Link Log, for Old Times' Sake

Here, as promised, is One More Link Log for Old Times' Sake, containing the best of what my e-friends have been posting and e-mailing. This Link Log actually started about two weeks ago but has been moved to a back burner while I've been at work on a Real Writing Job.

Categories: Animals, Censorship, Food (Yum), Health News, Philosophy, Pictures, Politics (U.S.), Politics (Virginia), Scary, Women's Issues

Amazon 

This probably deserves a separate post, because it's good news: Amazon seems to have reconsidered a policy that was discriminatory.

Recap: Last year I wrote some things posted elsewhere in exchange for Amazon giftcards, which I used to buy a few books for which I posted customer reviews on Amazon. A publisher appreciated those reviews enough to send me a set of books just for customer reviews on Amazon. I've enjoyed those books...but then, the publisher mysteriously didn't send me any more books or e-mails. Didn't I rave enough? Hmm. Another publisher liked the reviews I posted here, anyway, even when we mysteriously couldn't find my reviews on Amazon. Someone said Amazon was now posting only reviews from customers who'd bought books with a credit card. I complained that this was discriminatory. I received an e-mail that I'd broken some rule and was banned forever from posting reviews on Amazon. I replied: "What rule was that?" This weekend, I received an e-mail that my reviews were back online. I checked, and found one.



This is sooo the way it should be. My goal is to sell books, and Amazon's goal is to sell books, so we should be able to work together. (Ultimately, the little-bitty brook and the huge river flow together down to the same ocean...) I was willing to go on using Amazon, for what it's worth, despite a policy that I believed was discriminatory. I'm delighted to report that that policy has been reviewed! Here's to more customers writing thoughtful reviews of their giftcard purchases...note that I receive commissions on Amazon giftcards only if you buy them using the widget at the bottom of this screen.

Animals 

No more Petfinder links here until cookie issues are resolved, but how could this site have a Link Log without cute animal pictures? +Beth Ann Chiles looks at alpacas:

http://itsjustlife.me/trip-jazzy-acres-alpaca-ranch-leicester-north-carolina/

J.D. Tuccille could have dug deeper into the way the HSUS agitators cited here are functioning to promote species genocide for domestic animals, per Old Socialist goals of breaking up private home/pet ownership, but anyway s/he has written one of Reason.com's all-time best articles:

http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/03/are-we-all-gonna-die-if-animal-rescuers

Censorship 

The University of Oregon's President Schill makes sense. (It's news when a university president makes sense about censorship? Should this link go under "scary"?)

http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/10/24/students-who-squelch-free-speech-perpetuate-fascism-they-claim-to-oppose-university-president-says/

Christian 

Serious Catholic alternative to Halloween...

https://hubpages.com/holidays/How-The-Filipinos-Celebrate-All-Saints-And-All-Souls-Days

Food (Yum) 

This is not really a new or exotic recipe, but for me it was a new word. In the U.S. we sometimes see knackwursts or wursts; I've not seen them called Mettenden sausages before. Kale is what this recipe is all about. Here is a traditional thing to do with kale...I'm sure it has a special flavor when made with authentic German sausages, but kale tastes great (to grown-ups!) when cooked this way with almost any savory meat, or even with vegan sausages.

http://thellyscucinainternational.blogspot.com/2017/10/how-to-make-kale-with-mettenden-sausages.html

Health News 

I'm not recommending that anybody out there follow this page's advice. I'm recommending it for further research. Personal experience with this site shows that it's run by some people who have that "little learning" that is such a dangerous thing. They've done enough research to know that, yes, the A.M.A. often do hesitate to endorse "unproven, untested" remedies that do actually turn out to work--when the evidence for those remedies comes from individual patients and doctors--and, too often, rush to endorse remedies that have been "proven and tested" by short-term studies that may not have paid enough attention to long-term risks, when those short-term studies have been lavishly funded by corporations that stand to make a profit from selling prescription medications. And they've not done enough research, or taken an objective enough position, to make sure that they're not endorsing things that might be dangerous. (Laetrile, they endorse. Remember Laetrile?) Reading this site, I wondered if it was actually written by Kevin Trudeau.

As regular readers know, I have a long-term relationship with someone whose actual symptoms of Lyme Disease haven't become "chronic," but the complications have. Earlier in my life, my actual symptoms of mononucleosis and its complications became "chronic." I understand. I relate. I don't consider this man old, at all--it's a symptom that he feels "old"--nor can I imagine liking a younger man as much as I've liked him for eleven years now. The last few of which years have been spent feeling widowed all over again before the dang wedding...There are good and sufficient reasons for dumping anyone to whom you've been engaged but not married for more than two years, actually. Illness is not one of them. Illness is not a valid reason for dumping anybody. And it's not as if there were another man for whom I'd leave this one. I would like very much for his now legally adult, gainfully employed, foster son to move out, and so, no doubt, would the foster son by this time, so that I could live with my Significant Other in a legitimate middle-aged marriage--which means whatever it feels like to the partner who is feeling "older" on any given day, but, a lot of the time, it means a private nursing job without formal wages. I'd do that, yes. Even after the hormones settle down, love is still a kind of minor mental illness...grumble, grumble.

I would like it if some things mentioned on this page, which are not positively harmful, turned out to be helpful to my Significant Other. I would like it, also, if more information were available about the risks and benefits of the things mentioned on this page that are positively harmful. This is a web site that recommends laetrile, so CAVEAT LECTOR , but...people who are concerned about Lyme Disease should discuss this information, misinformation, and/or disinformation with their doctor. Some of it may help everyone move forward. I hope and pray.

https://healthwyze.org/reports/593-naturally-curing-lyme-disease-and-chronic-lyme-disease

And here's JAMA and UCSD, finally officially smelling the coffee about glyphosate...

https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2017-10-24-exposure-to-glyphosate-chemical-found-in-weed-killer-increased-over-23-years.aspx

There has to be some good health news out there. Well...what about ten days in California with the McDougalls? Southern California. In January. How good is that likely to sound? Help our e-friends recover from their losses in this autumn's fires:

[temporary sign-up link]

Marketing 

Is it possible to generate word-of-mouth advertising? Yougov says so. (This page caused "updated" Chrome to complain of "a problem." I didn't actually notice the problem, but beware.)

