UK: Patrick Vallance’s pandemic diary reveals Government’s maddening disregard for science

From telegraph.co.uk

The former chief scientist’s journal critiques politicians’ ‘cherry picking’ of advice and lashes out at ‘bullish, bipolar Boris’ 

“Keep a diary and someday it will keep you”, Mae West the American actress, is said to have quipped.

For Sir Patrick Vallance that day has arrived, as it emerged that the Government’s former chief scientific adviser was quietly writing a journal during the pandemic, a copy of which has now been handed to the UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

Early excerpts suggest it will make for deeply uncomfortable – if scintillating – reading, with the phrase “quite extraordinary” appearing frequently in relation to dubious government decisions.

One can only imagine the eye-roll that accompanied the sentence: “Some person has completely rewritten the science advice!”

“They’ve just cherry picked,” he grumbled. “Quite extraordinary.”

Sir Patrick was referring to the two-metre rule, which in the summer of 2020 was causing a headache for Number 10.

The excerpts seen so far of Sir Patrick's pandemic diary paint a picture of discord and capriciousness within Government CREDIT: Tolga Akmen/PA Wire

On the one hand, politicians – and arguably the public – wanted good, simple scientific advice that they could follow and would help to protect them from coronavirus.

But, the science on social distancing was vague and hugely dependent on circumstances.

Sage reports on the issue were complex, warning that it mattered whether you were outdoors or indoors, whether you were masked, whether you were facing someone and for how long.

At background briefings that summer, Sir Patrick made this clear, telling science journalists the two-metre rule was “not a rule from a scientific perspective” and advising that passing close to someone on the street for a second was an “absolutely negligible risk”.

“The risk can come down if, for example, instead of being face-to-face, you’re side-by-side or you’re back-to-back,” he said.

“It can be reduced by things like ventilation, it can be helped by being outdoors, it can be reduced if you’re wearing a face covering, or putting the screen up and so there’s all sorts of things you can do to reduce that.”

But those briefings were strictly off the record, and although journalists could hint at some of the discord happening behind the scenes, we were banned from being too explicit for fear of losing access.

Initially, the Government had accepted some of the nuance surrounding social distancing.

At the beginning of March 2020, the Department of Health released guidance warning that coronavirus could be spread when people have “close, sustained contact”, which they said meant “spending more than 15 minutes or longer within two metres of an infected person”.

But by late June, all ambiguity was gone and the two-metre rule was firmly and irrevocably in place.

Across the country, businesses stuck fussy markers on their shop floors to keep people apart. Even supermarkets insisted that customers queuing outdoors observed the sanction.

The rule itself had little to do with coronavirus, dating back to experiments by the Harvard scientist William Wells, who was looking at the contagiousness of tuberculosis in the 1930s.

Wells found that viruses causing respiratory infections are spread by different-sized droplets expelled by coughs and sneezes. Just one single droplet can be enough to carry an infectious dose and later research demonstrated the distances droplets can travel.

All well and good, but there was little evidence that it could be directly applied to coronavirus, a point that scientists were quite clear about. Even the World Health Organisation had advised that one metre was likely to be sufficient.

What is clear from Sir Patrick’s diary entries is that nobody was reading the science, let alone following it, as was consistently claimed by Downing Street.

For the rest of the country, it might be comforting to know that while we were shouting at the television, officials were feeling the same frustration with the Government.

But for Downing Street, this will no doubt feel like a betrayal, and one they did not see coming.

After all, you have to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back, and Sir Patrick always seemed so stoically on message.

Now we find he secretly despaired of “flip-flopping, inconsistent, bullish, bipolar Boris”.

Quite extraordinary.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/03/patrick-vallance-diary-journal-coronavirus-covid-lockdown/

Caught in a country at war: remembrances of Yom Kippur in Israel, 1973

From studlife.com

By Michael L Millenson

In mid-August 1973, I and a handful of other Washington University students began our Junior Year abroad program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem with two months of language classes (Ulpan). This preceded the regular academic year, set to start in mid-October after the Jewish holidays. Still, my Hebrew remained fairly rudimentary.

At that time, I lived in dorms in an out-of-the-way, working-class neighbourhood called Kiryat Yovel. For Yom Kippur, traditionally spent in fasting and prayer, I travelled to the main campus to attend services with friends. The dorms were close to the English-speaking Conservative movement’s seminary. 

