Tillerman books, part 3 (Voigt, reread)

[cahn]

...why yes, I'm still working on posting stuff I started back in August. So. The rest of the Tillerman Cycle (I'm not reading Homecoming), and these form a set for vaguely-spoilery reasons (see Seventeen Against the Dealer).

The Runner (4/5): The book about the "older generation" (mostly the Tillermans' dead uncle, Bullet, as a high school kid). Here we actually get to meet Francis/Frankie Verricker, the Tillermans' father, who's pretty much absent in the rest of the cycle. In terms of the overarching family theme of the cycle, this is the book where we see a family that fails (but because Voigt is so good at drawing characters and families as realistically complicated, this family also succeeds in some small and surprising ways), as opposed to all the other books, where we see families that are struggling to make things work in different kinds of ways, and by-and-large succeeding. It's also clearly the big setup for Come a Stranger, and the big emotional payoff of that one.

Sons From Afar (4/5): I really like this one. James and Sammy decide they need to find out about their dad. And they find — and I love this — that there are no easy answers and no good answers, in the end, there's just you and the people you love and what you choose to make of that. I think I like it because I like James, a lot; I love how he's smart and conflicted and tries to fit in and sacrifices his integrity for that and then finds that there's an integrity of the mind that he can't sacrifice. I love how he's cowardly and courageous at the same time. I'd love to find out what happened to him as a grownup.

I like the idea of Sammy and James both as different sides of Grandfather Tillerman — that between them they have all the sides that caused him to fail, and to fail his family, and to be unhappy, but because their family works, those same traits help them instead of hurting them.

Seventeen Against the Dealer (3+/5): Ummmmm. Yeah. It's a depressing book (though ultimately uplifting) and the one where Dicey loses her way before finding it again. The interesting thing about this one is Cisco Kidd.

I'm afraid I'm a very unironic reader of books that I love (though hand me some obnoxious YA dystopia, and we'll talk), and it was completely lost on me until I was reading a review on the interwebs that Cisco Kidd is totally supposed to be Dicey's and her siblings' father. Francis -> Cisco, duhhhhh.

Whether he actually is their father is, I think, not at all clear (there is never anything that can be taken as proof, and in fact Voigt is very careful never to have the man meet James or Sammy, either of whom would have tried to figure it out), and I think that's part of the point — it doesn't matter, in some sense, whether he is, although the book is more poignant if you assume he is. But whether he is or not, he's a stand-in for this man.

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ah, that makes sense of your reaction to Homecoming. And I didn't realize you'd made it nearly that far; I thought you'd never made it much past the beginning, when the kids are abandoned. Sounds like you have a good plan, then.

I felt very strongly as a child that my parents' love for me was conditional on Doing Well And Being a Good Kid. It didn't really change what I did (because I was naturally a risk-adverse, strongly-academic kid) but it certainly seems to have shaped some of my reactions (this isn't the only time I've noticed this).

That makes total sense. And you can really mess kids up that way (not saying you were, just saying that it's not a good thing to do). That said, my experience was totally the opposite: I felt my parents' love was so unconditional I would have appreciated some appreciation of my values, priorities, and behavior. You should totally accept your child's personhood without conditions on their interests! Planning out an arbitrary future for them and not being satisfied with anything else is wrong and terrible and potentially damaging.

But my sister could lie and steal and run away and make false accusations and neglect her children and stab my mother in the back (metaphorically), and I could be responsible and helpful and hard-working and honest and generous, and my mother would always say she loved us equally. Which told me that what she loved about me was that I came out of her uterus, not anything about who I was as a person. Which made me unable to place any value on her love. If "love" literally means "came out of the right uterus," then it's a historical accident. If I love someone, it's because of who they are and the interactions I have with them, not their genetics.

*nods* Yes, I see. For me this falls under "empathic reading," because my mom taught me very firmly to care what other people think (in retrospect, probably as a way to keep my spectrum-ish tendencies under control). So I spent a lot of time as an adolescent and young adult trying to figure out what I had to do to get other people to like me, and doing various activities that in retrospect I didn't particularly enjoy.

Haha, see, mine tried *so* hard, especially the older I got. She cared *so much* what other people thought. The problem with that approach is that I'm too emotionally self-sufficient for it to work. I *need* to pursue my interests. I may *like* having people who share my interests, but that's optional. If the people around me aren't the ones who share interests with me, then they're the wrong people for me to be interacting with. And that's fine. I've never experienced loneliness in my life (except vicariously through well-written fiction). Ditto grief or loss, for that matter. I don't miss people when I or they move away. At best, I miss activities with them, and usually not for long.

For me, doing something you don't want to so people will like you is like this. The previous place I lived, my route to the bus stop went past a yard with dogs. They ran and barked at me every time I walked past. They clearly did not want me walking past their yard. I could

a) quadruple my route to not walk past that yard (but who knows what other dogs would lie on the revised route)
b) stay home and not go to work
c) ignore the dogs

To me, doing my own thing and not fitting in is as much of a no-brainer as c) would be to most people walking past a yard with dogs. I had places to go and things to do. If people don't like it, well, the caravan moves on.

So that's why James's POV sets my teeth on edge. I'm not saying he's badly written! It's just that 1) he's living in a world where I can say exactly what choices I would make, 2) it would so self-evidently not be the choices that are making his life difficult, 3) he has nothing I don't have that I would even want to imagine. And that is a death sentence for a work of fiction for me.

So, your comment made me go look at dyslexia briefly, and I found this interesting page that argues that many of the symptoms of dyslexia can be mimicked in some children by teaching them the whole-word approach. I don't know how much credence to give this web page, but it certainly would fit your reading Maybeth's symptoms as dyslexia as well as the fact that she improved dramatically after James started phonics with her (and therefore didn't seem to have native trouble in matching letters to sounds).

Ooh, that's interesting! I'm not actually an expert on dyslexia; what little I know is what I looked up after I had figured out it was what my mother had, and once we confirmed it was that, I didn't have much incentive to dig. And she agreed so completely that she said getting even an unofficial diagnosis was the greatest thing that had happened to her since the birth of her children. But get this: it was literally this scene in Dicey's Song that led me to the epiphany that she was dyslexic, after twenty-some years of knowing her. And in a way that ties in with something else you wrote:

(Although maybe it's not consistent with her musical ability? Hmm. I feel vaguely that the part of my brain that processes musical memory doesn't work quite the same as the part that can remember a string of numbers or words, hence my using music to memorize number strings.

I was thinking about the part where James says, "Maybeth can talk, can’t she? So she knows the meanings. She can see, so she can see the words. But she doesn’t make the connection.”

And I was thinking about how three different people have tried to teach me to play something very simple, like the first few notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" on the piano, and all ended with the same frustrated "You're so smart, how can you be so stupid at this???" And I realized that I had the same mental block against making the connection between the notes, the keys, and what I could hear, fast enough for it to sound anything like music. I got all the individual parts, but I could not put them together.

Then I realized that my and my sister's frustration with our mother's difficulty with pronouncing written words was exactly like that. She had so much difficulty with such simple things that it felt like she couldn't possibly be trying.

Then I realized that there was a name for that, and it was reading disorder. I immediately hopped up, got on the computer, googled it, found a quick diagnostic test, and emailed it to her (without telling her why, just letting her think it was another fun online quiz, for the sake of getting a more accurate result).

She tried it, couldn't answer a single question, got frustrated, and asked me, "You can't do this, can you?" And I said, "Yeah, I can, it's not hard for me." Then she thought it was just one of those things only crazy-smart people can do, so she called over my dad, who has a high school education and isn't a big reader either. He also thought it was easy. Then I told her it was a dyslexia diagnostic, and she was floored. Suddenly her whole educational history, her whole life made sense, after fifty years of telling everyone, "Don't get mad at me, I'm trying. My brain just doesn't do that." (I'm honestly more embarrassed I didn't figure it out sooner.)

“You mean, what Maybeth does is sees — like the beginning of the word, and then she guesses?” is a pretty accurate description of what I can see my mother doing as well, when she reads aloud.

This is also consistent with the problem with her math — she can't hold enough things in her memory at once to make the connection with fractions — a child has to simultaneously hold in her head what the numerator means, what the denominator means, and that it's different from whole numbers.

Obviously, we can't tell with a fictional character. And I like your theory, it makes sense! I will just say that dyscalculia is found in something like half of people with dyslexia, of whom my mother is one. So it could go either way.

Re music working differently, I will say that I have a fantastic working memory, I have like the best working memory (I was born with it, I can't take credit for it), and I can do reading and math but not music. I have a huge mental block against music. So I concur with your sense that it's completely different.

My working memory may be why I was so successful with the whole language method. My mother (who is literate, but reads slowly and has limits on what she can read) taught me to read at age three using a whole word method. It's possible that learning that way evoked dyslexic symptoms in my mother, or made it worse, but it worked really well for me. By the time I started first grade at age five, I was reading on a fifth grade level (I wanted to skip first grade, no school ever cooperated with me skipping any grades after kindergarten).

Then in second grade they started teaching us phonics. It was so absurd that I was by then reading on a sixth-grade level but bombing phonics quizzes and making Bs in reading. What they were testing us on was not reading as I understood it (can I look at a text and comprehend its meaning and read it aloud?), but what felt like jumping through hoops answering questions with very counterintuitive answers. "Is the 'g' in this word hard or soft?" "I don't know, it's neither, that's not a property that sounds have, but you arbitrarily assigned one to it, and naturally it's the opposite of what my intuition says it should be. ARGH."

So phonics was extremely frustrating to me, as the person who for years was consistently assigned to read to the class when the teacher had a sore throat, and no one else in the class was capable of reading that book. "I've been reading since I was three, you know I can read, what is this phonics nonsense??!" Everyone else seems to like it, though, including James. ;)

[mildred_of_midgard]

If I love someone, it's because of who they are and the interactions I have with them, not their genetics.

Just to be extra clear on my position, when you decide to raise a child (genetically related to you or not), you commit to doing a good job, and that does *not* mean making them vehicles of your wish-fulfillment fantasies.

[cahn]

and my mother would always say she loved us equally. Which told me that what she loved about me was that I came out of her uterus, not anything about who I was as a person.

You know, this is very interesting. When I got pregnant with my second, I went straight to Amazon and bought Siblings Without Rivalry, and one of the points it makes is that one of the ways of comparing kids is to say you love them all equally, and it can be as damaging in some ways as comparing one to another in more overt ways, exactly in the way you've pointed out — if that's true, then how is the child special in any way? (The book, for what it's worth, counsels always turning back the conversation to the particular child who's asking and what one loves about that particular child.) It's a tricky question, though, especially for my own kids. I think I'd say there's some component of (my) parental love, the part that's tied up with responsibility, where the historical accident of "this is the kid I ended up with" is in fact the only reason for that love, even if most of the love has to do with who they are as people.

