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The epic *advice* of Gilgamesh.

My day is made, I have encountered the word excrementitious, which actually strikes me as one of those "probably a mellifluously beautiful word, if you don't know what it means" coinages ... Also: scatalogical archaeology! Always fun. Thanks, The History Blog.

Brace yourselves: this is me, not even trying to be clever. Just click. The world's most beautiful libraries. You're welcome. (The click beyond.)

Ahhh, the tedium of FASHION as opposed to style. We all know it's not just clothes, or at least in the form of textiles.

Remember when book covers were done by artists? Remember when all too many of them became photos of headless women? (Remember when we laughed at salads?) Apparently the current trend in cover design is flowers. This seems to surprise some people, but the development seems obvious to me, especially timed after November 2016, when stock photo libraries, advertising, entertainment, and so many visual aspects of the cultural landscape finally began to show women in active contexts, not strictly as pretty presentation objects. We were all sick of the ubiquity of book covers featuring decapitated women and sexualized women (the latter not being mutually exclusive of the former, which: ew). What's the next best sexual image? Flowers. Duh.

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Danger, Will Robinson! Plot bunnies ahead! But wow is this a GREAT mind-blower for Friday the 13th. The Atlantic on the possibility of truly ANCIENT civilization (... ?). Man, oh man, the fiction you could write riffing on this idea! OSUM. This appeals to me immensely, with my increasing thing about systems and scale ...

If you can fix this truth in your minds, namely, that the true use of books is to make you wiser and better, you will have both profit and pleasure form what you read.
--Sarah Fielding

Oh my gosh, what a splendid piece of YA literary history. Also, I love a teacher names Mrs. Teachum. I just like the word teachum, like hokum, absurdum, or bunkum but so much more appealing. Go make with the click.

And a little more from Smithsonian Magazine - e-cigs are using the same advertising gambits decades and even generations-since prohibited for combustible cigarettes. PLUS a back-to-school special ad, which I don't think the old school ever even tried. Stay classy, vape-producers!

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Mmmmmmmm! Palimpsest joy. Taking us back to the sixth century, no less. Speaking as an historical novelist writing in that period (indeed, the place and the people involved in Justinian's law itself), and having struggled with the dearth of contemporary primary resources: YAY!

Also, Palimpsest Joy would make a great name either for a band ... or maybe a porn star.

Oh, hey - speaking of pornography. I was having a "hmm" about how to frame this next link, but that may do nicely ... The Caustic Cover Critic has a good laugh for anyone who wants to see book covers NOT featuring that magical body part that might make Palimpsest Joy such a big star. It's technically SFW, but click at your discretion. But do click. The CCC is always worth it!

Another BOO from the cultural zeitgeist: hey, it's perfectly okay to ask female politicians discriminatory questions which are literally illegal in, say, the context of a job interview. (Prepare for the phrase "deliberately barren" to exist well past the 19th century, because it does.) Sigh.

"I'ma Send You to TIMBUKTU!" and Other Stories ... (or) ... on Literature Itself

When I was a kid, there were a few mythical experiences in life that never, somehow, lived up to their hype. Snipe hunts amounted to a load of pointless wandering and taunting, often with a group of kids who didn't even like each other (see: taunting). Opposite days - where every word was an argument against itself. Pediatric exercises in negation and frustration, that was all the "magic" I ever understood.

Then there was Timbuktu. I don't know how prevalent this was outside my little slice of the world, but there was a magic by which my brother used to "send me to Timbuktu" - and I think other kids would say or do this to each other, too. To be sent to Timbuktu meant some hand gesture, perhaps, or a magic word - spoken by some hapless exilee, or by the ones wanting to send them away - and an instantaneous disappearance the victim never could perceive.

When my brother sent me to Timbuktu, he evinced the most astonishing inability to see or hear me anymore. Indeed, one might even say his imperception of me was overacted, almost. Now and then, other people might be present and play along as well.

Again: the ultimate in frustration. "I'm RIGHT HERE!" is perhaps the most pointless piece of dialogue between kids or in science fiction, in recorded (or invisible/inaudible) history.

So Timbuktu, to us, was no real place, it was just a neato sounding word some kid had appropriated to be mean, and its geography was simply the delineation of disempowerment of some poor other kid. Usually not for too long.

They lectured the townspeople on the evils of their cult of protector-saints, then began to smash the intricate carvings with pickaxes and metal crowbars.

It's a joy, then, to read a little history/politics/culture/reality/hope ... about Timbuktu, today.

Timbuktu is a rich skein in the cultural history of the world, and its treasures have been imperiled. But there are people who save our shared human legacy.

Imagine the Library of Alexandria, with allies covertly preventing its obliteration. Imagine an alternate ending to The Name of the Rose.

Imagine your TBR pile growing by just one more volume of narrative nonfiction.

Conserving, and protecting, the material evidence of human innovation, ingenuity - art.

We are worth saving. We are worth studying. We are worth questioning, and maybe sometimes revering. Humanity is like a field of corn, constantly shifting and perhaps too-rich with vermin or smut, or maybe too try to grow - but as a whole, absolutely hypnotizing to view, as the wind lifts some eddy and draws undulating patterns. As we contemplate what grows before us.

And ...

Let's not forget that we also lecture and smash and destroy the artifacts of culture when it hits our prejudices.

All the Books

All the books I've bought lately have had their own distinctive, incredibly satisfying feeling in my hands. Of one book, I bought four copies. Its pages enchanted me. The resonance, when you tap the stack of them, that echo inside the minuscule spaces between them, the space inside the books, their universe.

Image: Wikipedia

Of another, I bought two. These are older books, hardcover, each of them with the mylar slipcover. One is a first edition, a gift. The other is for me. The instant I opened it, and my hand touched its cover, and I felt that soft vibration, heard the sound of its thump - that soft thump when you pat a book, that satisfying thump as warm as the thump I give Penelope on her furry, deep chest ...

That book had the best thump I have felt in a long time.

Penelope has good thump.

I knew I had to buy another copy of this book for someone I love. And that one, when I found it - that soft, quiet, warm sound. Of a book.

That glorious sound - when you *have* opened a book, when you've been using it as G-d intended, filling yourself with it - and you have to close it again. That sound, of closing a book. Closing a hardcover. That soft, soft, but definitive closing, the almost invisible sound of the mylar, the indescribable movement of paper against itself, and the covers coming together, protecting it, saving the rest of the pages for you, saving them all for you.

What is the best-feeling book you have held lately?

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Random thought: how about … never trust anyone (man or otherwise) who decides anyone (woman or otherwise) must not be TRUSTED on the basis of any aspect of their personal tastes?

Let it be said: The Telegraph is not my favorite UK paper. But they have a couple good links now and then.

First, their list of 30 great opening lines from literature . It's a nice breadth of recent centuries and authors. To read them all at once makes for interesting inspiration; even in a single sentence, the different novels take you to different places and introduce us to a variety of characters. Well worth the look, for my writer and reader readers!

Next, just this quote, though it's only one from a longer series. Anyone would know I'd agree with the sentiment, but in keeping with my Illusions of Recency posts, it's looking at the date on this one that'll either sober you up quick or reassure you somewhat about today.

Star Trek: Axanar and the legal aspects of copyrighting Klingon. What a fandom buzzkill, Paramount. Fan produced for *generations* (b’doom pssshhhhhhh) have been fun, hallowed, and even considered canon www.startrekcontinues.com at times. So much for that thing where “CBS has a long history of accepting fan films” and “…realizes that we’re just making their brand that much better.”. Bummer. With thanks to Dena Pawling for pointing to the suit.

Weird Illusions of Recency

The big problem with this post, opining that Stephen King basically invented cultural weirdness, is that the only comparison this writer is REALLY making is their own assumptions about, say, their own experiences growing up (and how King seems weird to HIM based on what he’d seen before) or perhaps some idea that the Eisenhower era really was what it looked like on Happy Days or something and that the whole world before it was a drab and colorless fantasy of Victorian purity and boredom.

Stephen King’s breakthrough was Carrie, in 1973.

Life and the pop cultural landscape before 1973 just were not a bounteous, homogenized world of normalcy. Sorry, folks.

Colin Smith linked this piece, and here is my comment from his blog:

Looking at the article, I am just not persuaded he’s that *fundamental* a force, culturally speaking. A great force, yes – but this writer clearly hasn’t sampled a wide variety of entertainment before the 1980s. The name Rod Serling leaps nimbly, if not actually aggressively, to mind here. The Outer Limits. Heck, even The Monkees, Lost in Space, and the Batman television show were cradles of pop cultural weirdness, and even a certain kind of horror, especially the latter. Torture was the order of the day in that cartoonish, camp outing. Even in the article itself, King’s own citations of his inspirations – which the writer clearly has not actually read – display plentiful weirdness and off-kilter obsessions.

I’m always annoyed at the idea that any given cultural/social construct was invented recently. The 20th century is particularly rife with illusions of recency, and it’s all predicated on the idea that (a) humanity actually changes and (b) evolution itself is heading toward some sort of Whig-historical idea of greatness.

Balderdash.

People have been bizarre since we’ve been people. The weirdness of our psyches is plain to see going back thousands of years, with even a casual acquaintance with history and the arts.

It's hard to think of anyone who has injected so much strangeness into the pop culture consciousness, and no one else has done it this long.

Again: Rod Serling.

Noël Carroll writes that for King, "the horror story is always a contest between the normal and the abnormal such that the normal is reinstated and, therefore, affirmed."

So: anti-weird, in the end?

The truth is, if we look at pop culture and weirdness, frankly we’re a lot LESS weird now, especially in cinema and in music, than 40 years ago. Some of what came out of Hollywood before I was even born, and through the 1970s, would never be made today, because: corporatization and money. Take a look at major studio productions like Tommy (you want weird? Two words: baked beans), Myra Breckenridge, Zardoz … even 2001, which was not presented as any sort of oddity, features as its centerpiece an extended, trippy stretch of special effects and curious philosophical imagery the like of which really has not been matched since. Kubrick’s first film, by the way, came in 1951, and he wasn’t waiting around on Stephen King to get weird.

The literature inspiring many films predates them by decades, in some cases. Some literature, too, going back to the eighteenth century, easily gives King a run for his money. Oh wait, and did I mention millennia? Yeah, read some ancient mythology for human eyes on death in the most stunningly … hey, *human* way.

In music, the 1960s gave birth to progressive rock, an experimental form borrowing from its own predecessor, jazz, and frankly from a lot of heavy drug use (also not invented in the 20th century; read a little bit of Louisa May Alcott’s lesser-known ouvre for some serious looks into tripped-out drug use and supreme weirdness

Ever heard of the Grand Guignol? Look it up, kids.

Sensation novels? Well, see above; their seeds go back three centuries previous to this one. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was an eye-popper in the weird and horror departments, both (and Julie Taymor’s adaptation is a shocker featuring Alan Cumming AND Harry Lennix, whom I admire to little bits all over the floor. Greek and Roman drama are filled with the most stunning human behavior.

“We live in increasingly bizarre times,” the blogger says.

Only if you have never studied anything about the past.

Specificity, Magic, and Getting Lost in Cover Art

Talking with Colin Smith recently at his blog got me thinking about the subjective effects of good illustration. We were discussing those pieces of art inside a number of books, but I'm struck time and again by the impact a photo cover has on me versus good old fashioned paintings and drawings. Even a photo of a sculpture is not the same.

When I was a kid, you still saw matte painting in movies and television. Science texts sometimes employed artists for renderings of various objects of study - space, in particular, was fertile ground (so to speak ...) for magnificent paintings of detailed scenes, worlds away from our own, exciting phenomena rendered in bold colors and evoking intensity, heat, movement - danger! - beauty ...

For over a century and a half, there has been a lament that photography destroys art, that it is soulless, that it is unworthy of contemplation. Of course, this is untrue.

And yet, there is something about a photograph - not least the limited and terrifyingly recycled library of stock images used these days in book cover design - that lacks, in comparison with the inspiration of a drawn or painted image.

For one, there is the specificity. As a reader, I dislike being instructed by a book's cover with quite the concreteness a photo provides.

Colin and I talked of the ability to get lost in a simple oil pastel drawing or watercolor, and I remembered the million worlds of Richard Scarry as absorbing adventures that could hold me for hours.

There is also the charm of style. There are covers of books I read growing up I still remember. In histfic, ersatz portraits that took real-life inspiration and transformed old paintings into compositions and costumes that ended up more 60s or 70s in their vibe. Historical figures' new pictures paying homage to known portraiture, but presenting attitudes perhaps less formalized than such images. (Seriously, click on the link, Robert Dudley is kind of perfectly conceived - and not even headless!)

Then there are the comparative studies - the 80s cover whose male model I crushed on, versus the 60s extravaganza of Historical Epicness. Even the 80s one isn't just a straight photograph; its sky is a painted vista, its background a world like so many of those matte paintings I knew from Star Trek as a wee little nard.

Even the most specific, detailed painting or drawing is still in some way subjective, and therefore invites inspiration over being a dictation.

Photo book covers, for me, have all the appeal of an over-sentimental film score. Bad scores are didactic - telling me how I must feel, taking away from me the opportunity to come to an emotion on my own with a character or characters.

I believe in the transportive beauty of photography, but I literally cannot THINK of a photographic book cover that has ever taken me to a new world the way other graphic forms can.

And, again, there is the issue of the strangely limited stock of images publishers seem to use. There are websites and fora all over Teh Intarwebs sharing "oh look, this pic again" images of cover after cover after cover - following the extremes of recycling costumes or particular photo shoots, or even single images, again and again and again and again. Some of the costumes used forty years ago in Elizabeth R have had almost embarrassingly over-recycled afterlife in modeling sessions for cover photos for historicals.

Even if you don't know the provenance, where an image has been used but differently cropped or tinted a hundred times before, a photo (so often of the old headless-woman) has only so much power to invite exploration. It feels like photo design covers are by far more prone to anachronism and even inappropriateness. Amongst all those discussions of "this one again" covers online, there are many conversations about how inauthentic design choices are.

A particular floppy red velvet ruff bearing no resemblance to any actual piece of clothing from any period of history ever is notorious, having graced every kind of novel from the Plantagenet to Victorian and back again. Novels taking place in one century sport covers evoking another, or one culture in the world is plundered just to decorate another. Female models wearing makeup abound; everyone must be pretty, after all.

And, not that the covers I've linked are not cosmetically enhanced in their own ways, but at least the living and breathing reality of a girl tottering about in a bad costume and pouting her strong lipstick isn't slamming me out of a story with all the power of ... well, that book I've been reading in which yards and yards of lace have appeared in a time three hundred years before its existence ...

This may be the power of the subjective graphic forms. They don't look entirely "real" to begin with, so their deviations from authenticity are less concrete, less jarring than a photograph's quantified, concrete, recorded verity. There is something banal in the carelessness of recorded anachronism or inappropriateness.

And I know I've couched a lot of my blather in historical fiction, but it is, honestly, in historicals that photography grates *me at least* the most. Because the medium is modern, it feels wrong right at the start, and because so many of the photographs chosen currently seem to have little depth (never mind being threadbare from frequent use), there is no allure.

Like any human attraction, specificity can both amplify and kill it. Specificity - that adorable mole just in front of a lover's ear, or the way they breathe when they first see your face - is magic. But it is also murder - the zipper you can see on the Elizabethan gown, or the Elizabethan gown fitting poorly on the headless model for a Regency romp ...

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Jessica Faust at Bookends Literary Agency takes a look at the downside of #MSWL, or the Manuscript Wish List many pre-published love to pore over, hoping to find someone who'll represent our work.

The Arrant Pedant has a great post for those Americans coping with taxes this season: on the task of taxes and axing about the history of etymology. Also, I learned a new word today - palatalization. Not sure when I'll get to use it, but I like it anyway. Syncopated.

Speaking of great words: I'm always a sucker for palimpsest. Not least because, as artifacts, the things are wells of curious information and questions. The History Blog looks at a palimpsest in which the Battle of Thermopylae gets an "all killer no filler" description. Never let it be said the History Blogger is not a History Nerd.

The on-demand economy – or old-fashioned temping? I gave up temping myself twenty years ago, because being pimped is no way to make a living. Gee, and it turns out there are others who don't want to work that way either. Duh.

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My regular reading seemed to want to concentrate on covers today ...

First, a new post from the Caustic Cover Critic - yay! On returning classics, or "stock photo cover design" - an interesting look at the different ways designers use images to create unique looks.

Then Janet Reid had a word on when to worry about your cover. "While it's not an asshat indicator, it's troubling." Hee!

Interpolating from a post put up after this Collection, but fitting in too well not to put here - Jessica Faust also has some thoughts on covers, and a fascinating angle. How being unable to "picture it" so to speak led to a rejection. Oh dear!

The History Blog takes a look at Dina and Uyan, a pair of preserved cave lion cubs which are likely more than ten thousand years old. And the author of *this* blog scoops up Gossamer the Editor Cat for a soft, warm snoodle.

The HB also tells us about the Diamond Sutra, the oldest printed book known to be preserved. A fifteen foot block-printed scroll found in the Mogao cave temples, which in themselves must make a glorious study, the book dates to May 11, 868. Hooray for the precise date in the colophon!

Penelope, Abigail Adams, and the False Maid

I swear, it is an accident that my dog's name is Penelope. When I first saw her,  the association with her name, as given to her by her foster organization, was by far stronger with my grandmother's dog, whom we called "Penny-Dawg", than with Odysseus' wife.

It amuses me, of course, that the image used on the article I linked above, happens to be of Artemis: or Diana.

But "that" Penelope does have her plangent resonance in my life.

Still, I would hardly name a dog for the ongoing facts of my life, least of all the fact that for double-digit years now, the man who's ruined me for all the other boys happens to be someone who lives thousands of miles away.

Penelope was what she was called before I ever met her, and when they asked me what I was going to name her, I was genuinely bewildered. "She's clearly a Penelope."

It's a bouncy name, and she has always been a bouncy girl. Honestly, I feel like it has a happy sound to it. It has her energy, perfectly.

And she'd make a rotten Abigail, though Mrs. Adams is yet another famed example of a separated, devoted wife.



People find a separated relationship immensely peculiar - not to say, a stoning offense - in the modern world. Because we are short on wild frontiers, and it has become uncommon for people to strike out on their own to make their fortunes to support spouses and/or children, there is, in the contemporary mindset, no reason to hold out for anyone who is far away.

"Geographically undesirable" is a thing - a big thing - I have learned, in the years Mr. X has lived so far away.

And standardized definitions of what comprises acceptable relationships are a huge thing indeed.

"THAT'S not a boyfriend!" someone who barely knew me said upon hearing a bit about Mr. X. Yes, well, I was past forty even then, and the term "boyfriend" is embarrassing in any case. Whatever my relationship is or is not, I don't *want* a "boyfriend" because I am not in school anymore.

But thereby we fall into a linguistic vortex many of us have been swirling around ever since the concept of romantic relationships not firmly on a short course to marriage was invented, and this lies well beside the point of this post.

I quit engaging debates about the validity of my relationships years ago, and leave it with "Find me the man who's better, locally" when it ever comes up at all.


It comes up less, with advancing age. People look at a woman of forty-eight, and if she's single, she fits into a certain tidy box, and pestering her to get a man seems less a priority for strangers than it is when she is thirty-something.



I'm working on some short stories, turning on Penelope and perhaps Melantho, her false maid.

Stay tuned with me ... I'll share if it works out.

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From The Atlantic, on the persistent trend in Hollywood to deny diversity in casting ... "(C)olorblind casting isn’t a form of acceptance or progress: It can just as easily be erasure wrapped up as benevolence."

A guy named Robert Wayne, scholars getting into fusses, “just another Preppy American”, dates of domestication, and the DNA of dogs. Giving dogfighting a new name – a great article nonetheless about a whole lot more than any particular study.

“I keep hoping these guys, who are supposedly Christian, would do the Christian thing and return these objects that they are holding illegally” ... at the intersection of finance, religion, and culture - or, why repatriation becomes complicated ...

From the Boston Globe, on the feminization of book cover design: "(H)ow does a publisher signal to a manly reader that a woman-authored book he has in his hands won’t offend him with talk of motherhood, makeup, and menstruation?"

The earliest prison memoir in the United States, from Austin Reed. Here is an excerpt from early in the book. Here is the History Blog's post on the publication.

Falling

There are two great usages of the concept of "to fall" in English, to which modern ears are no longer very well attuned, and which twine around one another.

A fallen woman, in antique parlance, was a woman - married or not - who has lost her virtue. Virtue is another of those concepts whose meaning has changed (at the very least), but it is not the topic today.

These days, as sneeringly as a woman may be treated for this or that infraction against other people's morality, it is little likely to be the death of her - at least, outside of contexts I don't propose to write about just now. My mother thinks Miley Cyrus is SCUM (her word) - largely because Miley, less a person than a child raised to be a product, has played into one of the major product marketing techniques of American popular culture, sex. Women who marry rich are as likely to be congratulated as written off for golddigging bimbos, but few observing one appreciate the finer points of her humanity. Britney Spears was the very paragon for a certain set of younger cousins of mine, as long as she touted her purported virginity, but she lost steam with many through a series of ill-timed underpantsless photos and that one time she shaved her daft little head.

Sigh.

But Miley has not been shamed out of society, and certainly the pariah has become staple to a leering community of celebrity  consumers - who literally DO *consume* people famous for five minutes, fifteen, or even almost an hour. Reality TV is built most often on the need to feel superior, even as we aspire to this or that thing such-and-such celebrity owns/product places in their "life".

There was a time it would have taken only the hint of impropriety to destroy a woman. One named Theresa Longworth spent a great deal of her life fighting the destruction of her reputation; and, to this day, the very sexual details of her existence perhaps outlive any sense of how profoundly distressing it must have been for her to have those things so much as imagined. Novels we still read today turn on the virtue of women whose wellbeing depended upon its never being questioned, never being destroyed.

To fall, for a woman, has through history been as fundamental a peril as the fall of Lucifer himself. To be thrown from society has been for MOST women - or anyone at all - through history, the most violent punishment conceivable (another aspect of a quote brought up this week in my comments).

Outcast. To many modern, especially American, ears, the term equates to the kid who gets bullied, or the million invisible mentally ill or imprisoned or otherwise "marginalized" people we rarely see, or try not to.

But in its practical, fundamental sense, it is those whom a community have put into the outer darkness.

This is no small thing, to be alone. Life today may be built to accommodate it, but the life lived solitary is still considered abnormal, and we punish people for living thus, whether they have chosen it or not. I've had my rants and fears about my social marginality.

But I have never been put aside, forsaken, nor shunned.

I have never fallen. Society has not shut me out, I have chosen and found my own place, but never been excluded.


The profundity of shunning is difficult to convey anymore, I think.

An awful lot of us have experienced it to one degree or another, but the ancient practice of social punishment has found a new face, and works in ways just as impenetrable to understand as The Past is for us to comprehend.


I know those who have fallen away ...

But I know nobody who has had to be a forsaken woman ... who has been denied fire and shelter ... who has fallen ...

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My brother has found some curious artifacts in his house; I have found none, but am leaving a few here and there, with an amused eye to the archaeologist who might dig up the place centuries down the road ... but nobody I know ever found two hundred grand worth of anything in their home that wasn't the home itself. Another of those Antiques Roadshow stories that gets people gnashing their teeth asking, "Why doesn't this happen to me!?" (Note to the HB that will never be seen: I love pre-Code movies too!)

On a vase that never met an ax - the crystal vessel most famously associated with Eleanor of Aquitaine, but with a history extending centuries before her ... and after.

Squirrels. In "Up", they are the subject of comedy without ever actually even appearing. In the Pacific Northwest, I know a certain girl who befriends and shares peanuts with them. On the other coast, though, there are an awful lot of people with no love for squirrels. And then there are those who might love them, but can't, due to lack of sleep! I hope you'll get some good rest soon, Donna.

And, of course, more from the History Blog, because it is OSUM. First, not only do we have a new word for the day (codicologist), but a look into the mystery of the "unborn sheet" - writers who read here, if you aren't intrigued by these two things, you should be! The Learny Stuff of History, brought to you by the Staedtler eraser company - neato spedito. And second, for the bauble-lovers among us, the oldest known gold jewelry, found in Bulgaria and dating to over six-thousand years old. Y'all know I'm a sucker for vintage jewelry! I'm also tittering at the comment by Celia, because her suspicion about "ritual object" is EXACTLY correct. Hee.

And, in closing, a note about the weather and migraines. I've been putting this post together for at least a full day now, maybe even two, I'm honestly unsure. It's been unseasonably hot, but with days here and there of normal cold, and so my sinuses have been in a bit of a riotous state. This has been a consistent issue with my sporadic blogging over the past couple of months, and the failure to provide Tom Williams with a guest post. Pointing this out is NOT a plea for sympathy - headaches are old hat for me, and no cause for pity; only a programming note, and maybe a cheap opportunity to kvetch about said weather.

But even a too-warm Thanksgiving is still a Thanksgiving, and I have been grateful for so much this four-day weekend. I am grateful for my job, two years old now - my beloved friends and family - my beautiful Penelope pup, and my sweetest Gossamer the Editor Cat.

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It is rare, if not unprecedented, for me to contemplate the phrase "everybody's talking about it!" without scoffing, pinching salt, or otherwise having no patience with the entire concept. But Harper Lee has brought us as close as I've ever seen, with the Go Set a Watchman epochal event publication. Mostly discussion seems to center on the disconcerting combination of darn-near-prurient curiosity about the manipulations involved in making public a draft work, and a general condemnation of the work as "should've been only a scholarly curiosity, really isn't a saleable novel, hey I'm only reporting the facts, and isn't it terrible they've done this (so I can buy in and then blog about it)?" There is a lot that's ghastly. So it was even more quease-inducing to read this. Apparently, Atticus - the great American symbol of moral rectitude and crusadership - turns out to be a big old bigot.

Sigh.

So let's look at racism in a different way. Nyki Blatchley provides a truly EXCELLENT post on the Aryan fallacy and all its little malformed fallacious babies. A linguistic/historical/cultural must-read, because it's incisive and important on multiple levels. It's good storytelling, it's good teaching, it touches on varied aspects of those ways we seem to love to come to wrong-thinking, and it's *sourced*, which is more than I ever do for y'all. So go. Now.

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It's all History Blog all the time for today, but quite a variety of linky interesting-ness to share ...

Let's kick off with Robert Cornelius, perpetrator of the first daguerreotype self-portrait. And then left dabbling in photography to look into alternative fuels for his family's lamp business. Strangely, pig lard did not take off, at least not long enough for pigs-flying jokes. (I had a crush on a guy named Bob Cornelius freshman year of college - so extra oddness points here for me, because this Cornelius is cute in a very modern way.)

Conveniently dovetailing with my recent reading of H. G. Wells, here we have the sale of the illustrations for the 1897 edition of War of the Worlds almost, but not quite, drawn by a guy called Henry the Dead. All images at the link are worth a click and closer peering. I'd pinch one here, but honestly I'm never clear on the HB what the public domain status of the images is, so just GO! Neato-spedito!

Inevitably, I'm a TCM lover as it is, but a summer full of noir ... is a summer I can get into. Yaaay!

And finally - as if the world needed ANY more examples of the fully OSUM splendiferosity that is George Takei brings to his masses the Japanese American History: NOT For Sale campaign. Historical education *and* preservation from the guy who literally piloted us into the future half a century ago. He's done rather a lot more than that, and almost all of it is fanfooogootastic. More neato spedito, y'all.

Peculiarities

It’s a boring old truism that one of the jobs of a writer is to spend some level of mind-time, *all* the time, on finely observing people, the world, and experience and quantifying these things for themselves so they can eventually steal these considerations, then cannibalize and synthesize them within stories.

It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.

THAT is awfully good writing.

Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.

Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.


All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.

I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.

Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.

No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.


***


For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)

I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?

How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?

A Simpler Time

I’ve reached that age where, with a certain chauvinism and privilege, the memory of youth and childhood appear to me “a simpler time.” This isn’t couched in the presumption that my childhood was better than YOUR childhood, if you are of a different age – nor that my childhood could beat up your childhood on the playground. It’s not even a reflection of technology and so on. It probably IS the result of responsibility; we all think in those terms, I think. And (assuming I have gained any), there is the influence of increased knowledge, and emotional experience, always mucking up the works in life.

My kid-dom in the seventies, and teen years in the eighties, weren’t an exceptionally halcyon period. I didn’t like either stage of life very much at the time, and have zero yearning to return. Yet it wasn’t bad stuff, my youth and childhood. There were bullies, but they never physically harmed me, and if they scarred me much emotionally – well, it still led to who I am now, and I like that person pretty well, so though I can remember them it’s not with feeling.

Much was forbidden, especially in the very much younger years, and I was one of those kids always griping of boredom. I didn’t love going outside to play, and though I did love reading, when I read about agents and other writers’ PASSIONS for it, devouring Proust and so on from the earliest ages – I won’t lie, a lot of what I read for a good long stretch was MAD magazine anthology books, and as much as I liked The Secret Garden and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories, I couldn’t say with any accuracy that they changed my life or have a tearfully cherished place in my heart. My reaction when given the first NOVEL I ever read, was resentment that there were no damned pictures. Seriously – it didn’t mean maturation and getting older (that attainment that meant finally gaining every privilege denied to the very young), it meant my parents were trying to bore me to death.

Then, of course, I read the book (a blue hardback with dustcover I am fairly certain I still have, and in mighty good condition – unless I gave it to my elder niece …). It was called “War Work”, which was an extremely unfortunate title to proffer to young-me. I found the very word War a complete drag (reasons I am a Trek nerd and not Star Wars – seriously), and where my parents, especially my mom, undoubtedly associated the WWII story with certain halcyon days of their own, all I heard was “this is a story about war, something that interests me precisely not at all.”

Of course, the novel was about a bunch of kids many thousands of miles and nicely protected continents removed from actual wartime, and involved playing games and the small hurts and so on of the characters and the times.


As I’ve said before here– the fact is, I generally feel like I fall short in the “passionate reader” aspect which is pretty strongly emphasized in the industry I aspire to. I don’t have moist stories to share about the first time I ever heard Charlotte’s Web read to us in school, though it certainly affected me, at least at the time. (My readerliness falls short in so many ways.) I can’t pretend I was outlining my own career nor plans as an authoress, indeed, before my mid-thirties. And we see how I have progressed there … ahem.


Back when things (and my brain) were simpler, the prevailing assumption was still that a girl child grows up and gets married, and husbands provide the breadwinning function. Yet even by the time I got to middle school and high school, that was changing. For a while, it was, “women CAN work” … and I was all, “Well, who needs THAT!?” – and then it pretty much became apparent that we were all going to have to work, aspirations or no. I was not excited by this aspect of social change, but let it be said I was never really into the whole wife-and-mother thing either. It’s just that I was an underachiever, I did LIKE boys, figured for (perhaps too long) sooner or later I’d find one who could feed me well enough, and nothing much shone forth in the firmament, leading me toward some magical calling.

Once high school had worn on for a couple of years, I began to realize the inevitable – not only that I was probably going to have to work for a living, but that the likelihood of being able to do so by simply being admired by millions and made independently wealthy thanks to my beauty and (acting) talent was vanishingly slim. I still majored in theater (or Theatre/Dance, as the also vanishingly slim department at the school I unfortunately chose as a non-launch-pad for this career) in a ditch effort to get some program to do that work for me, but knew well enough that I’d probably have to get a job.

Job, for me, meant “secretary” – and still does, though my level of commitment has arisen somewhat.

I took typing at age seventeen, in a horrible room at the back of the school filled with Selectrics and a punctilious teacher with little use for my brains and creativity (ask me about the jobs where that was the case too! not.), and managed to get out of there with the necessary skill set to feed myself if the right rockstar didn’t come along.

Of course, he did, but he ended his rock starring career in support of our marriage, which I promptly discarded. There were conversations during our bliss, as to whether we could afford toilet paper or not. I can’t even say “we were rich in love” because I was a nasty little vain shrew (back then), and money wasn’t even my problem.

Things, already, weren’t very simple anymore. And didn’t get moreso from there.


One of the biggest ways life is no longer simple lies in the fact that there is only one soul to manage the whole thing. From kitty litter scoops to mortgage payments and some sort of social life, there’s nobody to share it with. Nor, as when my childhood was so *delightfully* simple, to depend upon without thinking. Anything gets put off? That’s me without gas in the car or a slipping credit rating, or no heat because – no oil. Or hungry cute furbabies, subtly bonking around metal bowls, because mommy’s distracted. Aww. My life’s not actually all that complex, Batman – but heck if even the smallest detail can be left to somebody else.

It scarcely leaves time for the dazzling gorgeousness of Authoressial glamour, I tellya. And I am nothing if not heart-stoppingly glamorous. Just ask the cat.


So of course there’s a fantasy, that publication will somehow change things around here.

I don’t want to be Rowling, or King. Yet I’m well aware the old dreams I joked about, of “midlist glory” are frankly kind of dangerous, second-career-wise.

Yeah, I’ve always got typing. But typing isn’t paying for refinishing my kitchen floors, or vapor-sealing the basement. The joke about glamour – look, I picture myself talking at colleges and JRW_____ events and even churches and doing signings, hopefully. I like the idea of my bespectacled, turtlenecked nerd-chic portrait, and working to support my books. I *love* the idea of some fourteen-year-old kid falling for the story, and studying the history, then maybe turning around and telling more stories of their own – because they read me, once upon a time (har). I can’t wait to get scared that nobody showed up at that bookstore where I’m shilling, and even more scared because lots of people did.

I can’t wait for things to get MORE complicated. Unexpected. Unusual. Even frustrating, whatever the frustrations may be between advance and paying-out, another novel, and royalties. I can’t wait to cross the ocean, even if only vicariously flying on the leaves of my book, as it’s sold in Europe – and, hopefully, maybe even beyond. If I ever got to GO where I write about – Istanbul, Ravenna, the Channel Islands (oh yes, I have a third book in mind, once Ax and the WIP are out) … dang, that’ll be something neat.

And I hate flying, y’all.

Lay on the complications; childhood gave me much to be grateful for, but life’s not done yet, and I’m not persuaded my simple, safe youth and childhood are the be-all and there’s nothing left to seek. Let’s find out what sort of kinks this second job will bring on once it’s PAYING, at last.

Simple was so seventies. Show me the coming years. Show me the future …

Antique Style

His sister Rebecca—tall, erect, with grand lace, in a splendid stiff brocade, and with a fine fan—was certainly five-and-fifty, but still wonderfully fresh, and sometimes had quite a pretty little pink colour—perfectly genuine—in her cheeks; command sat in her eye and energy on her lip—but though it was imperious and restless, there was something provokingly likeable and even pleasant in her face.

How OSUM are the phrases “command sat in her eye and energy on her lip” and “provokingly likeable” … ? This description is as appealing and meaningful 152 years on as it was the moment he wrote it; that is the immediacy, the “there-ness” of wonderful writing, and it ignites neurons no matter how old.

This is why I love nineteenth and even late-eighteenth century novels. Far from prim musings on tea and crumpets, or the pinings of silent, tragic heroines, its finer observations of character and place have gathered no dust (I can never forget the DOG in Lady Audley’s Secret – so funny I still laugh, and I can’t even remember the words). I don’t “love it for itself” or “love it for what it is”, but entirely because so much of the preserved literature (not necessarily “the classics”) is such good writing.

There is a precision of language that gets lost in the presumptions we thrust upon a wide swath of century-old works, and a terrifying, trembling depth of feeling. “Sensation” novels especially, perhaps now the artifacts of our tut-tutting supposed evolution, can be wonderfully harrowing; the tension is incredible not only in Edgar Allen Poe (whom I do love, and who was reared in the same swamp and clay as I), but in Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sheridan Le Fanu, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Louisa May Alcott herself, mother of some hair-raising tales.

Metaphors of the repressed retro-image of the 19th century in particular, crinoline and drapery were not the smothering death of human feeling, as some people presume (and then decide to don corsets themselves and tell their own versions of retconned history, since they feel nobody did it right the first time). Perhaps, instead, those forces “repressing” our recent forbears presented a dramatic choke point we have lost.

I don’t mourn for the loss of centuries past, and am hardly the dreamer wishing I could fly back in time, but I *do* defend the humanity of those who came before us, and refuse to accept that the past itself represents any compromise of our ingenuity and talent. Creativity is stimulated by the restrictions we have faced and still do; certainly I won’t say that with twenty-first century license we are freed from all psychological constraint, and my stance that The Dirty, Stupid Past is indeed not more wretched nor intellectually dim than we are today does not equal bemoaning “what we have come to” nor any of the “why in my day” traps so many at my age begin to indulge.

Let us not forget: you and I live in tomorrow’s pathetic and ignorant history, slogging through with too much technology – or not enough – perpetuating, as humans ALWAYS have, our own worst miseries, and no more knowing what comes next than any of the billions we sneer upon for not having known before we came along. You and I are denizens of the past, and don’t know it. We can’t live like that.

Neither could anyone before. They were all the latest-and-greatest, and their talents are not lessened because they failed to know you and I would be inspecting their fruits once their bones were become dust.


A mind cultivated with no eye on history, on the arts and words and works of our past, is an intellect missing out. Not merely on instruction, but incredible entertainment.

And knowing past literature looks good at a party. So consider just a few recommendations …

• Lady Audley’s Secret … Mary Elizabeth Brandon
  A seminal detective story in the guise of a sensation novel, here is a funny and gripping set of twists modern readers will know from the start, but which still holds you to your seat – and even introduces a sort of proto-Columbo, in a character who actually grows a bit over the course of the novel.
• The Monk – A Romance … Matthew Gregory Lewis
  This utterly deranged romp through the exact same perversions and criminal insanity that still obsess us today. Written for the same rebellious reasons any young adult produces shocking statements, Lewis spent pretty much the rest of his life disavowing the work (published 1796), but it’s actually a fascinating read – and not the worst story I ever read, to boot. Grand Guignol storytelling!
• Carmilla … Sheridan Le Fanu
  This novel is THE goth kids’ must-read, the earliest lesbian vampire novel (and YES, Virginia, that is totally A Thing) and a precursor to Bram Stoker. For darkling cred, knowing Le Fanu widely, and this novel particularly, should be de rigeur****. I was lucky and read this for the first time during a power outage, with a flashlight; it’s easy reading, and fun in the dark.

I don’t mean to reduce recommendations to sensation or horror novels – just happened that I was sipping on some Le Fanu when this came up (see above!). I would *love* to see other people’s personal recommendations in the comments (as if my TBR pile is not extreme enough, here I’m inviting more … !).

Collection

Let’s take it as given that everyone reading this considers themselves above reading “list” posts or anything ever written for Buzzfeed.  Let’s assume we all know this is reductive silliness with no real importance nor even validity (… maybe!).  I won’t tell anyone if you click through – but  if you do, don’t feel bad; because #25 is perhaps the best time I’ve had with words since “immaterial”, and I didn’t even have have to produce the keystrokes.  28 “Favorite” Books That are Huge Red Flags …  Enjoy! We’re all friends here.

Everyone knows disgust and politics are closely related.  But did you know disgust actually underlies formulation of our politics?  Figures.

Because my TBR pile is not tall enough to topple yet, somehow - Religion and the Decline of Magic.  For me, the title alone is catnip, but its depth of content looks entirely absorbing.  Research on antique *mindsets* is so difficult, and this, even though it's not my period, would be illuminating!

Janet Reid relieves querying authors of the burden of research - or, at least, of the pitfalls of the databases most of us create.  Truth be told, I'll still keep personalizing - I'm an inveterate researcher, and I *have* had the best luck with the best-personalized of my queries.  It makes *me* feel better.  But, in keeping with the new directive - I did quit keeping spreadsheets and bookmarking interviews etc. a good while ago.  I read, I refer, I send, I quit.  Queries stay in the "query" folder until response is clear, and then go to the "completed" archive.  That's it.