Ash, by Malinda Lo (Buddy Review with Amanda at Zen Leaf)

Amanda and I read 'Ash' by Malinda Lo at the same time, so we did a little buddy review of it. This is the second half of that review, the first half being at her blog.

The story in Ash is pretty simple - it is a retelling of Cinderella, but one in which the 'fairy godmother' (a man in this case) is in love with Cinderella, and where instead of falling for the prince, Cinderella falls for the King's Huntress. I didn't enjoy it as much as Amanda, but it was a wonderful premise. Here's the second half of the review:

**************

Jason: I did not notice that. You'll laugh at me, but for a minute, I thought she was going to say the prince had a boyfriend at one point :D. But, then, it's interesting because even in this world, homosexuality felt like a rare exception to the general rule, an outlier not described properly by the 'rules of the game' - but that's just an impression. What you bring up about the romance is an interesting point. I didn't feel like it was like that with her fairy lover, but I certainly did with the huntress. But that didn't bother me, or impede my feeling like they were in love. I mean, part of what makes people so well suited to each other, I think, is that they can give each other what they need, you know? True love is more than just romantic attraction, it's feeling a comfort with each other. Some people need someone to be a comforter, some people need someone who is good at appreciating them, some people need someone who makes them feel like they are at home, etc. We all have things we need, and part of the beauty of love is that we can give those things to each other. So, which characters did you feel like you related to?

Amanda: I think it's uncomfortable to think about people choosing their romantic partners based on them being mother or father figures to them. Maybe it's because I was once in one of those types of relationships, but I think that there's automatically going to be a block in such cases. I get the impression that Ash and Kaisa could not live happily ever after because Ash really has some major issues to work out in herself. And I liked that about her. I liked that that was realistic.

I'm not sure I really related to any of the characters personally. I usually don't when it comes to fairy tales. Certainly I didn't to Ash or Sidhean. I understood Ash's stepmother and stepsisters, but didn't really relate to them either. I suppose in some ways I could understand Kaisa the best, though I felt like her character was a bit underdeveloped. I do like that she was considered a high station even though she was the king's huntress. I guess I assumed, when I first heard of the hunters and huntresses, that they were similar to the king's military - upper lower class, higher than servant but not royalty. It was interesting that she had a status above Lords. That wasn't something I expected. An interesting little twist in their world.

Who did you relate most to?

Jason: I think, in fairy tales, I usually relate to situations, more than characters. But in that sense, I related to Sidhean's situation, the sort of steady descent. Particularly at the end, where you learn that he has a curse that he, frankly, earned fair and square for his actions, I understood his character. I think sometimes I have to be cursed in order to learn, that I'm too oblivious to learn things without having my eyes opened by force. And so, the feeling that for him to grow he had to decay, and to be opened into real, genuine emotions (both love and regret, and then loss), was poignant to me - though I wish the last scene with him could have been a bit more evocative. I didn't mind it fading out then in the way it did, I just felt like that was the climactic scene for him, not her, and that he is almost absent in it.

Amanda: I'd agree with you on that sentiment. That was part of the place where I wish there had been MORE to the text. I personally am not convinced that Sidhean felt any real emotions, honestly. I don't know that a curse could actually make him feel something real, or that his feelings were ever anything more than lust/greed. There's argument both ways, but I couldn't feel like he really loved her, which I guess is why part of the ending felt false/unsettled to me. I needed more in order to buy into the way the book ended, to the way the characters all resolved their fates.

But overall, I really enjoyed the book. I'm sorry you didn't like it more. :/

Jason: Yes, that's part of the frustration, for me, is I felt like I had to really work to make up my own stories in this book - a fairy tale, to me, is just the opposite, it's this sort of infinitely fertile ground, that lets your brain spring up in different ways. Here, it felt like it was explained too much for that, but then not explained enough to be a world-intensive story like historical fiction or high fantasy might be. It kind of teetered back and forth and didn't succeed as either for me. But, honestly again, I think it is probably just me. I probably wanted the book to be something it just wasn't intended to be. Thanks for reading it with me, though :).

Read More......

Luna, Manchester, and Why Political Correctness IS Important

(Warning: This review makes occasional use of 'the f-word'. I don't use it OFTEN in life, but once in a while it finds it's way in. Sorry if I offend :/)

I recently read Luna, a book about about a transsexual girl - originally I had intended to write a more extensive conversation about it, but I don't think I could do so while maintaining my composure entirely (it was that good). And nobody needs that. I will only say that it was a beautiful book - it has it's faults, but fuck that, because it was beautiful and made me feel more awake than many a far more 'perfect' book. I don't know if it will affect everyone the same, but it did for me.

That being said, and my little store of comabtiveness being worn out...

I've actually had a number of places lately where I've been in contact with liminal things - those things which are neither this nor that, one thing or the other in our mind, and it has made me thoughtful on the idea.

Let me start with something that isn't as emotionally charged for us now: Victorian Manchester.

Manchester

Having just started a history of Manchester (Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City, by Gary S. Messinger), but having long been fascinated by the city, I found one of the early statements he makes very intriguing. Manchester (if you're not familiar with it's history) was the world's first truly industrial city, the first city that was built entirely around factories and industrial production (during the Industrial Revolution of early 19th century England). The city was a sort of shorthand for the horrors of modern living, as a result, for most of the Victorian period. And with good reason - people there lived in dire poverty, the rivers stank of chemicals and shone strange colors, the air was mired in endless smoke, the people were a mishmash of displaced immigrants, and the city government was forever trying to deal with problems it simply could not understand. This was early 19th century England - 'city' meant London, a mercantile city resting largely on the arms of merchants and tradesman, containing a (literally) medieval governmental structure. Manchester was something different, and it took a long time for people to find a paradigm to understand it:

Growth [in Industrial Manchester] posed fundamental problems of perception.... Educated Englishmen could have cited ancient Athens and Rome as more impressive than Manchester on all counts. Even easier were comparisons with the cities of the Low Countries... [or] London. Nevertheless contemporaries could find no complete precedent for Manchester.
To the present-day historian the reasons for this perplexity are clear. A modern observer can see that Manchester was the first predominantly industrial city in the history of the world... Contemporaries, of course, could not view matters in this perspective. But they did sense that Manchester's growth posed a challenge.

This challenge was, in many ways, a challenge of naming. People did not know what industry WAS, because they did not have the vocabulary we have now: simple words like 'blue collar workers' and 'urban growth'. Even words like 'industry', and 'wealth' had meanings that simply were not equipped to deal with these huge changes (consider that 'the spinning industry' pre-industrial revolution was something women did in the evenings in their homes, to earn extra money for their families, and a wooden spinning wheel was a complex, expensive piece of machinery).

The results of this phase shift are too complex to list hear, but they were deeply coloured by fear. Consider this is the period of the Luddites, who tried to destroy the machinery because it made it too easy to produce goods, reducing labor costs, for example. When the thing was an unnamed, belching smoke and displacing cultures, the thing was a monster, eating the green fields of England even as it bankrolled the empire. William Blake epitomized his horror in one of his poems, written as he calls for a struggle to return England to a state of New Jerusalem:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

That which is unknown and new is evil. The Faustian connection with science, progress and discovery is as old as the hills, and continues to hold resonance today (name me a movie about cloning that approaches the subject differently than a movie might approach a demon...). It was only, later, when we as a world had lived with the thing long enough to know it and to name it, and to learn what we meant with the name, that we could accept the new thing, and make it into something at least LESS disorderly. And in the end, industrialization has certainly had it's faults, but people live longer, more comfortably, and with a greater degree of equality than they did before the 'dark Satanic Mills' sprang up.

Before this could happen, though, people had to make a human, intuitive relationship with their new world. All the science, all the reason, all the evidence of the world couldn't win out UNTIL people had words and thoughts and history to understand themselves with.

Which is not to demean the science, reason and evidence - after all that's wher ethe words, thoughts and history CAME from. The industrialisation of England was accompanied by education - often feared and opposed by those in power, but in the end inevitable, and powerful. Common workers, put together in a small space, could take classes, discuss the world, come up with ideas, and make decisions about things larger than their own house. And for all that factory owners frequently feared that an educated populace was a cauldron of discontent, it was education that eventually saved the factories from public hatred. Education, after all, taught people to write and spell the names they had created, and taught them what the names meant.

Calpernia Addams

So, I know, that's oversimplifying a very complex issue, but turn now with to an (equally) complex issue that is more contemporary. In 1999, Barry Winchell, a PFC in the US Army stationed in Tennessee started dating a performer from Nashville. The two loved each other, they were happily dating, good sex life, the whole bit. The difference, the woman Winchell was dating, Calpernia Addams, happened to have a penis.

At this point, I find myself, paradoxically, in the same position that 19th century thinkers were in over Manchester: namely, what do I CALL Ms Addams? Is she a woman? Is she gay? Is she a she? I don't struggle with these names because I dislike transsexuals, but simply because there ARE no names that aren't terrifically loaded with meaning that I don't necessarily want to carry in what I'm saying. If I say gay, that implies something that doesn't exist in this case, for instance. Winchell was attracted to someone who he, and the other party, considered a woman. Winchell was asked, point blank, if he was gay, and responded 'no.' The same issue occured in Luna: the father asks if his son is Gay. Well, from the son's point of view? No, not at all. She's attracted to men, and in her mind, she's a woman.

With other words, there is just too much baggage. 'Transsexual' as a word, to me, feels either clinical (like a diagnosis) or derogatory (ie, the root of the word 'tranny'). Of course there are many transsexuals who don't feel this way, and in fact many words in a lot marginalized communities are derogatory terms that are being reclaimed as badges of pride (queer is a good example). But that's the thing: until the world has time to settle in, the world HAS baggage - negative or positive depending on the readers point of view, but baggage nonetheless.

This can make it uncomfortable, even dangerous to have the conversation. If I don't LIKE the word transsexual, then when you say it to me, the meaning of what you're saying changes, unavoidably. If the word Drag Queen has associations of ridiculousness to you, it's difficult to discuss someone who likes to wear women's clothing without marginalizing them, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, simply because our vocaublary is designed to marginalize people.

And the marginalization is sadly very effective. After being harassed by some of his fellow soldiers for his relationship, one of the harassers pounded his skull in with a baseball bat as he slept.

The immediate reaction in this situation is, for me at least, horror, abject and terrible. Followed by a deep desire to believe the murderer is, simply, a monster. But the problem is, believing men to be monsters is what created the situation in the first place. This isn't to remove any personal responsibility from the situation. The murderer is, DEFINITELY a murderer, and the act he committed is horrific. But, to make actions like this stop, just like making Luddite riots stop, we have to be able to name things, we have to be able to give people a vocabulary, because without a vocabulary, there is no world of ideas and thought, there is no change. You cannot get rid of monsters by killing monsters, you can only get rid of monsters by teaching them to be human.

Creating Names

Names are very powerful things. Consider the history of the last 10 years of the United States without the word terrorist, or the history of the holocaust without the words holocaust and genocide. Words DO matter - that's why I love to read, after all. The problem is that, naturally, the past has an advantage in loaded words over the future. When homosexuality became more public, it was the old word, first, that people knew: sodomy.

The trick is the future must find a way to make a new word. Sometimes, this is done, again, by subverting the old words, taking them back to make new meanings like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes it isn't - perhaps the old word is unreclaimable, perhaps the people affected want a fresh start. One way or the other, new language is created: 'Negro' becomes 'African American', 'sodomite' becomes 'homosexual'.

Of course, this new-word attitude is easy to lampoon, and can be overdone. This is where a lot of the animosity towards political correctness begins. If *I* say Negro without bias, why shouldn't I say it? Frederick Douglass said Negro. WEB Dubois said Negro. MLK said Negro. Why make a new word? Why be upset when people don't use your new word? It's a tricky balance, of course, but you have to remember that while you can control how you say an old word, you CAN'T control how someone else HEARS it. And even if using an unloaded word, using careful language feels awkward now, and even if it changes noone's mind, it educates a new generation with a new, more compassionate vocabulary - just as the old Mancunians had to learn a new way to describe a city, a factory, a world.

One of the truly painful things in the story about Addams and Winchell to me was that the two men most implicated in it were not designed to be bigots. One of them had a transvestite fetish and may have been homosexual. The other had known homosexuals in high school and had no problem with them. The issue is that the words still carried the weight of bias, and the stiuation provided no vocabulary to talk the situation over like humans. The argument: "You're a faggot!" "No, I'm not!" is, if you tease it apart, an argument over labels, a war of definition. The argument never made it beyond definition into conversation - partly because there IS no general definition for the situation Addams and Winchell found themselves in. Would the murderers have magically been nice guys who could have overcome their fear if there was a way to define the situation? Perhaps not. Perhaps the conversation would have solved nothing, perhaps it would have revealed only an irreconcilable hatred. But I wish they could have had the conversation, that they could have tried. And I wish WE could have the conversation, as a society, without having to struggle to define what it is we're even talking about.

Read More......

Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe (NSFW)

WARNING: Hero and Leander is an erotic poem from the Elizabethan period. This review contains references to sex and frank discussion of sexuality and erotica. If this makes you uncomfortable, don't feel obliged to read this post. When I was in high school, reading Shakespeare, our teachers (all of them) pointed out the dirty jokes to us. I remember this clearly, because I remember feeling like this was a sort of pat on the head - "well, they're just kids they can't enjoy this, so we'd better at least point out the dirty jokes. They'll like that". Dirty Jokes are not rare in Shakespeare. But normally they're just that - dirty jokes, nothing more. Shakespeare is frequently romantic, but in my limited experience, never erotic. Christopher Marlowe is an entirely different ball of wax. I will admit I had never read anything by Mr. Marlowe. I knew him as that guy who got killed in a barfight and wrote poems. Hero and Leander came up as a new recording on Librivox recently, I wanted to listen to a long poem while I was driving on a trip for work this week, and the powers converged. This was NOT what I expected. Witness this scene between Neptune and Leander, the male hero:

He clapped his plump cheeks, with his tresses played And, smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed. He watched his arms and, as they opened wide At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance, And, as he turned, cast many a lustful glance, And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye, And dive into the water, and there pry Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, And up again, and close beside him swim, And talk of love.

Or this, between Leander and Hero, his beloved, as she loses her virginity:

For though the rising ivory mount he scaled, Which is with azure circling lines empaled, Much like a globe (a globe may I term this, By which love sails to regions full of bliss) Yet there with Sisyphus he toiled in vain, Till gentle parley did the truce obtain. Wherein Leander on her quivering breast Breathless spoke something, and sighed out the rest;

The poem tells the story of two classically star-crossed lovers: the (ironically) virginal priestess of Aphrodite and Leander a man whose beauty Marlowe describes with a wanton luxury of words:

I could tell ye How smooth his breast was and how white his belly; And whose immortal fingers did imprint That heavenly path with many a curious dint That runs along his back, but my rude pen Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, Much less of powerful gods.

They fall in love, she tells him to come to her in her tower, and they... fool around, but don't fully consummate their love. She tells him to come back the next day, but his father finds out and forbids it. Unwilling to give up his love, Leander leaps into the waters of the Hellespont that separate the two, where Neptune, mistaking him for Ganymede, the beautiful cupbearer of Zeus attempts to seduce him. Realizing that the boy is drowning, Neptune figures out it ISN'T an immortal (always a good sign of that, drowning), and after talking to him about how lovely sex between men can be, finally gives up on the boy, and Leander arrives at Hero's tower - naked. Leander flees, to the shadows. Then to her stairs. Then to her room. Then to her bed. Yes, the implication is that she's not REALLY fleeing. The two of them consummate their amours, and the poem draws to a close as the sun rises (it was probably unfinished). I could talk about the beauty of Marlowe's language, I could tell you about the imagery he used, or the symbolic nature of the poem, I could dance endlessly around the central issue, but the central issue is this: this poem is about sex, and about how wonderful and exciting it is, hands down, no question. It's supposed to be a bit of a romp, yes, and admittedly, there is supposed to a bit of humor to Neptune trying to seduce the boy, but really, throughout the work, the poem is intense, erotic, and beautiful. And this is where I find myself stymied. Ironically, while our modern day talks incessantly about sex, there is a sort of code, that we can talk about it only in one of three ways: very clinically (like it's discussed on the news), very humorously (or at least with the attempt to be so), and talking 'dirty'. Our lexicon of sex tends towards the degrading, the angry. It's no coincidence that our words for the sexual act, or for the organs involved are either meant for textbooks, or used dually as descriptors and curse words. This is how sex is in our culture - it is either something we acknowledge logically, or something we're supposed to wallow in. Sex as beautiful gets paid lipservice, and some people really honestly fight for the beauty to come back to sex. But more or less? Sex is something we snigger about. More than anything else, listening to this, I was struck by sadness of that. Sex lives in the shadows of our lives - even of our private lives. Sex is associated with words like 'naughty' and 'dirty', if it's vocalized, often even within couples who have been having sex for ages. It brings up an interesting set of questions, really. For example, why is it hard for a person to tell their lover how great their sex was without either discussing tactics (clinical) or 'talking dirty'? Why is, say, a wife making a video of herself undressing or masturbating for her husband something 'naughty'? Maybe these things should be, I don't know. I certainly am not arguing that people should talk about their sex in the middle of a crowded restaurant the way they talk about the football game, or anything. But, when did 'private' begin to equal 'dirty'? When did 'honest' begin to equal 'clinical'? I don't know the answers, I'm just chewing on the questions

Read More......

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.

To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway were the first books of Woolf's I ever read. I don't remember which came first (I believe it was To the Lighthouse), but I remember the contrast in my experience of them. Mrs Dalloway was dark, far away, it did no seem to wish me to come in. As a book, it was forbidding and self-contained, a fortress of a book, filled I was sure with something beautiful, something which I could smell and hear at times, but which I was forbidden to see, simply because I was not worthy of the experience. (I've since peeked my eyes just over the fortress wall, mind you, but nonetheless...).

To the Lighthouse was none of these things. It was inscrutable perhaps, yes, but not inscrutable in the way that the interior of a fortress is, none of the feeling of being kept out of a thing. To the Lighthouse had the inscrutability of the sea - vast, eminently available, explorable, considerable, but nonetheless, unknowable - even as we know it. I feel about To the Lighthouse the way boys in old books felt about the sea: that it is a place where souls are forged, where experiences are had, a place with a certain home-ness to it. To the Lighthouse, like the sea, was a lover, or a harsh mistress. Mrs. Dalloway was a cloud, eminently arrayed but ever out of reach.

Over the past month, it's come to my attention from different people that this is not the normal way of things - that most people feel the opposite way, in fact. I want to tell you what I see in To the Lighthouse, that makes me feel at home - unavoidably my little essay will fail, because the very reason that the book is inscrutable is because the experience of immensity is supposed to be indescribable. That is, I guess, what makes it immense. But, I will have, at least, made the attempt.

For me, To the Lighthouse is a book about inbetween places and people. The lighthouse itself is a perfect example of this - it is a building that is at once of the sea and the sky, built on land that barely exists. It clings to earth - it is immersed in sea and sky. The house has a similar story, particularly in the second part, when it is invaded by the sand and the wind, and starts to decay - before being put aright again by the servants. Mrs Ramsay herself is, in many ways, the same sort of symbol - at once her hands are in the practical world, of raising children and worrying over molehills, of setting up love matches and entertaining guests, while her mind, at a moments notice, is lost in the immensities of thought, ranging over the great questions of philosophy with an easy authenticity that paints the efforts of her husband, or Charles Tannsley as what they are - gropings, accidental spelunkings obtained in pursuit of other ends. The towers of this novel are immensely tied into this to me, into this balance between the great and sensual sea, and the immensity of the sky.

Of course, I know that sounds like a kind of paragraph of nonsense, but there is a reason, for me, that it isn't. The lighthouse, the house, Mrs Ramsay (for everyone but herself), the sea, the sky, the tidal regions of the beach, all these twilit places would seem to tease an obvious question - what do they mean? OR to solidify the question more - these things are like life, halfway between the heavens and the grave, and inevitably bound for one or the other (or both, depending on your philosophy). Humans are, after all, this strange mixture of the sensual and the spiritual, and for eons, man has over and over asked the question - why? Why are we here? Why are we what we are? What are we, eminent strugglers, supposed to struggle against?

I think, though, in To the Lighthouse, this is a deceptive question: the very central point of the book, for me, is that the answer doesn't really matter. Asking the purpose of life is like asking the purpose of the sea, or the purpose of a painting, or the purpose of a child. They are things that simply are.

This may sound like simple old-fashioned Atheism - in a sense it is. It is and it isn't. The character of Charles Tansley shows this - he is the 'quintessential atheist' of the book (I put this in quotes because I don't mean to imply that atheists are like this, or like that, simply that the literary IDEA of an atheist is like Charles Tansley). Charles doesn't believe in nothing, rather he believes in believing in nothing. He believes there is no God, whereas the novel simply doesn't bother believing there is a God - or that there isn't. It accepts that there is a world, that is is here, that we are here, that we will die, and other people will live, that none of will accomplish immortality, and then gently, gently, ever so gently, whispers to us that we will live in it anyway. Like Mrs Ramsey, sometimes that will terrify us, sometimes it will comfort us. And that's okay, and there is no answer that will resolve it for us. In a world with no particular purpose, we must define our own, and we can never be wrong - and we can never be right. We simply will all live, try to do things we think are good, try not to do what we think is bad, and then, one day, we will die. We will paint, or write, or fix computers, and perhaps we'll be remembered for a very long time, or perhaps barely a moment, but eventually, we'll be forgotten. Our happiness will not last, but we will, in spite of that - or maybe because of that - be happy for our moment.

From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople."
"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."

Read More......