Heinlein Reader’s Discussion Group
Thursday 06-06-2002 09:00 P.M. EDT
I Will Fear No Evil
Here Begin The A.F.H. postings
“Now see here, Eunice! If you hadn’t played “My Last Duchess” to
half the country, I wouldn’t be having to repair the damage.”
(Internal dialogue, Johann to Eunice)
I remember the afternoon in English class when the teacher first read Browning’s poem to us…and the thrill of horror that I got as the fate of the young wife was casually revealed. For those who want to read it again, here’s a link, http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~dxu/poetry/duchess.html
It deals with a young woman who smiled at everyone, who had no scale by which to judge the worth of a gesture or a gift; all were of equal importance to her. An angel? Not to a jealous and proud husband who wanted to possess her utterly.
Now I’m not suggesting that Joe _did_ have Eunice killed so that he could replace her with the less intelligent and more malleable Gigi…but it’s something to think about
Eunice is a sometimes annoying, sometimes intriguing person. More so than with any other Heinlein character we get multiple POV’s and judgments of her character and personality…few of which bear much resemblance to the only true picture we have of her which we see fleetingly during the ride home with Jake after Johann has told them of his plan. Her thoughts as she sits in the luxury car with the man who will shortly become her lover are the _only_ time she’s free to be herself in the entire book, the only time there is no audience to seduce and play up to. You think she’s honest when she’s in Johann’s head? More often than not maybe, but totally? Some habits are hard to break and I’d bet this is one that Eunice never even tried to shake off.
Those thoughts are worth looking at in detail. They tell us what Eunice is thinking and using that we can make a judgment about her that is uncluttered by her tricks and pretty smiles. She’s a fighter and is unencumbered by loyalty to anyone but herself. Other women are competition (notice how she tells Johann that Winnie’s hair is out of a bottle? Turns out not to be so…) men are prey, easily manipulated, present in abundance, never out of bounds.
This is a woman who is light years beyond Tamara, Maureen and Hilda; pure sex appeal, irresistible to just about anyone (two exceptions; a devout man and a sadist…go figure…).
Proof of her ability to camouflage is in the descriptions of her. Even after allowing for the reluctance we have to speak ill of the dead, they glow in technicolour…yet are tainted by patronage and condescension, especially when it comes to Jake. Who doesn’t feel like whacking him over the head when he says indulgently about Eunice’s savings,
“The little dear was smart about money – a nice sum, enough to keep
him eating a couple of years, I think.”
That, ‘little dear’ had just got her salary doubled, a bonus of a million dollars and a seat on the board in the space of five minutes or so…
I also award him the winner of the most fatuous remark in the book when he says,
“I think Eunice had a romantic notion that she could give her body
to her boss if she no longer needed it and not let him find out.
Ridiculous but it fitted her sweet nature.”
Sure she did…and I have a bargain on this little gold mine no one knows about…
OK, I have plans for other posts about the book from different angles but I thought concentrating on Eunice to start with might be fun…what do you all think of her? How does she stack up against other Heinlein heroes?
Jane
—
“Jane Davitt” wrote in message
news:…
>Eunice is a sometimes annoying, sometimes intriguing person. More so
>than with any other Heinlein character we get multiple POV’s and
>judgments of her character and personality…few of which bear much
>resemblance to the only true picture we have of her which we see
>fleetingly during the ride home with Jake after Johann has told them
>of his plan. Her thoughts as she sits in the luxury car with the man
>who will shortly become her lover are the _only_ time she’s free to
>be herself in the entire book, the only time there is no audience to
>seduce and play up to. You think she’s honest when she’s in Johann’s
>head? More often than not maybe, but totally? Some habits are hard
>to break and I’d bet this is one that Eunice never even tried to
>shake off.
Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it reasonable to think it’d work the other way? Does anyone remember an instance where Johann sees something Eunice is thinking about? If she thought of deceiving him, he’d “see” that she’s thinking it. Enforced honesty by telepathy.
—
Oscagne, High Priest of Skeptics and Cynics
To bypass the Atans guarding my mailbox, replace FornMin.tam with ev1.net
Oscagne wrote:
>>
>
>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was
>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it
>reasonable to think it’d work the other way? Does anyone remember an
>instance where Johann sees something Eunice is thinking about? If she
>thought of deceiving him, he’d “see” that she’s thinking it. Enforced
>honesty by telepathy.
I don’t recall that; can you quote? I think they can peek but I think they can also put up barriers too.
Jane
—
Oscagne wrote:
>”Jane Davitt” wrote in message
>news:…
>>Eunice is a sometimes annoying, sometimes intriguing person. More so
>>than with any other Heinlein character we get multiple POV’s and
>>judgments of her character and personality…few of which bear much
>>resemblance to the only true picture we have of her which we see
>>fleetingly during the ride home with Jake after Johann has told them
>>of his plan. Her thoughts as she sits in the luxury car with the man
>>who will shortly become her lover are the _only_ time she’s free to
>>be herself in the entire book, the only time there is no audience to
>>seduce and play up to. You think she’s honest when she’s in Johann’s
>>head? More often than not maybe, but totally? Some habits are hard
>>to break and I’d bet this is one that Eunice never even tried to
>>shake off.
>
>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was
>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it
>reasonable to think it’d work the other way? Does anyone remember an
>instance where Johann sees something Eunice is thinking about? If she
>thought of deceiving him, he’d “see” that she’s thinking it. Enforced
>honesty by telepathy.
And yet, there are plenty of occasions when Johann doesn’t know something until Eunice chooses to tell him. For example, her illegitimate baby, and how it was conceived.
[Brandon Ray]
On Mon, 27 May 2002 17:41:32 -0500, “Oscagne”held forth, saying:
>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was
>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it
>reasonable to think it’d work the other way?
My recollection (theory?) is that Eunice can see what’s going on in Johann’s brain, as it’s meat–but Eunice is only present in a truly disembodied state.
—
-denny-
nocturnal curmudgeon, editor
Never try to outstubborn a cat. – Lazarus Long
“Jane Davitt”wrote in message news:…
>”Now see here, Eunice! If you hadn’t played “My Last Duchess” to
>half the country, I wouldn’t be having to repair the damage.”
>OK, I have plans for other posts about the book from different
>angles but I thought concentrating on Eunice to start with might be
>fun…what do you all think of her? How does she stack up against
>other Heinlein heroes?
>
>Jane
Goodness, food for thought there.
Taking into consideration that Eunice was born apparently without significant protection (money, family advantages) in a world as close to a toxic anarchy we’ll hopefully see, she seems in many ways more a female Lazarus to me, using everything she has (beauty and brains in particular) to survive in a hard world. And yet, her sense of honour dictated taking what she must have known was a fair risk in order to save the life of another as a rare blood donor – not the act of a con artist surely.
Like Maureen, Eunice was “amoral” – working out her own set of rules to live by and be able to look herself in the mirror at night. Unlike Maureen, she wasn’t living in an early 20th century Bible Belt community, but in a futuristic dystopia.
It might be fun to speculate what would have happened to Eunice had she not ended up the donor, and had instead received the million dollar legacy from Johann. As a woman of moderate wealth, a member of the board, and Jake’s paramour, she would have been in a position to achieve success and security, while keeping Joe as a concubine of her own. Artist’s model was a fun game while she was young, but could someone tutored by Jake the fixer and Johann the tycoon really be that unambitious?
Eunice’s sexuality as herself seemed somewhat more reactive than active. Ever eager and receptive, without pushing the issue, perhaps the geisha (many of whom also ended up very financially comfortable)? Her keeping of Joe is the sticking point to the argument of a survivor Eunice, though. Was he more than a talented (genius?) pet? Certainly he isn’t portrayed as an equal partner in the relationship, as he is illiterate and unaware of even where the money for his food comes from, almost a savant. Perhaps a surviving Eunice could have married Jake, set Joe up with Gigi and a comfortable life, with visiting privileges, and gone on to be a female Jubal.
[Carolyn Evans]
Jane Davitt wrote:
…
>notice how she tells Johann that Winnie’s hair is
>out of a bottle? Turns out not to be so…
…
IIRC, Winnie claims the colour is natural at one point – but I don’t recall Joan confirming it. I’m more inclined to believe Eunice.
[Simon Jester]
>From: “Oscagne”
>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I
No, just the opposite. When they are going to open Johann’s safe for spending money, he asks her if she can just lift the combination out of his head. She explains that no, neither one of them can just lift thoughts out, the thought has to be actively present for the other one to “hear” it.
>I seem to remember that Johann was
>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>was remembering.
I don’t remember this, or any other visualization, it was voice only.
—
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. – from 1984 by George Orwell
>On Mon, 27 May 2002 17:41:32 -0500, “Oscagne”
>held forth, saying:
>
>>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was
>>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>>was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it
>>reasonable to think it’d work the other way?
>
>My recollection (theory?) is that Eunice can see what’s going on in
>Johann’s brain, as it’s meat–but Eunice is only present in a truly
>disembodied state.
My theory is that Eunice is a grief-driven hallucination on Johann’s part.
[William Dennis]
“LV Poker Player”wrote in message news:…
>>From: “Oscagne”
>
>>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I
>
>No, just the opposite. When they are going to open Johann’s safe for spending
>money, he asks her if she can just lift the combination out of his head. She
>explains that no, neither one of them can just lift thoughts out, the thought
>has to be actively present for the other one to “hear” it.
>
>>I seem to remember that Johann was
>>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>>was remembering.
>
>I don’t remember this, or any other visualization, it was voice only.
Perhaps. But in compliance with Jane’s request I started re-reading today and found:
In the Ace 1987 edition on p. 150 Joan is trying to play the piano and can’t. Johann is disgruntled at his newfound inability and Eunice is soothing him by telling him that if he really wants to learn they can start from scratch and, “It’s in your head, I know; I could hear it.” This looks like evidence of an unintentional transmission of information from Johann to Eunice, outside their speech to each other.
On p. 153 when Eunice is using their hands to work on “Betsy” she tells Johann just to think of Winnie so that he won’t interfere with her task. After she’s done she asks him if he did, he says yes, and she says, “I know you did, I was right with you. Joan, for a girl who is, in one sense at least, a virgin, you have an unusually low and vivid imagination.” This may be the visualization I mentioned earlier.
My basic understanding of it is that they can read each other’s thoughts. Not even necessarily “spoken” thoughts, just images, sounds, concepts that occur to them. They demonstrably cannot read each other’s memories, or access each others’ minds like hard drives or something. That’d be why she couldn’t lift his safe combination from his head, he hadn’t thought about it yet. To hide something from him, though, she’d have to not think about whatever she wanted to hide. But if she was making a conscious decision not to think about something, then she’s thought about it. Ever try not to think about something? For example: _don’t_ think of an airplane for the next ten seconds… %^)
Or it could be that she’s a delusion. Or it could be that I’m a delusion and you’re not really on the computer right now, but actually in the proverbial hospital in the proverbial wetpack.
—
Oscagne, High Priest of Skeptics and Cynics
To bypass the Atans guarding my mailbox, replace FornMin.tam with ev1.net
“Oscagne”wrote in message news:…
>
>”LV Poker Player” wrote in message
>news:…
>>>From: “Oscagne”
(snip)
>In the Ace 1987 edition on p. 150 Joan is trying to play the piano and
>can’t. Johann is disgruntled at his newfound inability and Eunice is
>soothing him by telling him that if he really wants to learn they can start
>from scratch and, “It’s in your head, I know; I could hear it.” This looks
>like evidence of an unintentional transmission of information from Johann to
>Eunice, outside their speech to each other.
>
>On p. 153 when Eunice is using their hands to work on “Betsy” she tells
>Johann just to think of Winnie so that he won’t interfere with her task.
>After she’s done she asks him if he did, he says yes, and she says, “I know
>you did, I was right with you. Joan, for a girl who is, in one sense at
>least, a virgin, you have an unusually low and vivid imagination.” This may
>be the visualization I mentioned earlier.
>
(snip)
>
>Or it could be that she’s a delusion. Or it could be that I’m a delusion
>and you’re not really on the computer right now, but actually in the
>proverbial hospital in the proverbial wetpack.
>
The issue has been raised, both seriously and not so seriously, as to whether Eunice is a delusion of Johann’s.
I have been re-reading the book, but have found nothing yet that would prove it one way or the other. With respect to all of the ‘details’ that ‘Eunice’ relates to him, up to this point they could be explained as Johann ‘filling in details’ of her life from what he knows.
The problems associated with the two paragraphs above about the piano and the secretarial machine, ‘Betsy’ are of a different nature. The lack of ability of the new body to play the piano is not surprising since it would indeed require training and conditioning of the hands, fingers, muscles and all that to translate the music in Johann’s head to execution on the piano. Working with ‘Betsy’ is a totally different situation. True, it would involve training of the hands, fingers etc. to operate it, but there were indications that mental activity also went on as it involved setting up a search on the library net, (no widespread internet available at the time this was written), which I don’t believe could be explained by simply have the hands etc trained. At the least, if Eunice was not really there, then the search would have involved her body’s training plus mental activity from Johann, without his being aware of it.
In ‘Elsewhen’, Heinlein had Professor Frost going back along his timeline to re-occupy his body before he made the choice to quit school. In Piper’s ‘Time and Time Again’, the protagonist was killed in a war and found himself back in his body at the age of 13 or so. In both cases, the backslider retained all of his memories up to the time of transfer. This could be a possible explanation of Johann and Eunice being in the same body, Johann arriving there by virture of the transplant and Eunice by the transferral method used in these stories. However, that still leaves the problem with Jake joining them at the end.
David Wright
“David Wright”wrote in message news:ad11oo$tbgsh$…
>The issue has been raised, both seriously and not so seriously, as to
>whether Eunice is a delusion of Johann’s.
**snip cogent support of this statement**
I think we’re talking to cross purposes, here. My last remark (“Or it could be that she’s a delusion”…etc.) was meant to be facetious and humorous. I think Heinlein left the possibility intentionally ambiguous. Its meant to be a thought exercise IMO. None of the things I wrote were meant to support the idea that her soul absolutely had been implanted in Johann’s mind.
What I was rebutting was Jane’s hypothesis that Eunice was (or could have been) deceitful in her dealings with Johann inside Joan’s head. Specifically when she wrote, “Her thoughts as she sits in the luxury car with the man who will shortly become her lover are the _only_ time she’s free to be herself in the entire book, the only time there is no audience to seduce and play up to. You think she’s honest when she’s in Johann’s head? More often than not maybe, but totally? Some habits are hard to break and I’d bet this is one that Eunice never even tried to shake off.” My hypothesis was that because of the aforementioned passages I didn’t think she’d be capable of the screening her mind or hiding her thoughts that would be necessary to deceive him.
—
Oscagne, High Priest of Skeptics and Cynics
To bypass the Atans guarding my mailbox, replace FornMin.tam with ev1.net
>What I was rebutting was Jane’s hypothesis that Eunice was (or could have
>been) deceitful in her dealings with Johann inside Joan’s head.
>Specifically when she wrote, “Her thoughts as she sits in the luxury car
>with the man who will shortly become her lover are the _only_ time she’s
>free to be herself in the entire book, the only time there is no audience to
>seduce and play up to. You think she’s honest when she’s in Johann’s head?
>More often than not maybe, but totally? Some habits are hard to break and
>I’d bet this is one that Eunice never even tried to shake off.” My
>hypothesis was that because of the aforementioned passages I didn’t think
>she’d be capable of the screening her mind or hiding her thoughts that would
>be necessary to deceive him.
I agree that deliberate deception is impossible under those circumstances, but there is always self deception, and I think that was what Jane meant when mentioning old habits.
—
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. – from 1984 by George Orwell
“Oscagne”wrote in message news:…
>
>”David Wright” wrote in message
>news:ad11oo$tbgsh$…
>>The issue has been raised, both seriously and not so seriously, as to
>>whether Eunice is a delusion of Johann’s.
>**snip cogent support of this statement**
>
>I think we’re talking to cross purposes, here. My last remark (“Or it could
>be that she’s a delusion”…etc.) was meant to be facetious and humorous. I
>think Heinlein left the possibility intentionally ambiguous. Its meant to
>be a thought exercise IMO. None of the things I wrote were meant to support
>the idea that her soul absolutely had been implanted in Johann’s mind.
>
I really wasn’t commenting specifically on your post, but just on the concept in general. Your post just happened to appear with a lead-in that allowed me to comment. I didn’t take your comments as being one way or the other. I did know that you were being facetious.
David W.
“David Wright”wrote in message news:ad1dhv$tn4ph$…
(snip)
>I did know that you were being facetious.
>
and humorous 🙂
DW
>The issue has been raised, both seriously and not so seriously, as to
>whether Eunice is a delusion of Johann’s.
>
>I have been re-reading the book, but have found nothing yet that would prove
>it one way or the other.
As it happens, the last correspondence I had with RAH was on just this point. I had written pointing out that Joan Eunice knew the pass combination to her apartment with Joe — Blackbirds — which is information that JE could have had only if Eunice was real and not a delusion. He wrote back noncommittally saying that was a good catch, but not confirming the conclusion. From passing comments I’ve seen relayed from other sources, I suspect that he wrote this book with several contradictory scenarios in mind and tried to make all of them equally plausible.
Bill
“Oscagne”wrote in message
>
>Isn’t there some mention that they can see each other’s thoughts once
>they’ve been stuck in the same skull? I seem to remember that Johann was
>thinking of something… a past lover perhaps?.. and Eunice saw the woman he
>was remembering. So if thoughts are readable in one direction, isn’t it
>reasonable to think it’d work the other way? Does anyone remember an
>instance where Johann sees something Eunice is thinking about? If she
>thought of deceiving him, he’d “see” that she’s thinking it. Enforced
>honesty by telepathy.
Actually, I believe that they had to verbalize their thoughts for each other to see them. I’m not sure…I’ll have to re-read the book for you, but i’ll mark it when i find it. 😉
tam
>From: “David Wright”
>I really wasn’t commenting specifically on your post,
In the same vein, I have been giving this issue some thought. I tend to lean toward the hallucination view, but there is something to be said for the view that it really was Eunice.
As far as Eunice telling him things he could not know, is it really “impossible” for Johann to know something? It may be highly unlikely, but how is it impossible? Recently, Bill Patterson brought up Joe Branca’s door code and how Johann got it from “Eunice” inside his head. Well, it does seem kind of unlikely that Johann would have known this in any way. But impossible? I don’t see that. I’m betting that his mobile guards knew it. Before the operation, did they let it slip in his presence? Mabye, maybe not. Was it in the smoop summary he had done (today it would be called a background check)? Maybe.
So just on the basis of Eunice telling him things that he supposedly could not have known, I don’t think we can decide one way or another.
If Eunice really was present and this was not hallucination, was anything supernatural involved? I don’t think it is necessary to assume it was supernatural. How much of the personality and awareness is stored in the spinal column? Probably not all that much, but maybe enough to cause the dialogues related in IWFNE. Until we actually have a brain transplant done, I don’t think we can really know how much the spinal column is involved. We know that he brain can survive more or less independently, since the neck can be broken but he person survives while being paralyzed. We do not know anything about the opposite, since at this point we might keep a body alive on life support without a functioning brain, but we have no way of communicating with the spinal column and asking it if it is still self aware.
This theory falls apart when Jake joins the awareness. It might be that Eunice survived in the spinal column, but Jake joining them was hallucination. Then again, they both might be hallucinations. I prefer to think Eunice really was there, but that they hallucinated Jake joining them.
Then again, the whole point of the novel might have been to leave this matter unresolved.
[LV Poker Player]
—
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. – from 1984 by George Orwell
>I’m betting that his mobile guards knew it. Before the
>operation, did they let it slip in his presence? Mabye, maybe not. Was it in
>the smoop summary he had done (today it would be called a background check)?
>Maybe.
As you say, I’m sure the point of the novel was to leave the question unresolved — but even if the mobile guards knew it (which I seem to regard as less likely than you) and even if it were in the background check (which I regard as highly unlikely, given the “permanent information” nature of background checks and the highly transitory nature of passwords), that does not therefore make it likely or probable that their employer knew that fact. This supposition has been raised before, but I regard it as piling improbability upon improbability. Moreover, I tend to be leery of coming up with extra-textual explanations for improbabilities — particularly where there is an alternate textual explanation available. Yes, Heinlein could have argued in that fashion — but he didn’t.
Let’s summarize and say this is an issue that, on net, is more easily explained by the “she’s real” hypothesis. I still think RAH was trying to make several different interpretations credible.
Bill
BPRAL22169 wrote:
>>
>
>As it happens, the last correspondence I had with RAH was on just this point.
>I had written pointing out that Joan Eunice knew the pass combination to her
>apartment with Joe — Blackbirds — which is information that JE could have had
>only if Eunice was real and not a delusion.
>
>
Bill, I’m confused. There was no pass code; when Joan goes to visit, Eunice tells her to just say, ‘open up’ to the door, which begins to unlock and then stops. Eventually Joe opens it. ‘Blackbirds’ was what Eunice said to Joe when she was setting up a session with the guards. It was ‘short talk’ for midnight. From what i gather, short talk could be personalised but wasn’t that secret.
Jane
—
LV Poker Player wrote:
>
>I agree that deliberate deception is impossible under those circumstances, but
>there is always self deception, and I think that was what Jane meant when
>mentioning old habits.
>
>
Sort of, yes. With _any_ audience, I don’t think you got 100% Eunice. Maybe 90% when she was with Johann but it was still important for her to be someone he could love, possibly even more important once he couldn’t see her (sort of).
I thought when I first read the book that Eunice and later Jake were really there in his head and I haven’t changed my mind. If it’s illusion, it’s dull and I prefer it to be real. Heinlein wrote it so that we can all make up our own minds to suit. Clever.
Jane
—
“Jane Davitt”wrote in message news:…
>I thought when I first read the book that Eunice and later Jake were
>really there in his head and I haven’t changed my mind. If it’s
>illusion, it’s dull and I prefer it to be real. Heinlein wrote it so
>that we can all make up our own minds to suit. Clever.
Jane–
I think it is even more clever than that. RAH put us in Johann’s shoes pretty thoroughly: We search for evidence of Eunice’s real existence and are never quite able to pin it down to proof positve, yet we believe. Somehow, we just “know” that Eunice is real. And having spent the whole book digesting that improbability, it is fairly easy to swallow Jake’s entrance, with much less setup.
-Dee
Carolyn Evans wrote:
>And yet, her sense of honour dictated taking what
>she must have known was a fair risk in order to save the life of another as
>a rare blood donor – not the act of a con artist surely.
Yes; I was being a little provocative to start the debate 🙂
>
>Like Maureen, Eunice was “amoral” – working out her own set of rules to live
>by and be able to look herself in the mirror at night. Unlike Maureen, she
>wasn’t living in an early 20th century Bible Belt community, but in a
>futuristic dystopia.
They have strong similarities; might be fun to look at that more closely. Maureen fans; how do you feel about Eunice?
>
>It might be fun to speculate what would have happened to Eunice had she not
>ended up the donor, and had instead received the million dollar legacy from
>Johann.
Oh , yes 🙂 She’d have ended up in charge one way or another…
>
>Eunice’s sexuality as herself seemed somewhat more reactive than active.
>Ever eager and receptive, without pushing the issue, perhaps the geisha
>(many of whom also ended up very financially comfortable)?
Now here I disagree. She seemed to be dragging people into bed all over the place, with some amazingly convoluted cover ups for someone who was in ‘open’ relationships.
And am I the only one who started to count the number of times the mind twins told each other they had, ‘dirty minds’? I ran out of fingers and toes after a while and gave up…that got tiresome.
Jane
—
Simon Jester wrote:
>Jane Davitt wrote:
>…
>
>>notice how she tells Johann that Winnie’s hair is
>>out of a bottle? Turns out not to be so…
>>
>…
>
>IIRC, Winnie claims the colour is natural at one point – but I don’t recall
>Joan confirming it. I’m more inclined to believe Eunice.
>
>
>
Joan wouldn’t know. I assume if Winnie dyes it, she dyes both ends in a society where nudity is oddly acceptable (I’d think that would go with greater sexual freedom and it does a little but Joan is still obsessive about keeping her affairs secret before and after marriage)so that wouldn’t help.
We are told that Winnie has very white skin, can’t sunbathe and has very pale eyebrows and lashes; that isn’t conclusive but it makes me think she’s a natural redhead.
Jane
—
>
>”Jane Davitt” wrote in message
>news:…
>>I thought when I first read the book that Eunice and later Jake were
>>really there in his head and I haven’t changed my mind. If it’s
>>illusion, it’s dull and I prefer it to be real. Heinlein wrote it so
>>that we can all make up our own minds to suit. Clever.
>
>Jane–
>
>I think it is even more clever than that. RAH put us in Johann’s shoes
>pretty thoroughly: We search for evidence of Eunice’s real existence and
>are never quite able to pin it down to proof positve, yet we believe.
>Somehow, we just “know” that Eunice is real. And having spent the whole
>book digesting that improbability, it is fairly easy to swallow Jake’s
>entrance, with much less setup.
>
>-Dee
Like so much in Heinlein’s books. I never questioned as to whether or not she was a delusion. I automatically assumed that she was real and until this discussion came along, I never bothered to look for proof ‘fer or agin’ the idea. He was the master at selling me on the premises of his stories. Good thing he never tried to offer me a deal in Spanish Prisoners. 🙂
David Wright
P.S. Does anyone know what the ‘Spanish Prisoners’ con was all about in TEFL?
>Bill, I’m confused. There was no pass code; when Joan goes to visit,
>Eunice tells her to just say, ‘open up’ to the door, which begins to
>unlock and then stops. Eventually Joe opens it
Perhaps I’m the one that’s confused. It’s been long enough since I read the book that I no longer have a good grasp on the details.
Bill
— Bill Dennis http://billdennis.net “Dee”wrote in message news:…
>
>”Jane Davitt” &llt;>wrote in message
>news:…
>>I thought when I first read the book that Eunice and later Jake were
>>really there in his head and I haven’t changed my mind. If it’s
>>illusion, it’s dull and I prefer it to be real. Heinlein wrote it so
>>that we can all make up our own minds to suit. Clever.
>
>Jane–
>
>I think it is even more clever than that. RAH put us in Johann’s shoes
>pretty thoroughly: We search for evidence of Eunice’s real existence and
>are never quite able to pin it down to proof positve, yet we believe.
>Somehow, we just “know” that Eunice is real. And having spent the whole
>book digesting that improbability, it is fairly easy to swallow Jake’s
>entrance, with much less setup.
A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction novel.
—
Bill Dennis
http://billdennis.net
“William Dennis”wrote in message news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>
snip
>
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>novel.
>
>
>–
>Bill Dennis
>http://billdennis.net
>
>
A book whose thesis is that “memory” is not all held in the brain, but perhaps is distributed partly through other parts of the nervous system is what then? Particularly since we know that at least some of what we call conscious behavior is simply the tale we tell ourselves to explain our reflexes, eg the fantasy that we moved our hand from the hot stove because we felt the heat, rather than the reality that the sensory input didn’t even reach the brain till after our spinal cord reflex had taken care of the problem.
I know when I play piano or type for example, the actions are no longer requiring conscious monitoring. A lot of accustomed activity seems to be handled at the lowest possible level. So “the body”‘s ability with yoga and the secretarial machine ring true to me, particularly since we are not sure if perhaps the surgeon may have retained for example the cerebellum for better motor control of the new body.
As to the “personality” implant, I know I have a very clear mental map of my husband after 18 years, what he will say and do in any given situation. (Not of course always accurate, which is a source of joy in itself!). And Johann was a man of fair experience with women in general, and apparently deeply loved Eunice, and spent much time watching her, speculating about her, and quite likely knew very well the details of her life. I’d say he may well have had the ability to run conversations between himself and “his Eunice” before the surgery in his mind in the dark lonely hours of the night, just as I can when my husband is away and I need his “advice”. And of course, post surgery, there was no inconvenient real Eunice to contradict his version.
[Carolyn Evans]
“William Dennis”wrote in message news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>
>
>–
>Bill Dennis
>http://billdennis.net
>”Dee” wrote in message
>news:…
>>
(snip)
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>novel.
>
>
Why? Because we know of no way that a person’s personality can survive death of the body and re-appear when a new brain re-activates the body?
We also know of no way that spaceships can go flitting from star to star, overcoming or bypassing the limitations on the speed of light. We know no way that time travel can be done either linearly or multiplex.
We don’t hesitate to call these stories science-fiction, do we?
Maybe none of them will ever come to pass, but I don’t see the validity in making the distinction in this particular case.
David Wright
“William Dennis”wrote in message news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>
>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>novel.
Heinlein wrote other fantasies.
—
Oscagne, High Priest of Skeptics and Cynics
To bypass the Atans guarding my mailbox, replace FornMin.tam with ev1.net
“Oscagne”wrote in message news:3cf58d1d$…
>
>”William Dennis” wrote in message
>news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>>
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>>novel.
>
>Heinlein wrote other fantasies.
Such as “Waldo,” another fantasy in science fiction clothing.
—
Bill Dennis
http://billdennis.net
“Carolyn Evans”wrote in message news:3cf567c7$0$31824$…
>
>”William Dennis” wrote in message
>news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>>
>snip
>>
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>>
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>>novel.
>>
>>
>>–
>>Bill Dennis
>>http://billdennis.net
>>
>>
>A book whose thesis is that “memory” is not all held in the brain, but
>perhaps is distributed partly through other parts of the nervous system is
>what then? Particularly since we know that at least some of what we call
>conscious behavior is simply the tale we tell ourselves to explain our
>reflexes, eg the fantasy that we moved our hand from the hot stove because
>we felt the heat, rather than the reality that the sensory input didn’t even
>reach the brain till after our spinal cord reflex had taken care of the
>problem.
>I know when I play piano or type for example, the actions are no longer
>requiring conscious monitoring. A lot of accustomed activity seems to be
>handled at the lowest possible level. So “the body”‘s ability with yoga and
>the secretarial machine ring true to me, particularly since we are not sure
>if perhaps the surgeon may have retained for example the cerebellum for
>better motor control of the new body.
>
>As to the “personality” implant, I know I have a very clear mental map of my
>husband after 18 years, what he will say and do in any given situation.(Not
>of course always accurate, which is a source of joy in itself!). And Johann
>was a man of fair experience with women in general, and apparently deeply
>loved Eunice, and spent much time watching her, speculating about her, and
>quite likely knew very well the details of her life. I’d say he may well
>have had the ability to run conversations between himself and “his Eunice”
>before the surgery in his mind in the dark lonely hours of the night, just
>as I can when my husband is away and I need his “advice”. And of course,
>post surgery, there was no inconvenient real Eunice to contradict his
>version.
Ahhh, BUT — When an arm is transplanted onto another body — it’s happened in real life — that arn doesn’t recall the ability to play the piano. 😉
—
Bill Dennis
http://billdennis.net
“William Dennis” writes:
>Ahhh, BUT — When an arm is transplanted onto another body — it’s happened
>in real life — that arn doesn’t recall the ability to play the piano. 😉
>
>
There are no neural pathways from the arm to the spinal cord. It would have to be the whole body/brain transplant that would show the ‘body’ memory. We don’t know how much of the spinal cord was included in Johann’s transplant, but it would need to be a significant amount to include body memory.
Elizabeth
(speculating)
“William Dennis”wrote in message news:NsgJ8.145446$…
>
>
>–
>Bill Dennis
>http://billdennis.net
>”Carolyn Evans” wrote in message
>news:3cf567c7$0$31824$…
>>
>>”William Dennis” wrote in message
>>news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>>>
>>snip
>>>
>>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>>>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>>>
>>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>>>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>>>novel.
>>>
>>>
>>>–
>>>Bill Dennis
>>>http://billdennis.net
>>>
>>>
>>A book whose thesis is that “memory” is not all held in the brain, but
>>perhaps is distributed partly through other parts of the nervous system
>is
>>what then? Particularly since we know that at least some of what we call
>>conscious behavior is simply the tale we tell ourselves to explain our
>>reflexes, eg the fantasy that we moved our hand from the hot stove because
>>we felt the heat, rather than the reality that the sensory input didn’t even
>>reach the brain till after our spinal cord reflex had taken care of the problem.
>>I know when I play piano or type for example, the actions are no longer
>>requiring conscious monitoring. A lot of accustomed activity seems to be
>>handled at the lowest possible level. So “the body”‘s ability with yoga and
>>the secretarial machine ring true to me, particularly since we are not sure
>>if perhaps the surgeon may have retained for example the cerebellum for
>>better motor control of the new body.
>>
>>As to the “personality” implant, I know I have a very clear mental map of my
>>husband after 18 years, what he will say and do in any given situation.(Not
>>of course always accurate, which is a source of joy in itself!). And Johann
>>was a man of fair experience with women in general, and apparently deeply
>>loved Eunice, and spent much time watching her, speculating about her, and
>>quite likely knew very well the details of her life. I’d say he may well
>>have had the ability to run conversations between himself and “his Eunice”
>>before the surgery in his mind in the dark lonely hours of the night, just
>>as I can when my husband is away and I need his “advice”. And of course,
>>post surgery, there was no inconvenient real Eunice to contradict his
>>version.
>
>Ahhh, BUT — When an arm is transplanted onto another body — it’s happened
>in real life — that arn doesn’t recall the ability to play the piano. 😉
>
>
When we’re a little further advanced perhaps, and instead of arm we get arm plus brachial plexus, or cerebellar transplant, will we see the motor skills that relate to the donor’s trained or innate responsiveness, or that of the recipient? Given that the spinal cord is a continuum with the brain, at what level would a transplant a la Eunice/Johann best serve the recipient’s needs? Is Johann’s identity in his whole central nervous system, in his motor regions, his frontal or temporal cortex? If you transplant only the areas responsible for conscious thought, what sort of personality overlay would you have?
[Carolyn Evans]
This is reminding me of an almost forgotten movie about a man who has the arm of a murderer attached to his body. The arm takes over.
Jeanette–not recommending the movie
“David Wright”wrote in message news:ad3pjj$u2fra$…
>
>”William Dennis” wrote in message
>news:U5dJ8.143436$…
>>
>>
>>–
>>Bill Dennis
>>http://billdennis.net
>>”Dee” wrote in message
>>news:…
>>>
>
>(snip)
>
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, yet
>>retains the woman’s memories is a fantasy.
>>
>>A book in which a man’s brain is implanted into a dead woman’s body, and he
>>hallucinates that the woman’s personality is alive, is a science fiction
>>novel.
>>
>>
>
>Why? Because we know of no way that a person’s personality can survive death
>of the body and re-appear when a new brain re-activates the body?
>
>We also know of no way that spaceships can go flitting from star to star,
>overcoming or bypassing the limitations on the speed of light. We know no
>way that time travel can be done either linearly or multiplex.
>
>We don’t hesitate to call these stories science-fiction, do we?
>
>Maybe none of them will ever come to pass, but I don’t see the validity in
>making the distinction in this particular case.
I hope I haven’t accidentally rekindled that old argument over what IS and what ISN’T science fiction.
Well, here goes — travel between worlds is theoretically possible. As a matter of fact, NASA is investigating potential methods of doing so. Human personalities been stored in the *body* rather than in the brain, and that personality communicating with a transplant brain, is rather beyond the realm of the possible. If Eunice is not an elaborate fantasy on Johann’s part, and Eunice is *real,* then the book qualifies as fantasy. This is *not* a bad thing. TEFL works for me *either* way.
—
Bill Dennis
http://billdennis.net
“William Dennis”wrote in message news:zxgJ8.112882$L76.188517@rwcrnsc53…
(snip)
>I hope I haven’t accidentally rekindled that old argument over what IS and
>what ISN’T science fiction.
>
Only as a side issue 🙂
>Well, here goes — travel between worlds is theoretically possible. As a
>matter of fact, NASA is investigating potential methods of doing so.
Ordinary travel between the planets and perhaps even the nearer stars using sub-light technologies. If you know of serious thought being given to practical methods of super-light travel, I’d like to hear about it.
>Human
>personalities been stored in the *body* rather than in the brain, and that
>personality communicating with a transplant brain, is rather beyond the
>realm of the possible.
I see where we are having trouble communicating. I am not speaking of personalities being stored in the body other than in the limited sense as demonstrated by the discussions on the piano and secretarial machine where the body retains or loses the facility to work with familiar/unfamiliar instruments.
What I am talking about is a theme which is present in many of Heinlein’s works in that the personality exists not only in the brain, but in some fashion external to the body and brain. In such a case, the re-incarnation of that personality in a different body, (or in this case, the same body), makes some sort of sense in a hypothetical way. There is actually a hypothesis by Dunne which is used by both Heinlein and Piper, as I mentioned in an earlier post, involving n-dimensional geometry to account for this. As far as I know, there have never been any testable predictions or verifications of such a hypothesis, which prevents it from the status of becoming a theory, but it was a serious proposal and was not considered fantasy. Note that such a hypothesis can account for Jake’s joining the group mind at the end, whereas the ‘body memory’ does not.
Is such re-incarnation real, is super-light star travel possible, is time travel possible. Frankly, I doubt, alas, all of them, but at this stage, I can’t call any of them more or less fantasy than the others.
(snip)
Looking at other works of Heinlein, can we call his ‘World-as-Myth’ fantasy or not. It too is an extrapolation of time theories of Dunne and Ouspensky, especially Ouspensky as well as, perhaps, Everett’s ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.
>This is reminding me of an almost forgotten movie about a man who has
>the arm of a murderer attached to his body. The arm takes over.
But, since we’re talking brains here, how about:
“Donovan’s Brain (1953)
Yet another version of Curt Siodmak’s novel about an honest scientist who keeps the brain of a ruthless dead millionaire (Donovan) alive in a tank. Donovan manages to impose his powerful will on the scientist, and uses him to murder his enemies.”
[Quoted from http://www.imdb.com]
>Jeanette–not recommending the movie
I saw this one, as an Army brat, on an MSTS trip from Seattle to Yokohama. While it wasn’t the worst thing about that “cruise”, it was certainly well up in the final standings.
OJ III
[As should be obvious, not recommending this one either.]
I’ve been lurking on this board for some time now, thoroughly enjoying the considered discussions, distressing when the “flames”, “rants”, and “trolls” dominate the discussion. In the past couple of years I’ve began rereading most of RAH’s works, starting with “Grumbles..” and RAH:ARC from Nitrosyncretic press. I had read most of them before (starting with Boys Life version of Farm in the Sky), but didn’t have strong memories on any but a few of the later work.
I read IWFNW when it was first released in paperback, enjoyed it then moved on. Recently I came into possession of a couple of hardcopy first editions and immediately began rereading it. I am well aware that this is generally considered to be one of RAH’s weaker works, however I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The re-reading awakened memories of the earlier reading; in fact, it was almost as enjoyable as TMIAHM.
Finally to the point. What is the basis for the criticisms? I’m aware that RAH was severely ill and unable to do the final edit and it was published without his final polish. If that is true, I’m even more impressed with the quality of a “draft”!
Anyone want to comment? have examples of the basis for the criticism?
Hadley V. Stacey
There were two reasons for me to put that ms. in the hands of his publishers:
1. Mr. Minton told me that he had held a slot in his publishing schedule for
that ms. aand needed it, or he woul dhave to substitute something else.
2. I needed the advance to help with the hospital bills.
Mr. Minton (president of G. P. Putnam) told me that if I would allow someone to do the cutting, he would offer a large advance against royalties. But I knew that this was a special case, and that Robert would want to do the cutting himself. So the advance was cut by half, and the book was not cut by someone else.
It was as you see it today.
Ginny
“Astyanax12” wrote in message
news:…
>There were two reasons for me to put that ms. in the hands of his publishers:
>
>1. Mr. Minton told me that he had held a slot in his publishing schedule for
>that ms. aand needed it, or he woul dhave to substitute something else.
>
>2. I needed the advance to help with the hospital bills.
>
>Mr. Minton (president of G. P. Putnam) told me that if I would allow someone to
>do the cutting, he would offer a large advance against royalties. But I knew
>that this was a special case, and that Robert would want to do the cutting
>himself. So the advance was cut by half, and the book was not cut by someone
>else.
>
>It was as you see it today.
>
>Ginny
>Virginia Heinlein
>
I for one, certainly am glad you proceeded as you did although I believe it was unconscienceable for the publisher to take advantage of the situation. As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book twenty years ago and last week.
Thanks for the insight and the comments. I certainly appreciate them. I know you have heard this many times but I have spent many, many pleasurable hours reading Robert’s works from the earliest to latest. Two of my children are also avid fans.
Finally, I truly appreciate your comments on this group. It tends to keep it grounded and centered on the topic.
Hadley Stacey
BTW, Mrs Heinlein,
I’ve started my 15-year-old daughter reading Robert’s juveniles (actually, we started when she was 14 with the same one I started with in 1965, _Have Space Suit-Will Travel_). She pronounces them “awesome.”
—
RDKirk
“It’s always socially unacceptable to be right too soon.” — RAH
On 01 Jun 2002 18:06:12 GMT, (Astyanax12) wrote:
>There were two reasons for me to put that ms. in the hands of his publishers:
Of course, before it appeared in harcover it had appeared as a serial in one of Fred Pohl’s stf magazines — I think it was “If”.
I suspect that this appearance was edited for length, and possibly content, by Pohl. However, I am courious. Was Pohl working from the same draft that was sent to Putnam or from an even earlier draft?
———————————————–
Carrington Dixon
(For email reply change “nospam” to “attbi.com”
>Finally to the point. What is the basis for the criticisms?
I don’t think there have actually been any real “criticisms” of the book: almost all of the negative comment has been of the “I didn’t like the feel of it” variety or objections to its not being in current fashion of realistic/ironic novels.
The one comment I’ve seen which could be construed as verging on a technical criticism is that people were bored by the internal dialog. Others object generally to the somewhat “precious” portrayal of Joan Eunice’s interior life. I found it quite convincing of a 90+ year old man learning how to be female.
Bill
“BPRAL22169″wrote in message news:…
>>Finally to the point. What is the basis for the criticisms?
>
>I don’t think there have actually been any real “criticisms” of the book:
>almost all of the negative comment has been of the “I didn’t like the feel of
>it” variety or objections to its not being in current fashion of
>realistic/ironic novels.
>
>The one comment I’ve seen which could be construed as verging on a technical
>criticism is that people were bored by the internal dialog. Others object
>generally to the somewhat “precious” portrayal of Joan Eunice’s interior life.
>I found it quite convincing of a 90+ year old man learning how to be female.
>Bill
>
Certainly the themes could be controversial, but the same was said about TMIAHM (Russian influence), Farnham’s Freehold (racism, cannibalism, fidelity), and of course SIASL. The style of alternating first person dialogue was different at the time, but nowhere near as much as was later used in TNOTB and others.
I have never read any comments regard the “predictions” RAH made in the book. There are some striking similarities between the book’s “news clips” and today’s news.
I can understand people not liking a story or themes (there are several I don’t care for), but that is no reason to call the book “weak”, “uneven”, etc.
hvs
“Hadley V Stacey”wrote in message news:Dh9K8.263$…
>
>”BPRAL22169” wrote in message
>news:…
(snip)
>
>I can understand people not liking a story or themes (there are several I
>don’t care for), but that is no reason to call the book “weak”, “uneven”,
>etc.
I suspect that there are those who call it “weak”, “uneven”, etc because he didn’t make a final edit. Had he done so, there are still some of those who would call it “weak”, “uneven” etc, because it didn’t fall into a some artificially chosen neat category. I’m *neither* of those, thank Bog. It’s not my favorite Heinlein work, but I’ll still take it over most everything else.
David Wright
Hadley V Stacey wrote:
[snip]
>
>I read IWFNW when it was first released in paperback, enjoyed it then moved
>on. Recently I came into possession of a couple of hardcopy first editions
>and immediately began rereading it. I am well aware that this is generally
>considered to be one of RAH’s weaker works, however I thoroughly enjoyed
>the book. The re-reading awakened memories of the earlier reading; in fact,
>it was almost as enjoyable as TMIAHM.
>
I never thought it weak: on the contrary, from 1970 when I read it soon after publication, I considered it a very strongly felt criticism of the false directions the author saw society taking. It’s certainly didatic, however; and I think to most “critics” of didaticism, that damns it — but that’s not a weakness in my view — I’ve read Heinlein for his didaticism since I was eleven and started with Rocket Ship Galileo. Perhaps the problem they have with it is it more directly states criticisms, not in an optimistic view of the future overcoming problems, but as problems overcoming our own future so much that it will squash it in squalor and anarchy. So the tone offends some. That was at cross-purposes with the view many if not most of the literati in 1970 had of their own contributions to society and the future: “we” were “solving” all society’s ills, weren’t “we,” following our “summer of protest,” our “questioning of all authority,” our building of the “Great Society,” our tearing down of the wisdom of dead white men (especially now that it was clear we were getting out of that horrible unjust war as soon as we could); but the portrait of the future notwithstanding all that “we” had one in I Will Fear No Evil *is* fearsome and very contrarian, isn’t it?
Even the future’s richest flee, unsuccessfuly, the effects on Earth of the trends already showing up of failures in democracy, capitalism, education, the legal system, social welfare, etc., — not even the classic aimless ocean voyage of the no where of an utopia satisfies them — by finally leaving Earth completely for a new birth. A very nasty theme of dissatisfaction. A real downer, dude!
It flew against “common wisdom” of the times. That’s the criticism I’ve always heard of it. Readers didn’t like being told their conceptions of their own beliefs were wrong. I felt the novel very effectively did that and on a wide variety of subjects.
>Finally to the point. What is the basis for the criticisms? I’m aware that
>RAH was severely ill and unable to do the final edit and it was published
>without his final polish. If that is true, I’m even more impressed with the
>quality of a “draft”!
>
>Anyone want to comment? have examples of the basis for the criticism?
The only criticism that ever completely mystified and challenged me was from a long-time Heinlein reader, an older woman I knew, who with her husband had been reading Heinlein since the very beginning. She felt something about the end was dispicable, and ceased reading Heinlein with that novel, refusing to discuss it with me — it was plain as the nose on my face to her and she was surprised I didn’t see it. Something about the final portrait of Jo-ann offended her. She and her husband were in their early seventies at the time, about ten years older than the author. Something in there mixed with her mindset like oil with water; and I’m still more than merely baffled about what it was.
She was a great fan of Twain, and a sophisticated woman, a mature person, who in fact was more than a little avant garde in her own life: in fact, it was in her home as a high-school student I first read a copy of “1603” (if that is the correct date used by Twain for his little sketch of the actual language used in the Elizabethan Court), so it couldn’t have been the brief bit of blue language used by the character to describe her relationship with “Roberto,” her surprise lover. I cannot think of anything else I’ve ever read written by Heinlein up to this time that would have surprised or offended her. Perhaps it was something in the concealled until the end affair with “Roberto” itself (yeah, yeah, I know there are teeny little hints); but that affair was only a surprising incident, not a departure from Jo-Ann’s established character, at least to me. Was it the fact that “Roberto” is someone we are supposed to see as “Winnie’s” partner and that Jo-ann didn’t merely poach, so to speak, on Winnie’s preserve, while simultaneously carrying on an on-going same sex sexual relationship with Winnie (and the rest of the ‘cast of thousands, their name is Legion,’ as Maureen later told us), but concealled her poaching (from us?), maybe the duplicity or preservation of the privacy rather than the polymorphous perversity of it?
I’ve always been puzzled by this one critic; but I’ve never been surprised that criticism based on disagreement with the social criticism portrayed in the book has been leveled at at — that’s human nature, and also invalid literary criticism, a matter called by some of mere “taste.” And I know of no others that I can assess. Needed “tightening” doesn’t amount to much to me, because I cannot imagine how one would do it. That’s like the movie portrayal of Frederick in Amadeus complaining about too many notes. I enjoy all the notes — which ones in I Will Fear No Evil should be taken out because they don’t fit, I ask?
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
David Silver wrote:
>but the portrait of the future notwithstanding all
>that “we” had [d]one in I Will Fear No Evil *is* fearsome and very
>contrarian, isn’t it?
>
Another day, another typo.
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
“Astyanax12″wrote in message news:…
>There were two reasons for me to put that ms. in the hands of his publishers:
>
>1. Mr. Minton told me that he had held a slot in his publishing schedule for
>that ms. aand needed it, or he woul dhave to substitute something else.
>
>2. I needed the advance to help with the hospital bills.
>
>Mr. Minton (president of G. P. Putnam) told me that if I would allow someone to
>do the cutting, he would offer a large advance against royalties. But I knew
>that this was a special case, and that Robert would want to do the cutting
>himself. So the advance was cut by half, and the book was not cut by someone else.
>
>It was as you see it today.
>
>Ginny
It’s one of my favorites, Mrs. H. I’ve seen you take “the blame” for this book in the past, but as far as I am concerned you have nothing to apologize for.
—
Oscagne, High Priest of Skeptics and Cynics
To bypass the Atans guarding my mailbox, replace FornMin.tam with ev1.net
Mr. Heinlein did not do drafts of his stories. His motto was: “Do it right the first time.”
He would go over a ms. changing a word here and there, or a paragraph, but he never did a “draft.” Those mss. with his changes, are in the library at UCSC.
I’m still interested in what people think of Eunice, irrespective of her reality or lack of, especially as compared to Maureen. I’m also tempted to tie in my criticisms of her (which are legion) with a swipe at the society in which she lives (which is awful).
This book, written about a decade after SIASL was published, has a common theme; the use of (fascinating) news snippets to illustrate contemporary attitudes. The reporting on Johann’s trial is as nasty as any publicity that Mike received….and as slanted and untrue. Both Eunice and Jake both have the same dream; to get off planet and move to Luna. It’s unusual that Johann doesn’t; born too early (though about the same age as Heinlein?) he sees space travel as an expensive luxury and plays devil’s advocate, allowing the other characters to make a shameless plug or two for the ‘spin off’ from space research.
But it truly was a book in which Heinlein took some savage swipes at trends in contemporary US society; something that gets overlooked in all the criticism.
Education for instance; the book has as characters many illiterates, including Gigi;
“Computer fouled up my pre-school test records and I was in sixth grade before anyone caught it. Then it was sort o’ late to change tracks and I stayed on the ‘practical’. There was talk of putting me through a remedial but the principal put his foot down. Said there wasn’t enough budget to handle the ones that could benefit from it.”
Scary..and a kick in the pants for kids reading the book who whine about homework. The thought of separating people out and not teaching them to read is horribly reminiscent not just of slavery but of most of history before the 19th century or so. Keeping the lower classes illiterate has always been handy for keeping them content in their ignorance.
Dishonesty;
Johann’s butler is stealing from his employer…but is it stealing when Johann knows about it and condones it? Or a creative way to avoid paying taxes?
“If my butler is black-marketing two-thirds of what he buys for me and pocketing the proceeds – and he always has- then he’s anxious to keep his job. Which means that he has to please _me_. Jake, can yo think of a cheaper way to buy the nearest thing to loyalty that can be bought?”
And when Jake replies,
“Bad precedent. Corrupts the country” he says,
“The country is corrupt. But it is “the only game in town’; we have no choice. The problem is always how to live in a decadent society.”
Seems to me that it’s this that caused the decline..and it’s pure selfishness of Johann to cooperate in Hubert’s moral lack of fibre.
Sexual freedom gone wild…this is my view of a bad thing as shown…and echoes a lot of what I didn’t like about Maureen’s lifestyle.
When a father can be applauded for putting his 13 year old daughter on the ‘junior Pill’ and that daughter can do her best to seduce a 70+ man without her father being concerned..there’s something wrong. When the idea is that fidelity and honesty are lost causes within marriages..or so rare as to rival hens teeth..there’s something wrong. A (pregnant) woman sleeping around on her honeymoon and a few hours after her husband dies..I’m supposes to cheer, ‘Go Joan Eunice, you liberated woman, you?” Can’t do it. Did Heinlein expect me to? Or is it a subtle swipe again? Ok, enough of me talking…
Jane
—
in article , Jane Davitt at wrote on 6/2/02 8:00 PM:
[snip]
>Sexual freedom gone wild…this is my view of a bad thing as
>shown…and echoes a lot of what I didn’t like about Maureen’s
>lifestyle.
My view too. But I think Robert often toyed with the idea that a true sophisticate (I hate that word but it works) could escape the unnecessary taboo’s against infidelity, and only rely on the necessary ones.
Proposition: Sex is a bodily function akin to eating (especially in a society that places a high value on eating with company; intimate company) and as such should be treated as such. He hinted in GR that he had a disdain for the American concept of “going steady.” He (Oscar as narrator) said it was a way of preventing Saturday night from becoming the loneliest night of the /weak/ (IIRC). In other words, rather than having to /try/ to keep a mate happy, one only had to declare the effort officially over by announcing that a couple was “going steady.” Lazy, that is. Unfruitful, that is.
Would any of us who are married, feel hurt and betrayal if our spouse decided to eat dinner out with a friend for the evening? No. Perhaps, we have a friend we’d like to eat dinner out with ourselves. No huhu. His question, albeit I always thought it was a strictly intellectual question, was how is this different than infidelity? Especially, if the spouse in question eats dinner at home every other night–“always brings it home” as I believe Heinlein said a few times, though it is a fairly common expression.
My problem with our culture in this regard is that it attempts, especially since the introduction of the Birth Control Pill (the first /practical/ form of Birth Control in 7-24,000 years of civilization), to divide Love, Sex and Reproduction into separate entities.
Personally, I don’t mind them being divided up, theoretically, now that it is /possible/ to do so, it’s just that we aren’t and haven’t done a very good job of it so far. Well, 50 or so years is nothing in terms of cultural change. Marriage, as Heinlein acknowledges in many other stories, is a mechanism or device that assumes all three entities are interconnected. And even with the BC pill, they /still/ are–despite opinions to the contrary–mostly because a better way, a better viewpoint, a better mechanism has not been discovered or synthesized. Robert seems to have seen the same things and speculated many different ways this problem might be solved.
>When a father can be applauded for putting his 13 year old daughter
>on the ‘junior Pill’ and that daughter can do her best to seduce a
>70+ man without her father being concerned..there’s something wrong.
>When the idea is that fidelity and honesty are lost causes within
>marriages..or so rare as to rival hens teeth..there’s something wrong.
>A (pregnant) woman sleeping around on her honeymoon and a few hours
>after her husband dies..I’m supposes to cheer, ‘Go Joan Eunice, you
>liberated woman, you?” Can’t do it. Did Heinlein expect me to? Or is
>it a subtle swipe again?
>Ok, enough of me talking…
I think it was both a swipe at the decadence and a swipe at our Puritan natures at the same time–though this is prob. not the right term for you guys on the other side of the Pond–didn’t you push them all on us? 🙂 He disliked leaning on anything–convention or, one supposes, abrogating morality because it’s just too hard. There’s some phrase in the Bible about not clasping you hands over your belly and resting. That isn’t for us–it’s not our lot. This was certainly his motive in so many of his other speculations. Think man, think! Pretty well distills his message in his whole body of work.
—
Art
Art McNutt wrote:
…
>I think it was both a swipe at the decadence and a swipe at our Puritan
>natures at the same time–though this is prob. not the right term for you
>guys on the other side of the Pond–didn’t you push them all on us? 🙂
…
Heck, no – you Puritans crossed the Pond to avoid religious intolerance of yourselves, and so you could practice religious intolerance of anyone else.
😉
[Simon Jester]
>From: Jane Davitt
>I’m still interested in what people think of Eunice, irrespective of
>her reality or lack of, especially as compared to Maureen. I’m also
>tempted to tie in my criticisms of her (which are legion) with a
>swipe at the society in which she lives (which is awful).
It might be time to point out that Eunice’s behavior might not have been what Heinlein himself approved of or advocated. I am thinking in particular of his non fiction essay concerning EE Smith, Larger than Life, in Expanded Universe. In it he compares the attitudes of pre WWI with the attitudes of 1979 when Heinlein wrote the essay. He thought the pre WWI attitudes were much more pro survival than the 1979 ones. Eunice was a lot closer to 1979 than she was to pre WWI.
[LV Poker Player]
—
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. – from 1984 by George Orwell
In article, (Astyanax12) writes:
>There were two reasons for me to put that ms. in the hands of his publishers:
And thank you for doing so, ma’am.
I never found anything wrong with the book; in fact, I was surprised to learn later on that a number of people did. Rereading it both before and after I learned that, I never found any evidence of the flaws that have been attributed to it. I have always found it to be an engaging story replete with the sort of teach-by-example lessons on life that are part of Heinlein’s appeal.
Just by way of evidence that I am not lacking in critical faculties, I have the inverse experience with NOTB; I always did find it flawed, and even after reading an account of how it was actually purportedly doing something very sophisticated, upon rereading it was unable to find any evidence supporting the contention, even though I wanted to. Maybe it’s just over my head, but that doesn’t invalidate my opinion.
I’ll spend time with Johann and Eunice any day. Which points up one of the attractive features of Heinlein: so many modern books have heroes (perhaps ‘protagonists’ would be more accurate) that one wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alleyway, much less have over for dinner. But Heinlein’s heroes are the sort of people that make you wonder where they’ve been all your life.
—
Peter Scott
>It might be time to point out that Eunice’s behavior might not have been what
>Heinlein himself approved of or advocated.
Considering that is impossible to reconcile Eunice which, say, Lazarus Long (or even Lazarus Long with himself) I would have to say this is probably true. Eunice is a character, nothing more. She makes darn good fiction of the didactic sort, but the didacticism isn’t necessarily telling you what you /should/ believe, merely what you /could/ believe.
Alixtii.
