YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

 I was noodling around on Facebook today, looking for something I could write about for my blog, when I came across a short video. It was an attractive, thirty-ish woman, talking about an experience she had on a train, where another woman had warned her to keep her little girl away from the window because the sun would make her 'dark skinned and ugly'. What this woman was talking about was the presumption that darker skin is ugly, apparently rife in India. It's not just racism we have to deal with, it's the old prejudice against a tan, which in Western countries has been extinguished for a long time, but which persists in some cultures, presumably based on the idea that it indicates one has been working outdoors and is therefore a peasant, rather than an upper-class person who can stay out of the sun. The woman in the video was expressing a view that such prejudice is outmoded, and in a country where everyone is some shade of brown, deeply silly. If you want to see the video for yourself, HERE IT IS.

I've no argument with this. She spoke well and articulately and I agreed with every word. What caught my eye, though, and made my ears go back, were some of the comments people had posted.

I'm not talking about racism here. I wouldn't waste my time writing about that kind of pathetic nonsense. There may have been some racist comments, but not that I saw. I didn't read all of the comments. The comments to which I'm referring had nothing to do with the content of the video. 

They were about fruit.

You see, as she talked, this woman was cutting up a large fruit. I don't know what kind of fruit, it looked like some kind of melon, no doubt something they have in India. I think this woman is Indian, based on her accent, although she could have been Pakistani, Bangladeshi or so on. The thing about this fruit, though, was that several people were jumping all over the comments complaining about the way she was cutting it up and saying that it was wasteful.

Now, this wasn't a cookinig video, it was a social comment video. There was no clue as to the purpose  for which she was cutting up the fruit. For all I know, it was to make some curry or something. I mean, I say fruit, but it might well have been one of the many fruits that we treat as vegetables. You know, like aubergines, cucumbers, tomatoes, capsica, and so on. Or perhaps she was going to make jam, or chutney or something. We will probably never know. And personally, I don't care either, any more than I care about her hairstyle, her dress, or what I could see of the decor of the room she was in. 

The thing that bothered me was the way people seized on the one thing they could take issue with and jumped all over it. 

It seems to me that this is indicative of something we see a great deal nowadays: the keenness of so many people to nose into whatever other people are doing and correct it. Or chastise them, or whatever. I'm not talking about things that are illegal, like littering, or antisocial, like not picking up your dog's poo (I'm sure we can all have something to say about that). You know, things where the person's action is actually going to affect us in some way. I'm talking about things that are purely none of anyone else's business. Like the clothes a person has chosen to wear, or the kind of collar they have on their dog, or what they are eating for lunch.

And we see such rage! I have seen people lash themselves almost into hysterics because someone called their dogs furkids. Honestly. 

Where does it all come from, not just the rage but the sense that one is somehow entitled, that it's even meritorious, to dictate to other people how they live? I suppose the prevalence of social media could be a factor. But to me that seems overly simplistic. I think social media, like drink, just makes people express more of what they really are anyway, and that the driver for this Karenesque behaviour must be something more sinister. I would love to hear from readers, so if you have an opinion about this please do tell me in the comments. Meanwhile, my challenge to everybody for today is to mind our own business.

In other news, in the park this morning I saw a man attempting to get his dogs to go to the lavatory by showing them what to do - lifting his leg against a tree, and later, squatting. No, I did not say anything.

RUOK

In recent years we've been seeing this cropping up - RUOK Day. When we are all supposed to check on each other's wellbeing. Is it purely a mindless trend, like the Karen Cut and the Full Sleeve? I thought so.

A while ago, though, when I was writing Barefoot Tango, I realised I was deficient in the area of suicide attempts and getting one's stomach pumped, etc. It was necessary to the story, and I never, never skip my research. As a very wise person, I wish I could remember who, once said, 'Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.'

It's a delicate subject, and so I reached out on Facebook, trusting that among my many friends and followers there would be someone who could help me. I posted asking that if a person had been involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility, or had had his stomach pumped, and if he felt comfortable doing so, he contact me privately, in strict confidence, to share his experience. I wasn't very sanguine about this; I wasn't aware that anyone I knew met these criteria, and didn't really hope for a response.

