• Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
• “Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention.” (I like that phrase ‘phenomenal world’ to what I’ve always problematically referred to ‘the real world’)
• Why do we need words for talking about metafiction? To distinguish between the world within fiction and the world outside it.
• This distinction is more important now that more and more writers are deliberately violating logic and using language for its own sake.
• Although metafictional elements can be found in pretty much any work of fiction, metafiction as a literary device is relatively new in Western literature — perhaps 40 years old. (I adjusted from 20 years in a book which is 20 years old.)
• Examples of metafiction in children’s literature first occurred from the 1980s.
• There are two main types of metafiction.
• The first is to parody a well-known work of literature.
• The second is to consciously discuss the art of writing.
• Metafiction is prevalent in experimental post-modern literature, but shouldn’t be regarded as only an experiment for experiment’s sake.
• The message of a metafictional story is often that the world itself is artificial, constructed, man-made. It asks the question: What is the boundary that delimits fiction and reality?
• In books for young readers, polyphony is one example of a metafictive device. Polyphony is “multi-voicedness”.
• Metafiction isn’t a genre. It’s a trend within a genre.
• Metafiction in children’s books is different from metafiction in books for adults. This is because metafiction always relies on past experience of the reader. Young readers don’t have much experience.
• In children’s literature, metafiction is sometimes obvious to both the child and the adult co-reader, but often it is obvious only to the adult co-reader, resulting in a story which can appeal to all ages.
• Daniel Handler is a good example of a modern metafictive children’s author. His books are written by ‘Lemony Snicket’, and he even continues this gag with him to his stage presentations. Adult readers know that the Series Of Unfortunate Events wasn’t written by one of the characters from inside, that a publishing world exists, with a real-world author behind the name. As for picture books, Mo Willems is a good example.
• A Pack Of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean, Fade by Robert Cormier and Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers are also metafictive in that their endings make the reader wonder how much of it is really true.
• Directly addressing the reader is a type of metafictive narrative device. Maria Gripe used it in her books about Elvis, and it has been developed by many modern Scandinavian children’s writers in particular.
• A metafictional work has: the writer (e.g. Daniel Handler), the implied writer (e.g. Lemony Snicket), the narrator (the “I” of the novel), the implied reader (“you”) and the real reader. Other (non-metafictional) works might have the writer, the narrator and the reader. Simple.
• “As long as anything can happen in a book it can also happen in real life, since it always happens more in real life.” – Tormod Haugen, “A Novel About Merkel Hanssen, and Donna Winther, and The Big Escape (1986), a metafictional YA Norwegian book

Reference: Maria Nikolajeva’s Children’s Literature Comes Of Age, with a couple of more up-to-date examples of my own.

“I perceive, the backs of young ladies’ drawings, like the postscripts of their letters, are the most important and interesting part of the concern.”

- from The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

The Digital Ghosts Of Google Street View

Especially this very weird half cat which keeps making me laugh, despite me liking cats.

Found Notes, a Tumblr blog

And more disturbingly…

Meet The Men Who Spy On Women Through Their Webcams, or, why you should avoid webcams on your PC, from Ars Technica.

Creep Shots is presently on Tumblr after being removed from Reddit, and you can help to get rid of them, again, by helping to flood Tumblr’s inbox with complaints. (abuse@tumblr.com)

Creepshot also has a Twitter account (@creepshot). You can first block them, and then report for harassment from your list of blocked accounts.

Oh boy. That’s it for another year. To be honest, that season six finale could have served as the Big Finale and it would’ve still been okay. I can’t wait to see what’s in store for Don Draper next season, even though I spent most of season six thinking that he was now the least interesting character of them all. Finally, at the eleventh hour, he embarks on a character arc.

from Flavorwire

In the meantime I can rewatch some of the old ones and read speculation and analysis from my favourite TV bloggers:

• Slate
• Persephone Magazine
• Speakeasy
• Overthinking It
• The Good Men Project
• Tom and Lorenzo
• The Cut
• Paste
• NYT
• The AV Club
• Flavorwire
• Vulture
• Grantland
• Bitch Magazine

See also:

• Mad Men Reading List from ad broad
• 19 Incredibly Beautiful Mad Men Illustrations from BF
• Dear Joan Holloway: The 60s Will Pass from The Paris Review
• I read this and thought of Don Draper and Pete Campbell: Givers vs. Takers: The Surprising Truth about Who Gets Ahead
• The Mad Men With Things Drawn On Them Tumblr is very funny.
• Recipes for your Mad Men Party
• Adam Gopnik explains the 40 Year Rule of pop culture, with Mad Men as an example
• Advertisements from the Mad Men era, from Fast Co.Design
• The Foreign Language of Mad Men from The Atlantic
• Season Six In Pictures from Esquire
• Is “Mad Men” the Greatest Novel of Our Time? from Big Think

Here’s what I think about writing in books:

1. Don’t do it to library books. Scribbling in pencil is no better than doing it in ink.

2. Writing on your own books is one privilege of buying them with your own money, so why not?

But if I happened across this, I probably wouldn’t mind so much…

It’s possible to treat books with too much reverence. I know of someone who treats books so carefully she doesn’t even like to crack the spine of a paperback. But for me, reading with a pen in my hand is a surefire way to absorb more of what I’ve read, and this is the main reason why I bought my own copies of the very expensive university texts rather than make use of the ones on short-term loan in the library.

I especially like books with nice, wide margins and double line spacing. This kind of book design is almost asking to be filled.

This is a book I go back to frequently, and I find it just as interesting to see what I chose to make a note of a few years ago:

marginalia in How Fiction Works by James Wood

According to Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the best way to retain what you’ve read is to take notes on the material itself, then after you’ve read a chapter, write down a summary of what you’ve just read. If the book isn’t broken into chapters, write a one page summary after ten pages. (That’s a tip from Daniel Coyle.)

- summarised at Farnam Street blog: How To Retain More Of What You Read

Apart from the advantage of better retention, an annotated book means that no other book quite like yours exists in the entire world, regardless of its print-run.

See Also:

To Note or Not to Note: How Marginalia Changed the Way I Read from Book Riot

Medieval monks bitched a lot on the margins of books they wrote.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Google Story this week, by Vise and Malseed, in which the Google Books project is described. My own experience of university libraries is of reading books full of underlining, scribbles and tiny Chinese characters squished between the lines. Yet I haven’t seen much of that when I do a Google book search. I wonder if my own university library was particularly bad for marginalia compared to the likes of Harvard and Oxford. Is marginalia similar to a wall of graffiti, or a toilet door, in which a little encourages more, leading to an entire library culture of marginalia?

See Best of the Art of Google Books from Flavorwire

***

Someone at The Millions argues a case for David Foster Wallace’s footnotes probably getting him laid. I wouldn’t know. I’m not attempting David Foster Wallace until I’ve read a Dostoevsky. I do know that I find it annoying when I keep having to look at footnotes, then re-finding my position in the main text, when the footnotes really should’ve been a part of the main text in the first place.

High place phenomenon is that weird urge you get to jump off a bridge.

I don’t get that. I get a strange variation on that. I remember standing on a bridge one time holding a tennis ball. I wondered how hard it would be to get the tennis ball back if I dropped it. So I dropped it, entirely without meaning to. Sure enough, it was no easy job getting the tennis ball back.

In London I never liked standing at the front of the queue to get on a rush hour underground train. I always felt like I’d be pushed by the people behind me into the oncoming train and fall onto the tracks. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to push someone in front of me. But don’t worry, I never tried it. And I stay right away from trains these days.

Because there’s always the tennis ball.

Last night’s bookclub discussion dwelt for a short while upon whether Anne Bronte meant for Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to be a sympathetic character or not. Markham is a violent man by today’s standards, and it’s doubtful that Helen had a good second marriage.

We ended up discussing the life of the author as we tried to work out what the book meant. But is there a danger in doing so? In a world where author’s lives are increasingly public (due to media and social media), is there a danger that fans will look too closely at an author’s life and neglect to look at the words of the novel itself?

Is this something authors worry about, especially when writing a particularly nasty/racist/sexist character — and most especially when creating such a character who suffers no punishment within the world of the story? What a nasty character, we might think. It must take a nasty author to create such a thing. Whereas in fact, the author may think and act the exact opposite, putting it on the table for us to consider. If you’ve seen some of our greatest living crime writers in interview, you may be struck by how benign they are. Some of them are the sweetest little old ladies. We’re told that when crime writers get together they have a jolly time. If they harbored any nastiness in the first place, it’s all been purged in their fiction.

Are there tricks authors use to make it quietly clear that it’s the characters talking, not the authors themselves? Are some voices/points of view more likely to get the ‘presumptuous mimetic’ treatment?

MIMESIS AND SEMIOSIS

The mimetic way of looking at literary character: Imagining the character is a real person, based on the view that literature is a direct reflection of reality. A mimetic character is presupposed to “mean” or “represent” something. For example, you can give a literary character a Marxist, feminist etc. significance, presupposing that a character is typical for her class/gender.

The semiotic way of looking at literary character: Presupposing that characters, like any other textual element, is made of words alone.

The danger of the mimetic approach to characters is that we can easily ascribe to them features that the author had no intention of providing, merely because “girls always like to gossip”, “boys are naughty,” “schoolteachers are insensitive,” and so on. We can further ascribe to them backgrounds not found in the text, merely on the basis of our experience. … It is equally dangerous, and in my opinion illegitimate, to ascribe to literary characters traits extrapolated from real people, which is easily done when novels contain at least some autobiographical elements. For instance, although there are obvious similarities between Jo March and the author of Little Women, I would not be prepared to search for motivations behind Jo’s behaviour in Louisa M. Alcott’s biography.

- Maria Nikolajeva, Rhetoric of Character In Children’s Literature

For a New Zealand example, I submit that Janet Frame was the author most heavily subjected to pressure from the press to reveal where her fictional and real worlds overlapped and diverged. I suspect this went some way in explaining her aversion to interviews. She gave only a few in her entire lifetime. Perhaps she wrote her autobiography partly to answer the questions, hoping this would relieve her of the requirement to talk incessantly about her life.

JANET FRAME ON ‘GENUINE FICTION’

This is from one of those rare radio interviews, transcribed and published in Landfall 178 (Volume forty-five, June 1991) between Janet Frame and Elizabeth Alley.

Elizabeth Alley: In the autobiography you seem more willing than in the fiction to open some of the doors about yourself and your life – to correct some of the myths that surround you.

Janet Frame: I wanted to write my story, and you’re right of course, it is possible to correct some things which have been taken as fact and are not fact. My fiction is genuinely fiction. And I do invent things. Even in The Lagoon which has many childhood stories, the children are invented and the episodes are invented but they are mixed up so much with part of my early childhood. But they’re not quite, they’re not the true, stories. To the Is-Land was the first time I’d written the true story. For instance, Faces in the Water was autobiographical in the sense that everything happened, but the central character was invented. But with the autobiography it was the desire really to make myself a first person. For many years I was a third person – as children are. ‘They’, ‘she’… and as probably the oppressed minority has become, ‘they’. I mean children are forever ‘they’ until they grow up.

EA: For a long time you really were quite reluctant to discuss anything that had to do with the genesis or meaning of your work.

JF: Well I write, you see. I don’t tell about my life. I just write and that is my telling, but in order to set down a few facts and tell my story, this is my say.

My husband loves awful movies. The worse the better, if that makes sense. He borrows them from a guy at work who also loves bad movies. I suspect they love to complain about them. It’s like a competition to see who can find the worst one. Recently it was Hellboy. Any movie based on a computer game is also a great contender. After my husband has watched a terrible movie he inevitably finds me to roll his eyes and groan. Yet he watched the entire thing. Every. Single. Time.

I have wondered if I’m a movie snob because I refuse to waste time on these high action, high concept, low-aiming films. I watch a film to be moved emotionally. I prefer indie movies, which don’t follow the predictable script.

In short, we watch movies for different reasons. While I’m most likely to have spent my day illustrating or looking after a preschooler, my husband spends his days programming. Intellectually, these are of completely different intensity. So I conclude that terrible movies exist for a reason: to allow an audience to completely zone out.

How Did This Get Made? a podcast with Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas and June Diane Raphael. If you’re a connoisseur of awful movies, this is for you. I have listened to a few of them but I haven’t seen any of the films they talk about. I’m pretty sure the worst I’ve seen is Poltergeist 3. That was bad.

What we learn from awesomely bad movies. Nico Lang at Thought Catalog muses over a history of enjoying terrible movies and concludes in a philosophical way that we should all keep watching them.

What Kind Of Book Reader Are You? from The Atlantic is about reading, not watching films, but one type of reader is “The Hate Reader. Oh, you. You pretend to be curmudgeonly, you do, but you really just devour the reading you do in a different way.” Anyhow, I guess that means you can be a Hate Watcher.

“Stars Diss Hollywood”: Or why are there so many “shit movies”? from Go Into The Story

Visual Proof That Movies Are Getting Worse, from GOOD

The tomboy archetype in children’s fiction is an excellent example of abjection. Rather than accept their own femininity, heroines such as Jo march and Anne Shirley suppress it by manifesting nonfeminine behaviour. Both characters have to subdue their hot tempers, incompatible with feminine norms; Anne is also literally silenced as she abandons her imaginative, poetic language. Cross-dressing is another way of denying one’s body and gender. In contemporary novels, the grotesque archetype can be stretched quite far, since young women’s unwomanly manners are tolerated slightly more than in Jo March’s days.

…

One of the strategies for successful individuation of female characters is androgyny, which we see clearly in a growing number of contemporary novels, especially if we treat this concept broadly, including social androgyny as opposed to biological.

… girls are double oppressed: as women and as children. This implies that in a children’s novel, a female character’s development is more universal than in the mainstream, where the femininity is overt and explicity. Not least, girls’ fiction is historically a relatively recent genre; therefore, masculine patterns are “default values” in children’s fiction, as in many other fields.

- The Rhetoric Of Character In Children’s Literature by Maria Nikolajeva

Lists of Tomboys In Fiction – a Wikipedia category

Problems with the word ‘tomboy’ as a thing: To be a tomboy does not challenge gender norms, it merely reinforces them – boys do this and girls do that. Therefore, it is time that tomboy falls away from our vocabulary just like other derogatory terms have.

from Why The Word Tomboy Has To Go

(I prefer hoyden.)

“You’re only as good as your record collection”

–DJ Spooky via Austin Kleon

Whenever I spend the night at the house of a relative I’m surprised at how much the background media (along with lighting) affects the entire atmosphere of a home: the TV channel, the radio station, the music, the way some families are happy to shout through walls, the power of the neighbours’ speakers.

We live in a very quiet house, happily, in a very uneventful part of the world. (Mostly when I take the dog for a walk I don’t see another single person.) I have no time at all for morning breakfast shows, or for any sort of daytime TV. This is something I share with my husband and I believe it’s one of the main criteria for happy co-habitation. If you can’t stand newstalk radio it’s definitely something to bring up on a first date. Both myself and my husband have a long history of turning off radios which nobody appears to be listening to.

My aversion to daytime TV isn’t borne of some puritanical ethic whereby I think watching TV during the day is sinful, but rather the fact that cheap, cheesy programming full of infomercials, along with exploitative talk-show type crap is broadcast before three in the afternoon.

This is followed by the mostly noisy children’s shows, with low-budget theme songs and insanely high-pitched voices. Here in Australia we have Giggle and Hoot — who is popular, I’ll admit, and I can hear him coming from the kid’s iPad as I write — but I worry for that guy’s voice. One of these days the wind’s going to change.

Can music change your mindset for the worse?

The answer to that is ‘yes’, if you’re the man who was choked to death by his girlfriend because he wouldn’t stop singing Thrift Shop. I believe someone’s neighbour was shot after playing Celine Dion’s I Will Always Love You over and over again, but I can’t find any Internet reference to that and may well be making it up. Oh well. False memories are telling.

Why did that Nickelback fan love the love that song so much when his girlfriend couldn’t stand it? Who understands the nature of earworms? I’ve had Quadrille by Paolo Conte in my head for an entire week. Listen to it if you dare. (Darn. Now I’m done for, for another entire week of Greek dancing in the kitchen. Particularly troubling since that’s not a Greek song.)

People are studying this stuff. Apparently, background music can affect your perceptions of wine. Extend this thought and shopping malls might learn to manipulate us all into buying more merchandise. I can see why there are funds to study this possibility. Might it also be used to good effect in the classroom? (My own attempts at playing music in the classroom were largely unsuccessful due to ridiculously flimsy walls. On one occasion the principal wondered who was throwing a party.)

You won’t be surprised to know that our reactions to music involve hormones. The more I read about hormones, the more I conclude that none of us has a single personality between us: We’re all just driven by hormones. We may have no free will whatsoever. With that depressing possibility, bear in mind that if you’re someone who gets the shivers when listening to certain music, dopamine is your reason. (from Nine Facts That Will Change The Way You Think About Music) Classical music can give me the shivers, especially the soundtrack to Frida. I’ve avoided watching the film in case the film ruins the soundtrack. (That happened with The Mission.)

On the other hand, Masters Of War by Bob Dylan makes me yearn for a punching bag. That’s how effective it is at making me mad about war.

Certain other songs take me right back to a previous part of my life in the same way a smell can. Nothing takes me back to 1996 Japan quite like the Young Love album by the Southern All Stars, especially the song Ai No Kotodama, which is sung in Japanese, but in a weirdly false American English accent. So it follows that if you want to revisit (or dwell on) certain eras of your life, listen to music you played a lot during that time. There’s nothing like a relationship break-up to ruin an entire collection of songs, after all.

Trying to be happier works when listening to upbeat music. This is obviously more complicated than saying ‘This piece of music will make you happy’.

It seems clear to me that even if music can’t Change Your Life, it can definitely affect your mindset in the moment. And over a career of music-listening? Sure, I guess your music will affect your life.

See also: Why You May Want To Bring Your Own Music To The Casino from Big Think

The Psychology of Wealth from TSP

Will reading make you rich? from Salon

How do you get someone to lose interest in their hobby? Pay them to do it from io9

10 Things More Likely To Happen Than Winning The Mega Millions from Untitled Magazine

The mathematical law that shows why wealth flows to the 1% from The Guardian

The Queen Of Versailles, a movie length documentary, is perhaps the most depressing thing I have seen this year.

And this movie-length documentary is the best display of genuine assholery ever.

College Is Only Good for Helping Rich People Get Richer from GOOD

I’ve never given poor people credit for having noble souls, on the pretext that they are poor and only too well acquainted with life’s injustices. But I have always assumed that they would be united in their hatred of the propertied classes. Gegene has set the record straight on that score and taught me this: if there is one thing that poor people despise, it is other poor people.

- The Elegance Of The Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

The psychological effect of poverty is what lasts. You can send in rice to heal them and for energy but beware of giving energy to desperate people. They’re going to use it…. The hunger is bad but then you’d need about nine million therapists, who’d never be equipped anyway.

- Frank McCourt on Writing About Poverty

• On Being Broke vs. Being Poor from Jezebel
• What ‘Girls’ and ‘Shameless’ Teach Us About Being Broke and Poor from The Nation
• In Rust Belt, a teenager’s climb from poverty, from The Washington Post
• You Can’t Afford To Lose Your Temper When You’re Poor, as well as a few other things, from Blue Milk
• Rachel Hills points out that ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ is a false dichotomy.
• Is there such a thing as ‘the privileged poor’? from Rachel Hills at Daily Life
• Why Do The Poor Become Parents? from The Dish

The Mary Sue shared this short video. It’s Dustin Hoffman getting emotional about the epiphany he had after dressing up as a woman for Tootsie (1982). This is an interview from 2012, so I find it really interesting that the experience of dressing like a woman still affects him emotionally after all those years.

I’m reminded of the discussion we had at book club last month. I am the youngest at our book club by a long shot: every other woman was somewhere between 50 and 83. I find it fascinating to regularly attend a group outside my own generation.

We got to talking about beauty, and I argued that expectations to be beautiful have probably gotten a lot worse in the last few decades, especially for young women, and increasingly so for young men.

And then one of the older women pointed something out which I had not considered before: In the early part of last century, any woman could be pretty. Beauty hinged on your dress, your make-up, in short, how much money you had. Since the democratization of fashion, in which almost anyone can afford a cheap imitation of a luxury item, beauty has turned to the body itself. We have now been brainwashed into thinking that beauty depends on our ability to sculpt and mould our flesh like Plasticine. And if we don’t look like a supermodel it’s because we haven’t tried hard enough, or exercised enough, or eaten the right food. If we have wrinkles it’s because we’ve spent too much time frowning, or in the sun, or because we need some botox. In short, the beautification process has moved inwards, and is directly to do with our bodies, not with our accouterments. Beauty has become very personal, and it’s not a meritocracy, if it ever was.

I’m not looking forward to the day when our five-year-old daughter realises that only a select few get to be Beautiful. Whether she fits that description or not is irrelevant: it’s a harsh lesson either way. At the moment she has her own idea of beauty, and it’s the old-fashioned view: In order to feel beautiful, all she needs to do is put on a pink dress and, ideally, a plastic tiara.

Did Dustin Hoffman share this view of beauty before he actually tried it for himself, realising instead that there’s a limit to how pretty he could become with feminine accouterments and make-up? I wonder if a younger actor would have those same expectations.

di·chot·o·my /dīˈkätəmē/: Noun

1. A division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.
2. Repeated branching into two equal parts.

***

NATURE/NURTURE

The nature/nurture divide is a false one, since the experience we have in our lives will change the physical structures of our brains or our production of hormones. There is no unchanging biological reality, free from history, just as there is no blank slate on which the finger of experience writes. Our genetic inheritance helps to determine how we filter and respond to experience, and our experience modifies how our genetic inheritance expresses itself.

- from Living Dolls: The return of sexism, by Natasha Walter

All parents are dichotomous; what we really want is a child genius who is perfectly normal.

- paraphrased from Chocky, by John Wyndham

***

ATHEIST/AGNOSTIC

Atheism and agnosticism are not two mutually exclusive states of being. In fact, you’re either an atheist agnostic, or an atheist gnostic or a theist agnostic or a theist gnostic.

For more on that see The A Word, from Camels With Hammers at FTB, and Why Don’t All Theists Uncertain of God’s Existence Call Themselves Agnostics? also from FTB, and Since When Is Not Believing In God An ‘Agnostic’ Position? from Patheos

What’s the deal with agnosticism? is a video from The Atheist Voice explaining this same thing.

MAN/WOMAN

The idea of consistently and inflexibly gender-typed individuals is [under dispute]. That is, there are not two distinct genders, but instead there are linear gradations of variables associated with sex, such as masculinity or intimacy, all of which are continuous.

- from GENDER DICHOTOMY IS A FAIRY TALE WE HAVE BEEN TELLING OURSELVES TO SLEEP AT NIGHT, The Mary Sue

HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL

“Heterosexuality needs homosexuality, to be reassured that it is different. It also needs the illusion of dichotomy between the orientations to maintain the idea of a fence, a fence that has a right (normal, good) and a wrong (abnormal, evil) side to be on, or fall from. To the extent that we collaborate in seeing homosexuality as an opposite polarity (not part of a diverse range of human sexuality), we perpetuate this unhealthy, unrealistic, hierarchical dichotomy.”

~ Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu, Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out

FICTION/NON-FICTION

“Fiction is truer than most of the nonfiction we read because in fiction one can stay closer to the facts. Novels are there as a social tool to bring the news and make readers understand that people are more alike than they are different. And while those differences can be significant, the only way we can really touch each other’s shoulders is through fiction. We only have each other.”

- Kathleen Gerard

FEMINIST/HUMANIST

Since the backlash against feminism as a movement striving for female equality, quite a few women (in particular) are rejecting the word — most recently in the news is Susan Sarandon —  saying that they’d prefer to be called a ‘humanist’, not a ‘feminist’.

Here’s the problem with that:

Humanism is not really an alternative to feminism. Humanism is a cultural and educational philosophy that defines mankind as capable of betterment through study and reason. In this case, a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet: Though there are various definitions of feminism, there really is no synonym, no other word that accurately describes [feminist] beliefs.

– Ellen Page and Toni Collette are feminists, but Susan Sarandon is not? from Ms Magazine

Quick, quick, what’s the capital of Australia? Huh? Huh?

If you answered ‘Sydney’ YOU’RE WRONG.

It’s Canberra. About two hours’ drive inland and southish of Sydney.

I live in Canberra. Sort of. Just across the border. But if I tell you the name of my village you won’t know where that is. So I just say I live in Canberra, unless I’m in a place where Canberrans aren’t welcome, and then I saw I’m from country New South Wales. Fortunately we don’t have to drive around Australia with ACT (Australian Capital Territory) on our numberplates. I’ve heard that gives you grief.

Our small village is just down the road from Yass, which Americans — apparently — find funny.

Another hint: It’s not Scabby Range, Mount Fairy, or Dog Trap Road and it’s not Goorooyarroo either, though I’d pay good money just to have that as my address.

How does your home town rate in fiction?

Canberra doesn’t fare so well, nor in travel memoirs come to think of it. You rarely read from authors waxing lyrical about the place. Instead you get something like:

Nick stayed overnight in Adelaide. He had another press conference in Canberra the following day and was booked on a commercial flight early in the morning. He could have flown out that afternoon but he preferred to spend as little time in Canberra as possible – he found it a sterile place.

- Judy Nunn, from Maralinga

By the way, this is Judy Nunn:

Yep. Ailsa from Home and Away also writes fiction.

My favourite description of Canberra is from a travelogue by Bill Bryson:

“I glanced at my watch, appalled to realize it was only ten minutes after ten, and ordered another beer, then picked up the notebook and pen and, after a minute’s thought, wrote, “Canberra awfully boring place. Beer cold, though.” Then I thought for a bit more and wrote, “Buy socks.” . . . Then I decided to come up with a new slogan for Canberra. First I wrote, “Canberra — There’s Nothing to It!” and then “Canberra — Why Wait for Death?”"

- from In A Sunburned Country

Bryson then describes how every street corner looks the same. What he doesn’t mention is the by-law in Canberra, in which companies aren’t allowed to stick signage on roads because, well, they’re ugly, and detract from that ‘country town’ feel.

This is all well and good, except when you can’t find a place. I drove up and down a very long road one time searching for The Hilton. No signage. No masses of people to ask, either, this being a ‘country capital’ and all, but I eventually gate-crashed a Perisan carpet exhibition and sure enough, all the Canberrans know exactly where it is. (Right next to the Persian carpet exhibition, as it happens.) So I have to agree, Canberra is a bastard of a place to get lost in.

from The Book Show – interview with John Mullan

Ramona Koval: There’s so many things in this book that I wanted to talk to you about. You say that the British novel took a long time to discover a sense of place, and the discovery of weather in the novel only happened in the 19th century. What was going on?

John Mullan: Both those things, if you read novels, I think the sense of place…if you read novels until the early 19th century, apart from London and occasionally Bath (these are the two places you go to in 18th century novels which are distinct), all the other places are sort of generic places; there’s the countryside, there’s the open road and there are inns where you stop and every inn is just like every other inn, and every village is just a sort of general English village.

And then in the early 19th century, the person who really did it actually was Walter Scott, and he made Lowland Scotland and Edinburgh a kind of place that people right the way throughout Europe thought that they knew. It was picturesque and it was romantic and it was associated with legends and ruins and old stories, and his novels were full of old stories, and he made at least part of Scotland a place that in the imagination readers could be tourists of, almost. So before, more famously at the end of the 19th century, Thomas Hardy did that for Wessex, before Scott the idea that particular places apart from London could live in the imagination wasn’t something novelists thought of.

After Scott, the sense of place became something that novelists routinely did and now we expect it, almost. We expect it as something that novelists are careful about, getting their setting right. And equally weather. I think it was Jane Austen who discovered weather, really. Until she came along, occasionally in novels when somebody has to take shelter there’s a big storm, but the sense that novelists are the kind of people who notice the small details of ordinary life didn’t include doing the weather. Jane Austen…one of the many ways in which she…she’s thought of as rather a staid writer but in fact she’s incredibly innovative, I think, and one of the many little things she did was she discovered how a novelist could use the weather in their plot.

Over and over again it happens, and I’ll mention one small example; at the end of what I think is her greatest novel, one of the greatest novels ever, Emma, there’s a scene where Emma and Mr Knightly basically declare their love for each other. This is the climax of the novel, a climax of a novel which was full of misunderstandings and people not saying what they really feel. They do this because the weather suddenly changes. They’re going to take a walk around the garden and the weather looks inclement so they’re not going to do it, and you’re led to understand by the narrative that if they hadn’t taken this walk round the garden, if the weather hadn’t suddenly cleared up, they wouldn’t have been able to have this conversation, and it’s actually quite possible that they would have gone on feeling these things for each other and yet not declaring them and you wouldn’t have had the happy ending. It’s as if suddenly, miraculously the clouds, on a typical English day, clear away, the sun comes out, we’ll go for the walk, we’ll have the happy ending.

Humans offer an interesting example of sexual selection. In many traditional societies men go to considerable lengths to control the sexual and therefore reproductive potential of women, including enforcing celibacy until marriage, dire penalties for adultery and even surgical procedures such as clitoridectomy. While such attempts can never have been entirely successful, there’s no doubt that historically they have limited the mate choices available to women. Within the last few decades in western societies, however, women have, by and large, gained control of their reproduction. Liberated and armed with contraceptives, they now represent a powerful evolutionary force that is busy shaping the men of tomorrow. That’s because, through the men they choose to father their children, women are manifesting in flesh the ideal mate (or as close as they can attain to it) that exists in their minds. Over evolutionary time this selection must and will change the nature of men.

- Tim Flannery, from Here On Earth

In what ways is sexual selection being influenced by men?

Sort-of Related Link: The Best Dads in Literature

I had a university lecturer who stuttered. He had recently retired, and had come back to the Religious Studies department because his replacement had been dismissed under secret circumstances, though we suspected it had something to do with her not-so-secret hatred of all things Christian. (I guess the Religious Studies department aims for an academic approach rather than a fervent one.)

Anyway, this elderly man introduced his stutter along with his name by explaining that after his nerves calm down so does his stutter, and that after a while we’d hardly notice it. I was filled with admiration for this man, who had built an entire career on lecturing to large groups of people — a task many people without any speech difficulty whatsoever would find daunting. I wondered how long it took him to get to that place.

Due to the inadequacy of our previous lecturer, I was completely baffled about everything Christian, and had no idea where to start writing about some highly specific and esoteric topic regarding The Holy Bible. So I did what I was slowly being trained not to: I actually visited a lecturer during office hours and requested personalised help. My experience of university lecturers thus far had been one of condescending dismissiveness. But this little old man with the quiet manner and the severe stutter seemed approachable, so as a timid first year student, I did make my way along the corridors of the dark and dingy Religious Studies department (which I’m sure had a whiff of togas and lentils), and I did knock on his door.

As a consequence, I had the most helpful and kindhearted staff-student interaction that I experienced at university. One on one, his stammer was much less. He directed me to a certain book in the library*, and so I went, and it was helpful and I walked away with a good grade before promptly forgetting everything I ever read on the subject. (Not to mention the subject itself. Such is a university education.)

Ever since then I’ve thought that people with stutters are more likely nicer and more empathetic than the rest of us. I’m aware that this is just another bias, like assuming Labradors probably aren’t going to bite you, due only to the nature of people likely to own Labradors rather than the inherent nature of the dogs themselves — dogs are dogs, after all — but listening to an interview with David Mitchell reminded me of the general niceness of adult stutterers (or at least, the one or two I have met in my entire lifetime.)

This Radio New Zealand interview with David Mitchell is worth a listen, if only to learn best practice for conversing with people who stammer. (Short answer: Don’t finish their sentences, because you’re almost always wrong.) It’s also interesting to learn the extent to which speech and language therapies have advanced recently. David Mitchell doesn’t sound at all like someone with a stutter, but that’s only because he’s consistently employing strategies he has learnt from therapy. For people who stutter, speaking is a constant extra effort, even when they appear to have been ‘cured’. As someone who has no trouble speaking, this blows my mind. But it does remind me of speaking in a foreign language (Japanese, in my case, which I didn’t start learning until the age of 12), in which I have never stopped being conscious of grammar in some recess of my brain, even after gaining the outward appearance of fluency. Perhaps an empathy for people who stutter leads on to an empathy for the many, many adults around the world who are living the bulk of their lives as non-native speakers of another language. Native proficiency, along with neurotypical fluency, is a privilege.

The David Mitchell interview dates from the release of The King’s Speech film, which I loved. I’m sure this isn’t just down to my interest in stuttering. Like many from the colonies, I suspect part of my enjoyment came from the irreverence of Lionel Logue, or the chutzpah that could only come from someone who doesn’t give a fig about the rules: i.e. having actual speech and language qualifications. Down here, we like to think that we’re rebels and rule-breakers, especially compared to the Brits.

Related: article in Prospect Magazine by David Mitchell

* A strange thing happened when I visited the religious studies section of the central library, bereft of humans except for one young man who, like me, was poring over one of the many volumes from The Encyclopedia of Christianity (a truly soporific read, if you’re in the market for a cure to insomnia). When I took my seat a few spaces downwind — not so far away as to cause offence — the young man looked up and smiled warmly. ‘Hi, how are you?’ he said, ominously. This wasn’t a normal library experience — not for me, anyway. The only library interactions I ever had were people telling me to turn my pages more quietly, or glaring because I’d opened a window, or silent jostles for the last desk during exam week. In fact, the closest I had to meaningful human interaction was reading political graffiti on the toilet walls. Anyway, I assumed this young man had visited the same professor as I had. WHO ELSE WOULD BE HERE.

And because I was the super-conscientious type, as a matter of research I saw an ad in the newspaper and for reasons that now baffle me, I decided as part of my research to attend a big Christian event in the centre of town that very night. A schoolfriend of mine had since joined a fundamentalist Christian church and she didn’t take much convincing to drive me there. (I was still getting about on a pushbike.) Naively, I’d assumed from the advertising material that this ‘public lecture’ was an academic approach to Christianity, but as soon as I got there, I realised how wrong as wrong I could be. This was a huge townhall CHOCK FULL of evangelist types, and as soon as I pulled out my pen and paper, the woman sitting to my left greeted me in that warm, Christian manner and asked if I were a journalist. No, just a student… And then a young man sitting RIGHT IN FRONT of us turned around — with the generic kind of face you could swear you’ve seen before — and flashed me yet another warm grin of genuine proportions — and I started to wonder if I’d get out of that place without a series of hugs. I have always been a magnet for the insistent, born-again converting types.

“Fancy meeting you here,” said the young man, and I’m sure I looked bug-eyed and unenthusiastic right back at him, so he turned right back around.

Then it clicked. That strangely familiar face had been sitting right next to me in the library that very morning. “Oooooh, right,” I said, and whispered something to my friend about this being a fucking small town, despite the recent population growth.

“She just remembered where she saw you from,” said my Christian friend loudly and helpfully, as the dude swiveled back around. For some reason I felt compelled to tell him why I was here; I wasn’t actually Christian, just a student trying to pass the Christianity part of my religious studies course which I’d only chosen because I needed another 6 first-year points, and I didn’t fancy another dose of Shakespeare. (Shakespeare, in hindsight, would have since come in handy.)

I was informed that there is no such thing as a coincidence. I was told that The Lord had brought me here, and to him, and that I was obviously searching for something, and that something had something to with Jesus. I was only a hair’s breadth away from a relationship with Him. So I took the opportunity to quiz him — and my friend — and my new friend sitting to the left, about what exactly that moment looks like.

Apparently, Jesus comes up behind you and gives you a massive hug. That’s what it was like for library dude, anyway. Others offered a more waffly, spiritual ‘knowing’, and I have to admit, I haven’t been Jesus-hugged yet, but, as suggested, I am totally open to that possibility, and if it does eventually happen I’ll be sure to let you all know. (Likewise ghosts. I’m itching to see a ghost, or an alien. It’s the not knowing that’s killing me here, folks.)

By dog that was the longest Public Lecture ever. After that night I kept right away from the Religious Studies section of the library. We moved on to South Asian religions. I managed to avoid that dodgy part of  downtown-library by purchasing my own copy of the Bhagavad Gita which, happily, is long since out of copyright and which can be scored for a very low price, otherwise unheard of among university textbooks.

There was that meal with the Hare Krishnas, which is another story.

For all I know, Evangelical Library Dude has since moved on and joined a sect of Hare Krishnas himself. I’ll never ever know. (I wouldn’t join for the food.)

But if I was searching for something, I did eventually find it. At the age of 27 I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and decided to finally get off the fence and start identifying as atheist. Loaded as that term is, I have found it useful as an occasional conversation stopper, and I highly recommend it if you’re that way inclined.

Print Ad for athelete’s foot cream

1. Aquarium Sink – for people who really love their fish

2. Some people are making glow in the dark sushi

3. Most fish evolved in fresh water, from io9

4. Why This Fish Has Teeth All Over Its Body, from io9

5. The Story Of Sushi: A look at how raw fish ended up on your plate, from co.Exist

6. That Squid On Your Plate Could Inseminate Your Mouth, which will do nothing for the seafood avoiders out there, from Science 2.0

7. Inside The Mind Of An Octopus from Orion Magazine

8. Underwater Photos Of Miniature Toys Interacting With Marine Life from Laughing Squid

9. The Psychological Effects Of Fishy Smells from Improbable Research

10. Discovering Your Inner Fish –Human DNA Traced Back to Marine Origins from The Daily Galaxy

11. The female anglerfish absorbs her male mate into her body from OMG.

12. Listen to This Guy When He Tells You Which Fish to Eat from Bon Apetit

13. Which Fish To Eat? from GOOD

14. Man catches freaky 200-year-old fish, promptly kills it from io9

It is cold. It is cold and it is wet and we were going to drive to the snow at the weekend, except why bother when you can be cold in the comfort of your own home?

It might not be so cold if hypothetically I were an expert lighter of fires. Sadly, pyromania is not in my genes. What I need is a ‘fire charm’ of the sort you read in fantasy novels:

First, she opened the firebox and carefully riddled out the old ash, leaving just the last black embers, flecked with sparks. On to these she spread a double handful of straw and another of dry twigs, then closed the fire door, opened both dampers, and stood leaning against the still warm stove while she repeated the fire charm three times. Ma never bothered with the fire charm, but Tilja’s grandmother, Meena, had taught it to her so that she would know how long to wait for the twigs to be well alight before she added the coarser kindling. Usually it took four times, but three would be enough with a wind like this to drag the draught up.

- from The Ropemaker by Peter Dickinson

Speaking of fantasy, here is what a fireplace looks like according to Pinterest.

And here is what a home fireplace looks according to me:

That is not actually a bowl of steaming piss sitting on top of the grate. That’s because we live in a dry climate, and need to add a bit of moisture back into the air to keep our eyes from drying out. 

And this is a spider which recently hitch-hiked its way from ‘Out West’ (where our wood non-specifically originated from) to our back yard and subsequently inside on a log of wood. It’s a male funnel-web spider. Amazed to find such a deadly thing in our house we even had it classified by CSIRO.

I suggest he wouldn’t have made it anywhere near my desk had we installed a reverse cycle air-conditioner, as we’ve thought of doing many a time. The spider was added to the long list of reasons why I’m over the fireplace. I already have quite a long list, mainly after reading The Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris, which covers scientific rationality and makes a ton of sense. Basically, fireplaces are a dumb idea. Each couple of years when that four ton of wood is dumped into the back yard, we have a visual reminder of how bad we are for the environment. And then we check out alternative heating arrangements and are left baffled — making decisions for environmental reasons turns out to be a lot more complicated than it seems. So far, we’ve been stymied into inertia, compromising environment for comfort by keeping the house cool, relying on doonas and sleeping bags and ski-wear inside. I am currently wearing a snowboarding jacket over a puffy visy vest type thing, over top of a polar fleece over top of a thermal long-sleeved top.

