Greetings Long Weekend!

I walked around the one mile loop with M.

T. and I had lunch at Benjarong.

I did a one mile loop by myself.

I did a one mile loop with A.

SPOILERS ENSUE!

I read _Trust Me On This_ by Jennifer Crusie last night. I don’t think I’ve ever read that before altho honestly, who even knows anymore. In _Dogs and Goddesses_, there is a device in which the three women are smacked by flyers for a dog training class. They go; they drink temple tonic; it gets even weirder from there. But in _Trust Me On This_, it’s not a flyer for a dog training class that is a thin cover story for a risen goddess trying to reconnect with her priestesses; it’s a flyer for an academic conference that focuses on popular literature. Our heroine, a lifestyle reporter named Dennie, attends with the goal of getting an interview with one of the presenters, who is a feminist named Janice who writes about marriage and whose own marriage the reporter recently learned is ending — she heard it from The Other Woman (named Tallie, but she is perpetually offscreen and unimportant). Dennie figures Janice has got to talk to the press at some point and Dennie will do a great job of presenting this situation as A Good Thing. Janice brings in hotel management and calls the cops and accuses Dennie of stalking her, after Dennie tries to make her case to Janice in a hotel restaurant. Dennie turns to one of Janice’s friends, and Janice calls — and apparently brigades and has a bunch of other people call — Dennie’s boss, Taylor, who threatens to fire Dennie.

I just want to note right here: Dennie _at no point_ turns on Janice and boy, howdy, she really could. First off, the thing Janice is angry about (Dennie overheard a conversation involving Janice in a hotel restaurant and would like to use quotes from it because they are Awesome and Inspiring) and accusing her of criming or whatever is something _Janice did on a commuter train_ early in her career, and which Dennie points out to Janice as a, hey, you know, I’m starting to get a little frosty here. But Dennie does _not_ turn on Janice.

You might be wondering, wait, how is this a romance novel, I mean, do Dennie and Janice get together? No, altho that would have been a great novel also, especially if Dennie then dumped Janice in favor of some other woman who displayed a considerably higher degree of integrity. That would be some awesomely high quality chick-lit right there. But this is decades-old contemporary romance set in Ohio, so abandon your dreams right now.

_Meanwhile_, also at the academic conference are a con artist and a couple of federal level law enforcement types in pursuit. There is some banter between Dennie and Alec, the younger of the two anti-fraudsters, and some hilarious interactions between Harry (the older of the two anti-fraudsters) and Victoria, another academic at the conference who is also the aunt of Alec. Big points for creating a really delightful secondary romantic couple between a woman in her early 60s and a man in his late 50s. Big, big points. This is not common in Romancelandia.

The con artist has/had an assistant who the feds are aware of, but don’t know a lot about, and they think Dennie is that assistant. She isn’t. Antics ensue.

OK, so what do we have here. We have a woman whose career is in jeopardy. She doesn’t really like her job stuck on the lifestyle pages, but journalism jobs are tough to come by, and she would like a better one before she quits. She does not get her wish, because of Janice.

Janice didn’t really like her husband, but also her career success hinged on her successful marriage, so she had a transition problem, too.

Janice’s husband didn’t like his wife, but he made sure he lined up a replacement woman before divorcing Janice.

Victoria is at the pinnacle of academic success, and is not at all sure what she wants next, but she sure isn’t impressed by the men in academia. Harry presents a geographical challenge: he’s based in Chicago and she’s in Columbus, and for either one of them, moving ends their career.

Alec loved chasing fraudsters in person, because he was his own boss; working for Harry is better on lots of ways, but he misses that independence.

Crusie manages to wrap up this entire mess.

In O. Henry The Gift style, Harry and Victoria both quit their jobs to go be with the other person. Once they realize this has happened, they go buy the undevelopable Florida land that the con artist was selling, buy a houseboat, and enjoy their life together.

Alec now has Harry’s job; he gets the benefits of chasing fraudsters online (sleeps in his own bed, decent food, etc.) plus he is The Boss.

Janice capitulates and gives Dennie the interview, enabling Janice (presumably) to get out in front of the scandal and reframe her own career and her feminism.

Dennie now has her pick of plum journalism offers not on the lifestyle pages, and opts to go to Chicago rather than New York, so that she can be with Alec.

Throughout the book, Dennie thinks about a lake with a ledge at one end, pretty high up, that she jumped off of as a kid with her friend Patience. Patience was brave and jumped, but Dennie was reluctant to jump and when she did jump, often had some scrapes and once a broken arm to show for it. Patience was constantly egging her on, and saying she’d catch her (not a good idea from a 10-15 foot jump, but you know, nothing about this book is sensible). When Dennie gets her interview with Janice, she puts Alec on hold while she gets it written, shops it around, collects job offers and figures out what she wants to do with her life.

