Catherine's comments (member since Sep 12, 2008)

Catherine's comments from the Constant Reader group.

I might incline to Feng Shui in moderation. Certainly I know the principles of tai chi are sound. This book is quite amusing but apparently hard to find. Looking on B&N I found he´s written some interesting sounding children´s books too.

I was attracted by the Lucky Cat on the cover, and it was worth it. Nury Vittachi did some hard hitting journalism before the Chinese took over Hong Kong, when he turned to fiction. I´m going to have to check if the poor fellow is still alive and if he´s written any more hilarious stories. Personally, I´m rather less interested in Feng Shui than in other Chinese disciplines, but this is a hoot. The title detective works with the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics. He has been saddled with an mod Australian-American girl as an intern, and much of the plot and its solution turns on their efforts to understand each other. Then there is his secretary who refuses to answer the phone and chases clients out of the office while she gossips with her friends. Then there is the air conditioner that fell out the window, the haunted dentist´s office, and the teen scene at Dan T´s Inferno. It all adds up to a climax on the roof of the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

I have written to two authors with whom I had some personal connections. One was the U of Conn essayist Samuel F. Pickering, the model for DEAD POET´S SOCIETY. His father, also named Samuel F. Pickering, was my first boss and I shared my memories of him. Daddy also wrote, sharing his memories of Ransom Elementary School in Nashville, which both attended at vastly different times.
Recently I picked up an autographed copy of Chester D. Campbell´s THE MARATHON MURDERS, and after reading the acknowledgements I had to email him. The setting of the story had been suggested to him by a neighbor, who happened to be one of Mama´s closest friends. This happened after Mama died, so I was happy to get an update on her friend. I was happier still because this friend became a tourist and world traveler because of what Mama had talked about when they were in high school.
Mama wrote to English author Angela Thirkell and received Christmas cards from her every year.

This is a first novel by a lifelong student of military history, and is it a corker! The legion in question is made up of the survivors of Crassus´ horrendous defeat at Carrhae. According to history, they were preserved to serve as mercenaries by the Parthians (northeast Iran) and later fought for a Hun leader in what was then called Margiana. I haven´t been able to find out what that now is except it is between Iran and Samarkand, then called Sogdia.
Crassus was a member of the First Triumvirate of Rome, with Caesar and Pompey. He was also the richest, having made his pile by having his thugs set apartment buildings (insulae) on fire and then making the owner sell the building before his personal fire brigade put the fire out. Feeling outdone by his two partners, in his latter years he decided to break the peace treaty with Parthia because they were rich.
The story is told from the standpoint of four people, an Etruscan trained as a soothsayer, a Gaul captured for the arena, and Roman slave twins who are the natural children of Julius Caesar. The girl is sold to the best brothel in Rome and eventually gains a patron, while the three men, all escaping from something or other, join Crassus´s army. The events in Rome and on the campaign are told in great detail. I even learned that Roman rations were very much like Civil War hardtack (American Civil War to our international friends). The main difference is the Romans used olive oil, while our people depended on flour, water, and salt.
The whole period lives and explains anew why I´ve always thought that if Rome was a republic make mine vanilla.

If I may bring the discussion forward from pre-history a little, I´ve gotten some small shocks from my recent reading - the shock being IT´S THE SAME DAMNED THING ALL OVER AGAIN! The books were Jacquelin Winspear´s AMONG THE MAD and Barbara Cleverly´s BRIGHT HAIR ABOUT THE BONE. AMONG THE MAD features the chemical warfare testing being done hush-hush by the British government on veterans with PTSD. One of the characters in BRIGHT HAIR ABOUT THE BONE (set in 1926) reels off a list of American and international interests inclined to support the Nazis.
I hadn´t known about the weaponized chemicals testing on WWI vets, but I certainly know it´s happened since then and that it´s extremely hard to stop it from happening. As for the American interests supporting the Nazis, some of that is now belatedly trickling into the news. And it´s all the same. Monied interests pursue their own interests on the blood of everybody else.

I´ve just joined an online group called Critter Writers, since I almost accidentally found myself writing science fiction. Dr. Andrew Burt is the host. He has quite an impressive resume, and the site is ticking over very well. It focuses on science fiction, fantasy, and horror. There are also links about publishing, everybody´s dream.
Why science fiction? Well, my son started my interest. I was working on a novel set in Civil War Nashville and going nuts trying to research every aspect to get it just right. Historians are pretty unmerciful critics. I was trying to figure out everything from garbage disposal to what kind of music was available locally at the time. It was such a relief not to have to prove everything.

Reading this discussion I keep thinking back to Sir Terry Pratchett´s JINGO:

The meaning enveloped Vimes like a chilly mist.
¨Youŕe offering to change history?¨ he said. ¨Is that it? Rewrite the--¨
¨Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being reexamined and reevaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can´t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.¨

Shoshannah, I´ve been following the education mess in Florida on Democratic Underground. A frequent poster is a retired teacher who calls herself Mad Floridian. Her posts are one reason I brought this topic up. There has never really been a golden age of education except in isolated cases. I do worry about my grandchildren and am taking extra pains to see they get some history and a love of stories.

The way not to be taken in by fads is to have many teachers or sources with many different viewpoints. Some have hobby horses you can see a mile away.
My idea of What Is The Truth was greatly changed by reading Lawrence Durrell´s ALEXANDRIA QUARTET. Three of these books describe exactly the same events, each from a different point of view. I began to realize how much we can live through and not notice about the concerns and motives of people we interact with every day. I´m not about nasty CIA deeds or obvious propaganda. It´s like the truth is a giant prism - you pick it up and turn it over and learn some other facet of it.

The thing that bothers me about oil and our alternative futures is the fact that so many people have such a huge stake in maintaining the status quo. Historically, the kind of change we get depends on which alternative is embraced by the most manipulative and wealthy person. Geniuses labored to make dozens of kinds of good automobiles and aircraft with all kinds of technologies, only to be edged out by the manipulative and the greedy. The movie TUCKER is a great example of that.
Now someone has finally been moved to rummage through history and tell us how GM bought up and trashed or changed numerous good public transportation systems to make us all dependent on cars or diesel fueled buses. I know Nashville had an electric trolley system until at least 1940, because my father rode it in the fall of 1939. It reliably got him from one end of the county to the other twice a day.
We´ve had this nasty process with railroads, too. For years the L&N Railroad virtually owned Tennessee, and it took a very determined and wealthy man to operate an alternative intrastate network.
Sometimes it seems like we need innovative geniuses AND manipulative S.O.B.s.

What we need is to embed the facts in the living story in which they occurred. To make it real and relevant, you have to get across the idea that it´s real people with their blood, sweat, and tears. I remember my father talking about how frustrated he felt looking at pictures of things he remembered well and most people didn´t. ¨I want to point to the picture and say he was ALIVE, a real person, just like you¨.

Russ, I NEVER want to say that the US is always wrong, and I don´t know of any responsible historian or author of well researched historical fiction believes that it is. You have been hearing the knee-jerk responses of people who have their own reasons for believing we have always been right. A lot of people appear to be afraid the World As We Know It would fall apart if any of their ideas or beliefs are challenged.
Actually, even though I´m white, it was my ancestors who often ended up bad when the country was wrong about something. My great-grandfather died when a keg of black powder blew up on his road building site, leaving an indigent widow with five children - no social safety net back then. My grandfather lost the family home during the Depression - and he had never invested in the stock market.
Speaking of the Civil War, I was glad my son grew up after integration, because he didn´t have to hear about ¨how the North came down and told us how to run our business on the word of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had never been south of Lexington, Kentucky¨. He actually was given some idea of what had happened in Tennessee. I taught him more, of course. During genealogical research my mother found that a distant relative of ours had tried to implicate my Union soldier great-grandfather in a notorious torture murder. After learning his regiment, I was able to trace his history almost every day from the time he joined to prove this was a falsehood.

This all started from a conversation with Cousin Raub, which is why I miss him so much. I had been reading about how Queen Mary was really the brains of George V´s reign, helping him understand and perform his duties as king. I thought her a gallant and dedicated woman, but Raub said she was not a good mother to her sons. Because I´d read enough about the Windsors of the ´20s to interest me, I did a bit of research.
Queen Mary wasn´t a good mother because she didn´t have the faintest idea how to go about it or anybody to help and advise her. The Royal Family has always been unfortunately clueless in that regard. Mary´s father was the product of a morganitic marriage and always had his nose out of joint because he couldn´t afford as many servants as he wanted. Her mother was a tactless social butterfly (if you can imagine a butterfly who sometimes needed two chairs to sit on) who saw her daughter as an unpaid social secretary. They were always hard up. Mary was beautiful - I couldn´t believe the early pictures, and Queen Victoria saw her as a perfect royal bride because of her brains and sense of duty. Both she and George were so shy they wrote notes apologizing to each other for seeming so distant when they met.
The children did love their mother and enjoyed the afternoons they spent in her boudoir - especially when their father was away from home. One of the things Mary did was teach her daughter and three sons to wind yarn around a peg loom to make woolen mufflers. They did this while they talked or she read to them, and the mufflers went to charity.
This fascinated me because I had never been able to find any success at knitting, though I could do the basic steps. Knitting patterns are not easy to read, and everything I made wound up looking like it would fit a squirrel even after it had been blocked at the dry cleaners. I was delighted to find a plastic peg loom at JoAnn´s and have been steadily winding up mufflers and lengths I plan to sew into a sweater vest. It is very satisfying work, and I´ll be able to donate some to my liberal charities.
All because I got interested in Queen Mary...

I´ve been seeing some disturbing signs for a while that the Powers That Be are playing down the study of history and liberal arts generally. Social Studies are not included in the No Child Left Behind law, and everywhere I read and hear about how teachers must now teach to the test all the time. Friday I read an article on Truthout (also posted on TomDispatch) by a former air force officer now teaching history in a Pennsylvania university.
Young soldiers, he says, are more easily taught to torture when they are not taught this has always been against the law. All students can be more easily fed the myth that the US is always right, wise, and good if they aren´t allowed to study any inconvenient history. Workers can be more easily intimidated if they do not know the long history of the labor movement. Above all, history and the humanities are about teaching people to THINK, not how to get good jobs and become satisfied consumers.
I have met intelligent people who are astonishingly ignorant of the simplest historical facts - and what they do know they often learned on Star Trek! Bless fiction. Half the job the folks at Media Matters do is dredging up political quotes from nine or ten years ago to show what really happened and how politicians are reinventing themselves.
Historical fiction may yet be our salvation. Nobody can read Bernard Cornwell, Anne Perry, Victoria Thompson and their ilk without realizing the past wasn´t always good, lovely, and true. I feel personally blessed that both my parents loved history and were very definite about the wrongs that have been done and how we should remember them. Today I think most often of Daddy´s repeated ¨Remember the Battle of Anacostia Flats¨ and am thankful Jill Churchill used the incident as the background of ¨Someone to Watch Over Me¨.
I gave my granddaughter two of the American Girl Felicity mysteries for her ninth birthday. They tell the truth and even have a small ¨peaking into the past¨ section at the end.

I´m glad to know something about him. It was obvious a well read person was behind the Ring of Fire series and has attracted like minded persons to help him write. I´ll be picking up more of the series now and again. - Alternative history helps you think about history.

Thanks, everybody. That´s something I just had to share.

Those of you who´ve been around for a long time remember my reading a couple of Raub´s hilarious stories at CR gatherings. I also quoted his literate opinions from time to time - the truly astonishing literacy of an intelligent man burdened with extreme dyslexia.
Like many of my family, he had an unhappy childhood and severe emotional problems. Last Tuesday he shot himself. He was 60 or so and suffering both physical and emotional pain. I feel bereft. I left a eulogy on www.normadruid.vox.com.

I didn´t believe there was such a thing, but we had one Easter Sunday. It was just ten college kids with a ball of fire director. They put some of their own element into gospel - Jesus Lover of My Soul was sung against and around a background of Jesu Joy of Man´s Desiring, for instance. It was really something, and the wonderful thing was that they joined us for a couple of numbers. They sing English (and Latin) well enough but are not really good at conversational English except for their director. He woodsheded us (technical term for taking the piece apart) in the Hallelujah Chorus. What energy - and what fun to sing with these kids what I sang long before they were thought of! They also joined us on the Mozart Ave Verum Corpus. We had a string quartet, a brass quartet, the organ, the piano, and even a recorder on one number.
Then one of the girls climbed over the pulpit rail in her caftan style choir robe and I felt my age. Still, what an experience!

These two talented ladies have written an 18th century style novel. Both are academics who are thoroughly read in the minutae of American and British culture of the time.
The tale is told alternately by a Scottish painter who has come to Boston to evade his debts and the apprentice he hires - a well born fallen woman in disguise. Both have blindspots - he doesn´t realize she is a woman, and she is slow to realize he is falling in love with her. The most interesting thing here is the 18th century attitude - it doesn´t bother Stewart Jameson that he is falling for a young boy when he had hitherto preferred women. Sexuality and expressions thereof changed vastly and for the worst in the mid 19th Century.
What Jameson does notice is that while the colonists fret about their freedom they are totally oblivious to the contradiction of the slavery they practice. He and his apprentice shelter a highly educated black runaway (educated as an experiment by an English lord). This is a splendid period evocation.

Eric Flint seems to be the guiding spirit behind this alternative history series that involves several authors. All those involved must have done extensive research, because I found no obvious botches in their early 17th century European history. (Not that I´m an expert, but some personalities and conflicts I know)
The premise is that sometime during the 1990s a ring of fire surrounded a small town in West Virginia and set it down in 17th Century Germany in the time when Gustavus Adolphus and Cardinals Richlieu and Mazarin were the big names in Europe. The West Virginians include educators, hippies, union officials, and trailer trash who must find a way to mingle with the world they find. There are touches of comedy, but much of the book is gripping and believable action. The ideals on which the US was founded were present in 17th Century Europe - what would happen with a sudden infusion of people who firmly believed in them and tried to make them work?