A wedding could be organised quickly, the legal requirement was for banns to be read 3 consecutive weeks.
Not well informed young women can be pregnant for a while before they realise, hence 'I didn't know until I went into labour' stories. Or wise gran might have her waiting for missed periods. Suppose she showed at 20 weeks. In rural & working class areas, a wedding at 24 weeks with a careful choice of clothing wouldn't be unusual. Kid legally 'legitimate'.
He is fabulously quotable, sometimes really reactionary, sometimes brilliantly on point. Or just nasty-but-funny. He attacked women preaching because a woman, a Quaker, challenged him on the Bible and didn't bow down to his genius.
On the other hand he was scathing about slavery and once called for a toast 'to the next slave revolt!' and gave us 'noone cries louder about liberty than the drivers of [enslaved people].'
Ave Barrera's The Forgery (2013/2022) is a Mexican #art caper story about an #artist forced to complete a forgery as part of an inheritance fraud. But by the end its unclear (perhaps purposefully) whether the narrator has experienced imprisonment & exploitation by a violent & rich mastermind, or whether its all a fever dream brought on by a hand injury (turning to sepsis). While quite enjoyable its also finally unsatisfying as a novel.
There's an authority in writing which makes people disposed to trust the author on the world. Even among some, not all, people who are not uncustomed to reading SFF. The same authority in the historical writer Mary Renault, who I rate massively.
So a dilemma. A book with a great premise, written with panache, should be in my love zone, by a small press I admire.... doesn't land for me.
I don't particularly like posting meh reviews, unless they're big authors who can take it. It has a hefty number of reviews which really like it. And I'm not an edgelord who just wants to be a contrarian.
Community is so neglected, perhaps not by everyone, but especially by me. How many creative blocks could have been undone, or avoided all together if I could manage to be good company?
It's fascinating to me the gaps in any community between "this is what the community owes me" and "this is what I personally want to do for the community"
I've been involved in communities which appoint people to focus the caring for others and where, objectively, that made those people hyper burdened although their needs were no less and sometimes greater than those they needed to help
Language, Thought and Reality
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak.
I can't help wondering if using the same my for 'my wife' and 'my boot' has an effect.
The research paper should be rerun with people whose first and second languages are the opposite pairing. To fnd if the effect is simply 'thinking in a second language'
@bookstodon I'm looking for book recommendations for an 11yo who reads at a much more advanced level. He likes sci-fi. He has read the Hitchhiker's Guide series and loved them. I think he would enjoy some more 'hard' sci-fi as well. He needs something challenging but without subject matter that is too mature. Thanks for any help! #sciencefiction#bookstodon
So in Confederation America (1780s) there was the Anarchiad, a satiric epic poem that for the most part is tedious because I’m not into that kind of literature.
However, there are chunks of it motivated by extremely Confederation problems, like fighting over whether or not paper money should be accepted and/or states should be able to issue their own.
On one issue, the Confederate States were absolutely against states rights. Slavery was mandated in every state, and every terretory controlled by the Confederacy, it could not be abolished by any State means, and full complicance with enforcing it was required. I think it emphasised only black people could be slabes. Everyone who says the Confederacy would have quietly got rid of slavery if left alone is talking out of their fundaments.
If I were going to write a cultural history of monogamy, I think I would argue that humans have a history of religions and philosophies that idealize monogamy. But the majority of humans themselves have never been monogamous in practice.