In _Maybe This Time_, Andie puts her fiancee Will Spenser (hilarious name) on hold to go care for the kids in the haunted house. She ultimately dumps him (it’s not you, it’s me, and then, because this is a contemporary romance novel, he doesn’t accept the no immediately, altho he does eventually get the point).

In _Fast Women_, Nell is a brittle divorced woman who starts a new job and enters a new relationship more or less repeating what she did in her first marriage, quits the job and puts the relationship on hold to think things through, and _while_ she is in that nominal hiatus, gets another temporary job that enables her to solve some very old crimes that directly impacted her and Gabe, and which Gabe — a private detective — completely failed to realize were crimes and/or resolve them successfully.

Also, while we are here, there is so much confusion around Gabe and Chloe — she leaves him, but not completely for a while.

For that matter, Andie dumped her husband North and then they get back together again a decade later.

I mention all this stuff, because I’m specifically thinking of JAK and Jennifer Crusie as novelists born in a particular time frame, who are writing contemporary romance, and trying to figure out where the suspense / conflict / “story” is going to come from to support the actual story which is the formation of a new family unit / HEA / HFN. JAK settled into a pattern twenty years ago or more in which the hero and heroine meet (or re-meet) in some kind of fraught situation. They are each trying to solve either the same problem or problems which appear to be intertwined / related (looking for a missing person / object / both; solving a murder ; right a wrong ; etc.). After they each try to fend the other person off and fail, they agree to work on the problem together (to share information, to coordinate actions, to backup each other). I call this “The Deal”. As the problem is resolved (sometimes _after_ it is resolved), they each individually realize they _like_ working together and really intensely would _miss_ being together. They share this realization with each other and figure out how to go forward from there (HEA generally, but sometimes HFN).

“The Deal”, which creates conditions for attachment to develop, and the conclusion of “The Deal”, which threatens the attachment and ensure the parties who are attached _recognize_, _accept_ and _make a decision to act to protect_ the attachment is a loose framework which can be used to organize all sorts of interactions along the way to solving the mystery and helping the two parties get to know each other better and recognize that some of those irritating things are also quite delightful, etc.

Sometimes “The Deal” feels a bit contrived. Crusie novels don’t have that organizing framework. One of the biggest problems with contemporary romance in the heyday of JAK and Crusie is how to have a couple people spend a lot of time together getting to know each other _outside_ a dating context. Usually, the solution is to have them in some sort of office or other employment context and wow, such a bad idea. “Sizzle” just _feels_ like someone ought to be prosecuted. (Definitely Croswell, but very likely the two protagonists as well.) Crusie _explicitly_ engages with this, especially with the McKenna Agency in _Fast Women_ and their running joke about how every partner in the agency married a secretary (sometimes more than one). In _Faking It_, the youngest family member dates a series of young men and the older family members describe her as “dating careers”. Women who work at banks in Crusie novels have an especially bizarre dating pattern, as they date people they meet in the course of their job, but not people they work with in an ongoing way at the bank, but rather people who are doing business with them as a representative of the bank. And these women are _invariably_ horrifying in Crusie novels. The nice end is “Bank Slut” who breaks up working class marriages because she’s looking for reliable help around the house she owns. The bad end is the smart, ambitious woman from a working class woman who now works at the bank in _Tell Me Lies_.

I don’t think that “Bank Slut” term is a joke — if the feminist approach to Finding a Man is to Find a Man by Working with Him, then women at banks who work with all the men in the community but on a short term / occasional basis … I mean, you can see how that is going to work out in a heterocentric, monogamous culture. (I am not saying that Crusie endorsed much less endorses that perspective — she was _depicting_ it, and not on the part of a viewpoint character.)

Janice in _Trust Me on This_ is _not_ the only woman in a Crusie novel to build a book-writing career on the basis of her marriage. Cynthie in _Bet Me_, Cal’s ex, is desperate to get Cal back in part because she has already sold a pop-psych relationship self-help book based partly on her credentials as a psychologist and partly on her credential of being a successful career woman, who is beautiful, and who is married to a beautiful, successful man with a career.

Anyway. I’m really excited to be thinking about the Reuse in Commercial Fiction project with two authors, rather than just one. I’m particularly happy to be exploring how reuse in structure may have been crucial to one author’s greater volume of production, while another author made really effective use of co-authors.

