captivity_narratives epitome of incomprehensibility What a prof called a class of mine. Essentially it was about literature in early American history, but this was the unifying theme. Fast forward two years. A few hours ago, I was at Coles looking for some mystery-type books to buy for my uncle who's coming to visit Monday. One of the books on sale was Jaycee Dugard's memoir; I looked at it and thought, "I can't start reading that; it'd put me in a morbid mood and it already gets dark early." So what do I do? I meander over to the biography section and skim-read most of the way through Robert Fowler's book about being captured by an Al-Q'aida-affiliated group in north-central Africa. Perhaps the survival tips are useful. Perhaps I'm trying to convince myself that I'm not as trapped as I think. 141227 ... e_o_i Mary Jemison, or Deh-he-wä-mis, was an interesting case. Her family were English settlers to the colonies, before it became United States. When she was just a kid (Wikipedia says 12 but I remembered 15 for some reason), in the 1750s, her parents were killed by the Shawnee and she was sort of capture-adopted by the Seneca. She decided to stay with them and married twice (her first husband dying young). As an older woman, she did a fair amount of negotiating on behalf of the "Indians" and she told her story to a minister who published it (she'd always kept her English, though I don't know if she could write or how well). I was telling my brother about this, noting that the settlers were all afraid that the Native people were picking girls/women to capture so they could sexually abuse them, but this was mostly not the case: rather they thought girls would be easier to assimilate to their culture. Mr. Idealism responds with something like, "Exactly, they didn't rape anybody. Women and men were entirely equal in their society." Ms. Epitome goes, "But but but there were a lot of different societies," and then says, in attempted slyness, that it's ironic that they were all about assimilating the white invaders before the white invaders were all about assimilating them. Of course, then Mr. Idealist says that the Europeans did it on a worse scale, with a heaping helping of genocide, and the epitome's inclined to agree. But it doesn't mean this culture is inherently better than that culture... I believe he thinks that Celtic culture is actually the best. More bagpipes = more culture? India would be very cultured then, just more quietly cultured. 150109 what's it to you? who go blather from