Sarah Monette's Blog, page 45

5 things in the snow

1. Fantasy Magazine is having a poll to choose their best story from 2010. "After the Dragon" is on the ballot. (They're running a similar poll for Lightspeed .

2. Texas writer/artist/reviewer Melissa Mia Hall died last week because, not having health insurance, she couldn't afford to see a doctor. This won't happen to me because I got lucky, but it could happen to many of my friends.

What gives us the right to call ourselves a civilized country again?

3. matociquala 's The Sea Thy Mistress is officially out today.

4. Baby Amur leopard meets snow.

5. #5 is that I need to get off my ass and feed the cats, so I can make my dressage lesson. Excelsior!

PRE-SALE POST: Ben Jonson Memorial Fundraiser

THIS IS NOT THE SALE POST. YOU CANNOT BUY THINGS FROM HERE.


So here's the thing. Due to the RLS being a complete monster for the past week, I haven't been getting to sleep before about four in the morning--and therefore, haven't been able to drag myself out of bed before noon. Or one. (I hate this, btw, but that's not the point here.) Also, Wednesday, I have a dressage lesson at three, and I know for a fact that if I'm setting up sale posts to go live at two, I will be late. Which is bad.

So I'm making a change. The Ben Jonson Memorial Fundraiser will start at midnight CST, February 2nd, and run 'til midnight CST, February 3rd. This is much more realistic vis-à-vis my actual life right now.


How we're gonna work it:

Except for the production costs of Unnatural Creatures, all the money goes to the Companion Animal Fund.

I will pay shipping costs, and I will ship anywhere in the world. Depending on what the total ends up being, that may mean a lot of things get shipped Media Mail.

After the sale, I will set up a post with screened comments so that y'all can provide your shipping information. Also, if you want things personalized (e.g., To Gawain, with best wishes, Sarah Monette), I am happy to do so. You can specify the name or names in the screened comment. If you don't want an inscription, that's cool, too.

There will be three sale posts, one for the Doctrine of Labyrinths auction, one for the Unnatural Creatures subscription, and one for all the items that I'm simply selling.

1. The auction will run from midnight to midnight. Starting bid is $100.

2. Unnatural Creatures will be on sale from midnight to midnight. You can buy as many copies as you like. I won't place the order with Lulu until after the sale ends (and possibly a little after that, depending on when hominysnark gets the cover finished), so there's no need to worry about running out. I will order as many copies as have been paid for at the end of the sale. Please be advised that, since I will have to sign all of them once Lulu has shipped them to me, it may take me a while to get them shipped out to y'all.

3. Everything else. How this part of the sale is going to work goes like this: (1) You make a comment to the post indicating that you want to buy an item. (2) I reply to the comment, letting you know that the item is yours. (3) Then you PayPal me. I don't want anybody paying me when they are, for instance, the sixth person to comment for the five Companion to Wolves hardbacks. Also, if you are having cash-flow issues (as I know at least one interested party is), you may stake your claim during the sale and pay me later. I will not ship anything until the money has transferred, and I won't hold items indefinitely, but you can have a couple days' grace if you need it.


Also, if you don't want to buy anything (or can't afford to buy the thing you want), but would like to make a donation in Ben's memory (for whatever amount--if you can only spare a dollar but want to contribute, that is perfectly okay with me), I will figure out how to set up a PayPal button on the catch-all post so that that can be easy.


If there's anything I've forgotten to address, or anything that's unclear, or heck, just anything you want to ask about, please comment.

Project Valkyrie: waterlog

50(?) minutes, 36 laps.
295 miles, 31 laps.

I'm not sure about the time, because when I came out into the pool area, there was no lifeguard--just the intramural swim team coaches--and we (the middle-aged man who was the other person doing lap swim and I) had to wait for one.

Also, there's nothing like walking out of the gym lobby into a face-full of snow.

5 things, last Sunday of January edition

1. Beowulf socks FTW!

2. yuki_onna has an excellent rant about the portrayal of the USSR by Western authors, which has some common ground with my rant yesterday about the portrayal of pre-Enlightenment cultures by post-Enlightenment authors.

3. Cake Wrecks' Sunday Sweets this week include this impossibly adorable Baby Cthulhu cake.

4. jaylake wants pictures of what you're doing today. As he says, "Not exactly a contest. More like group art."

