Thomas Disch's LJ (RSS Feed)
03-14-2008, 02:57 PM
An unusually lively insomnia, beginning simply enough and climaxing with a guaranteed recipe for a fictional bestseller (series)recipe.
So, for starters, I was ruminating on the temptation to go to sea for a venturesome poor boy of the 19th century. The skills an able-bodied seaman had to master put ordinary students of theology to shame. To understand the sailing of a ship you had to make all of Newton second nature. The vector quantity calculation involved in trimming the sails are awesome. The ship's architecture had constantly to undergo major repairs. Navigation, ballistics, even foreign languages. You could learn a whole lot, and when you read accounts of apprenticeships at sea (Typee, Redburn, Two Years Before the Mast, Patrick O'Brian's string of masterpieces) you have the evidence that many young men did. Plus there is the social allegory: the ship's society as an emblem Of command structure and the realities of a class society. Animal Farm may satirize socialism, but has there ever been a ship run on socialist lines? Lend me the novel.
Women may well resent this, as they fret at all-male clubs of every sort, but because the days of sailing ships are so long past they have not been able to challenge male hegemony in that regard. I daresay there must have been transgender pirate fantasies of captains who fly under the bloody rag but imagine a whole ship womaned by able-bodied girls. Imagine those apprenticeships. How would it have come about historically? What if men simply couldn't go to sea (at least in America) and all the navies were run by women. What satire! What adventure! What bawdry! Now it's up to you ladies to roll up your bodices and write. Vol I might be
Britania! (Rules the Waves).
(Original Post) (http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/181894.html)
So, for starters, I was ruminating on the temptation to go to sea for a venturesome poor boy of the 19th century. The skills an able-bodied seaman had to master put ordinary students of theology to shame. To understand the sailing of a ship you had to make all of Newton second nature. The vector quantity calculation involved in trimming the sails are awesome. The ship's architecture had constantly to undergo major repairs. Navigation, ballistics, even foreign languages. You could learn a whole lot, and when you read accounts of apprenticeships at sea (Typee, Redburn, Two Years Before the Mast, Patrick O'Brian's string of masterpieces) you have the evidence that many young men did. Plus there is the social allegory: the ship's society as an emblem Of command structure and the realities of a class society. Animal Farm may satirize socialism, but has there ever been a ship run on socialist lines? Lend me the novel.
Women may well resent this, as they fret at all-male clubs of every sort, but because the days of sailing ships are so long past they have not been able to challenge male hegemony in that regard. I daresay there must have been transgender pirate fantasies of captains who fly under the bloody rag but imagine a whole ship womaned by able-bodied girls. Imagine those apprenticeships. How would it have come about historically? What if men simply couldn't go to sea (at least in America) and all the navies were run by women. What satire! What adventure! What bawdry! Now it's up to you ladies to roll up your bodices and write. Vol I might be
Britania! (Rules the Waves).
(Original Post) (http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/181894.html)