Mirror Story

I know I've talked to quite a few people about mirror stories. I think they are fun, and have (finally) written the rough draft to one. I'm going to post it in one order here and in another order over on fictionpress.com, so you can choose which to read if you like. First installment today, second installment tomorrow! That way, I'll also get different opinions based on when people check! I am clever that way.

It was a cool, dark night, and wolves were howling at the moon, barely visible through the trees. It was on nights like this that Joseph Daedalus most loved living in the middle of the woods. In a city he wouldn’t have been able to build a tower higher than the tallest trees, and in a city he certainly wouldn’t have been able to sit on the top of that tower, his clockwork butler serving him tea, listening to nothing but the howling of the wolves, the whispers of the ghosts, and the soft tick-tock of his butler beside him.

This, Joseph thought, was paradise.

And then there was an abrupt halt to the paradise in the form of a loud horn going off – the door. Who would be outside, in the middle of a haunted forest, at this time of night? Joseph hurried down to the door, to beat the butler. He pulled opened the door to reveal a young boy. “My name is Tobias Priestly, sir, and I want to learn your trade,” the boy said.

“What trade? Do you want to be a blacksmith?” Joseph asked, “A clock-maker?”

Tobias shook his head innocently, eyes wide as if there could be no mistaking Joseph’s trade. “No, sir,” he said seriously. “I want to be a sorcerer.”

Joseph laughed. “No,” he said, and made to close the door. Tobias yelped and caught his hand, though, crying, “Please, sir! I can already do some spells! I won’t be troublesome, I promise! And there are wolves outside, and ghosts, don’t send me away at night, please, sir!”

“No,” Joseph repeated. “If you can do some spells already, why don’t you use them to keep the wolves and the ghosts away?” He shook his head to Tobias’ pleading expression. “I will not teach you any magic.”

“But why not?” Tobias whined.

“Because…” Joseph sighed in frustration, looking at the too-big eyes tearing up on Tobias’ young face. It was altogether too pitiful. “Look. I’m not a magician. I’m an engineer, a blacksmith, a mechanic, a clock-maker. I build machines, I don’t cast spells. I can’t teach you to be a sorcerer because I don’t know the first thing about magic. Now why don’t you go find some crazy old wizard living in those haunted woods and study under him like normal magicians do.”

Tobias frowned in confusion. “But if you aren’t a magician, how did you kill all those dark sorcerers?”

Joseph sighed. “I don’t want to go into it.” Tobias didn’t look away, didn’t shrug and leave, just stood there stalwartly waiting for an answer, and finally Joseph caved. “I made devices, clever devices. Ones that maybe you have never seen before. I used them to kill the dark sorcerers.”

Tobias grinned. “Well, then, even if you aren’t a magician I still want to learn from you.” He laughed and stepped inside the door, casually sneaking in beside a dumbfounded Joseph.

“What?” Joseph asked. “Why?”

“If you aren’t a magician, then you must be something better!”

Joseph smiled, his reserve melting away with the boy’s gleeful expression. Not that he had much choice, since Tobias was already examining the clockwork butler, which had come rolling along its track towards its default station next to the door. “Well, then, come in,” Joseph said as he closed and locked the door behind him.

Tobias was a runaway and only twelve years old, but he was clever and a good worker. He paid careful attention to everything Joseph taught him, and was even prompter in his response to orders than the clockwork butler. Joseph taught him how to assemble finely tuned clocks, devious locks, music boxes, and tiny automata. Tobias loved all of them. When he grew big enough, Tobias learned how to make the finely cut gears for his machines, as well as swords and sheilds and mail. Joseph taught him how to make magnets by pounding iron, how to harness steam power to run a machine. For his journeyman project, Tobias built a little riverboat with a turbine that could use steam to power its way upstream.

And all the while, a shadow grew.

See, it never was long before a new dark sorcerer came about and decided that he would avenge the deaths of his compatriots at the hands of Joseph Daedalus. Joseph averaged one magical duel every two or three years, and so by the time Tobias was a journeyman and eighteen years old he was long overdue. And so, it happened.

The advance guard, a smoke-dragon, came from the west as the sun set. Joseph saw a dark spot in the sky, moving quickly although the day was calm, and leaned over to Tobias. “Do you see that?” he whispered.

Tobias nodded. “It’s not natural; moving too fast for that.”

“Go get the steam-powered fan, and set the butler to follow you with the iron net with lead weights and the crossbow, with adaptor. I’d say a few of the one-hundred pound sets should do the trick.” Joseph grinned. “We’re about to have a storm.”

Tobias nodded, grinned back, and hurried downstairs. Joseph finished his tea, watching the dark clouds slowly spiralling towards his tower. After this would be a zombie horde, or an orc army, or something. And then the final battle with the dark sorcerer himself. Or maybe this would be much more direct, and the dark sorcerer would be riding the smoke dragon? Joseph cleared his throat, and studied the sky. He didn’t ask for fights with these people, they searched him out. It was the least he could do to defend himself.

The clockwork butler came back first, and Joseph took the crossbow from him and set it on the floor, arming it quickly and setting the rest of the nets beside it. He then set the butler to bring back ammunition, in case he missed or the weight was too small to do anything but slow down the smoke dragon. The butler whirred and clicked for a moment and then turned around and left. Tobias was up shortly and dropped the heavy fan to the floor, filled the base of it with coal to start the steam, and lit it. It would take a full twenty minutes for the coal to get hot enough to start pushing the steam through the turbines and rotating the fan, but the smoke dragon was still barely more than a speck on the horizon. Tobias returned downstairs for more coal, just in case, but soon the two men were standing on the top of the tower, ready for battle.

“Is it always like this?” Tobias asked, “You can see it for miles?”

Joseph shook his head. “No, sometimes they try to appear in the middle of a workshop, and that prooves more difficult. But by and large, I think that these sorcerer types like the showmanship of a huge apparition. So we usually have warning.”

Tobias yawned. “It almost seems like he’s taking his time,” he commented. The fan began to spin, and Tobias laughed. “We’ll be ready long before he gets here.”

Joseph looked over at his pupil and smiled. “Just wait,” he said. “Don’t underestimate them, no matter how foolish they appear,” and he turned back to the considerably larger smoke dragon. “Be ready when I say,” he cautioned, and Tobias positioned himself to rotate the fan as needed.The dragon put on a final burst of speed, and Joseph shouted “Now!” and Tobias turned the fan, now at full power, towards the apparition.

The man on the back of the dragon just laughed, as he hovered in the middle of the cloud of smoke. “You think that will destroy my dragon? You are even more foolish than I thought, Daedalus!”

Joseph coughed and Tobias could barely breathe, but the smoke was swirling around them, disorganized, and underneath the sorcerer, a broomstick appeared. Tobias laughed until he couldn’t breathe at all, and fell into a coughing fit, but Joseph restrained himself and instead took careful aim and shot a one-hundred pound iron weight into the back of the broomstick. The sorcerer and his “dragon” careened out of control, only to be reeled in by another shot from the crossbow, this time a net of iron-chains. The power left in the broomstick fought the weight of the iron chains, and slowly sunk to the ground. Trapped in iron, the spell ended, and the smoke began to disappear. Joseph walked over to the wizard who had seemed so confident just a moment earlier.

“I had thought you would have known better,” Joseph said. “Word does get around. They all said you were very clever.”

The sorcerer, huddling under the weight of the iron chains, reached his hand out form beneath the net. “You have bested me…” he said, and trailed off.

Joseph was about to laugh, but suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He felt an invisible hand clenching around his throat, and struggled to look toward Tobias, signal for help, but couldn’t even move. He was suffocating. He looked down at the sorcerer, who was laughing maliciously. Clever. This one was clever.

And then, just as suddenly, it stopped. Tobias shouted something, and the sorcerer screamed, and Joseph fell to the ground. “You… you do use magic,” was all Joseph heard before he blacked out.

Joseph woke in his own bed, Tobias playing the part of dutiful doctor and the clockwork butler serving as nurse. “You’re awake!” Tobias chirped, and the butler asked, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, please,” Joseph answered before he properly realized that it wasn’t Tobias asking, it was the butler, and that the clockwork butler had never spoken before, so he was fairly certain that the clockwork butler was not supposed to speak. “You can talk,” Joseph said.

“Would you like some tea?” the butler replied.

Joseph blinked. “How can it talk?”

Tobias smiled. “Just a small improvement, sir. I gave him a voice.”

“You made him sentient,” Joseph corrected.

“Would you like some tea?” the butler asked again.

“Yes, please, now get it!”

Tobias laughed and set the butler to procure tea. “No, I didn’t make him sentient. Sometimes he does a better impression of it than then. You still need to physically set him to do each task. I just gave him a voice; he is as much an automaton as ever.”

“You used magic.”

“Yes, I did. How else would I have given him a voice?”

Joseph shook his head, and covered his eyes as he remembered the fight with the sorcerer. “Undo it!” he shouted.

“Why? I really don’t see what the big deal is! I used a harmless spell that will allow him to speak. I didn’t summon a spirit to inhabit his body! And if this is about magic in general, well, my magic saved your life and helped defeat that sorcerer, so you aren’t in a position to be complaining about it!”

Joseph tried to push himself up in the bed so as to look more imposing. This was unacceptable, he wouldn’t take this kind of outright insubordination from his pupil. “You are here as my pupil, on my whim. If you don’t follow my orders, I can and will kick you out! I was clear from the beginning – no magic! Now, you are going to remove that spell and then you are dismissed.”

Tobias sighed. “Fine. I’ll take off the spell, and then I’ll leave. But I still don’t see why you’re so afraid of magic.”

The butler rolled in on its track, silent but holding tea, and Tobias put his hand on its steel forehead. “Goodbye,” it said, and then nothing.

“It’s done,” Tobias said, resigned. “Everything is back to normal. And I know that you don’t owe me an answer, but I would appreciate to know why you’re so afraid of magic before I leave.”

Joseph rubbed his eyes. He wondered how long he had been asleep. “Magic changes you,” he said. “You start out young and happy, independent, ready to take on the world, and in a year of studying magic you turn into a wraith, skin like paper, prematurely hunched, a servant to the power as much as anything else. The more you use it, the worse it gets. I’ve seen it happen. It happened to my brother, it’s happened to friends. You can’t control power like that, it controls you. I uderstand that an occasional spell doesn’t turn you into a dark sorcerer, but it’s a slippery slope and one you can’t climb back up. Better, in my mind, to just never use magic.”

Tobias nodded, and started to leave, but then turned and said, “I’ve been studying magic these six years, while I’ve been in your tutelage. I was as powerful as that sorcerer who tried to kill you, and I am in control of my powers – healthy and happy, just like you said. I think that they can be controlled, if you keep an eye on your humanity. I think they can be tempered by cleverness and engineering, the things I learned from you. I warn you, I am going to continue to learn magic.” And with that, he turned and left.

Joseph just shook his head sadly. It was impossible that Tobias could control it, wasn’t it? Although, he had never heard of someone lasting even five years, and he had also never heard of someone gaining enough power to defeat a sorcerer – even in the simplest, most extenuating cases – without forfeiting their humanity. And Tobias was an unusually determined boy, as he had proved when he was twelve. Maybe, just maybe. Maybe it was enough that Joseph could allow himself to hope.

Jeremy Bentham

Utilitarian and father of the Panopticon, is kept in a box in University College London. There is a myth that they take him to board meetings, where he is listed "Jeremy Bentham, present but not voting" and does not vote unless a measure is split evenly - in which case he invariably votes for the measure. This is considered to be not true. What IS considered to be true is the fact that his head was replaced with one made of wax, because the old one had begun to decompose, and students were continually stealing it.

Imagine: "What's that you got in the bag, Tim?"
"Oh, nothing. Just Jeremy Bentham's head."

Really, if anything, the fact that it is a fake wax head makes me want to steal it even more. Also, I think Jeremy Bentham would be an AWESOME scav item. Or possibly using that principle but someone closer to the heart of U of C, like Milton Friedman.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Pleasantry and Vaclav Havel?

My current beef is about pleasantries. You know, when someone asks you "How are you doing?" and what they really mean is "I know you. We should acknowledge the acquaintance, but I do not really want to know anything about your life." They expect you to respond "Okay" even if everyone in your immediate family other than you (of course) has just died in a grisly murder. Or rather, they don't expect to actually hear about how you're dealing with the aftershock of discovering the bloody scene of the crime, the loss of both parents and three siblings, or...

Not that I have experience with that. I just like hyperbole.

Of course, I also know that there are certain situations where it is perfectly okay to respond to "How are you doing?" with "Oh gosh, it's awful. My parents just died in a plane accident" or even "I am feeling generally low but do not know why." There are just other situations in which those answers would be unacceptable, and this is not purely determined by whether or not they are true. Negotiating that is what makes us socially acceptable human beings. In fact, there are several people I (my family) know who don't negotiate that; they share too much. When you ask them "How's it going?" you are guaranteed to hear an at least ten minute tirade about whatever they are currently upset about. They are weird. It is hard to be friends with them, because they never let up. You can never have a casual conversation with them, it is always intense and meaningful. Who would want that? Blah.


But it also goes the other way; there are people who never share anything and just put on a happy face because they don't feel comfortable doing it. Or something. Because whenever they hear "How are you doing?" they respond "Okay," and stop there. I am like this. To use an example, at the beginning of every session, my therapist asks me "How are you doing?". Clearly, she means the question in a non-pleasantry way. I know this. But my response is "Okay," and she has to ask again, ask for details, before I actually share any. This is absurd. I am paying her to listen to the story of my life and help me work out the problems within it. I am paying her to hear more than just pleasantry. But my response is still just the vague "I'm fine," that I associate with civility and social contact. By responding in the shallow, social way, I am wasting time and money. But I still do it because I am distinctly uncomfortable doing anything else.
I am not comfortable with the fact that anyone actually wants to hear what's going on in my life, or that anyone cares one way or another how I am actually doing when they ask the question "How're you doing?"

I know that there are situations in which a good friend asks me how I am doing and it would be appropriate for me to actually share my emotions. I also know that there are people I can go to and say "I am feeling like crap and need to talk to someone. We are going to talk about my problems for five minutes and then other stuff" and that would be okay. The problem is that although I can say conclusively that when my therapist asks me how I am doing, she means it in the non-social sense, I cannot say which friends and which situations other than that are actually appropriate for heart-to-hearts or confiding or complaining or whatever it is that I do. I mean, I have a vague sense that at some points most of my friends would be receptive to it, but I can't say with any certainty what those are, and so I default to "Okay."

Which isn't exactly healthy, and leads to me feeling like I can't confide in anyone.

I was going to tie this into Vaclav Havel. I think he is the bees knees. I was going to compare that sort of social pleasantry to the veiled message of the "Workers of the World Unite!" sign. When you ask someone "How are you doing?" what you are really asking them is "Do you know who I am and are you willing to pretend that we have a connection?" You don't want the actual connection necessarily - the actual information - just the smile and the wave and the pretense. In social situations, this pleasantry serves the purpose of making everyone think (or force themselves to think) that they have connections while really only isolating people further. It forces people to find connections to eachother through flatter, shallower means, to express these connections through the way they dress or the music they listen to rather than actual sharing of stories and emotions. It allows you to superimpose your own trials and tribulations on other poeple who may or may not be going through them, simply because you don't have any contradictory information. My friends are the people who dress like me, who listen to the same music I do, and must be going through the same things I am. My friends are exactly like me, because we do not talk about enough of our lives to force differentiation. It means the friendship exists as a thin delusion, and will be brought quickly to an end whenever you find some potentially minor difference to pull it apart. Since society rests on this vague sameness, this shallowness, it all crumbles if you actually try to interact with it on a meaningful level.

Of course there are exceptions. I have fundamental differences and disagreements with people who I count as my good friends. Everyone does. But there is an element to which you are always surprised by those differences, you are caught off-guard when a friend is devout if you are an atheist (and vice versa), you are shocked when your friends do not understand why you did something or why they do not share your confusions.

I don't know if that actually ties back to Vaclav Havel very well. But I like it anyway.

Karen pointed this out at work today. Awesome. I feel like the first should be 'doesn't work' and 'works' instead of 'works' twice. My favorite is either the first or the second-to-last. Hers is "Do not believe in miracles - rely on them."


And as I have too much civ reading to know what to do with it, that's it for today. Maybe tomorrow I will post about Vaclav Havel. Maybe not.

On a related note, La Vie Boheme has been stuck in my head all day.

I should be doing a physics problem set. Or a biochem problem set.

On that note,

I am mildly disappointed with children's literature these days. Not that it isn't fun - it's loads of fun, for the right kind of kid. (of course, if you are a kid who doesn't like fantasy, you're dead meat). But it is exactly this break with reality that I find the most puzzling and the most disappointing. I think it might be a british/american switch - that the british way was more common earlier and has been overtaken by a more american method. Consider Peter Pan, or, to a lesser extent, Alice in Wonderland. In both cases, there is only one magical world and it is predominantly populated and created by the imagination. Especially in Peter Pan, the Neverland is immediately accesible to anyone who dares to imagine it. That's the point. Even remembering the games we used to play allows adults to see into the world of the Neverland, although we won't necessarily give up our hard-won seriousness and pay it a visit. My sense is that Alice in Wonderland was somewhat similar - especially in that it is a place of nursery rhymes and games, not a real place with real people so much.

Compare that to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Oz needs a physical journey to get there, unlike Neverland - hence the tornado. It is populated by real people with real problems; racism, war, etc. Later on in Baum's series there are whole long lists of neighboring countries across the deadly desert. The counties in Oz even have colors associated with them, and names that sound childish and amusing - Munchkinland, Quadling Country, etc. Even the Deadly Desert or Shifting Sands has a hint of the alliteration and rhyme that has become all too common in place names in children's books. Moreover, the Oz books have a 5th grade reading level, much simpler than either Peter Pan or Alice. The erudition and vocabulary in Peter Pan, the inside jokes with a parent, are gone. So is most of the narratorial voice, especially in the later books.

Of course, I devoured the Oz books as a kid. There's nothing wrong with them, they are perfectly good for a child to read. The only pit fall - the only thing they aren't as good for - is for a parent to read to their child. That's when the narratorial voice really comes out, it's when the inside jokes and vocabulary are accesible to a reader, and it's when the link of imagination becomes so important.

As an adult, I know there is no emerald city, that the things in Oz are simply impossibilities and bear no resemblance to reality. I can't imagine a time when there could have been a Munchkinland. I can, however, remember a time in my life when I thought I could fly, when my imagination was so rampant and powerful that the things I now know to be fantasies seemed oh-so-real and frightening. Sometimes, late at night, my imagination is almost that strong now - but it's darker, too, more full of zombies and vampires and ghosts, less full of fairies and mermaids and talking rabbits. Point being that any reader can remember a time when their imagination was strong enough to take them to the Neverland, if the Neverland is really all about imagination at base. But no reader can remember a time when magic was real, really real, not just a product of your imagination.

But again, that doesn't matter if it's just a child reading it -- they have the imagination to not care about whether something is real or not. The only difference is that Peter Pan, the novel, is much more interesting to a grownup reading it than, say, The Series of Unfortunate Events or even Harry Potter (although I love Harry Potter; just not as much as I love Peter Pan). The vocabulary, too, is important here - when a parent says an advanced word while reading, a child will either (most likely) ignore it since it is gone so fast or (perhaps) ask the parent what it means. It lets them figure out how to use those words and adds to the experience with the parent. However, if a child is reading a book alone and comes upon a word he doesn't understand, he can't just skip over it unwittingly; there it stands on the page in indelible ink, puzzling and jarring. He can't ask his parent immediately either - if the child is reading alone then presumably the adults are doing other things and do not want to be interrupted. So the word simply takes from the reading experience instead of adding to it.

Which brings me to a conclusion that I made a while ago, at lunch with my father, which is that parents don't read to their children anymore, after a child can read. Or maybe parents don't read to their children as much -- we have this idea that children should read quietly, on their own, without assistance. And that is what children's literature is for. For children to read alone. Which is why you can be more fantastical, and simultaneously why the vocabulary drops and the narratorial voice all but disappears.

I remember my parents reading to me and my brother long after we could read. (Then again I was reading the Oz books at age four, so I am very glad at this). They didn't read modern children's literature (with the exception of Harry Potter, when that came out, because it's so much good clean fun that it was hard to resist). They read C.S. Lewis, a bit, and Tolkein, a bit. I learned to read by struggling through Peter Pan with my mother. Children's literature was a group activity. I love to think of that being the way it is meant to be - these wonderful, imaginative books bringing parents and children together.

The second difference is the myriad of places common in modern children's literature. If an adventure doesn't involve a trip to at least twelve different locales, it can't rightly be called an adventure at all. Which isn't a childish point of view in the slightest, but a very adult one. An adventure, for someone who is looking for adventures, could be simply in the backyard. Physical distance is not necessary. Which is fortunate to older, british writers - because in Britain, there is no space. Everything is nicely crammed.

In the States, however, there is plenty of space. (Especially at the time of Baum and the others). Think of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - travelling down the Mississippi. You can go from town to town in the States, and there have always been stories of children doing it. There are always new places to discover, and each new adventure happens in a new place. Don't like something? Instead of changing it, why not just move on to a new location? The endless plains of the central U.S. parallel the huge worlds of children's literature we now see - getting from A to B is not as simple as wandering next door. You must go through C and D and E and the miles and miles of trails between. So children's literature is no longer nicely crammed, but rather takes place with much travelling between locales. Even in the sequels to Peter Pan that I have read, (official ones), the authors find the need to insert new places, new maps, new nations. The world is bigger now. So so are our imagined worlds.


I don't know how much of that is true - I don't know if parents aren't perhaps reading more to their children, or if children's literature has always been like that and of the older ones we only see those that stand out because parents enjoy them as much as children. But there is something to be said for someone who can write children's literature that grownups like.

Saturday musings

These are left-over from Saturday, since I spent most of the weekend sans computer.

4:00 PM, Millenium park:

A wedding party passed me, of high schoolers, parking their hummer limo on the side of the street and taking pictures in Millenium park - the obnoxious bride playing the part of prom queen.

Then again, for most of history, 18 was considered quite old enough for marrying (as was 16 and even sometimes 12). Now it is so young. Maybe half of that is an over-educated intellectual class; if you expect men and women to go to school until they are 22 (or later) which is the everyone-going-to-college paradigm, then 18 is still a child, still in need of education. And this over-educated system is far from universal even today. Besides, what is a wedding in today's society that a date to prom isn't, at base? The only difference is that a wedding is supposed to be permanent, but with the divorce rates throughout the western world being what they are, it seems obvious that even among people who wait until they are "old enough", marriage need not be permanent.

Really, my shock at seeing a teenager prancing around millenium park in a bridal gown speaks more to what my preconceptions of a proper wedding are than anything else. What is my idea of taste in such things - does it only include a secret trip to the local court (witnesses hand-selected and parents notably excluded), sans honeymoon or reception, like my parents? Or is the line drawn at the level of making such things public affairs - do I want to keep my wedding a secret from strangers? But what do I care, today, if some high school student I never knew and never will gets married?

However, part of me wants the entire scene to be a high school theatre group; taging a wedding somewhere public to show absurdity? Stage a wedding and then stage people crashing it, or the groom running away, or a groomsman shouting at the last minute that he can't take it any more - he is madly in love with the bride (or groom) and wants them to call it off (or he is madly in love with a bridesmaid and wants to make it a double wedding. Whichever). Or whatever, only something to add to the absurdity of it - so the strangers are the point, and testing what we think about the limits of decorum is the point, and all of that.

6:30 PM (Corner Bakery):

The man sitting to my left is a tourist planning his route of attackof the city: He has before him three open maps and he has covered the small table with them, pouring over them and comparing them, a general preparing an invasion of the territory.

He takes out another map and holds it up, comparing. Shall he take the Art Institute first, and go north from there, or install his sentries at teh highest ground with a strategic attack of the Sears Tower allowing him to easily see enemy forces from miles away? Is the Museum of Science and Industry in the south worth it or would the added mileage hurt morale and stretch his forces too thin - being a better target for another offensive, another time? Should he regroup in Greektown at dinner time or continue the assault to Chinatown? Or perhaps Pilsen? And, most importantly, when the attack fails (as it surely will) how much time will it take to pull out troops through O'hare?

"The Attraction Newton Forgot"

Yes, I am still excited about this. More exactly, I had an idea about it and I want to work it out somewhere other than the margin of my copy, since that is nowhere near enough space. (And no, that isn't supposed to be a joke, although given the play it might as well be.)

SPOILERS AHEAD. Don't read if you care. It's not a play where the surprise ending is important, but I don't know, maybe you don't want to hear my crackpot theories before seeing it yourself.


















In Court's brochure they say that one of the main themes of the play is "The attraction Newton forgot" - basically, that Newtonian mechanics is deterministic and the thing that messes everything up is, to put it as Thomasina does, "The action of bodies in heat." Basically:

Chloe: The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.

Valentine: Ah. The attraction that Newton left out. All the way back to the apple in the garden.

Now, there are a lot of oddities in this. First of all, Thomasina also could be talking about the second law of thermodynamics, which does break Newton's paradigm in that it is not reversible - and it in fact tells why so many things in life are not reversible (another theme of the play). But in Stoppard's way, he's making a parallel between the second law of thermodynamics and carnal embrace or love or crushes or lust or whatever it is that "the attraction that Newton left out" really is at base, and it's been picking at my brain.

Partly because half of the play has a bit of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-esque determinism to it, because it chronicles the goings on in a house at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while the rest of the play takes place roughly present-day, and is the story of scholars trying to find out what happened. Certain things are known in advance - for example, one of the characters goes crazy. One of the characters dies. But we never see any of this. And, truth be told, the ending of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern always bothered me, because it seems like there must be some way to DO SOMETHING, and that half the reason R&G are doomed to their fate is (besides the fact that it's Hamlet so everyone is bound to die) the fact that they never actually do anything until it is too late.

The thing is, I never put the goings on about sex/the second law of thermodynamics and the goings on about predetermination together until tonight, and given the end of the last scene, it makes SO MUCH SENSE. All of a sudden it's like "The grim ending with death and madness doesn't need to take place, you can just waltz instead!" because, well, that's what the ending IS.

And I might be crazy, but I'm going to stick to my guns.

At the end of the play, we "know" two things about the future of Thomasina and Septimus: Thomasina dies in a fire in her bedroom the night before her seventeenth birthday, and Septimus subsequently goes crazy and lives as a hermit in the hermitage in the garden (with his turtle, Plautus). However, the last scene for these two characters takes place on the night before Thomasina's seventeenth birthday, and Thomasina is not in her room ready to be burnt alive - she is downstairs with Septimus, waltzing. The very last lines from these characters are:

Septimus: Take your essay, I have given it an alpha in blind faith. Be careful with the flame.
Thomasina: I will wait for you to come.
Septimus: I cannot.
Thomasina: You may.
Septimus: I may not.
Thomasina: You must.
Septimus: I will not.
Thomasina: Then I will not go. Once more, for my birthday.

And the very last direction of the play is: "Septimus and Thomasina continue to dance, fluently." IF Thomasina isn't in her room, the predetermined fire doesn't happen, she doesn't die, and Newton's laws and predestination be damned - all because of the schoolgirlish crush on her tutor. (Or her love for him, depending on how much of a sap you are). Which is really what the quotes at the beginning of the post are about, right?

And in my opinion, this last one sums it up nicely:

Septimus: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone on an empty shore.
Thomasina: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

The second law of thermodynamics comes down to a waltz.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls - and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galazy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows the prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable in the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. Its the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

OMG Arcadia.

It is the play about EVERYTHING. Especially academics, because it is unclear to me that Tom Stoppard can write about people who aren't academics. But it's science and it's poetry and it's research and it's sex and it's love and it's ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING rolled into one, because it's ONE enthusiasm and ONE sort of emotion. And it's a bunch of actors running around the stage pretending to be total geeks, which is absolutely wonderful in its own sort of way. The scenes (like the one I quoted from above) where two people get into a heated discussion about something and then awkwardly realize that they're sitting rather closer to eachother than is totally comfortable (and yes there are a couple) are so wonderful and so true and so very much how it... how it works. Because the ideas are more important than the people.

So. Yes. If you are in Chicago, SEE THIS SHOW. If you EVER have the opportunity to see it or read it or whatever, DO IT. Because it is AMAZING.

Systems Bio. GAH.

An idea:

Biological networks are, by and large, scale-free networks (with a few high connectivity nodes and many low connectivity nodes, rather than mostly average-connectivity nodes). These seem to evolve continuously and quickly, rather than in a punctuated way (which is how random networks evolve, btw). Which, at first glance, goes against a "punctuated equilibrium" model until you realize that in punctuated equilibrium you aren't just modelling the evolvability towards one trait but rather the sequential evolution of many traits. ALSO, many protein people (and DNA people?) note significant homology between varying domains of different proteins and propose a mix-and-match model of evolution. FINALLY, transcription factors are overrepresented in genes which have significantly diverged from the human/chimp, human/ape or human/primate common ancestor. A couple ideas:

1) Do scale-free networks give you "punctuated equilibrium" when faced with a changing environment/target? If this is true, it would navigate the apparent difference above and explain why we observe scale-free networks with punctuated equilibrium evolution in nature.

2) What happens to network evolution when you preferentially change "transcription factors" (nodes which effect the state of other nodes)? This might shed some light on specifically human evolution and what makes us different from our closest evolutionary cousins.

3) Do random networks evolve into scale-free networks when you can add connections biased towards "transcription factors"? If this is true, it would go some distance to explain why biological networks are by and large scale-free.

EDIT:

So as I have one of the most Biology-heavy backgrounds in the Systems Bio class and certainly in the PCBio program (by which I mean I am either the first or second most Biology-heavy person in PCBio, depending on how you rank Pearl and myself), it seems odd at first that I want to think about computer science. But then again, I was caught explaining BOTH of the computer-science papers to my cohort, which puzzled me at the time.

I stopped being puzzled when I started going on a rant about STELLA and how horribly, awfully boring and ridiculous a programming language it was (but how it was particularly designed to allow one to easily create a dynamic network). I think I started talking about linked lists after that.

Which reminded me of Mr. Hiedler's class. And cults.

Oh Montgomery Blair.

Springtime for Hitler

Megan posted about mass-murder. I am responding at length here rather than clog her comments board.

First off, she links to an article about elementary school teachers scaring students by pretending that a drill was real. She claims that if you teach people how to behave in real situations, all the time telling them it's a drill, they'll know how to respond (and will respond properly) in the case of a real emergency situation.

I'm going to draw on personal experience here, so it's with high schoolers and not eleven year olds. I honestly can't say how eleven year olds would react to "dangerous" situations, but during my junior year of high school there were a few terrifying weeks when there was a sniper on the loose in the area. Every couple days, another person would be shot by the sniper and the school would freak out. Now this isn't the same as a gunman actually being in the school building, and I use the comparison ONLY because it is the best parallel I know. Point being, that when the announcement came over the intercom that we were experiencing a "Code Blue" situation, Megan was right - students didn't freak out. Instead, they thought it was a drill. In fact, I was the only person in my class to think, "Wait, they didn't say drill. This is for real."

Point being that while this very well might be different if you say something like "There's a masked gunner in the school. Hide under these desks," if you have a known procedure and drill it every so often, when an administrator says "This is a Code Blue situation", the students will probably daze off and hear "This is a Code Blue drill situation", and not take it seriously at all. Which is exactly what happened, even after I told my classmates that they were most likely incorrect. And while they didn't take it seriously, they still followed the rules for a "Code Blue" fairly precisely. It was within a standard deviation, I think.

My second example is more similar in the immediacy of its danger (but still nowhere near the same), and the point of it is that even people who are very well trained to respond to emergency situations react badly at times. When confronted with death, danger, and so forth, people panic. They lose control. The example being a little boy who started drowning in the pool over the summer. The lifeguard who was nearest watched in shock, and the lifeguard who was farther away swam through the pool to rescue the kid. This happened several times, actually, with one particular lifeguard doing almost all of the saving because he was the one who responded well to a crisis situation. These people are well trained, it's their job to be on the lookout for problems, and the issue wasn't that they didn't take it seriously enough - everyone saw what happened. The issue is that some people just panic. I've heard great stories from EMT friends about people just freezing in the middle of a call, or forgetting what to do. It happens. That's humanity. The only way to get someone to respond well to crisis, that we know of so far, is to innure them to crises - the seasoned veteran or the person who has been working in the emergency room for years can deal with situations better than the new recruit or the medical student. It takes a long time, but you do get somewhere.

Point being, for elementary students, there is no good way to actually train them on how to deal with a crisis situation. No matter what you do, they probably won't react well to a dangerous situation. Either they won't believe it, or they'll panic, and a very small number of them (remember, these are eleven year old kids, not exactly responsible, calm adults) might have the self-possession not to hurt themselves. Those teachers made a poor choice, but there isn't really a good choice available.

She goes on to talk about what the best ways to stop mass-murder are, and her basic argument (as I understand it) is that you can't legislate to people who are already breaking laws, so the best option is to "treat it at the source" with gun control and with psychiatric help for likely sociopaths.

First off, while I support gun control, I also think that there is absolutely no problem with someone who is sane and just happens to like hunting (or shooting ranges or WHATEVER) to have a gun. In terms of what people do with their private lives, so long as they aren't hurting other people, it is not the place of the government to legislate. However, having some control over guns, to prevent known (or unknown, I guess) sociopaths from using them, is probably a good idea, and having required safety measures to prevent small children or theives from getting them is also a good idea. BUT, no matter how tightly we regulate guns, and even if we outlaw them entirely, people will still get them. And if we outlaw them entirely, the only people who will get them will be the people likely to misuse them. Which is kind of... silly, in my opinion.

I have a couple problems with the proposal of "psychiatric help" to prevent sociopathy. In some cases (e.g. tumor in hypothalamus pressuring amygdala) there is something that can be treated by external action, and in those cases medical assistance is certainly our best bet. But most cases are not like that, as the VT shooting shows clearly. Psychiatric treatment isn't as simple as treating the flu or strep throat. Even comparing it to cancer, where INCREDIBLE amounts of personal strength is necessary to see a treatment through doesn't do it justice. Because in each of those cases, there is a clear physical cause - something that drugs, or a surgeon, can remove - and the personal strength required is the strength to see a treatment plan through, to go through pain and hardship and not succumb to depression. In psychiatric illness, however, you aren't fighting against a bacteria or a virus or even your own mutated cells. You're fighting against your own psyche, and that causes huge amounts of trouble unknown in other diseases. External treatments are not totally effective, and the treatment plan takes huge amounts of effort on the part of the patient. Basically, an antibiotic (or a trio of antibiotics) will cure you of the bubonic plague whether you want it to or not. But NO TREATMENT will cure you of a psychiatric disease unless you want it to and are willing to go through hell and high water to cure yourself. Sociopaths are known specifically for thinking themselves better than others, why would they want to be "healthy", when "healthy" is equivalent to "normal"?

Secondly, there's the problem that not all sociopaths are bad sociopaths. Our society prizes some of the traits of sociopathy, admittedly in milder forms. Men (and women) who are a little bit rebellious, and impulsive, who are aggressive enough to take action without worrying about it, who stand by their beliefs through fear of pain, and who don't dwell on remorse and the past are in fact lauded. Looking at a list of the symptoms of sociopathy doesn't just call to mind the mass murderer stuck in prison, but also many of our nation's leaders. I once heard (from a source I would trust) that most people who run for president are (at least a little) sociopathic. Don't forget that most sociopaths are on the outside charming and witty. Determination, bravery, creativity, pride, these are all things that we WANT to be part of our society, but they are exactly the things that, when present in too potent a form, and not tempered by empathy and care for others, are the hallmarks of sociopathy.

Again, you're faced with a problem almost without solution. You can restrict the means for getting a weapon, in which case dangerous criminals still have weapons while you are still restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens. You can try to treat sociopathy, but it seems to be patently hard to treat, and removing all forms of sociopathic urges from our society is something that we distinctly do not want to do, since the same things that seem to make a good leader are a start on the way towards sociopathy. As depressing as it might sound, maybe there is no way to really prevent these outbursts, and the only thing that we can do is to train people to handle crises better - which, as any EMT can tell you, is certainly difficult but can be done. Which brings us full-circle, to the idea that drilling lockdowns and other emergency procedures is the best way to save lives. It seems obvious to me that the longer a gunman spends prowling the halls looking for people to shoot, the shorter he spends actually shooting people - and the longer the police have to get to the scene before people are shot, the better. Shooting through locks isn't as simple as the movies would have it, and the windows on the doors of most classrooms (if present) don't provide a good way to reach the doorknob. Unless he knew that people were inside the room, would he really try that hard to get through the door? It would be like prying open a tough can of tuna to find only water inside. Lame.

As far as I can tell it, that's the best argument there is for drilling lockdowns and so forth. It's not an ideal option, but it might be the best one that we have.

This layout brought to you by boredom and procrastination

I've been wanting to do a stained-glass inspired layout for a while. But that will have to wait. This one is inspired, instead, by Cirque du Soleil's Grand Chapiteau. I like the semi-transparent boxes so you can better see the spiral. Fancy. I also was warped by my experiences in middle and high school about web-design, to feel that a cleaner, sharper look was better. So that while at first I thought it would be really cute to have the whole thing actually look like a tent, I decided against it in preference to something more abstract and streamlined. And of course, no frames. (That was the other thing I was told I can't say how many times - if you can do it without frames, don't use them).

We'll see how long this layout lasts. Over the summer I should have even more time to waste, so there might be some rapid-fire layout changes. Or maybe I'll actually have a life. Hah, that would be funny.

Sports Acro

My brother pointed me to acro links on Youtube today (this for instance), and it makes me want to get back into that sport or SOMETHING LIKE IT in any case so much more. When I stopped, I was 11 and at about this level, judging by tumbling pass. But my routine was all about fighting with my partner, not about something silly like dancing with him. The skills have changed so much since then; I haven't been able to find anyone doing quabet 1 1/2 (which was my favorite skill, but a bit rare at the time I guesss), and there's this freaky new crotch-catch thing that I find really odd and definitely don't remember. Maybe Daniil just didn't do that kind of skill, who knows. I always felt less artistic and more... gymnastic than the california teams. *shrug*

Point being that there is a group doing sports acro in Chicago, these guys, but they're currently practicing in a makeshift space in Evanston (I think) and I would need a car to get there easily - the CTA is awful about it. Which sucks. And there are these people doing trapeze and silks, but they're way far west at the end of the green line so it comes down to the same thing; semi-reasonable commute if I have a car, but not so much on the CTA. I've e-mailed someone about maybe starting an athletic club at the U of C for circus acrobatics, since the Circus club proper is an artistic organization and therefore doesn't have insurance for crazy shit like that. For a few miraculous weeks in winter quarter, someone was teaching silks through the circus, and I would love to do that again. So maybe if the acro group meets on saturdays, I can dedicate my saturdays to going up to evanston and back to do that, and have this other club to practice with during the week? But it doesn't seem worth it to get a car in Chicago just so I can do that sort of athletics, even though I watch the videos and desperately want to join in. Gah.

It's just... the gymnastics club isn't practicing this quarter so I am high and dry and without a physical activity to do. I should work on flexibility, and I've started stretching every night again, which is good, but not really good enough. If I don't have a goal and a cohort, I'm going to stop before the week is out, just like every other time I've tried.

It can't hurt to give it one more shot though, I guess. And maybe this summer I'll get zipcars and shorten the commute. Really, it would just be one and a half months - and the weekends until the second weekend in june are already scheduled, so one month - of crazy CTA. I could do one month. Probably.

The other option, of course, is to do cheerleading. But the cheerleading here, I think, is more shouting and less pyramids. Maybe that will be my next choice if Tamsen gets back to me in a negative fashion. But for now I'll just keep my fingers crossed.

*sigh* Maybe all of this is a stupid pipe dream. My parents say I should get into Yoga or Pilates or a martial art; something that I can do for the rest of my life. It makes sense; this kind of high-impact sport is notoriously dangerous and hard on people's bodies, especially as they get older. But I know that there were grownups on the Acro team when I was a kid; people with real lives and real jobs, in their late 30s. Which means that I could do this for 15 to 20 more years if I wanted to. That's a long time, and I can cross the bridge of needing to do something lower impact when I come to it. I just want something exciting now, something fun, youthful, and off-the-wall. I mean, I lost one sport because of an injury, and I really want to prove to myself that I didn't lose sports in general, but just one sport. I want to prove that I can be intensely athletic, do things that normal people just can't do, be dangerous and insane and beautiful and not stuck in my room scared to do anything for fear of hurting myself. And I'd like it to be the things that diving was when it was good; and the things that diving lost when it turned bad. I want something incredibly demanding on multiple people, with a strong team spirit and sense of camaraderie. Acro should be like that, if any sport is. And that just takes getting back into. Or something.

*wibble*

My mother is a Freudian?

I'm used to most people laughing at Freud and how ridiculous he is. But in the first half of "Civilizataion and its discontents", the following passage really jumped out at me:

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against the frustration from the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance. One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one. A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist's joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist's in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality which we shall certainly one day be able to characterize in metaphsychological terms. At present we can only say figuratively that such satisfactions seem "finer and higher". But their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses; it does not convulse our physical being. And the weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts which are far from being common to any practical degree. And even to the few who do possess them, this method cannot give complete protection from suffering. It creates no impenetrable armor against the arrows of fortune, and it habitually fails when the source of suffering is a person's own body.
I do not think I have made a complete enumeration of the methods by which men strive to gain happiness and keep suffering away and I know, too, that the material might have been differently arranged. One procedure I have not yet mentioned - not because I have forgotten it but because it will concern us later in another connection. And how could one possibly forget, of all others, this tenchique in the art of living? It is conspicuous for a most remarkable combination of characteristic features. It, too, aims of course at making the subject independent of Fate (as it is best to call it) and to that end it locates satisfaction in internal mental processes, making use, in so doing, of the displaceability of the libido of which we have already spoken. But it does not turn away from the external world; on the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to them. Nor is it content to aim at an avoidance of unpleasure - a goal, as we might call it, of weary resignation; it passes this by without heed and holds fast to the original, passionate striving for a positive fulfilment of happiness. And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method. I am, of course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved. A psychical attitude of this sort comes naturally enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love manifests itself - sexual love - has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happines. What is more natural than that we should persist in looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it? The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other. It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. But this does not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of love as a means to happiness.

It struck me particularly that my mother had said (basically) the same thing to me on several occasions. First, that it is an easy and obvious source of contentment and happiness to put your energy into work, class, writing, etcetera, and that those activities are a relatively surefire way to get satisfaction out of life, second that nothing is as effective at making you happy if you refuse to let it matter one way or another, and third that the most effective way to be happy is to have lots of friends and a social life (and sex too, I guess. But since she's my mom she tends to avoid that part). I guess my mom is just a Freudian at heart.

It's a fairly common occurance for me to read a text expecting to find it outdated and ridiculous and to find, instead, that I identify with it and it reminds me of my parents. Maybe my parents are just outdated and ridiculous. The same thing happened with my father and Aristotle; the entire class was talking about how ridiculous certain parts of the Nicomachean Ethics were, while I was just impressed by the similarities between (admittedly, other) parts of it and the lessons my father had tried to teach me as a child.

What it probably is, is that my parents read all of these texts when they were my age as well. They read Aristotle in their first years of college, and Freud thereafter, and Weber, and Durkheim, and Smith and Marx and all of them. They took Hum and Sosc and Western Civ, none of which have changed very much. My biology classes are probably significantly different from the biochem classes that my mother took, but a course on classical literature, sociology, or history won't have changed much since then. So the lessons that they learned in their core classes are still being taught today. Maybe every legacy kid here has the sense of deja-vu when they go through their core classes.

I wouldn't be that surprised.

But still. Freud? Everyone knows he's a perverted wanker. Everyone laughs at him. Even I laugh at many of his ideas about femininity. Why do I identify with his ideas?

Stories without order and Labyrinth stories

Borges has a short story about a labyrinth of words; a mammoth novel with the chapters scrambled in order. It's your job as reader to piece together the narrative, and take whatever you will from it. But since the narrative itself can go in multiple paths, different readers will read it very differently.

The idea of a novella or novel which defied order has really intrigued me. In its simplest case, imagine a novel that you could read either forwards or backwards. I would love for this to be a murder mystery. In one direction, it is the story of the detective figuring out what happened. You start with an unsolvable case, and talk to people and go bit by bit until you know what happened. In the other, it is the story of the criminal erasing clues and evading detection. You start with the crime, and visit each scene to ensure your safety, ending with an unsolvable case. I don't know if it's doable, but it's a cool idea nonetheless.

Things are certainly interesting when you want two paths through a novel, but even so you can determine an interior order suitable for either. Making a novel in which any chapter can be read in any order, without having it devolve into a series of short stories, that seems even more difficult. A novel, by definition, it seems, has to have a unifying thread that runs through all of it. It isn't mix-and-match. How can you have character development, large-scale themes, climax and resolution if you need to be able to take any chapter out of its place and put it anywhere else?

My first idea was to write a novel like an essay, or at least vaguely. My idea was that in most of my essays for class, slight alterations in the first and last paragraphs mean that each interior, supporting paragraph, can be displaced and rearranged at will. Of course, I generally think there is a good way and a few bad ways to rearrange the paragraphs, but the point of the essay would still come across no matter the order. Extrapolating this, if I work from a first and last chapter idea, I can introduce an idea in the first/last chapters, and have each other chapter pull and tug at the idea, flesh it out in interesting ways. They have a common thread, which is the idea, but each chapter is a unit unto itself and can be rearranged at will. The idea could be anything. It could be a murder mystery again, with the first and last chapters being the detective saying what happened and/or the crime itself, and each intermediate chapter being one piece of evidence that leads on the path from one to the other. It could be simpler, the description of a world or the different things that happen in a specific building.

But that feels too much like a short story anthology, not enough like a real novel.

Another idea I had was based on Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveller" (I think), a novel which is in effect the start of 14 or so different novels. In that structure, order doesn't matter because the novel is about the experience of reading, of writing, and of creation -- not about the plot of any of the 14 or so different novels begun in the book. However, even here, Calvino has a narrative plot with two readers that strings all of the works together, to keep it from being too much of a short-story anthology. But the idea is there: If the novel is about the creative experience, writing and reading and so forth, then the thread can exist between stories and not necessarily need a linear plot?

Which brings me back to something I have always enjoyed (and those of you who read my earliest writings will attest to this), which is the difference between fantasy and reality, and how stories mediate this gap. The first long story that I remember writing (I've been writing since I could read), was full of that surreal stuff. First we (my cousin and I) wrote a story, and then we wrote a story about the story, and then we wrote the combination and resolution of the two. And then we realized that we still had a lot of loose ends, so we tied all of them up. The point of it (for me) was how imagination works in the world, how the creative process works, how characters become real to an author and how the story threatens to swallow you whole - for better or for worse. It was a really cool story. What I liked best about it was the recusive aspect, the self-referential aspect, and it meant that you could, in principle, read the first two stories in either order and it would make just as much sense either way.

So it seems to me that writing about the experience of reading and writing is probably the best way to do away with the linear quality of stories. The scheme works this way:

1) Simple story, within the paradigm: brilliant inspector solves murder mystery
2) Meta-story: brilliant murder mystery writer solves murder mystery
3) Alternate Meta-story: clever murder mystery writer commits murder, is caught OR murderer is caught by murder mystery writer
4) Self-referential Meta-story: murder mystery writer sees murder mystery going on around him and writes it
5) Surreal self-referential Meta-story: murder mystery writer writes murder mystery and sees it going on around him
6) Alternate surreal self-referential Meta-story: Criminal writes murder mystey which leads to his own arrest

etcetera etcetera etcetera. You could use any plot/paradigm. The structure, the iteration, and so forth, draw attention away from the similarities (the paradigm itself) and point out how each story is different, i.e. how the story itself effects each iteration. You can even keep names the same - or very similar - between iterations (i.e. Gene, Jem, Jim, James, John, Jon, Jonas, Jonah, Jonathan, etc.)

So. Yeah. Recursion makes stories better, and seems like the best way to make an unordered story (at least to me).

There is nothing more peaceful, more solid, than sitting by a window or on a porch and watching it rain, listening to the far-off thunder. You revel in your safety, your security, dry in the face of a storm. You smell teh rain in teh air and on the ground, the smell of the world's promise not to disappear on you - where there is water, there is life. When it's raining and you're inside, it feels certain that everything will work out, everything will be okay. The sun brings ecstatic joy, maybe, adventure, the warmth of laughter, but with adventure comes danger and laughter often sounds like crying. The sun can burn. A light rainstorm brings only calm, cool, it washes the tension out of the air and leaves the world freshly washed, crisp, ready for the sun, the light of joy, and adventure. But rain regenerates, it solidifies, it serves as a desmonstration of teh promise that everything will work out, the grass will grow and the trees will turn green, every winter will warm up eventually and every summer will cool down eventually and you are left with the in-between, the cool crisp spring day and rain. There's nothing more comforting than a spring rainstorm.

Which is odd because there is nothing so impetuous as running out in the rain. Nothing so childlike as jumping in a puddle. After all, it doesn't do to go out in the rain, get wet and muddy and dishevelled. We're civilized people, and even animals take shelter from the rain. But every time it rains, I hear the promise in every drop, and I want to go out and play. It's my farmer's blood, or something, saying - It's raining! We won't starve! Everything will be okay!. I want to dance for joy, splash in every puddle, add the percussion of my laughter to the rhythm of the rain, let the water pour down my face and the thunder ring in my ears. The sun hides behind a cloud and my own joy shines brighter in comparison. Like a bright pink or yellow raincoat, bringing some of the fierce joy of the sun into a rainy day.

If you can read the links on the side bar, thank a Biochemistry professor.

Or maybe a geneticist.

They're codons when they can be, and letters when they can't. The only problem is that this alphabet doesn't have a "B", "J", "O", "U", "X", or "Z". It's a shame about the two vowels. And B is a fairly common letter. I'll use DNA instead of RNA because then you don't have to be confused about a "U" that needs to be translated versus one that doesn't. And because I like DNA better.

Translations for the non-geneticist (from the top): Ayn, Emily, Duff.

I wish I was synesthetic. It would be really awesome to be able to live a metaphor. Like, something that actually tastes blue or green or round or something other than sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, etc. Normal taste things. I was reading something on synesthesia, this neuropsych guy who thinks that synesthesia is the root of language - phonemes and the movement of your mouth mimicking various elements of the object/representation/whatever to be symbolized by the word. And of course then variations on that theme. But then he talks about poets and artists as being half-synesthetic, as in, their senses aren't unitary but all messed together, and so they see in metaphors and similies and things, they think of the world not as a place that can be rigourously and accurately described but in imagery and metaphor. It's all separated up for me, and maybe that's good in the field I'm in; precise and accurate physical descriptions are more useful to scientists than evocative imagery. But I was thinking about the other things I do, and I realized that part of the reason I hate poetry is because you have to think in that fuzzy way, and I can't do it. I actually sat at my computer for about an hour trying to find a metaphor because I could tell that there should be a metaphor for me to use in a certain spot in a story, and I couldn't. Just out and out couldn't, and in the end settled for a precise description instead. Maybe that's why my writing always takes up more words, because when I could use a metaphor I instead use a description, and it takes up more space.

So I would like to be a little bit synesthetic. I think it would be cool, in a fuzzy, artsy sort of way. And by synesthetic, maybe I just mean able to come up with really cool metaphors. So maybe I just want to be artsy.

But that would be silly, because if I was artsy I wouldn't know what the hell the links on my sidebar meant without being clued in, and I certainly wouldn't have thought to put them there.

They wrote an article about her

It's been a year. It's been a year and the one thing that I promised myself a year ago was that I would sort myself out and be in a better place now than I was then. And I am, I guess. Maybe I'm just in a different place. It probably doesn't matter one way or another. I still feel sick to the stomach thinking about what might have been, if I hadn't been injured. Thinking about my name still being up on that goddamned record board, thinking about what life would be like without migraines, without depression, without any of this crap. Thinking that I would have liked to be a varsity athlete these past two years, I would have liked that a lot. Thinking that I would have liked to have dove at my last divisionals, and allstars, and all of those meets.

I think about Sandra a lot, too, and Krista. Sandra can still dive but doesn't, Krista left the sport because of a knee injury. I remember all the times that Krista would be sitting on the side of the pool with a knee brace because she needed corrective surgery. All that and she still kept coaching. I wish I could have been that strong. Or maybe I am, but I haven't found the right place to coach. Maybe I'll pick it up again in graduate school. Maybe I'll go back to the sport I love.

Nothing has been able to replace it. Even though I get headaches just being in a pool for more than an hour or two, even though it's terrifying and heartbreaking at the same time, the only thing that even came close to replacing it was circus, and only that because of the pain and the fear and the stress, and the wonderful, warm, strong women who made it through all of that. I was constantly in awe, and it kept me coming back. But it was too far away, maybe too painful, maybe too much a lifestyle. I didn't have the guts to go in for the whole lifestyle, I wanted to still be a diver on the inside, long, naturally colored hair and no tattoos - don't scare the judges, they're really prudish old men on the inside - and that wasn't what they were. They were rebellious, dangerous, scary. Exciting.

There's a story there, I keep telling myself. I know there's a story there, about someone tempted by rebellion and danger but never quite getting there, someone who desperately wants to fly but not to run away from home. It's Peter Pan, really. Teach me to fly? Adventures? Mermaids? Pirates? Sure, but I need to be home by midnight, or my parents will be furious. I need to be home and study and work and get into a good graduate school and...

They wrote an article about her, about how wonderful she is. They mentioned me - I got her into the sport, after all, and it was my records she broke, but it's irrelevant why I wasn't around to keep the records, why she was the one the article was about and not me. And in general, the injury and the aftermath and everything that happened that year is irrelevant, it's the part of my life I want to look back on the least, it's the part everyone wants to forget, to pretend didn't happen. It would be easier for everyone if I had just decided I didn't much like diving, if I had just decided I needed more time for my studies or something. It might have been easier if it was just that I hated her, hated her with every bone in my body, and couldn't stand being near her enough to make the team worth it. The pain, in my head and my gut and just about everywhere, is too much. I feel like an exile, forced from a place and a life that should have, by all rights, been mine. It was stolen, and what do I have instead? Memories, migraines, and almost epileptic fits.

I don't like thinking about it anymore. I like pretending that I had a choice, that I know this is all for the best, that I decided I didn't want to dive. I like pretending I had control, that I could go back anytime and there would be no risk, no danger, no pain, just the normal fear and standard woes of returning to a sport. But it's not true.

I remember the look on my high school coach's face when he heard. He checks up with my parents now, regularly, to make sure that I'm doing okay. The man took us on a trip to Cuba (it was a trip that defined me, so much of it) and I like to pretend that the reason he could was because he was a CIA spook. He had a friend high up, and could get one of the last visas, or maybe he needed cover for a covert op. It was supposed to be a trip for comparative government students, and everyone else was in AP comparative government, but they were my friends and I knew the coach and so even though I didn't speak spanish and even though I wasn't particularly interested in politics and history, I tagged along. I visit him whenever I go home. He checks with my parents to make sure I'm doing okay, to make sure I'm dealing with the loss.

Sandra does too. I have a handful of dive coaches at home who sympathize with me, who invite me to coach with them, who want me to stick with the sport (like they did) even through my exile. It isn't the sport that did it, they say, just a few stupid people and one very stupid coach.

Jenn isn't coaching anymore. She could be. She abandoned the sport.

I wouldn't be surprised if Ashley never sets foot on a diving board again. I think she's only in it for the attention.

They said I wasn't dedicated.

They said I didn't love the sport.

Well, I loved the sport. Just thinking about it makes me cry anymore. I still love the sport.

But they don't write articles about things like that, not when they want to make our athletics department seem good, cool, a fun place to be. And the only amazing thing I've done is survive. If that counts as amazing.

Forbidden Cookie Theory

I have a theory for life. I call it the forbidden cookie theory. It is that if you deny something to youself, it will immediately become more desirable. If you give up cookies for Lent because you love them so much, they will become even more desirable for that month than they have been previously. Someone who can easily go a week on salads, rice, and other foods suitable for Passover will have cravings for bread and pasta for that holiday, simply because all they can eat is matzo. It is because thinking about denying yourself something is thinking about that thing.

It works in interpersonal relationships roughly as the song "Let Me Go" says: Let me go and I will want you more. As soon as you say that something can't happen, it becomes endowed with an almost wistful power over you. And even a light friendship can be devastating if instead of petering out it is abruptly cut off. People don't like sudden change, and they don't like denial.

I think this has applications to dieting. It's how weight watchers works. Tell people that they can eat anything they want, but that they should keep track of their calories and fat intake. When people realize that they have the choice, the cookie isn't forbidden, but instead carries with it repercussions that while not monstruous are present -- they can choose not to have the cookie because they don't want to, not because of an arbitrary rule they set up. And generally speaking, if you follow your cravings and do things in moderation, your body will tell you how to live healthily. It's evolved to do that well.

Finding Nerissa part 2

My computer was out of commission over the weekend, but here is the next section. There's been a total shift of setting, but I'm sure anyone would be able to pick up on it. These two introductory sections have, between them, most of the background that I need? The rest will be revealed as is appropriate. If you want to start at the beginning, go here. Please comment so I can make it better! Thanks!


Having just finished his fourth perfect waltz with his third perfect partner (his second partner’s nose was minutely too large and round for her otherwise elegant face), Sir Gilroy Innes approached the punch table. This was going to be, by all appearances, an excellent night, and the girl of honor had yet to be brought out.

Gilroy loved coming-out parties, for the simple reason that he loved innocent, naïve young girls. They were invariably so beautiful, and invariably so quick to fall madly in love. This one would be no exception, he thought, although the feats of daring and valour that he would have to go through to win her might be more perilous and strenuous than the everyday woes that afflicted more everyday maidens. She did come from the Zephyr family, and they had a name to uphold.

But what was the purpose of holding a coming-out party if you didn’t want your daughter to come out? Or rather, to be brought out.

Gilroy was very good at getting young, rich, and beautiful girls out of, well, just about anything. Which was why he simply adored coming out parties.

“A little heavy on the glitter, don’t you think?” asked Carey Douglass, Esquire, the latest of the rich money-lending and generally meddling family who without exception was found in the wreckage whenever a tragedy brought a great house down. He was referring, of course, to the décor, which was a young girl’s fantasy – all snowflakes and dewdrops and altogether too much glitter. But such a thing only befit a coming-out party, which was more about which family could spoil their little girl more rotten than any of the other families, and less about any pretensions towards adulthood. Everyone knew that a girl couldn’t be called an adult until she had been kidnapped, threatened with death, valiantly rescued, and possibly ravished soundly a few times.

Gilroy said as much. Carey laughed. It was a slimy, cocky laugh that implied he or one of his descendants would still be laughing when you or one of your descendants were destitute, driven towards insanity, and a shadow of your former grandiose self. The scary part, Gilroy thought, was that it was probably entirely true. Carey smirked at his acquaintance, and said “Well, then, we’ll all just wait for the little princess to come down the stairs, shall we? And then let the kidnapping begin?”

Even Gilroy had to smile at that, and pushed the more macabre thoughts from his mind (such thoughts were certainly unbefitting such an occasion). “I should hope to have more patience than that, sir, although being a businessman you probably never have event to show anything of the sort.”


Carey’s smile pinched at the edge, but he quickly regained his cool. “I assure you it is the opposite. You’ll see my patience. I intend to marry this girl.”

Gilroy laughed out loud. “You? How laughably absurd! A Douglass? Your family is blacker than black, eviller than evil, and has been for centuries. You are only tolerated because you have so many good, loving people under your thumb. Why, you’ll probably be the one she’s rescued from, when all is said and done. And a good thing too, if I do say so. In any case, the Douglasses have propagated themselves through slavery and adoption since longer back than anyone can remember, so I doubt that you’ll be the first in a long line of bachelors to get a wife. Your own father said that women were good for nothing except trade and to be dressed as dolls. Besides the idea of Lord Kenton Zephyr hitching his daughter to anyone not from one of the four estates? What sort of heroics do you intend to do to win the fair maiden’s hand? Hah!” Gilroy shook his head gaily. “No, I simply do not believe you.”

But Carey’s face was utterly serious. “Believe me, Innes. This has been in the works for a long time.” His voice was cold, grim, completely unlike his joking tone before. But he grinned and, as quick as a ghost, his serious manner was gone. “And what makes you think that marriage isn’t just a matter of trade?”

Gilroy tried to laugh, but he couldn’t get the image of Carey’s serious face out of his mind. If this had been planned for a long time, it certainly wasn’t a good thing for the only child of one of the four estates to come under the control of the Douglass family, not if Gilroy was behind the aristocracy (and since his lands and family connections paid for his various exploits, Gilroy was firmly behind whatever aristocracy was still left). A few moments passed in awkward silence, and when Gilroy finally was capable of looking back towards his companion with a smile on his face, Carey was gone.

Really, it wasn’t worth thinking about. The Innes family fortune was far from running out, and Gilroy’s older brother was hard at work in enlargeing it by any means possible. No matter what the Douglasses could do to other, less secure families, Gilroy was in no danger. No, certainly not. And there were other, pleasanter things to think about. Such as that beautiful young girl over there. Or that one. Or, really, the one who was trying to get past him to get to the punch bowl.

Two more dances later, and feeling much more himself, Gilroy was ready to take on a world full of freshly entered-into-society girls just begging for his attention. The petty machinations of Carey Douglass were pushed firmly from his mind, and he set himself towards the noble goal of finding which of these silly little things would be suitable for the type of liason that would end up with her locked up at the top of a tower and him knocking down the door to rescue her. His search was interrupted by a coughing from the staircase, and the middle-aged and rather paunchy Lord Kenton Zephyr stepped forward. Ever since his wife’s death, that man had really let himself go. There was no excuse for it, not in Gilroy’s mind. There was grief, and mourning, but after twelve years, well, the loss of a dearly beloved wife was no reason to let yourself grow fat – that would severely lessen the chances of finding another.

“My dear friends,” Lord Kenton shouted, to get the attention of the crowd. The noise died down and the music had stopped long ago. “My dear friends,” he began again in a less strained voice. “It gives me unspeakable joy that you have all gathered here today. After my wife’s death, it was hard for me to face society and the life that I once loved, the life my daughter deserves and is finally ready to enter. But with your help and support, I was able to understand that life goes on, no matter how much we want it to stop. Life goes on, through grief, and it is beautiful and wondrous for it. My daughter, well, it is long since time that this should have happened, and I can only thank my daughter for her patience and perseverence through a family tragedy. She has returned to me the hope and the joy that I thought was taken away forever, and I can only hope that she will soon make someone else that happy as well.” Was a tear running down the old man’s face? How unheard of, how unbecoming. “But! In the mean time, we can all do with a little more celebration, of the joys of youth, and beauty, and love!” There was a smattering of polite applause – what was he thinking, bringing up his long dead wife at a happy occasion like this? – and Lord Zephyr stood aside, among the other three heads of the four estates.

The doors opened and, presumably, Nerissa Zephyr stepped forward and began her descent down the stairs. The girl was beautiful, tall and regal and smiling happily, with perfectly done long blonde hair, large crystal blue eyes, the palest and smoothest skin, and an exquisite silver-shot dress. She was probably the only regal, mature, and elegant part of the whole party, as Gilroy could clearly see. There was something about her that was simply more serious than the other girls in the room.

That would probably be the tragic death of her mother when she was only six years old, and the surrounding controversy, said a small voice in Gilroy’s head. He ignored it. All the men in the room were thinking only of how they could be the lucky one to win her hand, and all the women were waiting for her to mess up.

She walked, slowly and smoothly, down the stairs to her father, curtsied nicely to each of the four Lords, and slipped her arm in her father’s for the remainder of the descent. She whispered something to him and they both laughed in a joyous, but not raucous, manner. She was leaning perhaps too heavily on her father’s arm to be absolutely perfect, thought Gilroy, but she was the closest approximation he had yet seen.

Then, tragedy struck. She wobbled, her eyes widened and her face cleared to one of panic, and she fell away from her father, reaching out but unable to catch herself by holding his hand. Her head whipped and hit the stair below. There was a terrible ripping noise, the sound of that beautiful dress tearing in two. She bounced several times before landing at the bottom of the stairs, a limp pile of glitter, fabric, and silvery blonde hair. The room was struck silent. A few excruciating moments passed, and she didn’t move. Not even the most ambitious women had hoped for something of this severity. Another family tragedy – the girl paralysed, killed, or even deformed – that was the last thing lord Zephyr deserved.

And then, seeping through the crowd slowly but assuredly, his step silent and calm, Carey Douglass approached her and bent down. He measured her pulse, declared her alive. The room breathed a sigh of relief. The girl stirred, looked up at the man who had come to her rescue. Her eyes went even wider, she screamed, and she ran from the room, her dress, in shreds, trailing behind. If this was the beginning of the courtship, she had been hoping for a different knight in shining armor.

But, almost appropriately, and just like Cinderella, she left behind her shoes. They were the most exquisite pair anyone in the room had ever seen. It was the talk of the town for weeks thereafter – how beautiful they had been, and how very tall.

Finding Nerissa part 1

First, an introduction: This is the first scene of the novel that I wrote in December, as part of a delayed NaNoWriMo effort. If you don't know about NaNo, go to http://www.nanowrimo.com because it's an awesome idea and a huge amount of fun to do. Hopefully, next year, I will be able to do it in November, when lots of other people are doing it.

The idea for this, actually, started as an attempt to write "High Fantasy" three years ago. There are remnants of that in the finished product, but the truth is that I can't write High Fantasy because I'm much more of a magical realist in the end, and so most of Fantasy bothers me. In its current form... well, you'll see. I am currently in the process of editing it, and I intend to post sections online as I edit them. Comments are awesome and will be appreciated.

Here's the first scene:


Arthur Miller’s family had been millers since before they had been Millers. According to the family mythology, the mill had been built some interminable number of generations ago, back before there were Smiths or Johnsons or Millers and when the Miller family had just been the family living on the bit of land where the north-flowing Grey River fed into the west-flowing Missimac. Of course, the family story also went that old Jonah, as this eons-old ancester was always called, had built the mill with Fairy labor, and that he had paid a price to the Fairies so steep that he couldn’t bear to speak about it, even to his sons. In this enlightened age, no one believed in foolish things like Fairy curses, although there was a joke going around the family that some day, the Fairies would come and steal away one of the boys. Or something like that.
Arthur’s younger brother, William, was perhaps the only one still interested in the story. He said that the reason no Miller girls had survived to adulthood in the recordable history of the family was the Fairies’ curse. He said that Arthur’s youngest, Jessica, was thus ripe for either death or mysterious disappearance. Arthur tried to ignore William’s rants about her safety, and had threatened to sever all ties when, a year previous to the events I am about to recount, William had told the four-year-old Jessica that she was doomed, doomed to death or kidnapping. There is no denying, however, that William was right about two things: one, as far as anyone could remember, no girls born to the family had ever survived to adulthood, and two, Jessica’s existence up to this point appeared to have been cursed with mysterious, but fortunately temporary, disappearances.

There was the time she miraculously was found playing in the kitchen garden at six months old, when she had been put down in her cradle just a few minutes prior. She had been found sleeping on the doorstep three times, and seven times had described the most wondrous adventures in the woods to her older brothers, although they all knew she had been safe and sound in her bed all night. Then there were the all-too-frequent discoveries of dry leaves and dirt on the windowsill next to a strangely open window, or the times she would fall out a window or meet strangers in the town. The girl was simply always running off, covering her nice frocks and patent leather shoes in mud, but there was nothing they could do about it. Arthur was hard pressed with managing the employees for the mill, scheduling routine maintenance, and dealing with the surly and arrogant steamboat operators who inevitably were assigned to carry his shipments, not to mention raising his three sons and his disappearing daughter. Ever since his wife died in childbirth, there was just too much to do. The land around the mill belonged to them, and they had close family ties to the sherriff and the mayor of the nearby town, anyway, so whoever Jessica met must surely be a relative or a friend of a relative. It wasn’t as if they would have trouble tracking her down.

It was on her fifth birthday that it happened. There was a ham in the oven and a plum pudding for dessert. Jessica was playing outside in the garden. Arthur had told her to stay away from the woods and was attending to the business of the mill. Her brothers were in the breakfast room wrapping the presents that the family had bought for Jessica and picking on poor little Nellie, the new maid. Arthur knew that hiring a teenaged maid just when his sons were thirteen, ten, and eight respectively was a poor idea, but her mother had been so eager for Nellie to enter into work on her twelfth birthday, and although Arthur thought it a shame for such a young girl to have to work, she was a bright child and very helpful around the house, and he couldn’t bear to send her away now. And the ham smelled delicious, besides.

He looked out the window, expecting to see Jessica carefully pulling the daisies up by their roots, snapping them off at the stem, and either tying them in a chain or tossing them by the wayside when this became too difficult. However, Jessica was nowhere to be seen. He carefully set down his fountain pen, pulled a coat over his vest, and quietly snuck out through the kitchen, so as not to disturb the boys. Then he allowed the panic to set in. Not another one of these mad chases around the house, the woods, the riverbeds, and the mill before finding her safe at home, covered in dirt and all in disarray, complaining of the odd stranger who had offered her sweets but tried to tie her up. “Jessica!” he shouted, hoping to hear her voice just behind him. No answer. He pulled at his tie in frustration and headed to the woods. It was always a good first bet.

The woods were surprisingly dark and cold for such a sunny June day, and he pulled his light summer coat closer to him. The mist from the river hadn’t been burned out of the air yet, and it clung to the trees giving everything a clammy feel and a moldly smell. The sunlight that reached the base of the trees was green-tinged and weak. These weren’t the woods Arthur remembered, not the woods he had grown up in and thought of as friendly neighbors. This was an altogether different sort of woods full of potential dangers for his five-year-old daughter. But Arthur shook his head. He would find Jessica. These woods were safe; he had played here alone when he was scarce older than his daughter. They had been over-hunted in his grandfather’s time, and so no animals would imperil his daughter and no hunters would accidentally catch her with a stray rifle shot. Jessica was safe, he would find her any moment. Mary had died giving birth to the girl, and Arthur would be damned if he would let both of them die.

He saw a swath of light pink ahead of him, and heard a giggle. Jessica. He raced towards it, and saw her playing happily at the feet of a rather fashionable-looking gentleman. He shouted her name but she seemed not to hear, and ran up to her but encountered first the man, who stopped him calmly and coolly, with a surprisingly strong and decisive hand on his chest. He was completely unruffled; his black silk suit hadn’t a speck of dust on it from the forest, his blood red tie was perfectly in place, and he wore a confident smirk on his face. Arthur almost snapped and tried vainly to get at his daughter. “What the Hell, man? She’s my daughter!” he shouted. The man made a “tsk”ing noise and just smirked.

“Daughter, perhaps, but yours she is not, sir. She was contracted over to us at the building of the mill,” the stranger said in an icy, nasal voice. He flipped out a folder from a pocket on the inside of his coat, extracted a worn and yellowing leaf of paper, and commented: “I have your forefather, Jonah’s, signature, dated some one thousand and forty two years, three months, and twelve days ago.” He held forth the sheet, and sure enough there was a shaky “X” written in the signature line behind an absurdly old date, with a mess of legal jargon so thick that Arthur could barely read it crisscrossing the page above it.

“This is absurd. That’s an old family story, a load of hocus pocus used to scare children out of running away, and you are either a twisted fool or a lunatic hired by my brother William.” Arthur tried to get to his daughter but was again blocked by the strange man.

“I’m afraid it’s all very true, Mr. Miller. Your daughter, Jessica, is our legal possession. I must admit we have had a hard time procuring her up to this point, which is why I am here instead of one of my employees. You know what they say, ‘if you want to get something done, you must do it yourself’, as I am sure you know as a fellow businessman.” The stranger grinned impishly, with that confidence that sent chills up Arthur’s spine.

“Legal Posession? She’s a human being, for the love of God!” Arthur was sure he was behaving in a most unseemly manner, but it was his daughter this man was talking about, not some object. “A five year old girl! She’s not a brute or a monster or anything suitable for possession! What are you, a man or an animal?”

It was foolish, in retrospect, for Arthur to say that. It can be forgiven, as this would be a completely innocuous turn of phrase had he been speaking to anyone who considered themselves human. But the strange gentleman’s eyes suddenly gleamed with anger and the strangely strong hand suddenly gripped Arthur across the front of the throat. Arthur choked. “I am certainly not some kind of animal, sir, and nor am I some sort of uncivilized human who disrespects legal agreements, as you appear to be. My name is Avery Douglass, Esquire, and I am here on behalf of my lending house to assure you that, as part of your contract, you are legally obliged to hand over the girl.” Arthur tried to gasp something out but failed. “What’s that you say? What will she live like? I assure you that unlike some of your crude customs, we treat the children who come into our posession very well. We already have plans for her, and I daresay she will live better with us than she would with you and your poor excuse at parenting.” Arthur struggled but the man was too strong. “I assure you, she will be happier, wealthier, and more beautiful with us than she ever could be among your kind.”

Mr. Douglass released his hold on Arthur’s neck. Arthur fell back gasping and grabbed a tree for support, his head spinning. “I… My daughter… Jessica…” He choked on each syllable. He reached out to his daughter, but Mr. Douglass turned to Jessica, who grinned and giggled and said to him, in an animated voice, “Did you know it’s my birthday, Mr. Avery? Can we go home now?”

Avery Douglass, Esquire, smiled. He took one last gloating look at Arthur, said “You have avoided payment of your debt too long. I hope you have learned your lesson and look forward to doing business with you again, sir.” He then picked up Jessica, and began to walk into the woods. Arthur felt the world spin around him, the ground rock beneath his feet, and everything go black.

Peter Pan in Scarlet

In 1902, Peter Pan first appeared as a character in J. M. Barries "The White Bird." "The White Bird" is mostly about a child, Mamie, who gets lost in Kensington Gardens at night and interacts with the fairies; Peter is merely a minor character, However, this is truly his first appearance. Coincidentally, the confusion between Thimbles and Kisses also appears in this work.

In 1904, Barrie wrote a play entitled "Peter Pan, or the Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up". It was a hit, and the first appearance of the Darling children, Captain James Hook, and the first major appearance of Peter.

In 1911, Barrie wrote a novel version of the play, entitled "Peter and Wendy".

In 1929, Barrie gave the copyright on his novel to his favorite charity - The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. They have prospered from numerous movie, stage-play, and musical versions since then, although the strict amount of money that the copyright has earned for the hospital is kept a secret, as per Barrie's wishes.

In 2004, Peter Pan turned 100, and, in honor of this prestigious anniversary, the hospital held a series of celebrations and charities. Among these was a competition for authors to write an official sequel to Peter Pan. The rules stipulated that it must include all the original characters: Peter, Wendy, Hook, Tink, and so on. The winner was Geraldine McCaughrean, and the book is called "Peter Pan in Scarlet".

From a purely personal perspective, I was bothered by the premise of a sequel with the original characters; Wendy, Tink, and Hook are all dead at the end of the novel "Peter and Wendy". At the very least, Hook has been eaten by a crocodile, Wendy has grown up, and Tink has died. Why have another adventure with them in the Neverland when rightfully, it should be Wendy's descendants and some other villian, with some other fairy sidekick or none at all?

However, as you might have guessed, I was given the book yesterday and read it today. So; spoiler alert!














Mrs. McCaughrean's premise makes up for the folly of the contest. Wendy is, indeed, grown up, as are John and the Lost Boys. Tootles is a judge, Nibs a Baronet, and Curly a doctor (all as they should be). It was a refreshing start. McCaughrean has certainly done her research, except for a few apparent but minor mistakes (Girl fairies are white, boys are pink, and the silly little ones who don't know what they are are yellow; you can certainly fly without a shadow or Peter would have died in the beginning of the original novel). She even references the very first appearance in "The White Bird".

The tone, admittedly, is a far cry from Barrie's hands-on narrative style. In fact, I think that the author of "A Series of Unfortunate Events" comes closer to matching Barrie in tone (although in those books I find that often it comes across a little more heavy-handed). One of my favorite things about the original book, and indeed other things I have read by Barrie, is the very real presence of a narratorial character. In "Peter and Wendy", the narrator is as important a character as Peter himself, and reveals a darker, more adult side to the story that is sadly missing in the sequel. The delightful monologues about Mrs. Darling's love for her children, Mr. Darling's pathetic guilt over the loss of his children, and the hints and clues towards Hook's links with the author - these make Peter Pan something that an adult can enjoy as much as a child. Such things are regretfully absent from McCaughrean's sequel.

Indeed, much of the darker side of the original Peter Pan myth has been sadly lost in the sequel. This is something that has certainly happened over the course of time - think of the Disney movie and the modern musicals as compared to the book. Today, even when we try to make a "darker" envisioning of the Pan myth, we come out with the drivel that was the latest attempt at a movie version; sexed up, violent but without purpose, and not emotionally dark at all. Still a children's tale at heart, although admittedly not the kind of children's tale that you would want to tell your children. At least this sequel doesn't do that - it is thoroughly a children's book. Certainly, about halfway through, there is a transformation in Peter towards Jas Hook which might be due to Peter's mercurial, flighty nature and his inability to differentiate between make-believe and reality - but, surprise surprise, that too turns out to be all the doing of Hook and not Peter's own fault at all.

Another thing that we modern readers always seem to be doing is changing Wendy. A particular sentence in the sequel bothered me: "Without the right upbringing, girls can be so... domestic." The original Wendy was nothing if not domestic. Remember the temptation scene, when Peter gets her to run away to the Neverland. He does so by tempting her with, of all things: darning socks, making pockets, tucking children in at night, and telling them stories. "How we should all respect you," he says. And then her introduction to the Lost Boys, in which they ask for a "Nice, motherly sort of person" and she says she fits the bill perfectly? Remember the rather disgusting Father/Mother game that Wendy forces upon Peter, to his dismay? Who is Wendy to be complaining about girls being domestic?

Then again, this is another common problem for modern readers. It is thought, I suppose, that modern little girls would not be able to identify with a female lead who wanted nothing more than to be a mother. At least, that to give them only the example of someone who wanted to be a mother would not be fair to their personalities or would trap them into cultural stereotypes of a woman's place being the kitchen or the nursery. You have only to recall the butchering known as the 2003 movie to know of a Wendy even more distant from her domestic roots. So perhaps I shouldn't be complaining about a grown Wendy who is a motherly sort of person, as she shows herself to be, but has her illusions about not being domestic.

Certainly, in the end, Wendy decides that the thing she wants more than anything is to see her daughter and be a real mother. She mothers everyone throughout the story -- from the grown-up lost boys to Peter to Hook and Smee. She shortens the sleeves on Hook's jacket to give to Peter (although, by rights, she had already made him an outfit out of Hook's old clothing at the end of Barrie's novel) and does other such domestic tasks.

Another thing that McCaughrean does is add to Barrie's universe. It is no longer just the Neverland but instead also a whole other realm; a maze of lost mothers, a sea of a thousand islands, and so on and so forth. It brings to mind the adventuring in "Last of the Great Whangdoodles" rather than Barrie's sort.

I have a whole rant about Hook and what she did to Hook, BUT that can be saved for later.

The most important thing, something which supersedes all of the stylistic differences and choices that were made, is that she kept the joy and adventure of the Neverland alive. McCaughrean turned the Neverland into a place where adults can grow young again, rather than just a place for children to go and never grow old. For that, I thank her. She has done it in the style of Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, and other modern children's writers. This book is a fitting sequel to Peter Pan, but just as much a product of its time that Peter Pan originally was. My heart will always be with the original, which I will probably now start reading again. But this one may deserve another read, when I'm looking for a lighthearted romp through second-childhood.