reviews, ubc, some other random things
Feb. 9th, 2008 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyMore reviews of A Companion to Wolves: here, here, and here.
On the other hand, redzilla is sick to death of trilogies and wizards and thieves, with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scott_lynch and myself as exhibits A and B.
Note to self: the maribou is the thing with the feathers; the caribou is the thing with the antlers. You only hurt yourself when you get the two confused.
UBC
Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Possibly my favorite thing about this book is Demos's confession, in his preface, that he discovered in the course of researching this book that, yes, he is descended from those Putnams. But this is because trivia and the malice of serendipity fascinate and delight me.
This is an excellent, careful, thoughtful history of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England, excluding Salem. Demos puts Salem in context, showing not only that it was an aberration, but how it was an aberration. More than that, though, he examines witchcraft as a phenomenon, both sociological and psychological, and he explains the part it took in Puritan culture.
The thing I found most interesting was the recurrent picture of witches, from depositions of victims and witnesses, as people who just won't go away. "Intrusive" is Demos's word, and he also talks about why this was such a problem for Puritans, caught between the realities of their tiny, isolated, precarious communities and the values they were taught of self-abnegation and social harmony. Again and again, we get word pictures of witches forcing themselves into other people's homes, other people's business, other people's families and lives. And I can see a way, in the subconscious, subcultural workings, in which an accusation of witchcraft was a desperate defensive strategy simply to make this person LEAVE YOU ALONE.
And that seems kind of trivial and funny (in a horrible, morbid way), but at the same time, it isn't. When you're taught from infancy not to assert yourself (and that's true for both Puritan women and Puritan men, although obviously both genders had strategies for getting around that--the important thing being that those likely to be accused of witchcraft were those who simply ignored those strategies and asserted themselves directly), you are really helpless against someone who ignores those rules and won't take a hint. And that is frightening. It is a threat.
Demos also talks about why most witches were women, and why most accusers were women, too, and, yes, it's much more complicated than Monolithic Patriarchal Oppression. I don't agree with everything Demos says (I find some of his psychological theorizing a little too heavy-handed), but he creates a coherent and sympathetic picture of both "witches" and their "victims" (or, to turn it around, witch-accusers and their victims) and in so doing, unfolds seventeenth-century Puritan culture in a way that makes it, if not accessible exactly, at least comprehensible.
This is why these people were who they were. Which is possibly the most important question history can try to answer.
I have a theory about tip sheets. My theory is that once you start signing them, you enter an infinite loop. Thus the fact that no matter how many you sign, the stack never gets smaller.
I really want to see the Muppets do Tom Waits' song, "Don't Go Into That Barn." I am a little worried about what this says about me as a person.
Around about the twenty-second of this month, I am going to go hole up atheresluck's place in a kind of minimalist writer's retreat, and there will be radio silence on this blog until after Minicon, whereupon we will resume with, so help me blue fuzzy thing, a complete draft of Corambis which I am not ashamed to show the world. That, at any rate, is the Plan. I'm not sanguine, exactly, but I admit to some cautious optimism that this may work.
On the other hand, redzilla is sick to death of trilogies and wizards and thieves, with
scott_lynch and myself as exhibits A and B.Note to self: the maribou is the thing with the feathers; the caribou is the thing with the antlers. You only hurt yourself when you get the two confused.
UBC
Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Possibly my favorite thing about this book is Demos's confession, in his preface, that he discovered in the course of researching this book that, yes, he is descended from those Putnams. But this is because trivia and the malice of serendipity fascinate and delight me.
This is an excellent, careful, thoughtful history of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England, excluding Salem. Demos puts Salem in context, showing not only that it was an aberration, but how it was an aberration. More than that, though, he examines witchcraft as a phenomenon, both sociological and psychological, and he explains the part it took in Puritan culture.
The thing I found most interesting was the recurrent picture of witches, from depositions of victims and witnesses, as people who just won't go away. "Intrusive" is Demos's word, and he also talks about why this was such a problem for Puritans, caught between the realities of their tiny, isolated, precarious communities and the values they were taught of self-abnegation and social harmony. Again and again, we get word pictures of witches forcing themselves into other people's homes, other people's business, other people's families and lives. And I can see a way, in the subconscious, subcultural workings, in which an accusation of witchcraft was a desperate defensive strategy simply to make this person LEAVE YOU ALONE.
And that seems kind of trivial and funny (in a horrible, morbid way), but at the same time, it isn't. When you're taught from infancy not to assert yourself (and that's true for both Puritan women and Puritan men, although obviously both genders had strategies for getting around that--the important thing being that those likely to be accused of witchcraft were those who simply ignored those strategies and asserted themselves directly), you are really helpless against someone who ignores those rules and won't take a hint. And that is frightening. It is a threat.
Demos also talks about why most witches were women, and why most accusers were women, too, and, yes, it's much more complicated than Monolithic Patriarchal Oppression. I don't agree with everything Demos says (I find some of his psychological theorizing a little too heavy-handed), but he creates a coherent and sympathetic picture of both "witches" and their "victims" (or, to turn it around, witch-accusers and their victims) and in so doing, unfolds seventeenth-century Puritan culture in a way that makes it, if not accessible exactly, at least comprehensible.
This is why these people were who they were. Which is possibly the most important question history can try to answer.
I have a theory about tip sheets. My theory is that once you start signing them, you enter an infinite loop. Thus the fact that no matter how many you sign, the stack never gets smaller.
I really want to see the Muppets do Tom Waits' song, "Don't Go Into That Barn." I am a little worried about what this says about me as a person.
Around about the twenty-second of this month, I am going to go hole up at
heresluck's place in a kind of minimalist writer's retreat, and there will be radio silence on this blog until after Minicon, whereupon we will resume with, so help me blue fuzzy thing, a complete draft of Corambis which I am not ashamed to show the world. That, at any rate, is the Plan. I'm not sanguine, exactly, but I admit to some cautious optimism that this may work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 04:39 pm (UTC)Do they not know who I am? Do they not know that when I want a book I want it now?
Demos also talks about why most witches were women, and why most accusers were women, too, and, yes, it's much more complicated than Monolithic Patriarchal Oppression.
You've stated on several occaisions now that the situation was "much more comlicated"...sooo what is the actual take?
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:29 pm (UTC)In the case of New England witchcraft, what you (general "you") are missing is the fact that while accused witches were mostly women, and while those women were assertive, (a.) not all assertive women were tried as, or even accused of, witchcraft, in fact the vast majority of them weren't, and (b.) the simple model of men-oppressing-women doesn't allow for the fact that most accusers were women. And, yes, there's a further refinement of the Monolithic Patriarchal Oppression model in which women police their own oppression, and I certainly think that happened in Puritan society, too. Also, a lot of the time, the structures of patriarchal oppression--the courts and magistrates and so on--were deeply resistant to convicting anyone of witchcraft. Verdicts were often overturned.
But my principal objection to the Monolithiic Patriarchal Oppression answer is that--aside from my general objection to it, which is that it erases agency--it doesn't address the really interesting questions about witchcraft: why these accusations and why these people?
(continued on next rock)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:30 pm (UTC)The answer seems to be (at least by Demos's argument, and like I said, I find him largely persuasive) that people likely to be accused of witchcraft were people who had a particular cluster of traits. They were likely to have either risen dramatically in the social/economic scale or fallen dramatically in the social-economic scale. They were likely to be aggressive and contentious (Demos notes that even in a litigious society like the Puritans', witches were notable for the amount of time they spent in court as plaintiffs as well as defendants. They were likely, if poor, to demand charity from their neighbors, and to accept it ungraciously, with insults. They were likely, as I said above, to intrude, and there's a common theme of offering medical help which the recipient manifestly does not want. They are likely to brag about their own abilities, and to do so in ways that hinted at supernatural powers. (Self-aggrandizing--it goes with the aggressive and intrusive.) If they were women (as most of them were), they were very likely either childless entirely or to be in their 40s or 50s--i.e., menopausal. Demos's theory is that there's a particular cluster of anxiety for Puritan women, and for Puritan ideas about women, that centers around the failure to bear children, either as a chronic condition or at menopause, as a change of state. And, yes, I think that's an oppressive, reductive, essentialist ideology of womanhood (in the same way that I am utterly horrified by the numbers of children Puritan women bore), but it's not fair to the Puritans to put it all down to "barefoot and pregnant" thinking. The infant mortality rate was ghastly (another part of the cluster of anxiety around mothers and witches), and it would be stupid, and oppressive in its own right, to say that women shouldn't value their ability to bear children. (If bearing children is what they want to do--but see, again, that's modern thinking and modern valuations--modern ideology--and if you slap it on the Puritans, of course they look oppressive and backwards and ridiculous. Most of New England was getting by on subsistence farming, when it wasn't being decimated by disease or Indians or crop blights or droughts. The beginnings of a mercantile class was another thing, actually, that was feeding into witchcraft anxiety. But my point is that we have the luxury to sit and think and read books and to decide if we want to have children or not. And that's our good fortune, not their willful ignorance.)
And a lot of the oppressive Puritan standards were equally applied to men as well as women. The comments Demos makes, mostly asides, about Puritan child-rearing are chilling. So, yes, patriarchal societal structure is part of the answer. But it's not anywhere near an explanation.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:45 pm (UTC)On the cluster of ideas and fears around childbirth, fertility, barrenness, etc, I get the impression (it sounds fascinating, but I still haven't got round to reading it rather than the reviews) that Lyndall Roper's work on witchcraft accusations in early modern Germany has a great deal to say about this.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:56 pm (UTC)The Thomas is something I've been meaning to read for, um, a really long time now. There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that, now that I'm no longer supposed to (it was on my research bibliography for my dissertation almost from the beginnning), I may actually get around to doing so.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 04:51 pm (UTC)I was so going to ask something snarky about accountants and greengrocers, but then I followed the link and realized the snark is too late by the end of the first paragraph.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:39 pm (UTC)(Is it sad that my misspent youth was misspent reading things like PC Wren's novels of the Foreign Legion?)
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:37 pm (UTC)That wraps around the neck,
For ornamental purposes,
But does not warm for heck;
But still, a better thing by far,
Than caribou's antler'd embrace;
A simple "C" change saves the day;
And also saves the face.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 07:41 pm (UTC)And yes. I was trying, in early morning grogginess, to figure out why I knew the word maribou and went briefly the wrong way.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 08:41 pm (UTC)But, but, the wizards are fascinating! Especially the Cabalines, that rather crazed combination of heretic-burning religious order and fishbowl think-tank.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-09 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-10 03:05 am (UTC)I think you are right about the conditions that engendered accusations of witchcraft, although IIRC there were witch-hunts in England around the same time. There were probably some other aspects as well that no one's found yet, but good for all the dissertations yet to come. Certainly more subtle and complicated than patriarchal oppression of assertive women"
no subject
Date: 2008-02-10 04:15 pm (UTC)Maybe they can join Scarlett Johansen on her new album? Not sure if that's included, but IIRC, it's supposed to be all covers of Waits songs.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-11 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-07 05:32 am (UTC)I have read hundreds of fantasy/sci-fi books and I love trilogies. Limiting a series to three books forces an author to focus on having a beginning, middle, and end verses the unending pointless blah that you see in these 10+ sagas. I firmly believe that if you are going to do a longer saga then the best way to do it is like C. J. Cherryh and Robin Hobb where you have consecutive trilogies. Easier for the reader to keep track of what is going on and there is actually resolution of conflicts.
I also hate it when a book has five story lines going on at the same time (for multiple reasons).
By the way, loved A Companion to Wolves, it was a lovely bit of fun in my life.