Weekly Roundup of History, Archaeology and Writing Wisdom Jan 3-9

My favorite posts from around the web this week. Enjoy!

Great post on researching & writing Virginia Wolf & the Bloomsbury group: a wise lesson in letting go of the total immersion in research so that the “fiction” can step out of the past and speak to you.

I sympathize. I find, before I can make the story happen effectively on the page, I have to let the borders blend between the history I know and the world I’ve imagined based on that history. A bit of willful forgetfulness. It isn’t that I abandon the factual, but that I have to find an imaginative spaciousness so that the characters live and breathe rather than exist in documents of the past.

Click here for Biographile Blog on Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf 

Stephen King’s 20 rules for writers. Hmm. Seem pretty sensible to me. How many of these do you follow? Click here for Stephen King’s post on OpenCulture.com  

Best cookie recipe ever! How to bake your own cuneiform tablet cookies from the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Many thanks to my husband for finding this link. How did I manage to train him to notice things like recipes for cuneiform cookies? I must be doing something right Click here for the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology post on Cuneiform Cookies   

Extremely quick (41 secs) video showing how stone blades can be flaked off from a larger chunk of stone using what looks like a bone or antler tool. There’s no spoken commentary and I couldn’t find an accompanying write up, so I’m interpreting what I’m seeing but I found it a vivid and remarkable recreation of a prehistoric skill. This must have taken a lot of practice and experimentation to recreate. Click here for Italian produced on flint-knapping video clip on Utube

Selma. This New York Review of Books post suggests a major distortion of history in this movie. “By distorting an essential truth about the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King over the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Selma has opened a very large and overdue debate over whether and how much truth the movie industry owes to the public. The film suggests that there was a struggle between King and Johnson over whether such a bill should be pushed following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, signed into law in July of that year. The clear implication is that Johnson was opposed to a voting rights bill, period, and that he had to be persuaded by King. This story has now been propagated to millions of viewers, to the point where young people in movie houses boo Johnson’s name.

But there was no struggle. This is pure fiction.” I have to say my recollection matches the NYRB view of history, although I’m no expert. Why portray conflict between Johnson and King when there was in fact a remarkable if wary partnership? What do you think of this? What motivates this choice? I can think of several despicable perhaps unconscious reasons for this depiction. Click here for post by Elizabeth Drew about the movie Selma on the New York Review of Books 

For the authors among you: a pretty darn good blog on book marketing and why one has to be smart about it. Some stuff I knew and do, other stuff is completely new to me. Darn. More crap to try if I ever get the time. Click here for Bad Redhead Media Post on Effective Book Marketing Strategies 

The Historical Novel Society Denver June Conference schedule is posted. My panel, Midwifery: Magic or Medicine? is on Saturday morning at 9:15. I’m happy to be presenting with Kim Zollman Rendfeld Lisa Yarde and Sam Thomas. See the whole schedule for an awe-inspiring weekend! Click here for the Historical Novel Society Conference website Schedule