Georgette Heyer and Oliver Sacks, Together Again for the First Time

[mrissa]

I read papersky's Tor.com post on How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Romance when it came out, and I went along with my life, humming and putting in the tiddly-poms as appropriate, but something kept nagging at me. It felt like a familiar experience that she was describing somehow, and yet I never did learn to love romance, so that clearly wasn't it. (I don't scorn romance. I have read a couple of Jennifer Crusies and a lovely pile of Georgette Heyers, and I was glad enough of them, and...yeah, there are probably other examples. But in general it is not the genre for me and a perfectly fine genre for other people and not a fitting subject for invoking taste hierarchies in a nasty sneering way.)

Just now it hit me.

Biology. Romance is like biology.

Well, now it makes sense.

It's the thing people try to shove you into because you're a girl! And you kick and scream and stick your elbows out and they CANNOT MAKE YOU. Nobody did this to me with romance. But oh, did they ever do it with biology. Physics, they said, would be full of boys, and I would probably be uncomfortable. (Have you met me? I said.) Better to pursue biology, which is, I pointed out, full of dead things and things that smell and also plants, which I tend to kill, and so we're back to the dead things. Physics, on the other hand, is full of things I could not possibly kill, except for that one particularly unfortunate lab partner, and why no, there is no reason he was never heard from again, why do you bring that up just now? And math. Physics is satisfyingly full of math. Oh look, they said! You have won ribbons in this science competition which happens to be full of biology because we are foolish and like that sort of thing and wrote it that way, thereby depriving you of a chance to demonstrate physics ability! Have you considered med school? Or biomed research? Due to your overwhelming girly girlitude? And also your being of a girl? And this sweetly pretty ribbon we have given your girly self for this science competition we sucked the physics out of just for spite?

Fie, I said, and also some other words that begin with f.

(Because people sometimes leap to unwarranted conclusions I will note that my parents were kicking and screaming with me NO NO YOU CANNOT MAKE HER SHE DOES NOT WANT TO SHE DOES NOT HAVE TO IT SMELLS FUNNY. They were not the people trying to get me to do biology instead, and nobody should blame them for the injustice of other people.) (The part about it smelling funny was mostly my mom, though. My dad is a chemist, and we all know how much leg they have to stand on in re: sciences that smell funny.) (I kid because I love.) (And also because chemistry smells funny.)

When I hit my mid-20s and nobody was trying to shove me anywhere, I picked up some popular-ish biology, principally starting with neuro-stuff like Oliver Sacks, and it was interesting. Quite interesting, in fact. And now I have stopped worrying and enjoy the worldbuilding in it a great deal.

So Oliver Sacks is exactly like Georgette Heyer, and that can stop bothering at the corner of my brain. So good then. It's settled.

Um. If I sit veryvery still and am veryvery quiet, perhaps nothing in my brain will jar loose a Georgette Heyer-style story with Oliver Sacks-type neuropsychological things in it. Yes? All comments to be posted in a whisper to avert this eventuality. Okay.

You can tell that the work on these two books is going well, because I am in an exceptionally silly mood, but that doesn't mean I don't mean every word of this post, approximately.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Too late. I want you to write that story! (And I loathed biology. Also in my day, it was Girls + Math/Science = Noes! and I was okay with that, because science and stinks, and math made no sense. Yes, I agree I am stupid I said emphatically to teacheral scorn when I flunked Algebra I for the second time, and bombed out of Geometry. [They could make fun of you in class in those days. It was considered good for you.] Yes, I'm stupid! Get me out of math! And I believed it for decades, until I discovered as a teacher that I was merely dyslexic. There was a, actual biological reason I was incapable or seeing the same number, or writing it correctly. So reading biology became interesting, too.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a few interesting conversations with women of your age when I was a teenager, talking about Star Trek: the Next Generation. I would say that Tasha Yar was the character who didn't have a girly job. And they would say, "Beverly Crusher was a doctor," and then we kind of stared at each other. Because I have never had a primary-care doctor who was male. Ever in my entire life. So I think for a lot of women your age, the Girls + Math/science = Noes! thing made being a doctor much more a major deal, but that was invisible to me when I was a teenager and biology had gotten to be the science with women in it.

