Category: Life Experiences

The 4th of July

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Black t-shirt with the words Mundus Sine Caesaribus on it.

I grew up with Fourth of July celebrations, though the ones I remember were not particularly patriotic – I don’t recall any speeches, much less any on the topic of loving one’s country – but rather an excuse for a community gathering.

In Friendswood, the then tiny town outside of Houston where I grew up, there was a parade every 4th followed by a barbecue and small rodeo in the community park. My sister and I rode horses in the parade most years, sometimes accompanied by our parents (depended on the number of horses we had available at the time).

I recall participating in the rodeo a few times, doing barrel racing and pole-bending on my horse Sue, who was quite good at those things, having been trained as a cutting horse. However, we never practiced enough, plus Sue was part Mustang, which gave her short legs. We never won anything.

In high school I remember marching with my high school band in a nearby town for the parade and even playing in a half-assed band for that town’s rodeo.

Much later on, when I lived in Washington, DC, I went down to the Capitol grounds for the symphony concert and watched the excellent fireworks display on the mall from there. No speeches at that event, either. I recall singing “This Land Is Your Land,” though. Reagan was president and most of the people at the concert were not big fans.

So my thoughts on the 4th of July have more to do with horses and parades and barbecue and music than they do with patriotism. Which is a good thing, because this 4th I am fresh out of patriotism. The regime in charge of our government is busy undermining almost everything I hold dear about the United States of America and bringing back all the worst aspects of our country. Continue reading “The 4th of July”…

Concerning the Life and Times of Mr Busket

personby Gillian Polack
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This week my thoughts are on a certain Mr Busket.

I gave a paper on him at the International Robin Hood Conference on Friday and he’s still nagging me. There’s a vast and deep discrepancy about what we know about his life from documents of the time and the rather fun story written about him after his death. Why did I give a paper about Mr Busket at a Robin Hood conference? Eustace Busket, who was most commonly known as Eustace the Monk, was quite possibly a source of a series of Robin Hood anecdotes. It was very cold the day of the conference, and, although I was at my computer, my brain kept turning “Eustace” into “Useless.” This is hilariously wrong. Eustace was a bunch of things but useless was not one of them.

I described him in my paper as “not merely a once-a-monk. He was also Eustace the pirate or Eustace the traitor or Eustace the genius sailor and courtier and leader of men or Eustace the much-hated.” He lived from around 1170 and died in 1217.

Eustace knew John when John was king of England, and John’s rivals across the channel. He worked for one and then the other and then he swung back again. His moment of greatest glory was probably when he controlled the English Channel through residence on the isle of Sark, and his moment of least glory was when he died. It wasn’t just that he died, you see. A contemporary chronicler explains that he was found hiding in the bilges. Normally one did not execute rich and noble folk captured in battle (one ransomed them for money) but Eustace was not well-loved and it’s quite possible his executioner bore him a personal grudge.

Eustace lived story and his thirteenth century biography doesn’t echo this at all. Historians talk about him as a colourful character, but only a couple have looked into his work at sea. Those few have pointed that that he was an extraordinarily important and skilled naval officer. He was the person Louis (son of the French king) employed for an attempt to invade England.

Understanding Eustace helps me understand two things. One is the nature of politics in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century and how the volatility and sometimes sheer craziness of those politics worked. The other is my usual area of how stories told about someone tell us a great deal about the nature of stories and how they work in a given place and time. While this latter statement is true of any story, Eustace’s is special. Because of the fascinating discrepancies between Eustace’s life and the story told about him after his death, and because Eustace faded from popular story when Robin Hood came on the scene, Eustace tells me more than most. In his story he was a trickster, like Merlin and an outlaw, like his contemporary Fulk Fitz-warin. This points to one thing that the real Eustace and the fictional Eustace had in common: they undermined and disrupted others’ lives.

I’m giving my Patreon folk my whole conference paper to cogitate upon, but this is, I suspect not the end of my adventure with Eustace. I don’t have time now, but I will return to him one day.

Treading Lightly – Glass

personby Pati Nagle
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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.)

Recently, with growing awareness about the health problems caused by microplastics, I began to want to minimize my physical contact with plastics. Does Tupperware shed microplastics into the food it contains? Does it shed them into the water that’s used to wash it? Into the food that’s (Ghu forbid) cooked in it? I have my suspicions, and I’m definitely more comfortable storing my food in glass.

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.

The Real and the Fake

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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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”…

Small Lives in Winter

personby Gillian Polack
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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.

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”…