The Classics. And sexy centaurs.

Hail, 

First off, here is a description (slightly edited) of baby centaurs at play.  It is from a work called Images by Philostratus the Elder, and it is either, as he says, him describing a painting of some centaurs at play or, as seems to me much more likely, him recording his impressions of actual real live centaurs which it turns out, really did exist and were wonderful and beautiful and completely awesome!!!!! 

Anyhow.  

Here it is: 

"Of the baby Kentauroi, some lie wrapped in swaddling clothes and some have discarded them. Some seem to be crying, some are happy and smile as they suck at their mother's breasts. Some play beneath while their mothers stand, while others cling to them when the mothers kneel down. One is throwing a stone at his mother - already he is naughty! 

The bodies of the infants have not yet taken on their definite shape, because they are still being breastfed, but some older ones are already leaping about, and show a little shagginess, and have sprouted mane and hoofs, though these are still tender. How beautiful they are! 

The human bodies of some of the Kentauroi grow out of white mares. Others sprout from chestnut mares, or black, or dappled, but they all glisten like those of horses that are well cared for. Sometimes a very white-skinned female centaur will have the body of a black mare - the opposition of the colours in one creature is what makes the whole so beautiful. They have a most delightful home in the valleys of Mount Pelion."

Three paragraphs and since then I've been ceaselessly turning over ideas in my mind, trying to get centaurs into my novel.  

Actual real reconstruction of unicorn by real scientist

What else?  

Some of my friends, the SF author ones, were expressing their concerns about how few people working in the field seem to have read the SF Classics.  The overall - although there was some dissent - view was that this was a bad thing.  My feelings on this are that if this is happening - and I am not sure if it is - it might be something to be celebrated, as much as mourned.   

Cave of unicorn, where above irrefutable skeleton was found.  In German, this is the Einkornhohle.  

For a start, none of us have the time to read all the classics.  I know, because I tried to do just that.  Over a period of about ten years I read - I am not joking - every Penguin Classic published between the dawn of writing and about 1750, maybe 1700, but sporadically from after that as well.  Every single one.  It cost time and money and health and probably a lot of sanity points I couldn't really afford.  I read the Bacchantes and the Guides to Greece and the Revelation of Divine Love and Collected Hindu Myths and City of God and the first Spanish records of the New World and The Critique of Pure Reason and I reckon I started to falter around there because have you seen it it's a freaking monstrous book I mean it is actually physically draining to read and thank God they don't do a hardback series or I would have ended up with arms like a fiddler crab and then I got to Hegel or Fuerbach or someone and drifted into theology and I gave up.    

A few things I learnt.  

1.  Short books - the Prince, the Dao De Jing, the Epic of Gilgamesh - say as much as very long books.  Max Weber could have written The Protestant Work Ethic in, say, a few percent of what he took.  It could have been a book you put in your pocket, rather than something you need a heavy vehicle licence to approach.  

1.5 Even the best write crap on occasion.  If you don't believe me, read Byron, who wrote the best "I am thirteen and girls don't understand me" poetry of all time.  No, all of it.  Every single frickin poem.  I'll be here.  Waiting for you to apologise.    

2.  Reading stuff by people you don't know and don't understand and maybe don't even like is important and wonderful and worthwhile.  

3.  There are startling, startling things out there and we are lucky to be alive.  

Centaurs had complex anatomies, with a cartilaginous upper thoracic spine that meant their heads and bodies flopped about whenever they tried to stab someone.  This is why they died out.  

4.  Some books don't really help some people.  Charles Dickens, for example.  It may have been me, I am sure it was, and maybe I'll try again later, but I wanted everyone in Oliver Twist dead.   

5.  Shakespeare is actually under-rated.  We should end the separation of Church and State and make bardolatry compulsory, with shunnings and stonings and stuff.  Seriously, read a few pages of Love's Labours Lost and marvel.  

6.  Or watch it instead.  Some books aren't meant to be read.  The Michael Alexander version of Beowulf works best declaimed on a rocky seashore or gathered around a fire - I have done both of these and they rock.  Shakespeare and Marlowe can be watched or read.  Dickens can be fried or fricasseed.  

7.  Don't try to do this yourself - read all the books - because it is impossible.  After the Age of Enlightenment literacy went viral and you can't read all the the things.

