This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.
One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.
Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.
I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.
(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)
This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.
The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:
The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.
This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.
(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)
This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.
As a writer, I find this to be doubly true for fiction. Except for the part about writing by hand. I think it’s fine to compose stories, especially novels, on a keyboard.
Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges
Ordinary and universal, the act of writing changes the brain. From dashing off a heated text message to composing an op-ed, writing allows you to, at once, name your pain and create distance from it. Writing can shift your mental state from overwhelm and despair to grounded clarity — a shift that reflects resilience.
Psychology, the media and the wellness industry shape public perceptions of resilience: Social scientists study it, journalists celebrate it, and wellness brands sell it.
In my work as a professor of writing studies, I research how people use writing to navigate trauma and practice resilience. I have witnessed thousands of students turn to the written word to work through emotions and find a sense of belonging. Their writing habits suggest that writing fosters resilience. Insights from psychology and neuroscience can help explain how.
Writing rewires the brain
In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker developed a therapeutic technique called expressive writing to help patients process trauma and psychological challenges. With this technique, continuously journaling about something painful helps create mental distance from the experience and eases its cognitive load.
In other words, externalizing emotional distress through writing fosters safety. Expressive writing turns pain into a metaphorical book on a shelf, ready to be reopened with intention. It signals the brain, “You don’t need to carry this anymore.”
Translating emotions and thoughts into words on paper is a complex mental task. It involves retrieving memories and planning what to do with them, engaging brain areas associated with memory and decision-making. It also involves putting those memories into language, activating the brain’s visual and motor systems.
Writing things down supports memory consolidation — the brain’s conversion of short-term memories into long-term ones. The process of integration makes it possible for people to reframe painful experiences and manage their emotions. In essence, writing can help free the mind to be in the here and now.
Taking action through writing
The state of presence that writing can elicit is not just an abstract feeling; it reflects complex activity in the nervous system.
Brain imaging studies show that putting feelings into words helps regulate emotions. Labeling emotions — whether through expletives and emojis or carefully chosen words — has multiple benefits. It calms the amygdala, a cluster of neurons that detects threat and triggers the fear response: fight, flight, freeze or fawn. It also engages the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that supports goal-setting and problem-solving.
In other words, the simple act of naming your emotions can help you shift from reaction to response. Instead of identifying with your feelings and mistaking them for facts, writing can help you simply become aware of what’s arising and prepare for deliberate action.
Even mundane writing tasks like making a to-do list stimulate parts of the brain involved in reasoning and decision-making, helping you regain focus.
Making meaning through writing
Choosing to write is also choosing to make meaning. Studies suggest that having a sense of agency is both a prerequisite for, and an outcome of, writing.
Researchers have long documented how writing is a cognitive activity — one that people use to communicate, yes, but also to understand the human experience. As many in the field of writing studies recognize, writing is a form of thinking — a practice that people never stop learning. With that, writing has the potential to continually reshape the mind. Writing not only expresses but actively creates identity.
Writing also regulates your psychological state. And the words you write are themselves proof of regulation — the evidence of resilience.
Popular coverage of human resilience often presents it as extraordinary endurance. News coverage of natural disasters implies that the more severe the trauma, the greater the personal growth. Pop psychology often equates resilience with unwavering optimism. Such representations can obscure ordinary forms of adaptation. Strategies people already use to cope with everyday life — from rage-texting to drafting a resignation letter — signify transformation.
Building resilience through writing
These research-backed tips can help you develop a writing practice conducive to resilience:
1. Write by hand whenever possible. In contrast to typing or tapping on a device, handwriting requires greater cognitive coordination. It slows your thinking, allowing you to process information, form connections and make meaning.
2. Write daily. Start small and make it regular. Even jotting brief notes about your day — what happened, what you’re feeling, what you’re planning or intending — can help you get thoughts out of your head and ease rumination.
3. Write before reacting. When strong feelings surge, write them down first. Keep a notebook within reach and make it a habit to write it before you say it. Doing so can support reflective thinking, helping you act with purpose and clarity.
4. Write a letter you never send. Don’t just write down your feelings — address them to the person or situation that’s troubling you. Even writing a letter to yourself can provide a safe space for release without the pressure of someone else’s reaction.
5. Treat writing as a process. Any time you draft something and ask for feedback on it, you practice stepping back to consider alternative perspectives. Applying that feedback through revision can strengthen self-awareness and build confidence.
