Category: Life Experiences

Creating Habits

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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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”…

Changes

personby Gillian Polack
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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.

If there were but words enough and time… or maybe a photograph

personby Gillian Polack
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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

Picture of a minivan splashing through a drowned road in a pine forest in New South Wales
1980s, Belanglo, at the time of the backpack murders

Life and Museums

personby Gillian Polack
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The weeks after a PhD is done are always peculiar. There’s a backlog of life and it rushes in and floods the everyday. This is me, right now. Ironically, New South Wales is also flooded right now.

My backlog of life includes so much to write and so much to read and (this weekend alone) six panels at one of my favourite science fiction conventions. Add the 25 pages of forms to fill in (only five to do this weekend) and seeing friends at last and… it’s a tad busy.

I have a new publication this week, along with a bunch of my favourite people. You can find it here: Issue 90 – My Favorite Museum – Journey Planet I’ve actually written about museums a lot. I wanted to work in one, but things became complicated and I never did. One of the books I’m writing (the non-fiction) includes analyses of museums.

One of the most reassuring things imaginable for me is to visit a museum and analyse and tear apart the exhibits and think about their cultural impact. This is nothing new. I first did this when I was about seven. There was a display of old irons and children’s clothes in a country museum and I looked at them and looked at them and there was nothing in writing that explained them and no-one to ask, so I told my parents (with such seriousness) that this was wrong and they could do better. I remember listing the information needed to describe those irons and clothes. I knew what I needed to know and I was upset that it wasn’t there.

I didn’t know I was going to be an historian then. I started collecting limestone from various places and thought I was going to be a palaeontologist and a writer. Then I was going to be an opera singer and a writer. Then a museum curator and a writer. Then I reached high school.

At high school I told I was too young to know my future. I said, “But it has to include history and writing.”

I was told, “No, you’re doing science.”

I was very argumentative. I did maths, but dropped the science and did every single history and English subject I was allowed, plus music and French. This worked.

I’m the person who has history and writing as core parts of her life, still… and I still love looking at the work in museums and I am even more opinionated about these things than when I was seven.

Even this month, when life is flooding me, I can stop and think about museums. There is one particular exhibit I’m hoping to see later this week: a seventeenth century German bearded jug. If I get to see it, I might report on it in a fortnight. Maybe. It depends on the flooding receding just enough to make reports possible.

Not Gods

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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“We are as gods and might as well get used to it,” Stewart Brand said back in 1968. I remember reading that in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the day.

The concept appealed to me, as did the catalog and its successor, the Coevolution Quarterly. I recall thumbing through the issues, finding gems of ideas amidst a lot of odd ones. In those pre-Internet times, it was a way – along with alternative comics, music, and the underground press, not to mention the Civil Rights and antiwar movements and second-wave feminism – to find something new to chew on.

We were definitely looking for something new to chew on.

I don’t remember exactly what I thought when I first saw those words, but l suspect that part of what I thought was that they were an admonition to human beings who were starting to unlock knowledge beyond that needed for basic survival. I heard “Be careful. We’ve got more power than we understand.”

After all, I grew up in the shadow of the Bomb. We were playing with things that could blow up the whole world, and far too many of the men – and it was mostly men – in positions of power were not the sort of person who was good at taking care or planning for the long term.

But these days as I look at some of what Brand has to say, I’m not sure at all that I was correct about what he meant. I’m starting to wonder if he was thinking more along the lines of the broligarchs who are out to spread humanity throughout the universe and even think they’re going to live forever.

After reading Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, I think those people believe they are gods, or that they’re becoming gods. Continue reading “Not Gods”…

More on living Jewishly in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I don’t normally share here what I’ve posted elsewhere, but I wrote something quickly for Facebook and realised that it meant more than I realised and so I’m sharing it. I suddenly saw that what I thought was unique and personal, told a story about Australia and Australians and the different places Jews hold in this country. It’s not a full picture, or even close to a full picture. It’s how much of Jewishness is out of sight in Australia and how some of us handle this.

In other places I am still the person I always was, in Canberra no-one wants me to give talks to to be seen in public. Most people don’t hate me, but folks who have known me for years and even decades have recently started demonstrating a whole bunch of reactions to my being Jewish. For some, I’m hurting others simply by being myself: a couple of people have recently informed me of how privileged and white I am and how much of the cause of problems (both in Australia and elsewhere) can be blamed on me. For others, I’m a low priority in their life where previously I was a close friend, and when these old friends cluster or when a group of those who think along these lines get together, if I say something it will be instantly contradicted before anyone stops to consider what I actually said.

A part of this is because I’m forever-unwell and Australia does not handle illness with much style. Most of the change has, however, happened since COVID (which taught so many of us to not be our best selves) and especially since October 7. There are whole social groups and work-related groups I’m now simply not reminded of or invited to because I’m Jewish, and there are others I may share as long as I do not assert myself too much. The most amusing part of the whole shebang (and it really is amusing) is that I am not considered an expert on much at all in the circles that do not want me round. Given that I have two PhDs and another one about to be submitted and all kinds of books written and conference papers delivered and research done and talks delivered and… I am an expert in those topics, this is a very peculiar kind of wilful blinkering.

All of this is local. It has led to big lifestyle changes and those led to some thoughts on Facebook. Those thoughts (with amendments) are the rest of this post.

I’ve talked before about being a giraffe. My giraffehood comes from being the first Jew many Australians have met.

“Oh, I’ve never met a Jew before,” a person informs me, and looks at me as if I am in a zoo. This is why I call it being a giraffe. I’m willing to talk openly about my Jewishness, so I’m a giraffe who answers questions. The questions and comments used to be mostly kind and fair. They are less so right now. At the moment, after the surprise that I’m actually Jewish, I’m informed who I am and what I think and how horrid I am if I don’t use the words they tell me to use and announce my self-hate at once. Once a week, without fail, I’m told that either I worship Satan or murder children. (For anyone wondering, I have not done or ever have wanted to do either of these things.) These questions and comments, when experienced several times a week, make me feel as if I’m on show.

Today something provoked a very different memory.

In the days before COVID and before the current rise in antisemitism (so any time until the end of 2019) I gave talks and was on panels at a couple of larger functions a year on average. Every single time, it being (mostly) in Australia people would chat with me in the foyer or over coffee afterwards. Australians chat over drinks. It’s a part of who we are. Mostly the discussion leads with comments like “I didn’t know Australia had any Jews before” or, on one very special day “Do you really have horns?” When I was much, much younger, children would actually feel my head for those horns.

Every second chat (again, on average) someone would look around to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot. They would confide in me. Sometimes they had Jewish parents but were brought up Christian “for safety”. Sometimes they were happily non-religious, but knew that their parents had been Jewish and were curious. I have enjoyed many conversations about how OK atheism for different branches of Judaism with this group of interesting people and even more conversations about why parents would choose to leave the Judaism behind and even to hide it. Sometimes those who confided in me were practising Jewish but didn’t know anyone outside their family because it was safer to be not-Jewish when out in the world. Most of these individuals had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Some were from other backgrounds but their families had also memories of persecution, often very recent. The real discussion began when they discovered we could talk about these things but that it wasn’t the whole story. I was brought up to understand that the persecution is a part of our history but (sorry Cecil Roth) the lachrymose version of Jewish history hides so much more than it explains. My history self is working on this reinterpretation of Jewish pasts for the next little while, and that’s partly because it was so important to the individuals who came to me and talked about Jewishness in secret.

I was a different kind of giraffe for these folks. I was the Jew they could talk to safely. I never tell enough about them for anyone to be able to identify them. I have many conversations after panels and after giving talks or keynotes, and these people were among the many. Their privacy is important. No-one hides such a large part of themselves without very good reason. I use my not-very-good memory to forget their names and where they live. I would have to work hard to remember those details and I simply don’t try to remember. This has led to me being very forgetful of names and addresses and friends have to always remind me, over and again. This is not a large price to pay for the safety of others.

Occasionally (like now) I will mention their existence. I’m often and usually the first person they have every spoken to outside their immediate family about anything Jewish.

The number of people who shared their confidences with me diminished somewhat when the Australian census changed its collection style. The number of people who admitted to being Jewish in Australia also dropped dramatically. It was no longer possible to guarantee addresses and names would be detached from information collected and so identifying as Jewish carried different baggage to earlier. I suspect there are many Jewish Australians whose background is not known to the Bureau of Statistics any more. I once estimated that there were around 200,000 of these people, but there is no real way of knowing. Since I don’t think those who let me know they’re Jewish are more than the tiniest % of those who don’t talk about being Jewish Australian, I know the thoughts of a few dozen people, not of everyone who hides their Jewishness in Australia.

The number of confidences diminished to zero after October 7, but this is partly because I’m no longer invited to give many talks. I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Canberra or East Coast Australia, or my expertise is no longer valued, or people want to avoid problems, so I’m not invited to the sort of meetings where someone can seek me out quietly and find out more about their heritage.

What I miss most about those conversations is the recipe-swapping. I have two really wonderful Crypto-Jewish recipes that I’ve dated to the 17th century from a person who identified publicly as Latin American Catholic. I gave them information about books and websites where they could place their heritage and understand it better without having to break their public face. This was a win-win. Once a year I cook a 17th century Jewish recipe from that hidden tradition, to celebrate how much this person knew (and still knows!) and how amazing it was to hear about it. (I also cook these dishes to honour those who were murdered at the command of the Inquisition, and this is my normal public reason for cooking: today is not normal.) At moments like that I understand why I might be a safe person to talk to about things.

Since October 7 and the diminution in places in Australia that want to hear me, there has, as I’ve said been no-one sharing these secrets. This means that there are fewer people who touch base with those who are isolated and scared. Those who found comfort in me chatting about how to write family stories or how to teach cultural differences respectfully or how to interpret foodways or all those stories about the Middle Ages are not going to talk to a rabbi or visit a community centre when hateful slogans are painted on the walls or there was a fire bomb or anywhere where there is a crowd chanting Jewhate slogans outside.

Australia has always been somewhat antisemitic. It was also one of the important places where Shoah refugees came. It’s always had a Jewish population that feels safer unseen. Moments when strangers can reach out and share their identity are so very important, given all of this.

I think one of the reasons I was considered safe might have been because it’s not been wise to wear a magen david in Canberra for about 20 years, so I wasn’t flamboyantly Jewish… I was just Jewish. Or it may be for another reason. Thinking back, I had my first conversations along these lines when I was pre-teen, so it may be something about the way I hold myself. I honestly don’t know. Several people have said it’s because I talk so much, so maybe it’s that.

When I first started having those conversations I used to feel so guilty, because I couldn’t understand why these people hid their identity. I always kept everything secret because someone had asked it and because I respected them.

These days, life in Jewish Australia is far more problematic. I can see the wisdom in being a hidden Jew.

Finally, results from Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don’t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then… sort-of.

Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House but not the Upper. They’ve gained quite a few more seats in the House of Representatives, but many of them were gained by slender margins and some of them (my own, for instance) are still borderline and the votes are still being counted. It’s as if most Australians looked at the candidates and looked at elections outside Australia and said “We’re going to make our preferences matter.” When a single electorate goes to layers of preferences, counting is slow and it has to be revisited when the seat is a close call. This is happening all over the place.

In the Lower House, we voted out the leader of the Opposition and quite possibly the leader of the Greens in his/their own seats, plus gave their parties fewer seat. Dutton (Opposition) gave a graceful speech to cede everything. Bandt (Greens) is still claiming a Greens victory. He has between 0 and 2 seats in the House of Representatives That Lower House), dropping from four, but he’s focused on the number of primary votes his party received over the whole country, I suspect. They’re down, but not by much. My assessment of this is that a large number of voters do not see the hate that I see. Enough do, and so the Greens are diminished, but, unlike the elves, they’re not so diminished they will not go into the west. The far right Trumpet of Patriots, on the other hand, got so few votes that I look at the data and think “Are there any far right politicians in this parliament at all.” Our far right is the right end of the US Republican or the UK Tories, if that helps.

As I read things, most of the controversial far right and left didn’t get enough votes to get lower house seats. This includes a handful of virulent antisemites. Those candidates trying to push extreme views (not just hate of people who happen to be Jewish) also didn’t fair as well as the pre-election polls said. Our House of Representatives contains far less hate than I had expected. This is a good thing.

While the same pattern applies to the Senate, the nature of the Senate vote (namely the quota system) mean that the changes are less. The far right is diminished, but not nearly as much as in the Lower House. Greens will still have a lot of power, and may be led by someone who really, really hates Jews. In some ways the Greens holding balance of power is good: if they vote wisely, they can be a curb on extreme policies by the government, and, if they go back to the roots they’ve been avoiding recently, will also push for environmental care and social justice. This is not, however, what they did in some significant votes in the past, so the Senate may become just a mess. Everything depends on the Greens paying attention to Australia and not their inner voices.

An update on antisemitism: it’s worse this week both on the right and on the left. Voters are not the loud voices in Australia, because of our system and because we’re part of the western world’s set of shouting matches between so many people who refuse to think for themselves. This hate is largely the usual mob trying to share their bigotry. The big thing is that Australia as a whole has voted against hate and also against a Trump model of government. We remain our ratbag and mostly centre-left self. We no longer, however, have a functional left wing party (Greens are now far further left than they used to be) and we don’t have any functional right wing party (the Coalition is very close to Labor in many ways and we did not put the far right in their place). The outcome of our next election may well rest on whether anyone’s clever enough to change this.

The path our voting took supports that sense reported on in newspapers of most parties sucking right now. It also supports my view of Australia, which is that the quiet majority do their own thinking and we will not know what that thinking is until election day. This time they’ve voted for social cohesion and stability. We often do that. What looks to the world like the left, is actually the most stable option for us.

If any of this appears self-contradictory, it’s because the big thing Australia has done is quite extraordinary. It has said “All the elections outside Australia are not our story.” Australians write our own story, it appears.

For me, this means, despite the massive increase in antisemitism, we’re not following the 1930s German route. We have a lively and dangerous far right and far left, and an enormous amount of antisemitism, but the voters have said, “Not in my parliament.” We’re not doing what we did in the Morrison days, and following the US path, either.

I don’t know where we are going, but that’s a big improvement on last week. Better not to know than to know that Jewish Australia is walking into hell. We are not. Not safe. Not comfortable. Not loved by extremists on either side. But we are part of Australia and Australia itself says so. Every single Jewish candidate received a normal level of votes. None in office was thrown out of office. The question now is will the far right and the Greens accept this and reduce their polemic. If they do, then the hate will reduce and Australia will be a lot safer and I can return to my own life. I have books to write…

A tale of two memoirs

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I love to listen to audiobooks while I work in the garden, take a walk, or cook a meal. Recently, I borrowed two memoirs from my public library and was struck by the contrast. Both were written by famous people and narrated by themselves. I was curious enough about each of them to listen to their stories.

The first was Spare, by Prince Harry (Random House), mostly because it popped up on my screen. Okay, I thought, his perspective on growing up in the shadow of Princess Diana’s death should be be interesting. His life has been very different from (or, in Brit: to) mine.

Being in the public spotlight does not qualify a person to write a compelling memoir, nor does belonging to a royal family confer the ability to narrate with clarity and emotion. Spare fails on both counts. The charm of Harry’s accent lasted about five minutes, long enough for the emotional shallowness—a combination of the dry text and the manner in which it was read aloud—and lack of awareness of his elite white privilege to wear thin. Since I know from my own experience what it’s like to lose a parent unexpectedly, I hoped I’d be able to connect with Harry’s loss. I found his denial of Diana’s death understandable as a child. The problem was that Harry, the adult looking back, seemed to not have gained any insight or grown beyond denial as a childish survival strategy. I heard no understanding of how much he’d matured through adversity, the pain he’d walked through. No connection between that loss and the subsequent estrangements from other members of his family or the mental health issues with which he struggled later in life. But there was lots about the privileged life where everything was provided without him having to work for it and which he accepted without question.

I finally gave up, so I never got to hear about his military service or his courtship with Meghan Markle and how they made a life for themselves apart from his royal relatives. I wish them well, but I found little in this audiobook memoir to attract and hold my interest in who Harry is as a person.

 In contrast, Lovely One, A Memoir, by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random House) was a joy from start to finish. Jackson is the newest member of the US Supreme Court and the first Black woman to be
confirmed to that post. As a student, she excelled in public speaking and debate, tackling challenging topics with determination and extraordinary eloquence. Her facility with communicating complex ideas shines through her narrative, as does her love for her family, her capacity for enduring friendship, her passion for justice, and her unwavering courage. Whether she is talking about the African origin of her name, the environment of racism and misogyny prevalent in here field even today, her and her husband’s struggles to maintain separate careers while raising two daughters, one of whom is autistic, she speaks with unusual clarity and persuasiveness. I loved every minute of her story. In another life, I want to be her best friend.

Highly recommended.

 

 

Dissertating

personby Gillian Polack
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I’ve finished a complete draft (a clean one) of my dissertation. Around 75,000 words, so about the size of a standard non-fiction study. While there are more processes to get through to reach that draft: annual reports, forms to fill, supervisors to meet and talk to, the actual work involved is the same as for most scholarly work if you already know enough about the subject. This is why the US has additional processes to check that the student has that knowledge. Australia doesn’t have Major Field exams and has limited coursework. It took me about five weeks all up to finish my coursework, in fact. We have to understand ethics for research, and how to work safely, and any languages for the research, and how to actually do the research, and the norms for the field we’re working in, and so forth and so on and… lots of small things, but, in my case, the only big one was learning about literary studies. I’d already done a lot of research in other disciplines and I already read all the languages, so my coursework was basically a matter of going through online modules and demonstrating I had the knowledge.

One entirely odd facet of doing three PhDs is the language side of things. For my first PhD I needed to read nine languages well. I couldn’t read all of those languages well enough (especially Latin, which I could not read at all) so I took a year off in the middle and did a Masters in Canada. That coursework taught me why the US and Canadian PhDs, with the hefty coursework load, are so very handy. It also taught me that my undergraduate degree was very rigorous, which is why I had most of what I needed before I began. I added Latin and palaeography to my skills in Canada and they are very useful!

For my second PhD I only needed five languages, and they were all ones I already knew. I’ve talked to so many fiction writers about this, and most of them did not need any languages except English. “How did you deal with archives and primary sources?” I asked. Some of them don’t. Others pay to have critical works translated or work with translations. Our minds were entirely boggled by each others’ approaches.

This led me to a new understanding. PhD theses (including exegeses attached to Creative Arts PhDs, which is what my second was) are each unique. Underlying skills are similar: research for original work (which is exceedingly different to the type of research I do to write a short story or a novel without a scholarly bent), the capacity to write, the capacity to edit, and an extreme level of patience with the processes of study and publishing.

I said that I’ve finished the thing, but I still have much administratrivia to do, and the copy edit to go through. My thesis will be submitted on 15 May, and it will be months before I know the result.

The need for patience is very familiar to me from my novels. Someones I wait months after the final edits are done for a novel to be published and sometimes years. COVID and the current economic crises have both elongated my wait times (and me being Jewish doesn’t help with some parts of the industry and makes no difference at all to others): I have two novels queued and do not know when they will emerge. My first PhD was beset by quite different crises, but with the same result. The examination took three years, which pretty much cost me my career, back then.

This (almost finished) PhD is different in one big way. The discipline I’m working in is the first I am not entirely comfortable with. I am far more an historian than a literary scholar. Working in Literary Studies has given me a solid appreciation of the work of literary experts. History is not easier, but it suits the way my mind works. I like assembling data and making beautiful patterns from it and explaining it to the world. Now that I understand that not all research does this and that it’s a good thing that there are different approaches (truly, I understand story far, far better now that I can see it from more than one discipline – it’s going to affect both my writing and my teaching, in good ways) my current work of non-fiction is suddenly a lot easier. I don’t have to read every bit of research written in the last 250 years in eleven languages to explain what needs to be explained. It still helps I have the languages, to be honest, but it also helps that I now look for who I’m talking to early on and that I pay far more attention to audience than I used to.

What does this add up to? First, even though I think of it as a dissertation, my PhD is a book. Now that I’m almost done with it, I can finish the book I began during my PhD intermission last year (that trip to Germany was for a purpose).

Two books in a year? Not quite. My earlier work is coming back to haunt me and I may have a third book, which is short essays and thus only needs editing. If this happens (and right now it looks likely) it’s a different type of book again, with quite different research. Short essays don’t need the deep and long research. They take somewhere between an hour (if I already know the subject and have the book I’m writing about in front of me) to about three days. The book adds up, over time, to about 8 months’ work, not three to four years.

Why do I calculate these things? I’m ill (and finally being a bit more open about it) and can’t do all the things I used to do. And yet I’m writing more than I ever have. Short stories (when someone asks) and novels and non-fiction. All these doctorates have helped me understand how much work I need to put in for my various types of writing.

Way back when I was a professional reviewer (a long, long time ago) one of the biggest issues I found with many works, was that balance between the right amount of research, taking the right direction for the research, and keeping in mind that the reader will have the book in front of them. All books need to be readable for their audiences. Those writers who hit this successfully every single time (and you can see some of these simply by looking at the work of other Treehouse writers – I share the Treehouse with amazing writers) can be trusted by their audience. You can pick up a book by them and know it will do what it is supposed to do and that you will be entertained, and often be made to think, and be delighted.

My writing is too diverse for this. For example, I’m untrustworthy for entertainment because my first PhD was so very not entertaining. It wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, I was in huge trouble for the first two years because, as my main supervisor said, “The reader is not supposed to want to turn the page.” This is why most theses are unpublishable as they are and why I didn’t even seek to get that first one published: I had to drain all the joy out to get it through examination.

I’ve learned a great deal over the years, and I managed to be properly scholarly without as much desiccation in the new thesis. It still can’t be published without significant changes. A dissertation is quite different to a book for the wider public because its audience is entirely different.

I still don’t believe anyone needs three PhDs, even if I end up with three myself… but I am in love with the amount of learning along the way. Knowing the difference between writing for academics, for teachers, for the general public and for myself: not a bad outcome. Knowing when to stop researching and why to stop researching for about ten different types of books: what every writer needs.

Let me finish the last unfinished thought and then I’ll get back to work. What is that thought? I used nine languages for the first PhD, didn’t I? It was a Medieval History book, and I read over 139 primary sources (Old French epic legends, Middle English Arthuriana, Latin chronicles and the like), and I had to have both the medieval language and the modern language and… it was so much fun. For years I was the world expert in Old French insults: I still teach how to use them effectively in fighting scenes.

Remember it was five languages for the second PhD, which was a time travel novel and a dissertation? I should have learned an extra language, but I discovered that Old Occitan was easy to read when one knows Latin and various dialects of Old French. I have the manual for it. I read through it once and realised that was enough to read most texts in Old Occitan. A friend once called this “the Medievalist advantage.” I try to say everything in the paragraph pompously because, honestly it sounds pompous.

The only languages I needed for the current PhD were English and French and maybe a little Spanish. That’s all. I learned the disciple, not extra languages.

There have to be PhDs where one only needs one language, but I’ve not undertaken any. Why? There’s a reason for the languages. They open up concepts and give exciting new insights. There is very little research that’s not better with knowledge of more languages. Think about it. Isn’t my life better because I can be rude to idiots in Old French?

In Praise of Inefficiency

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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At the beginning of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas she discusses a 1996 paleontology project in a cave on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska where the scientists, while looking at animal bones, found human remains.

They immediately stopped work and consulted with people from the Tlingit and Haida tribes who live in the region. After some discussions, it was agreed that the scientists could continue, but that if they found it was a sacred burial site, they would stop. And they were also required to share their findings with the tribes before they were published.

In this case, it was not a burial site and the eventual outcome of the work showed that the bones of the person they found were related to the people living there and that they went back more than 10,000 years.

But what got me were not just the results, but the fact that the paleontologists stopped and consulted with the people native to the region. That does not fit into the modern focus on being “efficient.”

Meeting with people takes time, especially when the way the paleontologists look at the world and the way indigenous cultures look at the world are often at cross purposes. It’s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.

But they didn’t, and the end result was useful to everyone. It just took extra time. And it treated people who were affected by the work with respect.

That brings me to how democracy should work. The people who are affected by decisions need an opportunity to discuss the matter and actually be heard. This is slow. It’s not efficient. But it’s vital to making a government that people can believe in.

I’m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It’s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I’m more likely to get out and walk if I have an errand to run. So I try to run my errands in opposite directions, even if I could combine them in one, and I stretch them out over a couple of days when I could do them all at once.

It’s a purposeful inefficiency. It’s not careless or sloppy. And that’s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.

Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods – though they are often structured with a lot of annoying rules that you only understand if you spend a lot of time going to council meetings. And much of that has become pro forma: you have comment period and then the council does what they were going to do anyway.

You often don’t get the impression that anyone is listening.

So what if, say, you were going to fund housing for homeless people and you actually spent a great deal of time talking with the homeless people in the area about what they needed and what they wanted. I’m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.

It also probably wouldn’t add as much to the coffers of the local developers who make their living getting city contracts to building housing for low income people who are never consulted about what kind of housing they need and want.

It’s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can’t afford a place to live. Continue reading “In Praise of Inefficiency”…