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Happy seems a bit of a stretch, even for the luckiest of us in 2020. Merry, perhaps, but while you can be both merry in the immediate moment and troubled at a deeper level, merry seems to require company in a way that happiness does not. And contentment... well. For many people, I think, grief may disbar contentment, in the 'I can be happy right now but I cannot yet be content, for this loss sticks like a burr'. But I'm not sure that is a universal of grief. I hope not.
I, mind you, don't really understand grief. Not the way most people mean it. I am lucky that my parents and siblings are okay, and have been okay all my life. The deaths of my grandmothers were not *nothing* to me, but they did not have the gutting impact that many people's grandparent-deaths do. My grandfather is dying, now - was not predicted to last the night on the 25th but clung, painfully, on. He may be dead by now; given I am neither as close to him as his older grandchildren are, nor pragmatically able to come home for the funeral, I won't be told as rapidly as I was for my maternal grandmother (when I did fly home, and declared thereafter that short of my actual parents, anyone else can die without me: I told you I don't really understand grief). I am clearly experiencing *an* emotion, but it is closer to concern than grief: I am not close to my grandfather but I loved and respected him, and I am both very glad he is lucky enough to die at home (not COVID), and deeply regretful that that his lifelong trait of being tough as shoe leather is leading him to a hard-fought end instead of a quiet restful passing. I am concerned about my father (and, more distantly - or through him - his family), upon whom will fall not only his own grief but various family stressors.
But I know that, when he goes, I will be ... memorially sad? I will not be grief-struck, as so many are this year. I will feel awkward, because I will want to talk about it, but I will repeatedly find how my feelings don't match up to the normal template of 'how one feels when one's grandparents die': in fact, I will probably not feel anything particularly legible to others. I know that the social rituals of bereavement are supposed to cover for that - and no doubt when a close to home grief DOES come to me I will be grateful for that- but I always feel like I should be covering for the deception, like "oh no, I'm FINE", and then I feel disloyal to the deceased. (Oddly, my maternal grandmother, who few of us actually *liked*, was easier. I could point to that and say: "I didn't like her, but she was important.")
This was not how this post was meant to go. What I meant to say was, December is weird. I have seasonal depression. And regular depression. And a coupla neurodivergences that, as I age, mean I'm always closer to burning out than I'd like to be. December feels HEAVY. I can't actually separate my notgrief from the general heaviness that is December.
In an extremely typical December sequence for me, I have had this post by Tom Cox in my electronic tbr sicne Dec 13, and only finally read it today, on the 27th:
I have seen extracts from this post every few days (I follow Tom on instagram, one of his cats on twitter, and several of his fans on twitter) since the 13th and felt validated, but not actually read it until today. And lo, I feel validated.
Related, possibly the most validating thing I've read this month is timeanddate's explainer, Why is the earliest sunset not on the Winter Solstice? Oddly I knew this was true of sunSET, but somehow presumed that that was a consequence of sunRISE being an anchor. Wrong! Sunrise doesn't start getting earlier until the New Year, and therefore I feel justified in sleeping in foreeeever.
Ahem. This is a book post, I believe.
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: "Real Men Knit", bought with a kobo voucher from my brother. Actually I started reading it mainly for a bookphoto attempt, which didn't turn out well. I bought it, having scrambled my memory of the TBR so as to think this was a gay romance about men knitting: it is not, but it IS cosy in the essential sense, and given a lot of its negative reviews are "this was billed as a romance but it's more a cosy family novel" I think I will enjoy it a lot more than I do most contemporary het romances.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Actively, only Tom Cox's "The Good, the Bad and the Furry". It feels weird, in this age of Twitter and Instagram, to read a book of "things some guys cats did" - I suspect Cox's shift to first countryside-based memoir and then weird fiction has something to do with the changing internet zeitgeist since 2010, when his book was published - but honestly, I really enjoy it. I enjoy Cox's wry humour, and his threading of cat related observations with deeply human ones.
Poetry: I don't think I've actually made any more progress with Paradise Lost since last post.
Lit Mag: Poor Autumn (Aus) Meanjin, still technically in progress.
For work: Actively, 'Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800'. Desultorily, 'The Fabliau in English'.
Recently DNF: 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows'. I gave it three or four chapters, and was a little more interested when a new, older POV character turned up, but... essentially, i continue to not believe that in the 21st century, in the Sikh community in fucking LONDON. you could post an ad for a creative writing teacher and not be flooded with candidates both more and less qualified than the protagonist, who I found utterly flakey. In that flakey way that is supposed to be "relatable", not "interestingly unlikeable" or "paralysed by internal conflict" (for the later, compare Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve). And which is neither likeable nor interesting to me. I just... in a better year I might have kept going and been rewarded. In 2020, my attention span is a sparse commodity.
Recently Finished:
Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am genuinely dithering between 3 and 4 here, but rounding up because my glod, this book as *something* that kept me actively, if VERY VERY SLOWLY, reading it for eleven whole months. I started it on 2 Feb 2020, and finished it 27 Dec 2020. At first I read slowly because most of the space was taken up by the adult-Peri plotline, which had... no... real plot... and also adult-Peri both bored and annoyed me. The past-Peri plotline had a lot to interest me, but felt at first like backstory for adult-Peri (rather than, as it turns out, for undergrad-Peri).
I became invested in her late teens, because of course I did: bookish, socially withdrawn, invested in an intellectual rather than social self, overwrought about theism. Obviously I have a vast cultural gap between me and Peri, but her overawed Oxford undergrad self was immediately sympathetic to me. Slowly, the adult self became legible, even as nothing happened in that plot.
Then, I began to see the foreshadowing re her Professor. I saw, ahead, either a student/teacher affair or an excruciating embarrassment, and found it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time under that anticipation *even though I admired Shafak's craft in setting it up*.
Perhaps because it took me MONTHS, not days, to get through the middle of the book, I found the final culmination dissatisfying. I might actually have *admired*, although not necessarily enjoyed, a student/teacher affair plot better. It felt like Shafak was deliberately setting out to subvert that plotline, but I wasn't happy with what she offered in its place.
Then there's... it's called Three Daughters of Eve. It seems like those three are Peri and her undergrad friends (I thought for a long time it would be Peri, her mother, and her daughter, but her daughter had no development whatsoever). Peri is by far the most developed character in the book, obviously. Of the Oxford trio, Shirin, the Muslim-raised nonbeliever, gets the most flesh. Mona, the devout Muslim feminist, only really gets fleshed out in a few tiny scenes where she and Shirin debate. This book leans SO HEAVILY into the ethic of indecision, not firmly committing to any side, but it's easy to see where Shafak's own loyalties lie - or at least, of two condemned types of conviction, which she finds more sympathetic.
I think structurally the book is weakened by departing from Peri's POV right at the end, to first the Principal's then Azur's. But I do think it needed another balancing POV - and that should have been Mona's.
That's it, that's the one book I finished this past fortnight, but my goat, I FINISHED it. Today is a red-letter day, I finished that book I was determined not to give up on and yet unable to finish.
Up Next: Mostly, I need to WRITE, not read. But by end of year I need to triage my 'hiatus' books that are still marked 'currently reading' in goodreads, and then either farewell them or make a solid effort once my immediate deadlines are past to get through them. 'A new companion to Chaucer' and 'The queer child' I'm looking at you.
Some links of note:
Tom Cox (own blog), Thoughts from early winter on a moor and 2020: a review. Another thing I need to do is overhaul my blogreader, cull things I don't read, and add things I should. Like this blog.
nakara kalasutra (own blog), Relationship Libertarianism. Pretty incisive.
Kai Cheng Thom (Xtra), People never seem to need me as much as I need them: am I an emotional vampire? Another Just A Good Advice Column example.
Geraldine Heng (In the Medieval Middle), Why the Hate? The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, and Race, Racism, and Premodern Critical Race Studies Today. Like the book, I do not find this post unnassaible: in particular, while addressing Pearce's (negative, deeply vitriolic) review essay, it does not grapple with Pearce's stance as a Jewish academic criticising Heng's treatment of Jewish history. I think it's valid in its assessment of the weaknesses of Pearce's essay, but it is a bit skew in claiming that Pearce has no standing to criticise.
Natasha Frost (Atlas Obscura), How the 18th-century Gay Bar Survived and Thrived In A Deadly Environment. A decent overview of 18th Molly Houses.
Parrish Turner, interview with Zayne Joukhadar (Electric Lit), How do we put words to the experience of gender? A good interview. Have added the book to my endless TBR.
Jenn Shapland (NYT), Butter, sugar and a tablespoon of grief. On holiday baking as a tie to one's ancestry. I might be wonky on the experience of grief, but I concede I have the icing-sugar covered kitchen to match this essay,
I, mind you, don't really understand grief. Not the way most people mean it. I am lucky that my parents and siblings are okay, and have been okay all my life. The deaths of my grandmothers were not *nothing* to me, but they did not have the gutting impact that many people's grandparent-deaths do. My grandfather is dying, now - was not predicted to last the night on the 25th but clung, painfully, on. He may be dead by now; given I am neither as close to him as his older grandchildren are, nor pragmatically able to come home for the funeral, I won't be told as rapidly as I was for my maternal grandmother (when I did fly home, and declared thereafter that short of my actual parents, anyone else can die without me: I told you I don't really understand grief). I am clearly experiencing *an* emotion, but it is closer to concern than grief: I am not close to my grandfather but I loved and respected him, and I am both very glad he is lucky enough to die at home (not COVID), and deeply regretful that that his lifelong trait of being tough as shoe leather is leading him to a hard-fought end instead of a quiet restful passing. I am concerned about my father (and, more distantly - or through him - his family), upon whom will fall not only his own grief but various family stressors.
But I know that, when he goes, I will be ... memorially sad? I will not be grief-struck, as so many are this year. I will feel awkward, because I will want to talk about it, but I will repeatedly find how my feelings don't match up to the normal template of 'how one feels when one's grandparents die': in fact, I will probably not feel anything particularly legible to others. I know that the social rituals of bereavement are supposed to cover for that - and no doubt when a close to home grief DOES come to me I will be grateful for that- but I always feel like I should be covering for the deception, like "oh no, I'm FINE", and then I feel disloyal to the deceased. (Oddly, my maternal grandmother, who few of us actually *liked*, was easier. I could point to that and say: "I didn't like her, but she was important.")
This was not how this post was meant to go. What I meant to say was, December is weird. I have seasonal depression. And regular depression. And a coupla neurodivergences that, as I age, mean I'm always closer to burning out than I'd like to be. December feels HEAVY. I can't actually separate my notgrief from the general heaviness that is December.
In an extremely typical December sequence for me, I have had this post by Tom Cox in my electronic tbr sicne Dec 13, and only finally read it today, on the 27th:
I’m always amazed at the speed of the transfer between the falling gold of late October and the light-sucked days of December and most of November, which is the time when you remember, once again, that autumn is nearly all hype and can barely claim to be a season at all. Now is the time of year I have been least successfully constructed for, as a human body and mind, and I learn to accept that fact more with each passing year. I have sometimes wondered if I can trick November and December into hating me slightly less but it is not possible. Mostly positive stuff has happened to me in the last five weeks, I’m elated to be away from the damp house I was living in before, and feeling fully healthy for the first time since the height of summer, but the fact still remains that it’s early winter, everything is dying, people are trying to force you to be happy about a capitalist plot to eat more animals and spend more money on worthless plastic crap, there’s nobody to legally dance with and the sun is just a fleeting rumour. It’s similar every year, even ones when a pandemic doesn’t all but obliterate your social life. The difference is that I know myself now and no longer beat myself up for feeling different to the people who tell me I am not allowed to feel this way. From the moment Winter Solstice occurs, I can feel the big strong arms of nature pick me up and turn me back in the right direction. The change is slow but always palpable. As for the few days leading up to it: they are reliably total bastards.
- Thoughts from early winter on a moor
I have seen extracts from this post every few days (I follow Tom on instagram, one of his cats on twitter, and several of his fans on twitter) since the 13th and felt validated, but not actually read it until today. And lo, I feel validated.
Related, possibly the most validating thing I've read this month is timeanddate's explainer, Why is the earliest sunset not on the Winter Solstice? Oddly I knew this was true of sunSET, but somehow presumed that that was a consequence of sunRISE being an anchor. Wrong! Sunrise doesn't start getting earlier until the New Year, and therefore I feel justified in sleeping in foreeeever.
Ahem. This is a book post, I believe.
