Beyond Selidor

I've just finished doing yoga — a slow, stretchy sequence, tucked upstairs in the bedroom, watching the night fall across the garden. Today is my birthday, and it's been a slow, sleepy day. I have:

Spoken to my father on the phone, and my mother and Sister #1 via FaceTime.

Gone for a short walk around the cathedral with Matthias, and picked up take-away bagels for lunch.

Pottered around online, catching up with Dreamwidth comments.

Drunk smoky Russian Caravan tea and eaten a segment of an incredibly rich marzipan brownie.

Made a plan for the remaining meals up to 27th December (in light of the fact that we're now staying at home rather than going away to Germany.

I've also finished one book: Skin of the Sea by Natasha Bowen, a YA fantasy novel which blends Andersen's The Little Mermaid with Yoruba mythology and West African history. I found the story to be really well written, and it's undoubtedly a good example of the type, but I find myself a bit wearied by tropey YA novels, particularly if they're told in first-person present tense, which they almost invariably are, and for this reason I perhaps didn't warm to the book as much as I would have done several years ago. The building blocks of the story are really interesting, and are put together well, it just wasn't what I was looking for in a book at the moment.

I'm now embarking on my annual The Dark is Rising reread, and it's like falling into a pile of warm blankets. The prose is as crisp as always, and the imagery — stark country lanes piled high with drifts of snow, otherwordly horses moving through unearthly ancient forests, and the contrasting warmth and hope of family and home — is as vivid and beautiful on this reread as it was the first time I opened this book. I feel as if its story is needed more this year than ever, and sinking back into those familiar pages is like coming home. It's wonderful.

I've spent most of my free time this week rereading the five books in Catherine Jinks's Pagan Chronicles series — a collection of books which I have loved for close to two-thirds of my life, and to which I always return for comfort and consolation. When asked which books have had the most impact on me, I'll generally immediately answer with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, but if I take proper time to consider the question, it's obvious that while Pullman's books are indirectly responsible for a lot of the choices in my life that got me to where I am, what I do, and who I'm with now, the Pagan series got into my bones and blood in a much deeper way.

I talk about these books a lot, but I'm not sure I've ever laid out what they're all about — or at least not recently.

( A multigenerational medieval found family )

Ambelin Kwaymullina talks about diversity in Australian YA literature.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Fear of causing offense becomes a fetish'.

Here's Daniel José Older on diversity, power and publishing.

Laura Mixon talks about building bridges and healing divisions.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz talks about self-care and 'staying in touch with the child-self'.

Aidan Moher discusses writing military SF without combat.

Astrid Lindgren's Second World War diaries have been published in Sweden.

Ana of Things Mean A Lot reviews Pride in the light of the recent UK elections.

I love this review by Electra Pritchett of Stranger and Hostage by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith:

If I had to pick a post-apocalyptic YA society in which to live, I'd pick the community of Las Anclas hands down, warts and all: rather than a hierarchical dystopian society where something random is outlawed and the government controls something else crucial to society, Las Anclas represents a kinder, gentler post-apocalypse. It's not quite a utopia, except in the sense that everywhere in fiction is, but that's precisely what makes it a believable and desirable place to live: its busybodies and jerks are notable because they're not the only kind of people in the town, and dealing with them would be a small price to pay in order to live in such a supportive and inclusive place.

The upcoming publishing schedule at The Book Smugglers makes me so happy.

I am really looking forward to the publication of Tell The Wind And Fire, Sarah Rees Brennan's latest book.

Via Sherwood Smith, listen to the oldest (recorded) song in the world.

Happy Friday, everyone!

One of my friends on Tumblr asked me to talk about why John Marsden's Tomorrow series had such a profound impact on me as a child and teenager, and why I continue to care deeply about the series to this day. Because I don't like writing long posts on Tumblr, I'm answering him here.

Content note: It is impossible to discuss this series without talking about war, violence and rape.

( I made a list )

I hope that answers any questions about what the Tomorrow series meant and means to me!

This article about children's literature on The Guardian by Meg Rosoff (warning for discussion of death, suicide and illness):

There is a theory that children's literature should uphold the idyll of childhood, offering charming scenarios and happy endings to protect the innocent from life's harsh realities. But children have extraordinary antennae for the things no one will explain. If a child has enough imagination to conjure dragons and monsters under the bed, he has enough imagination to figure out that something adults won't talk about must be truly terrifying. Sex, for instance, divorce or death. And that's where literature can help – by exploring the scary stuff with insight and, on a good day, wisdom.

