I rarely go read Sarah Hoyt's stuff; she's a yeller (that is, she uses ALL CAPS for emphasis quite a lot) and seems
a little crazy. But I happened upon her
latest about how teachers are horrible and we must homeschool to fight the power, and noticed this:
I’ll just say that I once screamed at [her son] Robert for three hours for writing something about half as bad as what I see from college students. He was in third grade. I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better. (More on that later.) He took it to heart and improved.
I'll bet he did. Later:
However, as I’ve learned over the years, my knowledge is often far from complete, and what happens OFFICIALLY is also not what happens in truth. (For instance, if I’d known both the kids were sent to the school psychologist once a week through elementary, to fish for stuff that might be considered “abuse” – probably because Dan and I were troublesome – they would have been out of there so fast that the school’s head would spin. Unfortunately both kids assumed this was “normal” and didn’t tell me till high school. On paper, it never happened.)
They were asking the kids (including the subject of the three-hour tirade) about abuse
every week? I don't know whether this is a genuine reminiscence or the script of a Lars von Trier movie. (I also think the hotel maid Hoyt says short-sheeted their beds every night just wanted them to leave.) Oh also:
While they were sending him to Title One, one of the books confiscated for reading in class was one of our signed Pratchetts (can’t remember which now, but might have been The Color of Magic. I remember because instead of telling me – he wasn’t supposed to take those to school – he broke into the teacher’s closet and stole it back. He was never caught.)
And I thought Lileks' family stories were creepy.
I clicked the link. I am very sorry and will never, ever, do so again. That woman is certifiable--her four year old was reading "the life of ceasar" and the only word he had trouble with was "incest?" The hell she says. The entire school system was putting itself out to push all the kids into remedial classes for the learning impaired. Man, when I think how hard parents have to fight to get their kid an IEP and into special classes I'm just agog at how easy Colorado makes it. The whole story--except for the school psychologist--reeks of crazy. The school was trying to get her and her husband to "sign away parental rights" to their younger child? Puh-fucking-lease. That woman must be seriously and obviously disturbed as a parent. Those kids must have been gibbering lunatics for the social workers to have been called in. Its INCREDIBLY hard to get overworked social workers and teachers to report your entire family--without cause? It doesn't pass the smell test.
ReplyDeleteI clicked the Amazon links for her books expecting to see a publisher like iUniverse listed. Holy God. I knew Baen Books had some maniacs in the catalog, but this gal makes David Weber look sane.
ReplyDeleteMaybe if it was a Fundamentalist Christian school...
ReplyDeleteConfiscating the Pratchett would fit that, too.
Nothin' like a 3 hour scream at a child to make them buck up their ideas. couldn't she have fired a pistol near him to drive home the message?
ReplyDeleteI went to school with bruises, broken bones, and PTSD, among other issues, and I only got asked about abuse maybe four times that I recall, and once that was because I'd been injudiciously venting at a classmate who, it turns out, just wanted to help. (Weeks before graduation, three months before I turned eighteen, me with college acceptance and dorm room number in hand. I'm not kidding. I know she meant well, but let's just wait this out, shall we?)
ReplyDeleteSo the kids are telling her what they think she wants to be outraged to hear, or she's exaggerating wildly, or "troublesome" doesn't begin to cover it. If they were asking more than once a month someone would have been visiting the house to see what was up, I assure you. Unless she lives in, fuck me, Guam, or something, counselors would be required to report that kind of intense and sustained suspicion. Even I ended up talking to CPS once, and my teachers mostly just thought (with some justification) I was clumsy, crazy, and insufficiently risk-averse. Absolutely, someone would have come to inspect the home and lesson plans before letting her home school.
