My brain likes to do two things when I'm trying to sleep

[conuly]

The first is make weird noises and strings of words that sound like they ought to be meaningful but ultimately aren't. If I'm very tired, I also get a light show. This doesn't help me fall asleep even a little.

If that doesn't work to keep me up, it likes to throw out random questions and try to make me think about them. This is an asshole move, because I've long since learned that thinking is a sure way to stay awake, so at bedtime I practice *not* thinking. This is tricky, because the underthought is something like _{"Am I doing it yet? Am I? Wait, shut up. Hm. Hm. Yay I did it! Crap."} It is hard to get the underthought to stop thinking, but the effort makes me sleepy. Anyway, a couple of these asshole questions in recent weeks are actually kinda interesting, even though I'm not myself interested in doing the work to come up with answers, so here they are in case anybody else is:

1. So, how would world history have been different if Europeans really had had widespread potatoes and Native Americans had tame/tameable horses prior to 1492? Potatoes are a way more productive crop than grains, really, and don't require you to subsidize a miller, and gosh, horses are just useful amirite? But horses aren't that likely, because you can't carry them on boats (well, unless they're big boats), unlike potatoes and, more importantly, sweet potatoes which is how we know for sure sure sure that there was some contact between Polynesians and (South) Americans in prehistory, the sweet potatoes. I wonder if Polynesians could've given them chickens, though. They certainly could have carried potatoes back to Asia. How much contact was there between Asian and Polynesian cultures anyway?

2. Is the reason so many rite of passage/coming of age stories in kidlit/ya take place during summer vacation because it's a liminal period between one grade and the next? Or, better yet, one type of school and the next? Wait, in order to answer that we'd first have to better define "rite of passage/coming of age" story... and I'm also thinking of stories involving, like, divorce or losing friends due to growing apart or sickness stories, so maybe I mean growing up stories? But like, hardcore growing up stories, because obvs all stories are about maturing as a person or else what the hell is the point? - and then we'd have to show that they ARE more commonly set during summer vacation than other times and who wants to spend the time to do that? Am I only thinking all this because I like the word "liminal"? (Yes, yes I was.)

This was a strictly defined "couple", not a permeable "couple". Most of the questions my brain throws out at bedtime aren't very good at all.

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Comments

[alexseanchai]

re 2, two words. No homework.

[conuly]

That's what I told my brain, but it kept poking me. I refused.

[notasupervillain]

Liminal is a pretty great word, though.

[conuly]

Isn't it!?

[redbird]

Yes, the Polynesians could have given South Americans chickens--they did so in this timeline. The interesting questions include why the chickens didn't spread further than they did? Did they arrive too late (carbon-dating puts those remnants sometime in the 1300s)?

South Americans also domesticated rice, but that rice was replaced by imported varieties after the European conquests. That, too, we have from archeology; the article I read noted it as the only known case in which a useful plant was provably domesticated three different times.

[author_by_night]

I think there's also just more time, pragmatically, in the summer for these novels. You don't have to deal with them having homework and school sports and stuff. :P

Also, I think summer IS a very teachable time IRL for a lot of kids, if not in as much of a dramatic way. You get more free reign to learn life things. You travel, you work a summer job, you just have to make your own fun because your parents are working. So you experience things you just don't experience in the school year.

[oracne]

For horses, you could just say that some of the pre-human horse species in the Americas never died out.

[brokenallbroken]

That's what I was going to say, yes. During school one's time is spoken for and hemmed in, put in a series of neat boxes for purpose. Places to be, things to do. Summer is when kids have time for that sort of thing, and the time they have is porous and elastic.

[conuly]

I could! But were those pre-human horse species really suited for domestication? Or were they more like zebras in that regard?

[conuly]

1. Fascinating!
2. Also fascinating!

[conuly]

Yup, that's all because it's a liminal period. (Seriously, say the word. Li min al. Doesn't it just roll off the tongue?)

[isis]

The first is make weird noises and strings of words that sound like they ought to be meaningful but ultimately aren't. If I'm very tired, I also get a light show. This doesn't help me fall asleep even a little.

Huh, my brain does this too, but for me it's a feature and not a bug. In fact sometimes when I'm having difficulty sleeping, I try to let my mind drift to hear those weird noises and phrases, or to form the visual variations I'm "seeing" into faces or bodies, and that usually gets me to fall asleep.