Currently Reading:
Fiction for Fun: "Real Men Knit", bought with a kobo voucher from my brother. Actually I started reading it mainly for a bookphoto attempt, which didn't turn out well. I bought it, having scrambled my memory of the TBR so as to think this was a gay romance about men knitting: it is not, but it IS cosy in the essential sense, and given a lot of its negative reviews are "this was billed as a romance but it's more a cosy family novel" I think I will enjoy it a lot more than I do most contemporary het romances.
Non-fiction for personal interest: Actively, only Tom Cox's "The Good, the Bad and the Furry". It feels weird, in this age of Twitter and Instagram, to read a book of "things some guys cats did" - I suspect Cox's shift to first countryside-based memoir and then weird fiction has something to do with the changing internet zeitgeist since 2010, when his book was published - but honestly, I really enjoy it. I enjoy Cox's wry humour, and his threading of cat related observations with deeply human ones.
Poetry: I don't think I've actually made any more progress with Paradise Lost since last post.
Lit Mag: Poor Autumn (Aus) Meanjin, still technically in progress.
For work: Actively, 'Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800'. Desultorily, 'The Fabliau in English'.
Recently DNF: 'Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows'. I gave it three or four chapters, and was a little more interested when a new, older POV character turned up, but... essentially, i continue to not believe that in the 21st century, in the Sikh community in fucking LONDON. you could post an ad for a creative writing teacher and not be flooded with candidates both more and less qualified than the protagonist, who I found utterly flakey. In that flakey way that is supposed to be "relatable", not "interestingly unlikeable" or "paralysed by internal conflict" (for the later, compare Shafak's Three Daughters of Eve). And which is neither likeable nor interesting to me. I just... in a better year I might have kept going and been rewarded. In 2020, my attention span is a sparse commodity.
Recently Finished:
Three Daughters of Eve by Elif ShafakMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am genuinely dithering between 3 and 4 here, but rounding up because my glod, this book as *something* that kept me actively, if VERY VERY SLOWLY, reading it for eleven whole months. I started it on 2 Feb 2020, and finished it 27 Dec 2020. At first I read slowly because most of the space was taken up by the adult-Peri plotline, which had... no... real plot... and also adult-Peri both bored and annoyed me. The past-Peri plotline had a lot to interest me, but felt at first like backstory for adult-Peri (rather than, as it turns out, for undergrad-Peri).
I became invested in her late teens, because of course I did: bookish, socially withdrawn, invested in an intellectual rather than social self, overwrought about theism. Obviously I have a vast cultural gap between me and Peri, but her overawed Oxford undergrad self was immediately sympathetic to me. Slowly, the adult self became legible, even as nothing happened in that plot.
Then, I began to see the foreshadowing re her Professor. I saw, ahead, either a student/teacher affair or an excruciating embarrassment, and found it difficult to read more than a few pages at a time under that anticipation *even though I admired Shafak's craft in setting it up*.
Perhaps because it took me MONTHS, not days, to get through the middle of the book, I found the final culmination dissatisfying. I might actually have *admired*, although not necessarily enjoyed, a student/teacher affair plot better. It felt like Shafak was deliberately setting out to subvert that plotline, but I wasn't happy with what she offered in its place.
Then there's... it's called Three Daughters of Eve. It seems like those three are Peri and her undergrad friends (I thought for a long time it would be Peri, her mother, and her daughter, but her daughter had no development whatsoever). Peri is by far the most developed character in the book, obviously. Of the Oxford trio, Shirin, the Muslim-raised nonbeliever, gets the most flesh. Mona, the devout Muslim feminist, only really gets fleshed out in a few tiny scenes where she and Shirin debate. This book leans SO HEAVILY into the ethic of indecision, not firmly committing to any side, but it's easy to see where Shafak's own loyalties lie - or at least, of two condemned types of conviction, which she finds more sympathetic.
I think structurally the book is weakened by departing from Peri's POV right at the end, to first the Principal's then Azur's. But I do think it needed another balancing POV - and that should have been Mona's.
That's it, that's the one book I finished this past fortnight, but my goat, I FINISHED it. Today is a red-letter day, I finished that book I was determined not to give up on and yet unable to finish.
Up Next: Mostly, I need to WRITE, not read. But by end of year I need to triage my 'hiatus' books that are still marked 'currently reading' in goodreads, and then either farewell them or make a solid effort once my immediate deadlines are past to get through them. 'A new companion to Chaucer' and 'The queer child' I'm looking at you.
Some links of note: