Gillian Polack's Blog, page 261
March 24, 2011
Andy Remic Soul Stealers (Book Three of the Clockwork Vampire Chronicles)
Angry Robot book time again (I read the books in clusters - this is the second last in this cluster):
How does one talk about a third book? First, one gives a warning. This review may contain spoilers if you haven't read the earlier books. Here, let me give you some anti-spoiler space.
What else does one say? If you liked the first two, you will like this? That's true in this instance. It has the same type of imagery and colour ('like ash confetti at a corpse wedding' works so beautifully in a sword and sorcery, over-the-top, steampunk vampire world). It has the same strange universe. It even has some of the same characters. Since I enjoyed the first two books, it was almost a given I would like this one. But what is it I like, besides the completion of the storylines I've been following and the wonderfully and depressingly absurd universe? (I still want to see Andy Remic and James Enge on the same panel at a convention - more reading of both writers just reinforces this view)
This book starts where the previous one left off (rather unsurprisingly, given that the last book left us all hanging off a vast cliff) with the Vampire Warlords (beings sickeningly between gods and humans) having been summoned. The writing is on the wall for humanity. The great hero Kell has been pushed too far. Most of the vachines (clockwork vampires) are dead, killed to raise the Vampire Warlords, and almost the first thing the Warlords do is crate a vampire army, using the knowledge of the once-human to dominate, instantly. Humanity is doomed to diminish, in vile slavery. On the way down, there will be much blood and guts and screams of agony. That's the way these things are.
All the rest is doom and fight and adventure. Of course it is. That's the kind of boko it is. There's les humour in this last book in the trilogy, but more than enough derring-do to make up. There's also a band of heroes that is nicely mismatched, with Kell wanting to save his granddaughter's honour and his granddaughter wanting something quite different and… I think you'd better read it for yourself.
How does one talk about a third book? First, one gives a warning. This review may contain spoilers if you haven't read the earlier books. Here, let me give you some anti-spoiler space.
What else does one say? If you liked the first two, you will like this? That's true in this instance. It has the same type of imagery and colour ('like ash confetti at a corpse wedding' works so beautifully in a sword and sorcery, over-the-top, steampunk vampire world). It has the same strange universe. It even has some of the same characters. Since I enjoyed the first two books, it was almost a given I would like this one. But what is it I like, besides the completion of the storylines I've been following and the wonderfully and depressingly absurd universe? (I still want to see Andy Remic and James Enge on the same panel at a convention - more reading of both writers just reinforces this view)
This book starts where the previous one left off (rather unsurprisingly, given that the last book left us all hanging off a vast cliff) with the Vampire Warlords (beings sickeningly between gods and humans) having been summoned. The writing is on the wall for humanity. The great hero Kell has been pushed too far. Most of the vachines (clockwork vampires) are dead, killed to raise the Vampire Warlords, and almost the first thing the Warlords do is crate a vampire army, using the knowledge of the once-human to dominate, instantly. Humanity is doomed to diminish, in vile slavery. On the way down, there will be much blood and guts and screams of agony. That's the way these things are.
All the rest is doom and fight and adventure. Of course it is. That's the kind of boko it is. There's les humour in this last book in the trilogy, but more than enough derring-do to make up. There's also a band of heroes that is nicely mismatched, with Kell wanting to save his granddaughter's honour and his granddaughter wanting something quite different and… I think you'd better read it for yourself.
Women's History Month: Cheryl Morgan
Making History
I am not an historian. History, after all, is written by the winners, and while I may have achieved a small amount of success in one field, I certainly don't feel like a winner.
I could, perhaps, have become an historian. I very much enjoyed the subject at school. I also voraciously devoured stories of past times. But it was clear to me at the time that history was very much his story. It was about the winners, the men.
Oh, there were always exceptions: Helen, Cassandra, Dido, Cleopatra, Matilda, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Mary. But exceptions were what they were, and their stories, no matter how glorious, or more often inglorious, came to us filtered. They were always written by men.
To write about women's history, therefore, requires a fair amount of original research. We don't know as much about the women of past times as we do about their male counterparts. And we are not sure that we can believe what we are told. Take Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example: she married the King of France, then divorced him to marry the King of England; she was mother to Richard the Lionheart and John; and she was a leading figure in the Courtly Love movement. She must have been an amazing woman, but I can't recall my history books even mentioning her. When I was a kid, the history of those times was all about Richard. I doubt that it is that much different today.
It is not only women, of course, who lose. History also tends not to talk about the poor, the conquered, the powerless. History is the story of the rich, the powerful, the mighty. Modern historians are making a determined effort to turn that around, but it is hard, because they have so much less to go on. Because to make history, to be remembered, you have to be a winner.
Let's fast forward to today. Where is history being made? An obvious place is in encyclopedias. That's where people are writing down information about how we live now, and about the past, which will be read by historians in the future. I'm going to single out Wikipedia, not because I think it is the best or worst of modern encyclopedias, but because its open nature allows us to see social dynamics being worked out in its creation.
In January this year the New York Times published an article claiming that less than 15% of the material in Wikipedia is written by women. Once again, history is being written by men. And is that because they are somehow "winning"? This blog post, exploring the reasons by more women don't contribute to Wikipedia, and written by the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, no less, suggests that in many cases this is true. Just as in so many other aspects of life, women who want to edit Wikipedia have to fight to have their voices heard, or at least feel as if they do. Often they simply can't be bothered, or don't have the time, to play dominance games.
I'm not trying to single out Wikipedia here. It is simply that its open nature allows us to see easily the same sorts of conflicts that are played out every day in homes and offices all over the world. Sexism isn't something that men necessarily choose to do. All too often it is an attitude that they have been raised to believe is natural and right, and which they have adopted without thinking. Getting rid of such attitudes is a project that will take generations, not years.
In the meantime, we have to leave what history we can. Those historians of the future won't all be lazy. They won't all turn to the most obvious sources. If we can leave our own history then it should be found, and hopefully taken into account. And that's why I am happy to contribute to things like Women's History Month. It says that we are here, and it says that we matter.
Cheryl Morgan is the non-fiction editor of the Hugo Award winning Clarkesworld Magazine. She also edits the literary review magazine, Salon Futura which is published by her company, Wizard's Tower Press. The company runs an online store selling DRM-free ebooks with no region restrictions.
I am not an historian. History, after all, is written by the winners, and while I may have achieved a small amount of success in one field, I certainly don't feel like a winner.
I could, perhaps, have become an historian. I very much enjoyed the subject at school. I also voraciously devoured stories of past times. But it was clear to me at the time that history was very much his story. It was about the winners, the men.
Oh, there were always exceptions: Helen, Cassandra, Dido, Cleopatra, Matilda, Eleanor, Elizabeth and Mary. But exceptions were what they were, and their stories, no matter how glorious, or more often inglorious, came to us filtered. They were always written by men.
To write about women's history, therefore, requires a fair amount of original research. We don't know as much about the women of past times as we do about their male counterparts. And we are not sure that we can believe what we are told. Take Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example: she married the King of France, then divorced him to marry the King of England; she was mother to Richard the Lionheart and John; and she was a leading figure in the Courtly Love movement. She must have been an amazing woman, but I can't recall my history books even mentioning her. When I was a kid, the history of those times was all about Richard. I doubt that it is that much different today.
It is not only women, of course, who lose. History also tends not to talk about the poor, the conquered, the powerless. History is the story of the rich, the powerful, the mighty. Modern historians are making a determined effort to turn that around, but it is hard, because they have so much less to go on. Because to make history, to be remembered, you have to be a winner.
Let's fast forward to today. Where is history being made? An obvious place is in encyclopedias. That's where people are writing down information about how we live now, and about the past, which will be read by historians in the future. I'm going to single out Wikipedia, not because I think it is the best or worst of modern encyclopedias, but because its open nature allows us to see social dynamics being worked out in its creation.
In January this year the New York Times published an article claiming that less than 15% of the material in Wikipedia is written by women. Once again, history is being written by men. And is that because they are somehow "winning"? This blog post, exploring the reasons by more women don't contribute to Wikipedia, and written by the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, no less, suggests that in many cases this is true. Just as in so many other aspects of life, women who want to edit Wikipedia have to fight to have their voices heard, or at least feel as if they do. Often they simply can't be bothered, or don't have the time, to play dominance games.
I'm not trying to single out Wikipedia here. It is simply that its open nature allows us to see easily the same sorts of conflicts that are played out every day in homes and offices all over the world. Sexism isn't something that men necessarily choose to do. All too often it is an attitude that they have been raised to believe is natural and right, and which they have adopted without thinking. Getting rid of such attitudes is a project that will take generations, not years.
In the meantime, we have to leave what history we can. Those historians of the future won't all be lazy. They won't all turn to the most obvious sources. If we can leave our own history then it should be found, and hopefully taken into account. And that's why I am happy to contribute to things like Women's History Month. It says that we are here, and it says that we matter.
Cheryl Morgan is the non-fiction editor of the Hugo Award winning Clarkesworld Magazine. She also edits the literary review magazine, Salon Futura which is published by her company, Wizard's Tower Press. The company runs an online store selling DRM-free ebooks with no region restrictions.
March 23, 2011
Camera Obscura - Lavie Tidhar
Fashions in literature are interesting things. I'm beginning to think that steampunk isn't the new black. The new black is a rewriting of the most popular views of the past, turning it science fictional, extending it into alternate history, giving proper deference to certain key authors. Steampunk doesn't cover everything that's appearing right now, nor all the tributes some of these books pay to authors who have gone before.
Camera Obscura is Lavie Tidhar's new novel and it is one such book, sequel to The Bookman, and my latest e-review book from Angry Robot. It's as devoted to books as The Bookman was. The Bookman itself shared the devotion so so beautifully demonstrated in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. It starts with someone reading a book and it moves to Part One, titled after a famous Edgar Allan Poe short story. There are references to various works of literature throughout. Most were reasonably apposite, though I admit an Ernest Bramah one (about 2/3 of the way in) broke the mood somewhat.
Camera Obscura not historical. It's not even vaguely historical. It's set on the same Earth that Tidhar so lovingly described in The Bookman: a world built of literature, with steampunk accoutrements and a lizard queen and a forensic automaton. Tidhar's Tom Thumb is a tobacconist, but once was a circus performer. Tidhar chooses his literary antecedents carefully - he mixes and mashes his authors, but cautiously. This time he bases a considerable portion of his tale in Paris and some of his literature and characters are chosen accordingly. It's a surprisingly Chinese Paris. Also a surprisingly tourist Paris. It's as if the characters don't actually experience France, but are laid on a landscape devised of literary settings and move through it. It's a very stylised novel in this way.
The first part of Camera Obscura is a fast-paced old-fashioned mystery adventure, with some detective work and much exotic and strange happening. Then it transmutes into an SF novel, still with much exotic and strange happening, but with more explanation.
What's interesting about this book is Tidhar's language choice. He uses modern idiom and speech, gently toned down, but modern cadences. This makes the book very accessible and far less pretentious than some of its ilk.
One thing I didn't enjoy was a dynamic female protagonist who was more at the mercy of events and people and strange beings than she was dynamic. She was skilful and intimidating from time to time, at least, but more often she was buffeted and a little bewildered and that was before the real hurt descended. This is often true of protagonists of this kind of novel, as strange things unfurl and need to be understood, but right now I'm yearning for female protagonists who get by with the tools women use to get by when buffeted, rather than simply following the prescribed plot. Also, I started to wonder if she was human early on, so little regard did she have for clothes, food, drink and PMT. It's a stylised novel in this way, too, however, not a realistic one, so this is mere carping. Lavie Tidhar is a fine craftsman and his novel is well meshed. I would really have liked to see Lady de Winter with PMT, however - it would have made her much more a challenge to the swarming darkness. As it is, there's a moment of discord when de Winter finds her way of handling an increasingly strange situation - her earlier passivity is turned upside down. It's even given a good reason. That doesn't make me more comfortable with it - I suspect that I've read a few too many novels with passive women in it and Tidhar is reaping the grain from seeds that others have sown.
I found the structure curiously like that of The Bookman. This means I kept wanting to pull it to pieces and to reconfigure it just a bit differently, with more stylistic links between the first and last sections, for instance.
I keep wanting to pull Camera Obscura to pieces because it's a novel taht's surprisingly easy to do this to. This doesn't make it a bad novel. In fact, I rather suspect it might be a very good one. Not high literature. More a lost heir of pulp. The top end of pulp. Reliably entertaining reading and intersting worldbuilding. (And I need to send out a search party for those last four sentences - bits of them have gone astray. If you discover the lost verbs, send them home right away and I'll give them a glass of hot milk and put them to bed - the other lost words can wait.)
Camera Obscura is Lavie Tidhar's new novel and it is one such book, sequel to The Bookman, and my latest e-review book from Angry Robot. It's as devoted to books as The Bookman was. The Bookman itself shared the devotion so so beautifully demonstrated in Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. It starts with someone reading a book and it moves to Part One, titled after a famous Edgar Allan Poe short story. There are references to various works of literature throughout. Most were reasonably apposite, though I admit an Ernest Bramah one (about 2/3 of the way in) broke the mood somewhat.
Camera Obscura not historical. It's not even vaguely historical. It's set on the same Earth that Tidhar so lovingly described in The Bookman: a world built of literature, with steampunk accoutrements and a lizard queen and a forensic automaton. Tidhar's Tom Thumb is a tobacconist, but once was a circus performer. Tidhar chooses his literary antecedents carefully - he mixes and mashes his authors, but cautiously. This time he bases a considerable portion of his tale in Paris and some of his literature and characters are chosen accordingly. It's a surprisingly Chinese Paris. Also a surprisingly tourist Paris. It's as if the characters don't actually experience France, but are laid on a landscape devised of literary settings and move through it. It's a very stylised novel in this way.
The first part of Camera Obscura is a fast-paced old-fashioned mystery adventure, with some detective work and much exotic and strange happening. Then it transmutes into an SF novel, still with much exotic and strange happening, but with more explanation.
What's interesting about this book is Tidhar's language choice. He uses modern idiom and speech, gently toned down, but modern cadences. This makes the book very accessible and far less pretentious than some of its ilk.
One thing I didn't enjoy was a dynamic female protagonist who was more at the mercy of events and people and strange beings than she was dynamic. She was skilful and intimidating from time to time, at least, but more often she was buffeted and a little bewildered and that was before the real hurt descended. This is often true of protagonists of this kind of novel, as strange things unfurl and need to be understood, but right now I'm yearning for female protagonists who get by with the tools women use to get by when buffeted, rather than simply following the prescribed plot. Also, I started to wonder if she was human early on, so little regard did she have for clothes, food, drink and PMT. It's a stylised novel in this way, too, however, not a realistic one, so this is mere carping. Lavie Tidhar is a fine craftsman and his novel is well meshed. I would really have liked to see Lady de Winter with PMT, however - it would have made her much more a challenge to the swarming darkness. As it is, there's a moment of discord when de Winter finds her way of handling an increasingly strange situation - her earlier passivity is turned upside down. It's even given a good reason. That doesn't make me more comfortable with it - I suspect that I've read a few too many novels with passive women in it and Tidhar is reaping the grain from seeds that others have sown.
I found the structure curiously like that of The Bookman. This means I kept wanting to pull it to pieces and to reconfigure it just a bit differently, with more stylistic links between the first and last sections, for instance.
I keep wanting to pull Camera Obscura to pieces because it's a novel taht's surprisingly easy to do this to. This doesn't make it a bad novel. In fact, I rather suspect it might be a very good one. Not high literature. More a lost heir of pulp. The top end of pulp. Reliably entertaining reading and intersting worldbuilding. (And I need to send out a search party for those last four sentences - bits of them have gone astray. If you discover the lost verbs, send them home right away and I'll give them a glass of hot milk and put them to bed - the other lost words can wait.)
Women's History Month: Kathleen Jennings
My childhood, when I talk about it, has strong tones of the Little House or the Billabong books. We had a cattle property, a wood stove, home-made bread, party-line telephone, School of the Air – the works. While the people who would later become my friends at university were memorising the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel Air, my mother read out loud to us in the evenings and my father did leatherwork or smoked his pipe on the steps.
It was a world of opinionated, strong-minded individuals, of immensely capable women and easy-going men. My father, an army officer, would willingly start arguments about the role of women in the military, and yet he encouraged both my younger sister and I to join the reserve (we didn't). My mother, when we informed her that "Mommies don't do paperwork", told us severely that this one did.
Education was valued – particularly for girls – and the potential for women's achievements was (as at least as far as I ever gathered) assumed to be unlimited. Women gave tracheotomies on classroom floors, went droving, threatened intruders with shotguns and put out bushfires with their dresses – obviously they could do something as mundane as politics or law. Yet daily life (for men and women) was never subordinate to grand schemes – the little domestic tasks were not only woven through the fabric of the day, they made up that fabric: sewing and woodwork, cooking and branding, chopping wood and feeding chooks.
For too long, I assumed that if something was "character building" it meant the activity would be was annoying, dirty, fiddly, dull, against my will and probably involve sleeping outdoors (my mother refused to go camping and said the house was primitive enough). I have since learned two lessons:
1. The first is that character building is like muscle-building, or practising scales – endless little irritations that one day come together to give you the attitudes and skills you need to do big important things.
2. The second is that the little irritations – the chores, the discipline, the cooking and dishes and hemming and washing paintbrushes – are themselves big important things.
When the details of daily life assume any significance in epic stories, it is frequently for one of two reasons. The first is that (particularly but not exclusively for women) they are a terrible fate the main character is trying to avoid. The second is that they are a means to an end – the wax-on, wax-off which will train some latent ability (predominantly but not exclusively for men).
In too many books I have read recently, a strong female character seeks to escape the every-day fate of other women in that world, and the author aids her by running down, denigrating and mocking the activities of those women (rather than the structure of the world which may limit the choices available).
I think it is fairly obvious that this approach can cheapen those other characters, but it also cheapens the value of the main character. If she becomes great only because of the opportunities available to her or the supernatural gifts conferred, what does that offer the reader, who may have a very earthbound view of her the reader's own potential?
I love grand adventures in which I can lose myself, and don't want those books to stop – but there is a special joy for me when those books acknowledge the small things. I also love those books which particularly honour small things. The beauty and heartbreak of everyday life, the extraordinary people doing ordinary things, the thousand little magics that make the world worth saving – those books which make me want to go out and look at marvellous little things, and actually go out and *do* something wonderful.
In books as in life I've come to believe a strong character is one whom the author – and the reader – respects in two ways. The first is by believing that character is strong enough to do the things which, in the world of the story, are great. The second is to show that the things that character does are important and dignified because that character does them.
-------------------
Kathleen Jennings
I have illustrated for Small Beer Press, CSFG, Adromeda Spaceways, and Fablecroft. My stories have been published by Antipodean SF, Andromeda Spaceways and I have a story coming out in the After the Rain anthology, ASIM. I also have a short Australian steampunk comic coming out in the anthology Steampunk! from Candlewick Press later this year!
I live in Brisbane and blog is at http://tanaudel.wordpress.com
It was a world of opinionated, strong-minded individuals, of immensely capable women and easy-going men. My father, an army officer, would willingly start arguments about the role of women in the military, and yet he encouraged both my younger sister and I to join the reserve (we didn't). My mother, when we informed her that "Mommies don't do paperwork", told us severely that this one did.
Education was valued – particularly for girls – and the potential for women's achievements was (as at least as far as I ever gathered) assumed to be unlimited. Women gave tracheotomies on classroom floors, went droving, threatened intruders with shotguns and put out bushfires with their dresses – obviously they could do something as mundane as politics or law. Yet daily life (for men and women) was never subordinate to grand schemes – the little domestic tasks were not only woven through the fabric of the day, they made up that fabric: sewing and woodwork, cooking and branding, chopping wood and feeding chooks.
For too long, I assumed that if something was "character building" it meant the activity would be was annoying, dirty, fiddly, dull, against my will and probably involve sleeping outdoors (my mother refused to go camping and said the house was primitive enough). I have since learned two lessons:
1. The first is that character building is like muscle-building, or practising scales – endless little irritations that one day come together to give you the attitudes and skills you need to do big important things.
2. The second is that the little irritations – the chores, the discipline, the cooking and dishes and hemming and washing paintbrushes – are themselves big important things.
When the details of daily life assume any significance in epic stories, it is frequently for one of two reasons. The first is that (particularly but not exclusively for women) they are a terrible fate the main character is trying to avoid. The second is that they are a means to an end – the wax-on, wax-off which will train some latent ability (predominantly but not exclusively for men).
In too many books I have read recently, a strong female character seeks to escape the every-day fate of other women in that world, and the author aids her by running down, denigrating and mocking the activities of those women (rather than the structure of the world which may limit the choices available).
I think it is fairly obvious that this approach can cheapen those other characters, but it also cheapens the value of the main character. If she becomes great only because of the opportunities available to her or the supernatural gifts conferred, what does that offer the reader, who may have a very earthbound view of her the reader's own potential?
I love grand adventures in which I can lose myself, and don't want those books to stop – but there is a special joy for me when those books acknowledge the small things. I also love those books which particularly honour small things. The beauty and heartbreak of everyday life, the extraordinary people doing ordinary things, the thousand little magics that make the world worth saving – those books which make me want to go out and look at marvellous little things, and actually go out and *do* something wonderful.
In books as in life I've come to believe a strong character is one whom the author – and the reader – respects in two ways. The first is by believing that character is strong enough to do the things which, in the world of the story, are great. The second is to show that the things that character does are important and dignified because that character does them.
-------------------
Kathleen Jennings
I have illustrated for Small Beer Press, CSFG, Adromeda Spaceways, and Fablecroft. My stories have been published by Antipodean SF, Andromeda Spaceways and I have a story coming out in the After the Rain anthology, ASIM. I also have a short Australian steampunk comic coming out in the anthology Steampunk! from Candlewick Press later this year!
I live in Brisbane and blog is at http://tanaudel.wordpress.com
Quantum Poets
Helen Lowe has real poetry on Tuesdays on her blog and me, I just report back on what my class is doing, the day after.
Today we got through a full chapter of Quantum Physics for Poets, because it was very straightforward stuff about canons and achieving orbit and a bit more about scientific method. Key words were Galilean and Newtonian mechanics, acceleration, and gravity. We talked for a happy five minutes about the shape of the earth and why different places are better for launching rockets. We rocket-tested (or canon-tested, depending on what we were discussing) both ballpoint pens and scrunched up paper. None achieved orbit. Quantum concepts only came into it at the very end of the chapter, so they only came into the last minute at the class. "Of course, none of this applies at the sub-atomic level," I said insouciantly, hoping no-one was picking up that I was really curious to know what a sub-atomic submarine might be like. "That's when it gets quantum."*
My class didn't pick my thought up, but they caught me on everything else. In fact, one of them turned to the others and informed them, three minutes in "It's Evil Teacher, today." "Oh good," someone else said.
*I still think I can't be getting this right. I'm getting much better at looking confident, however.
Today we got through a full chapter of Quantum Physics for Poets, because it was very straightforward stuff about canons and achieving orbit and a bit more about scientific method. Key words were Galilean and Newtonian mechanics, acceleration, and gravity. We talked for a happy five minutes about the shape of the earth and why different places are better for launching rockets. We rocket-tested (or canon-tested, depending on what we were discussing) both ballpoint pens and scrunched up paper. None achieved orbit. Quantum concepts only came into it at the very end of the chapter, so they only came into the last minute at the class. "Of course, none of this applies at the sub-atomic level," I said insouciantly, hoping no-one was picking up that I was really curious to know what a sub-atomic submarine might be like. "That's when it gets quantum."*
My class didn't pick my thought up, but they caught me on everything else. In fact, one of them turned to the others and informed them, three minutes in "It's Evil Teacher, today." "Oh good," someone else said.
