Librargh

<rant>

In Yellowstone
Once upon a time there were three bears. Baby Bear came back home before breakfast with a smirk on his face. It was like him to do that, smirk before breakfast. Mommy Bear made porridge.
"Where you been all morning?"
"Getting beat up. They said I talk like a polar bear."
They sat watching the TV because the porridge was too hot. A steaming bowl of mushy grain product. China dishes. The red tablecloth on top of the cheap wooden table bought for twenty-five dollars at a garage sale held by Mommy Bear's sister. There was no Daddy Bear anymore. His philandering with many mistresses had been sneaky at first, and once found out he had arranged a messy divorce. They only had two chairs.
"We should go for a walk."
A walk. They will pass the time it takes for the porridge to cool down by taking an ordinary walk. While they are out a girl named Goldilocks comes along and enters their house.
My daughter Goldilocks, she loves to read.
Her mother always.
Goldilocks tried both bowls of porridge, the second one being just right. How fun it will be to narrate the eating of the porridge to Robert Sproul, who had turned and gone home too early. Goldilocks tested the house's furniture. One excessively large chair. One just right. One bed with too much give in the mattress. One perfect. Stucco walls glistening like... uh... stucco doesn't glisten. Ceilings like parchment. Dirt floor littered with Baby Bear's toys. Sentence fragments.
The bears return in the present tense.
We found Goldilocks in my bed and ate her.
The bears were upset that their house had been invaded. Mommy Bear decided it would be best to move out. A boy in a non-human-infested part of the world isn't chased down by truancy officers. I am a god-fearing American Grizzly Bear just as patriotic as any other, so why must my boy be taken away from me just because he likes to go to the zoo?
It was the CIA. The CIA is responsible for Goldilocks.
The bears defected to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union wants maps, contents of garbage cans, locations of campsites. It was a worker's paradise, better in every way than America but not perfect.
The bears return in the present tense.
Mommy Bear made porridge.
They sat watching the TV because the porridge was too hot. A steaming bowl of mushy grain product. China dishes. The red tablecloth on top of the cheap wooden table bought for twenty-five dollars at a garage sale held by Mommy Bear's sister. There was no Daddy Bear anymore. His philandering with many mistresses had been sneaky at first, and once found out he had arranged a messy divorce. They only had two chairs.

</rant>










...if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not the biggest fan of DeLillo's writing style.

The obligatory bird referene post for Libra

Lee Harvey Oswald asks how many people know a killdeer is a bird.

Photo by me.

Now you do.

I apparently take killdeer for granted, and thus this is the best photo I have of any. The bird on the far left and the bird on the far right are both killdeer. In the middle are one spotted sandpiper and one solitary sandpiper.

If you want to see some live killdeer, head down to the Fourth Street extension just north of Windsor Rd (or anywhere else south of St. Mary's Rd). There was a nest last week near Atkins Tennis Center, though last I checked I couldn't find any evidence of it having been there. Considering the pestering and distraction displays I got from the adult killdeer in the area, though, there are probably chicks hiding somewhere.

ANYWAY,

This is the part where I get all  conspiracy theory-y and say that DeLilo purposely picked the killdeer as his random bird encyclopedia reference.

To start off with, it has the word "kill" in it, so we wonder about what other alphabetically adjacent encyclopedia entries Oswald was interested in.

Secondly, killdeer fit in very well as imagery for Win Everett's failed assassination plot (note that this might be an example of me reading waaaaaaaay too much specific biological importance into a nature reference, similar to my reaction every time I see mention of orchids). The killdeer's most notable behavior is that they will lead predators away from their nests and young by pretending to have a broken wing. It's actually a really fun display to watch, and pretty convincing. One of the parent birds will make a lot of noise and partially extend one wing while sitting on the ground, occasionally twitching it to make a point of its fictional injury. Movement of the wing and the bird's bright reddish-brown tail also help divert attention. When approached, the displaying bird will run along the ground, keeping just enough distance between itself and the predator to be safe but still a potential food item. This continues until the predator is deemed to be far enough away from the nest, at which point the bird ends the charade, spreads both wings, and flies away, eventually looping back around to its nest.

Specifics aside, killdeer are the classic example of diversion tactics in nature; there are other organisms that do this, but kildeer are the ones that end up in textbooks.

Everett's plot, then is like a killdeer's display: he is going to enact a life-threatening situation (broken wing/assassination attempt) that is ultimately fake, but convincing enough to lead nosy people to where Everett wants them (away from the nest/in support of an invasion of Cuba) while leaving the important target (mommy bird/JFK) unscathed.

After all, there are plenty of other weirdly-named birds that could have been used, one of which would be an even more blatant symbol:

(unfortunately, I have no photos of this bird)

Snipe.

The half-baked mechanics of time travel

As a science-fiction author, Butler isn’t content to simply say “it just is that way”, even in a novel she describes as fantasy. Though at first she seems to disregard the more nitpicky aspects of time travel, there are some instances in the novel where the 

 We can add plenty of more metaphorical interpretations to Dana losing her arm in the wall, but the way I interpreted it at first was a simple answer to an obvious question: it's established fairly early on that Dana moves slightly in space between the time she leaves and returns to the present, so what happens if she happens to move into an area where there's an obstacle?

The original Star Trek series had to answer the question of "why do Kirk and Spock never beam into a wall when using the transporter?" This was explained by the one-way accuracy of transporter pads. It was safe to beam crewmembers into a large open area on a planet's surface, but in order to move them from ship to ship there had to be a corresponding receiving apparatus on the other end to make sure they didn't end up like Dana. Transporter technology presumably got better as time went on, since this rule was disregarded in later Star Trek series.

Anyway, Butler gives a pretty clear answer to the question: yes, Dana's movements in space are random, and thus it is possible for her to wind up halfway inside of a wall. Certain versions of the X-Men storyline (superhero comic writers like to create alternate realities and retcon things out the wazoo) involve Nightcrawler dying from this sort of accident.

Butler does a fairly good job of sweeping other potential time-travel issues under the rug. Dana makes a point of not testing the paradox. However, there's one instance that I'm really kind of annoyed by.

Why is Rufus still in the past?

When Dana timeported while Kevin was holding on to her, Kevin got dragged into the past. Similarly, Kevin gets pulled back to the present when he tackles Dana during the confrontation with Rufus. So if a person in direct contact with Dana undergoes the same temporal displacement, why does the dead body of Rufus, which is clinging tightly to her arm, turn into a wall instead of following her to the present?

Does it not work on dead people?

Even so, is Rufus entirely dead at that point? 

The NaNoWriMo forums, which are a great place to look for answers to the weirdest questions you've ever wondered about, suggest that people are still alive for a while after losing consciousness from stab wounds.

The problem isn't so much that there's a loophole in the time travel--if I wanted to be really picky, I'd go after stuff like "why isn't the dirt under her feet timeported as well?" The problem is that this is a pretty blatant inconsistency, to the point of being distracting and causing tangents that lead to discussion of the finer details.

Oh, well. I guess I'll use a catch-all explanation:

Metaphorical license.