Category: process

Dissertating

personby Gillian Polack
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I’ve finished a complete draft (a clean one) of my dissertation. Around 75,000 words, so about the size of a standard non-fiction study. While there are more processes to get through to reach that draft: annual reports, forms to fill, supervisors to meet and talk to, the actual work involved is the same as for most scholarly work if you already know enough about the subject. This is why the US has additional processes to check that the student has that knowledge. Australia doesn’t have Major Field exams and has limited coursework. It took me about five weeks all up to finish my coursework, in fact. We have to understand ethics for research, and how work safely, and any languages for the research, and how to actually do the research, and the norms for the field we’re working in, and so forth and so on and… lots of small things, but, in my case, the only big one was learning about literary studies. I’ve already done a lot of research and I already read all he languages, so my coursework was basically a matter of going through online modules and demonstrating I had the knowledge.

One entirely odd facet of doing three PhDs is the language side of things. Fir my first PhD I needed to read nine languages well. I couldn’t read all of those languages well enough (especially Latin, which I could not read at all) so I took a year off in the middle and did a Masters in Canada. That coursework taught me why the US and Canadian PhDs, with the hefty coursework load, are so very handy. It also taught me that my undergraduate degree was so rigorous that I had most of what I needed before I began. I added Latin and palaeography to my skills in Canada and they are so very useful!

For my second PhD I only needed five languages, and they were all ones I already knew. I’ve talked to so many fiction writers about this, and most of them did not need any languages except English. “How did you deal with archives and primary sources?” I asked. Some of them don’t. Others paid to have critical works translated or worked with translations. Our minds were entirely boggled by each others’ approaches.

This led me to a new understanding. PhD theses (including exegeses attached to Creative Arts PhDs, which is what my second was) are each unique. Underlying skills are similar: research for original work (which is exceedingly different to the type of research I do to write a short story or a novel without a scholarly bent), the capacity to write, the capacity to edit, and an extreme level of patience with the processes of study and publishing.

I said that I’ve finished the thing, but I still have much administratrivia to do, and the copy edit to go through. My thesis will be submitted on 15 May, and it will be months before I know the result.

The need for patience is very familiar to me from my novels. Someones I wait months after the final edits are done for a novel to be published and sometimes years. COVID and the current economic crises have both elongated my wait times (and me being Jewish doesn’t help with some parts of the industry and makes no difference at all to others): I have two novels queued and do not know when they will emerge. My first PhD was beset by quite different crises, but with the same result. The examination took three years, which pretty much cost me my career, back then.

This (almost finished) PhD is different in one big way. The discipline I’m working in is the first I am not entirely comfortable with. I am far more an historian than a literary scholar. Working in Literary Studies has given me a solid appreciation of the work of literary experts. History is not easier, but it suits the way my mind works. I like assembling data and making beautiful patterns of it and explaining it to the world. Now that I understand that not all research does this and that it’s a good thing that there are different approaches (truly, I understand story far, far better now that I can see it from more than one discipline – it’s gong to affect both my writing and my teaching, in good ways) my current work of non-fiction is suddenly a lot easier. I don’t have to read every bit of research written in the last 250 years in eleven languages to explain what needs to be explained. It still helps I have the languages, to be honest, but it also helps that I now look for who I’m talking to early on and far pay more attention to audience than I used to.

What does this add up to? First, even though I think of it as a dissertation, my PhD is a book. Now that I’m almost done with it, I can finish the book I began during my PhD intermission last year (that trip to Germany was for a purpose).

Two books in a year? Not quite. My earlier work is coming back to haunt me and I may have a third book, which is short essays and thus only needs editing. If this happens (and right now it looks likely) it’s a different type of book again, with quite different research. Short essays don’t need the deep and long research. They take somewhere between an hour (if I already know the subject and have the book I’m writing about in front of me) to about three days. The book adds up, over time, to about 8 months’ work, not three to four years.

Why do I calculate these things? I’m ill (and finally being a bit more open about it) and can’t do all the things I used to do. And yet I’m writing more than I ever have. Short stories (when someone asks) and novels and non-fiction. All these doctorates have helped me understand how much work I need to put in for my various types of writing.

