Mari Ness's Blog, page 7

Flapperhouse Year One

It's legitimately cold today, so, to focus on warmer stuff, good news: Flapperhouse Year One, which contains a little flash story from me and works by many other massively talented people like Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and Natalia Theodoridou, is in print. You can obtain a copy at:

Createspace

or

Amazon.com

Stay warm, everyone. For those Australians reading this currently facing down a hurricane, stay dry.

Happy Snow Maidens Day!

My last entry on water maidens drew some, how shall I phrase it, hostility, entirely from critics in the New England area who pointed out, with some justice, that they had not seen rain in some time – to the point where they had forgotten what rain looked like, and that people buried in snow do not want to hear about rain, and that they, as a group, are not entirely certain that water, let alone water maidens, still exists beneath the piles of heavy ice and snow.

And one or two asked mournfully why, precisely, their states had been targeted by snow maidens.

To that question, I cannot give a full answer. Snow maidens are even more mysterious, and less known, than water maidens. True, unlike the water maidens, they are regular visitors to fairy courts, providing each court with just the fine, delicate touch of frost every court needs for winter celebrations, and providing fairy dancers with sparkling shoes formed from ice and light. Some have even been known to join in the fairy dances, tossing snowflakes from their hair as they spin, blinding even the fairies with the light that sparkles from their icy hands.

But they do not linger. Even the coldest of the fairy courts (and many are cold, indeed, making even current Boston temperatures seem warm, as difficult as that may be to believe just now) have their warm spots, too hot for snow maidens to tolerate. And fairy courts have other dangers – tempting hot drinks (all fairies agree you have not lived until you've tasted hot melted rubies, and thus, press this drink upon all), songs to heat the blood, and passionate affairs able to melt even the snowiest heart. Then, too, unless she is fortunate enough to be bound to a mountain, or a glacier, or a polar region, the life of a snow maiden can be quite, quite short – when she is not bound to spend summer months sleeping in a cloud. And so the snow maidens do no more than touch the courts with ice and frost before retreating to where they feel most safe: snow.

But that does not mean that they do not want to see more of the world. On the contrary: even the most shy, retiring snow maiden gets bored with endless grey and white. And so, each year, the snow maidens march or dance into greener lands, eager for a change – or, for some of them – eager to spin and dance. A few of the braver ones press themselves against windows, eager to see what's inside. Most, however, prefer to stay outside, swirling.

And sometimes they gather for a furious dance.

Some claim that their fury is born out of resentment regarding the confined nature of their lives. (Tree spirits, it must be noted, do not give this argument much credence, but then again, most tree spirits are asleep when the snow maidens visit – or at least pretend to be asleep.) Some say that it is all merely part of an ongoing war between the snow maidens and the water maidens, a fight so ancient that no one can even say how or where it began. (Water maidens, when asked, look bewildered at the mere thought – and indeed, few water maidens are particularly combative.) A few of the crosser sorts of fairies claim that the snow maidens are merely infuriated by mortals, and don't care how many fairies get inconvenienced by their dances. (It should be noted that these are generally fairies who have found themselves on the losing side of certain encounters with mortals, and that their accounts of many events have been found to contain certain inaccuracies.)

Others say that it is not a dance of fury at all, but a dance of joy. And still others that it is only an attempt to stay warm. After all, the snow maidens wear gowns woven of ice.

And the snow maidens? Well, when asked, they merely smile, and run blue fingers down the lips of the questioner – freezing those lips at their touch.

Which is why, perhaps, it is wiser not to ask, and wiser to instead watch for the snow maidens. From the corners of your eyes, of course: a sudden swirl of snow there, a crackle of ice there, a flash of colors that burns your eyes, a blue hand appearing, just for a moment, in the wind. Wiser, instead, just to watch their dances, knowing that eventually, those dances will end, and that eventually, the snow maidens will withdraw from the lands that are, after all, only temporary dwellings for them, back to the lands they find safer: lands of snow and ice, where they never have to fear the retreat of the cold. After all, those are also the lands of the water maidens, and the snow maidens have the greatest respect for their cousins.

(This post brought to you partly by demand, and partly by the reality that our little section of Florida - Florida - is dropping into freezing temperatures.)

Snow Maidens Day will probably be celebrated on February 15th in future years.

Happy Watermaidens Day!

Today I must advise you to pay careful attention to the rain.

You see, barring a few seductions here and there, water maidens tend to live rather solitary lives. Oh, that's not to say that they don't find the peace of their ponds and lakes and rivers and springs interrupted by mortals more often than they would like, or find their careful flower arrangements disturbed by children or alligators, or find themselves glumly removing trash from their waters. But none of these activities exactly involves conversation, and even these days, some fortunate water maidens can avoid even all that.

But that doesn't quite mean that they don't crave company. Quite the opposite. Or that they don't wish to dance.

The difficulty, of course, is arranging such matters. Water maidens have never been terribly comfortable with the formality of fairy courts. Or, for that matter, vice versa – many of the noblest of fairy queens have been known to make quite unkind comments regarding the puddles that water maidens often leave in their wake – to say nothing of the occasional unfortunate events with wilting water lilies and seaweeds. So gathering at the fairy courts – although this may be their right and privilege – is rarely the first choice.

