What Now, Counselor Cow?

I'm sure you're dying to know what have I been doing since you last saw me here, blogging about Melanesia. It so happens I've written another full-length manuscript and am lobbing it around where those things usually go, however, that's not what I want to talk about. Books are pretty much self-explanatory, despite the miles of blog space devoted to them by their authors (their great and wonderful and, might I add great-looking authors -- many of whom are friends I do not want to offend).

Or, at least books ought to be self explanatory. One of the cardinal rules we learn in any critique group worth its ink is: "Don't explain your plot, your characters, your setting or your voice. It either stands on its own, or it doesn't." I should know, I've said that to a host of writers myself.

So, in the spirit of all this stuff I just said, I'm going to be blogging for a while about the other stuff in my life. Non-book stuff. The stuff I've been doing when not writing. And that's counseling. Pastoral Counseling. I'm studying it in school and doing it in a real-life office, complete with fainting couch.

Oh, and I'm co-leading a seminar on relationship skills. The seminar is the thing that intrigues me the most because the dynamic that sets up between two people in a couple is fascinating. Plus, the work people will do to help their relationships be healthier is inspiring. You'll be hearing more about all this soon, I'd bet on it.

Change of Course?

Anyone who was familiar with my old Typepad blog will have realized long ago that this blog wasn't getting as much loving attention. I tried transferring material from one to the other for a while. But the original intent of my blog was to be a bibliography.

Yeah, that sounds kind of dry, but hear me out. While working on my first book, To One Who Lives On The Mainland, I found out two things: 1) Information about Melanesia from the late 1800's to 1940 is damned hard to find -- it pretty much doesn't exist. 2) When I did manage to find a bit of useful information in any format -- an antique book of anthropology, pen-and-ink drawings, a diary, an oral history, a mission report, a geographic study, personal letters from soldiers complaining of how much everything SUCKED...or ANYTHING -- it was a personal victory for me. I found the sources so fascinating that I had to share them.

Sure, I was writing a book based on these same sources. And the book followed out of my fascination with the people I was meeting through these vague sources. But the sources themselves were too hard-won to let them slip back into oblivion.

Well, that was years ago. The One Who Lives On The Mainland came out in December 2010, and since them I've (pretty much) finished another book (which has it's own bibliography blog), and begun a third.

So. Poor Blogger blog. So alone.

I feel guilty about this. I do. And I ask myself what to do. Make yet another blog? Rename this one and move on...damning the SEO torpedoes that would blow up new content under an old domain name? Close down everything and run to Tumblr?

Hmmm.

Is the New Temple of Solomon in the Solomon Islands?

I just ran across this article in Tablet magazine. Hardly can be considered part of the bibliography of To One Who Lives on the Mainland, but fascinating. So what is it -- Desperate grasping for international aid via the heartstrings of a distant people? A lucky coincidence in nomenclature, used ingeniously (or disingenuously)? Genuine underground/undiscovered history? Something I haven't thought of yet? How do you interpret what's going on here?

Novel Gets Readers Inside Civil War on Bougainville

Mister Pip

Lloyd Jones

Seventy Years of Fighting on a Tiny Island

Some of the most intense fighting of the war occurred on this scrap of land. If we look at the South Pacific "Island Hopping" campaign of WWII (of which Guadalcanal, Saipan, Iwo Jima are only a few) most islands were captured and held by the Japanese, then captured and held by the Allies. When American forces landed on Bougainville, however, soldiers from both nations remained on the island in a years' long for dominance; the Americans remained to defend a vital airfield while the Japanese struggled to destroy it. Unlike other islands in the South Pacific campaign which saw battle briefly then returned to a well-earned peace, Bougainville saw ongoing conflict until the very end of the war. 

 

 Civil War on Bougainville in the 1990's

After the war, the world's attention drifted away from the island and has never yet returned. That doesn't mean, however, that Bougainville has been peaceful. From 1988 onward (though a cease-fire has been in place since 1997) all hell has been breaking loose on the island of Bougainville. Some call it an uprising, some a war of liberation. Mercenaries, rebels, and the New Guinea regular army have been busily burning villages and killing civilians, but little attention has ever been paid by the outside world.

Novel Mister Pip is Rare Glimpse into the Sensual Heart of Modern Bougainville

Lloyd Jones' Novel Mister Pip is a rare literary reference to this all-but-unknown conflict. Mister Pip is both a light-hearted, elegiac read with beautifully-drawn characters, and a window into a tragic history most of us haven't heard. The forest village in which his narrative unfolds has somehow managed to remain willfully innocent of the bloodbath that surrounds them.

The narrator is Matilda, a young villager. Other main characters are her mother Dolores -- a woman who cares deeply but is too afraid of being duped to understand the people around her, and Mr. Watts, the only white man remaining on the island after war has caused anyone who can manage it to flee. When he is coaxed into reopening the school for the local children, he uses Great Expectations as his text.

As rebels and government troops struggle over control of the village, life for the inhabitants goes from bad to worse. In the end, a smoking ruin is left of Matilda's life, and she begins to hope for death. The character Pip from the Dickens novel plays both a part in the destruction of Matilda's community and paradoxically inspires her to go on living after everyone else is dead.

Infused with the sense of what it means to live in the tropics, Jones' writing makes the reader know how it feels to grow up and live at the very edge of human endeavor, tens of thousands of miles from "cultural centers," in one of the last places to be inhabited on the globe.

It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007 for Best Book, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

 

Not Europe's Descendants -- Melanesians' Blond Gene is Unique

In the past, visitors to the Solomon Islands have assumed that the number of dark-skinned and dark-eyed natives with blond hair must be have European ancestors somewhere back in their bloodlines.

Popular Theories On The Origins of Blond Melanesians

Many thought perhaps European sailors of the 18th and 19th centuries left enough of their DNA in the islands to produce blonds centuries later...in much the same way blue, green and hazel eyes turn up in Middle Eastern lands visited by Crusaders.

Some speculated that there may have been earlier, ocean-borne Europeans -- Vikings, perhaps, or some even earlier group -- who visited the Solomons in antiquity. Others speculated that there was perhaps a land route that brought the genes for blond hair across Asia and into the islands. The surprising discovery of Caucasian graves in Western China made this seem plausible.

Eager grad students began looking at art and mythology from the islands to see if there were further connections between Europe and Melanesia. So the recent announcement in the journal Science made for a lot of forehead smacking in anthropology departments. Geneticists, however are thrilled.

What Solomon Islanders' DNA Says About Their Origins

In 2009, researcher Sean Myles collected 1,000 DNA samples from local Melanesians. Working with the local chiefs for permission, he traveled from hut to hut, village to village across the Solomon Islands.

Back in the lab Myles and his colleagues discovered that the Melanesians' blond hair comes from a single genetic mutation that is theirs and theirs alone. It is recessive, so both mother and father have to carry the gene for them to have a blond child. Furthermore, this gene acts alone; in Caucasians a group of genes that work together determine hair color.

Looks like those hapless grad students looking for the genetic express from Northern Europe to Melanesia will have to find another thesis topic.

For more information, check out this article on the phenomenon of blond Melanesians from the Body Odd.

Blond Melanesians Have No European Ancestors

Much speculation has been made over the years about why so many Solomon Island natives have blond hair. The result makes for memorable photography of the people of the region. In a recent study, however, geneticists have discovered a gene unrelated to the blond gene in Europeans, is behind the phenomenon:

"The reason why some five to 10 percent of the islanders are blond comes down to simple genetics -- a gene called TYRP1 that natives of the Solomon Islands possess but Europeans do not, said the study in the US journal Science.

"So the human characteristic of blond hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania. That's quite unexpected and fascinating," said lead author Eimear Kenny, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in California."

Check out this article from the Medical Press for more on the story.

Check out the new Interfaith Column at the Borneo Post website. What's happening on the ground? What do you think?