Raising Feminists on Old Movies

personby Madeleine Robins
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My family watches a lot of movies, and many of them are old musicals from the 40s and 50s.  Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a 1954 MGM musical based on a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet called “The Sobbin’ Women.” Out in the pioneer northwest, a man decides he needs a wife, goes into town, finds one, marries her (she falls in love with him; what his feelings for her are is unclear), and brings her home to cook and clean for himself and his six half-civilized brothers.  Millie (the wife) civilizes the boys a bit, and eventually, after meeting some nice girls from town at a barn raising, the boys (led by big brother Adam, who read Plutarch’s “Rape of the Sabine Women”) go to town and kidnap the girls.  The townsfolk are prevented from rescuing their daughters until the pass clears (convenient avalanche), but Millie staunchly defends the girls’ virtue through the long winter that follows.  In the end, everyone winds up married.  The lesson about being kidnapped?  “They acted angry and annoyed, but secretly they was overjoyed…”

No, this is not a feminist movie. It’s pretty much rape-culture with music.

Why watch it?  It’s pretty, the music is pleasant (although the lyrics are just passable:”Can’t make no vows to a herd of cows…”) and the stars work hard.  Mostly, it has spectacular, athletic, muscular dancing.  The barn raising dance, in particular, is just…wow.  You briefly forget all about the political incorrectness of the surroundings and just gape in awe.

My daughters loved Seven Brides.  It also led to interesting conversations. Oh, we had interesting conversations about all sorts of movies, which often led to what I call “Well, dear,” explanations.  As in: “Mama, why are all those men in turbans so angry with Shirley Temple’s grandfather?” “Well, dear, the British occupation of India…” A movie like Seven Brides required several conversations, which led to more “Well, dear” moments (“No, honey, girls couldn’t vote in America until 1919.” “But that’s not fair!!!” “No, sweetie, it wasn’t.”). Continue reading “Raising Feminists on Old Movies”…

Introducing Medieval England

personby Gillian Polack
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Once upon a time, I spent an inordinate amount of my life answering questions from writers about the Middle Ages. A friend suggested this become a book and we worked together on this book for a bit, then she had to move on. I was introduced to an archaeologist (Dr Katrin Kania) and the book was much more accurate. My personal style wasn’t there and all the bad jokes had to leave, but, as a reference book for writers, The Middle Ages Unlocked was immeasurably better for Katrin’s share… even though it meant losing most of my jokes. She and I both laughed at each and every jokes as they were gently edited away.

It’s not a book to sit down and rad. It’s a book to check when you want something in particular while it’s technically about England in the High Middle Ages, we included much of France.

If we were doing it again, I’d add whole swards about life in Jewish England. Some researchers have been busy in recent years and we know a lot more about English Jews before 1290, thanks to them.

There were several writers who pushed us to finishing the book: Elizabeth Chadwick, Felicity Pulman… in fact, all the authors quoted on the cover, plus a few extra. Without their support, this book would not have happened. I didn’t want to write it, you see, way back when it was first suggested. My dream book was, in fact, an analysis of Old French epic legends, especially how insults were used and how some of the most interesting people were turned into their own kind of Medieval hero. This might be why I am guilty of writing the literature chapter in The Middle Ages Unlocked and why it just might mention those epic legends. Every chapter I wrote has something that shows it’s by Gillian. The food chapter contains information about pickles, for instance.

Our aim in writing it was to have a book writers could take form the shelf and find out more. Not just factually more, but to understand how we see the Middle Ages and where else they can find things. In the age of AI, it’s a surprisingly useful volume. It doesn’t invent. It doesn’t pull from random sources. The bad side it that when you argue with it, it does not argue back.

Does Money Solve Everything?

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve been procrastinating on my taxes, so I have money on the brain.

Most people say that having more money would solve most of their problems.

For some, that means the lifestyle of being able to throw money around – go to the best restaurants, buy a fancy car, live in an elegant house, travel to exclusive resorts worldwide.

Others just want enough so that they can pay their bills, see the doctor when they need to, and treat themselves from time to time without feeling pinched.

But regardless of how we define rich – whether it’s a lot of luxury items or just feeling comfortable that you can handle your needs – I think for most of us the true definition of “rich” is “never have to worry about money again.”

I know that’s my definition.

But according to Anand Giridharadas, who has been reviewing the Epstein files at length, people who are actually rich spend a lot of time worrying about money – particularly about how to make more of it and hold onto it over generations. He says emails around money are much more common in those files than ones documenting the abuse of children.

I was about to say Fitzgerald was right that the rich really are different from you and me, but maybe Hemingway’s (perhaps apocryphal) response on that point is also correct: “Yes, they have more money.” Continue reading “Does Money Solve Everything?”…

Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Elizabeth Spiers did a recent piece in The Nation on the anti-intellectualism of the broligarch crowd. It’s worth a read for its own sake, but she started it with a quote that got me to thinking about why people make art:

On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated his account to “posting an insane thing an AI executive said every day in 2026.” I can’t stop thinking about his entry for Day 15, quoting the CEO of a company called Suno, Mikey Shulman, as he claimed that musicians hate the process of making music. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think a majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

I mean, has this guy ever spent time around musicians? All they want to do is mess around with their instruments or their songs or jam with others. My own experience of music is mostly from marching band and church choir, places where you spend a lot of time in practice and don’t get paid.

And even the people who do it for a living also do it for fun. One of my favorite musicians, Joe Ely, passed recently, and almost every one of the many appreciations I’ve seen of his life and work talks about what a good time he had performing.

It’s obvious if you hang out with writers or artists or musicians or a lot of other people that many, many human beings love to do things that take a lot of work before you get good. And many of those things aren’t financially remunerative even if you get spectacularly good.

The only people using the predictive software labeled AI to do those things are people who want money more than they want to create. I don’t understand this myself. If you want to make money, go into finance. You’ll get a lot richer than 99 percent of artists and a hell of a lot richer than doing scam books.

I mean, take the guy who used a chatbot to write a paid book review for The New York Times. Getting paid to write book reviews for a prestigious publication is the gold standard for reviewers – who often work for free these days – and he didn’t even care about the gig enough to do the work. And got caught, since the predictive software plagierized the Guardian’s review of the book.

(The chatbot can’t read, so it didn’t read the book. I suspect the reviewer didn’t read the book either.)

The things I value most in my life are precisely those things that require the work. Continue reading “Doing the Work for the Sake of the Work”…

I Remember Marmee

personby Madeleine Robins
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This was written in the late 1990s. I had lost the file, and frankly thought I might have imagined I’d written the whole thing. And then last week, looking for something entirely else, I found it. I’ve softened a little bit on Marmee: Abba Alcott was doing the best she could in very trying circumstances (don’t get me started on Bronson Alcott, The Man and the Ego). But I’m still glad my daughter liked me better.

 

It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been throwing up for half-an-hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She’s changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the things that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her flyaway hair out of her eyes, away from her face. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half-on and half-off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.

And I’m remembering Marmee.

That Marmee: the mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women. Impossibly wise, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, serene Marmee. I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I’m taking care of Juliana and longing for my bed, there’s a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn’t feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee would make her daughter believe that nothing in her whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.

And in a sense that’s all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is my job. But there are moments, as with any job, where the work stinks–in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I”m doing this right. That’s when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.

Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa Alcott’s wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the weird bits prettied up or left out. I know Marmee was never meant to be a user’s manual for parenting. But it’s the nature of people–certainly people of my generation–to look for role models. Perhaps I do it because my own mother died before my girls were born. Maybe it’s because, with the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, we’re left mostly with Mommies Dearest and Mommies Amok. Or maybe I was simply bit by Marmee at a young age. In any case she continues to stick with me.

She must stick with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of horror I expected, but with a rush of fellow-feeling. It’s not just me, and that’s comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?

A few weeks after the night on the hallway floor, Juliana asks if we can start reading Little Women at bedtime. I wonder if I should confront the Marmee issue with her the way I did the prince issue in Cinderella (“I don’t know. Would you want to marry a guy you only met once at a party?”). In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, Juliana looks up at me and says “Marmee’s kind of–I mean she’s always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I’d feel like she didn’t like me the way I was.”

A little unsteadily, I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.

“Of course you do, Mama,” she says, in the tones of one stating incontrovertible truth.

Take that, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.

Have a delightful week

personby Gillian Polack
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This week includes autumn leaves for me and spring flowers for many of you, it has “Hug a Medievalist Day” and April Fools’. There are school holidays in so many places, and long weekends in even more. There’s Passover and easter and Orthodox Easter. I don’t have time to explore all the things I know I’ve missed because I have deadlines galore and preparing for Passover.

Whatever you celebrate, have a lovely time. If you have peace and quiet, enjoy it for me as well!

The Return of the Sex Test

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The International Olympic Committee, in its infinite (lack of) wisdom, has decided that it will test all athletes competing in female categories to be sure they are “real” women. They’re going to use the presence of the SRY gene as a determining factor, even though the scientist who discovered it in 1990 says it is in no way determinative.

The headlines all say this will ban trans women from competing as women. However, as a practical matter, there are very few trans women competing at the world class level. The women it will actually affect are those who have what is called “DSD” – differences of sexual development.

These women were assigned female at birth (AFAB) and raised as girls. It was only when they began competing as athletes on a high level and ran into testing procedures that they discovered they had some hormonal or other differences that are less common in women.

If you want to get an in-depth understanding of the actual science (which doesn’t support this policy) and politics underlying what happened, I strongly recommend the reporting by Reo Eveleth. They had a excellent article in Coyote on this news right when it came out and also did a newsletter report. A couple of years back, they did a superb podcast on the topic called Tested.

I’m not surprised by this decision, but I am furious about it. Spitting mad furious. I mean, I was already mad about so many things you wouldn’t think I could get any angrier, but this sent me right over the edge.

Now I’m a cis woman, as far as I know. I’ve never participated in anything that required me to prove it, so all I know is that I was AFAB and have never had any reason to question that or any problem with it.

I’ve also been a serious martial artist since I was 30, which makes me something of an athlete, though I’m in no way a world class one and the only competition I ever did was a few tournaments back in my karate days.

So why do I care? I’m not trans and I’m not a world-class athlete, so even if I turned out to have “DSD,” it wouldn’t matter.

Well, first of all, these people have the nerve to define who gets to be a woman, but they don’t apply the same kind of test to men. If you’re a world-class athlete and you say you’re male, you’re accepted as male. Trans men could compete. Continue reading “The Return of the Sex Test”…

Pocket universes and super heroes

personby Gillian Polack
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Eight years ago I spent ten days in Amiens. I had great aims and ambitions. I wanted to explore how World War I changed the people and the landscape. I did a lot of research in Australia early on, which was just as well, because my body was beginning to ache at the seams and I could only do half the research. I did that half, and I also did the related research for a novel. That novel is timely now, for all the wrong reasons.

It’s about the Green Children. There are medieval tales of the Green Children of Woolwich, and they are oddly consistent. I wanted to add a pocket universe to the story and turn it into fantasy with a little bit of scientific underlay. The best place to do this wasn’t in England, where the story came from. It was in the Zone Rouge in France.

I wanted to understand how Jewish superheroes would create themselves if they weren’t strangers in a world full of hate, but refugees in a tiny universe where they were the majority. I wanted to see the stupidity that comes with confidence and being the centre of things, and to put a non-Jewish superhero at the heart of the story, showing how she saw the world around her and how she dealt with some really bad cards. In other words, I wanted to reverse some of our assumptions.

Part of this was asking, “What would our world be like with magic?” I’m an historian and for me there is not one simple type of magic, but complex systems that interact and that change over time. In my novel I used some historical systems and some less historical, and added a couple that only belong in that other world. If there are many systems and if they’re not simplified for ease of tale-telling then they leave more chaos in their wake when they’re abused. Also, how would magic be regulated? I used the UK for the regulation of magic, because I could bring important and old families into the story. Also because it means I could play in the wonderful sandpit of alternate history in London. Imagine a history of England where Jews were brought back in the 15th century? I wrote a short story to explain a part of this, and it was a finalist in the Sidewise Awards, which means… it’s Alternate History, even though it has magic. I rather like this. The story is in Other Covenants.

I lived in London and I lived in Paris for a little, many years ago, and, historically, London is a lot more fun for the type of story I wanted to tell. Pop-up history, small churches with pits to hell… I needed to know that terrain. I know the church in question (and its history) and I know the streets in question. This is not just due to having lived there for a little, many years ago.  It’s because I used to teach students about medieval London at the Australian National University, and because I spent a whole day walking the whole of Cheapside because the maps of it showing it in the Middle Ages did not fit the modern maps. I took photos that document how and why Cheapside changed and can explain what this means to the wider City of London. I looked at the difference between Old Jewry, the newer Jewry where my family came from, and Golders’ Green. I walked all these places an took pictures, at various times.

A small US imprint published my novel as their first book. I never got to do a slide show of all the places and explain how the Somme and how London and Paris came together and how I used my historian-self to furnish the novel. Before the novel came out, I talked with a writers’ group about the layers of history in landscape and how war changed everything, using the Somme as a case study. Then COVID hit. Most novels published in the first two years of COVID are lesser-known. This doesn’t change the fact that my world-building for The Green Children Help Out was amazing fun.

What book should I introduce next week? Time-travel, magic in Canberra, non-fiction? I’m open to suggestions.

Living in the Ruins

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My current morning book is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

After reading the other morning, it occurred to me that we — in this case “we” means progressives who want a better country and are resisting the current destruction — keep trying to come up with fixes for our current messes that don’t change the system very much. So, for example, our ideas about health care are to imitate the European social programs and set up some kind of government-run single-payer system.

And while that’s not a bad idea as far as it goes and far more radical than anything that’s likely to happen anytime soon, I still have a feeling that we’re going to need something more than that, because our health care system is a colosal ruin.

Probably we have to start by recognizing how ruined things really are.

Tsing’s book uses the harvesting of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor – or maybe a guideline – for dealing with with life in an area that has been ruined.

Matsutake only grow in the wild; they can’t be farmed. And they mostly grow in ruined forests, which is why there is a thriving business in them in the forests of Oregon, where the old growth forests were heavily logged. The timber companies replaced them with timber “plantations” of fir and lodgepole pine.

While this doesn’t make for the diverse and healthy forest that came before, it does provide an environment for the matsutake.

The matsutake are a delicacy in Japan, which provides a market.

There are many different kinds of pickers and also a variety of buyers who arrange the international sales. Many of the pickers are immigrants from various parts of Southeast Asia who were displaced by the U.S. war in Vietnam and other parts of the region, but even those come from different ethnic groups and have different approaches.

There are also immigrants from Latin America as well as some White native-born Americans, many of them war veterans who find holding regular jobs difficult.

But also – interestingly – there are Japanese Americans who approach this as a cultural activity, not a business. These are people descended from those who were interred in U.S. concentration camps during World War II. Their approach is quite different from that of the people doing it as a business.

The various immigrant cultures and their descendants are people figuring out how to survive after their worlds have been upended by war and economic crisis. Making a living finding mushrooms that grow in ruins makes sense in their world.

