As I wrote here, one of my birthday presents this year was Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (and I note with a shudder that that Amazon page says “A Stranger in Olondria: a novel (Olondria, 1)” — please don’t let this be yet another trilogy!); I’ve just finished it, and as so often happens I have conflicting reactions. I’ll start by saying it’s a good novel, very well written, and anyone who enjoys Tolkien-derived fantasy should love it. The problem is that I am not one of those people; it is rare for a person to enjoy sf and fantasy equally, and I was a science fiction fan from the beginning. Yes, I liked Tolkien, but that was a one-off, just as my enjoyment of My Fair Lady does not make me a fan of musicals. Here’s the opening paragraph, which gives an excellent idea of what the book is like:
As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendor of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbor City, whose lights and colors spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call “the breath of angels” and is said to cure heartsickness and bad lungs. Beyond this is the Balinfeil, where, in the winter months, the people wear caps of white squirrel fur, and in the summer months the goddess Love is said to walk and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom. But of all this I knew nothing. I knew only of the island where my mother oiled her hair in the glow of a rush candle, and terrified me with stories of the Ghost with No Liver, whose sandals slap when he walks because he has his feet on backwards.
This is a poet’s prose, complex and polished and singing, and I can see why the reviews say things like “elegant language,” “the prose […] is glorious,” and “a poetic and elegant style.” The problem for me is that I quickly become impatient with it; like rococo painting and elaborate cocktails, it’s too rich for my taste. It’s not that I want stripped-down, “Hemingwayesque” prose — heaven forfend! But μηδὲν ἄγαν, as they say; if the merchants are delirious with scents and the earth is carpeted with almond blossom, I’m likely to take a hike to a less redolent vicinity. It’s a good example of what Bakhtin called chronotope: a fantasy novel is supposed to have melancholy beaches and light called “the breath of angels,” not to mention places named Bain and Illoun and Fayaleith — that’s how you know you’re in the right kind of novel. But me, I’m a stranger in Olondria; I’d rather be on Mars, even the impossible Mars of Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, which I recently read with as much pleasure as the first time around, half a century ago.
Having gotten that off my chest, I will quickly add that I adjusted to the delirious scents and robed priests and quaint festivals, and eventually found the plot gripping and the resolution moving; I particularly enjoyed the interpolation of stories within the main story, which work well (and are told less ornately). But it’s still not my kind of chronotope. Oh, and one thing that kept irritating me was the impossibility of knowing how all those place names are pronounced. Is Bain /beɪn/ or /baɪn/? Is Tyom monosyllabic /tjom/ or anglicized /ˈtaɪɒm/ or, say, /ˈtyom/, with an ü sound in the first syllable? I guess most readers don’t care about such things, being content to absorb the fantastically foreign-looking names by eye, but dammit, I need to know how to say them. That’s one good thing about Tolkien: he took care to let you know how his various languages worked and how to say their words.
but dammit, I need to know how to say them
I have this problem with the name of the multiply-genocidal star-destroying extremely alien Chenzeme in Linda Nagata’s Vast series. I mentally make it trisyllabic [‘tʃɛnzɛmɛ], but I have no idea how Nagata intends it to be read.
(It’s worth reading. You actually eventually find out why the Chenzeme are like that, and their motives turn out to be – at least – understandable, if hardly forgiveable.)
because he has his feet on backwards
The wild and hostile kikiris (“fairies” in the local English), which live in the Kusaasi-country deep bush and try to lead travellers astray to their deaths, have their feet attached backwards. “To confuse trackers”, I was told. I imagine it does.
I was wondering where the name “Samatar” came from: Somali, I see. I wonder if it has a transparent meaning in Somali?
Hm, I didn’t like that paragraph. For one thing, it hit one of my pet peeves twice: “winter months” and “summer months”. But I do like gripping plots and moving resolutions.
please don’t let this be yet another trilogy!
You’ll be lucky if it comes in under ten volumes. But your use of the word “resolution” is a good sign.
The wild and hostile kikiris (“fairies” in the local English), which live in the Kusaasi-country deep bush and try to lead travellers astray to their deaths, have their feet attached backwards.
That reminds me of the kokiri from Zelda, forest dwellers that take the form of human children. Some sources say they are forest spirits.
This style of fantasy has the same effect on me as Esperanto. I respect the effort but it is clearly a facsimile of the real world, it makes me wonder why I should spend my time with it? I can read 1001 Nights instead. Also „Olondria“ sounds like a name Ursula K. Le Guin would have made up, so I can go read her instead.
To which some would say, isn’t Tolkien simply a pastiche of Beowulf and the Norse Sagas with some Iliad thrown in? I suppose so, but by telling the story mostly from the perspective of Hobbits – ordinary non-heroic people – he did manage to create an interesting perspective on the old European heroic tradition.
Obviously it’s unfair to judge Samatar based on one paragraph, just my initial reaction.
kikiris
The proverb equivalent to “give the devil his due” is
Kikirig ya’a mɔr bʋʋdɛ, fʋn tis o ka o lɛbig o mɔɔgʋn.
“If a kikirig is in the right, concede the point and let it go back to the bush.”
Not all kikiris are hostile: they also are (in some sense) what constitutes a person’s siig “life force.” Men have three each, and women have four. They are human-shaped, but not everyone can see them.
The Bible translations use kikirig to render “demon.” The earlier versions use kikirbɛ’ɛd “bad kikirig“, specifically, for this, but the 2016 version just uses kikirig. Evidently the reputation of kikiris has deteriorated over the years.
The word itself is widespread in Oti-Volta, but linguistically odd: it has irregular sound correspondences suggesting that it has often been borrowed rather than inherited in common. I remember Lameen pointing out a similar word in Songhay.
The word itself is widespread in Oti-Volta, but linguistically odd: it has irregular sound correspondences suggesting that it has often been borrowed rather than inherited in common
Could this be partially caused by taboo effects?
Word taboos don’t seem to be a big feature of those cultures (but then, how would I know if they were?)
There seems to have been a fair bit of borrowing between Oti-Volta languages, especially from Western Oti-Volta to other groups, so in one way a loan doesn’t cry out for elaborate explanations.
On the other hand, kikirig seems to be a pretty basic concept in Kusaasi culture, being actually part of what constitutes a human being. On the other other hand, the dictionaries tend not to give enough detail on the meaning of the cognates (or loans) in other languages to be able to say whether the meanings are quite the same.
Franz Kröger’s excellent Buli dictionary does, and the parallel is pretty much exact, with wild hostile bush-dwelling kikerisa on the one hand, but also with kikerisa as part of what makes up a human being, three for a man, four for a woman. But Bulsa culture in general seems to be very close to that of Western Oti-Volta speakers. (And despite Manessy’s very odd classification of Buli/Konni as the most aberrant branch of Oti-Volta, in reality it is, linguistically, definitely the closest relative of WOV.)
Buli also has kikeruk for the hostile kind, but other speakers just use kikerik for both. This just looks like the pejorative use of that particular noun class when applied to animates, which is well established in WOV too.
1. There’s a range of prose styles within the fantasy genre, broadly construed. The non-Tolkien stuff I enjoyed most as a teenager (not that I’ve gone back to it much in recent decades) was by e.g. Leiber / Moorcock / Vance / Zelazny, who would have been more likely to steer clear of cataracts of roses and almond-blossom-carpeting, especially in the same paragraph.
2. I am interested to learn that Prof. Samatar has the same comparatively-unusual (esp. in earlier generations) mixed parentage as the late great Poly Styrene (in the world Marianne Joan Elliott-Said), except that Poly’s mom wasn’t a Mennonite. I see that she (Samatar, not Styrene) has also published a non-fiction memoir about a quest to find traces of the one-time Mennonite community in present-day Uzbekistan that was obliterated during Stalin’s time, which is a nicely offbeat/niche topic.
I rapidly get turned off by the cod-mediaeval style seen in a lot of fantasy. It’s never nearly as interesting as real mediaeval Europe. My heart sinks when castles and loyal feudal retainers start appearing …
Probably similar to Vanya’s response. Likewise, I find it difficult to muster much interest in even very ingenious conlangs, because they never quite measure up to the interest of a real exotic language.
It can be done well. It depends on how much the author is invested in the actual dynamics of their imagined society, as opposed to just treating it as a pretty (or grim) backdrop for magicky stuff or whatever.
Reminded* me – perhaps because I first’t read Vanya, “a facsimile of the real world” in particular – the first two pages of chapter 2 of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. As I told, I remember this book frequently and randomly, because it’s one of texts I practiced my translation skills with.
The first of these two pages can be found here:
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1525/9780520965980-004/html
and a part of the second here:
https://amateuranthropologist.home.blog/2020/05/11/bedouin-desert-sentiments/
(* not in the sense of similarity, conversely)
a person’s siig “life force.”
Which reminds me, one of the cultural elements (and plot points) in the novel is the jut (plural janut):
Not everyone has a jut, and it was a considerable shock for me when one of the main characters (spoiler alert!) tossed their jut into the sea.
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society
An excellent book!
I was wondering where the name “Samatar” came from: Somali, I see. I wonder if it has a transparent meaning in Somali?
I (of course) wonder the same thing.
“An excellent book!” – Yes. I picked texts almost at random, and totally happy that I chose this one.
And the two pages in the book, having same theme (arrival. fantasy, fancy language) but using totaly very different means (and largely not her text or not her fantasies) are better.
The paragraph you quote is a stylisation.
Not everyone has a jut
Everyone has a siig; you die without it, though this is not an all-or-nothing thing: your siig is what witches steal, and when it’s thought of as several kikiris, you fall ill if you lose one or two, but only die if you lose all three (for a man) or all four (for a woman.)
In an improving folk-tale about a man who should have taken his wife’s advice (what with her being a witch, and thus knowing what she was talking about), the man’s siig is hidden in the thatch of his entrance hut. Unfortunately his neighbour (yet another witch) knows about this …
What not everyone has in the Kusaasi scheme of things is a sigir “spiritual guardian.” Kusaal personal names often refer to a person’s sigir. It’s most often the win “spiritual individuality” of an ancestor. The father of a newborn consults a diviner to find out if there are any likely volunteers among family or local wina for the role of the child’s sigir.
Your win basically is you, but still distinct enough that you greet a person sitting alone by saying “blessing on your conversation”, as you would for greeting a group of people chatting. The idea is that a person sitting alone is communing with their own win.
A bit like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_Between_a_Man_and_His_Ba
The idea of the Egyptian bꜣ seems to be quite close to Kusaal win, though Egyptian kꜣ seems to be not quite the same as siig.
“You don’t have a win, Doctor. You are a win. You have a siig, temporarily.”
I thought about putting in the qualification “your win basically is you, according to our way of looking at it”; I don’t think the Kusaasi are Cartesian dualists. Neither win nor siig is the same thing as niŋgbina “body” or nyɔvʋr “life” (a compound, literally “living breath.”)
Pretty much everything has a win, not just human beings. And in fact the win of Everything is Win “God”, though I suspect that in that sense the word has picked up something from Islam.
I think it would be possible to characterise the win of something as a sort of pattern of organisation or pattern of behaviour rather than some sort of non-physical substance. Capital-W Win can also have much the same sense as our “fate” or “destiny”, too: wintɔɔg, literally “bitterness of win“, actually means “misfortune.”
In some sense, a person’s win survives their death, but I think that may be less like our idea of an immortal soul than the Buddhist idea that what is transmitted in reincarnation is not a “soul” (there being no such thing) but just moral cause and effect: like a dying candle lighting another, in the standard Buddhist trope.
Either way, one is imposing our thought categories on a culture where they don’t really belong.
The win of traditional Kusaasi culture certainly seems to me like the nearest term to our traditional “soul”, but the Bible translators actually adopted siig for that, and used win for “pagan god.” I suppose it just shows how incommensurate the two worldviews were. I don’t think this was just a matter of simple ignorance of local culture on the part of the missionaries: SIL involved L1 speakers in the translation process pretty much from the start, with good results on the whole.
