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One thing I read in the past fortnight that will keep tickling my brain for some time is Timmah Ball's essay Why Write?, from the autumn edition of Meanjin. Unlike, say Alexis Wright, Ball is not steadfastly convinced of the value of storytelling for Indigenous Australian culture, or at least, not for achieving the material social changes needed to preserve the lives and health of Indigenous Australians - to create the material conditions not just for cultural survival but for cultural thriving. Ball, a geographer by training, is as disillusioned with the audience of white readership (which, of course, includes me) as she is with architects and planners who seek to build homage to Indigenous cultures into new developments, but who shy away from incorporating affordable housing and other intiatives which might address the immediate needs of local Indigenous people. And yet, after time away, she returns here to writing: to writing about frustration with writing.
This is something I've been thinking about as I'm thinking about teaching 'Refugee Tales'. The group who put this together (the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group), and presumably the detainees who contributed, seem to believe in the power of storytelling - or storytelling combined with the ritualised process of walking through Kent, sharing stories along the way - to build solidarity, to affirm belonging, and effect change. And yet. Refugee Tales began in 2015, and is still assembled annually, and there has been no material change in UK asylum seeker policy - if anything, the situation has become worse. What purpose, then, do the volumes serve? A rebuke? A testament to history? A salve to the mostly-white readership of the books?
I don't have answers here, only a sense of frustration.
On a rather different 'why read' front, I have been wondering again about my own attraction to those most stereotypically-feminine of genres, the personal essay and the advice column. Growing up, I read a few books in the genre not yet called YA realism / contemporary - Looking For Alibrandi and Something To Tell You being the stand-outs, naturally. I read a fair few Margaret Clark novels, but I obsessively read her advice collection 'Secret Girls Stuff'. I had almost ZERO of the problems therein: I had a crush on boy, sure, but there was so spectacularly no prospect of reciprocation that I didn't waste time angsting about how or whether to ask him out. My friends had drama around me, but I was not close enough to any of them to experience the feelings of betrayal sketched out in the friend pieces. Many years later, having exchanged these books first for SMH Life And Style columns and then for Dan Savage and then for the weirder corners of the sexblog internet, and eventually for polyamory guidebooks and Captain Awkward - well, many years later I realised that although in some of those cases the draw is 'figure out how to negotiate my own feelings by example', the bigger draw has always been 'find out what the other humans are feeling'.
Perhaps that, too, has been driving my compulsive reading of lockdown memoir pieces. Not so much to validate my own feelings, but to place them as one tiny point in a big, big map of individual experiences. Hillery Stone's Fever In The Woods got its claws in a little deeper than I expected. It has that strong sense of place that is my kryptonite; I empathised with Stone's confusion upon finding that her children, unlike her, cannot or will not self-occupy when plonked in the woods (I don't think I ever realised how solitary a child I was, until Ms Now-11 got to the age range where I *remember* being her age). And then the description of both her son, in her present, and her much younger brother in her childhood taking sick with serious fevers. I don't know if I *remember* my brother's babyhood illnesses, per se, or only fragments of them, but the fear - the fear has stayed with me, and it's not the fear Stone describes herself feeling as a parent, it's the same fear that resurfaced from her childhood: the alarmed confusion of one who is not responsible, but who is suddenly both very confused, and very insignificant.
And with that, onward to the recap.
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve. Making small headway again, and empathising very much with young, anxious, study-absorbed Peri; slowly more with her adult self, too.
Poetry: I started Carol Ann Duffy's 'The World's Wife' as soon as I finished 'Ovid Resung'. I loved 'Little Red Cap' instantly; nothing else so far has caught my breath quite so well. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to make headway with Paradise Lost courtesy of Anthony Oliveira's podcast.
Lit Mag: Not exactly rapid, but some progress with the Autumn Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: All on hiatus.
For work: Jost's collection 'Chaucer's Humour', which is full of stuffy people being stuffy and conservative and thinking they're very smart. Useful as a barometer of how many ways one can be stuffy about Chaucer. Also Heng's 'The Invention of Race', which I am loving, although i also have a 46-page (! and also ?) negative review of it bookmarked to read afterward. And finally, 'Miroirs Arthuriens', an edited collection in French and English, which I have a review copy of and had forgotten about until quite recently.
