According To Hoyt

So, the short story will get done, promise, sometime tonight or tomorrow.  I wasted — not quite, but — all of yesterday trying to break into instapundit.  Not that they locked me out on purpose, mind.  They just changed systems and the fact my computer hates me did the rest.  I’m back in, now, but it took some doing.

Anyway, so that leaves me behind on Revenge (a dish best served edited) and with the story still unwritten — though I know it’s about Simon — and with Royal blood to finish, and…

Which brings me to this:

“…writing is antisocial. It’s solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone…and not even know that he’s doing it. As writer’s wives and husbands often learn to their horror.
And – attend me carefully, Gwen! – there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in at him with a stick. Because if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all…and if you shake him, he bites.”

Robert A. Heinlein
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

The thing is, mark my words, that Mr. Heinlein never thought of the truly horrible scenario: a household with three writers, or, let us admit, even though he’s not consented to publishing anything yet, four.

It gets very weird.  Not only because there seems to be some commonality to the mind, like there is someone pouring inspiration in buckets and it hits us all at the same time — must the be reason that both Robert and I ended up with characters named Tom who have to sacrifice themselves to escape in the same week — but also sometimes it feels like all these worlds are crowded in the house and you can feel your relatives’ worlds elbow-jostling yours.

Actually that feeling that other minds are too close is one of the most prevalent writers’ characteristics.  Friends who complain their office is too close to the neighbors’ house just make me feel like I’m not so crazy.  The best writing space I’ve ever had stood a floor and a half above all the neighbors.

People — and by people I mean other writers, at conventions — are always stunned that Dan and I can write in the same hotel room during our writing weekends.  Brother, it’s a relief.  It’s just two minds, and we’re fully concentrating on writing.  Except for some very pleasant interludes, we don’t SEE each other.

So, if you’re blessed or cursed with a writer (or more) in the household, here are some tips:

1- If they’re wandering around with this vague and lost look in their eyes?  Stay out of their way.  they’ll walk into you, and then they’ll argue.

2- DO NOT allow them to trap you into an argument.  It’s a ploy to avoid dealing with the story in their heads.

3- If they’re at the kitchen table clutching their heads and mumbling “I hate you so much” it’s not about you.

4- If they tell you they’re broken and will never write again, pat them on the shoulder and give them a soothing beverage.  DO NOT under any circumstances get into an argument over it.  See point 2.

5- If they come to you with a bright and shiny new idea that means they should give up the current work and start a new one, demur.  It COULD be the best idea since Lord of the Rings met Starship Troopers, but if you encourage them they’ll never finish the current one.  Or the new shiny one, either.

6- If they try to argue on 5, remember two, and shove a cat in their lap, then wander off on some REALLY URGENT ERRAND.  Make one up if you have to.

7- If your writer is between projects, watch your mouth.  Robert A. Hoyt’s Ninja Nun came from my mispronouncing Ninja Run.  Yeah.

8- If your writer has decided to give up writing, and what they do as a distraction is clean, let them.  You know damn well he’s going to start another ten projects and the place won’t get cleaned again for two years.  Let them clean for about two weeks, at which point they should be attempting to vacuum the cats and mop the children.  Then drop a few story ideas across their path.

9 – Make sure they eat, drink and shower SOMETIME.  You might not be able to manage all of these every day, but put in some effort.

10- If they just finished a book or a series, let them talk about the characters until they talk themselves out of the people/setting, so they can start a new one.  This is the time for long walks in the park.  DO NOT let them near bonfires, though.  Before anyone sees the manuscript, the temptation to burn it is high.  And burning thumb drivers or computers will get you in trouble with the EPA.  (Making copies of your writer’s product while he’s in the post novel sleep is also a great idea.  Then let him destroy how many copies he wants, until he goes “What have I done?  If only!” Then present him with the printed, copyedited manuscript and a copy of it electronic.  He’ll be fine.  Until the next novel.

I’m actually hoping to put up a short story to support Through Fire, which is now available in ebook only on Amazon.  But I’ll be honest and it might be tomorrow, as I’m trying to finish Darkship Revenge before the packing to move recommences.

So, for now, there’s this, if you’re inclined to buy and read.  And by the by the by there will be story.

I will first confess, mea culpa, that I’m always doubtful when I see headlines that say “Collapse Imminent.”  I’ve seen them every other week since I have lived in the US.  I’ve come to the conclusion that anticipating collapse is an American past time. Perhaps because we are aware of how much we have, and how well we live.  Perhaps it’s a sense of “this can’t go on.”

On the other hand nations do collapse, and I lived through a controlled, slow collapse where the statistics looked much worse than the real world facts. (Except for the violence, which looked much much worse on the street than was reported.)

The thing is none of these nations in collapse ever publishes this sort of thing.  Oh, maybe in very small and very regional press, but not naturally.  It’s rather whispered from person to person, and you just sort of kind of end up hoarding dollars, or gold, or something.

What I mean to say is that we have a VERY different culture and way of looking at things from countries who have collapsed in the past, which makes things hard to gauge.

BTW for those who think that genetics are the be all, end all of a country’s success, I’ll point out that Brazil has an awful lot of Britishers, Germans and Italians… maybe not the same proportion as the US, but enough to play with.  However, their culture is like others that came from Rome, and that means it is bound by internal rules and beliefs that make it perpetually the country of the future.  (That never comes.)  I’m sure a great part of what we’re seeing in Venezuela is also Latin culture in play.

However, I’ll admit our own country is giving me chills.  There’s a lot of ruin in a country, but we’re afflicted with a political class determined to ruin us.  Somehow we stopped hanging traitors and started electing them to political office instead.  I don’t think that’s an improvement.

Mind you, I still think that our collapse will be slow…  Which is why I have hope.

My hope is in the ways America is great, which is not the ways our government thinks we’re great.  It’s that we are a nation with a high proportion of Odds, and our culture still gives enough leeway to the “different” that we can try and do new and unexpected things.

I will grant you the new tech is only halfway through replacing the old.  As we’ve found to our own chagrin this election cycle, traditional media still holds a lot of sway.

But it no longer has it all its own way.  In the same way traditional publishers still hold a lot of sway, but Indie is coming up nicely.  And let me tell you guys, without fracking and the price oil wars we’d al be increasingly worse off.

I’m sure — not being an expert I can’t be specific — there are many other industries on the verge of this type of change.

You could say — runs — we’re the change we’ve been waiting for.  And it’s not what our elites expected.  Not at all.

They thought they had us bound and gagged for deliver to our foes.  I’m not going to lie to you and say things won’t get worse, but as long as it’s not sudden, we can fight the rising tide.

