coffee & ink

I have been doing so much Hugo short fiction reading and there are so many 2015 sf/f short stories out there ohmygod. I have read 44 stories in the past three weeks, which isn't actually more than I read all last year, but it feels like it. Those 44 stories were all good, by the way, or at least interesting or entertaining enough for me not to drop them after the first few paragraphs, but I am in my usual awards quandary, which is, Is good good enough? Is enjoyment my only metric for award-worthy? Is using metrics other than enjoyment privileging biased aesthetic criteria? (As if enjoyment, in itself, isn't biased. But also: as if the things that give women pleasure aren't so often derided, disregarded.) Which is why I was going to write a whole post on political bias in aesthetics. It would be so useful! I could just link to it every time I felt like writing a paragraph like this.

Anyway, here are three stories that are more than good enough:

• Lesley Nneka Arimah, Who Will Greet You at Home
  
• Carmen Maria Machado, Descent
  
• Sofia Samatar, The Closest Thing to Animals

You should try them and let me know what you think.

I would call two of these, oddly, horror; oddly because I don't think of myself as liking horror, or even reading much of it. But "Descent" is a perfect classical ghost story, except for the part where there aren't any ghosts, unless we're counting mortality; maybe we should count mortality. "Who Will Greet You at Home" has also that classical ghost story feel and also has no ghosts; the author calls it magical realism. It keeps making me think of The Rocking-Horse Winner for reasons I can't define, maybe just the unsettling feel; or maybe they're the same story, inside-out, this time the story really about mothering and gaps in mothering and not just the mother telling someone else's untouchable story. All of the stories have mostly or all female characters, and all of them are about relationships between women or women and girls. It's a nice feeling; almost like being human.

Brief note on ebook sales
Kate Elliott's Cold Magic is $3.49 and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle is $1.99 at multiple retailers and Megan Abbott's Queenpin is $3.99 at Amazon.

What did you just finish?
Books:
Madwoman After 30 Years - The Jane Eyre section is three essays:

• One competent and uninspired reading of images of enclosure introduced by the red room of the first chapter.
  
• One comparison of Jane Eyre to Krupabai Satthianadhan's Saguna, a semiautobiographical novel by an Indian woman. Saguna focuses on a trajectory similar to Jane's, from a book-heavy childhood to adolescent rebellion against social strictures to training for professional independence to companionate marriage, but with additional complications courtesy of colonialism. I would like to get a copy of this; I am particularly interested in how Satthianadhan situates her childhood reading of English classics and also in her medical training (she was going to be a doctor before ill health stopped her).
  
• One attempt to parallel Jane Eyre with Beloved and Madwoman in the Attic with Playing in the Dark, both of which I find tenuously argued, not to mention somewhat problematic due to the differences among the text which are elided. (Also, Sandra M. Gilbert, did you just call the feminists who criticized your work shrill? I am so disappointed in you.) Even though this is the least successful of the essays, its close reading of images on home in Beloved intrigues me. I may reread Beloved so I can see how Home plays on its ideas. I have been too preoccupied with how much Home riffs off Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (it so totally riffs off Ceremony) to consider how it fits into Morrison's body of work.

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
This is lovely, dense, and intricate, but reading it for the first time required a lot of effort. I think it will be more pleasurable on rereads, or perhaps when I am in a more congenial mood.

Sarah Lockhart, The Echo
Self-published romance novel with some pacing issues, but great use of language and a kind of negative narrative space -- I am fascinated by how the presence of the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the unsayable affect the story. I'm trying to write a review, but in the meantime, I recommend this very highly if you are at all interested in Regency romances. (Trigger warning for sexual violence, inexplicitly referenced.)

Janet Mullany, Dedication (rev. 2012), Improper Relations, and Mr Bishop and the Actress
The Echo put me in the mood for more Regencies, so I read the revised version of Dedication. My feelings remain largely the same, although tinged with the disappointment of of Mullany's later work. I do think the narrative balance between hero and heroine at the end works much better in this version. Am troubled that in both this and (the horrible) Forbidden Shores, the villain is a gay/bisexual man who uses or abuses women to manipulate the men they're interested in. Homosexual desire isn't vilified, the characters treat it very matter-of-factly, but the metatext is ugly.

Improper Relations and Mr Bishop and the Actress are much more lighthearted; Mullany calls them Regency chick-lit. They are charming confections. I am not sure how much of them I will remember in a week. I am very glad that in the second the courtesan heroine is very comfortable with her own sexual pleasure and the virgin hero is not automatically great at sex. (I'm looking at you, Courtney Milan.)