*I still think I can't be getting this right. I'm getting much better at looking confident, however.
Women's History Month: Monissa Whiteley
I'm not going to write about myself, because I don't. I write about other people instead. Other people are more interesting to me, because I know about me.
Last week I wrote a LiveJournal post about a woman from the past, but I didn't write about her. I wrote about the bushranger who denied knowing her, the husband who was hanged for sheep-stealing and the names and dates. Always the names and dates.
I've done the family history thing, and all my female ancestors have been carefully recorded as a series of names and dates: who/when they married, children's name and dates of births, when they died. Sometimes I have a photo, or an obituary or a letter written from NZ to a much missed son, but I know little else about them. Oh, I know more about the handful who came out at Her Majesty's expense. I know where they lived, their (claimed) trade, their height, eye & hair colour, shape of face, and what they got up to in the months after they were dumped in Hobart, until they got married. And then they also become a list of names and dates.
Their husbands turn up electoral roles and in land records. They leave wills. They have accounts at the local chemist, advertise their businesses in the local newspaper, put their name on petitions that get published in that same newspaper, get fined for letting their cattle stray, donate cups for sporting events. They leave footprints.
But for many women, ordinary woman, it seems the only footprints they leave are in the sand, waiting to get washed away with the next wave.
Obviously some women wrote journals and letters, which are stored away in the back of cupboard or donated to the local community history museum, until a researcher finds them and makes use of them. Therefore the sensible approach to researching women of the past is to find such a collection of material and use that as the basis of your research project. So now you know how to do it.
But what about those people who decide on a subject for a more irrational reason, and what to find out something about them? Then I reckon it comes down to luck.
Seriously.
And names and dates. Despite my grumbling above, they are useful. They provide the framework of a life, and can point to other places to look. The first place to look for information on someone is in the newspaper the week after they died. Of course, that requires knowing the name they died under and with some women that's a tad difficult. (Just because divorce isn't an option, doesn't mean women didn't "re-marry" and take another man's name. It just means there's no paper trail to help you find this.)
But filling in the gaps that flesh out those lives?
I say it's luck because that is what determines what ends up in archives and museums and local history collections. Luck that someone decided to keep a pile of letters, or some faded old photos, or out of date business records, and then someone else decided not to throw them out, and maybe someone else finally decided to pass on the junk that has been cluttering up the back room to their local history society.
That luck works both ways, and that means footprints of ordinary people can end up being preserved and made available to future researchers. Of course, well known personalities are going to figure prominently in collections. (I'm quite sure Lady Franklin and her husband left everything behind when they ran off home to England, except maybe a change of clothes.) Which is understandable, because the owners are more likely to hang on to something with "significance" and then consider it worth passing on. But community history is about ordinary people. I volunteer at my local museum, and by local museum I mean one that claims to have the biggest collection outside of a capital city so as you might imagine they have some interesting stuff, but a lot of it is interesting because it deals with the little details of life: account books from a local business, visiting cards, police/court records, a letter written from a father to a son telling him his wife remarried or a letter from an ex-convict inquiring about her personal effects, minutes of meetings of local organisations, notes from bushrangers, reports of charity events, newspaper clippings grouped by theme, posters promoting visiting entertainers. Anything or anyone might be in there. Somewhere. The problem, as always, is keeping track of what exactly is there, indexing it, making it easier for people to find thing (but I'm helping with that for one place anyway).
As another source of information, I have to mention newspapers. I love my newspapers, even moreso now that I can search them, and read them from home. Obituaries, and court sessions, and police reports and, um, I'm sure they have other stuff in them. Women do feature prominently in the various types of crime reports and inquests, not just as perpetrators but as victims, witnesses or "wife of". They appear in business advertisements (running a school maybe or a hotel, or a widow taking over the family business or selling her property). They perform at concerts, or fall off bridges, or have fathers & husbands who write letters of complaint.
And that is the other thing to do: bounce off the men in their life. Read between the lines of their lives, to find out something about their wives and daughters. Which is what I was doing with my lady above. In some records, it's actually the sensible way to do it. Jane Brown might not get a mention in the newspapers, but John Brown's wife does, or in more respectable circles, Mrs John Brown. Or sometimes it's the only way to approach the problem. This week I was searching for background information on another young lady, something more than "She left her husband". I knew knotting of her, so I read accounts of the man she left with (his biography, other books, newspaper stories and online). I finally found what I wanted via a manuscript that had been lodged in the state archives and published a few years back. Now if only I knew what name she was using when she died... (I might ask at the museum next week? )
It can be harder tracing women through history, but patience, stubbornness (and luck) do go a long way. I know I've left out some things, because I didn't want to go on for too long, but I'm interested to know what other people's approaches are.
Gillian is making me talk about myself, so I'll see if I can get with saying I'm currently a library tech student and volunteer at Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum, and I like to take photos of places I go and things I do, and then turn them into long Live Journal posts at
monissa.livejournal.com, where you might find a bit about me but more likely you'll find about more the Tasmanian conivct system than anyone needs to know, or tall ships, or anti-pulp mill protests, or other things (although not things that you'd rather be shot than called). I
also have a webpage somewhere, but it's perpetually out of date so I prefer not to think about it.
Last week I wrote a LiveJournal post about a woman from the past, but I didn't write about her. I wrote about the bushranger who denied knowing her, the husband who was hanged for sheep-stealing and the names and dates. Always the names and dates.
I've done the family history thing, and all my female ancestors have been carefully recorded as a series of names and dates: who/when they married, children's name and dates of births, when they died. Sometimes I have a photo, or an obituary or a letter written from NZ to a much missed son, but I know little else about them. Oh, I know more about the handful who came out at Her Majesty's expense. I know where they lived, their (claimed) trade, their height, eye & hair colour, shape of face, and what they got up to in the months after they were dumped in Hobart, until they got married. And then they also become a list of names and dates.
Their husbands turn up electoral roles and in land records. They leave wills. They have accounts at the local chemist, advertise their businesses in the local newspaper, put their name on petitions that get published in that same newspaper, get fined for letting their cattle stray, donate cups for sporting events. They leave footprints.
But for many women, ordinary woman, it seems the only footprints they leave are in the sand, waiting to get washed away with the next wave.
Obviously some women wrote journals and letters, which are stored away in the back of cupboard or donated to the local community history museum, until a researcher finds them and makes use of them. Therefore the sensible approach to researching women of the past is to find such a collection of material and use that as the basis of your research project. So now you know how to do it.
But what about those people who decide on a subject for a more irrational reason, and what to find out something about them? Then I reckon it comes down to luck.
Seriously.
And names and dates. Despite my grumbling above, they are useful. They provide the framework of a life, and can point to other places to look. The first place to look for information on someone is in the newspaper the week after they died. Of course, that requires knowing the name they died under and with some women that's a tad difficult. (Just because divorce isn't an option, doesn't mean women didn't "re-marry" and take another man's name. It just means there's no paper trail to help you find this.)
But filling in the gaps that flesh out those lives?
I say it's luck because that is what determines what ends up in archives and museums and local history collections. Luck that someone decided to keep a pile of letters, or some faded old photos, or out of date business records, and then someone else decided not to throw them out, and maybe someone else finally decided to pass on the junk that has been cluttering up the back room to their local history society.
That luck works both ways, and that means footprints of ordinary people can end up being preserved and made available to future researchers. Of course, well known personalities are going to figure prominently in collections. (I'm quite sure Lady Franklin and her husband left everything behind when they ran off home to England, except maybe a change of clothes.) Which is understandable, because the owners are more likely to hang on to something with "significance" and then consider it worth passing on. But community history is about ordinary people. I volunteer at my local museum, and by local museum I mean one that claims to have the biggest collection outside of a capital city so as you might imagine they have some interesting stuff, but a lot of it is interesting because it deals with the little details of life: account books from a local business, visiting cards, police/court records, a letter written from a father to a son telling him his wife remarried or a letter from an ex-convict inquiring about her personal effects, minutes of meetings of local organisations, notes from bushrangers, reports of charity events, newspaper clippings grouped by theme, posters promoting visiting entertainers. Anything or anyone might be in there. Somewhere. The problem, as always, is keeping track of what exactly is there, indexing it, making it easier for people to find thing (but I'm helping with that for one place anyway).
As another source of information, I have to mention newspapers. I love my newspapers, even moreso now that I can search them, and read them from home. Obituaries, and court sessions, and police reports and, um, I'm sure they have other stuff in them. Women do feature prominently in the various types of crime reports and inquests, not just as perpetrators but as victims, witnesses or "wife of". They appear in business advertisements (running a school maybe or a hotel, or a widow taking over the family business or selling her property). They perform at concerts, or fall off bridges, or have fathers & husbands who write letters of complaint.
And that is the other thing to do: bounce off the men in their life. Read between the lines of their lives, to find out something about their wives and daughters. Which is what I was doing with my lady above. In some records, it's actually the sensible way to do it. Jane Brown might not get a mention in the newspapers, but John Brown's wife does, or in more respectable circles, Mrs John Brown. Or sometimes it's the only way to approach the problem. This week I was searching for background information on another young lady, something more than "She left her husband". I knew knotting of her, so I read accounts of the man she left with (his biography, other books, newspaper stories and online). I finally found what I wanted via a manuscript that had been lodged in the state archives and published a few years back. Now if only I knew what name she was using when she died... (I might ask at the museum next week? )
It can be harder tracing women through history, but patience, stubbornness (and luck) do go a long way. I know I've left out some things, because I didn't want to go on for too long, but I'm interested to know what other people's approaches are.
Gillian is making me talk about myself, so I'll see if I can get with saying I'm currently a library tech student and volunteer at Launceston's Queen Victoria Museum, and I like to take photos of places I go and things I do, and then turn them into long Live Journal posts at
monissa.livejournal.com, where you might find a bit about me but more likely you'll find about more the Tasmanian conivct system than anyone needs to know, or tall ships, or anti-pulp mill protests, or other things (although not things that you'd rather be shot than called). I
also have a webpage somewhere, but it's perpetually out of date so I prefer not to think about it.
March 22, 2011
gillpolack @ 2011-03-22T22:44:00
This week is a bit of a delicate balancing act. Last week's emotions have caught up with me, but I can't put things off any longer. This means, of course, that I'm back to making lists.
I definitely had a list for today, but I've lost it. In its place, I've got four new review books and three of them are utterly gorgeous (one is merely not half bad at all). My crystal ball tells me that there will be reading in my near future. Also forms. One tonight and one tomorrow. Or two tomorrow. Three this week?
PS If you want to know what the test post was all about, just watch this space...
I definitely had a list for today, but I've lost it. In its place, I've got four new review books and three of them are utterly gorgeous (one is merely not half bad at all). My crystal ball tells me that there will be reading in my near future. Also forms. One tonight and one tomorrow. Or two tomorrow. Three this week?
PS If you want to know what the test post was all about, just watch this space...
Women's History Month: Lauren Roberts
Mother's Day in the U.S. is not that far off, but it's a holiday I've always disliked for its falsity. As if there should be one day that we acknowledge what for most of us is the biggest influence—for good or bad—in our lives.
Fortunately, for me, it is a good one. I couldn't always say that, of course. We fought during my teen years. As the oldest of five children, I got the unlovely experience of breaking away into adulthood first—oh, those times of angst!—when confusion, anger, and misunderstanding ripped our love into tatters of tears and frustration.
It wasn't easy to repair those ribbons of love, but as I entered my thirties, forties and beyond they were repaired. And every day, sometimes minutes at a time, I give thanks for someone I think I am going to lose this year. My mother.
When Gillian first asked me to name my heroes I came up with two names: Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Cavell. And they are heroes. Personal ones, but public ones as well. I admire them for what they accomplished. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my truest hero is Mom. Not because she is my mom—though I am fortunate in being able to say she is—but because she has run her life in accordance with the social dictates of her generation—becoming a wife and a mother, supporting her husband and raising her five children, all without complaint despite the fact she would have had a lot of legitimate complaints.
Mom was born in 1923 and brought up in the era of predetermined societal roles for women. Despite the interruption of World War II when she became a Rosie the Riveter for Douglas Aircraft Company. She followed those dictates closely, and without ever once complaining.
She and Dad had been high school sweethearts, and when he returned from the war they married. I was born a year later. Because they were Catholics, my four siblings (plus two miscarriages) followed in rather close succession. Dad worked at AT&T, and for a number of years a second job at night at a gas station in order to make ends meet.
For Mom, making ends meet was no less hard. Today, there is so much more opportunity for connections and support for mothers but back then in the 1950s and 1960s you had only your neighbors to talk with—when you could get away from the endless rounds of meals and diapers. But I don't think it was the tedium as much as the small humiliations that I didn't learn about until just recently. The time she was taking on a housecleaning job to earn needed money and the woman of house wanted her to use her bare hands instead of a brush to clean the toilet bowl. (She refused.) The time the small neighborhood grocer commented to her that she only came to his (more expensive) store when she needed credit to buy food. (She elected to serve oatmeal for dinner rather than take the credit any more.) The time the family was using her brother's vacation cottage at Lake Arrowhead and accidentally sat at someone else's picnic table and were confronted with a woman who screamed that she didn't know my uncle and to "get out." (She and Dad offered a heartfelt apology for the misunderstanding and shepherded us to the sandy beach.)
I only found out about those from her sister, and I also found out this: never once during any of those awful times or other difficult times did she lose her temper or strike back. She may have felt terribly humiliated or embarrassed but she never responded in anger. She stood straight and tall—at least as tall as her 5'2" would allow her—and looked life in the face. She had dignity.
Today, Mom is 87 years old and increasingly frail. She is physically bent because of lifelong asthma but in my eyes she still stands tall and straight. Mom is one of my heroes not because she is related to me but because someone who can accept life without being defeated by its difficulties is a hero of magnificent proportions. And someone upon whom I base my own life.
Lauren Roberts is the founder and editor-in-chief at BiblioBuffet, an online literary salon. Her passions include books (and more books), reading, cats, swimming, occasional gourmet meals, friends, and quiet times. One of her few regrets in life is not yet winning the lottery because she has her eye on darn near every Penguin Classics book available and can't otherwise afford them. She can be seduced with quality champagne.
Fortunately, for me, it is a good one. I couldn't always say that, of course. We fought during my teen years. As the oldest of five children, I got the unlovely experience of breaking away into adulthood first—oh, those times of angst!—when confusion, anger, and misunderstanding ripped our love into tatters of tears and frustration.
It wasn't easy to repair those ribbons of love, but as I entered my thirties, forties and beyond they were repaired. And every day, sometimes minutes at a time, I give thanks for someone I think I am going to lose this year. My mother.
When Gillian first asked me to name my heroes I came up with two names: Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Cavell. And they are heroes. Personal ones, but public ones as well. I admire them for what they accomplished. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized my truest hero is Mom. Not because she is my mom—though I am fortunate in being able to say she is—but because she has run her life in accordance with the social dictates of her generation—becoming a wife and a mother, supporting her husband and raising her five children, all without complaint despite the fact she would have had a lot of legitimate complaints.
Mom was born in 1923 and brought up in the era of predetermined societal roles for women. Despite the interruption of World War II when she became a Rosie the Riveter for Douglas Aircraft Company. She followed those dictates closely, and without ever once complaining.
She and Dad had been high school sweethearts, and when he returned from the war they married. I was born a year later. Because they were Catholics, my four siblings (plus two miscarriages) followed in rather close succession. Dad worked at AT&T, and for a number of years a second job at night at a gas station in order to make ends meet.
For Mom, making ends meet was no less hard. Today, there is so much more opportunity for connections and support for mothers but back then in the 1950s and 1960s you had only your neighbors to talk with—when you could get away from the endless rounds of meals and diapers. But I don't think it was the tedium as much as the small humiliations that I didn't learn about until just recently. The time she was taking on a housecleaning job to earn needed money and the woman of house wanted her to use her bare hands instead of a brush to clean the toilet bowl. (She refused.) The time the small neighborhood grocer commented to her that she only came to his (more expensive) store when she needed credit to buy food. (She elected to serve oatmeal for dinner rather than take the credit any more.) The time the family was using her brother's vacation cottage at Lake Arrowhead and accidentally sat at someone else's picnic table and were confronted with a woman who screamed that she didn't know my uncle and to "get out." (She and Dad offered a heartfelt apology for the misunderstanding and shepherded us to the sandy beach.)
I only found out about those from her sister, and I also found out this: never once during any of those awful times or other difficult times did she lose her temper or strike back. She may have felt terribly humiliated or embarrassed but she never responded in anger. She stood straight and tall—at least as tall as her 5'2" would allow her—and looked life in the face. She had dignity.
Today, Mom is 87 years old and increasingly frail. She is physically bent because of lifelong asthma but in my eyes she still stands tall and straight. Mom is one of my heroes not because she is related to me but because someone who can accept life without being defeated by its difficulties is a hero of magnificent proportions. And someone upon whom I base my own life.
Lauren Roberts is the founder and editor-in-chief at BiblioBuffet, an online literary salon. Her passions include books (and more books), reading, cats, swimming, occasional gourmet meals, friends, and quiet times. One of her few regrets in life is not yet winning the lottery because she has her eye on darn near every Penguin Classics book available and can't otherwise afford them. She can be seduced with quality champagne.
Matthew Hughes To Hell and Back. The Damned Busters.
Time for another Angry Robot book. I really wanted this book to be about pilots doing a dam buster job on Hell - I've not seen that novel yet, and I was looking foward to it. The Damned Busters didn't have a single pilot in it, however. I might have to wait for the Damn Busters.
