Teaching The Bible

Teaching two classes a day in summer session is eating my life.  It's worse than having a toddler.

This is especially true when one of the classes is Bible As Lit, since I am not only assigning massive chunks to be read every night (which I then have to re-read as well), I am having to do mountains of research for every class.  (Yes, if I had been wise I would have done the prep work over the three weeks I had off between classes.  But I was very busy writing short stories then, so.)

I did some of this research the last time I taught the class; except that was five or six years ago, and lots of new research has been done.  I am keeping like a day and a half ahead of the students, if that.

Still, it's a great class, one of my favorites.  We're on the bit of I Samuel with David and Jonathon tomorrow.  That's always a delight to teach.

One of my sources for that one tries to claim that the love between D&J is only a political love.  I suppose I'll pass this theory on to my students.  And then I guess I'll roll my eyes.  Um, yeah.  Okay.

The reason this theory isn't total nonsense is that I Samuel can be read as an apology, or a defense, of David's usurpation of Saul's throne.  In which case all of Jonathon's protestation's of love for David and his you-take-the-throne, I don't want it, are put in there to defend the idea that David doesn't take the inheritance of his own will:  It's Jonathon's idea.  

But that's not incompatible with D&J being lovers, either.  And so many other things indicate that their relationship is more than just buddies: what each of them says about the other's love being better than the love of women; what Saul says to Jonathon, about him "uncovering his mother's nakedness" in his relationship to David; the oath they make to one another at that very odd ceremony during the New Moon (shooting arrows by a sacred stone -- that looks very much like some buried religious thing to me).  

The kid is auditing this class, btw.  Part of home-schooling!  She's doing very well so far.

Well, Rats

Angry Robot Books rejected my novel.

I am sad.

But I finished another short story.  So that's something.

Wikipedia has this cool new feature -- probably all y'all all know about this -- little tiny embedded movies.  So if you should happen to want to know how, say, a hay baler works (my new story has hay baling in it) you can go on over to Wikipedia and look up hay baling and click on the tiny embedded movie and there you are, you are soon informed.

Don't I love living in the future?

There is also, of course, google video.  Even more useful. 

My Two Favorite Songs

I can't stop listening to these two right now.

Do You Hear The People Sing?

We Want Blood.

Sing it!

Weekends

We had a big party yesterday, saying goodbye to one of our friends / ex-students who is going off to Minnesota to an MFA program. Now it is raining (again!) and I am working on editing stories.

And my child has an ear infection.

Now you may think this is no big deal. What kid does not have an ear infection from time to time?

Well, mine. That's what kid does not.

She has hardly ever been ill, per se, in her life. Not that she hasn't been sick -- from age seven to about ten she was sickly, as the 19th century used the term. Failure to thrive, as biologists might call it. Once we determined she was allergic to something about corn syrup -- which this is as far as we ever got, thanks to my useless clinic and even more useless health insurance, which did about thirty thousand dollars worth of tests while discovering nothing at all -- but once we, by which I mean I, took her off all foods containing corn syrup* her symptoms disappeared and she began to thrive at last.

Where was I? Sorry. I'm still miffed about the corn syrup issue. They didn't even test for allergies. Gah.

Okay. So except for that, she's hardly ever been sick. Bronchitis when she was two. The flu when she was six. Croup at eight. A stomach virus at eleven. I can literally count the number of times.

The effect of this is, whenever she does get sick, it's full mode panic on her part. A fever, to her, literally means she's going to die. "What's wrong with me?" she cries. "Does any terminal illness start with an ear ache?"

"It's an ear infection," I said. "We'll go to the clinic tomorrow."

"Am I going to die?"

"You're going to take some Tylenol."

"And then I'll die?"

"And then you'll go lie down. Ai."

I'm not even sure it's an ear infection, frankly. I think it might just be the weather. Another big front is coming through, and my bones feel like someone's been hitting me with sticks all night anyway.

Meanwhile! I'm reading a book Dr. Skull brought home, Earth Abides, written in 1947. Sort of a mid-century The Stand. Only without the religious whackatude. A super-measles wipes out 99.99% of the population, and...absolutely nothing happens. At least so far. I'm about halfway through the book. It's very well written. And historically interesting. Not sure it's any good yet. But it is making me feel very feverish.


*It was the blogosphere that helped me diagnosis her! When the useless clinic was doing no good at all, and she had lost 12 pounds (at nine years old) and had chronic stomach pain, and would not eat anything, and could barely move around most of the time -- she spent all day sitting in one chair in our house -- I put out a blag, even before blags existed, and got all sorts of excellent suggestions, and that was one of them, that she might be allergic to corn syrup. We had already taken her off wheat and red dye, so taking her off corn syrup was, frankly, a snap.

Oh God

It's June.

It's summer in Arkansas.

Weather guy says we're heading for 98 degrees this week.

Four more months of this.

Do you see why I want to move to Barrows, Alaska? How would that be worse than this, exactly?

Okay, Maybe It's Just Me...

I've been seeing this study popping up in a lot of blogoports lately: confused Americans, who confusedly thinking that 25% of America is gaygaygay, when the actual percentage of Americans who are gayoramic is 3.5%, or thereabouts.

Explanations for confusions? Maybe people can't count. Maybe people don't know what 25% means. Maybe those gay folk are just so sassy and flamboyant, you know, and in your face, that one of them SEEMS like several of them, and SO... well, we get confused. Whereas nice quiet straight people who don't make a fuss, who notices them?

Whatever. All I know is I started counting gay, lesbian, and bisexuals I am acquainted with, and while it is true it is probably not 25% of everyone I know, it is a pile more than 3.5% of people I know.

And it's not like I live in San Francisco, either.

Is what I'm saying.

Memorial Day

I had a difficult encounter a few semesters ago, which I am not sure I handled well.

My policy for the past few years has been to let -- well, to force -- my students to write on topics which matter to them, which have to do with their majors if possible, and which are small, small topics. You can't write about global warming, I exhort them, because you can't solve global warming. Pick a topic you yourself can do something about. I then tell them the story of my Oklahoma student, an Engineering major, who had an issue with his road and his ditch -- how the road got graded badly by the county, so that it kept washing out the ditch, which made his fence keep falling over, so that his cattle kept getting out on the road. This was a problem he could fix. He wrote about that problem. "You want a problem like that," I tell them. "Find some problem like that to describe for me."

Generally these papers work very well.

However. This student was a History Education major -- going to teach History in the local high schools -- and what he wanted to write about, it developed, though he didn't pitch it to me this way, was how the Civil War was mis-taught in Southern High schools.

What he meant was: he wanted high school history teachers to teach students that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about the right of states to govern themselves. His argument was that by teaching that the Southern States had fought the war in defense of slavery, we were making Southern children feel bad about themselves and their heritage.

Okay, I told him. Except, first, have you done any research? The war was fought over slavery. So if you argue it was not, you're teaching something that isn't true. And second, have you considered that every child you teach is not a white child?

Many people, I told him, fought in that war on the right side -- against slavery, I mean. You're ignoring everything those people did

And for what? So you can argue some false pride for kids today? Why not teach them the truth? Some bad people in the past made bad arguments, which led to some bad decisions on the part of some other people, which nearly destroyed our country?

Which it did, I pointed out to him -- I asked him if he realized how close the Civil War came to destroying our nation. I asked if he had talked to any of our history professors about this theory of his? (Which he had picked up from a local high school professor, of course.) I told him to go talk to some of them, to see what they said.

He asked whether I was going to let my opinion influence the way I graded his paper.

"I just don't want to get an F because you disagree with me," he said.

This is probably the saddest I have ever been after a conference, I have to say.

Thinking About the Revolution

I've read two books in the past two days, Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett.


Both were cracking good reads, by which I mean they kept me up until late at night, turning pages. Both I had read before -- Mote, not since I was a kid, Night Watch last year sometime, when I first discovered Pratchett. Night Watch is much more to my taste politically. Mote is somewhat to the right of my politics.


But as I lay in bed last night (or rather, very early this morning, given that I am suffering from the worst insomnia in my adult life, and am hitting the pillow somewhere around five a.m. these days) considering the differences between the two texts, and why one of them annoyed me so much, while the other appealed to me so strongly, well, it really was not just that one is more leftist and the other is hard right military POV.

Because it's not -- Pratchett has a bit of the practical military POV mixed in with his populist-Leftism, and I'm not bothered by that.


And clearly I am bothered deeply by Niven & Pournelle's ridiculous ideas of a women's place in the world -- and while what they do with the alien Moties sex-change and so on is interesting, it does nothing to negate their insistence that "real" people (by which they mean European-ancestry White Guys) will keep their women at home after marriage, doing the child-raising.



No, here is what bothers me most about the Niven & Pournelle worldview: its insistence that the correct attitude of the citizen toward his leaders is respectful trust. (I do choose that pronoun carefully. Only men are actually people in N&P's world, despite his tossing in of a token woman character.) It is assumed -- and then demonstrated -- in the N&P world that those in command, those who are born to command, and given command, know what they are doing, and having taken command, will do the right thing.


It is assumed, and then demonstrated in the text, that those who object to the actions of leaders -- rebels, outies -- are bad people, who deserve to die, who deserve whatever punishment, up to having their entire planet reduced to radioactive glass, is visited upon them: they deserve this simply for having questioned authority.


Since the story is told from the point of view of one of those in authority, Rod (yes, this is his name, nothing phallic here, move along) Blaine, who is written as an earnest hero type who works very hard to get everything right and worries about getting everything right, the reader is reassured that those in authority are Really Good Guys who Really Want To DO Right by those in their purview.


We're not meant to look at the way Sally (his wife) is stripped of her power ("Rod won't let me think about the Institute after the wedding.") or how everyone with any power is a European white guy or how the decisions are made by fiat behind the scenes by the few white guys with all the power -- oh yes, benevolently, and we are TOLD these guys know best, and since those guys have been written as so noble and brave and intelligent, not like the wicked outies, well, it must be true, yes?


This is the worldview of the conservative, who believes -- I guess -- that, so long as he is the right man, the big man in charge can be trusted; and that everyone in the empire will be happy serfs who will be happy to serve, so long as the big man tells them what to do, except for a few idiots, who can be happily shot, or shot down with cool logic. (One scene that made me dizzy with disbelief early in the book was when the parliament -- I guess it was parliament -- met on New Scotland, and everyone in the parliament "pledges allegiance" to a hologram of the emperor, and then bows to it. I guess N&P think this is realistic. I guess they think grown-up people would actually do this. And, since I can see Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and her ilk actually doing it, I suppose they aren't exactly wrong.)


Contrast this with Pratchett's worldview in Night Watch, which strikes me as much more realistic and adult.


For one thing, the leaders are mostly idiots, or crazy. (Which, watching our own Congress, Q.E.D.) The few who actually know what they are doing and actually intend to do what is best for the land under their purview know better than to expect the people to follow them from blind loyalty. Most people, as Pratchett well knows, are mostly interested mainly in their own lives and what is going to affect them. Who has time for more that that, mostly? Maybe five or six percent of us, tops. And even then, only part time.

"Do the job that is put before you," Sam Vimes says in Night Watch: that's what most of us do, and it's what Vimes, who is one of Pratchett's best leaders, and best heroes, mostly does. Vetinari, Pratchett's other best leader, and other best hero, though a more ambiguous one, also appears in this book, at the very beginning of his career. Vetinari is Practchett's demonstration for why we should and should not trust our leaders -- he is a tyrant, the all-powerful, brilliant, wily ruler of Ankh-Morpork, not exactly benevolent, though he may well have, ultimately, benevolent ends.


Still, Sam Vimes does not trust him; Sam Vimes is always wary of him, and always acts to keep him in check. Sam Vimes, at one point, arrests him, because no one should be above the law. In this book, Night Watch, when the leaders of the city are entirely powerful, Sam Vimes (under the name John Keel) leads a revolution: moving the barriacades, bit by bit, so that, daily, more of the city is under control of the law, and less and less is under the control of whim and tyranny.


Niven and Pournelle's worldview, it came to me, as I was lying sleepless last night -- that is exactly what they want. When you want the government to be under the control of some powerful man who you are forced to trust to be benevolent and good, what you are trusting in is whim and tyranny. Sam Vimes/Terry Pratchett's worldview -- where we do not trust, but hedge the rulers around with laws and rules, and then, warily, warily, keep the rulers at heel with those laws and rules -- that worldview puts the government under our control. Perhaps it means the government is less able to act; it also means the government is less able to put its boot on our throats.

I suppose it all depends on what you want from a government: death to the rebels, or people who are free to quarrel in the streets if they damn well feel like it.

Bang, Crash, Wham! (Again)

Every third night it seems, now, finds me and Dr. Skull, the kid and the two dogs and the cat huddled in our hallway, listening to hail pelt the roof while tornado sirens wail in the distance.

Last night's storm was especially scary. We considered going to the tornado shelter, which is almost a mile away at the elementary school. We used to do this back when tornado warnings happened once a summer, at the most. Now that they're happening every other day, we've given up. Driving through the hail and rain and wind, climbing from the car, and staggering (or in my case crutching) into the shelter to wait, sodden and over-heated, with two hundred other people who live in shacks without basements -- well, it has lost its appeal. Also, the shelter is actually a gymnasium, more or less -- so horrible lighting, nowhere to sit, and kids running yelling and playing kickball, in and out of the crowds.

Although if these scary, scary storms keep happening we may need to rethink our policy. Last night, the wind and rain were fierce. The power went out (again) and stayed out until about seven this morning. Hail and thunder were continuous. When the wind blew especially hard, the frame of the house would creak in a disturbing manner. The cat ran away and hid under the white chair. We were out of candles -- used them all up the last time the power went out -- and I don't like burning candles during such a bad storm anyway. So we were using my iPad as our sole light source. It works very well for that, btw.

Eventually the storm left, and the power stayed off. Everyone went to sleep but me (I'm having bad insomnia these days) and I stayed up reading the iPad until four a.m., when the power came on briefly. No sooner had I shut up windows and shut off lights and reset the alarm clock (I had a medical appointment at 9.00) than the power went off again.

But we didn't get blown away, unlike many people. As I drove to the clinic this morning, trees were down all over town, the roof was blown off the local lumber yard, traffic signs were blown over, and the local sign on the Harp's store had been totally blown out.

Another storm coming tonight, too.

Wait, what? Raptors?

My kid is very edgy about this whole rapture thing, even though I keep telling her it's ridiculous.

OTOH, a couple of my students, even though they live in Arkansas (rapture central) have never heard of the idea of the rapture.

So here's a link! In case you care. Everything you wanted to know about the Rapture.

Which, as I keep telling my panicked child, is a totally invented piece of bullshit.

(Yeah, like other bits of religion aren't, I know. I am just more exasperated with this one because of how much it's scaring my kid. What a tool this guy Harold Camping is. Makes me wish for an actual God just so he would have to account to him someday.)

Fun fact! Rapture and rape come from the same Latin root! Rapio, rapere: to seize or to snatch away, to take for your own.

Oh, My

I know I shouldn't find this as delicious as I do.

It's just so sweet when justice (at least begins) to prevail.

Via Crooked Timber

The comments over there are especially worth reading.

Why, Look Here!

It's a story by me! At Strange Horizons!

You'll be glad to know that the kid has pronounced it interesting, but strange.

Swearing Is A Really Important Part of One's Life

(X-Posted at FanSci)


Stephen Fry explains here what I have often told those among my students who explain to me sweetly that swearing is a sign of a limited vocabulary or a lack of imagination: yeah, really, not so much.

In fact, as I point out to students (usually earnest religious freshmen) who tell me this, it is those with the largest vocabularies and the most education among my acquaintence who tend to cuss the most and the mostly foully. So go figure.

That being said, my kid was working on a SF story the other day and came to me with the question that haunts all writers of SF: "Ma. How would people cuss inthe future?"

Now this is a problem.

Because it is true that you don't want your characters just going fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck. That does get dull. The last thing you want is dull cussing. Part of the charm is cussing, like the charm of any writing, is variety and imagination. Also, well, we do mix it up. New cuss words are fun. I remember when I discovered fuckwit and tool. Didn't I love those words?

So you gotta figure that in the future (especially if you move far into the future) the way and the means by which your culture will cuss will be different than the ways and the means by which our current culture cusses. We're all into fuck and shit, here in the early part of the 21st century, plus a healthy dose of misogyny/misandry (bitch, whore, tool); but in Shakespeare's day, or the Roman's, things were very different. With Shakespeare, it was all blasphemy. Very little fuck this, and very much "God's teeth,""God's wounds" (Or Zounds, for short) "God's blood," and "marry" (Mary), and "go to (the devil)"; though also some misogyny -- "whoreson" and such are common in his plays.

And Roman cussing is violently sexual, or maybe I mean sexually violent? What isn't about farting and shitting and pissing is about rape and who is whose whore. Not so much misogyny/misandry as just misanthropy. As I tell Dr. Skull when we are watching Rome or Spartacus and he asks whether the Romans were actually like this, The Romans were very bad people, and the fact that the GOP keeps wanting to compare themselves to that culture tells you all you really need to know about the GOP.

So what you need to think about is what's powering your culture -- what's their central engine, what matters most to them? -- as religion powered Shakespeare's world, as sex and shame powers ours (and money, but where is the cussing about money? Hmm), as power and dominance powered the Roman culture: then your culture should make their vile words, their taboo-breaking insults, around those topics.

Also: cuss words in my exerpience are generally short words with hard consonants at at least one end, and short vowels in the middle. Not invariable, obviously. But often. Just saying.

Go, and cuss some more.

Bang! Crash! Weather!

Another big storm here last night, as if we had not had sufficient stormage.

Just thunder, hail, and rain this time, no tornados that I am aware of. Flood waters, though, with the water coming right up to our back door sill, and the power went out for several hours -- from nine o'clock to about one in the morning. We sat around with candles and flashlights and my iPad (you can still read on your iPad when the power goes down! Score more for the iPad! Though, sadly, the internet stops working. I am not sure why. Because the wifi isn't powered up anymore, maybe?) and the kid wondered if this was what it was like back in the colonial days of 1950, before we were all wired.

Yeah, I said. Sort of.

The kitty does not like thunder. Neither does Big Dog. He tries to climb in my lap. (And he is big.) She streaks around the house, hiding under things under the next burst of thunder, and then bolting for new cover. Anyone who tries to pick her up and comfort her gets clawed for their trouble, and occasionally bitten as well. Today she is a little calmer, but still wary. "She wants to know why you made it thunder like that," I told the kid, who is fretting over her.

"My poor kitty," she frets.

Meanwhile, the backyard still looks like a swamp, all the rivers are flooded, and more rain is on the way.

Almost Mother's Day....;

...and my kid has returned from New Orleans, where she was visiting our family.

And she has come back with purple hair!

She is so cool.

This is something she's been wanting for about three years, but since I am not a trained girl, I had no idea how to go about it -- even with instructions from several blog friends, I could not make it happen.  I even went so far as to take her to a "beauty" "salon" one time, when she was eleven, I think, but though they were very nice, they claimed they could not do such a thing.  (I was dubious, even if this is Fuck Smith.)

Luckily!  She has an aunt who is not only a trained girl, but who used to work doing hair and such.  She has connections!  She arranged for the work ( after first talking the kid's grandmother into letting her have it done) and went with her to have it done.  It's beautiful, I have to say -- not all of her hair is purple, just a wide thatch on the right, above her temple and eyebrow; and very dark purple, just brighter and lighter than the brown of her hair, so that you don't see it and then you do see it and then you say, ooo, that's pretty.

"It's so pretty!" I said, when I saw it.

"I know," the kid confessed.  "It's making me narcissistic -- all I want to do is look in mirrors."