Reading Wednesday
Jul. 3rd, 2019 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
Speaking of Seanan McGuire
Date: 2019-07-03 02:57 pm (UTC)Re: Speaking of Seanan McGuire
Date: 2019-07-03 02:59 pm (UTC)There's also
Marvel
Date: 2019-07-03 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 03:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 03:03 pm (UTC)I should not be surprised that he has an interesting life, given his fiction and personality in general.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 02:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 02:12 pm (UTC)https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/samuel-r-delany-ash-wednesday
http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/junot-diaz-samuel-r-delany-radicalism-begins-body
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 05:42 pm (UTC)These guys didn't have their own mattresses.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 06:16 pm (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 08:09 pm (UTC)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?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 05:53 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-03 06:00 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 01:12 am (UTC)*politely pretends not to notice* ^_-
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 01:19 am (UTC)I admit it's close. And too soon to tell given that this series doesn't seem close to ending.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 02:22 pm (UTC)Yeah, I get the impression it'll be going for a while yet!
Have you read Middlegame?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 04:22 pm (UTC)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!
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 04:50 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 06:09 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-04 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 11:37 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 01:35 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 11:54 pm (UTC)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)
no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 11:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-06 08:28 am (UTC)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".
no subject
Date: 2019-07-05 11:46 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-07 04:00 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-07 12:38 pm (UTC)