Beyond Selidor

This weekend has been a much needed reset after a very, very tiring week. Everything happened efficiently, without much effort on my part. Heavily limiting social media use also probably helped.

I began Saturday with my usual two hours of classes at the gym (my body is still in pain — in a good way — twenty-four hours later), and detoured home via the market, where I picked up Greek and Spanish deli items from their two respective stalls, and Tibetan food for lunch. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon slow-cooking a Burmese pumpkin curry for dinner, doing yoga, and chatting with people via Dreamwidth comments, before meeting Matthias — who had been out all day — and our friend E at our favourite cafe/bar. When I got there, they were sitting outside in the terrace garden, which was dark and bracing, but fine for an hour or so. I'm out of the habit of sitting outside in frigid British winter temperatures, although I used to do it all the time during the lockdown years.

This morning, I did yoga as the sun rose, ate a leisurely breakfast, prepared various bits and pieces for meals next week (stewed fruit, making up a fresh batch of muesli, etc), and drifted around the house aimlessly until Matthias and I decided to make the most of the clear winter sunshine, and go for a walk. The market square was as busy as it always is in such circumstances, and I had to queue for ages to get a coffee, but it was nice to be outside, and wander along the river, watching the geese, ducks, and swans frolic about.

I've been somewhat distracted this week, and my reading has suffered as a consequence — I only finished two books. The first, My Throat An Open Grave (Tori Bovalino), is a YA fantasy novel by an author I normally enjoy, retelling the Labyrinth film's story as a contemporary Appalachian gothic, with folk horror and commentary on the abysmal state of reproductive rights in the US. I feel as if I wish this had been better than it was: interesting ideas, let down by pedestrian execution and authorial timidity. (And why did it need to be told in first person present tense?). The other book was a reread: This Book Is Haunted (David McRobbie), a collection of ghost stories by an author who was a big deal in Australia when I was growing up. The book is from my childhood collection, and I had read it before, so none of the twists in the stories were shocking to me, but I did admire McRobbie's very broad interpretation of haunting. Very few of these are ghost stories in the classic sense: in many cases the characters are haunted by guilt, by stories unearthed on cassette tapes, by mysteries in old photographs, by advertisements in the Classified section of local newspapers, or by echoes of memories in buildings, landscapes, or artefacts. He has a particular interest in haunting journeys, as if trains and railway stations and ferry terminals evoke particularly vivid emotions, and in investigative journalism, and a magpie-like imagination, with an ability to find a story in everything. I really enjoyed the collection, and wondered if it would be possible to publish something like it — for a YA readership — today.

Now the remainder of Sunday stretches ahead, invitingly. At some point I'll need to start marinating the mackerel for tonight's dinner (spiced, seared, and served with a tomato-dill-lemon-garlicky sauce), but beyond that, I have absolutely no demands on my time, which is wonderful. Next week, I have the immense good fortune to be working from home four days out of the five, and I'm hoping that that, combined with the ease and calm of this weekend, will be enough to tackle the grinding exhaustion that has been such a major theme of this year.

I made it to the pool and back this morning without being rained on, which, given the weather this weekend is something of an achievement. It's been showering on and off since late Friday night, including torrential rain that blew horizontally under our umbrellas (and under the stall's marquee) during the time Matthias and I were at the market buying vegetables yesterday. It's very much been a weekend in which to hunker down at home, and stay as cosy as possible. After I've finished writing this post, I'm going to start preparing dinner — a juliusroberts roast chicken which he calls 'epic tarragon chicken,' which seems like the perfect nourishing choice for a cold rainy Sunday.

Yuletide assignments are out, and I'm pretty pleased with mine — lots of interesting prompts into which to sink my teeth, and my recipient seems to like the same things in canon that I do. I'm going to let ideas brew for a few days before settling on a final choice for the assignment. (And as an aside, it does feel this year as if I were going into the exchange more blindly than usual. I may be imagining things, but it felt like there were fewer letters, and less buzz around adding them to the letters app, or post, and so on. That may be a false impression, but it's certainly the sense I got.)

I have been reading quite a bit, and all of it's been enjoyable.

Earlier in the week, I read Nocturne (Alyssa Wees), a YA novel set in 1930s Chicago which interweaves retellings of Beauty and the Beast, the Hades and Persephone myth, and Phantom of the Opera. The prose is lush (verging on purple), and the setting I felt was underdone (a sprinkling of cliches), but the author's evocation of the experiences of professional ballet dancers, and especially what it feels like as a performer to perform had the ring of truth. I'm not sure I can completely recommend it — I found it enjoyable, while essentially mentally averting my eyes from its many flaws.

