Marie Brennan's Blog, page 212

End as you began

Ahahahaha.

When I set out to do my Wheel of Time re-read and analysis, I based my schedule on the projected release date of the final book. But I have enough experience with this series that I knew better than to assume it would come out as planned in November 2011, so I deliberately aimed to overshoot that date.

Well, I didn't overshoot by enough. As Sanderson says in the above post, the new date for A Memory of Light is January 2013. We were doing so well, right up until the end . . . but of course this series has to end with a massive delay. Because that's how it goes.

This means I need to think about how I want to handle my posts for The Gathering Storm (which I've been meaning to do for, well, months now) and Towers of Midnight. I don't want to lose every bit of momentum I had with this blog series, but I also don't want to be left waiting for nine months or more before the final book. (However fitting that might be.) If I'd known there would be this large of a delay, I would have started stretching things out last summer -- but too late for that now.

What's likely is that I will do two posts for TGS, one that's pure reader-reaction (what I think of various plot developments), and one that's analysis. Then I'll do the same for ToM, in the latter half of this year. But I'm open to other suggestions, too: should I post about "The Strike at Shayol Ghul"? Or the companion book? How should I kill time until this thing is finally done?

Three things make something closer to a post

First: it's the sixteenth, and that means I'm over at SF Novelists again. This time I'm continuing my points from last month, with "Competence is hot, part two."

Second: the same guy who does the Page 69 thing also had me contribute to My Book, the Movie (reposted over here). Long-time readers of this journal may recall that I've been on that blog previously, when I talked about my mental castings for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie; this time I update it with A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire.

And third: if you're going to be at FOGcon, then a) so am I and b) I'm also going to be one of the critiquers in the writing workshop, along with David Levine and Cassie Alexander. I don't know when signup for that closes, but I believe you still have time to join, if that's your cup of tea.

Since I'm combining things here, I'll leave comments open -- but on the competence thing, please do go leave your thoughts over on the SF Novelists site, rather than here. No login required, but if you're a first-time commenter please give me a little while to fish it out of the moderation queue.

Two bits of news

First of all, I'm featured over at "The Page 69 Test" (here and here), talking about page 69 of With Fate Conspire, and whether it's a good sample of what the book is like or not.

And second, the Intergalactic Awards Anthology is out, containing my Driftwood story "A Heretic by Degrees" -- as well as stories by a couple of friends of mine, aliettedb 's "Horus Ascending" and Von Carr's absolutely fabulous "Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain."

And now, back to cleaning my living room.

Reminder: Letters from the Onyx Court

You have a little over two weeks left in which to get a letter from the Onyx Court, hand-written by yours truly, in the persona of a character of your choice. Get 'em while they're hot, folks! (By which I mean, before I lose all ability to hold a pen, from concentrating so hard on not writing m when I mean n, and some weird many-humped scribble when I mean m.)

If I have time, I'll post a report -- with pictures, even -- of my adventures with the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship. Yes, I gave it a shot. The results were . . . interesting.

The DWJ Project: Archer's Goon

We're nearing the end of this project, and I've saved most of my second-tier favorites for next-to-last. These are the books I like quite a lot, but for whatever unknown reason didn't imprint on like I did my first-tier favorites.

The title of Archer's Goon refers to the Goon-like individual who shows up in the kitchen of the Sykes family, claiming that the father is overdue with his "two thousand." This turns out not to refer to money, but to words: Quentin, a writer, has for years now been writing and mailing off two thousand words of whatever crap comes into his head, four times a year. The most recent batch has gone astray. But it gets more complicated than that, because Archer is one of seven not-quite-human siblings who appear to rule the Sykes' hometown from behind the scenes, each one "farming" various aspects of society. Pretty soon they're all sticking their oars in, which makes life very difficult for the Sykes family, and it's up to Quentin's son Howard to sort it out.

One of the great appeals of this book is its quirky family dynamic. Howard's younger sister Awful is fabulous, and so are the occasions when her parents or brother use her as a weapon against outsiders. Quentin is sometimes deserving of a smack, but there's a point during the war with Archer and his siblings when you really understand the impulse to grin, dig your heels in, and see what they'll do next. Catriona, though less than tolerant of the crap produced by her husband's intransigence, has good reasons for objecting. And Howard himself protags very satisfyingly, following up on questions and looking for a way out. Together they're actually quite strong, which contrasts nicely with Archer's family: individually any one of them can outdo an ordinary person without trying, but their refusal to cooperate with each other undermines them.

Also, I love the Goon.

Spoilers!

I'm often puzzled by people who claim they don't see any point in re-reading books. This is a noticably different story once you know the Goon is Erskine; his interactions with Howard, and his avoidance of his siblings, all take on a very different light in retrospect, and unless you have a perfect memory, you probably aren't going to recall all the little grace notes laid in along the way. It's fun to revisit them, once you know the secret.

I also like that he is not quite an unalloyed Good Guy. He's manipulating the Sykes, too, albeit for better reasons than world domination, and imprisoning Howard and the others isn't what you would call nice. Torquil likewise starts out unsavory, but (thankfully) DWJ isn't the sort of writer who divides her characters into two neat camps; it's possible to bring him around. Even Archer isn't quite a straight-up villain; he genuinely thinks him running the world would be a good thing. He's just, y'know, wrong.

While I'm okay with him and Dillian and Shine being shipped off to Alpha Centauri, though, I have to admit I'm not pleased about what happened with Fifi. Yes, she's in love with Archer. But nobody thinks to ask whether that's a snow job he did on her, like Shine did with Ginger Hind. I guess we're supposed to take as evidence that he didn't the fact that Archer is equally besotted with her? It doesn't much reassure me, though, since it's entirely plausible that Archer got infatuated, and decided to make sure his affections would be returned. And even if their love-at-first-sight is genuine, nobody bothers to inquire whether Fifi is okay with blasting off into space with him. Unlike the others, she hasn't done anything to deserve it. I find myself feeling less than satisfied with that bit.

But I love, love, love the Goon, and the way he interacts with Awful especially -- he has this lovely knack of defusing her, in ways that I think Awful really, really needs. I like the way the dynamic between Venturus and his siblings gets reflected in the dynamic between Howard and Awful; it isn't anything as simple as a one-to-one matching, but various bits of how they interact show up here and there, helping Howard see that growing up as a human twice -- once without a sister, once with -- have made him a better person than he originally was.

I find myself deeply curious what backstory, if any, Jones had in mind for where the seven of them came from in the first place. We only get the barest hints of clues: Awful calls Dillian an "enchantress," and Quentin calls all of them "wizards;" Archer says they're not the same as humans, and live a good deal longer; they refer in passing to their parents. Because this is the British Isles, my first thought was that you could fic them as the children of Merlin and Nimue or whoever, but then their large stature makes me think of nephilim. I will entertain other suggestions in the comments. :-)
I've already finished reading Power of Three; just need to post about it. Six entries left, and five books . . . .

Anthropological Warning Signs and How to Spot Them

I'm engaged in research mode right now for the second book of Isabella's memoirs. But this isn't the focused, targeted research of the Onyx Court series, where I know my time and place and am looking for details; I'm trying to decide what time(s) and place(s) I'm going to be drawing from to begin with. Since the general sphere of this second book is going to be "sub-Saharan Africa," that means doing a fair bit of 101-level familiarization, before I decide where to dig down further.

One of the books I just read had me rolling my eyes at certain obvious flaws, and I figured that when I write up my "books read" post in a few weeks, I'd dismiss it with a flippant sentence that would make teleidoplex and albionidaho laugh, and move on with my life. But then it occurred to me that the flaws I see as obvious actually may not be. I spent ten years in anthropology and related disciplines; I'm familiar with the ways in which anthropological writing can go wrong. Not everybody else is. And it might be useful for me to talk to more than just the anthropologists in my audience.

So here, with an illustrative example, is how to look critically at the genre. This isn't in-depth technical stuff, where you need to know the region or the theory to spot where it's going wrong; this is just critical thinking, of a mildly specialized sort. But the flaws are a type that can slip under the radar, if you're not accustomed to them.

The book in question is The Kingdom of Benin in the Sixteenth Century, by Elizabeth M. McClelland. And I should say -- before I begin slicing it apart -- that it actually served my purpose to some extent, despite its flaws. That's because my purpose right now is to ask, "what do I want to use as the foundation of my invented culture?" Do I want to use the kingdom of Benin? I wasn't sure, so I read this book. And it gave me some details that were helpful. Not very many, since the entire book is a whopping fifty-one pages long, but some.

(Note: although the book focuses on a historical period, I still count it as anthropology, because it's more concerned with how people lived, rather than events. "Historical anthropology" is a recognized specialization within the discipline, and it kind of overlaps with archaeology, which is one of the major sub-fields of anthropology.)

McClelland's book started off well, which is why I brought it home from the library. A bit of historical context, about how Europeans came into contact with Benin in the sixteenth century, and then it uses their accounts to describe the geography of the kingdom, and the city of Benin itself. Given the use to which I'm going to be putting this information, I don't particularly need Archaeologist Brain to quibble with the decision to term Benin a "city;" it doesn't matter to me what size or population density or kinds of infrastructure it had, and whether it does, in fact, meet the archaeological criteria for analyzing a population center as urban in nature. (These criteria do matter, when you're trying to answer questions like how urbanization happens.) Me, I care more about what the houses looked like, and how the place was laid out. I can extrapolate from there.

But I do notice, as I read, that McClelland hasn't really explained to me where she's getting her information from -- not in detail. We are apparently drawing on the records of Portugueses, Dutch, English, and French traders -- who are they, and when were they visiting the area? Which details are drawn from which record? She only clarifies this in a few places, not nearly enough. We also benefit from archaeological work, but not very much of it; this book was written in 1971, and the excavation that had been done back then was very scanty. (And yes, I'm taking the time period into account when I criticize this book.)

Of course, this is popular nonfiction; I don't expect in-line citations for every last detail. But I notice, as I go along, that McClelland's few references are overwhelmingly skewed toward one particular Dutch writer, identified only by the initials D.R. It makes me wonder how much of her info comes from his single account. (I suspect quite a lot.) Nobody seems to know who he was, which means I have no context for his observations; McClelland must know when he wrote his account, but she doesn't even tell me that. No bibliography, either. Hrmph. Your rigor, it does not impress me.

But okay. There are maps -- this is good -- and photographs of artifacts and excavations, and reproductions of historical engravings. There's a floorplan for a chief's house that looks like it may have been adapted from an archaeological diagram. The caption for one of the engravings notes inaccuracies in the image; the roof does not match with what's known of actual structures at the time. These are good signs! We are documenting our sources, and noting places where they don't match up. Five points to Gryffindor!

Then the book moves outside the city of Benin and into the countryside, where it begins talking about village life. And here's where it gets more dubious.

McClelland launches this section by talking about rural houses. Here we get, not archaeological diagrams or historical illustrations, but photographs. But okay; when you get down to it, this kind of architecture is often quite conservative, because it draws on local materials and answers local needs, neither of which tend to change all that rapidly. (If you live in a hot and humid area and have wood to build with, your houses will look like X. If you live in a hot and dry area and have dirt to build with, your houses will look like Y.) McClelland tells me that "people have lived in houses like this for hundreds of years," and I'm willing to accept that as true enough to be going on with. I'd like to know if we have archaeological data to back up the assertion that these modern houses are like the historical ones, but for now, I'm okay.

