The character of Abdullah in Ann Chamberlin's 'The Sultan's Daughter'

Ann Chamberlin's historical novel The Sultan's Daughter (1997) has a character, Abdullah, who is a classic example of a eunuch character in fiction. He is self-aware and articulate. This is a good book to read for a presentation of the theme of personal loss as expressed by a fictional eunuch character.

Characters

This story takes place in the 1560s during Suleiman's reign. Suleiman's 40-year-old son, Selim, is a drunkard. His grandson, Murad, has taken as a concubine the beautiful Venetian-born Safiye, formerly known as Sofia Baffo. Safiye acquires a eunuch servant of Hungarian origin. She witnesses him being punished by having the soles of his feet whipped (the punishment is carried out by other eunuchs, specifically those who are categorized as racially "black"), and his nose, teeth, and fingers are also broken before she rescues him. She names him Ghazanfer. He speaks "in the laconic, hissing way the lack of teeth and outward masculinity forced him to." (p. 90) Safiye orders him what to say and what to believe (pp. 110, 120)

Murad's sister is Esmikhan Sultan. She is married to Sokolli Pasha, and she has a eunuch servant named Abdullah, who narrates most of the book. He is a young Venetian who was recently castrated in Pera. Abdullah has a relatively egalitarian relationship with Esmikhan. For example, he sits in her presence. (p. 37)

The women are not especially happy with their male partners. Although the eunuchs Abdullah and Ghazanfer are supposed to guard their mistresses' honor, both pairs – Esmikhan Sultan and Abdullah, and Safiye and Ghazanfer – have a sexual relationship. The eunuchs do not have relationships with anyone else, and seem not to be jealous of the women's relationships with other men.

Esmikhan has not been able to bear a surviving child. Of his relationship with her, Abdullah says: "We were two halves suddenly one, the failed single sexes suddenly whole. Or if we were whole the way we were, which her presence often made me feel, together we had double the space in which to stretch our humanity." (p. 170) And he speaks this defense of her: "At least she never thinks me inferior for a loss that is not my fault. She thinks I have gifts to offer, even as I am. Exactly as I am." (p. 186) He suspects that women perceive him as "nothing but a cold, dowdy eunuch who can never have known true attachment" (p. 312), but he is indeed attached to Esmikhan.

Abdullah thinks to himself:

"The real, enduring Esmikhan, I decided, was neither the physical, living body who had bloomed and caught Ferhad's young eyes, nor the thing that hung like a dead weight from Sokolli Pasha's marriage contract. Her essence was something else again, no easier to describe than the nature of a reflection. I remembered the first evening I'd met her, dressed as a bride, and that secret, invisible thing that had passed between us on the road from Kutahiya which has made me say on occasion that we were married, she and I. Being neither male nor female, but having in me the attributes of both, it was I who was most qualified to love the eternal reflection of my lady that was neither living nor dead. Indeed, I believe, when there is true love between mortals of any sex or between man and God, that is the part that is loved.

Abdullah does not think highly of Ghazanfer, and refers to him on more than one occasion as a "monster" (pp. 207, 257, 277).

Eunuch roles and stereotypes

Eunuchs (khadim, singular; khuddam, plural) in this society may travel between men's space (public space) and women's space (private space). They must ensure that women do not leave the harem unless they are veiled and guarded, and that the veil is maintained in the presence of any male guests who come into the harem. Their role is not merely organizational, but also involves the implementation: They open and close doors, hold up curtains, and carry messages. In rare cases, they are addressed as Ustadh as a greatly respectful honorific. (p. 180) By contrast, being called a "capon" is a great insult. (p. 184)

Eunuchs are often given feminine names. Abdullah's former male name was Veniero, and after his castration, he was originally supposed to be called "Lulu," but he managed to refuse that name and to go by Abdullah instead. (p. 37) Safiye's servant was originally called Hyacinth, but she renamed him Ghazanfer ("bold lion"). (p. 84)

They are said to have a manner of folding their arms across their chest, which seems to represent passivity or patience. (p. 21) Esmikhan says: "I'm afraid it's a khadim's lot in life to be ignored much of the time." (p. 37) They are fed the meat of calves rather than adult cattle. (p. 317) With effort, they may become "immune" to the "infection" of the influence of beautiful women. (p. 22, 57, 334) Abdullah is wary of becoming a "gossipy khadim and a talemonger" (p. 38) and resolves "to refuse the image of the eunuch, the wounded boy in need of mothering..." (p. 180)

Safiye thinks to herself that they are "whiny, shrill, gossipy, silly half-men like so many geese. They were worse than the lay sisters in the convent....That's where all you men keep your brains. One cut takes it all." (p. 56) She complains of being stuck in a place "crawling with dour eunuchs". (p. 320) Abdullah wonders: "Had the ability to feel Christianity been cut from me along with the rest?" (p. 174) When he gains four assistants, he notes that they "typified the worst infamy of eunuchs: the dull, fat, lazy stereotype from which we suffer." (p. 302)

The permanence of a eunuch's condition

This book does not have any castration scenes, but the reader gradually gains small amounts of information about what happened to Abdullah at the house in Pera. The house was dark (p. 21); he was given sweets laced with opium (p. 148); a man named Salah ud-Din had castrated him (p. 291); the severed parts may have been eaten by dogs in the street (p. 202); and his friend, a Syrian merchant named Husayn who was a husband and father, had avenged him by stabbing Salah ud-Din in the heart and then castrating the corpse. (pp. 186, 291) Husayn escaped punishment for committing murder by disguising himself as a Sufi dervish, a belief system he genuinely adopted as his own.

He asks a midwife if his maleness can be restored. She answers no. "By heaven, I was almost relieved to hear it, her sentence of lifeless life. A sort of desperate panic that had been eating at my heart – most would have called it hope – took love's poison and died." [Here, "love's poison" refers to aconite.] The midwife mentions that she could introduce him opium-smoking to assuage his existential problems, but that if the problem is the lack of a penis, she might as well justify a similar habit in herself. (p. 43)

Abdullah is aware of his "charcoal smudge" of beard and his "spayed, stripling cheek" (p. 38). Among the words used to describe his condition are "sexlessness" (p. 38), "unmanned" (p. 46), and "ball-less" (p. 186) He worries: "I can never wear Italian clothes again without a codpiece." (p. 163) When a man awkwardly tells him to "gather your things and – you're a free...you're free," Abdullah frets privately that, since he can't be a free man, "was there any use in freedom at all?" (p. 174)

Self-awareness

Abdullah has a good amount of self-awareness of his own emotions and of his role in his society, as expressed in these statements:

One cruel cut had put all hope of love forever beyond my grasp.
Esmikhan Sultan owns my body, I reminded myself. But not my heart, not my soul. My still-raw pain told me I would die before I gave those to anyone. (p. 16)

But the manhood left to me was not considered the equal of pirates or shipwreck anymore. I was meant to have no purpose other than the protection of this sanctuary behind the grilles. (p. 19)

It had been so long since anyone had consulted my desires in anything, perhaps that part of me had totally atrophied. Did I even know how to want anymore? (p. 185)

[No man] feign[s] a lack of manhood in a eunuch's dress – unless he's nothing left to lose. (p. 203)

I made my way thus far through acre after acre of nothing but men, carrying no more news than that my lady had bathed this morning and was once more willing, anxious to receive her lord. And these were the manliest of men who smoothed their chest-long moustaches protectively as they watched me pass. They guessed my message. This embarrassed me to the very root of all I was missing. (p. 206)

What else is a eunuch for if not to take his lady's most urgent messages to the outside world? (p. 251)

That a noblewoman's virtue is sometimes set but low on men's scale of values does not erase the fact that it was my whole reason for being." (p. 302)

Irony

Abdullah has an ironic awareness. He lacks "manhood in vague generality" yet must guard his mistress against the threat posed by masculine individuals. (p. 19) He thinks about "how overwhelming the task of a eunuch was – to somehow be stronger than men who are real men" (p. 237). His fellow eunuchs – dressed in robes and cone-shaped turbans, and anointed with "very feminine perfumes" – filled their "thick and heavily jeweled fingers" with fattening sweets (honey pastries and sherbets), making it less likely that they would ever do men's work aboard a ship. (p. 20) The springtime reminds him of new life but also of the anniversary of his castration (p. 21) and specifically of "when the pain and shame of my condition had been new upon me and I had been unable to feel anything beyond that." (p. 291) In the presence of a newborn boy, he feels "a bitter sort of awe" at being reminded of his own loss of that which was "only flesh" and also of his ability to make a "miniature self," that is, to reproduce. (p. 217)

Page numbers from:
Ann Chamberlin. The Sultan's Daughter. New York: Forge, 1997.

Image at the top of the article: A 16th-century painting of Sultan Suleyman I the Magnificent of the Ottoman Empire. GNU General Public License Wikimedia Commons.

How Karl Rove used Valerie Plame to discredit an anti-war argument

Scott McClellan claimed in his book 'What Happened' that he did not know Karl Rove was partly responsible for leaking Valerie Plame's name to the New York Times.

While President George W. Bush's primary intent behind overthrowing Saddam Hussein was to promote peace in the Middle East, the invasion was "marketed" to the public based on the need to disable Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, according to Scott McClellan in his 2008 book What Happened. McClellan served as Bush's press secretary beginning shortly after the invasion of Iraq and he helped to promote the latter thesis in favor of the war.

The false claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction led to one of the major scandals surrounding the Iraq War: the administration's deliberate leak of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame, ostensibly to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador to Africa under President Clinton and an active opponent of the war.

In January 2002, while the administration was still building its case for invasion, Plame helped arrange her husband's trip to Niger to investigate the authenticity of a certain set of documents that purported to establish Iraq's attempts to buy fissile uranium concentrate, or "yellowcake," from Niger. Wilson concluded that the documents were forgeries that contained false information. He had "every confidence" that his information was indeed "circulated to the appropriate officials within our government," as he insisted in an opinion piece in the New York Times over a year later. Unfortunately, he believed that his report "did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq" and, he feared, if his report was deliberately ignored, then we must conclude that "we went to war under false pretenses."

The Iraq-Niger uranium link was intended to be presented in a speech Bush delivered on Oct. 7, 2002, but the reference was deleted by deputy national security advisor Steve Hadley on the advice of CIA director George Tenet who explained to him that there was insufficient evidence. Unfortunately, when Hadley helped finalize the Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address, he forgot his prior discussion with Tenet; as a result, in that address, Bush delivered the infamous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The CIA admitted that the intelligence behind this claim had actually been a forgery and that the information was false. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the UN's nuclear inspection group IAEA, also agreed that "these documents...are in fact not authentic."

