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Literature: mental illness and disability; first-person; immigration; cats; Tiptree/Russ; best books
Further adventure in crossposts, books (and meta-media) edition
I get an icky feeling when mental illness is a plot twist, when reviews say "this character's mental illness is central to the plot, and I don't want to spoil what it is..."
even when they're otherwise sympathetic and/or informed depictions of mental illness
and not because mental illness doesn't have a major narrative impact, believe you me
but because when mental illness is significant enough to be central, to function as narrative lynchpin, then the mental illness is (in my experience, this is a subjective rant, etc.) never a secret to begin with.
Maybe this is also a pet peeve re: the boundaries of unreliable narrators and narratives, the flow-breaking coyness of a story withholding certain key elements, but only those elements, to increase tension. There are probably functional ways to use mental illness as a reveal in the same way that lots of other things can be a reveal, especially in third person narratives or in ensemble casts.
But if I were to tell my life story to you right now, even if I happened to be on my way to an alien planet or training a pegasus or something, if the spaceship was tragically delayed or my pegasus escaped into the wild, and the bad thing happened because of my crazy, (and have no doubt, my crazy would probably be involved: it negatively impacts every aspect of my life,) I would tell you about the crazy while telling you about the spaceship pegasus. It is key to my identity, apparently key to the story; in fact, I couldn't tell the story of my life or my spaceship pegasus without telling you about my crazy.
There are absolutely people with mental illness who don't see their illness as a defining aspect of their identity or story, and there's need for representation outside of problem novels: the crazy doesn't need to be forefront. But if the plot makes it forefront, then failing to convey it...
...it feels, at best, contrived; at worst, exploitative, even in those sympathetic and informed depictions.
My life may be compelling (haha not really but go with me here). My spaceship pegasus is absolutely compelling. My crazy has a lot of dramatic effects on my life, on my internal landscape, my emotions and relationships. But it is also something I deal with every day & which I intentionally know well; odds are, I knew it posed a risk to the spaceship pegasus, or I've since spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between my crazy and what happened to my spaceship pegasus. There are valid narratives about that thought process, about learning to understand the crazy and its fallout. But to tease or withhold the crazy, or to treat it as a dramatic secret, is othering and fetishizing and silencing and, honestly, it's simply insincere.
Disability as metaphor
The more time I spent with & as the chronically ill, disabled, sick, and/or injured, the less patience I have for metaphorical and meaningful disability, injury, and illness in narratives. Not that I don't understand the narrative weight, or the desire to explain why things happen to bodies (& minds). And, unfortunately, the representation provided by these narratives is sometimes better and certainly more than none at all.
But, often, bodies and minds don't have problems for a reason. In the same way that bodies aren't deformed because the people within them have monstrous personalities, no matter how we script it in narratives: illness and injury is not a metaphor for who someone is or how they live their life. To insist (in conversation, in stories) that these things exist "for a reason" is horrific, because it implies that people everywhere, every day, benefit from and/or deserve suffering, and it ignores that the arbitrary and purposeless nature of these things is part of what makes them so damaging.
Obvs, this is a different discussion from & about a disabled PoV, exploring the link between chronic conditions and personal identity, or how illness and injury can fundamentally alter a life, including but not limited to elements related to the illness or injury. The world needs more of those stories.
But it needs significantly fewer ""profound""" and thematically-appropriate illnesses & injuries which function as a metaphor for a plot or character arc, ty kindly.
Witch, Please and disability in Harry Potter
"I have a lot of feels about Witch, Please" having been said:
There's a missed opportunity in Episode 11B: The Half-coy Stint which just breaks my heart, because while the Forbidden Forest segment discussing bodies and power does a good job with intersectionality, engaging race and Judaism and class and gender and sexuality and body policing as well as the constant focus on feminism, they never discuss disability—and Half-Blood Prince and nonverbal magic is the perfect jumping off point for that discussion.
They do look at the source of magic, whether it's powered by wands/physical action, or words, or intent (and they look at ideology, and the false societal link between words & meanings, as power; and touch briefly on a previous discussion about the power dynamics of formal vs vernacular spellcrafting; and have elsewhere briefly discussed the lack of post-trauma therapy in the wizarding world which is the only discussion they've had of mental illness in HP), but they never look at how the action, word, and intent of spellcraft engage with bodies (or minds).
Who can use wands? what does physical casting look like for people who are paralyzed, have essential tremor, have poor coordination, or otherwise have issues with fine motor skills; are there available lessons for wandless magic in cultures where wands are common? What is the language of spellcrafting? who has access to which types of language; what alternatives are there for deaf or otherwise nonverbal magic users, or is nonverbal magic the only one, and how do they compensate for how difficult it is to learn (and why is it so difficult to learn)? And what does it say that these questions are only metatextual; that canon presumes that everyone has default access to fine motor skills and spoken language?
What it says, of course, is that canon has only tangential or metaphorical representations of disability/non-normative bodies—which Rowling developed into an egregiously awful* word-of-god pronouncement that those bodies just don't exist the HP universe:
and that's worth critiquing alongside aforementioned presentations of otherness.
* And canonically incorrect, if only because: glasses. If people of all ages are still using glasses in the wizarding world, then pesky physical ailments have not been magicked out of existence; also, wowwww fuck you too.
As a side note: I have encountered approximately only one story that does delve into disability within magic systems, which is Rachael K. Jones's "Who Binds And Looses The World With Her Hands"—a story in part about adapting a spoken magic system into a signed language, engaging these exact questions about access to the actions and language that create magic. (Also dealing with abusive romantic relationships; be warned.) These discussions are fertile.
Transhumanist narratives and disability
Transhumanist narratives: what happens to a consciousnesses when transferred into a different physical form—not as in "adapting to new senses" but as in: what would happen to my self in a different body? how much of my experiences are informed by chronic pain? by atypical brain chemistry? How would a new me change me; to what extent would a new body, even if just another human body, be me?
I feel like these are daydreams that a lot of chronic-health-problems people have (at least, I do), the escape from the meat prison, the joke about a faulty part replaced under warranty; but the inverse is also a common anxiety, especially for the mentally ill: how much am I defined by this condition? if $treatment helps with the illness, will it also change me? do I even exist outside of this experience?
Can anyone think of any examples of this sort of narrative? It'd be a rich discussion of disability, as well as a fertile bit of specfic, and I find myself with a mighty need.
things I think about when reading first person narratives: who is the narrator addressing, and why? is it a literal, canonical address, or metaphorical and unjustified? how accurate is this to the character's voice, and what separates internal (narrative) voice from external (dialog) voice? what separates character voice from authorial voice? can any of these elements be used to make the text more complicated/revealing/robust? when does establishing these elements—ex. in an apocalypse log—become distracting and/or tropey, rather than productive?
things which it feels like the vast majority of texts are doing with first person: this is a more immediate, immersive, and accessible way to deliver an otherwise identical story as a third person narrative; it allows for easier character development via backstory and internal monologue
TBF I could have the same conniption fit about limited vs omniscient third person narrators; I don't; I'm not hung up on those technicalities, despite that they could have equally interesting narrative repercussions
but the fudged line of "oops, the narrator knows more than was indicated they were supposed to know!" is noways so annoying as the fact that first person narratives draw attention to their unjustified existence without managing to fully benefit from their potential for immersion or character development though an intelligent—or at least self-aware—exploration of voice. they are lazy! obnoxious! when they could be so smart!
#I remember reading Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinth series and realizing: #oh—it's not that I hate first person because it *can't* be done well—but because it could be done well and *isn't* #and this is why I frequently get on with classics #yes the justifications of first person are frequently clumsy but as it turns out I prefer an obvious trope to a glaring silence #that said I get equally petty in my 'no one would ever write a letter/journal entry which is 50 pages long' hangups #I love how Kiernan resolves this—that the act of writing—the time demand—the emotional and physical labor #become a part of the first person narrative & say things about how motivation/obsession/communication/identity work for the speaker
There's a lot of post- or extra-Earth sci-fi where Earth maintains significance as a home. It's the final destination of a long voyage, or it's an emotional center; people born in off-world colonies still think of Earth as home, and the threat or destruction of the planet has vast consequence. And this narrative is effective for obvious reasons, because the consumers find it easy to extrapolate Earth's importance.
I feel like I haven't seen many post- or extra-Earth narratives that are speculative metaphors for real immigration—where relationships with Earth are complicated or generational: the loss of culture, the children of immigrants identifying foremost with the location of their birth, or being generations away from and no longer emotionally connected to their source of origin, or rediscovering their ancestry, or identifying ways in which both ancestral and modern location effects them. (CJ Cherryh begins the The Company Wars books with the fallout of Earth's obsolescence, the fact that it no longer has emotional or social power as our "home" planet, which is refreshing.) Is this because I don't consume enough SF, or because I read the wrong authors(/watch the wrong etc.), or because this trope is underexplored?
Books about cats (and why they all suck)
I woke up to this request for book recommendations:
and it delights me that someone is like "hey Juu, books about cats, recommend me some?" and angers me that there are no books to recommend.
The options for books about cats are:
1) Cats as antagonists—they're wild cats but generally act enough like domestic cats to fulfill cat desires, and don't need caretaking because they have agency, see: Valente's Fairyland series, Brian Jacques's Redwall series.
2) Cats handing out mystic one-liners, usually as speaking supporting characters; sometimes the cats are inaccurate clichés, sometimes they're convincing, but they're obviously magical and thus don't need caretaking and/or they exist in a historical fantasy setting with bad expectations of cat caretaking, see: Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Lewis's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
3) Anthropomorphic or non-anthropomorphic feral cat colonies which are magically free of death, disease, inbreeding, and overpopulation because ... reasons, see: Williams's Tailchaser's Song.
Things there are not: cats as pets, important to plot or otherwise, which are neutered, indoors, and free from disease. That's partially because it's a fairly recent model for cat caretaking, but it's not so recent as to explain its complete absence.
Honestly, I avoid books about cats because I love them too much, because I find unrealistic cat stereotypes so annoying and indoor cats is a point of joyless non-negotiation for me (I don't even like photos of cats outdoors off leash, and wish we didn't proliferate them even if they're pretty). Maybe there are better books about cats out there that I haven't encountered? (If yes, please recommend them.) Because there's such a need not to idealize cats either as sleek/sexy/graceful (have you met cats) or mystic or wild independent hunters when what they are is domestic animals who depend on us for their health and welfare.
this is why Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is so important to me: as a historical artifact I can forgive the treatment of domestic cats #and as cutesy as it is the cats feel diverse and real; the number of personalities balances the caricature of each individual personality
James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ
a post I don't have the wherewithal to write in full paragraphs right now:
that Tiptree wrote a story entitled "The Women Men Don't See," that that was a thing, the greatest and most obvious of all ironies
—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_Men_Don%27t_See
to come to these stories now is unfair, knowing Sheldon's history, having witnessed science fiction as influenced by feminist authors like her
but:
1) where finally reading Joanna Russ felt like feminist rage, like a hysterical laugh, at the way that misogyny comes from without, directly impacting women, and then is internalized by women, to work from within—
—to read Tiptree feels like a pervasive, blanketing anger: a view that sexism hurts men too, hurts everyone; but fuck them, be revenged against them, fuck their society and its pervasive tendency towards the worst
(Russ's single-gender societies are wry, engaged: she flirts with the concepts of utopia and dystopia, appears to discard them, and then reveals something very like the former via one tweak, one final insult: no men!; Tiptree's are sheer, bitter wish-fulfillment, untenable, unrealistic, but you can feel her clinging to them and, after enough stories, so does the reader: would that we just could get rid of the worst & would that it would fix everything)
2) she embodied that doubling in her writing: of Tiptree/Sheldon, and presentation/identity on a wider scale—see "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"—and it's absolutely, directed tied to misogyny because
3) when we talk about how the dominant white male perspective is available to anyone, accessible to anyone, re: identification and immersion, it's because of this: because it's so pervasive that it's internalized; a woman can copy that, embody it, write it from within and invert it—and it's part "passing" and part commentary and part the inevitable result of a misogynistic society
Why is to hard to review the best books?
