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highlyeccentricCourtesy of, well, the inevitable result of reading 8-10 things at once, and also of spending a week cat-sitting in Fribourg. Why working in someone else's house should get more reading done than working in my own, I do not know, but that's how it is.
Meanwhile, the most striking thing I read this fortnight, I think, is the essay Fucking Like A Housewife, by Jamie Hood, in The New Enquiry. It's a personal essay, with an artful mix of abstraction, self-exposure, and ironic reflexive comments, by a trans woman on desire and disappointment. I picked up the link from the substack/blog 'It's David', on the basis of this incredibly striking line: "A fantasy is at its heart a survivalist lie."
Cast your minds back to July 2019, when The Crane Wife came out. I posited that The Crane Wife is just one in a recurring genre of women's writing (although I wouldn't be surprised if there were also similar from gay men, or nonbinary people; I would be very surprised and FASCINATED to find its like from cis straight men). I can't exactly define it: the Disappointment Memoir, perhaps? The short story 'Cat Person' belongs here, too, although personally I didn't find it that engaging. But just as important as disappointment is desire, thwarted potential, hunger. Jess Zimmerman's Hunger Makes Me is another example. I'd put Lucia Osborne-Crowley's Meanjin Papers essay from Winter 2020, Depreciated: The Price of Love in there, too, although it was far too niche and Australian to go viral.
When these essays go viral, they seem to spark cathartic identification. And they do in me, too (to varying degrees; Cat Person was a particular low). And yet I find myself frustrated, over and over, at how... straight they are. The disappointment and despair that pervades them is, on the one hand, familiar: I, too, have dated Men (TM), but the sense of compulsion, that this must work because this is all there is? It's... odd, to read, as a queer woman. I could say yes, this is the double bind of the heteropatriarchy: how lucky for me, that this is not all there is for me. And I'm not arguing that it *isn't* structural. But I don't think it's actually limited to heterosexuality, the gaping void of desiring and needing and loving and somehow never being enough to get your own needs met or even, it feels, acknowledged. You can find its threads in all kinds of queer memoirs, and complicated tangled versions: of giving and loving and yet not being able to provide what the other party needs, and so on. Never surfaces in viral essay form, though, which is a shame: my gut instincts tell me that for queer women, especially, the ways in which this story grows in us aren't so far off from the ways - especially the ways outside of primary partnership - that the same story grows in straight women.
Let me know when someone writes a queer woman Disappointment Memoir Piece.
Hood's essay isn't the one I'm looking for; for one thing, nowhere does it suggest that Hood would identify as queer (perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn't; this essay is exclusively about her as a trans woman dating men). But it IS a version of the Desire/Disappointment memoir that won't go viral on account of not being "relatable" to enough people - in fact it's probably actively off-putting to most people who identified with 'The Crane Wife'. The desire in which Hood is repeatedly thwarted is the desire to be "a Housewife": to be allowed, invited, cherished in that most protected of feminine roles; to be able to offer love-as-service; all the things that her straight cis counterparts find constraining. She interrogates this desire, it's playing out as kink, it's function as a "survivalist lie", and the ways in which that fantasy might be a vehicle for desires more basic and more terrifying not to receive. I recommend it, both as a piece that deserves to be alongside the viral Desire/Disappointment genre, and as a fine example of personal essay craft in its own right.
Currently Reading: Oh so many things, as usual
Fiction for Fun: Bernadine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other', and Tamora Pierce's The Magic in the Weaving. I've been craving the Circle books since March, for obvious Pandemic reasons; bought them for Xmas and only got around to them now. I'm finding them so soothing. The Evaristo.. hmm. It's mostly portraits of people, so far, through the perspectives of first Amma, a middle-aged dramatist, and then her daughter Yazz. I was enjoying it until the switch to Yazz, and then... Evaristo is gentle with Amma's foibles and failings, but Yazz feels like a sharper satire, in places. Her apparently unassailable confidence in her own rightness and the wrongness of adults may yet be modulated, but the bit about her faking anxiety to get a larger room in halls gives me pause. She's starting to feel like a straw-gen-z, I suppose.
