bookandcranny

[bookandcranny]

people rly still talk as though the only kinds of queer narratives that exist or can ever exist are "angsty coming out story where someone gets hate-crimed in explicit and gruesome detail" or "the characters are queer but theres no real acknowledgment of it and oppression doesnt exist so theres no sense of queer history or community and basically its indistinguishable from a cishet narrative only sometimes a girl will kiss another girl but dont worry this is Good Representation actually" so choose one and be happy with it

[bookandcranny]

I read a podcast transcript about commodified sff/the kind of rot in fandomgenic media you sometimes talk about. These authors call it ‘squeecore’ — you might enjoy it https://kittysneezes.com/squeecore-transcript/

[“And there’s almost a weird, like, YA-ish, young-adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be “for adults”. Someone on our Discord, Kurt(?), pointed this out – characters feel weirdly young: they always think and act and feel like they’re in their late teens or early twenties; they’re kind of inexperienced, naive, still very full of wonder, and you get the sense they haven’t really lived a life before the story began?

JR: You could probably attribute a lot of that to, of course, to the YA thing that blew up in the last twenty years since Harry Potter; but there’s also a lot of influence from films, and a lot of influence from mainstream commercial narratives – the MCU, the She-Ras [sic], and the “save the cat”-style 3-act-structure screenplays that have really become the blueprint for a lot of storytelling.

RSB: Right, they almost feel like… maybe bad RPG protagonists; those silent protagonists that were very popular in the 90s who don’t really have personalities? Because you’re the player character, you put yourself in there. And I’ve been trying to figure out why, because for me, characters who are a little older, who have lived their life, maybe they have a haunted past and terrible secrets and regrets, and there’s something driving them toward this need to redeem themselves, but it never really tells you what it is, like – I love that shit. That shit’s – that’s the good shit.

JR [crosstalk]: Yeah, I think so –

RSB: Characters who have seen too much, and are kind of haunted, but you don’t know what it is? Like, aww, hell yeah, that’s right… [laughs]

JR: Yeah, and the older I get, the more I gravitate toward older protagonists as well; because I have nothing to learn from a teenager, right? Or a 57-year-old HR manager who writes like a teenager, and to teenagers.

RSB: Yeah, and it’s such a strange thing; I’m wondering if it’s because we have this need to eliminate or fill negative space. We need to explain everyone’s motivations; we can’t just let a character be the way they are; we have to have some kind of detailed flashback to The Traumatic Experience that made them this way. And that takes up a lot of space, so in order to evade– avoid having to do that, we just have these kind of flat, like, “JRPG from the ‘90s” protagonists that feel –

JR [crosstalk]: Yeah, like –

RSB: “Oh, they’re on the cusp of their life’s journey, and they haven’t lived.”]

…

[“JR: But I think that’s broadly – it’s sort of a tendency in the writers themselves, because as less people start out with the ability to make a living income with writing, it sort of becomes a hobby; but at the same time, the people with all the free time are the sort of white-collar professionals who have the the ability and the money to network, and to have the leisure time to write, and to pay attention to the submission grinder, and do all of these things that maybe a working-class person doesn’t have time to do, especially now.

RSB: Right. Someone working multiple jobs, and working blue-collar jobs where you don’t have downtime at work. In most white-collar jobs, you can usually squeeze out an hour a day to write. You can usually, if you work really efficiently, you can squeeze out a little bit of time to write. If you’re waiting tables, you really can’t do that; you rest your feet for two seconds, and your boss barks at you: “if you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” That’s it.

JR: Yeah, and of course, there’s a lot of wonderful working-class writers, but they’re not really being published because they’re out of the zone, they’re out of the clique.

RSB: Connections unfortunately do play a huge role in what gets published. You see pretty frequently in SFF magazines… Whenever I see a story that looks kind of mediocre, and I’m like “how did that get published?”, I look down and I always find out that, according to the writer’s bio, the writer is an alumna of one of the same workshops that the editors are an alumna of. It’s like, “oh. Okay, you’re in the same club.”

JR [crosstalk]: Yes, it’s very much social networking.

RSB: And it’s this club giving each other – publishing each other’s works, and giving each other awards. This is what it is. And the club costs five thousand dollars.

JR: Yup.

