Tales of Long Ago

It's been a long while, but then I have been reading some very long books. Chief among which has been Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by Luo Guangzhong. It's an abridged translation but it's still very, very long. This was a follow-up to Emperor of the Seas by Jack Weatherford (about Kublai Khan) which seems to have kicked me off on a Chinese history rabbit hole. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is itself a late medieval work but tells of ancient times. It covers several decades, countless wars and battles, and dozens of figures, all of which I knew absolutely nothing about and still am pretty lost, but the opening line is as timeless as ever: "Empires arise from chaos and empires collapse back into chaos. This we have known since time began." What do loyalty and honor look like when all the options are bad? How do you tell the Will of Heaven from just killing the most people? 

Also on the China theme, but at yet another time (please do not ask me to stick to one thing), was Return to Dragon Mountain (Memoirs of a late Ming man) by Jonathan D. Spence. I actually started this one a few years back but at that point I could not stomach the early chapters about his pre-collapse life of luxury when he would dedicate months to optimizing his cup of tea. I have come to terms with it, however. Some people must struggle just to survive, and some people are Chinese bureaucrats in 1625. He had plenty of struggling later on to make up for it, living in the drafty ruins of his former library and trying to find enough quiet and rice to finish his book. 

Bad Therapy by Abigail Schrier. I mostly read this as a counterpoint to the Resilience Myth and Myth of Normal books I read last year. Schrier and Mate agree on two things: kids shouldn't have smart phones and parents should trust their instincts. I'm pretty sure as humans in social interactions we don't have much in the way of instincts to go on; what feel like instincts are deeply colored by our experiences, exposures and culture to a degree we can never objectively evaluate. Which is no doubt why Schrier and Mate have opposite ideas about how parents will act when they are acting on their instincts. Also I think both of them overestimate (due to life stage, Schrier's children are too young and Mate's too old) how much parents can ultimately intervene between their children and the larger culture; at some point they will have to live now, not 100 years ago. Schrier does have some good points that psychotherapy, though undoubtedly having helpful applications, has not been an unmitigated boon, and is particularly untested and uncertain when applied to children. Overall it does seem like the more we think and talk and raise awareness about mental health, the more miserable everybody is. (And I say this as someone who has been using therapy and found it helpful for many years.) I don't think the picture is as bleak as she paints, though. As both a parent and employer of a significant number of Gen Z, I find them as reasonably functional as human beings as anyone is at that age. We have no doubt screwed them up a great deal, but then we always do. 

Talking about other fascinating beings, though, I thoroughly enjoyed The Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich about the social lives and problem-solving abilities of ravens. I also appreciated the amount of time Mr. Heinrich spent squatting in the snow under branch shelters to bring us these accounts. 

Taliesin by Stephen Lawhead. Duchess finished her Christmas stocking book at the airport and left it for me to read. I've always wanted to read Lawhead's take on Arthur, although the introduction of Atlantis definitely threw me for a loop. I did enjoy it but found the pacing uneven and some things didn't seem to add up. I do look forward to reading the rest but feel that I am still looking for an Arthur retelling that is as good as the title of The Once and Future King is. 

Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. This one, the beginning of a prequel series to Ender's Game, was Deux's stocking book but I found it a little too grim for bed time reading. There's only so many corpses in dismembered spaceships I can handle right before bed. Still I've found it pretty engaging and have carried on with the next few books, albeit earlier in the day. 

For before bed reading I have instead been revisiting Bookworld with the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. 

Slightly Deranged

A few weeks ago the enchilada casserole turned out extra-crispy which we thought was just the result of lack of attention, but then we noticed that the turned off oven was still going strong and further that it was the broiler, which hasn't worked in years. When the smoke alarm went off we decided our only option was to flip it off at the breaker, which did put a stop to it. Subsequent tests revealed that even if the oven was never turned on at all the broiler started heating up immediately. We could use the stove top, but only for about twenty minutes before the house started filling with smoke, or we could broil something very quickly. 

We put in a call to our friendly local appliance repair company, who have fixed our stove many times before, and they replied, without even looking at it, that if it was doing that now it was beyond further repair. So we adapted for a few days, doing a lot of scrambled eggs on the pancake griddle and tea in the microwave and soup in the instant pot. On particularly brave days we would cook a very quick supper on the stove top. The rest of the time we kept it flipped off at the breaker.

It's never a good time to replace an appliance, but right now is a particularly bad time as, if we ever get past Phase 1 of our building project to add on enough bedrooms and living space for Bookworm and Rocketboy to join us, at some point we will get to Phase 3 of making the kitchen fully wheelchair accessible at which point a new stove will be needed that would not fit into the current configuration. 

However, we were alerted to a free stove along the side of the road and DOB rounded up people to load it up, bring it home, and after much straining and some swearing, haul it all the way up and around the back and get it into the kitchen. 

While this had been going on, Deux had been making supper and noted that, for the first time in a week or more, the broiler had not come on. But that just seemed like a fluke, and the project was too far committed to withdraw, so we pulled the old stove out, brought the new stove in and . . . discovered that there was more than one type of stove plug. Some of our helpers considered swapping the cords between the stoves but thought better of it and finally with enough googling we found out that there were adapters that could be used and arrive in a few days. 

In the meantime we had two stoves in a kitchen that definitely was not designed for two stoves and no one wanted to drag the other stove back outside somewhere, so we plugged the old stove back into the old stove slot, shoved the new stove into a corner where it has converted the kitchen from difficult to navigate in a wheelchair to difficult to navigate in corporal form, and resumed using the new stove. 

Since then, the broiler has never come back on. We don't trust it. We try not to leave the breaker flipped but sometimes we forget. I baked gingerbread, which takes an hour of steady temperature, and it came out perfectly. We still don't know if the other stove even works because no one wants to drag the now-functioning stove out of the wall and plug it in to test. 

I am not sure what the moral is here but hey, at least we're not out the money for a new stove. Yet. 

Farewell Picnic

The time of this has been imminent but shifting for the last six months as Mr. Duchess worked out his military path, but the time has finally come and Duchess moved out of state yesterday. They won't get housing until he is further in his training so her stuff is all still here, but she can stay with some of his extended family and see him on weekends. So. It was time. 

We decided last Sunday to gather everyone up and do a picnic in the park. We hadn't all been together since Christmas, as Dame is still living in Seattle with Bookworm awaiting the completed addition. And we hadn't done a picnic in the park since . . . I'm afraid it might have been pre-Covid. I took the kids on some local hikes during Covid but DOB was not doing well enough to venture out, and then when he was better everyone was bigger and busier and everything had changed. But when they were little it was something we did pretty much every week the weather was remotely tolerable. 

It made the most sense to meet up with Dame and go to a park in Seattle and it proved to be the sort of glorious spring day that occurs much more in fiction than in actuality. We had been to the Asian Art Museum last month and I thought it might be fun to visit the park around it, especially since there was an old water tower you could climb for a view of the city. When I saw how nice the day was I was worried it would be too crowded, but it was just pleasantly populated. 

However, by the time we arrived, DOB was in desperate need of finding the restrooms and parked near one, while Deux and Dame immediately hopped out of the car and made a beeline for the tower at the other end of the park. Dash and Duchess and I unloaded the folding chairs and lunch and then were trying to catch up, while DOB followed along in a faint hope that there would be a restroom at both ends of the park and he could watch the stuff while we climbed the tower. 

There was not a restroom at the other end of the park, nor was even the approach to the tower accessible, so DOB wheeled back to the other one by the car while the rest of us trailed the first two to the top of the tower, Dash and I ladened with three folding chairs and a cooler bag full of lunch. After we had briefly caught our breath and admired the view at the top of the tower, we all went pell-mell back down again, back across the park to the car only to encounter no sign of DOB along the way. 

At this point we had had about enough of walking about with everything and so we decided to just sit down where we were (there was plenty of nice grass handy) and hope DOB turned up. Dash went off to look for him but apparently they both just spent some time wandering separately on some of the trails and enjoying the view. Eventually everyone and the food all made it to the same location and we had lunch and a resounding game of 6-person Spades (scoring invented on the spot) and the sort of conversation that would horrify people if it were made into cute little cards to stimulate conversation but the more printable of which was, "If you swallowed sunglasses whole, would you be able to digest them?" (Which was itself a spin-off of, "If I swallowed your sunglasses, would they still be in the car?")

Like every perfect moment it was over far too quickly and it is a thing that will almost certainly never occur again, but also, to steal a bit from Winnie the Pooh, in an enchanted place on the top of the Forest, four little ducklings will always be playing. 

 

Quite a Lot of Books

 It's been a while since I did a book post, but then I was reading some rather long books and then they kept interacting with each other in my head and I wanted to get them to settle down a bit before I reviewed them. 

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: This was in my childhood re-read slot. People do ask about its suitability for children a lot. Well, there's obviously murders but things are pretty tamely described for nowadays. Yes, Holmes does do cocaine occasionally between cases to keep his brain busy and Watson lectures him about it. It's an interesting glimpse into a pre-prohibition world and I don't know of any cases of children becoming drug users because of the example of Sherlock Holmes. 

I've also seen charges of racism, which I think is unfair. There are some terms that are no longer polite, but not used intentionally to be demeaning. And there are characters who express contemporary attitudes, but not once does a stereotype prove to be the solution to the problem. Indeed, that would be antithetical to the whole nature of Sherlock Holmes to accept a prejudice instead of probing to the facts. His attitude toward women is also surprisingly even-handed. He'll take facts wherever he can find them. 

In spite of all that's come down since they're still quite readable. Holmes is definitely not the detective you'd want to have over for dinner (that would be Father Brown if I'm cooking, Precious Ramotswe if she's cooking, or Lord Peter if he--or rather Bunter--is acquiring the comestibles elsewhere). But he's fun to watch. Which is probably because, despite his emphasis on logic and reason, he's not a dispassionate emotionally repressed person (even if he and Watson both believe he is). His passions are just entirely focused on problem-solving. 

Radium Girls by Kate Moore. This was our previous book club read and it was grim but fascinating. It might help to have a little more charity towards skeptics of the latest greatest new thing to recall that over the last two hundred years there have been quite a few new things that we didn't know, or didn't fully grasp, all the downsides of. Science can only tell us the answers to questions we have thought to ask; experience tells us answers to questions we don't even know about. 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I usually do *not* like books that are currently popular, but I gave this one a try and to my surprise I loved it. It was a little fast-paced for my taste but so well done and it had one of my favorite sci-fi themes of figuring out communication and what things are essential and what things are variable for sapient life and just fun nerdy buddies. I liked it so much I talked my book club into doing it for our next selection, it was time for something lighter after Radium Girls. I also read The Martian and then DOB and I watched the movie, both were fun. 

The Resilience Myth by Soraya Chemaly and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate. I'm putting these together not just because of the title overlap because they have a lot of common themes and I think the same glaring blind spot. Resilience's main point that treating resilience as a sort of internal mental toughness that people need to just have all by themselves is false and often actively destructive; sometimes we need to avoid harmful situations, lots of bad things *don't* make us stronger, and all of us need the care and support of others. Normal expands on Mate's common theme of the role of trauma in addictive behavior to look at physical and mental health and all sorts of social toxicity. Resilience I felt like was much longer than it needed to be and the author got bogged down fitting everything in the world into her hypothesis which somehow exactly matched up with well-drawn political lines which rather detracted from the usefulness or uniqueness of what she had to say. Mate at least has the humility to see some of society's problems in his own mirror. 

The starting point for both of them seems to be an assumption that modern society is unusually bad/stressful/toxic in various ways. And I always wonder about that. Not that we don't have plenty of problems. But are they genuinely *worse* than other humans have dealt with through time? Do we really suffer more than others in the past? That seems hard to swallow with almost any reading of history. Or perhaps we are not suffering more, but dealing with it worse--in which case we should probably be looking not just to the things that have always been there (war, poverty, prejudice, violence), but to things that have actually changed, including the changes that we like. Or again perhaps we're not suffering more *or* dealing with it worse we are just more often surviving things that would have killed past humans and needing coping skills to deal with the fallout.

And one thing I think they both brush on but don't genuinely appreciate is that the things they want to see more of are inherently in conflict. Mate expounds on this the most; he talks about the deep human needs for attachment and authenticity. He almost brushes against the potential tension between these two values but then scurries away from it and spends his entire final section devoted to advising people on how to deepen authenticity in their life without really delving in to how much in conflict this value is with the level of human support and connection that would be needed to provide people the support he advocates for in the beginning of the book. Whenever I hear someone declaiming on their journey to authenticity and self-care I always listen to the undertones because you can almost always detect quite a lot of people who were cut off or abandoned along the way. And then what became of *those* people's journey to authenticity? The same, probably, and the end result is a lot of very authentic but very lonely people. 

If there's one thing modern (American, at least, but from what I can tell it's pretty far spread by now) humans, of every political persuasion, are in agreement on it is that they should be absolutely free from constraint and judgment in their personal lifestyle choices. (Indeed, if authenticity is really what we're missing how is it the past seventy years of devotion to authenticity have not improved matters?) We don't have a lot of first-hand accounts from hunter-gatherers but we have quite a lot of information from small closely-knit agricultural communities and they are unanimous that the kind of village that provides comfort and support through the ups and downs of life is also insular, judgmental, intrusive, rife with gossip, and harsh on nonconformists. There have also been quite a few attempts to live a simpler, communal life closer to nature since the Industrial Revolution and the ones that didn't turn into sex or death cults mostly seem to have just fizzled out as staying alive is hard on those terms and the comforts of industrialization, even for the poor, are quite alluring.

Humans are social creatures, but like most social creatures, a lot of that socialization is squabbling. We can't be close without stepping on each other's toes. One person's allergy is another person's emotional support animal. To have the benefits of a group, we all have to give up some perfectly valid and good parts of ourselves, like trees in a forest losing their lower branches. To take an example Mate trips all over without noticing, he speaks vigorously of the need for greater support for parents and young children so that children can have the emotional and physical safety they need to thrive. Well and good. But he never openly acknowledges that to do that we would have to, as a society, assert that parenthood was a lifestyle choice that is deserving of an extra degree of social support--thus implying that it is in some ways *better* than not being a parent. Sure, that'll go over well.

Both authors spend plenty of time critiquing the downsides of capitalism, everyone's favorite whipping boy, without really proposing a viable alternative. The world not being made up of pure distillation of 19th-century economic theories, the reality is that we don't have competing systems in the modern world. Every major modernized country has a capitalized private sector that is then taxed and regulated to various degrees to support various kinds of public programs. Differences are in the details but the common unquestioned basis is money, which allows us to get the benefit of the labor of other people (which we could not survive without) without needing any kind of personal relationship with them. It is a system designed for individual authenticity--and solitude. And that is probably why neither author can point to a place where more generous social programs than the US are making that much of a dent in the essential modern problems. The impersonal transactions of modern life (mediated by the government or not) cannot provide a community. As someone who works around the edges of public systems, both getting people in, keeping people on, and kicking people out, I can attest that the world of public benefits is still a terribly lonely one. 

Anyway, while I think Mate is right in bringing light to the role trauma plays in both physical health and addictive behaviors, he does tend to overstate his case. If you define trauma so broadly that everyone has it, and addiction so broadly that everyone suffers from it, then you're definitely going to land at 100% correlation but still not have shown causation. We could certainly do with looking at more than the merely physical and finding connection and support for the struggling instead of relying on, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled." But looking solely inward doesn't seem quite the right direction.

I thought this article had some interesting counterpoints to the assertions in both these books. I have done plenty of therapy and found it helpful but it is at best a tool, not a goal. And tools can be easily misused, as I was reminded of meeting with a young man who was facing a much-deserved protective order from his ex-girlfriend. As I was advising him of what he could tell the court to hopefully get an order that would minimize its impact on his future career, I suggested he could promise to go to therapy. "Oh I've been in therapy for years," he proudly asserted, "I've got a great therapist." In many ways therapy is a commercialized lopsided substitute for genuine human connection. We are about equal parts matter and story. Sometimes therapy can help us tell ourselves better stories. But we still have to choose which stories we allow to shape us. 

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen by Garth Nix. This was a fun re-read. I got these books for Dame for Christmas because I know she will love them when she actually reads them but being 16 she is always in doubt about anything I recommend. But she has been gone since New Years' (Bookworm has taken over her schooling and with our house being currently in turmoil while we put on an addition for Bookworm and Rocketboy to move in, it just made more sense for her to stay with them until we are all ready for the move), I decided *I* might as well re-read them. They're one of the few depictions of necromancy that I find intriguing (bells--so lovely and mysterious) with intriguing characters and worldbuilding. (Like the series below, they're not actually a trilogy as such--they're a stand-alone followed by a duology.) 

The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold. I did a search and it appears I've never really reviewed these on here which is wild because they are undoubtedly at the top of my list of books I've found as an adult. They are fantasy, but the only real fantasy element is the quintarian religious system which manages to be both natural and transcendent, organized and organic. The main characters are mostly failures, usually middle aged, traumatized and cursed. And therefore in a position to be used by the gods. They certainly have much that is grim but they are also profoundly hopeful and real.

Intimations of Mortality

Our new year began with the sad news of DOB's Uncle Dan's sudden passing. This, in turn, spurred an unplanned trip to Ohio for the first time in 15 years, along with Duchess, Mr. Duchess, and Dash.  DOB wound up spending about ten hours on the phone straightening out the tickets. Duchess coordinated entertainment and snacks, Dash navigated, and Mr. Duchess pushed the wheelchair (DOB does not trust his power chair to the tender mercies of the airlines). I showed up and didn't lose anything I was carrying (except my lunch, once) and was very much reminded why we never tried to do this with four small children. 

The bittersweet thing about funerals that starts coming home in midlife is that they are often the only time you get together and see all the rest of the people. We were able to stay parceled out amongst DOB's two youngest brothers and their families, meet the baby neiphlings, see DOB's parents and other aunt and uncle, visit our old church and show Duchess and Dash our early houses and the parks we always played at. (Everything being covered with a foot of snow, we mostly viewed things from inside the cars.) 

We also caught the norovirus, which delayed Duchess and Mr. Duchess traveling back with us. This may have contributed to the unwise moment when Dash and DOB decided to try traversing the moving sidewalk with the wheelchair. The first one went uneventfully, even with DOB dragging a wheeled carryon alongside him and Dash having a massive backpack on. So we got on another, me trailing behind carrying a large carryon, my purse, two coats, a water bottle, and a badly wrapped sandwich. And then at the end of the second moving sidewalk, the front wheels jammed and Dash and I were stuck behind walking briskly in place to keep from being crushed into the back of the wheelchair with no room to get around the extra wheeled carry on. I realized something needed to be done to change the situation and the best thing I could think of was to fling myself--bags, coats and snacks entire--over the top of DOB to get to the other side of the sidewalk and then tug the wheels loose from that side. Somehow I did this and then did indeed manage to drag the chair off the sidewalk, although by this time the back wheel tire had also come off. We were flung about in the debris of this encounter and trying to wedge the tire back on when a flight attendant strolled by and remarked blandly, "You're not supposed to do that." No kidding. (Yes, there was an emergency kill switch, but no, I did not notice it in time to use it.)

After we returned home I went to the eye doctor's to pick up my very first pair of driving glasses. This is probably not a big deal to those who have worn glasses their entire lives, but for me it is a big step, and not just the physical adaptation to having something on my face (hopefully at some point without triggering a headache). Every other sign of aging one could probably address in some way with more yoga or less fat or eating three pumpkin seeds by the light of the crescent moon, but this just is: your eyes are old. They are getting older. It will not get better. It will just get worse, and worse, until you die. I did the math today and realized that Uncle Dan was just about the age DOB and I are now when I joined the family. Those 22 years went quickly and I do not know if I have another 10, like my mother, or 22, like Uncle Dan, or even 46 like some of my grandparents. But I very likely have less ahead of me than behind of me.