When I checked in the next day, though, I was overwhelmed. The response was staggering! The sheer number of my friends who had lived through a suicide attempt astounded me. Others had had psychiatric illnesses and been hospitalised. The other thing that overwhelmed me was the utter generosity of these people in sharing their experience. A great deal of the conversations took place in the comments on my post, a lot of people didn't even take advantage of my offer of privacy. I was humbled at the sheer generosity of my friends in willingly reliving those dreadful times to help my work. It was almost as if people had been relieved at the opportunity finally to talk about it to someone. 

The thing that stays with me, though, apart from gratitude of course, is my horror at the sheer number of my friends, people I thought I knew well, who had been through this stuff in their pasts. There is still such a stigma around mental illness, such an incentive to hide it. Or injury; many psychiatric problems, I think could be classified as injury, when they stem from a traumatic event. PTSD springs to mind, and many instances of depression or anxiety disorders. They are common. They are everywhere, and largely invisible. Someone you know is probably struggling right now. And psychiatric illness is just as debilitating, just as detrimental to quality of life, and just as potentially fatal, as a bodily illness.

So let's all remember this. Don't wait for some social-media-inspired Day. RUOK is a principle to live by, every day. It's a habit we all should have, to look for signs that a friend may be in trouble, and to make the opportunity for a conversation. You just could save a life.

 There's an interesting debate going on just now about the definition of antisemitism. You can read The Conversation's piece HERE. And, being me, of course I have an opinion about this. 

Actually, I don't. Both definitions seem fine to me. We ALL know what antisemitism is. We know it in our bones; you can hardly grow up in our times without knowing this, in the developed countries, anyway. But I don't think what it is is really the important issue at the moment. I think we should rather be focussing on what it it not.

We all learned in primary school the difference between the definition of a square and that of a rectangle, didn't we? For the sake of argument I'm going to assume we did. Maybe some of you were gazing out the window that day, thinking about your new puppy. Whatever. You can look it up if you really aren't aware of it. But the important thing is that although all squares are necessarily rectangles, not all rectangles are necessarily squares. And, just as the larger set includes, but is not limited to, the smaller, so the set of Israelis is not coextensive with the set of Jews.

I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that every Israeli is Jewish, although really I very much doubt this is the case. It would be a rare country indeed that had a truly homogenous population in any demographic. But I'm willing to grant that we may consider Israelis as all Jewish, if we find that helpful, although personally, I don't think it is really relevant to anything in the news just now. But it is far from being the case that all Jews are Israelis. Good heavens, Jews are everywhere. We have Australian Jews, and those people are Australians, just as the English ones are English, the French ones are French, azo azif. Jews are not all Israeli, any more than every dark skinned person is African. It is a nonsense.

Having got that out of the way, I'd like to direct your attention to the definition endorsed by 39 Australian universities. It's quoted in the link I gave you above, but the thing I want to focus on is that it explicitly includes Holocaust denial as an antisemitic act. 

I don't have any quarrel with this. The Holocaust was arguably the most terrible and shameful event in human history, and it continues to cause intergenerational trauma today. Even those of us who were not born at the time of it still feel its horrible effects. The cold, sick feeling you get at the sight of a swastika. The shyness and almost embarrassment you feel visiting a synagogue, if you're not Jewish yourself. Our acceptance that although our church invited everyone from the synagogue up the road to our service, not a single person from that congregation came, even though lots of us had been to their events and met people there, even though their rabbi was being our guest preacher that day. No one was surprised, although we were a bit sad. 

So yes, denying the Holocaust is antisemitic. I feel it in my bones. 

Given that, though, there have been claims that criticism of the Israeli state's actions in Gaza are also antisemitic. Many claims. And this strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. We are all encouraged to remember, and to condemn, the Holocaust. But our reason for condemning it is not because Jews were the victims of it. It is even bigger than that. We condemn and regret the Holocaust because it was wrong, evil. And if Israel's actions in Gaza are also wrong, they are just as deserving of condemnation, and it doesn't make any difference whether the perpetrators are Jewish, or Americans, or little green men from outer space. If it's wrong, it's wrong. And condemning evil qua evil cannot be antisemitic. To argue that it could, would be to argue that Jews were evil, which in itself would be practically a poster child for antisemitism. 

So let's all take a deep breath and reach for whatever tiny rudiments of logic we managed to take away from primary school. 

It Was You All The Time.

When I logged in to Facebook this morning, I noticed a number of American people saying things such as 'I no longer identify as American'... 'I plan to move to [insert person's favourite foreign country]'... and of course the old favourite, 'not my president'. 

My kneejerk was to feel approving. In a democracy, surely it's a good thing if people in general realise it when their country is being badly run. It is a good thing, right? Just as personal outrage can fuel large, scary life changes, such as leaving an abusive spouse, so societal outrage can fuel large political movements. We need the energy that righteous anger gives us to drive our actions, when those actions are daunting.

When I think about it a little more, though, I find it deeply disturbing. Looking at America today, from outside as of course I do, I see so many, and so strong, parallels to prewar Germany that it just isn't funny. I have been seeing this for a long time, of course, but these days I am finding myself among the mainstream. One can hardly go online without seeing someone comparing Trump to Hitler. And there's a part of me that still feels pleased that at last people are starting to see it, but there is a much bigger part that shrinks from the fact that I believe they are seeing the wrong thing. 

The thing is, however short it may fall of the ideal, America is still at least attempting to present itself as a democracy. And in a democratic government, it's not all down to one person. That's basically the whole idea of democracy, right? You don't have a king, or an emperor, or a dictator or whatever. You have a president, and that president is elected by a (however flawed) democratic process. And the moral result of this is to spread the responsibility right out through the populace. It is the American people who made President Trump possible, just as it was the German people who enabled the rise to power of the NSDAP. The Trumps of the world, the Hitlers, the Duttons, the Abbots, are not the disease; they are the symptom of our societal sickness. And just as these individuals are not single-handedly responsible for their rise to positions of power, we have to face up to the fact that is the people of each nation who helped them to achieve those heights, and we must accept our share of the responsibility for every stupid, vicious thing they do.

So, Americans. Let's not hear so much about your disapproval of the mess your country is in. It's been in trouble for a long, long time, getting worse every year. Let's rather hear about what you plan to do about it. Because this is not something that was done to you, of which you are the helpless victims. No, this is something you did, yourselves. You did it, not just with your votes on election day, but with your compliance, for years, decades, with your culture of greed, of fear, of celebrity worship, of dehumanising Blacks, gays, women, children and other groups, of 'rendition', of torture of prisoners, of grabbing everything you could get regardless of who then went without.

It was you all the time.

50 Ways to Lose your Reader

OK, not 50. But I do feel like venting a bit about all the ways that indie authors shoot themselves in the foot. And here are my top three.

I've written before about what will stop me from buying. That was largely packaging issues, though, Cover, blurb, first page, basic competence in the language, and so on. First impressions. Today, I want to talk about content, and some of the ways you can ensure I will never again download anything by you. Even if it's free.

1. Books about murder, pointlessly coupled with food porn. For some reason this always seems to be confectionary and baked goods; it's never Beef Wellington, or Pad Thai or anything. There are so many of these series, and not once have I ever read one that was any good. The one I'm currently reading even has complete recipes at the end of every chapter. For nasty weird American novelty biscuits. I so do not want to read this. Because let's face it, if I were interested in baking, I'd have bought a cook book. Probably one by Nagi Maehashi, because she seriously rocks.

I digress here, but if you buy one cookbook let it be one of hers. It's due to her that I can now make authentic Fried Rice that is as good as, and often better, than you get in a Chinese restaurant. She is a legend.

Be that as it may, a murder mystery is really not the place for recipe after recipe. I feel as if they've been put in just to up the wordccount to justify a higher price for the paperback. There is a reccipe at the end of nearly every chapter, sometimes even two or three, and I suspect the recipe wordcount in this book is higher than the story wordcount. In fact, the story seems like a bit of an afterthought, put in to proved excuses for these rather nasty-looking recipes.

So that's one thing, but it leads me to my next point, which is... 

2. Fiction A La Bandwagon.

Fiction, like everything else, has trends. Fashions come and go in every field of human endeavour. Not just food and clothing, but the big stuff. Architecture. Medicine. Even politics. We're seeing this on the world stage right now, actually. Fascism is making a comeback, almost everywhere. It's disturbing and unpleasant, but it's particularly unappetising in the novel. Honestly, if I read ONE more book about a band of plucky teenagers on a quest to save the world, while meanwhile beneath a mountain an ancient evil stirs, I shall probably throw up my breakfast. That goes double for darkly erotic vampires, hordes of zombies that want to eat your brains, and secret high schools for training witches. Oh, and of course, cupcake bakers who just happen to solve murder after murder. Nearly all of the examples of these things I have seen are in no way original, but appear to be seeking to cash in on the success of people like Rowlings, who actually did do something new. 

There's nothing really wrong, in my view, with having these things in one's work. I wrote about vampires myself in Bloodsucking Bogans, and I even wrote about zombies in my short story Danse Macabre. I don't mean to seem hypocritical here. I won't rule out a book just because it has vampires or zombies. But the question I ask myself is, was the vampire/zombie/dragon/pastry shop/secret school necessary to the story? Or has it been added just to push the story onto one of the current popular trends? Chloe Hammond's Darkly series, and Joseph Picard's Lifehack series are both examples of the former situation, not to mention being both really good reads, but far too many books are just porn, or teenage high school stories or whatever, with a werewolf pack, or vampires or something shoved in. And you can really tell the difference.  

3. The third big no-no for me, and one doesn't see it all that often, is the Soapbox Book. The novel that's been written to push an agenda. Ayn Rand's books are good examples of this. Now I don't mean to diss the activists among us. The late great Sheri Tepper's books nearly always carry a cargo of activism. Her thing was greed, and treading lightly on the earth. Mercedes Lackey, in her lovely Valdemar series, works hard to combat negative stereotypes of same sex relationships. There's nothing wrong with doing this. All novels are, au fond, about people, and good and evil are the parameters within which people interact, and a really good book will in my opinion always be extended at some point into the moral dimension. But Tepper, and Lackey, and others of their ilk, provide a really good story to carry their little cargo of light. A story that has its own presence, its own weight, that could, if necessary, hold its own without the moral content, although I do think that when done well, it enhances a work. Rand, on the other hand, either was unable to write well enough or couldn't be bothered to try, and so her books are a trial to struggle through, even without their often distasteful ideological content.

Terza Rima and All That

And now, for something completely different... a man with two - no, no, not that. Today I want to talk about education, and in particular, something that has an enormous influence on whether educational activities will be successful.

It's always been my hobby to take courses. I just love to learn stuff. I've done all manner of things, ranging from a two hour seminar on Shamanic spirituality to a law degree, all in the pursuit of my idea of fun, which many people have told me is perverse, but de gustibus right? Most recently, I discovered Duolingo, and for the last two years my husband and I learned Italian. Now, we often speak it to each other at home, although we're still not very good. I finished the whole Duolingo Italian course, but I'd got the habit, so I decided to resume learning German, so I'm doing that now on Duolingo, and brushing up my long-disused French on the side. My body may crumble as I age, but by God I'm determined I will not go senile.

Anyway, that's all good, but it really isn't terribly demanding, and lately I've started to feel a bit restless and cast about for something a little more challenging, and I came across this site: https://learn.modernstates.org/d2l/login

It seemed to be a bit like Open University, and they offer a number of free courses, so I signed up for English Literature, and I'm into the second unit of it now. And I feel as if I'm seeing double, or something. On the one hand, we have the set textbook, a beautifully written piece of erudition. On the other we have three to five minute lectures in which the tiny amount of content is so dumbed down as to be practically baby talk, and also contains errors of fact, and is delivered in a manner so patronising as to set one's teeth on edge, by a person who is evidently unable to pronounce basic English words. The set readings with each lecture have nothing to do with the lecture content, either. The only thing the lecturer seems to be interested in is the 'exam', which I bet will be multiple choice.

You can apparently apply for some kind of certificate after passing this course, which gets you into an American university, or gives you credit towards one of their degrees, or something. I'm starting to think the whole course may be a scam, aimed only at getting people into courses. Not that there's anything wrong with a prep course. A person's education may have gaps for many reasons, and it's great if there are ways and means for them not to be forced to give up. But I would have thought, for a prep course to be genuine, it would need to have a lot more content than this.

It's possible that my view is just jaded; these two units so far have been all about terminology, so perhaps the course will rev up shortly and be full of great content. And this is really the point I'm trying to make, and not doing a very good job of it today. But it is this - that once you embark on a course, it's better to just press on regardless, unless you find you're completely uninterested in the subject matter or something. 

Back in the days of my golden youth, I shared an apartment with a man who had dropped out of his Computer Science degree in the first semester. He told me about it at some length - because he already worked as a programmer, he said, the first lectures were too boring and elementary to be interesting, so he skipped going for the first three weeks, thinking he'd hop in when it started to be good. But alas! When he went back three weeks later, the course had moved on much faster than expected, and it was all so completely over his head that he couldn't understand a word of it. He was all sad because he had lost his opportunity to get a degree. 

A few months later, he enrolled again. Two years had passed since his first attempt. He talked a lot about his determination not to get caught like that again, and to attend every lecture. Nevertheless, the second week of the course I was surprised to find him at home on a Monday evening. Haven't you got your lecture, I asked him. And with a precious little head toss, he informed me that the material was beneath him, he knew it all and there was no point attending the early lectures. Reminding him of his previous failure, and his resolution, did no good, it never does with these people. Unsurprisingly, the following month, exactly the same thing happened, and he dropped out again. I don't know if he ever succeeded in getting his degree. Probably not; if you can't learn when it is so clear what you did wrong, there's probably no hope for you.

I started a Computer Science degree myself the following year. Seven years later (it was part time), I graduated. I don't suppose I was brainier, or more talented, than my flatmate. But the difference between us was that I went to every lecture. I did all the reading and set work. I handed in assignments on time. I paid attention during tutorials. Yes, sometimes I felt I wasn't getting much out of it - I too worked in the business, and at a rather more impressive level than my flatmate. But if I felt unchallenged in a tutorial, I'd spend the time helping someone who was struggling. Nothing fosters a deep understanding of a subject like helping someone with it. So yes, I didn't work all that hard, but I kept at it and ticked all the boxes. And in the end, I was rewarded. It's been like that with everything I've studied. Some things don't come as easily to me as others, but the old saying is still true - if you build it, they will come. If you build it by sticking with your commitment.

It's very easy to sneer at a course. There will always be something for you to criticise, although I do think a major error in the definition of a fundamental term is a bit worrying. Nevertheless, errors do happen, and get overlooked during proofreading and review, as we all know. I myself have learned this the hard way many, many times. So I'll be sticking with the English Literature course, and even if it turns out to be utterly useless, at least I'll still have the textbook, which is fascinating and beautifully written. And perhaps, when I get a little deeper into the course, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Just as one can sneer at practically anything, so too can one learn something from practically anything, and I've already learned how to construct a villanelle and a sestina, and who knows to what wonderful uses I may be able to put this knowledge?

THE SHAME FILES

 I'm too sad and disgusted to write much today, but in this entry of the Shame Files, I am of course referring to Donald Trump's announcement of his plans to invade Gaza and undertake so-called 'ethnic cleansing'. I wish I could say I was surprised, but this is the individual (I am reluctant to say 'man') who advised people to drink bleach during the Covid pandemic. People died as a result of that, just as people have always died when American presidents got too big for their boots. The Vietnam debacle has evidently taught the country nothing.

I don't know what the solution is for America. Their whole country is in such a mess now that it seems to me to be unsalvageable, but if there is any hope for it at all, they need to remove Trump from office. I do not believe this will happen, unless perhaps a happy release takes him to his eternal reward. So, I might as well joke about it, and I'll leave you with this meme with which I cheered myself during the first Trump administration.