Iconoclastic Bookshelf or Hipster Shenanigans? (February Reading)

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I have been waiting all month to make a post with that title. I'm tempted to make a poll questioning my break from the norm vs. the subject's wish to appear rebellious without actually breaking from socially acceptable roles, but that's taking the joke too far.

I'm pushing to get this out tonight because I am upset about the failboat disrespect of people's request to remain pseudonymous, and Micole asked people, If you'd like to express sympathy or agreement, I would much prefer to re-focus attention back on the real issues . . . if you can't think of anything (I am looking forward to being in the audience myself) or you are just too fucking tired of dealing with the SRS BZNSS of RaceFail (I am totally with you), but you want to do me a favor, post on the most recent book you read written by a POC, or your favorite book written by a POC, or give me recommendations for sf/f, romance, or historical fiction written by POC. So I point people to my comments on Zami to fill that request.

Tomorrow, as part of my work (and procrastinate) plan for my class 2-page essay, I will write something about why people might use pseuds online, and historically, to discuss contentious issues. I don't want my leisure reading to disintegrate into unhappy politicized polemics, but the pseud issue touches close to my heart, and the "race and the science fiction community" issues are in my back yard, and all the places I love. "Love" was a typo for "live", but both words can be used in that sentence with some degree of truth.

So, books!

God Stalk (P. C. Hodgell): I first read this around 2000 or so, as part of the Dark of the Gods anthology with Dark of the Moon and a short story, "Bones". It made only the slightest impression on me then, and now that I reread it I can more clearly say why: if the Gray Mouser were a girl with psychic powers, that would be very similar to this book. Sword and sorcery doesn't feed my id the way spaceships do, so I tend to be a lot pickier about my worldbuilding.

Wierdly, I may have enjoyed this more if I had read it later: Jame takes the cake for strained relationship with consensus reality, Marc is poor like the starving bohemian kids living on Avenue A, only he's not a kid, and there's a creeping edge of horror in Perimal Darkling that I should have liked. Hodgell's style may be working against her here; I want something a little more fluid to match Jame's fluid, damaged ethics. Also, there's some first novel structural flaws: the opening sequence on the Night of Dead Gods went on way too long, and Jame's delay in leaving the city was evident by looking at how much of the book was left when she first said she planned to leave. (It's like House. If you're 35 minutes in, it's never lupus, and the non-lupus treatment is also wrong.)

I also quickly reread/skimmed short stories in the Blood and Ivory collection, which may have influenced my sense that the horror should make me more queasy.

One Bullet Away: the Making of a Marine Officer (Nathaniel Fick):

After the talk, a young professor stood. "How can you support the presence of ROTC at a place like Dartmouth?" she asked. "It will militarize the campus and threaten our culture of tolerance."

"Wrong," replied Ricks. "It will liberalize the military."

Dartmouth college student challenges himself: to be a Marine office, to be a leader of men in peace and war, to be a Recon Marine. A little more than half the book chronicles Fick's experiences in and after his involvement with Operation Iraqi Freedom. I really liked the book: it talks about something I would never, ever in a million years do, so it's interesting to see the perspective of someone who does. It's also awesome parallax with Generation Kill, since the two books overlap at First Recon's experiences in the Iraq invasion. On a personal note, I am amazed at my hubris in posting my reactions to nonfiction accounts by and about living people, who might find this while vanity googling. It feels invasive. On the other hand, they wrote a book, so that constitutes tacit agreement to exposure in the sphere of public interest, yes?

That doesn't cover finding blog entries talking about how someone knows this guy and he's in this book this other guy wrote. Anyway: my toolbox of nitpicking genre fiction is poorly adapted to living-people nonfiction.

I am thinking about this because one of the things I found interesting about One Bullet Away is the mix of insight into Fick's experiences and emotions in the line of duty, separated from life events that might have been happening at the same time. I think there's one or two mentions of a girlfriend, and a couple nights out while in friendly territory. I'm one of those classic women who thinks by association - the cat licking his - Toby, have you gotten neutered yet? I need to ask K about that - next to the couch, tomorrow's work schedule, the laptop, the book review, it's all part of the big picture! - so I wonder what parts were elided that were significant to Fick's experience. But, you know, living breathing person who works around here and who I may have brushed past on the metro, so do I really want That Much Information. In the context of this semester's accidental project to educate myself, I want to see how the military works, and doesn't work, for different people, but what's the best way to do that?

So I give One Bullet Away thumbs up for keeping my attention and making me think on several different fronts.

Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World (Ken Alibek): All my notes are not available at the moment! I wish I had them! There isn't a lot to say without them: this was written in the '90s, it made me understand a little better why the bio and chemical WMD charges might not have seemed completely and intrinsically absurd in the 2001-2004 era, and I am interested in the moral equivocation Alibek experienced while working on these projects. I am also interested in Alibek's presentation of himself in the text as being a less-than-political figure, while rising quickly and high in the Soviet ranks. (norabombay, this is a little like the problematic characterization in the story we were talking about last night.) I think a second perspective on some of Alibek's promotions would be interesting. What I would also be interested in seeing is a good nonfiction book on the American biological weapons program. I read one book a couple years ago focusing on the chemical warfare stuff, but it didn't say a lot about biological agents.

Trivia: when I went to NYC a couple of weekends ago, I made a silly strung-out fool of myself talking to two older women while waiting for the bus home, then pulled this out to stick a sock in my mouth. It caught one woman's attention because she has actually met Alibek in the course of her work at the FDA. Speaking of small worlds! So now I doubly regret my nervous joking while in line for the bus.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Audre Lorde):

Carriacou which was not listed... nor appeared on any map that I could find... (p14)

This is Lorde's "biomythography", her reshaping of experience in racist, alien New York City into a story of Lorde finding her strength. One has to question the factual nature of the text, which may have been bent to present the truths of Lorde's story.

We held hands in Central Park Zoo and watched the monkeys. The mandrill looked at us with great sad eyes and we agreed with him that whether we were angry or not we'd never go that long without talking again, because friendship was too important and besides, neither one of us could remember what we'd argued about. (p92)

Lorde doesn't talk in a didactic way about the importance of women in her life; she says, once, "these are the people I have emotional resonance with" (I'm paraphrasing terribly, but Zami is ten miles away and I am not postponing this post to retrieve it) and spends more than 200 pages talking about the important people in her life, and all of them other than her father are women. Even her brush with pregnancy is framed around the pregnancy and abortion, not around the man who she slept with.

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

The dark side of this is the pain and misery: drugs, alienation, conflict with others and herself. Weed, speed and booze were common to Lorde's circle, as were poverty and rejection. It's hard to explain the pervasive effacement a black lesbian like Lorde would have faced. There were no novels for people "like" her. There was no Jackie O., or Harvey Milk, or even figures known well in smaller circles. And there was no community that embraced every part of Audre Lorde.

Every one of the women took for granted, and would have said if asked, that we were all on the side of right. But the nature of that right everyone presumed to be on the side of was always unnamed.It was just another way of silently avoiding having to examine what our living positions were within our small group of lesbians, dependent as we were on each other for support. (p205)

I think it's hard to admit you are wrong. I'm not sure Lorde was very good at it either. She wanted to be seen as the go-to person, a pillar of strength as strong as (or stronger than) the mother she fought with until and after she parted with her childhood home. And saying you have learned better implies mistakes, and you can't make mistakes if you're the go-to person. Lorde was not perfect, but she is broken and has tried to mend herself in ways that I find interestingly expressed.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold): I have had a very hard time with these novels for several reasons. Briefly, I find the core romance unconvincing, but Bujold is a talented writer even when I question what the heck she's doing. Also, now that I've read all four volumes, Bujold's claims that the series is a lot tighter than any of her previous series is spot on. In fact, I think splitting the novels does the story arc a great disservice. (For example, I unfortunately tend to think of Remo and Barr as backup Lakwalker #1 and backup Lakewalker #2, in the tradition of Merry and Pippin, the LotR backup hobbits.)

I think there are reasons beyond the May-December romance that I have issues. The series is written in Midwest dialect, which I generally do not notice as dialect until someone calls me on my New England / Mid-Atlantic word choice and sentence structure. Usually I dismiss it as simplistic. Which is wrong, but a a consequence of my world-view which I should address. The series is also a melange of genres: romance, fantasy, and now western. I recently found a book review and discussion of westerns that made me more sensitive to the specifically Western racial nuances underlying the Western genre. (And folks, don't go stampeding Veejane, I didn't ask before linking, so please say where you got the pointer, and behave respectfully. You know, wipe the mud off your shoes when you walk in the door, respect house rules, etc.) The series, especially Horizon, sets up the farmers as settlers absorbing lakewalker territory. Bujold argues for assimilation - the southern lakewalker camp Fawn and Dag visit has become more materialistic than northern camps, and has problems with members leaving the community to persue romantic relationships with farmers - which, since I was just reading Audre Lorde going on about the strength of difference, I'm not sure I agree with.

So. Horizon. Dag and Fawn confront the problem of building a Famer-Lakewalker community.

...okay, Bujold is trying. Fawn's unhappiness during the early part of Dag's medicine maker apprenticeship is uncomfortably reminiscent of underemployment in the face of following the spouse to a new job / deployment / whatever.

And yet. I was terribly surprised and delighted by Arkady following Dag northward, because I like Arkady. He's like Dag - older in body, skilled in his field, flexible in mind - only Arkady's emo baggage is packed with neat corners, and does not involve falling in love with someone young enough to be his granddaughter. Also, I associate the name with awesome characters (scroll to "Arkady Bogdanov").

On a petty, petty, note, I am glad to see two items I have been waiting for since the first book: the super-malice, and the logical conclusion of the romance in Dag and Fawn's child. The offspring thing becomes tangled in the question of community, which is interesting - it takes a village, thank you Hilary Clinton! - because where you raise your kids now influences who they are later.

I liked the exploration of society in the south, with the diversity within the lakewalkers, and the fuzzy boundaries where the groups are starting to blend. By the way, anyone who is surprised I liked prickly Calla, you have not been paying attention.

Comments

Re: For your amusement

[(Anonymous)]

This is why I'm a Library Thing member.

GRS