Collection

Ahhh, sweet memories of the rockin' 80s (and OH YES, I know precisely how cheesy that sounds; it's intentional, y'all). Turns out heavy metal attracts sharks. No surprises there!

One of the problems with my being slow to blog, and particularly with my lack of online presence recently, is that among other things I have been unforgiveably slow to congratulate Donna Everhart on her upcoming release! No excuses ... but felicitations, Donna!

After the fires in the state of Washington: growth. Mojourner Truth brings you BLOODY LUPINES. And don't miss the hauntingly beautiful juniper, too.

(C)alling Frenkel’s hypothesis “a highly controversial theory among other academics” is like saying that alchemy is a highly controversial theory among chemists...

What's this quote about, you ask? Only the beautifully bigoted idiocy certain media are only too happy to propogate carelessly ... or ... how Australians' accent is indeed NOT the product of national drunkenness. What people will buy into distressingly boggles the mind, but this is a glorious takedown and deconstruction. The Arrant Pedant is one of my favorite writers.

Now, you didn't think I was going to make it through a Collection post without linking to The History Blog, did you? Of course not. In closing, I give you: The HB's piece on NPRs Great Thanksgiving Listen.

Oh My Darlin'

I never bought them for years, but not so long ago my mom and I shared a clementine orange, and I realized what a great little snack these are. Mom eats the whole thing, peel and all; sometimes I do, sometimes I don't; but either way, this is a very MOM thing in my mind.

She used to always put one in the toe of our Christmas stockings. The present-frenzy of Christmas mornings always ended with a few in-the-shell nuts and a clementine, and so now when I begin to peel one, the scent takes me not to sunny summer thoughts, but to the holidays. The tradition began when *she* was a child, and getting an orange was a special holiday treat. Of course, when I was a kid, I half rolled my eyes but more just didn't care at all, about the old tales of family dorkiness born out of the backwash of The Depression.

This morning, The Friendly Neighborhood Coworker came by and offered me one. I had three on my desk and had just offered one to another teammate, who's been having a hard week. And she already had one (possibly courtesy of Friendly). Friendly and I agreed: that is Christmas.

They're also just yummy, a perfect serving size (with or without peel), pretty to have around, and the smell when you peel a clementine is wonderful.

This season, I've been feeling the holiday thing a bit - not necessarily possible every year, and not always a stress-free emotional state. Two years ago on the Friday before Thanskgiving, I was interviewing for my now-job. I remember sitting in the lobby beside the fire (we have a big 360-degree fireplace in our lobby), sweating because it was not cold yet, in my interview suit, talking with the HR executive I had known in a previous life. While I was sitting there, the coordinator who'd been working with my executives was calling my home to make the offer. I had not even left the building after my interviews.
I had two business days to make the decision, and had to beg for that much. They'd wanted to hear by Monday. The speed of the process concerned me; I was used to employers taking weeks, even a month or more, to get to decisions, never mind actual onboarding.

I announced to my friend Zuba, and my mom and stepfather, that I was leaving my old job AT Thanksgiving dinner.

Our family is not given to that kind of dramatics, but the timing was all to perfect. And I wanted it to be a reason *for* Thanksgiving.

Was it ever.

I hated to leave my last job. There are still things going on with my friends from that employer that break my heart, precisely because they have proven I did the right thing for myself. I was proud, working there, being a public servant, and I loved my team. I still do.

But I have been blessed again, and the work I do here is the best suited to me I have ever had, I think. Or maybe I am best suited to my job, after all these years. It helps that to some degree I have been able to create this job hand in glove with my executives; they had not had an admin before, so I have been able to "train" them, and use my career maturity to all our advantages.

There have been some pieces of good news and bad news from that world, of late. The woman I turned to for advice when I got this offer: is about to be a grandmother for the first time. Someone I loved working with is coming away from a long period of poor health. Someone else has had bad news. And in my world right now, there are those suffering because loved ones are in distress.

Like the holidays themselves, the days right now are light and darkness.

Last night, I stood in my boss's office, before the sun had entirely set, looking roughly eastward so the sun was not in sight ... but its light was, for the first time in days. The sky, thickly overcast all day long, had begun to clear just over my head, and out in front of me rose a thick, white cumulonimbus, painted golden by light I could not otherwise discern. Below the mound of cloud, it was still wet and grey, and to see the edge of blue sky above I had to lean over and look up.

Today, it is wet and clear and golden and bright. Cooling, at last (yesterday's rain was 70 degrees, dankly misty, and muggy and too-warm). It is Friday, and pay day, and next week I'll work three days. And there will be time for work and time for rest.

And, hopefully - reason for thanksgiving.

"I Was Raised Literalist."

 Last week, Janet Reid gave her readers a quiz. She acknowledged that all offered answer choices were incorrect - but the idea was to choose the least-wrong answer, and to state why.

This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult proposition for many. For me, it was impossible:

(Edited for clarity)

In kindergarten, they gave us an aptitude test in which one of the questions was, "If a white cow gives regular milk, and a brown cow gives chocolate milk, does a pink cow give strawberry milk?" I toddled to the front of the room and explained to the teacher that I COULD NOT COMPLETE the question, persistent in my attempt to impart to her the knowledge, "There are no pink cows!" She kept trying to insist I answer the question on its own terms. I could not come to such terms, I was raised literalist.

This quiz has me sitting, paralyzed, in my little orange plastic chair, peering in squinting turns at the purple mimeograph ink before me, and at Mizz Reid, unable to explain to her the quiz is impossible to deal with, and dreaming wistfully of pink cows.

Image: Janet did it!!

Janet seems to have enjoyed this story (though, again, it needed editing!), and quoted it in her Week in Review post on Sunday. Aww!

Amusingly (to me, anyway), this post got some attention this week. It is much the same story, in a way (and as much in need of editing), but ends with a good point and question.

I may not be able to cope with the concept of an imaginary bovine, but I seem to have a smidge of imagination anyway.

New Hair?

My fifth grade teacher used to comment excitedly, when one of the kids came in after a haircut, "New hair! New hair!" It was one of her mildly unexpected turns of phrase that came off as comedic because it was nonconformist.

Miss A. never married, because she was a career woman, and her concentration on her job and her kids was such that there was not room for other such encompassing commitments. Miss A. wore polyester skirt and pants suits in purple, neon lime green, pink, and red. Miss A. had the blackest of black hair, and Snow White pale skin. Miss A. is, very likey, no small part of my own sense of style, even if I don't express it in Visa of Dacron double-knit polyester.  Miss A. had a post-retirement career in the movies, working as an extra in quite an array of Hollywood and independent productions; I shared the background with her once, in the 90s, and it was fun to see her after twenty years or so.

I can see her rocking this kind of thing (rocking its bobby sox off):

Quotery

We are all captives of the picture in our head — our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.
Walter Lippmann

Happy Late Anniversary, Henry

I am too often late to observe anniversaries on the blog, but it's worth the blush and apology to share a 600-year-old hymn in tribute to Henry V's victory at Agincourt. Fascinating for many reasons, not least of which is just the sound of these rather wonderful human voices in song.

Personal Collection

It just started with a search string. Someone on AOL ended up on my blog with a set of words that intrigued me, so I looked where their search had led. It took me to some three year old posts.

And then I remembered The Sweet La's last month.

And I remembered remembering summer.

I found myself writing about Mr. X. In less than a month, I'll have known him thirteen years.

It took me to some feelossy-fizin. "Rejecting an ism, even knowing its actual face, because others find it ugly condones the perception of ugliness.  "Yes, that is ugly - whoo - that's not me!""

And a nice thing Cute Shoes once did. Cute Shoes is a lovely and thoughtful friend.

Collection

Dare ya not to click on this: the stunningly weird Freudian DaVinci Code. This even steals the cake away from the one I saw today where Jar Jar Binks is actually the evil mastermind behind all the scary stuff in Star Wars.

A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
--Rita Mae Brown

With thanks to Cute Shoes and a sock in my quibbles about the old poison makeup saw - take a look at 5000 years of makeup! Well, financially comfortable white women's makeup, anyway.

And, as to this:

Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one's finger and say, “It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident?”
--Agatha Christie

Yes.

