Right, but -- refugees from Sudan are pretty much mostly from Sudan, you know? The coolth of the DP camps was that you might be a German or a Polr or a Czech or a Bulgarian originally, and nobody would be really sure if you could hide your accent. You can totally reinvent yourself, so much so that the novel implied that No-name had no passport at all and could cross borders anyway.

But that can happen too. I knew someone once with a Yugoslavia passport no longer good , after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Since he was from a Serbian Mother and Croatian Father he refused citizenship in either succesor nation - therefor literally a man without a country. And in Africa a lot these wars are cross country. A lot of the refugees from the Sudanese war are Chadians, cause there are a lot of lighting raids into Chad to commit massacres across the border. The war in the Congo has involved at least five nations bordering it at various times. So a refugee in a camp in the Congo could be from any of a number of nations.

Incidentally being a "man(or woman) without a country" was not a superpower in Flemings time nor is it today. It gives you no special ability to enter a country. No nation has to let you in if you don't hold no passport from it. (Well on human rights grounds they are supposed to if you face death or unjustified imprisonment elsewhere - but you have to prove that, and anyway it is not always honored. And until well after WWII it was not even a legal obligation most places.) You have no special rights as a stateless person, but have no consul, no nation to stand up for you. It can mean a life sentence in refugee camp; Eric Ambler often used stateless people as characters; because their extreme vulnerability let him get them into terrifying situations without needing to have them do anything especially stupid. (Dr. Frigo for example). One of the under-rated great novels of our time The Death Ship by B. Traven had a stateless person as the primary character. It explained why he accepted a berth on the ship, and why he stayed with it - nowhere else to go.

But we have plenty of stateless persons today. And we have a lot of multi-state refugee camps where a person could well be from a number of states.

(Replacing the last line with this - cause while meant as general snark it does not read that way.)

In addition to stateless persons, 9/11 and Katrina set up perfect circumstances for your old persona to die and you become a new person.

Wide Sargasso Sea is excellent.

The BBC adapted that recently with one of my favourite young, British actors, Rafe Spall, as Edward. I think he's going to be in an adaptation of Dracula next.

I saw where David asked me the other day at how my book is coming, and I didn't answer because it's been slow and sloggy lately, I've been behind on my schedule, and the topic has been depressing to consider.

Anyway, with mounting frustration at how dry my book has been thus far (and, hell, I don't even want to read it at this point), I decided to start rewriting it today with a faux-pompous tongue-in-cheek approach that I hope other people (such as, say, my editor, publisher, comrades, and player-haters) might also find fun. Continuum has been pretty lenient with the other writers, and I hope to enjoy some of that leniency. At the very least, I hope they don't sue me for smart-assery. What's your take, David?

Stolen from Maud Newton's blog.

This is a valid sentence in the English language: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

Yeah, I've seen that one. It's fun.

Did I post Bob Bob's take on that here some years ago? He adds "people person" to the sentence (a "buffalo buffalo buffalo").

I read JE three times because it was the Academic Decathlon book.

Whoa! You were AD the year before me, I guess. I came in with Siddhartha and Remains of the Day my sophomore year. (Then My Antonia junior year, and Frankenstein senior year. Frankenstein is one of those books that should never, ever be read more than once or twice in a year, as I went from enjoying it to absolutely hating it.)

I read Jane Eyre when I was 12, as the only person who actually read in the middle school elective class called Reading for Pleasure. I loved it quite a lot, and just started re-reading it myself, actually. I also love Wuthering Heights, for very different reasons.

You were AD the year before me, I guess. I came in with Siddhartha and Remains of the Day my sophomore year.

I did that year too. The Remains of the Day is my default favorite book. I read that one three times too and discovered something new each time. I medaled in Essay a few times, I think, both years. And I've got some good anecdotes about them, too. For my Jane Eyre essay, I don't even remember what my thesis was, but I made up the ending to this book called Pest Control that I'd picked up in a supermarket one time (I must have been comparing modern storytelling to old-time storytelling for some reason). I figured the judges wouldn't have read the book anyway.

The best, though, is that one afternoon, my AD advisor and I struck up a conversation about the different meanings of the title of The Remains of the Day. We were just talking after school; I don't remember why the topic came up. I'd never really thought about it, but we came up with some interesting ways to interpret the title.

Guess what one of the essay prompts at Regionals was?

I read Jane Eyre when I was 12, as the only person who actually read in the middle school elective class called Reading for Pleasure. I loved it quite a lot, and just started re-reading it myself, actually.

I forgot we were having this conversation. I adore Jane Eyre. I read it the first time at 12 or so, too -- my mom had gorgeous oversized hardcovers with woodcut illiustrations from childhood, of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which was one of the draws. (I didn't read Wuthering Heights until later, though.)

I never found Jane whiny. Given her circumstances, I loved the fact that she stood up to Aunt Georgina, and to the horrible teacher at Lowood. I think she was surprised by her feelings for Rochester, which would have been distressing at that time, again given their very different circumstances and the things that had been said about her all her life. Her arc may have been melodramatic (and yeah, I wanted to smack St. John, and thought that section of the book could have been cut by a lot) but she learned to love and respect herself by the end of the book.

I also read crit about it years ago that theorized Helen was the super ego, Jane the ego, and Bertha the id. It was in a book called Madwoman in the Attic, I believe. Really interesting.