Category: nonfiction

I had a dream last night about trying to pack up everything in a large house, preparatory to moving.

My husband and I are planning to move in… I dunno. Somewhere between 5-7 years from now. Between this long-range deadline and the fact that my house is currently knee-deep in books I’m reading for World Fantasy (the photo on the left is the stacks of books I am not the primary reader on…the books that are my responsibility are in another room) the notion of is very much with me. And evidently, very much with my dreams.

I’m not sure how it comes to this. When I was graduated from college, I had… a couple of plants. Two or three shelves of non-textbook books, and perhaps six inches worth of record albums (yeah, vinyl. Because I’m from the Before Times). A small barbershop cabinet (about 10″ x 15″, and 40″ high). A guitar. My bicycle. That was about it. Moved all that stuff back to my parents’ house, where it barely made a blip (my parents lived in a Barn. When you live in a Barn there’s always somewhere to put stuff). When I moved into my first apartment I added a rather sad sack twin bed and a bureau. I bought a pot and a knife (my roommate had other cooking gear).

And then I began to acquire stuff. Nothing crazy: bookshelves made of boards and bricks, because I knew I would acquire more books. A Selectric typewriter, bought with part of the proceeds of my first book sale. A second-hand desk. By the time I moved into another apartment (same roommate) I had acquired more kitchen stuff, a better bed with a futon, a chair (prior to the chair I had done my writing sitting crosslegged on my bed with the Selectric on my lap, which may explain the state of my legs). My father gave me a Hoosier Pie Cabinet, because it reminded him of me.* More books, of course. Then I moved to a studio apartment on my own, where, among other things, my stereo was stolen. And on and on. I moved in with friends and wound up putting 90% of what I owned in storage. Then into a flat with another friend. Then I got married, and we had to negotiate whose stuff would achieve primacy in our three room apartment. Then we had a kid–kids require, or seem to require, an inordinate amount of stuff, even tho’ we were not of the “anything Little Gumdrop wants, she must have!” brand of parents. We moved to a larger apartment and put in a wall of bookshelves, and had another kid. And then we moved to California and bought a house–not a huge house, or a particularly glamorous house, but a whole house with an attic and a basement. The kids grew up. Both moved out, but left stuff behind. That stuff is mostly in the attic, which has dormer cupboards, so we can maintain the notion that the attic is a guest room.

A couple of years ago I gave away 25 cartons of books to the San Francisco public library. I don’t know what it is, but I have a distinctly squinchy, unhappy feeling about throwing out things that are useable but not wanted. I want them all–books and dishes and furniture–to find a new home. But finding that home can be challenging. I have my floor loom from when I was a kid and taking weaving lessons. It’s in good shape, entirely useable, and while I keep advertising it in local weavers’ organizations, I haven’t had even a tickle of interest. I also have a rug-hooking loom of my mother’s that I suspect I’ll have to donate somewhere. And my baking paraphernalia… I have heard that some libraries will collect baking paraphernalia and check them out. Maybe SFPL would like mine? In 5-7 years?

I walk around the house and state with certainty: when we move, THAT comes with us. And THAT. And THOSE. But not everything. And every time I think of picking something up–a tool for the kitchen, for instance–I am now reminded that I might not want that tool in the future, no matter how convenient it might be Right Now.

So, yeah. I’m a little consumed by Stuff. In my dreams, in my kitchen, in the attic.

_____

*Over the years my father gave me a number of things that reminded him of me, including the pie cabinet, and a large ball of alabaster and carving tools. I have never been sure why these things reminded him of me–was it structure or function? Still, I adore the pie cabinet. The alabaster was eventually surrendered to an art school.

I’m a bit snowed under right now. It’s mostly for the best reasons.

First, I have to do minor revisions and then I will have a PhD. I’m meeting with my supervisors this week to work out the best approach. Once the adjusted thesis has been submitted, that’s the end of doctoral studies for me. I promise I won’t do another PhD!

Second, I’m meeting with a Robin Hood scholar for shared work on Eustace the Monk. That guy haunts me.

Third, proof-reading is being done for a novel. More about that when announcement time arrives… which is not far away.

Fourth, this weekend I’m at the virtual end of Balticon. I have some wonderful panels and the best possible company.

Fifth, Swancon (the Australian national science fiction convention in Perth this year) is the weekend after. I’m running the Huamnities side of the academic programme. I’m lucky in the people I work with, because it’s all a lot easier for me than I expected. This is through the hard and clever work of the chief runner of all academic things and because of the Swancon team as a whole.

Sixth, I have a novel I need to write and a NF book to find a home for.

Seventh, I’ve my ME/CFS back. Aren’t I lucky?

I’ve had it for a while, but it’s reached the place where I can do things and this means I can overdo things and get set back for a full year if I’m not careful. I’m one of the lucky ones in that I get remission. I’m unlucky in that I was finally succeeding with an exercise programme that was enabling me to walk a full kilometre and I was so proud of myself. Pride and falls – we have reached the time of the fall. Not all falls are bad. It’s autumn in Canberra, so, if I wander in the right suburbs, I get to see autumn leaves. A friend and I investigated leaves last week, and we jumped in them and it was lovely.

With all this going on, later today I’ll put up posts for the next fortnight. They will magically appear on the right day and it will look as if I’m diligent and at my desk. I will be neither diligent nor at my desk, but I will be spending time with wonder and friends and much talk of speculative fiction. Also, I will be giving a workshop.

The noise you hear in the background is the Australian Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. It’s not the Commission itself, but many who hate coming out of the woodwork and making sure we see them. Most of them complain that too much energy and attention is being spent on Jews. This is beyond irony.

I got my start as a writer back in the long-ago, writing Regency Romances. These were relatively short novels that charted the progress of two characters toward each other, ending in a happy ending and (presumably) a wedding, set against the backdrop of the English Regency. I wrote five romances and then stopped. Not because I didn’t love the setting and the era, but because nudging two people toward each other, with no possibility of a surprise (given the expectations of the form, if you buy a romance, you expect that happily ever after) stopped entertaining me. And I write to entertain myself, first and foremost.*

But that wasn’t the only reason I stopped. At that time the expectations of the romance genre were, um, broadening, and I found I wasn’t very interested in the way things were going. This was the dawn of the Big! Sweeping! Highly Sexualized! romance, with lots of sex scenes using lots of (to me, risible) descriptions of sex which I found as arousing as plumbing manuals.

I am pro sex, personally, and in fiction. But many of the books I looked at at the time were, um, sex-scene delivery systems wrapped up in a thin coating of historical setting. Most of the books had protagonists who were of the middle and upper classes, who were swept off by pirates or brooding Earls or some such, and not-quite-forced into having mind-blowing sex, swept away on a tide of passion that overcame all their prior training about what a woman of good family did or didn’t do and… And there were (in my admittedly smallish sample, because most of the books I looked at were not to my taste) never any consequences. Not the obvious ones–pregnancy and STDs**–but the very crucial societal consequences to a woman of good family. This drove me nuts, and is part of the reason I started writing my Sarah Tolerance books.

I mention this because I’ve been reading a lot of “romantasy” of late, for Reasons. And I have, therefore, staggered through a lot of plumbing. Er, sex scenes. And some of those books come off as sex scene delivery systems wrapped in a thin coating of fantasy tropes. Not my thing. For the people who love this stuff, it is exactly what they want, and I’m happy for that. Everyone should have access to the fiction they want to read. And I think the authors of these books are just as happy as their readers–I don’t believe it’s possible to write this kind of fiction unless you subscribe to it wholeheartedly.

But I would like to suggest to those writers (who are probably not seeing this) that sometimes less truly is more. A little less specificity as to what goes where allows the reader to insert their own idea of what is romantic/erotic. Lead me to the bedroom door, as it were, and my imagination can tailor a scene that contains everything I find satisfying. Giving too much specific detail (particularly when the details are in language that makes me snicker) makes that impossible. I once had a writing student, a nice guy who wanted to write Harlequin romances, and (as I put it at the time) filled his books with more thighs and breasts than a poultry counter… but lacked incense. Sometimes the thighs and breasts get in the way of  the emotional core of the scene, which is what I’m there for.

We know how the plumbing works.  Tell me less.

__________
*I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, but honestly, if I’m not having a good time why would a reader?
** And dear God, why everyone in Europe didn’t have syphilis at this time I do not know, so how any of these characters could have dodged that bullet…especially with pirates and brooding Earls, neither of whom were famous for restraint…

I am up to my hips with reading for World Fantasy, but I was reminded of this piece which I wrote about 10 years ago. Sadly, it is still topical…

I was once chased around my parents’ kitchen by a friend of my father’s. But I’ll come back to that.

One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to leaf through a 25-year collection of New Yorker cartoons. Even at the time (the mid 1960s) many of them referred to a world that was vanishing or had vanished: references that must have been side-splitting at the time they were published, but were totally opaque to ten-year-old me. I still remember some of the cartoonists fondly–Chas. Addams, of course, but also James Thurber, Helen Hokinson of the deep-bosomed, slightly clueless club women, and Syd Hoff. But there was a class of cartoons–by guys like Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow, Jr.– that might loosely be termed a critique of modern relations between the sexes. They weren’t opaque, but even to me as a kid they were troubling.

A staple of these cartoons was the young, buxom woman being variously leered at, groped at, chased, etc., by an older, usually wealthier white man (well, yes, in the New Yorker of early days everyone was white). In some of these the woman is clearly playing along in hopes of–what, a diamond bracelet? A fur coat? As Cole Porter had it in Kiss Me Kate, “Mr. Harris, plutocrat, wants to give my cheek a pat: if a Harris pat means a Paris hat, Okay!” But in others, the woman looks uncomfortable and apprehensive.

As for the men in these cartoons, a few of them look hapless, as if they’ve stumbled into a situation where a woman is forcing them to ogle etc. “Honest, officer, I was just sitting here at my desk in my loud checked suit when my secretary perched on my desk to take dictation. What could I possibly do?” Others appeared to at least pretend to be looking at something other than the cleavage–pearls were a frequent fixture–but that was the joke, right? Because everyone, even a ten-year-old girl, knew that he was really ogling the woman’s breasts. But mostly these men look like they’re predators.

As a eight-, nine-, or ten-year old, what was I to make of all this? The takeaway appeared to be that all (powerful, elderly, white) men were letches. That working for such men inevitably meant some sort of harassment. That the wives of these men (who were all portly and dripping in the signifiers of their husbands’ success–furs and diamonds etc.) could do nothing but occasionally fume and nag. That the women being ogled etc. deserved it because they had breasts, because they wore provocative outfits and should have known what would happen, because they had jobs that took them out of their homes and into contact with the aforementioned predators. Some of the cartoons also suggested that there were young women who made the attraction of older, wealthier men into their jobs. All those portly, powerful, older white men were their marks (in which case it must be reasonable that the men would treat the women as prey, because the women were treating them as prey and…).

So there I am in my parents’ kitchen. I was 16 and home from school with a really horrendous cold of the streaming variety–my recollection is that I was a walking river of snot in a plush bathrobe. As I’ve said before, I grew up in a barn, and the living room windows overlooked a valley and a river and fields… very picturesque. One of my dad’s friends, a very fine painter, was painting a landscape of that view. I heard the downstairs door open, went out to the landing, saw it was–let’s call him Fritz–said hi, excused myself on accounta sick, and went back to bed. An hour or so later I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some tea and, being a well-raised child, I asked Fritz if he wanted a cup. He said sure, and I put the kettle on.

I’m not clear exactly how the subject of wouldn’t I like to have an affair came up–I was standing there in my blue plush bathrobe with a handful of tissues, blotting my nose and waiting for the kettle to boil.  I answered in the negative (this was all rendered more surreal by the fact that I had a crush on Fritz’s son) and may have made some comment about Fritz being my parents’ friend, and it would be weird, shading toward wrong. I was still trying to be polite, and perhaps he took that as an invitation to explain why it would be fine, don’t worry about it. Note: our stove was on an island in the middle of the kitchen floor. Gradually, Fritz moved around the island toward me, and I moved around and away. I felt rotten, and this was the last straw, but I did not want to be rude to my father’s friend. And all the time the image in my head was the one above: “Notice, class…”

The kettle boiled. I poured the water, told him where to find milk and sugar, should he want them, and decamped to my room. I think I may have locked the door, but in the event, Fritz didn’t push the issue, and while I saw him a number of times after that, his invitation was never mentioned between the two of us.

When older people excuse men for predatory workplace behavior (or predatory behavior generally) by saying “they came up in a different time,” well, yes, they may have done. But even in that “different time,” the cartoonists who were depicting these “funny” chases got the look of dismay on the faces of the women, the look of “I need this job but…” The look of being trapped. Even when I was eight- or nine- or ten-years-old I couldn’t see how that was funny.

 

Today is Patreon day and tax day and sorting out many things day. I feel like a character in the Mikado. “If sometime it must happen that a to-do must be found, I’ve got a little list.”

Today there are health things, and tax, and I need to post many recipes on Patreon, and fill in two big forms, and do some research, plus there’s housework.

My body isn’t in The Mikado at all. It’s Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, shouting, “You shall not pass!”

I shall make a cup of tea, shout back at my body, and see if we can agree on a mutually convenient place to be.

This was written in the late 1990s. I had lost the file, and frankly thought I might have imagined I’d written the whole thing. And then last week, looking for something entirely else, I found it. I’ve softened a little bit on Marmee: Abba Alcott was doing the best she could in very trying circumstances (don’t get me started on Bronson Alcott, The Man and the Ego). But I’m still glad my daughter liked me better.

 

It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been throwing up for half-an-hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She’s changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the things that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her flyaway hair out of her eyes, away from her face. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half-on and half-off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.

And I’m remembering Marmee.

That Marmee: the mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women. Impossibly wise, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, serene Marmee. I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I’m taking care of Juliana and longing for my bed, there’s a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn’t feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee would make her daughter believe that nothing in her whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.

And in a sense that’s all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is my job. But there are moments, as with any job, where the work stinks–in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I”m doing this right. That’s when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.

Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa Alcott’s wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the weird bits prettied up or left out. I know Marmee was never meant to be a user’s manual for parenting. But it’s the nature of people–certainly people of my generation–to look for role models. Perhaps I do it because my own mother died before my girls were born. Maybe it’s because, with the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, we’re left mostly with Mommies Dearest and Mommies Amok. Or maybe I was simply bit by Marmee at a young age. In any case she continues to stick with me.

She must stick with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of horror I expected, but with a rush of fellow-feeling. It’s not just me, and that’s comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?

A few weeks after the night on the hallway floor, Juliana asks if we can start reading Little Women at bedtime. I wonder if I should confront the Marmee issue with her the way I did the prince issue in Cinderella (“I don’t know. Would you want to marry a guy you only met once at a party?”). In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, Juliana looks up at me and says “Marmee’s kind of–I mean she’s always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I’d feel like she didn’t like me the way I was.”

A little unsteadily, I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.

“Of course you do, Mama,” she says, in the tones of one stating incontrovertible truth.

Take that, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.

This week includes autumn leaves for me and spring flowers for many of you, it has “Hug a Medievalist Day” and April Fools’. There are school holidays in so many places, and long weekends in even more. There’s Passover and easter and Orthodox Easter. I don’t have time to explore all the things I know I’ve missed because I have deadlines galore and preparing for Passover.

Whatever you celebrate, have a lovely time. If you have peace and quiet, enjoy it for me as well!