Ampersand Gazette #44
Welcome to the Ampersand Gazette, a metaphysical take on some of the news of the day. If you know others like us, who want to create a world that includes and works for everyone, please feel free to share this newsletter. The sign-up is here. And now, on with the latest …
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“They’re everywhere.
Muttering “thank you, five” under their breath when you swing by their cubicles to remind them about a team meeting happening in five minutes. Performing slightly too well at office karaoke after protesting slightly too much about getting onstage.
Former theater kids. They walk among us. … What happens to theater kids when we grow up?
Well before being appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson participated in theater and improv as an undergraduate at Harvard …. Other former theater kids include the governor of New Jersey and the editor of New York magazine. The Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada taught high school drama.…
After putting out a call on social media, I heard from theater kids around the world in every profession imaginable—working at the Department of Justice, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Goldman Sachs, and as doctors and lawyers. The tech world is quietly lousy with them, at Apple, Salesforce and Google (the chief executive of Figma is also a theater kid). There was a wine educator, a strategist for a tonic water company, a man who owns a “hot dog joint,” so many marketing professionals I lost count. And influencers, journalists and an adjunct professor who also runs a business selling backpacks to carry cats. (Theater adults are, unsurprisingly, very good at self-promotion.)
…
And being a theater kid is a permanent condition.”
from the Style section of The New York Times by Madison Malone Kircher
“Grown-Up Theater Kids Run the World”
August 22, 2023
We are.
Everywhere.
I mean, of course, theatre kids.
Well, really, theatre people.
You see, all of us, whether we’ve ever hung a light or sewn a costume or painted a flat or sung or danced in front of an audience pretending to be someone else, all of us are theatre people.
There’s a reason I say this. We’re all the stars of our own lives. No exceptions. No one else gets a starring role unless you give it to them. You’re the playwright, the director, the designers, the star, and all the other performers and crew needed to make good theatre.
Now, do you live your life as if it’s a theatre piece? Probably not. But why not?
We admire those people who do for the most part. Beyoncé, Barbra, Bono. Why?
Because they have found the courage to center themselves, their talents, their dreams, their hopes, their wishes in their own lives. That can sound selfish to some ears, and perhaps it is, inherently selfish. But selfish has gotten a bad, undeserved rap over the millennia.
If you’re not going to center yourself in your own life, Beloved, no one else will. You don’t belong in the center of someone else’s life. None one else belongs in the center of your life. You belong in the center of your own. And not in a self-centered, egotistical, bratty way either.
Here’s the secret to that: You are the center of your own universe, not the known universe.
The center of that universe is the Divine, in whatever form you choose to know It.
When you behave as if you are the center of the known universe, it’s dreadful, both for you and for everyone else involved. You did not incarnate here alone, Beloved, and you are, whether you like it or not, meant to consider and care for both yourself and for others. All others, at all times, forever and ever, Amen.
It sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? Be the center of your own universe, but don’t … you fill in the blank. The simplest answer here is: don’t forget there are others like you who count just as much as you do in the cosmic economy we know as life.
One of the biggest, and hardest to grasp principles of metaphysics is that everything you perceive is actually you. You couldn’t perceive it if that were not true.
That usually prompts the barrage of But what abouts …? I won’t fill in that blank or I’d be writing for the rest of this lifetime and beyond. Yes, the metaphysicians, me included, mean it. What you see, what you perceive, is all you.
Which is why it is also said that to change your perceptions is to change your world. Also, true.
Here’s a silly example: I had an appointment with a major internet service provider for a phone call yesterday at a particular time. The time came and went. She didn’t call. At times in the past, I would have huffed and puffed and blown the house down about people who don’t do what they say they’re going to do. Then I thought, Oh, she’s in Texas, and she told me how hot it was and how hard it was to manage it, especially with rolling blackouts of power. I also thought, Well, she has kids. What if one of her kids got sick? There could be a million and two reasons she didn’t call.
I’ve let people down before in my life, too. Because I forgot, or got distracted, or because of genuine emergency. If all that I perceive is me, how would I want someone to respond to my letting them down? Kindly. Hence, I chose kindly for this salesperson. She’ll call me Tuesday after the holiday is over. Or, she won’t. And it doesn’t mean a thing about me.
Center of my own universe, not the known universe. Do you see?
The next time you fall into reactivity (welcome to the human condition,) see if you can pause for just a moment to ask yourself, If I was the one behaving that way, what response would I want to get? Then do that.
Theatre kids, Beloved, are exemplary improvisers—we’ve had to be, and it stands us in good stead because life itself is one great big, magical improvisation, don’t you know?
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“I know noir has to stay cheap and fast and lurid. Noir relies on its low art status to speak to its wide audience. The central mechanism of noir fiction is to create a justice deficit that needs to be redressed. Shock and violence disarm the readers and heighten their indignation—that way, they are not being preached at but invited to engage. Whereas whodunits and cozy crime are puzzles, solved with a drip feed of clues, noir depends upon the reader’s sense of fairness. There is no better form to explore social injustice and, sometimes, nudge the dial of change a little bit.
…
As the literary theorist Stanley Fish argued, there is no such thing as point-of-viewlessness. In all cultures, through all time, the status quo is profoundly political. It simply masquerades as neutral.
And Fish’s famous reader-response theory posits that the reader is not a passive recipient of a literary work but a collaborator in that work, reading it through the prism of personal experience. In effect, each reader, with each reading, creates a new work. Each generation of readers brings a different sensibility to the text. So I will bring my politics to the writing of the book just as readers will bring theirs to the reading of it.…
I’m no gender essentialist and I don’t believe in an inherently female sensibility, but writers can’t keep their own worldview out of their work—nor should they try.
I expect some people will have the same objections about a woman writing Raymond Chandler. To the angry anti-wokers and the leave-things-aloners, I can only say: You’ve arrived too late. The revolution is underway. The barbarians are not at the gate. We are in the citadel.
And we’ve got a three-book deal.”
Denise Mina in The New York Times
Stepping Into Raymond Chandler’s Shoes Showed Me the Power of Fiction
August 27, 2023
I love the dramatic tone of noir. Do you? It always seems to me to be very high stakes immediately, and that’s fun for a reader and an author.
Still, I deeply appreciated what Ms. Mina had to say about why:
“The central mechanism of noir fiction is to create a justice deficit that needs to be redressed.”
A justice deficit.
Those three words thrilled me, particularly because of what she didn’t say: an injustice.
An injustice means that it’s stupid easy to fall into debates about what’s fair and what’s not. It’s a playground spat—no matter who’s having it. The House of Representatives, anyone?
The most delightful part of her phrase is that it demands that one not only have a point-of-view, but know what that point-of-view is. Often, we all have areas where we have points-of-view, but no clue that we have them, or where they came from. I can answer that one: subconscious programming.
As I am fond of saying, Darling, it’s subconscious, which means you aren’t aware of it.
Hence, her observation, “[T]here is no such thing as point-of-viewlessness. In all cultures, through all time, the status quo is profoundly political. It simply masquerades as neutral.”
When you make yourself the center of your own universe, one of the first tasks upon your arrival is to figure out your values—what you value, what you don’t, and what you will do when either arises in your life.
The status quo may very well be the status quo, Beloved, but it doesn’t have to be your status quo when you examine and choose your own values.
Of course your point-of-view will be influenced by myriad things: who you are, where and when you were born, to whom, what they taught you, what you’ve experienced—I could go on and on.
My point is that wherever you note a justice deficit in your world is very likely a place where you can potentially add your voice, your hands, your heart, your prayers, your intention, and your action to make a difference.
What are you waiting for?
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And in publishing news …
It’s September 1st, and I did not make my hoped-for August publication timeline for Jasmine Increscent. Oh well, I manage it sometimes, and not others. The glitch has been some digital things that needed sorting before I could put accurate promotional urls in my text. It meant a full stop. No point in uploading a book that I’ll just have to upload—and fill out all the forms—over again. Once is enough, believe me.
I’ll keep you posted on her progress, but it shouldn’t be too much longer. And, may I ask, if you read either of The Subversive Lovelies books and enjoy them, that you post an Amazon review please. Reviews are the major determining factor for that pesky little algorithm. Thanks!
We’re coming toward the end of summer now, and the beginning of school, the time when everyone’s schedules change. If you want a juicy last-minute summer read, may I suggest the first of the series, Jezebel Rising?
It’ll make Jasmine that much richer when you get to read her story. And for those who missed it …
Here’s the blurb (to whet your appetite)—
A wedding. Increasing. And it’s time to start her vicety … it’s a three-ring circus—oh, my.
Jasmine Bailey is the second eldest of the Bailey siblings, yes, those Baileys. Known for being much more in the present than the future, years earlier she’d begun a one-woman mission to serve mothers who’d been abandoned by their spouses in the worst slum ever to darken New York City: Five Points. Universally recognized by her honorific, Lady Jasmine, throughout Gilded Age society, the wealthy take their checkbooks in hand whenever they see her strawberry blonde braid and her lissome figure coming.
Now it’s time for Jasmine’s vicety—the second of four the sibs had planned upon the death of their beloved father four years earlier. Since then, Jezebel’s pair of viceties—The Obstreperous Trumpet, a saloon, and The Salacious Sundae, an ice cream parlor—were going great guns. Jasmine had originally intended to create a high-end gambling hell. Except ... her wedding is scheduled in less than a month, and she’s increasing. There’s, uh, a lot on her plate.
Jasmine’s research takes her from the lowest of the low policy shops in Mulberry Bend to an outré visit to the most elite gambling institution in town. Still, she’s struggling with what is in her heart about starting this vicety. A chance sentence, if you believe in that sort of thing, overheard whilst at breakfast one morning changes everything.
Will her struggle with gambling resolve to her satisfaction, or will Jasmine have to scrap every idea she ever had about it to start over again? Sure, no doubt she could, but does she want to, and how will that affect her siblings and their nefariously well-meant agenda in Chelsea Towers?
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I’m still writing over a thousand words a day on Gemma Eclipsing, which is rolling along nicely. The process for this one has been completely different than for the previous two. When will I learn?!
Each book comes with its own rhythm, cadence, timing, process and any one of a number of things that keep me fascinated. The process of writing is fascinating to me. For this book, because I started it immediately (the day after) I finished Jasmine has felt hard to hold on to re: the various strings of the plot. I keep having to reread what I’ve written.
Still, Tony, my editor (and if you need a good one, find him here), bless the man, sits with me every night before supper and lets me read to him what I’ve written that day—like viewing the raw footage of the dailies in the movie business. It’s the highlight of my day, and he always has a good idea or suggestion or some notion that I haven’t thought of. He’s a remarkable collaborator.
His self-dubbed name for what he does is Book Husband. And that’s exactly what he does. He, somehow, lives in the world that each of his authors has created, and participates avidly in that world. His gift is remarkable, so if this fall is a time to get going on that book you’ve always dreamed of writing, find him here with my heartfelt blessing.
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On an entirely different note, a next, new speculative fiction series is starting to gather momentum, and I am hanging on tight. Research is still top of the list.
One of the best things to happen is that I received a working title for the series, so here it is for inquiring minds …
The series title has remained the same since last I wrote, and I have been given the titles of all four books in the series. The first one is:
The book takes on the healthcare system in the U.S., and its evil twin, the insurance industry. I’m researching the avatar who steps forward to make the difference now.
And—so exciting!—I’ve written the first scene of the first book.
This is how it always happens. I write the first scene, and then put it away. In the case of The Subversive Lovelies, I went back to it some thirteen months later. We’ll see what Spirit has in store for The Phoenix Initiation.
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Now here is a little something yummy just for fun …
ChatGPT
I think that I shall never see
A wonder like ChatGPT.
Type “Write a sonnet”; out it churns
A work on par with Robert Burns.
Type “Write an ode,” and in two shakes,
Results to rival William Blake’s.
“Write comic verse,” and in a flash,
Wry humor à la Ogden Nash.
Poems were made by fools like me,
But now we use ChatGPT.
Jacob Stulberg
New York
from Letters to the Editor in the New York Times
August 27, 2023
Thank you, Mr. Stulberg, for your deliciously whimsical take on AI. I don’t know about your world, Beloved, but mine has been inundated with Chicken Littles, or is it Chickens Little, decrying the end of literature as we know it. Bunk.
There’s a clue as to why in the title, darlings. Really. A salient detail that gives the lie to every devastating prediction about AI. That word? Artificial.
Artificial—which you, and your experience, are not. You are real. And that would make your writing real, and hopefully, based on real intelligence as well.
Truth about the poem? I couldn’t resist. The rest of the entries are worthy of your reading time. Deliciously witty, snide, and altogether clever, and isn’t that what it’s going to take to get everyone on board for an Ampersand world. I am more convinced than ever that And is the solution to everything, and so, Be Ampersand, Beloved, until next time.