Then she gets into rural society -- how it was governed, how markets were run. Did D.R. or some other Europeans go out into the countryside, or hear from people in the city that markets were held every fourth day? McClelland doesn't say. Then she gets into the daily labor of Benin society, how hunting and farming and fishing were done (useful to me, since it helps build an ecological picture in my mind), and weaving and pottery --

Gee, it's nice of those European traders to describe in detail such mundane practices as the firing of household pots! And wait, what's this? More photographs! Of modern people!

Okay. There is, in fact, a recognized method in anthropology/archaeology of taking things modern people do and using them to understand what people did in the past. This is both common and very tricky to do right. In the Bad Old Days of the field, writers assumed that those primitive people over there were stuck in earlier "evolutionary stages" of human culture, and therefore one could TOTALLY use them as a window into the past. Whee! Yeah, not so much. But at the same time, you can learn things by looking at how current people live. Nobody carries out a 100% hunter-gatherer lifestyle anymore, untouched by sedentary societies, but that doesn't mean there isn't value in looking at how far modern foragers walk in search of various resources, or how they diversify their subsistence strategy to make sure they're not excessively dependent on one food source. If you're careful with your data, and think about it critically, this can be a very useful technique.

It's possible that when McClelland talks about firing pots, and shows photos of modern women doing that work, what she means is that somebody has looked at the archaeological evidence of pot-firing in the past -- kiln pit construction, scorch marks, chemical composition of the soil, etc -- and compared it against the evidence left behind by modern techniques, and found they're very similar. It's possible. McClelland doesn't give me any reason to believe it, though. So she is committing the anthropological sin of filling in the historical gaps with modern evidence, assuming that twentieth-century Beninese are Just Like their sixteenth-century ancestors.

Um. No.

I'm almost entertained, in a perverse way, to see that she pairs this with the inverse (which is not the same thing as the avoidance) of another anthropological sin. There's a thing known as the "anthropological present," which has to do with the way ethnographic writing tends to describe its object in the present tense, obscuring chronological gradations, and generally giving the hazy sense that the people under discussion live in some kind of timeless, unchanging state. McClelland's book employs what I can only call the anthropological past: she says that "The Yoruba women were especially skilled in making patterned cloth by preventing the dye from reaching certain parts of it," and then goes on to explain the process of tie-dying (which I guess was still new-fangled in the U.K. in 1971? Dunno).

That paragraph sits directly across from a color photograph of a woman in the process of tie-dying some cloth.

I can't even tell if we're talking about historical Benin anymore. Did they wear tie-dyed garments? There's no references to indicate whether they did or not; just the use of the past tense, amid a sea of other details that tell me McClelland is taking all her evidence from modern-day West Africa. It simultaneously asserts that the present is totally like the past, and erases that present, by treating it as if it were over and done with. And then, at the end of this temporal mess, we get this:

The photographs that illustrate this chapter were taken only 10 years ago. The weavers and potters of the part of Nigeria around Benin still practise the same skills as did their sixteenth-century ancestors.

No. You don't drop a pair of sentences at the END of your chapter to patch over the giant leap you've been making for the past ten pages or more, without any supporting evidence that were you were justified in leaping at all.

If you have to do this sort of thing -- and you often don't, but okay, your book is only fifty-one pages, and if you skipped this part for lack of evidence, you'd have no book at all -- then you START your chapter by saying, we don't have a lot of archaeological or archival documentation of how these things were done back then, but we do have X, Y, and Z that make us think we can probably look to modern practices to shed light on the past. Here are some weavers from ten years ago; their spindle whorls and warp weights look a lot like the ones found in excavations of historical Benin. Here are some quotes that indicate historical Beninese wore tie-dyed cloth, and some photographs showing how tie-dying is done today. The plants used for the dyes are common in the area, so we think those are probably the same. Here is how they fire pots nowadays, and we have no idea whether that's how it was done back then because nobody's dug up a kiln pit yet, but the pottery they produce looks like the shards that have been dug up, so there's that.