Occasional monstrous throwbacks to Homo equus occur, but they are shunned by society.  

Or forced into marginalised occupations such as sex work.  

Turns out reading some stuff written in the last two centuries is important.  Like, apparently a glorious socialist future awaits us all.  Who knew?

Anyhow - SF Classics.  I don't know.  I don't know that (takes a deep breath) reading, say, Asimov is a good idea anymore.  I don't think it is.  I don't know that reading Asimov makes you a better writer, more able to evoke feeling, more able to conjure images, more able to surprise, because many people I know already are better writers than Asimov.  I can easily name ten.  Seriously.

I don't know that we should read Asimov's stuff so that Asimov's ideas get more airtime because, to be honest, we had a whole decade or three or four, everything before the New Wave, where it was a lot of that white man science triumphant kind of stuff, and I don't know that the rise of Moorcock and Dick and the others made things worse for us.  

There were a lot of stories we didn't tell and haven't told, and can and must and need to be told, and going back to Asimov isn't going to tell us them.  

Here is what I am talking about.  It's a paragraph from The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson.  Read this:  

There's a planet they call Medusa.  It's made of rock, alright, but the rock has sharded and split so many times that there's nothing solid - just strands of rock splintered out from the surface like thick plaits of hair. Like snakes.  When the sky-winds blow, the rock-strands move, and something about the wind through them makes them sing.  Its as if a head is turned away from you, always turned away, and singing through the darkness, dark and lonely, never see her face.  

When I read that I was transfixed.  Three days and I still don't know how to talk about it.  Writing that stops your breath.     

Anyhow - read widely.  Read good, read hard, read frustrating stuff.  Read weird and strange, it's what we feed on.  Read magical and mysterious.  Read new, for God's sake, above all else read new.  Read vivid and morbid and odd.  Know that the other stuff is out there, and read it if you like - because that's the most important thing, read with fervour and hunger and need - but truth be told, there wouldn't be ten Truly Essential Classics in SF and maybe you don't have to do more than that.   

Anyhow.  My opinion.  Your mileage, or warpage, or parsecage, or whatever, may vary.      

Thanks for listening.  

Brendan

Time

Hail,
This is not my favourite post to have to write.  But I think, like they say, something's gotta give.

Now, I am separated.  That's not great, it's not where I saw myself or where I wanted to be, but it's not what I'm writing about today.  What I'm writing about is the possibility of pathology in my response to that situation.

My response has been something like this:

Glimpse into my psyche.  This is the least embarrassing snapshot I could find, but still, I feel I should charge.

This is a snapshot of an app called "Habit List" that I've got on my phone.  It's basically a self-generated list of things to do each day, and I have been using it a lot.

And putting a lot on it.  That snapshot, from a few days ago, is only half of what I had set myself to do that day.  The full day's tasks are about two and a half screens.  It includes helpful advice not only on avoiding sloth, gluttony and lust but more abjurations and circumscriptions - there are people not to call and things not to watch - than a particularly severe religious text.

The tasks include a lot of things - two hours of study a day, the gym four times a week, jiu jitsu twice, boxing twice, as well as the more important but inherently pleasurable and therefore frequently omitted things like "ring [insert name of dear friend I've known for twenty years and will otherwise not ring for months] and so on," but they don't include everything I do.  They don't include work, for example, and sleep.

Study - what I hate doing and will therefore do more of.  The hair is accurate.  That golden light around my head is me having a stroke because my brain, in self defense, is shutting off the blood supply to the lobe of my brain that controls whining.     

Work in the last seven days has been six days on, one off.  Of the six days one was a ten hour shift.  The others, Thursday morning to Monday night, I was working or on overnight call for I think one hundred and four hours in a row or thereabouts.  Tuesday, like I said, was off, then there's the next block of five shifts, which includes another overnight call, which I have just started.

Now clearly this is my choice, and almost as clearly I think I whined about this six weeks ago and I haven't done anything about it in the meantime so the purpose of whining about it now may not be immediately clear. But I am starting to suspect two, maybe three things.

What I love, and will therefore (temporarily!) do less of.  

The first is that I am deliberately, either consciously or subconsciously, doing this to myself because of the separation.  Whether as distraction or punishment or some blundering attempt at emotional thermodynamics, a perfectly efficient conversion of hate into work, I don't know.  But I've suspected for some time that the same bald, beardy man is responsible for 99% of my problems, and I think I'm narrowing the suspects down to very few.

The second is, like the story says, something's gotta give.  Something just has to.  I am not sleeping, and in me that's a sign.

And the third is I should do it now.  I am cutting back the blogging to once a week - the interviews, the weird medical Wednesdays will still go ahead, but less urgently. The exam is in fifty eight days (another app) and after then I can study less and before that I have to do less.  I am going to have to cut the jiu jitsu back.

Actual salt mines.  Just to re-introduce a sense of proportion here.  

And the fourth is, the things that I can't cut back are the very things I tend to.  I rang one of my dearest friends a few months back and found out that he was in England and had been for some weeks.  Which I did not know because I had not rung.  I remedied this by putting "call dearest writery friend" on the app (frequency - once per week, success rate - 75%, unbroken duration - three weeks so far!) and last night, when I parked the car in the dark, I spoke to him.

He is writing a detective series about a woman who lives in a museum and I cannot say any more than that except it will be glorious and wonderful and even if, when it comes out, you can only buy a heavily censored copy that contains only punctuation marks, you should read it.

It did me good.  I felt better.  I relaxed.  I can't stop that.

Anyhow - the novel awaits.  Speak soon, and thanks for listening.

Interview

Hail,
I have interesting friends.  Seriously.  I have kung fu and jujitsu instructors.  I have Latin-speaking equestriennes and synaesthetic sculptors.  I have emergency medicine doctors and transgender sociology students and cheese factors and people who work in thirteenth century castles.  I have people who've travelled to over a hundred countries and a marine biologist who's just back from Antarctica.
And lots and lots of medievalists and writers.

What this means is a lot of my friends can talk about interesting things in an interesting way, and and I am going to be interviewing them in this blog so that more people can hear them.

One of my friends works here.

So, if you want to know how fresh made goats cheese smells, or how hard jousting actually is, or what you can see when you look over the ramparts of an actual Welsh castle, or any manner of things, watch this space.  Interviews start soon.

In the meantime...

When I was a child I believed that spec fic made you better.  Reading about distant places and times

How could you "be racist"  when you were reading about the adventures of Spaceman Sprogg and his trusty Martian companion?  How could you fear the unknown when you loved it so much?  How could racism, sexism, any kind of ism exist for people who wrote and read about governments of intelligent crystals and hyperspace engineers who chirped and lay eggs?  

One of my friends does this on the weekend.  

It's not like that.  I don't even know if there are "racists", in the same way that there are, say, Albanians.  It's not an either-or thing, it's not something you are or are not.  I was raised in a deeply racist environment - south west Western Australia, the early seventies.  Mining and farming towns, places where non-whites were as close as you could get to utterly invisible.  I have the vaguest memory of being taught in school that there were subspecies of human beings, that we were Homo sapiens sapiens, and "they" were Homo sapiens australiensis.

It's all of us.  It's in all of us.  Like the things we do that exclude the fat and the old and the non-male and the everything-other-than-Spaceman Sprogg, it's systemic, and we are not just products of the system, we are the system.  It's deep, and it's ingrained, and it's doubtless neurological, we perpetuate it all the time, and we don't even know we do it.  That's the thing with unconscious cognitive distortions.  You don't see them because of, you know, the unconscious cognitive distortion.  

One of my friends can do this, and the next day, can still walk and use his arms.

So, when someone like Adam Goodes tells you what you've said is racist, he's probably got a better view than you have.  When a woman tells you she has been marginalised in a SFWA meeting, you don't get to say she hasn't.  It's not like the atomic mass of sodium, or the capital of Illinois, it's personal knowledge that is in no way, in no way, less true or powerful or beyond debate than any other form.  You can't tell someone what it's like for them.

Medieval lady busying herself tidying stuff around the house.

Anyhow.  This is not my debate - click on the links, and the links to those links, and listen to people who know.  I will get on with writing, and emailing my castle-dwelling, Latin-speaking, kung-fu fighting friends.

Thanks for listening,
Brendan

Roses

Hail,
First off - I am going to ask advice about how to embiggen my the number of people who read this.  I suspect it has something to do with content but also something to do with links and what I read and how to blog and so on.

