina, and so exactly the same as the Wise Latina on the Supreme Court. I could totally fill in for her on her days off, and she could finish my books.

THAT is racism. Stone cold, outright racism and worse than anything even racists ever came out with. You’re a widget. Your thoughts are determined by your melanin, your eye color, your accent.

And if you think I’m just being silly and what they mean is “diversity of experience” – okay, that’s slightly less racist. It’s also not what they’re filtering for. Otherwise Harvard would have set aside places for white guys from Appalachia, as different from their run of the mill student, in experience, as you could get. But even then…

Look, my experiences are not that uncommon. Technically you could take half a million people of my age/generation in Portugal and we’d have the “same” background until the age of twenty or so.

… until you looked more closely. Most of them (I don’t know anyone my age but me) didn’t grow up under grandma’s tutelage. Most of them didn’t fall madly in love with English first year they learned it, and start reading books in English for native readers by the end of that year. (With a dictionary in my other hand. And a pencil to write the translation over the word. My kids found my copy of Dandelion Wine the other day, and had MUCH fun.) None of them had the other, more private experiences that made me me. (And I don’t mean sex. I mean stuff that relates to me and my family background but which is not for public consumption.)

There is no way that a government, a governing board, an institution can assure “diversity” by hiring from anything that fits in the forms.

Yes, diversity can be and often is a strength. At least for creative and intellectual projects. I don’t think road crews could be made stronger by hiring skinny girls who can’t lift heavy objects and burn in the sun. So even in that, diversity is not just an unalloyed good. Sometimes the best people for a project are a family group who inherited the trade (say embroiderers or, thinking of Portugal, beggars.) Depends on what the project is and whether you want innovation or just “the same thing, as it’s always been done.)

BUT diversity is not skin color. Diversity is not even general experience of the “was hungry as a child” form. Diversity of the sort that creates strength is the sort that is inside your head. It expresses itself in insights few other people could have; in ideas that not only aren’t in the box but can’t find the box; in strengths and abilities that are natural to you or trained from very young, but other people simply don’t get.

These are not things that fit on a form. They have to be determined by knowing the person often more deeply than you can know anyone after a job interview. They require seeing people at the job and then moving them around. “Bob, I think you’d be better in this team. They need someone with your analytical skills.”

The best team my husband ever worked in was assembled sort of like that. The boss would get to know people and then shamelessly poach them for his team. And they were all “diverse” in what was inside their heads. (They were also fairly diverse in appearance and such, but that was just a side benefit for corporate headcounters.)

This is a system – arcane and near forgotten known as meritocracy.

It relies on REAL diversity – of thought, of opinion, of ideas – (which prevents debacles like Windows 8, written by geeks, for geeks, with no understanding of who the end users are) – of experience. It relies on real, individual competences and assumes that each person, regardless of color or visible differences also has some failings, which can be compensated for by other people who don’t have them.

BUT of course it doesn’t treat people as widgets (and now I remembered my original post. Never mind. Tomorrow.) Which makes it really hard for bureaucrats to administer society from the top down – and to treat everyone as pieces to be picked up and inserted into places where the bureucrats think they will fit.

And since meritocracy by itself destroys the idea of the all powerful and “scientific state” it must be ignored, and instead we must pay lots of attention to external characteristics and parrot “diversity is our strength” while requiring that everyone be just like everyone who looks like them.

 

PSA announcement: To my subscribers at the level you get all my stuff and those who are still waiting for the final copy of Witchfinder (i.e. cleaned up, not an e-arc) – the delay is because my husband is writing a program to put you all in the right categories, so that some of you don’t get three copies and the others none. It’s not as easy as it seems, and I appreciate your patience. This is also the reason I’ve delayed putting up a subscribe button for Elf Blood. If any of you wants copies of anything earlier (I really NEED reviews on The Musketeer’s Inheritance. Even though it’s a reissue of A Death In Gascony (and apparently tons of people didn’t know it was the fourth in the Musketeer’s mystery and only discovered it now, judging by how it’s selling) it’s decoupled from that edition, so it has zero reviews) or really needs a final of Witchfinder right now, ping me on Goldport and I’ll send?

