october 2023
Nov. 6th, 2023 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boneglueI remembered disliking this novel of grotesque biohorror and scientific hubris as a young-adult SF/F fan, because of all things I don't think I found it strange enough. I suspect I was shortly off of Mieville's Iron Council, for example, in which a major character wears the mask of a bull because the horns hide the arms of her dead baby, which were grafted permanently to the sides of her head by the state. One benefit of an intellectual upbringing in genre fiction is that your sense of strangeness is expanded. Novels can be many things other than strange; but if a novel wants to be strange, the aficionado of strangeness may find it parochial and domesticated if it isn't sufficiently challenging. In concept, many things in this novel have confrontational potential, not least the presence of Oryx, a mysterious woman from a Southeast Asian country (unnamed) sold to quasi-pornographers by her rural parents. But for some reason, I never felt Atwood really wanted me uncomfortable, and that's a loss.
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Gilead, Marilynne Robinson. 2004. 247pp. Mac's Fireweed Books, Whitehorse, YT.
Such gorgeous restraint. Is this all there is in the world? Light and water? Thank God.
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A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder, Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer. 2016. 231pp. University of Manitoba book sale, purchased for me by a coworker.
Memoir is not a genre I have spent a lot of time in; this book made me regret that. Hearing a story is intimate. In sociolinguistics, increasingly personal interviews are the method of choice to elicit unguarded speech; a professor once told us to ask, "Was there ever a time you thought you might die?" Chacaby's story is shared with forthright care and spans an extraordinary range of human experience, from an upbringing in the bush in which she wandered, camped and played alone to the radical women's community of the late 1980s. Sensitive but stoic, impressive.
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Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. 1999. 215pp. Little free library.
A novel like a still deep pool of water. I have been continually sinking my hand into it then drawing back, intimidated. An unstatement about power, and about not only the history of power but the future and memory of power. Now, as always in history, a timely moment to be asked how we will live with the things we did sincerely when we did not believe ourselves to be cruel. How to live, well or poorly, with the growing awareness of our prideful wrongdoing and our blindness. The novel is a site of interior journey, not a model of how to live, and there are choices here that are difficult for me to accept, as they are meant to be.
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- Stop Making Sense (1984) dir. Jonathan Demme
- Bottoms (2023) dir. Emma Seligman
- Over the Garden Wall (2014) showrunner Patrick McHale
- Nope (2022) dir. Jordan Peele