Sequential art:
Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja, Who Is A.C.?
Charming manga/anime-influenced origin story for Lin, who makes fantasy comics about a girl's daring adventures and becomes a superheroine. Starts off slow. Love the Utena and Sailor Moon references and ultimately the incorporation of the Internet into magic/mythology. I hope it sells well enough for a sequel to be commissioned.

Hope Larson, Mercury
Teenage girls attempting to navigate family, home, sexuality, friends in rural Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries. Magic realist elements. Very delicate sense of injuries and tentative reparations, longings filled and unfulfilled.

What are you currently reading?
Christina Stead, The Little Hotel
Have reached the weird POV switch around a third of the way through: First-person hotel proprietress switches to third-person hotel guest after the first paragraph of one chapter, with occasional intrusions of the first-person for a paragraph. Have no idea why she is doing this and, judging by other people's comments, will never get one.

What are you reading now?
Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. My friends who are trans or experienced trans allies think this is very 101, but I am at 101 and found this very useful. Especially helpful is the way it distinguishes sex, subconscious sex, sexual orientation, and gender expression. The investigation of ways feminism can still devalue feminity -- and particularly the ways in which women police gender -- is also very good, although I am still inclined to think that a lot of feminist exclusion of trans women is based more in cissexism and oppositional sexism than in transmisogyny -- that is, that trans men are accepted not because cissexual women value masculinity more than femininity but because they still don't really believe in transsexuality; despite all the theory, they believe that trans gender identity is a masquerade and cis gender identity is "natural."

You can tell that Serano comes from a science background. The discussions of biology and sociology are heavily annotated with reference sources, whereas the discussions of general social attitudes are much less attested unless they focus on specific texts. I wish there were more citations of specific discussions for back-up in some of the cultural studies discussions, but that is mainly because experience in these kinds of social justice discussions makes me want the arguments to be bulletproof, not because I disagree with the assessments. Of course, there is no such thing as bulletproof; some people will always resist and justify their privilege. But I want the arguments to have more body armor. Body armor. Wow, this metaphor is getting revealing.

The book is very US-based, though I think the arguments and attitudes analyzed are probably pretty common throughout the West. Not so sure about the rest of the world. It's very good on intersections of gender identity, gender expression, sex, and sexuality, but it doesn't deal with class or race at all so far. (I'm a little more than half-way through.) This is particularly noticeable for class, because she keeps using the word, but it's generally in the sense of "category" or "oppressed group in a hierarchy" than in the socioeconomic sense.

I started Amruta Patil's graphic novel Adi Parva: The Churning of the Ocean. I am taking it very slowly so I can absorb the images. The paint (marker?) is very thick, impasto; I have been trying to think what the art reminds me of. The roughness and roundness of the figures, the solidity of them, reminds me a little of Henry Moore. The sensuality and intense focus of O'Keefe, although the colors and use of space and cartoonishness (as opposed to more mimetic realism) is nothing like. I keep thinking of Chagall. Maybe it's the postures. It doesn't remind me much of US/UK comics or manga at all, maybe because it seems so different from pencil and pen drawings. The textures and figure arrangements remind me more of collages.

I've also started rereading Code Name Verity.

What did you just finish reading?
The last stories I finished reading were "The Advocate" by Genevieve Valentine, which I liked, and "Selkie Stories Are for Losers" by Sofia Samatar, which I loved. I am tempted to read the sample of her novel from Small Beer, even though I hate reading samples when I cannot get the whole book.

The last book I finished was Tansy Rayner Roberts' Love and Romanpunk, also short fiction, a linked set of stories set in an alternate history where the Caesars were descendants of various monsters: lamias, werewolves, vampires. The first one, the secret history of Julia Agrippina, might well have been made for vaznetti. My favorite is the second, because Fanny Wollstonecraft has always broken my heart. If you're interested in trying it out, Apex just put the third one online.

And my copy of the trade collection of the first volume of Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dexter Soy, and Emma Rios' Captain Marvel arrived, so I reread that. I love the characterization, the banter, and the emphasis on relationships between women, especially the construction of a heroic matrilineage for Carol Danvers. Dexter Soy's art works much better with the shift to brighter colors in the second or third issue; Emma Rios' is blessedly free of objectification of women; that said, it is hugely jarring to go from Soy's more mimetic style to the deliberate cartoonishness of Rios' in the middle of the arc, and neither of them seems to fit the tone of the book as well as Terry Dodson's did for Carol's guest appearance in Avenging Spider-Man. (Sadly not collected here.)

What do you expect to read next?
I could finish Code Name Verity. I could start The Touchstone, a novella by Edith Wharton, which I just borrowed from the library. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my library's ebook collection? I love it THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSS much.) Or I could read Night and Day, which has long been on my TBR shelves, because I am feeling like reading something rainy and quiet and inward.