Nor are water maidens ever particularly comfortable long away from water, or in water that is not their own. They can stand on land, certainly – they have even carried out the occasional seduction there, from time to time – and have even been known to venture a mile or so away from their water to obtain one of the latest electronic devices, or particularly fine chocolate. Legend even tells of three maidens who never fail to creep to nearby windows to watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones. (They are reportedly all on Team Dragon, and have threatened violent flooding if the final episode does not contain dragons flying in triumph.) But these are for short periods only – an hour or two, at most – and not quite right for a gathering of water maidens.

And so, when a water maiden craves company, she summons the rain.

You might see it – a touch of mist over a puddle, or a pond; a glimmer of light on a river, or a shimmer against a white cloud. Or you might see it on the edge of the sky – a thin grey line that for a moment, flashes silver and gold.

And then the rain, summoning the water maidens.

Watch carefully, when the rain comes after something like this. Watch very carefully, for that flash of other, for a sudden shimmer, for a touch of cold on your skin.

It might just be a water maiden, inviting you to dance and sing.

Particularly today, which is, by decree fee, the official Water Maidens Day, a day for all water maidens to emerge from the waters.

Water Maidens Day is the idea of poet, writer and folklorist Nin Harris. I'm just borrowing it for fun.

(Also, for those of you in the northeast currently buried in snow, the water maidens feel you. They really, really do. But even their magic has limits.)

Demands nominated for the Rhysling Award

Just learned that my poem Demands has been nominated for the Rhysling Award.

Major thanks to whoever nominated it; this was one of my own personal favorites from last year, and the recognition is very heartwarming.

Pioneer Girl: the Annotated Autobiography

Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder, edited by Pamela Smith Hill, has become a bit of a sensation, partly because it contains more tidbits about the Little House books, and mostly because its publishers, the South Dakota Historical Society Press, either genuinely failed to anticipate demand for the book, or, well aware of the basic laws of supply and demand, deliberately created an initially small press run to create that demand. In any case, Amazon got pummeled with complaints from customers who had pre-ordered in August and failed to get copies by Christmas, and this being the internet, copies started selling for a few hundred dollars on eBay. Impressive for a book that, as I'll be noting, has quite a few issues. I was lucky enough to score a copy through the local library.

Pioneer Girl was the manuscript that eventually, several rewrites and major edits later, became the Little House books. Previously accessible only to literary scholars, this is a heavily annotated typescript, complete with notes and information about other versions of the text.

It's a book with two clear agendas: one, give Wilder fans and scholars detailed information about Wilder's early life, and explanations for some of the terms she uses in the book, and two, defend Laura Ingalls Wilder from the multiple criticisms she's received from historians, biologists, Native Americans, meteorologists, and, above all, literary critics. Agenda one is mostly a success. Agenda two…well. That's more mixed.

Part of the problem is that Agenda Two means that the already overly lengthy footnotes – and I speak as someone who loves footnotes – end up containing completely irrelevant or useless or questionable information. One footnote, for example, earnestly tells us that ok, yes, yes, wildlife biologists have never found or documented a single cougar/North American mountain lion with black fur, but, well, the New Orleans Times Picayune reported that some people reported seeing a black mountain lion in New Orleans in 2011.

As a semi-biologist, I would like to point out that here, Hill would have been better off trying to argue that the animal Charles Ingalls actually saw in 1870s Michigan was a stray jaguar. Granted, I find it unlikely that jaguars would have gone that far north and east in the late 19th century, but they do occasionally have solid black fur and were facing habitat encroachment in the southwest U.S. at the time, and were more abundant in the U.S. than they are now. It's remotely (very remotely) possible. Or, alternatively, that since this animal, whatever it was, was seen at night, that no one actually got a good look at the color of its fur. Or that Charles Ingalls, or later his daughter, turned the animal into a "black" panther because this sounded more ominous. Or that Wilder, writing decades later, simply forgot the story's original details. All better than attempting to persuade us that a few people in New Orleans seeing some sort of black animal at night, well over a century later, is somehow proof that black cougars could have been around in 1870s Michigan.

(Hill also missed another obvious explanation here: bobcats. They are, granted, much smaller than cougars, but they can have black fur, and from personal experience, I can testify that if you unexpectedly encounter a bobcat in urban streets in Jacksonville when you are trying to eat a sub it initially looks a lot bigger than it actually is. Like just a little smaller than a full sized tiger. * Also, bobcats, in general, don't hang around to let anyone get a good look at them or study the color of their fur. True, Charles Ingalls, a hunter, should have been able to distinguish between a bobcat and a cougar – but in another story, he has difficulty distinguishing between a tree stump and a bear, and the story in general, like the other panther stories in the early books, was clearly meant to terrify the little girls into staying inside and obeying their parents. What I'm saying is, this footnote annoyed me.)

This is the sort of issue that litters the footnotes: elaborate explanations meant to argue for Wilder's accuracy and literary skills that all too frequently undercut or fail to support Hill's arguments. Another footnote, for instance, spends way too long discussing the differences between first person and third person narrative – before defending Wilder's decision to switch from first person (the autobiography) to third person (the Little House novels) by pointing out, reasonably enough, that this was the most prevalent literary choice for children's books at the time, and then adding the completely unnecessary note that J.K. Rowling uses third person too. The end result is a footnote that feels unnecessarily defensive, not to mention irrelevant, and goes on for several paragraphs.

All this to combat the idea that although Laura Ingalls Wilder provided the source material for the Little House books, the main author was not Wilder, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, and that the multiple inaccuracies in the Little House books can be explained away as deliberate choices by Wilder or simply Wilder forgetting – rather than things Lane made up or got wrong because she wasn't there.

This theory was apparently first raised shortly after the first few books appeared, based largely on a few inarguable facts: one, prior to the appearance of the Little House books, Wilder's literary output consisted only of articles in farm journals. Quite a lot of articles, as it happens – Wilder was an expert on chickens, and wrote about them and other matters of interest to farm women – but the articles themselves generally tend to be, how can we put this? Not very good, and certainly not literary. Her diaries and letters tend to be terse, showing little of the prose quality of the novels she became famous for.

Her daughter, on the other hand, was a widely published journalist, essayist and novelist who had published fiction in established literary journals. She was also well known for writing biographies that, to put it mildly, played with the facts – Henry Ford would have called it "outright lied" – admiring biographies that liked to give their subjects a certain mythic quality. Lane was also a staunch Libertarian who turned many of her later works into polemics against Roosevelt and the New Deal, elements of which form a large part of the Little House books, whose anti-government, individualistic tone gracefully hides the many times the historical Ingalls family found themselves accepting welfare and assistance from state and federal governments.

As a final note, Lane had written a successful novel, Let the Hurricane Roar which, like the Little House books, drew on the personal histories of her grandparents, and which contained several passages that sounded suspiciously like passages from By the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and The Long Winter - the same books, incidentally, that Hill is determined to prove show Wilder coming into her own as a novelist.

Lane herself claimed that she was just editing her mother's novels – but Lane was the person shopping the books to her own agent and to various editors. (The books went through additional edits by the New York publishers.) Other evidence suggests otherwise. Lane frequently used "edit" to mean "completely rewrite" when working with other authors. Letters between the two detail Wilder's complaints that she felt her daughter was doing too much editing; footnotes here frequently note that Wilder clashed with Lane, feeling that Lane's choices didn't show what "really happened." Hill tries to use these incidents as proof of Wilder's interest in history and accuracy, but they also work as proof that Lane was making numerous changes to her mother's manuscripts, not necessarily with her mother's approval – just as she had done to other authors. Another footnote suggests that Lane struggled with and did additional research for the railroad building scenes in By the Shores of Silver Lake - something she would not have needed to do if Wilder's original copy had been as clean as Hill would like you to believe.

Which leads us to the biggest problem: the transcript of Wilder's original copy.

It's awful.

It does, eventually, improve, and I am willing, to an extent, to handwave the first few pages as Wilder not remembering her early childhood all that quickly, and also getting into a writing groove. But with that said –

Look, I'm a writer. Many of my first drafts are not, I fear, particularly good. That probably applies to many of my last drafts as well. So I'm highly aware of the many steps between draft and final work, and how the final work can look completely different than the first.

But there's rough first drafts, and then there's this: multiple punctuation, grammar and spelling errors; no chapter breaks; a disjointed narrative that jumps from one story or bit to another story or bit, often without finishing up the previous bit, people just randomly popping in with no introduction or explanation. It reads exactly as I think it was meant to be read: a mother putting down her memories for her daughter, hoping that perhaps some of these memories might be worked into something that could be sold. But it does not, despite Hill's earnest efforts to argue otherwise, read as a potential literary work.

Here is one of the better written bits from those early pages:

"One night Pa picked me up out of bed and carried me to the window so I could see the wolves. There were so many of them all sitting in a ring around the house, with their noses pointed up at the big, bright moon, howling as loud and long as they could, while Jack paced before the door and growled.

Pa went to the town forty miles away and brought back a cook stove a window to put in the window hole and some lumber to make a door."

I've reproduced this verbatim, including the punctuation and the complete lack of a transition or a section break between these paragraphs. The first paragraph, true, isn't bad. But then. Nor is this an isolated case: it happens every few paragraphs, most of which are a lot more like the second paragraph.

Oh, and this was the draft meant for the adult book, not the juvenile books that eventually resulted.

And notably: this wasn't Wilder's first draft. This was a fair copy of several late drafts. This was the best that she could do on her own.

It wasn't publishable. Even now, if not for the name attached for it, this would not be publishable – and even with that name, the academic press that did eventually publish it assumed, with reason, that it would not sell all that well. Lane recognized this. The versions she sent to New York publishers – not included here but referenced in the footnotes – were not this manuscript. Moreover, the later Little House books, while retaining a sparse, simple prose, and retaining some of the incidents and much of the emotion, and the incidents, sound as if they were written by an entirely different person. Say, Rose Wilder Lane.

Hill, however, for whatever reason, wants us to believe that the Little House books really, truly, really were the products of Wilder's pen. To prove that the books are authentic, perhaps – a question that has come up a lot with the Little House books? Whatever the reason, this means we also get footnotes pointing to the vaguely descriptive passages about birds and sunsets as proof of Wilder's developing literary abilities.

Unfortunately, the very act of drawing attention to these passages just focuses on how very few of them exist, and how for the most part they are just Wilder's admirable attempt to show how North American bird populations have changed since the 1880s. (As a semi-biologist I will add that these were among the more depressing parts of the book.)

More problematic are the footnotes tackling Wilder's depiction of Native Americans in this and the Little house books, especially in her depiction of Kansas settlers.

Charles Ingalls, in the first of many questionable financial decisions detailed in this book, headed to Kansas when Laura Ingalls Wilder was about two, too young to remember the details. Indeed, her memory was so wrong that she got the state wrong: she assumed that her family had moved into what was then called Indian Territory – later Oklahoma. In actuality, the Ingalls moved to the Osage Diminished Indian Reserve in Kansas, but the next detail – that they were squatting on land at that point legally belonged to Native Americans – is correct.

Even Hill, however, has to admit that the next major event – Wilder's claim that "The soldiers were taking all the white people off the Indian's land" is "sketchy," which is putting it mildly – even though this claim was repeated in the much better known Little House books, as one of many criticisms of Washington, D.C. In reality, of course, not only did the direct opposite happen, but Charles Ingalls left land he had been illegally squatting on just before the land in question did come up for legal sale. This may explain why Wilder later assumed or believed that her family must have been in Indian Territory/Oklahoma: they would not have been able to purchase land there in 1870/1871, but they could have purchased land where they were in Kansas at that period. And although white settlers weren't ordered out of Kansas, as a footnote here details, white settlers were ordered to leave the Cherokee (not Osage) reservation lands in 1870.

Because Wilder had the state wrong, she also got a lot of other details wrong – confusing the Osage and Cherokee, for instance. Other details ring more true – her reports of accusations that the Osage had set the prairies on fire to drive out white settlers; scholars have noted that the Osage weren't actually around when these particular fires started, but that fact would hardly have stopped the white settlers from starting rumors anyway.

Where things went really wrong, however, was not so much in Pioneer Girl, which seems a more or less accurate rendition of the memories of a four or five year old written down decades laterm but in Little House on the Prairie, where Wilder (or Lane) took a few of these memories and turned them into fiction.

It's this transformation that rapidly became one of the most criticized elements of the Little House books (the other being the transformation of the historical life of Laura Ingalls into a successful work of Libertarian Party propaganda), criticized for its inaccuracy – for instance, for calling a friendly to white settlers Osage chief by the French name of Le Soldat du Chene. (In Little House Le Soldat ends up convincing the Osage not to kill the white settlers; this incident is not in Pioneer Girl.) That criticism evidently troubles Hill, who devotes several pages of footnotes to discussing it in this book.

The first problem with this is fairly obvious: the book she's footnoting is Pioneer Girl, not Little House on the Prairie, which means that we have a lot of footnotes about a mostly entirely different book smack in the middle of this one. And I do mean entirely: as Hill herself points out, the sequence of events is different; the novel, despite being a kid's book, is much longer and more detailed; baby Carrie is not born in the middle of the book. Still, an occasional comparison between the two books is fine, and expected; a lengthy defense of the novel in this book feels a bit out of place. No one is questioning that the two year old Laura saw some Osage and Cherokee Indians while she was in Kansas; it's the book she created from those memories that's in question.

The second problem: the footnotes themselves, which try to argue two things at once: one, Wilder (or Lane) did do research to attempt to make the book accurate, and the mistakes are all perfectly all right because Little House on the Prairie is fiction, and thus, are part of the "creative license inherent in the genre." Which leads to bits like this:

"And, in fact, Le Soldat du Chene was the name of an Osage chief who sat for his portrait in Philadelphia in the early 1800s. Granted, he was not Wilder's Osage chief, but the name itself had historical legitimacy."

This is weaseling. As this same footnote notes, when Wilder consulted them in the 1930s, the Kansas Historical Society was unable to verify that any Osage chief had been friendly to white settlers at the time, let alone one called "Le Soldat du Chene." The other person Wilder consulted is described in the footnotes as someone Wilder perceived as an authority on the subject, who suggested the name. In other words, Wilder's use of the name doesn't have historical legitimacy at all, since. Wilder merely used a name from a different time period suggested by somewhat she thought was an authority. (It is not at all clear from the footnote that this person even was an authority, but that's a separate problem.) It does not help that Wilder/Lane could easily have found the name of another Osage chief and used that, but instead stuck with a French name since that worked with the narrative she wanted to tell: namely, that the Osage were led by a chief, met by Charles Ingalls, who spoke French - thus the French name.

Nearly all parts of this story have been challenged by some critics, so Hill, in this same footnote, takes the opportunity to defend it by quoting a historian who noted that in 1865 very few "full blood" Osages were fluent in English, and "most of the mixed bloods were more accustomed to French." This is all very nice, but since we are talking about whether or not the full blooded Osages the Ingalls family encountered in Kansas in 1871 spoke French, again, not as conclusive as Hill argues it is.

And it's another place where Hill missed another possible, more logical explanation, found right in the text of Little House on the Prairie: namely that Charles Ingalls was unfamiliar with French. As "Pa," he clearly says he is just guessing. So even if absolutely none of the Osage or Cherokke in the area spoke French, that doesn't necessarily mean that Wilder was lying when she says her father thought they spoke French, just that he guessed wrong. That happens.

Sidenote: in Little House on the Prairie, Charles Ingalls finally learns the supposed story of Le Soldat du Chene from a different Osage fluent in English. Anyway.

Meanwhile, all of this attention spent on the question of French allows Hill to avoid discussing the actual controversy: Wilder's story, told only in the Little House books, which, according to a sidenote in this footnote, the Kansas Historical Society could not verify: namely that Le Soldat du Chene rode into the Indian War Camps (who were making war cries and whoops that terrified little Laura and Mary) and, with his Osage, stopped all of the other Indian tribes (not named in the text) from killing all of the other white settlers, thus driving all of the Indians away. Charles Ingalls uses this story to prove that the Osage, at least in this instance, are good Indians. In the next chapter the Osage ride off, passing right by the Ingalls house. Right after that, the mean federal government forces the Ingalls and the other settlers to get off the land.

This is the story that historians object to, not that language barriers existed between the Osage, Cherokee and white settlers in Kansas, or that some of the Osage or Cherokee may have spoken French.

Hill defends this (and other changes) by pointing out that the Little House books are fiction, and adding: "Artistically, Wilder's choice was a valid one." Well, sure, artistically. But that argument misses the main objection from historians: it's not that Little House is factual. It's that Wilder, and her publishers, presented the book as an authentic history, and that readers even now take her rendition as historical fact.

And it is a history that tells us – or at least, its child readers – that despite the occasional questions asked by Laura, and the assurance of Charles Ingalls that not yes, the West belongs to white settlers, and that the federal government was wrong to kick the family out of Indian Territory, and that "good Indians" are those that keep all of the other Indians from fighting to keep their land.

And for all of her talk about valid artistic choices, Hills goes on to argue in later footnotes that Wilder, not Lane, continually argued for accuracy in the later books. For instance, they apparently fought over the cat that appears in later volumes – Lane wanted to call the cat Black Susan, to keep it consistent with the cat named Black Susan who appears in Little House in the Big Woods and then vanishes from the rest of books. Wilder said that the second cat was a blue and white cat, and needed to stay that way. Wilder also insisted on having the never before seen in the books Uncle Tom be the uncle who travelled to the Black Hills, not the previously unseen Uncle George – on the basis that someone might check. Tom Quiner was on the list; George Ingalls was not. Which suggests that by the writing of that book (These Happy Golden Years, the last of the series) Wilder, at least, was sensitive to complaints about her historical accuracy.

While we're on this subject of questionable footnotes, I also feel impelled to note that the use of blackface by some abolitionists prior to the Civil War is really not a good defense of the use of blackface in 1883, after the Civil War. (Or, for that matter, prior to the Civil War.)

Which is not to say that all of the footnotes are approving or defensive. Hill does note errors in the text, or places where Wilder misidentified people (particularly prominent in the early parts of the text, when she was remembering her life as a four year old) or gave incorrect information about their later biographies (Wilder claimed that a boy in her first school, Clarence Bouchie, later became a heroic fireman in Chicago; Hill notes the lack of evidence for this.) In places where Hill is able to identify Wilder's characters, she provides fascinating tidbits about their later lives, gleaned from obituaries and census reports, often providing added context where Wilder does not. Her discussions of music, Charles Ingalls' fiddle, cloth, hoopskirts, and so on, is also fascinating, if largely inconsequential.

And much though I've complained about the base text, it, too, has some good stuff. An early bit shows the basis for one of the most emotionally powerful incidents in Little House in the Big Woods: a rather terrible bit where the brown haired Laura and golden haired Mary are told to ask an aunt which hair color she prefers: brown or gold. The tactful aunt says that she likes them both, but Mary later says that the aunt was lying and really prefers gold. Laura, who is, after all, very young, hits Mary (you go, Laura) and is whipped by her father for this. She goes and cries in the corner, and, as both this text and Little House notes, focuses on the only thing that she has to be glad about: that Mary had to finish the chores all by herself. It's an early introduction to life's unfairness, and it was a memory that still stung decades later – lending its power to the later book. (I'm still on Laura's side on that one.)

It's also fascinating to see just what Wilder and Lane chose to leave out of later books. Some choices are obvious – the story of Wilder's younger brother, who died while still an infant, eliminated because it was too sad for a child's story. Leaving Jack the dog behind in Kansas, ditto. Some simply didn't fit the pioneer environment – the Iowa period, where far from living isolated lives, the family helped run a hotel, or the reality that not only were the Ingalls not all that isolated in Wisconsin, Mary could even walk to school, soon joined by Laura. The Little House books generally present an isolated family until the last three books. The reality is more complicated.

Others focused on an uncomfortable truth: Laura began working outside the home at the age of eleven since her parents desperately needed the money. Her parents also found themselves accepting government assistance more than once. Neither one of these facts fit Lane's anti-New Deal, anti-government stance which became a significant theme of the entire series. (Notably, the people most at fault in Little House on the Prairie turn out to be not the settlers, squatting on land they didn't own, or even the Native Americans they make bigoted comments about, but the federal government in DC.) All of this provides a fascinating look at the creative process behind the Little House books – regardless of the actual author.

There's also some great stuff between Laura and her school rival Genieve Masters – one of the models for Nellie Oleson in the books. If you are wondering why Nellie Oleson was such an unpleasant child and teenager, it's because Genieve called Laura fat and made fun of her clothes. Laura was sensitive to both issues and fought back, but the memory clearly stung. The accompanying pictures show that Laura was very definitely not fat, but as the notes point out, her clothing was plain and unfashionable. Laura adored her parents, but certainly resented her clothing: a resentment that bleeds right through the novels.

Little House fans are going to love this book; history buffs will probably enjoy this book; those interested in issues of dual authorship and authenticity might want to take a look. I would just treat some of the footnotes with an abundance of caution, even if they end up being more fascinating than the actual text.



* Or, in reality, about one-fifth the size of a full grown tiger, as we realized less than a second later; it was just the dim lighting and the shock of encountering an actual bobcat in Jacksonville, not all that close to the city edges, that made it look so much bigger. In our defense we were not exactly the first people in Florida to mistake a bobcat for something larger: people do this all the time, mistaking bobcats for Florida panthers, coyotes for wolves, and black bears for dangerous animals. Florida does have a lot of bobcats, after all, even if they tend to avoid urban areas.

Cat Stairs

So my beloved Little One is now fifteen years old. He's still incredibly active - more active than the Grey One, who at 13 has decided that the best way to handle life, really, is to sleep through it, preferably underneath something and far away from people since people are just not something she needs to deal with. The Little One is still dashing around the house, watching birds, running to the door, yowling, crawling into people's laps (he's in my lap now as I type.)

But a few years ago I noticed that he had stopped jumping to the top of bookcases, even from the TV stand. (He used to jump to the top of a high bookcase from the floor, and back; it was kind of his thing. Last year he started approaching the couch only from the front, instead of racing up and leaping to the top of the couch from the back. And in December, for the first time, I saw him clawing a bit when he jumped up to my bed.

So in order to save the comforter, I bought him a nice little set of suede covered cat steps, so he can run up to the bed without nearly falling off it.

He's leaping over them to land on the bed.

The Grey One, naturally, is using them as yet another hiding place.

I'm so glad I invested in this.

Helen Rappaport, The Romanov Sisters

I'm still on a major biography kick.

The Romanov Sisters is a detailed look of the lives of Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, who had the initial luck and later massive misfortune, to be the daughters of Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia.

As the daughters of the tsar, they lived surprisingly simple, extremely sheltered lives until the outbreak of World War I – and even later. Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, were not fond of Russian aristocratic society (the dislike was mutual, and was a minor cause of the Russian Revolution), and were terrified, with reason, of assassination attempts. They therefore kept their children, for the most part, behind walls of guards, in palaces furnished largely in simple, middle class style.

Which is not to say that the girls were completely isolated: they had tutors and governesses, and their mother's attendants, and a few selected relatives and occasional playmates. They also interacted with the sailors on the family yacht – one decided exception to the more middle class lifestyle. The two older girls even ended up falling for a couple of the highly ineligible sailors, who, of course, couldn't possibly return the feelings. From the pictures, I'm pretty sure that this was mostly because the sailors in question were pretty hot, and Olga and Tatiana were, in that sense, perfectly normal teenagers, but Rappaport makes a convincing case that this was also because they simply didn't have the chance to meet that many men, eligible or not. There's several heartbreaking cases of the girls begging to hear about "normal" lives, or indeed anything outside their palaces. They read books, certainly; they talked to those they could, but it was not enough. The details of Olga's first real love are especially heartbreaking. On the one hand, I was glad that she at least had the chance to fall in love – something no other biography I've read of the Romanovs detailed. On the other hand, it went nowhere.

And, well, they also had Rasputin, the Russian mystic who, their mother believed, had miraculous healing powers. Rappaport doesn't dwell on him, probably because so many other books do, possibly because at the time, quite a few people were questioning his intimate access to the Grand Duchesses, especially since they had very limited access, intimate or not, to other people, and because Rasputin was known to sleep around a lot. People drew the obvious conclusions. Rappaport, who combed through diaries, memoirs and letters, does not, but also ignores the small issue that if something had happened there, the girls probably would not have said much. In any case, they did mourn his death, if only because by then it was obvious to the two oldest girls, at least, that something was badly, badly wrong in Russia, and the family was in danger. If Rasputin could be attacked and killed, they certainly could be.

By then, World War I had been raging for years. It had a profound effect on all four daughters, but mostly the oldest two: discussions of their potential marriages abruptly ended, and Olga and Tatiana went to work as nurses, in hospitals on palace grounds. Maria and Anastasia were too young, but visited the soldiers to entertain them. For the first time, the girls made real friends, and a bit of the protective bubble they lived in was shattered. Olga was apparently not all that well emotionally suited for this career, but Tatiana was: there's a hint here that had things gone differently, she could well have funded and managed hospitals, or pursued a successful career as a nurse. Among the most upsetting parts of the book are arguably those discussing the intelligent, capable, Tatiana: I kept thinking, every few pages, what a waste.

The most aggravating parts of the book, however, almost all have to do with their mother, Alexandra. Even the most sympathetic biographies of Alexandra – and this isn't one of them – struggle with her. It's odd, since on the surface, she should be sympathetic – an initially sweet, shy, deeply private girl who was terrified of her public responsibilities, who later found herself mother to a disabled son stricken with hemophilia – a disease she had passed down to him. She herself suffered from multiple chronic illnesses. It should be a deeply sympathetic story.

It isn't, because it's also a story of "Disabled mother keeps ignoring everyone and really screwing up." As someone who suffers from chronic fatigue, I completely understood Alexandra's inability to perform many of her public duties. I could also see part of the problem here – Alexandra refused to fall into the role of the disabled angel of the household, who never complains but continues to inspire others (this was a big Victorian thing) and I admire her for that. I also completely understand her wish for privacy. But the counter to this is simple: if you want to be a completely private person, you cannot marry the Emperor of Russia. And Alexandra went far beyond not performing many of her public duties: she ended up not performing any of them. She created unnecessary enemies. She ignored well meant advice from relatives and friends, eventually dropping all friends who were not essentially sycophants.

And of course, she continually took advice from Rasputin – except for the one time when it really counted. Rasputin advised Nicholas and Alexandra not to enter World War I. As wrong as he was about so many other things, he was completely correct about this. Russia was not ready for a war with Germany.

Fortunately, after the first few chapters, the book mostly focuses on the girls, sparing me some aggravation – while also making me grit my teeth occasionally over Alexandra's parenting. She had a gift for inspiring guilt trips in her daughters, and she also encouraged them to tell her all about their little crushes – which sounds lovely, except that these were also men that Alexandra would never have allowed the girls to marry. These sailors had no noble rank whatsoever, and Alexandra supported Nicholas, after all, when he exiled his brother just for marrying a woman who was only a countess. So this tends to come across as….I don't know, wrong.

But the rest of the stuff – the petty gossip, the clothes, the complaints from tutors and governesses, the first love affairs, the ongoing and growing sense of doom – is all surprisingly mesmerizing. Rappaport has a strong sense of narrative, and the illustrations just add to the pathos.

What struck me most about reading the book right now, however, is a small point not intended by the author: that is, the information that right after the first Russian Revolution (the February one) the Provisional Government offered to send the four Grand Duchesses into safety and exile. They might well have made it. Hostility focused on the tsar and his wife, not their children; Olga and Tatiana had arguably even gained some goodwill by working as nurses throughout the war. They had wealthy relatives throughout the world, who later took in other relatives and even some of the courtiers. (One of Alexandra's ladies-in-waiting, for example, ended up in a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court.) And although Nicholas apparently considered making changes, Russian law prior to the Revolution barred them as heirs to the throne, making them less of a political threat than other (male) Romanovs – for instance, Nicholas' brother, Michael, eventually shot by the Bolsheviks in June 1918, in part to prevent royalist forces from putting Michael on the throne. Many other Romanovs escaped.

But not the girls. Why?

Because when the offer of safety and exile came, they were too sick with measles to be moved.

By the time they recovered, it was too late. The four girls were forced to join their parents in what was, for all intents and purposes, prison in Siberia, if a prison that still had some servants. They were rarely able to leave their house, though they did write frequent letters complaining of boredom.

And a little over a year later, they were murdered along with their parents.

Rappaport, of course, wrote the book before the Disneyland measles outbreak, and none of it is meant as a cautionary tale about vaccinations. Still, reading it, I couldn't help but think of the alternatives, of what could have happened, but didn't.

Because measles.

The lessons of history.

Jill Lapore: The Secret History of Wonder Woman

William Moulston Marston was many things: a psychologist who took credit for inventing the lie detector machine, a failed academic who kept bouncing from school to school, a supporter of women's rights, a man who ended up in a happy triad, a man who insisted that his bondage activities were strictly scientific, and the creator of Wonder Woman.

Jill Lapore's recent book delves into a lot of this, and also into the history of the U.S. feminist and birth control movements. The third member of Marston's triad, Olive Byrne, happened to be a niece of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Byrne's mother went on hunger strikes to support the movement; this, and watching Marston write her books, made quite an impression on her. Much of the imagery of the early Wonder Woman comics - the breaking out of chains, the ropes, the lassos - came in part from early feminist cartoons, and in part from Olive Byrne. The bracelets Wonder Woman wears are hers.

That's all the nice scholarly part so that you can feel good about reading the book and that you learned something. The fun stuff is all of the gossipy stuff about Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, his lover Olive Byrne, and the triad they set up and concealed. This includes great stuff about the way Marston used both of them to write little articles saying how amazing Marston was, the trials of running their household, since generally speaking only Holloway earned a reliable income, their kids, and oh yes, the bondage. Holloway, in many ways, took over the traditional role of the husband, Byrne functioned in the more traditional "wife" roles, while working as a freelance writer, and Marston continued to have issues. And Wonder Woman joined the Justice League as a secretary. (Reading that I became much more resigned to the current new 52 Wonder Woman/Superman relationship.)

It's a fascinating and lavishly illustrated read, if, somehow, a little sparse, especially once Marston died, and Wonder Woman was passed to other authors. Part of the problem is, as Lapore acknowledges, it's not really all that easy to figure out who wrote various issues of Wonder Woman - although the issues that featured a lot of chained up women tend to be Marston's. It's also fascinating to see the reactions of DC editors to all of this sort of stuff, and the way Marston left specific information in his scripts explaining just how long all of the chains had to be. (It was his thing.) Unfortunately, after Marston's death, we get a lot less of this behind the scenes creative stuff, which is a disappointment, but then again, Wonder Woman's later creators don't seem to have been as interesting, or as influential.

Death Comes to Pemberley, or at least the BBC

I started reading Death Comes to Pemberley a few years back, and stopped just a few pages in: P.D. James is the sort of author I tend to admire more than love, and her Jane Austen tone felt off to me. But I was kinda curious about what actually happened in it, so when the BBC series popped up on Netflix I gave it a try.

My response?

Uhh.....

There's some good stuff in Death Comes to Pemberley, almost all of it in the background. Which is to say, the sets, magnificent. The shots of various people running through the woods looking for ghosts and murdered people and things carved into trees, also magnificent. The carriages and the horses? Yay. The costumes, mostly yay.

And then there's the foreground.

The chief problem with Death Comes to Pemberley is that it has no idea what, exactly, it is. A murder mystery? Kinda - someone is murdered, and that's...sorta dreary, and then the show kinda wanders to other things, and then there's an inquest, and then a trial that repeats a lot of stuff about the inquest, and then a last minute rescue that has a decided feel of an old Wild West movie to it. It would probably help if the "previously on Death Comes to Pemberley" bits didn't manage to be a dead giveaway, pun intended, for the third episode.

Is it a Jane Austen/Gothic mashup? Well, kinda, except that this was done before, by Jane Austen herself, and in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice which suddenly decided that the best way to make P&P accessible to modern audiences was to make it a mashup of P&P and Wuthering Heights, and, to be more fair to that film than I usually am, actually managed more fidelity to the original plot and a tighter focus on the social/economic issues involved.

Speaking of those, is it a commentary on the social/economic issues? Well, kinda: there's a lot of stuff about trials and so on. There's some stuff about marrying for family and a few reminders of just how unsuitable Darcy and Elizabeth's marriage was and the fallout from that. Jane Austen lived on the edges of high society - one brother was a diplomat; a sister-in-law a countess, but she herself never had money, and her books display constant awareness of this, and multiple takedowns (especially in Emma and Persuasion) of the upper classes.

This show ends with a nice member of the working classes making the utmost sacrifice to make absolutely sure that the upper classes are going to be just ok.

Is it a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, letting us know what happened to Elizabeth and Darcy and other characters? Well, kinda, but here is where the show really starts falling into problems, especially with minor characters. Most of the P&P characters go entirely unmentioned, with Jane making only a few brief appearances and Bingley not speaking at all. His sisters never appear. An offhand reference assures us that Mary got married off, and ends there; no info about her husband or status; Kitty is never mentioned. And Lydia is just mindboggling. She starts off the film in hysterics - something the original character seemed too callous to ever do; retreats to her silly self, which is fine, and then, at the end, suddenly displays loyalty, wisdom, insight and intelligence like where did this come from? I tend to think that Lydia in P&P is slightly more intelligent than other characters give her credit for - she makes a couple of pointed and correct jabs in Elizabeth's direction - but only slightly, but in any case, by starting off by presenting this films completely fails to lead up to that moment, and just feels false in every direction.

And speaking of false - this may arguably be the greatest misreading of Colonel Fitzwilliam ever, changing him from the amiable if somewhat directionless military officer clueless about the very limited opportunities for women into a near villain. It's....awful. The entire point of Colonel Fitzwilliam in P&P is to be a relatively decent guy so that Elizabeth will find him credible, a point missed here.

Is it a comedy? Well, it has two funny scenes: one involving Mrs. Bennet, and one involving Lady Catherine. In three hours.

But although the film doesn't actually manage to be any of these things, it seems to want to be all of them - thus the awkward lurching between Gothic, attempted social commentary and sudden "Oh, wait! This is P&P fanfiction! Summon Lady Catherine!" Which in the end makes it a major mess. And, on a fairly cruel note, there's Anna Maxwell Martin, who is good, but for reasons of makeup/lighting whatever her age looks far too old. She might not be. But this seems to take place about six to at the most ten years after Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth and Darcy have a son who seems to be about four or five, possibly younger, and although Elizabeth seems comfortable in the house and Lady Catherine is talking to her, she's still relying on Georgiana for some fairly basic info and hasn't learned most of the local legends, and expecting her second child. Georgiana and Lydia, 16 in Pride and Prejudice appear to be in their early twenties. Jane, 21 or 22, appears to be in her mid to late twenties. Elizabeth, who states in Pride and Prejudice that she is not one and twenty, looks to be in her mid-thirties, possibly her early 40s, aging decades to everyone else's few years. And she just doesn't sparkle that much - but I guess that's what happens when you thought you were in a social comedy but find out that you're actually in the middle of something that wants to be Gothic, but isn't.

Flash

I haven't talked much about The Flash here - partly because I haven't talked much about anything here, but mostly because there's just not that much to talk about: it's a fluffy popcorn show. Fun, but for the most part forgettable. But last night's episode, while one of the weakest so far, did something fairly interesting.



Flash's pilot introduced Dr. Harrison Wells, who has some sort of time travel/time computer thingy (H. Wells? Get it? GET IT????) He also uses a wheelchair - stunningly enough, for network TV, a completely appropriate powerchair. It was so appropriate I tuned in. The end of the pilot, however, revealed that Wells can walk, implying that he was totally faking needing a wheelchair. Ordinarily this would have irritated me, but the show made it clear that Wells was a morally grey murderer, suggesting that faking a disability isn't something "normal" or "good" people do.

And then last night it got really interesting.

The opening scenes showed Dr. Wells zipping around, confirming that he has superspeed. (An earlier episode suggested this, but fans were still debating.) A later scene showed him zipping around - and suddenly collapsing on the floor, unable to move at all. As it turns out, Wells is in some sort of self-treatment for superspeed addicts, or something, treating himself with tachyon particles (this show is not good at the science) which, to sum up means this:

He has a chronic illness which sometimes makes him unable to work, which is why he needs the chair.

Brilliant, Flash writers.

Most wheelchair users on television are of the "can't walk at all" variety, which kinda leaves out the many of us (me) who can walk, for short distances, but find that the chair is either easier, or, in my case, prevents falls and really painful bruising. (I started using the chair after a bad fall at the grocery store left my leg black and blue for well over a week - the only good thing about that was that my arm didn't hurt as much in comparison. In related news I suggest that everyone avoid falling in a grocery store. )

So to see this on television felt like a win. Granted, these are more or less the same people who finally gave me a bisexual superhero only to toss her off a roof right onto a dumpster (sigh), so I'm not feeling overly confident that this is going to be great portrayal moving forward, but for now, I'll take it.