Way back when I was a professional reviewer (a long, long time ago) one of the biggest issues I found with many works, was that balance between the right amount of research, taking the right direction for the research, and keeping in mind that the reader will have the book in front of them. All books need to be readable for their audiences. Those writers who hit this successfully every single time (and you can see some of these simply by looking at the work of other Treehouse writers – I share the Treehouse with amazing writers) can be trusted by their audience. You can pick up a book by them and know it will do what it is supposed to do and that you will entertained, and made to think, and delighted.

My writing is too diverse for this. For example, I’m untrustworthy for entertainment because my first PhD was so very not entertaining. It wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, I was in huge trouble for the first two years because, as my main supervisor said, “The reader is not supposed to want to turn the page.” This is why most theses are unpublishable as they are and why I didn’t even seek to get that first one published: I had to drain all the joy out to get it through examination.

I’ve learned a great deal over the years, and I managed to be properly scholarly without as much desiccation in the new thesis. It still can’t be published without significant changes. A dissertation is quite different to a book for the wider public.

I still don’t believe anyone needs three PhDs, even if I end up with three myself… but I am in love with the amount of learning along the way. Knowing the difference between writing for academics, for teachers, for the general public and for myself: not a bad outcome. Knowing when to stop researching and why to stop researching for about ten different types of books: what every writer needs.

Let me finish the last unfinished thought and then I’ll get back to work. What is that thought? I used nine languages for the first PhD, didn’t I? It was a Medieval History book, and I read over 139 primary sources (Old French epic legends, Middle English Arthuriana, Latin chronicles and the like), and I had to have the Medieval language and the modern language and… it was so much fun. For years I was the world expert in Old French insults: I still teach how to use them effectively in fighting scenes.

Remember it was five languages for the second PhD, which was a time travel novel and a dissertation? I should have learned an extra language, but I discovered that Old Occitan was easy to read when one knows Latin and various dialects of Old French. I try to say this pompously because, honestly it sounds pompous.

The only languages I needed for the current PhD were English and French and maybe a little Spanish. That’s all.

There have to be PhDs where one only needs one language, but I’ve not undertaken any. Why? There’s a reason for the languages. They open up concepts and give exciting new insights. There is very little research that is not better with knowledge of more languages. Think about it. Isn’t my life better because I can be rude to idiots in Old French?

On Keeping The Rules in Fiction

personby Madeleine Robins
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I have told some of this before, but I was thinking today about what happens when a writer changes the social rules* of the world they’re working in mid-work. Spoiler: it often doesn’t go well.

When I started writing my first Sarah Tolerance book, I drew, among other things, on a book I read when I was a teenager. The name and author of the book are lost to the mists of time: this was a period where I read voraciously, tearing through 5-6 books a week: classics, SF, fantasy, romantic suspense, Regency romances. I was a fairly uncritical reader: mostly I wanted the infusion of story. But even with the volume of story I was ingesting, some critical faculties were beginning to take shape. As you’ll note below, I read a lot of Austen.

So there was this nameless Regency romance. It is nameless and authorless because it irritated me so much that I threw it out when I finished it. Why did it piss me off so badly? It had a really fascinating setup, one that almost transcended the romance genre. Before the book starts, Our Heroine (hereinafter OH), has lived without marriage with a young man (I don’t remember if the decision not to marry was based on some Wollstonecraftian principle).*  At the time the book starts, the young man (who sounds like a monster to me) has died, and left OH (who has been cast off by her family after her disgrace) an income and a house–as long as she lives in the town where both she and the young man grew up. Where her shame is, of course, well known.

In the 19th century attitudes were still in the process of shifting from “marriage is about property” to “marriage is (sometimes) about love.” A woman’s marriageability was based on a number of factors: beauty was certainly one. Family property, and family lineage, were two other factors. Virginity was possibly the most important. A young woman who disposed of this crucial factor in her ability to make a good marriage was not only putting her own future in jeopardy, she was screwing up her family’s ability to wed fortune to fortune, or money to real estate, or Valued Lineage to Big Whomping Piles of Cash. Chastity had a dollar (or pound) sign attached. And no one thought it was odd or old-fashioned to think this way. It was okay to marry for love so long as the economics were in your favor; marrying below oneself for love (as Fanny Price’s mother did) had consequences. And sex without marriage could have near-fatal consequences for a well-bred girl. Continue reading “On Keeping The Rules in Fiction”…

I am the Red Queen

personby Gillian Polack
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I am so the Red Queen this week. I am running so very hard and would love to be able to feel that I’m on top of anything. I still can’t do long posts answering questions, but I have such good reason.  Six things have happened and any one of them would be enough to demand I re-order my day and drink much coffee.

Let me explain the things in random order. All of this has happened since Friday.

  1. I can see! Because I have unusually problematic eyes, new glasses are not so easy. I needed 3 pairs. Two pairs came last year and it took me about a week to get used to them. The third arrived on Friday and it took until today for my eyes to be able to interpret the world without dizziness. The new specs are very smart and I like them a lot, but, for me, buying glasses is always a bit of a gamble. If I have someone with me with good taste (as I had for the first two pairs) their good taste makes me look respectable. I cannot see things for myself, and for some reason, taking pictures of my in empty frames and then looking at the pictures on the screen just makes me want to walk away. I don’t know how I look, in other words, until I have the new glasses.
    Some of my friends hear the news and say, “New glasses!” They show me their reading glasses and tell me which chemist one can buy the best $10 pair at or that they were only $3.  Mine cost a lot, lot more than this. All three of mine together, in fact, added up to $1,000, which, given my eyesight, was a bargain. When I buy in Australia, I have to go to a specialist shop. It takes about two weeks once I’ve ordered, because the lenses have to be cut in Japan. Occasionally the optometrist loses my order (this happened last year, for the first two pairs) and I have to start from scratch. The new glasses are from France, and the same price as the Australian… but the glasses are lighter and easier to wear.
  2. My computer was dying.  On a bad day, it took eight hours to boot up. I have a new computer and it’s lovely. It arrived just before lunch yesterday and… I’m still sorting things out. Because I don’t like buying new computers, the technology changes a lot in between computers. I’m still adjusting to the new one. This may take a while.
  3. This is the week of my literary review. I sent 9,000 words to my supervisor and get comments on Thursday and then have to complete it. By Monday I also have to change a bunch of other things, and the Monday after (if I’ve got the dates right) then 65,000 words ought to be ready to go. In normal times, this is not a big deal. My normal self is seriously good at this kind of thinking and writing. This month is not normal times.
  4. My email didn’t transfer over properly from my old machine. All the saved categories mysteriously disappeared. Most of the deleted mail re-appeared. I found myself with well over 90,000 emails from just one account… and they included things that need to be done this week. I’m working on it.
  5. I have had a health blip recently. Since about November, in fact. On Sunday, my body announced that it may be deciding to recover from the blip, but it’s not certain. I feel a lot better than I have been. but I need to rest… a lot. Also, I lost 3 kg on Sunday, all inflammation deciding it didn’t like me (which is a good thing). It’s a bit too exciting. Blood tests are tomorrow, which is also a bit too exciting.
  6. I now know the shape of left wing antisemitism in Australia. I made a simple statement in public and received some very interesting and mostly vile responses and matched them to a bunch of previous knowledge. If anyone needs to understand the new antisemitism better, I can now explain it. That’s the good thing. The bad thing is that most of its purveyors want to tell Jews what we are and how we think and do not stop to listen. This is where the “All Jews murder children” stuff comes from, and I can now  explain how it begins in simply not listening, to not respecting, to bullying, to turning individuals invisible, to outright hate. If anyone wants to understand how the Left does this, ask me. I already knew about the right wing stuff, and have reached the stage where I can talk sensibly with many people on the right and we can come to a bit of an understanding given time and space. The irony is, of course, that I’m of the left.
    The reason I am the historian I am is because I refuse to dismiss all bigots out of hand. Most of them are really fine human beings who can’t see where their ideas and their hero-worshipping leads them. Right now, though, we’re at an odd point and it’s rather difficult to get past the hate and talk to the fine human being. This is the moment when violence is about to begin. This is also the moment when most people who are developing this problematic stuff are both moving into self-defensive mode and into a place where their ideas are consolidating into passionate beliefs. I’m seeing more theology of hate than I’ve seen in such a long time.
    I so miss being allowed to teach these things so that people can understand themselves and their friends and make their own decisions about which direction they’re going to travel in and why. Dumping people like me from teaching is, of course, a small factor in what’s happening. None of this is cheerful… but at least I understand more.

Is this enough cause to be late in the Treehouse and still not answering my readers’ questions?

The Pretty Past

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am working on spiffing up and making small revisions to my first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries, preparatory to reissuing them before I bring out #4 (title still in discussion watch the skies, etc.) One of the things I want to do is add a brief essay to each book about some aspect of the setting (and how, since these are books set in an alternate version of the English Regency, I might have changed it). This had led me to a whole lot of distracting but fun rumination, as well as an examination of why I wanted to write these books in the first place.