The Bush administration wanted to discredit Wilson's findings on his investigative trip to Niger and his opposition to the war. To this end, Bush permitted people in his administration to reveal classified information from the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to defend the claim that Iraq wanted to obtain uranium from African countries.

Behind the scenes – and without Bush's knowledge, according to McClellan – Valerie Plame's name, identity as a CIA operative, and role in organizing the Niger trip were leaked to journalists by vice presidential aide Scooter Libby, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and press secretary Ari Fleischer, under direction of Vice President Dick Cheney. The above individuals spoke to reporters after being guaranteed anonymity. It is possible that some of them may not have realized at the time that her identity was classified.

The pot boiled over when, on July 14, 2003, Robert Novak published these lines:

"Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."

According to McClellan, the first "senior administration official" in question was Richard Armitage; the secondary source, who simply confirmed the information for the article, was Karl Rove.

Cheney, with his aide Scooter Libby, had researched Wilson, discovered his wife's role, and began talking about the situation to discredit Wilson. Bush "was only generally aware of this larger campaign" led by Cheney and he permitted Cheney to use the information on Iraq in the NIE to discredit Wilson's findings to the contrary. This constituted an "informal" or "secret" declassification of the NIE; it would later be formally declassified. Bush kept this action secret from McClellan throughout the scandal, until casually admitting it to him in April 2006.

The heart of the scandal took place in July 2003. It was then that Rove disclosed Plame's identity to Time's White House correspondent Matt Cooper, although he managed to keep his involvement secret for two years. Three days later, Novak published the column that identified Plame as a CIA operative. Press secretary Ari Fleischer let slip to reporters that the Iraq-Niger uranium link had been entirely based on the forged documents, and, also within three days, lost his job to Scott McClellan. Although national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said the NIE couldn't be declassified because the White House didn't want to do "selective declassification," the NIE was formally declassified a week later. By the end of the month, Steve Hadley offered to resign because he felt personally responsible for the misinformation in the 2003 State of the Union and felt that Tenet had been unfairly scapegoated for the error.

That September, reporters began asking McClellan if Karl Rove, specifically, was responsible for the leak of Valerie Plame's name. Rove personally assured McClellan three times that he was not involved in the Plame leak, and McClellan passed on that information to the press. He soon defended Scooter Libby in the same way upon request from the president and vice president. "I had allowed myself to be deceived into unknowingly passing along a falsehood," he wrote in his book.

Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times were subpoenaed but refused to provide the names of the men they were defending: respectively, Rove and Libby. In August 2004, they were both found in contempt of court. Cooper never served jail time because Rove gave him permission at the last minute to divulge his name, but Miller ultimately served 85 days in jail in the summer of 2005 before receiving permission from Libby. Libby continued to serve as aide to the vice president until his indictment on Oct. 28. It was then revealed that he had spoken about Plame to both Miller and Cooper (although not to Novak), and that he had used former press secretary Ari Fleischer as a conduit for furthering the leak, when Fleischer did not realize the information was classified.

No one was convicted of the leak, but Libby was convicted of four felony counts of perjury and obstruction, fined $250,000 and sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Bush had repeatedly said throughout 2003 that he would fire anyone involved in the leak. In particular, he had assured an AP reporter that "If the person [involved in the leaking of Plame's name] has violated law, the person will be taken care of." Did he fire Libby? Quite the contrary: instead, he gave a new layer of meaning to the notion of "taking care of" the guilty party when he commuted Libby's prison sentence to two years of probation. (Libby was pardoned by President Trump in 2018.)

Many crucial details about the leak remain a mystery, and it is a subject of debate whether any crime was committed and exactly what that crime would be. One thing is clear, however: The whole scandal caught fire because the Bush administration promoted false information about Iraq before, during, and after the invasion of that country; covered up independent research that challenged the dominant myth; and launched a personal and partisan campaign to discredit and damage a husband and wife who sought the truth.

In 2019, Valerie Plane announced she was running as a Democrat for Congress. A September 9, 2019 video on YouTube features her saying: "I was an undercover CIA operative. My assignment was preventing rogue states and terrorists from getting nuclear weapons...Then, Dick Cheney's chief of staff took revenge against my husband and leaked my identity. His name: Scooter Libby. Guess who pardoned him last year? [image of Trump]...My service was cut short when my own government betrayed me....Mr. President, I've got a few scores to settle." She lost the election.

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Related: The Downing Street memo, originally written in July 2002 and published in a newspaper in May 2005. The memo said that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Photo: Valerie Plame speaking at Brown University on Dec. 5, 2007. © Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license Wikimedia Commons.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 29, 2008.

An abused boy is a tragic figure in M. A. McRae's novel 'Not a Man'

Shuki, a young eunuch, is repeatedly abused by men in the novel Not a Man. He and his fellow adolescents learn a good deal about sex as they grow up. Originally posted to Helium Network on May 13, 2014.

M. A. McRae's novel Not a Man is a sordid tale of a child sex slave. Written with a good amount of tenderness, the subject matter is nonetheless hard to take, especially with such a great quantity of words and repetitive anecdotes about abuse.