When I arrived in Israel, I began keeping a diary. Below is my lightly edited record of a traumatic period in Israel’s history that began with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War on Oct. 6, 1973, and whose “social, political, economic and psychological effects,” in the words of Israeli political scientist Susan Hattis Rolef, are still being felt.

Saturday, Oct. 6, 1973. Yom Kippur

 I leave services and go back to the dorms for a nap. At two o’clock in the afternoon, when I am half asleep, I hear the wailing sound of an air-raid siren. I sit up and listen. At 2:10, the siren wails again. There is running in the halls, and people are playing their radios very loudly. I check the location of my pants and resolve to put them on quickly. A while later, an “all-clear” sounds. I make a mental note to find out what the fuss was all about.

Courtesy of Michael Millenson

[Note: I had no clue that the country, including the radio, goes completely silent during Yom Kippur and that the sirens signalled a national emergency.]

When I get up at 4 p.m. and wander down the hall, I ask a group of American kids gathered around a radio whether anyone knows why the sirens sounded. They stare at me. Egypt and Syria have launched massive tank attacks along the Sinai and the Golan Heights, with heavy battles being fought. Doctors are being called up, and hospitals are being evacuated to prepare for the wounded. The bus drivers have been ordered back to provide transportation. Yoram, one of the madrichim (resident advisors) has already been called back to his unit.

Signs are up at the dorms telling us where shelters are. At 4:15 p.m., the radio is beeping, then broadcasting names every 15 minutes — code for different reserve units. The radio signal is weak, and Arab music from Jordan can be heard incongruously in the background. The sky has clouded over, and it has grown chilly.

Patti, a friend from WashU; Sondra, Patti’s friend from back home in Dallas; and I can’t understand the Hebrew anyway, so we head for shul. We are anxious, but we make wry jokes, having total confidence in the Israeli military. At 6:45 p.m., we walk back to the dorms in the dark. A barrier is up on the road, along with two parked trucks and an Army tent.

A blackout is in effect for the country. I go to a group gathered near the office, get a candle and matches from madricha Ruti. She informs me that we’re evacuating this dorm and moving up the hill to other dorms that have shelters, and to take food, a blanket, a flashlight, and a candle.

The rooms are fairly big, but hot — the blinds are all closed. Aaron Singer, the head of the One-Year Program, comes around to assure us that people will be here to guide us in the case of an emergency, and if the American Embassy says anything, we’ll be notified. I ask him how things are at Kiryat Yovel. He says he wants to go and find out and offers to take me. Delighted, I clear out.

We listen to the English news at 8:45 p.m. The Egyptians have beachheads on the east part of the Suez Canal, but they’ve been contained, Israel Broadcasting tells us. [Note: They were lying.] Singer translates Prime Minister Golda Meir’s speech to the nation: “There is no doubt of our victory,” she declares.

At Kiryat Yovel, some of the students have hitchhiked back from the (Conservative movement) youth hostel and other places. One panicked Canadian girl says the Western Wall was packed with people deep in prayer. The siren goes off — and they all start to scatter. The same thing happened in one of the Jerusalem neighbourhoods.

 Two of the resident advisors have already gone to their units. Tokens for phone calls are in short supply; I give a couple to Israeli kids in the dorm — one in uniform already — who are trying to call their units.

At 11 p.m., a group of us listens to the Voice of America. The VOA plays a CBS News report from Tel Aviv, to the background of wailing air-raid sirens. We can imagine what our parents must be thinking.

Israel Broadcasting at midnight says the situation is contained at both Sinai and Golan. There are two thousand Syrian tanks in the Golan! VOA says heavy fighting is still going on.

 

Sunday, Oct. 7, 1973

 “Students are urged to buy food tomorrow, but not too much,” says the notice posted in the dorms. Jerusalem housewives certainly heeded the first part of this advice.

 By the time I get to the Supersol at 9:30 a.m., the battle has already been waging for two hours. All six lines are filled with people backed into the aisles. Many have shopping carts completely filled, despite periodic announcements that there is only food to buy for today. One man indignantly defends his three loaves of bread to the checker, who tells him to put some back. I leave. By 11:30 a.m. when I return, there is plenty of milk, and new vegetables have replaced the battle-weary ones earlier.

 Everywhere, people gather around the radio, straining to hear. It is very frustrating during wartime to only be able to understand the general outlines of the broadcast.

