Gillian Polack's Blog, page 13

gillpolack @ 2016-01-06T15:52:00

On the way home today I worked out that I go to three supermarkets, but also to four specialist grocers. I was so convinced that I did all my shopping in the same place, that I didn't realise that I just don't shop as frequently as I used to, that's all. I still buy the food, but not as often.

The four grocers are the interesting bit. One is technically Chinese, but I realised today that more of their stock comes from Taiwan than mainland China. They mostly have instant food and junk food and sauces and drinks, but they also have a very good freezer section. Today I bought myself shallot pancakes and mango icecream. I didn't need them at all, but I really wanted them and I plan to work very hard to deserve them.

The next grocer would be called 'Asian' in other places, but here is Indian sub-continent. The Sri Lankan shop is a few doors away and if ever I desire fresh string hoppers, they have them, but otherwise I tend to avoid them as they stock too much in the way of snack food I will eat but should not. The other (which I drop in on more regularly) is actually a small supermarket and stocks food from all the Indias. Again, it has a truckload of snackfood, but it also has cooking equipment, very fresh spices in large quantities and an exceptional freezer section. I buy lots of vegies there to make curries in winter, for these are not the sort of vegies that are grown locally. Also, when I need a lot of yoghourt, I go there, for their yoghourt is amazing and cheap, but I need to be willing to eat those vast quantities. Which I do, in curry season.

The third shop goes on and off my register depending on the owners. It's just changed hands again so it's back on my list of favourite places. For years it was owned by a psychologist from the Northern Territory who was, like me, umpteenth generation Australian and dealing with being ethnically not mainstream. We swapped stories about life experiences and I got my dolmades there as well as my SE Asian ingredients, for he said "My ancestors were from Chinese Malaysian, but I like eating dolmades." I used to also buy ginger tea there. I had to stop buying ginger tea because of the sugar, which was a pity, for it's a wonderfully warming drink and brilliant to combat tension headaches and muscle aches.

The young blokes who took over from him were fine when we talked Dr Who, but not comfortable for me with politics, for they expressed a delight that I knew the grandfather of kids who had not seen the sun in nine days (that day we spoke, I'd just learned of it) due to bombs raining down on Israel. They actually said that it would be fine if the kids were hurt, because they were Jewish Israeli. I missed my fresh coriander and various other ingredients after that, but I couldn't face the conversation again.

Now it's changed hands again and it's a family business selling mostly Malaysian/Indonesian ingredients, which is perfect. All the fresh vegies I love, plus things like kencur and halo halo.

The fourth is my wonderful Lebanese grocer in Mawson. We're comfortable with each other's religions and I can get the dried fruit of my childhood there, and the finest ginger, and ancestral cucumbers and figs and the freshest cheeses and labneh and, of course, large quantities of my favourite coffee. It's next to one of the best butchers in the city (halal meat, always amazingly fresh, and they have good fruit and vegies, to boot), so I don't go nearly as often as I want to, for I always buy a lot more than I need. Unless I actually need three mangos and a punnet of raspberries when I already have fruit...

When I tally my favourite grocers, I wish I had six people to cook for, because then I could buy the things I want more regularly.

And I forgot one. There's the Thai grocer in Mawson, too. I get quite specific things from there. They have leafy greens that no-one else has, suitable for Thai and Japanese food, and they have that lovely sweet tamarind snack, and (you guessed it) a really good array of frozen foods. One day I'll go there and then go to the halal butcher and then to the Malaysian/Indonesian place near me and I'll buy all the ingredients I need for a giant rijstaffel (Indonesian style) and invite a squillion friends over. I used to do this sort of thing, but life intervened. I'd make a giant pot of beef rendang while I was at it and fill my freezer with rendang and leftovers and eat brilliantly for weeks. And my friends would complain about how fat I made them...

I need to do this. Not til I'm past this mammoth amount of work (so not this January) but maybe when things get a bit quieter. It would be so much fun! I could borrow a foodie friend and we would go to each and every one of these shops. Maybe in April, when the weather gets cold and everyone gets miserable. I could have an amazing feast with friends, and I could stock my freezer through the dreary months from the proceeds. All I need is a volunteer assistant, with car and the need to cook.

gillpolack @ 2016-01-05T14:57:00

Today was supposed to be a library research day, but it's wet and achey and I'm doing work at home instead. It isn't that I'm short of work, after all. The only downside of this is that I need to put something in a postbox and I walk outside and look at the sky and walk straight back inside again.

