Category: rants

Thinking About Old Age

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I was reading an interview with Richard Osman (find it here in either video or a transcript), who has written a series of mysteries called the Thursday Murder Club about people over 80 living in a retirement community and solving mysteries.

The books are read worldwide, translated into a number of languages. In talking about how societies treat their elders – and assuming that in the UK and the US we treat them badly – he said this:

But in Mediterranean countries, in Arabic countries, in China, elders are traditionally revered. Except every time I go to one of those places, people say, “Oh no, we’re exactly the same. We treat older people terribly.” And I’ll say, “No, you don’t, not really.” And they insist, “Yes, honestly, that’s why we love these books.”

And that resonated with me, because I know there are segments in our culture which supposedly revere elders and yet as someone who technically qualifies for elderhood, when I see the way those elders are treated, I find it condescending.

I like the idea of a book that treats so-called elders like people, so I put the first one on hold at my library.

But I have to say, I don’t want to live in a retirement village. I want to live around people of all ages.

Michelle Cottle, who did the interview, said living in a retirement village would be kind of like being back in college except without having to go to class. But having spent time visiting people living in such places, I don’t find that true. Part of that might be that as much as we complained about it, going to class was a major part of going to college and generated a lot of the ideas that made for good conversations with our friends.

I would like to live in community that had some of the aspects of college – my six weeks at Clarion West, living in a dorm with my fellow students, going to class, barely sleeping, were a high point in my life. But the students in our group ranged from their early twenties to their mid-fifties.

So I’m not planning to move into a retirement village or similar facility for old folks, at least not now. My partner and I are part of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative and we are trying to organize a multifamily co-op apartment building as part of that, one that would include a diverse group of people.

But there is another issue here, one I wrestle with. What if I develop a condition such as dementia or another severe illness or disability and need the kind of full-time care one gets in assisted living or nursing homes? I do not want my partner, assuming he is still able to do so, to spend all his time caring for my needs, and even though I’m putting money aside for my care in the future, I doubt I will have enough for 24-hour live-in aides. Continue reading “Thinking About Old Age”…

Reprint: Fighting Book Bans

personby Deborah J. Ross
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Federal judge overturns part of Florida’s book ban law, drawing on nearly 100 years of precedent protecting First Amendment access to ideas

Some school librarians in Florida have found themselves in the midst of controversy over complaints of “obscene” titles in their libraries.
Trish233/iStock via Getty Images

James B. Blasingame, Arizona State University

When a junior at an Orange County public high school in Florida visited the school library to check out a copy of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, it wasn’t in its Dewey decimal system-assigned location.

It turns out the title had been removed from the library’s shelves because of a complaint, and in compliance with Florida House Bill 1069, it had been removed from the library indefinitely. Kerouac’s quintessential chronicle of the Beat Generation in the 1950s, along with hundreds of other titles, was not available for students to read.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law in July 2023. Under this law, if a parent or community member objected to a book on the grounds that it was obscene or pornographic, the school had to remove that title from the curriculum within five days and hold a public hearing with a special magistrate appointed by the state.

On Aug. 13, 2025, Judge Carlos Mendoza of the U.S. Middle District of Florida ruled in Penguin Random House v. Gibson that parts of Florida HB 1069 are unconstitutional and violate students’ First Amendment right of free access to ideas.

The plaintiffs who filed the suit included the five largest trade book publishing houses, a group of award-winning authors, the Authors Guild, which is a labor union for published professional authors with over 15,000 members, and the parents of a group of Florida students.

Though the state filed an appeal on Sept. 11, 2025, this is an important ruling on censorship in a time when many states are passing or debating similar laws.

I’ve spent the past 26 years training English language arts teachers at Arizona State University, and 24 years before that teaching high school English. I understand the importance of Mendoza’s ruling for keeping books in classrooms and school libraries. In my experience, every few years the books teachers have chosen to teach come under attack. I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about the history of censorship in this country and pass it to my students, in order to prepare them for what may lie ahead in their careers as English teachers.

Legal precedent

The August 2025 ruling is in keeping with legal precedent around censorship. Over the years, U.S. courts have established that obscenity can be a legitimate cause for removing a book from the public sphere, but only under limited circumstances.

In the 1933 case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John Munro Woolsey declared that James Joyce’s classic novel was not obscene, contradicting a lower court ruling. Woolsey emphasized that works must be considered as a whole, rather than judged by “selected excerpts,” and that reviewers should apply contemporary national standards and think about the effect on the average person.

In 1957, the Supreme Court further clarified First Amendment protections in Roth v. United States by rejecting the argument that obscenity lacks redeeming social importance. In this case, the court defined obscenity as material that, taken as a whole, appeals to a prurient – that is, lascivious – interest in sex in average readers.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision created the eponymous Miller test for jurors in obscenity cases. This test incorporates language from the Ulysses and Roth rulings, asking jurors to consider whether the average person, looking at the work as a whole and applying the contemporary standards in their community, would find it lascivious. It also adds the consideration of whether the material in question is of “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” when deciding whether it is obscene.

Another decision that is particularly relevant for teachers and school librarians is 1982’s Island Trees School District v. Pico, a case brought by students against their school board. The Supreme Court ruled that removing books from a school library or curriculum is a violation of the First Amendment if it is an attempt to suppress ideas. Free access to ideas in books, the court wrote, is sacrosanct: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.”

Covers of 23 books with the quote from Judge Mendoza, 'None of these books are obscene.'
These 23 books were removed from Florida school libraries under Florida HB 1069. In his ruling in Penguin Random House v. Gibson, Judge Carlos Mendoza named them and stated, ‘None of these books are obscene.’
Illustration by The Conversation

What this ruling clarifies

In his ruling in August 2025, Mendoza pointed out that many of the removed books are classics with no sexual content at all. This was made possible in part by the formulation of HB 1069. The law allows anyone from the community to challenge a book simply by filling out a form, at which point the school is mandated to remove that book within five days. In order to put a book back in circulation, however, the law requires a hearing to be held by the state’s appointed magistrate, and there is no specified deadline by which this hearing must take place.

Mendoza did not strike down the parts of HB 1069 that require school districts to follow a state policy for challenging books. In line with precedent, he also left in place challenges for obscenity using the Miller test and with reference to age-appropriateness for mature content.

The Florida Department of Education argued that HB 1069 is protected by Florida’s First Amendment right of government speech, a legal theory that the government has the right to prevent any opposing views to its own in schools or any government platform. Mendoza questioned this argument, suggesting that “slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints.”

What this means for schools, in Florida and across the US

In the wake of Mendoza’s decision, Florida schools are unlikely to pull more books from the shelves, but they are also unlikely to immediately return them. Some school librarians have said that they are awaiting the outcome of the appeal before taking action.

States with similar laws on the books or in the works will also be watching the appeal.

Some of these laws in other states have also been challenged, with mixed outcomes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit already struck down Texas’ appeal of a ruling against Texas House Bill 900. And parts of an Iowa bill currently are being challenged in court.

But the NAACP’s lawsuit against South Carolina Regulation 43-170 was dismissed On Sept. 8, 2025. And Utah’s House Bill 29 has not yet faced a challenge in court, though it could be affected by the outcomes of these lawsuits in other states.The Conversation

James B. Blasingame, Professor of English, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Fighting Book Bans”…

To a Good and Sweet Year (a reflection)

personby Gillian Polack
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First and most importantly, I want to wish you all a good and sweet year. Tonight (Monday at dusk), you see, is my new year. It’s the year 5786.

I’ll be relieved when 5785 is over. It was full of silences and antisemitism. The people who retained me as a friend and as a co-worker also kept me going and helped me find safer paths to travel. I have also made new friends, many who are walking the same fragile road as me. Some of my old friends were silent and will hopefully re-emerge in my life when the hate dissipates (I can hope this because I’ve seen it happen before), some accuse me of things they know I am not guilty of: most just stepped away quietly, without explaining or caring. I am branded as someone to hate. So are most Jews. Ruptured (the book I spoke about last week) is still the best description of how this affects the lives of Jewish Australian women. It’s also broken some of the silences. I have several friends back. They don’t hate, but they had no idea what to ask me or how to ask me or even how to talk everyday, without the filter of hate that too much of Australia accepts. This is the real reason I hope to get some friends back. As more people find words without having to broach difficult subjects, they will realise that I’m still here and that I miss them.

I’ve walked away from some people, myself. Those who accuse and blame. Those who don’t see everyone as human and are part of jeering mobs. Those who agree with the public rhetoric of hate. It’s far, far easier to talk to left-leaning Palestinian activists than to these people. I hate walking away from them: I believe that understanding is the best way out of this shambolic time. Finding solutions that meet the needs of more than one group of people. Dumping slogans. This was what I and my friend did in the women’s movement, over twenty years ago, but too many of those I worked with lean into the slogans right now, which means… they’re not finding ways of making society functional for all of us, they’re sowing distrust and spreading hate.

There is good news. I’m not nearly as alone as I could have been. People are, fundamentally, good. I don’t get a lot of the income from writing I did, due to closing doors, and I only get to give talks or workshops maybe three times in a year, and I don’t get to teach at all (I so miss teaching!) but I can go to professional meetings (in fact technically I’m at one right now, as I write, but it’s a break time) and give academic papers and even keep friends in fandom.

I write for a shifted audience: some of my readers from always, but more Jewish readers. I’m also writing more Jewishly, because I am still that child who, when someone says “You’re a failure” I respond by being the person who annoys them. In this case, being Jewish is the failure-aspect, so I write more Jewishness into my fiction. And my history. I’ve spent all the time since I finished the doctorate sorting out how I got Jewish history badly wrong because I, too, was listening to formulae. I’ve finished the book on it and am looking for publishers. And I get to talk about it (sometimes): I just gave a talk to my local Jewish community on the food culture and the history of Jews in Northern France in the Middle Ages. I only made one of my Rashi jokes, which I felt disconsolate about at the time, but they want me back, so I will be able to make more.

I finished a PhD and wrote a book in 5785. I dealt with far too many bigoted idiots and I analysed the words they used and discovered the sources of their rhetoric. I learned how to de-prickle a prickly pear from a Palestinian activist and we talked about the (Jewish – they gave me references!) origins of the Medjool date. Learning that it’s possible to refrain from bigotry when one is being attacked and is displaced and when life is terrifying insecure gave me back some of my trust.

This activist is looking for the same thing I am: ways of talking and finding solutions. Those who shout and scream in Australia are not the people they trust. I’ve heard them (time and time again) talk about how the marchers in the West have made things worse. This does not make me happy. Good people causing more hurt is not something that will ever make me happy.

What will 5786 be like? It’s a transition year. We’re in a time of enormous cultural shift, worldwide. Enormous cultural shift inevitably brings the enormous idiots out of the woodwork. They’re a sign, really, that we’re moving into something different.

For me, I’m hoping issues with publishers will be solved and that the delayed books start to appear. I want to finish the book that was on hold because world events meant they needed new directions. And I want to finish that vampire novel. In a perfect year, I get to do more teaching, I get more of my public voice back, and I can take up the offer a friend made to get me to Melbourne libraries safely.

Every time I was in Melbourne this last year, the library day didn’t happen because of protesters outside it. This also happened the year before last. I would probably be safe, friends who marched informed me. They weren’t at the receiving end of the hate, however, and they’re not Jewish.

That’s one of the oddities about being Jewish. Historically, hate spewed at us can begin with words but it often leads to death. The Holocaust was the extreme version, but I am 7/8 a descendant of refugees from well before then, and I have no European family left at all. My family origins are from all over Europe and yet the one thing I’m guaranteed when I travel to anywhere in Europe is that I will not meet relatives. I do not think that marchers will kill me. They might hurt me, though, or shout at me, or push me around. All these things have been done to people I know. It’s not all the marchers. Most of them don’t know about the violence committed 50 metres away. I’m developing ways of identifying the ones who, in the 60s, might have been among the group who sent the letter bomb that crippled a cousin, or in the 70s, sent evil white powders to small Jewish organisations in regional Australia.

We don’t talk about Australia as an antisemitic country, but it has always had that streak. I’ve experienced trickles of hate since primary school, and then those trickles become a stream and right now that stream is flooding its banks, growing into a river of muck. None of this is new. What is new is the realisation that most of those who hate could have avoided hating.

What do I plan for 5786? To fight hate, as I always have. And to fight hating idiots, useful or otherwise. I shall avoid those who judge me for being Jewish or for not thinking exactly as they think, and enjoy the company of everyone who looks at those around them and see human beings. I shall write, and make bad jokes, and deal with my frail body.

This is one thing I discovered in 5785: it is possible to create a good year from a bad one with enough work and enough capacity to deal with the bad. 5786 will be a good and sweet year. For anyone who wants to understand why this is such a daring statement, read Ruptured. Having something I can point to and say, “Read this” reduces difficult moments and some of the misunderstandings and gives that much more energy that I can spend on making that year happen.

May you all have a good and sweet year… even if it takes some work.

Weighty Matters

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Every time I see an article about losing weight, it asserts that one cannot lose weight by exercise alone. And yet the only times in my life when I have lost a significant amount of weight, it was due to exercise.

This wasn’t ever a planned program, just the side effect of a significant increase in exercise. The first couple of times, I lost weight because I was suddenly doing a lot more walking.

That happened when I started college and lived on campus without a car at the University of Texas (the original one, in Austin), which was a large campus. The summer afterwards I also worked at the state capitol and walked to work as well as around campus.

My second year in law school, my financial aid didn’t come through, so I loaded trucks for four hours for UPS every morning before school. I dropped a lot of weight and got into good shape despite the fact that I stopped for donuts for breakfast on the way to work and drank Coke from the machine while I was there. And then often got biscuits and gravy from the cafeteria when I went to school.

(That may sound great, but I also recall I never got enough sleep that year and also had several colds. The exercise was great, but the lifestyle wasn’t.) Continue reading “Weighty Matters”…

Welcoming in the New Year

personby Gillian Polack
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I had plans for today. Mainly I intended to tell you about books, including the ones I’m reading now. A confluence of circumstances undermined that. That’s my words masking the fact that I’m living one of the books I was going to tell you about. Do not live a book, it’s not nearly as much fun as novels suggest.

The book I’m living is a group of essays, Ruptured, edited by Lee Hofman and Tamar Paluch. Thirty-six Australians write about their lives in Australia since October 7. In every essay there’s something that also belongs in my life, even though most of them come from very different abckgrounds to me. We’re all Jewish. We’re all women. We’re all Australian. Most of us are in the Arts. And we are so very different.

How am I living this book right now?

There’s always a rise in antisemitism just before big Jewish festivals. At least there is in Australia. And by ‘always’ I mean the last decade. October 7 put the rise on strange drugs and made it bigger and nastier, but it’s been happening for a while. And Rosh Hashanah has always been difficult in other respects. There was the year I wasn’t even allowed to take a single day off for it, even though the union had negotiated for moments exactly like that. The Federal public service let me know back then, in 1989, that being Jewish was not acceptable and that microaggressions would be the norm and punishment for wanting to take a day off for my new year was acceptable. I was on flextime back then. I had heaps of hours on my flextime, but had not even been allowed to take two hours off using those hours, in the morning. I did what every Gillian should do at moments like these. I brought a great deal of honeycake into work and everyone kept dropping by my desk to be fed. I worked the fewest hours I could, with the latest start and the longest lunch. I was on the computer maybe for 10 minutes, to sign in and out and check that I wasn’t missing anything urgent (I wasn’t going to let my sulk actually hurt anyone) and … I made my point. I was allowed to take Yom Kippur off, when it arrived. These days I am not allowed in places to begin with and feel like a child who has been sent to their room and can hear the other children play. I am lucky. I’m not banned from some things – in fact, I’m a welcome friend. This means I lose Rosh Hashanah this year for some things, but still get Yom Kippur and even Sukkot. Ironically, I first discovered this problem when someone destroyed my Yom Kippur a couple of years ago. I am alert this time of year these days. Always.

This year is better and worse. I have friends watching out for me. I’m not alone. Some years I have been very alone. The worse is that the public ferment is already worse and is going to get worse still.

The amount of work I have to do is immense, but VICFA (the organisation running a conference just before) has made sure that everything will be done several hours before Rosh Hashanah begins. And I have deadlines galore, but I’m used to that. This early in third term in Australia and the rest of the country does a lot of work in September and October so that things can be finished for the big shutdown from December. Rosh Hashanah was not planned with Christmas in mind, nor the Australian summer.

Why does this feel as if I’m in Ruptured? The essays show women having to do everything to the schedules and needs of the non-Jewish community, while fielding antisemitism, and having to be Jewish and do family stuff and remember that ordinary life still exists.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about what this means for Gaza. In fact, I just typed a very long paragraph on the politics and my concern about following slogans rather than seeking the human needs that the slogans are supposed to address. But even saying what I have just said may enough – in this ungentle year – to provoke anger and threats if the right person reads it. Free speech is not part of my new year. Not free speech for me, anyhow. I’m too Jewish. And that is something every woman who wrote an essay documented. A silencing. Even if our opinions are similar to the person speaking, we can’t speak safely unless we use the right words. And the right words are terrifying. My secret historical linguist (historical linguistics is a part of being an ethnohistorian, but I’m not a specialist in the field) analyses how words are shifting and… the new meanings of some of the words and phrases we’re told we must use imply that Jews are evil, by nature, and that a country with no Jews is an improved country. My secret historical linguist wants someone other than me to do a really, really good study into changing political language and protest language in 2025. I want to be proven wrong.

This new year, when I dip apple in honey and say “To a Good and Sweet Year” I will mean it fervently, for all of us.

WorldCon and “Con Crud”

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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WorldCon this year was great for me, despite being so huge that I never even saw many folks who I know were there. I did run into lots of other folks, had some good conversations, and heard some good panels.

The best thing I did was con-adjacent: Charlie Jane Anders put on a special Writers With Drinks before 700 people in Seattle’s Town Hall with Andrea Hairston, Annalee Newitz, Darcie Little Badger, Becky Chambers, and Cecilia Tan.

Not only were the readings great – no surprise with that line up – but the audience was fabulous and enthusiastic. I felt at home in a crowd for the first time in a long time.

I came away from the whole weekend inspired about getting on with my own writing and extremely aware of how important it is for people to get together in groups. And while smaller, local meetups are certainly good, large gatherings that don’t happen as often are also key.

People have been getting together in these ways for a very long time. It’s part of who we are as a species.

But of course, things being as they are, the aftermath of WorldCon was accompanied by posts on social media and notices from the convention about Covid and other contagious viruses among the attendees.

“Con crud” has always been a thing among those who spend time at science fiction conventions. And while I recall all too well the norovirus that went around WisCon one year, most con crud comes from contagious airborne viruses like colds and flu.

I saw one post that said these days people call Covid “spicy con crud.” It makes it sound like a joke. And really, we’ve always treated con crud as a joke.

Except it isn’t funny. The risks from Covid make things much worse, but the truth is we shouldn’t be so cavalier about other kinds of viruses. Far too many of them cause things similar to Long Covid, and of course, some people are at greater risk from respiratory viruses than others.

But somehow, despite the fact that we learned (or should have learned) from the Covid pandemic that there are a number of things as a society that we can do to stop the spread of contagious airborne disease, we are still running our society on the idea that everyone is just going to get these viruses and that’s OK.

It’s not OK. We should not accept getting sick – especially with the risk of ending up with major diseases later – as the price of getting together as a social species. Continue reading “WorldCon and “Con Crud””…

Escaping

personby Gillian Polack
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Is it already Monday?

I am going to write a series on Jewish writers.

Why?

I’m so glad you asked!

I spend a lot of time each week fighting hate. Some people don’t hate so much as think my whole life should be spent fighting the cause their heart is with, which is, in Australia right now, fighting everything about Israel, including its existence.

I am not Israeli (I fight the bad things it does and cheer on the good, just as I do with any other country), however most Australian Jews are dealing with unprecedented levels of antisemitism. This should leave me free of the need to articulate shibboleths, since I’m already one of the bad people in their eyes, right? Entirely wrong. Just over the weekend, these folks have been saying (if they’re nice) “You’re looking at this all wrong. I’ll explain to you how you should think.” If they’re not so nice I learn many things about myself I did not know.

Mostly the bad language and accusations fall into two categories: what I like to think of as new DoubleSpeak, or accusations. I asked someone if I could use their words here to illustrate the DoubleSpeak, as I wanted an example of the particular language they used – it was gloriously fake – and they disappeared from the discussion entirely. The insults can be mild, but they’re usually more dramatic. I’m learning how to handle them better. When someone calls me a child-killer I generally tell them to let the police know and to hand over all the evidence, for instance.

I’m trying to work out what kind of mind hates in this way. This is a marvellous opportunity to find out, because there’s so much hate directed at most Jews. In Australia, we’ve even got ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ I’ve seen people labelled this way three times in the last two days. Last week there were even more labels, because of a literary festival that went terribly awry.

I don’t know about you, but I need a break from this shambolic mess. This is why I’ll introduce books for the next few weeks.

Several groups of Jewish writers gave me details of their books to share (and I’m watching out for more!). The sadness is that I can’t read them until I’m caught up with all my backlog. I’ve been unwell again so the backlog is severe. My normal “Let me read everything first so that I can introduce it properly” will not work. If I’ve read and enjoyed something, I’ll let you know, I promise. Otherwise I’ll tell you what I can.

I’ll share books right up until Jewish New Year. If you want more books after that, I’ll happily continue. I might not be the only person who needs books to distract them from the rather scary everyday.

Stop the Rampant Racism

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The “administration’s” war on “DEI” fills me with such rage.

It’s not just that it is intended to undermine all the civil rights laws that people fought and died for so that the country could, in fact, live up to its principles and give everyone here the rights and opportunities that rich white men (and a few of their select friends) wanted to keep for themselves.

Or that it’s being used to undermine our universities and even medical research. Or to remove highly qualified people from positions of authority so they can be replaced by incompetents who suck up to the grifter in chief.

It’s that so many of the news reports cover it as if it is a policy issue and use “DEI” and “woke” as if they actually mean what the grifter uses them to mean. And they so rarely mention that these policies are a direct violation of many of our laws — which have not been repealed or overturned by the courts — and a good chunk of our Constitution.

I am reminded of someone I knew years ago who ran a small nonprofit working on housing. He hired two women to work for him — one Black woman with substantial experience in housing finance (better, in fact, than his) and the other a white woman with excellent administrative skills, who ran the office.

He micromanaged both of them. It drove them nuts.

He was politically quite liberal, but I always figured that, in his heart, he didn’t think anybody who wasn’t white and male could really do the job — even when they were doing it incredibly well.

I think that’s the crux of the problem: that too many white men don’t think either women or people of color are competent. I don’t mean just white supremacists or blatant misogynists – I mean people like that guy I knew. Continue reading “Stop the Rampant Racism”…

Walking After Midnight

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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When I was a teenager, I wanted to go hang out in the pool hall like the “bad boys” did. I wanted to learn to shoot pool – and I also wanted to just be in that kind of space – but it was made pretty clear that girls weren’t allowed.

I didn’t want to hang out in the pool hall because I was sexually attracted to bad boys. I wasn’t. It wasn’t sex I was after; it was the freedom to do something like hanging out and shooting pool.

(Learning some years later that my father was something of a pool shark and could have taught me to play well made this fantasy more poignant. I could have worked my way through school shooting pool instead of making pizzas and loading trucks.)

In the chapter “Walking After Midnight” in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust,  she quotes Sylvia Plath writing in her journal at 19:

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, synonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

That sums up exactly how I felt. While I read Plath back in the day, I don’t remember stumbling across this observation or realizing that she, too, understood this need, but I suspect this explains some of the tragedy of her life.

We didn’t want a romance with the likes of Jack Kerouac. We wanted to have adventures like he had. Of course, those adventures were all like the boys’ clubs in the funnies – “no girls allowed,” except, of course, as sex objects. Continue reading “Walking After Midnight”…

Unintended Consequences, or How We Fail to Hear About Good Books

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I’m thinking about how we hear about writers. This is not only for general reading, but also for academic writing. The second, in this case, leads to the first.

One of the subjects academics ask me about or various bods want me to write about is Australian science fiction and fantasy. Until a few years ago I knew when any book was coming out and knew most of the writers and was exceptionally useful. Right now, I’m only useful on some subjects.

I can talk about writers until about 2015, and often write about writers before 1900. An article of mine on Tasma-of-the-many-names was just published in Aurealis, an Australian speculative fiction magazine. I can write about Jewish Australian writers and, in fact, do. I can also write (and do) about the links between Australian writing and the writing of other countries. Also, many books that incorporate history are still part of my terrain because, first and foremost, I’m an ethnohistorian.

Recently, I stopped writing about most contemporary Australian writers. Some I still know a bunch about, but for many I know only the names of their works. Given I have so much else to write about and don’t have the physical capacity to go chasing, I now avoid mentioning certain types of writers. I still consult, behind the scenes, when international scholars want to flesh out their knowledge, but I have to tell them that, “I know about this person and their work, but I don’t know where it belongs.” I no longer introduce Irish fans to the latest in Australian speculative fiction: we talk about other things.

Why did this change?

There are three reasons.

When I let the wider world know that I was not well, two groups of local writers dumped me from their social circles, almost instantly. This marches alongside with when my eyesight started failing and I was no longer permitted to be an award judge. It was apparently too difficult to give me lifts or to make sure that a dinner was reasonably COVID-safe or to find a type of text my eyes could read without making them worse.

These decisions by others makes it much harder for me to find out more about writing from Australia, and especially from Canberra and the Canberra region. Given how much the world of publishing is changing and how we hear about something is often somewhat random, this has significant consequences. If I can’t answer questions at an academic conference, very few of the scholars asking questions look further. They’re also overworked and under stress: this is not an easy decade for any of us.

I don’t hear about work now by these groups of writers or those who are close to them until after the work is published. I would have to put in extra work for each and every published book to find out that it has been published and if a book is in my scholarly ballpark. I have chronic fatigue, five books to finish, and I am no longer paid to write articles about groups of books. I miss being a pro-blogger and a literary magazine person, because they gave me paid time to chase things. My paid time is firmly Medieval right now, and does not include modern SFF unless I’m writing something for Aurealis.

Prior to my exclusion, chat told me what was going on and I could chase it and… I knew so much without much effort. My social circles, in fact, were what initially pushed me into writing about contemporary speculative fiction online and in magazines and giving papers at conferences. One of the symptoms of my illnesses is chronic fatigue: I will take that extra work, but only when I can. I’ve had this symptom since my 20s, but it’s only after I confessed to it that it changed what I knew by changing who would accept me in their social circles.

Only a very few non-Australian academics write about Australian speculative fiction. I know many of them. My refocus on subjects that are achievable without make me more ill affects how these writers are seen outside Canberra. It is not intentional discrimination on my part, but if I don’t have time or energy to chase up something new that touches on my areas of expertise I then write on subjects that are just as interesting to my readers, but that don’t push me beyond my capacity. Eustace the Monk is a case in point. I’ve now been asked by a number of people about Eustace, and used the same core research for each inquiry. This enables me to have a full life, despite the illness.

Second, when I was excluded from a particular science fiction convention, the writers who consulted with me there lost access to me. And me, I was no longer in a position to hear about their work while they were thinking about it, because they no longer asked me questions or did my workshops. Work by those writers has to wait, the way work by most other writers waits, for me to get around to it. Since I was first working on a dissertation and now on non-fiction books, and also write my novels, the wait is long.

The first and second reasons added together affect one group of writers in particular. When scholars and fan organisers ask me about most Canberra authors, I tell them what I know, but what I know is no longer insider-knowledge for most writers. I’m not the only one, as local academic jobs in the Humanities are few and far between. Scholarly work about Australian speculative fiction is likely to mention writers’ names in passing than to look at their work closely or to teach it at university. Those who were part of my earlier studies are still getting articles written about them or even being tagged for (paid) academic stuff as a long-term result of that work. I am not doing the research or running academic programmes: I am merely one of the half dozen people who can be asked casually about the subject. That ‘merely’ has consequences for how much attention given to some writers who are probably very deserving of scholarly work and being taught at university. Some writers still get attention, but most writers won’t be seen. This only affects a group of universities, but there are very few universities in the world that teach Australian speculative fiction as a subject. Other courses that include Australian writers will only include the extraordinary,  and most of our fiction will be passed over.

The third reason, of course, is that I’m Jewish. I am no longer included on lists of writers to ask about this or that, because Jew cooties may be infectious.

So many other writers locally have no idea of my work at this point, much less my research. I joke that I’m better known in Germany than in Australia, which is not entirely true. I’m better known in some parts of Germany than in some parts of Australia. I’ve gone from being an Ambassador of Reading for the country, to being left off lists as a writer. This, again, reduces who I see and who I can recommend to others. It has, in fact, a bigger impact that the other two reasons combined. Jew cooties would not be a problem in the writing world if there had been a flurry of activity to replace the Jewish writers and publicists and editors and more. There has not been. We’re seeing an increasing numbers of holes in communication in both the writing world and in academia, and even in bookshop events, simply because of individuals who are too Jewish and whose work has not been replaced.

This is worse in the US than Australia. In Australia it’s my kind of work that’s missing. That’s too big to examine here. Maybe another day.

This disadvantages those who are not leaving me out of things, because I won’t write the general introduction to a field I am not on top of. The result right now? An introductory article I was going to write for an academic journal is not even going to be suggested. Someone else will have to write it.

When we play games with people’s lives, the person whose life is targeted is not the only victim. As a Jewish writer, my book sales are down by 75%. As a Jewish/chronically ill academic, the book sales of those I would have written about are also diminished.

The writing world is complex. Hate and exclusion do not affect just the target: they change what books we know about and what writers we want to read. My recent life is an example this.

 

Update: The chrnoic illnesses have ruled my week and so I put this up unedited. If you read it before 14 August, note that it is now edited! And tagged.