Vital Friday night facts

[mrissa]

Apparently cilantro believes itself to be a perennial in this climate, or else it reseeded itself. In either case, we have fresh cilantro growing next to the chives that are about to take over our home. Those of you who are considering coming to markgritter's birthday party (Minneapolitans: come! it'll be fun! and if you didn't see the invite on your friendslist, do let me know), please bring something with which to fend off wild chives on your way in.

But I have uprooted many enthusiastic little poplars today, and the laundry is getting done, so I am virtuous tonight. Also we ate up leftovers for lunch and dinner, which surely counts as virtue. Also The Grey Road is 3300 words shorter than it once was, with more to come. Or go, as the case may be.

I'm currently reading another Brother Cadfael mystery, The Potter's Field, after reading some nonfiction art history stuff earlier today. It's sometimes annoying to know enough to argue with the nonfiction I'm reading, but on the other hand it's a comforting feeling not to have to go where someone is trying to lead me by the hand. Because I am ornery and contrary, apparently. (Show of hands who's surprised.)

One of the things I noticed about The Grey Road is that I accepted "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun when I wrote it, and now I...really don't. I accept that some people mean it that way, but I no longer use it. I use plurals a lot more ("when people do X, they Y" rather than "when someone does X, he Ys"), and I use "he or she" to the point where I have to stop and remind myself that it isn't the proper construction for discussing Popes and baseball players. I don't even remember what caused the change. It's just...there. Funny things, brains.

Comments

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>> It's sometimes annoying to know enough to argue with the nonfiction I'm reading, but on the other hand it's a comforting feeling not to have to go where someone is trying to lead me by the hand. <<

I dated a lady once who had me go through her siblings' middle and high school history books to find errors and speculations being presented as facts. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have often told the story of one day in first grade, when I was talking to my mom while she was doing the laundry, and she asked what I'd learned, and I said we'd learned why we fought the Civil War. And she went very, very still, and then she said, "What did they tell you?" And I said, "To free the slaves!" And she sighed very deeply. And then she finished putting stuff in the washer, and we went upstairs and sat at the kitchen table and ate apples with peanut butter, and my history/poli sci/criminal justice triple-major mother explained to my six-year-old self about multiple causes and effects and differences in economic strengths in the Northern and Southern states at the time and Federalism and a dozen other things.

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I heart Cadfael. Also I apparently heart your mother, though I only just discovered this.

pronouns

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I use "they" rather than "he or she". It's part of my colloquial version of English; and it's been used in English that way for centuries, by people who included well-regarded writers.

I don't consider it any less legitimate than singular use of "you."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

She has had many lovable moments, to be sure. I think you will see another of them when I get around to writing about Emma Bull's "Why I Write Fantasy" essay.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

You were lucky--even most adults have never had any experience with an explanation like that. Especially here in the South, where we're still close enough to the war timewise that our grandparents remembered their Confederate veteran grandparents spinning tales of the fighting.

When I was in college (in Virginia), we had a large population of students from New England, and one of the history professors liked to get the students to write down their impressions of what the South was like before the Civil War. The Northern students invariably talked about slavery and oppression and the American version of a Dark Age. The Southern students talked about plantation houses and mint juleps and the American version of a Golden Age. Naturally, both were disabused.

The Southern students had been raised on States Rights--an issue that overall I believe in, but in this case they never saw the period documents that threw slavery into the arguments. The Northern students were raised to believe New England was a shining beacon of freedom that welcomed runaways with open arms, instead of being told that slavery existed in the north until the Revolutionary War (and in some places beyond--not to mention the fact that Washington D.C. had slave auctions until just a few years before the Civil War), about the anti-runaway slave laws, about the race riots in the cities, and how the word "nigger" was almost as common above the Mason-Dixon line as below it. (But then again, as I've mentioned here before, they were also taught that Plymouth Rock was the first permanent English settlement in America.)

Whatever other faults it may have had, I was grateful to the movie "Gangs of New York" for portraying just how racist New York City, as their example, was before the war.

OK, end of tangent. :)

[handworn.livejournal.com]

We in the north are just as close, timewise, and remember it pretty well, too. My great-grandfather told of his grandfather who was in the Civil War.

Certainly many people in the north didn't have much cause to hold up their heads, what with race riots, anti-abolitionist lynchings and the like. But it should be noted that, contrary to the implication of your statement, it was the south that caused slavery to be maintained in Washington, D.C., as explained by William Lee Miller in Arguing About Slavery. John C. Calhoun called slavery in the District "the Thermopylae of southern civilization"-- that is, the furthest outpost which must be held at all costs. Miller's book is a wonderful work, by the way, which deals with the efforts of the south to stifle even the discussion of slavery in the U.S. Congress, and John Quincy Adams and his small band of allies who were bound and determined to defeat them. Extraordinarily readable.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It wasn't about the Civil War. It was about history. My mom was not going to have me learning that everything has one cause and one effect. She felt extremely strongly on that point.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

>>We in the north are just as close, timewise, and remember it pretty well, too. My great-grandfather told of his grandfather who was in the Civil War.<<

I think sometimes I let myself get too inundated by the fact that here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we're surrounded by Confederate flags, reenactors, and such things. I've got family from both sides of the Mason-Dixon, and it's interesting to hear the differences in what each family remembers: In general, the Southern half of my family preserves stories from the Civil War (especially since my g-g-g-grandfather was an aide to Jefferson Davis), while the Northern half harkens back to the American Revolution. (At the time they lived in Pennsylvania.)

There are exceptions, though--once side of my Virginia family tells stories from the Revolution, but they're mostly family gossip. My umpteen-g-grandmother supported the Americans and her husband was a Tory who fought for the Brits, got captured right away, fought for the Americans as a way to stay out of prison, and was thrown out of the house upon arriving home because he'd fought for the Brits. :)

>>as explained by William Lee Miller in Arguing About Slavery.<<

That sounds like an excellent book--I'll have to see if I can pick it up at the local Barnes & Noble, or through interlibrary loan. Thanks for mentioning it.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Ah, got it. I should have before; being a history geek, I love tracing out such things. My most recent exploration was the War of 1812. A lot more intriguing than I thought, and somehow all my life prior I'd missed the fact, for instance, that Washington was burned in retaliation for the Americans burning the Canadian capital, a rather major fact in the whole business.

[(Anonymous)]

I noticed that my feeling on the use of "he" as gender neutral changed shortly after Siri was born. All of the articles I was reading about a new baby seemed to alternate between using he and she to talk about a child of unknow sex. For a while, this bothered me and jilted me out of the reading. After reading things that way for a while, though, it now seems unnatural when authors don't do it. Go figure.

Heathah

[toolittletime.livejournal.com]

Just stopping by to say that phrases like "enthusiastic little poplars" is one of the many reasons I enjoy reading what you write.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Well, the Civil War is obviously closer in time, and was fought when there were ten times as many Americans as during the Revolution, so more people have Civil War ancestors than have Rev-War ancestors. But the Civil War was fought over the meaning of the result of the American Revolution. Were we one country or only a collection of states? Federalism or Anti-federalism? Did we mean it when we said ALL men are created equal? Where's the line to be drawn between revering the past and clinging to it and its mistakes slavishly (no pun intended...originally)?

Also, the Revolution established us as a country, but it didn't change that much. Nowadays, exchanging one set of English-speaking white male leaders for another set of them much closer to home simply doesn't resonate that much, with as much as we take for granted nowadays. It doesn't pluck a chord in the modern American soul, to be poetic about it, the way arguing about who we are does. Brother against brother, too, will always do so, since it's a universal human theme. There are, I understand, English re-enactors who portray Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.