Anyhow, due to this circumstance I'm starting some of my reading ahead of time. This means that I've discovered that if one wanted to buy butter in Cambridge in the early 18th century (and possibly in the late 17th) it was available by the yard (pound or half pound, actually, but measured by the yard to suit the cooks in the colleges) on Saturdays. I won't be doing as much reading today as usual. I have writing and admin to occupy my rest-of-day.

Right now I'm putting off the admin. It's the only task that has a timestamp on it today, so of course it's the dullest of the tasks. I should finish it. Really, I should.

Am I inspiring myself yet?

I'm not normally so uninspired by admin. It's a side effect of the aches, I think. And the aches are the side effect of both the weather and a return to Schroedinger's Gillian. My teaching has been cut back for 2016, and so many other matters are in the air. Of the matters concerning which life is vague, there is unlikely to be good news, but there is a distant possibility of good news and so I fall back into bad old habits. Which reminds me, I have an academic article to edit, I should add it to my list for the day and get it done today and tomorrow. Early is better than on time, given I have a heap of deadlines this month. The less money I earn, the more deadlines I encounter. My publication record right now is impeccable.

gillpolack @ 2016-01-04T15:01:00

All sorts of people are giving me very useful suggestions on general studies that will help me understand the Stuart Age. I just wanted to thank you all for not doing this. I don't need overview modern studies. I also don't need to be history-splained...

I've said it before but I'll say it again here, just in case it helps (mostly in case it helps me - I feel a need to rant): I didn't start off as a Medieval historian. I did much Medieval literature as an undergrad and as a postgrad (this is how I became both a historian and a literary historian, it also meant I got to study Chaucer with Sister Frances, which was just unbelievably cool) but my undergrad history degree covered quite different areas. I don't regard them as advanced history, because a couple of units on the change from medieval to modern economies or a unit on magic and witchcraft in 15th-17th century Europe as an undergrad are not terribly advanced compared with post-PhD stuff, but they definitely gave me the general background I needed to get this project started. I also got to read a lot of critical sources that underpin what I'm doing now. Books I've been reading (17th century books) refer to Jean Bodin, for instance and I've read Bodin cover to cover.

I had amazing teachers and they loved it that I also could deal with the literature and they pushed me far more than most undergrads are pushed. I know the work of Sebastien le Tillemont, for instance, because my Roman Historiography teacher (Ron Ridley) said "Gillian, you're going to read 22 volumes of 17th century French for this 3rd year essay and there is only one secondary source and that's also in French and I can't help you, because my French isn't enough. You're going to have to sort out the whole Jansenist/Jesuit thing before you can write that essay, BTW." Ridley was an inspirational teacher and I read all the volumes and got a handle on why he thought the religion was important and it's magic now, because I can unpick and start to understand attitudes I only just glimpsed when I was 19.

When I talk about secondary sources, the sort of things I need are (since my list for next month is gradually growing) a really cutting edge biography of Titus Oates and the implications of his actions for the wider community and for local congregations (I need several of these, to be honest, for the likelihood that Australia has the best of them is ... unknown) and a really good study of regional and gender differences in basic education. I also need to know educational methods. Not for boys at schools, but for educated girls.

I will re-read some of the introductory works to fill in gaps, but I can find those for myself for they glare at me from bookshelves everywhere. They even glare at me from my own. Right now, I'm questioning them as I question myself: I do not rely on them to build up a period. For this novel, I don't want the publicly accepted 17th century, with rationalism used to explain the death of witchcraft and etc. That strand of thought has existed since at least the 16th century (I was looking at Reginald Scott briefly today, for instance) and the whole point of the novel is that I want to take the path less taken, the path that leads to actual magic. I am, after all, writing a fantasy novel. And it's not enough to take our world view and then add magic. I have to understand the world view that sees the magic, and I have to understand it from closer to the inside than I can do with the big modern books about the period.

All this is me trying to understand why people are telling me to start at the very beginning. It's a very fine place to start... but I did that over 30 years ago. Also, why would I ever choose a setting for a novel when I didn't even have a basic understanding of the setting? How would I know that the novel would work the way I wanted if I just said "Seventeenth century England is sexy - let's set it then"?

This is not an explanation of what writers do. It's a rant about a writer-historian who's been told to do basics, again.

gillpolack @ 2016-01-04T13:21:00

What I'm discovering right now is that there was so very much cultural change in late 17th century England that I'm having to revise what I read and why. Books on science from 20 years earlier may or may not give the science I need for the novel. Likes studies of demonology. Politics completely changed but so, it seems did a lot else. The eighteenth century is easier for us to read about, as moderns, because the seventeenth century went through an amazing flux.

