Lois McMaster Bujold: Various comments (sort of forwarded from LMB mailing list) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIGEST 2281: *My* favorite Heyers, hm. Depends a little on my mood, but they certainly include _Cotillion_, _The Unknown Ajax_, _Devil's Cub_, _The Foundling_, _Sprig Muslin_, _Sylvester_, _False Colours_, _Black Sheep_, _Friday's Child_, _Venetia_, _A Civil Contract_, oh hell, throw in _The Convenient Marriage_, _The Nonesuch_, _Frederica_, _The Toll Gate_, _The Corinthian_, and all the rest of the Regencies while we're about it. I find the mysteries mainly interesting as relics of their time. Reading _Penhallow_ after reading _Cold Comfort Farm_ is, um, dangerous. (_Cold Comfort Farm_, *not* by Heyer -- the lady's name escapes me -- is a hilarious parody of over-wrought books like, well, like _Penhallow_. I highly, highly recommend it to all who've ever overdosed on Thomas Hardy and his ilk.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIGEST 2610: > >It is a word I must now have written hundreds of times, but have > >never heard anyone other than myself even attempt to speak. > > > >So what is the correct pronunciation of "Bujold" > > "BOO-jold," with a hard "j" like "joke" or "June." My mother, not a Bujold > reader, pronounces it "BOO-zhold," which drives me batty. ... > > --Stephanie Actually, my own pronunciation of the name (my married name) slides around a bit. Depending on where it falls in the rhythm of a sentence, the accent shifts back and forth from the first syllable to the second. I do usually soften the "j", though not quite that much. That's all right. My older brother not only can't pronounce it, he can't spell it either. I've only had it nearly 30 years, after all... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIGEST 2283: Louann Miller wrote: (Girl books) "are the ones where... nothing happens. (The heroines win) a comfortable lifestyle and a good sex life... but nothing they do makes a difference outside their social circle." Lois writes: I think this is a correct perception of the book types in question, but whenever I contemplate this I think of the irony, I'm sure deliberate, in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, where Prince Wossface goes off to the War of 1812, *survives* his adventures, and returns home to find Princess Wossface dead in childbirth. In all times prior to own own, women *had* their own war, a war for life, with a body count to match or exceed anything the guys racked up on the field. They didn't require another arena for heroism. Turning (with relief) to the 20th Century however, Louann writes: "What I can't understand is why Mrs. Average who answers the phone in the tire plant office (and raises three kids in her spare time) reads Girl Books. Doesn't she get enough limitation in real life...?" Lois again: I can answer that in two words: Servant Envy. The one thing that all those romantic heroines *escape* is domestic drugery. I mean, really, all those scenes of the Ancestral Home, with the servants lined up bowing and scraping to inspect the new bride -- to the apartment dwelling or mortgage-burdened woman, up to her ears in sludge, drudge, screaming and vomit from several species, bills, and unhappy sex or lack of same, the idea of being a pampered beauty having nothing to worry about, really, but what lovely clothes to wear to impress the sugar daddy is pretty damned seductive. Also, in those romances, *the woman wins*. It's her needs, her agenda, that get met in the end; however (apparently) domineering the Dark Hero, he is her willing slave when the dust settles. Rest. And being valued. Whee! No wonder women gobble these down like popcorn. The unfortunately pernicious part about these tales is that the methods demonstrated don't work for real women in real life to achieve the ends desired. You can't force anyone to value you. And if you really want servants -- or rest -- you're better off turning your attention to making a pile o' money of your own. But I really do think most women who read these things do it for escape, not to find serious role models on any level. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIGEST 931: Re: Monogamy.... Nope, Eric, free sex'll never happen in any pre-technological society (such as Barrayar) where significant amounts of property and power are inherited through the male line. Monogamy will be enforced, especially on women of the propertied classes, at gunpoint if need be. As it has often been, throughout history. Remember, all those women you meet who for some strange, alien reason don't seem to want to roll on the floor and howl with you are all decendants of the *survivors*... (I won't even go into all the grotesque biological ways Sex Will Kill You if you're female in a pre-modern-medicine world (and in fact still sometimes does.) But I can, at length, if you have a strong stomach...) If you want orgies, go to Beta Colony. Their methods of tranferring property and power between the generations are quite different from Barrayar's, and they've had high-tech medicine for a very long time, culturally speaking. ------------------------------ DIGEST 0943: Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 15:55:09 -0600 From: Lois McMaster Bujold To: lois-bujold@herald.co.uk Subject: Re: biology in history Message-ID: <3453BC3D.3F68@mn.uswest.net> lois-bujold@herald.co.uk wrote: (Doug M. wrote) > Eric also mentions the Romans. Agreed. The promiscuity of upper-class > Roman women, from the late Republic onwards, is too well documented to be > doubted. Messalina may not have been the norm, but neither was she a > profound aberration (at least sexually). The Emperor Augustus, IIRC, > banished his own daughter for her notorious escapades, and that was during > one of the young Empire's more conservative periods -- the peculiar thing > was not what she was doing, but that she got punished for it. Hm. History cuts both ways... For another, contemporary take on the late Romans vs. sex, check out the opening section of St. Augustine's _The City of God_. In that section Augustine discusses a practical moral question facing his Roman... um, parishioners is not quite the right term since Augustine was bishop of Hippo, but anyway. It seemed the proper response for a Roman woman who had been raped was suicide. However, one of the Germanic hordes had just blown through Rome in one of the periodic sacks. The Romans had just figured out that if all the women who'd been raped committed suicide as they were supposed to, there'd be no one left to cook dinner, or do the chores. Augustine's answer, as I dimly recall (it's been decades sice I read the passage), came down to something like "Oh, well, they should live, but just this *once*..." I take all historical remarks on women's behavior (and especially late women's behavior) by their political enemies with a large tub of salt. It may be propaganda, being used to justify a number of nasty things, up to and including murder (e.g., Marie Antoinette). Also, the more lurid the story (true or not), the more likely it will be preferentially saved out of the mass of lost data that time plows under. To bring it back to fiction: one of the charms of a novel is that we can actually know "what really happened" in those in-real-life so-difficult he-said-she-said cases. And (am I allowed to do ObBujold?) in my universe, there is also fast-penta, which clears as well as convicts. On the other hand, can you imagine the pornographic political propaganda that has been made up over the years about Aral and Cordelia by their assorted enemies? The worst would be the slanders mixed with just enough bits of truth so that people could point to corroborative details, and cry, "See?!" This is a fascinating topic, which is why I got lured into it, but I think I should go back to writing Chapter 3 now. Shouldn't I? Ta, Lois. ------------------------------