The Stories We Shouldn't be Telling

I don’t really know how much of a “trend” this is, but in my casual, work-avoiding browsing of current events I sure have seen a lot of stories about “trans” women, i.e. men who have decided to call themselves women, running away with the prizes in women's sporting competitions. Apparently the Doctrine of Infinite Sexual Mutability trumps minor considerations of reality, such as the fact that individuals who were “men” up to and throughout adolescence before “transitioning” are going to be bigger, faster, stronger than actual women in later life, regardless of how they manipulate their testosterone levels.

So? What did we expect?

The First Reader likes to watch cop shows and spy shows, and he likes me to watch with him. I’m not sure whether that’s just because he enjoys seeing me scream at the TV or whether that’s a minor fringe benefit. In any case, over the last few years I have seen way too many episodes dependent on “90 lb. young woman wipes the floor with 250 lb. man because…” uh, because she is an expert in some obscure martial art that we never ever see her practicing? Because he wasn’t expecting her to be able to fight? Because she’s the good guy and the plot demands it? I’m pretty sure ALL the episodes boil down to that last reason, and I’m not totally unsympathetic to it. It certainly increases the range of stories we can tell if we get to assume that an attractive, slender young woman can work on an absolutely equal basis with her colleagues in some violent profession. If we never have to think, “Well, the bad guy wants to get away, so obviously he’s going to charge at the girl and knock her down… oops, why was she there in the first place?”

And the (Unrealistically) Strong Woman trope isn’t limited to TV shows, or I wouldn’t be griping about it here. I have read - well, I’ve started to read - too damned many military sf novels that portray women in combat as the absolute equals of men. I don’t mind if the writer wants to posit a high-tech future world in which battles are fought only via computer, and she with the fastest fingers wins… though you’d better make it convincing, and don’t get Captain Mary Sue involved in ground combat halfway through! I can sort of put up with a story that has Sergeant Mary Sue benefiting from mysterious physical augmentation – though the amounts of handwavium and unobtanium necessary to make Sergeant Mary Sue a combat infantry leader leave me dizzy.
But way too often I pick up a book that promises a strong female lead… and offers me a fairy tale world in which the only thing “different” is that we’re all going to pretend that women, not significantly physiologically different from today’s women, can fight on an equal basis beside men, also not significantly physiologically different from the men of today. Private Mary Sue can carry as much ammo and supplies as Private Marty Stu and can endure the same debilitating combat conditions. None of the men in her unit are the least bit dismayed by the prospect of seeing a woman wounded or mutilated. And, one assumes, they’re perfectly willing to visit death and mutilation on a woman who happens to be fighting on the opposing side.

Two questions.

Is this a world we really want to live in?

And if we pretend so very very hard that women are absolutely physically equal to men in armed combat, can we be surprised that the society we live in expects us to extend that pretense to athletic contests?

(Crossposted at Mad Genius Club

A Needle in the Right Hand of God

That's the title of a book I've been reading about the Bayeux Tapestry, but my reason for posting about it today is, of course, to commemorate a different invasion, the one that went the other way - from England to France - roughly nine hundred years after the one that inspired the original tapestry. One of the interesting tidbits in the book was this New Yorker cover, illustrating D-Day in the style of the tapestry.

Incidentally, the name "Bayeux Tapestry" has always seemed a bit strange to me, because I think of a tapestry as a piece of fabric whose pattern and images are intrinsic to the structure -- usually created by changing colors of the weft threads against a fully covered warp -- and the Bayeux Tapestry is actually a monumental undertaking of embroidery in colored wool on an already-woven linen background. However, I suppose the meaning of "tapestry" changes over time, and in any case, "The Bayeux Really Long Collection of Embroidered Panels," doesn't quite have the same ring, does it?

The Little Ships: The Other Memorial

In this country it's overshadowed, and rightly so, by our memorials to American heroes. But it's an inspiring story in its own right. I discovered this poem by Robert Nathan in, of all places, my ninth-grade English textbook, and I still remember thinking, "Okay, this year won't have been a total waste.") It may not be accurate in all historical details - for instance, we now know that the main use the British made of the little ships was to ferry soldiers from the coast to the much larger Navy ships that made the crossing (arguably more dangerous than repeated Channel crossings) but even the First Reader, the consummate nit-picker on World War II, was so moved by it that he forgot to complain about this.

And even after all these years, reading it makes me tear up.

