I don’t know how to say this, but I’m going home this week. I don’t know what I will do in my last little time in Germany, but I do know the flight back home to Canberra (3 flights, one of which is just under 14 hours long) is a total pain. Even with the best service and the nicest staff… it’s too long. So think of me this week. I’ll be bereft at my great adventure finishing, and then I have to get home. One good thing. I left home in midwinter. As I type this blogpost, it’s -2 degrees outside. 28.4F, for those who need Fahrenheit. I am going into summer. And when I leave Germany, I will be heading into spring.
I marvel at this kind of change every time I travel. My favourite is, of course, the once I traveled from Sydney to Los Angeles. I then went on to Houston, where my book tour began, but the Sydney to LA was the magic bit. I arrived earlier than I had left…
My father would be 106 today, if he were still with us. It’s also Friday the thirteenth and in fact he was born on a Friday the thirteenth. I looked it up once just in case this was just one of those family stories, and found it was true.
My parents also got married on a Friday the thirteenth. I looked that one up, too. It was our family joke – Friday the thirteenth was our lucky day.
Given that in this, the wealthiest country in the world, a place full of supposedly educated people, hotels (and possibly many other tall buildings) do not include a thirteenth floor, deciding that Friday the thirteenth is your lucky day is a small rebellion. Or a small statement of sanity.
Or, at least, out of step. My family was always a little out of step.
There is always at least one Friday the thirteenth in a given year, according to math wizards. 1918, when my father was born, had two, though the year my parents got married only had one. Every once in awhile there are three.
So obviously a reasonable number of people are born on a Friday the thirteenth – probably about the same number as are born on a Friday the first or any other day of the month (except 29, 30, and 31, since there are fewer of those in a year).
I wrote about public health a couple of weeks ago: specifically how I became fascinated by the people who do the detective work of tracking infections and threats to the public weal to their sources. In doing so I was reminded of Typhoid Mary Mallon. She was an interesting and rather tragic character. And stubborn as hell.
Mary Mallon, 1909
Mary Mallon emigrated to the US from County Tyrone, Ireland, when she was 15 years old. She stayed with family for a while, but for most of her professional life she “lived in” as a domestic worker, almost always as a cook. And she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, which is not a quality you want in someone involved in food prep. It is possible that she was infected in utero: that her mother had typhoid when she was pregnant. But Mary was, initially at least, unaware. And cooking was what she knew.
In 1900 Mary started working in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New York City. Within a couple of weeks people there fell ill. She left that job and went to the city. At her first post there several people became ill with fevers and diarrhea; she moved to another job soon after, and seven of the eight people in this new household became sick. In 1904 she went to work for the Gilsey family, where, once again, people became ill (no one in the family itself–Mary was cooking for the house staff). Once again Mary decamped, and got a job in Tuxedo Park, NY (yes, where the tuxedo was created). Within two weeks a member of the household staff came down with typhoid and was hospitalized. This time the staff member died, and again, Mary departed ahead of inquiry. Eventually, Mary wound up in toney Oyster Bay, Long Island, working for banker Charles Warren in a rented summer cottage. When more than half the people in the family came down with typhoid, the property’s owner became involved. Aside from the awfulness of the illness itself, the outbreak brought down the property value: typhoid was considered, at the time, to be a disease that only poor people in squalid circumstances got. Worrying that potential renters would believe he had a “sick” house, the owner had the pipes tested, looking for the possibility that the property itself was the culprit. The pipe and house came up clean. They had to look elsewhere.
So the owner of that Oyster Bay property hired an investigator, George Soper, to figure out how disease had come to his house in Oyster Bay. Backtracking, Soper could find only one person, an Irish cook who fitted a specific physical description, who had been at the site of all the outbreaks; Mary changed her name from job to job, but her accent and her description made her fairly easy to trace. Eventually Soper tracked her to the city, working for a family on Park Avenue.
Their meeting did not go well.
We forget, these days, that when Mary Mallon was told that she was a carrier, many people didn’t believe in germ theory. The idea that there were little thingies in your body which could not only cause disease but could somehow leap to other people’s bodies and make them sick, was fantastic. Mary Mallon certainly didn’t believe it: she threatened Soper with a carving fork. She refused to give urine or stool samples. Without Mary’s cooperation Soper had to establish an airtight history, and he did it. Over five years, members of seven out of the eight families Mary Mallon had worked for had contracted typhoid. Mary, her livelihood imperiled, denied any possible involvement: typhoid was everywhere, the food must have been contaminated by someone else, this was a plot to implicate her, a poor, innocent domestic worker… and Irish to boot. (Anti-Irish prejudice was still a thing at the beginning of the 20th century.)
Having no luck trying to deal with Mary Mallon, Soper went to the department of Public Health. They went all in and arrested her: she was forced into an ambulance by five policeman and a female doctor (who had to sit on her). At the hospital she was forced to give samples. They were found to be teeming with typhoid bacteria.
Public Health was a new thing in 1907, and I don’t think there had ever been a case like Mary Mallon’s before to establish precedent. Mallon made it clear she didn’t believe she was a carrier and would not cooperate; when doctors decided that the likeliest reservoir of bacteria in her system was her gallbladder, and suggested having it removed could solve the problem, Mallon refused.* The DPH and the legal system was convinced she posed a danger to the community, and she was sentenced to quarantine on an island in the East River. There she lived, giving stool and urine samples three times a week (perhaps someone thought she might magically test negative some day? In any event, it did not happen). Mallon could not do the work she did best (apparently she was a very good cook) and was living on the verge of poverty when George Soper visited and suggested that he would write a book about her case and give her half the proceeds. Rather than seeing this as a unique business opportunity, Mary locked herself in the bathroom until he left: understandably she detested being called Typhoid Mary.
In 1910 Mary was released from quarantine on the condition that she never work again as a cook, and that she take pains to avoid communication of disease to others (it is reported that Mary Mallon didn’t see much point in washing her hands until she thought they were dirty… and they didn’t look dirty after she used the toilet, so why wash then?). Quarantine had been hard on her: she was used as a guinea pig with trials of various medications, and non-typhoid illness was ignored. I suspect she would have promised anything to get off the island and back to something like a normal life. Once back in the city Mary found work as a laundress, but it paid only half of what she could make as a cook, and she didn’t like the work. After a year or so she started cooking again, using assumed names. Staffing agencies wouldn’t hire her, so she went directly to the kitchens of hotels and restaurants, and predictably, sadly, everywhere she worked there were typhoid outbreaks.
In 1915 Mallon went to work in the kitchen of the Sloane Hospital for Women. Patients got sick. Two died. George Soper, Ace Typhoid Investigator, identified Mary Mallon. She was again arrested, and again sentenced to quarantine on North Brother Island, where she stayed for the next 23 years. She was given a cottage to live in, and wound up working in a laboratory on the island as a technician.
Public opinion, which had initially seen Mary Mallon as a villain–not just disease, but that carving fork! the swearing and fighting back!–later reversed, and there was some sympathy for a woman who, through no fault of her own, found herself a public danger and unable to do the one thing she was demonstrably good at. Mary Mallon had a stroke in 1932 and died in 1938 at the age of 69. The nickname she hated is still in use, associated with recklessness, callousness, and the spreading of disease. Poor Mary.
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*gallbladder surgery was not the commonplace is is now. Mallon could legitimately have feared that she would die on the table.
This week may well be entirely spent in Dusseldorf. Or it may not. Things are being planned, but I don’t know the dates. I do know, however, that I am giving workshops. My favourite one is a subject I used to teach a lot and haven’t had the chance and … it’s going to be so much fun. A whole group of German translators are going to learn how to write battle scenes from the Old French epic legends. The epic legends were written in Old French. I cannot write in Old French, though i can still read it, so I teach in English. I’ve used the English writing to show how language changes the way we think about things and so, after the group had learned how to write an Old French poetic technique into English… they’re going to translate their verse into German. They are all far better linguists than me, so I’m going to learn a lot by teaching them. If I’m really lucky, I will learn some really effective German insults, along the way. I do not expect the students will use them on me. Insults just happen to be a part of that form of verse…
The details of the other workshop won’t be public for a few days (as I write this). That gives me a great quandary – do I tell you, because it will all be known by the time you read this? Or do I obey everyone and not tell you. I am obedient tonight, largely because it’s an impossible hour here and I am especially obedient when it means I get to sleep a few minutes faster! If you want to know what else I did in Dusseldorf this week (including that workshop) ask, and I’ll be forced to tell you when I return.
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”…
This week I travel to the Saarland. I’ll be working with friends who are also locals, because my German is pretty bad. This is when we delve into what people know about their local landscapes, foodways, folklore and other things. The Saarland is a special region. I’m visiting it and hopefully also Aachen to try to understand the role Charlemagne and his heirs and then the Holy Roman Empire played in the lives of Jews. When they came, why they came… and what locals understand of any of this. Do they remember the importance of their Jewish neighbours, once upon a time? I’ve already played with maps and I know just how important this region was. It’s not talked about a lot, but it was so important that France and Germany have fought over it. Most Jewish histories talk about the French side of the border, of Nancy and Metz. The German side is just as important.
I’m worried about just one thing. Very worried. I know I’m going to make Dreyfus jokes and I should not. The Australian Attorney-General is Mark Dreyfus and his father conducted me in a school choir once upon a time and, as an historian of France I’ve read up on the whole Dreyfus Affair and one of my favourite French writers wrote the ‘J’accuse’ letter, and the whole Dreyfus name comes from that border area, some of which is now in France and some now in Germany… and… I will try so very hard not to make Dreyfus jokes. Those jokes would be wrong in so very many ways. and yet I’m already tempted
Just to start with, there are numerous forms for the written word: poetry, essays, short stories, novels, memoirs, philosophic works, deep reporting, journalism of many types, advertising, plays, movies, television, speeches …
In the case of fiction in particular, some types are very experimental, some are very commercial, some fit neatly into genre categories — SF, fantasy, “literary”, porn — some don’t fit at all.
There are best sellers and books that barely sell. There are books that are recognized only after the author is long dead.
There are probably many very good books that never get noticed. There are many bad books that make lots of money.
There are a few writers who get rich, a few who get famous. Some win all the prizes; some never even make the short list.
There are lots of writers with day jobs. Some of them are trying to figure out how to quit their day jobs.
If what really matters to you is wealth and fame, there are probably easier paths than the creative ones.
So working on the assumption that you’re not likely to end up wealthy or famous or a Nobel Laureate, what is it that would make you feel successful as a writer?
I think this is an important question and one that can keep some of us from descending into the sloughs of despair. It’s also useful in helping writers starting out figure out what they really want from their career, which is why I started with an incomplete list of all the ways to be a writer.
I wrote this post a dozen years ago, just re-read it, and find I liked it enough to post again.
I have just finished reading Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility (which is to say, the final shooting script–Thompson wrote dozens of versions of the screenplay before it was acquired and put into production) and her diary from the shoot*. She is uniformly witty and down to earth (her comments about zits, hangovers, and feeling like a talentless hack are not only reassuring to the rest of the world–which is to say, to me–but are funny in their own right) and endlessly appreciative of her colleagues on camera and behind the scenes. I wish I’d been a gofer on that film.
Reading the diary, in particular, reminded me of the extent to which the production of an historical film of good intent (meaning, one that wants to get it right) relies on experts: the horse wrangler who teaches Willoughby how to drive a curricle (the sportscar of its day); the costumers and designers; the dance teachers; and Jane Gibson, “movement duenna and expert on all manners historical,” who taught bearing and manners and the reverence. By which I mean bowing and curtseying.
During my brief career studying ballet as a kid the first thing Miss Dear (honest to God, it was her name) taught us was the “reverence,” a deep bow which was to be given to her at the beginning and end of each class. Her class of 7-year-olds mostly teetered and tried not to fall over. Later, when I took some classes in historic dance, I learned several different reverences: it wasn’t until some time in the 17th century, I believe, that bowing and curtseying split off into sex-differentiated motions. According to Wikipedia, that font of all wisdom, the curtsey is a gesture of respect from an inferior to a superior. Hence all those bobbing Victorian maids in the movies (“yes, m’lady.” **bob**). Per Thompson:
“We learn the root and meaning of the bows and curtsies–or reverences, as Jane calls them. As you enter a room you ‘cast a gladdened eye’ about you. Beautiful phrase….
The bow is the gift of the head and heart. The curtsy (which is of course a bastardisation of the word ‘courtesy’) a lowering in status for a moment, followed by recovery.”
I had always understood the “lowering in status” part of the reverence, and that a superior may nod or bow less deeply to an inferior, either in dismissal or acknowledgment. You would bow very deeply–abase yourself–to a King, less deeply to a baron, acknowledging their superior status. My 21st century feminist self gets the status thing, even if she doesn’t believe in it, but was always troubled by the fact that a gentlewoman curtseyed to a gentleman (I believe in practice shewas supposed to curtsey to him, then he would respond with a bow). The idea of a recovery from that lowering of status pleases me. “I submit to your authority,” the curtsey says. Or maybe, “I acknowledge that society places a higher value on your gender than on my own.” And then the recovery: “But I submit only so far.” And then the bow, acknowledgement and “gift of the head and the heart”.
It’s easy for me to want to read a taking back of authority in the recovery from a curtsey: I love the past, but I am firmly a creature of now. One of the great tasks of writing then is to remember that Sarah Tolerance has no Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan or Ms. Magazine in her background; that however independent she is, she’s still a woman of her time, and while she might not feel that the man she’s curtseying to is worthy of her respect, she would still go through the proper forms. It’s her age, and not mine, that I am playing in.
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*I once read excerpts of Thompson’s diary from the movie Junior, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which she mentions that he was still so muscle-bound that it was difficult for him to tie his own tie–the muscles literally got in the way. I was then editing comics, and made sure to mention this to those artists who seemed to think that moving like a gymnast and being built like a fireplug were not incompatible…
Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf is my home this week. I checked the time, and earlier today (if you read this post when it’s planned to go up) I will be working with a group of MA students on my personal take (in one of my short stories) on the Australian Gothic. Earlier in the week, I’ll give a seminar on understanding the Australian Gothic. Everything else at the rime I’m writing is research, mostly on the memory of the Middle Ages. It takes more than a few days to even begin to understand a subject that big. Every town I visit will give me a different view, and simply going to Germany will open new horizons. By training, I’m a book research person, but the older I get the more i need to actually walk the streets in order to understand what the primary sources tell me.
This is only the first week in Dusseldorf. It’s so far a quiet week because I need to slow down every few days and give me feeble body a chance to catch up. I want to do everything, but my body won’t let me. This is one of the times when I let it complain in peace.
Also, I will have notes to write up. This is where I admit a terrible truth. I intend to take those notes next year (after I’m finished the current project) and turn them into a book. I am confronting a whole bunch of really tough emotional things as a Jewish Australian, as the descendant of a Jewish German, as an historian who tried to avoid German history because it was too damn emotionally difficult. I will write down what I face and all the mistakes I make facing it. I will write down the history I learn and anything special or amazing that I discover. And, in the process, I will learn more about why some people hate Jews for existing and why others see us as human beings. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it.
I’ve been paying some attention to the Democratic National Convention this week. I didn’t watch the whole thing – I know too much about politics in this country to be able to watch a lot of political speeches – but I did listen to Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech.
While I don’t agree with everything she said, I am excited about her candidacy. I’d be thrilled to see her as President even if she weren’t running against the criminal grifter and even if she wouldn’t be the first woman in the job.
Plus she has brought a new wave of effective political action into the mix, which also makes me happy because frankly I have no more stomach for Democrats running as Republican Lite.
So I’m hopeful that the Democrats will soundly defeat the convicted felon and force the Republican Party to either remake itself or fall apart.
I checked on the convention earlier in the week and was highly amused when I saw complaints online from various political writers about the fact that the Democratic National Convention was running behind schedule and President Biden wasn’t going to be onstage during “prime time.”
By “prime time” they meant not just broadcast-television-dictated prime time, but broadcast-television-dictated East Coast prime time, which is to say between 8 and 11 pm EDT.
I had several reactions to this.
First of all, I started paying attention to U.S. political conventions in 1960 – I was a nerdy kid and my parents were both journalists and liberal Democrats – and I have never heard of a convention not getting behind schedule.
I mean, you give politicians a mike and they’re gonna talk. Plus if there’s enthusiasm – and this year there is a lot of enthusiasm – there’s going to be applause and standing ovations and other things that slow the schedule down.
And while I’m sure there were speakers that no one would have missed much – say the governor of New York – one of the purposes of a convention is to allow as many players as possible to speak as well as bringing in some folks that beef up your presentation.
Secondly, the convention is being held in Chicago, which is on Central Time. Now I grant that CDT broadcast-television-dictated prime time is actually 7-10 pm, but it still was an hour earlier in Chicago.
Thirdly, it was 8:30 pm in California when I saw these complaints. That’s just the most populous state in the union, with the sixth largest economy in the world.
I note that Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech ended a little after 8 pm PDT – 11 pm EDT. Maybe that was close enough to prime time for those doing the griping.
Every once in awhile it’s nice when something important happens on the West Coast’s schedule instead of the East Coast’s.