Interesting where progress comes out unevenly, isn't it?

I get furious at how poorly we teach math and how poorly we understand different ways of learning it.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

So very true--I did not know of any female doctors when I was young, and you can imagine the times when I would have much, much preferred one. (However I will say that no male doctor was ever anything but professional. But still.)

My sister and I are adamant that math-minds should not teach elementary math. She flunked out of high school, later went back in her late thirties to get her equivalency and go to college, convinced that she was the stupid one of the family . . . now she is the top math teacher at her grade school. That is, her kids, whether second grade or fourth, whatever she teaches, consistently score way off the charts in math, and they love it. Because she figures out fun ways to get the ideas across, as all kids have their own way of learning.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that one of the problems is that we have people trying to teach kids math who do not understand math...and trying to teach kids history who do not understand history...and so on. Grade school teaching is a hard job! It is for people who are good at it, not people who can't figure out what else they want to do!

But that doesn't mean that people who believe themselves to be brilliant in whatever subject are going to be the ones who understand that subject. Your sister had to look at things from different angles, so now she has a better understanding of looking at things from different angles and when it might be necessary.

On the other hand, one of the best teachers-of-math I ever knew at whatever level had the same trick and was himself a math-mind originally. But he had that depth of understanding from the other angle. So I don't think he should be banned either. However you get there, as long as you get there.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You are of course correct, and our thing is a generalization. (Borne of the humiliation of those years in the sixties when a math teacher would scribble something on the board--usually with a totally incomprehensible 'short cut' and say, "It's so easy! An idiot can get it if he just pays attention!!"

What's required is not only a thorough understanding of a subject, but the ability to teach. Because sometimes someone knows a subject so thoroughly they either do not know where to begin, or begin at the top, skipping all those necessary steps in between.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When I used to tutor physics, I would get not only the physics majors but also the students who were taking courses for the non-major that didn't involve calculus.

And sometimes they would come into the tutoring room with a question, and I would say, "Just a second, can you give me a minute to think this out?" And I would start to write on the board, and the minute they would see the integral sign, they would panic. "We're not supposed to have to know calculus!" they would say. And I would say, "I know, no, I know. I'm not going to use this to explain to you. But this is how I know how to think about it, and so I have to go the long way around before I can figure out how to think about it without calculus. I promise I will come up with different math in a minute. This is just for me to think."

And eventually I would come up with how to do it with them, without calculus. But an interesting thing happened. After their initial panic, I think they started to feel good about learning how to do problems that were hard enough that the physics majors had to use the harder math to do them. And I think they were seeing--even if they could only follow one way of doing it themselves by the time they were done, they were grasping that there was more than one way to get there. And I think that's pretty important.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. Oh yes indeed. One of the great frustrations was being marked wrong for getting the answer, but not doing it their way, which made no sense.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I am just saying, but eavesdropping on conversations like this is one reason why I like LJ so very much.

(I also like to do it at the dinner table, only there people keep saying "Chaz, you're not saying much. Contribute!", but I'd rather just be listening.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That does make no sense.

I loved my physics teacher, who would have two blanks at the end of the problems on his tests. One was "Answer:" and the other was "Makes sense?" If you wrote something wrong in the first blank and "No" in the second, you got partial credit -- because being able to tell when your answer is way off-base is actually a very useful skill.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

What a great idea!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Srsly. Science is not about looking at one table and ignoring all other knowledge. It's useful to notice that while the density of the thing you've picked up has been calculated to be that of gold, you know that gold is a yellow metal, and what you've got is black and non-metallic. Just for example.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I had a math teacher with a doctorate in the subject, and concluded his doctorate should disqualify him from teaching pre-calculus to high school students. Because he thought this stuff was awesome . . . but had no idea how to teach it to us, nor to make us think it was awesome, too.

So much of it comes down to the teacher, really. My physics teacher? Was fabulous. My biology teacher? . . . well, on the topic of dead things, we were pretty sure she was one, and nobody in the administration had noticed yet.

(True story: I was confused about cells being hypertonic and hypotonic. I knew what the prefixes meant, but didn't know whether hyper, in this case, meant too much water, or too much stuff dissolved in the water. So I went up to the teacher and asked her. "I'm confused. Is it this way or that way?"

Her answer?

"Uh-huh."

With a vague, "my brain has actually begun to liquefy as part of the decomposition process" smile on her face.

IT IS NOT A YES-OR-NO QUESTION. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.)

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

I've actually preferred having female primary-care doctors, but my current clinic (where I've been for many years now) was so insistent on giving me a male doctor that I gave up and went with it. (I'm satisfied with my doctor, btw) (And it says something about what I normally type that so far, I've had to go back and retype "primary-care", because what my fingers move to type is "primary-char")

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I REGRET THAT I FEEL COMPELLED TO SPEAK IN THE OPPOSITE OF A WHISPER AT YOU. Because I think that Heyer!Sacks written by a physicist would be dandy.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

I wants. I wants. I wants.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I think we all wants, doesn't we?

[pameladean]

We does, precious, WE DOES!

P.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

....ooooooh. Now THAT would be a book.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I liked chemistry; physics was too abstract, and Superman had better things to do than to save foolish students who jumped off buildings, although the air hockey setup and the balance scale were fun. Biology was, I agree, full of dead things and things that smelled. The chemistry smells were different, generally less evil than formaldehyde (even butyric acid was less awful than formaldehyde and the whole building didn't smell like that) and nothing was SQUISHY. And many things exploded. Exploding was good.

I wasn't a romance person, or so I thought. I liked fantasy, and science fiction, and history; quest stories were wonderful, worldbuilding was my joy. Georgette Heyer was my exception, because the Regency setting was so alien as to constitute worldbuilding. Plus, many SF fans also loved her, and this caused them to hold Regency balls at conventions, which satisfied my taste for dressing up like a pretty princess. This was all good, and I still identified quite strongly as a SF/fantasy fan. Then I started becoming sufficiently involved to write fanfic.

And, lo and behold, I discovered that what I was writing followed some absolutely classic romance arcs and tropes. It was slash, but I could generally pick out one of the characters holding down a heroine role, and coding female, even when I wasn't writing them with stereotypically feminine traits. When one of your characters winds up in the setting-appropriate equivalent of Snow White's glass coffin, you've got some serious tropes going on. Or there would be a rogue who gets redeemed (although I hope mine were less icky than some of the het genre examples). So... I came to terms with romance as a genre and a template.

What I'm writing now is romance. Historical, m/m turning into m/f/m, full of deliberate subversions of gender expectations even while they outwardly conform... but it's romance and I'll be sending it to certain romance publishers when it's done.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am so glad it's a template that works for you! Possibly even with some chemistry, if you love me? Well, I'm told one can't have everything.

I think that romance has clarified for me that I am interested in established relationships. Which is a good thing to be conscious of, I think, even if it's not always a clear path to getting it.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm not sure about chemistry, precisely, although explosions are well within the scope of the thing. And the gunnery of the time involved plenty of physics, even if arrived at empirically rather than calculated rigorously. Navigation was physics! And trigonometry.

Medicine of the time involves rather GHASTLY biology. And some really ghastly chemistry as well, although since nobody's going to come down with the pox, we can largely avoid the more frightening uses of mercury. Antimonial emetics, while chemistry-based, involve far too many of the icky aspects of biology.

I'm really not sure how the chemistry knowledge of the time would have appeared in the characters' lives. Most of their daily experiences would have fallen into either biology or physics. It's before aniline dyes and sodium bicarbonate, and even slightly before gas streetlamps (they'll come in before the end of the war, if I manage a sequel) so apart from baker's ammonia, which is the cook's province and not theirs, and saltpeter and sulfur for gunpowder, there's just not a lot of chemistry in their lives.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I have somewhere a chemistry book from about your working time period, aimed at gentlemen of leisure who might light to putter about with this fascinating subject at home (it's new and it's hot, thanks to Priestly & Lavoisier). For equipment the suggestions include wine glasses.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

And it's entirely possible that a very minor character I invented does like to putter around with that, although I saw him as more of a botanist; quite possibly also his wife does. Most of what I know about them is that she 's very interested in mathematics and medicine, and he's enough of a botanist that they have a conservatory warm and humid enough to safely shelter a sloth.