And while we're at it, motel housekeeping is not for the faint of heart. Live crabs in the bathtub? I've seen that. The woman who one night decided to dye her hair blue and then cut it all over the bathroom? Seen that. The family that left the doors open and corn chips all over the bed so we ended up chasing half a dozen juvenile geese out of the room? Been there, cleaned up after that. The couple who thought it was funny to tell me it was fine to clean their room while they had sex? Yeah, that's happened. (Hell, it saved me the two minutes I'd have spent making the bed.) Drunken come-ons and actual sexual harassment? Yep. Teams of soccer camp kids who leave all of their shit everywhere and treat you like you're their court jester? Three years in a row! The woman who sneaked two dogs in, stayed for a month and a half, and I was cleaning fur and piss out of my uniform for weeks? Yeah.
You know why it would never have even occurred to me to short-sheet anyone? Because A) that's an excellent way to get fired, B) you are severely at the mercy of any guest who wants to accuse you of stealing stuff, and C) why the fuck bother? There are lots of ways to fuck with irritating guests without them even realizing it. Giving them the crummy threadbare towels, for example, or the new rough sheets. Using the smelly cleaner to dust the nightstand. Switching the pillows of two annoying guests every day. Pretending you don't speak English. So many opportunities your super will never even notice. Short-sheeting? Her kids silently hate her.
David Weber's also written one or two pretty good books, which I suspect beats her record by one or two.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, fuck parents like her.
ReplyDeleteYeah, she's nuts. And, like a lot of other people who are absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their rants, she ends up telling a lot more about herself and them than she intends to. If you scream at a third grader for three minutes, let alone anywhere near three hours, simply for not writing particularly well, then the school should be investigating you for abuse, because you're abusive. And the kids seem to be learning her obnoxious habits, if her stories are even halfway true. (This, by the way, is her son's LiveJournal; you can judge the quality of writing for yourself, but to me, it's the sort of over-long, meticulously-detailed and relentlessly unfunny stuff that's written by someone who insists on attempting humor without really having a sense of such.) I've seen moms like her; they drive, drive, drive their kids without mercy, and only seem to take their side when someone is either seeming to do their kid wrong or challenging their authority over said kid. The kids often end up being both miserable and arrogant at the same time.
ReplyDeleteThat LiveJournal isn't outrageously bad, but it is pretty... bad. I mean, hey, you like football and you like Lovecraft. Awesome! I completely understand your impulse to merge two seemingly unrelated things that you like in a creative way. That is a completely healthy impulse.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, simply calling a team the Colorado C'thulus does not constitute a joke. Please try again.
I teach legal writing. I get good results by commenting on their papers and showing them good examples of writing and asking them questions to get them to consider other options and think through the implications and weaknesses of their arguments.
ReplyDeleteI have never once considered yelling at them to be a reasonable teaching method.
He was in third grade. I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better. (More on that later.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, so I'm gonna talk about some boring stuff now, but I promise we'll get back to the part where I scream at a small child if ya'll'll just stick with me.
1. I DEMAND your DEFERENCE to me, CHILD, because I don't want you to grow up as a PEASANT in a NEO-FEUDAL REALM.
ReplyDelete2. Yes, lady, the entire school system is set up as an elaborate ruse promising education but actually delivering illiterates into adulthood, all part of THEIR scheming.
3. The Lars von Trier crack works on multiple levels, like how she reminds me of his movie where he equates (his own?) depression with with the earth being destroyed.
This is why Terry Pratchett doesn't give out his address to fans.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you talk to someone and they unload an entirely heartwrenching story of personal loss and betrayal on you. And after a while you deduce that while they may believe their own tale, in essence, they're leaving out some details, fabricating others, and scripting the other "characters" in their narrative in ways that no one actually talks or acts. I imagine conversing with Hoyt would be very much like that.
ReplyDeleteNo, don't. That's how they become parents in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's why teachers are liberals and should not be trusted with our impressionable students. That and talking about "self esteem". Home school! Home school like your republic depends on it! And like your kids won't end up being embarrassed by you and voting against your "family values" anyway!
ReplyDelete(Yes, I know you're teaching actual adults, but I bet you're still a liberal.)
So the kid's writing improved *and* he never used wire hangers again.
ReplyDeleteBaen employs Tom Kratman. There is no bottom.
ReplyDeleteFor comparison, Weber's recent work includes sympathetic portrayals of Third Workd revolutionary movements who are upset at being exploited by major transnational corporations and denied free access to healthcare.
Kratman's recent work includes an attempt to rehabilitate the Waffen SS, whom he believe get a bad rap from history. No bottom, I'm telling you.
Who on earth has the energy to scream at a kid for three hours?
ReplyDeleteThe thing that gets me about the stuff that he writes is how essentially joyless the whole exercise is. It's as if his mom is standing over his shoulder the whole time, loudly insisting that he will fully explore his premises and he will write so many thousand words and he will use proper grammar and spelling at all times... It's a perfect illustration of sci-fi/fantasy hack as stage mom.
ReplyDeleteI was a precocious reader myself, but I wouldn't have read "The Life of Caesar" (I'm guessing that she really means this; so much for Hoyt being a stickler for detail) at that age or anywhere near it, because not only did I not have the necessary knowledge base or personal context at that age to get any real meaning out of it, but also I read for pleasure--if I'd happened to get interested in the subject, I'd read whatever was in the family encyclopedia for a start and then move on to the school and public libraries, probably reading well above my grade level, and I might even pick up something like Lives of the Caesars only to put it down because it was boring.
ReplyDeleteSee also OH JOHN RINGO NO.
ReplyDeleteSomeone who thinks "assault and battery" is for other, lesser beings.
ReplyDeleteThat is exactly what's going on there. 90% of her article is fantasy. Comments are, too.
ReplyDeleteSee, I don't usually count John Ringo, because I'm about 90 percent sure John Ringo is deliberately working a gimmick to troll us all.
ReplyDeletePardon my French, but I call B.S. The elementary schools have not taught whole-word reading strategies exclusively since I learned to read, which was in the early to mid-1970s. By the time my brother came along they had switched to phonics exclusively, and that was three years later. In the 1970s. Now they do a combination. What it sounds like is that her kids were reading -- as in saying the words -- in books far, far above their level of understanding, and the teachers wanted the kids to be able to comprehend what was in the books, not just recite things to impress Mommy and Daddy's friends.
ReplyDeleteAs for the anecdote about the maid, it kind of says something when every single person you meet in life seems to have it in for you, doesn't it? As the self-help books say, who is the person that all your bad relationships have in common? Raising a kindergartener who writes "This is stupid" on his classwork says volumes about the kind of attitudes she's modeling for the kids.
"...he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better."
ReplyDeleteBecause that's who has the power, oomph, and clout in this world: the people who can express themselves well. Well, now you tell me. Last year it was probably, "NO NO NO. The hospital corners only go at the FOOT of the bed. Either learn this, or grow up and be at the mercy of people who know how to make a bed properly."
Yes, lady, the entire school system is set up as an elaborate ruse
ReplyDeletepromising education but actually delivering illiterates into adulthood
Actually that doesn't sound entirely inaccurate.
See, I have warm feelings for Baen Books because they published Lois McMaster Bujold whose Vorkosigan Series beat out Hoyt's for best at some clearly psychologically important moment.
ReplyDeleteI finally swallowed my gorge enough to read down to the part about the Maid. What does this woman not get about large corporations? Does she think they are places where "the maids" make decisions about how they are going to perform the work? If the corporation decides you are going to change 15 1.5 foot tall mattresses in two hours while sanitizing the bathrooms, and put the sheets on a certain way you are absolutely going to do it that way. If she doesn't like it she can switch hotels. Its the American way.
I also find the whole "Its my adopted country and I can piss all over other new immigrants" thing kind of jaw dropping in its contempt for, well, everyone.
Yeah, Weber's politics are pretty batshit, but honestly, reading his nonfiction, you get the impression that he's a pretty decent guy at heart. Which is more than you can say for the vast majority of military sci-fi authors, and way more than you can say for Orson Scott Card.
ReplyDeleteI never made it past the first chapter of my first John Ringo book so this is all a surprise to me. Minus, y'know, the surprise.
ReplyDeleteMostly after the conservatives got done with de-funding education because Those People only need enough education to flip burgers.
ReplyDeleteI call BS on the Pratchett story in that its held up as a sign of the contempt the teachers have for reading. She says the book was confiscated because her child was reading it during class time (e.g. publicly ignoring the tasks at hand and failing to contribute to the class that was actually happening). She then goes on to say that he broke into a locked cabinet and retrieved the book but no one noticed? Again: not believable. But as someone said upthread it does show the kind of person she is: a slavish devotee of her own self importance, teaching her child to be disrespectful to "the help," while considering herself some kind of rebel against illegitimate authority.
ReplyDeleteI think the worst of it, in some ways, is the faux love of history without the faintest idea of what that means. No, sweetie, you can't compare how language was taught in village schools to some fraction of the population to the attempt by an entire modern nation to teach everyone. You have no idea what the proportion of taught to untaught was, or the fall out and failure rate. You also can't compare the role assigned to reading/writing (by the way there was a short period in the future US where women especially were taught sufficient reading skills to read the bible but not writing because writing would encourage them to try to write and have their own ideas) and the fairly elaborate k-8 curriculum of math/science/reading/writing.
I'd also like to call "what the fuck" about the story about getting speech therapy for her kid. In my neck of the woods families with children in private schools routinely pull their children out and send them to public school in order to gain access to the free services of the TOP FUCKING NOTCH reading and language specialists associated with the public school. Private schools will not touch your perfect angel's problems. As for shelling out all that money for a private tutor--because that's what it is--what is she complaining about? IF the colorado public schools wouldnl't pay to bring her substandard child up to standard levels who should pay but her and her husband? Why beg for pity or admiration. Does she think she's not doing something that thousands of other people haven't had to do with just as few resources?
You really can't separate the story of public education in this country from 1) slavery, 2) southern anti-labor policies, 3) desegregation, and now 4) defunding intended to create privatization. Despite all that people have labored to educate children with tremendous love and sincerity, in often difficult situations, for decades. And the thanks they get is to be spat on by an unthinking, historically and culturally illiterate public.
ReplyDeleteOh, don't get me wrong. Baen also publishes some fine, fine authors. I've enjoyed David Drake's yarns for years. Even some of their far-gone wingnuts are fun -- Larry Correia is an off-the-deep-end libertarian gun nut with some terribly comical ideas about taxation (made all the more comical because he works for a defense contractor), but I laughed my ass off all the way through his Monster Hunter International series.
ReplyDeleteThey just seem to be drawing some increasingly peculiar people to the stable over the last several years.
Sorry man, but this kind of stuff drives me insane. Schools are better than they were when we were kids. We note some of the horror stories, for good and bad reasons, but dropout rates have been lowered around the country, more kids are finishing school than ever and testing scores have gone up (for many different reasons). Somerby likes to point this one out: math scores for black kids now, while still lower than whites, are actually on par with what white kids scored during the Clinton years. Now this is all imperfect, and there is always room for improvement, but a lot of the negativity we hear about with public schools is purposely designed to blame unions AND funnel money toward crackpot charter schools and other voucher scams.
ReplyDeleteOf course kids need to write better -- twas always thus. We just don't think that way because, you know, some of them are on our lawns.
When I was about forty I was startled to overhear my mother telling someone that I'd been reading Caesar's War Commentaries at seven. This was true as far as it went; I imagine that she'd forgotten that it was only the conquest of Gaul and not the civil war, and that the delivery vehicle was a "Classics Illustrated" comic. If the poor woman had lived much longer I don't doubt that her account would have had me reading the work in Latin.
ReplyDeletebut a lot of the negativity we hear about with public schools is
ReplyDeletepurposely designed to blame unions AND funnel money toward crackpot
charter schools and other voucher scams.
Naturally, but that doesn't make the negativity untrue, it makes the negative aspects of the education system manufactured. The fact that students are doing well on the standardized tests that pretty much every teach I know despises doesn't really say a lot to me. Those tests are a barrier to real education, but that's part of the point.
I don't like testing either, but the larger point is that the negativity is asymptomatic, actually. The vast, vast majority of public school is mediocre to decent to excellent, but that doesn't sell to the doomsayers, the cons and those committed to the idea that Kids Today are Dumb and Things Today are Awful, so we should homeschool and undercut teacher's union. It's basically -- but not totally -- a lie.
ReplyDeleteWe are uninterested to hear about the successes of public schools, their intrinsic role in the social contract and how they are turning out largely capable kids who are succeeding on the world stage, because that doesn't mollify those who live to bitch about their property taxes and those who want to kill unions with any cudgel they can find.
I agree with all of that, and I realized a few minutes ago that you were probably responding more to the simplistic "hurrr public shoolkids are dumb" nature of my original comment, which is fair. I was kind of joking but it did come across that way.
ReplyDelete"And I thought Lileks' family stories were creepy."
ReplyDeleteNo. Lileks' family stories are wholesome. Haven't you been listening?
Oh, trust me, I get my share of special snowflakes. My comments are usually pretty blunt, because that's what they'll get out in the work world, but I try hard to be fair. I've got one or two that have made me gnash my teeth, but yelling? WTF is the point of that? In all my years of being a lawyer, yelling never made me better. It just gave me PTSD and an alcohol problem.
ReplyDeleteYou also need to keep in mind that the low-cost, high-quality education during the postwar years (well, at least for white kids) was made possible by a) a commitment to the idea that government had a responsibility to provide education; and b) a huge corps of educated women who were shut out of jobs other than nursing or teaching and who could be paid a pittance because of de jure discrimination. Seriously, my mother went to a Catholic women's college in the 50's with only two majors: teaching and nursing.
ReplyDeleteA down vote! I am such a badass.
ReplyDeleteI feel sorry for Card more than anything else. Okay, I know that homophobic statements aren't a sure-fire sign that the speaker is secretly gay themselves. That said, he obviously has some Issues, which I don't see him Dealing With anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteThis: here is where I'm supposed to say something like, "I would like to bear this comment's babies," but let me say more accurately that I actually switched computers because the one I was using (Kindle Fire) didn't let me spell out how much this needs to be said.
ReplyDeleteAnd the allusion to testing by Jay B. was brought up explicitly to make the point that, by any objective standards, [on average] schools actually are quite good.
Another demonstration is that immigrant children perform better in schools than native born children do.
Sorry, but this moaning and groaning about "the dismal state of American education" always ignores the fact that there are other countries in the world with similar problems and similarly nuanced issues involved. Instead, we invariably assume the USA is the only country in the world where parents are busy, children like to do stuff that is not optimal for school performance, and taxpayers hate to pay for the education of other people's children.
She actually strikes me as the sort who would demand military corners.
ReplyDeletewhich was partly bc the shock unca sam got finding out that the chilluns of the depression, along with their bad teeth & rickets, were too unlettered to read the fucking manuals they had to operate their guns/radios/aeromaplanes wo a major remedial dose of the booklarnins -- i have read the original, musty smel ling yellowed editorials freaking the fuck out about this in 1942 with my own two eyes!!
ReplyDelete....i do not think that word means what you think it means....
ReplyDeleteI once screamed at [her son] Robert for three hours for writing something about half as bad as what I see from college students. He was in third grade. I told him unless he improved he would be an illiterate peasant at the mercy of people who could express themselves better.
ReplyDeleteBeing a writer and the son of a college English teacher who was an English major at a very good private university, I think I can say with some authority that this is basically 100 percent wrong, and clearly reflects the experience of someone with no experience in the working world.
If it is not wrong, I would like to know what planet the good writers rule over.
The really horrifying thing is -- she is a TERRIBLE writer. I have read more than a thousand fantasy novels -- probably more like 2,000 -- and I almost never fail to finish a book, but her fantasy about Elizabethan fairies was so unreadable -- well, let's just say that the Mary Sue parts were the good parts. I'm not the least surprised to find out she's a wingnut as well.
ReplyDeleteA veritable Antipodes Wayne LaPierre!
ReplyDeleteDitto for health care--it was the poor health of the draftees for the first world war that created the idea of national public health (plus of course the 1918 influenza epidemic) as a crucial issue of national importance.
ReplyDeleteY U No like Elizabethan Fairies? I recommend Wen Spencer's Tinker for some kickass fairies.
ReplyDeleteMalnutrition in WWII draftees created the school lunch program, too.
ReplyDeleteI am so bored I clicked the livejournal link and I just wanted to say that HJ has really hit the nail on the head with the word "joyless." The writing is so painfully dull, so rote--right down to the commas and the bullet points--that even someone like me who is addicted to the written word found it impossible to do more than skim, more and more rapidly. I read several of his pieces and each is duller than the rest. You can't even tell what he thinks is funny about his parodies--as both sports writing and horror it is so workmanlike and tedious that its like reading the chemical ingredients in a facial creme.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to contrast it with a similar mash up in the current New Yorker. Shouts and Murmers has a really funny two page piece called "Marv Alpert is my therapist" in which they interleave typical sportscaster lingo with a patient's speech. Its funny because its a dead on imitation of a recognizable style (sports talk) and of a scene (the therapist's room).
Oh well.
I too was a precocious reader, and I actually read a book about Caesar far before a normal person would because I wanted to know all about the Gallic wars. Thanks, Asterix the Gaul!
ReplyDeleteMaybe there's more context in her other entries - I didn't really want to read any more after that entry - but she certainly doesn't describe her kids as having that kind of hunger.
Someone who needs medication. (I yelled at my kid once for way too long - not three hours, thank God - but man, I have a hard time forgiving myself that one.)
ReplyDeleteI thought 'this sounds like someone who reads TNC' and then saw the username. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI actually buy the story about the Prachett - the wrinkle is that the teacher saw the kid getting the book out of the cabinet, but didn't say anything because it was the end of the day and they were worried about the kid. Kiddo was so anxious about it that in his mind/memory the cabinet was locked - memory's a tricky thing, and he must've been terrified of his mom being mad (or at least I would be).
ReplyDeleteDon't know it, will check at the library and see if they have it. I'm always up for a good Elizabethan anything; actually, I think that's why I hated Sarah's book so much -- the disappointment. You want a GOOD Elizabethan fantasy, read Elizabeth Marie Pope's wonderful book "The Perilous Gard."
ReplyDeleteI doubt it's a silent hate
ReplyDeleteYou READ the comments? You are way more brave than I am
ReplyDeleteThis. I am amazed at how quickly the schools teach my kids. I went to a school system which was one of the better suburban school districts in my state and my kindergartener is learning to read and write actual sentences....we did not do that. My daughters do chemistry and algebra in junior high, which was a high school thing when I was in school. It's been 30 years, but the pace of learning is so much quicker
ReplyDeleteI don't read TNC very often, actually. And I comment there even less. Good catch though!
ReplyDeleteYes! My daughter is finishing Algebra One in 8th grade, working through the text at her own pace with some friends. They plan on knocking off trig next in the few months before they graduate. As for the reading analysis and writing instruction, its been all over the map and extremely "forgiving" of mistakes in style but overall I think they have learned way more than I did 30 years ago about analysis and writing, and about history and critical thinking. She's still working on capitalization and punctuation but what she produces in those really long sentences is worth reading.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with that--the entire story has a retrojected feel. For one thing the child's "sin" was taking the book to school against his parent's wishes so its clear that, to the extent that the story has passed into family legend, it was very important that her son make up for the sin of bringing the signed copy in by "heroically" rescuing it and defying the authorities his mother so patently despises. I can well believe that when miss mommy screamer screamed at him "where is the signed pratchett" he spun her a marvellous tale about how he triumphed over adversity and got it back for her in order to distract her from her anger.
ReplyDeleteOh.My.God. The Perilous Gard was one of the books I adored in my youth and my oldest daughter (now 16) stumbled on it herself and loved it too. I must recommend a different book to you, Joyce Gard's "The Mermaid's Daughter."http://www.amazon.com/The-mermaids-daughter-Joyce-Gard/dp/0030816041
ReplyDeleteI consider this one of the greatest works of feminine/mystery/history/magical writing of all time. It tells the tale of the last (ish) of the line of women who enact the role of the mother goddess in a small society during the time of the Roman conquest of Britain.
Even horribly abused kids (and I'm not saying the son falls into this category) will shift blame from people other than their parents - it sounds like this story was some time later, but I can totally believe he was more afraid of mom's wrath than anything else, but then mentally rearrange things to make it mentally safer.
ReplyDeleteAdded to my list! Thanks. I've noticed you often reference my favorite books, e.g. Vorkosigan - great minds, etc. !!! :-)
ReplyDelete....i do not think that word means what you think it means....
ReplyDeleteWell, for the record, I do not think that word or any other word means anything at all, not when used by this band of scamps. But it's fun to pretend from time to time that they mean the stuff they write, so that one can "call them on it", I believe the espression is.
Yes! I love the vorkosigan books. Although I never got into the Chalion ones. Did you ever read her book "The Spirit Ring?" its a wonderful riff on the myth of the grateful dead crossed with research on some famous Italian jeweler/sculptor whose name I'm blanking out.
ReplyDeleteOh sure, I always wished she'd write another Spirit Ring book. It's Benvenuto Cellini. I think if you tried the first 2 Chalion books again you might like them better the 2nd time; I certainly did. They are basically riffs on Spain in the 15th century with north turned around to south (and way less bigotry!). Look, this is a Robin-Hood's-barn way to communicate -- I'm at starrise at boondock dot org if you'd like to talk more.
ReplyDeletemy email is busted. when it gets back up I'll try to connect. You can also reach me at aimaiami at comcast dot net
ReplyDeletegotcha. In the meantime let me also recommend some more authors you probably know all about already but ... The Naomi Novik series, "Temeraire" -- Horatio Hornblower with dragons; Elizabeth Moon, space opera with heart, especially the "Heris Serrano" books; Barbara Hambly, pretty much anything!
ReplyDeleteI've read all the Naomi Novik books but I found them petering out towards the end. Great, great idea and lots of wonderful stuff going on but her previous life as a games person seems to have made her reluctant to bring anythign to an end--if you see what I mean. Or fully commit emotionally to her characters. After a while you know its going to be one damned thing after another. Its sort of the Game of Thrones problem, I think. I've readone Elizabeth Moon book and liked it a lot. I'll check out the Heris Serrano books. Couldn't get into Barbara Hambly but I'll give her another look. I have had a hard time finding new people to love recently, bookwise, so I'm grateful for any suggestions. You can write to me at my email but for some reason I can't send anything these days until my tech guy fixes the problem.
ReplyDeleteTsk. "Canadians...they [lurk] among us."
ReplyDeleteIt was neither recent (2005 is recent? Nah.) nor an attempt to "redeem" anyone's honor. I think I know where the line came from, though, a not too very long thread on rpg.net began with that . Here's my explanation. It's long, but if one is really curious, rather than just smugly and stupidly assuming: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?442741-necro-Tell-Me-of-Tom-Kratman
I had a lot of fun with that one.
In any case, redemption of _honor_ had nothing to do with it.