On Competence and the Wringing Of Hands – Kate Paulk

It should surprise no one here that, me being a software tester by day job, I read a fair few software blogs. Mostly they stick to the nitty gritty of the programming world, sometimes with ranting (oh, who am I kidding. Get a software geek ranting and you have something epic that chances are most of the world not only doesn’t understand, but even if they did they wouldn’t see the point. It’s a bit like the operating system wars). Largely, though, it’s a very merit-based world. If you have good things to say you’ll be followed.

 

Occasionally though, you get things like this [http://blog.codinghorror.com/what-can-men-do/]. Now, I respect the living hell out of the guy who writes this blog. He’s one of the people who created the Stack Exchange network. He knows software like few others do. And here, he’s drunk the ink. Big-time.

 

It’s no secret that programming is an incredibly male dominated field.

• Figures vary, but somewhere from 20% to 29% of currently working programmers are female.
• Less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010.

So, on average, only about 1 out of every 5 working programmers you’ll encounter will be female. You could say technology has a man problem.

Really? Let’s take a look at what programming actually requires. It’s a demanding field where there’s little room for perspective. The software either does the job or it doesn’t. If it does do the job, then you can start throwing in things like how well it does it and the design and so forth. But at the sharp end, you’re talking about 1s and 0s that are do not have an indeterminate state.

More than that, it requires very specific syntax and instruction sets, because when you strip away all the fluff computers are nothing more than very fast morons. They will always do exactly what they have been instructed to do, they do not read the minds of the operator or programmer, and they don’t do what the operator or programmer wanted them to do unless that happens to be what they were told to do. In very specific steps.

The analogy I was given back in my software engineering degree was that you can tell a person to cross a room by saying “Go to the other side of the room.” To tell a computer this (we’ll presume a robot here), you might start with something in a high level language that does the equivalent of telling your robot to go to the other side of the room. That is broken down into steps along the lines of (in pseudo-code because it’s easier to follow):

While not (at destination) do

Begin

TakeStep(left)

TakeStep(right)

Loop

Stop

End while

The TakeStep breaks down even more, describing what to tense, what to loosen, which direction to swing the hips, how to balance on one leg while the other is making all those complex movements, how and when to shift balance, and so forth.

All of that decomposes even further into a whole lot of 1s and 0s.

In most entry level software engineering classes, maybe one person in five is capable of the kind of logical breakdown that can go from “walk across the room” to the hundreds of tiny changes that are needed to actually do it. Of those, most will be male.

Why? The male sex hormones are the biggest factor in the development of the parts of the brain that handle things like formal logic, analysis, and so forth (also spatial reasoning, direction sense and hyper-focus). Pretty much by definition, any women who are good enough to do this will be atypical.

In an earlier post I noted that many software developers I’ve known have traits of Aspergers. Aspergers is a spectrum disorder; the more severe the symptoms, the closer it is to autism. And did you know that autism skews heavily towards males at a 4:1 ratio?

Interesting. I might even go so far as to say some of those traits are what makes one good at programming.

Leaving aside the question of whether autism spectrum is being massively over-diagnosed where the real classification is “typical boy”, yes, the skill set that is best suited to programming does overlap rather a lot with what’s called high-functioning autism. In a way, this even makes sense, since one of the core issues with autism spectrum issues is the ability of the brain to filter out unwanted input. In people with autism spectrum issues, that ability is somewhat hampered, forcing the person to develop their own filtering routines. These routines do, at a certain level, resemble the way software works.

I’ve compared programmers to auto mechanics and plumbers in the past. And you’ll notice squarely where those occupations are on the above graphs. There’s nothing wrong with being an auto mechanic or a plumber (or a programmer, for that matter), but is there anything about those particular professions that demands, in the name of social justice, that there must be 50% male plumbers and 50% female plumbers?

Funnily enough, I’ve never seen the Feminist Glittery Hoo Haa crowd agitate for gender equity in plumbers. I’m sure the fact that plumbing is a dirty, smelly, and often unpleasant job has nothing to do with this. Really. Stop laughing, you.

