incipit vita nova

That Deaf Dumb and Blind Kid

It's charming and delightful that we anagnoresis and peripetia folk have exposed our children to so much of our music. The young 'uns may not be able to say all the names of the members of the Who or the Stones (humorously - Mick Jagger certainly believes himself to be the most famous man on the planet; Keith Richards may well be aware that most under age 35 know him only as "that guy from Pirates of the Caribbean who looks like Johnny Depp"). 

So ...

That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.

Pinball was one of my favorite "sports" back in the day. Now, a retro cultural artifact, like Pop Rocks, Pogs and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Everyone who views the Temple Grandin movie instantly "gets" the concluding scene, where an adult Temple and her mother attend an autism conference and the audience filled with parents and autistic children, desperate for any type of information and help, are "treated" to an expert who knows nothing of what he speaks, but is blaring at the top of his lungs. An autistic child who is spinning to comfort herself is told to sit down; Temple stands and declares, "No! I think spinning is good!" The audience immediately turns. They gravitate to her like the small fish did to me and Bruce in the Sierras last weekend, rapt, in identical ranks.

So, people "get" this. It's been enough time that autism is known and is beginning to be seen as a different form of perception from the majority of people. The problems experienced by people on the autism spectrum are understood by a plurality of others -- perhaps by now, a majority. And people are even beginning to understand that the gifts of perception of those on the autism spectrum are valuable, needed, necessary, essential. Truly a different ability, not a "disability."

I myself, enjoyed being deaf, dumb and blind. There was a comfort in it. It enabled me to tell myself I was "successful" in the eyes of the world. It facilitated social acceptance. I had an entire mask that pretended to hear and see, and which spoke for me. I have now perhaps 2 million words on this blog; to my satisfaction and no shame, I see the evolution inherent here. And I didn't go from "nowhere" to "somewhere." I was always and ever, writing the glimpses of what I did see, hear and feel.

To see well, one must also be willing to be seen. To hear distinctly, one must also be willing to be heard. To speak truly, one must also be willing to listen.

On these counts, the majority of people fail utterly. Is it their "fault?" No, it is as they are both born and raised. Our culture seeks to dull the natural senses and perception through so many means. It overlays a false sense of universality -- this is why there is such a great rush for dominance in our creative forms. Films don't undertake to tell any type of truth. The majority seek to "deliver" the expected, in order to make as much money as possible. They are carbon copies of carbon copies of carbon copies, so degraded in image that perhaps only the eyes and mouth are visible of the original image.

Food, the same. All these tomatoes must look alike. They must stay good over long truck journeys. They are picked green and "ripened" with gas. They are like red balls of wood. Nobody slices up wood and puts it on their sandwiches and in their salads. All these chips must be the same. All these cookies, as well. This is a bright orange orange, and improbably, even this hardest of fruits to degrade is bland and watery inside. You thought that was a peach? Doesn't it remind you of a breast implant? I can't even comment on the center aisles of the market as I haven't shopped there for years. Chicken tastes like white paste. Hamburger has little flavor; no wonder people want to buy the pre-flavored patties in frozen boxes.

We arrange our gardens in neat rows. We bisect them with concrete paths. Along the path are benches for those too fat, weak or tired to move their legs for longer than a tenth of a mile. We pass from one place to another in large, loud vehicles, which we falsely believe conceal us from those around - our armored cars.

We watch those we falsely believe "lead" us on television. Fox News or MSNBC - two oppositely-charged particles revolving around the same rotten nucleus.

We send our children to school at no younger than 5, and no older than 6, with rare exceptions. All born between certain dates start school at the same time. The younger ones begin with a disadvantage; the older ones an innate advantage in being a bit older, bigger, more mature. Eight months at such a young age is a tremendous difference. In the schoolyard, we smile to see our children emulate chickens in the barnyard, the stronger pecking the weaker, sometimes to death. Chickens appear to have once been dinosaurs, like all birds. They are domesticated into horrible behaviors - only certain breeds could survive even a few days in the wild. Is it the chicken which, trapped in its barnyard, emulates its master? 

What about the fact that we've domesticated ourselves into these same chickens is so difficult to comprehend? 

Out "there," in the land we haven't yet managed to domesticate and remake in our desired form, are the animals which remain. The vast ocean, which some believe may be a living thing, with its own thoughts. The earth itself, which we've changed only an infinitesimal amount despite our desire to believe we rule and conquer all. 

If the chickens leave the barnyard and the people are gone, in ten years' time or less, it will be as if there was no barnyard there at all.

I'm not saying this to be frightening. I'm saying this because there is a choice. It isn't "all or nothing" -- either live like this guy or live like Lady Gaga (who wears makeup to sleep in case she meets the man of her dreams there).

We can all be kind. We can all stop talking for a bit, and listen. I've picked up the "voice" thing for a bit and was at the cafe in San Juan Capistrano yesterday. While most conversations around me were pleasant, if not very deep, one young woman's brutal selfishness inspired me to wish I could leap up and punch her in the face (of course I did not). I think this is the mix. I think the majority of people are well-meaning, but deaf, dumb and blind, wandering through life never really seeing, hearing or feeling anything that's real. This includes other people -- but also the world itself and everything in it. And there are among us the brutes. They may not even realize what they're doing, but in most cases, they absolutely do.

People understand this as the "wolf in sheep's clothing" metaphor. We don't have a myth or legend for what is happening now, and I don't really know a metaphor for "us"/me/we. All I am saying is, open your eyes. Wake up. Listen. Be. Live in the present. You will not get much work done at first, I don't think. But that's fine, since you've been working for the wolf anyway. And that wolf is not, I think, precisely human. You are.

 

 

 

The Crossing

 

For some weeks, I would lie alone in the quiet night, imagining what it would be to take all my walls down. So long they had been up, so tall, broad and strong. Brutal and jagged, as thick as the Berlin Wall. I'd seen a piece of the wall, put up in the center of the Chapman campus like a hideous sculpture. It's not far from Adam Smith's bronze head. Students pass by this monument every day and don't know what the ugly sculpture is, just as they do not know Adam Smith. It's a tall hunk of dirty white concrete topped with twisted rebar, splattered with graffiti, some written in foreign tongues, most written in no language save agony.

