Q&A 15

[truepenny]

Q: Where did Mildmay get his name from, in story? I know where his first name comes from, but where did he get the fox epithet from, and why? I'm guessing it has to do with him becoming a more established assassin, but how does that automatically equal fox?

A: Mildmay is called "the Fox" partly because his cheekbones give him a foxish look (and, of course, once the dye is stripped out, his hair is fox-colored, but nobody (except Kolkhis) knows that when they start calling him the Fox, so it's just one of those little narrative ironies). There's also a lot of folklore in Meduse associated with foxes and their cunning, their ability to evade or escape traps. Foxes are liars, and also storytellers. And like anyone who's willing to be an assassin for hire, they are amoral. It fit him.

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Q: firstly, was there a reason that the Bastion didn't want Gideon back after he was captured with Mavortian von Heber and Bernard, and secondly, what was it that Gideon had on Thaddeus that he wasn't telling Mildmay about?

A: I don't know the answer to the second question--I have never been able to figure out Gideon and Thaddeus's backstory. But to answer the first question, the Bastion let the Duke of Aiaia have Gideon to make an example out of. Cementing good relations with the local leaders, etc.

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Q: I was also wondering, how did you come up with the word ´annemer´ for non-magical person? Is it because the (duplicated!) ´n´ wich in various European languages is a negation? (Sidetrack There´s also that word in J.K. Rowling´s universe, where to me it sounds very negative: a blunt, snubbed and cut off sound).

A: I actually don't remember how I came up with "annemer." It probably has to do with a- being a Greek negating prefix (e.g., amnesia, aphasia, etc.), but honestly, even that is just speculation. I don't remember doing any particularly deep cogitation about it (if I did, I'd probably remember the derivation); sometimes I just reach for a word and take what presents itself. "Mikkary" was like that, too (although the pun on misery, as Felix remarks, is obvious).

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Q: You use or repurpose a lot of uncommon words (for instance, "Margrave") and slang (molly, violet boy, janus). Coralines seem to be a rosary type prayer/meditation aid, although many cultures use beads or knotted string. When I google "coraline" however, I get Neil Gaiman's book, and definitions of the name (from coral! like "crystalline", I guess). Is a coraline something that exists as an object, or is it simply a word you borrowed to describe something familiar and make it foreign?

A: Yes, a coraline is a rosary. Since rosaries get their name from having originally been made of dried rose petals (unless that's an urban legend), I was looking for something that could have a similar origin: coralines, being the devotional aids of a maritime people, were originally made with coral. (And yes, magpie-like, I did lift the word itself from Neil's book.)

Q: Kept thieves don't have last names, although whores seem to (at least, Vincent does, but then he comes from what seems to be solidly middle class or higher, originally...). Are there other social classes that lack last names? Is this part of a class thing? Does Cardenio having a last name signify anything?

A: Yes, it is a class thing, the distinction between the working class and what probably gets called the criminal class, although that's a misnomer: kept-thieves and whores and pack kids, spiders and pimps and resurrectionists, sangermen and ketches and cade-skiffs. The people who make their living, legally or illegally or some of both, in Mélusine's underbelly. But of course people with surnames can end up in those places, and they may or may not choose to drop the surname, just as people without surnames have nothing to prevent them choosing to adopt one. So it's not reliable.

Cardenio is almost certainly of working class origins, so Richey is the surname he was born with.

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Q: We know the specific type of gem used in the rings of several different wizards in the series, and that Felix has had two different gems in his rings. Do the gems used in a wizard's rings have any meaning attached to them?

A: Cabalines (and Troian wizards--another thing apparently communicated between the two cultures by the wizards of Cymellune, like the calendar) believe that particular gems have affinities for particular types of magic, so as a wizard becomes more skilled and more politically/socially powerful, s/he will probably buy rings to suit. Felix's silver and moonstone rings that Malkar corrupted, for instance, are better than the rose agates set in "silver" (i.e., copper under a silver wash) that were the best he could do when he first got free of Malkar (and, no, that bit of backstory never made it into the books), but they're not as attuned to his particular talents as the gold and garnet rings the Celebrants give him. I never worked out the gemology in detail, but it is not accidental that Felix's gold and garnets are so perilously close to Malkar's gold and rubies.

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Comments

Annemer

[(Anonymous)]

The most obvious thing about the Annemer name was always that it was so close to "anemic", i.e. bloodless, a kind of arrogant way of assuming that a certain kind of blood (magic) doesn't run in their veins.