So - things will be done.  Meanwhile....

I lay in bed last night night and unknotted a difficult problem with chronology in my book.  There is something glorious about the mediaeval calendar - the cycles, the festivals, the interweaving arcs of moon and sun.  There are dates like Saint Peter in Chains, the Nones of May, the Octave of the Innocents and the Feast of Saint Lupe.  Feasts and famines and ferial days, days when you could see your lover - reflected, behind you, in the water, when foods changed from food to poison, when even the animals whispered psalms.

Most of us don't even have a weekend anymore.  A thousand years ago time was sacred, now, like everything else, time is money.

But in any case.

My favourite character - Emma - is an opium-addicted princess, a cripple and a genius and a warrior with a spear.  She hawks and hunts and harries the Danes and her horse could eat your face off.

She has also lost her mother - we should have a word for this, like we should have a word in English for a father or mother who's lost a child, a reciprocal of orphan - and she fears melancholy runs in her veins, because her mother hanged herself, and these things run in the blood.

Here is Emma reminiscing from one of those "start of the chapter" bits.  It's 1000 AD, the southern part of a place that is like, but not like, Sussex.  Emma is the daughter of an earl, her father has the capacity for brutality that his position makes necessary.  

"In any case, I do recall what happened next, because it became a song. I heard it one night around the fire, out on the northern Marches. The men did not know I was awake, or they would not have dared sing it, because I was still a child, and there were some things I should not know.

The song tells how the priest came to my father, wrapped in black, and sorrowful, and on a winter morning. And my father let him in. And the priest said that he had grim news. He had given the matter all prayerful consideration, and consulted the laws of God and of the land, and my mother’s body would not have hallowed ground, but must take its place among the unshriven and unsaved, and nothing would grow on her grave.

That was lies, of course, because I made certain that roses grew, once I knew. But he said that because she was a suicide, God’s peace must be withheld from her.

My father listened, and he said he understood the priest was doing what he must, and that he knew the laws over priests and men. And he said it was no matter, she would hallow the earth where she lay.

And he answered the priest with all courtesy, and gave the priest safe conduct home, and meat and red wine for the strengthening of his heart, and bid him stay overnight in a soft bed in good quarters, and sent him on his way.

And my father’s courtesy must have weighed upon the priest, somewhere in his heart, because within the week it seemed, he hanged himself. The same priest. It seemed in his madness – for it is often madness that drives the suicide – he had done himself terrible outrages. Before he hanged himself from the rafters he had lashed his own arms behind his back, and beaten his fat face black and bruised.

My father’s men who found him - Draca and Irminric and Yffi, whom my father had sent to ride after him, to ensure no unexpected catastrophe would come to him - they said it was a terrible thing to see a man of God take his life like that, all of a sudden. And my father sighed, and said that it was a grievous truth that often melancholy strikes those whom we least expect, and who least expect it themselves. And it was a terrible thing for a priest to be buried in unholy ground, and be prey for the dwimor and the wild things. But the Laws of God and the land were immutable in this way.  So they took him away to the unhallowed ground.

And nothing would grow on his grave.

Emma of Hald"

Weird Medicine Wednesday: Extreme Grue Alert.

Hail,
I write, and I doct, and sometimes people who do one send me questions about the other, and I am almost manically delighted to offer help.  Seriously, I have friends who help me with Old English, and friends who help with horsemanship questions, and friends who help me out when I need to conceal my vast ignorance of astrology or spear-play or plastering.

And if there's any way I can help, any kind of basic medical question at all, I am more than keen to be asked.  Email me at brendancarson2009 at gmail.com or facebook message me (Brendan David Carson).

At the end of the month I will have a Weird Medicine Wednesday where I will post the anonymised questions and answers here. Obviously these are just my opinion, and I am just some guy on the net claiming to be a doctor, and if you really want to slit someone's throat in a hammock (see below), consult your health care provider.  I have done some emergency and some psych and there are other doctors who know a lot more than me about a lot.  I may be able to find them but there will be mistakes and errors and they will be mine.

And this is actually seriously gory.  For those who get upset by that kind of stuff, then this may well be very much the kind of thing that will upset you.

Here is the first - a message I got about a week ago.

