Category: essays

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Summer

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on
I have two draft posts, lurking. They’re serious. Very serious. Full of the stuff of the moment. Half my day is spent fighting against hate, and those posts are about different facets of that.

I need a break. You need a break. We all need a break.

This is the perfect day for a break. It’s only 33 degrees C outside! And there’s only mild bushfire smoke! Positively salubrious. Also, someone has replaced the flag on the Iranian embassy (which is just a few miles from where I live) with the flag of the rebellion.

Let me give you an update on some of my 2026. It might be quite busy. I have 2 books to find homes for, novels emerging from the difficult period, short stories and essays emerging from the difficult period… and a conference the weekend after next where I get to talk about food and Tolkien. I have a meeting with an organiser to introduce them to the types of Jewish writing in Australia so that they can consider them for their annual programme and I have been tentatively approached about possible actual paid work.

This gives me hope.

I’ll let you know about the books and chapters and short stories as they appear. And now I go to consider how Sam Gamgee adoring potatoes is actually a Really Important piece of worldbuilding.

Making and Tools

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on
8 inch three tier chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, decorated with torn gold paper in the center of the top.
Birthday cake made for Chaz Brenchley. Chocolate cake with black-cocoa frosting.

I like to make things. In particular, I like to cook (in very particular, I like to bake). There are other things I do when the spirit takes me: bead, sew, very occasionally, knit. And write. And for all of these things making is rendered easier, not to say better, with the right tools. 

I began to think about this after seeing a clip on the internet where someone was asking “what is your favorite kitchen utensil.” And at least one of the people who was asked the question drew a total blank. “Who has a favorite kitchen utensil? Like, a spoon or something?” I can only assume that this person doesn’t cook, and regards the kitchen as a sinister place where wine glasses and bottled water are kept.

My initial problem with the question was kind of the opposite. Choose my favorite utensil? Outrageous: they’re all my favorites (and I don’t want to hurt my round Dutch oven’s feelings by preferring the oval Dutch oven, clearly). But as I was working in the kitchen this weekend I realized that, for certain purposes, I do have favorites, and they’re not unreasonable.

This weekend I made a cake for Chaz Brenchley’s birthday. Chaz, if you don’t already know, is a wonderful British writer of mysteries and fantasy (also writing as Ben Macallan and Daniel Fox), who married the lovely Karen Williams (now Brenchley) here in California and moved to the States. Usually when I visit Chaz and Karen I bring some baked goods, because it’s an excuse to bake without having the products in my own house. But a birthday requires something special and cake-like. And Chaz (unlike the man I married) does not turn up his nose at chocolate. So a chocolate cake it was, with dark chocolate frosting.

Rectangular stainless steel electronic scale, and folded instant-read thermometer.It was as I was making the cake that I realized I do have some very favorite kitchen tools: my instant-read thermometer, my kitchen scale, my decorating turntable, and my cake lifter. The utility of the instant-read thermometer is pretty obvious: no matter if you’re making fudge or rib roast, being able to  know what the temperature of the object is can be crucial. When I bake bread I can be misled as to the doneness by the golden color of the loaf, but my instant-read thermometer will tell me the truth about the interior. If I’m making filling for a cake, the instant read thermometer will keep me from turning the it into something stodgy and unlovely. I use my instant read thermometer daily.

Same goes with my kitchen scale. Particularly for baking. When I was a young, enthusiastic baker, I thought the point was to jam as much ingredients into a measuring cup as possible. More is better, right? Except that the variation between jamming all the flour you can into a measure, and sprinkling flour into the measure and wiping off the extra with the edge of a knife (the preferred method for bakers in the know) can make an actual difference in the finished quality of the baked good. This matters particularly when you’re following a recipe: to ensure success, you want the amount of flour or baking powder you’re using to match what the recipe developer is using*. It’s not that long ago (the late 1800s, I believe) when there was no standardization in measurements: “take a good knob of butter and add to it a spoonful of sugar” where no specification of what either measurement means? Waaaaaay too loosey-goosey.   Precision is a lovely thing. 

As I was making Chaz’s cake I thought about how comforting that precision is: I may screw things up, but it won’t be by putting in the wrong amount of stuff (it might be by omitting a step, but that’s another essay).

Cake lifter resting on my cake decorating turntable.

Once the cake was baked and ready to be frosted, I got to use two other of my very favorite kitchen tools: my decorating turntable and my cake lifter. Look: did I decorate cakes for years before I even knew these objects existed? You bet. But these are tools that make life easier, and isn’t that a good thing? This weekend I did not, aft first, deploy the turntable: after all, I wasn’t going for a highly finished cake. And the turntable lives in the basement along with a lot of my other cake-making paraphernalia (yes, I have that much. My husband still has his model trains in the basement. Don’t judge me). For a moment I didn’t feel like going downstairs to get the turntable. But as I started applying frosting to the cake I remembered how frustrating it is to have to turn the cake while it’s sitting on the counter, and how messy. I yielded to common sense and brought up the turntable, as well as my cake carrier (yet another indispensable tool for the cake maker). The base of the cake carrier is roughly the same size as the turntable, but if I tried to use it as a cake platter… 1) it would slip right off the turntable, with predictably distressing results, and 2) it would look awful. So I put the cake on the turntable and frosted it. Once all the frosting was in place I could rotate the turntable while scraping the sides, so they look nice and straight and smooth. The right tool for the project, right?

Finally, when I was happy with the cake, I used the cake lifter to lift it off the turntable without damaging the bottom edge of the cake, and deposited it on a platter which could then go in the cake carrier. For years I did the same thing using several standard spatulas, and it just… never worked properly. Fully frosted cakes are heavy, and tend to want to slide off smaller spatulas and… please don’t make me explain further. Things sometimes got ugly

So those are (some) of my favorite kitchen utensils. When I get a new one I frequently have a honeymoon period where every time I use it I am just tickled that I have such a thing. I really am a simple soul. Eventually it just becomes another object in my armamentarium of kitchen tools. But I still appreciate it.

For other things–Oh, I could sing you a paean of praise for my thread burner (for beading) or my Oxford Compact English Dictionary (for writing–also an excellent weight when cheddaring cheese). It is an excellent thing to have a tool that helps you do what you want to do.

So what’s your favorite tool? Or tools? 

 

__________

*Even now, when recipes on the internet can come from all over the world, the astute baker keeps track of whether a recipe is written in Imperial measurements, grams, etc. It’s all well and good to measure vanilla “with your heart;” baking soda, not so much.

 

Meanwhile, in Australia’s disconcerting summer…

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

So many posts and thoughts online talk about 2025 and what happened and what a good year it was. So many of my friends have written me cheerful season’s greetings saying “Happy Chanukah” after Chanukah is over (this happens every year) and hoping I had a really good Chanukah and… I’m Jewish, so of course I get these greetings and these thoughts. I’m Australian and it’s a hot summer and most people are very cheerful. I’m Jewish Australian and every single friend who sends me happy notes and telling me I am enjoying the season is ignoring the elephant in the room: antisemitism.

I only knew one person who was killed at Bondi. I know many people who were on that beach, however. I have family who live in Bondi. No-one expected me to be cheerful during the summer holidays that followed the massacre in Israel. Yet this year they stick to happy thoughts and tell me Chanukah is a time of cheer.

What is happening here?

First, Jewish pain in Australia doesn’t count for much, and Jewish problems in Australia are often pushed to the side. This is how Australia reached the events of December 14. The police are more willing to send officers to monitor protests than to send officers for a Jewish beach party when there are known threats against the party. While most Australians disagree with this, there are far too many who have said publicly these last two weeks that Jewish events should not take place in public and that Jews should handle every bit of risk ourselves.
This is familiar turf for bigots of most kinds. It’s pretty standard where there is race bigotry, class bigotry, bigotry due to skin colour, against new immigrants. It’s pretty nasty, whoever is told “It’s your fault, keep us out of it.” School bullies win when the class president says “Sort it out yourself.”
When the non-violent equivalent happened to me in the public service, I lost my career. “You can sort it out between yourselves,” my branch head told me. I couldn’t. Also, it took me far too long to realise that the work community that pranked me and left me out of things because I’m Jewish was part of a wider community that kept telling me that English was not my native language, and that both these things are part of a bigger picture that paints Jews as different and not people to support. Not all Australians… but enough Australians so that one of my friends went to twelve funerals in a week. And back then, we dealt with Molotov cocktails, not guns. Back then, no-one was hurt.

There is a wider context for this.

Jewish Australians have been around since 1788. One of the very first free settlers in Australia was Jewish. Her name was Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was Esther Abrahams, who was a very young convict. I am part of a colonialist-settler society and am one of the settlers. That country is Australia. Indigenous Australians are still fighting for equality and safety.
When I compare what happens on a daily basis to my Indigenous Australian friends and myself and my Jewish friends in the present (after the attempts by at genocide and ethnic cleansing in colonial Australia), it strikes me that an important difference between us historically is that Jews can ‘pass.’ This is why public Jewish events are so wrong for some: Jews don’t try to pass and are guilty of being visible. We’re seen. In public. As Jews. That’s why synagogues and Jewish schools and cars that announce “Happy Chanukah” have been targeted recently. Chanukah by the Beach was publicly Jewish. If we went into hiding, I’m told, we’d be fine.

Australia is developing new cultural structures and the prejudices and hate show what those structures are. Too many politicians (especially on the Left) and far, far too many people at the glittering end of the Arts are passive bigots. They are led by active bigots. Those active bigots spoke up loudly and publicly against the shooting, but almost none of them got in touch with Jewish colleagues to check we were OK. I say this as one of their Jewish colleagues. None of the Greens I know and only a small number of my writer and artist friends got in touch with me. Other Australians did. Non-Australian friends did.
Every friend who contacted me is a treasure. Everyone who did not, has made it clear who they are. In some circles, there’s public virtue but not private.
This is shaping Australia: some writers can have books in bookshops, some artists can get grants. Too much Jewishness or the wrong kind of Jewishness and you are, regretfully, pushed to the end of a queue. I’ve been told I’m privileged and White and should step aside and let others who have suffered discrimination take my place in this event or that conversation. This has been going on for about 15 years. More historical context.

It’s not obvious hatred. These people are otherwise good and charming and often witty. They just don’t want Jew cooties and, in the not wanting, create new layers to Australian society to protect themselves from said Jew cooties. It’s fine to have a Jewish friend, but you should not engage in private conversation with them when bad things happen. If a Jew is banned from certain circles, you don’t protest it.
Most Jews are currently lesser beings and our company can contaminate. We aren’t the only ones, but I experience the Jewish side every day, so the antisemitism is something I can talk about.  I speak from personal experience.
It began, years ago, with Jewish writers and historians having to be the Ginger Rogers in our society. We had to do everything everyone else did, but better, on subjects others approved of, as if we were dancing backwards and in heels.

This Gentlemen’s Agreement approach to Jewish Australians has been around since Federation. And earlier, but Federation and the infamous White Australia Policy contain clear issues that apply today. Under White Australia, only special Jews were White. Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian Governor-General, was Honorary White. Sir John Monash, who was rather important in World War I… was not. The official war correspondent (Mr Bean) did all he could to make sure Monash didn’t get the job. Even today, military and ex-military will (for the most part) treat Jewish Australians like any other Australian, due to Monash. But my electorate was named after Bean, and the far left and the far right now both shout that Jews need to be deported. The left is too busy hating Israel to come to the aid of Jewish Australians, and I am mostly banned from conversations with politically active old friends and colleagues because I don’t pass their purity tests. (I don’t pass because I refuse to do them, to be fair.)
These Australians are not even close to the whole of Australia. This is a limited number of Australians in a limited number of power blocks. If they weren’t building on the old hates that led – in Germany – to Holocaust, I wouldn’t be so worried. If Chanukah by the Beach had not been one of the worst mass murders in this country in the last fifty years, I would not be so worried.

While I can see where the passive bigotry is leading, it would take 10,000 words to explain. How about just two observations?
The first, is that it’s like frogs in a saucepan. The Left and the Literati and the politicians presenting that passive bigotry are enjoying a bath in the saucepan and we’re telling them the fire has been lit underneath it. Because we’re Jewish, some tell us “You’re the boy who cried wolf” and ignore what we say. These folks also ignored our concerns right up to the moment the shooters started to fire at Bondi.
The second is, if you factor in the history of antisemitism DownUnder, and if you add the history of treatment of others who’ve dealt with bigotry, right now, it looks like we’re heading for a society structured by bigotry.
This is canary in coalmine stuff. Every time antisemitism is rampant here, historically, we develop concerns about people from this background or that: non-English speakers, recent migrants, those from other religions, women. Indigenous Australians have never been let off that particular hook, and the Indigenous Australians I know and who I listen to are divided between those who support Jew-hate and those who fight alongside the Jewish community. I’m pretty sure (since I know some of the hate-supporters) that they have no idea they are antisemites. At least three I know believe they’re supporting people on the other side of the world by putting us in our place.
Some bigots think they’re doing the right thing. So did the guys who designed White Australia, which is the last time we had a divide this big and this dangerous (skipping World War II, because I am reaching my limits on the subject of hate, and these last few weeks have reminded me of how my European family disappeared). World War I and all the Australian soldiers (especially those who came from the various demeaned groups) broke that to pieces. World War I didn’t get rid of it, though. The social structure still hurt Indigenous Australians in appalling ways… and that aspect didn’t even begin to be addressed until the 1960s. It still hurts far too many.

One of the reasons the antisemitism brings down the whole of Australia: it’s never been only about Jew cooties.
Many Australians have always fought the hate and the fear and the cooties. Some Indigenous Australians are so much more capable than I am, and work for their own communities and for others who hurt. One of my heroes is William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta elder, who, when he and his family and friends were all not-quite-citizens marched to the German consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht and let Germany know what they were doing to their Jews was evil.
If you read his biography, you get a sense of what he had to handle in an almost-impossible everyday and how extraordinary he was… and why it’s so problematic that Australia is returning to this particular outlook.
I see so many otherwise intelligent people saying “The shooting was over two weeks ago – let’s spend the next 20 minutes on another crisis” when this crisis is linked to the other they then describe. I hear others saying “It’s the Jews’ fault,” and yet others explaining, “Jews are liars and shot themselves at Bondi. Look to Mossad.” There is passive hate, active hate, aggressive hate – every single bit of hate that’s shared, adds to the Jew cooties and changes the country.
This is why I couldn’t post last week. Getting through this is a full-time job because we don’t have enough words for it because those who have words are part of the problem. It’s a very Australian antisemitism. Like Australian Christmasses, it happens upside down to the rest of the world and is connected to the lives of so many people on our continent. I’m scared for myself and my family and my Jewish friends, but I’m also worried for Australia. My metaphors are still inept, but when a society changes this much it’s really, really bad.

Sleep Grade

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

I hit 90 last night! But I don’t know why.

Okay, lemme explain.

Six or seven years ago I got a Fitbit for Christmas. Not one of the fancy ones–mostly what I wanted was a wearable pedometer. But by the time I adopted the technology, my Fitbit would tell me all sorts of things about my heart rate, my exercise level, my oxygenation, and yes, my sleep. And I got the Fitbit at about the same time that I began to look at the correlation between sleep and brain health, especially in later life. And six years ago, my sleep scores were… not stellar. Fitbit grades on a 1-100 scale, based on time spent awake and asleep, time spent in each sleep stage (light, deep, REM and awake… which I would not have thought was a sleep stage, but there you go), movement during sleep, and sleeping heart rate. I don’t think I’ve ever gone below 60; the 70s are “fair,” and the 80s are “good.”

If families have mythologies of their own (they do) one of the roles I played, and was weirdly proud of, was “the last person to turn out her light.” This probably grew out of my childhood difficulty in going to sleep–once I was broken of thumb-sucking, anyway. Most nights I would crawl out of bed and sit in the window of my bedroom to read by the streetlight–until my mother discovered that I was ruining my eyes this way. At that point she said “Okay, read until you’re tired, then turn out your own (subvocalized) **damn** light.” From that point on, I usually read until midnight, even as late as 2am. Given that I had to be up at 7 or for to school, I don’t know how I survived. But I did. In fact, throughout most of my adult life I got by on 5-6 hours of sleep a night (with occasional weekend sleep orgies of 10 hours… and that ended when I had kids who wanted my attention regardless of what I wanted).

This, I now know, is not healthy. So for the last six years I have been working on a conversion of manners: I now go to bed around 10pm most nights, read for a while, and (if all goes well) am asleep by 11.  Over those last six years I have trained myself to fall asleep faster–breathing techniques, lavender pillows, temperature checks, light-blocking curtains, no screens before bed, reading soporific material–you name it, I’ve tried it. I have worked out a system of sorts, and I am pleased to say that my sleep scores are now almost always in the 80s. Sometimes even in the upper 80s.

But last night I hit 90. Excellent.

I feel like I should get an award. If I could figure out what I did last night to attain excellence I would do it every night. So I checked the statistics.

Last night slept for 7 hours and 13 minutes. I was awake for a total of 31 minutes in tiny increments. I had an hour and 51 minutes of REM sleep. I totaled 4 hours and 22 minutes of light sleep, and 59 minutes of deep sleep. My oxygen variation was low, and my sleeping heart rate was 59. Fitbit only detected movement during 2% of my sleep. That accounts for a 90.

A week or so ago, I slept for 7 hours and 14 minutes.  I was awake for 17 minutes, clocked an hour and 27 minutes of REM sleep, 5 hours and 3 minutes of light sleep, and 44 minutes of deep sleep. My oxygen variation was low, but my sleeping heart rate was 69! And I was restless about 5% of the night. My score for that not-terribly-different night? 83.

So what do I learn from all this? A lot of the things that affect my sleep I cannot directly influence. How often I’m awake seems to be a function of whether I’m comfortable, and while I strive to be, obviously in the middle of the night sometimes I’m not. Maybe I’m thinking too much. I cannot, as far as I know, control the quantity of REM sleep I get. Or my sleeping heart rate. Dammit, there are too many variables.

I will note that yesterday we went to see a screening of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along (it’s terrific) and I know that the music inserted itself into my dreams. Maybe the secret to upping my sleep score is musical theatre?

Stranger things have happened.

 

Melbourne

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

While you read this, I will be Medievalisting in Melbourne. Monday is my recovery day, so I’m seeing friends and family Tuesday I have in-service training which basically means really good behind the scenes tours at a major library and a major art gallery. Wednesday to Friday is the conference proper. My paper is written, my slides are almost there* and I don’t feel at all ready for any of it.

I’ll report back next week! There may be pictures, or there may not. It depends…

It’s rare that I can visit any campus these days, because I’m Jewish, but a friend has given me her phone number and the security number and, hopefully, all will be well.

 

  • My cutest slide is of the word ‘ritter’ scratched on a slate in Hebrew characters. I am so dreaming of writing a story where a Medieval Jewish school boy dreams of becoming a knight. If you want to see this picture, let me know, and I’ll share it when I’m at my own desk.

AI Flattery

personby Madeleine Robins
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For a few months now I’ve been getting odd emails. They start out reading like fan mail, and fan mail from some unusually perceptive reader who gets exactly what I’m trying to do. Flattering (and yes, I am not above being flattered, being just another pixel-stained techno-peasant working in the fields of fiction). So I am flattered for the first two to four paragraphs.

And then it becomes clear that these are sales pitches.

The first one I received was for Petty Treason, and mentioned the characters and the plot the the sense of place, and seemed to get what I was trying to do with the book, and to appreciate it. “Why don’t more people know this book?” she asked–a fine question, although of course with the number of books out there, how does anyone have the chance to find a book except through serendipity and marketing? And it turned out that the author of the letter was pitching her marketing services. As I was, at that time, in the process of re-issuing all three of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries (of which Petty Treason is the second) I was intrigued. I loathe marketing chores, and would have been willing to throw a bit of money to someone who would take on the task. So I wrote back, asking what she had in mind.

We exchanged two or three more emails, with proposed programs and low-cost, medium cost, and wotthehell let’s have it all cost options (no actual numbers were given). So I wrote back to find out what was included in each of the programs, and what the price tag was, and then… she vanished. Ghosted me.

Meanwhile, back at my inbox, I’d gotten another such email, effusive and flattering about Sold for Endless Rue, my retelling of Rapunzel. The writer called out the research (of which I’d done a ton, and it’s nice to have it noticed, see above re: being flattered) and the characters and the feminist underpinnings of the story. This time the sender wasn’t in marketing, but “managed” a group of 2000 avid readers who would positively swoon over my book, and write reviews in all the places that reviews get written and posted. But by this time my spider sense was tingling and I began to doubt that there was an actual human at the other end of the emails.

Why? The language of the approach emails is very polished, but more sales oriented than pure fan mail (I mean, “It’s rare to find historical fiction that feels both so authentically of its time and yet so urgently relevant today…”. Really?) And the emails focused on the things in the books that I was proudest of. And I began to imagine the person at the other end of the emails saying “Hey ChatGPT!” (Or Claude, or Grok, or whatever) “Write a marketing-approach letter that the author of Petty Treason will find hard to resist!”

“Ah!” my less cynical side murmured. “But how would ChatGPT/Claude/Grok know anything about Petty Treason and its author?”

And my increasingly sour side responded, Because Petty Treason and Sold for Endless Rue and The Stone War and Point of Honour (for all of which I have now received similar approach emails) were all scraped and used for Large Language Model training for AIs. As are all sorts of reviews and literary analyses and suchlike. I know this because I’m one of thousands of authors whose work is part of the Anthropic settlement (the first in a series of cases where the Authors Guild and other organizations have filed suit against AI companies that carelessly used other people’s intellectual property because it was there and they could).

So now these emails go into the trash. I’m not the only one who’s getting them–John Scalzi mentioned getting several a day, and if there is anyone who doesn’t need to pay for “a managed group of 2000 dedicated readers” to write reviews of his work, it’s Scalzi.

Tuesday is but a bowl of cherries, or a horse race, or an election.

personby Gillian Polack
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I am late, even for the US timezones. It’s still Monday in Hawaii, though, so I shall consider this post not too late. My reason is one that I find hilarious, every single time it happens. The US has elections the first Tuesday in November… Australia has a horse race. I usually write my posts for US time, which means often it’s Tuesday my time and today… I forgot. Last night I knew I had to write it, but things happened last night and I went to bed thinking “What haven’t I done?” And then I ate strawberries and cherries and chocolate with friends, as I do every year and turned home and made dinner and then realised I had nearly missed Monday. The cherries are important, because they are new season’s, just in time for the first time we normally eat them, which is the first Tuesday in November.

This fits with my current thoughts. I’m trying to work out why, right now, so many of us do not see the lives of others. We place our own life or our own assumptions about their lives onto the life we think they have. This does not actually help get rid of the really nasty bigotry I see in the world. I need to think more about the paths we walk and how to remember to look over and see and respectfully appreciate the paths of others. When I do, I may post about it. What I want to do is write a book, but the reason I keep being late and forgetting time is ME/CFS and I’m rather lucky I finished both my thesis and the last book before my current relapse, because it’s more severe than it’s been for a while. I can do more than I thought, but writing a whole new book from scratch is currently not possible.

What is even more fun than being publicly Jewish in a country that is lapsing into extreme racism? Being publicly Jewish with chronic fatigue.

Expect some of this to appear in my next novel… when the fatigue is sufficiently diminished to finish it. My brain is working on it even when my body can’t, so that piece of writing is still happening, just not on paper yet.

Since most of you who read this blog are from the US, I want to wish you the very best with your Tuesday elections. Every Melbourne Cup I want to talk about how elections and horse races are so similar and yet so different, but not this year. This year you have enough to deal with. You do not need additional bad jokes. Good luck!

World building and living in difficult times

personby Gillian Polack
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Some weeks the world is so full of pain that it’s difficult to write something small and sensible.

I used to deal with such things by inviting friends to dinner. I love cooking and chatting and it was the perfect solution. In Australia right now, it’s only the perfect solution for someone who is close within the Jewish community. I am not this person, although I sued to be. That’s another story.

So many of my friends say “Sorry, too busy,” or “Next time.” Add that to my illnesses arguing with each other (a squabbling family, with no respect for their physical host) and I need a different way through. My US friends are often dealing with much worse – Australia’s antisemitism might be pretty cruel, but as long as I don’t go out much, it’s safe, and Albo is not good news but compared with the US President, he’s goodness personified. I’m caught in a strange little bind.

A friend explained that this whole thing felt pretty much like the first two years of COVID. That was my breakthrough moment. My illnesses meant that I saw no-one during COVID unless they were delivering things. Compared with that first two years, I live in a whirligig and leave my flat once a week, sometimes twice! I have friends online. And, the biggest thing of all… my TV works. During COVID I watched all the Stargate TV. I muttered when the history was so badly off. I wanted to know what Daniel Jackson’s PhDs were in and how they gave him such an ill-balanced understanding of history.

One of my many bugbears with the show was that it would have been nice to have at least maybe one or two Jews in the ancient Middle East. Stargate helped me see where some bigots get their bigotry from. If all they know about ancient history was first presented to them by Stargate or something like it, then they do not see our world, but a fictional universe.

And I’m off-topic. I was going to talk about how that COVID suggestion led to me watching much Star Trek. When I can do all my regular work, I watch less. When isolation pushes me towards cliff edges, I watch more. I argue about the world building with myself, and use the stories to help understand why we got where we are.

I always used to do this, but I’d watch or read whatever it was my writing and history students needed to know and find ways through popular TV to get them to analyse. I so miss that. But locally, no-one wants me to teach or talk anymore. This means that the thing I do best – help people understand the cultural and social basis of their own decisions – is one of the things lost unto me because I’m too Jewish and not physically robust.

The other day I emerged from hiding a little and asked people if they had more sources for what’s happening in Israel/Gaza so that I could balance out what I was learning. The main critical sources I have access to are all from pro-Israel analysts. I can (and do) pull them apart and make sense of them, but I’ve not been able to find anything nearly as solid in the analysis of data from anywhere else. Instead of giving me more sources, so that I could balance when I knew and be fair in how I see things… I lost friends. I don’t know what they saw and why my request was so impossible (they didn’t tell me), but from my end I was using my teaching methods on myself. I asked for more sources so that I could compare language and belief, look for patterns of speech, check where terms come from and how they’re used, and, above everything, when people claim this or that, drill down and find the source of the numbers and the origins of the claims, and pull them to pieces and balance them with views from other places and in other languages. Add to this checking the path ideas travel, for instance, find a translation of an article in Al Jazeera in Arabic and then compare it with the English version.

From my perspetive, anyone who makes claims about happenings at the other side of the world without doing this is doing what writers do when we world build lazily. When we world build lazily, we draw on our preconceptions of a place and time or a type of book and build up from there. This is why there is a shortage of ancient Jews in Stargate. And it’s why I’ve been accused (personally) of genocide and other things.

I can deal with the illnesses, even though they have entirely changed my everyday. I cannot deal nearly as well with people who are bright, yet will not question and try to understand how things happen, and who blame me for their own lack of thought.

I could have just said at the start of this post, “Oh, how I miss teaching!” but the reason I miss teaching is fairly important. These things are, I admit, difficult. My Richard III class at the Australian National University was both loved and hated . I got hold of such a range of primary sources for the last 3 years of his life, and the whole course comprised of students learning about the nature of the sources and pulling them apart, and then crating their own arguments on whether Richard was good, bad, a demon, a human being… whatever they wanted… as long as they could convince the rest of the class. It was an extension class, so the only result they had was their fellow students’ approval. The class felt that there wasn’t enough class time, so adjourned to coffee or dinner nearby and argued for two more hours. This is the polar opposite of conversations that cannot ever happen.

Maybe I need to return to watching TV.

personby Madeleine Robins
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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.

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