One of my favorite bits in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility is a throwaway line: as the Misses Dashwood and their hostess, Mrs. Jenkins, leave a carriage to attend an evening party in London, Mrs. Jenkins says “Mind your slippers, ladies! The horses have been here.”

Why do I love this? The line doesn’t appear in Austen; it’s there to remind the modern audience that this is a different world. It’s not just that social mores have changed. The day-to-day process of life has changed. We don’t get around using horses and carriages, so you don’t have to worry about horseshit soiling your nice dancing slippers. I love it because it’s a very mild antidote to the sorts of romances I grew up reading, which zipped right over the physical difficulties of life in the Olden Days. When I was writing Regency romances I would occasionally be asked (breathlessly) “don’t you wish you lived then?” To which my answer was always “Hell, no.” No painless dentistry, no antibiotics, no central heating, no reliable refrigeration, heating with wood or coal fire… Add to that my certainty that I would not have been the daughter of a wealthy peer, but more likely a maid or factory girl, dying early from a disfiguring disease (although in fact, dying early, particularly in childbirth, could happen to any woman up or down the social scale). The sanitized past of the Regency romances I gobbled by the ton began to annoy me.

One thing I knew when I started writing Point of Honour, the first of the Sarah Tolerance books, was that I wanted it to be largely set in London, and I wanted to at least nod to the physical rigors of life in the Olden Days. T0 the smells, particularly of the Thames, which was breathtakingly polluted, and particularly in the summer had a stench that penetrated to the city, even in the nice neighborhoods. To the waste and the necessity for crossing sweeps (hordes of little boys who haunted street corners and would swee the mud, dust, fecal matter and urine out of the path of a pedestrian willing to pay). To the darkness: gas lamps were installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and there was an ordinance that every house must have a lamp or torch outside the front door, to dispel a little of the darkness. In poorer neighborhoods this law was largely ignored, and the streets could be pitch dark.

Regency romances don’t mention the outhouses, but I wanted to. I wanted to get dentistry (and its lack) and medicine (and its well intentioned and often wrong-headed notions) and to at least reflect the difficulty of daily life for the people who are not in the top tier of society. See, I knew, given the premise of the book, that I would be playing with the social conventions of Regency London. If I–or my Fallen Woman protagonist–was going to spit in the eye of social norms, the least I could do was give her a milieu that was equally brave. And un-sanitized.

And I admit that I have a small frisson of delight in detailing the dental shortcomings and smallpox scars of my characters, and in writing a scene where a “gold finder” (a slang term for the guy who cleaned out your privy when such was needful) disrupts the orderly working of a household. It’s not that the past wasn’t pretty: it’s just that that’s not all it was.

 

 

 

 

 

The Right Way to Be a Writer

personby Madeleine Robins
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TLDR: There isn’t one.

I once auditioned to teach a writing course on the community level for a place that offered a bewildering array of classes in everything from becoming a real estate tycoon to becoming a high-end chef. It was pretty clear to me that they syllabus the program wanted was based on the 5- or 7-beat plot (which are essentially the same thing, but the 7-beat-plot breaks the stages down a bit more). So I put together a class outline and taught a sample class and lost the gig. Why? As near as I can tell, it’s because at the end of the class I said something like “Of course, this is only one way to write a novel, and it might not be the one for you.”

Apparently that was heresy. True, in my opinion, but heretical in that situation. Oh well.

I think many satisfying books have a glancing relation to the 5- or 7-beat story (there are many different terms for each beat–one man’s “introduction” might be another man’s “exposition,” etc. But the writer may get there without once thinking in those terms.

These days a lot of the writing advice I see is not about writing at all, but about the business of being a writer. And a lot of that advice is such that I, for one, would never have put pen to paper if I had seen it as a young and tender human. If you are the sort of person who likes to write, but writes slowly, or sweats over crafting a sentence, or thinks in a quirky, non-linear fashion, some of the rules could stop you dead. If you’re the kind of introvert for whom having a Social Media presence gives you shudders the rules could stop you dead. And rules really shouldn’t stop you dead, honest.

I was confidently told last month by someone who I assume is living up to her own dicta, that if I couldn’t publish a book a month–more would be better, but a girl’s got to sleep–then I would never make it as a writer.

Um.

