Reading Wednesday, 9/4/13
Annette Lapointe, The Whitetail Shooting Gallery
There's this essay by Dorothy Allison where she talks about science fiction and sex, about the first sexual fantasies she ever had and how so many of them weren't about having sex, they were about exploring Mars, saving princesses, inventing robots. Lapointe captures the same thing, the half feral nature of adolescence, where the outside world and your body and books and music and an intricate interior world all intertwine. Lapointe's rural Saskatchewan is desolate, populated by farmers and artists, full of casual violence and hidden queerness.
John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, & Michael Thomas, Glitter and Mayhem
The stories aren't bad, but the only stand-out entry is Sofia Samatar's "Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes Out for Drinks with the Green Girl," which covers some of the same territory as Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, but in a whirl of bars and flirtations and dancing and friendships and escapes that come too late. We are fascinated by beautiful dead girls; they take their revenge.
I also liked:
The anthology was still a pleasure to read because of all the women in it -- lots of female characters, including a couple of trans women, and a lot of queer women.
Currently reading
Kate Elliott, Spirit Gate
I got a little farther in this, but put it down to read the Lapointe, and have been slow to pick it up again.
Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs
I am thirty pages in and in love. Like the Lapointe, this captures a particular flavor--of adolescence, of fantasy reading--in a way I've seldom seen.
Both books also drop mentions of the music and the sf/fantasy I grew up on, in a way I'm used to seeing only for the older generations' references. Either you get why there are abandoned copies of Dragonlance books in The Whitetail Shooting Gallery and why Jennifer disregards her cousin's comics because they're more X-Men than Sandman, and why the girls in All Our Pretty Songs bond over Tam Lin, Winterlong, Weetzie Bat, or you breeze over them without knowing there's characterization there; there's enough characterization elsewhere to make up for it. (These aren't anachronistic references; both novels take place in the 90s.)
It wouldn't break the experience for people who don't share the same cultural markers, I don't think, but ... I suppose I am so used to the Baby Boomer signposts in texts. I feel a special thrill of recognition to see Gen X and Millenial references instead.
I wonder if the references feel exactly the same to Millenials as the Baby Boomer references felt to me? I'm not sure. So much of the experience was tracking things down, assumptions of what they might be dreamed into different stories. (I can't even tell you how much punk rock startled me by not being nearly as dissonant as heavy metal or grunge.)
Weetzie Bat: This week's reading connects in odd ways. The Samatar story sort of feels the way Francesca Lia Block's books used to feel to me, and so does the McCarry. Not Weetzie Bat, I never liked that, but I can't even read the rest of them the same way now. Cultural appropriations all over the place; eating disorder and body image issues that I can't handle now. The strange shallow feeling of a writer who hasn't grown or changed. So many of her books are about LA, land of entrapment and glamour, and it feels like she got trapped there. But I reread The Hanged Man earlier this year, and with all those many flaws, it still gets something about what adolescence was like for me, this mix of desire and fear and sexuality looming dangerous. And the Lapointe, the Samatar, and the McCarry feel like that.
cups brewed at DW
There's this essay by Dorothy Allison where she talks about science fiction and sex, about the first sexual fantasies she ever had and how so many of them weren't about having sex, they were about exploring Mars, saving princesses, inventing robots. Lapointe captures the same thing, the half feral nature of adolescence, where the outside world and your body and books and music and an intricate interior world all intertwine. Lapointe's rural Saskatchewan is desolate, populated by farmers and artists, full of casual violence and hidden queerness.
John Klima, Lynne M. Thomas, & Michael Thomas, Glitter and Mayhem
The stories aren't bad, but the only stand-out entry is Sofia Samatar's "Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes Out for Drinks with the Green Girl," which covers some of the same territory as Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, but in a whirl of bars and flirtations and dancing and friendships and escapes that come too late. We are fascinated by beautiful dead girls; they take their revenge.
I also liked:
- Tansy Rayner Robert's "The Minotaur Girls," where a girl needs to free her friends from the labyrinth of a roller rink; Rayner Robert's urban fantasies really appeal to me. I'd love to see her do one at novel length.
- Christopher Barzak's "Sisters Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster," a retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses."
- Maria Davana Headley's "Such & Such and So & So," in which personified drinks seduce the unwary.
- Jennifer Pelland's "Star Dancer," in which a bug-eyed alien just wants to dance.
The anthology was still a pleasure to read because of all the women in it -- lots of female characters, including a couple of trans women, and a lot of queer women.
Currently reading
Kate Elliott, Spirit Gate
I got a little farther in this, but put it down to read the Lapointe, and have been slow to pick it up again.
Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs
I am thirty pages in and in love. Like the Lapointe, this captures a particular flavor--of adolescence, of fantasy reading--in a way I've seldom seen.
Both books also drop mentions of the music and the sf/fantasy I grew up on, in a way I'm used to seeing only for the older generations' references. Either you get why there are abandoned copies of Dragonlance books in The Whitetail Shooting Gallery and why Jennifer disregards her cousin's comics because they're more X-Men than Sandman, and why the girls in All Our Pretty Songs bond over Tam Lin, Winterlong, Weetzie Bat, or you breeze over them without knowing there's characterization there; there's enough characterization elsewhere to make up for it. (These aren't anachronistic references; both novels take place in the 90s.)
It wouldn't break the experience for people who don't share the same cultural markers, I don't think, but ... I suppose I am so used to the Baby Boomer signposts in texts. I feel a special thrill of recognition to see Gen X and Millenial references instead.
I wonder if the references feel exactly the same to Millenials as the Baby Boomer references felt to me? I'm not sure. So much of the experience was tracking things down, assumptions of what they might be dreamed into different stories. (I can't even tell you how much punk rock startled me by not being nearly as dissonant as heavy metal or grunge.)
Weetzie Bat: This week's reading connects in odd ways. The Samatar story sort of feels the way Francesca Lia Block's books used to feel to me, and so does the McCarry. Not Weetzie Bat, I never liked that, but I can't even read the rest of them the same way now. Cultural appropriations all over the place; eating disorder and body image issues that I can't handle now. The strange shallow feeling of a writer who hasn't grown or changed. So many of her books are about LA, land of entrapment and glamour, and it feels like she got trapped there. But I reread The Hanged Man earlier this year, and with all those many flaws, it still gets something about what adolescence was like for me, this mix of desire and fear and sexuality looming dangerous. And the Lapointe, the Samatar, and the McCarry feel like that.
cups brewed at DW