I was watching Benny and Joon tonight, and the character of Sam is supposed to be a "second Buster Keaton". This is a little funny because the most famous sequences from the movie are Chaplin bits.
The Dance of the Dinner Rolls definitely is. It's from The Gold Rush.
I'm almost certain that the Runaway Hat thing in the park is also Chaplin, although I can't name the film off the top of my head. I suppose if you take the entire sequence it's probably a mix of Chaplin and Keaton gags -- but Sam is awfully high on the Chaplin for a Keaton fanatic.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
Movie: Steel Magnolias (brutal spoilers)
I'm going to be blasphemous. I didn't care for Steel Magnolias. In fact, I kind of got the impression that people have confused it with a similar but better movie. Everyone who's suggested it to me as been all "Yay, strong women sticking together and supporting each other, yay!" and um... OK. If you say so.
It's a very typical -- I'd say archtypical -- 1980s women's picture. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's another movie where even if you haven't seen it, you've probably seen it.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd been able to pretend that Shelby had some rare condition that was completely not diabetes. Because that was completely not diabetes. They even tried to make it "special" diabetes, but it's just not cutting it.
First, so she has an insulin reaction, and you can tell because she has a... kinda seizure-y type thing? That's... unusual. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's unusual. My grandmother's aunt, or so I'm told, would fall asleep when she had an insulin reaction and could not be woken up until some form of sugar had been forced down her throat. My grandmother would turn violent or throw a temper tantrum. My extremely diabetic teammate in high school once had a bad insulin reaction while on a field trip bus, and they knew because while trying to fall asleep on his seatmate's shoulder in the middle of the day, he asked "isn't it cold in here?" -- in 90F weather with no air conditioning.
You look up "insulin reaction", seizure is not one of the common things to come up. It's usually some form of cognitive change (confusion, temper, or temper tantrum), or falling asleep and not responding to attempts to be woken up. If it gets to the seizure point, a doctor needs to be called, even if the juice makes them feel better.
Next problem with the diabetes issue comes as a result of the other big problem with the movie: a woman with baby fever with no regard for her own health. Death is an acceptable side effect if it gets you a kid made of your very own genetic material. Real women have babies. Full stop.
Yeah, it's one of those.
So of course Shelby has to have a baby of her very own genetic material with no consideration that she's got a very good chance of passing on her "special diabetes".
Now the major concerns of a diabetic woman becoming pregnant are:
1) Birth defects. Blood sugar levels off either way can cause problems, so you have to keep them under control. (Shelby didn't put any thought on-screen into this aspect of her choice. What little we see is "It might kill me but I'm OK with that because Real Women Have Babies.")
2) High blood pressure and it's associated effects. From my reading, blindness is usually the first major complication that shows up from diabetes-induced high blood pressure during pregnancy.
Not with Shelby though. Somehow the "special diabetes" completely trashes her kidneys while doing absolutely nothing else. No eye problems, no heart problems, just boom. Kidneys are completely gone. (It's OK, she just borrows one from Mom. And you thought it was bad when your kids take off with your clothes!)
And then finally she just goes into fatal renal failure with virtually no warning signs. Two pangs of pain in the back and boom, she's braindead. No fatigue, no nausea, no extremities swelling, no abnormal creatinine levels. Just drops like a rock.
But not before she drags the telephone outside to try to call for help, instead of calling from where the phone is located.
There are better Female Buddy Flicks out there.
(Poor Netflix. You know how it tries to bring up suggestions on movies you might like? It's just thrown up its hands and given up with me. Can't say I blame it. I mean, I loved Van Helsing and liked League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yet didn't care for Underworld. How to you guess with someone like me?)
It's a very typical -- I'd say archtypical -- 1980s women's picture. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's another movie where even if you haven't seen it, you've probably seen it.
I probably would have enjoyed it more if I'd been able to pretend that Shelby had some rare condition that was completely not diabetes. Because that was completely not diabetes. They even tried to make it "special" diabetes, but it's just not cutting it.
First, so she has an insulin reaction, and you can tell because she has a... kinda seizure-y type thing? That's... unusual. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's unusual. My grandmother's aunt, or so I'm told, would fall asleep when she had an insulin reaction and could not be woken up until some form of sugar had been forced down her throat. My grandmother would turn violent or throw a temper tantrum. My extremely diabetic teammate in high school once had a bad insulin reaction while on a field trip bus, and they knew because while trying to fall asleep on his seatmate's shoulder in the middle of the day, he asked "isn't it cold in here?" -- in 90F weather with no air conditioning.
You look up "insulin reaction", seizure is not one of the common things to come up. It's usually some form of cognitive change (confusion, temper, or temper tantrum), or falling asleep and not responding to attempts to be woken up. If it gets to the seizure point, a doctor needs to be called, even if the juice makes them feel better.
Next problem with the diabetes issue comes as a result of the other big problem with the movie: a woman with baby fever with no regard for her own health. Death is an acceptable side effect if it gets you a kid made of your very own genetic material. Real women have babies. Full stop.
Yeah, it's one of those.
So of course Shelby has to have a baby of her very own genetic material with no consideration that she's got a very good chance of passing on her "special diabetes".
Now the major concerns of a diabetic woman becoming pregnant are:
1) Birth defects. Blood sugar levels off either way can cause problems, so you have to keep them under control. (Shelby didn't put any thought on-screen into this aspect of her choice. What little we see is "It might kill me but I'm OK with that because Real Women Have Babies.")
2) High blood pressure and it's associated effects. From my reading, blindness is usually the first major complication that shows up from diabetes-induced high blood pressure during pregnancy.
Not with Shelby though. Somehow the "special diabetes" completely trashes her kidneys while doing absolutely nothing else. No eye problems, no heart problems, just boom. Kidneys are completely gone. (It's OK, she just borrows one from Mom. And you thought it was bad when your kids take off with your clothes!)
And then finally she just goes into fatal renal failure with virtually no warning signs. Two pangs of pain in the back and boom, she's braindead. No fatigue, no nausea, no extremities swelling, no abnormal creatinine levels. Just drops like a rock.
But not before she drags the telephone outside to try to call for help, instead of calling from where the phone is located.
There are better Female Buddy Flicks out there.
(Poor Netflix. You know how it tries to bring up suggestions on movies you might like? It's just thrown up its hands and given up with me. Can't say I blame it. I mean, I loved Van Helsing and liked League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, yet didn't care for Underworld. How to you guess with someone like me?)
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Babylon 5 DVDs - the technical issues
Babylon 5 was an awesome series. If you're a sci fi person and you haven't seen it, you should. If you liked Star Trek DS9, you'll like Bab 5 even more (and, um, that's not a coincidence. ^_^;)
However, the DVD releases have some technical issues. The way I hear it, Straczynski was perhaps a little too farsighted. He realized that 16:9 proportion HDTVs were coming and that syndicated reruns and video sets of TV series were going to have a market and acted accordingly, and IMHO that actually makes the current release worse than it would have been if he'd been as shortsighted as everyone else in the mid 90s.
Three problem areas: Live action shots, CG shots, and live action w/ CG special effects. (Yeah, that pretty much covers everything. Hang with me here, though.)
Live action shots have the least problems. Straczynski realized that widescreen TVs were coming and so taped the live action portions in widescreen on high resolution movie film. However, shots were still framed for the ubiquitous 4:3 TVs at the time. So at best, there's a lot of basically empty space on the sides of every wide shot. Close-ups are worse, though. A lot of his closeups are so close to show facial expressions that the tops of heads are cut off. This was fine on a 4:3 where the framing made it obvious (or more accurately, less jarring) that this is why the heads are chopped off. But in widescreen, you've got someone's hairline cut off and tons of empty space in the sides of the shot. It looks for all the world like they've made a mock widescreen by cutting off the tops and bottoms of a 4:3 shot.
(Even knowing scenes were actually filmed widescreen, I'm still convinced the Sci Fi channel did just cut off portions of some of the later episodes during their first widescreen showing, because the contents of Cartagia's desk were really quite important to that scene. But that's beside the point.)
Bigger problem is the CG scenes. They were NOT originally rendered in high resolution 16:9. The idea was that by the time 16:9 HDTVs became commonplace, computer rendering technology would be much better, so they would just re-render the scenes for widescreen with the better technology. I can see where at the time that seemed like a good idea, especially given how slow rendering was at the time (and probably still is, really). Looking back, I can also see how what actually happened was almost inevitable.
See, there were a few important questions that were not answered when they made this decision. Will the future technology be backwards compatible with our files? Will our files be high resolution enough to look good with the future technology? And, the one that bit them in the ass, do we have a robust storage system for all of our files?
When you're doing CGI, you aren't working with a single file. Usually each object, or at least each major object, is in a separate file for easier reuse and lower file sizes. Well, they've lost some of the models; they just don't have them any more.
So, they CAN'T re-render the CG scenes, because they don't have some of the important files. They don't have good archival copies of the CG scenes, because "we're just going to re-render those". All they have is the lower resolution NTSC format.
So, they're mixing the excellent image quality of the widescreen live-action scenes with the absolutely awful quality of the NTSC CG scenes that have not been stored well. To be perfectly honest, the switching back and forth from great quality to horrible gives me a headache to watch.
And, of course, to widescreen the CG shots they do have to chop off bits of the screen.
The worst to me, though, are scenes where CG effects are used in live action shots. They can't redo the CG effects. Sometimes they can recomposite the original effects over the better widescreen footage, which doesn't always looks so good. Sometimes they can't even do that and the entire image quality drops, which gives the effect of "Whoa, Delenn, you went all fuzzy all of a sudden". And whenever they do a composite shot, they have to chop off bits to maintain the widescreen ratio, because they don't have the sides of the shot in the special effects footage.
Lots of fans are unhappy with the image quality on the DVDs, and of course everyone has different ideas of how it could be fixed. Me personally, assuming it's possible, I'd rather have just the original 4:3 format shows, with the associated lower image quality in the live action shots but consistent quality throughout. It's the jump in quality between scenes depending on whether there's CG or not that gives me headaches. And frankly, I'd rather have the full shots of the CG scenes than the extra unessential side areas of the live shots that we get when converting to 16:9.
However, the DVD releases have some technical issues. The way I hear it, Straczynski was perhaps a little too farsighted. He realized that 16:9 proportion HDTVs were coming and that syndicated reruns and video sets of TV series were going to have a market and acted accordingly, and IMHO that actually makes the current release worse than it would have been if he'd been as shortsighted as everyone else in the mid 90s.
Three problem areas: Live action shots, CG shots, and live action w/ CG special effects. (Yeah, that pretty much covers everything. Hang with me here, though.)
Live action shots have the least problems. Straczynski realized that widescreen TVs were coming and so taped the live action portions in widescreen on high resolution movie film. However, shots were still framed for the ubiquitous 4:3 TVs at the time. So at best, there's a lot of basically empty space on the sides of every wide shot. Close-ups are worse, though. A lot of his closeups are so close to show facial expressions that the tops of heads are cut off. This was fine on a 4:3 where the framing made it obvious (or more accurately, less jarring) that this is why the heads are chopped off. But in widescreen, you've got someone's hairline cut off and tons of empty space in the sides of the shot. It looks for all the world like they've made a mock widescreen by cutting off the tops and bottoms of a 4:3 shot.
(Even knowing scenes were actually filmed widescreen, I'm still convinced the Sci Fi channel did just cut off portions of some of the later episodes during their first widescreen showing, because the contents of Cartagia's desk were really quite important to that scene. But that's beside the point.)
Bigger problem is the CG scenes. They were NOT originally rendered in high resolution 16:9. The idea was that by the time 16:9 HDTVs became commonplace, computer rendering technology would be much better, so they would just re-render the scenes for widescreen with the better technology. I can see where at the time that seemed like a good idea, especially given how slow rendering was at the time (and probably still is, really). Looking back, I can also see how what actually happened was almost inevitable.
See, there were a few important questions that were not answered when they made this decision. Will the future technology be backwards compatible with our files? Will our files be high resolution enough to look good with the future technology? And, the one that bit them in the ass, do we have a robust storage system for all of our files?
When you're doing CGI, you aren't working with a single file. Usually each object, or at least each major object, is in a separate file for easier reuse and lower file sizes. Well, they've lost some of the models; they just don't have them any more.
So, they CAN'T re-render the CG scenes, because they don't have some of the important files. They don't have good archival copies of the CG scenes, because "we're just going to re-render those". All they have is the lower resolution NTSC format.
So, they're mixing the excellent image quality of the widescreen live-action scenes with the absolutely awful quality of the NTSC CG scenes that have not been stored well. To be perfectly honest, the switching back and forth from great quality to horrible gives me a headache to watch.
And, of course, to widescreen the CG shots they do have to chop off bits of the screen.
The worst to me, though, are scenes where CG effects are used in live action shots. They can't redo the CG effects. Sometimes they can recomposite the original effects over the better widescreen footage, which doesn't always looks so good. Sometimes they can't even do that and the entire image quality drops, which gives the effect of "Whoa, Delenn, you went all fuzzy all of a sudden". And whenever they do a composite shot, they have to chop off bits to maintain the widescreen ratio, because they don't have the sides of the shot in the special effects footage.
Lots of fans are unhappy with the image quality on the DVDs, and of course everyone has different ideas of how it could be fixed. Me personally, assuming it's possible, I'd rather have just the original 4:3 format shows, with the associated lower image quality in the live action shots but consistent quality throughout. It's the jump in quality between scenes depending on whether there's CG or not that gives me headaches. And frankly, I'd rather have the full shots of the CG scenes than the extra unessential side areas of the live shots that we get when converting to 16:9.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Maybe I'll Pack This Nano Up
As I usually do in November, I've been participating in Nanowrimo. You might not know this except for the status widget temporarily living in my side bar, because I haven't really been talking about it. There's so much stressful stuff going on in my life this time around that I wanted this one to fairly light, low emotional investment compared to some year, and most importantly, be eminently bailable.
It's gone OK for the most part. The story's been pretty fun and there haven't been any angst puppies. But, then a non-writing problem came up. If you're reading this in November, see the block of red where 3 days were short and two didn't get any writing at all? Well, that's when what was supposed to be a squeeful indulgence of buying a fancy new sewing machine turned into a complete fiasco that took a ton of my mental energy and a significant amount of time (including taking off of work early one day) to sort out. It's still not settled, but it has settled down and right now I think it'll come out well, but it took a lot of footwork on my part for that to happen.
So now I'm about 5,000 words behind. That is absolutely overcomeable. In the past there have been times I wrote that much in a single day. In 2007, there were several times I did that much in a single day. But you know what? I just don't want to.
I'm just not feeling the love. The story's fine, there's nothing I want to do different. I'm not unhappy with it. I'm just not feeling it. The part I'm doing now ought to be the good part. My main characters have been kidnapped by terrorists and they're in the midst of the exciting death defying escape complete with crawling through Jeffries tubes and spouting technobabble, and once they escape the civil war will start, and it all ought to be cool. This is the part I was looking forward to writing. But now I just want to get it over with.
More importantly, I don't want to spend my vacation doing this. (Apparently I want to spend my vacation crazy quilting, which isn't the easiest thing with the sewing machine fiasco, but that's beside the point.)
Before I pack it up completely, I think I'm going to start playing with another story. If my muse goes nuts on the new, or goes "No, I do want to finish Emily and the Emperor", then great, we'll do it. If that's not happening either, then that's fine, too. Nowhere is it written that I must bat 1000 every time in everything.
It's gone OK for the most part. The story's been pretty fun and there haven't been any angst puppies. But, then a non-writing problem came up. If you're reading this in November, see the block of red where 3 days were short and two didn't get any writing at all? Well, that's when what was supposed to be a squeeful indulgence of buying a fancy new sewing machine turned into a complete fiasco that took a ton of my mental energy and a significant amount of time (including taking off of work early one day) to sort out. It's still not settled, but it has settled down and right now I think it'll come out well, but it took a lot of footwork on my part for that to happen.
So now I'm about 5,000 words behind. That is absolutely overcomeable. In the past there have been times I wrote that much in a single day. In 2007, there were several times I did that much in a single day. But you know what? I just don't want to.
I'm just not feeling the love. The story's fine, there's nothing I want to do different. I'm not unhappy with it. I'm just not feeling it. The part I'm doing now ought to be the good part. My main characters have been kidnapped by terrorists and they're in the midst of the exciting death defying escape complete with crawling through Jeffries tubes and spouting technobabble, and once they escape the civil war will start, and it all ought to be cool. This is the part I was looking forward to writing. But now I just want to get it over with.
More importantly, I don't want to spend my vacation doing this. (Apparently I want to spend my vacation crazy quilting, which isn't the easiest thing with the sewing machine fiasco, but that's beside the point.)
Before I pack it up completely, I think I'm going to start playing with another story. If my muse goes nuts on the new, or goes "No, I do want to finish Emily and the Emperor", then great, we'll do it. If that's not happening either, then that's fine, too. Nowhere is it written that I must bat 1000 every time in everything.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Movie: Dead Again (Aggressive Spoilers)
It's Halloween (obviously). Normally, like many people, I like to watch one or more horror or horror-parody movies on Halloween.
The original plan was Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, but I couldn't even make it through the first 10 minutes. The movie now holds the record for shortest bail-out time. Especially since the first 7 minutes and 35 seconds of the movie are not actually the movie. It's instead a racist skit/diatribe by the... producer? Director? Major fundraiser? going on and on about how Chinese bootlegs have robbed him of his retirement fund. WTF?! Seven minutes and thirty-five seconds of it.
So then we get into the movie, and two things immediately make me hit the kill button:
1) You know what's worse than bad acting? Fake bad acting. Fake bad acting can be effectively used for comedic value for 27 seconds; then it's just annoying. This promised to be a full movie of it.
2) So you can do the masturbating ax murderer gag, and in doing so you can show a full set of genitalia -- penis and scrotumm -- but they have to be a rubber penis and scrotum. Guy can't just whip it out, it's gotta be fake. But you can show it all, it just can't be real.
... That's some weird-ass American logic right there.
At least it was right up in my face "this isn't for you". None of this painfully dragging out for a while, do I want to keep going or not stuff. Nope, flat out "kill it, kill it now, kill it lots."
So, bailed early on, and thus needed another movie. Well, I didn't feel like anything in my collection (although now I wish I'd just watched The Crow), so I went through my Netflix instant viewing and watched the 1991 Dead Again.
This is one of those movies where, even if you haven't seen it before, you've probably seen it before. It's one of those reincarnated murder things, and everyone's switched up bodies this time around so you've got to figure out who's where, and isn't it cute that the writer thinks this is a super-original idea?
We go through a pretty mediocre movie, but it's not horrible up until the end when we hit one of the Trippiest Climatic Battle Scenes Evah! Of the movies I personally have seen, battle is second only to Taxi Driver's, and I'm actually tempted to boot it to first because Taxi Driver's at least fit in with the rest of the movie. Here it's just a completely slice of WTF.
First, though, there is no message so important that it justifies breaking down the front door belonging to a woman who is terrified of you and never wants to see you again. Well, maybe one: "the serial killer is in your closet". Even that one's really better done by cell phone, though. "Neither of us killed the other and oh, here's your anklet" is not even on the list of possibilities. I mean, seriously. Give her a call, or have the cute whistling friend she's sure to listen to do it, and tell her not to let the seemingly harmless British guy in because he's the killer. Oh, and since he's not recycled, you're on your way to turn him in to the police right now along with the evidence -- the long lost uber-valuable anklet and a suspiciously dead mom with fluid in her lungs and other evidence of being violently smothered.
But no, our hero's stupid. I actually cheered when he got shot for it. Luckily for him, fatal wounds aren't. Point-blank gunshot to the chest, that'll just knock you cold for a minute. But that's OK because when you come to, you'll leap with more energy than ever. You'll be downright genki.
Oh, and to the evil killer guy (and more importantly, the writer), when you've just established 30 seconds ago that a gun will not fire -- either out of ammo or jammed -- then putting it in some unconscious person's mouth as though to blow their brains out is completely not threatening.
And, final advice to all villains everywhere: do not make random wild cross-room leaps in slow mo, because the hero may opt out of slow-mo use that time to line up a trap that couldn't possibly be in place fast enough if you had instead made your wild leap in real time. By staying in real time himself instead of joining you in slow me, he can calculate complex approach angles, line up heavy props -- even adjust them for maximum effectiveness. Never could have done all that if you two had been in the same time dimension. Next time, just stick with the usual 9.8 m/s^2 fall acceleration, OK?
Whoo boy.
The original plan was Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, but I couldn't even make it through the first 10 minutes. The movie now holds the record for shortest bail-out time. Especially since the first 7 minutes and 35 seconds of the movie are not actually the movie. It's instead a racist skit/diatribe by the... producer? Director? Major fundraiser? going on and on about how Chinese bootlegs have robbed him of his retirement fund. WTF?! Seven minutes and thirty-five seconds of it.
So then we get into the movie, and two things immediately make me hit the kill button:
1) You know what's worse than bad acting? Fake bad acting. Fake bad acting can be effectively used for comedic value for 27 seconds; then it's just annoying. This promised to be a full movie of it.
2) So you can do the masturbating ax murderer gag, and in doing so you can show a full set of genitalia -- penis and scrotumm -- but they have to be a rubber penis and scrotum. Guy can't just whip it out, it's gotta be fake. But you can show it all, it just can't be real.
... That's some weird-ass American logic right there.
At least it was right up in my face "this isn't for you". None of this painfully dragging out for a while, do I want to keep going or not stuff. Nope, flat out "kill it, kill it now, kill it lots."
So, bailed early on, and thus needed another movie. Well, I didn't feel like anything in my collection (although now I wish I'd just watched The Crow), so I went through my Netflix instant viewing and watched the 1991 Dead Again.
This is one of those movies where, even if you haven't seen it before, you've probably seen it before. It's one of those reincarnated murder things, and everyone's switched up bodies this time around so you've got to figure out who's where, and isn't it cute that the writer thinks this is a super-original idea?
We go through a pretty mediocre movie, but it's not horrible up until the end when we hit one of the Trippiest Climatic Battle Scenes Evah! Of the movies I personally have seen, battle is second only to Taxi Driver's, and I'm actually tempted to boot it to first because Taxi Driver's at least fit in with the rest of the movie. Here it's just a completely slice of WTF.
First, though, there is no message so important that it justifies breaking down the front door belonging to a woman who is terrified of you and never wants to see you again. Well, maybe one: "the serial killer is in your closet". Even that one's really better done by cell phone, though. "Neither of us killed the other and oh, here's your anklet" is not even on the list of possibilities. I mean, seriously. Give her a call, or have the cute whistling friend she's sure to listen to do it, and tell her not to let the seemingly harmless British guy in because he's the killer. Oh, and since he's not recycled, you're on your way to turn him in to the police right now along with the evidence -- the long lost uber-valuable anklet and a suspiciously dead mom with fluid in her lungs and other evidence of being violently smothered.
But no, our hero's stupid. I actually cheered when he got shot for it. Luckily for him, fatal wounds aren't. Point-blank gunshot to the chest, that'll just knock you cold for a minute. But that's OK because when you come to, you'll leap with more energy than ever. You'll be downright genki.
Oh, and to the evil killer guy (and more importantly, the writer), when you've just established 30 seconds ago that a gun will not fire -- either out of ammo or jammed -- then putting it in some unconscious person's mouth as though to blow their brains out is completely not threatening.
And, final advice to all villains everywhere: do not make random wild cross-room leaps in slow mo, because the hero may opt out of slow-mo use that time to line up a trap that couldn't possibly be in place fast enough if you had instead made your wild leap in real time. By staying in real time himself instead of joining you in slow me, he can calculate complex approach angles, line up heavy props -- even adjust them for maximum effectiveness. Never could have done all that if you two had been in the same time dimension. Next time, just stick with the usual 9.8 m/s^2 fall acceleration, OK?
Whoo boy.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
IDYD Ch 3: This should have been a gimme
Back to the book I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional by Wendy Kaminer. Chapter 3 is about "Positive Thinking".
This one should have been a complete gimme. Granted, The Secret hadn't been written yet in 1992, but there were plenty of books almost exactly like it that had been. The problem is, as usual, IDYD's complete absence of any sense of scale.
Can we all agree that there's quite a bit of distance between clinically proven cognitive-behavioral techniques, and The Secret-styled "just think your self rich, famous, and happy" self-brainwashing? That there is a difference between visualization of a specific procedure as a mental rehearsal in addition to physical practice (a technique which has been empirically shown to improve performance over physical practice alone), and the idea that if you just sit on your butt and "visualize" what you want hard enough, it will come to you with no other work on your part whatsoever (let me know how that works for you)?
Well, this book can't tell the difference. In fact, it denies that techniques which have been shown to work actually do so if the author doesn't like where they've come from. For instance, when you were in school were you advised to have a dedicated study area and a specific time when you sat down and studied? I was, and I found it did indeed make studying easier. I didn't get distracted by other shiny activities because this was when I always studied. It was habit. But Kaminer insists that suggestion is bullshit that only a fool would try because it's "Pavlovian".
Um, I'm sorry, but humans do respond to stimuli and we do form patterns and get into habits. Have you ever been driving along a route you take often but this time actually have to take an unusual turn-off for an errand, and you just kind of zone out and miss your turn-off and then have to curse a lot and turn around, because you were on autopilot?
Of course you haven't! That's Pavlovian! Only a fool would do a thing like that!
Mostly, though, this chapter is dedicated to complaining about unbelievably out of date sources and throwing the reader wildly at conclusions. For instance:
"Don't worry, be happy. If it is difficult to imagine many people successfully obeying Peale's orders, it is frightening to consider what might happen if they did. If conflict avoidance is a primary goal, democracy itself is a secondary one, not to mention the justice that sometimes follows conflict resolution."
Whoa, throw on the brakes here. How in the world did we get from "don't worry" to "avoid conflict at all costs, even that of democracy and justice itself"? Non sequitor much? God, when the Lion King came out two years later, her head must have just exploded. Hakuna matata, everyone!
Actually, the Lion King is a good example of my argument about this book's tendency to take an extreme majority opinion as though it were an extreme minority one. I'm sure Kaminer was all "oh noes! Look at how the Recovery Monster has invaded even children's movies with it's 'no responsibility ever, just be brainwashed' life message." But what does Simba, and by extension the cute little kiddies in the audience, really learn? "No worries" is fine on your average no-major-crises day and can even get you through hard situations that are beyond your control (because seriously, what exactly is a 20-lb cub supposed to do against a 400-lb beta male and a pack of hyenas?), but you can't live that way forever. Eventually you've got to pony up and take some responsibility and do the hard crap. Ultimately the message is not Kaminer's fantasy society's "The 'recovery movement' is right; just give up your initiative and go along with what you're told and everything will be OK", but rather actual society's "that 'recovery' stuff is crap. You gotta grab the initiative and yank yourself up by your bootstraps."
Back to the book, though, it seems in this chapter that Kaminer does not know the definition of worry. Early she complains: "To suggest that some personal, political, or social problems might be worth worrying about misses Peale's point." Um, I would argue that there is not much at all worth worrying about. There's plenty to be concerned about and to do something about. But worrying is neither action nor planning. "Worrying" is sitting there spinning your mental wheels, going over something over and over in your mind without actually addressing it or even logically considering how to address it. There is nothing worth only worrying about. If it's worth worrying about, it's worth instead using that energy and time to actually do something about or really consider what can be done. If on the other hand, something isn't worth that useful physical or mental energy, it's certainly not worth the competely useless activity of just worrying about it.
By the way, the "Peale" she's railing about will be Norman Vincent Peale, and in particular his famous 1952 work, The Power of Positive Thinking. She spends page after page, I'd guess at least a full third of the chapter, ripping this book apart.
Let me say that publication date again: 1952. She's railing against a book that, at the time of her own publication, was 40 years old. Let's look at the state of science in the 1950s: smoking was good for you -- especially if you were pregnant, because you wanted that baby to be as small as possible when it was born; condoms could be washed out and reused; and Disney was shoving lemmings off cliffs and calling it educational. (Lemmings don't actually commit mass suicide.) On a psychological level, Freud's theories were in the early stages of falling out of favor, but more effective forms of pyschological therapy were 20 or more years off.
The Power of Positive Thinking may deserve a good shredding, but it's hardly an immediate problem. Picking apart a 40-year-old book on positive thinking is a bit like picking apart one of those old medical recommendations for women to smoke while pregnant to reduce birth weight. It's bad advice in a vacuum, but most people realize now how dated it is. (She also fails to mention that it was considered pretty darn nutty when it was published, and Preacher Peale's professional psychologist partner started going "I am so not with him. I didn't have anything to do with that POS" when it came out.)
She then ups that ante by spending several more pages instead complaining about Napoleon Hills Think and Get Rich, written in 1936.
::blinkblink:: Honestly! This is the best she can do?! She can't at least grab one of the McWilliams' books co-credited to infamous cult leader and nutjob John-Roger that were published in the late 80s/early 90s (and loved by Oprah, so she'd even get to tie in to the previous chapter), if not one of the even nuttier books I know were out there. She honestly couldn't find anything more recent and topical than 40 to 55 years old?!?! Geez!
Yeah, she's convincing me this "Recovery Movement" thing of hers is a new, modern, and immediately pressing problem. ::eye roll::
So, finally, last third of the book is dedicated to talking about est. WTF is est? est was a series of expensive "New Age awareness training seminars" which went defunct in 1984.
1984.
IDYD was written in 1992. Again, she can't find anything more topical than a series of training seminars that could only be afforded by a small elite group and had been defunct for 8 years?
The most frustating thing about IDYD, though, is that she does have a few good points, but they're so buried under the BS. For instance, she does point out the Big Problem with positive thinking: "There is no such thing as luck (positive thinkers don't generally believe in luck), which means that there are no hapless victims, only assholes who invite their own abuse." Yes. That's what a lot of us are on about with crap like The Secret; the dark side of "your thoughts literally rather than just perceptually create your reality" is that means that those in dire straits have brought it on themselves. However, she talks about the 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking for seven straight pages, the 1936 Think and Get Rich for five pages, the defunct est program for 4 pages, and this actual real problem for 2 paragraphs. (Hint: Good writing would be to put this argument about the dark side of Positive Thinking at the beginning of the chapter, and then relate all later source-shredding back to it. Bad writing would be... what we got.)
Next chapter: Support groups: evil incarnate or just whiny?
This one should have been a complete gimme. Granted, The Secret hadn't been written yet in 1992, but there were plenty of books almost exactly like it that had been. The problem is, as usual, IDYD's complete absence of any sense of scale.
Can we all agree that there's quite a bit of distance between clinically proven cognitive-behavioral techniques, and The Secret-styled "just think your self rich, famous, and happy" self-brainwashing? That there is a difference between visualization of a specific procedure as a mental rehearsal in addition to physical practice (a technique which has been empirically shown to improve performance over physical practice alone), and the idea that if you just sit on your butt and "visualize" what you want hard enough, it will come to you with no other work on your part whatsoever (let me know how that works for you)?
Well, this book can't tell the difference. In fact, it denies that techniques which have been shown to work actually do so if the author doesn't like where they've come from. For instance, when you were in school were you advised to have a dedicated study area and a specific time when you sat down and studied? I was, and I found it did indeed make studying easier. I didn't get distracted by other shiny activities because this was when I always studied. It was habit. But Kaminer insists that suggestion is bullshit that only a fool would try because it's "Pavlovian".
Um, I'm sorry, but humans do respond to stimuli and we do form patterns and get into habits. Have you ever been driving along a route you take often but this time actually have to take an unusual turn-off for an errand, and you just kind of zone out and miss your turn-off and then have to curse a lot and turn around, because you were on autopilot?
Of course you haven't! That's Pavlovian! Only a fool would do a thing like that!
Mostly, though, this chapter is dedicated to complaining about unbelievably out of date sources and throwing the reader wildly at conclusions. For instance:
"Don't worry, be happy. If it is difficult to imagine many people successfully obeying Peale's orders, it is frightening to consider what might happen if they did. If conflict avoidance is a primary goal, democracy itself is a secondary one, not to mention the justice that sometimes follows conflict resolution."
Whoa, throw on the brakes here. How in the world did we get from "don't worry" to "avoid conflict at all costs, even that of democracy and justice itself"? Non sequitor much? God, when the Lion King came out two years later, her head must have just exploded. Hakuna matata, everyone!
Actually, the Lion King is a good example of my argument about this book's tendency to take an extreme majority opinion as though it were an extreme minority one. I'm sure Kaminer was all "oh noes! Look at how the Recovery Monster has invaded even children's movies with it's 'no responsibility ever, just be brainwashed' life message." But what does Simba, and by extension the cute little kiddies in the audience, really learn? "No worries" is fine on your average no-major-crises day and can even get you through hard situations that are beyond your control (because seriously, what exactly is a 20-lb cub supposed to do against a 400-lb beta male and a pack of hyenas?), but you can't live that way forever. Eventually you've got to pony up and take some responsibility and do the hard crap. Ultimately the message is not Kaminer's fantasy society's "The 'recovery movement' is right; just give up your initiative and go along with what you're told and everything will be OK", but rather actual society's "that 'recovery' stuff is crap. You gotta grab the initiative and yank yourself up by your bootstraps."
Back to the book, though, it seems in this chapter that Kaminer does not know the definition of worry. Early she complains: "To suggest that some personal, political, or social problems might be worth worrying about misses Peale's point." Um, I would argue that there is not much at all worth worrying about. There's plenty to be concerned about and to do something about. But worrying is neither action nor planning. "Worrying" is sitting there spinning your mental wheels, going over something over and over in your mind without actually addressing it or even logically considering how to address it. There is nothing worth only worrying about. If it's worth worrying about, it's worth instead using that energy and time to actually do something about or really consider what can be done. If on the other hand, something isn't worth that useful physical or mental energy, it's certainly not worth the competely useless activity of just worrying about it.
By the way, the "Peale" she's railing about will be Norman Vincent Peale, and in particular his famous 1952 work, The Power of Positive Thinking. She spends page after page, I'd guess at least a full third of the chapter, ripping this book apart.
Let me say that publication date again: 1952. She's railing against a book that, at the time of her own publication, was 40 years old. Let's look at the state of science in the 1950s: smoking was good for you -- especially if you were pregnant, because you wanted that baby to be as small as possible when it was born; condoms could be washed out and reused; and Disney was shoving lemmings off cliffs and calling it educational. (Lemmings don't actually commit mass suicide.) On a psychological level, Freud's theories were in the early stages of falling out of favor, but more effective forms of pyschological therapy were 20 or more years off.
The Power of Positive Thinking may deserve a good shredding, but it's hardly an immediate problem. Picking apart a 40-year-old book on positive thinking is a bit like picking apart one of those old medical recommendations for women to smoke while pregnant to reduce birth weight. It's bad advice in a vacuum, but most people realize now how dated it is. (She also fails to mention that it was considered pretty darn nutty when it was published, and Preacher Peale's professional psychologist partner started going "I am so not with him. I didn't have anything to do with that POS" when it came out.)
She then ups that ante by spending several more pages instead complaining about Napoleon Hills Think and Get Rich, written in 1936.
::blinkblink:: Honestly! This is the best she can do?! She can't at least grab one of the McWilliams' books co-credited to infamous cult leader and nutjob John-Roger that were published in the late 80s/early 90s (and loved by Oprah, so she'd even get to tie in to the previous chapter), if not one of the even nuttier books I know were out there. She honestly couldn't find anything more recent and topical than 40 to 55 years old?!?! Geez!
Yeah, she's convincing me this "Recovery Movement" thing of hers is a new, modern, and immediately pressing problem. ::eye roll::
So, finally, last third of the book is dedicated to talking about est. WTF is est? est was a series of expensive "New Age awareness training seminars" which went defunct in 1984.
1984.
IDYD was written in 1992. Again, she can't find anything more topical than a series of training seminars that could only be afforded by a small elite group and had been defunct for 8 years?
The most frustating thing about IDYD, though, is that she does have a few good points, but they're so buried under the BS. For instance, she does point out the Big Problem with positive thinking: "There is no such thing as luck (positive thinkers don't generally believe in luck), which means that there are no hapless victims, only assholes who invite their own abuse." Yes. That's what a lot of us are on about with crap like The Secret; the dark side of "your thoughts literally rather than just perceptually create your reality" is that means that those in dire straits have brought it on themselves. However, she talks about the 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking for seven straight pages, the 1936 Think and Get Rich for five pages, the defunct est program for 4 pages, and this actual real problem for 2 paragraphs. (Hint: Good writing would be to put this argument about the dark side of Positive Thinking at the beginning of the chapter, and then relate all later source-shredding back to it. Bad writing would be... what we got.)
Next chapter: Support groups: evil incarnate or just whiny?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
IDYD ch 2: It Came from the Television
"I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional" by Wendy Kaminer. Let's review what the book has said so far.
"Everyone in the whole world is a huge whiner."
OK, that about brings us up to now...
In all seriousness, I think perhaps the biggest problem with this book is that it is a massively majority opinion that has mistaken itself for a minuscule minority one, a self-proclaimed lone voice of reason in an insane asylum, if you will. The author portrays the world as largely populated with people who claim either abuse resembling the Holocaust because their parents didn't help them with homework one night or proudly proclaim that they are victims of an addiction to... whatever. The most trivial of items will work. These people insist on talking about their addiction or hardships incessantly to anyone who will listen, much like some half-crazy guy on the subway, while simultaneously refusing to listen to anyone else. And above all, any addiction or claim to past trauma is a immediate, compete and irrevocable "get out of responsibility free" card.
Pfph.
This is not the case now. This was not the case in 1992, when the book was written. It was not the case before. There is still massive stigma against therapy. Just the phrase "my therapist" is an immediate conversation stopper in most company. Look around your workplace. Has anyone there come up and told you while on the clock that they're have a drug or alcohol addiction? Statistically speaking, 6% of them do. If they inadvertently advertise it, do the people around them go "oh, it's not their fault. They have an addiction," or do they go "Lousy drunk/pothead/druggie/OK-I'm-not-exactly-up-on-my-slang-here. Why doesn't he get his act together? They ought to fire the bum." If anything, trying to claim addiction or a hard past as an excuse for your actions will get you smacked down twice as hard -- one for the act, and again for trying to talk yourself out of the consequences of it.
I'm not saying either is the way it "should" be. I'm saying her personal little codependent nightmare world where the "recovery movement" has destroyed America complete with Mom and apple pie has never existed anywhere except in fear-mongering media portrayals and maybe some really bad sitcoms.
Bad sitcoms are not how the Recovery Monster will come through your TV to get you, however, and that brings us to Chapter 2 in the book: "Testifying: Television".
I'm trying to figure out the punctuation there. It's not like other chapters are "Testifying: Radio" and "Testifying: Semaphore Flags". Colons are always kind of tricky as punctuation goes, so maybe I'm in the wrong here, but that just doesn't look right.
Here the author goes on (and on and on) about about how the Recovery Monster's soul-baring, spilling-every-thought-in-their-head (especially the ones she doesn't want to hear. "Stop talking about child abuse! We need to focus on real issues!") minions "dominate the mass marketplace and help make it one that is inimical to ideas", and they have laid waste to intelligent discourse by utterly infiltrating... talk shows.
::blinkblink::
Right, because everyone emulates the guests on Jerry Springer.
I didn't know my eyes could roll 360 degrees. They're talk shows! Worse, with this book's publication date, they're 80s talk shows. I am old enough to run for Senate, and there has never been a time in my life when talk shows have not been considered trash television. If anything, talk shows trigger a strong knee-jerk anti reaction. Anything featured on a talk show has to be bad, anything someone does on a talk show is a sign of a trashy loser.
So, the rest of the chapter, do we go off this to talk about how the Recovery Monster has spread from talk shows to say, popular entertainment? Or worse, the nightly news?
Well, no. Talking about the news would mean admitting that everyone in the media exactly the same things she was saying, going to popular entertainment would mean facing that "the recovery movement" is a huge laughing stock. So we stick to talk shows, and how the Recovery Monster has turned them to a force of evil instead of their previous force for... evil. Hmm.
That's enough for one day. Next time: "Est. It's not just a suffix anymore." (What the hell is 'est'?)
"Everyone in the whole world is a huge whiner."
OK, that about brings us up to now...
In all seriousness, I think perhaps the biggest problem with this book is that it is a massively majority opinion that has mistaken itself for a minuscule minority one, a self-proclaimed lone voice of reason in an insane asylum, if you will. The author portrays the world as largely populated with people who claim either abuse resembling the Holocaust because their parents didn't help them with homework one night or proudly proclaim that they are victims of an addiction to... whatever. The most trivial of items will work. These people insist on talking about their addiction or hardships incessantly to anyone who will listen, much like some half-crazy guy on the subway, while simultaneously refusing to listen to anyone else. And above all, any addiction or claim to past trauma is a immediate, compete and irrevocable "get out of responsibility free" card.
Pfph.
This is not the case now. This was not the case in 1992, when the book was written. It was not the case before. There is still massive stigma against therapy. Just the phrase "my therapist" is an immediate conversation stopper in most company. Look around your workplace. Has anyone there come up and told you while on the clock that they're have a drug or alcohol addiction? Statistically speaking, 6% of them do. If they inadvertently advertise it, do the people around them go "oh, it's not their fault. They have an addiction," or do they go "Lousy drunk/pothead/druggie/OK-I'm-not-exactly-up-on-my-slang-here. Why doesn't he get his act together? They ought to fire the bum." If anything, trying to claim addiction or a hard past as an excuse for your actions will get you smacked down twice as hard -- one for the act, and again for trying to talk yourself out of the consequences of it.
I'm not saying either is the way it "should" be. I'm saying her personal little codependent nightmare world where the "recovery movement" has destroyed America complete with Mom and apple pie has never existed anywhere except in fear-mongering media portrayals and maybe some really bad sitcoms.
Bad sitcoms are not how the Recovery Monster will come through your TV to get you, however, and that brings us to Chapter 2 in the book: "Testifying: Television".
I'm trying to figure out the punctuation there. It's not like other chapters are "Testifying: Radio" and "Testifying: Semaphore Flags". Colons are always kind of tricky as punctuation goes, so maybe I'm in the wrong here, but that just doesn't look right.
Here the author goes on (and on and on) about about how the Recovery Monster's soul-baring, spilling-every-thought-in-their-head (especially the ones she doesn't want to hear. "Stop talking about child abuse! We need to focus on real issues!") minions "dominate the mass marketplace and help make it one that is inimical to ideas", and they have laid waste to intelligent discourse by utterly infiltrating... talk shows.
::blinkblink::
Right, because everyone emulates the guests on Jerry Springer.
I didn't know my eyes could roll 360 degrees. They're talk shows! Worse, with this book's publication date, they're 80s talk shows. I am old enough to run for Senate, and there has never been a time in my life when talk shows have not been considered trash television. If anything, talk shows trigger a strong knee-jerk anti reaction. Anything featured on a talk show has to be bad, anything someone does on a talk show is a sign of a trashy loser.
So, the rest of the chapter, do we go off this to talk about how the Recovery Monster has spread from talk shows to say, popular entertainment? Or worse, the nightly news?
Well, no. Talking about the news would mean admitting that everyone in the media exactly the same things she was saying, going to popular entertainment would mean facing that "the recovery movement" is a huge laughing stock. So we stick to talk shows, and how the Recovery Monster has turned them to a force of evil instead of their previous force for... evil. Hmm.
That's enough for one day. Next time: "Est. It's not just a suffix anymore." (What the hell is 'est'?)
Monday, October 19, 2009
OK, this book needs a blow-by-blow commentary.
Someone suggested that I read "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions", and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.
From the title, I thought it would have potential. I do grow tired of people who mistake imperfect families for dysfunctional. Being made of human beings, no family is perfect, and somewhere in the 80s we got the idea that if you weren't the Huxtables, your family was dysfunctional. If you can make the joke "my family put the fun in dysfunctional", odds are your family isn't. There's nothing at all fun about a dysfunctional family.
The author of IDYD is railing against "the recovery movement". What is "the recovery movement"? Damned if I know. It's this vague half-fictional entity that's destroying society. As near as I can tell, anything that isn't yanking yourself up by your bootstraps is this evil society-destroying entity. Of course, virtually no one needs any bootstrap yanking because the only form of abuse is violent incest. If you were not raped by your parents, you were not abused. Point blank.
This is actually a good place to jump into the blow-by-blow, I think. I am currently half-way through chapter 3 of 7 + a conclusion. The first ones may get mooshed together, and I don't know how much detail I'll go into the later ones. Hell, I very well may bail at any moment. But this book deserves a good ripping as long as I can handle it.
So, intro and chapter 1. I'm putting them together because I didn't realize the book had started with chapter 1. It seemed a continuation of the introductory explanation/whining. However, this is a good place for me to put a caveat. Just as, at least according to her early insistence if not her later writing, the author insists that she is criticizing the "movement" and not the people within it, I am criticizing how she says things, not necessarily what she says. Some of what she says, but not all of it. She does have some good points in here, but she's cast her net too widely, painted them with too broad a brush, buried them too deeply and committed other horrible cliches to them.
So, problem with how this author makes her point. First, she is very much a Suffering Olympics person. If anyone anywhere has ever had bigger problems or more suffering than you, you have no right to say anything about it ever. She is also astoundingly black and white. Hence the attitude that abuse is being raped by your parents, full stop. If you think any other behavior was abusive, you're a whiny mindless sheep. (The reason I repeat the phrase "raped by your parents" is because she repeats it, several times, as her standard for abuse.)
She's also misusing sources -- taking them out of context, not giving them when it's critical, that sort of thing. I think my favorite so far, though, is when in her complaints about the overuse of the concept of codependency,she writes "Almost everyone -- 96 percent of all Americans -- suffers from codependency, experts assert" -- and gives no citation. This statement right here is the crux of the entire book. Anything that 96% of the population experiences is normalcy; she's here to complain at least somewhat about normalcy being pathologized. But with no citations, what experts are we talking? Are we talking recognized and respected experts, or are we talking "Dr. Phil" type 'experts'?
I will say, there are some positively hilarious tidbits in this, though. One of my favorites in Chapter 1:
"Whether alcoholism is an inheritable disease or a learned behavior is a controversy about which I have no opinion. (I do doubt, however, that absolutely everyone who drinks habitually or in excess is a victim of her genes.)"
*snert* Nope, no opinion here.
She also has problems with etymology. I'm sorry, but the word "disease" actually does come from the roots "dis" and "ease" via the French, des+aise. It's not simple coincidence like god and dog. Yes, it gets annoying to hear it over and over in cheerful voices, but that doesn't make it not true.
Whoo. I write it out and it's worse than I thought.
Tomorrow: how the horrible society destroying monster will attack you through your television.
From the title, I thought it would have potential. I do grow tired of people who mistake imperfect families for dysfunctional. Being made of human beings, no family is perfect, and somewhere in the 80s we got the idea that if you weren't the Huxtables, your family was dysfunctional. If you can make the joke "my family put the fun in dysfunctional", odds are your family isn't. There's nothing at all fun about a dysfunctional family.
The author of IDYD is railing against "the recovery movement". What is "the recovery movement"? Damned if I know. It's this vague half-fictional entity that's destroying society. As near as I can tell, anything that isn't yanking yourself up by your bootstraps is this evil society-destroying entity. Of course, virtually no one needs any bootstrap yanking because the only form of abuse is violent incest. If you were not raped by your parents, you were not abused. Point blank.
This is actually a good place to jump into the blow-by-blow, I think. I am currently half-way through chapter 3 of 7 + a conclusion. The first ones may get mooshed together, and I don't know how much detail I'll go into the later ones. Hell, I very well may bail at any moment. But this book deserves a good ripping as long as I can handle it.
So, intro and chapter 1. I'm putting them together because I didn't realize the book had started with chapter 1. It seemed a continuation of the introductory explanation/whining. However, this is a good place for me to put a caveat. Just as, at least according to her early insistence if not her later writing, the author insists that she is criticizing the "movement" and not the people within it, I am criticizing how she says things, not necessarily what she says. Some of what she says, but not all of it. She does have some good points in here, but she's cast her net too widely, painted them with too broad a brush, buried them too deeply and committed other horrible cliches to them.
So, problem with how this author makes her point. First, she is very much a Suffering Olympics person. If anyone anywhere has ever had bigger problems or more suffering than you, you have no right to say anything about it ever. She is also astoundingly black and white. Hence the attitude that abuse is being raped by your parents, full stop. If you think any other behavior was abusive, you're a whiny mindless sheep. (The reason I repeat the phrase "raped by your parents" is because she repeats it, several times, as her standard for abuse.)
She's also misusing sources -- taking them out of context, not giving them when it's critical, that sort of thing. I think my favorite so far, though, is when in her complaints about the overuse of the concept of codependency,she writes "Almost everyone -- 96 percent of all Americans -- suffers from codependency, experts assert" -- and gives no citation. This statement right here is the crux of the entire book. Anything that 96% of the population experiences is normalcy; she's here to complain at least somewhat about normalcy being pathologized. But with no citations, what experts are we talking? Are we talking recognized and respected experts, or are we talking "Dr. Phil" type 'experts'?
I will say, there are some positively hilarious tidbits in this, though. One of my favorites in Chapter 1:
"Whether alcoholism is an inheritable disease or a learned behavior is a controversy about which I have no opinion. (I do doubt, however, that absolutely everyone who drinks habitually or in excess is a victim of her genes.)"
*snert* Nope, no opinion here.
She also has problems with etymology. I'm sorry, but the word "disease" actually does come from the roots "dis" and "ease" via the French, des+aise. It's not simple coincidence like god and dog. Yes, it gets annoying to hear it over and over in cheerful voices, but that doesn't make it not true.
Whoo. I write it out and it's worse than I thought.
Tomorrow: how the horrible society destroying monster will attack you through your television.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Movie: Underworld (Heavy spoilers)
Underworld: What happens when your GM can't decide between Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and then watches The Matrix. And for this reason, White Wolf sued. The Wachowski brothers, on the other hand, just shook their heads. And maybe snickered.
What to say about Underworld. Oh, I know. BWAHAHAHA! *points and guffaws* I mean, the leather bodysuits and trench coats, and the corsets, and the Hot Topic goth-wannabe wear. And just the name "Kraven" on your cowardly villain. No. Just no. Bad writer, bad. You were supposed to search/replace that before sending it to print. And the genetic bullshit. And going out of our way to wake up Viktor so he'll be around for the "he's evil" reveal when it could have just been written that way straight up to begin with. And none of these battles really mean anything at all because there's absolutely no reason to root for either side. And then Michael turning into this thing that's supposed to be a werewolf/vampire hybrid but looks more like a half man/half spotted newt. And the guy going into Super Standoff Mode and pulling out weapons and all the while he doesn't realize that half his head's been cut off. And the "oh poopie" look when he does realize it. Bwa ha ha!
At least as funny as 300. I can't believe there isn't a Rifftrax for this thing. How is that even possible?
One thing I will give Underworld credit for (OK, the only thing) is the gender swap on the usual stereotype. I mean, usually when you have a chosen one that's being fought over and chased and captured and uncaptured and recaptured and who doesn't really do much, but who has a lover who is constantly bailing them out and doing really kick-ass things to do it, usually the chosen one is female and the ass-kicking lover is male. This was a fairly nice change of pace. Except that the movie's awful.
End conclusion on Underworld: hilariously horrible.
What to say about Underworld. Oh, I know. BWAHAHAHA! *points and guffaws* I mean, the leather bodysuits and trench coats, and the corsets, and the Hot Topic goth-wannabe wear. And just the name "Kraven" on your cowardly villain. No. Just no. Bad writer, bad. You were supposed to search/replace that before sending it to print. And the genetic bullshit. And going out of our way to wake up Viktor so he'll be around for the "he's evil" reveal when it could have just been written that way straight up to begin with. And none of these battles really mean anything at all because there's absolutely no reason to root for either side. And then Michael turning into this thing that's supposed to be a werewolf/vampire hybrid but looks more like a half man/half spotted newt. And the guy going into Super Standoff Mode and pulling out weapons and all the while he doesn't realize that half his head's been cut off. And the "oh poopie" look when he does realize it. Bwa ha ha!
At least as funny as 300. I can't believe there isn't a Rifftrax for this thing. How is that even possible?
One thing I will give Underworld credit for (OK, the only thing) is the gender swap on the usual stereotype. I mean, usually when you have a chosen one that's being fought over and chased and captured and uncaptured and recaptured and who doesn't really do much, but who has a lover who is constantly bailing them out and doing really kick-ass things to do it, usually the chosen one is female and the ass-kicking lover is male. This was a fairly nice change of pace. Except that the movie's awful.
End conclusion on Underworld: hilariously horrible.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
DVD box text WTF?
The last couple of movies I've gotten from Netflix, the story summary has been... off.
I guess Chushingura wasn't terribly bad. The back-of-box text is:
"At the dawn of the 18th century, honorable Lord Naganori Asano (Yuzo Kayama) refuses to buy off a crooked official (Chûsha Ichikawa) and subsequently gets tricked into performing ritual suicide. Asano's masterless and displaced followers suffer humiliation and poverty while waiting for the chance to prove their loyalty by avenging their leader's death. This tense, deliberately paced drama is based on a venerable Japanese legend."
That's not really how it came across to me. Instead of "honorable lord refusing to buy off crooked official", it seems more like "well intentioned but inexperienced lord botches expected social niceties and incompetent shogun allows things to get completely out of control."
1) To me, it doesn't seem like bribery if someone gives you a gift worth 200 ryou and expects you to return the favor with... a gift worth 200 ryou. That just seems like the exchange of gifts between business/political associates that's common in some cultures, and the problem here is that Asano's list of customary amounts is about 50 years out of date.
2) Asano's not so much tricked into committing seppuku, as he lost his temper and drew his sword in the Shogun's palace, which the Shogun didn't much appreciate and which was well-known to be a stupid thing to do. Oishi wasn't trying to get Asano to pull his sword. Actually, it surprised the living crap out of him that Asano really did it.
3) Tragedy coming about because of a central leader's incompetence is definitely a major aspect of the film. The only time we see the Shogun, he's complaining that the guy who was just attacked and is bleeding from multiple sword wounds got blood on the Shogun's good kimono. We actually see the Shogun's dog longer than we see the Shogun, in a scene were the dog is being carried through the town in a palanquin while peasants are made to bow down to it. The Shogun refuses to hear Asano's reason for drawing his sword, which would have placated the underlings. Instead he destroys the Asano clan, while sending Oishi home without so much as a "shame on you". Every bit of the story was avoidable with decent leadership.
Oh, and "deliberately paced" is code for "there's really only 90 minutes of story, but it drags out for 3 and a half hours." Gosh, the movie must spend at least 20 minutes just replacing tatami mats -- and believe me, I wish I was kidding.
Still, I can at least see where the back of box text came from, even if I really disagree with it.
This time, though. I got Furin Kazan, released in the US as "Samurai Banners", and it's box blurb is:
"Yamamoto Kansuke (Mifune Toshiro), a Bushido fighter, has risen through the ranks through dishonorable means, a fact that his warlord knows nothing about. To Takeda (Kinnosuke Naka), Yamamoto is the consummate leader, a man beyond reproach. But when they both fall for Princess Yufu (Yoshiko Sakuma), Yamamoto is forced to compete with Takeda, who soon discovers what his once-loyal disciple is all about."
Did we watch the same movie? Um, no. Not at all. Kansuke, a ronin, gets hired on due to a dirty trick, but after that he rises through the ranks because he's a brilliant strategist. Granted, he starts as a sneaky bastard, but everyone knows he's a sneaky bastard. He gets called on it by an enemy about 45 minutes in and then he can't be a sneaky bastard anymore because no one's falling for it. As for the "forced to compete" bit, Yu's been dead 7 years by then and the competition come about because Yamamoto's spent the last 15-ish years leading the campaign to take over half of Japan and has the final battle all planned out so victory is just about guaranteed and then Takeda's goes all "oh, I decided I wanted to plan a battle, so I just moved the army." Oh, and if Takeda really didn't realize that Kansuke had a special devotion to Yu until the end of the movie, he's too stupid to rule anyway.
The movie is really more about ambition. I think it's summed up by the repeated line "What you want is something immense, that's out of your grasp. What I want is right in front of my eyes." Kansuke dreamed great big, and so did great big, and ultimately screwed up great big.
This one's a good movie, though, worth the 166 minute run time.
I guess Chushingura wasn't terribly bad. The back-of-box text is:
"At the dawn of the 18th century, honorable Lord Naganori Asano (Yuzo Kayama) refuses to buy off a crooked official (Chûsha Ichikawa) and subsequently gets tricked into performing ritual suicide. Asano's masterless and displaced followers suffer humiliation and poverty while waiting for the chance to prove their loyalty by avenging their leader's death. This tense, deliberately paced drama is based on a venerable Japanese legend."
That's not really how it came across to me. Instead of "honorable lord refusing to buy off crooked official", it seems more like "well intentioned but inexperienced lord botches expected social niceties and incompetent shogun allows things to get completely out of control."
1) To me, it doesn't seem like bribery if someone gives you a gift worth 200 ryou and expects you to return the favor with... a gift worth 200 ryou. That just seems like the exchange of gifts between business/political associates that's common in some cultures, and the problem here is that Asano's list of customary amounts is about 50 years out of date.
2) Asano's not so much tricked into committing seppuku, as he lost his temper and drew his sword in the Shogun's palace, which the Shogun didn't much appreciate and which was well-known to be a stupid thing to do. Oishi wasn't trying to get Asano to pull his sword. Actually, it surprised the living crap out of him that Asano really did it.
3) Tragedy coming about because of a central leader's incompetence is definitely a major aspect of the film. The only time we see the Shogun, he's complaining that the guy who was just attacked and is bleeding from multiple sword wounds got blood on the Shogun's good kimono. We actually see the Shogun's dog longer than we see the Shogun, in a scene were the dog is being carried through the town in a palanquin while peasants are made to bow down to it. The Shogun refuses to hear Asano's reason for drawing his sword, which would have placated the underlings. Instead he destroys the Asano clan, while sending Oishi home without so much as a "shame on you". Every bit of the story was avoidable with decent leadership.
Oh, and "deliberately paced" is code for "there's really only 90 minutes of story, but it drags out for 3 and a half hours." Gosh, the movie must spend at least 20 minutes just replacing tatami mats -- and believe me, I wish I was kidding.
Still, I can at least see where the back of box text came from, even if I really disagree with it.
This time, though. I got Furin Kazan, released in the US as "Samurai Banners", and it's box blurb is:
"Yamamoto Kansuke (Mifune Toshiro), a Bushido fighter, has risen through the ranks through dishonorable means, a fact that his warlord knows nothing about. To Takeda (Kinnosuke Naka), Yamamoto is the consummate leader, a man beyond reproach. But when they both fall for Princess Yufu (Yoshiko Sakuma), Yamamoto is forced to compete with Takeda, who soon discovers what his once-loyal disciple is all about."
Did we watch the same movie? Um, no. Not at all. Kansuke, a ronin, gets hired on due to a dirty trick, but after that he rises through the ranks because he's a brilliant strategist. Granted, he starts as a sneaky bastard, but everyone knows he's a sneaky bastard. He gets called on it by an enemy about 45 minutes in and then he can't be a sneaky bastard anymore because no one's falling for it. As for the "forced to compete" bit, Yu's been dead 7 years by then and the competition come about because Yamamoto's spent the last 15-ish years leading the campaign to take over half of Japan and has the final battle all planned out so victory is just about guaranteed and then Takeda's goes all "oh, I decided I wanted to plan a battle, so I just moved the army." Oh, and if Takeda really didn't realize that Kansuke had a special devotion to Yu until the end of the movie, he's too stupid to rule anyway.
The movie is really more about ambition. I think it's summed up by the repeated line "What you want is something immense, that's out of your grasp. What I want is right in front of my eyes." Kansuke dreamed great big, and so did great big, and ultimately screwed up great big.
This one's a good movie, though, worth the 166 minute run time.
Friday, July 31, 2009
MST3K Drinking Game
I was going through a very old binder (I swear the things reproduce when my back is turned) and found something I just have to share: the start of an MST3K drinking game.
- When the movie drives a crew member into an identity crisis, take one drink.
- When there is a reference to
- A previous episode, take one drink.
- Trumpy (outside of the movie "Pod People", of course), take one drink.
- Someone's "area", take one drink.
- A woozle who's name is Peanut, take one drink.
- A "war wilf", take two drinks.
- Gamera, take one drink.
- When one crew member vetoes another's joke, take one drink.
- When the movie has a moment so stupid, the cast can only laugh, take one drink.
- When the cast explicitly declares the movie's badness, take two drinks.
- When someone uses the phrase:
- "lip and tongue action", take two drinks.
- "Think about it, won't you?", take one drink
- "You can't handle the truth", take one drink.
- "Can I be in your movie?", take one drink.
- "If so-and-so and what's-their-face had a baby" (names filled in as appropriate), take one drink.
- When there is a name drop gag you get, take one drink.
- When the crew comes up with alternate lyrics to a movie's music, take one drink.
- When TV's Frank dies, take one drink
- If it's for keeps, chug it.
- When there's a Star Trek gag, take one drink.
- When there's a "It's a Wonderful Life," reference, take one drink.
- When you hear the words Capsnaffler or Fentuzzler, take one drink.
- When someone attempts to flee the theater, take one drink.
- if they succeed, take two drinks.
- When there is a riff by Cambot or Gypsy, take one drink.
- When a bot is destroyed, take one drink.
- When the credits include John Agar, Burt I. Gordon, Roger Corman, Robert Z'dar, Peter Graves, Tony Zarindast, or any Estavez, take one drink.
- If the credits include Raul Julia or Joe Don Baker, take two drinks.
- When a crew member voices a plant or animal, take one drink.
- When there's a monster named "Paul", chug it.
- When someone leaves the safety of a car to flee a monster, take one drink.
- When the 'bots exalt about underwear, take one drink.
- When the end of show stinger is from a host segment, take one drink.
- When someone loses consciousness, take one drink.
- When someone other than Frank dies, take two drinks.
- When the crew addresses the movie as an entity, take one drink.
- When the movie drives a crew member to cross-dress, take one drink.
- When Servo has hayfever, take two drinks.
- When someone references the crying Indian "litter on the highway" commercial, take one drink.
- When the crew does a sight gag, take one drink.
- When the movie recycles footage, take one drink.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Movie: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
I am sooooo late to the party with this one.
Actually, because I am so late, and it was so popular, and it is fairly recent, I won't go into the movie itself too much. If you were going to see it, you probably already would have.
What I'm going to do instead is put the entire world on notice: Never again do I want to hear someone say you can't have a good female lead in a good action movie. Ever.
Heck, this movie comes very very close to failing the male equivalent of Bechdel's Law. (Bechdel's Law being the principle that a movie should 1) have at least two women in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.) I have only seen two movies that fail the male equivalent. One is (of course) Thelma and Louise*, and the other is, interestingly enough, My Neighbor Totoro. (Dad and the boy are the only male characters. I'm not sure they ever talk to each other; if they do, it's about the girls.)
Here, the only reason Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon passes is because there's one scene where two men talk to each other about a sword. Maybe two scenes. And yet the movie holds the record for Oscar nominations for a non-American film, grossed about a bagillion dollars, and is widely (and rightfully) regarded as awesome.
So world, don't tell me it can't be done.
(And if you haven't seen it, you really should. We have some really bitchin' female leads here, and you just don't get to see that very often.)
*OK, confession time: anyone else, when you saw Thelma and Louise, did you also check the credits to see whether it was written by a man or a woman? I did. (It was a woman, BTW.) I was giving it even odds. In the early 90s I think it would have been difficult to find a male writer who would write a female buddy pic, but at the same time it was so over the top with the man-hating that I had to wonder if it was a guy trying way too hard to pass. I mean, it's not just over the top, it is so over the top. You've got to have the formatting to really express the misandry here.
Actually, because I am so late, and it was so popular, and it is fairly recent, I won't go into the movie itself too much. If you were going to see it, you probably already would have.
What I'm going to do instead is put the entire world on notice: Never again do I want to hear someone say you can't have a good female lead in a good action movie. Ever.
Heck, this movie comes very very close to failing the male equivalent of Bechdel's Law. (Bechdel's Law being the principle that a movie should 1) have at least two women in it, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man.) I have only seen two movies that fail the male equivalent. One is (of course) Thelma and Louise*, and the other is, interestingly enough, My Neighbor Totoro. (Dad and the boy are the only male characters. I'm not sure they ever talk to each other; if they do, it's about the girls.)
Here, the only reason Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon passes is because there's one scene where two men talk to each other about a sword. Maybe two scenes. And yet the movie holds the record for Oscar nominations for a non-American film, grossed about a bagillion dollars, and is widely (and rightfully) regarded as awesome.
So world, don't tell me it can't be done.
(And if you haven't seen it, you really should. We have some really bitchin' female leads here, and you just don't get to see that very often.)
*OK, confession time: anyone else, when you saw Thelma and Louise, did you also check the credits to see whether it was written by a man or a woman? I did. (It was a woman, BTW.) I was giving it even odds. In the early 90s I think it would have been difficult to find a male writer who would write a female buddy pic, but at the same time it was so over the top with the man-hating that I had to wonder if it was a guy trying way too hard to pass. I mean, it's not just over the top, it is so over the top. You've got to have the formatting to really express the misandry here.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Movie: My Sister's Keeper
Yesterday was a significant life-event anniversary, and I decided on a movie as a treat. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of movies in the theaters right now that really grab me. Out of curiosity when looking at the list of movies playing, I clicked on My Sister's Keeper's trailer, and it looked pretty good, so there I went.
The spoiler-free part:
If you are expecting a realistic movie, your suspension of disbelief will be stretched until it snaps like a cheap rubber band. However, if you're instead willing to pretend this is an alternate universe with much scarier codes of medical and legal ethics than our own, and just get into the emotional aspects and character interactions, it's a pretty good movie. It made me bawl like a baby, but you probably guessed that already. I'm willing to bet the original book is better. There are parts that very much seem rushed, cut off, or just not well developed -- very common in movies based on books.
Also, very good job capturing how inadequate parents operate, especially since this is a situation where people expect the parents to be hyper-competent instead of incompetent. There's one parent who has basically checked out of his responsibilities, and one who has completely defined herself in terms of one child -- thus requiring that child to fulfill her needs. And as a result none of the children are getting the care they need. Jesse has to care for himself, Kate has to care for her mother's emotional needs as well as her own, and Anna has to take care of everyone to the point where her own health is an acceptable and expected casualty. Some parts are obvious ("Give your sister your kidney, dammit! It's your duty to save her life!"), and some are more subtle. There's a scene where Anna is cleaning up one of the nastier aspects of Kate's illness, and I found myself wondering "Where are the parents? Why is this 11-year-old expected to wipe her sister's ass instead of shouting 'Mom, Kate needs some help'?"
Now, the Spoilerific part of the entry:
Some of the issues that I had with suspending my disbelief.
1) The premise. We have a preteen suing to avoid being forced to give a kidney to her sister who has gone into renal failure due to active leukemia. The whole time I was sitting there thinking "Would any reputable doctor actually take a kidney donation from a healthy preteen, even if they were willing?" If the movie hadn't largely been a lark on my part, I probably would have looked that up before going. For those with the same issue, I looked it up when I got home, and a very quick jaunt through the internet suggests the answer is "Technically yes, but..." Only a third of transplant centers will accept donations from mature but underage identical twins, fewer still from mature minor non-twins, and donations from immature minors are exceedingly rare. You throw in to this movie that the desired donor has made it clear she is NOT willing to undergo procedure, and that the recipient is suffering from leukemia that is not in remission, it would just never happen. No doctor that Sara would be wiling to let operate on Kate would take a kidney out of healthy preteen kid to put it into a kid that will almost inevitably die anyway because she's cancerous and will not be able to handle chemo or radiation with only one kidney.
2) Mom The Lawyer pleading her own case. What's the saying? A lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client. No lawyer of even moderate ability would do this, unless possibly she thought she could bully her daughter hard enough on the stand to make her drop the case right there, in which event, great mom, huh? But then again, the movie is a long string of "Great mom, huh?" moments, sprinkled with the occasional "Great Dad, too" and "Geez, Dad, grow a pair" moments.
3) Judge De Salvo repeatedly threatening to have Campbell's service dog removed from the court. Hello, service dog. As soon as he declared it to be a service dog, she had no right to do or say anything about its presence in the room, and I really hope a judge would know that.
I am kind of imagining about 10 years after the movie.
One, I really hope that when she reached adulthood, Anna found a really good psychological counselor to work with, because the poor girl is going to need one. "Nope, your parents didn't love you or think of you as a person, you were just spare parts for your sister, it was your job since infancy to save her life and in the end you failed."
Two, I bet by the time Anna is thirty at the latest, and probably much younger, she never speaks to her mom except on the yearly family vacation and that usually ends in a screaming match. Of course, Mom doesn't understand why her daughter hates her so, because in her mind she never did anything wrong. And she probably still thinks Anna was selfish for wanting to keep her kidney, still refuses to believe that Kate's wishes were Kate's wishes, and on some level blames Anna for Kate's death. Frankly, Mom really needs a good psychologist too, but I'm sure she'll never go to one because again, in her mind she never did anything wrong.
As for Anna and Dad, they probably get along better but are still distant. He wasn't as directly into the "Parts: The Clonus Horror" bit, but he never stood up for her, either.
So, finally summary on My Sister's Keeper: Completely unrealistic, but pretty good from a psychological and emotional aspect.
The spoiler-free part:
If you are expecting a realistic movie, your suspension of disbelief will be stretched until it snaps like a cheap rubber band. However, if you're instead willing to pretend this is an alternate universe with much scarier codes of medical and legal ethics than our own, and just get into the emotional aspects and character interactions, it's a pretty good movie. It made me bawl like a baby, but you probably guessed that already. I'm willing to bet the original book is better. There are parts that very much seem rushed, cut off, or just not well developed -- very common in movies based on books.
Also, very good job capturing how inadequate parents operate, especially since this is a situation where people expect the parents to be hyper-competent instead of incompetent. There's one parent who has basically checked out of his responsibilities, and one who has completely defined herself in terms of one child -- thus requiring that child to fulfill her needs. And as a result none of the children are getting the care they need. Jesse has to care for himself, Kate has to care for her mother's emotional needs as well as her own, and Anna has to take care of everyone to the point where her own health is an acceptable and expected casualty. Some parts are obvious ("Give your sister your kidney, dammit! It's your duty to save her life!"), and some are more subtle. There's a scene where Anna is cleaning up one of the nastier aspects of Kate's illness, and I found myself wondering "Where are the parents? Why is this 11-year-old expected to wipe her sister's ass instead of shouting 'Mom, Kate needs some help'?"
Now, the Spoilerific part of the entry:
Some of the issues that I had with suspending my disbelief.
1) The premise. We have a preteen suing to avoid being forced to give a kidney to her sister who has gone into renal failure due to active leukemia. The whole time I was sitting there thinking "Would any reputable doctor actually take a kidney donation from a healthy preteen, even if they were willing?" If the movie hadn't largely been a lark on my part, I probably would have looked that up before going. For those with the same issue, I looked it up when I got home, and a very quick jaunt through the internet suggests the answer is "Technically yes, but..." Only a third of transplant centers will accept donations from mature but underage identical twins, fewer still from mature minor non-twins, and donations from immature minors are exceedingly rare. You throw in to this movie that the desired donor has made it clear she is NOT willing to undergo procedure, and that the recipient is suffering from leukemia that is not in remission, it would just never happen. No doctor that Sara would be wiling to let operate on Kate would take a kidney out of healthy preteen kid to put it into a kid that will almost inevitably die anyway because she's cancerous and will not be able to handle chemo or radiation with only one kidney.
2) Mom The Lawyer pleading her own case. What's the saying? A lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client. No lawyer of even moderate ability would do this, unless possibly she thought she could bully her daughter hard enough on the stand to make her drop the case right there, in which event, great mom, huh? But then again, the movie is a long string of "Great mom, huh?" moments, sprinkled with the occasional "Great Dad, too" and "Geez, Dad, grow a pair" moments.
3) Judge De Salvo repeatedly threatening to have Campbell's service dog removed from the court. Hello, service dog. As soon as he declared it to be a service dog, she had no right to do or say anything about its presence in the room, and I really hope a judge would know that.
I am kind of imagining about 10 years after the movie.
One, I really hope that when she reached adulthood, Anna found a really good psychological counselor to work with, because the poor girl is going to need one. "Nope, your parents didn't love you or think of you as a person, you were just spare parts for your sister, it was your job since infancy to save her life and in the end you failed."
Two, I bet by the time Anna is thirty at the latest, and probably much younger, she never speaks to her mom except on the yearly family vacation and that usually ends in a screaming match. Of course, Mom doesn't understand why her daughter hates her so, because in her mind she never did anything wrong. And she probably still thinks Anna was selfish for wanting to keep her kidney, still refuses to believe that Kate's wishes were Kate's wishes, and on some level blames Anna for Kate's death. Frankly, Mom really needs a good psychologist too, but I'm sure she'll never go to one because again, in her mind she never did anything wrong.
As for Anna and Dad, they probably get along better but are still distant. He wasn't as directly into the "Parts: The Clonus Horror" bit, but he never stood up for her, either.
So, finally summary on My Sister's Keeper: Completely unrealistic, but pretty good from a psychological and emotional aspect.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Movie: Amadeus
I have what I think to be an moderate-to-maybe-getting-large movie collection. There's about 100 movies over there, not counting any TV series box sets or MST3K episodes. I've run into people only have 20 or so, but on the other hand I've also run into people who have over 1000.
However, I'm actually thinking of paring down, or at least enacting a "one in/one out" policy for a while. There's a few reasons for this. First, my tastes have changed. Some movies over there, I'm not as fond of now as when I bought them. Second, some of them were bought because at the time, it was the only way to see them. (Remember, I like some fairly odd things: silents, foreign, and/or not-so-famous classics.) That practice had a certain number of misses. Luckily, with Netflix, a lot of movies I previously would have had to buy, I can now just borrow. And finally, when I did the math I realized that for a movie that is available to rent, it isn't worth buying unless I'm going to watch it at least five times.
Ultimately, I'd like to pare my collection down to the movies I really love and watch at least once a year if not more often, and the ones that are relatively rare and thus hard to get on demand if I get an urge to see them. I'm not actively pruning my shelves, but for now if I happen to notice one that yeah, I'll never miss that, I'll move it to the "for trade" shelf. Likewise, if I watch a movie from my collection, afterward I decide "do I want to keep this, or can it go?"
So, what does this all have to do with the movie Amadeus? Well, Amadeus was one I bought on a whim around the time of the last Oscar ceremony. Barnes and Noble was having a sale on former Oscar winners, you see, and I was in a "stressed out, want a toy" state on top of it, so this one caught my eye. I'd seen it before and liked it fairly well, so it went home with me. I had an urge to watch it this week, so I popped it in, and afterwards asked myself "So, keep or trade?"
I'm going to keep it, and I can't give a good reason why. Objectively, it's 2 hours and 40 minutes of composers snarking each other. I won't watch it very often, because it is a 2 hour and 40 minute time commitment. And on top of that, it's so long that the disk has to be flipped over halfway through; I hate double-sided disks. I have to squint to tell what side I'm supposed to put up, and I still miss sometimes.
And yet, the movie just has that special something. I think part of it is, what creative hasn't felt like Salieri at one time or other? Remember, Salieri was not a bad composer. He actually did quite well for himself. His works were successful in their time, and he was court composer and later Kapellmeister. The problem is that Salieri was a good composer, living in the midst of genius. I can imagine his frustration, working so hard and with so much passion and yet always falling short of his vision, and then encountering this snotty little upstart who practically has perfect music fall out of his ass. Now not only does he feel like he can't do anything right, there's walking proof that it can be done, just not by him. And in the end, he can't even succeed at murdering the guy; Mozart's rude enough to just kick off on his own before he gets the chance.
Yet on the other side, I think we've all felt a little like Mozart, too. Imagine every day, seeing some hack have great success while your best efforts -- work you think is nearly perfect -- are barely even acknowledged. What incredible, maddening frustration one must feel.
Do I recommend this one? I can't really say yay or nay, because I don't even know why I like it, much less whether someone else would. Give it a try; don't blame me either way.
However, I'm actually thinking of paring down, or at least enacting a "one in/one out" policy for a while. There's a few reasons for this. First, my tastes have changed. Some movies over there, I'm not as fond of now as when I bought them. Second, some of them were bought because at the time, it was the only way to see them. (Remember, I like some fairly odd things: silents, foreign, and/or not-so-famous classics.) That practice had a certain number of misses. Luckily, with Netflix, a lot of movies I previously would have had to buy, I can now just borrow. And finally, when I did the math I realized that for a movie that is available to rent, it isn't worth buying unless I'm going to watch it at least five times.
Ultimately, I'd like to pare my collection down to the movies I really love and watch at least once a year if not more often, and the ones that are relatively rare and thus hard to get on demand if I get an urge to see them. I'm not actively pruning my shelves, but for now if I happen to notice one that yeah, I'll never miss that, I'll move it to the "for trade" shelf. Likewise, if I watch a movie from my collection, afterward I decide "do I want to keep this, or can it go?"
So, what does this all have to do with the movie Amadeus? Well, Amadeus was one I bought on a whim around the time of the last Oscar ceremony. Barnes and Noble was having a sale on former Oscar winners, you see, and I was in a "stressed out, want a toy" state on top of it, so this one caught my eye. I'd seen it before and liked it fairly well, so it went home with me. I had an urge to watch it this week, so I popped it in, and afterwards asked myself "So, keep or trade?"
I'm going to keep it, and I can't give a good reason why. Objectively, it's 2 hours and 40 minutes of composers snarking each other. I won't watch it very often, because it is a 2 hour and 40 minute time commitment. And on top of that, it's so long that the disk has to be flipped over halfway through; I hate double-sided disks. I have to squint to tell what side I'm supposed to put up, and I still miss sometimes.
And yet, the movie just has that special something. I think part of it is, what creative hasn't felt like Salieri at one time or other? Remember, Salieri was not a bad composer. He actually did quite well for himself. His works were successful in their time, and he was court composer and later Kapellmeister. The problem is that Salieri was a good composer, living in the midst of genius. I can imagine his frustration, working so hard and with so much passion and yet always falling short of his vision, and then encountering this snotty little upstart who practically has perfect music fall out of his ass. Now not only does he feel like he can't do anything right, there's walking proof that it can be done, just not by him. And in the end, he can't even succeed at murdering the guy; Mozart's rude enough to just kick off on his own before he gets the chance.
Yet on the other side, I think we've all felt a little like Mozart, too. Imagine every day, seeing some hack have great success while your best efforts -- work you think is nearly perfect -- are barely even acknowledged. What incredible, maddening frustration one must feel.
Do I recommend this one? I can't really say yay or nay, because I don't even know why I like it, much less whether someone else would. Give it a try; don't blame me either way.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Book: Thirteenth Child by Patricia Wrede (Heck yes there's spoilers)
So, ldragoon asked that I read Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child while letting my history trivia and natural love of riffing dance on it. I’ve slogged through all 344 pages, and I am ready to riff. I am soooo ready to riff. I am beyond ready to riff.
What I’m going to do here is basically an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet riffing. Take what you like, leave what you don’t. You see, logically speaking, adding magic unravels the entire sweater of history into a big ol’ tangle of yarn, and even “just” eliminating two continents’ worth of people completely trashes pretty much everything that happened since 1492. But Wrede’s insisting she’s still got something basically sweater-shaped here. Except where it’s obvious (changing two of the first 5 presidents, for example), I am not even going to try to guess at her logic as to which changes are intentional and which were oopsies. I’m just laying all the inconsistencies out, and you can decide for yourself which to write off as magic and/or intended, and which are just messed up.
I’ll roughly go through a chapter at a time, but I’ll pull in examples from later chapters as appropriate.
So, diving in:
Chapter 1
Enjoy this chapter for all its worth, because nothing even remotely interesting will happen again until Chapter 6.
1. Family Size
It really appears that Ms. Wrede is writing her mid-19th-Century huge family from the perspective of a modern small family. First page, Eff talks about families giving up on trying for 7th sons because “there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings.” (I will do my best not to groan at the unnecessary fantasy word changes. Don’t expect me to use them myself very often, though.) Actually, from what I’ve read written by modern people with large families, once you get to six-ish it gets easier. You’ve got the older kids to help take care of the younger ones, and of course by the time you’ve popped out number 10, the first few are usually out of the house. (That many kids, they’re often pretty eager to flee. ^_~) Twelve isn’t terrible much worse than six, and 20 isn’t all that different from 12.
Later in chapter 2, Jack and Nan are declared too young for child minding. It’s already established that Eff has a sibling who’s 8, which means Jack and Nan are at least 9 and probably 10 or older. In this time period in a society where huge familes are the norm, that would be more than old enough to be watching younger siblings. Again, looks like it was viewed from a modern standpoint instead of a period one.
Furthermore, let’s talk child-mortality rates. We are nicely before germ theory here. In the real world, statistically speaking, 3 to 7 of the Rothmers' children wouldn’t make it to age 18. Yes, this world has healing magic. However, Eff’s rheumatic fever, Mama’s broken leg, and the settlement magician who died of fever all suggest that it’s fairly limited in what it can do. Instead of losing 3 to 7, maybe instead we’re talking 1 to 4. Can we at least acknowledge the issue, attribute it to Papa’s own Seventh Son luck? Personally, I think it would have been stylish if a sibling had died of disease shortly after Eff’s birth -- see, unlucky 13th-- even though that means losing the part later where Eff vaguely hopes a sibling she hardly knows will die so she’ll no longer be 13th, and then immediately feels horrible.
2. Mama’s clothes.
I actually don’t have a problem with Mama’s clothes, but half my history trivia comes from a historical costuming interest, so I use these to help date the action and for a later complaint -- and just to get down with my nerdy self.
On page 4, Mama finds Eff so upset that “she got right down on the floor beside me”. Wow. Obviously she is not wearing a crinoline; otherwise this would have been fun to watch. That puts us before 1855-ish. If it’s 1840s, I don’t know how she managed it with the period’s corset. At that time, they were to the hips and over the belly, tightly laced, and busked. A woman could not bend at the waist. So, I gotta give Mama some serious credit here. With 14 kids, the woman’s got to be in her 40s at least. She’s fully corseted with busk, wearing a bodice that’s second-skin tight, 2 to 6 full petticoats, and a day dress that weights at least 20 lbs on its own, but she’s getting down on the floor with her daughter. I bet getting back up took some work.
Later, her skirt is described as being “navy blue pleats”, which supports an 1840s date. However, I want to point out the color. Aniline dyes haven’t been invented yet, so popular colors were “dull” blues, browns, and greens. Navy was absolutely doable, but it was more expensive than the more common duller shades.
3. Sugar cookies
To make Eff feel better after the 45 minutes it takes Mama to stand back up after getting on the floor in her full-length corset, they go and make sugar cookies, and Mama doesn’t even scold Eff when she spills the milk.
Milk? Who uses milk for sugar cookies? My sugar cookie recipe doesn’t call for milk.
Snark off, there are sugar cookie recipes that do call for milk, although it’s usually only a few tablespoons, not an amount you’d let a five-year-old try to measure out of a heavy stoneware jug, glass bottle, or metal milk can. (Personally, I couldn't even lift a plastic gallon jug of milk when I was five.) I don’t know if those recipes would have been common before refrigeration. The real reason I bring this up, though, is because there was fairly extensive debate over on ldragoon’s review about whether sugar would be readily accessible without either heavy mechanization or an extensive slavery system. They debated it, so I don’t have to. ;)
4. “Witch” as a pejorative.
This is neither a snark or complaint. I just find it really interesting that there are accusations of witchcraft in a society with widespread magic use. I was really hoping that Ms. Wrede would explain her terms, but no. That never happens.
Chapter 2
1. The Rothmers are freaking rich!
I already mentioned Mama’s expensive day dress. Now we find at that the Rothmers have one son at a University other than the one Papa teaches at, another either at boarding school or also in college, and a third going to University in fall. And all this on a professor’s salary. Wow! On top of that, in chapter 4 as a part of the job benefits, the family is given a nine bedroom house. Minimum. There might be more; we just know there’s at least 9. No wonder they can afford to make sugar cookies despite a lack of heavy mechanization or extensive slavery system.
2. The Secession War
One of the dangers of writing alt history is giving in to the temptation to just plunk your story bible down on the manuscript and let it carry the book on its own while you go get a sandwich or something. That unfortunately is what happens here with the bit about the Secession War, which ended in 1838.
First, credit where credit is due. I don’t know the details, but my understanding is that the United States actually did come very very close to having a civil war in the 1830s, so this is not wholly arbitrary. (Renaming it the Secession War is, though. That almost makes it sound like the South won, doesn’t it? But they didn’t.)
However, that almost 30 years would make a huge difference in the course of the war. You see, in the 1830s, England didn’t care so much about slavery in the Americas. Hell, they didn’t abolish it themselves until 1833. So if the southern states wanted to hold slaves, England didn’t really care as long as they were getting cheap cotton out of the deal. It wasn’t until Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Britain in 1852, selling 200,000 legal copies (and probably at least that many pirated copies), that the British people really got their feathers ruffled by it. Because of this new popular opinion against slavery, in the 1860s, the British government did not enter the war on the side of the South, which meant the South had funding problems. If the civil war had happened in the 1830s, hell yes the British would have been willing to break the Northern blockade and continue trade.
However, with South America controlled by one or more African countries instead of Spain and Portugal, Spain never imports massive quantities of gold, which means they never build their Armada to invade England, which means England never builds their Navy to counter and doesn’t have pirated Spanish gold to do it with anyway, which means the British Empire never happens. So maybe it doesn’t matter that the Brits didn’t have a problem with American slavery in the 1830s, and thus the South loses anyway.
And actually, with one or more African countries being Major world powers with capital M now, how did widespread slave trade even come about? Doesn’t the Middle Passage fall on its face? I suppose that depends on which African countries we're talking about, but with the entire power dynamic of Africa completely changed, and one or more countries in it having control of the gold that in our world went to Spain and was pirated by other European nations, you gotta at least seriously consider the possibility.
See what I mean about unraveling the sweater of history? I’m going on to the next topic before I hurt myself.
3. When and Where Our Book Is Set
So, we’re heading to a brand new, still under construction land-grant college not terribly long after 1838 in a territory bordering the Mississippi River. Well, there’s a little problem here. Most of that land already had statehood by 1838. Let me go dig out a statehood map. Let’s see. Illinois was 1818, Kentucky was 1792... Wisconsin, 1848! We’re going to Wisconsin, and it’s the 1840s! W00t!
4. Invisible Indians
Obviously we’re not calling it Wisconsin, because Wisconsin is a Native American word. Wrede has done a decent job of removing the Native American minutia from her world -- the names, the crops. Of course, we’re still a democracy (evidenced by presidents), the Enlightenment still happened (evidenced by mention of Jefferson’s voracious reading), and somehow we’ve managed to settle this country nearly in the same amount of time despite it not being cleared and cultivated for us by previous civilizations and being filled with mammoths and saber cats and nasty ass magical stuff on top of that.
It’s kind of creepy, actually. It’s like if one day you woke up, and there were absolutely no men. But no one was saying anything and we were all pretending nothing had happened and that there had never been any men.
I’m only going to touch on this, because this rabbit hole has no bottom. It’s been extensively discussed all over the internet. I wouldn’t be here if not for it. Nonetheless, I’m really disgusted with Wrede’s combination of laziness and racism. She didn’t want to use the pre-1980 stereotypes, she didn’t want to use the current stereotypes, and GOD FORBID she do some research into the vast array of actual Native America cultures. There was not a hive mind over here. There were vastly different societies, from the militaristic Aztecs to the socialist Incan empire, from the successful farming societies to wandering hunters to resource-hungry city dwellers whose over-harvesting of resources eventually caused their own downfall. If the Mississipian empire hadn’t collapsed on its own, their society had at least some resemblance to European considering they developed wholly independently. The choices are not limited to “warlike savage” and “pacifist environmentalist”.
This "didn't exist" bit? Worst possible way to handle things.
Chapter 3
We move West. It’s mainly just a boring train trip followed by a boring wagon trip. Mama won’t let anyone go off to explore during stops because then something interesting might happen. :P
1. Population Density
Blocking off everything west of the Mississippi River basically cuts American land area in half during this period. The population is probably not smaller, however. In fact, with the norm of huge families and the bizarrely low child mortality rate, it’s probably bigger. So I don’t really buy the smaller, more widespread population centers that Eff alludes to, and I really don’t buy the old growth forest the train passes through. With the Louisiana purchase almost completely off limits, Columbians would be packed to the gills.
2. Miss Ochiba’s clothes
When we first meet Miss Ochiba, she’s wearing “a high-crowned hat trimmed with cherries”, a “white lace neck scarf” and a “close-fitting blue jacket”. In other words, she’s dressed at the height of fashion -- in 1878.
Mama’s clothes have already established that we are pre-crinoline. Separates didn’t even become fashionably tolerable until hoopskirts were at their largest, and jackets didn’t come in until hoops had given way to bustles. Hats were the same; before the 1860s/1870s, they were mannish or at best childish, and no woman over the age of 16 would ever wear one. Bonnets were de rigeur.
I don't care what period our clothes are from. Well, OK, I do, but I'd give a pass as long as they were consistent. However, Mama’s clothes and Miss Ochiba’s clothes would never be worn in the same time period.
3. Miss Ochiba
I’m calling it now. Miss Ochiba is a quintessential Magical Negro(TM). She has no life of her own. She’s not married, we never even see her out in the town except the first time she came out to meet the new professor arrival, she has an amazingly subdued personality, she exists in the story solely to teach and guide our main characters, and when she’s no longer needed she’s sent off to a vague Star Trek reference. Holy crap, I think I just got Bingo.
4. The Racism Paradox
There is apparently exactly one black person in town. Sometimes Washington Morris visits, and then there’s two. Yet at the same time, we also don’t see any overt racism. Oh, Dean Farley and Prof Jeffries are kinda “ih” around Miss Ochiba. Maybe it’s racism. Maybe it’s indigestion, or “you’re bringing students to my university! Ew! Stop that!”
Guys, we are less than 10 years after a slavery-triggered Civil War here. I will grant that removing that almost 30 years I talked about in 2-2 takes with it some of the worst decades of moral push-back and race-based justification rhetoric, but nonetheless, ya don’t enslave someone you think is your equal. By choosing to still have African slavery in America, Wrede has chosen to make this an especially racist period in our history. By then denying that, she is denying the real suffering from history. Not cool.
Chapter 4
1. “Long and hot and boring”
This is how Eff describes the first graduation ceremony at Northern Plains Riverbank College. It’s also almost exactly my sentiment towards the book at this point. Including this one, we’ve got 2 more chapters and some sizable change before something even considers happening.
2. Mills
Eff briefly talks about the lumber industry and how some of the logs coming down the Mississippi are milled “right in Mill City”. Hence the name, I suppose. But then she says “most of them got piled onto flatcars and shipped east to the mills there.” Is Wrede crazy? Waste all that space stacking cylinders and all that weight sending bark and unusable edges? No, I think they would at least be roughed into blocks in Mill City before being shipped for further work.
Chapter 5
We finally actually see some magic, 48 pages in, despite it being talked about constantly. The kids are absolutely shocked by it, even though we later learn that in an average day even someone who isn’t much of a magician will do 5 or 10 spells without hardly thinking about it.
1. Revolutionary War Dates
Either William is full of it (and I do give good odds), or Wrede didn’t really do her math here. Everything she says about the Revolution suggest that it happened about the same time as in our world, but William says it was “almost a hundred years ago”. Either it’s really more like 70 years, or it took 30 freakin’ years to get this university thing going, in which case why doesn’t our location have statehood yet?
Chapter 6
Lan comes in to his natural magic by almost killing William. There, something happened! Here’s a voucher for more happening later. It’s on backorder right now. We might have something in stock in Chapter 10, but don’t get your hopes up.
Chapter 7
Mammoths actually do something. Off camera, of course. Our characters, on the other hand, continue to do nothing. Eff says that she would give her “best Sunday dress and a year’s growth” to be able to see what happened when Mama goes to go rip someone a new one. I would too, because it’d be something happening.
1) “Best” Sunday dress?
It’s the 1840s. That’s her only Sunday dress. If it gets too faded or worn, it’ll then become a day dress and she’ll get a new one. If she outgrows it first, Mama’ll let out the growth pleats, and she’ll be good for another year.
Of course, the Rothmers are freaking rich...
2) And Canada Bites the Dust!
We now establish that it’s “suicide” to go north of the Mississippi’s headwaters due to all the various scary critters running around. Good-bye, British North America! So long.
I’ve seen some impressive Americentrism in my fiction reading, but when an author can’t even stand to leave Canada on the continent... So, did she leave anyone down in Mexico, or is it just us?
3) Jackals
Why jackals as scavengers over here in Columbia? Are coyotes suddenly not good enough for the job? Or is it that Wrede couldn’t think up an alternate name to replace the lost Nahuatl root, so she just called them a completely different, utterly unrelated species? The coyote evolved over here along with the Dire Wolf; it is not originally Eurasian.
Chapter 8
Our heroine has not actually done anything, but the risk that she might is too great, so she comes down with rheumatic fever. This guarantees she can’t do anything whatsoever for an entire year. Because, you know, the action so far has just been too overwhelming and we need some downtime. :P
Honestly, giving it to Lan would have been a much better call. Then Eff could be fretting and blaming herself and maybe even go do something to try to make it right. But that would be doing something, wouldn’t it? (I swear it’s like the author had 180 pages of story and a contract for 350.)
1. How Long Have You Been Living Here Again?
Eff enjoys when William visits because “it was nice to see a face that wasn’t one I’d seen every day of my whole life.” No, just every day of half her life. She’s 10 years old, they’ve lived her when she was five, and William has come around to play with her brothers basically every single day. As she says herself, he’s practically part of the family.
Also, from this point forward we must all politely pretend that it’s not Really Freaking Obvious that William is sweet on Eff.
2. Brant’s Logic
Brant is the young Rationalist working to set up a settlement on the bad side of the Great Barrier that doesn’t use magic. “It will prove to everyone that we don’t need magicians to settle the plains, and the government will have to open the territories for settlement.”
Um... Wha? That’s a bit of a non sequitor, isn’t it? I mean, they haven’t opened the territories because it’s freakin’ dangerous and we haven’t figure out a way to fix that reliably. Matching the reliability of a magician, it’s nice to know that we can, but it doesn’t fix the “freaking dangerous” bit.
Chapter 9
1. Eff’s whining
a. “I don’t get to see my friends!”
Because she was on Turbo Load mode for a while there, our heroine is now a year behind where she was in school. However, the classes are mixed together by ability level, not age. So, doesn’t she just see her friends in different classes? Instead of seeing What’s-Her-Face in reading and composition, now she sees her in history. Some friends she might actually see more often this way.
b. “Waah, I’m a thirteenth child!
I swear to God I will remember the title of the book if Eff will just shut the hell up. Yes, she got crap for it every day until she was 5. Then she moved, and hasn’t heard another single solitary thing about it since, and won’t until she’s 13. It’s not going to be in the forefront of her mind anymore; children’s minds just don’t work that way. It’s mostly-forgotten “mean aunts and uncles” stories by now. If Wrede wants to keep this up, there ought to have been a reason to keep it in mind. Maybe a town ne’er-do-well that everyone looks at, gives one of those nods, and says “Well, you know, he was a 13th child.”
Personally, it would work a lot better if Eff did put it completely out of her mind now, and then it all nearly unexpectedly comes crashing down on her later when they go back to Helvan Shores. Believe me, if you have someone who was a pariah, and then they got to live a normal life, they will absolutely react violently if someone tries to drag them back into being a pariah again. And in the meantime, it is getting really annoying.
In any event, it really should stop right now on page 98 because Miss Ochiba tells her plain as day that being the goodness and good luck of being a seventh daughter more than cancels out the badness and bad luck of being a thirteenth child. But no, Eff just keeps constantly whining about it for several more chapters. Ironically, what finally shuts Eff up is almost blowing her uncle off the map. Coming thisclose to doing something evil actually makes her shut up about being destined to become evil. I don’t get it at all.
Chapter 10
Something actually happens! Kinda. Well, we see a dragon for a couple of seconds. We don’t actually see it doing anything. Someone kills it before it makes much of a mess. We don’t get to see that, either. Our heroine is all but dragged to go see the body. They don’t get anywhere near it -- big surprise.
Nothing happens again until the very end of Chapter 14/beginning of Chapter 15.
1. Slavery, and Africa as homogenous uber-country
I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring attention to the only discussion about pre-Civil War slavery in the book. I already talked about this a bit; I still don’t see how it comes about with one or more African countries taking the place of Spain and Portugal. I’d at least like to know which countries they are. I could buy slavery remaining more easily if they were already resource-rich counties known at the time as the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, than I could if it were the area known as the Slave Coast.
Also, you ever notice an annoying tendency people have of talking about “Africa” as though the entire continent is basically one big homogeneous society, rather than as a landmass containing many very different countries with very different cultures? Guess what Wrede does. They’re “Aphrikan colonies”; not, say, Nigerian colonies or Ghanan colonies. I mean, Africa’s basically the same all over, right?
2. Lack of foresight
Come spring, that dead dragon starts to smell really bad, so they start casting preservation spells on it.
...
Is Wrede really trying to tell me that it didn’t occur to them to do this any earlier, say before it started rotting?
3. Milk paint
One of Eff's brothers paints a bunch of garter snakes with grey milk paint and sells them as "baby dragons" the next spring. Milk paint is paint made with a combination of milk, lime, and pigment. The milk and lime react to form a coating of calcium caseinate, which after curing time bonds very well with wood and other porous surfaces. However, they are very sensitive to water (which means easy clean-up, but poor results on surfaces that get wet during the curing), and they’ve got a curing time. I don’t buy milk paint sticking reliably to garter snakes. On top of that, milk paint is somewhat caustic, more or less so depending on the amount of lime used. Those poor snakes.
Chapter 11
Eff’s resolute refusal to do something interesting is almost kind of a funny, in a head shaking trying not to cry sort of way. She sits here wishing that Dr. McNeil would bring back more of the strange North American animals so she could see them, never even remotely thinking it’d be cool if she could go out into the wild and see them herself some day. A little bit of an adventurous streak would be really nice in our heroine.
1. St. Louis
It’s stated that Lewis and Clark went up the “Grand Bow River” from just north of St. Louis.
Um, what state is St. Louis in?
Which side of the Mississippi is that?
If you said the side with no cities in this world, take a cookie.
(If you tried to mention East St. Louis, you have to give the cookie back. Not founded until 1820, 16 years after Lewis and Clark and many decades after St. Louis itself, and not renamed “East St. Louis” until 1861.)
Chapter 12
1. The boy’s clothing
Eff complains in here about her mending chores because the boys can’t go three 3 days without tearing a shirt and ripping out pants knees.
Yeah. After the third time, each and every one of them would get a beating and a single play outfit to keep wearing all summer long. It’s the 1840s. Cloth mills are bringing the prices down, but clothing is still too expensive to be destroying the way the boys are described as doing. It would be like if your kid had to have a laptop for school, but over the summer every three days it was so loaded with viruses and spyware from irresponsible use that it wouldn’t run anymore. Would you keep fixing it, or would you say “this is the last time, Sport. You mess it up again, you’re stuck with it until September.”
Also, Eff calls them “pants”. The word pants was first recorded in 1840, so probably would not have been in common use yet. She would say “trousers”.
2. Starter Trunk
With the announcement of Diane’s upcoming wedding, all the females in the family set to work sewing things for her “starter trunk”. I have never hear that term in my life, and I’ve not been able to find a reference to it. It would usually be called her “trousseau”, or more colloquially her “cedar chest” or even “dowry chest”.
Chapter 14
(No, I didn’t forget a chapter; there’s so little happening in Chapter 13 that there’s not even anything to point out.)
1. The Gray Wedding Dress
The gray wedding dress mocks me, because this is right around when the trend went from “best you can afford” to “must be white”, and I don’t have the documentation I need to say what side of that we’re on. My pattern books start in 1867, “Dressed for the Photographer” doesn’t have any wedding portraits in this decade, and I can’t find my big brown book of fashion plates (or indeed even remember if I actually bought it or just borrowed it from the library a zillion times). By 1868 (when I do have documentation), white was norm, especially for a first-time bride in a church wedding, although I found ivory in the 1880s. Late 1840s/early 1850s, I just don’t know for sure. Supposedly, Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1840 is what popularized white for weddings, so gray is probably accurate but unfashionable, especially for a family as the well off as the Rothmers seem to be.
Chapter 15
Eff actually does something, 161 pages in! Well, no, not actually. She starts to do something, but then stops herself, so all we get is a frightened drunk uncle and a cloud of sparklies. If she’d actually done something, we might have got some story going on, and we can’t have that!
Seriously, at the absolute least just to tide us over, couldn’t she have at least given Uncle Earn some tentacles, or donkey’s ears, or turned his skin green or something? And then she could be all “Ha ha, see, I intended to do something silly and childish all along. Oh God, Papa knows I tried to kill him.” But no, we don’t even get that much, just a cloud of sparklies.
Eff, just come to the Dark Side already. You’ll like it. We have cookies. We’ll even let you do stuff. Otherwise, nothing will happen again until Chapter 18.
Chapter 17
After another chapter so dull it’s not even worth talking about, we go beat out carpets. Yay. The story’s dragging, and then Wrede shows us housework.
But the good news is that in this chapter, Eff decides she might want to do something. Someday. She gets the idea, so painfully obvious at the end of chapter 11, of becoming a naturalist and going out to see scary critters for herself. There’s no consideration about whether a woman in this society would even be allowed to do this; I’d say the odds if favor of it are basically nonexistent. However, I’m just as glad that didn’t occur to Eff, because God knows the last thing our heroine needs is another excuse to do absolutely nothing.
Chapter 18
I’m sorry, I lied. I can’t in good conscience call the baby mammoth knocking over its fence “something happening”. Nothing happens here. Nothing actually happensever ever again *sobs* until Chapter Twenty-Freaking-Nine.
We do see the first, and only, hint that the Rothmers don’t have an endless stream of money somewhere.
1. Magic Styles and Stereotypes
Oh gosh, now Wrede’s stepped in it. The magic style stereotypes are so incredibly offensive.
Hijero-Cathayan (i.e. Asian): “Hijero-Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells.” Asian = group. You can tell how much thought and research went into that idea, can’t you? You know, it’s not like there’s actually people over there living out lives where they might, like Westerners, need to light fires for cooking, or carry heavy water buckets, or keep bugs away, or do the other dozens of things that the main characters do every day without hardly thinking about it. Nah, they’re just all doin’ big mystic crap, none of that living stuff. “They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries -- at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero-Cathayan magicians.” Look at that! Wrede doesn’t even let them keep their cookie!
I just got to point out, that the “Aphrikan” trying seeing the world as it really as rather than as it appears to be and redirecting energy instead of manhandling, those have at least some resemblance to Buddhist and Taoist traditions. It would need more research, but it’d show a little more thought than “group work”.
Believe it or not, the stereotyping in Aphrikan magic is even worse. Aphrikan is not about calling up magic, but just guiding the magic that’s already there, and it never works the same way twice if it even works at all, and by European standards it’s unpredictable and unreliable but it’s really really good at one particular thing, and that’s dealing with “natural” magic. Hmm. Passive, little initiative, unpredictable, unreliable, but with a primitive closeness to nature. I’ve heard stuff like this before. In fact, when I was reading the description of Aphrikan magic, my mind connected to a paragraph in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Stowe starts waxing poetic about how “If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race”, how great it’ll be because black people are so gentle and docile and in tune with a higher power. I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly, but I will be the first to admit that she was very much a product of her times. Haven’t we come any further than that in 160 years?
If you’re going to write outside of your time period and/or outside of your own culture, *you’ve got to do your research*. If you know you want European, African, and Asian magic systems in your world, and you’re a pasty Mid-Western white girl, you need to start reading. See what’s already there in the culture, and use that instead of just throwing antiquated and offensive stereotypes around.
Also, “unreliable”, don’t throw that at anyone. “Unpredictable” needs to be followed by “but it isn’t at all if you know what you’re doing” and NOT by “and I guess they’re right”. And that “good with nature” thing, that is a literary hand grenade. That’s been patronizing backhanded praise lobbed at just about every minority for the past 500 years, carrying with it the unspoken “because they’re uncivilized.” Find a way around it. Even “good with the unexpected” is a big step up. (In fact, “good at handling the unexpected” could tie in well with the themes of cleverness often found in the heroes of African folklore.)
Suffice to say, the different magic systems earned a scream of disgust and a book thrown across the room. (Well, not really because it is a library book. But if it had been my own...)
Chapter 19
1. The Age of Majority
So... You can sign up for a homestead on the life-threatening, nasty-creature-ridden frontier at age 18, but you can’t marry without parental consent until you’re 21. WTF?
2. Sawbones
The slang “sawbones” for doctor came about in our world because for most of history, the only way Western medicine could deal with a severely injured or especially infected limb was to amputate it. However, the way Eff’s rheumatic fever is treated suggests that the story world has antibiotics, even if they don’t realize that’s the mechanism by which their potions work. So there should be fewer amputations. Would “sawbones” still be used?
Chapter 20
1. Triskelion
A triskelion is a symbol with three connected spirals or three bent legs joined at the crotch, which is found across many cultures with diverse meanings. However, I’m a huge geek, so the first thing that popped into my mind when Miss Ochiba left for Triskelion University was the original Star Trek episode, The Gamesters of Triskelion. Hence my reference earlier. :)
Chapter 21
1. Eff’s new look
On page 20, a nearly 18-year-old Eff remarks that she has started putting her hair up and wearing full length skirts. What she doesn’t mention is that everyone around her was thinking it was about freaking time. This was usually done at age 14 if you were going to start working, maybe a little later in a well-off family, but 16 was the latest. When she waited until she was 17 and a half, people were whispering about her behind her back.
2. William’s old look
We’ve got to be in the 1850s by now (no news on that statehood thing, though). William is described as wearing a “beaver hat”. Beaver hats were out. They fell out of favor right about 1850 in our world, replaced by silk in the upper classes and wool in the lower. But, there’s more to it that.
The America beaver population supported the popularity of beaver hats well after the European beaver had been driven almost to extinction. That was with the full beaver population of North America available, and indeed searching for the pelts spurred a lot of exploration. Of course, in this story world everything west of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes is off limits. So there goes access to at least half the beaver population. With that reduction, the American beaver east of the Mississippi surely would have been wiped out long before, forcing beaver hats out of popularity even earlier in this story world.
3. And No One Knows What Lan’s Going For
Lan has grown muttonchops. Muttonchops were not fashionable at this time, especially not for young men. Sure, a few people wore them; a few people wear them now. But a young man picking a hairstyle to go with his nice new fancy probably imported paisley waistcoat? Nah. Young men were oiling their hair in this decade, and doing this wave thing, or almost a duckbill with this sort of topknot thing. Here, here's a picture of what I mean, not the worst example by far. There were some seriously scary men’s hairstyles going on in the 1850s, but not so much with the mutton chops.
4. What’s Differerent About the Rationalist Settlement?
Hmm. Every settlement west of the river is overrun with grubs and beetles, except the Rationalists. What could possibly be different about the only settlement in entire West that doesn’t use magic?
We will spend the next 70 pages politely pretending that the difference is not really freaking obvious. Or maybe screaming every 10 pages “The bugs are attracted to magic, you flaming morons! It’s so bloody obvious!”
Chapter 22
If you’re looking for a good spot to scream “The bugs are attracted to magic!”, I suggest page 240, where we discuss in detail how much the Rationalists dislike magicians.
1. Benjamin Franklin as a double-seventh son
Oh for goodness's sake. Ben Franklin was Josiah Franklin's 10th son, not 7th. Josiah was his family's 9th child. I wasn't able to find genders, but the odds are against him being a 7th son. This is not terribly obscure as trivia goes; the Google search to find this out will take you all of three minutes.
I find this change disturbing, because it smacks heavily of classism. Jefferson was from a rich and prominent family that could afford a good education. He can stay basically as he was.
But Franklin. His family was squarely working class. He was the son of a candle and soap maker and grandson of a blacksmith. His formal book education stopped at age 10. Being freaking brilliant isn't enough; Wrede's got to make him special for him to be capable of this great amazing Great Barrier Spell. :P Screw that.
2. Why didn't they just ask him?
A big deal is made out of no one understanding how Jefferson and Franklin created the Great Barrier because Franklin didn't write everything down, and Jefferson did but with references other people couldn't figure out.
Jefferson didn't die until 1826. The Barrier had to go up before Franklin's death in 1790. That's at least 36 years in which people could have asked "Tom, what the Sam Hill were you talking about here?"
Chapter 24
Including this one, only 5 more chapters until something finally happens.
1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
A. The Flag
Eff makes a deal about Papa and Prof Jeffries remembering that the flag carried by Washington and his crew “should only have thirteen stars”.
Actually, it shouldn’t have stars at all. There would have been a union jack there (sans the red portion of the diagonals). The Stars and Bars wasn’t used until 9 month later.
B. Robert Carradine
It’s too much to ask for Wrede to research actual participants of the crossing of the Delaware, or even important military figures under Washington. Instead we apparently get an actor best known for staring in Revenge of the Nerds.
C. The Light
Said actor is known for casting the light spell that guided Washington. Because when you’re setting up a sneak attack, you definitely want a big huge bright light on your boat.
Chapter 26
1. Sisters Hugging
When Eff sees her sister Rennie again, part of her wants to hug and part wants to yell at her, “but I wasn’t thirteen anymore, and I couldn’t do either one” in front of the others.
Actually, women relatives and close friends in this time period were expected to be very touchy-feely with each other, to a degree that modern audiences can find downright lesbianic. When she doesn’t hug her sister, the others are probably thinking that Eff is really pissed off.
2. Rennie’s Clothes
There’s nothing wrong with Rennie’s clothes, but I would have loved to see her in reform garb. The Bloomer trousers and short skirt. It’s a little early, but absolutely doable; in fact, the reason the Reform clothing movement didn’t die almost as soon as it started was because of pioneer women. In Reform garb it was so much easier to move around and do hard frontier chores and cook without setting yourself on fire. There’d also be this fun mirroring thing with Eff. Eff just stopped wearing pantalettes and short skirts (children’s wear) and comes out here to find her older sister wearing something that looks very similar to what she just discarded. And the cherry on top: in later decades, Reform dress was also known as “Rational Dress”. It’d be perfect!
3. Rennie and Eff’s Conversation
... falls flat on its face. Rennie and Eff talk about Rennie running off and it looks like they’re going to have a big argument or worse but then that fizzles, because an argument might be doing something, and then later Eff decides to just accept that Rennie said sorry even though there wasn’t much explanation, and the conflict just sort of goes away.
It didn’t occur to me until I was doing the dishes the next day, but I bet when this takes place, Eff hadn’t done the math on Albert’s birth yet. (If she has done the math, she’s just being an asshole.) Which brings up that this would have been a much better place to reveal the math rather than just tossed out in prose earlier.
So imagine if when Rennie says she was young and scared and did the best she could at the time and Eff asks what she was afraid of, instead of answering “Oh, stuff”, Rennie instead says, “Eff, you know how I eloped in May? Albert was born in November.” “What does that have to do with.. Oh. Oh!”
Rennie found herself pregnant and unmarried in the late 1840s/early 1850s. Hell yes she was scared. This is a golden opportunity for some character development. A great perception shift (Rennie from bossy selfish know-it-all to scared desperate girl), a good reinforcement that Eff is now a woman who can be trusted knowing how her sister messed up rather than needing the truth hidden from her. But no, instead we get an “Oh, just stuff” answer, a fizzled-out conversation, and a potentially major reveal just tossed out in prose way back in Chapter 14.
Chapter 27
As usual, Eff is actively kept from doing anything interesting. She wishes she was out bug-hunting with the boys, and as usual I do too, because it means something might be happening. This is how desperate I am at this point. Looking for bug pupae would be a step up. *head desk* At least we finally stop pretending that it isn’t Really Flaming Obvious that the bugs are attracted to magic.
1. Spell casting
So... all respect for the Rationalists goes completely out the window and we just start casting spells willy-nilly without even trying to be subtle about it anymore. Would have served them right if a local had come up and smacked them upside the head and told them to get the hell out of town.
2. Walking Boots
When she tells Wash and William she’s a 13th child, Eff specifically mentions avoid their eyes by looking at the toes of her walking boots. In the 1850s? Possible, but not likely. Boots didn’t come in until the crinoline did, and then there was a transitory period of gaiters over slippers and soft soled, heelless boots -- all driven by modesty rather than function. What you’re thinking of when you read “walking boots” is probably not what Eff is wearing.
Chapter 29
Finally, something happens! Don’t get your hopes too far up, though. For a second there it looks like Eff has finally become a character worth watching, but we later find out it’s just that her brother has, at great effort, drug her into doing something. :P
1. Full skirts
Eff specifically makes it a point to mention while getting on horseback that she’s glad she wore a full skirt. As opposed to? It’s 1850-something. They’re ALL full skirts. Your options when you wake up in the morning are putting on the skirt made with 10 yards of fabric, or putting on the skirt made with 12 yards of fabric. Thank God she went with the 12-yarder, huh?
I’m just glad she hasn’t started wearing that new-fangled Parisian crinoline thing.
Chapter 30
1. Bugs.
So, our heroine finally goes and does stuff and heroically battles one of the great unknown creatures of the frontier and it’s... bugs. Not dragons, or pyromaniacal bird things, or even mammoths. Just bugs. They’re not even carnivorous bugs. (Well, Wrede might try to slap life-sucking on as an afterthought, but it’s just slipped into a single sentence in the denouement and never really demonstrated.) The problem is that they eat magic, which means they can eat your protection spells, and that allows other things to come eat you later. If the other critters get around to it.
Bugs. Purty much.
3. No! Big Issue, Come Back! I’ll Love You!
The bugs do bring a Big Issue, though. They’re attracted by the spells settlements use to protect themselves, and this has caused enough buggy population growth that the Great Barrier could be in danger. This is a Big Issue. The things required for our short term survival are a detriment to our long-term survival! What else are our magics contributing too? The increase in the pyromanical bird population? The steam dragon that made it across the Great Barrier? Do we enter an arms race with nature itself, knowing the price of losing is complete destruction of the entire country? Do we abandon the settlements and attempt to deal with overpopulation to the east of the Mississippi? Do we have to start recruiting a whole bunch more Rationalists and let them have the entire west half of the continent?
Or do we just put together a solution that takes “a couple of days” of tweaking and then we’re completely hunky-dory? :P Wrede chooses the “couple of days of tweaking” route and completely drops the Big Issue.
I want the Big Issue. We should have fought the bugs at page 180 and spent the second half the book tackling the Big Issue.
And the book just kind of smacks its nose on the door on the way out. We got denouement going, but it doesn’t really have a conclusion; it just sort of reaches the end of a page, and stops.
So, final conclusions on Thirteenth Child.
If you can look past the massive racism in the set-up...
You’ll find a lot of racism in the book itself. I don’t think any of it’s malicious, but is this level of laziness and thoughtlessness really that much better?
But if you can look past the additional racism, you’ll find...
A story that’s at least twice as long as it needs to be, and thus LOOOOONG stretches in which abso-fraggin’-lutely nothing happens.
But if you could trim the story down to, say, 150 to 180 pages, you’d get...
Well, I’m afraid you’d still got the story of a whiny heroine who has no sense of adventure at all and has to be drug kicking and screaming into doing anything interesting whatsoever.
It’s a bad book on multiple levels. There’s maybe a few good scenes in it, but if they total even 20 pages I’d be shocked. Mostly, it’s a lot of nothing peppered with whining. There’s 12 hours of my life I ain't never getting back.
What I’m going to do here is basically an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet riffing. Take what you like, leave what you don’t. You see, logically speaking, adding magic unravels the entire sweater of history into a big ol’ tangle of yarn, and even “just” eliminating two continents’ worth of people completely trashes pretty much everything that happened since 1492. But Wrede’s insisting she’s still got something basically sweater-shaped here. Except where it’s obvious (changing two of the first 5 presidents, for example), I am not even going to try to guess at her logic as to which changes are intentional and which were oopsies. I’m just laying all the inconsistencies out, and you can decide for yourself which to write off as magic and/or intended, and which are just messed up.
I’ll roughly go through a chapter at a time, but I’ll pull in examples from later chapters as appropriate.
So, diving in:
Chapter 1
Enjoy this chapter for all its worth, because nothing even remotely interesting will happen again until Chapter 6.
1. Family Size
It really appears that Ms. Wrede is writing her mid-19th-Century huge family from the perspective of a modern small family. First page, Eff talks about families giving up on trying for 7th sons because “there’s plenty enough work in raising eleven or twelve childings.” (I will do my best not to groan at the unnecessary fantasy word changes. Don’t expect me to use them myself very often, though.) Actually, from what I’ve read written by modern people with large families, once you get to six-ish it gets easier. You’ve got the older kids to help take care of the younger ones, and of course by the time you’ve popped out number 10, the first few are usually out of the house. (That many kids, they’re often pretty eager to flee. ^_~) Twelve isn’t terrible much worse than six, and 20 isn’t all that different from 12.
Later in chapter 2, Jack and Nan are declared too young for child minding. It’s already established that Eff has a sibling who’s 8, which means Jack and Nan are at least 9 and probably 10 or older. In this time period in a society where huge familes are the norm, that would be more than old enough to be watching younger siblings. Again, looks like it was viewed from a modern standpoint instead of a period one.
Furthermore, let’s talk child-mortality rates. We are nicely before germ theory here. In the real world, statistically speaking, 3 to 7 of the Rothmers' children wouldn’t make it to age 18. Yes, this world has healing magic. However, Eff’s rheumatic fever, Mama’s broken leg, and the settlement magician who died of fever all suggest that it’s fairly limited in what it can do. Instead of losing 3 to 7, maybe instead we’re talking 1 to 4. Can we at least acknowledge the issue, attribute it to Papa’s own Seventh Son luck? Personally, I think it would have been stylish if a sibling had died of disease shortly after Eff’s birth -- see, unlucky 13th-- even though that means losing the part later where Eff vaguely hopes a sibling she hardly knows will die so she’ll no longer be 13th, and then immediately feels horrible.
2. Mama’s clothes.
I actually don’t have a problem with Mama’s clothes, but half my history trivia comes from a historical costuming interest, so I use these to help date the action and for a later complaint -- and just to get down with my nerdy self.
On page 4, Mama finds Eff so upset that “she got right down on the floor beside me”. Wow. Obviously she is not wearing a crinoline; otherwise this would have been fun to watch. That puts us before 1855-ish. If it’s 1840s, I don’t know how she managed it with the period’s corset. At that time, they were to the hips and over the belly, tightly laced, and busked. A woman could not bend at the waist. So, I gotta give Mama some serious credit here. With 14 kids, the woman’s got to be in her 40s at least. She’s fully corseted with busk, wearing a bodice that’s second-skin tight, 2 to 6 full petticoats, and a day dress that weights at least 20 lbs on its own, but she’s getting down on the floor with her daughter. I bet getting back up took some work.
Later, her skirt is described as being “navy blue pleats”, which supports an 1840s date. However, I want to point out the color. Aniline dyes haven’t been invented yet, so popular colors were “dull” blues, browns, and greens. Navy was absolutely doable, but it was more expensive than the more common duller shades.
3. Sugar cookies
To make Eff feel better after the 45 minutes it takes Mama to stand back up after getting on the floor in her full-length corset, they go and make sugar cookies, and Mama doesn’t even scold Eff when she spills the milk.
Milk? Who uses milk for sugar cookies? My sugar cookie recipe doesn’t call for milk.
Snark off, there are sugar cookie recipes that do call for milk, although it’s usually only a few tablespoons, not an amount you’d let a five-year-old try to measure out of a heavy stoneware jug, glass bottle, or metal milk can. (Personally, I couldn't even lift a plastic gallon jug of milk when I was five.) I don’t know if those recipes would have been common before refrigeration. The real reason I bring this up, though, is because there was fairly extensive debate over on ldragoon’s review about whether sugar would be readily accessible without either heavy mechanization or an extensive slavery system. They debated it, so I don’t have to. ;)
4. “Witch” as a pejorative.
This is neither a snark or complaint. I just find it really interesting that there are accusations of witchcraft in a society with widespread magic use. I was really hoping that Ms. Wrede would explain her terms, but no. That never happens.
Chapter 2
1. The Rothmers are freaking rich!
I already mentioned Mama’s expensive day dress. Now we find at that the Rothmers have one son at a University other than the one Papa teaches at, another either at boarding school or also in college, and a third going to University in fall. And all this on a professor’s salary. Wow! On top of that, in chapter 4 as a part of the job benefits, the family is given a nine bedroom house. Minimum. There might be more; we just know there’s at least 9. No wonder they can afford to make sugar cookies despite a lack of heavy mechanization or extensive slavery system.
2. The Secession War
One of the dangers of writing alt history is giving in to the temptation to just plunk your story bible down on the manuscript and let it carry the book on its own while you go get a sandwich or something. That unfortunately is what happens here with the bit about the Secession War, which ended in 1838.
First, credit where credit is due. I don’t know the details, but my understanding is that the United States actually did come very very close to having a civil war in the 1830s, so this is not wholly arbitrary. (Renaming it the Secession War is, though. That almost makes it sound like the South won, doesn’t it? But they didn’t.)
However, that almost 30 years would make a huge difference in the course of the war. You see, in the 1830s, England didn’t care so much about slavery in the Americas. Hell, they didn’t abolish it themselves until 1833. So if the southern states wanted to hold slaves, England didn’t really care as long as they were getting cheap cotton out of the deal. It wasn’t until Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in Britain in 1852, selling 200,000 legal copies (and probably at least that many pirated copies), that the British people really got their feathers ruffled by it. Because of this new popular opinion against slavery, in the 1860s, the British government did not enter the war on the side of the South, which meant the South had funding problems. If the civil war had happened in the 1830s, hell yes the British would have been willing to break the Northern blockade and continue trade.
However, with South America controlled by one or more African countries instead of Spain and Portugal, Spain never imports massive quantities of gold, which means they never build their Armada to invade England, which means England never builds their Navy to counter and doesn’t have pirated Spanish gold to do it with anyway, which means the British Empire never happens. So maybe it doesn’t matter that the Brits didn’t have a problem with American slavery in the 1830s, and thus the South loses anyway.
And actually, with one or more African countries being Major world powers with capital M now, how did widespread slave trade even come about? Doesn’t the Middle Passage fall on its face? I suppose that depends on which African countries we're talking about, but with the entire power dynamic of Africa completely changed, and one or more countries in it having control of the gold that in our world went to Spain and was pirated by other European nations, you gotta at least seriously consider the possibility.
See what I mean about unraveling the sweater of history? I’m going on to the next topic before I hurt myself.
3. When and Where Our Book Is Set
So, we’re heading to a brand new, still under construction land-grant college not terribly long after 1838 in a territory bordering the Mississippi River. Well, there’s a little problem here. Most of that land already had statehood by 1838. Let me go dig out a statehood map. Let’s see. Illinois was 1818, Kentucky was 1792... Wisconsin, 1848! We’re going to Wisconsin, and it’s the 1840s! W00t!
4. Invisible Indians
Obviously we’re not calling it Wisconsin, because Wisconsin is a Native American word. Wrede has done a decent job of removing the Native American minutia from her world -- the names, the crops. Of course, we’re still a democracy (evidenced by presidents), the Enlightenment still happened (evidenced by mention of Jefferson’s voracious reading), and somehow we’ve managed to settle this country nearly in the same amount of time despite it not being cleared and cultivated for us by previous civilizations and being filled with mammoths and saber cats and nasty ass magical stuff on top of that.
It’s kind of creepy, actually. It’s like if one day you woke up, and there were absolutely no men. But no one was saying anything and we were all pretending nothing had happened and that there had never been any men.
I’m only going to touch on this, because this rabbit hole has no bottom. It’s been extensively discussed all over the internet. I wouldn’t be here if not for it. Nonetheless, I’m really disgusted with Wrede’s combination of laziness and racism. She didn’t want to use the pre-1980 stereotypes, she didn’t want to use the current stereotypes, and GOD FORBID she do some research into the vast array of actual Native America cultures. There was not a hive mind over here. There were vastly different societies, from the militaristic Aztecs to the socialist Incan empire, from the successful farming societies to wandering hunters to resource-hungry city dwellers whose over-harvesting of resources eventually caused their own downfall. If the Mississipian empire hadn’t collapsed on its own, their society had at least some resemblance to European considering they developed wholly independently. The choices are not limited to “warlike savage” and “pacifist environmentalist”.
This "didn't exist" bit? Worst possible way to handle things.
Chapter 3
We move West. It’s mainly just a boring train trip followed by a boring wagon trip. Mama won’t let anyone go off to explore during stops because then something interesting might happen. :P
1. Population Density
Blocking off everything west of the Mississippi River basically cuts American land area in half during this period. The population is probably not smaller, however. In fact, with the norm of huge families and the bizarrely low child mortality rate, it’s probably bigger. So I don’t really buy the smaller, more widespread population centers that Eff alludes to, and I really don’t buy the old growth forest the train passes through. With the Louisiana purchase almost completely off limits, Columbians would be packed to the gills.
2. Miss Ochiba’s clothes
When we first meet Miss Ochiba, she’s wearing “a high-crowned hat trimmed with cherries”, a “white lace neck scarf” and a “close-fitting blue jacket”. In other words, she’s dressed at the height of fashion -- in 1878.
Mama’s clothes have already established that we are pre-crinoline. Separates didn’t even become fashionably tolerable until hoopskirts were at their largest, and jackets didn’t come in until hoops had given way to bustles. Hats were the same; before the 1860s/1870s, they were mannish or at best childish, and no woman over the age of 16 would ever wear one. Bonnets were de rigeur.
I don't care what period our clothes are from. Well, OK, I do, but I'd give a pass as long as they were consistent. However, Mama’s clothes and Miss Ochiba’s clothes would never be worn in the same time period.
3. Miss Ochiba
I’m calling it now. Miss Ochiba is a quintessential Magical Negro(TM). She has no life of her own. She’s not married, we never even see her out in the town except the first time she came out to meet the new professor arrival, she has an amazingly subdued personality, she exists in the story solely to teach and guide our main characters, and when she’s no longer needed she’s sent off to a vague Star Trek reference. Holy crap, I think I just got Bingo.
4. The Racism Paradox
There is apparently exactly one black person in town. Sometimes Washington Morris visits, and then there’s two. Yet at the same time, we also don’t see any overt racism. Oh, Dean Farley and Prof Jeffries are kinda “ih” around Miss Ochiba. Maybe it’s racism. Maybe it’s indigestion, or “you’re bringing students to my university! Ew! Stop that!”
Guys, we are less than 10 years after a slavery-triggered Civil War here. I will grant that removing that almost 30 years I talked about in 2-2 takes with it some of the worst decades of moral push-back and race-based justification rhetoric, but nonetheless, ya don’t enslave someone you think is your equal. By choosing to still have African slavery in America, Wrede has chosen to make this an especially racist period in our history. By then denying that, she is denying the real suffering from history. Not cool.
Chapter 4
1. “Long and hot and boring”
This is how Eff describes the first graduation ceremony at Northern Plains Riverbank College. It’s also almost exactly my sentiment towards the book at this point. Including this one, we’ve got 2 more chapters and some sizable change before something even considers happening.
2. Mills
Eff briefly talks about the lumber industry and how some of the logs coming down the Mississippi are milled “right in Mill City”. Hence the name, I suppose. But then she says “most of them got piled onto flatcars and shipped east to the mills there.” Is Wrede crazy? Waste all that space stacking cylinders and all that weight sending bark and unusable edges? No, I think they would at least be roughed into blocks in Mill City before being shipped for further work.
Chapter 5
We finally actually see some magic, 48 pages in, despite it being talked about constantly. The kids are absolutely shocked by it, even though we later learn that in an average day even someone who isn’t much of a magician will do 5 or 10 spells without hardly thinking about it.
1. Revolutionary War Dates
Either William is full of it (and I do give good odds), or Wrede didn’t really do her math here. Everything she says about the Revolution suggest that it happened about the same time as in our world, but William says it was “almost a hundred years ago”. Either it’s really more like 70 years, or it took 30 freakin’ years to get this university thing going, in which case why doesn’t our location have statehood yet?
Chapter 6
Lan comes in to his natural magic by almost killing William. There, something happened! Here’s a voucher for more happening later. It’s on backorder right now. We might have something in stock in Chapter 10, but don’t get your hopes up.
Chapter 7
Mammoths actually do something. Off camera, of course. Our characters, on the other hand, continue to do nothing. Eff says that she would give her “best Sunday dress and a year’s growth” to be able to see what happened when Mama goes to go rip someone a new one. I would too, because it’d be something happening.
1) “Best” Sunday dress?
It’s the 1840s. That’s her only Sunday dress. If it gets too faded or worn, it’ll then become a day dress and she’ll get a new one. If she outgrows it first, Mama’ll let out the growth pleats, and she’ll be good for another year.
Of course, the Rothmers are freaking rich...
2) And Canada Bites the Dust!
We now establish that it’s “suicide” to go north of the Mississippi’s headwaters due to all the various scary critters running around. Good-bye, British North America! So long.
I’ve seen some impressive Americentrism in my fiction reading, but when an author can’t even stand to leave Canada on the continent... So, did she leave anyone down in Mexico, or is it just us?
3) Jackals
Why jackals as scavengers over here in Columbia? Are coyotes suddenly not good enough for the job? Or is it that Wrede couldn’t think up an alternate name to replace the lost Nahuatl root, so she just called them a completely different, utterly unrelated species? The coyote evolved over here along with the Dire Wolf; it is not originally Eurasian.
Chapter 8
Our heroine has not actually done anything, but the risk that she might is too great, so she comes down with rheumatic fever. This guarantees she can’t do anything whatsoever for an entire year. Because, you know, the action so far has just been too overwhelming and we need some downtime. :P
Honestly, giving it to Lan would have been a much better call. Then Eff could be fretting and blaming herself and maybe even go do something to try to make it right. But that would be doing something, wouldn’t it? (I swear it’s like the author had 180 pages of story and a contract for 350.)
1. How Long Have You Been Living Here Again?
Eff enjoys when William visits because “it was nice to see a face that wasn’t one I’d seen every day of my whole life.” No, just every day of half her life. She’s 10 years old, they’ve lived her when she was five, and William has come around to play with her brothers basically every single day. As she says herself, he’s practically part of the family.
Also, from this point forward we must all politely pretend that it’s not Really Freaking Obvious that William is sweet on Eff.
2. Brant’s Logic
Brant is the young Rationalist working to set up a settlement on the bad side of the Great Barrier that doesn’t use magic. “It will prove to everyone that we don’t need magicians to settle the plains, and the government will have to open the territories for settlement.”
Um... Wha? That’s a bit of a non sequitor, isn’t it? I mean, they haven’t opened the territories because it’s freakin’ dangerous and we haven’t figure out a way to fix that reliably. Matching the reliability of a magician, it’s nice to know that we can, but it doesn’t fix the “freaking dangerous” bit.
Chapter 9
1. Eff’s whining
a. “I don’t get to see my friends!”
Because she was on Turbo Load mode for a while there, our heroine is now a year behind where she was in school. However, the classes are mixed together by ability level, not age. So, doesn’t she just see her friends in different classes? Instead of seeing What’s-Her-Face in reading and composition, now she sees her in history. Some friends she might actually see more often this way.
b. “Waah, I’m a thirteenth child!
I swear to God I will remember the title of the book if Eff will just shut the hell up. Yes, she got crap for it every day until she was 5. Then she moved, and hasn’t heard another single solitary thing about it since, and won’t until she’s 13. It’s not going to be in the forefront of her mind anymore; children’s minds just don’t work that way. It’s mostly-forgotten “mean aunts and uncles” stories by now. If Wrede wants to keep this up, there ought to have been a reason to keep it in mind. Maybe a town ne’er-do-well that everyone looks at, gives one of those nods, and says “Well, you know, he was a 13th child.”
Personally, it would work a lot better if Eff did put it completely out of her mind now, and then it all nearly unexpectedly comes crashing down on her later when they go back to Helvan Shores. Believe me, if you have someone who was a pariah, and then they got to live a normal life, they will absolutely react violently if someone tries to drag them back into being a pariah again. And in the meantime, it is getting really annoying.
In any event, it really should stop right now on page 98 because Miss Ochiba tells her plain as day that being the goodness and good luck of being a seventh daughter more than cancels out the badness and bad luck of being a thirteenth child. But no, Eff just keeps constantly whining about it for several more chapters. Ironically, what finally shuts Eff up is almost blowing her uncle off the map. Coming thisclose to doing something evil actually makes her shut up about being destined to become evil. I don’t get it at all.
Chapter 10
Something actually happens! Kinda. Well, we see a dragon for a couple of seconds. We don’t actually see it doing anything. Someone kills it before it makes much of a mess. We don’t get to see that, either. Our heroine is all but dragged to go see the body. They don’t get anywhere near it -- big surprise.
Nothing happens again until the very end of Chapter 14/beginning of Chapter 15.
1. Slavery, and Africa as homogenous uber-country
I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring attention to the only discussion about pre-Civil War slavery in the book. I already talked about this a bit; I still don’t see how it comes about with one or more African countries taking the place of Spain and Portugal. I’d at least like to know which countries they are. I could buy slavery remaining more easily if they were already resource-rich counties known at the time as the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast, than I could if it were the area known as the Slave Coast.
Also, you ever notice an annoying tendency people have of talking about “Africa” as though the entire continent is basically one big homogeneous society, rather than as a landmass containing many very different countries with very different cultures? Guess what Wrede does. They’re “Aphrikan colonies”; not, say, Nigerian colonies or Ghanan colonies. I mean, Africa’s basically the same all over, right?
2. Lack of foresight
Come spring, that dead dragon starts to smell really bad, so they start casting preservation spells on it.
...
Is Wrede really trying to tell me that it didn’t occur to them to do this any earlier, say before it started rotting?
3. Milk paint
One of Eff's brothers paints a bunch of garter snakes with grey milk paint and sells them as "baby dragons" the next spring. Milk paint is paint made with a combination of milk, lime, and pigment. The milk and lime react to form a coating of calcium caseinate, which after curing time bonds very well with wood and other porous surfaces. However, they are very sensitive to water (which means easy clean-up, but poor results on surfaces that get wet during the curing), and they’ve got a curing time. I don’t buy milk paint sticking reliably to garter snakes. On top of that, milk paint is somewhat caustic, more or less so depending on the amount of lime used. Those poor snakes.
Chapter 11
Eff’s resolute refusal to do something interesting is almost kind of a funny, in a head shaking trying not to cry sort of way. She sits here wishing that Dr. McNeil would bring back more of the strange North American animals so she could see them, never even remotely thinking it’d be cool if she could go out into the wild and see them herself some day. A little bit of an adventurous streak would be really nice in our heroine.
1. St. Louis
It’s stated that Lewis and Clark went up the “Grand Bow River” from just north of St. Louis.
Um, what state is St. Louis in?
Which side of the Mississippi is that?
If you said the side with no cities in this world, take a cookie.
(If you tried to mention East St. Louis, you have to give the cookie back. Not founded until 1820, 16 years after Lewis and Clark and many decades after St. Louis itself, and not renamed “East St. Louis” until 1861.)
Chapter 12
1. The boy’s clothing
Eff complains in here about her mending chores because the boys can’t go three 3 days without tearing a shirt and ripping out pants knees.
Yeah. After the third time, each and every one of them would get a beating and a single play outfit to keep wearing all summer long. It’s the 1840s. Cloth mills are bringing the prices down, but clothing is still too expensive to be destroying the way the boys are described as doing. It would be like if your kid had to have a laptop for school, but over the summer every three days it was so loaded with viruses and spyware from irresponsible use that it wouldn’t run anymore. Would you keep fixing it, or would you say “this is the last time, Sport. You mess it up again, you’re stuck with it until September.”
Also, Eff calls them “pants”. The word pants was first recorded in 1840, so probably would not have been in common use yet. She would say “trousers”.
2. Starter Trunk
With the announcement of Diane’s upcoming wedding, all the females in the family set to work sewing things for her “starter trunk”. I have never hear that term in my life, and I’ve not been able to find a reference to it. It would usually be called her “trousseau”, or more colloquially her “cedar chest” or even “dowry chest”.
Chapter 14
(No, I didn’t forget a chapter; there’s so little happening in Chapter 13 that there’s not even anything to point out.)
1. The Gray Wedding Dress
The gray wedding dress mocks me, because this is right around when the trend went from “best you can afford” to “must be white”, and I don’t have the documentation I need to say what side of that we’re on. My pattern books start in 1867, “Dressed for the Photographer” doesn’t have any wedding portraits in this decade, and I can’t find my big brown book of fashion plates (or indeed even remember if I actually bought it or just borrowed it from the library a zillion times). By 1868 (when I do have documentation), white was norm, especially for a first-time bride in a church wedding, although I found ivory in the 1880s. Late 1840s/early 1850s, I just don’t know for sure. Supposedly, Queen Victoria’s wedding dress in 1840 is what popularized white for weddings, so gray is probably accurate but unfashionable, especially for a family as the well off as the Rothmers seem to be.
Chapter 15
Eff actually does something, 161 pages in! Well, no, not actually. She starts to do something, but then stops herself, so all we get is a frightened drunk uncle and a cloud of sparklies. If she’d actually done something, we might have got some story going on, and we can’t have that!
Seriously, at the absolute least just to tide us over, couldn’t she have at least given Uncle Earn some tentacles, or donkey’s ears, or turned his skin green or something? And then she could be all “Ha ha, see, I intended to do something silly and childish all along. Oh God, Papa knows I tried to kill him.” But no, we don’t even get that much, just a cloud of sparklies.
Eff, just come to the Dark Side already. You’ll like it. We have cookies. We’ll even let you do stuff. Otherwise, nothing will happen again until Chapter 18.
Chapter 17
After another chapter so dull it’s not even worth talking about, we go beat out carpets. Yay. The story’s dragging, and then Wrede shows us housework.
But the good news is that in this chapter, Eff decides she might want to do something. Someday. She gets the idea, so painfully obvious at the end of chapter 11, of becoming a naturalist and going out to see scary critters for herself. There’s no consideration about whether a woman in this society would even be allowed to do this; I’d say the odds if favor of it are basically nonexistent. However, I’m just as glad that didn’t occur to Eff, because God knows the last thing our heroine needs is another excuse to do absolutely nothing.
Chapter 18
I’m sorry, I lied. I can’t in good conscience call the baby mammoth knocking over its fence “something happening”. Nothing happens here. Nothing actually happens
We do see the first, and only, hint that the Rothmers don’t have an endless stream of money somewhere.
1. Magic Styles and Stereotypes
Oh gosh, now Wrede’s stepped in it. The magic style stereotypes are so incredibly offensive.
Hijero-Cathayan (i.e. Asian): “Hijero-Cathayan magic is group magic. They hardly have any small, everyday magics that one magician can do alone, like fire-lighting spells.” Asian = group. You can tell how much thought and research went into that idea, can’t you? You know, it’s not like there’s actually people over there living out lives where they might, like Westerners, need to light fires for cooking, or carry heavy water buckets, or keep bugs away, or do the other dozens of things that the main characters do every day without hardly thinking about it. Nah, they’re just all doin’ big mystic crap, none of that living stuff. “They’re good at big things, like moving rivers and clearing out dragon rookeries -- at least, they say it was the ancient Hijero-Cathayan magicians.” Look at that! Wrede doesn’t even let them keep their cookie!
I just got to point out, that the “Aphrikan” trying seeing the world as it really as rather than as it appears to be and redirecting energy instead of manhandling, those have at least some resemblance to Buddhist and Taoist traditions. It would need more research, but it’d show a little more thought than “group work”.
Believe it or not, the stereotyping in Aphrikan magic is even worse. Aphrikan is not about calling up magic, but just guiding the magic that’s already there, and it never works the same way twice if it even works at all, and by European standards it’s unpredictable and unreliable but it’s really really good at one particular thing, and that’s dealing with “natural” magic. Hmm. Passive, little initiative, unpredictable, unreliable, but with a primitive closeness to nature. I’ve heard stuff like this before. In fact, when I was reading the description of Aphrikan magic, my mind connected to a paragraph in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Stowe starts waxing poetic about how “If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race”, how great it’ll be because black people are so gentle and docile and in tune with a higher power. I admire Harriet Beecher Stowe greatly, but I will be the first to admit that she was very much a product of her times. Haven’t we come any further than that in 160 years?
If you’re going to write outside of your time period and/or outside of your own culture, *you’ve got to do your research*. If you know you want European, African, and Asian magic systems in your world, and you’re a pasty Mid-Western white girl, you need to start reading. See what’s already there in the culture, and use that instead of just throwing antiquated and offensive stereotypes around.
Also, “unreliable”, don’t throw that at anyone. “Unpredictable” needs to be followed by “but it isn’t at all if you know what you’re doing” and NOT by “and I guess they’re right”. And that “good with nature” thing, that is a literary hand grenade. That’s been patronizing backhanded praise lobbed at just about every minority for the past 500 years, carrying with it the unspoken “because they’re uncivilized.” Find a way around it. Even “good with the unexpected” is a big step up. (In fact, “good at handling the unexpected” could tie in well with the themes of cleverness often found in the heroes of African folklore.)
Suffice to say, the different magic systems earned a scream of disgust and a book thrown across the room. (Well, not really because it is a library book. But if it had been my own...)
Chapter 19
1. The Age of Majority
So... You can sign up for a homestead on the life-threatening, nasty-creature-ridden frontier at age 18, but you can’t marry without parental consent until you’re 21. WTF?
2. Sawbones
The slang “sawbones” for doctor came about in our world because for most of history, the only way Western medicine could deal with a severely injured or especially infected limb was to amputate it. However, the way Eff’s rheumatic fever is treated suggests that the story world has antibiotics, even if they don’t realize that’s the mechanism by which their potions work. So there should be fewer amputations. Would “sawbones” still be used?
Chapter 20
1. Triskelion
A triskelion is a symbol with three connected spirals or three bent legs joined at the crotch, which is found across many cultures with diverse meanings. However, I’m a huge geek, so the first thing that popped into my mind when Miss Ochiba left for Triskelion University was the original Star Trek episode, The Gamesters of Triskelion. Hence my reference earlier. :)
Chapter 21
1. Eff’s new look
On page 20, a nearly 18-year-old Eff remarks that she has started putting her hair up and wearing full length skirts. What she doesn’t mention is that everyone around her was thinking it was about freaking time. This was usually done at age 14 if you were going to start working, maybe a little later in a well-off family, but 16 was the latest. When she waited until she was 17 and a half, people were whispering about her behind her back.
2. William’s old look
We’ve got to be in the 1850s by now (no news on that statehood thing, though). William is described as wearing a “beaver hat”. Beaver hats were out. They fell out of favor right about 1850 in our world, replaced by silk in the upper classes and wool in the lower. But, there’s more to it that.
The America beaver population supported the popularity of beaver hats well after the European beaver had been driven almost to extinction. That was with the full beaver population of North America available, and indeed searching for the pelts spurred a lot of exploration. Of course, in this story world everything west of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes is off limits. So there goes access to at least half the beaver population. With that reduction, the American beaver east of the Mississippi surely would have been wiped out long before, forcing beaver hats out of popularity even earlier in this story world.
3. And No One Knows What Lan’s Going For
Lan has grown muttonchops. Muttonchops were not fashionable at this time, especially not for young men. Sure, a few people wore them; a few people wear them now. But a young man picking a hairstyle to go with his nice new fancy probably imported paisley waistcoat? Nah. Young men were oiling their hair in this decade, and doing this wave thing, or almost a duckbill with this sort of topknot thing. Here, here's a picture of what I mean, not the worst example by far. There were some seriously scary men’s hairstyles going on in the 1850s, but not so much with the mutton chops.
4. What’s Differerent About the Rationalist Settlement?
Hmm. Every settlement west of the river is overrun with grubs and beetles, except the Rationalists. What could possibly be different about the only settlement in entire West that doesn’t use magic?
We will spend the next 70 pages politely pretending that the difference is not really freaking obvious. Or maybe screaming every 10 pages “The bugs are attracted to magic, you flaming morons! It’s so bloody obvious!”
Chapter 22
If you’re looking for a good spot to scream “The bugs are attracted to magic!”, I suggest page 240, where we discuss in detail how much the Rationalists dislike magicians.
1. Benjamin Franklin as a double-seventh son
Oh for goodness's sake. Ben Franklin was Josiah Franklin's 10th son, not 7th. Josiah was his family's 9th child. I wasn't able to find genders, but the odds are against him being a 7th son. This is not terribly obscure as trivia goes; the Google search to find this out will take you all of three minutes.
I find this change disturbing, because it smacks heavily of classism. Jefferson was from a rich and prominent family that could afford a good education. He can stay basically as he was.
But Franklin. His family was squarely working class. He was the son of a candle and soap maker and grandson of a blacksmith. His formal book education stopped at age 10. Being freaking brilliant isn't enough; Wrede's got to make him special for him to be capable of this great amazing Great Barrier Spell. :P Screw that.
2. Why didn't they just ask him?
A big deal is made out of no one understanding how Jefferson and Franklin created the Great Barrier because Franklin didn't write everything down, and Jefferson did but with references other people couldn't figure out.
Jefferson didn't die until 1826. The Barrier had to go up before Franklin's death in 1790. That's at least 36 years in which people could have asked "Tom, what the Sam Hill were you talking about here?"
Chapter 24
Including this one, only 5 more chapters until something finally happens.
1. Washington Crossing the Delaware
A. The Flag
Eff makes a deal about Papa and Prof Jeffries remembering that the flag carried by Washington and his crew “should only have thirteen stars”.
Actually, it shouldn’t have stars at all. There would have been a union jack there (sans the red portion of the diagonals). The Stars and Bars wasn’t used until 9 month later.
B. Robert Carradine
It’s too much to ask for Wrede to research actual participants of the crossing of the Delaware, or even important military figures under Washington. Instead we apparently get an actor best known for staring in Revenge of the Nerds.
C. The Light
Said actor is known for casting the light spell that guided Washington. Because when you’re setting up a sneak attack, you definitely want a big huge bright light on your boat.
Chapter 26
1. Sisters Hugging
When Eff sees her sister Rennie again, part of her wants to hug and part wants to yell at her, “but I wasn’t thirteen anymore, and I couldn’t do either one” in front of the others.
Actually, women relatives and close friends in this time period were expected to be very touchy-feely with each other, to a degree that modern audiences can find downright lesbianic. When she doesn’t hug her sister, the others are probably thinking that Eff is really pissed off.
2. Rennie’s Clothes
There’s nothing wrong with Rennie’s clothes, but I would have loved to see her in reform garb. The Bloomer trousers and short skirt. It’s a little early, but absolutely doable; in fact, the reason the Reform clothing movement didn’t die almost as soon as it started was because of pioneer women. In Reform garb it was so much easier to move around and do hard frontier chores and cook without setting yourself on fire. There’d also be this fun mirroring thing with Eff. Eff just stopped wearing pantalettes and short skirts (children’s wear) and comes out here to find her older sister wearing something that looks very similar to what she just discarded. And the cherry on top: in later decades, Reform dress was also known as “Rational Dress”. It’d be perfect!
3. Rennie and Eff’s Conversation
... falls flat on its face. Rennie and Eff talk about Rennie running off and it looks like they’re going to have a big argument or worse but then that fizzles, because an argument might be doing something, and then later Eff decides to just accept that Rennie said sorry even though there wasn’t much explanation, and the conflict just sort of goes away.
It didn’t occur to me until I was doing the dishes the next day, but I bet when this takes place, Eff hadn’t done the math on Albert’s birth yet. (If she has done the math, she’s just being an asshole.) Which brings up that this would have been a much better place to reveal the math rather than just tossed out in prose earlier.
So imagine if when Rennie says she was young and scared and did the best she could at the time and Eff asks what she was afraid of, instead of answering “Oh, stuff”, Rennie instead says, “Eff, you know how I eloped in May? Albert was born in November.” “What does that have to do with.. Oh. Oh!”
Rennie found herself pregnant and unmarried in the late 1840s/early 1850s. Hell yes she was scared. This is a golden opportunity for some character development. A great perception shift (Rennie from bossy selfish know-it-all to scared desperate girl), a good reinforcement that Eff is now a woman who can be trusted knowing how her sister messed up rather than needing the truth hidden from her. But no, instead we get an “Oh, just stuff” answer, a fizzled-out conversation, and a potentially major reveal just tossed out in prose way back in Chapter 14.
Chapter 27
As usual, Eff is actively kept from doing anything interesting. She wishes she was out bug-hunting with the boys, and as usual I do too, because it means something might be happening. This is how desperate I am at this point. Looking for bug pupae would be a step up. *head desk* At least we finally stop pretending that it isn’t Really Flaming Obvious that the bugs are attracted to magic.
1. Spell casting
So... all respect for the Rationalists goes completely out the window and we just start casting spells willy-nilly without even trying to be subtle about it anymore. Would have served them right if a local had come up and smacked them upside the head and told them to get the hell out of town.
2. Walking Boots
When she tells Wash and William she’s a 13th child, Eff specifically mentions avoid their eyes by looking at the toes of her walking boots. In the 1850s? Possible, but not likely. Boots didn’t come in until the crinoline did, and then there was a transitory period of gaiters over slippers and soft soled, heelless boots -- all driven by modesty rather than function. What you’re thinking of when you read “walking boots” is probably not what Eff is wearing.
Chapter 29
Finally, something happens! Don’t get your hopes too far up, though. For a second there it looks like Eff has finally become a character worth watching, but we later find out it’s just that her brother has, at great effort, drug her into doing something. :P
1. Full skirts
Eff specifically makes it a point to mention while getting on horseback that she’s glad she wore a full skirt. As opposed to? It’s 1850-something. They’re ALL full skirts. Your options when you wake up in the morning are putting on the skirt made with 10 yards of fabric, or putting on the skirt made with 12 yards of fabric. Thank God she went with the 12-yarder, huh?
I’m just glad she hasn’t started wearing that new-fangled Parisian crinoline thing.
Chapter 30
1. Bugs.
So, our heroine finally goes and does stuff and heroically battles one of the great unknown creatures of the frontier and it’s... bugs. Not dragons, or pyromaniacal bird things, or even mammoths. Just bugs. They’re not even carnivorous bugs. (Well, Wrede might try to slap life-sucking on as an afterthought, but it’s just slipped into a single sentence in the denouement and never really demonstrated.) The problem is that they eat magic, which means they can eat your protection spells, and that allows other things to come eat you later. If the other critters get around to it.
Bugs. Purty much.
3. No! Big Issue, Come Back! I’ll Love You!
The bugs do bring a Big Issue, though. They’re attracted by the spells settlements use to protect themselves, and this has caused enough buggy population growth that the Great Barrier could be in danger. This is a Big Issue. The things required for our short term survival are a detriment to our long-term survival! What else are our magics contributing too? The increase in the pyromanical bird population? The steam dragon that made it across the Great Barrier? Do we enter an arms race with nature itself, knowing the price of losing is complete destruction of the entire country? Do we abandon the settlements and attempt to deal with overpopulation to the east of the Mississippi? Do we have to start recruiting a whole bunch more Rationalists and let them have the entire west half of the continent?
Or do we just put together a solution that takes “a couple of days” of tweaking and then we’re completely hunky-dory? :P Wrede chooses the “couple of days of tweaking” route and completely drops the Big Issue.
I want the Big Issue. We should have fought the bugs at page 180 and spent the second half the book tackling the Big Issue.
And the book just kind of smacks its nose on the door on the way out. We got denouement going, but it doesn’t really have a conclusion; it just sort of reaches the end of a page, and stops.
So, final conclusions on Thirteenth Child.
If you can look past the massive racism in the set-up...
You’ll find a lot of racism in the book itself. I don’t think any of it’s malicious, but is this level of laziness and thoughtlessness really that much better?
But if you can look past the additional racism, you’ll find...
A story that’s at least twice as long as it needs to be, and thus LOOOOONG stretches in which abso-fraggin’-lutely nothing happens.
But if you could trim the story down to, say, 150 to 180 pages, you’d get...
Well, I’m afraid you’d still got the story of a whiny heroine who has no sense of adventure at all and has to be drug kicking and screaming into doing anything interesting whatsoever.
It’s a bad book on multiple levels. There’s maybe a few good scenes in it, but if they total even 20 pages I’d be shocked. Mostly, it’s a lot of nothing peppered with whining. There’s 12 hours of my life I ain't never getting back.
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