Squicky

It's no surprise that, in the general sense, "Westerners" (I'll refrain from defining THAT, if I may) find the concept of a wet nurse ooky, if not outright immoral. I have been a little surprised, though, at some of the specific folks who've recoiled a bit when I've brought up research for the WIP.

Personally, the idea of milk-kinship in particular intrigues me, particularly in the context of American slavery and the biological use of women. Reading historicals, as I almost always have, wet nursing wasn't clear to me early on, but once I understood it, it's possible I've known about the practice for more of my life than most, and so have never much questioned it.

One of the most important characters (in a multi-generational novel, and as the story grows, I am more and more hesitant to describe anyone as a "main" character) in my WIP starts out as a midwife and becomes a wet nurse. I am fairly confident in the whys and wherefores of this latter situation; setting up not only her physical ability to lactate, as well as its cultivation, but also the job itself and her position in the household. Less confident is my providing her the transition from midwife to wet nurse, and research on this sort of job shift in Late Antiquity Ostrogothic Italy is not easy to find (suggestions welcome!), but I hope it can be believed, because her being both is important as the novel is developing so far.

Almost impossible to find is any resource discussing what a worship service in the Arian Christian church looked like - but that is another post for another day. (Suggestions welcome!)

Perhaps the most modern literary reference to wet nursing is Rosasharn, in The Grapes of Wrath, whose gift of her milk is not presented as creepy or gross in any way. Less modern, but much more recently written, is Mirabilis by Susann Cokal, in which the main character nurses an entire population, in a historical set in France. I can't think of any movie depicting wet nursing, except perhaps in the most passing way, and Juliet's Nurse is less identifiable to most high-schoolers flogging their way through Shakespeare by her biological function than by her indecipherability, where she is supposed to be the comic relief and few really get that, any more than the rest of the language.

Wet nursing isn't much addressed in memoir, science fiction, fantasy, nor by category of audience. We have issues with the breast as a source of nutrition. The idea of sharing bodily fluids wigs people out for one reason or another - fear of disease, fear of being replaced as a mother or as a spouse, fear of intimacies unfamiliar to the nuclear family model, religious morality, name the parameters. I can still recall a scene from The Last Emperor, in which an eight-year-old Pu Yi nurses from his extraordinarily beautiful (and exotic; coz, yeah exoticization) wet nurse, and the way people responded with shock and titillation. I can recall The Big News story of its minute when an American woman nurses her child after it's old enough to be walking, talking, and training in the essential sexuality of the breast, which even still we are not comfortable seeing as the source of nutrition and bonding.

Sigh.

If my blog were more widely read, here we would have the onset of commentary on the fact that I have never procreated nor lactated myself. Let's consider my ignorance as read and remember I don't know what it's like to be an ancient Frankish warrior either, nor have I ever experienced life in Ravenna nor Paris, never mind 1500 years ago. I am an author, and "write what you know" is, frankly, horsefeathers.



Beyond milk-kinship and the fascination of a world not my own, the transactional nature of wet nursing is a deep draw for me in this writing (as the similar nature of sex has been). This character has traded on her body in a different way than many modern people might think of a woman "using her body" to get ahead or to support herself. The moral and the practical considerations, for this time, are vastly unfamiliar to our mindset, if not entirely inconceivable. Putting aside the objections my society, indeed even my friends and my family, might have to the idea of wet nursing, and exploring it not just as an institution but also at the individual level, where my characters meet, is exciting to me, an opportunity once again to leave my skin and leave the air I breathe and sounds I live with, and to imagine living another way, in another place.

This, for me, is what writing is *for* - because "the story", whatever else it is, is always a projection out of the familiar, out of the present. To me, "the story" is sacred space, takes place in sacred time. It's outside my workday and yours, outside what we know, outside, perhaps, even what we ACCEPT. Whether it is acceptable in its own terms, acceptable at all - these are the tricky fascinations of telling a story, the rabbit holes we bolt down, following its plot. Do I accept a world of dragons and palaces, where everybody's white and royal? Do I accept dystopian tales, where young people are imperiled? Do I accept these images of faith, of life, of relationships and of distances between my characters?

I'm a writer; I get to decide what to describe and where to go. You get to decide whether you'll come along, down the rabbit hole ...

Quiet Time

The blog has been a little slower than usual of late, partly because I have been researching and writing, but also because life has been busier than usual of late.

Since July, there have been Big Doin's at the office in particular, but at home it's been hopping too - or, if not my actual house, at least in my personal life. Though, yes, the house has had its share of attention. This week, it'll see a wall guy, a plumber, an electrician.

The two huge meetings I have had a hand in managing are over, the smaller one comes on Tuesday and I am sanguine it will go well. The greatest initiatives of the past two years are in hand. Financial year end is in the summer time.

I wonder whether calendar year end will settle down; it might be nice, but I hold no breath.

It is Sunday, and we got an extra hour this weekend; I have nothing much to show for it. Things are hard sometimes. Things are hard for someone I love once again. For more than one person I love.

It is hard to watch the fight against death, as hard as it is to watch death, sometimes.

Take the Con, or: "Is My Sociopath Authentic?"

It is the quiet hour. The JRW conference is not over yet, but I left early; grocery shopping for the week, a bit of silence, the need to post this, and a nap were calling me. Just now, nervous folks are standing up before the bulk of attendees, pitching live and in person in front of everybody for Pitchapalooza. I've done this (twice), and I felt it was more important to leave than to stay, on balance, and let my Conference be over for this year.


***


That nap I mentioned has intervened, as did the balance of an eleven-day "work" week (well, I didn't get a weekend, with the Conference!) and even some research on the writing. It's now six days since the Conference ended, and ... hey, things got interesting too!

This year, #WeNeedDiverseBooks/#WNDB was a focus, and I asked Ellen Oh and the panel, "Is there a parallel movement amongst READERS, a #WeReadDiverseBooks hashtag?" They paused, laughed, pointed at me and said, "You are starting that!"

I was excited, but as it happens, #WeReadDiverseBooks is in fact already out there, created by Janet Ursel. Not surprising!

There was some fun with new friends and old, the above-linked exciting mystery of the first page whose author never stepped forward - I never got myself together this year to submit a first page of my own, DARNIT - and ideas, ideas, ideas. Ahh, inspiration.

And so I've been reading about wet nurses and trying to find a way to research what a Late Antiquity worship service might have been like in an Arian christian church. Man, that is not easy.

And so I have been finding writers and others on Twitter and blogs, and finding new followers in return.

And today? For the firs time in too long: I finally get to do a bit of housecleaning!

Happy Saturday to all, and to all a good day.

Coming Soon!

The JRW Conference will be this weekend, and as usual I have signed up for an agent one-on-one, but this year I think I will use the time not to pitch, but to discuss the retirement of AX and perhaps look toward a synopsis or query for the WIP. It is almost distressingly early to be thinking about querying the WIP, of course, but the agent I plan to meet with is far too good to resist; and, perhaps more than the forward-looking, as little good as it does to look backward, I'd like a professional opinion regarding my instincts about AX and letting it lie. If the chemistry isn't good for that conversation, maybe I can just smile and tell the agent she has seven minutes to herself, and let her go get some coffee.

The old saw applies now, as it does for everyone, as it does all the time, "I haven't been working on writing/research like I should." Ohh the Great Should; who doesn't have Should-shaped bite marks on their behind?

The good news, of course, is that JRW gets me excited about writing - always in ways I don't even see coming - every blessit year.

And I get excited about JRW, too. I study for it, I anticipate seeing my friends and making new ones, little literary lullabies croon inside my head, singing songs of inspiration. I brace my bank account for the BOOKS ... and getting them signed! Squee!

I look at the weather and plan my outfits (hooray, it will be cool this year - a first!) and re-read interviews with whatever agent I plan to meet with, as well as researching all of them, in case we chat through the course of the weekend. I see myself in that chair upstairs, a couple years back, where I rewrote my pitch and was so excited (and block out memories of READING said pitch at Pitchapalooza, which is exciting, but which I have done twice now and am done with).

Perhaps it all sounds like a bit of a do, too much fretting and folderol, but it's an enjoyable indulgence, for someone like me. Getting out to a conference can be stressful and scary for some woodland creatures writers, but JRW is *mine*, and I love it and am grateful for it.

And so I contemplate what hairstyle *won't* be fussy, what sweater will look nice and be comfortable. What jewelry to wear, because my friends and I - a bunch of magpies - always gravitate to each other's sparklies. One doesn't want to be "too much" ... but you do want to garner the notice of pals attuned to your vintage yummy parure, or the boho seventies long, dangling pendant with just the right earrings. Pashminas are never so appreciated as they are by crowds of authorial Frowsy Women, and costume is never so much fun as when you are judging everyone else's of course!

So tonight I think, quietly, about how to ask what questions, and the smiles of those whose writing I love - and writing itself - and mine - and find: I am ready for bed.

Favorite Things: Turquoise, Beautiful Youths, and Thanksgiving

Collection

The Pee Dee river runs through the small South Carolina town where my grammaw lived. It's not one of the most famous American rivers, but it is one of the most fun names, and spoken with a good southern accent, it's charming into the bargain. Three cannon have been raised fro this river, and the story of the gunboat Pee Dee is an interesting one for American history buffs. Scuttled at one month of service, the craft's short life was nonetheless a part of Civil War history.

An interesting look at landscapes. Blackfoot art depicting encroachment upon Native American mineral rights at the British Museum. The British Museum blog is focusing on cultural dialogues; this one is especially striking.

The History Girls' Eleanor Updale has a particularly personal post about the Foundling Museum, London. Taking not only society's but artistic perspective on the state of  a woman of damaged virtue, here is a contemplation of the Victorian attitude - and the real history of a foundling's family.

The historical sewing and costume blogs I follow focus, almost necessarily, on the fine and the exceptional in textile history - because it is most often the fine and the exceptional that survive. Mojourner Truth has found a cache' of half century-old clothes we are both hoping he can find someone to preserve. His job has always been cooler than mine.

Back at The History Blog again, we have the unexpected evidence that mummification was more common on ancient Britain than might seem quite obvious. Mummification outside of desert climes: not just for peat bogs anymore! Beware, this does include phrases such as "putrefactive erosion", which I think would make a splendid name for a terrible band.

Local honey is good for allergies. Poison honey is good for exterminating your foes! "This actually works." Eep.

175K

My next page view will be the 175,000th.

Thank you all!

Late Night Collection

This blog hasn't been getting its usual effort of late, but I've been watching others', and I'm behind on sharing them. So here we are, let's get to the links!

Arrant Pedantry has - you guessed it - a bit more deconstructing pedantry, this time a look at the usage of the word anxious.

I haven't shared a Gary Corby link in far too long. Here, he explains the origin of the term - and the original rite - of catharsis.

Mojourner Truth has done a series of wonderful photos recently, on archaeological work and features in Hawai'i. The sled run here is one of my favorite of these posts!

Also, Mojourner is really funny. Sir Mo's A Lot - heh.

American Duchess shows us a little something about the history of 1940s shoe fashion - and beyond!

AD also has Scandalous Tango Boots! (And, some time in December, so will I!)

Jessica Faust has a good story at Bookends' blog's new home, about how she got a certain client in Days of Yore - lo, fifteen years ago, when he space-age material "paper" was involved in querying.

And last, but without a doubt not least, Tom Williams looks at nomenclature and rather a lot more. "Freedom Struggle"? "War of Independence"? ... or "Mutiny"?

My Stepfather Pronounces it Linka-DIN (*)

LinkedIn is like that friend with a pickup truck. You don't call them much, but when you have to move, suddenly you remember their number.

Worse ... maybe you kind of wish they wouldn't call YOU, either.

When I was worried about my job two years ago, I quietly updated my LinkedIn profile, reached out to a couple connections; managed to get an interview from one of them. That interview didn't pan out, but they called me back a couple months later - and here I am. (I met the woman who did get that first job, and she is made of solid OSUM gold, and no way should I have gotten that gig. I like mine best in any case.)

Every now and then, recruiters get frisky on LinkedIn, but that seems reasonable.

Over the last month or so, a salesman got silly and tried (a) to connect with me there and then (b) kept messaging me about "who is the right person to talk with about such-and-such" at my company. And (c) got himself DISconnected, because - ugh. No.

More recently, a restaurant reached out to me and at least two of the other Executive Admins at my employer, offering us free lunch. This sounds lovely - and I have it on excellent authority the purveyor sending these notes with connection invites makes great food - however, I work at a food distributor. And they are not clients.

How it looks to some folks when we bring in non-client food to our corporate HQ: not super.

So no free lunch for me, sad to say.

Every now and then I see the old "guess who's looking at your profile!" previews, and sigh quietly. Yes, Virginia, there ARE people I spent years losing touch with, and it was not easy.

Nobody really uses LinkedIn as a social network. It's a nicely distant quasi-tool to occasionally keep up with former coworkers, really. You can get their real contact info off 'em if need be, maybe send the odd bland "congrats" or holiday message or whatever.

Or you can let them know ... you might need that pickup truck. And maybe a spare pair of arms to carry a few boxes. And couches.



(*And I don't make fun of his way of reading the name. First time I ran across the website Plenty of Fish, I read it as Plenty Offish ... which strikes me as a hilarious name for a dating site.)

Well, SOMEBODY Wants It ...

My thanks to Tom Williams for pointing me to the one person in the world eagerly seeking a novel about Clovis I, King of the Franks.

Only tens of thousands more to go, and The Ax and the Vase is a product I can sell.

In the meantime: WIP. And sighing.

Pride and Prejudice and Privilege

Of all the literary scandals I've read in my day, holy heck is this a fascinating ethical exploration.

This cropped up in Janet's blog today, and for once the result was a comments section I did *not* find comfortable to read, so I am not linking it. It is only where I learned of this anyway, so go to the link above if you are curious about the deeper details. Skip over a LENGTHY intro all about rules, and most of a long series of paragraphs beginning with "I" and get to the one that begins with "I chose a strange and funny and rueful poem" and read from there.

The crux of the issue is a white male poet who submitted under an Asian (or Asian-sounding; I am not the one to verify other cultures' nomenclature) name, and whose poem was chosen for the Best American Poetry 2015 ... admittedly and partially because of this.

The examination of the man who made this choice, and both his culpability and the reasons for it, is devastatingly and honorably honest in the rarest way.

(T)here was no doubt that I would pull that fucking poem because of that deceitful pseudonym. But I realized that I would primarily be jettisoning the poem because of my own sense of embarrassment. I would have pulled it because I didn't want to hear people say, "Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy." I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity. ...  I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise.

That last sentence had to be an incredibly difficult conclusion to reach, and the conclusion of the post itself, Sherman Alexie's examination of his own identity, is a great example of integrity, whatever else the controversy may have borne for him.


It hasn't occurred to me to blog about this, but somehow it seems relevant in a sidelong way now.

At a very different point on an identity spectrum that spans not a line, but an entire plane and perhaps three dimensions, lies one Caitlyn Jenner. I've found myself watching a good deal of "I Am Cait", the reality show she launched along with the revolution in her own identity. It's the sort of thing I wanted to resist; frankly, it was unformed but in my mind to ignore the whole show attendant upon her transition, thereby proving my lack of prejudice (and maintaining a mile-wide perimeter against anything even Kardashian-adjacent). But, thanks to its ubiquity across many channels and many weeks, I caught the Diane Sawyer interview, and ended up reluctantly intrigued.

The theme of the reality show that has struck me far more than the splashy headline of "ooh, trans person" has by far and away been its examination of privilege.

Note that I do not say HER examination of privilege; because she went into the show with expectations that she would be exploring the process of gender transition, dealing with her family and her identity and the pain and the liberty she now has in her own skin, which has finally come to resemble the sense of self she's always harbored and hidden and lived with all her life.

But the fact is, Caitlyn's role - which she seems eager to adopt and live up to - has become that of an avatar for an entire "community" of transgender people ... and yet, "community" is a foolish term, because inherently the deepest problems with transgender individuals is that of isolation and even self-denial ... and yet, Caitlyn's experience is like NOTHING any other has ever experienced, or probably ever will.

For one, Caitlyn is transitioning at a time in her life which is not, perhaps (I am no judge here) typical of the experience.

She is also essentially chairing a public discourse and her own personal experience from a position of wealth and power pretty much nobody else in her position has ever possessed.

And the show is illustrating, in pretty clear detail, just how powerful Caitlyn's privilege is. The new trans friends with whom she is surrounding herself are keeping her pretty honest at every turn ("Why do you keep saying THEY when you talk about trans people? You are a trans person!" ... "You keep saying how normal we are. This is because you are aware of the freak factor." ... "YES, many trans women turn to sex work; not a lot of us have the privilege you do, and being trans can make it harder to keep a job, or lose you one if you have it." and so on). They are begging her to look at the power she wields, having been Bruce Jenner for as long as she felt she must or could hide - and to use it.

In a year when I've spent so much time examining my own privilege, to watch someone with this much of it trying to do the same, and doing so earnestly, if sometimes imperfectly, has been an unexpected lens through which to examine someone's transition into a physical body that aligns with their sense of self better than the one issued at birth.

Caitlyn has made a hell of an avatar. Statuesque and showing pride as well as vulnerability, gorgeously attired and constantly attended, the chrysalis has opened and someone unexpected and in some ways both spectacular and delicate seems to be emerging.

I don't essentially admire Jenner as a woman, any more than I did before we knew she was, particularly; but I respect her stepping up, acknowledging her power in a position which for most is the opposite of powerful, and trying to do good. Even for her, it cannot be easy; just as admitting his bias has hardly been easy for Alexie, in a situation he could have avoided if he chose to.

Caitlyn Jenner could have avoided this ... and yet, could not. Not while living with the fullest integrity.

Sherman Alexie could have avoided the controversy, too ... and yet, could not. He clearly placed honesty higher than comfort, and that is never simple, never easy.

Collection

I'm beginning to wonder whether I ought to change the title of my links posts from "collection" - being an occasionally churchgoing girl, sometimes it has the sound of an offering plate ...

One of the strange things that comes from global warming, after heat waves and insane, snow-stormy winters, and flooding and drought, is the archaeology uncovered in the latter of these disasters. The changing course of water, and of late especially drought, has literally exposed our past; and this is not the first time I've heard of it. Here, a not-exacly-a-"dig" at Vistula in Poland (as so often, via The History Blog). Resident archaeology experts encouraged to comment, ahem.


The History Girls has a lovely collection of portraits of women reading; the Japanese one is a nice addition to note. I am aware my blog skews heavily Euro-centric, even more so than American, so please take a look at the Kuniyoshi print; I actually have a great love of Japanese art. Perhaps I need to showcase this (or African or Mongol or Polynesian ... suggestions always welcome!).

Not quite in that vein exactly, we can take a look at a repurposing of foreign-distribution a particular cover for Penguin Classics. As he always does, the Caustic Cover Critic treats us not just to fascinating cover art, but his own worthwhile commentary.

Speaking of archaeologists - if you've ever wondered "What comes with an archaeology action figure?" the answer is here. (Product update: photogenic archaeologist has a couple more years on 'im now.) OSUM.

Okay, and now I must away. I have already rebuilt my bed an flopped the mattress (many people like to flip theirs occasionally, but when it's queen size and you do it singlehanded, it's definitely flopping), it is time to begin laundry, clean the cat box, and dust a bit. Related note: vintage Melissa Ethridge makes absolutely excellent housecleaning music.

Happy 78th birthday, dad. I'm celebrating by getting a few things DONE. Miss you.

This Never Happens to Me ... Genre Question!

Being an author of historical fiction, I often breathe a sigh of relief when other authors must decide on the genre of a given piece.

For my non(professional)-writer readers, you would be absolutely astounded at how difficult this can be. For one, category and genre are often confused - "YA" (young adult) is not a genre, but it often manages to pass for one, right or not. For two, where does one draw the line between historical and time travel, when sci-fi is not the point nor even much featured in a story? Or between dystopian and science fiction? Literary and coming-of-age, women's fiction or commercial ... the difficulties are confounding, and I am frequently relieved my own work sits pretty clearly in its place.

Today, though ... I have issues! But it's kind of fun.

In contemplating submitting a first page for my upcoming conference, I'm looking pretty hard at a certain ghost story I've been toying with for a couple of years almost.

Is "ghost story" an acceptable genre choice? Should it be sci-fi (though there is no science whatever, only fiction)? It has a sensual strain running through it, but it is NOT erotica by a long shot. There is romantic tension, but no way is this thing a romance - to me, it actually is, but in marketing terms, what I've written would not be understandably shelved with what publishing calls "romance".

I'm looking at one of my Reider pals in particular and a certain deliciously intemperate friend of mine, who have read the thing themselves, but would love feedback from anyone.

Where should I "shelve" an eerie and slow-building ghost story in the vein of Chinese fox legends?

What genre would you suggest?

Collection

There have been some emotionally exhausting aspects to this week, and work was trying today (it is amazing to me how fatiguing it can be to be *unable* to get things done - and I was without my laptop all day long, for stressful tech reasons). So my link-tease comments aren't especially clever. But a few things I want to share ...

A Mojourner picture is worth a good 688 words, at least. This entry: fighting fire with - welp, firefighters. Trained ones & everything.

And here, Mojourner shares a really good tribal map.

Lauren at American Duchess sometimes makes me with I had a wee bit more costuming gumption. Today's special, reblocking old wool hats. I love the white recut; visually interesting and very chic!

Ann Turnbull at The History Girls shows us a hidden villa, then walks away on a summer day, to leave it perhaps for others to find again.

Tom Williams has a piece on writing book reviews; I am particularly poor about doing this. Do you remember to recognize and review?

And finally, Janet Reid in Klingonee (or something very like it - and for THAT rather in little inside joke, I want a little credit). Like she wasn't awesome enough.

Random Thoughts From Monday

"My friend Cute Shoes is having a big day today, so I wore cute shoes and am thinking of her. Got three compliments in the space of a minute and a half; never underestimate the power of cute shoes!"

"'Vapin' is possibly the lamest word in the current vernacular. It is also very likely the lamest activity."

"Seriously, please. stop. using. 2-spaces and full sentences in PowerPoint. Please. I wasn't kidding when I said I'd pay y'all a nickel. A nickel! Come on!"

"Oh, all the regional execs will be here today ... Things it would have been useful to know."

"I wonder how many hours of my life I could save on strap-yanking if I finally sat down and put little bra-strap holders in my sleeveless tops?"

One single brackish cloud, away from the white and fluffy ones; small, shrinking. Like a tumor in the sky.

"Help! Help! I am being stalked by a pair of giant green eyes lurking around on four little butter-toed nimble-paws."

"Sisko is finally Captain. Let's get this series on the road."

Collection

"Every resident, every visitor, every passing tourist sees a different Buenos Aires" ... Tom Williams' really lovely look at the city nobody ever truly leaves ...

Kate Lord Brown at The History Girls on sating her appetite for a particular rare book (to see the dreadful pun I just made there, click away!). Have you ever had the experience of finding a hard-to-find book? For me and my family, it was the full set of the Durants' histories of western civilization, via Bibliofind, which my college creative writing professor told me about at some point in our highly sporadic post-college correspondence.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
--William James

I remember the post at Isis' Wardrobe about an upcoming Plastic Fantastic party, which sounded delightful to me. For pictures of the effusively ahistorical event, and some eye-poppingly creative costume ideas, enjoy her post about the festivities!

Three hundred years and a few days ago, The Sun set in France. A brief remembrance of Louis XIV - ever popular autocrat, astoundingly long-lived ruler, possessor of some truly spectacular wigs and satins.

Be a 'Vert - We Need More 'Verts!

Talking with Cute Shoes recently, she was dreading some upcoming events and saying "I am such an introvert."

Knowing what a charming and successful woman CS is, and having been friends with her now for a few years, I was drawn up short at the assertion she is an introvert; I know few people who can better handle others, and I know too how confident she is in managing them when it is called for. But, thinking about it, I understood what she meant.

