Greer Gilman's Blog, page 35
June 29, 2016
June 24, 2016
Slap on the wrist
Damn.
3 months for Collet Stephan, served in community under strict house arrest.
4 months jail for David Stephan; people in crowd cry out "What?"
Hot from the Calgary Herald
Nine
3 months for Collet Stephan, served in community under strict house arrest.
4 months jail for David Stephan; people in crowd cry out "What?"
Hot from the Calgary Herald
Nine
June 22, 2016
Stiff-necked
I am incandescent with rage. At not quite 19 months, Ezekiel Stephan died an excruciating, lingering, pre-modern death of untreated bacterial meningitis and a purulent right lung. His alt-med, all-natural parents, David and Collet, who still plume themselves on their godlike diagnostic and prescriptive powers, faffed around for two-and-a-half weeks play-doctoring him with magic remedies. The maple syrup got the headlines, because they’re Canadian: but that was merely childish whim. Other treatments must have been sheer torment, like the smoothies made of hotdog condiments, of “apple cider vinegar, onion powder, ginger root, garlic, hot peppers, and horseradish root.” That sounds like driving out demons, like putting your changeling child on the fire. I wonder how much malice they intended? Underplayed throughout, but crucial: they were giving him the snake-oil sold by the Stephan family company. I suppose if by some miracle the child had lived, they would have blazoned it forth as another Truehope cure.
Anthony Stephan, Ezekiel’s grandfather, declared war on modern medicine when his wife, David’s mother, killed herself. The boy was ten. She suffered from bipolar disorder—as do several of David’s siblings—and Anthony set about to invent a cure. His magic formula, essentially, is rebranded veterinary vitamins sold at a 1000% markup—“pig pills,” supposed to prevent ear-and-tail-biting in frantic creatures. EMPowerplus is marketed as sovereign for bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and autism (of course). The family has made a nice little fortune off of it. Their bank of telemarketers stand ready to cajole the desperate to go off their meds. Truehope’s faithful customers have committed at least one murder (psychotic break, hammer attack on "aliens": father dead, mother severely damaged), and gods know how many suicides. The company emerged triumphant from a battle with Canada Health, which failed to shut them down. David Stephan was raised as a Truehope warrior, a crusader against the evil pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and an enemy to government, the “lying machine.”
Naturally, he’s brought his children up as the Elect, will-nilly. Ezekiel’s mother didn’t sully the purity of her birthing experiences with anything so nasty as pre-natal care. None of their children (three survive) are vaccinated. A grave pity: there’s an excellent infant vaccine (free in Canada) for the very bacterium that killed their son, Haemophilus influenzae. The first doctor to see Ezekiel in all his brief life declared him brain dead.
His parents hold fast stubbornly to their beliefs. They didn’t bring him to a doctor when he came down with a lung infection, though he ran a high fever and was gasping for air. Even his oblivious mother thought the sounds he made were “heartwrenching.” They decided he was croupy—though he never had a cough throughout his illness—and are still maintaining that all he had was a touch of the croup.
They didn’t bring him to a doctor a week later, when he was lying in his crib moaning and twitching. His oblivious mother thought there might be something “neurological” about his repetitive, involuntary motions—which doctors at the trial described as seiuzures—but put them down to starvation and dehydration.
They didn’t bring him to a doctor when they had to give him food and water with an eyedropper. Very attentive. As his father boasted to the RCMP, “We've gone above and beyond where he has received exceptional care.”
A day or so after that, Ezekiel went stiff. His back starting arching. Collet Stephan did then call in her friend the nurse-midwife, who told her she didn’t think there was anything really seriously wrong with the baby, but she thought he might have meningitis. (How is this woman still a nurse? Why didn't she report them, as mandated? Why hasn’t she bloody well been charged?) So Collet Stephan went and Googled “meningitis.” She found Kernig’s sign and Brudzinski’s signs, performed the tests, and determined with “95%” confidence that her son had meningitis. But with her usual acumen, she decided that it had to be viral because if it were bacterial, he’d be dead already. (The two forms cannot be distinguished save by a lumbar puncture. Standard procedure is to assume it’s bacterial: start IV antibiotics at once, then do the spinal tap. Every second counts.) She then called a naturopath, looking for a nice immune-booster for a child with meningitis. The naturopath swears she told the mother to take her child straight to the hospital. (It gets a bit hazy here, as there are three conflicting testimonies: the Stephans’, the naturopath’s, and her receptionist’s.)
That night Anthony Stephan came and prayed over the child. They all still insist he wasn’t really sick. Not so's you'd notice.