Re: Annemer

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Not so much to me. The doubled 'n' made it seem like it came from a different root. Also, anemic used to be anæmic, I believe, certainly with emphasis on the second syllable and a long vowel. I have a hard time imagining myself reading 'annemer' in any way which does either.

Re: Annemer

[(Anonymous)]

As far as i know it comes from hema = blood. I didnt say i would pronounce it like anemic though, it does sound more like animal in my ear. It just always seemed like a lower-citified version of a condescending wizard term that had made its way into common use.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Of course, one of the fox's most traditional preys is the rabbit. One wonders if Kolkhis had a specific assassination she was keeping Mildmay for, just in case.

[alamaris.livejournal.com]

"...but it is not accidental that Felix's gold and garnets are so perilously close to Malkar's gold and rubies."

Aha! Glad to see I wasn't just being paranoid when I noticed that correlation.

[(Anonymous)]

...kept-thieves and whores and pack kids, spiders and pimps and resurrectionists, sangermen and ketches and cade-skiffs...

Why would sangermen and cade-skiffs be lumped in with kept-thieves and pack kids, especially when cade-skiffs seem to carry a certain respect even in the Mirador? I could see them as similar to garbagemen, not people who'd be invited to mingle with their social superiors but providing necessary services, unlike the "criminal classes." Becoming a cade-skiff is certainly a career; and I'm sure you know that the public executioner was often a well-respected person at many times in English history.

Also (and apologies if I should have submitted this question to the q&a entry, but it follows on from this discussion), it seems clear that being a cade-skiff involves "mysteries" as part of their duties of recovering and identifying bodies found in the Sim. What were these "mysteries", and are cade-skiffs regarded in some way as priests, or at least servants, of Cade-Cholera? Sue Lambiris

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

1. Because. And I said "criminal classes" was a misnomer.

To be less terse about it, human societies frequently don't make sense when you try to apply logic to them. And don't assume historical parallels are going to work either. All I can tell you is that, in Mélusine, cade-skiffs, ketches, and sangermen are considered--by the respectable bourgeoisie and the upper classes--as much outside the social system as criminals.

2. Cade-skiffs have some relationship to Cade-Cholera; I don't know if they're priests or devotees or carriers of contamination (in Mary Douglas' social sense, not literally--although given the prevalence of epidemics in urban societies without decent hygiene, the literal may be true as well. Presumably, if I ever write the story about Cardenio, we'll find some of these things out.

[oceruleanskies.livejournal.com]

I compare it to the caste-society in India. The Untouchables, those who work with leather (curing it using urine), the butchers, all those involved with the necessary menial tasks no one wants to see but will want to have the benefits of.

Ancient feudal Japan also had (and still has, under the cover of equality) an undercaste, indeed again those working with leather, meat, executioners, the dead etc. They were called Burakumin.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

I made the same associations as I read Truep's answer.

It also seems pretty reasonable to me that members of the for-lack-of-a-better-word criminal underclass would see being a cade-skiff as a respectable, important job (as Mildmay clearly does), while members of the overclass would not. The garbageman parallel is a useful one--in our world, working-class urban people are likely to see being a garbage collector as a good job: in most big cities, as well as many smaller communities, it's a municipal government job, with a strong union, providing job security and great benefits. And it's easier for urban poor people to realize how bad things would get, and how fast they'd get bad, if garbage isn't collected regularly. Upper-middle class people, on the other hand, think of garbage collecting as one of the worst jobs you can have, because you're out in all kinds of weather dealing with garbage all day, and even if they're aware that garbagemen have job security and great benefits (which they may or may not be), they don't see those things as scarce enough to be worth the stigma of dealing with garbage all day.

In Melusine, being a cade-skiff is a guild job, meaning there's job security, both in the sense that the job isn't going to disappear and that members of the guild have a status in the community that protects them from some of the dangers of being in the for-lack-of-a-better-word underclass. The guild also offers a sense of community, and of importance within the community, and opportunities to gain increased status and respect through moving through the ranks of apprentice, journeyman, and master. All of these things would seem to other members of the working- and criminal classes as very important benefits that may easily balance out the less than pleasant aspects of the job. Upper-class and respectable-working-class people, on the other hand, probably have access to enough other ways of gaining those significant advantages of security and status that dealing with dead bodies and the filthy Sim wouldn't seem worth it.

Wandering slightly afield, one thing I noticed as I was reading *Corambis* was the attention paid to the role of work, and the different kinds of work that people do. I'm thinking particularly of the woman who sells tickets at the train station, remarking that she likes her job because she gets to help people--that little scene made me go back and think about the way different jobs are portrayed throughout the series. In so much of fantasy, the only job categories that exist are Hero and Peasant: heroes save people, and peasants get saved. Even though all of the main characters except Mehitabel have fairly typical fantasy-world jobs (wizard, thief, soldier), the DoL books are populated with minor characters who have a variety of jobs, and we get enough little glimpses of them to have a real sense that these other jobs are just as interesting and important as the main characters' jobs.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And just to be really vain about my geekiness, notice that Felix's "job"--wizard--is actually a job. He has job obligations, and he gets paid.

(I realized about halfway through The Mirador that I was writing Marxist fantasy, with the emphasis on class and the constant concern about jobs and money and who keeps the infrastructure going. I didn't consciously set out to do that; it's just what happened when I started fleshing the world out around the major characters.)

Also, what you say about cade-skiffs is right on.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Yes! I wasn't thinking about Felix's Job when I wrote my comment, but I did notice it as I was reading--the section or two in The Mirador where Mildmay narrates about the different responsibilities that Felix has on different days. Coming from the fringes of academia as I do, that struck me as very realistic: committee-work, teaching, and research. I've always been an adjunct, so the very small amount of time he spent teaching struck me as enviable, but then again, I doubt I'd have much patience for spending as much time on committees as he did in that book.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Mirador is not primarily (or even secondarily) a teaching institution. It's a political institution--hence the committees. So that, while yes, the social structures of wizards are based on my own experiences in academia, it's not a one-to-one correspondence until we get to the Institution in Esmer.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Right--I'm sure he spends more than just one afternoon a week teaching in the Institution.

I'm sure my working-class roots are showing here, but I have trouble thinking of committee-work as *work*. I'm sure it's a pain in the ass and I'd hate doing it, but in my head, work should have some kind of tangible result, and sitting on committee seems to be mostly going around in circles.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

When I was an undergrad, I sat in some of the English Department committee meetings, and given the choice between that and being nibbled to death by ducks, I'll take the ducks anytime. And the Curia meetings are those meetings only magnified about ten-fold.

It certainly isn't work in the sense that Rollo and Maurice work, or Jean-Tigre works, or the poor women dying in Lornless's sweatshop work--and I suspect Felix would be the first to agree with you on the lack of tangible results. Also, of course, the utter lack of job satisfaction.

(And just to be randomly nosy curious, what do you teach?)

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Composition. Mostly community college, and a regional campus of Big State U. I've done standard freshman comp, developmental (remedial) comp, business writing, the whole gamut. Sometimes it was awful. The remedial students at Big State U branch campus *hated* my class--four groups of them, two years in a row--and never wanted to do any work, plagiarized constantly, never did the reading, resented me for trying to make them read and write in a composition class. It sucked, big time.

But I've also had some really nice classes. Last fall one campus of the community college started this Fast Track Business program where each class met for two and a half hours each night, twice a week, for eight weeks. They'd do one class from 5:30 to 8, and another from 8 to 10:30--then after 8 weeks it would start over again with two more classes. The idea was that the students would work all day, then come to class for five hours in the evening, and that way they'd be able to do 4 classes, almost a full load, in one semester. I had two comp classes: comp one the first half, and comp 2 the second half. I thought it was going to be hell--the students would be exhausted, they would only be there for the credential and not to learn, two and a half hours was far too long for one subject--but it turned out great. The second half of the semester I was in the second time slot, and the students were pretty tired by then, but they were all (with one or two exceptions in each class) really motivated, most of them were in the same classes with each other, so there was a strong sense of community where they'd pull each other up, everybody did the work, nobody cheated. They participated in class discussion, bringing up examples from their day jobs, and even sometimes from the other classes they had together. I asked to do the Fast Track thing again in the spring, but they gave it to somebody else.

I did get to teach both halves of the British Literature survey at the community college one time (I was much more qualified to do the first half than the second, but their standards are pretty low). That was really fun, because it was an elective so the students were a self-selected group with at least some interest in the subject. I found out partway through that I was making them do a lot more work than the person who taught it before--I divided the class in half and had one half or the other do a response paper each week, *plus* the two midterms, final, and term paper that the other person did--but the students actually seemed to like it. (I'm sure it helped that I was an easy grader on the response papers: the assignment was basically "think about something we read," so as long as they did that, they got a B+ or A- on it.) They really *did* think about what we read! Sometimes, even when it wasn't their group's week to write, their contributions to class discussion showed that they had thought about the reading before coming to class! We did some fun things, too--I managed to take a group to DC to see the Folger Museum and an exhibit at the portrait gallery, and made them cucumber sandwiches when we talked about The Importance of Being Earnest. None of them had any history worth talking about, so I did powerpoints at the beginning of each unit to give them an idea of the history, art, and music from each period. It was really awesome, and I think I did a great job. (I was not asked back to that campus the next semester, for reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained.)

What I've learned from these experiences is that I'm a terrible teacher when the classes are resentful and disengaged, and a fairly decent one when they're active and happy to be there. This has had some predictable results for my continued employment. Right now I'm working for an online tutoring company (students send in their papers, I comment on them and send them back. The nice thing about it, from the perspective of my personal limitations, is that if the students don't give a shit what I have to say, it's very rarely obvious) and hoping to get a summer job with the census (I did really well on the test, and someone I know works there).

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

It's been kind of a rough year. I started out last winter/early spring trying to be a rural carrier for the post office: finished the training program and did great, then hit two mailboxes on my first day delivering and got fired (as a rural carrier, you have to drive your car from the passenger seat, which is even harder than it sounds, and they aren't allowed to give you any instruction in how to do this because it's illegal). That's when I started selling books online, and doing some pet-sitting. Then I was a night house manager in a treatment facility for teen male drug addicts (my stepmother works there, is how I got the job). My job was to make sure the youth on my floor stayed in their rooms and didn't burn the place down, then wake them up in the morning (I got quite a bit of reading done during the night, but getting about a dozen teenagers to get up, shower, get dressed, and do their morning chores at 6 AM is no picnic). I was glad to quit when I got asked to teach the Fast-Track program, but then that campus had unusually low enrollment for the spring and didn't have any classes to offer me this semester. So I'm doing the online tutoring, a little pet-sitting, and the bookselling. I actually like all three of these jobs, but I'm not making enough to live on. I'm hoping to get some teaching work set up for the fall.

More information than you asked for, but I have the impression you have an interest in the various things people do for a living, so maybe I didn't bore you.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, not bored a bit. (I did not know that about rural carriers. OMG. O.O )

The students' attitude can make a tremendous difference--and it's beyond either prediction or control. One semester I was teaching two discussion sections back to back (I think that was the semester I was teaching 20th century American lit.--SO not my strong point). I called it my bi-polar semester. One section was apathetic and resentful; the other section was lively and engaged and fun. Same class, same assignments, same lesson plan. Different rooms, but in the same horrible building. And the energetic section was the second section.

And the one class I've truly enjoyed teaching was the upper-level survey of 17th century literature: the only time in my entire career teaching for the English Department that I got to teach English majors. They weren't all equally enthused about 17th century literature, but they were at least on board with the principle of the thing.

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Another thing about rural carriers (mail carriers in general, actually) that many people don't know is that the whole first part of your shift is spent sorting mail. These days, some of it comes pre-sorted by machine, but quite a bit of it isn't, so you stand in front of the case--a thing sort of like a bookshelf with very small shelves, with a pigeonhole for each address on your route (my route had some 600 addresses)--and sort the mail into it. The case is arranged in the order of the route, and the routes are laid out to cover the territory in as few linear miles of driving as possible, so a given street will usually appear on the case in a bunch of different spots--you might start out on Green street, then turn off onto White Lane and do one side of it, then onto Blue Drive, then back to another stretch of Green Street, then you do two houses on Blue Drive as you make a u-turn and go back to cover the other side of White Lane. Casing, as it's called, is considered the toughest thing to learn--most of the training program is about casing. I was great at it. I may even have revolutionized the way carriers are trained at the particular post office where I so briefly worked. On my first day, I made a little chart of my case, then when I got home I got out my crayons and colored the pigeonholes for each street a different color. When I went back to case the next day, I could pick up a letter, note the street name, then look at my chart to see the different spots on my case I had to check for that address, which was much quicker than searching the whole case. Eventually, of course, you'd end up with the whole case memorized and you'd know just where to put each letter as soon as you saw the address, but that takes a long time--and prior to my little color-coded chart, the only method to use before you got to that point was to check every single slot. After being fired for hitting the two mailboxes, I left my little chart behind for the next person, where I fondly imagine it is still used and copied today. (I suppose it's more likely that the next person threw it away, but I prefer to think of it the other way.)

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Just realized I wrote a whole long comment nattering on about me, me, me, and didn't actually reply to anything you said. I bet that class was fun--I've never taught upper-level anything (the community college of course is a two-year school, and the regional campus offered a few four-year programs, but not many). I did take a Restoration class as an undergrad, and liked it. I was more into the Early Modern period, but the Restoration is cool too. Nell Gwynn, of course--the *Protestant* whore.

One thing I think only teachers really get, and that both administrators and students consistently misunderstand, is how much of an effect student behavior and engagement has on a class. It's simply not possible to teach an excellent class when you're facing a brick wall. I was once asked in an interview, "How do you build community in your classroom?" I answered with a few different things that I do: icebreakers, group activities, encouraging students to address their classmates when they participate, not just me. "Does that answer your question?" I then asked. Well, no, said one of the interviewers. (It was one of those dreadful conference call ones.) "Another way of putting it would be, how are your student evaluations?" Which is, of course, not the same question at all. It's barely even a related one, and to see it as another version of the same question bespeaks a serious misunderstanding of what happens in a class. Or a community, for that matter.

Administrators seem to expect--and so do students--that a good teacher will give students the same (high-quality) experience every time, and your bi-polar semester proves that isn't possible, even if all controllable factors are exactly the same. I don't know, at the post office, you're allowed to not deliver people's mail if they don't hold up their end of the bargain by having a mailbox, putting it somewhere accessible, and not letting snow or junk pile up in front of it. Teaching, you're somehow expected to deliver the book-learnin' into people's brains even if they don't have them, don't use them, or fail to clear the snow from in front of them before coming to class. Faugh.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh jeez, sorry. I dropped you into a jargon-trap. When I say 17th century, I mean Early Modern. Because, at least in my department, Early Modern was divided into 16th century and 17th century, with the 16th century stuff that came before the accession of Elizabeth being lumped into Middle English (I don't know what the department would have done if anyone had actually wanted to study the Henrician poets--there were a couple of them on my prelims list, but they were never ever taught), and everything after 1660 being shoved at the eighteenth-century people. Except Milton, of course.

No, it makes no sense.

So by 17th century, I actually mean 1600 to 1660 (although many people put the cut off at 1642--it depends on how you feel about the Interregnum). I know perfectly well that 1661-1700 is also the 17th century, but I'm so used to the weird usage of my discipline that I forgot it was weird.

(Also--gaaaaah. Asking about student evaluations is not even even in the same ballpark as asking about what you do in the classroom. Hell, it's not even in the same sport.)

[alex51324.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK--yeah, that makes sense. I don't think either my undergrad or my grad called used the term "17th century" to describe *anything*, at least not in the catalog: at both places, as far I remember, you had your Medieval-to-early-modern (plus the Beowulf people, who didn't really fit in anywhere and were completely left out in the cold by the distribution requirements) and your Restoration-and-18th-century and then your modern-and-contemporary. Not sure why I leapt to the conclusion that "17th century" meant the second half--I think you said something about Restoration drama in a post that I read recently (but that you may have made years ago).

I loathe student evaluations, so I wished in that interview that I hadn't asked for clarification of the question. At Big Branch Campus, I always got terrible ones--in part because I had terrible classes, so I wasn't teaching my best, but also (I maintain) because they used a terrible instrument. They only had room for some very limited number of questions, so they'd load up each question with several conflated issues: one was something like, "I (meaning the student) feel that I have learned something of value in this class." So the question is really asking three things: is the course material of value? *Did* the student learn it? Does the student *feel* that s/he learned it? And *none* of those three things are really speak to performance as an instructor: the course material is determined by the college's performance objectives. The students' engagement with that material, or failure to engage with it, determines whether they learn it or not (and also, we already have a tool for illustrating whether or not a student has learned the course material: it's called a GRADE. And students don't get to pick them). Whether or not the student *feels* that s/he learned something is determined by...I really have no idea.

[oceruleanskies.livejournal.com]

An abject, hollow desperation is sounded out by the word ´mikkary´, of course in the first place, it´s the context you´ve put the word in, but the poetic feel of the word is like misery you are able to taste, like poison, because besides ´misery´ I also read the word ´mercury´ in the word, and via mercury there´s the association with ´arsenic´.
This is, of course, subjective, but then it´s by sounds (among other things) I used to try to parse through poems while studying.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

That's interesting about where "coraline" came from. I thought it had to do with prayers coming from the heart. (Then again, one of the most famous papers in my discipline is called "Utrum Copularentur? Of Cors!")