Daughters of the Stars

It's Elizabeth C. Bunce week over at the 2k8 blog, and since A Curse Dark as Gold is about a take-charge woman I thought I'd tell you about my all-time favorite kids' book, The Daughters of the Stars by Mary Crary. (Phew--that sentence wins the Link Award, for this blog anyway.)

A neighbor gave me Daughters for my ninth birthday on behalf of her dog, a basset hound named Gorgeous George. It (the book, not the dog) dated from 1939, and had a cover and two interior color plates by Eduard Dulac. It had only two plates, I found out years later, because it was published in wartime and the book was rushed into production before the paper ran out.

Where the Role of Women in Society is concerned, this is an hysterically subversive book. To capture the setting, think Thin Man movies or "My Man Godfrey," except all the bejeweled. begowned, black-tied sophisticates are up in the sky or under the sea.

It seems that all of nature (the progression of sun and stars across the sky, the workings of the sea, the rain, the thunder) is governed by a bureaucracy rivaling the British raj. Most of the cleverest bureaucrats are women, and the men in positions of power tend to be ruled from behind the throne by mothers, sisters, or wives. None of this is stated outright, you understand--it's just the norm.

A foreword by the author comments that few fairytales feature mothers--they're always dead or lost or otherwise absent, leaving the heroine to fend for herself. Depressed by this in childhood, Crary writes, she "made an early resolve to create a young heroine whose Mother should possess, besides beauty and rank, the additional and stupendous virtue of being alive."

That mother is Astrella, Daughter of the Stars and Luminary of Two Continents. In the first half of the book, she and her daughter, Perdita, must travel from the First Continent to the Second Continent so that Astrella can illuminate it properly. They follow a shining path through the sky, tangling en route with the evil Moon Queen and her minions. Astrella accepts help from a man at one point, but only the way Indiana Jones accepts help from some adoring damsel. Otherwise, she's perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her daughter, thank you.

In the second half, Perdita goes off on adventures of her own with a young sidekick (Noel, Prince of Two Planets) whose most useful attribute seems to be that he has pockets that button. Perdita rescues people all over the place and reunites her disgraced aunt with the rest of the family, all the time keeping her hair tidy, her hands clean, and her promise to learn French irregular verbs firmly in mind.

Here's a typical speech, when Astrella's father has attempted to forbid the restoration of his disgraced daughter.

"Very well," said his wife. "I hope I am not a disloyal woman when I say that this must and shall be. I have been your wife for nine hundred and twenty-one years, and although I disapprove of you in many ways, I am sincerely attached to you. But I am not to be commanded, nor will I permit you to come between me and either of my Daughters at any time. I am sorry to say this, but Mamma is now at a distance of only three thousand miles, and I am certainly going to send for her."

The Star's face lengthened considerably.

I remember reading somewhere that, back in the 50s and 60s, females in picture books and early readers seldom had hands. Little girls stood with their hands behind their backs and watched little boys play with trucks. Moms had their hands in their apron pockets.

I don't think Mary Crary would have approved.

Ender's Game

Here I am again, rushing to get a post done before an entire week has passed. (I will do better, I will do better, I will do better....) Part of the problem is that it's March and life is boring. Here's what I've done this week: Revise. Teach. Revise. Walk the dog. Revise. Play with my new DSL (at last! Jon Stewart clips! Because, yup, no cable or satellite). Revise.

Oh yeah, I did laundry. Want to hear about it? Didn't think so.

So all I have to write about is books. I did finish Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a sci-fi about a bunch of children trained to save the world from an expected alien invasion. I loved it and have been pondering The Hero ever since. Usually, I like my heroes to be enough like me in the beginning that I can imagine myself performing the heroic feats they manage by the end--the Harry Potter model, or better yet Frodo Baggins, who doesn't even have wizard parents.

Ender is introduced right off the bat as spectacular in brain power and strategic ability. Card gets you on Ender's side because he's initially the target of bullies. And his response to the bullying starts him torturing himself about whether his extraordinary talents might be accompanied by an underdeveloped moral sense. It crosses your mind that he may be right, and that the bureaucracy that has trapped him may be banking on that fact. You have to keep reading to find out whether he keeps his soul.

I was further entranced by the quality of Card's thinking about his world, in this case a couple of academies on space stations. He devotes a lot of ink to the way one would fight in zero gravity, for instance, and his conclusions are pretty cool.

Also on the bedside table: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman, The Gollywhopper Games by Jody Feldman (2k8er!), The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones, and Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttall. That last one's going to require a rainy Sunday, I'm afraid. It's too dense for bedtime reading, which is all I seem to do these days.

Procrastination Can Be Fun

OK, so I'm a bad blogger again. But it's because I had a pretty good writing week, so I get extra points for that. I wrote 15 pages worth of chapter headers from the point of view of my two main Filioli (small winged ladies and gentlemen, infesting a pub), figured out why a couple of characters aren't working and sort of fixed them. (Actually, the fix on one of them is going to be trouble--it may mean we have to see more of his parents and then we'll need more backstory on them...and it could go on that way forever.) And revised, revised, revised.

And hooked up DSL! My little town enters the 21st Century! (I personally am in the slow lane, but still...) And taught my writers group at the school.

And managed to fit in a touch of procrastination.

Back in the 1920s or so, Robert Benchley devoted one of his columns to a lesson on "how to get things done." I haven't read it for a while, but my recollection is that he'd make a list of things he MUST do, putting the least important at the top. Then he'd sneak off and work on the second thing in order to procrastinate on the first, then tackle the third thing while procrastinating on the second, and so on down the list until he got to the last item, which was the one that really needed doing and that actually got done.

So that's why I had such a good time writing this week. What I was supposed to do was organize all my tax stuff for the accountant. (I know...it's wimpy for a midget like me to have an accountant. But I'm a terrible form-filler-outer.)

Now it's 4 p.m. on Friday and I came in here after a walk vowing to get serious about the taxes once and for all.

Which is why I'm writing a blog entry.

See how that works?

FEMA Pain

Really, I don't want this to become an anti-FEMA blog. But poor Rob spent six hours in a classroom this week and has another six ahead of him next week, and for no good reason.

I gather from his anguished mutterings that the course is about Incident Command Structure in the kind of interdepartmental response that would be required if, say, a 747 took a nose-dive into Herrick Bay. The students are all rural volunteer firefighters used to "mutual aid"--the system around here that allows a local fire department to call in assistance from surrounding towns in case of a big fire or other disaster. So what they're learning in this course is either old hat or geared to city folk.

In a mutual aid situation, the fire chief in the town calling in the aid usually is the incident commander, but there is a graceful and efficient system for relinquishing command to someone else who has more experience with a particular situation. (For instance, a boatyard fire can involve dangerous and flammable substances specific to boatyards, so you probably want to turn incident command over to the person on scene who knows most about boatyard fires.)

The local firefighters are not likely to appoint a finance officer for the incident, as this FEMA course would have them do. "If we need a bulldozer at a woods fire," Rob told a large glass of wine the other night, "we call in the nearest guy with a bulldozer. We don't go out for competitive bids."

The firefighters have to take this course in order for the town to be eligible for FEMA grants. So next week they'll all sit there, glassy-eyed, for another six hours.

On a more positive note, looks like we're getting DSL in our little burb. At least some of us are--you have to be within 3 miles (or is it 3.5?) of the substation next to the library. I never thought I'd see the day. Now I have to decide whether to stick with my original plan of nickel and diming myself to death (i.e. buying the less expensive and slower plan) or getting the faster wireless version. I'm tempted, but I need to do more research on whether I really want more radio waves under my roof. Any insights out there?

Recent Reads

The great thing about a dull winter (definition: no skiable snow) around here is that you do get some reading done, at least in between tap-tapping on the keyboard and consulting travel guides about our upcoming trip to England.

Here's the recent under-the-covers-with-the-flashlight tally:

1. Stardust by Neil Gaiman. Yup, I'd never read it. And it's a jewel: funny, intriguing, endearing, fluent...all the good things. I loved American Gods, so now will rush out and grab Anansi Boys and whatever else I can get my hands on.

2. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. Nope, never had read that one either. It, too, is very funny, but I found myself just slightly let down, probably because I'd been hearing about it for so long. I don't have much explanation for the fact that I had to make myself finish it--I got tired of the clever "book about a book about a movie and a book" framework, I guess. I'd still recommend it--it's a great ride, funny, suspenseful and, of course, well written.

3. The Opposite of Invisible by Liz Gallagher. OK, I had to read it because she's in the Class of 2k8 and it just came out. But I didn't have to love it, and to be honest I didn't expect to because I'm not a big teen romance reader. I keep saying this...teen romance has changed A LOT since I was a teen. It used to be a barren wasteland of clean-shaven boys and girls in pastel dresses. But Alice and Jewel, the star-crossed best friends in Gallagher's book, are great characters--lots of edges and interesting corners.

4. Ditto I Heart You, You Haunt Me by 2k8er Lisa Schroeder. It's in verse, and it works like a house afire. It's a simple story of guilt and love-beyond-the-grave, and the verse format gives it its third dimension. Wish I could figure out why, but it does.

5. I knew I was going to love A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth Bunce. (Yeah, yeah, another 2k8er. So sue me.) It's based on Rumpelstiltskin but is NOTHING like a fairy tale. It's kind of a romance, kind of a ghost story, but mostly it's about a young woman taking charge and making things right at a time when women often didn't (or at least didn't get credit for it in history books written by guess who). Great detail about the era (late 18th century, as I recall) and the textile trade.

6. A Fall from Grace by Robert Barnard. A good ol' British murder mystery. Not much to it, but fun.

Right now I'm reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, a Christmas present a friend gave to Rob. It's sci-fi, which I haven't read for a long time. I'm enjoying it. Tell you about it later.

Bad Blogging and Space Object Re-entry

I have to scurry to get something on the blog so it won't be an entire week since I last wrote here.

It was a busy week. I interviewed for and wrote a story for The Ellsworth American and helped Rob pull together some stuff for a magazine that's going to display some of his work. Wrote a Filioli synopsis and some first-person Filioli commentary to interject between chapters. (I'm sure there's a formal word for "interjections between chapters" but I don't know it.) Cleaned up the first six chapters as much as I could--changing the main character's age at the last minute, because it's first person and I wanted less time to have elapsed between the events and the time of narration. Probably this'll turn into a major screw-up, because it was so last-minute, but I guess anything can be fixed at this stage.

Got the Filioli package to Kate the Superagent yesterday. So we'll see. A long time from now, probably, life being so busy at Harcourt in the wake of the Houghton-Mifflin merger.

Last night we went to see "The Gondoliers," put on by the Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Hancock County. Their past director and music director are back--yay, although last year's show was pretty good, too. Gorgeous music, singing and dancing, great costumes, nice set--only marred, as usual, but the fact that you couldn't understand a lot of the lyrics, especially when sung by the chorus or a neophyte soloist. You could tell what you were missing when one of old pros came on--every word as clear as if he were sitting next to you. But it was all fun--except for sitting next to Rob, who doesn't like "The Gondoliers" very much and was more annoyed than usual about the mysterious lyrics. This afternoon I'll write a review for the paper.

One highlight of our week was an email from FEMA telling Rob what to do if a satellite fell on his head. Some years ago, he agreed to be the Emergency Management Director for our little town. Before 9/11, this was an unpaid position with no responsibilities. In recent years, it is an unpaid pain in the butt. Rob and other firefighters had to be trained to combat Global Terrorism--Rob jokes about standing his ground when Al Qaeda frogmen march up from the harbor--and he's always having to do some little emergency-related chore.

This time, he got a memo warning him about the satellite's "uncontrolled decent." (Do you suppose they meant "decency"? Because I thought we had that well under control.) Then it said: "We will have six Federal Joint Interagency Task Forces located around the country ready to deploy the moment we know the impact area, responding to assist you in your role of immediate consequence management." It attached a nine-page "First Responder Guide for Space Object Re-Entry," which I plan to keep among my souvenirs. There's a novel in there somewhere, don't you think?

Miniscule Monday

Just little stuff today.

1. We had weekend guests, for a welcome midwinter break. Their names are Linda and Michael, and they brought with them Dudley, their six-month-old golden doodle (a poodle-golden retriever mix). That's Dudley at left--his baby picture from six weeks ago, actually. Right now he's bigger than our black lab, Callie. Can't wait to see how big he is when he makes his summertime visit in August.

The cat was not impressed with Dudley. She spent the weekend in the cellar, now and then poking her head out her little cat door to see if the coast was clear. It never was, so back she went for six more weeks of winter.

2. The 2k8 blog has an entertaining contest involving cover mutilation and multiple-choice questions (my favorite in high school). The Unnameables doesn't have a cover yet, so remains unmutilated. Should be getting a draft cover any time now--an unnerving thought, since having a cover makes everything so final, like a coffin lid. (My, aren't we in a cheery mood today? Too much wine last night, perhaps?)

3. I went to an orthopedist Friday to see why my knees hurt so much. I ruined them several decades ago running down a mountain-ette in the Lake District in England. (Waving my arms in the air and singing "The Sound of Music," as I recall.) Ever since, I've been doing what I can to keep my quadriceps (the front muscles in our thighs) firm and strong so the tendons attached to them will keep the kneecap from wobbling around like a weak frisbee throw. Turns out my quadriceps are now so much tighter than the rest of my thigh muscles that the tendons are shoving the kneecaps backward. Plus the inside thigh is much weaker than the outside, so the kneecaps are set crooked. So I have to have physical therapy to undo it all. Good going, Ellen.

Interesting bit of trivia: When you sit down and do ankle-lifts, the outside thigh muscles do the work from floor level to half-way up, and then the inside thigh muscles take over until you straighten your leg. Who knew.