Category: essays

Ice and Snow

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s zero degrees outside right now, and autumn. Translated for the US, that’s 32 degrees and Fall. This is one of the times of year that confuses our friends in the northern hemisphere. I know this because the number of times a day every single May that I’m told that the weather is warming up is ridiculously high.

Once upon a time only my US and Canadian friends forgot the southern hemisphere had different seasons, but these days it’s parts of Europe as well. December is the worst for this, because we’re told that Christmas is for everyone and requires cold weather to celebrate. A storybook Christmas has cold and snow and a big hot meal. Here, it’s more likely to include a picnic by the lake with black swans demanding their share of the food and with unlimited cold drinks.

Being told to rug up during the summer holidays has a special absurdity, but when it’s negative temperatures overnight (-3.2 last night – I’m typing this at breakfast time feeling that sudden rush of warmth as things become less bitter) every “Isn’t it nice that summer is coming” kinda rankles.

Of all those who forget that the southern hemisphere is not the northern, the most annoying are those who insist that I’m wrong and that winter is not coming. Our autumn is fully settled in late April everywhere, and one in three years is cold by mid-May. This is one of those years. Winter may not be already here, but it’s sent very clear messages that it’s close.

I live in the mountains (inland), so it gets particularly chill here. Canberra is too dry, mostly, for snow (though we had snow in northern Canberra over the weekend) but one of the southern hemisphere’s best ski fields is merely a bit over an hour away. Not that I ski. I did, however once unintentionally provoke the Deputy Prime Minister to fall thirty metres in the snow. That was, however, in summer. The snow was remnant snow and it was the day he gave his particular speech at the top of our tallest mountain and… I put the rest of it into one of my novels, because it’s one of those incidents that sounds fictional and therefore was crying to be used in fiction.

Anyhow, the ski season has begun (just) and I now work late at nights.

Why late? It doesn’t get properly cold until 4 am here, and I would rather go back to bed until my toes don’t curl to protect themselves. This is not typically Australian, and, in fact, didn’t used to be typically Gillian. When I was a child I’d wake up before dawn to walk in the melting frost. As I age, more and more I like going back to bed on days like this.

My work day, in fact, will be shaped around how cold it is over the next three months. And what work does this day entail? Mostly research into how writers develop the worlds for their novels and how these worlds, in turn, can feel more or less real to readers. It doesn’t matter (I am discovering) whether or not the world has magic or if all the plant life is purple with turquoise spots. The world can still feel real when things are not like the worlds we know. It can still feel entirely fake when thing are depicted precisely as we know them. It all comes down to the world building and how the writer pulls that world into the story itself.

My fiction for the next little while depends on my mood. This month’s new writing is all about a light novel where I test some of my discoveries about how writers build and depict worlds. The episode I’m typing when I need a breath of warmth has an almost-human couple discovering that kittens, too, can become vampires. Also that braggarts and fools exist just as much in the world of the supernatural as in the world we know.

This week has a few extras and will be busy. I’m late with my tax, so that’s urgent, and I’m editing, and I’m working on my Patreon papers.

This month’s Patreon essay discusses the very curious relationship between Medieval French epic legends and MCU movies, and I’ll be delivering that paper live at a conference later this week (from my home computer). This month’s fiction for patrons includes the how the kitten’s household semi-domesticates that very cute vampire kitten, and this month’s advice to writers will explain how popular knowledge of famous figures can work in fiction.

And that’s my world this week. It’s busy, but not so busy I can’t sleep for an hour more. Since I started writing this, the temperature outside has gone up by a full degree. Soon the sun will beam loudly into my east-facing work area and everything will be almost-comfortable. I shall take that as a victory, because this year’s winter is going to be cold, if autumn already contains frost and black ice.

When I was younger, I dreamed of a good income. I also dreamed of living somewhere warmer (northern NSW or southern Queensland) in winter and in my more-comfortable mountains in summer. Now that I can’t pretend to be young, I complain about the weather. The reason for the complaint today is not, in fact, because it’s cold outside, but because someone left the security door open over the weekend and all the warmth leeched out of my flat and so the warmest I can get it is fifteen degrees (fifty nine degrees for US readers). Crunchy cold grass underfoot ceases to be exotic when the warmest corner of indoors is under sixteen. And I’m sure there’s a joke in there… but my brain is frozen. Even the postie (who just delivered a parcel) tells me that it’s brisk outside. If you’re reading this from the part of the planet that careens towards summer, this morning I envy you, so very much. How much is so very much? Probably about ten degrees.

In Praise of Fanny Price

personby Madeleine Robins
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Originally published in 2016

I have been doing one of my semi-regular Jane Austen re-reads. Every time I find new things: This time I was chagrinned to realize the extent to which certain film versions had overwritten Miss Austen’s original text in my mind–not necessarily to their detriment, but I was looking for a scene in Sense and Sensibility that turned out to be a clever Emma Thompson way of compacting a good deal of information. But the original Austen is still there on the page, and still smart and incisive and funny.

So far I have gone through Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, and I’m almost through Mansfield Park (I skip Northanger Abbey, because Catherine Morland annoys the hell out of me). I started out, as one does, loving Pride and Prejudice; then for a long time Sense and Sensibility was my favorite; then, for almost as long, Persuasion. Now it’s quite possible that I am going over to Team Mansfield Park.

This is, apparently, unusual.

The Paris Review stated that Mansfield Park was Austen’s least popular book:

Austen’s own mother reportedly found Fanny “insipid”; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.” Even C.S. Lewis—in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s most priggish heroine, calling her “not only a Christian, but such a Christian—a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss … A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … Filthy, insipid little prude!”

Wow, that’s a little over the top, don’t you think, Clive?

Okay, I get it. Fanny is physically delicate, shy, easily overwhelmed. She doesn’t have her cousins’ robust physical health, and she certainly doesn’t have their robust egos. She’s meek and self-effacing (though I don’t think she simpers once, thank you very much). But do you blame her? Here’s a child who, at the age of ten, is sent to live with her very privileged cousins. Her aunt Norris (and to a lesser extent her uncle Sir Thomas) are determined to make the distinction between Maria and Julia and Tom and Edmund (the cousins) and Fanny’s charity-case self. She’s constantly reminded of it, and of the fact that she can’t (and shouldn’t) expect to be treated the same way. She’s physically slight and easily overwhelmed (I suspect nutritional issues and an anxiety disorder, but can’t find any textual evidence to prove it), and initially she’s academically and socially way behind her cousins. It might be satisfying to see the worm turn, the mouse face down the cat, and so forth. That’s bread and butter in a 21st century YA novel. but in Austen-land, where class suffuses everything so deeply that it’s hardly necessary to mention it, it would be hard to make it believable.

Like the Bertram girls, Fanny studies with a governess. But her real teacher, the one who informs her tastes and her heart, is her cousin Edmund. And Edmund, destined for the Church, is a prig. He’s kind to Fanny; he’s really the only one who sees, and values, Fanny for who she is. Everyone else sees only her utility, the perfect poor-relation who can be counted upon to fetch a shawl or stay tactfully home so there won’t be an odd number at the dinner party. Her frankly loathsome Aunt Norris sees her as someone further down the class scale whom she can bully without fear of repercussion. It’s no wonder Fanny loves Edmund, who encourages her to explore literature and history, who talks about religion and principles and right thought–who treats her as if she were intelligent which, as it happens, she is.

Look, I had a serious crush in 6th grade on a kid who held the door for me (because I wasn’t used to people being, um, nice to me at school). I totally get Fanny seeing Edmund as a combination of Parfit Gentil Knight and Moral Arbiter. About the only thing that saves Edmund from being an irredeemable prig is that he falls in love with Mary Crawford, whose moral compass is–shall we say–variable. For once Edmund’s rectitude abandons him and he is blinded by, and led around by parts of himself he would ordinarily not admit to owning. He sees Mary’s witty, shiny, beautiful, feckless self and tries to believe that deep down she’s got the same sort of moral center as Fanny–in a sense, the woman Edmund created. It’s hardly surprising that when Mary displays her lack of moral base, Edmund recoils. At that point it’s inevitable that he’ll back to Fanny.

A lot of people think of Jane Austen as a “romance writer,” a notion that would very likely have made her head explode just a little bit. But, as Austen herself said, she wrote of “love and money.” And class. Austen writes about class all the time. Elizabeth Bennet’s comment to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that Darcy “is a gentleman and I am a gentleman’s daughter” is quite correct. They may be at different ends of the “gentleman spectrum”*–he’s got relatives in the peerage, and centuries of economic and class privilege behind him, and she’s got “inferior connections:” relatives in trade–but they in terms of class they are equals. Sir Walter Elliot may regard himself as the very model of a modern country baronet… but he can’t suck up fast enough to his cousin the viscountess. Fanny Price, whose mother married beneath her, is introduced to a world very different from her own when she moves to Mansfield Park.

Fanny Price has good reason for being the person she is. And she continues as that person despite pressure from within and without her family. For a woman constitutionally skittish and anxious as she is, that in itself is heroic. It’s nice that she gets the guy in the end. It’s nicer that she does so without having to become a Mary Crawford or a Maria Bertram.

Say It Again

personby Madeleine Robins
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Almost three decades ago, when my older daughter was in preschool I got a call one day: she had slipped on a slide at the playground and cut her chin. How badly? “I think you’re going to want to take her to the doctor.”

Okay. Bad enough to flap her generally unflappable teacher. I made my apologies to my boss and got myself uptown, and inspected the chin–when you can see identifiable layers of adipose tissue, yes, it’s time to call the pediatrician. So I called the doctor, asked our after-school babysitter to meet us there, and gathered up my bloodied but unphazed girl. With the immediate scare of blood and tumult over (Julie had been holding an ice pack and gauze at her chin for some time) she regarded the whole exercise with curiosity–until the doctor told us he had to stitch up her chin. This would involve several small injections of lidocaine to dull the pain, then the process itself. At which point Julie went from vaguely curious to Totally Against The Whole Idea. Continue reading “Say It Again”…

Embedded Dislike

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote this not-actually-academic piece for my Patreons about a year ago. This is how I play with a concept. It’s what I do in the very early stages of research, when I’m trying to understand what approaches are sensible and which are stupid. I’m giving it to you now, partly because the themes of Hogwarts’ Legacy apply to it and partly because, while I talk about things Jewish in this example, we need to understand embedded prejudice for so many things. I face embedded prejudice every day because of my physical restrictions and because I’m female and Jewish; transpeople are dealing with far too much facing of it right now (and without nearly enough support); and most minority cultures in face it every day (sometimes in horrific ways) while being dealt with by mainstream culture. Australian politics has just demonstrated how poverty brings forward such embedded attitudes, and in the UK ‘class’ shouts as an issue. No country has the same set of biases, but all of us have groups whose everyday is flavoured by how others simply accept stories and what lies embedded in them.

While I’m researching cultural embedding, I’m not on top of this part of the subject yet. That deep acceptance of stereotyping and hate that appears in literature is very difficult.

I really need to focus on more ways of discussing embedded prejudice in my research. I began experiencing how literature delivers wallops related to prejudice when Oliver! (and its source Oliver Twist) caused me many problems as a child, then, when a whole year level studied The Merchant of Venice, I had to deal with it again. The deeper bias in these works are led to by a shallow bias and some really stupid interpretations. Every time Fagin is given a European Jewish accent, for instance, I see the application of the Universal Jew prejudice. Fagin was based upon a real person, Ikey Solomon, who was probably Sephardi and who almost definitely had a London accent. Solomon was well-known for dressing nattily (and for being a high-level, well-connected fence for stolen goods), not for leading children astray. He ended up in Australia (before it was Australia, when it was a bunch of British colonies) and his personal story is so much more fascinating than  Dickens’ novel. There’s a modern novel about him, too, but I don’t recommend it because it gets the Jewish side very wrong, too and poses a very different set of problems.

I can’t follow this research up right now – I am in the middle of a project that examines other facets of culture in fiction. This other project is helping me understand how to look at these things fairly. I need that fairness. Not everyone who depicts people using these biases does it intentionally. However, every single one of them hurts people. Since I’m terrified of the impact Hogwarts’ Legacy will have in this respect, I need to share some of my thoughts. These thoughts are neither serious nor complete, but they play with some very important concepts that I will return to, when I can. I’m writing a novel that addresses some of them and I will do old-fashioned research for the rest.

If you want to read something a bit more considered than a daft essay, you will find better discussions (but not of  vampires) in my book Story Matrices. I wanted to develop methods that would help writers and editors understand what they’re doing so that they can make active choices in these matters. Story Matrices is that book.

 

My entirely daft theory about Bram Stoker and his Jewish vampires.

There is one thing you need to know about Bram Stoker, before I can begin talking about his relationship to vampires and my new (totally untenable) daft theory: he didn’t like Jews. If he were brought forward to this century and put on a convention panel with me, he’d be very uncomfortable, even though I don’t match the Jewish stereotypes he carried. I’ve had Thoughts for a while about this, but the Problem of Garlic brought everything together. That’s as good a reason as any to begin with the problem of garlic. Except I can’t.

I’ve been trying to handle this for years. Behind his writing there is something significantly more than the various put-downs you see in other authors of his time and place: he genuinely didn’t like Jews. My current random theory is that this didn’t mean he knew nothing about Jewish culture. He probably didn’t know that he used Jewish culture and also the stuff used to describe Jews by bigots, but his own bias meant that his incorporation of these things together in his work was seamless and convincing and created our classic vampire story. Our classic vampire story, in order words, quietly reinforces antisemitism. Just like Dracula, it looks charming, but it hurts people.

My theory goes (in its wayward way) that he took some Jewish folk culture from Eastern Europe and applied it to vampires. Also, there were quite a few Jews in Transylvania in the nineteenth century. They spoke Hungarian, were classified ethnically as Hungarian, and were citizens. This is the by-product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. None of them (as far as I can work out) were in any way related to any branch of my family. Jews in Ireland were not granted citizenship until 1846, while most other people were given citizenship in 1783. None of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish Jews were in any way related to any branch of my family, either. (This is another aspect of various Jewish cultures – the need to work out relationships to other people.)

And now we’re finally up to that garlic.

There is one very folkish and not at all religious part of Jewish culture that contains garlic as a repellent. Just one. But it’s a big one. In fact, it’s how some Jews handle Christmas.

It’s not been easy to be Jewish over the centuries and much folk culture has sprung up to help people deal with it and the violence towards Jews that can go alongside it. A lot of the folk culture was lost with the various mass murders that tend to be handed out to Jewish populations, but recently, I have been exploring one set of folk practices in particular. This aspect began about 1800 years ago, and it’s the Jewish stories (note the plural) of the life of Jesus. My favourite is, of course, from the Middle Ages and one of several lives of Jesus from that time.

Lives of famous people is such a Medieval thing: it includes the lives of saints, and the spectacular deeds of kings and princes and noble knights. The stories about Jesus don’t fit into those types of stories at all: in this set of Jewish folk cultural traditions Jesus was no saint, king, prince or noble knight. The stories of Jesus all fit into the category of lives about famous magicians, alongside people like Merlin.

All of the versions of the story of Jesus are entirely unacceptable and not-nice from a Christian perspective. My favourite includes flying and the pulling out of hair. Being a polite religion and this being considered fictional and part of folk culture, it was mostly kept hidden from Christians, out of respect. Also, of course, because it isn’t always safe to be Jewish and one doesn’t want to provoke more persecution.

That variant of the life was told on Christmas Eve, for hundreds and hundreds of years. We don’t know which Jewish cultures told it, nor how they did, nor how many knew it, but Christians being upset about the story have written about it over the centuries and scholars have checked what they’ve written against what they knew about Jewish cultural practices and… it really happened. It might still really happen. If it does, it’s not part of my family’s tradition at all.

The stories about Jesus seem to be a way of dealing with antisemitism and its accompanying violence. In far too many times and places it was unsafe to leave the house at Christmas, you see. Stones were thrown at Easter, so Christmas wasn’t the only time and place that it was safer to shut the doors and make home tight and safe and not leave it until the bigotry passed a bit.

This is all related to garlic. I’m getting to that.

When one shuts one’s doors and shutters windows and pretends one isn’t home because otherwise it was dangerous, one develops folkways to keep the evils out. Some European Jews had a tradition, over hundreds of years, of eating garlic on Christmas Eve to keep Jesus away. His rising from the dead, you see, was not interpreted the same way by Jews as by Christians. Garlic, in Eastern Europe from at least the 19th century, kept evil beings away… and while it’s deeply troubling that Jesus was seen as evil by some Jews (historically) when you consider what was done to Jews in his name, it’s very easy to see how this occurred. An undead magician who brought evil with him was kept away by garlic on Christmas Eve. And maybe also salt. I forgot the salt.

Salt has some big baggage. Salt was used in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when someone was investigating a case. It was blessed according to Christian rite and put in the mouth of Jewish witnesses to force them to tell the truth. And now I can’t remember if salt was used in Stoker* or in other vampire stories. One day I will check, I promise.

Stoker used folk material from Wallachia and Moldavia for his vampire background. It’s really as simple as that. There was a significant Jewish population (some cultural overlap here with me, because Romania did, at times, include what is now known as Moldova and my mother’s maternal grandparents were from there) and Stoker simply included the whole. His main source was An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, and was written by the British diplomat in that region, William Wilkinson. Stoker used other sources, but this one is freely available on the web and I can give you a link to it, so it’s the one I’m citing. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=RogMAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Really, this is not about Stoker being antisemitic (though he was, and Wilkinson himself describes Jews as of “obscure race” and an “inglorious nation” so he would not have liked me, either) it’s about how cultural practices develop and what happens when an Irish writer doesn’t stop to think about whose culture he’s borrowing and how. It’s about the damage done by inconsidered cultural appropriation.

The vampiric traditions in the various cultures of Europe have little to do with most English vampire stories. My favourite European vampire tradition is that you can handle vampires by strewing seeds and grain on the ground, because they will be forced to collect them and count them and that gives the victim time to escape.

The burial of possible vampires, though, is just as interesting. It has been verified by archaeologists, which is where I found out about bricks. Potential vampires might be buried upside down, or decapitated, or buried with sharp objects to prevent them from doing harm. Some people were buried with bricks in their mouths, to prevent them rising (in Scotland and in Italy as well as in Romania). This is all evidence that European belief in a vampire rising and causing damage is something many cultures share. The vampire as sexy and pale, however, that’s the stuff of novels. (Also, there was a vampire craze in the eighteenth century, and I need to explore this one day. We call all kinds of things vampiric these days, when they were far more clearly demonic possession, and I need to find out where the eighteenth century assigned it.)

The thing is, there was a “Jews are dangerous because they are sexy and pale and lead good Christians astray” cultural construct in the nineteenth century. Also, not everyone considered us full human beings. The impurity of blood notion the Inquisition spread had consequences. And blood drinking is a libel that has been used to attack Jews from the Middle Ages. Invented, and has not a thing to do with either the Jewish religion or any Jewish folkways and debunked so very many times… but Jews are still being accused of it and murdered with it as an excuse and… near-humans who are pale and sexy and find the cross really uncomfortable and drink blood and won’t disappear when you want them gone so you have to resort to violence and awful means? Sounds like vampires to me. The garlic is an extra, a bit of appropriation to make the thing real.

Stoker’s vampire doesn’t fit the folk tradition, but it’s a good literary metaphor for Jews by antisemites. I don’t think it’s that any more, for most people, but the moment I saw the nature of the folkways and bigotry inherent in the first century of vampire tales told to the general public in English (and French, to be honest, and possibly German) I started realising that many of these stories underpin antisemitism and violence.

This is why, when I use vampires, I use them a bit differently. But that’s a different story.

*You need an endnote. Most of what Stoker wrote was borrowed, however, he invented vampires not being visible in mirrors for Dracula. In Judaism, mirrors can be portals for the soul at certain times. I doubt Stoker knew this and I can’t see any evidence of him knowing it, unless he’s describing evidence of vampires not having souls.

 

 

Manners

personby Madeleine Robins
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Life overwhelmed this week, and I didn’t finish the post I was working on. So: something from a few years ago.

 

Manners are important. I’m not talking about not chewing with your mouth open (though please, don’t). I’m talking about that old stalwart you heard when you were a kid: Don’t be a Brat. Don’t talk back.

Really: someone on Amazon doesn’t like your book? Pound a pillow, burn her in effigy, but resist the impulse to get on line and explain in detail why You are Right and She is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. It’s a losing game, I promise you.  The best you can do is say “I’m really sorry it didn’t work for you.”  Silence is even better.

Don’t Talk Back to Editors. You’d think this was a no-brainer, but sadly: no.

Case in point. An acquaintance of mine, years and years ago, wrote a novel.  Friend, who liked my mother and valued her literary judgment, sent her a copy of the manuscript and asked if she knew any editor who might be willing to look at the book.  So far, so good.  This is how careers get started.

My mother, ever helpful, read the manuscript, was dubious, but sent it on to one of her best friends who was, in fact, an editor at a Major Metropolitan Publishing House.  And the friend, because she loved my mother, read the book. And sent back an eight page letter to my friend, explaining why the book was not commercially viable, and giving detailed feedback about what problems needed to be fixed in order to render the thing more commercial and, therefore, more publishable.

Think about this: this editor took the time to read the manuscript and give pages and pages of useful feedback to the author on a book that she had no interest in publishing.  She did it because she and my mother were friends.  And what did my friend do?

Fired off a letter explaining the ways in which the editor was Wrong Wrong Wrong.

Now, even if the editor had been wrong (and, at least in my opinion, she was not), what my friend should have done was say “Thank you so much for your time and professional expertise, for which I did not pay a dime. I will take your cogent suggestions to heart, and hope to submit the revised novel to you at a later time.” After that, she could have gone home, pounded that pillow, burnt the effigies, whatever made her feel better.  But writing a tantrum-like letter to the editor was dumb in a Big Dumb Way.  Not only did she burn that particular bridge; she burnt a lot of bridges with one fell swoop.  Cause editors talk to each other.  They go out to lunch, they call each other, they email, and you can bet that if my friend submitted a book to someone who mentioned her name to my mother’s friend the editor, the feedback would not have been stellar.

This doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for your work.  If someone says “we want to publish your book, but we really want the protagonist to be a lizard,” it’s perfectly reasonable to say “You know, that’s not the book I wanted to write, and while I appreciate your viewpoint, that’s a dealbreaker for me.”  But don’t tell an editor that your therapist, your writing workshop, or the guy who makes your latte at Starbucks think your book is a flawless work of genius as it is.  It’s the editor who’s going to have to persuade the company to spend money buying the book, and publishing and advertising the book.  Anything you can do to make yourself look like someone she wants to work with is a good thing.

Being a brat, obviously, is not.

Shedding a Layer of Protection

personby Madeleine Robins
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Like almost everyone I know, I have a lot of books. A few fewer since the minor flood in the garage took out a couple of boxes that were stored in anticipation of getting new bookshelves, but generally a lot. For pretty much my entire life, from before I could read, I have believed, somewhere deep in my heart of hearts, that books are a form of wealth. It’s only lately that I realized they were also a form of… insulation? protection? I feel safe when there are books. The more books, the safer. (I have no idea what I need protection from. Boredom? A lack of reading material?)

So yeah. I like having books around. But I have also reached a point in my life where I realize that I have a lot of stuff. Emphatically including books. I don’t seem to be able to keep from accreting them, but I’m being a little more deliberate about which books I keep. I am still giving house space to all the plays I read and studied in college. And my Chaucer textbook (because sometimes I want to re-read the Wife of Baths Tale or something). All the paperback Georgette Heyers I ever bought, and so many many of the paperback science fiction and fantasy books I bought from the spinner racks at the drugstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where I spent my high school years.

Lately, with a sense of bemused sadness, I look at the stacks of books and realize that I’m never going to want to read some of them again. It’s hard to contemplate getting rid of some of them because they were such one-hit wonders, books I don’t think will ever have a digital edition. If I get rid of those books, who will ever know of them? On the other hand are the books I have replaced more than once due to loss or wear and tear–finally I got e-copies. You never know when the need to re-read Murder Must Advertise or the Jane Austen canon might overwhelm.

These days I read a lot on my phone. It’s less to carry, and I never run out of things to read. I also read paper books, of course. Especially before I go to sleep, when I’m trying to get the blue light of the day’s screens out of my brain. Truth be told, I still prefer paper. But paper is heavy, and if I need to carry more than one book (because I’m nearing the end of one and God forbid I should find myself book-less) it’s less to schlep. The luxury of getting on to a plane and knowing that–barring battery problems–I need not be stuck at 30,000 feet with nothing to read, is significant. And if-and-when we downsize from our current house to something a little smaller, I’m going to have to get rid of a good number of my books.

So these days, as I walk around the house, I find myself picking out some books–you. And you. And you. And adding them to the “donate” list in my head. The public library, or the Little Free Libraries of my neighborhood, will get a modest donation. A series of modest donations over the next few years. Because, as safe as it may make me feel, I cannot be Madeleine’s Home for Forgotten Books forever. Better that they find new homes with people who have not read them and may find them a source of delight. And I will learn to live without that particular layer of insulation.

 

 

 

 

The Lost Past and the SF Writer

personby Gillian Polack
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I wrote about lost culture for The History Girls  last week, and I’d like to continue the conversation with myself today, here.

Our lost past is often the past as experienced by cultural and religious minorities in lands ruled by someone else. My personal quest for lost pasts is currently the European Jewish past. I want to know what my ancestors ceded, culturally and religiously, in order to survive. I want to find out what’s missing. I also want to write more novels that use it.

The vast majority of English-language novels are informed (often very quietly) by Christianity. If writers depart too much from this, then most readers won’t have an expected set of understanding to start from and will have to work much harder to get into the novel. The cultural and religious minorities do the heavy lifting to make multiculturalism work. For the whole of my life I’ve had to do cultural outreach because most people can’t or won’t. This is not a wonderful thing for the everyday, and it also has an uncomfortable effect on our fiction. If the vast, vast majority of readers expect to see an historical world that refers to Christian heritage, then they need to be given a clear path into anything different. Creating that clear path while avoiding tropes and racist constructs can be … difficult.

I’ve got a bit of a history of looking into these things. My academic research examines what we do as writers to construct the worlds for our novels and to narrate the stories set in those worlds. I look into what we see when we build that novel… and what we don’t see. When I started publishing my research, I started with examining how writers use history in fiction, and moved onto cultural encoding. Right now, I’m beginning to have a much more precise understanding of how important genre is as a pathway that readers travel into story.

The novel I’m currently (slowly) working on is set on Earth but in the same universe as Poison and Light and after that same catastrophic war. It’s about lost culture.

The trick will be to welcome readers into a very strange land and to make them want to stay a while. The town at the centre of the story, where everything happens, is almost all Jewish. This was not historically so very odd, the capital city of seventeenth century Lithuania was at least 40% Jewish, for example, and many of the nearby towns were almost 100% Jewish. The history was destroyed when almost all the Jews in these towns were murdered and the English language world was left with some really odd views of that time and place. Christianity informs those views, and so does antisemitism. Moreover, since the Holocaust, most people have forgotten that there were wholly Jewish towns in Europe, that being Jewish was perfectly normative for millions and millions of people. It’s easier, storywise, to describe us as perpetual outcasts.

A Jewish strange land where Jews are safe, however well I can back it up historically, is surprisingly difficult to write. It’s not that Jewish history is lachrymose, it’s that we focus (in popular culture) on the hate and the loss and the tears. It’s easy to do. It’s easier to focus on tears than to to discover lost people and their interesting lives.

What’s important right now is that I think I’ve found a way of building the town so that it contains actual Jewish history (reconstructed with some glaring errors 300 years from now, since future historians and world makers are human, too, and will have their own preconceived notions) while keeping it interesting to the reader. It all comes down, as so many things do in fiction, to the opening.

I could spend another 300 words explaining my theories and how I apply them to create the first words of the novel. Or I could simply give you my draft first words and you can ask yourself, “Would I read this novel?” All the explanations in the world don’t make an opening tempting. Let me give you the words:

Space and boundaries fascinate me. Take, for example, the street I walked through this morning. To most people, it was just a street. A very wide street. Once upon a time it was set up for horse and carriage. In the old, old, old world. Then it was used by motor cars and grew wider. That was the old, old world. It became so wide that, in the difficult days of the old world, there were wooden houses down the middle. They lacked plumbing and almost any other amenity. They became the place where refuse was thrown. The people that society couldn’t accept. Wouldn’t accept. Hated for no good reason. That time didn’t last long. It wasn’t because the bad attitude towards other humans failed. It was because someone in power noticed the value of wide streets. They bought it up, turned it into a market zone and all the rickety houses were knocked down.

It’s ironic, isn’t it, that half the people who live in this town are descended from the poor souls who were thrown out of their homes, like dirty dishwater. Their work brings the tourists in. Their work creates my work. Even walking down this street feels insolent.

So Much of a Good Thing

personby Madeleine Robins
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Map of California indicating drought status as of January 13, 2023
Image from U.S. Drought Monitor https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Current Map/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA

I have rain fatigue.

This is the rainy season in San Francisco. We know to expect that December through February will be wet–although this year the procession of atmospheric rivers, cyclone bombs (WTF?) and their accompanying sequelae–floods, mudslides, property damage, even loss of life–seems to be overdoing it. The mantra, in California, is “We need the rain.” And we do. The unrelenting rain of the last month has been a soggy, cold, disastrous blessing. If you’ll look at the map, you’ll note that there is no where in the state that isn’t “abnormally dry.” Currently a little less than half the state (46%) is in a state of severe drought,. Sounds pretty awful. But wait, what about all that heavy rainfall in the last month? Hasn’t that helped at all?

In fact, it has. A lot. Three months ago 94% of the state was in a state of severe drought (41% was actually in extreme drought). Three months ago 16% of the state was in a state of exceptional drought–and exceptional, in this situation, is not a good thing. So that last month of rain has been a godsend. And given how far the state still has to go in order to be out of a state of drought, I should not complain if we get another month or two of deluge.

Sadly, I almost certainly will. Continue reading “So Much of a Good Thing”…

How we understand the past ‑ from three directions

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m a bit late because things are suddenly very busy. I also have no time to write anything new. Let me give you something old…

This was first published on 11 December 2011 BiblioBuffet. I wrote for BiblioBuffet for 3 years, once a fortnight, and it was such a joy. You can still find all the pieces on the Wayback Machine.

One of the recurring tasks of the Medievalist who does other things (like write here, or teach, or write fiction, or even go to dinner parties) is to deal with the popular idiocies that abound about the Middle Ages. Flat earths, rotten food, chastity belts: popular ideas that have little or no grounding in actual history sometimes appear unending.

A little while ago, I reviewed a book about classical science. This book (unintentionally) reinforced one of those odd views about the Middle Ages. It assumed that there wasn’t much in the way of scientific progress or scientists during the period. James Hannam read my review and emailed me, suggesting I read his book on Medieval science, God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science,which addresses precisely this issue. He kindly sent me a copy and he was right ‑ I needed to read his book. If you have an interest in what actually happened in science in the Middle Ages then you might also need to read his book. I don’t agree with all of it, but I’m very glad it exists.

The writer’s choice of form is shaped by the nature of their caring about history. Hannam cares passionately about science in the Middle Ages and he faced some of the same dilemmas as I do concerning popular misconceptions. This is why he wrote what he wrote.

In his introduction, Hannam lists many of the less-intelligent things, of the kind I listed in my first paragraph those I gave above, that I’ve found people think about Medieval science. His list gave me an immediate sense of not being alone. Hannam points to sources such as Richard of Wallingford and Thomas Aquinas and quotes Voltaire and others deriding the darkness of the mind in the Middle Ages. Through these quotations he demonstrates, passionately, where our rather negative view of Medieval science comes from. I shall refer to this introduction in class next time the subject comes up, because Hannam has all too obviously encountered the same sets of attitudes I have. He looks at those attitudes, and deals with them succinctly and clearly.

His views are not mine. They exclude women’s science, for instance, and I would have liked a better coverage of the science behind the spanking new technologies of the time, of distillations and spirits and advanced optics and more. I would especially have liked a close look at how the different religions of Europe combined to achieve major cultural transformation.

Hannam’s book is a popular history. It targets some widely-held misunderstandings about the Middle Ages and the role of the era in modern science. It carries its own burden of understanding, however. What do I mean by ‘burden of understanding’? We all interpret the world around us. We all carry a whole raft of material we use to help us in this interpretation, from assumptions right through to careful analysis. Hannam’s material is carried by his passion for the Middle Ages and the shape of his understanding of the Middle Ages. His Middle Ages isn’t mine: it is, however, still powerful.

These interpretations are linked to the form we choose to write in, the subjects we choose to write about and the approach we take to these subjects. Hannam chose popular history. There are other choices.

Not so long ago I looked at a scholarly writer whose passion led him into the life of Benedetto Blanis. The result was a book, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis, that was written from an expert (academic) vantage point but that is accessible to the wider public. It contains fascinating insights into Jewish life in Medici Florence. Because Edward Goldberg’s passion was more scholarly, the overview of Blanis’ life and times was not enough. His new book, A Jew at the Medici Court. The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo (1615-1621), contains the letters of Benedetto Blanis. Unlike the first book, this is not really for the wider public. It’s a critical edition of the letters, with English summaries and rather good notes. Unlike the popular book, we can see directly into Blanis’ life.

The wonder of a good scholarly edition is that the notes and the index and the scholarly apparatus (I am in love with the phrase ‘scholarly apparatus’) serve as tools to help the reader see something more clearly. In this case, it’s Benedetto Blanis and his world.

It’s a terrific companion volume to the first book and the summaries of the letters give the key information in each (which is good for readers who have insufficient Italian). Goldberg’s passion for the past is expressed through his wish for us to see Blanis and understand his life, and he gives us all the tools we need. The letters themselves are the pure magic. Goldberg was clever to realise this and facilitate the transit between them and the reader.

They’re a door opening to give us a peek into something amazing. Opening the volume at random, I read that Blanis has received his patron’s last letter. He’s extremely polite to his patron ‑ his language is full of courteous superlatives. He uses phrases like “deo gratia” ‑ this shows to me that the Christian and Jewish communities had common language. And all of this is to ask if he can send a package of clothing and some silk to Venice under Don Giovanni’s seal. It makes me think that the patronage relationship can be like that of a child at boarding school towards the family back home. “Send money.” Send food.” “Can I do this, please?”

A good history will give you a considered overview. A good critical edition of primary sources allows you to think differently and explore byways. here, the focus changes according to the life of the letter writer, not the thesis of the modern author ‑ this means that letters can throw up the most extraordinary bits of information. At this point I should give you an interesting tidbit to lure you into yearning after the book. Three times have I opened this volume to find something and three times I’ve found myself absorbed in the stuff of Blanis’ life, when he was trying to make a living, when he was trying to get out of prison, when he was describing a suicide, when he was carefully manoeuvring around politics that were bigger than he was. It’s an addictive, fascinating book.

In this instance, the first book illuminates the second ‑ Goldberg’s passion for history has given us a pair of volumes that work marvellously together.

A third book that’s led first and foremost by the writer’s passion for the (historical) subject is different again. It’s fiction, for one thing. Suzy Witten, in The Afflicted Girls shows her passion for communicating the horrid events of Salem in 1692.

This kind of book is harder for the historian to evaluate. I can read the letters presented by Goldberg and I can analyse Hannam’s approach to science, but the measure of success for history in a novel is how much the reader cares. And the historian as a reader of historical fiction or fantasy is a very difficult reader indeed. It’s not that I don’t read historical fiction: it’s that I’m a fussy audience for historical fiction.

Witten has been dutiful in her research, and it shows in the fine detail that colours the novel. What is missing for me is that (especially near the beginning) the fine detail is uncoloured by emotion. I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted at the Porter family’s “roll-top bright painted calash.” It’s not something that I know from my own frame of reference and Witten doesn’t always give enough information for me to interpret it within the frame of reference of the novel. It must be important, for the description occurs at the beginning of a chapter, but I don’t know the way in which it’s important. Is it presumptuous of the Porter family to paint in bright colours, or is it an entirely everyday thing? Are they rich, or struggling poor? Without any knowledge of how much it costs to buy and run a calash, I don’t know where it fits in the society of the novel. This means that, while the society of the novel is full of detail, I don’t always have the tools to assess that detail and Witten herself doesn’t always give me the tools. I can see Witten’s passion for the past and for brining readers the lives of this town at this time, and I hurt when they hurt (for it’s a strong narrative) but I do it from the vantage point of the present. It’s a distant viewing, not a close one. When Witten brings us close in (as she does on the very next page, when we learn that the use of a Boston dressmaker has social and emotional consequences) the past is far more alive.

By the time we reach the harrowing events of the witch trials, the past is more fully alive and the novel is powerful. Still, it’s interesting that Witten carries with her the baggage of description. Its excessive detail is her way into understanding what the past looks like and feels like. It’s her way of carefully documenting it. Documenting, however, works best in a book such as Hannam’s and fine documentation of detail works best of all in a book such as Goldberg’s. In a novel, that documentation works better when it has an emotive aspect. It is a path into the past for the reader and it’s important that this path show us how the specifics of the place and time were viewed.

Telling detail is, in fact, the reader’s link to the normative past, the typical day. Those small bits of information concerning daily life show how that normal everyday moment is seen by those who live in the world of the novel. When this small world all falls apart, we then have a frame of reference from which we can understand the emotional depths. This link between the apparently trivial and the narrative is something that’s much more difficult for nonfiction to achieve. It can bring us into the past and make us feel for the history of individual and to cry for the loss of their lives.

All three of these books-the popular history, the letters, the historical novel, carry us into the past. They use different methods and have different reasons for the journey, but they are how we, as readers, begin to understand the people who have gone before.

Books mentioned in this column:

A Jew at the Medici Court. The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebreo (1615-1621) by Edward Goldberg (University of Toronto Press, 2011) 9781442643833

Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis by Edward L. Goldberg (University of Toronto Press, 2011) 9781442613331

God’s Philosophers. How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam (Icon Books, 2009) 9781848311503

The Afflicted Girls. A Novel of Salem. By Suzy Witten (Dreamwand, 2009) 97800615323138