breathedout (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
breathedout) wrote2019-04-10 07:57 am
breathedout) wrote2019-04-10 07:57 am
Reading Wednesday 4.10.19
Holding steady at six books currently in progress, although they're a slightly different mix this week than last week. It's difficult to decrease that number when holds keep coming in on Libby!
I'm continuing to make my way through Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, from which I posted an excerpt a few days ago about colorism at post-Civil-War Black and mixed-race colleges and universities. This week I started and finished the third of the five sections, "William Lloyd Garrison," which covers roughly 1840 through 1880. This period is so much more talked-about in popular American discourse about anti-Black racism than the period in the preceding section—the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dialling-back of Reconstruction are all, for good reason, central to what we tend to think about when we think about race in this country—that this section had fewer "huh! the more you know!" moments for me. Still, it continues to be a very helpful refresher and synthesis, combining concepts & historical trends I may be familiar with, in ways that I may not explicitly have thought of before. I'm intrigued to get to the section coming up—"W. E. B. Du Bois"—as the period it covers is my particular era of interest but American racism during that era hasn't especially been a focus for me. I'll be interested to see what kinds of connections it sparks. That said, it'll have to wait a bit: having reached a good stopping point, I returned the book to the library early & put my name back in the queue, since there was someone waiting.
I also finished Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, which, as mentioned last week, I picked up because it's the April selection of a local queer book group I'm hoping to join. Hooo, friends. I have taken one for the team in reading this so that you don't have to. I'm not exactly sorry I read it—I do still think it'll be a FASCINATING discussion, and it is useful to have the data point about the first novel with a post-op trans protagonist, and a novel that came out of the queer (gay male) world in 1968—but: wow. Last week I sort of thought, okay, this book is rapey and transphobic, but it's Period-Typical (tm) rapey and transphobic... and that could still be true but it definitely got WAY MORE rapey and transphobic as it went along, with the levels of casual racism and antisemitism pretty much holding steady. As the kids say, "yikes."
With regard to the transphobia in particular, I'm sort of left with this outstanding question about Vidal's intentions and my own ability to evaluate or even perceive them: there's just so much triangulation that I find myself having to do, in order to imagine myself into the shoes of his intended 1968 reader. Based on the first 29 30ths of the novel, I'd say that its ideal sympathetic audience was a gay, white, cis, areligious man, probably living in either New York or LA, or at least having visited one of those cities; and the ideal antipathetic audience (which was certainly part of the goal here, to shake up the squares) was The Straight World: also white but suburban, hetero, churchgoing. Okay. But Vidal chose to end his novel with a return to straight-looking conformity: after falling in love with a straight girl, Myra is the victim of a hit-and-run car accident that basically strands her in traction without access to hormones, and her breasts are removed because the impact has ruptured the silicon implants, which is a health risk. She is initially understandably appalled to be forcibly de-transitioned, but when she realizes that Mary-Ann can now love her, she accepts it as all for the best, reverts to being Myron, and the two settle down together in a ranch house in the Valley to write for television and raise dogs. So... I know what my reaction to this ending is, but what would have been the reaction of Vidal's intended readers? Was it intended to read as gross and unsettling to the ideal sympathetic reader? Because it seems to me that the specific movement of Myron and Mary-Ann to a ranch house in the Valley to live this parody of a heteronormative life, would have come off that way to an urban white gay dude in the late 60s, just as much as it does to me. I suppose, if we focus on the ideal antipathetic reader, it's sort of a "we're everywhere, touching all your things" claim: a winking reminder to Mr. and Mrs. Anytown USA that this person with a sordid queer past could be right in their own backyard. I guess this is the most likely interpretation, in which case maybe I was wrong to spend so much of this novel reading it as if it were being written as an affirmation, with a queer audience in mind. Or maybe, like the cross-dressing comedies of Shakespeare, the delight in genderfuckery is there in the beginning and the middle, but in the end everything has to be wrapped up in a way that restores unthreatening, heteronormative order. Though, c'mon, Gore. By 1968, SURELY the option was out there for writing endings that wholeheartedly embrace a lack of order. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a comedy which literally ends with the destruction of the world via nuclear bomb, had been out for four years. That said, if we must return to the status quo at the end of a comedy, I suppose this ending is skin-crawly enough to at least be destabilizing. Don't read it, though, probably. Unless you're writing a paper on queer literature of the 1960s or the history of trans representation in America or something.
ANYWAY after those two uplifting reads, I felt in need of some pure escapism, so I've been spending some more time with Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, the previously-mentioned western opium-smuggling thriller with the bisexual/gender non-conforming Latina disguise aficionada protagonist Alma Rosales. It's super enjoyable! A real page-turner. Alma feels written with EXACTLY ME in mind, which is a nice change from the Vidal. I'm a little over a third of the way through it right now, and I think at this point I'll probably focus on this one until I finish it; it's pleasingly twisty-turny with a flash-forward/flash-back structure that keeps you guessing about how our heroine got from Point A to Point B. As the setup might suggest, it's also got a lot of extremely pleasing identity-and-disguise-and-powerfuckery porn (figurative porn, so far, though my hopes are high). For example, the scene when Alma, in male disguise as her altar ego Jack Camp, macks on the mistress of her male coworker with whom she also has a sexually-charged rivalry, and whom she previously cased while posing as a naive Scottish governess in need of a chaperone about town. Or the scene in which she watches this same coworker watch her interact with their mutual boss (and Alma's ex-lover) Delphine; and she is turned on by seeing herself in both their eyes. Good stuff! Good stuff. The Port Townsend connection continues to be fun, too: spotting traces of the town I've spent time in, in the 1887 frontier port described.
Thanks to the arrival of a Libby hold, I also started Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, which is so far very... memoir-y. It's interesting, if no-frills in its style; so far he's covered his privileged & very Anglicized upper-caste Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, which includes an (also very Anglo-reminiscent) coming-of-age-as-a-gay-man-at-boarding-school-amidst-horrific-abuse-by-the-older-boys section, and then his awakening to a wider consciousness of systemic oppression during his sojourn at Tufts College in the early 1980s. His reflections on India versus the US in the 70s and 80s are interesting, as are his recollections of comparing the reality of the US with his youthful idealized notions of the freedom and equality in the west. One of the things he talks about at some length is how, upon coming to the States, he read voraciously everything he could find about the science and political reality of gay and lesbian life, even if a lot of that news was grim: because in India it was simply not mentioned, so he had felt wholly alone. In one of those pleasing bookish connections (pleasing for me, not for poor Dube), he writes:
"Oddball" is. One word for it. I will say, reading this passage the day after finishing Myra made me very grateful that I have such a comparatively wide and easy-to-access library of queer literature and resources available to me. Good grief.
Anyhoo anyhoo. Once I finish The Best Bad Things I want to start a re-read of Austen's Persuasion forgreywash's and my project on adaptations. It has been a MINUTE since I read anything published before about 1890. Updates as they come.
I'm continuing to make my way through Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, from which I posted an excerpt a few days ago about colorism at post-Civil-War Black and mixed-race colleges and universities. This week I started and finished the third of the five sections, "William Lloyd Garrison," which covers roughly 1840 through 1880. This period is so much more talked-about in popular American discourse about anti-Black racism than the period in the preceding section—the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dialling-back of Reconstruction are all, for good reason, central to what we tend to think about when we think about race in this country—that this section had fewer "huh! the more you know!" moments for me. Still, it continues to be a very helpful refresher and synthesis, combining concepts & historical trends I may be familiar with, in ways that I may not explicitly have thought of before. I'm intrigued to get to the section coming up—"W. E. B. Du Bois"—as the period it covers is my particular era of interest but American racism during that era hasn't especially been a focus for me. I'll be interested to see what kinds of connections it sparks. That said, it'll have to wait a bit: having reached a good stopping point, I returned the book to the library early & put my name back in the queue, since there was someone waiting.
I also finished Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, which, as mentioned last week, I picked up because it's the April selection of a local queer book group I'm hoping to join. Hooo, friends. I have taken one for the team in reading this so that you don't have to. I'm not exactly sorry I read it—I do still think it'll be a FASCINATING discussion, and it is useful to have the data point about the first novel with a post-op trans protagonist, and a novel that came out of the queer (gay male) world in 1968—but: wow. Last week I sort of thought, okay, this book is rapey and transphobic, but it's Period-Typical (tm) rapey and transphobic... and that could still be true but it definitely got WAY MORE rapey and transphobic as it went along, with the levels of casual racism and antisemitism pretty much holding steady. As the kids say, "yikes."