 

As Temple Grandin sees her life as a series of doors that she opens and walks through, so too have I seen my life as a series of bridges. One crossed with a path to follow, and then another, and another, and another.

 

And this bridge, the highest, like looking down from the Golden Gate Bridge to the chill gray water below. The drop is some 270 feet, 27 storeys. Of the 2,000 people who've jumped off the bridge since it was built, only 33 have survived, and of those, only a handful have recovered from their injuries.

 

One of the survivors said, "the second my hands and feet left the rail I realized I had made a mistake, I realized how much I needed to live, or didn’t want to die."

 

For me, it is not to jump off the bridge, it is to cross it without falling.

 

And I am so afraid.

 

Once when I was young, my grandmother was in a rare contemplative mood and wished to tell me of the days before my mother died. She often spoke of driving to Los Angeles from Redlands each day to see her. Well now I know such trips; when I was young I could not imagine them. But I was eager for any word about my mother.

 

Nana said she went in one day to find my mother out of bed and lying on the floor beside the window, unable to stand.

 

I immediately saw her, slim, pale arms and legs tangled, fingers reaching for the sunlight.

 

"I was dreaming, mother," she said. "I dreamt I saw the most beautiful color, and I was trying to reach it. But I fell."

 

I asked what the color was, though I already knew. I had dreamt of this color my entire life.

 

Before I could really write, I wrote about it. I told all of our stories mixed into one. Nana pointed out the old copper pot on the patio, and its patina. That was the color. It was, it is, the color of time.

 

These newborn eyes, the color of old copper pots which have been left in the sun. The color of a nugget of turquoise taken straight from the earth, of the sea off Laguna at sunset, of what you are moving toward, of what will be as well as what was. Your eyes. Your child's eyes. Your mother's eyes. Shot with time's arrow, melted, forged into a pot.

 

To say that this is my favorite color is to say that I like to breathe air. It is as much a part of me as my blood, the muscles in my legs, my fingers.

 

I think often of the choice my mother made. I would have made the same choice. Rather than grasp for a few more miserable sick months, just let go. Give my life to my baby.

 

That baby was me.

 

I did make the same choice as was given to me and would make it ten thousand times over. But I had no real risk to my life, and instead it was the baby's life that was taken. In terms of his eyes, they were blue. So blue.

 

Grief is like biting into a crab apple, over and over. Regret is a bittersweet orange bad at the heart. Loneliness the comfort of a rotten, threadbare sheet.

 

And how I have loved such things. My daily bread and meat. They have the comfortable familiarity of Poe lifting Virginia's dusty white bones from her grave, gathering the bone and mold and death in a mad embrace.

 

And ahead, I see the color of time.

 

Yet I remain fearful to leave these things behind. Reluctant to cross the bridge and step into the clear blue sky. I do not wish to fall. But around me, the bridge is crumbling. The walls are cracked.

 

I must cross now; I have no real choice.

 

If I stay on the bridge, I will surely fall, and if I go back, behind the walls, I will die.

 

For some weeks I have been feeling the world around me more than I feel myself. First, while swimming, I felt the water about my body, and my body hardly at all. For the first time, I swam with the water, not fighting it. I went fast. Then walking with Gambit, his eager body pulling forth, I felt the world about my face and arms and hands, the warm sun on my cheeks. Dancing on the patio after Jay Lake died, I said a prayer for his soul and felt the world about my hands, and I let it lift them, then felt it holding my muscles as I danced to the music of the air. The wind rushed through the trees. A bird sang, and then took flight.

 

Then came a bear, his black eyes flashing. A buck chasing a doe through the forest. A doe and her fawn eating calmly, no fear at all.

 

The sun on a high mountain rock, above the world and all its cares.

 

Gently, the sun touches my face, my shoulders, my back, my belly, my breasts. I am as God made me.

 

I already know that I will never truly live if I do not cross these steps. If I do not take his hand, if I do not truly kiss his lips, feel his blood rushing, feel his heart beating, feel his love through his hands. If I do not let this thing happen, if I do not let him feel me –

 

I will be ashes, clay, dust, mold, bones in a grave.

 

And like all things we think to be so difficult at first, the doing is as easy as slipping into warm water.

 

I slip from my skin into his, and he into mine.

 

We are the buck and the doe. We are one under the crystal blue sky. The sun is like fire; our shadows meet. This savage black image, raw as hell, naked on the flat gray rock, is who we are.

 

I have crossed the great divide and have not fallen; he fell a short way, but got up again.

 

Yes, I have been afraid. I have shivered alone in the cold night.

 

But now I am warm and unafraid.

 

And on my finger, because we are people, and people make such things and do such things to remind themselves of eternal truth, things of which the buck and doe and bear have no need, for they never forget how to live, I wear a stone that is, improbably, impossibly, inevitably – the perfect, exact color of time. 

Note: The human magnetic "sixth sense" works only in the range of blue light; i.e. the color of time.

Just Don't Brag About Consuming Spoiled Junk Culture

Today I will be a lion for literature. Lions, by the way, do occasionally eat carrion, but only as a last resort. They prefer fresh protein they hunt themselves.

Today, I saw Igor Goldkind reference this quote, and it struck me so:

"Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." - Terence McKenna

Terence (1946-2000) is referred to as "The Timothy Leary of the 90s."

Because I am a physical empath, I tend to understand things first through physical metaphor. So much of what is provided to us as books, especially fiction, but also a great deal of popular non-fiction, film and television - and indeed, similar media such as games and internet content, is akin to junk/fast food.

I've done a lot of work, not just on a personal level, but also working with businesses and entrepreneurs, in the area of real food. Food is tangible, and it's something (like reading and writing in a population with 100% literacy or nearly-so) that everyone participates in.

When people eat what I call "corporate food" constantly, it dulls their tastebuds. It makes it difficult for them to enjoy real food. I remember a little girl from our neighborhood when Meredith was young. She was raised on a diet of fast food (Del Taco and Taco Bell, mostly) and literally cried when offered celery with peanut butter at our house. She not only gagged when she tried to eat it, it made her cry. And yes, she was already overweight at a very young age.