Poetry: puttering onward with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: Not quite halfway through Winter 2020 Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: I haven't picked up the hooks or the Foucault since l last did a Reading Post, oops.
For work: Got to get back to 'The Fabliau in English' now, I guess.
Recently Finished: 'The Lotus Palace' should've gone in last update, actually, as opposed to 'ABSOLUTELY NOTHING', which is what I claimed.
The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this and will definitely be following up on the series. It's a combo historical mystery and historical romance, set in the pleasure quarter of Tang Dynasty Chang'an. The worldbuilding / historical research is rich and rewarding without ever overwhelming the plot. Protags fascinating, Our Heroine's occasional bits of unreliable (or withholding) narration deftly deployed. My quibble with it is the pacing / twining of the mystery and romance plots and their respective generic demands. The fortuitous mechanics to allow the Happily Ever After come too quickly and with too little detail in comparison to the mystery plot, which might be okay if they were a rapid fade-out, but then we stick around for the last odds and ends of the mystery plot to be likewise deus-ex-machina'd.
Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I devoured this and enjoyed it, and yet. I read it and loved it in its prior online existence, and wasn't sure how it could be improved. For the most part it IS significantly improved: the worldbuilding and political plot are much strengthened. Oddly, though, some things were lost in the shift that make the mystery plot - and the villain of the final crisis- less compelling. And I am not happy with the logics of how gender and sexuality work in this expanded universe: long story not for covering here, I feel. (DW note: that's a post under lock if you have access but missed it.)
A Companion to Literature and Film by Robert Stam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I think I had this out by mistake (instead of A Companion to Film and Adaptation). Couple of useful essays though.
Spinning by Tillie Walden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was beautifully executed, but oddly difficult to read: the art style and minimalist text somehow really effectively conveys a sense of trapped combination drive and despair that's a Lot.
Pending next update: a couple of weird Canterbury Tales adaptations, and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works'
Online Fiction:
Adam Ouston (Meanjin Winter 2020), The Velvet Plain. This is... as close to sci-fi as Meanjin gets. Surrealist. Maybe it's enviro-fiction? Maybe it's not. Warning for some brutality.
Rebecca Slater (Meanjin Winter 2020) Scales. This one definitely is climate fiction, and the surreal elements more easily interpretable as metaphor. Not one that will stick with me for a long time.
Pauline Melville (Electric Lit), Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary discuss their suicides. I definitely want to read the collection from which this draws, and am slightly annoyed it has no online footprint beyond this so I can't file it in goodreads.
Phoebe Barton (Lightspeed Magazine), The Mathematics of Fairyland. This is sweet (cn: suicidality), but not as mathematical as I had hoped.
Up Next: I need to prioritise for work: stuff on fabliau as genre, stuff on violence and humour. Everything else as whim takes me.
Some links:
Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon (LitHub), Taking Kink Seriously: A Reading List.
Cara Giamo (Atlas Obscura Feb 2019), The celebrity tortoise breakup that rocked the world
Franki Cookney (The Overthinkers Guide to Sex, blog), The best bad sex I ever had. At the time I couldn’t quite articulate it. It felt like having sex with someone who didn’t actually like sex, I remember saying to a friend. Cookney connects that to Peggy Ornstein's reseach on (straight) young men and sexuality in a way that is, shall we say, Not Wrong.
Atlas Obscura place entry, Méret Oppenheim fountain. Saw this unexpectly this past week in Bern. It is WEIRD.
