Well-Tempered Hyperbole

Just finished: Indigenous Ingenuity: A Celebration of Traditional North American Knowledge by Deidre Havrelock and Edward Kay. This is worth a read but also I wanted it to be better than it was. My main issue was the tone of condescension cloaked in breathless wonderment towards its young audience and precolonial Indigenous peoples, which I honestly do not think is intentional on the part of the writers and more a factor of how people think that children ought to be spoken to. My second issue had to do with the ending, which focused on ecological technologies and suddenly jumped forward to present day Indigenous Nations working with governments to create sustainable ecosystems. Very cool, but because of the book's structure and emphasis on precolonial technologies, it made it seem like Indigenous societies today are only working in that field. (This is not remotely true! If the section on communication technology had, for example, included a jump forward to discuss the Skobot, I'd have been fine with this aspect.) But also, it described things like carbon trading fairly uncritically, when in fact while carbon trading is better than carbonmaxxing like our current overlords are doing, it's a fairly useless system that greenwashes the omnicidal criminal corporations turning our world into a burning hellscape. So if the book is inaccurate about this, what else is it inaccurate about?

Beowulf translated by Francis B. Gummere. It's Beowulf. This is the less fun translation, albeit the one I'm more familiar with, because my hold on the Headley one didn't come in on time. We can discuss whether or not it's the most metal of all historical epics.

Currently reading: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. Speaking of Scandinavian-influenced epics. This is the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which as you might recall broke all the way through my general dislike of YA to be one of my favourite books of the year. So far I am binging this and it's excellent. Our heroine, Anequs, wants nothing more than to get through her time at Kuiper's Academy, get licensed to ride her dragon, and return to her people on Masquapaug permanently, preferably with her two love interests, Theod and Liberty. But now the Anglish have set up a presence on the island and she's increasingly being drawn into shitty white-people politics that she wants nothing to do with.

This introduces a whack of new characters and factions. There's a Jewish character, Jadzia (Blackgoose, you fuckin' nerd lol), who I adore, and a secret society called the Disorder of the Grinning Teeth, which is the name of my new black metal band. There's also a new teacher whose name escapes me but who provides an interesting contrast in pedagogy from the first book. I should add that this is very much a magical boarding school story and not a residential school story, so it's very cool to see the idea of colonial educational institutions that could, theoretically, be reformed and democratized rather than needing to be closed and having the people who run them thrown in Forever Jail. 

Also the dragons are cool.

 Let's take a little break from reality and talk about romantasy! Escapist tales of fucking fairies and immortal elves and nothing to do with politics whatsoever, right?

Okay you know whose blog you're reading here. Two new-to-me podcasts with great names, Ordinary Unhappiness and In Bed With the Right, did a crossover episode, "Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma." For someone who has never read a romantasy (but read a lot of the precursors) I'm kind of obsessed with it as a genre and even more obsessed with the discourse around it. 

Disregarding the people whose opinions I don't care about, there are kind of two opposing takes on its appeal.

This is a fundamentally conservative genre that encourages women to become tradwives and relish in our own oppression.
This is actually a liberatory genre that allows women to explore their fantasies and traumas.

I don't think either side is fully right or wrong here, and that tension is worth exploring. This episode starts from two positions that many critics and admirers of the genre neglect: That women have agency, and that not everything women like is inherently feminist. From there it looks at where the romantasy boom came from, what its appeal is, and what it says about the psychology of its readers. I came away without a spicy take beyond that it turns out that a lot of the stories I wrote and never showed anyone when I was in my teens and twenties actually fit pretty neatly into the genre, which means that either BookTok girlies and I read a lot of the same books growing up, or there's something very deep in our culture that it speaks to, such that we reproduce the tropes unthinkingly.

I also find it interesting (not really discussed on this episode) that for all that the romance formula is reified into tropes and beats and commercial genre fiction is expected to at least somewhat engage with word counts and structure, romantasy really does appear to be an exception, and you can still write and sell stupidly long books in which nothing much happens, and no one complains about it. Dear Publishing Industry: Another world is possible.

 Events, dear friends, have been piling up faster than I can write about them—personal tragedies, global horrors, and work conspiring to keep me at a pace where I have not yet emerged from under the weight of one massive project before I'm saddled with the next. Needless to say things are happening but I get approximately 15 minutes of laptop time a day if the subway cooperates and it's largely spent answering emails.

Anyway, on with the podcasts. This week's episode is from a new-to-me podcast, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein. I heard him on Bad Hasbara and he was very funny and insightful, and his actual podcast doesn't disappoint. My favourite episode so far has been "She Had Elon's Baby. Then, Leopards Ate Her Face," featuring Ashley St. Clair and Juniper.

I didn't know the name off the top of my head but Ashley was one of those far-right grifters/pick-me girls who is very traditionally pretty and thus assumed that there was no need for feminism. She wrote an extremely transphobic children's book that I had actually heard of because it was on one of Queen Coke Francis's video essays*. The title of the episode is not precisely accurate, in that the leopards in question started gnawing Ashley's face before she gave birth, as she had started to turn away from her transphobic stance when she was pregnant with her second child.

You have questions. I also had questions. One of the reasons this particular episode is so good is that Matt handles everything as responsibly as anyone can. He has Juniper (the trans podcaster/editor who, among other accomplishments, popularized "goblin mode"), who was the one who engaged with Ashley as she made her turn away from the dark side. Neither one of them softball the conversation, laying the harms that Ashley did out very clearly, and questioning whether she has actually changed or whether this is another grift (for the record, neither of them conclude that it's a grift).

It's a hard listen because obviously it is. Trans people are being targeted for genocide around the world and especially in the US, and Ashley was one of its instigators. It asks hard questions: Can people change? Is the community that they harmed obligated to believe and accept those changes? What does it mean to make amends and reparations, or to build trust? What can we do to deradicalize people (note: Ashley's redemption arc seems to have started with queer and trans folks engaging her online, which I'm legitimately surprised at)? 

Anyway it brought me a little bit of desperately needed hope so maybe it will help you too.


* Check her out if you do YouTube video essays. She's a drag queen who mainly covers culture war stuff and she's hilarious.