The next day Ezekiel could not be bent to fit into his carseat, so the Stephans laid him on a mattress in the back of the SUV, and jolted him 105 km to the nearest town. Unthinkable agony. There they bought some echinacea, but did not tell the naturopath that they were the parents who had called the night before, nor that the baby was out there in the car. They then went and ran some mundane errands: signed papers at their lawyer's, went shopping at a Superstore. It has a walk-in clinic. They ignored it.
That evening Ezekiel stopped breathing. David Stephan called his father first, then 911. He ended that first call, saying there was no need to send an ambulance, the baby was breathing now, and they’d drive him to the hospital. Twenty minutes later, they set out. (“O hooly, hooly, rose she up...”) They called 911 again from the road: he’d stopped breathing again. By the time they met up with the ambulance, Ezekiel had flatlined.
He lingered a few days on life-support, but the case was hopeless.
In April, the Stephans were convicted of failure to provide the necessaries of life. Myself, I’d’ve called it depraved indifference. Sentencing arguments start tomorrow.
And these hubristic narcissistic squeaky-clean scumbag parents? Show no remorse, no recognition of their crime, no empathy. They’ve set themselves up as martyrs.
Ezekiel was fine, they insist, until the EMTs got hold of him and killed him.
GoFundMe had to shut them down, but they’ve gone on soliciting money for themselves on Facebook—in part, in unconscious irony, to get their car fixed. Oh yeah, they’d take their SUV in, just not their child.
After the verdict, David Stephan wrote an open letter to the jury, more in sorrow than in anger: he said he forgave them (sanctimonious bastard) and loved them, but that they were pitiful fools to be taken in by the grand conspiracy against his family and faith, against all of us.
And just yesterday, the Stephans both appeared in a video interview sponsored by some utterly vile anti-vaxxers, calling for a courthouse rally. (Oh, the judge will love that.) The stand? For every parent’s right to treat their children as they will.
"This isn't just our battle; this is everyone's battle," David Stephan says/ Again the grandiosity, against the presumption.
"It’s becoming quite a parental rights issue for medical choice, for how we deem to treat our children, and ultimately, what it comes down to is whether we have the right to vaccinate or not to vaccinate without being held criminally liable, or whether or not we have to rush our children to the doctor every time they even get just the sniffles, in fear that something may just randomly happen, and then we’re held liable."
No, Mr. Stephan, meningismus is not the sniffles, a pleural empyema (with a fibrous crust preventing the expansion of the lung) is not a touch of croup. A child who cannot eat or drink or bend or breathe—a baby in terrible pain—must be rushed to the doctor at once. A child who cannot speak must be spoken for. Your children are not your possessions, not for your private use: not as punching-bags or playthings, slaves or acolytes. You may not send them down mines or let them play in Times Square after midnight or in blizzards in their underwear. You may not pimp them out to pathogens.
Nine
Anthony Stephan, Ezekiel’s grandfather, declared war on modern medicine when his wife, David’s mother, killed herself. The boy was ten. She suffered from bipolar disorder—as do several of David’s siblings—and Anthony set about to invent a cure. His magic formula, essentially, is rebranded veterinary vitamins sold at a 1000% markup—“pig pills,” supposed to prevent ear-and-tail-biting in frantic creatures. EMPowerplus is marketed as sovereign for bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and autism (of course). The family has made a nice little fortune off of it. Their bank of telemarketers stand ready to cajole the desperate to go off their meds. Truehope’s faithful customers have committed at least one murder (psychotic break, hammer attack on "aliens": father dead, mother severely damaged), and gods know how many suicides. The company emerged triumphant from a battle with Canada Health, which failed to shut them down. David Stephan was raised as a Truehope warrior, a crusader against the evil pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and an enemy to government, the “lying machine.”
Naturally, he’s brought his children up as the Elect, will-nilly. Ezekiel’s mother didn’t sully the purity of her birthing experiences with anything so nasty as pre-natal care. None of their children (three survive) are vaccinated. A grave pity: there’s an excellent infant vaccine (free in Canada) for the very bacterium that killed their son, Haemophilus influenzae. The first doctor to see Ezekiel in all his brief life declared him brain dead.
His parents hold fast stubbornly to their beliefs. They didn’t bring him to a doctor when he came down with a lung infection, though he ran a high fever and was gasping for air. Even his oblivious mother thought the sounds he made were “heartwrenching.” They decided he was croupy—though he never had a cough throughout his illness—and are still maintaining that all he had was a touch of the croup.
They didn’t bring him to a doctor a week later, when he was lying in his crib moaning and twitching. His oblivious mother thought there might be something “neurological” about his repetitive, involuntary motions—which doctors at the trial described as seiuzures—but put them down to starvation and dehydration.
They didn’t bring him to a doctor when they had to give him food and water with an eyedropper. Very attentive. As his father boasted to the RCMP, “We've gone above and beyond where he has received exceptional care.”
A day or so after that, Ezekiel went stiff. His back starting arching. Collet Stephan did then call in her friend the nurse-midwife, who told her she didn’t think there was anything really seriously wrong with the baby, but she thought he might have meningitis. (How is this woman still a nurse? Why didn't she report them, as mandated? Why hasn’t she bloody well been charged?) So Collet Stephan went and Googled “meningitis.” She found Kernig’s sign and Brudzinski’s signs, performed the tests, and determined with “95%” confidence that her son had meningitis. But with her usual acumen, she decided that it had to be viral because if it were bacterial, he’d be dead already. (The two forms cannot be distinguished save by a lumbar puncture. Standard procedure is to assume it’s bacterial: start IV antibiotics at once, then do the spinal tap. Every second counts.) She then called a naturopath, looking for a nice immune-booster for a child with meningitis. The naturopath swears she told the mother to take her child straight to the hospital. (It gets a bit hazy here, as there are three conflicting testimonies: the Stephans’, the naturopath’s, and her receptionist’s.)
That night Anthony Stephan came and prayed over the child. They all still insist he wasn’t really sick. Not so's you'd notice.
The next day Ezekiel could not be bent to fit into his carseat, so the Stephans laid him on a mattress in the back of the SUV, and jolted him 105 km to the nearest town. Unthinkable agony. There they bought some echinacea, but did not tell the naturopath that they were the parents who had called the night before, nor that the baby was out there in the car. They then went and ran some mundane errands: signed papers at their lawyer's, went shopping at a Superstore. It has a walk-in clinic. They ignored it.
That evening Ezekiel stopped breathing. David Stephan called his father first, then 911. He ended that first call, saying there was no need to send an ambulance, the baby was breathing now, and they’d drive him to the hospital. Twenty minutes later, they set out. (“O hooly, hooly, rose she up...”) They called 911 again from the road: he’d stopped breathing again. By the time they met up with the ambulance, Ezekiel had flatlined.
He lingered a few days on life-support, but the case was hopeless.
In April, the Stephans were convicted of failure to provide the necessaries of life. Myself, I’d’ve called it depraved indifference. Sentencing arguments start tomorrow.
And these hubristic narcissistic squeaky-clean scumbag parents? Show no remorse, no recognition of their crime, no empathy. They’ve set themselves up as martyrs.
Ezekiel was fine, they insist, until the EMTs got hold of him and killed him.
GoFundMe had to shut them down, but they’ve gone on soliciting money for themselves on Facebook—in part, in unconscious irony, to get their car fixed. Oh yeah, they’d take their SUV in, just not their child.
After the verdict, David Stephan wrote an open letter to the jury, more in sorrow than in anger: he said he forgave them (sanctimonious bastard) and loved them, but that they were pitiful fools to be taken in by the grand conspiracy against his family and faith, against all of us.
And just yesterday, the Stephans both appeared in a video interview sponsored by some utterly vile anti-vaxxers, calling for a courthouse rally. (Oh, the judge will love that.) The stand? For every parent’s right to treat their children as they will.
"This isn't just our battle; this is everyone's battle," David Stephan says/ Again the grandiosity, against the presumption.
"It’s becoming quite a parental rights issue for medical choice, for how we deem to treat our children, and ultimately, what it comes down to is whether we have the right to vaccinate or not to vaccinate without being held criminally liable, or whether or not we have to rush our children to the doctor every time they even get just the sniffles, in fear that something may just randomly happen, and then we’re held liable."
No, Mr. Stephan, meningismus is not the sniffles, a pleural empyema (with a fibrous crust preventing the expansion of the lung) is not a touch of croup. A child who cannot eat or drink or bend or breathe—a baby in terrible pain—must be rushed to the doctor at once. A child who cannot speak must be spoken for. Your children are not your possessions, not for your private use: not as punching-bags or playthings, slaves or acolytes. You may not send them down mines or let them play in Times Square after midnight or in blizzards in their underwear. You may not pimp them out to pathogens.
Nine
June 20, 2016
Leapfire
Wishing you joy at the solstice.
Nine
Nine
June 18, 2016
Child Garden
It's been a few years since I've weeded and raked and bedded out my collection of ballads. They were looking just a little mossy and forlorn. Drawing on Halewijn Vandijk's magnificent Child Ballad Database, which lists well over 10,000 recorded versions, and on eMusic's excellent stock of independent labels (they carry Topic, oh joy), I've been laying out whole pleached alleys of new songs to wander through. Just now, I have 3025 Child-ballad tracks (some of them excruciating, many glorious). Since I last looked, several people have ventured on the unrecorded: I now have "Judas" (Child 23), one of the very earliest of texts, and two fine and very different takes on "Hind Etin" (Child 41), until now sung only in Norwegian or in field recordings locked away in archives. I have a "Queen of Elfan's Nourice" (Child 40) that isn't bloody "Elf Call."
There are ballads for which my One True Version exists (Martin Carthy's take on "Willie's Lady," remade from Ray Fisher's); there are some I love turn and turn-about (June Tabor's and Frankie Armstrong's takes on "The Duke of Athole's Nurse"/"Little Duke Arthur's Nurse"), and half-a-dozen of Child 200 ("Raggle-Taggle Gipsies," "Black Jack Davy," "Seven Yellow Gypsies"). And there are ballads for which I've yet to find the perfect form, the perfect balancing of words, voice, storytelling, tune, and accompaniment.
What are your best-loved versions?
Nine
There are ballads for which my One True Version exists (Martin Carthy's take on "Willie's Lady," remade from Ray Fisher's); there are some I love turn and turn-about (June Tabor's and Frankie Armstrong's takes on "The Duke of Athole's Nurse"/"Little Duke Arthur's Nurse"), and half-a-dozen of Child 200 ("Raggle-Taggle Gipsies," "Black Jack Davy," "Seven Yellow Gypsies"). And there are ballads for which I've yet to find the perfect form, the perfect balancing of words, voice, storytelling, tune, and accompaniment.
What are your best-loved versions?
Nine
June 5, 2016
Songs of innocence and experience
"Moonwise is innocence to Cloud & Ashes’ experience."
May I plume myself a little? In the service of a fine and quiet critic of fantasy?
Matthew David Surridge, who wrote a lovely meditation on Cloud & Ashes, has just published one on Moonwise—and in such company! You can find Only Once Imagined, his latest collection of essays (only $3 Canadian!) here. There are essays on Alan Garner, Robertson Davies, M. John Harrison, Leonora Carrington, Patricia McKillip, Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt), Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Gentle, among others: all writers of otherwheres.
His earlier book, Reading Strange Matters, which reprints the Cloud & Ashes piece, may be found here.
Sadly, Mr. Surridge is best known for his excellent, principled refusal to be press-ganged by the Puppies. He deserves to be better read. His work is a pleasure.
Nine
May I plume myself a little? In the service of a fine and quiet critic of fantasy?
Matthew David Surridge, who wrote a lovely meditation on Cloud & Ashes, has just published one on Moonwise—and in such company! You can find Only Once Imagined, his latest collection of essays (only $3 Canadian!) here. There are essays on Alan Garner, Robertson Davies, M. John Harrison, Leonora Carrington, Patricia McKillip, Katherine Blake (Dorothy Heydt), Nalo Hopkinson, Mary Gentle, among others: all writers of otherwheres.
His earlier book, Reading Strange Matters, which reprints the Cloud & Ashes piece, may be found here.
Sadly, Mr. Surridge is best known for his excellent, principled refusal to be press-ganged by the Puppies. He deserves to be better read. His work is a pleasure.
Nine
June 3, 2016
If I had another penny . . .
Damn. This time Swarbrick isn't sitting up in his bed, reading his obits and laughing. I was hoping he'd as many lives as Cat Chant——or that his wizardry could raise himself.
I'll never see another blazing "Byker Hill," with a long curl of ash falling into his soundhole.
Nine
I'll never see another blazing "Byker Hill," with a long curl of ash falling into his soundhole.
Nine
May 30, 2016
A palpable hit
Q. has a subscription to the Hartford Stage, and now and then kindly invites me to join him. Their artistic director, Darko Tresnjak, clearly believes in More is More. I've seen an absolutely cracking Kiss Me Kate, an annoyingly conceited Romeo and Juliet set in a sandbox, and Hamlet's father's ghost rise up on horseback like the Erl-King to bear his son away. (So much for Fortinbras.) Q. is still raving about Tresnjak's Witches, which I missed.