Now Atwood quotes Sara J. Chipps on why all of the above is problematic. I won’t quote the quote in full, just the key points and my observations.

1) Diversity leads to better products and results

Really? Diversity of what? This is a load of shit, frankly. A diverse customer base leads to a diverse range of products and results. It doesn’t matter a damn who creates that range so long as the people doing it are smart enough to recognize that their customers aren’t widgets.

Not to mention, reducing “diversity” to a combination of skin color and possession of dangly bits is frigging insulting. I have pale skin and an innie. The idea that this makes me just like everyone else with pale skin and an innie is laughable. Most of my “diversity” is going on inside my skull and is completely invisible to the wider world.

What’s more, I work in the damn field. I’ve worked in other male-dominated fields. I’ve never been treated differently because of the innie – but then I’ve also made damn sure I’m competent and I do the job I’m being paid for.

2) The Internet is the largest recording of human history ever built

And? The Internet is full of applications that are used by people all over the world. The people using those applications are what is recording the history, not the people who write them. If your 80 year old grandmother who’s never seen a computer before can figure out how to write and update a blog, if kids from a village in Africa can work out how to use laptops and how to hack them without any instructions, then I guarandamntee you it doesn’t matter if the people who write the software have an innie or an outie.

3) Women in 10 years need to be able to provide for themselves, and their families

And men in 10 years don’t? Is there any guarantee that software engineers 10 years from now will be able to support their families? Nope. There is only the assumption that software engineering is going to stay a relatively high-status and high-pay occupation.

You know what is going to be around in 10 years and provide a living? Plumbing. Electricians. You know, all the heavily male careers that are also hard work, hot, dirty, and often dangerous. The ones that frequently also call for a fair amount of brute strength (yes, electricians, too. You know how much those mega-sized extension leads weigh?). Programming is already being outsourced to places where the programmers will work for a dollar an hour and think they’re doing well (we won’t go into the quality of the software they write… let’s just say that there are always a ton of assumptions behind software and many of them are cultural so someone from a different culture isn’t going to get them…).

Atwood’s next effort is a long list of things that can be done to make programming a “more welcoming profession for women”. Hell, it’s not a welcoming profession for most men. It attracts weird, it attracts poorly-socialized people (yes, I’m one of these. I can fake it for a while, but sooner or later the truth shows). Programming is ultimately for people whose focus is on cutting through the crap that makes up most of everyday life and teaching a very fast moron to do things that the ordinary everyday people think are valuable. If you don’t have the basic competence, you might as well not bother.

Now, I think Atwood meant well. He is, for the most part, a decent person who likes good software. What he doesn’t get is that women in the USA have been told for years that they are capable of anything, and that any criticism of them is sexist. These two concepts are not compatible. Nor are they true.

Women are not capable of defeating men on a pure strength-for-strength basis. They need an equalizer of the Sam Colt variety. This is not sexist, it is biology. Women have a different center of mass, a different balance, a lower muscle mass and lower muscle density. Yes, a female body builder will likely wipe the floor with an average male about her size. She won’t be able to do that with a male body builder about her size. That’s just one example. There are many, many more.

As for criticism, well, you have to learn to distinguish between personal attacks and critique. It doesn’t matter who you are (or whether you’ve got an innie or an outie) you will make mistakes. Some will be minor mistakes. Others will be such a breathtaking “oh my god what have I done” balls up you’d swear there was a bull elephant on his back somewhere. Critique that looks at what was done and how to make it better and/or not make that mistake again is not racist, sexist, or anything-else-ist, even if it comes in the bluntest and crudest wrapper imaginable (if you’re dealing with poorly socialized males, this is pretty much a given).

Are we clear? Good.

Now, let me point out that in my varied career attempts, I’ve been a field geologist in a 6 person camp. I was the only female there, and I was dealing with manly! men, the kind of men to whom a woman being pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen was possibly dangerously liberal. I had no problems. Why? I did my job. I did not complain. I did not ask for help unless I’d already tried to do something and couldn’t. I hauled the bags of ore chippings myself because that was part of my job (with one exception – the bag that contained the chips from three meters of damn near solid silver-lead-zinc ore. That thing weighed about double what I did and I couldn’t even drag it). I dealt with the heat, the dust, and I didn’t treat the men’s language or their discussions as anything to be upset about.

As a result, they respected me. Not as “a woman” but as “Kate, the field geo”.

The same thing applies in software engineering, or anywhere else. If you do the job and don’t make a fuss over stupid shit like everyone calling USB drives “dongles” or the way connectors are labeled male or female depending on whether they’ve got innies or outies, you’ll get on fine. I have. And do. Not only that, I feel like I belong because I know damn well I’ve earned the respect of my co-workers.

So no, there is no need to “encourage” anyone, be they black, white, purple, male, female, “yes please”, or anything else. People will seek the fields that interest them. The traditionally male-dominated fields are still largely merit-based: those that do a good job will be respected regardless of the nature of their dual couplings.

And shame on the Feminist Glittery Hoo Haas for conflating merit with bigotry.

Let me assure you I don’t remember this picture.  I’m told the dog, almost off-camera is Vadia, a dog I never consciously met.  In other pictures, there’s a look of the Pit to her, but she was a mut and we never knew a cross of what.  Vadia means “Stray.”  She showed up one day — if like other dogs, she followed dad home from a ramble — and simply never left.  This happened a lot when we lived at grandma’s (in an apartment cut out of the house) which we did at the time.  Grandma had the big neon sign saying “sucker” over her front door and every stray cat, dog, goat, turtle in the neighborhood knew there would be a free meal and she didn’t even give them a sermon.

The young, serious gentleman next to me is my older brother.  I can’t swear to it, but I think my infant self was trying to figure out how to pull his hair.  I truly was an awful trial to him.

The person holding me was my mother.  She didn’t know it and thought the worst was over — my having been born extremely premature, by this age (I’d guess 5 to 6 months) I’d attained normal weight if not quite a bit over, and was clearly “normal” — but as soon as I was weaned a host of auto-immune issues set in from eczema to asthma, to a weakness of the lungs that led me to catch pneumonia at the drop of a hat to… just about anything that crossed the village or even waved in the wind would come and pay a visit.

Mom spent the next six years of her life battling for my life and becoming far too closely acquainted with doctors and hospitals.  I wouldn’t be here without her.  And I suspect I wouldn’t be a writer without that history, either.  I am by nature short on ability to stand still, and if I’d been healthy I doubt I’d ever have spent much time reading.  And if I hadn’t been sickly at a time when antibiotics were still new enough in Portugal not to have penetrated the general consciousness — and therefore at a time when quarantine was strictly observed for even the most trifling cold — and hadn’t I spent a lot of days in a room which didn’t even have a window, in other words, hadn’t I been bored out of my gourd, I doubt I’d ever have got the knack of telling myself stories — which means I’d never have thought to tell OTHER PEOPLE stories.

A lot of you are mothers, most (some I’m not too sure about ;) ) had mothers, a few of you are about to be mothers or will be mothers eventually.

From my own experience, it’s a terrifying thing.  It’s far worse if you imagine you have control over exactly what your child will be or will become.

Give that idea up right away.  You don’t have control.  You have influence — and don’t give it up when you see the kid going astray — if I hadn’t fought like a madwoman, #2 son would be  6th grade drop out.

I try not to consciously throw my weight around too often.  Only in things in which I think with experience they’d make a different decision and might once they’re older.  Things like “get an education. Make it stem.”  Or “Don’t get a tattoo, certainly not before your mid-twenties, and if you must get one, get in a place you can hide it with clothing for business interviews.”

For me to put my foot down and become exercised it needs to be something pretty important, like “If you’re driving to Denver, take your own car, I don’t know how those other kids drive.”  I also do the mother thing and demand they call if they’re out after 10 — just because I can’t go to bed till I find they’re all right.

On the other hand, it’s amazing sometimes how much influence I have had without meaning to — particularly in matters of books and writing and art.  Though the question must be begged here “is this influence or genetics?”

I don’t know.