Resilience may be as ordinary as the journal entries people scribble, the emails they exchange, the task lists they create — even the essays students pound out for professors.
I logged in, expecting to tell you how the hate in Australia (which began as antisemitism and is now extending) is so tightly focused that your best friend might be bullied and you might not see it. When I’m alone, that bullying eats up a chunk of my day each and every day. This last week, however, it was less than a minute of each day and it was not every day. I was able to talk work with colleagues. When I sat down here, it struck me that I don’t often talk about that side of my life.
I used to. I used to be the kind of irrepressible historian who got excited for everyone. I’m still that historian. I don’t get to talk about it so often, is all.
Instead of dwelling on the bad side of life, then, let me find one page of notes from one day of the conference (one in forty-five pages of notes from the conference) so that you can enjoy history with me. We all need time out from hate, after all and every single US reader here had a lot more trouble to handle in the every day.
Some of you know that one of my novels (Poison and Light) is about how future humans use the past to hide from a present they found uncomfortable. Right now, a group of Australian scholars is examining how people in Early Modern England (and elsewhere, but the papers I heard were on Early Modern England) use history to imagine the future. The discussion was wide-ranging. They talked about witches and about ghosts, about predicting disaster and about what happened when the disaster failed to occur, about pamphlets and politics and poetry. It was the perfect panel for fiction writers and an exceptionally strong example of why fiction writers should get to know Medievalists and Early Modern scholars. Every other minute I thought of a writer who should have been there, asking questions about the ghosts and about the politics. The worlds they explain and the concepts they explore help us understand what we write and help us write it the best we can.
How does this understanding work in practice? My notes have an outline describing how the chair (and the head of the research project, who of course I talked to afterwards and of course we’ve planned to meet to talk about the science fiction side of things) breaks down the concepts of Imagining the Future into categories that can be explained.
She spoke about writing that give models of temporality: utopias, dystopias, and the mundane. Think about how these categories fit modern science fiction. Poison and Light is half-dystopia and half mundane, because all of my fiction talks about the lives of individuals and so the mundane is important to them. China Mieville (to my mind) writes dystopias and so does Sheri S Tepper.
But who writes utopias? I can think of earlier writers, like Sir Julius Vogel. Help me out! Who is writing now and has written a utopia that brings history into the future? We were given the theory of Star Trek, because it claims to be in a perfected future (at least for humans) but the reality of Star Trek is not utopian. Star Wars is, however, dystopian. It’s much easier to find examples when one looks to television. But I want to talk about novels!
She then moved to scales of temporality, whether the novel is set near (Earth!) or far away (Poison and Light again, since it’s in a solar system far far away – I may have attended the conference as an historian, but during this panel I felt so seen as a writer). With TV, my mind goes straight to the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who and compares them with (of course) Star Wars … again.
Why is the near and far important? Because so much of historical writing is used to discuss this apocalypse, or that. How far is apocalypse from our everyday? Much further, if it’s not on Earth. And here Poison and Light fails. It’s set far away, but Earth faces apocalypse while the people on New Ceres pretend they live in the eighteenth century. (I’m seeing this now with the lucky souls who are not enmired in hate – they are the people on New Ceres, while most of us are, alas, on Earth.)
I keep thinking that this whole project can help me understand my own New Ceres universe. I’m writing a second novel set on Earth next year, where the 14th century and the 17th century and how we deal with post-apocalypse join the party. My project echoes the ideas of people hundreds of years ago as humanity faces a bleak present. Where some people find refuge in fancy dress, others find refuge in explaining the world through ghosts and looking at neighbours as if they themselves are the catastrophe.
The last category asks whose future it is. Is it personal and everyday? Is it national? Is it a global future (my New Ceres again), a human one… or is it post-human.
The experts were historians and literary historians and most of the examples (by a long, long way most of the examples) belong to our past. The categories were however, really handy for questioning and understanding science fiction. And now you know why I will not give up that side of my life. I have learned so much in such a short time, and my fiction benefits.
Every time universities lose these experts, we lose the benefit of their thought and learning… and our everyday suffers.
Let me go away and think about what our lives would be like if we didn’t have these little injections of learning to help us tell better stories. No, let me not. Let me go away and write more fiction, celebrating the worlds of both historians and writers.
Alex Washoe, a writer I follow on Facebook, posted this quote the other day:
Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.
– Johnny Cash
It got me to thinking, which was her purpose in posting. It’s certainly something that applies to all kinds of artists.
There are many different kinds of limitations. I recently finished the book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren, who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. The book is much more than an explanation of cool methods developed to address various disabilities (created both individually and as systems); it also gets into discussions of social and philosophical complexities.
For example, she discusses the experience of Audre Lorde, who had a mastectomy and declined to use a prosthetic, only to discover the expectation that she should wear one to make other people comfortable even if it was not comfortable for her. Hendren observes:
Her post-op prescription for prosthetics was never solely about functionality; it carried a social meaning.
And a discussion of humans as tool users – one of the most basic things we do – leads her to muse “your everyday life offers non-stop evidence that the body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.”
Because I’d recently read the book, my first reaction to the word limitations was to think of those that come with every human body. Even if you aren’t disabled, there are things your body won’t do that someone else’s does easily.
Some people are very physically flexible; others will never be no matter how much stretching they may do. Certain activities require certain body types – ballet dancers are a good example, one made most stark by the fact that so many of them are retired by the time they are forty because even with the perfect body they are doing things that cannot be sustained into old age.
However, a lot of people who have a passion for dance have found ways around that, ways that incorporate their limitations. There are dancers who perform in wheelchairs, dancers that have curvy bodies and big hips, dancers who are not remotely young. Their limitations are part of their style.
A singer might have a voice others find pleasing, but still have a limited range, which affects the songs they sing and the way they sing them. That is style. In fact, there are some singers whose voice is not necessarily pleasing to all – Bob Dylan comes to mind – who make a virtue of that necessity. Continue reading “Limitation as a Virtue”…
I just posted about one of my novels, Borderlanders, on Facebook. Let me share that post, and let me add to it.
Memories…
This was the book wanted by readers on FB. I noted (on FB, obviously) that my academic stuff had given me a way of writing a novel with a chronically ill protagonist where the protagonist remains the hero, is not cured, is not killed, and is not replaced. I was going to teach this method to others, but first COVID intervened and then antisemitism. I don’t get to teach much, these days. I may have to write another novel, having said this, because I learned so much in writing the novel that I could now write a much better one.
What’s very strange is, during these 5 years, more people I know have the illness my character had, due to long COVID. I’ve had it since I was in my twenties, but I’m one of the fortunate ones for whom it goes into abeyance. Right now, I’m trying to coax it back to sleep. Not everyone has that luxury, which is another reason why I should write another novel. Not yet, though. While it’s awake, every moment of every day is not straightforward, and I am behind on all my fiction.
This mysterious illness was known as chronic fatigue in Australia in the late 1980s, but these days it’s called ME and the fatigue is just a symptom. We know a lot more about it. One thing we know is why walking up the street can be so impossible. For some of us it can set the illness back, and for others it can destroy life entirely. This is why I consider myself so fortunate. I may have to not do much for a few months, but after that time I can do a little more and then a little more. This is just as well, because it’s only one of several illnesses I have and I have this daft desire not to be bedridden or die young.
For me, the most annoying symptom is when my executive function is not working. I lose time (sometimes weeks) and can’t do simple things. Oddly, I can still write books.
I always tell folks, do not assume someone can or cannot do a thing when they are ill. Ask them. And ask them each and every day if you must, because the small everyday can change. Some days I can walk up the street and back and I can write 6,000 words. Other days I can hardly get out of bed.
The illness is not just part of our everyday, it becomes part of who we are, for better or for worse.
I would like to see a superhero who has ME. It would be such a wonderful thing, watching them change the world… on days they can do more than toddle. And seeing how other people respond to the wild level of change they see when a powerful person has to watch what they do every minute would provide a great sub-text to a movie. It’s quite a different set of options than those for someone who cannot walk without assistance, or someone completely confined to bed who uses their amazing telepathic abilities to run the world.
There are so many amazing stories in the lives of the people we mostly prefer not to see. I now want to see a whole sequence of superhero movies or a TV series that focuses on those lives. There is a different sort of heroicism when one is not visible and has to fight just to get through the everyday, especially when they do astonishing things. Most of those astonishing things are attributed to someone else, because, of course, the invisible and half-seen can’t possibly be the heroes we dream of. Except, of course, they are. I get through my illnesses because of those people. Some of them are role models and some of them help when others don’t even begin to see that I might not be able to ask for help when things are bad.
One thing about this non-extent show: costumes would be far too problematic for some of the hidden heroes. So would heroic stances and being randomly interviewed by reporters. It would be such a different and fascinating set of stories.