Dunkirk by Robert Nathan

Will came back from school that day,
And he had little to say.
But he stood a long time looking down
To where the gray-green Channel water
Slapped at the foot of the little town,
And to where his boat, the Sarah P,
Bobbed at the tide on an even keel,
With her one old sail, patched at the leech,
Furled like a slattern down at heel.

He stood for a while above the beach,
He saw how the wind and current caught her;
He looked a long time out to sea.
There was steady wind, and the sky was pale,
And a haze in the east that looked like smoke.

Will went back to the house to dress.
He was half way through, when his sister Bess
Who was near fourteen, and younger than he
By just two years, came home from play.
She asked him, "Where are you going, Will?"
He said, "For a good long sail."
"Can I come along?"
"No, Bess," he spoke.
"I may be gone for a night and a day."
Bess looked at him. She kept very still.
She had heard the news of the Flanders rout,
How the English were trapped above Dunkirk,
And the fleet had gone to get them out
But everyone thought that it wouldn't work.
There was too much fear, there was too much doubt.

She looked at him, and he looked at her.
They were English children, born and bred.
He frowned her down, but she wouldn't stir.
She shook her proud young head.
“You'll need a crew” ,she said.
They raised the sail on the Sarah P,
Like a penoncel on a young knight's lance,
And headed the Sarah out to sea,
To bring their soldiers home from France.

There was no command, there was no set plan,
But six hundred boats went out with them
On the gray-green waters, sailing fast,
River excursion and fisherman,
Tug and schooner and racing M,
And the little boats came following last.
From every harbor and town they went
Who had sailed their craft in the sun and rain,
From the South Downs, from the cliffs of Kent,
From the village street, from the country lane.

There are twenty miles of rolling sea
From coast to coast, by the seagull's flight,
But the tides were fair and the wind was free,
And they raised Dunkirk by fall of night.

They raised Dunkirk with its harbor torn
By the blasted stern and the sunken prow;
They had reached for fun on an English tide,
They were English children bred and born,
And whether they lived, or whether they died,
They raced for England now.

Bess was as white as the Sarah's sail,
She set her teeth and smiled at Will.
He held his course for the smoky veil
Where the harbor narrowed thin and long.
The British ships were firing strong.

He took the Sarah into his hands,
He drove her in through fire and death
To the wet men waiting on the sands.
He got his load and he got his breath,
And she came about, and the wind fought her.

He shut his eyes and he tried to pray.
He saw his England were she lay,
The wind's green home, the sea's proud daughter,
Still in the moonlight, dreaming deep,
The English cliffs and the English loam
He had fourteen men to get away,
And the moon was clear, and the night like day
For planes to see where the white sails creep
Over the black water.

He closed his eyes and prayed for her;
He prayed to the men who had made her great,
Who had built her land of forest and park,
Who had made the seas an English lake;
He prayed for a fog to bring the dark;
He prayed to get home for England's sake.
And the fog came down on the rolling sea,
And covered the ships with English mist.
The diving planes were baffled and blind.

For Nelson was there in the Victory,
With his one good eye, and his sullen twist,
And guns were out on The Golden Hind,
Their shot flashed over the Sarah P.
He could hear them cheer as he came about.

By burning wharves, by battered slips,
Galleon, frigate, and brigantine,
The old dead Captains fought their ships,
And the great dead Admirals led the line.
it was England's night, it was England's sea.

The fog rolled over the harbor key.
Bess held to the stays, and conned him out.

And all through the dark, while the Sarah's wake
Hissed behind him, and vanished in foam,
There at his side sat Francis Drake,
And held him true, and steered him home.

Incidentally, the first time I crossed the Channel it was on a boat that the owner swore had been one of the little ships at Dunkirk. It may even have been true; at that time it had only been 19 years since Operation Dynamo. I will say that the boat was remarkably well preserved. But at eleven I totally believed him.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Everything's a learning experience

One thing the First Reader and I have in common is that, as introverted readers from childhood, each of us has a large vocabulary of words that we know from reading but have never heard or used in conversation. This leads to frequent exchanges like:
"Have you ever heard of X-x-x?"
"Oh, is that how you pronounce it? I always thought it was x-X-x."
"Well... it's how I pronounce it; I haven't a clue what is correct."
Of recent years, it's likely that at least one of us will have a smartphone within reach and we'll figure out the approved pronunciation on the spot. But there's no telling how many Debatable Words remain.
I hadn't expected that knee-surgery-complicated-by-pneumonia would affect this phenomenon, but it's become one of the less boring side effects of the whole thing. For about ten days I felt like a limp dishrag, too tired even to hold a book or a Kindle, and for the first time in my life I've been listening to audiobooks. When in normal health I find them too slow, but for the last week and a half "slow" has matched my comprehension perfectly.
Naturally, I haven't been taking notes and can't tell you which words I've heard out loud for the first time ever. The only ones I remember are the mysteries.
When I read Jane Austen, I see "shew" and hear "show," assuming that spelling but not pronunciation has changed. But whoever read my audiobook of Persuasion consistently read it as "sh-you". Which jarred, but may be correct; I'm too tired to do the research now.
The other surprise came while I was listening to Connie Willis' Blackout. Her characters, stumbling around in the Blitz, frequently encountered "arp wardens" and every time that jarred too. Without thinking about it, I'd always mentally heard "ARP" in this context as "Ay-ar-pee," spelling out the letters instead of pronouncing them as an acronym. Now I wonder which pronunciation the contemps used. That should be discoverable if I dig out enough contemporary radio broadcasts, but I'm not going to do it today. A native speaker of English-English rather than America-English might know; Ashley, if you read this, what's your pronunciation of ARP?

Promises, promises

\
Knee surgery is so much easier now than it was 20 years ago, they said.
Think how much you'll enjoy being able to take a walk in the park, they said.
You'll be so much happier and healthier afterward, they said.

Yeah, well, maybe. Eventually. I wanted to believe all that, and I don't think I did enough research before plunging into this project. I certainly hadn't counted on living at my daughter's house for two and a half weeks after surgery! As for pain... I really don't like pain.

Let's just say it hasn't exactly been a walk in the park.

However. As of today I'm back in my own house, with a laptop and Internet access, and maybe in a couple of days I'll get back to regular posting. (Along with paying for the final cover of Salt Magic, entering all the edits on Language of the Dragon so that I'll be ready to shove that book through formatting and KDP when Cedar finalizes that cover, doing a sort-of-last edit on A Child of Magic so that I can inflict it on beta readers... things pile up when you lose a couple of weeks, don't they?)

Now that pain pills are no longer fogging my brain, I hope that I'll be able to get back to plotting Tangled Magic, which is languishing as a collection of disconnected notes made just before surgery. I miss writing. I want to get back to work.

For today, though, I think I'm going to be a wimp, lie down and listen to an audiobook. The new knee is complaining loudly about what I've put it through already, and I don't seem to be very good at concentrating through pain. Yeah. Total wimp. Definitely flunking Stoicism 101. And I don't even want to think about the prospect of going through this all over again with the other knee!

Incommunicado

The first knee surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning, after which I'll be at the hospital for a couple of days. Once I get sprung, I expect to be stuck in the one part of our house which has a bedroom and a bathroom at the same level, at least until I can manage stairs again -- no idea how long that's going to take, but I hope it won't be more than another couple of days. The thing is that this part of the house is the part where Internet access is patchy at best and mostly nonexistent.

Given my relaxed "schedule" of blog postings, this gap should hardly be noticeable. But if anybody wonders why I'm not responding to comments or emails this week, now you know.

FINISHED!

Not that it's of great importance or immediate relevance, but the First Reader is out and the kids could care less, and I have to gloat to somebody. I've just typed the last words of the seventh book in the Applied Topology series - the one I thought I wasn't going to write, but Thalia ambushed me. And as usual, I'm inordinately pleased. Not to mention being grateful to Real Life, for letting me finish it thirty-six hours before I have to present myself to the hospital for the first knee surgery. I figure I can lounge in bed or on a couch and edit the thing, even in the hospital and then at home, but I'm not so sure about placing a laptop on my knees or concentrating well enough to write new words in that first week.

For chronological reasons this book will have to be published after the first two books in the upcoming Dragon Speech series, because the first one has to take place less than a year after A Revolution of Rubies. Furthermore, Thalia makes cameo appearances in both Dragon Speech books; in the first one she's pregnant, in the second she's nursing a newborn, and in this book the baby is 10 months and she is just, with some reluctance, agreeing to go back to work part-time. I could edit the cameo appearances, but I don't see any way around the Revolution of Rubies connection. Ah, the joys of writing two series in the same universe! And when I think that I did this to myself... oh, well. It does not materially diminish the joy of completing this one.

The working title, which I rather like, is A Child of Magic. As always, reactions and suggestions are always welcome, but bear in mind that I'd like to keep to the format of the first six Applied Topology books: A [NOUN] of [NOUN].