[Yougov list link]

Philosophy 

Recently this web site discussed Eat the Rich, a book that explains why many people have come to believe that practicing good will toward humankind means not trying to build bigger bureaucracies to keep people happy (which won't work) but leaving people free to find out what works or doesn't work for them, and find happiness in their own way (which can work). Eat the Rich (yes, two separate links) would've made a great documentary. Are you, or do you know, a documentary movie maker? Here's your chance at fame:

https://anthemfilmfestival.com/

Pictures 

+Martha DeMeo captured a really unusual image of sunshine on mist. If you miss Thomas Kinkade, you'll love this post:

http://themarthareview.com/gods-beauty/

Politics (U.S.) 

Here's an "expose" article that opens a trend I'd like to see continue: Democrats stop pushing the old dead Socialist religion and get back to the popular blue-collar type of issues that party's actual members actually support. This writer is an Obama fan...and the position of this web site is that it's about time somebody found something good to report about anyone using the name Obama, even if it seems to be mostly Michelle rather than Barack Obama. Actually, cutting through the red tape around local licensing is a bipartisan issue; in the long run it's good for business and the tax base, Republicans, as well as helping people get off the unemployment rolls. We could start with an overriding policy that any licensing requirements that reflect ability to pay, as distinct from actual competence, should be permanently ruled illegal, and any licensing board that has depended on them to keep membership down and prices up should be unable to issue licenses until they've set up a whole new licensing policy that reflects competence only.

http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/28/getting-veterans-back-to-work

Politics (Virginia) 

Here's a useful tool for rating your Virginia legislators...on a specific set of issues. Note that VTPPF's ratings, even on "protecting our rights" and "fiscal responsibility," may not be everyone's; there are links you can click to find out which specific votes may have given your legislator a different rating than you might give him/her. (Remember that one year Senator Carrico voted against a bill a lot of people liked for, he explained, the valid reason that it was likely to be overridden by federal legislation later in the year in any case, so why bother making changes that would have to be changed again before they went into effect...)

https://vtppf.org/scorecards/

On a strictly local level, e-friend Jack Beck is running for office in Wise County. He's well to my left on "big" issues, but on the local level that's not necessarily even a concern since local officials don't set policy on those "big" issues. How well Beck can represent his townsfolk, I can't really say, but I'd guess pretty well. At least he's a decent man and a solid bookseller. Wise County could do worse...I'll just add that, on the local level, Scott County has done worse, and stop before I mention any names.

https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/up-up-and-away/

And in Pittsylvania County, conservative local candidate Barbara Hancock is facing a "name" problem with a young, inexperienced challenger who happens to share the name of a respected local citizen...This web site wishes Candidate Hancock as much success as one of our local people has had in surmounting the confusion initially caused by his sharing the name of an older man who became infamous by getting charges reduced from murder to homicide, on the grounds that this older man had inadvertently shot someone while attempting to murder someone else. Really! But the younger man is not a close relative and has been doing a good job in office for the past ten years.

http://www.hancockforsupervisor.com/2017/10/same-name-syndrome-community-baffled-by.html#more

Scary Things 

If you let your mind dwell on it, this Halloween edition of the "Garfield" strip wasn't funny at all...

http://nowiknow.com/starving-garfield/

Women's Issues 

Recently I read (and reviewed, for eventual display here) a biography of Rita Hayworth. The author, a male fan, seemed to think he was writing a smooth enjoyable story; that's part of what made it so blood-boiling. In Hollywood Harvey Weinstein's behavior was not only precedented, but traditional. Male agents, directors, and producers had no respect for actresses. Women who didn't want to be exploited, cast as bimbos or worse, harassed, blackmailed, overtly treated like objects, and also ordered at best to keep it secret if they had children, did not become actresses.

We lived in California. "Did you know any movie stars?" Hah. My mother did recognize some of them, even pointed them out to me, in a discreet and respectful way. I'm not sure how many of the ones she recognized she'd ever met, apart from Tallulah Bankhead, whom many people loved but Mother loathed. She knew a lot of the women who felt that they'd failed and been ruined trying to be movie stars. And my family never went to movies or bought movie star magazines. Abstaining from movie-watching was a rule some churches had in the 1960s, but regardless of whether or not they were attending one of those churches, my parents were boycotting an industry they considered ethically unfit to survive.

I did a quick search for Hayworth on Bing just now, and what popped up as Link #2 out of 10 is so not news:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-flashback-rita-hayworth-was-sexually-harassed-by-mogul-harry-cohn-decades-1049356

It never was news. If she'd reported it, at the time, other actresses would probably have said, "So what? Who's not been through 'the casting couch' routine?"

Men, and the women who weren't being harassed, thought the ones who were being harassed were getting special benefits from what they imagined to be romantic affairs with teachers, supervisors, and customers.

http://alicewalkersgarden.com/2017/10/a-branch-sexual-abuse-in-the-present-time/

Nota bene, not a bene(fit): "A small check from my tormentor / Meant I could stay in school." And this kind of man got away with this kind of abuse of young students because there were other kids, some of whom could not stay in school, who would've said they'd have had no problem being pinched or chased around the office by Old Mr. Moneybags and taking his "small check."

Now, if this was too serious and made you want a chortlebreak...I do in fact find meaning in the inane passages Tom Woods quotes. That meaning being: "Totalitarianism is not going to be rationally defensible in the post-Soviet era, and will have to be thrust upon people by presenting information in a visual and automated form," Handmaid's Tale fashion.

[temporary link to Tom Woods' page here]

Morgan Griffith on Puerto Rico, and Other Thoughts

Due to timing, this web site has missed posting several of Morgan Griffith's e-mails in a timely fashion. I regret this, and apologize to readers, who the computer shows are reading these posts. Virginia readers can always check Congressman Griffith's web site but, if you're already here...and some of these e-mails really are too good to miss. Like these suggestions for the longsuffering U.S. citizens on Puerto Rico...seriously, we have power grid problems in the Blue Ridge Mountains like nobody's business, and I think microgrids and home-based solar (and pedal) power are excellent ideas.

