Challenge 1130

Primitive

In Martin Westlake’s Source of Inspiration: What appears to be the function of Kage’s dream in which he has a vision of Syuuto weeping and beginning to walk away? Is it a form of Kage’s grief? What else might it be?
In Jeffrey Greene’s The Head and Its Hair:
1. Why is it important that the Head is disembodied rather than part of a fully mobile body?
2. How might one describe the Head’s personality? Why might the questioners who come to interview the Head not make their encounters a subject of public gossip?
3. What are Rolance’s three questions for the Head? Does he ever get a chance to pose them or even say what they are?
In Gary Inbinder’s Morituri or Curtains for Nemo and Kafka:
1. Refer to Bewildering Stories’ collection of the author’s Nemo and Kafka stories. Have the chracters always been such good friends?
2. What changes in television broadcasting have taken place in the first quarter of the 21st century that might account for their resignation to watching the same reruns?
In Huina Zheng’s Why I Am Proud of My Daughter:
1. What might provoke the middle-school teachers to overload their own pupils with homework? Are the teachers, themselves, subject to overt or implied competition with each other?
2. Females literally embody the continuation of life while males contribute genetic variety. What might be the consequences of the systematic application of selecting males for breeding? Does any authoritarian system enhance species survival?
3. What current conditions in the societies of, for example, North America might account for some political groups’ denouncing equal opportunity and promoting a reversion to the patriarchy and other social structures of previous centuries and ages?
4. The essay relates the patriarchy of today’s China to that of earlier times. Does paleoanthropology have any evidence that the worldwide practice may even date from a much earlier genus of mankind, such as the Neanderthals?

Responses welcome!