I then reread Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy. These are books that I first read in primary school (when I was definitely slightly too young to take in everything they were doing), published in the 1990s but set in an English girls' boarding school in the early 1960s. Each book is narrated in first person by a different teenage girl — a trio of close friends in the boarding school — retelling the fairy tales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White respectively. I have been reading and rereading these books for the past thirty years, and have always been impressed by the ambition of what Geras was trying to achieve, and the fact that she was able to achieve it — in YA novels, in so few pages (each book is about 150 pages long). On one level, they are spectacular works of historical fiction, capturing vividly the mores and pop culture of a very specific time and place, in a way that plays on the senses. You can almost feel the candlewick bedsheets and rustling 1960s dresses, or taste the bland insitutional cooking in the boarding school and the hot chips and tea cakes smothered with butter ('real butter!' as the characters rhapsodise, as opposed to the margarine they get at school) eaten on Saturday trips into the village neighbouring their school. The prose itself is lovely — flowing and unobtrusive, with memorable turns of phrase that have stuck with me since I first encountered the books. But where Geras truly triumphs here is as a reteller of fairy tales: the rarefied lives of these upper middle class girls, tucked away in their boarding school or in carefully circumscribed social activities in which they are shielded from the complications and difficulties of the wider world are their own kind of fairytale unreality, making the bizarre sequences of events drawn from the source material feel plausible and solid. And I have seen a lot of Goodreads reviews criticising these books for their 'unbelievable' romance (the insta-love based on little more than a glimpse or a conversation) — but that to me is the most believable part of them. I wouldn't go so far to say they are universally representative of teenage female sexuality, but the intensity of emotion, the tendency to imbue minor events with epic, poetic, portentous significance — all of that is painfully familiar to me (in the sense of 'teenage me is in this picture, and she doesn't like it'). There's some stuff in the books that you just have to roll with (and if you can't get past it, you will not have much fun with them) — they are aggressively heterosexual, and there is the aforementioned insta-love, often with people we'd consider wildly innappropriate (the Rapunzel book is about a romance between a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and the new 22-year-old lab assistant in her school; he's not her teacher, but it's obviously not a relationship most of us would be comfortable with). They are not romance novels, even though romantic love is the ribbon that runs through them — they are fairytale retellings, and among the best I've ever read.

Finally, I read (for the first time) The Throne of Caesar, the concluding book in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa historical mystery series. I have read all the other books in the series many times, but at some point I stopped keeping up with the series, and until this year had no idea that Saylor had written this book, which focuses on the days immediately before and after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In his author's note, Saylor mentions that he had avoided writing about this period — even though it was the logical conclusion to his series, which starts during Sulla's dictatorship and follows the next few decades of the erosion and death of the Roman republic, with each book involving a mystery linked to key political events during that time period — because, as it was one of the most well-known political assassinations in history, he couldn't think of anything about it that could be a mystery for his ancient Roman sleuth to solve. In the end, he managed to find an angle — and a mystery — and wrapped everything up neatly. The series (most of which was published in the 2000s) is explicitly linked to Saylor's own sense of anxiety and despair at American national politics and international relations during the George W. Bush period, and this last book, which was written in 2014 (but published in 2018) seems as much to be closing a door on those previous political anxieties (which seem now so small, with the hindsight of what was to come) as on the series' characters. I can't help but wonder what they would have been like if he'd started the series a decade later.

It's the first day of a four-day long weekend here. The sun is shining, the fruit trees are blossoming, and I'm remaining blissfully close to home for the entire time, which is very much needed after an exhausting few weeks.

Matthias and I have made a tentative return to live music. We saw one concert — God Is An Astronaut — in London a couple of weeks ago, and Goldfrapp in Cambridge on Monday. Both were great, but what really blew me away was Goldfrapp's support act, Salt Ashes, whose music reminded me of that of another of my favourite bands, The Knife, during my very favourite period of their music. (Less sharp, and more conventional lyrics, maybe, but a similar sound.)



So my question to you all on this Friday open thread is this: have you ever experienced a gig where you went in knowing nothing about the support band, and came away with new, enjoyable music? And, if so, what was the gig, and who was the band/singer?

These past two weeks have caused a steady depletion of my mental energy, to the extent that I've retreated into a world of chefs and cooking. I've always cooked as an expression of love, and I always find reading cookbooks, chefs' Instagram accounts, and above all interviews and podcasts with professional chefs to be really cosy and relaxing. And so for the most part I've bounced between Nadiya Hussain's Instagram highlights and random interviews/panel discussions involving Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi, or both. (There is some method in this madness: I was given the Jerusalem cookbook as a Christmas present, and the Falastin cookbook as a random gift by Matthias early on during lockdown, so I have been basically swimming in za'atar, pomegrante molasses, tahini, and the other repeat ingredients of the Ottolenghi/Tamimi oeuvre for the past few months.)

My favourite so far was this panel discussion between Tamimi and Ottolenghi several years ago when they were promoting their Jerusalem cookbook. They were constantly asked the most ridiculous things (and people seemed to want them to act as some sort of poster children for Israeli-Palestinian peaceful coexistence, as if their own personal circumstances, friendship and business partnership could somehow be expanded outwards to an entire fraught region; they resisted this as unrealistically sentimental and simplistic), but ultimately it's just an hour of two people geeking out about food and flavour. I feel their pain re: those dreadful premade refridgerated falafel sold in British supermarkets, which are an abomination.

I say that I've only had mental energy for cooking and foodie stuff, but that's not 100 per cent true. I've also read a bit of short fiction, mainly the newly unlocked stories in the current issue of Uncanny Magazine. My thoughts on all are behind the cut — every story is free to read online.

( Five short stories behind the cut )

What is getting you through the current ... everything?

I have lived in this country for more than a decade, and I have still not learnt the fundamental lesson: when planning to be outside for any length of time, first check the weather.

Yesterday Matthias and I, wanting to take advantage of the time afforded us by a four-day weekend, decided to spend the morning doing a long walk along the river. The walk itself would take more than two hours there and back. We left the house to sunny, windy weather — warm enough to wear t shirts, and spent the way out meandering among the cows, houseboats and bird life. Here's a photoset.

About a minute after the last photo was taken, when we were essentially the furthest it was possible to be from our house, it started pouring with rain, which lashed us horizontaly due to the howling wind. There are several pubs along the river, but of course due to lockdown they are all closed, so there wasn't even that option of waiting inside for the rain to ease — all we could do was trudge forward, in our t shirts, for an hour and a half until we arrived home. We were miserable and frozen, and I immediately ran a hot bath to warm up. By the time I'd thawed sufficienty, I was exhausted, and I ended up doing nothing between 3-6pm but lie in bed. This was, as you can imagine, not the way I had been planning to spend my Saturday!

Sunday so far has been a vast improvement — an extraordinarily lazy morning, eating crepes and tea for breakfast, chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime (they're still in isolation in Sydney together, working from home, but Australia is gradually relaxing most of the lockdown restrictions, and I have to say I feel a bit of envy at them being able to sit in cafes, and, as of 1st June, go to the pool), and reading.

I've somehow ended up signed up for a programme through the publisher Hodderscape which gives UK resident participants their choice of a selection of free ebooks at set intervals throughout the year. (If you want to participate, you can sign up here — my understanding is that this is limited to UK residents only, but it might be worth double checking.) My first book was Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, a collection of weird, whimsical fairytales, most of which had an underlying bite. It's not a subtle book — there's a running strand of Animal Farm-esque political fables which are recognisable as parables about the rise of Trump and right-wing nationalism, aggrieved Gamergate types screaming that they're being silenced, and so on (one is even about the 2010 Lib Dem/Conservative coalition government in the UK, that's how unsubtle and specific they are) — but I enjoyed it a lot. 80 per cent of it is an unfolding series of stories about otherworldly beings, and their quests, lives, and loves, as they roam in and out of the human and other worlds, and the remaining 20 per cent is filled by those political fables. Often when modern authors try to invent or adapt fairytales the result is too syrupy for my tastes, too kind, but these keep that unearthly wildness, and that refusal to explain the workings of their world. Fairytales shouldn't require explanations: things within them just are, and you either accept that as a reader or not.

I discovered, through roshanichokshi, the existence of a webcomic called Lore Olympus, which as far as I can tell is a modern retelling of the Hades/Persephone story, so I guess that's what I'll be reading this afternoon!

What's everyone up to this weekend (not that time has any meaning in these times of lockdown)?

This year I participated in Wayback Exchange, an exchange for fanworks in fandoms whose canons ended at least ten years ago. The exchange went live last weekend, and today it was time for reveals. I was amused to see that I ended up writing for the same person who wrote for me, even though it was in completely different fandoms.

My gift was a gorgeous, lyrical Sunshine/Constantine fic in the Sunshine fandom. My favourite thing about this pairing is the way the two of them transform each other, Con making Sunshine a little bit more monstrous, and Sunshine bringing him just a little bit into the daylight, and this fic captured that perfectly.

Last (First) Light (1069 words) by Meilan_Firaga
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Constantine/Rae "Sunshine" Seddon
Characters: Constantine (Sunshine), Rae "Sunshine" Seddon
Additional Tags: Canon Continuation, Slice of Life, Fluff
Summary:

Dawn became my sunset.

Life has changed for Sunshine in so very many ways. What's one more?

My assignment was Hades/Persephone from Greek mythology, and I had a lot of fun writing it.

Six Crossings (2116 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Greek and Roman Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ἁδης | Hades/Περσεφόνη | Persephone (Hellenistic Religion & Lore)
Characters: Ἁδης | Hades (Hellenistic Religion & Lore), Περσεφόνη | Persephone (Hellenistic Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon
Summary:

Five times Persephone was transformed by the seasons, and one time she transformed the season instead.

Did anyone else participate in this exchange? Or did you write or receive fic (or indeed other types of fanworks) in another exchange that revealed authors recently? Feel free to share or gush about it here!

A lot of people have been sharing Yoon Ha Lee's post, 'The problem with problematic'. In it, yhlee responds to criticism levelled at Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series (the first book of which is up for a Hugo this year) by trans and/or nonbinary readers — criticism which has had the effect of removing a lot of nuance from responses to the series. Worse, as yhlee writes, this criticism has had the effect of erasing trans readers such as himself from the discussion altogether:

All this just to say--readers are so individual in their reactions that "never write something hurtful" is untenable.

I think this is related to the going trend these days, which is to ask authors not to write works that are "problematic." But what do we really mean by that? Analysis of, say, racist or sexist elements in media is valuable, and we need more of it. But sometimes what I see is not that, but "don't write problematic works" in the sense of "don't write things that I consider hurtful."

As I am neither trans nor nonbinary, I'm not going to dictate to trans/nonbinary people how they should respond to Palmer's books (which is not what yhlee is doing, either), except to say that I think yhlee is correct when he says that Palmer's future was a dystopia telling itself that it was a utopia, and that you cannot understand her novels unless you view them from this perspective.

However, like yhlee, I think this response to the Terra Ignota books is a symptom of a wider problem. I saw similar discussion around queer representation in Seth Dickinson's The Traitor Baru Cormorant, with a number of LGBT reviewers repulsed by the tragic fate of the book's queer characters, and a small minority adoring the book and feeling like their queer identities were being called into question for doing so. Amal El-Mohtar was one of the latter group, and wrote a blog post along those lines:

I’ve been watching conversations emerging — mostly on Twitter, mostly subtweeting, mostly in fits and starts — trying to categorize responses to the book according to some sort of ticky-box taxonomy of readers. I find this utterly repellent. Some people will suggest that only queer people have problems with the book, ergo it must write queer people’s lives poorly; others will counter with “well, Amal liked the book,” as if that could be the last word on the subject; still others will try to parse whether it’s my Brownness or my Queerness that has shaped my response, in pursuit of some sort of One True Response to the book.

I've not read this book, and again, I have no intention of dictating people's responses to it, or telling them that they should read a story which they are going to find upsetting and hurtful. What I find troubling is the idea that people — particularly those of (multiple) marginalised identities — feeling they have to march in ideological lockstep and respond in identical ways to identical stories, especially if there's an implication that a divergent opinion calls their marginalised identity into question (or that they have to pick and choose between one or the other of their marginalisations, as if responding to a story in a certain way means they've prioritised their identity as a POC over their identity as an LGBT person).

I have my own version of this regarding the rhetoric surrounding the 'proper' way to write women. For various reasons, partly because of my personal history, partly because of my lifelong narrative preferences, I respond much better — and will choose to read, watch or be fannish about — stories where the female characters are survivors of trauma, where their heroism has come at great cost, and where their powers are in spite of misogynistic pushback. I could list a thousand examples, but the first handful that spring to mind include the five Wives in Fury Road (victims of sexual violence), the clones in Orphan Black (who are quite literally viewed as patentable property without bodily autonomy), Jessica Jones in the Netflix TV series (a victim of sexual violence and mind-control), Laia from Sabaa Tahir's Ember in the Ashes series (who voluntarily allows herself to be enslaved in order to spy on her enemies, putting herself at constant risk of sexual and physical violence), Shahrzad from Renée Ahdieh's Wrath and the Dawn duology (a retelling of the 1001 Nights played fairly straight), Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy (an escaped slave with a traumatic history that's only hinted at, but which is fairly obvious if you read between the lines), Briseis and Chryseis from the Iliad (captured in war and victims of sexual violence) and Paige Mahoney from Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series, who begins the series in a very Stockholm Syndrome-y situation.

I'm not saying these are the only depictions of female characters that I respond to — some of my favourite stories entirely lack this element! — but these tend to be the fictional characters that are closest to my heart, whose stories I draw on at times when I need courage, and inspire the bulk of my fannish feelings and output. What I don't respond to, and what is very low on my list of narrative priorities, are female characters who enter their stories already powerful, suffer no trauma, and wear their power joyfully and lightly.

And yet I am constantly bombarded (at least in my corner of fandom) with categorical assertions that what female audiences want are untraumatised, joyful, uncomplicatedly happy female characters who revel in their power. This may be true for the vast majority of women and girls — as I said above, I have no intention of dictating others' storytelling preferences. But I'm told, in furious Tumblr post after furious Tumblr post, that the Whedonesque heroine — one who experiences her power as a kind of violation, and who fights at least in part as a response to trauma — is anathema, is unwanted, is hurtful to all female fans. But for me it is precisely this kind of character that gives me courage, because such characters tell me, over and over again, that I as a woman will survive, will be brave, will live on and find power in the support and community of other women, and that women with my experiences will get to be the protagonists of our own stories.

Most of the responses to yhlee's post (outside of the comments on the post itself) seem to have been along the lines of well, this gives us lots to chew on without really engaging in the points made. My feeling is that we'll never progress beyond this point unless people are prepared to talk about the broad spectrum of reactions to stories, and allow for this range of reactions without trying to police people's identities. I have it somewhat easy. I'm not exactly starved for narratives of my chosen type: the world abounds with stories of traumatised women taking back power for themselves, although of course some stories do it better than others. When it comes to depictions of more marginalised identities, the dearth of representation is much starker. This is precisely why the solution to bad or limited representation is not to enforce a uniform response to this representation, but rather to do everything in our power to encourage and enable more representation. (This obviously means significant structural changes to publishing, film- and television-making, and a huge amount of work in amplifying marginalised voices and making creative fields less hostile to creators of marginalised identities.) I believe enforcing a party line when it comes to people of marginalised identities responding to fictional marginalised characters is deeply harmful. I also believe that the cure for this problem is as many stories as possible, so that everyone is spoiled for choice when searching for stories that speak to them.

Day Twelve: Favorite female character in a movie

Ree (Winter's Bone)

Looking back at all the entries I've written for this meme so far, I think I have a type, or at least a few types of character that always appeal. Ree shares several qualities with my other favourites, most notably a very specific kind of bravery. It's a passive bravery: she endures, rather than acts, and she carries the burdens of those around her because others can't bear to. Her father is a drug dealer who's long since vanished from the scene, her mother is suffering from untreated mental illness, and her community has closed its doors to her. Ree is the only person trying to keep things together for her younger brother and sister. When it looks as if her family will lose their house unless she can find her father, Ree refuses to give up, and she embarks on an emotionally harrowing quest to bring him home.

I spoke in my entry on Peaky Blinders that it was a show about trauma, and male violence, and the way the women in the community tried to manage that violence. Winter's Bone explores similar themes, although Ree is too worn down, too cut off to have the power to direct and manipulate male violence in the way the women of Peaky Blinders do. Rather, she seeks to contain this violence in the hopes of keeping it from her door. As she continues her search for her father, she is exposed to greater and greater danger and ever increasing violence, as it leads her into corners the community would prefer to keep hidden.

The whole film has a sort of mythic quality. It deliberately emphasises the elements of katabasis in its story, as Ree's search for the truth takes her further and further away from light and hope. There's a fabulous scene towards the end of the film in which a group of women take her in a small boat on a river in the middle of the night, like some kind of Appalachian Persephone or Inanna. The river is inky, Ree is fearful, the women are stern and offer no comfort, and the whole thing is shot like a journey to the underworld.

Winter's Bone is not a very hopeful film, and you get the sense that the when the credits roll, Ree has succeeded only in keeping the storm at bay for a little longer, not that her life has much chance of improving. She should be able to endure all the torments the world throws at her, but she shouldn't have to.

( The other days )