It may be fortunate that I don’t make my living by writing, because I flunk many of the Right Way To Be A Writer tests. The fastest I have ever written a book was a little under three months–from turning in the outline to the editor  (I never outline, but it was a media tie-in book and such was required) to dropping the manuscript on said editor’s desk. Approval of the outline, by the way, came in a week after I delivered the book (the book was needed urgently, as the writer whose work had previously been scheduled for that slot had had to drop out–publishing schedules are sometimes inexorable). So: I am not going to be putting out a book a month, under any circumstances. I don’t, as noted, outline (actually, sometimes I outline when I’m about 2/3 of the way through a book to make sure I know where I”m going). The 5 or 7 steps in my plot are observed only when the book is done and I can say “hey, look! Rising action! I did that!” All in all, in terms of the Right Way shibboleths, I’m a pretty bad writer.

And yet I’ve written more than a dozen books, published 11 of them (I’m polishing #12 as we speak). So somehow, despite the rules, I appear to be a writer.

All this is to say: you are a writer if you write. You may not be an author (I tend to think of authors as persons who have written, and perhaps published. Authordom involves past tense). You may structure your work rigorously according to one metric or another, or wander, as I do, over the landscape of your plot until you find yourself at a satisfying destination. The rules are really just there to help you, not to grade you.

Okay: maybe there is one rule I would say is inviolable: Be yourself and have fun. If you’re having fun, even if it’s the stare-off-into-the-middle-distance-and-swear-under-your-breath sort of fun, then you’re doing it right. If you’re having fun, it’s far more likely that someone else–like the audience–will as well (all things being equal, and the book being written in sentences and stuff).

You can tie your own hands by following the rules; that may make you feel safer. But remember that art is by its nature a risky business.

Melted Brains

personby Gillian Polack
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These last few days I reacted to all the not-so-good things in my life by writing a story. The trigger was being told about six different interpretations of Dickens’ Christmas Carol in far too close succession. I’m not quite finished the story yet, but I had such a strong reaction to my small reveal that I am sitting back, bewildered.

The tale is set in a world I’ve used before, the same Jewish Australia that provides the setting for The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Judith, one of the protagonists of Wizardry has a boyfriend that people who read my short stories will know. Secret knowledge. Rather important secret knowledge. The story read with that knowledge is quite different to the story read without it. That’s not what my readers were reacting to. I didn’t tell them about Ash, who happens to be the Demon King and to be an outstanding student of Torah.

I still don’t know why these small words elected any excitement at all, I talked about writing “a Jewish Arthurian story, and the narrator is drunk.” The thing is, it being me, it’s not an adventure story. It’s a cosy tale set in the Middle Ages and is full of rabbis and people who think far too highly of themselves. Judith has opinions about everything and most of her knowledge is borrowed. Maimonides and Rashi are both mentioned, far too often and… trust me, this is not the story most people think of when they dream of Jewish Arthurian matters.

There is much Middle Ages in my life again, which is why it intrudes into my fiction. My next novel (the much-delayed one) is partly set in a Middle Ages. Not our Middle Ages, but close to it. It’s not our Middle Ages because I wanted to break away from the standard way we talk about history and bring people to life using… actual history. I always get into such trouble when I do this.

My non-fiction also contains the Middle Ages. Both of them have so much more than the Middle Ages, as does this little story. I think I might be living irony. Or is that sarcasm? We are in the middle of a heat wave in Australia and when the heat melts my brain the difference between irony and sarcasm melts along with it. This means my short story is the product of a melted brain and has a drunken narrator.

Pity my supporters on Patreon, because they will read it sometime in the next week. If they like it, I might consider editing it further and seeing if anyone wants to publish it*.

*I send all my new fiction out to patrons in a private newsletter. For some publishers this still counts as first publication and for others, not. In any case, I never send it out before it’s been given a thorough going-over, based partly on my patrons’ reactions to it. It’s the difference between a good first draft and a story ready to be shown to the world. My patrons get to see who I am as a writer, not just who I am when I have the help of amazing editors. I do not know what they will make of the drunken narrator nor the melted brain.

