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”…
In today’s digital world, people routinely turn to the internet for health or medical information. In addition to actively searching online, they often come across health-related information on social media or receive it through emails or messages from family or friends.
It can be tempting to share such messages with loved ones – often with the best of intentions.
Although there is a fire hose of health-related content online, not all of it is factual. In fact, much of it is inaccurate or misleading, raising a serious health communication problem: Fake health information – whether shared unknowingly and innocently, or deliberately to mislead or cause harm – can be far more captivating than accurate information.
This makes it difficult for people to know which sources to trust and which content is worthy of sharing.
The allure of fake health information
Fake health information can take many forms. For example, it may be misleading content that distorts facts to frame an issue or individual in a certain context. Or it may be based on false connections, where headlines, visuals or captions don’t align with the content. Despite this variation, such content often shares a few common characteristics that make it seem believable and more shareable than facts.
Another marker of fake health information is that it presents ideas that are simply too good to be true. There is something appealingly counterintuitive in certain types of fake health information that can make people feel they have access to valuable or exclusive knowledge that others may not know. For example, a claim such as “chocolate helps you lose weight” can be especially appealing because it offers a sense of permission to indulge and taps into a simple, feel-good solution to a complex problem. Such information often spreads faster because it sounds both surprising and hopeful, validating what some people want to believe.
In a study on vaccine hesitancy published in 2020, my colleagues and I found that controversial headlines in news reports that go viral before national vaccination campaigns can discourage parents from getting their children vaccinated. These headlines seem to reveal sensational and secret information that can falsely boost the message’s credibility.
The pull to share
The internet has created fertile ground for spreading fake health information. Professional-looking websites and social media posts with misleading headlines can lure people into clicking or quickly sharing, which drives more and more readers to the falsehood. People tend to share information they believe is relevant to them or their social circles.
In 2019, an article with the false headline “Ginger is 10,000x more effective at killing cancer than chemo” was shared more than 800,000 times on Facebook. The article contained several factors that make people feel an urgency to react and share without checking the facts: compelling visuals, emotional stories, misleading graphs, quotes from experts with omitted context and outdated content that is recirculated.
Visual cues like the logos of reputable organizations or photos of people wearing white medical coats add credibility to these posts. This kind of content is highly shareable, often reaching far more people than scientifically accurate studies that may lack eye-catching headlines or visuals, easy-to-understand words or dramatic storylines.
How to combat the spread of fake health information
In today’s era of information overload in which anyone can create and share content, being able to distinguish between credible and misleading health information before sharing is more important than ever. Researchers and public health organizations have outlined several strategies to help people make better-informed decisions.
Whether health care consumers come across health information on social media, in an email or through a messaging app, here are three reliable ways to verify its accuracy and credibility before sharing:
Evaluate the source’s credibility. A quick way to assess a website’s trustworthiness is to check its “About Us” page. This section usually explains who is behind the content, their mission and their credentials. Also, search the name of the author. Do they have recognized expertise or affiliations with credible institutions? Reliable websites often have domains ending in .gov or .edu, indicating government or educational institutions. Finally, check the publication date. Information on the internet keeps circulating for years and may not be the most accurate or relevant in the present context.
If you’re still unsure, don’t share. If you’re still uncertain about the accuracy of a claim, it’s better to keep it to yourself. Forwarding unverified information can unintentionally contribute to the spread of misinformation and potentially cause harm, especially when it comes to health.
Questioning dubious claims and sharing only verified information not only protects against unsafe behaviors and panic, but it also helps curb the spread of fake health information. At a time when misinformation can spread faster than a virus, taking a moment to pause and fact-check can make a big difference.
I’m back from my daring adventure in Perth and Adelaide. I discovered – to my great happiness – that antisemitism in Australia is far more closely targeted than it looks. The bigotry in the media and on the Left surrounded me where I live and so I was inundated and so were many people I know. That inundation is targeted, not at me, but at anyone Jewish. I happen to be local to it and know too many people who share those politics. This is not me, personally (though a part of it is also me, personally) but most Jewish in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra. Sydney and Melbourne have the largest Jewish population in the country, and that has been very precisely targeted with hate, but Canberra? It’s where the politics happen and the media mocks. I’m mostly collateral damage. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, outside Canberra, the science fiction community has a normal mix of politics and does not carry hate. The Arts, however, does carry hate. More and more I mix with other Jewish writers and editors because they don’t demand I hate myself. There are many writers and industry professionals who do not make those demands, but they leave me alone because I’m either politically perilous because of my upbringing or they simply don’t want to worry about it. “Jew cooties” strike again.
The moral of this story is that we can be trapped in a fishbowl where haters surround us. It’s only a fishbowl. It’s not even a whole city. Most non-Jews in Canberra want to tell me how awful Israel is and inform me about their views on genocide. They don’t want to talk about my end of things, not my murdered cousin, not everyone I know caught up in the war (Israeli and Palestinian) and most certainly not how alone I’ve been in Canberra, because they don’t want to reach out to me as friends. This is the problem I’m facing. Not even our “I talk to the Jewish community” Senator has sorted out how this affects local Jews and that we are the ones forced to explain ourselves every day and remind others that we’re still human.
I’m very glad that this is specific to certain circles in Canberra, even as it hurts to be dumped and deserted and hated. I now have ten days when I rediscovered that I hurt, but am still me, and that I have more friends than I knew and (if I can get past the hate) even have a life. I was less ill when I didn’t have to reach out and hope that the person I emailed wouldn’t come back to me with a demand that I denounce whatever (that day) they wanted me to denounce. And I have chats with taxi drivers to sustain me.
I have been saying for a while that the antisemitism is part of a wider problem of not seeing people for their actual cultures and religions. Jew-hate is a symptom of a wider disease. I was (locally) silenced and left out of things because I am wrong because I’m Jewish and Gillian (some people dislike me, and I may not enjoy this, but when it’s a personal thing it’s not the same thing as bigotry at all) and could see how so many people translate ‘Jewish’ into “Zio’ and ‘person who murders’ and other excitingly false tags and stories. Every time they think along these lines, it’s as if a slab of historical understanding is wiped from their brain, by choice.
I could also see that Muslims in Australia are mostly assumed to be Palestinian Australian (the actions of the certain Pakistani Australian senator do not help with this, at all). So many people assumed that there was a single Muslim voice and vote, when Muslim Australians are… Australian. We are such an independent mob. Why should Muslims not think for themselves? In fact, they did, and voted in a bunch of ways during the election. The media, being its current slow self, did not pick up on this. It also did not realise that so many Australians belong to other religions. The taxi drivers were Hindu, but from quite different parts of India. In Canberra, I’m more likely to run into a Sikh or Coptic Christian, but I have Hindu friends here. The only religion numerous enough to change an election outcome is Christianity. Australia is closer to a secular country than other Christian countries, but it’s still Christian. I lie to explain that the Lord’s Pray opens Parliament and that our ruler is also the ruler of the Church of England, but the truth is that, everyday, Christmas and Easter are times the country stops. Many atheist Australians still live the Christian year. They don’t do it in a religious manner, but they will eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and see Christmas Day as a day on which no-one should work.
What does all this mean?
I think we need to reconsider Australia as a country. We should look at the hateful targeting of minorities (Indigeous Australians have suffered and still suffer what Jewish Australians are currently enduring, to give the most obvious example) and not accept the media and the Left as arbitrators of our lives. In my perfect world, the majority I discovered when I broke out of my goldfish bowl will know to reach out to people like me (my friend Anna did, which is why I was able to safely travel) and connect us again with a safer world. This connection can be done with coffee locally, or a chat, or a movie, or a walk in the park. It’s an acknowledgement that our lives matter and that we don’t have to self-hate in order to be allowed to live. Simple things with radical consequences.
There is so much shouting right now. For every shout, I think we need ten instances of community building. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m talking to other Jews who have become isolated and scared and bringing them into my suddenly-much-safer place. I’m writing fiction and essays that promote safe paths for people, and affirmation of cultural complexity. I’m still spending an hour a day analysing the rest-of-world, because it’s still not safe, but I’m taking the second hour I used to analyse and using that to analyse from a more productive and positive direction. I’m going to finish books and get them into the world, because that’s another path to reducing hate.
Finding publishers is the tough bit right now. Not all publishers are antisemitic, nor even half of them, but there are other crises happening and Jew cooties mean that many prefer works by someone other than me. Many, but not all – I need to find those who want my novels and non-fiction. Some of this is already happening.
A friend reminded me of a song that tells a story of how big change happened here, in Australia, when we were in a place that we thought we could never get out of. I was not one of the victims then. I was on the side doing the hurting and had no idea that I was part of something that awful. It wasn’t anything I intentionally did, it’s that I didn’t know that it was on me to reach out and be part of change. Vincent Lingiari and his friends and colleagues spearheaded that change when I was in the early part of primary school. Most of my life, then, has been spent seeing what changes can be made when we see people as themselves. A pop song helped and the use of the melody by an insurance company didn’t help at all, so I’m not sure how much today’s children know of what began when I was a child. Let me share that song, because it explains in the best way.
When I meditate – which I do sporadically, though I keep intending to get more regular about it because it always makes me feel better – I see myself as being one with the universe.
I don’t mean I’m the all-encompassing universe all by myself. I mean I’m a tiny speck of this amazing great whole.
I find this very comforting. It reminds me that so much of what is touted as of paramount importance is really meaningless.
It doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try to do good in the world as best I can, but it does help me let go of too much attachment to the outcome of anything I do. These days, with so much damage being done to our lives every day, I find it helpful to remember that while doing is up to me, outcomes aren’t.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman has a chapter called “Cosmic Insignificance Theory,” which I think is much the same thing as my meditation. He observes:
Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks [four thousand weeks is an average human lifespan] isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely – and often enough, marvelously – really is.
Cosmic insignificance theory is diametrically opposed to the kind of world the broligarchs seem to be after, particularly the ones who think they’re going to live forever, perhaps uploaded and combined with some all-powerful “AI.” Continue reading “Time Is on Our Side”…
I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that would make those episodes into something cohesive. The problem, really, is that a lot of that connective tissue is pretty dark, and I haven’t been sure how to write that stuff. And that I am constantly aware of what I think of as the Rashomon factor.
Rashomon is a Japanese film from 1950 staring the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, in which the same story is told from four different perspectives. A samurai is found murdered in a forest; a priest, a bandit, the wife of the samurai, and the samurai himself (through a medium) tell their versions of the story, in none of which they are the villains. Every single event ever has many different versions. Especially in families. In writing a memoir you either have to be rock-solid in your conviction that your version is the true one, or ready to deal with the anger or anguish of family response.
There was a fascinating article in The New York Times on a new book by Molly Jong-Fast, about growing up as the daughter of writer Erica Jong. In the ’70s Erica Jong was sort of a literary “It” girl, the author of the novel Fear of Flying, and the creator of the phrase “zipless fuck.” Continue reading “Is Turnabout Fair Play?”…
This is a short note to let you know that, when you read this, I will have emerged from my second science fiction convention in a fortnight. I will have seen some of my favourite people and will be too tired to write anything.
I wanted to apologise for no blog post. Instead of that, let me give you a picture. A picture, after all, is worth a thousand words. Actually, it’s worth more than 1000 words. I used this picture (and the memory of getting through that flood) in a story I set in Belanglo Forest. I stayed in the log cabin (and have a picture of the log cabin if you want to see it) and drank at the pub and, very fortunately, didn’t see any dead bodies. If you’re curious about the story (which probably classifies as sarcastic horror), you can find more about it here: This Fresh Hell – Australasian Horror Writers Association
1980s, Belanglo, at the time of the backpack murders
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:
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.
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.
