A Certain Slant of Light

At some point I will post substantive things again, but for now, another link: Elephants Hold Vigil for Human Friend, which is about elephants filing past the home of a human who helped them.

Awwwwwwww. I love elephants. I feel that there's great potential for higher-level human-elephant communication.

First, a fascinating article: Walking in Roman Culture, which is about, well, walking in ancient Rome. I know, it sounds kind of weird. But the article is unexpectedly fascinating.

No less remarkable, for Strabo, was the bafflement some of these poor Spaniards felt at the day-to-day habits of their new Roman allies or conquerors. One group of tribesmen, he explained, visiting a Roman camp and seeing some generals taking a stroll, “walking up and down the road”, thought they were “mad and tried to take them back into their tents”, either to sit down and rest, or get up and fight. Despite Strabo’s patronizing tone, it’s one of those rare occasions where we can catch a glimpse of the barbarian point of view on the Romans.

Second: epics! I've been watching mid-twentieth-century epics set in ancient Rome, Ben-Hur and Spartacus. Ben-Hur has a chariot race - a chariot race, you guys! it's impossible to beat a movie with a chariot race! - but Spartacus has Crassus and young Julius Caesar and lots of Roman senatorial politics, so they've both got a lot going for them.

I feel kind of bad for finding the senatorial politics more interesting than Spartacus and His Rebelling Slave Army - but there aren't a lot of individual characters in the slave army. It's like watching Eisenstein's early movies, Strike and Battleship Potemkin, where you're supposed to cheer for the nameless masses and thus develop your socialist consciousness. Eisenstein is a genius and both those movies are splendid, but there's nonetheless something very unsatisfying about cheering for the nameless masses.

So in Spartacus the only characters with sustained arcs in the slave army are Spartacus and his girlfriend Varenia - whose relationship is surprising sweet and well-developed - and Antoninus, who I think is Spartacus's friend? but it's not clear? because until the end of the movie, at which point they're apparently best buddies, the only time they converse is when they're chatting at each other in front of the entire camp around the campfire. That's not a bonding experience (especially given that Antoninus seems really unhappy with the conversation), that's entertainment for the camp.

It's an interesting reversal of the more usual dynamic in war movies, where the best buddies are joined at the hip and the love interest is tacked on at the end. I certainly wouldn't want to cut any of Varenia's scenes. But it would have made the gladiatorial combat at the end much more affecting if Spartacus and Antoninus had at least one scene where they talked.

So you may remember that I started writing a story for one of my first graders, about the adventures of Princess Rose.

And then I ran out of passages to read with my third grader, so I decided to adapt Princess Rose for her reading level. After all, what's not to love? Trolls! Dragons! Seven-league boots! Princess-eating snakes!

(“You’ll be the first princess I’ve eaten," said the snake. "I hope princesses taste as ssscrumptious as knights.”

“Oh no,” Princess Rose told him. “Princesses taste terrible. We taste like green beans and peas and other awful things.”)

And...it's morphed into a children's chapter book, the very slender kind intended for second and third graders. About 5,500 words now; I'm thinking it will be around 6,000 when I'm done.

I've written a book! A children's book! My ten-year-old self would be so proud.

I’ve been watching Downton Abbey! Is anyone else watching Downton Abbey? Because Downton Abbey is awesome! It’s a costume drama - and WHAT COSTUMES, you guys, the clothes are so beautiful. The evening gowns! Ornate yet elegant, never fussy. All the men in suits! Lady Sybil wearing Turkish trousers!

- it’s a costume drama, as I was saying, set at a country house in England around World War I. It has all these wonderful, rounded, loveable (and occasional hateable) characters, both the family and the servants, and is just, in general, amazing.

Amazing with an extremely large side order of problems. Making their only gay character a petty, self-serving, mendacious jackass was questionable (I have more to say about Thomas anon, but not in this entry) - and there’s Matthew’s skeevy paralysis story - and then, of course, there are the class issues, most obviously in the relationship between Lady Sybil, youngest daughter of the house and budding radical, and Branson-the-socialist-Irish-chauffeur.

I really want to ship Sybil and Branson. I love love LOVE Lady Sybil (you rock those Turkish trousers, girl!) and Branson is so cute and so promising in season one, and I think all sorts of fascinating things could be done with their relationship. The class differences! The cultural differences! Ireland!

But after a promising beginning in season one, most of those interesting things don’t materialize in season two. Instead, Sybil and Branson’s relationship devolves into an endless round of “Run away with me, Lady Sybil! But I’m not ready yet, Branson!” Which is unfortunate, because:

1. It makes Branson look immature and pestering;

2. It’s boring. If Sybil and Branson chatted about Marx or E. M. Forster (it’s a pity A Passage to India wasn’t published yet, I feel like they might find some personal relevance in it) rather than YET AGAIN riding the “to elope or not to elope” merry-go-round, their relationship would have much more substance and complexity and might actually engage with those interesting class/cultural issues;

and 3. the fact that their relationship doesn’t have more substance makes it seem like Branson is not so much in love with Sybil, as in love with the idea of sticking one in the eye of the ruling classes by making off with one of their daughters.

Ew. Now that I’ve written it out, that sounds disturbingly plausible. The chip on Branson’s shoulder is quite large enough for it, and he is always very aware - much more aware than Sybil is - that Sybil is far his social superior. I realize it’s more difficult (and dangerous) for him to forget that she’s the daughter of his employer than it is for her to ignore the fact that he’s a servant...

But for god’s sake, he wants to marry her! If that’s going to work he has to see her as an individual person rather than a disturbingly attractive representative of the oppressor class, through whom he can score a victory against said oppressor class. And Sybil, similarly, needs to see Branson as more than a handy escape from her gilded cage life as an aristocratic lady.

Part of what makes Lady Sybil and Branson such an interesting couple is that - though they are genuinely fond of each other - they also see the relationship as a means to an end (to, in fact, related but different ends, which may cause friction in the future). Their marriage as a dramatic renunciation of social structures they despise.

The problem is that in the second season the dramatic renunciation overshadows the fondness, so it’s not clear what will keep the relationship together once they’ve made their big statement. Sybil in particular doesn’t seem to realize that if she’s not careful, she’s going to flee the airy cage of Downton Abbey right into the cramped confines of a just-barely-middle-class housewife in a cold water flat.

It’s clear that Sybil wants to work, but while Branson is at least theoretically in favor of women’s rights, season two suggests that in practice he won’t be fine with his wife working. There’s a scene where Branson disparages Sybil’s job as a war nurse, and this disparagement is implicit in a lot of their interactions. Run away with me now, he’s saying, and it’s implied: because you’re not doing anything important here. Your work as a nurse doesn’t count.

It’s fairly easy to envision their marriage in depressing failure mode: Sybil an unhappy housewife sick of scrubbing floors, Branson blaming her unhappiness on her snooty upbringing, and everyone else cackling “See! See! See what happens when the classes mix!”

But I prefer a future in which they both commit themselves yet more strongly to their radical vision of social and gender equality - theirs is not a relationship that can thrive on half-measures - and go on cool journalist adventures together. They could cover the rise of fascism in Italy! Meet the Fitzgeralds in Paris! Witness the Harlem Renaissance! The possibilities are endless!

Alanna, knowing quite well that George collected the ears - and sometimes the rest - of those who disobeyed his orders, hid a grin behind her hand.

Ah, George Cooper. Everybody’s favorite King of the Rogue.

I like George. Everyone likes George. I think it’s impossible not to like George. He’s got lots of funny lines, and he’s so darn nice to Alanna, and he seems to understand her implicitly, which not many people do.

None of this is to say that George Cooper, and the worldbuilding surrounding the court of the Rogue, makes much sense. The quote at the start of this entry encapsulates the problem: here we have the nicest guy in the world...who mutilates his followers when they don’t do what he wants.

Which habit, going by Alanna’s reaction, is...apparently humorous? Oh, that King of the Rogue, he cuts people’s ears off. Isn’t he a card?

This reaction might make sense if Tortall were a more violent society, but it doesn’t really come across that way. The pages aren’t beaten, knight masters don’t beat their squires (THANK GOD. That would add a whole new level of ick to Alanna and Jon’s relationship), nobody gets branded or drawn and quartered or what have you in punishment, so it seems out of place for Alanna to find George’s method of punishment charmingly quirky rather than indicative of pathology.

I would find this less alarming, but Pierce mentions the whole “George cuts people’s ears off!” thing at least once a book, as if it’s an amusing hobby. IIRC in Trickster’s Choice we even learn that he has an ear collection.

Yes. Just like a serial killer on Criminal Minds, George Cooper, ex-King of the Rogue and Lord of Pirate’s Swoop, collects his victim’s body parts.

“He always seemed like such a nice fellow, lord provost, sir. Always helpin’ the young nobles get nice horses, he was, and such a good listenin’ ear, too! Can't hardly believe they found all those skeletons in the dungeon at Pirate's Swoop.”

But even more alarming, the rising ruling cohort of Tortall - Alanna, Crown Prince Jon, Raoul and Gary - not only don’t care what he does to his followers (who are, after all, criminals); they also don’t give a hoot that George and his thieves are preying on Jon’s law-abiding future subjects, either. This doesn’t bode particularly well for Jon’s reign, at least as far as the common folk are concerned.

(My favorite completely-unsupported-by-the-text theory is that George's main business is smuggling. Old King Jasson placed ruinous tariffs on certain absolutely necessary goods [it seems like the kind of thing he would do], King Roald can't be bothered to lift said tariffs, so the legal establishment turns a blind eye to George's activities because, hey, it's a stupid law he's breaking, and he's helping keep order to boot.

This explains why George has such an incredibly good spy network, which you wouldn't think he'd need as Lord of the Petty Thieves. A merchant, especially an illegal merchant, needs good information about the surrounding countries.)

So, yes. George Cooper: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

I'm going to get back to George and the Bazhir (and, now that I've finished Lioness Rampant, the Doi and the K'mir, and Pierce's treatment of tribal peoples in general). But for now, on the topic of Lioness Rampant: my kingdom for some motivations!

I mean, I can just about wrap my mind around Roger's motivations (thwarted ambition! Also, being dead makes you crazy), and Delia's (who thinks she's going to be Roger's queen), and Josiane's (thwarted love for Jonathan/being Jonathan's queen! Also, apparently being from the Copper Islands makes you crazy), and Ralon's (thwarted ambition again. Jon and company chased him out of page training, for what was - in Ralon's mind, at least - mere customary hazing of Alanna).

But Alex. Alex's motivation is that - he wants to prove he's a better swordsman than Alanna? I'm not at all clear that this is his motivation, but no better explanation is offered...except that even by the fairly low standards set by the other villains' motivations, this makes no sense.

Why does proving that he's a better swordsman than Alanna involve sitting back and letting Corus be destroyed? - and the text states explicitly that Alex knows Roger's true plans (is, in fact, the only one who does; Delia et al just think Roger means to be king), so it's not like he doesn't know what's going to happen. He can't just corner her during sword practice and badger her into a duel?

But most of all, WHAT IS DRIVING THOM? Yes, yes, he wanted to prove he was a great sorcerer by resurrecting a dead person, but Tortall is a large kingdom with lots and lots of dead people, most of whom are not traitors to the crown who were killed by his very own twin sister, any one of whom Thom could resurrect!

(Also, doesn't resurrecting a traitor to the crown seem awfully treasonous? Or is that just me?)

I've read that in the original, unpublished, adult book version of SotL, Thom and Roger were lovers (which is its own barrel of worms...) but that doesn't make any sense in SotL as published, because Thom hates and fears Roger even more than Alanna, so clearly is not so in love with him to bring him back from the dead against all reason.

I can only assume that the Sorcerer's Sleep Roger cast upon himself included a compulsion that forced Thom to raise him. It would have been nice to have that stated somewhere.

Before I get into all of The Woman Who Rides Like a Man's problems - which are many and varied and could probably support a chapter in a dissertation thesis - I want to mention a couple of things the book did really well. I have the impression that Pierce did some serious thinking between In the Hand of the Goddess and WWRLaM, and made an effort to counteract some of the problems of the first two books.

First, Alanna finally starts interacting with women in this book, and it's actually handled pretty well. There's a little bit of "Alanna teaching the benighted savages about feminism," but it's not all one-way interaction: Alanna teaches the girls to be shamans, the girls teach Alanna weaving, and Alanna realizes that weaving is actually an important and noble pursuit (and, by extension, that women's work has value).

There's this lovely quote:

"How can I not like other women?" Alanna inquired. "Particularly after knowing Kara and Kourrem and Mari Fahrar and Farda? I don't feel nearly as odd about being female as I did before I came here."

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with books about the One Awesome Girl (and no other girls at all), so it's nice to see Pierce give that a knock on the head by having Alanna meet lots of interesting women.

Second, the disintegration of Jon and Alanna's relationship. Alanna would be a terrible queen, and would moreover be absolutely miserable as a queen. But even if Alanna had the requisite patience and tact for queenship, Jon would be a rotten husband for her. He's high-handed, self-centered, and seems to have trouble with the idea that people (specifically Alanna, but people in general) might have desires contrary to his own. (Tortall is damn lucky that he evolves from the spoiled prince to the elder statesmen of Protector of the Small.)

Jon's mishandling of his relationship with Alanna - "Of course you'll be coming back to Corus with me! Why should I ask you before having your horse saddled?" - is also one of the best depictions of sexism in SotL. Maybe even all the Tortall books, which tend to assign sexism to characters we're supposed to hate; it's much more troubling (and interesting) to see a previously sympathetic character revealing his underlying sexism.

Jon assumes that Alanna will want to marry him immediately and start popping out heirs, never mind that this assumption is contradicted by everything he actually knows about Alanna individually - because Alanna's individual desires are, in his mind, clearly overruled by the fact that she's a girl, and girls all want to get married and have heirs post haste.

Alanna, of course, disagrees, and their liaison goes up in smoke. Alanna takes up with George, who disturbs me more every time I read the Tortall books.

But this is getting rather long, so I'll leave George-your-friendly-local-Mafia-boss and the Voice of the Bazhir for another post.

Watched Dead Poet's Society last night. It gave me whiplash, because for half of Mr. Keating's scenes I was all "BEST TEACHER EVER" (which is how you're supposed to react) and for the other half, I was like, "You are so lucky this is a movie and your students are scripted to respond correctly, because otherwise you would be scarring some of them for life."

Case in point: the scene where Keating makes Todd Anderson loose a "barbaric yawp." First, he teases Anderson about being afraid of public speaking. It's very gentle teasing, but still, if one of my teachers had informed the entire class that I was afraid of something - I wasn't afraid of public speaking, but something else - I would have shriveled up and died on the spot.

Then, desirous of effecting instant desensitization to the terrors of public speaking, Keating drags Anderson to the front of the class so he can yawp properly, in front of everyone, with all of them staring at him. When Anderson fails to yawp loudly enough, Keating basically attempts to goad him into shouting.

As this is a movie, this works just fine, but I'm pretty sure that in real life 90% of shy students would react one of two ways. Either they'll stand at the front of the room, humiliated and miserable and incapable of yawping (barbarically or otherwise) for the endless eternity it will take the teacher to let them sit; or they will cracks like eggs halfway through the yawping session and flee the classroom weeping.

Either way, their fear of public speaking will be magnified tenfold.

And sure, maybe the other 10% will find their inner yawpmeister (although I doubt most of them will spontaneously spout poetry like Anderson). But a teaching method with a 10% rate of success versus a 90% rate of "that was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life" is a BAD TEACHING METHOD.

A couple of book reviews, because I post nothing but book reviews these days. I have other posts I mean to write! About Downton Abbey and Fruits Basket and The Social Network! Seriously, I've been meaning to write about The Social Network since December. The angst! The betrayal! The fandom, which apparently saw a completely different movie than I did! Where to even begin?

But for now, a couple of book reviews.

1. Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief, by James McPherson

I know nothing about the Civil War. As I'm going to be a Ph.D student in American history next year, this is a little worrisome, so I decided to try to remedy the situation.

This is a very good starting point. McPherson is famous for his Civil War histories, and with his lucid, incisive writing (he can even make battle tactics make sense! Without the use of maps!) it's easy to see why.

There are a great many points I could discuss about this book, but that one that sticks out at me is McClellan. McClellan was the general of the Union's most important army for the first few years of the war. How he hung on that long I do not know, because he was the most frustrating, incompetent, unwilling to attack general ever. Lincoln keeps sending him "MCCLELLAN ATTACK LEE'S ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES" telegrams, and McClellan keeps not attacking, but somehow it takes nearly three years before anyone fires him. Why? Why? WHY?

Apparently in person McClellan had tremendous charisma, but it doesn't come through in the paper trail he left behind. In his letters, he sounds like a petty, peevish megalomaniac with a messiah complex.

2. Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell.

I wanted to read Mitchell's new book, The Vespertine, but the library doesn't have it because the library doesn't have anything, so I read Shadowed Summer instead.

It's a beguiling mixture of things I love and things I hate. On the plus side, it's about two best friends - Iris and Collette - solving a mystery in their small Louisiana town of Ondine, which is so wonderfully described that you can feel the heat and the butterfly weed. Ondine feels like a real place; I don't know enough about Louisiana to know if it feels like a real Louisiana place, but it feels like someplace you could walk through. And a ghost story, to boot!

In the things I hate column, a love triangle. A love triangle where Iris and Collette like the same guy, no less! WORST KIND OF LOVE TRIANGLE EVER.

It's somewhat salvaged because Iris doesn't like the boy that much (half the time, she hates him for distracting Collette), and because Iris makes the right choice in the end - my best friend is more important than a guy I won't remember in two years. But still. Why love triangle, why?

The great Tortall reread continues! I've finished In the Hand of the Goddess, and naturally enough, I've been thinking about Pierce's handling of the gods. Her gods peaked in Alanna: The First Adventure: there's a sense that of the gods are distant, unknowable, powerful and perhaps benevolent but still terrifying.

Whereas In the Hand of the Goddess begins with the Goddess showing up to act as Alanna's life coach, which rather drains the mystery and the terror from her. And the gods only become more knowable from here on out; by the Trickster books, they simply seem like extremely powerful, but ultimately petty and fallible humans.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that - the Greek gods are much like that in myths - except that, 1) Pierce doesn't seem to want to take this to its logical conclusion - she seems to have these fuzzy ideas about these gods being just and benevolent and wise that she can't quite shake, even though they don't really play out in practice; and 2) the characters don't find the gods nearly as terrifying as they should, given that the gods are just petty humans who happen to have the ability to toss around thunderbolts.

...my thoughts on this issue are still fuzzy. I think I'll have more to say once I've reread In the Realms of the Gods, which I barely remember, because I never reread it, because I was so displeased by the (to my eyes) utter out-of-left-fieldness of Daine/Numair.

A:TFA also has the best sense of the Gift as something powerful but precarious. In the later Tortall books - indeed, in a lot of fantasy books - people talk a lot about magic going wrong and backfiring spectacularly, but we never see it happen. Magic seems about as dangerous as electricity.

And electricity can be very dangerous, I know, but no one worries that they're going to set their house on fire every time they flip a light switch. I suppose for magic to be really useful, it would need to be pretty reliable...but that makes it seem much less, well, magical.

(A lot of worldbuilding advice suggests that a good fantasy world needs to have strict rules for magic, which I don't agree with. I think it's important for magic to have limits - and for authors to stick to those limits - but for magic to have specific rules, like laws of physics, that it follows every time, makes it so much less numinous or mysterious or interesting.)

On a completely different note, Pierce's take on romance is skeevier than I remembered it being, and I was never really big on her romances. There's this line, about George's pursuit of Alanna: “He hadn’t kissed her since Jon’s birthday almost a year ago; but he let her know - with little touches, with softness in his eyes when he looked at her - that he was stalking her.”

Stalking her? Maybe that word didn't have all the negative connotations in the 1980s as it does today? But...even without extra negative baggage, a hunter stalking a deer is not really an attractive image.

And this isn't even getting into Jon. (I'm going to discuss Jon more after reading Woman Who Rides Like a Man.) What strikes me about Jon, in this book, is how perfunctory his characterization is: he's more of a character space on which readers can project their fantasies about princes, than a fully realized character in his own right.