In article, Jane Davittwrites:
>Sexual freedom gone wild…this is my view of a bad thing as
>shown…and echoes a lot of what I didn’t like about Maureen’s
>lifestyle.
>When a father can be applauded for putting his 13 year old daughter
>on the ‘junior Pill’ and that daughter can do her best to seduce a
>70+ man without her father being concerned..there’s something wrong.
>When the idea is that fidelity and honesty are lost causes within
>marriages..or so rare as to rival hens teeth..there’s something wrong.
>A (pregnant) woman sleeping around on her honeymoon and a few hours
>after her husband dies..I’m supposes to cheer, ‘Go Joan Eunice, you
>liberated woman, you?” Can’t do it.
My interpretation is that here Heinlein is presenting people who love and value life so much that they are unwilling to spend any more of it feeling bad than absolutely necessary… and that they have either evolved to the point or put in the work necessary to get to the point where they can pass through grief, rage, despair, and all that other stuff much more rapidly than we’re accustomed to.
Desirable? Debatable. But all of us have some reference point for “It’s Later Than You Think,” and not a few of us might wish, in retrospect, that we’d spent more time enjoying life than feeling run over by it. I think Heinlein is showing us what you get by taking that to an extreme, which is one of the functions of science fiction.
—
Peter Scott
Peter Scott wrote:
>>
>
>My interpretation is that here Heinlein is presenting people who love
>and value life so much that they are unwilling to spend any more of it
>feeling bad than absolutely necessary… and that they have either
>evolved to the point or put in the work necessary to get to the point
>where they can pass through grief, rage, despair, and all that other
>stuff much more rapidly than we’re accustomed to.
>
>Desirable? Debatable. But all of us have some reference point for
>”It’s Later Than You Think,” and not a few of us might wish, in retrospect,
>that we’d spent more time enjoying life than feeling run over by it.
>I think Heinlein is showing us what you get by taking that to an extreme,
>which is one of the functions of science fiction.
>
>
Well, Johann explained his calm over Jake’s death by saying that when you get to his age, you deal with death better; “Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me – death is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way.”
That’s a nice bit…yet totally contrary to what LL might think, as he staves off death by every means possible for centuries until the flavour goes..only to be cheated out of emulating Johann’s calm acceptance by Ira and pushed back on the treadmill.
But I just find it odd, even amusing, for grown people to be obsessing over sex to the exclusion of all else. Sheesh; it’s fun, sure and I’m not knocking it. No way. It’s high on my list of fun things to do…but for them it _is_ the list and it’s a game that they insist on playing with as many people as they can. I was annoyed by the fact that Joan (or Eunice, whatever) notices that one man (Dr Hedrick) has a jealous wife…IOW, is in a relationship where infidelity is not acceptable as it was for Brian and Maureen…but still contemplates sleeping with him as a way of saying thank you for services rendered. Uh…flowers or a cheque do quite well too you know, dear. Might want to think about that before you endanger someone else’s marriage on a whim.
Jane
—
LV Poker Player wrote:
>>From: Jane Davitt
>>
>
>>I’m still interested in what people think of Eunice, irrespective of
>>her reality or lack of, especially as compared to Maureen. I’m also
>>tempted to tie in my criticisms of her (which are legion) with a
>>swipe at the society in which she lives (which is awful).
>>
>
>
>
>It might be time to point out that Eunice’s behavior might not have been what
>Heinlein himself approved of or advocated. I am thinking in particular of his
>non fiction essay concerning EE Smith, Larger than Life, in Expanded Universe.
>In it he compares the attitudes of pre WWI with the attitudes of 1979 when
>Heinlein wrote the essay. He thought the pre WWI attitudes were much more pro
>survival than the 1979 ones. Eunice was a lot closer to 1979 than she was to
>pre WWI.
>
>
Oh, yes..we don’t know what he thought, or at least I don’t. As a reader do we need to? Should the author make it clear that a character is ‘wrong’ or is that up to us as readers to make our own judgment?
Jane
—
“Jane Davitt”wrote in message news:…
>Peter Scott wrote:
>
>
>>>
>>
(snip)
>
>Well, Johann explained his calm over Jake’s death by saying that
>when you get to his age, you deal with death better;
>”Death is an old friend; I know him well. I lived with him, ate with
>him, slept with him; to meet him again does not frighten me – death
>is as necessary as birth, as happy in its own way.”
>
>That’s a nice bit…yet totally contrary to what LL might think, as
>he staves off death by every means possible for centuries until the
>flavour goes..only to be cheated out of emulating Johann’s calm
>acceptance by Ira and pushed back on the treadmill.
>
Jane, I don’t think that you can validly compare the two. Johann knew that he was dying and had accepted that fate as he indicated. He didn’t really expect the transplant to work and saw it as a way out.
Lazarus, OTOH, was dying only after he let himself get in that state by rejecting further rejuvenations because ‘the flavour’ had been lost, and in fact, said something later to Ira that was very similar to what Johann had said, IIRC, about hid feelings on death shortly before he was ‘rescued’ by Ira. When the flavor returned, he seemed just as anxious to escape death and only put himself into a dangerous position when he decided to do it ‘for Maureen’.
David Wright
Jane wrote:
>LV Poker Player wrote:
>
>>>From: Jane Davitt
>>>
>>
>>>I’m still interested in what people think of Eunice, irrespective of
>>>her reality or lack of, especially as compared to Maureen. I’m also
>>>tempted to tie in my criticisms of her (which are legion) with a
>>>swipe at the society in which she lives (which is awful).
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>It might be time to point out that Eunice’s behavior might not have been what
>>Heinlein himself approved of or advocated. I am thinking in particular of his
>>non fiction essay concerning EE Smith, Larger than Life, in Expanded Universe.
>>In it he compares the attitudes of pre WWI with the attitudes of 1979 when
>>Heinlein wrote the essay. He thought the pre WWI attitudes were much more pro
>>survival than the 1979 ones. Eunice was a lot closer to 1979 than she was to
>>pre WWI.
>>
>>
>
>Oh, yes..we don’t know what he thought, or at least I don’t. As a
>reader do we need to? Should the author make it clear that a
>character is ‘wrong’ or is that up to us as readers to make our own
>judgment?
>
>Jane
I don’t think Heinlein had clear ideas of who was “right” and who was “wrong.” I doubt one can say that say, LL was “right” and Eunice was “wrong” or vice versa. An author understands each character’s worldview as a valid paradigm and “believes” it for the period that s/he is writing it. Heinlein was a great writer; just because he was didactic doesn’t mean everything he wrote was the One Truth According to Heinlein. Heinlein had many Truths, most contradictory (re-read TNoLL).
What the point of this observation is, I’m not sure. Alixtii.
In another thread, it was suggested that the Star Wars series might be seen by some as an allegorical biography of George Lucas. I once wrote an essay suggesting I Will Fear No Evil might be such an allegorial biography of its author, Robert Heinlein.
Such theories rank right up there with the interpretation of dreams, IMO, nevertheless, sometimes they are fun to write.
I made the mistake of replying to the post in the other thread with a flippant comment that I felt the theory about Lucas had the same validity as mine about Heinlein. I was asked in reply, to post it.
Here ’tis, for your enjoyment (in picking it apart):
An Angry Fabulist’s Expression
of “Rejection Syndrome”
(c)1998, 2002 All rights reserved.
An essay by David M. Silver
I Will Fear No Evil
by Robert Anson Heinlein
The novel I Will Fear No Evil was almost fit for publication when in January 1970, peritonitis almost ended Robert Heinlein’s life. Just before hospitalization, he completed the first cut of his draft. The author gravely ill and unable to make business decisions, his wife and agent exercised their authority over his affairs and decided upon publication in unfinished form. The result is said by one commentator to be “a rather rambling and murky story line that almost certainly would have been shortened and tightened up considerably had Heinlein been able to edit the draft before publication.” Heinlein remained very ill and underwent other surgeries for the entire next two years. Because it lacks this supposed needed final polish and contains what many then and now consider bizarre subject matter, it has been one of his least appreciated works–a sad fate considering current social history and, also, what I believe is its true intent.
It is not a part of the “Future History Series” but seems to exist further down the time line of Stranger In A Strange Land, which Jubal Harshaw in his brief encore appearance in To Sail Beyond The Sunset tells us is our very own.
The story occurs a half-century or so into the future.
Dramatis Personae:
Johann Sebastian Bach Smith is perhaps the richest man on an increasingly crowded Earth, a self-made, cantankerous very old coot who has made the final error. He has let himself fall into the clutches of the medical profession, and they will not let him die. Mentally as acute as ever, but permanently harnessed into life support gear afforded only the very rich, he has found a way to outwit the medicos by committing an elaborate suicide. A brilliant, unorthodox surgeon, considered charlatan by most, claims he has successfully transplanted brains from one chimpanzee to another–and there are films of the operation and both simians now climbing trees and eating bananas. Doubting whether a first attempt with a human will succeed, even were the operation not a fraud, Smith does not care–he’s got no choice. The hopeless alternative is to accept increasingly mind-numbing narcotics to offset pain until a final vegetal state arrives.
He wagers not to wait and suffer mental or physical agony. All he needs is a body, recently dead; and, as it would make a wildly overoptimistic surgical team more willing to attempt this lunacy if the body has the same rare blood type as he–AB Negative, his solution is simple: advertise for a body!
Eunice Branca, a delightfully beautiful, young, nubile and intelligent woman, is Smith’s recently promoted private secretary. She supports her husband, a body-painting artist, whose favorite canvas is his wife. She likes old Johann, appreciates his gallant efforts to evade the inevitable fate tied to his automated bedpan, and delights in exhibiting herself to this very old man in his last few days: Are those tights she’s wearing, or just paint? Only Eunice, her husband, and the reader, know for sure.
Jake Salomon is Smith’s private attorney, long-time friend, and co-conspirator against the medicos. One other thing: he’s quite a “fixer.” Organ transplants have become big business. Relying on precedents that a dead body is ‘property’ of the dead person’s estate, Salomon has little difficulty in setting up a lawful offer to buy a recently dead one in ‘prime’ condition for his very rich client. It’s simply a matter of awaiting some accident to provide a proper host for Johann’s brain.
Joe Branca is the prototypical artist as a young man, seemingly a minor character, not very bright, but talented in an obscure area few would seriously believe is art: “body-painting?”! It’s doubtful whether he would be able to live, let alone pursue this “art” without the effort and strong, loving support of his talented wife. He is offspring of an indolent cranky ungrateful mother, who, vicious, bigoted and stupid, lives on the largess of the country–a welfare drone, paradoxically grinding out bastard children who grind out bastard children ad infinitum and, amazingly, thinks herself neglected by and “better” than almost all others of her indulgent, troubled, decaying society.
Plot Synopsis:
To his surprise, Johann awakens from surgery. Memories of strange dreams under anesthesia did perturb him a bit; but he’s delighted to find himself alive, without pain–for the first time in years. Numbness below the neck gradually wears off as his new body adjusts to the demands of its new brain. He’s not even particularly shocked to find the young new body is female–no one thought to specify the sex of the donor. He’s perfectly willing to try on his new life in that gender–it might be fascinating! A bit curious he has asked for a mirror, which they are bringing.
The tremendous shock caused by discovery that the face and body the mirror discloses are those of Eunice Branca would kill a lesser man. Then suddenly that which had been disturbing him during his time under anesthesia becomes manifest. Eunice is present in his consciousness. Since the operation she has always been there. She soothes his troubled mind. How can two “consciousnesses” exist in one brain, short of that conditions described in The Puppet Masters, i.e., parasitic enslavement and exploitation of one form by another, or what persons educated before the end of the 1970s then and the general public still calls “schizophrenia”?–for this is not an essay on the current labeling flavor of the day endorsed by an evolving profession. I leave that question for later.
The body and minds of this construct Johann-Eunice start a journey unlike any in the annuals of speculative fiction. First, there’s the little matter of recovering legal control over self. During unconsciousness following surgery, to keep Johann’s granddaughters from having him declared dead (and presumably inherit), Salome, er, Salomon did a legal dance to persuade the state to declare him guardian over Johann’s head and Eunice’s body. The granddaughters are offspring of his second and third wives, who each divorced Johann, but only after presenting him with children not biologically his; and, therefore, they are not granddaughters in any but the strict legal sense of being children of his presumed “daughters” who themselves also were born during wedlock.
And the only son this man ever had, an honorable man who died taking a worthless hill in a discredited war, was the result of yet another cuckolding whose mother, whom Johann truly loved, died giving him birth. But Johann, a gentleman, has and will never mention this knowledge (certain because of the blood types he knows his “children” possessed) to anyone except Eunice whom he finds now sharing his brain, even though control over the property and his corporate empires is at stake.
Salomon and Johann-Eunice will win the legal battles. A bewildering display of sub-plots intermixed with didactic social commentary occurs during this contest and following. Here I set most of the didacticism aside, since commentary on all the subjects raised by the author’s agenda would require an essay far beyond the scope of this paper: however, as a first decision, Johann-Eunice ordains she will henceforth be called Joan, but pronounced “Yo-an” Smith.
First among the subplots: Johann was a sperm donor; and frozen sperm exists. As all of Johann’s putative children from three wives were not biologically his (Johann was lucky in a “foolish fourth marriage,” hoping to bring back something that had died in him with the death of his ‘son’ whom he loved, as it brought forth no issue, but merely cost a “chunk of money” to get shut of it), Johann-Eunice decide early on there shall be one; and secretly one of Yo-an’s eggs is surgically implanted fertilized with his thawed genetic remnant, immediately before the next activities commence.
Next is this little matter of returning to an adult life–this time as a woman. First, to complicate things a bit, Yo-an seduces “Winnie.” She is another prototypical character, a bright vivacious redhead, familiar to all Heinlein’s readers, a type sometimes associated with Virginia (called by some “Ginny”) Heinlein, his second wife. She is Yo-an’s nurse, and now becomes female companion, that is, nursemaid. To complicate matters a bit more, Winnie has a boyfriend, the semi-mysterious Robert, or “Roberto,” whose detailed associations with Winnie and profession are kept private and off-stage from us by the author, until mid-novel when we find he was one of the specialists charged originally with Yo-an’s physical recovery. To complicate yet more, it turns out that Eunice, before her death, had an on-going affair with Jake Salomon, old Johann’s “fixer” and only real friend. So Yo-an seduces Jake to assuage his grief and reveals to him her secret: the two minds that exist in her cortex. Then Yo-an visits Joe Branca, still struggling to produce ‘art for art’s sake,’ and finds him in virtual poverty. He told the “fixer,” Jake, to “kark in his hat” when offered a staggering sum for Eunice’s body. Eunice was mugged and murdered while shortcutting through one of the many dangerous neighborhoods existing in this decaying world of walled and privately policed enclaves to save time getting to an emergency patient as an “Angel of Mercy,” a rare blood donor. One of Joe’s old models, “Gigi,” whom Eunice knew and loved, has moved in and is trying to support them by, unknown to Joe, prostituting herself. Yo-an loves them both and arranges personally with the model to subsidize Joe. Joe’s head is so far up in the clouds he does not ask about the source of money Gigi brings for food and shelter. Now the young struggling artist has an effective ‘keeper’ again! The plot is beginning to resemble one of Wagner’s Ring-cycles–less some of the murders–well under way, isn’t it?
Let’s skip the rest of the complications, including much more sleeping around, er, loving. Jake marries Yo-an; and they sail away onto the only safe and secure place now existing on Earth, the open seas of the Pacific itself. Joe and the model, now married, and many other people come along on a large trimaran. Other complications ensue, including more love triangles. These complications interfere with Joe’s art, so the couple decide to go ashore. During their helicopter departure, Jake, still strong and virile, tries to steady a swinging piece of heavy luggage being winched above, overtaxes his aged heart and immediately expires.
At that moment, Jake’s consciousness enters Johann-Eunice’s shared brain and body. Now they are a trinity. Curiouser and curiouser. Step aside Wagner–this author’s just surpassed you and taken the teacake at this party of the mad!
Now to the finale: Johann-Eunice-Jake decides to immigrate to the Moon to escape Earth’s soiled civilization entirely and ensure the soon-to-be-born child may be born in a world of hope. Reenter “Winnie” and boyfriend Dr. Roberto Garcia, who was responsible for the care of Johann-Eunice during her first convalescence. They accompany the emigrant Johann-Eunice-Jake as her personal servants (huge charitable donations would have gone elsewhere had the Lunar Authority not allowed that wild departure from its strict screening policies–the rich necessarily always play by ‘different’ rules) as that baby is very important and, by the way, there now appear some indications that the graft of nerve cells between brain and spinal cord is deteriorating–a situation called by the healers of this novel “rejection syndrome.”
A hiatus intervenes. We are in Luna; and Johann-Eunice-Jake is in labor. Yo-an repeatedly insists to ‘Winnie’ that she promise that, if anything “happens,” the baby will be named Eunice Jacob. And just as the expectant mother goes under, while an argument over NAMES occurs among the three in the brain, there is the following conversation between Yo-an and Winnie:
“I do promise you, Joan. Cross my heart.”
“My dear sweet Winsome. We’ve come a long way together, you and I and
Roberto [The emphasis is not in the original].
“Yes, we have dear.”
“I’m ill. Am I not?”
* * * * *
And as she goes under, the “rejection syndrome” begins … and Johann-Eunice-Jake begins to die while giving birth to a new life.
But then something shocking intervenes:
Between surgeries a conversation occurs between Yo-an and “Roberto” the putative doctor. In very erotic detail, Yo-an, using the classic and infamous Anglo-Saxon verb, thanks him for graphic acts of sex in which they have engaged. “Now wait just a minute,” I said when I read this first edition hot off the presses, twenty-eight years ago, “This is the first time I’ve ever read anything like that in Heinlein. He doesn’t exactly put asterisks in as in expurgated copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover but his writing is never like this. When did she have a chance to get in the sack with ‘Roberto?’ He faded into the woodwork as soon as the paralysis following the original transplant surgery wore off.” Then I thought hard and remembered that among many beddings she and Winnie once swapped partners (Jake for “Roberto”) after a night on the town. There was nothing remarkable then described about the sex that evening; but I shrugged off the seeming lack of a point–other than a severely ill-timed but understandable expression of gratitude–to this and read on. After all this is a Heinlein lady, and all Heinlein ladies are unique–to put it kindly–and quite tricky. Perhaps they found other times? I then read on to the bitter end in which at the instant of giving birth to new Eunice Jacob, that overburdened treble mind expires, leaving these last words:
“An old world vanished and then there was none.”
Thematic Synopsis:
I used to consider the salient point in I Will Fear No Evil to be that Eunice’s consciousness continues to exist in the donor body. I saw this novel, among other things, to be Heinlein’s conscious examination of the one form of self-identity some believe exists, an identity so strong as to defy death, that is, an inquiry into the question: is there a “soul?” I reasoned he reasoned if Eunice’s consciousness were present in the left-behind body after the death of her brain–and her brain was shattered beyond repair (declared “dead”) in a mugging–then T.H. Huxley’s scientifically unprovable and undisprovable enigma “how can a soul exist” necessarily needs re-examination. How this scientific-proof extrapolation to the “animus” occurred to the author is fairly easy to infer. He expressly writes here of the cellular memories of the flatworm, an inoffensive otherwise not very unusual early form of life we all recall from basic biology that has one unique property. Cut in two, each end grows the missing part. The tail grows a head (with a complete whatever passes for a brain in a flatworm), and the head grows a tail. Medicine considers “death” to occur when the brain is said to be “dead.” Ah, but what if a body can regenerate the brain? Not yet? Maybe not; but way back down in our evolutionary chain, our DNA could! What made that happen, then, but not now? “Could that be the soul?” Heinlein is asking.
If a soul truly exists, then indeed David the King, my namesake who wrote the Psalm, and Robert Heinlein may honestly recite:
Yea, Thou I Walk
In The Valley Of
The Shadow Of Death
I Will Fear No Evil
For Thou Art With Me
Thy Rod And Thy Staff
and the symbolic old man with a beard both Eunice and Johann say they saw in their troubled dreams during their original recovery will indeed appear. That neatly accounts for the title.
Maybe so. But then there are these matters of wives supporting artists and all this business about names, particularly hyphenated ones, including the screwy argument over names at the end and interdependence of threesomes and of “split personalities,” and “rejection syndrome.” And then the mysterious stranger “Roberto,” a one-night stand tucked in there with such significance to the lady with the hyphenated name that Heinlein (that ‘nice Naval Academy graduate’ even librarians named Mrs. Grundy used to love) actually writes purple prose to describe her gratitude. And we didn’t get an afterlife here, did we? We got a version of the bubble ending from Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain, favorite author of mother Maureen Johnson Smith of Thebes (I almost said Butler), Missouri and grandfather Ira Johnson. Oops, sorry wrong Smith. It’s Johann Sebastian Bach Smith here, not Woodrow Wilson Smith, isn’t it?
But then we are reading about artists such as Joe in this book, not successful naval officers, leaders or politicians, aren’t we?
One thing I learned a long time ago: Robert Anson Heinlein was a very tricky writer about many things, but most importantly about names. Look at Stranger In A Strange Land for example. Virtually every name in it has multiple resonances.
Take one here from the very beginning: Agnes, Johann’s first wife, whom he loved for the short period they had together (like Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as the author reminds us). She gave him the beloved ‘son’ who died in a discredited war. One meaning for Agnes is “Chaste.” (Another is lamb in Latin, usually a victim or an innocent sacrifice when referred to in religious writings.) David, later the King and poet who wrote the Psalm, was a sacrifice as well, when they sent him to face Goliath. And we recall another David Lamb, don’t we? “The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail,” from Time Enough For Love? The son’s blood type from the dog tags that were all that was left of him was “O+,” impossibility for an AB-negative father. What is wrong here? Why that name is deliberately upside-down! Nothing in this novel is what it seems! Because it is not primarily a novel, I believe. On a major level it is the allegorical autobiography of Robert Anson Heinlein, born July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, graduated United States Naval Academy, class of 1929, married briefly to a lady concerning whom little is known almost immediately after graduation, then divorced and remarried to Leslyn MacDonald who supported him after he was rejected from Naval Service because of tuberculosis; and probably while he was rejected a few times by publishers concerning those mysterious first efforts at writing which are now turned up by conscientious research, rejected by the voters in an election for the California State Assembly in 1938 in which as Johann tells Eunice “he” was put up to run by the party in an election they were going to lose anyway, because he could afford to pay for his own campaign (RAH took out a mortgage), and whom he mysteriously divorced in 1947 concerning whom there have been recurrent rumors of hospitalization for alcoholism and, perhaps, of a family history of bipolar disorder, finally thereafter married to the vivacious red haired woman who everyone calls “Ginnie,” but he called “Ticky” until the day he died, who was and continues to be his “mouthpiece” to his adoring public and whose shared philosophies were the subject of heated rejections by 1969, in the midst of the draft-dodging, “Heigh, heigh, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” drop-out malaise then occurring. You remember, don’t you? It was about the time some critics began to say his publicly acclaimed Starship Troopers had been awarded the Hugo in mistake, because the novel described a “fascist utopia”–a libel we read deliberately resurrected when Verhoeven’s filmed abortion was released.
I can go on…. Three wives. Students at our service academies are still not permitted marriage until they graduate. In the 1920s, just as today, they were taught they already had Three Wives: Duty. Honor. Country. Above all else, these are the three precepts all of our service academies drum into the minds of their graduates. He did his Duty with Honor to his Country; and it rejected him when it discharged him despite the “cured” status of his tuberculosis, then rejected his persistent efforts to return when he “with a feeling of loss of personal honor such as I never expected myself to experience … found myself sitting on a hilltop, in civilian clothes, with no battle station, and unable to fight, when it happened” on December 7, 1941. He nevertheless did the duty that was offered him during that war by his beloved old commander, now Admiral Ernest King–a bastard job which could just as easily have been done by a Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander rather than a Mr. Heinlein, that included “unofficial” work as mediator between naval officers who respected that Class of 1929 ring on his hand and civilian scientists who respected him as the eminent artist in a field they revered. He did it just as Johann did his duty to what was presented him by unchaste Agnes. She gave Johann a bastard but died in the attempt, and the fine boy died in a discredited war. Whether it was Oscar Gordon’s father’s UnWar I (Korea), or Evelyn Cyril’s own UnWar II (Vietnam), it does not matter; it was one of the rocks he found on Glory Road. Duty, Honor and Country. One died early, two divorced him, and three gave him bastards and, by 1969, some of their progeny was abusing and wasting needed resources and grasping greedily for more. The fourth wife that he divorced after he tried recommitment to a public service life for a year to revive his hopes. Politics? That cost him a heap of money to get shut of. He needed to sell that “first” short story, “Time-Line,” to pay off the mortgage he took out for the ill-fated attempt at the California Assembly.
Filling in the remaining allegorical blanks is left as an exercise to the student, if you will.
“Roberto,” you miserable sonofabitch suffering from “rejection syndrome,” you’ve done it to us again. And it took me twenty-eight years to figure it out. I am so embarrassed I am going to vanish in a bubble ending.
David M. Silver
April 19, 1998, lightly revised June 5, 2002
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
On June 5, David Silver wrote:
(snip an absolutely magnificent essay that every fan or casual reader of RAH should read and learn from)
Oh, well done, David, well done indeed! Thank you.
Steve J
—
“…everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”
–Margaret Atwood
“David Silver”wrote in message news:…
>Thematic Synopsis:
>
>I used to consider the salient point in I Will Fear No Evil to be that
>Eunice’s consciousness continues to exist in the donor body. I saw this
>novel, among other things, to be Heinlein’s conscious examination of the
>one form of self-identity some believe exists, an identity so strong as
>to defy death, that is, an inquiry into the question: is there a “soul?”
>I reasoned he reasoned if Eunice’s consciousness were present in the
>left-behind body after the death of her brain–and her brain was
>shattered beyond repair (declared “dead”) in a mugging–then T.H.
>Huxley’s scientifically unprovable and undisprovable enigma “how can a
>soul exist” necessarily needs re-examination. How this scientific-proof
>extrapolation to the “animus” occurred to the author is fairly easy to
>infer. He expressly writes here of the cellular memories of the
>flatworm, an inoffensive otherwise not very unusual early form of life
>we all recall from basic biology that has one unique property. Cut in
>two, each end grows the missing part. The tail grows a head (with a
>complete whatever passes for a brain in a flatworm), and the head grows
>a tail. Medicine considers “death” to occur when the brain is said to be
>”dead.” Ah, but what if a body can regenerate the brain? Not yet? Maybe
>not; but way back down in our evolutionary chain, our DNA could! What
>made that happen, then, but not now? “Could that be the soul?” Heinlein
>is asking.
Dave,
Really, this is a terrible book. An embarassment. Something the author’s wife admits was released at a time of dire financial need. A blight on a body of work that’s otherwise pretty much okay as popular fiction goes and among the best scifi around. I read it once when it came out, obligated to do so because I’d read everything else he’d written, and I think it was the thing that finally made me look critically at the rest of his writing. Before it, I enjoyed the paternalistic escapism; after it, everything was in a new, clay-footed context.
I’m disappointed you didn’t put “scientific proof,” above, inside quotes. Sure, you didn’t claim it was “scientific proof” but it’s really strained to use “scientific” in the same sentence with this “proof.” Flatworms? The body eventually being able to regenerate the brain with the implication being that the flatworm is a “higher” life form than the human? The soul as a thing with substance? It’s so thin, it’s laughable; but I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the missed connection and maybe suggesting I know why your friend got miffed enough when she read this abomination that she quit Heinlein.
Now, I don’t know souls from Shinola and I’ll be the first to confess. I do know, though, that there’s a spiritual. I’ll be the first to confess, too, that what I know about the spiritual, I know about the spiritual and will never claim that what I know about it applies to anybody else. Just me, see? What I know (that works for me) Bob almost hit–and then he did his little a-guy’s-gotta-come-up-with-something-empirical-or-his-credibility’s-shot bullshit and the flatworms crawled off the petrie plate.
There’s intellect and emotion and physicality. They don’t exist, of course, apart from each other because they can’t. There’s a way, I think, to bring them all together at the same time. It can’t be done alone.
I think your friend saw that Bob was approaching (what I think is) the right answer but when he faltered, she lost faith in him. I did, too, but for another reason at the time. I was younger than your friend, didn’t have her wisdom and maturity. I think she lost faith, he lost credibility with her and they were through. I think he was in love and grasping for understanding but he both was bound by Western notions of “science” and his readers’ expectations that he be able to explain the formerly unexplainable. I believe he failed at the substantive attempt but the fact pattern remains intact for a successor to fit it to the controlling law and make it a good theory.
This has been revealing enough of my unprovable, personal beliefs that I’ll also invoke the students’ proving it and beg off. You’ll forgive me.