Just discovered that the Canticle for Leibowitz quote has been widely fathered on Christian-Attribution-Magnet C S Lewis, who seems never to have expressed any such view. It seems of somewhat borderline orthodoxy to me … my reponse would probably be, “Well, in a way, I suppose …”
That line has always suggested to me that Walter Miller was very poorly instructed by his converters.
as far as i know, there’s just one other Olondria book, which has a quite different flavor, though the type of heightened language isn’t too far off from Stranger.
i don’t see the tolkein connection at all, myself. it’s a lot more present to me in most hard-ish sf (often filtered through joseph campbell*) than in anything i’ve read of samatar’s. i see rushdie, le guin, and ghosh in there – though those are what resonantes for me, rather than her stated influences.
and the memoir is fascinating, both about the mennonite trek to central asia and about her particular upbringing in the church.
.
* if the timing worked out a little better, i’d be very tempted to suspect his monomyth owed a lot more to tolkein’s fiction than to any actual folklore research.
What not everyone has in the Kusaasi scheme of things is a sigir “spiritual guardian.” Kusaal personal names often refer to a person’s sigir.
The “daemons” in the series filming of His Dark Materials are like guardian animals.
Siga guardians seem usually to be the wina of people, but they can also be genii loci, and are quite often the wina of trees: somebody called Atiig “Atiga” (“Tree”) has a tree-win as guardian. So does someone called Akudug “Akudugu” (“Iron.”)
I don’t think animals qualify, though. (There don’t seem to be any people called “Lion”, for example.) I think you have to be a rational being to be a sigir. This includes trees, in the Kusaasi Weltanschauung: a tree can even be a witch.
I realized after my last post that Rodger C might post a reminder* that the original quote from A Canticle for Leibowitz was heretical. Unlike him, however, I did not know that was so when I first read the book. (My father read Fiat Homo to me when I was only five or six, inspired to do so by the NPR adaptation. I didn’t read the rest of the book myself til I was about eleven.)
On the other hand, based on David Eddyshaw’s detailed explanations in the past, I was pretty confident that the modified quote as I posted it was—if not necessarily the way an Oti–Volta speaker might usually think of it—not factually inaccurate. Certainly, it ought to be more accurate than Father Zerchi’s original.
* Rodger C’s linked comment also reminds me of the snowclone: “Who Y-s the Ymen?”** However, as a further allusion, whenever I reference that Juvenal quote, I never show the entire question—because the entirety is never shown in-panel in Watchmen.
** The dummy variable there obviously cannot be “X.”
I wonder if Miller had read George Macdonald, who expressed the same heresy in very similar words almost a century earlier:
I read on wikipedia that the late Mr. Miller prepared for his conversion to Roman Catholicism by dropping* bombs on the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, which seems an intriguingly unconventional approach. But yeah, the point of the Incarnation is that both the material and immaterial parts are kind of important to the whole and deprecating one of the ingredients is not going to lead to anything positive.
*Maybe he was not literally the bombardier in the USAAF aircraft involved in the missions, but still.
@TR: That sounds quite likely. George MacDonald, of course, never claimed that his beliefs, even though he was a Congregationalist minister, were orthodox. He did not believe in Biblical inerrency, and he only believed in predestination by way of not believing in eternal damnation.
He was a universalist. (I feel impelled, however, to point out that Calvin himself, unlike many of his theological progeny, thought that, at the very least, most people would be saved.)
It’s notable that MacDonald’s literary works aimed at children are vastly better from the literary, psychological and ethical standpoints than those of the orthodox but ghastly Charles Kingsley.
I was just pointed by a stray reference in After Virtue at K’s essentially unforgiveable poem
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/farewell-71
QED.
It is pretty difficult to conceive of a human consciouness surviving (and remaining sane) in a totally disembodied state, and various otherwise reasonably orthodox Christians have denied that this is actually valid doctrine:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mortalism#Soul_sleep
“a tree can even be a witch.” – I wasn’t too impressed when I tried read fantasy based on specific mythologies. Say, I tried Saladin Ahmed because there is not much Arab-themed fantasy around, and yes, it is Arab-themed and fantasy. No, the problem isn’t that the mixture doesn’t work and not that it didn’t feel differently enough, nothing systematic. But ‘theme’ is not a predictor of a good book. His novel is simply average. But I think it would be fun to read something Kusaasi-themed.
I refute Kingsley’s “essentially unforgiveable poem” thusly:
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.
Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.
Practise your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,
It is so frail.
For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.
***
I have perhaps previously told the anecdote of being a scruffy 21-year-old and finding myself at a cocktail party face to face with an octogenerian professor who had actually known the poet (1888-1974) who wrote those lines and trying with no success to make small talk.
JCR roolz.
https://www.poetry.com/poem/22390/judith-of-bethulia
A contemporary photograph of the lady:
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/2/judith-with-the-head-of-holofernes-domenico-beccafumi.jpg
That may be Charles Kingsley she’s giving the side-eye to.
@David E.: Visually, I prefer https://lucascranach.org/en/US_FAMSF_1954-74/
WIth its nicely “meta” title.
One gets the strong impression that the Saxon court lady would also have been unimpressed by Kingsley’s ditty, and indeed, probably by Kingsley himself. Her choice of props seems … pointed, somehow.
To be fair, the lady doesn’t look as if she’d be impressed by much at all.
The Beccafumi portrait implies that Holofernes was a leprechaun.
Nah, it’s a shrunken head. As implied by the John Crowe Ransom poem. Basically, handbag-sized, for convenience. J is still carrying the sword in case any other Assyrian general feels like trying it on.
Sack, and be sacked.
David Eddyshaw: To be fair, the lady doesn’t look as if she’d be impressed by much at all.
I am dubious of the “lady of the Saxon” court attribution. Cranach was quite capable of doing portraits of individuals, and that simply does not look like one. It has pretty much the same face the artist used for a generic young, beautiful woman. Unless the painting has a known sitter, it seems unlikely to be a real portrait of a specific lady.
He painted a couple dozen of ’em, apart from those attributed to his workshop or followers. Everyone wanted one above their breakfast table. The women don’t all look the same, but are standards.
The northerners were good at portraits, but Cranach was not as good as the Flemish painters of his generation and of the previous one.
I have such a problem with a certain painting by Ferdinand Max Bredt. It surprised me a lot when amidst imaginary (?) naked ladies in harems (cf wikimedia commons for him) I came across a picture actually painted in Tunis – my reaction is strong, because I know it not logically, but instinctively and at once (the light is north african). Logically it’s Tunis too. So the dresses must also be real (the girl’s dress is definitely interesting) and so must be people and I must have met their great grandchildren. But I can understand nothing about the (too smooth) face.
at the very least, most people would be saved
creeping majoritarianism! (better or worse than pluralism, i can’t say)
…Was thinking about this dress when joking about the strange dialogue about pants whose fragments are used as examples (and scattered across at random) in the Wandala (Mandara) grammar (not in this thread) . Sorry if anyone found my ”muslim”, ”’pants” and ”daughter” weird in this specific combination. It’s some Cameroonian guy’s rant in Wandala that combines them, and as posted it as a riddle I preferred to explain nothing (and be a guy who says weird jokes about Muslims).
By the way…
Does God have the sense of humour, and can blasphemy be pleasing to God?
(remembered a Khayyam’s quatrain in Russian translation where the poet claims God is drunk. A friend of mine used it in a quiz.)
“…one thing that kept irritating me … ”
Well, she does pronounce them somehow in her head.
Perhaps it didn’t occur to her that English can be ambigous or she though that would be overly pedantic, especially without an actual fictional landuage. But the desire to let the reader’s hear and experince everything as the author does is enough. Names aren’t ‘graphical’ to her.
That quote beginning “As I was a stranger in Olondria…” reminds me somehow of the novel by Christopher Priest called The Islanders:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Islanders_(Priest_novel)
Does God have the sense of humour
Of course. Traditional exegesis of several of Jesus’ dicta spectacularly misses the dominical piss-taking. (Camels? Eyes of needles?) Also, beetles.
and can blasphemy be pleasing to God?
No. But the actual scope of it is much narrower than generally asserted. Blasphemy is purporting to speak or act in the name of God when you don’t. So “Piss Christ” is not blasphemy, whereas signing a decree mandating putting the Ten Commandments in Texas schoolrooms is.
“Here’s the opening paragraph, which gives an excellent idea of what the book is like:”
If it does, that excellent idea, to my mind, is that the book is a stinker.
“This is a poet’s prose, complex and polished and singing…”
No, it’s a collection of windy clichés, ill-chosen images and rather improbable assertions: how can spice merchants run their businesses if they are ‘delirious with scents’?
Scandal aside, “Piss Christ” is a beautiful and moving photograph.
as far as i know, there’s just one other Olondria book, which has a quite different flavor
Well, that’s fine with me — it’s an interesting world, let her explore it from various angles. But this novel is complete as a novel and doesn’t need any furshlugginer sequels.
i don’t see the tolkein connection at all, myself.
Upon mature reflection (or agonizing reappraisal), I think you’re right — I was suckered into a misleading comparison by the Tolkienesque map and vaguely Tolkienesque names. But there are no other races (orcs etc.) and there is no overarching historical narrative, just your basic bildungsroman in a fantasy setting, with a civil war gestured at in a few pages towards the end.
Is God drunk? “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.”
Or consider the perspective of a fellow who converted to Islam (ex-hippie British-Sufi subgenre): https://genius.com/Richard-thompson-god-loves-a-drunk-lyrics
@DE, reference to Jesus also leads us to God’s preferred genre of fiction, headdress etc…
I liked Samatar’s Olondria books (there are two) well enough, but her nonfiction is more interesting. The White Mosque is an extremely colorful narrative, and her academic works, Opacities and Tone, are very stimulating.
@hat: o! be at ease! the other Olondria book isn’t a sequel – it’s just in the same world! (it’s more overtly leguinian or delanyan in form: a set of interlocking novellas)
–
i don’t disagree with DE’s answer to can blasphemy be pleasing to God?, but there are some schools of practice/thought that come pretty close to that. parts of the “descending to ascend” tradition in jewish mysticism, especially its sabbatean and frankist branches, did* commandment-violation as a devotional act. but i think that for them, part of the point of sanctification through transgression / redemption through sin is that the apparently/previously blasphemous becomes something else in the process.
.
*or do, i suppose, since i believe there are still observant dönmeh communities.
Actually, blasphemy here is my mistranslation of
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/богохульство:
“Бог (Box, “God”) + -о- (-o-) + хула́ (xulá, “abuse, reviling”) + -ство (-stvo)”
somewhat more narrow in scope.
PS. I have alwayt been curious about Mennonites in Central Asia, and I’m much more excited to hear that someone has something about them than that someone wrote a decent fantasy novel:)
Or consider the perspective of a fellow who converted to Islam (ex-hippie British-Sufi subgenre)
Alas, he falls prey to the very heresy we were discussing:
But a drunk’s only trying to get free of his body
And soar like an eagle high up there in heaven.
More Gnostic than Islamic …
However, in Islam as in Christianity, there have been differing opinions regarding what (if anything) a soul experiences between death and resurrection:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barzakh
Incidentally, despite the forcible attribution to an Arabic root there, in reality this is yet another Arabic word of Iranian origin:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%B2%D8%AE
Looking to see if there were any English words that are, like barzakh (not in OED), from Parthian, I found this in the OED s.v. Albanian:
Better than the weirder one among these two:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Children's_songs_in_Arabic
(though the less weird song is an etymological mystery in itsels)
@drasvi
Are you sure bogokhulstvo should not be simplified to bogokhuistvo? This would make it easier to pronounce for, eg., L1 speakers of Oriental languages.
All in all, the link is a good caricature of the Arab world as it appears to people from abroad:)
Which a en.WP caterory precisely is – a heap of everything known to foreigners.
(Of course the actual Arab wolrd is somewhat less grim)
“High world” to “barrier” hardly leaps out as an obvious semantic change. After looking at Cheung’s paper, I find myself unconvinced by any of the three Iranian etymologies (two of them textually unattested) that he proposes or mentions for this word. To make matters worse, the Qur’an does not unambiguously attest the eschatological reading of the word, only the sense “barrier”. There is a long tradition (predating anything that could be called Orientalism) of seeking Persian explanations for obscure Quranic terms, and it often results in overstretching.
“High world” to “barrier” hardly leaps out as an obvious semantic change
True.
As I understand, Samatar (indeed, what does this name mean?)
– is not a fantasy writer.
These two novels are her comment on the genre of epic fantasy (in which she loves certian things and hates certain other things, and it is not difficult to guess which ones).
– worked 18 years on them:)
Tolkien gave more than one thing to the genre and in many ways defined it.
But there is one thing other writers seldom if ever repeat, the dream of beauty. I mean the elves and elven everything. Here it is human beauty. Lots of it, mixed with all things big cities have.
And it is not the author’s thoughts, it is a character’s thoughts.
And the character is quoting what people say.
Yet there is excitementб which possibly reminded LH about Tolkien.
I think I’ll give it a try. I thought at first about the quote what Graham said about it, almost same words (what ‘poet’, it is so genre, if those aren’t clichés they are meant to be ones). I did not say it because I was not sure. Also I can’t tell good English from bad English:)
But I changed my mind and I’m curious about the author. Besides she worked in South Sudan (and does not like war) – perhaps her account of a fantasy war in the second novel will be interesting. No, I hope she never experienced it first hand, but feleing somethign about it is enough.
(There is something I want to read but have never actually read: a novel where character deal a lot with cultural barriers. Like I do sometimes, but more. An author of such a novel must be better travelled than I am.
This has little to do with Samatar, but it illustrates my idea of how experience can, in principle, enrich a book)
as i’ve said, i like them (and her other work) a lot! i’ll be interested to hear what you think, drasvi, especially because her characters are very often tangling with cultural barriers (which is something i appreciate in delany as well).
I’ll be interested as well.
thx!
___
Barriers:
1. This thought arose a decade ago. I already mentioned that hypothetical scenes form hypothetical unwrriten stories (usually science fiction) often come to my mind when I’m doing nothing. I don’t remember what exactly that one was about, but I remember that my character was a girl travelling along a long river (based on our Nile). And when she was talking with a local man (in my head, of course, but I remember nothing of that dialogue) in some country (perhaps again based on our Egypt. A country far from her own, but she has already spent quite a while there), their dialogue made their different (fictional) cultural backgrounds easy to notice. That was spontaneous.
My circle of communication was diverse and we were mutually exotic, so it happened in the imaginary dialogue because it happened in conversations I was having.
And I realised that I don’t see this in fiction, and that moreover, that despite everything I’m not experienced enough to write such a book – that’s a book where conversations my character is having in different places on her way are marked by cultural differences as often as my own conversations, and where these differences are different for different places. And where, of course, cultures are not reproducing those real cultures that I know.
Which means: most writers are not experienced enough for this.
On the other hand, no one has to be realistic:) A good writer can do it with alien cultures.
2. So actually, I don’t think I’ll find what I want to find anywhere. That’s why I want to find it:)
And I do not expect fictional cultures to be able to compete with real cultures – as long as the fictional ones are within the range of real ones.
Star Trek is all about “cultural barriers”, but those in Star Trek are more similar to the conflict between our monogamy and polygamy. They are whole institutions practiced by otherwise perfectly WEIRD people in strange dresses, said to be aliens. They are less exotic than an engineer from Tehran or I. I even think if I check I’ll find ennumerable instances of, say, polyandry there (polygyny is surprising to no one other than in its three y’s in a row).
Meanwhile in reality you come across such barriers very casually.
Given the role of travels in science fiction and fantasy (which also means meeting characters from other cultures) and given how much I enjoy some books with such travels, it would be interesting to look at a less simplistic portrayal of inter-cultural contact.
OK, how about a reading list of mostly 20th-centrury English-language SF?
Poul Anderson, The Day of Their Return, though it might be more simplistic than what you want. Reading the still more simplistic Agent of the Terran Empire first would help.
Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel and its sequel, The Naked Sun
Leigh Brackett, The Book of Skaith. High-class pulp.
John Crowley, Engine Summer
Robert Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road (at least the Nevia episode), Job: A Comedy of Justice. Again maybe a little simplistic for you.
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, The Eye of the Heron
Chad Oliver. I don’t remember much of his work, but he was a cultural anthropologist.
Jack Vance: “The Moon Moth”, “The Potters of Firsk”. I don’t usually like Vance, but those are exceptions.
Gene Wolfe, “Seven American Nights”
And then there are the ones I’m forgetting.
Cultural barriers with aliens whose cultures might not count as “within the range of real ones”: Joe Haldeman, “A !Tangled Web”; Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Translator” (both humorous); Terry Carr, “The Dance of the Changer and the Three” (not humorous)
Joe Haldeman, “A !Tangled Web”
Finally I meet someone who also has read that story. It used to be one of my favorites.
I don’t know whether that is what drasvi had in mind – the narrator mostly isn’t stumped by !Tang culture because he has familiarized himself with it; it’s his less-prepared rival who suffers. But it’s a nice, entertaining read.
@jf
C.J. Cherryh (or for an earlier author, Andre Norton) comes to mind…
Hans, what I have in mind is that imaginary young lady travelling along the Nile and her conversation whcih I don’t remember. It happened effortlessly simply because that’s what I was constantly having in my conversations. Think of what could make you realise that you’re talking to a Lebanese girl or Kazakh guy and not to a German. All those things whether they lead to misunderstanding or not.
Female characters often speak and behave differently from male characters, and not only in that men have one “male” characteristic (say, exaggerated self-confidence for men and exaggerated issues with it for women) and otherwise are same as women. That’s because the author constantly experiences gender*.
With imaginary cultures it is different.
___
*Often readers are even annoyed with women speaking like men in novels written by men and men speaking like women in novels written by women. I mean those novels where gender roles reproduce ours, not books where the author wants to play with them,
And I don’t mean that this difference must be important for the plot any more than gendered behavour is (even though misunderstandings can be interesting).
I guess you might find LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” interesting, where one of the things she explores is the difficulties of a gendered culture communicating with a culture where biological sex is only temporary and gendered roles don’t exist.
@Hans: How did I forget that one? Not at that high level, but there’s still Rocannon’s World (a planetary romance) and Planet of Exile. Maybe to some extent City of Illusions.
You should have been reading rec.arts.sf.written around the turn of the millennium, when people who did something wrong often apologized !Tang-style.
ETA: On gender roles, there’s Joanna Russ’s classic “When it Changed”. And while I’m at it, James Tiptree, Jr., “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
@pp: I haven’t read much Norton or Cherryh. What do you have in mind?
Nothing whatsoever to do with gender, but Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco deserves mention, as an all-too-plausible account of a spectacular failure to communicate with a (very) alien culture. (Clue’s in the title …)
@Hans, yes. I contrast our developed ability to portray gender to our cultural naïveté (which is expected). But gender is certainly among my interests (except that I don’t problematise it).
@DE, still haven’t read it. During the boom of 90s some publisher printed nice 12-volume collected works of Lem. The publisher warned that they chose not to print this one and also a certain “philosophical treatise”. You can imagine HOW MUCH I wanted to read both:)))
Then the publisher printed them both, but…
Reading The Winged Histories and while I’m finding it entirely likeable, the strange thing is that it is an exceptionally easy reading for me – someone whose English comes entirely from scientific works, textbooks, Wikipedia and forums and who seldom finds fiction easy.
Must mean: 1. she does not use the more colloquial register 2. and fancy epithets. (The problem with adjectives is that you can’t guess the precise meaning from the context and are too lazy to look them up because they change nothing:) Some writers use uncommon adjectives in quantities)
P.S. 2 is not too difficult to confirm. Yes, she does not use fancy adjectives:)
P.P.S. “…we were given… honitha…”, “…I ate my honith…”
She seems to have worked on languages too.
@Jerry Friedman: Those three Hainish novels against the background of an interstellar war are good, but also really weird in some ways. The information about the enemy is so scant, and the people down on each planet typically have no idea what is going on out in space, where the intense fighting might be.
Cherryh’s best book is possibly her first, Gate of Ivrel (which I mentioned recently in another thread), but it’s probably not the kind of book drasvi is looking for. For anyone who does want to read it, I recommend not continuing with the rest of the series, at least not past part one of the second book. (The series has no ending anyway.)
You should have been reading rec.arts.sf.written around the turn of the millennium, when people who did something wrong often apologized !Tang-style.
Too bad I missed that…
@jf, brett
I was thinking of the “Pride of Chanor” books by Cherryh (did she also do the book about a migratory race of mercenaries who are defeated and have to return along their migration path?) and I remember Norton did aliens well, there is one novella about a catwoman thief or slave who is going on some kind of treasure hunt and becomes extremely powerful in the end.
@Brett: Yes, that it an odd feature of the “three Hainish novels”. Although wasn’t the war in Rocannon’s World different from the one that had taken place in City of Illusions–rebels in the former, the Shing from outside the League in the latter? If there’s a war in Planet of Exile, between those two, it’s only in the background, as I recall.
For Le Guin, war, and cultural barriers, there’s also “The Word for World is Forest”.
I may have sounded dismissive when I called Rocannon’s World a Planetary Romance, which it is, but I can’t imagine the sub-genre being done better.
@pp: Thanks. I haven’t read the Pride of Chanur books. For the mercenaries, are you thinking of the Faded Sun trilogy, with the regul and their mercenaries the mri? I seem to remember liking that.
I’ve also left out the whole Time Travel Romance genre, such as Jack Finney, Time and Again (which I read in the Reader’s Digest Condensed version not long after it came out) and Diana Gabaldon, Outlander et seqq., of which I’ve read the first two.
Planet of Exile is the first of my two encounters with Le Guin.
I read – as I remembered – the first few pages when I was a preschooler. I TOTALLY loved what I read (they were wholly dedicated to a description of a very desolate land:)) and dreamt about finding a copy all my childhood.
Children read slowly and imagine what they are reading… (not sure why this desolate land charmed me)
As an adult I found the text on the Internet, and it is not “few pages”, it is a paragraph.
The second encounter was discouraging. They did not (almost) publish fantasy in USSR, so in 90s there was a fantasy boom. And of course someone translated and published her fantasy, which very quickly made me bored. And when, poorly known in USSR, Le Guin acquired here the reputation of “an important fantasy author” I learned to think of her as a popular-in-the-West author of bad fantasy, who also may have wonderful but poorly known books in other genres.
I would still think so, if not this forum:))))))
I don’t think Le Guin wrote bad fantasy. I suspect that (like me) you’re not particularly fond of fantasy as such. There is fantasy that I appreciate, but it has to be a lot better in terms of sheer literary and artistic quality for me to enjoy it than science fiction needs to be – I can enjoy quite mediocre SF, but not mediocre fantasy.
I think that a further factor is that the Earthsea sequence is, if not YA, at least not aimed at quite the same audience as the Hainish cycle. Again, YA stuff needs to be really superb (not just good) to be at all tolerable to us old folk.
But then, I don’t like the Narnia books either*. What do I know?
* Frankly, to the degree that, when I encounter people whose taste I generally respect who do appreciate them, my instinctive reaction (usually, tactfully suppressed) is “What, really?” But like the man said, de gustibus …
I suppose the Narnia books are aimed at children, not teenagers, though. And children are easier for grownups to empathise with than Young Adults. Too embarrassing to admit that you remember being that daft yourself.
of the books i’ve read among those mentioned (definitely all the cited le guin, russ, tiptree, carr, asimov, cherryh; most of the heinlein; enough norton for confidence; likely some of the others that haven’t stuck in my memory), to my mind only Always Coming Home actually creates/created a sensation for me as a reader of encountering a culture outside the euro/colonial baseline that the writers (and i) all come from. to me, as much as i love many of the other books, their “aliens” (whether human or otherwise) present variations within that space or versions of fairly familiar imagined-others structured by selective reversals and adjustments of that norm, rather than by their own logics and processes (i’m pretty sure le guin says as much of a lot of her work). i’d say the same of almost all sf/f writing: it’s a very rare thing, because it’s very difficult to do.
that’s very much not a value judgment to me – a lot of the sf/f i like best sits very much within my home cultural territory – but i think it’s worth noting the difference between writing that depicts cultural contact (well or badly) and writing that enacts it. clearly, that line would fall very differently for someone encountering the genres from definitively outside their culture of origin; relativity applies, as ever.
@JF:
I’ll see you your “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, and raise you “The Screwfly Solution”, which is both chilling and remarkably upsetting precisely because it’s so damn plausible as SF. (Also, one of the best last lines ever.) Worth a dozen of the Handmaid’s Tale.
their “aliens” (whether human or otherwise) present variations within that space or versions of fairly familiar imagined-others structured by selective reversals and adjustments of that norm, rather than by their own logics and processes
I’d give an honourable mention to Anne Leckie’s Translation State, which heavily features Presger Translators – beings created by the Presger specifically to be less alien to humanity than the Presger themselves, in order for communication to be possible at all. The Translators are quite alien enough to be going on with …
I’ve praised C J Cherryh’s Alliance-Union stories before, for the way they present the objectively horrific Union culture from within: to Union citizens, it’s all just normal life. Most people are brainwashed clones. So?
Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky is crafty in several respects, too. The Spider culture is presented in strikingly anthropomorphic terms – at times, jarringly so – but we find out in-universe that this is very largely a translation artefact, and the process whereby that’s come about is actually very disturbing, relating to the vile culture of the Emergency, the main human antagonists. And we find out in due course that, loathsome as the Emergency is, most of its actual citizens just take it for granted that this is how things are, and many of them are perfectly decent people on their own terms.
Bad science fiction – if we count it as science fiction – is also numerous series where people with laser rifles move in spaceships and shoot at aliens. Some of which are horrible. And if we don’t count them as sceince fiction, then perhaps we also should not really count all books with swordsmen and magicians as fantasy.
[In the chronological sequel to A Deepness in the Sky (actually written first), A Fire upon the Deep, it turns out that hexapodia actually was the key insight – something that totally passed me by when I read the novel. (I eventually discovered this from an economics blog.)]
@DE, that opinion about Le Guin, it was based on
(a) one paragraph I read as a preschooler
(b) maybe a chapter or something I read in my teens.
Also her reputation as a fantasy author in Russia (because most of Russia learned about her when Russia was thirsty for fantasy). While often my intuition lets me recognise a book I really, really, really must read by a single vignette (metaphorical, I don’t rememeber examples where it was a vignette) and once I read, it always turns out it is indeed a book I must read, I still think more research is needed:)
Yes, as a teen I read how a magically talented boy (or was it a girl?) repels an attack on his village and imagined how in the next chapter as a student of magic he is stronger and repels a worse attakc on something else, and then in next chapter he is even stronger and … Having found nothing charming about the character or the world didn’t want to keep reading it. I love Tolkien not because “there are powerful magicians there”. What I read seemed more like a receipe for commercial success. Perhaps I was mistaken. Anyway, my preschool memory is more important for me, and perhaps the reason why I never tried to read more is her reputation, which made me think that MOST of her books are going to be something people very different from me can enjoy.
DE, I don’t know. I can enjoy fantasy. Perhaps, I’m more tolerant to amateur authors who are going to change than to famous authors who have found a receipe for success and are going to follow it, but I can read works by both with some pleasure. I also can read your grammar or teach math or… There are many enjoyable things to do.
drasvi, Le Guin is not primarily a fantasy writer. I know a lot of people love her fantasy novels, but I’m not a fantasy fan — I read a couple and let it go at that. I highly, highly recommend her sf (especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed).
Oh, and “The Word for World is Forest.”
drasvi: Yes, as a teen I read how a magically talented boy (or was it a girl?) repels an attack on his village and imagined how in the next chapter as a student of magic he is stronger and repels a worse attakc on something else, and then in next chapter he is even stronger and …
For what it’s worth, that is not at all how things play out in A Wizard of Earthsea.
@LH, I understand that. I told why I thought so exacly because I was mistaken.
I figured; I just wanted to share my enthusiasm again!
@Brett, again: I’m not telling what I “think” about her. I’m telling what I mistakenly thought.
And I exaggerated a bit. I din’t think the book will be about “power, more power!” and absolutely nothing more than this. There are such books, but I didn’t know about them. And this would seriously contradict the genre.
However she does employ this trick, which I met in so many books and maybe the first of them is hers: “a boy, (preferably raised in village or a brothel) turns out very strong (promicingly stong), defeats someone stronger and is exhausted” etc. I didn’t know it, but this trick is meant to make reader expect certain things (specifically: a career) thus my italicised promicing(ly).
I didn’t find it appealing. I found it calculated. And as I didn’t find anything else in this first very small fragment of the book appealing, I was bored.
@drasvi: Yeah, I got that. That was why I said, “For what it’s worth…,” in case you might be interested in revisiting the book. Although they are primarily young adult novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan are as good as any of Le Guin’s science fiction.
Speaking of tropes and tricks: The Winged Histories, the second novel about Olondria is a good example. The first few pages are about a girl who joined the army. In a school. A reviewer (a female reviewer. do people prefer to read novels by same-gender author?) says there is a plenty of such books and I believe her, even though most of female warriors I know are perfectly historical, and I understand why she expects a certain continuation. And then many pages of warfare, which for the reviewer is “deconstruction”.
Also I learn that in Balinfeil dogs don’t bark at hight.
La nuit, tous les chiens se taisent.
That was the curious incident.
And in the distance, a dog was sleeping peacefully through the night.
Although they are primarily young adult novels, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan are as good as any of Le Guin’s science fiction.
And The Farthest Shore is the best YA novel of all time. I have spoken.
Not, of course, like the YA novels of later decades, which have sex in them.
@DE:
I’ll see you your “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”, and raise you “The Screwfly Solution”, which is both chilling and remarkably upsetting precisely because it’s so damn plausible as SF. (Also, one of the best last lines ever.) Worth a dozen of the Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s a great story, but I don’t remember it having non-shared cultural assumptions the way HHDYR does. And I liked The Handmaid’s Tale a lot too.
Back to Poul Anderson: I should have mentioned what may be my favorite fantasy of his, The King of Ys (four volumes), written with his wife, Karen Anderson. Lots of trouble with different cultural expectations there.
Hey, does The King Must Die count?
Jerry Friedman: And The Farthest Shore is the best YA novel of all time.
That’s a take.
(A bit of previous discussion of the book may be found sprinkled around this thread.)
As to The King Must Die, I know it’s supposed to be about the the cultural differences between Greek and pre-Greek peoples, but that aspect never really made much impression on me. I think the half of the book that covers Theseus’s mission to Crete is really excellent, but the other half (including the final episode on Naxos) is just not very inspired.
i won’t commit to exact dates in this periodization, but i don’t think YA was a genre when the first Earthsea books were written. I’m not even sure it was a marketing category yet, which preceded its emergence as a genre by some years. at that point, sf as an entire genre was marketed heavily to (the boy side of) the demographic now targeted by YA-as-marketing-category, but i think that functioned rather differently for sf than it does for YA today (and even for YA in its pre-genre period). so i’m not sure how much sense it makes to think about that first trilogy in those terms – as opposed to, say, le guin’s much later Annals of the Western Shore. i’m not sure they’re less outliers within YA-as-genre now than they were within High Fantasy when they came out.
o! and while i was trying to recall the trilogy title of the Annals books, i remembered that the two stories le guin wrote set on the planet o (in the hainish cycle) are ones that do manage to enact some genuine cultural dislocation for me, in a typically le guinian serene way: Mountain Ways and Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.
o, and am i wrong to think of The King Must Die (haven’t reread it since i was a preteen, i think, but i did like it a lot then) as basically a novelization of arthur evans’ version of knossos? (or is it just that i recently read cathy gere’s Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism?)
(a bit more context for dogs, and why I think it is specifically dogs somewhere rahter than your dogs):
“Waking at night in an unfamiliar bed in a roadside inn, I would become aware that although the window was open, the world was sleeping so soundly that there was no noise at all. No dogs barked, no midnight horseman jingled by on an errand. Even the mattress, firmly stuffed wtih goose feathers, did not crackle beneath me like the leaf and straw-stuffed mattresses of Kestenya.“
Genre or marketing category but the name makes me cringe seriously. Or well, what makes me cringe is the genre name. As a marketing category it is no different from any: “those are science fiction books FOR those of housewives from Tula, who wear short blue dresses and own a samovar. Moroccan brides who have a silver or golden samovar as a part of their dowry can find them interesing too”.
But when people use it as a genre lable… it is like telling all this crap crawled into the style and content and your book is not literature anymore. Of course you can have an image of your reader or addressee in mind when you write something. But such an image is not “genre”.
It’s a great story, but I don’t remember it having non-shared cultural assumptions
Good point. It’s more along the lines of biological determinism. But, on reflection, acute (and uncomfortable) as Tiptree’s observations about sex and gender are, she generally is implying biological determinism rather than talking about cultural differences. (In The Women Men Don’t See, the women end up leaving with actual extraterrestrial aliens in their determination to escape a world run in accordance with the notions of the well-meaning and ghastly male narrator.)
Just refreshing my memory of the story, I was struck by this:
I wish I lived in a world where this was evident nonsense …
(The main thing that strikes me about MAGA and the cultural gangrene it is spreading across the world is the racism. The thing that struck my thoroughly apolitical wife is the misogyny.)
Le Guin is more … optimistic, I suppose. Especially in her short stories, she often deals with distinctly culture-driven gender roles.
I will accept what is said in the quote in some contexts from some people – but not in other contexts from other people.
Yes: it ought not to be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way.
I wish I lived in a world where this was evident nonsense …
Even the first time I read the story, it struck me as a clear statement of a self-evident truth.
@rozele: Mary Renalt states outright (in her notes at the end of the book) that she based the Cretan part of the story on what Evans and his successors had uncovered at the House of the Double Axe.
“truth” – fine as someone’s complaint (which it is).
But it contains strange ideas about the history of gender roles, sweeping statements about a group of people (chosen based on their bodies and nothing else) and a strange formulation of the real problem
Again, as someone’s complaint it is fine. We don’t expect everyone to know history.
Speaking of history, is the idea that in Gaza and Yemen women are what they “always” were, that is property, while in richier oil countries they are “allowed” to be more than property – or what?
Or maybe that women are property in all barbarian societies and some civilised societies, and only rich civilised societies allow women to me more than that?
And the problem:
Yes, in some societies women can – among other things – be treated as property.
But they are not only property.
It is of course disgusting, to be property “occasionaly”.
But the idea that women are property par excellence… It’s a very different idea.
Compare
“The roof is damaged, there is so much water in the room that there is fish in that room! Let’s fix the roof!” and
“There is nothing but water. No roof to fix”.
I don’t like where such an idea will lead a supporter of male domination (namely that “property” is “natural”, “true” state of women) and I don’t think I’ll like where it would lead a feminist.
AFAIK, that was a stage feminism went through around the 70s and/or 80s: women & men are even more different than Western culture used to think, and therefore we need to really dramatically remake society to achieve equity or fairness.
i think some of tiptree’s writing can absolutely lend itself to that kind of “cultural feminist” (to use ellen willis’ useful typology) bio-essentialist interpretation, but i’m of the opinion that what tiptree’s doing in them comes from more of a very strong cultural-construction perspective (some of that opinion certainly comes from what i know of tiptree/sheldon’s biography). some of joanna russ’ work is similar in that way, but russ’ more active engagement with feminist analysis makes her stance a bit clearer.
But it contains strange ideas about the history of gender roles, sweeping statements about a group of people (chosen based on their bodies and nothing else) and a strange formulation of the real problem
Again, I think it is literally true. But I recognize nobody wants to admit it or think seriously about the situation; if we did that, we’d have to completely remake society, and who has the time or energy?
This is not “true” or “false” in a narrow sense. For one thing, I assume it’s said by a character. That character has its own outlook, its own reasoning, its own reasons to talk the way it does. It’s said to another character that also has a history, an outlook, a reason for the first character to talk as it does. And its said in a certain context, a setting, a world, with its inbuilt institutions and culture.
For another, it’s meant as a cynical statement, disabusing the other of whatever illusions they might have about inevitable and irreversible progress. The purpose and effect might not be disillusionment but a more realistic approach, not by slogans or theoretical discussions of moral or the common good. That could mean joining the revolution or it could mean working for those incremental institutional, cultural, and judicial changes that shifts the power balance permanently.
Or with a different take: A cynical statement is an idealiization. It’s the function you’re left with after assigning the least favorable value to the variables you can’t control. As such it’s evidently true for a certain narrow perspective on reality.
it’s meant as a cynical statement
What makes you say that? Is there some reason to think it’s not completely straightforward?
It’s cynical by being completely free of illusions. And there’s no contradiction in terms. A cynical view may well be the only realistic view.
It’s certainly not presented as a cynical statement within the story itself. And the narrator’s self-revealing comments (he’s not a bad person) certainly support the notion that, at least within the story itself, the speaker is absolutely correct in her appraisal.
Given that it’s a rookie interpretational error to suppose that a fictional character speaks for the author, the actual whole framework of the story supports the interpretation that in his particular case, the character is indeed speaking for the author.
You may, of course, disagree with the author. I think that to do so at present shows a certain … naivety.
@Brett: All I saw in the thread where The Farthest Shore appeared was your comment and John Cowan’s response. I agree much more with him. For me the ending was by no means anticlimactic and depressing; it was an uplifting climax and denouement. A taste of reconciling oneself to reality is an exciting ingredient in fantasy, for me.
John’s comparison to the ending of The Lord of the Rings is apt. Something sad (not depressing, for me) happens at the end of TFS, but it’s the story of a victory.
TE: it’s meant as a cynical statement
LH: What makes you say that? Is there some reason to think it’s not completely straightforward?
DE: It’s certainly not presented as a cynical statement within the story itself.
I think people are using two different meanings of “cynical”. AHD has
Trond made it clear that he means some combination of 1, 3, and 4, which seem pretty similar. I can understand LH’s comment only through sense 2, since only that one is the opposite of “straightforward”. DE’s comment looks like definition 2 to me too.
Sense 2 is recent. The last time I checked AHD, probably two or three years ago, it didn’t have that sense, and M-W still doesn’t. But I think it’s the sense I encounter most often.
I mean, to me it’s exactly parallel to “Capital cares only about itself and will crush anyone who tries to impede its quest for ever-increasing profits”; do you see that as “cynical”? To me that term has an inherent negative/dismissive quality, however you define it.
In other words, “You’re being cynical” implicitly says “I don’t agree with you.”
@LH, I would absolutely “completely remake” our society for my own feminist reasons.
But one of claims is, for example, that “women are property” is the norm and “women are more than that” is a rare deviation observed in certain rich (and perhaps it’s also implied: civilised) societies.
In other words: go to Bushmen hunter-gatherers and you will almost certainly find that women there are property, if not because they are hunter-gatherers then because women are “always” property.
That is bullshit.
@Jerry: Yes, thanks!
@Hat: Not really cynical, since it assigns emotions to “capital”. But to take another example: In my capacity as union representative, I may occasionally feel the need to tell people that a company, no matter the moral values of its owners and management, has no loyalty, no emotional bonds, no sense of duty or respect for anyone. It’s a business operation that buys labour at the lowest possible cost and sells it for the highest possible prize. That’s cynical, but it’s also true. It’s not the whole truth, all the time, because we have institutions and laws that makes a company operate in certain ways, but it’s still what it comes down to in the end of the day.
Or specifically “crisis”.
It is not difficult to find a country in crisis.
The prediction is that status of women there is much lower (again: property and nothign more) than in countries without a crisis, whenever it can technically be lower.
Is this prediction true?
And as you like Veiled Sentiments: of course I find certain ideas of Awlad ‘Ali about women very odd.
But it would have never occured to me to call bedouin women “property”.
@LH: I’d prefer to say that an analogous statement about capitalists was cynical (and not really true). Like all statements about people, cynical statements are more likely to be true if they’re applied to an individual than about all people.
In other words, “You’re being cynical” implicitly says “I don’t agree with you.”
Not when I say it. But then my parents described themselves as cynical about most politicans—I think my mother still would—and often used some form of “cynic” when laughing at some wisecrack I made about some politicians or other public figure. I admit I might hesitate to tell my students, for example, that they should be “cynical” about televangelists.
“Capital cares only about itself and will crush anyone who tries to impede its quest for ever-increasing profits”
I think the negative vibe there largely comes from the wording; if you recast it as the (more or less) factually equivalent
“Capital is morally neutral, but will by its very nature always try to prevent any attempt to undermine profits”
you’ve basically got a (more or less Marxist) proposition which may or may not be true (apart from anything else, it depends on just what you mean by “Capital”) but which I wouldn’t describe as “cynical.” (Marxism is really not nearly cynical enough.)
It is difficult for capital to be morally neutral.
Its actions are human actions.
The Marxist idea I was obliquely alluding to is that the Capitalist doesn’t go about exploiting the workers because he’s an evil man (evilly twirling his moustache* the while) but because he’s enmeshed in a system where he doesn’t really have much choice in the matter, though he probably doesn’t see it that way himself. (The basic idea behind this goes all the way back to Adam Smith.)
Part of what I mean about Marxism (as a system, rather than a lot of more or less Marxist individuals) not being cynical enough. That, and that utopianism of any kind (all too liable to end in tears) only appeals to those who lack a proper degree of protective cynicism. A serious bug, just waiting for zero-day exploits …
* Gotta have a moustache to be a Capitalist. Also a top hat. Probably spats. The ladies have to settle for being Capitalist molls. It’s an unfair system.
No, she (evilly …?) has a choice.
Even on the verge of bankruptcy, where any attempt to be less exploitative means being immediately outcompeted she still has a choice.
But usually she is not on the verge of bankruptcy.
However, this does not mean she is any worse than a worker or me, or that she is “evil”.
If I recall correctly, the Marxist point is not about individual capitalists, but about capitalists as a class. An individual capitalist may well refrain for moral reasons from doing certain things to maximize profits, but that means he is bad at being a capitalist and, over the long term, will fail and be replaced by more ruthless capitalists.
The conomic forces driving capitalists in that direction are certainly there; what Marx underestimated is thevcountervailing forces (collective worker action, the state) that can prevent Marx’s scenario of absolute exploitation and concentration.
Team The Farthest Shore represent! (Personally I put all three of the trilogy equal, rather than one as the best.)
Marx underestimated is the countervailing forces (collective worker action, the state) that can prevent Marx’s scenario of absolute exploitation and concentration
And the US is busily destroying these countervailing forces …
What could possibly go wrong?
“…countervailing forces (collective worker action…”
And competition for [skilled] employees.
That’s where the “AI” comes in …
(It can’t actually do your job, but it doesn’t have to be able to: all that’s needed is for your boss to believe that it can do your job.)
Perhaps we will make them pay for talking to us.
But there is something reassuringly decadent in the idea of humanity exiled to another planet offering sex for money to (AI) tourists in slums. Still better than aliens, they’ll be telling each other.
“The Screwfly Solution” is a stunner — one of a handful of stories where I remember the exact moment when it kicked me in the guts — but as Jerry was saying, it isn’t about an encounter across cultural barriers: even the alien’s motivation is so recognizable in 1970s-US terms that the narrator can give it a job title!
(The story starts out in the viewpoint of a heroic white male academic solving the problems of tropical primitives, but pretty soon, well…)
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” on the other hand, ends with an encapsulation that’s stuck in my head of how everybody believes we are the default and they are an aberration:
Marx underestimated is the countervailing forces (collective worker action, the state) that can prevent Marx’s scenario of absolute exploitation and concentration
i, like many*, tend to disagree, and think instead that marx’s political thinking (as opposed to his economic analysis) was fatally undermined by clinging to the ’48er fantasy of the state as a liberatory force – which it cannot, structurally, ever be.
.
* especially anarchists, but also plenty of non-leninist marxists who would not use that term.
Much of my education was in Russia rather than USSR, so I didn’t really have to pretend I studied Marx, and much of what I heard about him was unfavourable. All I remember on the question of “Marx and the state” is that the state in his terms is аппарат насилия (I forgot what it is in German and don’t know the usual English translation, the first Russian word means “apparatus”, the second is “of violence”). So I used to think his view of it is sceptical … Was I mistaken?
The orthodox Marxist view is that the state (as currently conceived of) will (eventually) “wither away.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hardcastle/1946/wither_away.htm
I think the idea is essentially that it will be succeeded by a kind of anarcho-syndicalism. But just as the Bible is pretty skimpy on what it says about Heaven, Marxist theory can be pretty light on the details of what will actually follow capitalism.
I think the view that the State itself can be a force for progress (in this sense) is a Social Democrat thing rather than full-on Marxist. Certainly the State is necessary to prevent a Marxist revolution and preserve capitalism, for example by effective regulation of the more egregiously predatory manifestations of capitalism. Social democrats are generally trying to save capitalism from itself. How realistic this objective is, has yet to be seen.
The orthodox Marxist view is that the state (as currently conceived of) will (eventually) “wither away.”
I beg leave to disagree with m’learned colleague on this point. That bollocks was included in The Communist Manifesto as a sop to the Anarchists in whatever internal polemics was going on at the time. I don’t think Marx believed it; I don’t think any orthodoxy paid it more than lip-service.
If anybody’s still professing it, that’s only because they haven’t made the effort to read Kapital (That that SPGB ref quotes mostly Engels is very symptomatic: Marxism for the nursery.)
Hans’s thought is somewhat independent of the particulars of his list of “forces”.
rozele can think of comparison between systems with and without the state and likely this is not what Hans means. Restrictions on either capitalism or socialism are realised as state decrees. State is definitely a factor.
However, I don’t know to what extent we can speak of it as a “force”, that is ascribe any tendency (and speak of this tendency as agency) to it specificlally in the context of capitalism.
Logically, it can’t be too friendly to it: money is a competing form of power.
“…the view that the State itself can be a force for…”
@DE, note that you too call it a “force” – or are speaking of someone thinking so of it.
Again, definitely a factor. But a force is more than a factor.
I beg leave to disagree with m’learned colleague on this point. That bollocks was included in The Communist Manifesto as a sop to the Anarchists in whatever internal polemics was going on at the time. I don’t think Marx believed it; I don’t think any orthodoxy paid it more than lip-service.
This rings true to me. (And I’ve never understood the anarchist-communist thing; communists have everywhere and always imposed the kind of brutal, all-encompassing state my fellow anarchists are supposed to hate.)
Come on, is ISIS the true face of Islam?
Russian “communists” support traditional fucking values. The Chinese are capitalists. You can’t seriously apply one label to both them and Marx.
So you should
1 ask and honestly answer the question to what extent it is also true for people you (and them) call “communists”.
2. make sure they are independent from each other (because you pretend to have statistics).
But instead they both follow the receipe of Russian “success” and have support from USSR.
It’s a good thing you put quotes in Russian “communists,” because Lenin would have laughed at them. I was talking about actual communists, Marxist-Leninist-(Stalinist/Maoist) types, not anybody who happens to use the word. As I would hope you know.
because you pretend to have statistics
Why do you say insulting things like this for no reason?
And I don’t like communist ideas.
I mean, well, I don’t believe in property. Everything around is God’s, period. Children have toys and in THAT sense we can speak of owning something too, but I must remember that I’m speaking about it in this specific sense and “believe” not in property but in God.
But I’m an individualist.
PS i don’t know why you find “statisitics” or “pretend” insulting.
Stats because “everywhere”. But using this word “statistics” I only mean: you pretend that your thought is based on numerous examples. If you like, let’s change my wording to this.
“Pretend” because for your examples to be many, they must be independent.
You sound like you are trying to pick a fight, and I’m not interested.
PS i don’t know why you find “statisitics” or “pretend” insulting
Let me help you.
“Pretend” will be understood by a L1 speaker to mean “deliberately make a false claim” in the context where you used it there. You can’t use it in this way without implying deceit; it’s not like “pretend” as in “children making pretend.”
Assuming that you did not in fact intend to accuse anyone of deliberate lying, I hope this explanation will be helpful to you in avoiding such misunderstandings in future.
@LH, you asked a question. I answered it, and not in an aggressive tone. And you call it an attempt to pick a fight.
@DE, I’m talkign to a man who causally says things like “women are treated like shit by Russian men” and can’t understand why I decribe them (without taking an offence) as technically insults.
I accept that. But I won’t treat him as a snowflake.
I can ENJOY communication with someone who simply says what he thinks without caring about tone and everythign. But if he is only one way so, likely he will keep thinkin I’m trying to pick a fight and I’ll be the only one who is enjoying it.
LH, my tone has little to do with you personally. People call the Chinese “communists”. That annoys me. We need to agree on terms if we want our conversation to be meaningful.
Also it was a stylistical choise. Please, simply don’t take it as a sign of hostility! But don’t ask me to avoid such tone unless you are going to learn to be soft.
@drasvi
When you say pretend, do you mean something more like намерева́ться? I am not trying to mansplain, just understand.
French prétendre is a classic false friend, too: “claim, mean”, not “pretend.”
It’s just now occurred to me that “Pretender” (as in “Old” and “Young”) presumably at the time meant just “Claimant”, without the necessary implication of falsehood that now clings to it.
The orthodox Marxist view is that the state (as currently conceived of) will (eventually) “wither away.”
in principle, yes! (as they say in yerevan)
but only in the a future far enough distant that it doesn’t affect their practice in any way. the position basically comes down to “you have to become the state to end the state”*, which is (in technical language) absolute garbage. you can’t government your way out of the state any more than you can profit your way out of capitalism or religion your way out of theocracy.
the leninist tradition generally just invents epicyles to pretend that their states (actually-existing or imagined) somehow don’t count as states.
(yes, as AntC said, marx’s formulation was to try to appeal to people with critiques of the state (whether using the word “anarchist” or not) – who were a solid majority of the socialist movement during most of his lifetime, precisely because not everyone refused, as he did, to learn the lessons of 1848 and 1871.**)
(it’s not a term i use, but “communist” as in “anarcho-communist” predates “communist” as in “leninist” – the latter is, i would argue, another cynical use of opposing currents’ language, just like the adoption of “soviet” to mean a state-controlled structure rather than a specific model of self-organization against state and capital.***)
.
* there certainly are other possible interpretations of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, but when they’ve been put into practice (1930s catalunya and manchuria; early 1920s ukraine; arguably elsewhere on smaller scales) leninist states and organizations have actively worked to dismantle them by any means necessary and replace them with state forms. for a current example, there’s the syrian civil war – generally, leninists have been rather active in support of the now-fallen Ba’athist regime, and rather hostile to the complicatedly non-statist project of the Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria – the only group holding territory that’s made any effort towards liberatory social change, on the basis of direct collective control of resources and decisionmaking.
** or of the cycle from the Terror to napoleon, for that matter.
*** the same move as we see from the other side of the political spectrum, who use “public” to mean “state-controlled”.
Thanks, rozele and AntC.
@PP,
“mansplain” – I thought about this word during our the Semitic argument (what is great is that there is my “Semitic” argument and my “Hamitic” argument with DE. The second is about Meinhof, and the first is about nothing). But I’m a man:/
No. I mean pretend.
This word does not have a good Russian translation: “делать вид” is two words, and there is a plenty of English usages of “let’s pretend that X” (where it is not quite deception) uncommon in Russian.
Sloppy argumentation IS a form of deception. So what if I want to refer to that?
It can be
1. it’s the speaker who’s being fooled here (this happens often)
2. the speaker has developed a habit to be sloppy during heated arguments with others because it makes arguments sound stronger. But she isn’t actually thinking anything about this process, it is done intuitively. And when she’s not arguing with others, she’s less sloppy.
(This also happens often)
3. the speaker “evilly” thinks “ha-ha-ha, I’m fooling him”. (in a context like this one – almost unthinkable)
DE says my “pretend” refers to 3.
I of course know that LH is a sincere man and can be rather 1 (or myabe also 2 ) like we all, but not 3.
However it is still a form of deception. Two problems here.
1. One is my education.
In my (and not only) idiolect I often refer to false mathematical claims as “lies”.
As in “Wait, I lied! What I said is true only for [….], but not for […] for example, and not for all […]”.
And I do think of this as lies and it FEELS as lies. And no one takes offence when we’re solving a problem together.
But then of course misunderstandings arise even with other Russians:)
2. is my addressee, as I explained above. I think it is his job to interpret my words in more friendly way and not like DE does, not my job to pick them carefully.
That would have been different if I spoke to someone else. For example, my certain Arabic-speaking freinds, very soft and polite.
I frequently dislike myself for being habitually too self-assertive with them, it feels like pressure (especially when my interlocutor is 20-something and a lady and I’m speaking to her like I speak to Russian men). It would not even occur to me to say “you pretend that….” to them.
Again, if LH is going to be soft and polite with everyone, I’ll change too. But thus far i have no problem with his tone. He has a problem with mine:)
I think it is his job to interpret my words in more friendly way
Nope.
DE, but I don’t care about your opinion of my communication with LH, especially expressed so.
Not because I don’t respect you. I do respect you a lot.
But it is my communication with him, not you!
When you said “you are trolling us” (and were “well-meaning” as someone who I hardly will ever respect since then, noted, shocked by my responce to your warm words), you also commented on my comment addressed to LH, and not you.
(and should we really, really, be talking about this all? )
P.S. well, I won’t delete this comment, but I think simple “nope” is entriely appropriate. So I disagree with what I said above about “I don’t care”. I do, but you of course understand that your ‘nope’ is not informative:)
@drasvi
Instead of “Nope”, how about
“If someone makes a faux-pas that is due to speaking too quickly, or to a nuance in a language that is not their L1, they can expect to be treated as if they acted deliberately. If they then notice and want to explain themselves better, it helps if they start with an apology”. This is what I understood by “Nope”.
But this has nothing to do with me and I disagree with it anyway.
drasvi, it’s not your tone I object to but your decision to get pointlessly argumentative (as it looks to me). I’m sure you knew what I meant, but you chose to act as if I were making a detailed historical essay using carefully chosen terminology, which you would then (like a hostile reviewer) pick apart. I have no interest in engaging in that kind of back-and-forth (“well, what about THIS?” “ah, but THAT!!”). If you disagree with my point, say so clearly and make clear exactly what you object to, don’t play with words.
We need to agree on terms if we want our conversation to be meaningful.
No, we need to understand each other.
It’s as if, when the argumentative spirit takes you, you forget everything you know about me and treat me as if I were some ignorant foreigner who knows nothing about Russia, communism, or anything else and start picking apart my comments on that basis. Try assuming the best instead of the worst and see if that improves the conversation.
There’s one important remnant of communism in the PRC: power is still organized on Leninist principles there.
In order to continue existing, capitalism must be constantly saved from itself by a state that artificially maintains competition. Without that, you get cartels, megamergers and monopolies very, very quickly, the Invisible Hand and all its blessings become nonexistent, and then you have feudalism instead of capitalism. That is because competition is a huge waste of resources; there are strong incentives to avoid it one way or another and thereby make the market unfree. I keep saying that the greatest force for capitalism in the world is the EU Commissioner for Competition, who has the power to forbid mergers (and uses it a lot more often than the corresponding US institution).
As in economy, so in ecology in this case. Very rarely can you actually observe competition in the wild; what you can see a lot is “the ghost of competition past” – most often niche partitioning between species, between sexes, between ontogenetic stages…
In German it is, AFAIK, possible to be an entirely legitimate and uncontested Thronprätendent. But the word is isolated there, there’s no verb to go with it.
@DM, but we were talkign about Marx.
And this connects China to his “communism” by a chain: China has something in common with an ideology which, in turn, has something in common with Marx.
I am an L1 speaker who has previously noticed myself using “pretend” in similar circumstances reasonably often without intending to strictly imply deceit, particularly when I think there’s a common fallacy or oversimplification involved. I think I usually highlight that by saying something like “let’s not pretend…” rather than directly saying my interlocutor is pretending something. Either way, though, it reads to me as implying a need to reassess the assumptions used. Maybe I am too much a mathematician…
Come to think of it, in another recent thread here I almost added a comment saying something like “let’s not pretend the division around the rainbow banner is about whether it includes enough colours”.
@Jonathan I think your “let’s not pretend …” could at least be interpreted as “Let’s not deceive ourselves that …”.
It’s a sympathetic/not aggressive preface, But to me still hints at deception. (Also negation in English has slippery effects.)
Try switching to “Let’s not imagine …”
but only in the a future far enough distant that it doesn’t affect their practice in any way.
As Comrade Dzhugashvili might have put it: if there’s any ‘withering away’ happening on my watch, it’ll be the Anarchists in the gulag.
We all remember, don’t we, that Bakunin compared Marx to Bismarck?
Ridiculous. Bismarck only had a moustache. No comparison at all.
Fair enough.
That makes “communists” an ethnicity.
I and my Arab freinds on the one hand – and ISIS and violent Christian states on the other – have the Quraan and Christian tradition.
And these communists are more like my friend Lesha and Solomon. “Both are Jewish”.
there’s a longstanding tension between the idea that what parties (especially ones that control states) call themselves is what’s important for discussing their politics, and the idea that their actual practice is what’s important. this is especially tense with parties that call themselves “communist”, precisely because the original political meaning of the term is pretty much incompatible with the project of controlling/becoming a state, which first marx and then the bolsheviks put at the center of their political theory and practice. the tension hit duffy wyg& levels of apprehension and dissension* once the NEP (and all subsequent economic models in the u.s.s.r) re-imposed the market as the primary model of resource distribution, and once deng made it official that capitalism was the p.r.c’s economic model (the “white** cat, black cat” speech).
personally, i don’t have much interest in the trotskyist debates about whether to interpret the u.s.s.r. as “a degenerated/deformed workers’ state” or “state capitalist” or “proletarian bonapartist” or whatever. but i would not use “communist” to describe either the p.r.c. or the u.s.s.r. (as opposed to using it as a word in the ruling parties’ names), just as i would not*** use “liberal” to describe the parties of jair bolsonaro (brazil) or jorge ubico (guatemala), or “democratic” to describe the junior partner in the current u.s. regime.
.
* to keep us in the sf realm.
** actually, apparently, a yellow cat.
*** unless my main point was going to be a polemical one about liberalism.
Fair enough. When I use “communist” I’m thinking of Stalinist/Maoist party-states, but of course that’s a specialized sense.
“but of course that’s a specialized sense.”
Thanks.
The PRC actually self-identifies as “socialist”, and working toward communism rather than having already achieved that happy outcome. (This ties together with the “withering away” motif, of course.)