The addictive, taste-killing properties of "corporate food" is the direct cause of the obesity epidemic and the corresponding epidemic of "diseases of civilization." It's not a proximate cause, it is the cause, because this food inspires addiction and produces corresponding lethargy leading to physical inactivity. There should scarcely be a person alive in America today who does not know that eating fast foods and junk foods today (or simply eating out daily) is bad for their physical health. To say something like hot Cheetos is "food" is like saying Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" video is Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

Well, there are plenty of people around who find Beethoven's 9th "boring." Even some who might prefer the Miley Cyrus auditory and visual object to an actual music video by a singer-songwriter of talent. That "song" took six people to write. If they're so music-impoverished this is their idea of favorite music then ... maybe they want a little harder-core junk food than Flaming Hot Cheetos to eat as well.

This crap pushed out on the public by - one of my favorite terms, and I can't remember who came up with it, but probably Hitchens - it feels like him - "patent leather-haired vulgarians" with nothing but cynical contempt for any and all foolish enough to lap up their beastly products - it's ruined so many people's hearts and minds. There's out and out debasement and corruption, Dorian Gray-style (that's a character from classic literature). Then there's just people who can't read chapters over 500 words in length. Or, who are so accustomed to reading first-person narratives of characters of 16-22 years of age that they can't read anything else. There are people who think all they can read is James Patterson, or David Baldacci or whomever.

Oh why, oh why, is this so? We are told "people don't read any longer." Then we are told they are only interested in these simple, debased products. I'm not writing this to slag on individual authors, but here's a semi-bestseller not of particular note - a wholly commercial project from beginning to end, exploitive of the author who was certainly not capable of writing something worth so many people reading it, and made into an understandably mediocre film by people who probably wished they were dead by the time they were able to wrap these colossal, derivative bores.

Even Mondelez, even Cargill, even PepsiCo (especially PepsiCo) have realized that they must move toward real food if they want to stay in business. Ten years ago, there were 60 free-range, grass fed cattle ranches in North America. Today there are more than 2,000. About half of the produce section in my local Ralphs is organic, and they've opened a locally-sourced section as well. I can buy hormone-free, organic, grass-fed meats in the store. Yes, I pay more, but it's there. A decade ago, there very nearly were no family-owned ranches left. The family-owned farms were nearly gone. Today, they are coming back. Because people are hungry for real food.

I believe people are also hungry for real books. This is what real people tell me. This is what I see, for example, when Igor reads his real poems. I see faces light up, I hear expressions of astonishment and delight.

 

Unlike nearly every other industry, the publishing industry is still caught in the business mentality of the 1950s, when they were thrilled to discover food technology and the ability to turn eating into a giant corporate license to print money as opposed to an activity central to life, family functioning, and social interaction. Please do not tell me that the corporate foodists of the past were unaware that processed cheese by-products were not addictive, and that ag hormones didn't also have their corresponding similar impact on young and growing bodies. They knew. As to whether they knew rampant obesity, heart disease, cancer and other concerns would arise, that I do not know.

Now - for business reasons - big food sees that it must go a different direction. People simply no longer want to kill themselves. They are physically choosing life.

We need to choose the life of the mind as well. Killing our brains, deadening and anesthetising them - it's making all of us Americans stupid. It's turning us into weak sheep who will accept the politics put forth in our country. It's making kids who can't find Italy (the "boot shaped" one) on a map, much less know who Mussolini was.

It's making people who are regular readers brag that they "don't like the classics." Hey, regular readers who "don't like the classics," are you enjoying the Penny Dreadful show? It was made by people who "like the classics." Did you like True Detective? It was made by people interested in a little bit different kind of classic. Imagine what I thought when "The King in Yellow" was brought up on the show. "That can't be," I thought. Oh yes, it could be -- oh yes, it was.

No, it's not all bad. But the vibrancy is coming out of film and TV now. And that is limited. That visual, time-limited medium is brilliant at what it does but it cannot communicate complex emotions, ideas and concepts across time and space.

There were two notable products made in 1605 that are still sold and consumed in the same form as they are today: Don Quixote, and Hamlet. These are today's first loaves of real bread made by wheat and yeast and hand, these are today's version of that first bottle of wine. 

Everyone, everywhere, in all sectors, are hungering for real things. Let's take just that wine, for instance. A vintner will tell you all about the grape, the weather, the soil, the appellation, and every tiny aspect that goes into making fine wine, as opposed to, oh, say Annie Green Springs or Thunderbird. 

Well, what's the word?

The vintner who makes the real wine cares about the person who drinks it, and cares about every single thing in that bottle. 

The writer who makes the real book cares about the person who reads it, and cares about every single word in that text. 

A publisher who has a clue - cares about these same things as well. This cannot be said at present, for the most part. The only way we have to communicate beyond time and space, to tell stories encompassing the imagination, the heart, the mind and the best that is in us -- as Faulkner said, 

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

He was speaking about the Cold War, and the effect it had on young writers, causing them to give up hope and belief in humanity.

I am speaking about our cultural desire to really live, and the war we are presently fighting against those who wish to feast on our own bodies and minds. They wish to take our hard-earned money. Debase our families and daily lives. They have no interest in who we are except as something to support their ravenous lifestyles. They have made us slaves to their needs. 

Do you know what Frederick Douglass did as the most-salient thing in his earning his freedom and being probably the one person who did the most to spur on Emancipation? What thing he did that could have cost him his life? Look him up, by the way. Use your spare brain (Google). 

He taught himself to read and write. It's real. Most of the books that are shoved in your face: are not.

 

 

Pokemon You Choose: Future Visions in the Top Books of 1985-86

I realized something extraordinary while re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold's wonderful Barrayar books. First, these are as fresh today as when they were written nearly 30 years ago. There's not a thing dated about them - fortunately - because they're set in the far future in an imagined space world created by Lois. And yet they're not "strange," weird, or even filled with completely unpro'noun'c'ble names with in'eXp'lic'aa'bl apostrophes.

So amazing.

So Old Lady did some digging. By the way, "Old Lady" is one of my joke nicknames. Gambit and Ollie love "Old Lady" as differentiated from "Young Lady" (Meredith).