>
>If a soul truly exists, then indeed David the King, my namesake who
>wrote the Psalm, and Robert Heinlein may honestly recite:
>
>Yea, Thou I Walk
>In The Valley Of
>The Shadow Of Death
>I Will Fear No Evil
>For Thou Art With Me
>Thy Rod And Thy Staff
You’re not even a little apologetic for terminating the psalm on the phallic ending point? Come on, restoreth my soul.
>
>David M. Silver
>
>
>April 19, 1998, lightly revised June 5, 2002
>
>
>
>–
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
I write and I’ve written and it always amazes me, the things people read into what you write. If I stare at them long enough, I can convince myself I did them on purpose. If I talk with myself soothingly enough, I can believe that acceptance is superior to understanding. It must be old age. There’s no fool like an old fool.
LNC
cmaj7dmin7 [L.N. Collier] replied, quite thoughtfully, to my invitation to pick apart the essay:
>”David Silver” wrote in message
>news:…
>
>>Thematic Synopsis:
>>
>>I used to consider the salient point in I Will Fear No Evil to be that
>>Eunice’s consciousness continues to exist in the donor body. I saw this
>>novel, among other things, to be Heinlein’s conscious examination of the
>>one form of self-identity some believe exists, an identity so strong as
>>to defy death, that is, an inquiry into the question: is there a “soul?”
>>I reasoned he reasoned if Eunice’s consciousness were present in the
>>left-behind body after the death of her brain–and her brain was
>>shattered beyond repair (declared “dead”) in a mugging–then T.H.
>>Huxley’s scientifically unprovable and undisprovable enigma “how can a
>>soul exist” necessarily needs re-examination. How this scientific-proof
>>extrapolation to the “animus” occurred to the author is fairly easy to
>>infer. He expressly writes here of the cellular memories of the
>>flatworm, an inoffensive otherwise not very unusual early form of life
>>we all recall from basic biology that has one unique property. Cut in
>>two, each end grows the missing part. The tail grows a head (with a
>>complete whatever passes for a brain in a flatworm), and the head grows
>>a tail. Medicine considers “death” to occur when the brain is said to be
>>”dead.” Ah, but what if a body can regenerate the brain? Not yet? Maybe
>>not; but way back down in our evolutionary chain, our DNA could! What
>>made that happen, then, but not now? “Could that be the soul?” Heinlein
>>is asking.
>>
>
>Dave,
>
>Really, this is a terrible book. An embarassment. Something the author’s
>wife admits was released at a time of dire financial need. A blight on a
>body of work that’s otherwise pretty much okay as popular fiction goes and
>among the best scifi around.
It was released at a time of financial need. What is isn’t is very much like the body of other well-known, popular novels he written since the end of World War II. What I don’t consider it to be is a blight, however, albeit its differences. What occurred, I think, was his last concentrated effort at “world saving,” which he claimed to have given up on back around 1947 along with a few other things, including a hopelessly ill wife and marriage. He’d focused for years on putting groceries on the table, enabling him to write finally the magnus opus Stranger in a Strange Land which by 1970 was enjoying full cult status among the new generation, then in full “tune in, turn on, and drop out” escapism.
He tried, very hard for him, I think, to write to communicate with this new generation’s audience, trying to create a combination of the young and the paternal voice so far as he could use it for didactic parts of the work. He may have failed in that: I think he misjudged some readers who looked to him only for escapism, and others on another segment of the spectrum who were so far committed to ‘changing the World’ that they couldn’t suffer criticism of their efforts.
Perhaps the portrayal of the capitalistic anarchy that Eunice Branca and Johann Smith live in even alienated the nascent Libertarian movement that so appreciated TMIAHM, only two years earlier.
He deliberately took so many contrarian positions to the ‘truths’ of that age that he risked provoking offense at any point of the compass toward which he turned the prow of that trimaran vessel he put his Three Is A Crowd protagonist.
But I’ve always enjoyed the icon-breaking mask worn by this author (I loved his contemporary Phillip Wylie); so rather than being alienated by not fully understanding this work from the first, I’ve been content to keep plugging away at it — over a good number of years now.
Perhaps that’s because I was just finishing, or had just finished, the exposure to the puzzle palace that is English literature; or, otoh, was just beginning to study the no less obscure sophistry we both knew as law. I was at the right age to tolerate obscurity, which on one level, its imagery, this work is. [There is, however, little or nothing obscure about the social criticism parts.]
>I read it once when it came out, obligated to
>do so because I’d read everything else he’d written, and I think it was the
>thing that finally made me look critically at the rest of his writing.
>Before it, I enjoyed the paternalistic escapism; after it, everything was in
>a new, clay-footed context.
>
>I’m disappointed you didn’t put “scientific proof,” above, inside quotes.
>Sure, you didn’t claim it was “scientific proof” but it’s really strained to
>use “scientific” in the same sentence with this “proof.”
I wouldn’t go very far in the direction of putting quotations around anything these days involving DNA. I’m not educated in the field of research biology enough to do other than parrot what I see or read. I simply sit and watch the mind-candy the PBS Nova programs discuss [“Evolution” is the latest I’ve been watching.] and wonder where exactly the discoveries will lead “scientifically.” From the latest series I’ve watched, I suspect there’s probably a gene sequence that actually does enable the DNA to rebuild not only the brain but virtually every other part of every body of every being that ever existed.
But I think we both might agree in 1970 the notion of regeneration of the brain was a guess of the wilder, hairer variety.
>Flatworms? The body
>eventually being able to regenerate the brain with the implication being
>that the flatworm is a “higher” life form than the human?
If “higher” means more adept at regeneration, perhaps not too laughable. But, as the flatworm is believed to share a common ancestor with homo sap it means that we continue to have that DNA sequence that will trigger regeneration. Whether we’ll ever be able to pull the trigger is another question, along with whether we’ll ever want to do it. [I have no shame. ;-)]
>The soul as a
>thing with substance? It’s so thin, it’s laughable; but I’m not laughing at
>you.
Wry laughter is fine. I laugh at myself all the time, now that I’m retired. But the notion of a soul, of course, is the great delusion the shamans have afflicted us with; and so much written and said I suspect Heinlein just had to return to that befouled well.
>I’m laughing at the missed connection and maybe suggesting I know why
>your friend got miffed enough when she read this abomination that she quit
>Heinlein.
Gads! In the depths of despair, Heinlein decided the most common flatworm to mankind — the tapeworm that inhabits our colon and can be passed on by virtually any expectoration of our body, even some suggest: mother’s milk, is our own very immortal soul?! 😉 Ye Gads!
No, seriously, tell me more about the missed connection you see. Why “abomination”? If not here, then E-Mail.
>
>Now, I don’t know souls from Shinola and I’ll be the first to confess. I do
>know, though, that there’s a spiritual. I’ll be the first to confess, too,
>that what I know about the spiritual, I know about the spiritual and will
>never claim that what I know about it applies to anybody else. Just me, see?
>What I know (that works for me) Bob almost hit–and then he did his little
>a-guy’s-gotta-come-up-with-something-empirical-or-his-credibility’s-shot
>bullshit and the flatworms crawled off the petrie plate.
>
But it’s simply a framework for the fable, L.N. And who knows, in a stranger than reality but reality nonetheless, the guess may have truth in it.
>There’s intellect and emotion and physicality. They don’t exist, of course,
>apart from each other because they can’t. There’s a way, I think, to bring
>them all together at the same time. It can’t be done alone.
>
So far as we now know, true. And isn’t it wonderful we get to experience this terminal disease called human life? Then what happens?
>I think your friend saw that Bob was approaching (what I think is) the right
>answer but when he faltered, she lost faith in him. I did, too, but for
>another reason at the time. I was younger than your friend, didn’t have her
>wisdom and maturity. I think she lost faith, he lost credibility with her
>and they were through.
L.N. is referring here to another post I made in yet another thread, that started by Hadley V. Stacey, entitled “IWFNE, What’s the Problem?”, in which I stated, in part, this criticism leveled by a lady I knew at the time I first read it:
“The only criticism that ever completely mystified and challenged me was from a long-time Heinlein reader, an older woman I knew, who with her husband had been reading Heinlein since the very beginning. She felt something about the end was d[e]spicable, and ceased reading Heinlein with that novel, refusing to discuss it with me — it was plain as the nose on my face to her and she was surprised I didn’t see it. Something about the final portrait of Jo-ann offended her. She and her husband were in their early seventies at the time, about ten years older than the author. Something in there mixed with her mindset like oil with water; and I’m still more than merely baffled about what it was.
“She was a great fan of Twain, and a sophisticated woman, a mature person, who in fact was more than a little avant garde in her own life: in fact, it was in her home as a high-school student I first read a copy of “1603” (if that is the correct date used by Twain for his little sketch of the actual language used in the Elizabethan Court), so it couldn’t have been the brief bit of blue language used by the character to describe her relationship with “Roberto,” her surprise lover. I cannot think of anything else I’ve ever read written by Heinlein up to this time that would have surprised or offended her. Perhaps it was something in the concealled until the end affair with “Roberto” itself (yeah, yeah, I know there are teeny little hints); but that affair was only a surprising incident, not a departure from Jo-Ann’s established character, at least to me. Was it the fact that “Roberto” is someone we are supposed to see as “Winnie’s” partner and that Jo-ann didn’t merely poach, so to speak, on Winnie’s preserve, while simultaneously carrying on an on-going same sex sexual relationship with Winnie (and the rest of the ‘cast of thousands, their name is Legion,’ as Maureen later told us), but concealled her poaching (from us?), maybe the duplicity or preservation of the privacy rather than the polymorphous perversity of it?
“I’ve always been puzzled by this one critic; but I’ve never been surprised that criticism based on disagreement with the social criticism portrayed in the book has been leveled at at — that’s human nature, and also invalid literary criticism, a matter called by some of mere “taste.” And I know of no others that I can assess. Needed “tightening” doesn’t amount to much to me, because I cannot imagine how one would do it. That’s like the movie portrayal of Frederick in Amadeus complaining about too many notes. I enjoy all the notes — which ones in I Will Fear No Evil should be taken out because they don’t fit, I ask? [End quotation of the earlier post.]”
>I think he was in love and grasping for understanding
>but he both was bound by Western notions of “science” and his readers’
>expectations that he be able to explain the formerly unexplainable.
Both correct, I think.
>I
>believe he failed at the substantive attempt but the fact pattern remains
>intact for a successor to fit it to the controlling law and make it a good
>theory.
>
That’s an intriguing statement, but what is the controlling law? Huxley didn’t know of any other than the scientific method and, on Wednesdays through Friday, neither do I. Let me know about it and on Saturday, maybe I won’t inspect the Garden to see whether the woman has given the man fruit of the tree to eat; but think on it instead.
>This has been revealing enough of my unprovable, personal beliefs that I’ll
>also invoke the students’ proving it and beg off. You’ll forgive me.
>
Yes, of course. 🙂
>
>>If a soul truly exists, then indeed David the King, my namesake who
>>wrote the Psalm, and Robert Heinlein may honestly recite:
>>
>>Yea, Thou I Walk
>>In The Valley Of
>>The Shadow Of Death
>>I Will Fear No Evil
>>For Thou Art With Me
>>Thy Rod And Thy Staff
>>
>
>You’re not even a little apologetic for terminating the psalm on the phallic
>ending point? Come on, restoreth my soul.
>
Sure, why not, even if this is a Thursday and I’m officially an agnostic on Thursdays. Unfortunately, I cannot find my wife’s King James [she was raised a good Lutheran like all Minnesota Norwegians]; and you really don’t want to read what the New Catholic Translation in the New American Bible (©Catholic Bibical Association, 1969, 1991) did to its poetry. I shuddered. I keep it around for the research footnotes and have noticed over the years that some are like those fabled islands in the Pacific. They appear, then disappear, from edition to edition. Nice for a traditionalist, albeit lapsed, Catholic to know the Inquisition is still hard at work. Lemme see if I can find a website. Okay, here ’tis:
Pss.23
[1] The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
[2] He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
[3] He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
[4 ] Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they
comfort me.
[5] Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
[6] Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
I have no shame. And what do you have against staffs? 😉
>
>I write and I’ve written and it always amazes me, the things people read
>into what you write. If I stare at them long enough, I can convince myself I
>did them on purpose. If I talk with myself soothingly enough, I can believe
>that acceptance is superior to understanding. It must be old age. There’s no
>fool like an old fool.
>
>LNC
You’ll have no disagreement from here. Sorta. Thanks for putting together that critique. My mind works slowly enough that I may eventually figure most of it out.
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
Stephen Jordan wrote:
>On June 5, David Silver wrote:
>
>(snip an absolutely magnificent essay that every fan or casual reader of
>RAH should read and learn from)
>
No more or less than what I read here frequently from regular and casual visitors alike. That neglected and virtually abandoned reading group website of mine (disconnected links and all), where this essay once appeared, has lots of room for fun essays on Heinlein works; and you need not pretend to apply any scholastic rules of criticism to write and E-Mail me one for inclusion. I.e., it had no claim nor intention of being a scholastic journal. There is room for as many essays as are likely to be submitted, or I can find more room. I’ll not have time to write more myself in the forseeable future. Warm up your keyboard, Stephen — and others.
>Oh, well done, David, well done indeed! Thank you.
A pleasure.
See, http://members.aol.com/agplusone/rahmain.htm
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
David Silverwrote in message news:…
>In another thread, it was suggested that the Star Wars series might be
>seen by some as an allegorical biography of George Lucas. I once wrote
>an essay suggesting I Will Fear No Evil might be such an allegorial
>biography of its author, Robert Heinlein.
>
>Such theories rank right up there with the interpretation of dreams,
>IMO, nevertheless, sometimes they are fun to write.
>
>I made the mistake of replying to the post in the other thread with a
>flippant comment that I felt the theory about Lucas had the same
>validity as mine about Heinlein. I was asked in reply, to post it.
>
>Here ’tis, for your enjoyment (in picking it apart):
>
>An Angry Fabulist’s Expression
of “Rejection Syndrome”
>(c)1998, 2002 All rights reserved.
>An essay by David M. Silver
>I Will Fear No Evil
>by Robert Anson Heinlein
>
Top drawer stuff, Mr. Silver. The only thing I can think of to pick on, well; I’m sure /I/ must be the one who is wrong. I thought he mentioned the worm experiment where they set up an electrocution booby-trap on a table, let worm “A” accidentally find it, then they take the dead carcass and throw it in the blender and feed it to worm “B.” Worm “B” is crawling on the table, gets close to the electrode and then starts running for the hills. Maybe I read this somewhere else, and /I/ made the connection to IWFNE.
Now I will have to pull it off the shelf and read it again.
—
Art
Art wrote:
>. . . [snip] . . . The only thing I can think of to pick
>on, well; I’m sure /I/ must be the one who is wrong. I thought he
>mentioned the worm experiment where they set up an electrocution
>booby-trap on a table, let worm “A” accidentally find it, then they
>take the dead carcass and throw it in the blender and feed it to worm
>”B.” Worm “B” is crawling on the table, gets close to the electrode
>and then starts running for the hills. Maybe I read this somewhere
>else, and /I/ made the connection to IWFNE.
>
>Now I will have to pull it off the shelf and read it again.
A result that, in the words of McA is: ” . . . the fulfillment of all my boyish dreams.” I may have to quickly reread it too. Neat experiment. Hope they washed the electrode. I wonder if worms can smell. [“Hmmm. That big black bar smells a lot like cooked me!”]
—
David M. Silver
http://www.readinggroupsonline.com/groups/heinlein.htm
“The Lieutenant expects your names to shine!”
Robert Anson Heinlein, USNA ’29
Lt (jg)., USN R’td (1907-1988)
Go To Discussion Chat
[Editor’s Note: The following were posted after the chats on the 6th and 8th]
Carolyn Evans wrote:
>>Like Maureen, Eunice was “amoral” – working out her own set of rules to live
>>by and be able to look herself in the mirror at night. Unlike Maureen,she
>>wasn’t living in an early 20th century Bible Belt community, but in a
>>futuristic dystopia.
Jane Davitt wrote:
>They have strong similarities; might be fun to look at that more
>closely. Maureen fans; how do you feel about Eunice?
>Now here I disagree. She seemed to be dragging people into bed all
>over the place, with some amazingly convoluted cover ups for someone
>who was in ‘open’ relationships.
Jane–
I really hate missing out on both chats, but I read the logs and have been thinking about this. I have come to the conclusion that the resemblance between Maureen and Eunice is superficial. Both of them sleep around, both of them have “open” marriages, both of them enjoy sex wholeheartedly. BUT…
Maureen has sex for her own pleasure and that of her partner. Eunice has sex for mutual pleasure, sure, but also because that is just about the only worth she sees in herself. Both have “open” marriages, but Maureen never gets into a relationship that she has to hide from Brian. She is ashamed that she misjudged the “Rev. Timberwolf,” but she does not get into a relationship that would make Brian feel threatened. Eunice gets into a relationship with Jake, even though she believes that this particular relationship would make Joe feel inadequate, and thus she has to hide it from him.
–Dee
On Sun, 9 Jun 2002 23:31:23 -0500, “Dee” held forth, saying:
(I have not read the chat-logs, btw, nor was I involved–so maybe I’m repeating someone)
Maureen has sex for her own pleasure and that of her partner. Eunice
>has sex for mutual pleasure, sure, but also because that is just about the
>only worth she sees in herself. Both have “open” marriages, but Maureen
>never gets into a relationship that she has to hide from Brian. She is
>ashamed that she misjudged the “Rev. Timberwolf,” but she does not get into
>a relationship that would make Brian feel threatened. Eunice gets into a
>relationship with Jake, even though she believes that this particular
>relationship would make Joe feel inadequate, and thus she has to hide it
>from him.
But note that she says (about Joe) she bought herself a gigolo, and got the best she could afford. She obviously doesn’t consider Joe her equal (and to me he isn’t; he’s basically a one-trick pony), whereas it appears she does so consider Jake. (Discussions of Joan Eunice’s relationships are of course a different matter.)
I think she values herself rather highly–and I also think that our perceptions are colored by the overall negativity our society places and has placed on women with a high sex-drive.
—
-denny-
nocturnal curmudgeon, editor
Never try to outstubborn a cat. – Lazarus Long
On Sun, 9 Jun 2002 23:31:23 -0500, in alt.fan.heinlein, “Dee”quoth:
>Carolyn Evans wrote:
>>>Like Maureen, Eunice was “amoral” – working out her own set of rules to live
>>>by and be able to look herself in the mirror at night. Unlike Maureen, she
>>>wasn’t living in an early 20th century Bible Belt community, but in a
>>>futuristic dystopia.
>
>Jane Davitt wrote:
>>They have strong similarities; might be fun to look at that more
>>closely. Maureen fans; how do you feel about Eunice?
>
>>Now here I disagree. She seemed to be dragging people into bed all
>>over the place, with some amazingly convoluted cover ups for someone
>>who was in ‘open’ relationships.
>
>Jane–
>
I really hate missing out on both chats, but I read the logs and have
>been thinking about this. I have come to the conclusion that the
>resemblance between Maureen and Eunice is superficial. Both of them sleep
>around, both of them have “open” marriages, both of them enjoy sex
>wholeheartedly. BUT…
>
Maureen has sex for her own pleasure and that of her partner. Eunice
>has sex for mutual pleasure, sure, but also because that is just about the
>only worth she sees in herself. Both have “open” marriages, but Maureen
>never gets into a relationship that she has to hide from Brian. She is
>ashamed that she misjudged the “Rev. Timberwolf,” but she does not get into
>a relationship that would make Brian feel threatened. Eunice gets into a
>relationship with Jake, even though she believes that this particular
>relationship would make Joe feel inadequate, and thus she has to hide it
>from him.
>
Maureen (mostly) defers to the accepted female role, but she has great
>confidence in herself. Eunice has always been preparing herself for the day
>when Joe Branca will tire of her. She says that the only meaningful way a
>woman can thank a man is on her back, OWTTE. This is an educated woman (in
>a time when literacy is not taken for granted) with a license for three
>children, and when people speak of her they appear to have been charmed by
>her generosity of spirit. Hugo loved her dearly, and there was definitely
>no sexual activity between them. But Eunice sseem to view herself as little
>more than a sex-object. Maybe Eunice’s physical beauty was a curse more
>than a gift, since it became her self-definition.
>
Everyone that meets Maureen sees something quintessentially maternal in
>her–“Mama Maureen.” Her beauty not only survives aging, but grows in
>maturity. She knows that she is desirable, but she does not define herself
>by physical atractiveness. Maureen is sure of herself as a woman, even when
>we first meet her in her teens.
>
Eunice seems to be arrested, some ways, in the role of perky
>cheerleader, and she is preoccupied with her physical desirability. She
>tries to prove that desirabilty to herself over and over again without ever
>being satisfied. For all of her talents and gifts, Eunice ends up “more to
>be pitied than censured.”
Thank you; this is much of what I was trying to find the words for. Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to me; I’ve never known a female like this. Of course, that just makes it “unbelievable”, not “impossible”…
—
~teresa~
^..^ “Never try to outstubborn a cat.” Robert A. Heinlein ^..^
https://www.heinleinsociety.org/ & http://rahbooks.virtualave.net/
“Blert!!!” quoth Pixel, a small, yellow cat.
MSN messenger ID =
AIM id = pixelmeow
denny wrote:
>(I have not read the chat-logs, btw, nor was I involved–so maybe I’m
>repeating someone)
Hi, Denny. Part of the discussion was about how some of Eunice’s liaisons seemed less than “open.” And whther Eunice was a “slut.”
Dee wrote
>>Eunice gets into a
>>relationship with Jake, even though she believes that this particular
>>relationship would make Joe feel inadequate, and thus she has to hide it
>>from him.
>But note that she says (about Joe) she bought herself a gigolo, and
>got the best she could afford. She obviously doesn’t consider Joe her
>equal (and to me he isn’t; he’s basically a one-trick pony), whereas
>it appears she does so consider Jake. (Discussions of Joan Eunice’s
>relationships are of course a different matter.)
Well, I thought the “bought myself a gigolo” remark was joking. Eunice makes it clear that Joe doesn’t care about money. So does what we see of Joe first hand. I think she values Joe very highly, as does everyone who gets to know him, apparently.
But if the remark was not joking, what does it say about a woman’s self-valuation that she chooses to buy herself a gigolo for a husband?
>I think she values herself rather highly–and I also think that our
>perceptions are colored by the overall negativity our society places
>and has placed on women with a high sex-drive.
Well, you could be right, but it’s not the way I see it. Interesting, though, that a man attributes the perception to negative attitudes about highly-sexed women, and the women have not spoken up so far to say this. Of course, women are often hardest on other women.
–Dee
teresa wrote:
>Thank you; this is much of what I was trying to find the words for.
>Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to
>me; I’ve never known a female like this. Of course, that just makes
>it “unbelievable”, not “impossible”…
Pixel–
just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least for me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
–Dee
denny wrote:
>(I have not read the chat-logs, btw, nor was I involved–so maybe I’m
>repeating someone)
Hi, Denny. Part of the discussion was about how some of Eunice’s liaisons seemed less than “open.” And whther Eunice was a “slut.”
Dee wrote
>>Eunice gets into a
>>relationship with Jake, even though she believes that this particular
>>relationship would make Joe feel inadequate, and thus she has to hide it
>>from him.
But note that she says (about Joe) she bought herself a gigolo, and
>got the best she could afford. She obviously doesn’t consider Joe her
>equal (and to me he isn’t; he’s basically a one-trick pony), whereas
>it appears she does so consider Jake. (Discussions of Joan Eunice’s
>relationships are of course a different matter.)
Well, I thought the “bought myself a gigolo” remark was joking. Eunice makes it clear that Joe doesn’t care about money. So does what we see of Joe first hand. I think she values Joe very highly, as does everyone who gets to know him, apparently.
But if the remark was not joking, what does it say about a woman’s self-valuation that she chooses to buy herself a gigolo for a husband?
> I think she values herself rather highly–and I also think that our
>perceptions are colored by the overall negativity our society places
>and has placed on women with a high sex-drive.
Well, you could be right, but it’s not the way I see it. Interesting, though, that a man attributes the perception to negative attitudes about highly-sexed women, and the women have not spoken up so far to say this. Of course, women are often hardest on other women.
–Dee
teresa wrote:
>Thank you; this is much of what I was trying to find the words for.
>Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to
>me; I’ve never known a female like this. Of course, that just makes
>it “unbelievable”, not “impossible”…
Pixel–
It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that something just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least for me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
–Dee
>teresa wrote:
>Thank you; this is much of what I was trying to find the words for.
>Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to
>me; I’ve never known a female like this. Of course, that just makes
>it “unbelievable”, not “impossible”…
>
>Pixel–
> It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that something
>just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least for
>me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with
>sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and
>women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth
>offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
As I read IWFNE for the first time, I recall thinking that the words spoken by Eunice after the transplant came across as some sort of male fantasy of what men really wished women believed. It reinforces my contention that wasn’t the real Eunice rattling around inside Johann’s brain. “Eunice” was simply Johann’s brain coming up with a way to make Eunice still alive, a way to cope with the guilt of winding up inside the body of a person he had grown to love. Had the real Eunice never worked for Johann, yet somehow ended up a donor, this never would have happened. Virtually everything Johann learned of Eunice after the transplant that could be verified was already known by Johann.
[Dee]
teresa wrote:
>>Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to
>>me; I’ve never known a female like this.
Dee wrote:
> It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that
>something just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her
>approach to sex, at least for me.
William Dennis wrote:
>As I read IWFNE for the first time, I recall thinking that the words
spoken
>by Eunice after the transplant came across as some sort of male fantasy of
>what men really wished women believed.
The first time I read IWFNE, RAH got me caught up in the tale so well that Eunice was real to me. He made me _want_ to believe, along with Johann. It was only on later readings, that I realized how much Eunice was “off.”
>It reinforces my contention that
>wasn’t the real Eunice rattling around inside Johann’s brain. “Eunice” was
>simply Johann’s brain coming up with a way to make Eunice still alive, a
>way to cope with the guilt of winding up inside the body of a person he
had
>grown to love.
I think it [the words spoken by Eunice after the transplant came across as some sort of male fantasy ] is the single most telling piece of evidence, pro or con. If Eunice were “real”, she wold have been more complex. She definitely is not a typical Heinlein heroine, in my book. The “typical Heinlein heroine” is fit, smart, skilled and beautiful, with a healthy appreciation of sex–a superwoman of sorts. But somehow, Eunice is a cartoon compared to Friday, or Maureen, or Hilda, or Star, or Hazel, or . . . (fill in the blank with your own Heinlein heroine.)
>Had the real Eunice never worked for Johann, yet somehow
>ended up a donor, this never would have happened. Virtually everything
>Johann learned of Eunice after the transplant that could be verified was
>already known by Johann.
I have never been able to come up with a single verifiable thing that Eunice told Johann, that was not already known. Some ambiguities, maybe, but nothing concrete. Wait, I do remember one thing: Eunice told Johann about tickling Jake before he told J., I think. Of course, that could be from knowing both of them and filling in the blanks with a good guess, rather than from being told. How much “ESP” is really putting together some subliminal observations to reach a correct conclusion?
What you said about a male fantasy of what men wish women believe, reminds me about how I feel about _Playboy_. Wants to present itself as oh, so sophisicated, but it strikes me as very adolescent. Like the James Bond movies. Fun, sure, but not particularly sophisticated. The good life = beautiful women, fast cars, and good booze. Nothing wrong with any of that, but if that’s _all_, it is pretty shallow.
I don’t think the Eunice veiwpoint is _the_ fantasy of nearly all men, but possible _a_ fantasy of nearly all men–what do you guys say? Maybe _the_ fantasy of boys, whatever their age. The fantasies of _men_ are probably too rich to be limited to this one view.
–Dee
Dee wrote:
I don’t think the Eunice veiwpoint is _the_ fantasy of nearly all men,
>but possible _a_ fantasy of nearly all men–what do you guys say? Maybe
>_the_ fantasy of boys, whatever their age. The fantasies of _men_ are
>probably too rich to be limited to this one view.
>
>–Dee
I shudder to say this, but, Ma’am, I’m of “Two Minds” with reference to this novel. I enjoy(ed) a great deal of it during my first 7 or 8 read-throughs. What I like(d) is basically what I “always” like(d): The turns of phrase, the telling detail, the “throw-away” comment that enlightens a character or a situation, the descriptions which embody more attitudes and values than just a retailing of content — these I consider the elements that compose the RAH “Right Stuff.” I must agree that the “fantasy” to which you refer in your last paragraph is ALSO part of the enjoyment of the novel–for me. No matter the physical age of the male in question (I submit myself as an example), there is a bit (more often, MORE than a “bit”) of the puerile. It’s the “Peter Pan” Syndrome in a modified form, I believe. It’s part of most males as much as the monthly circadian is a “part” of most females. I accept and appreciate what is before me.
‘Nuff said,
Dr. Rufo
“Dee wrote:
> I don’t think the Eunice veiwpoint is _the_ fantasy of nearly all men,
>but possible _a_ fantasy of nearly all men–what do you guys say? Maybe
>_the_ fantasy of boys, whatever their age. The fantasies of _men_ are
>probably too rich to be limited to this one view.
Dr. Rufo wrote:
>I must agree that the “fantasy” to which you refer in your last
>paragraph is ALSO part of the enjoyment of the novel–for me. No
>matter the physical age of the male in question (I submit myself
>as an example), there is a bit (more often, MORE than a “bit”) of
>the puerile. It’s the “Peter Pan” Syndrome in a modified form, I
>believe. It’s part of most males as much as the monthly
>circadian is a “part” of most females.
>I accept and appreciate what is before me.
So, if I read you right, then we are in agreement–a fantasy, but not the only one. I wouldn’t consider a man puerile because he entertained this fantasy. But if his fantasies were limited to _only_ this one, well, that’s another question. Don’t men have other fantasy females than only the “I only exist for sex–anyone, anywhere, anytime” image? What about the image of the woman who is so superlative and so discriminating that she salivates for the fantasizer, and him alone? I would have thought that would be at least one other, just to come up with one off the top of my head.
(Obviously) I’m no expert on male fantasies, but whenguys talk about celebrity fantasy women, they seem to describe women who portray an image that is significantly more than an animated sex-toy.
–Dee
Dee wrote:
>Pixel–
It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that something
>just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least
>for
>me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with
>sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and
>women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth
>offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
I recall a line from a stand-up comedian (can’t recall the name) a decade or so back along the lines of: A woman looks for the one man who will give her every thing she wants and needs. A man looks for every woman who will give him the one thing he wants and needs.
I think I had it in my .sig for a while back in those days. I guess I should do an archeological google.
Humans have some good cookbooks, but one has to be careful about
using recipes from a species that can thrive on okra and marshmallow
peanuts. Freefall Comic 5/17/2002
Ward Griffithswrote in message news:nhFN8.74762$…
>Dee wrote:
>
>Pixel–
> It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that something
>just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least for
>me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with
>sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and
>women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth
>offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
>
>I recall a line from a stand-up comedian (can’t recall the name) a decade
>or so back along the lines of:
>A woman looks for the one man who will give her every thing she wants and needs.
>A man looks for every woman who will give him the one thing he wants and needs.
>
>I think I had it in my .sig for a while back in those days. I guess I
>should do an archeological google.
>–
>Ward Griffiths
Additionally:
(some) Men marry their ideal woman, expecting her to never change, (some) Women marry a man expecting him to change into their ideal man*. both genders are often disappointed…
*1st corollary: It’s been known to happen that a gal may nag her hubby for years to get him to change little things, and after he’s gone along with it, she divorces him because… “You aren’t the man I married anymore…”
(the male side doesn’t count as a corollary, as it is well known that all ‘ideal women’ are equal to some guys, but some are more equal than others. grass is greener & all that.
IHTEY
Rusty the bookman
“bookman”wrote in message news:JBFN8.233$…
>
Ward Griffiths:
>I recall a line from a stand-up comedian (can’t recall the name) a decade
>or so back along the lines of:
>A woman looks for the one man who will give her every thing she wants and needs.
>A man looks for every woman who will give him the one thing he wants and needs.
bookman wrote:
>(some) Men marry their ideal woman, expecting her to never change,
>(some) Women marry a man expecting him to change into their ideal man*.
>both genders are often disappointed…
Rusty–
I don’t disagree with either of you that there is a truth to be found in those maxims. What I am asking is, from the male point of view, are those the only truths?
–Dee
>”bookman” wrote in message
>news:JBFN8.233$…
>>
>Ward Griffiths:
>>I recall a line from a stand-up comedian (can’t recall the name) a
>decade
>>or so back along the lines of:
>>A woman looks for the one man who will give her every thing she wants
>and
>>needs.
>>A man looks for every woman who will give him the one thing he wants
and
>>needs.
>
>bookman wrote:
>(some) Men marry their ideal woman, expecting her to never change,
>(some) Women marry a man expecting him to change into their ideal man*.
>both genders are often disappointed…
>
>Rusty–
>
I don’t disagree with either of you that there is a truth to be found
in
>those maxims. What I am asking is, from the male point of view, are those
>the only truths?
>
>–Dee
Dee,
the short answer: depends on the male.
longer: Those are not _my_ only truths, and they don’t cover the whole spectrum, not by a long shot!
My wife is much the same as when I married her, execpt she’s better than ever. 😉
heh, I suspect that if there was found to be a man who ‘truely understood’ women, and a woman who ‘truely understood’ men, and they were to marry, it would be discovered that neither knew diddly-squat. 🙂
YMMV, o’course.
Rusty the bookman
who doesn’t have to understand
processor architecture to enjoy
computers, nor women to enjoy
his marriage…
Dee wrote:
> I don’t disagree with either of you that there is a truth to be found in
>those maxims. What I am asking is, from the male point of view, are those
>the only truths?
bookman wrote:
the short answer: depends on the male.
longer: Those are not _my_ only truths, and they don’t
>cover the whole spectrum, not by a long shot!
Rusty–
That is what I was trying to say. I would expect a certain immaturity in any man or woman for whom it is the _only_ truth. and for Johann/Eunice, it seemed to be very nearly the only truth.
–Dee
>Dee wrote:
>> I don’t disagree with either of you that there is a truth to be
>found
>in
>>those maxims. What I am asking is, from the male point of view, are
>those
>>the only truths?
>
bookman wrote:
>
> the short answer: depends on the male.
> longer: Those are not _my_ only truths, and they don’t
>cover the whole spectrum, not by a long shot!
>
>Rusty–
>
That is what I was trying to say. I would expect a certain immaturity
>in any man or woman for whom it is the _only_ truth. and for
Johann/Eunice,
>it seemed to be very nearly the only truth.
>
>–Dee
no huhu, Dee.
I was just tackin’ on for ennertainmint valyoo, ya know?
best regards,
Rusty the bookman
Dee wrote:
>”bookman” wrote in message
>news:JBFN8.233$…
>>
>Ward Griffiths:
>>I recall a line from a stand-up comedian (can’t recall the name) a
>decade
>>or so back along the lines of:
>>A woman looks for the one man who will give her every thing she wants
>and
>>needs.
>>A man looks for every woman who will give him the one thing he wants
>>and needs.
>
>bookman wrote:
>>(some) Men marry their ideal woman, expecting her to never change,
>>(some) Women marry a man expecting him to change into their ideal man*.
>>both genders are often disappointed…
>
>Rusty–
>
I don’t disagree with either of you that there is a truth to be found in
>those maxims. What I am asking is, from the male point of view, are those
>the only truths?
>
>–Dee
Short answer? No. Then again, my “ideal woman” is an artifact of dreams, fantasy and fiction. My wife is a real human being with a mean streak. She insisted that I spend last Saturday doing the tourist thing with visiting relatives (mine, not hers). I’d avoided the top of the Empire State Building for the more than a decade I’ve been in this part of the continent. I went. The main gratifying point was that the nephew who made me a grand-uncle has a great big bald spot at 28, while at 47 I’ve got some grey but exactly the same hairline I had when I was eight years old.
Humans have some good cookbooks, but one has to be careful about
using recipes from a species that can thrive on okra and marshmallow
peanuts. Freefall Comic 5/17/2002
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002 20:41:09 -0500, in alt.fan.heinlein, “Dee”quoth:
>teresa wrote:
>>Thank you; this is much of what I was trying to find the words for.
>>Eunice seems too sweet, too “sex-ish”… it just isn’t believable to
>>me; I’ve never known a female like this. Of course, that just makes
>>it “unbelievable”, not “impossible”…
>
>Pixel–
It’s not just that she seems to “sex-ish,” is it? It’s that something
>just doesn’t quite seem to ring true about her approach to sex, at least for
>me. The idea that the only meaningful way a woman can thank a man is with
>sex kind of gets to the heart of it. This seems to belittle both men and
>women: Men only want one thing, and women only have one thing worth
>offering. I think that men and women are both more complex than that.
Yes, exactly. I just don’t have the words to say why I think Eunice is somehow “wrong”, or whatever. Sex, sex, always sex. Coy, kissing everyone, and the men thinking it’s all “okay”, or whatever the hell they’re thinking. Of course, this was written in 1970? Maybe that’s how RAH saw things going. But I’ve always found that men give more respect to women who *don’t* have sex with them.
—
~teresa~
^..^ “Never try to outstubborn a cat.” Robert A. Heinlein ^..^
https://www.heinleinsociety.org/ & http://rahbooks.virtualave.net/
“Blert!!!” quoth Pixel, a small, yellow cat.
MSN messenger ID =
AIM id = pixelmeow
From: “James Nicoll”
Subject: Re: RG AIM Chat IWFNE; Eunice Evans Branca : Chameleon or Con artist?June 6 and 6
Date: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 11:46 AM
In article, Teresa Redmondwrote:
>
>Yes, exactly. I just don’t have the words to say why I think Eunice
>is somehow “wrong”, or whatever. Sex, sex, always sex. Coy, kissing
>everyone, and the men thinking it’s all “okay”, or whatever the hell
>they’re thinking. Of course, this was written in 1970? Maybe that’s
>how RAH saw things going. But I’ve always found that men give more
>respect to women who *don’t* have sex with them.
Depends on the culture of the man, doesn’t it? I once had the displeasure of working with a religious fanatic from Egypt who spent most of his time maligning any woman he thought dressed in a sluttish manner (Pretty much every woman he saw. Even the Mennonites offended him). That’s one end of the scale.
I seem to recall an article I read during the All The President’s Blowjobs scandal about Southern men of a particular age and place and how they saw women. Some women were for fun and those were mistresses. Others were serious and those you married and reveared. For some reason, defining things so that it’s impossible to be married to a fun woman can cause stresses in some marriages. Take Newt Gingrich, for example, a guy who has affairs, marries the women involved and then dumps them for the next mistress. Being married to Clinton must have its trying moments for Hillary but at least she’s never been served divorce papers in her sick bed.
James Nicoll
Dee wrote:
>”Dee wrote:
>
>> I don’t think the Eunice veiwpoint is _the_ fantasy of nearly all
>>>
>men,
>
>>>but possible _a_ fantasy of nearly all men–what do you guys say? Maybe
>>>_the_ fantasy of boys, whatever their age. The fantasies of _men_ are
>>>probably too rich to be limited to this one view.
>>>
>
>Dr. Rufo wrote:
>
>
>>I must agree that the “fantasy” to which you refer in your last
>>paragraph is ALSO part of the enjoyment of the novel–for me. No
>>matter the physical age of the male in question (I submit myself
>>as an example), there is a bit (more often, MORE than a “bit”) of
>>the puerile. It’s the “Peter Pan” Syndrome in a modified form, I
>>believe. It’s part of most males as much as the monthly
>>circadian is a “part” of most females.
>>I accept and appreciate what is before me.
>>
>
So, if I read you right, then we are in agreement–a fantasy, but not
>the only one. I wouldn’t consider a man puerile because he entertained this
>fantasy. But if his fantasies were limited to _only_ this one, well, that’s
>another question.
Yes, Ma’am, we agree, “sort of.” We both see this as a “fantasy construct” but I am willing to label it a “childish” construct. I am also willing to admit that it is, more or less, a part of the “permanent” structure of the male ego. Possession of, or recognition of this, as a portion of the male ego, does not MAKE a man childish — it is a part that is ALWAYS childish.
>Don’t men have other fantasy females than only the “I
>only exist for sex–anyone, anywhere, anytime” image? What about the image
>of the woman who is so superlative and so discriminating that she salivates
>for the fantasizer, and him alone? I would have thought that would be at
>least one other, just to come up with one off the top of my head.
Once again, I agree. This is ALSO another fantasy. Also “childish.” Also possessed by many males. These fantasies are “childish” features of otherwise “mature” males. I believe that the contrasting elements are each and all parts of the whole. I might even go so far as to suggest that were these, or similar “childish” elements missing, that there would, indeed, be “something missing” from the *soi disant* “mature” male. They are, each and all, part of the “seasoning” in the mix. Trouble occurs when one element over-shadows or over-powers the “balance.” Does that make my statement any more clear?
Dr. Rufo
On Wed, 12 Jun 2002 10:42:59 -0400, Teresa Redmondheld forth, saying:
>But I’ve always found that men give more
>respect to women who *don’t* have sex with them.
You’ve been around the wrong men. Some of us have the utmost respect for women who give us the gift of themselves. 🙂
—
-denny-
nocturnal curmudgeon, editor
Never try to outstubborn a cat. – Lazarus Long
Dee wrote:
>> So, if I read you right, then we are in agreement–a fantasy, but not
>>the only one. I wouldn’t consider a man puerile because he entertained this
>>fantasy. But if his fantasies were limited to _only_ this one, well, that’s
>>another question.
Dr. Rufo wrote:
> Yes, Ma’am, we agree, “sort of.” We both see this as a “fantasy
>construct” but I am willing to label it a “childish” construct. I
>am also willing to admit that it is, more or less, a part of the
>”permanent” structure of the male ego. Possession of, or
>recognition of this, as a portion of the male ego, does not MAKE
>a man childish — it is a part that is ALWAYS childish.
>>Don’t men have other fantasy females than only the “I
>> only exist for sex–anyone, anywhere, anytime” image? What about the image
>> of the woman who is so superlative and so discriminating that she salivates
>> for the fantasizer, and him alone? I would have thought that would be at
>> least one other, just to come up with one off the top of my head.
>Once again, I agree. This is ALSO another fantasy. Also
>”childish.” Also possessed by many males. These fantasies are
>”childish” features of otherwise “mature” males. I believe that
>the contrasting elements are each and all parts of the whole. I
>might even go so far as to suggest that were these, or similar
>”childish” elements missing, that there would, indeed, be
>”something missing” from the *soi disant* “mature” male. They
>are, each and all, part of the “seasoning” in the mix. Trouble
>occurs when one element over-shadows or over-powers the
>”balance.” Does that make my statement any more clear?
Doc, I have been giving what you (and bookman and Ward Grffiths) have had to say, some time to “percolate” in my brain. I think I am coming to see it this way:
There are certain fantasies about women that are “universal” among men. (N.B.–the word universal is not to be taken completely literally.) The one we have been discussing appears to be one of them, and I am really not surprised at that. There are probably certain fantasies about men that are “universal” among women, but I am not sure what they are–the Prince Charming fantasy, perhaps. That the fantasies themselves are immature does not make the holder of the fantsy immature, but rather human. A person wold be less complete if he/she could not enjoy a few fantasies now and again (and again and again. )
BUT, if a person is limited to just the one fantasy, he/she seems to suffer from a poverty of imagination. If the person fixates on the one fantasy to he exclusion of all else, and it becomes the viewpoint for “real life” then he or she seems to me to be an immature and one-dimensional person.
So, to get back to the original discussion of Eunice/Johann, she strikes me as “wrong” because of this one-dimensionality. The first reading of IWFNE, I didn’t even notice it, just enjoyed the hell out of another Heinlein book. Later readings, felt a wrongness accumulate, began to realize why. Discussions here clarified that, for me at least, this “living the fantasy” was not easily swallowed. I don’t dislike IWFNE, and I feel sure that I will return to it again, in the future, but it doesn’t hold up to re-readings as well as some others. The aspect of human nature that RAH spotlights in this one is too restricted for my taste.
–Dee
Dee wrote:
>> That is what I was trying to say. I would expect a certain immaturity
>> in any man or woman for whom it is the _only_ truth. and for Johann/Eunice,
>> it seemed to be very nearly the only truth.
bookman wrote:
> no huhu, Dee.
> I was just tackin’ on for ennertainmint valyoo, ya know?
Hi, Rusty–
Yeah, I know. But like RAH, you have probably added a kernal of truth to the entertainment value.
My failure to answer earlier was just letting this discussion “percolate” in my own mind for a while. I addresses a longer answer to Dr. Rufo, but it is really a response to you and Ward Griffiths as well. Thanks to you all for the input on male fantasies.
–Dee
Ward Griffiths :
>Short answer? No. Then again, my “ideal woman” is an artifact of dreams,
>fantasy and fiction. My wife is a real human being with a mean streak.
>She insisted that I spend last Saturday doing the tourist thing with
>visiting relatives (mine, not hers).
Well, That is just the sort of mean and tyrannical begahavior one can expect from wives.
>I’d avoided the top of the Empire
>State Building for the more than a decade I’ve been in this part of the
>continent. I went. The main gratifying point was that the nephew who made
>me a grand-uncle has a great big bald spot at 28, while at 47 I’ve got some
>grey but exactly the same hairline I had when I was eight years old.
LOL. Maybe your nephew should sue his barber . . . for selling him a haircut with a hole in it. You, on the other hand, can enjoy those distibguished threads of silver.
BTW, how do you prefer to be addressed? May I call you Ward?
–Dee
>Ward Griffiths
>
>Humans have some good cookbooks, but one has to be careful about
>using recipes from a species that can thrive on okra and marshmallow
>peanuts. Freefall Comic 5/17/2002
>
>bookman wrote:
>> no huhu, Dee.
>> I was just tackin’ on for ennertainmint valyoo, ya know?
>
>Hi, Rusty–
>
> Yeah, I know. But like RAH, you have probably added a kernal of truth
>to the entertainment value.
> My failure to answer earlier was just letting this discussion
>”percolate” in my own mind for a while. I addresses a longer answer to Dr.
>Rufo, but it is really a response to you and Ward Griffiths as well. Thanks
>to you all for the input on male fantasies.
>
>–Dee
truth? you flatter me, Dee 😉
Taking time out to _think_ is a good thing, too. Too many people in my life don’t bother, they just run on pre-program & hard-wired reflex.
I read your reply to Rufo, and you may well have laid your finger on the reason that IWFNE is one I don’t re-read, either. For me, it’s a taste thing, and that one doesn’t taste quite right.
I agree with you on lacking depth in fantasy life, but want to add that fantasy includes the ‘Walter Mitty” as well as the “Penthouse Letters”. Both can be loads of fun – I simply lack the skill to translate my twisted maunderings into the long green.
Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the gory details…
Rusty the bookman
Me think? Whatever gave you that idea?
Dee wrote:
>That the fantasies themselves are immature does
>not make the holder of the fantsy immature, but rather human. A person wold
>be less complete if he/she could not enjoy a few fantasies now and again
>(and again and again.)
Miss Dee, there we have it. I suggest that there are some fantasies that are, of their nature, “immature.” They date from a period in the developmental life of the individual male/female when that individual is not fully psychologically, physically, or emotionally matured. I also suggest, to rephrase your statement, that this is not a “bug” but a “feature” of the mature(d) individual. The (sexual) fantasies we have mentioned are not the only ones we (humans) hold. For example, I will mention the “King of the World” or (as Rusty said, the “Walter Mitty”, “Hero” fantasy. No matter the chronological age of the individual, there are some fantasies that continue to be enjoyed and re-visited. Sometimes they become “richer” or “more fully developed” but the availability of the basic (if you’ll allow the mis-using of a technical term) “fugue state,” is almost always there.
> BUT, if a person is limited to just the one fantasy, he/she seems to
>suffer from a poverty of imagination. If the person fixates on the one
>fantasy to he exclusion of all else, and it becomes the viewpoint for “real
>life” then he or she seems to me to be an immature and one-dimensional
>person.
> So, to get back to the original discussion of Eunice/Johann, she strikes
>me as “wrong” because of this one-dimensionality.
The “Johnny One-Note” quality to which you refer is, I believe, clearly there. I appreciate it for what it is and do not choose to make it otherwise. I suggest it might be rather like the fan of “science-fiction” who hasn’t read anything since 1988 because he doesn’t want to anymore. All conversations on that topic end there. If that person is your friend, you accept the condition and proceed as you can. If you’d rather not, then you needn’t participate in converse with him. Do you see my point?
>The first reading of
>IWFNE, I didn’t even notice it, just enjoyed the hell out of another
>Heinlein book.
Moi aussi.
>Later readings, felt a wrongness accumulate,
No “wrongness developed just a feeling of acceptance of a friend’s limitations. I’ve just never felt like criticizing my friends, Eunice & J.S.B. Smith.
>The aspect of human nature that RAH
>spotlights in this one is
just what I accept and wouldn’t want to alter.
Pax vobiscum,
Dr. Rufo
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ddavitt: I love to watch them
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ddavitt: Heh.
TreetopAngelRN: <<
TreetopAngelRN: I got everyone’s name written down 😎
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ddavitt: they did well yesterday
TreetopAngelRN: Sports?? Not much of a sports person, rather watch food shows and movies
ddavitt: wb Peter
TreetopAngelRN: Hi Peter!
pjscott100: Hi Jane
ddavitt: My husband is a fan of iron Chef; v funny
TreetopAngelRN: Love Iron Chef
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ddavitt: Hi Will
TreetopAngelRN: Hi Will!
pjscott100: Will!
geeairmoe2: Hello, all.
pjscott100: Treetop, sorry, forgot your real name
TreetopAngelRN: Elizabeth
pjscott100: ah right
TreetopAngelRN: sokay!
ddavitt: We’ll give it a minutes then start
ddavitt: I’m tired; might not make it till 11
TreetopAngelRN: Hubby says sometimes I forget it too!:-\
ddavitt: Oh what the heck. let’s just start anyway:-)
TreetopAngelRN: all of that early soccer
ddavitt: No; lauren!
pixelmeow has entered the room.
TreetopAngelRN: ah kids!
pixelmeow: howdy
ddavitt: IWFNE I read at 13 ish; when did you all come across it?
pixelmeow: damn this little keyboard!
ddavitt: Hi teresa!
pixelmeow: hi!
TreetopAngelRN: Hi Teresa
pjscott100: okay, equal numbers of pointers and setters… okay to start 🙂
ddavitt: I had discovered H, raced thru all the juvies in the library and ventured into the adult section
TreetopAngelRN: I must have been about the same age Jane
pjscott100: I was ~15
ddavitt: There was this book…and the cover was so awful i didn’t want to read it
ddavitt: Took me a while before i ddi too
pjscott100: Not the one with the skull and the uh… decoration…
ddavitt: You got it
ddavitt: Awful cover
pixelmeow: Mine is the one with the dark haired lady on it.
pjscott100: “Was that supposed to be what I thought it was supposed to be?”
ddavitt: I assumed it was horror, which i hate
geeairmoe2: High school sometime, probably 16, 17.
ddavitt: Is it a skull with a blonde wig?
ddavitt: And goopy stuff ooozing from the mouth?
TreetopAngelRN: yuck, glad I didn’t see that one
ddavitt: major yuck
ddavitt: It’ll be on wegrokit
pjscott100: Yes, but there is a, uh, gelatinous cream-colored substance (trying to avoid terms which will offend when discussion is posted on web 🙂 )
ddavitt: So covers do count…
ddavitt: At 14 that wouldn’t have occurred to me:-)
pjscott100: Maybe not to a female…
Copycat669 has entered the room.
geeairmoe2: If Heinlein was on the cover, I didn’t notice much else.
Copycat669: Hi guys. I have strep so don’t get too close…
ddavitt: When i did read it, i was confused now and then but I enjoyed it
TreetopAngelRN: Covers always count, I’ve torn some off so I could read the story without touching the cover…Cujo comes to mind…
ddavitt: Hi there, don’t breathe on us then:-)
TreetopAngelRN: Hi Tam!
DavidWrightSr: Don’t worry. we’ve got electronic filters in place 🙂
pixelmeow: I didn’t think too much on the cover of mine, pretty innocuous…
ddavitt: This is a UK edition
pjscott100: It and SIASL definitely provided an education I was otherwise lacking 🙂
Copycat669: OMGspeaking of covers….i FOUND the SISL that my mom said she threw away! it’s missing the front cover, but it’s as dogeared and loved as it can be.
pixelmeow: Only problem I have with the cover on mine is that it’s not what I think Eunice looks like…
ddavitt: That can put you off
Copycat669: that’s what started this in the first place. What does Eunice look like on your cover?
pixelmeow: She’s got dark hair, really dark mouth…
ddavitt: If she’s not a skull, it’s a start
TreetopAngelRN: not much, split head pic Johann on left (too young) and Eunice on right
pixelmeow: pale skin, but you can see some ribs.
pixelmeow: Like, windows, or holes, or something, but not gruesome.
TreetopAngelRN: brain look to the crown of the head
ddavitt: Hard to convey what happens in a picture
pixelmeow: She’s pretty, but not Eunice.
pixelmeow: I think Eunice looks more like Friday (Whelan).
TreetopAngelRN: On top in gold lettering Robert A. Heinlein…that’s what counts
ddavitt: I see her as having dark hair
geeairmoe2: I have the Berkley Medallion paperback, 70″s-ish, kind of a split male-female face, exposed brain.
ddavitt: , medium height, stacked
TreetopAngelRN: That’s what mine looks like Will
ddavitt: Yet io’s far from a gruesome story
geeairmoe2: Price: $1.75
joelrmpls has entered the room.
joelrmpls: Hi there.
DavidWrightSr: Hi Joel
Copycat669: I have the same berkely. mine ws only 1.50
pixelmeow: I do like the story, really…
pixelmeow: hello!
pixelmeow: in a way… just not everywhere.
ddavitt: What puzzles me is that they decide the new creation is Johann…but always call it ‘she’. Goes against the decision that ID is in the brain
ddavitt: Hi Joel
TreetopAngelRN: I think everyone sees Eunice as a different woman, their own idea of perfection and I think Heinlein meant us to think that way.
pixelmeow: Yes, I see that…
pixelmeow: to Jane
pixelmeow: And Eliz
DavidWrightSr: Funny thing happened when I bought my copy. I was in PA and came out of the store where I bought just as a bank was being held up across the street. there was this screeching of tires and the car flew off down the road
Copycat669: I think Joan is a completely different beast from Johann and Eunice.
pixelmeow: You know, I’ve been good for this chat.
pixelmeow: I’m actually reading the book.
TreetopAngelRN: 😀
Copycat669: what is your name, other cat?
pixelmeow: I was just going to ask if I could have some names…
pixelmeow: I’m teresa.
ddavitt: They see a woman and respond accordingly ( oh boy do they respond!)
Copycat669: i’m tam
pixelmeow: hi!
TreetopAngelRN: Hubby has a completely different idea of Eunice, than I do
pixelmeow: Jane, I think I’ve hit on what I don’t like about this book.
DavidWrightSr: We have Joel, Tam, Teresa, Will, Peter, Jane, Elizabeth and yours truly
labert8 has entered the room.
pjscott100: IWFNE is one of H’s many stories that ends in death of heroes (even point of view characters!) yet makes it positive.
pixelmeow: HEY!
ddavitt: Just sent labert an invitation
pixelmeow: COOL!!!
ddavitt: and here he is!
pixelmeow: Long time no see, labert!
labert8: HI, pix, and all. Glad to be dropping in.
pjscott100: Few others attempt this (one example that comes to mind is James Blish’s A Clash of Cymbals aka The Triumph of Time)
ddavitt: What is it you dislike Teresa?
pixelmeow: I dislike how easily old cantankerous Johann turns into sexy Joan.
pixelmeow: It doesn’t wash, for me.
ddavitt: Birth of a baby; ultimate positive ending, peter, i agree
ddavitt: Yep, that bothers me
pjscott100: Why?
Copycat669: I think that sexuality is more primal than just male/female
TreetopAngelRN: Old cantankerous Johann was in a lot of pain, had not really enjoyed life in a long time
ddavitt: it’s a man’s brain, decades of experience…why should the chassis affect the engine?
Copycat669: and i think that Eunice in his head helped him to ‘ACT’ female
pixelmeow: I don’t see any man like Johann being able to so easily speak in a feminine voice, like Joan uses.
ddavitt: That should have been suspicious
pixelmeow: Yes, Jane. And yes, Tam, to an extent,.
pjscott100: You’re an ancient old codger given a fantastic new young body… why not make the most of it instead of bitching about the plumbing?
ddavitt: not a question of bitching
TreetopAngelRN: exactly Peter!
ddavitt: He was a siasl
pixelmeow: Well, yes, but how does he know so easily how to talk to men???
pjscott100: Eunice was helping him
ddavitt: found his bearings using Eunice
pixelmeow: Look up with batting eyelashes and say “darling”…
Copycat669: Stranger in a Strange Lady?
pixelmeow: but it seems to come so easily!
ddavitt: should have been spotted by jake who knew them both so well
labert8: He’s been on the other end for years, Puix. Much experience, just reversed.
ddavitt: Yes, tam:-)
DavidWrightSr: And there were probably a lot of coaching going on that we never saw/heard
ddavitt: Does that prove she existed then?
pixelmeow: I agree, labert, but it’s like this. You see a lot of the coaching.
pixelmeow: For what bothers me, there’s no coaching.
ddavitt: Could any man have dredged up makeup tips and such from his own mind?
joelrmpls: Darn. Gotta go — Whining Spice needs to be put to bed. Again.
geeairmoe2: Does this fall along gender lines? The belief a guy can’t become female as easily as a female could become a guy?
joelrmpls: Later, all…
ddavitt: Night joel
pixelmeow: Eunice isn’t saying “No Johann, inflect the other word!”
joelrmpls has left the room.
pixelmeow: later
TreetopAngelRN: that we know of, maybe we are just supposed to assume that for the story
Copycat669: I think that the thought process affected his/her behavior
pjscott100: I have this theory that women don’t like to think men could know them that well 🙂
labert8: BUt so much of what Joan does is automatic, taken from Eunice’s circuitry, the typing machine, for instance
ddavitt: No, I’d have a lot of trouble being male too:-)
pixelmeow: Yes, true, but it’s the mouth speaking the words of the brain.
ddavitt: When he doesn’t think about it, yes, ‘the body remembers’
Copycat669: If you, David, heard me say something in your head first, couldn’t you emulate that voice? aND WE HAVE (sorrY) to keep in mind that it was HER voice, her vocal cords, etc.
pixelmeow: Which in the case of the piano, didn’t work.
TreetopAngelRN: no body memory with the piano, Eunice could hear the music in their head though
labert8: He does slip into the role very easily, but I can’t recall, how long is the span, a year or more, right?
pixelmeow: He is thinking of it, and the mouth is giving forth what he wants to say, in a way that Eunice would have done it.
pjscott100: Women are fond of saying that men think with theirs… so why shouldn’t there be a similar effect in a female body?
pixelmeow: Yes, Eliz.
ddavitt: but he’s convincing from the start, a day or two after he wakes up
pixelmeow: Well, if my brain were put in a man’s body, I don’t see my thoughts being translated into a manly form of speech.
labert8: Hmmnn, should have re-read more and faster today. Poor preparation 🙂
ddavitt: hormones?
TreetopAngelRN: clearer thought processes once pain is resolved
Copycat669: My new epithet is JOHN THOMAS ehehehehe
pixelmeow: But his thoughts are translated into a “lady’s” form of speech.
ddavitt: male brain being literally drugged into femininity?
pixelmeow: But his music *isn’t* translated into the fingers.
pjscott100: In the acting classes I have done, that was a fairly basic exercise
ddavitt: No but the body remembers what the old brain used to tell it
Copycat669: perhaps we “see” male or female based on the atmosphere. In this case, in a male or female body.
TreetopAngelRN: he had a lot of time to study women
geeairmoe2: Perhaps a male can be more easily controlled by a woman; especially if the male accepts the female knows what she’s talking about.
ddavitt: ? Don’t see why
DavidWrightSr: But he had a lot of experience with women, 70 or 80 years of it and could reasonably know how they said things even if he didn’t know why they said it
ddavitt: Again, not necessarily
pixelmeow: That’s the only thing that works for me,, what David said.
Copycat669: Can you honestly say that you can tell from the words we are using here right now which of us are male and female? (if you can, i want your secret, because i’ve worked HARD at it for my job)
TreetopAngelRN: how much of what we say is prejudiced by our voice, body shape and gender
geeairmoe2: I saw it as a sudden rebirth — he needed a mother to guide him.
pixelmeow: Tam, you’re right, but look at how JE talks in the book.
pjscott100: I see it as being a round peg in a round hole
geeairmoe2: Up to a certain age, men learn more from their mothers then their fathers.
pjscott100: Or “When in Rome”…
pixelmeow: It’s very obvious to me that it’s a woman talking, but definitely an older style of woman.
TreetopAngelRN: But, I expect Johann to SOUND female and he is in female form
pixelmeow: All those “dear”s and “darling”s.
Copycat669: I think we “see” it as female. If we isolated the dialogue only, I suspect that we wouldn’t know. And i know LOTS Of men who use dear and darling.
ddavitt: He lets E talk him into stuff..but I think he secretly wants to do it anyway. be interesting id they ever had a real clash of wills but they didn’t
pixelmeow: Really?
pixelmeow: I don’t know anyone who uses them…
pjscott100: If (and I accept it may be debatable) you think that H portrayed any female characters accurately, then why shouldn’t another man be able to do the same?
pixelmeow: I don’t know, I guess you’re right, Jane.
TreetopAngelRN: nope, I guess Dad says Honey, not Dear
ddavitt: Does anyone else get tired of the sex, sex, sex all the time?
Copycat669: peter, that’s my point exactly!
Copycat669: in better words!
labert8: Never! ! 🙂
ddavitt: Sheesh..I pity the pizza delivery man who comes across Eunice!
pixelmeow: Jane, YES.
DavidWrightSr: no,no,no O:-)
pjscott100: Not at the age of 15 🙂
pixelmeow: David, I’ve named you before… 😉
ddavitt: She bonks everyone who moves…
pixelmeow: Yes, she does./
TreetopAngelRN: No, I see it as a natural part of Joan-Eunice
labert8: oh, in the book. It is the most common complaint in my circle.
ddavitt: It’s too much
ddavitt: too forced
pixelmeow: Yes, it is!
pixelmeow: damn bold keeps turning itself off…
Copycat669: i think sex was integral to the issue, though
ddavitt: I am faithful and I feel like a freak to a Heinelin heroine
labert8: I think it may be tiring, but it mught be true for a horny male who’s been on the bench for a long time, and finds that a new set of experiences await.
pixelmeow: anyway! For this book, I agree, it was, but it just made me uncomfortable.
ddavitt: I wouldn’t have dreamt of sleeping around on my HONEYMOON
Copycat669: i mean honestly, do any of us care if he/she peed standing up or sat down? NO! When a man is trapped in a woman’s body, we wanted to know how it was going to affect SEX
pixelmeow: Me either!
labert8: Faithful is a cultural vice, not a natural one
TreetopAngelRN: old man, no touching for a long time, suddenly finds self in new body, I’m surprised the cats got a reast…
pjscott100: If H had not tackled the sex issue thoroughly readers may have felt that he wimped out
ddavitt: I get miffed at this idea that fidelity is for the proles
DavidWrightSr: You mean you’d wait until afterwards?:-D
ddavitt: Heh…faithful until death, that’s me
pixelmeow: Okay, let me ask you men something.
Copycat669: peter, man, get out of my head….(HA! A joke!)
pixelmeow: You find yourself in a woman’s body.
labert8: for the proles Jane?
pixelmeow: Is the first man you do anything with going to be your best bud?????
pixelmeow: I mean, come on!
pixelmeow: With him knowing it’s you in there???
ddavitt: genuises make their own rules about sex is a H quotation
ddavitt: Guess i made the rule to be faithful:-):-)
labert8: perhaps. not in this society though, In a sexually liberated one? Why not someone you trust?
TreetopAngelRN: who better to trust??? I know I am not male, but question is still valid.
DavidWrightSr: Good for you Jane, I was just kidding.
Copycat669: well….if a man’s going to experiment with homosexuality, he usually selects someone he’s “best friends” with.
pixelmeow: Yes, Jane, but somehow that feels more like just sweeping aside a problem.
pixelmeow: Hm, yes, I guess so…
pixelmeow: but what about the judge and the other attorney?
ddavitt: That’s OK David:-)
labert8: horny is as horny does
pixelmeow: All that “brother Schmidt” stuff is not so nice.
pjscott100 has left the room.
ddavitt: It isn’t the sleeping around so much as the deciet
ddavitt: deceit
pixelmeow: Of course,then you find out they are more buddies than you thought…
TreetopAngelRN: Morality is your agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules.~~Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land
ddavitt: Brian and Mo agreed to open marriage; that’s fine, doesn’t bother me. their choice
ddavitt: Eunice, jake and Joan _cheat_
Copycat669: great quote
labert8: I was reading some posts on that , and it does bother me, but other than Winnie, if she doesn’t know, who gets deceived?
ddavitt: Lie, cover up, sneak around like a French farce..undignified
pjscott100 has entered the room.
pjscott100: network problem… grr…
DavidWrightSr: As always, I look at it this way. H is forcing us to ask questions about things by deliberately pushing those buttons.
ddavitt: why get married if you don’t love someone so much that they’re all you need?
Copycat669: I agree, though. if you’re goint o have an open sexuality, your partner needs to know.
ddavitt: Yes..that dates the book..pre AIDS
pixelmeow: Jane, I’m with you on this one.
pjscott100: This was the 70’s… still the sexual revolution
ddavitt: Thanks Pix!
pixelmeow: 😀
labert8: Morality is being forced to follow someone elses rules. Ethics is making your own.
pixelmeow: Well, my rule, for myself, is that I only want/need one man.
pjscott100: Question assumptions, question traditional beliefs
DavidWrightSr: Right
pixelmeow: Yes, but I know what’s right for me.
ddavitt: Hmm..but marriage should be full of trust..or what’s the point/ TELL them you want someone else..if they can’t accept that, you can spllit up, but don’t lie about it
pixelmeow: And it’s not “cheating” that bothers me about this book.
Copycat669: I think this is beyond morality. I mean what does morality have to say about living in another person’s body?
pjscott100: I don’t think he was saying that this was better than being faithful… simply that it was another possibility (one which had not received much attention hitherto)
pixelmeow: Yes, I agree, Jane.
labert8: Marriage is also a social construct. It’s rule do little to obviate evolved drives. Deciding that a convention shouold set aside all other instincts is foolhardy. Witness cheating rates.
pixelmeow: Yes, to that, too…
TreetopAngelRN: If I knew that it would not hurt my husband, I MAY have a fling, but since I tell him everything is would not be a problem
pixelmeow: oh, I’m getting all turned around!
geeairmoe2: got to feed the cat, brb.
ddavitt: I agree that marriage has other purposes than romantic fullfillment
pjscott100: Although I grant you that I am not aware of any people I can personally say have made the open lifestyle work
DavidWrightSr: If H succeeded in making you sure of your attitudes, then he accomplished his goals. If he succeeded in having others junk something they didn’t really believe then he did it again
ddavitt: Can be for financial or status gain
pixelmeow: Didn’t H say that marriage was for making and raising babies?
pixelmeow: Or something like that?
ddavitt: But it’s still a contract and should be defined so both people know what goes and what doesn’t
TreetopAngelRN: Marry for status, but fool around for love???
Copycat669: Joe and Eunice’s marriage was worse than what Joan did.
ddavitt: Depends on what you agree.
ddavitt: Why tam?
Copycat669: and just HOW did they pronounce that? Was it Jone or Joe Anne?
pixelmeow: yo-ahn.
pjscott100: Many writers have said that their goal is to piss off the reader (David Gerrold for one, and he often succeeds). Fortunately H doesn’t go that far for me.
ddavitt: Jo Anne I think…never heard that but other people have
DavidWrightSr: I always assumed Jo-ann
ddavitt: Yohann was male name
Copycat669: Johann was yoahn. i thought it was different.
DavidWrightSr: not Yo-Han
pixelmeow: I say “jone”‘ in my name.
pixelmeow: duh
ddavitt: I say Jone too when i read it
pixelmeow: in my head.
labert8: Did JOe and Eunice have any expectation of fielity? Or had they rejected it as artifical?
Copycat669: joe and eunice set it up for each other
ddavitt: They were open…but she stil lied about jake
pixelmeow: Yo-Hahn was the man
pixelmeow: Yo-Ahn was the woman.
ddavitt: Told him about the gurads; they were lower class…but Jake was rich and a threat to Joe
Copycat669: if fidelity and not honesty is the issue, they had many more instances of cheating.
pjscott100: I think H was postulating a society where open relationships were so common that expectation of fidelity was as optional as deciding who gets which side of the bed
ddavitt: She lied as easily as breathing
TreetopAngelRN: So she avoided hurting Joe’s feelings
TreetopAngelRN: he knew she was with someone, just not who it was
labert8: Is lyng acceptable when the other person would be more hurt by the revelation?
ddavitt: She did something she knew he wouldn’t like; why/ To get sex with someone.
Copycat669: I dunno. I guess i just eliminated all conventional morality with a man’s head in a woman’s body.
ddavitt: Someone rich and powerful…
ddavitt: Why?
ddavitt: Maybe she could have, oh, JUST NOT DONE IT?
TreetopAngelRN: did she really LIE to Joe or just leave out information?
ddavitt: 🙂
Copycat669: Labert? (not sure which one is your real name) I think that lying is never less hurtful
pjscott100: I think H put forward such a society as a counterpoint to the traditional one to open up minds/press buttons. If anyone’s read Fowles’ The Magus, something similar happens there.
labert8: Why is there any inherent value in not doing it?
pixelmeow: With you again, Jane…
ddavitt: Loyalty to spouse?
labert8: it’s labert, yes, and hi. It tends to be hurtful, I’ll admit.
pixelmeow: just not doing it.
TreetopAngelRN: She never told us about Roberto, either, until the end…did she lie to us?
pixelmeow: Yes, loyalty.
pixelmeow: She said “Bob”.
ddavitt: Roberto..don’t get the confusion
ddavitt: We know they slept together
Copycat669: And actually, I am applying my own hypotheses about sex when I throw out morality. I know that if my head were suddenly in a man’s body, I’d never leave the bathroom.
labert8: BUt did Joe expect sexual loyalty? Are we applying our rules to their sociuety? remeber, she believed there were what, nine genders?
ddavitt: and jake and Winnue did too; bound to carry on swapping, they lived a door away
pixelmeow: Six genders, and she had said to him one time that she found someone she wanted to spend the night with, and he said “have fun”.
ddavitt: Joe didn’t expect her to be faithful but she said he wouldn’t have liked her going with jake
Copycat669: man bi, man hetero, man homo, man celib, woman bi, woman hetero, woman homo, woman celib
ddavitt: later, he sleeps with jake himself of course..
labert8: I do things I know my wife won’t like. that’s life. she does too.
pixelmeow: Eyebrows!!!
ddavitt: Sure..but big things?
pixelmeow: I don’t recall that!
Copycat669: SEX thing??
ddavitt: Yes; he (jake)goes to see him and has a three some with gigi.
labert8: see that bruise? Kidding. of course, but yeah, don’t we all sometimes? and was this a big thing? Unfortunately I can’t recall JOe’s exact attitude.
pixelmeow: I thought that was JE?
Copycat669: I leave hair on the sink if i’m too lazy to pick up my shedding….but i don’t put that on par with picking up my coworker for a romb in the backseat.
ddavitt: Yes but earlier jake
TreetopAngelRN: she felt Joe would have been threatened by Jake’s status, she never said that Joe would not like Jake as her partner
pixelmeow: Ah, okay, haven’t gotten there yet.
ddavitt: Lemme see if i can spot it hang on
Copycat669: but his status was only an issue if she was having sex with him
pjscott100: I do think you’re trying to hold THAT society to THIS one’s standards and moral codes… and it don’t work that way
Copycat669: i’m not applying social custom…i’m merely applying what I believe about relational dynamics and trust.
labert8: Maybe a better question is, is there any possibility that human society could ever become like that? Was rah stretching too far?
pjscott100: Another version of the “Pardon him Theodotus: he is a barbarian and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
TreetopAngelRN: True, Tam that’s why she didn’t say anything, it kept Joe happy and what kept Joe Happy kept Eunice happy.
labert8: Does anyone else accept the premise that jealousy (envy) is the most destructive of emotions? That’s a step towards their rules.
labert8: And most fruitless use of emotional energy?
TreetopAngelRN: Jealousy is the most destructive in my book.
pjscott100: There are plenty emotions that are destructive enough that I don’t feel the need to pick a winner
DavidWrightSr: As someone pointed out, this was during or just after the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ and that society was the prototype for what RAH wrote. Personally, I missed it myself, so I can’t speak from experience
Copycat669: nah. i think that jealousy is a by product of distrust, which is to me, the worst.
ddavitt: Got it.”Look Boss, don’t be so naive. they were crying over the same girl -me- and Joe is as ambi as an oyster when it suits him.’
labert8: good point. I think the book was exploring, as one avenue, the possible elimination of it. LIkely? I don’ t know.
TreetopAngelRN: I got the best out of the sexual revolution…parents who were open and honest about sex and helped their children protect themselves.
ddavitt: Mine too
pjscott100: I am more impressed by the fact that an elderly monogamous man and rather right-wing to boot could create such a fantasy
pixelmeow: Okay, Jane, I recall it now.
pixelmeow: thanks!
labert8: NOt mine, and they lived through it. BUt at least my mom owned rah books. that helped.
ddavitt: No prob.
BPRAL22169 has entered the room.
pixelmeow: hi, bill!
ddavitt: Hi Bill
pjscott100: Hi Bill
TreetopAngelRN: Hi Billl
BPRAL22169: Yo! Sorry I’m late; I’ve been having some trouble with my DSL provider.
Copycat669: hi bill
labert8: right wing?
DavidWrightSr: Greetings Bill
TreetopAngelRN: My sexual education really helped with a preeteen step daughter
Copycat669: so, that quote? I don’t think it says that jake had a threesome..
ddavitt: We’re just trying to decide if Eunice and joan were sluts or products of a different time
pjscott100: I could be wrong on that
BPRAL22169: I think both a and b.
ddavitt: It’s implied and certainly happens on the ship
Copycat669: I vote Eunice=Slut, Joan=man, which by application of theorem, =slut.
ddavitt: Joan asks Gigi is they can vist in the city…as a quartet
labert8: Hi bill, long time . . .
pjscott100: And they say the Gender Wars are over
BPRAL22169: I think anybody who was an adult before about 1960 was deeply and favorably impressed by the “wholeheartedness” with which women entered into sex after about 1965.
BPRAL22169: Labert. it’s been awhile.
LV Poker Player has entered the room.
labert8: There’s a lot to be said for that theory, copycat (?)
TreetopAngelRN: Johann, the male part of Joan-Eunice had a new plaything ann wanted to experience everythig
ddavitt: We lay there and thouhgt of England before that, huh?
Copycat669: just kidding. Joan is a slut because any person who gets to have the opposite sex experience is going to want to experiment.
pixelmeow: hey!
labert8: Or admitted entering into it.
pjscott100: Is it as satisfying to think of Canada? 🙂
BPRAL22169: Following the Good Queen’s advice.
ddavitt: Eunice was a slut; what’s her excuse?
LV Poker Player: Ok, I figured out how to get into this chat. Is this how I send a message?
Copycat669: I get more out of it if I think of Italy, actually….but the hills of Scotland are a real turn on, too.
pixelmeow: Yep!
TreetopAngelRN: Eunice was a slut by YOUR morals, not the society she lived in
ddavitt: seruiosly, she comes across as a nymphomaniac
BPRAL22169: Yes, you have gotten it, LVPP
ddavitt: Hi LV, didn’t see you
Copycat669: Hi LV. Yes, you have arrived
LV Poker Player: capital!
ddavitt: Mesages scrolled up as i typed
BPRAL22169: Carson city, I think.
pjscott100: Elizabeth: Exactly my point.
labert8: she wasn’t a slut, Jane. She was enthusiastically enjoying a natural part of life. Only our her /now rules lead some to label her negatively.
Copycat669: I think she was by her own society too, though.
ddavitt: If E not a slut, why all the cover ups that johann did IN HIS OWN HOUSE?
BPRAL22169: There was a joke current about the time: if a woman says she is “liberated,” that means she’s a slut.
Copycat669: Not everyone in that society was as freely sexual.
labert8: with free attiudes about sex, woudn’t more people participate more often, with more variety? It all follows from the groundrules rah set up.
TreetopAngelRN: only person I heard described as a slut in IWFNE was Joe’s sister who continually got pregnant
ddavitt: The gossip mags would have had a field day..which implies soiety in general not quite as accepting as it seems
ddavitt: Or more hypocritical than now
BPRAL22169: Would Heinlein consider Eunice a slut? I don’t think so.
labert8: Johann worried about scandal, because of antiquated beliefs. NO one else gave a damn.
TreetopAngelRN: gossip mags are the BIGGEST Mrs. Grundy’s in the universe
Copycat669: Heinlein? OMG! I think I would really like to have known a bit about HIS sexuality.
BPRAL22169: I think the distinction he probably made was casual sex without emotional involvements.
pjscott100: But the gossip mags exist to report any private information they can find out… it’s an issue of privacy more than sexuality
pixelmeow: Except Jake, also…
DavidWrightSr: No way.. His coverups was generally to protect what he thought of as reputation of partner, IIRC
ddavitt: Eunice and Johann constantly, tediously even, tell each other they have dirty minds. i think they even use the slut word happily
pixelmeow: remember, he wants to protect Joan’s reputation.
LV Poker Player: I can think of two problems which were not mentioned at all or passed over VERY briefly, STDs and pregnancy
BPRAL22169: He told us — he tried everything at least once and if he liked it, more than once.
BPRAL22169: Could be an ironic use of the term, Jane.
pixelmeow: Yes, LV, true.
ddavitt: No, much was made of contraception
BPRAL22169: en famille.
Copycat669: std’s werent’ an issue when the book was written
TreetopAngelRN: Didn’t Heinlein consider casual sex, a step above masturbation? IIRC from Notebooks
ddavitt: Pills, diaphrams ect
Copycat669: what does iirc mean?
labert8: Assuming that the notebooks speak for rah? tsk, tsk
DavidWrightSr: If I recall Correctly
BPRAL22169: If I Recall Correctly
ddavitt: 13 year old on ‘junior pill’, Winnie with thigh implant (ahead of his time there)
pjscott100: Quote I recall is “Masturbation is safe, clean, and free of emotional tangements. But it’s LONELY” (paraphrase)
Copycat669: thanks
LV Poker Player: true about contraception, but that society would have had MAJOR problems with STDs
pjscott100: They may have had cures for them
ddavitt: It would if Eunice gave you one of her friendly kisses
Copycat669: lv, the society in which he lived as he wrote, or the society he wrote about?
BPRAL22169: There are many battles RAH kept fighting long after they were pretty much won IRL. The masturbation thing is one of those.
TreetopAngelRN: ghonorrhea and syphillis at the time, only ones that were even considered STD’s
geeairmoe2: The general assuption about the future is the conqouring of STDs.
Copycat669: what do you mean by that, bill?
pjscott100: For those who weren’t around before AIDS… casual sex had a much better rep.
LV Poker Player: both really, if they had cured STD’s it was not mentioned
labert8: Bill, did he actually have an axe to grind with masturbation?
BPRAL22169: It wouldn’t even be considered necessary to talk about masturbation nowadays.
ddavitt: I was a teenager before AIDS; I remember it well it well :-):-)
TreetopAngelRN: true
LV Poker Player: He grew up in a society where it was discouraged, “You’ll go blind” and such like
BPRAL22169: I don’t think he had a specific axe to grind about masturbation; it’s one of those things that were big issues when he was growing up.
BPRAL22169: Exactly.
Copycat669: LV, i was sexually active from 85 on. AIDS and even STD’s were somthing “other people” got. So 70’s would have been worse, i think.
labert8: BUt he often didn’
ddavitt: And he didn’t quite realise when it stopped being one?
BPRAL22169: No, in the 70’s you expected you would get gonhorrea but a shot of penicillin took care of it.
labert8: t accept the belief s of that society. sorry, premature transmission there.
DavidWrightSr: STD’s are a problem in our time and society, and not just AIDS
Copycat669: OK, now i sound like a slut myself, don’t i? 🙂
BPRAL22169: STDs were a problem even then.
ddavitt: The clap and such have been around for ever pretty much
pixelmeow: No, Tam, you don’t…
pjscott100: I repeat that I think it’s amazing that a man with H’s demographics could write something so outre that it still tweaks much younger people
Copycat669: They have, but they were treatable. No one died from herpes.
pixelmeow: it’s how I remember it, also.
BPRAL22169: In the sixties and seventies, there was an epidemic of incredible ignorance about sexual matters.
DavidWrightSr: And still is Bill. I know I work for the Health Department
ddavitt: I was SA…a lot influenced by reading H..but I took em on one at a time in the sense that i didn’t cheat which is my beef with E
geeairmoe2: How much is arrogance — it can’t happen to me!
TreetopAngelRN: Even AIDS didn’t get the press it needed until celebrities started dying from it.
BPRAL22169: “Diffrent strokes for different folks.”
DavidWrightSr: Jane, you can’t cheat if you are playing by the rules which she was
Copycat669: well, i for one, think that IWFNE is just a book about that thought that we have all had at least once, “What would it be like to have a’s body for just a day…”
LV Poker Player: I seem to remember something about after Jake came back from Washington, someone said something about D. C. having a high rate of VD?
LV Poker Player: Does anyone else remember that?
BPRAL22169: No, it’s a lot more than that, Tam.
ddavitt: I was brought up to have few hang ups about sex; brought boys home to my room from 16 with parents approval as they knew I was on the pill. No big deal
pixelmeow: Not offhand, LV, but I’ll get to it as I keep reading…
BPRAL22169: It’s the hoariest cliche in science fiction — the brain transplant — made to become a huge novel
labert8: I think its much more than that Tam. It also explores the deeper point of what to do with second chances, among many others
mertide has entered the room.
LV Poker Player: My memory has been known to play tricks on me, it might be from something else
pixelmeow: hey, filly!
TreetopAngelRN: Carolyn!
ddavitt: jake and Eunice cheated on each other and the stpid part is that they didn’t need to, as jake finds out when he’s dead
ddavitt: Hi Filly
mertide: Hey!, thanks D.
mertide: I’m racing in and out, kids exams today
BPRAL22169: And it’s in a dialog with the whole field of science fiction — showing that you could be as “new wave” in terms of content and subject matter and still have a strong story – i.e., old wave.
ddavitt: They didn’t trust each other enough to say, I’m sleeping with the gurads…yet they were old friends, deeply in love…sad
pixelmeow: (that *is* filly, isnt’ it?)
mertide: Are you talking to ME! (I had to use that line)
BPRAL22169: And it’s a study in reality and hallucination.
labert8: mertide = filly = other previous ‘mer’ s? If so, hi filly!
pixelmeow: Yes, YOU!
LV Poker Player: If there were no physical problems to worry about, STD and pregnancy, would unlimited sex then be moral?
mertide: No, mertide is Carolyn from Brisbane Australia, sorry
TreetopAngelRN: Yes!
BPRAL22169: So, even before you start talking about the specifics of the mythos, you’ve accumulated a lot of thematic material.
Copycat669: well…on another topic, I wonder what is the significance of (on page 507) “The Iowa State Annual Picnic in Long Beach California” WHAT the heck is that all about?
pixelmeow: Okay, we had someone in afh that your handle reminded me of.
pixelmeow: Hi, anyway!
mertide: Hi anyway back
labert8: Well hello anyway!
mertide: Hi elizabeth
mertide: Hi labert8
ddavitt: Yes, it does say that about VD in Washington; just checked
mertide: Hi Jane if I didn’t hi before
mertide: how disruptive
labert8: So did the thread ever answer the hallucination theory, Bill? No one seemed to be winning as far as I read in David’s transcript.
ddavitt: Sorry carolyn, hi
ddavitt: I’m getting all bewildered by the speed of the replies:-)
BPRAL22169: Can’t be 507, Tam — the book only goes up to 401 pp.
pixelmeow: I’d like to know if it was hallucination, myself.
ddavitt: I type too slow…
labert8: I feel out of practice too, Jane.
Copycat669: in MY book, darling…second paragraph of chap 26
ddavitt: It’s a lively chat tonight..which is great
geeairmoe2: Who was hallucinating? Him or her?
Copycat669: 29, typo, sorry
TreetopAngelRN: %)& in my book, it’s just one of those news update type things throughout the book
ddavitt: i love the news headlines..very funny
BPRAL22169: I just realized — I’m looking at a hardback, and you’re probably looking at a paperback.
LV Poker Player: The free willers and predestinationers are tied in the fourth quarter, or however that translates to IWFNE terms 🙂
Copycat669: yeah, it is. which I hated. But to have the Iowa picnic in CALIFORNIA??
ddavitt: show off
ddavitt: Some of the ads are like the ones in friday too
pixelmeow: I want to believe it wasn’t hallucination, but I can’t decide, and I’m still reading it again.
LV Poker Player: Beginning of chapter 29, whatever edition you have
TreetopAngelRN: That does seem strange…better weather?
labert8: Iowa sucks? perhaps? or is totally owned by the farm industry conglomerates?
pixelmeow: I love the headlines, too!!!
mertide: I can’t quite see whether it matters whether the book coincides with our reality, it’s fiction isn’t it? I don’t have to believe in FTL drives to enjoy a story about them
Copycat669: Hey! I’m an IOWAN!
pixelmeow: 😛
ddavitt: Don’t get me wrong…for all my bitching about Eunice, i enjoyed reading the book again
DavidWrightSr: Ok, to change the subject. Opinions needed: what did Heinlein mean by that last line. ‘and then there was none’?
pixelmeow: I picked it up again for YOU, Jane.
TreetopAngelRN: <
ddavitt: It has some very touching bits…umm, could have phrased that better
labert8: JUst kidding! I think the second is more likely, and I meant in their where/when.
ddavitt: Thank you pix:-)
pixelmeow: so it’s YOUR fault.
pixelmeow: 😛
pjscott100: gotta go handle something, but will leave this logged in
ddavitt: Hey; it’s sparked a good chat!
Copycat669: David, I think that means that they died. there isn’t anything left.
DavidWrightSr: Did he just mean ‘their world’ was gone or there was
DavidWrightSr: no world left
ddavitt: There’s a baby
BPRAL22169: It seems to mean the world
pixelmeow: Oh yes. And I’m trying to compare E to Mau, but it just doesn’t work for me.
Copycat669: their world.
TreetopAngelRN: “and then there was none” The trio expired, noone else was close enough to them to continue the composite
DavidWrightSr: Solipsism again?
pixelmeow: Apples and oranges, I guess.
ddavitt: They died becasue their work was done. going into the baby’s head…now that would have been icky
Copycat669: i think that they ceased to exist.
pixelmeow: I also guess I like Mau better.
pixelmeow: In some ways.
mertide: Unless you assume the whole story was a hallucination post the original surgery
pixelmeow: But in others, E seems more “naive”, or something.
ddavitt: What did the baby do? remember the money that went into space research and interstellat travel?
Copycat669: Nah. I don’t see anything indicative of hallucination.
BPRAL22169: I don’t think solipsism — just that the observer died so the observed world ceased to be.
TreetopAngelRN: maybe they all went on to be reincarnated in the usual way, they no longer had to be held together to survive as an entitiy
ddavitt: I think he/she went on the vanguard and Hugh is a descendant of Johann
ddavitt: So there.
pixelmeow: ROFL!!!
ddavitt: Thank you
labert8: We’re seeing the novel from the character’
LV Poker Player: ..Apropos of nothing, there is the end of Beyond This Horizon, where the elderly council member apparently comes back as Felix’s and Phyllis’ baby
BPRAL22169: More likely Joe-Jim
pixelmeow: did you see what I wrote up there, Jane?
Copycat669: Go back a few, David. “A baby cried, a world began.” He is saying that each person has his “own” world, I think. When the three entered the one body and it died, they all three ceased to be.
ddavitt: ROFL…
labert8: s point of view, so without them, there’s nothing. Especially for Johann
ddavitt: which bit Pix? No joke, i can’t keep up
BPRAL22169: Chockma, binah, Ayin!
pixelmeow: I spoke to your comparison of E and Mau.
ddavitt: Oh…
DavidWrightSr: This story reminded me strongly of one of Piper’s stories where it was shown that the ego survived after death and was reincarnated in other bodies.
pixelmeow: We can take it up again later.
TreetopAngelRN: Johann’s brain rejected the transplant, and took the composite with him, no Johann, no composite
BPRAL22169: That comes from Dunne, I think.
ddavitt: I’d like to compare them
Copycat669: so where is ego stored if no body is left to store it in?
ddavitt: If we don’t get chance tonight, on sat maybe?
mertide: The “catching” of Jake’s “Soul?” is the oddity though, if such a thing exists outside the body altogether what happened to the three of them?
pixelmeow: Announcement!
DavidWrightSr: Everyone accepted reincarnation but were split over whether or not the new incarnation was voluntary or just happened to the nearest new baby
ddavitt: GA
BPRAL22169: There is another answer to the where is it stored problem.
pixelmeow: We are moving Heather home Saturday…
BPRAL22169: /ga
pixelmeow: so I don’t think I’ll be able to be here then.
ddavitt: Home?
ddavitt: Did i miss soemthing? has she been poorly?
pixelmeow: She’s been at Mom’s for the last most of a year.
pixelmeow: Going to first grade at a good, respectable school,
Copycat669: I’m moving to newton over the next few weeks and starting my new job at the Newton Daily. 🙂 so I’ll be intermittent.
ddavitt: Oh, OK. That will be great for you!
mertide: congratualtions
ddavitt: Glad she wasn’t sick…
pixelmeow: which will let the parents know earlier than a month before the end of the year if her child is not doing well!
TreetopAngelRN: You got a job, Tam!
ddavitt: Tell me about it, Pix…
Copycat669: yep. 🙂 i missed editing. It will be fun. 🙂
ddavitt: E’s teachers this year have been dire…all of us mums are up in arms over them
TreetopAngelRN: Congrats!!!
pixelmeow: So she’s had a good First Grade, and is counting the days until she comes home.
ddavitt: I bet she is!
pixelmeow: Sorry to hear that, Jane…
Copycat669: That’s one of the most important years in school, i belive. I’m glad she’s coming home, though.
pixelmeow: but that’s why I can’t be here Sat…
ddavitt: E has coped; very grounded child
pixelmeow: Me too. 😀
pixelmeow: Good.!
ddavitt: Others not so happy
pixelmeow: And now back to the conversation, all!!!
ddavitt: Well, do you want to look at Eunice v maureen then?
mertide: That;s why 6 years of education spills over 12 years, to make up for teacher disasters 🙂
pixelmeow: Ooo, yes!
TreetopAngelRN: bad teachers don’t always ruin good kids, thank God!
labert8: Don’t get me started on schools and teachers (except me , of course.) Makes me think too much of JOe’s illiteracy and how close we’re getting to it.
ddavitt: Take over Pix..unless people want to break for 5?
LV Poker Player: blech, guess I better break that one up
mertide: Does anyone think Eunice was like any woman they know mentally? 🙂
BPRAL22169: We are already at it. Functional illiteracy is the rule among high school graduates now
TreetopAngelRN: break for five, please, I have an escape attempt going on
Copycat669: sux we don’t find out if the baby’s girl or boy
ddavitt: Noone I know…
pixelmeow: No, me either.
ddavitt: OK, break for a bit then.
pixelmeow: Ok.
DavidWrightSr: Lets break
ddavitt: I’m off to get a drink brb
LV Poker Player: There is a different, and in my opinion better, viewpoint expressed by Friday
labert8: Tell me about it I teach college freshman, and they can read or analyze to save their lives.
Copycat669: make mine tequila, darlin, while you’re up?
pixelmeow: what’s that, LV?
TreetopAngelRN: back! Need to buy a bigger turtle tank, one has figured out how to flip hiself over the side
LV Poker Player: Friday says that if a person cannot go home and brag about his/her sexual adventures, he/she should not have sexual adventures
pixelmeow: Good point.
LV Poker Player: Eunice should not have laid Jake by that standard
labert8: escape attempt! rofl. lukily it after bedtime, east coast. no escape attempt. Wait, human or animal?
pixelmeow: Yep. I have to agree.
TreetopAngelRN: I agree with that POV
labert8: bragging does make it more fun.
ddavitt: back…
pixelmeow: hi, dear!
pixelmeow: (trying on JE speak)
TreetopAngelRN: animal, turtles
ddavitt: I don’t recall F saying that..to whom?
labert8: Probably the NZ family.
pixelmeow: You know, it sounds like something Mau would say.
ddavitt: But it is a good rule
DavidWrightSr: ‘they can read or analyze to save their lives.’ Did you mean “can’t”?
labert8: or talking about them
pixelmeow: Or Briney, at least.
LV Poker Player: Internal dialogue, after she meets that guy on the subway who turned out to be a fellow enhanced AP
mertide: Eunice was putting discretion ahead of honesty with the people she said she loved
Copycat669: I don’t know about that….i’d have to remain celibate by those standards.
LV Poker Player: can’t remember his name
labert8: Yes, sorry, can’t. To too large a degree. Obviously some get through with some training.
ddavitt: maureen never, IIRC, slept with anyone without telling B before or after the event
TreetopAngelRN: Carolyn just said what I was tryting to say
ddavitt: By my standards, that makes her not a slut
mertide: ooh, psychic
pixelmeow: Yes, Eliz, I agree, I got it…
ddavitt: But still a bad mother
pixelmeow: Yes, Jane, exactly…
pixelmeow: I have to say it, I would vomit if I thought of the things she did.
ddavitt: We are twin thought tonight Pix:-)
pixelmeow: 🙂
pixelmeow: All we need now is Jani…
ddavitt: That would be fun:-)
pixelmeow: Yep.
Copycat669: Vomit? Give an example of a vomitous thought?
labert8: Why vomit? I disagree with some,. but tnot that violently.
ddavitt: Four in the bed..mum, dad, daughter and fiance/ Blech
pixelmeow: I am sorry, but the thought of my daughter being done by her father makes me want to vomit.
ddavitt: ditto
mertide: conspiring with her daughter for her to bed her father
TreetopAngelRN: I never had any kids except the step kind so I cannot be a good source for information, but I do appreciate some of Mau’s solutions
labert8: Ah yes. Blue mud situation though?
pixelmeow: I don’t know, labert.
pixelmeow: I just don’t know.
labert8: Especially after what they’d learned from LL?
ddavitt: It’s just sex for heaven’s sake…it’s not vital to do it with everyone you know or like
pixelmeow: and I can’t get beyond it.
mertide: I thought less poorly of it before I had a daughter of my own
pixelmeow: Me too!!!
TreetopAngelRN: we are back to daughter’s marrying their father’s
Copycat669: ahhh…ok. I see. I’m not interested in MY father by any means, nor am i interested in MY son, but the thought of incest is kinda racy for me. 🙂 I can hang with it if I’m applying it to other families.
labert8: BUt why not? Tennis is fun too
ddavitt: It doesn’t kill you if you only sleep with the same person for ooh, a whole month
BPRAL22169: I think we get sidetracked on the racy/distasteful question. I don’t think that’s why the situations were in the book.
geeairmoe2: I’ve always wondered what female’s thought about how authentic RAH’s women sounded discussing sex.
pixelmeow: You have to be right, Bill, but why were they there?
BPRAL22169: Heinlein was a very old hand at this, and he knew deeply that one man’s hot sex is another man’s cold pancake the next day.
ddavitt: funny; i’m liberated, un prudish and uninhibited by most standards… yet H can offend me in his books.
labert8: Setting aside tribal taboos, however well grounded, isn’t automatically wrong. In fact it encourages complex thought, a dwindling commodity, in both Eunice’s world and our own. Witness religious fanaticism.
Copycat669: I think they are authentic…we just don’t admit it.
mertide: They sounded like men discussing sex a lot of the time to me
BPRAL22169: Gods, Ubermen, transhumans are not bound by the taboos of the all-too-human.
geeairmoe2: I always thought they talked how men wished they talked.
ddavitt: Eunice was none of those
BPRAL22169: It’s radical individualism we’re seeing.
pixelmeow: Sigh.
ddavitt: aka utter selfishness
Copycat669: They talk how I wish I could.
Copycat669: If I could throw off the mantle of Judeo Christian morality.
mertide: The things that turn women on in my experience weren’t present, and the things that men dream of were
pixelmeow: I’ve never spoken with anyone else like that in my life…
ddavitt: I have no such covering..
TreetopAngelRN: to be totally open and free about sex? I’m all for it.
BPRAL22169: Jane, Heinlein is a perfect example of a radical individualist. Would you say he was utterly selfish?
ddavitt: Ditto elizabeth
labert8: Individuallism is the unltimate good in many rah books. Making ones own rules, examining their effects, living honestly with them .. These are lofty goals.
pixelmeow: They are lofty, and idealistic.
ddavitt: They go together by definition….can’t speak for h himself..I didn’t know him
mertide: polyamory is one thing, incest is crossing a different line
pixelmeow: In my sense of the word, which means that it doesn’t stand up to day to day life.
pixelmeow: At least not for me…
labert8: Idealism is the only thing that raises us above the animals we actually are.
ddavitt: If you are the most important thing, if your desires are always to be satisfied..that’s self-ish
LV Poker Player: one of the reasons for the incest taboo is genetics. If this were not a problem, would incest still be wrong?
pixelmeow: That’s what RAH was asking, maybe?
ddavitt: YEs IMO
BPRAL22169: The point is, the totally self-responsible individual doesn’t stand in the conventional moral categories — he is “Beyond Good and Evil” to quote a familiar title.
TreetopAngelRN: I don’t think Heinlein was selfish, I think he sparked debate/sharing of ideas, just like we are doing now
labert8: Selfish is the definition of human. The few times someones steps beyond that are happy times, but rare.
pixelmeow: Yes…
BPRAL22169: LVPP, that’s what he spent his next book examining in detail, isn’t it?
ddavitt: Piffle to excuse self indulgence
mertide: There were a skillion other people to sleep with that week apart from her Dad
LV Poker Player: TEFL? That was certainly one of the themes
BPRAL22169: Jane, which remarks are you characterizing as “piffle,”
labert8: wrong genetically and wrong morally are very different things. MOrals change with the times.
ddavitt: Yep; you only have one father to have a relationship with
pixelmeow: Yes, indeed.
ddavitt: The beyond good and evil bit
mertide: I have to go sorry, I’ll watch for the transcript to see what you all decided hahaha
mertide: sorry to hit and run
pixelmeow: bye!!
ddavitt: Or a father figure..wif you had one of those would you want to sleep with them? Why in heaven’s name?
BPRAL22169: Nietzsche spent 8 books and almost the entirety of his creative life examining that question.
labert8: Bye !
Copycat669: I think that RAH opened up his mind to think about sexuality beyond the walls of the box that society’s drawn for us.
mertide: bye all
TreetopAngelRN: Good day Carolyn
mertide has left the room.
ddavitt: i ‘did’ N in philopshy; two weeks at uni. can’t remember enough to comment
BPRAL22169: We get that it’s not to your taste, Jane.
LV Poker Player: I think that anything that causes people to think outside the box is good, even if they ultimately reject it and decide the box is good
Copycat669: perhaps you’d want to sleep with a male relative to take an already intimate relationship to a more intimate level.
pixelmeow: Yuk.
labert8: Whyever is that piffle, Jane? Good and evil are invented categories, and they change with the wind. It’s dangerous to rely on them.
ddavitt: It’s an inappropriate avenue to greater closeness in some cases IMO
pixelmeow: LOL, labert, you should have been in afh last week.
ddavitt: Oh, hang on..
TreetopAngelRN: There was the day I looked at a picture of my male cousin and wished I was a few years younger and not so closely related…good looking kid!
geeairmoe2: Expanded on the genetic thing, an incest prohibiton assures a wider gene pool. If you have incest, you can’t have manogomy. Got to spread those genes around.
ddavitt: individual is above good and evil is just too easy a get out
labert8: Certainly very dangerous. usually harmful, yes. Inherently, ultimately, and forever wrong? NO.
Copycat669: well, especially with Mau…she had a VERY intimate relationship with her father. SEx was the “final frontier” in their relationship.
BPRAL22169: I don’t know — customs of exogamy ought to be enough for that purpose, Will.
pixelmeow: That’s what I was saying earlier, Jane.
labert8: Why pix?
pixelmeow: ’cause I was saying those same things, again…
BPRAL22169: We only have taboos against things we are otherwise inclined to do.
ddavitt: Why would that be?
BPRAL22169: There wouldn’t be any point to a taboo about eating rocks, would there?
labert8: well said bill.
Copycat669: Is there a taboo against sticking hairpins in electrical sockets?
ddavitt: How can we want to do what is wrong?
ddavitt: (Is that red Planet?)
ddavitt: How can one act against one’s nature/ Or maybe HSSWT?
labert8: You keep starting from the same supposition. WHat were saying is that its a rocky one.
BPRAL22169: What the heck is “wrong”? You talk as if there were some kind of categorical absolute involved.
TreetopAngelRN: Hugh Farnham was glad there was another female along, he was worried about having to bed his own daughter for procreation
ddavitt: But to say, hey, i’m a rugged individual, don’t go execting me to see things the way you all do is generally self deception
BPRAL22169: The choice Heinlein presents us with over and over is that customs are not moral absolutes.
Copycat669: I WANT to do what is wrong every day. My hsuband and I acknowledge that a marriage certificate doesn’t shut off the attraction and I point out nice hooters every once in a while.
ddavitt: A murderer is a radical individualist then
Copycat669: Some people think we’re crazy and I’m just asking for trouble.
TreetopAngelRN: same in my house Tam
labert8: Wrong is acting counter survival. All other rules are made up by shaman.
Copycat669: I think I’m being realistic about his intimate desires and affording him the safety to be honest with me. Honesty is more important to me than some mental fidelity
ddavitt: I’m deeply in lust with Spike off Buffy but I don’t plan to hunt down james marsters and try to sleep with him
BPRAL22169: Heinlein gave rather specific guidelines to maintaining individual identity and living in a conventional society.
pjscott100: Where?
Copycat669: I’m deeply in lust with a man I used to work with. I WOULD hunt him down and sleep with him if given permission.
ddavitt: blue mud..more deception
BPRAL22169: Let’s see — how many books and stories are there . . . ?
Copycat669: My husband defines my sexual morality.
BPRAL22169: But I’m thinking particularly of the Mrs. Grundy quotes in TEFL.
ddavitt: or keeping his love and trust is more important than a fling?
TreetopAngelRN: in order to survive in a society you sometimes have to resort to blue mud in public.
labert8: I say exactly those things Jane. And I know society wants to slap me on the head for them SO did Mike in Siasl.
ddavitt: or go and make your own society..as Ll did on tertius
TreetopAngelRN: If I could, I would
BPRAL22169: Of course, every family is its own society.
pixelmeow: True.
ddavitt: I suppose so.
Copycat669: Not really, jane. I’m sure that if I really wanted to, Jeff would give me permission to have that fling. But it’s not the sex that’s offensive, it’s the dishonesty
TreetopAngelRN: and we rub in the blue mud before leaving the house
ddavitt: I agree entirely
LV Poker Player: It seems to me there is, or at least should be, room for the committed monogamous couple and for the open relationship
LV Poker Player: Why should society condemn either one?
ddavitt: Nothing wrong at all with an open marriage as long as the rules are clear and both agree
labert8: Not even the dishonesty, it’s the violation of the agreement, whatever it is.
Copycat669: I think that today’s society IS ok with htat.
ddavitt: Yes; if your word is woth nothing, neither are you
Copycat669: Society only intervenes when you hire a divorce lawyer.
LV Poker Player: And your point is that Eunice did not always all that open, and I have to agree
labert8: See Jane we do agree
ddavitt: 🙂
ddavitt: I’m very tolerant…really I am1
pixelmeow: Now, comparing E to Mau…
ddavitt: Yes..?
pixelmeow: Mau seems to have her stuff together.
TreetopAngelRN: okay
BPRAL22169: Hey! We just converged on the subject!
pixelmeow: Okay, okay. I’ll wait!
pixelmeow: 🙂
ddavitt: Don’t sound so surprised; i’m hosting, i’m in control
TreetopAngelRN: 😀
BPRAL22169: That’s true. I should have known.
ddavitt: When i catch up with the fast typing anyway
labert8: Lead away, Jane.
pixelmeow: I talk to NW too much on IM.
ddavitt: Maureen had a strong father figure..Eunice did not
pixelmeow: You’ve gotta type fast then…
BPRAL22169: You control the vertical, at the very least.
pixelmeow: Yes.
Copycat669: well gang, while I love to talk about sex, I AM struggling with strep so i should go to bed. I’m working on 6 x H. I finished Eternity this morning. I LOVED J(can’t think of the name) was a man! that was soo soooo sooooo good
labert8: Say hi for me next time.
ddavitt: I cry at that story
BPRAL22169: Joathan hoag?
ddavitt: Get well soon
pjscott100: Jerry
labert8: Jerry !
pixelmeow: Get well, tam…
ddavitt: Jerry Was A man, yes
Copycat669: working on jonathon. But I LOVE jerry was a man. 😉
pixelmeow: I feel for ya, I do.
Copycat669: by guys!
TreetopAngelRN: Get some sleep Tam, lots of fluids
LV Poker Player: I don’t think Eunice ever mentioned her parents
labert8: Feel better
Copycat669: thanks all!
pixelmeow: Yes, I don’t recall that she did.
Copycat669 has left the room.
pjscott100: Take care
BPRAL22169: I think I still have a copy of the magazine that appeared in.
pixelmeow: Bragger!!!
BPRAL22169: An extra, I mean.
ddavitt: I am writing some fiction thses days which is improving my speed…don’t laugh…Buffy fan fic
pixelmeow: I have never watched a single episode.
TreetopAngelRN: why would we laugh?
ddavitt: Fun and i see what Colin Campbell means about it being addictive
pixelmeow: Did watch the movie, tho…
BPRAL22169: It’s one of David Silver’s favorite stories, so I picked up a copy for him and wound up with two.
pjscott100: I’m more of a B5 fan myself
BPRAL22169: Sci-Fi is running the movies now.
ddavitt: Fan fic is a mixed bag; some is dire and some is excellent.
pixelmeow: Ahem.
ddavitt: But writing it is fun
pixelmeow: So Mau has her commandments…
ddavitt: Yes; rules of life
pixelmeow: I think she’s got a good idea of what they mean, what she should do with them.
ddavitt: eunice has them too; not to hurt anyone
BPRAL22169: Writing is the only game for adults!
pixelmeow: I don’t know that E has the same idea of them, tho.
BPRAL22169: To heck with this politics stuff!
ddavitt: I thouhgt that was politics? 🙂
pixelmeow: Not them specifically…
labert8: writing is politics
LV Poker Player: Dak Broadbent thought it was politics
ddavitt: Yep..
Reilloc has entered the room.
pixelmeow: but that you should have a code of conduct.
pixelmeow: Hello!
pjscott100: Eunice is rather… innocent is not the word, but I don’t like the connotation of ‘uneducated’
labert8: all speech acts are political.
geeairmoe2 has left the room.
ddavitt: Hi reilloc
Reilloc: Evening all.
pixelmeow: Yes, I agree. E is very naive.
pjscott100: Howdy
BPRAL22169: I think her father gave her some rules of thumb and required her to examine them one by one.
ddavitt: She’s not dumb at all…
BPRAL22169: Yo
labert8: she’s naive, a bit too silly even to actually have accomplished what she seems to have
pixelmeow: Bill, that’s why I like Mau’s position in this.
pjscott100: Point I’m trying to make is, she’s not got as much going upstairs for her so she makes up for it with heart.
ddavitt: As i said, look at that tiny bit in the car when she’s still alive
BPRAL22169: I’m sorry — in this what?
TreetopAngelRN: Eunice has empathy
labert8: It’s sensible, but not oo introspective
pixelmeow: In the comparison, and why I mostly like Mau more.
labert8: too
ddavitt: Contast what she thinks to herself and what she says aloud to jake
ddavitt: Big diff
ddavitt: and the only time we hear her when she’s alone
pixelmeow: I think Mau knows good and well everything she does and says.
ddavitt: and totally natural, no audience
pixelmeow: Not that she’s always right, or that I always agree.
labert8: she’s very sure of what her priorities are in that scene.
BPRAL22169: Well, yeah — she was trained that way.
ddavitt: E and M both pander to their men
pixelmeow: I feel that E is just skipping happily thru life, not too worried about too much.
pixelmeow: Yes, Jane, I agree.
ddavitt: Joan does it even when she is still a man
pixelmeow: And I’ve tried to follow the other you’ve said…
ddavitt: Now that’s weird
TreetopAngelRN: Mau is amoral, she has had to make her rules, so they fit her and has to think extra hard about why it sould be a rule
pixelmeow: but gotta get this part out.
pixelmeow: And Mau has definitely thought it out.
pixelmeow: I respect the hell out of that.
ddavitt: Sure..am i being cryptic?
BPRAL22169: Somewhat, yes.
pixelmeow: No, Jane, not at all. Just trying to do one thing at a time…
labert8: Maureen groks god better than Eunice does?
pixelmeow: Sortof.
pixelmeow: Maybe that she groks at all.
pixelmeow: 🙂
ddavitt: i mentioned it in my first lead off post. Only see Eunice alone for a little bit then she’s in Johann’s head and not alone veer again
pixelmeow: Mau’s every thought isn’t about sex, and it seems that E’s is.
ddavitt: Don’t see the real her much
ddavitt: Not kidding
pixelmeow: Which isn’t bad, per se, just not what I like.
TreetopAngelRN: Mau grew up in a socitey with lots of Mrs. Grundy’s she had to know what she was dealing with
pixelmeow: Yes, good point…
BPRAL22169: It strikes me they both had different things that were dangerous for them.
pixelmeow: It’s just that E seems so flippant.
ddavitt: Men think about sex what? every 8 mins or 8 seconds?
labert8: BUt, Pix, is thqat a skewed view of her? Authors choice focusses us on that part of her life. But we know there was more.
BPRAL22169: And were trained and adapted for their particular dangers.
ddavitt: Can’t recall…:-)
pixelmeow: Hell, I don’t know!
ddavitt: I reas it somewhere…
ddavitt: read
BPRAL22169: Seconds, that would be.
pixelmeow: I wonder about that, too. What in Mau’s life didn’t we see?
pixelmeow: Lots!
BPRAL22169: Seconds for me, certainly!
LV Poker Player: I don’t see how the frequency of sexual thoughts could be accurately measured?
BPRAL22169: That is, I’ll have seconds, please.
ddavitt: I just asked david what he’s been thinking of as i typed.
TreetopAngelRN: E has it covered at home, a happy man, and she has it covered at work a happy boss, she can be a bit more carefree
pixelmeow: Hm, Bill, I don’t know that you need any…
labert8: E presents herself as more flippant than she realy is. Look at how she handles letters from Joe’s mom.
pixelmeow: 😀
ddavitt: he said he was watching soccer. i rest my case.
pixelmeow: Yes, labert, true…
pixelmeow: but even that seems so… I don’t know.
pixelmeow: I don’t have the words.
TreetopAngelRN: by Joe’s wish, Joe only wants the highlights
BPRAL22169: I’ve heard that statistic before — it might be true for teenagers, but I’m not so sure it’s universally true.
ddavitt: I don’t know why she comes over as un educated? seemed bright to me.
TreetopAngelRN: he says so himself
pixelmeow: LNC? thoughts?
Reilloc: Oh, sorry, I was just watching and writing to the kids.
Reilloc: Sex is the question?
pixelmeow: Comparing Mau and Eunice.
labert8: She reminds me of the popular girl in high school, the one who has to pretend to care about hair and makeup cuz her friends do, but reads Jung at home. Or heinlein.
TreetopAngelRN: sex is always the questionO:-)
Reilloc: I think that’s right.
Reilloc: Marx was wrong, you know.
pixelmeow: I dunno, labert, you may have it right and I’m foold.
pixelmeow: fooled even.
Reilloc: Economic determinism’s just one step short of the truth.
ddavitt: Moving away from sex (and we’ve certainly bumped up the average this last few hours!) What about the common goal of eunice and jake to go to the moon?
Reilloc: The Marx brothers were closer to the true state of affairs.
ddavitt: A goal that johann doesn’t share/
pixelmeow: I haven’t read that far.
ddavitt: Was that H working in a plug for NASA?
geeairmoe2 has entered the room.
pjscott100: E is a perky little thing who makes up for lack of intelligence or wisdom with compassion and love… it’s pretty much all she has to give so she gives a lot of it
ddavitt: Didn’t he write ‘Spinoff” about then?
labert8: Chaos? the true state of affairs?
ddavitt: Peter, you sound like jake
pjscott100: Thank you, m’dear
Reilloc: Time flies like an arrow, lab.
geeairmoe2 has left the room.
Reilloc: Fruit flies like a banana.
ddavitt: ‘dear little woman’ Don’t get fooled; she was sharp
LV Poker Player: Johann was certainly unusual for a Heinlein main character, being indifferent at best to space travel and colonization
ddavitt: Devils’ advocate?
pjscott100: Plug for NASA? Surely not.
pixelmeow: She just seems a twit, to me.
pjscott100: H stood far more for non-governmental space exploration
TreetopAngelRN: Johann didn’t see anything in it for him, he was too old to go for too long
LV Poker Player: That is my thought, pjscott
pjscott100: And he was not one to pine for the unattainable
labert8: Am I still waiting for a punchline Reilloc? I think she’s uncomplicated but thoughtful Pix.
TreetopAngelRN: exactly, Peter
pixelmeow: labert, I just can’t figure it out.
ddavitt: She was licensed for 3 babies; that was evidence of status
labert8: RAH would be pleased by that, I’d wager.
ddavitt: Did well at school, had a good job
pixelmeow: Yeah, I bet.
pjscott100: I am in mind of Fraser’s remark on Cheers: “You know, Lilith, you amaze me. Usually people with your limited physical appeal make up for it with personality.”
TreetopAngelRN: E was street smart and had a career
LV Poker Player: She was more than your ordinary secretary, I think her title today would be Executive Assistant.
ddavitt: she got a million dollars and a directorship in space of 5 mins
labert8: I’m actually waffling myself, based on my reading about two tears ago, and the four or five before that.
ddavitt: Sure, she would have voted their way, sure she would…
pixelmeow: Yes, Jane, by acting the pretty little fluffhead….
Reilloc: Was that the punchline? “Two tears ago?”
ddavitt: I read it and made notes last week…
pjscott100: He would have appointed his cat to the board if he could.
ddavitt: ‘Acting’ yes…
ddavitt: She might have surprised them
pixelmeow: Sigh. Yes, acting. I guess I like Mau’s way of doing it… stepping aside and letting that a-holes coat go flinging past ehr.
pixelmeow: her, even.
LV Poker Player: I don’t think so Pjscott, remember the discussion about yes-men and obstructionists?
ddavitt: I mean, jake thought E thought she could donate her body and Johann would never know/ How dumb is this guy?
TreetopAngelRN: E knew what was really going on outside the fortress with the masses, the pulse of the world tyhan old Johann and Jake ever did.
DavidWrightSr: Jane. Wouldn’t she have gotten the million only after his death. It was done as a life insurance policy, IIRC. Done to get around changing his will
pjscott100: That’s what I meant… cats are not Yes Men
pjscott100: 🙂
ddavitt: I think the way she had to cater to them, all through the book made me furious
ddavitt: But they expected him to die on the op table in a matter of weks
ddavitt: forever sweet talking them..
DavidWrightSr: That was before the decision to do the transplant wasn’t it
TreetopAngelRN: yes, she had to couch terms in fem speak so they would even listen to her/him…Johann never had a chance
ddavitt: jake forgot she was johann almost at once; saw the body, ignored the brain. ironic or what when he was fighting as a lawyer for the pre emincemce of the brain.
ddavitt: No, same day he told them of it
TreetopAngelRN: i agree
ddavitt: spelling going..sorry
pjscott100: How close are we to actually being able to perform this operation?
ddavitt: Dunno..
Reilloc: It worked on Bush
TreetopAngelRN: no idea
Reilloc: The chimp died, though.
LV Poker Player: My guess is a long way away
pjscott100: ROFL
ddavitt: heh
ddavitt: I think it will come
ddavitt: Why not?
TreetopAngelRN: I can’t even get a guy to keep breathing with only 1/4 of his lungs left
ddavitt: car crash, one dies, body Ok, one body smashed, brain OK, why not combine the two?
LV Poker Player: I think reconnecting the spinal column nerves will hold us up for a long time
ddavitt: But long time by what standard?
pjscott100: There may be a surfeit of brains and a deficit of bodies though
ddavitt: heart transplant was unthinkable what, forty years ago?
ddavitt: Don’t know enough of this
TreetopAngelRN: I haven’t heard anything is even close to the horizon
ddavitt: Was that decison they mention in the book, Rhode v parson, real?
LV Poker Player: It might be like the discussions of breakthroughs in TMIAHM, no real way to predict the time frame
LV Poker Player: I think we are looking at a major surgical breakthrough to reconnect the spinal column, not just refinement of current techniques
TreetopAngelRN: would have to go back to my organ donation books and read up, Jane
TreetopAngelRN: Spinal column work is going forward, but not brain transplant
ddavitt: Henry parsons v Rhode island in the seventies it says..
Reilloc: I gave my Wurlitzer to the Salvation Army and it’s still going.
TreetopAngelRN: LOL
DavidWrightSr: I don’t think that we have any way presently to reconnect spinal nerves that are severed. And this would require considerably more than that I would think
ddavitt: But it’s the sort of advance i can see being possible soonish as opposed to say FTL
LV Poker Player: copyright is 70
ddavitt: true..maybe he made it up then
pjscott100: Goggle doesn’t find it…. so it doesn’t exist
TreetopAngelRN: realignment, patching the spinal covering and steroids, other possible drugs
pjscott100: Google, even
ddavitt: nanothingies like on ST that can go in and fix it from the inside?
LV Poker Player: If we can patch a severed spinal cord, that would be a big step toward a successful brain transplant
ddavitt:
TreetopAngelRN: agrees with LV
TreetopAngelRN: what???
pjscott100: Probably some sort of smart interface that figures out the interconnections over time and gradually withdraws after making them
TreetopAngelRN: naw, I don’t know either!!!
Reilloc: No nanotechnology in RAH
BPRAL22169: There has been some small degree of success with jumping over damaged areas of a spinal cord.
ddavitt: I know nothing of medical stuff..probably shouldn’t comment
TreetopAngelRN: LOL
TreetopAngelRN: Yes Bill, teaching it to rerout itself and make new connections
DavidWrightSr: Elizabeth I have a question. Do you think Jake’s heart failed or was it embolism or such in brain? AG said heart, but it seems to me that it isn’t specific enough
pjscott100: Who was that comic who said it was a good job he wasn’t a woman… he’d stay in the bedroom and play with his breasts all day…
BPRAL22169: I think Drexler didn’t publish his book on Nanotech until 82 or 83.
pjscott100: engines of creation first pub 1986
ddavitt: massive rupture of blood vessel in brain it says
EthAriel has entered the room.
ddavitt: Hi there
pixelmeow: hi!
ddavitt: You made it..
pjscott100: Hey
DavidWrightSr: Welcome Ariel
labert8: “No nanotechnology” : one of the fewe things he managed to fail to anticipate
BPRAL22169: Even later than I thought. The ideas weren’t kicking around much before that book. And not a lot after, either!
TreetopAngelRN: I think, reading it over it was a combination of heart and brain for Jake. The heart had an attack which could have increased the blood pressure ensuring a rupture of an already weakened blood vessel in the brain
EthAriel: I’ll be darned, finally figured it out…
ddavitt: Just as the chat winds down:-)
BPRAL22169: Are we having a short session today, Jane?
LV Poker Player: don’t feel bad, this is my first time here
ddavitt: well, it has for me…getting tired. it’s 11 pm and we have to get up early to watch the England game
EthAriel:
ddavitt: 9 till 11? isn’t that normal?
DavidWrightSr: no 9 to 12
BPRAL22169: It used to go 3 hours.
ddavitt: But no one wanting the room, it can go on for ever
TreetopAngelRN: I can talk for awhile EthAriel
pixelmeow: is this another break???
pjscott100: jane, move to the west coast… everyone’s doing it 🙂
LV Poker Player: +
BPRAL22169: Yes, and this room we make each time, so nobody ever comes behind us.
ddavitt: I wouldn’t know; by 11 I’m dozing off.
labert8: Don’t be seduced bu the dark side, Jane, the east coast is best.
EthAriel: I’m not a happy camper. Got promoted again. :-[
TreetopAngelRN: did you see my explanation David?
pixelmeow: damn window stopped scrolling.
ddavitt: Lauren is 19 months and still doesn’t sleep thru:-(
ddavitt: And that’s bad, why?
pjscott100: Neither do our cats
ddavitt: I like it here in ontario
DavidWrightSr: Yes, Thanks. I couldn’t tell from the quick glance I did. Just didn’t think that it was primarily heart from the description
ddavitt: OK, I will go, I’ll read it in the log and argue with you all on afh:-)
ddavitt: Thanks for a really good chat; lots of fun
EthAriel: I don’t mind being assistant manager, but as manager I get stuck working up to 90 hours a week. Been there, done that and I hate it.
DavidWrightSr: Anybody here not mailing of notice today?
labert8: ACK!! Shall itell you that mine did at two months? No? insensitive? Better you than me, I’d be insane by now. Wait . . .
ddavitt: See you on saturday
BPRAL22169: Yes, and we even hit the subject a couple of times!
pixelmeow: bye Jane!
pjscott100: Bye Jane!
ddavitt: Lots of times, bill!
labert8: bye jane
EthAriel: I work to live, I don’t live to work.
BPRAL22169: Have a good one!
ddavitt has left the room.
DavidWrightSr: Faster than a speeding bullet
BPRAL22169: Oh, goody! Now we can talk behind her back.
TreetopAngelRN: LOL
pixelmeow: Bill!!!
pixelmeow: For shame!
TreetopAngelRN: Dear Jane,
labert8: Now that she’s gone, we can talk Heinlein (tee hee)
LV Poker Player: work is for people who don’t know how to play poker!
BPRAL22169: LOL
pixelmeow: so what do you manage, Ariel?
pjscott100: So I have to wonder… how does a youngsta react to the sexual mores in IFWNE? Do they seem tame?
labert8: Ah, it’s fun to be back amongst the flock.
TreetopAngelRN: it depends on the youngster
pixelmeow: It’s good to see you back, labert.
labert8: I read it first at 14. DO you mean youngsters now?
pjscott100: Well, an average youngster
BPRAL22169: I don’t know about that — thing have gotten awfully puritanical in the last 15 years.
pixelmeow: I didn’t find it until mid 20s.
EthAriel has left the room.
TreetopAngelRN: don’t know any average ones, no contact
labert8: puritanical? do you really think so?
pjscott100: I mean someone currently young, who’s been raised in the current climate
labert8: It seems they know about everything now, and what to join in.
pjscott100:
BPRAL22169: The teenagers I know now are utterly conventional.
labert8: I could tell you horror stories about my fiftenn year old.
labert8: and he hasn’t read nearly enough Heinlein.
BPRAL22169: Now, labert, you have just enunciated a redundancy!
TreetopAngelRN: They have all sorts of hardware sticking out over their bodies and most of them seem fairly well centered, sexual, manners etc
labert8: who me?
BPRAL22169: Conformist, is what I meant.
BPRAL22169: isn’t every story about a 15 year old a horror story/
pjscott100: Elizabeth – do they end up in the ER whenever someone yanks on the body piercing?
labert8: Rofl!! yes, I should have seen that.
pixelmeow: someone yanks on my tongue stud *they’ll* be the one in the hospital!
TreetopAngelRN: Some of them do, if not right away then when it gets infected
LV Poker Player has left the room.
labert8: “what to join in.” should have been “want”
pjscott100: I see it as nonconformity in search of a raison d’etre
TreetopAngelRN: kids seem the same to me, however they still think they are the ones to think of it first
pjscott100: whereas the 60s were more the other way around
DavidWrightSr: Conformity has always been the name of the game for most. At least it was in my day
labert8: But they also have sex thrust at them in the media, far more and earlier than we did
TreetopAngelRN: conformity to THEIR age group, not to the next gen
BPRAL22169: It’s a teenaged developmental stage.
pjscott100: David, that’s a tautology
DavidWrightSr: That’s what I meant
BPRAL22169: Self-in-peer-group. With the individuation crisis moving self finally into self.
pjscott100: Bill, hauling out the expensive words now…
TreetopAngelRN: not necessarily, Labert, just more open
pixelmeow: ROFL! I was wanting to ask Bill to use monosyllables…
BPRAL22169: in
BPRAL22169: di
BPRAL22169: vi
BPRAL22169: du
BPRAL22169: a
BPRAL22169: shun
BPRAL22169: How’s that?
TreetopAngelRN: thanks
Reilloc: What’s it mean?
pixelmeow: LMAO!!!
DavidWrightSr: Yeah. translation please.
BPRAL22169: Hold on, I have to think how to say this succinctly.
Reilloc: Allow me?
BPRAL22169: /ga
BPRAL22169: We’ll compare notes.
pjscott100: This is too funny… I can see in years to come there will be annotated versions of THJ
TreetopAngelRN: no worries, I always read with a dictionary close by
pjscott100: Learned critics will argue over what the hell Bill really meant
pixelmeow: taps toe…
Reilloc: The phenomenological pidgeon-holing of an ordinary process into grant-inducing language calculated to maximize principal and amount of research study.
BPRAL22169: Individuation is the process of becoming an adult with control over one’s own moral, social, and psychological processes.
pixelmeow: that’s what individuation means?
pixelmeow: Ah. Thanks.
Reilloc: Nah, that’s growing up.
BPRAL22169: Hmm. I see we had different teachers.
pjscott100: Doesn’t have to be an adult, surely?
BPRAL22169: Yeah.
Reilloc: Some people do it, some dont.
labert8: Some adults have done it some haven’t. Perhaps most.
Reilloc: I respectfully decline.
BPRAL22169: This particular society really encourages people to stay in the self-in-peer group stage, and condones arrested teenagers.
pjscott100: We used to call it “Learning who you are”
Reilloc: I like them.
Reilloc: Some of my best clients are arrested teenagers
labert8: MAny folks don’t realize they have those processes, they just proceed to live by what ever rules someone beats into their heads, without ever examining them.
BPRAL22169: Yes, arrested teenagers do make a clientele, don’t they?
Reilloc: Ones with wealthy parents do.
pjscott100: I agree Bill, and I think it’s more prevalent in the USA than elsewhere
BPRAL22169: Good point.
TreetopAngelRN: society, at this time, dislikes kids who can think and be outside of their peer group
Reilloc: Interesting…
BPRAL22169: Yes — troublemakers.
TreetopAngelRN: they are, they disrupt the class if they ask pertinent questions
pjscott100: I think we have not come to terms with how parents have become a minor influence in the upbringing of their kids
DavidWrightSr: But they still look down on the peer-group thingy too. or at least lament the bad effects of it
BPRAL22169: My 10 year old nephew is constantly in trouble at school for just that reason — the teacher is an idiot.
labert8: It dislikes anyone who can think. Thinking causes questioning, questioning takes time, and tends to point out that those in authority have no good answers, and are often incompetent themselves.
BPRAL22169: Who “they”, David?
TreetopAngelRN: my 16 year old nephew for his entire life
TreetopAngelRN: he lost respect for teachers when the first one told him “I don’t know, go sit in your seat.”
pixelmeow: well, I’m fading fast….
pixelmeow: time for bed.
pixelmeow: got lots to do tomorrow…
TreetopAngelRN: Good night Teresa!
pixelmeow: good night, all!!!
pjscott100: Night night
labert8: Night pix. see ya soon, hopefully.
pixelmeow: thanks for a great chat!
BPRAL22169: Withholding respect from teachers is the best thing for ’em.
EthAriel has entered the room.
pixelmeow has left the room.
BPRAL22169: Make ’em work for it, I say!
TreetopAngelRN: tell them that:-D
Reilloc: Work makes freedom.
TreetopAngelRN: It got him put in a special class
BPRAL22169: Hmmm. Arbeit jetzt macht frei
BPRAL22169: doch
labert8: A good point Bill, blind trust in teachers frustrates me more than anything else about my kids.
pjscott100: Hmmm… the examples of teachers in H’s books were all ones that deserved and got respect IIRC
DavidWrightSr: I can respect a teacher who would say I don’t know, but he/she would then have to say, ‘lets find out’. Just sit down and shut up. no way
BPRAL22169: I respected the ones who weren’t baffled by my bullshit.
TreetopAngelRN: the nephew’s “specials” teacher understand what a whiz the kid is and has taken him through University math, sciences and English
labert8: I had a student tell me that last semester. My respect for him increased.
pjscott100: The best ones are like that… but there are fewer teachers that good today because the profession isn’t as respected by society as a whole as it was
BPRAL22169: What, labert? Sit down and shut up?
TreetopAngelRN: We always told him, “let’s find out”
labert8: No, that he was pleased to find thast I wasn’t baffled by . . .
BPRAL22169: I think teachers are respected more than they should be as is. How much social respect do you think an overpaid babysitter ought to get?
Reilloc: Uhhh….
BPRAL22169: Find me a log.
pjscott100: Bill, that’s a vicious circle… and you’re heading down it in the wrong direction
Reilloc: Isn’t it that kind of attitude that creates low pay and drives the best from teaching?
TreetopAngelRN: at least my teachers encouraged forward thinking and those that didn’t, I knew to give them whatever they wanted for the grade and get the heck out of there
BPRAL22169: I don’t know. “By their fruits ye shall know them” seems reasonable to me.
pjscott100: People tend to rise or fall to meet your expectations
labert8: Overpaid babysitter?
pjscott100: As evidence, I adduce the LAPD
TreetopAngelRN: teachers are not allowed to control a classroom, so they just do their best
BPRAL22169: But each individual person is different. There are personally respectable individuals teaching, and they should be respected IMHO.
BPRAL22169: The US’ educational system has removed the element of teaching from a teacher’s job description.
TreetopAngelRN: Small classes seem to do better, both by the students and the teacxher
pjscott100: Yes, but on the level of the profession-as-a-whole, the motivation for good people to become teachers is lacking
labert8: very true. the system is the problem, not the teachers or their pay.
DavidWrightSr: ‘teachers are not allowed to control a classroom, so they just do their best ‘ Amen. My son found this out and found his students absolutely uncontrollable. No support whatsoever from administration.
BPRAL22169: Yes, the “overpaid babysitter” was a relative statement: You wouldn’t pay a babysitter at the same rate, was all that meant.
labert8: the reason I stayed away from secondary teaching
pjscott100: And this leads to a downward spiral; a good teacher goes into a classroom and finds that the students expect him/her to be bad and has to work harder to get the respect they deserve
TreetopAngelRN: so they try to teach an unruly class instead of picking out those that want to learn and teach them
TreetopAngelRN: level playing field
DavidWrightSr: In his case, the ones who wanted to learn couldn’t because there was too much disruption from those who didn’t care.
pjscott100: It would be unbalanced not to condemn parents just as much
BPRAL22169: I don’t find that a problem, pjscott — I expect to work to earn respect. Why shouldn’t they?
TreetopAngelRN: don’t get me started on parents and ther obligations:-D
labert8: someone’s comment awhile back about parents is important. Their role in education has disappeared, and may be the main problem.
BPRAL22169: Ultimately what it comes down to is that learning is a unique and individual thing — the interaction of a unique mind with the subject matter. Teaching is not something that takes place in a class. it takes place in the individua
pjscott100: I’m saying that they’re in an environment that forces them to expend more effort to get that respect, effort which they could have used for education instead
DavidWrightSr: We found out when our kids were in high school, that the administration did not want us involved. That lead to complications for them.
BPRAL22169: Yes — you might force them to actually do some education, perish forbid!
labert8: You’re right BIll, and much of our culture labors to encourage students not to work hard at learning. REligion des it, media does it, parents do it.
DavidWrightSr: We got involved just the same, and some of the teachers took it out on the kids.
DavidWrightSr: In ways that we couldn’t really combat
TreetopAngelRN: learning also does not happen in a classroom, but the structure needs to be there and be used for learning to take place. Teachers who cannot provide that structure because of disruptions are handicapped
BPRAL22169: There is a religion of Jamesian education that militates against any learning or any teaching going on in an American classroom.
pjscott100: All I’m saying is, society doesn’t value the teaching profession as much as it should. So we get the teachers we’ve got.
pjscott100: Same argument as to why we’ve got the government we have.
BPRAL22169: “Teachers who cannot provide that structure” aren’t teachers. What are they doing in a classroom?
TreetopAngelRN: agree Peter
labert8: I walk a dangerous line with my kids teachers too. HOw can I complain and not expect them to burn the kids. Yet some are illiterate.
labert8: or nearly so
TreetopAngelRN: if they are not alloowed to control a classroom they cannot provide the structure
BPRAL22169: “Controlling a classroom” has nothing to do with teaching or learning.
labert8: BIll, they’re struggling with too many kids, too few textbooks, too little support, etc . . .
pjscott100: If a teacher doesn’t have to tackle issues like drugs, guns in the classroom, STDs, etc, they’d have more time to teach… stuff
BPRAL22169: Analyzing a problem in terms of elements that don’t actually bear on the problem is . . . not likely to produce results.
TreetopAngelRN: Teachers are not allowed to stand kids in the hall or stay after school, it might briuse their little egos, with these controls taken away what can they do?
EthAriel: If the classroom is out of control, how do you teach and who will learn?
labert8: What elements don’t bear?
BPRAL22169: Controlling a classroom does not bear on teaching or learning.
TreetopAngelRN: it has to…
Reilloc: Uhhh’
pjscott100: I don’t think I can agree
BPRAL22169: It bears on being a jailer. Now, if you take the element of being a jailer out of being in a school. . .
labert8: Why not? If students can’t concentrate on, or hear, a discussion, is teaching not effected?
TreetopAngelRN: hoiw can you teach in a hurricane or a windstorm of bullets?
DavidWrightSr: If you can’t get half of your class to stop talking to each other, throwing footballs across the room etc. you can’t get anybody to even hear you, much less learn what you are trying to say.
pjscott100: Bill, you just agreed with me… the ‘jail’ environment of a school is contributing to the problem
Reilloc: Are you saying the teacher shouldn’t be the one with the job of turning on the lights?
BPRAL22169: Look, kids who get an education, educate themselves and they don’t do it inside the classroom. the very most that a school (a real one, I mean) can do is provide an opportunity.
pjscott100: And that environment was created by all of us, not just teachers
EthAriel: Well, I am about to make myself unpopular again. Children are animals in training to be human. If you let the animals run wild, they do not learn to be human.
TreetopAngelRN: You have 33 students…25 of them won’t shut up and sit down what do you do? You can’t punish them
BPRAL22169: Peter, yes, I agree with you. The jail environment is not “contributing” to the problem — it is the whole of the problem.
labert8: You seem to be back at the flaws of the system. I’ll join you there. Teachers can’t be discipliniarians, but no one else will assume the mantle. Not parents, not administration. Solution?
BPRAL22169: You can either have a school or you can have a jail. The voters have opted for jails.
pjscott100: Nehemiah Scudder
pjscott100: 🙂
Reilloc: What about what happened when we let the educational theorists take over?
TreetopAngelRN: so we have large daycares for our children and they are not learning anything but what they teach themselves…
labert8: You’re right Bill, but you expose the larger problem: our culture doesn’t value education, it values profit.
pjscott100: Bingo, labert
pjscott100: Lordy, we have enough counterexamples from RAH… look at any of the scouting or cadet novels
BPRAL22169: This is what happened when the educational theorists took over. William James invented a model that could be operated like a factory, so that’s the model that was adopted. The only problem was, education wasn’t included anywhere
BPRAL22169: in the model.
Reilloc: Wrong
pjscott100: Kids in RAH books put most contemporary adults to shame in terms of education
Reilloc: We trusted them and didn’t watch them.
BPRAL22169: /ga
EthAriel: No, not a jail. A training academy. You can’t train a horse the fancy stuff until you can control it. You can’t bond and teach if it is doing its best to sunfish until you fall off.
BPRAL22169: “them” who? Educational theorists?
Reilloc: Yes.
labert8: You can’t blame the theorists. They don’t and never have had the control.
BPRAL22169: I sometimes have trouble following the pronoun attribution.
Reilloc: Really?
pjscott100: No-one takes power without it being given to them
Reilloc: I think I said that.
BPRAL22169: I’m not sure I would agree, LNC: to a certain extent, the theorists provided what was asked of them.
EthAriel: Kids in RAH books weren’t kids. They were adults in a childs body. Podkayne {spelling?} was anyway.
BPRAL22169: No one who has to have power given to him can ever take it.
Reilloc: Nobody asked them to take over, though.
Reilloc: We hired them to teach.
TreetopAngelRN: parents and “education” have abdicated from teaching children
Reilloc: It’s a little like the military having no civilian control.
labert8: Who else? POliticianms? local yokels on school boards whose concern is to lower taxes?
pjscott100: Rephrase: no-one takes power without the acquiescence of those who have the right to deny them that power
BPRAL22169: local School boards
BPRAL22169: OK, Peter — I’ll go along with that one.
pjscott100: I just think that by the time we’re done with all the finger pointing, we’ll find it pointing at ourselves
labert8: Yes, Peter, and the bread and circuses mentality has taken emphasis off of education.
pjscott100: (Trite, I know)
Reilloc: That’s right.
DavidWrightSr: Nothing new. I believe Twain said ‘God made a moron for practice, then he made school boards’.
TreetopAngelRN: College…English Comp 101…15 students…14 just out of highschool and one over 35…who had to be taught grammar?
BPRAL22169: I think there is something basically wrong with the way things are done in the U.S., from top to bottom.
pjscott100: Having come from the UK, I agree
BPRAL22169: It’s something that started just 100 years ago (at Boston Public, I think) and could be junked
labert8: Yes, Bill, its called capitalism
labert8: that should heat things up
BPRAL22169: No, it’s called not thinking about what you’re doing.
pjscott100: What I have seen of US education system makes me profoundly glad I got all mine in the UK
labert8: that too.
TreetopAngelRN: I’m glad I got the bulk of mine, the stuff that counts in the 60’s and 70’s.
BPRAL22169: In fact, if you want to get some specific knowledge, you go to the market for it even now — so the part of education that is actually “capitalism” instead of just a boogey-man is actcually working and has never ceased to work
BPRAL22169: in this country.
pjscott100: I think the fact that anyone comes out of a US high school sane is a testimony to the fundamental adaptability and strength of the human being
TreetopAngelRN: who you calling sane???
BPRAL22169: LOL. The same, of course, is often said of the army.
labert8: that may be. the culture is insane, why should its offspring be?
pjscott100: Bill, you sound like you’re arguing against having a school system at all…?
DavidWrightSr: Well, public school doesn’t seem to work very well now does it?
labert8: scrapping it and starting over might be a good idea, but again, the fundamental beliefs about the value of knowledge would have to be altered as well.
TreetopAngelRN: I argue with the school board all the time, gets me no where, “You don’t have kids, how can you know?”
DavidWrightSr: Lots of people have opted for home schooling.
BPRAL22169: Everybody who deals with the product of these institutions knows in intimate detail!
TreetopAngelRN: same as telling the kid, I don’t know, shut up and sit down
pjscott100: Aside: in the UK “public school” actually means private, e.g., Eton. There was a great line in a Peter O’Toole movie (forget title). Psychologist is discussing a mutual friend:
pjscott100: “But then he was subjected to an environment of ritual sadism and licensed pederasts.” “You mean he was sent to public school?” “Yes”
labert8: Does anyone think we *aren’t* headed for the kind of society, complete with A.A.’s, shown in IWFNE?
pjscott100: “A.A.”?
DavidWrightSr: Abandoned Area
labert8: Abandoned Areas
TreetopAngelRN: Must go and do laundry…it’s been fun! Good Night everyone! Stay well!
labert8: carpe diem!
DavidWrightSr: Night Elizabeth
pjscott100: Sheesh, we’re more or less there in Los Angeles
BPRAL22169: Before Jamesian education showed up, the US had a huge industry for open public education, killed. No reason such a thing couldn’t happen again.
pjscott100: Bye Elizabeth!
labert8: exactly.
TreetopAngelRN has left the room.
pjscott100: I got pulled over by a cop for speeding on the 110… I drove down the nearest offramp and he told me he was going to ticket me but the neighborhood was too dangerous and we should both just get out of there asap.
labert8: the failure of taker culture, if anyone’s read Quinn’s Ismael.
pjscott100: This was on a Sunday morning.
pjscott100: That close enough for you?
Reilloc: Close enough for me.
labert8: Another in a long line of symptoms
Reilloc: Night all.
pjscott100: Night!
labert8: night
Reilloc has left the room.
BPRAL22169: And I think it’s time for me to disappear, as well.
pjscott100: This has been fun
pjscott100: Time for me to go too…
labert8: NIght BIll, enjoyed it immensely.
pjscott100: Night all
pjscott100 has left the room.
BPRAL22169: Night.
BPRAL22169 has left the room.
DavidWrightSr: It’s getting late for me too. Anything more to comment on?
labert8: We seem to be petering out. Eth?
EthAriel: I just felt ignored. Have I been plonked?
labert8: Sorry, not by me, and hopefully not by anyone else. In my experience here, you’ve got to leap into the fray.
EthAriel: I did. Anyone care to tell me how to change the color of my screen name?
DavidWrightSr: Glad that you could make it
DavidWrightSr: Your screen name should be in red right
labert8: I’m ignorant, I see yours in purple.
DavidWrightSr: I believe that everyone sees their own name in read whereas the rest of the colors seem to follow some strange esoteric pattern.
DavidWrightSr: red not read
EthAriel: Ah well, I don’t get off work until 8 pm MST and it takes time to drive home. Yes, it is red. I want deep blue or green.
DavidWrightSr: I think that is the one color you can’t change. There is some way to affect others, but I’m not sure how to do that
EthAriel: I arrive at work 7:30 AM, get off 8 PM. and it is an effort to arrive “here”.
DavidWrightSr: If I get a chance, I’ll play around and see what i can do. That’s slavery, not work
EthAriel: Oh well, red will do then.
labert8: Come back Saturday night, if you can. Perhaps you’ll get more response. Earlier on we really did talk RAH. Ick. Sounds like time to look for work.
DavidWrightSr: Saturday is at 5:00 P.M. EDT
EthAriel: Yeah, that is why I was hacked when the “promoted” me to manager.
EthAriel: I work Saturday…sigh.
DavidWrightSr: I do have your e-mail for notice of the log don’t I
labert8: David, Eth, I should go too, it’s midnight here, and I have the baby all day tomorrow. Need sleep for that.
DavidWrightSr: how about yours labert. did you get notice
EthAriel: Yes. Is it all right if I use another screen name that I like better?
labert8: I’ve been getting them right along. Yes.
labert8: THey’ve been a little lifeline to the afh I don’t get to play in
DavidWrightSr: that’s fine about name as far as I am concerned
EthAriel: Well, good night. I know you’re tired. Hugs….
DavidWrightSr: Night all.
labert8: later all.
DavidWrightSr: Log officially closed at 11:53 P.M. EDT
Final End Of Discussion Log