Thomas Sankara’s regime in Burkina Faso was described as “communist” by its enemies (like France.) The system’s resemblance to the Soviet Union or the PRC was … not very striking.
Backing up to “The Women Men Don’t See”, and the dialogue “Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us …”: Jerry Friedman said
I don’t see how languagehat could have meant sense 2 (“selfishly or callously calculating”); saying that out loud isn’t calculated or self-serving for the character, Ruth, at all — on the contrary, it was risky, since the other character, Don, then decides she’s crazy and gets even more patronizing.
I read the comments above as being about whether “cynical” means “*accurately* perceiving that men can’t be trusted to be anything other than self-serving” (what I think Trond meant) versus “*inaccurately* or lazily overgeneralizing that men are only self-serving” (what I think David E and languagehat took Trond as saying).
I wouldn’t say that Ruth speaks for the author, exactly — and biographer Julie Phillips wrote “it’s not at all clear which side Tiptree is on” — but rather that Ruth is shown as very much not a fool, and *not the only woman* with this view. She has a friend she can trust to “take charge our affairs”, who Don imagines she might invite to leave Earth too. “Two of our opossums are missing” — but how many more of the women that he takes for granted as happy little servants actually think they’re surviving in the chinks like opossums, and would escape like Ruth if they could?
(I was flabbergasted to read that Alice Sheldon had her agent submit this story to Playboy, Cosmopolitan, and Penthouse before sf magazines. Hard to imagine Playboy running it, even though they had previously run a story by Le Guin — credited as by “U.K. Le Guin”.)
An excellent analysis, and yes, that last part is astonishing.
So Trond believes that the claim that he and I both can’t be trusted to be anything other than self-serving is “accurate”.
(it very well can be accurate, though I don’t think the flaw in question has anything to do with sex)
You seem determined to seek out insults where none were intended.
:/
I repeated what ktschwarz says.
I meant something. Namely: if that’s what Trond meant, I’m slightly surprised.
I meant nothing else.
But neither ktschwarz nor Trond said anything about you!
Trond explained what he meant by cynical: “disabusing the other of whatever illusions they might have about inevitable and irreversible progress.” And that’s exactly why Ruth gave that speech. (It’s in response to Don’s “Didn’t they get that equal rights bill?” — the story is from 1972, it seems to be a near future as seen from there.) By the end of the story, Don’s illusions are, if not shattered, a little bit chipped and cracked.
But Ruth didn’t say it in support of a revolution, or incremental change. She’s just tired of smiling and nodding along to Don’s platitudes, and she lets the mask slip.
“Didn’t they get that equal rights bill?”
To which the answer in the real world turned out to be: No, they didn’t.
@ktschwarz: I see what you’re saying. It looks as if I took Hat and David E too literally, not for the first time in my life.
@Hat: Submitting “The Women Men Don’t See” to Playboy and Penthouse would have had so little chance of success that I wonder whether Sheldon did it to make some kind of point, at least to herself, maybe that Cosmo didn’t see those women any more than Playbody (that’s what I typed) did. Or maybe she wanted at least one person at those magazines to read the story.
Another note on “cynical” and dictionaries. Jerry also said (July 22, 2025 at 6:02 pm):
You’re right that that sense is newer, or at least more common than it used to be, but if you looked in a dictionary two or three years ago and didn’t find it, it can’t have been a current AHD: they added that sense in the 2000 edition.
(Sadly, AHD cannot have changed any definitions since two or three years ago. The website says “Copyright 2022”, and the publisher had stopped actively maintaining it some years before then — that’s why it doesn’t have “covid”.)
This sense of “cynical” was added to the OED in a 2023 revision, but they found examples going back almost 200 years:
Which just goes to show that the earliest citation is not the full story; sometimes a word or a sense will have a trickle of usage for a long time, rare or even proscribed, before reaching mainstream popularity. For example, Bloix did some research in comments here showing that although George Eliot once used “frustrating” as an adjective as it’s commonly used today, that sense didn’t catch on until much later. But a general dictionary can’t do that much work for every word they revise.
“But neither ktschwarz nor Trond said anything about you!”
LH, “if ktschwarz believes that Trond said something unpleasant about me, THEN someone have insulted me” is YOUR idea, not mine. It did not even occur to me.
ktschwarz emphasises – as I understand!!! – that in in ktschwarz’s (but not your and DE’s) opinion for Trond a certain claim* is accurate for each and every man. It is normal then to think to what extent the claim is accurate for me, for Trond and for all men I and Trond know well – and whether Trond actually could mean that.
Testing claims made about every X on known examples of X has nothing to do with insults.
(besides, if you believe that unpleasant claims about someone may insult her, you really shouldn’t make such claims about “men”, “women”, “blacks”, “whites”, “children”, “people in glasses” and so on.)
*the claim is soft in ktschwarz’s formulation: “can’t be trusted…”. It is less soft in the quote: men see nothign but property in women and want to enslave them.
I’m confident that my attitude to women is very different.
Why confident:
The romantic image I associate with women (specifically objects of romantic interest and not only) is that of flight. Metaphorical one: in the sense of following dreams, realisation of one’s potential etc..
The dreamer here is the object of affection, not only me.
It is anti-BDSM.
At best (or worst) I can develop very different tendencies and desires (metaphorical BDSM) and obtain an internal conflict.
Yes, people ‘own’ their spouses and friends etc. in some sense of the word ‘own’.
Ruth’s claims from the story can be perfectly justified without every single man in the world either thinking that’s how things ought to be, or deliberately colluding in perpetuating the situation.
Just as the existence of racism and the blighting of many lives by it is not in any way thrown in doubt by the fact that you and I (and of course, all Hatters) are not racists.
Self-described evangelical Christians throughout the world are currently busily promoting fascism and undermining democracy. I am a self-described evangelical Christian, and I (and God) regard their attitudes as a blasphemous abomination. We are not fated to be defined by our labels, not even by labels that actually fit us.
It’s the racists, sexists, and Christian theocratic bastards who try to present any criticism of their ideologies as personal attacks on (respectively) “whites” in general, men on general, or Christians in general. Nobody should fall for it. They are liars, and need to be told to fuck off.
It did not even occur to me.
I apologize, then. I am extremely fallible.
Submitting “The Women Men Don’t See” to Playboy and Penthouse would have had so little chance of success
i’m not so sure of that! i could see tiptree – remember that “alice sheldon” was not in anyone’s picture until at least three years after “The Women Men Don’t See” – thinking of Playboy as a perfect venue for an edgily feminist novelette by a man well-known to be a moonlighting intelligence operative*. the magazine was a venue for “literary” sf (famously, serializing Fahrenheit 451 in its first six months), and for edgy writing on gender, just not so much for writers who were avowedly women**. “i only subscribe for the articles” was funny enough to become a cliché partly because it was right at the edge of plausible when they were printing bellow, palahniuk, clarke, nabokov, malamud, vonnegut, etc; especially by ’73, when the pictures were starting to be fairly tame by comparison to the competition. to me, the more surprising thing, actually, is that Playboy passed on it!
penthouse, i dunno.
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* not unlike john le carré, who Playboy published. tiptree’s public persona could, in fact, be as easily described as a quintessential Playboy ideal man as a quintessential heinleinean*** “competent man” – aside, of course, from his pesky tendency to treat women as people.
** wikipedia, however, tells me that under robie macauley’s literary editorship (1966-76), Playboy actually printed lessing, gordimer, oates, and sexton. so it may well have been ahead of a lot of more capital-L Literary publications of the day.
*** i.e. castiglione via rand
@LH, no problem!
[Why Alice Sheldon had her agent submit “The Women Men Don’t See” to Playboy]
wikipedia, however, tells me that under robie macauley’s literary editorship (1966-76), Playboy actually printed lessing, gordimer, oates, and sexton. so it may well have been ahead of a lot of more capital-L Literary publications of the day.
OK, I’d have to read those stories to really know. But what I was thinking was not that the story was too literary or that it was actually by a woman, but that that particular story was very un-Playboy-ish. Maybe I was wrong.
You’re right that that sense is newer, or at least more common than it used to be, but if you looked in a dictionary two or three years ago and didn’t find it, it can’t have been a current AHD: they added that sense in the 2000 edition.
This time thing… very unreliable.
(Sadly, AHD cannot have changed any definitions since two or three years ago. The website says “Copyright 2022”, and the publisher had stopped actively maintaining it some years before then — that’s why it doesn’t have “covid”.)
That’s quite disappointing, but thanks for mentioning it.
In USSR several journals were widely known in the not really narrow (“Soviet intelligentsia”) circles of readers of science fiction for publishing it, occasionaly.
Note that usually science fiction was printed in insufficient quantities, difficult to find and sought after.
Accordingly: “i only subscribe for the articles” sounds… I mean, we subscribed to much, much stranger things than Playboy for this:)
What would be strange, of course, is the idea that someone may find pictures of naked ladies LESS interesting. I would have found them more interesting if Playboy were the only place (if we don’t count greek art) where I can see one (one picture, not one naked woman). At first.
On the other hand, it would be similarly strange if someone subscribed to something like Playboy because of pictures in the 21st century when those pictures are all over the place.
I knew that Playboy published “sophisticated” stuff, and the one name that surprises me is that of Vonnegut. Not because of the content of his stories, because of the style, maybe (in Russian translation). Quite distinct from my associations with Playboy)
DE, you don’t need 1 (one!) person who wants it to descend into either war (quickly changing) or some crappy social arrangement (never changing).
But once you have a war, you have some people who hate who they think is “their enemy” and others who want victory rather than peace.
And once you have a crappy never changing social arrangement, there are its supporters.
Even if this arrangement horrifies everyone else (people of the historical society which once would descend into the crap) and is bad for everyone.
@JF: i don’t disagree! (but i’m not quite interested enough to take on the project of finding out if they got unusually upbeat work from lessing, oates, and gordimer, or if my assumption that they’d be aiming for lighter is entirely wrong.)
It’s the racists, sexists, and Christian theocratic bastards who try to present any criticism of their ideologies as personal attacks on (respectively) “whites” in general, men on general, or Christians in general.
Arrogant prick/hypocrite-in-point would be Peter Thiel, see at ‘walking paradox’: right-wing Christian, anti-woke, and fairly openly has sex with men, but wants that news not widely known.
Also anti-immigrant despite being an immigrant — via South Africa, again. His connection with New Zealand is a prior right-wing government broke their own rules to grant him residency on the expectation of investment. He invested ok: in a fuck-you property as a bolt-hole for when he’d turned the rest of the world to shit.
@DE you are clearly an exception, but it is really hard not to tar all “evangelical Christian”s with the same brush. The most generous term I can find for them is gullible/lacking in critical thinking. (It would be hilarious to see J.D.Vance described as ‘intellectual’ if not for the power he wields.)
it is really hard not to tar all “evangelical Christian”s with the same brush. The most generous term I can find for them is gullible/lacking in critical thinking
Indeed. Though the situation seems to be very much worse in the US than here. Although we have (for example) far-right-financing-and-plugging Paul Marshall, who I have no reason to doubt is an actual believing Christian (alas), unlike a fair proportion of the outright heretical Trumpistas, the evangelical circles I move in are horrified by the xenophobia, racism and bigotry which have corrupted right-wing discourse here too. (In other words, I’m – thank God – by no means exceptional.*)
There has been a vogue among far-right pundits of the kind who infest the once-respectable Daily Telegraph** for insisting that anyone who has the temerity to claim to be a Muslim in public life to be required to disavow terrorism committed in the name of Islam whenever they speak, no matter how evident it may be to any normal person that they are naturally horrified by it. Seems clear that evangelical Christians actually do need to shout out loud and clear that the Trumpites and their Christian supporters are shitting on the Gospel of Christ.
So I do.
* Someone in our prayer meeting was pointing out – from experience – that “people traffickers” – demonised as all being the worst of criminals – include people who have saved the lives of people fleeing lethal persecution.
