Boyne’s World

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I want to talk about reality. Something that appears and reappears in my historical research life is that we all think we are firmly linked to reality. That we know and understand clearly the difference between pure fiction and the stuff of our everyday.

I want to introduce you to the work of John Boyne, because it quite clearly proves that this is not always the case. Why is Boyne’s work more important than the words of a seven year old friend who recently explained unicorns to me? Because the friend and I have a clear understanding that we believe in unicorns only in certain contexts. We step sideways into a fictional reality and are perfectly agreed on when we should step back and accept that the unicorn in question is a stuffed toy. It is, in fact, the unicorn in question is the stuffed toy that was used to promote the Glasgow world science fiction convention in Australia for two years. More than one child has played with or borrowed it and understands its particular links to reality. One talked to it and made sounds to demonstrate that it was talking back. We held a three-way conversation and her mother was not at all worried that we had descended into a place where the rules of physics and the natural order we know did not hold.

My question is whether John Boyne has the same understanding? He might. If he does, then his work contains other problems. I’ll leave the other problems to you (I’ve had enough of antisemitism today – I’m Jewish and accusations are currently part of my real and ordinary life) and look solely at how Boyne works with the worlds he creates as a writer, and with history.

Let’s start with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. It’s read by children all over the world, and is the basis for many people’s view of the Holocaust. As fiction, this is a pain, but not in and of itself a problem. Boyne could keep it fictional quite easily by saying, “This is not built from our world. It is imaginary” and suggest that something else be prescribed reading on the Holocaust, something with a stronger basis in our reality. He could also rewrite Jewish characters so they were not cardboard cutouts. I feel like Pinocchio, wanting to be a real human being.

I have not seen him say his work is not our world. Instead, he wrote a sequel, which is at least as problematic as the first novel and is also recommended to me by people who want me to know more about the Holocaust. I ask them where my family is in the book and they cannot answer. I am still a wooden puppet. All my family in Europe in 1939, except for one teenager, died in Auschwitz. Ask me about it sometime. The story is nothing like Boyne’s novels.

If you want to understand where Boyne’s novels differ from actual history and lived experience and why not accepting them as fantasy or magical is a problem, this site is a good place to start:

https://holocaustcentrenorth.org.uk/blog/the-problem-with-the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas/

Until the release of a third novel by Boyne, I didn’t realise that the problem was one with reality, nor that Boyne was such a lazy researcher. In A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, Boyne uses a recipe for dye that is genuine, because he researched it. He researched it in the same way that I researched the title of his novel, just a moment ago. He used the internet and a search engine. The recipe he came up with was from a game spun from the Legend of Zelda.

I’ve had to look up dyes, myself. I needed a Medieval recipe for a black dye for my forthcoming novel. I didn’t like what I read on the internet and I didn’t trust myself to interpret dying technique without advice, so me, I asked a textile archaeologist, Dr Katrin Kania. An email each way and I had my dye, suitable for exactly the right place and time. My dye may still contain errors, but those are errors of interpretation, not errors of existence.

This recipe had me thinking about how I could accept a well-written novel that has a bunch of problems, some ethical. My conclusion is pretty much what gave me my opening to this little piece. Boyne now represents to me a writer whose work claims historicity but is actually, like my own work, fantastical or science fiction. My work is more historically accurate than his in some places (for instance in my time travel novel) because, well, I’m an historian. The Old Occitan in Langue.doc 1305 is an indication that history is a base for my fiction. The Zelda recipe is an indication that fantasy is a base for his, while the apparent reality of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas suggests alternate history. A nicer Holocaust than the one Jews and Romani actually went through and mostly failed to survive. A Holocaust that didn’t murder children on arrival at an extermination camp and where young German boys weren’t part of Hitler’s youth, and where children could play by a barbed wire fence manned by guards who shot to kill.

This helps me understand some of the people who tell me day in and day out that they do not hate Jews: they live in a fantasy world, just like Boyne. Maybe even the same fantasy world as Boyne.

I did not mean to write anything sarcastic today, but it’s one of those days where body aches and antisemitism walk side by side. If I were to create an alternate reality from today, it would be more depressing than ours. It’s already been created, though, in various places, including in some of the stories in Other Covenants.

I wrote one of the hopeful and happy stories in that volume. I need to get back to that place, where I admit the bigotry and stupidity and that some people are lucky enough to live in a safer world. That’s the thing, Boyne’s fantasy world reflects his own sense of what the real world looks like, as do my fantasy worlds. In my real world, the fate of Australia’s Jews depends on our election on May 3. He lives in a world that’s quite terrifying for me, because he cannot see who he hurts with his writing and how. If he wants to contest that, I would like to see him assert a different sense of reality… by making the Zelda dye using the original ingredients*.

* You can find the recipe partway down the page here: Boy in the Striped Pyjamas writer accidentally includes Zelda recipe in new novel | Eurogamer.net

No Going Back to Normal

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m reading a collection of essays called The New Possible in which the authors discuss their visions of what the future should look like and how we can get there. It was published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and the first piece, by Jeremy Lent, talks about the kind of balanced civilization we need to develop.

Early in the piece, he asks:

Does it seem like, as soon as one crisis passes, another one rears its head before you can even settle back to some semblance of normal?

And then, discussing not just Covid but the Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, he points out:

Ultimately, there is no going back to normal because normal no longer exists.

It’s an argument based on the deep flaws in neoliberalism. I don’t disagree with either his thesis or his goals, but I think I’d put the bit about normal differently:

We shouldn’t go back to normal because normal sucked.

Now these days, what with the Stupid Coup (a term Rebecca Solnit came up with that fits my perception of things), many of us, including me, would take the old normal. After all, they’re destroying parts of the government that worked well – like the Weather Service and NOAA – and making those that needed some changes, such as the understaffed Social Security offices and Veteran’s care, worse.

That’s not the mention the blatant racism of the “anti DEI” campaign, one that wants to eliminate Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from our history. (It was disgusting that the baseball team that brought Robinson into the majors went to the White House despite the grifter’s efforts to erase him.)

All the flaws that exist in what passed for normal are still there and being made worse – bombing and union busting and mistreatment of immigrants – while people who shouldn’t be in charge are destroying the good stuff.

A couple of months of this and most of us – me included – would really love a return to normal. Except, like I said, normal sucked. Continue reading “No Going Back to Normal”…

A tale of two memoirs

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I love to listen to audiobooks while I work in the garden, take a walk, or cook a meal. Recently, I borrowed two memoirs from my public library and was struck by the contrast. Both were written by famous people and narrated by themselves. I was curious enough about each of them to listen to their stories.

The first was Spare, by Prince Harry (Random House), mostly because it popped up on my screen. Okay, I thought, his perspective on growing up in the shadow of Princess Diana’s death should be be interesting. His life has been very different from (or, in Brit: to) mine.

Being in the public spotlight does not qualify a person to write a compelling memoir, nor does belonging to a royal family confer the ability to narrate with clarity and emotion. Spare fails on both counts. The charm of Harry’s accent lasted about five minutes, long enough for the emotional shallowness—a combination of the dry text and the manner in which it was read aloud—and lack of awareness of his elite white privilege to wear thin. Since I know from my own experience what it’s like to lose a parent unexpectedly, I hoped I’d be able to connect with Harry’s loss. I found his denial of Diana’s death understandable as a child. The problem was that Harry, the adult looking back, seemed to not have gained any insight or grown beyond denial as a childish survival strategy. I heard no understanding of how much he’d matured through adversity, the pain he’d walked through. No connection between that loss and the subsequent estrangements from other members of his family or the mental health issues with which he struggled later in life. But there was lots about the privileged life where everything was provided without him having to work for it and which he accepted without question.

I finally gave up, so I never got to hear about his military service or his courtship with Meghan Markle and how they made a life for themselves apart from his royal relatives. I wish them well, but I found little in this audiobook memoir to attract and hold my interest in who Harry is as a person.

 In contrast, Lovely One, A Memoir, by Ketanji Brown Jackson (Random House) was a joy from start to finish. Jackson is the newest member of the US Supreme Court and the first Black woman to be
confirmed to that post. As a student, she excelled in public speaking and debate, tackling challenging topics with determination and extraordinary eloquence. Her facility with communicating complex ideas shines through her narrative, as does her love for her family, her capacity for enduring friendship, her passion for justice, and her unwavering courage. Whether she is talking about the African origin of her name, the environment of racism and misogyny prevalent in here field even today, her and her husband’s struggles to maintain separate careers while raising two daughters, one of whom is autistic, she speaks with unusual clarity and persuasiveness. I loved every minute of her story. In another life, I want to be her best friend.

Highly recommended.

 

 

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 to 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’d already done a lot of research in other disciplines and I already read all the 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. For 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 very rigorous, which is why I had most of what I needed before I began. I added Latin and palaeography to my skills in Canada and they are 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 pay to have critical works translated or work 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 from 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 going 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 that I pay far 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 be entertained, and often be made to think, and be 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 because its audience is entirely different.

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 both 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 have the manual for it. I read through it once and realised that was enough to read most texts in Old Occitan. A friend once called this “the Medievalist advantage.” I try to say everything in the paragraph 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. I learned the disciple, not extra languages.

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’s 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?

In Praise of Inefficiency

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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At the beginning of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas she discusses a 1996 paleontology project in a cave on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska where the scientists, while looking at animal bones, found human remains.

They immediately stopped work and consulted with people from the Tlingit and Haida tribes who live in the region. After some discussions, it was agreed that the scientists could continue, but that if they found it was a sacred burial site, they would stop. And they were also required to share their findings with the tribes before they were published.

In this case, it was not a burial site and the eventual outcome of the work showed that the bones of the person they found were related to the people living there and that they went back more than 10,000 years.

But what got me were not just the results, but the fact that the paleontologists stopped and consulted with the people native to the region. That does not fit into the modern focus on being “efficient.”

Meeting with people takes time, especially when the way the paleontologists look at the world and the way indigenous cultures look at the world are often at cross purposes. It’s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.

But they didn’t, and the end result was useful to everyone. It just took extra time. And it treated people who were affected by the work with respect.

That brings me to how democracy should work. The people who are affected by decisions need an opportunity to discuss the matter and actually be heard. This is slow. It’s not efficient. But it’s vital to making a government that people can believe in.

I’m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It’s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I’m more likely to get out and walk if I have an errand to run. So I try to run my errands in opposite directions, even if I could combine them in one, and I stretch them out over a couple of days when I could do them all at once.

It’s a purposeful inefficiency. It’s not careless or sloppy. And that’s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.

Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods – though they are often structured with a lot of annoying rules that you only understand if you spend a lot of time going to council meetings. And much of that has become pro forma: you have comment period and then the council does what they were going to do anyway.

You often don’t get the impression that anyone is listening.

So what if, say, you were going to fund housing for homeless people and you actually spent a great deal of time talking with the homeless people in the area about what they needed and what they wanted. I’m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.

It also probably wouldn’t add as much to the coffers of the local developers who make their living getting city contracts to building housing for low income people who are never consulted about what kind of housing they need and want.

It’s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can’t afford a place to live. Continue reading “In Praise of Inefficiency”…

Showing Up

personby Madeleine Robins
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A hand-lettered protest sign upside down, propped against a green plaid couch.Like five million of my fellow Americans, I spent Saturday, April 5, outdoors in the company of a few thousand neighbors, protesting the policies and behavior of the Executive branch, and the lackluster resistance by the Legislative branch. Here in San Francisco we were lucky: the sun was bright, the skies were blue, it was comfortably warm, and the minimal police presence appeared to be there to manage traffic. There were speakers at the rally I was at (albeit with a very underpowered sound system that made the speeches hard to hear) covering the gamut of areas of concern, from illegal deportation to attacks on civil rights, to tariffs, to the defunding of damned near everything I care about (National Parks, education, medical research, museums, etc.).  We waved our signs, chanted some chants, generally let the world know that we are angry–enraged–about the actions the current president and his minions have been taking since January 20. Then, as the rally wound down I wandered over to public transit and rode home in company with some of the folk who had been at the rally too (as evidenced by the signs and sunburn I saw around me). However angry we in the aggregate might be, the folks at the SF rally were polite and entirely non-violent; there were kids in strollers, elders in walkers, folks in wheelchairs, just… everyone.

My own personal bubble is filled with people who are concerned about the way things are going and how much worse it could get, so I was startled to encounter people in San Francisco who didn’t know that the rallies were happening. Not that they disapproved, they weren’t aware (when I stopped to get a coffee, the barista saw the sign I carried, asked what was going on. When I told her, she moved my coffee order up to the front “so you won’t be late”). I know there are  people in my neighborhood–yes, even in San Francisco–who think the actions of the current administration are just dandy (although I do wonder how they’re feeling given the state of the stock market right now). I think it’s important for me to remember that there are a lot of different ways to feel about right now. I don’t know how the small conservative cohort of my neighborhood feels about the rallies–one guy I ran into rolled his eyes at my sign, but said “at least you got a nice day for it.”

So what was the point?

Showing up. Being there among others who are as frightened and angry as I am. Part of the tactics being used to dismantle the government and disrupt social norms is to persuade us that we’re each in it alone, that we have no power, that we have no voice. But I felt good about showing up. I felt good that there were others–thousands of others in my city, and millions across the country–who also showed up.

Showing up doesn’t fix things, any more than Senator Cory Booker’s magnificent 25 hour filibuster on the Senate floor fixed things. Not everything one does creates a fix. But showing up creates solidarity, underscores the problems being protested, energizes the people there with an energy that can spill outward and onward. It can show the people with power who are wavering about taking action that there is pressure to act rightly. And it can get people off the bench: a lot of the speakers at the rally I was at encouraged people to do the things that create solutions: volunteer, run for office, make phone calls, rattle cages; there were places to sign up to do all of those things, and those tables were busy.

I know people in other states whose weather was not as fine as ours in San Francisco. They stood out in the cold and the rain, bundled up and with umbrellas and rainbows, and they showed up. I stand in solidarity with all of them.

A Week in the Life…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the final throes of the thesis-writing. In five weeks, my thesis will be submitted for examination. This means the complete thing needs to be done by this Friday. Sounds fine? Except… this Saturday is Passover. Some friends helped me with some of the shopping and I’ve ordered everything else for delivery plus the fresh stuff at the market), but I need to have the flat clean (since I will be hosting) and the kitchen made as proper as I can. I come from a family that had special dishes for the festival, but my health makes a whole bunch of things not possible and complete kashruth is one of them. I do a best-I-can version, which is not at all suitable for anyone religious.

I do some thesis, do some Passover prep, meet another deadline, deal with the latest panic (my mouse died over the weekend, for instance and my printer is currently sulking), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, do some of my exercises, wonder if I’ll get any sleep, worry about my mother (who has COVID, as do two of my close friends), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, and so on until I can sleep. It will all be sorted by Sunday, and then I will quite possibly not wake up for 36 hours.

Tomorrow I have coffee with a neighbour. Normally I would ask to not do anything extra this week, because I’m already doing 18 hour days, but he’s very seriously ill and can be quite difficult even when he’s well and I cannot leave it long. So… tomorrow.

I will have to send someone a note about a Wednesday meeting. It’s with a local candidate. We have elections on 3 May, you see. I really need to talk to him and I’ve tried and tried and failed and failed and finally he comes to the Jewish Community Centre and it’s the Wednesday before my thesis has to be sent and before Passover. His timing is so bad.

He should have asked to see us last week, or left it until the week before the election. The timing suggests that he really doesn’t see antisemitism (or us, as the local Jewish community) as a high priority. Also, his office gave me the run around when I offered to talk to someone about why things are the way they are at the moment – and this is part of my academic expertise and I can be really useful… The staff of two politicians have given me the run around. I so miss my previous self, who was asked about things! Anyhow, I’ve decided not to offer my knowledge and understanding to politicians any more. I’d rather meet my deadlines and enjoy cooking for Passover.

Other people are asking me about things, which is a bit of a relief. My big insight for today is that it’s actually very easy to identify who is marching for hate and who is marching with hope that they can improve the wrongs of the world. It’s not what side people take (the good side of history that so many people claim right now… not actually how most of the world operates).

The way people march tells us so much. Look at the body language and listen to the slogans. Do the slogans provide methods to effect change, or are they declamations that lead nowhere. Does the group prevent others from passing, or block access to anywhere? How angry are the people, and what reasons do the slogans give for any anger? Do marchers stop and talk and listen, or do they simply shout, or do they accuse strangers of… almost anything. Telling strangers who the strangers are and shouting in their face is the issue here: actual change agents talk and listen, because change happens when people can see they’re a potential part of solutions. Those marches that breathe fire and brimstone and don’t take a moment to stop being angry, those marches where (as happened this week) a group surround a single stranger and bullies them – they’re the marching equivalent of Nazis in the 1930s. This doesn’t mean their cause is terrible: it means that these particular people are bullies.

Look at how people march and what specific goals they aim to achieve with the march, and whether not even a small part of those marching bully anyone watching or anyone trying to get past and you get a good notion of whether they really care about others… or whether they are informed by hate. If you don’t want to carry that hate with you, you need a way of winding down.

My way is often thinking about food. I have learned a whole new bread-making method in the last few weeks, entirely to handle the antisemitic hate I encounter. This week is not about that bread, however: now that I’ve sorted out how I will obtain all the things for cooking, I have most of a menu for Saturday night.

We begin, of course, with the ritual things. I have horseradish (it cost an arm and a leg, but I have some – it’s simply not in season in autumn) and matzah. I will serve the matzah with charoseth. My father’s charoseth recipe is wonderful: apples and almonds and sweet wine made from Concord grapes and enormous amounts of cinnamon.

After the charoseth, there will be the traditional eggs and potatoes, to be dipped in salt water. I have organic free range hen’s eggs from my local egg farmer ($25 for 60 large eggs, for those tracking the prices of eggs), and also a little packet of quail eggs. There will be no chopped liver – I have the ingredients (the liver is in the freezer) but intend to eat it on Friday week.

After that, of course, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah dumplings) both of which I make according to old family recipes. The main course is roast chicken (with lemon and garlic) and vegetables. The roasted vegetables will be potato and lotus root. I haven’t decided all the side dishes yet, but there are two types of pickled cucumber, and the same kind of ancient olives that grew near Jerusalem around the time the Temple fell. There is a story behind why these olives grow in Australia, and that story has family connections.

I was going to make cakes (an orange-almond one and a choc-nut one) for dessert, but I think we’re skipping dessert and going straight to afters. The Passover meal I grew up with is far, far too large for modern Australia. A friend found me chocolate macaroons and I have dark chocolate, and the best organic dried muscatels from a local farm. I will have fresh figs with this, and maybe some other autumn fruit. I may make one of the cakes during the week… or I may not.

Tomorrow, to give me time away from my computer on such a busy day, I shall make bagels. That’s the last of the flour and yeast. Tomorrow lunch is the last of the rice and the last of the nori. Step by step I sort my world, and then I cook the big dinner on Saturday.

II live such a simple, slow life.

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

For the Good of the Realm in Outcasts StoryBundle

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Covers of all the books in the Outcasts Storybundle.

My novel For the Good of the Realm is part of the Outcasts StoryBundle, curated by Danielle Ackley-McPhail.

As the description on the StoryBundle link says, “Outsiders. Rebels. Free-Thinkers. Who doesn’t love an underdog?” In all these books an outsider plays a key role even though they’re likely not appreciated.

As with all storybundles, you can get the whole package of ebooks for $20 or pay more if you’re so inclined.

Read more about the bundle on the eSpec Books blog.

In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in August, 2019. I’m still here, still holding on to hope. We aren’t all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.

Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essays called “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness, and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me as well as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But the constant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaults on democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.

What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, such disregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and air water, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for our lives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not become the enemy?

I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistance is. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are many possible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person. Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters in front of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’s businesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). I wore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Those memories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember how frustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of 100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and so forth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friends still got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did were wounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave up hope that the senseless carnage would ever end.

But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching and chanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduring lesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, over and over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guess history, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling down a slope create a landslide.

My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when I saw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were a terrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parents were active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party” in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became the target of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillance since 1947.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalized citizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “went underground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and using only cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of those havens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretly watching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd to me to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time. Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard, terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Not unscarred — it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention to myself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better, more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from the mid-60s by Carl Oglesby (I think) on my door. I searched for it on the internet and couldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being a time to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another, and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, and equality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness, racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government, then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: we of the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.

This is what I tell young people today. I remember what my parents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or another during the Cold War:

Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, not just what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness. Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balance in your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.