A collection of one ...

The blog's been pretty limp for a long time - unfortunately not the kind of infrequency that keeps a reader wanting more. I follow several others like that, but even my following of other blogs has been pretty poor of late. I don't read like I used to, don't write at all, really haven't blogged either. And am not even really thinking about "maybe I'll write again" and so on.

That said ... please go visit one of those I follow! Jeff Sypeck is such a good writer, and his observations about anything he uses *his* blog to point to are worth the stopover every time. In this case, too, the way he's pointing has me fascinated AND my mind is blown. Spoiler alert: Mike Tyson is fascinated by Clovis, the Merovingians, the Franks???? I mean ... Huh. It doesn't take me back, ahem, but does provide the unexpected imaginary mindpic of Mike Tyson reading my novel (had it ever seen the light of day). Huh.

What DID happen to them?

 

 

This is one of my favorite videos in a long time. 24 minutes and some change, but if you're interested in dogs and history, or the history of dogs, worth every bit of it. Carolinas of course do feature, and in this context pups like my girl are even more interesting.

Collection

Here is a plot bunny giant enough and strong enough for me to want to saddle it up and gall-hop away: on "crones" in sci fi. YES, PLEASE.

(N)o person inherently deserves to have a larger psychological piece of the universe than another person

I would add: or physical piece. Walk like a man, talk like a man - get crashed into by men, my friend! This phenomenon is the WORST in grocery stores, and it's always white men.

the brittle tedium of being yourself in a foreign place

This is an exhibit I might have to visit, Hopper and hotels. (Initially, I used the term "go see" in that first sentence, but changed it to "visit" ... both because my brain insists upon certain rhythms - but also because it seems, in the dingy gradation of color words have for me, a better choice for the picture.) What Sebastian Smee reviews as problems are part of what I see as the strengths in Hopper. The unfinished stories these pieces evoke. The "clunkiness" of his female figures strike me as, in fact, similarly honest to the rest of his images; celebrating bodies which are not artistically or aesthetically perfect. The strands of hair, the skin tones and shadow are impeccable. I can see muscles and bones where Smee apparently cannot.

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...

Florence and the (disaster preparedness) Machine

Yes, it is coming this way. Forecasts, of course, vary - but the upshot in more than one tracking-map I've seen seems to point to pretty intense inland flooding, which means: for all the frustration it took me dealing with JES (ugh) to get it, I *am* provisionally glad I have a pretty new sump pump and waterproofed basement.

For all the frustration JES caused me over a year and a half trying to get it right, I will also be WATCHING carefully to see how well the 'proofing and pump will perform.

As for the rest of it ... I stopped this morning for gas. There was a pretty impressive (but blessedly not static) queue, and this at a station with ten pumps. There are several gallons of water for me and the fur kids, kibble enough for them for more than a week, and for me some less-perishable foodstuffs and a non-electric can opener. Tonight, I need to remember to throw several large bags or bottles of water in the freezer; these can help it act as a cooler for at least *some* period of time in the event of an outage. Other than that, plentiful candles and funeral fans.

Funeral fans, for those not familiar with this Southern tradition, are good-sized stiff paper fans, most often provided by funeral homes for those ladies sitting beside a burial in the hot Southern summer. These fans outpace any folding fan I've ever had, for maximal air-movement output. And, fella babies, I can tell you: as a woman enjoying the frequency of hot flashes reserved for those of us passing out of August and our fertile years, moving air is not low on my priorities list in facing this possible emergency.

It tends to be hard for me not to be amused at the way my hometown responds to the merest whiff of emergency. We go mad for grocery stores and water when weather calls for anything beyond routine, and so when a disaster may actually be looming, the drama still looks quaint - because, frankly, I've seen this city go nuts time and time again, when six flakes of snow were in the offing. Sixty miles away.

So, facing what could end up being a twenty-four-incher on uncertain heading, but looking likely to visit here, even if peripherally ...


Yeah. I'm amused by my community. But don't think I didn't buy gas on purpose, and that inventorying the hand-fans and water available are just entertainment.

As seldom as I have troubled to actually *write* anything here since my stepfather died, I will check in.

For those of you so much closer to the impact of winds and real danger: my prayers are with you. Be well, and check in when you can too, please. Donna. Colin. Anyone in the Carolinas.

Consumeration and Cred

We’ve shifted from seeing ourselves primarily as makers of things, craftspeople of one variety or another, to seeing ourselves primarily as consumers

... I'm not saying that this sort of referencing ... is bad writing or poorly conceived. I’m arguing it isn’t writing or conceiving at all.

It’s scratching an itch that we have somewhere.

Oh my, this was a Lightbulb Moment for me. It's one of those things we know but don't "realize" in general, and it's the very shape of our lives. See also: memes. There is some kind of truth in this observation well beyond comedy. Memes live as something more than comedy, they're indicators - we point to those things we want to make sure others know we have seen, just as we post pictures of those things we want to make sure others know we have eaten, people we have met/known/hated/adored/had sex with ... We've gotten awfully pointy in my lifetime. (Oh yeah. I did that on so many purposes.)

I would say this, though: this is more about cred than about advertising our consumption. We get to the cred BY pointing out the references that signify whatever area of the cultural landscape we wish to live upon. For my part, I get my cred by NOT knowing certain references - I am old, I have earned the privilege of never having heard of all the recent 20-year-olds who have died tragically and had articles written about them. I have earned respite from the effort of keeping up with what on fleek means, or who is doing what on YouTube or anywhere at all. I have earned the right not to have an Insta, and to have some fuzzy idea, "Is Snapchat over?" or be entirely surprised that Grey's Anatomy apparently was not canceled like seven years ago or something.

Nobody gives a hang what anybody else is eating, or quoting, or in-meme-ing about. They are interested in, culturally, where somebody stands. If someone is familiar with my political/comedic/subcultural/art cred, I'll be interested in references they might make I don't already know. We judge by where someone places themselves on these social, virtual maps - they just quoted the third Doctor or the Stones or (not Taylor) Swift or Childish Gambino or the Christian Bible or made a Left Shark joke or hollered back to All Your Base, and I love them for it: we share this.

Our consumption is a signifying - UNIFYING - communicator.

Pretty deep, even if it isn't writing.

I need to go marinate in some Trek now.

Contrarian Collection(-ish)

Funny how clicking through can go. You're reading about how nostalgia can be a societal ill, and within two clicks the news is how great nostalgia is for us.

Of course, it's a matter of restrictive dieting, where we forget about simple balance in favor of magical prohibitions.

Maybe you need a little escapism just to unkink. And maybe you don't want to fiddle with credits. But wait, credits are culturally vital. And then *again* ... Stingers are really the evil that will destroy us all.

If it appears I am picking on The Guardian, this is largely an accident - you could argue that they're pan-opinionated in these non-news pieces, but it might also be said the flexibility is itself destabilizing and crippling, deconstructing any integrity by offering all options.

Really, it's any thinkpiece these days. Like this post itself, there is so much inspirtation/opinion/guidance on offer in the world that it can be all too easy to cling to one given social, philosophical, or would-be-scientific outcropping just to hold on for dear life.

And that always ends up as a restrictive diet. It doesn't matter the hill, too many of us are willing to pick ONE to die upon, and this is the danger of our times.

There are many vistas, from many hills. It might not be a bad idea to trek to more than one outcrop just to see the perspective another one doesn't offer. And build a worldview from more than one point. Staying fixed leads to resource collapse, and we die of the entropy.

#CriticalThinking may be the best tool we have to stave off incivility, insensibility, insularity ... insurrection. Because dying on one hill, or living on just one outcropping: insanity.

Collection

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!

Scale

God said let there be lights in the firmament of the Heaven, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

To a fruitfly, it might seem a wasteland of time, beyond bearing.

To a molecule ... to an atom, to a gluon ... all existing at such different scales: would my life seem vanishingly short, or extraordinary in its immensity?

A living cell might exist within a comprehensible "human" scale, though it comes and goes more quickly than we do.

