I grew up with Fourth of July celebrations, though the ones I remember were not particularly patriotic – I don’t recall any speeches, much less any on the topic of loving one’s country – but rather an excuse for a community gathering.
In Friendswood, the then tiny town outside of Houston where I grew up, there was a parade every 4th followed by a barbecue and small rodeo in the community park. My sister and I rode horses in the parade most years, sometimes accompanied by our parents (depended on the number of horses we had available at the time).
I recall participating in the rodeo a few times, doing barrel racing and pole-bending on my horse Sue, who was quite good at those things, having been trained as a cutting horse. However, we never practiced enough, plus Sue was part Mustang, which gave her short legs. We never won anything.
In high school I remember marching with my high school band in a nearby town for the parade and even playing in a half-assed band for that town’s rodeo.
Much later on, when I lived in Washington, DC, I went down to the Capitol grounds for the symphony concert and watched the excellent fireworks display on the mall from there. No speeches at that event, either. I recall singing “This Land Is Your Land,” though. Reagan was president and most of the people at the concert were not big fans.
So my thoughts on the 4th of July have more to do with horses and parades and barbecue and music than they do with patriotism. Which is a good thing, because this 4th I am fresh out of patriotism. The regime in charge of our government is busy undermining almost everything I hold dear about the United States of America and bringing back all the worst aspects of our country. Continue reading “The 4th of July”…
I have for been several weeks preparing four books for publication: re-releases of the first three Sarah Tolerance Mysteries, to be followed a month later by the release of The Doxies Penalty, the fourth in the series. Because I’m publishing with an independent micro-press, I’m doing a lot of the production work myself, which means I have been engaging with my own text up close and personal.
The good news? I still like all four books. I can find passages that give me pleasure (and have found comparatively few that make me wince and say “what was the Author thinking?” This is not always the case when looking over your old work. But of course, as I read, I notice things. Like,” damn, the Author uses a lot of em-dashes.”
A thing to know about me: my major in college was theatre, and while I mostly did behind-the-scenes stuff (props and costumes and especially stage management) I did a good deal of performing. Having read a lot of plays and thought in terms of performance then, when I’m writing now I think in terms of the weight and rhythm of words as they’re spoken aloud. If I’m reading my own work I want markers, flags for performance. Thus em-dashes, which I think are most useful pieces of punctuation for capturing the rhythm of the way people speak.
Much as I love Jane Austen’s books, in real life people rarely speak in full sentences. People interrupt themselves–and others–all the time. For people interrupting themselves, I suppose one could use the parenthesis (another of my favorite forms of punctuation). But because there’s usually an imperative quality to interruptions, and abruptness, I prefer em-dashes.
Here’s a bit from my new Sarah Tolerance book, The Doxies’ Penalty:
“I would think you’d prefer to hand him to Sir Walter—”
“In the general way, we’d find ‘im some justice from our own—if ‘e’s one of ours. Look, I cannot promise to look out for the fellow, nor give him up, without I ask a blessing to it.”
There’s an interruption of the first speaker, which really demands an em-dash. And the second speaker interrupting himself to qualify what he’s saying. I could, in justice, use a comma to set off “if ‘e’s one of ours.” But the comma doesn’t imply the sort of emphasis that self-interruption usually requires.
You could say that I’m leaving myself—and other performers—information on how to read the words, aloud or otherwise.
When I was doing a final pass on the manuscript for Doxies I did a search for the old-style double-hyphen which (in typewriter days) stood in for an em-dash, which would be added later in typesetting. Because sometimes I use a double hyphen rather than Option-Shift-Hyphen (on a Mac keyboard). And inevitably I find some. I also find inconsistent spacing around my em-dashes, and other typographic horrors requiring repair. I am closing in on my deadline to hand the MS over to the formatter, and I want to make their work as pain-free as possible.
If all goes well, The Doxies Penalty, Sarah Tolerance #4, will be available mid-October.* And yes, that was a plug. When you’re working with a micr0-press you also have to pitch in on marketing where you can.
