Strong Verbs Are Just Better

One of my preoccupations, as you may have noticed, is the question: why do we read? Why do we read fiction, or any kind of narrative? What are we finding there? I am also currently frustrated, from both fandom and the popular-fiction-sphere (literary fiction isn't quite subject to the same pressure, although marginalized authors very often are), with what seems to me to be a stifling call for 'good' representation, morally upright stories, heartwarming narratives at the expense of ones which challenge, ones which excavate pain and rage, ones which ask why and how human beings hurt each other and ourselves. These shouldn't be contradictory needs, but it often seems like few people can imagine a story-selling market where the two needs can be met.

The best thing I read about fiction and fictionality in the past fortnight, and indeed for quite some time, was Meredith Talusan in conversation with Torrey Peters at Electric Lit. I did not have Detransition, Baby on my to-do list, because I thought I was going to be very uninterested in a 'queers settling down and having babies' story. I have rectified this erroneous assumption and ordered a copy.

TP: I see Twitter encouraging a particular type of politics. An attack or defend mindset. Fiction is a space for a different kind of mindset. A slower more meditative mindset which may still be political, but in a different mode. When politics are slower and more personal and there is less need for rapidly deployable defenses, I sink into my own way of seeing the world.

I say things in this novel that I would never air on Twitter, and then I get to watch how those statements land with different characters. So it becomes very personal, very open. It was less a deliberate thing or an unconscious thing, just that I think fiction as a mode allowed me to not be anticipating my attacks and defenses. I could write a sentence or joke and know that no one would read it for years. And that space and time allowed for watching and feeling. And because my vantage is a trans vantage, that became the natural vantage of the book—I didn’t choose it for political reasons, but because it was simply the vantage from which I see, although that has political implications, of course. But the emphasis on that vantage arose from a mode of fiction that encouraged an impulse to share and see what happens, rather than an impulse to attack or defend politically. Long-form fiction has been for me, in the age of Twitter, a refuge of honesty and openness and even a different kind of humor.

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Currently Reading:
Fiction For Fun: Girl, Woman, Other, in fits and starts; the erotica collection 'Say, Please', edited by Sinclair Sexsmith, in a non-linear way.
Poetry: Still puttering on with Paradise Lost
Lit Mag: None, although I've caught up on my TLS subscriptions.
Non-Fiction for interest: Actually picked up 'Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre' again.
For work: The only active one is a book called 'Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom', which is very good.

Recently Finished:

The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting by K.J. Charles

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Good: engaging, sparking romance, I liked what happened to the secondary relationship plotline. Unfortunately, for a 'plots schemes and frauds' book, the actual scheme had some obvious flaws that surprised me, coming from KJC - and there wasn't a point where the characters were like 'ah... well, that wouldn't have worked, bugger' and revealed their wishful thinking, they just... were saved by Key Scheme Thing never happening so Problem Result never came up.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this! I keep thinking I've read it before, but no, I haven't. I think I've read the first page or two, in a critical context, but not the book itself.

I liked that the secondary plotline characters' patronising attitude toward the Africans they were working with (they themselves African-American) unravelled, but what *didn't* seem to be challenged was the African-American characters' placing of blame for their ancestors' slavery on the current peoples of Africa. It really surprised me to see what I knew as a white supremacist apologia - well, AFRICANS traded in slaves too you know! - coming from Walker's characters, and it didn't seem to be unpicked. I rather thought a lot of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was captives of war, and individuals seized for assorted colonial enforcement purposes?


Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine by Ritchie Robertson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Rather ponderous to read, and overly invested in strict genre boundaries, but useful.

Online Fiction: It's actually been a while since I updated out of this bookmark tag.

Carribean Fragoza, Lumberjack Mom, Electric Lit: Enjoyed.

Ken Liu, An Advanced Readers Picture Book of Comparative Cognition. Link goes to Lightspeed Magazine; I read it as an Escape Pod podcast (and it's a re-read, from the Paper Menagerie onthology

Charlie J. Stevens, Black Arion. Electric Lit, where I read it because of the clickbait-title 'When I grow up I want to be a genderless mollusc'. That title does far less for it than the actual title, but did get me to read it.

Ursula Vernon (RedWombatStudio), Elegant and Fine. I feel like maybe I read this back on LJ, but it had slipped my mind. An indisputably better Problem of Susan story than Gaiman's (although I continue to like that far more than many people do).

Up Next: Any one of the umpty million books on my TBR cart, of course! I need to pick another Chaucerian adaptation and run with it...

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Some links:

Kathy Davis (Guernica), There's no simple way to make it okay: on grief and growing a meadow.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Meanjin blog), What if we never recover?

Anna Weerasinghe (Nursing Clio), Sister Mariana's spyglass: the unreliable ghost of female desire in a convent archive. Great read.

Namwali Serpell and Maria Turmarkin (Yale Review), Unethical Reading and the Limits of Empathy: on the problems of reading for identification, and many other things. Dense. Challenging.

Tom Woodhouse (MERL blog), The Horseman's Word: A Secret Society of Horse Wizards. I had heard of the Horseman's Word, before, but I didn't realise it didn't grow up around horse *riding*, but around ploughhorses!

Karen Weise (Bloomberg Businessweek), The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide: Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price.. TL;DR fishy legal dealings implied.

Meredith Talusan, interview with Torrey Peters (Electric Lit), Let us be negative role models for each other

James Cahill (TLS), The face of an angel: Beyond the myth of Francis Bacon. Very interesting, but the most important thing this article offers is enough information on Francis Bacon that I will stop getting utterly thrown by 'but what has a 17th century philospher to do with modern art?' (Never mind that whenever I hear about the philosopher Bacon I think of the 13th century Roger Bacon instead)

Irina Dumetrescu (TLS), Let us now tell stories: Why we might write about trauma.

Michael Saler (TLS), Making something of ourselves: the history of character and how we shape it.

Alice Wadworth (TLS), Review of Food 4 Thot and Wheels on Fire, both podcasts.

Desirée Baptise (TLS), Review of Bright Burning Things by Lisa Harding

Claire Lowden (TLS), review of Taking A Long Look, by Vivian Gornick.

Jonathan Egid (TLS), Work–life balance: Applying the ‘project view’ to the life of John Stuart Mill.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape (TNI), Hot Allostatic Load. On intra-community abuse in queer and kink/poly communities.

Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), Why Americans Love Giant Closets.