It boggles my mind.
I reread L.M. Montgomery's Rainbow Valley recently. It portrays a wide variety of parenting styles. The one that stuck with me was a widowed Presbyterian priest who neglects his children *horribly* - doesn't ever know where they are, hardly talks to them from day to day, doesn't provide them with proper clothing either for the weather or the prevailing social standards, allows them to be malnourished - and sometimes starved - and to live in squalor (because the housekeeper's an elderly relative and he doesn't want to offend her by getting someone who can cook and clean).
There's one chapter where his son Carl's done some awful social sin (I think it's the time they sang Polly-Wolly-Doodle in the graveyard during the Methodist prayer meeting) and he decides he has to whip Carl. So he goes to the woods and cuts a switch - not that one, it's too heavy, oh no, not that one, it's too light, it was a serious error, after all - and eventually calls Carl up to his study, agonises some more, then lets him go. The title of the chapter is 'Carl is - not - whipped.'
I'm not sure if I'm meant to read in a subtext of he neglected and ignored them all, but at least he didn't hit him, but I do.
Which is all completely beside the point.
Or the Prince Myshkins' Nothing on the Moon.
"And now that the fog is not allowed,
They're picketing the cloud
And sueing the monsoon,
Somehow the good visibility
Allows us all to see
The slogans on the moon..."
Recent past: Elsewhere and Nevernever by Will Shetterly. I hadn't managed to get hold of them any earlier. One of my friends ordered them online and I borrowed her copies.
Just finished: Dear John, by Richard Berry. He lived in England for four years, and wrote a letter to the Prime Minister back home every week until he returned to Australia. Until I summarised it just then, it didn't occur to me to compare it to The Odyssey. Penelope and her weaving make an interesting metaphor for government, though.
In the middle of: Birds of Prey: Old Friends, New Enemies, by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land, Dick Giordano et al. Comics TPB. I like some fierce, smart, strong Barbara Gordon in my comics.
Next in the to-read pile: Partnership, by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball, because I need some mush in my literary diet, and it's been a long time between rereads.
The thing about parliament (UK, Canadian or Australian) is that it means 'let's talk'. This is what I like about it.
Good grief that article was puffy. If I hadn't read and enjoyed her in Starlight 1, I'd have been put off trying her.
You know what? I prefer Brust and Lindholm's "Gypsy". To the CNN's version, I mean.
It brings to mind how I felt when they brought the internet censorship act into Australia. This can't be happening. Oh wait, it is. Yeah, but they can't make it work. That doesn't mean they're going to give. OK, so they'll do it, but everyone will ignore it. Yeah.
Racing round and round in my head.
Kevin: I'm sure the molluscs *did* make it in the Philippines. What I want to know is where they got the hands!
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