This article by Malorie Blackman, about libraries. Also on The Guardian and brought to my attention by Matthias:

Libraries are the best literacy resource we have. For children they provide an equaliser that allows everyone access to books, story-telling sessions, homework clubs; expert librarians who give non-partisan assistance and advice regarding books; and warm and safe environments within which to discover and explore the world of literature. Libraries switch children on to a love of reading, with all the ensuing benefits, and can make them lifelong readers. Without them, literacy may increasingly become the province of the lucky few, rather than the birthright of everyone.

As a librarian, and a lifelong lover of libraries, this matters to me.

This astonishing post on Wait But Why. Like all discussions of the vastness of space seeming endlessness of time, it left me feeling disoriented, overwhelmed, slightly teary, and very humbled. Existence is an amazing and terrifying thing:

I'm not really sure why it's okay that the eventual fate of the universe is cold silence, and I certainly as hell don't know what was going on before the Big Bang. And this is why the most important skill of a species intelligent enough to understand both their insignificance and their mortality is the capability for distraction. Because the facts of reality are just too intense. This is also a reminder of all the things that needed to happen exactly as they happened, for billions of years, on this very particular planet, for you to exist.

This poem by Tumblr user wytchbytch.

Life is a bit crazy at the moment. For the past couple of weeks, my supervisor and I have been discussing the final stages of my PhD, and yesterday we had a meeting where we sorted out four potential examiners. (I need two examiners, one from within my department and one from another university, but I need to nominate two potential people for each examination slot.) I've written my abstract and am at the point where I need to inform the university of my intention to submit...in September! I am both terrified and relieved to have got this far. But this means the next few months are going to be extremely sleepless.

I have had huge numbers of tabs open for weeks and weeks and weeks (and even resorted to emailing links to myself in order to close some tabs), just waiting for me to have the time to do a linkpost. I don't really have time, but I want to get these out there before too much time passes, so here they are.

I finally dusted off my Romanitas blog and posted the next of my commentaries. This one's for Romanitas Chapter 5, 'White and Silver'. I also wrote a fairly negative review of Juliet E. McKenna's Chronicles of the Lescari Revolution series on my Wordpress review blog:

I’m sad to say that the series just doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t work for me. The problem is partly one of characterisation (I find all the characters clichéd collections of tropes rather than engaging human beings), but really one of believability. The problem is that the whole revolution is too easy.

This is an old post by sophiamcdougall about London, but it's so wonderful that you need to read it anyway.

Australian YA author Melina Marchetta is someone I really admire. She's constantly pushing herself in terms of what she writes, and is thoughtful and articulate about her writing and that of other people. This interview with blogger Jo at Wear The Old Coat is characteristically excellent:

I don’t believe that writing for and about young people is a public service. The problem about role models is that some people may believe a good female role model is someone who doesn’t have sex as a teenager at school. Other people may believe that a good role model is someone who challenges the establishment. Or someone who works hard and gets into university. Or someone who doesn’t have to go to university or college to succeed. I don’t think of role models or teaching lessons when I’m creating character. If I did have a secret wish of what I’d like to come out of my writing, it’s that someone feels less lonely. Or someone feels more connected. Or someone questions the status quo.

Another author very dear to my heart is kateelliott. I've mentioned before that I'm deeply interested in people on the margins of history, people who led fulfilling, happy and interesting lives, but whose stories were never recorded because the Powers That Be didn't view those people's activities as being important. Elliott is an author after my own heart. She puts such marginal people front and centre in her medieval (and nineteenth-century) inflected worlds. Her interviews and blog posts make it clear that this is a deliberate choice. If you're not reading her already, this latest offering might tempt you:

I am not, by the way, a monarchist nor do I yearn for the halcyon days of yore with a secret reactionary bent to my heart. The idea that epic fantasy is by nature a “conservative” subgenre is, I think, based not only on an incomplete reading of the texts but also on an understanding of the medieval or early modern eras that comes from outdated historiography.

I don’t doubt specific works can be reactionary or conservative (depending on how you define those words), but more often than not I suspect–although I can’t prove–that if a work defaults to ideas about social order that map to what I call the Victorian Middle Ages or the Hollywood Middle Ages, it has more to do with sloppy world-building in the sense of using unexamined and outmoded assumptions about “the past” as a guide. I really think that to characterize the subgenre so generally is to not understand the variety seen within the form and to not understand that the simplistic and popular views of how people “were” and “thought” in the past are often at best provisional and incomplete and at worst outright wrong.

Historian Judith Bennett calls this the “Wretched Abyss” Theory, the idea that the European Middle Ages were a wretched abyss from which we modern women/people have luckily escaped. It’s one of the founding myths of modern feminism as well as the modern world. Me, I want to live now, with internet, antibiotics, and that nice intensive care nursery that saved my premature twins. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t also responsible to depict a more nuanced and accurate representation of “a past” as it was lived and experienced as a dynamic and changing span.

And now, for a complete change of subject, have a link to a post about Oideas Gael, the Modern Irish language school where I've spent a couple of happy summers. It really captures the heart of the little village and the classes. I was sorry to hear from the post, however, that Biddy's (one of the three pubs in the Glen), has closed down. Its wall had a sign promising 'ól agus ceol', which is really all you could possibly want in a pub...

Love, Joy, Feminism is pretty much my favourite blog these days. It's written by Libby Anne, who grew up in an abusive fundamentalist subculture in the US, but broke away as an adult. She is an articulate, unflinching and persistent critic of the culture in which she grew up, and this makes her dangerous to those who promote that subculture as a way of life. If you feel up to it, I highly recommend her most recent series of posts, which are on homeschooling and its potential to exacerbate abuse and neglect. You can tell how rattled Libby Anne's posts are making some people, as she's receiving a huge backlash from the (so-called) Homeschool Legal Defence Association (an organisation that believes children have no rights, parents have complete ownership over their children and that any regulation beyond parents informing the state of their intention to homeschool is an infringement on parents' freedoms). I highly recommend reading everything Libby Anne writes.

Still on the topic of homeschooling, here is a post by Jon Bois about his homeschooling experience as a child in rural Georgia in the '90s.

Check out this TED talk about changing the way we talk about abuse and harassment. The gist of it is that men (are the perpetrators in not all, but most cases of abuse and harassment) should be told that being bystanders to abuse and harassment is a failure of leadership - that if they are in positions of authority or relative power, and they do nothing to investigate, discourage or stop abuse and harassment, they are failing as leaders.

Finally, have a read of Maureen Johnson's post about genderflipped YA book covers.

You get two memes today, mainly because I wasn't near a computer for most of yesterday. Aren't you lucky?

Day 12: Your thoughts or opinions about Harry Potter.
My feelings about the Harry Potter series are a complicated mixture of pride and disappointment. I loved the books, and enjoyed reading them, and I felt all the feelings I was presumably supposed to feel, crying, celebrating and growing up with the characters. At the same time, I feel disappointment because they are flawed books and they could've been better.

What I am most grateful for is the fact that for at least 10 years, there was a series of books that I could discuss, agonise over, analyse and whose story I could attempt to predict with my friends, and with my generation more widely. While most of my friends are readers, not all of them read as much or as often as I did, and the Potter books were a unifying force. And I feel a rush of curious pride when I think that my generation's Beatles was not a band but a series of fantasy novels.

Day 13: Your thoughts or opinions about Mean Girls.
I knew about Mean Girls before it was a film. It began its life as a sort of sociological self-help book called Queen Bees and Wannabes aimed at mothers of teenage daughters. The irony is that it was introduced to me by the mother of a friend of my sister. This mother breathlessly pushed the book on our family as a sort of Bible of the interactions of adolescent girls, a sure-fire way to avoid bullying. And her daughter had been bullying my sister for the past two years.

The film is pretty good, too.

( the other days )

I'm not sure if you are aware of the minor YA literature kerfuffle that broke out last week when yet another ignorant idiot opined that adults shouldn't be reading YA literature. Kristin Cashore didn't engage, posting the blogging equivalent of 'burn!'