Whether any of this will make it into the story, I have NO idea. I just know it's there.

What's the chemistry book called? Maybe if I'm lucky it's on Google Books or the Gutenburg Project.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I'll check and see if I can put my hands on it; a lot of the books are currently in storage.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Established relationships. Yes. Functional ones, particularly. Where people actually love and support each other, and still get to have adventures - together even! This should not be as hard to find as it is.

-Nameseeker

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Now I want a seventeenth-century Superman comic in which one of his nemeses is Isaac Newton constantly doing the sort of physics experimentation that you can only do safely if you happen to have Superman around.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Okay, that's hilarious.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Biology was one of my best science teachers ever (him and the 8th grade Earth Sciences teacher). But biology itself, not so wonderful. Also they wanted us to do nasty things to amphibians (spinal pithed frog), which I did apparently competently but not terribly happily. That lead to my science fair project on acid produced from burning plastics, too.

I still have reading some Heyer on the list, will no doubt get to it some day. I haven't read any genre romance, but two of my very favorite books, A Civil Campaign and Gaudy Night plus Busman's Honeymoon have very large components of romance -- both involving actual adults.

Nobody tried very hard to push me into sports, that I noticed, or into auto mechanics (that one I might have enjoyed learning something about), those being stereotypically male things for my adolescent period. I played ping-pong pretty seriously, but that was close to my limit of interest in sports.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, we did nasty things to frogs, too. Also crawdads and earthworms. I am all in favor of things being hands-on, but this is sort of like "The Cold Equations" in that a certain subset of people tend to push for the nastiest possible hands-on-ness for some reason.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

People who really had to do a lot of that to really learn real new things (which was mostly before I was born I think) may have set the standards in colleges, which then trickled down. Or something. There's been tremendous change in treatment of house pets in my lifetime (and farm animals, more in the other direction). Activism against animal experimentation has been heavy, and even sane people can object to quite a lot of it (spraying oven cleaner in guinea pigs' eyes, say). Those changes have been largely mainstream.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I got discouraged from continuing as an honors math major. By an advisor. Who said "Women do not do well in mathematics." He had to repeat it several times before I got the message.

I referred to it later as having been offered a radical mathectomy.

(My college years were pretty awful.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Women do not do well in mathematics HERE LET ME MAKE SURE THEY DO NOT."

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

One of the better aspects of the Reed Math department was that, despite basically all the professors being dudes (we one female visiting prof my first two years), we actually had and kept a lot of female math majors.

At least part of this was that the Physics Dept. ended up being nearly mono-dudes. But I know several of the women who were in the major with me went on to get at least graduate degrees in the field.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Women tend to be better-represented in math than in physics at nearly any institution these days, but I'm glad that Reed wasn't letting the side down in terms of keeping majors.

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I would have loved honors maths. And likely would've done well. But I was told I was stupid in math, simply because what is easy for lots of people (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) is very hard for me, and what is hard for some people (algebra, geometry, trig, calc, etc.) is easy for me (as long as I have a calculator to do the "easy" stuff). I cannot help it that numbers move around on me and only seem to stay still with variables added in. But according to school that was my fault, and thus I was stupid at maths and not allowed to take physics (which I was highly interested in), or calculus beyond what was mixed in with my other math classes.

Goodness. And I'm not sure where to divide that previous paragraph up (or even if it needs dividing up), despite having a BFA in creative writing. Lovely.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of that out there. It leads to people thinking they would like math majors when in fact they would hate math majors because it is none of the calculation-y stuff they like and are good at.

[redbird]

I've been trying to explain to my trainer at the gym that there's not much connection between the math she'd need for the degree she's looking at (in physical therapy), and the arithmetic that she doesn't find intuitive. I do things like look at the weights she's giving me and saying "that's only 10% more" or "you've taken off a third of it," when she's thinking just in terms of it being a 5- or 10-pound weight, but not proportions. I'm guessing that if she does have to do calculus, they won't be worrying about her ability to multiply fractions, or to look at two numbers and have the ratio jump out at her.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

See also "why I can't type".

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, that's all right; probably you'll pick a line of work where you won't much need it.