This isn't a long review because The Damned Busters isn't a long book (also, because I'm short on time right now - 3 more weeks of term and then life slows down a little). It may not be a long book, but it's sparkling and fun and somewhat actuarial in tone. I've always thought that one of my sisters would have been happy as an actuary. Now I'm certain of it. Demons and contracts and talk show hosts who fail to get their guests angry on prime time TV. And a Strike. Must not forget the Strike. Or the superheroishness. There is much superheroishness (although no spandex).
An actuary gets involved in the interests of various angelical and demonic beings and has to calculate his way out of it, finding his true love (or not) along the way. It all comes down to an old, old storyline…
This is one of those books where it's possible to say quite clearly "If you like so and so, you'll like such and such." It's very much in the Tom Holt model, humorous fantasy that riffs on matters religious and mythical. Even the underlying themes are similar. This is not a negative comment, by any means. There can never be too many deft and quirky fantasy novels. Reading for wet days. Reading for bad weeks. Reading for messy journeys. Its pace and style aren't quite as good as Holt's, but it's still, as I said, a lot of fun.
This isn't a long review because The Damned Busters isn't a long book (also, because I'm short on time right now - 3 more weeks of term and then life slows down a little). It may not be a long book, but it's sparkling and fun and somewhat actuarial in tone. I've always thought that one of my sisters would have been happy as an actuary. Now I'm certain of it. Demons and contracts and talk show hosts who fail to get their guests angry on prime time TV. And a Strike. Must not forget the Strike. Or the superheroishness. There is much superheroishness (although no spandex).
An actuary gets involved in the interests of various angelical and demonic beings and has to calculate his way out of it, finding his true love (or not) along the way. It all comes down to an old, old storyline…
This is one of those books where it's possible to say quite clearly "If you like so and so, you'll like such and such." It's very much in the Tom Holt model, humorous fantasy that riffs on matters religious and mythical. Even the underlying themes are similar. This is not a negative comment, by any means. There can never be too many deft and quirky fantasy novels. Reading for wet days. Reading for bad weeks. Reading for messy journeys. Its pace and style aren't quite as good as Holt's, but it's still, as I said, a lot of fun.
Women's History Month: Alyson Hill
My sister and I come from a long line of extraordinarily ordinary women. Well, that's what they'd all have you believe anyway and is, most likely, what they all believed as well. But the women in our family are tough old birds and marvellous at keeping secrets - they are collectively the antithesis of Drama-Queens. In their small town histories, it was important that anything out of the ordinary was brushed under the carpet, locked in the closet or stuffed under the mattress. I know this now, because I remember when eavesdropping on particularly interesting chat, I would inevitably hear that "The Walls have ears.." and then chat would stop abruptly or change to the color of the knee-rug that Aunty Gwen was crocheting.
Once I became a girl of a 'certain age' (i.e. pregnant) the walls no longer had ears when I was around, and it was then I discovered more about the blood that ran through my veins through tidbits and stories given in agonisingly brief details. I learned to corner the story-teller at a later stage and tease more interesting bits out slowly and casually to get a proper story, but the imagined shame of scandal always weighed heavily on my Aunts and Nan. And so it was that I discovered the convict ancestor sent to Sydney for murder: she'd been out walking with a companion (boyfriend) when a man jumped out of the bushes and bashed her companion with a plank (he died), she very quickly twisted a rock in her hanky and hurled it slingshot-style at the attacker, it hit him on the head and he died some days later!
There was a Great-Great-Great Tyrant Grandfather who had a harem of women: his wife, her sister and a couple of Indigenous women who had moved in as Nannies. The resulting baker's dozen children were brought up altogether and only two birth certificates were ever recorded.
Nan once walked next door and decked her neighbour 'once and for all' as she was sick of him coming home drunk and belting his wife. And once I asked if Bushranger Ben Hall was any relation to Granny Hall - the silence was suffocating and the looks could have cut glass! The lives of the women in my family, retrospectively, were better than soap operas to me but my female relatives showed great disdain for my fascination. They valued the good, the shiny, the new and couldn't understood how wonderful their crazed glazed lives were to me.
It's only now - with the passing of so many of our elders, that I get secret letters from my Aunt with all the details I longed for. She still thinks she is an ordinary woman but she recognises my love of stories, and I seemed to have passed some secret test, so she would like me to know 'our family': a 'perfectly normal, ordinary family, though there may have been some nuts'. What I learned from these women, is how important it is to look behind the curtain; there is no ordinary.
Once I became a girl of a 'certain age' (i.e. pregnant) the walls no longer had ears when I was around, and it was then I discovered more about the blood that ran through my veins through tidbits and stories given in agonisingly brief details. I learned to corner the story-teller at a later stage and tease more interesting bits out slowly and casually to get a proper story, but the imagined shame of scandal always weighed heavily on my Aunts and Nan. And so it was that I discovered the convict ancestor sent to Sydney for murder: she'd been out walking with a companion (boyfriend) when a man jumped out of the bushes and bashed her companion with a plank (he died), she very quickly twisted a rock in her hanky and hurled it slingshot-style at the attacker, it hit him on the head and he died some days later!
There was a Great-Great-Great Tyrant Grandfather who had a harem of women: his wife, her sister and a couple of Indigenous women who had moved in as Nannies. The resulting baker's dozen children were brought up altogether and only two birth certificates were ever recorded.
Nan once walked next door and decked her neighbour 'once and for all' as she was sick of him coming home drunk and belting his wife. And once I asked if Bushranger Ben Hall was any relation to Granny Hall - the silence was suffocating and the looks could have cut glass! The lives of the women in my family, retrospectively, were better than soap operas to me but my female relatives showed great disdain for my fascination. They valued the good, the shiny, the new and couldn't understood how wonderful their crazed glazed lives were to me.
It's only now - with the passing of so many of our elders, that I get secret letters from my Aunt with all the details I longed for. She still thinks she is an ordinary woman but she recognises my love of stories, and I seemed to have passed some secret test, so she would like me to know 'our family': a 'perfectly normal, ordinary family, though there may have been some nuts'. What I learned from these women, is how important it is to look behind the curtain; there is no ordinary.