IATA slots possible link fu

A. and I were watching TikTok and one of those It Went Viral Here Is an Update things went by. It involved a United flight from Newark to Rome (Italy) that sat on the tarmac for 4 hours, went back to the gate, let 3 people off, encouraged everyone else to stay on because they were gonna leave soon, sat on the tarmac another couple hours and eventually canceled the flight 7 hours after planned takeoff time. The viral folks did get a different flight out of a NYC airport the next day, got to Rome, did their trip, had to buy new tickets for out and back again because the return flight was also canceled on them and United told them they would rebook but then apparently did not.

There were a variety of people who apparently social media’d about this event. It’s a terrible thing to have happen and there were further statements about no food or water provided (which is a violation of law) while on the tarmac. All in all, it is yet another horror story in support of I’m Never Ever Gonna Fly United Again, of which there are too many to count, and it isn’t just United altho they are definitely pretty high on the shittiest of airlines list.

A. and I discussed this and she wanted to know why (legacy) airlines are like this, and I got to thinking, you know, I don’t really know. I mean, I _think_ it is because they have Mostly Monopoly because of slot allocation, but I’m not 100% certain how that works.

https://www.iata.org/en/programs/ops-infra/slots/slot-rule-reform/

This is an absolutely crystalline instance of Status Quo Bias.

IATA is a trade association of airlines. There is a wikipedia entry. It’s worth reading.

I sat around thinking about that slot rule reform piece at the IATA website for quite a while. Walked around thinking about it. Lay in bed thinking about it. Talked my poor husband’s ear off about it. And I have come to some conclusions.

Slot rules are only a problem at overburdened airports. We don’t _really_ want to fix this problem by having lots more airports / space at airports, because Climate, but also because people who live underneath flight paths in and out of airports have trouble sleeping and there are racial issues there. The balance between new entrants and existing players and competition and choice and wtf is all just a bunch of self-serving garbage slamming the door closed behind the existing players and forcing new entrants to be _extremely_ innovative to survive at all.

Why are some airports so overburdened? I mean, you could get into it about hub and spoke and routing systems and the failure to upgrade computer systems (because it is expensive and quite hard). I also think, tho, that a big chunk of the problem is our centralization as humans into a comparatively small number of highly networked large urban agglomerations. We do that because people do business between those points, because people have family in or accessible to those points, and those points build up cultural capital (stuff to do, things to eat, places to go, things to see) that makes those points ever more attractive.

I suppose here is where I must mention Schelling points.

But fuck all that. I think the real issue is the Grand Tour. We need to create alternatives to the points on the Grand Tour and work to build cultural capital around those alternatives to the points on the Grand Tour. It’s not that hard. We visited the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in 2004, and then again in 2023. It’s a wildly different experience (except the room itself of course hasn’t changed), as it quit being a sleepy, regional destination and started to be a Pan-European and even World destination. Leavenworth, WA was put on the map by the railroad, and then the railroad moved, and if it wanted to still exist it needed some sort of replacement mission.

From the wikipedia page: “The entire town center is modeled on a German Bavarian village as part of a civic initiative that began in the 1960s. The area is a major, four-season tourist destination with festivals nearly every month and a multitude of events year round.”

There are _really_ nice resorts and hotels there.

What would the world be like if no matter where you lived, you could get in a car, or on a bus or train, and in an hour to a day’s travel-on-the-ground (I’m okay with boat, altho Jones Act), you could be in a destination that was like Franeker or Leavenworth in 2023 — you can park, the crowds are not bonkers, maybe you have to buy timed entry tickets for a major attraction but there’s plenty of interesting stuff to do and good food to eat and places to go and things to see. A lot of PNWers my age probably remember driving down to DisneyLand when it was like that and wow is it not like that now. What would the world be like if that’s what we all did when we recreated, instead of getting on a plane?

I’m not saying we should ban planes. I’m not saying you can never get on a plane to fly across a continent or an ocean to meet with people who you love but whose lives are centered somewhere a long ways away from yours. I’m not saying people should never fly from one place to another because of the needs of management and governance whether that is public or private.

But I’m finding myself having to explain to people why I’m driving to Pennsylvania and exploring Bucks County with my sister, or why I keep going back to the same places on the other side of the country or an ocean. I love travel, and I specifically love regional travel, and I keep doing much bigger, longer distance, get-on-a-plane travel and when I think about why, I’m not overjoyed with my answers because the answers sound like I’m succumbing to peer pressure. Justifying it with, well, I learned a lot is not particularly satisfying.

I have friends that will not fly for a variety of reasons (which I fully support). I am aware of the whole Flygskam thing. And also, I do point out there are some real difficulties in taking a Euro trend where there’s a whole lot of rail options and oh-so-much to do and see within a comparatively short drive. OTOH, there’s a whole lot in a lot of the United States to do within a not-honestly-that-much-longer drive. Flygskam might help with the airline assholery. At an absolute minimum, it would reduce the number of times in your life you had to deal with it.