Gillian Polack's Blog, page 118
April 22, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-23T10:55:00
My exciting few days has already begun. Conflux isn't until Thursday, but I'm teaching tonight, and have various messages and appointments this afternoon, and my tax has to actually be finished (because it's time, and because I rather suspect my houseguests would prefer a bed to the floor) and everything else has until tomorrow night to be finished. Everything. The tax is more-than-usually problematic, because of various factors and I've entered the easy things on my spreadsheet and have only the difficult to go.
Conflux-attendees will be pleased to know that liqueur and chocolate and books are already packed. Clothes...less so. I have my priorities right. If there's anything I should bring, then people should tell me today or tomorrow.
Also, my uni email is sulking and doesn't send me through what it ought. I suspect I am being migrated to a new system and they forgot to warn me. This means that things that ought to be happening, aren't, and if you need me urgently, you might have to email me using my trivium address (for FB, Twitter and LJ are all connected to my uni account).
What I want to do is work so very quickly that I can read my shiny new review books. Now that ASiF is no longer, I am reviewing for ticon 4, and Liz just sent me a lovely parcel. Liz gives me choices in books and these are all ones I wanted to read (each for quite different reasons) so it's a bit like BiblioBuffet (except I write set length standard reviews, instead of essays).
And that's it from me. I have taxing work ahead!
Conflux-attendees will be pleased to know that liqueur and chocolate and books are already packed. Clothes...less so. I have my priorities right. If there's anything I should bring, then people should tell me today or tomorrow.
Also, my uni email is sulking and doesn't send me through what it ought. I suspect I am being migrated to a new system and they forgot to warn me. This means that things that ought to be happening, aren't, and if you need me urgently, you might have to email me using my trivium address (for FB, Twitter and LJ are all connected to my uni account).
What I want to do is work so very quickly that I can read my shiny new review books. Now that ASiF is no longer, I am reviewing for ticon 4, and Liz just sent me a lovely parcel. Liz gives me choices in books and these are all ones I wanted to read (each for quite different reasons) so it's a bit like BiblioBuffet (except I write set length standard reviews, instead of essays).
And that's it from me. I have taxing work ahead!
April 21, 2013
Review: Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein, Distant Intimacy
Sometimes books that fail in their intent are interesting. They’re interesting for all the wrong reasons, but they’re worth a look. Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein’s Distant Intimacy (Raphael and Epstein Distant Intimacy. Friendship in the Age of the Internet. Yale University Press, 2013) is one such book. This is a memoir as much as a conversation. At heart, the two writers are prepping historians and refined readers on what they want known and how they want it known.
It was written from a very straightforward premise. “We can get some income if we email each other for a year and publish it.” The email where the correspondence is proposed is included in the volume and, while the cynical aside about income isn’t maybe the first and foremost reason for the year-long correspondence, it’s an obvious part. This leads to the underlying theme of the correspondence, which on the surface seems to be “We are important people. Let’s talk about this. Also, we may name drop where appropriate.”
If Raphael and Epstein had been lesser writers than they are, then this book would have been entirely intolerable. Other reviews in fact, suggest that it is. It’s not the most comfortable correspondence to read. It does, however have redeeming features.
When I’d read Distant Intimacy, I decided it was time to see the film Darling again. I hated it in my teens, but I am older and wiser now. Or maybe just older. What I found in it made sense of a lot of things. Raphael wrote the script. Darling is all that it is said to be. Some of the flaws of Distant Intimacy turned into a gem of a character study. The main character has so little substance that she dreams throughout most of her major life experiences and fails to understand either herself or the men in her life. In the end, she lives one of the dreams and, of course, it turns out to be hollow.
Raphael and Epstein distil those aspects of their lives they want people to know about. They want us to understand their dream and their vision of themselves. It’s quite possible that this is the whole of their lives and that they belong in Raphael’s film script, but I am a hopeful individual and I doubt it: I don’t think they’re hollow. I do think, however, that they’re posing. I hope they are, for all those cutting words about strangers are much less unhappy if they’re part of a wish to set themselves up as a kind of nouveau Algonquin than if it’s all they have.
The pair start off as a tag team, setting each other up for posts about…themselves (mainly). This means that quite a bit of the email exchange has one reflecting the other or floating on the other’s previous statements. This lends the correspondence an unnaturally even tone.
The differences between them become more interesting when one (normally Epstein) assumes too much shared history and takes the superficial similarities as real. The other becomes defensive (yes, I was in the army; my wife is Jewish even though you don’t seem to know this) and the careful mannerisms fall away somewhat. The writing improves and there is just a touch of narrative tension. Suddenly it’s obvious that this pair of writers could have written something quite different if they’d been less respectful of each other or less worried about appearances.
Distant Intimacy is amusing, in a nasty way. Raphael condescends about Susan Sontag’s condescension, for instance. This makes it very easy to describe the whole book using that form of amused superiority. After all, as I have said, the authors put themselves on show, and are writing with a high level of self-awareness. They name drop. They idea drop. They experience drop. They out-Jewish each other (I rang my mother at one point to tell her “Thank goodness my Jewishness is different to theirs.”). They think about the many blessings they have endured and the many people they despise.
As the letters continue later in the year) the posturing diminishes and the letters become far more interesting. It’s less exhausting to read from this point, too. Raphael (who is generally the leader in the letter-exchange) misses his daughter on her birthday and talks about losing her and this is where the letters really start to be letters. The two writers are still entirely central to their own universe and they still name drop and snark, but from here, they allow their humanity to colour the picture. It isn’t the loss of their children that creates this sense of humanity: it’s a slight change in register signalled by that loss.
A significant component of the exchange of thoughts is a promenade of who they know (hopefully not their friends) and who they read (normally well-dead). I found myself writing acerbic notes about these people, for the somewhat bitter outlook of the two writers is infectious. I found myself feeling guilty about this, and guilty about the occasional negative witticisms I have committed (DC Green – you were right!). The truth is that when one sees this kind of comment piled up like a heap of autumn leaves, one wants to sweep one’s brain clear of the clutter.
Something that struck me throughout my reading was how very different these two men are from me. Of course they’re different: they’re privileged males from a place and time where that privilege makes a big difference. But they’re also Jewish and we ought to have more in common. I’m going to spare you the notes about this, and the long conversation I had with my mother. It is enough to know that we share a religion, but that it informs our lives very differently. I first encountered people with this particular Jewish background when I did my MA in Toronto (not counting having read Philip Roth, for I don’t want to count that) – they invariably made me feel inferior. Epstein says that Jews are disappearing. I like to think that we’re simply avoiding people who make statements like this. Epstein may well have a specific classification and set of characteristics that define a ‘real Jew’ and that many of us do not belong*. He doesn’t explore this, however, but makes the statement and moves on. I would have liked to see him explore this. I would have liked to know why he thinks Jews are disappearing and why he and Raphael consider it so essential to quantify their Jewishness.
Epstein talks about Montaigne and wants to be compared to him. It was during Epstein’s longing to be thought of as Montaigne that I decided to rewatch Darling. I was looking for a parallel to that feeling of a displaced life. Why should Epstein be yearning for this kind of recognition at this stage in his (mostly) eminent career? Because for him the dream of recognition is so very important. When he lives the dream, he may not recognise that he is living it.
While the letters were worth the detour from my normal work and my historian side can find many, many things to use (pity I’m an historian of the wrong period and place) but the bottom line is, mainly because appearances and wit count for so very much with both writers, they’ve created something that leaves me uncomfortable. There are many perfectly delightful writers who I am certain not to spend my life studying, and Raphael and Epstein have added themselves to that list. Their world and their friends and their shared (and possibly artificial) misanthropic outlook make them hard to endure for long.
This correspondence made me think of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Imagine that this is London in the late eighteenth century. Sheridan has just given his days-long speech to Parliament to prove that, although he is a witty and erudite playwright, he’s more than that. The difficulty with this very high level of public posing is that it lays a person’s ego bare, even if one tries to hide it. It’s seldom a good look.
In essence Distant Intimacy demonstrates two small lives. Because both lives have significant public elements, the smallness is a shock. Once their mere humanity is recognised, however, the writers become more interesting and more likeable. They are full of yearning and dreams. They strut and they show who they know. They also, when one reads carefully, admit some astonishing things and demonstrate that their lives are interesting and are imperfect and that the choice of this email correspondence as a vehicle was quite probably a mistake. By the end of the volume they have begun communicating with each other, and started talking to us. Raphael and Epstein show us, in that moment, the book that could have been.
*For the record, Epstein’s grandfather and mine came from the same place and probably left it around the same time and for similar reasons and I’m pretty sure my whole family still exists and the vast majority of us are still Jewish. We’re Australian, though. We may not qualify.
It was written from a very straightforward premise. “We can get some income if we email each other for a year and publish it.” The email where the correspondence is proposed is included in the volume and, while the cynical aside about income isn’t maybe the first and foremost reason for the year-long correspondence, it’s an obvious part. This leads to the underlying theme of the correspondence, which on the surface seems to be “We are important people. Let’s talk about this. Also, we may name drop where appropriate.”
If Raphael and Epstein had been lesser writers than they are, then this book would have been entirely intolerable. Other reviews in fact, suggest that it is. It’s not the most comfortable correspondence to read. It does, however have redeeming features.
When I’d read Distant Intimacy, I decided it was time to see the film Darling again. I hated it in my teens, but I am older and wiser now. Or maybe just older. What I found in it made sense of a lot of things. Raphael wrote the script. Darling is all that it is said to be. Some of the flaws of Distant Intimacy turned into a gem of a character study. The main character has so little substance that she dreams throughout most of her major life experiences and fails to understand either herself or the men in her life. In the end, she lives one of the dreams and, of course, it turns out to be hollow.
Raphael and Epstein distil those aspects of their lives they want people to know about. They want us to understand their dream and their vision of themselves. It’s quite possible that this is the whole of their lives and that they belong in Raphael’s film script, but I am a hopeful individual and I doubt it: I don’t think they’re hollow. I do think, however, that they’re posing. I hope they are, for all those cutting words about strangers are much less unhappy if they’re part of a wish to set themselves up as a kind of nouveau Algonquin than if it’s all they have.
The pair start off as a tag team, setting each other up for posts about…themselves (mainly). This means that quite a bit of the email exchange has one reflecting the other or floating on the other’s previous statements. This lends the correspondence an unnaturally even tone.
The differences between them become more interesting when one (normally Epstein) assumes too much shared history and takes the superficial similarities as real. The other becomes defensive (yes, I was in the army; my wife is Jewish even though you don’t seem to know this) and the careful mannerisms fall away somewhat. The writing improves and there is just a touch of narrative tension. Suddenly it’s obvious that this pair of writers could have written something quite different if they’d been less respectful of each other or less worried about appearances.
Distant Intimacy is amusing, in a nasty way. Raphael condescends about Susan Sontag’s condescension, for instance. This makes it very easy to describe the whole book using that form of amused superiority. After all, as I have said, the authors put themselves on show, and are writing with a high level of self-awareness. They name drop. They idea drop. They experience drop. They out-Jewish each other (I rang my mother at one point to tell her “Thank goodness my Jewishness is different to theirs.”). They think about the many blessings they have endured and the many people they despise.