It's a bit like me and math. I was good at it as a student (current status - unknown), but good lordy did I hate it.

Social situations can be the same.

And, as much as some people who know me - and don't - will smirk at the idea, I am a default introvert myself.

Put me in a situation with people, I do well; I trained at the knee of my mother, a woman with the most remarkable *memory* for other people's lives I have ever seen, but also open and eager and extremely interested in making connections with others. And yet - at bottom, my mom is not actually confident. She is at times not unlike the nervous little girl I remember being; standing before the door of a friend's house, wanting them to come out and play, yet finding the doorbell suddenly overwhelming.

But take away other people, give me no daily schedule of discipline - office, errands, and so forth - and I'd scarcely ever leave my house.

My default operational status is "Sit. Stay." I quite love people. I even enjoy being sociable.

But, given no specific motivation to be among them? I will not be. I'll be home with Penelope and Gossamer.

Being "on" with others can be strangely physically exhausting. I come home from the Conference most years with a migraine, and a major area of stress for me with The Big Meeting recently was the need to be in the front of the room so much, even if I wasn't a speaker. To work with the hotel, to field questions and issues, to confer with executives on issues and practicalities.

Extroversion is exciting, it's rewarding. It can be fun, it can be surprising.

It's invariably exhausting, for some of us.



I'm not sure whether I can identify where on the spectrum of INTROVERT <---------------------> EXTROVERT I actually lie. Perhaps it varies; a sine wave of energy versus hermit-ly resting.

Are you more one than the other? Are you both, depending upon circumstances? Or are you both, but sometimes circumstances don't quite match your level of social energy as you wish it would ... ?

Collection

Patrick Stewart brings Teh Funnay

The grey poobah is visiting Janet Reid again; and, in answer to her question of the day: it is wonderful how much he does to unplug me. Having a #GossamerTheEditorCat and the inimitable Penelope Pup in the house keeps me *human*. And happy. And grateful. And hugely, hugely entertained.

Ahhh, the promised land. When language columnists presume to the role of prophet. Sort of. "In layman's terms it's called being an ass." I love the Arrant Pedant, and it'd been too long since the last update! The AP's closing advice is EXCELLENT for any reader, writer, speaker, or person living in the world. Be curious ...

Family secrets and lies, enduring shame, and the reunion of a daughter with her mother after seventy years ... #1 of 3 History Blog posts ...

Of the pieces I've read on Khaled al-Asaad's murder at the hands of the so-called Islamic State, The History Blog's is, inevitably, the best (and does include good links, as always).

Janet Reid asks, "YA or adult?" and a whole community full of commenters contributes as well. As we do. "Damn the tomatoes!"

A Twit Who Writes

Over the past six months or so, I've seen the (wildly unreliable and self-contradictory, I know) stats on this blog bloat stupendously in the 'bot department, and I lulled for a long time in promoting it (mostly on Twitter). So it became a regular pattern to see 500 hits a day from Russia and like 38 from the United States. France became highly occupied with me during this period--enough that I could not consider it genuine traffic, and asked myself the occasional "So, France--new spam capitol of the world? Huh" and got so I hated seeing my daily traffic.

I also was looking at the hard times in my family, dealing with big events at work, traveling on my own, and even occasionally trying to WRITE (theoretically what I do and the core reason this blog exists). So Twitter looked like too much of a time suck, and I wasn't in a shilling mood.

Lately, logging on more regularly again, and talking with my Twitter pals, not only has my following there seen a little increase, the stats here have begun looking less discouraging. Interestingly, bots are DOWN; which, with more activity, seems to my wee and paltry brain counter-intuitive, but it's certainly gratifying. They're still around in abundance, but more and more my legitimate travel gives them a run for their money, and even wins not-rarely.

Given there was a time I never got any real hits here at all other than randomly, or the roughly three people who put up with my poorly organized word-dumps, it's comforting to see sustained actual readership, even if the particulars are still murky given Blogger's curious algorithms.



As with Blogger, so with the actual work of writing. The WIP is still early going, but it's not an inviable embryo anymore, and its development is really exciting. I may be embarking on that hushed-taboo I've never indulged: writing a frankly and in detail about sex, in a work I intend for publication.

Mom won't read the work anyway, but it's still always been my standard not to humiliate her nor anyone I loved with work much too far to the outre' side.

I know we're not supposed to write for an audience; but with Ax it was pretty easy not to peel back the sheets on a couple comprised of a Catholic saint and the guy who wielded a pretty lethal ax and so on in order to gain his domains. (One could divert, here, into a discussion of the relative moral horror of gruesome battles and executions versus the objectionability of loving sex, but that is another post, and indeed one I probably don't need to even write at all).

But I want to contemplate sex and its role in a world so very different from "our own" (as if today's world is all one nice and convenient, homogenized experience ...). I want to give full life and beating hearts to characters of more variety and differing stations than Ax required me to consider. Maybe I want to work out issues of my own; storytelling is important, but let's not pretend my heart doesn't beat, and that has no influence. Maybe I just want to be a wayward little scamp and scandalize my family; it wouldn't be my first time. My instinct is, though, this story just calls for an entirely different look at relationships (and transactions) than Ax had the room for. The shift into multiple POV and third person creates (demands?) more perspective than the first-person narrative of a single, biased voice.

And sex is an un-ignorable part of human experience. Our expectations surrounding it certainly change, our attitudes toward it are formed by amazingly powerful and multifarious influences. It's strong stuff, with or without the framework of morality; and usually with ... though morality is slippery stuff.

Growing up, it wasn't so at my house. But growing up, there never was any pretense sex didn't EXIST. My mom and dad were very much into each other; my brother and I dutifully made fun of them for it. Its very undeniability underscored its dominating importance, and both mom and dad had their own clear ideas on the sanctity of Correct sexual behavior.

In a novel populated by women who facilitate birth, give birth, trade (and are traded) on marital alliances, and at one point even endure that sexy little malady, "hysteria" (go ahead, ask me what the curative was!): you cannot get the story done without a bit of sex  here and there.



For those readers I know don't get into sex scenes; maybe I'll have to put one up here, just for a test ride. I don't write erotica, though I think it's not true that what I write has no appeal. For one character, there is tragedy inextricably attached. For another ... the motives are less clear, though is many ways the connection itself is unadorned and straightforward. When it comes to marriages, sex must be had, and heirs underlie any "lying" (with) that gets done.

Fecundity is always present, too. Sex did not exist only unto itself, and this is a dynamic many today have never honestly grappled with. I knew people long ago whose "accidental" pregnancies were intentional "traps" in actuality (the success rate there was not necessarily encouraging). I knew people, too, for whom it was always recreational.

This latter dynamic? Not as easily achievable - not for women - in Late Antiquity.

Yet even that needs attention.


***


It is perhaps in order to apologize to my readership, that sex has so dominated my posts of late. But I find it hard to feel repentance.

Not because I'm a slut, but because: this is where the writing happens to be right now. And this blog exists because of my writing.

If it's better I lay off, don't hesitate to ask me to stifle it.

Or if you have questions about the politics and mechanics of ancient sexual practice - comment away with that. It's not merely interesting to research and consider, it's been a stimulating (har) subject, creatively. I'm both challenged and energized, and it's got me thinking - which usually gets me blogging away.

If I need to shut up, say so. Because after this, we get into all the other research (archaeology and Procopius - how I love you!). It could get less sexy, but it won't be diminished for self-indulgence as I geek out on studying.

More on Sex (or NOT)

The only thing about this article is my bemusement at the idea there are still people who don't know the chastity belt concept WAS a joke. It's been a long time since anyone took the idea seriously.

Hasn't it ... ? (Yipes.)

I would point out, though, that it's no fantasy there have been men through history who felt it necessary to control women. The final paragraph is a bit flip on this point.

Some of the theology, though, ties in nicely with the themes I've been working with on the WIP, and it's an interesting article.

When A Picture is Worth a Thousand Barfs

I'll shut up about airsickness, I swear - but, honestly, how could I not share this? Possibly the single most literally-brutal misfire in copy and graphic design, I give you:

The Delta airsick bag.

Simultaneously sympathetic and terribly threatening, complete with Terminator reference?

Check.

Also: hurl.

SEXY SEX SEX SEX (... or, "Also, I Write")

For an author’s blog, there’s been precious little word around here lately about actual writing, and work in progress. Skipping over the inevitable excuses, I’ll admit there’s been LESS going on here of late, but thank goodness it’s not nothing at all.

Early in vacation, I was struck by some thoughts on the facts of life as it were; the expectations we place upon sex – today, or “in the past” – and how immutable these feel to us. Sex has always had a pretty high importance to human beings; at a guess, even before history got onto the subject, paternity and the apparent magic of a human being coming out of another one, seemingly out of nowhere. Its intensity of pleasure has long been tied to its importance in interpersonal politics, and perhaps the development of moral expectations was inevitable, given the esteem we place on lineage across all cultures.

These days, the idea of sex as a tool is generally considered rapacious beyond all sanction, and dismissed (again, across, at the very least, quite a *few* cultures) as immoral and crude. Bargaining for position by assuming certain - *ahem* - disreputable positions is, after first being offensive and manipulative, at bottom pathetic. It hardly fails to HAPPEN; indeed, some folks I've been aware of personally prove to me the phenomenon is not limited to the dregs of society. Entire industries and reality entertainment genres (*) thrive on the commoditization of "fairy tales" and wealth-as-romantic-glue, and there has been draconian conditioning, in the past thirty years, tying distinctly to certain gender roles/expectations and material outcomes. Hooray for marketing.

(*This, by the way, is not intended to refer only to romance competitions, but also to huge swaths of HGTV programming, mythologizing the importance of McMansions, settings, vacation stylings, and the types of couple-dom we should aspire to emulate; but at least they've embraced diversity in that last item, somewhat.)

American culture and pop culture have a uniquely slutty-yet-judgmental thing going on, wherein the increase in sales of lives for entertainment and prizes has produced that rarest of "guilty pleasures" - the right to judge others wholesale even as we simultaneously are enjoined to wish we had something we could sell for a good price.



"In the past", though ... transactional sex represented a wholly different market.

As was still true when I was growing up, and remains so for some today, girls and virginity were a whopping big deal. Speaking fundamentally to the importance of that lineage I mentioned above (read: PATERNITY, specifically), virginity took on an aura of magic which imbued it with an almost terrible power. To this day, PURITY is still subject to the curious confluence of desire and defense which mark something which is wanted precisely for the value in its own termination. Lifelong chastity may garner the golf-clap of social approbation. But it's the virgin on the marriage market who's long been an actual *prize* - sought for, competed over; her extinction the very highest tragedy and the greatest sacrifice to the gods.

Coming alongside paternity arise the subjective motivations - virtue and submission and status and all the tantalizing stories we've told, as humans, about the power and magic and pleasure of sex.



For a while there, the completely absurd working title for the work in progress was "Matrilineage" - not because even for a moment I ever thought that was remotely good, but because the WIP is a novel of women. Three generations, their experiences and their points of view. The midwife who spools from one of their lives to another has always been a prominent force, and she has begun seriously to develop. This is a woman whose life revolves around the reproduction of others.

The one male character who has developed any voice at all is: an illicit sexual partner.

Illicit sex had, fifteen hundred years ago in an Ostrogothic court barely a generation old, what you might call Serious Consequences. Particularly for a princess to be used in the marriage market by a king already proven canny in such alliances, and still in the process of using even chronologically advanced and legitimacy-compromised offspring in it.

Virginity was quite the big deal for a princess. Its being disposed of, deals still must be made; and advantages still could be constructed by marriage.

Many of the marriages in the WIP are matters of pragmatism, and some may have been more removed from romantic concerns than is generally popular to write about without the remediation of a little bodice-ripping on the side. The Ax and the Vase touched on this, and I even alluded to the ancient practice of a small country capitulating to the Roman Empire in order to get its protection, as a similar dynamic to certain marriages. In the WIP, the analysis will be much closer to my characters' hearts - and bodies - and I am intrigued not only by the possibilities, but by the implications. The perspectives are so necessarily unfamiliar, and I enjoy getting outside my own expectations (not only in my writing).

In Ax, this practical use of marriage as a tool got quite a light touch. To really explore the unpleasantness, though - and in ways it isn't always perceived by modern authors and audiences - excites my wee and paltry brain. It's bouncing around like Colin  (if you aren't a Hitchhiker's fan, the link probably won't help, and if you are, you don't need it: so skip the click either way - it's Wikipedia anyway, and I know how people can be about the 'pedia).

Suffice to say: inspiration. It's happening.

So yay for sex!

Collection

I'm torn between a "who needs garden *gnomes*" joke and a take on the "How does your garden grow? With cockle shells and silver bells, and MEDIEVAL BEASTIES! ROWRRR!!" here. Either way, Jeff Sypeck's garden may (astoundingly) have a cooler guardian than Mojourner Truth's.

But then, Mojourner's got directional hopping. And I've seen at least one living guardian doing a bit of a satan's caper around a fire in *his* garden, so that's pretty monstrous.

Elizabeth Chadwick hosts a guest post from Katrin Kania, on hip huggers, mass production, and medieval clothes making the man. When "one of a kind" was likelier than not! (I would pick only one thread here; historical and quasi-historical clothing is very MUCH mass-produced these days. It may not be accurate, but it's definitely a "thing". Otherwise, American Duchess's beautiful - and, to be sure, customizable - shoes would never sell.)

Carolynn with 2 Ns (one of those reef-ers or Reiders I go on about from time to time, though I've been horribly neglectful of the community and its blogs of late) has some thoughts on ages that are called "certain" (heh - love that phrase!), publishing's slow pace, and prioritization. Those of us beyond the prodigy years can wear ourselves ragged worrying about being too old ...

Finally, Jeff Sypeck again - on how very much more engaging it is to actually read and recite poetry, as opposed to analyzing it. I will refrain from ANY profundities about Michelle Pfeiffer and Black students.

But I have to admit, I never could resist Coolio (and MP's would-be badassery pooch problem in this clip is as hilarious as ever).

How Could I Not?

Yesterday was the 50th birthday of the man I love. He's still very far away, and the relationship we have is one that many of those who love me feel isn't good enough for me.

I deserve better.

What those in my life lose sight of is: he deserves better too.


Who do you know who has what they deserve?

Who gives what their loved ones have the right to expect of them, or gets it?

It is a constant loss to me, that my life is lived without the simplest touches, without laughing in the same room, without a partner to pump the gas and empty the litter and go out to eat with and just hear, breathing. This isn't the choice I would have made.

But to gain these things by substituting someone else - somehow, over the years (and I still look around at my options), has not been a viable choice. And that *is* the choice I definitely have made.

He has said to me:

You have a heart so strong and so fine, I am honored for you to have found me a place in it. That you want to give, and give, and give-- I'm humbled at times by your generosity. If I'm hurting you want to soothe, even if it is just to be near... your need to fix my hurts is so powerful.

The way you revel in my appearance. Call me beautiful. The way you mean it. No one has ever found me so fine.

How you have labored to be with a man so far away... putting off the idea of a more convenient partner so you can be with me.

You use your wit and your intelligence as if your appearance had no power, and the effect is devastating.

There is no generosity in me. I just don't know what else I could do, but as I have done.

To someone who has endured it, I said: to abandon someone suffering depression would be immoral.

And I've never found the man yet who could distract me from this one.


It's not what I deserve. But nothing else is, either. All I can do is hope the day will come that - even for a moment - I can give him the blessing he deserves.

Collection

Mary-Louise Jensen at The History Girls on the church that was buried and the sandy lands of Jutland. Some really nice photos here. There is a lesson about building on solid rock, but mine is not to judge. :)

Lauren at American Duchess shows a great step-by-step on vintage-izing a hat and dress. I used to wear hats sometimes; hats are such fun.

Nyki Blatchley on authorial agenda, invented secondary worlds, and EastEnders. Is his fantasy work less "real" than my own recreation of the worlds of characters whose lives lie utterly beyond my experience? It may be closer to the realities we like to understand as such; yet each of us is writing some expression of truth ...

We found a HUGE number of beached jellyfish on an outing while I was on vacation not long ago. Here, the hugest single one of all ... Strangely beautiful photos.

Finally, the Caustic Cover Critic has another eclectic post of both regrettably and (of course!) hilariously poor cover designs. Proving once again, the wilds of the public domain can be a scary territory to broach.

Collection

Buzz Aldrin's moon-walking papers. I know this has been making the rounds - every now and then my being a late-adopter of The Latest Thing does, I know, make me late to good parties. But this was too neato-spedito to let go by without linking it.

Babies are the tiniest basic scientists - as if we could not tell by watching the little experimental geniuses. Little physics experiments, in the littlest hands of all!

On the experience of the numinous, with History Girl Caroline Lawrence. Numen is one of those words I've always loved, both for its concept and its sound and the way it feels to speak. This is a nice look at it, and the experience of it.

Happy Fun Times on the Job

Pretty much everyone who knows me is aware how happy I am at my now-not-so-new job, after having left a team I loved a bit over a year and a half ago. My professional loyalties run pretty deep, and only once in the past decade have I left a position with pleasure; though even then it took a long time for the realization to dawn on me, that I was a poor fit at that employer, and really unhappy with them. These days, though – having left a job I was proud to hold and coworkers who meant the world to me – it may be I am happier than I’ve ever been at work. And that says a GREAT deal.

This past week, I went on vacation. Planned back in May, it was a trip to see my brother and nieces, in a city I have come to enjoy very much. NEXT week, I travel for work. Planned much more recently: the business trip I have to go on *next* week. Yes, I have to travel for work.

You think being a secretary means making other people do meetings, and planning *their* travel. But every so often, the tables turn on you.

We’ve covered how much trouble I have with flying. (I almost typed flaying there, though the latter may be preferable to airsickness.) It’s not a matter of fear, nor even annoyance at the crammed-in anti-glamor of air travel. It’s the inescapable physical wretchedness of the experience; the trip out to my family was a 4-bagger. Coming home, things were significantly better, and I think I have acupuncture to thank for the relief … but, even with that, the physical experience of flying is still flat-out awful.

See also: I have caught a cold. Of course. (I intend to blame the shriek-voiced women behind me on the red-eye home, who talked for an hour and a half on in a blacked-out cabin filled with people trying to sleep, splashed water on my next-seat neighbor, and generally kicked and jostled my seat in for the four-hour night we had together.)

So I hab a code.

In its way, the timing could not be better, all inconveniences considered. I wasn’t ill while I was with my family. I was able to work from home today and not expose my coworkers to the crud. And, given a few days between now and the next flight, hopefully the worst of the bug will be over before I fly again. It’s my plan to believe the acupuncture that helped so recently may still have an effect for this next trip. And also to re-up the Dramamine, Bonine, and/or Sea Bands.

Please don’t advise ginger on me. The first person who tries to tell me how to manage airsickness I’ve been dealing with for 37 years gets the airsickness bag I once filled with ginger-flavored goodness as a thank-you gift, and a no-expense-paid flight – just a flight, doesn’t matter where to – because, GAH. FLIGHT.


As all this is going on, my boss has had his hair set alight for him just at a point things had gotten civilized with his own travel schedule. And his hair is at a premium.

It’s all exciting, actually; I enjoy being able to SEE the people I work with every day, many of whom are at distant locations. It’s especially gratifying that things seem to be going well – and, not for nothing, I’m getting exposure and earning up brownie points (and, one hopes, a bit of comp time perhaps, once this event is in the bag). For the first time, I’ll be in front of the CEO, too; not just my own guys.

We’ll be in a city known for great food, and our company has a certain amount to do with great food; we’ll eat very well, on an outing together and even during our meetings.

Even better, this will all be over a week from now, and I'll be able to get out and enjoy myself for the first time in a while. Yay! I like a good August night out, on my own or with pals.

Vintage Theory

I have a theory and it is mine, but you can have it - indeed, you can comment on it and all those lovely things we can do in blog-land. So go to it!

Today, I wore a soft jersey shirt with a raw-edged asymmetrical cut. It's a flattering top, very very soft, and several years old. The jersey has held up very well, and the raw edge is still perfect, no strings coming loose nor runs trying to open up in the weave. It's wonderfully comfortable, washable, and has a unique style. It is also the first top I bought in what has become a trend: the long-line asymmetrical sleeveless knit top with curious draping/ruching/mixed textiles, and at the time I bought it, it was daring and forward thinking. It's still an excellent design, still not widely imitated to effect as good as its own.

But it is several years old. And it is made of a very light, delicate jersey knit.


This got me thinking.

With the various vogues for vintage style - and this dates well back before Mad Men, Downton Abbey, or even the fashion, beginning in my own much-molded youth, for rockabilly styles - it's always been a mix of re-created ... and ORIGINAL ... vintage clothes. Inspiration for big-shouldered 80s styles lay in an interest in 40s fashion silhouettes, and we resurrect and imitate Victorian, New Look, Flapper, even 18th-century clothes.

Okay, we're not wearing 18th-century, but I've seen people who wear original 19th-century coats in my day. And certainly much of the 20th century is represented in vintage shops and so on.


Here is the thing I realized:

When the first whiffs of 80s retro came  along, I waited for the vintage to come out. And it never did.

Beginning almost alarmingly soon after the decade died, by 1990, Madonna was playing around in giant bellbottoms, and cork plats came into style all too quickly, ushering in the still-extant-to-some-extent 70s fashion rehash. The 60s have been in style since the 80s; plastic-fantastic colors and shapes and Carnaby cute replaying almost without let all along - winklepickers, granny purses, big hair and long hair and staid, nubby boucle knits and Flower Power.

We have pieces of these original decades. I have a 1940s grosgrain purse of my great-grandmothers, which is in spectacular, strong condition, and which I can carry on special occasions. I have a hat nearly as old, a straw hat of my grandmother's. I've seen American Duchess's Lauren modeling dresses she plans to WEAR, not just collect. I myself own a magenta moire' New Look dress made in the UK and very definitely original (that rare original large enough to fit a modern woman's body).

The reason these things can be recycled/reused is this: they were made well enough to survive.


The 80s retro never took off in the way previous decades did because there really isn't as much in the way of surviving originals. They are definitely still *around* - but the quality of clothes made in the 1980s does not stand up to the standards of previous manufacture or hand-making. Even the 70s still used more natural (resilient) fiber and tailoring made to be altered and some expectation that garments should be built to last.

In the 80s, earlier synthetics were perfected ("") and proliferated. In the 80s, seam allowances disappeared, never to be seen since. In the 80s, commerce overcame design, and fashion overcame style to a great extent. In the 80s, the concept of perennial pieces began to be depressed, if not actually opressed or repressed, and short attention spans for fads were built into an industry whose market influence discouraged classic must-have pieces and began heavily to emphasize label uber-alles.

There hasn't even been much whiff of 90s retro, and 15 years on I hear people occasionally actually talking about what they miss in 90s fashion. But the skater-skirts-with-tights and chunky Mary Janes are going to have to be rebuilt this time, because the ones we had bit the rayon-shrinkage or Payless-poorly-constructed dust, or at least are thinner on the ground (and, yeah, in textile) than better made clothes have been for those interested in older decades used to be.


All of it's getting thinner on the ground, of course. With profligates like me WEARING sixty-year-old dresses, they're not going to last the way furniture or architecture might. With others DIY'ing pieces already perhaps compromised - or NOT - even what survives intact is deliberately deconstructed (if not actually destroyed, at least by some lights).

With actual construction being the crap that it mostly is, there won't be many Members Only (or L'Autre Mode ... heh) jackets to go with prefabricated fake DIY Chucks or stirrup pants or Benetton slouches in United candy colors.

No wonder 80s retro didn't take off the way 70s and 60s and so on did before. It'd have to be remade altogether.

And who wants to do that ... ???

Collection

On "performing" the seven deadly sins (without actual commission!). One should be "sharp when expounding, stern when correcting and kindly when exhorting." (For those who are uber-nerdy on this subject, the full paper is here.)

An interesting essay contest - in which a farm is the prize ...

Cue Mission Impossible theme music: the intel in monkey feces - or "Why Primatologists Love to Collect Poo" - best headline I've seen today.

Primary sources are the best. Medieval Jews' writings on Christianity and Christians, from the Eucharist to money lending.

Traveling Thoughts

This has been on my mind the past week or so. It seems a long time ago; and yet, everything I described then, I recall with such acute clarity now.

People change, time changes places. But memory is strong stuff. For which I am ever grateful.

Collection

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

Sigh.

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

Retouched

The past several weeks have brought many reconnections (of sorts) from the past. Songs cropping up, memories with them. Today, a cousin I haven't seen in years pinged me on LinkedIn; this may be reverberations from my brother making new connections a few days ago. A few days ago, a practically-family old friend cropped up, definitely in the wake of the brotherly LinkIng. But there was also that photo of my ex husband I found online; he and I have not been *out* of touch for many years now, but I haven't actually seen him face-to-face in almost exactly thirteen years, so it was nice to see he's aging beautifully (if a little cheesily - hah - the photo was for his work, so it's a bit the corporate Olan Mills style portrait; and the angle is weird, he's looking upward at a camera too highly placed). And then, the sighting of my first love.

I've spent a lot of years losing touch with a lot of people, and the internet makes it possible to erase barriers with the click of an anonymous button. I've been fortunate, in that those I need not be in touch with have not seemed to need to be in touch with me either.

Ahh, but. "But" - the stuff of which blog posts are made.


A lot of times, the idea of first love has a bit of a nostalgic swoon about it. Remembering mine has been bringing  a time in my life into a focus I've never really put on it with age. All that time spent forgetting, and an easily distracted wee and paltry little brain.

First love. When I use the term, it is not the very first boy I ever kissed, nor even the very first one I felt turbulently emotional about. I mean the boy I encountered for the first time on the terms I have met a man ever since - a certain confidence and assertiveness, a certain romantic awe, and a certain set of expectations.

Expectations, back then, were nascent things; but First was the first relationship I ever had that HAD them. We thought we'd get married, we had at least one of our kids named (First seems to have been the only guy I ever seriously imagined children with - or, perhaps, it was the very embryonic nature of this first adult romance that overlooked my lack of maternal drive).

We also went through some really adult stuff. Hard stuff. First was in rehab when we decided to be officially Going Together, and our first official date was my senior prom.

Gave my mom the vapors, all this, and reasonably so. But let it be said that the adult stuff we were dealing with, if I consider it with both pragmatism and the sentiment of my mother's perspectives, was NOT the stuff that would have worried her most. First's rehab TOOK, and well enough that I became, for the last year or two I spent time with a certain beloved crowd of my youth, rather the Go To counselor for an awful lot of people concerned with their own issues with one substance or another. I'd always been, almost conspicuously, very much a good girl in a crowd not thick with them - or, at least, not thick with girls who wanted it known they were good.

It's hard for me to believe how short the time really was, from just being two people who shared a group of hanging-out friends and acquaintances, to being seriously in love ... to being over. Back then, the space of a year seemed great. Twenty-nine years later? Almost endearingly fleeting.

Yet, dusting off the memories and giving them a real look, after so long, I find they are not silly things to smile at as if from a superior vantage. (I met the man I *did* marry only a little more than a year after all of this, and that relationship isn't a product for patronizing.)

It's sort of gratifying to exercise memory muscles long left to relax, if not really to atrophy. I recall the music vividly; the smell of smoke in a city built on tobacco, and a crowd almost adamantly addicted to it. I recall the blue plastic booths in that before-malls-even-had-food-courts burger place we'd meet, and the fake white marble-like stuff of the benches we'd hang out on; built in the 70s and stripped of cushions in the 80s; hard, angular, not much good for comfort, and meant perhaps to discourage precisely the sort of mall-rattery I loved so much and remember now seldom but with a certain mellow sweetness. I recall exactly where he was standing, and where I was standing, when I walked up to my then-flirty-friend and all but dared him to be anything more than that, without ever speaking an actual word.

I recall how giddily terrifying it was to put my interest in a guy out on the table like that. And I remember how gratifying, when the interest was returned.

I do smile indulgently now: thinking about the fact that at least four of the, well, four major relationships of my adult life have all begun the same way.



People who know me much at all, or even just have read enough on this blog, know that I am not forgiving of the person I was roughly through my twenties. I have no patience with that person's need for attention, for drama. Her vanity. Her pettiness and meanness.

But the girl of eighteen? She was something more than just a good girl hanging with the mall gang. She hadn't "discovered" she was attractive, and so was free of the need to focus everyone's undying attention upon that. She was half kid in jeans and sneaks ... and half housewife, in her mind, possessed of the guy she wanted to marry, surrounded by friends and acquaintances who came to her for advice as if she had any sort of wisdom. She was good to those she cared for. She was ... maybe something kind of pure. Not necessarily nice - in those teenage years perhaps even more than in her regrettable twenties, she took all too much pride in NOT being "nice" nor "sweet" (and yet somehow drawing people to her who trusted and turned to her).

She'd never been deeply sad nor hurt, either. She'd never *lost* - not profoundly, unnaturally ... bitterly.

She was an interesting welter of potential - some of it deathlessly squandered. Yet from the ashes of her (burned in those regrettable twenties) rose the woman I am now. Someone I am not ashamed to have become.



It has been remarkable to me how easily conjured the memories of that time really are. Fleeting images of flirting with First when we were friends, before we'd ever touched the idea that could be anything more. Evenings at the sub shop we took over as the mall drew our attention less; hanging out in the parking lot there, or inside - that smell of a sub shop, peppered salami and vinegar and bread. Riding in a car.

All these memories are literally warm ones: most of our actual relationship took place during one tiny summer, so long ago it seems fragile and impossible. T-shirts and sleeveless sweaters. Jeans and sneaks. "Labyrinth" and "Legend" and his parents' Vista Cruiser wagon, or my folks' Plymouth Fury - the Tank, the Zucchini. Our friends could pack in nine to the huge bench seats, and I bought gas two dollars at a time for a car that would barely get thirty miles on its allowance. We'd sit on the hood of it, or lie back, the engine still warm, the steel so strong, while the stars wheeled above and life seemed endless, and the air perhaps even cooled just a little.

He never did stop smoking, at least back then. With everything else he gave up, he still had that. Odd how many of our friends smoked - really, all of them, in this group, in this part of my life. So YOUNG. I think of it now and it shocks me; not least, that the adults in our lives didn't even seem to notice (my mom, though, would have skinned me alive).

I can recall the way he held his cigarette, the posture of his neck, his arm, his shoulders.

I spent months studying his face; knew it so well that seeing him thirty years later ... yes. I see him in there. That impossibly young boy, the floppy shiny hair we all had before the 80s got heavily hairsprayed. The gloss and eyes of youth, like no other age, no matter what we do to preserve it. Real youth. He seemed beautiful to me. The nervousness I see now, an old lady, only the more touching and appealing for recognizing it. For having lost it.

I can remember the coda, after our relationship was over. I remember his mother calling me. And going to him. A meeting so terribly hard I would not share it here like mere emotionally-engaging entertainment.

we went through some hard stuff, some adult stuff, First and I. I never hated him. Never lost my respect for him.

That, at least, is a legacy echoed since. I've never hated any man I ever loved. I have, perhaps, that boy and that girl a debt of thanks. It's what made me the person who can talk about "Beloved Ex" and mean it without being trite.

It's galvanized in me the heart that has been so purely devoted to Mr. X.


Dear G-d. What that girl would have thought, if she could ever have even imagined what her heart would become.



For all that has passed now; I still am sort of the girl with a cocoon of privilege. The mantle of invoilate safety about me - no man, no love, no fear has ever taken from me the core security my parents built. I worry, because I know others have not been so blessed. Beloved Ex. Maybe First. Mr. X himself, certainly. Even my mom has not, in a way, been as lucky as I; I was forged in experience she never had.



It is time, perhaps, to listen to something old. To let Penelope on the couch, and just quietly pet her. To remember that car, the wind through its windows. And "teenagering" ... the way it was. And the way, for me at least, it was meant to be.

I was so very lucky. I'm grateful for every second.