Re your first question, I know it's considered flawed but I thought Guns, Germs, and Steel had a lot of interesting points. I imagine that potatoes arriving in Europe earlier would have made less difference, since they had domesticated staple grains, but that earlier horses in the Americas would have been huge.

[conuly]

I'm glad it works for you even if it doesn't for me!

As for potatoes, surely some of it depends on when we introduce them, yes? Potatoes in the 12th century - small impact. Widespread potatoes during the early days of the Roman Republic? Possibly a greater effect!

[thewayne]

Have you ever read 1421: The Year China Discovered America? It's about the huge Chinese trade fleets. Quite impressive and controversial.

https://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp/0061564893/

[cloudsinvenice]

I think they get to piggyback the reader's own emotions about the long summer holidays, too, which helps...

[nodrog]

I agree, but interpreted more widely - no irrelevant regimentation.  This is why, for example, the characters in Archie Comics, who are supposedly in high school, seem more like college students with a very light course load - because the reality of that full-time job sitting in class all day would damp any fun, kill any storyline - except during summer vacation.

[nodrog]

Oh, the whole topic of pre-Columbian Europeans and vice versa runs deep with me.  We have the shadow, the footprint, the circumstantial evidence for Bronze Age Europe in the New World, but the tangible proof has yet to emerge.  A single bead of Egyptian faience found in a British passage grave was all it took to prove trade links existed; a single bronze artifact in an American mound or Mayan pyramid would do the same…

“Horses Disappear From North America”

[nodrog]

Surely, purely coincidence, coming across this.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/earth_temperature_timeline.png

[halfshellvenus]

the underthought is something like "Am I doing it yet? Am I? Wait, shut up. Hm. Hm. Yay I did it! Crap."

Hahahaha! Or maybe that should be, *cries* Because that is my life on a nightly basis. ;)

That 'identical character' meme was a hoot. I don't know all the characters, and the House/Perry Cox one didn't quite work for me. Han and Chewie vs. Calvin and Hobbes? Wonderful. :D

[conuly]

I completely see House and Dr. Cox, though to be fair I thought Han/Calvin, Chewie/Hobbes was a stretch... despite how much I want to see the Falcon turned into a sled!

[conuly]

Yeah, but books and TV shows set during the school year get around that by either having the students spend very little time in class (Archie) or by having them goof off and pass notes throughout class except when they're napping (Archie again, Saved By the Bell, everything else) or just ignoring the fact that they're in school.

Re: Coming of Age

[nodrog]

But as your own phrasing shows, that’s wrong - and coming-of-age stories are not supposed to be wrong.  In fact, the good ones are plusright!  Not just right but better!  I’m thinking of a story I read where the boy’s society had industrialized and climbed straight out of the atmosphere - Space 1889, so to speak - so their social customs were still primitive.  Specifically, they were set up rather like a military academy:  The rite of manhood was to kill a Great Beast, and have that “bombing mission tally” tattooed on your forehead, and until then you were a “blankie,” a plebe, an earthworm, &c.  Because it didn’t stop there; doing it again conferred higher privilege.  The “upperclassmen” had four such tallies.

But there were no Great Beasts in space!  So the scorned, “blankie” character had a problem!  Then these aliens show up, and he sorts them out, and the upshot of it was the recognition that brains and disciplined, logical problem-solving can count by themselves, that there’s more than one kind of “Great Beast” in life if you think about it, and so he is awarded his tally after all.  The epilogue had an older character grousing like a medieval knight that this would make their own triumphs against actual Great Beasts meaningless, and he was told, Yah, well, time marches on.

The moral of the story being that “coming of age” just might mean maturing the society in the process.

[Note also - I’m sure you already have - the encouragement this gives to the grade-school bookworm nerd who reads science fiction stories, to persevere against the “pep-rally culture” around him that glorifies the school athletes who get the girls and the glory.  Buckle down to those books!  Living well is the best revenge!  Recall the epilogue to Back to the Future, where McFly the former nerd is now a successful author and Biff the former school bully is practically bowing and scraping to him.  Neener neener!

Alice Cooper, “School’s Out”

[nodrog]

You can also look farther, to what is meant by “summer vacation.”  To take a brutal example, Red Dawn (1984).

        Well, we got no choice
        All the girls and boys
        Makin’ all that noise
        ’Cause they found new toys

        Well, we can’t salute ya
        Can’t find a flag
        If that don’t suit ya
        That’s a drag

        School’s out for summer
        School’s out forever
        School’s been blown to pieces…

They certainly came of age, in a Sarajevo / Mogadishu / Afghanistan fashion.  That they were effectively destroyed thereby - well, see the First World War.    https://g.co/kgs/qYQn2d


The key element is an obliterating change, a change of state.


        No more pencils, no more books
        No more teacher’s dirty looks
        Out for summer
        Out till fall


Normally this is comfortable, expected - but it need not be.

“I’m also thinking of stories involving, like, divorce or losing friends
due to growing apart or sickness stories, so maybe I mean growing up stories?”

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Eyes


p.s.  If you really want to get weird, you could count several of John Norman’s Gor books into this, but I ain’t touchin’ that.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

1. A. Potatoes are nutritious and yummy, and can be grown just about anywhere there's enough water for them, so I'm sure they'd have been wildly popular whenever they were introduced. Not sure they'd have made a huge difference socially, though, because Europe already had a lot of root vegetables. Turnips and rutabagas can do just about anything potatoes can do.

I too have to mentally edit out the edible nightshade family from tales with medieval settings. It's like in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Xena, or, The Warrior Princess (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html):

"And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's versicon
And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon"

1.B. If the Native Americans had had tame horses before the Spanish brought them, the entire history of the world might have been quite different. One reason the American tribes fell so easily to conquest was because they were all isolated from each other - a horse culture would have linked tribes over wider distances. Of course, just as in Europe and Asia, 'linking' means raiding as well as trading; a horse culture tends to be a warrior culture, so European invaders would not have gotten the initial foothold they did - maybe no foothold ever.

2. A. Summer vacation is intrinsically liminal. Anything can happen in that space between leaving one grade (or school) and starting another, away from the daily/weekly/monthly grind of the school year, and away from the critical eyes of peers and teachers. In summer the weather is warm, the days are long, and - not having school - kids are more at liberty to go do things on their own.

2.B. All stories are not necessarily about maturing as a person, unless one defines 'maturing' as 'whatever happens to a person over time'. Plenty of stories are plot-driven rather than character-driven: the point is the action, and how it affects the protagonist's personal development isn't really pertinent, especially if the protagonist is doing well just to survive from one chapter to the next.

[conuly]

Ah, well, there's my big secret: I don't like heavily plot driven stories too much. I think of them as necessary vehicles for reluctant readers and otherwise try not to think much about them at all.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I've been an insatiably voracious reader since I learned to read at age 3, and I like plot-driven stories just fine. Comes of cutting my literary teeth on my father's old sci-fi paperbacks back in the 60's - a lot of those stories had fantastic plots, but no more character development than was absolutely necessary to move them along.

[conuly]

Well, to each their own, I guess :)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

True that. However,

"I think of them as necessary vehicles for reluctant readers"

... consider that some of them may only be 'reluctant' because they don't much care for character-driven stories. Guys of the tech/engineering mindset are often that way. My daughter's fiance writes beautiful descriptions of settings with nobody in them - it's like the literary equivalent of Myst, if you remember that game. He mostly finds character-driven fiction tiresome and sticky.

One of my former students would tell me long, rambling tales of the book he was "writing" - actually only thinking about writing, without all the bother of putting pen to paper. The stories were pretty good, though, except that all his characters were nameless, faceless cardboard. I finally insisted that he give ONE of them an actual name, and write a chapter in which that character does something - he did it, but it was incredibly hard for him even to think of a name and a rudimentary personal history for a single character.

Hard for me to grok, because names and personal histories and complicated relationships spring instantly to my brain when I start spinning stories. My problem is the opposite: my characters have way too much inner life, while outer life is passing them by - which is very authentic when one's writing immortal Elves in an enchanted forest, as I was, but really, SO much navel-gazing! Talk about 'sticky'; my chars were always wading through the Bog of Eternal Angst. A good story really needs a balance of plot, character and setting, which is not so easy to achieve.