So when Tresnjak gets his teeth into a brand-new musical, based partly on the Disney [correction: Don Bluth's animated] Anastasia, partly on the Bergman film, and wholly on Quintessence of Princess, it will be lavish. My heavens, it was something else: a triple-layer gilded drum of chocolates, just varied enough not to cloy. Judging by the ecstasies and curtain-calls, it will be bringing 'em in in busloads for the next X years.
At intermission in the lobby, I heard a sweet high soprano burst into Anatasia's big first-act closer, in the time-honored way. I turned round, and saw a very tall, very spidery and spiffy young black man.
I thought it was a decent score, splendidly sung; a pretty fair book (given the essential flaws in the story), well acted; and splendid choreography, splendidly danced. Besides imperial waltzes, kasatskys, and Charlestons, there were cameos for Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan, and a play-within-a-play Swan Lake, going on while the Dowager and Anya cast "Is it?" and "No, it can't be!" glances, box to box. Everyone adored the comic tango between the rogue who thought he was selling a fake Anatasia to the Dowager, and the cynical Countess (with a good old-fashioned Broadway growl).
But bozhe moy! what shameless spectacle! The curtain rises on a winter palace, with moonlight through the whirling snow, rayed out along the endless marble floor——and a tiny little white bed, with a tiny little nightgowned princess, and the notes of a music box, spangling the air like sparks of snow ... After that, it's one damned jawdropper after another: vistas of St. Petersburg, with sunset on the domes, the Finland Station, all of Paris, and beyond all, the Pont Alexandre at l'heure bleue.
Nine
So when Tresnjak gets his teeth into a brand-new musical, based partly on the Disney [correction: Don Bluth's animated] Anastasia, partly on the Bergman film, and wholly on Quintessence of Princess, it will be lavish. My heavens, it was something else: a triple-layer gilded drum of chocolates, just varied enough not to cloy. Judging by the ecstasies and curtain-calls, it will be bringing 'em in in busloads for the next X years.
At intermission in the lobby, I heard a sweet high soprano burst into Anatasia's big first-act closer, in the time-honored way. I turned round, and saw a very tall, very spidery and spiffy young black man.
I thought it was a decent score, splendidly sung; a pretty fair book (given the essential flaws in the story), well acted; and splendid choreography, splendidly danced. Besides imperial waltzes, kasatskys, and Charlestons, there were cameos for Josephine Baker and Isadora Duncan, and a play-within-a-play Swan Lake, going on while the Dowager and Anya cast "Is it?" and "No, it can't be!" glances, box to box. Everyone adored the comic tango between the rogue who thought he was selling a fake Anatasia to the Dowager, and the cynical Countess (with a good old-fashioned Broadway growl).
But bozhe moy! what shameless spectacle! The curtain rises on a winter palace, with moonlight through the whirling snow, rayed out along the endless marble floor——and a tiny little white bed, with a tiny little nightgowned princess, and the notes of a music box, spangling the air like sparks of snow ... After that, it's one damned jawdropper after another: vistas of St. Petersburg, with sunset on the domes, the Finland Station, all of Paris, and beyond all, the Pont Alexandre at l'heure bleue.
Nine
May 26, 2016
Full fathom five
I've been dipping into An Elizabethan in 1582, the wonderful diary of Richard Madox, Fellow of All Souls and chaplain aboard the Edward Bonaventure, headed for the Spice Islands and for China, though her voyage failed. As shipboard politics grew tense—he did not approve of swerving from their mission to engage in privateering—Madox began to write in cipher, then in Latin and in Greek in cipher, giving the masters and sailors around him names out of Greek and Roman comedy, which made his narrative fall into playlike shapes. An Aethopian legate "brought our general an elephant's tooth and a long-tailed monkey, which pleased him inordinately as a result of that sympathy which I believe exists between them. But after he had twice fouled his guardian with urine and aroused enmity between his master and others ... he was finally given to Pyrgopollinices, a matter which marvelously vexed Colax." Everything intrigued him: a wizard-king of Guinea, the taste of crocodile. He cast the journey's horoscope; he sketched a tattooed woman "finely pinked"; he drew flying fish. And he died of a bloody flux off the coast of Brazil and was committed to the deep.
Nine
Nine
On consideration...
A friend and I were talking of gods in fantasy, and jumped lightly from "not a tame lion" to my own disreputable Cloudish pantheon, which is ... uncuddly. At best, I said, "I don't think Brock has actually ever eaten a child."
Nine
Nine
Greer Gilman's Blog
- Greer Gilman's profile
- 42 followers
Greer Gilman isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