Foz Meadows carried on being awesome, noting a disturbing sexism in the original writer's article:

The bolding is mine; take note of it! Because rather than a critique of the content of YA novels, what this piece actually represents is the following assertion: that it’s fundamentally embarrassing for grown men to share any interests whatever with teenage girls. In fact, according to Joel, it is actually more embarrassing for a man to identify with a teen girl via the medium of literature than if he were publicly demeaning and sexualising her via the medium of pornography!

Ugh. She's also got a rather brilliant post about default narrative sexism in which she makes the point that there's an awful lot of sexism in fantasy novels, so much so that its existence is unremarkable. But curiously, there's sexism, but no sexists.

We are left with sexism as a background detail: one which is used to justify the plight or origins of particular female characters and the total absence of others, but which is never actually addressed. Which, in instances where the protagonist is male, or where the majority of the cast is male, leaves us instantly with a screaming, red-faced anachronism: where are the actual sexists? Why, if sexism in this society is so deep-seated, are the heroes so unusually enlightened? Here is why; I will tell you the secret. Because we are meant to like them. Funnily enough, most authors have cottoned on to the fact that writing openly sexist heroes is less heroic than it is disgusting; that it’s sort of difficult to hail Weapons McFighty, Trueking Noob and Roamer Nomadson as the exalted Lords of Awesome when they’ve spent the majority of the book acting like entitled jerks.

To which I say a resounding 'YES!'

After a while fearing I'd lost my blogging mojo, I'm back (and better than ever?). I've got a post over on Wordpress about the wonderful, wonderful dystopian YA novels written in Australia in the 90s.

After I wrote it, I realised that tomorrow (today in Australia) is Australia Invasion Day, so let's pretend I wrote that post to be entirely thematically relevant. Or something.

Those of you who don't normally follow online discussions of YA literature may not be aware that yet another debate about the value (or lack thereof) of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series has been raging for the past few days or so. I was going to write my own response, but I realised that to do so adequately, I would have to write about my own attitudes as a teenager towards sex, in horrific and embarrassing detail. Ultimately, I feel uncomfortable doing that. Suffice it to say that in spite of a comprehensive (harm minimization-based) sex education during my teenage years, a mother who was open about such matters and answered my questions frankly, and access to the best in 90s teen advice columns (ie, I read Dolly and Girlfriend religiously), those attitudes were extraordinarily messed up.

I'm going to leave it there, as far as my own experiences go, and instead link to five posts which I've encountered recently. While not all are about Twilight specifically, the things they discuss are all connected.

YA author blackholly kicked things off with a post in which she argued that the criticism of Twilight fails to recognise a very valid reading of Meyer's series: namely, that if you interpret it through the lens of kink (that is, Bella has a submission and masochism kink), it ceases to become such a problematic narrative.

It's okay to be a feminist and fantasize about being tied up and whipped. It's okay to fantasize about being in love with an ancient and deadly monster who, perfectly or imperfectly, loves you back. It's okay to fantasize that you're a deadly assassin, slipping through an ancient city. And it's okay to fantasize about even weirder and darker stuff than that.

I'm not completely convinced by this reading, but I agree it's a valid one, and Black's post is something that needed to be said. I'd encourage you to read the comments, as they add a lot to her points.

Next off the mark was sarahtales, another YA author, who sadly seems to have abandoned LJ for the bright lights and big city of Tumblr. Her post takes Holly Black's feminist perspective and expands on it.

But ladies should be allowed to be into weird business, and nobody should shame them. Being like ‘I am SO MUCH MORE WORRIED about ladies being into Edward Cullen than anything dudes might like’ does carry a bit of a savour of a Victorian papa, who is like, the young ladies must be protected from the world, their brains are too feeble, they will wander into SIN, they can’t even help themselves, they will dump buckets of glitter on ROGUES and go to town on them, they have no sense at all!

And then someone linked to Kit Whitfield's post about Twilight, Flowers in the Attic and Wuthering Heights. Whitfield, in my mind, gets right to the heart of the matter:

[G]iven that both Twilight and Flowers In The Attic are books aimed at the young adult, the blend of innocence and experience has a definite edge to it. Both feel like books addressed to a virginal state of mind - which is obviously not the same as a chaste state of mind: a state of mind whose experience of ordinary sexuality is too limited for it exert much gravitational pull, and to which wild transgressions seem all the more natural because there's no first-hand knowledge of the mainstream sexuality the books are transgressing. Sexuality in these books is so innocent, it doesn't know how far from innocence it strays.

(I'd recommend reading Whitfield's earlier post 'Misremembering the Brontës', as it represents an earlier stage in her thinking on these matters.)

It was almost serendipitous that I happened to follow a link one of my friends posted on Facebook to this New York Times article, 'Teaching Good Sex' by Laurie Abraham, which is about a sex-ed programme at a Philadelphia school which emphasises, along with the usual stuff about contraception and consent, the actual emotional and physical feelings associated with sex.

Nobody wants to talk to teenagers about these things. Partly this is just because it's awkward, and partly it's because the backlash from doing so would be too great, but as I read the article, I began to realise that this is the kind of education all teenagers need.

You may not see the connection between this and Twilight, besides the fact that both are about sex, but when I post my final link, I hope my thought process becomes clear.

It's from Libby Anne, a survivor of the Quiverfull/Christian Patriarchy movement in the US, and it's about how that movement's panicky attitudes to sex had extremely harmful reverberations that affected her ability to function sexually after she got married.

When I first started dating the young man who was to become my husband, I didn't have any sexual feelings toward him. No sexual fantasies. No sexual desires. None. When I told him this, he became concerned, very concerned. He insisted that this wasn't normal, but I had no way to know, nothing to measure it against.

After a few months, I did start having sexual fantasies. But they were all fantasies of non-consensual sex. Why? Because on some intuitive level that made them safer, less taboo, and less sinful. After all, in these fantasies, I didn't have a choice. I didn't have sexual agency. I wasn't choosing to have sex. I wasn't active. It wasn't that I wanted to fantasize about non-consensual sex; rather, as a result of the purity culture and my suppression of my sexuality, this was the only kind of sex I could fantasize about.

Believe me, I am not trying to kink-shame here - from the glass house of my adolescence, I'm in no position to throw stones (and if I have screwed up in this regard, please tell me). All I am saying is that I see a very clear connection between Twilight, and the story it tells, the lack of sex-education classes like the one discussed in the NYT article, and Libby Anne's experience of an adolescence spent suppressing all sexual impulses. Texts are not written in a vacuum, stories do not resonate with an entire generation for no reason, and when something is as popular as Twilight, we need to think about why that may be.

ETA: My boyfriend pointed out this article by Anne Billson in The Guardian, which seems to be drawing on some of the points raised by the bloggers I linked to before.

Twilight caters to the sexual fantasies of teenage girls. I'm not saying in a good way, but at least it caters to them, and there's not a lot else at the cinema that does.

This is an old post, but it's become sadly relevant again because publishers still Aren't Getting It. If you read one thing in relation to the #YesGayYA debate, read this post by seanan_mcguire.

“Books do not determine a person’s sexual orientation. I was not somehow destined to be straight, and led astray by Annie On My Mind and the Valdemar books. I was born with universal wiring. I have had boyfriends and I have had girlfriends and I have had both at the same time, and none of that—NONE OF THAT—is because I read a book where a girl was in love with a girl and I decided that being bisexual would be a fun way to kill a weekend.

But those books did tell me I didn’t have to hate myself, and they did tell me that there was nothing wrong with me, and they did make it easier on everyone involved, because here was something I could hand to Mom and go “See? It’s not just me, and it’s not the end of the world, and it’s not the only thing that defines me.” Supposedly, ten percent of people are gay or bi with a tropism toward their own gender. It stands to reason that there should be positive non-hetero relationships in at least ten percent of YA literature. And they’re not there. And things like this are why."

I'm straight, and when I was growing up the only books I encountered with LGBTQ characters were 'issues books', you know, where the character struggled with coming out. The first book I can remember with a LGBTQ character who just existed as part of the story was The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman, which has Balthamos and Baruch, a pair of gay rebel angels. There were gay and lesbian characters on some of the TV shows I watched, but it was the mid-to-late-90s, and things should be better now. I know it's not all about me, but I think this is relevant to everyone. Representation matters. It matters to straight kids like me because we need to see that the world isn't made up entirely of people like us. And it matters to LGBTQ kids because they need to see people like them being brave, being heroic, being clever and kind and compassionate and complex. They need to see themselves as part of the story.