AlotofGaul

Books of 2011

2011-12-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

Here is a list of the most overlooked books of 2011, from the Galley-Cat site of MediaBistro, which I don't think you can get to without being a member. The links go to the Amazon page of each book. I've already found a few to put on my wish list (a little late, but you never know...)

You can also hear these discussed on NPR by going here.

Free Samples of the Most Overlooked Books of 2011

The Curfew by Jesse Ball

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon

Say Her Name: A Novel by Francisco Goldman

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

Pym: A Novel by Mat Johnson

Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais

The Farmer’s Cookbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Making Cheese, Curing Meat, Preserving Produce, Baking Bread, Fermenting, and More by Marie W. Lawrence

World Enough & Time, On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwen

Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth

The Long Goodbye: A memoir by Meghan O’Rourke

The Conference of the Birds by Peter Sis (no sample available)

There But For The: A Novel by Ali Smith

Grandpa Green by Lane Smith

Habibi by Craig Thompson (no sample available)

If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter

The Isle of

Signal Hill Library event

2011-10-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, October 19, 6 pm- "Nite At The Library"
1770 E. Hill St., Signal Hill, CA 90755.
Posted by: "dianajamespublicity" djlitmgmt@sbcglobal.net

featuring Joel Fox, Tammy Kaehler and Molly Lewis
They'll address the topic of getting a publishing contract.
Kaehler and Fox both have debut novels in the market and Molly Lewis, the CEO at Zova Books will
interview them about their experiences in getting that first book deal.
Molly Lewis has spent many years in the business of selling books and publishing fiction.
Join us for an exciting evening of Q&A, and please, share this message with friends who are learning the ropes of the book world!

Tammy Kaehler established a career writing marketing materials, feature articles, executive speeches, and technical documentation. A fateful stint in corporate hospitality introduced her to the racing world, which inspired the first Kate Reilly racing mystery. Tammy works as a
technical writer in the Los Angeles area, where she lives with her husband and many cars.

Joel Fox is the author of Lincoln's Hand, a Zane Rigby novel. Fox has authored hundreds of opinion articles, which have been published in the national papers such as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today; also in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and other papers across the country. Fox had an essay published in a Time Warner-Baseball Hall
of Fame sponsored book, What Baseball Means to Me.
Library Site: http://www.cityofsi gnalhill. org/index. aspx?NID= 325
Presented by Diana James Publicity and the Signal Hill
Librarywww.prmeinc. com

Comma or no?

2011-07-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

There are some amusing articles about the premature announcement of the death of the serial comma--you know, the one that precedes "and" in a list. The AP Stylebook (for journalists) says discard it. Oxford, Harvard, MLA, APA, Strunk & White, and the Chicago Manual of Style support it. Such a controversy.

Jacket Copy wants to insert a new comma style: the Shatner comma. As in, "I'm, still, the, captain, of, this, ship, mister!"

Wizzley says there is no controversy; every authority but one supports the serial comma, and even AP says to use it when clarity is needed..

To prove their point, supporters cite this Merle Haggard photo caption, which is even mentioned in Wikipedia: "The documentary was filmed over three years. Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall."

This pictures was on the Making Light blog, and on other blogs. Making light labeled this "via Bruce Baugh."

As Wizzley mentions, you can even buy tees and hats proclaiming your support for the serial comma--under the name of the Chicago comma (for Chicago Manual of Style, of course). Go to Zazzle and poke around. There are all styles of shirts, not just the first four you see.

Aerial Archaeology and New Pyramids

2011-05-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

The BBC says infrared imaging from satellites has located 17 new pyramids in Egypt, along with thousands of tomb/home/town sites. The Week has a concise summation and video here.

Two of the new pyramids are near Saqqara, and excavations are underway to prove/disprove their existance. (that's Giza--not Saqqara--in the pretty picture.)

Dr. Hawass is not happy and is very critical of the new documentary based on the satellite research. Here are quotes from him, along with more details about the discoveries.

It's all led to a 90-minute BBC special called "Egypt's Lost Cities." (Bummer! I don't get the BBC station anymore.)

Aerial archaeology is almost as interesting as underwater archaeology, huh?

All this seems a very natural outgrowth of aerial photography--the kind that discovered many ancient sites in the Picardie region of France, forty or fifty years ago.

Roger Agache plotted out hundreds of Roman and Celtic homes and farms by taking pictures from a plane. Those photos revealed the patterns of buried ruins. That's one of his photographs at left, showing a Bronze Age funerary site at Noyelles-sur-Mer.

Sometimes a dusting of snow made the outlines of old fences or walls clear; sometimes it was the patterns or color in the grain.

Just in the last couple of years, the research is available online and in English, describing not only the pictures, but the on-the-ground excavations. Here's the site.

Many other researchers carry on aerial archaeology, but I'm more into Gaul than Stonehenge. So Agache's work and the excavations it inspired interests me more.

BBC List of Top 100 Books

2011-05-08T11:47:00.000-07:00

This showed up on my FB page and crashed it. Supposedly, you can go through the list and check what you've read...didn't work too well. So I went looking for the original list and was surprised to find that it came out in 2004.

In April 2004, the BBC started a survey to find the top 100 best-loved books in "the nation" (presumably Britain). The list follows.

I am surprised how big a chunk is science fiction and fantasy. Twenty years ago the list would have a different character, doncha think? The movie LOTR and the Harry Potter series surely played a role in that.

Another surprise is how many classic American books are on the list: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, for instance. These stories can't be transplanted.

Anyway, here's the list, from the BBC's The Big Read. How many have you read?

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

I've read 43. That means I've got a list of 57 books to read that everyone else recommends. The BBC said (according to that blighted Facebook ap) that most people have read only six of these books. Makes me feel smart.

And here's something weird--other bloggers have put up this list, and slight variations occur. One blogger included The Time-Traveler's Wife. Huh? Anyway, there's actually another hundred list, according to Wiki. The public voted and a list of 200 was actually assembled. You can see the full 200 here.

Seth Myers on Huffington Post

2011-05-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

Well, not just on HuffPo. I couldn't find a clip of just that, so here are the first ten minutes of Seth Myers at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He was hilarious, but my favorite joke comes in the section about "After Parties," about half way through.

"Like everyone else, I'll probably just go to the Huffington Post party. The Huffington Post party is asking people to go to other parties first, and just steal food and drinks and bring it from there."

You Gotta Pay Me!

2011-03-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

Yeah! The title of this post is a quote from Harlan Ellison, btw, not simply my own frustrated outburst.

Visual Art Source, one of HuffPo's contributors has decided (belatedly) that they will no longer provide free content to that mega-website that now has AOL bankrolling it. They originally did because HuffPo gets 26 million visitors a month, but they're calling it quits now.

Visual Art Source, in the person of Bill Lasarow, lays down two conditions for contributing to Huffington Post again:

First, a pay schedule must be proposed and steps initiated to implement it for all contributing writers and bloggers.

Second, paid promotional material must no longer be posted alongside editorial content; a press release or exhibition catalogue essay is fundamentally different from editorial content and must be either segregated and indicated as such, or not published at all.

Lasarow follows up with this gem:

I am also calling upon all others now contributing free content, particularly original content to the Huffington Post to also join us in this strike.

My heart is warmed.

I really, really like Ariana Huffington. I enjoy her books--which I have paid for--and her appearances on TV.

She's very smart. Somehow, she's figured out a way to run a rather liberal blog without paying any of the writers who contribute material. Except herself, of course.

Even smarter, she's managed to make all us hard-working folks not notice or complain about it.

How does she do that? Smoke and mirrors?

I can imagine what she'd say if someone tried stiffing her!

So here is my favorite video once again: Harlan Ellison ranting, "They always want the writer to work for nothing!"

Desks of Brilliant Minds

2011-02-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

A while back I did some posts on the writing sites of certain authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was fun, till I discovered that my idea wasn't too unique and the best I could do was refer to other articles. How droll.

So here's another article on the topic. Desks of the rich and creative, from Flavorwire.

May I draw your attention to the work areas of Albert Einstein, Tina Fey, and Al Gore, for starters? Obviously, a clean desktop is the sign of a less-than-exemplary mind! Or maybe, as author Emily Temple states, sometimes a cluttered desk is just a cluttered desk.

Uprising and Archaeology in Egypt

2011-02-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

A February 3 story in Science Insider reports looting by around 200 people in Saqqara. The tomb of Maya, King Tut's wet nurse, has been "completely destroyed." Things may get worse. According to the story, looting in the area is out of control.

Saqqara is just south of Cairo, and is the City of the Dead--a huge, ancient cemetary. Parts of it are 5,000 years old. Saqqara contains pyramids, most famously the Step Pyramid of Djoser, but is not the site of The Pyramids--that's Giza. That's the Step Pyramid at right, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In his blog, Secretary-General Zahi Hawass denies that this happened. He says he has phone contact with every museum and site in the country. Dr. Hawass acknowleges two incidents: a break-in at the Egyptian Museam and at a Sinai storage facility where six boxes were taken.

At the Museum, he says 70 objects were damaged but can be repaired. Hawass claims that media reports of two mummies being damaged are incorrect; actually two unidentified skulls were damaged. He even posts a picture of a mummified head.

His Feb. 7 post details some of the harm done, such as the gold being stripped from a walking stick, part of King Tutankhamun's collection.

As for the Sinai breakin, according to Hawass all 288 objects stolen have been returned.

This is apolitical. Looting tombs and museums does not support either side. I appreciate that news is confused during such chaotic times and that rumors sometime get reported as news. OTOH, anyone who's ever seen Dr. Hawass on TV knows he has a. . . um. . . very unique, take-charge type of personality. I hope he's not exaggerating and that indeed, there's been no looting at Saqqara and all stolen objects have been returned.

Book Covers

2011-02-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

As a follow-up to a point in the previous post--that self-published or not, ebook or print, covers are very important and no writer should scrimp on them--here is a blog entry from The Book Designer with resources. It contains 8 tips for selecting a great cover.

I even found a Book Cover Archive. Wow.

And to the right is a re-imagining of the Harry Potter books, with covers designed by M. S. Corely to make them look like Penquin Classics. I love it. These show how attached we can get to one cover design (which anyone who fell in love with a particular edition of a classic will understand.) But how elegant and simple these are!

The Future of Publishing

2011-02-01T19:21:00.000-08:00

That was the name of the panel discussion on the Westside of Los Angeles that I attended: The Future of Publishing.

On the panel were a couple of literary agents, one conversant with technology and one who didn't speak, a book consultant specializing in self-published ebooks and print books, two entrepreneurs--one with a company combining ebooks and video, and the other running a small press and a book PR firm, and a successful author covering the film industry.

One of the entrepreneurs met most questions with an answer along the lines of, "I don't know what's going to happen, but it should be exciting." I'm not mocking him. I think all in all, he probably expressed the most truthiness.

While one woman proclaimed that "the time for self-publishing is here, definitely and without doubt," not all agreed. Rather than repeat their (very polite) arguements, here's what I learned:

In the last six months, the publishing industry has convulsed and changed more than any other industry.
Before 1976 (before Star WArs, iow) two of five published books made money. But that was OK; in publishing up till then, novels had years to make back their investments with slow, steady sales. Now, however, publishers are conglomerates who produce only the cream of the crop, as proffered by agents. The business is Hits-drven and celebrity-oriented.
OTOH, there are more opportunities than ever for those willing to venture into self-publishing and ebooks. Remember, though, you still must produce a superior product. Spare no expense on a great cover and editing.
The gatekeeper and many middlemen are being eliminated. Everyone can be published, and hopefully the best books will rise to the top. This all means more $$ for authors who get bigger shares of sales for their ebooks, and who don't have to wait months and years for publishers to send them checks for books sold.

All agreed on this: Authors must become marketers. One entrepreneur advised learning as much as possible about the way Itunes works and sells. Reviews and word of mouth will still be important.

Journalism Lingo 101: Source Equals Quote

2011-01-25T10:48:00.000-08:00

Credit: Free images from acobox.com

Here it is January 25 and I have not posted to this blog in 2011. Shame! Shame! I've been busy, and for a week, sick with a cold--not a nasty, painful cold but the kind that makes you want to curl up on the sofa with a thermos of hot chocolate and doze all day while a cable station loops the Lord of the Rings movies nonstop.

Meanwhile, the bills must be paid so I'm writing a lot for Patch.com. I'm getting used to throwing stories together quickly and not trying to make them perfect.

I've also learned that when journalists refer to sources, they mean quotes. I didn't know that; it cost me at least one story.

You see, when the word "source" is used to anyone who studied history or any discipline other than journalism, it conjures up images of bibliographic entries. It may refer to an interview, but many sources are articles from newspapers and magazines, or books that contain facts. You source facts to vet them.

So when an editor told me I needed more sources in my story on the Tea Party, I went to Fox News and the conservative pundits who are credited with starting the Tea Party. I used their data, giving credit ("as so-and-so reported in her weekly column for the Washington Post").

There! Now the information in my article was sourced. I wasn't happy because I thought it made the piece way too dry. But I figured the editor would be happy.

She wasn't. She killed the story (OK, the murder was mutual. I was unwilling to invest further effort in a story that had already taken more of my time than it was worth).

Weeks later, I meet with another Patch editor who talks about having 2 or 3 sources for every story. The same buzzword...this time I asked her exactly what she meant by source.

Quotes, I learned.

Not expert quotes, necessarily. A source could be a kid at a carnival, as long as they say something worth printing, like "I threw up on the Tilt-a-Whirl!"

That's all it is. I could talk to a crazy person and he could be a source. In fact, maybe I have.

End result is that articles are much easier to write. I quote my source; I don't have to vet their information as long as I've got the quote.

Presumably there's another level of reportage, better paid, where fact-checking plays a bigger role in evaluating what quotes to use to tell the story.

When I write for magazines, I double-check all information. I go to experts. I look up stuff. I like that better. But magazines aren't responding to my queries right this second, and I have bills to pay and promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, hee hee, ho ho.

"A Lead is a Promise"

2010-12-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

What is more welcome than a new piece by John McPhee, and on writing, of all things!

This article ("Writing a Strong Lead is Half the Battle"--the quote in my blog title comes near the end) is from the Wall Street Journal. It's short and to the point and everyone who writes should read it.

I don't consider myself a journalist; my degree is in history. But I love to write and want to write well. Like many, many freelancers these days, I find myself working for Patch a lot, so I'm learning to write a lead.

Or, as some purists would have it, lede. Thank you, Mr. McPhee, for spelling it "lead." That makes me feel less like an outsider. "Lede" seems to be the secret handshake that proves one went to journalism school.

McPhee is one of my heroes. I know little about hiim except that he writes great articles and books about the things he finds interesting. His writing is always exactly right--the pacing, the unrolling of facts, the subtle story behind the facts. If I set out to emulate him in everything I write--except the fiction--I would do quite well, I believe.

I'm not the only one who thinks he's a joy to read, of course. Everyone loves him--his book Giving Good Weight was passed around by engineers at the aerospace company I once worked for, and believe me, those guys don't normally read anything but schematics. McPhee won a Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World.

Successful Writers Defined

2010-12-17T12:13:00.000-08:00

In this most excellent interview, blogger and author Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen defines a successful writer as "someone who can make a living by writing."

Fairly simple. Know anyone? Actually, I've met a few and their energy amazes me.

Pawlik-Kienlen does not query magazines, but makes her living from several successful, monetized blogs and by selling her ebooks. One of said ebooks is titled 75 Ways to Make Money Blogging--certainly something I'm adding to my Christmas list (it's only ten bucks!)

She gives a couple of tips in her interview--it's well worth reading, so go to. I could add more but I'm going to go check out her blog, Quips and Tips for Successful Writers.

Musings on New World Food

2010-12-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

Here is something that makes me glad I didn't get a book published at 22, cuz this is exactly the sort of error I would have made: Inserting food like potatoes or tomatoes into a story set way before these products made it out of the Americas. Or inserting coffee or spices a few centuries before they were known.

Seriously. It is hard to write a scene of someone waking up during...I dunno, the 12th Century mini-Rennaisance, and not pouring themselves a steaming cup of Joe to get moving. How did people get up before coffee? More to the point, what did folks drink on a 12th century morning?

I keep thinking about that internet anecdote I read years ago, about a New Agey author who wrote a book on ancient Irish Druids. She based her text not on research, but on intuitive or channeled knowledge, and stated that the potato was quite sacred to them. When it was pointed out to her that potatoes were not introduced into Ireland until the 17th century, she wondered why everyone was being so mean to her.

So I look up every vegetable and condiment before I put it in a story. I hope everyone does. When I read a book, say Ancient Evenings by Mailer, I enjoy it that much more knowing that he invested years in the reseach. I don't want any anachronistic faux-pas to jolt readers out of the magic.

Mucho apologies for neglecting the blog once again, btw. Who knew I could get so busy?

SWAT Port-a-potties

2010-10-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

I know this is just silly, but...

You know when something awful happens in a neighborhood and the SWAT team comes out (thankfully) and maybe even the bomb squad? Sometimes there's a person barricaded in a home, and the police are there for hours and hours.

I never thought of this before, but they bring their own key-locked port-a-potties, bolted to a trailer. It makes sense. I mean, if you're evacuating civilians and deploying snipers, do you really want to knock on a door and say, "By the way, ma'am, may I use your bathroom?"

So I took a picture. Because even heroic death-defying law-enforcement officials have to pee at times.

Under the Sea Near Wales

2010-10-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that the seas have risen over the millennia. Not making it up; as the glaciers receded and (now) the ice caps melt, more water is released into our oceans.

So historical sites are submerged.

An article from Wales Online tells how archaeologist Dr Andrew Petersen (pictured, looking quite rakish and Indiana Jones-ish) is searching off shore near the coast of Wales. Specifically, he hopes to find fish traps made of stone or willow, which may have been put in place a Long, Long Time Ago. Saber-tooth tiger era Long Ago. And in the process of seeking these fish traps--which are quite large--Dr. Petersen will also keep an eye open for things like fossilized forests that may tell us how people lived in the area many thousands of years ago.

Dr. Petersen did similar oceanic surveying in Qatar recently, and found an underwater mosque, fort, and homes. (Story here or BBC story-with-pictures here) So heck, who knows what may turn up?

Dr. Martin Bates, an environmental archaeologist, states in the Wales Online article that the current sea level was established 6000 years ago. "We are going to use multi-beam sonar surveys to look beneath the sand banks and see what is under the sea bed above the rock, that relates to the last Ice Age. This new science is still in its infancy.”

Exciting...makes me want to go back to school and learn all this new stuff. Except that there's probably tons of math and chemistry involved. More news will no doubt be forthcoming, since a Nations of the Sea Conference took place at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff three weeks ago, when this story appeared.

Good Earth Floors--a How-to

2010-10-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm exploring the wonders of Twitter, I come across tons more stuff. Just what I needed, right? Only, since tweets are limited to a couple of lines, I don't have to read through much, just skim. Like scanning a counter full of scarves for a color that jumps out at you.

Here's what jumped out today: an article from England about putting in an earthen floor.

Once as ubiquitous as thatch roofs, over the centuries earthen floors have gone the way of ... um ... earthen floors. Dirt is something you shake off as you walk inside, right? Not what you walk on inside the house.

Looking for pictures, I found a site called Build and Rebuild. Their "Earthen Floor" link sent me here, which is where ia found the picture and step by step instructions for the home builder.

I recall reading about how wonderful earth floors were, in The Horse of Pride. Helias recalled how his mother swept it--swept the dirt off the dirt floor, an image hard to shake. And as the UK Tobias Jones piece shows (the same one referenced above), a well-designed earth floor hardens into a rich, beautiful surface...eventually.

In the meantime, though, you're dumping sand (or straw or ash), manure, and clay together. In this modern effort, Tobias Jones laid in a gravel subfloor (I doubt that our ancient ancestors did that) and uses a cement mixer to toss his ingredients together.

Lacking a cement mixer, I wonder how the Celts put together their floor. In small batches, perhaps, mixing sand, manure, and clay in a vat and then dumping it on ground? A plot of ground cleared of large rocks, foliage, roots, etc...I don't recall ever reading about the construction of an ancient floor. A gravel subfloor makes so much sense, but has such a floor ever been found?

Tobias points out a couple of real advantages to the earthen floor. Flaws--cracks, dips, etc--can be so easily fixed. Second, there are no health risks--no asbestos hiding in the mix, no chemicals, no skin irritants, etc. That is surprising--isn't manure a prime ingredient? Not that I'd be setting food on the floor, but isn't manure rather aromatic in an unpleasant way? Tobias never mentions a troubling smell.

He finishes with his plans to finish the floor with a layer of beeswax, although linseed oil is another option. Linseed oil, I learn from another blog (I love cob), is combustible, so be careful with that. This picture--of an earth floor after being treated with linseed oil, came from that blog as well.

An expert called in to consult on the floor was a felow called "Old Boar": Eddie Wills. His expertise is in Iron Age crafts, among other things, and he's trying to set up an Iron Age Lake Village. Another name to run through Twitter!

Garbled Spam

2010-10-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

Time to award someone for their prodigious gall!

I delete a lot of spam commments on this blog. This one made me laugh...you gotta credit this writer's stamina, hammering out a sales pitch with (I'm guessing) a dictionary and very cheap thesaurus before him or her.

I affair listening to music from my iPod while I'm on the emigrate, be it on the bus, the indoctrinate, or good while doing groceries. Quest of that saneness, I every time requirement a creditable span of stereo earphones with me, and of ambit on some days I'd like my earphones to be an whistles, where I match it with my outfit for that day. So I get a join of creator earphone every other month.

The typical links and garbage follow.

"on the emigrate"--was the writer looking for a synonym for on the road? and "the indoctrinate"--a class? But I'm mystified by the first phrase: "I affair listening to music". I affair? Too precious.

The Tromenie: a Breton Pardon with Gaulish Roots

2010-09-29T21:08:00.000-07:00

In my humble opinion, Brittany is one of the loveliest areas in France. I offer as evidence my only picture of Locranon, a town with bodacious hydrangeas.

The Breton peninsula is particularly Celtic, being the land of the Veneti, Osismi, Coriosolites, and other tribes of Caesar's day and before, and being repopulated in the 5th century or so by people from Cornwall.

Brittany has a lot of Catholic processions and fests, called Pardons, but one--the Tromenie--dates back to the Celtic times before Caesar. The Tromenie takes place on the second Sunday of every July, outside the village of Locranon--a place which you may have seen in A Very Long Engagement. The idea is to walk the route of St. Ronan, who founded Locranon.

Pilgrims walk to a little chapel where St. Ronan's supposedly lived and have an open-air Mass.
That's the Petitie Tromenie. Here's a pretty comprehensive site with its history, some music, and lore. It's documented to have gone on since the 11th century, and since St. Ronan lived several centuries before that, my guess is that the practice is much older.

Every six years, though, folks make the Grande Tromenie--a map of that route is on the site, at the bottom of the page. The next Grande Tromenie will be in 2013. These 19th-century postcards show the area--it hasn't changed all that much.

The Grande Tromenie route follows a much longer path from the village well to a clearing called Le Nemeton. That word--Nemeton--is Celtic for temple (that's pretty well documented, even though a lot of the Gaulish language is lost). Twelve markers are passed during the seven and a half mile circuit, representing the twelve months of a lunar calendar. Or, if you prefer the Catholic version, the markers are twelve stations of the cross. It's anyone's guess whether a sacred walk was made yearly during the B.C. years, but I wouldn't bet against it. I was told that some of the markers date to pre-Roman times.

When I went looking for links, I was surprised to find this 1959 article from Time Magazine, describing the Tromenie. An abbreviated version of the legend of St. Ronan and how the walk started, and what the author saw in 1959, is very interesting.

Judith Merkle Riley Dies

2010-09-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite authors, and someone local to my former home in Claremont has died after battling cancer for years. It's sad when anyone dies, but espcially a writer. Fans know that there will be no more wonderful, intricate stories forthcoming.
Judith Merkle Riley's historical novels were published from 1989 to 1999. My favorite, The Oracle Glass, is at left.

I heard her speak at an Inland Empire area bookstore in 2003 or 2004, and bought a book. For book lovers, is there any thrill greater than stumbling across a writer that's new to you, but that has several books published? To find not just one, but several magical realms waiting to be visited?

Her last book was The Master of all Desires, and Nostradamus himself was a featured character in it. Both books mentioned here are stand-alone tales, not part-one-of-a-series or anything liket hat. I may be in the minority, but I'm getting to the point where "Series" is a code word preparing me to accept formulaic plots and escapes with no real thrills.However delightful a first book is, knowing there's a second installment takes the freshnes out. You know the hero will survive to star in future adventures.

I digress. The point of this post is simply to say that I am saddened that Judith Merkle Riley is gone.

Irish Historical Works Online

2010-09-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a nifty website called CELT: the Corpus of Eectronic Texts. Texts are all of Old Ireland, from the 5th century onward. Want a sample? Here's how the first two entries in the Annals of Ulster translates into English:

U432.0Kalends of January sixth feria, fifth of the moon, [AM]4636. AD 432 according to Dyonisius.
U432.1Patrick arrived in Ireland in the ninth year of the reign of Theodosius the Less and in the first year of the episcopate of Xistus, 42nd bishop of the Roman Church. So Bede, Maxcellinus and Isidore compute in their chronicles.

This incredible collection of texts from the 5th through the 20th century is a result of intense scholarly work done by the Department of History and the Computer Center of the University College Cork.

What's online, in English and other languages? Annals of the Four Masters, Annals from all over Ireland, the History of Nennius, the Cáin Lánamna (the Law of Couples, dating back to about 700 A.D.), lives of saints, travelers' descriptions of Ireland through the centuries, old tales of Finn and other heroes... so very much, right at your fingertips.

Thank you, UCC. If I ever bury myself in Celtic history again to write a follow up novel, I will be pouring over this treasure.

Ancient Herbs 'n France..s

2010-09-14T21:28:00.000-07:00

A bow to Respighi in the the title.

When you get sick, you seek out the person who can make you better. Today, that may be the clerk at RiteAid, but before the 20th century it was very often someone who knew plants and made medicines from them. In Death Speaker, my novel of ancient Gaul, the heroine is raised by a woman who heals with plants, so I had to do a bit of research on them.

The pretties on the right are Aconitum, aka Wolfbane. If you know your Harry Potter you know it's poisonous. Information on it and how it works on the human body is all over the internet. A decent place to start is here at Thinkquest.org, but there are plenty of other spots as well.

Not surprising that poisonous plants are well-covered on the net, is it? Death is sexy. We love that stuff. There's even a TV show on SPIKE called 1000 Ways to Die. The commercials turn my stomach so I won't include a link.

But even finding information on non-lethal plants--like this comfrey--gets easier every day, as herbalists, nurseries, and agencies in every state and country put their plants online. When I check several sights and they all agree on a how a plant grows and how it affects people, I'm pretty comfortable using that information.

Oddly, I didn't rely on books on herbs, mainly because there's so much dis-information around. Isn't that weird--I used to trust the printed word implicitly. But I've seen many books on "New-Agey" topics, like herbs and healing, which went into rituals and folklore...yet when I tried to learn more, I found nothing at all that could support the book's claims. No other books, websites, experts--nothing.
So if a book claims that a plant was once used to cure headaches, for example, but no other book or expert or website backs up that claim...well, maybe the author vetted their information, maybe they didn't. Maybe they just repeated something they heard anecdotally, and maybe they got it wrong.

If I've got a headache, I want something I KNOW will knock it out. And if my character has a headache, I figure she wants the same thing. So I try to find it for her. It's the least I can do.

Geography, 2000 Years Ago

2010-09-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

Some musings about writing a historical novel:

One of the most difficult things to figure out in an ancient setting is the geography. The further back you go, the more things change. Seas rise and fall, rivers change course, beaches erode, hills get carved up by miners...stuff happens.

Of course, the good part about that is the further back you go, the less likely it is that someone may call you out on a mistake. ("You idiot! That lake is manmade--no one would have stopped there before 1972!")

My novel is set in France, 2000 years ago. France is unique in that it--more than most countries--has tamed its rivers. Who knows how the Loire ambled along in the BC era? Well, there may be a few scholars of the esoteric who know, but not many. How about the beaches near Carnac? What were they like? And the fields, what sort of flowers would have grown wild there?

I did as much research as I could. Maybe I over-researched, but I think that's better than not doing enough. I even found a little book in a university library that was written for American soldiers in WWI, explaining in general terms the lay of the land in France. What a jewel that was!

One thing I did learn was that the seas have risen over the past two milennia. Archaeologists know it. The many islands off France and other countries in Northern Europe have higher shorelines than they used to. Some disappear entirely, and yet there are carvings and structures that indicated they were used once, maybe 3000 years ago when the seas were lower.

An annotation on Caesar's Conquest of Gaul clued me into the fact that the Netherlands and Belgium and other coastal areas were more marshy than they are today.

The bottom line is that you do your best, which is the bottom line for almost everything in writing, isn't it?

The Cost of EBooks

2010-08-26T16:20:00.000-07:00

Like many others, I thought books for the Kindle would be dirt cheap. Five dollars or less--after all, no paper, shipping, store costs, etc. Wrong!

According to the September 2010 Wired Magazine's "Burning Question" column--which I can't find online--those costs account for a paltry 15% of book prices. The other 85% is taken by authors, editors, designers, marketers, publicists, distributors and resellers. And all but the last two (and I'm not so sure about distributors) are still necessary to effectively sell ebooks.

In addition, an ebook needs antipiracy software, programmers to adapt each text to different platforms, and extra legal support (not sure what that entails). Another less obvious reason for slightly higher-than-necessary prices comes from Larry Doyle: Publishers are "concerned about devaluing people's perception of books."

Hmm. Don't know if I agree but I never pass up an opportunity to quote a Doyle. That was my grandmother's family name.

However, Rick Broida--the author of this Wired article--goes on to point out that authors can eliminate all those middlemen and publish their tomes on Amazon. Amazon lets authors take 35%, an unheard-of cut...but wait! Apple ibooks will let authors keep 70% of sales--70% !!!

I assume that means, though, that the author has to put out money in advance for professional editing and cover art and design. I assume too that all publicity is the author's responsibility, so s/he will probably have to pay for a publicist, travel, promotional items, ads.

So stay tuned. I doubt that we'll be downloading $4.99 thrillers any time soon.

Howard Carter's Notes

2010-08-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

Howard Carter died in 1939, seventeen years after discovering Tutankhamun's tomb. The treasure he found has been all over the world, but usually rests in a museum in Cairo, right? Nothing more to know?

Ha! Of course there's tons more to know! But we're just now going to find out how much more, and what that 'more' is.

Turns out that since Carter died, only about a third of his carefully written research notes--including over 3500 cards, 1000 photographs, 60 maps, notes from chemist Alfred Lucas, and hundreds of pages from Carter's own journals and diaries--have ever been made public. Carter spent ten years cataloguing his find--there were about 5400 objects in the tomb, after all. But he died before he could publish all that stuff.

Carter's notes have been locked up in the Griffith Institute, a temperature-controlled underground lab/library/archive at Oxford University. Read all about it here at Archaeology News Net. The article is a reprint from the New Zealand Herald of August 9, 2010.

In 1993, a gentleman named Jaromir Malek became the caretaker of Carter's notes, and two years later he and began working with Jonathan Moffett, the chief IT guy at the Ashmolean Library. (I'm sure both men have far more impressive titles.) Fighting a sparse budget for years, they are now near the day when most of the archive will not only be available, but will be online.

In fact, 98% of it IS online. Wow.

I just always assumed that as King Tut's tomb was so well publicized, everyone knew all about it. Wrong! Everyone just got so entranced by the Big Gold Shiny Things (understandable) that they've never bothered to really study the many mundane and ordinary (ordinary to ancient Egyptians, that is) items in the tomb. Now it's all online and available. (The other 2% will be up within three months.) HERE.

Maybe the most valuable link I've ever made.

Janelle Brown on HuffPost: Dearth of Paying Creative Jobs

2010-07-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

In a great article that starts out with anecdotal evidence of creative talent fleeing Los Angeles (my city), Brown nails something that has been bothering many, many people lately. She talks about the writing opportunities on the Internet: "In a flooded marketplace of ideas, the price for creativity has been driven down by a glut of free supply."

Brown points out that over 30,000 writers/journalist have lost their jobs in the past two years, and fight over the pathetically small pay that sites like Demand Media offer. (I could add a few others, but Demand is who Brown singled out.) She gives some great examples, then moves on to other creative types: musicians, filmmakers, etc. She does get around to plugging her own book, This is Where We Live, only to mention that she's found bootlegged copies of it downloaded 9,500 times!

Enough of stealing her thunder: read the article. She ends with a scenario that reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.

Ebook Updating Capability

2010-07-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

Here is something I didn't know: when an ebook is updated or revised or corrected, the seller can, technically, update, revise, or correct each copy of that ebook that sits on Kindles or Ipads everywhere. Read about it in the May 2010 issue of Wired but I can't find a link to the piece. Ironic, huh?

Now, just because a seller can reach out tentacles across the airwaves to manipulate text, doesn't mean that they do. As Wired points out, a year ago Amazon deleted a bunch of copies of 1984 from the reading devices of customers because the copies were bootlegged. (huh? I don't know how that happened but that's what Wired says.) Customers were very angry; Amazon apologized and will not update or change an ebook without a customer's permission.

It brings up possiblities, doesn't it? How many new textbooks are sold because the authors add a new chapter and up the rev. number so that students can't buy a used copy? If the texts can be automatically updated, students don't have to buy new books. But why would authors take the time to update such books if they're not compensated for their efforts?

What about translated works? When a new translation of The Conquest of Gaul becomes available, should everybody who has an older copy have the option of updating? And what about a map book? Now there's something you'd want to have updated, huh? But if there's no profit in such updates, who will bother?

I'm probably spinning my wheels. As I said, just because ebooks can be updated doesn't mean they will be.

Susan Isaacs Gets the Last Word (Deservedly So!)

2010-07-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

A Wall Street Journal article about book signings in New York City makes clear what branding and positioning hath wrought. The big book stores like Borders and Barnes and Noble offer venues seating up to 1100 people. Each outlet has its own cachet--do you want liberals, the savvy and trendy, or warmish families with their kids in tow?

In a way, this sounds so much like an amped-up version of cheerleader tryouts in high school. I'm sure it's inevitable--bookselling is a business--but reading the story almost makes me glad I'm an unknown drudge. Almost.

(OK, truthfully, I wish I had that problem. I wish my publicist was going nuts arranging a slot for me.)

The piece finishes with a bit of spectacular wisdom from Susan Isaacs: "Say you sell 75 books. It's all to the good, but I don't know how much it matters in the scheme of things....You should be using that energy to write books."

Paying for Writing Space?

2010-07-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

As in--the writer pays to write there.

I wouldn't have thought this a workable business model, even in non-recessionary times. But in Santa Monica, there are two such places. One has been around a few years; the other just opened.

The new one first: Writers Junction. You join and use the facilities whenever you like. There's a coffee-bar/kitchenette, a cozy lounge with cushy sofas and chairs, a small lending library, a couple of meeting and/or presentation rooms, printers & a copy machine, and--the main raison d'etre of the place--quiet, well-lit writing alcoves where you can plug in your laptop and just scrive in quiet privatude.

Is that worth $125 a month (with a year's commitment)? Writers Junction is a modern, uncluttered place (check out pictures here), and I suppose for folks who can't get peace and quiet any other way, it's very worth it.

The other place (for writers, anyway. This L.A. Times article mentions other facilities for creative types, including artists, designers, etc.) is The Office, which charges $150 part-time, and $250 full-time. Those are first month introductory rates, btw. Like Writers Junction, a full-time membership at The Office gets you access at ALL hours.

Here's a picture from their website at left--it's certainly more attractive to me, but I'm a sucker for big windows and sunlight. The Office has been around for six years, and even has an "It was written here" page of honor--heavy on screenplays.

Again, worth it? Well, if all those screenplays and novels on their "It was written here" page would not have existed but for The Office, then yeah. If you live in Santa Monica. Wonder if the concept has been tried elsewhere?

Radar maps Hyksos' capital

2010-06-21T23:29:00.000-07:00

Remember the Hyksos? The foreign invaders who ruled Egypt for about 100 years? No one is sure who they were--a branch of Phoenician? Semites--Canaanites? Their ascendancy in Egypt took place 3500 years ago: 1664 to 1569 BC. In context, that's just before the dynasty that gave us Thutmose and Hatshepsut.

An Austrian team of archaeologists led by Irene Mueller used radar to map out the boundaries of the Hyksos principal city, Avaris. There are tons of stories on all the news networks, all saying exactly the same thing. I'm linking to this one on Heritage Key because it links best to a map--the only picture accompanying all those news stories. But Heritage Key's version of the map lets you zoom in.

So, the 2.6 sq. km. they've mapped out with magnetometric and resistivity surveys contain streets, temples, cemeteries, houses, and a possible port area (has the Nile changed course in that area in 3500 years? Probably, huh?). The Heritage Key article says that the most amazing find so far has been frescoes in a Minoan style, showing bull-leaping--similar to the artistic themes of Knossos on Crete.

It's not clear to me whether those frescoes are from the Hyksos palace, or from later, 18th-Dynasty Egyptian palaces that were built on the site--the current locale of Tel el-Dabaa. Or Tell el Daba'. A 2008 version of the ubiquitous map--with labels and more detail--is here.

Ten Most Amazing Historical Objects...

2010-06-20T12:44:00.000-07:00

...According to the Web Urbanist--and this link goes direct to the posted list, with all the pictures.

Number One is the Antikythera Mechanism, which I've blogged about before. But some of the objects are news to me--like Number Two, the Baigong Pipes, which may have been literally used for number two. (But probably not.) The picture and following link are from China Expat.

The Baigong Pipes of China sit on top of a mountain and go through caves. Not everyone agrees that these are pipes or the remnants of pipes, but they certainly are intriguing. Wikipedia describes them and compares them to some naturally occurring pipe features in Navajo country and Louisiana.

The list also includes the Phaistos Disk, the Shroud of Turin, the Baghdad Battery--which I just saw on TV. Here's a nice site explaining the battery, which could generate 1-2 volts of electricity...but for what purpose?

What else is on the list?

Roman Dodecahedra (left) which could be anything from dice to a calibration device. About a hundred of them have been found throughout Europe. The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica, the Coso Artefact, The Maine Penny, the Voynich Mss--I was going to look up links for these, but go to the Web Urbanist list and read their descriptions.

World's Oldest Leather Shoe

2010-06-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

Let's set the stage: In a dark, cold cave in Armenia, underneath layers of sheep dung that have settled like cement over the finds, archaeologists have discovered the following curiosities:

Three human heads preserved in ceramic jars
wine-making equipment, complete with grapes
a laced up leather shoe stuffed with straw (or excelsior if you prefer)

Which item is grabbing the headlines?

After all, bottled heads are a dime a dozen. Unless one proves to belong to Joaquin, the California bandit who's preserved head went missing during the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, who cares?

But the shoe is 5,600 years old, which makes it older by three centuries than the previous world's-oldest-leather-shoe (found on an ice mummy), so that's the news.

For the record, the world's oldest shoes (leather or not) is claimed by North Armerica: a 6900-year-old sandal made with woven fibers and leather. And since this new find was found at the beginning of the current excavation, meaning that 98% of the cave is still to be dug into and searched, who knows what further boundaries may be broken?

Here are links to news stories about this:

New York Times (though you have to wade through clever asides about Sarah Jessica Parker's shoe size (geez, leave the wisecracks to bloggers, for crying out loud!) (one of whom (Geekologie) came up with Air Methuselahs)
the interactive, peer-reviewed science journal PlosOne, who broke the story

Gladiator Graves in York

2010-06-07T22:08:00.000-07:00

Saw this on CNN and wondered, "How do they know the dead are gladiators?"

Several clues, notably ONE body with a bite mark from what could have been a lion, tiger, or bear. Other bodies had hammer blows to the head, or were even decapitated. Some sites say all the bodies were decapitated but it's not clear.

Eighty bodies so far, all seeming to be athletic, fit males, taller than average, many with strong right arms. They date to around 1600 to 1900 years ago--the time of Rome's control of Britain. Although the NPR story narrowed it down to the between the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Some of the graves had pottery or meat joints (from horses, sheep, and chicken) in them.

None of which proves that the graves are those of gladiators, but that's a reasonable guess. And something else worth mentioning--no cemetery of gladiators has ever been found before.

Scientists have been studying them for seven years, but keeping it secret. Sneaky scientists! (OK, actually, I applaud them.) And the lead archaeologist...I do not lie...is named Dr. Hunter-Mann. Now that is karmic.

The York Archaeological Trust will launch a website about the cemetery June 14--the same day that a documentary on the find will be released in Britain. Hope it'll be shown here soon too.

New Free Pictures

2010-05-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

This may be of interest to other bloggers: PicApp now has Reuters photos available.

If I didn't have a chihuahua in my lap that would have been much easier to type.

Anyway, here's an example of a Reuters News Photo... Steve Nash right after breaking his nose in the May 23 game against the Lakers. Like I couldn't have copied that from a million other places, right? But I suppose that knowing I'm not stealing it from some starving photographer means something.

Anyone want to take bets on what facial feature of Nash's will get dinged up tonight?

Clearly, my mind is not on my work! But a post is a post is a post.

For the record, I have sent out over 170 queries in the last two years for my wonderful historical novel. Discounting the last dozen who haven't had time to reply yet, that means 158 agents will be beating themselves up soon over missing the opportunity to handle this bestseller. Man!

Not Applying for This Job!

2010-05-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

Craigslist ad:

Research/Writing Partner (city omitted)
Freelance writer seeks research partner for article on "Planned Kidnapping" a new fad that's moved from New York to Los Angeles. The article is for a relationships/love tips-type online magazine, and I'm looking for a partner that will help me research and field-test this new fad. It will be a fun, unique and interesting case-study!!!!

When the article is published, we'll split the money evenly.

Please send pictures and resume if interested.

•it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
•Compensation: no pay

I suppose this could have been written by an incredibly naive person who thinks he/she has a great idea, although if that's true, he/she just gave it away. I don't read into this that the writer is on assignment, do you?

But the less benevolent side of me suspects there is no magazine and no story, only someone seeking an incredibly naive partner or two who can be urged into playing kidnap games, with all that that entails.

"Please send pictures and resume if interested." As Mr. T says, "I pity the fool."

A Productive Week or Two

2010-05-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, indeedy

I polished off an article that should earn up to $500, and did my first restaurant review (for $75). Both have been accepted, so let's hope the checks are in the mail--or at least on the way to Paypal.

I also submitted a last-minute piece for $40--but the editor has not yet acknoweledged receipt. Grr! Bad editor, bad!

I put the last coat of paint on 1/3 of my bathroom (no one's gonna pay me for that, but I sure feel good about having it done.)

I heard a wonderful, inspiring speaker at a monthly meeting of the Independent Writers of Southern California. I've gotten both hopeful news and a rejection from two different agents. I've kept ahead of the bills, attended two family birthday parties and had fun (not too hard!)

I watched the Phoenix Suns move to the next level of the play-offs with a bit of blood, sweat & tears, got a paycheck, and have lots of work for the week ahead.

Other than the fact that I haven't had time to blog (this will have to do), does life get any better?

Keeping Up With Technology...or not

2010-05-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

Who remembers the "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock?"

I grow old, I grow old

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I feel that old and silly, after reading what should have been an interesting article about digital magazines and how they're marketed. Oh goody, this will no doubt give me another reason to buy an ipad--I can have Newsweek electronically delivered!

So I thought, but the focus of the piece ("The Digital Newsstand: How Magazines Will Be Sold in the Tablet Age") was about existing media storefronts--which I didn't know existed--or more complicated stuff. Like creating apps for the magazines and positioning them on clients' websites.

I'm at the age where discovering a whole new world is more often exhausting instead of exciting. A fuddy duddy, iow. Bah! New apps? Something with small print, no doubt, and I forgot where I put my glasses.

Don't younger folks also get tired of having to master new technologies every five weeks?

Am I really a fuddy duddy? Wait! No!

That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all."

New pubs for 2010!

2010-04-30T10:39:00.000-07:00

Yay for me! Two new books out from Gale Group's Greenhaven Press. I'm the third editor, which means I wrote some of the intros, found articles, cut them--even learned to do some paste-up stuff.

Of course, all this was done last summer, so having copies of the finished books delivered to me was a Very Nice Surprise. But also--none of the work looks familiar. Did I really write any of this? Skimming through, I found one phrase (in the Middle Class book) that stuck: Love Jones Cohort.

Professor Kris Marsh at UNC coined the term to refer to "a new kind of middle-class black: young, never-married, urban professionals living alone."

Love Jones Cohort. OK, now I remember! My immediate reaction had been "Love Jones? Was that some Pam Grier movie?" Hey, I'm a boomer--that's my cultural reference point!

But Love Jones was a 1997 movie about a Chicago poet...a young (in 97) Chicago poet. A yuppie in the 2000s, then, and Marsh's symbol for a new stereotype.

But isn't it funny how quickly we forget our work, once it's finished and we must move on to other articles/studies/books? Two months ago I finished a piece on important Supreme Court decisions. Do I remember any of the new facts I encountered while writing that? Beyond what I already knew--Miranda v. AZ, Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education?

Nah. Maybe one thing: What Happened to Mr. Ernesto Miranda.

Miranda's case, Miranda v. AZ, established that a suspect must be read his/her rights before being questioned by police.

Miranda confessed to a rape without being told of his legal rights, so when the Supreme Court decided his case in his favor, Miranda won a new trial--and was convicted again! Turns out, the police didn't even need his confession because they found a witness to his crime. Yup, the whole reason for the famous Miranda case turned out to be moot for Mr. Miranda!

The hapless Miranda got killed in a bar fight a few years later, after serving his sentence for the rape. And--irony of ironies--while his killer escaped, the police picked up an accomplice and read the guy his Miranda rights while Miranda lay dying or dead.

Books Up and Down

2010-04-19T14:41:00.000-07:00

The good news: Ebook sales shot up 176.6% in 2009, though they comprise only 1.3% of book sales. Better news: adult hardcover book sales were up nearly 7% over 2008 levels. Not so good news is that adult paperback sales went down 5.2%, and overall book sales were down 1.8% in 2009--all according to this New York Times story.

I'm part of the problem, I suppose. While I've bought books as gifts over the past month, my own reading material has come from the library. Right now it's Olive Kitteridge and the Orson Scott Card Homecoming series, which I guess is sci-fi (the first book is pictured at left; there's five in the series).

My very Catholic bff thinks that the Homecoming books tell how the Bible was written. I don't want to break the spell by pointing out that Card is Mormon and the main character is named after Nephi, who (Mormons believe) wrote the Book of Mormon on golden tablets. I suppose we all look at our books through the lenses (or seer stones) of our own beliefs, so does it matter?

Joshua Whatmough's Book

2010-04-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

If you're going to write a novel set in Gaul the most wonderful collection of names can be found in a 1949 book by Professor Joshua Whatmough called Keltika, being prolegomena to a study of The dialects of ancient Gaul,.

Sometimes Keltica is part of the title; often not. Dunno why the "ancient" is necessary as there's no modern Gaul to confuse it with. Last bit of trivia--while the book was published in the 1940s, most copies seem to be dated 1970.

Need names? The Dialects has got you covered. I'm relatively certain that Professor Whatmough did not intend his scholarly work to be fodder for romances, but where else can you find such lists of Celtic names? Many come from pots, of all places, but potters signed their works using Greek or Roman letters to spell out their names--monikers that would otherwise have been lost. There's also place names and divine names--all sorted out by region.

Got a male character from West of the Rhine? Call him Maro or Firmus (now that's telling), Abbo for comic relief (well, Abbo sound funny to me), or even Voranus, if you're a fan of the HBO series Rome. Those are all legit names from the region.

As to what those names may mean in Gaulish--good luck! I've read that only 200 words of that language is known, but that may be an old figure. I'm not too sure what's known and what's guessed to be a word's meaning based on its similarity to Gaelic or Cornish, also Celtic languages.

I do have a Gaul-French dictionary, but a lot of words seem to be guesses. If someone wants to update me on the status of scholarly knowledge of the Gaulish language, I'd appreciate it.

As for Professor Whatmough, whose name I adore, I found this article on him and his work in 1963. Better, here's a charming portrait and anecdotes from a former student, along with a picture of the man. He wasn't just an expert in Gaulish, but in all Indo-European language families. He was fluent in 8-22 tongues, depending on how one defined "fluent." He died only a year after retiring.

Show on Anglo-Saxon treasure to air Sunday, April 18

2010-04-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

The largest cache of Anglo-Saxon gold--not treasure exactly, but battle trophies--is ready for its close-up. The gold, buried in the 7th century, was found by lucky guy with a metal detector.

I blogged on the discovery a few months ago--September 2009 to be exact. Now the National Geographic Channel is ready to air its documentary on the hoard of gold, including 86 sword pommelcaps. The show will include battle re-enactments and views of the treasure.

National Geographic's online site has lots of extras--mostly about those battle scenes, but nifty pictures, words from the director, and links to production team blogs are there too.

Bronze Age Mummies

2010-03-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

Recall the wonderful The Mummies of Urumchi in the 1990s? The book about the dessicated remains of tall, blue-eyed people who'd died thousands of years ago, and were buried wrapped in plaid-style blankets--not in Europe, but in China--presented archaeologists with a riddle: Did Europeans migrate to China during the Bronze Age?

Apparently so, because Chinese bulldozers, preparing the ground for Chinese engineering projects over the last few decades have been uncovering more European-in-appearance mummies. Now we have The Tarim Mummies, and they are touring! Today, the exhibit opened at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana--a mere stone's throw away (assuming you have the pitching arm of a titan). Here's the Yahoo story.The centerpiece of the exhibit--this "Beauty of Xiaohe"--has a feather in her hat, flaming red hair, and eyelashes you could paint with.

This pictures has been reprinted at several blogs, so I'll join the crowd. Far from being an anomaly, the scholarly consensus seems to be that these mummies represent a migrating people who lived north of Tibet from 2000 BC to the 4th or 5th century AD.

Professor Victor H. Mair talked to The Los Angeles Times about the mummies. (He was quoted in the Yahoo story too.) Apparently a lot of testing has not been done on the mummies-Mair suggests an examination of their stomachs is in order. CT scans and other tests are also lacking.

It's good, IMHO, that the Chinese authorities have not rushed to rip open bodies to get at every possible microbiological clue about the mummies. Sure, we'd all like to know more, but invasive tests may not be the smartest course. Given the strides that science makes decade by decade, what's invasive and destructive today may be scannable tomorrow.

Cabbages and Celts

2010-03-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

Let's see...I had corned beef and cabbage 3 nights ago, and corned beef sandwiches at a party last night, and corned beef and cabbage and potatoes this morning, and I'll probably have the same for dinner tonight. Too much of a good thing is actually pretty satisfying.

All hail the lowly cabbage! Hated them as a kid, but now I love 'em. The Celts did too.

Wild cabbage, back in the early days, probably resembled collard greens. That prolific plant, through selective planting and breeding, gave birth to today's cabbages, cauliflower, collards, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale and kohlrabi.

Brussel sprouts are basically the buds of the plant. Broccoli and cauliflower are the flowers of the plant, inbred to extremes.

When did all this cultivation and manipulation take place? I'm not sure, and so I can't say exactly what sort of cabbage the ancient Gauls enjoyed.

The Aggie-horticulture site points out that the Latin word for cabbage is based on the Celtic word for the plant, bresic, implying that the Celts introduced the Romans to it. The white, hard-headed cabbage grows better in colder climes, so that makes sense. Gaul, Britain, and Ireland were all a lot colder than most of Italy.

Celtic Myth Podshow

2010-02-24T20:48:00.000-08:00

"Bringing the Tales and Stories of the Ancient Celts to Your Fireside," is what the banner reads. The blog is the Celtic Myth Podshow, which I just discovered and wish I'd found sooner. Because then I'd know more about Seahenge, pictured at left. (the picture, btw, appeared in The Guardian and was taken by Michael Walter/PA). More about Seahenge in a moment. Here's what Celtic Myth Podshow offers, very briefly:

Over 30 podcasts from 2008-2009, each reciting tales from Irish, Breton, Welsh, and other Celtic sources. Some are holiday musical programs.
Photo and art galleries from various contributors
A cute little button to become a fan of their Facebook site, which triggered an unstoppable avalanche of facebook pages opening up, one after the other, until I had to reboot. Don't click on that.
The Celtic news blog mentioned in the first paragraph.

The blog offered news about the rebuilding of "Seahenge". The Seahenge site was discovered in 1998 near Holme-Next-the-Sea, is about 4000 years old, and consisted of 55 timbers in a circle--with an upturned oak tree stump in the center. The timbers have been on display at the Lynn Museum, and now the exhibit will close for 4 months so that the stump can be added. This picture is from the museum's website.

Mary Robert Rinehart's Writing Room

2010-02-18T21:07:00.000-08:00

Try saying that ten times in a row...Mary Robert Rinehart's writing room, Mary Robert Rinehart's writng room, Mary Robert Rinehart's robin room...nope. Can't do it.

Anyhow, this was her room in 1926. In Washington DC. Thanks to Shorpy, a wonderful collection of ye olde photos, who displayed this today.

Rinehart, the "American Agatha Christie" according to Wikipedia, would have been about 50 that year. This is a home she shared with her husband, a doctor, from the early 20s till his death in 1932. The lady wrote mysteries, and is credited with the phrase "The butler did it." She didn't actually write those words, but she wrote a bestselling mystery in which the butler, dang him, actually did do it.

For 1926, this is a pretty cool room, doncha think? There's a fan that looks a lot like the fan I bought at Home Depot recently. As for that furniture--would it be out of place on any patio today? Ferns, an exquisite lamp, sheer curtains...the only thing that dates this room is the radio. Or was it called a wireless still?

Pharaonic DNA

2010-02-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

King Tut had a cleft palate, as did his father, Akhenaten. His mother was Akhenaten's sister. Tut suffered from Kohler's disease and clubbed feet, inherited from grandpa Amenhotep III. And he wasn't murdered.

We know all this from DNA analysis. Cool, huh?

A CT scan discovered that King Tut's leg was broken just before death, and that brain malaria most likely killed him. But it's the DNA confirmation of his paternity and maternity that settles a lot of questions.

For two years, winding up in October 2009, researchers did all sorts of tests--twice--on several royal mummies in Tutankamun's family. Ten possible near-relatives were analyzed, as well as five royal mummies from the previous century (Tut died around 1323 BC). The results are just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (JAMA...wouldn't you assume this would be in an archaeologica or Egyptology journal? Just a thought.)

And all those theories of Marfan's disease, or a biological basis for elongated skulls and womanish curves in Akhenaten's family? No genetic evidence of any of that was found. Possibly, the portrayals of Akh & Tut & co. just reflect a passing artistic style. It's in all the papers today, so here's a link to the Science Daily piece. I like it particularly because it ends by bringing up some of the ethical questions that come with this type of work. Who's entitlted to a right of privacy, even after death? for example.

Dumb and Frustrating

2010-01-26T19:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a dilemma:

When otherwise nice people send you an email that's been forwarded 728 times, with all 852,639 "to" addresses still attached, advising you in 36-point font that THIS IS NOT A HOAX! and THIS WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA--IT'S REAL!!!! ... and what follows is so clearly a hoax and a pile of manure that no sensible person over eight years old could possibly believe it to be true, and Snopes and every debunking site in the f-ing world has exposed it and no one but a moron would believe that Bill Gates wants to send them a check because he's testing a new email system ... and yet the person who sent it to you is a decent person--stupid and naive, yes, but still not someone you want to insult and burn bridges between ... so what do you do?

Blog out your frustrations.

Shout out!

2010-01-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

How exciting--my writing pal has moved fast in the last 2 months. She went from being a (sigh) writer-in-search-of-an-agent who (like me) sent over 150 queries on her fantastic book idea, wondering about the meaning of life and joining me in a weekly rant about the unfairness of the agenting world to poor, struggling authors like ourselves, to being zapped with the magic wand of a real, live, fairy god-agent! Within weeks she had a contract with a publisher and is now being mentioned in Publishers Weekly and (today) The Biographer's Craft.

Debra Ann Pawlak; remember the name.

Actually, she was two up on me to start with--she's authored two books already. The Arcadia book at left, and the Bruce Lee bio at left-left.

Still, those agents are slippery little buggers and very hard to catch. Go, Deb!

Books Read in 2009

2009-12-31T13:57:00.000-08:00

I got 40--who can beat that? Probably a lot of people. That's less than one a week.

Best novel (I'm slow here, playing catchup):

Yup, Kite Runner. I haven't seen the movie either. I don't know how much of this story--the culture and racism that was so well expressed in the novel--could come across in a film. But I'll get around to the movie eventually, I'm sure.

Best nonfiction would be Devil in the White City. But its only real competition was The Soloist. For some reason, other books didn't thrill me--some covered interesting topics, but the writing was pedantic; others were just dated tomes that I read as research.

Biggest disappointment: The General in His Labyrinth, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I have no problem with the author de-heroizing Simon Bolivar, but the story never grabbed me. Garcia Marquez, it seems, uses his prose to make points--like the tedium of a long marriage in Love in the Time of Cholera. I barely made it through that, but I appreciated his courage as a writer. I couldn't stay with The General in His Labyrinth past the middle, though--and it had such a beautiful cover!

One More Book for Moi!

2009-12-28T01:28:00.000-08:00

Whoopee! Another tome to add to the pile (figuratively, of course. I can't afford to buy this book, even though I contributed to it.)

Latino History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (Sharpe Reference) contains articles that I wrote about Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which forced Mexico to cede California and the Southwest to the US, way back in the 1840s), and a charming little piece titled "Conquest of the Americas," in which I accomplish the amazing feat of describing centuries of bloodcurdling cruelty in 1500 words.

Yeah, I don't believe it either. But they rewrote it so many times to make it politically correct that all the really nasty stuff has been toned down. I almost wish they'd taken my name off it!

Coligny Calendar

2009-12-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

Just in time for Christmas, here's a neat-o site about the Celtic Coligny Calendar!

That's the calendar at left, or a piece of it, which sits in a museum in Lyons, France. The calendar dates to about the first century, but many experts who've examined it think it reflects computations made a thousand years earlier.

According to this site, last October was the month of Ciallos. I'm just juvenile enough to point out the resemblence of that name to a certain pharmaceutical product, and I should be ashamed.

Ciallos is not a month that occurs every year. The Celtic calendar managed to reflect both the lunar and solar time periods, and it did this by adding extra months every few years to keep us all in sync.

We're in the month of Semiusonna now. According to the Caer Australis site I linked to earlier, this (the 24th) is the last day of the month. Christmas Day marks the beginning of Equos--in 2009, at least. But not all calendrical geeks agree with Caer Australis, I'm sure. In fact, some think the Celts began their months with the dark new moon, while others assume the month began with the full moon...or something in between.

Basically, the Celts divided the year into a dark and light half, the dark half (fall and winter) preceding the light half. The months had dark and light halves as well. All months had either 29 (unlucky) or 30 (lucky) days. It's all very complicated, but what I find interesting is that the big feasts do NOT correspond with the solstices or equinoxes (equinoxi?).

Or am I missing something?

The Archaeology of Caesar's Gaul

2009-12-22T20:11:00.000-08:00

Just came across this webpage in BurgundyToday, which shows the sites linked to Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul--the later years, anyway. Vercingetorix, Alexia, that sort of stuff.

I learned that three sites vie for the honor of being the site of the siege of Alesia, which surprised me. My old, dog-eared copy of Caesar's writings states unequivocaly that Alise Ste. Reine stands on old Alesai. According to Burgundy Today, two other places make that claim. Chaux-de-Crotenay is one; dunno about the other.
The Battle of Alesia, pitting Caesar (with Roman Legions) against Vercingetorix (with a loose confederation of Gaulish tribes), was the defining fight of Caesar's eight-year conquest. Many huge fights occurred before it, and other rebellions and uprisings followed, but Alesia--because of Caesar's writings--is seen as the key fight, and the one that ultimately decided the fate of Gaul. Livius.org presents a description of the fight, and I borrowed this picture of the Alise Ste. Reine site from their website.

Fired!

2009-12-16T20:57:00.000-08:00

Hah! I can return to this blog, because my stint as a political canvasser for an environmental group ended! Yup, you can take the writer away from verbose prose, but you can't take verbosity outta the writer!

I tried; I did. And I earned money to pay for Christmas gifts. But honestly, getting fired was a relief. I was so afraid that one of those prim matrons coming out of Trader Joe's was truly going to spit on me. They wanted to, I could tell.

I used to be rude to canvassers. Never again. I will never walk by and lie and say I'll come back when I won't (one lady did, bless her, in a month of canvassing). I will never snarl and give them the evil eye. How could I have been so nasty? Maybe this month of being a (lowly) paid canvasser was karmic payback. It is hard work.

On the plus side, you get to be outside all day. You get to meet nice people often. People tell you "Good luck" and "God bless you for doing this." (usually, they tell you this just after explaining why they can't give you any money.)

One the minus end, there are all those nasty old people who growl and want to spit at you. And there's that troublesome part about talking people out of money when they've just told you they have none, that they've been laid off and are taking care of sick parents or are nearly homeless. That's where the fired part comes in. A good canvasser never gives up--a good canvasser will talk that recently laid-off person out of their last five dollars. I wimped out. I said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Thanks for stopping to talk to me."

I'm so glad I got fired!

Famous Last Words of Calvino

2009-11-29T20:00:00.000-08:00

Just finished The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, and it ends with the greatest line(s) (it's all one sentence, but a longie):

That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

Here's to forking off!

Ghostwriting Credit?

2009-11-24T20:43:00.000-08:00

I love this Craigslist ad for a ghostwriter:

Hello, I have written a * * * * book that needs some polishing. The reviews have been positive so far, but there is still something that is missing. I would be willing to pay something, but ideally I am looking for someone that wants to beef up their resume.

Ideally? Ideal for whom?

As I read it, Bozo wants a ghostwriter to do the work for free and not get credit (because ghostwriters do not get credit by definition), and yet somehow be satisfied that they can use the gig to "beef up a resume."

Bozo finishes by stating "This book WILL BE PUBLISHED." All caps.

I'd love to know if anyone actually applied for this gig.

BTW, I did send out query #150!

Checking In

2009-11-21T13:56:00.000-08:00

I have neglected this blog shamefully, so here's a post. I've sent 146 queries to agent for my wonderful historical novel (yes, it really is wonderful. Read the first couple of chapters to find out!) I will try to bump that total to 150 over the weekend.

A dear friend in another state has found an enthusiastic agent for her nonfiction book, after about 150 queries. It happens! She's going full-speed ahead now, so fast it's scary.

Rather than a roller coaster, though, my writing life is a pretty still, sometimes muddy river...much like this, taken near Paimpont Forest in France--one of the sections of old forest still left. Not necessarily where my novel takes place, but close. The kind of site you would have seen 2000 years ago.

October Afternoon

2009-11-01T17:28:00.001-08:00

I'm such a lucky slob. I got to visit with an amazing 93-year-old lady, and this is the view from her living room.

No good reason to be there. I was invited along with friends and served coffee and walnut torte and ice cream. Just because at 93, this lady has learned that she can take all the time she wants to do what she wants, be it have company, cook tortes in spring pans, or sleep.

Here's something from an essay she wrote; I hope she doesn't mind that I quote this tiny bit:

We're each given our life, our own Great Adventure
our chance to learn, to accomplish deeds great and small,
some of which will matter.

Mudlarks and History

2009-10-18T14:37:00.000-07:00

You might think (I certainly did) that in a huge city like London, any segment of riverbank was long ago picked over for the archaeological detritus that might be hidden there. Well, we're wrong. Maybe you'd like to distance yourself from me.

I'm not sure why--maybe because the Thames has not been concreted over like most well-behaved rivers--but London's river remains rich in ancient deposits, some dating back to Roman times. Treasure hunters rejoice!

If you want to muck about, though, you'll probably only be allowed to do so on the south bank. The north side of the river is the private domain of serious, if amateur, excavators . Britain issues a very limited number of licenses allowing exploration of this artifact-rich area, so the owners of those licenses have formed their own fraternity: The Society of Thames Mudlarks. This picture, from OurPastHistory.com, shows mudlarks working the shore at Southwark.

The name comes from a term that once referred to street urchins in the Victorian Age. At low tide--and tides on the Thames can drop as much as 25 feet--mudlarks go to work, many using metal detectors. They find coins, tools, and toys--like guns that actually carried a charge and may have blown off a few fingers. Most of the objects fell out of ships through the ages, and anything over 300 years old become property of the Museum of London (though the finders are rewarded).

National Geographic did a piece on the mudlarks in 2004. Last week's Time Magazine featured a fascinating "Postcard" segment about them as well (pg. 6 of the October 12, 2009 issue, or here). Go read it for a hint of the finds, all the regulations about what happens to the goodies dug out of the river mud, and for a profile of Steve Brooker, former pro skateboarder and awesome Mud God of the mudlarks. Just this year, Brooker found a ball and chain once worn (unwillingly) by a 17th-century prisoner. Here's a link to that story in the Daily Mail, which is where the picture below came from. Brooker's find is the only complete ball, chain & lock ever found.

The last paragraph of the Time piece intrigued me. Through a series of mini strokes, I read, Brooker lost large portions of his own memories about three years ago. Irretrievably. Does that have anything to do with his need to uncover history?

During the last few years of my parents' lives (they died within a week of each other, after 55 years of marriage), I became obsessed with family history and genealogy. I made connections all over the country with folks who had the same unusual last name, and found that the 200 or so people in the world who shared that name were, indeed, all related and all traced their history to a town in the Rhine Palatinate region of Germany.

Then my parents died, and I lost interest. With all the fickleness of a spoiled prom queen, I packed away the charts and notebooks and have not looked at them since. Doesn't take much analysis to figure out what was going on there, does it?

So I was curious about Brooker's loss, and how it played into his fascination with mudlarking. This entry from Antiquarian's Attic says that Brooker has been a mudlark for 12 years. I guess my attempt to read something Freudian into his passion is misdirected, but the tail of the mudlarks is still a fascinating one.

Musing on Celts and Written History

2009-10-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

Most folks think Irish when they think Celts, and that's fine. Ireland, after all, is still the only Celtic country never conquered by Rome. When scholars and others speculate about Celtic society, they use records found in Ireland because those are the oldest available records about Celtic customs.

The earlier Celtic people of Ireland, Britain, the Iberian peninsula, France (Gaul), Switzerland, Eastern Europe, etc., did not write down their history. They considered history far too important to commit to writing. Instead, it was memorized by the educated classes--the druids--who could interpret it properly.

Buggers. Even that previous paragraph contains a ton of untestable assumptions--about the druids' roles, and the reasons that histories and beliefs were not written down, f'r instance.

Since there are some examples of these ancient tribes using Roman or Greek letters to note very mundane things--like accounting records or praises of deities--we know that the Celts used writing. Julius Caesar (not an unbiased source, IMHO) says the druids would not put their beliefs in writing for religious reasons. Unless we unearth a 2200-year-old history etching somewhere, I guess we have to settle for that explanation.

And that leaves the writings of Celtic Ireland, both pre and post Christian, to give us a clue to earlier Celtic beliefs. But the oldest existing records of ancient Irish history are still about seven centuries removed from the days of an independent, non-Romanized Gaul, and seven hundred years is A Long Time. Not to mention the geographic distance...

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but think about it. Seven hundred years ago, chances are the city/town you live in did not exist. Maybe your country did not exist. Seven hundred years ago, Europe was still recovering from the Black Death that wiped out a third to a half of its population. The Inquisition was just ramping up, so free thought was not only outre but downright suicidal. Most people in Europe were illiterate peasants who lived on the verge of starvation. How much have we changed since then? An immeasurable amount.

What's the point? Just that it seems awfully tenuous to me to speculate about the B.C. Celts and their society based on early Irish texts, such as a law code (the Brehon) first codified in 438 A.D. I'm not sure how old the oldest examples of the law code are--certainly more recent than 438--but tradition says that the laws date back to the 8th century B.C.

Tradition is very unreliable. My own family tradition handed down the story for 2 or 3 generations that a great-great-great grandfather of ours was a judge in the old country. Guess what? Someone did some Real Research and found out the tradition was completely bogus. No judges, only farmers and seed merchants. Period. So if tradition can be fictionalized within sixty or seventy years in one family, what can happen over seven centuries?

OTOH...This was a society that trained men and women to memorize long histories, we are told. And if the histories were sacred to them, would anyone dare screw them up? But OTOH...even written histories get warped over time. Every re-writing changes something very subtly, doesn't it? Language changes, and those who study this claim that it changes at a measurable rate.

I got into an argument with an engineering type person a couple of months ago about that. He was irate that language changed. He felt that someone should stop it from changing. He truly believed that was possible, and he felt that due to a lack of conscientious effort on the part of English professors, he had been cheated out of his right to comprehend and enjoy Shakespeare and Chaucer in their original words.

I thought he was crazy, though I didn't say so. Still, he grew quite heated over his points, and I can only assume that most people don't bother arguing with him often.

I digress. But this is a blog; I'm allowed.

A Previously Unknown Stone Circle Found...

2009-10-07T21:13:00.001-07:00

...only a mile from Stonehenge! Wow. I'm ferklempt.

The archaeologists are calling it Bluestonehenge or just Bluehenge, and are pushing the idea that Stonehenge was a burial site. Perhaps, they say, Bluestonehenge is where bodies were cremated before burial at Stonehenge. I can't point to any flaws in that theory, but it does assume a lot. However...quien sabe?

After thousands of years, we learn that another stone circle was off the River Avon? This is too cool. Here's the CNN story. It seems that only the pits are left--the blue stones, from Wales, were removed about 4500 years ago and may actually be the bluestones of Stonehenge. But originally, they stood in a vast circle a mile distant.

This Chicago Tribune story gives a bit more detail--there were 25 stones in this newly-found circle, and they stood for about 500 years before being moved. After that a round ditch about 74 feet across replaced the stone circle.

It's just amazing to me that new discoveries are made at some of the most famous and studied sites on earth.

Everything You Want to Know About Druids

2009-10-03T11:06:00.000-07:00

There are several books with the title "Druids," including a novel by Morgan Llywelyn which I sorta reviewed here. Tons o' fun.

A digression:

You know that when you read a novel, the author is allowed to Make Things Up, right? This picture, for instance, represents a lurid, fictional scene. Not Real.
With non-fiction books, the author is not supposed to Make Things Up. Some of them do, though. How can the reader beware of this practice?
Your best bet is to look at the credentials of the author.
If s/he is a university professor, chances are the information in the book is carefully researched. The author has an academic reputation to uphold, and that probably is more valuable to him or her than the success of the book.
If the author has no real credentials, and especially if the book is self-published or from a publisher you never heard of, be careful of taking the words to heart.

Digression over.

The nonfiction books with "Druid" in the title fall into two categories: those dealing with the historical, Celtic Druids, and those devoted to neo-druidism.

The two categories are completely separate. Neo-druidic books that promise to teach druidism are promoting a philosophy, religion, and lifestyle that was invented in modern times, and uses impressions of ancient druids as its inspiration--like the happy couple to the right.

Look, no one knows what ancient druids believed. They left NO written record, and the writings about them are filtered through Romans and Greeks. Those authors may have been lying, or misinformed, or faithful reporters...we don't know.

That leaves a handful of books by scholars and historians about druids. Of these, I recommend Peter Berresford Ellis' book, The Druids -- or, as Amazon bills it, A Brief History of the Druids (The Brief History). Even though it features Stonehenge on the cover (a construction that preceeds Druids and Celts by a coupla millennia), it's the most recent book that gathers together all that we can know about Druids--from archaeology (including Lindow Man), ancient writing, and Irish and Welsh traditions.

Ellis takes the position that Druids were the educated segment of society--the doctors, lawyers, judges, scientists, and yes, priests. He compares them to the Brahmins of India. He makes conjectures, sifts through the evidence. If you read a book by a different expert, s/he might have different opinions.

Druids are mysterious. They were the elite and guarded secret information. That information died with them, though.

I'm reminded of a line from the book Indeh by Eve Ball--a book about the Apache...a line I can't find right now! Dang. I hope I don't butcher the quote, but one of the Apaches who was telling his history turned to Ms. Ball and said, "You white people, you keep everthing up here in your head, and nothing in your heart."

Why didn't they write anything down? I imagine they didn't want their most sacred information being poured over by whatever enemy got their hands on a scroll, but that's my opinion.

Anglo-Saxon Treasure Trove

2009-09-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Sales of metal detectors are bound to go up, at least in the UK. A treasure hunter with such a device (which means an everyday guy, I suspect) stumbled upon the largest cache of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found by an amateur, in a field in England. It was buried there around 1300 years ago--all this according to National Geographic. They've posted pictures too.

The lucky guy is Terry Herbert, and the field belonged to his friend. Here's a picture of Herbert, along with a MSNBC story. Over 1500 gold and silver items were found there, near Burntwood. It's all very manly jewelry, much with inlaid garnets. I copy this one picture here, but you really should see the NG site. The find is amazing.

The fellow cataloguing the find believes it is war loot, partly because so many pommels are included in the stash. The poem Beowolf, which the Anglo-Saxons wrote, refers to collecting pommels from enemies' sword handles as trophies, he said. (The Celts collected heads. Pommels didn't smell nearly as bad, I'm sure.)

The preliminary translation of this runic writing reads: "One bracelet to rule them all, one bracelet to bind them..."

Wouldn't that be fun? Then we could imagine that JRR Tolkien had access to some secret historical documents predating the Masons and Rosicrucians, and that his mythology of Middle Earth actually hints at long-secret truths... Actually, I've met people who do believe that.

In fact, the inscription is Latin (how droll) and reads "Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee..." Truly.

Magical Thinking

2009-09-21T09:27:00.001-07:00

I first came across the term Magical Thinking when I read Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking. (Wonderful book, made me cry.) Never having studied psychology, I assumed she invented the term to describe her irrational connections and thoughts while she struggled to cope with her husband's death.

Now I learn that Magical Thinking describes a whole host of unscientific reasoning that every culture on earth practices. Magic and shamanism, creative visualization, positive thinking, viewing life as a metaphor, pretend, hero worship--all are examples. In fact, Psychology Today recently published an article on Magical Thinking, which is how I learned about it.

And what I find most interesting in that article is that the ONLY people who don't practice Magical Thinking are the clinically depressed. Who wants to be in that cohort?

Here's the quote, given in a section of the article discussing rituals and how we use them to give ourselves an illusion of control:

In fact, a fully accurate assessment of your powers, a state known as "depressive realism," haunts people with clinical depression, who in general show less magical thinking.

My dog tries to engage me in magical thinking. These last two days she has conducted a blitz campaign to convince me, against all logic, that scratching her back before beginning any activity will enhance my success and enjoyment of the activity. If I stand, sit, type, read, prepare to eat or drink, she's there--hopping onto my lap or the nearest surface, swaying her back down to invite my fingertips to the best spot. "Go ahead," her anxious eyes plead. "Everything will be better if you scratch. I promise!"

Actually, the magical thinking is on my part, imputing all those motives to a dog.

So what does all this have to do with my usual topics? Well, it makes the Celts and other cultures less removed from us in their thinking. So they were superstitious? You want superstitious? Watch Nomar GarciaParra's movements before he curls into his batting stance and waits for the pitch.

And what about those emails we're afraid not to forward to five people in five minutes? How many of us get suckered into arguments on the radio, without having any verified facts at hand to guide our passions? We're magical thinkers to our core, just like the ancient Celts, Romans, Egyptians, Athabaskans, or anybody else.

The Original Spinners and Weavers

2009-09-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

There are three fat spiders in this picture. The wind was blowing one of them (top leftmost), but you can still see her.

I don't like spiders, but I am grateful to this trio who inspired me to compare weaving with web spinning. If spiders are sloppy with their webs, they don't eat. If they don't repair the web, food gets away.

I compared them to a hardworking woman of the Iron Age in my novel, and the first few chapters are now online. Go, me! The entire novel is complete, so if anyone knows an agent and would like to get me out of a hundred slush piles, please drop me a line!

NEW Oldest Fabric Ever Found!

2009-09-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

We just keep moving the date back a couple of thousand years at a time, right? The previous oldest fabric was 28,000 years old and found in the Czech Republic. (article here)

The new and current title holder goes back 34,000 years. Found in the Republic of Georgia, this material is flax, and it's twisted and dyed. It may be pushing it a bit to call it cloth, but it is a textile. Here's an article in Science Daily, and there are some microscopic photos of the strands attached.

It seems only yesterday that I wrote an article for a still-unpublished Encyclopedia of Invention which claimed that the oldest woven material was found in Turkey, and dated to about 20,000 years ago. The bit of cloth was wrapped around an antler and had fossilized. No one imagined that any fabric older could have survived. (NY Times article)

Sigh. Actually, it was 3 or 4 years ago that I wrote about that--that's how fast discoveries are being made.

The reason I decided to study history was that my previous field--computer networks--changed so fast and I got tired of having to learn a new operating system every other year. I figured what I learned in history would be subject to changing opinions, but that the stark facts and evidence would remain the same.

Silly me.

Is It Journalism Vs. Media Now?

2009-09-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a sad comment about the state of journalism, taken from The Atlantic Online, October 2009:

"With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery."

As a writer, I think I know the difference between opinion and news, but I'm constantly amazed by how the line is blurred not just on every station, but in every gathering where a political topic is raised.

The author of the quote is Mark Bowden and the article is titled "The Story Behind the Story." Good read.

A Van with Gall

2009-09-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

What remains to be said? For years, this work of art has been parked in the same lot each day. Sometimes I see a man wildly arguing or preaching to people who stop to talk. I've always assumed the topics of conversation would be a bit limited, so I just pass and do my Dilbert imitation ("Don't make eye contact....don't make eye contact")

Tearin' Up Tara

2009-09-01T17:41:00.000-07:00

The Hill of Tara in Ireland is being excavated in parts because of work on the M3 Highway. The good part of this is that exciting finds are being made.

For instance, the remains of a NINE THOUSAND YEAR OLD fishing basket was found in Clowanstown, County Meath, the Irish Times reported last week. They can date the basket because it was made of alder saplings, which are radio-carbon datable. . . possibly to the Mesolithic. I'm getting verklempt. Read more about it at the National Road folks' commissioned report or at TaraWatch while I compose myself.

Nine thousand years old. A small wooden dugout, possibly a toy, was found nearby, along with axes and stakes and cherts and stuff.

This was revealed at an archaeological conference last week. Other finds include:

"3,335 lithic finds or stone tools, including 144 polished stone axeheads and fragments"
"a portion of an unfinished block wheel which has been dated to the late Bronze Age (2200 BC-600 BC)"--the oldest ever found in Ireland
Pottery--some grooved--and beakers, a few pieces dating back to 2900 B.C.
Spindle whorls (weights) that may be nearly as old
In Tipperary, remnants of a palisade enclose a natural mound, deliberately enlarged with layers of glacial soil. “The first known major Neolithic landscaping project” an archaeologist said
Remains of wooden trackways and platforms built over wetlands during the Neolithic, over four thousand years. (This was County Longford, where an N4 bypass was under construction.

So what's the bad part of these wondrous finds?

They're tearing up the richest, most ancient heart of the country to put in a frickin' road!

The EU filed a lawsuit in 2007. The Smithsonian and other organizations have expressed their condemnation over the possible loss of historical site of interest to all. A petition asking the United Nations to declare the Hill of Tara a World Heritage Site is stalled because Ireland must first approve it, and Ireland is playing the bad guy in this skit.

If you'd like to sign a petition asking the UN to take action, go here. The goal is to gather a million signatures by the end of 2009, and present them to the UN in NYC, urging them to take action. The tally is not even close, so far. So go sign, tell your friends.

This area was occupied by people over nine thousand years ago. No one should go tearing it up for a stupid road!

Allee Couverte

2009-08-30T17:42:00.000-07:00

Allee Couvertes are Neolithic era gravesites, usually short little tunnels made of stone. This one, the Allee Couverte du Morgau Bihan is in Brittany, France. Kids were climbing all over it. I guess it's pretty hard to hurt stone after the third millennia or so.

That's the top of a home beyond the stones, which stand on private land, I believe. People stop there all the time. Those giant slabs of rock have been resting on the standing stones since around 2,500 B.C.

There are carvings inside the allee couverte too, but my pictures didn't capture them too well. A shepherd's crook, and what looks like spearheads or tools, possibly. A descriptive sign (in French, of course) called them palettes.

These structures predate druids and Celts by two thousand years, and nothing really is known about the people who set them up--except they liked to raise incredible stone monuments. Did they disappear, merge with the Celtic tribes that came later? In the case of the Allee Couverte du Morgau Bihan, I think the Celtic tribe would be Ossismi, since the site is near Quimper.

New England Writing Sites

2009-08-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

OK, this will be the last post on great places to write, promise. At least for awhile.

This Los Angeles Times story lists the vital data of the homes of six late lamented literary giants, all in New England. Address, phone numbers, and admission charges, of the home of:

Louisa May Alcott (Orchard House)
Emily Dickinson (actually, two houses but the one pictured was her home, the Homestead)
Nathaniel Hawthorn (the real House of Seven Gables)
Mark Twain (the most expensive to visit, at $14)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Herman Melville (Arrowhead)

Being a Californian who's never ventured to New England (although I did hopscotch over it into Canada), I wonder what role cold weather and lush green springs play in literary creativity. Possibly none; most writers seem to love the landscape they land it, desert or seacoast, cold or hot, rural or urban. The exceptions that come to mind are adventure-seekers like Ernest Hemingway, or the chronically depressed who don't feel at home in any place.

NOT a nice place to write

2009-08-20T17:02:00.001-07:00

At least, I didn't think so at first. Would you like to write at Heathrow Airport for a week (Terminal 5, specifically), blocking out all the questions, the sights, the noise of people and machines, the smells, cries, booms, surprises, fussy parents and screaming children...d'ya think a guy who writes books with titles like The Consolations of Philosophy (shades of Boethius!) could enjoy that?

Alain de Botton is Heathrow's writer in residence for a week, and far from blocking out all the above-named distractions, he will produce a book about them, to be called A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary. Read about him at the New York Times. But it's it all the papers, blogs, Gawker, etc. (this picture is from SkyNews). NYT has the best photo though, showing his desk in the terminal--pretty much cleared, except for an open MacLaptop...and a big ol' jet aeorplane sneakin up behind him.

It's a guaranteed book--de Botton got the advance AND expenses (he sleeps at a nearby Sofitel). Well, for that I'd sit in a nice airport. I'd sit in a dingy bus depot, too. Whatever it takes. BBC quotes de Botton as saying that airports encapsulate the modern world, featuring "interconnection, fast travel, the destruction of nature... dreams of consumerism and travel". Well, heck, I could make up something deep about Greyhound, the great economic equalizer, leveler of patrons, blah, blah. Really, give me an advance: you'll be amazed at what I can do.

Tried to find a free photo of Heathrow--found a surfeit of pictures of celebs arriving at the airport, many of whom I've never heard of.Here's one of the outside.

Writers rooms....115 of them

2009-08-18T22:21:00.001-07:00

Oh, ouch! I thought my idea--expressed here a few days ago--of posting pictures and a few paragraphs on nice places to write was a good and original one. I started with Zane Grey's office.

But now I learn--from an $8.95 desktop "website of the day" calendar--that The Guardian has a whole series of writers' rooms online...115 at last count. Another series covers artists' rooms, and musicians' rooms, and so on. Here's Jane Austen's. She died in 1817, but someone's obviously taking care of her things. Yes, Pride and Prejudice was actually written on this teeny table.

Roald Dahl, George Bernard Shaw, Charlotte Bronte--well, those are the oldies. How about Colm Toibin? I like his office; it's lined with books, floor to ceiling. Will Self has the most orderly and obedient post-it notes on the planet (right). Simon Callow is writing another book in dressing room 7 of the Haymarket Theatre, where he performs nightly in Waiting for Godot.

Clive James, Nicholas Mosley, Richard Sennett, Ciaran Carson...lots of writers, many of which I don't know at all. But don't let my ignorance slow you down. Go explore the site. I'm going to pour another glass of two-buck Chuck and visualize my office as the most-visited entry in the Guardian series.

Irish Timber Circle Dates Back 4,000-5,000 Years

2009-08-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

The BBC announced that ancient ritual circles were excavated in Ballygawley (in Northern Ireland) over 2006-2007. The circles were not of stone, but of timber--which is great, because timber can be dated. According to venerable radio-carbon techniques, the circles date to the middle of the third millenniums BC, and some parts of the circles may be even older.

A three-year-long project turned up the circle while excavating and clearing ground for improvements to the A4 and A5 roadways. Pottery and charcoal were also found, but we'll have to wait till next year to learn what those artifacts revealed.

The archaeologists say that two concentric rings of wood beams apparently replaced an earlier series of pits. There was a "monumental porch" on one side, presumably the entrance. The outer circle of timbers likely supported wattle or planked walls between them, so the inner circle was hidden from the view of outsiders.

Here's the story in the local paper. But the Best Presentation is here--a PowerPoint slide show of not only the Ballygawley site, but other archaeological sites along the roadway. Pictures, maps, aerial views, and drawings--all courtesy of the Killeeshil & Clonaneese Historical Society!

New Books with My Articles!

2009-08-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

Yay! Two more editions of the F.Y.I series:

First, featuring my astonishing expose of lusty rabbits, presidential turkey pardons, and the history of Gypsies, Roman new years, battle chariots, toothbrushes, getting shanghaied and more:

In the second book, I blow the lid off fruitcake, cognac, Mother Goose, space junk, leprosy, Murphy's law, plank-walking, and a plethora of other topics.

Clicking on the link should take your right to Amazon, so you can buy them right away!

Ancient Music of Greece

2009-08-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a site that lets you listen to Greek music from a couple thousand years ago. Just click on any of the numbered items at the bottom, and listen in Real Player or Windows Media Player.

The music is actually written down--ancient fragments of tunes that survived, like the bit of parchment at right. This was copied from the music site, and apparently was preserved in a Middle Ages manuscript. (Medieval bookmakers often grabbed old parchment to press together into book covers) (my ignorant layman's explanation).

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I'm kinda glad the ancients stuck to philosophy and writing plays. In fact, I suspect some of these ancient music authorities let their preschoolers sneak in a plastic recorder ditty or two.

OTOH, how do we know that these notes aren't intended more as cheat-sheets for professionals (fake books, IOW), who could probably improvise, harmonize, and in general give a much fuller sound than what we hear on these recordings? Just a guess.

You can also click on "Homeric singing" to hear what the Iliad sounded like, way back then. All courtesy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Zane Grey Wrote Here

2009-08-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

I'm cheating just a little, because I wrote about this historic house on my other blog, HistoryLosAngeles. That was more on the history of the home, but this is where the man actually wrote: a second-story office and library that includes this fireplace. (Did you know his real first name was Pearl? Pearl Zane Grey?)

There's a lot more to the space--the picture below (from Unreel Locations) gives a long view of the room. In that one, the fireplace is to the far left, just before the end of the room. The entire area is 3000 feet (the house is 15,000 sq. ft)--two or three times the room most apartments and homes have. The ceiling beams are so massive that they dwarf the space below, and it doesn't look huge--rather, it seems downright cozy. So yeah, I could get some work done here....

Of course, that was back in the days when cutting edge technology was a manual typewriter--and they've got a couple of those in the house, just for show. Actually, I think lined writing pads suit the environs better, don't you?

I'm gonna create a new category for this: Writing sites. Just great places to write. If I get desperate I'll take pictures of Starbucks or Coffee Bean and post them.

Celtic Languages: Cornish

2009-07-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

There are 300 fluent speakers of Cornish--the Celtic dialogue of Cornwall--left, and they're working hard to ensure the language doesn't die. So says Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times on July 25, 2009. He quotes a native speaker relaying a folktale:

"Y'n termyn eus passys, 'th era tregas yn Selevan den ha benyn yn tyller cries Chi an Hordh. . . . "

Which sounds a lot like "In termenus passeus thur trigus 'n sleven..." You can hear it on the
Times site--just go to the insert.

The Cornish language was saved from near-death in the early 20th century, when scholar Henry Jenner gave a speech before the Celtic Congress, which was dedicated to preserving Celtic Culture. They had not accepted Cornish as a Celtic language, but all assembled spoke either Welsh, Irish, or Breton--all indisputably Celtic tongues. Jenner gave the speech in Cornish, and everyone understood. Ta-da!

Since Cornwall is in the utter south of England, and just north of ancient Gaul (France), it makes sense that their language, like Irish and the others, would share common words--enough to be mutually comprehensible.

Scholars like Simon James and Peter Berresford Ellis are in agreement on this much, at least: that Celtic was an Indo-European language (as were Latin and Greek and Sanskrit) that broke into several separate languages. The "Gaulish" tongue is largely lost--we know only a few hundred words. The language of Celtic Iberia is likewise a mystery. But several places managed to hold onto their language, like Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and yes--Cornwall.

Parts of Brittany also hold onto a Celtic language: Breton. The history of that tongue is unique. Although Brittany was considered part of ancient Gaul around 2,000 years ago, the Roman conquest and subsequent Romanization of the area did it damage--how much is up for debate. Many folks fled to southern England when the Romans moved in, and took their language with them.

Five hundred years later, migration moved in the other direction. Invading Anglo Saxons drove a lot of folks from Cornwall back to Brittany, with their version of Celtic-speak. The Breton language to day is derived from that--from Cornish--and not from ancient Gaulish.

Spinning at the Ren Faire

2009-07-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Ha! I knew I had pictures of spinning somewhere! This is from the 2006 Renaissance Faire near Irwindale, CA. The lady--she seems too demure to be called a wench--is holding a spindle in her right hand.

In the first picture, she's wrapping the spun thread around it. The spindle is actually upside down; when she gives it a flick and lets it go (as described in the previous post), the weighted end will be down and the little hook--which appears to be at the bottom now--will be at the top.

In fact, that's exactly how the spindle is positioned in the second picture. The reason that I went with a different picture to begin with is that it just seemed very rude to chop the lady's head off when she really did not do anything deserving of such a fate.

In the second picture, you can also see the distaff tucked in her belt--or maybe pocket. This stick holds the prepared wool. In the 21st century renaissance, the wool is all even, sparkly white, and lovely. In Ye Real Olde Days, the clumps of wool were not so nice looking.

Why am I writing about spinning? Well, this is what women did in Gaul and in almost all European lands. Spindle weights are found all over Europe, as are weaving looms or the remnants of looms. And where there's looms, there's got to be thread, which implies spinning. Some of the looms are over 5,000 years old. The stone weights are a little harder to date, I think, because stones can only be dated in context with other goods found near them--they're not organic, so no radio-carbon dating.

If you're writing about a woman in Gaul, or in any pre-Renaissance setting, she probably spent her day spinning. Even the wealthy.

Spinning Thread

2009-07-06T18:57:00.001-07:00

You've heard the Carl Sagan quote: "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

Well. In the days before the Renaissance, say, 1400 A.D. and previous, in order to have a dress to wear, you must first domesticate sheep.

Then sheer them, clean and prepare the wool, and spin it into thread. Then gather a lot of thread together, fasten some of it to a loom, and weave the rest crosswise through it, until you had a length of cloth. Then and only then, could you think about fitting that cloth onto your body for warmth and modesty and decoration.

For thousands of years, women spun thread All Day Long. Every day. They spun thread while they watched the babies, talked with their friends, walked around, looked for food. They stopped spinning long enough to stir the stew or skin the rabbit for dinner, and maybe they stopped while they slept (but they still dreamt about spinning, I bet).

It must have been as natural as breathing, for thousands of years. If you didn't spin, you had no clothes. Simple as that.

This picture shows a Greek woman spinning thread, and it sits outside a display showing a dozen weights that fit onto the spindle. Those weights held the spindle down. (The spinning wheel didn't come along until the 14th century or so.) The long wooden stick with fuzzy wool is called a distaff. A woman tucked the distaff into her belt or someplace handy, and plucked clumps of fiber from it, twisting them in her fingers to make thread.

Periodically, she gave the spindle a flick, like you would a toy top. As it spun, the new thread spun. The weight kept the spindle from swinging erratically, and when it touched the ground--when you'd spun out a few feet of thread, iow--you wrapped the new thread around the spindle and flicked it again.

If you ever go to a Renaissance Faire or something similar you'll see it. Fingers get very clever, and the process goes quickly--especially if you have to do it day and night. Just keep grabbing and twisting those fibers together into thread, and the spindle with its weight will keep twirling and stretching the thread out just so.

I wonder if spinning was stress-relieving? and if a woman developed carpel tunnel syndrome or got arthritic...yowch. Let's hope someone else stepped in before she had to run around naked!

Gonna be an odd sort of day...

2009-06-30T12:26:00.001-07:00

You know it will be good and bad when this is the first thing you see when you get up, and it makes you laugh till you cry.

On the plus side, the first thing waiting in my email box was a request for sample chapters from an agent. Go, me!

Oldest Flute (so far) Found near Ulm

2009-06-27T21:46:00.000-07:00

How old? Thirty-five thousand years. And it is unmistakeably a deliberately carved flute. The twelve pieces of it fit together to show a delicate instrument with five holes, carved from the wing bone of a griffon vulture. The finished mouth piece has a V notched into it. (The other end is missing)

Griffon vultures are now gone from Germany, but the species is not extinct. They thrive in Spain and in the Middle East.

The flute was found at Hohle Fels (which means Hollow Rock in German), a cave in the hills west of Ulm. This picture is from the ShowCaves site, and was taken by Jochen Ducheck. The cave entrance is right below the giant rock.

This is the same cave in which an equally ancient, headless, tiny, voluptuous, female-shaped carving made of mammoth ivory was found--here's my post on that. And here's another picture from ShowCaves showing an excavation near the entrance to the cave.

So. Musical instruments, lots of bones indicating successful hunts, and big-boobed statues . . . Obviously, around 35,000 years ago, Hohle Fels was party central. And that's not just mho--most of the articles, including this one from the New York Times, make some joke about Happy Hours. The Los Angeles Times story was headlined, "Germany's 1st nightclub?"

The same archaeologist (Nicholas J. Conard) that made this recent find also discovered the previous claimant to World's Oldest Flute as well--in the same area. I wrote about that on a HubPages entry, and included an interesting link to a sound recording of what that flute would sound like. Just in case you're interested. But those and other possible flutes were apparently not considered conclusive. Were the holes placed there deliberately, some nabobs of negativism queried, or were these very old bits of ivory just thin and deteriorating? Well, the vulture bone has lines--decorative, I'm guessing--as well as aligned holes, so I don't think the artifact could conceivably be anything BUT a flute.

1897 Lourdes Film

2009-06-22T14:21:00.000-07:00

The World Digital Library has all sorts of online treasures, graphically searchable by continent or time line. Our own Library of Congress collaborated with UN agencies to compile it, making the world's cultural heritage (well, part of it) available to anyone. What have they got?

Ancient maps. The first printing of a letter from Christopher Columbus dated 1493. Photographs from all over the world. Recordings, including a bagpipe version of Amazing Grace. Manuscripts, including Christine de Pisan's 15th century book on etiquette and practical advice, translated into English in 1489 so that Henry VII's soldiers could benefit from her words.

Here's a film by the Lumiere brothers showing the procession at Lourdes in 1897. Neato!

Update on Looting

2009-06-18T13:06:00.000-07:00

In the previous post I gave the basic story of how looters--who were digging up Native American artifacts in the Four Corners area--were arrested last week.

To be very clear, NO ADULT could possibly be unaware that what they were doing was a crime. While most of the artifacts came from federally-owned land, we now learn that some were dug up on tribal land. These people committed crimes for years and profited from them, making tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their actions show not only a scorn of law and order, but complete disregard for Native American sensibilities.

One of the accused committed suicide, leaving his wife to face charges. No one's cheering about that, but he committed crimes and so, charges were filed against him. Did that drive him to suicide? Do we not arrest people if they're liable to kill themselves?

Latest development? According to the Los Angeles Times, Senator Orrin Hatch grilled our Attorney General Eric Holder (pictured) over the display of force used in the arrests. Senator Hatch questions the used of 100 armed and body armored agents to arrest two dozen criminals in a remote area.

Huh?

The government finally enforces long-standing laws, sending four officers per criminal, and that's excessive?

"They came in full combat gear...like they were going after, you know, the worst drug dealers in the world," Hatch said.

My, how unreasonable. Dressing for the occasion, not taking chances when arresting those who have broken the law repeatedly. Hatch called it a dog-and-pony show. I think he's running one of his own.

Looters Charged with Looting--what a concept

2009-06-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

Indictments have been issued against 24 people accused of looting Native American sites on public land (story in the Los Angeles Times)

Yay!

The crimes took place in the Four Corners area, and many of the folks indicted live in Blanding, Utah (pictured at right, and the picture is from city-data.com). But looting seems to go on everywhere in America. As the Times story says, "Archaeologists, Native American groups, and preservationists have long argued that the government has not moved aggressively enough to stamp out the plundering of artifacts." Soooo true. Often, the only steps taken (because no money has been allocated to do more) is to keep sites kinda secret, so that looters won't sneak in.

This time, though, investigators put a mic on an antiques dealer and--after two years--were able to catch the brigands who were allegedly fencing goodies, including a rug made with turkey feathers.

The article describes how the University of Utah used to pay people to bring in arrowheads and pots--up to the 1920s. That was 80+ years ago, but the sense I get from this story is that some experts blame the government for not convincing the public in this area that looting damages archaeological sites.

I don't buy that. While greed and stupidity go hand in hand, no one is so ignorant as to think that digging up a grave isn't doing damage. No one supposes that desecrating a grave is a good thing, do they? There's even a Wikipedia entry on Looting!

These jerks sneak around and work at night because they know they're breaking the law. The affidavits show that the thieves knew the authorities were after them.

Archaeologists estimate that 90% of the 20,000 archaeological sites in that area--San Juan County--have been looted. The criminals can get up to ten years in prison.

Thank You, James Poniewozik!

2009-06-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

FOR ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION!

Which is: If the Journalism Business Fails, Who Pays for Journalism? That's also the title of his June 8 editorial in Time Magazine.

Here's a quote: "If journalism is not a revenue producer, much of it could become like freelancing—but freelancing you can't live off of."

Poniewozik (I love that name) brings up some interesting near-future scenarios about who and what system might produce our news. I especially like the ideas about product placement and am rooting for Miles O'Brien (if you don't understand the reference, please go read the column. Really, it's good).

I'm not a journalist; never went to journalism school and have very limited experience writing straight news stories. But journalists are fellow writers, and thus I feel their pain. (I also worry that if the freelance market is flooded with out-of-work journalists, jobs for writers will be even harder to get. Selfish me.)

Nick Magazines Closing Down

2009-06-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a lot into this, but not doom and gloom. Nickolodeon and Nick Jr magazines are shutting their doors and about 30 staffers will lose their jobs--not to mention the multiple freelancers who lose another market.

Kids are not reading less--in fact, I think they're reading more than ever (thank you, Lemony Snicket and J.K. Rowling and all the rest!) But the idea of children watching the mailbox in anticipation of a glossy new magazine just for them, with their name on the address label, is just so quaint.

Why would a kid in 2009 look forward to getting a magazine when they can hop on the internet for all the stories and pictures they want, picking and choosing among many topics and printing out what appeals most to them? Ligers, shipwrecks, dreamy androgynous dudes--right there at your fingertips. It's all free, as long as there's a spare color print cartridge nearby.

Change is good. That's my mantra, when things-fall-apart-and-the-center-cannot-hold-and-I-need-to-get-to-my-happy-place-fast. Change is good. Really. Good and hard.

From a reader's point of view, it's a simple paradigm shift. Adults have habits--well, some of us do--of flipping idly through bound pages as we sip our lattes. Kids are forming new habits. Let's just hope they don't spill their strawberry fraps [please keep them from caffeine] on the keyboard as they're googling and clicking.

From a writer's pov, there's this little wrinkle of making a living. Hard to find internet markets that pay as well as print did--not that print paid all that well, or even all the time. In ten years I'll probably have it figured out, but right now it's dicey.

Romance Novel Sales Up!

2009-05-31T12:19:00.000-07:00

Here's one sub-genre that's doing well during the recession, which makes sense when you think about it. According to this AP story, sales of romance novels rose 2.4% during the week of May 10th.

For a bit of contrast, sales of travel books were DOWN 16%. Mysteries? Down 17%. Ditto self-help books. Logically, you'd suppose folks looking for a bit of wish-fulfillment or escape would buy those as well, right? But apparently nothing beats soft core titillation. Duh.

Cheap thrills for tough times! Yeah!

However, I must say that the romance-reading folks interviewed for that article made me wonder about the point. One woman had just lost a child in a horrible game-playing accident; another is blind and looking for work. Financial strain, chronic illnesses, trajedy--was the journalist dared to find the women with the worst problems who then found solace reading romance novels?

I guess she's got to keep her job interesting too.

Journalism and Media

2009-05-29T10:51:00.001-07:00

Back to what we read in the media and how it's in upheaval mode, which I blogged about a few days ago. In the article "Brave New Media" in the ASU Magazine, I read that 120 newspapers have shut down in the US since January 2008.

Tim McGuire of the Cronkite School at Arizona State U says:

"There's no question that corporate media is in trouble, but journalism is stronger than ever. It's the corporate media model that's under attach because the advertising model has gone bust. We've funded journalism on the backs of advertisers who wanted to reach the eyeballs of our customers. That model is broken, and we have to find another way to fund the journalism that we value so highly."

So it sounds like journalism is still valued, but no way to pay for it has replaced the old way? Where does that leave journalists who would like to practice their trade as well as eat and pay rent?

More interesting quotes from other professors at the Cronkite School:

In the last 10 years, the market that television can reach has shrunk so much...we're constantly challenged to think of how to make what we're teaching relevant. (Craig Allen)
Radio may be the one electronic medium whose current business model survives intact for the foreseeable future (Frederic "Fritz" Leigh)

Venus Figure is 35,000+++ Years Old

2009-05-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

But I sure wish the archaeologists would dream up a new name for these voluptuous statuettes. Please. After all, calling it a Venus figure prejudges its purpose, doesn't it? It creates a context in our heads. And when looking at something that may be up to 40,000 years old, that's a big mistake.

I like what archaeologist Paul Mellars of Cambridge U says about the piece though. Rather than accepting it as a fertility symbol, he suggests: "These people were obsessed with sex."

This lovely piece of work, carved out of mammoth ivory, was found in a cave in Schelklingen, in southern Germany--14 miles southwest of Ulm. (Not that I know where that is, but you might.) The tiny statue was in six pieces when unearthed, and it lacks a head, feet, and a left arm. It is the oldest representation of a human being ever found.

According to the AP story, the left arm is still being sought, but the lack of head and feet seem to be part of the artist's intent. You can just barely make out the loop that indicates it may have been hung from a string or hook.

I hope it is OK to reprint this AP photo by Daniel Maurer, since it seems to be the only picture of this amazing object.

The particular cave, Hohle Fels, has been rich in ancient deposits, and this piece was found 9 feet below the current surface. Both Neandertal and homo sapiens used the cave and left debris, but the scientists are certain this is made by our homo sapien ancestors. Bits of worked bone and ivory, flint-knapping debris, and animal remains were found nearby.

Discoverer Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tubingen in Germany also found carvings of an animal head, a bird in flight, and a half-human, half-lion figurine, all about 5,000 years younger than the headless female. That's from a Los Angeles Times story--Conard wrote about his work in the journal Nature, but the article is only accessible to paid subscribers.

Sarah Palin has a book deal

2009-05-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

And I don't.

This is a new low.

Do you have a book deal? Admit it! None of us do! And does anyone want to read what the Alaska governor has to say about anything?

Apparently the publisher thinks so.

If the publisher is wrong, will it make getting published (a) harder or (b) easier for the rest of us?

Truly a no-win situation.

I'm going to go eat my sauerkraut and sausage now. Likely, the doomsayers are correct and life as we know it will end with a magnetic pole flip-flop on December 21, 2012. I predict that I will get a six-figure offer on the 19th.

Submerged Greek City from 2800 BC to be Excavated

2009-05-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Not sure if excavated is the correct word, since the site--a town named Pavlopetri--lies under 3 or 4 meters of water. Explored, maybe?

According to Science Daily, a team will soon be diving into and paddling around the sea off Laconia, Greece. There, the ancient town of Pavlopetri, dating at least from the Mycenaean Age, will be studied. Using equipment developed for the military (for what purpose, I wonder?), archaeologists hope to splash through ancient courtyards, tombs, and cist graves. Wow. All those things are still there, underwater, after 4800 years? Excuse me while I push my jaw back into position and wipe up the drool from the keyboard.

This lovely photo is from Laconia.org, and shows some of the harsh conditions and primitive accommodations that the archaeologists must accept during their grueling fieldwork, which will take place over three years.

Pavlopetri was probably once a port and trading town, so there should be much to discover. The archaeologist who discovered the site in 1967 is also participating! Among the things they hope to learn is--just how far back does Pavlopetri date, and why did it slip into the sea?

The Science Daily article hints that a bit more funding is needed--so far the University of Nottingham (here's their page on the site, and the first picture came from there), the Institute of Aegean Prehistory, and the British School of Archaeology at Athens have contributed financially. May I suggest someone get National Geographic or the Discovery Channel on board?

Because if I can't be on that beach--and I can't, 'cause I don't have a PhD in Archaeology--I would love to see this on my TV, sitting on a cushy sofa and eating Doritos.

Media Revolution

2009-05-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

According to this March post by Clay Shirky ("Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"):

The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing.

Guess what? The topic at this point is NOT newspapers.

No, the article is describing the revolution that followed the invention of Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century.

Of course, the article draws the comparison: what happened when Gutenberg upset the status quo is what's happening with print media now: a revolution. The post describes how the profitable newspaper model worked for centuries, and why it has ceased to work. Who could have predicted that craigslist wasn't just a new internet fluke, but something that would transform industries? The old way doesn't work and the new paradigm (the format and funding for news collection and delivery 20 years hence) is not yet in place. My favorite lines of the piece? "You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. and Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

EBay Good for Archaeologists

2009-05-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already seen the story in Archaeology Magazine, Science Daily, Yahoo, or a host of other sources, here's the deal. Ebay makes selling faux antiquities so easy that looting of archaeological sites has decreased.

Professor Charles Stanish of UCLA wrote the article called "Forging Ahead, or how I learned to stop worrying and love EBay." It's a really good article; click on one of the links above to read it in full. What follows is my quickie dissemination of his well-researched facts.

Looting works like this: some poor schmuck robs a grave or stumbles upon a treasure. Said schmuck wants cash--usually to do something frivolous like feed his children--so he sell his find to someone, who sells it to someone, and so on and on. The money's made in the middle; the finder gets little and the customer at the end pays big time.

Selling fakes is a little different. In the past, the fake had to be really good to get a high price from collectors. Naturally, high-end fakes cost more to make and involved skilled artisans.

So in comes EBay, where a low-end, cheaply-produced fake--in fact, a mass-produced ton of cheap fakes--can be shipped out regularly to hundreds of wanna-be collectors all over the globe. Why risk arrest and jail by stomping around old burial grounds at night if you can set up a pottery workshop and sell more goods that way? The finder/producer now gets more money, because he's producing more goods--all day, in a shed, with his friends and neighbors helping out. The only middleman might be the shipping/EBay shop in the nearest town. (I bet there's a shipping dock in the back of this bazaar!) Also, because so many cheap antiques are available, the market for looted goods is impacted. Their price declines. A real win-win scenario.

Thanks to the miracle of online auctions. Ah, technology!

Newspaper Dirge

2009-05-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is about to shut down the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun announced it's laying off 61 staff members, and I spent 20 minutes discussing why we don't need newspapers with My Luddite Friend. I was playing devil's advocate to her defense, but the truth is I love my LA Times and would hate to be without it.

It's a book: Anachronistic Media and the Women Who Love Them ... It ... Whatever.

My Luddite Friend says we need local papers to inform us of things we wouldn't know, like an accounting scandal at a neighboring city.

"I'll see it on the local news," I say.

"Not a big enough story for TV," she says.

"Then why do I care?"

"Because you should know, as a citizen, that these things happen. You should know so you can demand accountability and transparency from your own city."

"But now that you've told me, I don't care. I'm not going to demand anything from my own city. If I wanted to be involved in local politics I'd go to city council meetings, but I don't."

We don't really talk like this. I've taken out all the "Well....'s," the "um's," the "Shit...never mind's," and all that.

My bottom line is that we're lazy. Give me the news with the least possible hassle. If all I have to do is push a button and sit through a few commercials, I'm fine with that. The LA Times is for browsing through during those dumb commercials. If a news story about an accounting scandal in a neighboring city makes the news, I'll probably flip through the Times during that segment, too.

For me, the newspaper is entertainment, not anything that's going to make me a better citizen.

Maybe we get the news we deserve.

Why Do We Read?

2009-04-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, the Los Angeles Times invited 13 authors to share their opinions on this burning issue, and put together a full-page replication of their answers. Since it's about the only part of the Sunday paper I read, here are my highlights:

We read to free ourselves from the grind and the misery and big ticking time-bomb questions of life. . . . We all need contemplative time, time away, time in another world altogether. (T.C. Boyle, author of The Women: A Novel)
Books have the power to be the light we are seeking at crucial moments in our lives. Reading helps us realize we are not alone, that we can change our circumstances and even achieve the impossible. (Gioconda Belli, author of Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand, a novel of Adam and Eve)
The library was where I made my best friends. . . . books are ultimately about stimulating imagination and broadening a worldview. In my South-Central neighborhood, Dickens more than did the job. (Erin Aubry Kaplan, journalist)
I read because it is one of the very few satisfying escapes from reality that isn't fattening and doesn't destroy brain cells. (Amy Koss, author of Side Effects)

And my favorites:

. . . you're sitting right there, reading, and you're anywhere, everywhere. (Veronique de Turenne, blogger, who co-authored Port of Los Angeles: An Illustrated History with Ernest Marquez)
[answering the question Why do we read?] . . . the world I found myself in didn't come up to my standards. I was 11 at the time. So I went to the library. . . Now, if my life doesn't come up to my standards . . . I still open a book. (Carolyn See, author of Golden Days and The Handyman)

Be So Good They Can't Ignore You

2009-04-26T14:46:00.001-07:00

But you really have to see the drawing to appreciate the sentiment. Click on it. Go!

More on Synopsis Writing

2009-04-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

Nothing interesting to say, but I don't want this blog to get stale.

Here's an update: I have rewritten both my one-page and detailed synopses. Like most writing, I whined through the hard part, then rolled around in the grass and revelled when the result begins to show promise.

What had I done wrong that required rewriting? Well, struggling to get all the plot twists in left me very little room for things like themes, motivations, and the like. According to Them That Teach, those things are very important in a synopsis.

So, the FIRST paragraph of the one-pager now states the major life issue confronting our fair heroine, and hints at the theme of the book. A lot of characters and twists got cut away to make room for statements about conflict and emotions. Do I really need to mention the names of her companions? No, but I do need to say that she's devastated by her losses. And I injected more of the tone of the novel itself. All good.