Category: essays

Trojan Planets, Diamond Stars, and Other Astronomical Wonders

personby Deborah J. Ross
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1st known ‘Trojan’ planets discovered locked in the exact same orbit around a star

Astronomers have discovered the first evidence of ultra-rare ‘Trojan’ planets: two sibling planets bound on the same orbit around the same star.

The potential co-orbiting planets, dancing around the young star PDS 70 roughly 370 light-years away, consist of a Jupiter-size planet and a cloud of debris — possibly the shattered remains of a dead planet, or the gathering building blocks of one yet to be born.

Trojan planets get their unusual name from the two asteroid clusters seen around Jupiter, which, upon their discovery, were split into Greeks and Trojans (the opposing sides of the mythical Trojan War in Homer’s Iliad) based on their proximity to the gas giant’s gravitationally stable Lagrange points.

Lagrange points are places in a solar system where the gravitational pulls of a star and an orbiting planet balance out the motion of an object’s orbit, trapping the object so that it moves in lock-step with the planet.

 

White dwarfs are truly strange objects. After a lifetime of billions of years of fusion, they transform themselves into something else completely different. They transition from blazing balls of plasma to degenerate lumps of carbon that eventually crystallize into diamonds that last for unimaginably long time periods.

It takes a quadrillion years for a white dwarf to crystallize, and since the Universe is not even 14 billion years old, astronomers will never spot a fully crystallized one. But this research removes some of the mystery by finding one that’s just starting to become a cosmic diamond. Curious astronomers will study more of these bizarre stellar remnants, and one day, we may know exactly how and when something so strange can happen.
 

A skyscraper-size asteroid flew closer to Earth than the moon — and scientists didn’t notice until 2 days later

Now dubbed 2023 NT1, the roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters) space rock sailed past our planet on July 13, traveling at an estimated 53,000 mph (86,000 km/h), according to NASA. However, because the rock flew toward Earth from the direction of the sun, our star’s glare blinded telescopes to the asteroid’s approach until long after it had passed.

Astronomers didn’t catch wind of the building-size rock until July 15, when a telescope in South Africa — part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of telescopes designed to spot asteroids several days to weeks before any potential impact — caught the rock making its exit from our neighborhood. More than a dozen other telescopes also spotted the rock shortly afterward, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.

Hundreds of ‘ghost stars’ haunt the Milky Way’s center. Scientists may finally know why

“Planetary nebulas offer us a window into the heart of our galaxy and this insight deepens our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way’s bulge region,” University of Manchester astrophysicist Albert Zijlstra said in a statement.

Studying 136 planetary nebulas in the thickest part of the Milky Way, the galactic bulge, with the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the team discovered that each is unrelated and comes from different stars, which died at different times and spent their lives in different locations.

The researchers also found that the shapes of these planetary nebulas line up in the sky in the same way. Not only this, but they are also aligned almost parallel to the plane of the Milky Way.

On the Bookish Life

personby Gillian Polack
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I spend two hours a day exercising. This will not make me slender or muscular or fit or fabulous. It will, however, enable me to get out of bed safely, to walk up the street, to cook, to work. On a bad day, I do at least a half hour. On a good day, whenever I need even a 3 minute pause in work, I do stretches. Some bodies require greater effort than others to do the everyday. Mine is one of them. Every day I do these exercises means less pain the next day. Each day I give in and stay sitting at the computer or the television or talking on the phone or lying in bed means that the next day will be … not good.

Why am I telling you this? I increasingly notice a problem with the way people who have invisible disabilities are treated. We need to talk about it. A blogpost is a good way of beginning a conversation when one is limited of movement. This is that post.

I use a walking stick mainly so that the rest of the world can see that I’m not capable of the things they think I ought to do. I can’t run a 100 metres at breakneck speed the way I did as a teen. On a bad day, even walking to the bus is a vast endeavour and it really helps when the bus doesn’t stop 100 metres away from the bus stop. It takes me time and effort to walk that 100 metres and… some buses don’t want to wait that long. If the driver can see the effort by looking at the walking stick, then they will stop where I’m waiting and both the bus driver and myself are happier.

Today I wish that the walking stick principle applied to my letterbox. It was bitterly cold this morning and I entirely understand the post office delivery person wanting to move as quickly as possible, but the card they left me in lieu of ringing my doorbell means I have to walk for over a kilometre to retrieve a parcel. Then I have to walk back again.

The walking stick is a critical piece of equipment, and so are the exercises. I shall do them assiduously every day until I’m able to walk up the street and get that parcel.

Every day is a set of calculations. Can I do this today? What do I need to do in order to be able to that the day after tomorrow? The more I exercise the fewer of these computations I have to make. The more I am willing to label myself as visibly disabled, the more condescending many people are, and the more I am actually able to do stuff.

I don’t get many face to face gigs any more. My writing income is significantly reduced as a result. This is rather annoying side effect of the walking stick announcement. So many organisers begin asking the most physically capable people on their lists for their events. The most physically capable of us get the work, they get the income and they get the book sales. I am still asked for online gigs (sometimes even with money attached!), but face to face in my own locality? Rarely.

It’s not that people hate me. Audiences, in fact, really like me. It’s that a lot of us are described as ‘difficult’ because we can’t do all the things, all the time. My local bookshop made up excuses when I asked them for a book launch two years ago. My audiences are good and my sales are good with those audiences (in one case there were 83 people and all the books sold out within ten minutes) but the bookshop (and writers’ centres, and community centres, and a lot of local community groups) like to organise events with someone who will come to meetings face to face. If you can’t, but can still come to the event, it’s considered not good enough. This is especially true for free events. If I’m willing to give my time but not able to meet all the other demands (“Come in today for a meeting, please”, “Can we do this online?” “No, not really. Besides, you’re local. It’s no effort for you.”) … I’m not asked again.

This is interesting for other reasons. One of the booksellers in question actually told me I should accept reduced royalties because the 50% of the cover price they got wasn’t enough for all their overheads. They were being paid for the function in question: I was not. The function promoted my books and writers are simply expected to work without pay for the vast majority of promotional events. Without pay and usually without meals. If the book launch is during a meal time, I’ve been asked to cook food for the audience, but I can’t eat myself because … it’s a performance and I need to be available to answer questions and explain the book and… all the things.

The disabilities are not the only problem then. The heart of the matter is that writers are expected to have day jobs or other sources of income. Most people see us as kind of serious amateurs, rather than as professionals.

This changes the way we do things. For me, there’s a rather special side effect given by these experiences. Since I worked out why my local income was way less than it should be and my local presence is way less than it should be, I can’t buy all the books I want. I simply don’t have the money. I prioritise what I buy. Where there are two books I want to read and I can only afford one, I will buy the one where the writer faces similar obstacles to me. Or where the writer is from a country where they have to fight an entirely different range of obstacles.

There is a really good side to all of this: my book collection sparkles with exciting work by authors who ought to be well known but are not.

I need to get back to those book posts and introduce you to some of them!

Parental Archeology

personby Madeleine Robins
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In the annals of 1950s cheesy paperback covers, surely Man of the World should feature somewhere. The sell line (“He wanted her for things money couldn’t buy”) drips innuendo, without actually saying anything. The babe on the cover is sultry. The promise that it’s “complete and unabridged” suggests that there are naughty bits that a more timid publisher might have expurgated. I found nothing that by current standards would be considered naughty.

Growing up, this book was among the hundreds of paperbacks from the 50s and 60s that lined the walls in my parents’ house. I read a lot of them, but only recently have I tried to read this one. There’s a reason for that: is is supposedly based on my parents’ courtship.

My father was a graphic designer working for David Selznick in Hollywood when my mother came to interview for a secretarial job. I don’t know that she was actually his secretary (by the time I wanted to ask questions, my parents’ relationship had degraded to the point where neither of them wanted to talk about it) but she caught his eye. And within a year or so both of them had relocated to New York City, and my mother was working as a secretary to film critic Stanley Kauffmann, who (according to family lore) had a crush on my mother. And somehow Stanley decided to make Mom (and therefore Dad) the centerpiece of his new novel. So I had to go digging through it, looking for clues about these people before I knew them. An archeological dig, as it were.

Reading this book is weird. I’m not a big fan of mid-20th century male-angst fiction (which is how I would classify this book). But every now and then there is a sentence or a description that makes me sit up and think Oh My God: These Are My Parents. 

When my parents met my father was married to a woman named Kit, who was a model, Vogue Magazine beautiful, and apparently a… difficult person. According to the novel, the protagonists (Nick and Delia) have a rather chaste thing going on–she lives with her mother, as my mother did–and they go to the movies or out to dinner. Early on in the book she decides this is going nowhere, and moves to New York. Okay, so far it jibes with family lore. My mother moved to New York and lived in a walk-up over a men’s haberdashery across 6th Avenue from the Women’s House of Detention on 9th Street. My father moved back to New York, having split with the beautiful Kit. He had an apartment-and-studio on 11th Street. Somehow they got back together. 

There are the bones of that story in the book (I will confess I’ve read about half of it and only skimmed the rest). It’s the details–particularly about Delia–that are so startling, that hit me with the force of accuracy, even when it was something I’d never considered before.  Here’s one:

With one letter he dictated, he asked her to enclose a memo that his former secretary had typed before she left, Delia retyped the memo.

“Why?” he asked. “What was wrong with it?”

“I–I’m sorry,” she said, and shrugged. She frequently stuttered when she was the least bit disturbed. “I–I know she was your secretary and very nice and so on, but I just don’t call that good typing.”

“Why not?”

“L-look at the spacing. It’s spotty. And some words lighter than others. Like there.”

“You know that you’re slightly nuts?”

“I can’t help it. I like it to look nice.”

And my first thought, after slightly nuts? was Holy crap, that’s my mother, the woman who could type 105 words a minute on a Remington manual typewriter. The woman who was given raise after raise at Bantam books, because they wanted her to keep doing secretarial work because she was so damned good at it. 

The bits where I recognize my father are less startling, but ring almost as true (Kauffmann didn’t have a crush on my father, after all). I wish I’d read this book decades ago, when it was still possible to ask my parents about some of it. Are any of the plot details–beyond the ones I’ve related above–remotely accurate? I’m not certain I would have gotten much out of them–they really didn’t talk about their early relationship even before that relationship started shredding. But with this book as a starting point I could have asked some questions.

My mother died in 1986; my father died in 2011. No matter how carefully I comb through the pages of Man of the World, I’m not going to know the truths about their early years. And yet I keep paging through, looking for clues.

 

Raised in a Barn: Sleepover Ninjas

personby Madeleine Robins
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(July 4th rather threw my schedule off. I offer another of my Raised in a Barn memories…)

How many of my memories of childhood involve thinking I was putting something over on my parents? A lot, I’m afraid.  I didn’t give my parents as much credit as I suspect they deserved, but then, I don’t think any kids do.  When you have an eccentric-rustic-unusual weekend place, you get guests.  My parents were very social people, so they threw great, great big, parties, and invited friends to come up for the weekend a lot.  I learned to plan out a party from my father, who staged them like military operations, with time-tables and quartermaster lists, and food you could add more to in case of unexpected drop ins.  But it’s the expected stuff that, in retrospect, awes me.

Once a year I was permitted to invite a group of friends–up to a total of 8 including myself–up to the Barn for the weekend.  This was usually in the spring, a delayed birthday party (because my birthday, and my brother’s, are in December, when it’s cold up thar).  And here’s the thing that, in retrospect, awes me.  My parents loaded 8 kids in the station wagon, drove three hours to Massachusetts, and spent the weekend with them.  The sheer noise level in the car must have been migraine-inducing, never mind the weekend itself.  Anyone who has hosted a kids’ sleepover party will appreciate the chaos involved, and yet twice a year (once for me, once for my brother) they took on this task.  At times I think they even enjoyed it (both of my parents could be particularly creative around social occasions, and a weekend with a handful of kids calls for serious creativity).I have a bunch of party-at-the-Barn specific memories: the pumpkin-carving contest; the day a loaded hammock fell, seriously smushing the girl on the bottom of the girl-pile; the telling of scary stories at night when we should have been asleep.  But none of these memories shine quite so bright as the night we all decided to sleep in my room.

Some background: at this point there were criss-crossed studs in the walls, but no walls, so all the rooms on my side of the barn were open to the world.  My brother’s room and mine were on this side of the house; my parents directly across the hall.  They had walls (well, they were the parents).  The usual thing was to distribute camp cots in my room and my brother’s room: three cots plus the bed in each room would accommodate all parties.  Only one Saturday night we decided, after lights out, that we should all be in one room.  How hard could it be?

My parents were reasonably zen about some whispering after lights out, but I suspect they knew from experience that if we didn’t all get some sleep we would be soggy and cranky the next day.  So at some point they would make “no more talking up there” noises. The decision to rearrange the room was made after these noises had been made.  Nonetheless, all of us got up, padded into my brother’s room, informed the girls in there of our plan, and got them to start disassembling the camp cots.  All this was done sotto voce rather than in true whispers, with a good deal of clattering and giggling.  Finally, my father came out on the landing on the other side of the house and told us to shut up and go to sleep.

As happens under these circumstances, we immediately quieted down, whispering and being careful with our clattering cot parts. But such quiet doesn’t last.  After a minute or two Dad came out to repeat, with increased force, his instructions about shutting up and sleep.  And again, we subsided into whispers (in the dark–no lights on, of course, because: no walls) and tiptoeing.  And again it didn’t last, and again Dad came out on the landing, this time telling us in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t shut up and go to sleep right this minute he would load us all into the car and drive back to NYC right now.

We believed him.  The problem was that at this point we were half-way through the moving process: all the cots in my brother’s room had been disassembled and carried into my room, where there was absolutely no room for them.  Maybe one more cot, but that was it.  If anyone was going to sleep that night, we had to either reverse the whole process, or soldier on.

In the dark. In silence.

Somehow, we did it.  In memory, the whole experience became a little like one of those Navy Seals rescue operations in a bad movie: all stealth and hand-signals. We got two of the three camp cots from the other room wedged into my room, at which point there was absolutely no way to touch the floor.  One girl slept on the window seat.  One slept on my bed with me, head to toe (nothing like waking up to someone’s feet in your face).  And the others bestowed themselves on the cots in more-or-less random order.  And we did this all silently enough that Dad did not come out and yell at us again.

The next morning he came upstairs to announce that breakfast would be available shortly.  And found himself looking at a room packed wall-to-wall with ten year old girls.  He got that “I’d smile, but that would be a concession I’m not prepared to make” quirk to his lips, said “PANCAKES!” and went downstairs.  And all of us rolled out of bed–rolled because there was no way to get up and walk out of the room–and went down to breakfast.  We all had the sublime self-congratulation of kids who believe they have somehow gotten past the gatekeepers of propriety and pulled a fast one.

Deconstructing the room in the daylight turned out to be much less fun than setting it up in the dark.

Beauty and Virtue

personby Madeleine Robins
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My mother, 1967

My mother was a beautiful woman. Full stop. She had straight hair, almost black (in 1920s Nebraska she and her sister Julie, surrounded by Scandinavian and German blonds, were always tagged to play the “Oriental” characters in geography pageants) and expressive brown eyes with a slight epicanthal eyefold which made her look a little exotic. And the bone structure, O! the bone structure. My father could still, years after her death, talk about how beautiful she had been (this despite the fact that the last 20 years of their marriage had been hellish for both of them). 

My mother, 1955

 

 

She was also funny and smart, charming and loving and deeply troubled. For the second half of her life she was an alcoholic whose anger at the world drove her to slow self-destruction, a sort of “see! Look what you’re making me do!” message to the people who loved her. I suspect the alcohol was the best she could do to manage a life-long anxiety/depression disorder, but when you’re a teenage girl taking almost the full brunt of the anger of a highly verbal alcoholic–well, that didn’t make it any easier. Whatever I wanted to be when I grew up, it wasn’t my mother. Except in looks.

It was an unspoken truth: in my family my mother was the standard of beauty. I, however, take almost entirely after my father’s side of the family. I recognize now that my paternal aunts and my grandmother were lovely–photos I’ve seen of my Aunt Eva in her 30s show her cut from the lush Ava Gardner mold–but somehow that wasn’t what was wanted. No one said anything to me specifically–“shame you took after the wrong side, kid,” but the message must have been there, because I absorbed it. Almost 70 years later, I struggle with feeling that it’s somehow my fault, as if I chose to take after the wrong side of the family. And because I’m neurotic, I wasn’t content with not looking like my mother, or not being pretty by the standards of the day (late 1960s–think Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton), I assumed that I was ugly, and that it was my fault. My looks were a moral failing.

It wasn’t helped that I got little incentive to believe otherwise: my father, in matters of aesthetics, could not put aside his absolute truth in favor of affection; I overheard someone say “Madeleine is beautiful,” once, and his immediate rejoinder was, “Madeleine? Madeleine’s not beautiful.” Whatever the speaker saw, my father couldn’t even say “thank you” and let it lie. He heard an error and had to correct it. I think my father would have been delighted if I’d looked like Mom and my brother had looked like him–what mattered in his son (to my father) was a carrying on of his artistic skills and vision, and he got that. But my brother also got my mother’s eyes and bone structure, for which I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM. Ahem: he’s also a really good guy, and abundantly talented.

I was told by someone in high school that “you act like you’re pretty but you’re not.” I’m not sure what the basis was for the statement, but this much is true: I’ve spent my life acting as if I were pretty and making a fair go of it. Then I had daughters. They are uncomplicatedly beautiful, each in her own way. I’ve made it my purpose in life (one of them, anyway) to make sure they know it. One of them looks like me, which has caused me a certain amount of cognitive dissonance: how can I accept that she’s beautiful when I have all these wobbles about my own looks? Granted, we live in a society where images of the current definition of perfect are everywhere; it’s in the interest of influencers and cosmetic companies and magazines etc. to make us all uncertain about our own appeal. It takes a stronger woman than I am to completely shut it out. And that daughter who looks like me? Has spent hours of her adolescence and adulthood watching grooming videos and keeping au courant with makeup trends and… So she’s not immune to it either. But she does not appear to have fallen prey to my “If I Don’t Match the Dominant Paradigm It’s Because I’m a Bad Person” psychosis, for which I am abundantly grateful.

My mother, 1975

So here I am, pushing 70 and daily more aware that there’s no chance of a do-over where I can opt for Mom’s genes over my father’s. I understand, with the full force of my intellect, that I’m not scare-the-goats ugly. I’m even attractive. Like my mother, I’m funny and smart and charming (sometimes, anyway). I accept, also, that what I look like (beyond niceties of grooming) has nothing to do with my moral failings or triumphs. Mom died at 62–a victim of smoking and drinking and her own anger, which was a product of her anxiety and depression; it took me years to get over seeing those behaviors as moral failings rather than the symptoms they were.

I look in the mirror and see an older woman with the marks of her years and her experience, with humor and adventures and mistakes and the odd triumph here and there. If I get an occasional echo of “it’s your fault you’re not…” whatever,  well, this stuff lodges deep. I expect I will get those echoes until I die. But they’re echoes. With luck and attention they will keep growing fainter with time.

Fairy tales and Privilege

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m still dreaming about fairytales.

Today’s dream is strongly influenced by a book that’s been on my coffee table for a while. It’s on my coffee table to remind me about certain constructs it discusses. Until I finish thinking through these constructs, it will stay there. It’s been on my coffee table for two months now, because that’s how much is in it that helps me think things through. What is this mysterious book? It’s White Christian Privilege and it’s by Khyati Y. Joshi. https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781479840236

It reminds me (and is a very good introduction to the understanding of) what it means to be from a majority culture background (or not) in the US. I’m not from that background, so it also helps me see how and why I am who I am and have certain in experiences in relation to those who are from that background.

None of this is why I’m thinking about the book today. First off, I’m thinking about the normative nature of American White Christian Privilege in the publishing world, along with that linked (and older) standard White British Privilege. And today, just ‘cos, I’m not thinking about how the White Australia policy’s legacy in Australia mean I’ll never be quite White, or Christian, or American. All these things have had some large ramifications for my life so far, and no doubt will continue to do so but… today I’m thinking about its influence on how we see fairy tales, or, more precisely, fairy tale retellings.

Fairy tales have always been explained using European views. This goes back to the beginning of fairy tale analysis. Folk motifs and tale types revolve around European culture. This cultural heartland for fairy tales has been mostly carried over into US scholarship. Fairy tales are defined by Europe and retold in cultures where we need to factor in White American privilege.

This means that some tellers are valued more than others – it helps a writing career to have privilege. American writers are more heard than Indonesian writers or writers from Eswatini. There is a hierarchy of countries in publishing, where one is in relation to those privileges makes most of us invisible and unless one is visible. A few extraordinary writers are visible regardless. Rabindranath Tagore and Stanisław Lem and Tove Jansson are good examples of this. Despite the Tove Janssons of this world, there are core cultures that are more visible, secondary cultures (like Australian) that are rather difficult but not at all impossible, and then there are writers from most of the countries of the world who, even in English translation, are not visible. How many of us have read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s work, for instance. Not me… yet – I need to get hold of it and read it. Every year I spend some time identifying amazing writers I haven’t yet read because they’re not buffered by much of that privilege. I keep discovering many great works and brilliant writers and my life is forever enriched but… none of this is what I’m thinking about today.

Today I’m thinking about how we define certain types of story as fairy tale and we (scholars in the field) generally don’t automatically think “Why is this story classified with these other stories?” It’s culturally problematic to define all story types from around the world in a certain way. It’s great for many reasons (seeing who uses what kind of tale, finding out how stories spread) but it operates in the same way as that White Christian Privilege.

Joshi spends a lot of time explaining that this privilege is not a layer of opportunity and gloss on top of everyday life: it’s the fabric of everyday life. Equally, getting rid of the cultural context for, say, a story taken from the Talmud, or something from the Dreamtime, and reducing it to common denominators, is putting the cultural interpretation of mostly-White, mostly-Western scholars and fiction writers above most of those who tell and use the stories.

They may be fairy tales, and seen as fairy tales, but what if they aren’t? What if they’re part of an immense and complex songlines that cross a whole continent and that predate our knowledge of the fairy tale by thousands of years (at least) and tens of thousands of years?

My questions include the critical one: what do we do to stories when we strip away all of this meaning from them? My answer is that we lose how they’re told, why they’re told, who has cultural responsibility to tell and interpret them and we lose the capacity to see why and how this responsibility is important for the story itself. So many Jews are taught how to read Talmud. We can take stories apparently out of context, and give them relevant contexts in the retelling – this is a part of the upbringing of many of us but… in a world of White Chrsitian Privilege, it’s more likely that someone (even someone Jewish, who lacks this specific training) will see those stories as fair game for retelling from a White Christian perspective. The story derived from this approach will sell better than something with the original contexts still attached, but its culture of origin will be compromised.

There are many ways of handling this.

One is to maintain the commonalities (especially theose that allow the story to be included in those scholarly indices that bring the world of folk tale and folk motif together) but to make sure, as scholars, that the cultural base of all tales are understood. Stories from pre-colonial Australia would, then, always have notes saying where the story was collected, which songline/s it belongs to, and whether the story has been reinterpreted to meet international tale and motif expectations.

Another approach is to read more books by people who come from different backgrounds, and to look for books that address cultural issues as part of the storytelling. My current coffee table book for this is This all Come Back Now (ed Mykaela Saunders) https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/This-All-Come-Back-Now-by-Mykaela-Saunders/9780702265662 .I was happy to give a story for the Other Covenants volume, sharing my rather peculiar background (ed Lobel and Shainblum) https://bookshop.org/a/1838/9781953829405. Some of the stories fit within a general normative context (not all, but enough to make it readable) but both volumes as a whole question all contexts and present more varied cultural background.

There are other approaches, but two are enough for one day. It boils down to knowing where we (as readers) fit in relation to various types of cultural privilege and for us (again, as readers) to reach out beyond that and to read work by writers who come from a range of backgrounds. Our reading is richer and our life is more interesting.

Also, and this is my favourite side effect from questioning privilege, when we ask about how we interpret fairy tales and looking at what stories have been drawn into that net that are not actually fairy tales, doors open to enormous numbers of brilliant writers. Many haven’t yet been translated into English, but the more we read beyond our tiny cultural boundaries and the more we question our privileges, the more publishers will say “That sold well. Let me try another translation of a famous writer from this background.” The more we work on living in a bigger world, the more that bigger world has to offer us.

Birthdays

personby Gillian Polack
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This week I’m late because I went to an (online) convention in New Zealand over the weekend, and had meetings most of yesterday and an excellent but long meeting today. Everyone’s trying to get all kinds of things done because it’s a long weekend next weekend. Last weekend was a long weekend in New Zealand, which is why they held the convention.

This is a long weekend that the US is unlikely to ever want to celebrate. How can I say this with such certainty? It’s called the King’s Birthday and for a long time it was called the Queen’s Birthday). It’s the birthday of neither. It’s an ancestral date that was picked to celebrate the birthday of the monarch of the UK and the Commonwealth. The UK celebrates it at a different time of year and, I was told recently, no longer get a day off for it. Australia doesn’t have a date so much as a day: it’s the second Monday in June. Since the date changes, it’s a symbolic birthday, not an actual one.

Mind you, a century and a bit ago migrants who knew their birthday by the Jewish calendar who chose a random date on the secular calendar to celebrate, basically had a mobile birthday. My grandmother had that, and when we finally checked what precise date her birthday was on… her parents got the secular date wrong. From the time she was four, she always celebrated her birthday on a different (but equally wrong date). I told her this when she was … not young, and she told me back that she was old enough to celebrate her birthday whenever she liked.

We stick by The King’s/Queen’s Birthday, not because we’re wildly Royalist, but because winter celebrations are few and far between. It’s cold and it’s dark and we live in Narnia ruled by Jadis. I don’t mind that there’s no Christmas (I’m Jewish, so why should I mind?) but the cold and dark are harder to endure when there are no parties.

After Monday, my life will be cold and partyless. Right now, the days are getting shorter and it’s very tempting to stay in bed.

Think of me as you enjoy summer.

Not a Machine

personby Madeleine Robins
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My body is not a temple. It’s not a wasteland, either, or a castle, or any other locational metaphor I can think of. It’s a body, and frankly I tend to treat it like a machine. I take moderately good care of it–I don’t eat terribly (I’m fortunate that I like almost all healthy foods except liver and hard boiled eggs). I live a modestly active life–I walk a lot. I try to read and stay involved with the world (there’s a heartbreak) and to laugh as much as possible (I am helped in this by an extraordinarily silly family). But all the laughter and eating healthy and spending 45 minutes on the elliptical does not alter the fact that I’m getting older. I’m not trying to stay young–that’s a mug’s game. I’m just trying to optimize what I have.

My father made it to just-shy-of-98. His twin made it to 100. My mother died relatively young, but she had health complications that made it, well, unsurprising. But her sister is 97. Genetics-wise, and barring speeding vehicles, falling pianos, or illnesses I can’t currently anticipate, I may be around for a while, yet. And so I keep using what I have. Of course, what I have is not what I used to have, I forget that sometimes.

Case in point: this weekend my daughter and her husband moved. Discovery of several rooms-worth of black mold made this not just a good idea but an imperative. My husband and I drove up to help, and spent about eight hours packing things, carrying heavy things, and (in his case) driving a truck to and from storage. The move was complicated by the fact that my daughter had hurt her back and couldn’t lift anything (well, she could and did, but every time she did her body informed her that this was a dumb idea). I climbed up and down stairs (and was grateful to have remembered to bring my knee brace). After a few hours of standing in the kitchen packing dishes I had to take off my shoes: my feet hurt. I carried some boxes I probably shouldn’t have. But the work had to get done, and I did my part. But every now and then the thought occurred to me: this used to be a lot easier. A lot easier.

The bill started to come due on the drive home, when my entire body hummed with exhaustion, the knee brace was squishing my leg, and my feet ached no matter whether I had shoes on or off. It took about 36 hours–and two good nights of sleep–to restore me to my usual level of reckless activity. But I am reminded again that, while I tend to treat my body like a machine–oil it, fuel it, make sure it’s running smoothly, surely it’ll run forever–it’s not a machine. (Hell, even a well-tended machine has a useful lifespan, after which it’s–what? a museum display?) My new resolution is not just to hear what my body is telling me, but actually listen. I’m in it for the long game, maybe another 20-30 years, during which time what I have won’t be what I used to have. My goal, in the words of Spencer Tracy in Pat and Mike, is that “what’s there is cherce.”

 

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.