Category: Life Experiences

Finding Books

personby Gillian Polack
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Part One

One of the less-talked about side effects of the current wave of antisemitism is that we simply don’t hear about Jewish writers. Some of us (Jewish writers) write for the wider world, some specifically for Jewish communities. The vast majority of us are less visible. I was chatting with other Jewish writers a few weeks ago, and I discovered that this was worse in Australia than in the US, but that there’s no place not infected by the hate.

What readers read is our choice. Finding out about books we’d like to read is far more difficult than it used to be. If a reader has a favourite author who happens to be Jewish, they might not have access to anything new by them because the book publicity trail ignores much of the new work by Jewish writers. At the other end of the spectrum, if a reader doesn’t want to read any book by Jews, they can simply not buy the books or not borrow them from the library. Losing public awareness of Jewish writing doesn’t change the situation for those who will never read a Jewish writer: it changes it for those who want to and have no idea what books to ask for.

What I shall do here is, on the Mondays when I have a group of writers who share being Jewish and who want to be introduced… I shall introduce them. It’s that simple.

I’ve gradually, over the years, found other ways of sharing news about writers, to make up for those essays I used to write, that looked at so many books that I’d read. I miss the parcels of books in the mail, and excitedly reading a dozen of them and finding three that would work together nicely.

My new way of finding books for other people (when I can’t obtain them all myself or read them all) is to ask writers, “Who would you like to be in a group with?” When I get answers to this question, I’ll write more posts like this. They won’t always be about Jewish writers, because there are other groups that are also less seen than they should be. That’s the thing about antisemitism (as most of Australia saw on Sunday, even if they had no idea what they were seeing): it spreads into distrust and silencing of other minority groups. It’s as if people discover permission to lose chunks of culture and the people who create that culture. I can’t tell you about the books or who their audience is unless they’re in the world of science fiction, fantasy or historical fiction, or unless they write history at my end of the history trail. I used to be able to! One of the side-effects of being unwell (and plodding towards blindness) is that I no longer read three books a day. I miss having read all the books and being able to say “Oh! I read that! I can talk about it!” This is not a review series, then, but a simple set of reports.

Call this a series on how writers see themselves and which books they see sitting nicely alongside theirs on the shelf.

If you know of writers who are missing from bookshelves and from essays and from talks, encourage them to contact me and to share with me some details of their work and that of several other writers. And now on to our first group of writers!

Part Two

Debbi Weinberg Lakritz writes children’s books. The US has its own labels, and there they’re called picture books. If there’s a pile of books and a child instantly sits down with it and will not budged until all pages have been turned, then her books may be in that pile. The writes she suggests belong with hers on that pile (shelves don’t work nearly as well as glorious stacks of books when we’re talking about picture books) are Liza Wiemer, Ann Koffsky and Erica Lyons.

When I was a child there was just one picture book for Jewish children in our home library and none at all in our local library. We read it and read it and read it. One of my sisters learned how to use the stepstool before it was actually safe, because this book talked to us in a way that other books didn’t. The book disappeared fifty years ago and I only half remember its title. It was published in the 1940s or 1950s, and was a beige hardback. I look back at my Melbourne childhood and wonder at it and am totally pleased that these days there are choices for picture books that talk to Jewish children.

If any of you explore those books, let me know about them? I would love to know how children read and enjoy books that reflect their own background. I was not one of those children and nor were any Jewish Australian children in the 1960s.

Tomorrow night I attend the launch of a book that discusses what it’s like to be a Jewish Australian right now. I shall raise a glass there to these four authors, and to every other writer who helps give children a sense that they belong in this world. Debbi explained her group of writers to me and told me how warm and supportive the Jewish kidlit world is. This is another excuse to support kidlit. We need that kind and generous world to expand, so very much.

Escaping

personby Gillian Polack
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Is it already Monday?

I am going to write a series on Jewish writers.

Why?

I’m so glad you asked!

I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don’t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia right now, fighting everything about Israel, including its existence.

I am not Israeli (I fight the bad things it does and cheer on the good, just as I do with any other country), however most Australian Jews are dealing with unprecedented levels of antisemitism. This should leave me free of the need to articulate shibboleths, since I’m already one of the bad people in their eyes, right? Entirely wrong. Just over the weekend, these folks have been saying (if they’re nice) “You’re looking at this all wrong. I’ll explain to you how you should think.” If they’re not so nice I learn many things about myself I did not know.

Mostly the bad language and accusations fall into two categories: what I like to think of as new DoubleSpeak, or accusations. I asked someone if I could use their words here to illustrate the DoubleSpeak, as I wanted an example of the particular language they used – it was gloriously fake – and they disappeared from the discussion entirely. The insults can be mild, but they’re usually more dramatic. I’m learning how to handle them better. When someone calls me a child-killer I generally tell them to let the police know and to hand over all the evidence, for instance.

I’m trying to work out what kind of mind hates in this way. This is a marvellous opportunity to find out, because there’s so much hate directed at most Jews. In Australia, we’ve even got ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ I’ve seen people labelled this way three times in the last two days. Last week there were even more labels, because of a literary festival that went terribly awry.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from this shambolic mess. This is why I’ll introduce books for the next few weeks.

Several groups of Jewish writers gave me details of their books to share (and I’m watching out for more!). The sadness is that I can’t read them until I’m caught up with all my backlog. I’ve been unwell again so the backlog is severe. My normal “Let me read everything first so that I can introduce it properly” will not work. If I’ve read and enjoyed something, I’ll let you know, I promise. Otherwise I’ll tell you what I can.

I’ll share books right up until Jewish New Year. If you want more books after that, I’ll happily continue. I might not be the only person who needs books to distract them from the rather scary everyday.

Walking After Midnight

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.

I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.

(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)

In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust,  she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.

We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects. Continue reading “Walking After Midnight”…

Unintended Consequences, or How We Fail to Hear About Good Books

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I’m thinking about how we hear about writers. This is not only for general reading, but also for academic writing. The second, in this case, leads to the first.

One of the subjects academics ask me about or various bods want me to write about is Australian science fiction and fantasy. Until a few years ago I knew when any book was coming out and knew most of the writers and was exceptionally useful. Right now, I’m only useful on some subjects.

I can talk about writers until about 2015, and often write about writers before 1900. An article of mine on Tasma-of-the-many-names was just published in Aurealis, an Australian speculative fiction magazine. I can write about Jewish Australian writers and, in fact, do. I can also write (and do) about the links between Australian writing and the writing of other countries. Also, many books that incorporate history are still part of my terrain because, first and foremost, I’m an ethnohistorian.

Recently, I stopped writing about most contemporary Australian writers. Some I still know a bunch about, but for many I know only the names of their works. Given I have so much else to write about and don’t have the physical capacity to go chasing, I now avoid mentioning certain types of writers. I still consult, behind the scenes, when international scholars want to flesh out their knowledge, but I have to tell them that, “I know about this person and their work, but I don’t know where it belongs.” I no longer introduce Irish fans to the latest in Australian speculative fiction: we talk about other things.

Why did this change?

There are three reasons.

When I let the wider world know that I was not well, two groups of local writers dumped me from their social circles, almost instantly. This marches alongside with when my eyesight started failing and I was no longer permitted to be an award judge. It was apparently too difficult to give me lifts or to make sure that a dinner was reasonably COVID-safe or to find a type of text my eyes could read without making them worse.

These decisions by others makes it much harder for me to find out more about writing from Australia, and especially from Canberra and the Canberra region. Given how much the world of publishing is changing and how we hear about something is often somewhat random, this has significant consequences. If I can’t answer questions at an academic conference, very few of the scholars asking questions look further. They’re also overworked and under stress: this is not an easy decade for any of us.

I don’t hear about work now by these groups of writers or those who are close to them until after the work is published. I would have to put in extra work for each and every published book to find out that it has been published and if a book is in my scholarly ballpark. I have chronic fatigue, five books to finish, and I am no longer paid to write articles about groups of books. I miss being a pro-blogger and a literary magazine person, because they gave me paid time to chase things. My paid time is firmly Medieval right now, and does not include modern SFF unless I’m writing something for Aurealis.

Prior to my exclusion, chat told me what was going on and I could chase it and… I knew so much without much effort. My social circles, in fact, were what initially pushed me into writing about contemporary speculative fiction online and in magazines and giving papers at conferences. One of the symptoms of my illnesses is chronic fatigue: I will take that extra work, but only when I can. I’ve had this symptom since my 20s, but it’s only after I confessed to it that it changed what I knew by changing who would accept me in their social circles.

Only a very few non-Australian academics write about Australian speculative fiction. I know many of them. My refocus on subjects that are achievable without make me more ill affects how these writers are seen outside Canberra. It is not intentional discrimination on my part, but if I don’t have time or energy to chase up something new that touches on my areas of expertise I then write on subjects that are just as interesting to my readers, but that don’t push me beyond my capacity. Eustace the Monk is a case in point. I’ve now been asked by a number of people about Eustace, and used the same core research for each inquiry. This enables me to have a full life, despite the illness.

Second, when I was excluded from a particular science fiction convention, the writers who consulted with me there lost access to me. And me, I was no longer in a position to hear about their work while they were thinking about it, because they no longer asked me questions or did my workshops. Work by those writers has to wait, the way work by most other writers waits, for me to get around to it. Since I was first working on a dissertation and now on non-fiction books, and also write my novels, the wait is long.

The first and second reasons added together affect one group of writers in particular. When scholars and fan organisers ask me about most Canberra authors, I tell them what I know, but what I know is no longer insider-knowledge for most writers. I’m not the only one, as local academic jobs in the Humanities are few and far between. Scholarly work about Australian speculative fiction is likely to mention writers’ names in passing than to look at their work closely or to teach it at university. Those who were part of my earlier studies are still getting articles written about them or even being tagged for (paid) academic stuff as a long-term result of that work. I am not doing the research or running academic programmes: I am merely one of the half dozen people who can be asked casually about the subject. That ‘merely’ has consequences for how much attention given to some writers who are probably very deserving of scholarly work and being taught at university. Some writers still get attention, but most writers won’t be seen. This only affects a group of universities, but there are very few universities in the world that teach Australian speculative fiction as a subject. Other courses that include Australian writers will only include the extraordinary,  and most of our fiction will be passed over.

The third reason, of course, is that I’m Jewish. I am no longer included on lists of writers to ask about this or that, because Jew cooties may be infectious.

So many other writers locally have no idea of my work at this point, much less my research. I joke that I’m better known in Germany than in Australia, which is not entirely true. I’m better known in some parts of Germany than in some parts of Australia. I’ve gone from being an Ambassador of Reading for the country, to being left off lists as a writer. This, again, reduces who I see and who I can recommend to others. It has, in fact, a bigger impact that the other two reasons combined. Jew cooties would not be a problem in the writing world if there had been a flurry of activity to replace the Jewish writers and publicists and editors and more. There has not been. We’re seeing an increasing numbers of holes in communication in both the writing world and in academia, and even in bookshop events, simply because of individuals who are too Jewish and whose work has not been replaced.

This is worse in the US than Australia. In Australia it’s my kind of work that’s missing. That’s too big to examine here. Maybe another day.

This disadvantages those who are not leaving me out of things, because I won’t write the general introduction to a field I am not on top of. The result right now? An introductory article I was going to write for an academic journal is not even going to be suggested. Someone else will have to write it.

When we play games with people’s lives, the person whose life is targeted is not the only victim. As a Jewish writer, my book sales are down by 75%. As a Jewish/chronically ill academic, the book sales of those I would have written about are also diminished.

The writing world is complex. Hate and exclusion do not affect just the target: they change what books we know about and what writers we want to read. My recent life is an example this.

 

Update: The chrnoic illnesses have ruled my week and so I put this up unedited. If you read it before 14 August, note that it is now edited! And tagged.

Lateness

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.

In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.

In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.

The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.

What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.

We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.

Farewell to Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.

My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry.  Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.

More Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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The day after tomorrow, I’ll be on my way home. I’ve been in Eden nearly a week and am used to it. I no longer hear the waves every minute, even though Calle Calle Bay is close by. I’m used to the lack of birdsong and the fact that there are so many dogs that barking is an ordinary part of the soundscape. Where I live, in Canberra, I’m woken up by magpies and kookaburras and there are so many other birds that sing, but I have to walk at least as far as the beach is from me right now to hear any dogs barking. I know how to pronounce most of the local names, and the one I had most wrong was Calle Calle (which is Caul Caul). I have talked to many locals and written many words. The biggest thing is that I have proven what I needed to prove: that one of the reasons I’m so il in Canberra is the climate there. I’m not suddenly well in Eden, but I am in far less pain and I can do more walking. In a half hour, in fact, I will be walking to the community market, which is about 1 km away. There and back will be all I can do in a day, but I can only walk that far in Canberra on really good day and here, there was only one day I could not.

I cannot afford to move down to the coast, but at least I know that if I save enough I can go to a seaside town once or twice a year and get writing done. I need more internet than I have access to here, however. I am saving all my writing for when I get home, when I will edit it and upload it and … things would have been a lot simpler if I could have finished all that here. The problem is only partly that wifi is spotty. It’s also my computer, which worked splendidly in Perth and doesn’t even connect enough in Eden to use the university’s online system of access to my word processing.

I could use my computer more readily in regional Germany than in regional Australia. I chat with locals about things like this and we swap the realisation that Sydney has far more of small everyday luxuries than places like Eden. Groceries are more expensive here, for instance, because Eden has the same distribution system that Canberra had when I first moved there, and so there are the storage and transport costs to Sydney to be factored into, say, the price of tomatoes. Even cheese is not cheap, which is ironic, because Eden is part of the shire of Bega and Bega is one of the most important cheese-making regions of Australia.

I was going to write you a romantic post about Eden the place, or an historical post about the whaling industry, or a post with pictures of gardens and I was going to ask you which was the real garden of Eden, but… I wanted to talk about the price of tomatoes. Maybe another time…

Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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At the moment this post goes online, I’m probably asleep in Eden, which is a town in coastal NSW. If the bus doesn’t break down en route, if nothing goes wrong, if… if…

I have to write much now that my thesis has been submitted for examination, and it’s cold in Canberra, and Eden is in the middle of whale season. Three excellent reasons to catch a bus and visit the Sapphire Coast. I’m not going for long. When I’m back I might tell you about some of the work I did there. I don’t want to jinx my writing by promising vast amounts of it.

I’ve been through Eden a couple of times. I’ve written Eden into a short story (“After Eden”) and into a novel (Borderlanders). I might see if I have the courage to tell the owner of the pub from Borderlanders that one of their staff members is in a novel. I haven’t told anyone in Robertson (further north, in the mountains) that the whole town is in both story and novel so… maybe not. We will see,

I’ve never spent more than an hour in Eden, because I’ve always been there on the way to somewhere else. It’s on one of the most spectacular roads in the country, Highway #1, that goes (mostly) right around the coast. I’ve dreamed of travelling the whole way round, but can’t see how to make that happen. I can, however, go to Eden.

Eden is one of those places that’s not well known but is rather special. First, whales. Also, tourist-watching, though I suspect it’s the wrong season for the giant boats. Eden is, in fact, probably the Australian equivalent of Nantucket, if the whalers from Nantucket worked with orcas.

Mostly, the town is a lovely place where I can walk down to the sea even on a bad day and it’s not nearly as cold as Canberra. We’ve been warned that the wind straight from the Antarctic is coming again, from tomorrow. Canberra will be bitter-cold for up to a week. In Canberra, as I love saying but don’t love experiencing, that Antarctic wind travels directly over the biggest snowfields in the country and collects cold from the coldest mountains in the country and Canberra is its first city after all that collected cold… Canberra has a very solid wind chill factor on Antarctic days.

The Sapphire Coast and its hinterland has complex and fascinating history, lovely cheese (best grassland in mainland Australia, around Bega), and is part of an overland trail that dates back thousands of years. I can’t walk the trail, and I doubt I can get to Montague Island to greet penguins, but Eden contains enough architecture and history and whales and museums and a good local library so that when I get mental cramps from writing, I will not be bored. I will take pictures and research later fiction. Or I will walk five minutes to the nearest beach and watch for whales.

If all has gone well, this is where I am right now, while you’re reading. Maybe at the beach, looking at Twofold Bay or out over the Pacific. If you’re reading from California, wave at me, just in case.

The Latest Texas Floods

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Even though I was born in Houston and grew up in a small town near there, my Texas heart is in the Hill Country, so the recent flash flood disaster hit close to home.

I have family in New Braunfels, which is a little southeast of the disaster in Hunt, but also on the Guadalupe River. A year ago, we rented a place near Hunt to see the eclipse and spent much of our time downhill from that place floating in tubes on the river. It was a peaceful time and we enjoyed hanging out with relatives for several days.

I assume that the place where we stayed survived the damage (it was across a road and uphill from the river) but I’m sure the steps down to the river and the facilities there are gone. The worst loss there would be a bathroom and some tubes for floating. Fortunately, no one built homes too close to the river at that location.

Flash floods are a fact of life in that part of the world. In fact, the saying “turn around, don’t drown” was started by Hector Guerrero, a warning meteorologist for the National Weather Service in San Angelo, Texas, which is about 150 miles northwest of Hunt and also experienced flash floods in the latest storm.

While the Guadalupe River and other rivers in the Hill Country flood regularly, this event was particularly bad given the extreme amount of rain that fell quickly — about 15 inches in a few hours, which is about half the yearly average rainfall.

I listened to weather expert Daniel Swain’s discussion of the disaster on Monday morning and learned that one of the reasons the Hill Country is at great risk for erratic rainfalls like this one is because the Gulf of Mexico is so warm.

I knew the Gulf was warm, since I spent so much of my childhood at the beach playing in that water and was surprised when I moved to the East Coast and discovered that the Atlantic is not as warm, even in summer. (Much less the Pacific.) And of course, with climate change, the Gulf is getting warmer, which is why there is now greater risk from hurricanes.

But I didn’t realize how much affect such warm water has. In fact, the warmth of the Gulf and the winds and storms that it produces also are a cause of tornado weather all the way north to Canada. Different weather patterns crashing into each other – and that’s not the scientific explanation, just my grasp of it – cause a lot of problems.

Some of the flooding was also related to a tropical storm in the Gulf that hit Mexico and moved north, just as an example.

I was not surprised by the flash floods, because I know the area. I used to drive my father around the area west of New Braunfels since he liked to look at the wildlife. We would stop as we crossed every creek, to see if there was any water in it. Many of the creeks and even some of the rivers are mostly dry or close to it, except when it rains. Continue reading “The Latest Texas Floods”…

Handling things

personby Gillian Polack
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This week I don’t want to write at length. I’m still dealing with a bunch of nasty stuff done in Australia on Friday night. It struck me, though, that most readers of this blog are also dealing with bad things. We are not having an easy time of it, any of us.

What I would love to know is how we all handle things.

My best approach (and the most difficult) is to think everything through and understand. Twenty years ago I could take that understanding and share it with activists I knew and we’d find ways fo helping people and moving past the logjam that the impossible creates. Right now, most of those people aren’t talking to me because I’m too Jewish, but I still delve deeply and understand, and when someone asks, I can help them reach the stage where they can identify the hate and the slogans and the dark alliances and make their own decisions for their lives. I really miss teaching – I don’t get to explore ideas with many people and certainly don’t get simple solutions. This was once the best approach, but now makes me feel helpless. Also, I find it exhausting. It’s especially exhausting when friends tell me “The group I marched with was not at all antisemitic. You are imagining things.” Perfectly good people can march alongside vile bigots and as long as the bigots are polite in their presence and the good people accept the rhetoic unquestioningly or don’t know the dowhistles then those good people do not know what is being done in their name.

Solitaire is not the best way to deal, I have discovered. I start playing when things get too much and then cannot stop.

Cooking was a great support (because I love cooking) when there were friends around who could eat my food, but, between COVID and our charming new present, not many people eat my coking and so all I have is too much food and… my freezer is full.

Last time there was a wave of antisemitism (the Molotov cocktail years) I did a lot of walking and enormous amounts of dancing. They were so good for me. I cannot walk far these days and I can only dace for maybe 2 minutes. I am so proud that I can now dance for two minutes, it’s like life returning. I needed 2 hours of dancing back then, to give me a break from everything. I would lose myself in the music and my feet would replace my brain in ruling my life and over time, my body forgot the burdens it carried and life was wonderful. If my illnesses would go into abeyance, I would dance again, but, right now, dancing has a Jew has its own aches. Walking doesn’t. I will work on improving my walking.

Superhero movies and TV and K-drama help a lot. They’re not my everyday and I can take a break from my everyday when I’m watching them. Crime dramas and sad stories of sorrow… less good. A couple of friends suggested I watch things to do with the Holocaust, or one of the documentaries about October 7. If I want to sleepwalk, I promise, I will watch those things.

These are a few of the things I’ve tried.

We all live different lives and we all have different approaches to turning the impossible into something we can handle everyday. The impossible for someone in the US is quite different to the impossible for someone in Australia. I’d love to know some of your ways of dealing.