As the letters continue later in the year) the posturing diminishes and the letters become far more interesting. It’s less exhausting to read from this point, too. Raphael (who is generally the leader in the letter-exchange) misses his daughter on her birthday and talks about losing her and this is where the letters really start to be letters. The two writers are still entirely central to their own universe and they still name drop and snark, but from here, they allow their humanity to colour the picture. It isn’t the loss of their children that creates this sense of humanity: it’s a slight change in register signalled by that loss.
A significant component of the exchange of thoughts is a promenade of who they know (hopefully not their friends) and who they read (normally well-dead). I found myself writing acerbic notes about these people, for the somewhat bitter outlook of the two writers is infectious. I found myself feeling guilty about this, and guilty about the occasional negative witticisms I have committed (DC Green – you were right!). The truth is that when one sees this kind of comment piled up like a heap of autumn leaves, one wants to sweep one’s brain clear of the clutter.
Something that struck me throughout my reading was how very different these two men are from me. Of course they’re different: they’re privileged males from a place and time where that privilege makes a big difference. But they’re also Jewish and we ought to have more in common. I’m going to spare you the notes about this, and the long conversation I had with my mother. It is enough to know that we share a religion, but that it informs our lives very differently. I first encountered people with this particular Jewish background when I did my MA in Toronto (not counting having read Philip Roth, for I don’t want to count that) – they invariably made me feel inferior. Epstein says that Jews are disappearing. I like to think that we’re simply avoiding people who make statements like this. Epstein may well have a specific classification and set of characteristics that define a ‘real Jew’ and that many of us do not belong*. He doesn’t explore this, however, but makes the statement and moves on. I would have liked to see him explore this. I would have liked to know why he thinks Jews are disappearing and why he and Raphael consider it so essential to quantify their Jewishness.
Epstein talks about Montaigne and wants to be compared to him. It was during Epstein’s longing to be thought of as Montaigne that I decided to rewatch Darling. I was looking for a parallel to that feeling of a displaced life. Why should Epstein be yearning for this kind of recognition at this stage in his (mostly) eminent career? Because for him the dream of recognition is so very important. When he lives the dream, he may not recognise that he is living it.
While the letters were worth the detour from my normal work and my historian side can find many, many things to use (pity I’m an historian of the wrong period and place) but the bottom line is, mainly because appearances and wit count for so very much with both writers, they’ve created something that leaves me uncomfortable. There are many perfectly delightful writers who I am certain not to spend my life studying, and Raphael and Epstein have added themselves to that list. Their world and their friends and their shared (and possibly artificial) misanthropic outlook make them hard to endure for long.
This correspondence made me think of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Imagine that this is London in the late eighteenth century. Sheridan has just given his days-long speech to Parliament to prove that, although he is a witty and erudite playwright, he’s more than that. The difficulty with this very high level of public posing is that it lays a person’s ego bare, even if one tries to hide it. It’s seldom a good look.
In essence Distant Intimacy demonstrates two small lives. Because both lives have significant public elements, the smallness is a shock. Once their mere humanity is recognised, however, the writers become more interesting and more likeable. They are full of yearning and dreams. They strut and they show who they know. They also, when one reads carefully, admit some astonishing things and demonstrate that their lives are interesting and are imperfect and that the choice of this email correspondence as a vehicle was quite probably a mistake. By the end of the volume they have begun communicating with each other, and started talking to us. Raphael and Epstein show us, in that moment, the book that could have been.
*For the record, Epstein’s grandfather and mine came from the same place and probably left it around the same time and for similar reasons and I’m pretty sure my whole family still exists and the vast majority of us are still Jewish. We’re Australian, though. We may not qualify.
The usefulness of historians: the work of Brian P Levack
I want to explore how using a specific historical study can expand a writer’s horizons. Or make their work easier. Or both. Also, I don’t want to do real work. I’m listening to Clara Butt while writing this, which is definitely expanding my horizons and making my work easier. It’s the way she changes register. She could sing duets with herself as both heroine and hero. I blame my great-grandmother’s record collection for my current fascination with Clara Butt.
My own fascination with the history of witchcraft and exorcism and related subjects goes back to my days as an undergraduate. I have a polite little library on these subjects, which I mostly use for teaching. This is why I put up my hand to look at Levack’s book. I wanted to see how his work on possession and exorcism fitted into current understanding of magic and witchcraft and sorcery of the same period. If I were writing a regular review, that’s what I would be analysing and describing, but it’s much more interesting looking at Levack’s book from the point of view of the fiction writer, for the stuff he talks about is bread and water for horror writers and meat and drink for creators of alternate worlds or historical tales. There’s so much in here that’s handy and meaningful and colourful and leads into stories or gives stories depth. This is true of many works of history. It’s just a matter of reading them with an eye to gleaning and scavenging and idea formation and plot sequencing. It’s also a matter of understanding them.
For writers looking for roles strong female characters can play, for instance, and feeling themselves limited by the roles currently available in dark fiction series of books, there were two known female exorcists in Venice in the sixteenth century. Venice in the sixteenth century is perfect historical fantasy fodder to begin with, but add dark magic and female exorcists and the potential storylines are endless*. Levack’s discussion of the different roles played by exorcism and the strategies used by those pretending possession will help with that.