RSB: So, if you don’t have that, you can’t get in. And… maybe you can sneak in, if you’re – fucking – an amazing writer, but it’s definitely an uphill battle for you in a way that it isn’t for other people. And chances are you might have a different sensibility than other people will have. There’s very much a certain type of, I don’t know, socializing that’s acceptable, where it’s like that very WASPy, passive-aggressive condescension is okay; but being direct and straightforward in a way that a sort-of working-class person might be, that a person from a non-WASPy culture might be, gets you branded as “unsafe” and “abusive”. “]

cackling

[bookandcranny]

[“What I am actually doing in my mind is both a political, spiritual, culturally revolutionary act. I’m going to make you love people you ain’t got no reason to love in the world. But to do that, I have to put them into your heads and your heads are occupied by everything you think you know about them, every fear, every stereotype. What’s tricky about this is that I try to write what I think of as lyrical realism so I try to make them people that I believe in who are living lives that I recognize, keeping in mind that you will most likely have some things in mind that I’ll find offensive and I’ve got to counter it.”]

Dorothy Allison

[bookandcranny]

Dorothy Allison, from Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature, 1994

[bookandcranny]

Do you have any tips for reading as many books as you do or is it just something you feel naturally motivated to do? Thanks for posting excerpts, i always find awesome books following u

Spiderwebbing.

Do you have single name or title to go off of? The author gave an interview on some podcast platform where they recommended a bunch of other works; plug their name into where you get your podcasts and start tracking down leads. The back of the book has a list of other titles offered by the publisher. The author mentions a work they found influential? Track that one down. Use it to lead you to six or seven others.

I’m motivated by insanity and deeply rooted loneliness and alienation and those forces don’t work the same way for other people. I also came of age on an internet where young queer people liked to whine and handwring about how we have NO history and NO culture because we’ve been SO oppressed for so long that our only recourse is to watch marvel movies and supernatural reruns so we can pretend dean winchester is a homosexual, so spite is also somewhere in the mix. Spite’s a great motivator— I’m currently reading as much alithia zamantakis and jules gill-peterson as I can get my hands on purely because they don’t cleave to the Appropriate Political Language You Must Use Or Be Branded A Saboteur and I like how good they are at describing complex dynamics without summarizing them for political convenience.

only other tip I have is to actively notice any reading anxiety you have the moment it comes up and put kind attention around it. that’s all it takes.

[bookandcranny]

house rules, by rachel sontag

[bookandcranny]

[“Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another “wastebasket” category (though as Bourne (2011: 76) ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that “in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated” (cited in Decker 2013:199). The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices (Spitzer 1980: 31–32). Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann (2000: 113) who describes psychiatrists’ typical view of the BPD patient as “an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.” Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann’s (2000: 115) study reveals psychiatrists’ revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are “patients you don’t like, don’t trust, don’t want … One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different.” Becker (1997: xv) reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that “[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis.” A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood (Ussher 2011: 81), something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal (Caplan 1995: 237).

By the mid-1980s, the hysteria diagnosis had disappeared from the clinical setting while BPD had become the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder (Bourne 2011: 76). BPD is now the most important label which psychiatric hegemony invokes to serve capital and patriarchy through monitoring and controlling the modern woman, reinforcing expected gender roles within the more fluid, neoliberal environment. Nevertheless, as Jimenez (1997: 163, emphasis added) reminds us, the historical continuity from hysteria to BPD is clear:

Both diagnoses delimit appropriate behavior for women, and many of the criteria are stereotypically feminine. What distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger and other aggressive characteristics, such as shoplifting, reckless driving, and substance abuse. If the hysteric was a damaged woman, the borderline woman is a dangerous one.

The overemotional, needy housewife of the nineteenth century had been replaced at the end of the twentieth century by Glenn Close in the film Fatal Attraction (1987)—an out of control, irrational, aggressive (if unknowing) victim of women’s liberation. As the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013: 664) states of the BPD sufferer,

Easily bored, they may constantly seek something to do. Individuals with this disorder frequently express inappropriate, intense anger or have difficulty controlling their anger … They may display extreme sarcasm, enduring bitterness, or verbal outbursts. The anger is often elicited when a caregiver or lover is seen as neglectful, withholding, uncaring, or abandoning. Such expressions of anger are often followed by shame and guilt and contribute to the feeling they have of being evil.

BPD asserts a moral code on the neoliberal woman, defining the limits of her independence in line with dominant, expected gender roles in the twenty-first century. Thus, the introduction of such categories to the DSM is far from accidental. In contrast, Jimenez (1997: 166–167) insightfully states,

It was related to the social and cultural gains women achieved in the 1970s, when many middle-class women moved into the public sphere, increasing their independence and reshuffling gender roles. These personality disorders define the mentally healthy woman as one who is renewed and energized by social change and no longer dependent on men, but neither angry nor aggressive. According to the criteria, a woman who is mentally healthy restrains her sexuality and does not use her new powers to manipulate men. Together, these diagnoses demonstrate psychiatry’s ability not only to respond to changes in gender-role arrangements, but to limit their impact.

Personality disorders such as BPD serve as the latest versions of supposed scientifically valid medical classifications with which to police and control women’s behaviour in neoliberal society. As Ussher (2011: 81) has reiterated, it is a historically persistent form of social control of women that powerful forces in society have considered deviant: As the outspoken, difficult woman of the sixteenth century was castigated as a witch, and the same woman in the nineteenth century a hysteric, in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, she is described as “borderline.” All are stigmatising labels. All are irrevocably tied to what it means to be a “woman” at a particular point in history.”]

bruce m.z. cohen, from psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness, 2016

[bookandcranny]

Hello 👋,

I hope this message finds you well. My name is Aziz, and I’m reaching out with a heartfelt plea to help my family find safety and reunite with our mother. 😞

The ongoing war in Gaza has torn my family apart. My mother and newborn sister are stranded in Egypt, while I, along with the rest of my sex family members, am trapped in the midst of the genocide in Gaza. We have not only been separated but have also lost our home and are enduring unimaginable hardships. 💔

Your support can make a difference. Whether by reading our story, donating, or sharing our campaign with others, you can help us reunite, find safety, and start anew. 🙏🕊

Thank you, from the depths of my heart, for your kindness, compassion, and solidarity during this difficult time. ❤🍉

https://gofund.me/58268669 🔗

[bookandcranny]

writing tip: searching "[place of origin]ish names" will get you a lot of stuff and nonsense made up by baby bloggers.

searching "[place] census [year]" will get you lists of real names of real people who lived in that place.

[bookandcranny]

reading non-fiction will have you standing up and giving ted talks to your furniture

[bookandcranny]

— Megan Fernandes, “I’m Smarter than this Feeling, but Am I?” from I Do Everything I’m Told

[bookandcranny]

[”EF: Could we talk about the direct address to the reader in the footnotes? As an example, in the foreword you write, “Even if I were saying—hypothetically speaking— that this is a code, they will never be able to read it. There are some things you can only see through tears.“ These moments felt like a space of cruising—like winks or nudges—where all these intimate meanings and feelings are subtly negotiated between the text and trans readers. Those parts of the book made us feel really held.

JR: Those lines were like rope ladders thrown into a void, hoping that someone would climb them. It was hard for me not to write a book that contained many kinds of codes or secret tunnels for people. So, direct address was one part of that, but then, also, I didn’t want to do too much of that kind of direct address, because the effect of intimacy was something I was in large part hoping to generate through the structure and movement of the narrative, so that a reader would keep reading and get caught up in plot. On that level I’m very traditional: I think the most libidinal, most intimate thing you can give to a reader is allowing them to get caught up in plot. Maybe this goes back to what I was saying about reading/being-read-to as an S-M dynamic. I’m just trying to be a good top.”]

— a conversation with jordy rosenberg

[bookandcranny]

👀

[bookandcranny]

it can genuinely hurt to read challenging work but three quarters of the time it’s because of the part of you that’s observing and analyzing you having a hard time with the materials and deciding to be breathtakingly mean about it

[bookandcranny]

save me used book that costs $3... $3 used book save me

[bookandcranny]

the author's barely disguised longing for a kinder world

[bookandcranny]

“It’s a cliché among political philosophers that if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationships and local community. “Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She focused on the role of terror in breaking down social and family ties in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin. But we don’t need a secret police to turn us into atomized, isolated souls. All it takes is for us to stand by while unbridled capitalism rips apart the temporal preserves that used to let us cultivate the seeds of civil society and nurture the sadly fragile shoots of affection, affinity, and solidarity.”

— Judith Shulevitz, Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore