Chapterhouse Session V Questions & Observations

Getting sad we’re almost at the end of this adventure with you (but looking forwards to the next). Thanks again for all you do, being true to yourself and for staying the course. Was Frank Jewish!? Do you know what the inspiration for space Judaism was? Thoughts on Teg’s ‘awakening’ scene with Sheeana? Probably would not get published today. What are your favorite lessons for this collection of chapters?

p.402 "This may be the stupidest thing I ever suggested. I should go and be with Murbella." say what you will about any negatives of Richard Jordan playing Duncan Idaho, I can at the very least see him delivering this line pretty much perfectly. He does sort of fit this older Duncan. (you might have to watch The Secret of My Success with Michael J. Fox in it to confirm that) p.419 "We are addicted to the self we construct." growing up to think I would pursue STEM, to the point of finishing the degree, then having to accomodate the inertia of accumulated pride as i found myself working in a completely different industry. You have to decide what you're keepin,' and what you're droppin'. p.426 "Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you." The primeval origins of conflict. And the oddness now is that we are reaching a point where we self-impose guilt over it. Not just 2nd amendment debates but veganism, animal rights etc. Overprotectiveness going too far versus being self-honest about our nature. p.438 "Beware jargon." I enjoyed that little counter thrust. p.444 "He dared the Agony and look what came of that!" or: "the end-all of the entire efforts of what we're trying to do with the breeding program is to have a male experience the Agony. No, not like that." p.463 "The accumulation of power in places voters could not touch." have a go at the phrase 'non-voted tax' in a search engine some time soon. p.466 "Blackguards? I never use that word." "He may not be a BLAGGARD, Higgins."--Colonel Pickering, My Fair Lady(1964) p.463 "Thus did Caesar arrive. Thumbs down on the whole damn thing!" I've spoilered that at the beginning of a stream or two, quite a while back. p.479 "Leverage points are not all in high office." We're experiencing that fact right now. Twitter being a communications hub

Second to last session and I am running late - must observe! P. 404 Mother Teg defies the Sisterhood from the past again, having trained him well enough to protect him from their gross sexual manipulations (I really didn't want that to go on). The BG say that once they get a girl, they never really lose her. I am not sure they ever really had Mother Teg. She manages to be one of my favorite Dune Characters despite not being alive in any of the novels. P.419 - Odrade talks to Bellonda about how dangerous it is to let yourself be enslaved by your own habits (big problem of mine personally) - 12 pages later (431) Bellonda has decided that her habit of letting herself remain fat and untidy is standing in her way. I like that the Sisters really seem to listen to each other. P. 422 - The Futars demonstrate that they were designed / trained to use some variation of voice that is targeted to HM. Cool. For me the Futar are a more prominent part of these novels that Herbert ever intended. I wish he had lived to write a novel that focused on the Futar's and their handlers.... P. 463 - now we know that the HM came from Fish Speakers. Did Leto II see that? He should have protected his women better. P469. - It sort of blew me away when Duncan mentions offhandedly that no one understands the principes used by Holtzman to let humanity spread throughout the universe by folding space. It took more than 15000 years and a major human diaspora for someone else to figure out how it worked well enough to do something new with it. Maybe this is meant to reinforce illustration of the dangerous tendencey humans have to sometimes resist innovation, but it certainly stuck in my head. P. 484. Leveling Drift. Brilliant Parents are likely to have children closer to average. I wonder if Herbert put this in because he had already made it clear that the BG are trying to manipulate humanity by controlled breeding, but he did not want it to look like they believed that out and out wide scale eugenics was a workable or moral practice. It has been made clear that actual direct control is not a preferred tool of the BG, and maybe genetics is one of the arenas in which they realized this. P. 497 I appreciate that before the novel was over, Frank let us meet Clary, and assured us that he was OK with Odrade's decision to Cyborg him.

First question: how many people gave up in the first chapter of this session, threw the book across the room, put it the trash, lit it on fire and obsessively washed their hands for hours? This gender-switched Nabokov is fundamentally, for a sane person, incredibly disturbing. Like this is SA as they say on YouTube to bypass censors and keep to the terms of service. SA on a *child*. Not sure the publishers today would let this fly without asking for at least an age up of the character. Like if you want to talk about politics, maybe leave your weird ass fantasies out of the book cuz it's not sugarcoating the "political" message. In the annoying repetitive words of Frank Herbert, "How dare you?!" 😉😆 Anyway, Murbella goes through the Agony... there's some mentions of the Grail (as a concept, like a personal grail), let's leave that to my later comments. She comes out of it changed and Duncan has a sad about it because despite living a hundred lifetimes and having probably half a dozen times as many lovers, somehow Murbella is special. That Honored Matre pussy must have been real good. Maybe it's the returning of *all* his memories while in the honeymoon phase that made all previous lovers who were experienced beyond the honeymoon doe-eyed phase look not as great... Anyway, realizing how "fragile" Odrade's plan is because of old misconceptions about the Roman Empire and "barbarians" (the Roman Empire's PR is the greatest of PR of all time, you have to hand it to them, it would take 2000 years at least for any other global superpower to potentially reach the same level of PR), he has more of a sad because he will lose Murbella. Some other stuff happens, we learn the Honored Matres came from Fish Speakers, the Ixians are "dying" because they're not innovating, and Herbert speaks of bureaucracy as opposed to adapting to change... Spoken like someone who has never been *inside* a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are perpetually changing internally, buying stupid processes externally, at the business-to-business level, adding layers of process and stamps of approval necessary to be obtained internally, so that at the client/customer level, things gets bogged down further and further. They adapt continually, just *against* their original purpose, and further and further away as time goes on, until the system breaks completely from being incapable of doing its original task. So from the end-user perspective, it looks both enormous, impersonal, and unchanging. But it is changing, just getting bigger and more impersonal, externally and internally. To get back to the grail. Chrétien de Troyes wrote "Perceval, the Story of the Grail" which is possibly the most famous part of the Arthurian legend, but died before completing it. It is a great set up, a quest to find something, and Chrétien himself not finishing the quest, it has left countless writers to write continuations to finish the story. None of them feel like they quite fit what Chrétien had set up, but there's no way of knowing what Chrétien de Troyes would have actually written to complete the story, so it remains idealized and "ideal" in our collective (un)conciousness, and it drove innumerable writers to come up with something of their own, all the way to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and beyond. I do not believe the story would have had the same impact had it been finished. Herbert never got to finish the Dune series either, so while his son added more stuff, you and many others have every right to reject these follow-ups as non-canon, against the author's wishes. But it also means that the conclusion can remain similarly ideal, perfect, immaterial, in our minds, so we can never be disappointed like everyone should be disappointed in how the Chronicles of Narnia concluded. We see the same pattern with Game of Thrones. Will GRRM ever finish his books? At this point, I don't know, and perhaps I don't even want them to be finished, because that way I can never be disappointed. End of rant, see you next week to talk more about why cliffhangers are sometimes best left as cliffhangers.

PJ B