Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Finished reading: Heavenly Breakfast by Samuel R. Delaney. I've only ever read Delaney's fiction before, and really had no idea he'd written any non-fiction. Heavenly Breakfast is a semi-memoir about the time he lived in a NYC commune in 1968 with a band by the same name. It jumps back between notes he took at the time and recollections a decade later.

Having lived in a coop and collective living situations, I have to say that the thought of a living arrangement like Heavenly Breakfast squicks me out. I'm probably a bad leftist but I need my space and the thought of everyone sleeping in a room (in both senses of the word) and a shared bathtub in the kitchen is just horrifying. The Heavenly Breakfast is contrasted with two other houses: The Place, so anarchic that it doesn't even have electricity and everyone is on drugs, and January House, which comes off as rigid and hierarchical and full of terrible people.

It's at its most interesting when the 1970s Chip's voice kicks in, analyzing the revolutionary potential (or lack there of) of communal living, and suggesting his past self is an unreliable narrator. At one point, one of the women reads his memoir and comments that she's portrayed as not doing anything significant even though they had a life-altering conversation that he doesn't remember at all. My favourite passage involves the commune members encountering a man who is polling people about their attitudes to the Vietnam War on the street, and is dismayed when they refuse to answer.

"All political action within a given system perpetuates that system if only because that system has defined which actions are and which actions are not political. But when all questions of politics, from policy to the presidential election, follow the semantic form 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' the spectrum from yes through maybe to no is a meaningless range of answers."

Currently reading: In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire. This is the latest book in Seanan's Wayward Children series, and follows Lundy, who we meet in the first book. Wayward Children is swiftly becoming my favourite of this prolific author's series, possibly even eclipsing Newsflesh (don't tell @umadoshi!). All of the books are relatively standalone and revolve around Eleanor West's School For Wayward Children, a boarding school for kids who have entered magical worlds through portals and are now having problems readjusting to life in our world. They're melancholy, bittersweet odes to the loss of childhood innocence and they tend to mess me up quite a bit. Portal fantasy is among my favourite genres, and the exploration of what happens to children afterwards and their feelings of rejection grounds the stories in a very adult, very bleak reality.

Lundy is an obedient, bookish child who walks through a door into the Goblin Market, which is also very rules focused. Unlike all of the previous children we've met, Lundy is able to go back and forth between worlds, as long as she follows the rules and understands that when she turns 18, she'll be permanently on one side or the other (children who don't follow the rules are turned into birds). This being a prequel, we already know what happens: Lundy ends up on our side of the door, cursed to age in reverse, and helping Eleanor run the school. But it's the getting there that is compelling, her gradual distancing from our world and the bargains she makes to survive in the other.

Comments

Speaking of Seanan McGuire

[dewline]

I'm guessing that you already know of her projects for Marvel and other comics publishers? She also has a presence here on Dreamwidth. If you were already aware of that, feel free to ignore/delete this.

Re: Speaking of Seanan McGuire

[sabotabby]

Yes! Though I am so out of the loop on Marvel that I never know where to start for things to make sense.

There's also aftertheendtimes, which I'm a member of.

Marvel

[dewline]

Understandable, that "out of the loop" comment. She's been writing Spider-Gwen/Ghost Spider for about a year now, but I waited until after the most recent comics Spider-verse crossover was done because...well, long story involving my walking away from the Parker-focused titles after they retconned away Peter's marriage to MJ. I stick to the adventures of "Earth-65" Spider-Gwen and "Earth-616" Miles Morales now.

[kore]

I loved Heavenly Breakfast. I remember reading it in the early eighties and wishing he'd write more memoirs, and then boom! Motion of Light in Water.

[sabotabby]

I'm gonna have to read that too.

I should not be surprised that he has an interesting life, given his fiction and personality in general.

[kore]

MOLIW is B E A U T I F U L. It's one of my favourite memoirs -- books -- ever. It's so good and introspective and probing and all about his writing as well as his sex life and being young in NYC and being gay and married and it's just so so so good.

[rdi]

I just read "Bread and Wine", which is a graphic novel(la?) about how he met his partner, who at the time was living homeless on the streets of New York. Sounds like I need to read these as well!

[sabotabby]

He's prolific. I haven't read nearly enough of his stuff based on how much I enjoy the stuff that I've read.

[kore]

I really liked Bread and Wine too, even if that was a little bit more of Delany than I was expecting to see! But the art's gorgeous.

[kore]

Also if you like his memoirs he just had two great pieces in the Boston review

https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/samuel-r-delany-ash-wednesday

http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/junot-diaz-samuel-r-delany-radicalism-begins-body

[minoanmiss]

FWIW a commune like that would squick me too but/and it's fascinating to read abotu.

[sabotabby]

My feelings exactly.

[frenzy]

i can be a bad leftist with you because i lived in a commune for 5 years and I am super Over It. like I could live on a compound, but i need my own space. and no my own bunk is not my own space.

[sabotabby]

Space divided into apartments (with separate kitchens and bathrooms) or a compound with friends is really ideal.

These guys didn't have their own mattresses.

[frenzy]

Geez.

Yeah in the older days of the commune i lived in, folks shared their CLOTHES and that seemed too extreme to me.

like im happy to share i guess. but just knowing 200 something other folks could snag the one thing i want to wear that day?

still basically if you were married you got your own room. well with your spouse. all living rooms and kitchens were shared. single folks always had to have a roommate. and it was so so tiny

[nyctanthes]

Love the quote about surveys.

[sabotabby]

Yeah, I'm feeling that especially with the mainstream discourse around the concentration camps. I basically don't believe in borders let alone imprisoning and murdering people who cross them, and to hear people nitpicking about how the camps should be run (not friends of mine, but, like, most of the Dem establishment) is just such a bizarre framing of the issue that I feel like I don't even have the common ground to begin debating the issue with them.

[nyctanthes]

Yeah...I read something today that basically said "the Dems on tv/in the debates are left/progressive. But guess what, the Dems actually governing this country are not particularly left wing." Not a groundbreaking thought. But a sobering reminder.

As long as liberals cluster on the coasts and our electoral system continues to disproportionately weigh the votes of conservative, underpopulated, white majority states...we're screwed?

[sabotabby]

That, and the Dems lack, in general, imagination and faith in their convictions. The best they seem to be able to muster is tiny tweaks in reaction to the massive changes that the Republicans toss at them.

[ironed_orchid]

I've got his memoir The Motion of Light on Water, which charts the early years of his relationship with Marilyn Hacker (and others) and which finishes around 1968. There's a great bit in there where he interrupts the narrative to say that people in the late 80s think he's irresponsible for writing about cruising and bathhouse culture in the 60s, but he wants to write about what it was like then, and that it is pure luck that he never got HIV/AIDS.

I really want to read Heavenly Breakfast, which sounds like it was written first, but set afterwards.

Having lived in a hippy commune in the bush, I like the idea of urban communes with separate dwellings but shared garden spaces and a dedicated space for parties and communal meals. Basically like condos, but everyone knows each other.

[sabotabby]

I want to read that. He's a fascinating character.

I think condos where you know everyone would be great. I'm also all for sharing tasks and spaces that I don't care about (i.e., gardening) but I require a separate living space for everyone's health and wellbeing.

[umadoshi]

possibly even eclipsing Newsflesh (don't tell umadoshi!)

*politely pretends not to notice* ^_-

[sabotabby]

:D

I admit it's close. And too soon to tell given that this series doesn't seem close to ending.

[umadoshi]

And too soon to tell given that this series doesn't seem close to ending.

Yeah, I get the impression it'll be going for a while yet!

Have you read Middlegame?

[sabotabby]

I haven't. It looks really up my alley, though.

[lapinlunaire]

I'm squicked out by that idea too. Everyone sleeping in a room? There's NO WAY that is hygienic. There's a reason why diseases ran rampant in Victorian slums where people didn't have enough space! Come on! I also feel like a lot of these situations attract the "bathing is too burgeois" types so no, I would not want to share anything. Barf.

That paragraph you quoted is... I have no words.

I now want to read this book, but don't want to read this book. How many stomach ulcers will I have by the end of it?

Wayward Children sounds really interesting, thank you for the rec!

[sabotabby]

The Place sounded downright nightmarish; I've been to spaces like that and they're awful. But I'm bougie and relatively fastidious.

On the plus side, he doesn't get super graphic. There is a particularly bad bit involving a child.

I think you'll enjoy Wayward Children. The first is arguably the weakest (lots of time spent worldbuilding, with a secondary world classification system that feels gratuitous to me) but it just keeps getting better from there.

[lapinlunaire]

I've never been to actual communes but I've been to similar situations. At my old uni there was this thing, like student housing but different from the regular student housing. Those houses are effectively managed by the students who live there so they have different systems and you have to be invited to live there. I went to a couple of the left-leaning ones and they were pretty gross. One was especially bad, it attracted an even larger amount of "bathing is bougie" types. For example, there was this white guy with dreads and I'm sure you can see where this is going, his dreads were 100% disgusting, he always seemed to wear the same pants, he wore sandals and you could always see black grime under his toe nails, and he always smelled like fish for some reason I'd rather not know. I had a classmate who lived there (we were never actually friends and she later turned out to be really into shit-talking people) and invited me over for dinner, I don't know how I managed to be polite and eat because their kitchen smelled like actual garbage. Also, somehow in these houses they could paint murals but had mold growing on the walls and somehow couldn't fix that. SHUDDERING FOREVER.

In my case I don't think it's just being burgeois because I have reasons! One is obviously my OCD. The other is cultural and the way I was raised. My father is a very gross person and showered every day, now imagine those of us who aren't gross.

I also don't think hygiene is burgeois, it's annoying people looking for an excuse to be disgusting while trying to claim leftist cred.

[sabotabby]

Hygiene is in no way bourgeois! Like have you noticed that it's mainly white people who reject showing regularly (historically and today)? All the primmies I knew were white. Like it doesn't make you one with nature, it just makes you gross.

