... having been breathed out

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.