 We go to Ulpan this afternoon. Our teacher Shulamit is an officer in the Instruction Corps, so they were not called up. We learn a slew of new words — frontier, blackout, armoured unit, absorption of attack — which are immediately proving to be useful. At night, two middle-aged men with Hagah, the Civil Defence Command, are standing in the street in front of the dorms and calling up to those with unshaded lights shining from their rooms. Cars have appeared with their headlights painted over in blue.

Courtesy of Michael Millenson

 The battles still appear serious. We expect a good number of casualties, given the lightly-manned posts on the borders. [Note: I had just turned 20. Israeli draftees manning those posts were 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds.]

Monday, Oct. 8, 1973

 Most of our class comes to Ulpan this morning, but there is no teacher. Buses are infrequent. An armoured personnel carrier rumbles up the street in downtown Jerusalem, not carrying troops at present, but ready. Windows on downtown stores are taped, following the orders of Hagah.

 The war has a name: “the Yom Kippur War.”

Michael Millenson, BA 1975, was a humour columnist for Student Life before going on to become a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist at the Chicago Tribune, a healthcare consultant, a book author, and an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University. To listen to the full narration, Millenson elaborates on the Take One podcast.

https://www.studlife.com/scene/2023/10/04/caught-in-a-country-at-war-remembrances-of-yom-kippur-in-israel-1973

Opinion: All seemed lost with social media. Then I found Letterboxd.

From washingtonpost.com

Fran Hoepfner is a film critic in New York City and writes the newsletter Fran Magazine.

I’ve spent time on just about every social media app on the planet: for work, for pleasure, for personal gain, for perverse curiosity.

As social media continues to expand, I’ve found the issue — with X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok — is the lack of control over what I see. My X page is inundated with posts by people I don’t follow; the replies to my posts are full of spambots, despite what the platform’s owner says. Instagram won’t stop bombarding me with ads for swimsuits. And TikTok’s algorithmic suggestions know so little about me as to prompt an identity crisis. Maybe we weren’t supposed to “connect with friends and the world around you,” as Facebook advises; just friends might have been enough. Or, rather, imagine the weary obligation of trying to talk to every attendee at a music festival, rather than just the people standing beside you as you wait for your favourite artist to take the stage.

And just as all seemed lost, I found Letterboxd.

In its FAQ, Letterboxd bills itself as “a global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past.” But its real omnipurpose shows up a little later: “How should I use Letterboxd?” the site asks; “However you like,” the site answers. What I like is keeping to myself and doing my own thing. And more often than not, Letterboxd allows me to be introverted on a social media app.

I’m not using it to see what other people do — I’m using it the way I did the opening pages of my journal, before I stopped keeping one. For years, I hand-wrote entries about my life, what I got up to, whom I went out with, what movies I was seeing, what I was reading, what inspired me, what drove me insane. At the start of my journals, I’d keep a running log of what movies and books I watched and wrote about. I’d begun to write a bit of freelance film criticism, and I’d been a lifelong reader, and it always made more sense to have an analogue method for keeping track of these things.

I use Letterboxd to be funny, to be astute, to troll. I exist there without rules for myself. I am consistent about neither punctuation nor grammar. Over time, Letterboxd grew to be less of a “social” media and more of an extension of self.

It can be difficult to explain to anyone outside the film community (or even within the film community) what the point of Letterboxd is. Why not simply remember the movies you watched using your brain? Or keep, as my mother has done, physical ticket stubs on your dresser? Perhaps the appeal of Letterboxd is that its usage is almost analog, a means of tracking and documenting. I can lose journals and ticket stubs, but Letterboxd keeps me tethered to pieces of myself the way Facebook once promised to. It is a museum of culture — my own wing dedicated to the development of my taste.

I can scroll back through my diary and see logs of what I was watching five years ago during a bad breakup (Claire Denis’s “Let the Sunshine In,” Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love”), I can see what I was watching during the early days of the pandemic (Todd Haynes’s “Safe,” George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road”), I can see what I was watching the first month my partner and I started dating (Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain,” Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break”). These logs do not mean anything in isolation or out of context, but to me, they mean just about everything.

Here is the other miracle of Letterboxd: I don’t have to see anything I don’t want to see. I follow those whom I like and respect — critics, friends and strangers alike — those who have proved themselves worthy of appearing in my feed. I often disagree with the people I follow, but live and let live. Users can either turn off comments from those who don’t follow them or turn off comments completely. No one is forcing you to engage.

But you do have to engage on Letterboxd with yourself — your habits, your viewing, your preferences. We tend to think of taste as an objective measure: Does a person have good or bad taste? Taste, like all things, is built not only on the material consumed but also on the day, the weather, the company. But I grew to like what I liked whether I watched it in my bed at 2 in the morning or in a rollicking theatre audience. This cumulative build exists nowhere but my Letterboxd account, and it makes sense only to me. That a diary of mine (even if it’s just film consumption) exists openly — publicly — is an act of trust and exhibitionism, maybe. But you know what? So is a movie.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/26/letterboxd-social-media-film-introverted/ 

The Healing Power of Journaling

From egypttoday.com

When was the last time you grabbed a pen and paper and decided to let your thoughts and emotions out? Or let’s ask the right way; did you ever try journaling? For many people, journaling may sound like a daunting, time-wasting thing to do. If you are wondering what benefit can come out of keeping a daily journal, read along. You won’t be disappointed. 

 

1. It helps you release emotions.

Some people find it hard to express their emotions or to vent and open up to others. They end up bottling up, frustrated, and drained by all the feelings they carry within their hearts. Writing a journal creates a safe space knowing you won’t be judged, you will express freely, and you will feel more relieved to know it is just between you and your diary.

 

2. Journaling helps you learn more about yourself.

Journaling opens up your eyes to things that maybe you try to turn a blind eye to. It helps you dig deeper into yourself and your emotions and reflect on why sometimes you feel the way you feel in certain situations. In doing so, you will become more self-aware and will understand yourself better.

 

3. It clears your mind.

Our minds are cramped with too many thoughts throughout the day between the positive and the negative. By putting your thoughts on paper, you discard those things that don’t matter and keep track of things that matter and need your attention. By journaling you declutter the mess in your mind.

 

4. Journaling helps you have a clear vision.

You can have all the ideas and goals in mind but haven’t you written them down with a plan you’ll never reach where you want to be. Journaling helps you organize your thoughts and see the whole picture more clearly.

 

5. You’ll become more grateful.

One of the ways you can journal is by counting your blessings, or finding something to be thankful for every day. Making gratitude part of your journal will help you on your bad days. Whenever you feel down just go to any page and read one of the things you count as a blessing and you will be instantly reminded of all the great things you have.

 

6. You’ll have better track of things and memories.

A journal is a great way to relive happy moments. Writing down about a happy memory or an occasion and rereading it years later, will make you feel like reliving this memory all over again. The details put into journaling will make a past happy memory more vivid.

 

How to build the habit?

• Schedule a fixed time every day to build the habit. Some people like to start their day by journaling to kick off the day on a fresh note. Others prefer to make it the last thing at night to recap their day.

• Set the right mood. For instance play calming music in the background and light a scented candle.

• Create the system that works best for you. Whether you prefer a pen and paper, or to journal on your laptop, just pick what works best for you.

• Make it simple. Don’t be focused on your writing skills, just focus on being real, honest, and letting all your thoughts and emotions out.

https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/6/125850/The-Healing-Power-of-Journaling 

Christine Lai on Archives, Ruins, and Her Debut Novel Landscapes

From interviewmagazine.com

By Amanda Paige Inman

I spend a lot of time thinking about diaries. A compulsive diary keeper myself, I instantly understand the impulse to keep one when I encounter it in a novel. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s foreword to Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, she writes: “All diaries and notebooks, whether intended for publication or not, whether invented by their authors or not, whether framed as (or within) novels or not, are all dialogues with the self. They are instances of self-doubling and self-fashioning.” When we read a fictitious diary, we are reading not just the words of a narrator, but the way that they envision themselves, complicated by the way they hope to be seen. Archives serve a similar purpose.

When I spoke to the author Christine Lai, she mentioned Forbidden Notebook and a few other novels animated by the urge to record. Considered alongside these other books, Lai’s debut novel Landscapes, published in the U.S. this week, is special in that the narrator, Penelope, is not just a diarist, but an archivist too Set in the near future, Penelope is tasked with archiving an art and ephemera collection in what remains of a crumbling estate and finds herself increasingly drawn to a past that cannot be muffled. The story of an archive—discovered in not only what it preserves, but what it leaves out—is compelling, and Landscapes has a lot to say about art, ruins, and beauty. Fittingly, Lai spoke to me last month about missed connections, the joys of collecting, and her enduring fascination with country houses.

AMANDA INMAN: How are you?

CHRISTINE LAI: Good, thanks. How are you?

INMAN: Good. Where in the world are you?

LAI: I am in Vancouver. What about you?

INMAN: I am in Nyack, New York. Yeah, just a little bit north of the city. When I was thinking of how I wanted to start our conversation, I thought we could take the lead from your novel and begin with ruins. The first image we get is Turner deciding to paint the ruins as they were, rather than the renovated and restored estate. Why did you want to start with this image?

LAI: Well, I’ve always been fascinated with ruins. I’m really drawn to ancient ruins when I’ve gone to Rome and Greece, and also because I studied romantic literature, and the romantics were obsessed with ruination. So it’s just something I’ve always been thinking about. I know a lot of people tend to associate ruins with a sense of despair, or think of a ruin in a city as kind of dystopian, but I actually associate ruins with the idea of rebuilding. The flowers and the weeds that grow through the ruins, they’re symbols of hope. I just think ruination is kind of the flip side of construction, so I like to think of that juxtaposition as well.

INMAN: I agree. I work with rare and antiquarian books, and spend a lot of time thinking about restoration, so this book was made for me. How did you decide to include these archival descriptions?

LAI: Early on, I wanted Penelope to be an archivist and to be working with archived items. I didn’t include the actual items until later on in the writing process. I thought of the book as a kind of a box, so I started collecting these objects, and I wanted the descriptions because I love the materiality of old books. They tend to be very expensive, but I love just handling them, or going to a bookstore to look at them, and I actually love learning the terminology that booksellers use, like “foxed” or “ slightly foxed. So I wanted, in some ways, for the materiality of the books or the objects to parallel what has happened to the world outside and also to Penelope herself.

INMAN: Well, it’s like another form of ruination. And it just keeps echoing around the reader in all shapes and forms, so it’s like you’re in this ruination soup, which I loved. It reminds me of Daisy Hildyard, when she was reviewing Sarah Baume’s Seven Steeples.

LAI: Oh, I’ve been meaning to read that.

INMAN: She wrote this amazing review in the New York Review of Books, and I’m just going to read this to you.

LAI: Yeah, please.

INMAN: “Anybody who’s ever read a book on how to write fiction knows that a bath mat belongs in a story only if it indicates some telling detail about the protagonist or if it’s to be used as a murder weapon. This approach to narrative is not universal, but it is familiar. We might observe that it is an ethos of annihilation. It eradicates the intrinsic value of everything beyond the main characters, so it’s a nice fit for a species bent on the destruction of everything outside ourselves.”

LAI: Oh, that’s brilliant.

INMAN: Yeah, it’s absolutely brilliant. And I was just thinking of how you included these descriptions of items in the estate. Traditionally, people might be like, “Oh, cut it.” But it’s part of the world building. It’s not necessarily moving the plot forward, but it feels essential, you know?

LAI: I’m so glad you think so. They were very essential, especially after I added them. All the different objects are related to her memories as well, so they do kind of propel the book forward in some ways, even though they don’t.

                                                                         The author Christine Lai, photographed by Jasmine Sealy.

INMAN: Let’s talk about Mornington Hall, the setting and the landscape of where a lot of the novel takes place.

LAI: I guess the inspiration for the country house was novels like Ishiguro‘s The Remains of the Day. I’ve always loved country house novels, but I wanted a ruinous country house, first because of my fascination with ruins, but also because I came across these photographs by a Belgium-based photographer called Mirna Pavlovic, and she just goes to all of these abandoned mansions and castles throughout Europe and photographs them. They’re absolutely sublime, and there’s this kind of melancholy beauty to them. I was also really drawn to the works of W.G. Sebald. I feel like I’m constantly returning to his work. He has all these dilapidated houses and talks about how the building of these houses necessitated destruction, so I did some research about the history of the country houses and how often they require the removal of entire villages. So it all looks very beautiful, genteel and civilized, but actually there is this history of destruction and brutality linked to colonial history. But I actually found that just the most fascinating part about country houses, this kind of double-sidedness, the beauty on the one hand and the history of destruction.

INMAN: Speaking of dark history that doesn’t take away beauty, should we talk about Julian? I wanted to strangle him.

LAI: He was challenging to write, because he’s a character who’s very opaque to himself and has this drive to erase things about himself and about his past. So it’s hard for me to portray that in a way that still kind of outlines the character for the reader. I wanted to kind of juxtapose his perspective with Penelope’s, and the different sections are meant to be written in a slightly different style. Hers is in this kind of open-ended and capacious tone, and with his, the sentences are shorter and there aren’t as many metaphors or use of figurative language. In this case, the readers know early on what exactly is in Julian’s past, so it’s really a matter of seeing whether or not he ever comes to terms with that. I also wanted to have a character who approaches art in a very different way than Penelope. For him, it’s not really about comprehension. It’s about possession. It’s about hanging that piece of work on a wall and claiming that it’s his, and so there’s always this distance between him and artworks, despite his longing to get closer to them. So he fails to do so. And what did you think of the sections?

INMAN: I’m really glad you said the way that they approach art is so different, because that was one of my big takeaways. I felt like Julian was this empty, hungry void that was just trying to bring as many things as he possibly could into himself. We also get Penelope’s diaries, which I really want to talk about. Do you keep a diary?

LAI: Not a diary, I keep a notebook. What about you?

INMAN: I love a diary. I didn’t start keeping one religiously until a couple of years ago, but it’s a really nice way to orient myself.

LAI: It’s therapeutic.

INMAN: It’s so therapeutic. And Penelope says that, too. She compares keeping a diary to Louise Bourgeois’ sculpting as a form of alchemy.

LAI: I love books that are written in the diary form, or they’re epistolary in some ways. There’s a kind of open-endedness and an unfinished quality to them that I really appreciate. And I love this idea of the diary as a way of writing your way out of despair. I love The Forbidden Notebook, and how it actually subverts the idea of a notebook as a place of salvation. I loved The Wall by Marlon Haushofer. And Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men was also in the form of a diary, and that’s very dystopian but it’s kind of like The Wall in that it’s about community and loneliness. So I was just really, really drawn to that and other kinds of diary novels, like Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, which I loved. And Kafka’s diaries, which are referenced throughout the book. I mean, it’s obviously not a “Kafkaesque” book, though I would love to write a Kafkaesque book one day, but I was really drawn to the image of him writing his diaries late at night when the rest of his family has gone to sleep. It’s like his haven, the one place where he’d go to be himself and to indulge the ideas he was obsessed with.

INMAN: Have you ever been a collector?

LAI: Yes, I love collecting things. I collect books I love. I’m trying to start a collection of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, but in different languages, which is quite hard, because I think you have to travel for something like that. I collect vintage postcards, so the postcards that are referenced in the book are from my own collection. I love reading the messages. And they’ll have ones like, “Oh, I’ve just left the dock, and I will be in New York in however many days.” So it’s really fascinating the way that people used to use postcards. It’s like the tweets or text messages of the late 19th to early 20th century.

INMAN: I mean, imagine all the missed connections. Things get lost in the mail all the time. Like, “Hey, I’m on my way. Meet me at the dock,” and then sideways stamp, and they never show up and your life is changed drastically.

LAI: That’s a great idea for a story. Do you collect anything?

INMAN: I have a couple old postcards. I have a few first editions of these horrible, horrible books about British people going down to south Florida and being like, “This is a wild place.” I would like to think of myself as being a collector, but also space is limited, and time is limited.

LAI: My dream was also to have a secondhand bookstore.

INMAN: There’s one in Nyack called Pickwick, and he doesn’t really have it organized at all, and everything is in vertical stacks. If you want a book that’s at the bottom, it’s kind of like just, “Sorry.” Though I love the place, I don’t want to have that type of bookshop.

LAI: A bit more organized.

INMAN: I have a bajillion more questions. For people that read this book, I urge everyone to check out the notes section, because it’s like one of the greatest reading recommendations list I’ve ever seen.

LAI: I’m glad. Me and the publisher, we were debating whether or not to include notes, because the Canadian edition doesn’t have notes. People really kind of differ in terms of their opinions or their approach to this. I personally like notes when I read, because you can tell when you read a novel if there’s a lot of research. I often want to know where the research comes from. Not to verify facts, but just so I can do further readings if I want to. But I don’t think that’s very common. I think Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X is one of the few I’ve read recently that does have that.

INMAN: Oh, I loved it. And this is your debut, right?

LAI: It is.

INMAN: How do you feel about that?

LAI: I’m really excited. It is a bit daunting. You’re a brilliant writer as well, so you know what it feels like to have work out there. It just feels like it doesn’t really belong to you anymore, because people are going to read it however they’re going to read it. And I’ve found that kind of difficult, just psychologically letting go of this thing that I’ve always thought was mine and mine alone.

INMAN: That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around.

LAI: Yeah. I mean, it’s still nice to see the object in stores and to hear about other people’s experiences of reading it, but I’m always a bit apprehensive. I don’t know if I want to know what other people think, especially friends and family. I find that really odd. I actually didn’t tell a lot of people that I was writing a book until I had signed a contract. They’re just like, “You’ve been writing a novel?” I don’t know what people were expecting. Maybe they were expecting a love story, or a mystery, or somebody dies, something that’s very plot-driven. So I think the initial reaction from some of my friends has been surprise, and that’s been kind of difficult to explain to them.

INMAN: Have there been reactions that you found surprising, like people read it differently than you had intended?

LAI: Yeah, absolutely. People reading it in a complete autobiographical way surprises me. Well, maybe it doesn’t surprise me, because that’s very common nowadays. But, yeah, people who definitely read it and assumed that I’m Penelope, so that’s kind of been a bit strange. I knew that there were some readers who were not going to like the archive items, because they disrupt the flow of the narrative. So I’ve always known that. But it’s been a really wonderful process. I have great publishers, great editors, who I’m lucky to have found. A couple of years ago, I was looking up online how to self-publish and feeling really overwhelmed. I don’t know anything about marketing or publicity, and I admire people who are able to do it, but I know that I would not be able to do all of that on my own.

INMAN: People are always like, “Oh, I’ll just self-publish,” thinking that it’ll be easier. And it’s like, no, that’s a full-time job.

LAI: It really is. And for literary fiction, it doesn’t seem like it’s all that possible.

INMAN: Well, I’m excited to see what happens with this book. I honestly think that so many people are going to love it.

LAI: Oh, thank you so much. I hope so. And I hope I get to meet more writers and readers. I think that’s been the most rewarding part, chatting with people like you about books.

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/christine-lai-on-archives-ruins-and-her-debut-novel-landscapes

You matter most: Journal your heart out

From newsrecord.org

By Anna Carlson

“Dear diary” is a statement many have written at some point in their lives, but the power behind keeping a journal can be underestimated. The ability to express our emotions through words is such a gift, because in doing so, we can release, rebalance and restore. 

Finding a journal that is appealing is the first step. There are so many different styles out there and choosing one that suits you is the fun part. Writing becomes easier when you enjoy the space you’re writing in. If you pick out a journal that spikes your interest, you will be more likely to use it. 

There are several different methods to journaling, such as keeping a diary. Writing about your day and getting it all out on paper is beneficial and can be interesting to look back on. Writing in a daily journal is great for your mental health as it gets out a day's worth of thoughts and clears the mind. 

Expressing yourself through words rebalances your energy and there is no wrong way to do it. There are a number of methods to journaling and all of them are beneficial.         Obtained from Pexels

Writing out what you are grateful for is also beneficial. Stating all that you're grateful for will help attract those things further. It can also help when you have had a tough day, because you are able to remind yourself of all the good in your life and will begin to feel and think more positively. 

Writing letters that you will never send is a great way to release built up emotions. This is extremely useful for me personally because it is not always easy or even the right situation to fully express how you feel to someone. When you journal out these emotions, there are no limitations as to what can be said, which is why it is so freeing. The people you are writing to never have to see the letter but writing out how you feel helps diminish intense emotions. 

A creative approach to journaling includes writing poems, as they can be very expressive and metaphoric. There are really no rules when it comes to writing a poem, which makes this not only enjoyable but also flexible.

Self-reflection can also be found in journaling. Reflecting upon your own actions and the outcomes they have produced calls for self-growth. It is difficult to replay situations, especially when there may have been mistakes made. However, it is important to do so in order to learn from those actions. By doing this in a journal, you are not only documenting it but are also taking the thoughts out of your head and putting them on paper, unbinding and organizing your feelings. 

Setting goals for yourself in your journal helps to hold you more accountable to achieve them. When you write something down, it proves to be more prominent. You may hold yourself more accountable to reach your goals if you have them stored down in a journal. 

All in all, there are so many different methods to journal and no one way is better than the other. It is extremely beneficial for your mental health to keep a diary or journal so that your emotions, wants and needs are expressed thoroughly and to the fullest extent. 

https://www.newsrecord.org/opinion/you-matter-most-journal-your-heart-out/article_92667566-50a9-11ee-aac3-a7e994a6c659.html 

A Maine woman’s diary from the 1970s has become a TikTok sensation

From bangordailynews.com

When Hilary Eyestone is visiting her mother, Lynn Bonsey, in Bucksport, they’ll often go for a drive around Hancock County, through Surry, where Bonsey spent much of her childhood and taught middle school for the last 30 years.

“Almost without fail, she will point out some place that she wrote about in her diary,” said Eyestone, a Westbrook resident. “She has it all written down. This house here, this old business there, what happened where. She can kind of fact check her own life.”Bonsey’s diary is the stuff of legend in her family — years of stories, jokes, observations and funny moments in her life, written down in exacting detail in stacks of notebooks. She started it in 1968, at age 15, and continued until the mid-1980s, when she was too busy raising her kids and teaching to regularly keep it up.

Hilary Eyestone and Lynn Bonsey run the podcast and TikTok, “My Mother’s Diaries.” Credit: Hilary Eyestone

Eyestone knew her mother was the perfect storyteller, with her tales of badly behaving boys, youthful mischief and colourful Maine characters. As a platform, TikTok was the perfect place to start sharing her stories with the world.

Last fall, Eyestone and Bonsey launched My Mother’s Diaries, a TikTok account in which Bonsey reads excerpts from her diary in the place where it happened — places like her college dorm at the University of Southern Maine, her grandparents’ old house in Surry, on the side of the road in Ellsworth, and a Howard Johnson in South Portland where she worked as a cocktail waitress in the 1970s.

The posts are sweet, sarcastic and silly, with a touch of dry absurdity — in other words, just the way Bonsey wrote her diary when she was a teenager and young woman.

“I’ve always liked to hear a story and to tell a story,” Bonsey said. “I retired last year and I knew I wanted a project to work on. I can’t imagine how anything could be more fun than how this has evolved. I think it’s made my relationship with Hilary even stronger.”

An early post the pair made on the My Mother’s Diaries TikTok account went viral in May, with 2.1 million views and counting. Eyestone and “Clod” — Bonsey’s first name is Claudia, and her family calls her Clod, though everyone else calls her Lynn — were showing up in people’s TikTok feeds worldwide.

Suddenly, millions of people had heard the story of how Clod cried the first time she had to use the loudspeaker at her job at Zayre’s, or how one day she looked out the window of a Ramada Inn in Portland and saw her boyfriend kissing another woman. Before, those were things she’d only shared with her family and closest friends.

“It was a little terrifying, seeing the views start to pile up,” Bonsey said. “I always tried to write in a light-hearted way, but also in a very authentic way. I’m rooting for that woman who wrote those diaries. I think it’s pretty unusual to keep something as detailed as I did. To go back and go through it all again, and do it in public, has been really interesting.”

In addition to keeping a diary, Bonsey filmed some moments in her younger years with a Super 8 camera. Eyestone has digitized much of that footage and has used it on the TikTok page.

Eyestone has also used that Super 8 footage on the podcast they started back in May, also called My Mother’s Diaries, in which they dive more deeply into Bonsey’s stories — as well as stories from Eyestone’s childhood, split between southern Maine, Massachusetts and Hancock County. Filmed versions of the podcast are on YouTube.

“Honestly, we don’t even care if anybody is listening to the podcast,” Eyestone said. “We’re just having fun cracking each other up.”

They’ve even created a line of t-shirts bearing particularly juicy quotes from the diaries, like “I’m going to Freeport and I’m going to dress in something sexy,” and “Joe called yesterday and told me that some guy on the swimming team told him I was weird.”

“She’s eminently quotable,” Eyestone said. “It’s really funny to think about strangers wearing a shirt with quotes from her diary on it.”

Mother-daughter relationships can span the gamut from warm and loving to complicated and fraught. Bonsey and Eyestone’s relationship is based on humour and honesty, and their love for each other is palpable, which is something their TikTok and podcast followers have quickly picked up on.

“We’ve had people comment and say things like ‘I miss my mom so much,’ or ‘I wish I had this kind of relationship with my mom,’” Eyestone said. “It makes me really grateful for this relationship we have, and the ability to be creative and tell stories together, because that’s really at the root of everything we love.”

In Bonsey’s very first diary entry, dated Aug. 20, 1968, she wrote that if she didn’t think that, in the future, she’d want to “get kicks” out of what she wrote as a teenager, she’d burn the whole thing in the fireplace.

“Boy, am I glad I didn’t do that,” she said. “I guess I saw into the future.”

New episodes of the My Mother’s Diaries podcast go up every two weeks on Apple Podcasts and on YouTube.

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2023/09/02/news/hancock/maine-womans-diary-1970s-tiktok-sensation-joam40zk0w/