Mondayitis

personby Gillian Polack
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Do you ever have a week when you’ve got more to do than you’ll ever fit in and there’s not a lot of time and it’s all the best work, then fun stuff but you don’t feel well and the world world becomes too much so you sit down with a big cup of tea and watch Captain Scarlet? That’s me. Today. I’m not well and I’m busy and it’s all stuff I want to do…

I have until Thursday afternoon to finish the conference presentation. It’s about how I used my ethnohistorical self to devise a perfectly formed lost culture of magic for one of my characters. I get to talk about magic! And history! And my own writing! I’m talking about the cultural contexts of the magic in The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Demons in lemon trees. Home made amulets. That sort of thing. Except that it’s not ‘that sort of thing’ – I created a complex magic system based on the history of magic, specifically, Jewish magic that my character would have inherited. You can trace where her family lived for about 3000 years if you look at the crumbs of magic I left along the path of the novel. I’ve learned a lot more about the history of Jewish magic since then, and could now create more characters with quite different family heritage and give them all equally Jewish magic.

The truth is that I’m not well. I used to simply take time off to get over the illness-hump, because I get them all the time. Right now, though, I’m busy. I’ll be busy until next June. I love being busy, but I’ve not had to handle so much work alongside the illness since pre-COVID. That’s why I’ve been watching Captain Scarlet. I used to learn new ways of dealing with things by taking long walks or by dancing for two hours. I’ve learned that watching certain types of TV gets me that same thinking, the sort that will change my world because it must. What has Captain Scarlet done for me today? I know I shall include a reading in my presentation and that I shall record the reading for Patreon. I shall also give my patrons some of my coolest research photographs this month, which means I don’t have to write the new fiction I have no time for. And I shall write 700 more words tonight and my new book will reach 50,000 words. I have to finish with all the books on my table (about 40) and have them away before I need to use the table for anything but cups of tea, and those 700 words are the first step in this process. They will also free my brain, because I have 3 essays and that paper t write tomorrow.

Another way I deal with illness is by rewards. The days shopping is delivered, I have potential treats, which I cannot open until I have done the essential work. Tomorrow is such a day, and so IO shall write 6,000 words. Captain Scarlet taught me all this, so it must happen… after a cup of tea. One of the difficulties with my illnesses is staying hydrated, so tea comes first, and stretches and the gentle exercise that will get me back the mobility I had until I tried dancing last week.

It will all work, one gentle step at a time. Until I took that time and admitted just how unwell I am this week, I felt as if the world hated me and as if nothing would ever be finished. This is the single biggest reason for admitting things are impossible and for sitting down in front of the television with a big cup of tea. Light watching and big cups of tea help me find the distance I need to handle the otherwise impossible. Wishing life were kinder is not nearly as effective.

More on returning home

personby Gillian Polack
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Do not return from abroad. Not returning to a messy everyday is now a fixed star in the constellation of my life journeys. Of all my returns, the recent one is physically the most arduous, and also the most difficult to juggle. Yes, my everyday involves the equivalent of juggling while on a high wire with no shoes and no net.

I’ve been home over a week and I’m still juggling. What am I juggling? The theft of my purse (and its ongoing ramifications), the impossible flight home (things went wrong – not too seriously, but I left my flat in Dusseldorf at 10.30 am on Thursday and arrived at my flat in Canberra at 10.30 am on Saturday) and lots of little things that have gone not-quite-right or completely wrong since then. My favourite today was when I needed to speak to my doctor over the phone because they closed down my bus stop while I was away. It’s temporary, but I couldn’t walk to the next stop and still have the capacity to walk at the far end, see the doctor, run messages, and then everything in reverse. If I’d known the bus stop was closed, I would have left much earlier had a halfway chai at my favourite cafe.

Lots of small things add up. The last two weeks were more exhausting than the previous six weeks, which says a lot, given what I spent the previous six weeks doing.

Also, I was not wrong when I posted last week. Western Germany was easier to be openly Jewish than Australia is currently. A major political party supported a pro-Hezbollah rally in Sydney, for example, where Jewish deaths were threatened, but the party claims to not be antisemitic. I already miss talking about politics openly and easily.

My trip to Germany brought together so many things I’ve been thinking about for years. The book is writing itself at the moment. I will reach a stage soon where I will hit the research brick wall, but I have the first set of research materials all ready for when I reach that stage.

This book is on contemporary German views of their own Jewish history prior to 1700 and has become a place where a lot of things I’ve learned over my life come together. When the current Australian Greens metamorphosed into a small case study in the book, I found myself able to handle things a bit less fretfully. I need to understand and I need to help others understand… and I’m very lucky to have the luxury of a few weeks recovery time (because of my health, this time has been budgeted for) where the main thing I do is sort out the messes life produces, rest enough so that my body recovers from it all… and write.