With regard to the transphobia in particular, I'm sort of left with this outstanding question about Vidal's intentions and my own ability to evaluate or even perceive them: there's just so much triangulation that I find myself having to do, in order to imagine myself into the shoes of his intended 1968 reader. Based on the first 29 30ths of the novel, I'd say that its ideal sympathetic audience was a gay, white, cis, areligious man, probably living in either New York or LA, or at least having visited one of those cities; and the ideal antipathetic audience (which was certainly part of the goal here, to shake up the squares) was The Straight World: also white but suburban, hetero, churchgoing. Okay. But Vidal chose to end his novel with a return to straight-looking conformity: after falling in love with a straight girl, Myra is the victim of a hit-and-run car accident that basically strands her in traction without access to hormones, and her breasts are removed because the impact has ruptured the silicon implants, which is a health risk. She is initially understandably appalled to be forcibly de-transitioned, but when she realizes that Mary-Ann can now love her, she accepts it as all for the best, reverts to being Myron, and the two settle down together in a ranch house in the Valley to write for television and raise dogs. So... I know what my reaction to this ending is, but what would have been the reaction of Vidal's intended readers? Was it intended to read as gross and unsettling to the ideal sympathetic reader? Because it seems to me that the specific movement of Myron and Mary-Ann to a ranch house in the Valley to live this parody of a heteronormative life, would have come off that way to an urban white gay dude in the late 60s, just as much as it does to me. I suppose, if we focus on the ideal antipathetic reader, it's sort of a "we're everywhere, touching all your things" claim: a winking reminder to Mr. and Mrs. Anytown USA that this person with a sordid queer past could be right in their own backyard. I guess this is the most likely interpretation, in which case maybe I was wrong to spend so much of this novel reading it as if it were being written as an affirmation, with a queer audience in mind. Or maybe, like the cross-dressing comedies of Shakespeare, the delight in genderfuckery is there in the beginning and the middle, but in the end everything has to be wrapped up in a way that restores unthreatening, heteronormative order. Though, c'mon, Gore. By 1968, SURELY the option was out there for writing endings that wholeheartedly embrace a lack of order. Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, a comedy which literally ends with the destruction of the world via nuclear bomb, had been out for four years. That said, if we must return to the status quo at the end of a comedy, I suppose this ending is skin-crawly enough to at least be destabilizing. Don't read it, though, probably. Unless you're writing a paper on queer literature of the 1960s or the history of trans representation in America or something.
ANYWAY after those two uplifting reads, I felt in need of some pure escapism, so I've been spending some more time with Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, the previously-mentioned western opium-smuggling thriller with the bisexual/gender non-conforming Latina disguise aficionada protagonist Alma Rosales. It's super enjoyable! A real page-turner. Alma feels written with EXACTLY ME in mind, which is a nice change from the Vidal. I'm a little over a third of the way through it right now, and I think at this point I'll probably focus on this one until I finish it; it's pleasingly twisty-turny with a flash-forward/flash-back structure that keeps you guessing about how our heroine got from Point A to Point B. As the setup might suggest, it's also got a lot of extremely pleasing identity-and-disguise-and-powerfuckery porn (figurative porn, so far, though my hopes are high). For example, the scene when Alma, in male disguise as her altar ego Jack Camp, macks on the mistress of her male coworker with whom she also has a sexually-charged rivalry, and whom she previously cased while posing as a naive Scottish governess in need of a chaperone about town. Or the scene in which she watches this same coworker watch her interact with their mutual boss (and Alma's ex-lover) Delphine; and she is turned on by seeing herself in both their eyes. Good stuff! Good stuff. The Port Townsend connection continues to be fun, too: spotting traces of the town I've spent time in, in the 1887 frontier port described.
Thanks to the arrival of a Libby hold, I also started Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex, which is so far very... memoir-y. It's interesting, if no-frills in its style; so far he's covered his privileged & very Anglicized upper-caste Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, which includes an (also very Anglo-reminiscent) coming-of-age-as-a-gay-man-at-boarding-school-amidst-horrific-abuse-by-the-older-boys section, and then his awakening to a wider consciousness of systemic oppression during his sojourn at Tufts College in the early 1980s. His reflections on India versus the US in the 70s and 80s are interesting, as are his recollections of comparing the reality of the US with his youthful idealized notions of the freedom and equality in the west. One of the things he talks about at some length is how, upon coming to the States, he read voraciously everything he could find about the science and political reality of gay and lesbian life, even if a lot of that news was grim: because in India it was simply not mentioned, so he had felt wholly alone. In one of those pleasing bookish connections (pleasing for me, not for poor Dube), he writes:
So absolute was my lack of theoretical knowledge that everything I read came as a revelation. Despite having studied at India's leading school and college, I had never come across any scientific information on homosexuality, not even in biology textbooks. The sum total of my reading had been the mild allusions in Jacqueline Susann's books, a handful of sexual passages in Harold Robbins's potboilers, and Gore Vidal's oddball Myra Breckinridge.
"Oddball" is. One word for it. I will say, reading this passage the day after finishing Myra made me very grateful that I have such a comparatively wide and easy-to-access library of queer literature and resources available to me. Good grief.
Anyhoo anyhoo. Once I finish The Best Bad Things I want to start a re-read of Austen's Persuasion for
greywash's and my project on adaptations. It has been a MINUTE since I read anything published before about 1890. Updates as they come.