ETA: My contribution, feeding feral cats (for some reason, LiveJournal is not letting pictures show up in posts or comments at this time, so here's the link):


(Other pics: 1 (without zoom, so that's the actual distance between him and me), 2, 3.)

5. I was hoping to go spectate at a horse show this weekend, but the RLS and associated dyshypnia (is that even a word? sleep dysfunctionality is what I mean--I suppose dyssomnia would be the other option) mean that I have not been able to drag myself out of bed before noon, and the show is two hours away. So no ponies for me, which makes me sad. (The RLS makes me tired and frustrated and stressed, which doesn't help, either.) You are welcome to post things that might help me be more cheerful, although please note that that is posed as an invitation, not a demand.

UBC: The Devil's Dominion

Godbeer, Richard. The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.


There are two problems that I complain about persistently when I'm blogging about the Salem Witchcraft Crisis. One is the tendency of Salem historians to go around proclaiming that they have found the One! True! Cause! The other is the failure of modern historians to cope with witchcraft beliefs.

Godbeer avoids complaint #1; this is only partly a book about Salem, and his scope--magic and the occult in seventeenth-century New England--is broad enough that he avoids the temptation of Salem-specific hobby-horses (although he has a hobby-horse or two of his own, as I'll discuss further down the page). In fact, one of the most useful things about The Devil's Dominion is the chapter in which Godbeer looks at the broad spectrum of causes for anxiety in Essex County in the two decades leading up to the trials: raids by Native Americans, hostile micromanagement by the English government, Quakers (seriously--Quakers were as threatening to Puritans as Catholics), smallpox.

On the other hand, he falls down absymally over complaint #2. He criticizes John Putnam Demos for his psychoanalytic model of witchcraft affliction, without seeming to realize that his own model of how affliction expressed anxieties about salvation and personal responsibility for sin does exactly the same thing, and even more meretriciously. For example:

The boy's repeated attempts to confess indicate a sense of personal culpability, yet his very belief that he was tempted by the Devil placed him in a passive role. Eventually he redefined the situation by becoming possessed. Possession constituted both abdication and recognition of responsibility. The boy [...] had transformed himself into a victim and became the recipient of much public sympathy.
(113)

And:

Local communities became gripped by the spectacle of the possessed because it spoke to a central spiritual issue: liability for sin. The struggle of the victim struck a resonant chord in the community at large: through another's possession, people could experience vicariously the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan.
(119)

1. "he redefined the situation by becoming possessed": here and elsewhere, Godbeer is very sloppy about respecting the worldview of his subjects. The suggestion that the boy consciously chose to become possessed means that, really, this book should be about conmen and gulls. Throughout, while he acknowledges that "ordinary people" believed in magic, he tends to assume implicitly that cunning folk and confessing witches and afflicted and possessed people, deep down in their heart of hearts, know better. For example, in talking about Katherine Harrison's prediction that Elizabeth Bateman would not marry the man who was currently courting her, but would marry a man named Simon: "There could be any number of explanations for Harrison's accuracy: she may have realized that their master's opposition to the marriage was unshakeable; she may have been using the medium of fortune-telling to lobby on Simon Smith's [Bateman's eventual husband] behalf. What matters for our purpose here is that townsfolk not privy to such explanations automatically assumed that Harrison had occult powers" (33-34). He assumes there has to be an "explanation," that Harrison must have been basing her prediction on psychology or on a preference for a different man (although from Godbeer's very brief discussion, I notice that we, as readers, have no evidence that Harrison knew Simon Smith at all; nor do we know how much time elapsed between prediction and marriage). In Godbeer's view, Harrison must have been scamming Bateman. At another point, talking about Puritan intellectuals' habit of collecting weird occurrences (or "especial providences," in Puritan vocabulary), "Hull did not try to interpret these wonders; nor did Winthrop. [...] But neither did they express any doubt as to the objective reality of these bizarre phenomena" (58).

"Objective reality"? That's a post-Enlightenment yardstick, and it very emphatically needs not to be applied to pre-Enlightenment thinkers. It puts the discussion in terms that none of the people under discussion would have used or been comfortable with. Or, to use another post-Enlightenment term, grokked.

Now, I am not saying that historians of seventeenth-century New England have to believe in divination or witchcraft or any other point of their subjects' cosmology. But I am saying that they have to approach that cosmology, and all those beliefs, with respect and without trying to explain them away for post-Enlightenment readers. Because in so doing, all the historian accomplishes is to put another layer of obscuration and confusion over his or her analytical lens. And implicitly encourages the belief that his or her pre-Enlightenment subjects were a bunch of gullible fools. Which they were not.

2. "a central spiritual issue: liability for sin": this is Godbeer's hobby-horse. He insists on viewing all occult practices and fears in New England through this lens, which I think makes him twist a lot of things out of true.

3. "the emotional relief provided by temporary fusion of self and Satan": this seems to me GRIEVOUSLY to misinterpret and misrepresent Puritans. I don't want to commit the same mistake in reverse, so I'm trying to resist the impulse to an equally sweeping generalization. But my reading of and about Puritans has indicated that their worldview was all about the struggle between good and evil. That if spectacles of witchcraft affliction struck a resonant chord in local communities (which I actually tend to agree it did), it wasn't because there was any relief of any kind in the "temporary fusion of self and Satan" (a very modern idea, and one that dismisses any layers of meaning of the concept of Satan beyond the psychological) but because the spectacle was a direct representation of the cosmic struggle Puritans believed themselves to be principal actors in.

4. "Possession": Godbeer's use of this term irritated me into yelling at the book, partly because he was very close to doing something clever, innovative, and extremely useful and he booted it.

What Godbeer was gesturing toward was a comparison of witchcraft affliction and spirit possession. I think this is a fascinating idea and potentially useful, like the comparisons with nineteenth-century hysterics. The problem is that Godbeer rushes his fences: he doesn't lay out the parameters of the comparison (which means he elides the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, as well as benevolent and malevolent), and rather than making a careful and nuanced analysis, he collapses affliction and possession into one thing, whereas for New England Puritans, they were very different things (even though they might look quite similar) and belonged in different categories. Affliction was what happened when you angered a witch, or when the Devil was trying to coerce you into serving him. Possession was what happened when you agreed to serve the Devil. One was a sign of virtue, the other a sign of evil. Girls like Elizabeth Knapp and Mary Warren wavered back and forth across that line, confessing and recanting having signed the Devil's covenant, and it has been clear to me, from what I've read, that those two states were recognized and treated as distinct by those around them. Conflating them makes it easier to talk about witchcraft, but it also muddles the very thing you're trying to understand.

As with Escaping Salem , the other book of Godbeer's that I've read, The Devil's Dominion is competent to very good research-wise: he's read a lot more Puritan divines than I could ever bear to, that's for sure, and he did an excellent job of laying out primary evidence for the schism between the legal definition of witchcraft (a covenant with the Devil) and the popular definition of witchcraft (maleficium: doing harm to others by occult means), and I only wish he'd done a better job of talking about why that schism persisted and its causal relationship to the history of witchcraft proceedings. Analytically, the book ranges from plebeian to reductive to what I would call out and out wrong.

So, interesting but frustrating. As so many books on the subject seem to be.

morbid much?

So I've figured out why American history always bored me stupid in school. It's because I could care less about the Narrative of Progress which is how American history is generally taught. I'm fascinated by the disasters.
Tombstone and the Gunfight Near the O.K. Corral
Little Big Horn
the Donner Party(There's a reason one of my tags is clusterfucks of the old west.)the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692
murders like those of Mary Rogers and Helen Jewett1

And something reminded me this morning--I can't even tell you what--of what may be the first of these obsessions with morbid Americana: the terrible death of Floyd Collins. I first learned about Floyd Collins on a Girl Scout trip to Mammoth Cave when I was fourteen or so, and I've had a sort of aversion/compulsion complex about him ever since. Someday, I am going to figure out the story that wants to be written around him and write the damn thing.

But in the meantime--yes, what interests me is the underbelly2 of the American Dream.

---
1On the other side of the Atlantic, I was fascinated by Angela Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary, which is of the same morbid genre.
2Like Shelob's: "Her vast belly was above him with its putrid light, and the stench of it almost smote him down" (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers 428).

one more reason for the Ben Jonson Memorial Fundraiser

I went by the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital today to pick up Ben's ashes. I spoke briefly to the vet who had taken care of him, about the autopsy results (not final yet, but it looks like it was most likely lymphoma). As I was getting ready to go, the vet said, "Wait, wait--I think I have something for you." He disappeared and came back with a ClayPaws plaque they had made for us of Ben's paws. Please note: we didn't ask them to do this--wouldn't even have thought of it. They just did it. It may be the nicest damn thing a stranger has ever done for me, and it made me cry there in the waiting room.

I am so grateful to them, and I'm glad I have a way to say thank you.

Project Valkyrie: waterlog

55 minutes, 36 laps.
294 miles, 31 laps.

Lovely empty pool. It occurs to me that my definition of "personal space" may be a little . . . how shall we put this? Extreme.

not everything we touch dies

Via ihasahotdog, an happy update on some of the dogs rescued in the 2008 Michael Vick bust.

first lines

Time for the first line meme! Because I need to organize my head.

1. The Goblin Emperor
Maia woke to the grip of his cousin's cold hand on his shoulder.

2. An Apprentice to Elves [with matociquala ]
Tin laced her fingers together across her gravid belly and frowned along her nose at the feeble human child.

3. Thirdhop Scarp (Kyle Murchison Booth)
The current owner of Thirdhop Scarp claims that the name is a contraction of "third hope," but this is etymologically dubious in the extreme; still improbable but far more likely is the local explanation: that if you fall off the escarpment, you reach the bottom in three hops.

4. "The Haunting of Peter Ludgate" (KMB)
The terrible irony in Katharine Blood's name became apparent in her death.

5. "The Moon Key" (KMB)
The vampire was waiting for me when I got home.

6. "All the King's Horses" (KMB)
[no first line yet]
[title from Peter Mulvey, "Stephen's Green": All the king's horses / That you once swore you'd seen / Are still waiting for you / Back in Stephen's Green"--it's a story about carousel horses, and right now that's all I know]

7. Blue Lace Agate (Ghoul Hunters)
[first line recalled for refurbishing]

8. "The Brides of Nyarlathotep" (GH)
The Renault case refused to break. Snapshots of the victims had gone up on the corkboard in the briefing room, one by one, and most of the agents in the Bureau of Paranormal Investigations' southeast hub could recite their names by heart: Lydia Renault, age 27; Mary Anne Sumner, age 24; Dale Kelton, age 25; Joella Barber, age 24. And they were waiting, sick and helpless, for number five.

9. "Under Babylon" (GH)
Mick Sharpton's howl of outrage--"oh fuck no!"--was clearly audible in the junior agents' office.

10. "Hiroshima After Hours" (GH)
[no first line yet]
[what did WWII look like in Mick & Jamie's world?]

11. "Crossing Styx"
"Think of it as a vacation," Jamie suggested. Mick's reply was physically impossible, but very creative.

12. "The Bone Jesus"
[no first line yet]

13. [no title yet]
When a full-bird Colonel of the Interstellar Military Corps, Medical Division, tells you that you're a miracle, you believe her.

14. [no title yet]
It was noon before the new wheeler said anything to me.

15. Dark Sister
Nephael cannot remember Heaven.

16. Schrödinger's Parable of the Cat
Denise Blumenthal died on a beautiful spring morning in the polity of Greater Manhattan.

17. Cormorant Child
With a shriek of protesting metal, the hatch opened, and Mule fell out of the palace-ship into the long grass of the Edrin Valley. He was trying to run before he made it to his feet.

18. "Pellucid"
The windship Pellucid heeled over, her sails filling as they caught the wind called the Mariah, one of the winds that blew so steadily across the desert that they had been mapped more than a century before: the Mariah, the Medusa, and the Mother of Angels, which had another name among windship crews.

19. [no title yet]
The wayhouse was gutted.

20. "Clouded Mary"
Clouded Mary descended from the train one careful step at a time. She gripped her valise tightly in her kidskin fingers, mindful of the one ripped seam where her steel armature poked through.

21. The Marriage of True Minds
Sanspiro Base is a company town all the way. Ginmet's proprietary newsfeed is all there is, unless you know how to hack the commset for Radio Free Sanspiro or W-FCK or one of the other half dozen or so pirate stations that aren't worth anybody's time to hunt down. And they get their news from Ginmet anyway, so it's only a matter of which sauce you want with today's helping of lies.

22. [no title yet]
May 18, 187- / My dearest Nancy, / We have finally reached Father's new posting at Fort W---, after a gruelling five day journey from Madison.

23. "Doc Holliday Makes a Deal"
I died on November 8, 1887. It was not a pleasant experience. Even less pleasant, however, was finding that death was not a permanent and irrevocable state of being in which a man could lie quiet and be eaten by worms as it pleased them. As it turned out, death was anything but.

