compersion & limerence

A whole bunch of book-adjacent bullshit, prompted by #1 on the list:

1. I am sick and the DayQuil wore off, I do not like it.

2. A couple people in my IRL circle have been recommending Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox to me. I feel complicated about this, because I have reason to believe I won't like it (sea_changed 's commentary from last year, and Bogi Takac's review, among others). I read Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle books under similar circumstances (important and queer to someone I was close with), and I found them adequate, at best, and really hardly even that. I don't feel like I'm good at dealing with that -- "I know you loved this book but I did not care about the things you cared about in it at all." Although, that friend, in retrospect, was really pretty shitty about me not being into Raven Cycle, so maybe that isn't me after all. In any case, it makes me concerned about Fox, and having to generate excuses about why a meaningful-to-trans-people trans narrative is not meaningful to me.

3. That said, my other reading material has been great recently; I'm pulling from the Lambda Literary awards list for quality books to order from the physical library (particularly excited about Disoriental, Négar Djavadi) and a metric ton of romance novels from Libby for "I'm tired" books, and some Tamora Pierce re-reads.

4. I am moving to a new city quite soon (!) and both of my future roommates are queer librarians (!!) with three cats (!!!) and are upsettingly cute (!!!!) (we follow each other on Instagram).

I am doing "book rec cleanup" today, which means collecting various book-rec tools.

1. Queer SFF Recs: this is a very nifty little catalog of queer SFF, organized by sexuality & SFF type & do-the-queers-die & lots of AO3-like tagging.

2. did u kno, you can search your library catalog for books on goodreads? I have been making a concerted effort to do paper books (partially also because the waitlists are not 10 months long, and partially because ebook terms of service for libraries make me incandescently angry.

3. Unfortuately this means I must visit several different library branches all weekend, woe is me.

4. Am looking forward to moving (which I'm doing soon!) with a limited library of unread books + comfort books + common lending books (Annihilation, Mrs. Dalloway)) and seeing how rapidly I fill up a new bookshelf (expected: quickly.)

Had an actual ask that I will put up top: I am soliciting recommendations for media about Iran! Books, movies, comics -- although books are preferred, fiction or non-fiction.

Media report, in no particular order:

1. H is for Hawk deserves every ounce of praise it got. Contents: hawking, grieving, complex relationships and projections with the natural and human world, historical queers. A+++



2. I am re-watching Black Sails with housemates, who are watching it for the first time. HOO BOY. S1 is very good, on rewatch; I'm, as always, 500% here for Miranda and Eleanor, and this time for the religion/forgiveness themes. My Flint feelings are inextricably bound up with my breakup feelings, which really complicates Media Analysis(!). We are now on to s2(!!) I



3. Sara Farizan's YA If You Could Be Mine; Iran, present day, girls in love and also coming of age. It features some Iran-specific trans v queer politics, which are really fascinating to illuminate how sexuality and gender can and do occupy very different idealogical spaces. That said, I felt pretty dubious about the trans politics, which in an American context would have been quite upsettingly transphobic & TERFy. All that said, I would really appreciate it any other recs about Iran—compelling histories or modern fiction or anything in between! (I've also read Greg Egan's Zendegi, which also had a plot point revolving around Iran's transsexual politics, and I'm v. much side-eying the way the trans people are used, but not as the main characters. Farizan is Iranian-American and Egan is not, although I don't know much about Farizan's stated queer politics).



4. Have now finished all of Murderbot; I found them thoroughly delightful sci-fi/space hijinks, but not quite the trans gut identification that I'd hoped for. But: hella fun!



5. Also binged all of Stranger Things S3. I cried, although I'm not sure I really feel it was totally earned.



6. I'm moving in the fall and I went to visit my new city! I am freaking out a little bit about, you know, moving away from my entire social support system, but also excited about the ~opportunities, professionally and in terms of time freed up for solo hobbies.

...The pig was not facing the camera. At the foot of the page was printed, in italics, I will make you fishers of men. This document explained my aunt Molly's departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.

Such a net, such a harvesting, would put an end to all anomaly. If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too. From there, we must imagine, would arise a great army of paleolithic and neolithic frequenters of the lake-berry gatherers and hunters and strayed children from those and all subsequent eons, down to the earliest present, to the faith-healing lady in the long, white robe who rowed a quarter of a mile out and tried to walk back in again just at sunrise, to the farmer who bet five dollars one spring that the ice was still strong enough for him to gallop his horse across. Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.

Sylvie said that in fact Molly had gone to work as a bookkeeper in a missionary hospital. It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sorry I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, ch 5 (p 137 in Picador Modern Classics version)

There is not a single part of this passage that doesn't tie me up into knots of awe and amazement.

What I Cried About On Wednesday, Week of 3/20 whatever, by felinejumper

SO. Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive. It's a road trip novel, a novel about a dissolving marriage, a novel about echoes and sound and memory, about the stories children and adults tell to each other, and a novel about, god, missing migrant children, children getting lost, the human atrocity of the U.S.-Mexico border. (fwiw it is also, almost incidentally, queer, but her queerness is layered amongst backstory and not at all a narrative priority.) It was a very incredibly good and intense read and I strongly recommend it while also feeling exceedingly odd about recommending a book that is...joyful but not about a joyful subject, mayhap.

( more thoughts )

Not a full report, but I've been reading Sarah Waters' Affinity and wow, is it a claustrophobic queer horror experience. I think I really like it,but it's almost too intense an experience to enthusiastically recommend. It's visceral and creepy and deeply disturbing.

My brother & his partner did me the immense favor of showing me The Handmaiden--which, incidentally, watching that bath scene? That buttons scene? With a family member? Do NOT recommend, I've never been so turned on in the presence of a family member before, I can't tell if they know how hot those scenes are-- and I was like yes, I sure do need more of this in my life. And thus, Affinity.

( soul and body horror (mild cws, I guess?) )

Somewhat unfortunate that I'm about to meet a new person in checks watch now o'clock while completely mired in the horrors of Millbank and Victorian era prisons, but hey, whatcha gonna do.

… the complex checks and balances of the American Constitution as analysed in The Federalist (1788), which were designed to keep radicals like [Thomas] Paine trussed and tied.

Somebody please advise, my book used this offhand phrasing and now I don't know what to do with these somewhat-unwanted visuals that immediately presented themselves.

(Source: The Invention of Science, David Wootton, p 20)

‘…Let’s go for a really long walk, shall we, dear? I’ve been wanting a really long walk now for weeks.’
Liar — most kind and self-sacrificing liar! Puddle hated long walks, especially with Stephen who strode as though wearing seven league boots and whose only idea of a country walk was to take her own line across ditches and hedges — yes, indeed, a most kind and self-sacrificing liar!

The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall

I emote everywhere every single time Puddle enters the narrative (on name alone, among other reasons), and I actually laughed at loud here. Just imagine the sigh you'd heave trying to connect to a 21 year old who thinks nobody understands them! It's a glorious little bit, her self-sacrificing grumbling walking, if wistful—the scene just proceeding is Puddle ruminating on the conspiracy of silence :( One of my narrative things is mentorship, and when I started Well earlier today I was not expecting to find it at all, really. Foolish me, since Part 1 and Part 2 are about, among other things, mentoring relationships succeeding and failing in so many different relationship structures! Is there fic, guys? Am I going to have to write "remembered Puddle/OFC"?

Two things:

1. I had a very detailed dream about seducing and then engaging in polyamory negotiations with Natalie Portman last night. She, to my surprise, had a nipple ring, so. Thanks, subconscious, for that.
   
2. I read a Victorian erotica novel from 1905 today (the one that shows up on Project Gutenberg's Top 100 Downloads, if you find yourself in need). It was *insane*, and writing at the level of kinky-you-hesitate-to-send. Not a recommendation (like...really, not a recommendation), but wow, WOW, wow. Wow, an experience. I guess I knew the Victorians Did Stuff but I, as usual, underestimated them. Good research for the 1915 fic, though.

By the time of Hirschfeld’s visit to the Chicago fair [in 1893]. . .[there was] widespread dissemination of racist cartoons, which had begun to circulate in the 1860s and typically conflated “Negro” subjects with apes—even if, as Zakkiyah Jackson has argued, the apparently dehumanizing racist representations and discourses were fueled by the knowledge of the humanity of the enslaved.
This racist visual genre had gained momentum in British, American, and German contexts with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,...At the same time, however, the voices of abolitionist and antiracism campaigners such as [Frederick] Doug­lass and [Ida B.] Wells, who challenged not just legal and social discrimination but also the popular racism that propped up such practices, were increasingly, and widely, heard. Given the popularity of the abolitionist movement in the United States, Hirschfeld’s silence on the debates about the Chicago World’s Fair is all the more noticeable. It indicates both his own detachment from the abolitionist and antiracism struggle and the more insidious privilege of whiteness, which normalized and made invisible to him the racism of the Chicago World’s Fair and American society more widely. [emphasis mine]

-p 20, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture, Heike Bauer, PDF available upon request

The broader context for this is: Hirschfeld went as a journalist to the 1893 World's Fair, and failed to mention any of the discussion around (a) racist imagery at the fair or (b) the, you know, people-exhibits, in any of his reporting. An interesting addn'l note is that Douglass was originally pro-fair, as it would highlight African-American culture, until he heard about the actual content.
This excerpt particularly of note for me given the evolutionary biology reference, and the eternal misinterpretation of how natural selection works. Have we really been leveling the "my grandfather wasn't an ape" for that long?!


( whisperspace )