Collection

But our stories are about resistance, resurgence and badass MMA fighting congresswomen, reconnecting with our grandparents, fighting for future generations, building pathways for our fish, our children and our more-than-human relatives to thrive. It's time to represent our stories, our voices, our insights, our languages and our words for ourselves. In most of our Indigenous languages, our terms for ourselves translate to "the people." "Who are you?" someone asks. "What is the name of your tribe?" Our word usually translates to "We are the people. We are people, human beings." It's how we have represented ourselves since time began. It's about time for the media to catch up.

Once again, I'm confronted with a scientific expression of that system/spirit intuition I've been working within for the past two years at least. This article is a beautifully put ... sense of self, if you will.  "‘you’ are more than the contents of your chromosomes. The human body contains at least as many non-human cells (mostly bacteria, archaea and fungi) as human ones. Tens of thousands of microbial species crowd and jostle over and through the body, with profound effects on digestion, complexion, disease resistance, vision and mood. Without them, you don’t feel like you; in fact, you aren’t really you. The biological self has been reframed as a cluster of communities, all in communication with each other." This is worth the click for the writing, too, which is wonderful.

Banana. Plastic. Cool.

Edited to go beyond the bananas.

We all need hope, and I am willing to be persuaded it's worthwhile. So - yes, the environment as it existed before human intervention is in TROUBLE ... but the rate at which we're recognizing and seeking to rectify our errors is increasing every day. That is a good thing.

We're figuring out strategies to capture CO2. We're insatiably curious, even as we're scared, and that means we're fighting the consequences of our own blunders. Because homo sapiens are innovators.

Yes, there will be more unforseen consequences. Yes, there will always be greedy bastards who don't believe and don't care what has been manifest for decades - and is exponentially dangerous with every year that passes. Yes, it's sad we all look to (my niece, whom I shall not name here), Autumn Peltier, and Greta Thunberg - and feel stupid and scared and ineffectually guilty. The stupids *are* real.

Those who contemplate the groceries and trash we use are often paralyzed by the solutions that make their way into our attention - out of reach financially and/or geographically. When even the solutions aren't solutions, some, overwhelmed, just throw out plastic when nobody's looking - the new "throw up our hands and give up."

But there is HOPE. We are more than the contents of our chromosomes. And we're more than the consequences of our hubris.

And we're smart. And we're fascinated. And we're thinking about this. There's never been more focus on the problems stemming from and leading to climate, ecological, specie-al change.

Hope. Hope. HOPE. And learn.

White Gentrifier Guilt

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tooling around Teh Intarwebs and the real world, getting a feel for real estate. Watching my mom, aged 80, continuing to grapple with the question of whether to leave the home she shared with my stepfather (answer: almost certainly not) has me thinking about what I'd like my own old age to look like, and it's possible it might not look best in the house I've got.

When I purchased my home in July, 2001, I never imagined being in it 18 years. It was meant to be starter equity, to be traded in when I found some hapless victim man - really very nice, but nothing I meant to become permanently attached to.

Well, my equity is now old enough to vote, or to die in a foreign war (but not drink!), and I find myself wondering whether it might be best traded on at some point. The house is two steep storeys, AND has a full basement: and the laundry is located all the way down there. Being of a moronic and stubborn nature, this means I regularly huck hundred-pound loads of clothes up and down stairs in varying states of safe clearance. Oh, in my fantasies, some engineer appears magically and offers to build a motorized dumbwaiter in a convenient spot. But then, in my fantasies I also have a slate-floor screened porch, a brick car port with electricity, and the house is suddenly not located in a super-white neighborhood either.

Yeah, I am 51 years old, and have realized that MOST of my life has been lived in a White Flight bubble. The schools I went to were named for old white politicians, proponents of Massive Resistance (we could have been Edgar Allen Poe high, but ohhh no - must be a politician!). The suburbs I spent most of my time in were without diversity.

So I don't really want to live my entire life in the economic, cultural, and personal bubble that is White Fragility Comfort. If I do sell, I'd love to see my place go to people who don't look exactly like me. When I bought, I was still a little afraid to buy in neighborhoods with bars on the windows.

Now, I'm more afraid to buy in those neighborhoods because, inevitably, those of us who grew up like I did are seeing how nice the houses were, that our parents or grandparents left behind in heading for the suburbs ... and they're coming back, displacing historically Black neighborhoods, denuding beautiful homes of vintage architectural details (white shaker cabinets that do not reach the ceiling and theoretically high end finishes that clash with and poorly cover older homes' interiors - what I call "stick on" kitchens), falling for ugly and disrespectful flips. Gentrification is killing family businesses and families, pricing people out of places they have lived maybe for generations.

I don't want to be that person. The notation "yoga studios and coffee shops are popping up everywhere!" in a listing, translated, means "don't be scared, lil' white folks, you can come back to the city because we're papering over what it used to be as fast as we can destroy lives!" It also means ramping up economic inequality - and, cringe-ironically, sending those who'll no longer be able to stay to cheap apartments ... or maybe the midcentury ramp crappy flips we're leaving behind now that they're no longer fashionable.

In just a few weeks' looking at my own future and driving around trying to suss out the worst of the gentification, I haven't figured out how to puncture the white economic bubble I've spent an awful lot of my life in, versus avoiding landing like a lummox on an even more delicate neighborhood ecosystem without damage.

One thing I know: whatever comes, I'll have zero use for boo-teeks, coffee shops, or yoga studios, so at least I don't have to feed THAT aspect of economic flux.

But I don't really know if there is an answer. It's entirely possible the answer is, "Sit down and shut up" - and, the fact is, I'm entirely willing to take that answer. Eighteen years in, I let my eye rove, and what I find when I come literally home is, home is a really nice place. Maybe I ought to hope my own environs might diversify with time, and save money for that dumbwaiter, that porch, that car port. A person could do far worse.

For now, I'm educating myself, and it's already working. I'm getting a feel for what the real priorities would be, what it would take to take me away from the house where I have loved my Sweet Siddy La and Pen and Goss, where I endured my father's and my stepfather's and my best friend/sister's deaths. Where I felt Mr. X's hands across my back as he held me, the day dad died, the first time he ever visited here. It wouldn't be easy to strip my home and leave these walls, these bricks, these good bones.

Maybe at some point I'll figure out the balance. Maybe (it's remotely possible) Mr. X and I might even find a home together someday.

Eh, maybe I'll be hit by a bus tomorrow. It's unlikely. But in the meantime, I gotta live.

And my place isn't a bad one for doing that...

Collection

Fella babies, today we start off with the direct line from representation to racism. (The click beyond.)

Marketing ten thousand steps for fifty years. Man, what a triumph - but not of healthcare information.

It's been my policy to view actual moving/sound footage of Trump as little as possible, so I rarely end up seeing Melania either. However, during his recent visit to the U.K., I caught a little of their welcome to Charles and Camilla ... and was car-wreck fascinated. Go to about :45 and watch her attempts to maintain a smile. It's eerie.




And then there's the light FIST she makes as she turns to enter the house. Yikes.

Welp, and if like me looking at those two (not meaning Charles and Camilla, but hey, YMMV) makes you feel dirty ... maybe it's a good thing. On the relationship of microbial bacteria and depression - not what you might think! (Or: hooray for pets!)

And here we have the final nail in the coffin as to my old argument with my bro: I am NOT a(n) historian.

Collection

#TFW a "Housewife" begins to discuss any treatment she has discovered for any possible ailment, real or imagined or self-inflicted ... (No, this isn't as clickbait sketchy as some of those "gawk at vintage advertising stories you see on Teh Intarwebs.)

Brain scans on rappers ... discovered that during freestyle rapping, brain activity increased in the brain areas that engage motivation, language, mood, and action.

This piece is a wistful one for me, as a writer who knows what I CANNOT do; I do not have the chops. But man would I love to read this story from the perspective of the kids whose world this already was.

NSFW ... since about 1600 (science-ing the what out of what?). Ahhh, I love it when The Arrant Pedant gives us glorious etymology. Enjoy!

Collection

(I)f there’s one thing women* don’t need, it’s another reason to feel unwelcome...
(*or anyone)

For all the brouhaha about political correctness, and my own grappling to find the line(s) I will not cross, and the boundaries to delineate in interaction with others, I've never found a better phrase than the now-problematic "PC" itself. Thank you to Joel Kim Booster for providing the best conceptualization: "As a human being, I find accountability to other people extremely important... I don’t think we’re really willing to do that math. Is this joke worth being an asshole?" This laser-focuses the fact of community, of the dynamics of interaction. Also, this is a nice, multifarious view of retroactive linguistics. Balance.

"The politics of a Dick Wolf police procedural are simply less visible to many—including, apparently, Wolf himself—because they mirror the politics of the privileged. For middle-class and affluent white people, a pro-police, pro-institution worldview is apolitical because it’s neutral to them. It is neutral to Dick Wolf. That worldview is not politically neutral for black men, or trans people, or victims of sexual assault, or impoverished people, or basically anyone who isn’t a wealthy white person." It is unnecessary for me to add anything to these words but the link.

Art. It's cool. It's wearable. Let's take a breather from my recent posting and look at neat wearable art - more than mere costume, here we have musings from science fiction to avant garde to "red" to under-the-microscope entries. I think my favorite is Quantum, but "shell" packs a pointed punch today of all days.

Collection

When an article features Terry Crews and mentions Rosey Grier, I'm going to be all the way in for clicking THAT. When that article fully displays the principle and ever-perfecting manhood, well pre-dating Crews' current testimony before the Senate, and how sumptuously he expresses not only his humanity but his convictions, I all but weep. He's proving what we know - and most need to know. Additionally, he's funny as hell.

A joke I heard on Twitter once: "White people upset about BET asking, 'Why don't we have White Entertainment Television?' ... We do, it's HGTV." Worth the click because sometimes online discourse is fertile.

In other TV musing, something struck me about Pose recently. Having watched other Ryan Murphy works, I knew early on that the discussion I'd seen regarding how unrealistic Pose is was almost funny: Murphy's not interested in realism, he presents setpieces, and he does that nicely if you choose to take it on his/those terms. (Feud felt intentionally setbound; even outdoors scenes are claustrophobic and closed-in. That plays to the emotional worlds of the Crawford and Davis characters in play.) For Pose, the archness is not as visually obvious, so I've seen complaints about, say, just how glamorous the scene is made to look, or the opening sequence for the series itself, where "real" historical costumes are stolen from a museum for a gay ball. Preposterous! And duh. Here is the thing: Pose is 80s TV. Figuratively (it's set in the late 80s) and literally (its emotional beats are ALL Very Special Episode-worthy). The depth of plotting is *veeeerryyy* much like 80s TV - sitcom or drama. The pacing is extremely 80s; when TV took time to lay things out. For many, this seems slow or dry or even insulting (making the implicit explicit). But this is so, so true to its time. It takes the 80s seriously, AND it tells stories no network (remember, we really had three back then) would have told in the time itself. I kind of think that's genius, and it's not Murphy's first time reining pace enough to slow things down like this. Given his current influence, you wonder how this might bear out in others' work. Imagine a vogue for *less* cinematic TV; imagine the VSE's regaining ascendance. I've seen surprising amounts of ink on VSEs over the past couple of years. My guess is nostalgia is bringing it back, in service of subjects even the original concept never served.

Leaping from television to literature, who has read Connie Willis's Doomsday Book? I actually re-read it a year or two ago, and - forget Jurassic Park - this book will scare the willies out of you, in both its plague-ridden timelines. So reading about the extraction of leprosy from centuries-old skeletal remains ISN'T HORRIFYING AT ALL. Just as long as you haven't read the wrong books. Yeep.

Finally ... hmm, and more hmm. Yes, fella babies, it's Adventures in Science Reporting again!

I have written in the past about Penelope's ancestry, and as little obsessed as I am with pedigree, it's not beyond me to admit fascinated with the idea my beloved Pariah descending from millennia of fascinating forerunners. Oddly enough, it seems like cancer is about all we really have left of pre-contact canine breeds. Still - being a critical thinker - it is hard not to wonder about previous DNA studies, pointing to modern Amercan dogs' long history here. Hmmmm. Keep us posted, Dr. Ostrander.

Collection

Strangely, considering how much I lean on them for content around here, it's been a while since I did a Collection post. Let's make up for that, shall we?

This post from Casey Karp is a funny bit of truism - on procrastinators, writers, and the facts of documentation. He has a nimble way with a word, go read his blog for this, or many other things!

Who watched Feud, the recent "anthology series" (we used to call these miniseries, kids) about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford? One of the things that captivated me was its production design. From the brilliant cutout-animation of the credits to the airless, sky-less sets - even the outdoors feels indoors in this film - there is a set-bound feel, for such a sprawling piece, covering decades and many cities. The returns to a single home for each star (Crawford had many over the years, but writing historical fiction does involve elision and compilation), the visitation of one windowless and symmetrically-posed restaurant booth, the sets within the sets. It's all among the most amazing visual arts pieces I've ever seen done in a movie or show; there is a realism to the details, but an overwhelming, airless enclosure about the whole.

Many of my friends and family know, I've barely ever been able to tolerate Susan Sarandon at all, but of COURSE she was almost literally born to the role of Davis, and she probably edges out Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford here. Vocally, neither of them puts in a full-time job of sounding much like the original stars, but Sarandon does provide several moments looking and sounding like Davis which are spine-tinglingly eerie. Lange never even attempts the flinty twang of Crawford, which is a shame given that Crawford's voice is so much a part of her persona for those of us who've really spent any time watching her performances, but she doesn't fail as utterly as Faye Dunaway did with her voice. The smoker's modulation she does use is at least entirely appropriate to Crawford's aesthetic, and makes sense as a character choice.

Okay, enough of that. How about the history of the American grin - and the import/export problems with it? Very cool piece by The Atlantic; nicely detailed, but not a long read.

(D)ata showed that flight delays got worse as more people based purchases mostly on price. Airlines didn’t have to compete at being good—they had to compete only at being cheap.

Who doesn't love a good victim-blaming? I don't! In "the evolution of how we do things" news: aaaaahhhhh, airlines. Turns out it's all our own fault we're miserable with air travel. There is a complex web of implications here; not all of it bad, and some of the worst of it perfectly persuasive. Personally, I'm creeped out and concerned about The Uber-ization of Everything, but the wider implications could be interesting, should they actually play out. Hmmm. Lots of hmmm.

Ten high-quality products manufactured in the United States - I had no idea ANY shoes were manufactured domestically any more, and will keep New Balance in mind for my next pair of sneakers. Which may be sooner now, just because I know this.

Collection

This travelogue by a gent I worked with, ummmm four or five jobs ago, gave me multiple giggles in a row. If you like limericks (even non-ribald ones), this post is for you. Glorious!

An interesting development in Sweden: a gender rating system for films. It appears to be pretty much a cis system - male and female representation, nothing beyond. But as a member of those privileged to be examined in this,  it is of great interest and a matter for hope that anyone's looking at all. (If you have the stomach for it, a click onward to the Seth McFarlane article is worth a couple minutes as well.)

The History Blog has a couple of good ones - here, telling us that CBS This Morning will be at the National Museum of African American History (not just open for a day, folks) tomorrow morning. And here, with the beautiful tribute to a Jewish woman in Egypt - a third century epitaph.

15. Because we will not forget.

Final Voyages and Beyond

Tonight, I finished off a sporadic Netflicking of Enterprise, which (along with all the other Trek the 'flix has to offer) is always in my queue. This finale wants to be a Trekkie/Trekker love letter, but is one of those notorious fails that cheapened what came before. Since it was early yet, I decided to finish off my *evening* with the next-up episode of DS9, "Far Beyond the Stars".

FBS has been next-up for some days, if not a week or two, because it's so damned good I don't just watch it any old time as background noise. Every time I see it, this episode is new again.

In the best possible way, this script is tight and taut. It runs like a well-oiled machine, but is not a device, is not a tool. It is story within story; one of the best frames on TV, even though it uses an unremarkable conceit to take us where it literally goes. After the cruel framing device used in Enterprise's finale, this one shows all the world how it is DONE.

Synopsis - The diverse crew of the 24th-century space station Deep Space 9 play different roles in the old "is it all madness/a dream?" scenario, through the character of Captain Benjamin Sisko. Now set in 1950s NYC, the cast are now an ensemble of neighborhood and office characters who know Benny Russell, a science fiction writer enduring racial prejudice and the question of his own sanity.

Stock setup. Stellar (har) execution.


This episode would make a perfect exemplar for a non-fan of the best of Star Trek - why those of us who love it so much, do. It's also deadly goddamned good TV completely apart from its Trek-ness. The production values are strong, the acting is wrenching (a good thing), the comedy is not neglected, and the characters each get the most fascinating workouts. Penny Johnson, who interestingly is barely noted in any of the links above for the ep (perhaps her understatement and naturalism make her work seem effortless), is marvelous, and brought me to mind of Nichele Nichols in "The Lieutenant".

Notable, too, is Michael Dorn's sole outing in all his Trek experience, playing a human being. His exceptionally warm smile and non-Klingon voice are perfect as he plays a smooth baseball hero himself up against the fact he's alone, playing in a white league.

Freed of heavy makeup, Armin Shimerman (there's a Buffy inside joke, by the way), Rene Auberjonois, Marc Alaimo, Aron Eisenberg, and Jeffrey Combs are all quite good.

Cirroc Lofton is a revelation, now no longer Sisko's son, but a savvy young man whose lines are almost the perfect commentary on the episode's racial themes. He is heart-rending and almost as innate in his character's skin as Johnson is. It probably doesn't need saying that Brock Peters is good; but I'll say it.

Those who know DS9 know the complex, maddening, yet charismatic Marc Alaimo - originator of the Cardassian species on Trek during the TNG years - and his role here is, even for those familiar with his villainous Gul Dukat, honestly bone-chilling. I say this on a 90-plus humid night in Virginia in July, sitting on a leather couch.

Rene Auberjonois has a thankless role in an alter-ego which echoes, without the comedy, his role as Clayton Endicott in Benson; unlikeable, and scarily authentic in the punctilious, officious skin of a character the actor himself, I believe, could not less resemble.

Avery Brooks' sometimes over the top performing style is harnessed here (under his OWN direction) in one particular scene of unhinged horror that is powerfully effective.

Even the music is excellent, and used practically, not just sound-tracked over scenes as an emotional instruction how we should feel. One brilliant use of a free-form so famous even I have heard it, though I cannot name it and am not going to throw more links around, uses the cacophany and melody of the instrumentation in a harrowing moment where the main character fears he is losing his mind. The moment he clings to Johnson is sublime, animal, gripping in the physical and the metaphorical sense; his eyes are hunted and his intelligence is both at its height and teetering upon madness. Live brass in the streets, the noise of mammoth crowds, the traffic and a little stock footage of NYC - even Brooks' own moment of song - are the best music Trek ever used.

The editing is a great tool in service of this story; it moves the story subtly, alarmingly, follows the overarching arc, and picks out fine detail.

Keith DeCandido and I have swapped a grin and a lie in the past about this story, either at RavenCon or on Twitter. I've had his "rewatch" essay bookmarked for yeas. I like his take on this piece.


All this is to say - this is why I love DS9 the best. This is why I love Trek. This is what I'd tell people who know me, but don't understand why I am a fan. This is where I might point someone, if they were not and were curious. This would be a hell of a gateway drug (the fact that some areas of the Trekverse might thereafter disappoint notwithstanding).

I love it. And now for bedtime.

Setting It Right

Yesterday, I ran across a new old-TV channel on the air locally, and saw that one of the shows coming up for the evening was The Lieutenant. This show was EARLY Gene Roddenberry, before he launched Star Trek. It stars Gary Lockwood, who was in the second TV pilot of Trek (ST's FIRST "reboot" - with Captain Kirk instead of Pike), as the bad guy with the silver eyeballs. He also appeared in a little-known sci fi outing called 2001. Look it up, it's tripendicular.

I met Lockwood and Kier Dullea the first year Mr. X and I were dating. They asked us if we were “in The Business” because we were so good looking. Then we met David Carradine, which was a whole 'nother story. Oh the good old days.

Anyway, one of the eps of The Lieutenant on last night was “To Set It Right” – about racial conflict on a Marine base. It includes Dennis Hopper and Nichelle Nichols. This episode was not aired at the time it was made. Too controversial.

Supposedly, this episode’s shutdown was part of the reason Roddenberry conceived of taking the issues and themes he wanted to explore into outer space. So he could get away with it.

Watching the ep now, it almost feels like something that’d have a hard time even today, and not just because of the 50-year-old linguistics. It really is pretty incendiary; I’m fully impressed with how brave a production it was.

Ms. Nichols is terribly young, wonderfully warm, and absolutely, brilliantly intelligent – and, as she remains even today, just a breathtaking beauty. She has some meat in this part, really difficult dialogue and a couple showcase scenes in which her education is on full display. “He’s been a negro a lot longer than you’ve been thinking about his problem.” She gives the would-be liberal white boy some SERIOUS what-for without a shrill note. Without her scenes, what the script has to say would be queasily uncomfortable - dated in the awfullest way - but she provides relevance that lasts and is meaningful *right now*.

I could not find the whole episode, but if you have Get-TV, look up the schedule for "The Lieutenant".

And, if not: here are a few scenes:

This episode does use the N-word, "negro" and "boy" - but not in the casual "well that was how they *talked* back then" way, but in a pointed way, questioning the way they talked, in what was "now" at the time. It also gorgeously deconstructs the White Guy Saves The Day plan, and avoids becoming a Very Special Episode - or making things easy. It looks at the perspectives of multiple minority characters, each of whom has their own voice, and is an actual *character*.  So by the time it does end with a pair of special moments, it feels more earned than a completely pat TV script.

This gets the "save until I delete" treatment on the DVR. And I'll watch more, to be sure.

Collection

Janet Reid quoted me at some length in this week’s epic edition of her Sunday Week in Review …

DLM had some very wise words to our questioner:

(I)t's in no way my place to tell another author their vision must be blinkered, but I can at least speak to the necessity (sometimes) of putting away a novel. And it does not come lightly.

OP, I spent ten years learning how to write a novel, and writing it. Some of those latter years, I queried. I learned I had more work to do, I did it, I queried again. What came out of that was a VERY good novel; a good read, a fascinating look at a little-regarded piece of world history. And a book I cannot sell.

It's been a year since I first allowed myself to even conceive of the idea of putting this work away. But I quickly realized it was necessary. Years of my life. A story I still love. All those dreams. And the universe's answer was "no."

Believe me when I say, I know how hard it is. I know how heartbreaking.

But I also know this: to put that firstborn book away, to let it rest, to stop asking more of it than the market can realistically yield ... is LIBERATING.

I’ll be honest, it’s hard not to think (though she has never said as much to me) she agrees with the reasoning by which I came to retire The Ax and the Vase.

Speaking of which:

Something I said to someone today, about The Ax and the Vase … “It's a GREAT novel. But right now, the he market is not dying of need for novels about The Ultimate White Dude in Power. … I hated losing those years of my life. I hated putting that novel away. And I know it's been the right thing to do, and I'm even glad. Clovis' voice isn't the voice we need to hear, not right now. It hurt like hell, but I learned and grew and what I've gained from the experience I would never give up.”

Tom Williams and I were talking recently about the new image header on his blog, and he said it helped to inspire his most recent work. I can remember falling into cover images when I was a kid, coming into the world of the book – or, perhaps more often, a world of my own making, and finding universes filled with tales. It seems a good time to write from an image. Unrelatedly (?), I’ve also read a little, of late, about Tantalus and Sisyphus. And the Caustic Cover Critic led me, a moment ago, to this. Stay tuned for a short piece, born of these things. I’m thinking world-building of my own …
Unless the short stories I've been posting are throwing off the blog content? Opinions welcome.

The History Blog has given me a few chances lately to get out of the usual Western European and/or American groove.

In a once-inaccessible cliff tomb in Nepal, we find the tantalizing possibility that The Silk Road circa 500 AD had a much more southerly route than has historically been believed.

An excavation at a museum which once was a priory turns up a tiny Arabic chess piece. There is a speculative piece of background about Cardinal Wolsey’s guests at Wallingford Priory that provides some lovely opportunities for stories about someone losing a piece of a game with which they traveled, five centuries ago, but I perhaps will not be the one to write that story. For me, the truly interesting part is what a bishop’s mitre has in common with a war elephant.

Another evocative find is the jewelry treasure which may have been hidden to save it in a period of upheaval: “The National Museum of History experts believe the cache of silver jewels was a family fortune buried in the turbulent days of the Chiprovtsi Uprising in the fall of 1688. Since almost everyone in the area was killed in battle, executed, enslaved or fled, there was nobody left to dig up the treasure.” Difficult not to imagine the desperation in this poignant hidden silver.

Back in my English groove, the photos of this  13th century mosaic floor at Somerset is a gorgeous look at a period when decoration was marvelously bright and bold. When I first became familiar with 13th-15th century European and English architecture and furnishings, I was astonished by the exuberant and high-contrast graphics and bright colors. Modern preconceptions tend to color everything in The Past (and especially the so-called medieval period) a bit of a faded sepia tone, but five minutes’ perusal of any variety of heraldic design should put paid to this notion, and heraldic design is dominant in this rare sample of a noble’s expensive tiled floor. Glorious!

For an idea of the vividness of a medieval interior, take a look here.

If you were interested in the Silk Road story, or my own obsession with historical costume and conservation/preservation of textiles, this seventeenth-century find is a STUNNING rare piece, colors still tantalizingly present and the cloth in excellent condition. From a *shipwreck* no less!

#WeNeedDiverseBlogs

As discussions at Janet's community tend to go, today's post brought on a rangy, tugging, distractable, and bracing chat as much like a cute and strong and happy puppy on a leash as usual. I need to quote Janet Rundquist in full on one of her comments today, with thanks for her permission to use this ...


ProfeJMarie (Janet Rundquist) said...
Colin,
"It doesn't help me to understand the Mexican experience, or what it's like to be Latino/Latina if I'm constantly drawn out of the story because sections of important dialog are in a language I don't understand,"

This statement is where my point is. This assumes a lot about our readers. And while it can obviously apply to many populations, I'm going to go out on pretty solid limb and say that your statement above assumes that "most" readers are white, European, English-only speakers. It also assumes that when I put Spanish phrases into my novel, you are assuming that my purpose is teach about Latino culture. It's not. My native language is English, but I speak Spanish. I am not pulled out of a story due to Spanish phrases. Maybe I am if there's lots of Amharic, but I go with it because A) I am not the only one reading that book and B) that's the nature of the story and those characters.

Malinda Lo has a fantastic series about how this kind of thing impacts diverse voices from becoming part of the mainstream. It's our ("our"=we white people in the publishing biz) unintentional bias that gets in the way. It seems like a little thing, but it actually has more impact on the systemic issue than even I realized until recent years.

Perceptions of Diversity in Book Reviews

ie: as white readers and writers, we often make the mistake of making "white" and "English" the default. For the writer who had full paragraphs of Spanish followed by English... while I agree that his approach is misguided, his motivation behind it seems legit.

And now I've veered further away from the topic of this post, prune it all to Carkoon.


I snip this out of the fuller conversation because it stands so beautifully on its own, even if you never click to see the whole thread today. Little in-jokes about prunes and Carkoon aside, this is a delightfully stated point. The Malinda Lo link (Perceptions of Diversity link) is also, as Janet sometimes describes good things, a sox-knocker too, unpacking the theory that diversity in novels is "contrived" or implausible. To which I say: sigh. However, to the shout-out to Meg Medina, an author I know personally, am honored to consider a friend, and admire both as a writer and as a woman, I say: huzzah!

Diversity is not “praiseworthy”: It is reality. 

--Malinda Lo

I have to be honest. Almost a year on ... I actually feel better and better about putting The Ax and the Vase down for a nap. I *still* think the thing is a damned good novel. But it is ever more clearly, to me, an obvious result of my own blindness and privilege, curvatus en se, a learning tool.

The Rhythm of the Boogie the Beat

Janet's community has been at its best today, and inevitably it's all got me thinking. Thinking things like this ...

What a lot of us fail to see through our privilege is that "white is the default." I place that in quotes not for sarcasm, but because the words are not mine; they are at the base of #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the issues with diversity (not just in publishing, but I'm trying not to go off the rails here). I grew up understanding that whitneness is the signifying quality of American-ness, and never thinking about that. I lived in a suburb that was the product of white-flight, and went to a school named for a proponent of segregation and massive resistance. So-called "genteel racism" was (and even remains) not hidden.

THE major reason I decided to shelve The Ax and the Vase was that, no matter how good the writing is, nor even how interesting the story is: American publishing is not suffering from a dearth of tales of white dudes in power. There isn't a single POC in that novel, and I thought that was completely valid, and I WAS WRONG. I guilted about it, but didn't change it. The WIP is an entirely different matter.

... and this ...

Diversity is not an agenda.

Diversity is the reality of our world - in the past, where I write, in the present, in every part of the world, no matter what. There is diversity of age, of gender identification, of color, of religion, of tastes in ice cream, of economic/relationship/educational/class/intellectual status. We don't all have the same resources. There is no world without differences: yet many of us grew up not seeing that. Many grew up feeling invisible because "white is the default", and faces and voices of color were not proportionately seen and heard - even still, there's no money in it, as far as certain industries are concerned.

Dis-inclusiveness makes for poor writing. 

I write precisely because I want to see something of the word other than where I live. The inside of my navel would make an awful setting for a story. Story is for many readers not merely an escape, but a venture OUT - out of the day to day, out of what they already know, out of their own skin.

And diversity is not all about skin. Remember that it's much, much wider than "political correctness" or complaining about old white dudes. Old dudes need representation too, in cultures obsessed with youth.

Diversity is not a punishment for privilege, and it's not even the political rectitude so many who fear this punishment find so abhorrent. It's just the real landscape of the world we live in.

... and this ...

And too: diversity is not (only) about color/ethnicity.

I am mystified by those who can stomach Pandora bracelets or licorice or team fitness challenges. These things horrify me to a point it's hard not to think "You are doing it wrong" about those people who love this stuff. And I left out a lot - diversity in our health (mental illness and its challenges have been much on my mind of late), and stigmatizations that do not relate to ethnicity even tangentially. We "other" people for as many reasons as there are people marginalized or brutalized or CELEBRATED.

... and this ...

(D)iversity is not a quota system. There is no magic number to get all the people we're not to stow this talk of diversity.

Failure to include is the failure to reflect the world. ... I grew up in Downtown White Flight, but one of my closest friends was a Black girl named Holly. She wasn't invisible; she introduced me to the concept of Michael Jackson outside of The Five, and when she did Rapper's Delight, I damn near fell over in awe at the speed of her singing-speech.

Diversity is not a didactic directive that we all have to write about POC/disabled/young/old/mentally ill/poor/disenfranchised/licorice-loving/religiously alternative/gay/differently pinky-toed people. It's the distillation of the point that if we're writers, and if we pretend that non-us people are invisible, we are failing in our WORK - failing to reflect the abundance of the world we live in, or the one we're trying to build.

"I came that they might have life, and have it in abundance." Why would we want to revel in limitation?

***


My own final comment above brings to mind something that has always bothered me in production design most particularly, but does happen in prose.

Historicals are especially plagued with this - prop masters get so carried away finding JUST the right clothes or home furnishings or cars, or location scouts just the right place to shoot, that any other period than the exact year of their story is neglected. Nineteenth century homes contain nothing from the seventeenth or sixteenth; girls in 1970s productions wear only Dorothy Hamill haircuts and wedgies;

The picture-perfect past is only ONE single slice of the past, one instant's place on a timeline: when, in life, we all have a lot of our own past around us right now. Why would not *our* past have had *their* past about them?

It's a silly view, and it's poor world-building. It misses out on the beautiful English Georgian portrait hanging in the home of an early twentieth-century Australian. In my own home alone, thirty percent of my furniture would be gone - and the home itself - if someone reconstructed my "set" strictly in 2016 terms.

And so it is a silly view, that the world had no black people in it, just because I wrote a novel set in ancient Gaul - that only one woman was club-footed, and maybe there was like one miscarriage as a sub-plot, and everybody was intelligent and overall healthy and all the same color.

And so it is a silly view, that all the Black people in America were offstage in the 1950s, waiting for the Civil Rights movement and Jimi Hendrix and Oprah to give them stories to tell. It is a silly view, that Black people exist only in the context of cotton fields and The Cotton Club.

It is no view at all, and no voice. It is the brutality of non-seeing, of rendering people and lives invisible. Some of those people might be white, or rich, or men named William. Diversity is many things.

But a lack of it is only one thing: a bloody bore to read.


***


Edited to add this: PLEASE consider going to the link to Janet Reid's blog. It is not a short read, because today we commented unfettered, and the discussion was long. But the conversation is a glorious example of the best of human interaction, debate, conversation. It closes with thoughtful words from the lady herself, our hostess, Queen of the Known Universe (QOTKU) - and comments are closed. So the thoughts it will provoke: bring them into your world. Bring them here, too, I would love that.

But, for now, Lord, it is night. G-d rest you all.

Collection

"Trying to get that music out on the page is just absolute hell, so you fail." A great writing clip from Unleaded - Fuel For Writers, with Ta-nehisi Coates.

For my Asian art loving nerd readers ... The British Museum blog has three interviews with manga artists - Nakamura Hikaru, Hoshino Yukinobu, and Chiba Tetsuya.

Unleaded also has a GREAT pie chart - How Shakespeare Killed off his characters. Some of the more obscure methods are kind of hilarious, taken out of the usual obligatory sober literary context. "Baked Into Pie" ... eep! Hee.

The history girls has a phrase I love for what I usually rant about under the "popular misconceptions" and "oh the dirty stupid past" tags - recency illusions. I love this way of putting it, and hey - I love 40s platform shoes, too.

And ... because I *was* historically inaccurate ... when a picture speaks a thousand words. (The much later artistic rendering of) the coronation of Pharamond - a Frankish king very close to my period, and indeed a name I chose to use in The Ax and the Vase. From People of Color in European Art History.

Also from the POC in European art blog, an image of St. Maurice - one of my favorite saints, actually.

Dena Pawling has a look at the treatment of women attorneys. It's not pretty ... so to speak. Sigh.

From the Portuguese machete, to its little-known political symbolism, to Tiny Tim: the ukulele has a rather remarkable history. Its *present* includes some virtuoso work by one of my nieces, but its past is interesting too. Thanks to If It Happened Yesterday, It's History.

Courtesy of medievalists.net, Seven Myths of the Crusades - a nice look at historical scholarship, though sadly it's not as nice a look at Terry Jones as a lot of Python fans might hope to see. I own his The Crusades series - and, like a lot of tele-history, it suffers ... some weaknesses. This is a good start to looking at the much more complex realities of this series of religious wars and battles.

For a lighter-hearted Python allusion, you could wander by themarysue.com to learn about cocunuts in medieval England. "(M)edieval England was lousy with coconuts" - OSUM.

Playboy’s hackneyed idea of what a nude is, and who it’s for, seems increasingly narrow in the selfie age. When Kim Kardashian is celebrating her own body in superabundant selfies and many less famous people are doing the same, the nude is neither oppressive nor commodified – it’s a part of how human beings communicate with one another.

The last point here is what arrests my attention ... The Guardian has an extremely curious take on the abolition of nudity from Playboy's pages ... I'm not sure I'm persuaded by its argument that this is in fact a culturally dismal move; given the wider picture of our culture, it's not as if the objectification and sexualization of women is (a) on the decline, or (b) something I can accept as wholesome and positive. But the point about shame is one to pause upon, even if Kardashian selfies make a challenging argument for cultural elevation. It's worth a ponder, at least, to contemplate the wider ideas on display in this article. The reference to Indian and Shunga art helps, for me, to take it out of my personal moral context and look at art (erm) objectively.

If I Had My Druthers

Please accept my apologies for a late post from Monday ...


Monday mornings that start off rolling are the best beginning for a work week. I had a mental note or two coming in, only a minor glitch or two firing up, and a good, solid four hours of steady work to keep me going in the a.m. There were also two fresh new rejections (both of them expected, so the sting was minor); one on a query sent only yesterday, and one only a couple or three weeks old.

IF I HAD MY DRUTHERS

I honestly wonder, as I consider shelving (as distinct from “drawering”, which would imply entirely giving up hope) Ax____, whether it is right or wrong to do so. It’s hard to be open to the possibility of putting away a work I know is GOOD, even if I have begun to consider that it may not be the work that can launch my second career, but I am trying to allow the idea to be … okay. At the same time, yes, querying is a numbers game and this could just be my origin myth, the tale of the super-author in the making, the cred that makes my own arc as worthwhile as (insert respected/much-rejected author’s name here) – and as Clovis’ own.

That latter is tempting, and honestly I would hardly stop to think about “quitting” (for NOW) on Ax, except that … I feel like I’ve run out of lists to plunder, research resources to take advantage of. Options. I feel like I’ve queried every agent who even mentions histfic without dotting their eyes with little Regency romance hearts or … yeah, mentioning that it’d be nice to see something other than some white European king for a change.

Hilary Mantel did spectacularly well with Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, but … Hilary Mantel also wasn’t a debut novelist in the first place, and was writing and publishing on a different continent from my own in the second place. She had twenty years’ catalog of performance behind her. She also found a way to write about the perennially-blockbuster Tudors without quite treading old ground. And now she also has TWO Man-Booker prizes to her credit.

Not a platform I can claim to stand on. Though I’ve got a story that not only doesn’t tread old ground, but illuminates a huge swath of the history of the West *and* even some of the very reasons #WeNeedDiverseBooks today, it isn’t. Diverse. And nobody’s heard of Clovis I on this side of The Pond (a *selling* point that gets in its own way, Catch-22 style [an appropriate problem for an author named Major?]). It’s not MG, YA, or NA; there isn’t a single dragon, pneumatic beauty, or magically-engendered neurosis in it. Game of Thrones readers might dig it, but I’m not comping that and don’t have compelling plans to garner that audience nor proof I could.

And but.

And but.

And but.

Ten years I’ve spent with this novel, now. Learning from it and LOVING it, though that may not shine through given my dry and pragmatic statements about killing darlings and it being a product and oh-so-professional detachment. I LOVE Ax and the Vase, it has been both one hell of a good story to be part of, and iet means the world to me. It is a manifestation of something my dad talked about all his life (“somebody should write a book” was a stock phrase in my house growing up), and he died before I ever began to write. I have no doubt he’s rooting for it, and there is a minor, sentimental strain in wishing I could publish a book I know he’d probably have enjoyed immensely on its own merits … and been inexperessibly proud to know I wrote. (Heck, at that, half the dead folks in my family would probably like this book; those who have gone before me gave me the very voice in which it’s expressed, after all.)

I am to this day entranced by the story, to the point that actually feeling it’s ready, it’s finished, is still exciting – just to know I have done this thing, that I made it, I have something to do with something this great.

I’m proud of my work.

Even if I let it go for now, there’s no doubt I’d try to get it out there as a follow up. (It is a prequel of sorts to the WIP; they are as unalike as they are inextricably linked.)

Lord, just thinking and writing about it, I gnash and resist with a fury the idea there’s no agent out there who could (… who would …) do anything with this book. It’s a bloody good read, it’s a ripping yarn.

If only I could find some hidden stash, somewhere else to turn.


In the meantime, I must turn to the WIP. If I have missed some dozens of agents who would do my work proud, somehow or other I’ll find ‘em – and beware, agents.

This isn’t quitting. I’m just turning slightly to one side … for the moment …

Collection

It's been some time since I linked any updates on Richard III's exhumation and reburial and so on, so here's The History Blog's latest on this week's upcoming (Thursday, 3/26) ceremonies for those who've also been somewhat sporadic in keeping up. As always, good links included, and nice details.

Medieval People of Color looks at (please pardon the pun) a different kind of diversity in this post, with well-known paintings recreated for the blind . This is the sort of idea that begs the question, "How come we never did this before? Have we done this before ... ?" And it's true - sometimes the fascination and beauty in art are in the small details. An interesting exhibit not only for the visually-challenged; looking at classics in a new way.

The British Museum (and its blog) examines nudes in ancient Greek art "as an expression of social, moral, and political values." Today, it's covering nudity that perhaps most reflects my country's and culture's social, moral, and political values ...

Kim Rendfield hosts Marina Julia Neary, who tells us about life behind the rusting curtain, and whose title alone, "Saved by the Bang" (for a novel touching on Chernobyl) has me itching to see just how much I can balance on the TBR pile ... Oh dear! Side note, the discussion of spelling of her given name is a neat look into

Passion of Former Days has French kisses (vintage (not scandalous!) French postcards). With original notes, as sent at the time. Ooh la la!

Keep an eye peeled in 100 days for Tom Williams' next outing, Burke at Waterloo!

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

There is a movement in publishing which has gathered a great deal of momentum just in the past six months, and which is gratifying to see - and which I have DECIDEDLY failed (with The Ax and the Vase, that is) to participate in. Ax is not only about a royal white dude, but it's self-absorbedly told in first person POV, *and* includes a long and inextricable subplot about, essentially, hating and punishing homosexual behavior.

I've talked about it before, and don't defend these things in their essence. Ax is the story that made me tell it, and (failings and all) it still captivates me, and it's a great novel. I didn't think, when falling into the story, about its demographics, and have wrestled with my own culpability as an author since.

The WIP happens once again to be about a royal princess, but (a) this novel will be told, at least, from the point of view of a woman, and (b) takes place in world by far more cosmopolitan than an ancient Frankish stockade. At least two major characters are people of color, and the issue of how one of these must die is one I am dealing with at great mental length these days, because it echoes, for me, the insensitivity of a White Dude King killing off the gay man in his ranks, and there is concern not only for my ethical expectations, but also the genuineness of the world. I shy away from political correctness in dealing with any story, and yet there is a definite need to "redeem" myself from some of the constraints my original first-person novel brings with it, no matter how good it is.

There is also the concern of my being a white person of undoubted privilege and freedom, and the extent to which I exoticize diversity, as opposed to presenting it properly. I couldn't even bring myself to add to the community response at Janet Reid's recent post about diversity; they do too good a job there for me to improve on it. I just know I want to participate in #WeNeedDiverseBooks - in the right way for who I am and what we all want to accomplish.

How to do that ...

• Avoid exoticization - turning someone's entire culture into a Hallowe'en costume (or, even worse, a sexy Hallowe'en costume) to dress up my book.
• Avoid appropriation - imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes, it's just a reductive presumption, and can lead to a loss of perspective. Not good for writing about something.
• Don't impose myself on a character or a culture - researching a world to build it, without demolition in order to reface it. Storytelling is not a wasteful home design show out to impose a fresh new face on an old house, it's an exploration of structure and style which should be true to intent. I don't jam 21st-century feminists into my works, and I don't fetishize the worlds into which I want to bring my readers.
• Follow the story. If the characters are allowed "their own truth" so to speak, everything will work better. I love to be led, as an author.
• Keep #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the great diversity and voices *in tune* all the time. I find inspiration in Twitter all the time for this, connections and perspectives not only keeping me honest about my privilege, but affecting the way I live and write, and how I think about approaching everything.
• FIND THE HISTORY. There are more and more people every day seeking to illuminate sources beyond the powerful white men. Researchers are amazing people, and they share - it would be madness not to take advantage of that, as a writer.

The WIP is bringing with it, every day, more exciting opportunities in its story, its research - its *characters*.

Wish me luck ...