For me, doing something you don't want to so people will like you is like this. The previous place I lived, my route to the bus stop went past a yard with dogs. They ran and barked at me every time I walked past. They clearly did not want me walking past their yard. I could

a) quadruple my route to not walk past that yard (but who knows what other dogs would lie on the revised route)
b) stay home and not go to work
c) ignore the dogs

To me, doing my own thing and not fitting in is as much of a no-brainer as c) would be to most people walking past a yard with dogs. I had places to go and things to do. If people don't like it, well, the caravan moves on.

I think this speaks at least partially to the difference in our reading styles — although (c) is also a no-brainer for me, I think I could probably read a book where the protagonist did (a) or (b) as long as I could get sufficiently into the character's head to understand that person. But — on the other hand — I think what would allow me to get into that hypothetical character's head is in fact my experience with doing things that seem ridiculous looking back on it because of feeling anxiety about other things. Which it doesn't seem like you do in that way. So, okay, both reading style and character :)

And I was thinking about how three different people have tried to teach me to play something very simple, like the first few notes of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" on the piano, and all ended with the same frustrated "You're so smart, how can you be so stupid at this???"

Okay, this is fascinating to me, it makes total sense as a dyslexia analogue that you can't connect what you see(/do) and what you hear. I've never heard of this before, so this is really very interesting to me — I mean, I expect there must be, or could be, a ton of people like you, but of course playing an instrument isn't as important as reading.

So now I totally want to do experiments on you :) It seems to me that given what I know about your brain at this point, it ought to be able to be possible to teach you to play (say) Twinkle on the piano using sheer muscle/visual memory — that is, just the piano keys, ignoring the notes and what you hear entirely. Like, I'm thinking about using a keyboard with the sound turned off. Then it becomes completely a eye-hand/memory matching problem (I assume you wouldn't have any trouble matching the piano key shape, and given your memory you certainly shouldn't have any trouble remembering the sequence — it's interesting, too, because relevant to our above discussion on how music memory is stored in the brain, although I do have muscle memory, I certainly don't remember sequences of piano keys in this way at *all*, I remember sequences of pitches — and maybe not even that, but rather a phrase of pitches, the way they connect together (an analogy would be, if I'm remembering a quotation I don't remember the individual words in sequence, but rather the sense of the sentence) — and the sequences of keys are merely the way I transcribe them in my brain for my hands, if that makes any sense). Once you have the correct motor control sequence, turn the sound on very faintly, and then add more sound. This wouldn't get past the part where your brain can't connect what you hear and what you see together (so it wouldn't be analogous to treating dyslexia, where I think (?) they actually try to get that connection in place), it would more re-route it by teaching your brain to essentially ignore this weird sound input that it can't get to match up properly. (…although I wonder if your brain could in fact be taught just by enough exposure to match it up, just maybe using different mechanisms. But to do that well I suspect we would have had to start much earlier in your life.) This seems to me to be analogous to the whole-word method for teaching reading, which, well, worked for you, didn't it? :)

I mean, one wouldn't really want to learn an instrument like this -- it wouldn't be very satisfying in the sense that most people play music because they actually like the connection between the action and the sound, and I think this strategy would not allow you to actually appreciate it :) Mostly it just set off my "Wait, would it be actually possible to design an algorithm to do this thing?" buttons.

Then in second grade they started teaching us phonics. It was so absurd that I was by then reading on a sixth-grade level but bombing phonics quizzes and making Bs in reading. What they were testing us on was not reading as I understood it (can I look at a text and comprehend its meaning and read it aloud?), but what felt like jumping through hoops answering questions with very counterintuitive answers. "Is the 'g' in this word hard or soft?" "I don't know, it's neither, that's not a property that sounds have, but you arbitrarily assigned one to it, and naturally it's the opposite of what my intuition says it should be. ARGH."

I also find this very interesting! So here's a question: when you read aloud and come to a name that you have never seen before, how do you read it? I mean, I think you probably are reading phonetically (although it depends a lot to the answer to that question). And I think it's the case that a lot of people who did learn using whole-language were able to make the jump to understand phonetics on an intuitive level - even that article I linked doesn't claim that everyone had problems with whole-language, just a minority of kids. But it seems to me that it wasn't the idea of phonics that was frustrating to you, it was a) the fact that you knew it already and b) that because you knew it already, the arbitrary nomenclature was frustrating. I imagine you already knew that "g" could be pronounced in two different ways, right? So teaching you "hard" and "soft" g was kind of pointless. (Okay, now I'm wondering whether second-grade-you might have found actual linguistics terminology more useful. It would certainly have been more interesting for you, I expect.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Okay, well, there are a few different pieces at work here. One is how you start teaching a child to read words, and one is what they're doing at the advanced old age of 33. ;) And the key to reading any writing system is: how much correlation between graphemes and phonemes is there? How much can you predict the pronunciation from the writing?

For some language + writing system combos, it's 0%: you have to memorize everything. For others, it's near 100%: you can get the pronunciation totally from reading. For most, it's somewhere in between. English is notorious among European languages for having a relatively lower correlation between sound and spelling. It means you have to memorize more. But it also has an especially large lexicon, so you can't possibly predict everything. So you have to do some memorization of individual words, and learn some patterns.

I promise you, now that I've taught ESL, that I spend a lot of time looking up words I've only seen in writing, because I've made up a pronunciation in my head based on the spelling, but before I can tell anyone else how they're pronounced, I have to check. I'd say I'm right about half the time.