[cloudsinvenice]

I've seen black people on Twitter pointing out how much privilege it takes to go, "You know what, being clean is optional for me!" Like if you're white you can spin that shit as an eccentricity, whereas for a minority racists will jump all over it and say it's indicative of the moral character of an entire category of people.

I will keep an eye out for that book. I'm always intrigued by accounts of punk houses, communes etc., though I always feel like I'm a little bit too private and a little bit too controlling to thrive in that situation.

[sabotabby]

The farther you are from power and privilege, the less freedom you have to bend the rules of conventional lifestyles and attractiveness.

When I was in high school, one of my acquaintances discovered feminism and decreed that No Woman Ought To Shave Her Pits and Arms. Which, in theory, is something that I accept as true. But. She was a slim, conventionally attractive blond girl, and her unshaven hair looked like duck down, and she had no problem getting jobs, teachers' approval, friends, and boyfriends despite her natural state (she could also get away with no makeup). Whereas on me, the same thing reads as slovenly and lazy, and I have relatively light hair.

[cloudsinvenice]

This is exactly it.

[lapinlunaire]

There was a really good zine (I think it was) about feminism and not shaving body hair, and it was about exactly that, how it's so much easier for some women rather than others.

Now that's reminding me of JKR describing a Sikh girl as having a moustache and I'm pissed off again.

To be fair, I don't wear makeup. I don't know if people have ever disapproved of that or if they even notice. It's just that I was never taught how to put on makeup and when I tried to teach myself I gave up because I hear you need foundation or whatever it's called and I have a really hard time finding my skin tone, especially among cruelty-free brands. But I'm definitely lucky, e.g. I've never had to work at a cosmetics store where it definitely sounds like a requirement (not that I'd be hired, I know nothing about cosmetics)

[sabotabby]

If you feel like spending a lot of money on cruelty free makeup, I cannot recommend Black Moon enough. It's expensive, but they have beautiful colours (and on their website they show how each colour looks on different skin tones) and their lipstick tastes like cookie dough. Also they're vegan and they give some of their proceeds to cancer research or something.

[lapinlunaire]

That's a really good point. PoC already have the reputation of "smelling bad" and there are lots of racial stereotypes related to smell, so there's probably less pressure on white people. If you're a middle class white person you can be rebellious and not shower, if you're a middle class PoC you don't want to seem gross.

[cloudsinvenice]

I'm getting increasingly interested in how certain behaviours get a pass when someone has enough privilege, versus how differently they're interpreted without it.

I was watching a documentary the other day where an autistic woman pointed out that when you're disabled (particularly if you're not neurotypical or have a mental health condition), support staff will tend to see all your personality quirks as aspects of your disability, as functioning problems that need to be stamped out. Queerness in people with ASD can often be seen as "gender confusion" and problematised by clinicians. Yes, a lot of autistic people are resistant to social pressure towards binary gender expressions, but if the person is happy with who they are, then that's a feature, not a bug.

Edit: I mean, not that queerness is universally accepted when you're not autistic, gah, far from it, but it does illustrate rather well what happens when society says to some groups "all your differences have to be levelled out" and to others "you're normal so we'll overlook that".

[lapinlunaire]

OH GOD the "one with nature" argument. I hate that one too. There are plenty of animals that actually attempt to be clean. If you're out in nature, being gross is a great way to get parasites or be found by predators, so I guess it's true in a way. Commune with those parasites! Feel at one with the fleas! Get the plague!

I'm sure it's not all PoC who have a background of being clean but I feel like in a lot of cultures and community there is, and in some cases that's been taken away in recent times but was a historical thing. I have definitely never heard any POC make the "in Medieval times nobody showered and everyone was ok!" argument.

[smilingslightly]

Just saw this newly published interview with Delany, which is to be part of a series: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stonewall-before-and-after-an-interview-with-samuel-r-delany/

The following conversation springs from Chip’s reflections on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in the summer of 1969, stirring up memories as diverse as his childhood summer camp, his most obscene novel, and his mother’s stroke . . . .Along the way, Chip gives substance to his lifelong artistic and scholarly interrogation of the politics of identity, bringing into relief the marvelous resistance of our lives and experiences to solidify themselves into anything as stable as a fixed self and a unified vision. For Delany, Stonewall was not a transformative moment, but a symptom of a larger metamorphosis in American culture, one deeply connected to his own childhood, when he met Stormé DeLarverie as a camp counselor, long before she became famous for allegedly throwing the first punch at Stonewall.

I had somehow got the impression that Heavenly Breakfast was an abridged version of Motion of Light and thus never read it, which is exciting because now I have an unread memoir to seek out. I'm betting his time in the commune heavily informed some of the 'gang' living scenes in Dhalgren, which is the book I would try to memorize at the end of Fahrenheit 451, good luck to me.

[sabotabby]

I think his commune experience popped up in Through the Valley Of the Nest Of Spiders b/c the sex and living situation in that also made me feel profoundly uncomfortable.