The premise

Not a Man is set in the modern world, probably in the mid-20th century, given the references to technology. The story opens in an Arab nation that is never named. Shuki, whose family is impoverished, is a 10-year-old sex slave to a wealthy man named Hassanel Daoud who is of English descent and was raised Arab according to his stepfather's culture. Hassanel often puts the boy in restraints and allows other men to have their way with him. The boy puts up with it because he knows his family needs the money and because he sees "Uncle Hass" as his caretaker.

Hassanel asks Shuki if he will consent to a "small operation" that he likens to a circumcision but does not explain any more fully; he bribes Shuki with the promise of gifts. Shuki is drugged and gagged as a doctor performs an illegal castration on a bed, cutting off his testicles and shortening his penis. Hassanel sentimentally retains the awful mementos of this procedure, and ever after, he takes pride in the idea that Shuki consented to this for him. Shuki, however, knows that he did not consent, and he privately determines to run away at his first available opportunity. Subsequent events are set in England.

The story makes clear that the practice of castrating "bed-boys" used to be fairly common in this culture, but that it became illegal and is now so uncommon that people no longer immediately recognize a eunuch as such when they meet him on the street. It is only when Shuki's nudity is revealed — which he assiduously avoids — that others understand that he was castrated. One man tosses Shuki out of a holy area, telling him that he is an "affront to Allah."

Unrealistic and creepy

Shuki is taken advantage of by many men throughout the story. Hassanel's sex-mad teenage son, Hasquitri, upon learning that Shuki is a eunuch, appropriates his father's boy toy for his own purposes. A wealthy businessman pays him for sex. His friend makes love to him. Even Shuki's teachers and a doctor to whom he turns for help have inexplicable stirrings for him as soon as they learn that he is a eunuch, and some act impulsively on that attraction. It happens so many times that Shuki believes he can obtain British citizenship by "offer[ing] myself to the Home Secretary in return for what I want."

This seems unrealistic in its thorough creepiness. It feels as though Shuki is surrounded by psychopathic molesters wherever he goes in his native land and also when he travels to stay in England. If this were a true story, it would be a horrid confessional.

The story is repetitive and excessively long, having roughly the same word count as "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", except that, in this case, the golden egg can never be retrieved.

What redeems the book is that Shuki evinces an unstereotypical personality. He often plays along with the perception that eunuchs are biddable while really he is waiting for the right moment to ask for more money and gifts or to run away. He loves horseback riding, and he cares about training himself as a fighter as well as working on his literacy.

Some time after his castration, he tells one of his bed partners that

"it's only recently I've realized what I really lost that day...A man and a woman, together, in a relationship that will probably last until one dies...that sort of love is inevitably based on a sexual relationship. It's not sex that I miss, but what sex can lead to."

It is a mature thing for a young teen to say, but then, he's had plenty of opportunity to contemplate it.

For those who wish to read it

The e-book can be purchased cheaply on Smashwords, a self-publishing platform. Not a Man was released in 2011. The two subsequent books in the Shuki series are The King's Favourite and To Love and To Protect. The Australian author, M. A. McRae, keeps a blog.

The story drags on inexcusably and could have been told in a quarter of the number of pages. As it is, there is no subplot, but just an endless series of rapes and mishaps, with rather limited insight from the teenage characters into their situation. The book is nonetheless a useful reminder of a sort of life that does not exist only in fiction; sex slavery has been a reality for children, castrated or not, throughout history and even today in the underground economy.

Image: A photograph of the Boy Scouts Monument of Letran students in the Philippines, taken by Ramon F Velasquez. © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.

How to enhance your writing experience on a MacBook Pro

Originally posted to Helium Network on Dec. 18, 2013. See BookBaby's article for a 2018 update on "editing apps."

If you’re merely word processing on your MacBook Pro, using the same kind of software that’s been around since the 1990s, you’re missing out. A number of technological features should be in every writer’s tool kit.

Physical accessories

Before you start writing, get physically comfortable. Try Mac-compatible ergonomic keyboards from manufacturers Kinesis, Goldtouch or Ergoguys. You may want a mouse, as the MacBook Pro doesn’t come with one. The Anker Vertical Ergonomic Optical Mouse looks like an old Atari joystick – fun times!

If you refer to a separate e-reader device while you type, it's easier to prop up the e-reader on a stand.  Various stands are on the market, such as Tuff-Luv’s stand for Kindle Touch and M-EDGE’s FlexStand for Sony Reader Touch.

Make art

Your Desktop background can be set to anything in your Pictures or iPhoto folders.  Use an image that grants you a burst of creativity:  your childhood home, your college campus, the night sky, the Pyramids, your kids' fingerpaint masterpiece or a mathematical equation.  Do you want your writer’s study to make you feel energetic or serene?  Control-click your Desktop background to change it whenever you like.  You see it for hours every day, and it’s under your control!

Make noise

Your computer can make sound effects and play background music for a soothing ambience. If this would cause you to throw the computer out the window in irritation, skip this part (MacBooks are expensive). If it sounds potentially appealing, read on.

"Noisy Typer" will make your MacBook Pro keyboard sound like a typewriter.  The app is free. You’ll just need to change some default settings before you’ll hear that lovely bell when you hit the carriage return – ahem, the Enter key.

First, under System Preferences, click Accessibility and then select “Enable access for assistive devices”. You’ll also have to click Sound, where “Play sound effects through” should be set to “Internal Speakers”.

