Category: essays

Multivitamins and the Mind of Older Folks

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I was a participant in the COSMOS trial (it was fun!) examining possible benefits for older folks from cocoa flavonoids and an ordinary multivitamin (they used Centrum Silver). While the cocoa extract had no effect on cognition, the multivitamin did–it actually improved cognition! (Cardiovascular events and cancer results are reported elsewhere). Here’s the summary:

Vitamins, minerals, and other bioactives in foods are important for normal brain function, and deficiencies in older adults may increase risk for cognitive decline. Dietary supplements are often recommended for cognitive protection, but supporting evidence is mixed. COSMOS investigators partnered with colleagues at Wake Forest University to test whether daily use of cocoa extract or a multivitamin for 3 years can reduce the risk of cognitive decline. The COSMOS-Mind sub-study enrolled 2,262 COSMOS participants aged 65 and older who completed annual telephone interviews to assess memory and thinking abilities. The investigators found that cocoa extract did not affect cognition. On the other hand, daily multivitamin use improved cognitive function. That is, participants assigned to the multivitamin group had higher cognitive test scores after 3 years than the participants assigned to the multivitamin-placebo group. The investigators estimated that taking the daily multivitamin slowed cognitive aging by approximately 60%, or the equivalent of 1.8 years over the 3 years of the study, but this finding requires confirmation in future research. “COSMOS-Mind provides the first evidence from a large randomized trial to show that regular use of a typical daily multivitamin may improve memory and thinking abilities in older adults,” noted COSMOS Co-Director Dr. Howard Sesso, who leads COSMOS with Dr. JoAnn Manson. However, the story continues to unfold as other investigators complete separate studies in COSMOS that dig more deeply into the effects of both cocoa extract and a multivitamin on different aspects of cognition and other aging-related outcomes.
The whole study is here.

Family History and the Queen

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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My grandmother was the only person I knew growing up who didn’t love the English or their Queen. She usually made this clear by slightly snide remarks, an oddity because she was generally very nice to people.

I didn’t understand this until many years later, when my father told me that while my grandmother was a teenager in the second decade of the 20th century, her grandfather lived with her family at the hotel they ran in Christoval, Texas. He was going blind by then, so she used to read to him from books he was fond of as well as from the newspapers.

So I imagine that in the spring of 1916, she read to him about the Easter Uprising in Ireland against the British.

I should mention that her grandfather, Florence McCarthy, was born in County Cork, Ireland, and immigrated to the United States as a young man in the 1850s. I don’t know why he came, except that he had a brother in New York, but while it might have been for economic reasons, it might also have been political ones.

In any case, based on my grandmother’s attitude about the English, I venture to say his politics were on the Irish side of the Uprising.

My grandmother, in fact, always saw herself as Irish even though she never visited the place. I don’t think she left the U.S. except for a trip or two to Mexico. But she was always more Irish in her own mind than she was Texan. Continue reading “Family History and the Queen”…

Very Clean

personby Madeleine Robins
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I was ten when A Hard Day’s Night came out. It played for about a year at the Village Cinema, four blocks from my house in Greenwich Village. The Village Cinema was a little art house, and while my mother was not against dropping the kids at the movies (I was 10, my brother was 8) especially during the summer when it was hot and there was air conditioning, she preferred to do it at the Waverly or the Loews Sheraton (both larger, with a larger, more supervisory staff to make sure we wouldn’t be spirited away). I think she found the Village Cinema–what was called an “art house” in those days, a little skeevy. In any case, neither my mother nor my father was enthused by the idea of taking us themselves and spending two hours watching what they anticipated would be a standard teen-pop-star movie.

Enter my Aunt Julie. Julie is my mother’s younger sister. She not only didn’t balk at taking us to the movie, she was delighted. By the time she came to visit we were in Massachusetts for the summer, so the three of us went to the Mahaiwe, the local theatre in Great Barrington, to see it. The rest, as far as we were concerned, was history. The three of us came home afterwards singing and quoting lines (“I now declare this bridge open…”) and within a week or two my mother, at least, gave in to the siren call of upbeat music and my aunt’s enthusiastic recommendation, and she began quoting from it as well. My grandmother called to ask me what the refrain of “he’s very clean,” referring to Paul’s grandfather, was all about. I saw Hard Day’s Night a good dozen times over the next year, and whole chunks of the dialogue moved into our household vernacular. Continue reading “Very Clean”…

Kitchen Interlude

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the middle of a kitchen fit-out. As I type this, the tiler is preparing the wall, and his favourite radio show fills my workspace.

I’ve been waiting for this for over thirty years. The cupboards are almost done, and well over half of them are filled with my cooking equipment. Over two metres of shelf space (about six feet for the non-metric among us) is cookbooks and food reference books. I already have nearly three metres of food-related books in a nearby shelf in my lounge room. Finally, I will be able to find the books I want, when I want. I suspect this means that whenever I need to write about comfort books, for the next little while, I’ll be writing about food or food history.