Returning Home

personby Gillian Polack
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My everyday was so much easier in Germany. Antisemitism didn’t play silly buggers with the ground I walked on there, as it does in Australia. Australian antisemitism is mostly gentle and kind, but no less troublesome for that. Until I went to Germany I had no idea of its place in the general scheme of things, but now I understand that, too. Five weeks where I could literally be myself taught me that I am not the heart of the problem. Nor is me being Jewish. I know about what is wrong with Australia and why bigotry triumphs right now. Around me, many people are raging about Nazis, but doing nothing about the gentler and more insidious racism. Whatever I do to handle this will be uncomfortable, and if I don’t do anything I will also be uncomfortable.

How did Germany teach me these things?

It still has all the history that cause the Shoah. It’s dealt with some of it supremely well, and other parts not at all. My research project concerned how Germany handles its Jewish past, especially the past up to 1700. I explained I wasn’t a German historian, but a French/English one. I was entirely open about my Jewishness, but also about the parts my family played in the war. There were no closed doors. In fact, it was quite the opposite. People wanted to talk to me and tell me their views and hear what I had to say. They were excited by my questions and chased things up for me: we all know a lot more about Jews in the Saarland, about the relationship between lebuchen and honeycake, about the Jews who never returned to Germany, about medieval expulsions and why they were not always as they seemed, about Roman Jews in Germania… and a whole lot more. There will be a book. In fact, nearly half the book is already written (and needs a publisher!) but this post is not about that book.

I was able to use my experience to better understand the 1930s in Germany and why so many non-Jewish Germans were silent then. Also why everyone’s favourite patriotic children’s author was murdered. The murder was death camp stuff: tragically normal that year. The silence, however, was mostly not intentional. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of non-Jewish Germans did not hate Jews and are still trying to handle what happened. Many people closed doors for emotional safety because life was too full of problems. Small lives became smaller lives. Some of them closed doors to keep out people (Jews, Roma, people with the wrong politics or sexual preferences) who might make their own lives more difficult in a chancy decade. There was fear; there was selfishness; there was small life syndrome. The actual hatred was confined to a much tinier portion of the community than we mostly think.

Those who accepted the Nazis, or got on with their lives despite the Nazis are perfectly normal people. Good people who mostly led good lives. They silenced those around them without hate (or with only a little hate, not enough to murder or throw stones) and when the worst happened were terribly shocked. I learned a lot about things from how shocked people were and how, three generations later, they are still determined to fight and ensure this does not happen again. They are still dealing with their families being a part of the horror. Good people who discovered that goodness is not enough by itself, that silencing and closing doors and leading small lives can feed terror.

Australians are doing the small life thing to most Jewish Australians. I’m largely not dealing with hate. Three people I know well clearly hate me because I’m Jewish, only three, out of hundreds. The occasional hate mail is just that – an occasional nasty piece of email from a nasty piece of work. Most of the others who make my life more and more difficult are agreeing with politics that silences or isolates (why I am so worried about the Aussie Greens – anyone who backs them without pushing them to talk to the Jewish community as a whole is helping close doors) or they are dealing with impossible situations personally and do not have energy left to find out why I’m missing from this place or that, or… there are a number of other possibilities, but they all come down to preferring small lives above shared lives.

The biggest thing I noticed in Germany was how much easier life is when one doesn’t have to do a bunch of work to be heard. In Australia, I have to run an extra mile before anyone will listen to me, because I have to prove I’m someone who deserves a little attention. I have to open closed doors. Some of the once-open doors are locked and I have to beg for a key. All attention I previously had for my books, my classes,Women’s History Month, and a truckload of other things is immaterial to the world around me. at home Bookshops do not stock my books. Reviewers won’t review my books. And this applies to the vast, vast majority of Jewish writers.  In Germany, scholars and students looked at my books and my work. My life’s work is important and interesting. I could also talk openly about my research and its impact and everyone talked openly back. Me being Gillian is sufficient.

I’m not going to spend the rest of my life contacting politicians and people I used to work with and social activists who knew me, once upon a time. I wrote to them when I could before I left, and they never answered. I am still the person who can give excellent policy advice on these things. More so now, in fact, because of my current research. I’m still the person who spent twenty odd years of her life fighting for human rights for many people, and teaching people how to fight for themselves. I am an expert they need to talk to, but their doors are closed. Those politicians and activists and most of Australia’s left have chosen small lives. If someone doesn’t bother to read my email because I’m no longer the right person or the known person, or assumes that someone else will be more acceptable, then that’s their choice. All those choices have been made. I will not write any more letters.

If someone wants to talk with me, I am still the expert I once was. I discovered this is Germany. I don’t teach what one has to do to prevent or limit the spread of bigotry: I teach how things happen and tools that can be used. Choices and paths are for the person dealing with it in their every day. I once made a living providing history and understanding and tools, and had completely forgotten about that part of my life, because of the amount that part of my life has been sidelined. Right now, just getting to see anyone and get a decent conversation that may or may not lead to changes is like running a marathon. To run marathons, one needs spoons. I’m chronically ill. Another thing I discovered in Germany is that one can lead a much better life with a chronic illness if one doesn’t have to battle to be heard.

I’m still very happy to help anyone deal with identification of bigotry, whether they are themselves unintentionally excluding, how cultural tendencies push towards how we see people. However, I’m not well, and I’m not willing to spend all my energy explaining why I can be useful (very, very useful) at this moment in Australia’s history. I tried that, and it took all my energy with no results. I left thinking that I was not the person I thought I was, and had nothing useful to give. Now I realise, thanks to the last five weeks, that it is Australia that has changed and that I am simply one of many people dealing with the downside of that change. Being Jewish is my everyday, but that everyday results in closed doors. Much of Australia is quietly and gently hiding itself from anything that might cause it emotional distress, and one of those subjects if being Australian and Jewish. Simple descriptions are applied to us and who we are and how we live our lives is not considered something worth knowing.

If you want to talk to me about these things, and the shape of prejudice in society and how to handle different manifestations of that prejudice, then I’m happy to help. Ask me. Don’t wait for me to find you. If you want to scold me for being Jewish or thinking Jewishly or keep me out of things until I know my (polite and submissive) place, then you’re not seeing me.

If you want to know who is pushing me aside in this way, just look at groups of people or events I have been involved with in the past. If I’m not there, ask the event people why. I am not given reasons why – I’m just excluded – so I can’t speak for them.

If I am at an event and especially if I’m talking about things that matter to me, then please celebrate, for the people organising that event are not closing doors. They’re not taking the lazy path into bigotry. Their lives are bigger than this.

 

PS For those who are curious, I was a Research Fellow at Heinrich Heine University for a month, and was doing research supported by Deakin University. I owe both universities a great deal, for helping me understand the incomprehensible.

Free-Range Writing

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The only good thing about NaNoWriMo’s absurd defense of so-called “AI” writing devices is that it was announced at the same time as Ted Chiang explained in the New Yorker why large language models are incapable of producing good fiction: “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art”

Ted is as brilliant a writer of essays as he is of fiction, so that piece is full of excellent observations. I recommend reading the whole thing. One key point he makes is that writing requires making thousands of choices – maybe ten thousand for a short story – while the prompts for the writing bots don’t allow anything like that many. As he says:

The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

A bot that allowed you to make all the possible choices wouldn’t save you any time, but that’s the only kind that could even conceivably create art. All you can really put in a bot prompt box is your basic idea, and as Ted says about writing:

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium.

For those who missed it, NaNoWriMo issued a statement saying that it’s OK for people to use AI when participating in the program where everyone tries to write a novel in the month of November. They even claimed that it is “ableist” and “classist” to prevent people from using AI to write their novels.

The organization – which is apparently a 501(c)(3) – was taken to task on social media by a large number of writers, including some who are disabled and others who don’t come from money. There are, after all, a number of useful tools not powered by LLMs that are useful to the disabled and, as more than one person has pointed out, all you really need to write is a pencil and some paper.

It’s worth noting that NaNoWriMo’s supporters include ProWritingAid, an “AI” writing “toolkit” that costs money.

Well-known writers have stepped down from any involvement in the organization and, given the fallout, I wonder if NaNoWriMo will survive.

Just as an aside, most publishers don’t want anything generated by “AI,” so I’m not sure there’s much point in participating using AI if you want to actually publish what you write.

Plenty of smart people have responded to this nonsense effectively, so I won’t repeat all the things they said. But here’s the thing that gets me that doesn’t directly involve the controversy: Why did people make NaNoWriMo into an organization? Why couldn’t it just be an informal project? Continue reading “Free-Range Writing”…