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Too Like the Lightning (Palmer)
I had tried this back in 2016 when it came out (having read Palmer's blog on occasion) and got twenty percent in before grinding to a halt. I knew that a lot of what I couldn't deal with was the narrator Mycroft's voice, and when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hamsterwoman posted about her Terra Ignota Yuletide gift, I thought, hmm, you know, I've always intended to try this out again, and now that I have several years of salon (working on year 5!) and a LOT more reading of Enlightenment sources under my belt... Also, I was spoiled for what Mycroft Canner had done
And I finished it this time! It did indeed make it rather easier that I now have a lot more experience with the Enlightenment and Enlightenment prose. (Also, I laughed when a salon showed up in the book, although sadly in this salon there was a lot less discussion of historical/literary/scientific ideas (there was a little) and a lot more sex.) I am also now much more used to reading primary documents without being the target audience and therefore not having the applicable context and only being given that later either by reading more or byselenak and mildred_of_midgard -- which is somewhat similar to the experience of reading this book, in that in-character-Mycroft is writing for an audience that is again Not Me but in the future. It's neat that Palmer is able to structure it that way.
I think it's an interesting book! I'm not going to talk about the gender stuff (it's interesting to see that eight years after publication it doesn't seem all that shocking or confusing, whereas I remember it being rather more so on first reading). The worldbuilding is interesting. I was definitely lost for most (maybe all) of the book. I was also warned that the book would end without tying up everything (though there's one very interesting revelation that does get made!) as it's really supposed to be half a book, which was good to know and I will follow up with the next half.
One worldbuilding thing that I was intrigued by: There are family-like units (the bash') that are in fact not families (though they can be) but groups of people who choose to live together (generally 3-6 plus a couple of romantic partners, I'm told by the wiki), sort of like a rooming group in college. (Every so often I dip my toes into a Rationalist blog, and I get the vague impression that they tend to do this kind of thing, especially as young adults? And Palmer herself is in academia, where I feel like this is more of a thing that can happen.) I must say that on one hand this sounds very appealing and on another hand it is really hard for me to see how it would work on a practical level (I feel it's hard enough to structure a household with one other reasonable adult plus kids!) especially without the whole thing evolving into hierarchical structures, but maybe that's just me/my getting stuck in 21st-C culture. I imagine the decoupling of romance and living together helps. I do really love about this future world that it seems to be structured in a way that in many aspects is more communal and more focused on community in general (I haven't even gotten to talking about the Hives!) than ours. I also loved how one of the big technological advances is that it's really easy and fast and cheap to travel anywhere in the world to anywhere else, so people have been essentially decoupled from location (which of course would be helpful, perhaps even mandatory, in things like being able to form a bash').
Palmer says in her blog that young people generally form a bash' in the college-to-young-adult years that they're on a Campus (the Campus being a sort of university-tradeschool-internship-gradschool-professionalschool kind of place where you stay for the number of years you need to do post-secondary schooling and professional training and internships). This also kind of makes me feel like I would be terrible at this, in the sense that during those years, although I did manage to make friends with individuals, I was very, very bad at joining groups of people, even groups where I more-or-less liked everyone in the group. (I still am bad at this, though now I am much better at faking it.) I like the idea of finding a bash' -- it's a very appealing idea to have a bunch of people to form a familial-like community with -- but I'm afraid I just wouldn't be able to find multiple people that I wanted to live with who also wanted to live with each other long-term. (Especially once kids are in the mix -- I feel like for this to work, everyone in the bash' would have to be on the same page parenting-wise, and I think that might be difficult except in a hereditary bash', and maybe then too -- there is a lot that my sister and I don't agree on, for example, in terms of parenting.) But maybe this would be different if everyone grew up expecting to do this and training on some level to do this -- for example, I did receive a lot of cultural messages about being a parent growing up, which in some cases I know could backfire, but in my case was actually very helpful in making sure that I did think in the back of my head about being a parent and the kinds of things I would want to do as a parent, years before I actually became one. Either way, though, I am sure that there are people who don't fit into a bash', or don't manage to find one, and I wonder how they navigate life in this society. And how does it work to "break up" with a bash'? And how often does that happen? (And I love that this book is making me think about this kind of thing!)
The final revelation:
It's funny, though -- in some ways now I know too much about the Enlightenment. For one thing, one of Palmer's clear secondary goals in this book is to teach people about the Enlightenment, so Mycroft will namecheck Diderot and then expound on Diderot and his Encyclopédie and I'll be like, OK, cool, so, can we go on to the next thing? That being said, I did learn things about de Sade (all of which have now retreated to my passive memory, so don't ask me, lol), whom we have not hitherto treated in particular detail in our salon. (I also feel like, if you were learning about the Enlightenment from this book, you would get a bizarrely skewed idea of it, where Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau and de Sade, and possibly Madame Pompadour? would be the only main contributors -- though on the other hand, the Terra Ignota Enlightenment-based society does have politics and philosophy and science and so on all mixed in together, which is the same feel I get from salon, so I do think Palmer has done a nice job with that which I wouldn't have picked up on back in 2016.)
In Mycroft's narration, he says that his society treats Voltaire with especial relevance; he is the brilliant, witty, wise crusader-for-human-rights Patriarch and his ideas and writings are apparently the baseline of this society. And, like, Voltaire really was all that, but also he was a lot of other things too, so that my response is, "But what about Voltaire being an incredible troll?" (This may get picked up in subsequent books; Mycroft is clearly at least a bit of a troll and certainly an unreliable narrator, though whether he gets into Pamela levels of unreliable narrator (in brief, Voltaire actually rewrote his own letters to get revenge on Frederick the Great by trolling historians in the future -- THIS GUY!) is unknown to me at this point -- but Mycroft is writing for the future, so...) And also relatedly: "But what about Voltaire satirizing basically everyone he ever quarreled with, and also the part where he quarreled with everyone?" And also: in a world where Voltaire is the biggest of deals, what about his partner and philosophe/mathematician Émilie du Châtelet?? (I welcome spoilers here -- not specific ones please! but if you want to say "yup, Voltaire-style trolling is sure a big theme by the time you get to book 3!" I would love that!)
I think my biggest problem with the book is that, although I'm now OK enough with Mycroft's voice that I can read it, I still don't like Mycroft very much. This is kind of a problem, given that Mycroft is the narrator and a big driver of the action. (This is also distinct from spoiler thing -- it seems to be the case that he's not able to think in spoiler way anymore, whether this is because of a B5-like brain wipe or something else, and so I'm reserving judgment as to whether I should think of him as even the same person who spoiler.) He's either being annoyingly obsequious or patronizing, and I don't like either of those things!
Anyway, I very much enjoyed that the book made me think about things, I am definitely going to read the second book, and then we'll see whether I get more or less into the series!
hamsterwoman posted about her Terra Ignota Yuletide gift, I thought, hmm, you know, I've always intended to try this out again, and now that I have several years of salon (working on year 5!) and a LOT more reading of Enlightenment sources under my belt... Also, I was spoiled for what Mycroft Canner had done that is, that he was a serial murderer, though I did not know details
which helped me not throw the book across the room when I got to that part :)And I finished it this time! It did indeed make it rather easier that I now have a lot more experience with the Enlightenment and Enlightenment prose. (Also, I laughed when a salon showed up in the book, although sadly in this salon there was a lot less discussion of historical/literary/scientific ideas (there was a little) and a lot more sex.) I am also now much more used to reading primary documents without being the target audience and therefore not having the applicable context and only being given that later either by reading more or by
selenak and mildred_of_midgard -- which is somewhat similar to the experience of reading this book, in that in-character-Mycroft is writing for an audience that is again Not Me but in the future. It's neat that Palmer is able to structure it that way.I think it's an interesting book! I'm not going to talk about the gender stuff (it's interesting to see that eight years after publication it doesn't seem all that shocking or confusing, whereas I remember it being rather more so on first reading). The worldbuilding is interesting. I was definitely lost for most (maybe all) of the book. I was also warned that the book would end without tying up everything (though there's one very interesting revelation that does get made!) as it's really supposed to be half a book, which was good to know and I will follow up with the next half.
