it's not the same moon in the sky

So katzenfabrik and anotherbluestocking have been sharing this essay on Twitter and now I'm obsessed with it. It's all about how women in the literary and artistic canons tend to be defined by the surrounding men, and it took me ten minutes to post a link on Facebook because I couldn't decide which chunk of it to quote, so fiercely was I nodding at all of it.

"I read Mansfield because I was reading Ali Smith, and Ali Smith loves Mansfield and she almost only loves women writers, so I took note. It’s always interesting which women are admired by those women who seem to intellectually prefer women. Katherine Mansfield wrote about being a woman with sorrow and effervescence, in the same way Marina Tsvetaeva did. While Mansfield characters are usually ensconced in ruffled middle class desperation—getting dressed, throwing parties, wanting to die; the material opposite of Tsvetaeva—both refuse to let the world off the hook for what girlhood does to a person. The splitting of self, the doubled being and not-being that femininity necessitates, how words and images stutter over this multiplicity, built for a masculine singular." - Secret Canon, Audrey Wollen.

Part I is here.

( Read more... )

Finished:
Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth - This was very satisfying and fun: essentially, if you want to hang out with Oscar Wilde and his friends and solve mysteries, this is the book (and series) for you. And who doesn't want to do that? I'll continue to read these as I spot secondhand copies.

Doctor Occult - Dave Louapre, Dan Sweetman (Vertigo Visions, 1/1) - I hadn't come across Doctor Occult before (appallingly, I still haven't finished reading The Books of Magic; if he's an an issue I have read then I don't recall him), but it turns out he's another old DC character like the Sandman who was resurrected in a new form by Neil Gaiman. Doctor Occult and his partner Rose Psychic are, in this incarnation, aspects of the same being, and when Rose disappears, the Doctor must find her in a world of subconscious desires.

So it's a metaphysical, psychosexual journey where the plot is more character-driven than an ongoing series would demand - in other words, the sort of thing that Vertigo Visions one-shots were made for. The real-world background stuff shows its age a little, in that the gender fluidity of Occult/Rose is counterpointed by a trans interviewee on a TV talk show in a way that's played for 'extreme' value (they're a preacher and have transitioned more than once).

Overall, the comic's typical of Vertigo's attempts to push boundaries in storytelling at the time, and if you love 90s-style pencilling and colouring, the art will certainly be your bag. There's also a hilariously pithy summing up of the characters' adventures up to that point inside the front cover, which makes me want to dig around in our collection to see where else they show up.

Reading next:

A handful of DP7 comics we found in a charity shop.

I'm as shocked as you are. Admittedly, you're getting all of January's books so far in one go...

( 'So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.' )

I can't believe it's been a month since I did this, but then it was a very busy one...

( ...and then I cleverly left in the filler text and had to edit the cut )

Close enough, I guess. But I've decided to give myself an amnesty on the backlog; there comes a point when it's just irrational to attempt to catch up on five months' worth of unwritten-up books.

( So, most recently... )

I fell out of doing the Wednesday reading meme back in April, which is unfortunate because at the time I still had a backlog dating from the end of February to work on. So, nearly five months' worth of books...

( ...will certainly not be tackled in this one post, but I can make a dent in them at least. )

Well, this has taken me into April. I'm going to try and post another batch of these every day until I get to what I'm reading now...

It's been a while, but the meme is back! Also, I see this is my first public entry in ages. I swear, potential friends, it's not a complete desert - there is more going on beneath f-lock...

( Come for the books, stay for the books )

I've been meaning to do this for a while, but it was delayed by illness, work and sheer exhaustion. Brace yourselves, mes amis - it's the giant chapter-by-chapter Prince Lestat post! Or, to be honest, it's the first of several posts, because I want to get this thing rolling and not wait until I've commented on the whole thing. Also, I doubt that LiveJournal's post size limit can cope unless I split this thing up. I'll probably do it based on the sections of the book, but we'll see how things shake out.

Content note: sex, IVF, decapitation.

( Spoilers! A warning which will be cut off when this crossposts to LiveJournal, since they don't let you have custom cut text anymore. Whatever. )

I owe the new people I met on the friending meme an intro post, so that will hopefully happen tomorrow. But for now, books!

Books finished:

Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin

( spoilers; TW suicide and rape )

Books abandoned:

Sane New World: Taming the Mind by Ruby Wax

I raced through the first 90 pages during a particularly long session in a waiting room, but when I went to pick it up in bed that night I found I couldn't muster the will. What bothers me is that she veers so much between fact and opinion in a way that sometimes blurs the two - sometimes "millions of years" is used colloquially, other times literally. Often she's candid about something being her opinion, or a generalisation that won't necessarily apply to everybody, but then she'll make a sweeping statement about how none of our ancient ancestors had OCD, which leaves me thinking, "But how can we know that?" I can believe that human mental problems have changed with the social and environmental context in which we find ourselves, but it just makes no sense to bang on about how great neuroscience is and then make assertions you can't back up with it. It made me think I should probably just find a book for a lay audience that is specifically about neuroscience (your recs are welcome).

The Other, Darker Ned by Anne Fine

This is a story about the friendship between a young girl, and the student husband of her blind father's assistant. I like found family, and stories set during lazy, atmospheric summer days (hypocritically, I often enjoy them during actual atmospheric summer days in which I complain about the atmosphere; I was not made for heatwaves), and Anne Fine (one of our best modern children's/YA authors) was a mainstay of my bookshelf in my teens. But this turned out not to have aged well (it was written in 1979, and along with much of her ouvre, Fine has since updated it to reflect a changing society and her own tougher editing skills, a process she writes about interestingly, for adults here and for young readers here). While it's as sharply observed as any of her work, I prefer her more conflict-ridden books, and when Wikipedia confirmed that the success or otherwise of a charity jumble sale is the high dramatic point of the book, I decided to bow out.

Currently reading:

Romanitas by Sophia McDougall

The premise is that the Roman Empire never fell; today the world is (apart from the Independent South of Africa) divided between the Roman, Chinese and Japanese empires. The world map at the beginning of the book is terrifying to behold - vast swathes of the world under Rome's control, and as the cover picture suggests, crucifixion is still a punishment; one's life prospects are still defined by being either a slave or a freeman. So far, I love it - it's extremely well written, with subtle characterisation and inventive takes on the telepathy and healing powers experienced by two kids who are on the run...

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

I adored Fun Home, and recently I got lucky and found a very cheap nearly-new copy of the sequel. Only a few pages in, but so far I love it, and R, who has a better eye for these things than I do, remarks that her style has evolved interestingly since the last book. Me, it just makes me want to draw, as her work always does. What a luxury to have another Alison Bechdel graphic novel ahead of me...

Reading next:

This is a bit of a joke, as since I began doing this meme I've noticed that listing a book here almost guarantees that I will NOT read it next. But for what it's worth, Morrissey's book is still hanging in there (technically I did read a little of it).