From Publishers Weekly:

Last month, online retail newcomer Bookshop divvied up a sales dividend of more than $1 million among 861 bookstores who use the site to sell books. It is the latest in a string of successes for the fledgling company that many booksellers, who receive a percentage of each sale made through Bookshop from their stores, praise for providing a lifeline during the coronavirus outbreak. But some booksellers say their own advocacy organization, the American Booksellers Association, is not being transparent about its financial relationship with Bookshop.

ABA’s support has been key to Bookshop’s success. Andy Hunter, founder of Catapult and Soft Skull Press, launched Bookshop in January, and the timing sheltered many American bookstores from some of the worst financial effects of the coronavirus. Through Bookshop, anyone—including but not limited to booksellers—can set up ordering pages backed by a massive book database. ABA has encouraged members to sign up, and ABA CEO Allison Hill praised Bookshop at ABA’s town hall in June. “Bookshop has reached an entirely new audience that were interested in us, but didn’t necessarily know how to buy from us,” she said. “Bookshop pulled customers from [competitors] and maybe introduced us to some new customers.”

Hunter structured Bookshop as a socially responsible B corporation and has emphasized that he believes those new customers are being drawn away from Amazon to the benefit of indies. The result, he said, is that indies have their first effective digital retail platform after years of unsuccessful ABA-led initiatives. But not all booksellers are happy about the ABA-Bookshop connection, with some expressing frustration and disappointment about how the ABA has communicated its specific ties to Bookshop.

ABA confirmed to PW that it holds a 4% stake in Bookshop, the result of the association’s $100,000 investment in the company. The investment was approved by the ABA board in February 2019, seven months before members were informed of ABA’s “affinity partnership” with Bookshop, and nearly one year before Bookshop launched. (The investment was also made before Hill took office.) In addition to its stake in Bookshop, ABA receives a 10% media-affiliate commission from click-through sales that originate from its IndieBound book database.

. . . .

Toadstool Bookshop owner Willard Williams and manager Mike Joachim did not initially see eye-to-eye about Bookshop. Both had concerns about the site and neither wanted to use it for Toadstool’s three New Hampshire stores, Joachim feeling strongly that it would lead to increased competition from nonbookseller Bookshop affiliates. Williams reserved judgment because Bookshop was helping many indie booksellers survive during the pandemic. “My understanding is that the ABA did not think IndieBound was getting enough attention and tried tinkering with it to no avail, so they jumped at the idea of Bookshop,” Williams said. “It did launch at an ideal time, given the virus disruption, and it enabled many stores to keep customers supplied with books.”

But after learning of ABA’s financial connections to Bookshop, both booksellers said they are worried they are competing with the organization that is supposed to represent their interests. “Every time a consumer in my area orders from Bookshop, I lose the sale and ABA benefits from the sale,” Joachim said. He worries that Bookshop’s pursuit of affiliate links for click-through sales only adds a new competitor alongside Amazon. “ABA is supporting and investing in a company that is aggressively seeking to pay individuals—bloggers, influencers, authors, readers in my community—to direct business away from us,” he said. Joachim is afraid that ABA is profiting from nonbooksellers who can set up Bookshop accounts while asking member stores to sign on despite Bookshop’s significantly narrower margins.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to DaveMich for the tip.

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Carrie Fisher

From The Bookseller:

Tate has announced it is making 313 redundancies in its commercial operations, Tate Enterprises, including at its bookshops and publishing branch.

An email to staff, leaked online, from director Maria Balshaw and c.o.o. Vicky Cheetham, was sent on Tuesday announcing the job cuts at Tate Enterprises, due to be finalised by mid-September. The figure represents more than half of the commercial branch’s employees.

Referring to “painful and difficult decisions”, the email said: “While we have done everything we could to save as many jobs as possible, we simply cannot afford to keep employing as many colleagues as previously. The long-term drop in visitor numbers we are expecting for the foreseeable future, and the consequent loss of revenue, have left us no option but to resize our businesses in line with future demand.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

From Public Books:

Lamenting the shortsightedness of environmental policy—in 1971—U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, deployed a by-now familiar move from the playbook of ecological advocacy. He looked to the future:

Despite its familiarity, U Thant’s statement here is rhetorically complicated. And it continues to inform efforts to tackle climate change to this day. Rather than castigating the present from some abstract future perspective, contemporary environmental defenders often follow U Thant’s lead, grounding their judgments in a singular figure—“some future universal historian,” geologist, or brother from another planet—who sifts through our future remains with fascination and disbelief. The question, then as now, is simple: Will we collectively close our eyes to the future dangers barreling toward us?

But such a question leads inevitably to a second, perhaps even more pressing question: How can we create a scientifically informed history of the future? This question has galvanized a slew of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and activists, who, echoing U Thant’s warning, are turning to speculative nonfiction, a genre that strives to document the years ahead. The vogue for histories of tomorrow is driven primarily by climate breakdown and the Anthropocene. Such anticipatory histories seek to counter a disastrous temporal parochialism unequal to the demands of the warmer, more insecure world. Nonfictional forays into the future, on the one hand, tend to warn us of coming disasters, and on the other, urge us to take action today.

In a spirit of anticipatory memory, writers, artists, and activists encourage us to own the future by inhabiting it in sample form. They encourage us to feel our way forward into the emergent worlds that our current actions are precipitating. They encourage us to break out of our temporal silos and—from our diverse Anthropocene positions—face the challenges that shadow the path ahead.

In the Anthropocene, Clive Hamilton observes, “the present is drenched with the future.” Despite that, powerful economic, technological, and neurological forces intensify our present bias, severing current actions from future fallout. The neoliberal fantasy of infinite short-term growth, the digital splintering of attention spans, and the rewiring of our brains for restless interruption: all favor dissociation. The average American, after all, checks their phone 150 times a day. A succession of staccato inputs now threatens to crowd out futures of remote concern—futures that seem immaterial, in both senses of the term.

Speculative nonfiction has no innate politics. After all, Big Oil has invested heavily in creating documentaries set in the future that present the companies’ energy trajectories in a glowing light. That said, it is progressives who, recognizing that the trend lines all point toward a warmer, less stable climate, have been most insistently adventurous in experimenting with this futuristic documentary form. Again and again, progressives have conscripted speculative nonfiction as an ally against short-term extractive economics, digital dispersion, political prevarication, and ethical inertia.

Link to the rest at Public Books

As he read the OP, PG reflected that readers generally have few problems accepting science fiction as fiction in part because it is set in the future and includes elements that do not exist (or do not exist in the form depicted) at the present time.

From Writer Beware:

I’ve written about this new “beware” twice already (you can see those posts here and here), but it appears to be a growing problem, so I want to put out a more focused warning.

Scammers–the same Philippines-based Author Solutions copycats that I’ve featured numerous times in this blog (also see the long, long list in the sidebar)–are impersonating reputable literary agents and agencies in order to bamboozle writers into buying worthless “services.” Here are the misused names I’ve documented so far; the scam companies they work for are in parentheses:

– Jennifer Jackson of the Donald Maass Literary Agency (TechBooks Media)

– Victoria Marini of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency (Writers Desks)

– Danielle Burby of the Nelson Literary Agency (Writers Desks)

– Nelson Literary Agency (some guy calling himself Jason Smith, Book Scout, with a fake Nelson Agency email address)

. . . .

These approaches are followed by opportunities to spend large amounts of cash. For the Jennifer Jackson scammer, it’s a “review” of your book plus “book insurance and returnability” for a total of $1,400. For the Victoria Marini scammer, the video trailer she’s shilling for “promotional” purposes costs $3,000 (an amazing discount!) For the Danielle Burby scammer, it’s “Submissions to Traditional Publishing Companies” by “Book Scouts” for the wallet-squeezing sum of $5,000. 

Link to the rest at Writer Beware

PG usually doesn’t include live links in the OP’s he excerpts, but made an exception due to the potential danger of these types of operations to overly-credulous authors and other creatives.

PG has received other reports of scam publishers or author service companies, perhaps because some of the crooks have realized that a lot of people are being forced to stay at home and some have decided to write a book.

As a general proposition, PG suggests that your fraud phaser should be permanently set to stun (at a minimum) during these times.

If you want help with your writing, in the US, sign up for a writing class at your local community college (not one that’s just popped up). It shouldn’t cost you much.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Cancel culture notwithstanding, legal commentator Ken White argues that “this is a golden age for free speech in America.” For decades, he notes, the Supreme Court has protected all manner of objectionable speech, from burning the American flag to homophobic protests outside servicemen’s funerals. That’s true—but those victories rest on a broad cultural consensus. If campus norms continue to displace free speech culture, judges and lawyers will eventually start to ignore the First Amendment or, worse, chip away at it until it is meaningless.

Free-speech culture gave us the First Amendment to begin with. It kept free speech alive in the tumultuous 19th century. It reinvigorated the First Amendment in the 20th century. It informs interpretations of the First Amendment today—and it will determine whether free-speech protections will survive.

That’s very much in doubt, considering the state of those norms in higher education. Our organization was founded in 1999. Back then, if Princeton investigated a professor because he wrote an op-ed disagreeing with activist demands, or the public called on Auburn to fire a professor for expressing antipolice views online, or a conservative University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor was hounded to suicide for abrasive public statements, it would be a very bad semester. All this happened within two weeks last month, and the fall semester hasn’t even begun. As students graduate, cancel-culture norms spread beyond campus, to newsrooms, corporate boardrooms—and sooner or later courtrooms.

What is free-speech culture? Folk wisdom like “it’s a free country” is one window into cultural values, and free-speech values pervade our idioms. Sentiments like “to each his own” and “everyone’s entitled to an opinion” can be found all over First Amendment law. “Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much,” the justices observed in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). In Cohen v. California (1971), they declared that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

. . . .

[W]ithout a corresponding culture, free-speech law becomes a mockery. Consider the following constitutional provisions:

• “Everyone shall be guaranteed freedom of thought and speech.”

• “Citizens are guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, assembly, demonstration and association.”

• “Everyone has the right to express and disseminate his/her thoughts and opinions by speech.”

Each of these promises sounds similar to the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause. But Russia, North Korea and Turkey, respectively, lack the free-speech culture necessary to make them real. Even in freer countries such as Spain, Britain and France, people have been imprisoned for rap lyrics, social-media posts, and reading choices.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

YES, YOU HAVE HEARD this story before: we face a serious problem, which is likely to become much worse if we do not take serious measures to stop it now. But the immediate measures we need to take are pretty painful — not as painful as what sufferers in the future will experience, but they are not necessarily us. They may be people we care about, our children or grandchildren, but, even so, their future distress feels less real than actual, albeit lesser, distress happening right now to us (especially to me). Why sacrifice our well-being for their better-being? Economists call this “having a steep discount rate,” the sinister twin of compound interest: we value things in the future less the further out they are. The economists’ language has the clinical asepsis of much of their lexicon and does not quite convey how inevitable, even fated, the intrinsic reaction is.

If you are reading this in the summer of 2020, you do not have to reach far for an example: social distancing. It is inconvenient on a personal level and ruinous on the scale of the economy, but if one adheres to the restrictions then the coronavirus could be controllable: fewer deaths, a functioning health-care infrastructure, time bought to develop plans to restore economic activity without devastating public health. All that good stuff only happens to future people — in this case, to future us in six months — if we grit our teeth and forgo haircuts now. You can evaluate for yourself how well that’s been going.

These sorts of problems yoke the present with the future. However, they also necessarily tie the present to the past, since the past sets the conditions of our present, propelling the trajectory we now have to alter. The complex interactions of the three time frames conflate two distinct issues: how we know what we know about what has been, is, and will be happening; and how we act to solve the problem — a question of knowledge and a question of practice. Each “how” is in turn linked with a “who”: these sorts of challenges can only be tackled with massive coordination, so specific individuals must either take the responsibility of leadership or assume the responsibility of its abdication.

The commonness of these problems does not make them any less frustrating. Debates over the second issue of what to do — which is typically where one starts in an emergency — devolve more or less rapidly to the question of knowledge, because that seems easier to get a handle on. It also does not require anyone to assume present pain. Meanwhile the present turns into the future, and the usurious loan we unwittingly took out will eventually come due.

. . . .

It has been over 50 years since a human first walked on the surface of the Moon. Although there are some noises about returning — and many more about going to Mars — nobody, except possibly China, is seriously contemplating it. A feat that required tremendous ingenuity and courage, it also, of course, required oodles of money. And so we no longer go because of the cash. NASA consumed a mind-blowing 4.41 percent of the federal budget in 1966; in 2019, it was below half a percent.

In his engagingly readable Spacefarers, science writer Christopher Wanjek briefly relates what happened after the Moon landing: once his name was safely embossed on a lunar plaque, President Nixon promptly cancelled the Apollo program. It was time to economize. Enter the Space Shuttle.

. . . .

[Wanjek] wants humans to be out there, and there does not stop at the ISS, about 250 miles up. Indeed, he thinks the returns on investment in the ISS are meager. There have been no exciting indications that terrestrial industrial processes would be better performed in orbit, and much of the science is trivial. From decades of ISS work (and Russian research on the Mir space station beforehand), the most important thing we have learned about microgravity — either in deep space or in free fall — “is to get out of microgravity as quickly as possible.”

Some of the most compelling passages in this book designed to get you excited about space are about how unpleasant space is. All sorts of bad stuff happens to your circulation, your bones, your muscles, and your eyeballs. The radiation is sure to kill you once you get beyond Earth’s magnetic field unless you have lots of shielding. Solar weather is a big deal.

Wanjek is most thorough about the challenges of Mars, but most plausible when it comes to the Moon and asteroids. He has a knack for explaining the practical details of how one might possibly overcome them: how to mine water from the Moon’s regolith and then split it to release oxygen; how to 3-D print radiation shielding from Moon dust; how to manage the temperature extremes; how to treat toxic chemicals that would otherwise frustrate Martian agriculture; and so on. He also works through how to simulate gravity through rotating segments of a spacecraft — without it, the months to Mars will render the passengers so weak they won’t be able to stand even on the 38 percent of Earth’s gravity on the red planet. He devotes a great deal of attention to the “tyranny of the rocket equation”: how to transport material out of the Earth’s gravity well, and how a stable infrastructure could make it less ruinously expensive.

. . . .

Wanjek posits two reasons why we go to space: “war and profits.” During the Cold War, competition between the Soviets and the Americans kept space rockets flying in lieu of nuclear ones. If we want to send crewed missions farther afield than the ISS, then — absent a reprise “Sputnik moment” such as a Chinese Moon landing — it has to be about making money. He discusses space tourism, mining asteroids, and even colonization, though he is cautious about the last until we know whether human physiology can fertilize an embryo, birth a baby, and raise a child to adulthood under conditions of .38 (Mars) or .166 (Moon) of Earth’s gravity. (It’ll never happen in microgravity.) State leadership across the globe has been weak on this front, so the mantle is being seized by private corporations. It will be the anticipation of astronomical profits — the pun fits with Wanjek’s charming proclivity for dad jokes — that will get us to space for good.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

H.G. Wells

From Public Books:

“Spying and fiction are not entirely different processes,” says historian of British espionage Ben Macintyre, in a conversation with master of spy fiction and former intelligence officer John le Carré. “You try to create an artificial world. And the better and more realistic and more emotionally believable you can make that world, as either a spy or a novelist, the better you are going to be at it.” Yet, Charles McCarry, who was a deep-cover operative for the CIA, and the author of the Paul Christopher novels, doesn’t see continuity between spying and fiction but, instead, between the secret and everyday worlds: “The fact of the matter is, the secret world is too much like the ordinary world to be altogether entertaining. The elements of tradecraft that thrill us in books—cover stories, clandestine meetings, dead drops, telephone codes and so on—are techniques familiar to anyone who has ever covered a big story for a newspaper, negotiated a big contract against serious competition or conducted a clandestine love affair.” Fiction and spying can look like each other, and spying and everyday life can look like each other.

What to make, then, of the new glut of women writing about spying—both in fiction and in memoir? On April 28, 2020, Jung H. Pak—a history PhD who spent 10 years working for the Central Intelligence Agency—published Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator. Pak writes as a former intelligence officer, and as a woman former intelligence officer, about a uniquely powerful, brutal, and secretive male leader. Pak’s biography of Kim was published during an obviously fascinating and enormously consequential context: active, ongoing speculation about his health. It also emerged into a specific literary context: innovative writing by women about the work of intelligence. Intelligence work by women is at the heart of new novels and memoirs about women intelligence officers. Books by Lara Prescott and Amarylliss Fox (not to mention books by Kate Atkinson, Lauren Wilkinson, Nada Bakos, and Tracy Walder) show women serving as spies, writing about serving as spies, and, in doing so, interlacing writing and spying.

Recently, women writing about spying—in memoir and fiction—has moved in two directions. In the past, fiction about espionage synched up with the intelligence concerns and capabilities of its day. But, today, fiction about espionage also sets its stories in the past. I focus here on The Secrets We Kept, by Prescott, a novel published late last year but set during the Cold War.

Meanwhile, a new crop of memoirs takes readers inside the lives of women intelligence officers who served in the relatively recent past, whose service is shaped not by the Cold War but by 9/11 and its aftermath. Fox’s Life Undercover is one such memoir and is central to what follows.

The women writers tell women’s stories of writing and spying. The experiences of practicing tradecraft aren’t precisely McCarry’s, and that’s worth discussing. Most importantly, they chronicle what spying looks like and what the everyday looks like, and, meaningfully, insist on their overlap.

For these women, paradoxically, the practice of being a spy and being an ordinary woman are not dissimilar. “I’m neck-deep in a game of make-believe,” laments Fox, “and the game is so convincing, I have no idea when it began. Or the ‘I’ who is playing it.” Sound familiar?

Link to the rest at Public Books

From EquiMed:

Barn sour is a term used by horsemen to describe a horse that doesn’t want to leave home, presenting resistance or complete refusal if you try to ride him away from his comfort area.

Horses become barn sour for various reasons – usually human error in handling or training, not understanding how the horse’s mind works.

As a herd animal, the horse prefers to be with his buddies. He may be reluctant to leave them unless he is well-bonded with the human who is leading or riding him.

Link to the rest at EquiMed

While growing up on ranches and farms (“ranch” in the Mountain West = “farm” in the Middle West), PG often heard his father use the term, “barn sour.” Contra the definition above, PG’s father applied it to horses, cattle and many other domesticated animals. (Pigs, the most intelligent farm animal, are their own separate thing entirely.)

Basically, per PG’s father, when an animal was barn sour, it was failing to thrive because it had been locked inside a confined space for too long and needed to get out in the open air where it could talk to its buddies.

PG decided he was barn sour from being confined to his Coronavirus hermitage for too long. Mrs. PG is always excellent company, but still. So, PG arranged a lunch with a small group of attorney buddies yesterday. (Nobody was contageous, the restaurant had half its tables and booths blocked off, etc., etc.)

We had a wonderful time and (typically for attorneys) talked up a storm. PG learned that nobody likes Zoom Court, but it does fulfill legal requirements and can move some cases along the path to conclusion.

However, Zoom jury trials have not been approved locally, especially in criminal cases where, in the United States and elsewhere, the accused has lots of constitutionally-guaranteed rights and appellate courts will reverse and remand for a new trial if those rights are infringed, sometimes by even a teeny-tiny bit.

The authors of the US Constitution made no mention of Zoom trials (at least in writing).

One of our number, a small woman who prosecutes sex crimes, including sex crimes involving juveniles, has three back-to-back jury trials scheduled as soon as flesh-and-blood judges and juries can come back to the courthouse. In PG’s experience, judges and attorneys (on both sides) dread trials involving sex crimes. A bloody auto accident damages trial is easier to deal with emotionally.

For those who have not experienced the misfortune of practicing law, a criminal jury trial is a legal proceeding in which the defendant’s constitutional rights are most carefully protected. One misstep by whoever is acting on behalf of the state or federal government trying to send bad guys and bad gals to prison and it is quite probable that a mistrial will be declared by the judge.

A mistrial means that the trial has to start all over again from scratch with a new jury. Given how much time jury trials take and how crowded criminal dockets tend to be in many places, a new trial may not be possible for several months. If the victim of the crime has testified before a mistrial is declared, the victim has to tell his/her terrible story all over again in a public trial and has several weeks or months to anticipate doing so.

Defense attorneys (who are ethically obligated to put forth their best efforts on behalf of their clients, regardless of what their personal feelings may be or whether they have advised their clients to accept the offer of a plea bargain instead of taking their chances at a trial before a judge and jury that could easily result in a more severe penalty) are almost always happy to have a mistrial (they’re the ones who will make a motion for a mistrial unless the judge decides one is necessary on her/his own) because witnesses may move to distant lands for good or bad reasons and, sometimes victims tell the prosecuting attorney/district attorney/state’s attorney that they can’t stand the idea of sitting in court talking about the worst day of their lives again.

On many more than one occasion, a mistrial results in a plea bargain on better terms (from the defendant’s perspective) than any plea bargain offered by the prosecutor prior to the mistrial or that a judge is likely to order if a jury deems the defendant to be guilty.

Another factor is that, despite careful preparation on both sides, it is quite possible that surprises will happen during a trial. Witnesses will say surprising things when a lot of strangers, including an intimidating judge, are watching them or something different than what they told counsel during a pre-trial meeting them to go over their testimony, etc., etc.

PG provides this lengthy explanation to provide a bit of perspective about the pressures his friend who prosecutes sex crimes is feeling. PG understands from other attorneys that she is a fierce courtroom presence who is noted for meticulously dotting her legal i’s and crossing her legal t’s (a practice which ultimately results in her having to conduct fewer trials than she would if she weren’t so good at her job.)

Usually, this woman’s criminal trials are separated by at least a few weeks, so the specter of carefully preparing for three jury trials in a row with little time in between each would be intimidating for anyone.

However, in the fashion of almost all social gatherings of attorneys which PG has attended, the lunch conversation consisted of talking shop in a light, witty and intelligent manner that certainly lifted PG’s spirits and, he hopes, those of the other attendees as well.

The lingering effects of lunch beat back barn sourness for PG for a few hours, which was fortuitous since he had a great many complex tasks to complete.

Which is why he didn’t have the time to post yesterday.

PG is having a jammed-up day.

It began with a long out-of-office meeting and continued with a wide range of must-do tasks that took longer than he anticipated (of course).

He has not abandoned TPV or its lovely visitors.

He needs to complete one more must-do task, then he’ll put up some posts albeit probably fewer than he usually does.

From History Extra:

Charlotte Brontë steps into her father’s study. In her hand, she holds a book – a hardback volume bound in cloth, with the words ‘Jane Eyre’ stamped on the cover. “Papa, I’ve been writing a book,” she announces, rather understating the true matter of her achievement. In fact, her novel is completed, published, and is selling at almost record speed. “Have you my dear?” the unsuspecting Reverend Patrick Brontë replies, without looking up. As Charlotte continues, the clergyman slowly realises that his daughter has become a literary sensation, in secret, right under his nose. After some time, Patrick calls in Charlotte’s younger sisters, Emily and Anne: “Charlotte has been writing a book – and I think it is better than I expected.” It is good that he approves of Charlotte’s tale, because he’s about to learn that his other daughters have similar stories to tell…

This conversation, recounted by Patrick years later to Charlotte’s first biographer, occurred at the beginning of 1848. It was a tumultuous year for the Brontës, with glorious highs and tragic lows. But at this point, the Brontë women were happy, little knowing that they were on the brink of legendary – if short-lived – careers. They have since become famed the world over for their intense, dramatic and tragic novels, for which they had plenty of inspiration in their own lives…

. . . .

The tragedies started early for the Brontës. In 1821, when Charlotte was five, Emily was three and Anne was not yet two, they lost their mother to illness. Four years after that, their two eldest sisters both died of tuberculosis in as many months. Five Brontës remained: their father Patrick, an Irish-born, Cambridge-educated vicar, the girls, and their brother Branwell, who was a year younger than Charlotte. Their mother’s sister, Aunt Branwell, also lived with them in the parsonage of the industrial town of Haworth, Yorkshire. The unassuming grey-stone building, in its bleak setting between a graveyard and the vast expanse of the moors, became a much-loved home, to which the sisters always felt a painful pull.

. . . .

Over the next few years, the sisters took up various, generally short-lived, teaching positions. “All three girls hated being teachers and governesses,” says Barker, largely as “they couldn’t spare the time to write about their imaginary worlds, and Charlotte in particular resented the servility of the position.” Anne was the only one to maintain a long-term post, as governess to the Robinson family from 1840-45. Shortly after Anne joined the Robinsons, Charlotte spearheaded a scheme to open their own school. For this they needed a more sophisticated education so, in February 1842, Charlotte (aged 25) and Emily (23), went to a school in Brussels.

. . . .

They pushed through their homesickness to make the most of the opportunity, only returning at the end of 1842 after Aunt Branwell died. Afterwards, Charlotte returned to Brussels alone. She became forlorn and depressed, and also fell in love with her tutor. The painfully one-sided attachment would continue long after she left Brussels at the end of 1843. Back in Haworth, lovelorn Charlotte set about sourcing pupils for the school, but none were found and the entire dream was dropped, with surprisingly little regret.

. . . .

In autumn 1845, Charlotte found some of Emily’s poems and read them, uninvited. Emily was enraged by the intrusion, but the incident gave head-strong Charlotte an idea – if the sisters could gather a collection of poems, they might be able to publish in secret and, if successful, they could become professional writers. They would never have to teach again, nor would they have to worry so much about Branwell’s ability to provide. After calming Emily, Charlotte, who as Barker explains “was the only one ambitious for fame,” convinced her sisters of the plan.

Link to the rest at History Extra

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

John Irving

Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

John Irving

When I was six months pregnant, I moved across the world, and I found myself thinking a lot about containers. First, in order to move I had to put everything I owned, including books, into containers. Then those containers had to be loaded into a shipping container that went across the Atlantic. My old life had to be folded and put away in the trunks of memory as I said goodbye to friends, quit a job I was sorry to leave, broke the lease on my one-bedroom apartment, and signed the paperwork for my spousal visa. And in the third trimester, it had become more and more obvious that my body was itself a container—one that was struggling to contain a writhing, wriggling being.

IMAGE: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

The boxes carrying my things arrived at my new home a few weeks before my due date, and I put my books back on the shelf, not knowing how to organize them. When would I get to read again? As I waited for contractions to start, I read as fast as I could, soaking up the alone time. But it turned out having a baby didn’t mean I couldn’t find time to read. It just meant reading was different. I read on my Kindle app on my iPhone as the baby nursed. I spent long, lonely maternity leave days browsing the shelves at the local library, and then I read my picks while the baby napped.

But what should I read, now that I inhabited this strange, new life? The world was no longer defined by containers—I was outside of all the boxes now, wandering around in a cold new world and watching over a vulnerable, needy being who didn’t know or care what I was thinking about.

I decided to take on a year-long experiment of reading only women authors. My energy to read—and especially to be an engaged, opinionated reader—was dwindling. I wanted to find inspiration and understanding in the voices of other women. It was reductive, I knew, to imagine other women were the solution, but at the same time I craved reductive thinking. I just wanted things to be simple, and to work.

Early in the year, I found a book that let me look inside another new mother’s postpartum mind, and I recognized my own warped perceptions. The book was Little Labors by Rivka Galchen. “She had appeared as an animal,” Galchen writes about her newborn daughter. “A previously undiscovered old-world monkey, but one with whom I could communicate deeply: it was an unsettling, intoxicating, against-nature feeling. A feeling that felt like black magic. We were rarely apart.” Galchen’s book is in fragments, in dream-like observations and factually-presented metaphors that echoed my own disordered internal world. Suddenly, I felt like I was in a container again—a box labeled “Mothers like Rivka Galchen.” I was sure my experiment was working.

Link to the rest at The Millions

Here’s another PG experiment with a new (at least to him) WordPress block.

The two images and the text included with them are called a Media and Text block. PG likes the look and thinks it’s better than putting a big cover photo at the end of the post per one of Amazon Associates SiteStrip embeds.

Feel free to share your responses to intermingled media and images in posts. After viewing other websites that include visual media along with stories/articles, he was concerned that TPV was a little visually boring.

The downside to more image/text combos is that PG tends to wander off into OCD voyages to locate the perfect public domain/royalty-free image, so if he continues to use Media and Text blocks, he’ll do so on an intermittent basis. PG is inclined to match image sizes to text sizes a bit better if he continues to use this particular block (there goes that OCD again), so tweaking the size is likely to be an additional step.

From The Paris Review:

I call the Wig Man. He picks up. “My sister,” I say, “was diagnosed …” He interrupts me because he is driving and he is in a rush. “My store,” he says, “was looted last night.” “My sister,” I want to say, “…” He tells me he gathered all the hair that was left on the floor. “Glass everywhere,” he says. “I filled my Toyota Tacoma with all the hair that was left. I am driving home now,” he says. “Is you sister’s hair long?” he asks. It is. It is very long. “Because if it’s long what your sister should do before treatment begins is cut all her hair off and I will sew it, strand by strand, into a soft net. It’s called a halo,” he says. “I want to help your sister,” says the Wig Man. I imagine his Toyota Tacoma so stuffed with wigs that black and brown and blond hairs press up against the windows. Like animals trapped inside their own freedom. He starts to cry. I am certain he is driving across a bridge. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” he says.

“Neither do I,” I don’t say.

Sewing a wig strand by strand is called ventilating. I watch a tutorial. With a needle you draw each strand through a lace net and knot it on itself. The needle goes in and then out like thousands of tiny breaths. Ventilating a wig takes the patience of the dead. Each knotted strand is like a person sewn into a free country. The knot is tight, and the net is manufactured. “Of course my life matters,” says Eli my six-year-old. “Why wouldn’t it matter?”

My sister decides not to cut her hair. Instead she lets it fall out, slowly and then suddenly. She yawns, rises, and climbs up the stairs. She leaves behind a trail of blondish gold thread, like a princess coming undone. I write six different essays on Rapunzel. All of them are terrible. I help my sister into bed, though she prefers I not touch her. On her nightstand are six glittering tiaras. She wears one to chemo. Another to breakfast. “Isn’t it strange,” I say, “that I write about fairy tales and you are a fairy tale princess?” She looks at me hard. “A sick princess,” she says.

Of all the fairy tales, Rapunzel gives me the most difficult time. 

. . . .

I never call the Wig Man back. Instead, my mother buys my sister four wigs made out of strangers’ hair. Two brown ones, and two blond. My sister refuses to try the wigs on so my mother tries them on instead.

. . . .

“Did you know,” says my sister, “that in Disney’s Tangled Rapunzel lives inside a kingdom called Corona?” “That can’t be right,” I say.

I cut off all my hair. A twelve-inch braid long enough for nobody to climb. I throw the braid in the trash and then remove it from the trash. It’s soft and dumb. “I can’t look at it,” says my mother. “Get it away from me,” says my sister. I put it in an envelope and send it to a dear friend’s brother, an artist who makes Torahs and animals and money out of human hair and skin. I mean it as an act of solidarity, but I get the feeling my sister and mother read it as an act of pointless sacrifice. To punish Rapunzel for betraying her captivity, the enchantress winds her braids around her left hand, cuts them off, then takes Rapunzel to a wilderness and leaves her there. “See,” I say to my sister. “It’s not so bad.” She looks at my short hair, and a small forest grows between us.

Other than Disney’s, in no version of Rapunzel is Rapunzel’s hair magical. It can’t bring back the dead, or heal a broken bone, or keep a woman young forever. It can’t light up dark water. It can’t be thrown like a lasso so Rapunzel can glide from mountaintop to mountaintop. It doesn’t, like his hair does for Samson, give her god’s power or the strength to kill a lion with her bare hands. It cannot keep a man from being shot for his blackness. It’s just hair.

“I’m sure Rapunzel is wonderful and not terrible,” emails a friend, “but also there’s something Sisyphean about Rapunzel …” 

. . . .

Rapunzel, my sister. I am using my sister’s cancer to write about the impossible because it’s impossible my sister has cancer.

. . . .

It is late afternoon and my sister is sleeping. In the dining room, my mother has lined up all the wigs on their Styrofoam heads. Like four extra daughters. She keeps walking by them and smoothing their hair with her hand. 

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From Etymology of the Day:

Beginning as a slang term in 19th-century London, the stir in stir-crazy means “prison.” According to the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology, stir may have originated as a variation on Start, a nickname criminals gave to Newgate, a notorious prison throughout London’s history. Stir, if this is true, broadened out from “Newgate” specifically to “prison” in general.

The Oxford English Dictionary first cites stir in Henry Mayhew’s 1851 journalistic investigation, London Labour and the London Poor. His interviewees mention folks “in stir” or “out of stir,” or, as Mayhew helpfully glosses, jail or prison.

By the early 20th century, stir had traveled to the United States, where crazy was added to describe “a prisoner who has succumbed to prison-induced insanity,” as slang lexicographer Jonathon Green defines it. He points out many colorful permutations: Stir-bug, stir-nut, stir-psycho, and stir-simple all referred to such prisoners who had gone stir-crazy, while stir-batty, stir-happy, and stir-looney were other ways to characterize the experience. US prison slang used stir for other terms throughout the 20th century, too, such as a stir hustler (“one who has mastered the ‘art’ of incarceration”) and stir lawyer (“a fellow prisoner who offers advice based on his own purported legal expertise”). Green also finds stir active more recently, used for “time served in prison” come the 2010s.

Link to the rest at Etymology of the Day

The truth is that Trout, like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and many others, writes parables. These are set in frames which have become called, for no good reason, science fiction. A better generic term would be ‘future fairy tales’. And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near.

Philip José Farmer