Dear Brendan, 
Can you help me with a technical question? If a grown man, but slender, were lying curled up in a very saggy bed (so, almost as close around him as a hammock) with a waterproof mattress protector on it, and his carotid artery was cut open, would he eventually bleed enough to be sitting in it up to his CHIN? Would he produce that much blood before his heart stopped pumping? 
Best, Actually-Very-Pleasant-And-Highly-Lauded-Author. 
PS I hope all is well with you!

Here is a slightly amended version of what I wrote:

Dear AVPAHLA, 
I love this stuff. 
Right - total blood volume in an adult male is about 5 litres. 
I cannot imagine the man living much past 50% blood loss - 40% is often fatal even with aggressive fluid replacement. He would die and he would lose consciousness before he died. 
So he'd pretty much stop bleeding after 2.5 L.  
As to "to where on the body a man in a very saggy bed would displace 2.5L of fluid" - I don't know, but it's not a vast volume. 2.5L in a bath is very very shallow, even though this situation seems almost as if the man is in a (waterproof) bag, it may not be enough. I imagine it would partially cover his chin if he is lying on his side, maybe reaching his mouth, but I really don't know. 
Do you have a cooperative friend with a soft bed onto whom someone could pour 2.5L of water and see?  Perhaps you could ask on Facebook for a slender man to lie in bed while you pour water over him?   

And here is another letter from a few months back.  This is from another of my truly decent, kind, cultured and civilised friends with whom I one day hope to eat scones or something.  I will disguise her name accordingly:

Dear Brendan, 
You've probably never done this - at least, I hope you haven't - but I need my main character to discover a dungeon in which a couple of dozen men were left to die a couple of weeks earlier. Would they all have died of thirst by that time? If any had died within a day or two of being thrown there, what would be the stage of decomposition? This needs to be serious horror, a real low point:-)
Yours, 
S.  

Seriously, the following is gruesome.  Look away now.

Dear Scondolina, 
These conditions are not unfamiliar to me - I have worked in the public hospital system (joke).  

After a few weeks without water everyone would be dead.  There are multiple variables to be considered, but even under the optimum conditions of temperature, humidity and fitness I cannot see anyone lasting a fortnight without water, and most people would be seriously compromised after two days and dead shortly afterwards.  If there was water dripping down onto them, so they got a few drops an hour, that could make a difference.  It may be that eating each other and drinking each other's vital fluids would stave this off minimally - that is outside my area of expertise, thank God - but in the end, without something less salty than yourself to drink, you are dead.  

The stages of decomposition vary a lot depending on local conditions.  I would guess that (the following is ghastly) you may be at the bloating stage, but there may be some variation.  

Basically, the bodies will be cold.  They will be flaccid - rigor mortis is long gone.    The skin will be discoloured - the recently dead will be greenish, by now we are talking more of a grey-brown-black, quite possibly blistered.  Abdomen, scrotum (scrota, if more than one), breasts and tongue will be swollen, eyes will be protruding - this is all due to the gases of decomposition.  

The smell, while not indescribable, will almost certainly be unprecedented.  In most people there is reflexive nausea, although not necessarily vomiting.  There may be the heart pounding, the rapid breath, the dry mouth, tightness in the chest.  

My understanding of this kind of stuff is intrinsically horrifying - that the distress people feel in situations like this is visceral, deeper than the reasoning brain and not the kind of thing that a normal person can in any way reason away.  

Hope this helps, 
BDC

Okay.  I think I have probably written myself out of everyone's friends list now, but this is not all that it's about.  There have been questions about surviving arrow-shots (the character lived), and what the plague looked like (three characters died and three lived, surprisingly) and one memorable one about treating a punctured lung with only the equipment found in an office supply shop (they died - but it was not from lack of Blue-tac).

Ask away.  Next Weird Medicine Wednesday is in about a month.  I will respond my email or message and also, there's the blog.

Lamia

Usually I post Wednesdays. This supernumary post is is because I have a grand total of four - count them, four - patients on the ward. There will be a normal post Wednesday, about hammocks and bleeding to death.

This is maybe not a part of my book. It's a part I have cut out - I have moved it from where it is, and it will either appear in about a fifty thousand word's time, in book two, or maybe in book four, or not at all.

When I was ten or so I read Dune, and the encyclopaedia entries at the start of every chapter galvanised me.  They made it clear that everything was real. So at the start of each chapter of my book I have tried to have something - some letter from a priest, a recipe for lung and butter soup, a man describing to his son the way to gut a rabbit. 

Here is something that was from the start of chapter fourteen. 
Of The Creature Called the Lamia.

This is the nature of the lamiaie.  They are made in diverse ways
– by a virgin swallowing a serpent’s egg, when the moon is in the sign of
Scorpio, the wearing of a garment woven of Libyan papyrus stained with
the blood of a cock, the use of certain charms, both whispered and
read.  And depending upon the means used to produce it, the creature
is born.

The lamia have mingled nature of snake and man, and this is shown in
their appearance.  In the lowest kind the nature of the serpent will
predominate – perhaps a serpent with lashed eyes that blink, or one
that mimics human speech, or that has hands.  In the time of
Theodosius, Athanasius of Crete found such a lamia in his bedroom.  It
had been sent by a servant girl who hated him.  He made the sign of
the cross and it was stilled.  It had the form of a serpent, slim and
small, but it was warm, as if its blood were hot, and every scale was
a woman’s fingernail, long and smooth and slim. 

Sometimes a lamia may when born, seem to have much of the nature of a
child, but – Oh, perfidious nature! – lack arms or legs, or have eyes
that do not blink, or open a mouth to show forked tongue and poison
breath.  What seems a woman will shed her skin, or seems a man sleep
three months in the winter. Johannes Ithaca had a little lamia, barely
two hands high, that was like a toddling child covered in snake-skin.
It could not speak, but hissed, and he fed it rats and mice.  In
summer it copied gospels with his monks, but it could not abide the
cold.

The highest, and most dangerous, show themselves human in all ways.

And like a serpent, they often appear in dreams.



And it is wise to flee from them, for salvation of the soul as much as
the body.  And in all ways these creatures are similar to man, and it
may be that a day to them is a year to us, for serpents, as is well
known, do not age except very slowly.

On the Nature of Demons.  Michael Palatinae, The Fourth
Year of the Reign of Nikephoros II Phokas, the Year of Our Lord 967.
In Byzantium of the ten thousand lamps.

I don't know what will happen or if this bit will ever see the light of day, but here it is. 

Thanks for reading,
BDC

Giving it all away

Yes, well, I'm giving it all up.

I had two separate conversations with children today.

One was with one of my nephews.  It was about how boring his new school was.  From there it segued onto ways it could be improved.  Lava, he suggested, would be a good first step.  Fields of lava in the playgrounds, to swing over, and play games near.  There was a sizeable school oval, and a good part of it could easily be converted to a lava-field.  And swords instead of softball - because softball was not particularly useful, whereas being able to fight with a sword was.  And invasions - periodic invasions - of giant ants.

Actual school photo

Proposed school crossing sign

And then the son of one of the nurses, about the story that was being told, or read, or written - details were unclear - at school.  Lizards with giant DNA featured, as did bumper cars, and mutants called rats or rat mutants, with names like Beren and Cynthia.  Someone spliced plant DNA with animal DNA and flushed it down the sewer and that didn't go so well.

In the meantime, in my story, monks sit in a room and discuss the tithes on turnips.  Seriously, it's rather dispiriting.  How do I compete with that?

Action scene from my novel.  

What else?  Work goes rather well.  Rural general practice is potentially utterly baffling - there is almost no selection criteria, people present with almost any problem.  I started the day with mild hypertension and finished it with a diabetic coma, maintaining an airway while the elderly anaesthetist squirted sugar into this barely breathing man's veins, watching him wake from the dead, like the white-bearded man was some Old Testament prophet.  It is terror and joy and pressure and pride and a lot of borderline exhaustion.

And lastly, here is a link to an article about women who fight.  There is a lot that is true that we have told ourselves is not true, there is a lot that is untrue that we have told ourselves is true.  In my book, Emma rides armoured with spear into battle, Aelfwen slings stones and slits throats.  There is a gentle, softly spoken girl who brings about the death of a king, and a puppeteer and playwright who kills a pirate with her teeth.

Anyhow.  On with the turnip tithe.

Thanks for listening.
Brendan