Recently Finished:
Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book. It was not easy reading: it's sharp, and bitter, and rarely shies away from depicting the brutality and callousness of rape and other violations at the heart of so many myths. I found myself tracking in careful comparison: which stories were bluntly anatomical, which more evasive, which metaphorical. And the story in the voice of Salmacis was a BRILLIANT choice, a narrative of feminine hunger and violation of a beautiful young man, and it too does not shy away from the violence she does to him.
The remainder for work, and none of them worth giving individual reviews to: the Blackwell Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c 1350-1500; a book of essays in honour of James M. Dean (the contributors of which were ROBBED, i tell you, by James M. Dean's search-engine clever choice to include his initial in his professional name); and Helen Young's 'Constructing England', a book which seems pretty good, and I can't figure out why she didn't pitch and revise it with a legit publisher instead of going through Edwin Mellon with what's clearly a serial-numbers-filed off PhD and which suffers as a monograph because of that.
Online Fiction: Both from Strange Horizons; I recommend both in podcast format.
Christine Lucas (Strange Horizons), My love, our lady of slaughter.
Anya Johanna de Niro (Strange Horizons), A voyage to Queensthroat. I particularly loved the deft use of narrative time here - the slippage between the narrator-now, the story-now, and the past. A+++.
Up Next: I think i've ploughed through the most significant teaching related books I have out, so what's up next is things on the reserve shelf, and/or saved articles. More reading on Chaucerian humour. When the Shafak is done, onward to ... whatever I fancy at the time, I guess.
Some other links:
Sophie Lewis (Mal journal), Collective turn-off. Right now – even when they publish ostensibly optimistic books about how, for example, ‘women have better sex under socialism’ – female leftists sometimes seem unable to envision outright good sex, indeed, unable to dream up anything better than, simply, an absence of domestic abuse. Fascinating take on the 'heterofatalism' trend, and touches on some things that I sense as a bisexual woman that I can't quite articulate.
Tara Haelle (Elemental), Our brains struggle to process this much stress. Not really new news, but delivered well, and with enough context that the advice isn't trite.
Rebecca Watson (LitHub), The Internet has split our sense of self: can the page reproduce that?
Melissa A. Fabello (Human Parts), The joys of queering your relationships. A nice chill complement to the Lewis piece above; may be needed to fortify oneself to tackle the Giovannitti one.
Sophia Giovanniti (Majuscule), In defense of men. Honestly the best take on the 'we should stop saying UGH MEN' discourse I've found yet, especially as it acknowledges this bit: The performative online displays of man-hating stem from a longstanding in-person sociality: the age-old tradition of straight women bitching about their boyfriends to one another, which they do precisely to feel a sense of community with other women. I have been known to UGH MEN, but I am very quickly alienated from the conversation when straight women do so, because it's so bound up in the functioning of heteronormativity in that context.
Suzanne Conklin Akbari (LitHub), Can the essay still surprise us?. (I wonder, do we demand surprise?)
The Saturday Paper, Editorial, A Revenge on Theory: a scathing take on the current AusPol higher ed policy debate.
Jami Attenberg (NYT), Is Resilience Overrated?
Irina Dumitrescu (Longreads), The Masterclass Diaries: How To Learn Everything. A great example of personal essays I enjoyed not because they gave me any great critical insight, but because they evoke one person's thoughts and feelings very well.
Jenny Bhatt, interview with Shruti Swamy (Electric Lit), Stories About the Worst Things Possible. I just really liked Swamy's way of talking about her process here - especially that she stressed she wrote about mothers and motherhood *before* she was a mother, because the experience fascinated her, not because she had autobiographical experience.
This is something I've been thinking about as I'm thinking about teaching 'Refugee Tales'. The group who put this together (the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group), and presumably the detainees who contributed, seem to believe in the power of storytelling - or storytelling combined with the ritualised process of walking through Kent, sharing stories along the way - to build solidarity, to affirm belonging, and effect change. And yet. Refugee Tales began in 2015, and is still assembled annually, and there has been no material change in UK asylum seeker policy - if anything, the situation has become worse. What purpose, then, do the volumes serve? A rebuke? A testament to history? A salve to the mostly-white readership of the books?
I don't have answers here, only a sense of frustration.