It's spectacular stuff. My part of the Middle Ages also went through a series of giant cultural shifts. The thing is, though, that there are fewer sources for the Middle Agse, so fine interpretation of a limited number of sources is how one gets at it. For my current project, I need a different approach.

What this means is that my 150 books for January have diminished rapidly, for most of them give me the indications I need of where different parties and different places stood. I'm down to less than 80 books. This is not an 'already' - it's taken much hard work. But it's faster than I expected, for most of the books only had a half hour's work in them. The last 80 will be much tougher and slower, for they're where I get my mindset changes from, and I need those mindset pages before I can flesh things out and write the novel. This is the month where I address the worst of the things I think I know and transform them into understanding and new knowledge and can write about the period in a way that isn't just a modern pastiche.

This was the point of reading so many primary sources. Telling detail for the novel, plot points: all these are important. The most important thing is one I learned from examining the fiction of others: we carry our culture around with us and unless we address it directly, it informs every single thing we write about. I decided I didn't want to write about the modern assumptions of myself or others unless intentionally. I want to be in control of my story.

'Control' means finding out how 17th century England was shaped, in their minds.

From February I can add modern historians into the mix, for I have a better base to understand them, and, as I put it the other day, to argue with them. December and January were the toughest months, however, for using strategic reading to confront one's assumptions and to build an understanding is never easy. it's one of the happiest things i can think of in terms of growth (both intellectual and personal) but it's not easy.

gillpolack @ 2016-01-01T13:26:00

I've had a very productive and exciting 2015, but also a very difficult year. Today sums up the irony of all those breakthroughs still garnering me not -enough paid work and so forth. You don't need to know the 'so forth' - I've been chronicling it all year.

And that was my year in summary. My NY resolution is very mild. I intend to be a bit more public about my research processes. I'll tweet and FB them and I'll continue to do occasional posts here. This is because I had one too many person say to me glowingly "I read seven books for the research for my historical novel. I understand everything!" The year before people said "What book should I read?"

I'm not up to most secondary sources yet, though I should be, soon. I used last year to get a handle on the best way to research. It was going to be tricky, for my 17th century goes against modern thoughts about it (since modern thoughts believe the magic and folk belief to be unreal and in my novel this will not be the case) so I had to delve into primary sources to work out just how much things differed. remember those 1000+ books I got hold of? I'm down to the hard end of them, which is slower but infinitely more exciting. My task for January was 150 books (from this morning only 137, for I'm reading cleverly - the skills of the historian are exceptionally handy in real life!) and by the end of that I'll have my world framework and a lot of the material I need for my timeline and my plot. I'll then spend a few weeks putting it in perspective and pulling it to pieces using the main modern scholarship in the field, which will probably mean me arguing aloud a lot as I read things.

For me creating an argument is essential to crafting a novel. Under each and every novel I write is a serious argument about something I'm passionate about. These arguments are not always obvious. They don't need to be. Readers can (and do) read my novels as superficial and I'm happy. For story counts and characters count just as much as argument.

What the argument does is not only help structure the novel, it helps me work out what I need of all the information I gather. I read this much for Langue[dot]doc 1305 (it didn't show, for some of it overlapped for the Beast and in my novel's bibliography I only listed the books I read specifically and separately) and my argument helped me winnow the chaff, so that the only stuff that appeared directly in the novel was what I needed to tell the precise story. I spent a whole week sorting out rulership for the region, and some of my results were inconclusive and I had to rely on extrapolation. That whole week came out in Guilhem's disaffection and in who could call him to account, and in a comment on keys.

My NY gift to myself was to understand how people saw the world. How different English people from different backgrounds interpreted the globe and its regions and countries, mainly. This was what I did from when I got home early this morning until when things cooled down enough to sleep. It was wonderful!

From 1660, the regions of the world were seen differently, but until the 1680s, books continued to be published that used the old view, the one without the terra incognita borealis and australis (borealis turned out to include Greenland!). The easiest way to think of it is that Australia was possible for people with a new education or the right geography book but not for others, and everyone still lived with quite a bit of the Macrobian description I already knew from the Middle Ages. Mesopotamia is part of Asia, and Jews do not exist anywhere (most of the geographies listed the religions of the region, and in no region was anyone Jewish - I wasn't going to include any Jewish characters, but now I wonder if I couldn't make a really good moment in Paris...). It was because of this precise moment of the universe changing that I'm writing this novel, but it was really exciting to see it expressed in maps and geographies. A very wonderful way to start the New Year!