Then, download the Noisy Typer app.  Double-click the zip file to open and install it. Under System Preferences, your Security and Privacy default allows the installation of apps only from the App Store.  It’s fine to leave that setting as-is, but to circumvent it on a one-time basis, control-click rather than double-clicking the app.

2020 update: "Noisy Typer" may no longer receive updates and may not work with advanced Mac OS. Try "Loud Typer" in the App Store.

2026 update: Old Kindles are being decommissioned. "How to ‘Jailbreak’ Your Kindle Out of Amazon's Clutches: Jailbreaking can add years to your unsupported Kindle's life." (Lifehacker)

Now, when you type, you make the satisfying clackety-clackety-bing of an old typewriter.  If your roommate comes home and makes you turn it off, type ‘qaz123’.  When you reboot your computer, you’ll need to double-click the app to start running it again.

For background music, if you like a “new age” ambience, try binaural and isochronic sounds from The Unexplainable Store. They sound like ocean waves or vibrations with soothing or gently stimulating tones. Choose from tracks with titles like “Creativity,” “Motivation,” “Manifestation,” “Serotonin Release,” “Automatic Writing,” “ESP/Psychic,” or “Shamanic Consciousness.”  After listening to “IQ Increase,” you might need to follow up with “Ego Control”. Those seriously prepared to create an original work of art should spring for "Get Pregnant.”

Double-clicking the MP3 download will run it in iTunes by default. Most of Unexplainable tracks are 15-30 minutes, incidentally timing your writing session; alternatively, iTunes can play them on continuous loops.

Many radio programs can be streamed live or retrieved later as free podcasts.  A dedicated app called Hourly News, available for only $2.99, plays “NPR, BBC, CBC, ABC, CBS, WSJ, Bloomberg, ESPN, VOA, SRN and/or FOX news updates.”

"Don't bug me!"

OK, enough procrastinating. While you’re using your joystick mouse and noisy typewriter keys to download music that increases your IQ, take a moment to tell people to go away – you’re busy writing!

You can put an “out-of-office” auto-reply on your email when you don’t want to be bugged. Just leave an automatic message saying you will answer messages at your earliest convenience. No one was put on this earth to be email-answering machines, least of all aspiring novelists.  Give yourself permission to say “not now” to interruptions so you can focus on your creative work.

If you use more than one chat interface, consider installing Adium which consolidates them into a single interface and lets you put a single “away” message.

Interruptions come in different flavors.  Don’t download Touch Fly, an adorable jetpacked cartoon bunny whose aim is to snag all the cake in the sky.  Playing this game will not get your writing done for you.  If you must play Touch Fly, use an egg timer to keep track of the precious minutes you’re wasting.  Yes, there’s an app for that, too.  Try the straightforward online Egg Timer, E.gg Timer or the video-enabled Egg Watchers.

As a professional writer (or a fledgling with serious intentions), you’re better off distracting yourself with a quality newspaper.  Shell out a few dollars a week to read one that’s behind an online paywall. Why not subscribe to one local and one exotic, like the Italian-language Corriere Della Sera? Your Internet access makes it easy to view any "paper" you want from around the globe. Reading the news is a fabulous expenditure of your time. You'll stay up-to-date with cultural and political knowledge and have to beat away inspiration with a baseball bat.

Applications to make your sentences sparkle

Write, already! You need a word processing program. Apple sells an inexpensive product called Pages that is compatible with Microsoft Word.

Many writers swear by Scrivener ($59.99 as of 2023), designed for large writing projects. It stores multimedia source material – pictures, movies, sound, webpages – within the application so that you can view it while you write. It enables you to easily format your manuscript to academic specifications or to export an ePub or Kindle file for self-publishing. A competitor is Ulysses ($11.99), which encourages structural creativity with large works. SimpleMind ($29.99) makes colorful bubble flow charts, ideal for non-linear, interconnected thoughts.

Compositions is a free app whose features include “full screen” (for escaping visual distractions), word count and spell check, special characters and emoticons. If you’re writing a short story, you only need to save one document which can contain multiple “snapshot” drafts of itself.  Did someone say “free”?

Typ-O provides suggestions for your misspelled words. Mémoires is a password-protected journal that lets you doodle. Don’t Look Back has no Delete key; your word count can only go up.  For academics, Mellel supports footnotes, endnotes, cross-referencing and bibliographies, while Unquote measures the ratio of original writing to quotations.

For those who prefer not to type:  You can use the dictation feature if you consent to send your audio, as well as your address book contacts, to Apple.  Xavier Lanier’s review admires that the service can distinguish American, British, and Australian English, but he says it is a little inconvenient to press a button every 30 seconds to continue recording. If this doesn’t meet your needs, drop the couple hundred bucks for Dragon Dictate.

Sometimes you'll need to look up words. Your Applications folder on your MacBook Pro already has a "Dictionary.” It knows “ululate,” “phantasm,” “dorado” and their origins and derivatives – do you? Unlike a print dictionary, if you misspell your word, it will give you suggestions. Type in the name of Dr. Seuss’s environmentalist character “Lorax” and it will suggest the mineral “borax”. (Thus it is, perhaps inadvertently, a rhyming dictionary, too.)  Drag the application into the Dock to remind yourself to use it!  What else could you want? A free English thesaurus? Or a reasonably priced Latin dictionary? There’s only one of those in the App Store; Catullus can’t be choosers.