But for people like me, middle class though far from wealthy, the idea of surviving amidst the ruins that capitalism has wrought is scary. Still, when I look around me, I see those ruins everywhere.

I walk around Oakland, where ordinary houses sell for a million dollars (fancy ones for much more) and the rents for cafes and retailers are so exorbitant that far too many go out of business quickly. I see boarded up buildings everywhere alongside new apartment complexes — ugly ones, but still shiny.

Our city has been cut to pieces by highways running through it, tearing apart neighborhoods. Those highways and other badly planned projects add environmental ruin to the mix.

And of course, we have people living on the streets. Some have serious mental illness or addition problems, but a lot of them just don’t have the money for a place to live.

So much money and so much ruin, all at once.

It’s not just Oakland; I mention it because it’s where I live now and I know it. You can see it everywhere. Chris Brown’s book A Natural History of Empty Lots provides detailed looks at what creatures and plants are coming back in ruined urban landscapes, primarily in Austin, Texas.

Now I can see better ways of doing damn near everything and I would love to wave a magic wand and make those things happen. We have the tools, the resources, even the brainpower to make all this happen. Our problem has always been the will, particularly the political will.

But I think we’re only going to build this better world in the ruins of the capitalist state. Continue reading “Living in the Ruins”…

Distracted Reading

personby Madeleine Robins
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I just read a book that took me forever to finish. As it was one of the many, many books I have to read as a World Fantasy Award judge the slowness of the read was a problem. Well aware of the stack of “to be reads” teetering in my room, I kept wanting to move faster. But I couldn’t. Why? It’s not a bad book, the prose is readable, most of the characters are interesting, the setting, based on an African culture, is intriguing and lovingly detailed. Sounds great.

But there was a pronunciation guide at the front of the book.

I am a whole word reader: what this means in practice is that I will note a word without hearing it (trying to learn to read using phonics slowed me down so much when I was a kid that I thought I was developmentally challenged). Even with names with multiple diacritics (signaling intonation, stress, and pronunciation) I sort of note the shape of the word and zip on past. Unless there is a pronunciation guide at the front of the book. For some damned reason, paging past that guide meant that thereafter, every time I encountered a name, I was compelled to page back to the pronunciation guide and see if I was reading the name correctly–even with the names with no diacritics. Nine times out of ten I was correct. The thing is, to get to the story and keep everyone straight, I didn’t need that pronunciation guide. So why is it there?

I generally find maps, lists of characters, explanations of social hierarchies, glossaries, and other world building stuff to be distractions. If they exist, I think they should be at the back of the book (yes, even those pages long lists of characters in Dostoevsky which I think must be provided lest the Western reader get tangled up in patronymics). I also tend to think, in modern fantasy, that these things signal, either that the author has not done a good enough job massaging the world-building into the text, or that the author is so in love with their world-building that they want everyone to see what they’ve created.

I recognize that impulse, believe me, I do. 9/10ths of the worldbuilding work I do when I’m writing second-world fantasy never makes it to the page, and yet it is work I’m proud of, and why can’t I show it off? But I don’t think it helps most books, and in some cases it actively hinders it.

In the case of this book, I think there may have been another reason for all this front matter. The author is writing for a Western audience that may not be (probably isn’t) well versed in her culture. In using a pronunciation guide she’s offering that audience an opportunity to learn her language, to get it right, to hear the names as if she was pronouncing them.

The problem is that, by doing this, the author privileged her desire that the reader get it right, over the reader’s (which is to say my) desire to stay in the story and get pulled along with it.

The presence of the pronunciation guide at the front of the book made it impossible for me not to check each time a name showed up. Why couldn’t I ignore the guide? I am not certain–maybe because for me it turned the book from a story to get involved in into a lesson. I realized the further I went, the more invested I was in sounding out the names–even names I was familiar with. I don’t think that’s what this writer intended.

Don’t get between me and your story, please. I’m distractible enough.