What Are You Reading Wednesday
Jan. 30th, 2019 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricBehold, a week in which I finally finished some things!
Currently Reading:
Fiction: Yelena Moscovitch, Virtuoso, which I'm really enjoying but wishing I hadn't decided to read on my phone
Lit Mag: Latest issue of The Lifted Brow, the Blak Brow issue
Academic: 'Contemporary Chaucers Across Time', Stephanie Trigg's feschrift
Other: n/a
Recently Finished:
At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow. This was... very slow going (I think it took me four months), although I don't know that that was the book's fault so much as my weird brain-state post PhD.
I enjoyed it, I was moved by it, I admire it as a piece of craft, and more importantly, I will be chewing it over for a long time afterwards.
In the end, the central character for me was MacMurrough. I think you could make a fair case for it being Jim, but I felt in the very final pages, it was not Jim we were seeing, but MacMurrough's impression of Jim.
That aspect, having MacMurrough as the character who held the book together for me, made it a complex read. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen this book more often in the litany of Problematic Representation, because Anthony MacMurrough is a problem, and everything about his characterisation is a problem. He is presented as a problem, and as a man with problems. He is, inarguably, a predator toward younger men, and he is also a victim. The stream-of-conscious narrative doesn't offer easy judgements on him.
This passage in particular stood out:
A little before or after that quote, MacMurrough also reflects on himself as a stunted youth - his constant self-image positioning himself as younger, more vulnerable, disempowered, compared to whomever he is speaking to. That encapsulates both a sharp truth of queer temporality (related to what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the 'backwards birth' - or for a less theoretical frame, what Nico Oré Girón talks about in this Electric Lit piece about consuming queer YA as an adult) - MacMurrough, like many queer men, experienced a stunted childhood/coming-of-age. That is a driver both in his generous mentorship of Jim (and his over-idealisation of Jim and Doyler's relationship) and in his predatory behaviour toward Doyler. He acknowledges the economic difference between himself and Doyler, but not the differences of age, in part because he is a coward, and in part because he is caught himself at late adolescence.
I wanted to read MacMurrough's relationship with Jim - whom he finds attractive, and idealises, but opts to mentor and protect rather than to seduce, although the lines become rather fuzzy at times - as redemptive. That, through mentoring a younger queer man, MacMurrough is able to redeem his own experience, and right some of the warps in his character. He even establishes a more equitable relationship with Doyler - based on mutual regard for Jim, and on renegotiating their sexual dynamic. MacMurrough *liked* bottoming for Doyler and Doyler liked topping him. So far so good.
Except, I realised, some days after finishing the book: the difference is class.
MacMurrough never sleeps with Jim (at least, not in the narration - I think we can infer they had some kind of relationship in the epilogue stage). He desires him, and idealises him, and allows Jim to enjoy being the object of desire, but he doesn't come into Jim's bed as he does Doyler's.
The difference is class. Jim's middle-class status, however tenuous, buys him true childhood in MacMurrough's eyes, and allows him to be idealisable. Doyler, the dung-cart boy, never had that privilege. He can be a bought bit of rough, or elevated to a sort of equality in his status as rival for and co-protector of Jim, but he can't be the beautiful boy. He isn't worthy of protecting, except insofar as MacMurrough protects him *for Jim*.
That. That realisation was slow to dawn on me. I do mean this as a critique of the *characters*, not the book - there's no overt narrator making judgement calls, but all the components of the situation are lined up and offered to you with a fair invitation to make your own judgement from the unreliable narration available.
In short, while I enjoyed it, many wouldn't. I suspect there's also a subset of people who would find it rewarding to study (I would) but not to read for fun. I think I'd love to teach it, although the problematics of teaching a text like this are... many and various, and not being a specialist in either Irish or contemporary lit I might be safer sticking to my own specialist field's problematic texts.
Winter by Ali Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a well-written book, quite readable for stream-of-conscious style. Unless you're such a fan of Ali Smith that more Ali Smith is always the right answer, though, I don't really see what this one has to offer that Autumn didn't already provide. Some meditation on what the point of activism is if the world is truly cooked, and some more on art and/or/vs politics. But where Autumn utterly engrossed me, this seemed a bit samey.
Poetry:
No new online fiction, but I went to a poetry reading by AK Blakemore. I have mixed feelings about her poetry - in general I think I liked the newer material better. Of what I can find online, I recommend 'the new men', from this pair of poems published in Hotel magazine:
Up Next: Hannah Kent's The Good People, from the library. Something else from my hard copy shelf, as a matter of urgent clearing-out.
Music Notes: I noted last week that I discovered Bishop Briggs? Chalk up half a week's obsessive binge-listening, broken only by (I can't recall how) discovering that Florence Welch and Josh Homme did a Live cover of June Carter and Johnny Cash's Jackson.
I love it. They look so mismatched together! Their styles are so wildly different, it's like they triangulated and ended up at country music. I love it so much. Bought Florence's MTV live album for the sake of that song.
Currently Reading:
Fiction: Yelena Moscovitch, Virtuoso, which I'm really enjoying but wishing I hadn't decided to read on my phone
Lit Mag: Latest issue of The Lifted Brow, the Blak Brow issue
Academic: 'Contemporary Chaucers Across Time', Stephanie Trigg's feschrift
Other: n/a
Recently Finished:
At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'NeillMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow. This was... very slow going (I think it took me four months), although I don't know that that was the book's fault so much as my weird brain-state post PhD.