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*The first three books in the series, Point of Honour, Petty Treason, and The Sleeping Partner, will be re-released in September. See comment above about marketing.
I gave a paper on him at the International Robin Hood Conference on Friday and he’s still nagging me. There’s a vast and deep discrepancy about what we know about his life from documents of the time and the rather fun story written about him after his death. Why did I give a paper about Mr Busket at a Robin Hood conference? Eustace Busket, who was most commonly known as Eustace the Monk, was quite possibly a source of a series of Robin Hood anecdotes. It was very cold the day of the conference, and, although I was at my computer, my brain kept turning “Eustace” into “Useless.” This is hilariously wrong. Eustace was a bunch of things but useless was not one of them.
I described him in my paper as “not merely a once-a-monk. He was also Eustace the pirate or Eustace the traitor or Eustace the genius sailor and courtier and leader of men or Eustace the much-hated.” He lived from around 1170 and died in 1217.
Eustace knew John when John was king of England, and John’s rivals across the channel. He worked for one and then the other and then he swung back again. His moment of greatest glory was probably when he controlled the English Channel through residence on the isle of Sark, and his moment of least glory was when he died. It wasn’t just that he died, you see. A contemporary chronicler explains that he was found hiding in the bilges. Normally one did not execute rich and noble folk captured in battle (one ransomed them for money) but Eustace was not well-loved and it’s quite possible his executioner bore him a personal grudge.
Eustace lived story and his thirteenth century biography doesn’t echo this at all. Historians talk about him as a colourful character, but only a couple have looked into his work at sea. Those few have pointed that that he was an extraordinarily important and skilled naval officer. He was the person Louis (son of the French king) employed for an attempt to invade England.
Understanding Eustace helps me understand two things. One is the nature of politics in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and how the volatility and sometimes sheer craziness of those politics worked. The other is my usual area of how stories told about someone tell us a great deal about the nature of stories and how they work in a given place and time. While this latter statement is true of any story, Eustace’s is special. Because of the fascinating discrepancies between Eustace’s life and the story told about him after his death, and because Eustace faded from popular story when Robin Hood came on the scene, Eustace tells me more than most. In his story he was a trickster, like Merlin and an outlaw, like his contemporary Fulk Fitz-warin. This points to one thing that the real Eustace and the fictional Eustace had in common: they undermined and disrupted others’ lives.
I’m giving my Patreon folk my whole conference paper to cogitate upon, but this is, I suspect not the end of my adventure with Eustace. I don’t have time now, but I will return to him one day.
The other day on social media, I saw an article in SF Gate about a San Francisco bookstore that decided it would no longer sell Harry Potter books. The store, Booksmith, told the reporter they didn’t want to contribute in any way to J.K. Rowling’s new foundation that provides funding for those fighting inclusion of trans people in single sex spaces.
Since I saw the story first on on social media, there were, of course, comments, one of which said it was “sad” that bookstores were “banning” books.
That’s ridiculous, of course. A bookstore is not obligated to stock any book it doesn’t want to, particularly since no bookstore – except maybe Amazon – can stock everything. All booksellers curate what they sell. That’s not banning.
Now generally most bookstores try to stock books that they think will sell well that are in keeping with the kind of store they want to be. A science fiction bookstore won’t bother with nonfiction bestsellers, but might well offer obscure editions by a revered author.
And many indie bookstores won’t sell small press books because the publishers can’t offer the return deals that big publishers give them. Both indie bookstores and small presses have tight budgets.
But bookstores, perhaps more than most businesses, reflect the taste of the people who own and run them, so it’s no surprise to me that a given store might decide not to stock books by an author they despise.
What makes it a story is that they said exactly why they’re doing it, instead of just not having the books in stock.
This reminded me of an old friend of mine, known all over the state of Texas as Tiger, though his given name was David, who for a couple of years in the late 1960s owned and ran a record store in College Station, Texas. Continue reading “Principles and Retail”…
The Adventures of Mary Darling, by Pat Murphy (Tachyon)
Peter Pan: We’ve all read the book, seen the play, or watched the animated film, so we know the drill: In Victorian London, three children are swept away to Neverland by PeterPanSpiritOfYouth, where they have many adventures battling pirates led by the dastardly Captain Hook. They leave behind a frantic, ineffectual mother, a bombastic, equally ineffective father, and a drooling dog nanny. Author Pat Murphy asks, Is that really what happened? What if Mary Darling had once been spirited away to be a “Mother” to the Lost Boys, despite her insistence that she is not a Mother? What if she understands all too well the deception and peril of the place and its capricious leader?
In Murphy’s retelling, after emerging from the first horrific shock of finding her children missing, with only one place they could have gone, Mary Darling determines to rescue them herself. Under the innocuous facade of a Victorian wife lies a powerful woman who has fought her way free of Neverland with considerable piratical skills. Of course, she encounters opposition, first in her husband, George, who is loving but befuddled by her “independent ways.” A more significant barrier comes from her uncle, Doctor John Watson, who enlists his friend, Sherlock Holmes, in determining what ails her. Holmes decides that Mary is the prime suspect in the disappearance of her children.
As Mary embarks on her quest to rescue her children before they either starve to death in Neverland or fall prey to Pan’s careless disregard for human life, her past reveals itself in layers. In past and present, we meet old friends and allies, people whose lives have been forever altered by their contact with Neverland. We also discover the reality behind J. M. Barrie’s imperialistic misrepresentation of indigenous peoples, the role and power of women, and the importance of memory.
The Adventures of Mary Darling is a brilliant re-imagining of a familiar tale, laying bare its folly and portraying the ingenuity, skill, and heroism of Mary and a host of other characters, invented and glossed-over. My favorite was James, a sweet gay boy, one of a series of Pan’s “Toodles,” and who later as Captain Hook proves to be one of Mary’s staunchest and most able supporters. It should come as neither surprise nor spoiler that Mr. Holmes never appreciates his loss in insisting that logic is the only reality.
Treading Lightly is a blog series on ways to lighten our carbon footprint.
So in 2022, I wrote a Treading Lightly post about cheese. Recently I realized that one of the photos in that post needs an update. It’s this one:
Still grating my own cheese and loving it, but I no longer keep it in plastic. I am working to eliminate as much plastic as possible from my life. Single-use plastic for sure. I recycle as much packaging as possible and I prefer to buy products that aren’t packaged in plastic (or made from plastic).
Regarding this obsolete photo, I have also been ditching things like my massive collection of Tupperware, some of which is pictured here. I did not do this lightly! I spent years and a ton of money building a Tupperware collection that served my every need. I was even a Tupperware sales person for a while. (That didn’t last long; not my scene.)
Enter my new collection of glass jars. It took a while to move everything out of the Tupperware or the original plastic packaging and into this array of canning jars. I love them! I can see the contents better, and they have this lovely gleaming glass aesthetic going on. Shiny, kinda old-fashioned and homey.
For stuff that I’d been keeping in its original plastic packaging, I discovered that not only could I see it better, the jars are more efficient for storage than the plastic bags. Case in point: brown sugar.
Stored in the “resealable” plastic bag, my brown sugar would always dry out. Even if I cleaned all the sugar out of the seal, and then folded it down and clamped it shut with a binder clip, it dried out. I tried adding a little clay thing that you soak in water, no go. The sugar dried out. As soon as I put it in a glass jar, it stayed moist without any fuss.
Even better, it’s easier to get stuff out of the jars without spilling it than to get it out of plastic packages. That brown sugar, when I tried spooning it out of the plastic bag, would end up all over the counter. With the jar, I spoon it out and rarely lose a grain.
That goes for the cheese, too. Here’s the updated photo:
The cheese looks prettier in this glass! (The cheddar is white cheddar, btw.) The jars are easier to open and close. Measuring from them is a breeze. They fill the shelves more efficiently. And they cost a fraction of what Tupperware costs.
I absolutely love keeping my staples in glass.
Give it a try! At least for the brown sugar – you will love that.
My current morning book is Jenny Odell’s Saving Time. It follows well on Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, since both are critical assessments of how we approach time, but while Burkeman focused on undermining the self-help time management industry, Odell is going after modern ideas of time and how to live in a more political fashion.
Both are philosophical books and good examples of critical thinking about time, though very different from Carlo Rovelli’s equally fascinating book The Order of Time, which was my first morning book.
In an early chapter, Odell writes about the commodification of leisure time, which includes various businesses set up to give us manufactured “experiences.” Reading about not just theme parks, but businesses tricked out as theme parks in Saving Time made me remember a business trip I once took to Las Vegas.
I tell many stories about that trip, which was to a three-day conference on class actions. I lived in Washington, DC, at the time, so I flew out early and went to San Diego to visit a friend, and then went back to Las Vegas. It was February, and when I flew out of Baltimore there was about a foot of snow on the ground. (I’d had to struggle through snow drifts on my small and unplowed street to get to a corner where a shuttle could pick me up for the airport.)
It was glorious in San Diego and my friend lived in a place east of the city where we could sit on her balcony and just stare at the hills and trees. The weather was still glorious in Las Vegas, but the hotel was on The Strip.
It was, in fact, the New York New York hotel. When you entered, you had to navigate across a casino floor to get to the front desk. It was smoky, too — I think smoking was still allowed in such places in Nevada.
The room was fine, but to get a meal you went down to the main floor where, in addition to the casino, there was an area styled as Greenwich Village with cafes. It even had fake steam coming up around fake manholes.
I hated it. First of all, while I used to play a bit of poker, I’m not a serious gambler, so the casino held no attraction for me, particularly since it was just table after table of people playing games, plus slot machines. No character at all.
Secondly, it was all so plastic, particularly the fake Greenwich Village.
I remember talking to a friend about how much I hated Las Vegas and he said, “Most people like the energy.”
And I said, “It’s fake energy.”
I mean, I’ve been to Greenwich Village many times, starting the the 1970s — so back when it was much less gentrified than now. It has always had wonderful big city energy. Continue reading “The Real and the Fake”…
I decided to re-read Mansfield Park. It’s one of my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels (who am I kidding? All Austen’s novels are in some wise my favorite) even though the heroine, Fanny Price, is shy and neurotic and not robust–she’s sort of the Bizarro-World version of Elizabeth Bennet. But Fanny is the moral center of the novel–which sounds pretty stodgy, but really isn’t.
Fanny is a poor girl who lives with her cultured, wealthy relatives, where she is useful, unregarded, and has nothing to do but run errands and observe the doings of the family. She is taught and nurtured by her exceptionally virtuous cousin Edmund, with whom she is secretly in love for most of the book.
It’s good that Fanny has at least one exceptionally virtuous person in her life, because everyone else–from her dreadful Aunt Norris to her Very Upright uncle Sir Thomas Bertram (whose fortune derives from his slaveholding plantations in Antigua) to Edmund’s tosspot brother Tom, to her vain and self-absorbed cousins Maria and Julia–is problematic. And that’s before we get to the Crawfords.
How to describe the Crawfords? A charming brother and sister who are visiting in the neighborhood. They’re fun and witty and good looking and well-to-do… and have the moral compass of chewing gum. It takes everyone else a long while to figure this out, but Fanny knows at once. This is partly because Virtuous Cousin Edmund immediately falls for Mary Crawford, and Fanny sees him tie himself into knots trying to excuse Miss Crawford’s worldly, calculating behavior (Edmund is going to be a clergyman; Miss Crawford would prefer he not, because clergymen are stodgy and boring). But also because Henry Crawford is a monster of charming ego, and Fanny watches the damage he does.
So there I was, reading Mansfield Park for the umpteenth time, and a scene I remembered wasn’t there. I paged ahead and confirmed that the scene is not in the book. Which meant it was doubtless from the film of Mansfield Park from 1999, with Frances O’Connor as Fanny and Jonny Lee Miller as Edmund. Thus I had to watch the movie (as well as finish reading the book). Mansfield Park-the Movie (hereafter MPTM) follows the plot of the novel, but it also draws heavily from Austen’s own letters and notes (there are a lot of comments about the slave trade–which had been abolished in 1807, although slavery in the British colonies had not); in this version Fanny writes stories of the same sort that Austen herself wrote, and quotes her lavishly (“run mad as often as you choose, but do not swoon!”). In this treatment Fanny is not only an observer but a critic, and a sharp one. And while it’s not canon (heaven knows what Miss Austen would have thought) it works very nicely.
But they add/change some things. To explain what, and how it lands, I’m going to give the traditional SPOILERS warning.
Here is a cake to separate you from the information I’m about to disclose.
Okay. In Mansfield Park, book and film, Henry Crawford amuses himself on his visit by flirting heavily with both Maria and Julia Bertram, with the stated aim of making them fall in love with him, but without any intent to follow through and actually marry one of them. Since Maria, the older daughter, is already engaged, this is doubly caddish behavior. When the game palls, he leaves, hurting both sisters. Fanny watches this happen. Maria then marries her bubble-brained but wealthy fiancé, Mr. Rushworth. Julia goes off with them on their honeymoon. With the coast now clear of Bertram sisters, Mr. Crawford returns… and falls seriously in love with Fanny. Who does not trust him as far as she could throw him.
So far, this is the plot of MP and MPTM. Mr. Crawford proposes to Fanny (to the delight of Sir Thomas, who thinks it is a highly flattering match for his penniless niece). Fanny refuses Crawford, flat out. She cannot tell her uncle (or anyone else, really) why she dislikes Mr. Crawford without outing her cousins’ flirtations with the man.
Here the two paths diverge.
In MP, Fanny goes to Portsmouth to visit her birth family. Fanny’s cousin Tom is taken seriously ill (and Mary Crawford writes to Fanny about how swell it would be if only Tom died, leaving Edmund heir to the family title and fortune, and therefore much more eligible to marry herself). Meanwhile Mr. Crawford visits and tries to get Fanny to change her mind. She doesn’t. Crawford goes away, encounters Maria Rushworth née Bertram, seduces her, and the two run away together, to the horror and distress of the Bertrams. Fanny returns to Mansfield Park to comfort the family in their affliction; Edmund discovers that Mary Crawford is just as morally bankrupt as her brother (without Fanny having to disclose anything–which also absolves her of the right to dance in circles saying “I TOLD YOU SHE WAS EVIL!”) And in the fullness of time Tom recovers, Maria is abandoned by Crawford, and Edmund realizes that he loves Fanny. They live happily ever after.
Not bad for the moral center of a novel.
In MPTM it’s much the same, but. Fanny doesn’t just go home to visit her birth family–she’s sent there by Sir Thomas, who is seriously pissed that Fanny turned down Crawford’s proposal. While she’s in Portsmouth (living with her vulgar, poor family) Crawford comes. He is charming and solicitous and doesn’t make Fanny feel bad about her vulgar, poor family–and when he proposes again she has a moment of insanity and says Yes. The next morning, when he comes to see her, she backs out of the engagement. Crawford departs in high dudgeon. NOW Tom Bertram becomes ill, and Fanny returns to Mansfield Park to comfort the family. While there Mary Crawford confides in Fanny all the “if only Tom would just die, already” stuff. Then Maria comes home to visit her brother–and Crawford shows up, and sleeps with Maria IN HER FATHER’S HOUSE, and they run away together. And Mary Crawford suggests that it’s all Fanny’s fault–if she’d only taken Henry when he offered, but the poor boy isn’t used to having to wait for anything, so…
So what was accomplished with the restructuring? In the book Crawford does not make a second proposal, and Fanny certainly never has a moment where she says yes. In the movie it’s implied that part of the reason that she accepts Crawford is that her birth family is so awful that she just cannot (and this was part of Sir Thomas’s thinking when he sent her home: try what life according to your actual marriage prospects is like, Fanny!). It also gives Crawford a little more motivation to seduce Maria–he’s smarting from Fanny’s rejection. And we get to see Mary Crawford say awful things directly to the Bertrams in the middle of their drawing room: advising them that if the manage things right, some parts of society will shun Maria, but she’ll still have enough of a social life to make it okay. The watcher sits there thinking Shut Up! That might fly in the upper reaches of the aristocracy, but for a country baronet and his family? No. And saying it to Edmund, who is now a clergyman, is a kind of moral cluelessness that is very special indeed.
I can see, from the filmaker’s perspective, why they made the changes. The story remains essentially the same, and might be somewhat more comprehensible to a modern audience. It moves better to have scenes played out rather than described in letters (although Fanny discovering Maria and Crawford in bed would not have been Miss Austen’s first choice. Or second). But having seen the movie and read the book at virtually the same time, I still don’t think there’s a world in which Fanny Price would ever say Yes to Henry Crawford, even if her birth family was twice as bad.
The title makes my life sound like an elegant painting. It is not, alas. It’s not nicely synchronised in colour, time, or any kind of harmony. In fact, this post is late because last night was midwinter being midwinter being midwinter. It was 4 degrees (39.2 for all those who prefer Fahrenheit) at 6 pm and I’m just warming up now. Me heater is on and I’ve moved from the night-time down dressing gown to the daytime oodie* and I will write this afternoon. I was supposed to run messages. A friend was going out and got the urgent things for me (paid in very fine chocolate and coffee) because today’s warmest was riddled with wind from the snow, which makes walking very difficult for those of us with arthritic joints. I can’t catch a bus because the nearest bus stop is too far away on days like this and I have been eating junk food. It’s one way of dealing. Not the most sensible, but it got me through last night and this morning. Tonight I’m back to being sensible. Between now and then, I must write some novel. This is my atonement for eating junk food. If I eat garbage I must produce good words, to keep the world in balance.
The novel is a vampire novel (of sorts) and my characters, too, will be eating junk food. What is junk food to a vampire/werewolf cross? I still have to work that out. I have ten minutes…
Spellcheck tells me I intended to write ‘foodie’. Given my recent eating habits, I fail at foodiedom and defy Spellcheck.
I’m fascinated to discover how many of the books I’ve chosen for my morning reading practice have turned out to be about time. I started with Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, just finished Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, and have just started Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Live Beyond the Clock.
None of these books is about how to be more productive, which is good because my morning reading is not remotely about efficiency and productivity. It is, even though I’m reading words and writing down some of the ones that strike me as important, a kind of meditative practice.
It started out as a practical thing. I like to do some movement when I first get up – some physical therapy exercises that keep my body moving right along with my Tai Chi form – but I also want to keep an eye on my blood pressure. It’s best to check blood pressure when you’re relaxed, so I started reading for about 15 minutes before I dug out my cuff.
Reading quickly became important in its own right, and over the six months I’ve been doing this, I’ve figured out how to get the most out of it.
First of all, the ideal books are ones best read for a few minutes at a time. Rovelli’s on time was an excellent starting place, since it addressed time as approached by physicists with a philosophical bent and required me to think rather deeply about it when I read.
Books of essays are also good – I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest collection No Straight Road Takes You There before I started on Burkeman. Basically, any book in which reading a few pages gives you something to think about works.
And interestingly, most of the books I’ve ended up really appreciating in this practice are ones I’ve had for some time, but hadn’t read much of, because in truth they are books best read in small doses. If you keep reading to finish the book – as I am prone to do with novels or with nonfiction that’s more reportorial – you miss a lot of the point.
While I’ve been a serious reader all my life – I not only cannot remember not knowing how to read, I do not have any idea how I learned to read except that I already knew how when I started school – I’ve never read this way before.
I might have read school assignments a bit at a time and even taken some notes, but that was for a completely different purpose. In general, I’ve always been the person who buried her nose in a book and kept it there until the end or until interrupted. And I hated being interrupted.
I still read that way, but not first thing in the morning.
And among the things I have learned – especially as I read about time – is that doing this particular bit of reading every day is an incredibly important way to spend my time. Continue reading “Creating Habits”…