I have had my thyroid checked about three times in my life, all by different doctors, and apparently I am normal. Not one of those times did I actually ask for the thyroid test — I must just look to GPs like I have something wrong with me.

It’s possible there’s something wrong with the thyroid test. I’ve been reading about this. I’ve also read that a mildly underactive thyroid may actually be a good thing if longevity is your aim. That’s assuming you don’t mind 93 winters of cold nose tip. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to actually touch me in some way will often recoil with, ‘Oh my god, your nose/feet/fingers are freezing!’ as if they themselves have been physically harmed in some way. And I have no sympathy whatsoever, because it’s my nose/feet/fingers and they’re attached to me. For permanents.

As much as I love Canberra and four seasons, and the sure knowledge that any further deadly spiders have since perished in the minus five degree nights, I have plans to retire to warmer climes.

Or maybe I’m just an advanced species, pre-adapted to this scary warm climate we’re hurtling towards.

***

For that next fun game of Trivial Pursuit: 

Fear of Cold or cold things- Frigophobia.
Fear of Cold: extreme, ice or frost- Cryophobia.
Fear of Cold- Cheimaphobia, Cheimatophobia, Psychrophobia or Psychropophobia.

A Brief History Of Being Cold — BBC Radio 3

Two possible ways that life evolved on ice from io9

Scientists Discover How to Turn Off the Feeling of Cold from Big Think

In case you’d like a short summary of all the media this past week, I’ll save you a few hours of Internet reading:

1. A baby was born in the UK. It’s called Alexander something, single-handedly bringing three old-fashioned names back into… fashion?

2. Some Weiner called Anthony.

3. J.K. Rowling wrote a book under the name Robert Galbraith and it didn’t immediately sell millions.

This news about Rowling has been hogging my entire feed, or so it seems. People are actually surprised to learn that J.K. Rowling’s non-Potter books sell MOSTLY… almost entirely… because of her name.

In other words, most people who have purchased Rowling’s new detective novel since hearing the breaking news are buying it because of the author’s name.

Here’s Duncan J. Watts writing for Bloomberg:

Last weekend’s revelation that J.K. Rowling is the author of the critically acclaimed and — until now — commercially unsuccessful crime novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling” has electrified the book world and solidified Rowling’s reputation as a genuine writing talent: After all, if she can impress the critics without the benefit of her towering reputation, then surely her success is deserved.

And yet what this episode actually reveals is the opposite: that Rowling’s spectacular career is likely more a fluke of history than a consequence of her unique genius.

Whenever someone is phenomenally successful, whether it’s Rowling as an author, Bob Dylan as a musician or Steve Jobs as an innovator, we can’t help but conclude that there is something uniquely qualifying about them, something akin to “genius,” that makes their successes all but inevitable.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m above all this. I spent a few hours browsing second-hand books the other day and walked away with an armload of novels which I’d picked in most part because I’d heard about them. In some cases I hadn’t heard about the books — I took a chance only because of the author’s name. If I were paying new book prices, I probably would’ve needed to be a lot more sure of the contents before handing over the cash. We all do this. We are all buying things because someone, somewhere has told us to buy them.

When it comes to the role of luck in artistic success, or perhaps any kind of success, much as already been said:

The works of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, though great, are known today as classics because of the slightest, fortuitous turns of circumstance – turns entirely beyond the authors’ control. “Moby-Dick” was met with near universal scorn, until it was found by a sympathetic critic in a used bookstore in 1916, 25 years after Melville’s death. A remaindered copy of “Leaves of Grass” was also happened upon – this time bought from a book peddler and given to a critic as a gift.

- Secrets of Success from Salon

This next part may seem completely unrelated.

But check out the Wikipedia entry on Martha Stewart, which I gotta admit, had me actually LOLing a while back:

Martha and Andrew Stewart divorced in 1987. Subsequently, Stewart dated Sir Anthony Hopkins, but ended the relationship after she saw The Silence of the Lambs. She stated she was unable to avoid associating Hopkins with the character of Hannibal Lecter.

Sir Anthony made such an excellent job of playing a psychopath that I might feel the same way about dating him. Ditto if Rowan Atkinson had ever entered my dating world, or Jason Alexander (aka George Costanza) or Jack Black. I have no idea what these men are like in real life, but my response to these actors has been carefully crafted by films and expert marketers.

Even after meeting the real Anthony Hopkins, marketing had done such a great job on Martha Stewart that she (reportedly) called the whole thing off.

I’m reminded of the J.K. Rowling news because whether we like it or not, our impressions of things, and people, and authors — and their books — are out of our hands to a large degree. We’re all riding along on this wave of pop culture and it takes a leap of faith to branch out and find small distribution stuff which is tailored exactly to our own eccentric tastes, and not watered down to suit the profitable masses.

Given that there’s only so much money in our entertainment budgets, and only so many hours in the week, I suppose the best we can aim for is to keep an ear to the ground for things that might interest us, and take a punt every now and then on something completely new.

Oh yes. Our second small press picturebook app for iPad comes out today. It’s called Midnight Feast. Funny I should mention that.

Also on my mind lately: 

Is there any such thing as bad publicity? Maybe that unlikely sounding truism is actually true.

Paula Deen’s Bad Week Leads to Great Sales from Publisher’s Weekly. You see, I’d never heard of this woman’s name until her very bad week. I’m not even American. Yet now, for some godforsaken reason, I remember her actual name.