And that’s a mind-relieving thing.  Sure I influence them a lot, but there are a lot of other things — genes, circumstances, the time and place they live in — that will influence them more.  The rather strange idea that mothers can shape a kid absolutely is exactly that, a strange idea.

Humans are more complex than that.  There’s nature, there’s nurture and there’s something else.  The something else was expressed to me by a friend as “In the end, we all raise ourselves.”  This might not be true for everyone, but it’s true for most people worth knowing.  Sooner or later we take responsibility.

Mom couldn’t have made me a writer if she tried.  And she wouldn’t try.  She still doesn’t read fiction.  She will listen ad nauseum to history programs, or how things work, and she’ll read political magazines and newspapers and religious polemic, but she doesn’t like fiction.  Dad reads fiction all the time, but other than mystery — his secret vice — it’s usually worthy books, the kind that win literary acclaim.

So, how did I turn out as I did?  Who knows.  Genes, boredom, illness, and, oh, yeah, in the end I discovered science fiction and fantasy, and I found my mental home.  (As opposed to a mental hospital, though some would say…)

How much this was influenced by the woman in the picture below, my paternal grandmother, who was a second mother to me and my brother and my cousin Natalia (in picture) I don’t know.  She used to tell me stories with shape shifters, see?  (Mom disapproved.)  I suspect it was more her genes than her influence which made me a writer, but her influence did form a great part of who I am.  When in a pinch, I often hear something she used to say.  Did she mean it that way?  Perhaps.  She was very close to her mother and grandmother, from whom I guess is where she got her aphorisms.

But what she gave me most of all were things she never said.  Grandma was never still.  From waking to sleep, from the time I met her — when she was 63.  At least that’s the first age I remember for her — till about three months before her death, there was always something to clean, someone to cook for, some animal to rescue, some child to console, some crop to grow, some story to tell.

From her I learned that if you want to do it, you do it, you don’t moon about it. Being a woman is no excuse for not doing things and not trying things: if it’s what you want to do, you do it.  If people talk, they will — you can’t stop people’s mouths.

From her I learned that you shouldn’t be too meek.  She did tell me that “The more you bow, the more they see your slip” — but actually what I learned from her actions was that it’s okay to be meek and appeasing if you have to be and it gets things to happen faster.  It’s only when principles or self-respect are involved that you should stand on your dignity.  A lot of people who put on airs of power and dignity in fact have neither.

The most important person is the one who does what has to be done. And most things just take a lot of hard work.  And no work is too hard.  And you weren’t put in this Earth to spare yourself and let other people go in need whom you might help.  And if you can’t give money, or solve someone’s problems, you can always lend a sympathetic ear.  And cats should not be allowed to go in need of food or care either, because they’re cats, and you should look after them.  And no animal ever deserves harsh treatment because they’re dumb brutes and will love you with just a little encouragement. And other people’s business becomes your business if you can help/improve their lot (by this I mean, if you can bake them a cake when they’re sad, look after them when they’re sick, listen to them in distress.  The idea of offloading these things on government was UTTERLY alien to grandma.)  But most of all, you do what you have to, and you bear what you have to, and you don’t cry and you don’t whine.  Life is work and until one is done the other won’t be.  But thank heavens, there are people we love and who love us along the way — and that makes the work joyful and makes it all worth while.

She never told me most of this, understand.  But as I followed her around through the day (I remember I used to hold on to her apron strings) I soaked a lot of it through the skin.

Things such as my storytelling, my capacity to take physical pain, my mystical turn of mind might be genetic as might (sigh) to an extent my wretched metabolism.  BUT my understanding of self respect and respect of others?  That comes from watching how grandma interacted with people, and how she lived her life.

So, to the two women (one living) who are responsible for my being here, and for my raising myself as I did, and for my being who I am, Happy Mother’s Day.

And the rest of you, go enjoy mothers, or children, or “adopted” children or grandchildren, or nephews and nieces.  A lot of you might not be biological mothers, but you still have a hand in shaping the future, by what you say, by what you do, and simply by being.  Raise yourself as best you can.  You might be raising other people, unknowing.