** From which I learn that my own mother is not “white British.” Good for her!
(Vance, of course, is a hypocritical Catholic pseudointellectual, rather than a hypocritical Evangelical pseudointellectual. But one must be ecumenical …)
Oh, there are Catholics in the US who call themselves “evangelical”. It’s not like the word had a widely agreed-upon definition!
my own mother is not …
I wish I had even that much street cred. Search as I might, all my ancestors seem to have been white, hetero and English. (There’s a family rumour one grandmother was 1/8th Scottish, otherwise all branches trace back to East Anglia.) I can only apologise.
(BTW am I deficient in never having heard of Leo Strauss/or deficient in thinking there’s no good reason to have heard of him? I racked my brains for any Straussians who might have had a Moment. LS at least seems to have had a sensible scepticism about Popper.)
Leo Strauss has been extraordinarily influential on various intellectual and political circles, but if you’re not interested in those circles, you can perfectly well ignore him.
Thanks @Hat. Then L. Strauss’s notoriety seems to have been crimped by never appearing in the Philosophers’ Drinking Song. Unlike several from whom he claims influence.
“Leo Strauss drank like a mouse”
I was unfamiliar with Leo Strauss too (though that is less surprising in my case than AntC’s.) Mugging up on him from WP, the general tenor of his views seems not totally unlike that of Alasdair MacIntyre’s, at least in After Virtue (a work which mentions him not at all, however.)
Gotta love Eric Voegelin on Popper (cited there):
Tellingly, that quote is about Popper as a historian of philosophy, not as a philosopher.
Leo Strauss rang a 20-year-old bell… yup, there he is in brief.
That’s a good short summary. “Among Strauss’s former students include such neoconservatives as Paul Wolfowitz, Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, and Abram Shulsky”: badly written, but yeah, if you like Paul Wolfowitz and Allan Bloom you’ll love Leo!
MacIntyre has been accused of being reactionary too, though the charge was a good bit harder to substantiate in his case.
I found a lot of interest in After Virtue, but (as with so many such works) felt it was a lot stronger on diagnosis than potential cures. (I haven’t read any of his other publications.)
MacIntyre has interesting things to say about the moral-philosophy trends of Modernity and their various kinds of unsatisfactoriness, but he left me with the impression that he felt that the abandonment of the Good Old (basically Aristotelean) Ways was driven by a sort of wilful perversity, rather than a growing realisation that there might be some deep-seated problems with said Good Old Ways themselves. I’m not at all convinced by this back-to-the-future stuff, even when it takes a relatively benign form.
No noble-lie-endorsing with MacIntyre though. Aquinas is a better political influence than Plato, at least.
rozele has convinced me that Playboy really was a potential market for Tiptree. The Tiptree persona might not have been well-known to Playboy editors, since a lot of it was constructed in sf fanzines and personal letters, but it doesn’t matter, since the quintessential competent man is right there narrating the story. He has some male-gazey comments on the women’s looks and a brief but graphic sex fantasy that might have appealed to the Playboy audience, too. But then comes the action scene where he pulls out his gun to protect the women from alien invaders and … oops, he’s not quite as competent as he thought.
And, I now notice in the biography, that wasn’t the only time Tiptree submitted to Playboy: Fred Pohl, after buying “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for Galaxy, sent it on to Playboy in hopes of more money and exposure for the promising new writer. A lesser-known story, “I’m Too Big but I Love to Play”, was submitted there as well. Would’ve been interesting if any of them had appeared there.
Strauss
The adjective “Straussian” shows up practically every week on the blog Marginal Revolution. Today’s appearance:
“3. This ad was banned from UK TV? Is the Straussian read that it is actually an ad for Americans to view?”
@ktschwarz: i think you’ve hit the nail on the head! i expect the problem was exactly that juxtaposition of an immediately recognizable “competent men” with what happens when one encounters reality. which is making me think about how espionage-agency fans tend to ignore post-1991 le carré (and especially post-2000 le carré), where he stops letting Cold War lesser-evilism justify anything* – i can’t exactly picture Playboy running an excerpt from, say, Absolute Friends, or even Our Game.
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* i love the smiley books as much as the next le carré completist, but his work really did improve once he stopped pretending there was anything redeemable about the “western” side of the not-so-great game.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold did not make me feel warm and fuzzy about the West, despite the final speech of its hero. It made me feel dirty, as intended.
I haven’t read any of his later books. Any recommendations?
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is probably the consensus for the best spy novel of all time—and Smiley (although he’s a very minor character) is not a nice guy in it at all.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is probably the consensus for the best spy novel of all time
Except maybe in the Netherlands, where apparently some people believe it was too much like The Darkroom of Damocles, by Willem Frederik Hermans.
One thing that didn’t change in the post-Cold War Le Carré books I’ve read is that where the U.S. appeared, it was the bad guy. Playboy might have had a little trouble with those.
Ironically, Le Carré thought that American readers often understood the tawdriness of what he described in his novels better than the British.
Who Playboy was published for? Men who are 20 or 65?
(If 20, I don’t think those en masse are hostile to feminist ideas)
This was in 1973. Certainly, my own attitudes to such matters in 1973 were distinctly less enlightened than they are at present.
DE, I was a staunch feminist when I was a child:)
I mean, even if you take idealised ‘traditional’ Arab society (or that from Veiled Sentiments) – you don’t expect a boy to like that he can’t flirt with the girl he likes, can’t talk with the girl he likes, can’t touch her and can’t marry her.
And I don’t know why would he want intellectual suppression of women like in 19th-century Europe (I mean education). I also don’t know why not*. But no, I don’t see such a desire among men who are 16 or 20, here or in the Arab world. But they aren’t your supporters of ‘traditional’ restrictive society. They disagree. I think (yes) some of their ideas will be in line with feminism, and (yes) some won’t, but they tend to disagree anyway.
*Other than that if your a boy and are going to study, you’re likely to want to meet a girl.
I haven’t read any of his later books. Any recommendations?
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, for sure. Perfect, in its way.
Even in the Cold War era, Le Carré wasn’t shy of playing up the essential grubbiness of spying. Sure, Smiley is a good man, but he too is morally compromised: indeed, in some ways, that’s what the novel is really about.
rozele is quite right that this gets a lot more in-yer-face in the later novels, though.
The Americans don’t really feature much at all in earlier le Carré, as I recall.
TTSS was the first one I ever read. I thought rozele meant later, post-Soviet works.
(BTW there’s a very specific and perhaps unprecedented plot device shared between TTSS and William Goldman’s Marathon Man, published the same year, which I won’t give away here. It’s amazing that both came up with it independently and simultaneously.)
The adjective “Straussian” shows up practically every week on the blog Marginal Revolution.
Thanks @Seong, I know plenty of uses of “Straussian”, mostly wrt music, occasionally Claude Lévi-; none made sense in that context. (Of course how Leo’s name gets applied more than half a century after his death can’t be blamed on him.)
So mea culpa — chiefly for claiming to be open-minded/widely-read in social critique when clearly I’m not. OTOH life is short, you don’t have to read much of this stuff to detect it’s usurping the form of political philosophy/critical thought to serve pre-determined ends. ‘The Noble Lie’, indeed!
The Americans don’t really feature much at all in earlier le Carré, as I recall.
Are we avoiding spoilers? American intelligence plays a crucial and evil role in one that wasn’t that long after TTSS.
The CIA come off as a pretty bad lot in the very next book, The Honorable Schoolboy.
I wonder how le Carré felt about the CIA personally. He certainly knew that the Americans were better at counterintelligence than MI6. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is about how bad MI6 was at all sorts of things, but counterintelligence is obviously the most central one. And le Carré presumably knew that his own career as an agent wouldn’t have lost if the British hadn’t protected members of the Cambridge Five even after James Jesus Angleton had made his suspicions about them clear.
i’m not saying that le carré’s earlier work did anything in the way of romanticizing any of the agencies involved – just that the tawdriness, the amorality, the dirt of all kinds was presented as necessary*, and to a significant degree justifiable because of its necessity (though not necessarily forgivable). the books clearly loathe the CIA and all its works, but because of how the US pursued the shared anti-USSR project, and its more naked commitment to putting national self-interest ahead of the overarching goal.
i think with the later work, what you’ll enjoy most depends on what subject matter catches your imagination/interest. the ones that stand out in my mind: Our Game swirls around post-soviet intrigues in the caucasus wars (and british romanticism about Noble Mountaineers); Absolute Friends is about the “war on terror” and its continuities with the Cold War intelligence world; A Most Wanted Man is also a “war on terror” novel, loosely based on an actual ‘extraordinary rendition’ case; The Constant Gardener is about the pharmaceutical industry (and probably still quite timely, 24 years later).
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* in a “but look at the other guys” kind of zero-sum framing.
since the quintessential competent man is right there narrating the story.
Have you read the story recently? Don tells us early on that he is years past his sexual prime, and not particularly attractive or charismatic. He tries to play the competent man but basically fails almost immediately. To make matters worse he is “cuckolded” by a Mayan pilot who enjoys the sexual favors of a nubile young woman while Don limps around injured dependent on a competent woman to rescue him. All that happens before Don commits the ultimate faux-pas of being a bad shot with a gun. I can’t imagine this was a mirror Playboy wanted to hold up to its readers.
There was a 1991 television adaptation of A Murder of Quality,* scripted by le Carré himself, apparently, and starring Denholm Elliott as Smiley. It’s good, although I think the director, Gavin Millar, made one major error. If they wanted to have an interesting mystery, he could not just cast Joss Ackland and ask him to act suspicious, because Ackland’s normal mode of acting just oozed constant, Do not trust this guy, vibes. Ackland was quite capable of toning it down, but when he didn’t it required great care with the storytelling not to destroy all suspense.
* When it was shown in America, because it was a Smiley story, Rebecca Easton evidently decided to show it on Masterpiece Theater, rather than Mystery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Murder_of_Quality_(film) ?
I meant to mention this earlier, but it apparently slipped my mind. If you want a more explicitly satirical take, depicting an intelligence operation run by people who really don’t know what they are doing, there is le Carrie’s The Looking Glass War. It’s not primarily about the Circus but rather another military intelligence unit left over from World War II that is still trying to run operations in the sixties.
This italicised really sounds as if normally that would be an exaggeration.
Perhaps, but if in reality we have semi-delusional officers receiving orders from fully delusional politicians instead of fully delusional officers receiving orders and informing decisions by those politicians, that’s hardly comforting.
This italicised really sounds as if normally that would be an exaggeration.
No, it’s to emphasize that even though intelligence operations are normally run by people who don’t know what they’re doing, in this case it’s so extreme it needs to be specially pointed out.
LH, you are saying that normally it is an exaggeration (which you like enough to use).
Because when it is not, the word really changes nothing.
Even I exaggerate, of course, when I say that Putin is “fully” delusional but the degree to which he is not is so small that further increase in his delusions practicaly changes nothing. Would be same war but ‘against flying saucers” and not agaisnt what it is said to be against.
1. Should I cry tears if some of his officers are delusional too?
2. How many wars are as delusional as this one?
LH, you are saying that normally it is an exaggeration
No, I’m explaining Brett’s italics, which you misunderstood.
Yes, and your explanation precisely means that normally it is an exaggeration.
When you “don’t know what you’re doing” without exaggerations, it is no different from “really don’t know”, “really, really don’t know” and so on.
Anyway, we are not in the 2nd century when the world (the collection of states and peopes) is seen as principally competetive and war is glorified. We are in the world that thinks it has learned to be more collaborative where wars arise from stupidity and lead to nothing good for no one.
And in this world idiots in the army won’t bother me unless I believe that “we” are good and clever guys fighting against other people’s stupidity. Which is not what I beleive in (but which, of course, what most people both here and in Russia do believe in. It is this belief that I want to undermine, of course, both here and in Russia).