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
Lessons from the Storms
The 2017 hurricane season has been the most active and destructive to the United States in a number of years. From Puerto Rico to Texas, storms have caused devastation, some of which lingers long after the hurricanes have dissipated. The challenge of rebuilding is daunting.
As part of the rebuilding process, we should learn how to better prepare for similar events in the future. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I serve, is committed to evaluating preparations for and responses to these storms. We hope that thoroughly understanding what worked and what didn’t in the 2017 hurricane season will help the country prepare for future natural disasters. The lessons learned from this year can have positive impacts across the country, not just in those areas vulnerable to hurricanes.
On October 24, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responded to Puerto Rico. I had the opportunity to chair this hearing as the Vice Chairman. We learned that the hospital ship USNS Comfort has not been fully utilized. The Food and Drug Administration also detailed setbacks to Puerto Rico’s medical products industry, which is important to the supply both in Puerto Rico and in the rest of the United States, and its plans to address potential shortages while manufacturers restore their operations.
The Energy Subcommittee, on which I also serve, will follow suit on November 2 by reviewing how energy infrastructure weathered the storms. I expect there will be important lessons at this hearing. Throughout this year, the Subcommittee has held hearings on the electrical grid, and Puerto Rico’s struggles with restoring power have highlighted the grid’s vulnerabilities as well as possible solutions.
One of several innovations put forward to get Puerto Rico back online is the use of microgrids, defined by the Microgrid Institute as “a small energy system capable of balancing captive supply and demand resources to maintain stable service within a defined boundary.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently brought attention to microgrids when he suggested that small modular nuclear reactors would suit Puerto Rico’s needs: “Wouldn’t it make abundant good sense if we had small modular reactors that literally you could put in the back of C-17 [military cargo] aircraft, transport it to an area like Puerto Rico, and push it out the back end, crank it up and plug it in?”* The idea may sound far-fetched, but this technology is actually in development in the national labs overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy and may be on the U.S. market by the middle of the next decade. Besides nuclear, renewable power could fuel microgrids as well.
Microgrids make sense for an island like Puerto Rico, but there are other contexts where they would be suitable. While the technology could be used anywhere, if flooding, a snowstorm, or another catastrophe cut off a town in the mountains from the rest of the electrical grid, microgrids could keep the lights on until conditions returned to normal.
We’ll take a look at how microgrids might help Puerto Rico and consider how they could be used as part of disaster response in the future anywhere in the country. This is just one example of how we can better understand what works and what doesn’t. If the lessons learned from these storms better prepare us for the next one, these tragedies will not have been in vain.
The “Windshield Phenomenon”
A recent study published in the scientific journal PLOS One suggests that insects are in decline. One way this finding has been made more tangible is the “windshield phenomenon.” You would once have plenty of bugs splattered on your windshield driving down a highway, but now there are fewer bugs to meet their demise as you head on down the road.
While insects are an important part of any ecosystem, I am glad this study has come out now and not, say, a year ago. If it had, the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency may have sought to ban windshields to protect the insects, or perhaps mandated that all cars be outfitted with a soft net mounted a few inches in front of their hoods and windshields so bugs would be protected from the windshield until they could fly away safely.
For History Lovers
For those of you who love history, a friend recently sent me an interesting article about Greek resistance to the Axis powers in World War II. The Greeks’ tenacious defense changed the course of the war. You can read the article here.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

* “Puerto Rico Eyed As Electricity Grid Innovation Testing Ground,” https://www.bna.com/puerto-rico-eyed-n73014467356/
"

Correspondents' Choice: October Book Links

If you earned more than US$20 in the past week, you need to support this web site. Here are the links that make it easy:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4923804

https://www.freelancer.com/u/PriscillaKing

https://www.guru.com/freelancers/priscilla-king

https://www.fiverr.com/priscillaking

https://www.iwriter.com/priscillaking 

https://www.seoclerk.com/user/PriscillaKing

You can also mail a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322.

Amazon doesn't show a page for Donald Breckinridge's new novel And Then, at the time of posting. I'm taking Jee Leong Koh's word that it will be available for a book party in New York in November. This image caption links to a picture-burdened, slow-loading, but interesting web site for multicultural books...I think JLK is trying to take up the mantle of Ishmael Reed, and as a reader I appreciate that.

Off-Amazon link: https://singaporeunbound.org/

Fair warning: Lisa De Pasquale's snarky book for "social justice warriors" comes recommended by Ann Coulter.



Lillian Duncan's novel, Puzzle House, is available in Kindle form only. Feh. If someone would be so kind as to print out a loose-leaf copy for me, I'd like to read it. It's about a person with neurofibromatosis type 2, where the benign tumors (neurofibromas) form in the brain rather than under the skin.



How do youall feel about Callista Gingrich's writing a rhyme to help children remember the names of our First Ladies? I'm not sure, myself; anyway I'd like to see what she wrote.



Liz Curtis Higgs has a new book coming out:



Marsha Cooper recommends this guide to those who enjoy watching cats and would like to draw or paint them...Google says this picture link pasted in with MC's Amazon Associate link, which is as it should be. If you click on or hover over the image of Patricia Lynne's Classic Sketchbook Cats you should see a long URL containing the letters "marshas" toward the end. Click that if you want to buy the book and give MC her commission. She's worked hard at being a good, impersonal, marketing-oriented blogger for years now, and she was a faithful e-friend to those of us who knew her on Bubblews.



Despite our sinful natures, Abigail Marsh claims, we are (or at least some of us are) "wired to be good." I' be interested in her reasoning here. If you're interested enough to spend $20, after reading the book please send it to me.



Recommended by National Review staff, this one sounds like a delightful read--the author's other translations have been endorsed by all sorts of people including Ursula K. LeGuin:

Happy Halloween! Pris Wins Lottery

Seriously. This is another whiny me-me-me post but I think it at least contains enough irony to be worth typing, unlike the me-me-me post I decided not to inflict on youall on Friday afternoon...

First, my thanks to Jim Geraghty for this priceless seasonal greeting, which explains why I'm willing to recognize a holiday I usually don't:

"
Happy Halloween! Try your best, ghosts and goblins. We live in a world with North Korean nukes, opioid addiction, Antifa, Russian hackers, a mass shooting in Las Vegas that still lacks a revealed motive, and Harvey Weinstein. Honestly, by comparison, ghosts and goblins are kind of relaxing.
"

Russian hackers? Oh dear, I hope that's not where my Russian readers have been this weekend? The computer shows a lot of Turkish readership, which may be bad, or not, and an increase in Italian readership. Well, salaam alaikum Turkish readers, benvenuti Italian readers, I hope you're all here with good intentions and I hope some of you will go to Google + and socialize a bit. Russians, too.

Now the status update: Last week I accepted a serious writing contract and spent most of my online time, and substantial amounts of my offline time, writing an e-book. The payment for the e-book is supposed to be more than I've made in any two Fridays...any two days in any market since the early days in Duffield. That's a good thing, because I wasn't able to go to Friday Market at all.

I had the e-book to finish. I hadn't left enough of it to need more than one hour to finish, on Friday, under ordinary circumstances. Circumstances have not been ordinary. I've been having a lot of celiac reactions to food that is naturally gluten-free but has evidently been contaminated with glyphosate, this fall. I've been sick as a mule through all of October and most of September. The celiac reaction itself is limited, but it compromises immunity to everything else...Some sort of boring little streptococcal infection has been going around. Early last week I noticed my usual reaction to streppy-bugs: bad breath, occasionally a prickly sensation at the back of the throat, and an energetic mood.

Then on Thursday I'd planned to go somewhere after the day online, and a car pool buddy didn't show up. So I walked about two miles carrying my nice warm laptop under my big thick blanket shawl, and the sun was bright and the temperature was about 70 degrees Fahrenheit...and what was going on? I felt cold! I felt tired! I felt as if I'd walked ten miles when the temperature was about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So I knew I had a fever. Also the back of my throat started to feel inflamed. Also instead of feeling energetic I felt exceedingly tired, spacey, and sleepy.

Most people don't become ill from most streptococcal infections so it's easy to forget, even if you've lived in the same house with someone who did, that it is occasionally possible for someone who's not already in a hospital to become seriously ill from strep. People I know joke about it, "If I have to go in I'll breathe on you!"--but it's not funny when someone is going through chemotherapy.

On Friday morning, in addition to the need to allow time to finish a writing job while feeling spacey, and the fear that I might actually be immune-compromised to develop streptococcal pneumonia like Old Sick Patients get, another reason why I didn't want to go into Friday Market was...that the weather was perfect. A friend was likely to be there. Her husband has cancer. If she was there, and I was there, she was likely to talk to me, and I was likely to breathe on her, and she was likely to go home and breathe on him. If I wasn't there, some other infected person was likely to breathe on her anyway, but at least she wouldn't remember me as the one to blame.

So I went in and fulfilled my contractual obligation and stayed away from this friend, thereby spending the last two dollars I had, and walked home. And it was a warm, sunny, delightful day for a quick two-mile walk on mostly level ground. And it felt to me like walking ten miles on a cold day, uphill. I still had a fever.

On the way I saw a garishly colored scrap of cardboard in a dry gutter. I often see them. People buy lottery tickets and throw them down without even checking whether the tickets are good for a dollar or two in online "Extra Chances" winnings.

I don't like gambling...but with state lotteries, as with charity bingo games, even though I see these things appealing to gambling addicts' weakness, I don't see them as actually gambling. When you buy a card in a charity bingo game you're donating money to a cause, and you may or may not acquire a piece of junk, which you may or may not be able to use, sell, or re-gift, as a souvenir. When you buy a state lottery ticket you're making a payment to a state fund. I'd actually support state lotteries as a desirable way to make taxation voluntary if they were covered by strict regulations that lottery revenues would be used to replace tax revenues and lower taxes, thus transferring the burden of taxation from frugal people to spendthrifts, which I don't see as a bad thing. The idea of being able to win the "Extra Chances" prize some lottery-ticket-buying wastrel threw away has always appealed to me. People who aren't going online anyway usually don't consider the "Extra Chances" prizes worth going to the computer center for, so...call it the payment this public-spirit-challenged person owes me for removing a piece of ugly litter from the road.

So I picked up the discarded lottery ticket. Lo and behold, the litterbug had bought one of the more expensive cards that contained two "instant win games, played separately" and hadn't even played the game on the back of the card. Wotta hoot! I took that ticket home.

I spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday sweating out the fever, sitting by the space heater, heating chicken soup over a candle, taking lots of naps, and agreeing with the cats that this business of being sick during my designated cat-entertaining time was a total bore. At some point, while sitting up, I scratched off the coating on the back of the lottery ticket.

Say whaaat?! It said "WIN"!

Ah, yes...I've been saying for a long time that when I win the lottery I'll remember how supportive various so-called friends and relatives have been since I became a rich man's penniless widow. Well, I remembered them. I remembered, as promised, what I've had to say to them for all these years:

Thptptpt.

And the $5 winnings were good for today's lunch and coffee, too.

Everybody wins a state lottery once in their lifetime, but, duh, what people usually win represents a big loss on what they spend. For me $5 is a real win. For the person who paid for the winning ticket, $5 was exactly the amount he or she paid...for that ticket alone...probably the amount the person paid every time he or she cashed a paycheck or went to the convenience store or whatever, for who knows how many years.

But in Maryland I knew a chap who claimed he never bought lottery tickets for himself, but one day he went to the store for a sick friend who specifically told him to buy a few tickets...and when they divided the tickets and scratched off the coating, he won the million-dollar jackpot. So he said. And I know his bank really did freeze his account for a few days while verifying his claim, and he really did retire.

I'm still feeling my normal reaction to the little streppy-bugs my now immune-challenged body hasn't completely wiped out yet. It's sort of a weird feeling to have, these days. I don't always know which members of my own generation are seriously concerned about strep infections, sometimes with good reasons, and which ones would be insulted by the idea that they need to take streppy-bugs seriously. I didn't feel bad about handing the card to the kid in the convenience store, but I felt bad when a friend came up to me in the cafe to ask if I was feeling better. I would have preferred not to get a good look at any faces, today, that are framed by even small patches of white hair...

Is it possible to find an Amazon book link to go with this story? It is easy. One of America's very best writers of scary stories happens to be remembered best for a hypothetical-scary-future story called...

Book Review: Shaggy Planet

A Fair Trade Book

Happy Halloween, Gentle Readers! If this book isn't very scarey, at least it is full of unusual costume ideas...

Title: Shaggy Planet

Author: Ron Goulart

Date: 1973

Publisher: Magnum

ISBN: none

Length: 175 pages

Quote: “'Our Peluda government is working night and day to move you wretched people out of potential war zones, and all you do is complain.' 'As a matter of fact,' said the woman, 'you didn't even reunite me with the right husband. But the one you found is better.'”

That's one of the many throwaway lines in this ridiculous novel. If it's a shaggy-dog story, well, the title warned you. 

Peluda (“furry, fuzzy, shaggy”) is a space colony experimenting with a big totalitarian government that helps people, and not getting the experiment right. Agent Peter Torres is called in to investigate the disappearance of a government official, which coincides with a sudden up-surge in the population of a native species called hummels that look like shaggy dogs.

There's not much science in this fiction; it's a space spy story with talking robots, weird weapons including sprays that can turn a specific target into a member of a different species, and incompetent bureaucrats. Torres continually uses his enemies' competence against them and is continually frustrated by his allies' incompetence. It's funny if you're able to suspend disbelief long enough and pay attention, which I have to admit I found difficult.

If, on the other hand, you choose to read it as satire rather than either science or suspense, then it becomes as hilarious as the blurb writers promise...and although the targets of satire were relevant in 1973, I found them no less relevant in 2013. 

The author known as Ron Goulart (among other names) is still living, although retired, so Shaggy Planet is a Fair Trade Book. You can buy it here for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment. (You'll probably see prices below $5 on Amazon, but if you add the eight or ten more books of this size that will fit into a $5 package, you'll start cleaning up on shipping charges.) Upon receipt of a money order for $10 (plus $5 for each additional book in the package) by Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or Paypal payment of $11 (plus $5 for each additional book in the package) at the address you get by e-mailing this web site's published e-mail address that you're interested in Shaggy Planet, we'll send $1 per book (by him) to Goulart or a charity of his choice. In addition to browsing this web site for more Fair Trade Books (click on "A FAIR TRADE BOOK" at the bottom of this post) you might want to check the Wikipedia entry for Goulart's other pen names and publications--he was quite a prolific writer. 

From time to time this web site reminds people that you don't have to find a book here to buy it here. If you're buying a book this web site has reviewed or linked to, you're automatically entitled to suggest another book, of your choice, for discussion here. 

Book Review: The Ninth Directive

Title: The 9^th Directive

Author: Adam Hall

Date: 1966

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: none

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “Certain information came in and it was decided that action was indicated. No fewer than eight directives were planned and examined before the decision was formalized. This is the ninth, and it has now become a definite mission.”

Fair disclosure: I don't consider myself competent to evaluate spy stories. This is a spy story.

An Englishman, Quiller, the protagonist in a series of spy stories of which this is #2, is assigned to protect an unidentified but very important “Person” from assassins in Bangkok. A specific assassin is suspected. Quiller doesn't like or trust the spy relaying his instructions and feels bad about being ordered to kill a stranger who, though Quiller believes he's on the enemy side, may not actually be the one planning to kill “the Person”...and sure enough, the violence when “the Person” arrives is a bombing not a shooting. Quiller has to give up merely following orders and find out what's going on.

Although it's not a nice story about nice people, The 9^th Directive is free from obscenity. Violent deaths and mayhem are described in as detached and off-scene a way as possible. Quiller's mind is on work not sex, although there is of course an attractive female spy and part of their investigation of each other takes place (offstage) in a hotel room. When the people Quiller knows “swear” they use “good, clean” profanity; what they say may be vile but the individual words would be properly used in church, not that any of the characters noticeably attends one.

I didn't like it, but people who enjoy spy stories evidently do. To buy The 9th Directive here, send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. Several editions exist, some bulkier than others, but you could probably get at least three more books into the same package with whichever edition of this book you've ordered.

Book Review: The People Time Forgot

Title: The People Time Forgot

Author: Alice Gibbons

Date: 1981

Publisher: Christian Publications

ISBN: 0-87509-405-8

Length: 346 pages

Quote: “Now you have come with the gospel, and we want to thank the Christians in America who sent you to us...we want new missionaries to take your place.”

One of the last pockets of Stone Age culture was the Damal tribe of Irian Jaya, Indonesia...and while it's easy to fall in love with the quaint, Green, often beautiful “folk cultures” of prehistoric or barely-literate tribes, it's also easy to forget the horrible effects some superstition or other has had on most groups of illiterate people. This web site has had few readers in Indonesia and can talk frankly about that country. So let's be frank...first, about richer, more "modern" countries.

Before discussing the Damal tribe, may I remind readers of the finger-sacrifice scene that opens Christy, the crazy confusion about diseases of which pruritus was actually an effect but was believed to be a cause even into the twentieth century, the blood feuds in some parts of Europe and North Africa and North America, the myths spun to support the perversion-even-of-slavery that was legal in the United States up to 1865, the violent opposition of European doctors to the idea of washing their hands in between patients, and the still ongoing efforts to market making unwanted babies and having surgical abortions as “liberating” for our most poorly educated young people. The Damal had no monopoly on stupid, crazy, barbaric, anti-Christian, anti-Islamic, anti-Humanist, and generally unaccountable behavior. Readers from the Global South are entitled to say “And what price your superstitions?” We have several, not all of them the cute, harmless kind like picking up unusual stones/leaves/flowers “for luck.” Some of us still believe in separate “human races.”

That said...the scenes with which we meet the pre-Christian, un-Muslim Damal tribe, as The People Time Forgot, read like an exaggeration a corrupt mission might have concocted for fundraising purposes. They're not. Independent research determined that some situations may have been even worse than the missionaries thought.

In many Stone Age cultures and even in some literate ones, tradition required men and women to eat separately and follow different dietary rules. In some of these cultures, most or all protein foods were designated for men only. Most notably in the Fore tribe, protein-starved women took to sneaking out at night to dig up and eat freshly buried human corpses. Rumor spread through the islands that women were cannibals and might kill someone—through “witchcraft” if not outright murder—in order to eat his or her flesh. So when a child died, not only were its parents unlikely to console each other, but its father was likely to blame and kill its mother. And these people lost a lot of children. They blamed “witches” when adults died, too. The protagonist of the story that opens this book, Meyong, a reluctant child bride, will soon be fleeing for her life when her brother-in-law dies in a perfectly natural accident...and although Meyong didn't cause or expect the brother-in-law's death, and doesn't tell the missionaries whether she ate some portion of his dead body, she emphasizes and reiterates that she was just awfully hungry when he died. In the 1990s women like Meyong, and younger people who had been the babies in their arms, would die horribly from kuru, the human equivalent of Mad Cow Disease, a direct consequence of cannibalism.

(Richard Rhodes' Deadly Feasts, which reported preliminary studies linking kuru with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in the Global North, is the book I remember. Amazon is currently touting a newer study of this subject that I've not read, Robert Klitzman's Trembling Mountain.)

Islam is also a missionary religion, and Muslim missionaries are credited with raising the cultural standards of some parts of Indonesia, but they hadn't reached the Damal people. Alice and Don Gibbons, and others from their church, were the first to confront the devastating effects of this tribe's primitive superstition. Some twentieth century missionaries, like Elisabeth Elliot, brought back lessons the English-speaking world could learn from insular low-tech communities; apart from feeling like cornered rats who had to kill or be killed whenever they saw a foreigner, the Waorani apparently had many good ideas. Other insular low-tech communities, like the heart-sacrificing Aztecs and like the crypto-cannibals in some parts of Indonesia, seem to have reached points from which their cultures could either convert to foreign customs pronto or self-destruct.

It's fashionable and politically correct to deride the claim that Stone Age people who had been “converted” to religions they didn't understand were grateful to either Christian or Muslim missionaries. Phillis Wheatley (was she even thirteen years old at the time?) wrote her little exercises in poetic form: “'Twas God who brought me from my native land.” Modern readers squirm and mutter, “Oh, right!” Then we consider the puberty rites Wheatley was likely to have escaped by being enslaved, and the fact that even rich girls, in the eighteenth century, weren't always rewarded for writing poems, and we have to admit the possibility that Wheatley might really have meant...that her “owners” might have been better suited to bring up little Phillis than her own parents had been. Eww, ick, how could anything about slavery have been good? Slavery as practiced by the English colonists in North America was an abomination. Still, some say that “All things work together for good...”

Islam stopped most Arabs selectively killing girl babies, and many North Africans practicing body mutilation rituals that killed many young people. Catholicism stopped Aztecs sacrificing freshly killed human hearts. Protestantism stopped desperate, destitute “Auca” people fighting the rest of humankind. Protestant Christian missionaries likewise stopped “witchcraft” and witch hunting among the Damal people. Humanists...should try to control their envy. They may mean well, but blather about the beauty of primitive wood carving hardly compares with getting bereaved men to console rather than murder their wives.

Were other effects of contact between Stone Age people and missionaries less salutary? Yes. Where the sincerely benevolent missionaries went,the greedy traders always followed. But that's not the Gibbons' subject in The People Time Forgot. Should it be? Would people like the Damal have been any less bait for greedy traders if they'd not been hastily “converted”? Somehow I doubt that. Time was doomed to catch up with the Damal. If greedheads sponsored missions in order to be able to draw up unjust contracts before local people had read enough to recognize the injustice, at least the missionaries offered the local people the chance to learn to read, to adopt styles that helped them blend into city crowds, to know what new technology was used for. Sometimes one suspects that those who act as if it were such a terrible thing to “convert” a Culturally Disadvantaged Person really resent the person's being even that much less disadvantaged.

In 1981 books like The People Time Forgot were still raising money for remote area missions. Today many of those efforts are being carried on by indigenous people who no longer need foreign teachers, although many still accept money from the U.S. or Canada; mission efforts are most needed in cities. However, The People Time Forgot is a primary document of history...

Fair disclosure: I first read this book with an older relative who was an active Republican. We talked about the historical fact that, although President Obama's stepfather was a rich urban Indonesian rather than a Damal or Fore or other remote area tribesman, the incidents described in this book come from the time and, in a general way, the place where the former President was growing up. We suspected that the Obama administration's rural policy, which we agreed was very bad, was influenced by his unusual perspective—growing up in a place where “rural poor" might have meant “confirmed cannibals”! I'm glad I didn't get around to posting this book online during the Obama Administration, that most of the people whose idea of “conservative political discourse” didn't have this piece of information to pick at in their childish way. The last thing anybody at this web site ever wants to do is blame people for growing up in “Third World” countries. But I will say that being in Indonesia in the 1970s seems to account for Obama's difficulty appreciating the American agrarian tradition. We salute people who've grown up in such interesting times as “the Third World countries” have had in the past century...but we say, with all due respect, those people are unqualified even to discuss rural North America.

About missionary efforts...there's still an active web site for www.cmalliance.org . When I checked, it noted that the Gibbons and Richardsons were missionaries. It discusses what their churches are still doing. Some countries still need missionary help, although the emphasis shifted rather quickly from "emergency medical treatment and basic literacy training" to "advanced medical supplies for teaching hospitals, advanced mechanical and computer skills training, and advanced English grammar and literature courses for people who want to publish writing in English." Modern missionaries are less likely to convert headhunters than they are to teach university-level classes, but the need for mission service still exists.

The People Time Forgot is a bargain at $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment. (It's available at that price because it's been widely distributed.) Feel free to add newer books (or older ones) to the $5 package.

Tim Kaine Meets with Military Spouses

(Edited to remove typographical error from the title.)

Editorial comment: Employment for the young people shown in the pretty picture that fouled up the browser? All well and good. What about fair compensation for older military spouses who can't even think about employment because they are full-time caretakers?

Anyway. From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA):

"
This week, I joined military spouses and business leaders in Arlington for a summit on improving employment opportunities. We discussed obstacles to employment for military spouses – like moving from place to place and dealing with credentialing and licensure across state lines – and successful strategies businesses have implemented to recruit and welcome military spouses into their workforces.

This event started a good dialogue about how our businesses and institutions can support military spouses. We talked about what Congress can do to help and how we can work more closely with our Governors, businesses, and military installation commanders to address unemployment issues. This event was a positive step and I believe the conversation we had opened up eyes in the room to the magnitude of this challenge that military families are facing and will ultimately bring positive change.
"

Book Review: Pure Lust

Title: Pure Lust

Author: Mary Daly

Date: 1984

Publisher: Beacon

ISBN: 0-8070-1505-9

Length: 448 pages plus 2 indices

Quote: “The title Pure Lust is double-sided. On one side, it Names the deadly dis-passion that prevails in patriarchy—the life-hating lechery that rapes and kills...Primarily...Pure Lust names the high humor, hope, and cosmic accord/harmony of those women who choose to escape...This lust is...astral. It is pure Passion.”

Yesterday this web site discussed a popular "romance" novel and pronounced it pornography. Today we consider a nonfiction book whose frequent references to sexuality definitely rate PG-13, but which I do not consider to be pornography. Here are no detailed descriptions of sexual acts; no effort to stir up sexual thoughts or feelings in the reader. Daly's intention is to cheer and encourage feminist activists who were discouraged by the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. She does this with her trademark combination of rarefied intellectualism, quirky humor, and wacky wordplay. Her study of philosophy and theology at Fribourg is more prominent here than it is in Gyn/Ecology or Wickedary, but she's never above illuminating a point with a reference to a pop song, TV show, novel, memoir...or "interview" with her cat.

At no time in life have I ever been allowed to forget that the English/German word “lust” is not a true synonym for “lechery.” "Lechery," rather than either "lust" or "luxury," is the correct English name for the Deadly Sin of Luxuria. For reasons a child never fully understood, my parents enjoyed reminding themselves, and us, that “lust” is a closer synonym to “libido”--for better and for worse. Life force. Animal spirits. “Desire,” in the Buddhist sense. It can mean the desire to possess things, the appetite for food and other creature comforts, cravings for power or status (or luxuries!). Dad used to title wish lists “Lust List.” The official rationale for this was so that we'd remember that although lust is a Deadly Sin, it's neither the only Deadly Sin, but nor always even a real sin—it can be just an animal instinct. In older English, and apparently even in modern German, “lust” had positive meanings; a “lusty crew” of young people didn't mean lascivious young people so much as energetic, enthusiastic ones. German families chose “Lust” and “Lustig” as family names.

Raising the irony to “News of the Weird” level when, a few years ago, the real legal name of a sex offender was found to be Lust...

Anyway, for those who don't know, the late, great Mary Daly was a Catholic scholar turned feminist scholar turned feminist humorist. Her writing is very much an acquired taste, acquired almost exclusively by women. She usually tried to write on more than one level; in a sense her books were deadly serious, and the ones about women's history and theological history were excruciatingly researched; at the same time they were meant to elicit chortles, and they do. Her affinity for wordplay led to the most popular of her books, the Wickedary, a dictionary that presented English words in slightly modified ways to reflect a radical feminist worldview; in Pure Lust the first index is an “Index of New Words”: “anamnesia,” “biocide,” “foresister,” “Crone-logical,” “Nag-Gnostic,” and many more. She self-identified as a “Revolting Hag,” explaining that women could hear a difference between “She is a Revolting Hag” as a simple description or even a tribute, and “She is a revolting hag” as an insult coming from someone who lacked feminist consciousness.

(I've never been sure whether I wanted to meet her. I've never met a woman who agreed with me about the way to make “She is a Revolting Hag” sound unmistakably different from “She is a revolting hag.” I've often described Daly, in writing, as "the glorious, uproarious, Revolting Hag of Boston," but I've never felt confident that I could say that in the way I meant it.)

A middle-aged woman in active revolt against boring dead-end jobs and dry, androcentric writing, Daly's “Elemental Feminist Philosophy” urged women to invest their energies in “Journeys beyond the State of Lechery,” to focus on desires for “abundance of be-ing,” “wisdom, joy, and power,” “a focused gynergetic will to break through the obstacles that block the flow of Female Force.” She encouraged her audience to celebrate their “rich diversity...We are Augurs, Brewsters, Dikes, Dragons, Dryads, Fates, Phoenixes, Gorgons, Maenads, Muses, Naiads, Nixies, Gnomes, Norns, Nymphs, Oceanids, Oreads, Orishas, Pixies, Prudes, Salamanders, Scolds, Shrews, Sibyls, Sirens, Soothsayers, Sprites, Stiffs, Sylphs, Undines, Viragos, Virgins, Vixens, Websters, Weirds.” Virginity, or even monogamy, was not yet considered liberating—Daly wrote things that inspired those of us who reclaimed abstinence as liberating—so Daly shrewdly commented that “One definition of the adjective virgin is 'never cap­tured: UNSUBDUED.' Wild virgins assume this definition for ourselves.,By thus breaking the rules of common usage we show that we are...Wantons,” ellipsis original, meaning “lacking discipline: not susceptible to control: UNRULY...excessively merry or gay: FROLICSOME.”

Feminist writing and activism often involved talking and writing about sexual abuse. Often the language was raunchy, and undeniably there were documents of abuse (which were, of course, absolutely evil acts when non-consensual) that gave young feminists furtive ideas about things we wanted to go home and do, consensually. So Daly wrote: “A Scold is...'of ribald speech...addicted to abusive language' (O.E.D.)...Female truth-telling—scolding--about phallic lust predictably will be called ribald and abusive.”

Sometimes I think, hope, that young women don't remember what Daly and her audience were trying to change, even as late as 1984. According to pop culture men were supposed to want to flop into bed with any woman, at any time, unless of course they'd reached a consensus with their peer group that certain women were too old, fat, ugly, or “crazy” (usually in the sense of independent, real mental illness rarely serving as a deterrent to sexual misadventures) to appeal to any man. Women were supposed to want to flop into bed with any man, at any time, too, only women were also burdened with the responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancies and not being tagged as shameless sluts, so while men were supposed to keep saying “Let's, let's, let's” women were supposed to keep saying “No, no, no” while nonverbally suggesting that they wanted to say yes. “If you kiss me, of course, you would have to use force, but you surely are stronger than I am.” 

In the 1980s women were starting to call out all the rape and harassment this aspect of pop culture was generating. It still remained for younger, sometimes self-styled “womanist” or “post-feminist,” typically late baby-boomers or early Generation X, to prune back the stupidity. Most men do not in fact want to have sex all day and every day, men and women are capable of sex-free friendship if they choose it, “no” means “no,” “yes” means “yes” and is what we say if we mean “yes,” and...beyond that...In the 1970s Inez Garcia famously shot and killed a rapist. Feminists cheered. Boys whined, “Wouldn't it be more liberating for her just to have said yes?” Well, actually, no. By 1990 there was more of a consensus that the really liberating thing for her to have done would have been to have taken control of the encounter and defused the man's desire, while keeping her clothes on. Any self-respecting Bright Young Thing could release a man's tensions without so much as crumpling her blouse. For further details, if needed, one could consult the novels of Alice Walker...

In the 1980s women were slowly becoming aware that, if a man indecently exposed himself to us, we had choices: the empathy hug with quick caress, the braying laugh, the snip gesture, the loudly drawled “Is that the best you can do?” I think women who came of age hearing about these choices probably always opted for the empathy hug. (Well, I did.) Older women were still saying, expecting sympathy, “Of course I quit that job after that pervert exposed himself to me at the bus stop,” and we were finally starting to say, “You mean—if he was all that repulsive—you couldn't ask someone to walk with you, or call the police, or just say 'Wow, I've never seen such a little one'?”

Writers like Daly, who was shamelessly, blatantly anti-male, who never missed a wisecrack at the expense of men, whose general tone could be read as “If you've always liked your brother, shame on you,” were part of the change. I have to say that their overall effect was good. My brother happened to be about as congenial, and my natural sister about as uncongenial, as children could be when we were growing up. I didn't need to be told that Daly's vision of women celebrating a sisterhood in rich diversity was a deliberate visualization of a desired outcome. Her sneers at all fathers, all brothers, all sons, all priests, all male writers, at all males whatsoever and wherever they might be (she adopted only female cats), were a stereotype—based in a less than satisfactory early life, as narrated in Outercourse—invoked to encourage women to share the dream of sisterhood. I was about twenty years old when I discovered this writer, still mired in the morbid self-consciousness of the very young. Even then I knew I'd been much luckier in life than Daly. But bitter herbs have a cleansing and healing effect on the body, and the bitter feminist writers, of whom Daly was surely the best, had a cleansing and healing effect on American thought.

So, do today's women still need to be reminded to celebrate our potential as Naiads, Nixies, and Norns—elemental feminine spirits credited by folklore with Powers, at least of having more fun than mortal women were supposed to have? Hmph. In Germany we recently heard of an organized act of rape-as-terrorism during which, apparently, all the women involved were not only unarmed but toothless. Not only Nixies to lure those lousy creeps into deep water, and Norns to warn them of their short unhappy lives, but Maenads with Labryes seem to have been called for.

But seriously...once men get it through their heads that gender polarity does not mean they score any points for acting like jerks, women are not doomed to that happy henhouse vision of Daly's. We can celebrate gynergy, at conventions and suchlike, but we can also enjoy the company of normal men. Once they learn that they're expected to make their company enjoyable, in real life most men find that easier than several other things they expect themselves to do.

What, seriously, did Daly believe and teach? As an excommunicated Catholic, she found supporters and publishers in the Unitarian Universalist Church, which has been known to affirm both Paganism and political lesbianism. Daly wrote with sympathy for those groups, although she was older than most of the lesbians and accustomed to celibacy, and her own theology of “God the Verb,” a Supreme “Be-ing” that transcended gender and number and just about anything traditional religious thought had ever said about It, was very different from the campy “Let us pray just like we use-ta: let us pray to Zarathustra” sort of Paganism. (Daly was neither whole-Bible nor fundamentalist, but it's worth mentioning, to Christian readers, that what she wrote about “God the Verb” is more biblically accurate than many Christian sermons; she had been a Bible scholar.) She was, of course, a leftist, though back when that meant “opposed to nuclear proliferation and the draft and the Vietnam War” it was an easier position to respect than it has become. There are plenty of digs at the Reagan Administration and the Religious Right in her books.

The philosophical “Realms of Spheres” she addresses in Pure Lust are considerations of the question “What do women want?” The First Realm addresses discontentedness with “the Sadosociety” of Catholic culture, which, in the twentieth century, tended to equate virtue with altruism and “selflessness,” which were often equated with women's sacrificing themselves to the mere self-aggrandizement of male “superiors” in the church hierarchy. “In courses of anamnesia, of unforgetting... we...weave the way toward Naming our own Real Presence. Weirds conjure the courage to Sin—to realize be-ing.” The Second Realm explores disparities between authentic “passions” and socially ingrained “emotions,” what women really want and what they've been told they're supposed to want. The Third Realm of “Metamorphospheres,” “Belonging, Befriending, and Bewitching,” presents “Stamina as its own reward. Here thinking is also thanking,” and women revel in largely hypothetical ecstasies of creativity.

In real life, do most women still want families more than friends? (Most do.) Do women who really want to “create” actually prefer mindless labor jobs to jobs that use up some small portion of our talent? (Well, I do, in the sense that I'd rather be paid to wash windows than to write dishonest product-supportive articles.) Do we even want female friends? Real friends, as serious creative introverts like Daly or like C.S. Lewis used the term, and not just any random female willing to bray about her private body parts and functions across the partition in a public restroom, as Gwen Macsai seemed to define “girlfriends” around the turn of the century? 

If I never have a “girlfriend” like Gwen Macsai, I'll be pleased...but real synergistic partners, like the actress with whom I used to write poems, or the housemate with whom I foster-mothered a teenager, or the woman with whom I mopped up what was left of the typing business in the 1980s, or either of the women with whom I worked on books, are gifts from God, loved without physical passion but with no less loyalty than husbands or children should be. Women who say they've never liked other women much or had much luck with same-sex friendship are deeply to be pitied. So, of course, are the ones who mistake mere extroversion for friendship.

Women are complex beings. At some times our “angel” natures, our cerebral qualities, seem subsumed in our “ape” functions of bearing and nursing babies. In the twentieth century we naïvely thought that, since baby-making isn't going to satisfy a woman's creativity after age fifty, women who wanted “careers” should either forego motherhood altogether, or leave the babies behind as soon as they had medical permission to go back to work, and try not to mention or think about their children on the job. Women who've been successful both inside and outside The Home now seem to be reaching a consensus that that was all wrong, that women can and should devote themselves to nursing babies for as long as five years after the birth, that the overall effect this has on the brain may actually boost these women's intelligence (or is it just that the sex hormones have done their bit and begun to subside?). 

In Pure Lust Daly seems to suggest that creative friendship might go beyond just meeting the emotional “needs” that cause teenaged girls to take their boyfriends seriously, that women might either choose a sorority-house lifestyle over marriage, or at least focus their minds on working in teams with other women and think of marriage and motherhood as mere, banal body functions like digestion. This is surely an exaggeration, though not as extreme an exaggeration of Daly's actual life choices as it is of most women's. Yet nature does give women a considerable amount of time during which, even if we've chosen to center our lives around children, we don't have children, and our emotional lives will invariably center around whatever comes closest to being the creative work we do, and whoever come closest to being our working partners. In 1984 Daly was at this stage of life—the stage from which I'm writing this review, the “Croning”--and she was revelling in it, presenting it as the culmination of a career for which even full-time motherhood might be seen as a preparation. And now I'm old enough to say that, about that, she was right.

Many animals start dying when they stop reproducing. Human women typically get at least fifteen years—a short human generation—of declining fertility, followed by twenty to forty years—a full human generation, or two—of complete sterility. Those of us who've made reasonably prudent health choices and chosen reasonably healthy ancestors are likely to be active and productive for up to sixty years after the stage of life that can be dominated by sex. And even those of us who didn't have menstrual problems can experience this postsexual phase of life as a time of steady energy, emotional peace, and vibrant health. We have more energy and more intelligence to give to our work than any hormone-raddled twenty-year-old ever had. 

If celebrating these facts of life requires a little defiance of androcentric business culture, the kind of thing Daly actually describes when she gets down to the details of the “Wicked Witching” she commends—writing and promoting other women's books, travelling, socializing, working in women's health clinics and classes, teaching, protesting, helping younger women escape harmful situations—makes her exaggerated descriptions of “breaking Terrible Taboos,” “Labrys-wielding,” “Raging” that “demands “Shrewd as well as Fiery judgment,” etc., richly ironic and hilariously encouraging.

Not every woman wants to invest the time it takes to read 448 pages of this, and those who don't think they'll enjoy Pure Lust are unlikely to miss anything. Those who do enjoy it, however, will find much insight and encouragement in it. This is a useful book for young women and a useful book for active Crones. Its once-timely topical wisecracks have become historical, but enough of its content is evergreen that it deserves to stay in print.