tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12976515015560622522024-03-07T13:43:04.507-05:00The Orange Swan ReviewSkimming the surface of the written wordOrange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-50626136267975690732023-07-06T19:12:00.010-04:002023-07-06T19:16:47.269-04:00May & June 2023 Book Report<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjelkxYUe1FXwmIN4nwDXjyESWFHvji93-PY2soEU5n3tM1s3D4LzKA4c1Io85yRkvVUN7tl-VFS2SKRVLRYoeeTLdfb1_8dVgs7EDxYU91X6Qf1kevdsTsHoK77Q3BEbIgG-ogTRfC0jrcRVBqXB2F1Nsb4yUAO3MZIwyG59-yZA2iwEuIJaiVOi9__Ag/s344/gentleman%20jack.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="228" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjelkxYUe1FXwmIN4nwDXjyESWFHvji93-PY2soEU5n3tM1s3D4LzKA4c1Io85yRkvVUN7tl-VFS2SKRVLRYoeeTLdfb1_8dVgs7EDxYU91X6Qf1kevdsTsHoK77Q3BEbIgG-ogTRfC0jrcRVBqXB2F1Nsb4yUAO3MZIwyG59-yZA2iwEuIJaiVOi9__Ag/s320/gentleman%20jack.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://amzn.to/44b2rVi"><i>The Other Mrs</i>., by Mary Kubica.</a> This thriller opened well, with the set up of Sadie and Will Foust and their two young sons having recently moved from Chicago to a small island community in Maine to look after Will's recently orphaned and troubled sixteen-year-old niece, and also to get a fresh start for their family for darkly hinted at Other Reasons, when their neighbour is found murdered. The tension built, the plot thickened, I was turning pages in an enjoyable feeling of suspense... until it all fell apart on an improbable denouement. I can't talk about why the resolution was ridiculous without spoiling the plot for anyone who might want to read the book, which I don't want to do, so I'll just say that I do wish authors who write this kind of potboiler wouldn't resort to tired TV movie-type tropes about mental health issues so often. </div><p><a href="https://amzn.to/46Fstl6"><i>Gentleman Jack: The Life and Times of Anne Lister</i>, by Anne Choma.</a> This past March I watched the HBO television series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7211618/" style="font-style: italic;">Gentleman Jack</a>, which is based on the life of Regency landowner, industrialist, voracious learner, intrepid traveller, trailblazing lesbian, and exhaustive diarist Anne Lister, and it was one of the best period pieces I have ever seen. Suranne Jones plays Anne Lister like a force of nature, and I loved that Anne wasn't presented as a saint or anachronistically progressive, and that her sister Marian was an intelligent and insightful person whom Anne underestimated. The costuming and sets were excellent, and it's always nice to see Gemma Jones as well as some other other British actors I recognized from other shows. In June I watched the series again, and when I found myself wanting to know more about Anne Lister, I read the book the show was based on. I rather wished I'd read one of the other autobiographies in existence on Lister instead, as this book was primarily concerned with Anne Lister's courtship of Ann Walker just as the show was, and I wanted a fuller picture of her life, but it is a very good book in its own right. It gives an unflinching portrait of Anne who, fascinating as she is, would not have been an easy person to live with, or even the most likable person. Extraordinarily intelligent and gifted people with whirlwind levels of physical and mental energy <i>do</i> tend to leave the rest of us battening down our hatches as best we can, and though Anne was at least a century and a half ahead of her time in her own understanding and acceptance of a sexuality she didn't even have terms to describe, and in her determination to build a life with a committed partner, she was well behind it, even medieval, in her outlook on other sociopolitical issues, such as that of labour rights. <i> </i></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p>Now, just a note about the status of these book reports. Obviously, I am very late with this book report, and I've only read two books in the last two months (that I remember -- I have a dim yet horrible feeling that I read one or two others and just didn't document my thoughts at the time and now can't remember them), but there's a reason for that. Since mid-May I've been working on writing a novel, and it is absorbing not only my writing time, but my reading time as well, as I need to do research for it. It'll be some months before that will change, so I won't make any empty promises about future book reports for the rest of this year. However, I am hoping to get time to work on the list of essays I've been wanting to write, so there may some things in the pipeline for this blog. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-85167095120017168532023-05-04T17:57:00.001-04:002023-05-04T17:57:38.235-04:00April 2023 Book Report<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizWDSjpOl2hBPHna8fzms2gdnzaRTi27Wa8BC6aK3A0Y-Cok1LSP5ORq0hB5x734zAb5CGKk6ahrgdQwQPGnZA7ZRNyHYqSNVRJUE29DRdgNcHIgdeJE6GBna4yLIaXe4hjZpb7mMtw47ga2NBrMepMedS9yDZuGvVc8oUEvVGectPQP1hvbu4qSqH/s278/mistress%20of%20nothing.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="181" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizWDSjpOl2hBPHna8fzms2gdnzaRTi27Wa8BC6aK3A0Y-Cok1LSP5ORq0hB5x734zAb5CGKk6ahrgdQwQPGnZA7ZRNyHYqSNVRJUE29DRdgNcHIgdeJE6GBna4yLIaXe4hjZpb7mMtw47ga2NBrMepMedS9yDZuGvVc8oUEvVGectPQP1hvbu4qSqH/s1600/mistress%20of%20nothing.jpg" width="181" /></a></div><i><p><i><br /></i></p><a href="https://amzn.to/418qx0L">The Mistress of Nothing</a></i><a href="https://amzn.to/418qx0L">, by Kate Pullinger.</a> I recently picked up a copy of this novel in a Salvation Army thrift shop largely because I thought that the Lady Duff-Gordon in it was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy,_Lady_Duff-Gordon">Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (1863-1935)</a>, fashion designer and sister to Elinor Glyn. When I got the book home and began to read it, I soon realized that it was set in the 1860s and that the terminally ill and middle-aged Lady Duff-Gordon who figures in it could not possibly be the same Lady Duff-Gordon who had survived the sinking of the <i>Titanic</i> in 1912 and that the novel's Lady Duff-Gordon was in fact <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucie,_Lady_Duff-Gordon">Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon (1821-1869)</a>, writer and translator. Oops. In my defense, I'll just say that the two women's names <i>are</i> damn similar and also I was misled by the illustration on the cover of the edition I bought, which depicts a woman in a dress and hat that is far more in the style of the 1910s than in that of the 1860s. But it was a happy mistake, for I enjoyed this book. Its lush and evocative descriptions of Egypt left me pining to visit Egypt, its portrayal of the fascinating Lady Duff-Gordon led me to google to learn more about her, and its tale of the personal growth and difficult life path of its determined heroine and narrator Sally Naldrett (lady's maid to Lady Duff-Gordon) had me avidly turning pages to find out what happened next. Because Sally's ultimate fate is unknown, Pullinger created an ending for her that was as good as was realistically possible in order to wrap up her novel on a positive note. I was invested enough in Sally that I found myself painfully hoping that she did actually have a reasonably decent life after being summarily dismissed from Lady Duff-Gordon's service, that though she was up against a cruelly repressive socioeconomic system and her employer's situational narcissism, she was ultimately able to become mistress of herself. <p></p><p><a href="https://amzn.to/3LWleNq"><i>The Elements of Style</i>, William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White.</a> I've been working professionally as a print/ text editor since I graduated from Centennial College's Book and Magazine Publishing program in the spring of 1994, and I'm afraid that I'm a far less accomplished and skilled editor and writer than one of my nearly three decades of experience ought to be. Language usage and the craft of writing is incredibly complex and always evolving and I wish so much that I had realized at 20 that I should be making a deliberate continuous study of it. Instead, I stocked my bookshelves with texts on editing and writing that I vaguely intended to read at some point, as though I were setting a stage for playacting at being an editor rather than genuinely being one. When I recently took my thrift shop copy of <i>The Elements of Style</i> from the bookcase that holds my collection of professional reference texts, I found a sales receipt in the book from the Goodwill on St. Clair Avenue West, dated July 29, 2000. It had taken me nearly 23 years to actually read the book after buying it. </p><p>Having finally justified my $0.75 investment in a copy of this book, I can definitely understand why <i>The Elements of Style</i> is considered a classic and essential editing and writing text. I was relieved to discover that I <i>did</i> know most of the rules and principles laid down in it, and to find I had enough knowledge and experience to know that some of its dictums are outmoded, such as the default use of singular male pronouns. I enjoyed its bracing emphasis on plain style and standard language usage, which have long been my own decided preferences. E.B.'s White's advice that one should write in whatever style comes naturally, and then work to correct and refine it, rather than affecting someone else's style, was exactly what I needed to hear, given my anxiety over my lack of a distinctive writing style. And I decided I must keep an eye out for the most recent, or 4th, edition of <i>The Elements of Style, </i>as an upgrade from the 2nd/1972 edition I have, and once I get it, <b>read it</b>. </p><p><i>Henrietta's House </i>(AKA <i>The Blue Hills</i>), by Elizabeth Goudge. I first discovered Elizabeth Goudge when I read <i>The Little White Horse</i> at 11 or 12. I've been reading and collecting as many of her books as I could ever since, an effort that has gone slowly because many of her books are out of print. To date, I have 15 of her titles and there are perhaps another 17 that I want. None have had quite the charm for me that <i>The Little White Horse</i> has, but there is a gentle, leisurely, contemplative quality to all of them that I love. As with a Quaker meeting, the atmosphere of Goudge's novels draws me in and compels my irritable, impatient, sardonic brain to settle down and truly experience the quiet beauty of it. So few things have that effect on me that I value it highly when I find it. When I came across a copy of <i>Henrietta's House</i> recently in a Salvation Army thrift shop, I pounced on it immediately. The story is a near fairy tale, as Goudge's books tend to be (even her most realistic novels have myths and legends woven into them). A party of assorted people in assorted vehicles set out for a picnic in the hills to celebrate the birthday of a young boy among them, become separated enroute, have various improbable adventures, and then they all get something they wished for, most notably ten-year-old Henrietta, whose fondest wish was a house of her own in which all of those she most loved could gather. It's a slight but appealing story. </p><p><a href="https://amzn.to/3NXJ3pN"><i>Lovesick: A Memoir of Searching for Mr. Good Enough</i>, by Frances Kuffel.</a> This is Kuffel's third book, all of them memoirs. She's a very talented writer whose polished, painfully lucid prose is a pleasure to read and who refuses to reduce the messy complexity of her struggles with her weight and her romantic relationships to a tidy narrative. I related all too well to her account of trying to find someone compatible and willing to be in a ongoing romantic relationship with her, and of how she has to turn to her web of friends for some of the emotional needs partnered people usually turn to each other for. God, the slings and arrows and the sheer <i>grind</i> of meeting guy after guy via dating websites, of analyzing each guy's presentation of himself to see if he's a good fit or even safe to meet in person, of assessing the developing situation (do I like him? is this working? does this have potential?), of enduring one disappointment after another, of ultimately never having anything work out, even when there's no actual mistreatment involved, and there often is. <i>Lovesick</i> is an entertaining book, but I wonder if it wouldn't be a better read for someone who has no clue what internet dating can be like as opposed to someone who's had to do too much of it. The former type of person would hopefully find it a valuable and empathy-generating education, whereas I, who am in the latter category, can only summon a weary, "I hear you, sister."</p><p><a href="https://amzn.to/3AWtAhH"> <i>The Yoga Bible</i>, by Christina Brown.</a> To be strictly accurate, I should specify that rather than actually reading this entire book, I read the introductory parts at the front of this book, paged through the bewildering array of poses, skimmed the pages on yoga practice for various medical ailments, and read the final pages on meditation and various types of yoga. I had just bought a secondhand copy of this book online and I wanted to have a quick look through it and find out what information it contained. I hope to get to know it more thoroughly as time goes by, as I'd like to begin daily yoga practice. I shall be 50 in August and I could definitely stand to develop my core strength and improve my flexibility. <i>The Yoga Bible</i> seems to be a good reference book on yoga poses, and a decent primer on yoga's characteristics and benefits, but it didn't have any suggested practice routines as I had hoped. I'll have to seek out a seven-day beginner yoga routine elsewhere, or perhaps devise a research-based yoga plan of my own. </p><p><a href="https://amzn.to/3Lx1zCp"><i>Ruby and Roland</i>, by Faith Sullivan.</a> Some years ago I picked up a copy of Sullivan's <i>The Cape Ann</i> at a thrift shop, and it was so good that she's been one of my favourite authors ever since. <i>Ruby and Roland</i> is another of her Harvester books, all of which I own, but though it's a pleasant read it's not the best of them. The main character, Ruby Drake, born in 1898, has an idyllic childhood that comes to an abrupt end at 12, when her parents go on a sleigh ride one starry winter night and freeze to death after their horse goes lame. Ruby is first taken in by a German couple and then, when they suddenly inherit an estate in Bavaria (yes, seriously), she becomes hired girl to Emma and Henry Schoonover, farmers who live just outside Harvester, Minnesota. Ruby falls in love with her married neighbour Roland, and then develops a friendship of sorts with his wife Dora, who (much like her literary namesake Dora Spenlow Copperfield) is childishly unprepared for life as a farmer's wife, as well as devastated by the loss of her baby and by her parents' disownment of her, as they disapproved of her choice of husband. Ruby then has to remove herself from that combustible situation and try her luck back in her home town. </p><p>This book's prose is as beautiful as Sullivan's always is, but I found so much of the plotting of this book wildly improbable. Ruby is implausibly precocious and mature, and she has an uncanny way of landing on her feet that is not particularly realistic for a penniless orphan in the early twentieth century. I don't want to spoil the book's ending for anyone who might read it, so I'll just say I don't think that spending one's entire life cherishing a brief, youthful love is a literary trope that seems to be an extremely rare occurrence in real life. All the long-term single people I know, including me, are alone not because they're enshrining a lost love in their hearts but because they never met anyone else. It also seems to unlikely to me that Ruby would choose to live the rest of her life at such close quarters with a daily reminder of her secret past, especially when it might blow up in her face at any moment. </p><p><a href="https://amzn.to/3LDQ3Fg"><i>L.M. Montgomery and Gender</i>, edited by E. Holly Pike and Laura M. Robinson.</a> I've been a L.M. Montgomery fan since I first read Anne of Green Gables at the age of eight or nine, and have what I've recently begun to think of as an L.M. Montgomery library, consisting of copies of all her novels, nearly all her short story collections, her complete journals so far as they've been published, several biographies, and critical works about Montgomery and her work. I even have a copy of <i>Aunt Maud's Recipe Book</i>, a collection of Montgomery's favourite (and slightly modernized) recipes. As I get older I find myself more interested in Montgomery's journals than her fiction, but when I do read her fiction I read it in a very different way from how I read it as a child, a teenager, or even as a young woman. I recently bought this book new (a brand new book is a very rare indulgence for me!), and it was an interesting read and a worthy addition to my Montgomery library, giving me some new insights into Montgomery's fiction, which I know nearly by heart. I had never considered that <i>The Blue Castle</i> had so many fairy tale elements (i.e., a hostile family, a magical transformation, a prince in disguise, and even a high-heeled shoe as a plot point), or just how female-centric Montgomery's fiction could be (i.e., after Matthew's death in <i>Anne of Green Gables</i>, Anne takes his place as co-head of the household, becoming a manager, bread winner, and even (in the sequel) a co-parent with Marilla after they adopt Davy and Dora Keith together). </p>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-79869923088306943452023-04-04T18:29:00.000-04:002023-04-04T18:29:16.570-04:00March 2023 Book Report<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVMBD56fj1vTxK74ODFf7F4rsZ1z5al0wamJ1StfxPk_QdchsWk5Gca5eyE2yGSSnOfAuWZV620QAAIwXVoQFpKDhFbybctOdg6RbFwA_TkjY_PwTpZCUk9hhu4cFAz8DnLtxrdwJ_ojlZcxHcuMd6WtSSDo7ikcjqYja2xPgDwMCMtYvwM_jjkZfL/s2295/Jude.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2295" data-original-width="1394" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVMBD56fj1vTxK74ODFf7F4rsZ1z5al0wamJ1StfxPk_QdchsWk5Gca5eyE2yGSSnOfAuWZV620QAAIwXVoQFpKDhFbybctOdg6RbFwA_TkjY_PwTpZCUk9hhu4cFAz8DnLtxrdwJ_ojlZcxHcuMd6WtSSDo7ikcjqYja2xPgDwMCMtYvwM_jjkZfL/s320/Jude.jpg" width="194" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";"><p><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";"><br /></span></p>In an effort to get myself blogging more regularly, I've decided to start posting a sort of monthly book report, which will consist of my thoughts on the list of books I read during the previous month. The idea is that I might sometimes have enough thoughts on some of the books for them to become a full-fledged book review, but we'll see. At any rate, here is my book report for March 2023. </span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-Donald/dp/0190692006/ref=sr_1_1?crid=OQQSVEL3L9L6&keywords=the+reactionary+mind&qid=1680646170&sprefix=the+reactionary+mind%2Caps%2C212&sr=8-1"><i>The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to
Donald Trump</i>, by Corey Robin.</a> </span><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";">This book was more theoretical than I had expected, and
made me feel like a lightweight. I know embarrassingly little about classical
political theory. However, I found Robin’s ideas about conservatism as a
reactionary modern phenomenon interesting (not that this was new idea to me),
and I quite enjoyed his scathing chapters on Ayn Rand, Antonin Scalia, and
Donald Trump. “Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah
Berlin, and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The
third was neither but thought she was both.” Hee!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";"><a href="https://amzn.to/3maMLAQ"><i>A Complete Guide to Manicure & Pedicure</i>, by Leigh Toselli.</a> I bought a copy of this book for my grandniece Cauliflower in 2022, and then another for myself in January of this year, thinking it was time that I upgraded my own very basic manicure skills. The book seems to be a good basic primer on manicure and pedicure techniques, and I discovered I'd been doing a number of things wrong, sigh. And I concluded that while I am certain I will never venture into any sort of fake nails, I am definitely willing to make a foray into what has been for me the previously unknown French manicure territory. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: Baskerville Old Face, serif;"><a href="https://amzn.to/3UhAM0P"><i>Jude the Obscure</i>, by Thomas Hardy. </a>I'm not one to enjoy novels in which the characters insist on making one fatefully foolish life choice after another, but though this is one of those, and it all ends in horrific tragedy, I still found it worth reading. Hardy makes it very clear that Victorian society weighed like a ton of bricks on those who flouted its conventions regarding marriage, both inwardly (in terms of social conditioning) and outwardly (in terms of social consequences), and that Jude and the love of his life Sue were up against crushing impediments in their efforts to find happiness together. When I considered the times in my life that I've made self-destructive choices because false views I'd been schooled in growing up had me convinced that I was doing the right thing morally, I realized how facile it was of me to judge the characters from my vantage point of a 21st century perspective on marriage. I did enjoy Arabella's character, as her briskly opportunistic take on the institution of marriage was often darkly hilarious, if more than a little sociopathic. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face", "serif";"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stress-Proof-Brain-Emotional-Mindfulness-Neuroplasticity/dp/1626252661/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2MRRUPJXBUQGF&keywords=the+stress+proof+brain&qid=1680646287&sprefix=a+stress-proof+%2Caps%2C509&sr=8-1"><i>The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity</i>, by Melanie Greenberg</a>. I've never been good at dealing with stress, and right now I face a legal situation that I very much need to get moving on but has me petrified like a deer in headlights, so it seemed like a good idea to read a book on this topic. I didn't learn much that was new from this one -- I've figured out the general principles of dealing with stress on my own over the years -- but reviewing them and learning more about the scientific basis for them didn't hurt. </span></p>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-5530995963696802042021-08-18T20:06:00.005-04:002021-08-22T17:02:02.602-04:00This Meme Is Not What It Seems <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6XfeIxf7UhnUG8Izs9edm5NlR7SgECjiNXVmkU-FZIL3NmfT8u39PKYtzL_9yO3OwRl9Xe5gLWZPy_ei01Pnqx5g2Dg9QUxCmpQjFwCBsR-XeXhaJqsWwuHxx_Ni7CzfmxQeP-te6svg/s554/573+days.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="554" data-original-width="385" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6XfeIxf7UhnUG8Izs9edm5NlR7SgECjiNXVmkU-FZIL3NmfT8u39PKYtzL_9yO3OwRl9Xe5gLWZPy_ei01Pnqx5g2Dg9QUxCmpQjFwCBsR-XeXhaJqsWwuHxx_Ni7CzfmxQeP-te6svg/s320/573+days.jpg" width="222" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><div class="kvgmc6g5 cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">I've seen this photo floating around on the internet and popping up in my Facebook timeline. It's the kind of thing anti-vaxxers are posting and pointing to as a proof/argument that vaccines are not necessary and should be a personal choice. I'd like to take a critical look at this photo and its claims, and lay out the case for why this photo is neither proof of nor argument for anything.</div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem;">In the photo, we see a woman in scrubs holding a sign that says, </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem;"><br /></div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: center;">573 DAYS FACE TO FACE WITH COVID PATIENTS WHILE UNVACCINATED </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: center;">NEVER GOT COVID </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: center;">I HAVE AN IMMUNE SYSTEM </div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: center;">DON'T MANDATE MY CHOICES!</div><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">I was unable to find a source for this photo or any reliable information about it. We don't know this woman's name or where she works or what her professional role or credentials are; therefore there's no way to verify that anything on her placard is true, or that the text on it hasn't been photoshopped. She's wearing scrubs, but that doesn't mean she's a medical professional. She might be someone who simply dressed up in scrubs to create an anti-vax meme. She might be a veterinary assistant. She might be some sort of medical professional, but not one that works directly with COVID patients. After all, she doesn't claim she provides medical care for COVID patients, only that she's "face to face" with them. She might a hospital employee who does intake, and only sees COVID patients "face to face" from behind a plexiglass shield and in full PPE, in which case the shield and PPE would have protected her, not her immune system.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">Even is she is a bona fide healthcare worker who works directly with COVID patients, we can't be sure she never got COVID. Was she tested for it? How often was she tested for it? Even if she never actually became ill, unless she is tested very regularly, it could be that she got it, remained asymptomatic, and infected others without knowing it. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">Then there's the claim that she's been face to face with COVID patients for "573 days". Dating back from today, August 18th, 2021, 573 days ago was January 23, 2020. COVID existed at that time, but the pandemic wasn't declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization until March 11, 2020, and there weren't that many known cases in late January 2020. Where does this woman work that she has been "face to face" with COVID patients ever single day since January 23, 2020, or even before that, since this photo was posted earlier than today? And is she really claiming that she's never taken a single day off in 573 days? That claim, at least, is almost certainly not true, so we know this woman lied about, or at least exaggerated, one of her claims, and if she lied about or exaggerated that claim, what else might she have lied about or exaggerated? </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">Even<i> </i><b>if</b> everything this woman's sign says is true, even <b>if</b> she is someone who has been face to face with COVID patients every single day since before the pandemic really began, and has been tested regularly and has test results proving that she never got COVID, her experience is still not proof that vaccines are not necessary. She is <i>one person</i>. One person who has had the extraordinary luck to avoid infection without being vaccinated does not constitute proof that vaccinations are unnecessary. We need to look at the bigger picture, at the infection rate among the people who are at risk for COVID19. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">Let's look at how it's affecting health care workers. According to the <a href="https://www.oha.com/news/updates-on-the-novel-coronavirus?fbclid=IwAR1wPaT5OToFsZlRqvPMzmRX96FROjzyzbrPWQ-k5VzYiIGckP9iiLBvZaI">Ontario Hospital Association, there have been 23,772 health sector workers infected with COVID19 in Ontario alone to date</a>. I've been unable to find up-to-date numbers on how many Ontarian or Canadian health care workers have died of COVID19 to date, but according to the <a href="https://www.cihi.ca/en/covid-19-cases-and-deaths-in-health-care-workers-in-canada?fbclid=IwAR04iMrrjOMpkY-Svo7YnN1e8fEKbAncYHBwWLTkS3RSom9rgtTe3tb8R4o">Canadian Institute for Health, as of February 25, 2021, 24 Canadian health workers had died of COVID19</a>. Those 24 workers were unlikely to have been vaccinated by February 2021, so their immune systems and even their PPE didn't protect them, just as they haven't protected the countless number of healthcare workers who would have become infected and died worldwide. The experience of <i>one </i>unvaccinated healthcare worker who escaped infection (and again, we don't know if she is a healthcare worker, or actually had contact with COVID patients, or wasn't infected) does not prove that vaccines aren't necessary when we know for a fact that so many, many unvaccinated health care workers have become infected and even died of COVID worldwide. </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">This woman is one person whose claims cannot be verified, and it would be foolish of anyone to rely on her opinion. If you had cancer, and you visited 99 actual doctors who gave you nearly identical advice about how your cancer should be treated, and then you saw a Facebook photo meme of someone claiming to be a doctor holding a sign with advice on how to treat cancer that's completely at odds with what the 99 doctors say, would you follow the advice on the sign written by someone who may not even be a doctor and whose advice may not even have been tested on anyone, or would you follow the medical advice from actual doctors who have been known to successfully treat cancer patients? </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-family: "Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14.56px; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div dir="auto" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 0.91rem; text-align: justify;">The science, the statistics, are clear. Everyone who can be vaccinated should be, and healthcare workers, who are especially high risk, should be vaccinated or they should find something else to do for a living. They have no right to risk other people's lives out of ignorance and carelessness, and frankly, I would never want medical care from anyone who is supposedly medically trained and experienced and is still so pig-headed, so ignorant, and so irresponsible as to deny accepted science and objective reality regarding vaccines. If this woman is indeed any kind of healthcare worker, and this message is actually one she intended to send and not photoshopped, I hope she gets fired for having disseminated dangerous misinformation, as what she is doing is a violation of professional medical ethics. </div></div></div>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-65261129503886403122021-05-09T14:02:00.024-04:002021-11-17T14:58:41.806-05:00On Productivity<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg185dC08YzrrbA6HePjPM3v2_HXr59I3pvvsQm_u5PX-1Aw5z_8KXe41ivVB4erhXqBGGZ4m4fbfI5YpWuXvuImqG8j6BuKBp4A9YSbInkgwTCVJX1aobE_-S1_2MiUGh3RQHj_z3ezA4/s2048/ARC+planner+interior.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg185dC08YzrrbA6HePjPM3v2_HXr59I3pvvsQm_u5PX-1Aw5z_8KXe41ivVB4erhXqBGGZ4m4fbfI5YpWuXvuImqG8j6BuKBp4A9YSbInkgwTCVJX1aobE_-S1_2MiUGh3RQHj_z3ezA4/s320/ARC+planner+interior.