"A clear conscience. When did you acquire this taste for luxuries?"
A brilliant show, or so I imagine it from the clips I have seen. I admitted that to my children apologetically, even though they all know that we have not had a TV for decades and I never see anything in its entirety. But Ben assures me that this is a very millennial approach, to browse through shows rather than watch them, so I am now simply au courant.
"Don't you miss Merry?" (our wirehaired dachshund who lived to be 19)
"I miss the Merry of the first 16 years, I don't miss the Merry of the last three," and then my usual followup "Life is more genteel without animals." We have no current pets. My wife might get a dog the day after I die, but even she is learning to be happy with other people's dogs instead. Hello sweetie dog! Yet even I have some appreciation of them.
Especially online.
I haven't followed it, and there may be more to it than what I am hearing. But Ann Althouse, who doesn't much like Trump, is quoting Andrew McCarthy, who doesn't much like Trump, and Glenn Greenwald, who doesn't much like Trump, who all say these indictments are put up jobs. His accusers want to stick it to The Man, but they are The Man, not him.
I said eight years ago that there was (and is) plenty of reason to dislike Trump, but somehow his opponents have to keep making stuff up to drive that spike to the center of the earth anyway. He can't even just be Hitler, their usual comparison. He has to be Hitler and Putin and Bull Connor and Sauron. His opponents are the ones who made him, not his supporters. If they could have just treated him like an everyday opponent he would have had much less power. Their desire to allow him no power gave him power. He leveraged popular hatred of their hatred into support for his campaign. Those who felt kicked around reasoned that if the Chosen Ones hated him so much, he must be pretty good.
He isn't Pretty Good, but he's doing it again. They have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.
ChatGPT is not going to take your job, but someone who knows ChatGPT might. This is not something to skip over. ChatGPT is an extraordinarily important evolution in Natual Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence...This is a game-changer outright. It is not an AGI. It is not Artificial General Intelligence something like the HAL9000 computer from A Space Odyssey 2001, it is not the Star Trek computer. It doesn't even think as a human being would, but it definitely has very striking human characteristics...Now, the AGI isn't here, and it won't be here for quite some time.* If ever. But ChatGPT? It is possible that this is the landmark where they say "This might be where we started."**
David McKay "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"
I am not finding a transcript. Sometimes you only get those if you are a subscriber.
Update: See James's comment below about transcript.
He talks about how best to think about what it is doing (It is a probability engine, not a supercharged search engine) and thus how to use it. Also, how not to use it, and why some uses of it are going to be unhelpful for a long time.
*I like nice definite time estimates like that.
**Another one of those over-specific predictions. Look, I get it. This is a domain where we have all seen some things happen much fast than expected and others much more slowly. I thought this was a good use of my half-hour anyway.
It's good to get the clarification from someone who is much more in touch with the terrain, in this case Steven Pinker talking about Paige Harden, a left-hereditarian who has come under great attack.
It didn't save her from an idiotic attack from the New York Review of Books, which for about 50 years, has had idiotic attacks on - it's been kind of the vanguard are the establishment, the Empire striking back consistently, for any claim that there is any biological, genetic evolutionary basis to anything. They're the enforcer of the blank slate dogma. And it was true when Gould was one of theirs and he and Richard Lewontin were the major repeat contributors. Now it's been picked up by Marcus Feldman, and Paige Harden was the was the victim of that.
I don't think I had ever located the center that exactly myself. In fact, I know I didn't.
I noted for years that in the intellectual culture, nothing about humans was allowed to be innate - except sexual orientation, which could only be innate. I hoped that people would recognise the inconsistency and think about the issues rather than just accept what was considered the proper answer.
Similarly, innate differences between groups of humans - men and women, different racial and ethnic groups, mountain people and valley people - were also not allowed. I would point out that I had always found it easier to accept that I just wasn't athletic, or just couldn't visualise spatial problems, or just wasn't coordinated enough, than to keep hearing that I had poor character and just hadn't tried hard enough, like those others who attributed their success to hard work (also likely heritable, BTW) and other virtues they could give themselves credit for. I hoped people would ponder what the real insult was, what the real cruelty was.
Such things have not worked out that way. People did see that there was a contradiction, but they doubled down on the craziness and denied the next level of reality instead.
"Man will become better if you show him what he is like" Anton Chekhov, quoted by Steven Pinker.
Like I said: Saying the quiet part out loud. Can't understand why folks don't like this.
Also by Chekhov, and even less generous of spirit. "There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality." I think that a lot.
Though these things are seldom quick. I get carried away.
Once I have worked a topic to death I don't tend to return to it here very often. I just assume because I have covered a topic with some thoroughness and repetition that is as locked as solidly into your heads as into mine. This is of course amazingly stupid of me. I constantly use and reuse the information about early Indo-European history, for example, and doubt that many of you have even a fraction of the fascination that I do about this. You have your own fascinations. But Indo-European is an anchor point, a nexus of my understandings about language, both English and related languages but also linguistic principles and changes in general. When I think about genetics, I am constantly doubling back on Yamnaya y-haplogroups (R1b especially), whether their insane amounts of violence are genetic or cultural/opportunistic, fixation of certain traits. It's my pool of examples for understanding everything else. Eurasian geography. When I think of academic battles and competitions, the push and pull of fashions and schools of thought about the IE Urheimat is one of my models (I also use 20th C psychology). Sometime the controversy is internal - people really believe in the Anatolian or the Pontic Steppe theory. Sometimes the controversy has more to do with external forces from modern culture or even personalities. Some people deeply wanted Marija Gimbutas to be right for modern reasons, some wanted her to be wrong.
I shall impersonate ... a man.
Come, enter into my imagination, and see him:
They had cattle and sheep. Domesticating horses was not easy. The necessary docility must have been a one-in-a-thousand mutation, and some would say the horse is still barely domesticated. But it gave these early(4200 BC) Indo-Europeans access to the steppes. Horses are not only a source of food in themselves (and one that can feed itself through the winter by breaking through ice with their hooves), but a significant advantage in herding other animals. They are portable dinners that also do specialised work for you. A genetic mutation allowed the I-E's to consume milk and dairy products which allowed them to become dairy farmers and support bigger and healthier populations and to maintain large herds without having to slaughter them for food.* So as the size of the tribes increased, the physical size of the tribe members increased, and the size of their flocks increased. So that meant their power and wealth increased. It also required more mobility since large herds need more land to graze. This resulted in a sophisticated system of guest-host relationships. (They seem to have been an amazingly violent people, even compared to the violent people who were already there. Even at the far edge of their establishing control at the western end of Europe they displaced the builders of Stonehenge by wiping them out. And those weren't a gentle people. Yet they also show an intensity of guest-host reciprocal relationships that are not founded solely on kin groups, which came to be a European standard for later global dominance.) But to really exploit the grasslands you need to be able to carry water and shelter with you. Otherwise you have to stay in the river valleys. When the covered, wheeled, wagon was introduced a short time later, by 3400BC, their mobility increased exponentially. They were now masters of the steppes. They were on the move.
We’ve now entered the era of the pastoral nomads. Movement and migration became the norm for these people. The horse and wagons had transformed the steppes from an ecological barrier to a transcontinental highway, and it enabled the spread and expansion of the original Indo-Europeans. We are now ready for the expansion of the Indo-European language. As I said, with the growth in the population of these tribes, combined with the growth in the size of the herds, there was a constant need for migration and expansion. It was basically a nomadic lifestyle which meant move or die. Sometimes this expansion occurred through military power. Sometimes it occurred through migration and displacement of other peoples. Sometimes it occurred through intermarriage, and coalition-building and integration. Sometimes it was likely a combination of these factors. So the original Indo-European language expanded with the expansion of these people but not always through military conquest. But these Indo-European people tended to be the dominant people in these new societies, and the language of the dominant group tends to perpetuate. So that was typically the original Indo-European language spoken by the people. Earlier I mentioned that around 4200 BC or so, Indo-European herders were beginning to spread southwestward around the Black Sea in a counter-clockwise direction. And as you may recall, they encountered farming settlements in the Balkans west of the Black Sea. And the archaeological evidence indicates that many of these settlements were abandoned and overrun by the Indo-Europeans. So historians believe this branch of early Indo-Europeans were the early ancestors of the oldest known branch of the Indo-European family tree – the Anatolian Branch. Note that this was just from the horse-riding alone, overrunning the locals. The lactose mutation and the wagon weren't part of the picture yet.
I am already going too long. That will do. There will be a quiz on this tomorrow morning.
*The lactase persistence theory is now less accepted. I think it has to much going for it to be completely eliminated and think it is still a partial solution. I had a thought how it might be partly salvaged, and asked Greg Cochran over at West Hunter what he thought.
I spend more time on prehistory than history these days, but it occurs to me that almost everything is prehistory. I don't only mean that written documents only appear very late in the human record, though that is part of it. But even once writing and inscriptions come into play, they record so little that 99.99% of the rest of existence goes unrecorded. We have developed excellent methods for figuring out what languages names on columns, or palace financial records mean based on very little information, and it is loads of fun to know anything with any certainty about the past.
Certainty. Funny. In my nostalgia tour I have uncovered radically different memories of the same events among my friends - and these are highly literate people, often with excellent memories. When only two people remain who even remember that a particular event occurred, as happens with my brother and me, how ephemeral is the human record of it anymore when we disagree about what happened? Eyewitness testimony is increasingly regarded as almost pointless.
Literacy was widespread in NW Europe after 1500, which means there were more people who could read than there had been a few centuries earlier, but still not very many. Outside of that small area, there was less reading and writing still. Does that mean that most of Russia was prehistoric even though some history was being written in Moscow? How long do we consider the Native American record to be essentially prehistoric? Okay, how about the comparatively literate puritan settlers? We think of ourselves as having copious records of them, but that is only comparative. Really, we have no records of human existence, just a few scraps here and there. The internet has allowed many more people to record bits of their lives, and this is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference, I think. How much of my life exists now in record before my blog and current email address? My mother dutifully kept a baby book on me, and there is a birth certificate and baptismal record. We had a few report cards. A few photos. The school system records my attendance, as does my college. There are yearbooks that record a bit more about me. We kept some photos.
Really, there is nothing.
We are still living in prehistory, with occasional rays of sunlight piercing the forest cover.
The rule I know but somehow cannot learn is: one experiment at a time. If you are trying something new, an interesting recipe with one of those awesome pictures and the directions say "beef, pork, chicken, or duck..." it is probably not good to say "Duck! Why didn't I think of that!?" New recipe. Stick to the first three. And if you are operating from the this was really good at that restaurant/Barbara's house/ the food festival in Boston you are in even more danger.
First make the dish as close to the one you were so impressed with first. Because you will learn things from that. Do not switch in the duck or the salmon, and dear God not the the prawns or the shrimp on your first attempt. I say this to you with great severity, because you should know this, you stupid person. And also because I keep getting this wrong forty years out.
Next, because you agree with me and know that I am right but find yourself doing it anyway I will tell you the next rule. Do not even consider a second experiment. This is not only because you double the chances of something not being quite right for unexplained reasons, though that should be enough, you fool, you fool. It also doubles the chances that you will not have quite the right ingredients. You always have both kinds of soy sauce, or a little smoky bacon in the back, or (almost) fresh rosemary in a little bag in the cheese drawer, leftover from a few days, week, okay week-and-a-half, uh, three weeks ago...gee, where is that now...
I admit that I have had culinary experiments where I am on my fourth substitution - but not terrible because the third and fourth ones were ingredients where I had two tablespoons but not a third and zipped in some worcestershire/lemon juice/almond flour instead - but these have been rare. Hardly ever have I done this. And hardly ever was I in a hurry so that I decreased the time for cooking and upped the temperature 25 degrees.
It occurred to me that there was a parallel from my theater education and likely there are parallels in every field. Do the simple thing first. See how that went. In theater I was competent in acting and literature before I took a single course. Not brilliant, but... But in Theatre 202 (second semester: technical theater), we had to design costumes for a something, then design a set, then a lighting design. They told us to keep it simple, and in fact insisted on it. Design a box set. Something like Chekhov, or if you want something Significant and Serious, Synge or Miller (yawn). Not I-think-"Macbeth"-on-playground-equipment-would-be-so-deep. Costume something that other people have actually heard of and you might be asked to do if you are ever stuck being the costume designer for a light opera company in Des Moines...not a 1952 Scandinavian novel that no one has ever made into a playscript. Or light the basic set with little equipment - because as the high school drama coach you will have no budget - for Tennessee Williams, not Maeterlinck. You ain't there yet, dude. You ain't playin' at that level.
Let me point out, in case you missed it, that the bad examples above were not made up. Okay, I was 18. So sue me. Though as I turned 22 for my final project I was still attempting to be Ionesco or David Garrick, and going down in flames.
I can see it in the career I eventually had as well. Don't give the intern the unclear-diagnosis murderer as a therapy training ground. 8th-grade Home Ec was right: sew a drawstring bad. Cook biscuits.
Mystery within mystery, trap within trap, and who has the final card to play? I loved Sleuth when it came out and tried to get others to go see it, but no one was much interested. I don't think I took a date to it either time I saw it, and it was unusual for me to go to a movie alone. I then rented it and showed it to my children when they were in high school and junior high, but they were not much impressed either. The poor quality of the picture on the TV may have had something to do with it.
So now I am trying it on you, to see if you will like it.
We went to the annual "Beer and Benedictines" lectures at St Anselm's College at pub night. We hadn't planned on the pub being taken up with that, but it was fun. Engineerlite cornered the Benedictine priest for conversation afterward, and I cornered the Chem professor who discussed fermentation and its history. We went on for about ten minutes, and I got to hit the information about Gobekli Tepe and the fermentation of wild rather than cultivated grains, and the myth of unsafe medieval water requiring mixing beer in with the family supply and other such oddities, and a good time was had by all four.
But then the prof inexplicably wanted to go to more modern events and complain about how terrible it was that Trump had been such friends with Putin, at which I mildly demurred with some statement that I thought Donald was always convinced he could do business with people and therefore put on that appearance, but actions told a somewhat different story. People who are not knee-jerking Democrats know that this could be stated much more emphatically, but I didn't.
Predictably - and I saw where all this was going even as it was unfolding, he went on to say that "at least" Trump had just been indicted. A quick exchange revealed that he does not understand some of the issues involved about what the underlying crime is and is not, and that the need to make a very solid case when prosecuting someone from the opposition party is heightened. Again, I thought I was mild in my pushback about this. He didn't seem to quite get what I was saying. They seemed to be new ideas to him. He was unsatisfied.
He then said he thought Biden had been doing a great job in Ukraine. We had not come near this subject in any way before this. I allowed that the situation was impossible, and the fact that we were not actively in WWIII was worthy of some credit. He was clearly annoyed at this point, and said he thought it was really important that we strengthen the power of NATO. Well, it might be. It's one of the POV's that has circulated since the beginning and has some thoughtful adherents. Another POV, that extending NATO membership has been unnecessarily provocative, and Ukraine is only 50% worth of our attention is one of the competing views, which also has some thoughtful adherents.
I took no position. What I wanted to say at this point was "You are making cultural statements, attempting to declare what your social group is, rather than strictly intellectual and foreign policy statements. I'm not convinced you actually know much about these issues."
I didn't of course. But even hard science professors at Catholic colleges seem to be making their political decisions on the basis of tribal identification at this point. It's part of why I doubt that "better education" is likely to have much effect. This gentleman has a 99th percentile ability to deal with numbers and data. He doesn't use it - for personal reasons, whether emotional or social.
When my oldest was about five or six and I had just started reading "chapter books" to him, he asked about one of the characters in the Lloyd Alexander series "Is he on the good team or the bad team?" I think this is bout the level we are playing at here. "Are you on the good team or the bad team?"
I stopped wearing a watch at some point as a young man and have never gone back to it. Whether that is horse that taught me to estimate time after a twenty-year stretch or cart that allowed me to forego that I don't know. But I am very good, sometimes exceptionally good at this for some reason. I am not often good at those pre-tech skills like sense of direction or estimating distance or amounts, so it is mildly surprising. Yet even in childhood, when as a car game to shut us up my mother would say "tell me when we have gone a mile" and I would look at the speedometer and move the dial up or down for when it was a minute or two minutes later, I sometimes nail it within a second or two. Even now,when I set the timer for seven minutes, or decide to walk for 90 minutes, I am spot on nine times out of ten.
Yet here's the thing. That tenth time I can be wildly off. There is a time-counting mechanism in my brain which allows me to daydream and come back somehow, but once in a while it shuts off and I show up at the party with potato salad for the afternoon feast, not noticing that the sun has long since set and I should have been bringing an evening dessert heavy with chocolate or alcohol or both. Or the cheese toast has been broiling for 27 minutes and is inedibly crisped and on the path to household fire danger.
Relistening to podcasts about how linguists determined where the Indo-Europeans were originally from*, it occurred to me that I enjoyed this in the same way that I enjoy Tom Wessels and Reading the Forest Landscape and the general idea of forest succession underlying it. It is not all blue-sky dreaming, there is real data to be dealt with, plus some ability to check one's conclusions with other information. It is similar to a geometric proof, staring at something and trying to figure out what is relevant and how hard or soft the information is.
Psychiatric diagnosis is much fuzzier, because there are 10x more factors brought to bear on the final problem, but I liked that puzzle for the same reasons, and discerning motives is much the same. I am less fascinated by treatment plans, which really should be the more important task, unfortunately. It is detective novel stuff, whether one favors the Conan Doyle or Chesterton approaches, which is rather like playing 3-dimensional "Clue," whatever that might look like.
*Episodes 6-9 would be a good starting point.
So John-Adrian* is off on a 10-12 hour snow machine ride to Bering Land Bridge National Preserve to hunt more caribou. His share was 100 lbs last time, and I don't know how much caribou he thinks his family is going to eat this year, but he enjoys it. I've had reindeer, which was very nice, but never caribou.
Because I thought of Frost's "Stopping By Woods" WRT women writers, noting that the narrator could easily be female, as indeed it could be someone of any race I pushed it further. We can all zip ourselves into that one. There is admittedly some difference because of our expectations of the time period. Why would a black woman be out late with a horse cart in New Hampshire a century ago? It would distract us from the poem, thinking that there must be something else up that we are missing. Yet a black woman might zip herself into the narrator's head as she reads and have much the same experience as anyone else. It's an easy identification. Nor does the poem change much if Frost assigned the property to a woman...no wait, that does change it a lot, of a man contemplating a woman's forest. Never mind. the narrator can be Everyman, but the locale and time is so specific that other deviations from Generic Person for the Setting will make it a different poem.
His other poems mostly do the same. The narrator of Christmas Trees, or The Road Not Taken could be easily imagined as many things other than a white male of productive age. Fire and Ice might change a bit in meaning if we thought the narrator a woman, but I don't think racial differences would matter much. Mending Wall could theoretically have a female narrator - this would be a farm wife after all, not a woman from the city - but somehow it doesn't quite work, and Two Tramps In Mud Time would have all sorts of extra meanings of them expecting her to give up her work for them to do instead, and her reaction to that. Interesting meanings, perhaps, but definitely different.
I have no inclination to consider the other poets. Not my remit. It does have a flavor of Borges asking us to imagine what Don Quixote, word for identical word, would mean if it had been written in the 20th C.
We are singing "And Can It Be" by Dan Forrest for Easter, and I have joined the choir for this, as I also did at Christmas. At first rehearsal, even though I have received a link to the piece and even a link to the bass part alone, I have not seen the music, and so am only very approximate in my knowledge of the piece. When the director is telling the whole choir about subtleties of the dynamics I wonder a bit about that.
"You have to sing the question mark."
Hmm. But okay, some of the sopranos seem to either sight-read or know the piece, so maybe this means something to them. But let me assure you that the basses do not yet know what the notes and entrances are, and we are putting all our effort into that.
"Notice the tempo change at measure 28 (from 66 to 72). And it's with movement."
And I am looking for the notes in that measure.
"I don't want to hear any "r's"
I would like to find my notes. And then work on my entrances. It reminds me of of taking Interpretive Dance in college. (23 girls in leotards in a mirrored room. Yeah, you guys go out and beat each other to death on the soccer field.) Dr. Carole Sherman, with some sort of a one-hand drum would tell us to imagine we are floating in free space. Or that our arms were two feet longer. Lady, I am sure you are a very nice person who knows her business, but I am looking where to put my feet so that I match everyone else at least 90% of the time.
Tomorrow night is second rehearsal, I now have the music, and rehearsed with it daily. I almost have the notes and entrances, though I will need to start almost from scratch when I have the other two basses, one on either side, who know it about as well as I do, singing in my ear. I am confident of little, except that I am not yet ready to consider what consonants I shall elide.
The lyrics are based on the familiar Charles Wesley hymn, but the music is quite different. It's a nice piece. I'm giving you a version with more basses, some of whom are presumably singing the question mark. Though how would I know?
BTW, the entrance of kettledrums is always stirring. It would be nice to have kettledrums installed in my life. I would start by using it for my entrances.
The oversimplification is that when men are writing they believe they are talking about humanity as a whole, but are undervaluing or even excluding women's perspectives. Women, on the other hand, quite consciously include men in their writing. It would seem at first glance that women are therefore writing more comprehensively. Yet it doesn't seem to work that way, does it? Or not often. This is because when women write they are frequently looking at the specific topics of male/female interactions, of a woman negotiating a world dominated by men, or women observing themselves in their romances.
The relations between men and women are one of the largest topics of humanity, yes. But there are a thousand other topics that women are much less likely to address. Male comedians will talk about women and sex, but they will riff on many other subjects. Women joke about men, or about sex much more frequently. I sometimes have the impression that it is other women who push women writers back into the boxes of such topics. But I am not a woman writer, so I may not see this clearly.
I noted in my comment under James's discussion about the Great American Novel that Willa Cather would be an exception. Even though marriage and male-female relationships are a good deal of her material for her novels, she is writing about settling the West, and about American attitudes and opportunities and dreams. I'm collecting other exceptions if you think of them. Black and other ethnic female writers sometimes focus on that aspect of negotiating with the rest of the world, but that seems like a parallel track.
Yet there is another large category of women writers who are exceptions to this, and they are the writers of children's books. Laura Ingalls Wilder is writing the American frontier experience. There is no effort to make the protagonist generic or seem anything but a girl, but the perspective is meant to represent us all.
Not really a digression, because it bears on the main topic, though from another angle: I note that "us all" means "both males and females, but probably only whites" in this context. It is very hard to put any kind of real character out there that does not make some group as a whole feel they are being left out of the discussion. Bill Cosby's early comedy succeeded because everyone - well, all males especially - could recognise their childhood in his descriptions. Jewish comedians could do Jewish mother jokes because non-Jews saw a lot of similarity in kind, if not in degree. When writers and other creators attempt to do Everyman, it nearly always is indeed a man. I will not comment on what that says about our culture and psychology here, I only note that it is so. Everywomen are rare.
Back on topic: Anne Shirley is clearly a girl in all her episodes, and it is well-known that boys don't tend to read books with girl protagonists. Yet her story of abandonment, failures, coming-of-age, and success is about humans in general, not just girls. One series of Madeline L'Engle's books is read with pleasure by boys, girls, and adults, and is not race-restricted. But her "Austins" series is very much girl-coming-of-age, and it would be an unusual boy who would take to it.
The Young Adult novels, and even YA nonfiction, are far less often accessible to both sexes, precisely because the gender differences, and the navigation of one with the other and the pursuit of identity are the point. That is also a large issue in all of humanity, but it is still necessarily narrow and exclusive. It doesn't include cabbages and kings, or why the sea is boiling hot, or whether pigs have wings. To choose that genre includes a great deal of pressure to have topics chosen for you.
Picture books and those aimed at the youngest children are even better for including both males and females, as well as all ethnic groups. You can zip just about anyone into the illustration and it's the same story. And even farther down that line, animal characters can be very generically human, which is part of why they are a useful device. However, there is now a limitation on that. While animals can be sexless in literature, once one starts to go near the topic of sex at all, they are going to be quite binary. A trans hedgehog is clearly a sermon in the making, not something that is going to flow naturally out of the data. So it may not be surprising the women writers gravitate to writing children's books and animal books. That children are, and certainly were considered one of the special spheres of women is likely the main reason for the focus, not only because of interest but because of easier cultural acceptance of the work, yet the greater artistic freedom, of portraying worlds of girls who nonetheless represent both sexes is also a draw.
Thinking of picture books put me in mind of Susan Jeffer's illustrated Robert Frost "Stopping By Woods" and it is quite true that it could easily a female, or a person of either sex from any race or group. If we ask why this is, we see that the generic human being a a white male is double-edged. Yes, it proclaims "majority culture." But it is also rather undecorated, a vague clay sculpture which the reader can decorate as he likes. Even the term"everyman" is rather indistinct, like an undecorated Christmas tree. Even a male protagonist written by a woman can be that. At least I think so. There may be hundreds of examples of Everymen written by women, but I'm not thinking of them.
