Karenporn

I have stumbled over a portion of the internet of which I had previously not known. It’s possible I might have been happier that way, but you can’t unring that bell.

There appears to be a small industry producing short videos or playlets in which one person is truly awful, and gets their comeuppance. Like a scripted version of an encounter filmed on someone’s phone, where (for example) a nasty person calls the cops to shut down a kids’ lemonade stand because it’s a “health code violation”. Of course the nasty person is a well-to-do white woman and the “violation” appears to be nothing more than that the kids are black and selling lemonade in her neighborhood. The nasty person is eventually scolded or arrested or otherwise trounced, and goodness and virtue triumph.

One “brand,” if you can call it that, focuses on the adventures of the Mango Park Police Department; they have their own YouTube channel, and many many videos. The hero, police captain James Porter  (and occasionally, confusingly, a Mango Park judge as well) is played by a black man (actor Verne Alexander) who exudes decency. The Captain’s frequent foil are women cursed by their features to play the “mean and self-righteous” role. There are other repertory players who appear in these things–sometimes as good guys, other times as villains. The playlets all have titles like “Boss Forced to Resign After Mistreating Black Employee,” or “Wealthy Entitled Karen Sues Cops, Does Not End Well.” The sins of the villains are overblown–this is not a subtle art form. The production values are somewhat below those of a 1970s Afterschool Special, with writing to match.

What fascinates me is that these playlets get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, and many comments, most of which are of the “You rock, Captain Porter!” variety. Some of the audience seems to confuse Captain/Judge Porter with real world sometime-jurists like Judge Judy Sheindlin.  As I say, there are a lot of these: someone is making enough money doing this to finance these videos and to make more. But who is the audience? 

I was talking to my daughter about this phenomenon. She calls it “rage-bait,” but I’ve been thinking of it as “Karenporn,”* entertainment that sets up an easy target: an entitled, well-t0-do (usually female) white person who thinks that anything that crosses their personal squick line must be illegal; who expects the authorities and the world around her to laud her for taking a stand. And the satisfaction of these stories is that the Karen (or Chad, as I believe her male counterpart is called) gets smacked down hard. 

If you are a conservative of the MAGA stripe, maybe you think this is entertainment for liberals? I find it hard to believe that most of the liberals I know would watch more than one of these films without wincing. Because I wanted to write about them, I watched several, and felt oddly queasy–certainly not triumphant or entertained.

Maybe there’s just a portion of the electorate that hungers to see cartoon villainy get its comeuppance? If so, I recommend almost any of the the Marvel films–both the villainy and production values are more convincing.

__________
*with apologies to my several friends named Karen who do not deserve to have coals of fire heaped on them for the bad behavior of others.

Boyne’s World

Today I want to talk about reality. Something that appears and reappears in my historical research life is that we all think we are firmly linked to reality. That we know and understand clearly the difference between pure fiction and the stuff of our everyday.

I want to introduce you to the work of John Boyne, because it quite clearly proves that this is not always the case. Why is Boyne’s work more important than the words of a seven year old friend who recently explained unicorns to me? Because the friend and I have a clear understanding that we believe in unicorns only in certain contexts. We step sideways into a fictional reality and are perfectly agreed on when we should step back and accept that the unicorn in question is a stuffed toy. It is, in fact, the unicorn in question is the stuffed toy that was used to promote the Glasgow world science fiction convention in Australia for two years. More than one child has played with or borrowed it and understands its particular links to reality. One talked to it and made sounds to demonstrate that it was talking back. We held a three-way conversation and her mother was not at all worried that we had descended into a place where the rules of physics and the natural order we know did not hold.

My question is whether John Boyne has the same understanding? He might. If he does, then his work contains other problems. I’ll leave the other problems to you (I’ve had enough of antisemitism today – I’m Jewish and accusations are currently part of my real and ordinary life) and look solely at how Boyne works with the worlds he creates as a writer, and with history.

Let’s start with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It’s read by children all over the world, and is the basis for many people’s view of the Holocaust. As fiction, this is a pain, but not in and of itself a problem. Boyne could keep it fictional quite easily by saying, “This is not built from our world. It is imaginary” and suggest that something else be prescribed reading on the Holocaust, something with a stronger basis in our reality. He could also rewrite Jewish characters so they were not cardboard cutouts. I feel like Pinocchio, wanting to be a real human being.

I have not seen him say his work is not our world. Instead, he wrote a sequel, which is at least as problematic as the first novel and is also recommended to me by people who want me to know more about the Holocaust. I ask them where my family is in the book and they cannot answer. I am still a wooden puppet. All my family in Europe in 1939, except for one teenager, died in Auschwitz. Ask me about it sometime. The story is nothing like Boyne’s novels.

If you want to understand where Boyne’s novels differ from actual history and lived experience and why not accepting them as fantasy or magical is a problem, this site is a good place to start:

https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/blog/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/

Until the release of a third novel by Boyne, I didn’t realise that the problem was one with reality, nor that Boyne was such a lazy researcher. In A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, Boyne uses a recipe for dye that is genuine, because he researched it. He researched it in the same way that I researched the title of his novel, just a moment ago. He used the internet and a search engine. The recipe he came up with was from a game spun from the Legend of Zelda.

I’ve had to look up dyes, myself. I needed a Medieval recipe for a black dye for my forthcoming novel. I didn’t like what I read on the internet and I didn’t trust myself to interpret dying technique without advice, so me, I asked a textile archaeologist, Dr Katrin Kania. An email each way and I had my dye, suitable for exactly the right place and time. My dye may still contain errors, but those are errors of interpretation, not errors of existence.

This recipe had me thinking about how I could accept a well-written novel that has a bunch of problems, some ethical. My conclusion is pretty much what gave me my opening to this little piece. Boyne now represents to me a writer whose work claims historicity but is actually, like my own work, fantastical or science fiction. My work is more historically accurate than his in some places (for instance in my time travel novel) because, well, I’m an historian. The Old Occitan in Langue.doc 1305 is an indication that history is a base for my fiction. The Zelda recipe is an indication that fantasy is a base for his, while the apparent reality of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas suggests alternate history. A nicer Holocaust than the one Jews and Romani actually went through and mostly failed to survive. A Holocaust that didn’t murder children on arrival at an extermination camp and where young German boys weren’t part of Hitler’s youth, and where children could play by a barbed wire fence manned by guards who shot to kill.

This helps me understand some of the people who tell me day in and day out that they do not hate Jews: they live in a fantasy world, just like Boyne. Maybe even the same fantasy world as Boyne.

I did not mean to write anything sarcastic today, but it’s one of those days where body aches and antisemitism walk side by side. If I were to create an alternate reality from today, it would be more depressing than ours. It’s already been created, though, in various places, including in some of the stories in Other Covenants.

I wrote one of the hopeful and happy stories in that volume. I need to get back to that place, where I admit the bigotry and stupidity and that some people are lucky enough to live in a safer world. That’s the thing, Boyne’s fantasy world reflects his own sense of what the real world looks like, as do my fantasy worlds. In my real world, the fate of Australia’s Jews depends on our election on May 3. He lives in a world that’s quite terrifying for me, because he cannot see who he hurts with his writing and how. If he wants to contest that, I would like to see him assert a different sense of reality… by making the Zelda dye using the original ingredients*.

* You can find the recipe partway down the page here: Boy in the Striped Pyjamas writer accidentally includes Zelda recipe in new novel | Eurogamer.net

Dissertating

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?

Showing Up

A hand-lettered protest sign upside down, propped against a green plaid couch.Like five million of my fellow Americans, I spent Saturday, April 5, outdoors in the company of a few thousand neighbors, protesting the policies and behavior of the Executive branch, and the lackluster resistance by the Legislative branch. Here in San Francisco we were lucky: the sun was bright, the skies were blue, it was comfortably warm, and the minimal police presence appeared to be there to manage traffic. There were speakers at the rally I was at (albeit with a very underpowered sound system that made the speeches hard to hear) covering the gamut of areas of concern, from illegal deportation to attacks on civil rights, to tariffs, to the defunding of damned near everything I care about (National Parks, education, medical research, museums, etc.).  We waved our signs, chanted some chants, generally let the world know that we are angry–enraged–about the actions the current president and his minions have been taking since January 20. Then, as the rally wound down I wandered over to public transit and rode home in company with some of the folk who had been at the rally too (as evidenced by the signs and sunburn I saw around me). However angry we in the aggregate might be, the folks at the SF rally were polite and entirely non-violent; there were kids in strollers, elders in walkers, folks in wheelchairs, just… everyone.

My own personal bubble is filled with people who are concerned about the way things are going and how much worse it could get, so I was startled to encounter people in San Francisco who didn’t know that the rallies were happening. Not that they disapproved, they weren’t aware (when I stopped to get a coffee, the barista saw the sign I carried, asked what was going on. When I told her, she moved my coffee order up to the front “so you won’t be late”). I know there are  people in my neighborhood–yes, even in San Francisco–who think the actions of the current administration are just dandy (although I do wonder how they’re feeling given the state of the stock market right now). I think it’s important for me to remember that there are a lot of different ways to feel about right now. I don’t know how the small conservative cohort of my neighborhood feels about the rallies–one guy I ran into rolled his eyes at my sign, but said “at least you got a nice day for it.”

So what was the point?

Showing up. Being there among others who are as frightened and angry as I am. Part of the tactics being used to dismantle the government and disrupt social norms is to persuade us that we’re each in it alone, that we have no power, that we have no voice. But I felt good about showing up. I felt good that there were others–thousands of others in my city, and millions across the country–who also showed up.

Showing up doesn’t fix things, any more than Senator Cory Booker’s magnificent 25 hour filibuster on the Senate floor fixed things. Not everything one does creates a fix. But showing up creates solidarity, underscores the problems being protested, energizes the people there with an energy that can spill outward and onward. It can show the people with power who are wavering about taking action that there is pressure to act rightly. And it can get people off the bench: a lot of the speakers at the rally I was at encouraged people to do the things that create solutions: volunteer, run for office, make phone calls, rattle cages; there were places to sign up to do all of those things, and those tables were busy.

I know people in other states whose weather was not as fine as ours in San Francisco. They stood out in the cold and the rain, bundled up and with umbrellas and rainbows, and they showed up. I stand in solidarity with all of them.

On the Eve of April Fools’

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day. I’m not reminding you of this. I’m trying to work out how to read the news tomorrow. You see, our next Federal election is on May 3.

Australia has a very different election cycle to the US – we’ve only known about the coming election for a few days. We’ve known for a while that the last possible day for the election was May 17 and our elections are always on a Saturday. We also know that the preferred date for the election for the current government was mid-April but that the Queensland cyclone rudely intervened. Now Queenslanders are upset because the election is on their long weekend. Queensland’s vote is critical this time round, and so many people are arguing about how upset Queenslanders will vote.

We have an unpopular party currently in power (Labor, which is our liberal), an unpopular coalition not currently in power (Liberal/National, which is our right wing, with a leader who is often described as a mini-Trump or “Mr Potato Head”), and a bunch of unpopular minor parties, one of whom is the Greens. The Greens are spectacularly good at calling for a shared society while they promote antisemitism.

This is the messiest election I’ve seen in fifty years of election watching. It’s also going to decide the nature of Australia in a fundamental way. We have a silent majority, you see, and we have the compulsory vote: the silent majority will speak. None of us know enough about that silent majority. All the pollsters are discovering new ways of finding out. Today, for instance, we found out the most likely voting pattern for under 30s in cities.

What has this to do with April Fools’? It’s simple. In a mad-crazy election lead-up, all the major and minor parties are jabbering as if the world will end if they fall silent for even a second. Very little of what they say makes sense. At least on April Fools’ Day we know for certain not to believe what they promise.

An Academic Lens on What We Do, Plus Floaty Potatoes

This past week I braved the rigors of flying in America (spoiler: flights were thankfully uneventful) to go to Orlando, Florida for ICFA. That stands for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which is put on by IAFA (the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts). I have been going to ICFA for maybe a dozen years; it is one of my favorite conventions. A lot of that has to do with the writers and artists who attend, in addition to the academic professionals who come to deliver papers and be on panels. Possibly the most satisfactory programming–to me, anyway–is when you have academic and creative folk on a panel, sharing perspectives.

What kinds of things get talked about? Here are the titles of a handful of panels and discussions:

  • The Haunted House is a Fruiting Body: Fungus in Moreno-Garcia and Kingfisher
  • Devil’s In the Details: place and personhood in Horror
  • Monstrous Adaptations, Translations and Appropriations
  • A Wolf in the Fold: Werewolves in Modernity and Post-Modernity
  • Accepting, Resisting, and Complicating the Zombie
  • History is Written by…The Power of Alternative History in Fantasy

Plus, there are readings by the creative guests, and a performance of flash plays (disclaimer: I usually wind up performing in the flash plays. This year the plays were so flash they were one minute long, intermixed with improv. It was enormously fun). There are banquets and awards dinners which I usually don’t attend, and a ton of people to talk with.

Part of what I like about ICFA is that so much of the time my head is down and my attention is on my own paper, and I don’t think about what someone trained in reading and understanding text in a literary or philosophical sense might think of what I’m doing. And that’s a good thing: if I thought about that too much I very likely would not write anything ever again. But to see the kind of thoughtful critical treatment of fantastic literature that the participants at ICFA provide is heartening. I came up in a time when SF and fantasy were the decidedly junior members of the literary firm; that’s not the case any more.

Like most conventions, though, the very best time is sitting around the pool (Florida, right?) and talking with friends old and new, talking about writing and publishing and the world. Going out to dinner. Looking for the alligator who very occasionally used to waddle by the lake (I saw him once, years ago. Never since).

The convention runs Wednesday – Saturday night. Most participants leave on Sunday morning, but some of us stay an extra day and have an adventure: go to Gatorland or, as I did this year, head to the Blue Springs State Park to see manatees. There were so many manatees, and their calves! Apparently the local term for manatee is “floaty potato.” It is apt. I honestly wonder about the early European sailors who thought manatees were mermaids–that’s what a long time on a ship will do to your perception.

Anyway: ICFA. Highly recommended.

Raised in a Barn: Good House Keeping

The world overtook me this week, but here’s a piece from the past.

When I was a kid and my family lived in New York City but spent weekends and holidays at the Barn, guests were a way of life. At the beginning, that meant that everyone stayed in the old farmhouse across the driveway which had come with the property. It was probably a late-Victorian vintage, but not the charming vintage. More the utilitarian-structure-built-by-people-with-no-taste vintage. Its lack of curb-appeal aside, it was a perfectly serviceable house with heat, water, and electricity. And walls. All of which, in the early days, the Barn lacked. So we, and our guests, would kip in the house, sometimes three or four to a room (kids on camp cots), then rise and go our Barnish way.

The house, as I’ve said, was ugly, but it was not without its interest. In the attic we found all manner of weird, dusty, flyspecked treasures: framed academic certificates awarded to people whose names were rendered in such tortured ornate penmanship as to be unreadable; huge old school maps, one of them so old that it predated the Gadsden Purchase (1854!), unwieldy ugly dressers and chairs. Unlike the Barn, the house was not a refuge for livestock, but there were–or had been at some earlier time–mice, and their nests. Downstairs there were three or four small bedrooms (the one I slept in had cabbage rose wallpaper which I, at five, thought the height of elegance). Below that, the kitchen (with coal burning stove!), living room, and dining room, where my parents’ old paperbacks and furniture went to die. I have a strong, visceral memory of those paperbacks, with their lurid covers (even Mill on the Floss was rendered shocking! by the art and copy) and musty smell. Those books, which had names like Keep the Aspidistra Flying, were yellowed and crumbling and seemed very exotic to me, may account for my early onset book-lust.

Until we got plumbing in the Barn, which involved dowsing and drilling and many exciting things, we carried water across the 200-odd feet from the house to the Barn, where the electric stove and refrigerators were almost the first things to go in. Picture a make-way-for-ducklings line of family members, each with his or her pot or pitcher of water for cooking or washing up. O! Pioneers! And of course, unless you were really committed to roughing it, you retired to the house for the private use of plumbing.

At night, the kids would be tucked into bed in the house; then the parents would retire across the driveway to the Barn for whatever revelry seemed good to them. My brother and I were used to this, but guest-kids often had a problem going to sleep in a strange house in a strange place with strange sounds outside, and would start crying. It fell to me, as the hostess and presiding child, to cross the pitch-dark lawn to the Barn and alert the parents that one of their offspring was freaking out.

The minute the Barn was at all habitable, we shifted our base of operations over there. This left a perfectly serviceable ugly farmhouse, abandoned for daily use. My brother and I used it for hide and seek; we were the only kids I knew who had a whole house to play house in. But as we got older those games palled, and the poor house was left to become colder and more empty, until my father declared it an eyesore. He’d never wanted the farmhouse. So he put an ad in the local Pennysaver: free house for anyone who would move it away. When he got no takers, he sweetened the deal: free house and a quarter acre of land to anyone who would move it away. That got someone’s attention: the house was raised up off its foundations, ready to be rolled away. Except the taker defaulted: he couldn’t afford to move the house. So now we had a house up on jacks, and it stayed there for months. Without foundations, the once sturdy house began to droop toward the middle, at which point, like a car with a sprung frame, it was declared a junker.

What to do with a dead house? In the end, Dad offered it to the local fire department, and they came over and had practice fires: light ‘er up, put ‘er out, light ‘er up, put ‘er out. What was left was ploughed into the foundation, and seeded over; within a remarkably short time there was lawn there, and you’d never have known there had been a house there. Those school certificates and the map without the Gadsden Purchase Dad gave to the local historical society, and then there was no trace of the house at all. It was all a little bit like a structural version of A Star is Born–with the upstart upstaging the old veteran. I still remember the smell of those books, and that cabbage rose wallpaper, though.

In Hopeful Times: Robert Reich on Optimism

 At the beginning of Trump 1.0, I began a series entitled “In Troubled Times.” With the onset of the war in Ukraine (aka The War of Russian Aggression), I shifted to “In Times of War.” Today, Substackian Robert Reich offers reasons for cautious optimism. Let’s feed that hope!

This is a very brief summary. Click on the link to read the whole thing and to subscribe.

Friends, If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing — not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.
1.Boycotts are taking hold.
2. International resistance is rising.
3. Independent and alternative media are growing.
4. Musk’s popularity is plunging.
5. Musk’s Doge is losing credibility.
6. The federal courts are hitting back.
7. Demonstrations are on the rise.
8. Stock and bond markets are trembling.
9. Trump is overreaching — pretending to be “king” and abandoning Ukraine for Putin.
10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “shock and awe” plan is faltering.

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.

Seeing things Jewishly

So many strangers are telling me right now that I’m not Australian and that none of my relatives are Australian and… my mind keeps returning to what this means for the Arts in Australia. Certainly it’s much more difficult for anyone Jewish to earn money in the Arts here: there are some places I won’t even fill in the forms until I see that things have changed. I don’t have much physical capacity and when something is obviously a waste of my time, I do something else with that precious time. However… it struck me that I see the world through my upbringing. I talk about books from non-Jewish Australia a great deal, but my own view of the world is shaped by my family and their friends and the stories I was told as a child.

We all see the world from our own eyes. If someone were to ask me how I see the arts in Jewish Australia, I’d only give a partial answer, because there is so much stuff I forget. The first thing I think of, in fact, is what has impacted me and when and why. I thought, this week, then, I’d give you a little list. The list is little but it contains many words, because I annotated it. Welcome to the Arts in Australia seen Jewishly, through my life.

Let me begin with family and friends.

My mother’s family arrived in Australia before World War II or died in that war (save one person, who is not part of today’s story because he was not an artist, musician or writer). Mum’s immediate family was all here by 1918. It was a big family in Europe and is not the smallest family in Australia. Of all my mother’s cousins there are two who were well-known as writers. Very well-known, in fact.

Morris Lurie was Naomi’s brother. Naomi was so much a forever part of my life that even now she’s gone, I still think of one of Australia’s better known writers of plays through the fact that his sister was Naomi. Every time Naomi was in Melbourne, she’d shout “Sonya,” across the street to my mother, because they were very close. Mum hates loud voices and Naomi thought that Mum hating the noise and the laughter was hilarious.

I know about Morrie, and I collected his plays when I was a teenager. One of the lesser known facts of Gillian’s life is that, for twenty years, she collected plays. I still have my collection, but most of it needs a new home. I never met Morrie. He wasn’t much into meeting our side of the family. Even if we had met, I suspect we wouldn’t have had a lot in common. Naomi, on the other hand, was someone I would spend any amount of time with. She was my bridge to the Yiddish-speaking side of the family, and is the main reason why I don’t use that in my fiction: it’s her culture, not mine. My cultural self is from my father’s family. Loving Naomi, though, sent me to understand klezmer and Sholom Aleichem and so much else. I need to re-read Morrie’s plays. Maybe now I’m no longer a teenager I’ll like them more. Maybe not. I’ll see.

Arnold Zable is, as my mother explains, a family connection. His refugee cousin married Mum’s refugee cousin. Arnold is Victoria’s great storyteller. He also wrote an amazing book about the family left behind: Jewels and Ashes.

My father’s side of the family is so very musical. One of my father’s best friends was an extraordinarily well-known performer… but that’s another story. This is one of the days when stories lead to stories and those stories lead to more stories. Between family and friends, I grew up with music the way I grew up with rocks. Science and music and Doctor Who kept our family together for a very long while.

The most famous musician/composer/music critic in the family (she was never just one thing, nor was she a simple person) influenced me a great deal in my youth. Linda was my father’s first cousin, and spent time with me when I was very uncertain of where I fitted and who I was. She accompanied my sister on the piano when that sister was doing more advanced music. She told me some of the stories of her life, but never the really private ones.

Linda was Linda Phillips She described her own music as “light classics.” We played them on the piano at home… but never well. Her music was a lot more than ‘light classics’ as was Linda herself. Her daughter, Bettine, also wore her talents lightly. I knew that she had acted on stage with Barry Humphreys as an undergraduate, but I had no idea that she was a famous radio actor back when radio was the centre of so many people’s entertainment. They were both quiet about their achievements.

Here I need to explain that, not only were they modest and exceptionally fun to be with, but they were nothing close to my age. Linda was my father’s first cousin, to be sure, but she was born in the nineteenth century: she was sixty years older than me. Linda lived until the twenty-first century, and we lost Bettine to COVID. They were part of an enormous change in the Arts in Australia, beginning with Linda’s early career as a pianist over a century ago. I grew up with this, taking it for granted that there was a life in the Arts and a world and so much enjoyment… but seldom enough money to live on.

There is a third family musician, my own first cousin, Jon Snyder. His life is another story. He was in a very popular band (Captain Matchbox) and became a music teacher. His professional life began in the sixties, so the age differences are still there, but not as great. So many of the friends of my schooldays also became musicians, and three of them play in the same band, in Melbourne. That’s another story, however. I am no musician. I had some talent, but words were always more fun and, to be honest, I used to be tone deaf. I love music and the artists who create and perform it, though, because until I left home, it was part of my everyday. In fact, even when I left home, music crept up on me. I kept running into friends of Linda’s. They would send messages to Linda through me. Stories breed stories…

Also, this stopped being a list almost as early as it began being a list. I’ve only talked about a third of the writing side of the family. But this post is long enough. The rest can wait.

PS I have not at all forgotten the questions I promised to answer. There are only two questions, but the answers require a lot of thought. My everyday is a bit over the top at the moment. When things calm down, I will answer those questions. I promise.

Intermission

I am barely in the US Monday as I type. By the time this post goes up, it will be your Tuesday. I meant to write something 24 hours ago, but everything became too complicated, and I needed to breathe. I took medicine and I breathed, then I went to sleep.

This morning, my body told me to go back to sleep. It does this from time to time. I’m chronically ill, and there are times when bedrest prevents a whole host of problems. I listened and I slept. Since then, I’ve been catching up with everything and finally, finally in the early evening of my Tuesday and the cusp of Monday and Tuesday in the US, I can write my post. In that intervening time, I have left the questions my readers asked in such a safe place that I can’t find them… and I don’t want to talk about which bits of my body hurt and why, or the fact that this summer is never-ending.

Summer is always never-ending in February in my part of Australia. Then autumn hits with storms and leaves and arbitrary weather and it is as if summer never was. Only some parts of Canberra have the leaves, and there is a moment when pretty colours seem very exotic and Canberrans go driving around admiring these foreign trees and watch them shed their leaves. Last year I took some spectacular photographs from a local park. It’s too early this year for spectacular photographs. We’re still at the period of spectacular fatigue.

That we actively have to look for leaves in certain suburbs is why so many Australians subdue a chuckle when someone from the US talks about Fall. Not only is our autumn at a different time of year, but you need to be in very particular parts of Australia for there to be autumn leaves at all.

This moment of perpetual summer is when school has gone back after the long break, it’s when the heat is more likely to bite, and when university begins. Everything starts up, and so many of us just want to sleep until the more comfortable weather comes. It’s one of those times when all kinds of work deadlines present and many demands are made and those of us who are sensitive to the heat suddenly dream of the northern hemisphere.

Why do I call it an intermission? I’ve been writing about Todorov and that moment he describes as a hesitation, when you don’t know what the world of the novel will bring you. Anything’s possible. There could be horses, or unicorns, or fast cars, or slow bicycles. I often stop at that point in a novel and dream my own story, the plunge in and see where the real story will take me. That’s what life feels like now. As if it could go in a thousand different directions. Only I haven’t stopped to dream my own story (it’s tempting) because it’s too darn hot.