Category: nonfiction

I am re-reading a book that was published in 1969 (Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede*). As I was enjoying the things that go along with a re-read (the comfort of a known plot which allows you to sink into the characters, renewed enjoyment of the writing, discoveries of things you slid past on the first readings) I realized that I was also reminded of the way the books of my youth were made, which is different from the way they are generally made today. Lemme ‘splain.

For eight years I was the Operations Manager at the American Bookbinders Museum. In practice, this title included a bunch of functions including Design Department, Chief Docent, Rental Manager, and Covid Czar–but the important thing is that I learned to look at the objects which had been, for my entire life, vessels for story. Looking at this book (which is a decommissioned library book with WITHDRAWN stamped on the inside cover, still in its mylar jacket cover) it’s… elderly. Probably the same vintage as many of the books I took out of the library when I was a teenager: full “adult size” books from the Adult section of the library (this one is the 6″x9″ trim associated with the top of the publisher’s list–what the publisher believes will be important and sell well, as Brede did). And it swivels a little because the binding has loosened over the years.

Until the advent of paperbacks, books (almost all, at least in the Western world) were sewn. In the photo on the right you can see the stitches at about 1″ intervals. (Here’s a good description of the anatomy of a sewn book, from the Princeton Public Library). The structure of a book is meant to keep all the pages together in the correct order, safely. Sewing signatures (or gathers) into a larger text block, was the way this was done for a thousand years. Most sewn books have a hollow spine (which is to say, the sewn spine is flexible, and the spine cover “floats” above it to protect the spine without making the structure more rigid. Then came the paperback, where the pages are glued together in a block. This has some serious benefits, but paperbacks are ephemeral. Granted, I still have paperbacks I stole borrowed from my parents that were published in the 1950s, but most paperbacks were not expected to live very long. Their structure did not hold up (when I worked in Production at Tor Books we would get letters calling us uncomplimentary things because eventually the spines of really thick paperbacks would begin to split or separate–this was a function of the process and the glues then available).

Then, in the mid-late 1990s, the technology changed. The glue used in “perfect” binding (that’s what paperback bindings are called in the trade) improved hugely. Wonder why trade paperbacks suddenly went from being a rarity to being a dominant format? It’s because suddenly you could do a trade-sized book at a price that was much more buyer-friendly, without the fear that the latest Big Horror (or Fantasy or Biography) Book would fall apart while you’re reading it.

So picking up In This House of Brede and really looking at it was a bit of a time capsule for me. The original purpose of books–all books–was as a container for information. Vessels, as I said above. You wanted to protect the information and keep it organized so that you can move back and forth as needed (the codex form on which the modern book is based makes that easier than the earlier format, the scroll). And you wanted to be able to keep that protected information out of the hands of the people you didn’t want to have it, whether because it would give them an advantage, or because you didn’t think they were worthy of it. The information in those books–whether it was an epic poem or a history or an alchemical formulary–had value. By the time this particular book was published, the point was not to keep this story or any other out of the public hands–it was to make it widely, broadly, lucratively available. The shift in binding technology helped with that. (But I can still pick up this book and sniff it and be transported back to 14-year-old me at the library.)

There’s a lot of agitation in certain quarters about keeping information out of the hands of… oh, children, or innocents, or people who think. Everyone. I’m hoping that technology–the genie that’s been let out of the bottle–will make that impossible in the long run. Fingers crossed.

__________
* I have, for all my total lack of religious background, a fascination with monastic practice and life. Don’t ask me why.

In honor of Banned Books week, I offer this memory of my daughter’s stand against book burning.

It would be difficult to find a neighborhood more concentrated with left-leaning intelligentsia than the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Which is not to say there are not conservatives, curmudgeons, and random people who think the world is going to hell in a handbag, but the traditional Person On The Street on the Upper West Side is likely, at the very least, to be four-square for the First Amendment.

Which is why my daughter burning a book on the sidewalk occasioned considerable outrage.

It was a perfectly gorgeous Saturday in spring; Julie, age 11 and at the tail end of 6th grade, had to do a multi-media report on a book of her choice, and the book of her choice was Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. She had discussed the project with her teacher, and decided to do a three dimensional collage representing the pile of books that are burned in the book; ringed round the pile would be text from the novel (one of the major discussions was which quote; the book is chock full of good lines).

If there’s one thing we have around the house, it’s books. Some of them so old and tattered they would probably go up in smoke at an incendiary glance; others still young and green enough that a match would be required. And I’m afraid I feel rather proprietary–nearly maternal–about all of them. It took us several hours to find a grocery-bag full of books that could be sacrificed in the name of education, and I insisted, for safety’s sake, that this all be done outside on the sidewalk, where nothing much could catch fire. A book-burning kit was added to the bag: matches, oven mitts, a bucket (to be filled with water just before we went downstairs), a couple of tired old dish towels which would be sacrificed if necessary to smothering flames. In my head I had moved beyond issues of censorship and was thinking of getting my kids through this alive.

Saturday morning Julie and her little sister and I went downstairs and found a nice clear patch of sidewalk on our quiet side street, and set up for business. I supervised and distracted Becca (who was six, and to whom this was Just Another Inexplicable Thing Her Sister Did) while Julie went to work.

The first book burned too fast. Kid didn’t want a pile of ashes; she wanted books in various stages of char. This was how we decided that old, worn paperbacks were a bad idea. She took up a book of actuarial tables and had better luck with that, although working out the routine of lighting the page, blocking the breeze, pulling on the oven mitt, and putting out the flame when just the right amount of book had been burnt, took a little work. About the time the third book had been lit, an elderly couple came down the street, moving urgently. The man was practically waving his cane. The woman yelled: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!”

Julie, to her credit, finished putting out the book before she turned around. “It’s for a class project,” she said.

“WHAT KIND OF SCHOOL ASSIGNS YOU TO BURN BOOKS?” (I was not sure if the woman was upset or deaf or both, but she was very loud.) “DON’T YOU KNOW WHO BURNED BOOKS?”

For a moment Julie looked a bit confused; in her mind at that moment, the answer would have been Montag, the “fireman” from Fahrenheit 451. “My school didn’t assign me to burn books; I’m doing an art project about a book about a man who–”

“BURNING BOOKS IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO!”

“I know! That’s what the book is about.”

“WHAT BOOK IS THIS?”

Fortunately, we’d brought her copy of Fahrenheit 451 downstairs with us. Julie took off the oven mitt and showed the book. The woman reached for it, but the old man, whose caterpillar-like eyebrows had been working up and down with alarm, suddenly looked enlightened.

“Ahh,” he said. He turned to his companion. “She’s making art.”

“SHE’S BURNING BOOKS!”

He nodded. “I’ve read that book. It’s says that burning books is a terrible thing. She’s making art to show that.” He smiled at Julie. “Go ahead, sweetheart.” And he looped his arm through his companion’s and continued onward toward Amsterdam Avenue.

They weren’t the only ones to comment negatively on Julie’s project. By the time she had crisped the seven or eight books she required, four or five more people had come by and viewed with alarm. Each time she got a little better at explaining what she was doing, leading with “I’m doing an art project to demonstrate that burning books is bad.” She got into some interesting discussions. By the end of the hour or so it took her to get done, she was exhausted and a little annoyed at having had to explain what she was doing over and over again. From their accents, I think that the first couple were from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and likely immigrants from a formerly Communist country. The others who stopped were old and young, black and white. All were at least dismayed by what they saw happening. The protest I liked best came from a little kid who was out with his dad. “Don’t you like books?”

“I love them so much I don’t want anyone to do this. Ever. Plus, it’s for school.”

The little boy nodded and they went on. They’ll ask you to do anything if it’s for school.

When I was a kid we lived in New York City, but every weekend we commuted to our Barn in southern Massachusetts. This was a three hour drive (plus, on the trip north, a stop for dinner), and my brother and I were kids, which is to say, not always patient. We did not indulge in “are we there yet” because I think we had a sense of just how well (or poorly) that would have gone over. But we did get antsy. The radio was a distraction, but at some point the signal from NY would get too weak, and we clamored for something else. My parents would consent to play games–Geography mostly. But best of all was when my father told stories.

Some of his stories were autobiographical. Or pretended to be: I am pretty sure that the story he used to tell us about having been mistakenly rolled in a rug one year during spring cleaning and forgotten until the rug was unrolled months later was, shall we say, a metaphor for what it was like being the second youngest in a family with eight children.

And then there was “Breakfast in Space.” This was a story told in many parts, from one week to the next (it was a serial, thus the punny title). It chronicled the adventures of a pair of siblings named Madeleine and Clem who went to Little Red Space School (my brother and I went to a Greenwich Village school called Little Red School House). I don’t, at this remove, remember a whole lot of details except for a long sequence where the students were out in their spacesuits playing some variation on tag, when my brother discovered that he could cheat by farting, the afflatus being expelled through the exhaust ports and… (hey, this story was pitched to a 9- and a 7-year-old, and this detail delighted us).

The other tale was Little Red Riding Hood. In my father’s telling, Grandma was a famed courtesan (the sort who would have fit in nicely with Desiree Arnfeldt in A Little Night Music) named Rosamond Gemutlich. Rosamond spent all her time in a glass bathtub, drinking champagne and dictating her scandalous memoirs about her time with a Graustarkian Princeling with a long Germanic name which my father pronounced with relish exactly one time before explaining “but he was known as “Franzu.” Rosamond’s granddaughter, also named Rosamond but called Little Red, would come to visit. Little Red had a bit of a smart mouth, and occasionally Grannie would smack her in the chops with a frying pan. If Grannie got too enthusiastic this would require a trip to the  ER to enlist the services of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (aka Young Doctor Bob)*. I don’t recall much in the way of plot for this story, but the details were outrageous, and doubtless pleased my parents as much as they did my brother and me. And yes, we were raised on Warner Bros. cartoons, so the notion of a grandparent hitting her kid with a skillet–often!–did not phase us.

The fact that my father would come back to one of these stories, week after week, both amazes and exhausts me. I’ve told innumerable stories to kids, many of them made up on the fly (when I chaperoned school field trips my kids would offer me up as sacrificial entertainment). I may have placed more importance on plot and an ending than my father did. But it’s a serious effort and takes a nimble mind. Oddly, as my mother was acknowledged within the family to be “the writer,” it never occurred to me to wonder why she was never the storyteller. As an adult, I realized that there’s a difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. My father was the former, my mother the latter.

It’s probable that those storytelling sessions didn’t last more than half an hour (but that’s a long time to keep leaping from story point to story point, wisecracking all the way). Replete with my father’s invention, my brother would fall asleep for the rest of the drive, and I would stare out the window, committing it all to memory so I could relate the story to a couple of friends at school who demanded I report back each week.

__________

*A few years later my father had to get some No Trespassing signs made up for our property, because in winter hunters–some of them neither bright nor respectful of property rights–would crawl all over the mountain looking for deer, and there was a very real danger of a shot hitting an unintended target. As a joke, he had some of the signs made up in the name of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (Young Doctor Bob). My father was always his own best audience.

I had plans to introduce a book today, but … maybe next week. Some books have to be read a few pages at a time, and this is one. Also, today I have a profound envy of everyone who doesn’t have chronic fatigue. Why this week? Because the energy other people spend on planning and adjusting plans and making their daily lives work is energy I do not have. More than once recently I’ve had to skip events I wanted to attend or cancel dinner parties because someone had to check something with me and changed this or that and, in spending energy in these small discussions… I ran out of spoons.

I do that a lot right now. I know the triggers and I’m handling everything almost well enough. The trick is in the ‘almost.’ Even typing this is exhausting. Several friends have given me advice, because they know it will help. The thing is, I’ve had chronic fatigue for around 40 years. At this point, advice does not help. I have a list of things that must be done… these things help. And some friends listen, but most, right now, don’t. So… bed.

The moral of this week’s very short post is, “If you know anyone who handles chronic fatigue, when they say they’re not dealing, keep things simple.”

Next week, however, I should have some comments on a book where I feel seen. Very, very seen.

Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)

Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?

Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.

There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.

Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.

Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.

Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.

I suspect that some of the stuff I experience everyday is about to go into my fiction. A part of this is intentional: how can I not use the hateful things people send my way because I’m Jewish and use them as triggers for vampire attacks? What vampire wouldn’t react to a really wrong insult that tells them who and what they are and gets it entirely wrong? What vampire wouldn’t get bloodlust and rage and remember how much, how very much they will always hate Bram Stoker?

And then there is the “If you don’t think like me, you do not belong.” This is hidden under other words, but it’s the useful subtext. And it explains why we do not clearly identity the vampires and werewolves in our midst, because why would they self-identity when we’ve already told them they don’t belong if we do?

The concept behind this is not new at all. It’s much easier to address the hate we experience everyday when we have vampires and werewolves and fae and other beings to act as a channel.

And that’s all I have to say this week, because this week is one of those weeks when I have a solid amount of despite targeted at me and, if I were a vampire, I would be both triggered and well-fed.

Fortunately, I am not a vampire. Why fortunately? I’m so glad you asked.

Have you ever wondered how a Jewish vampire would explain to a rabbi that they live on blood?