today I transcribed about ~6 book review notes which were languishing in far-back pages of moleskines
why are they almost always of books I loved
(answer: b/c it is Difficult to have positive feelings; criticism is generally more distant and easier to pinpoint, but liking a thing? really loving a thing? requires an emotional investment, which is hard)
my current book reviewing habits are write a page of notes immediately upon completion (for short fiction, I also write 2-3 lines after I finish each story) > transcribe the notes into a word editor via voice recognition (the voice recognition is new; I started doing it to make it easier to transcribe when away from my desktop, which I keep turned off during the day, but I also believe I benefit from threading the review thoughts through multiple formats, handwritten, voice, word processing—it seems like an extra step but actually has made reviews much faster to compose) > edit and post my reviews while matchmaking in Overwatch, yes, seriously, while on voice with 2-5 other people
I don't write reviews primarily to socially interact, not because that wouldn't be great and healthy for me, but because I am chronically too low-energy to ... socially interact. I write them to process & for my future reference—it's how my brain interacts with and internalizes media. but when I am as profoundly low spoons as I am rn, it's a constant effort to balance the work of a review against the guilt and perceived (but totally non-existent) pressure to do the review vs spending the time instead on, you know, actual media consumption. hysterically, I've been doing more than my usual media consumption in order to avoid the circumstances causing the low spoons! and so the problem redoubles.
it's easy to get lost in that struggle & I have spent way too much time on multi-hour reviews wherein I struggle over every word
finding more casual, low-key ways to get started (speech to text is finicky and ends up with homonyms and missing capitals, so I just roll with it: here is my trash draft!) and polishing the reviews in a setting where I literally cannot overthink or overwork b/c I'm already multitasking has streamlined that process significantly
I do, however, apologize to my open-mic gaming frands who nightly are subjected to my surprisingly loud CLACKY CLACKY CLACK typing
#there is an especial shame in talking about talking about things; it is a certain sort of navel-gazing #but—and I realize how pretentious and self-absorbed this sounds!—the way my review habits & style have changed over time #honestly fascinates me #(I just interest me SO MUCH you guys)
I get an icky feeling when mental illness is a plot twist, when reviews say "this character's mental illness is central to the plot, and I don't want to spoil what it is..."
even when they're otherwise sympathetic and/or informed depictions of mental illness
and not because mental illness doesn't have a major narrative impact, believe you me
but because when mental illness is significant enough to be central, to function as narrative lynchpin, then the mental illness is (in my experience, this is a subjective rant, etc.) never a secret to begin with.
Maybe this is also a pet peeve re: the boundaries of unreliable narrators and narratives, the flow-breaking coyness of a story withholding certain key elements, but only those elements, to increase tension. There are probably functional ways to use mental illness as a reveal in the same way that lots of other things can be a reveal, especially in third person narratives or in ensemble casts.
But if I were to tell my life story to you right now, even if I happened to be on my way to an alien planet or training a pegasus or something, if the spaceship was tragically delayed or my pegasus escaped into the wild, and the bad thing happened because of my crazy, (and have no doubt, my crazy would probably be involved: it negatively impacts every aspect of my life,) I would tell you about the crazy while telling you about the spaceship pegasus. It is key to my identity, apparently key to the story; in fact, I couldn't tell the story of my life or my spaceship pegasus without telling you about my crazy.
There are absolutely people with mental illness who don't see their illness as a defining aspect of their identity or story, and there's need for representation outside of problem novels: the crazy doesn't need to be forefront. But if the plot makes it forefront, then failing to convey it...
...it feels, at best, contrived; at worst, exploitative, even in those sympathetic and informed depictions.
My life may be compelling (haha not really but go with me here). My spaceship pegasus is absolutely compelling. My crazy has a lot of dramatic effects on my life, on my internal landscape, my emotions and relationships. But it is also something I deal with every day & which I intentionally know well; odds are, I knew it posed a risk to the spaceship pegasus, or I've since spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship between my crazy and what happened to my spaceship pegasus. There are valid narratives about that thought process, about learning to understand the crazy and its fallout. But to tease or withhold the crazy, or to treat it as a dramatic secret, is othering and fetishizing and silencing and, honestly, it's simply insincere.
Disability as metaphor
The more time I spent with & as the chronically ill, disabled, sick, and/or injured, the less patience I have for metaphorical and meaningful disability, injury, and illness in narratives. Not that I don't understand the narrative weight, or the desire to explain why things happen to bodies (& minds). And, unfortunately, the representation provided by these narratives is sometimes better and certainly more than none at all.
But, often, bodies and minds don't have problems for a reason. In the same way that bodies aren't deformed because the people within them have monstrous personalities, no matter how we script it in narratives: illness and injury is not a metaphor for who someone is or how they live their life. To insist (in conversation, in stories) that these things exist "for a reason" is horrific, because it implies that people everywhere, every day, benefit from and/or deserve suffering, and it ignores that the arbitrary and purposeless nature of these things is part of what makes them so damaging.
Obvs, this is a different discussion from & about a disabled PoV, exploring the link between chronic conditions and personal identity, or how illness and injury can fundamentally alter a life, including but not limited to elements related to the illness or injury. The world needs more of those stories.
But it needs significantly fewer ""profound""" and thematically-appropriate illnesses & injuries which function as a metaphor for a plot or character arc, ty kindly.
Witch, Please and disability in Harry Potter
"I have a lot of feels about Witch, Please" having been said:
There's a missed opportunity in Episode 11B: The Half-coy Stint which just breaks my heart, because while the Forbidden Forest segment discussing bodies and power does a good job with intersectionality, engaging race and Judaism and class and gender and sexuality and body policing as well as the constant focus on feminism, they never discuss disability—and Half-Blood Prince and nonverbal magic is the perfect jumping off point for that discussion.
They do look at the source of magic, whether it's powered by wands/physical action, or words, or intent (and they look at ideology, and the false societal link between words & meanings, as power; and touch briefly on a previous discussion about the power dynamics of formal vs vernacular spellcrafting; and have elsewhere briefly discussed the lack of post-trauma therapy in the wizarding world which is the only discussion they've had of mental illness in HP), but they never look at how the action, word, and intent of spellcraft engage with bodies (or minds).
Who can use wands? what does physical casting look like for people who are paralyzed, have essential tremor, have poor coordination, or otherwise have issues with fine motor skills; are there available lessons for wandless magic in cultures where wands are common? What is the language of spellcrafting? who has access to which types of language; what alternatives are there for deaf or otherwise nonverbal magic users, or is nonverbal magic the only one, and how do they compensate for how difficult it is to learn (and why is it so difficult to learn)? And what does it say that these questions are only metatextual; that canon presumes that everyone has default access to fine motor skills and spoken language?
What it says, of course, is that canon has only tangential or metaphorical representations of disability/non-normative bodies—which Rowling developed into an egregiously awful* word-of-god pronouncement that those bodies just don't exist the HP universe:
broadly speaking, wizards would have the power to correct or override 'mundane' nature
and that's worth critiquing alongside aforementioned presentations of otherness.
* And canonically incorrect, if only because: glasses. If people of all ages are still using glasses in the wizarding world, then pesky physical ailments have not been magicked out of existence; also, wowwww fuck you too.
As a side note: I have encountered approximately only one story that does delve into disability within magic systems, which is Rachael K. Jones's "Who Binds And Looses The World With Her Hands"—a story in part about adapting a spoken magic system into a signed language, engaging these exact questions about access to the actions and language that create magic. (Also dealing with abusive romantic relationships; be warned.) These discussions are fertile.
Transhumanist narratives and disability
Transhumanist narratives: what happens to a consciousnesses when transferred into a different physical form—not as in "adapting to new senses" but as in: what would happen to my self in a different body? how much of my experiences are informed by chronic pain? by atypical brain chemistry? How would a new me change me; to what extent would a new body, even if just another human body, be me?
I feel like these are daydreams that a lot of chronic-health-problems people have (at least, I do), the escape from the meat prison, the joke about a faulty part replaced under warranty; but the inverse is also a common anxiety, especially for the mentally ill: how much am I defined by this condition? if $treatment helps with the illness, will it also change me? do I even exist outside of this experience?
Can anyone think of any examples of this sort of narrative? It'd be a rich discussion of disability, as well as a fertile bit of specfic, and I find myself with a mighty need.
things I think about when reading first person narratives: who is the narrator addressing, and why? is it a literal, canonical address, or metaphorical and unjustified? how accurate is this to the character's voice, and what separates internal (narrative) voice from external (dialog) voice? what separates character voice from authorial voice? can any of these elements be used to make the text more complicated/revealing/robust? when does establishing these elements—ex. in an apocalypse log—become distracting and/or tropey, rather than productive?
things which it feels like the vast majority of texts are doing with first person: this is a more immediate, immersive, and accessible way to deliver an otherwise identical story as a third person narrative; it allows for easier character development via backstory and internal monologue
TBF I could have the same conniption fit about limited vs omniscient third person narrators; I don't; I'm not hung up on those technicalities, despite that they could have equally interesting narrative repercussions
but the fudged line of "oops, the narrator knows more than was indicated they were supposed to know!" is noways so annoying as the fact that first person narratives draw attention to their unjustified existence without managing to fully benefit from their potential for immersion or character development though an intelligent—or at least self-aware—exploration of voice. they are lazy! obnoxious! when they could be so smart!
#I remember reading Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinth series and realizing: #oh—it's not that I hate first person because it *can't* be done well—but because it could be done well and *isn't* #and this is why I frequently get on with classics #yes the justifications of first person are frequently clumsy but as it turns out I prefer an obvious trope to a glaring silence #that said I get equally petty in my 'no one would ever write a letter/journal entry which is 50 pages long' hangups #I love how Kiernan resolves this—that the act of writing—the time demand—the emotional and physical labor #become a part of the first person narrative & say things about how motivation/obsession/communication/identity work for the speaker
There's a lot of post- or extra-Earth sci-fi where Earth maintains significance as a home. It's the final destination of a long voyage, or it's an emotional center; people born in off-world colonies still think of Earth as home, and the threat or destruction of the planet has vast consequence. And this narrative is effective for obvious reasons, because the consumers find it easy to extrapolate Earth's importance.
I feel like I haven't seen many post- or extra-Earth narratives that are speculative metaphors for real immigration—where relationships with Earth are complicated or generational: the loss of culture, the children of immigrants identifying foremost with the location of their birth, or being generations away from and no longer emotionally connected to their source of origin, or rediscovering their ancestry, or identifying ways in which both ancestral and modern location effects them. (CJ Cherryh begins the The Company Wars books with the fallout of Earth's obsolescence, the fact that it no longer has emotional or social power as our "home" planet, which is refreshing.) Is this because I don't consume enough SF, or because I read the wrong authors(/watch the wrong etc.), or because this trope is underexplored?
Books about cats (and why they all suck)
I woke up to this request for book recommendations:
Hi, Juushika. My name is [ ] and I'm brand new to Goodreads. Thanks for your review of Tailchaser's Song—I have very little time to read fiction right now, though I love doing it, and have to be VERY selective about what I read. I'm wavering about Tailchaser's Song. I appreciated what you said about the agenda Tad Williams seems to have in this story—one that doesn't necessarily serve cats very well in real life. I'm wondering: have you read any other cat fiction lately that you would recommend?
and it delights me that someone is like "hey Juu, books about cats, recommend me some?" and angers me that there are no books to recommend.
The options for books about cats are:
1) Cats as antagonists—they're wild cats but generally act enough like domestic cats to fulfill cat desires, and don't need caretaking because they have agency, see: Valente's Fairyland series, Brian Jacques's Redwall series.
2) Cats handing out mystic one-liners, usually as speaking supporting characters; sometimes the cats are inaccurate clichés, sometimes they're convincing, but they're obviously magical and thus don't need caretaking and/or they exist in a historical fantasy setting with bad expectations of cat caretaking, see: Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Lewis's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
3) Anthropomorphic or non-anthropomorphic feral cat colonies which are magically free of death, disease, inbreeding, and overpopulation because ... reasons, see: Williams's Tailchaser's Song.
Things there are not: cats as pets, important to plot or otherwise, which are neutered, indoors, and free from disease. That's partially because it's a fairly recent model for cat caretaking, but it's not so recent as to explain its complete absence.
Honestly, I avoid books about cats because I love them too much, because I find unrealistic cat stereotypes so annoying and indoor cats is a point of joyless non-negotiation for me (I don't even like photos of cats outdoors off leash, and wish we didn't proliferate them even if they're pretty). Maybe there are better books about cats out there that I haven't encountered? (If yes, please recommend them.) Because there's such a need not to idealize cats either as sleek/sexy/graceful (have you met cats) or mystic or wild independent hunters when what they are is domestic animals who depend on us for their health and welfare.
this is why Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is so important to me: as a historical artifact I can forgive the treatment of domestic cats #and as cutesy as it is the cats feel diverse and real; the number of personalities balances the caricature of each individual personality
James Tiptree Jr. and Joanna Russ
a post I don't have the wherewithal to write in full paragraphs right now:
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
—Robert Silverberg
that Tiptree wrote a story entitled "The Women Men Don't See," that that was a thing, the greatest and most obvious of all ironies
Robert Silverberg reviewed the story before it became known that Tiptree's works were written by a woman. He compared Tiptree favorably with Ernest Hemingway and remarked that "it is a profoundly feminist story told in an entirely masculine manner, and deserves close attention by those in the front lines in the wars of sexual liberation, male and female." After he learned the truth, he told Alice Sheldon "You've given my head a great needed wrenching."
—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women_Men_Don%27t_See
to come to these stories now is unfair, knowing Sheldon's history, having witnessed science fiction as influenced by feminist authors like her
but:
1) where finally reading Joanna Russ felt like feminist rage, like a hysterical laugh, at the way that misogyny comes from without, directly impacting women, and then is internalized by women, to work from within—
—to read Tiptree feels like a pervasive, blanketing anger: a view that sexism hurts men too, hurts everyone; but fuck them, be revenged against them, fuck their society and its pervasive tendency towards the worst
(Russ's single-gender societies are wry, engaged: she flirts with the concepts of utopia and dystopia, appears to discard them, and then reveals something very like the former via one tweak, one final insult: no men!; Tiptree's are sheer, bitter wish-fulfillment, untenable, unrealistic, but you can feel her clinging to them and, after enough stories, so does the reader: would that we just could get rid of the worst & would that it would fix everything)
2) she embodied that doubling in her writing: of Tiptree/Sheldon, and presentation/identity on a wider scale—see "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"—and it's absolutely, directed tied to misogyny because
3) when we talk about how the dominant white male perspective is available to anyone, accessible to anyone, re: identification and immersion, it's because of this: because it's so pervasive that it's internalized; a woman can copy that, embody it, write it from within and invert it—and it's part "passing" and part commentary and part the inevitable result of a misogynistic society
Why is to hard to review the best books?
today I transcribed about ~6 book review notes which were languishing in far-back pages of moleskines
why are they almost always of books I loved
(answer: b/c it is Difficult to have positive feelings; criticism is generally more distant and easier to pinpoint, but liking a thing? really loving a thing? requires an emotional investment, which is hard)
my current book reviewing habits are write a page of notes immediately upon completion (for short fiction, I also write 2-3 lines after I finish each story) > transcribe the notes into a word editor via voice recognition (the voice recognition is new; I started doing it to make it easier to transcribe when away from my desktop, which I keep turned off during the day, but I also believe I benefit from threading the review thoughts through multiple formats, handwritten, voice, word processing—it seems like an extra step but actually has made reviews much faster to compose) > edit and post my reviews while matchmaking in Overwatch, yes, seriously, while on voice with 2-5 other people
I don't write reviews primarily to socially interact, not because that wouldn't be great and healthy for me, but because I am chronically too low-energy to ... socially interact. I write them to process & for my future reference—it's how my brain interacts with and internalizes media. but when I am as profoundly low spoons as I am rn, it's a constant effort to balance the work of a review against the guilt and perceived (but totally non-existent) pressure to do the review vs spending the time instead on, you know, actual media consumption. hysterically, I've been doing more than my usual media consumption in order to avoid the circumstances causing the low spoons! and so the problem redoubles.
it's easy to get lost in that struggle & I have spent way too much time on multi-hour reviews wherein I struggle over every word
finding more casual, low-key ways to get started (speech to text is finicky and ends up with homonyms and missing capitals, so I just roll with it: here is my trash draft!) and polishing the reviews in a setting where I literally cannot overthink or overwork b/c I'm already multitasking has streamlined that process significantly
I do, however, apologize to my open-mic gaming frands who nightly are subjected to my surprisingly loud CLACKY CLACKY CLACK typing
#there is an especial shame in talking about talking about things; it is a certain sort of navel-gazing #but—and I realize how pretentious and self-absorbed this sounds!—the way my review habits & style have changed over time #honestly fascinates me #(I just interest me SO MUCH you guys)