One worldbuilding thing that I was intrigued by: There are family-like units (the bash') that are in fact not families (though they can be) but groups of people who choose to live together (generally 3-6 plus a couple of romantic partners, I'm told by the wiki), sort of like a rooming group in college. (Every so often I dip my toes into a Rationalist blog, and I get the vague impression that they tend to do this kind of thing, especially as young adults? And Palmer herself is in academia, where I feel like this is more of a thing that can happen.) I must say that on one hand this sounds very appealing and on another hand it is really hard for me to see how it would work on a practical level (I feel it's hard enough to structure a household with one other reasonable adult plus kids!) especially without the whole thing evolving into hierarchical structures, but maybe that's just me/my getting stuck in 21st-C culture. I imagine the decoupling of romance and living together helps. I do really love about this future world that it seems to be structured in a way that in many aspects is more communal and more focused on community in general (I haven't even gotten to talking about the Hives!) than ours. I also loved how one of the big technological advances is that it's really easy and fast and cheap to travel anywhere in the world to anywhere else, so people have been essentially decoupled from location (which of course would be helpful, perhaps even mandatory, in things like being able to form a bash').
Palmer says in her blog that young people generally form a bash' in the college-to-young-adult years that they're on a Campus (the Campus being a sort of university-tradeschool-internship-gradschool-professionalschool kind of place where you stay for the number of years you need to do post-secondary schooling and professional training and internships). This also kind of makes me feel like I would be terrible at this, in the sense that during those years, although I did manage to make friends with individuals, I was very, very bad at joining groups of people, even groups where I more-or-less liked everyone in the group. (I still am bad at this, though now I am much better at faking it.) I like the idea of finding a bash' -- it's a very appealing idea to have a bunch of people to form a familial-like community with -- but I'm afraid I just wouldn't be able to find multiple people that I wanted to live with who also wanted to live with each other long-term. (Especially once kids are in the mix -- I feel like for this to work, everyone in the bash' would have to be on the same page parenting-wise, and I think that might be difficult except in a hereditary bash', and maybe then too -- there is a lot that my sister and I don't agree on, for example, in terms of parenting.) But maybe this would be different if everyone grew up expecting to do this and training on some level to do this -- for example, I did receive a lot of cultural messages about being a parent growing up, which in some cases I know could backfire, but in my case was actually very helpful in making sure that I did think in the back of my head about being a parent and the kinds of things I would want to do as a parent, years before I actually became one. Either way, though, I am sure that there are people who don't fit into a bash', or don't manage to find one, and I wonder how they navigate life in this society. And how does it work to "break up" with a bash'? And how often does that happen? (And I love that this book is making me think about this kind of thing!)
The final revelation:
Spoilers!
So I loved that there's this evidence that the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash' is killing a small number of "unimportant" people to prevent war and therefore save a much larger number of people. I mean, part of my head is like "does that really make sense??" (...does any individual person, especially a non-visibly-important person, really affect that much?" and "if it does affect that much, wow, they must have really good modeling to be able to figure out the effect of killing non-visibly-important individual X on war Y") but it's a great reveal and the philosophical questions are really interesting and I'm excited to learn more!It's funny, though -- in some ways now I know too much about the Enlightenment. For one thing, one of Palmer's clear secondary goals in this book is to teach people about the Enlightenment, so Mycroft will namecheck Diderot and then expound on Diderot and his Encyclopédie and I'll be like, OK, cool, so, can we go on to the next thing? That being said, I did learn things about de Sade (all of which have now retreated to my passive memory, so don't ask me, lol), whom we have not hitherto treated in particular detail in our salon. (I also feel like, if you were learning about the Enlightenment from this book, you would get a bizarrely skewed idea of it, where Voltaire and Diderot and Rousseau and de Sade, and possibly Madame Pompadour? would be the only main contributors -- though on the other hand, the Terra Ignota Enlightenment-based society does have politics and philosophy and science and so on all mixed in together, which is the same feel I get from salon, so I do think Palmer has done a nice job with that which I wouldn't have picked up on back in 2016.)
In Mycroft's narration, he says that his society treats Voltaire with especial relevance; he is the brilliant, witty, wise crusader-for-human-rights Patriarch and his ideas and writings are apparently the baseline of this society. And, like, Voltaire really was all that, but also he was a lot of other things too, so that my response is, "But what about Voltaire being an incredible troll?" (This may get picked up in subsequent books; Mycroft is clearly at least a bit of a troll and certainly an unreliable narrator, though whether he gets into Pamela levels of unreliable narrator (in brief, Voltaire actually rewrote his own letters to get revenge on Frederick the Great by trolling historians in the future -- THIS GUY!) is unknown to me at this point -- but Mycroft is writing for the future, so...) And also relatedly: "But what about Voltaire satirizing basically everyone he ever quarreled with, and also the part where he quarreled with everyone?" And also: in a world where Voltaire is the biggest of deals, what about his partner and philosophe/mathematician Émilie du Châtelet?? (I welcome spoilers here -- not specific ones please! but if you want to say "yup, Voltaire-style trolling is sure a big theme by the time you get to book 3!" I would love that!)
I think my biggest problem with the book is that, although I'm now OK enough with Mycroft's voice that I can read it, I still don't like Mycroft very much. This is kind of a problem, given that Mycroft is the narrator and a big driver of the action. (This is also distinct from spoiler thing -- it seems to be the case that he's not able to think in spoiler way anymore, whether this is because of a B5-like brain wipe or something else, and so I'm reserving judgment as to whether I should think of him as even the same person who spoiler.) He's either being annoyingly obsequious or patronizing, and I don't like either of those things!
Anyway, I very much enjoyed that the book made me think about things, I am definitely going to read the second book, and then we'll see whether I get more or less into the series!
no subject
I had a lesson with my singing teacher's teacher once, who told me that he saw this a lot in Asian students with English as a second language, so it's possible that I got this from my parents' English. I also, of course, grew up hearing Southern accents, which also tend to do some dipthong-y things, so that may also be a factor.
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I always had a heck of a time getting my students to not transcribe it as a pure vowel when I was teaching phonology.
Maaaaybe you're supposed to sing it as a pure vowel? But if nobody thinks you have an accent when you're speaking, I imagine this is why!
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I think the single letter "O" is a pure vowel? (I was trying to pay attention while the sacrament prayer was going on at church yesterday, where they say "O God the Eternal Father" as part of it.) But I say it exactly the same as the o in "boat." (I think I know what to do with my mouth so that it doesn't come out like the o in "boat," but that's only after years of my singing teacher basically explicitly teaching me how to hold my mouth in the right way -- which is how I know that I say it the same as the o in "boat," because when I'm speaking "normally," I hold my mouth in the dipthongy way and not in the round-o-vowel way.
But then even when I'm thinking about it consciously and I've got the mouth in better position, I get confused between where to exactly put my tongue to distinguish between "ah" and "oo" and "o" sounds and, yeah. It's a mess. Maybe if I'd taken lessons for longer I would have got that figured out too.)
no subject
In fact, the inability of native English speakers to pronounce pure "E" and "O" vowels on demand accounts for why we have accents in languages that expect them, like Romance languages.
So maybe singers are expected to be able to do that on demand, but I don't think "I got criticized in singing for not making sounds that aren't in the English phoneme inventory" translates to "I can't even do vowels in English right"!
Disclaimer: I'm being deliberately imprecise in my linguistic vocabulary here, because I don't think you have the jargon for what I want to say, but I think we're talking about the same thing. I'm just putting a disclaimer here in case anyone comes along and points out that I am saying factually wrong things. ;)
ETA: Singing in my head (because no one wants to hear me sing out loud, not even me :P), I think maybe I *do* put a pure vowel in "O God"? But if I'm speaking it, I definitely make it the same diphthong as in "boat".
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Well, I guess I'm glad we had this conversation, because I'd always thought that I was terrible at vowels. Apparently I'm just bad at singing vowels!
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It was not until I went to grad school that I realized not everyone pronounced "fell" and "fail" the same, but then it emerged that I have a *ton* of vowel differences from standard English! Yet standard English speakers don't think of me as having an "accent"; I just confuse them occasionally with random words.
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But the thing that I find interesting is that both she and her teacher (also, obviously, an opera teacher) didn't seem to have trouble teaching other Americans how to sing pure vowels! Just me. And that her teacher said he'd also had similar issues teaching Asians who grew up speaking an Asian language, but not Americans.
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didn't seem to have trouble teaching other Americans how to sing pure vowels! Just me. And that her teacher said he'd also had similar issues teaching Asians who grew up speaking an Asian language, but not Americans.
See, I am also suspicious of this as a blanket statement. First of all, Asians has to be a subset of Asians, since that covers a whole lot of not just languages, but language families. And the one that I know the phonology of the best, Japanese, actually has those pure vowels! Chinese, maybe not (Wikipedia seems to confirm), and Korean...well, Wikipedia tells me at least Seoul Korean has a pure O vowel as well. (Pyongyang has a pure open o instead.)
Second of all, many, many Americans have problems with this, specifically because our language doesn't have these phonemes in its inventory! It's precisely why so many of us have the specific accents in other languages that we do.
Third of all, children growing up in the US get their phoneme inventories from their peers, and if you went to an American school speaking English as your first language, it basically doesn't matter how well your parents speak English. If Korean were your first language and you had an accent in spoken English, then sure, you'd have a Korean phoneme inventory and struggle with foreign phonemes (which I maintain probably *wouldn't* include the pure O, though it might depend on where exactly in South Korea your family was from).
So here's my theory. It has two parts, both involving cognitive bias.
1. Americans who are bad at hearing and reproducing vowels outside their phoneme inventory are bad enough overall at hearing and pronouncing things on demand that they generally don't go in for opera lessons. The subset of people who take opera lessons overlaps significantly with the subset of people who can hear and reproduce those vowels. You, Cahn, are a rare case where you can do more with your voice on demand than someone like, say, me :P, but you struggle with a specific thing that most non-musically-trained Americans struggle with.
That's selection bias.
2. Your teacher's teacher got it into his head early on that this was something Asian students struggled with, and so he tends to remember Asian examples better than non-Asian examples, without actuallly thinking about the individual students' backgrounds or the phoneme inventories they grew up with. This is why you're going to count in his head as an example from now on, even though you have no accent in English and are not a native, unaccented speaker of Korean.
That's confirmation bias.
And so that's what I think is going on.
no subject
Next time I happen to see her (which might not happen for a while) I should ask her. And also ask her what percentage of her students do struggle with vowels (since she does get a lot of beginners). I'm certainly still worse than the average serious opera student at hearing vowels :)
Another data point that is probably not relevant (since I'm not usually with my family when I sing), but is interesting to me at least: one of my sister's boyfriends absolutely thought I had a very strong Korean accent because he only saw me when I was with my family. I know that when I'm with them I start dropping articles (since Korean doesn't have them) and start adopting the imperfect grammar that my parents use. I don't think I start pronouncing things like they do (e.g., I've never noticed myself pronouncing l's and r's the same) but I suppose it's possible.