On a rather different 'why read' front, I have been wondering again about my own attraction to those most stereotypically-feminine of genres, the personal essay and the advice column. Growing up, I read a few books in the genre not yet called YA realism / contemporary - Looking For Alibrandi and Something To Tell You being the stand-outs, naturally. I read a fair few Margaret Clark novels, but I obsessively read her advice collection 'Secret Girls Stuff'. I had almost ZERO of the problems therein: I had a crush on boy, sure, but there was so spectacularly no prospect of reciprocation that I didn't waste time angsting about how or whether to ask him out. My friends had drama around me, but I was not close enough to any of them to experience the feelings of betrayal sketched out in the friend pieces. Many years later, having exchanged these books first for SMH Life And Style columns and then for Dan Savage and then for the weirder corners of the sexblog internet, and eventually for polyamory guidebooks and Captain Awkward - well, many years later I realised that although in some of those cases the draw is 'figure out how to negotiate my own feelings by example', the bigger draw has always been 'find out what the other humans are feeling'.
Perhaps that, too, has been driving my compulsive reading of lockdown memoir pieces. Not so much to validate my own feelings, but to place them as one tiny point in a big, big map of individual experiences. Hillery Stone's Fever In The Woods got its claws in a little deeper than I expected. It has that strong sense of place that is my kryptonite; I empathised with Stone's confusion upon finding that her children, unlike her, cannot or will not self-occupy when plonked in the woods (I don't think I ever realised how solitary a child I was, until Ms Now-11 got to the age range where I *remember* being her age). And then the description of both her son, in her present, and her much younger brother in her childhood taking sick with serious fevers. I don't know if I *remember* my brother's babyhood illnesses, per se, or only fragments of them, but the fear - the fear has stayed with me, and it's not the fear Stone describes herself feeling as a parent, it's the same fear that resurfaced from her childhood: the alarmed confusion of one who is not responsible, but who is suddenly both very confused, and very insignificant.
And with that, onward to the recap.
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: Elif Shafak, Three Daughters of Eve. Making small headway again, and empathising very much with young, anxious, study-absorbed Peri; slowly more with her adult self, too.
Poetry: I started Carol Ann Duffy's 'The World's Wife' as soon as I finished 'Ovid Resung'. I loved 'Little Red Cap' instantly; nothing else so far has caught my breath quite so well. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to make headway with Paradise Lost courtesy of Anthony Oliveira's podcast.
Lit Mag: Not exactly rapid, but some progress with the Autumn Meanjin
Non-fiction for personal interest: All on hiatus.
For work: Jost's collection 'Chaucer's Humour', which is full of stuffy people being stuffy and conservative and thinking they're very smart. Useful as a barometer of how many ways one can be stuffy about Chaucer. Also Heng's 'The Invention of Race', which I am loving, although i also have a 46-page (! and also ?) negative review of it bookmarked to read afterward. And finally, 'Miroirs Arthuriens', an edited collection in French and English, which I have a review copy of and had forgotten about until quite recently.
Recently Finished:
Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlinMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I loved this book. It was not easy reading: it's sharp, and bitter, and rarely shies away from depicting the brutality and callousness of rape and other violations at the heart of so many myths. I found myself tracking in careful comparison: which stories were bluntly anatomical, which more evasive, which metaphorical. And the story in the voice of Salmacis was a BRILLIANT choice, a narrative of feminine hunger and violation of a beautiful young man, and it too does not shy away from the violence she does to him.
The remainder for work, and none of them worth giving individual reviews to: the Blackwell Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c 1350-1500; a book of essays in honour of James M. Dean (the contributors of which were ROBBED, i tell you, by James M. Dean's search-engine clever choice to include his initial in his professional name); and Helen Young's 'Constructing England', a book which seems pretty good, and I can't figure out why she didn't pitch and revise it with a legit publisher instead of going through Edwin Mellon with what's clearly a serial-numbers-filed off PhD and which suffers as a monograph because of that.
Online Fiction: Both from Strange Horizons; I recommend both in podcast format.
Up Next: I think i've ploughed through the most significant teaching related books I have out, so what's up next is things on the reserve shelf, and/or saved articles. More reading on Chaucerian humour. When the Shafak is done, onward to ... whatever I fancy at the time, I guess.
Some other links: