Fairies and Sarcasm

I misheard someone talking about the fairies in their garden as “I’ve got theories at the bottom of my garden.” And I do. So many of them. There are people who cannot deal with me for more than ten minutes at a time because that’s the limit they have for the way my brain works. I also have friends who love to talk with me for hours because I apparently say interesting things.

I’m not going to do that today. Not so much theory. Just a smattering of reaction that may one day become theory.

Yom Kippur is over and my life is the better for it, but I’m wrapped into how Australian Jews are represented on the public broadcaster responsible for multicultural services in Australia. My latest email from them told me (on Yom Kippur, though obviously I didn’t read it until afterwards) which shows are being moved from their streaming service. One of the two lead shows that is being taken down, as announced on the Jewish Day of Atonement, is David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count.”

This is the same broadcaster that, when I asked what TV programming they had for the High Holy Days last year, sent me to a Hebrew radio show (hint: Hebrew is not the standard language of Australian Jews, English is).

This year, the special show they had just before our New Year was set at (in their regular email about programming), they explained, a Jewish funeral. It may have been a comedy set at a funeral, though the detailed description sounds as if it was set in the mourning period immediately after a funeral. I don’t know for sure because it was, honestly, not something I wanted to start my new year with. I’m assured by a non-Jewish friend that it’s a good show. If they put it on again, I’ll watch it and find out. I’ll watch the Baddiel tomorrow, though, because these programming decisions make me feel very much as if there are fairies at the bottom of the broadcaster’s garden, that Baddiel’s title sums up what needs to be said about it, and that I’m far safer with my theories than watching public television right now.

The good news is that some of my thoughts will be words at a bunch of places in October: at the Irish National Convention (I’ll be presenting online), at a Melbourne academic conference, quite possibly at the World Science Fiction Convention (again online), and elsewhere. I won’t be bored. (And if you want details of where I’ll be, let me know and I’ll post them as they are finalised.) I also won’t be able to see if SBS finally sort out why I wax sarcastic about them. They stopped replying to my emails when I pointed out that sending me to Hebrew radio was about the same as sending Australian Catholics to Latin radio.

I may be full of ideas these days, but I used to be such a nice person. I suspect sarcasm comes with menopause. Just suspect, mind. I now want to read a proper and carefully researched scientific study of the relationship of sarcasm to menopause. I shall go to bed and dream of such a study…

Political Ageism

I keep seeing newspaper columnists and others tut-tutting about Joe Biden’s age. Despite the fact that he’s doing a good job – better than I expected even if he isn’t doing some of the things I consider important – some suggest he shouldn’t run again.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are apparently planning to nominate the failed former occupant of the White House who tried to hold onto his job despite losing an election, a grifter who is under indictment for multiple crimes, someone who has proved that he is incapable of doing the job by the complete mess he made of it.

By the way, that con man is only three years younger than Biden, which certainly makes him no spring chicken. If anyone was raising the age question seriously, they’d be discussing it in reference to both men.

As someone a little, but not a lot, younger than both of them, I am aware that older people are at greater risk of health conditions that can keep them from doing a job than younger ones. But that is far from my first consideration when it comes to evaluating someone who is running for office.

I’ve never been a fan of maximum ages for jobs. If you can still do the job mentally and physically, why should you be forced to stop?

I do suspect that one reason people use age as a proxy there is that it’s messy to determine whether someone is still capable of doing work if you have to evaluate them. Plus there’s still plenty of ableism out there, plenty of efforts to push someone aside because they are disabled in some way.

Old people are likely to have accumulated some health conditions. My partner keeps telling me that we’re going to reach a point where we spend all day taking medications, doing physical therapy exercises, and making doctor appointments. He’s joking, but it is true that older people can’t ignore their health the way we did when we were young.

Here are some questions to ask about politicians with health issues:

  • Can they do their job around it?
  • If they can’t, will they be able to once they’ve had treatment?
  • Are there reasonable accommodations that will make it possible for them to do their work?

Based on what I can tell about Senators Feinstein and McConnell, my answers to those questions suggest that both of them should retire.

Joe Biden’s doing fine. Continue reading “Political Ageism”

Minority Cultures

I asked on Facebook if anyone wanted a short essay on how to check if something is reliable for the group that it’s attributed to and why it matters to let me know and they did. It was a good thing to write early into my New Year.

Today is when I introduce the wider issue. Over the next year, I’ll focus on specific cultural elements and, gradually, I will introduce cultural relativity, so that anyone following the series can understand the difference between how they see a given culture and what that culture is, in reality. Today, I shall use an Australian Jewish example in honour of the year 5784 and also because what happened in Australia over the last week is a really good introduction to why cultural relatively and precision is important.

What happened in Australia? A major public broadcaster in Australia formally celebrated Jewish New Year only on their Hebrew radio channel, according to their own search engine. SBS has a Yiddish channel (which has a report on antisemitism that I’d love to hear… but my Yiddish is very small, and learned as an adult) and a Hebrew channel that contains most of their publicised Jewish content. These two radio shows are the focus of programming for SBS for those they identify as Jewish Australians.

Programming outside these two radio shows includes the occasional recipe on the food site, news about antisemitism, news about Israel (often showing a worrying bias) and, from time to time, aspects of Jewish history and life as part of regular TV. There is an upcoming series that talks about how a part of Australia nearly became Israel, and has a Jewish presenter (whose father I once made laugh, but that’s another story). A Jewish comedy thing has just been shown, and I’ll get to that in the next paragraph.

The capacity to product culturally fair and supportive material lies within all this, but SBS gets things wrong, almost every time. Late last week, for instance, it advertised a new show with a Jewish theme. “Just in time for New Year!” I thought. I was prepared to admit publicly that I had been entirely wrong in my assessment of SBS.

The show is all about things that happen at, as the promo explains, “a funeral service.” When I looked at the detail about the show, it’s not a funeral service… it’s what SBS thinks is a Jewish funeral service. And it’s a comedy. Programming that includes anything Jewish is rare and special, but a comedy that revolves around death is not appropriate as the sole Jewish offering for the Jewish New Year. It’s the time when we celebrate life and talk about the living future.

What else has SBS done that includes Jewish Australia but also hurts it? SBS had a report on the first Australian cookbook (I’ve written about it elsewhere, Abbott’s heavily plagiarised volume) and mentioned the Jewish recipes… but the presenters had no knowledge that the recipes were all plagiarised from a very famous Sephardi London cookbook. The most crucial aspect of Jewish Australian history represented in the book was missed. This aspect is that Jews have been in Australia since the First Fleet, that nineteenth century Australian Jewish culture was heavily from London ie from an entirely different corner of the Jewish world to current stereotypes, which are mainly American.

I asked SBS themselves about their Jewish programming, a while back. They sent me to the Hebrew radio show. The languages of those two radio shows (Yiddish and Hebrew) support the stereotype that all Jews are sufficiently other that, regardless how long someone’s family has been in Australia (in my case, between 105-158 years), English won’t be their mother tongue. That became a bigger problem when the broadcaster itself sent me to the Hebrew radio show when I asked about Jewish programming. When I asked SBS about why they’d sent me to Hebrew programming, I also asked them if they sent all their Catholics to Latin radio shows. They did not reply.

The whole of the Australian multicultural broadcaster sets up a view of Jewishness that applies only to a minority of Australian Jews. The view does not reach past stereotypes or challenge racism or accept Jews as fully Australian, and they do not know how to culturally focus. They don’t even have a 101 in this: when I looked up “Jewish New Year” in the food section, I found recipes for long, plaited challah. It is not a New Year dish. We eat a round, white challah at this time of year, because we want to have a good and sweet year. This challah is readily available in those supermarkets that stock kosher food, so it’s not that hard to find out about. The problem is not the challah. It’s the conflation of search terms and the assumption that Jewishness is simple and doesn’t need focus.

The lack of focus on what Australian Jewishness is, leaves out the wider Australian community. Most people who rely on SBS and who do not speak Hebrew have no idea that it’s New Year for us. The article in a Canberra newspaper this year was inaccurate, but interviewed a Jewish local leader, so reflected some aspects of Judaism better than the publicly-funded national broadcaster.

Why is this so important? And why do I appear so consumed by it?

I used to advise government bodies on these issues (not just on Jewishness, but how to see and devise sensible government policy for multicultural Australia and its many different communities ie how to get past stereotypes and into reality), but they told me I was not someone they wanted advice from. This was when the Howard government came into power. The Howard government left a legacy that later governments took up. When I worked with SBS (on a different issue, but this subject came up in discussions) they were very aware of issues that they now ignore entirely. Some communities are more visible and have better representation than others. Jewish Australians are now part of the othered groups, and we’re a very good canary in the cultural hate coalmine.

SBS’s lack of understanding is a good template. It demonstrates a wider problem. That lack of focus, of seeing people for who they are, applies to many cultures in novels, in music, in TV, in cinema, in news reports. Given this, the skills I used to teach – how to see outside one’s own cultural boundaries and how to do this respectfully – may be handy again.

I’m going to find some of my old teaching materials, and work, bit by bit through them here, on this blog. I’ll also do interviews of writers, but not as many as I had planned. And this is my New Year promise to you. There will be silly posts, and lazy posts, but there will also be some very useful ones, that take up my past work and update it, and present it to anyone who needs it. It’s not the same as the day-long workshops or than the consultations that are in my past, but if my posts help even one person not create the sort of mess a very well-intentioned public broadcaster has made, a mess that unintentionally supports antisemitism through its support of stereotypes, then that’s a good outcome for a New Year resolution.

Decline and Fall

I grew up learning that the Roman Empire fell because of decadence. This was intertwined with Christianity as interpreted in Texas small towns. I don’t actually know much about Rome and my father, who was fascinated by Roman history, is no longer around to ask.

A quick Google search indicates that, as with many things, the collapse of the empire was the result of many things and decadence is unlikely to have been a major factor. And of course, these days cries of “decadence” come from right wing extremist talking points about drag queens and the idea that women control their own bodies.

So it’s a word one should use with caution.

But I read this Lyz Lenz Substack piece and felt so horrified that my first response was that the world was decaying around me.

What shocked me wasn’t the bros coming out to defend their rapist friend – I knew that happened. It was that there was a TV show called Punk’d over 20 years ago that was a nasty version of Candid Camera on steroids.

The show did appalling things to people for a joke. The one that really got me was the one that set up the pop star Mýa to go on a date with a guy who pretended he was obsessed with her in a very creepy way.

The people who did this had to know about the real problems famous people have with that kind of stalker, not to mention that this kind of obsession is one of the terrible things that happens to many women. But they put it on anyway and then called it a joke.

They got rich making “jokes” like this. And lots of people apparently watched this on television.

Now I think that’s decadent: making entertainment out of people’s very real fears. Continue reading “Decline and Fall”

Lawyers Destroying Themselves

Law is inherently conservative.

By conservative, I mean two non-exclusive things:

  • It prefers the status quo.
  • It favors the elites, as in the well-known quote from the French novelist Anatole France:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

I was once helping my father with a minor legal issue in his business. I told him he had to do such and such. He told me J.P. Morgan expected his lawyers to fix things, not tell him he had to follow the law. I told him he wasn’t J.P. Morgan.

I am quite sure that J.P. Morgan got away with all kinds of things and that his lawyers helped him do it. He was incredibly rich and powerful.

But even though law favors the powerful, even as we can all cite numerous examples of wealthy people doing terrible things and getting away with it, there are limits to how far lawyers can go even on behalf of such people.

As I watch all the lawyers caught up in the many criminal cases against our former grifter-in-chief, I find myself shocked that so many people who once had sterling, establishment careers were willing to throw those over to support a con man. I mean, these are supposedly conservatives. Right-wing extremists, to be sure, people who advocate authoritarian government, but still, conservatives.

I did not expect to find such people throwing away their careers in an effort to block an election and destroy our democracy.

John Eastman had a cushy job at the Claremont Institute. He had a reputation among those who think the Federalist Society makes sense. All he had to do was share his outrageous positions in the form of, say, law review articles and op-eds, rather than positioning them as legal advice and trying to convince other people — notably Mike Pence — to do illegal things to try to block the will of the people.

And Rudy Giuliani was the former mayor of NYC and a former U.S. attorney. He’s an asshole, sure, but all he had to do was stay out of all this and many people would still think he was a hero because of September 11.

I have no idea what they thought was in it for them. It’s not like Trump has ever been loyal to people who sacrifice themselves for him. Continue reading “Lawyers Destroying Themselves”

Gender and Chess

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) is blocking transwomen from competing in women’s chess tournaments.

No one has come out and said it, but it’s clear that this is rooted in the misogynistic belief that women are inferior to men when it comes to chess. As with the bans on transwomen in physical sports competition, the underlying assumption is that someone assigned male at birth is clearly “naturally” better at chess than someone assigned female, and transition doesn’t take away that advantage.

However, a person assigned female at birth who has won women’s chess competitions will lose their titles if they transition to male. Apparently FIDE is recognizing that a transman counts as a man, even before they transition.

I gather FIDE sees the act of transitioning to male as confirmation that the person is not an inferior being and therefore should not compete in an inferior category.

Transwomen, on the other hand, will not lose the titles they won in male competitions before transitioning. That this is ludicrous doesn’t change the reasoning.

Of course, none of this makes any sense. There is in fact no reason at all for chess competitions to be divided by gender, except for the fact that chess has been dominated by men and women’s competitions are a way for women to get their feet in the door.

The assumption that women are inherently inferior at the skills of chess is just another misogynistic tool for blocking their participation. Continue reading “Gender and Chess”

Old Time Radio Ads: Now on Your Podcasts!

So many of the ads you hear on podcasts these days evoke the ones on AM radio back when the DJs who played the records or the stars of the regular programs would tout the benefits of soft drinks or laundry detergent or cigarettes.

That goes back a hundred years or more and even I am not that old, but I used to listen to a weekly program of old-time radio dramas and sitcoms on the NPR station in DC and some of them had the ads embedded.

Now every time I hear a podcast host speak favorably about their sponsor — especially when I get the feeling that this person is extremely unlikely to ever use that product — all I can think of are the sort of ads that were common on the radio in, say, the 1930s.

I find it shocking that these people — these very smart people — have to do this. I don’t mind them asking listeners to pay directly for the program, but it bothers me to hear a professor tout a product.

At the very least, the ads could be done by actors, as they are on television and radio these days.

You will of course tell me that I should pay to support these programs. After all they cost money to make. But the problem is the way they’ve decided to have people pay.

Most of them are ad-free for paying listeners, or so they say. I suspect to get that benefit, I will also have to log in through a special app or some such, making it a lot more difficult for me to just scroll through what’s available on my different subscribed podcasts.

But the bigger problem is that I have to go separately and support each one. It’s the same problem with magazines and newspapers, all of which want you to subscribe to them, and only them. And while there are certainly some publications and podcasts and TV series and whatnot I prefer to others, the truth is I want access to all of them.

I’m not going to listen to only one podcast or read only one newspaper.

I don’t want just one source of news. I want to browse among many. But nobody wants to set up an easy way to pay for that. Everything is a separate app.

And those separate apps can all screw up. Today there are notices on social media that Patreon has screwed up its payment system in some way. Apparently some of the creators aren’t getting their money, but also the supporters aren’t getting their receipts or any notice of whether there is a problem with their payment.

Apparently I need to check my credit card and check Patreon to see whether the people I support got their money. That kind of glitch does not make me inclined to keep supporting people there. So not only is it a problem that I can’t support a range of people, but I also can’t trust the program that is supposedly making it possible for creators to get some income.

In an app like Substack, you only get the individual newsletter you pay for. I want a dozen points of view, or more; not just one or two, but I can’t afford to give $50 a year times a dozen newsletters. Nor do I want to read every word someone writes in their newsletter. I might only want to read part of what they do.

It’s not that I object to paying. What I object to is paying for access to only one thing.  Continue reading “Old Time Radio Ads: Now on Your Podcasts!”

Living in the Anthropocene

According to First Dog on the Moon (I do rigorous research for these essays), some geologists have decided that the Earth moved from the Holocene into the Anthropocene in 1950.

Although First Dog also points out that there is a bit of scientific kerfuffle over that date, I’ve decided to go with it. By the time anyone dealing with what constitutes an epoch makes it official, I will probably have shuffled off this mortal coil, so I have to make to do with the facts I have.

The thing I like best about choosing 1950 as a date is that it means my entire life (give or take a year) has been lived in the Anthropocene. And that feels about right to me.

Given the current disaster news – the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast is about the temperature of a nice hot tub right now and that’s not even the worst thing going on – the years of my lifetime feel like the end result of the work of that segment of humanity who believe the purpose of life is their personal dominion over the planet, all of its other life forms, and most people.

While there is a dangerous sect of religious dominionists, the secular kind have done most of the damage. The human race over my lifetime appears to have been well-populated with people who can look at a beautiful landscape and think of all the ways to destroy it so that they can make something imaginary, which is to say money.

A lifetime that includes “plastics” (why, yes, I did see The Graduate back in the day), vast expansion of nuclear bombs and nuclear power without equal understanding of what we were doing, and human-engineered existential threat (I’m not talking about chatbots) seems like a perfect place to start the anthropocene.

I mean, I grew up a mile from an oil refinery. Continue reading “Living in the Anthropocene”

On the Bookish Life

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!

The Rules of Writing

All genres of writing have their rules. For example, you can’t put a spaceship in literary fiction (though Michael Chabon could probably get away with it).

In science fiction, one of the rules is that you can’t write about writers.

Some people take this rule very literally. I once wrote a story about a freelance writer in a gig economy who needed to go from Washington, D.C., to Virginia at a time when passports were required between states. Hers had expired, so she had to cross illegally.

(Once again I realize that a story that I never spent much time submitting was ahead of its time and now is so obvious that it doesn’t seem prescient. I mean, we’re now living in a time where states are purporting to prevent their residents from traveling to other states for health care, not to mention one with an economy built on gig work.)

But back to the subject of fiction rules. One of the criticisms I got from my writers group was that it was about a writer and that wasn’t acceptable.

But that’s not what the rule means, really. There’s no reason your character can’t be a writer. The purpose of the rule is to keep science fiction writers from producing the navel gazing stories that revolve around writing.

There are any number of exceedingly boring literary stories and even novels that revolve around editorial assistants who are working on a novel and having an affair with their much older editor boss.

Others focus on creative writing professors in minor colleges and their inability to write and their affairs with their students.

This is the kind of fiction you get when a writer takes that major writing instruction “write what you know” literally. And this is the kind of fiction that the rule against writing about writers is trying to avoid.

I am thinking about this because I just read a couple of positive reviews in The New York Times of books that I can’t imagine being of interest to anyone at all. Perhaps there is a small subset of writers who want to read books about aging writers who can’t produce anything and younger writers who are trying to get some dirt on them to feed their own writing. Continue reading “The Rules of Writing”