annsepstein@att.net

Is Writing a Vice?

From an interview with historian and writer Jill Lepore: “The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril: Jill Lepore on writing the story of America, the rise and fall of the fact, and how women’s intellectual authority is undermined” by Evan Goldstein (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 13, 2018):

Q. You get asked about your productivity a lot. I gather it’s a question you don’t like.

A. I sometimes say to people — this is like a 1930s thing to say, you can picture Barbara Stanwyck saying it in a noir film — it’s like complimenting a girl on her personality. It’s not about “You do good work,” it’s about “You do a lot of work.” // For a lot of people writing is an agony; it’s a part of what we do as scholars that they least enjoy. For me writing is a complete and total joy, and if I’m not writing I’m miserable. I have always written a lot. For years, before I wrote for The New Yorker, I wrote an op-ed every day as practice and shoved it in a drawer. It’s not about being published, it’s about the desire to constantly be writing. It’s such a strongly felt need that if it was something socially maladaptive it would be considered a vice.

I’m with her. Read Lepore’s latest book, These Truths. For more of my thoughts on writing see REFLECTIONS.

Learn History Through Fiction: Italian-American Labor 100 Years Ago

Most Italian male immigrants in the 1900s were manual laborers, constructing public works such as roads, sewers, subways, and bridges. Women worked as seamstresses in factories or did piece work at home. Many established small businesses to serve fellow immigrants in their city’s Little Italy neighborhood. Read more about Italian-Americans at the beginning of the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Story About Death Café to be Published in CultureCult Magazine

I’m happy to announce that my short story “It Ends With Cake” was accepted for publication by CultureCult Magazine — a journal of art, literature, and culture — for their Winter 2019 issue. Here’s the log line: Told in the first person plural, “It Ends With Cake” draws readers into the meeting of a death café, where participants seek closure about their own notions of mortality while revealing deep fissures between them. Read about the publication in SHORT STORIES. Learn more about the death café movement in BEHIND THE STORY (see 09/23/18 post).

Learn History Through Fiction: Flowers for Flanders’ Fallen

This Sunday, November 11, is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the Armistice was signed. The Great War took the lives of 10 million soldiers worldwide, including over 117,000 Americans, and decimated the French and Belgian countryside. Singularly, the windblown seeds of poppies thrived in the blood-soaked soil, and became a symbol of the dead, as memorialized in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” Read more about WWI in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Was Hollywood Pro or Con WWII?

In September 1941, isolationist Senator Gerald Nye charged Hollywood, many of whose studios were headed by Jews, with producing pro-war movies “to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, and fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them.” In truth, it was just the opposite. With Europe a big consumer of American. cinema, studios were afraid to offend the Nazis. That changed in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when Hollywood enlisted in the war cause by producing combat films with major stars and patriotic cartoons with Disney characters. Read more about Hollywood and WWII in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Court Allows Children to Work 60-70 Hours a Week

In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact child labor laws, which was the right of states only. In the Progressive Era, public outcry against child labor grew. Children worked 60-70 hours a week, often in hazardous conditions, which documentary photographer Lewis Hines said left them “stunted mentally and physically.” Child accident rates were three times those of adults. While recognizing the adverse effects, the Court said Congress could not control such practices when they involved products, such as cotton goods, that were not inherently immoral. Read more about labor laws over the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Pop Artist Pops Up in Pittsburgh

Andy Warhol, the youngest of three boys, was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to working class emigrants from Slovakia. His father, a coal miner, died in an accident when Warhol 13. In third grade, Warhol developed chorea, a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary movements of the extremities and permanent skin blotches. He became a hypochondriac, afraid of doctors and hospitals, and was often bedridden. As a result, he was an outcast among his peers and drew close to his mother. While he was confined to bed, Warhol listened to the radio, drew, and collected pictures of movie stars. He said this period formed his personality, and gave him the set of skills and preferences that shaped his artwork. Read more about Andy Warhol in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Derivation of Topeka

The name “Topeka” (meaning unknown) is believed to derive from the languages of the Kansa and Ioway tribes. City founders chose it because it “was novel, of Indian origin, and euphonious of sound.” Laid out in 1854, Topeka was a Free-State town established by Eastern anti-slavery men after passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Bill. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Depression Fashions Cheap but Cheerful

Fashion trends of the 1930s were a response to the Depression. They included synthetic fabrics that could be more cheaply manufactured than using natural fibers (rayon instead of cotton, nylon stockings instead of silk); recycled burlap flour sacks; color and pattern to liven up otherwise dreary lives; and zippers which were less labor intensive to install than buttons or other fasteners. For the few remaining wealthy folks, winter vacations in the Mediterranean and the Bahamas allowed them to sport tans emphasized by sparkling white dinner jackets and shimmering ivory evening gowns. Read more about fashion trends across the decades in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

Learn History Through Fiction: Missile Launch Sends U.S. Astronauts Into Space

On 06/11/1957, the U.S. Air Force launched the first operational missile, the Atlas D, in San Diego. Atlas became a workhorse for the space program, sending John Glenn in Mercury 7 into space for the nation’s first manned orbital flight in 1962. Discover more about San Diego’s historic role in aviation in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).