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Be a Cactus Podcast
Hosted by Victoria Waddle · EN
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Iran and Exit Prohibited; AI-Generated Writing; Cesar Chavez Fallout
Mar 2200:26:35Tap to summarizeHello Friends,There are some things I wanted to discuss about this crazy week, so I’ll put off the final discussion of Enshittification. Next week we’re starting the new schedule of alternating the “Library and Banned Books News” with these review posts rather than having both within one week. So—next Sunday is about libraries and censorship.¡Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!I read in two newspapers that California is changing its Cesar Chavez holiday to “Farmworker Day/El Día del Campesino.” I’m glad my state is continuing with the honor. I’m over being heartbroken over the loss of idols. I think it’s best to celebrate ideas and movements that have helped people rather than any particular man. If you need some helpful reading on the Chavez abuse news, these may be useful:This guest post on the Contrarian by Maria Cardona.Let us be absolutely clear: none of these horrific revelations erase the very real gains made in farmworkers’ rights through years of grueling, backbreaking organizing. Those victories belong to an entire movement. Yes, Chávez was a leader — but so much of the unacknowledged credit belongs to Dolores Huerta and to the women who powered that movement from behind the curtain.And this:However, the farmworkers movement is not defined by an individual — and never has been. As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi noted, “A movement is about the people — not any one person — and its strength lies in the values it upholds. We can honor the farmworker movement — and the generations who sacrificed to build it — while also confronting painful truths. No legacy is above accountability.” While we are shaken to our core, we continue to honor the tens of thousands of farm labor activists.Anne Lamott gives us hope, as always.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.And here’s some good news from this week’s Reasons to be Cheerful because it’s important to remember that everyday people work to correct past mistakes, even devastating ones.The Native Seed Farm Safeguarding California’s FutureAt Heritage Growers, every acre is being cultivated to repair ecosystems and help the Golden State meet its ambitious conservation goals.California is widely recognized as one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, supporting thousands of endemic plant and animal species, more than any other US state. However, California’s Biodiversity Initiative notes that its wetlands, riparian woodlands and forests have “suffered extensive losses,” with “an estimated 80–90 percent” of its biologically diverse landscapes altered or lost in the past 150 years. Development, agriculture, invasive species, climate change and increasingly intense wildfires are among the culprits. Reestablishing native vegetation is crucial to reversing those trends.Right after I posted Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” the librarian in Rutherford, TN said she will not move those 190 YA (mostly LGBTQIA) books out of the teen section because it violates the First Amendment Rights of the teens. We’ll see what ensues, but it’s a reminder that good people are out there fighting.Iran and Its PeopleI read a couple of articles this week about the choices Iranians are now having to make.Iranians Weigh Tough Choice: Stay or Flee from the LA TimesWhat the War Has Done to Iranians from the New YorkerAnd one closer and more personal, a text convo between the New Yorker Journalist Cora Engelbrecht and “Hadi” in Tehran. There’s Hadi’s early sense of hope about the war, the fulfillment of a lifelong wish for the death of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which later turns to despair when the regime itself stays in place. I’m not sure whether you can access the article if you’re not a subscriber, but it’s very worthwhile. Here.“As for me, my situation is clear,” he added. “I want to remain close to what’s happening. I’m staying here in the middle of the war until the very end, until my home, what I consider my home, is taken away from me.”After reading these, I thought of a wonderful memoir about Iranian culture and history, about leaving Iran after the 1979-80 revolution. Exit Prohibited deals with the same question: should we stay or should we go? I know the author, Ellen Estilai, through the Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit.Opening the Door on Iranian CultureExit Prohibited by Ellen EstilaiAt the end of July 1980, Ellen Estilai, her husband, and their two daughters are leaving Iran. The decision isn’t easy. Ellen met and married her husband, Ali, in Davis, California, a decade earlier when they both attended university. Ali always planned to return to his homeland after earning his PhD in genetics. As a “first student,” his foreign education was paid for by the Iranian government on the promise to return and with his father’s house as collateral. After Ali graduates, Ellen goes with him, later giving birth to their children. Though she plans to spend her life in Iran, the 1979 revolution and its repressions make staying impossible. And while all four members of the family have permission to leave, Ali is detained at the airport. His passport is confiscated, and he is told he’s on the mamnou’ol khorudj — exit prohibited — list.Ellen and her daughters take off for Switzerland with plans to continue on to the United States. But they’ve no idea when they will see Ali again. She wonders: “Who would want to prevent Ali from leaving Iran? Which officious bureaucrat, which backbiting colleague, which sly neighbor could have written the letter or made the phone call? And just what is Ali being accused of? Having an American wife? Not being Islamic enough? Working on saffron?”The author moves from these thoughts to an examination of her life in Iran. Though hijab is not required under the shah’s rule, many Iranian women continue to wear headscarves, knee-length coats with long sleeves, and pants underneath. Those that don’t are eyed suspiciously as too westernized. As one of them, and a foreigner to boot, the author is sometimes distrusted. Yet she immerses herself in the culture and learns Persian. Her in-laws are a large, happy group who welcome her without hesitation. Their open-heartedness and gatherings, “a celebration of connectedness, of old roots and new growth,” satisfy a need that is not met in her small family of origin. Unlike her mother’s anxiety over hosting gatherings or guests, Iranians believe that a guest is God’s gift.Life in Iran is far different from what the author is used to. With few convenience foods available, she finds herself cooking much of the day. Itinerant street vendors call through the neighborhood selling coats and pants, watermelon, crystal dishes, and more. Though she is not convalescing, Ellen feels like Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window. As she watches the drama in the courtyard and on the balconies, she discovers a good deal about her neighbors’ lives.The author also learns cultural norms. Taarof is the necessary offering of compliments and ceremonial courtesies (“these endless streams of pleasantries took so much valuable time”). The fatalistic worldview that everyone has their own ghesmat (kismet) prevails. Nonetheless, this view allows for a tradition of warding off the evil eye by preparing hot coals in a brazier and tossing in esfand (wild rye) seeds. And, of course, there is the ever-present samovar because tea is a part of all interactions, business or pleasure.Ali lands his dream position as a professor in the Biology Department at the University of Tehran. He secures funds to create a new department, the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, and to purchase new equipment. Though his hopes of improving Iranian education appear to be coming true, some people are envious of him.Meanwhile, Ellen completes her education in English Language and Literature and begins working at the new Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as Manager of Education. The author’s discussion of the museum — architecturally, it’s ...
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Enshittification Part 2, Plus 2 Good Novels
Mar 1500:25:33Tap to summarizeHello Friends,While the frightening and exhausting aspects of life seem to overtake us, let’s not forget that good people do good work and we should keep up with that, too. Remember, every Sunday, Jess Craven posts lots of good things happening. Here’s a little thanks I got for giving blood in 2025. That felt good. Although I am still mostly reading research books for a novel I’m working on, I’ve had a chance to listen to a few wonderful novels. I finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. It’s that story of Nomi Nickel, whose life in the Mennonite colony of East Village, Manitoba is without fun and without prospects (unless slaughtering chickens as a job counts). Both her sister and her mother were excommunicated and left three years earlier. Full of grief for her missing family members, Nomi breaks all the rules, numbs herself to pain, and longs for escape.I also listened to Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb thanks to a recommendation by Beth Peyton. It’s a realistic look at farmworkers’ lives in the Great Depression. The characters in this novel flee the Dust Bowl and find an equally difficult situation on California. While the novel I’m working on has characters coming from Mexico during the same time period, they share some of the same issues with an abusive labor system. Sadly for Babb, her book was scheduled to be published, but just before, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath launched and was a runaway best seller. Babb’s book was finally published in 2004.Enshittification Part TwoFor Part One, check last week’s post.Let’s look at Cory Doctorow’s discussion of how we ended up in the internet platform mess. There are obvious issues with companies that can act as monopolies with no serious oversight (lax government regulation). But additionally, various companies figured out how to override the interoperability of computers at the same time that their work force became less valuable to them.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Getting Past the Interoperability of ComputersPretty much every computer in existence is capable of running every computer program that people know how to write. This has been beneficial to industries and customers with computer technology becoming faster. Computer chips also became faster and cheaper. Great stuff until companies started planting chips in everything including your car, your thermostat, your medical implant, even in the ink that goes into your printer. Suddenly, they can control your options in relation to that product. An example: You can’t buy a third-party ink cartridge that’s safe for an HP printer because it has a computer chip installed that will only read its own cartridges. Doctorow says that this allows HP to charge $10,000 a gallon for ink. While this sounds like hyperbole, he appears to be serious about that cost.Changes in the Work ForceWhen companies like Google and Facebook were new, tech workers had a lot of power because if they quit, they could easily find a job elsewhere. This is no longer true. These workers had a sense of mission and were spending all of their time at work, dedicating their lives to companies whose mottos were “Don’t be evil” (Google) and “Connect every person in the world” (Facebook). Today workers don’t feel any sense of ownership over the products. They are more likely to feel betrayed.Enough Money to Acquire EverythingThe root of the problem goes back further than these companies to the 1970s when Democrats and Republicans both declined to enforce antitrust laws. (Joe Biden embraced the ‘consumer welfare standards theory’ of antitrust law, but then he was out of office.) Unregulated, companies like Amazon are able to create monopolies in many areas. For example, diapers.com was an e-commerce leader. To put them out of business, Amazon sold diapers significantly below cost, losing $200 million over a single month on these products. Diapers.com went bankrupt. Amazon picked it up and then shut it down. So now they exercise a great deal of control over the diaper market. This takeover also sent a message to companies: if Amazon makes you an offer, you have to sell or else you’ll go broke.While Google has only made one great product (a search engine), they have been able to acquire many other people’s inventions. So Google Docs, Google Maps, their navigation system, their satellite images, their server management, and their customer service were all other people’s or other companies’ inventions that Google bought and integrated into their own company.Enshittifying That One Great ProductThe great product that Google created, its search engine, has been enshittified.According to Google internal documents displayed by lawyer Megan Gray in the Google DOJ trial in October 2023, Google uses a semantics-matching technology to invisibly append brand names to queries. An example Doctorow gives is a search for kids’ snow pants. The customer query is “kids’ snow pants.” Google would add the words “North Face,” unseen by the customer. Ads for North Face come up first. North Face pays Google a lot of money to have their ads triggered when their name is searched. Google gets paid. “Depending on your point of view, this is either merely very sleazy, or it’s actual fraud.” (79) Google claims that this is not true and that Gray misunderstood what was going on; however, they refused to explain themselves any further.Google also makes a lot of money by selling its search engines to other companies. This matters if you are an Apple user who believes you are not being tracked when you use Apple products. If you search using Safari, you’re actually using Google search. “Google has a non-consensual dossier on the behavior, social ties, purchases, economic status, employment history, and physical location of virtually every Internet user.” (81-82) Google gets $20 billion a year for this service.“It turned out that ‘If you are not paying for the product, you’re the product’ was wishful thinking. It is true to say, ‘Even if you pay for the product, you’re the product if the company can get away with treating you as the product. ‘” (83)There’s no end to bad actors running similar scams. Apple requires app makers to exclusively process payments through Apple’s system which takes a 30 percent commission on every purchase. (To place this in context, that’s ten times as high as the fees credit card companies charge merchants, which are already “sky-high.”) (84)Adobe planned to train AI on the work people create on it until creators rebelled en masse and moved to smaller company’s products.“The ability of purveyors of cloud-based products to alter their terms, prices, and features at will enables one of the most beloved Enshittification tactics of tech business leaders: bait and switch.” (100)Use an App; Do as You PleaseThe most common tactic tech companies use to flout regulation is to break the law with an app, and then insist that the law hasn’t been broken at all, because the crime was committed with an app. (111)One of the best examples would be Uber’s argument that it’s not an employer because it directs workers with an app. Companies can also say that they’re not committing wage theft if they do it with an app. Again Uber is an example with their algorithmic wage discrimination. When they offer jobs to all the drivers in the neighborhood, they calculate a different wage for each driver based on the driver’s recent behavior.Uber can raise the cost of a taxi for riders if their phones are about to run out of batteries. That’s called twiddling, the process of changing the price (recommendation weights, search rankings, etc.) through automated or semi-automated means. Like ‘We’ll just twiddle all of these knobs in order to make more money.’ Offline companies can’t do these kinds of things. Doctorow imagines a gas station owner seeing someone leaving a vehicle that’s stranded in the snow and coming toward the station to get some snow chains. He doesn’t have the opportunity to change the prices on all of those before the customer walks through the door. In digital business, they can change everything all the time instantly and do that based on their surveillance data and other information.Amazon takes the app scam to a whole other level. Since it uses delivery service partner (DSP) companies for its vans, it has fired the companies when their drivers unionize. If those workers were employees of Amazon that would be illegal, but Amazon can claim that it exerts control over the drivers through an app. So it’s an intermediary.Amazon surveils delivery drivers with sensors in the vans that record the traffic around a vehicle. Inside the van cameras monitor the drivers down to the motion of their eyeballs and mouth. So if they’re singing along with the radio, Amazon can tell them they’re not paying attention to driving. They tell the drivers what route to drive and set crazy quotas for deliveries. Since they demand the dismissal of drivers who don’t live up to the standards it sets, Amazon drivers end up urinating in bottles. The fix? They get in trouble if they come back to the depot with bottles full of urine, so they throw them out the window and then you have roads leading to Amazon depots that are littered with sealed bottles of human urine.Twisting Intellectual Property LawWhen big tech companies say it’s impossible to run code of your choosing on their computers, what they’re really ...