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><p>I'm a long-time fan of <i>The Onion</i>, and some of its articles are special favourites and a never-failing source of amusement to me, generally because of their almost painful acuity as to human foibles and frailties. "<a href="https://www.theonion.com/plan-to-straighten-out-entire-life-during-weeklong-vaca-1819566088">Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results</a>", originally published in 2001, is one such article. It's a hilarious blow-by-blow account of how 31-year-old data entry operator Derek Olsson intended to get his life organized during his one-week vacation from work, but instead pissed away the entire week, getting next to nothing done. </p><p>Back in 2008, while on a week's visit to a friend in Raleigh, North Carolina, I showed him the article "<a href="https://www.theonion.com/local-girlfriend-always-wants-to-do-stuff-1819569613">Local Girlfriend Always Wants to Do Stuff</a>". Prior to my flight to Raleigh, I had emailed Tim a carefully researched list of sightseeing activities we might enjoy, and during the visit peppered him with requests to do this or that, while he generally preferred that we just hang out in his apartment, enjoying each other's company, so the article was very much our bag. He laughed out loud a few times while he read it, and "Local House Guest Always Wants to Do Stuff" became a running joke between us for the rest of my stay with him. I thought he'd enjoy the Derek Olsson article too, so I found it for him and left him to read it on his laptop at his desk while I did needlework on the couch. Tim read the second article in silence, without so much as a smile, and then shut down his laptop. I said, "You didn't laugh... didn't you think it was funny?" He said, morosely, "It's too close to home." It is indeed, and I've reread it perhaps half a dozen times since then, each time wincing over how well I relate to Derek's hapless efforts to take charge of his life.</p><p>Productivity and self-discipline are things I struggle with. I have chronic fatigue issues, and on the average day I have about four good hours when I have the physical and mental stamina to actively work and focus on whatever tasks I have to do, which is a very significant handicap, but even before I developed chronic fatigue in 2007 at the age of 33, I had a tendency to muddle through life in an introspective fog, hampered by a number of bad mental habits and dysfunctional behaviours. I could do quite well at things when I was able to focus and put the effort in, but my performance has always been, to put it euphemistically, uneven. I'm the kind of person who has to use every organizational trick and scheme in the book to get herself moving on anything. So, as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to get more done with limited resources, I've written this post as a way to explore some of my ideas about productivity, and how to improve it, as much for my benefit as anyone else's, and using our executive function challenged friend Derek Olsson as a case study. </p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">According to the article, Derek's planned tasks for his time off included finishing unpacking the remaining boxes from his move into his apartment three years before, buying his two months' married friends Steve and Kim a wedding present, paying his gas bill, having his car serviced, picking up a new computer desk from Staples (and, presumably, assembling it as well), and "a thorough cleaning of his apartment, laundry, re-ordering of checks, buying a bigger CD shelf, signing up for a T'ai Chi course, cashing in a large jar of loose change at the bank, updating his resume, looking for a new job, and 'figuring out the whole Melanie thing'." It seems to me that, unless his apartment was an utter disaster, he could have gotten all those things and quite a bit more done in nine days if he'd planned better and put in a reasonable level of effort each day. </span></p><p>I think productivity can be boiled down to certain key components, and here's my working list of those components:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Know what you want to do.</li><li>Devise a plan/strategies for how you will do it.</li><li>Do what works for you.</li><li>Keep track of your data and organize your space.</li><li>Try journaling.</li><li>Have realistic expectations and a healthy locus of control.</li><li>Don't get sidetracked.</li><li>Engage with and enjoy whatever you do.</li><li>Talk yourself through frustration and discouragement.</li></ul><p></p><p>Now, let's look at how these tactics actually work.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Know What You Want to Do and How You Will Do It</b> </p><p>When you want to get stuff done, it's important to know both what you want to do and to have a plan and strategies for how you'll do it. Some tasks require pre-planning type steps, such as making appointments and doing internet research, that you'll need to do in advance. You'll need to figure out what to prioritize and what to postpone if necessary, and to plan to do the preparatory things first when tasks are interdependent. </p><p>Derek's first mistake was that he didn't know what he was going to do. He made an incomplete to do list on Saturday night. He ought to have made a comprehensive to do list on Friday night, if not sooner, and then he ought to have done some thinking about how he could accomplish as much of his list as possible during his nine office-free days. For instance, he might have decided that, over the next week, he would spend the mornings working on tasks at home, his afternoons running errands, and his evenings relaxing or with his girlfriend, friends, or family, or perhaps doing the kind of low-key things he could do sitting on the couch, such as internet research or working on his resume. He might have decided he would begin his housekeeping efforts by first unpacking the boxes in the basement and putting everything away, then doing a preliminary household tidy with the goal of making sure everything was at least in whatever room it was supposed to be in, and with that done, he could then clean and organize one room each morning. Or he could decide to keep working one process at a time: to first unpack, then tidy, then clean the bathroom, then dust/clean surfaces, then vacuum, then begin organizing one compartment at a time (i.e., closets, drawers, cupboards, the fridge, etc.), or one category of his belongings at a time (i.e., clothes, documents, kitchen equipment, etc.). </p><p>I'm not a big believer in multi-tasking, but there are some tasks that can be done in tandem. Laundry is a task that combines well with others as it has lots of down time, so Derek could have combined that with his unpacking, or, if he doesn't have ensuite laundry in his rental apartment, he could have taken his planner or device with him to whatever laundry facility he uses on Friday evening, and worked on getting organized and making his plans while the washer and dryer were running. </p><p>He might also have made a separate list of errands he had to do, and then figured out how he could do them as efficiently as possible by subdividing them. For instance, he could have figured out which things he could buy at the mall, and gotten them all on one trip. If he had to take his car to be serviced, he might have planned to take it to a garage within walking distance of a mall, so that he could do his shopping while his vehicle was being worked on. He could plan to reduce the amount of running around he had to do by doing online research/shopping or making phone calls, and he should have made whatever appointments he needed to make very early in the week, if not before then. My dermatologist is always booked up months in advance, so, as I see him twice a year, each time I visit him, I make the next semi-annual appointment before I leave the office, which saves me time and the hassle of not being able to get an appointment slot that works best for my schedule. </p><p>Once Derek got his place cleaned and organized, it would have been a good idea for him to create a housekeeping plan that he could use to make sure that he can keep his living quarters in shape and his life in order going forward so that he never again had to use his one-week vacation to play catch up. I have a housekeeping schedule myself. I'm not one of those people who can just automatically do housekeeping things as they need to be done, with the exception of tidying, which comes very naturally to me. I'll notice that something needs to be cleaned, and think, "Oh, I don't feel like doing that now," or "I don't have time to do that now." When I have a housekeeping schedule, my mindset becomes, "This needs to be done, and this is the time I've set aside to do it." </p><p>I dust and clean the bathroom on Mondays, vacuum on Tuesdays, grocery shop on Fridays, and cook for the week and do laundry on Saturday mornings. Sunday is my day to work on <i>me</i> -- I'll do my nails, and my hair if it needs it, and do things like polishing my shoes. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I do the "extra" tasks that don't need to be done every week, such as scrubbing the kitchen floor, or cleaning out a closet, or working in the garden if it's summer. Some weeks there's nothing extra that needs doing on Wednesday or Thursday, which means I get the time to do something else. If I stick to this schedule, I always have nice nails, clean clothes, food in the fridge, and a house that's clean and orderly enough for unexpected company, and it doesn't feel arduous at all. </p><p>I'm not recommending my plan as some universally suitable housekeeping regimen, but rather as an example. I batch cook once a week because I don't like cooking and absolutely cannot stand having to cook every day, and because it's very cost efficient. I live alone and don't mind eating the same thing for several days in a row. Batch cooking every Saturday morning therefore works really well for me, but it wouldn't work for someone with a family, or who is a foodie. It can take awhile to develop a housekeeping plan that works for you, but I think it's a good idea for most of us.</p><p>Then too, such routines can have a very stabilizing influence on us. I have found that, while the pandemic took its toll on me and made me somewhat less productive, my basic daily routines have mostly held firm despite the extra stress. </p><p>As to Derek's plan to decide what his future was with his girlfriend Melanie during his time off, all I have to say regarding that is that, given that Derek apparently never spent <i>any</i> of his one-week vacation with his girlfriend, his feelings and intentions towards her have manifested themselves and it's time for him to bail -- if she doesn't dump him overboard first. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Do What Works For You</b></p><p>When organizing your life, it is crucial that you use whatever systems and techniques work best for you. Organizing strategies are like diets: however much everyone else might laud them, if <i>you</i> can't stick to them, or if <i>you</i> find them onerous and painful, they are useless to <i>you</i>. I'm always trying new hacks and methods and routines to get more done, and probably nineteen out of twenty of those new ideas fall by the wayside because they don't work for me, or stop working once the novelty wears off. But perhaps 5% of the time whatever new strategy I've tried works so well for me that it soon ceases to be a rule and simply becomes how I function. I will never find some magic formulation that will make me the super producer I want to be, but given that I sometimes find techniques that help a little, it's worthwhile for me to keep trying new ones. </p><p>I read years ago that one should make one's to do list for a day the evening before, because one's unconscious mind will work on it overnight. When I tried it, it did seem to work, so I've been doing it ever since. I find I often wake up with ideas for how to do something on that day's list better or more efficiently. I'm not ever conscious of getting these ideas -- they are simply in my mind when I awake, when they weren't there the night before. In another example, I aim to be up, breakfasted, dressed, and to start work by 9 in the morning, and I used to stop for lunch at 12, try to go back to work at 1, work until 6, and then have supper, exercise after supper, and have the rest of the evening free. (That is, theoretically. The reality is I often have to stop work somewhere in there to go back to bed for several hours, and some mornings I oversleep for hours.) That 3-hour morning was usually fine, but I was finding my 5-hour afternoon such a slog that it basically wasn't happening, and I was always too hungry to wait until 6 for my supper. So, several years ago I decided I would change my routine, and stop for lunch at 1 p.m. instead of noon, which divided my working day neatly into two 4-hour segments: 9-1, and 2-6. It worked very well, the only drawback being that my cat was Very Outraged by the fact that I'd also moved his lunch time from 12 to 1 p.m. without consulting him, but Trilby accepted the new order of things. (Eventually. Mostly.) Then there was the time, soon after I moved to my present (and very walkable) neighbourhood, that I resolved to combine my errand running with the daily one-hour brisk walk I take for exercise. I had been someone who could never get her library books returned on time, and that simple resolution immediately transformed me into someone to a person who was very much on top of her errands. Besides library book drop offs and pick ups, I do my banking, take my shoes to the cobbler, get a few necessities at the dollar store or drug store or Home Depot or Staples, mail parcels or buy stamps at the post office, scout out new restaurants and coffeeshops and other businesses I might use, and probably some other things I'm not thinking of at the moment. Now I actively look for errands to run before going for my walk, and am disappointed if I can't think of anything that needs doing. </p><p>You need to become your own efficiency expert, to develop an understanding of how you function, and to work with your own natural tendencies rather than against them. If you are, say, definitely either a morning or an evening person, you will need to structure your day around your best times. My best times are the morning, so I schedule things that take the most energy or are the most high priority for then. I don't have the stamina to do physical work all day long, so I plan it in increments of one or two hours. Setting up any sort of reward system doesn't work for me, as I tend to just give myself the rewards anyway, even when I haven't reached my intended benchmarks, so I just set my living standards and treat myself in a way that seems reasonable and is affordable, and do my work for its own sake. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Track Your Data and Organize Your Working and Living Spaces</b></p><p>In <i>The Onion</i> article, Derek reports that on the Friday of his beleaguered week off, he tried to pick up a desk he had on layaway at Staples, but as he didn't have his receipt with him instead wound up "arguing with the [poor Staples employee] for almost an hour". He also managed, during the course of his week, to lose his gas bill while on his way to the mailbox. He should not have left his house without knowing exactly what errands he was going to do and making sure he had whatever information or items he needed with him to do that, such as measurements for the space for the CD rack he wanted to buy, or his friends' wedding registry details. A planner of some kind would have helped him collate that information, and possibly also given him a secure place to keep his gas bill until he could put it in the mailbox. </p><p>I use an old school paper-based planner for my to do lists, and to keep track of other information. Again, thanks to my chronic fatigue issues, my short-term memory is terrible, my memory for numbers and other hard data such as addresses and names, which has always been poor, has only gotten worse, and it helps enormously to have everything documented. I have a dark brown <a href="https://amzn.to/33j4KaW">ARC junior-size notebook</a> that I've been using since 2013. I was so thrilled when I first discovered the ARC line of products at Staples, feeling that I'd finally found the planner I'd been looking for since I was in my late teens: a good-looking, durable, customizable, reusable system I could refill from year to year, which made it much less environmentally wasteful than most bound planners. I ran into a snag when I realized that Staples Canada doesn't stock the annual calendar inserts that make the notebooks useful (seriously, what the hell, Staples Canada), and every November for seven years, I made arrangements with one of my American friends to buy and ship me the coming year's refill. Then in late 2019, I became the happy owner of an ARC hole punch, made myself a set of durable laminated monthly tab dividers, and learned to create and print my own calendar refills for my ARC notebook, which makes the cost of a refill pretty negligible. </p><p>I love my planner and hardly leave the house without it. For that matter, I barely go from one room in my house to another without it. In it, I not only write my daily to do lists, but also keep lists of the projects I want to do and other goals, lists of the things I want and need to buy, my gift list for the year, list of the books I want to read and movies/TV shows I want to see, lists of the addresses and other contact information for family, friends, and useful professionals, and track my deadlines, appointments, and Zoom meetings. I usually keep recent receipts and/or documents I have immediate need for in the front cover's inside pocket, and a zippered insert at the back holds my samples (fabric, yarn, paint, etc.) for convenient colour matching when shopping. </p><p>The above may come across as some sort of ARC advertisement, but it is not. I have no dog in this race. I know a lot of people are using their phones for nearly all of the above these days, and I know people who have other paper-based systems. My 82-year-old parents use a calendar that hangs in their kitchen to keep track of their engagements and coordinate the use of their one vehicle (and the monthly calendar is usually a mass of ink as a result, because they are extraordinarily productive and active people for their age). My sister uses a desk planner at the office, and a kitchen calendar to keep track of her personal life. Do have a planning system of some kind, but use whatever planning system works best for you. It may take a process of trial and error to find out what system that is, and you may never be done refining your system, but by all means try some different methods out, and go with whatever organizational methods make your life go more smoothly and easily. </p><p>Having an organized work and living space is even more important than having a planner system. Years ago when I was doing a interior decorator's certificate program at George Brown College, I remember our instructor telling us, "Everything in your home should have a home," and it's a solid maxim. When you have a designated place and/or maintenance system for every object you own, it makes it easy for you to use it. I have a rule that my email inbox can't have more than ten emails in it. I have a folder in my filing cabinet for warranties and user manuals. I have a <a href="http://modwardian.blogspot.com/2020/07/i-have-receipts.html">special folder for paper receipts</a>. I have wardrobe planning strategies (and <a href="http://theknittingneedleandthedamagedone.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-orange-swan-guide-to-wardrobe.html">have written at length about them</a>). I keep my keys either in my coat pocket or in one particular zippered pocket in the handbag I use for daily use. I have a hook on my hall closet door where I hang that handbag. There's a little notebook in the odds and ends drawer in my kitchen that I use for my grocery lists -- I can add items to the list whenever I run out of things during the week. When it comes to basic supplies, my rule is usually "buy one ahead" (i.e., there is one opened bottle of shampoo in the shower and a second unopened one in the supply basket in the linen closet, and the same goes for conditioner, dental floss, moisturizer, cold cream, deodorant, etc.). I very seldom waste time trying to find anything -- if I own something, I very reliably know where it will be in my house, even if I haven't needed it in quite some time -- and it's very rare for me to lose anything, or to have to make a special trip to the store.</p><p>In general, I try to be aware of "pain points", by which I mean those tasks that are a pain in the ass, that are a waste of time, that I hate doing, that I can't seem to stay on top of . Whenever I become aware of these pain points, I try to do some thinking about how I can resolve whatever issue I'm having rather than simply assuming nothing can be done about it but soldiering on. Soon after buying my house, which needed a huge amount of work, I became frustrated with my inability to keep track of the samples and information I needed for the renovations, and one day I spent two hours setting up a home renovation binder in which I could keep all my fabric samples, paint chips, quotes from tradespeople, diagrams of the garden, measurements and other specifications, lists of things that needed to be done, etc. Each room/area of the house had its own plastic sheath in which the relevant info was kept. When I described this binder project to my mother, she started going on about how much time it would have taken me to assemble it, her implication being that it was a useless waste of that time. I pointed out that I had been regularly spending much more time on protracted and exasperating searches for a particular sample or piece of information than it had taken me to put the binder together. </p><p>Setting up systems to keep your information or physical objects organized does take time and effort, but it's an investment in your quality of life going forward. Once you have organizing methods that work for you, and routines that will help you keep them that way, they will save you time and frustration over the long run. Such rules and systems can seem a tiresome nuisance at the outset, but paradoxically if you implement only those that work well for you, they will be freeing, helping you to get necessary and/or formerly difficult tasks done as quickly and easily as possible, and maximizing the time you have left for more fun or fulfilling activities. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Try Journaling</b></p><p>I have found journaling can help a lot when I'm working on an ongoing project, or trying to make life changes. It gives me an outlet for all the feelings and thoughts that might otherwise interfere with what I'm trying to do. I've also found that writing down what I planned to do on a given day, then writing an account of what I did do, and comparing the intended agenda with the actual course of action, is a useful exercise. Seeing what I did that day set down in black and white makes it easier for me to look objectively at how I function, and can help me spot self-sabotaging behaviours or logistical issues, and identify ways to manage my time better. If you're struggling with productivity -- or for that matter any issue in life -- I recommend journaling as a coping strategy. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Have Realistic Expectations</b></p><p>I have one mantra regarding the quality of the work I do, and it is "Aim for excellence, not perfection." The first is achievable; the second isn't. </p><p>As to the quantity of the work I do, it's one of those time management tips that, after writing a to do list, one should estimate how much time each thing will take to make sure it's a realistic list. This is a tip that was a revelation to me when I first came across it years ago, because it made me realize that I was hopelessly over optimistic when it came to estimating how long things would take and how much I could get done in a day. I'd write up a to-do list for the day, then duly estimate how long each thing would take... and realize that I'd planned at least fourteen to sixteen hours of work. I'm still overly optimistic in this regard, but now I'm aware of it and guard against its effects when I'm planning my work. If I'm not sure how long something will take, it usually goes on my to do list in the form of "work on X for two hours" rather than "do X". When Derek Olsson was planning his week, he should have estimated how much time each thing on his complete to do list would take, and then, if it really was too much to accomplish in nine days, he should have figured out which items he was going to prioritize and do on his vacation, and then made a post-vacation plan for how he would do the rest. </p><p>It's also important to not expect oneself to work too hard, and to make time in your schedule to relax, have fun, and spend time with those who matter to you. Fourteen hour work days aren't sustainable. I think it would be reasonable for Derek to have planned to do 8-9 hours of work each day, which with the addition of 8 hours of sleep would give him 7-8 free hours a day. He'd need to use some of that time for meal breaks, a shower, getting dressed and groomed, and exercise, of course, but that should still have left him with a mostly free evening. </p><p>Derek should have planned to have fun and to spend time with the people in his life during his free evenings, but he also should have set some sensible limits on his recreational time to make sure it didn't derail the rest of his agenda. Derek went out to a local pub for its "Rocky's Sunday Night Record Jam" on Sunday evening, something he said he didn't ordinarily didn't get to do because he had to get up at 6 a.m. on workday Mondays. I think it was fine for him to go to the pub, but he should have decided in advance on how many drinks he would have, and what time he would come home and go to bed, and then stuck to that, so as not to impede his ability to work on his projects on Monday. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Have a Healthy Locus of Control</b></p><p>Not every problem can be resolved by individual effort, and it's important to take a step back and make sure you're distinguishing between the things that are realistically within your control, and the things that aren't. Sometimes your problems are going to be larger than you can cope with alone, and you'll need to turn to your family and friends for support, or avail yourself of professional help. Sometimes problems are systemic, and will require collective effort, or even a major societal shift. Things like neurological issues, substance abuse, personality disorders, eating disorders, depression, grief, or other psychological problems can also interfere greatly with your ability to function. If you've been having a protracted struggle with some problem that's impacting your quality of life, and you've been unable to overcome it on your own despite your best efforts, do reach out for the help you need. If you don't believe that anything can help you, think of it as exploring your options and finding out for sure whether there is or isn't help out there for you. If you're a member of a marginalized group, you may be dealing with the fallout from bigotry or oppression. I'm not going to try to tell you how to deal with that, because it's <i>not</i> your responsibility to overcome other people's hate or institutionalized discrimination, but I will say I hope that you have a support system you can turn to for help. </p><p>Right now most people are struggling with the emotional stress and practical hardships caused by pandemic conditions, and with the fear occasioned by the looming climate crisis. These are terrible times, I know, and having every horrifying detail of every thing that's especially fucked up about our messed-up world seared into your brain every time you go online or look at the news is not making matters easier, but all we can do is try to keep calm and carry on, and do the best we can to make things better. Look about you, take stock of your skills and resources, identify the things that you can reasonably do to help yourself and others, and then do those things. Start where you are, use what you have, and do what you can. Keep in mind that sometimes your efforts will position you to take advantage of future opportunities and solutions that aren't even on the horizon right now. And, whatever happens, you'll know you did whatever you could do. There's a lot of comfort and peace of mind to be found in that feeling. </p><p>When I look at Derek's situation and assess it for possible larger issues that are too much for him to deal with on his own, or are systemic, I find it would probably be a good idea for him to consider whether he has ADHD or some other neurological issue that's interfering with his ability to get anything done, and have himself assessed for it. I also think it's utterly ridiculous that he gets just one week's vacation a year. That is simply not enough time off, and unless he can get a better job with a better compensation package and/or move to a region with better labour laws, that is something he can probably only play a small part in addressing through some sort of political effort (i.e., voting for political candidates who will work towards better protections for labour, or supporting union organization). </p><p>But that said, Derek's locus of control is set much too low, and he should be taking more responsibility for his problems. He's a young, straight, white, and apparently healthy and able-bodied man, which is the easiest setting in North American society, and if he can't keep his living quarters clean and tidy and do his laundry, that's on him. He needs to expect more of himself. Resolving to use responsible language and nixing such phrases as "if the whole universe hadn't been against me" would be a good start. Losing his gas bill payment on the way to the mailbox was a boneheaded move, but Derek didn't "have to wait until a second notice" to pay the bill as he claimed, especially when that will probably mean he'll have to pay interest charges/late fees. He could have searched for the missing envelope, or written and mailed another cheque, or better yet, set up automatic payment for that bill and whatever others he can, in order to save himself the time and effort of doing it every month.</p><p>Sometimes our problems will be too much for us, and we will need help... and sometimes we simply have to give ourselves a shake and get moving. If you're feeling frozen and overwhelmed (this is something I struggle with), take one action, even if it's only a minor one. That one action will probably help you do another, and another after that. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Don't Get Sidetracked</b></p><p>Once you have a plan to do whatever needs to be done, don't get sidetracked into off-list trivial tasks that might be fun or easy to do but that won't have any actual pay off in terms of your quality of life. Derek spent most of the second Saturday of his vacation re-alphabetizing his CDs. For the record, this is actually something I have some sympathy with. All my books and CDs are alphabetized. When you have a lot of anything, such as books, CDs, or DVDs, it's wise to put them, and keep them, in some sort of order so you can find a particular book or CD easily without a time-wasting search, so I would say it is worth doing. But it's a low priority task, and Derek should have focused on more consequential to do list items first. I also note that the article says Derek was "re-alphabetizing" his CDs, which suggests that the CDs were already in alphabetical order, and well, <i>dude</i>. </p><p>I have my own off-list pitfalls. I've noticed I often get sidetracked into planning, researching and shopping for the supplies for some future project when I have so many projects planned, researched, and shopped for already. Or I start a new project when I have so many already on the go. I find the planning and preparation part of a project, and starting a new project, easy, fun, and exciting, while putting in the actual work of doing a project can be frustrating and tedious. I try to be aware of this and to draw a hard line against prepping for new projects, or starting a new project instead of working on an unfinished one, unless it becomes genuinely necessary that I do a particular one right away. </p><p>I will add here that sometimes the trivial and/or fun tasks have their uses when it comes to getting yourself into working mode. All those time management books tell us to do the most important tasks first, and while that is sound advice in a general way, I find that sometimes when I can't get going, it can be helpful to start with a quick, easy item. My day usually starts with a few such routine tasks: making my bed, washing up the few breakfast dishes, cleaning the litter box. Getting one or a few such things done gives me a sense of accomplishment and momentum, and helps my brain transition from "Oh No I Have To Do Boring and Unpleasant Work Now And I Don't Wanna" mode to "Yay I'm Getting Things Done" mode. </p><p>Be aware of the kind of flabby pleasures one lets oneself slide into in an effort to avoid doing something worthwhile, as when Derek spent the Tuesday of his vacation re-reading a Harry Potter book in his bathrobe. The Harry Potter books are no temptation to me, but I have my own work avoidance black holes to steer clear of. I often spend too much time re-reading an old favourite book or mindlessly browsing the internet, and one of my 2021 resolutions was to stop playing video games, though this specifically meant "stop playing online solitaire", since that is the only one I was playing. I deleted all the games on my 2012 laptop years ago, but in an evil moment in 2020, I discovered I could play solitaire online for free. And I'd often find myself getting sucked into playing it for hours out of inertia -- despite my better self's reminders that it was an idiotic waste of time and I wasn't even really enjoying it -- because my tired, overwhelmed brain found it easier than dealing with the level of effort and frustration involved in doing something worthwhile. Mindfulness is key when it comes to these treading water activities, as it's easy to stop oneself early on or before you begin rather than after one has gotten completely sucked in. These days I try to make it a rule that if I am genuinely too tired to do anything active or focus, I must take a nap rather than do something mindless, as sleep is the constructive option, even if it means I won't get anything done right away. </p><p>If you should get some overwhelming urge to play hooky from your working agenda, at least make it count by doing something that you can really enjoy and will be glad you did afterwards. Life is too short and precious to spend doing something stupid that you're only doing because it helps you avoid doing something that you don't want to do. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Engage With And Enjoy Whatever You Do</b></p><p>Try to enjoy whatever you do by engaging with it fully. Mindfulness techniques can help with this. Keep in mind that you needn't enjoy everything in anticipation or wait until you feel like doing something before you do it, because the act of doing something usually generates the appropriate feelings for it. I think I hate to vacuum and dread it, and always have to remind myself that the reality is that once I get going on the vacuuming, I don't mind it very much, and that it's so rewarding to have a clean house afterwards. </p><p>As for the things that are impossible to enjoy, or are even miserable, I have read that in Alcoholics Anonymous one of their slogans is, "If you're white knuckling it, you're doing it wrong." This advice seems to me to apply to far more of human experience and endeavour than sobriety, and even though I have never done drugs or been a problem drinker, I try to live by it. There's no virtue or sense in torturing oneself. If we make our lives and our work harder than they really have to be, we're setting ourselves up for a relapse, or outright failure. If something you have to do is time or labour-intensive or otherwise difficult for you in a way you find unbearable, it's time to rethink it. Maybe there's something you could do to make it more pleasant and enjoyable. Maybe there are hacks or techniques that will help you do it faster and/or more easily. Maybe you need better tools or equipment or there's some sort of technological solution. Maybe it's worth hiring it done. Maybe there's another alternative to doing it at all. Maybe the task isn't even your responsibility and someone else should be doing it.</p><p>If you are still finding an absolutely necessary task too tedious for words, look for physical ways to make it enjoyable. Playing music or an audiobook or a podcast while you work could be an option, or talking on the phone, or singing while you work. (I seem to be unable to vacuum without also simultaneously belting out Lady Gaga songs.) Or change your environment. Once when I had a skirt to hem, it wasn't happening because I find hemming boring and that skirt seemed to be a mile around. I decided part of the problem was that, when I tried to do it at home, I was surrounded by so many other more interesting/fun things to do that I'd invariably ditch the hemming to do something else. In an impulse born of exasperation with myself, I packed the skirt, scissors, thread, and my pincushion into a tote bag and went to the park. There I had nothing to do but hem the skirt, and while I worked, I could also enjoy the fresh air, sunshine, the sight and sounds of children playing, people watch, and chat with the half dozen or so children or adults who came traipsing up to me see/ask what I was doing. It was all very pleasant <i>and</i> I worked non-stop on that skirt until it was done. I've kept this life hack in mind and have often taken other portable tasks to the park since. Libraries and coffeeshops can also be good places to work (pandemic or post-pandemic conditions allowing) if you can't focus at home or wherever you're "supposed" to be working. </p><p> </p><p><b>Talk Yourself Through Negativity</b></p><p>Some people have excellent physical and mental stamina and/or naturally stable, positive, direct minds, and they seem to find it easy to forge ahead with whatever needs to be done. I admire and madly envy such highly effective, super productive people, as I have neither attribute. My energy levels have been crap since I developed chronic fatigue issues in 2007, and my bizarre brain has always been a sort of neurological minefield. I am high-strung and irritable, and am <i>very</i> prone to ruminating, fantasizing, distraction, frustration, getting overwhelmed, discouragement, and despair, and it's extremely difficult for me to keep myself on an even keel mentally. I have gotten somewhat better at controlling myself as I've grown older -- my tolerance for frustration has certainly improved immeasurably since I was a teenager or even since my twenties -- but it's still a constant battle. </p><p>I can't do much about my physical energy levels, but I live in hope of getting better at managing my mind. I look to the kind of incredibly effective super producers I admire -- some illustrious ones like Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Stacey Abrams, as well as other people I know personally -- and try to analyze how they do what they do, and to apply those insights to my own life. My friend Christine is one such person. I have known her since I was sixteen and she was seventeen, and she has always been the kind of person who could map out a course of action and carry it out in incredibly efficient, no-fuss, matter-of-fact way, whether it was as a co-editor of our high school newspaper as she was when I first met her, or as the senior-level civil servant she now is, or while planning her wedding, or renovating her kitchen during her pregnancy with her first child, or selling her house and moving to a new one while pregnant with her second child. I've learned so much from her over the years, both from observing how she functions, and from her repeatedly giving me timely and specific advice on how to translate my own pie-in-the-sky ideas into realistic plans in which the nuts and bolts are all lined up. </p><p>One thing I've noticed about super producers is how good they are at not being bogged down or boxed in by negativity or other such mental roadblocks. They're good at cutting through all that self-defeating mental crap, at separating the useful from the useless, at inverting dysfunctional paradigms, at remaining focused on what can and should be done and what process and resources it will take to do it. No matter how carefully you plan or how hard you try, things will go wrong and you will make mistakes, and you'll get frustrated and discouraged, and that frustration and discouragement can become difficulties in themselves. It's important to develop the mental tool kit for working through mistakes and setbacks, and to talk yourself through moments of frustration or negative thoughts instead of letting them derail you.</p><p>For instance, in <i>The Onion</i> article, Derek became exasperated with himself because he found a box labelled "magazines" actually contained socks and a pencil sharpener, and then gave up unpacking the boxes and went upstairs to watch TV, which was only going to lead to him being even angrier with himself in future for having <i>still</i> not unpacked those boxes. What he should have done was remind himself that, mislabeled or not, that box still needed unpacking, that the socks and pencil sharpener were of more use to him than magazines that would have been over three years old, and then unpacked that box, and moved on to the next one. Derek also spent the entire last day of his vacation berating himself for having wasted an entire week, instead of deciding to focus on at least using that one remaining day wisely. There's no point in wallowing in regrets or other negative feelings. Whenever I find myself in an "eleventh hour" situation, which happens all too often (and for that matter is basically status quo for me, given how I've spent my life), I try to think, "What can I do right now," rather than chastise myself for what I should have done hours or days or years ago. Whenever I find myself getting upset about a situation, I try to remind myself that I can either uselessly emote and carry on about it, or make a plan to resolve or at least improve the situation, and then choose to do the latter. </p><p>The mental tricks we can use to overcome negative thinking and get ourselves moving can be amazingly simple. My father is a <a href="http://modwardian.blogspot.com/2018/10/woodworker-woodworks.html">woodworker</a>, and one time some years ago a customer of his had ordered four grandfather clocks from him. It was a huge, complex project and one which Dad probably found intimidating. He told me that at one point when he realized that time was getting on since the order and the clocks weren't getting built, he resolved that from then on he was going to work on that clock project every single day, even if he didn't get much done. He kept that resolve. Some days Dad would work on those clocks for hours, and some days he would work for as little as fifteen minutes, but with progress being made on that job every day, those clocks got done in good time. (And to <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBrkgpmmwqnVSVCcY1gkFqcZvxtQAkiPFnUyNFwZILlINaaL1z-JofeW0jZHdzqKO0cUfzMufg4GCSYTVU5FMA46CvxBJhUXUSpVXfzq0PGP3byQyDpMu6CmgPIeu-tddJw-e2aNwDBhqB/s1600/10.jpg">stunning end results</a>.) Whenever I've used that tip to get moving on a big project, it has worked well for me too. </p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>Getting a Handle on Things</b></p><p>When I began writing this piece, I originally thought I could polish it off in three or four hours (this would be an example of the characteristically hopeless over-optimism that I referred to above). The resulting essay, which is over 7,800 words long, took much more work and far longer than my initial expectation. We live in a messy, complex world and we are messy, complex beings. It can be very, very difficult for us to get ourselves and our lives in any kind of order, and that order will always be limited and fragile given how much shit life can throw at us. But learning, and being mindful of, the basic principles of productivity can help a lot. </p><p>When one carries a heavy load, the task can be brutally hard, or even impossible, if all the weight is in one big box that one's arms can't comfortably reach around. Carrying that weight can become much easier when the contents or the box are transferred into packages that can be stowed away in a backpack and a few tote bags, or into smaller boxes carried on separate trips, or if one uses a dolly to move the big box, or has someone to help carry the big box, or if one can even add improvisational handles to the big box using packing tape and a couple of small plastic bags. The weight of the task remains the same in all cases, but strategy and method can make it far easier for us to bear. </p>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-43476101272060998432020-11-02T08:27:00.000-05:002020-11-02T08:27:35.427-05:00Style Dissected<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLLvIc28-b03fj_0zYsotPsNEfUaMC9itLc6vELH3L14kKGZhRHbszXKj6F9a9AMzohhEecgdYjuYrBoanFQG_q3d0dATLK2tFCK0JIqHOTpD-n8qotrKBKsmrYetHuTyewtRoP8FdX5jR/s1600/style.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLLvIc28-b03fj_0zYsotPsNEfUaMC9itLc6vELH3L14kKGZhRHbszXKj6F9a9AMzohhEecgdYjuYrBoanFQG_q3d0dATLK2tFCK0JIqHOTpD-n8qotrKBKsmrYetHuTyewtRoP8FdX5jR/s400/style.jpg" /></a></div><br /><i><a href="https://amzn.to/3dVfEbo">The Power of Style</a>, </i>by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, published in 1994, is a book that I checked out of the Toronto public library system more times than I care to count in the ten or so years after I first saw a copy on display at my local branch. When, circa 2007, I came across a $5 copy of it at Value Village, I snapped it up at once. I was quite sure that I'd paid out more than $5 in overdue library fines for this particular book. <br />
<br />
<i>The Power of Style</i> contains well-written essays on, and wonderful photographs of, fourteen different uber-stylish women. Who are, for the record: Rita Lydig, Pauline de Rothschild, Daisy Fellowes, the Duchess of Windsor, Millicent Rogers, Mona Bismarck, Coco Chanel, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elsie de Wolfe, Diana Vreeland, Slim Keith, Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, and Gloria Guinness. With all its beautiful photos and fascinating biographical details, <i>The Power of Style</i> is a pleasure to read and peruse, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in style, but I find myself tempted to schluff over any actual review of the book and get down to musing about my fascination with it. I am deeply interested in style and have a treasured collection of 30-odd books on style and fashion history. Style does fascinate many people, probably because it is so elusive. We know it when we see it, but it can never be quite defined, and as motion attracts the eye so does the ever-shifting, chameleon quality of style attract the gaze. The act of making the messy business of living look effortless and elegant awes and inspires. Being stylish is an accomplishment; perhaps not the most worthwhile accomplishment, but an achievement nonetheless. And though being conventionally attractive and wealthy can help one be stylish, it's not something one is born with nor can it be bought. <div><br /></div><div>There is a companion book to this volume by the same authors called <i>The Power of Glamour</i>, but while I enjoyed reading that one too, it never captivated me the way <i>The Power of Style</i> has. Being glamourous never seemed like an attainable or even worthwhile pursuit to me -- glamour is an illusory, ephemeral quality, dependent mostly on youth and beauty, and no one's life is glamourous up close. Style, on the other hand, is somewhat more concrete, and is the fruit of concerted originality, discipline, verve, confidence, wit, and resourcefulness. Several of the women profiled in <i>The Power of Style</i> weren't beautiful in any conventional sense. The Duchess of Windsor, Elsie de Wolfe, and Diana Vreeland were all undeniably plain, but they all learned early in life that while beauty is a gift of nature, nearly anyone who is willing to put in the effort to become well-groomed and well-dressed can be attractive, and such were their learned skills of self-presentation that their very names are bywords of style. </div><div><br /></div><div>I used to read this book again and again, as though it held the key to becoming a woman of style if I could only find it. How could I be more like these women? I suppose I did eventually unlock their secret, when it dawned on me that these fourteen women were icons of style <i>because they weren't imitating anyone else.</i> These women created unique look for themselves and their homes and entertained in a way that suited their unique physical looks, their tastes and interests, their era, their particular milieu, and their means, and while they drew inspiration from others and the world around them just as I do from them, they always transmuted whatever ideas they got from elsewhere into something truly their own. </div><div><br /></div><div>This principle of evolving my own style, of making an educated choice as to what I really wanted and what suited me and disregarding the rest (as Diana Vreeland said, "Elegance is refusal,"), has imbued all my own efforts at dressing and decorating since, and has not only made me much better at both but has also been incredibly freeing. Though I loved fashion magazines in my teens and twenties, I almost never read them anymore, as I find they are mostly about conspicuous consumption and passing trends and a very prescriptive idea of attractiveness, when what I'm interested in is choosing and often making beautiful, good quality clothes that I can enjoy for years until they're worn out. Often some timeless fashion photo from the past can be of more real use to me than pictures of some ridiculous of-the-moment $1200 purse. What little real information fashion magazines offer (i.e., tips on makeup application, organizing or exercise) can be found for free and in greater detail elsewhere. Pinterest especially has become a replacement for magazines for me (despite <a href="http://orangeswan.blogspot.com/2017/08/pinterest-me-dialogue.html">my issues with its search engine</a>), as it is both an amazing research tool and a way to create a visual file of ideas and plans for any design project. The concept of self-directed style has also been an essential part of my editorial slant on my knitting blog, <i><a href="http://theknittingneedleandthedamagedone.blogspot.com/">The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done</a></i>, where I try to encourage knitters to take a critical approach towards the process of selecting knitting patterns for their projects, and to <a href="http://theknittingneedleandthedamagedone.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-orange-swan-guide-to-wardrobe.html">be their own designer when it comes to wardrobe planning</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even though my study of this book did teach me how to be a woman of style in theory, I have relinquished whatever hope I may have had of ever actually becoming one, as it takes resources and a level of energy I will never have. This book makes it plain that being a woman of style requires not only originality and verve and self-discipline, but also resources. Being a style icon is incompatible with holding down a full-time job and doing all one's own housekeeping, not to mention caring for small children. Very few of these women had a job with regular office hours, and none did all their own housekeeping. Diana Vreeland did work 18-hour days as editor-in-chief of <i>Vogue</i>, but she also had a household staff, including a maid who polished the soles of her shoes and ironed her dollar bills. Most of the fourteen women either had no children or were lacklustre mothers. Daisy Fellowes met her four young daughters in the park one day and didn't know them. </div><div>
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Then too, the pictures in this book and the anecdotes related in the essays are highlight reels, not the backstage view. There are no pictures of any of these women taken just after they had woken up in the morning, or in the act of grooming, or weathering a bad case of the flu, or while they were in an advanced or even middle stage of pregnancy, and there are no pictures of Slim Keith after she had ceased to embody her nickname.<br />
<br />That isn't to say their lives were all exquisitely arranged floral bouquets. These women experienced financial difficulties, married men who mistreated them, struggled with poor health, or sometimes were so consumed with appearances that they didn't accomplish much else, as in the Duchess of Windsor's case. But throughout their lives, whatever happened, their style was a tool and a mainspring that they used to earn a living, to attract partners, for social <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">entrée</span></span>, to inform or even become their life's work, and to define and sustain themselves. Their lives are worth study and a continued source of inspiration, because one needn't be an icon of style to use style in one's own life in much the same way. </div>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-65357829652917954352019-03-06T12:42:00.002-05:002019-03-06T12:53:33.307-05:00Sometimes David Can't Stop Goliath, and Shouldn't Be Expected To<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDwY-MzuPcKZWCBp_2zeMo_kI5XhLTNfB09lvHqNyFjgSWGAFiI8VipH-dqbftoIGgW4U_cmlq4QRw704lieIxFZ7_nc-VKHm_wEcwOyMdQ3SUYyQCoYIjV4HJaHX5OYFi8f_KgmFEXI0/s1600/Gayle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDwY-MzuPcKZWCBp_2zeMo_kI5XhLTNfB09lvHqNyFjgSWGAFiI8VipH-dqbftoIGgW4U_cmlq4QRw704lieIxFZ7_nc-VKHm_wEcwOyMdQ3SUYyQCoYIjV4HJaHX5OYFi8f_KgmFEXI0/s400/Gayle.jpg" width="400" height="267" data-original-width="1024" data-original-height="684" /></a></div><br />
Everyone's praising Gayle King for keeping her cool in the face of R. Kelly's abusive lies and rage during her <i>CBS This Morning</i> interview with him, and rightly so. There's no denying that her steely composure is admirable. But it should never have come to the point of a woman having to sit in a room with an abusive man and remain calm and professional despite his garbage behaviour in order to do her job. R. Kelly should have been imprisoned decades ago.<br />
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When I see situations like Gayle King interviewing R. Kelly, or Christine Blasey Ford testifying against Brett Kavanaugh, or Hillary Clinton debating Donald Trump, or Lucy DeCoutere testifying against Jian Ghomeshi, it always hurts me. Yes, they all showed great fortitude in the face of abuse, stayed calm and resolute, did what they had to do. But the fact is that they should never have been put in that position, and that, heartbreakingly, when they were, their gallant best efforts didn't do much good.<br />
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We're asking too high a level of individual effort and sacrifice in our society, and not enough of ourselves collectively. We need to become more effective at curbing abuse and bigotry and corruption in their early stages.<br />
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No amount of wealth, success, or fame, or other privilege should ever insulate anyone from the consequences of abuse. No one should ever get away with decades of crushing others under their feet. And no victim should ever be left unheard or without recourse. When we don't listen to victims, when they are left to struggle with their abusers on their own, powerful abusers become only more powerful, more emboldened, more destructive. Over time they become leviathans whom it's impossible to stop by any amount of individual heroism, though we keep throwing people in the line of fire anyway.<br />
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It's time to level the playing field as much as we can socioeconomically, and especially in our criminal justice systems, to keep the Donald Trumps from becoming the juggernauts that they are, and to safeguard us all, both from the damage they can do, and from anyone having to make Sisyphean personal efforts to get justice.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-86173578292265589162018-01-30T15:49:00.000-05:002019-05-20T20:20:16.108-04:00On the Care and Feeding of Single PeopleLately I came across Aimee Lutkin's excellent essays, <a href="https://jezebel.com/when-can-i-say-ill-be-alone-forever-1790274012">"When Can I Say I'll Be Alone Forever"</a> and <a href="https://jezebel.com/i-did-everything-you-said-and-im-still-alone-1821345701">"I Did Everything You Said and I'm Still Alone"</a>, and reading them was an exercise in painful self-recognition that brought tears to my eyes. I could have written them, though not nearly so well. In those two essays, Lutkin nailed two very painful and frustrating facets of being unhappily single: no one who isn't single wants to listen to a single person talk about it or even seems to understand where they're coming from; and a single person can do everything everyone and every advice book suggests and still never find that right person or even a satisfying substitute for a romantic partner.<br />
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But this post isn't an essay on the trials and tribulations of a solitary life, and it doesn't offer tips to single people on how to meet the right person or cope with singleness. Single people get lots of that sort of advice, and I think that as someone who, at 44, has been single for basically her entire adult life, that maybe it's time for me to turn the tables. Maybe it's time for me give some advice to partnered people on how to treat the single people in their lives. Because, partnered people, we single people love you, but <i>holy shit you do not get it sometimes</i>. Before anyone gets all "not <i>all</i> partnered people", let me say that while there are partnered people who don't need advice on what to say or not to say to single people, there are many who do, because every single "don't" in this article is based on something hurtful or exasperating that at least one well-meaning but clueless partnered person has said to me. <br />
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So, if you're partnered up, here are some suggestions on things not to say to the unhappily single people you care about:<br />
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<b>1. Don't blithely assure single people that they're going to find someone.</b> Unless you're the only person in human history who can predict the future, you don't know if they will or not, and maybe they won't. Some people never do. It's an empty, baseless reassurance that does nothing to help them cope with the reality that they are currently lonely, and is often used to callously cut off the conversation they're trying to have with you about that loneliness. What you need to do is hear that they are lonely and to try to help them cope with their solitary walk through life while it lasts. <br />
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Years ago I had a married friend who was struggling with fertility issues and who was anxious that she'd never have children. In the three and a half years it took her to become pregnant, I never once told her, "Don't worry, you'll be able to conceive!" because I had no idea whether she would or not. Instead, I'd remind her that her fertility doctors believed that they thought she and her husband would succeed eventually. When she was upset that one option had failed her, I'd tell her to remember that there were still a number of options to work through. Since the process was going to take time, I suggested that she mentally reframe the problem from "Will I ever become a mother?" and/or "When will I become a mother?" to "How do I want to spend whatever childfree time I have ahead of me before I either have a child or adopt one?", because the first two questions were the kind of unanswerable questions that can leave one howling at the moon, while the last question gave her agency over how she felt because it was a question she could answer, and act on, herself. I also did some googling and reading on the topic to inform myself, and sent her links to essays and articles about infertility that I thought had helpful insights. In short, I put a lot of thought and care in what I said to her, and my suggestions did seem to help her manage her anxiety and make the best of the situation. <br />
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Meanwhile, whenever I tried to talk about my grief over being single (and also childless, like her), all she ever did was say things like, "Oh, you'll find someone! You don't believe it but someday you'll see I was right!" and then turn the conversation back towards her own problems. She expected me to listen to her carrying on about her fear that she was infertile before she and her husband had even started trying to conceive, but at the same time she took the attitude that the problem that I'd already been struggling with for years was a non-issue because it was likely to be resolved any minute now. Guess what? She was not right. And not the least bit of help. And shocked and outraged when, after her first child was born, I decided I wasn't interested in keeping in contact with her anymore because our friendship was far too one-sided in general. When a friend is struggling with a problem, you need to hear them and do your reasonable best to help them rather than casually and falsely telling them that it's temporary. <br />
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<b>2. Don't tell single people that "having a partner isn't everything" or "you won't be any happier with a partner", or go on about how happy you supposedly were when you were single five or fifteen years ago.</b> People who are unhappily single are lonely and hungry for intimacy and companionship, and you, who regularly enjoy intimacy and companionship and support with your partner and may never even have known what it is to go without it for years, let alone decades, are effectively telling them you think it's a non-issue that they're going without what you're enjoying. You're the equivalent of someone with a mouthful of food and a full plate in front of you and a full-stocked pantry behind you telling someone who has been going hungry for months, years, or even decades that food isn't everything. While it's true that, like food, romantic companionship and physical intimacy aren't everything, you need to remember that it's easy to take it for granted when you're getting plenty of it. You need to understand that romantic companionship and physical intimacy are very basic emotional needs and it's really difficult and painful to go without them on a long-term basis, and you need to be careful not to be dismissive of that pain. After all, if you were so happy when you were single, why didn't you say, "Oh, no thanks, I'm perfectly happy on my own!" when your current partner wanted the two of you to get together? If you think being single is so great, why don't you leave your partner and go be single for the next ten years? If you are not willing to give up what you have in order to be single yourself, don't loftily tell other people that they should be contented to be single. It's going to come across as, "Got mine; fuck you."<br />
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<b>3. Don't draw non-existent parallels between your life experience and theirs.</b> If your single friend is single in their thirties or later, don't go on about how you felt about being single when you were 23, and how things worked out great for you and you're sure it will for them too! Being single in your thirties or later is <i>nothing</i> like being single in your early twenties, when there's a much larger dating pool, your friends are also mostly single and childless and have time for you, and you don't have to worry much about your biological clock. <br />
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<b>4. Don't tell single people that they should just be happy to have the other good things they have.</b> Sure, your single friends might have a thriving professional career, a good education, a nice house, and the time and money for travel and/or elaborate hobbies, and I'm sure they do appreciate their good fortune and take satisfaction in their accomplishments. But those things aren't a replacement for a relationship, and it's human nature to want a full complement of life's good things. Would you trade your partner and the children you've had with your partner in for any of those things? Would you want to be told that you should just be happy with your partner and children and not want a career or a nice house or a chance to travel too? <br />
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<b>5. Don't give pat advice or pep talks that your single friends don't need.</b> If they have a dozen hobbies, don't tell them to get a new hobby. If they're already reasonably active and social, don't tell them they "just need to get out there!". If they're reasonably confident about their looks or self-worth, don't butter them up. If your single friend is depressed or never seems to do anything with their spare time but watch TV, then, yes, it's appropriate to gently suggest some self-care and new horizons. <br />
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<b>6. Don't give your single friends lectures on how they "don't think anyone's good enough for them".</b> I've had "friends" berate me because I turned down a man who was ten to twenty years older than me, or had substance abuse issues, or was thrice divorced (and blamed <i>everything</i> on his ex-wives), and they were way out of line. Most of the single people I know have very reasonable expectations: we want to date people who are age-appropriate, who have their act together, whom we enjoy being with and are physically attracted to, and who will treat us with care and respect. We might also have a silly little checklist of "nice to haves" (I know I have one that's too embarrassing to share), but that frivolous checklist will go right out the window if we find someone who really does it for us and meets critical mass on our really important requirements. Telling a single person that they think they're "too good" to go out with someone they don't find attractive or age appropriate or together enough or whom they just don't enjoy being around is obnoxious and inappropriate. You're effectively telling them they don't deserve someone with whom they can be happy or even contented. <br />
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That's not to say that chronically single people don't sometimes have higher standards than many partnered people. I have observed that the people I've known who were never single for long, who went easily from one partner to another until one worked long-term, weren't very selective. I'm not saying their standards were too low, but rather that their mindset was different, that they were more willing to try a relationship on for size, or that they were willing to live with certain things that I wouldn't, or that they were the sort of people who meshed with others more easily and didn't need their partner to be as compatible with them as I do. And if that works for them, the more power to them. However, if you are someone who has always found it easy to find a significant other, you may need to realize that sometimes other people are "harder to fit" than you, that this need for high-level compatibility may not be a need they can compromise on, and that it's just as offensive and inappropriate for you to chastise others for their high standards as it would be for them to criticize yours for being too low. <br />
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<b>7. Don't take the attitude that partnered people are more together or in any way superior to single people.</b> A friend of mine, let's call her Lynn, was once asked at a wedding if she was seeing anyone, and before Lynn could answer, the bride interjected, "Oh no, Lynn hasn't found herself yet," which was so supremely obnoxious that Lynn's first (though suppressed) instinct was to go to the gift table, pick up the beautifully gift-wrapped box containing the blender she'd given the bride, and go home to make herself a margarita or three. In case this needs saying, a single person can be very self-aware and know exactly what he or she wants out of life, and still never find the right person to be with. While it's true that some single people have personal issues that compromise their ability to form relationships, finding a partner is neither proof of functionality nor a measure of overall success in life. I've known plenty of very abusive, irresponsible, narcissistic, or otherwise dysfunctional partnered people who were so busy controlling their partners, blaming their partners for everything that's wrong with their lives, or desperately clinging to a shitty relationship, that they'd never developed any awareness of or worked on their own issues, or even figured out what they want to do with their lives in terms of career or other personal goals. And yet so many of these very same people preened themselves on their achievement in being in a relationship, brandished their partnered status as though it was a proof of superiority, and condescended to single people. Don't be one of those people.<br />
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<b>8. If your partner is away for a few days or weeks, don't carry on about how alooooone you feel to your friend who's been single for years.</b> Seriously. By the same token, if you're thinking of complaining about a lacklustre Valentine's Day present to a friend who received nothing at all for Valentine's Day, maybe think again. Complaining about a relatively minor issue to someone who's dealing with a comparable issue on a much larger scale is tactless and insensitive. <br />
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<b>9. If you are in a happy relationship, please watch the rhapsodizing over how ecstatic you are in your life with your partner.</b> I'm not saying you can't talk about your relationship or happiness at all, and a good friend will always be genuinely happy for your happiness and ready to do a reasonable share of listening to your feelings about your life even when they don't share your good fortune, but do try to be sensitive about it. If you owned a large, beautiful home and your friend lived in a junior one bedroom rental apartment, would you make continually make comments about how much better it is to live in your house than it is to live in some sad rental? On the flip side of this coin, please don't assume that your friend envies <i>your</i> particular partner/relationship. They may not exactly admire your partner or your relationship and be too diplomatic to say so. So don't say things like, "Someday I hope you find someone as great as Sweet Lumps!" because they may very well be thinking, "I'd rather be dead than be with anyone remotely like your Sweet Lumps." <br />
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<b>10. If you are in an unhappy relationship, don't tell your single friends that they should just be grateful not to be with a bad partner.</b> Yes, you have a problem, <i>but so do they</i>, so don't make it all about you and expect them to be there for you when you're dismissing their issues as being less important or less difficult than yours. I have a close friend whose marriage... isn't good ... and the two of us have been able to support each other through years of her contentious marriage and my loneliness because we both understand that our two very different problems are equally heartbreaking and tough to live with, and because we both listen, really listen, to each other and are consequently able to offer apt advice or insights, and to recognize when we have no advice to give, instead of projecting. <br />
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<b>11. If your single friends complain about the lack of sex/physical affection, don't tell them to just go out and get laid unless you know they're the type to be okay with hookups.</b> Yes, some people can handle casual sex, but some can't. Some people need to have a sense of genuine connection with another person in order to have any desire to be physically intimate with them, and/or they can't bear being discarded afterwards. It's really insensitive to tell such a person to "get over" such niceties and go bang someone they don't really know or even like much, or who is very likely to disappear on them the next day. If we're wired to care about such things, that's how we're wired.<br />
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<b>12. If your single friends are anxious that they will never get a chance to have children, or grieving because they know they will not, don't be dismissive.</b> That is one major grief that they are dealing with. Also, don't blithely assure them they can have or adopt a child on their own. Single parenthood certainly isn't for everyone, and it's financially impossible for many. <br />
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Now that we've more or less covered the "don'ts", here are some "dos": <br />
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<b>1. Listen.</b> Don't assume that you know how your single friends feel. Don't assume you have the answers to what may be an irresolvable problem. Just listen to whatever they have to say, and then when you're reasonably sure you understand where they're coming from, you can perhaps trying weighing in with some realistic suggestions or comfort if you can think of any. Yes, it can be depressing to listen to someone talk honestly about how lonely and unhappy they are. But you know what? It can be hard for us to see you enjoying things we don't have and perhaps will never have, and if we rise above that, we deserve to have you do the same for us. The last time I visited a friend and her new baby, I took a handmade gift and a homemade cake, cuddled and fed and admired the baby, joked with my friend's partner, and was interested in a guided tour of the nursery decor. Then when I got home I flung myself across my bed and cried because I'll never have a baby. I'm genuinely happy for my friend, I really enjoy knowing and spoiling her darling little girl, and the contrast between our respective situations hurts me, but I do what I do anyway because that's what a good friend does. If your single friends are there for your happiness in that way even when it's painful for them, be there for them in their loneliness even when it's a downer for you. <br />
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<b>2. Make an effort to keep in touch and spend time with your single friends.</b> Part of the reason it's so hard to be single in westernized society is that so many partnered people cocoon into their romantic relationships and don't bother nurturing their friendships with single people. I've had quite a few friends disappear completely on me once they got a partner, only to breeze back into my life once the relationship was over, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they'd disappeared from my life for months, and confidently expecting me to support them through their breakup as though nothing had happened. If you care about your friends and want your friendships to last, find time for them. They won't expect you to have the same amount of time for them as you did when you were single, but you should be fairly reliable about answering phone calls/emails and see them at least occasionally. If you are simply too busy to see them individually, invite them to one of the things you're busy doing, such as having dinner with your family.<br />
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<b>3. Introduce your single friends to other people in your life, and include them in any gatherings you host whenever you can.</b> Single people usually need to expand their social circles in order to increase their chances of meeting someone. Do try to avoid inviting a lone single friend to a gathering that's otherwise all couples. Yes, they'll be adults and make the best of it if it happens, but it's not going to be much fun for them to be the only odd one out. It's much more considerate to invite a mix of coupled and single people to your parties -- and will also probably make for a better and livelier party, because people who arrive alone are more motivated to mingle.<br />
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<b>4. Try a little matchmaking if you can think of particular single friends who would be a good fit and everyone's up for it.</b> Setting friends up on dates is considerably easier than it used to be now that everyone's used to online dating, and sending both parties photos and online links to give them a sense of whom they're meeting makes the date much less blind and awkward. But don't just throw together any two random single people and expect it to work. Try to match up people who live in the same region, are relatively close in age, and who have similar I.Q.s, tastes, interests, and world views. Don't be pushy about it, or over-involved in the mechanics, or take it personally if the match doesn't happen. If they don't want to meet, or if they did and it didn't work out, you'll need to respect that it's their choice. Do be prepared to try again -- after all, if finding the right person was easy, your friends wouldn't be single. Also, be self-aware about your matchmaking abilities. If every would-be couple you try to set up proves to be mutually repulsed, you may not have the knack of predicting whether two people will prove compatible, or much understanding of what your single friends need in a partner, and it's probably a better idea to host dinner parties or movie nights and hope something eventually gels between some of your assorted single friends. <br />
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<b>5. Try to keep gift-giving reasonably even-handed between you and your single friends.</b> If a good friend flew to your destination wedding, spent megabucks on whatever tux or bridesmaid dress your attendants wore, bought you engagement, shower, and wedding presents, and now gives your kids birthday and Christmas presents, maybe you should have more concrete and active plans to balance the scales than entertaining vague notions of someday buying them a beautiful wedding present when/if they ever get married. If, after thinking back over the course of a friendship, you realize that a single friend has been and continues to be much more forthcoming with gifts than you have been, I'd suggest that you take steps to make the situation more equitable. You can create gift-giving opportunities by sometimes marking a milestone in their life with a present: when they finish a degree after years of part-time studies, move to a new home, run a marathon, get a promotion, or finish some important personal project. Or give them a gift because they're feeling down, or just because. By doing this, you're demonstrating that you don't thoughtlessly and selfishly expect them to be the source of a one-way stream of presents because that's "just how it works", and that you believe their lives are as important and worthy of celebration as yours.<br />
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Looking back over my dos and don'ts, I see a lot of the advice I've given is simply a matter of being a self-aware and considerate friend, taking the time and making the effort to really see and listen to your friend, being sensitive to what they needs are, and making sure your relationship is truly equitable. It's what good friends do, whether single or partnered, if we wish to have healthy and lasting friendships. I am sure there are lots of partnered people out there who could come up with their own list of advice for their single friends. But in any case, if you're partnered, thank you for taking the time to read and consider <i>my</i> list, and if you decide to act on some of my advice, your single friends may thank you too.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-81480709246987353392017-08-07T17:19:00.001-04:002018-09-09T19:20:37.061-04:00Pinterest & Me: A Dialogue<b>Pinterest:</b> Here are 100 new fall outfit ideas for you!<br />
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<b>Me:</b> They're all photos of long-legged twentysomething models in oversized tops and/or sweaters, skinny jeans, boots, and a tote bag. <br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Here are 150 more fall outfits in exactly the same vein for you to copy! <br />
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<b>Me:</b> Maybe I'll just start searching for crafting tips instead.<br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Okay, but I'm going to include some more photos of the oversized top, skinny jeans, boots, and tote bag look in your search results just in case!<br />
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<b>Me:</b> You need to learn some self-awareness, Pinterest. I'm going to search for closet organization tips now to help me figure out how to make the most of my 5' x 2.5' bedroom closet.<br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Here are some articles recommending that you put furniture, rugs, and artwork in your closet for that relaxed, homey, magazine photo shoot feel!<br />
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<b>Me:</b> No, I need ideas for <i>how to organize a closet of very modest size</i>, Pinterest. If my closet were big enough to hold freaking furniture and rugs, I wouldn't be asking for help.<br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Here are some lovely photos of Oprah's closet, which is larger than your bedroom and has custom-built oak cabinetry!<br />
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<b>Me:</b> Look, forget I even asked about closet organization tips. I'd like to see some ideas for making simple bead necklaces.<br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Here's a stunning Art Deco diamond choker!<br />
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<b>Me:</b> Oh, I give up. This is like trying to discuss fashion and decorating with Gwyenth Paltrow [navigates away from Pinterest].<br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> Would you like to see some oversized top, skinny jeans and tote bag outfit ideas with *strappy sandals* instead of boots? Or how about 105 ideas for things to do with mason jars combined with self-tanner ads? And I see you pinned a recipe for cinnamon rolls, so here are 200 more nearly identical cinnamon roll recipes that I'm sure you'll be eager to see! Hey, is this thing on?Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-74074401254161092982017-04-29T06:00:00.000-04:002017-04-29T06:00:33.261-04:00Mything Facts: Some Thoughts on Naomi Wolff's "The Beauty Myth"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh38fSaxtsvvXRcDSfS92OcybwyU2jB3OgZn3YDBitk_wtFyLUrQh28yLOsLt-TQ_JAyqB5EXlrpanys2cFVxANOLkUoxwCrKFM3N52dU7oZyy1KqG0qwM0t6C23hyjUqLZO4w-kuZsS5w/s1600/beauty+myth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh38fSaxtsvvXRcDSfS92OcybwyU2jB3OgZn3YDBitk_wtFyLUrQh28yLOsLt-TQ_JAyqB5EXlrpanys2cFVxANOLkUoxwCrKFM3N52dU7oZyy1KqG0qwM0t6C23hyjUqLZO4w-kuZsS5w/s400/beauty+myth.jpg" width="263" height="400" /></a></div><br />
Yes, I've only gotten around to reading the 1990 opus <a href="http://amzn.to/2bXYn63"><i>The Beauty Myth</i></a>, by Naomi Wolff, recently. As a feminist I have to say it is definitely worth reading and that I wish I had read it earlier, but as an editor I must say it reads like a PhD thesis that has the potential to be excellent but needs a lot more work. The book is poorly written in a graduate student style (read: dense, clunky prose that's a chore to get through), and Wolff makes a lot of sweeping generalizations and uses statistics with an inexcusable sloppiness. According to her "the majority of middle class women in the United States suffer from some version of anorexia or bulimia"; the actual facts are that <a href="http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/">anorexia affects 0.9% and bulimia 1.5% of American women at some point in their lifetime</a>. Her predictions for the future are, well, hysterical (i.e., she claims poor women's breasts may be transplanted onto rich women). <br />
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Her scathing comments about Retin-A and insistence that is a dangerously untested product aroused in me a guilty consciousness of the prescription tube of Retin-A in my bathroom cabinet. I googled the matter to find that while it is true that there have been no long-term clinical studies done on Retin-A, it has been in widespread use since its invention in 1969 and thus far there is no indication it is not safe for long-term use. <br />
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Still, this is an important work, and Wolff's central thesis of an artificial societal ideal of beauty that is being imposed on women in order to keep them poor, shamed, distracted, and powerless is one that should never be allowed to fall off the political progressive's radar. If you haven't read <i>The Beauty Myth</i> and aren't planning to read it, I recommend that you at least check out the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/836516-the-beauty-myth-how-images-of-beauty-are-used-against-women">GoodReads list of selected quotes from the book</a>. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-55753985624795520402017-04-27T14:12:00.002-04:002017-04-27T14:43:13.639-04:00The Cat Who Taught Buddhism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWCgy3EIgt5TU7yF2XjHsfxvvtvREcBRcOmD-B46bNZXC7QJbJmv4dz3dS-9cH5L-V0nhZxnUncrIca7aqvFMZnnecJfZGMHpMRleAQ9oV3ViAoO5VaINRoD7xVy2er1nkmWBjjYqOzN0/s1600/cat+who+went+to+heaven.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWCgy3EIgt5TU7yF2XjHsfxvvtvREcBRcOmD-B46bNZXC7QJbJmv4dz3dS-9cH5L-V0nhZxnUncrIca7aqvFMZnnecJfZGMHpMRleAQ9oV3ViAoO5VaINRoD7xVy2er1nkmWBjjYqOzN0/s400/cat+who+went+to+heaven.jpg" width="272" height="400" /></a></div><br />
When I first read the 1931 Newbery winner <a href="http://amzn.to/2qazdDw"><i>The Cat Who Went to Heaven</i></a>, by Elizabeth Coatsworth, I didn't like it at first, nor even know quite what to make of it. It's a little fable about a poor artist whose housekeeper comes home from the market, not with the needed and expected food, but with a little white cat with yellow and black spots that she has purchased with their last few coins. Over the course of the short story, the artist, the housekeeper, and the cat repeatedly choose to be kind and compassionate towards each other, even when their acts of kindness come at great personal cost. Their loving-kindness ultimately results in a miraculous event, and in material and artistic success for the artist while the cat dies of joy. <br />
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It's a story that jars against my worldview and life experience, during which I've learned that, while kindness is indeed an excellent thing, it does have to be balanced by self-preservation, particularly when one is dealing with a narcissist or an abuser and acting with self-sacrificing kindness is a recipe for being further exploited and abused. No miracles or afterlife is ever going to redeem those who have given too much of themselves. And I had to snicker a little at the scene in which the cat catches a bird and then sets it free when it sees the bird's terror and despair, because cats are not only carnivores that would not survive long on a vegetarian diet, but are also one of the few species that really enjoy hunting. (My cat would rather mouse than sleep.) In fairness to the book, the little spotted cat is described as an unusual cat with a remarkable capacity for emotion and empathy.<br />
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When I set aside my need for realism, I find things to enjoy about the book. There are no sociopaths or abusers in the tale, which means the characters are able to practice selflessness to their heart's content without anyone taking advantage of it. The story describes the unhurried and mindful process by which the artist works so beautifully that it draws one in. The illustrations, by Lynd Ward, which are also meant to stand in for the work of the artist in the story, are unquestionably lovely. The cat's grief at being excluded from the species of animals allowed to adore the Buddha is palpable, and the resulting change in the Buddhist status quo on cats moving. But I still found it difficult to swallow the cat's death from joy as a satisfying denouement. And I thought Coatsworth really ought have included some sort of preface that provided necessary context and background information for North American readers who know nothing of Buddhism. A little bridge building does make it easier for the uninformed to cross into new territory. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-16286518865807791712017-02-19T18:01:00.001-05:002017-02-19T18:38:51.790-05:00Joy Unsparked: Some Thoughts on Marie Kondo's Thoughts on Tidying Up<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtupRRNrmYlkhcOcyPSeforXiOs6LD3xzzyiIyyLSrj_sx70YfRdDJh_SX1bd4o7XTjgc9k2NweoRt1aXVNSjbUxS6af_niRhSqRgfc5D3MEwb5-su7Gv-D-Ow2-ZE9oAxwdZSoqRATzk/s1600/Marie+Kondo+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtupRRNrmYlkhcOcyPSeforXiOs6LD3xzzyiIyyLSrj_sx70YfRdDJh_SX1bd4o7XTjgc9k2NweoRt1aXVNSjbUxS6af_niRhSqRgfc5D3MEwb5-su7Gv-D-Ow2-ZE9oAxwdZSoqRATzk/s400/Marie+Kondo+book.jpg" width="281" height="400" /></a></div><br />
Marie Kondo's book, <a href="http://amzn.to/2kXuqSR"><i>The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing</i></a>, has been on my radar for awhile now. It's a New York Times best seller, and has inspired much discussion and both mockery and reorganizational efforts among the citizenry of the internet sites I frequent. I'd even done some KonMari organizing myself after reading about her concept of vertical folding, and was very pleased with its revolutionary effect on my sock and underwear drawers. Seriously, vertical folding (which means folding things into rectangles that will stand upright) is <i>such</i> a great idea. It's extremely space efficient and allows you to see everything in a drawer at a glance. Folding my laundry takes a little more time than it used to, but it's time well spent because I no longer spend any time rooting through the drawers trying to find the right colour socks or underwear. The book does have a reputation for being ridiculously over the top, but I began to wonder if Kondo might have some other great ideas, and decided it was worthwhile to wade through the book's absurdities in order to pan for any other valuable nuggets it might contain. <br />
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As I read the book, I kept a notebook handy so that I could keep a list of all the useful new organizational ideas that I came across. But I got to the end the last page of the book without creating a list. Instead, I had notes on things that stood out to me in a negative way. Kondo's <i>modus operandi</i> consisted of principles I've already been living by for years (i.e., organize things one category at a time, prune your belongings down to what you actually need and want <i>and then</i> figure out how to store them rather than the reverse, store items of one kind together, etc.), or concepts I disagreed with (i.e., don't keep anything doesn't "spark joy", get rid of unread books and spare buttons for clothing, empty your handbag every day, talk to your belongings and thank them for their service). The only useful new thing I learned from her work is vertical folding, and I learned that without reading the book. That is very thin pickings for a 200-page book that promised me life-changing magic. <br />
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To be fair, I am not the intended audience for the book. Far from being a hoarder or even ever having had a problem with untidiness, I share Kondo's passion for orderliness, for keeping my belongings tidy and readily accessible, and for keeping the total amount of stuff down to what I actually need and use. In my twenties I lived in one 10' x 15' room in a rooming house for almost five years, and at the end of that time I still had a few empty drawers. Though there's always room for improvement and I'm always open to new ideas for how to be better organized, I'm good enough at the job of being neat that friends and acquaintances will often ask me for suggestions on how to keep their space as tidy as I keep mine. However, given that Kondo prides herself on being an expert on being tidy who has been incessantly tidying the spaces around her since kindergarten and says she spends 70% of her life thinking about tidiness, I have to wonder why she didn't have more ninja-level organizational tips to offer me. I suspect that the answer lies in the fact that keeping things tidy isn't rocket science, that it's easy to keep your things tidy if you have only a reasonable amount of it and an average amount of closets, drawers and shelving to keep it in, and that the real issue that most chronically messy people have is simply one of excess, and they often need help working through both the mental and physical aspects of the downsizing process. If you are someone who simply cannot seem to pare down your belongings to what you actually need and use, you may find this book helps you get into a mental zone where that's possible.<br />
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Much fun has been made of Kondo's rituals of talking to her belongings and thanking them before she discards or stores them, of how she writes of feeling a connection to them and caring about whether they're happy and comfortable, which can across as silly and even psychologically unhealthy to Westernized people, but her mindset has to be considered within the context of Kondo's devout Shinto beliefs (she spent five years working as a Shinto shrine maiden in her younger days). Her attitude towards her material belongings makes more sense when you understand that it's rooted in the Shinto principle that everything has a soul and deserves to be treated with respect. And then too, I can see value in her ideas even for someone who has never heard of Shinto. Her approach will foster mindfulness, and if you're a hoarder who has a lot of emotional barriers to work through when it comes discarding unneeded things, Kondo's suggestions may give you a shame and guilt-free framework for working through them.<br />
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More worrisome is Kondo's references to just how obsessed she is with throwing things out and keeping things tidy, to the point where it seems to have taken over her life, she thinks about tidiness nearly constantly, and she gets very upset if some tiny detail of her environment is not as she wants it, as when she describes herself as being "near tears" because she has to scrub some slime off the bottom of a shampoo bottle. If a friend of mine was showing that level of preoccupation with and unhappiness over something so trivial, I would do my best to persuade her to talk to a therapist about it.<br />