Have a wonderful New Year, everyone, and enjoy many good books!

gillpolack @ 2015-12-26T13:39:00

I'm not doing a lot of work today, because we had a full moon and a giant thunderstorm and the two conspired to murder sleep. What I'm doing, however, is critical underpinning for the novel.

One of the things I've noticed, a big difference between diaries (eg Pepys) and modern novels is the size of the society and the amount people know. It's so easy to write fiction where the characters meet the Great People (mostly men) of history and the readers' expectations of history being a small and familiar place can be met (I've been watching Penny Dreadful and it plays with a literary variant of this notion). Most gentry-society and the people who floated in its vicinity were operating in small and familiar places, but in a quite different way.

I'm using the amazing tendency to catalogue everything (maps, listing the Good and Great in every region, giving techniques for household management, popular sayings in French and English, big thunderstorms in Ireland - seriously, there's a whole pamphlet just for this latter) to help me work out a society to serve as the base for my people. Today I'm printing out descriptions of the worthies of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingtonshire, London and Westminster and I shall start mapping, I think, so that I know who is likely to meet whom and when. The map is the tricky bit, for I have no cartographical skills. I have maps for London, Paris and St Ives - contemporary and wonderful, but what I need is a map that shows my roads travelled and their vicinities (St Ives to London, London to Paris), plus the region around St Ives, including Cambridge, Ely and some of Norfolk. Then I can map data onto it and my tale will be more easily told.

Why am I writing all this in my blog? Because historically-based fiction doesn't need info-dumping. This is how I'm avoiding some of that.

It's also because people have been assuming that I just know things, because I'm a historian. I do data mapping and diagrams and thinking of my worlds in layers for every novel. I do it differently for every novel, but I create my societies so that I can just then tell the tale. Readers don't need to know how I made the streets of Canberra magic in The Time of the Ghosts (I annotated a street directory for that map, since I know the areas pretty well) but I need to get all the research to the stage where I can live and breathe it for my characters. I'm not even nearly there yet, and I can't write the novel until I've made significant progress. This is my progress. I'm breaking down the complex into digestible portions and then diagramming them (one way or anther) so that I can access the complex again when I need it, without too much effort.

It's not how much work one puts in - it's how cleverly the work is done. It has to match how one's brain works and it totally and always has to feed the story. This is the big lesson I got from my first PhD and it's been wondrously useful to me ever since.

gillpolack @ 2015-12-25T22:05:00

I've been stuck workwise for hours. I keep reading the same sentence over and again and then going and doing other things, because I want to contemplate the sentence. I've decided that if I give it to you, here, I can then finish the pamphlet and get maybe a bit more work done.

"Que sont ie vous prie ces Deuins, Aruspices, Magiciens, Cabalistes, Triacleurs, Charlatans, Maistres-Mires, et autres desesperez, sinon Precurseurs de l'Anti-Christ, enfans perdues, et Fourriers de Sathan?" It's from a 17th century pamphlet about the "Rosee-Crois" (which is not the same thing as the Red Cross, for those who have enough French but not quite enough history) ie esoteric doings by initiates.

Later it says that Adam was the first 'cabalist', which means there's a 17th century French view that matches the Jewish popular view of the ancientness of Kabbalah, Except we know where it comes from and it's really not that old - which serves as a warning never to assume modern historical knowledge from 17th century polemical pamphlets, especially ones that refer to Enoch in a particular way. And all this is why, even though I've found good means to handle much of the religion in my novel (for those who want to know, I'm calling it the Vicar of Bray Ploy) there will still be a solid foundation of matters religious for it's impossible to write a decent book without a solid religious foundation. That sentence says a whole bunch about how different types of magic work (or don't work), for instance and the religious relationship of one thing with another.

ETA: Just in case you were wondering what I do on 25 December... this is mostly it. Also some editing. Also some DVD watching.

gillpolack @ 2015-12-24T10:33:00

This year, I've encountered more people who understand that I work on 25 December and who don't have a problem with that than any year in the past decade. Mind you, I've also run into more people who insist that "Merry Christmas" is a religiously neutral greeting because absolutely everyone celebrates Christmas. Unlike New Year, it's a universal festival, I've been told, thrice in three days.

I skipped this worst of things by only going to the parties where people were unlikely to argue with me on these matters. Some of them I skipped intentionally and others I skipped because I had no way of getting there and back. Still, it means I'm totally enjoying hearing the kid from upstairs singing carols as she comes in from checking the mail.

Turns out the reason I turn grumpy most years is that the Be-Like-Us-Sayers were the dominant voice. I just need enough space to be me and I'm perfectly happy with the season.

Mind you, I still think that people who tell me that Christmas is secular are religiously and historically ignorant and somewhat insensitive. It includes an element of cultural and religious coercion currently, and that means it's not neutral.

For everyone who celebrates, happy Christmas! For the rest of you, I'm round if you want Friday to be a bit more normal. I'll be working muchly, but I'll be round. On 26th it's my father's 92nd birthday and I'm remembering him with a friend, but I'll be working in the morning. I'm taking next Tuesday off, I believe, for it's the day after my next deadline and I have Plans.

gillpolack @ 2015-12-23T13:03:00

Thanks to Farah Mendlesohn posing the question for books in general, I found myself asking on Facebook about Australian or NZ children's books that have Jewish characters and are not about the Shoah. From the answers, I'm not the only one with a fudgy memory. A few good books have been recommended, some of which I knew about but had forgotten. I shall give it a few days in case other people's memories call forth more books and I shall expand from children's to YA and children's (for Goldie Alexander reminded me of a book of hers, and we'd talked about it last March, so I want it in my list). Once I have a list and have checked them to see if there are actually Jewish characters and they're not about the Shoah, I can put the list up here and on my other blog, if there's anyone interested.

This exercise reminds me of how much writing I don't have time to read. It also reminds me that, though the Jewish communities here are way big compared with my childhood (and in my childhood they were way big compared with my mother's childhood) we're still a quite small and often-connected minority. Goldie, for example, was a close friend of my late aunt, who was Michael Gawenda's sister. Morris Lurie was my cousin and Arnold Zable is a family connection (as I keep explaining, if you read Jewels and Ashes, my family member apparently married the guy who made a living as a carnival attraction). And so on. Except that I don't live in the borsht belt and never have, so the only person I know from this list is Goldie (my mother knows people - she is my go-to person for who is related to whom and how - except I just remembered and am adding this in, I knew Jean Holkner, for she taught my mother creative writing, and, of course, I know her grand-daughter! Two wonderful people. The Australian writing world is better for both of them.). This is one of the reasons I need to read all the books now, on top of the 200+ books I'm otherwise reading in January.

Another reason for reading is that I want to understand, now that we're finally getting a literature, what that literature looks like. I don't know if I'll write it up or not, it depends on if there's an interest. I will definitely blog a booklist if even one person wants it, however.

gillpolack @ 2015-12-20T23:10:00

I've done a tally of what I need to do before 1 February to stay on track. I need to finish editing Secret Jewish Women's Business and get the final to my publisher. I need to check a proof and do an index. I need to pull a whole heap of things together for a third volume and think about them profoundly and send them to another publisher (we've talked about it, and I need to take the next step). I need to finish with the big reading-of-primary-sources for the St Ives novel (that's 215 books). And I need to finish one character arc for the science fiction novel.

I will be taking some time out during this period, for I'll pay for it during the year if I don't. I'll also pay for it during the year if I don't do all these things.

I'm very thankful my reading speed is back, now that my eye is almost healed. I'm even more glad that I'm doing the Great E-book Experiment for the 17th century novel. My calculations say that if I finish 35 books by the new year, I will have a mere 180 to read in January. This is research reading, so some books will be mined for stuff and some will be read from cover to cover. It's not nearly as worrying as it sounds when one thinks merely of numbers! What I spent much of this evening doing was working out my approach (what I need to know for the novel, now that I have a better general understanding of both the period and the novel): the actual reading is much more straightforward now than it was.

I read more for Langue[dot]doc than I will for this novel, I suspect, because of the Great E-Book Experiment. Also because I'm doing something very different with this novel. Langue[dot]doc was all about seeing what could be done to match up the history of historians with the hsitory of fiction writers. The bottom line with that, now that reviews are in, is that even historians don't notice that level of care, but that it counts for me as a writer in terms of the lives of the characters and in terms of shaping the story. This novel is more fantastical, so the trick will be to make the fantastical real and authentic within the novel, and able to be accessed by readers and not too impossible for historians. It's quite a different approach, though it will still emerge as a Gillian novel, and very few people will care about those differences.

The biggest group of books in my coming reading deal with religious and otherworldly matters. The second biggest group deals with place and travel. This reading will shape a lot of the novel and offer my characters their pivotal moments.

And now I'm wittering. I've finished reading for the night and will edit until things become cool enough to sleep. That will be about 3 am, given what's happening outside. The big weather shift has happened, though, and I am in less pain and less muddle-headed. And I now know I have enough reading to keep me from being bored until teaching starts back.