A bunch of writers started hanging out in a virtual treehouse when the pandemic hit and now don't want to leave.
My novel For the Good of the Realm is part of the Outcasts StoryBundle, curated by Danielle Ackley-McPhail.
As the description on the StoryBundle link says, “Outsiders. Rebels. Free-Thinkers. Who doesn’t love an underdog?” In all these books an outsider plays a key role even though they’re likely not appreciated.
As with all storybundles, you can get the whole package of ebooks for $20 or pay more if you’re so inclined.
Read more about the bundle on the eSpec Books blog.
During the pandemic I figured out that Covid and many other diseases spread through the air and could be minimized and contained with good indoor air quality methods. While I was far from alone in this understanding – I learned about it from some very smart people – those with the clout to make sure we improved air in every place from schools to public buildings to offices and other workplaces ignored or minimized the problem.
As a result, many of us still find it necessary to wear masks in a lot of indoor spaces, something that is not only annoying, but actually under attacks. Far too little has been done to improve indoor air quality despite the fact that the benefits go much farther than avoiding contagious diseases and include improved cognitive functioning and avoidance of health problems caused by chemicals trapped in poorly ventilated spaces.
So when I stumbled on Carl Zimmer’s book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe while browsing in a bookstore, I was intrigued. I knew Zimmer was a science writer for The New York Times, and the book seemed to have thorough reporting.
What convinced me to buy this thick book in hardback rather than wait until it was available in the library was the blurb from Ed Yong, who called Zimmer “one of the very best science writers” and noted that the book would leave readers “agog at the incredible world that floats unseen around us and outraged at the forces that stopped us from appreciating that world until, for many people, it was too late.”
I almost never buy books based on blurbs, but since Yong is a brilliant science writer and a man of fierce integrity when it comes to his profession, I had no doubt that he was giving his honest opinion.
And he was right. Air-Borne is a superb book that shows deep research into the history of the things that float in our air – much more than viruses – and of the people who have struggled to show us that we need to pay attention to what we’re breathing.
I was already outraged before I read it, but looking at the history increased my fervor. So many scientists came up with valuable clues to how viruses, bacteria, and fungi spread through the air only to be pushed aside or overlooked.
The book starts with a 2023 concert by the Skagit Valley Chorale, the choir in Washington state that experienced a super-spreader event that left two people dead after they met to rehearse during the early days of the pandemic. The number of people infected at that rehearsal was one of the things that made people realize this virus was air-borne.
Zimmer was at that concert with a CO2 meter in his pocket, trying to gauge if he needed a mask. As someone who often travels with a CO2 meter, since the amount of CO2 in the air gives you a good idea of the ventilation in a space, I recognized a kindred spirit. Continue reading “Breathe, but Safely”…
The changes in the US are reaching out over the world. Added to the increase in antisemitism and many more people are looking through a red veil and seeing hate or despite when the reality is we’re not communicating clearly. Whether I’m right or wrong or entirely evil in whatever I say, I feel like a mouse with cats both visible and invisible, just waiting to pounce. Some of my friends have gone quiet, which is sensible. I am sometimes not so quiet and a random cat pounces. The cat might be pouncing because I’m vermin or because they’re hyper-aware and see me as vermin, but either way…. they pounce.
And I need to think of nicer things. Not the cyclone. It was not, as cyclones go, a very big one. In fact, it was hardly a cyclone at all. The parts of SE Queensland and NE NSW it hit, though, included much flat land that was easily saturated with water. People talk about the hills of Brisbane, and yes, they are pretty. But Brisbane airport is 3m above sea level and it’s not the only part that’s so close to sea level. When there’s too much rain, the land becomes saturated quickly and Brisbane floods and the floods do not roll down the mountains to the sea… because a large part of the city has low elevation. On the Gold Coast, there is very little beach left, but beach can be restored. So far, all my friends and family in that region are fine, which is something.
You need some good news, right?
The first bit of good news has to do with water… from the opposite end to floods. There is a new book (ebook right now, and I’ll make a formal announcement when the paperback comes out) that talks about water and that intends to raise money to help people in very dry areas (Sahel-dry) manage water. I have an alternate history sarcastic little piece in it. You can find the ebook here: Yemoja’s Tears
The second bit of good news is that later this week is Purim (the feast of Esther) and it’s obligatory for me to get drunk. This year I think I need it.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.
One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.
Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.
At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.
In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.
I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.
We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.
We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:
We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.
She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.
And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.
But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House. Continue reading “The War on Infrastructure”…
Every fall, when it starts to get dark earlier, we see a deluge of messages on social media aimed at telling women how to stay safe (and yelling at men because they don’t have to pay attention to such things). These messages – which include things like holding your keys in your hands and not going out alone at night – are usually well-meant and mostly wrong.
There are also ongoing debates about how to deal with violence against women in our society, with many people arguing that the focus should be on those who commit the violence. These people think it’s unfair to encourage women to learn self-defense, since they’re not the cause of the problem, and advocate for programs aimed at perpetrators.
Unfortunately, even improved laws and law enforcement around sexual assault and rape – and such improvements are scant – don’t help when someone’s being hurt, and the training programs aimed at stopping men from harming have been unsuccessful.
What has been most successful, as Meg Stone points out in her excellent and thorough new book The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence, is the approach taught as empowerment self-defense, a feminist-based system that includes both training in effective physical techniques and a number of other skills such as boundary-setting that can prevent a difficult situation from getting out of hand.
Stone is the executive director of IMPACT Boston, one of a number of groups worldwide teaching effective self defense as more than just fighting back. She’s also worked in the area of preventing gender-based violence for over thirty years and, as this books illustrates, she is very skilled at presenting the issues in a way that changes the response without provoking more of a fight – a very useful self-defense skill.
As Stone points out in detail in the book, linking to studies, unlike the short programs aimed at convincing, say, male college students not to attack women, empowerment self defense classes such as those taught by IMPACT and similar programs have been shown to reduce the number of assaults and to otherwise give women the power to make their position safer.
As Denise Velasco, a participant in a program teaching self defense to janitorial workers at risk of assault, told Stone:
I came to a point where I understood that self-defense wasn’t just about defending yourself; it was about changing the way you looked at the world in terms of your own power.
Continue reading “The Cost of Fear: A Great Book on Self-Defense”…
My partner and I are making our way through The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World …, a posthumous book of essays by David Graeber, with one of us reading it aloud while the other is cooking. Thursday night, Jim was reading an essay called “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” a piece about the late 20th and early 21st century global justice movement.
He read these words:
Direct action is a form of resistance that, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free. [emphasis added]
And I exclaimed “Yes” and would have thrust my fist in the air if I hadn’t been stirring a pot.
Now this is in part because I am inspired, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, by the likes of the Zen Monk Takuan Soho, who did not cower before the powerful or mistreat those who lacked power.
I want to move through the world as a free person, to treat all with respect so long as they do the same to me, and to stand up to bullies and Nazis. That this may be a perilous time for such an attitude does not keep it from resonating deeply with me.
I have a friend who refers to the rich and powerful as our “owners.” It drives me crazy, though I understand what she means and can even see some merit in the usage when I think of organizing unions of workers and tenants and others.
But I do not acknowledge that anyone has that kind of right over me. That certainly includes the broligarch in chief who is orchestrating the destruction of our government right now.
This is also driven by my feminism, because so much of what is going on right now is aimed at making women into second-class citizens again – people with limited rights but still bound by the law – and I am damned if I am willing to go along with that.
I didn’t think I was inferior back when the law treated me as such – I am old enough to remember when the minimum wage for women was lower than that for men, just as an example – and I have no intention of recognizing anyone’s right to reinstate that kind of misogynistic discrimination.
Some of it is rooted in the current of American Exceptionalism in which I was raised. In my childhood, it was not uncommon to hear a dispute on the playground that ended in the words “It’s a free country.” Continue reading “Defiantly Acting Free”…
I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.
The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.
I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.
Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.
Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.
In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.
Here are some of quotes that struck me:
Nothing is valid always and everywhere.
[T]he world is nothing but change.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.
I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book. Continue reading “A Reading Practice”…
I meant to return to answering questions today. Next week. Today I have other things on my mind.
Yesterday, I was caught up in trying to work out why it’s so important to so many people to not let Jews mourn loss. I saw Irish Jews forced to leave a Holocaust Memorial ceremony. I saw people told “What about others who have died?” when they tried to mourn families murdered during the Holocaust. I saw so much more than this that I lost words and avoided writing.
Even political leaders who gave official statements about the Holocaust toned it down this year, left off the dangerous word ‘Jews’ and generally faffed around. Someone on my timeline suggested that we should mourn all lives not focus on specific lives even for one day, and I wondered if it were possible to make all anniversaries about the death of a parent about all parents without hurting those who had lost their parents. We all need time to mourn because we all need to heal when we’re hurt. Each and every one of us at an appropriate time. Not all of us for just one shared minute.
This mood carried over into all kinds of other things. One of them left me incoherent until this morning. Please understand that I am not yet over my incoherence. This may not be the best post I’ve ever done, but my heart is in it.
Someone on social media said, “Think of all the colour, art, theatre, celebration and other cultural value that immigrants and different cultures have brought to Australia. Hmm just remind me what the Jews have brought us, a bit of theatre and film maybe?”
The first Australian opera was written by someone Jewish: Isaac Nathan. The famous story of Fisher’s ghost, the story that led to a Fisher’s ghost festival every single year in the Sydney region… it was written by someone Jewish. The writer who brought English folktales into the international fold and who is still read as the classic purveyor of English folk tales was Jewish and from Australia.
Jewish Australia was such a strong part of Australia’s nineteenth century culture.
We couldn’t stand out and be different very often, because that was not safe. This doesn’t mean that we didn’t contribute. Jews have been part of Australian culture since modern Australia began, just as Jews have lived in Australia since 1788. One of the first free settlers in Australia was a Jewish baby who arrived on the First Fleet, and many of the early arts and early printing in colonial Australia were by Jews or done with Jews.
This particular history shows why some of us create art and celebrate culture that is similar to mainstream culture: religious difference does not imply complete cultural difference.
More than that, though: many Jewish cultural mavens don’t have the same access to the wider community because it’s not safe or because they/we are too Jewish.
Still more, this means is that Jews in Australia are left aside by others who share culture, because of histories past and shameful. Let me give you an example. When I first came to Canberra I met the people in charge at our Polish club and they told me I was welcome to join, since I had ancestors from Bialystock and from around Warsaw and we spoke very similar cultural languages. Then they discovered I was Jewish and they said “We do not accept Jews.” At the cultural festivals in Canberra, there used to be Jewish and Israeli foodstalls and singing and dancing, but these days it’s not safe and very few Jewish culture-bearers from any background are on programs and everyone asks me “Why don’t we have a Jewish food fair any more?” The food fair is a specific thing. It covered many different Jewish food cultures, and was a delight. It was run to make money for children’s education, but the insurance premiums the Jewish community had to pay were so high after the Molotov cocktails 20+ years ago, that the community would not only not raise money with a food fair… it would go into debt.
One of the wonders of modern Australian history is the great change that made us a nation with so many writers and musicians and actors and… an immensely artistic country. This development of the arts into something of international note (including that enviable coffee culture) was spearheaded by Holocaust survivors. And yet there is not Jewish contribution to culture and the arts?
When I was in my teens I asked many Shoah survivors, including writers, “Why Melbourne? What made you choose to come to Melbourne?” I was told they wanted to get as far from Europe as they could. These people were mostly honorary aunties and uncles who went to school, university or shared a social group with one of my parents.
We were the older Australian Jews. They still shared their art with the rest of Australia. Much of Australia simply pretended my branch of Australian Jewish weren’t Jewish at all, or were pretenders, or did not have and specific cultural background they presented. My father’s first cousin, Linda, has had any indication of her Jewishness removed from her Wikipedia page, except for the title of one of her most popular song series.
We are not really permitted to show off the folk culture or the national culture the way other Australians are able.
There is the bigotry, which I’ve mentioned. Add to this the need to be safe, which is related to the bigotry.
There is another related factor. Many non-Jewish Australians pretend we don’t exist. This is why almost no-one in Australia knows who the author is of the first Australian Jewish fantasy novel. How do I know almost no-one knows? Because I am that author.
Another aspect is whether others who share our ancestral cultures are willing to share. The Polish Club fits in here. Just as the Polish club did not want me, few mainstream Australian culture experts see Jewish Australian writers unless we write about the Holocaust, about rebellion against Ultra-Orthodoxy… in other words, unless we create what they feel we ought to create. Our own culture is far less important than their view of it.
Also, for some of us, our culture is Anglo-Australia. My cultural foodways include challah and lamingtons and meat pies. We’re entirely allowed to publicly celebrate the lamingtons and meat pies, but most Australians don’t see how challah fits into the picture.
Add to all this that we can’t appear too different and still be safe. There are days and times I cannot walk in a given place and guarantee my safety. When I’m in Melbourne on a day where pro-Palestinians march, I cannot use the State Library without walking around the long, long way and entering by the back, for instance. I cannot walk that far, so I cannot use the State Library on those days.
Jews in Australia have never been permitted to be too different from majority culture and so we have our own culture, that is similar to that of the majority. This doesn’t mean we bring nothing, because our ancestors were part of that majority culture before we even came to Australia. It means that some people look and don’t see something they think of as distinctive or exotic and so think we have brought nothing. Take Jewish composers out of Australian history and the whole modern development of international level music would be jeopardised. The folk music scene in Melbourne would lose its best violinist. Dame Edna Everage would not have worn those glasses. Eliot Goblet and John Safran and Elle McFeast would not be part of our world. There is so much culture Australia would not have.
We cannot appear too different in public. I can be publicly Jewish because I have an Anglo-Australian culture, but local bookshops do not stock my books – not even the ones used in universities in the US and Germany – and I am not sufficiently distinctively Jewish because when anyone assesses Jewish culture in Australia, the whole of the Anglo side of things tends to be ignored. This is why I wrote The Wizardry of Jewish Women – I am trying to redress that balance.
Let me ask that question from social media again:
“Think of all the colour, art, theatre, celebration and other cultural value that immigrants and different cultures have brought to Australia. Hmm just remind me what the Jews have brought us, a bit of theatre and film maybe?”
What does most of Australia bring to understanding and even encouraging Jewish Australian cultures? Not much at all. It’s not a lack of culture. It’s a lack of knowledge and a lack of community.
Update: I always tangle certain writers. There was more than one John Lang. The one who wrote Fisher’s Ghost was Australian-born, and famous for it. He was not the brother of Andrew Lang, of the many-coloured fairy books. The Fisher’s Ghost Lang’s maternal grandfather was one of the Jews who arrived here on the First Fleet, so Lang himself was not actually Jewish. I always, always get the many Langs confused. I wrote articles to make sure I didn’t, but I still do. John Lang still fits here, but as someone with Jewish heritage, not as a practising Jew.
If you’re in the United States and looking for something to do besides watch the political shenanigans going on right now, check out Alternative Liberties from B Cubed Press. Both the Kindle edition and the print version are now available.
According to the book description, “Alternative Liberties gathers together some of the finest minds in speculative fiction to address the implications of politics in 2025 and beyond.” You can see a complete list of authors in this blog post introducing the book.
Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore has a poem in this anthology called “Not Civilized Yet.”
B Cubed is doing an online event featuring readings by a number of the authors on Facebook beginning at 3 PM Pacific Time (4 PM Mountain, 5 PM Central, 6 PM Eastern).
I once wondered what would happen if each time a place was central to a novel what would happen to the place if the mentions carrying charges. If the charges were of fairystuff, then new York and London, more than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, would turn into fairy wonderlands. Japanese anime answered this question for me by making the charges the stuff of detonation and world-changing tragedy. Tokyo has died more times than anywhere else in the Japanese-speaking world.
When I’d explored this notion decades ago, I kept it in mind, and nearly made a map containing all the places that were the heartland of a novel, just to find out more. At that point I entered the public service (this was a long time ago) and there was no time to make maps.
I turned my thoughts to notions that did not need mapping. How much do we centre our narratives around the US and around England? What does this do to our sense of what makes home? How does it affect how we see ourselves? Often it means we see ourselves poorly, because the London and New York publishing industries tend to reinforce the bias from the stories they select for publication. It’s far, far harder for outsiders to get published and have careers without moving to those places and creating networks and being seen. The further one is from a central place, the more difficult it is. In Australia, Sydney, Melbourne (and recently Brisbane) are those central points. People who can travel a lot and create modern networks are less disadvantaged. We know what this does to careers. I’m not sure we have looked deeply enough into what this does for the stories we tell.
Today, I’m thinking about this quite specifically in relation to the US’s story dream of a Wild West and in Australia’s equivalent. In novel terms, my favourite Australian story based in our Wild-West equivalent is Voss. It’s the opposite of anything written by Zane Grey. White won a Nobel Prize and Grey sold more novels than I can count. They are not, to be fair, good comparisons, because they were not simply written at far ends of the world, but they are also at far ends of the literary spectrum. Yet White and Grey are the two writers who always come to mind when I start to think about popular stories that share history. I read them both when I was fifteen and sixteen. I fiercely wanted to understand them. I didn’t want the literary understanding I was being offered at school. I wanted to understand how they tell us who we are and what would happen if we put them in historical perspective.
Both writers demonstrate some of the core stories we associate with European settlement when we’re telling stories that focus on that settlement. Those core stories give me hints on how we shape our own histories to make them distinctive. The publishing tendency to centralise rubs away differences. Publishing tends to limit the range of stories we’re offered and to focus on areas that publishers think will sell. This reinforces a small concept of the past and the reinforces it again and again and again until we think it’s legendary. Those of us who are not in the right region or culture find the legendary passes us by.
When I was twenty-six I accepted that job in Canberra and suddenly the stories of a gunslinging past were staring at me from the roads I walked. Local farmers were descended from famous bushrangers (Australian outlaws). Canberra is on the road from the goldfields to the big smoke. And yet… we didn’t have a big set of Wild West stories. We have some bushranger songs and tales, but they’re not encapsulated in a whole world the way the Wild West stories are. Australia’s writing legacy was through the UK rather than through the US and do, instead of dime novels, we had penny-dreadfuls and their ilk and heirs. We had writers such as Mary Fortune and Fergus Hume and, later, Arthur Upfield. They’re quite different in nature and story style. In many cases, the lives of the writers themselves held elements of that penny-dreadfulness and the books were often set in Melbourne. For Fortune and Hume, the best place to start with with the work of Lucy Sussex. She is also from Melbourne. Melbourne is, these days, a City of Literature, but it still relies on people living there and does not reach out so much to the rest of Australia. Likewise, the earlier Australian popular literature mentions of places do not seem to carry the same charges as novels set in New York or in the Wild West.
For readers, this is a good thing. Each novel can be read by itself and for itself. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s not so good. The pressure remains to write novels set in New York or to tell yet another Wild West science fiction story.
What are we missing with this? I was going to explore this in another post, next week, but I’ve been thinking about it. Would anyone reading this (including Treehouse friends!) like to talk about our histories? We could compare the dates we’re taught as important. We could discuss why the US has the Wild West while Australia has Marvellous Melbourne. We could compare goldrushes and outlaw stories. It could be a great deal of fun. Would anyone like to share a discussion? (Not for next week, for a mutually convenient future time.)