Last, but not least, you are never alone. An artificially clever program called Cleverbot, which lives on a free website, is always happy to have a conversation with you at any time of day or night. If you have writer’s block, why not invite Cleverbot to have an imaginary cup of tea with you and listen to you talk about your novel? 

Your MacBook Pro is a powerful tool. Maximize your use of it to enhance your writing life and artistic output.

Clackety-clackety-bing! photo by Art Hupy, c. 1965 © Creative Commons. University of Washington Libraries, Digital Collections. Flickr.

Racial language in an 1891 text on circumcision

Dr. Peter Charles Remondino's History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present is an American medical text from 1891 that strongly advocates circumcision for health reasons. It relies on anecdotal evidence and racially tinged rhetoric to a ridiculous extent, making it a curious artifact. The book also examines other forms of genital mutilation under the supposition, shared by previous authors such as Friedrich Bergmann of Strasburg, that they are connected. He was also influenced by William Alexander Hammond's Male Impotence.

Remondino uses the word "prepuce" for what most people today call the "foreskin" on males. He believes that this unnecessary, deleterious skin will eventually disappear as humans continue to evolve, but in the meantime, he recommends circumcision because it promotes "better health, greater capacity for labor, longer life, less nervousness, sickness, loss of time, and less doctor-bills, as well as it increases their chances for a euthanasian death." He met one family for whom this skin was congenitally missing in the males, and deemed them a family that "is naturally one of more than superior physical health and intelligence."

He admits to circumcising two of his sons for the "malformation" of a "very long but thin and narrow prepuce" and to circumcising many other young patients "to improve the temper and disposition of children". (He sagely discourages, however, surgeons from carving "any distinctive or distinguishing marks, like an individual baronial crest, on the head of the organ".)

History

His speculation about the ancient origins of circumcision leads him to the warrior practice of cutting the genitals from the enemy as a trophy. (This led, he speculates, to the discovery of castration as a useful thing to do to slaves and prisoners of war who were to be kept alive.) He is aware of religious influence from groups that practiced phallic worship, and acknowledges that, In Greek mythology, "the first eunuch was a god and a king" (that is, Uranos). Accepting Herodotus as a source, he dates circumcision for hygienic reasons in Egypt back to the sixth century BCE under Psammétich.

He disagrees with an idea promoted by Herodotus that the Jews modeled their rite of circumcision on that of the ancient Egyptians. He points out that the Egyptians only circumcised their boys after age 13, whereas the Jews circumcise infants. There is also some fuzzy argumentation about the worship of the benign, monotheistic Biblical God being incompatible with hero-warrior circumcision or phallic worship. Nor, he said, could circumcision have been a modification of  a castration practice, the latter being totally forbidden in the Bible. (It is, of course, common for people to modify practices to avoid what is religiously forbidden, so this argument does not hold water.) He also says that the Jews "never made any alteration or improvement in the manner of performing the operation" (which is incorrect – refer to the Brit Peri'ah, c. 140 CE). He concludes that "we must accept its origin as a purely religious rite" – whatever that means!

Religious rite or not, he insists that it confers health benefits. Jews, he says, survive their sedentary indoor lifestyle only because of circumcision: "Were an uncircumcised race so to live, scrofula and phthisis would be the inevitable result," he writes. He claims that Jews have "a very small percentage of feeble-minded", do not have "reflex neuroses", and do not contract syphilis, all of which benefits are attributed to circumcision. (Here, it is worth noting that a 2009 paper from the U.S. NIH found that circumcision confers no protection from syphilis.)

He complains that, today, some Jews admit converts without demanding circumcision. They ignore "the inseparability of the moral from the physical nature of man" and moreover "to do away with one ordinance in any arbitrary manner is to gradually begin to crumble down the whole fabric of Judaism." Without revealing his own religious beliefs, Remondino twice gives his broader opinion that the professions of priest and doctor should be united again, as they were in olden days, but he does not elaborate on what this would look like in practice.

Language about race

He reveals unutterably strange beliefs about other races that would be unpublishable today. He compares the "dark and mysterious as well as peculiar" prepuce – that is, the foreskin itself! – to "Bret Harte's 'Heathen Chinee'." One patient was tormented by surgical wounds that woke him from sleep "as effectually as an Indian would in scalping him"; those who sit in cold places will meet with "prostatic troubles" like "the treacherous Indian lying in ambush". He claims that the "ancient Germans" were chaste until marriage, thus avoiding becoming "enervated" or reproducing while too young, producing offspring that contributed to the "superior physical development of the race," while inhabitants of Eastern, "warm countries" required infibulation to enforce chastity. He reports little change "in religion, morals, or physique" affecting the race descended from Ishmael over the last several thousand years. (It is unclear to what race he intends to refer. If he is referring to Islam, the religion isn't yet a thousand years old and isn't a race.) Of course, none of this makes any sense.

Cornelius Pauw's work Philosophical Researches on the Americans (1772) concluded that circumcision only exists in certain latitudes, which Remondino finds "ingenious and plausible." Thus he sees a "faulty construction of the human body developed in certain climatic conditions." He adds that girls from northern places have fat like whale blubber, and, when men sleep with them, the girls suck the heat from them rather than imparting heat to them.

