I, hello, welcome. Hello, everyone. Hello. We're gonna get started in just a moment. We'll let folks fill up the space and we see you or we see your, we see the number and we see your name. So welcome, everyone. But you're more than a number. More. More. I'm Anissa. I'm your librarian host tonight. And if you've never been to a program with me, I don't know why because I feel like I'm here every night. But I provide you with a link, a document that has links for tonight's program, library news. And as we go along, if books come up, I will add them to that chat. And it's just a living document so you can grab it now. I'll put it in there later as well. And hello YouTube viewers as well. All right, let's jump in with some news, library information. Tonight we are here as part of our summer stride. And we are thankful that Rebecca Handler is joining us as part of summer stride. Thank you Rebecca. And we will be in conversation and we'll have time. You can throw questions in as we go. So if you wanna ask questions, just do it. Throw it in the chat. And I want to welcome you all here again and acknowledge that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramishesh, the Loni peoples, for their original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramishesh community. And you can find out more information about Bay Area indigenous and native culture from this reading list that I just popped in the chat box. You can also find out what territory you are staying on. And this map is called Native Land. It's really cool because it's kind of interactive and it tells you what treaties were in place at certain times and when they were broken. And it's a worldwide map. So it's kind of cool. And then last thing I'll say is check out Segorte Land Trust. They're a women led run organization coming out of the East Bay and they are doing some amazing work in land back movement. All right. Oh, I had a slide for that. There it is. Summer stride. Yay. It's over. Oh my God. All the kids go back to school tomorrow. That is the end of summer stride for kids but summer stride for adults continues. So do your 20 hours reading. You'll get your tote bag. If you don't know what I'm talking about, 20 hours of reading, exploring, coming to events, get you an iconic tote bag that we've been doing a different design every summer long or I don't know how long, many, many years. And it's really nice looking and good quality. Yes. And it holds about 10, 15 books depending on the size. We have several campaigns. Yeah. Several campaigns at San Francisco Public. One of them is called On The Same Page. It's ongoing, been happening for 17 years. By monthly, we choose a selected book, author and we celebrate their book. And you can find it at every single library when you walk in, you'll find these books. And we're celebrating a great summer sizzle read, Beverly Jenkins, Wild Rain. Gosh. I will be right back. I wanna read that right now. I know, right? And it will only take you a weekend because it's that hot. I can tell. But it also has feminism and family planning and it's a historical fictional romance. So check it out. And she'll be in combo on August 23rd with librarian Rachel Fiege. Let's see, what else is happening? Oh, August is really a bit all about food. We've had some great food. Neocos Creamery was last weekend. We have Up This Weekend, Aresmendi, Other Avenues, Cultivate Community out of Venetia at the deep grocery out of Oakland. And I hear there's samples about to be had from Aresmendi and Other Avenues. So come out, we are in person these days. We need your support. It's still a struggle. We know it's still scary to go out, but Sunday is the best day at the main library because Aresmendi and the farmers market. So double your fun at the next center. 1 p.m., the future, past, present, and future of the co-ops in the Bay Area. We partner with The Amazing Medicine for Nightmares bookstore to bring Filipino and Latinx poetry Saturday, August 27th at 7 p.m. Part of the food mix was author to now to James Bird Beard Award-winning author, Christina Cho at Richmond, but we had to postpone so it's in September, but it's still part of summer strike. You can collect your tote bag until September 20th, so it counts. Our largest literary campaign of all the year and not years are very loose now because of COVID. So one year is equal to two. Our 17th annual, one city, one book we have selected. This is Ear Hustle, celebrating the work of Nigel Poor. Erlon Woods, this will be, you are gonna start seeing this everywhere. You're gonna see banners, you're gonna see buses, the books are gonna hit your library mid-September, we'll have a bunch of book clubs, and then we'll have a main event with Erlon and Nigel, November 3rd in combo with Piper Kerman from the writer from Orange is the New Black. And also there will be two months of programming aligned with this book. So topics about incarceration, abolition, reentry, the amazing Angela Davis will be joining us in the virtual library. I just can't even tell you how amazing the program we have and it will be powerful and it should be transformative. So get your book, you can get it now, you can get the audio book, you can listen to podcasts or you can wait until mid-September when they hit the shelf everywhere. All right, enough with the library news. We are here tonight to see, to talk to Rebecca Handler and discuss her debut novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone. Handler is a writer who lives and works in San Francisco, her stories have been published and awarded in several anthologies and her debut novel, Novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone is available now in at the library, in print, in e-book, in audio book or at your local bookstore. Don't buy from the A word, local. I'm gonna let Rebecca tell you about the book but this book has received star reviews in Kirkus and has been long listed by the Center for New Fiction. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and it'll be us. And again, throw those questions down as they come. We're happy to, it's gonna be a nice free flow and convo. Hi folks, thanks Anissa. Yeah. And hi to my friend Nancy Monic who put a little note for us in the chat. That's very sweet, hello. Yes, we talked about Anissa and I chatted that if you can just put questions as they come up we're not gonna save them all for the end, we can incorporate them as we go. So we'll try to make this as conversational as possible even in this awkward format. But thank you so much for having me. Love the libraries so much. We'll talk more about my love for libraries but I'll tell you a little bit about this book, Edie Richter is not alone. It came out last March in the prime of the pandemic. There it is, we both have it. And it is the story of an idiosyncratic woman who is grieving after her father dies. He had Alzheimer's for many years. Her husband, Oren is offered a temporary position in Perth, Australia. So she moves with her husband, Oren from San Francisco to Perth thinking that maybe the remote landscape will help her heal from her grief when in fact it does the opposite and helps sort of her come to terms with this very dark secret that she has been harboring. So that's my quick synopsis of Edie. It was really just to my absolute delight that it received great reviews when it came out. It was interesting to release a book during a pandemic. Many other authors who I know have apologized to me that my debut novel came out during a pandemic because they're like, oh, they must have been so hard. But for me, I didn't really know any difference. And so any sort of reception that I got was icing on the cake. And actually the weird thing about Zoom events, all of my launch events were on Zoom is that they were extremely well attended. And Anissa and I were talking about that too. It's just this weird thing, which I know that we all have talked to death by now about, but I just felt the love and I felt the support. So it's just been a really, it was a really wonderful first year being a newlywed with my book. And now I get to see it in libraries all over the city, which is great. So I've had some fun when I'm in, I'm often in San Francisco libraries, perusing or working or both. And one thing I like to do now is see if my book is there and then I have a little Sharpie with me and I'll sign it. Bandalism, bandalism. Right. There's nothing cooler than having your book in a library catalog anyway. And it's not just our catalog. Once your book goes into any library catalog, it's in the world catalog. That's like famous. That's just so cool. And librarians have been really wonderful to me about it. So, and thank you to everyone for those of you who have read it or those of you who are considering reading it. It is available in the library. And as Anissa said in your local bookstores. And if it's not your local bookstore, you can order it, it's pretty cinch. Yeah, same with your library.  And they will. If you get the copy from Glenn Park, I believe it's the autographed copy going around. Exactly. So, tell us a little bit about how you decided to put this book into existence and coming into writing later in life and particularly around this book and this topic. Talk about that. Yes. So, I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about, because this is a library audience, I'm going to assume that it's a smarter group than sort of your average audience. We're all pretty smart on here because we go to libraries. And I thought it would be just sort of interesting to delve in a little bit to something that people ask me about quite often. But I haven't really spoken about in an event like this before, which is the fact that I came to writing fiction later in life, as they say, in my 40s. And so I can tell you a little bit about how that happened and what the benefits of that are. Because I have a feeling that there's other people in this audience right now who might have a book in them and might consider, or if not a book, maybe a musical album or something like that, some sort of creative endeavor. And I definitely fall into that category and I want to inspire all of you to go after those dreams. I have always written for my work. So sort of my professional experience in my career has been in fundraising for nonprofits. And then more recently in the past like seven, eight years I've been working in philanthropy where I work with foundations and help them with their grant making, which is very rewarding. In that line of work, I have always done a lot of writing and really enjoyed it. There is a lot of storytelling in the world of nonprofit fundraising and grant making. People resonate with stories and that's why they give money or that's why they get involved as a volunteer with a nonprofit. So I've always sort of had my eye out for stories, good stories. And I majored in anthropology a long time ago in college. And I actually think that I'm a big proponent of anthro majors and encouraging people to take anthro classes. It's kind of the underdog major I feel the social sciences. And what it teaches you is to observe people. And I mean, I could talk about that for hours but it basically teaches you that when you're observing people, you are always an outsider looking in and to write with a more sort of objective language than you might otherwise. And I feel like the anthropology background plus my years and years, almost 20 years of writing in nonprofits really helped me develop my style of fiction. Now how I actually came to fiction was because I, like Edie, moved from San Francisco to Perth, Western Australia in 2015. And when I moved, I started a blog which I still have which is called onewomanparty.com. And I started that as a way to keep in touch with people and to share kind of the experience of moving a family across the world, adjusting to a different culture, et cetera. It's a lot of like observational humor type pieces, what it's like to grocery shop in a different country, how Australians are very passionate about sports and flip flops, things like that. And I started to bump up against the fact that real life was hitting me and I had no interest in writing like a tell-all sort of memoir and I wanted to protect people's privacy. And so kind of one thing led to another and I realized that I couldn't kind of keep going with nonfiction. I had to explore a different way of writing about ideas and people and characters and stories. And I discovered fiction. I've always been an avid reader and have always been drawn to unusual characters. I would say if it's team character versus team plot, I usually go with team character, not that I don't want a good plot also, but I always look out for interesting people doing unusual things. And so I started writing some short stories. I took a writing class in Perth with the writing teacher named Susan Medalia who's a writer herself and a wonderful teacher. And I ended up submitting a few stories for publication in Australia. And then I got this kind of seed of an idea of this woman, this very unusual woman who has this experience with her father and moving across the world. And I started writing a short story called Edie Richter and it got longer and longer. And then I started, I started to think, hey, wait a minute, I think I'm writing a novel and I think I'll just try to write a novel. And years later, here it is. So writing a novel is a very long and solitary process. You have to be very patient with yourself and very patient with your writing practice. But that is probably a very long answer to your question. Well, that was great though. But I wanted to give kind of a general. So it opens it up to other questions, so the book, now that you mentioned it, because when I read it, my focus definitely was on Edie. But when you mentioned your character development, there are so many characters in this book and you can just feel like, so the husband character, you can just feel the annoyance, you can just feel it burping and bubbling. And he's not even doing anything wrong.  And it was important to me to show what I think of as a very real relationship. Absolutely, it was. I loved the husband and wife character, definitely realistic. But then also the characters that you bring in, the driver, the driver's ad guy, as well as the tourist. And even like light characters, like the bus driver and the characters on the bus, they're all just very well developed and very, it puts you in that place. So great job on the character development. And I just wanted, I just put in chat too, but you can, if you didn't see my chat, how many out of the 23, 25 people here and YouTube have read the book? If you, it's really juicy also, and it really gives a hook just right from the start. So I see some of it in any way. I'm glancing over occasionally and I do see people's lovely comments. Thank you so much. There we go, here it comes. All right. So for those of you who haven't read it, again, it's like, just like Wild Rain. It's a weekend. I think I read it twice over the weekend because I listened to the audio book first and then I was like, wait, I need a second. And then I picked up the book. Actually, you know, one of the, sorry to interrupt you. No, no, go right ahead. I was just gonna say that one thing I love is when people tell me that, I mean, obviously it's lovely when people say that they enjoyed the book, but particularly from people who don't read a lot of books. I've heard from readers where they felt that my book was like accessible and approachable and drew them in and they wanted to finish it. And honestly, for me, we are like busy people and we have all been through really, really hard things in the past few years. And a lot of us don't have patience for long books or are used to reading on the internet or reading magazines or whatever. And so I just, I love that. Like if this novel is nothing but a gateway to other novels, then I'm happy. And the fact that people have enjoyed it on top of that gives me great pleasure. It is sort of written like that kind of internet style where each section is kind of on its own thing. And then the timeline, the way you've developed the timeline which is not direct fully allows you to just absorb one chapter and they're pretty short. Even there's one chapter, there's one chapter that's like literally two paragraphs. So definitely accessible for sure. I tried to write it in a way where you could get into bed and read two paragraphs and just have something to think about. And, or you could read the whole thing in one sitting like I know, so. That's very blog style to me, no? Yeah, I'd like, yeah, I've always been a sucker for a short paragraph, I gotta say. Tell me like, so I love audio books and I definitely listen to audio books every night and this was a good one for me because not in a bad way, I'm gonna say this, but it put me to sleep, I'd listen to a chapter and then by the second I'm like, wait, what happened? But the audio book process, so I, a lot of people don't have any kind of say or like how it's developed in the audio book. Did you get any kind of say in that development? I did, I'm so happy you asked me that actually because it was a really interesting process. I wanted narrator approval and the reason for that is because there are, given the fact that Edie and her husband, Oren, they're both American but they moved to Australia. So it was important to me that if anyone were to attempt an Australian accent, it would be a good one because I knew that my Australian friends would never forgive me if the audio narrator had a terrible Aussie accent. So I requested an Australian actor who could do an American, a convincing American accent as opposed to an American actor who can do a convincing Australian accent. So I think that the latter is a lot harder. And yes, and I wish that maybe someone can look it up for us and put it. I wish that I remember the name, I would love to give the voice actor a shout out. I don't remember her name right now. Meg, something, Meg. But I was really, yeah, I was really delighted. She does mispronounce Marin, someone pointed out. Yeah, Marin. There's some, I think like once in a while you can tell that she's Australian but I kind of love that. That doesn't happen. Yeah, I think she has an interesting accent. Oh good. There's some like East Coast or something that comes out sometimes too. Megan Smart, yes. David put it in for us. Oh, thanks, Dave, that's my husband. Daisy Fawn says that she read it and found it very entertaining and is one of those people who rarely reads a book. So it's really very accessible. Thank you so much. Yeah, I loved Megan's voice. And when she does Edie's voice, it's just so perfect. Well, Edie is such an unusual character who really just like speaks very bluntly and actually this might be a good, I wasn't even planning this, but this might be a good segue to me reading a little bit of it. Would that be, would this be a good place to do that? So I'm just gonna, I actually normally don't love reading too much on Zoom because I feel like we could lose people. I promise you I won't read too much. I'm gonna read like two pages guys, okay? But it's just really to give a sense of the voice of Edie's voice. So the way this book is set up is that Edie has some flashbacks of memories that sort of help inform her character and inform sort of what's going to happen. She's kind of slowly losing her mind. So I'm going to read part of chapter 25. After Orin left for work, I read an article online, Fatal Bear Attack in Wyoming. A man's body had been found outside a cave in Bridger Teton. Most of the flesh had been ripped from his bones. The man's name was Seth Lister. My first Thanksgiving away at college, I spent the long weekend with a girl named Lauren Lister at her family's house on Long Island. We weren't particularly close, but she and I worked together at the campus dry cleaners. When she learned I was planning to stay at school over the holiday weekend, she said, that's sad, you should come home with me. Her childhood room was very girly with lace curtains and yellow rose wallpaper which she used to peel back to write the names of boys she liked as well as anything else she needed to get off her chest. Dave, Carlos, mom is annoying. I wish Claire would break her arm. I slept on the bottom bunk and stared up at the glow in the dark adhesive butterflies. Lauren had a brother named Seth who was still in high school and lurked in doorways. He was the kind of person who would have hidden behind a tree at someone's funeral. I got stuck sitting across from him on Thanksgiving and had to watch him gnaw on a turkey leg until it was bare, at which point he deposited the large bone beside his plate on the faded purple tablecloth and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his plaid flannel shirt. He leaned over and whispered to me across the table. I can't wait to get away from all this. I don't think I had heard him say one word since we arrived the night before. I don't know what you mean, I responded, scooping more cranberry sauce onto my plate.  I looked over at their father who was at the end of the table emptying a packet of Splenda into his coffee. The older neighbor couple on either side of him kept interrupting each other as they talked about a local politician they had run into at a bowling alley.  Seth continued, as soon as I graduate, I'm selling all my stuff and buying a car. I wanna drive cross-country and have time to think, you know, gotta stop eating meat too. This stuff is disgusting, he said, gesturing at the devoured leg. You looked like you enjoyed it, I responded, wiping my mouth with a paper towel, which I then crumpled and held in my fist under the table. I did, he shook his head. That's what's wrong with everything, Edie. Humans just take whatever they want.  We just go to Costco and buy dead animals wrapped in plastic for a holiday commemorating the slaughter of millions of Native Americans. I don't think it was millions, I said. Seth glared at me. Lauren came back to clear the table. Hey, Edie, wanna give me a hand? As we stood at the kitchen sink, scraping remaining food into the trash, she apologized for her brother. He is such a creep sometimes. You should see what he writes in his diary. You read his diary, I asked, stacking dishes in the dishwasher. Only once, she said, when I thought he might blow up the school. Seth ended up doing exactly what he said he'd do.  The article said that park rangers shot and killed the bear they thought was responsible for the attack. They weren't certain this was the bear that had ripped Seth apart, but they killed it anyway. They had to do something. Thank you. You're welcome. So that was a little bit of the idea of like her. The remaining two paragraphs of that chapter really give a great idea of what she's like, too. Yeah, she just wants, she wants. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think she has some like social cue issues. Right, exactly, exactly. Not many. So some of the two main topics are like, as many as many topics, but memory and identity really come up in this book for me. There's a part where the kitty is in a support group at all time or support group and the question of identity comes up. And I think that's just such a powerful point for the book and for Edie. Yeah. And she's kind of, she seems to be coasting through and so in her head most of the time, but when she has that opportunity to talk about identity, I think that's just so powerful. And obviously memory because of the flashbacks come up a lot. Can you talk a little bit how you developed that and how that worked for you and how you identify as the writer of this book and sort of how much of your identity is into it? Yeah, I can, I'd be happy to talk about identity. Can you, Anisa, can you put our little faces next to each other again? Oh yeah, sorry. Cause you're like, it looks like I have a thought bubble coming up and like I'm thinking about you. You don't wanna be my, you don't wanna be your thought bubble, trust me. I mean, I am thinking about you right now because you asked me a question about, yeah. So this book is largely to do with identity and I'm glad that that resonated with you. She is wrestling with the fact that her father's, I don't wanna say too much without giving it away, but like her father's identity was changing as he was losing his memories. So it kind of deals with the question of like, who are we when we don't have our memories? Who are we when they start fading and how much of our memories make up ourselves and our identity? So, and I actually tried to structure the book in a way that sort of simulates the brain of someone with Alzheimer's. So to kind of shoot in more longer-term memories that Edie would start to have progressively more and more as the sort of story keeps going. I, in terms of my own experience with identity and Alzheimer's, my own father had Alzheimer's and died in 2013 and kind of helping care for him and then watching his demise and subsequent death ended up giving me kind of the seed of an idea for this story, because there was a lot of like what ifs. And again, I don't wanna like get into it too much right now, but his life and death certainly helped kind of loosely inspire the story and watching his identity shift and then watching roles change, you know, as you age and I think I'm part of what we're supposed to call a sandwich generation when we're between our parents, our aging parents and our children that we're raising and sort of we sort of have our, we have a lot of identities there, you know and I consider myself a lot of things including a wife, a parent and a daughter still. And I think my mother is thankfully still with us and I think I'll always be a daughter even without my parents, which is something that I noticed after my father died is that I still felt like his daughter even though he's not here anymore. And I think I will always feel like a daughter. Yeah, yeah. I think memory is really interesting too in the glimpses of Alzheimer, but also in just the glimpses of each person's memory. And so like when your father would bring up memories that he had, like particularly I'm thinking of the trip in Boston when he met you in Boston and that memory comes up. No, Edie's father. Yes, Edie's father, not your father. But how memory, even though, you know his memory is eschewed, I mean he could be in another state where his memory is still different from yours and not in Alzheimer. So memory is so fluid, I think and applying this to Alzheimer is just very interesting to me, I think. Yeah, I'm always really interested in the relationship between siblings and their memories and how you can have people who grow up in the same house and go through similar things and they have very different interpretations of it. And I noticed that with my own brother and my husband has many brothers and sisters and I noticed it when I'm with my in-laws how they talk about the same incident and they have like really different memories of how it went down. And I think that that's really, really interesting to think about. And it's like what is the truth then? Like who's in charge, right? Like who's in charge of the truth? We all contribute to it and we all have our own truths. I love this on page 80. My body was a collection of muscles and bones and a thing I had done. And I think that's just like a thing you had done. There's many things you could have done. And just those memories stay in your body. I like that about that sentence. Thank you. So this book really borders memoir to me. How much of it is memoir? I mean, it's seeming like it's a lot. And then how do you, it's such a fine line sometimes with memoir and fiction, right? Yeah, it's funny when you were talking about Edie's dad and you said, you're dad. And I was like, wait, did you know for a minute? I'm like, wait, did you know my dad? Yeah, the, I'm not interested in, I mean, I love to read memoirs. But I'm not interested in writing one myself. But I am interested in like, I always had this vision like when I was working on this book that it's like if you, and everyone has to bear with me because I'm not sure this like metaphor works like outside of my own brain. But I feel like if you took like a washcloth and dipped it in a bucket of water and that is your life, right?  And then you squeeze it. And what comes out of there is fiction for me. Does that, I don't know if that works for anyone else out there. What do we think? What do we think? Maybe that's just like I see washcloths for some reason. Maybe I need to wash my face. I don't know. But I feel like I always have this and I love water so much. I'm deeply connected to water. So I often have this image of just like I'm getting soaked with reality. And then I get to sort of squeeze it and make something else out of it. So I mean, when I was working on this novel I made because, you know, Edie lives in San Francisco and moves to Perth and because my father had Alzheimer's and her father has Alzheimer's later. There's like the connections are very obvious. I made like deliberate choices to make it very different. So I have a brother, I gave her a sister. I made him, I made her father have very early onset Alzheimer's. My own father did not. My father was much older when he got Alzheimer's. I made the mother character very different from my own mother because I knew the wrath that I would experience if I made the mother recognizable. And then lastly, and probably most importantly I made Edie very, very different from myself. So she does have the facts of her life. Many of them are inspired by facts of my own life. She waitress at a seafood restaurant in Boston and I used to be a waitress at Legal Seafood in Newt Center, Mass. So, you know, I certainly like use some things that I know and have experienced but I really enjoyed creating another character who is like, is a fantasy. You know, I think we all kind of fantasize about being someone who's very blunt and it does not really take people's feelings that much into consideration because that is a questionable way to go about life. I think that actually I am a little judgy of people who tend to say whatever they want all the time. Like, I'm not sure that that's the best way to go about it but I loved writing that kind of character and I loved getting her into trouble and I loved seeing her sort of try and her failed ways to resolve, you know, her conflicts with her neighbor. There's sort of this neighbor character that's kind of her nemesis and her mind and she becomes obsessed with this neighbor. And yeah, so that was really, really fun. I loved like switching it up for sure. We can definitely- And I was just gonna say like, what did they always say like what all fiction is memoir and all memoir is fiction? Exactly. Like I think whenever I read memoirs, I always wonder, okay, what did they make up? I'm like per our earlier chat about memories. You know, it's- Exactly, right? It's, yeah. It's very subject. It's memory. It's not necessarily fact. In very subject. Rachel says she loves the neighbor relationship. I, you know- I live vicariously. Thank you, Rachel. I don't think I wanna live vicariously by next to that neighbor. But also, Edie really played a part in it, right? Like I just like, who goes through- I don't know, I'm like, this is like, like she would just go in and rearrange the house. Yeah, there's what you're referring to is her neighbor asks her to take care of her house when they're away for several days to feed the fish and, you know, bring in the mail and stuff. And so Edie, you know, does what she's supposed to do and then takes it 10 steps further. She accidentally spills some coffee and then one thing leads to another and she's having the house professionally cleaned and which is really strange to do with someone else's house. So yeah, she makes some bold choices for sure. I love that too, Rachel. I'm glad that you like that. I like that relationship. That was very, very fun to write. In fact, I would love to like read something that's from Fiona's perspective, you know, having this crazy American neighbor move in. Let's see. Oh, someone wrote, William wrote, what's next? Well, what's next? I'm going to assume that you maybe mean, what am I writing? I'm thinking. I think that sounds like a good assumption. We're just like, what am I doing after this Zoom? I'm gonna have dinner and then. I am working on a new novel. And it is taking me a while, but it's gonna happen. And I'm really excited about it. It's very different that the protagonist is a woman. She is very different from Edie. The story takes place over the course of one night in San Francisco. And it is about a woman who starts to believe that her life could be a play and that there is an audience watching her. And I have a first draft of it as Anne Lamont would say, a shitty first draft.  So I've got that and working, plugging away on the second draft. Yeah, but thank you for asking.  And one of her, I don't know if it was a book where I saw her speak while she talked about her child and how she raised her child with a group of librarians and there couldn't be a better family than librarian staff, library love. So I'd love to hear some of your library memories in San Francisco. Yeah. Your favorite library and from our attendees. Let us know your favorite library even if you're not from San Francisco. Yeah, definitely. I would love to hear what people, I just wanna have a little library love. Like we've gotta do that. Like let's just think about libraries and thank you everyone for your lovely comments. So I grew up in San Francisco. I'm a native. I grew up near Westportal. And so the Westportal branch was my sort of regular library. And I'm not sure if that building has changed that much. Like it kind of every time I walk in, I feel like it still smells the same like old musty books. And there's the wonderful children's section and huge wooden desks where you can work. And it's just like a glorious building. And I used to, so I went to Herbert Hoover Middle School and after middle school, I would walk down the hill with my friend Leslie Tucker and drop her off at home and then go to the library or Leslie would come with me and sit there, sort of do my homework, but mainly just like look at the stacks. Sometimes I would leave my books on the table and walk down the street and go to Shaw's Candy Shop and get some fudge. Or I would go to the wonderful, so the Westportal Books Shop, which is wonderful where you could buy my book if you want, plug. The bookshop used to be called Toy Village back in the day and it was a little toy shop that sold those. I don't know if people remember the rolls of stickers that came on like big rolls and I had a sticker collection. And so we'd like cut off stickers and so I'd bring those back to the library and put them in my like textbooks and stuff. We used to have to cover our textbooks with brown paper and so I remember sitting in the library like sticking stickers on my brown paper wrapped books. And now, oh my God, I just want to read everyone there. I'll let you read it, Amisa. Oh, I see another shout out for Westportal Shaw's. Yeah, there is, so Shaw's is the candy shop and I remember when it was gonna be sold and it was sold to people who actually renovated it. It looks beautiful.  Yeah, Toy Village presents wrapped in red and white striped wrapping paper. I know, God, that was the best. So yeah, I went to Westportal Library and then now I'll go to Westportal or go to Parkside on Taraville. And what I love is I can do holds like from home. So I'll go look at the catalog at home and then find, I just did this with John Cheever. I'm going through John Cheever's stories and I put it on hold, or sorry, I requested it and then I got an email like three days later that it was ready for me to pick up. So come on now. Yeah, I know, right? And we also have like what used to be called Interlibrary Loan but Link Plus, like they come quicker than our local branches. If we don't have it, one, ask, we'll buy it, two, get it from Interlibrary Loan. It comes so quickly. It's so great. It's called Link Plus. Oh, hey, Matt Smith. Matt Smith Library Center Library, Fortland, nice. And then I saw a shout out to the North Branch and Berkeley Public Library. I've been to some amazing libraries. You know how librarians are, they just want to go to every library. But like the Calistoga Library is so cute. It's adorable if you haven't been there. That's right, go there. It's a nice one. I mean, one of my memories is pretty recent with the libraries where, when at the beginning of COVID, when it looked like we were gonna be shut down for maybe like a couple of weeks. And then remember that when we all thought we were gonna be closed down for like a week or two? And then it was like, oh, the libraries are gonna close for a while. So come get books now. And I took my teenagers, I was gonna say they're now teenagers, but they were younger than, I guess I had one teenager and one younger one. We went to the West Portal Library and we left with like the max amount of books. Like we just, we left with, I don't know, 50 books. 150 books, all three of you could check out 50 books. I mean, plus DVDs. Yeah. And I remember just thinking, God, it felt like I was hoarding, you know? Like, cause I had this panic set in. Everybody did, yes. Are we not going to have any books for a while? Yeah, that was interesting. We luckily, you know, didn't take us too long to get into the whole curbside pickup action. But yeah, what a wild time we've all been through for sure. I know. So many Belcier brands. Sorry, but Ellen said the Belcier brand. I don't think I'm in there. What street is that on? That's on Coddington, I want to say. It's nice. And it's just, it's really super neighborhood branch. Like it's just got a core group of users. It's really wonderful. Yeah. I've worked at every single branch as either a bookshelver, a page or a librarian except Golden Gate and Presidio. So I have been around. Great debut, Rebecca. There's some other parts in here. Other parts in here. That's Excelsior. Thank you. Anissa, when we were talking before, you had asked about kind of the process of getting it published. Yeah. Which I'd be happy to touch on. I don't want to get like too deep in it in case that's not interesting to everyone. But I will just say, I mean, I referenced before it takes so long to actually from like, you know, start to finish when you start a book to get into the world. And I was coming from, so I was living in Australia where writers by and large do not have agents. That is not a thing. So if you write a book in Australia, you can send it directly to publishers where in the States, we are a much larger country with a much larger market and writers generally try to get agents before they get published, before they seek a publisher. So when I came back from Australia, when I searched for an agent began and I don't know if he's on this call, but hi, Steven, if you are. And that's another weird thing is Steven and I have never met in person because of COVID. Because I worked with him before COVID and then COVID, like we were, you know, he's in New York, so we talk on the phone and then COVID hit and yeah, we just still haven't met, so it's wild. I have like a lot of people who helped me bring this book into the world. I've never actually like sat down and had a coffee with in person. It's pretty crazy. So yeah, the process of getting an agent was that took a while and then the process of getting published. So with the agent, he, you know, pursued different publishing houses and unnamed press. If they're here, hi, love you guys. And yeah, and then we got this wonderful, you know, offer and relationship with unnamed press out of LA, which is a smaller independent press. But the whole thing is, and part of, you just have to be so, you have to get comfortable with rejection for sure. And I think my experience in fundraising for so long where you basically get rejected for a living on a daily basis, prepared me for writing. So, and what I learned was, you know, if your book is rejected by an agent or a publisher, oftentimes it has nothing, like you can't read too much into it. Oftentimes it has nothing to do with your skill or the subject matter or your writing style or anything like that. It has like, there's so many other factors, you know? So I remember talking to one agent who said, I love your manuscript, but I just sold a book that had Alzheimer's in it and I'm not sure I can sell another one. So something like that, like that's just really out of your hands. So yeah, that's kind of how I got published thing. And then with this new book, we will, once I have a good manuscript that I'm, you know, really proud of, we will shop it around. The agent will shop it around to different publishing houses. So it's sort of same thing. And do you have a publicist? I do not have a publicist. I have, I mean, I should say, there is a wonderful publicist and a couple of people at unnamed, but they're a really small shop. Yeah. But I don't have my own publicist now. Yeah. Interesting. I'm always like, could I be a publicist? Yeah, I guess people do. I don't know how many people talk about it. Yeah, I think it's huge. I have to pay for it. Yeah, yeah. It's not, I mean, agents only get paid when you get paid. Right. Whereas publicists, I think you pay them regardless. I don't think they get, I don't think they get paid based on where you get published or, you know, where you get marketed or whatever. And there's a question in the chat, which is, what's your writing process like? Which is like, you know, Yeah. Early, do you? Yeah.   And then I write for three hours and I have no other responsibilities because my brain works best in the morning. That rarely to never happens. So my writing process is I try to write something every day. So I have a job and a family and, you know, obligations in general, but I try to write something every day. So even if it's not like, you know, I always keep a notebook with me. So sometimes writing every day is just writing a page, handwriting a page in a notebook. Other times it's working on my book. Other times it's writing something for my blog, which is a great, I kind of use that blog now. Onewomanparty.com, you should subscribe and learn when I have a blog post up. I kind of use it as like a sandbox, you know, I can just like try stuff out. I can write like nonfiction observational stuff. I just wrote something about outside lands where I went a couple of weeks ago or I'll write a little like weird short story and just play with it. So that's fun. So that's kind of like warm-up writing for me. I kind of use my blog as like a warm-up place. But yeah, a book I try to write a little bit every day if I can, even if it's a line in the book. Like honestly, that's kind of where I am at this point. Interesting. And I'm not a, you know what? I would also love to be a nighttime writer, but I'm just, I don't really think well past like 3 p.m., let's be honest. Yeah, that's what I tell my boss all the time and they don't buy that. My boss might be on here for all I know, sorry about that. Yeah, but I do, I have, speaking of my work, I do, I work for a wonderful, I'm not just saying it because maybe some of my coworkers are on here, but I work for a wonderful company called Pacific Foundation Services. We manage a bunch of foundations, mostly, most of them are in the Bay Area, but they know that my passion is writing and they have been so flexible with me and I work on a part-time basis with them. And I'm very, very lucky to be able to do that. So just a little shout out to PFS. That's great. That's great. Yeah. I had a question and it slipped on through, but does anyone have any final questions for Rebecca Handler and get her book, get it at the library of your choice? We have 28 locations or at the book, well, it's not called West Portal Book, it's called Book Shop, West Portal or something weird. Shop, West Portal, that's right. I can also do like a little plug for the paperback version that's coming out. Oh, when is that coming out? October 4th. Awesome. And I don't, I'm supposed to- That's a great sign, right? That's a good sign. Now all books come out in paperback. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited. And the cover is really fun. It's a different cover. All of the books in your cover out there. It's really cool. I would hold it up, but they haven't arrived yet. Yeah, so the paperback comes out October 4th and then I also just want to remind everyone or tell everyone that I love, one thing I love is dropping in on people's book clubs. So if any of you are in a book club or know anyone in a book club and wanna recommend AD Richter is not alone, then find me on social media, I'm on like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that jazz and or on my blog, you can write an email on there. And let me know when you guys are meeting and if I'm able to like zoom in or if it's in San Francisco, I've met up with I think three book clubs in San Francisco now like in person, which has been super fun. It's fun, it's really fun to talk about this book with people who've read it because then we can get into all the nitty gritties and spoilers and stuff. So yeah. Yeah, we're definitely holding back here. So I recommend you all check out the book and I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna like recommend it to our adult librarians that they throw it down for the book club. That sounds like a great idea. It'd be really, really fun. Yeah, I would love to do it at the library. Yeah. Alia Vols who wrote Homebaked, she's always willing to just drop in at a book club. So fun, fun book too. We love our San Francisco authors. We love, you know, San Francisco books. They aren't as, they're a little fewer and far between than they used to be since we priced out all of our authors, but it still exists. So friends, you know, you can check out all of San Francisco books at San Francisco Public Library or shop local Rebecca Handler. Thank you so much. Library pleasure. Thank you all. Thank you guys so much. And thank you, Anissa and everyone use your libraries and go support them. All right, have a wonderful night everyone.


Okay, I'll start talking This is a repeat of what I did last Saturday except Probably a little smoother Since I'm rehearsed now I had fun making this talk and my daughter sort of laughed at the concept I tend to get global and wider and wider perspectives and things I look at and So she was making jokes about if I went back to the big bang And how medicine came from that but At any rate I have a few points. I'll make in this talk that are recurring themes. One is that Absolutely millions of people have gone into making Antibiotics and modern medicine what it is and most of them are Nameless, but they contributed along the way and Many good ideas arise in many different places at the same time or nearly the same time or sometimes Century or two before and Then aren't taken seriously. So for whatever reason, but I think it's all driven by Basic needs and I took this Maslow's pyramid And made my own isosceles trapezoid flipped. So I think Probably especially in the northern climates or the extreme climates an altitude or toward the poles warmth is An immediate need and if you don't have it within a matter of hours you can die and water is next and the people proud human history have tended to follow the rivers and the streams And then food and in between Taking care of these needs rest Uh One thing that I've read before about hunter-gatherers is Looking at primitive or what one would term primitive societies that They spend about two or three hours a day taking care of their needs the rest of the time they spend chatting and socializing or Gazing off at the mountains or whatever they want to do and was probably happier Existence for humankind and as nobattic hunter-gatherers dealing with Problems as they arose and Was a lot less hierarchy in society. I think but at any rate I think so much of Science and especially biology came out of agriculture And I think the first step in developing agriculture for humankind was probably not tilling soil They may have ended up someplace like What became mesopotamia and the fertile crescent and such um Tigris and the uh freddy's rivers where life was good and Enable to assist by gathering things at first until their population grew but I think the first step was to become herdsmen and Maybe dog owners canine owners to have uh this incredible magical power of Becoming bonded to an animal and Having grown up on a primitive farm myself. Um, I understand how you If you have much experience with animals, you can see their spirit by looking at them and watching what they do and um I think that the Allusion to cattle especially in mythology And some religions is related to the importance of Being herdsmen and a transition from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers So I put these pictures in here and it went from the nurturing Eternalistic view of this universe as in hindu religions and Norse religion where our Norse mythology where the cow Had rivers of milk From its teats and it licked the rind from the rocks and exposed The frost giants and the gods To a creation story um And it evolved to uh a paternalistic myths Such as the minotaur and crete That was a Picasso sketch there at the bottom of the minotaur Showing violence and brutality And a subjugation of women and sort of thing so uh I think archetypes and Explanation of man's Collective consciousness that way is a really fascinating thing if You're interested in that you might want to read Joseph Campbell as a start If you haven't heard of him Most of you probably have Uh, eventually we got into agriculture and using animals that had So much more power and they uh interesting they show this This is from a A grave or burial chamber of Synodum uh Synodum That's it's it's it's Listed there in german, but it's a painting on a grave chamber And um The cattle are Shown so much smaller than the man. Uh Maybe trying to suggest dominance of man over the animals, but uh If you try to compare the strength of the strongest man The world to that of an average horse it's Pathetically one-sided We keep going here as soon well one other point about the these uh cattle were Awesome and this aura uh That existed until uh, I think 16 27 or so um was uh about uh, a kilo uh, well a thousand kilograms and seven feet at the shoulder 2.13 meters at the shoulder and um Caesar talked of them and said how Uh They were like diminutive elephants and they could hold their own against man or beast and they're depicted in cave paintings As you see at the top there uh one, uh And and I point that out just to go back to primitive man looking at natural world before it had been tortured and attenuated Managed to do It was a lot more level playing field. Uh, and the Animals they saw must have struck all in their minds There were a couple of brothers in the 1930s who were, uh Hitler supporters um who They wanted to make germany great again. I guess There must be some kind of acronym That they could put on a red cap For that but at any rate, uh, they tried to rebread the aura and um the uh, nazi or Nazi propaganda relied a lot on What they considered arian mythology or any sort of norse mythology including the Being cycled by Wagner. They shot Wagner It's for operas Norse mythology and If I've insulted anyone here, I'm sorry, but uh, I I have No sympathy for nazis and fascism That's it. That's the way it is Uh, at any rate, it's it was an interesting thing to me that they're actually working on Rebreeding something akin to the supercows and by around 2020 or 2025 they think they'll have them and they think they have an important, uh Place in the ecology of your Grazing animals that could fend for themselves So now as soon as you had farming You had, um Hard labor if you've ever worked on a farm and done any, uh working of the soil and Just from gardening if you've done gardening, you know, it can be very hard work and um It Soon as uh people started to argue I would work by my wits and you work by your hands uh, you could start to have, uh stratification of society and subjugation of people And slavery emerged pretty quickly And as well as the excuses for why some people should be slaves and uh, for instance this, uh, unfortunate gentleman in the red Who has keloid scars on his back from being whipped Uh There's still slavery in the world today Moving on though, uh It's been noted humans, uh The main take home point on this slide is that humans spend uh More time working Than eating they uh When compared to chimpanzees or orangutans or other primates uh humans don't like to uh Consider themselves primates, but I can't see much difference at any rate, um Humans with the smaller jaws and smaller teeth and uh larger brain uh Managed to eat Uh pretty quickly and get the calories they need to sustain themselves and uh The other primates spend nine to 12 hours a day eating Part of that's because of the food they eat But a large part of it's because of cooking And this goes I I gave some, uh citations here from Oliver Goldsmith among other 18th century writers onto Modern primatologists have been interested in the fact that cooking probably allowed a lot of growth in the human population and specialization Way from having massive jaws and claws um Book you can increase the nutritive value of whatever you're eating if you've got a dead bone You could boil it and there's collagen in it and Generals leech out and you could broth own broth It's got considered a prominent part of prehistoric diets I've also read arguments that uh humans were scavengers and um or they were farmers and uh go to kills and break open the bones Using the hands and suck the marrow out the marrow has a lot of fat content Um So over the past almost two million years, uh There's been a fair amount of divergence uh from uh commoners And other primates um This is uh Assetious list here of the diet of chimpanzee. They don't really have breakfast lunch and dinner. It all runs together That's because they don't have to get back to work Unless it's to reproduce Or maybe protect a territory or something the um Use of fire uh has been uh probably uh in play for at least a million years and um This the slide is fabricated painting of neanderthals and uh What looks like a valley full of uh game, but uh including mastodons, but uh 400 000 years ago were the first fireplaces I threw this one in for fun Uh, as I mentioned a bone broth And they actually sell bone broth chickens or other animals and I found this uh Little poster that I thought uh Uh was uh I sort of personally related to it chickens, uh Can be quite affectionate if they're treated nicely almost any animal if they're treated nicely And they don't have to eat you them. See you as prey not starving to death the uh Sweet bonded I'll turn on you sometimes if it's uh not a good situation I don't be careful know what you're doing at any rate, um one other thing that emerged was pottery and I suspect that fires On a clay base may have given the idea But since 14 000 years earthenware Uh was made that's quite porous. It doesn't store liquids very long um and uh I read about in japan for instance, uh There was evidence of um I swept my track far here and got a Get off excuse me uh They would make baskets and coat them with clay and um Make earthenware and they talk about preserving fish they would ferment fish I thought that's really quite interesting. There was a lot of fermentation as as a way of storing food. That was one of the major problems uh The idea of storing fish that was fermented. I think is really interesting and there's variations on how you do that Fish almost immediately starts to decompose and there's a couple of diseases. I want to mention to you uh Seguatera is a seguatera toxin comes from a dino flagellate type of algae bloom that's eaten by smaller fish and then predatory fish like aracudas and Spanish mackerel and a grouper and seabass that eat the smaller fish concentrate this in their tissues and uh it uh this toxin from this algae in seguatera affects sodium channels and uh It it really uh is associated with fish called in Caribbean Central America Hawaii And uh near the equator plus or minus 35 degrees latitude or so That's what I recall and um It's a lipid toxin that is heat stable cooking doesn't destroy it. You can't taste it And uh It can make you sick sometimes for years usually for weeks or months It's not so common to get die from it Pretty quickly you can get nausea Uh ramps and abdominal pain and vomiting and diarrhea and then uh heart effects cardiac effects and uh Hustle effects and uh, so One thing that's generally in eating really large fish uh There's another disease that I I I didn't talk about this last Saturday, but it is I think it's quite interesting. It's uh scrum void. Um, when you have fish that's uh dead bacteria can act on the flesh of the fish muscle and start to break down the muscle and make bioactive amines particularly histamine histamine and massive levels can cause Uh add effects histamine is one of the major um mediators of allergy like allergic rhinitis allergy to pollen That's part of empty histamines. Well, these histamine levels can be extremely high and histamine can cause, uh capital increase capillary permeability and and uh loss of uh, basically third space displacement of your extracellular fluids, uh or vascular fluids and cause shock this Also, I mean you may have a like a metallic taste, but often it's said that there's no particular taste or uh visual effect that you can detect to Tell if the fish has not been managed Uh, right and has partially decomposed this way um Any fish that's caught should be kept at Below 40 degrees uh Fahrenheit Continuously, uh, and that's 4.4444 for At infinitum degrees centigrade So less than five degrees centigrade, uh, or else then, uh, they can become Dangerous now most of the stuff I've read they say this is rarely fatal, but actually knew a physician who had, um eel and Of fish of some sort in, uh The outer banks in north Carolina and, uh Driving home. He got sick and he recognized that he had scramboid and he died from shock His blood pressure dropped out from so much histamine But he could tell what where it was going. It usually starts with, uh nausea vomiting cramps diarrhea tearing And uh Some overlap in symptoms with uh sequitura so, uh Any rate storing of the food I think is a real interesting problem And, uh He's uh, this is just a I wanted to show, uh Examples of some early earthenware and glazing didn't start until some time later And uh lead glazing really started in the roman empire Not one of their best ideas But it, uh, it sealed, uh the Earthenware One of the uh outcomes of Fire, I think of fire is a bigger thing that humans achieve by discovering how to Have energy from the environment And release it in a controlled way How to use heat to drive processes Uh, and the kiln was a big step in that, uh with kilns, uh Back to mesopotamia as the first updraft kiln, which is something like a like a chimney um They could cook but They also could fire pottery better and Uh If you look at, uh Temperatures attainable with burning charcoal if you take wood and you heat it Um With limited oxygen the, um, uh, you'll drive off The water component from the Carbohydrates and end up with more pure carbon Pure carbon you can get a pretty high temperature and, uh Higher than that you have to compare in their Oxygen levels and things like that. I just for interest. I put in melting points of pedals I think that uh and and compare that to the Melting point of a clay component kalen at the bottom of that list there the Kalen is there's about three, uh Solicitate type Components to clay And kalen is one that's common and it's actually used and it's small divided particles can be ingested for Uh diarrhea it's absorptive And I put this slide in just because I thought it was uh fascinating and the Link to it online is to the right So that I could get to call I made two columns of it's a long long Timeline that goes vertically, but I just got the first part of it. Um, gold Is something you could discover easily if you were wondering about, um, especially in streams where the uh Wash off of mountains and, um Gold tended to form in nuggets often and, uh Those get swept downstream heavy so they spotted Water, uh in a shallow stream, especially like an tanning for gold gold And, um humans like crows like shiny objects uh Copper native copper can occur Um But most of the time it's uh in an ore But it could be smelted and then silver Silver is quite interesting. Uh, then you can get into more toxic things, but uh, silver has medicinal qualities They used to put uh I guess going back to 1880's silver nitrate, uh prophylaxis for gonorrhea of the conjunctiva drops of Silver nitrate in the eyes of newborns uh, because they could get uh this inflammation of their Conjunctiva, which is this, uh external sort of mucosa lining of the Eye up to the cornea and under the lid and uh in some cases that would cause perforation of the cornea and infection in the globe um Globe being the eyeball And so putting silver nitrate, uh Is it's quite toxic through the bacteria And uh, there's really no bacterial resistance to silver um Nowadays they, uh tend to use Bethromycin eye ointment uh and uh that Is usually effective and chlamydia is a big uh concern for infection of the eye Conorrhea these days, but uh either can do um Was a lot of problems Kind of tragic for an newborn to end up blind because of an eye infection picked up on their way through the birth canal um also silver and Almost silver sulfidine. Uh, it's an ointment that uh I had experience too with the using these in severe burns uh I told the story. I won't go through all that again right now, but of uh years ago when I was in training I had two patients with similar severe Similar severity of third degree burns, which is full loss of skin thickness So they have terrible fluid losses first that you have to replace or they'll die And they'll die of shock And bite quickly too and uh then, um They are vulnerable to infection and uh, you know, so you These dressings on and with silver sulfidine and uh or silver ointment and uh Take them to hover tanks and and Steerl water and they lower them into it and Scream in pain as it's a horrible experience and The dressings soak off and then apply fresh dressings and try to skin grafts on as fast as you can but uh, it's Interesting that the second common metal to be Um, I'm I guess third common metal by humans Uh as medicinal qualities this way Um, there's also stories of um, Alexander the Great and his incursions into india uh his Army had dysentery that the commanders tended to have less severe problems And it was uh, according to the story it was attributed to the silver cups So glass also, uh, was in an extremely important advance and uh, probably arose from Pot fire on sand, uh, but it goes back 3500 Before the common era That's that's about 5500 years ago um and the first glass vessels are are from About, um 3500 years ago and, uh, about, uh 21 or 22 centuries ago syrian craftsmen invented the blowpipe And that'll come in to a story i'm going to tell a little bit later But I have constituents of, uh, soda line glass here I wanted to mention I'm jumping forward now I wanted to mention the inventiveness and how ideas emerged that were ahead of their time or that gave way for Really clever adaptations as greater insight emerged Uh, this, uh, Dennis Papain, uh, was a ugonaut So he had to flee from france lived in germany for a time and then I died in london But he invented a steam digester in 1679 I he, uh I'd given a talk on statistics earlier on and demovere was uh similar he was a ugonaut who had to france because of the risk persecution um which was a benefit to the countries like holland and germany and, uh, written that, uh These folks fled to because they were often educated and craftsmen and But uh, he also invented a steam engine 1690 uh, uh, and he built it in 1707 and in hanover and in germany and was Going up the river with it. He had permission to do this and uh, it was attacked by This made me think of the story of the luddites, uh, a mob of local river boatmen Who figured This is going to be the end of our jobs if we let him get away with it. So they destroyed his boat But this fellow in the 1600s invented a piston that worked uh mechanical piston Which considering materials and the techniques for working metals even that point, uh Was which it's pretty much craftsmanship It's quite an achievement Any rate, uh, I go Jump about here a bit, uh food preservation techniques, uh It would not be a bad idea to, um uh Have some of these in your repertoire Uh, I mentioned last week. I consider the universe, uh, an unstable dangerous place people particularly and, uh, you can have periods of time go by when, uh, everything you take for granted uh Edisons to electricity to water to food supplies To security are totally lost And you might be, uh Able to survive if you know some Fundamental tricks from history, uh Uh Drying the food it's it's interesting if you Drying meat is more dangerous.  They're Just because they're picked from the tree doesn't mean they're dead. Um, so, uh It's I think that's one thing that defines, uh, the Difference and uh, it's much easier to safely store vegetables and fruits and it is um meats and fish, uh And um animal products culturing also is one way It's longer it's making yogurt made a batch of yogurt Yesterday that'll last me a week It's a microwave biology experiment in a process Lactobacillus bacteria use Your previous yogurt as an inoculum for your flash heated milk um And fermenting wine I put this in simply as a Kind of a road map that can be applied to fermenting most anything um, but Wine has a lot of culture to it, uh and, uh Basically for for easy steps you uh stomp the grapes and uh Makes must which is this mixture and then a primary fermentation based on yeast that's on the skin And that's really active in that first five days and then you rack it uh racking As you pour off the supernatant and uh, or you siphon it off And uh, if you taste wine and you hold wine up to the light and look good you want to look before you spin it um to see that It's not a lot of sediment shouldn't be a lot of sediment in um and uh After the first five days, um, you can rack several times where you You'll get more sediment uh as yeast get killed off because they've used up their oxygen and their sugars and the alcohol level increases Make the last uh the first 70 percent of the alcohol comes about in the first five days so Uh, it'd be pretty easy for primitive people if they've got A tainer to put fruit in that uh Doesn't let a lot of oxygen in to get some kind of liquid that would have some alcohol in it um the secondary fermentation It's continuation of the same process That's not the same as second from Secondary fermentation means a second step where it just slows down and tell by the look of it the Foam from the yeast activity This is and you start to get just little tiny bubbles and uh not Not this uh kind of raging fire of metabolic activity going The yeast are growing and using up their uh Substrate So, uh, if you do a second fermentation, I I really say I have a little note here at uh You can put some extra fruit material To feed the yeast and they'll make more carbon dioxide and if it's sealed you can make a sparkling wine so You can stop the fermentation process with cold shock or you can add sulfur trioxide Generally, uh, qualitates wine or quality wine I'd have sulfides in it and uh Pasteurization Is really important and I'm going to talk about that in my second part a little bit more of it If you heat wine above 104 degrees Bound height of 40 degrees centigrade that'll kill the yeast You can still have other pathogens in the wine And uh If you want to kill those that the ones that are most likely to make you sick, uh, you heat it to I I mostly known of 70 degrees centigrade for 15 minutes or so Is is pretty typical for pasteurization. I don't have experience with flash pasteurizations I um the way I I do something in between these two when I make yogurt Uh And actually grew up drinking raw milk from a herd Our herd of cattle Uh, wasn't pasteurized Uh, one of the later talks I want to do along these lines is about Mycobacterium and tuberculosis and you can have bovine tuberculosis and you can have a typical mycobacteria that calls diseases like sclerophylla where you can have Draining lymph nodes especially in the neck and uh Or in the face From ingesting these other mycobacterium Those are also killed by pasteurization but uh You have to watch if you don't pasteurize you have to really watch your herd and uh be able to recognize if you're if you've got sick cattle And these mycobacterium just in the soil they're ubiquitous really Um, you can also stop the uh fermentation by dumping some alcohol in vodka And uh I like this uh this uh dimijon Term for these as part of the wine cultures you see Formus 60 liter bottles That have a narrow top that worked And even the technology of being able to seal these these are impermeable uh non porous containers um That'll keep oxygen and keep gas is out on the atomic level, but uh Even sealing techniques of sealing these things has come a ways German, it's a court flasher. It's uh Often these are the ones I have in this picture don't show it, but they uh have a basket uh That they're uh enveloped in that helps handling and helps them not to get broken uh now Getting up to an interesting point there was um and this relates More than you might think to Edison I want to talk about As as we go along Napoleon wanted to have ways of conserving food for his army And he offered 12 000 francs and um Nicholas op out was a confectioner who figured out a way of doing this and um he uh Did a lot of experiments over at least six years and He didn't get he he got stiffed for a long time But after about 10 years they started to pay him off the french government I started to pay him off for his contribution uh, but he came up with a way of preserving food by Eating it and keeping it separate from air and he would basically put it in the bottle Put a seal on it with backs Or corking but these were um narrow a narrow mouth bottle, but uh um And he did experiments in heating the water bath for varying lengths of time and that was successful um variably successful, but uh Pretty stupendous for the day and age. Uh, he did a big demo he bottled and heat preserved whole sheep And uh Show he could do it. I guess so I'm I'm not going to get into this too much, but it's it's sort of related to uh, the pasteurization except you these are these are sealed Uh, and and the 21st century you got two ways of canning and it was a hot bath hot water bath where I have the range in temperatures in both Fahrenheit and sundegrade there for 35 minutes to two hours. I'd tend to I would not tend to cut that short um, if you're going to use hot water bath, uh pressure canning where you can have uh Sealed container has a rack and put some water in it. It's uh, sort of like the steam digester that uh, I've been invented that I showed you a minute ago um Which has a lot of industrial uses uh I'll tell you about it further later um If you're going to can things like tomatoes are generally if you can more acidic acidic things and you'll be okay uh, if you're not, um Careful you can, uh inadequately process these things and uh end up with botulinum Which is a clostridium botulinum is uh, it's a soil bacteria It's really durable at situations, uh um, there's a number of things like anthrax Clostridium tetanus uh, clostridium botulinum. They can form spores so and when it when Times are good. They desporulate and go back into cellular form and invade And they produce exotoxins There are uh, seven exotoxins associated with botulinum They're called abcdefg and A and b particularly are noted for um, causing human disease They're an And uh, I'll tell you very quickly. It's um AB the most toxic natural, uh Natural occurring substance with the highest toxicity and on the planet in terms of it's In fact on humans, um, so you want to use, um Clean jars. They can be uh, sterilized at a dishwasher or you can boil them, which isn't a bad idea and use tongs um, and there are specialized jars that you can get nowadays that uh are There's some history behind that and you can, um, blanch the Tomatoes right kind of flash boil them and then the skin peels off Much the way it happens with humans if they get, uh Bad scalding skin just disappears Uh, it's really severe Peels off and it's gone Then the boiling water you if it's a hot water Canning you want um to put it in boiling water. It's on a rack So it's not right on the bottom of the container and jars are Have water over there over the top of them and uh Most people don't monitor the water bath if they're doing home canning Uh, like that if it's boiling it's boiling. Uh, and uh, so you would be in excess of the temperatures they list there Which generally is not a problem Um, putting pickling salts now pickling salts are not like table salt table salt has I died and uh anti-caking ingredients which can even be things like kale in those little particles I mentioned that are in Part of clay that can make earthenware That are absorptive. They help keep salt granulated, but you want to use pure salt and uh, the salting helps reduce It's just salinity and I give a level here about 10 percent Like 10 gram percent salt solution would be a mixture like I List there two three milliliters of the salt powder to Eater of water and then lemon juice is great for acidifying and lemon juice often has a pH of about 4.2 And if you put 30 milliliters in A liter of water it's a pH of about 4.5 if you have a pH of 4.5 in a food Then generally bacteria are not going to grow in it One of the major reasons why bacteria stops stops growing in a culture medium Is because of the acidity from the waste products That they produce by their metabolism Okay, I'll move ahead The microscope was a major step forward Which then was kind of Is there and then kind of not exploited but They went hook uh in 1666 was credited with making the first real successful when Uh his uh is a single lens This this flat plate in this picture is actually a two brass or ten plates Riveted together and there's a little convex lens in it a single lens and the tip of this point Just outside of that aperture upper third Is that where the specimen was put it could be a drop of um Pond water or blood or Scrapings from his teeth. He looked you spermatozoa. He looked Is it accurate I guess and Must have had very good eyes and Probably stood shade With the specimen just getting sunlight And uh look through the hole and He could see things with magnification up to 250 Which is stunning for a single simple microscope like this um the uh Shape of the lens in these cases were convex or by convex It was lentil shaped like the lentil seeds and lentil is the origin of The the latin word for lentil is the origin for uh the word lens His name for the shape and uh for food um Now uh He got his he was a lens maker glasses For reading and uh seen better especially for reading I think Uh or looking at things close Uh Had become more and more popular and this is in the Netherlands and uh His best uh glass um that He was able to uh Develop into a lens came from the droplet of the little bead Of glass that was on um glass blowers pipe and uh Which I think is kind of interesting goes back to the invention of glass blowers pipe by uh The first century uh before the common era syrian uh craftsmen So any rate it's I actually find this really fascinating that it was such simple uh Design he was able to achieve what he did now uh 100 years before well 70 years before 15 90 uh There was a father and son who were lens makers who made a compound microscope and this has to uh pipes that are um nested and sort of like a telescope and um It was a compound microscope with uh a If the objective or the part that was down by the uh object to be looked at was uh Uh convex on one side and flat on the other and the other lens was uh My convex and it only had um a Magnification of 10x 10 power Which isn't much it's uh It could do almost that well uh with a Good handheld uh magnifying glass um The uh robert hook uh Further developed that microscope and made refinements. Uh, I'll show you a picture of that in a moment and uh uh, he published in 1665 uh Micrographia and One of the Drawings depicted mucor mucor is a fungus um I've had some patients that had mucor uh that uh particularly with uh Diabetics, uh, and they're impaired immunity they get uh Or growing in their sinus and it can be invasive And invade the globe invade the eye socket Uh go through bone It requires uh generally and it kills kills tissue as it goes and it requires uh aggressive removal of all the affected tissue Means their sinus and their eye Is sometimes lost Always bothered me terribly But um And the cases I dealt with with this uh an ophthalmologist came in and took out the eye uh But uh Some of these talks I give like a non-alcoholic Stegatohepatitis and uh the importance of the microbiome and it's a it's relationship to type 2 diabetes Uh try to keep your blood sugars good And your diet good at any rate, uh Hooks microscope only got to about 50 power Hmm. I'm not seeing my oh there. I was trying to there we go I was trying to advance and I couldn't see anything happening. Um, this is just a drawing of the uh Hooks microscope that has an eyepiece a tube and The objective is that little point down at the bottom and he used a um Glass crystal or things containing water to diffuse the light source um and uh Honor microscopes have an aperture that you can adjust so that you can let more or less light in and Sensor for the light source and they often have an electric light Electric light source. I I used uh my uh microscopes with mirrors a lot when I was young Uh, I was in medical school. They gave us a uh rented us a uh microscope with a electric light to use for Uh, I have mine about 18 months. I wish I could have bought it. I couldn't afford to but uh um at any rate the Condenser will diffuse the light so it's not glaring in one spot and uh, it's really Quite a quite a thing that uh You have a stage and you put the slide on top of that and just having a clear glass slide with a smear on it And I'll talk more about how to do those later But uh, there's so much I think if it is culture you can say it's technology, but I think there's a culture As part of the culture of science and how People anywhere can look at the microscopic world and this insert. There's a picture of dead cork Uh, hook just took thin slices and it showed these little cells and he was the first to use the term cells Okay going further just to mention john dalton joseph priestly attributed to Scientific knowledge that hoped a lot in medicine in that uh It was a transition from alchemy and magical thinking to scientific chemistry and quantitative observations Some of these pre-saging The atomic theory um, I particularly liked uh priestly Joseph priestly because he was uh uh such an open-minded Progressive thinker. Uh, he was the one to name um Rubber As rubber because he noted a use of it. Uh, it was being uh imported for this is going into the age of exploration and um exploitation of uh Anyone that could be conquered uh to take their resources and um often used them for the labor and uh, so Europe was being flooded with interesting products and one of those was rubber It uh priestly was the one who noted that rubber would mark away or a rub away the mark of a pencil on paper and These this is just a list of the gases that he discovered and he was clever. He Wasn't a chemist originally. He kind of got into it and um He used a collection Over mercury which was makes me think of levosier a bit, but uh Who lost his head in the future revolution? but uh one of the Things that benjamin franklin encouraged him to write a a book on his experiments and electricity and he used it to Um demonstrate and I I love this idea that scientific process Scientific progress depends more on the accumulation of new facts that anyone Can discover and on the theoretical insights of a few men of genius and I think back this would have been in um great britain the time of just uh worship of uh Just about of isaac newton newton died. I think in 1727 So he was legend and one of the reasons why microscopy didn't advance more. I think um, is it kind of lay laden for 150 years was because um mathematical physics was so uh successful and astronomy and uh the experimental method and uh physics was so productive it drew a lot of talent Um I just wanted to show what rubber trees look like and uh, they Do cuts in them and uh draw their sap and the sap was sticky and It would form uh at a great temperature form kind of a neat substance that bounced and could be shaped But if it got too hot it became gooey and sticky and if it got too cold it would just crack and um so not to get into this too much, but uh One thing I put a lot more information slides than I can ever cover in talk But my idea is that people can visit my um slide uh PDF and uh read through things if they want to Pursuit further, but um Charles Goodyear uh in 1847 finally after At least six or seven years of Struggling to figure out how to make rubber Usable he was Obsessed with this he dumped his family on friends who were charitable and he spent a couple of stents in debtor's prison and He bought a process where Uh A colleague had discovered that adding sulfur to the rubber. It wasn't sticky I found that uh, he he accidentally dropped some of that on a stove And the heat vulcanized the rubber and so Sorry, I bumped my microphone.  There's uh Modern mason jars Actually have a lid to put over the jar That's separate and then you have a ring that locks down on it that has uh, uh mason Invented a tool to uh cut threads into this zinc lead this zinc ring cap and um The inner lid that lays right in and contact with your material to be canned Is not to be used a second time although I guarantee it's People do it the rubber gets Uh fatigued and has little cracks and you can get bacteria in there and you can get very sick So, um, don't cut corners with that inner lid But uh having a good seal is critical to successful canning Yeah, this guy also invented the salt shaker um So I'm up now to where I had uh gotten before and amazingly, I did it About 10 minutes faster Um, so I'm gonna stop here. Uh, except to add that from my mention of chemistry um I'm going to continue this talk uh at I guess uh in two hours um and uh the In the 1840s like helmholtz, uh showed uh in Any writings that physics applied to humans At human beings were not some, uh uh Magical creation that Did not respond to the laws of nature and, uh, uh, Liebig um Did a similar, uh thing for chemistry uh so I mentioned that because I'm going to tell a story in when I start talking about the seven Pandemics of cholera of the first use of IV fluids And one of the things that was stunning to me was the outrage of the medical community And it was rejected and it was Really not until like 1902. I think that IV fluids were used again Because they didn't understand the physiology and they didn't have precise chemistry But um, they'd had stunning results, but Physicians felt it was outrageous to Violate the sanctity of the human body by infusing fluids it Is another thing that reveals the level of magical thinking that Humankind has had to overcome to be able to Advance So I'll stop there any questions Thank you for the applause day Questions comments Thank you Shanta. Thank you. This is all I have a lot of neat things, uh Um to share of Things we take for granted and where they came from that Happened in the 19th century that uh, I think will be interesting for the next talk Once I I'm basically going to walk us up to the beginning of antibiotics and then I'm going to do a talk after that or probably be January or uh about Focusing on three diseases micro bacterial diseases, which include osis and leprosy uh syphilis and uh And then uh We'll have a sort of other Talks that are To some degree disease oriented That uh talk about the classes of antibiotics and what we've got and where it's going What the future of it is so that's that's my concept Thank you for letting me indulge in this Walk through human history Uh As I see everything is connected in a way. Thank you, Jess. Any other questions? comments When I was in residency uh There was one guy who had a real sense of humor and uh He was answering questions and uh, there were several medical students with us and they had number of questions And he seemed like he grew weary of the questions. And so he turned and looked at them. He says anyone else went on load Some reason that just came to my mind Okay, well, thank you for your attention


for more on that. Let's get it out to Meredith Murokovic with the Clubhouse report presented by your local forward stores. And Meredith, let's talk more about Stan and what he's done. Has he been delivering hits? Yes, but he's been delivering clutch hits for the Yankees. Not only last night, but all season long. He really has been exceptional in those situations all season long. In high leverage situations for the Yankees this year, 2.99 batting average, seven home runs, 40 RBI's. Now last night was the ninth walk-off win for the Yankees this season. Third for John Carlos Stanton as a New York Yankee, and he just continues to impress his teammates. We always have confidence in G.  So he's been swinging the bat well lately and you know he's been on a tear. So big night for him and it was a big one for us. He's hot right now, you know. He's scary when he comes up to play. Everybody knows it. The whole world knows it.  He's going to do damage. Clay, from a pitcher's perspective and in these extra ending rules, what is it like or I guess how imposing could it be facing a hitter like John Carlos Stanton? Yeah, I mean, you know, starting to enter with a runner in a second, it can be distracting and it can kind of take your focus off the things that needs it needs to be needed to focus on. So you have the runner there that can be distracting and can kind of get you thinking, you know, you need to approach the, you know, situation a certain way and then you got you know, standing up there at the plate and he's not a guy where if you don't execute pitches, it's probably not going to go your way. So I think it's a it's a tough situation and I'm glad we have the lineup we have and you know, I'm on the steam and helping our guys win. And while John Carlos Stanton may have delivered the final blow yesterday, let's not forget about Aaron Judge Jack. You mentioned it. These two guys are really leading the way offensively since August 1st, a combined 19 home runs driven in 45 as a duo. Aaron Boone was asked about it. He said, I really just love where these two are at right now. Those two guys in a lot of ways are driving us right now. They hope it continues this afternoon. Stanton is back at DH. The loop boy is out of the lineup.