breathedout | Entries tagged with american lit

The Fall 2019 issue of queer literary journal Gertrude Press is out; personal highlights include the lovely, lyrical creative nonfiction piece Floor, by Emily Jaeger, and the equally reflective poem "Leap/Bound", by Emily Van Kley.

People not named Emily contributed some really great & interesting things, too, but those are my favorites. I swear I'm not biased.

I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item: my mother's chiffon scarf, the humidity of a cut pumpkin. Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return. I'd seen old Yardley slickers—the makeup now just a waxy crumble—sell for almost one hundred dollars on the Internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it—to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

—Emma Cline, from The Girls

I actually have been clawing some reading (and more writing) time back into my schedule. Largely by waking up at 4:15am so that I can either shoehorn an hour of writing time in before yoga (on Monday/Wednesday) or be showered/made-up/dressed/dog-walked-and-fed/dishwasher-emptied by 6 so that I can write from 6-8 and read from 8-9, before work at 9:30 (Tuesday/Thursday/Friday, with a third yoga class on Thursday nights). Is this sustainable long-term? I mean probably not, but quite possibly it doesn't need to be, since once the house is done and the dog's a little older my life will hopefully become more low-key. And both of those are things that WILL happen, as I have to remind myself every hour on the hour. ANYWAY, here are some things I've been reading!

I picked up Manuel Muñoz's The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue collection while

greywash and I were on our road trip down through the Central Valley and then back up the coast of California, and then continued to graze on it when we got back. These are extremely finely-crafted stories, but/and they are also unremittingly bleak: quiet, grief-soaked, superbly-observed portraits of queer (specifically gay-male) Latinx life in small Central Valley towns. And I mean small: those with a context for the geography will understand what I mean when I say that for many characters in this collection Bakersfield is conceived of as a big city, Fresno is an almost overwhelming metropolis, and even Kettleman City has a whiff of the cosmopolitan about it. Muñoz's is not a vision that romanticizes or even recuperates small town life: most of his narrators have either left the Valley and then had to return due to family tragedy or financial setbacks, or they dream of leaving or are trying to leave, and those who don't are living a painfully circumscribed, claustrophobic existence. This is also a collection obsessed with grief and mourning; almost all the stories deal with the aftermath of deaths either figurative, literal or both.

So it's not light reading, and even if I wasn't so strapped for time right now I think I'd have taken the approach I did, of reading a story here and a story there over the course of several weeks rather than powering through cover to cover. That said, they're such finely-crafted little gems of works, and deeply human, and there were all these little moments that I keep thinking about, a week after finishing it. In one story, the main character's long-term boyfriend has left him and moved to San Francisco; a year later the ex-boyfriend returns with his current boyfriend, because his (the ex's) father is dying. In one flashback scene, the narrator remembers visiting his ex's parents the day after the split: the parents are monolingual Spanish speakers with moral objections to their son's homosexuality, but with whom the main character has gradually developed a relationship over many years, including acting as their English-Spanish translator and interpreter when one was needed. He remembers the father speechifying about how disgraceful it was when one spouse leaves or cheats on the other after many years—the mother nodding along even though everyone present knows that her husband has his own mistress of long standing. All the triangulations of loyalty and disloyalty, choosing to love and not-choosing to love, the subtleties of what constitute family ties, and the often-inadequate expressions of all this—it's so incisively rendered, in so few words; and I keep coming back to it in my mind and kind of aching with it. That's a particularly transcendent moment, but the entire collection is similarly affecting and well-wrought. I highly recommend it in small doses.

Then I palate-cleansed with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War, which

oulfis recommended to me as an entry point to sci-fi, a genre I often struggle with. My library hold came in and I zipped through it in a couple of days: an extremely clever, hopeful little novella about sapphic spies on opposite sides in a war across time and space, who strike up an unusual correspondence and then fall in love. Some of the prose in this was a little clunky and/or purple, self-consciously shooting for something it didn't quite pull off; but the premise was so fun and the execution so energetic and charming that I didn't care. I would say this is "sci fi" to the same extent that, e.g., shippy fanfic in a canon involving a detective could be said to fall into the "mystery" genre: there is a futuristic sci-fi-ish concept, but most of the ins and outs of the war, the societies these women live in, the other people they know, etc. etc., are going on incidentally in the background, while the relationship between the two spies is heavily foregrounded. One catches glimpses of various missions as the agents infiltrate times and places, nudging civilizations and histories this way or that, but the larger whys and wherefores of each mission, let alone the war or world as a whole, feature barely at all—they're only present to the extent that they support the developing relationship. What the novella cares about is being a clever epistolary spy v. spy love story, which it does well. As such, I found it a lot easier going than most sci fi! Ahahaha. Well spotted, oulfis, it was a good starting point for the world-building-averse. :-)

In my Tu/Th/Fri post-writing morning hour, which I've set aside for writing-project-related research reading, I've been making my way through K. David Harrison's When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, which is extremely sobering (especially since it was written in 2006, so some of the moribund languages he discusses are now almost certainly extinct) but also fascinating. I excerpted a bit from this this other day and may well want to preserve more of it. It does come from a white, discipline-of-sociology perspective, with the assumptions and training that that implies—and let's not fail to mention that I'm reading it in English!—but Harrison makes an effort to include case studies of individual speakers of these languages with whom he has actually worked and lived, including their own words about the experience of language death. And he brings up quite a few issues that wouldn't have occurred to me, but which I think will be really useful in writing the story for which I'm reading this book (an explicitly anticolonialist Margo/Fen Magicians short story the idea for which randomly bit me in the shower one morning, and which I hope to start work on after I finish my MHHE fic, now about 75% drafted). After I finish up the Harrison, the plan is to return to research reading for my original-fiction novel, starting with a return to Eric Thomas Chester's The Wobblies in their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era.

Lastly, I just started Emma Cline's The Girls and Claudia Salazar Jiménez's Blood of the Dawn. The former is a holdover from the reading I downloaded for our roadtrip—it's a fictionalized version of the Manson cult, moved disconcertingly north to the Bay (but the narrator's grandmother was still a movie star? And it's hot in early June? This novel is geographically confusing; it really seems like it should just... be set in LA)—the latter something I read about on Asymptote. Will report back! Maybe! I miss interacting on the internet and feel much more human when I can eke out time to read, so here's hoping.

Quick drive-by entry to note that:

(a) I finally (finally!!) finished Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, which continued to be intensely twisty and sexy and rife with gender-fuckery and just all around a delightful good time. Also I would think a pretty quick read for someone who could sit down and focus on it instead of haring off to finish other things by book group deadline or before a library return date loomed.

(b) As a result, I'm down to five in-progress books, which is almost kinda-sorta manageable?? Three would be better, but I'll take five.

(c) Next up I'd love to finish Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, which I'm still very much enjoying although I didn't get much time to read it last week, before picking up Nina Revoyr's A Student of History (of which

fiachairecht and I were vaguely planning on coordinating our reading) and Larissa Lai's When Fox is a Thousand (which is the next Queer Book Group pick).

(d) I also managed to read a fanfic which I thought was 10k words but was actually 70k words, without realizing (SOMEHOW) that it didn't just seem long; it actually was long. I'm blaming my lack of realization 90% on exhausted, anxiety-fueled insomnia, and 10% on the fact that the premise of the fic really only called for 10k (if that), so stretching it out to 70k was a bit of a painful exercise. However, the decision to continue reading was 100% on me. I palate-cleansed with a few old favorites, so it's all good.

(d) I did not end up going to the queer theory book group, not only because I only got a few pages into the book but because I had a surprise extra day of jury duty last week. Between the lengthy commute to the courthouse and my scattered attempts to put out work fires before & after jury selection, it totally threw off my whole schedule, already in chaos because of the new puppy. HOWEVER:

(d) I got less reading time than expected last weekend, but in compensation I came out of it with a complete revised draft of my novel outline, now with two (2) POV characters instead of one, and a whole home-front thread involving a smuggling investigation and a conflicted f/f affair. So that's much more scandalous than my original outline! I dig it.

pennypaperbrain, I am now ready to actually write you that email about the Petrograd section, which I don't think I'll be cutting after all. \o/

Fare forward, travelers.

Let me tell you, friends, I am not thrilled to be on Day 2 of jury duty with horrible cramps. Nothing about that delights me. :-/

The plus side of sitting in an uncomfortable beige room all morning yesterday while the courtroom readied itself for our participation, was that I got through about a third of Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, on which

tellitslant and I are attempting to more-or-less coordinate our reading. I'm definitely digging it thus far: certified Bisexual Disaster and University of Toronto dropout Starla Mia Martin returns home to the small town where she grew up, moving back in with her mother and taking a graveyard shift job at a campground to try to get her debt load under control, and is promptly haunted by an equally queer ghost from the recently-demolished amusement park down the street, which used to provide the town's economic lifeblood. Excellent, evocative sense of place (always a must for a ghost story); believably prickly dynamics between a mother and daughter who are both, shall we say, strong personalities; and I like Starla's narrative voice. Excited to read more.

Other than that, my big reading news for the week is that I did actually manage to make it to Queer Book Group! And it was super enjoyable! Hurrah! The group was about a dozen people, most of whom seemed like regulars who knew each other, although they were very welcoming. The conversation about Real Queer America really demonstrated why it's interesting to talk with other people about books: in some cases peoples' qualms about Allen were the same as mine: in the service of highlighting the positive work being done and lives being lived by queer folks in red states, she at times soft-pedals the negative aspects. But other people had qualms that were almost the opposite of mine, feeling like the book was a downer for the degree to which it DID discuss the negatives. There was also a good, kind of tangential conversation about our own backgrounds as they related to the book, which was particularly interesting because many of the group members were in their 50s and 60s and a few others were in their 40s; Allen is 30 and talking to such a multi-generational group really highlighted what a short historical memory her book has. This is not exactly a criticism of Allen; she set out to write essentially a travelogue/memoir, not a history. But talking to people twice her age who grew up in small towns definitely emphasized how much things have changed. It was also interesting hearing people's takes on Allen's hostility toward big, overpriced cities, of which San Francisco is of course high on the list. The group being an East Bay audience, I found it kind of hilarious the degree to which it was split between "How dare she insult our beautiful California!" and "She is correct, the city exemplifies everything horrible about corporatized queerness."

Anyway, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted out of the experience, so I will be back for sure. Next month's selection is Larissa Lai's fairy-tale-inflected novel When Fox is a Thousand, of which I had never previously heard. Will report back!

Incidentally: tangentially apropos of the Allen, or at least of a couple of conversations I've had on here about a subject Allen neglected: I just this morning learned about Karen Tongson's Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries, which came out in 2011. It's still not exactly the study of queer life in red-state suburbia that

donut_donut and

lazaefair were craving (Tongson focuses on the Los Angeles sprawl), but I'm nonetheless intrigued.

More and more LGBT people seem to be operating on a similar wavelength [to that of the author, a trans lesbian who prefers to live in a small "red state" city rather than a large coastal one]. I asked Gary J. Gates, the most widely cited demographer of the American LGBT community, what evidence he has seen of queer demographic shifts away from coastal big cities over the last decade.

He pointed me to his recent Williams Institute analysis of U.S. Census and Gallup polling data, which compared the concentration of same-sex couples in American cities in 1990 to the percentage of their LGBT population from 2012 to 2014. (It's an imperfect comparison, but given how hard it is to gather data on a small population like the LGBT community, it's one of the best available.) And the results are striking: Salt Lake City leapt up thirty-two spots in the overall rankings between 1990 and the 2012-2014 time period. Louisville, Kentucky, rose thirty slots over the same period. Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana both jumped more than twenty places. Meanwhile San Francisco remained static, Los Angeles fell two slots, and New York had a staggering eleven-place slump.

Gates believes that this discrepancy speaks to the social change happening in many red-state cities. As he wrote in the analysis: "Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago."

Indeed, an "important explanatory factor" for that data, as Gates acknowledged in the analysis, is the increased "willingness" [I, breathedout, would argue "ability"] of LGBT people in conservative areas to come out of the closet. In other words, although the analysis probably indicates some degree of population shift, [there is also an element of simply revealing that... ] LGBT people have been building beautiful lives away from the coasts for years. [...] But because the media overwhelmingly focus on the tragic things that happen to queer people in red states, that kind of community building often goes unnoticed by people on the coasts. As Jack Halberstam wrote in In a Queer Time and Place, "Too often minority history hinges on representative examples provided by the lives of extraordinary individuals"—among them LGBT people who have been murdered in conservative parts of America.

"[In] relation to the complicated matrix of rural queer lives, we tend to rely on the story of a Brandon Teena or a Matthew Shepard rather than finding out about the queer people who live quietly, if not comfortably, in isolated areas or small towns all across North America," Halberstam wrote.

—Samantha Allen, Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States

The real strength of this book is in the individual stories of people Allen talks to on her trip across the country, from the queer Latinx youth organizers of Aquí Estamos in South Texas, to Temica Morton, the Black woman who spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's first Pride Parade in 2016 as an add-on to a queer community bar-b-que she's been hosting for years, to Smoove G. and Nicci B., co-owners of the Back Door: Bloomington, Indiana's beloved queer bar and gathering-site. But those stories are—for reasons similar to those cited by Halberstam above in relation to the (inter)national news media!—difficult to excerpt out of context. I had my quibbles with the book overall, mostly relating to Allen's lack of acknowledgement that some people just genuinely love big cities as much as she loves small ones, but I am absolutely in agreement with the idea, as expressed here, that when it comes to queer narratives we desperately need to expand our geographical focus and tell stories about ordinary living-their-lives queer people who are from places other than New York City, and to a lesser extent San Francisco and LA (although I freely admit I adore SF and LA narratives, having personal connections to both those places.) The NYC and coastal-big-city stranglehold on US storytelling both fictional and non-fictional is REAL. And it is, as Allen points out here and as I'd echo despite having lived in big coastal cities my whole life and loving them dearly, doing us all a big disservice.

I was also interested in Gates's data on shifting queer demographics over time. Whether they come from a real population shift away from big coastal cities or whether they're more a result of increased quality of life/ability to come out for red-state queers, they do still indicate measurable change. Which is a big part of Allen's point: things are (slowly) shifting for LGBT people in red-state America, and there are a lot of fascinating and encouraging stories to be told about the activists and regular queer folks who call these places home.

In the grand tradition of ~~divorcées~~ ~~women~~ people in their late thirties, it seems my brain saw fit to start my birthday with a 1am anxiety attack to the nonsense tune of "You Are Bound To Lose Everything Worthwhile In Your Life (And Now You Are Too Old To Start Over When You Do)," with an encore rendition of the catchy little number "Adding More Worthwhile Things Only Means A Greater Amount of Inevitable Loss." To quote that immortal sage Jake Peralta: "Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool." The silver lining was that after I moderated my mental/emotional spiraling with some CBT exercises and arrived at the point where I was able to breathe but was still very much awake, I found myself with a few hours of surprise reading time, which has been thin on the ground lately. So that actually was cool, and not in the Peraltan sense; even if I honestly would rather have been sleeping.

During the night I got through a couple chapters of Samantha Allen's Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, which is the May selection for the queer book group that I am going to attend this time, y'all, it's happening. Allen's prose style is super engaging and fast-paced, and she strikes a nice, supportive three-way balance among (a) explicating the larger political context for the things she talks about with facts & figures, (b) connecting with other individual queer folks on her travels and relating their stories, and (c) her own personal history and feelings on being a queer person in red-state America. As a trans woman reporter and ex-Mormon who started coming out to herself while a student at Brigham Young University, later fell in love with her now-wife over graduate studies in Bloomington, Indiana, and currently lives in Georgia, the latter are, as you can imagine, many and complex; although an important part of this book's political agenda is to destigmatize middle America and the South among lefty/queer circles, and to make the point that they have always been, and always will be, just as queer as anyplace else. In fact, Allen says in many places that she prefers to be queer in a red-state context, both for practical reasons—regular people can still afford to live in places like Houston and Atlanta, unlike in New York and San Francisco—and also because in these places, where LGBT folks are still more urgently embattled, she finds it possible to access a queer community that has more passion and cohesion, and less cliquey in-fighting, than she has found in the big coastal cities.

(As a side note, I was talking to both

greywash and the friend/lover with whom I had dinner on Monday, about the weird defensive reaction I noticed in myself, especially to Allen's intro chapter. A wholehearted lover of cities myself, and also a seeker-out of passionate, politically-engaged people with whom to surround myself, my experience of LA and San Francisco and Portland has been much different than Allen's—and that's totally fine! I'm still 100% on board with her mission of reclaiming red-state America for the queers who have lived there all along, and for whom it is a beloved and meaningful home. Queerness is not, as she argues well, an urban invention, and there's a ton of amazing activism going on outside NY and SF. Despite being completely convinced of this, though, I surprised myself by ongoing surges of defensiveness about the parts of Allen's argument that I read as portraying city-dwelling queer communities as apathetic and petty. Luckily, as the chapters progressed I got over it: probably at least in part because it becomes very clear that Allen, despite her preference for red-state queer America, does not sugar-coat the challenges of queer life in Utah or Texas, even as she also celebrates their joys.)

Anyway, the first post-intro chapter involves Allen's first return to Utah since she left the church to transition, and it's poignant to read her personal reflections on finding a much more thriving LGBT support system in place there now than when she left. She talks to Mormons and ex-Mormons who have decided to stay and fight to make Utah a more welcoming place, with to all accounts impressive success. Allen and her traveling companion spend a good deal of time at the Provo chapter of Encircle, talking to the youth who are served by the programs there and who basically, in some cases, consider it home. She also talks to Emmett Claren, one of the first openly trans people to remain in the Mormon fold: he lives with the constant possibility of excommunication, but for him the faith and community are important enough that he plans to stay until & unless they kick him out, and meanwhile he is agitating for greater acceptance from within. The second chapter of the book, which deals with Texas—both a rally against the transphobic bathroom bill that passed their legislature in 2017, and a look at queer organizing in South Texas immigrant communities—is also very interesting, if less personally immediate to Allen's life story. More updates as I continue!

I've barely started Mari Ruti's The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, which is the Q2 selection for the queer theory book group that meets this coming Wednesday. I'm still in the midst of Ruti's dense introduction, always the slowest-going section of an academic book. Her points seem interesting but honestly I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to get through something this theoretical before Wednesday. I'd like to! But I won't beat myself up about it if I can't.

I've also been really really meaning to pick up Amber Dawn's Sodom Road Exit, which

tellitslant and I were going to try to read at the same time. But between work, house and puppy I have not managed it. Sorry for my tardiness,

tellitslant! /o\ It's next up this weekend, and since I'm taking tomorrow off and have few concrete plans other than sleeping, writing, and reading, I'm hopeful that I can polish off the Allen and move on to the Dawn.

Holding strong at six books currently underway. One of these days I'm gonna get it down to five, y'all.

I finished Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. I'm sure no one who has seen me enthusing about it the past few weeks will be surprised to hear me say that it's excellent, but y'all: IT'S EXCELLENT. Highly, highly recommended, and I don't even read memoir as a general thing. Dube writes with incredible intelligence, experience, and empathy about the intertwined recent histories of the queer rights and sex worker rights struggles in India and the US, and how those things intersected both with global events (the AIDS crisis, the puritanical policies of the Bush administration, the rise of the BJP and Shiv Sena parties) and with his own life as a gay man bridging the gap between his Anglicized Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, and his social justice work and education in the US, India, and elsewhere. I was telling

starshipfox in comments, that one of the things I found particularly moving about this book is that, although Dube never sugar-coats anything, he does pay attention to moments of success and hope; and overall manages to maintain hope in the face of what is often some very grim subject matter. That's an ability I admire so, so strongly; and a line that's very difficult to walk effectively.

The only quibble I have with this book is that Dube's terminology around transness feels dated. I think some of this is an awkwardness of cultural translation: when talking about sex workers, for example, he often uses the phrase "women, trans women, and men sex workers," which reads oddly to American eyes because it seems to imply that "trans women" is somehow a separate category from "women." However, when he uses this phrase in Indian contexts (which is most of the time he's using it), it's pretty clear that what he actually means is "women, hijras, and men sex workers," which is a distinction that makes a lot more sense since the Indian concept of "hijra" doesn't map neatly or exactly onto the Western concept of "trans woman," but is instead considered a distinct gender category from either "woman" or "man." Dube does use the phrase once in an American context, where it should probably have been replaced by something like "women, non-binary, and men sex workers." He also occasionally uses "transgender" as a noun, which feels awkward. But overall this is a pretty small complaint compared to the vast number of things that Dube does extraordinarily well and insightfully.

After finishing the Dube I started in on Jane Austen's Persuasion, which

greywash and I are reading for our study group on adaptations. It's been SO long since I actually read any Austen, and I have to say that as I get older my impression of her barely-contained bitter fury only increases. It's pretty remarkable that her stuff is often remembered as gentle and frothy, because: I'm only three chapters in, but wow. Tear em up, Jane.

I also finally got around to reading Kate Lear's "It is No Gift I Tender", the last long story in her Endeavour Morse/Max DeBryn fic series. This whole sequence is lovely: bittersweet, understated, and erudite in extremely show-appropriate ways. Lear's Max voice is just really, really wonderful; and since Max is canonically really, really wonderful, stealing every scene he's in despite there being relatively few of them, it's a particular pleasure to get to spend so much time with him via these stories. I especially appreciated the ways in which Max's specific set of cognitive distortions are simultaneously very visible to the reader as cognitive distortions, and also often pretty inarguably reasonable reactions to the position he finds himself in vis-à-vis the law and society. There's also just a lot of awkwardly infatuated midcentury Englishmen lying around in gardens reading Catullus and attending open-air Mozart concerts and going on confusedly heartbroken fishing trips and so-on, which is a narrative space that's extremely soothing to me personally. (... However much of a contradiction that might be with also reading a lot about the history of 20th century British imperialism. I contain multitudes.)

Also read a bit more of Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things (previously mentioned here and here) which continues to abound with fistfights and delightful genderfuckery. Carrasco really makes the most of her protagonist Alma spending most of the book in one disguise or another—usually as her male altar ego, Jack Camp—and taking her primary delights in (a) fighting/rivalry and (b) noticing other people noticing her and reacting to her. "Alma likes to know what people make of her," says the narrator at one point, which is partially a survival strategy, but she she also just gets off on it, and gets off on provoking as much of a reaction as she can. Which is great fun to read.

Purchase-wise, I picked up a Kindle edition of The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, by Mari Ruti for the queer theory bookgroup meeting mid-May. Kindle editions are way down on my list of preferred formats, but as the linked post outlines, it was like $60 cheaper than a paper copy, for some reason beknownst only to the publishers. So. There we are. I'll probably start this in the next week or so.

I also, on a whim, while browsing in a local bookstore with a friend of mine, picked up a sale NYRB Classics copy of Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark, which is a sort of absurdist-sounding French novel written in 1935 but set in 1917, in which a philosophy professor in a provincial town gets into a petty squabble with a hawkish pro-WWI colleague and ends up fighting a duel. Those who know me will understand the SEVERAL reasons this setup appeals. I also just love the NYRB Classics imprint; I think they're doing great work getting obscure and out-of-print works, many of them in translation, out there into the world.

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. ( Obviously, CW for transphobic details ahead. ) 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.

Well last week I was at five currently-in-progress books and thought I might be down to four in a week's time; instead I'm back up to six. "C'EST LA VIE, as the Americans say," as my French friend Marie Christine used to say.

Anyway, early this week I realized that the April meeting of the queer book group I'm looking at trying out is coming right up, so I got a start on Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968) in order to be finished by the time the group meets. I'm now a little under halfway through and I can already say: it is going to be a very interesting conversation. The novel is super offensive; I'm not saying that in a bragging-approving way, although Vidal obviously was writing to be deliberately provocative; I'm saying: there are a lot of very legitimate reasons to be offended by this book, including but not limited to: casual racism, casual antisemitism, rape jokes and general complacency toward rape, allllllllll the homophobic slurs, depiction of a trans woman as a sexual predator and, simultaneously, a depiction of a sexual predator (the same woman) as broadly sympathetic. So you know, if any of that is a hard-line "no" for you, and I would hardly blame you if it were, give this one a pass!

All that said, it's also a pretty fascinating anthropological glimpse into its queer-historical moment, and, poorly as much of it has aged, other parts of it are genuinely very funny. The whole thing is a kind of carnivalesque satire, so all the characters are caricatures, but Myra, the trans woman protagonist, is, as I said above, both broadly sympathetic and an interesting data point for literary queerness, especially since she exists in a milieu and an aesthetic that is very recognizably gay-male. (Myra predates John Waters's Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble by just a few years, and we're definitely playing in the same ballpark; and the thread of Myra's cinematic obsession is continued in works like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976).) As such Myra's hardly the only queer in the village that is the third-tier acting academy in Westwood where she has landed a job teaching Posture and Empathy while trying to collect her "husband"'s land inheritance from the washed-up radio cowboy who runs the place. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is how she interacts with the other flavors of queer folks she meets (with slurs; yet also with recognition), as well as how she interacts with her own queerness. This passage, for example, in which a colleague invites her to a mixed-gender orgy ("Myron" is her past self, whom she publicly refers to as her late husband):

I was at a loss for words. On the one hand, the idea was definitely attractive. Myron sometimes enjoyed the company of four or five men at the same time but he did not believe in mixing the sexes. I of course do. [...] Although I am not a Lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex.

The suggestion that Myra's transition has enabled her to countenance more "mixing [of] the sexes" among her sexual partners than she was able to before it, is an interesting one. Anyway I'm sure I'll have more to say about it as I continue reading over the next week and a half.

Apart from the Vidal, I've been making some headway on Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, from which I posted a couple of excerpts as I went. I was mentioning to someone in comments that Kendi's book is an extremely high-level overview that's written for a popular audience, which makes it different than most of the history that I read, and I keep hankering after deeper dives on incidents on which Kendi spends 2-3 paragraphs and then moves on. Still, though, as a synthesis with a focus on the development of racist thought in the US, it's good, and it's helping me both to remember sections of US history I haven't thought much about since high school (what happened in the 1820s, anyway?) and to combine in enlightening ways various things I did know about, but hadn't related to each other. It's divided into five top-level sections according to the historical figure who serves as the sort of "guide" through that era—Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB DuBois, and Angela Davis—and I've just finished the Thomas Jefferson section & moved on to the Garrison. This will be a long-term reading project, though: I've been checking it out from the library but there are always people waiting, so at the end of each three-week stint I have to return it and put my name back in the queue.

Also reading and re-reading a bunch of journal articles and book chapters for novel research, including a few chapters from Marjory Lang's Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 1880-1945, and a re-read of Craig Heron's "The Great War and Nova Scotia Steelworkers". Both of which are very useful for my purposes but I don't have a ton to say about them more generally. Though I will share this bit of doggerel verse in which editor JP McEvoy imagines a heavenly reception for a female journalist who reported on the circuit of turn-of-the-century women's clubs and charitable societies:

St Peter met her at the gate,
And took her by the fin
Said He: some sins we all must rue
But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—
Come in.

I actually finished multiple things this week! I'm on my way to reducing my number of in-progress projects! Go me! ... I will admit that I also started something new, which I will talk about for #accountability and also because I'm really enjoying it.

On the plus (or rather minus) side of the equation, I finished both Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. I mentioned the former back in early February, and having finished it, my opinion remains pretty much the same as it was then: I enjoyed it a lot, but the huge amount of hype surrounding it is kind of mystifying to me. It struck me as a well-written but fairly standard bildungsroman, told at a narrative distance that was a little removed to really enthrall me. I liked its focus on girls, women, and female friendship, but the majority of the things I read are about girls and women: friendships between girls and women, or love affairs between girls and women, or, ideally, complicated whatsits somewhere between or outside those two things between girls and women. So that's not exactly a novelty, though maybe that's because I very consciously seek those things out? Maybe if I were reading straight off the best-seller list (wording intentional) it would be more uncommon? I dunno, man. I remain kind of flummoxed by the mind=blown reaction that so many folks apparently had to this book. However! It's certainly a fine book, and one I'm glad I read.

For the Record, on the other hand, was super fascinating, which I'm sure is unsurprising to hear me say since I kept excerpting it while reading. Arondekar makes a nuanced argument about archival methodologies that strive for completeness and legibility: both the conservative stance which says, for example, no queerness existed in the past because it's not in the archive and the archive is complete; and also queer/feminist/subaltern studies (though, plainly, Arondekar belongs much more to the second of these groups than to the first) which attempt to recover in the archive what's been lost, or to read a complete story in what has gone unarchived, essentially letting the gaps dictate what they should be filled by. Her idea, greatly simplified here by me, is instead to dwell in the incompleteness of the archive: to find places where the incompleteness itself makes meaning, rather than always to look for places where it can be mitigated in favor of real or imagined completion. (You can see the connection to the passage on Kipling and Freud that I excerpted the other day.)

Almost more interesting, though, to the casual reader, is that in the process of exploring this idea Arondekar surveys all kinds of intriguing queer-historical moments, from Richard Burton's missing report on the male brothels of Karáchi, to an abortive sodomy conviction in Allahabad in 1884, to the fetishization of the rare-in-real-life india rubber dildo in Victorian porn, to an analysis of the scant few stories Rudyard Kipling wrote about the 1857 Mutiny. Arondekar closes her Kipling chapter by discussing a non-Mutiny Kipling story, "To Be Filed for Reference," in which the narrator is bequeathed a long-heralded yet (according to the narrator) ultimately nonsensical and inappropriate-for-revelation text by a semi-autobiographical character occupying a liminal space between Englishman and "native":

"To Be Filed for Reference" maps the genesis of a friendship between McIntosh Jellaludin (the only Kipling character to have successfully "gone fantee" and passed into the hybrid, sullied space of Eurasian identity) and the ubiquitous male narrator. The friendship, and the story, culminates in the form of a literary transaction, an exchange of a strange body of narratives, a "hopeless muddle" of jumbled tales that Jellaludin, on his deathbed, bequeaths the narrator.

The narrator first stumbles on the drunken Jellaludin on a dark night and befriends him with the enticement of tobacco and books in exchange for what he ironically calls "the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante" (Indian Tales, 377). ( Born out of this drunken erudition... )

This was all very interesting to me because it so happens that I just started another story which also starts with the meeting of two men, also in a caravanserai in India; in which one man (as in the Kipling) offers the other tobacco and then, eventually, over drinks and in an interaction reminiscent of lovers (as in the Kipling), gives him a book which (as in the Kipling) offers the promise of enticing, previously-unsuspected yet near-unfathomable stories requiring much glossing and interpretation, at least one of which (as in the Kipling) involves a connection between a feral northern/white foreigner and an Indian woman: Indra Das's The Devourers. (One assumes that Kipling did not go on to chronicle the adventures of queer werewolves.) Not that the frame narrative of two strangers meeting in the night and exchanging stories or even texts is a unique one, but the many commonalities of those two setups do bring up the interesting possibility of reading Das as explicitly in dialogue with Kipling. I'm not far enough along in the Das to have much in the way of substantive comment on that front, but it does make a person wonder. Arondekar/Kipling connection aside, I'm finding Das's tone a little bit slow going: it sometimes feels self-consciously ponderous in a way historical fiction can be prone to before authors totally get in the swing of whatever voice they're adopting. A lot of the time my reading-brain can adapt, though, if I just keep on; and a lot of the time the author limbers up in their prose as the book goes on, as well.

On the minus (or rather plus) side of things, this week I also started Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, which is a queer historical crime novel set in 1884 in Port Townsend, Washington—a little town I happen to have spent a lot of time in, since I have family there! So that's fun. The protagonist is the bisexual and gender-nonconforming Alma Rosales, rogue Pinkerton operative and disguise aficionada, who I love already after reading this passage, just a dozen pages in. Anyone who has—well, met me, but especially anyone who has read How the mouth changes its shape, will be not at all shocked that I am won over; right before this Alma even thinks to herself "be glad there's not a looking glass here":

To lacquer on manhood, Alma starts with the hands. Gentlemen wear rings. A workingman wears calluses. He leaves dirty fingerprints on newspapers, drops peanut shells in his path. His nails may or may not be bitten. In winter his knuckles crack with cold.

She shakes open a sackcloth bundle. Inside is a warped metal pipe, slick with grease, caked with ash. A sailor sold it to her from a dockside box of scraps. He said its explosion unmade a boiler room and nearly sent its ship to the bad place.

Only faint smears of French chalk remain between her fingers. Gripping the pipe, she twists her hands in opposite directions. Twists, so the pipe's grease grits into her skin and its metal ridges rouse the nerves of her palms.

Remember how to talk like Jack Camp. Rough voice. Tobacco-muddled tongue.

Grip, twist.

Remember how to move like Jack Camp. Hips first, cocksure.

Twist.

Remember how to fight like Jack Camp—and at this, Alma smiles. This is her favorite thing. The red and sweat and swearing, the fire in her rib cage, the bend and crush of bodies. Muscles contracting. Sunbursts of pain. Nothing but the pummeling, the wild onrushing of life.

As Camp, she could be a thief, saying, I was on a crew in the city. We ran small-time jobs—liquor, queered cash. Your place looked like easy pickings, and your boys sure as shit didn't put up much of a fight.

I forgot how fast-moving crime fiction is; I'm only like 20 pages in and Alma has already knocked a guy out and been knocked out herself; and that's putting aside the two-page prologue in which she gears up to shoot someone after telling them not to use her name. But it's nice having a bit of a pot-boiler in my pocket when the majority of the other books I've got on the go are histories of racism, railways, and volunteer nursing in WWI. All super interesting, yes, but sometimes a person just wants a good old-fashioned in-costume queer fistfight.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I'm at five current reading projects, down from eight when I started trying to cut down. Maybe by next Wednesday I can be down to four?

Here are three books I just learned about and which look intriguing, all of queer interest & authored by women. None of them are released yet, so I can't say whether they're actually good. But they piqued my interest, so I am passing them on to you this March 8. (Blurbs are taken directly from the promo materials, which is why they feel a bit... inflated. Or at least. I hope that's why.)

A People's History of Heaven, by Mathangi Subramanian:

A politically driven graffiti artist. A transgender Christian convert. A blind girl who loves to dance. A queer daughter of a hijabi union leader. These are some of the young women who live in a Bangalore slum known as Heaven, young women whom readers will come to love in the moving, atmospheric, and deeply inspiring debut, A People's History of Heaven.

Welcome to Heaven, a thirty-year-old slum hidden between brand-new high-rise apartment buildings and technology incubators in contemporary Bangalore, one of India's fastest-growing cities. In Heaven, you will come to know a community made up almost entirely of women, mothers and daughters who have been abandoned by their men when no male heir was produced. Living hand-to-mouth and constantly struggling against the city government who wants to bulldoze their homes and build yet more glass high-rises, these women, young and old, gladly support one another, sharing whatever they can.

A People's History of Heaven centers on five best friends, girls who go to school together, a diverse group who love and accept one another unconditionally, pulling one another through crises and providing emotional, physical, and financial support. Together they wage war on the bulldozers that would bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that does not care what happens to them.

Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States, by Samantha Allen

A transgender reporter's inspiring narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states, celebrating LGBT survival and activism and offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was a suit-and-tie-wearing Mormon missionary. Now she's a senior Daily Beast reporter happily married to another woman. A lot in her life has changed, but what hasn't changed is her deep love of Red State America, and of queer people who stay in so-called "flyover country" rather than moving to the liberal coasts.

In Real Queer America, Allen takes us on a cross-country road-trip stretching all the way from Provo, Utah to the Rio Grande Valley to the Bible Belt to the Deep South. Her motto for the trip: "Something gay every day." Making pit stops at drag shows, political rallies, and hubs of queer life across the heartland, she introduces us to scores of extraordinary LGBT people working for change, from the first openly transgender mayor in Texas history to the manager of the only queer night club in Bloomington, Indiana, and many more.

Capturing profound cultural shifts underway in unexpected places and revealing a national network of chosen family fighting for a better world, Real Queer America is a treasure trove of uplifting stories and a much-needed source of hope and inspiration in these divided times.

A Student of History, by Nina Revoyr

Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it at first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings.

Putting aside his half-finished dissertation, Rick sets up office in Mrs. W--'s grand Bel Air mansion and begins to transcribe her journals--which document an old Los Angeles not described in his history books. He also accompanies Mrs. W-- to venues frequented by the descendants of the land and oil barons who built the city. One evening, at an event, he meets Fiona Morgan--the elegant scion of an old steel family--who takes an interest in his studies. Irresistibly drawn to Fiona, he agrees to help her with a project of questionable merit in the hopes he'll win her favor.

A Student of History explores both the beginnings of Los Angeles and present-day dynamics of race and class. It offers a window into the usually hidden world of high society, and the influence of historic families on current events. Like Great Expectations and The Great Gatsby, it features, in Rick Nagano, a young man of modest means who is navigating a world where he doesn't belong.

Hi [XXXX],

I hope you're doing well! I happened across not one but two different things today that seemed relevant to your interests, and I'm taking their confluence as a sign that I should send them your way.

First: Michael Nava is adapting his 1986 novel The Little Death into a radio play released as a podcast called Lay Your Sleeping Head. I don't know if you're familiar with Nava (I was not), but this write-up makes the project sound very cool: his protagonist is a gay Latino detective, and the story is a noir set in San Francisco. The podcast will be fully scored and voice-acted, classic radio style. It sounds like Nava's had an interesting journey adapting it, too; I liked his reflections on the process, and on hearing his character's "voice" for the first time.

Second: I can't figure out a more elegant way to link you, but if you click here and then scroll down to "Postcard One," you'll find an interview about a new translation of Facundo Bernal's Palos de ciego, first published in 1923. (Again: I was not familiar; I don't know about you.) Says the introduction:

Facundo Bernal, a long-neglected border author, writes about life in LA and in the border town of Mexicali, capturing the colour and flavour of Mexican and Mexican-American life in the first decades of the 20th century. Seidman’s inventive translation recovers Bernal’s essential work from a historical and geographical margin.

The whole interview is good and definitely left me intrigued about Bernal's work, what with the links to modern-day border life & politics as well as the Modernist shout-outs. The section on the baseball poem particularly grabbed me this way.

Anyway, happy Friday!

xo,
[breathedout]

(PS for DW: Nava's novel is noir, and one convention of the genre is that the protag's love interest almost always dies and/or is revealed to be a criminal/double agent/otherwise untrustworthy. If this will bother you in the context of the love interest being same-sex, don't listen. But if it's any comfort, this convention is 100% equally present in straight noir.)

In her thirtieth cahier, shortly after separating from Caroline Besterman in 1968, Pat had written: “To live alone, to feel occasional depression. Much of the difficulty is from not having another person around for whom one puts on a slight show—dressing nicely, presenting a pleasant expression. The trick, the sometimes difficult trick is to maintain one’s morale without the other person, the mirror.”

In Switzerland [in the 1980s], Pat had found a supportive publisher and world representative in Daniel Keel and Diogenes, a German-speaking public eager for her work, and not one person, really, for whom she could perform her “self.”

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 35: The Cake That was Shaped Like a Coffin, Part 2)

The capping irony: based on all the stories of all the women with whom Highsmith did live over the years, “presenting a pleasant expression” for someone else’s benefit is not something she, in reality, ever seems to have done. On the contrary, she fought cruelly and almost continually with every lover and other housemate she ever had (except, arguably, her last lover, Monique Buffet). Is she here, nearing the end of her life in solitude, remembering the past through rose-colored glasses? Or did she actually perceive herself, at the time, when she was fighting tooth and nail with Ellen Bumenthal Hill, or sleeping with both members of a couple and then informing on them to each other, as acting “pleasant” for her lovers’ benefits? If not for those lovers, would the Highsmith of the 1940s through 1970s have been even meaner and nastier? Or is the pleasantness she recalls here a red herring, and is the truth that she would have simply felt (and now did feel) less herself, somehow, without someone for whom to perform, regardless of the content of that performance?

(This is also interesting to me because, despite also being a bit obsessed with performative self-presentation, I absolutely adore(d) living alone, and usually feel most “myself” when there’s no one else around. Though I also live in the internet age, where being physically alone doesn’t mean I’m devoid of human contact.)

peachpulpeuse asked: i was just thinking about the conversation you lot were having re american road trips, and i realized that even tho the road trip in the price of salt is supposed to be a romantic getaway, or whatever, it gives me the same itchy nervous dried-sweat feeling as the extended road trip/pedo kidnapping in lolita. have you felt the same thing? is it an artifact of creepy road trips (e.g. f&l in lv)?? or is it just that p. highsmith cant help but make you feel anxious and culpable? idk anyway cheers

Yes, definitely. I mean to some extent that anxious dread is very much rooted in the plot, since they’re being tailed and spied on by Carol’s husband’s private detective the whole time, so there’s that uneasy tension between getting away and running away.

The prospect of escape, in particular escape from one’s own identity, is I think always incredibly appealing to Highsmith and I think she herself perceived it as a little too appealing: dangerously appealing, for reasons that become obvious with Ripley. Which makes it intriguing that she plays the tension in the road trip section of The Price of Salt the way that she does: what outcome are we, the readers, supposed to be rooting for here? One is very conscious that in reading a romance novel one is supposed to be rooting for the main couple to stay together, and in this case I legitimately do… but does that mean hoping for Carol to choose Therese over her daughter, staying with Therese and just never returning to New York? Starting a new life from scratch in some little town in the American West, just severing all ties with her previous existence and living in permanent exile, à la the end of Du Maurier’s Rebecca? I mean, that’s sure what Highsmith herself would try to do, over and over again, but I think even she gets why it’s a disturbingly claustrophobic and unsatisfying version of a happy ending. The one that she gives us—where Carol chooses New York and her daughter over Therese and then the court takes the daughter away anyway, so that Carol ends up in a tenuous reconciliation with Therese as a sort of consolation prize—feels maybe more politically depressing but also more genuinely… freeing? At least to me. And I end the book feeling a lot more confident that Therese is going to have the opportunity to develop into her own independent person, than I would have if she and Carol had shacked up in Santa Fe or whatever.

And then too, in the road trip section, the fact that the dynamic between the two women, even on its own, is remarkably… prickly… adds to that sense of unease. Schenkar has this great line about Highsmith, which is that “Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape from her new lover.” I think there’s definitely a bit of that tension going on with Carol, and perceiving it through Therese’s eyes just adds to the sense of shaky footing. Highsmith herself felt both cruelly abandoned and oppressively hounded by her mother, who was the most enduring and also the most mutually hurtful love of her life; and I think it’s interesting that she sets up this fictional dilemma where, no matter what Carol does, she’ll be both abandoning and pursuing a relationship with a daughter-figure (one eroticized, one not, but the glass of milk scene alone sets up mother-daughter vibes between Therese and Carol). That’s enough to create a prickly dread-feeling for anyone, I think!

But yeah, ahahahaha basically I think everything Highsmith wrote is supersaturated with guilt and anxiety. ISN’T IT GRAND.

So. The Price of Salt (1952). First lesbian pulp with a “happy ending,” meaning in this case that neither of the female protagonists died, went mad, or decided they liked men after all (or, incidentally, chose to elope and cut themselves off from all the other people they love). To many readers—very much including me—the understated ending of Highsmith’s novel feels “more realistic” than either a typical romance-novel Happy Ever After, or the overblown, censorship-enforced, soap-operatic tragedy of pulps like Spring Fire.

( INTERESTINGLY (suicide cw): )

[Note from 2019: I still await, and am tempted to write myself, the Norma Desmond/Carol Aird fanfic. A Yuletide possibility, perhaps.]

The element of terror—anxiety—is important. Perhaps overconsciousness of details—by which an individual tries to fix his place, from which he tries to gain security and confidence, but without success. It is the element of security, that is forever missing; the meaning and importance of life that is missing.

—Patricia Highsmith, preparatory notes for The Tremor of Forgery as found in Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 25: Les Girls, Part 9)

Pat [Highsmith] and Marijane [Meaker] broke up quickly (and then continued to break up slowly) during their six months of cohabitation. Pat … moved in and out of the house so many times, that they had to change moving companies a couple of times to avoid embarrassment.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 23: Les Girls, Part 7)

And a follow-up quote from Meaker on the subject: “By then, we didn’t like each other, we didn’t want to be around each other, but in bed it was fire.”

Although Pat’s array of styles and subjects couldn’t be more different from Proust’s exquisite deconstructions of the phantoms of the faubourg, her best long fictions–like demented, demotic chips off the Proustian block–share a serious approach with Proust: the capillarial crawl of a hypervigilant consciousness over a detailed psychological territory, every word of whose narrative is conveyed in a voice cloaked (but not necessarily concealed) by another (but not exactly opposite) gender.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 9: Greek Games)

…. what an intriguing comparison. That final observation on gender, in particular!

Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

“Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing.” […] Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know. […]

“He laughed, his own unmistakeable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.”

Ripley’s Believe it or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel created by Robert Ripley […] in 1918. […] By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in the American household vernacular.

—Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Chapter 21: Les Girls, Part 5)

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September 2024

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Page generated Jul. 4th, 2025 11:54 am

... having been breathed out

Entries tagged with american lit

Gertrude Issue 30

That the person they had once been

Reading Thursday 9.12.19

Reading/Writing Wednesday 5.22.19

Reading Wednesday: Jury Duty Edition

On geographical diversification of queer life in the US

Reading Mumbleday 05.09.19

Reading Wednesday 4.24.19

Reading Wednesday 4.10.19

Reading Wednesday 4.3.19

Reading Wednesday 3.27.19

In honor of International Women's Day

I just sent this email and then realized: why not post as well?

Presenting a pleasant expression

Road-tripping & nervous dread in The Price of Salt

Highsmithian ironies

The element of terror is important

Pat and Marijane broke up quickly and then continued to break up slowly

Highsmith and Proust

Pat once said