I’d love to read a series about a hard-boiled noir Venetian exorcist, cynical but devout, having to thread her way through the worlds of devils and of men. Or what about a tale of a German Teufelsbanner? The Teufelsbanner was an itinerant exorcist. If you need an outsider in a story, a Teufelsbanner would suit the bill in so many kinds of narratives. They went around seeking explanations of the religious and distressed and would provide a lovely narrative bridge into the troubles of small communities. Although why someone would actually become a Teufelsbanner (and people obviously did it for a living) is beyond me. This is where the past is far stranger than my imagination.
For the fiction writer, there’s a powerful value in understanding source texts. Take Shakespeare. Think of Prospero’s wonderful speech – the “This rough magic I here abjure” one. Levack explains that adjuring was what one did when commanding demons or exorcising. Adjuring and abjuring was flirting with very dangerous stuff indeed. Prospero’s abjuration meant a lot more to the listeners of the day than it does to most of us, for it meant more than giving up magic. It meant his soul was safe and his body was not imperilled. There would be no possession, or penalties if his conjurations went awry. Hell was no longer imminent. Knowing the definition of ‘abjure’ that Shakespeare knew opens doors onto danger. This opens up plotlines and character possibilities to anyone writing using that setting.
As well as helping us interpret texts in their contemporary contexts, studies like Levack’s are full of material that will help a writer build up a society. How much power does a king have in your country of Confusiana, roughly based on Spain at the time of Philip IV? Well, let’s test it. Could the king expel demons from someone? An answer to that question helps determine whether the society believed in demoniacs, how much power the throne actually had and how society expected that power to be used.
Telling detail helps build a society, but it also helps prevent yet another lookalike built society that largely comes from a writer’s unexamined assumptions about a place and time. In the case of Philip IV of Spain, just choosing his country makes a change from a lookalike seventeenth century France (largely based on misreadings of Dumas) so the question of royal power would consolidate that difference and bring the story to life. (I like Philip because he translated Guicciardini, but that’s another story entirely.)
What’s most important is the statement I make so often to writers who want to write with historical references. Levack’s study really emphasises the need for writers to choose their time and place and to research it, not to fall for generalisations. Exorcism changed over time and from place to place. Exorcism in Catholic France at the time of the Wars of Religion was used as a tool to prove that miracles still existed and that, therefore, Catholicism was the one true Christianity and all Protestants were foul heretics. Put your story in a Protestant town at the same time, and the story is entirely different. Instead of calling in an exorcist, a case of possession was more likely to be addressed through fasting and prayer.
And Jews? This is where Levack slips up. He has a short section on Jewish possession, but it isn’t as detailed nor as well grounded as the treatment of Christian Europe, so if I were writing about events in a seventeenth century community and there were Jews present, I would seek another source before trying to explain what they thought or how they reacted.
This whole study, with its focus on the difference in belief and how those differences manifested in behaviour towards anyone considered to be possessed underlies something that only a small proportion of fiction writers get right: we need to respect belief. Levack covers this in our introduction. We don’t have to share the belief of the people we invent, but if we don’t respect that their belief is genuine and understand how it operates then our world is hollow and our people are just shameful echoes of ourselves.
I’ve many more notes and many more thoughts on how the book can be used. But alas, I’ve run out of background music**.
What have you missed out on? You’ve missed out on Levack showing ways that cynics and even unbelievers fitted into devout societies, how people remain people in any time and place (and how we have to work out who they are, and craft them from whole cloth), that there are pictures of demons and that these pictures look nothing like the stuff of modern dark fantasy, that there are real people who are just begging to be fictionalised (Johannes Bergerus, for instance, who arrived in Utrecht in 1599 and exorcised demons using theatre, magic, religion, pulverised human teeth and the heart of a wolf), that gender relations are able to be seen in who exorcised whom and why, and that the seriously cool detail you can get from Levack’s book is truly, seriously cool.
*The talents of Dame Clara Butt are also endless: I put on Rule Britannia and Ye Banks and Braes at the same time and now she is singing that duet with herself in gloriously strange counterpoint, with rousing chorus.
*I would say that Butt has deserted me, but that would be liable to misinterpretation.
April 20, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-21T12:25:00
My weather sense is still reliable: the outside temperature dropped to 0.1 degree overnight. My common sense is still entirely unreliable: I have a cold. I also have little time for those who make really daft statements: I just explained to someone on Twitter that the builders of Stonehenge were not cavemen. I wonder if he also thinks that his Medieval ancestors ate rotting food. If he does, then obviously his ancestors did, and his further ancestors were primitive people while mine were sophisticated and intelligent and doing awesome things. This makes me wonder how close were the caves in the region to Stonehenge and if maybe some of the workers actually lived in caves. This didn't make them cavemen, except by stretching the common understanding of cavemen to include anyone who lives in a cave (and I just saw a website of beautiful cave houses, which means quite a few modern cultures also produce cavemen) but it does test my knowledge of the geology of the area, which is a good thing.
My list for today and for tomorrow-after-doctor is eight things long. There are about 20 small things on top of those eight big things, though. The cold is running interference. The brain doesn't want to work. And all I can say is 'hah!' and get on with things.
My list for today and for tomorrow-after-doctor is eight things long. There are about 20 small things on top of those eight big things, though. The cold is running interference. The brain doesn't want to work. And all I can say is 'hah!' and get on with things.
April 19, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-20T13:49:00
I've been so busy storing out things-of-which-I-cannot-yet-speak-publicly that I completely forgot how close my next story is to publication. Next (the anthology) is already around - I have to wait for my copy, though, for I skipped one meeting for another and alas, I skipped the one where I could have collected my author copy.
The official launch is at Conflux, and friends who can't attend the convention are still welcome to come to the launch. It's at 6pm this coming Friday, at Rydges Capital Hill.
Also, I've packed my curious teaching aides for my five senses workshop for Conflux. I so want to say :insert evil laugh here: but my evil laugh has faded under the weight of trying to get everything done by Conflux. I'm inching closer to having a futon free of paper, but right now my place looks rather littered, for there are so many things underway.
If I get my act together, I might post a book essay today. If I don't, it will have to be tomorrow. Then I can put a book away (just one).
And in other news, I suspect the heaters will be out by the end of the week. Or that my houseguests will want to use my special down dressing gown... At least this means that Conflux will be surrounded by autumn leaves. I'm willing (during a rare half hour gap in proceedings) to show interstate and overseas friends my magical autumn route to Magna Carta place and beyond.
The official launch is at Conflux, and friends who can't attend the convention are still welcome to come to the launch. It's at 6pm this coming Friday, at Rydges Capital Hill.
Also, I've packed my curious teaching aides for my five senses workshop for Conflux. I so want to say :insert evil laugh here: but my evil laugh has faded under the weight of trying to get everything done by Conflux. I'm inching closer to having a futon free of paper, but right now my place looks rather littered, for there are so many things underway.
If I get my act together, I might post a book essay today. If I don't, it will have to be tomorrow. Then I can put a book away (just one).
And in other news, I suspect the heaters will be out by the end of the week. Or that my houseguests will want to use my special down dressing gown... At least this means that Conflux will be surrounded by autumn leaves. I'm willing (during a rare half hour gap in proceedings) to show interstate and overseas friends my magical autumn route to Magna Carta place and beyond.
April 18, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-19T10:52:00
I'm re-reading a critique of something I wrote and trying to extract the useful bits to improve my piece and it's hard. It's hard because the crux of the critique is "I see the structure of this novel differently to you, so you should change your view of the structure and follow mine." and "You need to be arguing that really, this author is totes a feminist because there's behind the scenes stuff that affects the novel that's carried out by women" and "You need more bibliography." There is a small bibliography because there's nothing on the work or on the kind of approach I'm using. He wants his approach and therefore his bibliography (but won't give me an example of who I'm missing, so I don't know why his approach is so much more effective than mine - when someone said to me "Where's Ankersmit?" about something else it was instantly obvious I'd made a mistake and I instantly rectified it. In this case, it's instantly obvious only that I'm working from an entirely different angle to this other person and that he won't accept that. This doesn't mean that I can't improve the article, but I've tried and tried to use his comments to find ways of making it sounder and more solid and, to be honest, I can't. The critique-person wants to prove that this author is arguing from a very sophisticated feminist position, and I'm arguing "Let's look at the worldbuilding - what role do women play in the backdrop to the universe." And I can't see the behind-the-scenes stuff he talks about in my reading of the novel and he hasn't given me chapter and verse so I can look it up and go "Oh, is that what he means. Drabbit, I have to write a completely different piece now."
This is the paper I gave at the Gender Games conference. There's a possibility (only a possibility - I am from quite a different intellectual background and my work on the nature of worldbuilding isn't nearly where I want it to be to) of it being published. I went to old criticisms (prior to the conference) to see if I could improve my understanding. This frustration is the result. The conference was wildly positive about the paper (although I've lost the name of the crucial person I wanted to consult, which isn't good - she had the single best insight I've ever heard about Gaiman, and I want to cite her) and completely got what I was saying and pushed it even further.
I'm also not at all convinced that I'm writing a solid article in terms of standard literary approaches. It works for some fields, in other words, and not for others. And any magnum opus by me on the nature of built worlds in fiction is a way off yet - it's none of the current books on which I'm working. I have so much work to do! This is an important exploration, though, and it leads to very interesting results and yes, I'm going to finish the essay but no, I don't think I can change my approach.
I don't know if this article will get published, but at least it advances my understanding about what I'm doing with my thinking on how writers develop worlds for their fiction.
And I realise this is quite possibly the first time I've mentioned in public that I'm working on worldbuilding as a long-term project. When the Beast is finished, and my stuff on how writers relate to history is closer to wherever it's going, that's quite possibly the main project I'm working on. I've started writing about it and thinking about it, and quite obviously I'm already teaching it, but it didn't dawn on me that there was a book that had to be written until this bloke told me off for not seeing things in his way. There's nothing wrong with his way, but it's a different article with different conclusions and it misses the whole reality of how writers build stuff into their worlds unknowingly. The critiquer's argument was that I needed to explore Gaiman's conscious work on women and feminism, whereas I'm arguing about the material that creeps into one's writing entirely unintentionally. The unaddressed assumptions.
Both the worldbuilding and the what-we-know relate to a writer's craft and to the cultures that writers live in and those that they depict. It's a natural extension of my work on history. This was also partly what I was working on in that government advisory stuff in the 90s. How unaddressed assumptions influence what we do. Writers can be well-intentioned and nevertheless write all kinds of hatred into their fiction, negatives that undermine the book and undermine the society in which the books live, but negatives that the writer doesn't realise they possess. I'm still working on techniques to reveal the difference between what we think we know and what we actually know - this essay is my initial foray into applying some of those techniques to novels. I've been experimenting with my own fiction until now, and my first doctorate was about how those assumptions about the past coloured Medieval culture and shaped senses of time and history. So this is nothing new for me. What's new is me talking about it. No-one was interested 25 years ago.
And I have possibly a quite different novel to write to the one I started. This is not relevant to any of the above: it's the outcome of a really interesting conversation this week. I'll find out if I do or not in a few weeks, when I've done the preliminary work.
Still, there's so much to do that's fascinating and so few hours in the day.
This is the paper I gave at the Gender Games conference. There's a possibility (only a possibility - I am from quite a different intellectual background and my work on the nature of worldbuilding isn't nearly where I want it to be to) of it being published. I went to old criticisms (prior to the conference) to see if I could improve my understanding. This frustration is the result. The conference was wildly positive about the paper (although I've lost the name of the crucial person I wanted to consult, which isn't good - she had the single best insight I've ever heard about Gaiman, and I want to cite her) and completely got what I was saying and pushed it even further.
I'm also not at all convinced that I'm writing a solid article in terms of standard literary approaches. It works for some fields, in other words, and not for others. And any magnum opus by me on the nature of built worlds in fiction is a way off yet - it's none of the current books on which I'm working. I have so much work to do! This is an important exploration, though, and it leads to very interesting results and yes, I'm going to finish the essay but no, I don't think I can change my approach.
I don't know if this article will get published, but at least it advances my understanding about what I'm doing with my thinking on how writers develop worlds for their fiction.
And I realise this is quite possibly the first time I've mentioned in public that I'm working on worldbuilding as a long-term project. When the Beast is finished, and my stuff on how writers relate to history is closer to wherever it's going, that's quite possibly the main project I'm working on. I've started writing about it and thinking about it, and quite obviously I'm already teaching it, but it didn't dawn on me that there was a book that had to be written until this bloke told me off for not seeing things in his way. There's nothing wrong with his way, but it's a different article with different conclusions and it misses the whole reality of how writers build stuff into their worlds unknowingly. The critiquer's argument was that I needed to explore Gaiman's conscious work on women and feminism, whereas I'm arguing about the material that creeps into one's writing entirely unintentionally. The unaddressed assumptions.
Both the worldbuilding and the what-we-know relate to a writer's craft and to the cultures that writers live in and those that they depict. It's a natural extension of my work on history. This was also partly what I was working on in that government advisory stuff in the 90s. How unaddressed assumptions influence what we do. Writers can be well-intentioned and nevertheless write all kinds of hatred into their fiction, negatives that undermine the book and undermine the society in which the books live, but negatives that the writer doesn't realise they possess. I'm still working on techniques to reveal the difference between what we think we know and what we actually know - this essay is my initial foray into applying some of those techniques to novels. I've been experimenting with my own fiction until now, and my first doctorate was about how those assumptions about the past coloured Medieval culture and shaped senses of time and history. So this is nothing new for me. What's new is me talking about it. No-one was interested 25 years ago.
And I have possibly a quite different novel to write to the one I started. This is not relevant to any of the above: it's the outcome of a really interesting conversation this week. I'll find out if I do or not in a few weeks, when I've done the preliminary work.
Still, there's so much to do that's fascinating and so few hours in the day.
April 17, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-18T16:25:00
My computer keeps telling me the weather is changeable, and my body keeps telling me the weather is changeable and I finally gave up on doing things outside the home today. Also, working on the computer is very slow when it keeps sulking (why does my computer have my weather sensitivity? it's all very odd) so I've mostly done other things.
I've sorted a lot of paper and books and discovered a whole heap of stuff that I did ten and twenty years ago that I had forgotten about and that feeds directly into my most problematic current area of research. I didn't just work in this same area - I advised government on it. And I had forgotten. I now have my advisory papers and can use them to outline the section and then address the fiction/history relationship through a much sounder structure. I'm very happy about this. I was going to develop a sounder structure and now I already have. That's weeks of work saved! Also, a possible conference paper or journal article, once I've worked out how my structure applies to my current research, and should the occasion arise.
I am also getting rid of about 40 books, because I've decided to revise my cookbook collection paradigm. I can't seriously collect books in all the categories I once did, for I'm simply not working as much on culinary history, so I shall give away a few and have a more focussed collection. This means I only need to watch out for matters Jewish, matters historical, regional/country books produced by reliable sources within a country (all the fun tourist and "We think those strangers eat like this" stuff is gone) and community/organisation cookbooks produced for that community or to raise money or etc. This supports my research and my love of reading cookbooks and gives me insights into a bunch of matters, but means that I have some space. Not a lot. Enough space so that there are no more cookbooks tumbling onto the floor. Or there will be none, when I give the overflow (which is currently overflowing in a spill of recipes near the TV) away and have finished this particular food history course.
I started doing the sorting because I needed to find particular photos to scan them. I've found a few of them...
I offered a course on Medieval places for this semester, telling myself that if it went ahead, I could use the photos I have already set up electronically, but I could add the photos from England and France in 1995 and 1986. I can't use the negatives, which would theoretically be simplest, because my charming thief last year pulled every single negative out of its folder and scattered them. This was in the middle of my eye crisis, so sorting negatives has not yet happened. And sorting photos meant I could do some of the also-important-work on papers and books and diminish my possessions. Which I have. I have about a cubic foot of recycling and about another cubic foot of books that need rehousing*.
I've done a heap of work without even touching my to-do list for today. That's OK, though, for I have no meetings tonight and so I can do my day list this evening.
It all coming together, but in an odd, Gillianish way.
*If anyone knows anyone travelling between Canberra and Culcairn or Holbrook or Albury, I have a bunch of books (too heavy to post) that are needed by a sous-chef and his mother.
I've sorted a lot of paper and books and discovered a whole heap of stuff that I did ten and twenty years ago that I had forgotten about and that feeds directly into my most problematic current area of research. I didn't just work in this same area - I advised government on it. And I had forgotten. I now have my advisory papers and can use them to outline the section and then address the fiction/history relationship through a much sounder structure. I'm very happy about this. I was going to develop a sounder structure and now I already have. That's weeks of work saved! Also, a possible conference paper or journal article, once I've worked out how my structure applies to my current research, and should the occasion arise.
I am also getting rid of about 40 books, because I've decided to revise my cookbook collection paradigm. I can't seriously collect books in all the categories I once did, for I'm simply not working as much on culinary history, so I shall give away a few and have a more focussed collection. This means I only need to watch out for matters Jewish, matters historical, regional/country books produced by reliable sources within a country (all the fun tourist and "We think those strangers eat like this" stuff is gone) and community/organisation cookbooks produced for that community or to raise money or etc. This supports my research and my love of reading cookbooks and gives me insights into a bunch of matters, but means that I have some space. Not a lot. Enough space so that there are no more cookbooks tumbling onto the floor. Or there will be none, when I give the overflow (which is currently overflowing in a spill of recipes near the TV) away and have finished this particular food history course.
I started doing the sorting because I needed to find particular photos to scan them. I've found a few of them...
I offered a course on Medieval places for this semester, telling myself that if it went ahead, I could use the photos I have already set up electronically, but I could add the photos from England and France in 1995 and 1986. I can't use the negatives, which would theoretically be simplest, because my charming thief last year pulled every single negative out of its folder and scattered them. This was in the middle of my eye crisis, so sorting negatives has not yet happened. And sorting photos meant I could do some of the also-important-work on papers and books and diminish my possessions. Which I have. I have about a cubic foot of recycling and about another cubic foot of books that need rehousing*.
I've done a heap of work without even touching my to-do list for today. That's OK, though, for I have no meetings tonight and so I can do my day list this evening.
It all coming together, but in an odd, Gillianish way.
*If anyone knows anyone travelling between Canberra and Culcairn or Holbrook or Albury, I have a bunch of books (too heavy to post) that are needed by a sous-chef and his mother.
April 16, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-17T15:06:00
I've done some useful things today. I've done some less useful things, too. I've worked out, for instance, that I have a lot of books. What I need to do is find out how much (in cubic metres) so that if I have to move, I can make book-decisions, except that today's usefulness has determined that books aren't the problem (for they are compact) - the bookcases are. If I move locally (within Australia, anytime in the next two years) I might just take everything and be damned, but if I move internationally I will have to measure and think and make many decisions. I'm not taking whitegoods, wherever I move (for all mine are too old to be worth the effort) and I just assumed I could make up the space in bookcases and desks. But I have five desks and uncountable bookcases. The upshot is that I need to talk to friends who have moved, and I need to walk round my place with them and think strategically.
It's not that I have anywhere to move. It's that if I do have to move, I won't have much time and I have a lot of books in cases. And desks. And just thinking about it has made me realise how much easier all this would be if no-one ever wanted to employ me outside Canberra. This is the crisis of the week. I don't think it's a real one, but I have to take it seriously and work it through, one way or another.
I haven't done all this requalification to do the kind of job I love just to give up because of a few daunting decisions. Nor will I (sorry to the friends who keep insisting I should) go back to the public service at once, giving up just because no job offered itself to me on a silver platter the moment I finished the doctorate. Just because I can do a job, doesn't mean I should. If I were a public servant I couldn't do the research or the writing or the teaching and if those three things are stripped away from my life, all that is left is admin and policy. Just because I'm good at something, doesn't mean I want to spend my life doing it. It isn't as if I didn't give it a fair go. I gave it ten years, in fact. I gave the Public Service a very fair go.
I wish I knew why people keep suggesting I try for a 'normal' job. Yes, I could get one. I would be intensely unhappy again, though, and why on earth should one try that route twice? I keep thinking they must be seeing something I'm not in my lack of abilities, but I'm getting stuff published in both the academic and the fiction sides, and I'm doing good research and I can obviously teach. I wish I knew what they were seeing in me that I'm not, that justifies me giving up my dreams. And if they're wrong, I do wish they'd support the dream-following rather than telling me of new jobs in the APS. I'm Schroedinger's Gillian already - I don't need support that buries the box six feet under.
All this self-doubt spawned by several friends telling me that the public service is waiting for me sent me to measuring my books. I thought if I at least had a notion of how much of my life I'd lose if I moved, it would convince me that I'm not lying to myself about my writing and my research and my teaching. And that my examiner's weren't wrong. And that my publishers aren't wrong. And... I think it's time for chocolate and a cuppa.
It's not that I have anywhere to move. It's that if I do have to move, I won't have much time and I have a lot of books in cases. And desks. And just thinking about it has made me realise how much easier all this would be if no-one ever wanted to employ me outside Canberra. This is the crisis of the week. I don't think it's a real one, but I have to take it seriously and work it through, one way or another.
I haven't done all this requalification to do the kind of job I love just to give up because of a few daunting decisions. Nor will I (sorry to the friends who keep insisting I should) go back to the public service at once, giving up just because no job offered itself to me on a silver platter the moment I finished the doctorate. Just because I can do a job, doesn't mean I should. If I were a public servant I couldn't do the research or the writing or the teaching and if those three things are stripped away from my life, all that is left is admin and policy. Just because I'm good at something, doesn't mean I want to spend my life doing it. It isn't as if I didn't give it a fair go. I gave it ten years, in fact. I gave the Public Service a very fair go.
I wish I knew why people keep suggesting I try for a 'normal' job. Yes, I could get one. I would be intensely unhappy again, though, and why on earth should one try that route twice? I keep thinking they must be seeing something I'm not in my lack of abilities, but I'm getting stuff published in both the academic and the fiction sides, and I'm doing good research and I can obviously teach. I wish I knew what they were seeing in me that I'm not, that justifies me giving up my dreams. And if they're wrong, I do wish they'd support the dream-following rather than telling me of new jobs in the APS. I'm Schroedinger's Gillian already - I don't need support that buries the box six feet under.
All this self-doubt spawned by several friends telling me that the public service is waiting for me sent me to measuring my books. I thought if I at least had a notion of how much of my life I'd lose if I moved, it would convince me that I'm not lying to myself about my writing and my research and my teaching. And that my examiner's weren't wrong. And that my publishers aren't wrong. And... I think it's time for chocolate and a cuppa.
April 15, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-16T10:20:00
The good news is that I finished most of my work yesterday (including all the super time sensitive stuff) and made a start on most of the other work. The bad news is that I then developed a migraine and a bit short on rest as a result. Not the end of the universe, but rather a nuisance.
What's this all about? It's perfectly obvious from this end. I seem to have picked a less-than-ideal time to move ungently from perimenopause to full menopause. Also, we have autumn storms and my weather sense wants to join in the party that is being had in my body. None of this is big in the ultimate scheme of things, but it makes for a difficult few weeks.
Conflux is keeping me honest. I have to have my desk clear before my houseguests arrive, for otherwise they will have nowhere to sleep. My flow-over shelf for paper is, you see, the futon.
I like finishing tasks and meeting deadlines, so, as each piece of paper gets put away and as more space is created, I feel a hum of satisfaction joining the party that is going on inside my body.
And all this adds up to a strange April.
What's this all about? It's perfectly obvious from this end. I seem to have picked a less-than-ideal time to move ungently from perimenopause to full menopause. Also, we have autumn storms and my weather sense wants to join in the party that is being had in my body. None of this is big in the ultimate scheme of things, but it makes for a difficult few weeks.
Conflux is keeping me honest. I have to have my desk clear before my houseguests arrive, for otherwise they will have nowhere to sleep. My flow-over shelf for paper is, you see, the futon.
I like finishing tasks and meeting deadlines, so, as each piece of paper gets put away and as more space is created, I feel a hum of satisfaction joining the party that is going on inside my body.
And all this adds up to a strange April.
April 14, 2013
gillpolack @ 2013-04-15T14:38:00
There are actually jobs to apply for this week and a lot of my time is spent trying to work out what is wanted and whether I can provide it. A doctorate is a lot easier than the job market! (For me, anyway, for I have an unusual CV.)
What else am I doing today? Lots. Today and tomorrow are the days when, if I don't finish a bunch of things from my list, they will scrunch up my teaching and I really don't like it when that happens. I have to finish all kinds of things, therefore before 3 pm tomorrow, and twelve things before I can sleep tonight.
Today is the day, therefore, of the five minute lunchbreak. Which is now. Multigrain biscuits with quarg (on one) and olive spread (on the other) and a big cup of coffee. Total comfort food and lazy lunch, but it gives me time to blog.
If I whiz through things and discover an extra half hour in my day, you might get a real blog post. Don't count on it, though.
My next task is a cool one. It's part of the Middle Ages for Writers project (as opposed to the Middle Ages of Writers project*) and basically consists of me deleting a bunch of stuff from a file. Considered deletion, but nevertheless, erasing many words. I was unhappy with a Beastly chapter (which, let me be honest, was one I had drafted) so I asked K if she would mind redrafting (for she thinks differently to me and is good at solving the kind of problems we had with my drafting in this case) and this is part of what needs doing for the next stage of the redraft. We're making sure that none of the good bits from my early version go missing from the final, basically.
When the admin and the various other things slow down, I can work on some fiction. Not, I think, today. Today is already laden with many big tasks. It's not the number of the tasks, you see, it's the fact that most of them resemble the labours of Hercules. But Hercules did not have a fig and pumpkin biscuit spread with quarg to help him.
*I really need a project about Middle-Aged Writers, to round things out, don't I? Or maybe a project about writers who write middle-aged folks as their protagonists, which is, in fact, what I am occasionally wont to do.
What else am I doing today? Lots. Today and tomorrow are the days when, if I don't finish a bunch of things from my list, they will scrunch up my teaching and I really don't like it when that happens. I have to finish all kinds of things, therefore before 3 pm tomorrow, and twelve things before I can sleep tonight.
Today is the day, therefore, of the five minute lunchbreak. Which is now. Multigrain biscuits with quarg (on one) and olive spread (on the other) and a big cup of coffee. Total comfort food and lazy lunch, but it gives me time to blog.
If I whiz through things and discover an extra half hour in my day, you might get a real blog post. Don't count on it, though.
My next task is a cool one. It's part of the Middle Ages for Writers project (as opposed to the Middle Ages of Writers project*) and basically consists of me deleting a bunch of stuff from a file. Considered deletion, but nevertheless, erasing many words. I was unhappy with a Beastly chapter (which, let me be honest, was one I had drafted) so I asked K if she would mind redrafting (for she thinks differently to me and is good at solving the kind of problems we had with my drafting in this case) and this is part of what needs doing for the next stage of the redraft. We're making sure that none of the good bits from my early version go missing from the final, basically.
When the admin and the various other things slow down, I can work on some fiction. Not, I think, today. Today is already laden with many big tasks. It's not the number of the tasks, you see, it's the fact that most of them resemble the labours of Hercules. But Hercules did not have a fig and pumpkin biscuit spread with quarg to help him.
*I really need a project about Middle-Aged Writers, to round things out, don't I? Or maybe a project about writers who write middle-aged folks as their protagonists, which is, in fact, what I am occasionally wont to do.