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Though Kondo's book is short, it still reads as repetitive and overwritten to the point that I am quite sure I could condense all the really useful information in it into one article. She spends way too much of her total word count telling us how much she helps people and how none of her clients who have "successfully completed" her course have fallen back into their old messy ways. Her wording is suspect (much like those of an addictions counselor would be if he claimed that no addict he's treated who has successfully stopped drinking has gone back to drinking) and I am skeptical, and wonder what objective reportage on her clientele's current habits would reveal. She also goes on <i>ad nauseam</i> about her central mantra: do not keep anything that does not give you a spark of joy. I've heard better and more useful mantras, frankly. My toilet plunger, roll of duct tape, and box of tampons don't give me a spark of joy, but I'll be damned before I throw any of them out. I suppose the ideas is that I'll think about how happy I'll be to have those things on hand when I need them in order to feel the requisite spark of joy, but that makes the decision process more convoluted than it needs to be. I much prefer William Morris's, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful," and my own less graceful maxim, "Decide in specific terms what you need and want, and stick to that." <br />
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I find it strange that she says almost nothing about over buying, which is the root cause of much messiness. But then she doesn't seem to object to overconsumption or the waste it causes. She proudly writes (twice!) that she has helped her clients discard over a million items in total, and reassures her readers that if they find they've thrown out something they wanted, they can go buy another. She claims that if a button falls off a shirt, it's a sign that the shirt has reached the end of its life. It makes me cringe when she describes the discarded items as "bags of garbage" when they are almost certainly usable items, makes almost no mention of the possibility of donating the cast offs, and says that on average her single clients will throw out 20 to 30 garbage bags full of stuff each, and a family of three 70 bags. The idea of all this waste, in a world where overconsumption is a threat to our continued survival and the problem of what to do with garbage an ever-growing one, horrifies me. If Kondo must encourage people to throw things out in such a wholesale fashion, couldn't she also encourage them to buy less and to dispose of their discarded items responsibly?<br />
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Unlike Kondo, the flip side of my love of orderliness is my hatred of waste, and I believe that the environmentally responsible course of action is to balance the two. For instance, when reorganizing my sock drawer last year, I decided that my ideal sock drawer would contain eight pairs of white or ivory cotton socks, eight pairs of trouser socks in brown or olive green, and eight pairs of hand-knitted wool socks. Right now I have 12-15 pairs of each kind of sock, and my wool socks are commercially made work or hiking socks instead of hand-knitted. I would indeed feel the kind of ease and relief she describes her clients as feeling after a purge if I could get my sock drawer population down to that ideal level... but I'm simply <i>not</i> throwing out my extra existing socks before they're worn out, as that's wasteful. I also mend or darn my socks whenever reasonably possible to extend their usefulness, which I'm sure Kondo would consider the equivalent of prolonging a loved one's mortal agony with life support, but I regret nothing. As long as I don't buy any more socks until they're actually needed, my sock drawer will eventually come to look the way I want it, and reducing by process of attrition rather than by purging means I'm spending less on socks and putting fewer of them into a landfill long-term. I'm doing the same thing with my yarn stash. My ideal stash would fit in a single plastic storage box, as I like having some odds and ends around to use, but don't like too much sitting about waiting to be used as that fusses me. I've made a concerted effort to be more disciplined about how much I bought (no more impulse buys of yarn I have vague intentions of using "someday"), and to use up what I had on hand. Two years ago, I had four bags and four boxes of yarn on hand; I now have one bag and four boxes. I expect it'll take another two or three years for me to get my stash down to the size I want it. This is fine with me, as it means that yarn is going to be turned into useful items rather than possibly winding up in a landfill as it might even if I took it to a thrift shop, and also that I'll be buying less yarn long-term. The textile industry is very bad for the environment. <br />
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Not that I'm not willing to discard things that don't meet my standard of usefulness. One day last February I was getting ready to go out somewhere and got frustrated because none of the five or six lipsticks in my makeup case went with the clothes I was wearing. While en route to my destination, I did some thinking about what shades of lipstick I would need to have in order to have one to go with every possible outfit in my wardrobe, and decided I should have four: red, bronze, berry/plum, and coral/orange. When I got home, I tested my theory by thumbing through my closet and drawers (i.e., thinking, "yes, red with this sweater, plum with this dress, coral with this top..."), and then I turned to my existing lipstick collection. I had a coral lipstick and a berry lipstick that I liked, so they stayed. I got rid of the others: the unflattering pinks and purples that had been freebies and had never suited me, the broken old one, the orange/red one that was relatively new and expensive but that made me look as though I'd been dining with Hannibal Lecter. Then I bought a new red lipstick and a bronze lipstick, selecting each shade with great care to make sure they suited me. I've been living with these four lipsticks for some months now and I'm happy with my lipstick strategy. It's one little aspect of my life that's all sorted out. I always have a suitable and flattering lipstick to wear, regardless of what clothes I choose. I don't waste time opening lipsticks and trying to figure out which to wear as it's easy to decide on the right one and to remember which of the four is which (they all have different cases). There's more space in my makeup case. I'll save shopping time and money long-term because I am never tempted to buy new lipsticks when I know I have all the lipstick I need. I wouldn't recommend my particular lipstick rule to anyone as it wouldn't work for anyone but me (i.e., other women might prefer to have different lipstick colours, more or less lipstick colours, or no lipstick at all), but I do recommend that anyone who's trying to get reorganized use that basic principle: decide exactly and specifically what you need, and then by a combination of responsible purging, wearing things out and using them up, and mindful shopping, work towards a state of affairs in which you have just that.<br />
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Everyone's comfort level with stuff is different. My mother says my living room is "so full", my sister says it looks "half-decorated", and I think it's just right. I think that's partly why Kondo's book has met with a lot of hostility: everyone has a different benchmark and they <i>really</i> don't like the idea of anyone trying to reset it. <br />
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But despite the fact that this book seems to have helped some people, I don't think I'd recommend Marie Kondo's book to anyone. There must be better, more helpful organizational how-to books out there. For that matter, I'd question whether anyone who is struggling with this issue needs an organizing how-to book at all, when there is so much information and advice available online, and what they might need is, in more extreme cases, therapy and medication, or in most cases, the help of a tactful and better organized friend, or simply time to consider the problem and then do what is necessary to resolve it. The buying of a how-to book on how to tidy up might only prove a way to postpone actually dealing with the issue, and become, ironically, part of the problem it was supposed to correct. It amuses me to wonder, how many copies of this bestselling book are sitting about in an overstuffed home, unread? Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-17043819375406217792016-08-14T06:00:00.000-04:002016-08-14T06:00:54.655-04:00Some False and Broken Notes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwSXZpqVhwOGu4fki0Eko2Eyaws3WICFIr1TyzWoujoVtzJxZXwGI5eV3F9IIqZ0mZpzX0NHcEmqX4NGvYndX_r3ztET0WnuzFup0xtZ-k4TX82_011sofuGSfsXWlLe4gyeVhs1YD7H8/s1600/trumpeter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwSXZpqVhwOGu4fki0Eko2Eyaws3WICFIr1TyzWoujoVtzJxZXwGI5eV3F9IIqZ0mZpzX0NHcEmqX4NGvYndX_r3ztET0WnuzFup0xtZ-k4TX82_011sofuGSfsXWlLe4gyeVhs1YD7H8/s400/trumpeter.jpg" width="268" height="400" /></a></div><br />
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The 1929 Newbery Medal Award Winner, <a href="http://amzn.to/2bg2c4o"><i>The Trumpeter of Krakow</i>, by Eric P. Kelly</a>, which (as you would expect from the title) is set in Kraków, is based upon a centuries-old Kraków tradition, and an accompanying legend. In Kraków, beginning at the stroke of each hour, a trumpeter plays a 5-note tune called the Hejnal (you can hear it <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVQbxXvyG7A">here</a>) out of each of the four windows of the tallest tower in St-Mary's Church tower. It's also traditional to end the Hejnal on a broken note. Kelly claims in the prologue to his novel that this tradition was created after a 1241 invasion of Kraków, during which the trumpeter faithfully stayed at his post to play the Hejnal but was shot through by an arrow before he could finish. It's a colourful story, but there isn't any real evidence that it's true. Kelly's version of this legend was the first to be written down. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Trumpet_Call">According to Wikipedia</a>, there is an 1861 account of invading Tatars and a sentry who sounded the alarm, but this account does not mention the sentry's death. One trumpeter <i>is</i> known to have died while on duty and the broken note tradition may have originally been a tribute to him, but that was in 1901 and the trumpeter died of natural causes. It's unclear whether Kelly was misinformed (at the time of writing <i>The Trumpeter of Krakow</i> he did not yet speak Polish well), whether he combined or confused the two stories, or whether he was simply the first to record an actual legend.<br />
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All this aside, <i>The Trumpeter of Krakow</i>, set in 1461, is the story of a young trumpeter, Joseph Charnetski, who used the Hejnal to sound another alarm. It isn't a bad story. It has a decent plot, seems to be reasonably well-researched as to its period detail, and is a rather entertaining adventure story about a family sworn to protect the (fictional) Great Tarnov Crystal, and the villain and the alchemist who are determined to get their hands on it. It also has a certain frustrating woodenness to its characters and dialogue that keep it from being an excellent book. The characters are sketched in a few simplistic lines, especially in the case of the female characters. Joseph's father is honourable and brave, his mother is pious and gentle (and isn't even given a name of her own), and Joseph is a less-self-assured version of his father. Elzbietka, a young friend of Joseph, is kind and in need of a mother. Joseph's mother obliging steps up for this role and the two of them rush improbably into each others' arms the minute they meet. I will give Kelly some credit for having given Elzbietka a part to play in the story's action and for also having her question why, if learning Latin (as Joseph does) is such an excellent thing, it is not for women as well as men.<br />
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Kelly also used his characters' looks to define their personalities in a way that was common in fiction until mid-twentieth century or so -- one often reads about a "noble" or "refined" features in old novels. The Charnetskis are described as having honest or pleasant faces, and this is how Kelly describes Peter, the book's villain:<br />
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<blockquote>It was the face, however, that betrayed the soul beneath. It was a dark, oval, wicked face--the eyes were greenish and narrow and the eyebrow line above them ran straight across the bridge of the nose, giving the effect of a monkey rather than a man. One cheek was marked with a buttonlike scar, the scar of the button plague that is so common in the lands east of the Volga, or even the Dnieper, and marks the bearer as a Tartar or a Cossack or a Mongal. The ears were low set and ugly. The mouth looked like a slit that the boys make in the pumpkins they carry on the eve of the Allhallows. Above the mouth was a cropped mustache which hung down at the ends and straggled into a scanty beard.</blockquote><br />
Subtle, huh? Using one's character's appearance as barometer to their level of refinement or morality is a literary trope that may have had its origin in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology">pseudoscience of phrenology</a>, and that, thankfully, has fallen out of fashion now. It's a nonsensical notion, and there's surely enough lookism in the world without our having to go to the extent of considering anyone's looks indicative of goodness or evilness. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-12899376932749985822016-08-07T06:00:00.000-04:002016-08-07T07:56:14.759-04:00Lindy West and Radical Goodness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr830FdC4fn9dpFv0fRUFHVuYBPPPMCEfI7rrHCDx5l09exbhR2lRWKEL3rcvfuKX-bLJpNwln2mxF8wFivbT0K623Igwt0_nvSUXt8K30xif0xzFYHvfQFam6DZD1l-_L7jT2uA0KzdA/s1600/shrill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr830FdC4fn9dpFv0fRUFHVuYBPPPMCEfI7rrHCDx5l09exbhR2lRWKEL3rcvfuKX-bLJpNwln2mxF8wFivbT0K623Igwt0_nvSUXt8K30xif0xzFYHvfQFam6DZD1l-_L7jT2uA0KzdA/s400/shrill.jpg" width="400" height="225" /></a></div><br />
I first became aware of Lindy West via Twitter several years back because my friends would often retweet some of her <i>bon mots</i>. I followed her myself after checking out her page, and the finesse burns West serves to the idiots who troll her made me reconsider my own online policy of not bothering to engage with anyone who didn't seem worth talking to. Then I began to read the columns she writes for <i>The Guardian</i>, and I admired her grasp of social issues and the way she consistently looks beyond individual bad behaviour and into the possible causes and solutions of the larger cultural problems they symptomize. In her September 2015 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/dear-fat-people-vrial-video-canadian-comedian-nicole-arbour">"The 'Dear Fat People' video is tired, cruel and lazy – but I still fight for the woman who made it"</a> piece, she told the "Dear Fat People" YouTuber, "I fight for you in your capacity as a complex, fully formed human being with the right to autonomy over your body, even if that body gets fat." In <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/07/daryush-roosh-v-valizadeh-and-his-acolytes-pilloried?CMP=twt_gu">"Now Roosh V and his band of sad men in dark rooms know how it feels to be bombarded with bile"</a>, a February 2016 piece written after Roosh V, a self-styled "pickup artist" who posts photos of himself standing by expensive cars and brandishing fistfuls of cash, and who with the help of his online minions has been doxxing and harassing women (including Lindy West) for years, was himself doxxed by the internet vigilante group Anonymous and revealed to be living in his mother's basement by the <i>Daily Mail</i>, West wrote that she took little pleasure in the blowback Roosh was facing, because "I want actual change, not whack-a-mole with a grandiose troll." She's a better person than I am by far. My reaction to Roosh V's outing was more along the lines of a tweet I saw that said, "I want to fly around the world and systematically arrange floodlights so 'ROOSH LIVES IN HIS MOM'S BASEMENT LOL' is visible from space," and any <i>Guardian</i> essay I'd have written on the topic would have mentioned that the photos of Roosh at his mother's door show him in a sweat-stained t-shirt. <br />
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When I saw West's tweets about her forthcoming first book, <a href="http://amzn.to/29MVE8o"><i>Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman</i></a>, I was quick to put a library hold on it, and very eager to read it. I thought there was a good chance it would be one of those consciousness-expanding reads that permanently changed the way I saw the world. It wasn't, but then few books are, and then too as a feminist who is fairly well-informed about most of the issues West writes about, I am among the converted rather than among those for whom her perspective would be new or challenging. For me, reading <i>Shrill</i> was much less a revolutionary reading experience than one of deep recognition. <br />
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In a book that's half memoir and half polemic, West writes about growing up in a society that indicated in so many cruel ways that she should not be taking up space or expect to be a success or to be loved or even treated with basic respect because she was "a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men", and about her journey towards confidence, towards not only owning the space she occupies but enlarging her sphere until she became a force for helping others reclaim theirs. It's a journey I recognize because it's so similar to the one I've made myself. The abuse I experienced growing up destroyed the sense of self-worth I needed to combat it, to protect myself from further bad treatment at the hands of others, and even to live my life with any real enjoyment, and I was a long time acquiring a sort of hothouse confidence and learning how to fight the instinctive reaction that if someone treated me like shit, it must be because I am shit. As I read <i>Shrill</i> I kept thinking of a minor but telling incident from when I was 21. One summer day I got on a TTC bus and sat down near a couple of boys in their late teens. One of them said, "What about...?" and inclined his head towards me. The other made a disgusted face and snorted, "No!" I'm 42 now, and if something like that happened to me these days, I'd tell the boys that if they don't learn to treat women with more respect, they are going to be virgins until they die, and then move to another seat, but at 21 I had no defenses against that kind of garbage, and I just sat where I was and felt terrible. <br />
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West writes about growing up fat in a world where being fat is considered "not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing", about the painful shyness it created in her, about the lack of media representation for fat girls (she provides a scraped-from-the bottom-of-the-barrel list that includes Miss Piggy and Lady Cluck from Disney's <i>Robin Hood</i>), about how she stopped doing ordinary things like going swimming or hiking with her friends, about being so revolted by her own menstruation cycle that she could never bear to tell her mother she was running out of tampons, about the men who wanted to have sex with her but didn't want to be seen in public with her. Then she writes about becoming a woman who decided that, screw it, <i>she was valuable</i> and that she was damn well going to not only wear crop tops and bathing suits but also write and publish a piece about being fat illustrated with a full-length picture of herself <i>and</i> call out not only the guy next to her on a plane trip for being a dick but also her boss (who was, by the way, Dan Savage) for the "obesity epidemic" pieces he was publishing. It's glorious and inspiring, and I love the fact that what proved to be West's salvation, and her prescription for anyone who's uncomfortable with their own or anyone else's fatness, is so simple and down-to-earth: look at pictures of fat people online until you get over it.<br />
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But it wasn't as though West's acquired confidence broke down all barriers and made her bulletproof. Her chapter on what it's like to fly when you don't fit into the airplane seats made me first want to shed a few tears for her and then force every airline executive in the world to read it. She continues to face obstacles and to receive bad treatment from others, she writes about it all and about the systemic misogyny it stems from... and then she faces a barrage of online and offline harassment for it. But she pushes back against that too and she's had the satisfaction of seeing a resulting change not only in some of the individuals she interacted with but also in the larger cultural milieu. Dan Savage changed the way he wrote about fat people. One of her most abusive trolls (he set up sock puppet Twitter account for West's father, who had very recently died) actually backed down and apologized to her after reading an essay she had written about how his specific behaviour made her feel, and he didn't stop with only an apology, but also changed his own life. Twitter's CEO told his employees that they needed to get serious about preventing abuse on their platform. Some of the comics she's criticized for misogyny have started to rethink the kind of rape jokes they make. <br />
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<i>Shrill</i> isn't a landmark book, but it is a very worthwhile one that should be read and discussed, as the documented lived experiences of all marginalized people should be. We'll never improve this society of ours until we start really listening to those who are most affected by its failings. The man who is now West's husband told her that during their first moments of real connection, "I started to realize that you weren't just funny--I'd always thought you were funny--but that you might be a really, really radically good person." He was absolutely right, and I can't be thankful enough that Lindy West's particular kind of radical goodness, with its unflinching honesty, compassion and respect for humanity, will be shining a light on and before us all for many years to come. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-26059567616459710362016-07-31T06:00:00.000-04:002016-07-31T06:00:08.056-04:00Riding Along with CJ<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8VmfcLDjAALAGeRVQ3yCJQJT5Ya2PqCnxQDE-u-PU9ObT8EWPy2e1_FCrI4f9F3KM8gxxDjB8LjCLwkP3uQTARvLLF7g3c-SCiKGjnnxOCsncOPL96R60NLMepJIaNjVyVZIvzFv5xY/s1600/last+stop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA8VmfcLDjAALAGeRVQ3yCJQJT5Ya2PqCnxQDE-u-PU9ObT8EWPy2e1_FCrI4f9F3KM8gxxDjB8LjCLwkP3uQTARvLLF7g3c-SCiKGjnnxOCsncOPL96R60NLMepJIaNjVyVZIvzFv5xY/s400/last+stop.jpg" width="325" height="400" /></a></div><br />
The 2016 Newbery Medal Winner, <a href="http://amzn.to/2anJCqi"><i>Last Stop on Market Street</i></a>, written by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson, is an atypical pick for the Newbery committee, which usually goes with a full-length novel rather than a storybook intended for very young readers. (This in turn might just mean that my corresponding review is also shorter than usual.) However, the Newbery committee wasn't alone in recognizing the book's merit, as <i>Last Stop on Market Street</i> was also a 2016 Caldecott Honor Book, a 2016 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book, a <i>New York Times Book Review</i> Notable Children's Book of 2015, and a <i>Wall Street Journal</i> Best Children's Book of 2015. If it had any more award stickers on its cover one wouldn't be able to see the illustration. <br />
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<i>Last Stop on Market Street</i> is a simple tale of a little boy named CJ who boards the bus with his nana on a Sunday afternoon to go downtown and work a shift at the local soup kitchen, and more generally, is a book about living in the moment and connecting with others as opposed to comparing oneself to others and envying them. CJ looks enviously at his friends who drive away from church in a car and who don't have to go to the soup kitchen on Sunday afternoons, and his grandmother, who is awesome, gently redirects him towards finding value in his own Sunday afternoon experience. The text is very evocative and sensory as CJ sees and feels and hears everything about him: the rain, the diversity of the other passengers, the music made by one of the passengers on the bus. The illustrations are vivid and appealing with some fun details for children to discover on their own while they are being read to. I especially loved that CJ's nana, in her white bob, black dress, and green bead necklace and earrings, is a stylish-looking individual rather than a more clichéd frumpy grandmotherly type. <br />
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I must agree with those who chose to honour and award this book that it's a book worthy of praise, as it is delightful in both its appearance and content, so much so that I might just have to buy my three-year-old grandnephew a copy for Christmas. <br />
Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-54312996527074859982016-07-17T06:00:00.000-04:002016-07-17T06:00:05.405-04:00Virtue Unrewarded<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMYIejNCoak8CzMVNgOXQ5Oh6J9ilrocmiPlj2hLcV48gQ4WSBmm13Q055sFfqYSBX-IVUSa6kp4J6EAJkwdRJ1toVlFcLdd7AvT6kHI2uFJyEe4nCktSihnxRjU-jN_OCqw0oKMyqqo/s1600/pamela.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWMYIejNCoak8CzMVNgOXQ5Oh6J9ilrocmiPlj2hLcV48gQ4WSBmm13Q055sFfqYSBX-IVUSa6kp4J6EAJkwdRJ1toVlFcLdd7AvT6kHI2uFJyEe4nCktSihnxRjU-jN_OCqw0oKMyqqo/s400/pamela.jpg" width="247" height="400" /></a></div><br />
Since I don't think I need to worrying about spoiling a novel that is nearly 300 years old, let me start off with a synopsis of Samuel Richardson's <a href="http://amzn.to/29J4RyC"><i>Pamela</i></a>. Pamela is a beautiful 15-year-old lady's maid whose employer dies, leaving her in the employ and at the mercy of the departed lady's lecherous son, Mr. B. He begins a campaign of trying to get her into his bed, and when she resists and insists on being sent home to her parents, he pretends to agree but actually directs his coachman to transport her to another estate of his, where she is held prisoner, her extra clothes and all her money and even her shoes are withheld from her, and her letters to her parents and other sympathizers are intercepted. Her employer makes an appearance at this second estate and slips into bed with her disguised as another maid, and later threatens to strip her naked in an effort to find the letters and journal she has written and hidden away from him. All this occurs in the text that comprised the original first volume of the book. In the second volume (for the writing of which Richardson seems to have changed dominant hands), Mr. B. discovers by reading Pamela's papers that he has made Pamela so miserable that she has considered suicide as a means of escape, at which point he turns an unexpected right-about-face. He relents, returns Pamela's belongings, allows her to choose between going home to her parents or back to his other estate, and proposes marriage. Pamela equally inexplicably decides that she's in love with Mr. B. and accepts his proposal. They marry and are happy, though Mr. B.'s change of spots is clearly only skin-deep (among his many rules for Pamela: she must not approach him unsent for when he is angry, or be "twice bidden" to do something), and he blithely introduces her to his previously unmentioned illegitimate daughter. <br />
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Through the course of Mr. B's pursuit and persecution of her, Pamela repeatedly prides herself on her virtue and her honesty. She will <i>not</i> sleep with a man who is not her husband, regardless of what inducements he offers her or hardships he inflicts upon her. Her determination to protect herself from the the very real possible eighteenth-century-style consequences of pre-marital sex, and the considerable courage and ingenuity she demonstrates when trying to escape the clutches of Mr. B., are very admirable. But then she sold herself puzzlingly short. It was her right to refuse to have sex before marriage if that was what she wanted, but she seems never to have considered that rather than simply holding out for an offer of marriage, she should have held out for an offer of marriage <i>from a man worth marrying</i>, as marriage to a terrible husband can be every bit as miserable in its own way as being abandoned, penniless, unemployable, shunned by all "decent" people, and with a child to support. This <i>was</i> the eighteenth century, and the sexual double standard that lingers on today, even in mainstream secular society, was received wisdom then. But it's a double standard that is about much more than only sex. It still seems strange to me, even for the time, that a young woman who cared so much about her own honesty and virtue did not insist that the man she married should also have those qualities, that a young girl who was so insistent on having sex on her own terms while single was unconditionally willing to submit to such overbearing behaviour from her husband. We don't see this kind of thing even in Richardson's novel <i>Clarissa</i>, in which Clarissa Harlowe steadfastly refuses Robert Lovelace, who similarly abducts her, because she is not satisfied with his character, public opinion or her future matrimonial chances be damned.<br />
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Depressingly, we haven't made all that much progress in leveling the sexual politics playing field since 1740, when <i>Pamela</i> was published. Yes, in secular Western society it is now uncommon for women to be considered dishonest or unmarriageable because they've had premarital sex. But even leaving aside fundamentalist religious cultures in which abstinence is expected of only the females, and of such extreme consequences for non-compliance as what are indecently designated "honour killings", even in this best case scenario of a secular, liberal society, there is still a pernicious myth that women bear a disproportionate share of responsibility for making their relationships work, that if they play their cards right they'll get their reward: a healthy, happy, lasting relationship. As I read Pamela's reiteration of the 48(!!!) rules her husband had set for her, and her anxious annotations as to how she could best adhere to them, I was painfully reminded of my own and my friends' Herculean attempts to make our relationships with men work out... and of how the men in question sat back and refused to change a thing about their treatment of us, or made at most, and very grudgingly, a few tiny concessions. As a close friend of mine said to me, "In bad relationships, you're staying more for the fantasy of what the relationship could be than for its actual potential." And that's what <i>Pamela</i> is -- a fantasy. No man who would abduct a woman and hold her captive would ever make a good husband, and no woman can change an abusive, controlling asshole into a kind, respectful man. Yet so many of us keep rowing the boat of our relationships all by ourselves, hoping that one day, if we try hard enough for long enough, our partners will get it and start doing their share of the rowing. I've never seen that work -- we inevitably end up going in circles, and exhausting ourselves -- and I don't buy that it worked in <i>Pamela</i>.<br />
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That's not to say that <i>Pamela</i> doesn't have its fine qualities. It was progressive for its time, because it was the first important English-language novel to feature a heroine who worked for her living. Pamela's rightful insistence on her chastity would have also been a much-needed goosing of classist sexual mores of the time, which regarded working class women as sexually available and disposable. The novel is unsparing in its censure of those who do not dare help Pamela because they don't feel they can afford to offend such a wealthy and powerful man, and to those who unquestioningly aid Mr. B. in his efforts to bend Pamela to his will. Richardson's erudite prose is a pleasure to read. And the book is compulsively readable and suspenseful. I enjoyed the first half of <i>Pamela</i>, rending as it was to read about Pamela's growing privations and distress, and looked forward to the reward Pamela was promised in the subtitle. I just wish such an intelligent and strong-willed heroine had gotten the reward she truly deserved: the freedom to live her life on her own terms without having to turn herself inside out to please a man, regardless of whether she was married or single. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-81044158504495251522016-07-12T21:16:00.000-04:002016-07-12T21:16:20.736-04:00The Neverending Pigeon Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnA9OqqL6DHHOOqDWFPrYH7fNWwAMc63z13_K0yWBAtnfvnwZ-w6mLTTx_MdcKUTiwxMqhkjJ83y86GUG4IdK-mEq1PDAVv4aczOMax_zuxg8PZweD-NiIZq1eq5fbVWKzt4-GSnnKQ0I/s1600/gay+neck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnA9OqqL6DHHOOqDWFPrYH7fNWwAMc63z13_K0yWBAtnfvnwZ-w6mLTTx_MdcKUTiwxMqhkjJ83y86GUG4IdK-mEq1PDAVv4aczOMax_zuxg8PZweD-NiIZq1eq5fbVWKzt4-GSnnKQ0I/s400/gay+neck.jpg" width="268" height="400" /></a></div><br />
A Good Reads review written by Good Reads member Phil Jern says of <a href="http://amzn.to/29NDzg8"><i>Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon</i></a>, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, the Newbery Medal winner for 1928, "This book is a milestone in anyone's life as a reader. Before it, you are one of a multitude. After it, you are one of a select few who have heard about it, sought it out, picked it up, and persisted with it well past the point of enjoyment." This seems harsh. Unfortunately, I cannot disagree with a word of it.<br />
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<i>Gay-Neck</i>, like 1927's Newbery Medal winner <a href="http://orangeswan.blogspot.ca/2015/11/will-jamess-smoky-cowhorse-and-other.html"><i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i></a>, is the story of a life of an animal told by a writer who clearly has a great love of and significant experience with the species, and again as in the case of <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i>, the resulting book manages to be very dull anyway. <i>Gay-Neck</i> is at least mercifully free from the ugly racism and folksy affectations of <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i>, though the titular name of its main character hasn't dated as well. The story's narrator is a young boy who raised Gay-Neck in pre-World War I Calcutta (now Kolkata). There are a few sections of the book in which Gay-Neck speaks for himself, but Gay-Neck's narrative "voice" reads as identical to that of the main narrator, which is not only confusing but a missed opportunity for adding to the literary quality and reader's enjoyment of the book. Anthropomorphized animal or object "voices" can be a lot of fun when properly done. (I have fond memories of an email correspondence that occurred between the problem mice in my house and a friend of mine years ago before I adopted my cat. The first email had the subject line "send cheees now" and in it the mice claimed to have "trapped the murderus human in her own trap ha ha ha send cheees now we like bree".) <br />
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Gay-Neck's story is based upon Mukerkji's own boyhood experiences, as he also grew up in India and kept pigeons. We learn next to nothing about the boy -- not even his name! -- or the Calcutta of the time, which seems a waste. There are tantalizing glimpses of India and its culture in the book's descriptions of Mount Everest and the jungle and some fragments of Buddhist thought, but in general the story's narrator is too busy telling us about the care and feeding of pigeons and advising us on how often to clean pigeon's nests to develop much of a setting for his story, much less any of the other qualities that make for good fiction. There's no character development and not much of a narrative arc, and the prose is flatly observational. <br />
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Then Gay-Neck serves as a messenger pigeon in World War I, and whatever the story gains in narrative interest during the war chapters it loses in authenticity, as Mukerji never trained pigeons for war service much less witnessed their use for such a purpose. He claims that the nictitating membrane or "third eye" that pigeons protected Gay-Neck from the effects of mustard gas. Pigeons <i>did</i> prove resistant to all but the most poisonous gases, but they were fitted with masks and provided with <a href="http://www.vlib.us/medical/gaswar/Pigeon%20Box.jpg">pigeon lofts especially designed to protect messenger pigeons from poisonous gas</a>, and there's no mention of this in the battlefront scenes in <i>Gay-Neck</i>. I'm also skeptical that the narrator, who spends the book repeatedly losing and rediscovering his precious pigeon, not only gets Gay-Neck back after the war but also helps him make what must be the world's fastest-ever recovery from PTSD with some Buddhist monk magic, but at that point I was too relieved to have reached the end of the book to care very much. <br />
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After making most of my way through the Newbery Medal winners of the 1920s, I sometimes wonder if the librarians who were the Newbery committee members of the period actually secretly hated children.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-13951248557842896422016-04-13T18:26:00.000-04:002016-04-13T19:05:24.677-04:00Being Hitty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO3btmk6wQTIPhEjsw3Son7y1-_6tKmJIB-o2P8_duFbEo4eqS5ww5sjkYNczzpuwn_VNFkoQzRcT6mnTtYY3AKqCxTJiSCBKCQzSvCt3MPqmrp6FOeGQCukCsKAjipPY80v-1c7oY2Bw/s1600/Hitty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO3btmk6wQTIPhEjsw3Son7y1-_6tKmJIB-o2P8_duFbEo4eqS5ww5sjkYNczzpuwn_VNFkoQzRcT6mnTtYY3AKqCxTJiSCBKCQzSvCt3MPqmrp6FOeGQCukCsKAjipPY80v-1c7oY2Bw/s400/Hitty.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Years ago when the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120802/"><i>The Red Violin</i></a> came out, I read a review of it in which the reviewer complained that an inanimate object doesn't inspire much interest or emotional investment. When, much later, I saw the movie, I disagreed. Following the titular red violin through four century chain of custody was very interesting and involving. But then I'm the sort of person who not only likes old things and is careful to preserve them but also sometimes wonders what their history has been and where they might end up. I'm the happy owner of a number of pieces of furniture that I found on someone's curb, brought home, and repaired and repainted/reupholstered/refinished. Where have these pieces been and what would their former owners say if they could see them now? ("Kick themselves for throwing them out," my friends assure me.) What would my great-grandmother have said if she could have foreseen when she bought her set of kitchen chairs circa 1900 that they would be sitting in her single, childless, and yoga-panted great-granddaughter's dining room in 2016? My guess is that Great Grandma would have found other aspects of my life circumstances more startling (starting with the yoga pants), but those chairs are as good a common thread as any if one were to craft a jointed narrative about the two of us. <br />
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This is all to say that though the Newbery winner for 1930, Rachel Field's <a href="http://amzn.to/1VWnNhA"><i>Hitty: Her First Hundred Years</i></a>, which is the story of a little wooden doll's first century of existence, has a number of online reader reviews which criticize it for being boring, I liked it. Hitty, a little doll carved from mountain ash in early nineteenth-century Maine, relates her adventures to us from her home in an antique shop in the late twenties. She had much more interesting experiences than my dining room chairs have probably had, in no small part because she's portable and lends herself much more easily to anthropomorphism. Hitty is, as one might expect of a doll of her early Victorian origin and many years of fraught existence, a prim and pragmatic character, though she isn't without her share of vanity as well as a liking for finery. Her tale begins with her travels in the care of the little daughter of a sea captain. After a shipwreck, she experiences life as "god to a tribe of savages" on an unnamed south sea island, and after being lost in India, as the tool of a an Indian snake charmer. Then she passes through the lives of missionaries, Philadelphia Quakers, a fashionable, wealthy New York family, and a poor, overworked, and tenement-dwelling New York family. She attends a Patti concert, has her daguerreotype taken, meets John Greenleaf Whittier and becomes the subject of one of his poems, and later meets Charles Dickens, though Dickens, less inspired by the sight of her plain, serene face, merely picks Hitty up off the floor where she has fallen and hands her back to her young custodian. Hitty becomes a prop for an artist who painted children's portraits, is dressed in an exquisite lace bridal gown and displayed in an Exposition, lives with a sharecropping family, and finally suffers the indignity of being traded for a painted soap dish and made into a pincushion before she ultimately achieves the status of an antique and passes into the hands of doll collectors and antique dealers. There are also times when the Hitty spends an undefined number of years abandoned in, respectively, an attic, a hayloft, and a dead letter office. I'm inclined to think the author used these intervals to keep the book a publishable length.<br />
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Besides <i>The Red Violin</i>, this book reminded me of another episodic movie called <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106379/"><i>Being Human</i></a>, in which Robin Williams plays a recurring character named Hector who appears in a variety of historical scenarios ranging from Roman times to the present day, and in each vignette he strives to survive, to protect and care for those he loves -- and to find shoes that fit. This book has a similar style and themes, and it isn't at all a bad way for a child to learn about the history of American childhood. The book presents us with such a wide variety of family dynamics, material circumstances, and child training philosophies, all playing out over a long time period, and a certain universality of childhood experience ties it all together. Every little girl who called Hitty hers chafes against the parental restrictions and material circumstances of her life, something all children can relate to. I even found something a little subversive in the fact that Hitty has some of her most interesting adventures because her current young mistress her did something she wasn't supposed to do. Don't those stolen moments of freedom often become some of the most important and enjoyable of an adult's childhood memories? <br />
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As is to be expected from a book over eighty years old, there are aspects of the book that have not dated well. I can only hope that Hitty learns less offensive ways of describing people who were other than American and white in her second century (the sharecropping family's dialogue was especially horrendous, all "gwines" and "dats"), and her classist attitude towards the poorer families she lives in is also quite problematic. Hitty spends considerably more verbiage detailing her life among the wealthy than the poor, and seems to regard life among the white and the at least comfortably well off as being her proper place in life and the only sphere in which she can be contented, while life among other kinds of people is merely a mishap to be passed over as quickly as possible. The little girls who own her are also described and assessed in terms of typically Victorian feminine virtues: their gentleness and good temper (or otherwise), and their sewing ability and industry. But then, again, this book only covers Hitty's first century. Perhaps someone will write a sequel covering Hitty's next one hundred years in which she belongs to a diverse selection of children -- boys and girls -- who are more fully realized, and in which Hitty wears stylish flapper outfits, the New Look, poodle skirts, groovy paisleys, dresses for success, grunge, etc. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-23285465888743092372015-11-04T19:33:00.000-05:002015-11-04T19:35:05.848-05:00Smoky the Cowhorse and Other Fictions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6mVLCv5zZvHvdp5WBzXKQ31Aa1i2Ms94XP1QOAePFp5dZFC9CNZ-EDOG0VMNvtfHWEVueVVnqV0ov1CNVR9Oz2S9VnN6pa8bE02I3p8kbvmxEwGvVE_T1NWkVBGbk4AqibCtfznTjtQ/s1600/smoky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq6mVLCv5zZvHvdp5WBzXKQ31Aa1i2Ms94XP1QOAePFp5dZFC9CNZ-EDOG0VMNvtfHWEVueVVnqV0ov1CNVR9Oz2S9VnN6pa8bE02I3p8kbvmxEwGvVE_T1NWkVBGbk4AqibCtfznTjtQ/s400/smoky.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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The inside jacket text of my library copy of the Newbery medalist for 1927, Will James's <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416949410/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416949410&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=VCSHVTEFDHOEUEI5"><i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i></a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1416949410" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />, says that "A cowboy, son of a cowman, Will James was born in a covered wagon in Montana." Well, no, he wasn't. As a matter of fact, James was born Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault, in 1892 in Saint-Nazaire-d'Acton, Quebec, Canada. I do not know precisely where he was born, but covered wagons would have been extremely uncommon in Quebec even in 1892, so it seems safe to assume that this detail too was fictionalized. Dufault learned wrangling and other cowboy skills when he relocated to Saskatchewan as a young man, so it also seems likely his father wasn't a cowman, which like covered wagons would have been almost unknown in nineteenth century Quebec where cattle herds were too small to require specialized staff. Dufault changed his name to William Roderick James when he fled Saskatchewan for the States after being accused of cattle theft. After several years of drifting and working at this and that, he was arrested for cattle theft in Nevada and served 15 months in prison. Upon his release he spent some time working as a movie stuntman and then served a year in the U.S. army during World War I. When the war ended, he worked as a wrangler, and sold his first book, after which he made his living from writing and probably also with the various ranches he bought with the proceeds of his books, until his death from alcoholism in 1942. <br />
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The dust jacket quotes James as saying, "I write for everybody like I would talk to friends who are interested in what I have to say," and <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> is written in what is purportedly a written version of a cowboy's tall tale, but even before I finished the book and did the internet research that told me James was not who he claimed to be, I didn't buy it. Those who genuinely speak an authentic regional or cultural English dialect always write in standard English prose to the best of their abilities when it comes to putting words on paper, unless they are reproducing a dialect in a dialogue between characters, and even then it's best to use a light touch in terms of misspellings and grammatical errors so as not to make the text too unreadable or to make the character sound too caricatured or ignorant. To write an entire book in a cowboy's supposed semi-literate folksy vernacular is an irritating affectation, especially when said cowboy uses words like "eddication" or "crethure" but has no apparent difficulty with the correct spellings of "commotion", "functioning", and "superintendent". My subsequent discovery that James was actually French-Canadian did nothing to decrease my annoyance. <br />
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Like the 1926 Newbery medalist <a href="http://orangeswan.blogspot.ca/2015/07/shen-of-sea.html"><i>Shen of the Sea</i></a>, <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> is another example of a regrettable faux exoticism that seems to have deceived and dazzled early Newbery selection committees again and again. To be fair, they weren't the only ones taken in by James's folksy act. In 1930, Will James wrote a fictionalized autobiography, <i>Lone Cowboy</i>, which became a bestselling Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and even my library copy of <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> which, as I've said, features James's fictional biographical information on its dust jacket, appears to have been published circa 1980, which means that his personae may have remained intact as late as that. It's astounding to think how much our contemporary easy access to information has changed such things. <br />
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There <i>are</i> occasional modern day cases of authors slipping fictionalized memoirs by their publishers, such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Love_(novel)">Norma Khouri's <i>Forbidden Love</i></a>, or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces">James Frey's <i>A Million Little Pieces</i></a>, but these days such fabricators are rare and are generally caught out within a year or two of publication. Fabricated biographical details used to be much more common. It used to be standard practice for movie studios to demand that their contracted actors and actresses change their names, lie about their ages, and even pass their illegitimate children off as much younger siblings if not deny their existence completely, but now it's so easy for anyone with internet access to check IMDB that no one bothers. There is still quite a lot of lying among politicians, but it's usually promptly and gleefully called out by the likes of Jon Stewart or John Oliver. Unfortunately too many citizens continue to embrace the lies circulated by those too shameless, too dysfunctional, and too greedy and power-mad to ever admit that they've been lying no matter how high the evidence is stacked against them, but these days the truth is usually out there for anyone who cares to seek it, and human beings have long hated being lied to and have little respect for liars once they know the truth. I didn't hear too many people defending James Frey when he appeared on <i>Oprah</i> after his memoir's debunking and Oprah Winfrey all but turned him over her knee. A book written in a fake dialect would never be published by a traditional publisher now, much less selected for a major literary award.<br />
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That's not to say <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> is completely inauthentic. James did indeed work as a cowboy, he was a rancher, and he knew, and I suspect deeply loved, horses. <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> relates to us the life of a cowhorse from the time of his birth on the range through his training and work as a cowhorse, his subsequent theft, and his passing through the hands of various owners and change of names and work as he becomes by turn a rodeo bronco, a riding horse rented out by the day, and a broken down plow and cart horse destined for the knackers, before he is finally rescued by and reunited with Clint, the cowboy who originally broke him in and loved him. It's a narrative arc very similar to that of <i>Black Beauty</i>'s, and though as a literary effort <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> is far inferior to <i>Black Beauty</i> (I pined for <i>Black Beauty</i>'s perfect prose the entire time I was reading it), James's anger over the extent of the cruelty and neglect a horse could endure from its owner is as palpable as Anna Sewell's ever was. <br />
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The deliberately misspelled and ungrammatical prose of this book makes it a tedious chore to read, and the opening chapters that describe Smoky's early years running free on the range are very boring, but I haven't even gotten to the book's ugliest flaw: its racism. The horse thief who steals Smoky is described as "being a half breed of Mexican and other blood that's darker... a halfbreed from the <i>bad</i> side, not caring, and with no pride", and is referred to through the subsequent pages as "the breed". I don't even know where to start when it comes to deconstructing that appallingly racist characterization, and it only gets more disgusting when I consider James's own history as a cattle thief. And it gets worse. Because of his treatment at the hands of the horse thief, Smoky becomes a horse who hates all men of colour, or as James so delicately puts it, "his hate was plainest for the face that showed dark". I have no real experience with horses, but I am very, very skeptical that this would even happen. <br />
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Then, in a later incident, when Clint finds Smoky again and subjects his abusive owner, whom we have been given to understand is non-white, to a horse whipping, a sheriff approaches Clint, <i>grins</i>, and says, "Say, cowboy... don't scatter that hombre's remains too much; you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don't want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he <i>was</i>." Clint then proceeds to go "back to his victim and broke the butt end of the whip over his head" as the sheriff watches. Smoky's former owner goes to jail for animal cruelty, but Clint faces no consequences for assault. He gets to take Smoky home with him and then "spend the evening 'investigating' with the sheriff". His vigilante assault is considered to be not only just deserts but a joke, and he is elevated to the level of a de facto officer of the law who works with the sheriff as an equal. I don't believe for one minute that a native American or a Mexican who had attacked a white horse owner for animal cruelty would have escaped any consequences for his actions in the American west of the 1920s. While a white cowboy like Clint who attacked a "hombre" for his treatment of his horse may well have gotten away with it in that time and place, James's representation of it as a just and even satisfying turn of events is unacceptable. <br />
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Between the poor and affected quality of its prose, the dullness of its opening chapters, and the stunningly bigoted treatment of its non white characters, this is not a book that deserves to still be in print, but it is, because that is the power of the Newbery medal. Choose well, future Newbery committee members. You really do not want a <i>Smoky the Cowhorse</i> to be your legacy. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01287919619057927733noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-16588256481404575302015-10-13T17:36:00.000-04:002016-07-23T19:24:46.399-04:00An Uninvincible Biography<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsMAZP7ud8FRHENNgbWcp_3oU0o1M6xYchdtiZQj-yjmU7OpwbpoOiuj4hYLgGZvpMnmLj0XurCNIGjp932RMtQeZhUUM8jzjXoLtTKtkmXOvMRwD5IYWny81OEyVyt8LeB5u8Bykgj3Ym/s1600/louisa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsMAZP7ud8FRHENNgbWcp_3oU0o1M6xYchdtiZQj-yjmU7OpwbpoOiuj4hYLgGZvpMnmLj0XurCNIGjp932RMtQeZhUUM8jzjXoLtTKtkmXOvMRwD5IYWny81OEyVyt8LeB5u8Bykgj3Ym/s400/louisa.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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The Newbery medalist for 1934, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316565946/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0316565946&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=EMC4PDZCZY5ENOJC"><i>Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women</i>,</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0316565946" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> by Cornelia Meigs, hasn't aged well. But then biographies don't tend to. Continued historical research efforts into a subject of interest and scientific advances as well as the greater ease of access made possible by computerization and the rise of the internet means that the amount of biographical information available tends to grow rather than decrease, and very often an old biography proves to be not only incomplete but incorrect. Then too, the standpoint from which we view and analyze a historical subject can change radically. <br />
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Such is the case with <i>Invincible Louisa</i>. I wasn't far into my re-read of this book (I first read it as a teenager) before I decided I'd have to track down and read a more modern biography in order to assess the accuracy and worth of <i>Invincible Louisa</i>. These days there are many books available which treat not only Louisa May Alcott's life but also the other members of her exceptionally talented and accomplished family, but the one I chose was <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312658877/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0312658877&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=VN7MX3VSYUDKNP5J"><i>Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women</i></a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0312658877" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> by Harriet Reisen, which from what I can tell seems solidly researched and written, though I will say I was taken aback by the several errors Reisen makes in her references to the text of <i>Little Women</i> (i.e., she writes that Beth March was sixteen when she died when Beth actually would have been twenty or twenty-one, and she refers to the twins Daisy and Demi Brooke as Jo's children when they were Meg's). I expected better accuracy from someone who describes herself as a passionate Alcott fan, especially when these textual references were so easy to verify. However, I am here to review <i>Invicible Louisa</i> rather than Reisen's book. <br />
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As I wrote above, <i>Invincible Louisa</i>, while it would have been solidly researched and written for its time, has been supplanted in its usefulness by more modern biographies. Thanks to relaxed social morés, modern biographers can write more freely on questions such as whether Alcott was a lesbian, and they also have much better access to documentation than Meigs would have had: more Alcott family correspondence and other writings as well as newspapers and city records, and more records of interviews with those who knew Alcott personally, as well as a great deal of Alcott's own fiction that was unknown in the thirties and has been rediscovered since, and the result is a fuller, more nuanced picture of who Alcott was and what her life and circumstances were. Meigs paints a portrait of the Alcotts as a family that lived on love and intellectual stimulation and took poverty in its cheerful stride. In Reisen's account, Reisen goes into much greater detail about Alcott's family background and her parents' early lives and marriage, and then relates how Bronson and Abba Alcott spent so irresponsibly and were so cavalier about debt that at one point they owed their various creditors the astounding sum of $6,000. (According to an online calculator I consulted, $6000 in 1850 dollars is the equivalent of $177,777.89 in 2015 dollars.) Bronson and Abba Alcott not only had no expectation or hope of ever repaying their debts but were none too concerned about it. Abba's well-to-do relatives became unwilling to lend them money outright and instead would take steps to safeguard any gifts of money by such measures as arranging a line of credit at the grocer's, and Abba was outraged by the terms of her father's will, which tied up her inheritance in an effort to keep the Alcotts from wasting it. This picture is a far cry from the kind of noble privation Meigs writes about, and it gets even darker when one considers Reisen's suggestion that Bronson Alcott may have been unable to earn a decent living for his family due to his suffering from some form of unrecognized and untreated mental illness. More sobering as Reisen's account may be, I much prefer it to Meigs' prettified version. It's far more interesting, for one thing. It's always better to know the truth of a matter, and the sentimentalization and oversimplification of poverty, with the accompanying claim that poverty's solution lies in rugged individualism, is a long-standing pernicious myth in North American society that can't be deconstructed often enough. <br />
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Speaking of pernicious forces, I can say the same of Meigs' sickly sweet portrayal of Louisa May Alcott herself as the dutiful, self-sacrificing daughter who never thought of herself and died just two days after her father, with her life's primary mission accomplished. Here are the closing sentences of <i>Invincible Louisa</i>:<br />
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<blockquote><i>When she died, she did not know that Bronson Alcott had gone just before her. What she did know was that she had taken care of him to the very last of his needing her, that she had been able to guard and protect and watch over the entire family. That, indeed, was happy ending; that was the whole of what she had wanted from life -- just to take care of them all.</i></blockquote><br />
You'll have to excuse me while I unroll my eyes. Meigs is asking us to believe that Louisa May Alcott, an ambitious, driven, passionate, moody, impatient, complex, talented, sophisticated, and intelligent woman, asked nothing more from life than to care for her family, and that's not a proposition that makes any sense even on its face. Reisen's account, which is supported by her references to historical documentation, is again a less simplistic view. Alcott <i>was</i> generous, she <i>did</i> love her family, and she <i>did</i> greatly enjoy providing them with the kind of easy, comfortable lifestyle she wanted them to have. But she was no saint, nor simple-minded, and there were other motives and emotions at play. She sometimes feared she was more loved as a moneymaker than as a daughter. She adored her young sister May (the counterpart of Amy March), but Alcott felt some resentment over the fact that her sister had an easier life than herself thanks partly to Alcott's efforts and partly to May's sunnier gifts: her more admired golden-haired looks, her gracious personality, and her even temperament. Alcott complained that May "always had the cream of things". As in <i>Little Women</i> where Amy is invited to go on a European tour with her aunt and cousin while Jo remains at home, the Alcotts' wealthy and well-connected relatives were quicker to be generous with the gentle, grateful May than the sharp-tongued, independent Louisa. Then too, Alcott's generosity wasn't without an ulterior motive: supporting those she loved kept them more closely bound to her.<br />
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Alcott also definitely wanted more out of life than simply to take care of her family. She loved her writing for its own sake and strove for literary excellence. She could be quite political and campaigned for the abolition of slavery, complete racial equality, and women's suffrage. She enjoyed social life and cultural attractions such as plays, lectures, and concerts (as long as they didn't take too much time away from her writing), and she wasn't above enjoying her wealth herself once she had it. I was glad to read that she indulged in silk dresses made by the best dressmakers and a European tour, and hired a household staff rather than subscribe to her father's view of housework as being good for the character. She had many friends, both male and female, some intense relationships with men (most notably with a certain Ladislas Wisniewski, a Polish expatriate twelve years her junior who became the model for Laurie Laurence of the <i>Little Women</i> series), and some marriage proposals, though she accepted none of them. She was not a woman who was so emotionally wrapped up in her birth family that she didn't wish to marry, but rather a passionate woman who never happened to meet a man she considered a satisfactory counterpart, and who consequently wisely embraced the freedom and independence of single life despite its loneliness rather than settle for any of the substandard marital partnerships that were open to her. Again, the true story is the one I would rather read. I don't care to see the Victorian mythic ideal of woman as a selfless and single-minded caretaker perpetuated.<br />
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Another myth that Reisen corrects is the theory that the poor health that plagued Alcott from her late twenties until her death in her fifties was due to her having been treated with mercury when she contracted typhoid pneumonia while working as Civil War nurse. This was Alcott's own view (it was a comfort to her to feel that she had lost her health for a noble cause), and was commonly believed by Alcott scholars until 2001, but it is not true. The mercury would have been eradicated from Alcott's system within a year, and it is now thought that her chronic health problems and early death were probably caused by lupus (though her extremely poor childhood nutrition certainly didn't help), as indicated by her symptoms as described in historical documents and by a telltale butterfly facial rash that appears in the only portrait ever painted of her.<br />
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I'm not faulting Cornelia Meigs for not writing a better biography. She did the best she could with the material and the knowledge she had available to her in the thirties. But I wouldn't recommend Meigs' biography to anyone but an avid Alcott fan who is determined to glean every nugget of information possible about Alcott by reading every book ever written about her. If you have a milder sort of interest in Louisa May Alcott and are only prepared to read one or two books on the subject of her life, go with Harriet Reisen's biography and/or some of the other more contemporary Alcott treatises. We have better options now. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-92197452570799317482015-07-22T19:31:00.001-04:002015-11-10T15:32:11.069-05:00Chinoiserie and 1920s-Style Multiculturalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjklqSnmdfhxF278uif_16vUfB-ngOVCJKCCm7mpkQcmhmTP9o2yC6vQwo8CQ3JrWhBM96C-ZtAhFqnX-CWGgFqX8woodqMwo7O9WhLnJ1l57fddf4X1ptFzB41qKDbhnRD-XuIQVwY-mEm/s1600/Shen+of+the+Sea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjklqSnmdfhxF278uif_16vUfB-ngOVCJKCCm7mpkQcmhmTP9o2yC6vQwo8CQ3JrWhBM96C-ZtAhFqnX-CWGgFqX8woodqMwo7O9WhLnJ1l57fddf4X1ptFzB41qKDbhnRD-XuIQVwY-mEm/s400/Shen+of+the+Sea.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The Newbery medal-winner for 1926, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525392440/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0525392440&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=T6BEZGLZZANSOOXW"><i>Shen of The Sea: Chinese Stories for Children, by Arthur Bowie Chrisman,</i></a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0525392440" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt=""style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;"/>is another Newbery winner that would never see the light of day had it been written in contemporary times, unless it were as one of those thousands of self-published opuses on Amazon that few ever read. The quality of the book itself isn't really the problem, at least not when judged strictly by literary terms. The sixteen tales in <i>Shen of the Sea</i> are written in competent if not fine prose and are even quite inventive and fun in spots. In true folktale tradition, the clever and good, or sometimes the merely simple and persistent, repeatedly and delightfully defeat the mighty and cruel. The plots are so standard for such tales that I hardly need worry about spoiling them for you: the simple beggar boy proves himself worthy to be the son of a king, powerful demons are tricked into a pickle bottle, and the exquisitely beautiful and virtuous young maiden escapes an unworthy bridegroom. We are also presented with some <i>pourquoi</i> tales for the invention of fireworks, china, printing, tea, chopsticks, the kite, and gunpowder. <br />
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Like the 1925 Newbery winner <a href="http://orangeswan.blogspot.ca/2007/06/tales-as-beautiful-as-they-are-good.html"><i>Tales from Silver Lands</i> by Charles Finger</a>, the U.S.-published <i>Shen of the Sea</i> is a collection of stories set in another land and culture from those belonging to its American author. However, unlike Finger, who collected the stories for his book on his travels through South America, Chrisman never even visited China. His stories may not have either. Chrisman studied Chinese literature and history as a hobby (one wonders just how many books and periodicals on the topic would have been available to a non-academic of very modest financial means in the 1920s), and the closest he seems to have gotten to experiencing Chinese culture himself was talking to a Chinese storekeeper he met while travelling in California. The storekeeper may have given Chrisman some of these stories, but it's equally possible that Chrisman made them up himself. These stories, far from being authentically Chinese, are actually a bit of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinoiserie">chinoiserie</a>, a cultural appropriation of Chinese culture by someone whose understanding and knowledge of it seems to have been slight and imperfect. Even the illustrations in <i>Shen of the Sea</i> are of a piece with Chrisman's faux Chinese efforts. The book contains 50 silhouettes by Danish artist Else Hasselriis. The silhouette style seems to have been chosen because it was meant to reference Chinese shadow play, but as you'll see from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_play">Wikipedia article on shadow play</a>, the silhouette art form does not look anything like Chinese shadow puppets, though it does look quite a lot like the French version of shadow puppets that arose after French missionaries who worked in China brought the art form back to France in 1767. The illustrations do have considerable charm, but, like the text, are a foreigner's conception of Chinese art rather than actual Chinese art.<br />
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In the 1920s, any effort to learn about and show appreciation another culture would have been progressive for the time, and I am sure the 1926 Newbery committee had nothing but good intentions and honestly considered this book to be broadening and educational for children. However, in the Age of Information, we do expect our information to be more reliable and authoritative than that provided by Chrisman (unless, of course, we subscribe to any Rupert Murdoch-owned news publications or channels). The bar for those writing about a culture not their own is much higher now, and rightfully so. We don't need misinformation and misrepresentations that purport to be truth clouding people's minds and self-perpetuating until they create generations of misguided citizens, especially when those who have absorbed misinformation about an issue tend to cling to their beliefs and refuse to entertain the possibility that what they believe to be true is not actually true after all, even when presented with evidence. <br />
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Not that I'm comparing Chrisman's book to, say, the anti-vaccination campaign launched by a certain few educationally challenged celebrities. I doubt that <i>Shen of the Sea</i> has done China's relations with the rest of the world any measurable level of harm. The book at least represents Chinese culture as being interesting and worthy of the attention of outsiders. I can't speak to the accuracy of the information about Chinese culture, though I will say I found Chrisman's use of Chinese names that read as jokes in English (i.e., Ah Mee, Ah Fun, Hai Lo) and certain other comic touches to be cringeworthy. There is also definitely a dearth of female characters. They are always supporting characters even when the tale is named for them, they seldom speak or do anything of note, and they all fit into one of a few archetypes: beautiful, desirable maiden or princess; nagging or silently suffering wife, or witch. To be fair, the same could be said of many old folktales. <br />
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But as careful as I've been to temper my criticisms of this book with mitigating factors, I doubt I'd ever give or recommend this book to a child. <i>Shen of the Sea</i> may have been the best English-language children's book about Chinese culture available in 1926 but, happily, these days we have better options. Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-38466687674244280772015-07-16T21:44:00.004-04:002015-11-10T15:33:25.341-05:00Why the Future of Publishing May Involve Rotten TomatoesOne of the paradoxes of our time is that while people often claim that publishing is in its death throes, it’s never been easier to get published. We live in an age in which it’s possible for anyone with a computer and an internet connection to make their book (or music, art, or video/film) available for the whole world to see. That is, theoretically. Because as wonderful as it is to think that talented, creative people are guaranteed a way to publish their work for the world to enjoy, that there will be no brilliant novels languishing unknown in a drawer because their authors couldn’t get closer to being published than a publishing house’s slush pile, as those who have self-published any of their work know, it’s damn near impossible to get anything approaching a reasonable audience to look at whatever they’ve produced. What people mean when they claim publishing is dying is that the traditional publishing model is on its way out. And perhaps it is. Perhaps we are moving towards a publishing business model that will be almost exclusively author-driven and involves the author hiring whatever level of editing, production, and marketing services he or she can afford... which means that, as most authors won’t be able to afford to sink any money into a such a risky venture, most publishing will be a modest, do-it-yourself affair with correspondingly modest readership and financial results. <br />
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One of the dangers of this outcome is that almost all of our writers and artists will become dilettantes who are expected to produce work for the rest of us to enjoy in whatever time is left after working a day job (not to mention doing the housekeeping, spending time with their romantic partners, raising their kids, exercising, seeing their friends etc.), and all in return for driblets of money that may not pay for much more than the cost of the internet connection required to publish their work. How many books will even the most talented and committed writer produce under such circumstances before deciding it just isn’t worthwhile, or even possible, to keep at it anymore? This rather heart-rending article from author Christopher Pierznik, <a href="https://medium.com/@pierzy/what-happens-when-virtually-no-one-buys-your-book-4c23d6071026">"What Happens When (Virtually) No One Buys Your Book"</a>, paints a vivid picture of the kind of scenario I am thinking of. Pierznik is keeping on because he finds writing too rewarding to give it up, but many gifted writers won’t. <br />
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The other serious drawback to self-publishing is that, as so very many people have the same few artistic goals and so very few have the taste, skill, and talent required to produce anything really worthwhile, we’re all getting swamped by a sea of self-published material that is mediocre or worse, with no feasible way to find the high-calibre creative work. Who's going to read all those thousands of wretched self-published books on Amazon to find the occasional scattered gems among them? Self-publishers are always told that they have to market themselves, but the truth is that many very accomplished self-published writers and artists <i>do</i> knock themselves out trying to promote their work and still aren’t developing much of an audience. If anything, increased individual self-marketing efforts on the part of the self-published legion only makes matters worse, because it means more people yelling into the void and more people tuning it out. No one really trusts or even wants to have to see or listen to these amateurish promotional efforts. After all, as the old saying goes, self-praise is no recommends, and a self-published author’s mother’s glowing Amazon customer review of his or her self-published novel is even less reliable, not to mention more piteous. <br />
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The truth is that, as our society so often does, we’re asking too much of those who are the most burdened by a common problem, and it’s both unfair and unrealistic for us to do so as the issue is systemic and in most cases can’t be resolved by even the most Herculean individual efforts. What we need to do as a society, whether we’re creators or consumers of art, is to figure out how to make it possible for the cream of our artistic efforts to rise to the top where it can be readily found (and one hopes, purchased) by those who will appreciate it. We need to develop reliable and efficient ways to find the best and most worthwhile of self-published, and for that matter, traditionally published materials. <br />
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I don’t claim to have the wholesale solution to this structural problem, but I do think that part of the answer is that we need critics and filters. We need reasonably objective and non-vested people with educated tastes to do the time-consuming work of sifting through the mass of what’s out there and to highlight the best of it for the rest of us. And then, as this task will take an army of critics, we need systems, or filters, to amalgamate all these critical opinions. It’s an enormous and historically unprecedented privilege to have access to the sheer mass of books, movies, art, and music that many of us do, but the excess of it all is overwhelming. In a time of cultural overabundance, those who can devise filters to streamline choice for the audience and make it easier to find the good stuff will be providing a useful and gratefully received service, and if they can also find a way to monetize the service, they’ll do very well for themselves. <br />
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You can probably think of filters of your own that you use, not only for entertainment purposes, but for other, more mundane services. <a href="http://homestars.com/on/toronto">HomeStars.com</a> is one that comes to my mind. If you’re not familiar with HomeStars, it’s an online directory of contractors with accompanying consumer reviews and an aggregate rating system. I find it an invaluable tool for finding reliable and affordable tradespeople to work on my house. The aggregate experience of ten or more people who have employed a contractor gives me very reliable data on the quality of the contractor’s service, as a single friend’s recommendation might not. Then there’s <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/">Metafilter.com</a>, which is a community web site where the users link to the best and most interesting materials on the web for all to enjoy and discuss (and the moderators keep the site’s quality high by deleting whatever posts don’t measure up to MeFi standards). Whenever I want to find fascinating online news coverage or in-depth articles or fun websites to read, I can always find some on Metafilter’s front page. When there are an estimated more than one billion websites out there all vying for my attention, this is a real time saver. <br />
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In my own small way, I’ve created one specialized filter of sorts by authoring a <a href="http://theknittingneedleandthedamagedone.blogspot.ca/">knitting blog</a>, on which I review the latest patterns from sixteen different knitting magazines and the occasional book of knitting designs. I write articles on knitting-related topics as well, but it is my reviews that are the <i>raison d'être</i> and main draw of the site. Knitters who wish to buy new patterns can either check out all the preview pictures on sixteen different websites several times a year... or they can just read my website. Quite a number of my readers have told me that I’ve saved them a lot of time and money and made it easier for them to find, select, and buy knitting patterns they’re happy with. Alas, nice as it is to hear that my site is as useful to my readers as I hoped to make it, I’ve yet to figure out how to effectually monetize it.<br />
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But after thinking over all the means and systems I use to find creative work to enjoy, I submit that the best existing model we have of this kind of critical filter is the one that we have for movies: <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/">Rotten Tomatoes.com</a>. Before I began using Rotten Tomatoes to help me select movies to view, I did things like relying on recommendations from friends or individual movie critics, or checking out the IMDB pages of actors I admired to see if they’d done anything I hadn’t seen and cared to see. I found these methods frustratingly ineffective, as though I were using a single fishing hook and a short line to trawl a vast ocean for a good catch. Sure, sometimes I did manage to snag something good, half by chance, but I often couldn’t find anything that appealed to me, or if I did manage to come up with something that seemed that it might be good and watch it, it sucked. Rotten Tomatoes was a revelation. Whether I’m in the mood for a classic horror movie or a contemporary comedy or a documentary, I can pull up lists of the top-rated movies of any genre and/or of any year and pick something to suit in just a few minutes. Or I can vet a movie I’ve heard of and decide whether it’s worth watching. And if I don’t care to watch a popular movie but wish to know enough about it to be able to discuss it intelligently or to understand all the media references to it, it’s easy to find a few good reviews for it via Rotten Tomatoes. Because the ratings are calculated by aggregating the opinions of dozens of professional and semi-professional critics, they are a very reliable indicator of the quality of a movie. While I don’t necessarily love every movie with a “Certified Fresh” Rotten Tomatoes rating, I always find them worth watching. I’ve found and watched so many excellent movies via Rotten Tomatoes that I am certain I would never even have heard of in any other manner. <br />
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We need the equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes, or possibly a few of them, for every artistic field of endeavour. There is not an equivalent for books. Yes, there is <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/">GoodReads.com</a>, but it isn’t what I wish it was. At present its rating system is entirely dependent on user reviews, and user reviews aren’t reliable. They are too easily gamed, for one thing, with authors prodding (or guilting, as the case may be) their spouses, family members, and friends into writing good reviews for them, or even writing reviews of their own work themselves. Then too, even when user reviews are sincere and impartial, the opinions expressed in them often lack any real discernment or value. To be clear, I’m not saying all user reviews are worthless. I’ve read many that were intelligent, insightful, and well-written, but such a high proportion of user reviews are of such poor quality that a rating system that depends on user reviews isn’t reliable as a meter of artistic excellence. Consequently, though Good Reads has value as a place for readers to enjoy cataloguing and commenting on their reading materials, it isn’t as effective a tool for helping its users to find the best books as Rotten Tomatoes is for helping its users to find good movies and TV shows. Amazon also relies on user reviews, as does IMDB. Both sites have a lot of utility in their own ways, but neither site is what I would call a really effective or efficient means to find good books or movies. <br />
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I would like to see Goodreads take their user services to the next level by featuring links to professional, or at least semi-professional, book reviews and setting up an aggregate rating system based on them, as Rotten Tomatoes does with movie reviews, and I’d like to see each area of the arts get equally effective filters. It won’t make the world less noisy and it won’t mean every gifted artist will succeed in finding an audience, but perhaps such filters will give both artists and audiences a fighting chance of cutting through the clamour and finding each other.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-80087537213981151632012-07-14T18:09:00.001-04:002015-11-10T15:34:13.141-05:00Crispin, a Kid on a Quest. You Know, Like Many of the Other Newbery Medal Characters.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjljGZfN-bhNglySFcGaip4XH3470OBOCNnlqlQXTIPTHQUi8epuJHa0n6IfloERnsbumn4JILC26t2-4IgAYocxRgNa7bVC-KLOaY7be36Gsa-srvNclRgLcDfJ7B6VEnlNttCMivKNX9/s1600/crispin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjljGZfN-bhNglySFcGaip4XH3470OBOCNnlqlQXTIPTHQUi8epuJHa0n6IfloERnsbumn4JILC26t2-4IgAYocxRgNa7bVC-KLOaY7be36Gsa-srvNclRgLcDfJ7B6VEnlNttCMivKNX9/s400/crispin.jpg" /></a></div><br />
In the Newbery Medal winner for 2003, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786816589/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0786816589&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=WAOI6DDXVVLKGMDE"><i>Crispin: The Cross of Lead</i>, by Avi</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0786816589" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />life for Crispin, a boy of thirteen living in England in 1376 A.D, is as it's often said of existence in medieval times: nasty, brutish, and short. He and his mother Asta are peasants, cottars without land of their own, who make a meager living working the Lord Furnival's fields in the little village of Stromford. Crispin has been told that his father died in the last widespread plague. The other village children shun and taunt him for reasons he can't fathom. Then Crispin's mother dies, upon which turn of events Crispin's circumstances become even more nasty and brutal and his life expectancy even more uncertain. <br />
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Lord Furnival's steward, John Ayecliffe, first shows up at Asta's funeral demanding that Crispin surrender his ox as death tax, which will mean starvation for Crispin. Then Crispin is seen observing a secret meeting between Ayecliffe and a cloaked stranger in the woods, after which Ayecliffe accuses Crispin of whatever crimes conveniently suggest themselves and puts a price on his head. Crispin receives some hints as to his family history from his few friends and, provided with a little bread and his mother's leaden cross, flees the village for the nearest city as his friends advise, though they aren't exactly sure where any of England's cities are because they’ve never seen them personally. Various adventures ensue, the first and most important of which is that Crispin meets Orson Hrothgar, otherwise known as Bear. Bear is a travelling performer who can sing and dance and juggle balls. He is also adept at smoke and mirror-style political intrigue, and at frightening the wits out of a particularly unsophisticated thirteen-year-old boy. <br />
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Haven't we already seen this book in the Newbery list? Let’s see, boy is thrown on his own resources by the death of his strong-willed, yet physically frail and poverty-stricken mother, and he has some keepsake left to him by his mother that turns out to have an unsuspected significance relating to his mysterious antecedents. Oh, and he's embroiled in larger political and military turmoil. No, wait, that's <a href="http://orangeswan.blogspot.ca/2007/07/johnny-tremain-and-irresistible.html"><i>Johnny Tremain</i></a>, the Newbery-winning book from 1944. And <i>Bud, Not Buddy</i>, the Newbery winner from 2000, which I have read but haven't reviewed yet. <br />
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Child on his or her own is a very common theme in children's literature. It's classic wish fulfillment, both a child's greatest fear and worst nightmare. Heaven knows a kid can't have spine-chilling adventures, much less embark on some very important quest, with a parent looking over his or her shoulder and saying it's bedtime or homework time or that it isn't safe to do this or that. And another common theme in kid lit is "mysterious parentage", which taps into another common childhood fantasy, that of belonging to another family, one more exciting and significant, or perhaps just less problematic, than one's own. Tie these themes together, put your adolescent hero or heroine in an exotic and/or historical setting, and it makes for an exciting book for a kid. Hell, I'm 38 and I read <i>Crispin</i> in two sittings on a single day. <br />
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Suspenseful as <i>Crispin</i> is, some of the plot twists are contrived to the point that they're an eye roller. I found Ayecliffe's vendetta against Crispin to be rather awkwardly developed. Crispin is a threat to Ayecliffe because of who he is, yet Ayecliffe only sets a price on Crispin's head once Crispin has seen him talking to another man in the woods, though Crispin has neither seen nor heard anything that is incriminating. The kind village priest who helps Crispin, Father Quinel, tells Crispin to hide in the woods for another day and then come back to the church for food and for some information about his mother and himself. Crispin asks why Father Quinel can't do the Big Reveal right then, and the priest tells him it's better and safer to learn such things just before he leaves the village for good. Of course fate in the form of an evil and power-hungry steward intervenes, and Crispin doesn't hear the revelations. Though we do eventually learn what Father Quinel had to tell Crispin, we never learn Father Quinel's reason for delaying the reveal. I suspect the motivations for the delay on both John Ayecliffe's and Father Quinel's parts are really Avi's and have to do with creating suspense. And of course this is an important element in an adventure novel, but so is devising a credible course of action for your characters so that they seem like actual people rather than marionettes whose strings show all too plainly. These trumped-up behaviours reminded me of <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/11/27/2507131/the-davinci-code.html">Dave Barry's parody of <i>The DaVinci Code</i></a>: <blockquote><i>Handsome yet unmarried historian Hugh Heckman stood in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., squinting through the bulletproof glass at the U.S. Constitution. Suddenly, he made an amazing discovery. "My God!" he said, out loud. "This is incredible! Soon I will say what it is."</i></blockquote><br />
The character of Bear is quite well drawn. The man is an enigma and his repeated sleight-of-hand behaviours obscure both his motives and his actual beliefs, convincing not only Crispin but even the adult reader (er, this one, anyway). While Crispin is slower to catch on to Bear's misdirections than the reader is, Bear is a complex character who plays his cards close to his tunic and there's enough in play that I finished the book thinking there was still probably more to Bear than had been revealed. This is fortunate as there are two more Crispin books, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003JDCSC8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003JDCSC8&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=2CINJN5ABEIMA7TX">Crispin: At the Edge of the World</a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B003JDCSC8" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;"/>and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003M69MB2/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B003M69MB2&linkCode=as2&tag=theknineeandt-20&linkId=GSQOG2MNERZJWVOM"><i>Crispin: The End of Time</i></a><img src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=theknineeandt-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B003M69MB2" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;"/>and Avi needed to save some plot twists for those books. <br />
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I did really enjoy that Orson Hrothgar’s nickname Bear is a clever classical allusion. The name Orson is derived from Latin and means "little bear". There is a fifteenth-century romance about twin brothers, Valentine and Orson, based on a fourteenth century <i>chanson de geste</i> which tells the tale of how Orson was raised from infancy by bears while Valentine is given a knight's upbringing at court. The Valentine and Orson story is not directly referenced, but it is a nice meta reference bonus for the adult reader who catches it. And Bear is indeed very much the wild man of the woods that his literary namesake was, as he is huge, loud, aggressive, and has cast aside many of the sociopolitical norms of his time to be what could only be considered a dangerous radical and freethinker by fourteenth-century terms. <br />
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The historical setting does seem to be well researched, and the psychology of the characters is probably about as authentic as is possible. Avi does as well as any author could in creating a medieval mindset with its implicit belief in God and the devil, fear of hell, reverence for the priesthood, and some truly creative religiously themed oaths, my favourite of which was, "By the bowels of Christ". Even the most dastardly character in the book is compelled to at least partially respect the binding effect of swearing a vow before God. Crispin does seem to be a little too concerned with his self-esteem in a way that I suspect isn't period appropriate, but then Avi had to make Crispin a boy contemporary readers could relate to. <br />
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Relatively minor nitpicks aside, I’d have to say that <i>Crispin</i> is definitely a quite solidly enjoyable book that is exciting, well-written, and rich in accurate period detail, if it does feel a little boilerplate as to its plot. But then I must remember that this is a book that is written primarily for kids, not for an adult who's gotten a little sated on "kid on a quest" books.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-76000402644964655272012-06-06T22:00:00.000-04:002015-11-10T15:36:30.918-05:00Etsy's Unique and Handmade Problems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrj38bIA4zHthJ2ppAzuy0Q2g0GFnwuXKDvsCHAVoJuRUl_QnybPF4SiekPdHdjtcFPNuavFxo7GI7SP8ZRobXiSLgQWitHbC_UXUNBptE2IFcK8cXFWRD7MA_eKOViGBLGc-yms6jtlv/s1600/ex-lax.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrj38bIA4zHthJ2ppAzuy0Q2g0GFnwuXKDvsCHAVoJuRUl_QnybPF4SiekPdHdjtcFPNuavFxo7GI7SP8ZRobXiSLgQWitHbC_UXUNBptE2IFcK8cXFWRD7MA_eKOViGBLGc-yms6jtlv/s400/ex-lax.jpg" /></a></div><br />
If I’m going to write about Etsy, I should probably begin by saying that up until this past spring, I loved Etsy. Etsy was, if not in exactly in my blood, so often on my mind that it seemed to be nestled among my neurons. Before a recent job loss, I was on Etsy nearly daily doing searches and making sure no one else had bought any of the items I had favourited. I just can’t tell you much it meant to me that I, a super-picky and budget-minded and so-seriously-retro-that-I’m-anachronistic shopper who comes home empty-handed from most of her trips to the Eaton Centre, could type a few search terms on Etsy and then browse through pages of items that are at least in the ball park of what I want. Between March 2010 and March 2012, I made 79 purchases on Etsy. Etsy helped me rebuild my jewelry collection after it was wiped out by a burglary (my second, sigh) in January 2010. Etsy made it possible for me to have a mostly non-cheesy collection of swan items. Etsy helped me find very specific gifts for assorted gift-giving occasions. Etsy helped me find affordable Art Nouveau antiques for my 1912-built house. Etsy has an enormous selection of goods, many of which are at very reasonable prices, and a legion of talented, hard-working, honest, and professional sellers. <br />
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But for all its good points, Etsy has its flaws, which range from slightly annoying to the truly ugly, and when one of its failings manifested itself in an outright fiasco this past April, I became unwilling to shop there any longer. <br />
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Etsy claims to be an online marketplace strictly for hand-crafted and vintage goods. Their site policy states that vendors can only sell items that are either substantially handmade by the seller, craft supplies, or vintage items, which according to their policy must be at least 20 years old. It is, on paper, a great policy which has allowed them to corner a niche in the marketplace. Unfortunately Etsy does not make an honest effort to enforce the policy. The site is rife with mass-produced goods that are available at much lower prices on eBay and Amazon. <br />
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I was trying to give Etsy the benefit of the doubt that they were at least attempting to enforce their policy and finding it beyond their capabilities, until this past April. On April 20th Etsy posted an <a href="http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2012/featured-seller-ecologica-malibu/">interview with a featured seller, Mariana Schechter</a>, owner of Etsy shop Ecologica, who claimed she designs and makes handmade furniture from salvaged wood. She said in the interview that, “So many designers and craftspeople eventually mass produce their products. Mass production makes it easier to sustain bigger profit margins, but it takes away from the individuality of each item”, and added, “There is something personal and unique that occurs when you craft something with your hands.” <br />
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Of course this all sounded beautifully in line with the Etsy mandate, until April 21st, when a website called Regretsy.com exposed and proved Schechter to be a wholesale importer whose supposedly handmade goods are entirely factory-made and shipped to her by a company called All From Boats, based in Indonesia. <br />
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On April 22, a full day after the news broke, a coffee table from the Ecologica was among the handpicked items on the front page, and after a week or so of internet <i>sturm und drang</i> (read: Etsy and Regretsy and <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/115181/Can-you-buy-plausible-deniability-anywhere-online-now-that-Etsys-run-completely-out-of-it">Metafilter</a> threads of punishing length), Etsy <a href="http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/notes-from-chad-6/">took the official stance that Schechter’s business qualifies as a “collective” under their guidelines, and scolded their users for being meanies</a>. <br />
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On June 5th, it was discovered that the <a href="http://www.dailydot.com/news/etsy-reseller-ecologica-malibu-vanishes/">Ecologica Malibu shop had been closed</a>. Etsy will not say why. My own best guess is that Schechter closed her own shop because she wasn’t making many sales and/or had finally figured out she was never going to get any respect from the Etsy community again. But the kicker is Etsy has not removed the Featured Seller article about Schechter. Etsy's shameless disregard of their own site policy is stunning. My suspicion is that Schechter’s import business paid them for the featured seller spot. If that is the case, Etsy can’t remove it without breach of contract. <br />
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All this brou-ha-ha over Schechter was simply an especially dramatic boiling over of problems that have been bubbling for a long time. <br />
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Etsy has long failed to set any sort of threshold as to the quality of the goods for sale on its site. There are people on Etsy selling—or trying to sell—rusted tin cans, pieces of scrap wood, filthy and damaged old toys, and other items that are neither handmade nor vintage. An item’s presence in Etsy's vintage or handmade categories is in no way an assurance that the item is actually vintage or handmade. There are "vintage" Blackberries for sale, as well as many other less obviously new and mass-produced goods. I’ve certainly been taken. A necklace I once bought from the vintage category was no more vintage than my 2012 daytimer because I saw the necklace—and matching earrings!—at a kiosk in the mall the week after my necklace arrived in the mail. There are also many copyright infringments. And even when items for sale are described honestly, it can be very difficult and time consuming for a buyer to find a specific desired item because the search functionality is so crude. <br />
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All of these problems hurt sellers who are trying to sell genuinely handcrafted or vintage goods. They can’t charge prices that are competitive with those charged for mass-produced goods, their goods are hard to find among the sea of mass-produced offerings, and the customers they are trying to reach are being driven away from Etsy entirely because it’s not offering the kind of merchandise it claims. <br />
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Even before the Mariana Schechter debacle, Etsy wasn’t making any discernible effort to weed out the outright crap and site policy violations. Items flagged as violating site policy remained in place. Worse, Etsy sometimes even <i>promotes</i> such items by featuring them on their front page collections of "handpicked items". These handpicked items, incidentally, are clearly selected to suit a colour scheme or topical theme, not on their own intrinsic merit, with the result that while the photo collections make the front page look pretty, the practical value of it to buyers is vanishingly slight and vendors who are selling garbage but who can take artistic product shots get bonus traffic to their shops, while vendors with much better wares do not. <br />
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I was glad to see Etsy has at least retired one of their more useless features, the "You might like" recommendations. I found them so absurdly off the mark as to be completely useless. Why on earth would Etsy think I might like a Simplicity clown costume pattern or a book on how to draw Woody the Woodpecker? Is it because I searched on Etsy for a skort pattern and a clown costume seemed like the next logical step? Or were they hoping in some oblique way to warn me away from that slippery slope? <br />
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As if all this weren't bad enough, by far the most disturbing feature of their business practices is their treatment of Etsy sellers. I have read accounts of former sellers whose listings or entire shops were closed arbitrarily and without warning by Etsy, leaving the sellers with no way retrieve their product images and descriptions, without any refund of listing fees that were supposed keep their goods visible and available for sale for several months, and worst of all with no way to contact their buyers and arrange for the delivery of the goods they’ve paid for. Etsy also seems to offer very little protection or assistance for buyers who are running into problems with dishonest sellers. <br />
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And another very serious Etsy business misstep, one which exacerbates all their other problems, is their refusal to allow any dissent on their site and their heels-dug-in refusal to respond constructively, or even, sometimes, lucidly, to customer and vendor complaints. On one occasion, when an Etsy member asked in the forums why there was a crumbling old brick among the featured products on the front page, a moderator simple told her not to call out in the forums. <br />
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When a reseller shamelessly posted in the forums asking for tips on how to sell her "handmade" notebooks and another Etsy user politely replied that, though her notebooks were very pretty, she couldn't sell her notebooks on Etsy because they are not handmade but mass-produced, the commenter was told not to call out in the forums. <br />
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When an Etsy seller was told she can’t sell her Mr. T album in her shop because Etsy had “received a copyright infringement complaint from an agent representing Mr. Chuck Norris” and the seller replied meekly that her listing didn’t mention Mr. Norris in any way, she was told Etsy didn’t have the information to reply to her question and that she must contact Mr. Norris’s representative. Yes, you read that right.<br />
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If Etsy wants to be a successful and respected site, much less a community, as its creation of forums and "friend circles" and other social networking-type features seems to indicate, it needs to show respect and consideration for its users by allowing a certain amount of open negotiation and conflict and by having the courtesy to listen and respond to their complaints. And too, they need to understand what a resource their users' suggestions and criticisms and flagging of unacceptable items can be. <br />
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Etsy so far seems completely unwilling to allow dissent on the site, and nature's abhorrence of a vacuum is nothing compared to the average internet denizen's refusal to accept a lack of space in which to complain. It didn't take long for some independent venues appear, and there are ways for dissatisfied Etsy users to make themselves heard. If you have problems with Etsy's practices, you can post to the <a href="http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/etsy.html">Consumer Affairs site</a>, or to <a href="http://www.sitejabber.com/blog/2011/04/13/pros-and-cons-of-etsy-com-review-round-up-of-a-craft-marketplace/">SiteJabber</a>. <br />
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Other sites have sprung up to address Etsy’s business practices: <list name="."> <item><a href="http://etsycallout.wordpress.com/">Callin’ Out on Etsy</a>; <item><a href="http://etsybitch.blogspot.ca/">Etsy Bitch</a>; and <item><a href="http://etsyrefugeesociety.blogspot.ca/">The Etsy Refugee Society</a>.</list> <br />
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Not only is there much to criticize about Etsy's business practices, making fun of Etsy's wares is an end and a pleasure in itself. My friend Jacquilynne launched a web site called "The Good, the Bad, and the Etsy" back in June 2009. She would critique three pieces of Etsy merchandise daily, and usually it happened that one would be a well-crafted item while the other two would be hilariously badly crafted, or perhaps well-made but deeply weird. I fondly remember two of her reviews in particular. In one she referred to a top with a demure, pieced calico front view and half laced-up, half-bare back view as "Amish in the front, Rumspringa in the back". And when reviewing a $1500 needlepoint cushion depicting an erect and graphically detailed penis with the motto, "It won’t suck itself", Jacquilynne headlined her critique with a succinct, "For $1500, It Should". <br />
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The Good, the Bad and the Etsy was building momentum nicely when Jacquilynne decided to close it down just two months after its inception because she was receiving death threats from unhinged Etsy sellers who had taken umbrage to her snarking on their crafts. Again, you read that right. <i>Death threats.</i><br />
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As The Good, the Bad, and the Etsy had been posted to the front page of Metafilter and Jacquilynne and I are both members, I initiated a MetaTalk thread to inform the other members of what had happened, and it became a meaty discussion about the value and boundaries of critical discourse. I <a href="http://metatalk.metafilter.com/18097/Back-away-from-the-pointy-metal-tools-Etsy-vendors">recommend the thread</a> as interesting reading in its own right. <br />
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Jacquilynne clarified her decision to discontinue the blog in the thread: <blockquote><i>To be clear, I didn't take the blog down because I felt like I was in danger (internet death threats—ooh scary!), but I was already feeling sort of bad about one person who emailed me and seemed genuinely sad that I'd mocked her item, and I got a couple of threats in a couple of hours, it suddenly all seemed not worth it.</i></blockquote>Etsy can’t be held responsible for the behaviour of their sellers off-site, of course, but Jacquilynne’s experience does indicate that one of the site's problems is a faction of Etsy sellers who have neither talent nor the discernment to realize their own lack of ability, and who can't behave like adults when anyone says so. <br />
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Of course, I probably don’t have to tell anyone who has read this far about the most successful Etsy complaint and snark blog there is. I couldn’t even get this far through the review without referring to it. Regretsy is owned and operated by the wickedly and incisively satirical April Winchell, and on Regretsy she daily serves up the dregs of Etsy with generous dollops of snark sauce and side orders of pie charts and Photoshop, and has gotten a few book deals in the process. Winchell skewers Etsy for all its flaws and excesses, posts about everything from the serious problems I’ve mentioned to more minor nitpicks such as product shots of food with hairs twined in among the goodies on the plate, unintentionally hilarious misspellings in posters or wall decals offered for sale, poorly made or useless "crafts" such as a necklace that consists of a paperclip on a piece of stiff wire, artwork that is supposed to depict a certain celebrity and looks nothing like said celebrity, hideous and unwearable clothing, vendors who use words that do not actually mean what they seem to think, gratuitous nudity in product shots, and Etsy’s many twee pretensions. Winchell and her many devoted readers sometimes manage to embarrass Etsy’s staff into addressing at least some of its more minor problems. And not incidentally, Winchell and her readers have also raised tens of thousands of dollars for various charitable causes and given specific items, such as new sewing machines, to Etsy vendors in need. The site, which has developed its own culture and momentum, is a lot of fun and also serves the greater public good in a very concrete way. If I didn’t already think the whole "people who make fun of other people's creative work are fat jealous losers who can't do anything worthwhile themselves" was one very dumb canard, I would after seeing what April Winchell has accomplished with Regretsy. Criticism can be fruitful as well as an end in itself. <br />
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I’ll try to avoid recapping any of Winchell's posts here because there's really no equivalent to reading them oneself. There's a lot of scope in making fun of Etsy. Not only is it satisfying to see Etsy outed for its many hypocrisies and legion absurdities, but sometimes some of the offerings on Etsy, while genuinely handmade and well-crafted, are so jaw-droppingly bizarre that Regretsians marvel at and celebrate them rather than making fun of them. April Winchell has had to categorize her many posts. Some of my favourite categories are: Garbage; Compare and Save; Dead Things (and a sub category within Dead Things, Tragicrafting; Not Remotely Handmade; Not Remotely Steampunk; Annoying Descriptions; Peck of the Day (in which Winchell makes fun of the senselessness of the choices for the Handpicked items on the front page); and, for the truly unclassifiable, Don’t Ask Me. <br />
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In one favourite Regretsy post of mine, which involved Winchell’s recap of a Etsy "Featured Seller" article on a Etsy vendor named Sartoria, Winchell employed something I’ll describe as a Wank-O-Meter to measure Sartoria's level of fatuous pretension in the article. Spoiler: it's a very high level. Moreover, one can almost smell Sartoria's studio through the computer screen. <br />
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While many Etsy vendors are wonderfully good sports about having their items mocked and appreciate the increased traffic and sales that Regretsy always brings their way (after all, purchases are paid for in government tender whether bought in a spirit of irony or while "under the influence" or in sober and sincere appreciation), some aren’t. As in Jacquilynne’s experience, some of the Etsy crafters whose items are mocked on Regretsy don’t seem to have much more maturity, self-control, basic literacy skills, or grasp of what does and does not constitute illegal behaviour than they do esthetic sensibility. Winchell therefore gets her own share of hate mail, which she opportunely turns into fodder for more Regretsy posts in her Mailbag category. My favourite of these letters was a classic from a person who threatens to call a "layer" and get a "crease and desist". <br />
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All snark (or most of it) aside, as I see it, Etsy only has two viable ethical options, the first being that Etsy must begin to enforce its own policies, make every effort to close resellers down as efficiently as possible (they would never get them all) and remove any Featured Seller spots involving resellers. And in this case Etsy should also apologize to the community for not doing so earlier, as it has been dishonest to claim to be promoting handmade goods while knowingly allowing resellers on the site. <br />
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Alternatively, Etsy should admit they’ve become dependent on resellers to keep the site profitable, and announce that from now on they will be allowing resellers but their products will be strictly labelled and categorized as such. If they have received payment from resellers for Featured Seller spots, they must come clean about that and promise users that from now on paid advertisements will be completely distinct from any editorial content, and promise that they will do their utmost to make sure the handmade categorization can be trusted by all users. They should also apologize to the community for not doing so earlier. <br />
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Both of the paths involve making some changes and disclosures and apologizing to the Etsy community. There is no way around that. There are also other changes that need to be made, such as setting some sort of standard for goods offered on Etsy, treating their vendors better, improving the search functionality, allowing honest dissent on the site, and just in general listening to and learning from the criticisms made of Etsy. <br />
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But at present I don’t have any reason to believe we’re going to see Etsy make a real effort to clean itself up. And I believe what will happen is that Etsy will slowly decline. <br />
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At present Etsy has a reputation for being the go-to site for handmade goods and are valued at more than $600 million according to the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203604577394231271835046.html"><i>The Wall Street Journal</i></a>, but they can’t coast on an undeserved reputation forever. The Etsy "handmade" brand will become increasingly derided. Etsy will gradually lose their frustrated artisan sellers and their disappointed customers to other sites that offer genuinely handmade goods and treat their users with more respect, such as <a href="http://www.artfire.com/">ArtFire</a>.<br />
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Gradually Etsy will become eBay, only smaller, with higher prices and an obviously dishonest, inept management style, and they’ll find out they can’t compete with eBay on those terms. And there’s an ironic justice in this. Etsy has forced their artisans to compete with sellers hawking mass-produced goods labeled as handmade, and they’ll eventually find themselves pitting these "handmade" wares against a juggernaut vendor selling reams of mass-produced goods for far better prices. <br />
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That’s my prediction. Of course, I could be wrong, or even if I am right, Etsy may manage to stick around and stay profitable for many years to come, but meanwhile, I have done my bit to protest Etsy's dishonesty and mismanagement by closing my Etsy account, discouraging my father, who is a talented woodworker, from opening an Etsy shop, and by writing and posting two Metafilter posts and this review to let people know exactly what Etsy’s all about. And then too, I keep in mind that there are compensations in Etsy’s continued survival, namely that Regretsy is ying to Etsy’s yang, and that so long as Etsy refuses to mend its ways, Regretsy can go right on trumpeting the fact that Etsy’s ass is showing through its "reclaimed crocheted afghan" pants.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcfMXdzkKtmrj5UowTMgbHp0cCMNsnaj50WQlCXiBKRzu438UEDBKGHribhj-1jAO4eMTFqQNnQlzzPRiQHkSb5yY2mUF5pnmYn-PconGuHQbAAU1MsQdx9izIj9P13Y3S1zD88gsJyRuy/s1600/reclaimed+afghans.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcfMXdzkKtmrj5UowTMgbHp0cCMNsnaj50WQlCXiBKRzu438UEDBKGHribhj-1jAO4eMTFqQNnQlzzPRiQHkSb5yY2mUF5pnmYn-PconGuHQbAAU1MsQdx9izIj9P13Y3S1zD88gsJyRuy/s400/reclaimed+afghans.jpg" /></a></div>Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1297651501556062252.post-54676541594957644482011-07-25T14:04:00.008-04:002015-07-24T11:18:17.564-04:00By Way of Sorrow, Indeed<iframe width="530" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZrU94t9YKN8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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Someone on Metafilter.com linked to the lovely slideshow above on YouTube yesterday, saying a friend of his had put it together in celebration of New York's first legal gay marriage ceremonies. I defy anyone to look at the succession of images depicting loving gay couples, contrasted with images of the hatred and bigotry they've faced for so long, and not be moved. The slideshow is set to a song called "By Way of Sorrow", which my Googling tells me is written by Julie Miller and performed by a group called Cry, Cry, Cry, and I cannot imagine a more perfect accompaniment for this video.<br />
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As happy as I am for these couples, as thrilled as I am to see that the tide of homophobic bigotry is on the wane, my happiness is veined with sorrow and shame. I feel sorrow that gay people have had to wait so very long for a civil right so many of us have had all our lives, that the U.S. Federal government still does not recognize their marriage, that if they were to merely drive across the state border into New Jersey, their marriage certificate would legally mean nothing, that according to Wikipedia only 4% of the world's population lives in a jurisdiction that offers legal gay marriage, and that gays face discrimination and even violent persecution nearly everywhere on the planet.<br />
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The shame I feel relates to my own past. As a Canadian I live in a country that has recognized gay marriage for six years, and I am in no way responsible for what the U.S. or any other country's legislative tardiness in coming to it's senses. The shame is personal rather than political, and is rooted much further back. <br />
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I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. I attended a Christian school and Sunday School and church all my childhood, and had few other social contacts as my family lived on a farm. I'm embarrassed to think how indoctrinated I was at 14 or so, but the reality is that I didn't have much chance to be otherwise. As I attended public high schools, the re-education process began in grade nine and eventually led to my becoming agnostic at age 28 and an atheist at some point in my thirties, but it took many years for life to chip away what had been instilled in me. <br />
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At 17, when I was still two-thirds cocooned in a hard shell of patent Christian theology, I fell in love with a close friend who was gay. I didn't know he was gay, of course. If I'd had any real experience at all, I would have known. If I hadn't unconsciously wanted not to know, I would have known. Incidentally, it turns out that my first crush (at 11) and first boyfriend (at 16) were also gay. This is why you'll never hear me claiming to have gaydar, though since this trifecta I have at least, so far as I know, managed to pick straight men to date. <br />
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But it wasn't entirely due to my naiveté and wilful disbelief that I didn't know. My friend didn't tell me, and he had girlfriends before and after me. I finally clued in over four years later when I came across evidence through a bizarre chain of circumstances. It <i>was</i> his responsibility to tell me. Had he told me he could have spared me a great deal of pain, and both of us a lot of drama, and maybe we could have saved the relationship we did have that meant so much to us both in those days. <br />
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However, he didn't tell me, and in the years since I have recognized that I had a hand in keeping him silent. I remember very clearly, and with many a cringe, that one day on a walk through the park the subject of homosexuality came up and I expounded on what the Bible says about it and quoted the Biblical words "with such do not eat". I may even have shaken a finger at him. There were other incidents when I spoke disparagingly of gays or acted grossed out by what "they" did.<br />
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To understand the enormity of this you must know that I was a backward, sensitive teenager completely lacking in confidence or a sense of self-worth. My friend had confidence and self-esteem to burn, and whenever I was around him he cast such an aura of it that he made it possible for me to be wholly and unself-consciously myself while feeling completely accepted and supported. When I was around him we were in a world all our own and nothing anyone else said or did had the power to hurt me. He created that wonderful space for me... and in return I told him he wasn't fit to eat with. <br />
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I do keep what I did in perspective. He remained in the closet for a number of years afterward and I very much doubt it was my wagging finger that kept him there. He had a lot of issues that were unrelated to me, and even to being gay, just as I had my own issues that caused me to spend several years looking to him for things it was crystal clear all along that he could not and would not give me. But he was for several years someone I loved more than anyone, he probably suffered a lot over the conflict between who he was and what the world around him expected and allowed him to be, and instead of helping him and giving him the support he always gave me, I gave him one more slap in the face. It is this regret that remains with me to this day, more than fifteen years after all other regrets evaporated when I came to see that I wouldn't have been at all happy paired up with him even if he weren't gay. <br />
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And this is partly why, even though I am heterosexual, I am such a passionate supporter of gay rights. I've had intimate experience of how bigotry towards gays and living with lies hurts all of us, even when we're the bigots. Had my friend and I grown up in a time and a place when being gay was accepted as readily as being left-handed and the world offered the same options to a gay teenager as it did to straight kids, we both could have been saved the pain and waste of those years. And then perhaps my journals from my late teens would not be so full of an anguish so raw that to this day, twenty years later, I cannot bear to read them. <br />
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So to the newlyweds (including my former friend and his husband who have been maried for what must be close to three years now), I say congratulations, best wishes, and please forgive us all for being so wretchedly slow to give you your rightful place at the table.Orange Swanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14882469292993325370noreply@blogger.com0