Participate in, promote and create disruptive industries.  We’re the underfunded rebels against an overarching and feckless establishment.  The only way we win is by hitting them where they don’t expect: in the tech and in the economy.

Put your shoulders to it and push.  The American people isn’t finished.  The American political class needs to be.

 

 

Pia Glenn of xoJane again attempts to Explain feminism- Julie Pascal

Pia Glenn of xoJane again attempts to Explain feminism.  (I know it’s “again” because this is the second most important thing that feminists do.)

A bit ago actress Maisie Williams of “Game of Thrones” innocently announced the plain truth, the elephant in the room, the evidence before her own eyes, and the shock of it all is still being felt.

“And then someone explained [feminism] to me.  And I remember thinking, “Isn’t that just like everyone?” And then I realized everyone is not a feminist, unfortunately. But I also feel like we should stop calling feminists “feminists” and just start calling people who aren’t feminist “sexist” – and then everyone else is just a human. You are either a normal person or a sexist.”

Because what Miss Williams got was the “Explanation”.  I’ve gotten it before.  So have you.  Feminism is about equality for everyone, it’s pretty simple the Explanation goes, women are equal to men and deserve to be treated the same.  And Miss Williams is entirely correct in her complete obvious honesty… “Isn’t that just like everyone?”  Why yes, it is.  It’s exactly “like everyone” except for a few people who actually and truly are sexists.

Well, Pia Glenn simply won’t have it.

“…Women who have lived longer lives and suffered seriously due to sexism might be less likely to find beauty in her blitheness, of course, and she does go on to say, “Because it works the other way, as well. A lot of men have it hard too,” which is an unfortunate follow-up that reveals her not fully embracing the idea of sexism as a systemic ill that actually doesn’t work the same way in reverse.”

Because women, that’s all of us BTW, who have lived longer, who understand, know that the unfairness in women’s lives is entirely different from the unfairness that men experience.  Feminism isn’t about equality and not being sexist, it’s about a “systemic ill” that only flows in one direction, ever.

So, because explaining what feminism is never works very well but results in logical and clearheaded young women getting it ALL WRONG, Pia Glenn is now going to explain what feminism is *not*.

Feminism is not a buzzword.  

It’s DEEP.

“Feminism is a movement that is vital to societal progress, not the latest headline or hot topic.”

Turns out that young ladies tend to say foolish unhelpful things when they are cornered by reporters and Pia would like reporters to ask older women and men questions about feminism.  Yes, I think that would work out about the same as you do.

(By the way, “ladies” is Pia’s word choice, not mine, so we can safely assume that “ladies” is no longer an inherently sexist term.  Good to know.  I’m sure certain people involved in a SFWA brouhaha a couple of years ago will soon be issuing apologies.)

Feminism is not determined by your career.

I honest to dawg have never heard a single person claim it was.  I will say this… some people are professional feminists.  They spend their time policing the expressions of young women who foolishly think that feminism is the opposite of sexism rather than a systemic ill that men can never experience.

Feminism is not a 100% lovey-dovey sorority pact.

Pia explains, “My feminism is such that I want gender equality and specifically to support women, but I’ll tell another woman she done fucked up if that’s what went down, and I expect the same.”

Pia, you done fucked up.  I realize you believe that’s impossible, and you do go on to explain that you’re talking about trivial stuff like making mistakes at work because women are “new” to many careers and don’t have experience which “hasn’t been doled out evenly”, which is sort of… interesting, because we all enter the world naked and hungry and we all arrive at our first job completely and entirely unexperienced.

But patriarchal logic aside, we should understand the rules of fighting: “I can read you to filth without attacking physical appearance, like history so often has with women, or using gendered/coded insults.”   Because, again, history never does this to men… right, I forgot, systemic and only in one direction.  Well, what about this then?  The choice of insult is irrelevant to the validity of an argument.  If you insult in non-gendered, non-appearance attacking ways, you’re still issuing insults.  You haven’t achieved some get out of jail free card because you yourself made a rule about proper and improper insults and then followed them.   Insults have a rhetorical purpose and it’s not a nice one.  They attack the person, no matter you never mentioned gender or appearance, and serve the purpose of allowing you to just skip the part where you ever have to prove your point.  If my purpose is to insult someone rather than prove my point, a gendered insult is as good as any other.

Feminism is not about your appearance.

Of course not.   I’m pretty sure it’s actually about concocting pure fiction and then being really mad about it.  (See the next point.)

Feminism is not automatically pro-abortion.

“Ultra-conservatives like to paint ugly pictures of so-called feminazis sneaking into the bedrooms of pregnant women at night and forcing abortions upon them. We know this is bullshit,…”

Yes, so do we.

Just as we know that “feminists” like to paint ugly pictures of so-called pro-lifers impregnating women against their will, locking them up, and making them carry to term.  Apparently feminists make up both versions of this story, the one where ultra-conservatives lie about an abortion squad sneaking into your house and forcing an abortion on you, and also the lie about women being made to have babies against their wills.

No one thinks that a woman shouldn’t have a choice.  As Maisie said, “Isn’t that like everyone?”  Yes, it is.   So is belief in bodily autonomy.  That’s like… everyone.

Since no one wants to force any woman to reproduce if she does not want to reproduce the question comes down to when in the reproductive process those choices are made and how that bodily autonomy is exercised.

If you’re anti-abortion you believe that women are fully capable adult humans able to make informed choices before becoming pregnant and you think that the unborn are entitled to bodily autonomy as well.   If you’re pro-abortion you feel that women are not able, or at least ought not to be expected to make their reproductive choices until they darned well get around to it because it’s just not that important as the fetus is just cells.  Shockingly there are people in the world of both opinions who can be in profound disagreement with each other without hatred.

In any case, the answer was yes, feminism is automatically pro-abortion.

Feminism is not against men.

“Again, we’ve all seen and heard the “scary” propaganda. But there is a space to address the difference between misandry as a playful pushback against misogyny that we know can’t have the societal gravitas of historic woman-hating, but can still be used to express fully justified frustrations, and… straight-up hating men.”

I think the term for that is “word salad.”   I’m tempted to just leave it with her own amazing eloquence explaining why hating men with “fully justified” reasons is different from just straight up hating men.   And it really doesn’t matter how hateful the man-hating is because it “can’t have the societal gravitas of historic woman-hating“.  In other words, and trying not to commit word salad myself… it’s not hate when women do it.

And so we arrive at Project Consent… good people Pia usually admires, undoubtedly feminists themselves, but they made a mistake.   They said that “rape is not a feminist issue”.    Except that it is.

“… feminists certainly know that male victims of rape absolutely matter as well, while fighting the highly gendered scourge of rape overall.”

Male victims matter, yes they do, but rape itself is gendered.   Apparently like sexism and hard times and lots of other things, while it can happen to men, it’s really all about women.  And forgetting that fact for a moment requires apologies and some groveling.  No one can just assume good will and intentions.  That would be silly talk, right there.  Time to throw about some non-gendered insults because they done fucked up, no?

Which brings us to the first most important thing that feminists do – they make people on their own side issue apologies for doing feminism wrong.

Feminism is not in need of backlash.

I just have to quote most of it because it’s amazing.

“Ultra-conservative ladies of social media, you can keep your signs about why you “don’t need feminism.” You’re operating on behalf of the enemy, and the devil needs no more advocates. (…) …what we don’t need are the women who seem to think they’re doing something revolutionary by loudly declaring that they choose to be subservient to their husbands or they prefer to assume a “lesser” role in the home.”  (emphasis in original.. remember it for later).

(…)  “They’re unable or afraid to assert that work done in the home, including child-rearing, is valuable beyond belief and they should be prized as contributing members of society. They might have been made to feel inferior or somehow inadequate for choosing a path that looks from the outside like what feminism seeks to combat, and, unaware or not in command of their agency, they think they’ll take up arms for those they perceive to be on their side.”

Eventually all feminists will reach this point.  What you’ve just observed is a writer who feels superior for not using gendered insults explaining to you that women don’t know their own minds, they don’t know who is on their side, and they aren’t “in command of their agency.”

Men used to do this.  Pat you on the head.  Say “little lady”.  All in a “oh, isn’t that cute, it talks!” sort of way.   Now feminists do it.

“We are on your side. Feminism is on your side. It bears repeating that choosing to be a devoted wife, mother, or female partner of any kind who works to maintain a home for yourself and your partner/family because you want to does not exclude you from feminism or make you the enemy.

Doing so because you feel that’s “a woman’s place?” Well, that kind of does.”

She honestly can’t keep her story straight.   If I support my spouse and family “because I want to” that’s really okay?

Do I get to “choose” to be submissive?  Am I allowed to “prefer” to assume a role that is supportive of my husband’s fully capable adulthood and agency?  If I explain that it’s far too easy for women to transfer all of the feminine management and authority over their home and children into “bossing” their husband and therefore they ought to make a concerted and thoughtful effort not to do so, if I explain that would that make me the enemy?

Feminism is not a quality pickup line.

Considering how many male “feminists” are shit lords (Bill Clinton, cough, cough), it must work or they wouldn’t do it.

Feminism is not an insult.

Well, since you already said that gendered insults were off limits.

“This goes back to the narrow minds who spread hateful propaganda and are ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of what the word means. To the fools who spew “oh she’s one of those feminists” as though it’s a negative thing, I’m sorry that you’re so lost, but you’re damn right I am.”

Feminism can be used as an insult because of the feminists.

Women proclaim themselves not to be feminist because of the feminists.

Women who get the Explanation and are amazed because “isn’t that everyone?” can’t escape the fact that there are others, there are “those feminists” out there.  The neurotic hysterics who think that even when men are raped it’s about women, that men can’t be oppressed, that it’s okay to be hateful toward men because, even if you wanted it to, your hatred of men would lack historical gravitas, who believe that women who point out the foolishness of these positions lack agency and self-awareness, and that women are too ignorant to understand and control their reproduction at the source.

There are the Marxists and the man-haters and the “PIV is rape” nut-jobs.   There’s that never ending foolishness about the Patriarchy.  There’s the slut walks followed by outrage over fantasy armor and video games.  There’s giant pink vagina costumes and demands to be taken seriously.  There are the language police, the tone police, and whoever it is who issues the lists of words that are sexist this week.

It’s the double standards.  It’s the fact that feminism can bring the hammer down on Project Consent for failing to present rape as a gendered issue but they can’t be bothered to bring the hammer down on “all PIV is rape”.

Pointing this out is not hateful propaganda.  It’s not being confused in our poor weak female brains about what the word means.

And really, if we want to talk about delusions – there is no “gendered” insult or insult to a woman’s looks that is more offensive than the insult of suggesting that those women who disagree with “feminism” are lacking agency or understanding about their own lives.   People know what feminism is.  They know what it is not.  And feminism has earned every last insult.

Feminism is not going anywhere.

And we come to the last reason that people hate feminism.

“It’s not a trend. It’s vital to progress, and if you’re not with us, you’re against us. What Maisie said.”

Stealing the voice of women.  

Maisie didn’t say “if you’re not with feminism as imagined by xoJane, you’re against us.”  You don’t get to steal her voice.  She said that feminism as it was explained to her already described everyone except for sexists, and that it also applied to some of the hardships that men face, and that we should just have “normal people” and “sexists” and not have feminism at all.  She was clearly not using the xoJane definition of feminism.

What else she might say now, older, and with better understanding of just how much trouble she could be in for using a word wrong or suggesting that men have troubles too, I couldn’t say and neither could you.

 

The first time I heard the Heinlein dictum about not handicapping your children by making their life too easy, I was still technically a child myself.  Technically, because I was around fourteen I think.  I didn’t know how easy I’d had it, relative to the world at large (who does?) but I knew I had it better than my parents, who only didn’t have to walk up hill barefoot in the snow because it rarely snows in Portugal.

So I was mildly resentful of the idea that it was bad for kids to have it too easy.  I no longer am, and in that way of aging children and their parents (though Heinlein could only count as a mental parent) I’ve come to think the old man had a good point.

Look, I had it much easier than most people in the generation previous to mine.  Too easy?  That’s relative.  The family was never wealthy enough that I could have whatever I wanted at the drop of a hat with no worry about how much it cost.  In fact, my incentive to tutor a lot in college was that I could pay for my own books and also for additional language courses on the side.  So I was conscious of financial limits, and not so sheltered that I didn’t get in my share of physical danger and fights.  (Though I wonder if my parents were aware of those, having grown up in different times.  Well, mom was aware of what use I put my umbrella to, hence buying me the weaponized umbrella, but I wonder if she had any clue how often those were deployed against real weapons.  My brother seemed to have a little more clue than the parents, as he told them if I didn’t learn to keep my mouth shut, I’d end up disappeared or dead.  I didn’t.  I don’t know if the old man (RAH) was right again and it’s easier to be a live lion, or if I got lucky.  Who knows?  The fact that I invented “fight like a cornered cat” before it was hip probably didn’t hurt.)

However, life has its way of giving you challenges neither you nor your parents could have anticipated.  For instance, I will not claim to have been an indifferent student, because none of you would believe it.  I was usually at or near the top of my class (and if only near, I was working my tail off to be top.)  I was/am one of those people “born with something to prove” and quite capable of being unconscionably hard on myself to make up for natural deficiencies.

And natural deficiencies I did have, as I found out when I started going up against others in intellectual arenas.

I am not going to talk about IQs, because IQs are…. slippery, particularly above a certain level.  I’m simply going to say by the end of elementary school, most of us know exactly where we stand in relation to those we’ve encountered.

I had a good enough reasoning and could do things like reconstruct/invent methods of solving mathematical problems, if I’d forgotten formulas.  I had words at my command with almost lightening ability, compared to my classmates.  I could reason through philosophical principals and, due to a defect in character, find flaws in the best constructed arguments.  My memory was good enough for either words in context, or for numbers given a place I could reel them off from (I used to know all the history of the renaissance in relation to Leonardo DaVinci’s birth date.) My reasoning was useless for anything spacial.  I couldn’t — quite literally — think myself out of a paperbag.  It was non-existent for visual puzzles.  (Let me touch the pieces, though…)   And my memory was NOTHING for random syllables, arbitrary words, and unconnected/not logical strings.

Because G-d has a sense of humor, I was pushed — through a chain of circumstance and events — into humanities in 9th grade (which is when you make the choice in Portugal.) In the humanities, you were pretty much consigned to teaching, UNLESS you studied languages.  I could easily have taken philosophy.  Baffle them with bullsh*t has been a strong point since I learned to speak.  But at the time, for reasons known only to Bob, I was convinced I’d hate teaching.  (Actually I was wrong and right.  I do love teaching in itself, almost as much as writing.  I purely hate the bureaucracy and in Portugal it was/probably is worse than here.) So I took languages.

What do languages offer?  Ah, yes, the endless opportunity to memorize endless strings of what is to a foreigner arbitrary syllables.

Part of the reason I loved English from the first is that the verbs are MUCH simpler, and there was less arbitrary bullsh*t to memorize.  There is also a certain internal logic to English which I couldn’t explain because it’s a back-brain thing, but once I had acquired a basic vocabulary, I could start reading in English, which gave me the “roots” of things and made it easier to learn English by making the strings of syllables less nonsense.

German, because it’s both arbitrary as to genders, declines everything including nouns, and is more strict as to structure was my least favorite and more easily lost language.  (Also our teacher tried to teach us by translating nothing, which fell into my competency black-hole.)

That said, I will note I was still among the top of my class for languages, which included German.  I managed it by packing in an inhumane amount of work around my busy social life.  I must have worked four to five times as hard as my colleagues who were GIFTED in languages.  (I’ve seen gifted in languages.  My brother is.  I’m not.)

At the end of it, I spoke five languages with enough fluency that on my first-to-stay flight into the US I found myself the hub of translation going through customs.

I’ve lost most of that fluency in acquiring near-native fluency in English.  (Well, it seems close to native to me, but I might be wrong.  OTOH English is the language I think in and have for thirty years.)  Because English is what I needed to make it in a fiction writing career, where I had neither acquaintances nor help and perhaps not a natural talent for.  Perhaps not?  Who knows?  Some people seem to me to be natural storytellers, but then what I do with characters might seem all supernatural to them.  WHO KNOWS?  I’m not in their heads.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not to brag, and I’ll admit readily most of what I’ve done is not through natural talent or intelligence, but through hard hardheadedness, refusal to give up and the sort of determination other people put to more useful ends, like trying to cure cancer or map the brain.

I was thinking about this while contemplating my sons’ generation.  These kids are screwed five ways from Monday, and there will be another post on this later on.

BUT the way in which they’re screwed worse is that they were raised with “self-esteem” teaching.  Okay, not my kids.  I was the horrible mother who would look at the proffered childish drawing and go “You can do better.”  Now I wasn’t stupid, and I knew what they were capable of at any given age, but if it was something they knew they hadn’t put any effort into, I knew it too, and could call them on it.

Many people and most of their classmates’ mothers were shocked by this.  Didn’t I know I was destroying their self-esteem and their chances at success?

Well, no.  I was giving them an honest opinion.

I suspect they resented it as much as I did my parents’ honest opinions, but then when Marsh first showed me his art, when Robert first showed me his writing, and I said “this is good” they knew I wasn’t fooling, and that my opinion was something they could build on.  (Marsh’s writing is very good too.  Think Bradbury with better plotting.  Someday I’ll convince him to publish it.  Right now the perfectionist doesn’t consider anything ready to let go.)

But most of their generation PARTICULARLY THE GIRLS are coddled and protected within an inch of their lives and treated as prodigies.  And don’t argue with me on the girl thing.  If you don’t have kids in school — particularly sons — you don’t know how skewed it is.  Most of the work is geared to “a woman’s way of learning”, things are demanded at appropriate ages FOR GIRLS who develop faster than boys (for instance to deliver work on time with no demands.  Teen boys can’t do that till about 16, but it’s demanded at 11.  If your male middle schooler is floundering, you know why.  Add to that that most teachers are women, and women of a certain generation, who feel they are “sticking it to the patriarchy” by “encouraging” girls more and what you have is a recipe for disaster, particularly for girls.

Let’s right now admit men and women are different, with different capacities.  If I ever persuade my brain-researcher friend to give you a post on how hormones influence brain development, we’ll have a biological base to build on.  But still, statistically across all the various cultures of the world, men and women are different in raw capabilities.  Men prefer spacial and mathematical reasoning (well, abstract, where mathematical is iffy) and enjoy danger more.  Women are linguistically inclined and able to multitask or work in an “Interrupted environment” better.

Now these are all statistical capabilities, which applied to real life mean very little, and applied to real humans are not predictive.  I mean, you’d expect to see more male engineers and more female linguists — and you do — but it means nothing as to whether your own very special male or female apple blossom should be one or the other.

Remember where I said above that NATURALLY I suck at languages (other than native) but I did get to the top of my class in them.  In a different leg of pants of time I’m a damn good mechanical engineer which is what I WANTED to be.  I was always pretty good at assembling machines (well, mostly disassembling them and streamlining them, ie. ending up with spare parts, but never mind.)  It would have taken a lot of work because of my tendency to transpose digits and I might do things by either feeling the parts or cutting them out of cardboard so I could feel them (how I do carpentry) but it COULD be managed.

I’ve known women engineers and women mathematicians who beat out even gifted men.

I’ll add here that I don’t understand the NEED of the cognoscenti in our society to fight natural inclination and make male nurses and female engineers. It seems to me they’re working out some bur under their own psychological saddle, so to speak, by playing with the lives of others.

On the other hand if women want to be engineers and are willing to work hard enough they should stand the same chance as any man.  And yet, we have classes that start out with equal numbers of male and female, in engineering, but by the end it is, as younger son puts it “a sausage fest” most women having deserted to Business or Art or Art of Business or Business of Art or whatever.

A lot of these were probably never that interested, and were pushed by parents/teachers.  But those that were were handicapped.

Any number of boys quits too.  Fewer than the girls, because they weren’t as handicapped.

These kids are handicapped by making their lives too easy.  If the school goes out of their way to value “a woman’s way of learning” a woman will never learn to stretch her winds.  If even boys are taught “you’re special and unique” and every thing they toss out with little thought is praised, they don’t learn what their blind spots are or to compensate for them.

What this means is that sooner or later they’ll come up against things they’re bad at — the best “rounded” person has things they suck at — and they don’t know what reserves they have, nor how to fill in the holes in natural talent with work.

Yeah, there are places hard work won’t take you.  There are natural abilities you can’t compensate for with really insane levels of work.  For instance, I’m tone deaf (and mid range deaf.)  I remember before the pneumonia that likely made me so (around 12) being able to write down notes as heard from piano.  Now?  Not all the hard work in the world would get me to do that.  I simply don’t hear it.

However, absent physical disability, I have yet to find one single “gift” that you can’t make up for by working harder and LEARNING.  Even if that means insanely hard.

But if all your life you were praised for your genius and your “gifts” for which you had to do nothing or very little, you will never learn that you have defects in your abilities.  And worse, you’ll never learn to compensate for them.

We’re destroying entire generations, particularly females, by making their lives too easy.  And what’s worse, they will have absolutely no resilience when they come up against something that’s actually difficult.  The fact that this is being done to the girls particularly by a generation of women who think they’re making it so girls “win” is tragic and scary.

I don’t know if you can learn to work and compensate later on in life.  I’d say we’re about to find out.  The idea terrifies me more than a little.

Meanwhile, teach your children well.  They’ll have to make up for generations scarily ill-suited to the adversity that’s coming.

And make up your mind to it that we’re going to have to work harder and smarter to get this boat to shore.  Put your shoulders to it, and let’s do it.

*So I managed to decide that my driving lesson — to get me back on the road after being sidelined for three years for various reasons — was tomorrow, not today, which means I missed it.  Subconscious avoidance?  Getoutoftown.  It’s like I have a mild phobia or something.  Yeah, okay.  This is going to make it very hard, as I’ll have to have lessons after the move.  OTOH it gives me the day to work.  I’ll be back.  Tomorrow – SAH*

Pocket Full of Promo – Jason Dyck

Cedar Sanderson

Twisted Mindflow: A Collection of Stories

This is a collection of seventeen stories, with author’s notes and a foreword by Sanford Begley, the author’s First Reader.

A collection of seventeen shorts, flash, and oddball stories, twisted as they flowed out of my head and onto the paper.

Some may seem familiar, others appear here for the first time.

Get into my head…

Currently available for free

Ben Zwycky

Nobility Among Us

“Still, this process does not sit well with me. Letting the people think they are in control of these proceedings, having them vote for their chosen candidate as if they will change the way things are done, these are dangerous ideas. Furthermore, these are actual lowborns we are admitting to our ranks. What if something slips through the filtering process, what then? I have this nagging feeling that this whole enterprise will come back to haunt us one day.”

Brought together by a reality show designed to pacify the people of Gandria, Viscount Marcus Draishire and his low-born wife are secret devotees of the forbidden book. This could get both of them imprisoned or worse. Marcus hears a case of a cattle farmer suing his baron for unfair taxation. Should he follow the king’s decree, that all nobles are immune from criticism, or judge the case on its merits? Marcus chooses the latter and gets himself some unwanted attention. He now has to balance acting in the best interests of his subjects against antagonising his superiors, who tend to express their displeasure with a bomb, bullet or knife.

The people under him have their own struggles and the nobility itself is walking something of a tightrope, the need to crush dissent weighing against that of projecting a benevolent public image; no-one wants another uprising.

Beyond the Mist

The Chara Series Book 1

Am I falling or flying? Powerless or mighty? Imprisoned or free?

I have nothing: no possessions, no memories, no reference points or even solid ground to stand on; just falling (or is it flying?) through an endless mist. A voice beside me says this is the last free space in a world of slavery and suffering; another that it’s a self-imposed prison from a world of beauty and adventure. Who should I believe? What is waiting for me out there?

I make my choice and begin to discover what lies beyond the mist.

Today is the last day for Kindle Countdown on this book

Selected Verse – Faith and Family

A series of love poems that gives glimpses into the magical process by which a lonely and shy young man transforms into a husband and father and how the love in his family grows. This is followed by verse that look at aspects of wider family life, then at the ways in which the divine has revealed itself in history, both in ancient and modern times, how these clash with a fallen world and call us to something higher and grander than ourselves.

Selected Verse – Heroes and Wonders

A collection of poems dealing with heroes and wonders of the grand type we see depicted in our favourite epics as well as inspiring everyday examples that only a few ever notice. Beauty to enjoy, courage to inspire, wisdom and folly to admire and avoid.

Highlights include a heartfelt celebration of a life well lived, the story of a survivor of China’s brutal one child policy, an uplifting appreciation of nature’s cycles, and a grand tale of a beast that haunts the hearts of men.

Awake the hero within you, and stand in awe of wonders that never cease.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Resonant Bronze

Lodestone Tales Book 2

The warriors of Torbellai brought back a prize in the night, and young Paitra wants to see it. Even hidden away in the armory, the artifact changed the whole mood of their mountain citadel from dread foreboding to hope. But the warlord hid the fighters’ plunder for good reason. Forged by trolls and radiating magic, it presents grave risk to any who approach it.

Through death into magic and sound, Paitra confronts… resonant bronze.

Heinlein, towards the end of his oeuvre concluded that reality was not logical but whimsical.  Given various things going on right now, he might have had a point, but not quite.

Pratchett talked about a force “Narrativium” holding reality together.  And he was right, at least for humans.  The problem is that the rest of reality doesn’t really much care what humans see, and also that Narrativium can be an unwittingly deceptive force.

Pratchett played it both seriously and for laughs.  I.e. he was aware of how the “narrative” affected him, and he poked it in the eye with a sharp stick, even while making it work.

So, yeah, the one chance in a million is a guaranteed thing.  And the young man adopted by dwarfs really is the lost prince, but would rather be a policeman.

Which is how to treat this form of subconscious, pre-formed narrative in our heads.  Be aware of it.  Be amused when it works.  Use it for comfort when you need comfort.  BUT don’t think that impersonal reality really cares what the narrative thinks should happen.

We are more surrounded by narrative then ever, and I don’t mean “carefully crafted narrative.”  We have that too.  The left here, the inheritors of Soviet Agitprop HAVE indeed sold a bill of goods to a new generation.  Part of owning education, and mass media and even entertainment.  So people who are raised in this bubble, and whose work or real life never take them out of it — a minority for sure, but still a significant group — tend to see everything through the narrative.

This is how you see Sad Puppies and our supporters, with people like me, and Larry and Kate in it called “neo nazis” and accused of being “racist, sexist, homophobic.”  That poor little duckling was told in school that anyone who opposed the commands of the “intelligentsia” who gave their orders on “diversity” (of color or what you do with your pee pee on your time off) were neo nazis and hated women and gays and people of color.  She couldn’t even see the people on our side, but had to go with the narrative, because she’s been watching the world through it for her whole life, and if she let it go she’d have nothing.  Her sense of self would disintegrate.

And so, the Sad Puppies revolt must be NOT about taking down a small, insular corrupt group who use the sacred cows of their class to keep control and profit from a once-venerable award.  It can’t be about the fact that we’d like stories which will captivate the public and grow the field, as opposed to the current pseudo-literary and indigestible pap.  No.  It must be that we want to prevent women and people of color and gay people from being in the field.  Which, you know, is SUCH a powerful narrative that they can’t even see those holding the assterisk and trying to force it on others are the most powerful house in the field, or that those fighting them are largely outsiders, and, yep, some of us people of tan (or married to them) and women.

That is the force of constructed narrative.  But constructed narrative has its limits.  When people leave the bubble (for most of us end of college) or face something that really doesn’t fit it, it has a tendency to shatter like glass.  (If you can’t avoid facing it, of course.)  Which leads to sudden reversals and changes that seem crazy-fast.  Black swans and the avalanche started with a few grains of sand and which lead to those are the best way to understand how such narratives crack.

The more dangerous narratives are the ones that are so old that they have become part and parcel of the human race.  Yeah, they’re now part of our entertainment, bu they were part of fairy tales, they were part of … probably tales told by hunters around the fire in the Neolithic.

And the stories we tell ourselves.  Both of those sets will lead you astray.

Let’s start with the stories we tell ourselves.  Humans are designed to see patterns in things.  It’s how we managed to learn and become a successful enough species that we could invent and create and become what we’re now.

The ability to discern patterns is evolutionarily favored, because if you know that by the river you’re likely to find both easy hunting AND predators who might eat you, you’re more likely to be aware enough to come back alive AND with prey.

However, once you go past the little patterns that reflect directly on your life, they are crazy-making.  Hence the whole Trump-is-Reagan narrative that most people who support Trump have told themselves.  It ignores how different the two men are, and the policies that Trump defaults to, which are usually leftist, and the fact that the man’s word can’t be trusted as he says and unsays and dances all over the place.  It also ignores the fact that Reagan was the successful governor of a very large state, while Trump excels mostly in the wheeling and dealing of crony capitalism, which is very different from the side of the government than the side of the crony, and which will bite him in his fleshy behind when he catches the car he’s been barking after.

Instead it fastens onto “former leftist, claiming to be Republican [which Reagan had proved, but never mind], hated by the left” and then heaps on this unlikely vessel all the qualities Reagan possessed including a deep religious faith. Because that’s how the stories we tell ourselves work.  We fill in the blanks with what was there before.

This is most often seen in private life, when a man has been treated very badly by a brunette who yelled at him  and therefore fastens on a blonde who is all seeming sweetness, without noticing they are both equally manipulative.  He knows through the narrative in his head that if he looks for someone who looks and sounds totally different, he will be rewarded.  Alternately when someone loses a mate looking for one with similar superficial characteristics/circumstances.  “My Betsy was a secretary and I met her on Thursday.  I met Mary on Thursday and she’s a secretary.”

All these might seem foolish, but they’re not. As I said, this is how the human brain is supposed to work, and why so much of Marxism seems persuasive.  So many fairytales have conditioned us to “Poor but honorable wins in the end” that it’s easy to buy the idea of a sainted proletariat that gets rule and makes everything perfect.  In the same way, the search for the perfect leader (instead of one who will do and be our employee and get kicked out if he doesn’t perform) has its roots in the countless stories of the long-for king who restores everything.  Even the idea that poverty causes crime or that the destitute are only “forced” into crime by “society” is part of those narratives, some older than civilization.

And sure, those things probably happened that way at some point.  And perhaps third sons (the first inherited the house, the second was usually his second-in-command and stand in if something happened to the first) often made good better than the other ones.  Certainly, forced to leave and seek their fortune, some of them returned fabulously wealthy.  What story has forgotten is those that died, or were lost by the way side, which I’d guess was the vast majority of them.  But since they never returned, it’s easy to imagine they became rich in another country.  And perhaps the guilt of their brothers in having made them leave made them feel more desperately that something good must have befallen the youngest one.  And thus long-standing stories are born.  And story has a weight of its own, so perhaps the third son tried harder, and had an idea he must be more innovative. Which in turn increased their chances of doing well.

And perhaps the poor orphan girl with no dowry also had heard the stories, and was extra nice, which improved her chances of marrying, if not a prince, someone of substance … who had also heard the stories.

The modern era has added other narratives, some designed to make a necessarily short visual narrative more thrilling.   “One chance in a million” and “when all hope is gone” and “out of the ashes.”

Yeah, sometimes one chance in a million comes true.  And yeah, sometimes things turn around when all hope is gone.  And yep, sometimes groups and people come up out of the ashes.  However, there’s survivor bias in those tales, as in the tales of third sons  who make good.  To count on them, or to make things worse so they can come true is not only foolhardy but counterproductive.

Which brings us to the SINGLE most destructive myth of movie and narrative, part of it I think encouraged by the left and Marxists (but I repeat myself) to justify and help along “revolutions” around the world often promoted and pushed by the Soviet Union, covertly from behind the scenes.  But part is simply that it makes a better story.

This is the myth that revolution occurs when poverty and oppression is at its strongest.  In fact, from the French Revolution to the Russian revolution, to other spontaneous revolutions around the world (NOT helped by the USSR), revolution happens when an oppressive regime liberalizes and tries to moderate itself.

If revolution happened when oppression is at its worse, North Korea would now be a democracy.

That’s not the way it works.  Truly oppressed people have neither the strength nor the ability to rebel.

And why is this the most dangerous myth?  It encourages “burn it all down” and “the worse, the better.”  (Which was Lenin’s great piece of nonsense.) It encourages otherwise sane people to want to bring about collapse and destruction, because they’re convinced something wonderful will rise from the ashes.

It never has, it never will, except in Hollywood works not known for their relationship to reality.

But Narrativium doesn’t have to make reality obey it.  Only the minds of men.

Beware of what narrative controls you.  Beware of the infiltration of narrative into your thoughts.

Narrativium, like government and fire, is a good servant but a poor master.

 

 

Okay, I’m sick and tired of hearing in every group I belong to that “Doom, gloom, the end is coming soon.”

Now, I join with you in thinking that we’re on a difficult path and with the pool of two joker-Americans to pick from for the presidency, it might be a mighty step for joker-Americans, but the rest of us are going to suffer a worse economy, diminished prospects and likely, in either case, because hyenas smell blood, war at home and abroad.

The severity of all of these could range from a continuation of the last eight years or to much, much, much worse.

How far worse?

Well — sigh — we stand to lose a lot of our liberties. This will slow down the rate of improvement in the sciences and tech, or bring it to a halt all together.  Our children will face yet a more diminished world and eventually, sometime around our great grandchildren, if this goes on, they’ll be about as poor as the rest of the world.

I mean, let’s be real, okay?  I’m more than sick and tired of people envisioning a plunge down into the middle ages, or the stone age.  I’m more than sick and tired of people imagining that tomorrow we’ll be Venezuela.

There is a lot of ruin in a country, particularly a country as rich as the US. And no, you have no idea how rich you are.  Nor do Europeans guess how rich we are.  They tend to think it’s “about like them” or worse because less government assistance, but take it from someone who’s been all over Europe and a great part of the US: you have no idea.  I once read that the equivalent for Europe was about two social levels down.  So, if you’re a secretary in the US, you live as well as doctors in Europe.  And that’s by and large true, with adjustments.  For instance, in the US things are easier to find, particularly specialized gadgets/food/clothes are much easier to find and take less time.  OTOH in Europe, (at least in the Southern part of it) you’re more likely to find cheap household help.

But what I’m trying to say is that the crash rarely comes the way you expect it.  Oh, sure, civilizations in the world have been destroyed suddenly and no two stones have remained together, but that was when the world, and civilization was smaller and more easily squelchable, and even then I wonder if life changed that much between the before and the after for the average peasant on the outskirts of the city.  We know that when we dig beyond the historical accounts of fierce battles and entire populations of cities put to the sword, what we find is far less radical, far less scary and often far less heroic.

Even Rome, we think now, fell not in one great glorious invasion, but because the d*mn barbarians kept trickling over the border, and the Romans found them too useful to kick out, or even defend the border from (stop me when the tale sounds familiar.  Never mind.) Sure there were military invasions, but Rome qua classical Rome was already long gone.

And then there was the rest of the Empire.  Did Rome really fall?  Come walk  the streets of Portugal with me sometime, and tell me that.  And then we’ll both laugh at how things change, without changing.

There is, I’m trying to tell you, an inertia to good things as well as bad.  As hard as it is to change society for the better, it’s also difficult to change it for worse.   Sure things can get worse, slowly and incrementally, but even with horrible management, with terrible presidents, with laws restricting our freedoms, your wealth won’t vanish overnight.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, you’re not even going to go back to the days of two tv channels, much less to the days of tube radio, or of no mass entertainment at all.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, computer programmers won’t become farmers.  Barring a cataclysm of epic proportions, instead of really a lot of small cataclysms and difficulty obtaining things, you’ll find that you’re better off in a somewhat suburban community near the city, where you can get the best of both worlds than in the middle of nowhere, where there are no jobs and food is hard to come by, unless you grow it yourself.

Look, things are going to get worse.  We are so rich you might not notice it for a while.  It’s more a matter of less new stuff, fewer vacations.  Then they’ll get yet worse.

In the seventies, we stopped baking at all, unless it was someone’s birthday because baking used too much fuel.  Even for birthdays, things like “pancake cakes” where you fried each layer on the stove top started being popular, because less fuel.  VISUALIZE having to consider how much gas/electricity you’re using to cook a meal and adjusting your lifestyle accordingly.

There’s a long way for the US to even get to that, much less to compounds and growing your own food, and shooting intruders.

Yes, I know, you’re going to say “what happens when the welfare checks fail?”  Supposing that happens, instead of them just being diminished or devalued?  The recipients will prey on their own neighbors and riot.  And then they’ll die.

Most of what we’re seeing about Venezuela, which is a LOOOOOOOOONG way from where we are (yes, richest country, blah blah, yeah, sure but FAR more uneven than here) is about the POOR.  My family there which is anti-Chavez and solidly middle class is AT MOST being inconvenienced.  Sometimes they can’t find what they want in the store; the choice is smaller; they have to contrive. The black market starts figuring BIG in everyone’s life.

But isn’t there a lot more crime?  Well, yes.  There has always been, also the idea that crime is caused by poverty is a Marxist thing.  Crime is caused by criminals and people constitutionally not inclined to obey the law.  If I understand Venezuela (and I claim no more knowledge than what I overheard from relatives, then policing was always like in any Latin country, dependent on bribes and on “if you commit a crime but pay me” — that has just gone more out of control, as, I’d guess, the police become less zealous.

BUT crime can be way worse before life dissolves.  People tend to imagine welfare recipients becoming destitute and descending on other neighborhoods.  This is not the way it happens.  The way it happens is that they mostly sit in place and lament and try to use their victimhood to get stuff (from charity, from politicians, from…) A few of them will spy targets of opportunity and strike, but that’s just an INCREASE in crime, not total lawlessness.  It means fences go up and people hire neighborhood security patrols.

Look, I’m not saying any of this is GOOD.  I don’t want a diminished future for my children and grandchildren.  I don’t want greater crime. I don’t want medicines and electricity and the comforts of civilization to be irregularly available.  And I definitely don’t want us to lose our freedom. Not only because that’s the real engine of our growth, but because it is our hope for a better future.

BUT what you’re imagining is not what’s likely to happen.  Compounds out in the middle of nowhere, as Ferfal pointed out, never work out.

Don’t quit your job and become a goat herder.  This is not the way to survive.

If you can stay in place.  If you can’t, find a place where you can be safer and still keep your job/get groceries/etc.

We’re more likely to get hit with what happened in Argentina, and is happening in Venezuela and Zimbabwe than with the “no two stones together” thing.  And the strategies are different.

Your first priority should be to maximize your income or your wealth.  In collapses, it is the poor that suffer the most.

Your second priority is to make sure your home is safe, even if all it means is installing an alarm, getting another gun, or putting a bigger fence around your home, so you don’t make yourself a bigger target.

Your third priority is making sure you’re safe.  This might mean guns, but self defense courses are also encouraged.  AND most of all being situationally aware.

Your fourth priority is to have enough supplies laid by.  Not the world in supplies, but enough that you can survive a week or two of disruption.

There are other things you can do, like lay by a supply of used gold and tradeables.

In the end these will see you better off than the armed compound in the middle of nowhere.  (Though if that’s an option/you don’t have a job that requires attendance, and you feel you will enjoy it, go for it.)

However, even as you prepare for the worst — or at least the very very bad — keep fighting.  This is no time to go wobbly.  Fight in culture and civil society before you have to fight with weapons.

Be not afraid.  And don’t give up.

 

 

 

 

Over the last few days I’ve been reading endless numbers of fairytales — in effect all of the fairy “color” books.  Not on purpose, precisely, except insofar as I downloaded a compilation of them from Amazon and at this time they’re a useful thing to read.

You see, I’m trying to finish two books before the end of the month, which means I can’t afford to get captured by a story and end up sitting and reading all day.  the (mostly Andrew Lang-compiled) fairytales are very short, about three pages tops, which means if I get captured it’s no time at all to get to the end of them, but they’re involving enough to keep me reading.  Well, most of them.

One of the things it is doing is replenishing my imagination.  It’s amazing, when you only remember the core fairytales, and those often disneyfied, how you forget some of the unbelievably difficult trials that the characters in the original fairytales are put through.

The other thing it is doing is reminding me of the “structure” of western (which most of these are.  The others often “taste funny” depending on how westernized they have been or not) story telling reminding me of things like “when it’s almost won, often turning back for good and sufficient reason will almost cause the loss of the whole expedition, and lead to a more epic battle than ever.

There is something about these fairytales, particularly the older ones, that seems to tie in to the place we dream from.  And like dreams thy often have the strangest contradictions.  I’m struck, for instance, by the weirdness oft repeated in stories that a fox that doesn’t have the strength to take its own tail off a trap can command several other foxes to build her savior a whole palace in a day, or to chase cattle out of the tall grass, or whatever.

It’s also funny how often people change personalities completely, which is another thing that seems to come directly out of dreams, good or not.  For instance, after a great battle, you throw your bridle over a troll and it becomes a beautiful horse (or princess) who is grateful you rescued him/her.  But also it’s amazing how often the beautiful woman the main character, or the character’s father marries turns out to be a horrible person who will try to kill the whole family.

That has the feel of dreams, where people often change face in the middle of a conversation and you realize that all the time you were having this involved conversation it was with a long dead relative, a cat, or the cow on a field next door.

Russian stories are harsher and there is more strife within families themselves.  Japanese stories often feel like elaborate allegories I’m not equipped to understand; Arab stories involve an untold number of acts of treason, often by the women in the family, German stories often revolve around food and it is astonishing how often the dim witted fellow or the idiot succeeds due to being an idiot.

There is a slightly different flavor to each.  But they all taste of the place humans go in their dreams, a place in which the collective thought of mankind was formed and forged.

Some of them I remember from when I was very young, when the stores kept, in the place now reserved for candy “cockroach books.”  These were little chapbooks about the size of a palm that reprinted mostly moral tales or fairytales.  I wasn’t very fond of the moral tales — not that I objected to the moral, or at least not often but — because they were annoyingly preachy and reiterated the moral loudly and in virtue signaling tones. I never had much patience for that…  BUT if there were fairytales for sale I almost always whined till mom bought me one.  (Mom was also much more likely to buy me that than a candy bar or even cough drops.)  Thus I have read MOST of those fairy tales at one time or another.  (My favorite remains the one where the princess refuses to marry until the father in despair gives her to a drunken soldier.)

As I said, it is wakening some thing in me I thought was long dead, and which is probably dormant, a place where stories form unbidden, a place where magic can happen.

I’m not absolutely sure where it will take me, but I will do my best — promise — not to fall into the inconsistencies where a carp cannot possibly jump back into the water alone but can manage to commandeer enough fish to deviate a stream for its former benefactor.

 Do You Kipple? – Alma Boykin

 

Asking Huns and Hoydens if they’ve ever heard of Rudyard Kipling is a bit like asking a fish if it knows how to swim. You’d get a blank look (assuming you spoke the right dialect of Fish) and a response along the lines of “Doesn’t everyone?” At some point in our lives, the majority of us were introduced, stumbled into, or discovered Kipling’s poetry, and probably his short stories. I suspect fewer of us have read his novels, especially Kim. The Light that Failed is interesting but not as good, in my opinion. The Nauhlahka was co-written with a friend and ahm, er, is pretty terrible. Captains Courageous is pretty good.

 

He got me through very hard emotional times in Germany, sustained me in grad school, and if I were forced to rebuild civilization from scratch, the Authorized translation of the Bible (aka the KJV) and Rudyard Kipling’s Complete Verse would be on my short list of works to start with. I love some of his poems, I flinch from a few, and a very few make me wonder if he were having an especially bad day, or was under the influence of something especially good.

 

 

So, a question: do you recall what your first introduction to Rudyard Kipling’s work was? And what is your favorite poem or story of his?

 

I first met Kipling when I was five or six and my parents read the Jungle Book and Just-So Stories to me. This came after seeing the TV cartoon of “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” but before the movie of the Jungle Book. I read Kim as a teenager, once I knew enough about the Raj to understand what was going on with the Great Game.

 

 

My favorite Kipling is a lot harder to pin down. It changed over time. I locked onto “Baa baa Blacksheep” when I was a teenager and the target-of-choice for jerks in Junior High and High School. “The City of Brass” both appeals to me (when I’m angry at society) and terrifies me (because of society). Most of us know the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” at least in part, and probably mutter under our breaths on occasion, “As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn/ The Gods of the Copybook Headings/ With terror and slaughter return!”

 

For the wild excitement and bravado of the story, “The Ballad of East and West” ranks up there with Banjo Patterson’s “Man from Snowy River,” and I can recite large chunks of both from memory. “The Way through the Woods” and “Bridge Guard at the Karoo” both evoke nature and emotion so well, and I’ve used “Way through the Woods” to introduce the Romantic Movement to my history students, even though Kipling is not officially considered a Romantic poet. He did a lot of Romances, in the sense of heroic tales of kings and princes and warriors and last stands, but he’s not Longfellow. On the other hand, soldiers in the US and British armies (and probably others) don’t use Longfellow as teaching tools the way they use “Arithmetic on the Frontier” or “Soldiers of the Queen.” Leslie Fish’s setting of “Puck’s Song” makes me smile every time I sing it, in part because she peels back the history of Sussex in a way I love to do with other places.

 

Kipling’s verse is finally coming out of copyright and is becoming more available, for which I give great thanks. If you can find a copy of M. M. Kaye’s edition of Kipling, The Moon of Other Days, snatch up a copy. Her notes and the illustrations are absolutely magnificent.

 

So, do you Kipple?