In real life, I’ve met these invisible people in essential services. From a desk or from home they make a lot of the everyday possible for so many other folk.
Today I’m thinking about how we allocate meaning to objects. This is not a great theoretical thing. Specifically, I’m thinking that most writers I know will say “My character needs a drink” and allocate something to drink from. That something fits the world of their novel. If the character (let’s call them ‘Fred’) drinks ale, they may use a tankard. If Fred drinks wine, then a wine glass. Whatever they drink from tends to reflect the society they’re in. If Fred is on a space station, drinking something terribly celebratory and ancient, then Fred might gingerly unwrap the ancient wineglass, stop to admire it and to consider their five times great-grandmother who owned it in the 1950s and sip ordinary wine from it. The wine takes on attributes because of the vessel it’s drunk from.
From the author’s view, then, mostly it’s easy. What is Fred’s culture? When and where does Fred live? What important information does the drinking vessel communicate? Does the reader need to know that Fred’s wine drinking habit goes back nearly two hundred years, or does he just need to assuage his thirst? We write – in an ideal world – what we need the reader to see.
When I see a vessel as historical because it’s in a museum display case, I do what the reader does. I will check the card describing its origin and where it was found and then insert myself into its history. I am the reader. The person who wrote that card (‘Sheila’) gives it the context a writer does. Before Sheila, that glass had a quite different life. If Sheila chooses it to illuminate life in the Middle Ages and the glass is from the twentieth century (like Fred’s) then we have a clear and present misinterpretation. Even if the date and place are entirely correct, however, we’re liable to misinterpret. (and this next bit is a description of an actual exhibit in a very real museum) For instance, what if Sheila includes the glass as an example of daily life in an exhibition about the people of a specific city from the Middle Ages to about 1700? Obviously, she’s telling us that the epople in the city used glasses like this. And if the exhibition only showed Christian spiritual objects for the most part, she’s insinuating that religious Christianity is the main drive of life in that city.
But what if, historically, that glass was owned by someone Jewish? That focus on Christian religious iconography and that small space for everyday life implies otherwise unless she notes on the card “Most of this exhibition plays no part in the religious life of 20% of the inhabitants of those town. This glass was owned by one of those 20%.” That card might still be drowned out by the many rooms of religious art, but at least that one object points out that, just because most people thought this thing doesn’t mean that everyone did. It also helps people see that we attribute meaning to an object. That glass might be on my mother’s dinner table or lost in space, but ti’s still capable of being drunk from by quite different people. We allocate meaning. When we’re bigots, we allocate meanings that exclude or that even hate.
What does this mean for novels? Fred’s glass might belong somewhere different entirely. We only know what the novelist tells us. And if it’s an historical novel set in a place with a significant Muslim or Jewish community (say, a particular part of London, right now) and there is no indication of that in any of 200 noels by 150 writers, then when we read about Fred, we leave out actual people from actual places and times.
When most of the people who talk about Jews without checking our history, who talk over Jews, who tells us the world would be better if we were invisible, read novels, their view that Jews don’t have a history and should not have voices is confirmed. If someone Jewish then walks down the street and the reader sees them, they’re seen as exotic. That wine glass has helped remind the reader that Jews are exotic and alien.
If Fred is a woman and we use the world built by the people who wrote the 1960s (original) version of Star Trek, then the glass would be held by someone very feminine and with little agency. Even the most senior woman on the Enterprise is scripted as having little agency. That glass reminds us that she’s not permitted to serve herself wine, nor to break the glass and use the sharp shards to save the lives of everyone on board the ship.
In our lives, objects are not neutral. We assign meaning to them. Story matters, because story gives us that meaning. If 200 books with a setting where Jews lived do not contain Jewish characters then it’s worth looking for books that do. When women lack agency and plot points don’t hinge on them, find books where women matter. This applies to so many of us. We all tend to accept that novels and TV and film are about certain types of people only, that gender and size, and skin colour, and shape, and religion, and class, and agency, and even shoe size are all pretty standard.
However, that wine glass in that exhibition is never culturally neutral. Nor is our reading. When we ourselves walk down that street, we carry all this with us. We use it to navigate how we talk to people and what we talk about and how we judge them and what place in our lives we assign to them. Right now, Judaism is part of my awareness partly because I’m assigned to being outside the lives of many people I once knew, because one does seldom invites Jews to dinner or to walk in the park right now. My relationship to that wine glass has, then, been shattered entirely. My once-friends’ relationship with the glass has also been changed: no-one Jewish drinks out of any glass at their dinners.
Every single one of my novels asks about what baggage we carry in some way. For example, Poison and Light and The Time of the Ghosts are about women doing exciting things. Both novels contain Jews living lives with meaning. The Art of Effective Dreaming is about how we carry such knowledge and how we can change it if we want to. Langue[dot]doc 1305 questions where our interpretations of the world come from. The problem with writing such books is that a glass can never just be a glass in my mind. I need to know more about every place and every time, and I don’t need one bit of information about that glass.. I need to start off with a dozen. Then I can choose the one I need for that character at that point in time in that novel. My example of how that operates is in The Time of the Ghosts. Three women drink three cups of coffee. Each coffee reflects who the character is, and even the cups they drink from are quite different. One carries the cultural baggage of not questioning where things come from and accepting stereotypes, while the other two celebrate who they are.
I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.
In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.
In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.
The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.
What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.
We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.
I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.
My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry. Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.
The day after tomorrow, I’ll be on my way home. I’ve been in Eden nearly a week and am used to it. I no longer hear the waves every minute, even though Calle Calle Bay is close by. I’m used to the lack of birdsong and the fact that there are so many dogs that barking is an ordinary part of the soundscape. Where I live, in Canberra, I’m woken up by magpies and kookaburras and there are so many other birds that sing, but I have to walk at least as far as the beach is from me right now to hear any dogs barking. I know how to pronounce most of the local names, and the one I had most wrong was Calle Calle (which is Caul Caul). I have talked to many locals and written many words. The biggest thing is that I have proven what I needed to prove: that one of the reasons I’m so il in Canberra is the climate there. I’m not suddenly well in Eden, but I am in far less pain and I can do more walking. In a half hour, in fact, I will be walking to the community market, which is about 1 km away. There and back will be all I can do in a day, but I can only walk that far in Canberra on really good day and here, there was only one day I could not.
I cannot afford to move down to the coast, but at least I know that if I save enough I can go to a seaside town once or twice a year and get writing done. I need more internet than I have access to here, however. I am saving all my writing for when I get home, when I will edit it and upload it and … things would have been a lot simpler if I could have finished all that here. The problem is only partly that wifi is spotty. It’s also my computer, which worked splendidly in Perth and doesn’t even connect enough in Eden to use the university’s online system of access to my word processing.
I could use my computer more readily in regional Germany than in regional Australia. I chat with locals about things like this and we swap the realisation that Sydney has far more of small everyday luxuries than places like Eden. Groceries are more expensive here, for instance, because Eden has the same distribution system that Canberra had when I first moved there, and so there are the storage and transport costs to Sydney to be factored into, say, the price of tomatoes. Even cheese is not cheap, which is ironic, because Eden is part of the shire of Bega and Bega is one of the most important cheese-making regions of Australia.
I was going to write you a romantic post about Eden the place, or an historical post about the whaling industry, or a post with pictures of gardens and I was going to ask you which was the real garden of Eden, but… I wanted to talk about the price of tomatoes. Maybe another time…
The title makes my life sound like an elegant painting. It is not, alas. It’s not nicely synchronised in colour, time, or any kind of harmony. In fact, this post is late because last night was midwinter being midwinter being midwinter. It was 4 degrees (39.2 for all those who prefer Fahrenheit) at 6 pm and I’m just warming up now. Me heater is on and I’ve moved from the night-time down dressing gown to the daytime oodie* and I will write this afternoon. I was supposed to run messages. A friend was going out and got the urgent things for me (paid in very fine chocolate and coffee) because today’s warmest was riddled with wind from the snow, which makes walking very difficult for those of us with arthritic joints. I can’t catch a bus because the nearest bus stop is too far away on days like this and I have been eating junk food. It’s one way of dealing. Not the most sensible, but it got me through last night and this morning. Tonight I’m back to being sensible. Between now and then, I must write some novel. This is my atonement for eating junk food. If I eat garbage I must produce good words, to keep the world in balance.
The novel is a vampire novel (of sorts) and my characters, too, will be eating junk food. What is junk food to a vampire/werewolf cross? I still have to work that out. I have ten minutes…
Spellcheck tells me I intended to write ‘foodie’. Given my recent eating habits, I fail at foodiedom and defy Spellcheck.