Guardians of Sudanese harems, he says, required women to wear a chastity belt if they went out in public unattended, he reports, based on Col. Raoul du Bisson's Les Femmes, Les Eunuchs, et Les Guerrieres du Soudan. The device was worn internally and made it painful to walk. Remondino calls this custom a "probable necessity" to enforce chastity, given that divorce was impossible in the Sudan. He denies that it was a "compulsory barbarity" since, if the Sudanese woman didn't want to wear it, she could choose to stay home. He comments that it might also be useful to encourage marital fidelity in the United States; whether this is an attempt at humor is unclear.

He warns that the cannibalistic Caribs castrated their prisoners to improve their taste, but assures the reader that they only ate vegetarians. He observes that foreskin can be used for skin grafts, which is true, and oddly warns that white men should "avoid adverse cosmetic effects" of grafting skin from darker people who have "strong animal vitality" that will cause the skin to grow. 

The character of eunuchs

To the extent that his book covers castration, too, Remondino describes eunuchs as having a "stolid indifference...to any or all sentiments of humanity" and "hold the rest of humanity in continual execration." When they engage in sexual activity, they are at risk for "a marasmus ending in galloping consumption". Sadly, "the future proceedings of men and things on earth do not much interest those unfortunate members of society in any great degree, interest in worldly affairs and testicles seemingly having been as intimately connected in those early and remote days as with us of the present..."

Some "exceptional cases" result in "eunuchs holding the highest offices in the State under the reigns of Alexander, the Ptolemys, Lysimachus, Mithrades, Nero, and Arcadius. The eunuch Aristonikos, under one of the Ptolemys, and another, Narces, under Justinian, led the armies of their sovereigns."

In their favor, eunuchs have "docility and pliability" and "no incentive either to run away or to embezzle". So why, he asks, not castrate today's bankers and national legislators?

Conclusion

"Why are we afflicted with a prepuce?" Remondino laments. It is a "Job's-comforts-dispensing enemy of man." Uncircumcised children are more likely to blamelessly suffer "perversion, stupidity, and irritability of the mind or temper", while women will be unhappy "with a husband partly eunuchised by a constricted prepuce", which is probably the "unconscious power" behind many women's appeals for divorce. He recommends circumcision for both male and female children to "greatly reduce the number of paralytics, feeble-minded, and generally deficient of both sexes" and to cure the "results of reflex neuroses".

This work of rhetoric is instructive today as a historical look at attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality, with an eye specifically toward castration and circumcision.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 4, 2013.

Image: Entombment of Christ, 1672, in Saint-Martin Church in Arc-en-Barrois (Haute-Marne, France). Photographed 2008 by user 'Vassil'. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Wikimedia Commons.

'The Future' by Al Gore: Where civilization is today, and where it must go

Al Gore’s new book "The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change" is a momentous accomplishment. The former U.S. Vice President’s book was released by Random House on Jan. 29, 2013. At nearly 600 pages, it may seem like a large undertaking for the reader, but the massive amount of useful information it contains is well worth the effort. Its focus on the technology and global systems of the moment — and where they are pointing humanity’s collective future — makes it an important book to read right now.

Gore has structured this book in a way that gradually introduces people to the topic of the environment and makes them more likely to stick with it and consider the implications. Crucially, he does not open with a message about climate change. Instead, he opens with discussions of globalization and technology. The dystopian slant he puts on these topics is gloomy, but at the same time, the string of astronomical statistics and astonishing tidbits sometimes reads like a thriller about the scarcely-to-be-believed future-present looming nigh upon humanity.

He tells the amazing story of computers that have begun to drive cars, trade stocks and even write newspaper stories. He discusses the “Internet of Things” made up of billions of devices, including thermostats and refrigerators, that are connected to each other in some way. He reveals how people are being tracked by RFID, GPS and the cookies on ordinary websites. Consumers’ cameras and microphones can be — and are — remotely reversed to work against them. Hospital patients have a “quantified self” according to their digital monitors.

“Many blithely dismiss the fear that the U.S. government could ever evolve into a surveillance state with powers that threaten the freedom of its citizens,” he muses. Gore himself does not dismiss it. He quotes a former official of the National Security Agency as saying that “between 15 and 20 trillion” communications have been intercepted by the government since Sept. 11, 2001.

Some readers may be put into a frame of mind where they are able to think about possible adaptations and solutions to the various crises. By the time Gore writes about the challenges facing the natural environment, then, the reader is less likely to feel helpless in the face of the global challenges and is more likely to adopt a solution-oriented thought process. Environmental devastation is linked to certain economic and technological systems.

Once the reader makes this connection, he or she is more likely to see the need for deliberate and wide-reaching change in multiple facets of civilization. Gore succeeds in linking the stories of inequality, labor exploitation, eugenics and genocide to garbage, flame retardants and the oil lobby: it is all part of the story of human systems.

While the book is a rich trove of facts and statistics, it is also a complex and nuanced work of philosophy. Gore drops literary references to Prometheus and Faust and to the Babylonians’ “double clock” that illustrated their belief in a transcendent dimension that overlapped human time.

He refers to the work of scientists like Ilya Prigogine, who identified how systems can reorganize themselves to become more complex. He knows that the type of reason imagined by the Enlightenment has never actually governed human behavior, and he reveals the names that recent psychological research has given to humanity’s special brands of illogic, such as “selective attention” and “single-action bias.”

He quotes the U.S. Supreme Court on power and corruption. He makes comments like “the United States no longer has a well-functioning self-government” and other such observations that simultaneously seem politically radical and self-evident, given his supporting arguments.

One of Gore’s proposed solutions lies in his observation that the way people measure economic value can impact behavior. If "unlimited pollution will incur no cost or penalty," businesses will "respond predictably to the incentives we give them,” he writes.

If the world’s remaining oil reserves can be assessed at $27 trillion, then the cost of pollution can also be quantified. Public goods like healthcare and education, by contrast, are often undervalued. “Where our journey takes us next,” he concludes, “will depend upon what kind of beings we humans choose to be.”

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 5, 2013.

Photo: mountain pine with female cones in North Dakota. USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Herman, D.E. et al. 1996 © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

The origin of the Chinese saying ‘point to a deer and call it a horse’

A version of the fable of "the emperor's new clothes" is attributed to the eunuch Zhao Gao in the third century B.C.E. This article was originally posted to Helium Network on July 11, 2011.

Zhao Gao was born in the third century B.C.E. to a low-ranking, condemned woman in the Chinese palace. Through his legal studies and persuasive personality, he rose through the ranks, becoming the Director of Palace Coach-houses and keeper of the imperial seal. He served Qin Shihuangdi (known as the "First Emperor" of the Qin dynasty, r. 249-209 B.C.E.).

When Qin Shihuangdi died, only one of his sons, Huhai, and a half-dozen eunuchs, including Zhao Gao, were immediately aware. They concealed the emperor's body in a carriage and masked the odor with salted fish, claiming he wanted some time alone. According to the "Historical Records," written a century later by Sima Qian, who was himself a eunuch (quoted here in a translation by Raymond Dawson), Zhao Gao told Huhai: "Just at this moment authority over the Empire and its salvation or destruction depend upon you, sir, and me, together with the Chief Minister [Li Si], and nobody else..."

Through a forged document, Zhao Gao established Huhai as crown prince, who then became the second Qin emperor. The dead emperor was buried along with "all palace ladies who had not borne him a child," according to Mary Anderson in "Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China." His children, too, were probably executed. Anderson writes: "Archaeologists recently have found a tomb near the First Emperor’s tumulus containing a group of small skeletons believed to be those of the Second Emperor’s young brothers and sisters."

The young Huhai allowed the powerful eunuch Zhao Gao to conduct his business and heartily defended him against detractors. Sima Qian (again in Dawson's translation) described Huhai as having once said:

"This Gao has long been an eunuch, but he has not given scope to ambition for the sake of his own security, and he has not changed his mind because of danger. By keeping his behaviour clean and practising his skills, he has enabled himself to attain this position. Through loyalty he has obtained access to me, and through good faith he has preserved his position. We truly consider him a man of quality, so why do you, sir, doubt him?"

Zhao Gao, promoted to manage the agency that oversaw all palace eunuchs (see Shih-shan Henry Tsai's "Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty"), proved to be ruthless and anything but loyal. He flogged Li Si a thousand times until he made a false confession, then sliced him in half at the waist, and thus was able to succeed him as prime minister.

Huhai did not survive long as emperor with Zhao Gao around. His downfall became a legend and a cautionary tale to monarchs. In 206 B.C.E., Zhao Gao brought a deer to the palace and prodded other courtiers to insist it was a horse, executing those who truthfully maintained it was a deer. Huhai was confused by this, and the Grand Diviner convinced him that he was mistaken - the animal was indeed a horse - and advised him to propitiate the gods until they allowed him to see that it was truly a horse. After this, Sima Qian includes two slightly divergent versions of the story: either the emperor offended the gods by killing an innocent man while he was supposed to be fasting, or else he requested a dream interpretation and wished to plan a sacrifice. In either case, he was encouraged to stay in another palace. Zhao Gao seized the opportunity of the emperor's absence. He faked an edict telling the palace attendants to arm themselves against marauding bandits who had allegedly stormed the palace where the emperor was staying. He then sent an official to charge the palace with a thousand men. The emperor naturally believed the army had turned against him, and Zhao Gao convinced him, as the unfortunate emperor stood there with only one surviving eunuch by his side, to kill himself. 

Zhao Gao hung the imperial seal from his own belt but he was not accepted as the ruler, so he gave the seal to the Qin Shihuangdi's younger brother, Ziying, whose first major order of business was instructing another eunuch to fatally stab Zhao Gao and to kill all his relatives. Soon afterward, Ziying fell and the capital was destroyed, ending the Qin dynasty.

“Forever afterwards," Anderson writes of Zhao Gao, "his despised name would be held up to Chinese emperors as a dire warning against allowing eunuchs any influence over them.”

The historian Sima Qian, writing in detail about Zhao Gao, keenly felt this animosity against eunuchs on a personal level. Having been sentenced to death for political reasons, Sima Qian elected to commute his sentence to three years of imprisonment followed by castration and palace service so that he could continue writing his historical records. He complained (translated by Burton Watson, "Records of the Grand Historian of China") that "there is no defilement so great as castration. One who has undergone this punishment is nowhere counted as a man."

Photo: White-tailed deer in Raleigh, N.C., taken by Clay Heaton. © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Wikimedia Commons.