What sort of books do I have? Everything from Apicius in Latin (with a facing French translation), through a history of potatoes, from Ancient Greek recipes to seventeenth century Polish, from food archaeology in the thirteenth century to food travels in the twentieth. French cooking magazines, a great many community cookbooks and Jewish cookbooks, and… well, lots. I’ve not counted them in recent years – five metres of shelf space is many, many books.

Also, someone stole some once, and I’m still aggrieved. A friend of mine has been gradually replenishing the community cookbook section from the stolen, which is a wonderful process of discovery. I used to have more community cookbooks from Victoria, which is my own background, but now they represent the far west. Next time she visits, I shall cook her dinner from some of the coolest recipes in the books she’s sent me.

Eventually, I’ll bring categories together. My old herbals and wild harvest books are scattered: Culpeper and Mrs Grieve need company. I have two modern cookbooks that recreate Medieval cuisine that I use all the time, then an array of similar books (with research problems, or no recipes) I use mainly for research. Do I store them together? Do I keep all books on food in the Middle Ages together, from the brilliantly insightful ones that I love, to the ones I love to hate because they claim everything and deliver errors?

I’ll not make firm decisions now. The tiler is doing the tiles today and I can’t cook until he’s finished. Dinner tonight is cold chicken sandwiches, made from ingredients that are living right next to my television. It’s camping, in a way.

Next week I’ll have access to everything, I hope, and after that… wait and see.

Right now, I have deadlines.

Ugly Baby

personby Madeleine Robins
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This post was written several years ago and published elsewhere.

A book is like a child: grubby, ill-behaved, beautiful, beloved.  Often all those things at the same time.  You finish a book and send it off into the world with the fervent hope that strangers will be kind.  Editors will not only recognize your baby’s beauty and charm, but will see past that unfortunate haircut and the scabs on her knees, and will want to teach it manners and perhaps pay for the braces and ballet lessons that will allow your child to be as loved by The World as she is by her parents.

Sick of this metaphor yet?  The thing is, even the best parent artist has blind spots.  For that reason, you rely on editors.  And art directors.  And book designers and proof-readers and on and on.  But even those folks can get, um, blinded by their own involvement.  The result can be a bad edit, a horrible cover, a well-intentioned marketing effort that appears to be aimed at an audience from Mars. Continue reading “Ugly Baby”…

Auntie Deborah is Still Giving Writing Advice

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Dear Auntie Deborah…


I wrote a story using another person’s characters, even though they said not to. Can I publish it since their book isn’t copyrighted?

If the author has published their story in any form, it’s copyrighted. That, however, is beside the point. It’s just plain unethical to do what you suggest. It’s a great way to make enemies in your genre and create a horrible reputation that will haunt your career, assuming you still have one after such a bonehead move.

Create your own characters. Write your own stories. Treat your colleagues and their work the way you would like to be treated. Pursue your career with integrity and generosity.

 

Are self-published books inferior to professionally published books?

It all depends.

Not that long ago, self-published or vanity press books were assumed to be of inferior quality, that is to say, unpublishable by “real” (traditional) publishers. There were exceptions, of course, but that was the conventional wisdom.

Today, however, many self-published books go through the same rigorous editing and quality standards as traditionally published books. Some genres, like romance, are especially friendly toward self-pubbed projects.

With modern publishing technology (ebooks, POD printing), there are many reasons why a pro-level author might want to self-publish, including:

  • Niche projects, like memoirs or family histories.
  • Series that were dropped by trad publishers but that have an enthusiastic fan following.
  • Well-written books that don’t fit into the NY “best-seller” model.
  • OP (out-of-print, rights reverted to author) backlist.
  • Great books that straddle genres or otherwise confuse traditional marketing/sales departments.

That said, many self-published books are dreadful. They aren’t good enough to attract the interest of an agent or publisher to begin with, they aren’t professionally edited or proofread, the covers are amateurish, and so on. The challenge for the reader is to sort out those books that are truly a wonderful reading experience.

Does reaching a certain number of reviews increase your indie sales?

The short answer is that nobody knows. Theories abound, usually to line the pockets of the “experts.” “Gaming” the Amazon system is a losing proposition. What might have been true 2 years or 6 months or last week no longer works — because thousands of self-published authors have tried it, thereby flooding the system with meaningless tweaks.

If you want to increase your sales, write a great book. Publicize it. Get stellar reviews on Publishers Weekly and the like. Write an even better book. Rinse and repeat. Even then, there are no guarantees when it comes to sales, but you’ll have the satisfaction of writing really good books.

My first attempt at a novel is a New Adult Romance novel using the Three Act Structure and I’m floundering. Help!

I’ve been writing professionally for over 35 years and this is what works for me: I noodle around until the story catches fire. Then I have some idea of: the hook, one or two plot points/reversals, the big climax, and the emotional tone of the ending. Sometimes I fall in love with the characters and they run away with the story. If I’m selling on proposal, I use that much to generate a synopsis. If it’s on-spec, I dive in. As long as I feel as if I’m flying or surfing the story, I keep on. I use things like structural analysis only if I feel stuck.

The thing is, and always has been for me (12+ trad pub novels, 60+ short stories, plus collections and non-fic), I go where the creative joy is. Anything else is a boring slog.

All this said, I write fantasy and science fiction, where fluid structures are appreciated. Romance is much more formulaic. Consider that your muse might be leading you to write a love story, not a by-the-numbers romance. Always, always listen to your heart. Continue reading “Auntie Deborah is Still Giving Writing Advice”…

Critical I

personby Madeleine Robins
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Once I got reading under my belt, I couldn’t do enough of it–books, stories, cereal boxes, comic books. I gobbled up story like I was starving for it, initially uncritically, but fairly soon starting to think about why stories worked/didn’t work for me. In this I had a partner: my brother Clem. He and I amassed a comic book collection of perhaps 2000 well-worn, repeatedly read comics–most, but not all of them DC (the home of Superman and Batman). Clem and I haunted the smoke shop at the corner, where the new comics came in every… I think it was Tuesday… and conspired over which one of us would buy which. We took them home and read the them and then we talked over them. Clem, a far better artist than I will ever be, led the way in discussing the art. One of our favorite riding-on-the-subway games was to identify people who looked like they were drawn by specific artists. Continue reading “Critical I”…

In Troubled Times: Tenaciously Hopeful

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this on January 2, 2017, right after the presidential election. I’m putting it up again as a reminder of how important it is to take care of our mental well-being in troubled times.

Recently, I’ve noticed more articles on staying grounded in joy and hope, even when surrounded by fear. Perhaps such articles have always been part of the general social media discourse and I am only now becoming sufficiently calm to notice them. But I rather think (hope!) this is a trend. In me, it certainly is. After the initial rounds of fear and trepidation, the constant adrenaline wore off. I’m not naturally a person who enjoys being fearful; from my experience training dogs, I suspect it’s not an appealing state for most of us. Some, I suppose, enjoy the “high” of confrontation, even violence, but I’m not among them. Harming others and myself is not where I want to live my life.

I see also posts affirming commitment to action, often in terms of “We Will Fight On!” and I’ve been resisting the urge to jump on that bandwagon. (Also the “Organize the Resistance” brigade.) It all sounds so necessary, a matter of putting my money where my mouth is. And is just as unrealistic for me as remaining in that state of terrified fury.

As unhealthy.

I am not objecting to others following the paths to which they are led. Resisting fascism and protecting the most vulnerable are inarguably vital to our survival as individuals, communities, and a society. I am thrilled that people have the drive and knowledge to organize such resistance. I will be right there, cheering them on. But I won’t be in the forefront.

It’s taken me a long time, coming from a family of dyed-in-the-wool organizers (labor unions, radical politics, war resistance, etc.) to come to terms with not being one of them. Undoubtedly, seeing the cost to my family played a role in my reluctance. I’ve marched in my share of civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, written a gazillion letters, painted an equal number of signs. But it’s not where my heart is. I’ve seen the joy in the eyes of those for whom this is their passion, their “thing.” I want to hug them all and say, “I’m so glad you’re out there, doing this for both of us.”

The fallacy is that making the world a better place is an either/or proposition. Either I’m out there, making headlines by facilitating events of vast numbers for the people’s revolution (as an example), or I’m sitting at home, knitting while Yosemite burns.

The fact is, any social movement happens on many levels. There’s the outward, banner-headline, political level, one that often requires organization on a national or international level. There is a community level, supporting your neighbors, particularly those in need. Soup kitchens are just as necessary as demonstrations outside the White House, although they serve fewer people. Taking care of ourselves and our families is yet another.

Quiet, mindful actions that focus on compassion, justice, and unity need not be limited to small numbers. In fact, outward activism must be balanced by inner activism. We can all find where we are called to act along that spectrum, and we can move back and forth (or in and out, whichever image works best) with circumstances, experience, and energy levels. What a relief to realize I don’t have to pick one thing or level of involvement!

So what speaks to me right now is remembering joy. The year to come is almost certainly going to be full of occasions for grimness if not despair, so I don’t want to start off that way. I want to fill up my “savings account of hope” as much as I can, cultivating those people, places, and things that lift my spirits. I want to never, ever let go of believing we can survive this, kindness and persistence will triumph, and no matter how dark it may seem at the moment, love will win.

I refuse my consent to fascism. I also refuse my consent to despair.

I affirm that I will cling tenaciously – relentlessly – to hope, and I invite you to do so, too.

Thinking about lost culture again

personby Gillian Polack
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Lost culture is exciting. How can something be exciting when we have lost it? Most times when we talk about loss, it’s in terms of the events that caused the loss. The political pressure, the murders – dire events that add up to big cultural losses. Yet, when a culture is lost because of irrepressible cruelty, it leaves traces. For years, I’ve been watching for such traces, to see how much we can know when remnants of a population have been forced away from their homes and when their lives have to be rebuilt from scratch. I don’t want to hear about horror. I want to find out what we can know about what was destroyed. I don’t look for the names of people: I want to know how they lived.

The first and most obvious relic is, in many cases, linguistic. I was just reading a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century Yiddish in Europe. It traced loan words from cultural areas such as food. Those loan words matched with a bunch of trade records and showed that there was a dynamic and strong Jewish butchers’ industry in the Polish-Lithuanain Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. These days most of the surviving descendants are in the US and may not even eat kosher, but some of the Yiddish has snuck into US English and so, in parts of the US, there is a memory of a life that people once led.

Other records come from the persecutors themselves. The records of the Inquisition have vast repositories of cultural information about Spanish Jews. They used it to technically prove that people were reverting to Judaism or had not dropped Judaism. While conversion to Christianity is by a claim of faith, the Inquisition demanded complete cultural change. Those who held religious power in the empire Spain led was key to maintaining that Jews were impure and that impurity carried down the line to children and to children’s children so people with Jewish ancestry had to be watched forever in case they shifted back to their ancestral religion.

The “convert, leave or die” ultimatum in Spain in 1492 left a lot of people, then, having to forsake family traditions and local customs. It was not safe to wash and wear nice clothes on a Friday, or to send for sweets made by your favourite Jewish confectioner, or even to eat salad on Saturday afternoons. It was possible to be burned alive if any of these small things informed the Inquisition that you were secretly Jewish. Because the Inquisition documented their research into what they regarded as lapsed converts, we know more about everyday life before 1492 as well as after it.

Another hidden aspect of culture is what happens when a whole cultural/religious group is suddenly missing: local culture changes to fill the biggest and most gaping holes. For example, in some places where Jews were sent into exile or mass murdered, the remaining Christian population would suddenly eat more pork. Why? I assume because it proved they were not Jewish and were therefore safe. Big cultural shifts have reasons. This is only one of them, but it’s a deeply-distressing one.

Let me finish on a less distressing note. Superstitions. Some superstitions are folk beliefs that have walked alongside popular culture and religious culture for a while. Others are what’s left when the framework and history for that belief or action is lost. I can imagine that, when we all have flying cars, people will still look both ways before crossing the road, because a hundred years of watching for regular cars instilled a habit so strong we mostly don’t notice we’re doing it.

What look like irregularities in a contemporary culture can tell us a lot about where that culture has been, historically. It’s not the core of my research right now. It’s something I keep an eye on. A lot of the lost elements of culture are the aspects that will bring a novel to life for readers. Understanding how they fit together and create living spaces for real people in our past also helps us write history into fiction more accurately.

 

 

Someone sent me to a story the other day because they knew I was interested in alternate Jewish history (because my most recent novel, The Green Children Help Out, has superheroes and alternate Jewish history) and that story rested all of its research on Christian views of history. The concept was a terrific one: what would happen if the relationship between Christianity and Judaism were inverted, with Christianity the minor religion. Making Judaism more Christian both culturally and religiously meant the story didn’t even come close to exploring the concept. The major players were changed, but the everyday culture was not.

It’ll be a while before I can write a novel using these historical explorations, unless I want to follow the path of the story I so dislike. Before I can bring my imagination to play and tell stories based upon hidden and lost history, I need to find as much as I can about the hidden and lost histories. It’s a marvellously fun trail, but the research is happening now. Old and trusty studies aren’t nearly as useful as conferences and conversations with those doing the research.

The Pleasures of Constraint

personby Madeleine Robins
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My daughter is visiting, and wanted to watch the new Netflix version of Persuasion. She wanted me to watch Bridgerton when she was here over Christmas, but after 20 minutes of making increasingly acerbic comments I absented myself so as not to, as we say in my household, yuck her yum.

Persuasion was not as annoying to me–or perhaps I simply let go of the hope or belief that this would be Austen and just let it be what it was: a good-looking rom-com in Regency dress, with similarity in plot and character names to its namesake, and none of the underlying heft. This is not to yuck the yum of the many people out there who find this exactly what they want. But what do I want?

I grew up with historical films (and TV shows, but when I was a kid the closest to “historical” TV series got was westerns, and even as a kid I was pretty certain that the look and attitude was not what I would have found had I been transported magically to the West in 1880). Continue reading “The Pleasures of Constraint”…