The molecule - these can be broken so easily, or may hold tight for eons and eons. Some unstable and brief, some all but immortal from where humanity stands.

Down into the tenacious atom ... the nucleus ... these buzzing, speeding systems outstripping any velocity we can understand - are we great, slow, neverending collossi, or fleeting organisms, so ephemeral as to be irrelevant? So tempting to conceive a universe in the orbit of an atom. So human.

And, if space folds into itself, who is to say that scale does not ... that Horton was right, along with every one of us when we discover the mind within the brain we already had: that, though we know the universe is the greatness around us, we also occupy the greatness which encloses lives and systems and universes impossibly small? That there are systems within us; planes we do not understand which make us up. Not merely the individual cells coming and going, each one's life one necessary part of what we think is "our" own life - but symbiants - even the impulses and autonomic actions that preserve life, but we do not create.

We are minuscule and immense; it is all in how we look - outward, and inward.

And we owe debt both to the greatness beyond us, as well as the greatness we enclose, which contains all we think is "small" ... That we are both gargantuan and infinitessimal, and that our part is to BE part of both these scales: in the universe, which is the organism of which all our lives are the tiniest part: and as the universe, within which myriad forces exist, dependent upon us, or making up the magic and meat that *is* us.



My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

But if I do not honor its scale, it might as well be nothing at all.

"You can do ANYTHING you set your mind to."

25 years ago now, having left my marriage and come home to Virginia, I found myself in a job with one of the best managers I've ever known, a woman I'll call C. C managed a keen balance between getting the ratty jobs done but finding each employee's talents, and playing to them. So it was that, as a secretary, I ended up assisting the guy who was writing a book. And the IT guy. Writing our newsletter. And, by the end, taking care of orphan clients (we were an insurance and financial services agency).

It was just at the moment I was about to be sent to Minnesota in February for securities training that I left that gig. But I never did forget that manager, and C stands out to this day as one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some great, wise people.

All this time later, I have found a position where I get to do my own balancing - still a secretary, but one with decades more experience on the resume, and in a company/with a team where I have been able, almost singlehanded, to define my job. I get to play to my own strengths now.

Not long ago, I was thinking again about how I ended up being a secretary. Yeah, it was the early and mid-80s that formed me, and yeah I was VERY much an underachiever during my early career (though, looking at that job I mentioned above - maybe not so lacking in gumption as I have told myself for so long now) ... but nothing was stopping me from pursuing some more specific or lucrative or creative ambition.

But, the thing is: my parents always told me, "You can do anything you set your mind to."

Here is the problem: they never gave me specifics. Mom might occasionally talk about things *she* would wish to do, or which she found prestigious.

But neither my mom nor my dad ever did as C did: took up the thread of what I loved, or was good at (which were not entirely the same thing), and revealed to me the particular things my talents or my abilities could lead to. Nope, not even my dad. And he was a professor - a student advisor. His very life and career were dedicated to pushing people toward success.

Or ... maybe just to knowledge. To understanding those concepts he himself taught, or to harnessing those from other disciplines, which his students were studying. Synthesizing these to the tools to reach their specific goals.

My dad was encouraging to a fault - but the fault was, he just opened the doors wide. He provided no guide but "anything" - and that was too much. Overwhelming, or under.

I have always known that what I do is "less" in the eyes of other people; nobody's subtle about it. I basically fell into it to make a living. Doing what I do was not a dream, wasn't something I *sought*. I have made it mine, and I'm not complaining nor regretting. But it, in the barest and least freighted, but clearest sense of the phrase, "is what it is."



I could do anything I set my mind to. Sure. But in high school, I already knew I was directionless.

And MOST OF US ARE as teenagers. And that is okay.

But then majoring in Theater (or, insufferably, Theatre/Dance, at my insufferable alma mater) never was going to get me famous and wealthy and yield a successful movie star at the end of college.

(To which I now say: Thank MAUD.)

But it wasn't getting me anywhere else, either. Working on the crew was pizza money and fun, not a career trajectory. Our department wasn't good enough to provide one of those, frankly.

And I could type.

So I fell into my first jobs, my early talents - whatever they might have been - sublimated to make a living, and over the years I've done well, or just done *enough*, and scrabbled and fought my way to giving a damn ... and here we are.



I am proud of my work, and I love what I do. But don't ever think that this was my fantasy. Or even my calling. It was barely my *aptitude*, even, for a while there.





This morning, musing to a friend at work that my hair was looking particularly teased-and-tapered in an 80s sort of way, I pulled up Beauty and the Beat on my phone, and revisited that time before directionlessness became ... well, to borrow one of the Go-Go's song titles, Automatic.

The Go-Go's, I think, may seem a bit bugglegum and maybe even gimmicky these days. But that first album, steeped in 1981 and its New Wave-ness, was not a feather-light pop concoction. There is a menace in the chords. This album is bouncy, but it's bouncing on bruises, and it's propulsive. (Automatic is very dark and affecting. It *still* hits me in a very deep place, perhaps the more for life's experience rather than less.)

And this album is inextricably linked to the one person, before C, who ever pointed me at anything specific.

It was my brother.

I can't remember how it came up, and how it ever seemed "real" at all - and, the fact is, the moment of this memory may not have lasted more than a few days. But my brother, for some reason, excitedly encouraged me to get a band together, like the Go-Go's. To cover them, for Stunt Talent Night. He pointed to Kathy Valentine, and said I could do what she did.

It didn't change my life - or, at least, it didn't set me on a path. But my brother was the only family member who ever looked at anything in me, and pointed to anything at all. He didn't say "You can do anything you set your mind to."

He said, "You could do THAT."


I was too shy. I didn't know any musicians. Time ticked on, the moment passed, I never did it. Years later, I still entertained the odd fantasy of being a drummer - or, later still, a lead singer. But instead I watched Beloved Ex do it, and was still too shy. And never thought to connect to the many musicians we did know then, to try to become one of them. Well, never thought of it seriously. Never had the confidence to try.

And I had a job. And hadn't, perhaps, divested myself of the vague idea I might become wealthy and famous by sitting around waiting, hopefully being 80s-foxy enough for the world just to arrange its attention and money around me. Or maybe being a writer. Or just getting by, day to day.

There were a lot of years of getting by, long periods of time lived day to day.

And, not in the least ironically at all, it was my brother, again, who pointed me at something, years later. Aged 35, he asked me to go to a writers' conference ... and we all know how that has gone. Still the world has not arranged itself around my ridiculous success. But at least I consider myself something more than a 'nartist now.


I don't wish things had gone some other way. My life is an awfully good one to live, and the means to my living never has been the most important thing to me (the people I work with are, though). The idea of an alternative life in which What I Do *was* more important is no source of regret for me; perhaps in that life, my soul would not have been the one I have here and now, and my soul means everything to me.

No, I don't wish things had gone differently at all.

Just: looking at my parents. Thinking of the way C managed the people she worked with. I'm actually just surprised it *didn't* go differently. And curiously grateful I failed to have certain dreams ... ? What I did have was people like C, and others, and enough privilege to say I've made my way successfully, even if not prestigiously.


And I'm doubly grateful for that big brother, too. Turns out - he's actually even more special than I understood. Back in those years when I idolized him so, and didn't even know why.

Collection

Just two links today, unless you count the recursive looks back upon my own musings.

For them/by them - a remarkable collection of perspectives not just on the period of sexual harassment history that began in Autumn of 2017 (and more), but on the dominant narratives and who is STILL left out of those narratives. The graphics are exceptional, and the writing ... well. Exemplary.

The very fact that such a model exists offers tacit permission for him to treat his wants as valid. ... I wish that he, as the adult in the room, had looked past his emotions to consider what would have been best for me ...

Also: "I’m disappointed that the story has remained focused so squarely on the villainous doings of the metropolitan elites." Yep. It's not just the "powerful" (rich) men, and it's not just white women in subjective but nonetheless injurious situations.