Douglas Dowland (The Rambling), Flirting with Foucault. Dowland uses Eric Wade's memoir of Foucault's time in California, during which Wade (and his partner) "flirted" (per Dowland) with Foucault, to put forward an argument about flirting as generative of thought, friendship, philosophy. I would like to be on board with this argument, I really would, but I am thrown by the fact that from Dowland's description what happened here is Foucault turned down a speaking invitation, Wade ambushed him at a different event and wangled his way into his graces by offering to drive him to a site he wanted to see, plied him with substances and asked him wildly personal questions about his sex life. Nice to know even Foucault gets sexually harassed on the job??
Lizzie O'Shea (Overland), Facebook vs the media code: whoever wins, we lose. I read this trying to figure out what the rationale for the 'make google and facebook >>pay for news<<' thing is. I have gone from baffled to impressed at the gall. It's not a copyright based argument at all, it's a sheer power grab. And one that will profit Murdoch more than most.
Amanda Meade (Guardian), Google and Facebook: the landmark Australian law that will make them pay for news content. I had to read this one to check I wasn't misunderstanding.
Ketan Joshi (RenewEconomy), Google's Sky News Australia team-up will make it a climate misinformation powerhouse. This is Not Good, folks.
Sonja Blignaut (Own blog), On depletion - as different to fatigue.
Julia Ftatek (The Rambling), Jonathan and Taylor: the two Swifts. I really enjoyed this one, do recommend.
David (own blog/substack), David Davis XVIII: Part 3, 'good for you'. Cautions against 'therapeutic' justifications for kink. I don’t care if it’s good for me. It doesn’t need to be good for me for me to be allowed to do it.
Robin Craig (Looking At Porn blog/substack), Tickling. I love humans, humans are so great and come up with so many niche things.
Neelanjana Banjeree, interview with Randa Jarrar (Harpers Bazaar), There is a bigger world: Randa Jarrar on her memoir 'Love is an Ex-Country'.
Meanwhile, the most striking thing I read this fortnight, I think, is the essay Fucking Like A Housewife, by Jamie Hood, in The New Enquiry. It's a personal essay, with an artful mix of abstraction, self-exposure, and ironic reflexive comments, by a trans woman on desire and disappointment. I picked up the link from the substack/blog 'It's David', on the basis of this incredibly striking line: "A fantasy is at its heart a survivalist lie."
Cast your minds back to July 2019, when The Crane Wife came out. I posited that The Crane Wife is just one in a recurring genre of women's writing (although I wouldn't be surprised if there were also similar from gay men, or nonbinary people; I would be very surprised and FASCINATED to find its like from cis straight men). I can't exactly define it: the Disappointment Memoir, perhaps? The short story 'Cat Person' belongs here, too, although personally I didn't find it that engaging. But just as important as disappointment is desire, thwarted potential, hunger. Jess Zimmerman's Hunger Makes Me is another example. I'd put Lucia Osborne-Crowley's Meanjin Papers essay from Winter 2020, Depreciated: The Price of Love in there, too, although it was far too niche and Australian to go viral.
When these essays go viral, they seem to spark cathartic identification. And they do in me, too (to varying degrees; Cat Person was a particular low). And yet I find myself frustrated, over and over, at how... straight they are. The disappointment and despair that pervades them is, on the one hand, familiar: I, too, have dated Men (TM), but the sense of compulsion, that this must work because this is all there is? It's... odd, to read, as a queer woman. I could say yes, this is the double bind of the heteropatriarchy: how lucky for me, that this is not all there is for me. And I'm not arguing that it *isn't* structural. But I don't think it's actually limited to heterosexuality, the gaping void of desiring and needing and loving and somehow never being enough to get your own needs met or even, it feels, acknowledged. You can find its threads in all kinds of queer memoirs, and complicated tangled versions: of giving and loving and yet not being able to provide what the other party needs, and so on. Never surfaces in viral essay form, though, which is a shame: my gut instincts tell me that for queer women, especially, the ways in which this story grows in us aren't so far off from the ways - especially the ways outside of primary partnership - that the same story grows in straight women.
Let me know when someone writes a queer woman Disappointment Memoir Piece.
Hood's essay isn't the one I'm looking for; for one thing, nowhere does it suggest that Hood would identify as queer (perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn't; this essay is exclusively about her as a trans woman dating men). But it IS a version of the Desire/Disappointment memoir that won't go viral on account of not being "relatable" to enough people - in fact it's probably actively off-putting to most people who identified with 'The Crane Wife'. The desire in which Hood is repeatedly thwarted is the desire to be "a Housewife": to be allowed, invited, cherished in that most protected of feminine roles; to be able to offer love-as-service; all the things that her straight cis counterparts find constraining. She interrogates this desire, it's playing out as kink, it's function as a "survivalist lie", and the ways in which that fantasy might be a vehicle for desires more basic and more terrifying not to receive. I recommend it, both as a piece that deserves to be alongside the viral Desire/Disappointment genre, and as a fine example of personal essay craft in its own right.
Currently Reading: Oh so many things, as usual
Fiction for Fun: Bernadine Evaristo's 'Girl, Woman, Other', and Tamora Pierce's The Magic in the Weaving. I've been craving the Circle books since March, for obvious Pandemic reasons; bought them for Xmas and only got around to them now. I'm finding them so soothing. The Evaristo.. hmm. It's mostly portraits of people, so far, through the perspectives of first Amma, a middle-aged dramatist, and then her daughter Yazz. I was enjoying it until the switch to Yazz, and then... Evaristo is gentle with Amma's foibles and failings, but Yazz feels like a sharper satire, in places. Her apparently unassailable confidence in her own rightness and the wrongness of adults may yet be modulated, but the bit about her faking anxiety to get a larger room in halls gives me pause. She's starting to feel like a straw-gen-z, I suppose.
Poetry: puttering onward with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: Not quite halfway through Winter 2020 Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: I haven't picked up the hooks or the Foucault since l last did a Reading Post, oops.
For work: Got to get back to 'The Fabliau in English' now, I guess.
Recently Finished: 'The Lotus Palace' should've gone in last update, actually, as opposed to 'ABSOLUTELY NOTHING', which is what I claimed.
The Lotus Palace by Jeannie LinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this and will definitely be following up on the series. It's a combo historical mystery and historical romance, set in the pleasure quarter of Tang Dynasty Chang'an. The worldbuilding / historical research is rich and rewarding without ever overwhelming the plot. Protags fascinating, Our Heroine's occasional bits of unreliable (or withholding) narration deftly deployed. My quibble with it is the pacing / twining of the mystery and romance plots and their respective generic demands. The fortuitous mechanics to allow the Happily Ever After come too quickly and with too little detail in comparison to the mystery plot, which might be okay if they were a rapid fade-out, but then we stick around for the last odds and ends of the mystery plot to be likewise deus-ex-machina'd.
Winter's Orbit by Everina MaxwellMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I devoured this and enjoyed it, and yet. I read it and loved it in its prior online existence, and wasn't sure how it could be improved. For the most part it IS significantly improved: the worldbuilding and political plot are much strengthened. Oddly, though, some things were lost in the shift that make the mystery plot - and the villain of the final crisis- less compelling. And I am not happy with the logics of how gender and sexuality work in this expanded universe: long story not for covering here, I feel. (DW note: that's a post under lock if you have access but missed it.)
A Companion to Literature and Film by Robert StamMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I think I had this out by mistake (instead of A Companion to Film and Adaptation). Couple of useful essays though.
Spinning by Tillie WaldenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was beautifully executed, but oddly difficult to read: the art style and minimalist text somehow really effectively conveys a sense of trapped combination drive and despair that's a Lot.
Pending next update: a couple of weird Canterbury Tales adaptations, and 'Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works'
Online Fiction:
Up Next: I need to prioritise for work: stuff on fabliau as genre, stuff on violence and humour. Everything else as whim takes me.
Some links: