Historical novels and the conception of self

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Catching up on some things, here: I finished The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant several weeks ago and before I mess with the code to remove its image from my sidebar I may as well blog about it, eh?

I liked the book; I liked the way it pulled me into the 15th century and into the inner life of the narrator. The fact that it raises issues around suspension of disbelief is not any flaw in the novel per se, but in the genre.

One can’t help but wonder whether a 15th century teenager would view the world in a way that could even be communicated to a 21st century observer.

How did women living at that time view themselves? How could they?

In some respects, I think Dunant has probably hit on a few answers. The narrator’s habit of filtering her interpretation of the world in religious terms comes across as plausible, for instance. And certainly her conflict with her parents and siblings rings true, given her personality and intelligence. There is internal consistence, which helps a great deal to make the novel’s pretenses work.

But what about the primary themes of the novel? They are essentially feminist: the narrator is precociously bright and desires desperately to be a painter; because she’s a woman, both her intelligence and her artistic ambitions are a liability. This conflict, incidentally, isn’t handled in a way that’s stilted or cloying. Nonetheless, one can’t help but wonder whether any woman at that time could have articulated herself in those terms.

Put another way: could such conflicts have become even close to conscious 500 years ago?

It’s an impossible question to answer; we can’t place ourselves inside the skins & minds of long-dead people.

Historical novels are, instead, rather like dreams: they insert a contemporary self into a vastly peculiar landscape and say, “now. React.”

Quite possibly, that’s enough.

The way out is up

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Can’t solve a problem on the level at which it were wrought.

So. Anyway. This is kind of cool. There’s a thing called Reverse Speech.

If human speech is recorded and played backwards, mixed amongst the gibberish at regular intervals can be heard very clear statements. These statements usually appear in short sentence form and are nearly always related to the forward speech. It appears constantly throughout language, so much so in fact, that it is believed to be a natural part of our speech processes.

The webpage has audio clips if you want to listen for yourself. Some are pretty amazing, especially the ones that aren’t taken from famous audio recordings (scroll down to the list at the bottom of this page). By which I mean, this isn’t muddled audio inkblot stuff — it really sounds like clearly spoken words.

Either a huge hoax or our subconscious minds are continuously encoding “secret” messages in our speech.

From the FAQ page, the phenomenon was discovered by one David Oates “after his tape deck became damaged and only played tapes backwards” and that we embed these sort of messages every 5-15 seconds as we talk.

Wild.

Cold nose :-)

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This is my parents’ cat, Bibs.

cold nose

When he comes in from outdoors this time of year, apparently his nose feels cold, so if the space heater in their sun room is on he likes to sit with his face almost touching it.

We’re all the same . . .

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some will a strut and some will fret
see this an hour on this stage
others will not but they’ll sweat
in their hopelessness in their rage
we’re all the same
the men of anger
and the women of the page

they published your diary
and that’s how i got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here’s a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

so i know i’m alright
my life will come my life will go
still i feel it’s alright
i just got a letter to my soul
when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say
each life has its place

From Virginia Woolf, by the Indigo Girls (Rites of Passage album).

This version of the lyrics is from the rites of passage CD liner notes, only with line breaks.

the place where you hold me
is dark in a pocket of truth
the moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
and so it was for you
when the river eclipsed your life
but sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
and it was my rebirth

so we know we’re alright
life will come and life will go
still we know it’s alright
someone’ll get a message to your soul

The song stunned me when I first heard it because it so perfectly captured how I felt when I discovered Woolf’s diaries. (Her novels otoh — I should probably reread them now. I read them in college because one was supposed to, and didn’t really warm to them. Perhaps I was too young.)

I wonder if she came to realize, at the end, that her gifts could not substitute for a belief in deservedness . . . nor earn it.

Thanks!

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To all of you, I hope you’re having a wonderful Thanksgiving. And thanks to all who visit this blog. It means so much to me to have people read & appreciate my writing. Thank you so much.

Amazon’s policy on sock puppetry

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It isn’t easy to find, but if you check out the Participation Guidelines that Amazon publishes on the Community section of the site, there’s a clause that suggests sock puppetry is a no-no. It’s under Prohibited Content or Activities, which lists the “conduct or Content that is prohibited” and includes this bullet:

The impersonation of any person or entity or forging of any e-mail communication or any part of a message

I suppose that someone with a slippery enough grasp of ethics might argue that impersonating a fake person — posting under the identity of someone who doesn’t exist — doesn’t count. I mean, it’s not like the fake person would mind. Since he’s fake. Not that you can ask a fake person’s opinion.

But the issue isn’t just that you’ve taken advantage of some hapless fake person. It’s the act of impersonation: pretending to be someone you’re not in order to gain some advantage. (And hey — fake people are entities, too!)

Amazon doesn’t bother policing their site for this kind of activity, obviously. But it’s nice to see they do recognize it undermines the credibility and validity of their reviews and they don’t consider it an acceptable use of their site.

[tags] sock puppet, bogus Amazon reviews [/tags]

More advice for would-be Amazon sock puppets!

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John Scalzi has some advice. It falls along the lines of the whole Biblical eye-plucking idea.

Nothing about whether it’s a good idea, if your sock puppetry has been outed, to threaten to sue bloggers who blogged about it, though.

Hmmmmmm. I do suppose that if you have removed both hands, it would be hard to phone said bloggers with your threats . . . even hands-free phones need to be dialed . . .