Shards of Honor is the first book in the Vorkosigan Saga, and was published in 1986. Seriously, here are two of the reviews - these are pull quotes - from the book's Amazon sales page:

"[Bujold] gives [her] characters enough emotional depth, and enough sense, to raise their story beyond cliché." --Locus

"Bujold has a nice hand with the complications . . . All in all, Shards is a worthy effort, and worth reading for any fan of SF romance." --Analog

Old Lady dug some more and also found these, to be perfectly fair -

"This superb first novel integrates a believable romance into a science fiction tale of adventure and war."
- Booklist

"Possibly the best first novel of the year"
- The Chicago Sun Times

And those second two are fair, and true. But if you only read the first two, you'd think these were "average" books, wouldn't you? Let's look at some of the other big contemporary books of that day.

Ender's Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card. Ender Wiggin is selected as a child able to combat the alien "Buggers" who are about to attack humanity for a third time. The boy believes he is playing a game, only to discover that the game is real, and he's killed, if my memory serves me right, millions of the insectoid aliens.

Ender's Game won the Hugo and Nebula Awards and of course, was recently made into a film, nearly 30 years after its first publication.

"Card has taken the venerable sf concepts of a superman and interstellar war against aliens, and, with superb characterization, pacing and language, combined them into a seamless story of compelling power. This is Card at the height of his very considerable powers—a major sf novel by any reasonable standards."—Booklist

Ender's competition for the Nebula Award included The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood. This equally-famous book, set in the "Republic of Gilead," ostensibly within the borders of the former United States, tells the story of Offred, who is a "handmaid" who's having The Commander (Fred's) baby. Reading this book made me sick to my stomach. I was sickened by finding their illicit (in the bizarre culture proposed) love affair vaguely titillating. It's just sad, depressing, and the theoretical "renaissance" which follows the dark ages portrayed seems poor and thin.

How fascinating - the featured reviews of Canadian author Atwood's work are from Canadian publications ... and they are not so glowing as the Ender's Game reviews (SURPRISE! Not.)

"The most poetically satisfying and intense of all Atwood's novels."-Maclean's

"The Handmaid's Tale is in the honorable tradition of Brave New World and other warnings of dystopia. It's imaginative even audacious, and conveys a chilling sense of fear and menace."-The Globe and Mail

Our other 1986 big books include Greg Bear's Blood Music, in which nanotechnology goes wild and subsumes humanity. Greg Bear is a really great writer and this book is unforgettable. And sad and negative and apocalyptic. His opposing pole, David Brin, published The Postman that year, which is also post-apocalyptic, but posits that things we share - such as mail delivery - may eventually save us all despite ourselves. I remember reading the original Postman novella and thinking, "I love this writer. I love that it's not all doom and gloom and it's about love and hope and courage and humanity."

Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar books are not "space opera" in the denigrating terms that usually implies. I certainly cannot find any random, inexcusable failures in so-called "worldbuilding." They are meticulous in all aspects of "realism," and examine such issues as types of weaponry and their use, including moral and ethical concerns -- like stunners, which do not kill, vs. disruptors, which always kill or gravely disable, creating human "vegetables." 

And in terms of "world," with all the cultures of Bujold's future space society, she brings together two total badasses, Cordelia Naismith (pictured on cover above) and Aral Vorkosigan - worthy of Cordelia's honor and general badassery (which he almost immediately recognizes). These books are extremely well-written, fast-paced, and just in general bigger-ass efforts than any of the more publically-famous and commented on/referenced contemporaneous books I mentioned.

Which of these is not like the others?

• Ender's Game: boy plays killing "game" and actually does kill millions.
• The Handmaid's Tale: enslaved woman trapped in sad, horrible life must have powerful man's baby just to stay alive.
• Blood Music: guy comes up with amazing nanotechnology that could lead to immortality; instead, it swallows everybody and makes us all biosoup.
• Shards of Honor: There's all these planets and a big-ass war brewing, and a powerful woman and man from the opposing sides and very different cultures navigate treacherous situations while falling in love ... eventually to found a dynasty that stands for the future and hope. The woman comes from a democratic, open society; the man from a closed, hierarchical one. 

There's a Facebook Page dedicated to "Cordelia Naismith: Badass" - there are two members at present. Cordelia is a Betan survey ship Commander. Unlike attempts at portraying female commanders in some other media (i.e. Star Trek - who wants that lady captain?) this one works. Probably because Lois McMaster Bujold has something of a clue as to how people actually operate.

This morning, John Kessel commented on Facebook about how he'd been writing for some time about "What it is to be a man" in today's rapidly changing society. Well, I'd rather think it wouldn't be good to be a little boy tricked into killing millions, no matter how satisfying the "game" may seem at the time. Nor do I think it would be very good to be a guy who inadvertently invented nanotechnology that ate everybody alive. Nor would it be good to be The Commander, forced to enslave a woman to carry his child, and screw her behind closed doors while fending off questions from his understandably disgruntled wife.

Aral Vorkosigan's life was neither easy nor pleasant, but at least he could look himself in the mirror each morning and know he was looking on the face of an honorable man. And it happened all by accident, but he found a woman as powerful and honorable as himself in the course of his ... well, in the course of trying to keep his ass alive to fight another day. As to Cordelia, we all wish to find our mate or match, and so she did, although I don't think she ever got to finish her survey.

Is what I am saying clear? There was one book in 1985 that tagged where men and women need to go and can go. Can anybody make the intellectual argument that the machinery of making a child a stone-cold killer, or the machinery of human enslavement, or the deadly potential of out of control "science," is "better" - a better future vision - more "insightful," and better- written and generally all-around better for people to read? This book was not Ender's Game, nor was it The Handmaid's Tale, nor was it Blood Music, nor any of the others.

It wasn't about complaining. It was about doing. It showed how it's done with delight and flair and joy and thrills. This book was Shards of Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

If It's a Trope, It Must be True!

I was a very, very bad Amy at one of my Baycon panels. I think the programming committee saw that I'd checked I'd be willing to be on the "Romance in SF/F" panel and saw "female" and added me to this all-female lineup of diehard romance writers and readers.

Yeah. I wrote one delicate sex scene 10 years ago that I had to ask Ron Collins for help with. Mel in "To Kiss the Star" suffered from unrequited love for John. I only checked the box because I figured Astá and Broos were some type of big couple, like beta readers have been saying, referencing Gone With the Wind.

So I got there late due to being unable to locate the room. Here they are talking about their favorite and/or least-favorite "romance tropes." As seen on the beloved TV Tropes.org website. I think Broos and Astá might have belligerent sexual tension. Except they admit their feelings for each other and they do not actually fight, they just engage in who has the upper hand in each conversation/plot/plan. They're involved in serious life and death business together, not Anime swordplay as depicted on the little illustration for this "trope." The Knight in Sour Armor has a great picture - it's a knight made out of lemons.

I'm willing to say there's no "TV Trope" for Astá. I've been looking and she's not a bitch, she's not snarky, she's not innocent, she's not waiting to be saved; she is a mother and she is in love, and everything she knows and loves is at risk. Yeah, she's damaged, but she's still standing strong. She doesn't let it affect her ability to trust and love.

Not one of these people on the panel could name a strong female heroine. An audience member brought up Honor Harrington, the primary character in the popular books by Baycon Guest of Honor David Weber. Honor's apparently now in a triune marriage with a man and his disabled wife. When I asked if there were any popular romantic couples in which the female was significantly more powerful in practical terms than the male, an audience member suggested "Aurora in Four Voices" by Catherine Asaro, my friend who is one of the New People. Aurora is in love with some slacker artist chap.

So Bad Amy brought up Gone With the Wind. The more I think about this book, the more I realize that it's the great American novel to date. It can stand to War & Peace. It has considerable things in common with that book and the other great Russian novels. Immediately, the moderator said "oh, it's full of tropes." Scarlett's an "ice queen" or "ice bitch" or whatever. Rhett Butler is the "rogue with a heart of gold." And this just torqued me off. 

I've wasted an hour looking through that TV Trope site. And I see NOTHING regarding art or literature on it. It's all stereotypical stuff. Art happens when it transcends stereotypes. Or "tropes." 

Let me put it in a way people can understand since our culture renders most incapable of understanding Scarlett O'Hara as one of the greatest female characters in all literature, for all of her dislikeable qualities. Margaret Mitchell tagged what it was to be a woman of power in a time in which that power was twisted, turned, negative, brutal, damaging. She tagged what my grandmother was; what I very nearly became. What TV Trope is Hamlet?

Is he the "Hamlet" trope? There isn't one. There are superficial, non-comprehending "tropes" applied to Hamlet on this website. I loathe to quote Harold Bloom in a positive manner, but I will. 

"We read to reflect and to be reflected," Bloom said in 2003. "You can make of the play ‘Hamlet' and the protagonist pretty much what you will, whether you are playgoer or reader, critic or director, actor or ideologue; push any stance or quest into it and the drama will illuminate what you have brought with you."

Yes, of course you can write something about the "rogue with a heart of gold" or "the ice queen" or any of the other "tropes" on that website. As audience members pointed out, there is nothing negative inherent in the website or the concept of "tropes." The only negative thing is that they reinforce "the expected."

The expected is something that cannot recognize the great artistic achievement of a book like Gone With the Wind. It is a society incapable of comprehending the individual human nature and dignity of any woman -- and only very seldom, the individual human nature and dignity of any man. Hamlet is one of the best examples of a fully-human character (as Bloom pointed out, and he also included Falstaff) I can think of and he has been around a very, very long time.

Celie, in The Color Purple, is she a trope? Or is she an individual with her own individual human voice and nature? What a nice trope that would be. Raped, semi-literate, abused black girl former slave. Nice trope huh? I recommended Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea to the audience. That book remains barely in print, as do most books written by females in earlier times of the 20th century (and to be fair - a number of excellent books by male authors as well). That book is about Creole Bertha Rochester, the mad woman in the attic from Jane Eyre. The mousy governess who gets the mysterious, tortured, dark and injured hero who is her true love: told as a bad trope ever since Jane Eyre, but in the book, a magnificent story. The vengeful madwoman in the attic who sets the house on fire: trope. Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea - real woman. Oh, and Rochester is a brute. And he really always was, and how insightful of Jean Rhys to understand this. Bertha should never have left her island with him. He brutalized her and drove her to that attic of insanity.

That's a picture of Bertha Rochester - a monster - torturing Jane Eyre in the night, a woodcut from the Fritz Eichenberg-illustrated edition of Jane Eyre. I had this book, and Wuthering Heights, also illustrated by him, while growing up. I read them many times, poring over and over these intense pictures.

The artist writes about real people. Typists write about tropes. Bad, bad Amy.

 

 

 

Are Men or Women Better Writers?

Let's see what the interwebs have to say. The top web result for this query, entitled "In Which These are the 100 Greatest Writers of All Time," has 14 female and 86 male writers on its top ten list, going all the way back to one of the first writers ever known -- a guy who may not even have been real -- Homer. Moving over to Wikipedia, an encyclopedic list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time" proposed by some survey of 100 writers conducted by the Norwegian Book Club, has 10 out of 100 books by 9 female authors (two books by Virginia Woolf are on the list).

In this survey, women require their own list -- otherwise they would barely appear at all. Fifteen of the list of 101 top writers "according to critics" are women. This online public voting website has 15 out of 100 slots devoted to women, but a few different names from other lists, such as J.K. Rowling and Sylvia Plath, do appear.

 

 

 

 

Jane Austen is the only female to appear on the first slide of the Google image scroll for a search for "Greatest Authors of All Time" and "Top Authors of All Time." The scroll does change depending on minor wording changes. Sometimes she's in the middle; other times, she's at the end. Slightly better is womens' placement on Wikipedia's list of 88 bestselling authors: a clean 20% or 22 out of 88 are female, counting Jan Berenstain, half of the Berenstain Bear author team.

This survey of 125 current authors and their "favorite books" turned up an average of two out of ten female authors on each of the "top 10" lists.

Eleven (11) of the top fifty (50) "Greatest Books of All Time" from GreatestBooks.org are written by women, with the usual Jane Austen/Virginia Woolf duplicates, but a welcome surprise in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, possibly the American novel with the greatest scope. Nineteen of 50 books published in the 2000s on the "GreatestBooks.org" website are identified as written by women; the list includes multiple titles from several female authors (Zadie Smith, J.K. Rowling). According to the site's author, "This list is generated from 43 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others." This explanation gives some illumination as to how books few have read appear by huge bestsellers; however, there's no algorithm to excuse a truly horribly-written, conceived, nasty book like Philip Roth's The Human Stain appearing on such a list. Next to The Lovely Bones.

I like to just look in this title at random to pick out choice bits.

There's no accounting for this kind of talent.

Coleman had first seen the woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes before closing time, to get his mail -- a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily associated with the church-ruled, hardworking goodwives who suffered through New England's harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and obedient to it. Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She'd had two years of high school education.

That's the second paragraph of the book. It's told third-hand. In other words, it's not the narrator Zuckerman who's getting it on with Faunia Farley. It's "Coleman Silk," the black literature professor who's passed all his life as white.

Maybe Roth would like to take on a girl who's had a little more than two years of high school education. And who's actually worked for a writing living.

 

 

Age of the Gatekeepers and Special Words: Temple Grandin & Arizona Farmer-Ranchman

I've taught An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks to a number of English classes now, and the last chapter of the book tells the story of his visit with the remarkable Temple Grandin, PhD. During later classes, students watch Temple Grandin (2010) starring Claire Danes.

I've watched this film better than a dozen times, and it never fails to move me. Today, I noticed something different, however. During the last third of the movie, which covers Temple's establishment of her career in animal science (or as pictured charmingly in the film with a human groom and cattle bride, "animal husbandry"). An important door that opened for Temple was a door at the cattle auction, where she followed the good-natured editor of the Arizona Farmer-Ranchman trade publication out of the auction ring to what looks like the upper walkway of a huge barn or stockyard building. Temple is clearly apprehensive and nervous about talking to this nice gentleman. She blurts out her interests in animal studies and observations as quickly as possible (in true autistic, Temple style). He responds, "I'll read anything you send me, Miss Grandin. Here's my card. You address it directly to me" - and walks on. Excited, Temple goes off to compose her first article for the publication.

This is published, and she's later able to show it to her Master's Thesis advisor at Arizona State, along with the preliminary manuscript of her Master's thesis - on "mooing." The anti-female, anti "Temple" (or autism) bias she experiences is crystal-clear throughout this part of the film.

But only today did I see the 19th and 20th century gatekeeper aspect of publishing, and the "You're published, you're special," and "some publications are better than others" sub-theme. Temple is successful and gets business and influences people through her articles in the Arizona Farmer-Ranchman. Her stockyard-smell and clothing gets an upgrade courtesy of a female employee of the publication. The kindly, down to earth editor gives her a can of Arrid Extra-Dry. It's Temple's attitude (fear at approaching the editor) that stood out to me. And then there's Scotty, who spit in Temple's Jell-O as a kid. This snake-eyed snob and his booshy parents aren't interested in Temple's Master of Science in Animal Science degree or her hard-won articles for the Arizona Farmer-Ranchman. I always hated this threesome, and they made Temple cry in frustration later with her mother. If my memory serves me right, Scotty "had an article in New York Magazine." Yes! The same shop that thinks what Harold Bloom allegedly did to Naomi Wolf is more news- and note-worthy than the estimated 10,000 actual rape- and murder victims out there.

When I think about what Temple Grandin has overcome, the doors she has opened for herself and so many others -- the things that I visualize as bridges crossed, they are so numerous that this one seems such a small one in comparison. The whole Temple Grandin movie shows this so eloquently:

• Young Temple was diagnosed with autism, or as the booshy doctor put it "infantile schizophrenia," and her mother's fault. He recommended institutionalization, which her mother thank goodness, refused.
• She was ostracized and teased at school due to her differences -- bullying and torment. "Fish in France!"
• She was a "weirdo" and freak at college due to her squeeze machine and other differences ("Pervert!") - until she became Valedictorian.
• Good Ol' Don at the feedlot where she studied at Arizona State ... total misogynist and jerk of whom his own foreman, an observant man, said, "I'm not even sure old Don can write."
• Multiple challenges from individuals jealous of her talent and ability, looking to take advantage of her autism to set traps and pitfalls for her in her livestock handling projects.
• Getting published, as a young woman in an unconventional-for-women field, especially at the time.

 

Yet snotty Scotty and his appalling parents are instructive. "Scotty's had a piece in New York Magazine." Probably sponsored by Daddy's friend from the Club.

Well jolly good for Scotty.

I feature a salient quote in my talk on the history and future of publishing from the only book editor to ever achieve name recognition: Maxwell Perkins, known as the editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe. Perkins worked for Scribner's & Sons, now Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster today. Perkins became a book editor after graduating from Harvard and going to work for the New York Times because he was drawn to

"one of those professions whose practitioners deal in the most powerful of all commodities — words."

Put "power" and "commodity" in a single equation and you get: no little autistic girls allowed. Cows are dirty. And boring. Scotty's piece that Rex took for New York Magazine is a humorous romp about the history of golf.

Part of Temple's autism, I think, is that while she feels the fear of a prey animal, she doesn't so strongly feel the intimidation, entitlement, denigration or influence of the booshy Scotty's of the world. I think despite the upset portrayed in the film over the snobs at the party, she was fairly quickly able to get over it and get back to her important work, which has since become incredibly important in so many ways.

But here in this small area, in this great film, great real life, and great story, is so much of what is wrong with publishing illustrated. 

There is no chance in Hell that Maxwell Perkins would have taken anything I've ever written seriously. He would likely have not looked at a single word I've written ... someone like me would be right to have been apprehensive or fearful about submitting work to such an editor. He did do Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Marguerite Young. Marguerite Young is barely in print today, with her most recent edition of the book Perkins edited, Miss Macintosh, My Darling available in a 1993 archive edition. I haven't read this book nor any of her other work so I can't say whether or not this is as unjustified as Faulkner being out of print for a decade before his Nobel Prize award. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling is a classic children's book very much in print. But Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings isn't Ernest Hemingway.

I'm not going to say Temple made the kind of progress with the publishing gatekeeper problem as she was able to with autism and animal science. 

Maybe it will take a different type of approach ... because it's as scary to me to be doing what I'm doing as it was to Temple to walk across the threshold of those many, many doors she opened. "A door opened, and I walked through it."

"And I held it open for you," said her kindly friend from the supermarket, whose husband worked at the Abbot slaughterhouse. 

I view them as bridges. I have just begun to ask my friends to help me cross, and themselves, at the same time.

Perkins, I'm coming for YOU. And booshy snake-eyed Scotty, too.

 

 

A Lifetime Later ...

There's some legacy posts on this blog that deal with resumes. My resume's decent. LOL - it's outstanding. It's a lifetime of work starting at age ... seriously I've been working since age 13 - but let's say age 17. If I was a man I'd have been on the cover of Fast Company years ago. I'm not sure they know I've legacy-judged their competitions due to the laziness factor out there ...

As an example, at age 20, I became the first female editor and publisher of the Collage, the 5-college newsmagazine of the Claremont Colleges. I had 25 employees and we ran 40,000 copies a week and were intaking at least $40,000 to $50,000 in ad revenue weekly. I learned a lot of lessons then; right now - what stands out the most is that "people falsify their timesheets."

And now at age 52, I'm officially an enterprise level entrepreneur. Never could figure how to make Pacific Human Capital a more than small enterprise ... but Chameleon is a different animal.

Chameleon Publishing's funding offering is just about ready. I completed the revised financial projections first thing this morning, after incorporating lessons learned from our market comps.

Had an interesting time the other day reading J.A. Konrath's much-read blog. Pretty much everything I have come to learn is covered by Konrath -- with one exception. Konrath has successfully done it for himself. As I'm constitutionally incapable of doing that, I'm doing it for everyone else.

Now as to what will happen - I don't know. But I am in this for the long-haul. I am in this for sustainable operations for decades to come. Maybe 170 years from now, when authorship is a recognized profession and rewarded beyond anyone's wildest dreams of today -- when this renaissance is long done and yet another begun -- my little old old-fashioned picture, or perhaps a picture of Meredith confused with myself, will be viewed by young people of that day. They will think, "I can do better." 

And that - is the whole point. The enchilada. What we are all put here to do.

On Writing: My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Mindy Klasky, my fellow Book View Cafe member and gifted writer, who invited me on this blog hop about what we're working on! Mindy's writing a hot series of nine romance books about the Diamond Brides ... they're the wives of the players on the fictional Raleigh Rockets baseball team. I'm thinking it's all about the different positions that they play. Perfect Pitch and Catching Hell are the first two books, and are already available. The other books will be released on the first Sunday of the month until November.

1) What am I working on?

I'm finishing a sci-fi story called "The Ruined Gods," about Roger and Rikki, a couple in the near future who've become aware of other lives they've led in other times and places. Not "past lives," but simultaneous lives in alternate universes. This lifetime is by far the best they know of. In all of their other lives in other universes, they lose each other in brutal, tragic ways. In this future world, medicine is so advanced people live lives twice as long as we do now. People's memories are also preserved as a form of "immortality." Not only have Roger and Rikki been having these waking dreams of the other lives -- in this life, Rikki is going to lose Roger, because he has a genetic abnormality that means most medical treatments won't work on him any longer. He is genuinely dying. Roger and Rikki believe that if they die together "for real" in this universe, they'll be together for real - in eternity. They'll never die and lose each other again.

Roger and Rikki are like this hot couple I know ... LOL. Broos and Astá book dinner reservations as Roger and Rikki Black, realtors from the Hamptons. 

I'm also working on the second book in my fantasy series, Like Fire, Like Light, and Like Life. There's kind of a hot couple in these stories too -- Broos and Astá. They've got a theme song, by Lorde.

This is a fast-paced fantasy with action and romance about ... well heck. It's about Astá fighting to save her people and all she knows and loves. And it's about Broos and Astá trying to finally stop fighting and be together.

There's a magical creature, Shula the Salamander, who only talks to Astá -- until the end of Like Fire. Then Shula has decided she may like Astá's daughter Meria better. Meria's a little like a girl that I know with dark red hair.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Like Fire is in the beta read phase right now and I am hearing "It's like Harry Potter crossed with Gone With the Wind." Like Gone With the Wind, it takes place during a huge war, one in which brothers do fight brothers and cousins fight cousins. It has magic and wonder, and deep, true love. Two brutally damaged people fighting to save the lives of all they know and love.

There are no current high profile fantasy books about a strong female leader like Astá, nor about a family that's predominately female, nor a culture that has a female-centered religion. And it's not a European-inspired medievalesque fantasy. More like early Renaissance and it's an invented fantasy world, the Wide World.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I finally decided to write not only about "what I know," but to put characters in my books and stories inspired by the real people I know and love. This has set my writing on fire. It's a joy to write. The stories write themselves.

Now there are two things going on. First, I write both science fiction and fantasy. Like Fire is somewhat of a hybrid in that the world has its own logic, and Astá's people are also developing technology of an early Renaissance nature and considering the difference between magic - which is what the Wide World has sought for so long, and which they fight over - and the things people are able to make. Things like dragon flyers and Hammerstes (ballistas). And things that can heal and help people. Like Fire and the other books in the series are about finding peace and love in a world filled with brutal violence, a world that has not changed for generations but is now changing fast, and about passing the torch to future generations.

Now that I've been writing these books, I find that science fiction has a certain coldness and calculation to it. It's not that I'm not interested in this type of speculation any longer. I just sold a story of that nature to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, about a "maker" who invents a machine that will stop time, based on current physics research into the amplituhedron. It's just that I love the heat of the fantasy and the emotional intensity. Like Light, Like Fire, Like Life.

Let me talk a little bit about righteous rage, as well. I have been rage-filled since age 21 (and if you know me, you know why). Prior to that, I was gentle, shy, affectionate and trusting. I'd been traumatized a great deal but I was still a young, trusting and naive person. My first anagnorisis and peripetia was of a similar nature to Percy Julian's -- an innocent and sweet 12 year old boy coming upon a young black man lynched in the forest on his grandfather's farm. 

My rage doesn't rule me and hasn't for years. But when I want to bring it into play, it is always there with me. So when I'm writing about brutality and violence, I am fully-engaged. I will never shy from that. Nor will I shy from any other deep emotion. This, to me, is what writing is about. I suppose it's why I am so engaged with the fantasy books. Because that heat and passion is to me, something of a deeper nature and more true than a more intellectually-oriented science fiction story.

4) How does your writing process work?

Every time I think about this, I get a mental picture of the old commercial I grew up with: Orson Welles saying "We will sell no wine before its time."

 

Oh that devilish expression!

I don't start work until I'm ready. I need to know at least the beginning and end of the story in my mind, and yes this includes Like Fire, Like Light and Like Life. I write about 5,000 words a day; however, this includes non-fiction, of which I write a great deal and have for years. 

My best writing time is the mornings, but the way my life is, with so many clients and founding Chameleon, I write when I can, which includes evenings and at night. 

I'm not an "unexamined" writer. Oh, I love that. Let me examine that. I am an examined writer. By that, I mean that while I've always written on instinct, I have control on a word, sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, structure and book level. I know exactly what it is I did when I finally decided I could best-tell a story by including characters inspired by the real people in my life.

I estimate I've published about a million words of fiction, countless words of non-fiction -- and if I want to do a certain project, let's say, a 5,000 word science fiction short story, I know exactly how much time it will take and exactly how to do it. Now I know how long novels will take. I can't write at the pace Mindy describes because I need to be "dialed in" to do it right (i.e. know what I'm doing, engaged fully with the work). About 1,500 to 2,000 words a day with a novel allows me to do my best work.

Next week visit Jennifer Stevenson - creator of someone I wished I knew - Sex demon Lord Randy! The real Randy!

And Patricia Pooks Burroughs, author of This Crumbling Pageant and many other awesome books and screenplays. Pooks listens to my peripatetic love life ... 

And my bestest writing friend, great sci-fi author Ron Collins. Because love is real, Ron is now a full-time writer and has founded his own publishing company!

 

 

 

 

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The Anagnorisis and Peripetia Generation

Anagnorisis: or the journey from ignorance to knowledge. Peripetia: the moment, in Greek tragedy - an awful one - of realization of a life-changing truth. I don't think in today's world that peripetia need be tragic or horrible at all. It can be wonderful, transformative, life-changing.

For Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe, this moment came with two lamb testicles hanging on his chin.

 

So I just realized Mike Rowe, whom I think is about the best thing since sliced bread, is a whole week younger than me.

I used to say we were the "Rehab Generation." Now I think - we're the anagnorisis and peripetia generation. We are the ones who are coming to realize, all across the world, that so many things we were taught growing up are untrue. The list is nearly endless. This journey of knowledge and enlightment is exploding all over the world.

Mike Rowe's incredible TED talk tells the story of how, after many Dirty Jobs shows, he went to a sheep ranch in the Rockies. There, with the sheep rancher and his wife, his job was to remove the tails and castrate about a hundred lambs. This, on the farm, involved cutting the tail off with a sharp knife and biting off the lamb's testicles. With the mouth. Teeth. Then spitting them into a bucket. Mike seems to have held his first pair on his chin for a bit, however.

In charming Mike Rowe fashion, he describes how he did his research in advance of going to the ranch. The Humane Society recommended this procedure be done with the aid of two rubber bands. Put tightly around the tail and scrotum, the parts would fall off after about a week. This procedure, the Humane Society said, was preferable to the alternatives.

In this case, the quick removal of the tail with the knife, and quick biting of the testicles and removal.

Mike described the two different results. The rancher went ahead and put rubber bands around the tail and scrotum of a lamb to satisfy Mike's request. The lamb staggered off, falling down several times. It was in obvious pain -- pain that would last for a week of misery.

The lamb done the supposedly "inhumane" way was running around happy and content in moments.

I feel almost like, after centuries of maltreatment and cruelty being the norm for humanity, of people investing the majority of their short lives on this planet in either telling others what to do or telling themselves they were better than others, we moved into a 20th century that became all about bureaucracy and nothing about real work. And the bulls*** continued. Nearly all problems arose and continue to arise because of a peculiar human blindness and self-centered-ness.

You know those people who always "Have to be right?"

I think that particular human trait is what has fed all of our negative social and business structures since time began. It's not "leaders" having to be right. They are typically enlightened and know they're not always right. It's followers. It's the steady, certain ones laboring under blinders for their entire lifetimes.

But then people suddenly wake up and open their eyes.

So, anagnorisis - the journey from ignorance to knowledge. That begins with realizing "I don't know." Then you do things. Then you know.

So right now, I know some things. And the journey of the rest of my life is to continue to learn the things I can, in the areas that I do not know. And since I do know that it's a bad idea to put rubber bands around the little lamb's tail and testicles - I'll definitely spread that information around.

Legacy publishing is just about the worst way imaginable to support people writing to the best of their ability. As a result, readers aren't getting the best books. The best art is not being produced. When it happens, it's a stone cold accident.

It's like the 1900s, when people who were born with severe disabilities, such as Helen Keller, were thought to be unable to even think - perhaps were not even people at all. It was "known" at the time that people couldn't grow or change. They were what they were born to be. It's like the early 20th century, when 12 year old Percy Julian could go out berry-picking on his grandfather's farm in Alabama and come across a young black man hanging dead from a tree. And nothing too much happened, I'm quite sure! And the man who invented cortisone and birth control pills was meant to never go past the 8th grade in school. Because it was "known" that black people couldn't do science. 

So we have a choice now. Do we want the "special" writers and artists club, like the white, wealthy chemists who didn't want to accept their extraordinarily gifted colleague, a young man with a background so vastly different from their own, the gap could hardly be bridged?

Or do you want an actual industry? A new renaissance?

Or back to the monastery, with the monks and the slaves. Maybe master will pay us some attention, and throw a coin. As seen in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."