I enjoyed it, I was moved by it, I admire it as a piece of craft, and more importantly, I will be chewing it over for a long time afterwards.
In the end, the central character for me was MacMurrough. I think you could make a fair case for it being Jim, but I felt in the very final pages, it was not Jim we were seeing, but MacMurrough's impression of Jim.
That aspect, having MacMurrough as the character who held the book together for me, made it a complex read. I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen this book more often in the litany of Problematic Representation, because Anthony MacMurrough is a problem, and everything about his characterisation is a problem. He is presented as a problem, and as a man with problems. He is, inarguably, a predator toward younger men, and he is also a victim. The stream-of-conscious narrative doesn't offer easy judgements on him.
This passage in particular stood out:
‘... they make it so damned difficult. They make a thing so deeply wrong that no morality can afterward apply. It doesn’t matter how we go about it, kindly or coldly. ... One can be a gentleman thief. One can be a love-struck murderer. We’re just unspeakable, we’re sods.’That caught me with its truth, and yet. These are the words of a man excusing himself, to himself (or to his mental personification of his former mentor-lover), for predatory behaviour toward younger, lower-class men. There are resonances here of the older men in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, too - predatory, and yet desperately pathetic. Possessed of economic privilege and yet constrained by homophobia, unable to form anything resembling a meaningful connection.
A little before or after that quote, MacMurrough also reflects on himself as a stunted youth - his constant self-image positioning himself as younger, more vulnerable, disempowered, compared to whomever he is speaking to. That encapsulates both a sharp truth of queer temporality (related to what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the 'backwards birth' - or for a less theoretical frame, what Nico Oré Girón talks about in this Electric Lit piece about consuming queer YA as an adult) - MacMurrough, like many queer men, experienced a stunted childhood/coming-of-age. That is a driver both in his generous mentorship of Jim (and his over-idealisation of Jim and Doyler's relationship) and in his predatory behaviour toward Doyler. He acknowledges the economic difference between himself and Doyler, but not the differences of age, in part because he is a coward, and in part because he is caught himself at late adolescence.
I wanted to read MacMurrough's relationship with Jim - whom he finds attractive, and idealises, but opts to mentor and protect rather than to seduce, although the lines become rather fuzzy at times - as redemptive. That, through mentoring a younger queer man, MacMurrough is able to redeem his own experience, and right some of the warps in his character. He even establishes a more equitable relationship with Doyler - based on mutual regard for Jim, and on renegotiating their sexual dynamic. MacMurrough *liked* bottoming for Doyler and Doyler liked topping him. So far so good.
Except, I realised, some days after finishing the book: the difference is class.
MacMurrough never sleeps with Jim (at least, not in the narration - I think we can infer they had some kind of relationship in the epilogue stage). He desires him, and idealises him, and allows Jim to enjoy being the object of desire, but he doesn't come into Jim's bed as he does Doyler's.
The difference is class. Jim's middle-class status, however tenuous, buys him true childhood in MacMurrough's eyes, and allows him to be idealisable. Doyler, the dung-cart boy, never had that privilege. He can be a bought bit of rough, or elevated to a sort of equality in his status as rival for and co-protector of Jim, but he can't be the beautiful boy. He isn't worthy of protecting, except insofar as MacMurrough protects him *for Jim*.
That. That realisation was slow to dawn on me. I do mean this as a critique of the *characters*, not the book - there's no overt narrator making judgement calls, but all the components of the situation are lined up and offered to you with a fair invitation to make your own judgement from the unreliable narration available.
In short, while I enjoyed it, many wouldn't. I suspect there's also a subset of people who would find it rewarding to study (I would) but not to read for fun. I think I'd love to teach it, although the problematics of teaching a text like this are... many and various, and not being a specialist in either Irish or contemporary lit I might be safer sticking to my own specialist field's problematic texts.
Winter by Ali SmithMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a well-written book, quite readable for stream-of-conscious style. Unless you're such a fan of Ali Smith that more Ali Smith is always the right answer, though, I don't really see what this one has to offer that Autumn didn't already provide. Some meditation on what the point of activism is if the world is truly cooked, and some more on art and/or/vs politics. But where Autumn utterly engrossed me, this seemed a bit samey.
Poetry:
No new online fiction, but I went to a poetry reading by AK Blakemore. I have mixed feelings about her poetry - in general I think I liked the newer material better. Of what I can find online, I recommend 'the new men', from this pair of poems published in Hotel magazine:
Up Next: Hannah Kent's The Good People, from the library. Something else from my hard copy shelf, as a matter of urgent clearing-out.
Music Notes: I noted last week that I discovered Bishop Briggs? Chalk up half a week's obsessive binge-listening, broken only by (I can't recall how) discovering that Florence Welch and Josh Homme did a Live cover of June Carter and Johnny Cash's Jackson.
I love it. They look so mismatched together! Their styles are so wildly different, it's like they triangulated and ended up at country music. I love it so much. Bought Florence's MTV live album for the sake of that song.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-30 08:08 pm (UTC)