Abigail Nussey

This post is a couple of weeks overdue, but I might as well get it up on here anyway — Book 1 of the Shadows Cast Series has been completed.

SYNOPSIS: Fhala-Nyda Unica Laeke Rees couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t at war. A child of the Reformation of the planet Ghalua by its sister planet Kandur, the native of Ghalua found herself at the center of the Resistance at a young age. After failing to break her hero out of prison, she was incarcerated on Kandur as a psychopathic criminal under the care of Tor Jukinan, a Kanduraa philosopher and scientist of the Reformation. Years later the war has ended but once again conflict looms on the horizon, and Rees is forced to work with her old enemy Jukinan in order to save millions of lives from plunging into the darkness of another race-based campaign. As the appointed War Scholar of her new world Aradonya, a satellite of the distant gaseous planet Ladis, can Rees save millions of inhabitants from a senseless war of hate—all the while securing peace and absolution for herself, at long last?

Note that this is the rough draft; at this point I have edited 3 1/2 of the 15 total chapters, and don’t expect to complete the first edit until mid-August (since I will be away for three weeks at the NKS Summer School in Burlington, VT).

I’ve been working on the Shadows Cast concept for four years, and the bulk of the first book was written since October 2009.

I also have about 1/2 of Book 2 of the Shadows Cast Series completed.

And now, a poem in Kanduraa (the original language of the series) to tide you over:

ADIM ELORIATIS ZA (ONLY ON SUCH A MORNING)

Adim eloriatis za apea
tralina ridesian antenasi;
adim ayn u’arei jaire retainki
esia, en ko, piya kedra, teri’are.

Only on such a morning could I
breathe with shuddering gasps;
only when the rain pounds on my
chest, or you, sweet lover, lie on it.

Here are a few good recent hits from around the web:

Jezebel: Girls are Pink, Boys are Blue: On Toddlers and Gender Roles

So how can parents challenge stereotypical notions of gender? Eliot suggests that it isn’t as easy as giving a girl a raygun and having a boy play with My Little Pony: “Many parents have tried this, to little effect. Girls turned the trucks into families, boys played catch with the dolls, and both sexes knew there was something fishy going on.” She instead suggests that parents consider buying toys such as Legos for girls, which encourage “the kind of visuospatial skill that is linked to higher mathematic achievement,” and perhaps getting your son a pet, as it encourages boys to be nurturing and patient.

One wonders, however, how much influence a child’s peers have on their understanding of, and adherence to, gender roles. It’s certainly important for parents to challenge gender stereotypes, but unless the rest of the world joins in, children are going to be faced with, say, classmates who pull a truck from a girl’s hands and yell, “This is a boy’s toy!” or science and math teachers who overlook a girl’s contributions to the class, or fail to encourage her to participate, due to an ingrained belief that women do not excel in these fields. Perhaps the best anyone can do, as Eliot notes, is to just try to provide kids with as equal a playing ground as possible: “”I don’t want to be accused of saying it’s all environment and it’s all parents, I just want to right the ship. As a mother of both a daughter and sons, I believe we’ve got to find a better balance.”

“Victims of Social Leveling” by Leonard E. Read

EconLog, “Matching Narrative to Policy“

Mark Thoma writes,

Regulators certainly made mistakes, and there is plenty of room for improvement, but does that mean we should abandon attempts to regulate? Of course not.

It is hard to argue against the proposition that better regulation would be better. But for regulation to be better, I think there has to be some correspondence between the narrative of what went wrong and the proposed regulatory change.I am to be talking on this at a conference in a couple of days. My current thoughts.

1. My own narrative is that the causes of the problem were a) clumsy capital regulations, which induced a lot of financial innovation that was primarily aimed at regulatory arbitrage; b) housing policy that encouraged lenient, subsidized mortgage credit; c) the suits vs. geeks divide, with people in power (in both large banks and among regulators) having too much confidence and too little knowledge.

2. My policy recommendations match my narrative. Assume that regulation will be clumsy, and aim for a system that is easy to fix as opposed to hard to break; get rid of all policies that encourage lenient subsidized mortgage credit. and break up the 10 largest banks into about 40 banks.

3. The current financial regulation bill matches nobody’s narrative. I will explain this view in more detail subsequently. Briefly:

–if the problem was that we deregulated too much over the past 20 years, then why doesn’t the bill simply reset regulations to what they were 20 years ago? or 30 years ago?

–if the problem was that house price increases and mortgage leverage got out of hand, then why does government policy continue to try to push mortgage loans with low down payments?

–if the problem is that lenders were exploiting borrowers (which would justify a focus on consumer protection), then why is it that we ended up bailing out the lenders?

This is the great Shirley Verrett singing Eboli from Don Carlo. The video is a BBC Telecast from 1971. This is truly wonderful, she’s a master. Her high notes are exquisite!

Also note the gorgeous use of chest voice (not easy to pull off for many of those schooled in the Western technique…).

This site’s still under heavy construction, but I wanted to point you to a couple of new pages:

Art Gallery (link)

This is a gallery of a selection of my work, mostly taken from 2005 – 2006 when I was on a bit of a visual art bender.

Note that I took classes at the New England Realist Art Center with Dennis W. Cheaney for about nine months. These oil paintings (and some others not yet put up on this page) were done during those classes. The pencil sketches and oil pastels were done largely before I started taking classes.

Publications (link)

Though I’ve only really begun attempting to get a few of my things published, I put together a page on which I’ll post each new publication. Right now it is a (very) short list of articles, poetry, blogs, and Demonstrations.

This site’s still under heavy construction, but I wanted to point you to a couple of new pages:

Novel Projects: (link)

This page gives titles and expected dates of completion for all my current novel projects. Note that most are still in concept-stage, though the Shadows Cast series is quite heavily researched at this point, one book very close to completion.

Poetry: (link)

This page has a short selection of some of my better poetry. I include the month/year written under the title, as it is usually quite relevant.

Stay tuned for more updates. Since I’m making the final push for the first book in the Shadows Cast series I don’t really have much time to devote to this site, but I plan on making it my main online jumping-off-point, so it will be beefed up with more content over time.

Hello, fellows and fellas. This site is under construction. Please stay tuned for updates. Ciao!