24. [no title yet]
The Emperor's head hit the floor with a wet thud. The body stayed upright a moment longer, and then simply collapsed; the blood jetting out of its neck soaked Moth through before he could think to move.

25. The White Devil
"So," said Viv. "How was MLA?"

26. "The Witch of Arvien"
The water closed over her head for the second time.

27. The Second Son
On the twenty-fourth of April, Medraut dreamed of Loheris again.

28. "The Skyscrapers of Bianch'Elen"
Long ago, in a world none of them can remember, the vampires were taught to dance.

29. [no title yet]
The woman in my office had been dead for five days when I found her. The smell was unbearable, but the ghost was worse.

30. Black Hart Circle
There were four in the game. Deep play, deeper than the pockets of at least two of them. Lydia Nash might be as collected as a woman choosing a new hat, but Esme Collier and Kori Fletcher were out of their depth, and Fan Carpenter didn't look any too comfortable either.

31. [no title yet]
They'd taken the crime scene tape down from the basketball court.

32. "The Kitsune's Tragedy"
The English milord would not last out the day.

33. [no title yet]
Ludovic Priest was under the dashboard of a '79 Comet when Skeeter sang out, "Bully lights!"

34. "Marjorie Kelly"
When I was thirteen years old, I murdered my best friend. Before you can understand anything else, you have to understand that.

35. The House at the End of the World
When Sebastian Marlin became a man, there was no one to celebrate with.

36. [no title yet]
The werewolf had hooked his iPod up to the stereo and put it on shuffle. He'd danced stiffly around the room to a Paul Cebar song and now stood at the window, whiskey glass forgotten in one hand, staring out across the rooftops at the sunset.

37. The Sidhetown Tigers
Jefferson Finch was a lousy pitcher, but he was the best we had.

38. "The Queen in Winter"
There were five queens in the creche. Beulah, Pauline, Camille, Thelma, and Katrina. Beulah was the favorite, and one night after the nurses had gone to bed, the others ganged up on her. There were only four queens after that.

39. "The Tale of Two Dead Mice"
Once upon a time, there were two dead mice, white and small and sleek. One had eyes as green as gangrene, and the other had eyes as red as spurting arterial blood. At night--when, being dead, they did not sleep--their eyes glowed like lanterns, and if they wished to hide, they had to shut them tightly.

40. The Werewolf Laura Stiles
Callum pushed back from his desk violently, as if physical distance could get him farther away from the collection of mistakes currently masquerading as the English 201 midterm.

41. Winter's Tale
I woke up in a nearly empty lecture hall.

42. [no title yet]
"What are you doing, sister-wife?"

43a. "(Un)fallen"
[no first line yet, just the ornithopter photograph]

43b. "(Un)fallen"
The pain is intense, sharp, and localizes itself gradually, as Vij comes closer to consciousness, into a throbbing knot on the back of ser skull, just behind ser left ear. Se reaches to touch it, groans as that wakes a whole new set of pains through ser left shoulder and arm, and only then wonders why se is corporeal at all.

44. The Further Adventures of Teddy Truetext
[no first line yet]

45. [no title yet/YA(1)]
Diana leaned closer to the mirror.

46. [no title yet/YA(2)]
Never mind what I got sent to Pridmount for.

47. [no title yet/YA(3)]
After his third time in the Cage, Jude began to lose his childhood. He wasn't aware of it at first, so he never knew where it started, but one morning, he looked at the picture of his family where it stood on the tiny, wobbly table by his bed, and he couldn't remember who the other kid was.

48. Yes, No, Always, Never
[no first line yet]
[Cardenio Richey and Vey Coruscant's copy of the Principia Caeli]

49. The Bride of Vranar
[no first line yet]

50. "Dragons of Earth and Sky"
[no first line yet]

51. "The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, QUEEN OF LIVERPOOL"
The Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool, had been grounded for thirty years, since the successful implementation of Chen and Tiedemann's q-curve drive had made her and all her sisters obsolete.

52. [shorthand: Moria-Berlin]

53. [shorthand: "Cold Missouri Waters"/"Lawrence, Kansas"/wizards]

54. [shorthand: homeless vampires]

55. [shorthand: were-tigers]

56. [main character's name: Varya]

57. [main character's name: Owl]

Coming up with ideas? So not my problem.