Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 5

My Electronic Overlord

[image error]I really am a simple soul.

In December I was given a Fitbit for my birthday. I love it. I may, in fact, have gone a little off the deep end about it. It’s a little bit like a tamagotchi (remember those?) except about exercise: it requires attention and gives you just enough approving feedback to keep you giving it that attention. This is how our E-Overlords are going to take over: by making us want to please them so we get tiny gratifications.

The new exercise standards, as I understand them,...

The Boy Who Played Air Guitar now available on Curious Fictions

Bit by bit, I will be posting my short stories on Curious Fictions. Want a quick read? Try The Boy Who Played Air Guitar, originally published in Tales from the House Band.

There’s a lot of really good stuff available on Curious Fictions. Check it out.

And yes, I’m working on Sarah Tolerance and a new sekrit project, honestly.

Perfect is the Enemy of Wonderful

[image error]I use the phrase “Perfect is the Enemy of Good” a lot, reminding myself that retooling a sentence or a paragraph can mash all the spontaneity and beauty right out of it. But it’s not just applicable to writing.

My daughter got married on New Year’s Eve. It was–to my “make-a-list-and-check-it-twice-delegate-but-confirm” mind–a rather oddly organized event: outside on December 31 in Northern California. Setup on the driveway of the house of some of their friends, and organized as a potluck. And...

Night of the Cake (or The Cake Also Rises)

[image error]So my daughter is getting married tomorrow afternoon. Outside (in December in Northern California, that means a balmy 40-50 degrees. The bridal party will wear parkas) at the home of a friend. In order to do it all as cheaply as possible (their choice–they’re poor as church mice, and every time we point out that the Parents of the Bride traditionally carry many of the costs, they say “but still…” which is noble but occasionally annoying, as I’ve had to reassure the kid over and over that the...

Communal Language: Movie Edition

[image error]I sometimes wonder if I’ve done a dreadful, dreadful thing in raising my children to love many of the movies that my husband and I love. My younger daughter famously went to school one day in 3rd grade, talking enthusiastically about a film the family had watched the night before, only to find that none of her classmates had ever seen Casablanca. Even today, I suspect they sometimes get blank looks from the less media-steeped of their friends.

My family’s conversations are peppered with lines...

Being in Touch

[image error]Back in the olden days, when I was 13 and we moved from Greenwich Village to rural Massachusetts, and long-distance phone calls were expensive–particularly calls made during the day–the way I had of keeping in touch with friends was to write letters. Which I did, some. But 13-year-old girls are not always punctilious about returning letters right away, and gradually the friendships I had outside of school sort of fell away. My position, socially, at the school I had attended from age 4 onward...

Entitlement, or: No One Has Suffered as I Suffer

Anent nothing (or actually, anent a long, chewy series of Tweets by David Rothkopf about the way a certain class of people in our society–guess whom?* gets a pass for treating people badly–which the author calls Asshole Culture) I started thinking about M*A*S*H. Not the beloved TV show where many of the most despicable characters turn out to to be people who can learn not to be despicable (or are revealed to be secretly not despicable, etc.) and in which the remaining despicable people get th...

Writing Angry

I’m a coward. Let’s get that on the table first thing. I am not one of those heroines who stands up to a person in a rage and tells them off in some narratively satisfying way. My own personality, and early training, work against it. When I’m dealing with a volcanically angry person? I shut down. I get quiet and sort of “gone-to-my-own-private-island” absent until it’s over. It’s different if I see someone being bullied or harassed–but even then, my tendency is not to confront the bully but t...

The Factory Girl’s Song

[image error]Come all you weary factory girls
I’ll have you understand
I’m going to leave the factory
And return to my native land.
      …
The Overseers need not think
Because they higher stand
That they are better than the girls
That work at their command.
–The Factory Girl’s Song, 1830

Reading up on something for work, I somehow got directed to an amazing document: a short book, The Woman Who Toils, by Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst, published by Doubleday in 1903.

Mrs. Van Vorst and Miss Van...

Scary Abundance, and its Pursuit

[image error]On Saturday night, spur of the moment, my husband, my daughter, and I went to see Sorry to Bother You, which starts out looking like an urban maybe-failure-to-launch comedy and then becomes, not just sort of Science Fictional, but profoundly weird. I recommend it. But I did walk out of the theatre feeling like “What wasthat?”

And then last night we went to see Generation Wealth, a documentary about… well, not so much about wealth, but about acquisition of wealth, about what drives us as a soc...