osprey_archer | Entries tagged with theories

In my New Year’s Resolution post last year, I commented among other things that I had read too much the year before. The total then was 315 books. This year, the number is higher.

Now these numbers are high partly because the list includes about fifty Sherlock Holmes stories, partly because I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books for the Newbery project, and partly because when I worked at the library, I often had hours at the circ desk with nothing much to do but read. And the more I read, the more books there were to read, and the faster I tried to read them, the faster they piled up, until I began to feel like Lucy stuffing chocolates in her mouth as the assembly line sped up and up and up.

This is of course simply one small example of a phenomenon that can occur with movies, music, recipes: things that you do for pleasure somehow come to feel like chores to be gotten through. I don’t think I’m alone in coming to feel this way about my TBR. I am perhaps unusual in that I was in a position to attempt to solve the problem by reading stacks and stacks and stacks of books.

So I am here to say: you cannot solve this problem by reading more. The problem lies in seeing reading (watching movies, listening to music; life) as a to-do list, to be gotten through as efficiently as possible. Hurrying will never make you feel less hurried.

And I was thinking also about how some of my favorite days on my road trips were the times when nothing much happened. The day it poured in New York City, so I stayed in my friend’s apartment and wrote letters and listened to the rain with her sweet cat Bagels (who has since died). The fact that in Boston we made time to go back to the Boston Public Library Reading Room twice, just because it was a nice place to work, and never mind all the Boston sights going begging. (Someday I will visit the Isabella Stweart Gardner Museum, though.) An afternoon on Prince Edward Island when I sat on a bench by a lake and watched the Canada geese gather in great numbers before they rose off the water to head south.

So this year, I want to slow down. Anything worth doing simply takes the time it takes. Take a deep breath, and enjoy the journey.

Here’s the premise of Carl Safina’s Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace: although many human beings believe that wild animals are driven largely by instinct, in fact many animals, particularly social animals, have to learn almost everything they will need to know to survive, just as humans do. Moreover, what an animal learns is dependent not only on its species, but the culture of its particular family or clan: some chimpanzee groups crack nuts with rocks and some don’t, some orcas hunt only mammals and others hunt only fish, and so forth and so on.

Safina also notes that among social animals, a sense of “us” and “them” is basically universal. What isn’t universal is conflict based on this categorization: “us” and “them” doesn’t have to lead to “us versus them.” Although humans, wolves, and chimpanzees spend a lot of time fighting other creatures of their own kind over things like territorial rights, elephants and orcas and bonobos just avoid the groups that they dislike. Those Orcas who eat That Thing We Don’t Eat are weirdos and we don’t talk to them, but when we meet by accident, we don’t fight about it; we just go in opposite directions.

I feel like a lot of human visions of conflict resolution involve widening the frame of who we see as “us,” ideally until it includes all of humanity and maybe some of the more intelligent animals too (easier to see an orca as “us” than Donald Trump, tbh)... but given that every social animal on earth has a concept of us vs. them, maybe this is simply too big an ask. Like, literally, maybe most people are not capable of sustaining this conception outside of moments of ecstatic spiritual experience.

And also, maybe most of us don’t want to, deep down inside. I haven’t seen this framing often recently, but in my early LJ days I remember a good deal of discussion about how the only people you were “allowed to hate” are Nazis and pedophiles. Okay, first of all, it’s amazing how wide those words can stretch when there’s someone you just really really really want to be allowed to hate, like Those Shippers who ship the Wrong Ship - but also, what a telling framing. Hate as a treat that you’re allowed under special circumstances.

In any case, the human and orca situations aren’t truly analogous. All the orcas have apparently agreed to Orca Truce, no matter how repulsive the salmon-eating orcas may find those weirdo orcas who peel seals with their teeth. (Seals! Those Other Orcas eat cute little seals, who are mammals like us! Don’t talk to those seal-eating orcas, children. Some of these orca groups who never fight each other have also refused to interbreed for literally tens of thousands of years.) Humans have not achieved Human Truce. And maybe “They are Them and THAT’S FINE, we don’t need to fight about it” is even harder for the average human to cope with than “all humans are Us, really”?

***

On a lighter note, one of my ongoing projects has been a matriarchal fantasy world. It was Carl Safina’s earlier book Beyond Words, actually, that suggested to me that rather than remake the wheel, I could just model this society off one of the female-dominated animals societies, orcas or elephants or bonobos… Okay, maybe not bonobos. That would be so many sex scenes.

All of these species, as noted in the above paragraphs, don’t have wars. And I’ve been contemplating, one, is this even a human society if they don’t have wars - are you at some point simply elephantomorphizing your human-shaped characters, if you will?

Which is not perhaps a bad thing! But, two, am I interested in writing it if no one is marching off to war? At Beth & Becca’s wedding, I was chatting with someone about my books, and she teased me that Briarley is a fairytale retelling set in World War II, and A Garter as a Lesser Gift is an Arthurian retelling set in World War II, hmmm, suspicious, and I insisted that no, I write lots of things that aren’t World War II!

At which point

blotthis piped up cheerfully, “Yeah, Aster has books about other wars too!”

BUSTED. I mean, I do write non-war books! I have multiple books in which there are no wars at all! (It occurs to me that the no-war books all have female main characters.) But yes. I do go back and back and back to war.

I can only begin by wailing: BETH!!!!!!!

I always spend the second half of this book weeping over Beth’s chapters. In a way the story of her trip to the seaside with Jo is more painful than her actual death: here you have Jo swearing to fight Beth’s illness, as if she can clap on a knight’s helm and a sword and do battle with it, and Beth already knows that it’s hopeless. The tide’s going out, and won’t come back.

And then the death chapter - the way the whole family rallies around her, doing everything in their power to make her last months bright. Poor Beth gets weaker and weaker, and Jo stays ceaselessly by her side to nurse her, and then Beth dies “on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath…” Oh, it’s all so sad.

On a more hifalutin literary level, I’ve been thinking about the fact that tear-jerking was considered legitimate emotional mode in nineteenth century novels. It was a sign of high breeding and emotional sensibility to cry over a sad book. Hence Dickens’ LENGTHY spinning out of Little Nell’s demise (Beth’s is comparatively swift!), hence all the deathbeds in Elizabeth Gaskell’s books, hence the political strategy of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is designed to punch you in the heart with tragic scenes of families ripped apart by slavery until you scream “Slavery must be abolished!” (Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, famously cried so hard over Uncle Tom’s Cabin that he had to leave a railway carriage.)

In the twentieth century, when it became socially unacceptable to cry your eyes out over anything (and certainly over a book), this sort of thing came to be viewed as emotionally manipulative and even dishonest. If tears are unacceptable there must be something wrong with books designed to provoke them.

It seems to me that writing off tears as a literary reaction also makes it impossible to write honestly about whole swathes of the human experience. How do you write an honest account of a character going into a slow decline at a brutally young age without making the reader cry?

As I reported yesterday, I have AT LONG LAST finished Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, which I have been reading since, God help me, August.

In the past I've sort of informally sorted war books along an axis, based on their attitude from war, which axis runs from BRUTAL to GLORIOUS. During Fire from Heaven, it occurred to me, perhaps belatedly, that these are properly two separate axes: brutal to not-brutal and glorious to not-glorious. These axes should be overlaid to form four quadrants of war stories.

So, on the glorious/not-brutal quadrant, you have classic boy's own war adventures. On brutal/not-glorious, you've got things like All Quiet on the Western Front. And then you've got Fire from Heaven, which is in the "war is brutal AND glorious" quadrant."

In a sense this is unavoidable: it's a book about Alexander the Great, who is Great because he conquered a swathe of the known world, and this is not a book that is trying to complicate your understanding of whether that is truly Great. This is a book about how Alexander is the bee's knees, and although war is brutal (I wouldn't say that Renault lingers unduly on the brutality, but there is a certain "this is not a boy's own story" emphasis on its presence) this does not, somehow, mean it is not glorious. In fact, brutality and glory may be inseparable.

For many modern readers, and by "many modern readers" I of course mean myself, this is an alien view. Frankly, I probably found it as challenging as many of her early readers may have found her positive depiction of Alexander and Hephaistion's love affair. (This is adorable and does not take up a lot of page time.) I was not, unfortunately, in the mood to be challenged, particularly not on this particular topic, because I read so many war books over the past year that I am honestly just tired of war right now, so whenever Alexander marched to the cusp of another brutal yet glorious battle I screeched to a halt, hence the fact that it took me four months to read the darn book.

Possibly I'm just not the right audience for historical fiction about world conquerors. I should keep this in mind if I ever run across a novel about Napoleon.

***

ALSO, does Mary Renault have an Oedipus complex kink, or DOES she have an Oedipus complex kink? It had not occurred to me that this could be a thing, but I've read four of her novels now, and the Oedipal thing is ALL over three of them, and the fourth one has female main characters, so there's really no place to shove in an Oedipal complex, but let's be real, The Friendly Young Ladies had MORE than enough going on already.

1. In The Charioteer, baby!Laurie asks his mother to marry him. They grow up to have an arrestingly dysfunctional relationship during which she's more or less constantly telling him to stop having feelings about things like "you put my beloved dog down because he was inconvenient." (At one point Laurie, apparently with no sense of irony, tells Ralph "my mother's pretty well-balanced." Laurie. Laurie. IS SHE, Laurie?)

2. In The Last of the Wine, Alexias's father accuses him of sleeping with his hot young stepmother and Alexias runs away into the hills SO far and SO fast that he almost DIES and then collapses, sobbing, because although the accusation is not literally true it is true in his HEART. And then he gets his first girlfriend, who is literally old enough to be his mother.

3. In Fire from Heaven, baby!Alexander (like Laurie!) asks his mother to marry him, AND ALSO spends most of the book seesawing about whether or not he wants to kill his father, before finally deciding that his father is NOT his father so patricide is not technically patricide and is, therefore, okay, probably. But then his father dies of other causes anyway.

In a way it is futile to ask why an author kinks on certain things, but also WHY. WHY, MARY.

I scream this to the heavens as if it is going to in any way hinder me from reading more Renault books. It definitely will not. I will continue reading them and then shrieking like an incoherent dolphin.

...But probably these further Renault readings will take place after a break of some months because honestly I am SO tired of war books right now. I've read so many. I just want to read books about books and savor the quiet life among people who are not leading any conquering armies at all.

This is not so much a review of Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer as a couple of musings inspired by the book, which covers Brooklyn’s queer history roughly from Walt Whitman to Truman Capote. (The book is not solely about gay men, but it does tend to be more about gay men than about anyone else.)

The first thought is that public understanding of queer history suffers a lot because many people basically assume that the 1950s are representative of a sort of baseline historical attitude toward queerness, when in fact the 1950s were unusual in the virulence of their homophobia and in the intense police pressure on queer communities. They were near the apex of an arc of oppression which took its first wobbly steps in the 1890s, slowly rose after World War I, ramped up exponentially after World War II, and only began to fall after the Stonewall riots.

The other is this quote, in which Ryan is talking about early twentieth century attitudes towards same-sex relations between men: “Homosexuality wasn’t a permanent or fixed identity defined by the gender of your partner; instead it was an action almost any man might undertake if the circumstances were right.”

I’ve seen variations on this quote in a number of different sources, and I guess what gets me about it is that none of the authors ever seem to stop to consider that the people heading the committees that shaped the policies based on this thinking were themselves… men. Their belief that “almost any man might have sex with another man” may well arise from their own experience. Either they themselves had succumbed to the temptation for a same-sex encounter or two when they were young and giddy and also susceptible to the temptations of female hookers (also considered morally reprehensible! Also a very common form of sexual experience for young nineteenth century men!), or at any rate they knew enough guys who did that when someone was like “You know who is susceptible to the attractions of male hookers? ALL MEN,” they were like “Yeah, that checks out, manly men WILL fuck anything.”

It also occurs to me that, while this attitude is often presented in opposition to the idea that homosexuality is a permanent identity, these two ideas are not actually opposed. There can be people who are primarily interested in same-sex sexual activity AND ALSO people who will bang a person of the same sex occasionally if they’re in a single-sex environment or the price is right or they just happen to feel like it or Venus is in retrograde.

I got halfway through Catching Fire and WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT, I had to stop for a breather because ( spoilers )

Ahem. On a different note, I feel the strange urge to give President Snow How to Be a Better Dictator tips, because he clearly needs some help in this department.

And by “better” I definitely mean “capable of holding onto power indefinitely despite being evil,” not “actually being kind of a good ruler” tips. This poor man, he walks into Katniss’s house and is all “let’s speak honestly with each other,” and then he actually does it like a rank amateur. All the best dictators lie like rugs, President Snow. Get with the program.

Anyway, in the course of speaking honestly, President Snow strongly implies an ultimatum to Katniss, and later on he lets her know that she’s failed. President Snow! No! You never tell your political enemies that they have failed and are powerless putty in your hands until they’re actually walking down the hall to the firing squad! Until then, keep dangling shreds of false hope in front of them and make them jump through hoops like porpoises. Surely that’s amusing in a tedious sort of way.

At all times, keep this maxim in front of you: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” You want to minimize your subjects’ freedom, you’ve got to make sure they’ve always got something to lose. The revolutions come when the bread lines get too long, President Snow.

And this is really his problem: he’s all iron fist and no velvet glove, when that soft fuzz of lies is what makes dictatorships function. You want to prevent revolution? Then you need buy-in. You need your subjects to believe the system offers them something.

Why present the Hunger Games as what they actually are - a terrifying reminder of the wealth and power of the Capitol and a punishment for recalcitrant districts - when they could be rebranded as a glorious opportunity for district bonding and social advancement? Make people root for their own district tributes! Set up tribute training centers in each district! Smile as parents fight each other for the chance to train their children to die gory gladiatorial deaths, because a win in the arena is their best and maybe only chance for social advancement.

(I get why Collins wanted the drama of selection-by-lottery, but as long as volunteers are allowed, I really think that every district no matter how poor would be training tributes. Sure, the poor districts’ tributes are going to be kind of like the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings, but they’re still going to give it their best shot.)

And all that intra-district bonding will have the glorious side effect of making all the districts loathe each other. Encourage that. To you all the districts may be indistinguishable conquered colonies, but don’t let them realize that. Play up their differences. Get them to direct their hate at each other. Divide and conquer, President Stone. Divide and conquer.

Crossposts: http://osprey-archer.livejournal.com/571535.html

This both is and is not a War and Peace post. I’ve gotten to the part of the book where Natasha falls ill following her broken engagement, and I was feeling a bit smug, as modern people are wont to do when confronted with the medical incompetence of the past, while Tolstoy snipes about the fact that doctors are useful purely for their placebo effect: the doctors “were of use to Natasha because they rubbed her ‘bobo’ and assured her that it would soon be over if the coachman went to the chemist’s in the Arbat and got some powders and pills in pretty boxes for a ruble and seventy kopecks, and if, without fail, she took these powders dissolved in boiled water and intervals of two hours, neither more not less.”

But then I came across this terrifying article, Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, the gist of which is that modern medical research is also pretty awful at figuring out what’s actually wrong with people and how to fix it: “80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong.”

Eighty percent! Forsooth!

The article goes into some depth about why this is so. Basically, a study that suggest drug X or nutrient Y can cause dramatic health improvements net researchers funding and career advancement, and therefore researchers desperately want those findings. They aren’t usually lying outright; they’re led astray by their own wishful thinking. And drug companies will test and retest a drug until they get a study that shows it having an effect.

The article is based on the meta-analysis of John Ioannidis, who offers the cheerful advice that the layperson should just ignore medical research. Most of it’s wrong, and anyway the body is an immensely complex system and we barely understand it. There is no one best diet or exercise regime, no magic bullet to ensure longevity, so just chillax.

From one point of view this is cheerful advice: no more fretting over dueling studies about whether a glass of red wine with dinner will lengthen your life or hasten your demise! But, like Natasha, I think that most of us like to have faith that someone out there knows how to fix what ails us, and from that point of view none of this is cheerful at all.

***

In other War and Peace news, Napoleon is invading Russia, and Pierre, God bless his strange soul, has become interested in numerology. By dint of adding up the letters in his name (using a different variation of his name each time), Pierre has discovered that his name adds up to 666 - the mark of the beast - just like Napoleon’s! Which means that he must in some mystical way be connected to Napoleon!!!

Oh Pierre. I love Pierre. He really is not the brightest candle in the box, though.

I’ve been dipping into Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea over the last few days, reading it slowly and leaving a bristling porcupine path of bookmarks through the book: quotes that I want to remember. I think it’s a good book, and an important book, although perhaps not a book that I needed at this very moment: it’s about finding solitude in a life that has grown too hectic, even if hectic with much-beloved things - “For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures - an excess of shells, where one or two would be sufficient.”

The shells are a metaphor for stages in life, relationships in life; really any part of life that you can imagine becomes embodied in shells. Lindberg wrote the book while staying in a cabin on the beach, and the rhythm of the waves creeps into her writing.

“We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, and relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.”

If her major theme doesn’t feel applicable to my life right now (I have too much solitude, oceans of solitude), then this sub-theme of ebb and flow and continuity through change and living in the moment probably is: “One must accept the security of the wingèd life, of ebb and flow, and intermittency.” Other kinds of security are ultimately illusory.

Or this quote, which I have been chewing over since I read it, because I’m not sure if I believe it - and I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t believe it’s true, or if I do, but don’t want to. How true is a friendship that has no durability in the face of adversity?

But, on the other hand, perhaps a friendship doesn’t need to last forever to have been true at one time.

“Duration is not a test of true or false… Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. It relates to the actual moment in time and place… The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.”

I watched How to Marry a Millionaire a couple weeks ago, and while I don't have much to say about the movie itself (cute and interesting if you like 1950s comedies; probably not worth watching otherwise), it has led me to spend some time mulling over the issue of likability in fiction.

Or maybe I should put "likability," because I think there's a difference between what any particular person likes in fiction at any given time, as opposed to what creators or studios or culture or whatever thinks that we're supposed to like. I do like the characters in How to Marry a Millionaire - I have a particular soft spot of Schatze, which is probably no surprise: her cleverness and veneer of hard-bitten cynicism are more to twenty-first century tastes than her somewhat air-headed colleagues, Loco and Pola.

In particular, I think modern viewers would find Loco frustrating, because the poor thing is as dumb as a brick. A married man invites her to his lodge in Maine, and despite all signs to the contrary (including Schatze telling her "Don't do it, Loco, he wants you to be his mistress"), Loco remains convinced that this lodge is some sort of gathering place - like a lodge of Masons or Elks - where she'll meet lots of eligible bachelors, rather than, well, a secluded cabin the middle of nowhere.

(But don't worry. Once they're there, Loco gets the measles and meets a charming park ranger. She thinks that he's a wealthy man who owns timber until he actually shows her his itty bitty ranger cabin, but no matter, she's in love and happy to throw over her part in the gold-digging scheme.)

And that also makes me think of Oliver Twist. When I read the book, I found Oliver's denseness quite frustrating: he's literally watching Fagin teach his friends how to pickpocket, and yet he's totally gobsmacked when they actually go out and pickpocket people for real.

But Oliver's ignorance makes him unimpeachably innocent, and perhaps that was more important to early Victorian readers than his savvy or lack thereof.

And it occurs to me that this reflects a broader shift in what is defined as "likable" in a character: the burden of proof has switched from whether characters are virtuous to whether they're smart.

Although the pendulum may be swinging back in the other direction, at least in certain segments of fandom, although the standard of virtue is now twenty-first century social justice rather than early Victorian moralism.

I almost mended a copy of Olivia today, but at the last minute we decided its condition was too poor for repairing, so into the recycling it went. :( Hopefully another Olivia will show up soon; I really want to read this book.

I did read Elizabeth Schoonmacher's Square Cat, which is about Euly, a square cat in a world of round cats. It's a hard life, being a square cat. She looks silly in stripes. She's invisible in rooms with lots of right angles. She tips over, and - being square - she's just kind of stuck there. At first Euly's friends try to make her feel more round, so she'll feel like she fits in; when that doesn't work, they put on cardboard boxes, and they all experience the square cat life together, at which point Euly realizes that being square has its advantages. At the end, they all flop down together and look at the sky, which is, the book tells us, a view "only a square cat could have."

I guess maybe the round cats would roll away if they tried to lie down and look at the sky. Or something.

There are many things I love about picture books, but one of the things I find irritating about them is that they can be so relentlessly upbeat. Every cloud has a silver lining. When one door closes, a vast panoramic window with a view of the Grand Canyon opens. The ugly duckling will always turn into a swan, and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer will always save the day in the end.

And I like upbeat stories, I do. But in the aggregate, this relentless positivity begins to feel emotionally dishonest. I realize that picture book authors don't want to discourage the three-year-olds of the world, many of whom will in fact outgrow their ugly duckling stages and do just fine, but at the same time, I feel like it would be good if these books would occasionally allow disappointments to actually be disappointing.

Maybe being a square cat is tough, but Euly has managed to acquire two awesome cat friends who want nothing more than to cheer her up. Isn't that happy ending enough without pretending that round cats are incapable of looking up at the sky?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

You should take my opinion of William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life with a couple of handfuls of salt, because he was very much preaching to the choir here. It was a library book, so I didn't actually draw sparkly little hearts around the section where he talks about how research has supplanted teaching as the central duty of professors (with predictably awful results for undergraduates, and perhaps not quite as predictably awful results for the general quality of published research), but that was definitely my feeling about a lot of what he wrote.

I particularly liked this quote: "The problem is that students are incessantly encouraged to believe that academic excellence is excellence, full stop, that better at school means simply better - better morally, better metaphysically, higher on some absolute scale of human virtue." (214)

I know people who believe this, or an even stronger form: higher not just on a scale of virtue, but on a scale of absolute worth. It's a catastrophic belief, both in terms of social consequences - as Deresiewicz notes, the downside of the meritocracy is that the people at the top believe they deserve it (the very definition of meritocracy being, after all, rule by the most meritorious) and can't see that in many cases, the game was rigged in their favor: something like 75% of Ivy League students come from the top 25% of wage-earners.

But also because if you fail at anything, well then. You've just proved you're one of the worthless.

What I’m Reading Now

Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, which is basically dragons in Regency England, if England were called Scirland and London were named Falchester. I have the impression that Brennan threw up her hands and said “Screw it, I don’t want to do a bunch of research about the Napoleonic Wars, I want to focus on DRAGONS.”

Which seems legit. I feel like many authors would benefit from this approach. If you don’t care at all about the actual history, invent an alternate universe with period flavor! It would warn off serious history buffs and entice in the readers who are interested in the period tropes.

(And not just authors. If the producers of Reign had just admitted to themselves that they had no interest in history and set it in an alternate universe vaguely inspired by Mary Queen of Scots, all my qualms about watching it would disappear.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Maureen Johnson’s The Madness Underneath, the sequel to The Name of the Star.

Oh oh! And I have Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Season of Ponies! Multi-colored horses, here I come!

I went to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier again (they’re showing it at the Union), and in between this and dipping my toe in the waters of Winter Soldier fic I, like everyone else in the universe, have been having many Bucky thoughts.

1. The general assumption in fic seems to be that as soon as Bucky realized he was actually Bucky, he shucked off years of brainwashing and was left mostly with overwhelming guilt, anger issues, and the instincts of a feral cat.

But it would be really interesting if he doesn't shuck it off that quickly - if, for instance, once he starts working for SHIELD (everyone seems to assume he's going to work for SHIELD) he mostly expects it to work like Hydra, just maybe with less elecroshock memory-destroying chairs. "So when am I going back into cryo?" Bucky asked, after he and Steve completed their first mission. "What do you mean I'm not going back into cryo? That seems awfully wasteful."

And Steve died a little inside as he tried to explain that no, SHIELD doesn't put its agents in cryo between missions, and no really Bucky, it's not because we don't value your skill set properly. We do! Really! Even if we never tell you that your work is a gift to humanity.

It's like people raised in really restrictive environments, religious cults or whatever: even if they leave the fold and consciously reject those believes, that doesn't mean they've rooted all those unconscious assumptions about how the world works out of their heads. Or, actually, I think anyone who has decided to make a conscious effort to fight racism or sexism or so forth has probably experienced this: it's easier to change your conscious beliefs than your underlying assumptions.

2. Speaking of "your work is a gift to humanity" - and I love that scene, by the way, because Pierce gives this spiel about how the asset's work is a gift to humanity and shaped the century and is creating freedom for everyone blah blah blah, and Bucky listens and at the end of it he's like... But this isn't even slightly related to my question about the man on the bridge... Because Bucky is brainwashed, not stupid: he's observant enough to notice that Pierce didn't actually answer his question, just gave him a puff piece to distract him.

Anyway. The common assumption seems to be that once Bucky finds out he was brainwashed, he's going to feel super guilty about all those assassinations. But maybe not. Maybe he thinks some of them were unnecessary but some of those assassinations, goddamnit, really were gifts to humanity, and nothing Steve says is going to take that away from him!

After all, if he decides that all the assassinations were just wrong, that means that all his suffering and pain were pointless. It might be less painful to believe that some good came out of it.

I also think this would set up an interesting conflict, where Steve is inclined to see current Bucky as essentially a broken version of the old Bucky, and Bucky gives him a lot of push-back on that because, well, look at all I've accomplished! Fuck you, Steve, just because I'm not the same person you knew doesn't mean I'm nothing but the empty traumatized hull of your best friend. I've been doing things for the last seventy years! Can't say the same for you, glacier boy.

Not that he's totally ungrateful, mind. Just resentful at the same time. The world was a lot simpler when Pierce assured him that his work was a gift to humanity whenever he got confused.

3. Paranoia! I want so much more paranoia, you guys. Paranoia from all sides!

Sure, Bucky saved Steve's life, but then he just up and disappeared and who knows where he's been for the past few days/weeks/months before he turns himself in or Steve finds him or whatever. Going back to his Hydra handlers? Being recaptured, re-brainwashed, and sent to SHIELD as a Hydra spy? "You have to accept that possibility," Agent Coulson told Steve.

"But - !" Steve protested. "After what they did to him - !"

"If you can't," said Agent Coulson, "you're really too emotionally compromised to look after him. Because you have to keep an eye out for signs that he might be in contact with Hydra. We can't have them infiltrating us again."

And Steve is tormented, TORMENTED by the fact that he has to spy on Bucky, but when Bucky finally finds out he is all, "THANK GOD you guys are actually putting some effort into counterintelligence this time around, I don't want to wake up some day and discover that I am working for Hydra again because you fuckers couldn't be bothered to do your due diligence. Not that I would be waking up. The first thing they would do is stick both of us in cryo. TRUST NO ONE. CONSTANT VIGILANCE."

I kind of expect that Bucky would be at least as paranoid as Nick Fury. I'm not sure it counts as paranoid once you've realized that, no really, everyone you knew really was lying to you all the time about everything. With the aid of a memory-erasing chair, to boot.

Given that history, I think talking honestly to a therapist would be near the end of a very long process of healing. Because for a long time, being asked to discuss weaknesses, fears, and painful memories is just going to sound like, "Please hand us all your vulnerable points on a silver platter so we can use them again you."

Especially if the therapist is SHIELD connected. Especially given how Hydra-infested SHIELD was in the first place. Oh sure, you think you've caught all the Hydra agents, but... TRUST NO ONE.

***

I actually have some other thoughts, largely of the "Time to get my Soviet history geek on!" variety (I'm sure that if anyone ever acquainted Stalin with the idea of a brainwashed amnesiac super-assassin, Stalin would have responded by demanding a whole battalion of them, and possibly summoning the already existent one to shoot vodka glasses off Politburo members' heads), but this has become mammothly long so I'll stop.

"The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies." - George Eliot

I've been reading Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, which I must confess to enjoying more than Middlemarch itself. I've always admired Eliot's literary goal of extending her readers' sympathy, but I find her hard to read, even tedious: Middlemarch's exhaustive delineation of all its characters mental states is rather, well, exhausting.. Of course it's nice to have everyone's perspective on everything, but at the same time, must we get their perspectives at quite such great length?

Mead's book, however, I've been enjoying a lot, particularly for its examination of the way that a favorite book can become a part of the self. "Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself...There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft on a tree," she writes.

As such, there's an element of memoir to the book, as Mead is showing how Middlemarch has shaped her (and how her life has shaped her reading of Middlemarch. But Mead keeps the focus firmly on Eliot: both on Eliot's biography and on Middlemarch itself. Mead has more sympathy for Lydgate than I do - I tend to think that, given his opinions, Rosamund Vincy is exactly the wife he deserved - but the chapter about Casaubon, "The Dead Hand," is particularly fine, particularly in its discussion of insecurity and uncertainty.

***

I don't think that art necessarily enlarges the sympathies. In fact, I think there are certain kinds of art where the fact that one's sympathies will remain comfortably unenlarged is part of the appeal - war stories about the action-packed excitement of killing faceless enemies, or love stories where the protagonist's romantic rival is a completely unworthy person whose feelings about being losing their beloved need trouble the reader not at all. Doubtless there are other such stories, too.

Although I think often books have both elements to them - in most books, the circle of sympathy extends this far and no farther, if only because the nature of a book means that the author has to focus on certain things and not others.

For instance, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies play up the "excitement of killing faceless enemies" bit of Tolkien's books (the faceless enemies are there in the books, although perhaps not so much the excitement of killing them?). But I wouldn't say that Lord of the Rings is on the whole an unsympathetic book. It's just that Tolkien directs the readers' sympathy and attention not to finding humanity in enemies, but toward sympathizing with the fallibility of good characters who succumb to temptation, like Boromir and Gollum and Frodo. (Perhaps Denethor, although in a very different way?)

Even for authors who do take enlarging sympathy as their goal, they need to find a receptive partner in their readers. The first time I read Middlemarch, despite all Eliot's care I found Casaubon vastly irritating: I described him, and I quote, as "a cramped and petty man with a mildewed soul, too small to commit any actual evil, but possessed of a personality so arid that it sucks the vitality out of everyone around him."

Clearly I was not about to allow my sympathy to be enlarged, at least not enough to include an anxious, fretful middle-aged pedant. But Mead's book has accomplished what Eliot did not: I do begin to feel for him, despite all the suffering their marriage visits on poor Dorothea.

I’ve just finished reading Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell’s Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, which is an affectionate, insightful, and hilarious lambasting of a genre that both authors love. I think it’s worth reading purely for the funny, although its capsule history of the romance genre (and brief romp through romance subgenres) are interesting for their own sakes, even though I would have enjoyed a more detailed section about subgenres in particular.

However, they briefly hit on a pet peeve of mine. The book is quite worth reading otherwise, but I just had to share.

Specifically, Tan and Wendell argue that the romance genre is inherently revolutionary, which is a move that slash fandom has made me wary of. I think in both cases there’s a kernel of truth to this argument: het romance and slash are both largely genres by women, for women, and there is something revolutionary about any marginalized group making a space where its voice is dominant.

But I think people who buy into this argument often go far beyond this kernel of truth and believe that their genre either is or ought to be revolutionary about everything. On the one hand, I am all in favor of self-improvement projects, and I think there’s a lot of pleasure (leaving aside, for the moment, the social justice benefits) to be gained from, for instance, watching/reading/playing more diverse source materials and striving to connect with a more diverse range of characters.

But on the other hand, the idea that a genre is justified by its inherently revolutionary nature leads to the embarrassing spectacle of fans twisting themselves into intellectual pretzels trying to rationalize that X, Y, or Z seemingly non-revolutionary (and note I say non-revolutionary, not anti-revolutionary) trope or pairing or whatever is actually totally revolutionary. As if that were the only possible excuse for liking something. Because we need excuses to like what we like.

And honestly, I’m sick of arguing about whether such-and-such a thing is revolutionary. It’s such a reductive question. Is Jane Eyre revolutionary because of the primacy it gives to Jane’s voice and her passion and her desires, to the extent that its forthrightness shocked many contemporaries? Is it anti-revolutionary because it channels those things into a marriage to Rochester (or because of its treatment of Rochester’s first wife Bertha)?

Of course the question is unanswerable. The book is both things at once, and a lot of other things as well. Most art is like that. If we could boil it down to one word, what would be the point?

I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages, which is a sort of extended musing about Lincoln, Darwin, and how they’ve shaped modernity. It’s a thought-provoking book in general, but this quote in particular stuck out to me: “The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties: liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle.”

This sums up something that often bothered me in academic history (or simply academic discussions), a sort of “more enlightened than thou” mindset: the kind of mentality that looks at the radicals of the past, people who signed Emancipation Proclamations or suffered death threats or had their printing presses destroyed by mobs with axes, and says, “So what about their accomplishments? Those people never reached my pinnacle of twenty-first century enlightenment, and therefore I can look down upon them from my lofty moral heights.”

This is particularly pernicious in academia, which tends to encourage the idea that smart people, by sheer virtue of their intelligence, are in some absolute sense better than everyone else - as if intelligence were the ultimate measure of human worth.

But intelligence is an accident, like beauty or athletic talent or rich parents or being born in the twentieth century. It’s not a reflection of virtue because it’s not something that we chose or earned; it’s something we were given, by luck or God or genetics, and therefore it’s foolish to look scornfully at people who lack any of those advantages, because “there but for the grace of God go I.”

I think that if one’s philosophy - any philosophy, feminism or Christianity or postcolonial theory, anything - becomes largely an excuse to look down in touchy judgment on 99.9% of humanity, past and present, then it’s not worth much. People so often seem to latch onto the judgmental parts of a worldview before they get to the parts that expand their kindness and compassion.

If we see farther than Abraham Lincoln did, it’s not because we’re fundamentally better human beings. It’s because we have the good luck to stand on the shoulders of giants.

It is a misty, misty morn! I meant to get up and be productive, and indeed I did eventually, but it took a while because I was up until two last night on account of having two pots of tea in the evening.

Not all to myself, mind. My parents brought me a box of Belgian chocolates (did I mention they went to Belgium? They went to Belgium. "You always go the best places when I'm in school," I said wistfully.

"Do you even know anything about Belgium?" asked my dad.

"They have chocolate!"

"Anything else?"

"...more chocolate?")

Anyway, having acquired this box of Belgian chocolates, it was clearly imperative to have my friends over for a Belgian chocolate tea party. Sadly the photos didn't come out very nicely - let's face it, the interior of a chocolate box is only visually interesting when you're trying to decide which one to eat - but it was a lovely party. We discussed whether or not ghosts count as undead. Rick said no, I said yes, provided they're the kind of ghost that can talk to you and still has feelings and such, rather than just a ghost that mechanically repeats the same movements as if they're in a movie.

And, as all loyal Scooby Doo fans know, if you find the second type of ghost, you should probably start looking around for the projector anyway.

You know what would be great for a non-Scooby supernatural investigation show? If the show split half and half between supernatural and non-supernatural causes. It would add an extra layer of interest to the investigation to have to put serious work into deciding if this one was really a ghost, or just a vengeful relative or disaffected teenager with a projector.

***

Also also!

fic_corner stories are live!!!!! And I have TWO, OMG, both for Crown Duel, but filling different prompts! I haven't read them yet, because I am reading the dullest book ever for my nineteenth-century US history class - I shouldn't complain too much, this is the first bad book we've read - so I'm going to let myself read the stories when I hit milestones in the book.

I will link those once I've read them. (Also, any other recs I have for the exchange. WANT TO READ EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW.) For now, here are the stories I wrote:

Ivy and Thorns, Ella Enchanted, G. “The language of flowers,” said Manners Mistress, looking over the finishing school garden with a dreamy smile that usually meant she was thinking of the king and queen. “Ah! Is there a language in the world sweeter, more delicate, more suitable for gentle maidens than that of our petaled sisters of the garden?”

At finishing school, Ella and Areida learn about the language of flowers. Hattie, as usual, gets in the way.

I enjoyed writing all of this - Areida's sweetness, Ella's defiance, musings about how Ella's curse works - but I think my very favorite bit was writing Manners Mistress. My friend Emma betaed it for me.

The Persistence of Memory, Code Name Verity, G. “Did you ever read A Little Princess?” Julie asked. “I loved to pretend to be Sara Crewe." Maddie remembers playing pretend with Julie.

Betaed by our most excellent

rymenhild, who pinpointed brilliantly why it wasn't quite gelling. I think it does now!

A few days ago

asakiyume posted an excellent report about Readercon, particularly a section about not apologizing for your work when you perform it or post it - that apologizing is asking the audience to give you a gift of their acceptance, rather than giving them a gift of your work.

And it does make the story feel like a demand rather than a gift: as if it’s being shared for the sake of getting "No really, this is actually great!" feedback. But couching art in those terms in effect spoils the feedback: one has to wonder how sincere the feedback is when the work is presented in terms that suggest the author needs an ego boost.

Feedback is an expression of love and, like all expressions of love, maybe it loses something if you have to ask for it.

***

Clearly there are times when it appropriate to say, “I need you to tell me you love me; I need you to support me.” And being able to ask that - to have confidence that such a request will be fulfilled - can show the strength of a relationship.

But if someone offers these things only when asked, then I do think that’s a sign that something is wrong: that, probably, your love (not necessarily romantic love) is unrequited. A relationship is supposed to go both ways.

***

asakiyume pointed out that, though we rarely think of it that way, an apology is often a social demand: a particularly abject apology often ends with the injured party comforting the person apologizing - because the apology has focused attention on how terribly guilty the apologizer feels, not on the suffering of the person they wrong.

I've been thinking about guilt recently, and the way that people can use their own feeling of guilt to shield themselves from the consequences of the way they act to other people. They dwell on how guilty they feel, rather than how bad they made the other person feel - “You can't possibly accuse me of anything that I haven't accused myself of a thousand times.”

But often the point is not that you (general you) have never thought something and need to be told it, but that the other person needs to say it and to have you acknowledged that their pain is more important than your guilt.

Guilt is such a painful emotion that it's hard to think of it as something that we might indulge in. But wallowing in feelings of guilt allows us to get out of the hard part of actually making amends. Guilt is just a feeling, and simply feeling it does no good for the people we have hurt. Making amends requires action; and action is scary, because it can be rejected.

A couple more Newbery books, both of which I feel bafflingly indifferent to. An award-winning book ought to be quality enough that you don’t forget all the characters’ names three days after you read it, don’t you think?

(Actually I have a theory about this. One of the signs of a great book is its ability to inspire feeling, which means that great books are often inherently polarizing - people love them or loathe them. Therefore, often the best books only get honorable mentions for awards, because people feel too strongly about them to compromise.)

Even given this theory of quality, however, I am at a loss to explain why Emily Cheney Neville’s It’s Like This, Cat won anything; I kept forgetting the characters’ names as I read. Bafflingly, this beat Sterling North’s Rascal for the medal in 1964, and I’ve got to say, Rascal got robbed.

It’s Like This, Cat has a sort of Catcher in the Rye-lite feel to it: the protagonist is a disaffected youth who shares with Holden Caulfield the peculiar tendency to spell crummy “crumby.” I guess the Newbery committee must have read it and concluded that its pervasive slanginess made it Relevant to Today’s Youth.

I would love, incidentally, to know how Today’s Youth reacted to this book back in the sixties and seventies. I don’t suppose any of you read it then? Maybe it is asking too much to hope that anyone could remember it, though.

I don’t even hate It’s Like This, Cat: it’s too slight to inspire that much feeling.

Also Monica Shannon’s Dobry, about a peasant boy (named Dobry) in Bulgaria who becomes an artist. It reminds me of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sun Horse, Moon Horse, only Sutcliff did it better. Dobry’s sculptures may live, but Dobry himself, not so much.

Therefore, rather than review Dobry, I will share with you a story of Bulgaria that my Bulgarian college roommate Slavena shared with me, about why Bulgarians nod to say “no.”

When the Ottomans invaded Bulgaria, one of the generals caught sight of a beautiful village girl. He sent his men to bring her to him, and he said, “Will you marry me?”

“No,” she said.

He took out his sword and put its point to her throat, close enough to bite the skin as she breathed. “You'll marry me now,” he ordered her.

“No,” she said; and as she spoke, she nodded her head, so that she impaled her throat on his sword.

And that is why Bulgarians nod to say no.

Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars is like Star Trek, if the characters in Star Trek took the Prime Directive seriously (and the women got better parts). It is also like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince, in that nary a chapter passes without characters either swearing solemn oaths or going through hell to keep those oaths - except that unlike The Lost Prince, Enchantress from the Stars has a plot that rises to a crescendo that is not merely satisfying but stunning.

Oh, and it has telepathy. And a fairy tale retelling. And one of my favorite heroines of all time, Elana: bright and curious, empathetic, a little impetuous. As the story begins, she’s heading through space to join the Federation’s Anthropological Service, but - entirely against all orders and policy - sneaks onto a landing craft onto a Youngling planet.

(Younglings are people like us who haven’t yet evolved out of wars, greed, etc., and into our full psychic potential.)

Normally, an untrained civilian like Elana would be sent back to the Federation spacecraft sharpish - but because of plot complications, Elana is stuck planetside. So, untrained though she is, she has to take the Service Oath:

“And I, Elana, swear that I will hold this responsibility above all other considerations, for as long as I shall live...”

This is all we get of the Oath, and yet it becomes a mantra that the characters live by as their situation grows steadily more desperate. The Oath demands not only that you would die for it, but that you would go out of your way to get killed for it if need be. That is why Elana is stuck planetside, in fact: one of the Service agents in the landing party got vaporized distracting the Imperial soldiers who are invading the planet from the Federation landing craft.

This was not, let me be clear, a matter of military necessity. A Federation has no plans to go to war with the Imperials, and in any case a Federation landing craft is as technologically advanced over an Imperial one as an atomic bomb is over a tomahawk. The agent had to prevent disclosure, because if the Imperials discovered that there was a civilization hugely technologically advanced beyond them, it would mess up their cultural development.

This, then, is Elana’s mission: to stop the Imperial invasion of Andrecia (a planet where the inhabitants have a medieval level of technology), without disclosing the Service’s existence.

Elana accepts the anti-disclosure position until she visits a local village. She seems starvation - disease - a beggar who had his hands cut off by the king - and she is so horrified that she storms back to her father, the mission leader, who is up there with Atticus Finch in the Best Fictional Father Ever category. “Why doesn’t the Service do something?” she demands. “Why [can’t we] devise some way to correct obviously unnecessary evils without revealing ourselves?”

“The real issue here is the whole concept of ‘obviously unnecessary evils,’” her father replies. “Who are you to say that human suffering is unnecessary?”

Elana of course finds this answer horrifying. Enchantress from the Stars takes place in an Enlightenment universe, where overcoming human suffering truly does lead to lasting human progress (indeed, for the civilizations that make the Federation, has already led to utopia), so the balance of the evidence is on her father’s side; and yet Elana does not cease to find it horrifying.

One thing I really like about this book is that, while Engdahl has a definite point of view and makes it clear that this is so, she doesn’t try to force the reader to accept it. The reader can, with Elana, reject this answer, without rejecting the book, because there is so much going on in it.

One would think that the nature of good and evil and the ultimate disposition of the universe were quite enough to be getting on with in a single children’s story, but Enchantress from the Stars is endlessly prolific with ideas. It deals - and deals well! - with a myriad of other topics: symbolism, the nature of belief, providence, sacrifice (and the ability to meaningful consent to sacrifice in a situation where one doesn’t have all the information), the meaning of love, imperialism...

It has a great anti-imperialist screed: Jarel, a disillusioned Imperial officer, thinks bitterly, “We are on no higher a level than the natives, and we never will be; progress is a myth! If there are superior peoples in the university, it is pure luck...that they have never found us. For if they ever do, they will surely consider the Empire the worst disease ever to threaten the galaxy and will deal with us accordingly.”

It is, in short, a book that is good food for thinking with - and a real pleasure to read, to boot.

Reading Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War, in which the author uses a Gramscian analysis to prove that the pacifists and radicals didn’t accomplish anything in their opposition to the war. The fact that they kept the US out of war until 1917 and remained powerful enough then that Wilson delayed for nearly two months after the Germans restarted unrestricted submarine warfare before he finally declared war does not apparently count as an achievement.

Do the radicals ever actually accomplish anything in this kind of analysis? It always seems to boil down to “The radicals did this which may seem like an achievement, but they didn’t manage to create utopia and also anyway their achievement was totally co-optable by the Conservative Forces of Evil so it doesn’t count.”

It is super boring reading books when I can basically summarize the argument of every chapter before I even read it.

Also, I’m pretty sure that if we make “completely non-co-optable” our standard of success, then every reform movement - nay, every movement in the history of the world, anywhere on the political spectrum! - was a failure, because people are capable of interpreting art in ways that seem diametrically opposed to any straightforward reading of it. Look at Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the US,” which Reagan used as his campaign song!

Left-wing academics really ought to know this. Isn’t the eminent slipperiness of meaning one of the main points of deconstruction theory? Saying, “This kind of imagery would later become a staple of pro-war propaganda” is all but meaningless, because any kind of imagery can be twisted to mean almost anything you want it to.

***

The valiant author also seems to have decided that any response to World War I other than doctrinaire pacifism was a priori wrong, and, moreover, that anyone who changed their mind about the was not responding to the fact that the war kept changing, but had simply allowed themselves to be brainwashed by propaganda.

He doesn’t present this as a proposition that he intends to defend, mind; he simply assumes that it is true and bases his analysis on it. Because clearly the highest duty of the historian is to strap historical figures to a Procrustean bed composed of modern-day, left-leaning, social justice morals and assail them for failing to fit. All while piously insisting that it is not the historians’ place to judge.

Postmodern histories overflow with sort of contradiction. (I would call it hypocrisy, but I’m not sure these historians are sufficiently self-aware to be hypocrites.) They have a pious horror about the idea of judgment, but that doesn’t prevent them from judging the hell out of everything.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with theories

New Year's Resolutions

Book Review: Becoming Wild

In Memoriam Beth March

Book Review: Fire from Heaven

When Brooklyn Was Queer

Catching Fire

War and Peace: Book 3, Part 2, Chapter 5

Book Review: Gift from the Sea

How to Marry a Millionaire, and Likability

Picture Book Monday: Square Cat

Wednesday Reading Meme

Winter Soldier

The Extension of Our Sympathies

La revolution est morte, vive la revolution

Angels and Ages

Tea and chocolate and fics and things

On Apologies

Newbery Books + musings on quality

100 books, #25: Enchantress from the Stars

Book Review: Partisans & Poets