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Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
Mar 800:22:38Tap to summarizeHello Friends,Tonight, I’m picking the winners for the book giveaway and will be sending the books out ASAP (hopefully tomorrow). Thanks to those who participated.Today, I’m discussing Enshittification by Cory Doctorow and then following up with some links for writers. This is a ‘Part One’ because there are many issues Doctorow illuminates, and then he concludes with some ideas for changing online culture. These deserve a discussion as well.Also—I mentioned this in Friday’s “Library and Banned Books News,” but if you only read Sunday’s book discussions: I will be changing the schedule in a week or two so that there is only one post per week, on Sunday. The Library/Banned Books News will alternate with the book discussions. Two reasons for this:* I feel the world is just so much right now and people are dealing with an onslaught of information.* I want more time to work on a novel that I have finally started! (Yay!)Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory DoctorowI’d like to explore Enshittification in depth because I think the story it tells is important for all of us. There may be three parts to the discussion (not sure). I encourage you to get your hands on the book ASAP and read along. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in now. 😊“You Are Not Just an Ambulatory Wallet”“It’s not just you. The Internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of s**t, all at once. Worse, the digital is merging with the physical, which means that the same forces that are wrecking our platforms are also wrecking our homes and our cars, the places where we work and shop. The world is increasingly made up of computers we put our bodies into, and computers we put into our bodies. And these computers suck.” (3)Doctorow notes that he is an Internet activist who’s been working for digital human rights for decades. He calls our era the Enshittocene, which has been caused by specific policy decisions at ‘middlemen’ platforms that connect business customers to end users or connect workers with their customers. Some of the bad actors he discusses are eBay, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Google (connects publishers and advertisers to searchers) and Facebook (connects people who want to socialize rather than search).So, what is enshittification?Doctorow names it in four steps:* First, platforms are good to their users.* Then they use their users to make things better for their business customers.* Next, they abuse those business customers to clawback all the value for themselves.* Finally, they have become a giant pile of s**t. Why Do We Stick Around if the Platform is So Bad?There’s a cost for leaving these spaces even though it’s become a hassle to be there. For example, if you leave Facebook, it’s likely the people you hang out with will not be available to you on another platform—it’s hard to get other people to switch. So when Facebook realized that it could make money from advertisers and publishers, they did so by spying on the users and then using an algorithm to target advertising based on what the users were interested in. Eventually, Facebook stopped being good for business customers as well by increasing the price of targeted ads and, at the same time, not showing the ads to the users that the advertisers had selected.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Is It Truly Evil?All the platforms discussed have engaged in downright evil behavior, but Amazon is among the most egregious in that their policies affect everyone, including people who have never used their platform. Let’s look at their story. Other platforms are variations on the Amazon theme.Amazon also started out as good for users. It had a lot of investors with a lot of money which it used to subsidize goods (sometimes selling them below cost) and shipping. It had a generous ‘no questions asked, postage paid’ return policy.Early on, Amazon couldn’t lock people into using it the way Facebook could. So it came up with the idea of Prime membership, which creates lock-in because customers are paying for shipping a year in advance. Quite the incentive to shop on Amazon. In addition when you buy audiobooks, movies, and most e-books and e-magazines from Amazon, you’re permanently locked into Amazon‘s platform because the projects are sold with digital rights management. There’s a form of encryption that will force you to view or to listen to those products using apps that Amazon controls. If you leave Amazon and delete those apps, you lose all the media you’ve bought from their platform—an incredibly high cost of switching.Amazon was good to its business customers until it wasn’t. Because Amazon tracks so many users and people stop there for almost anything, Amazon has been able to extract higher discounts from the merchants who sell there. This brings in more users, which, again, makes the platform even more indispensable for the merchants. They have to go there—allowing Amazon to keep requiring deeper discounts, and on and on.It finally comes to stage three, the pile of s**t stage: Amazon using tactics to shift value from the business customers to itself. It started tracking merchants’ best-selling items and cloning them and, at the same time, moving the original seller’s items far down on the search results. The original product doesn’t show when a person searches for it specifically. It shows the Amazon clone instead. Amazon also charges merchants a lot of junk fees that are pitched as optional, but in effect, they’re mandatory. Prime is an example. If a merchant doesn’t include prime shipping, then people won’t pick them. They are pushed so far down in the search results that they’re basically nonexistent. Yet another thing merchants must do: Use fulfillment by Amazon, a service where the merchant sends items to Amazon’s warehouse, where they’re packed and then delivered. It’s more expensive than comparable or even superior shipping services from other shipping companies, but if a merchant ships through a third-party company, then it gets dropped down in the search and ceases to exist. Amazon is gouging its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods (which compete directly with those merchants’ goods).All this turns into higher prices for customers. Merchants pay Amazon “through the nose.” Amazon junk fees add up to 45 to 51 percent of what it earns on the platform. So merchants raise prices on their products, not just for Amazon customers, but as a whole. For reasons that are unclear to me (seem like a loophole and a cheat at the same time), this is necessary for Amazon to stay clear of the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against them. So, we’re all paying the ‘Amazon tax’ no matter where we shop.Doctorow makes similar enshittification arguments for Apple, for its iPhone, and for Twitter. (However, many people were able to leave Twitter when Musk came along and turned into the Nazi platform it is.) Enshittification is well worth reading to see how Apple and Google are in cahoots. (Don’t believe Apple when they say they are not tracking you.) But, wait! There’s more!How Did We Get HereDoctorow shows why this Enshittocene spread so far and so fast by looking at the world that companies operate in.Any company would want to charge as much as possible for goods and services while they spend as little as possible, paying the lowest possible wages, giving customers the lowest quality products, and selling them with the highest prices. What stops them is if workers could quit over low pay; if their suppliers would stop shipping products when their invoices are unpaid; and if the customers would turn away because of the high prices. But our enshittifiers are effectively monopolies, so the markets and the competition to stop them don’t exist. Add to this that they’re not regulated by the government.Part Two will discuss how all this happened: how competition, regulation, interoperability of computers, and worker power all slipped away. Meanwhile, repeat reminder: I recommend you get your hands on the book. If you want to borrow it from the library, it probably has a hold list, so put your name in ASAP.A Few Links of Interest for WritersWhat is AI Voice?Authors and Money (or Lack Thereof)Authors Hoping to be Published This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com
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Book Giveaway and Gratitude
Mar 100:13:30Tap to summarizeHello Friends,I decided to celebrate, dive into gratitude, and relax this weekend rather than write an essay. And read a bit of a book about Mexicans in the 1920s fleeing the Cristero War as research from the novel I’m just starting.I want to celebrate that we here on Be a Cactus are now a group of over 500 subscribers, a thing I am very grateful for! So—I’m having a book giveaway for U.S. subscribers. (I once gave away a book that went to Europe, and I paid $38 for the shipping. Yikes!)I’d like to send out two copies each of Acts of Contrition and Keep Sweet along with fabric bookmarks that I handmade. Read the descriptions below, and if you are interested, click the link to message me, indicating which book you would prefer. If there are more than two people who are interested for either, I’ll put names in a hat and draw.Keep Sweet (Crossover Novel)Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Acts of Contrition (Feminist Literary Short Fiction)The women in Acts of Contrition face society’s devaluation, from parents, from elders, from all who assume authority over them. They battle oppressions as simple as gender stereotyping, as complex as prerequisites to friendship or love. Some can look back and laugh, some find luck in their escape from harm, some engineer their own good fortune, all the while riding a wave of dark humor. What all the characters come to understand is that silence places them at greater risk than speaking out. They progress toward freedom through the telling of their stories.GratitudeIt’s great seeing books of poetry coming from friends I’ve met through various literary organizations and writers support groups. I truly loved Here to Be Remade by Lavina Blossom (Bamboo Dart Press), who is also an artist. Just arrived is Anna Gasaway’s My Mother’s Husbands from Finishing Line Press.I’m also grateful for lifelong friends. One sent me a ‘blind date with a book’ surprise this week. The wrapping was so beautiful, I waited a day to open it. Part of my relaxing this weekend will be doing literary word searches. (I think I’ll start with Margaret Atwood.) Thanks, Kathy!A deeper dive into The Little Magazine for those interested:The Little Magazine That Defied American CensorshipMargaret Anderson’s Little Review fought to bring the great works of modernist literature to the United States.WritersWriters, did you read this? If not, you should.Thank you for reading, for being here, and for subscribing! Jo Scott-Coe Jo’s Substack Mary Camarillo Life With Riley This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victoriawaddle.substack.com
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A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls
Feb 2200:24:21Tap to summarizeStruggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.— Coretta Scott KingHello Friends,I hope you have been enjoying the Olympics. We had a birthday celebration this weekend, and I got to try a Himalayan restaurant (Indian, Nepali, and Tibetan food) and have ultra-chocolatey cake (recipe below). I’m also happy that my vision has cleared up a bit. Today I want to chat up A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls: Margaret C. Anderson, Book Bans, and the Fight to Modernize Literature by Adam Morgan. After that I have a little on the new author scam industry, abetted by AI, which allows the scammers to act like they’ve read books they know nothing about.A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls“The Red Scare made Americans paranoid that anyone they passed on the street could be a bomb-wielding anarchist, and Comstock and Sumner’s book-banning campaigns stoked fear that reading modern fiction and poetry could turn young women into disease-ridden lesbians and prostitutes.” (3)On October 4, 1920, Margaret Anderson was arrested and charged with publishing a ‘filthy, indecent, and disgusting’ work of fiction—an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses—in The Little Review and distributing copies through the Post Office Department in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act. A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls is the story of what led to this incident and what followed.Anderson was born in Indianapolis to an affluent and conventional family that included a depressed father, a controlling mother, and two sisters who shared some of her adventures. In 1908, she headed to Chicago, which was in artistic and literary bloom. At the time, Anderson was supported by her parents, who sent her sister to live with her in an effort to keep her on the safe side of societal norms.Margaret worked at various journals, increasingly more prestigious, eventually landing at The Dial, the most influential literary magazine of the time. There, she held various positions and learned many of the practical aspects of publishing a magazine. She met the “most prolific artists and writers” and by 1913 was gathering support to launch The Little Review. She did so in 1914. Though she was unable to pay contributors, she published many great writers because “[m]ost … magazines and publishers that could afford to pay poets and writers in those days were not—yet!—interested in the bizarre, mystifying, sexually explicit, or politically radical writing Margaret would champion in The Little Review.” (38) The list of contributors include the literary rockstars of the period. Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, and Sherwood Anderson were early contributors.In a stroke of luck, in 1916-17 Ezra Pound, who had previously been published in The Little Review, petitioned Anderson to publish him and T. S. Eliot in each issue, James Joyce when he liked, and Wyndham Lewis if he “comes back from the war” (93)—all writers “too odd and obscene to be published in major magazines that paid contributors.” (94)Pound wanted a guarantee of 5,000 words per issue and eight issues per year. If he could get this, art collector, patron of the avant-garde, and lawyer John Quinn, would pay the authors. (They needed a source of income.)The deal was made and began in April 1917. In 1918, The Little Review started to publish sections of Ulysses serially. By 1919, it was being censored—copies were held at the post office and later burned—and by 1920, Anderson and her co-publisher and life partner, Jane Heap, were on trial. This period contains the heart of A Danger, which includes long quotes from the published sections of Ulysses which were deemed obscene, as well as what Anderson and Heap self-censored in an effort to continue the serialization.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Supporter of the avant-garde, lawyer John Quinn (mentioned above as the one who paid Little Review contributors Pound, Joyce, Eliot, and Lewis) ended up representing Anderson and Heap at their trial. While he was on the cutting edge in art and literature, he was socially conservative—it may be more true to say homophobic and racist. He, therefore, resented working for Anderson and Heap as he didn’t approve of their relationship. In truth, he hoped to have the case dropped if the women agreed to stop publishing Ulysses. He believed this would help sales of the novel when it was published because Little Review readers would want to finish it.Over the life of the magazine, Anderson’s choices sometimes threatened its existence through the loss of her patrons. Her support of the anarchist Emma Goldman was especially controversial among her early donors and subscribers. In 1914, Anderson’s father died at the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane in Indianapolis of a hemorrhagic stroke caused by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain. His death ended Anderson’s parental support. Her mother, whose conventional morality was ruffled by everything Margaret did, cut her off when she refused to abandon the magazine. They never saw one another again.Anderson is courageously undeterred. I feel that her early (extreme) privilege was necessary to her undaunted sense of the importance of her work. Still, she proves stalwart. Out of money and evicted from their apartment after expressing support of Emma Goldman, she and Heap create an encampment on a Lake Michigan beach north of Chicago. Later, they break into a house in California. When they learn the owner is the local sheriff, they convince him to rent it to them.In fact, much of what takes place in Danger feels like the story of another world, both the weirdness and the luck. At times, Anderson and Heap live in French castles. When Anderson’s sister divorces, she and Heap adopt her children only to later leave them in Paris with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who then adopt them. (Wouldn’t you love to read the biography of those boys?) Unbelievably, Anderson, an accomplished pianist, gets the Mason & Hamlin Company to give her a new piano in exchange for free advertising each time she moves into a place where she has room for one (by my count, four pianos).Anderson and Heap published their last issue in 1929. Ulysses would be published as a complete novel in Paris by Sylvia Beach, who didn’t fare much better than Anderson for all her support of Joyce.In her introduction to the 1972 edition, Flanner describes the process by which “Ulysses,” …. was brought about:Ulysses was the paying investment of his lifetime after years of penury, Sylvia said, while hardly acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs almost wiped out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random House in New York for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which, as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. “I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce, the pleasure was mine—an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him.”( Janet Flanner, introduction to “Paris was Yesterday,” quoted in “By way of Books and Their Makers: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce” by Macy Halford, March 5, 2010, “The New Yorker.”)After they end publication of The Little Review, Anderson and Heap both join a cultish group of followers of George Ivanovich Gurdieff.“By following him, his students could evolve their minds into something semi-divine—and if enough human beings did the same thing, their collective consciousness could prevent the destruction of the universe.” (190)After a serious car accident, “Gurdjieff spent most of his time writing and dictating a manuscript that would become Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, an allegorical representation of his trackpads that reads like a Byzantine science fiction novel.” (192)It’s a strange turn in their previously admirable lives.A Danger includes a good deal of background for each major character or influence that we meet. We learn what William Carlos Williams wore and that Ezra Pound was engaged to Hilda Doolittle twice. While the lives of literary superstars might interest English majors, I think some readers will find the book a bit saggy and off point in these interjections.We also get the background of the many women that Anderson and Heap conduct affairs with and of those they partner with after their breakup. (Opera singer Georgette Leblanc is Anderson’s second significant love, and they remain together until Leblanc succumbs to cancer.) So many people circle one another in a dance of changing partners that it’s hard to keep them straight, and I’m not sure they all contribute to the story.Ultimately, though, Anderson’s life is worth the tale. Wild and wonderful as it is, it makes a good read and adds to the literary history of Chicago of the first quarter of the 20th century.I had requests for strawberry shortcake for the last two birthdays. This time, there was no special request, so I felt like going back to an old favorite—Hershey’s Cocoa Cake. This is super easy to make. I plan to make a slightly more complex chocolate cake for St. Patrick’s Day (Guinness stout, coffee, ganache filling ...
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Making Meaning with Your Story; Some Good Books
Feb 1500:28:22Tap to summarizeHello Friends,Here’s another set of quotes from Sojourners I thought you’d like:There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.- 1 John 4:18may the tide / that is entering even now / the lip of our understanding / carry you out / beyond the face of fear- Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats”And another I read on John Fugelsang (adjacent to fear, I think—kind of a ‘do the right thing even if you’re afraid’ quote.):Temporary power is never worth permanent disgrace. —John FugelsangSpeaking of perfect love, I hope you had a happy Valentine’s/Galentine’s/ Palentine’s Day yesterday.I’m a bit down that I can’t see well in my left eye four weeks after surgery, but am still hopeful that I’m not in the 5% of people who have no improvement. To chipper myself up, I thought I’d try something different today and see if you’re up for a challenge and then follow that with some good news.The ChallengeI’ve been thinking a lot about how I wish I had better known some of my friends and family who’ve died. And now I can’t ask them anything. This feeling has helped me to understand what I’d like to do that will leave a sort of personal record for loved ones when I am dead.I periodically write a ‘literary journeys’ article for the So Cal News Group newspapers. I wrote this for last Sunday. Have a read and see if you’d like to try it.Make your family’s life story meaningful for future generationsI haven’t made New Year’s resolutions for many years for the same reason most people stop doing so. My follow-through is pretty bad, so I end up feeling worse than when I started.If you’re like me and already feeling bad about a lack of progress on your literary resolutions for 2026 or even about not making a resolution, I have a challenge for you. You don’t need to read 100 books this year or write a novel draft in three months. Instead, kickstart your creativity with something that will be a gift to your most important readers — your family. Explore your life story in a way that will be meaningful for the next generation. In a way that will be meaningful for you.In the last five years, which have been full of loss for me, I’ve come to realize the importance of family stories. My parents, brother, half-sister, lifelong friend, two sisters-in-law and others close to me are gone. I’ve realized that I know almost nothing about my parents’ childhoods, about their early years, their hopes and dreams. They were not ones to write letters or have a video recorder. They didn’t leave a record for us to look back on. My brother died far too young, but I have a single voice message he left me, wishing me a happy birthday. I keep it to play periodically. To hear his voice.I happen to have made one recording of my parents’ voices about five years before they died. I’d received a recorder-microphone as a gift so that I could quickly save my thoughts and ideas for the stories I would write. On a whim, I decided to bring it to my parents’ house one evening along with dinner. After we ate, my husband took to the kitchen to wash the dishes, and I started asking questions. One of my dad’s funniest and most moving stories was about his grandmother’s dog, who waited for him at the bus stop each day after school. I forgot about the recording, but after my parents had died, I happened upon it in my computer files. I was excited to play it, but was unable to hear anything. However, I could see that something was there. I sent a copy to my son, who realized the loud noise of the pots and pans clanging in the kitchen at the beginning of the recording had set the sound range. He removed it, and my parents’ voices came to life. I was reduced to a puddle of wonder and tears. I emailed it to my siblings. One of my sisters started to listen to it while driving, but was so emotionally overwhelmed that she had to pull over.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.So, here’s what I’m hoping you will do: if your parents are still alive, ask them the following questions. And then answer these questions for yourself, both in writing and in a recording. When you or your family are ready, listen and read.These questions are a bit different from the usual writing prompts, but I think they can open the door to related memories and to buried emotions, hopes and dreams.* Who is the bravest person you’ve known? Not someone you’ve read about or can find in the history books. Someone in your life: a friend, relative, coworker, etc.* Who was your best childhood friend?* Did you have your own bedroom growing up or did you share with a sibling? Describe your room. (This can lead to interesting reflections on sibling relationships.)* Describe your favorite childhood hideaway. Why did you go there? What did you do there?* Discuss your childhood pets.* Think of a time when you did something you shouldn’t have done. Describe how it made you feel.* Have you ever needed stitches, broken a bone, or been hospitalized?* Who was your favorite relative?* Who was your most interesting neighbor?* What was your most beloved toy?* What was your mother’s favorite perfume? Does it trigger any memories?* How did you spend holidays with your extended family?* Describe a time when something went completely wrong while your family was traveling.* What was the best home you lived in growing up? Why?* What major world events do you remember from your childhood and young adult years?* Describe your earliest jobs. What did you do? What was the environment like? What were your coworkers like?When we talk about the ordinary events of our childhoods, we illuminate how full of possibility and imagination we have always been. Be known to your loved ones. It’s a gift.Authors Connect with Me, Their ReaderI mentioned recently that I’m writing thank you notes to authors. Two YA authors have emailed me responses that were very kind— Chris Crutcher said he admires people who had a career in public education. That made me want to go back a grab something he wrote. I found a short story as a stand alone audiobook for a series called “Guys Read” edited by John Scieszka. The story is “The Meat Grinder.” The publisher’s description is: If Devin Mack can’t actually fight his father, he’s going to fight everyone he can find on the football field.This doesn’t do it justice. The abused Devin Mack, who has been in and out of foster care, is actually forced into high school football and just wants out. He’s small and no athlete. But a star player wants him to believe in himself and works to make that happen. It’s a fun story, not least because of Devin’s voice. A great story for teens, including those who find sports humiliating. Also—a great story for writers who want to see how character voice is done!I also wrote an email to Jonathan Maberry, who is a NYTimes bestselling writer of horror. He has a YA series entitled Rot & Ruin that I used to booktalk to our students. (I wrote a bit about it here.) It’s creative and creepy. I told him how much the students liked his books. He wrote back a thank you and mentioned that Rot & Ruin is in development for a film. He said that his middle school librarian “absolutely changed the course” of his life. (Yay, librarians!)I mentioned last week that my friends and I had seen George Saunders on his book tour. In Story Club with George Saunders he had told the story of his dog, Guin, being very sick. It was an ongoing issue that we clubbers were following. Apparently, she had a UTI and, now treated, is doing much better. But I was moved by the story and took a copy of The Mortality of Dogs and Humans to him as well as a bookmark I’d made for him from fabric with a dog print. He saw my name on the book and said, “Is this you? I feel like I know you.” (Because I comment on the stories etc.—I am an active member.) That made me smile.So—if you’re feeling blue, why not write a little note to an author whose work you appreciate? They are often kind and respond.What I’m ReadingI’m reading some good books and will discuss them soon. I finished A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls by Adam Morgan. It’s about Margaret Anderson as the creator of the literary journal The Little Review, which serially published sections of James Joyce’s Ulysses until Anderson and her partner (Jane Heap) were arrested and charged with mailing obscene literature. I will probably discuss it next week.I’m in the middle of Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. I know some tech companies are led by horrible people doing horrible things, but I didn’t realize how horrible they actually are. Doctorow is good at explaining the who, what, and why. But I’m getting a little down and looking forward to the last section of the book where he will discuss what we’re supposed to do about it.Here’s ...
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Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang
Feb 100:24:23Tap to summarizeHello Friends,I’m writing this a bit early because I’m going out of town, first, to attend the life celebration of a friend’s mother, and then to go with my friends to hear George Saunders in Santa Cruz as he tours for his new novel Vigil. I confess: my husband wanted the audiobook, so I listened to Vigil the day it launched. My friends and I will be getting signed copies at the event, and then we’ll read and talk about it together. Lovely.I’ve wanted to discuss Separation of Church and Hate by John Fugelsang for a while. If you enjoy Be a Cactus, please click the heart and/or comment. It helps others to find us. Okay, here we go!Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds by John Fugelsang“The primary driver of most global conflict, oppression of women, suppression of science, persecution of gay people, and abuse of power is not religion. It’s the extreme fundamentalist wings of all the world’s religions that provide this drama for the rest of humanity.” (6)“Paul’s a bit edgier than Jesus in ways that make him more attractive to a certain kind of right-wing believer. While the gospel teachings emphasize love, compassion, and inclusivity, Paul’s personal opinions about women and sexuality just couldn’t help but bleed through his writings. Which means that over the last two thousand years, many Christians have been taught to prioritize certain passages from Paul’s letters that suit their personal biases over Jesus’s irritating orders to love everyone.” (46)The inside book jacket of Separation claims that “the son of a former Catholic nun and a [former] Franciscan brother delivers a deeply irreverent and Biblically correct takedown of far-right Christian hatred.” I found the bits of humor less irreverent than refreshing. Generally, the book is a defense of Jesus’s ministry. Fugelsang takes down Christian Nationalist and fundamental evangelists’ arguments one after another, showing that they are not based on the words or actions of Jesus, but simply self-serving baloney. He reminds us that context matters—and he gives that context.“He was the most famous innocent brown skin man ever to be wrongly executed by the state, and he was deliberately killed in the most painful and humiliating of ways.” (21)Separation is for anyone who wants to debate far-right Christians on the hot-button topics of the day. This includes anyone from true believers to atheists. (You don’t have to believe in a God to prove that what Christian nationalists say about him is not based on the text of the New Testament.) Fugelsang includes many chapter titles that begin with “Thou Shalt Not” and include: Take All This Too Literally; Hate Feminists; Hate the Gays; Hate People Who Have Abortions; Hate “Illegals”; Hate on Poor People; Kill People Who Kill People to Prove that Killing People is Wrong; Hate Gun Control or Worship Warrior Bro-Dude Jesus; Hate Jews, Muslims, or Even Atheists; Be, or Defend, a White Supremacist.“Jesus, disdained wealth, and earthly power, and challenged traditional laws of his own faith. He rejected earthly materialism, renounced the idea of revenge, and commanded us to welcome the stranger.I know, right? Just like Donald Trump.” (23)What Fugelsang tells us will be familiar to people with knowledge of the Bible. I was raised as a Catholic, as was Fugelsang—though his family was far more liberal than mine. His parents “tried to raise us to be progressive, free-thinking, sexually-repressed Catholics” 😂 Of his father, Fugelsang says, “His overall parenting strategy was to guarantee that I’d be way too liberal to ever fit in with the Christians and far too Christian to ever blend in with the liberals. And almost every therapist I’ve ever been able to afford has agreed that his plan worked perfectly.” In general, mid-to-late-twentieth century Catholics were never encouraged to read scripture. Specific Bible stories are on rotation in the Mass, each week delivering something from the Old Testament, something from the Gospels, and something from the Epistles (letters, New Testament, but not the Gospels). However, many Bible stories are left out of the rotation—perhaps because they are too dull, too crude, or too sexually explicit for the listeners (yes, really).When I was a teen, I decided to read the Bible. Later, I also took a ‘Bible as Literature’ class in college, which covered only a portion of the text. However, from these studies and from the weekly readings in church, I knew the stories that Fugelsang addresses and why far-right Christianity has them wrong. For example, when someone tells me things like the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about the evils of homosexuality, I know it’s about accepting the stranger. But I would never be able to quote chapter and verse to prove it. In fact, in most cases, I couldn’t even tell you which book of the Bible they are in. For that, you need someone like Monte Mader, who can quote anything in the Bible from memory and tear any Christian Nationalist argument to pieces.This is also what Fugelsang offers his reader. He reminds us that Jesus brings about a New Covenant through his life, teachings, death, and resurrection, fulfilling and superseding the Abrahamic Covenant. This means Fugelsang is not worried about previous guidance. “With this New Covenant, the emphasis shifts to love, grace, and compassion (John 13:34).” (40)Fugelsang points out what should be obvious to those who have read the New Testament—that the apostle Paul is Jesus’s PR man and was dispensing advice in letters as he tried to keep the early church together. Some of his advice contradicts the word of Jesus and many Christians have based their tenets on it. Yes, Paul is why so many of us are so screwed up. (The Sermon on the Mount/the Beatitudes play pretty big in Separation.) But in Paul’s defense, he was just writing letters to various Christian enclaves and communities (and these letters sometimes contradict one another—women can lead, no women need to be quiet in public, etc.). He didn’t know they would be gathered together and included in the canon. The main point: stop taking Paul’s advice over Jesus’s commands. “If Jesus was the game-changing rock star, Paul was his hardworking, deeply uptight, conservative PR guy.” (43)“Now remember, Paul also ordered slaves to be obedient to their masters. Most of us would disregard that admonition as coming from a flawed man from an archaic era, right? Take note of anyone who thinks Paul’s order for women to submit shouldn’t be weighed in a similar context. Paul is not, in fact, Jesus.” (99)Separation is organized by discussions of popular fundamentalist arguments and the words of Jesus that dismantle them. So: There is the claim of the far-right and the scripture it is based on; then there is the actual context of that scripture. (This is very helpful if you want to back up your arguments.)Beyond all this, it’s nice to read and be reminded of what Jesus was actually like. It is, dare I say, refreshing? “I was taught…that Christianity was about the things Jesus prioritized: Service to others. Forgiveness. Caring for the poor, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner. Fighting injustice with nonviolence, like Dr. King and Gandhi. Standing up for the less fortunate, like Dorothy Day and Catholic Charities. Love. Empathy. Compassion.” (3)“And if there’s one thing the Bible shows us, it’s that authoritarian government, aligned with some extreme conservative religious fundamentalists, literally killed Jesus.” (9)Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Some Interesting Discussions in Separation of Church and Hate that will upset the fundamentalist apple cart:Jesus and WomenThere’s a discussion of how women kept Jesus’s ministry afloat financially.* “We know that Mary Magdalene, along with Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, were fellow travelers. To a sane person in the twenty-first century it might seem obvious that there were actually fifteen apostles, at least.* “Wrong, says the church. Those women might have always been with JC and the twelve, but they didn’t have full apostle passes. They just followed Jesus from gig to gig, working the merch tables like it was a boy band tour. The church continues to treat these women as secondary figures rather than leaders.” (105)* “All four Gospel writers specifically cite Jesus rejecting the accepted cultural norms and treating women with respect. Not only did he break rabbinic laws of his day by teaching and talking to women, but he allowed women to touch him—including those considered ‘unclean’ by the culture at large.* He begins in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:28, by essentially telling men, “Stop looking at her like that.”* “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’* This could be the first recorded biblical utterance of ‘Eyes up here, buddy.’ Jesus’s admonition to not look on women lustfully is not anti-sex—it’s anti-sexual harassment.” (90-91)Abortion* Fugelsang argues that the Bible never forbids it and Jesus never mentions it. “Again, nobody’s saying Jesu...
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Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse
Jan 400:20:12Tap to summarizeSo let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. - Galatians 6:9“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” —James Baldwin“People can cry much easier than they can change.” —James BaldwinHello Friends,I missed posting last Sunday because I was sick for a week over the holidays. I have a lot to catch up on, but have been feeling down and not exactly hopping to it, as they say. I’m missing those in my generation who have died—my brother, my lifelong friend, my sisters-in-law, and others. I miss my parents and their generation as well, but their exit feels more natural. With others, I have the irrational desire to call them and say, “Okay, that’s enough of missing you. You need to get back here right now!” Do you feel this way about loved ones who are gone too soon?Friday, I was thinking about the three quotes above. I’d like to believe the first, am more inclined to believe the second, and worry about the third. All this was on my mind before the Venezuela debacle.I was planning to post some gift links to things you might enjoy, but this Venezuela invasion made me think that a discussion of Nobody’s Girl —which I’d planned for next week—connects to the news right now. I know that the invasion is about so much more than the Epstein files (Heather Cox Richardson has a great assessment in this video showing the move toward ‘spheres of influence’ a la Putin). But Epstein is a piece. Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes points to it:So—I’m going to put the book discussion first. I’m certain you know there are triggering events in the memoir. I need to include some of that here. Links to 2025 round-ups follow, in case you are up for that, too.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.“I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s house? And why haven’t they led to the prosecution of any more abusers?” (366)From Publishers Marketplace’s Publishers Lunch newsletter on December 17, 2025:Nobody’s Girl’ Sells 1 Million CopiesVirginia Roberts Giuffre’s NOBODY’S GIRL, her posthumous memoir of sexual abuse and trafficking by Jeffrey Epstein, has sold 1 million copies around the world ….“This is a bittersweet moment for us,” Giuffre’s family said in a statement. “We are enormously proud of our sister, and the impact she continues to have on the world. We’re also filled with so much sorrow that she couldn’t be here to witness the impact of her words.…”Giuffre died by suicide in April. Before publication, Giuffre’s family asked for revisions to the manuscript to reflect the author’s relationship with her husband, who she accused of abuse and from whom she was getting divorced.Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre“Today I know that Epstein liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life support system for a vagina.’ I didn’t know that then.” (140)Nobody’s Girl begins with a note from Giuffre’s collaborator, Amy Wallace. She lets the reader know that Giuffre had called her early in 2025 to tell her that her husband, Robbie, had assaulted her during an argument. She also mentions that Robbie was arrested in 2015—ten years prior to the publication of the book—after assaulting her. This is the edit that Giuffre’s family asked for. Throughout the book, Giuffre only has positive things to say about her husband. He appears as a rescuing hero.Those frontloaded facts about the two assaults change the way the reader sees the couple’s relationship, the way we engage with the entire text. Between this and the knowledge that Giuffre died by suicide in April 2025, we read under a black cloud.It isn’t just the sections on being trafficked by Epstein that are a rough go. Giuffre was abused from childhood, starting with her father, who began molesting her when she was only seven years old, letting her know that if she told anyone, he would kill her younger brother and bury him in the woods. A pedophile neighbor, who seems to have an understanding with her father, also rapes her repeatedly. She finds some solace in caring for and riding horses.When, as a mere child, Giuffre has repeated UTIs and can’t hold her urine at school, she sees a doctor who tells her mother that her hymen is broken. Her mother replies that she rides horses.Giuffre shares that she believes her mother knew early on what was happening to her but didn’t want to face the truth. Decades later, when she tried to address the issue, her mother would tell her that she couldn’t bear to hear about it.“But if I was going to finally call Dad out, I wanted to make sure at least my uncles and aunts could hear. ‘This guy has been fucking me for years, since I was a little kid,’ I yelled in their direction, ‘and no one‘s done shit about it.’ I wish I could say they all stood up then to form a protective barrier around me. But they didn’t move. So after a startled silence, Dad grabbed me by my neck with one hand and punched me in the face with the other. Then he shoved me into the borrowed camper where we’d all been sleeping and continued beating me until my lips were split open, and one of my eyes was swollen shut.… The next morning I woke up thinking that since I’d finally revealed my father‘s abuse out loud, something would have to change. Maybe, at the very least, someone would acknowledge what I’ve been through. Instead, before we left to drive back to Florida, the entire extended family acted as if nothing had happened.” (47)Giuffre’s trajectory is textbook abused-kid stuff: she begins starving herself, drinking and doing drugs, and acting out. She’s sent to a reform camp for juvenile delinquents, Growing Together, where kids supervised and restrained the ‘newcomers’ in what Giuffre describes as a Lord of the Flies atmosphere of hazing, physical, and sexual abuse.Her ‘reform’ program includes such helpful exercises as being forced to stand in front of a mirror and hurl insults at herself. She runs away repeatedly. After being raped and nearly killed by a man who picked up Giuffre after asking her if she needed a lift, she escapes from a seedy motel room and is back on the street, afraid he will come back and find her (he has a gun). A limo stops and an old man with a young girl tells her he will help. She’s picked up by modeling agent Ron Eppinger, who rapes her, keeps her, calls her ‘baby’ and asks to be called ‘daddy.’ He trafficks her to a man in his fifties.She thinks this is what all men do—this is what life is. And who wouldn’t, in her shoes? She accepts it.“I didn’t know then what a therapist would tell me a decade later: that when children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together. I didn’t know that abuse victims struggle to see red flags because they become desensitized to inappropriate behavior.” (74)Not long after an FBI raid leads to the arrest of the fifty-something ‘boyfriend,’ her father, who was a groundskeeper at Mar-a-Lago, helps her get a job as a locker room attendant at the spa.One not-very-busy day, she sits at the reception desk reading an anatomy book. Her dream is to become a masseuse, and thereby escape the trap of her life. She’s studying. In walks Ghislaine Maxwell (who had seen her walking and targeted her). She chats Giuffre up, tells her she knows a man who wants a massage therapist to travel with him and is willing to train her. Excited, the sixteen-year-old gets her dad to give her a ride to Epstein’s pink mansion.Maxwell thrives in the same swamp as Epstein. She, too, is an apex predator, convincing countless girls that she can be the caring mother they never had. She often participates with Epstein in raping and abusing victims.“From the start, they manipulated me into participating in behaviors that ate away at me, eroding my ability to comprehend reality and preventing me from defending myself. From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.” (75)Like Giuffre’s father. Epstein threatens to harm her little brother. “‘We know where your brother goes to school. … You must never tell a soul what goes on in this house.’” (83) He and Maxwell sometimes take Giuffre on outings, just as parents would do, buy her little gifts, have her hair done and her teeth whitened, all of which make the abuse more confusing to her. She takes up to eight Xanax a day to cope.The book continues with a detailed account of Giuffre’s abuse and trafficking by Epstein and Maxwell, in various countries, to academics from prestigious universities and to powerful and famous people, including Prince Andrew. Giuffre endures sadism. She is one in a ...
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Who are We, Anyway? What are We Reading?
Dec 1400:22:00Tap to summarizeI had finished writing this post but hadn’t gotten a chance to record it yet when I heard the news that people were shot, injured, and killed at Brown University. Thoughts and prayers, yes, but without systemic change, our “unthinkable nightmare” will continue to be routine.Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me. - Isabel AllendeHello Friends,I don’t know what to think this holiday season when I see Santa dressed in camouflage, looking happy to go to war. Hasn’t this year been hard enough? Who thinks this is fun?Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz RyanImmigrants have been on my mind both because of what is happening to them under the Trump administration and because I hope to write a novel with IRL elements of some relatives. This week, while I was baking a lot of cookies, I decided to listen to a children’s audiobook because I wanted to see how the migrant child’s POV was handled. Here’s a little summary from a banned books poster on the Intercultural Research Development Association website.Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz RyanThe novel focuses on Esperanza, the only daughter of wealthy Mexican parents, and follows the events that occur after her father’s murder. It is a story of love, loss, and hope, set in Mexico during the 1930s, just after the Mexican Revolution. Grade level: 5-6.Actually, a lot of the book takes place in Southern California after Esperanza and her mom are forced to flee Mexico and their privileged lives there. They become farm workers. And that’s why I was interested in the novel.Esperanza has been withdrawn from schools in various states and districts. I’d say I can’t imagine why, except that I can. What I mean is, there is no good reason for the bans. No foul language, no sexual content (not even ‘clean’ romance), no violence, nothing age inappropriate. But, like most banned books, it empathizes with ‘the other.’ The migrant farm workers. It also discusses unions and strikes in a simple way. It looks at racial and cultural prejudice. On the whole, it’s a very good novel that helps pre-teens understand desperate people in the Great Depression and what it is like to work on a vast agribusiness farm. The only fault I found in it—this is a spoiler, but I can’t imagine you are going to read a book for ten and eleven-year-olds—is that a teenage friend of Esperanza’s somehow goes all the way back to Aguascalientes in Central Mexico (over 1,600 miles one way) and retrieves Esperanza’s grandmother (abuela) and returns with her to Kern County, CA. I wanted to know how in the world he achieved that, but there are no details. I think even a ten-year-old might question it. However, on the whole, it’s a wonderful book for kids. So if you’re looking for a gift book, thumbs up. (If you’re looking for a teen/YA gift book, consider mine, Keep Sweet.)Digression: I’m thinking about my sentence “Esperanza has been withdrawn from schools in various states and districts.” In Spanish, esperanza is hope. So, yeah. And while you might not think of a book being removed from a school district as a ban, the book is banned from that district. It doesn’t have to be a national ban to use the word. In addition, in Utah, if a book is banned in three districts, then it is removed from all public schools, AND they didn’t allow students to bring copies of those banned books on campus to read until advocacy groups pressured them into changing the rules. Big bans! It’s like they can’t tell the difference between reading and smoking weed. Between bringing your favorite book to campus and bringing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. * Catholics in power in the Trump administration and the Supreme Court ignore Catholic leadership from the Pope on down about the treatment of immigrants (fun fact—61% of those deported are also Catholic).Stop in the Name of God by Charlie KirkA book I’m not going to read is Charlie Kirk’s Stop in the Name of God: Why Honoring the Sabbath Will Transform Your Life. Apparently, it is a big bestseller. In his Book Club newsletter, Ron Charles discusses it, and I thought you might be interested in what he has to say. While he points out the lack of editing resulting in many errors such as having the exact same, word-for-word, sentence on consecutive pages (Donald Trump is a co-publisher, so …), he also gives Kirk credit for pointing out that people need down time as part of a spiritual practice.[M]uch of this posthumously published book is committed to theological arguments, devotional reflections and practical advice on reclaiming the Sabbath to restore spiritual balance in a culture overstimulated by technology and consumerism. … But “Stop” is also a strange, uneven volume that sometimes gets lost in the wilderness.His grasp of world history and religious history is spotty; his philosophical analysis displays the rigor of a late-night bull session after the pizza has grown cold. False choices, straw man arguments, cosmic leaps — it’s a Macy’s parade of inflated fallacies. When he speaks from the heart about the blessings of setting aside a day every week, he can be genuinely moving; when he tries to make a case for Intelligent Design, he should be moving on.Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Awake by Jen HatmakerWikipedia describes Jen Hatmaker as an American author, speaker, blogger, and television presenter. Apparently she is very well known in the evangelical/conservative Christian world, which canceled her (literally—her publisher stopped publishing her books) when she came out as supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. According to Hatmaker herself, she was also canceled when she got a divorce in 2020 after discovering her husband’s affair. I guess that can happen twice.I put Awake on hold at the library because I read something about it which gave me the idea that it discussed purity culture in the evangelical space. I don’t follow evangelical celebrities, so I didn’t know any of the above background on Hatmaker. This put me at a disadvantage in reading the memoir.The first 100 pages make the assumption that the reader knows who Hatmaker is and what she’s done. She starts with waking from a dead sleep to hear her husband talking on the phone to his lover, saying he can’t quit her. So, a compelling beginning. But then she talks about being the wife of a pastor of a small church. When she then mentions calling her personal assistant to ask her to make some travel arrangements, I thought, ‘How does a pastor’s wife—of a very small church, that is—have the money for a personal assistant?’ And, yes, I had similar questions throughout those 100 pages.Hatmaker gets through her trauma with some very good friends, ones who seem to have a lot of money and can offer her cool getaways. They are also handy. At one point, a group of them rebuild her porch and decorate it beautifully. While these women are generally in the Christian community, some of them are also pretty New Agey. They do things like sage her house to get rid of the bad vibes from the broken marriage.While Hatmaker continues to be a believer, she decides to leave her church and hasn’t joined another. She does write a bit about the purity culture—she married as a teen who was still in college, partly so she could have sanctioned sex. Mostly she goes from that first moment when she awakens to her husband’s betrayal to the moment when she is awakened to her authority over herself and her responsibility for her own life. This well-worn trope is nice—the reader is glad for her—but this wasn’t the book I was looking for.* On church, purity, and sexual abuse: I read that victims of the Catholic clergy in the New Orleans Archdiocese are to receive $230 million.AdventAs I think of the theme of being awake, I realize I have sort of been sleeping through the season of Advent, which saddens me because I appreciate the sense of renewal it brings when I pay attention. My son introduced the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer to me, and I like how there is a prayer in there for just about everything. Last week, someone asked me to pray for their ill/injured dog. Yes, I found a good one specifically for that. For Advent, there are prayers for being in the presence of grace and love (for Christians, in the person of Jesus).Rather than take myself to task, as I write this, I figure I have two weeks left of the traditional Advent season, and I don’t want it to be a Santa in camouflage holiday. So I’m tuning in to what can be meaningful for me. Here’s something I loved:<a target="_blank" href="https://open.substack.com/pu...
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Gift Ideas for Book Lovers And Do-Gooders!
Dec 700:25:15Tap to summarizeHello Friends,Everyone I know is focused on giving right now, which is pretty nice. However, I found myself getting stressed out on ‘Giving Tuesday’ because there were innumerable worthy groups I wanted to contribute to. I did manage many by carrying over to Wednesday. One thing I don’t like is when I donate to a charity, and they send me an email the next day saying something like ‘There’s still time to donate!’— making me look back because I think I must have screwed up.My latest blood donation was in November. They gave me these crazy PAC-MAN socks. Thanksgiving time seems to be sock time for the Red Cross. (Last year it was socks with the TV sitcom Friends theme.) If you’re in the middle of deciding what to give to which charities, giving blood is one of the nice things to do. 😊Gifts for Book Lovers/Gifts that Do GoodNovel TeasA friend gave this tea to me as part of a book launch gift when Keep Sweet came out. It’s fun for book lovers and authors. The tea itself is good enough (though not great) and each bag tag has a quote related to books.Good StoreEveryone I know in the teen/YA book sphere loves John and Hank Green. Their books are lovely. I booktalked them frequently and got high school nonreaders to give reading a try! Most teen readers love, love their books. They’ve made a lot of money on their work, and decided it was enough (in itself, a wonderful and wild decision when we think of the rapacious billionaires running our country). Now, they are working to make the world a better place. Through the Good Store, you can support maternal health in Sierra Leone, fight to end tuberculosis, and to save coral reefs.* 100% of the profits from Sun Basin Soap and the Awesome Socks Club go to Partners In Health—specifically to support the construction of the Maternal Center of Excellence in Sierra Leone.* 100% of the profits from Keats & Co go to Partners In Health to support their Tuberculosis Project in Lesotho. Tuberculosis is the world’s deadliest infectious disease—yet it is entirely preventable.* 100% of profits from EcoGeek purchases go to the Coral Reef Alliance—specifically the Maui Watershed Restoration project.I have been drinking the Keats & Co. teas (after John Keats, English Romantic era poet who died of TB), especially the Earl Grey. They are so good! Great quality, yummy. For the holidays, I added the purchase of teas, coffee, and wacky socks for friends and family.Also—If you have friends who haven’t read Everything is Tuberculosis, that would also be a nice gift. I discussed it here:More BooksFor all book lovers, here’s a reality check my friend Laura shared with me. If book titles were honest. Enjoy! Thanks for reading Be a Cactus! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Indie PressesI’ve often mentioned that it’s lovely to buy small press books. Here’s a list from LitHub that you might use to select gift books that you might not otherwise be aware of: 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025.And—a quick self-promo here—my books are from very small presses. Keep Sweet is for people fourteen years and up. (Topics are for mature readers.) Teens work to escape from a patriarchal cult. Timely.Elizabeth, the protagonist in “Keep Sweet,” Victoria Waddle’s latest release, is fourteen years old and living in a rural “Community” with her parents, three sister wives, and 16 siblings under the thumb of a “prophet” who controls everything, from their pets and candy consumption, to who they will marry and have children with. When he decides Elizabeth will marry her cousin, Elizabeth’s future seems doomed. But when she turns to the “helper” inside her and recognizes the power of her own intuition, she starts asking questions and finds her own voice. — Cati PorterBook ExchangeSomething I think is fun is to add a book I’ve read to the gifts I am giving family and friends. This is especially true if what they want is a donation to a worthy cause. I make the donation, but it’s fun to open something, right? I take books from my shelf that I believe they will like and wrap them up. Right now, I’m looking at some of my family book club books. I have more than one copy of some of those, basically new. I want to give two of my friends the same title so we can all talk about it later.If you are horrified that I give away lots of books, let me justify it through my library training. At work, I had to remove thousands of books—yes thousands. They became too worn or out-of-date; as science advanced, the material became misleading (‘We’ll go to the moon someday!’ ‘AIDS is a 100% death sentence’); people lost interest in the topic (a pop star, etc.). There are so many reasons to remove books and make way for new ones. So—I try to do that in my own life as well.Sacrament by Susan StraightI mentioned last week that I was reading this. It’s an especially good choice for Southern California readers and nurses anywhere, but the family love and friendships will appeal to just about any reader.The American RevolutionIf you or loved ones have been watching The American Revolution on PBS, you might want to get the companion book. ( I have it on my wishlist for Santa.) The series includes information that isn’t in many sources on the Revolutionary War, particularly the role of American Indians on both sides.I’m thinking there are other good books on the topic, which should be of peak interest right now with the coming of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Here is an article excerpted from a new book, so you can see if you like it, and two books I enjoyed when they were published. There will be renewed interest in them now. They, too, include information about the war that I had never learned before.Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters by Edward J. LarsonGive Me Independence: On 1776, the Pivotal Year For What Would Become America from LitHubEDWARD J. LARSON CONSIDERS THE IMPACT AND LEGACY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY CAUSEFrom Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters by Edward J. Larson1776 by David McCulloughAs a book about a momentous period of history, 1776 is short—under 300 pages excluding the endnotes. Its brevity is part of its success—it’s a tightly woven story of the trials and triumphs of George Washington and the Continental Army. The reader meets many players in the American Revolution from both sides of ‘the pond.’ David McCullough has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; his writing skills shine here.Previously, I had only read of King George III as a madman, and was surprised to find him pretty reasonable in this account. I learned why the leaders of the British Army and Navy made some costly decisions that, on the surface, appear blundering and foolish, but on closer examination, had merit. I understood why Washington ‘crossing the Delaware’ is so famous an event. I even learned about William Lee, the enslaved man who served with Washington, always by his side and in the thick of things.Though the success of the American Revolution depended on many people—and they are given credit here—George Washington is the star of the book. He takes the most ragtag, miserable group of diseased, undisciplined men, who several times flee from battle (you won’t read that in your history book!), and wins a war for independence. Success didn’t follow a straight line, and many important battles were lost along the way, causing Washington to despair and his second in command (Charles Lee) to privately question Washington’s ability to lead.1776 began so badly for Washington that he wrote to Joseph Reed (an adjunct general):“I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulders and entered the ranks, or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity, and my own conscience, had retired to the back country, and lived in a wigwam.”Reed, along with Charles Lee, came to criticize Washington for indecision—which was, as 1776 shows, a valid criticism. But Lee is the worst sort of backstabber. In an encounter that seems like it should have come from a fictional tale of intrigue, Lee wrote a letter to Reed about Washington:“[I] lament with you that fatal indecision of mind which in war is a much greater disqualification than stupidity or even want of personal courage. Accident may put a decisive blunder in the right, but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the men of the best parts if cursed with indecision.”This letter was accidentally delivered to ...
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