Friends of the Serpent

It's weird for Philly & north to be expecting a foot or more of snow and for that to be the *minor* part of a winter storm. We're all battened down, here: lots of food in the freezer, extra milk for hot chocolate, we have a generator. But since not much ice is expected, "only" a foot of snow and bitter cold weather, we count as relatively OK -- this isn't anything people aren't prepared for, after all. My car is a Subaru, and this is why.

I'm thinking a lot about those of you in regions where the infrastructure & housing construction are less prepared. Send up a signal flag at fandom_checkin if you can.

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You must PET! I command it! says Purrcy and so of course I must obey. A stern taskmaster, but adorable.

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#Purrcy was playing excitedly in his box, so I stretched my phone over to see what he was playing with -- and it's a Forbidden Hair Tie, he *knows* he's not supposed to have those! I swapped it for a feather toy, less likely to get swallowed to disastrous effect.
#cats #CatsOfBluesky #Caturday

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I meant to post My Week in Books on Wednesday, but writing about Lord Shang got involved, also my back hurt. So this is the list as of Wednesday.

#9 Tales from Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
I didn't read this when it first came out in May 2001 -- I was waiting to get around it and then 9/11 happened and my concentration was shot for a year or more. This is where she really does the work of looking at the patriarchal and Western preconceptions she'd lazily incorporated into Earthsea's worldbuilding way back when (when she was young and I was a child) and asking How (in a Watsonian fashion) they got in there, before she dismantles them in The Other Wind.

#10 The Other Wind, Ursula K. Le Guin
So this is the one where Le Guin finally dismantles all the parts of her original Earthsea worldbuilding that didn't grow as she grew, that were put in lazily or because they were tropes or "archetypes" and not because they spoke the Truth of her heart.

One of these things was, why are there no female students on Roke? Another was, how does this relate to the Old Places and the Old Magic? Both of these questions Le Guin started to work with in Tehanu. But the central question is, why does the Land of the Dead look like the ashy afterlife of the mediocre dead in certain Western mythologies, where is Death that is the necessary other side of Life?

And it's pulling on that thread that unravels everything, patriarchy, Old Magic, Kargad lands, dragons, and all. To reform it into a more perfect union? Perhaps. At least one that has a chance to grow better.

And yes, I cried at the end. "Not all tears are evil."

#11 The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Re-read for the first time in decades. It was one of my re-re-re-reads during my childhood/teens, but I didn't read it aloud to my kids when they were young because I didn't want to attempt the Yorkshire accents, so the gap was longer than for many of my childhood faves.

I hadn't remembered how much it's a story of two rich children whose parents never wanted them. But of course when I read it then I wasn't a parent, that part didn't register. Another thing I notice now is that it's a sign that Mary and Colin are ill, neglected, and ugly that they are *too thin*, and of returning health and good looks that they become *fatter*. This was normal! This is the human baseline: too thin means undernourished and ill, plump means healthy. When Mary first comes from India her hair is lank, flat, and thin; when she becomes fatter and healthier her hair comes in thicker and glossier.

What did register, what really soaked into my brain, were the descriptions of spring coming. I wonder how much my feeling that spring is the best season is due to this book?

And now that I've been a gardener for years the gardening passages mean even more than they did to me as a child.

#12 Kim, Rudyard Kipling.
Tried reading it as a teen but could never make it out of the first chapter, this was my 1st time through. Not what I expected--I thought there'd be more of a *plot*. And I didn't expect so much of it would be about religious seeking. I knew, from "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" in The Second Jungle Book that Kipling respected the sadhu tradition, but no-one had mentioned that Kim's most important relationship is with a lama, that spying-for-the-Empire is really his side gig. And WOW, Kipling really has zero respect for the C of E, the Catholic priest comes off a *lot* better.

I picked this up to read because, having just read The Secret Garden, I was thinking about the orphans of Empire who feature so heavily in British kidlit of the late 19th C & between the wars. Wandering through Wikipedia, I found that Kipling *was not a native speaker of English*. I hadn't realized how deeply the imperialist project had twisted him personally. Because it's clear that he loves India as his native land, even though he doesn't love the people as his people--but the English aren't truly his people, either.

People who've imagined what happened to Kim O'Hara in the future are IMHO wrong if they think he'll still be a British agent after 1922 at the latest. By the end of the novel he's still a political ignoramus, but sooner or later he's going to talk to some adult Irishmen about the connection between the most recent (1899-90) famine in India & the Potato Famine. Maybe he'll slip away to Ireland, maybe to America, maybe he'll use his skills for Indian freedom--but once he figures out he's not actually *English*, just another one of their playing-pieces, he's not going to stay loyal. It's just a Game to them, after all.

#13 The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China. By Shang Yang, edited & translated by Yuri Pines
I picked this up because I've read some of Yuri Pines' academic articles. Lord Shang is one of the most reviled writers in traditional Chinese thought, usually for the uniform, harsh punishments he recommends for *everything*. What Pines makes clear -- and what you can see in the text -- is that Lord Shang was opposed to a lot of what were considered virtues -- filial piety, family loyalty, even human feeling (ren, 仁) -- because they were used to indulge sloppiness and corruption. He classified the teachers of such virtues -- that is, Confucian scholars -- among the worthless, wandering class, who have to be eliminated or discouraged if the state is to achieved its goal: the establishment of a unified Empire of All-Under-Heaven.

Obviously Confucian scholars, who Lord Shang hated, would more than return the favor of hating him back! But to my reading they also hated him for two additional reasons.

Lord Shang's formula for controlling the people and molding them into an unstoppable military force involved both a carrot and a stick. The stick was a very heavy punishment-based legal code, which everybody talks about in horror. More important to my mind was the system of carrots: cutting off all other methods of social advancement besides through the military, but leaving military success as a *guaranteed* route to social rising, open to foot soldiers on up. *Any* peasant who went to war and was credited with an enemy head got more land. With more success (= heads), more land, more authority, more money -- the prospect of true social advancement was there, for anyone who was willing to fight.

And this leads to the other reason later scholars hated Lord Shang: it worked. This formula to create a motivated rank-and-file military is one reason Qin overcame the other Warring States, to become the first dynasty and set much of the template for future Chinese history.

There's only been study so far comparing Lord Shang to Machiavelli and I haven't been able to read it, but there's a lot to do there. Both men were realists, advising rulers about what *really* works, talking about human behavior as much as possible stripped of their respective cultures' platitudes. Lord Shang's advice is more extreme because the situation he faced was more extreme: states with millions of people, fielding armies of tens or hundreds of thousands, warring against others for the prize of Emperor of All Under Heaven. The stakes for Machiavelli's Prince were minute by comparison, and the level of control he might exert was also limited. And he didn't propose anything as radical as offering a route for social advancement to peasants.

#14 A Most Efficient Murder, by Anthony Slayton

#15 A Rather Dastardly Death, by Anthony Slayton

First two in the "Mr. Quayle Mysteries". The first one is better, as it has a strong flavor of Wodehouse mixed in with Agatha Christie. But both owe too much to Christie IMHO in that they're *fundamentally* snobbish. Also, as pastiches written by an American, they suffer from a. Americanisms/anachronisms, b. not realizing how the passage of time works. Mr. Quayle is frequently described as a "young man", but he was in The War and this is 1928, he is no longer young.

So they passed the time, but that's about it.