There is a constructive breadth, at that first link, of ages and understandings of (cis and binary) gender dynamics, and some of what is said I question. But it is best to understand than to refuse to know that others think things we do not.

“I remember when you told me I made this one girl feel uncomfortable because she had to say no twice, and I never forgot that.”

Some of what is said, in the last quarter or so of this anthology of perspectives - those things said by men, and about their looks - are ... well. Striking.



Where is the second link, you ask? Right here - and here is why:

While women aren’t confusing egregious incidents with less obviously offensive ones, the small ones matter, too. And not talking about them is the easiest way to ensure they go on and on, ad infinitum. 

Aside

Ran across the following phrase today, and realized I haven't done an "aside" post in a VERY long time. This rates it:

thoroughly half-baked

Okay, carry on.

Collection

(W)ealthy people manage their discomfort with inequality, which in turn makes that inequality impossible to talk honestly about — or to change.

Ooohh, this is interesting. When wealth is treated like dirty laundry - the elite distancing themselves from being elite. I am reminded of the little old lady guest star on Taxi, who expressed that she was "filthy comfortable." A well-written and considered piece on making class divides invisible. (Interesting too is the point that the women interviewed for this piece appear almost afraid of husbands finding out what they disclosed, even anonymously. "He would kill me.")

(T)he wholesale adoption of garbage disposers in all five boroughs could, in theory, significantly reduce waste, cut costs, and offer the city a highly efficient, alternative renewable energy source.

... and they weren't even LEGAL there until the nineties!

Am I the only dork who finds the environmental science of garbage disposals genuinely interesting? Probably not, as this is an article about it. The sheer volume of waste we produce - NYC's stats are startling indeed, not least in the financials - is stunning, and yet we really do not think about it much. Even as a single-person household, I feel like my volume of refuse is small, even in the recycling bin - but the proportion of it that is food IS terribly high. This owes to the fact that when I need to stop eating something, I do better to dispose of it than to save it for later, because later is all too often sooner than it should be. Oh the twisted psychology of American weight and trash ...

Speaking of weight, how about this piece of science? "A gallon of water weighs about 8.34 pounds. And by one estimate, Harvey dropped 33 trillion gallons of water--" ... and it turns out that upwards of three hundred trillion pounds of sudden weight gain can deform the crust of the Earth itself.

Let's not even ask where the bubble in the wallpaper might be. (Not in China, though the water-weight research there might be instructive for us, even though the context was the filling of a dam and not a massive storm.)

What can we learn from a refrigerator light bulb thirteen billion miles from Earth? Find out now, Voyager.

Women clad mostly in soft towels, softly filtered. Women smiling at salads. Stock photography: you've come a long way, baby. NYT has an interesting, inspiringly hopeful, look at this year's trend. The bits about babies and how images are used/by whom are not exactly progressive, but at least it's not all pearly-lighted, calm, blank naked shots anymore.

Collection

Once it is known that buyers are willing to purchase items with dubious or nonexistent provenance, the market for those items expands, which in turn encourages the kind of looting that we’re witnessing today in the Middle East. The connection between a scrap of papyrus and on-the-ground violence may be difficult to see. But it exists.

Many have seen the headlines of the $3M judgment against Hobby Lobby in regard to the thousands of tablets and bullae they amassed by questionable means. Here is a closer look at their path to such startling acquisition - and the speed at which they took it. "Breakneck" is not often the pace of archaeological commerce. This is an interesting, in-depth look at the people involved and the often all-too-shady business of trading antiquties.

Sometimes, it's a shame I am so slow to toddle through the blogs I follow and read; John Davis Frain has a personal and extremely good entry on Independence Day. It is both unique and universal: the trick of a mighty fine writer. It's also brief, and not really about flag-waving. So, worth a click any time of year.

I was late, too, to Celia Reeves' blog, where some weeks ago she talked about a Day of Remembrance. Beautiful post, with a photo worth clicking on to enlarge and really look at closely.

Colin Smith has two posts I wanted to share with anyone who hasn't seen them already (again, I am shamefully late in my perusal). One on writing about writing, as a pre-published author. And another, from the genuine-interest-in-people side of the "where are you from - really" question. CNN link worth a click beyond as well, from the "I am exhausted" side. These two pieces make good companion looks at the question - and not super-long reading, either.

Commentated

In the past month, comments here have dried up entirely. It doesn't seem to me the content has changed, so I muse about the possibility that summer has led to less traffic.

Unfortunately, it is hard to tell. My traffic stats have for the best part of a year now shown massive bot traffic, from the U.S. It used to be when my "viewership" was up, I'd see Russia all over my posts. Anymore, though, it's domestic traffic, curiously enough all Mac. I'd indulge vanity and think I had a geek stalker but the levels indicate bot, not human.

There are still days Russia dominates the fake traffic around here, and we've always got Asia. But the major point here is that my actual readership appears to be gone.

And just when things have been getting so exciting with the WIP, too.

The point of THIS wallowingly self-indulgent post is this: what content is worth commenting on? Right now, is it better just to leave the blog fallow, wait out vacation season, and not worry that nobody's around much anymore? Or are all of you lurking and yawning ... ?

I have an idea for a good post. But it's possible I may be wasting my time.

(And yes, I know I need to shill this place on Twitter for stats' sake; it does work. BUT it does not ever result in comments.)

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.

Murder, I Wrote

I used the tag GREAT writing on this post, because sometimes writing *feels* great ... and you can just about believe your own work might be so, when that happens. Last week's momentum reached a bit of an apex in The Murder Scene ... wherein one of the main characters finds herself about to be burned alive, without touching the fires slowly cooking her life away. And it's as harrowing as it sounds.

Most writers know, reading our work out loud is important, and as I am ruled by rhythms (and a former theater major), I like doing this. It's hard to stifle the desire to read to anyone who makes the mistake of speaking with me on the phone, or coming over, and sometimes I fail. Such as Friday night, when I read the murder scene to my brother.

We both came away kind of shaking our heads. I realized that one key descriptor calls up the very birth scene which opens the novel (and the life of the woman about to meet her end). I wrote that birth scene maybe a decade ago; it was one of those backburner moments during research and side work on this WIP, while I was writing The Ax and the Vase, and I've never wanted to change it (yeah, you're not supposed to edit before you've even finished writing - for me, that "rule" is like typing; I self-correct as I go, you can't ask me not to do that, it is my way of doing things). My brother even approved of that callout; and I trust him as a critic. He's never been shy to criticize me! Heh.

But, yeah. Right now, it is all I can do not to post this scene here, and on my cube wall, maybe a couple billboards, and everywhere in the world.

This is what writing can feel like. It's been a long time since I attained this sense of accomplishment, and the way it followed on (Heaven help me) a THEME showing up uninvited - a theme which will work to create tension ... I mean, wow.

Yes, exquisite phrasing, is it not? "I mean, wow." Me writer. Me college gradual. Look, this is a blog, I'm allowed to save some of my best for the work meant for sale, right?

Few of us are at our most eloquent when things get truly exciting, but the excitement is real.

Picking and Choosing

Scenes come to me when they will. The term "pantser" doesn't appeal to me, but I am not an outlining writer, and the idea of composing a novel in order confounds me. I follow the research first, and the inspiration second. Usually because the latter doesn't precede the former, and I have a harder time capturing it.

Not long ago, I was working on that quiet moment, knowing what has got to come after it. The scene stands alone (though I do still need to get rid of that research-y bit about natron), but really there's no novel if anything does that. And so I must proceed.

Eventually.



I don't want to write the pogrom. And that is what follows, there.

Writing one of the first riotous, violent religious purges in the storied history of Christendom all but makes me long for a battle scene. And I hate writing battle scenes.

But even to contemplate this is so much worse. The only redemption before me is that I will not write from within the perspective of the murderers, the looters, the rapists, the cruel. But it is little consolation; knowing one is only surrounded by looting, rape, and killing doesn't take away the looting, rape, and killing.



So, today, I got back to the murder scene.

It's strange how preferable this is to writing the pogrom. It is smaller in scale, of course, and so I have more control, more ability to move through the mechanics of each moment - realization, sensation, progression.

It also takes place with a character who has come to a philosophical place of relinquishment. She's lost enough to eschew the rest, and life appears all but pointless by this moment. Losing everyone else was hard; losing herself, even painfully, may be a relief.

I've watched this relinquishment, of course. I've been witness to plaintive, righteous begging for death. It's hard, but great Christ do I understand it.

And so the crux of this murder is that it becomes manumission; the killers will free this woman, and she will accept escape at last, if only when she sees there is no other choice.


Thematically, of course, this links to my post from yesterday. So I had to go to this scene. (That is my excuse, and I'm sticking with it.) I had to find the sensations of the ground under her toes, the air down her throat, the sweat of her skin.

It's got me thinking of another death scene too. A character I can scarcely bear to see die, but who eventually must. A person can only live so long, and in the sixth century CE, even less than we tend to expect now.



When I emailed the manuscript to myself last night, as I do periodically as a kind of backup - the chronicle of my "versioning" (and progress) - I put a subject line on the email: "What good is this life edition" ...

There is an ancient religious philosophy - not only in Western schools of faith, but certainly predominant in Europe for centuries - that this life is a vale of tears, and the only existence worth contemplating is the eternal destination of the soul.

Think of Heaven. For kings and peasants alike, this was the mindset encouraged by so many aspects of so many ways of life.

Even as kings needs must strategize every single day.

Even as peasants must tend and bring in the harvest, the flock, the catch. Must learn how best this is done. Must feed the body, for letting it die - no matter how useless this life may be - was still a sin.



All these contradictions.

I'd rather write death than massacre.

Writing. Like everything else, it comes down to choices.

So. How's YOUR writing going?

Church Today

Verse Three ...

For sins of heedless word and deed, for pride ambitious to succeed, for crafty trade and subtle snare to catch the simple unaware, for lives bereft of purpose high, forgive, forgive, O Lord, we cry.



One of the great lessons of Jesus is "Do not fear." It is one of the most oft-reinforced exhortations from Christ,  the words perhaps varying, but the message essential to the nature of Christianity itself.

One of the things many fail to notice, if they even notice this theme at all, is that there is no implication that there is nothing TO fear.

This is what it means when it is said that religion is a comfort.

Today, I realized these things, and I also asked myself, "In the void where fear might have been - what are we to do instead?"

Act.

Collection

It just does not get better than the idea of "poop studies" as the "motherlode" of information in archaeology. (Ask an archaeologist!)

The Caustic Cover Critic has a great look at The Clothing of Books, which sounds as fascinating and somewhat frustrating as he describes. It makes you wish you could see this author speak on the topic that gave rise to the book itself, which is how covers are the wardrobe of a book.

Lahiri's talk begins from her own experiences as the child of immigrants, always dressed incorrectly in clothes that are durable but out of fashion, marking her out as an Indian amongst Americans.

Fellow Reider Donna Everhart's debut, The Education of Dixie Dupree, has found its way into my hands (can I just say: deckled edges ... you had me at deckled), but I have not had time of late to crack into it. Everyone has splendid praise for it, but either it's a busy season for me or I am savoring the anticipation for a while. I like to say it is the latter! Alla y'all will be done and feeling Bittersweet, longing for more, by the time I settle down on a long winter's day with an afghan and a Gossamer the Editor Cat, to enjoy it on my own.

Popularizing science and scholarship in the news is a blessing and a curse. While it can dumb-down or over-promise studies and breakthroughs to the lowest (read: most exciting) terms, journalistic coverage of historical study, archaeology, medicine, and other gee-whiz science serves the very real purpose of providing hope and inspiration to those suffering pain, ignorance, or fear and to those who may in turn bring innovations of their own into the world. Here is a great slice-of-life look at one such story - the supposed 14th-century caesarean ... or not - and its journalistic and intellectual implications. (Found by way of The History Blog's perhaps less critical look a the story, where the comments are worth reading.)