Now, when you're teaching children, you can start with phonics and correct them when it leads them astray on individual words, and trust their memory to collect examples of exceptions. Or you can start by having them memorize enough words to be able to read short texts, and trust them to notice patterns, and maybe explicitly teach some. Most books for beginning readers that I'm aware of make use of words that rhyme or are similar in some way.

I have an exceptionally good working memory *and* good pattern recognition skills (these stood me in good stead in formal linguistics, where the goal is to look at a set of data and deduce the underlying principles). I was started with memorizing whole words until I could read a book without knowing any of the letters, at which point I began to match up what I was saying to what I was seeing, but yeah, I definitely picked up patterns, some of which were pointed out to me explicitly and some of which I noticed on my own.

I absolutely would have loved learning proper linguistic terminology in second grade! As soon as I learned about place and manner of articulation and voicing, I was like, "Oh, THAT's what they should have been telling me, instead of all this hard and soft nonsense."

Re our discussion of Maybeth's learning difficulties, I was keeping it in mind while reading Seventeen, and these are the data points I found:

“Maybeth, you can remember recipes, can’t you?” “That’s different; it’s easy. It’s not just— words. I can remember music,” Maybeth explained, more relaxed now. “They tell you, if there’s something you’re good at then that’s a good way to work. But music is notes, and they’re easy to remember because you can hear them. And this is— just words.”

“[History tests are] all memory. And I can’t remember enough.”

Then, when they do a timeline in color the way Maybeth understands time:

“I can remember boxes,” Maybeth said, still staring at the paper. “I can understand colors.

Inconclusive, if you ask me. She can remember a lot of things that aren't words, but she can't handle words. Which points to something like dyslexia.

But then my mother, who is dyslexic, excelled in history in community college, as long as she wasn't asked to write about it or read out loud. Remembering facts and putting them together was the easy part; articulating her knowledge in well-written paragraphs on the spot was the hard part. She could do multiple choice easily, but whenever she knew the test would have an impromptu essay on one of, say, three topics, she would figure out which topic the teacher liked best, as that was the one they would most likely be wiling to read 50 essays on, write up the essay before hand, looking up every word in the dictionary, and then type and retype the essay until she had it memorized. Then she'd go in and regurgitate the memorized essay on the exam.

It usually got her an A, although she got caught once when she mis-guessed which question would be on the test. She *still* got the A, I believe, but I remember her saying the teacher said, "I see what you did there. Don't do it again." (I.e. study for all the essay topics.)

She never told anyone about her labor-intensive workaround for exams, so no one ever caught on to the fact that she was dyslexic. Everyone else just went in and wrote their essays cold based on what they remembered. She also could only do one class at a time like this.

I always found this fascinating; she has dyslexia and dyscalculia, but must have a pretty good working memory. Not quite as good as mine, but still pretty good.

So maybe Maybeth is dyslexic and dyscalculic and has an average working memory? Good enough for recipes and music and things that don't trigger her disability, but not good enough to compensate for her disability by sheer hard work?

Re music...I could definitely memorize a sequence of key presses, but you'd have to signal me visually somehow *when* to do the key presses. Because I was doing them in the right order, but because I had to laboriously think through each step (and I still don't know how anyone else can do it any other way), it was really slow and sounded nothing like music. Presumably, with enough muscle memory, I'd get faster, but I'm still unconvinced that it would come out with the right rhythm, mostly because when I try to sing in my head, I can never get the timing to sound anything like music. I'm not so tone-deaf I can't hear the difference? So I suppose there's hope? But it would be a very labor-intensive process.

I'm also not great at distinguishing notes--my wife, who is extremely musical and could have been a professional musician with some encouragement and a less fucked-up childhood, did some experiments pressing keys on the keyboard and asking me which were which, and was constantly having to say, "NO, those are DIFFERENT notes. NO, this is the SAME note." I could tell some apart, but there were a lot of false positives and false negatives. She was pretty impressed at how bad I was. Like everyone else who ever sat with me at a piano.

So no, I don't think I'd like to learn an instrument using the workaround. ;)

Now, some random thoughts on Seventeen:

I just finished rereading it. Still boring. Rather less so, now that I know who Cisco is. But still.

The most interesting thoughts I had were about Dicey and role reversal. How she offers Cisco what she does in part because she remembers what it was like.

Maybe he was hungry, Dicey thought. His face didn’t look hungry, but there was hunger mixed in with laughter in his eyes, so maybe he was too proud to ask. “Sure, okay,” she said.

She also knew what it was like to need shelter and to have only the one chance for it. One chance on a good day, she remembered; there had been days when they had no chance.

So now Dicey's in a position to pay it forward. BUT, what I now realize is that she's paying it forward to the same man who contributed to her being in that position in the first place. She's reaching out, but she's reaching out to the wrong person?

Because he sure as hell doesn't learn anything from it. Unlike Gram, who's also in a way responsible--if her daughter couldn't take care of her kids, it was in part because of all that childhood abuse. Gram gets a redemption arc. Cisco seems uninterested in redemption; he knows damn well who Dicey is, when he asks her all those questions about her siblings and her grandmother and her...huh. Her mother. He never even asks about her father. I think I had missed that because of the societal expectation that mothers take care of their children, fathers are optional (Solitary Blue, says otherwise). But both Jeff and Mina ask “Where are their parents?”

Cisco knows damn well there's no father in the picture, and that's why he never asks, and Dicey missed it and I missed it until just now.

Anyway, Cisco is not above anything stealing from his own daughter. However, before that, he makes it pretty clear he thinks he should be paid for the work he's doing, and Dicey agrees, and yet she never tells him. His theft at the end was unjustified and totally in character, but she didn't know that he was going to steal from her or that he was the father who abandoned her, so I can only judge her actions by the knowledge she had at the time.

It's consistent with the way she takes Jeff for granted, and keeps telling herself she'll call him and doesn't. She does a lot of not reaching out in this book.

So I'm left wondering if we're meant to conclude that she should have reached out to Cisco, and she didn't.

I'm not convinced that it would have prevented the theft, much less that he would have been responsible with the money she gave him (hello, Atlantic City), but it is interesting to think about. Wanting to surprise someone with cash is not the way to do business, not the way to treat someone who's clearly hungry and homeless and has been hinting that he wants money for the work he's doing, and certainly not what I'd expect from someone who's *been* hungry and homeless. Someone who'd earn money by showing up, doing the work, and proving she was worth the keep. If nothing else, this is a guy who comes and goes--you might well never see him again before you have a chance to give him the money you're planning to give him.

Speaking of theft and role reversal, I thought of Sammy and James in Homecoming, and Dicey's reaction.

“And Sammy didn’t take money, he took food. And Sammy didn’t take it from someone who’d helped us. Even you can see the difference.”

And Cisco, of course, takes money from someone who'd helped him.

[cahn]

Your comment about looking up pronunciation reminded me that I always have to look up pronunciation of words that I've only seen in books. The interesting thing is that (unless I internalized the spelling of the word wrong, which does often happen) I usually get the overall pronunciation right and the syllable stress completely wrong, like, I would say probably quite a bit more than 50% of the time. (I realize there are patterns with syllable stress, but I didn't internalize them when it would have made a difference, and now it isn't worth it.)

Ah, I forgot about Maybeth and the boxes! (I still have yet to get to Seventeen. I'd like to write up Runner before I get to Sons or Seventeen, so I don't fall too far behind :) ) I'm coming around to your opinion that it's probably something like dyslexia; that makes sense with this new data. The musical notes I would say is not a conclusive data point (again because I think musical memory works differently), but recipes and boxes and color… yeah, that's starting to add up.

Because I was doing them in the right order, but because I had to laboriously think through each step (and I still don't know how anyone else can do it any other way)

Oh, hold on, I want to know more about this thinking through it. So my thought here is that you look at piano keys and see a visual pattern. If I told you to press a sequence of keys (say, the beginning seven notes to Twinkle), you would basically map the first key I told you to the corresponding visual key, and then go back and figure out what the second key was, and map that… yeah, I can see how that would be laborious and time-consuming. I think this is not so different from what I do, with the large caveat that as I said before that I dont' think in terms of a sequence of keys but in terms of a phrase of notes -- but the map for me is pretty much completely automatic. (The automaticity comes because of a whole bunch of training, of course; but also in large part because, I think, of a pronounced feedback process between my ear and hand; this feedback process is what seems to be missing for you.) What if each key was labeled by a number, would that make it easier? Like if I could tell you 11 55 66 5 (and each key had a number sticker so you could just look at the keys and see where you were supposed to push). This is actually not that different from things I've seen to teach kids (colors instead of numbers are often used for pre-literate kids).

Of course this still doesn't at all answer your rhythm question -- I didn't even think about rhythm when I was trying to hack your music playing, huh — which probably says something about me. Possibly just that my major training is in violin — it's widely known in the music world that string players tend to be relatively crap at rhythm compared to other instrumentalists. (The reason for this is that string players have to place the fingers quite precisely to get the right pitch, so we tend to be hyper-focused on pitch and dismiss rhythm as that thing that you do after you get the pitch right.) But also I've noticed that my daughter has very good pitch and rather poor rhythm compared to other kids. I mean, at this point she's had some relatively intensive training on rhythm, so now she's now on or above the level I'd expect from a typical kid her age, but she definitely does not come by it naturally. (Whereas I don't ever remember not understanding rhythm fairly intuitively, but it's possible I don't understand it naturally myself — I too had intensive music training starting very young.)

Anyway, I wonder — and yeah, this is just a thought experiment at this point, since this is sounding less and less fun to actually do in real life (although if I ever was in the same place as you and a piano I might just try the sticker thing just to see, ha) — if one could set up a light, or something, to signal you when the key press was supposed to occur — well, okay, I don't wonder that part so much, I'm pretty sure it could be done though would probably be kind of painful — what I do wonder is whether repeated practice doing this would rewire your brain so that you would be able to match it up. I wonder this precisely because when I started rhythm work with my daughter, she appeared to have a great deal of trouble with it — like, it seemed like she had trouble hearing when she was doing it right or wrong, and would blithely play something e.g. not matched with the metronome at all and not appear to notice. She was able, however, to coordinate with clapping at the same time as I did (rhythm clapping is another widely used pedagogical trick that I remember doing when I was a kid), and with practice she's gotten better at even metronome rhythm work (though she still hates it).

Re Seventeen: I don't really understand why Voigt even bothers bringing in Cisco for a non-redemption arc, except maybe that she thought it would be interesting to see the flip side of it? (I don't find it interesting, which is why I question it. I'm kind of a sucker for redemption arc, though.)

Cisco seems uninterested in redemption; he knows damn well who Dicey is, when he asks her all those questions about her siblings and her grandmother and her...huh. Her mother. He never even asks about her father. I think I had missed that because of the societal expectation that mothers take care of their children, fathers are optional (Solitary Blue, says otherwise). But both Jeff and Mina ask “Where are their parents?”

Oh. OH. I had totally missed that (same societal expectations blinding me here). WHOA. Does he ever say anything about fathers?

However, before that, he makes it pretty clear he thinks he should be paid for the work he's doing, and Dicey agrees, and yet she never tells him. His theft at the end was unjustified and totally in character, but she didn't know that he was going to steal from her or that he was the father who abandoned her, so I can only judge her actions by the knowledge she had at the time. It's consistent with the way she takes Jeff for granted, and keeps telling herself she'll call him and doesn't. She does a lot of not reaching out in this book.

Yeesh. Dicey is definitely (has always been) rather poor at communication. I'm thinking here of the parallel view in Dicey's Song and Come a Stranger and how it's really, really easy to read her rebuffs of Mina's friendship overtures as racism (which it of course isn't, but how is Mina supposed to know). It's… really a good thing that she is marrying Jeff, who is better than average at communication (except when it impinges on his issues).

It's interesting to compare her to Bullet — Bullet is poor at communication, but in his case it's not because he isn't thinking about it, he just doesn't care… well — in the first half of the book, he isn't thinking about it because he doesn't care, but near the end of the book he is thinking about it and he still doesn't communicate effectively because he doesn't see the point in it (e.g., in telling everyone else that Tommy's been set up).

“And Sammy didn’t take money, he took food. And Sammy didn’t take it from someone who’d helped us. Even you can see the difference.” And Cisco, of course, takes money from someone who'd helped him.

OH. Ouch. And, huh, interesting that it's James who did that in Homecoming — James has always been the one of them that had the most fluid moral sense, which he shares with Cisco (only James, of course, has his family and a core of morality to back him up).

It seems like there are a bunch of parallels between Seventeen and Homecoming, maybe? I wonder if anything is going to be different for me going in because I've read Homecoming now…

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, I am so bad at syllable stress. But also vowels. Here's a recent example (of why phonics only gets you so far): pasty, the Cornish food. Is it pronounced like pastry, past, or pasta? I recently learned that my lifelong pronunciation with the vowel of pastry, which might I add is the correct vowel for "pasty-faced", was wrong, and it is, in American English at least, the vowel of "past". The OED tells me the British pronunciation is with the vowel of "pasta".

English abounds with examples like this. That's why starting with memorizing whole words works for so many kids.

The piano sticker experiment has been tried, funnily enough. That's exactly what one of my friends came up with, after I failed to make any progress any other way. It got me to the point where I could press the keys in the right order, but even after quite a bit of practicing, it was still very slow, and sounded nothing like music. Muscle memory would presumably speed it up, but I still don't think it would sound like music until you flashed lights at me (which is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote "you'd have to signal me visually").

At this point, yeah, it becomes indistinguishable from a form of gratuitous torture, and the experiment will probably not be tried in real life unless it's in the name of actual science that will benefit people who are not me. I have often thought how grateful I am that I live in a society where I'm not required to go through the convolutions necessary to connect things that don't naturally connect for me, the kind my dyslexic mother had to go through to write an impromptu essay (and she wasn't able to complete even a 2-year degree in community college). Music is optional, for which I am glad.

Oh. OH. I had totally missed that (same societal expectations blinding me here). WHOA. Does he ever say anything about fathers?
Not that I caught, but this passage, when they're exchanging names, is interesting.

“How’d you get a name like that?” he asked, without looking up from his work.

Dicey shrugged. She wasn’t about to say I got it from my father, or so I think, but I’m not sure because he took off years ago, so I never asked him.

She thinks she got it from her father, and it is the sort of name you'd expect from him (dice, gambling, etc.), but but Cisco, like other characters, seems to think it's an odd name in the above passage. And in Runner, he says, "She [Liza] even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her." He's referring to Tillerman, but it sounds to me like Liza picked the name Dicey. And then never explained it.

In Homecoming, Eunice's priest friend says,

"That’s an odd name, Dicey. What is your real name?”

“Dicey’s my name,” she said. “I don’t have another one.”

“You just don’t know it,” the priest assured her. Dicey didn’t argue. After all, maybe he was right.

What do you think?

Here's another thing Cisco says that's not precisely about fathers, but is about him and Liza, when he's quizzing Dicey about Jeff:

“Maybe I don’t want to get married,” Dicey suggested.

“I have trouble believing that. It’s always seemed to me, there has to be an awfully good reason for a man to do it, but a woman, I mean, she’s got everything to gain. Someone to support her, and be responsible, and owe her fidelity, take her out, keep her happy. She can have children.”

“You don’t need to be married to have children,” Dicey pointed out. She could have added, My parents weren’t, but she didn’t.

“I know that,” Cisco answered.

If you read this in the light of his relationship with Liza, we know Liza didn't want to get married (we have Ab's word on this), and we have Francis telling Bullet (in an account that is a pack of lies) that he did propose to Liza, who refused him.

“She won’t marry me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much mind not being married. I told her I’d marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn’t have done that if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let her, you can believe me. It’s not my fault— I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they’d send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.”

I don't know how much of that to believe, but I do believe he wanted Dicey to have his last name. I doubt he'd have settled down (like he said, he doesn't much mind not being married, and I doubt a wedding ring would keep him from running off). But Ab seemed to think marriage might settle him down:

“Your momma stuck around here a long time just because she felt sorry for me. I was glad when she began seeing Francis. He was handsome and cheerful. I thought, maybe she’ll be happy, maybe she’ll steady him down. But do you know what I said to her, just before she left this house? She was twenty-one then and her father couldn’t stop her. I said—‘ We don’t want to hear anything from you until we hear that you’ve been married.’...She said, ‘I’ll never get married.’

And then there's this, a little further on in the discussion between Cisco and Dicey about marriage:

“Yeah, well, you’re old enough to be my grandfather,” Dicey reminded him.

For a minute, it looked as if Cisco was going to say something angry. Then he decided he would take it as a joke. “You’re telling me it’s none of my business,” Cisco said.

“Something like that.”

“I still say you ought to marry this boy. You’re not going to have all that many offers,” he warned her. One thing you could say about Cisco. He wasn’t exactly sweet-talking her.

“Have you ever been married?” she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could be nosy.

“No,” he said. But there was something in his voice, some difference, as if he might be lying, or as if he might wish he were married, or as if there were some sad story behind that simple no. She stared at his back, and wondered.

Maybe he did want to get married, maybe he'd still have run out...I don't think we can know. But it is interesting to think about.

Speaking of old enough to be her grandfather, apparently he almost is, judging by the chronology in Sons:

“He was years older than she was,” James announced. “Our father. Because I’ve been thinking, Mrs. Rottman said he was in third grade in 1938, which means he was about eight, which means he was born around 1930. He could have been nine, you see,” he explained at Sammy’s confused look. “It’s only a rough date, but Momma wasn’t born until 1942, so he was more than ten years older than she was.” “So what?” “It’s not normal, it’s— she’d have been awfully young for him, if you—”

Oh, ha, I was hunting for that passage, and I found this a couple pages before:

“Now I can see why Momma didn’t name me [James] after him [Francis].”

“She named me after her brother.”

“I don’t even know why my name is James,” James said.

Yep, Liza picking the names and not explaining them. I mean, we know she didn't talk about the name Samuel, and we know why, but wow, yeah. Do we know of any other James's? I can't think of any. Maybeth shares the "beth" with her mother Elizabeth, but that's all I've got for the other kids.

[cahn]

Agh, vowels! Yes, those too! Wait, that's not how you pronounce pasty? I've always pronounced it that way too. And my toddler has just started being interested in how letters sound and oh man, I feel so bad every time I try explaining to him that "T makes a t sound but A makes an aaaah or an ahhhh or an ae sound…" It would totally make sense for him to start with memorizing a bunch of words.

The piano sticker experiment has been tried, funnily enough. That's exactly what one of my friends came up with, after I failed to make any progress any other way. It got me to the point where I could press the keys in the right order, but even after quite a bit of practicing, it was still very slow, and sounded nothing like music.

Wait, ok, I'm glad this experiment was tried (although maybe you're not :) ) because this is really interesting to me that this didn't work. I would have thought that pressing a sequence of numbers would be quick, not slow, for someone who has technical skill — it might still not sound much like music, but I would have thought the failure mode would be more along the lines of doing it too quickly. So — at work I have to badge in by pressing a sequence of five numbers; these five numbers are the same every time, but they come up on the keypad in random order. Would this be difficult/slow for you? Would 10-15 numbers be difficult/slow for you? That is, I assume the problem is not remembering the sequence, given your excellent working memory, and given the stickers (or a keypad) the problem shouldn't be translating from one modality to another. Therefore, it seems to me the problem must either be the actual mapping (in which case I'd expect you to have trouble with both a piano and a randomized keypad) or the addition of sound confusing your brain (in which case I'd expect you to have trouble with the piano, but not the keypad).

…um, if you ever get tired of my performing thought experiments on you, feel *totally free* to ignore me :) (I expect that is fairly clear, but thought I'd verbalize it just in case.) I think you have just engaged my "I really want to understand how this works" buttons :)

He's referring to Tillerman, but it sounds to me like Liza picked the name Dicey. And then never explained it.

That… sounds rather plausible, and I have this whole story in my head now as to Liza knowing that Frank gambles, and naming Dicey after dice as some sort of, I don't know, talisman against it? But that's all in my head, I have no textual evidence besides what you've just presented (which I like).

“I know that,” Cisco answered.

Agh! Of course he knows, the jerk.

“She won’t marry me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much mind not being married. I told her I’d marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn’t have done that if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let her, you can believe me. It’s not my fault— I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they’d send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.”

“Have you ever been married?” she asked. He wasn’t the only one who could be nosy. “No,” he said. But there was something in his voice, some difference, as if he might be lying, or as if he might wish he were married, or as if there were some sad story behind that simple no. She stared at his back, and wondered.

Yeah, right there the "No" is actually the truth, but he should have been married, so to speak. I agree, I don't think it would have stopped him from running off (though if his wages were garnished maybe it would have been easier for Liza), and maybe I'm being too nice to Frank to believe what he says to Bullet, but I actually am inclined to believe that he would have married her if she'd pushed the issue, given that he does in fact go back to her four times and gets them a house… his statements to Bullet that we can check, I think, mostly are lies in terms of degree (although I'm mostly thinking of the house here), not wholesale falsification like his lies to Honey — so I'd believe, for example, that he never actually told her he'd marry her (as he told Bullet) but that he would have been willing to if she'd pushed it.

I don't know of any other James in the books. I wonder where that name came from too.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Re Seventeen: I don't really understand why Voigt even bothers bringing in Cisco for a non-redemption arc, except maybe that she thought it would be interesting to see the flip side of it? (I don't find it interesting, which is why I question it. I'm kind of a sucker for redemption arc, though.)

I forgot to mention in my earlier wall of text, I'm not sure what the purpose of this is either. But I think I know why I find this book so boring: it contains so little of the Tillermans interacting. Dicey avoiding her family, avoiding Jeff, and talking to various strangers (to us, the readers) in the boat-building business is just not that engaging. And until just recently, Cisco was included in that. At least now, I can read some deeper meanings into their exchanges, which makes it more interesting.

But my favorite parts are and always have been where James is talking about college, or when Dicey is helping Maybeth with her school work. When the family's together. These are the characters I love, why so little of them?

Which makes me wonder why I love Runner so much. I guess Bullet, even when we're just inside his head, is engaging with way more interesting stuff,what with the draft and the school paper and race relations and cross-country, and he gets interesting interactions with Patrice and Tamer, and even with that one teacher who reads Housman to the class and makes them think. How many coats of paint Dicey can get on X boats in Y hours just doesn't measure up.

So yeah, that's why Seventeen is so boring for me. Not enough character interactions, too much detail of the boring, frustrating, stressful side of running an unsuccessful business. (If a sense of joy in her work permeated the book, my interest would be way higher, even if I had no interest in the topic per se.)

[cahn]

Yeah, you make a good point that Bullet actually interacts with people a lot in Runner for a book that's about a person who likes to be really solitary. And the running scenes are really good too, even though they're by himself.

I snarfed up Sons today and just started Seventeen -- I agree, I love the group scenes so much. The family scenes (one of which basically starts the book). I'm sorry to hear there aren't more of them! Ah well. I think also that the boat-building people I've seen her interact with so far are also just not that interesting (sleazy boat-builder, sleazy boat-customer, enh), whereas Patrice and Tamer and even the characters like Tommy are interesting.

(by the way, I maaaay have fairly limited screen time for the next 1.5 to 2 weeks, so if I don't reply to you or make gargantuan posts on Stranger and Sons, that's why, not because I don't love these discussions :) On the other hand I will definitely have offline time to finish up Seventeen...)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yes, exactly! The people Dicey interacts with in Seventeen are so unpleasant, it doesn't make for enjoyable reading. I also just realized that a contributing factor for me is that her *work* is so unpleasant, even though it's supposed to be something she likes. Bullet's cross-country scenes are so great in part because he's doing what's right for himself.

(by the way, I maaaay have fairly limited screen time for the next 1.5 to 2 weeks
Totally understood. After my initial burst of "Omg, a fellow Tillerman fan!"-driven obsessing, real life has returned, and especially in the last two weeks, which is why this reply is so late. I'll also be traveling most of September, and *won't* have much time for offline reading. But I'm definitely enjoying these convos!

By the way, random cross-reference:

From Dicey's Song, Millie speaking:

"I saw Ab downtown with her three children, the little girl about as pretty as your sister. They were having a race, down the sidewalk, all four of them running as fast as they could. Oh — they were having a good time.”

Dicey got back to her work, trying to see the picture Millie had been looking at: Gram a young woman, like Momma, and her three children. Momma and Bullet and John, all of them in a race. Bullet would have been last because he was smallest. Unless Momma hung back to let him beat her. That was the kind of thing Dicey thought Momma would have done. She wished she could ask Gram if that was the way it happened.

From Runner:

Bullet guessed he didn’t fault Johnny, and he didn’t fault Liza either. His eyes roamed around, watching the stars. He guessed his mother didn’t either, although he knew that she, at least, missed them. Not that she said so, not that she tried to stop Liza from going— but he could read her. And, if he remembered, he remembered how different things used to be, how different she was . . . He could remember seeing her run, her skirt tangling at her legs and himself running to try to catch her and her laughter when she pretended he had— but that was all gone, long gone, faded away, closed off. As far as he could tell, his mother didn’t miss it.

And then, continuing the scene where Millie is remembering the race in Song:

“It surely is a blessing for Ab that you turned up,” Millie said. “I guess no matter what your Momma did, Ab is happy to have you.”

“You think so?” Dicey asked.

“I guess she’s more like her old self these days,” Millie said. Dicey believed what Millie was saying because however stupid Millie might be at reading and numbers she had known Gram all of her life.

So you've got two characters remembering Ab racing with her kids*, two characters wishing she would talk about it, two characters noticing that she'd changed, and Millie observing that Ab has come full circle. Which fits with the theme we've observed of the later generation making right on the earlier generations' mistakes. The helping, healing theme. Dicey and her siblings are Gram's second chance.

* With a common element of pretending for Bullet's sake, although I *think* in Bullet it's his mother, not his sister, he's remembering holding back. The pronouns are a bit ambiguous to me there. Is that how you read it?

[cahn]

So I didn't actually mind Seventeen that much, but much of that might have been rock-bottom expectations -- I went in only remembering the boat-building parts, and was pleasantly surprised that there were any family bits at all (although far too few, of course!). I also didn't mind the boat painting as much as you did -- I think I've internalized that good craftsmanship involves a certain amount of boring repetitive work.

Good travels to you! I won't expect replies anytime soon :) (though yesssss talking Tillerman with you has been SO FUN) And due to my own Life Happening I think now it's been enough time since I read the last three books that I need to reread them before writing them up... :)

With a common element of pretending for Bullet's sake, although I *think* in Bullet it's his mother, not his sister, he's remembering holding back. The pronouns are a bit ambiguous to me there. Is that how you read it?

Yes, that's how I read it too. :( It makes me feel really sad for Gram, though happy that she gets the second chance.