Always, always be clear about where and when the information comes from. If you have to analogize between periods several centuries apart to bridge the gaps in your knowledge, own that fact. Don't write about modern Yoruba women in the past tense, and hope I believe you're talking about people in the sixteenth century.

Even for 1971, this is not very good.

So, to recap: McClelland's book commits several basic sins of anthropological writing. It
seems to rely heavily on a single documentary source of uncertain origin and dubious reliability,
fails to signal when it abandons historical evidence for modern,
makes no attempt to show a convincing rationale for using modern evidence, and
deliberately erases the present in its attempt to talk about the past.

If you read books of this kind, watch out for such things. Ask yourself where the evidence comes from. Pay attention to what tense the author is using, and whether that obscures temporal gaps in what's being described. Any time something outside the scope of the discussion gets brought in for puposes of analogy or proof, give it the side-eye, unless the author makes a good argument for why it's justified.
Whew, that was long. Feel free to chip in with similar points or examples in the comments, and I'll answer any questions I can. I really have a hard time telling how much of this is obvious and self-explanatory, how much is obvious once you know to think about it, and how much is still half-buried in arcane anthropological jargon.

Also, if you know of any better books on daily life in the kingdom of Benin, please do let me know. :-)

unexpected hazards in letter-writing

So I wrote the first Onyx Court letter tonight, and after abandoning one slightly messy-looking attempt two sentences in, succeeded at producing fair copy.

Then I folded it up, got out the sealing wax stick -- which has a wick, like a miniature candle designed to drip copious wax -- and nearly lit the damn letter on fire.

Need to experiment and figure out if it's wick length or what that caused burning bits to drip off it along with the wax. Or, y'know, give up on the sealing wax thing. But I have this stuff, and never use it! This seems like the perfect excuse! I just didn't consider this as one of the possible hazards when I set out to write these letters.

Books read, January 2012

Hey, alecaustin ! You thought your book post was embarrassingly late? ;-)

Before we get more than a quarter of the way through February, I should talk about what I read last month.

Guardian of the Dead, Karen Healey. Loved this one. I am gung-ho to see more urban fantasy, whether YA or adult, that acknowledges there are supernatural options other than vampire/werewolf/etc, especially options that aren't northwestern European in origin. Healey's book is set in New Zealand, and while I utterly lack the background to judge how accurately she depicts the supernatural element, my impression is favorable: it doesn't feel shoehorned into a European paradigm, and also doesn't feel Wow Look at This Exotic Thing I Found. It helps that race and colonialism get mentioned, rather than ignored, and also that the story makes it clear New Zealand magic stuff isn't the only magic stuff in the world.

It did start on a slightly rocky footing -- largely, I think, because the main character is (through no fault of her own) extremely confused about what's going on at first. Like, on the level of forgetting conversations, or remembering things differently than they went two pages before. This led, in a few places, to me being confused too, which was a bit of a problem. I also have to admit I found the book structurally weird, in that the plot that shows up early on -- which looks very much like the kind of plot you see in a lot of YA urban fantasy -- turns out to be almost a side note to the actual plot, which shows up later on. That shift of gear startled me a bit. Despite those quibbles, though, I very much liked where the story ended up going; it hit a lot of my love-of-the-numinous buttons, and also showed a remarkable willingness not to flinch back from consequences. I'll forgive a lot more than this book's flaws, in exchange for those things.

Fox and Phoenix, Beth Bernobich. Alas, although I wanted to love this one, I didn't. Three reasons, I think. First, I haven't read the short story that serves as a prequel, and the references to its events kept making me aware of that lack. (Especially since the plot of that one sounded more fun.) Second, and more trivially, I was unpersuaded by the world; I like the fact that it's Chinese in basis, but the blending of magic and tech felt awkward to me, with chi being referred to as "magic flux" and essentially treated like electricity. Third, and most unfortunately, I just didn't like the main character. I think he might have been fun in the short story, but here he's the sort of boy who shirks his chores and ignores his homework and avoids the girl who used to be his best friend because she's "bossy." Me, I wanted to read about the best friend, who actually put effort into studying magic and preparing for obstacles and so on. (There was, very unfortunately, a moment late in the book when the protagonist thinks to himself that he's been useless, that his friends have done all the real work. I was inclined to agree.) So this one was a miss.

