I’m going to stop playing you. I keep saying this, and then I keep playing.
You allow the word ‘tit’ (presumably because it’s a bird) but not ‘tits’ (because two birds would be offensive).
You don’t allow the word ‘queer’, because (obviously!) being gay is offensive. Double sorry, Peter and Paul.
However, you do allow ‘altar’.
I recently splashed out and bought myself a new pair of gumboots for my birthday. I’m over all this chicken poo being tramped through the house. I also got a new schmick new Apple Mac and a pair of actual lace up winter boots for my birthday this year, but I don’t want to be a cliche and wax lyrical about migration from PC to Mac because I’m sure you’ve heard all that before. However, I think the gumboots are worth blogging about.
This is them:
There was surprisingly little choice at Big W considering it’s the middle of winter. It was black, black or black.
They cost $25.
The rest of the crew also needed new gumboots. The six year old found pink shiny ones (which she hasn’t taken off since, except for a mandatory few hours of school athletics, for which she begrudgingly wore trainers) and the girls’ gumboots were only $10. This seems about right, because there is less overall gumboot required for such tiny feet.
My husband also needed gumboots. The men’s gumboots were on the shelf above the women’s gumboots.
As you can see, the men’s gumboots are pretty similar to the women’s gumboots, except women’s gumboots have a dinky little strap on the side. I’m not sure what this is for, because if I want to feel pretty, I’m generally not in the mood for wearing gumboots (though I did just wear my gumboots to the supermarket which is a new low of slovenly country living, even for me.)
As you may also note, there is more overall ‘gum’ in a man’s gumboot owing to their larger feet.
So I ask you, why were the men’s black gumboots $10 while the women’s black gumboots $25?
You may then wonder why I bought the women’s gumboots and not the men’s, because what the hey. Except even the smallest of the men’s gumboots were still too wide for my feet, so it wasn’t really an option.
This experience takes me back to the start of the month, when Aldi had their annual sale of ski gear. I don’t actually ski, but snow wear comes in handy around here. I bought a bunch of woollen socks (irrelevant to this discussion) and also two zip up jacket type things. One is for men and the other is for women. They were exactly the same price. Five cents short of forty dollars, if I remember correctly.
It wasn’t until my husband put his on that I realised the ‘men’s’ version has an extra zip up pocket on the chest. The women’s jacket is identical in every other way, except for the more ‘feminine colours’ (yes, pink). If a man wanted to buy a man’s jacket in pink he was fresh out of luck.
I’m going to feel more sorry for myself than for pink-loving men, however, because I find pockets with zips on them very handy. They’re good for keeping an iPod in, or a bit of change, or a receipt.
One might argue that women don’t really suit breast pockets owing to the fact that we have breasts. This is one argument, and I’m pretty sure the designer would argue that way, but if the man’s version was going to come with an extra pocket, I would have expected it to cost an extra few dollars, to account for the cost of the zipper. But no. These jackets are exactly the same price, and you know what that means in effect? It means that when women buy clothes, we are subsidising the men, who get more overall value for less money.
I’m not yet sure what I can do about this state of affairs. In the meantime, when my husband and I are out in public, in our (almost) matching black gumboots and our (almost) matching zip-up cardies from Aldi, then I will ask him to hold the little annoying shit that tends to accumulate on outings. He has an extra pocket, after all.
The gender essentialism or the lack of apostrophes?
Big W Toy Sale
Or maybe it’s that in order to get the odd ten dollar discount at Woolworths Australia I have to get these emails every second day, and then ‘activate’ my offers.
Every now and then the checkout operator says, after scanning my Everyday Rewards card, ‘Oh wow, that’s wonderful. You just saved ten dollars!’ and I say something along the lines of, ‘No, your company just paid me ten dollars for the private details of my shopping habits.’
But then I am a glass half empty sort of consumer.
Our six year old gets on the bus at the end of our street, along with a number of other kids from the village.
One of the fathers is off work this week due to rain, and said to his daughters as he ushered them onto the coach yesterday, “See you, girls. And remember, this is the easiest time of your life!”
I shook my head and said, partly under my breath, “No, it isn’t.” But he said exactly the same thing to them again this morning. It’s just something he says. He glanced at me, perhaps expecting another disagreement this morning, but I can’t be bothered. You see, it’s a long story, and no one wants to hang around windy bus stops at the time of year.
Thing is, that throwaway line reminded me of something my own father often said to us when we were kids: “Childhood is the best time of your life.” He explained that childhood is the only true freedom, that everything gets worse once you endure the responsibility of adulthood, that I should make the most of every day of sunny childhood before the depths of despair known as the rest of my entire life.
My mother did a slightly different thing. Whenever an adult asked me if I liked school I would answer with a fairly lacklustre response, and my mother would always correct me. She’d inform me, and the adult, that in fact I loved school. I’m pretty sure she convinced me, too. If the uninspired structure and discipline of primary school was something I ‘loved’, then I wasn’t to hope for anything more.
It was a great surprise to me, therefore, that my life grew immeasurably better almost immediately after leaving school. Turns out, childhood wasn’t the best/easiest/sunniest time of my life. I happen to be one of those fortunate people who enjoy the freedoms along with the responsibilities of adulthood.
Telling our kids that life is only going to get worse is a damn shitty thing to teach them, don’t you think? Everyone’s life pans out differently and no doubt for some, those few years of childhood are in fact the only decent ones. Then there’s this thing called rose tinted glasses, or amelioration in hindsight, or perhaps it’s just looking at the lives of your own kids, thinking how nice it would be to not have the worry of bills and bosses. But kids have different worries. They have canteen lines and teachers and school rules and they spend all day alongside other partially formed individuals who say thoughtless things.
When I had a pregnant belly, and later when I had a newborn and a toddler, strangers would often tell me that these are the best years and although they feel lengthy, they go by so quickly, so I was urged to make the most of them. This, to me, was another version of pointless regret for time passed. Sure, it’s true. You only get one chance at those early years, but the fact is, you only get one chance at every single day.
Besides, does anyone really know how to make the most of every single moment? What exactly does it mean I should be doing?
In the meantime, I’ll do my best in the moment, remember times past with fondness where possible and look forward to the future.
Yesterday I made pancakes for breakfast, and drizzled maple syrup over the top. This was to celebrate a birthday in our family. Normally for breakfast we’d be eating eggs fried in coconut oil, free range fatty bacon, with broccolini or 10 brussels sprouts.
When I say ‘normally’, we’ve been eating like this for over 2 years now: I hesitate to say the ‘Paleo Diet’ because although Loren Cordain created a longterm bestseller out of this branding, it’s too easy to poke at with the skeptic’s stick. People who eat a Paleo diet are already aware that the Paleolithic Era was very long and contained many different cultures who ate many different things, and that it’s impossible to recreate a Paleo diet these days anyhow because we don’t have access to the same seed stock etc etc.
So we eat a Paleo template diet, which doesn’t include added sugar, and with people I don’t know really well, these days I talk about our food choices as little as possible. That’s still quite a lot of talking, because food always comes up. Book club conversations go a little something like this:
“Would you like one of these [magnificent looking baked goods] that I made this afternoon?”
“No thanks, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Oh that’s right. You don’t eat anything these days, do you?”
“I gave up sugar two years ago, yes. Still on it. Yes.”
“Oh, but these don’t have much sugar in them.” *sugar crystals on top of sugar biscuits glint under firelight*
“No thanks. They look delicious, though. Oh, look at that knitting. What are you knitting? Anything? Anything at all?”
“You do need a bit of sugar in your diet, you know.”
And at this point I reach a conundrum: Do I argue with this, or do I let it go? Because the fact is, humans don’t need sugar in order to live a healthy and full life. Specifically: there is no metabolic pathway which relies on fructose or glucose or any other kind of sugar in order to function properly. This sort of conversation can get uncomfortable, because first it depends on a definition of ‘sugar’. Humans may not need sugar, since our bodies can be well adapted to fat. Nor can humans avoid a bit of fructose, because fructose exists in tiny amounts in green vegetables, to let humans know that the leafy thing not poisonous. There is no fatally poisonous plant out there which includes fructose. Which explains why we like it so much. Ergo, we can’t avoid fructose because we can’t healthily avoid vegetables.
I did a lot of research before changing our diet completely. The following fact resonates with me the most, and I keep coming back to it:
There are many different healthy diets around the world, from cultures who eat very little besides sweet potatoes, and others who eat little other than goat’s milk and blood. But there are two things which unite all healthy diets, transcending time and space. Healthy diets are:
1. High in fibre
2. Low in sugar.
And we are part of the zeitgeist and not at all hipster. Indeed, we are the cliche.
People do mean different things when they say, “I’m giving up sugar”, from
We started off closer to 4, but have settled between 3 and 4, with celebratory food limited to the birthdays of immediate family members and Christmas.
Yesterday’s pancake celebration was appreciated mostly by the resident 6 year old, who demonstrates a very human need for rituals which surround celebrations — this is something we all seem to need — but since this family eats (super expensive) free range bacon on a regular basis, switching to any other kind of food for celebratory purposes actually means a lowering of nutritional standards, and in our case the pancakes feel like the food people have survived on in times of need. Indeed, the Disney version of Little House On The Prairie shows the family stopping on their journey west to eat pancakes, which they only ate because they had nothing else. Flour products start to feel like the food of peasants. (And for much of the world, pancakes would be a step up. Acknowledged.)
Anyway, I had a slight bellyache after eating those pancakes, which is super common for those of us who have switched to eating nothing but whole foods.
A woman called Eve O. Schaub wrote a memoir called Year Of No Sugar, and in this article she explains the feeling you get when you’ve been eating really well for ages then you suddenly eat something highly processed: You really, really do feel like crap. I don’t care if it’s placebo — it’s a thing.
I could write a book-length memoir about this topic, too. But I can’t be bothered and apparently it’s already been done, so here are the main things I’d like to say about giving up sugar in Australia. These are different things I might say about giving up sugar in Japan. In Japan it would be easier, especially if you live in the north, where there is no tradition of adding sugar to everything. In fact, I did by default give up sugar when I lived in Japan some years ago.
The situation is much different in Australia.
About 2 years ago I approached the director of our daughter’s preschool and asked if they might reconsider their birthday cake tradition. With a roll of 70 kids, there was cake dished out every week, and that’s on top of the ‘cooking lessons’ they get — gingerbread men, easter eggs made of cheap ‘chocolate’ products, flavoured milk (to teach stirring) etc. I was asked to write a letter about this to formalise my complaint, so I did, and a year after that the director finally got around to putting a stop to the cake tradition. (Coincidentally, she had given up sugar herself, because the nutritionist had put her on an exclusion diet to remedy a skin complaint). By that stage our kid was due to leave preschool anyhow. (For all I know, the birthday cake tradition started up once me with the gob left.)
The start of primary school was celebrated with gingerbread men, because it’s apparently impossible just to read a classic tale about a gingerbread man without also eating one. Every fundraising meal deal includes food which is not only full of sugar, but of ethically dubious dinosaur shaped chicken-meat, fried in damaged oils. Almost everything from the school tuck-shop includes sugar. When the students volunteer to do an important job such as MC assembly, they are rewarded with a chocolate brownie. I first noticed this school culture when attending their information session, so at the interview I told the principal that we’re a sugar-free family and I don’t agree with sugar being used as reward. He told me I didn’t have a thing to worry about, that their reward system involves blue stars blah blah blah, but sure enough, sugar features highly each week in class. I pack no sugar in our daughter’s lunchbox but she gets it not only from birthday parties but from the place where she is required to be every day of term, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it.
You won’t find an Australian school which allows peanuts or tree nuts — these are common anaphylactic allergies in Australia. So the Paleo recipes you find online which rely on nut flour aren’t permissible as part of a lunchbox. Nor is dairy, sometimes. Well, my daughter can take dairy, but she has to sit on the ‘dairy seat’, which is hot in summer and freezing cold in winter, and so if I do pack berries with heavy whipping cream, the kid chooses not to eat it.
Since treating refined carbohydrates as sugar means giving up bread, no bread. I can see why bread became popular, though. Sandwiches are really convenient.
Obviously, school lunches need to be brought from home when you’re a sugar-free family. The thermos is your best friend. You end up making large dinners, and sending leftovers for lunch. You’re rewarded with a healthy kid who never has a day sick, but it does all take time, and time is a resource that many people don’t have much of. Summers in Australia are hot — our child’s school isn’t air-conditioned(!) and so you’ll need to include freezer packs around the salads and meats and boiled eggs. (Though you’d need to do that anyway. That said, we never had freezer packs and we turned out all right. *taps cane angrily*)
Before I got rid of sugar I was seriously worried that I might not be able to do it. I figured I was addicted (in the broad sense of the term), that I just liked it too much, that eating life would be unsustainably boring, and I already don’t smoke or drink… I figured I might, if I were lucky, be able to give it up for a few months, and I’d see how I felt, then keep going if it were worth it. (People on the Internet and in books said that it was.)
Sure enough, it is worth it, for all the reasons that many others have already gone into. But in hindsight, my worries were misplaced: I thought that giving up sugar would be like going onto a permanent restriction diet, constantly salivating over things I could no longer eat. In fact, what happens about a week after giving up sugar is that your taste starts to change. Fruits start tasting sweeter. Carrots start tasting sweet like fruits. Feta cheese started (weirdly) tasting like Russian fudge. (It was after making a shit tin of Russian fudge — and obviously scoffing way too much of it — that I started this whole ‘journey’, as they say.)
If you keep with it, you’ll probably end up making other dietary improvements, such as replacing damaging fats with healthy ones, or switching flour products for starchy vegetables, or taking up a sport or buying kettle bells… (It has taken two years, but I’ve now done all of these things) so it’s hard to know how much of any health improvement can be attributed to the elimination of sugar. Commonly reported, and true of me: you won’t get colds very often, and when you do it won’t be for long. Minor health complaints you didn’t really know you had will miraculously disappear. You’ll be able to work with your brain all morning AND all afternoon without thinking of food or sweets or coffee (assuming you also gave up coffee… as I had to do *sniff* in reluctant acknowledgement that heart palpitations are not a Good Thing). Your brain, in short, works better. And the brain is really quite important and something you should look after. You are your brain.
And anyone who has given up sugar for any length of time already knows this, but here’s why it’s hard:
1. Read up about fats, and eat a bunch of healthy ones. (Fatty fruits like avocados and olives; coconut oil and good quality butter for garnish and frying; avoid transfats and seed oils — there, I just saved you a whole bunch of reading.) Unless you increase your fat intake (assuming you’re following the government’s low fat recommendations) you’ll have real trouble subsisting on a sugar-free diet. You do need to get your calories from somewhere.
2. Pick your conversations. Be aware that food is a very political thing. You might as well talk about religion or abortion rights, really. Women especially — we all have some sort of relationship with weight-loss diets, which gets enmeshed with body image issues, which is conflated with self-worth. Women have absorbed the low-fat, high-carb (by default) message more thoroughly than men have, and you won’t be persuading anyone who isn’t ready to listen. This includes correcting people who are straight out wrong: A wise person once said, you don’t have to turn up to every argument you’re invited to. You can just say, “Gotta die of something,” when people point out, again, that putting cream in your coffee is going to kill you dead. (My husband works in a big office and they’re used to him now, and to his cream clogging up a space in the communal fridge, but he had months of that.)
3. Your friends will be the ones who like you even without the food and alcohol lubrication. So you may end up with fewer friends, but better ones. Some of them may even change their diets along with you. Birds of a feather, and all that.
4. You can’t support different diets under the same roof. Not long term. My husband needs to be milk and gluten free, so we all are. Gluten is particularly insidious, because even a tiny amount makes a difference and spends at least 6 months in the body (though I’ve heard varying times around this length.) So we can’t have bread crumbs floating around on the bench. (Besides the fact lots of people who advocate sugar elimination also advocate elimination of gluten products, and I’m inclined to believe those people now.)
5. Health improvements are rapid at first, but keep on keeping on. If you’ve given up sugar, you’ve probably given up processed food. If you’ve given up processed food you’ve probably given up man-made transfats (I say ‘man-made’ because they do actually occur in nature), and it takes 2 years for the body to get rid of those, because our tissues use them as building blocks. So if you go on an elimination diet for six weeks and your particular health complain doesn’t improve, try it for two years and then see. (Though six weeks is pretty magical, mostly.)
6. Eating well is expensive. People say it’s not. In Australia, it is. If you compare eating well to buying all your foods in the form of Big Macs, then yes, you’ll come out better off eating whole foods, because Big Macs are expensive last time I checked. But if you are sensible, budget-wise, and have been bulking your meals up with pasta and other flour products then yes, switching from flours to sweet potatoes, and from crackers to tree nuts, and doubling your vegetable intake, you’re going to be spending more on your food bill. (But less at the doctor’s, and less on medications.) It may seem like you’re spending way more at the supermarket/butcher’s because you’re no longer splashing out on incidentals at fast-food venues, because you never thought to include those in the food bill in the first place.
7. Find a doctor who’s on board with this stuff or who at least doesn’t try and get you off it. I don’t actually know how my doctor feels about my switching to a so-called high fat diet because I HAVEN’T HAD TO GO SEE HIM YET. Hooray me. I can tell you what the dentist said, though. Fantastic gum health. (And I hadn’t actually been in for a pro clean in almost two years.) This is particularly gratifying because I have severe gingivitis in my recent ancestry, which is apparently a window into heart health.
8. On that note, you can’t just switch your diet without a good intellectual understanding of why you’re doing so. I read a bunch of books (Gary Taubes, William Davis, Udo Erasmus, Nora Gedgaudas, Sally Fallon et al) and listened to a heap of Paleo related podcasts before a switch flicked over in my head. Some of these people are anti-vaccinations. I just thought I’d mention that, because I am pro-vaccination. Strongly. Long story short, use your thinky things, do a lot of reading, and practice skepticism as best you can, given your level of philosophy and science training. Rule for life, that.
I am stoked with our high fat, low carb way of eating. It has been a bit hard, but not in the ways I expected. We gave up nothing and gained so much*.
*Mainly, my husband now controls his severe asthma without 2x daily Seretide. This has been the most obvious health improvement of all.
Silence of the Lambs is one of those films which I seem to watch every few years — always on a rainy day — because it’s showing on free-to-air TV. I first saw it as a teenager. (I was making Japanese flashcards in the living room and my mother was knitting, I think. It was raining outside.)
For me, the annoyance was offset by the pleasure derived from a perfect response.
Clarice Starling is left out of a discussion between detectives and agents — all male — because her superior says he doesn’t want to discuss grisly details (in front of a woman). Rather than speak up at the time, Starling takes the opportunity to creep around a house and look for telling clues. Later, on the way back to head office, the guy who excluded Starling has noticed that she may have been put out, and explains that he was only trying to get the men out of there (or something). He says it doesn’t matter — tells her not to take it to heart.
Clarice Starling replies that indeed it does matter. The men look to him in order to know how to act, and so it very much matters. This is a feminist line if ever I heard one, and a satisfying one, too. Don’t we all love hearing fictional characters deliver great comebacks at exactly the right time? The kind we wish we’d been able to give…
The ending is significant in any story because of its positioning, and I’m noticing that a number of films which are otherwise feminist in tone don’t take the risk of leaving an audience thinking the message is too feminist friendly, because they almost take back any messages that might have been absorbed earlier.
In this film I made a gagging sound when Clarice is congratulated by her male mentor, who tells her that her father would be proud. Clarice Starling is thereby accepted into the world of men, but more significantly, the assumption is that she has been after male approval this whole time, and that her worth as a human being is dependent on acceptance of father figures. A father’s approval is indeed significant. But why not her mother’s approval, as a counter example?
Let’s not forget that in the story it is mainly young women being killed. (As usual.) A feminist may well be sick and tired of that. And no, the fact that several men are killed also is really no consolation.
There is also a variation on street harassment, from Miggs and also Hannibal Lecter, and although Miggs gets his punishment, Lecter walks free, which is necessary of course, otherwise there’d be no sequel.
Less believable to me is that almost the whole world seem against Clarice Starling. Obviously this is to build empathy in the audience, but it’s just a bit much that even the head of the prison is so lascivious. Sometimes I feel in stories that conflict is ratcheted right up and surpasses its effectiveness. The clumsy flirtations of the lab scientists have Clarice Starling in yet another sexually charged situation — do male writers think it even possible that a man does not interact in this way with a young woman? — but their efforts are less intimidating because of their nerd-cred. In real life, of course, a guy with nerd-cred is no more or less intimidating — this is a slightly annoying trope.
Given that the baddies are both men and Clarice Starling is as monomoniacal as the men she works alongside in regards to catching Buffalo Bill, no, Clarice never does talk to another woman about something other than a man. There is a scene in which she bounces ideas off her friend who is a woman, but they’re talking about work.
Is this a problem? Probably not.
Very good, though looks slightly low budget by today’s standards.
The ending is problematic.
A few years ago I happened across the paperback in a secondhand book store and decided to actually read it in order to find out just how, exactly, Clarice ends up at the right house while the other police ends up at the wrong one. This is one weakness of the film, at least for dimwits such as me. Caught up in the action, I never did understand how they got the guy at exactly the right time. When I read the novel I worked it out but I’ve already forgotten the answer.
Needless to say — that old cliche — the novel is better than the film, though the two can exist quite happily in the world. It’s easy to forget that this was a bit of a groundbreaking novel, because so many similar have come out since.
bitchsquealer
it is only respect for your parents that will prevent me from murdering you outright… I would rather eat dog shit full of razor blades than have anything to do with you.
“Obviously,” Tiny is saying, “she’s just a hot smoldering pile of suck.”
Furthermore, you are an asshat. That is all.
he’s as big as a house (and I’m not talking about a poor person’s house either)
- from Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
If I had a dog with a face like yours, I’d shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards.
I once had a zit that looked like you. Then I popped it. And then it looked even more like you.
This one time, I ate, like, three hot dogs and a bowl of clam chowder, and then I got diarrhea all over the floor, and it looked like you.
And then you ate it.
basement mole rat
- from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie
…the Roman cults of Stercorius, Crepitus, and Cloacinus — respectively the divinities of filth, farts, and sewers…
- from The Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray
“Roscoe,” Vivi told him, “when I write my memoirs, you will be much more than a marginal character.“
- from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells
(That one’s actually a compliment, but I figure it could function equally well as an insult.)
She wanted to say something sensible but knew not how.
- of Mary in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
From The Shocking History Of Advertising by E. S. Turner
But the most heartfelt and effective insult I’ve heard comes from a Bob Dylan song. It moves me every time:
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.- Masters of War
midden — a dunghill or refuse heap
1. Shakespeare’s Insults For Everyday Situations from Persephone Magazine. See also Animated Anatomy of Shakespearean Slurs at Brainpickings
2. Literary Insults For Every Occasion, collected by Flavorwire
3. 50 Best Literary Insults, collected by ShortList.com and another one by Stylist
4. Hilarious Insults, Rendered Lovingly And Mailed To Strangers from Co.Design
5. The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time from Examiner
6. And for the opposite of a ‘literary’ insult, YouTube Insult Generator Means None of Us Are Safe
“My breasts felt like two empty sacks.”
- Molly, Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry
I’m a big McMurtry fan, but I do prefer when he’s writing from a male point of view. Here he writes from Molly’s point of view. She’s lying on her bed missing her sons, who’ve been gone off to war. She’s contemplating her breasts. I can imagine what McMurtry, as writer, might have been thinking after he made the decision to write part two from a woman’s point of view. “Now, what’s it really like to be a woman? How would a woman feel? I know. Women have breasts. I bet women spend as much time thinking about their own breasts as I spend thinking about women’s breasts. Better put in something about having breasts.”
My question is: Do other women think this way generally about having breasts? If I were lying on my bed missing my hypothetical sons, I think my own anatomy would be the last thing on my mind. But, as just one solitary owner of breasts, maybe I’m the anomaly. Maybe other women think constantly about their breasts, as stand-ins for emotional states. “My breasts felt droopy that day. This reflected my generally blue mood,” or “My breasts felt perky at the party, it was a really good party.”
What do men have that might serve as the masculine analogue for a sexualised breast? I figure it’s testicles.
Let’s try the same but from Gid’s point of view. We’ve heard from Gid for the entire first half of the novel. He spent a good portion of that time feeling lonely, too.
“My testicles felt like two empty sacks.”
-
Larry McMurtry,said no one ever
George R. R. Martin has a tendency to do the same thing:
Right now I’m reading a book from mega-selling fantasy author George R. R. Martin. The following is a passage where he is writing from the point of view of a woman — always a tough thing for men to do. The girl is on her way to a key confrontation, and the narrator describes it thusly:
“When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest …”
That’s written from the woman’s point of view. Yes, when a male writes a female, he assumes that she spends every moment thinking about the size of her breasts and what they are doing. “Janet walked her boobs across the city square. ‘I can see them staring at my boobs,’ she thought, boobily.” He assumes that women are thinking of themselves the same way we think of them.
- Cracked
Tell me, are there things that women writers consistently get wrong about the physicality of being a man?
Not in these parts, anyhow.
Our daughter started primary school this year, at the zoned state school here in New South Wales. Upon enrolment you fill out a small pink form and tick whether you want your child to do religious education once per week or to be pulled out.
Almost every parent of the children in my daughter’s kindergarten class elected for their kid to be enrolled in religious education. Only four of kids stay in the classroom. The rest leave. I’m glad that this much is true; when I was at primary school, the few who didn’t do religious education were the ones who had to leave, making RE the classroom default. Mine were also secular schools.
What does my kid do while the others are learning about Jesus? Plays independently with the three other little atheists. This allows her teacher some extra planning time — to a point — and teacher workload is an issue in its own right, and independent play is also good, but what COULD the class be learning with that ‘lost’ hour? Oh, just the fundaments of evolution or something like that, I guess. Or physical education, which has been pushed right down to the bottom of the educational priorities with all that testing and an increasingly demanding curriculum. I didn’t understand evolution myself until I was well out of school and read up on it of my own accord. I had plenty of RE, though, and memorised enough verses in my time.
Earlier this year a girl on the bus gave our atheist kid a creepy thing to colour-in. Because segregating the religion only works yay amount when the R.E. kids are issued with proselytising materials, then take them outside the R.E. classroom into the wider school.
‘This Boy Belongs To God’ – grooming, much?
Fine, whatever. On the upside, our kid can’t really read. By the time she’s old enough to read fluently she’ll be old enough to understand our own family views on all this religious stuff.
But now she’s been assigned a part in the Christmas play which, fine, is Christian, and Christmas draws upon many different traditions so whatever. Except the lines I’m to practice with her go like this:
And for once, it’s not the lack of apostrophe which pisses me off the most. It’s the fact we can’t send our kid to school and expect that she gets a decent scientific, atheist education.
So, this latest thing where Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) made a reference about watermelon when presenting Jacqueline Woodson with the National Book Award for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming. With me being unschooled in the details of American racism, I had to look up what the hell watermelon has to do with anyone. If you’re not American, and similarly baffled, here’s an explanation. (Or maybe it’s just me, for whom this particular stereotype is news.)
Daniel Handler has since made an apology and is even donating money towards helping fix lack of diversity in children’s literature. As a consequence, we’re all reminded how it’s not okay to talk about someone’s race when she is accepting an award — hammering home, again, how someone’s main identity is ‘black’, that she can’t just go ahead an be a writer and a person during one of the most significant events of her career.
When it comes to language and joking and big-name authors and the language they toss off lightly, I’m reminded of something written by Neil Gaiman, but I don’t remember the attendant twitter storm. Maybe there was one and I didn’t see it. Anyhow, remember a while back he schooled up readers on why we shouldn’t be harassing George R.R. Martin for taking his sweet time before releasing his next Game Of Thrones instalment? Gaiman wrote on his blog:
George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.
This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly George is, indeed, your bitch, and should be out there typing what you want to read right now.
When I hear the word ‘bitch’ I feel a twinge. Maybe it’s similar to the reaction a black American hears when they get linked somehow to ‘watermelon’ — who knows. When our female prime minister was called ‘Bob Brown’s Bitch’ I felt it, independent of how I felt personally about Julia Gillard.
Because isn’t the word ‘bitch’ a gendered insult? Whoever provided the definitions for ‘bitch’ at Urban Dictionary didn’t include any gendering in this particular use of the word:
(3) Modern-day servant; A person who performs tasks for another, usually degrading in status.
And it’s true — bitch is applied to both men and women as an insult, in the same way men are quite often called ‘girls’ or ‘grandmas’ as insults (most recently, in my experience in the first Wimpy Kid movie, by the coach, oh no, and also in The Grey, a crappy film which happened to broadcast on TV a few nights ago… I could go on.)
Etymology only takes us so far, I know it. When I tell someone ‘goodbye’ I’m not saying ‘God be with you’, and although ‘bitch’ refers to a FEMALE dog, we’re not talking about dog breeding. But take a look at another of the Urban Dictionary meanings of ‘bitch’ (which isn’t used much Down Under):
(2) Person who rides specifically in the middle of a front-seatting [sic] only car meant for 2 passengers or less [sic].
We don’t need much of an imagination to realise how this meaning came about, with driving historically being a man’s job, with any woman sitting in pillion position.
Bitch is still a gendered insult. Even when applied to men, the insult is still gendered because the main thrust of the insult comes from being a man losing his manhood due to behaving, supposedly, like a girl.
Gendered insults are so prevalent in the culture that they have been completely normalized and people often don’t even notice when they are using them, but “being completely normalized” is not equivalent to “unsexist…”
When Neil Gaiman says ‘George R.R. Martin is not your bitch’ I’m reminded instantly of another, earlier time, in which I squirmed whenever my grandmother would say regularly and without awareness of her own racism, ‘I’m not your little black boy!’ This was one of her regular sayings. She’d come out with it if we asked for a drink of water or something. Not so implicit meaning: Black boys are for doing your jobs.
It also reminds me of signs in workplace kitchens which say, ‘Your mother doesn’t live here.’ Not so implicit reading: Mothers are for tidying kitchens.
Of course we’re supposed to read these things ironically. Ha ha. Except it usually is the mothers doing most of the kitchen work. It is still black people disproportionately employed in low-paid work.
That’s why it’s still not okay for a white author to draw attention to a black author’s race at the National Book Awards. Tried and tested now, thanks Handler.
What about the gendered equivalent of oppressive language? When is that going to be not okay?
There’s a good case to be made for not bothering to wade through difficult fiction, and for me that comes when I’ve lost faith in the author. An unenjoyed book can put you off reading for a long while, whereas a stint of good reading only makes you want to read more.
On the other hand, sometimes you feel obliged to get through books you don’t care for; one of them’s when you have to read for school. The worst personal example I have of required reading is A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. Years later when I joined a book club, a previous designated book had been that one. My fellow book clubbers speak of it in equally unglowing terms, but at least they didn’t have to write a damn essay on it. For that I had to read the damn thing twice. (That’s the book that made me change majors to linguistics rather than the Emperor’s-New-Clothes of English literature.)
Then there are times in your personal reading life when you know you’re reading a good book and that you’d be better off in some nebulous way for having read it, but although you can see it’s good, you just aren’t concentrating on it.
Huckleberry Finn, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man have fallen into that camp for me recently. What to do when a book looks set to give you up rather than the other way round?
1. Write notes as you read and use them as book marks. I tend to write notes on fiction with a large cast of characters. Doesn’t matter how messy they are — the point of writing them is not to keep the paper but to keep the mind organised. You can write notes on a bunch of different things. Maybe on plot points — whatever seems most challenging about the work.
2. Read aloud. Reading aloud is tiring. So I sometimes read the first sentence of each paragraph aloud, then skim the rest of the paragraph until I get back into the story. Not good for public transport and quiet libraries.
3. Get onto Goodreads or Sparksnotes. This spoilers the plot. That’s the downside, but chances are you weren’t really gripped by the plot if you’ve got to this stage. You might remember a couple of years ago some study about how spoilers can increase your enjoyment of a work of fiction. I find spoilers necessary if I’ve just waded through five chapters with eyes-glazed-over and can’t face going back to find out what I didn’t absorb. Internet plot summaries tend to be chronological and you can always read only as far as you’re supposed to have got.
Discrimination Against Men = Offering Women Jobs
If only I could view my friends’ updates and never read a single comment made by their friends. Is there an app for that?
Ah well, back to the comparative sanity of Twitter.
Pulitzer Prize winners may have a reputation for being dense and requiring much work, but if that’s the case, Lonesome Dove is an exception. This is what you’d call ‘super readable’. A page-turner. Which is just as well, because you could build a house with these bricks.
If you would like to know what it feels like to be a cattle man in the Wild West in the mid 1870s, and you don’t like the idea of getting kilt or drinking black coffee for breakfast or hoiking up black phlegm from all the dust or using your saddle for a pillow while sleeping on the hard, cold ground; if you aren’t the owner of an actual time machine, then this is the book for you. McMurtry does an excellent job of detailing the day-to-day realities of being a cowboy in the Wild West.
And few authors would be more qualified. Larry McMurtry’s own father was a cattleman, along with every one of his eight uncles. McMurtry himself obviously absorbed a lot of the dialect, grammar and vocabulary of cattlemen, putting it to good use in his Western novels.
I wouldn’t have called myself a fan of Wild West stories beforehand. The West was a misogynistic setting, not to mention all the atrocities involved in almost wiping out the Native Americans. Cowboy stories can sometimes glamorise and glorify the white man’s domination. Indeed, McMurtry can’t rewrite history, but nor does he glamorise these men. “Would you want to know them?” he said once in an interview, acknowledging that the main characters are emotionally stunted, unreasonable people. Yet they are also rounded. Gus and Call feel like real people. Newt, the ‘Lonesome Dove’ of the title, is the teenage newcomer, and the reader’s introduction to this foreign world.
There is violence in this book, as there was in the Wild West. But there is no attendant glory. Rape scenes are referred to but not described in gory detail. Even the battle scenes which have been extended for dramatic purposes in the mini-series adaptation comprise just a page or two in the book. The vast majority of text describes day-to-day practicalities and conversations and emotional landscapes. Gus drops many funny and quotable one-liners.
The female characters are constrained by the gender rules of their time. Despite this, they are as strong and stoic as the men. As it says on the cover, ‘If you only read one Western novel in your life, read this one.’
Brush-busting – riding through scrub
Duds – clothes
Carrot, bean, dingus, pod, a poke etc – well, you can guess from context.
Cowpie – a dropping of cow dung. McMurtry spells it as a single word, but pronounce it as two.
Crack one’s noggin – to go a bit crazy
Chili-bellies – derogatory term for Mexicans
Chunking varmints – killing animals to eat by throwing rocks at them
Cut out a beef for the cook – to choose a cow from the herd in order to eat
Draw rein – to rein in a horse and make it stop
Harry – to harry an area is to cause trouble; to persistently carry out attacks on (an enemy or an enemy’s territory)
In chunking distance of – near
Lope – the cowboys use this word to mean ‘ride a horse’ somewhere as in ‘lope on over to X’
Lunkhead – a slow-witted person
Nuzzling the jug – having a drink
On the prod – riled up and stirring others up for a fight
Plays out – when a horse ‘plays out’ she has had it, with no energy left, and can die.
Soap bones – a disparaging term for someone’s horse. (They used to make soap from horse fat and glue from the hooves.)
Sour as a clabber – describes Jake’s look. Clabber is a food produced by allowing unpasteurized milk to turn sour at a specific humidity and temperature. Over time, the milk thickens or curdles into a yogurt-like substance with a strong, sour flavor.
Talk guff – guff is ridiculous or insolent talk
Sporting life – sex work
Wet as a muskrat – a large semiaquatic North American rodent with a musky smell, valued for its fur
Adobe – a building made of clay bricks (or the clay, or the bricks). Adobe buildings are common in countries with low rainfall. The clay is basically silt deposited by rivers. The bricks are dried under the sun.
Army trail – these were well-marked, making it possible for even someone with as few trekking skills as Roscoe to make his way between towns.
Barroom – a room where alcoholic drinks are served over a counter. July and Roscoe are warned that in the Wild West they’ll be facing ‘more than a barroom scrape in Arkansas’.
Bluff – a high, steep bank, as by a river or the sea, or beside a ravine or plain; a cliff with a broad face. The men see limestone bluffs to the west as they travel north.
Breastwork – a low temporary defence or parapet. A little fort made by Gus and Pea to protect themselves from Indian arrows
Cistern – When I think of a cistern I think of the toilet, but the cistern is the tank used to store rainwater in Lonesome Dove. Unlike wells, cisterns have waterproof linings. In Lonesome Dove, the well is still being dug, and no one particularly wants to dig it in the heat.
Corral – a pen for livestock, especially cattle or horses, on a farm or ranch. We might just say a paddock, here. Or an enclosure.
Cow trail – What the cowboys call the cattle trail, the path used to transport cows from place to place. You can find old maps with major cattle trails marked on them. The cow trail of this story is the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which is highly significant because this trail is named after the two men who inspired the characters of Gus and Call.
Cutbank – A cut bank, also known as a river cliff or river-cut cliff, is the outside bank of a water channel (stream), which is continually undergoing erosion. So, not quite a ‘cliff’ but just as hazardous to your cattle and horses if you fail to see it coming.
Freshet – the flood of a river from heavy rain or melted snow. Gus and Pea met with this after being surrounded by Indians in Montana.
Gully – A gully is a landform created by running water, eroding sharply into soil, typically on a hillside. Gullies resemble large ditches or small valleys, but are metres to tens of metres in depth and width. Blue Duck is in the habit of retreating to a particular gully when tailed.
Llano – (in South America) a treeless grassy plai. “The llano is a big place.”
Red River – The Red River, or sometimes the Red River of the South, is a major tributary of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers in the southern United States of America. Legendary for drowning cowboys.
The Canadian – shorthand for The Canadian River. The Canadian River is the longest tributary of the Arkansas River. It is about 906 miles (1,458 km) long, starting in Colorado and traveling through New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma. Blue Duck tells Gus that he’d better watch out if he sees him north of The Canadian River.
The Canadian River
Two-bit town – Jake Spoon returns to Lonesome Dove and is disappointed to find it’s still a ‘two-bit town’ (‘missing 15 cents’). ‘Two-bit’ means cheap/worthless and comes from “the value of a quarter of a dollar.” There is no such thing as a single bit, at least not anymore. The now obsolete Spanish dollar comprised eight reals, or eight bits, so a quarter of the dollar equaled two bits. The phrase “two bits” carried over into U.S. usage, though there’s no bit coin in U.S. currency. “Two bits” first appeared in print in English in 1730 (and later developed the figurative sense of “something of small worth or importance”), followed in 1802 by its adjectival relative. These days, the adjective has far surpassed the noun in popularity. (Merriam-Webster)
Windlass – apparatus for moving heavy weights, like the thing over a well which is used to pull up dirt (and presumably water, when it’s dug).
Apache – refers to a number of Native American groups with little political unity.Apachean people formerly ranged over parts of Arizona, Mexico, New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado. In Lonesome Dove the Apache don’t get much of a mention, except to say Call and Gus once thought they’d head ‘out west of the Pesos’, but only the rare settler has challenged the Apache, so there was ‘no need for Rangers’. I wonder why the white men left the Apache alone, even while fighting the Comanche? The Apachean peoples had already been fighting with the Spanish and Mexican peoples for centuries. By the time the American Army thought of fighting them, they were very good fighters and strategists.
Blackfeet – not to be confused with the ‘Blackfoot Confederacy’, of which about 6,000 live today. The Blackfeet Nation are called Pikáni and are mainly in Montana. Both Blackfoot and Blackfeet peoples speak Blackfoot language. Much of their history is similar. They were named ‘blackfeet’ by white settlers, because they did something to the bottom of their moccasins to make them more durable. (Maybe using pine tar or charcoal or something like that.) Or it may have been a reference to the bottoms of their actual feet, which turned black from running barefoot.
Braves – refers to Native American warriors. Today there’s the ‘Atlanta Braves’ baseball team, which is weird because otherwise the term is an insult due to its troubling history as outlined in this novel. (Ditto ‘redskins’.)
Card sharp – a person who uses skill and deception to win at poker or other card games. So, not quite a cheat. A card counter.
Cornshuck mattress – Lorena’s bed in Lonesome Dove is a mattress stuffed with the husks of Indian corn. None too comfortable.
Cowpoke – another word for a cowboy, but used disparagingly. A cowboy has prestige and credibility. A cowpoke tends to be lazy. Shortened also to ‘poke’.
Cowpuncher – yet another word for a cowboy
Comanche – a Plains Indian who inhabited what used to be called ‘Comancheria’. This part of the world is now New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The Comanche were hunter gatherers with a strong horse culture. Gus has killed as many Comanche as any other Ranger in his time. Despite this, he feels some affinity for them, being ‘people of the horse, not of the town’.
Desperado – a desperate or reckless person, especially a criminal.
Farmers – are at the bottom of the pecking order. Cattlemen are a step up from farmers, according to cattlemen. Yet the cattlemen, along with Roscoe and July and Joe stay at farms along their travels, with interesting encounters along the way. I guess the farmers along the Army trail and other established cattle trails were used to overnight guests.
Horse thieves – were a threat to horse traders and rustlers and wranglers, though I can’t personally work out where one begins and the other ends. I suppose a horse thief steals horses that have already been rounded up by the likes of Gus and Call’s team, though it seems Gus refers to himself as a kind of ‘rustler’ (horse thief).
Horse trader – Clara’s husband Bob is a horse trader, and has made a lot of money by providing horses for the army. Gus considers this a dangerous job. “I’ve known horse traders who didn’t last a year.” Jake points out that Gus himself is a horse trader, though technically Gus round up the cattle and sell them on to horse traders. The comment about the danger of horse trading foreshadows the condition in which they will find Bob, who has been kicked in the head by a horse and rendered brain dead. Presumably the job is also dangerous because of the threat of being captured and scalped by Indians.
Horse wrangler – A wrangler is someone employed to handle animals professionally. So he breaks the horses in. A cowboy herds the horses up while himself on horseback.
Kiowa – another Native American tribe. They migrated from western Montana southward into the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the 17th and 18th centuries, and finally into the Southern Plains by the early 19th century. In 1867, the Kiowa moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma.There are about 12,000 left today. Call gets bitten in the back by a ‘Kiowa horse’ and Gus says he should’ve known better than to turn his back on one. This made me wonder if Kiowa horses were especially vicious. But Gus’s comment may have been a comment on the Kiowa people themselves: ‘Typical of all plains Indian peoples the Kiowa were a warrior people that fought frequently with enemies both neighbouring and far beyond their territory. The Kiowa were notable even among plains Indians for their long distance raids, including raids far south into Mexico and north onto the northern plains. Almost all warfare took place while mounted on horses after the introduction of horses into Kiowa society.’ (Wikipedia)
Nester – a squatter who settled on government land, usually to farm
Peon – a Spanish-American day labourer or unskilled farm worker (whose boss is a ‘jefe’). This is how the cowboys refer to the underling Native Americans. (For example the men who work under Blue Duck.)
Pistolero – Thrown around as an insulting term by these American cowboys, a pistolero is a member of an armed band of roving mounted bandits. Comes from Spanish ‘pistola’, of course. (Pistol.)
Posse – originally a body of men summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law. More widely, a group of people with a common occupation. ‘A posse of cowboys’ etc.
Sharpshooter – someone who can shoot a gun very accurately. Gus is the best sharpshooter in the group.
Sioux – Jake says the Sioux and the Cheyenne have got the grass of Montana all to themselves. He wants to go up there, kill them off and reap the financial rewards of claiming Montana for men like him. The Sioux comprise three major divisions based on Siouan dialect and subculture (Santee, Yankton-Yanktonai, and Lakota). Today, the Sioux govern across several reservations, communities, and reserves in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana.
Sodbuster – a farmer or farm worker who ploughs the land. As mentioned throughout Lonesome Dove, cowboys and outlaws pay little respect to farmers.
Stage robbers – people who rob stagecoaches, a type of four-wheeled covered wagon pulled by horses/mules. Stagecoaches were frequent targets for robbers, and it didn’t help that they ran on established routes at predictable times. (The Jarbidge Stage Robbery was the last stage robbery in the Old West. In 1916 a small two horse-driven mail wagon was ambushed on its way to Nevada.)
Vaquero – a horse mounted livestock herder. Basically a cowboy, before American cowboys existed. In fact, the American cowboys learnt much of their craft from the vaqueros, who developed their skills on the Iberian Peninsula, took them to South America and then moved up into America eventually.
Waddie – another slang term for a cowboy, though perhaps McMurtry is using an anachronism with this one. It maybe didn’t come about until the late 1800s. The word is used to describe skinny Jasper Fant. It is generally used affectionately to describe each other.
Wrangler – The person in charge of the remuda (group of horses) is generally known as a wrangler.
Arrows – while the white men used guns, the Indians used both guns (usually old and poorly maintained) and arrows. Sometimes the arrows were poisoned. Native American tribes used venomous reptiles to provide the poisons required. In the Southwest United States, the Gila Monster, being one of the only two venomous lizards.
Beaver hat – impossible to guess what a beaver hat would look like since, apart from being made of beaver, could be a variety of shapes and textures, from fluffy to shiny and smooth.
Bed-ground – the cowboy equivalent of a bedroom for the night. Good cowboys didn’t need much sleep, and had to remain awake on a horse for very long hours. Neither Gus nor Call need much in the way of sleep. The men whose circadian rhythms require more sleep soon get a reputation for being lazy.
Bowie knife – a fixed-blade fighting knife first popularized by James Bowie in the early 19th century.
Brogans – lace up shoes, worn by Louisa. There are both men’s and women’s styles. Louisa wears men’s ones.
Buckboard – a four-wheeled wagon of simple construction meant to be drawn by a horse or other large animal.
Buckshot – coarse lead shot used in shotgun shells
Buffalo chips – dried buffalo dung used as fuel, sometimes even for cooking (which Gus hates)
Buttermilk – both Gus and Call love to drink buttermilk. Originally, buttermilk was a byproduct: the liquid left behind after churning butter out of cream. These days it’s made by culturing milk.
Cap and ball gun – The cap and ball loading method is one of the first and earliest methods of loading a revolver. Samuel Colt created the first revolver in 1836 which relied on loose powder and ball, although this meant that the gun would be slow to load, usually requiring around four minutes, the method was practical and dependable. In the 1870s when the men met Indians using such a gun, this meant the gun was old-fashioned.
Cavalry cap – What Deets wears on his head. Apparently he found it lying around sometime in the 1850s. It’s like a baseball cap that’s kind of squashed down at the front.
Chaps – Leather pants that go over normal trousers to protect the legs when riding through bushy terrain. Chaps look like leather trousers minus the bum and crotch area. Sometimes fringed for decorative purposes.
Danny Glover playing Deets in the miniseries
Cobbler – refers to a variety of dishes, consisting of a fruit or savoury filling poured into a large baking dish and covered with a batter, biscuit, or pie crust before being baked. Po Campo makes the men ‘a sugary cobbler made with dewberries’. (It’s thought that sugary food is good for hangovers.)
Derringer – a small pistol with a large bore, which is very effective at close range
Dewberry – any of a number of trailing brambles (in N. America) with soft prickles and edible fruit resembling the blackberry, which have a dewy white bloom on the skin
Dogie – motherless or neglected calf, easy to round up for even the most hapless cowboy.
Double eagle – a gold coin worth 20 dollars
Dust – it’s hard to imagine how much of it there would have been and how you would be affected in the days before even sunglasses. The men wore bandannas across their mouths to get less mud in their mouths, but the men new to the job found themselves wanting to throw up, there was so much white dust kicked up by the cattle. Men and horses looked white with it.
Fatback – as in ‘biscuits and fatback’. Fat from the upper part of a side of pork, especially when dried and salted in strips. (Apart from the biscuits – scones – these men pretty much at a paleo diet.)
Frock coat – worn by the eccentric entomologist, A frock coat is a man’s coat characterised by a knee-length skirt (often cut just above the knee) all around the base, popular during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Fryback – another food. Eaten with cornbread. I can’t find exactly what it is, though perhaps it’s leftover lard?
Goat-gun – Bolivar holds his goat-gun close when he’s feeling unsure. Gus is worried he’s going to blow up the whole house and everyone with it. I suppose it’s called his ‘goat gun’ because he uses it when he goes rustling goats, but underscores the way these men felt about their weapons — different weapons for different, specific purposes.Jake Spoon is said to have killed the dentist with his ‘buffalo gun’. Same with knives and horses.
Gunplay – the word to describe shoot ups. Gunplay is what the men fear when they go rustling.
Hackamore – Call instructs the boys to make hackamores after they’ve caught a large herd of horses. A hackamore is headgear which does not have a bit. Instead, it has a special type of noseband that works on pressure points on the face, nose, and chin.
Hats – liable to blow off more than one might think.
Henry – a rifle patented in 1860 by a man with the last name of Henry, funnily enough. Cal carries a Henry. Gus favors the Colt Revolver.
Hobble – horses need to be hobbled so they don’t run off. When one of the Irish brothers is startled and drunk he tries to ride off on a hobbled mule. A horse can be hobbled by tying two of its adjacent legs together, or by tying up one leg. I wonder how unpleasant this is for a horse.
Horehound candy – a dark brown hard candy with a distinctly bittersweet taste. It is commonly sold in 5 inch long sticks or lozenges, which are often sugar coated. It’s a folk remedy for helping sore throats and other cold symptoms.
Lariat – a rope used as a lasso or for tethering. Bolivar takes one with him to have a shit among the chaparral. Gus and Call, looking on, can’t work out why he needs a lariat to take a dump.
Lunch – there is none. Call doesn’t like to stop for a midday meal. This makes a hearty breakfast important.
Malaria – Gus called his horse Malaria which makes me wonder the extent of its threat in that area at that time. Malaria was eradicated in America in the 1950s but had been prevalent in earlier eras, particularly before the 1880s. Malaria was a leading cause of death. When it didn’t cause death it seriously undermined public health. (In the southern states, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, 7.8% of deaths in 1850 resulted from malarial fevers.)
Mash – home-distilled alcohol. Probably made with cornmeal, sugar and yeast in boiling water. You can even use sourdough as starter. This ‘mash’ was probably fermented by covering the pot in cheesecloth and storing in a dark place. After a while the top turns brown and foamy. When the sugar has been metabolised by the yeast it turns sour. Sounds disgusting. Prohibition didn’t take place in the US until 1920. The men also drink a lot of whiskey, often sharing a jug on the veranda.
Pallet – a straw mattress, or a crude or makeshift bed
Patching – needed to be done regularly, both on the wagon and on Deets’ quilt pants. I guess this means the men were good with needle and thread.
Plains Indian Sign Language – The Kiowa and other nations picked up sign language from the Mexicans. It’s no longer used much. It originated because each tribe spoke a different language, and they needed to trade to each other and so on. There is mention of sign language in the book. In the TV series, Gus seems to make the Plains Indian sign for ‘good’ as Blue Duck approaches.
Pommel – the highest part of the back of the saddle
Point – referred to positions, like sporting positions, alongside the herd. (Left point, right point etc.) The worst place to be was at the rear, catching all the dust. (The ‘drags’.) This spot was reserved for the lowest ranked in the crew, and in this case, the youngest. Dish is an excellent ‘point man’, keeping point all day, never letting the cattle get out of sight.
Reins – ideally made of plaited horse hair, which is stronger than leather reins.
Root-the-peg – a pocketknife game. Players flip knives to make them stick in the dirt. Another pocketknife game is mumblypeg, also called ‘mumbletypeg’, which is mentioned later in the book. The men use a ‘case knife’ which is term used in the south simply meaning a table knife.
Quirt – Lorena uses a quirt to cut a man’s face. I thought it was a kind of knife but actually it’s a whip. A quirt is a forked type of stock whip which usually has two falls at the end. The falls on a quirt are made of leather, buffalo, or cow hide. The core of the quirt is usually a leather bag filled with lead shot, the main part including the handle is often made from braided rawhide, leather or kangaroo hide and is usually somewhat stiff but flexible.
Rawhide – animal skin that has not been tanned. It’s therefore a much lighter colour than leather, more like parchment. (Think of a dog’s chew toy shaped like a bone like you can buy at the vet. That’s rawhide.) Cowboys used it to make whips because it’s more durable than leather. It’s also used to make drums and lampshades and sometimes shoes.
Rivermen – cause the sheriff in San Antonio grief. These are men who are ‘always drinking, fighting and cutting one another up’. I’m imagining men such as those in Huckleberry Finn, who live on boats, making lives of crime and odd jobs. Others would have made honest careers out of transporting fur and liquor and many other goods of the time by water. And it would have been a physically demanding job.
Rowel – Gus sits on Lorena’s bed and likes to ‘twirl the rowel of his spur’. It seems the ‘spur’ refers to the entire thing that straps to the boot. The ‘rowel’ is the little round thing with spikes that hurts the horses. Gus plays with his spur as if it’s a musical instrument. Some cowboys used to add small metal earring-looking things near their rowels which jangled when they walked. You’ll recognise the sound from cowboy movies or spoofs. These jangly pieces were called ‘jingo bobs’ or ‘jingle bobs’. I suppose those jingo bobs were the cowboy equivalent of no-muffler in the age of the rev-head.
Serape – Bolivar’s garment — a long, blanket-like shawl. Generally brightly coloured and fringed, worn by Mexican men. Bolivar gives one to Newt to use as an actual blanket.
Singing – the only skill those Irish brothers brought was their ability to sing. As Gus said, if there’d been two more of them, they’d have made a fine barbershop quartet. In fact the skill of singing wasn’t entirely useless. Cowboys used to sing overnight to keep the cattle calm. The songs would mask other sounds of the night, which were inclined to put the wind up the cows, in which case they were liable to take off in a panic. As long as the singing continued, the cattle remained calm. They would sing songs such as ‘Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie‘ and probably got mighty sick of the songs they knew, though Irishmen are famous for knowing many, many songs as they come from a strong tradition of singing.
Singletree – These days called simply a ‘tree’ – the top part of a saddle. Made of wood, hence ‘tree’. In the old days saddle trees comprised different parts of wood. Then they were made of a single piece of wood, but for a while the term ‘single tree’ distinguished the two kinds. Peaches gives July’s stepson an old singletree before the two set off after Jake Spoon. I had to ask what the ‘single’ refers to on Quora and here are the answers.
Saddle – the saddle was possibly a cowboy’s most important piece of equipment. He used it not only to ride in but as a pillow at night. He used its horns to tie the end of a lasso. His other equipment hung off it. A saddle was like a pair of boots in that it needed breaking in, and would have moulded itself under specific pairs of buttocks.
Saddle scabbard – where the men keep their rifles. Looks like a scabbard a cowboy would wear on his belt, but this is bigger and hangs off his saddle.
Saddle soap – still used today for keeping leather supple. Comes in a tin like shoe polish and apparently has a distinctive smell.
Sidearm – a weapon worn at a person’s side, such as a pistol or formerly a sword
Six-shooter – a revolver with six chambers
Slicker – a long overcoat. A cowboy slicker would ideally have had three buttons above a split at the back, with the buttons doing up over the man’s backside, making it more practical for sitting astride a horse. Gus wore a yellow slicker.
Trail-broken – once the cattle are trail-broken it’s easier for the cowboys to keep them going where they want them to go.
Walker Colt – The Colt Walker was a single action revolver with a revolving cylinder holding six charges of black powder behind six bullets. It was designed in 1846. Deet carries one of these.
Winchester rifle – Winchester rifles were among the earliest repeating rifles; the Winchester repeater was incredibly popular and is colloquially known as “The Gun that Won the West” for its predominant role in the hands of Western settlers. But Call always uses a Henry, even when his men are all using Winchesters due to their being lighter. Perhaps Call considers a lighter gun a kind of laziness.
Bay horse – Bay is a horse colour. Brown with black hairs in it. (Unlike ‘sorrel’, in which there are no black hairs in the mix.)
Beeves – plural of beef (cows raised to be beef)
Bison – The systematic commercial bison hunting by white hunters in the 19th century nearly ended the bison herds and permanently changed Native American life on the Great Plains. Early American settlers called bison “bufello” due to the similar appearance between bison and buffalo, and the name “buffalo” stuck for the American variety. But buffalo and bison are different animals.You find actual buffalo in Africa and Asia. The American bison has a large shoulder hump and massive head. Buffalo have all but gone from the South but are still plentiful in Yellowstone, according to Jake, at the time of the story. It’s commonly thought that bison were plentiful on the American plains before white men arrived, but in fact the Native Americans themselves kept the populations down. For a while there was a population explosion of bisons, between the events of white men killing a lot of Native Americans, and white men killing a lot of bison.
Bronc – short for bronco, a wild or half-tamed horse of the western US.
Bulls – unlike grizzlies, unbranded bulls were a genuine threat, wandering into camp and mating with the cows, charging at the cattlemen, threatening their horses.
Bullbat – not a bat but a common nighthawk. Comes out at sundown. It is sometimes called a “bull-bat”, due to its “bat-like” flight, and the “bull-like” boom made by its wings as it pulls from a dive.
Buzzards – if cowboys see buzzards in the distance circling around something on the prairie it’s a good sign they’re eating something dead. No wonder buzzards have an ominous undertone in film.
Chaparral – a shrubland/heathland plant community found mainly in California and the North Baja California Peninsula. Shaped by mild, wet winters and hot dry summers with wildfire. Comes from Spanish ‘chaparro’, meaning the Kermes Oak.
Crawdad – dialect for a kind of crayfish. In Australia they’re called ‘yabbies’.
Cottonmouth – a large, dangerous semiaquatic pit viper which inhabits lowland swamps and waterways of the south-eastern US. When threatening it opens its mouth wide to display the white interior. Another danger when crossing rivers and stopping to let horses drink.
Dun horse – a dun horse comes in a variety of colours but its body is lighter than its mane and its legs.
Gant horse – ‘gant’ is also used as a verb as in ‘to gant a horse’. Seems to be a regional variation on ‘gaunt’, and means to make a horse thin by insufficient feeding and a lot of riding/work. Also ‘to gant up’. Seems to be Scottish. (The character of Call was born in Scotland, which causes Gus to accuse him of not being American over breakfast.)
Gelding – a castrated animal, especially a male horse. ‘To geld a horse’ is the verb.
Grizzly bears – the men are scared of bears, perhaps in a pleasantly threatening kind of way, because they’ve never actually seen one down south. There would have been a few back then, sure, but grizzly bears were pretty much wiped out from the plains of America (by men such as these) between 1850 and 1920. Today grizzlies are not found in America outside Alaska and the very top of the Canadian border. The cowboys in LD did eventually meet a grizzly when they got high enough. It proved about an even match for the bull.
Grulla – a type of horse coloration. (Pronounce as if it’s still only Spanish.) The body colour will be smoky or mouse coloured (not a mixture of black and white hairs, but each individual hair is mouse colored). A grulla usually has a dorsal stripe, shoulder striping or shadowing and black leg barring on lower legs. Grullo is used equally.
Horse nickering – Lorena can hear horses nickering from her room, but I had no idea what that actually sounded like. Here’s a YouTube video of someone’s horse nickering. It’s basically an excited grunty sound. People who know horses divide nickers further: There’s the greeting nicker, the courtship nicker and the maternal nicker.
Jackrabbit – a hare found on the prairies and steppes of North America
Lobo wolf – lobo is Spanish and Portugese for wolf, so I guess the men mean wolves from across the border.
Locoweed – (also crazyweed and loco) is a common name in North America for any plant that produces swainsonine, a phytotoxin harmful to livestock. (It looks quite a lot like Paterson’s Curse, which is the equivalent around these parts.)
Mosquitoes – It’s hard to imagine how much of an annoyance these would have been. The mosquitoes are so thick at one stage that if one of the cowboys touched his face he’d end up with a red smear across it. There wasn’t even the benefit of DIMP. I guess a successful cowboy would have had to build up somewhat of a resistance to the bites over time, or else end up covered in huge welts. It’s mentioned that the Irish brothers suffered most, and I’m thinking it’s because they had yet to build some resistance to the local mosquitoes.
Mesquite – the coals of mesquite are used for fires to cook over. Mesquite are trees which grow in hot, dry areas of southern America, as far north as Southern Kansas. The cattle herders do not like mesquite because it’s hard to drive cattle through. They much prefer the prairies.
Mouse snake – the boys are scared even of mouse snakes after one of the crew is killed by a nest of cottonmouths. I wonder if they mean a ‘rat snake’ which is not venomous, changing it to ‘mouse snake’ to make it seem even less harmful.
Nag – an old/worthless horse
Pacing horse – Jake Spoon is known for riding a pacing horse. What is that, exactly? Jake says he prefers pacing horses because they’re ‘easier on the seat’. It’s to do with a horse’s gait: ‘a pacing horse is less stable on uneven ground, which would make it less practical as a cowboy’s horse. A pacing horse lifts the front and back leg on the same side, and rocks side to side as it moves forward. A trotting horse lifts right front/left rear (left front/right rear) together, and it’s a much more even gait for the horse (and the rider). … For some horses, pacing is a fairly natural gait because it’s been bred into them. It is possible that in the Lonesome Dove example, they are not referring to an actual pacing horse, but just any horse with a fancy gait that wasn’t necessary, such as a Tenneesee Walking Horse… they’re giving [Jake] crap because he’s got a fancy-pants horse when any regular horse would have been a more practical choice.’ (MetaFilter) When Gus sees an Indian (Blue Duck) riding a pacing horse he is immediately suspicious. Indians didn’t traditionally ride them, so Blue Duck may have shot a Mexican and taken his pacing horse.
Possum – are mostly eaten by negroes, who catch them. (Negroes also eat turtles, according to the girl who tags along with Roscoe.)
Prickly pear – an annoyance to cowboys who are often getting spiked by it. I wondered if the bush grew pears, at least. Turns out it’s a cactus — the archetypal kind that you would’ve seen on Road Runner etc. Its hairlike prickles easily penetrate the skin. They’re native only to America but have been introduced to other parts of the world, including Australia. The fruit of prickly pears is edible, although it must be peeled carefully to remove the small spines on the outer skin.
Rat Snake – a medium to large constrictor. They eat mainly rodents and birds and are nonvenomous.
Rattlesnakes – are a plenty in Lonesome Dove. Jake Spoon says it’s a pity there’s not a good trade in snake meat, in which case Lonesome Dove would be a lot better off. Unlike rat snakes, rattlesnakes are venomous. Poison gets into you when the snakes bites with its fangs. There was no antivenom when this story was set. Antivenom was originally called ‘antivenin’, and the first published use was in 1895. At first it was just for the Indian cobra. These days, if you got bitten by a rattlesnake you’d need a product called CroFab, the only official treatment in America since the year 2000. Before that there was Crotaline, which had only been around since 1953 anyhow. If you’re bitten by a rattlesnake there’s a chance it’s a ‘dry bite’ — one without venom. But you can also lose a limb or your life, especially if you have an anaphylactic reaction, or are stuck out in the wilderness.
Remuda – a herd of horses from which ranch hands select their mounts. The word is of Spanish derivation, for “change of horses” and is commonly used in the American West.
Shoat – a young pig, especially newly weaned. The shoats (often called pigs by the characters) hang around Lonesome Dove, killing snakes etc. The shoats in Lonesome Dove are often described as having a ‘blue’ coat. This is a black/grey colour which looks bluish under the light.
Snub a horse – an unbroken horse is sometimes tied (snubbed) to a snubbing post so it can’t run around of its own accord. Also called a ‘patience pole’.
Sorrel – Sorrel is a herb, and the flower on its spike is a brown colour, which is used to describe one of the main colours of horse. Brown, for the uninitiated. You’ll have seen plenty of brown horses. Technically that shade is called ‘sorrel’. A sorrel horse has no black hairs.
Steer – a castrated male bull. Steerhide is leather made out of a steer’s skin. The saddler uses strips of it to make rope.
Turtles – can be seen in the rivers. Janey calls them ‘snappers’ and is more afraid of them than of rattle snakes. Roscoe assures her that they may be deadly but they’re slow.
Varmint – an animal considered a pest; specifically : one classed as vermin and unprotected by game law.
Water moccasins – the snake that killed the Irish boy when crossing the first river. Another name for cottonmouth.
Withers – the highest part of a horse’s back, lying at the base of the neck above the shoulders. The height of a horse is measured to the withers.
This story happens 1876-1879 or thereabouts. What was going on in America at this time? According to Call, the big towns have things like ‘oprys and streetcars’, though he personally does not hanker after such things, preferring a comfortable life in the wilderness. For these men, the border is the safest place for them to be, because the local Native Americans have been killed, chased off or mainly subdued. For them, travelling through the Wild West will present a hazard, as this is not the case yet for all of North America.
Of the men in Lonesome Dove, only a few can read at all, and Gus is the best educated of them, misplaced apostrophe notwithstanding. He has a primitive introduction to Greek and Latin, though never finished his education. While much of America is illiterate, the best lettered know not only how to write in English but in Greek and Latin as well.
Deets being black has never had a scrap of education and won’t believe Gus when Gus tells him the world is flat. His view on the world is of the superstitious kind. Others in the group don’t know where Canada is exactly. Even the worldly Gus doesn’t know if the Northern Lights are visible from Montana. Newt thinks ‘the north’ is a place rather than a direction, and has never ridden further than San Antonio.
Although Deets is Call’s most reliable man, Call can’t put a black man in charge of anything. It goes without saying that women of the Wild West have no rights and no say whatsoever, and if they achieve anything in life it’s by persuading a white man to help them out. Gus regularly refers to the men as ‘girls’ in a mildly insulting way, pointing out the gender hierarchy each time.
America is still in its Puritan era. Lorena’s clients don’t even like to take their clothes off most of the time, which is what makes Gus and Jake different. Many are scared away when she undresses herself, which is why she does it.
A lot of men are suffering PTSD after the Civil War. Bill Spettle for example ‘died of drink’. There’s a hole in the male demographic. These lands are missing middle aged men. In fact, the male death rate is still so high that if a man sees a married woman he likes the look of he’s inclined to wait until her husband dies rather than give up hope of romance altogether. Gus is especially prone to this way of thinking.
For an account of a slightly earlier time: Review of Mark M. Smith’s “The Smell of Battle, The Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War”
Big Indian Raid of ’56 – Clara’s parents were killed in this raid in Austin. The Texas–Indian wars were a series of conflicts between settlers in Texas and the Southern Plains Indians. The Comanche fought hard against the settlers. The years 1856–1858 were particularly vicious and bloody. I can’t work out if the ‘big Indian raid of ’56’ refers to a particular actual battle during that time, but the main thing is that the last big battle happened in 1858, with the Battle Of Little Robe Creek. This marked the end of Comancheria.
Little Robe Creek, Oklahoma
How much did Gus pay to have a poke at Lorena that time Jake Spoon was out branding dogies?
So when Lorena charged $2 per session it would cost the modern man $50. Roscoe as Deputy Sheriff was earning about $750/month and I guess that’s how he figured he was poorly paid.
Scalping – Gus lives with the fear of being ‘scalped’. His hair turned white age 30, but he still has a head full of it, which makes him nervous because he guesses it’s attractive to Indians. He doesn’t really want to ride up to Montana in case he’s scalped. What is scalping, and was this really a thing? Indeed, ‘Scalping is the act of cutting or tearing a part of the human scalp, with hair attached, from the head of an enemy.’ Some Native American tribes practised scalping from way back (while others never did). The practice lasted until the end of the 19th century in some cases, and was still going on during the Civil War, which I suppose legitimised Gus’s concern for his head. As usually happens, something as gory as this has a lot of mythology around it, and it would seem the white man took up this practice with creepy gusto. There was already a European tradition of using heads as trophies and proof of bounty hunting; scalps were only a small modification on that. (See: Scalping Fact and Fantasy.)
Summary justice – refers to the trial and punishment of suspected offenders without recourse to a more formal and protracted trial (for example a jury trial) under the legal system. It is also a term sometimes used to describe or justify vigilantism. Call and Gus prefer this kind of ‘justice’ since the only jailers available in the wild west are ‘circuit jailers’, who may or may not turn up to a trail if a criminal is found.
General Lee – Bolivar is under the impression that ‘General Lee freed the slaves.’ Gus points out that it was actually Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves. Robert E. Lee (1807-70) served as a military officer in the U.S. Army, a West Point commandant and the legendary general of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War (1861-65). He’s famous for being bloody-minded, sacrificing lives in battle even while knowing the battle was hopeless. These days Lee is generally considered a hero in the south and a traitor in the north, but mostly as a soldier who fought for a cause he believed in. After he seceded in the war, he did spend the rest of his life fostering relations between the north and the south. (This makes me think he’d have fought just as hard for the opposite side had his birthplace been slightly to the north.)
Goodnight-Loving Cattle Trail – Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving were real men. They are ficionalized in Lonesome Dove by Call and Gus respectively. (Gus = Loving and Call = Goodnight.) The fictional characters are very different in personality and circumstance from the real life men, though the main plot points line up approximately. Also, Gus mentions Charlie Goodnight in his conversation with Blue Duck, so even if these two characters are based on real men, the real men also exist within the story.
Rangers – Gus and Call used to be rangers before they started the Hat Creek Cattle Company and Livery Emporium. But what exactly did rangers do? ‘The Texas Rangers were unofficially created in a call-to-arms written in 1823. Ten years later, on August 10, 1835 Daniel Parker introduced a resolution to the Permanent Council creating a body of rangers to protect the border. The unit was dissolved by the federal authorities during the post–Civil War Reconstruction Era, but was quickly reformed upon the reinstitution of home government. Since 1935, the organization has been a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety; it fulfills the role of Texas’ state bureau of investigation.’ (Wikipedia) The Texas Rangers is the oldest law enforcement in America. Here’s a description of a ranger’s camp life. (Spoiler alert: Not all that romantic.) Gus and Call also shot their fair share of Indians. But the job ‘wore out’. ‘In the south it became mainly a matter of protecting the cattle herds of rich men like Captain King or Shanghai Pierce, both of whome had more cattle than any one man needed. In thenorth, the Army had finally taken the fight against the Comanches away from the Rangers, and had nearly finished it. He and Call, who had no military rank or standing, weren’t welcomed by the Army; with forts all across the northwestern frontier the free-roving Rangers found that they were always interfering with the Army, or else being interfered with. When the Civil War came, the Governor himself called them in and asked them not to go–with so many men gone they needed at least one reliable troop of Rangers to keep the peace on the border.’
The United States from 1868-1876
1. Sit on my arse even more wasn’t actually a plan, but is a plan by default because I have some big phat books on my tbr pile, plus another Goodreads challenge of a book a week (which I blew out of the water last year — yay me!) and to confound matters we are now streaming American Netflix (and for the record, you may think we live in Australia but actually we live in 90210, like every other Australian paying double what Americans pay, plus a proxy fee, to stream American Netflix.)
2. Plant something edible that actually gets to the edible stage and then eat it is something I have already started on. (Doesn’t include parsley.) I squirted a little tomato my mother-in-law gave me into some potting mix*, both my husband and I have remembered to add water (so far) and voila, there are some cute little shoots. This is unbelievably exciting because for a good few years there I thought I couldn’t even grow mint. (And then it miraculously came to life, not quite proving my gardening expertise.) Next challenge will be keeping the little tomatoes away from our six free range chickens, who actually managed to steal a few of my other tomatoes for planting when I inadvertently left them on the ground beside my foot for two seconds. Will need to invest in some shade cloth from Bunnings and persuade my husband to erect some sort of enclosure with chicken wire, because I have tried to lift wooden posts and can’t quite manage it. So doing it myself is out.
*tomato squirted mostly onto my t-shirt but still, success.
3. Continuing to attend tennis, including social tennis in which I am slightly intimidated by having to play with men who are ten years younger than I am, is enough of a goal in its own right without heaping undue pressure on myself to actually improve any. I figure that will continue to happen if I just attend and do a bit of hitting, despite the coach’s dedicated and enthusiastic advice in which he seems to have mistaken me for a young, aspirational protege.
4. Learn to make goddam mayonnaise. How hard can it be? And experiment with nice salads that aren’t just chopped up cabbage mixed with frozen bits of corn. Be more regular about buying bones for soup stock in winter. Eat actual lunch instead of getting hungry around 4 o’clock and ruining appetite for dinner.
5. I am not going to drink coffee. I. am. not. Everyone is sick of hearing about it. “Oh, I thought you gave up coffee.” “Oh, you’re drinking coffee again?” “Do I offer you coffee or not?” Do not offer me the coffee. The reason this is so difficult for me is because my husband has a super-duper coffee machine and I hear that wonderful grinding/steaming sound constantly. The house smells of coffee constantly. And I do really like the taste of coffee. My palpitations disagree.
6. Don’t let the house get cold over winter. Turns out keeping the house warm is more efficient than letting it go stone cold. I was much better about that last winter and plan to continue, even though I feel like I’m babysitting smouldering sticks sometimes. This is a hard resolution to make at the height of summer with RFS helicopters flying overhead, but there you have it.
Even punctuation can get lost in translation. Square brackets can be used simply for emphasis in Japanese, but have here been translated into, what English readers will no doubt recognise as, ‘scare quotes’. The translator should have used a bold font in the English version.
I wonder how long quote* marks have been used in this way? Originally designed to indicate direct speech, they now indicate someone else’s direct speech, even when that someone else isn’t referred to. In other words, by putting quote marks around a word or phrase, you can use it without really owning it, or owning up to it. While ‘scare quotes’ seems to be the phrase which has caught on to describe this phenomenon, I’ve also heard them aptly referred to as the ‘rubber gloves of punctuation’. When I see them used as anything other than a direct quote I imagine the writer holding a putrid item between forefinger and thumb, other hand pinching nose to mask a bad smell.
And this is why we need to be mindful when using them, especially in online debates, which can get heated. When disagreeing with someone’s words, to what extent do we put their ideas in speech marks when disagreeing with them? While we don’t want the ideas of others to mistaken for our own, there’s something downright hostile about donning rubber gloves before daring to pick up your interlocutor’s words. I have at times made the decision not to use scare quotes (for reasons of politeness) and subsequently had phrases not my own mistakenly attributed to me. I have typed scare quotes then removed them because it sounded too hostile. I have had my own words quoted back to me in scare quotes and felt vaguely annoyed about it, in the same way someone tries to imitate something you said by putting on a high-pitched silly voice that sounds nothing like how you actually said it.
The perils of modern punctuation. I blame the Internet. I’m adding it to the list of worries which begins with, ‘Are my sentence-final full-stops on Facebook sounding too abrupt?’
Last week I was in Target buying socks and undies when a woman and her son (about 12) walked past. At least one of them had terrible body odour, but that’s by the by. The more interesting thing is their shared theatrical response to finding a Frozen t-shirt in the boys’ section. The boys’ section, of all places! “That’s ridiculous!” they exclaimed to an audience of me, as if I might join in and tut-tut the shop assistants who obviously messed up when hanging the garments.
If you read my blog you’ll know my position on this.
The world is full of parents who promulgate the idea that stuff with girls in it isn’t for boys. Nothing new there.
What I find more interesting is my daughter’s new lunch bag from Aldi: A choice between Frozen and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (She chose Frozen.) Here’s a picture of the lunch bag:
Don’t know about you, but the ensemble of Olaf between the two female leads reminds me a lot of images we see all the time, like when racing car drivers accept a trophy flanked by two women in bikinis, or B-grade actors when they prepare to get shot by the paparazzi.
Surely, the most sexist, conservative consumer of Frozen merch could be persuaded that the movie is not just for girls. Not only does this lucky man have a blonde on his arm, but the Betty/Veronica duo, from which he can choose.
Yes, I know, I’m imprinting my adult observations of porn culture on top of this children’s film. So I’ll look at it from a child’s perspective. From the most naive position I can imagine, I come to the following conclusion:
In a film about two sisters, a male character must still take centre stage. The male character is the most important, not only in boys’ movies but in girls’ movies, too.
Breaking down with numbers:
Someone elsewhere may have done a breakdown of actual lines of dialogue according to gender, but looking at the raw numbers, this is a common ratio. Whether a box office film is ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’, or more rarely, ‘for both’ there are generally more male characters than female. And yes, I’m including the snowman, and the turtles too, because when animals speak and wear clothes, or are personified and generate audience empathy, they are for all intents and purposes, human.
I doubt the sheer number of male characters in Frozen would convince sexist/conservative anyones that boys may happily wear a Frozen t-shirt without harassment, even if it features just Olaf’s goofy grin, but I’m glad that this time our local Target ran out of room in the ‘girls’ aisle’ and had to spill over into the ‘boys’. I hope that will happen more often.
Based on the novel by Ira Levin (who also wrote other big-name works such as The Stepford Wives), this is a psychological thriller made in 1968 and set in 1966, New York. A young recently married couple move into an apartment where the actor husband will be close to the theatre where he hopes to make it as a big star. His wife, Rosemary, will occupy herself with having babies, just as soon as his career takes off. But this apartment has some very strange neighbours.
There is a scene which is difficult to watch for anyone who is up to speed with rape culture. To say anything more would be a plot spoiler. Rosemary’s reaction after the event is so mild-mannered that there is no catharsis for the viewer. I wanted to see her yell, or say something threatening. Rosemary never yells. Feminists will understand that in some real life cases, yelling is not an option. Threatening is not an option either, when you live in a society where you’re totally reliant upon your husband, and largely responsibile for your marriage working or not.
The young Mia Farrow looks very young indeed, with a childlike body and voice and a way of wishing to please her husband, as many young women would have been in 1966. The good news is that she does undergo a character arc. She realises that she has been trapped in a situation and does her best to escape from it. Whether she does or not is beside the point: Modern viewers who have ever been through the maternity system will probably identify with Rosemary as everyone around her becomes obsessed with the shape of her body, what she’s eating and drinking, and the paternalistic nature of the medical system, in which women are entirely at the mercy of medical professionals, some of whom are still condescendingly reassuring. Rosemary knows something is wrong and no one believes her. The bigger picture is that women have been considered neurotic and emotional for centuries. This film holds a candle to all of those issues, but in the guise of a supernatural thriller.
Yes, because the Bechdel test only requires two women to talk about something other than a man. But apart from one brief conversation in the basement laundry, Rosemary’s talk with other women is all about her impending birth. So if you add the addendum that two women can’t be discussing babies or romance or shoes in order to pass, this doesn’t.
That said, I don’t believe every feminist movie needs to pass the Bechdel test. The whole point of this story is that Rosemary is trapped, with no line to the outside world. Therefore, it’s necessary that she not talk to friends from her former life.
I’ve watched this several times and the more I watch it the more of a feminist story I feel it is. I’d like to know if Ira Levin was conscious of creating a story which so beautifully acts as a metaphor for certain common feelings experienced while pregnant.
The viewer will be left wondering what happens after the story ends, but I hesitate before recommending reading the 1999 sequel, which Levin wrote himself but which is pretty terrible. You’re better off not knowing what happened next.
Everything is foreshadowed and everything ties together thematically in some way.
Humour makes the sadness even sadder.
Audience expectations are constantly thwarted, making every scene an ironic one on some level. Juxtaposition is also heavily used, leading back to the main juxtaposition: life and death. Third time round, this actually feels overdone. We constantly see some horrific death followed by a mundane reality, such as what the characters are having for dinner, or what’s gone wrong with the plumbing.
Audience sympathies really do shift according to character and season. Brenda is an unsympathetic character for the first two seasons and then very much written to be sympathetic, partly by surrounding her with characters even worse than herself (e.g. Margaret Chenoworth) and by nice characters who like her (e.g. Justin).
Nate becomes increasingly unsympathetic. It’s like the writers can’t have both Nate and Brenda sympathetic at the same time.
The children don’t age as they would in real life. Rico’s son is the worst in this regard, as filming time doesn’t mirror narrative time passing. (Played by the actor’s real life son, he’s actually a pretty terrible actor. I wish they’d have found another kid, as all the other child actors are GREAT.)
The actor who played Brenda’s sex worker friend died, in real life, several years after shooting due to an undiagnosed heart problem.
This is the article Alan Poul recommends during the audio commentary of the That’s My Dog episode, and it’s about what viewers should be expected to take from television which pushes the boundaries of genre. Many felt the episode in which David is hijacked by Jake to be unreasonably violent.
Three times was great, and I think I’m finally done. Thanks, SFU!
– Richard Ford, Canada
Next time some woman I hardly know tells me with side-eyes that I Remind her of Her Sister, I’m going to quiz her very carefully.
1. How *exactly* do you think I am like your sister?
2. How would you describe the nature of your relationship with your sister?
And finally, “I’m sure you know your sister a lot better than you think you know me.”
One of those things you swear you’ll say next time and then never actually do, except I might be finally approaching the age when things I mean to say do, indeed, spontaneously spurt forth.
And people complain about getting older.
A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts which included thoughts on the gendered nature of crying. It’s commonly accepted that women cry more than men. Then I happened upon a summary of a scientific study which put the gender difference down to both hormones and social conditioning.
Last night I read the preface to a reprint of a lesser-known Larry McMurtry novel. (I have turned into a bone fide McMurtry fan, and now want to read ALL the books.) If you’ve ever seen the classic film Terms of Endearment you may, like me, have been unaware that this was based on a book, and that Terms of Endearment is only the third instalment of a much bigger, wonderfully capacious ‘Houston series’.
This is from the first in the series, Moving On*, written by McMurtry 18 years after the novel’s initial release:
The knottiest aesthetic problem I fumbled with in Moving On is whether its heroine, Patsy Carpenter, cries too much.
McMurtry explains that 1970s feminists hated Patsy Carpenter, which shocked him greatly because he loved writing her. He also explains:
I might say that I had not even the haziest consciousness of this problem while I was writing the book. Then it was published and I immediately started finding myself locked into arguments with women, all of whom resented Patsy’s tears.
Though the women I was arguing with were often on the verge of tears themselves, and occasionally brimmed over with them, they one and all contended that no woman worthy of respect would cry so much.
… The book was written in the late 60s and set less than a decade earlier. As arguments over Patsy’s tears persisted, I gradually came to regard it as essentially a historical novel…In that simpler era–as I explained to many sceptics–virtually all women had cried virtually all the time. The ones I knew were rarely dry-eyed, so it seemed to me that I was only obeying the severer tenets of realism in having Patsy sob through chapter after chapter.
My editor, Michael Korda, was evidently one of the few people alive in the late sixties whose memory for social and domestic history was as precise as mine. He too remembered a time not so long ago when virtually all women cried all the time. I believe he was as shocked as I was when half the human beings in the Western world treated the book with scorn. And it cannot have helped that the other half of the human beings–i.e., the males–ignored it completely.
1. Is Larry McMurtry’s memory of the 50s accurate? When I watch the odd classic film from the 50s, sure enough the women cry easily, but I always thought this was a theatrical trend rather than a reflection of reality. It’s possible Larry grew up around unusually expressive women. I need to ask some really old people.
2. If women indeed cried all the time all over the place (in 1950s America, at least), is this because women were more unhappy back then? Tears can also be about anger and frustration. Perhaps 1950s women were less able to express these latter emotions in any other way. Tears may have been all they had?
3. Wouldn’t it have been safer if Larry McMurtry, when writing a novel about a woman, had worked with a female editor rather than one named Michael? I have yet to make it past chapter one of this huge novel (and for the record, Patsy has already cried) and I get the feeling this one will be just as good as any of his others, but from a marketing perspective alone, perhaps an effort should be made to mix different genders when working as a team on a book — or on anything, really — simply because a feminist female editor may have forewarned Larry about the crying thing in regards to marketing, even if Larry didn’t have his finger on the political pulse.
4. If women cry far less now, is this a good development? Or should men really be crying a bit more? Might angry-crying be the preferable alternative to violence?
5. If women cry far less now, that means we may cry even less in future. It’s also possible that in some hypothetical future culture, men start to cry more than women. Can we apply this fluidity to other things which are ‘inherent’ to males and females, imagining a vastly different life experience for all genders?