Bloodhound, Tamora Pierce. Sequel to Terrier, and a Tortall book. Further adventures of being a cop in a pre-modern society. I kind of want to send all writers of "gritty" epic fantasy to read this series; Pierce doesn't rape and torture her characters, but she pays attention to things like how counterfeiting can destroy a kingdom's economy, with devastating consequences for the populace. That, to me, is real grit. The notion of the Court of the Rogue is, admittedly, on the romantic side, but that's an inheritance from the earlier (and less gritty) Tortall books, so I can forgive it. And the story at least acknowledges some interesting ethical questions about the contact between cops and criminals. If it slides away from answering those questions outright, that's okay; people slide away from uncomfortable things like that all the time, so I can easily believe that the characters do the same. Whether or not it gets resolved in a later book, I will have to wait and see.

I could have wished for a better villain motivation -- the ones responsible for the counterfeiting turn out to have been kind of stupid and selfish, in ways that disappointed me a little bit -- but still, pretty good stuff.

Minor Arcana, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Guide to Korvosa. Gaming book, for the Pathfinder RPG. Ignore the bit where it tells you how many people live in Korvosa. Or just add another digit, and then the city it describes will make more sense.

Enchanted Glass, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray. Another serious miss. Some of my complaints are trivial; I recognize that not everybody will be bothered by ladies in Victorian London riding on top of an omnibus, or the "white" dome of St. Paul's being apparently unmarred by all the pollution. Some of my complaints are less trivial: a teacher at a British finishing school spouting mythology that sounds more like late twentieth-century neopaganism, or nobody thinking to suggest that the red-haired, green-eyed girl surnamed Doyle might be, y'know, Irish. Some probably should have put me off the book right from the start, but they weren't as blatant as they got later, and I was able at first to process them as the prejudices of an upper-class Victorian protagonist, which might be called out by the narrative as it went along. But no, there really are just Gypsies running around outside the finishing school -- one of whom is a fortune-telling old lady, the other of whom is the Inappropriate Paramour of one of the girls at the school -- and, well, the best thing you can say about the treatment of the Indian character is that he ended up pretty much being irrelevant to the story. I'm sure his secret magical order will continue to play a role in later books (an order which he proudly proclaims to be older than King Arthur or Charlemagne -- way to ignore his actual culture, there), but I don't intend to read on to find out.

Reading on did allow me to discover that the book has some moderately decent things to say about female friendship, and the constriction of social roles in that time period. But it wasn't nearly enough to counter-balance the flaws.

Servant of the Underworld, Aliette de Bodard. Yay, back to the better stuff! First of a series of fantasy mysteries set in pre-contact Tenochtitlan. The only way in which I am the wrong audience for this book is that I was occasionally impatient for it to stop explaining things I already knew. But since your average reader probably needs those explanations, I can't really fault it for that.

The story is, as markgritter has noted, not quite a mystery in the genre sense; the point is less to figure out whodunnit than to stop whoeverdunnit from carrying out their nefarious plan. The shift from one to the other is, as with Guardian of the Dead, a little jarring. And I confess I felt just a little bit out of step with the characterization throughout, in a way I can't quite articulate. But still. Aztecs! Fantasy! I went out and bought the two sequels, and am looking forward to them.

The Game, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

We're off to a slow start so far this month, but hopefully that will pick up.

The DWJ Project: The Game

This, like Wild Robert, is a shorter piece published on its own; I'd guess it's a novella, in terms of length. Hayley, having disgraced herself to the grandparents who raised her, is sent to live with her numerous cousins, who play an unnamed and very odd game involving a realm known as the mythosphere.

. . . and I really can't say much more than that without giving spoilers, because the story itself is so short.

I like The Game; I just wish -- as I often do with DWJ's pieces in this range -- that it were longer. It doesn't partake of the flaws that tend to weaken her actual short stories, but it also doesn't have room to fully leverage the virtues of her novels. The concept of the mythosphere is nifty, but I want a whole novel exploring it; the brief glimpses we get here only make me wish for more.

And now, the spoilers!

I have to say, the mythology in this one is pretty obscure. I used to know my Greek mythology on a nationally competitive level -- no really; I did NJCL for years -- and I'm not sure I could have named all seven Pleiades on command, or recognized them in disguised form. The more famous characters, like Mercury and Jupiter, are almost wholly offstage, and the names are altered enough to make identification tricky. This does undercut things a little bit, since the story is so short; the note at the end, explaining who everybody is, has to do more of the heavy lifting than it should.

However, the mythosphere stuff is awesome. Hayley's experience as a comet is a joy to read; I love how it combines both the image and the scientific reality, without acting like those two paradigms have to cancel each other out. I wish we got more exploration of that, not because it fails to stand as it is, but because there's so much unused potential there. Some of it, admittedly, can't be done in a novel; if the mythosphere incorporates not just stories from ancient religions but all stories, then presumably you can find a strand that will lead you to Frodo Baggins, or Superman, or Mickey Mouse. But I think you could do some fascinating things with comparative mythology, since the strands seem to be organized thematically.

I also liked the very DWJ-ish moment when Hayley realizes how long she's been living with her grandparents, without ever being allowed to grow up. Pleone isn't nearly as abusive as some of the other parental figures wandering around her ouevre, but she definitely belongs in that camp.
Archer's Goon is next! (I've actually finished reading it already; I'm just behind on posting.)

I am trying very hard not to be doomed

Oh, god. I blame kniedzw . And also the research question that sent me to my bookshelf last night, searching for a book that was not in either of the sections I expected it to be in, so I scanned along the shelf looking for it, and found this instead.

I had completely forgotten that Once Upon an Eon Ago, kniedzw purchased the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship.

Which is a reproduction of an honest-to-god 1864 system of penmanship instruction. This thing is . . . wow. The theory book starts with "Signals," which are the cues the teacher should use, "by bell, tap, or by counting, at the teacher's discretion." They are as follows:

Position at Desk.
Arrange Books.
Find Copy and adjust Arms.
Open Inkstands -- In double desks the pupils on the left (the pupil's right) will open and close inkstands.
Take Pens.

At this point the teacher should pay particular attention to giving instruction in penholding. When ready to write, give the order to TAKE INK.

No, seriously. I have this vivid image of a dank, grim little classroom, the teacher standing stiffly at the front, rows of bows and girls at the desks in uncomfortable suits and dresses, moving like proper little Victorian automata while the teacher rings his bell. Which probably isn't far off the mark.

The real question, of course, is whether I am going to subject myself to the Spencerian System for the letters from the Onyx Court. I know better than to put this to a popular vote; you all, being not the ones who would suffer through it, will cackle and tell me to doooooo iiiiiiit. And I am so very much not sure it would be worth it. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop myself . . . .


Edited to add: oh my god, it's even worse than I thought. The instructions for each exercise!

Turn in n, x, and v, at top and base the same, i.e. as short as possible with continuous motion. The x combines Principles 3, 1, 2, 1. The v combines 3, 1, 2, 2. After the combination is written, finish x by beginning at the base line, crossing upward through middle of First Principle, with a straight line, on the same slant with curves, and ending at upper line. Finish v same as w. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, dot 1, cross, cross.

No really, I think the teacher is supposed to be counting out each movement for the students. I am increasingly afraid of this book.